eepy

He was colouring something — a car, maybe, or a blob that might have been a dog — and the yellow crayon moved in big, purposeful strokes across his paper.

You did not cry.

You considered it.

Then you leaned across the table and took them back.

He looked up.

Brown eyes. Even at four, they were startling — dark and serious and far too watchful for a boy his age.

He stared at you.

You stared back.

Then he slid the gold crayon back across the table to you, said nothing, and went back to his drawing.

His name was Simon.

You would not learn that until the register was called the following morning. But you remembered his eyes before you remembered his name.

— ✦ —

He broke your glasses in Year Two.

Not on purpose — or so you believed, for most of your life, until you were old enough to accept that

Simon Riley did very few things without purpose.

He knocked into you in the corridor outside the dining hall, your plastic NHS frames hitting the linoleum floor, one arm snapping clean off at the hinge.

You stood there, the world going soft and blurry at the edges the way it always did without them, and you felt the particular, humiliating sting of being unable to see properly — the vulnerability of it, the indignity.

Simon picked up the frames. Looked at them. Looked at you.

He didn't say sorry straight away. He examined the break with the seriousness of a boy who was already, at seven, very careful about what he said and when he said it. Then, "I'll carry your bag till they're fixed."

"You broke my glasses," you told him like he didn’t know.

"I know." He nodded.

"That's not the same as fixing them."

"No," he agreed. "But it's what I've got."

He carried your bag for three days. And when your mum brought the repaired frames in on the fourth morning, he handed the bag back without ceremony, turned, and went to join his mates by the football cage. No further apology. No acknowledgement that anything had occurred between you at all.

That afternoon, you kicked over his sandcastle in the playground.

He watched you do it. Didn't say a word.

You felt better.

And somehow, after that, you were friends.

— ✦ —

He couldn't read very well. You figured this out in Year Three, during the round-robin reading in class — when the teacher went along the rows and each child read a sentence aloud.

You noticed the way Simon's jaw set and his hands went flat on the desk the closer it got to his turn. The way his eyes moved across the page, laboured and slow, tracking words like they were things to be wrestled rather than known.

He got through his sentence. Barely. His face was blank when he sat back, the particular blankness he'd already learned to wear — that carefully constructed nothing that meant everything was fine when everything was not fine at all.

You didn't say anything about it. Not then. You were eight years old, not stupid.

What you did was start reading with him at break time. You presented it as something you needed — you told him you were practising for a reading competition and needed an audience.

Simon was not fooled. He was never fooled, not really.

But he sat down with you on the bench by the library door and listened while you read, and then slowly, carefully, you handed the book to him and asked what he thought happened next, and he had to read ahead to find out.

It took most of the school year. But by the summer he was reading chapter books. He never thanked you. He did start saving you a seat on the library bench every break time, and that was the same thing.

— ✦ —

He played football and rugby.

You read on the grass bank above the field.

It became a kind of institution — the ritual of your shared proximity without shared activity. Simon on the pitch, broad and determined and already bigger than the other boys by Year Five, already moving with that particular physicality that seemed less like playing and more like declaration.

And you on the bank above, your book open, your reading glasses (a better pair now, tortoiseshell) perched on your nose, half-reading and half watching without ever quite admitting to the watching.

He always knew you were there. He didn't do anything about it. But sometimes, when he scored, he'd look up at the bank first before he looked anywhere else.

You told yourself you were only there because the grass was nice and the light was good.

You were not a good liar, even then.

— ✦ —

The boy's name was Daniel Holt and he pushed you over in the playground in Year Five because you'd refused to give him the answers to the maths homework.

You'd said no three times and the third time he pushed you and you went down hard on your palms and your knees, the concrete was unforgiving.

You were crying before you'd fully registered what had happened. Not dramatically — small, shocked, indignant tears, the kind that arrive before the pain does.

Simon was there before a teacher was. You didn't even see where he came from. One moment the playground was its ordinary mid-morning noise, and the next Daniel Holt had a split lip and Simon Riley was standing over him with blood on his knuckles and a look on his face that was completely, utterly calm.

The calm was the frightening part. Even at ten.

He got three days at home for it. He spent the first afternoon sitting on your front step, eating crisps, because he knew you'd be furious with him and wanted to face it head-on.

You were furious. You told him he was an idiot. He told you Daniel Holt had it coming. You told him violence wasn't the answer. He told you Daniel Holt wasn't going to touch you again.

He was right. Daniel Holt never came near you again.

You didn't thank him either. You went inside and made him a sandwich, and that was the same thing.

— ✦ —

Secondary school arrived like a change in weather — everything slightly larger, slightly louder, the corridors longer and noisier, the stakes somehow higher and more ambiguous all at once. You arrived with a bag so heavy your shoulder ached within the first hour: your textbooks, yes, but also the extracurricular books you carried everywhere, the extra notepad you used for non-school thoughts, the six different highlighters you colour-coded by subject.

Simon took the bag from you on the third day without asking.

"I can carry it," you told him.

"I know," he said.

He slung it over his shoulder like it weighed nothing, which for him it probably didn't. He'd grown over the summer — not just taller, though he was that, but broader, thicker through the shoulders in a way that made him look like a man playing a boy, trying the shape of it on. He wore it well, even at eleven. He wore everything like he'd already decided what he was and was simply waiting for the world to catch up.

He carried your bag when it was heavy, and it was frequently heavy. He did it without comment and without making you feel small for needing it. That was the thing about Simon — he never made you feel small. He made other people feel small, sometimes, when they deserved it. But not you. Never you.

— ✦ —

The bruises were never from rugby.

You knew by the second year of secondary.

You were not naive — you had read enough, observed enough, understood enough about the world to recognise the shape of what was happening in Simon Riley's house even though he never said a word about it.

The bruises were in the wrong places for rugby. They appeared in the wrong season. They were around his ribs and his arms and once, memorably, along his jaw, and he came to school the Monday after the jaw bruise with that face — that blank, carefully constructed nothing face — and you sat next to him at lunch and said nothing at all.

You said nothing because there was nothing you could do. You were twelve. You were a girl with a book bag and highlighter pens and absolutely no power over the man who was hurting your best friend, and knowing that — the impotence of it, the helpless, hollow ache of caring about someone you could not protect — was the first truly adult pain you ever felt.

What you could do was this: you could make sure he had somewhere to go.

Your mother, who was perceptive in the quiet way that some mothers are, never asked questions when Simon turned up at the back door on a Sunday evening or a Wednesday after school.

She just set another plate.

Your house became a refuge without anyone naming it as such. Simon did his homework at your kitchen table, ate your mother's cooking, watched telly with your family, and slept on your sofa sometimes when the option was presented naturally enough that it didn't feel like charity.

— ✦ —

You got your period for the first time on a Tuesday in November, in Year Nine. In the school toilets, third period, when you were thirteen years old and the day had been entirely ordinary right up until it wasn't.

The particular cocktail of shock and pain and embarrassment and the specific existential bewilderment of being a person whose body was doing something enormous without prior adequate notice left you sitting on the closed toilet lid crying in a way you hadn't cried in years.

You got out your Nokia. That familiar brick of a phone, the keypad worn smooth at the number five. You typed Simon's number and pressed call before you'd properly decided to.

He picked up on the second ring. "Yeah."

"Simon." Your voice came out wrong. Too thin.

A beat. When he spoke again his voice had changed — quieter, more careful. "Where are you?"

"Girls' toilets. Near the science block."

"Right," he said. "Stay there."

He appeared outside the girls' toilets seven minutes later — you could hear him through the door, his voice low and flat, telling a Year Eight girl to go use the other ones — and then he was there, right there on the other side of the door, talking to you through it in that steady, even way he had when he wanted to be calm on your behalf.

"You're alright," he said. “Do you need me to go to the office?"

"No," you managed. "I need — I don't know what I need."

"I'll get you something from the vending machine," he said, that Manchester accent of his low and unhurried. "And I'll text your mum."

When you came out of the toilets twenty minutes later, looking wrung-out and clutching what the school nurse had provided, Simon was leaning against the wall. He looked at you for a moment — took you in, the way he always did, that comprehensive, assessing look — and then he stepped forward and kissed your cheek. Quick. Certain. His mouth warm and deliberate against your cheekbone.

"You're alright," he said again. He said it like a fact. Like he was making it true by saying it.

You cried a bit more, for different reasons, and he pretended not to notice.

— ✦ —

He was captain of the rugby team by Year Ten. It suited him — the leadership, the sense of purpose, the structure of it.

You went to his matches sometimes, wrapped in a scarf on the touchline, and watched him move across the pitch with that same quality you'd noticed on the primary school field: less like playing, more like declaration.

He was ferocious and focused and occasionally frightening, and the other boys deferred to him not just because he was bigger than them but because he had the kind of authority that doesn't need to be announced.

Afterwards he'd find you on the touchline, still carrying that quality — coiled, alert — and it would take him a few minutes to come back to himself. To come back to you.

"Good game," you'd say.

"Yeah," he'd say.

And then slowly, the set of his shoulders would ease, and he'd become Simon again. Your Simon. The one who stole your crayons and carried your bag and ate your mother's shepherd's pie like it was sacred.

— ✦ —

He could make you laugh. This was not a small thing.

Simon Riley was not, by general consensus, a funny person. He was serious and quiet and his face in repose looked like a man carrying a private weather system. But he had a dry, deadpan wit that he deployed rarely and precisely, and it landed, every time, like a key in a lock made specifically for it.

He knew how to make you laugh because he'd spent years learning you. The specific frequency of your humour. The things that made you dissolve into giggles rather than just smile. He deployed his wit with the same precision he deployed everything else, and the result was that when Simon Riley made you laugh — really laugh, the helpless, breathless kind — it felt like being given something he didn't give to anyone else.

Which, you would eventually understand, was accurate.

— ✦ —

His name was Ryan Marsh and he was your first kiss, in the park on a Friday evening in Year Ten, and it was fine. It was nice, even. Ryan was sweet and nervous and smelled of his older brother's aftershave and the kiss lasted approximately forty seconds.

Ryan Marsh had a broken nose the following Monday.

Simon maintained, with total conviction, that Ryan had walked into a door. Ryan, to his credit, corroborated this story completely.

You did not push the matter, partly because you had no concrete evidence and partly because some part of you — the part that read on the grass bank and watched the pitch and noticed when Simon looked up at the bank before he looked anywhere else — felt something that was not entirely uncomplicated about it.

You and Ryan Marsh did not have a second kiss. You told yourself it was because the chemistry hadn't been right.

You were getting a bit better at lying to yourself, by fourteen. But only a bit.

— ✦ —

GCSEs arrived the way all important things arrived — with more weight than you'd expected and less warning than you'd have liked.

Year Ten and Eleven were the years you restructured Simon's entire approach to studying, methodically and patiently, the same way you'd helped him learn to read, finding the approach that worked for how his mind moved.

Simon was not unintelligent.

He was, in fact, formidably sharp in ways that didn't translate easily to an exam paper: quick to read people, quick to understand systems, possessed of a spatial and strategic intelligence that you recognised and admired even as you taught him how to write it down in ways that the mark scheme would accept.

He sat with you at your kitchen table night after night — your mother quietly replenishing the tea,— and you explained things in the language that made sense to his brain rather than the language of the textbook.

He sat with you at lunch during school hours and glared at anyone who called you a nerd. The glaring was extremely effective. Simon Riley's face, by fifteen, was a significant deterrent.

His GCSE results, when they arrived, were good. Better than anyone who knew his circumstances might have expected from a boy who'd had so much working against him.

He rang you on the house phone when he opened the results envelope. He didn't say much. His voice, when he spoke, was different — something in it unguarded, the Manchester in it softer somehow, without the armour it usually carried.

"Couldn't have done it without you," he said.

"You did it," you told him firmly. "I just held the torch."

"Still needed the torch."

You smiled so hard your face ached. "Go celebrate, Simon."

"Yeah," he said. And then, quieter, "Thanks, sunshine."

— ✦ —

He was an apprentice at the butcher's on Renshaw Street after school — learning the trade with the same focused, physical competence he brought to everything else, solid and unhurried, his big hands learning new kinds of precision. You had a job at the bookshop two streets over.

On his lunch breaks you would walk over with a sandwich and a packet of crisps, and you'd sit on the low wall around the side of the shop while he ate and you talked about nothing in particular and everything in general.

He had sawdust on his boots and you'd have ink on your fingers from pricing stickers, and you'd sit in the thin afternoon light talking about books and people and where things might go from here, and it was the most ordinary, irreplaceable thing in the world.

You didn't know, then, that you were storing it up. You didn't know you were in the middle of something finite.

You were seventeen and you thought you had time.

— ✦ —

It was the eleventh of September, 2001.

You were at work when it happened — the bookshop had a small television in the back room, and you watched the footage with your hand pressed over your mouth and the world rearranging itself into a new shape around you.

Simon came to you that evening. He didn't knock — he had a spare key, had done for years — and you heard him come in and go into the kitchen and fill the kettle, the sound of him so familiar and domestic and real that something in your chest loosened a fraction.

He brought you tea. He sat on the sofa beside you and you watched the news together in silence, and at some point your head found his shoulder without either of you deciding it had.

"I'm going to join up," he said. Not asking. Telling.

You lifted your head from his shoulder. Frowned at him. "Join up what?"

"The military."

The word landed in the room and stayed there. You looked at his face — that flat, certain expression he wore when he'd already decided something — and you felt the ground shift slightly under you.

"Simon. You're seventeen."

"You can join at sixteen with parental consent," he said. Straightforward, as though he'd already looked into it. Which of course he had. "Seventeen without."

"That's—" You stopped. Started again. "You've thought about this before today."

"Yeah."

Of course he had. You could see it now, the shape of it — this was not a reaction to the footage on the television, not a hot, impulsive thing. This was something Simon had been building toward without telling you. The structure of it. The purpose. The particular kind of belonging that came from being part of something larger than yourself. You'd always known he'd go toward something like this. You'd just hoped, without ever quite admitting to the hoping, that it might be further away.

"You're not going to try to talk me out of it." Not a question.

"Would it work?"

He held your gaze. "No."

"Then no," you said. Your voice was very steady. You were proud of it. "I'm not."

He was quiet for a long moment. The television continued its awful repetition. Then his arm came around your shoulders, heavy and warm, and he pulled you in closer against his side.

You stayed like that until the tea went cold.

— ✦ —

The train station was grey and noisy with other leavings, other arrivals, other people in the middle of things.

Simon stood in front of you on the platform with his kit bag and his big, careful hands and the face he'd spent seventeen years learning to keep blank, and it occurred to you, not for the first time and not for the last, that you loved him.

That you had loved him in different quantities and different registers for most of your life. That you did not know how to say it and were not sure it would do either of you any good if you did.

So you didn't say it.

You went up on your toes and you hugged him — truly hugged him, arms around his neck, your face pressed against his jaw — and he held you back with both arms, the kit bag dropping to the platform, and he was so solid and warm and real that you memorised it.

"Don't be an idiot," you told him, muffled.

He made a sound that was almost a laugh. Almost. "Best I can do is try." The Manchester in his voice, low and warm and his.

"Simon."

"I know," he said quietly, against your temple. "I know, sunshine."

You stepped back. You held it together. He picked up his bag and he walked toward the platform and at the door of the train he turned, and looked at you standing there with your glasses and your coat and your hands pressed together in front of you, and for a second you saw something in his face that wasn't blank at all.

Then he was gone.

You cried on the way home. Proper, ugly crying, in the front seat of your mother's car, while she drove and said nothing and passed you a tissue.

You cried because you thought you might never see him again. Because the world had cracked open on a Tuesday in September and people were going toward the fracture and Simon Riley was one of them.

You cried because you never told him.

— ✦ —

He sent a birthday card every year.

They arrived with no return address and postmarks from places you'd never heard of, and sometimes they were late and sometimes they were so early you suspected he'd sent them weeks in advance in case he couldn't later.

They were always plain — Simon Riley was not a man who browsed the sentimental section — white or cream envelopes, the kind of card that was almost generic, and inside: his handwriting, which had improved vastly from the boy who'd struggled across the page in Year Three, and always the same thing. Your name at the top. Happy Birthday, sunshine. And then: S.

Just S.

Like he was still close enough that you'd know exactly who that meant. Like the initial was sufficient.

It was.

You sent his birthday gifts to a P.O. box he'd given you, wrapped carefully, the tag always: From your best friend. You didn't know if he received them all. You sent them anyway. It felt important to keep sending them — to maintain the thread, even when you couldn't see both ends of it.

— ✦ —

Thirty-four years old now.

You have no husband. You had come close, once — a man named Patrick who had been perfectly acceptable in every measurable way and who had wanted to marry you and had probably deserved someone who could give him more of herself than you could manage.

You had not been fair to Patrick. You knew that. You had been in love with someone else for most of your adult life, and even with the someone else absent and silent and possibly dead, there wasn't room for anyone else.

You have no children, though you wanted them. The timeline on that was becoming its own quiet ache, the kind you didn't prod too often.

You have a job that pays the bills and not much else — admin in an office building that smells of carpet cleaner and recycled air, the kind of work that requires enough of your brain to stop it from wandering but not enough to satisfy it.

You have an apartment that is functional and yours and that you have tried to make cozy, with books on every surface and plants that are mostly surviving and a kitchen you actually cook in.

It is not the house. It is not the house you told Simon about when you were sixteen and lying in his back garden on a summer evening, staring up at the sky.

No birthday card for five years now.

Five years of the particular, specific silence that was different from all the silences before, because the silences before had been interrupted. Annually, reliably, he had broken them.

Five years of nothing had the texture of conclusion. Of a chapter closing. And you had reached the point — slowly, painfully, with the kind of acceptance that doesn't feel like acceptance but feels like exhaustion — where you were fairly certain Simon Riley was dead.

Your heart ached for your best friend in the low, constant way of grief that has become so familiar it's almost structural.

You carried it the way you carried other things, quietly, with your spine straight.

Which is why you are sitting across from a man named — it didn't matter, it really didn't matter what his name was — on what your colleague Debbie had described as 'a perfectly nice date with a perfectly nice man' and trying to remember what it felt like to be interested in your own life.

The man sitting across from you was the complete opposite of Simon Riley.

He was trim and well-dressed and had the kind of face that was handsome in a way that required no effort to appreciate and inspired no particular feeling from you.

He had been talking for, by your reckoning, forty-seven minutes. In that time he had covered: his career (impressive, in his telling), his car (expensive, in his telling), his last holiday (exotic, in his telling), and his general philosophy on modern dating (nuanced, in his telling).

He had not asked about your job. He had not asked about your books or the one peeking out of your handbag; the one he'd glanced at and not commented on. He had not asked if your pasta was nice, which it was, actually, genuinely nice, and you'd have told him so if he'd asked. He had not asked you almost anything, come to think of it.

Simon Riley, who spoke perhaps a tenth as many words as this man, had always asked.

Simon Riley had always wanted to know. Not because it was polite. Because he actually, genuinely, in the particular way of people who care about very few things very deeply — wanted to know.

You excused yourself to use the bathroom and stood at the sink running cold water over your wrists and looking at your own reflection, and you thought: this is fine.

This is a perfectly nice evening with a perfectly nice man. This is what moving forward looks like. This is what being a person in the world, a person with a life and a future and reasonable expectations of company, looks like.

You dried your hands. You went back to the table. He had ordered himself another drink without asking if you wanted anything.

You finished your pasta and smiled at appropriate intervals and thought about Simon Riley and felt, as you so often felt, quietly furious at him for being gone.

— ✦ —

The birthday card arrived on a Thursday morning.

You almost missed it entirely — it was tucked between a pizza delivery leaflet and something from your energy supplier, the cream envelope almost camouflaged by the mundane. You shuffled through the post on autopilot and then stopped.

Your name, in handwriting you would have recognised anywhere, would have recognised in your sleep, had recognised in your bones for thirty years.

You sat down on the bottom stair. Your legs suddenly uneasy.

Your hands were not steady.

The envelope opened. The card was white. Plain. Almost generic.

Inside:

Happy Birthday, sunshine.

I'm sorry it's been so long.

I'll explain everything.

Come, if you want to.

If you can stand the sight of me.

Below that, an address. Three towns over. A postcode you didn't recognise.

And then, at the bottom, the way it had always been at the bottom: S.

You sat on the bottom stair for a very long time.

Then you got up, went to your room, and started thinking about what to wear.

— ✦ —

You plucked up the nerve to go on a Saturday.

The drive took forty minutes and you spent most of it trying to manage yourself — talking yourself through reasonable expectations (he is alive, that is enough, start there), warning yourself against things you could not control (the five years, the silence, the way your hands were doing that unsteady thing again), cataloguing everything practical (the address, the map).

The street was quiet. Semi-rural, the kind of neighbourhood that sits between things — between town and country, between the ordinary and the aspirational. The houses were spread out, set back from the road, each with its own front garden and its own character.

You parked. You looked at the address. You looked up.

And you stopped breathing.

It was a beautiful house.

Large, substantial and solid, the kind of house that had been built to last. White painted render, clean and bright in the afternoon light. A white picket fence surrounding the front garden, which was full of flowers. Roses climbing the gatepost. Lavender edging the path. Foxgloves and dahlias and great loose clusters of something purple you couldn't name from here. The kind of garden that had been planted with intention, tended with care, left to be a little wild in the best way.

A porch. And a porch swing, painted white, with a yellow cushion on it.

And flying from the corner of the roof, bright against the blue afternoon sky: the Union flag.

You sat very still in the driver's seat.

You were sixteen years old. It was a summer evening and you were lying in Simon's back garden on an old sleeping bag, looking up at the sky. He was beside you in the way he was always beside you — solid, quiet, taking up exactly the right amount of space. You'd been talking about the future the way teenagers do, in great floating hypotheticals that feel more like weather than plans.

"What kind of house?" he'd asked. He asked follow-up questions always, quietly, wanting the specifics. It was one of the things about him you loved.

And you'd described it. A big house, not ostentatious but real — space for books and for people and for a garden that did what it wanted within reason. A white fence, because you'd always liked them. A porch with somewhere to sit. A flag, because you were — despite everything — proud of where you were from.

Simon had been quiet for a long moment.

"Okay," he'd said. Just: okay.

You had thought he was humouring you.

You had not thought — you had not let yourself think — what it might mean, that he was going to do anything about it.

You got out of the car. Your legs were not entirely reliable. You held the gate and walked up the path — lavender brushing your hand where it grew close, the scent of it too perfect, almost staged — and you stopped at the foot of the porch steps.

The door opened.

He had to duck.

That was the first thing you noticed. The physical fact of him, the sheer size of him, his shoulders nearly touching the doorframe on both sides simultaneously, the automatic dip of his head as he stepped through onto the porch.

He straightened.

The afternoon light landed on him and you had to spend a moment recalibrating, because the last time you'd seen Simon Riley he had been seventeen years old with sawdust on his boots and a train ticket in his hand, and this man —

This man.

The white button-down shirt was simple, the sleeves rolled to the elbow, and from his left wrist to well past the roll of the sleeve his forearm was dark with ink — a sleeve of tattoos, intricate and considered. A whole geography of imagery that you couldn't read from here but would, you thought, take time to learn.

His right wrist carried a watch. His black slacks were fitted close enough that you could see the muscle of his thighs pulling the fabric with every shift of his weight, and his shoes — loafers, black with gold buckles, completely unexpected and somehow exactly right — were precise.

His hair. A dark sandy blonde, longer than military specification presumably allowed and slicked back from his face, which meant you could see all of it, his whole face; the angles that had sharpened from boy to man, the jaw, the set of his brow, and those eyes. Those brown eyes that had been watching you since you were four years old and had never, not once, looked at you with anything less than complete attention.

He was raking those eyes over you now. Slowly. With the same quality he'd always had — that comprehensive, unhurried assessment that somehow never felt like being measured — and his hands were in his pockets and he was standing there like that, on the porch he'd built or bought or arranged specifically around a description you'd given him at sixteen.

He looked like something out of a magazine and like Simon all at once.

You were going to murder him.

"Hi, sunshine."

His voice. Lower than you remembered, rougher, carrying all the years he'd lived since you last heard it. That Manchester accent — still there, unmistakably, that warm northern flatness underneath everything, the vowels shaped by a city, by a street, by a particular kind of upbringing that no amount of training had entirely smoothed out.

That nickname, in that voice, in that low, deliberate way he'd always said it: like you were his.

Like it was a prayer.

You opened your mouth. And you closed it. And you looked at him — this enormous, tattooed, stupidly handsome man who had stood on your mother's doorstep at twelve years old with bruises he didn't mention, who had kissed your cheek at thirteen and broken Ryan Marsh's nose at fourteen and waved goodbye from a train platform at seventeen and then sent you birthday cards from the edges of the world for a decade and then stopped for five years —

"Five years," you said. Your voice was very quiet.

Something moved in his face.

"I-,"

"I thought you were dead." You snapped cutting him off.

"I figured you would’ve."

"Simon."

"I know, sunshine." He said it the same way he'd always said things he couldn't argue with — not deflecting, not dismissing, just absorbing. The Manchester vowels in his voice like a hand on your shoulder. "I'll explain everything. I promise. All of it. Whatever you want to know."

You looked at him.

He looked at you.

The afternoon settled around the house, around the garden that was your garden in your own sixteen-year-old description, around the flag and the porch swing and the lavender and all of it, and the distance between you on the path and him on the porch steps was perhaps four feet and thirty years and five years of silence and a whole life of choosing not to say the one true thing.

"You built me the house?" you asked, whispering it. Like you were afraid to say it.

He was quiet for a moment. Then, "Bought it. Had the garden done the way you said."

"Simon." Your heart ached.

"You said lavender at the edges," he said. His voice was completely level. "You said a porch with somewhere to sit. You said you wanted to see the flag from the garden."

You pressed your hand to your mouth.

The rage was still there — it was not going anywhere quickly. The five years of it, the grief of it — but underneath it, something else. Something that had been there since you were four years old at a preschool art table, larger and quieter and more permanent than anything else you'd ever felt.

"You were sixteen," he said. As though this explained it. "You told me what you wanted. I just..." He stopped. Started again. "I wanted to be enough first. I wanted to have what you needed."

There was a long silence. A bee moved through the lavender. Somewhere a few streets away, a lawnmower hummed.

"Come inside," Simon said. "I'll make you tea. And I'll tell you everything."

You looked at him on the porch of the house he'd built you from a word, and you thought: you absolute idiot. You wonderful, impossible, infuriating man. You thought I'd stopped. You thought thirty years of this was something you could be enough for eventually, like it was a bar to clear, like there was a version of you I was waiting on instead of just —

Instead of just you. Always just you.

The lavender brushed your hand again. You walked up the steps and he looked down at you with those brown eyes that had never once left you.

"Hi, Simon," you said.

Something happened in his face. Something opened.

"Hi, sunshine," he said, his hand coming to the small of your back to guide you inside.

He made the tea.

You stood in the kitchen of a house that smelled of fresh paint and cedar and something faintly floral from the garden drifting through the open window over the sink, and you watched Simon Riley move around it like he'd always lived here — filling the kettle, finding the mugs without opening the wrong cupboard, knowing where the teabags were — and you thought: how long. How long has he been here, in this house he bought for you, learning where everything lives, waiting.

You sat at the kitchen table. It was a good table, heavy oak, the kind built to last and you ran your thumb along the grain of it and tried to arrange your feelings into some kind of order and failed.

Simon set the mug in front of you. Milk in last, the way you'd always taken it, which he knew because he'd made you approximately four thousand cups of tea over the course of your lives. He sat down across from you, his own mug between his big hands, and looked at you.

You looked back.

The kitchen light was warm and it caught the angles of his face. The jaw, the brow, the slight crook in his nose that was new, or newer, the result of something you didn't know about and weren't sure you wanted to.

He was watching you with that particular quality of attention he'd always had. Complete. Patient. Like you were the only thing in the room worth looking at.

"You're not wearing your glasses," he said.

You blinked. Of all the things. "No."

"Contacts?"

"For about ten years now, yes."

He was quiet for a moment, studying your face with that same unhurried attention, "I missed them."

"You missed my glasses?" You say with the deadpan tone you'd perfected over the years.

"Tortoiseshell ones," he said. "Used to push them up your nose when you were concentrating." He took a gulp of his tea, Adam's apple bobbing when he swallowed.

You stared at him. Eighteen years. Eighteen years of distance and war and God knows what else, and he missed your glasses. "Simon."

"Just saying."

"You are unbelievable." You scoff.

"The contacts suit you," he said, and the corner of his mouth moved — barely, almost nothing, but you'd spent your whole life reading that face and you caught it. "Everything suits you. But I liked the glasses."

"Stop it." You snap.

"Stop what?"

"Whatever that is," you said, and you pointed at his face, at the not-there-almost-smile, at the quality of his voice when he said everything suits you, at all of it. "You don't get to do that. You've been — Simon, you've been gone. You've been gone for eighteen years and for five of them, I thought you were dead." Your voice stayed steady, which surprised you. You'd expected it to crack on that. "So you don't get to walk out onto your porch looking like — like that — and tell me you missed my glasses and flirt at me like no time has passed."

He listened without interrupting. He always had — it was one of the things about him, the way he gave you the whole space of what you were saying before he entered it.

"You're right," he nodded.

"I know I'm right." Your spine straightened.

"I owe you an explanation."

"You owe me considerably more than that, Simon Riley, but yes. An explanation would be a start."

He wrapped both hands around his mug again and looked at you across the table and there was something in his face that was not the blank-nothing face, was not the armour he'd worn since he was twelve years old but something that was quieter and more exposed and a great deal more frightening because of it.

"Not here," he said.

You frowned. "What?"

"I don't want to do it like this. Sat in a kitchen." He glanced around the room briefly, as though orienting himself. "Come to dinner with me tomorrow night."

"What I—"

"The Grill on Merton Street."

You went very still.

The Grill on Merton Street. You hadn't been in years — not since you'd moved away from the area, not since things had shifted and the rituals of your old life had quietly been replaced by other things.

But you knew it. You knew every table in it. The way the light came through the front windows on a Sunday, the smell of it — roasted meat and old wood and the particular warmth of a place that had been feeding families for decades.

Your mother had loved it. Your father used to order the same thing every time and be pleased about it every time, and you and Simon had sat across from each other in the corner booth with the sticky laminated menus and kicked each other under the table and laughed.

"That's still open?" you managed.

"Had a look earlier this week," he said. "Still there. New owners but the same building. Same corner booth."

You looked at him. He looked at you. Outside, through the open window, a late bird was making itself known in the lavender.

"Fine," you said. "Dinner. Tomorrow. And you're going to tell me everything." you struck at him with a serious face.

"Everything," he agreed.

"I mean it, Simon. All of it."

"I know you do."

You drank your tea. It was exactly right. The temperature, the strength, the milk ratio and you hated him a little bit for that. For the fact that he still knew, that across seventeen years and God knows how many miles he still knew exactly how you took your tea, and he'd made it correctly on the first attempt without asking, and you were absolutely not going to cry about that.

You were not.

— ✦ —

You dressed carefully.

Not because you were trying to impress him.

You told yourself this firmly, standing in front of your wardrobe in the room you'd taken in the local B&B — you'd booked a night, not knowing how long this might take, not knowing what state you'd be in for the drive home afterwards — and you told yourself that you were simply dressing appropriately for a dinner at a decent restaurant.

That was all.

That was the entirety of it.

The dress was deep green. Fitted through the waist, falling to just below the knee, with a neckline that was elegant rather than dramatic.

You'd bought it for a work event two years ago and it had lived in your wardrobe since, waiting for an occasion that felt worth it. You put your hair up — not elaborately, just neatly, the kind of arrangement that looked effortless and had taken twenty minutes — and you wore the small gold earrings that had been your grandmother's. Low heels. The good handbag. A slick of red on your mouth that you almost wiped off twice before deciding to leave it.

You were not trying to impress him.

You were absolutely trying to impress him.

He was waiting outside The Grill when your taxi pulled up, standing on the pavement with his hands in his pockets. The air around him relaxed and easy. An anchored stillness, like a man who'd learned to wait and had made peace with it. He has the same dark slacks as yesterday, same loafers with the gold buckles, but the shirt tonight was black.

A deep, clean black that made his shoulders look approximately the width of a doorway, which was in fact an accurate assessment — and he'd left the top button undone. His hair was the same: pushed back, dark sandy blonde curling at the nape of his neck and catching the amber of the streetlights.

He saw you get out of the taxi.

He went very still. Completely, suddenly, entirely present in a way that landed on you like a hand against your sternum. Under your heartbeat.

You crossed the pavement toward him and his eyes moved over you — slowly, comprehensively, that same rake of attention he'd given you yesterday on the porch steps, only this time there was nothing restrained about what it did to your pulse.

He eyed you the same way he used to look at the extra cuts of slow roasted beef your mother added to his plate every time he joined you for a Sunday roast after church.

"Hi," you said.

"Hi, sunshine." His voice was low. The rough Manchester sending tingles down your spine.

He opened the door for you.

The Grill smelled exactly the same.

Roasted meat and warmed bread and old wood and something faintly of candle wax. It hit you the moment you stepped through the door and you had to stand still for just a second, just one second, to absorb the weight of it.

Your father's coat on the hook by the door. Your mother's reading glasses going into her bag as the menus arrived. Simon across from you, fourteen and fifteen and sixteen, his big hands wrapped around a Coke glass, his eyes on you under that careful brow.

The layout had shifted slightly — new owners, as Simon had said — but the bones of it were the same. The dark wood panelling. The low warm lighting. The tables set with proper linen and actual candles in glass holders. And in the back left corner was the booth.

Simon's hand was at the small of your back as the host led you through. A light touch, barely there, the kind of thing that could be merely courteous and was absolutely not merely courteous.

You said nothing about it.

You were almost at the booth when a voice said, "Well. I don't believe it."

You turned.

Margaret and Gerald Howarth.

Margaret had been your mother's friend since before you were born — a small, bright-eyed woman who had somehow barely aged in two decades. Her silver hair cut the same way it had always been, her husband a large, genial man beside her with a napkin already tucked into his collar. They'd been eating here since before you were born too, you suspected. Some people were simply woven into the furniture of a place.

"Margaret," you said, and you felt a genuine, warm rush of it. Of being seen by someone who had known you as a child, who had watched you grow up, who carried that particular knowledge of you that only people of a certain generation can hold. She was already rising halfway from her seat, her hand extended, and you took it and she covered it with her other one, the way she always had.

"We heard you were back in the area," she said — which was interesting, since you'd only arrived yesterday, but news apparently still moved at its old speed around here. Her bright eyes moved to Simon, and something in them softened with recognition and surprise in equal measure. "And Simon Riley. My goodness."

"Mrs Howarth." Simon's voice was respectful, quieter than usual, and you noticed — because you noticed everything about him — that he straightened fractionally. Not stiffly. Just the particular adjustment of a man in the presence of someone he'd known when he was young and unguarded.

"Look at the size of you," Gerald said, not unkindly, staring up at Simon with the frank appreciation of one large man for another. "What are they feeding you?"

"Gerald," Margaret scolded mildly.

"It's a compliment." He shrugged.

Simon almost smiled. "Good to see you, Mr Howarth."

Margaret was looking between the two of you with the expression of a woman who had been quietly observing people her entire life and drawing accurate conclusions from very little evidence. "Are you together?" she asked, with the particular directness that came with age and with having known you since you were in a pushchair.

"We're having dinner," you said carefully.

Margaret's expression said, quite clearly, that she had heard this and had also heard everything it was not saying. "Well," she said, patting your hand once more before releasing it, "it's lovely to see you both. You always did belong together, the pair of you. I said that to your mother once, do you know. I said those two—"

"It was lovely seeing you, Margaret," you said, with great warmth and only mild desperation.

She laughed, a bright, pleased sound and settled back into her seat.

As you turned to follow the host the rest of the way to the booth, you were almost certain you heard Gerald say, to his wife, "told you" in a tone of quiet marital satisfaction.

Simon was very carefully not reacting to any of this. You were very carefully not looking at him.

You saw two others you knew before you reached the booth.

Kim Ashworth, who had been in your form in Year Ten and who looked essentially the same as she had in school except that she had a baby on her hip and a husband trailing behind her with a changing bag.

She stopped mid-step when she saw you, did a small, delighted double take, said oh my God twice, and then looked at Simon in a way that was extremely uncomplicated in its appreciation before remembering the husband with the changing bag. There were promises exchanged to catch up properly, phone numbers that would probably not be used, genuine warmth on both sides.

And then at the bar, perched on a stool with a whisky, Dave Pearce — who had played alongside Simon on the secondary school rugby team and who greeted him with the particular vocabulary of men who knew each other at fifteen and have not changed as much as they think.

There was a brief, loud exchange that involved at least one shoulder-clap that could have knocked a smaller man sideways, and then Dave shook your hand too and told Simon he was punching. Which Simon received without expression and you tried your hardest not to laugh, biting your lip.

Finally the corner booth. You slid in. Simon folded himself into the seat across from you, the table scaled to ordinary human beings and therefore slightly absurd against the size of him, his knees bracketing it, his shoulders blocking the view of the room behind him entirely.

The menus came.

They were not laminated anymore — proper printed card, changed seasonally, the kind that meant the new owners had ambitions. But the roast was still on. The proper Sunday roast, the one your father used to order when you could afford to.

"Same corner," Simon said quietly.

"Same corner," you agreed.

He was looking at you across the table the way he used to look at you across this table, except that now his face was older and larger and had been to places that had clearly asked things of it. The look was different in its texture. Deeper, maybe. Older in the same way he was older. Like it had more weight behind it from all the years of being carried.

"You said everything," you reminded him. "All of it."

"I know."

"So." You gestured for him to start.

He set his menu down. Looked at you. And then he started talking.

He told it the way he told everything — without embellishment, without drama, in the flat, precise language of a man who had learned to communicate facts and trusted the facts to carry the weight without decoration.

He'd gone in at seventeen and he'd been good at it. Not surprising. He was built for the structure of it, for the clarity of having a purpose and a unit and a chain of things that made sense.

He'd moved up fast — faster than he let on in the cards he'd sent you, which had been careful, he explained, deliberately careful, because the more you knew the more you might worry. Which, you pointed out, had not been his decision to make. He didn't argue with that.

Task Force 141 came later. Years later, after deployments that he summarised in a sentence each and you understood enough from his face to know that each sentence was doing the work of much longer things.

He was a lieutenant now. He said it the way he said most things about himself, flatly, without vanity, presented as information. He had certain freedoms now that he hadn't had before, certain ability to make choices about where he went and when and what he did with the things the years had given him.

You both ordered your food.

"And the five years?" you asked, sipping your cocktail the waitress had brought over.

He was quiet for a moment, he stared at his San Miguel pint, the condensation sliding down the glass. Your food had arrived at some point during the waiting, while Simon collected his thoughts.

He picked up his fork and then set it down again.

"There was a man," Simon said.

Something about the way he said it made you put your fork down too.

"He ran drugs. Major operation, international — I won't go into all of it." He said this without flinching, looking at you steadily, not softening it. You'd always appreciated that about him — the way he treated your intelligence as a given. "After I escaped him, he decided to make it personal. He went after the people I—" He stopped. Chose the word carefully. "The people I was connected to."

The candle in the glass holder between you threw warm, unsteady light across his face.

"He killed them," Simon said. "My brother. Tommy's family." A pause that cost him something; you could see it cost him. "My Mother."

The restaurant continued around you — the murmur of other tables, the clink of cutlery, someone laughing softly near the bar — and you sat very still.

"Oh Simon," you whispered, you could feel the way your face formed the sympathy.

"I'm alright." He said it the way he'd always said it, the Manchester flat and absolute. The way that meant; don't make it bigger than I can hold right now. You knew that voice. You honoured it.

"He knew about you," Simon said and you froze. "That was the other thing. He'd done his research." His jaw shifted slightly. "As long as he was alive, you weren't safe. If I'd contacted you, properly contacted you, kept the thread going the way I wanted to, it would have given him a cleaner line. A more reliable way to reach me."

You understood the logic of it. You understood it clearly and immediately in the part of your brain that processed information. The other part — the part that had sat on the bottom stair with a birthday card after five years of silence, the part that had thought past tense — that part was going to take considerably longer.

"So you cut me off," you said. Not as an accusation. As a fact, laid down. You were starting to understand the shape of it.

"To keep you safe. Yes."

"Without telling me why." You sighed but you knew you were being unreasonable, but you hoped he would let you for a little longer.

"If I'd told you why, you'd have known there was a threat. And you'd have—" He stopped. The corner of his mouth moved, something that was not quite a smile and not quite not one. "You'd have done something about it. Gone looking. Made noise."

"I would not have—" You stopped, because you would have. You absolutely would have. You'd spent thirty years being completely unable to sit on the sidelines where Simon Riley was concerned, and the knowledge that someone was threatening him would have made you entirely unreasonable. "That's—" you huffed.

"Yeah," he said.

"You could have found a way—"

"There wasn't one. Not one that was safe." His voice was very level. "I went through every option, love. I promise you. Every one."

The word arrived quietly, without ceremony.

Love.

He'd never called you that — not in thirty years, not in all the time and all the familiarity of what you were to each other. He said it the way he said everything that mattered: without preamble, without dressing it up, laid down like the fact it was.

"And now?" you asked. Your voice was quite steady. Steadier than you felt.

"He's dead." No elaboration. None needed. The flat Manchester vowels carrying the weight of it cleanly, without mess. "And you're safe. And I—" He looked at you across the table, across the candle and the white linen. "I bought the house," he said. "I've spent a while making it what it is. Making if perfect. I saved up for years. The 141 pays well when you get to a certain level and I wasn't spending it on anything else."

"For years," you repeated, feeling a shiver rack up your spine and your toes go numb.

"Since I was about twenty." He said this without apparent embarrassment, as though it were the most natural thing in the world to spend fifteen years saving money to buy a woman a house from a description she'd given you at sixteen years old. "Took a while to find the right one that wasn’t too far from your parents. The lavender took three growing seasons to look like it did when you pulled up."

Three growing seasons.

He had planted the lavender three years ago. He had stood in a garden three towns from where you lived and planted lavender along a path because a sixteen-year-old girl had mentioned it lying on her back in his garden thirty years ago, and he had tended it for three years, and he had waited.

"Simon Riley," you said.

"It's got room for your books Sunshine, built the shelves myself." His lips quirked up at the corners at your flabbergasted expression.

"You are the most—" You stopped. Started again. "Do you have any idea what the past five years have felt like? Do you have any idea what I—" Your voice did the thing you'd been preventing it from doing, cracked at the edge of the sentence like a plate under too much weight. You stopped. Pressed your lips together. "I grieved you. I sat in my flat and I genuinely, actually grieved you and decided you were dead. I had — Simon, I had a plan for getting through it. I was managing it."

"I know."

"Don't say I know." you snapped sounding more like a bratty child than angry.

"I'm sorry." And this was different. This was not the automatic I know, the absorbing of your anger. This was something he said the way he said very few things — carefully, with full weight behind it. His eyes on yours across the table. "I'm sorry for the five years. I'm sorry I couldn't find another way. I'm sorry you were on your own with it." A pause. "I'm sorry it took me this long to have something worth coming back with."

"The house is not—" You stopped. "You didn't need to buy me a house, Simon. I didn't need—"

"I needed to," he said. Simply. "I needed to know I was coming back with something real. Something that wasn't just me turning up with nothing after all that time, asking you to — to accept—" He moved his hand across the table, and his fingers stopped just short of yours. Not touching. Close. "Asking you to take me as I was. I needed it to be enough. I needed there to be something I could give you that was—"

"Simon." Your voice was very quiet.

"I know it's not—"

"Simon." You turned your hand over on the table. Just that. The small, deliberate movement of turning your palm up.

He looked at it. Then he looked at you. Then, slowly, he put his hand in yours — his enormous, careful, tattooed hand. Not quite the one that had carried your bag through every corridor of secondary school and pulled you up off the pavement after Daniel Holt and held you on the platform at the train station, but this one now and his fingers closed around yours and he held on.

"I only ever wanted you," you said softly.

"Sunshine-"

"You were always worth it," you cut him off. And then, because it was time — because it had been time for approximately thirty years and you were done waiting for the right moment when the right moment had repeatedly failed to arrive — "You were always enough. You were always the thing I was — Simon, you have always been the only one I wanted. Exactly as you are."

He was very still.

"I didn't tell you on the platform," you said. "I should have. I've thought about it every day since."

"So have I," he said.

The candle between you flickered in some movement of air from the kitchen, and in the warm unsteady light his face was open in a way you had waited thirty years to see. His hand was warm and sure around yours, and from the other side of the restaurant you were almost certain you heard Margaret Howarth say something to Gerald in a satisfied undertone.

"You planted the lavender," you grinned.

"Three years ago." He finally smiles back at you, it was crooked and uneven and you loved it.

"You are," you said carefully, "the most ridiculous man I have ever known." You shook your head still grinning.

"Missed you too, sunshine," he smirked.

Dinner ended the way the best dinners end — not with a definitive conclusion but with a gradual, reluctant unwinding, the kind where both people keep finding one more thing to say, one more thread to pull, because the alternative is standing up and the evening becoming past tense.

You ordered dessert.

Neither of you particularly wanted it but you both ordered it, and you both knew why, and neither of you said so. The chocolate brownie was very good. Simon ate his methodically, the way he ate everything, and at one point looked up and caught you watching him and said nothing.

The candle between you had burned down to a stub by the time the bill came.

He paid. You protested on principle. He gave you a look that had not changed at all since he was fourteen years old — flat, certain, faintly amused — and handed the card to the waiter without further discussion.

"That's not—" you started.

"Next time," he said.

Next time. You let it sit there between you, warm and presumptuous and everything you wanted.

Outside, the evening had cooled.

The last of the summer still holding in the air, the kind of September evening that felt like a concession, like the year wasn't ready to be done.

The street was quiet for a Saturday, just a few couples moving between the restaurants and a group of lads outside the pub further down having a smoke. The amber of the streetlights made everything look like something worth remembering.

Simon stood beside you on the pavement, close enough that his arm brushed yours when he turned to look down the street, and you were very aware of the warmth of him and the black shirt and the lavender you couldn't smell from here but could somehow still feel in your hands.

"Walk with me a bit," he said. Not a question, not quite. He'd always done that — phrased invitations as though the outcome were already agreed, as though he simply assumed you'd say yes because you almost always did.

"Alright."

He fell into step beside you, and for a little while you just walked — past the wine bar with its fairy lights, past the old library that had become a gin distillery at some point in the last decade, past the post office that had been there since before either of you were born. You talked about small things. Easy things. The kind of conversation that runs alongside the real one underneath.

Then he stopped.

You stopped too.

Simon looked down at you. His hands were in his pockets. That brown gaze of his moved over your face in the way it had been moving over your face all evening — like he was cataloguing it, like he was making up for lost time in the looking.

"Dance with me," he said.

You blinked. "What?"

He tilted his head, "Come dancing with me."

You stared at him.

Simon Riley, who had sat against the wall at every school disco you'd ever attended, arms folded, watching everyone else with the expression of a man conducting a private risk assessment.

Simon Riley, who you had never, in thirty years of knowing him, seen voluntarily approach a dance floor.

"You don't dance," you said.

"No," he agreed. "But you do."

The simplicity of it landed somewhere very central.

You do.

As though that were reason enough. As though your enjoyment of a thing were sufficient justification for him to walk into it without hesitation.

Which, you supposed, when it came to Simon, it always had been.

"Alright," you said, for the second time in ten minutes.

His hand found the small of your back again, that same light, deliberate touch from inside the restaurant and he guided you down the street.

Simon said you weren't far, when you heard it.

The particular sound of a Domino's box. The slight crinkle of a carrier bag. And then your mother's voice, carrying across the quiet street in the way it always had — warm and clear and entirely without volume control.

"Oh honey! We thought - oh!"

"Oh fuck," you cursed.

You said it very quietly. Not quietly enough. Simon chuckled under his breath.

Your parents were coming along the pavement from the direction of the only car park around here — your father in his weekend coat, your mother in the blue one she'd had for fifteen years. A Domino's pizza box balanced in her arms and a carrier bag hanging from your father's hand.

Movie night. Of course. They still did it every other Saturday, had done since you were small, and of course they would do it tonight of all the Saturday nights in the entire calendar.

Your mother's face when she saw you was pure, unguarded delight — the face she always made when she encountered you unexpectedly, as though each time were still a pleasant surprise. Then her gaze moved, naturally and automatically, to the man standing beside you with his hand at the small of your back.

The delight didn't disappear. It did something more complicated.

"Oh honey," she said again, but differently this time. Softer. Her voice going somewhere else entirely. "Simon?"

The Domino's box dipped. Your father caught it with the reflexes of a man who had been catching things your mother nearly dropped for forty years.

Simon had gone still beside you. Not that controlled, present stillness he had, the one that wasn't tension but something adjacent to it. He was looking at your mother with an expression you couldn't fully read from the side, but you could see the line of his jaw, and it was careful.

"Mrs—" he started.

"Don't you Mrs me," your mother said. Her voice was not angry. That was the thing — you'd prepared yourself, in the split second between seeing them and now, for anger, or for the brisk, self-protective coolness she used sometimes when she'd been frightened. But it wasn't that. It was something that had tears in it, which was considerably worse to witness.

She handed the pizza box to your father without looking at him — he took it with the silent competence of long practice — and she crossed the pavement in four short steps and she put her arms around Simon Riley.

He was so much larger than her. He had always been larger than her, even at fifteen when he'd eaten her shepherd's pie at the kitchen table and been careful to seem like it was casual and not like he was starving. Even when she gave him seconds and he looked like he would beg for thirds.

But now it was almost absurd, the smallness of her against the width of him, and he stood there for just a fraction of a second — that fraction where you could see him recalibrating, receiving something he hadn't prepared for — and then his arms came around her and he held on.

Your mother was crying. Small, quiet sounds, the kind she made when she was trying not to. Her face was pressed against his chest and her hands gripped the back of his black shirt and she said, muffled and with great feeling, "You absolute boy."

Simon said nothing. His eyes, over the top of your mother's head, found yours.

You had to look away. The street was very interesting. The lamppost in particular.

You bit into your lip.

Your father appeared at your shoulder.

He was a quiet man, always had been. The kind of steady, observant presence that took things in without making a production of the taking in. He stood beside you with the pizza box over one arm and the carrier bag in the other hand and watched his wife hold the boy who had eaten at their table for a decade, and he said, very quietly, to you,

"Well. He's not dead then."

"No Dad," you managed. "He's not dead."

"Good," your father said.

As though this settled it. As though the entirety of the past five years of your grief and his, because he had grieved Simon too in his quiet way, in the way of a man who doesn't say things aloud but feels them thoroughly. He looked at Simon over the top of your mother's head and gave him a single, deliberate nod. The kind that meant; we'll talk. The kind that meant; I have things to say to you. The kind that also, underneath both of those, meant; I'm so glad son.

Simon received the nod with equal gravity, which was exactly right.

Your mother finally pulled back. She held Simon by the arms — or tried to, her hands not quite making it around the circumference of them — and looked up at him with red eyes and the particular expression of a woman who has a great deal to say and is choosing, for now, not to say most of it.

"You'll come for dinner," she said. Not a question. The same tone she'd used on him at fifteen and apparently intended to continue using indefinitely. "Sunday. Proper dinner. Not a restaurant. Mine."

"Yes," Simon said. Immediately. Without hesitation.

"Good." She released his arms and reached up and patted his cheek once, firmly, the way you might with someone who had done something frustrating and beloved in equal measure.

Then she turned to you, and her expression did something complicated and warm and knowing, and she didn't say any of the things she was clearly thinking, which you appreciated deeply.

What she said instead was: "Don't stay out too late. You're thirty-five, not seventeen."

"Mum." You scolded.

"I'm just saying." She shrugged.

"We're going dancing," you told her, with the energy of someone redirecting a conversation through sheer momentum.

Your mother looked at Simon. Simon looked at your mother. Something passed between them that was private and thirty years old and not yours to have.

"Of course you are," she said.

Your father passed the Domino's box back to your mother, and said, "Right then. We'll leave you to it." He looked at Simon one more time. "Sunday," he confirmed.

"Sunday," Simon said.

Your parents moved off down the pavement.

Your mother looked back once — just once — and her face when she did was the face you'd seen her wear at your primary school nativity and at your GCSE results and on the morning you'd gone to university; the particular face of a woman watching her child be happy and feeling the full, complicated, loving weight of it.

Then she turned back to your father and said something you couldn't hear, and his hand found her shoulder as they walked, and they rounded the corner and were gone.

You stood on the pavement in the September evening and breathed.

Beside you, Simon was also very carefully just standing there.

"She cried on me," he said, after a moment.

"Yes."

"Didn't expect that."

You turned to look at him. He was looking at the corner your parents had turned, and his face had the quality it sometimes had when something had reached him — not visibly, not dramatically, just in that particular stillness that meant something had got through.

"She cried about you," you told him. "When you stopped writing. Three years ago — there were several times, actually, but three years ago was the worst. She held me in her kitchen and we both—" You stopped. Managed the next part carefully. "She loves you too, Simon. She always did. You were at our table every other night for years."

He was quiet for a moment. Something moved in his jaw. "I know," he said. And this time the I know was different from all the other times he'd said it tonight — heavier, and private.

"You agreed to Sunday dinner," you giggled.

"Of course I agreed to Sunday dinner," he said knowing full well he would have been stupid not to and gotten an earful from your mother.

Simon offered you his hand.

Not at the small of your back this time. His hand, palm up, in the space between you. Old-fashioned and deliberate.

You put yours in it.

"Come on then," he said. "Let's go dancing."

There was, as it turned out, only one place to go dancing in this town on a Saturday night if you meant actual dancing — the kind with a proper floor and music with a real structure to it.

It was not a club.

It was not a bar with a cleared space near the speaker.

It was the old church hall on Callow Street, which had been hosting the Saturday Evening Social Dance since before either of you were born, and which Simon seemed to know about with the specificity of a man who had done his research.

"A dance hall," you said, standing outside it. Through the tall, thin windows the warm light was visible, and the sound — strings, a proper band, something with a waltz rhythm that made the windows hum faintly. "You're taking me to a dance hall."

"Only place with a floor."

"Simon, this is a — there will be pensioners in there." you said quietly.

"There'll be a dance floor," he looked down at you. "And you said yes." he shrugged but looked smug.

He pushed the door open and held it, and because you had in fact said yes, and because the music through the door sounded genuinely lovely, and because you were still holding his hand from the pavement, you went in.

The church hall smelled of floor polish and tea. Fairy lights were strung along the rafters — someone's addition, not the original fixtures, and they made the whole space amber and soft.

Round tables lined the edges, most of them occupied by couples in their sixties and seventies and eighties, a few younger faces dotted among them, everyone dressed with the particular care of people who still believed an evening out was worth dressing for.

On the small stage at the far end, a four-piece band was working through something in three-four time with the ease of musicians who had played together for years.

And at the edge of the floor, clipboard in hand, wearing the same expression of organised authority she'd worn every PE lesson for fifteen years was Mrs Valerie Croft.

She was smaller than you remembered. Or perhaps you were simply larger.

She'd retired at some point — the hair was fully silver now rather than streaked — but the posture was identical: spine straight, chin up, the bearing of a woman who had spent decades telling teenagers to stand properly and had eventually simply become the embodiment of the instruction.

She looked up from her clipboard as you approached and her eyes moved from you to Simon, and to her credit, she didn't miss a step.

"Well," she tilted her chin up to meet his eyes, "Riley."

"Miss," Simon said. Which was technically incorrect given that she had a ring on her finger and had for as long as you'd known her, but you suspected it was because he'd called her Miss in secondary school the way you had. "Mrs Croft. Sorry. We were passing and— " He paused, which was unlike him. "Is there any chance we could crash it?"

Mrs Croft looked at him. She looked at you. She looked at your joined hands with the expression of a woman who had supervised enough teenagers to recognise a development when she saw one.

"Can you behave yourselves?" she asked.

"Yes," you said nodding.

Simon said nothing.

Mrs Croft made a sound that was not quite a laugh but was adjacent to one. "Floor's open," she said. "Don't knock anyone over." And she turned back to her clipboard.

The first dance was not elegant.

Simon was, as he had always been and had openly admitted, not a dancer.

He was a man built for other kinds of movement — purposeful, directed, the kind that had somewhere to go. Dancing required a different relationship with your body, a willingness to be present in it without agenda, and that was not naturally his.

But he was trying. And Simon Riley trying at something he wasn't good at with complete, unhesitating commitment was one of your favourite things in the world.

He held you correctly — one hand at your waist, the other holding yours at the right height — because he had clearly looked this up at some point, which you were choosing not to think about too hard. His footwork was careful. Deliberate. Slightly behind the beat in the way of someone counting silently.

"You're counting," you told him trying your hardest not to laugh.

"Shut up."

"Simon, I can see your lips moving." you snorted.

"I said shut up."

You were laughing now. Properly, helplessly, the kind that came up from somewhere real — and he looked down at you with that face, that flat, long-suffering, completely fond face, and something in his eyes that was warm in a way that had nothing to do with patience and everything to do with the fact that your laugh had always been, apparently, one of his favourite sounds.

"You're doing fine," you told him, once you'd recovered.

"I'm doing terribly," he answered. "Keep going."

By the second dance, he was better.

By the third, he had found something. Some adjustment in the way he held you, the way his hand settled more fully at your waist, drawing you closer so the movement between you became less about individual steps and more about one shared thing. He was a quick study. He always had been, once he'd decided something was worth doing.

You became aware, gradually, of the room watching.

Not intrusively. Not all at once. But in the soft, peripheral way of a room full of people who have been in love for decades and recognise the particular weather of it when it walks through the door.

An older couple near the stage — she in pale blue, he in a suit that had been good once and was still cared for — had stopped talking to watch you.

A woman at one of the corner tables had her chin in her hand.

Mrs Croft, by the door, was very deliberately looking at her clipboard and failing to look only at her clipboard.

You didn't mind. You were too busy watching Simon watch you.

The band changed tempo at half past nine.

The waltz gave way to something with a different shape entirely — something that moved from the hips rather than the feet, a rhythm that was slower in its pulse and considerably less innocent in its intention.

A rumba.

You looked up at Simon.

He looked down at you.

"I don't know this one," he said.

"I'll show you." you breathed.

You took his hand and placed it lower at your waist, right above the curve of your ass. Deliberately watching his face when you did it, watching the shift in his expression, the way something in his eyes went very still and very focused. "Hip to hip," you told him. "Slower than you think. Let the music pull you."

He followed your lead with an attention that was frankly overwhelming in its completeness.

Simon Riley giving you his full, undivided, physical focus was not a small thing. He was so large and so present and he moved with you rather than against you, adjusting with every shift of your weight, and somewhere in the second minute of the song the counting stopped and something else replaced it.

He drew you closer. His hand at your hip pulled you in until there was no space left between you, until you could feel the warmth of him through the green of your dress and you were very aware of every point of contact, of the music and of the room full of people who had gone very quiet.

Then he turned you.

It was not technically correct. It was not what the dance required. But he turned you in a single, smooth movement that his body had decided on and yours simply followed, because that was what it did with him.

And then he dipped you.

The room tilted. His arm was across your back, solid and immovable, and you were suspended in the amber light with the music around you and your hand at his shoulder.

He lowered you — slowly, with complete control, no hesitation in the hold and then his face was close, very close, and his nose grazed the line of your throat making your breath hitch.

A slow, deliberate graze. The warmth of his breath against your pulse point. You felt it in places that had nothing to do with dancing, between your legs throbbing.

His hand — the one at your hip — slid down, just slightly, just enough, finding the outside of your thigh where the fabric of your dress lay, and he hooked your leg, slowly, around his hip. His fingers at the back of your thigh. Holding you there. His nose still at your throat.

The music resolved. Somewhere behind you, someone started clapping.

He brought you upright. Smoothly, slowly, until you were standing again and his hand was still at the back of your thigh. Your leg still around his hip and your faces were very close. Your heart was conducting itself in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with exertion.

You were panting. Slightly. Just slightly.

He was not panting. He was looking down at you with the almost-smile, the one that had always been rarer than gold and twice as valuable — and his eyes were warm and very dark and entirely, completely satisfied with themselves.

"You looked that up as well," you managed.

"No," he said.

"Simon—"

"That one," he said, "I just wanted to do."

From the table by the stage, the woman in pale blue was applauding with great enthusiasm. Her husband had two fingers in his mouth and was whistling.

Mrs Croft had given up entirely on the clipboard.

The taxi back was not a long ride.

It felt longer than it was, and shorter than you wanted.

You sat beside him in the back seat with his thigh against yours and the city moving past the windows and neither of you speaking. The silence had a texture to it that was thick and warm and anticipatory in a way that made the air feel heavy in your lungs.

His hand was on your knee. Just resting there, heavy and warm, the way he did everything — with complete, unapologetic certainty.

You did not move it.

The house appeared at the end of the lane with its white fence and its dark windows and the lavender silver in the moonlight.

You were out of the taxi before it had fully stopped and you were aware how eager this appeared and you didn't care.

Simon paid the driver and caught up with you in three strides because his legs were considerably longer than yours and always had been.

He got to the door first. Key in hand.

The door opened.

And you did not wait for him to step through it.

You took him by the front of his shirt, that black shirt, warm from his body, the fabric bunching in your fists and you lips were suddenly on his.

You walked him backwards through the doorway and you felt the moment his back met the wall just inside and you were already kissing him before he'd fully registered the sequence of events.

Your mouth on his. Your hands in the front of his shirt. Thirty years of it finding its way out all at once, without ceremony, without preamble, without any of the careful management you had been applying to yourself since you were four years old at a preschool art table.

He kissed you back.

He kissed you back the way he did everything — thoroughly, completely, with his full attention and no apparent interest in doing anything else ever again.

His hands came to your face, big and careful, tilting your jaw, and for a moment you were simply inside the realness of him and the warmth of him and the fact that he was here and alive and kissing you in the hallway of the house he'd bought for you.

He pulled back.

"Easy, sunshine," he said against your lips. Low. A little breathless, which you would be privately triumphant about later. The corner of his mouth pulled up in that crooked smile.

You became aware, in the slightly dazed way of someone returning from somewhere, that your hands were still in his shirt and his hands were still on your face and you were standing approximately two inches apart in his hallway.

You also became aware, in the refocusing of your vision, of his mouth.

Of the scar on his upper lip.

You didn't know how you hadn't noticed it before — through dinner, through the dancing, through all of it.

Perhaps you had simply not been this close before. Or perhaps you had been looking at so many things that you hadn't been looking at everything.

It was small, a thin pale line bisecting the left side of his upper lip, old enough to have faded to silver, the kind of scar that had been there for years and had been lived with so thoroughly that the face had absorbed it.

You lifted your thumb and touched it, gently. "How'd you get this?"

He went very still, alert and present and reading you.

You kissed it. Softly. Just that.

Something moved in his throat.

His hands shifted from your face to your waist, warm and settled, and he began to move you gently — backwards, one steady step at a time — turning you both away from the wall and deeper into the hallway. His foot found the door behind him and pushed it closed with a quiet, final click.

"If I tell you about that one," he said, his voice low and even above your head as he guided you past the entrance and toward the stairs, "I'll have to tell you about the rest."

He looked down at you as he said it, that look, the one that said you were the most interesting thing he had ever encountered. The one that made you feel simultaneously seen and slightly undone — and his expression had in it something that was fond and amused and entirely, devastatingly warm.

You kicked your heels off at the bottom of the stairs. They went somewhere behind you. You didn't look.

Your bag went next, dropped against the banister.

"The rest?" you repeated. Your voice came out slightly smaller than you intended. Your eyes, entirely without your permission, moved down the front of him — the black shirt, the breadth of his shoulders, his torso, his thick thighs, all of him — and back up again. Slowly.

He watched you do it. He said nothing.

You swallowed. "Tell me then."

His hand at your waist steered you up the first step, and then the second, and the stairs curved slightly toward the landing above, and at the top of the stairs he pushed open the door to a bedroom.

The room was large and furnished.

A bed, properly large, the kind that accommodated a man his size without complaint. Low lamps on either side casting the same amber warmth as the hall below. Dark wood floors, a window looking out toward the garden, the curtain shifting slightly in a crack of night air.

He kissed you, just inside the door you kissed him back and his hands were at your hips.

Then he pulled back with a groan. Both of you breathing slightly harder than was strictly accounted for by climbing one flight of stairs.

"I want to, sunshine," he said. His voice was very low. Restrained. His hands still on your body, holding you there, his thumbs moving in a small slow motion against the fabric of your dress that was doing nothing to help you think clearly. "I do. But I need to hear it from you first. Your permission. Clear words. I don't want to misunderstand you."

You opened your mouth.

And then your eyes moved, over his shoulder, to the dresser.

A skull mask looked back at you.

You closed your mouth. You looked at it. The mask, white and stark and precise but somehow both alien and completely, recognisably his. The balaclava beside it, folded neatly. And tactical gloves — enormous, black, reinforced, approximately the size of your head.

"That yours?" you asked.

Simon turned his head, following your gaze. He looked at the dresser, then back at you. "Yeah."

"What is it?"

"What I wear on missions."

"Oh," you said.

And then your brain did something entirely beyond your authority. It constructed, with great speed and considerable detail, an image: Simon, broad and enormous, in black tactical gear. Gloved hands. That mask. Hovering over you.

You swallowed.

The image did not leave. It simply settled in, warm and vivid and decidedly unhelpful.

"Sunshine."

His hand came to your face — his big, warm, ungloved hand, his actual hand, the one you knew — his thumb sweeping gently under your eye, bringing you back into the room and the amber lamplight and the present moment.

"Hmm?" you managed meeting his gaze.

His eyes moved over your face with the same comprehensive attention he always gave you.

"Your permission, love," he said. Quiet. Certain.

"Oh." You blinked. "Yes. Yes, you have it. Always."

The almost-smile. "Not for everything I want to do to you." His thumb was still moving, very gently, under your eye. "I'll ask. Multiple times."

You stared at him. "Multiple—"

"Times," he confirmed. His voice was entirely level. His eyes were not.

You pushed his shoulder and your cheeks burned.

He caught your hand as you pushed it and laughed, a low, real, full sound, the kind that you had spent most of your life engineering because it was so rare and so completely, unreasonably good.

You laughed too, properly, the helpless kind, and his forehead came down to rest against yours and you were both laughing in the amber light of his bedroom with the skull mask on the dresser and the lavender outside the window and thirty years behind you and everything in front.

The laughing settled.

Not all at once — it unwound gradually, the way laughter does when it's the real kind, leaving something warm and loose in its place.

His forehead was still against yours. His hands had moved from your face to your waist, both of them now, holding you the way he'd held you on the dance floor — with that complete, unhurried certainty, like you were something he'd been waiting to hold properly for a very long time and intended to do it right.

The amber light of the lamps lay across everything. Through the gap in the curtain, you could see the edge of the garden — the pale shapes of flowers, the dark of the lawn.

"Tell me about the rest," you said quietly.

He pulled back just enough to look at you. "The scars?"

"You said if you told me about the one on your lip you'd have to tell me about the rest." You reached up and touched the scar again — that thin, silver line — with the pad of your thumb. "So tell me about the rest."

He looked at you for a long moment. Then he reached up and began, without ceremony, to unbutton his shirt.

You were very still.

He did it the way he did everything — without drama, without performance, button by button from the collar down, and when he shrugged it from his shoulders and set it aside you understood, in a way you hadn't before, what eighteen years of that life had written on him.

He was enormous.

You'd known that in the abstract — had known it from the doorframe and the dance floor and the way rooms seemed to reorganise themselves around him — but this was different.

This was the specific, undeniable reality of his shoulders, the breadth of his chest, the muscle of his arms that carried the tattoo sleeve on the left, the ink wrapping from wrist to shoulder in dark, intricate patterns that in this light you still couldn't fully read but wanted to.

And the scars.

There were more than you'd expected.

Each one a different shape and age and story, written into the topography of him in pale and silver lines. A long one along his left ribs. Something older, fainter, across the top of his right shoulder. A circular scar below his collarbone on the left side that your medical knowledge was sufficient to identify and that made your chest constrict briefly and completely before you put that particular knowledge away for now.

He was watching your face as you looked. Careful. Giving you the time of it.

You stepped forward. You placed your hand flat against his sternum — his heart under your palm, steady and real — and you felt him exhale.

"The lip," you said.

"Kandahar. 2004. Caught the stock of a rifle." He said it the same way he'd told you everything tonight — flat, factual, trusting the fact to carry the weight. "Bit through my lip. Wasn't pretty for a while."

You moved your hand from his sternum to his ribs. Found the long scar there, traced it gently with your fingertips.

"That one."

"Knife. 2009. I moved the wrong way and the other man moved the right way." The shadow of something in his face that was not quite humour and not quite not. "Lesson learned."

Your hand moved to his shoulder. The older, fainter scar.

"Before the military," he said, before you asked. His voice changed, just fractionally. Flatter. Doing more work to stay level. "Not a mission."

You understood. You didn't ask further. You pressed your lips to it instead — gently, just that, your mouth against the old pale mark — and you felt the breath go out of him in a way that was different from all the others. Slower. Deeper.

"Sunshine," he said. Very quietly.

"The one below your collarbone," you said.

A pause. "That one's not a story for tonight."

You tilted your head back to look up at him. "Is it a story for eventually?"

His eyes on yours. Something in them that was considering, assessing, "Yeah," he said. "Eventually."

"Alright," you said. You meant it. You had waited thirty years; you could wait for the story of one scar.

His hand moved to your face. That same gesture from the hallway — his thumb at your cheek, slow and deliberate and he tilted your chin up and kissed you. Not urgently this time. Slowly. Deeply.

His hands found the zip at the side of your dress — careful, unhurried — and he looked at you, a clear question in it, and you nodded, and his hands were very steady and very gentle. Your dress went the way of your heels and your bag, somewhere behind you, unmissed.

He looked at you the way he had looked at you on the porch yesterday, and outside The Grill tonight, and across the restaurant table, and on the dance floor — with that complete, comprehensive attention.

Only now there was nothing restrained about what was in it. It was simply there, open and certain, and it was thirty years of something finally being allowed to be exactly what it was.

"Hi," you said. Which was absurd. Which made him laugh again, low and real.

"Hi, sunshine," he said. His hands at your waist. His forehead dropping to yours.

“Si I need to-“ you breathed in deep, “I um,” he pulled his head away from yours, looking into your eyes with those brilliant brown ones of his.

“What is it Sunshine?” He asked, his finger under your chin tilting your head up.

“I’m, I’ve never-“ you sigh, “I’ve told you so many things, I can’t believe I can’t even say this to you.”

“Do we need to slow down?” He asked, his voice softening.

“No. It’s not that. I mean I’m not a virgin if that’s what you’re thinking I just, no guy has ever-“ you sigh again, your eyes dropping from his.

Simon is quiet. He waits, the way he always waits — giving you the whole space of it, not rushing you toward the end of the sentence.

“Made it good,” you finally say, to his chest. “For me. It’s always just, fine. Maybe sometimes I get close but then it’s over. Not that there’s been loads of guys, maybe three.”

A beat.

You make yourself look up at him.

Something changes in his face.

You see the flare of it.

Anger.

Not toward you — you feel that immediately, the anger isn't at you, it moves through him and settles somewhere else entirely. His jaw shifts. His eyes, for just a moment, go somewhere dark and quiet.

"Every one of them," he says. Low. More to himself than to you.

"Simon—"

"Had you," he says. "And didn't—" He stops. The jaw again. His eyes squeeze shut. "Didn't pay attention."

"It's not—"

"It is." His eyes open. He looks at you, his hands moving to your hips, both of them, settling there with a weight that feels like anchoring, like he needs the contact as much as you do. The darkness has settled now, controlled, underneath everything else.

"And I wasn't here." Something moves through his expression — not guilt exactly, but something adjacent to it, something private and old. "Should've been your first, sunshine. Should've been there to—"

He stops himself. His forehead drops to yours.

"I've waited years for this," he says quietly. "I'm not rushing it. And I'm going to pay attention."

“Pay attention?” You ask breathless.

“To every sigh,” he kissed your cheek, “whimper and moan.” His lips moved down to your jaw. “To the way your hips move, the way your back arches, the way you’ll writhe under me, how I’ve imaged it every time I’ve gotten off for the last two decades.” He whispered the last bit into your ear, teeth tugging on your earlobe.

You gasp, “Simon.” Your cheeks burn.

“Oh don’t tell me you never thought about it.” He grins pulling back to look down at you.

You look at the floor sheepishly cause of course you have. Of course you’ve cum the hardest you ever have in your life only when thinking about Simon fucking you.

"Oh you have." He smirked titling his head.

“Shut up.” You push his shoulder and he laughs.

His hands leave your hips and then you're moving, his arms around you, and the edge of the bed meets the back of your knees.

Then his massive paws are in your hair and his lips are on your neck as your back meets the sheets. His weight heavy and solid on you. You could tell he was holding himself up so he didn’t squish you.

He leaned back on his heels, kneeling between your legs. You sighed in satisfaction when his fingers ran over your bare skin. His blunt nails scratching softly where your pelvic bone sits.

"So beautiful Sunshine," He grabs your hips and squeezes, "Fill my hands with you finally." Simon groans. A noise you've been picturing in your head. This and everything else that happens this evening, you truly believe, will be one of those times when reality is better than anything you have imagined.

Simon's brown eyes have always been intense, but right now the way he's looking down at you it's like he is someone else entirely. His eyes almost black with how much they have darkened.

"Simon." You tangle your fingers with his.

"Can I?" He asks. His hand, the one not in yours, trailing down your thigh and stopping on your mound. You clench around nothing when he pushes down, just a little bit of pressure that you feel in your clit and makes your hips buck.

You don't miss the way his lips do the almost smile thing. You nod furiously but he shakes his head.

"Need your words love." He raises a brow.

"Yes, yes Simon touch me." You breathe out, your chest feeling tight when he nods, moving his hand down to cup your cunt over your underwear.

And maybe its because you haven't had sex in three years, maybe its because you are touch starved or maybe its simply because its Simon, but your back arches and your moan is down right pornographic with a simple touch over your underwear.

"So responsive." He mumbles, his thumb rubbing circles over your clit through the fabric. "Get your tits out for me Sunshine, wanna see em." he grunts feeling your underwear getting wet.

Shakily you reach behind your back and unclip your bra. "Been thinking about them for years. What they look like, how they'll bounce when I fuck you." He groans as you pull the straps down your arms and fling the bra on the floor.

His eyes are on your chest, he doesn't blink. Then as if his system has rebooted, he blows air out of his cheeks and whistles low. "Fuck lovie, so pretty. You're a dream." Simon leans forward and wraps his lips around your breast, his tongue swirling around the nipple as his thumb continues circling your clit.

You moan, fingers tugging at his hair.

He comes off your breast with a pop making you whine and push at his shoulder. He grins pressing his thumb firmer against you, while sliding his other hand over your leg, index finger tracing over the small scar on you leg from when you fell off your bike after Simon broke your training wheels.

There was something comforting about this. Simon wasn't someone you had to explain yourself to, he already knew every version of you, he was simply adding this one to his list. This version, open and honest and begging the man you'd known for thirty years to make you cum on his fingers.

This didn't feel like a hook up, not like other guys have, but it felt like two people who have been each other's home for years and they're finally admitting it.

"Kiss me Simon." You're not even sure if what you said made sense with how much you were panting. But he leaned down to graze his lips along yours. Teasing and soft, despite the fast past he'd started to set with his thumb.

"Stop teasing." You huffed.

"Its my favourite pastime." He grinned hooking his fingers in your underwear, pulling them down and moving with them to settle between your legs.

You gasp, when his tongue slides from your asshole to your clit. "Simon!" His dark eyes are locked on yours as he swirls the tip of his his tongue around your entrance. Your toes curl, your head falling back onto the soft bed sheets.

A few occasions, you could count on one hand, had a guy you were with eaten you out and it was good but fuck, it didn't feel like this.

You felt like you were burning all over with each swipe of his tongue, each dip inside your entrance, each pattern he begins to circle over your clit.

He was learning you.

Simon groans against you, his breath hot, it made you dizzy. You feel everything, its too much to quick and your hips start to buck against his mouth.

Simon clearly had no intention of slowing down or stopping as he slides his arms around your thighs and splays his hands over the tops of them locking you in place.

It feels like fire, like molten lava pooling low in your abdomen the harder his tongue presses against you.

You don’t even recognise the sounds coming out of you, it’s as if every movement pulls a new one from you. 

His thumb replaces his tongue and he rubs the bump in small circles until you can barely breathe. “Sound so pretty,” he murmurs just as your back arches and you moan loudly into the night air. 

He is still speaking but you can’t hear anything he is saying, it’s all blurring together the way your vision is blurring. His thumb slides from your clit down until it’s pushing its way inside you. Your hips jerk away but his other hand is quick to hold you in place.

“No running.” Simon growls.

You cry out when his tongue comes back to torture you, lapping at you like he’s never had a drink and you're fresh water. Soon enough the rhythm he’s built has your hips rolling forward seeking more of whatever he has to give you.

Your hand reaches for his arm and squeezes hard the exact moment your vision turns white and your body shakes, dissolving into pleasure. It's like lightning pulsing through you. He works your through your orgasm, wringing every last wave of pleasure from you before he moves to your lips, kissing you.

“Did so good Sunshine. I’ve got you.” His arms wrap around you, your nipples grazing against the hair on his chest, that alone has you whimpering. 

"Need more, want you inside me Simon. Please." You look into his eyes, your shyness gone with your orgasm.

"Okay Sunshine." Simon chuckles, the sound vibrating against you.

He pulls back and gets off the bed before he starts to unbuckle his belt. He pushes his black slacks down along with his underwear, his large, and he was so fucking big, cock already hard.

"Always wondered what you'd be like in bed," He tilts his head with a smirk, "If you'd like being in control. Or if you'd prefer me to lead," He knelt on the bed again, and oh my god Simon Riley, your best friend of thirty years and the love of your life was crawling up the bed towards you until his cock was flush with your entrance. "If you'd be needy and beg. Or if you'd bark orders at me." He slapped the head of his cock against your clit. "If you'd be loud or quiet."

"If you'd let me do whatever I wanted to you," his head titled back, eyes shut, "Fuck Sunshine, the things I've imagined doing to you," He looks down at you with the most intense gaze, pining you there on the bed, "Would you let me lovie? Do whatever I want to you?" He asks, pearly whites peaking out to sink into his bottom lip.

"Like what?" Your breath is so unsteady, so hitched and uneven you feel your cheeks heat even more than they have done at his words.

He grins, "Like what?" He chuckles pushing the head of his cock against your entrance, not in, but resting against it, "Wanna fuck you so hard you can't walk. Make love to you slow and so deep you'll feel me everywhere. Bend you over every surface in this house and make you cry on my cock-"

"Simon!" You gasp.

"Can I Sunshine?" He groans pushing in a little more and your eyes sting with tears at the stretch.

"Yes! Please yes!" He pushes in slowly. One of his hands coming next to you on the bed and the other gripping your hip. He keeps sliding in further, so slowly until its sheathed inside you.

Simon does not move. You can see the restraint within the way his teeth are gritted, his brows furrowed, sweat forming on his forehead. 

“Fuck you feel amazing wrapped around me, so tight.” He groans. 

You don’t have any words and even if you did, you doubt you would be able to say them. You have never felt so…full. So filled to the brim and unable to get a reprieve from it.

“M’gonna move, gotta move Sunshine,” Simon growls and the fullness disappears for a second before he’s pushing himself back in. 

“Fuck you feel so good Si.” You shudder and stars appear in your vision when he moves forward and takes your legs with him folding you in half.

Simon Riley has you in fucking mating press and didn't even break the slow rhythm he's building. He continues this push and pull movement until it begins to flow, each movement begins where the other ends. The pattern making you sob, “Don’t stop!”

You can't function and its only now that you understand the phrase 'being fucked dumb', rocking your hips, trying desperately to keep up with each thrust, back arched so beautifully.

Simon lets his hand slip and curve around your jaw without thinking about it, "Taking me so well Sunshine." The feral look in his eyes sends a shiver up your spine.

"Too big." You sobbed, your hands grabbing at his large biceps as he thrusts harder. He could feel every ridge and curve of your sopping cunt.

"You can take it." He encouraged you, biting at your neck leaving marks in his wake and looking so damn happy whilst doing it.

You continued to moan and whimper, tears of pleasure falling down your face while Simon's huge body hovered over you. Protecting you from the outside world, in here, it was just you and him.

"Si..oh!" you cried out feeling him hit that rough spot inside your weeping, swollen cunt.

"There it is." He didn't mean to grin like a obsessed man in such an intimate moment but he couldn't help himself. He never can with you. Each thrust hits the one place no man ever seems to be able to find but Simon seemingly found with ease. A spot that makes a tightening begin like a coil, being wound with every drive of his hips.

Your sinful noises morph into higher pitched breathy little screams.

"I know lovie, I know." He cooed, holding you closer. His sweat glazed skin meeting yours as his large veiny hand slips under your head, his other arm curling around your waist.

You move your hips and he groans vulgar into the air, his hand gripping your hair and pulling your head back, a little to the side before he attacks your neck all messy. Smearing his lips across your throat, you don’t even recognise the sound that leaves your mouth.

He pulls away, his dark eyes flit to your squelching pussy, the noise attracting his attention pupils dilating, honing in on the way your cunt sucks his cock back in. He couldn’t pull away even if he wanted to and fuck he doesn’t, he wants nothing more than to stay in your pretty pussy forever.

“Simonfuckyespleaserighttheredontstop!” All the words and moans blend together until your mumbling nonsense trying your hardest to keep conscious, it’s difficult with the way he’s fucking into you so deliciously it’s making you delirious in the best way.

His big body towering over yours, big hands gripping you almost bruisingly. His thick muscular hairy thighs press against your skin compellingly, the sight before you, it's irresistible. All you have to do is look down to see his massive cock sliding in and out of you, a ring of white collecting at the base.

It's too much seeing him like this, feeling the sweet pleasure burn through you and yet Simon moves one of his hands off your head and presses a thumb to your swollen, aching clit.

You're done for.

You sob, so fucking loud you swear everyone in the world can hear it, hot tears flow down your cheeks staining them.

"That's it." The words wash over you with your orgasm, it swirls around you, clings to you, and pushes you down down down the rabbit hole of pleasure. Oversensitivity sets in making you whine at his touch, but you can't stop yourself from wanting more.

Your hips buck into his touch eliciting a dirty chuckle from him.

As Simon picks up his thrusts, he comes to the conclusion that he loves you like this, wants to see it everyday. You're so drunk, so delirious and he loves it. Loves the far away look in your eyes right before they roll back into your skull.

He shoves his face into your neck groaning, "Gonna cum Sunshine, need to. Where?" his thrusts pick up again, as if that were even possible.

"Cum inside me Simon, fill me up." You cry out.

Simon must have been right there as he cums the second you finish your sentence. Hot thick robes of cum pushing deep inside you. He rubs your clit faster and another smaller orgasm zips through you leaving you whimpering.

He stays in you, holding you until he goes soft. He moves your legs so they don't cramp. "Did so well for me Sunshine. I love you so much." He looks into your eyes as more tears spill down your cheeks.

"I love you Simon." you bring your fingers into his hair, pulling him closer to kiss you. The contrast between the way he just destroyed your guts and is now kissing you so softly, is astounding.

He is careful when he picks you up and walks into the ensuite bathroom to the right, flicking the light on and placing you on the toilet. "Gotta pee sunshine, don't want you getting you a uti." He says and you're so tired you don't even have the energy to be embarrassed.

Your eyes as still closed as you pee. Your hand moves to find the toilet paper but a warm flannel is being pressed against you, Simon's other hand on your knee to keep them open. You whine and push his hand away, "Simon that's icky." You frown at him opening your eyes to see him looking at you with a frown of his own.

"Nothing about you is icky Sunshine. I'm clearing up my mess, now move your hand." You do as told and it occurs to you, through your tired haze, while Simon gently wipes you clean that he must be used to clearing up mess with the job he does.

"All done. Want a shower or straight to sleep?" He asks.

"Sleep." You yawn making him smile at you.

He carries you back to the bed, lifting the duvet and settling you both underneath it.

The particular quality of afterwards settles in the room.

The warmth of it, the specific silence, the way the world outside the window continues to exist and you become aware of it again in layers. The sound of the garden. The distant sound of a car somewhere. The sound of him breathing.

You were lying with your head on his chest. His arm around you, heavy and warm. His heartbeat under your ear, steady and unhurried, the same heart that had been beating beside you in one form or another for thirty years.

His hand moved. Slowly, idly, up and down your back.

You watched the lamplight glow on the beside table. You thought about the lavender. You thought about the train station in 2001, and the birthday cards, and the bottom stair with the cream envelope, and Margaret Howarth saying you always did belong together with the satisfied certainty of someone who had known it before either of you did.

"Simon," you said.

"Yeah."

"You planted lavender for three years."

"You mentioned that already."

"I'm still processing it."

A low sound in his chest that was the rumble of a laugh contained. "Take your time Sunshine."

You propped yourself up and looked at him. His face in the lamplight — older, marked, those brown eyes that had been watching you since you were four years old, now watching you from a pillow in the house he'd bought you.

His expression was open in the way it had been open on the porch and at the restaurant table and in the dance hall, the way it had been open perhaps three times in thirty years before tonight and was now, apparently, simply his face when he looked at you.

You loved him so much.

You had loved him in different quantities and different registers for most of your life and now you loved him in this one too, this new one, and it was the same love and completely different and you thought you would be discovering its dimensions for a considerable amount of time.

"You should have told me," you said. "Years ago. Before the train."

"Yeah," he said. No argument.

"I would have said it back then too."

Something moved in his face. "I know," he said. And then, quieter, "I wasn't ready then. Wasn't enough yet."

"Simon—"

"I know what you're going to say."

"You were always—"

"I know," he said. "I believe you. Now." His hand came up to your face, tucking a strand of hair back, his thumb at your cheekbone. "Took me a while to get there. But I'm here."

"You're here," you agreed smiling.

"And you're here." his hand tangled itself in your hair.

"I'm here." you giggled.

He looked at you for a long moment. Then, "Stay with me."

Not a question, not quite — more like a hope said aloud. The rarest thing from him. He had carried so much silently for so long, and this one small thing cost him something, and you could see it, and you loved him for it.

"It's my house," you said cheeky and bright.

He blinked. Then that laugh again — the real one, the rare one — and your heart did what it always did when you earned it, that particular, irreplaceable lurch.

"Yeah Sunshine," he said. "It is."

You lay back down against his chest. His arm came around you. His heartbeat under your ear.

Outside, the lavender moved. The Union flag was still on the roof. The porch swing sat in the dark with its yellow cushion, waiting for morning.

"Sunshine," he said. Into your hair.

"Hmm."

"I love you."

You pressed your lips to his chest, above his heart.

"I love you too," you said. "I've loved you since you were that chubby four-year-old who stole my crayons."

A long pause.

"Chubby," he repeated.

"Stocky," you amended, grinning into his chest. "You were very stocky."

"I was four."

"You were a very solid four year old."

His arm tightened around you — not painfully, just firmly, the way of a man making a point through the medium of holding — and you laughed again, helplessly, into the warmth of him.

He made that sound, that low rumbling laugh that lived in his chest, and the lamp burned warm and low and outside the lavender moved in the dark.

Simon Riley.

Who stole your crayons at four and broke your glasses at seven and learned to read because of you and carried your bag through every corridor of secondary school and punched a boy for pushing you over and kissed your cheek in a toilet corridor and sat beside you through every lunch and glared at anyone who called you a nerd and came round to your kitchen table for years and went to war at seventeen and sent you cards from the edges of the world and planted lavender for three years and bought you the house you described at sixteen and came home.

He came home to you.

Your best friend. Your home. Your Simon.

Still, it's yours now. Inherited from a relative you rarely talked to; the deed shoved into your hands even though you don't know a fucking thing about tending soil or keeping animals, and now, you're the hesitant owner of twenty acres of stubborn, murky ground, a creaky barn, and a house that needed more love than you knew how to give. You weren't naive— you knew damn well you had no clue how to farm— but a part of you believed in the fantasy anyway. That you could trade traffic for trees, the concrete jungle for open fields. That you could learn as you went, like people do in stories.

The land, however, doesn't care about your optimism.

The tractor won't start— it doesn't even cough. The chicken coop smells like something died in it, and the hand saw you picked up at the feed store, after googling how to cut wood like an idiot, isn't doing more than blistering your palms.

You've cried twice. Once in the barn, when the roof leaked straight into the feed bags you'd just bought, and once in the kitchen, when the sink gave a groan and spat rust into the dishwater. The feed turned to mush, the water still ran rusty if you didn't let it bleed first, and what stared back on the reflection of your kitchen window looked every inch the fool who thought their life would become a Hallmark movie.

By the third day, your body aches in ways you didn't know it could. Your thighs are sore from trudging through mud that clings like wet cement, your shoulders burn from hauling feed, and your palms are raw from gripping tools you barely know how to use. Your first ever attempt at splitting wood ended with the axe bouncing off the log and nearly catching your shin. Sweat stings your eyes even though the air's cool, and suddenly you feel like laughing, half hysterical, half furious. The laugh sticks in your throat when you hear it, a solid thud, rhythmic, like the sound of a heartbeat. It was coming from the tree line that marked the far end of your property.

This is the first time you see him.

He's built like the logs he's splitting, broad and solid. Shirtless too, despite the chill, steam coming off his skin. Scarred shoulders and forearms bunch and flex with each swing of his axe. The curls at the crown of his head catch the sunlight, damp and wild from sweat, strands springing in different directions across his forehead. No hat shields him from the wind; his ears are ruddy, matching the sharp tip of his broad nose. His breath clouds the air in short bursts, but he doesn't seem to care.

He doesn't look up right away, keeps at it unhurried, like he's done this a thousand times before, and when he finally does pause, it's not because of you— the log gives, the split clean, the wood halved nearly to his boots. Only then does he straighten while rolling his shoulders back. His gaze flicks to you like a weight, as heavy as the axe he leans against the tree trunk. The silver marks running along the edges of his chest, the heaviness of his middle, and the strain of his denims over the swell of his thighs is staggering.

There's no comfort in his expression— dark eyes blunt and hard-edged, rooted in earth, his mouth set in a flat line, and then— oh. His mouth moves.

"What?" he grunts. Well, pardon me. You splutter, stepping back too fast, and your glove snags on the loose post of the fence. The wire catches, jerks your arm, and you stumble forward, nearly pitching into the dirt. An awkward shuffle is what keeps you upright, and your cheeks burn furiously when you realize how ridiculous you must look, tripping over a fence post.

Suddenly, his hand is on yours, casually untangling your glove from the wire. You hadn't even heard him approach— no crunch of leaves, no squelch in the dirt. For a man his size, he moves like fog.

The heat of him hits first— radiating off him like the open mouth of a hearth, the scent of him follows close behind: Woodsmoke, sweat, tobacco. Not the sweet kind from a pipe, just dry and bitter. Makes the back of your throat prickle.

He frees your hand like it's a chore, like pulling burrs off a dog's fur, and not a kindness from one neighbor to another. When he steps back, you don't wait, tucking your tail in and bolting; sneakers slipping in the mud, breath stuck in your throat. You don't look back either, just make for the porch like it's a finish line, pride in tatters behind you. The door sticks when you shove it open, the house greeting you with its usual chill. You kick off your shoes too hard, one skidding across the floor and smacking against the cabinet, and glance down— the hole in your brand new glove is small but ragged, and there's a scratch blooming red beneath it. Great. Perfect.

The antiseptic makes the cut sear when you dab on it with a cotton ball, the sting making your eyes water. The scratch isn't deep, but it's angry. Thin, red, and pulsing as if it was trying to remind you of every mistake you've made since stepping foot on this wretched land. You press harder than necessary, watching the skin blanch around it, trying to erase the moment with pressure alone.

Tossing your other glove onto the counter, it lands with a wet slap, and you lean against the sink, knuckles bled white and stare out the window. The field stretches wide and indifferent, and this time you don't cry, don't curse. You just stand there, unraveling, slowly, quietly, like a thread pulled from a hem. And you could pack up, sure. Sell the place, pretend it never happened. But then what? There's no backup plan. Just the same city with a job that chewed you up and spat you out, the same overpriced rent, the same noise that never fucking stops.

You'd rather rot in the dirt than go back and hear your friends say I told you so.

Besides, spite is cheaper than therapy.

---

The town's not much. Just a handful of crooked streets blended together, the kind of place where the gas station doubles as a bait shop and the post office closes early on Fridays because nobody's in a rush. The diner still has a jukebox that eats quarters and a waitress who calls everyone "hon", whether she likes you or not. There's a church, a feed store, a hardware shop that smells like sawdust, and a bar that pretends it's not open before noon.

Everyone knows everyone. And if they don't know you, then they know about you. (Hard not to when your car is the only one that skids on gravel.) You're the one that got saddled with the plot that has a rusted windmill that folk use as a landmark when giving directions.

You're the only one parked crooked outside of the grocery store, the only one asking where the boxed mac and cheese is.

It smells like dust and citrus cleaner in here, the kind that clings to the floor and never quite masks the scent of old produce. You're halfway through reading the handwriting on a box of eggs when the woman behind the counter leans in, elbows on the register, voice low, private.

"You settling in alright?" You give her a cautious nod. "Must be quite the change, coming from the city." A shrug is all you manage. "Well, bless you." She says it like benediction. Like you're going to need all the luck you can scrape together. Your gaze drifts past her shoulder to the corkboard on the wall, where handwritten flyers are pinned: lawnmower repair, free kittens, bible study potluck, Thursday at 7. You hope she doesn't expect you there. You're not a fan of churches and green bean casserole.

She glances out the window, where the hills roll out.

"You seem like a nice girl," she says. "Steer clear of that one."

You blink. Who?

Another voice chimes in from the canned goods aisle— an older man with a cart full of beans and dog food. "Simon Riley," he says like the word itself tastes bitter. "Lives out past the tree line. Big feller. Quiet. Keeps to himself."

The woman nods, "Used to be military, or something like it. Nobody really knows. He's not trouble, exactly, but he's not neighborly either. Doesn't take kindly to folks pokin' around."

Oh. The neighbor whose land backs up against yours. The one you’ve heard about in passing— mean as sin and just as ugly, lives alone, doesn't wave. You think of the way he freed your hand, his fingers careful but not kind. Now you know his name. Simon.

You thank them, pay for your groceries, and step out into the sun with a warning tucked between the receipt and the bruised apples you didn't mean to buy. The bell above the store door tinkles behind you, its little jingle out of step with the knot tightening in your stomach.

The outside air smells of motor oil and hay, a mix you might not ever get used to, and the gravel lot radiates heat through your shoes. The bag digs into the crook of your arm as you fumble with the keys, and when the car starts, the engine coughs before catching, the sound ricocheting too loud in the small parking lot. A woman in a straw hat looks up from her truck bed from across the street, and the same older man pushes his cart past, eyes flicking toward you. The road out of town stretches straight and bare, the fields rolling out, some with cattle and others with horses.

By the time you hit the bend that curves toward your land, the sun's dipped lower, sky streaked with the last embers of fading light, casting long shadows over where your boundary brushes his. He's there, of course he is. A massive figure against the gold of the field, broad back bent over something you can't quite see.

Whatever, not your business.

You park crooked again, the tires crunching over the loose stone in your driveway and sit there for a beat longer than necessary, fingers curled tight around the steering wheel. Simon still doesn't move, still bent over something, or maybe nothing. You don't look long enough to find out.

The groceries are heavier than it should be, the boxed mac and cheese pressing against your hip as you shoulder the door open. The porch shifts under your weight, same as always, and the screen door slaps shut behind you. You unpack slowly— eggs into the fridge, careful not to jostle the cracked one. Apples into a gaudy ornate bowl. The coffee joins its expired cousin in the cabinet, and the crackers go into the drawer that sticks unless you tug it right.

The house creaks in response, settling around you like an old dog curling up at your feet. You flick off the kitchen light and pad down the hallway, the floorboards groaning under each step. The bedroom is cool, the sheets still stiff from the last wash, and the window rattles faintly in its frame.

You change in the dark, tugging off your jeans and hoodie, slipping into a shirt that smells like detergent and not much else. The mattress still feels unfamiliar beneath you, the ceiling above blank. Silver filters through the window, and you watch shadows creep along the wall.

Outside, the windmill moans once, long and low, and the porch creaks once. The thought that it could've been deliberate makes your pulse thrum in your ears. You aren't sure if it's fear, anticipation, or some stupid pull you can't name.

Sleep comes slow, but it comes.

---

It slips again— your grip, your temper, the last thread of patience you've been nursing since spilling the coffee you made at sunrise. The latch to the chicken coop jerks sideways, the wire snags, and the gate swings wide in mockery. Muttering something sharp under your breath, you tug at the wire with stiff fingers. It bites back, slicing another thin line across your knuckle. You let out a hiss, more out of frustration than pain, and sit back on your heels, breath fogging in the cold.

Then you feel it, the shift, the pressure of someone watching. You turn around and Simon's already pushing off the fence and walking closer, boots sinking steady into the dirt. Up close, he's so much worse— his shirt pulls tight across his shoulders, damp with sweat and dust, clinging to the curve of his belly and the thick roll of his arms. He crouches beside you, bare hands thick-knuckled and scarred, and they move with the kind of ease that makes you feel like a child playing house.

You sit there, useless, and can't help but notice the small details: the faint scars along his forearms, the way the collar of his shirt rubs at the crease of his neck, the set of his jaw when he considers a problem. None of it invites intimacy, and yet, your thoughts keep lingering there, in that cozy space where observation and curiosity brush against something sharper.

Simon threads the wire, tightens the hinge, and tests the swing, and you watch the gate behave for him like it never did for you.

"Y'shouldn't be strugglin' with tha," he says finally.

"I—uh, it's tricky," you manage, fiddling with the drawstring of your hoodie. "I've uh, never really done this before."

He glances at you briefly, eyes narrowing at the scratch on your hand, and his jaw tightens, muscles ticking under the skin, but he doesn't say any more. He just shakes his head once and goes back to his property, dust rising faintly around his boots with each step.

It was the first of many things he fixes for you. When you can't manage your firewood pile before a harsh front, he shows up without asking, stacking it neatly by your porch. Not just stacked, aligned. Tight rows, bark facing out. You open the door to thank him, voice stiff with the effort, and he just nods, mutters, "S'nothin."

Then the fence. You woke one morning to find the rotten posts ripped out and new ones driven in, straight and deep into soft earth. You hadn't made any calls. But there he was, out in the early light, hammer swinging with brutal efficiency. You stand at the window, coffee cooling in your hand, rehearsing what you'll say. That he can't just show up. That you'll be damned if you pay him for something you didn't ask for.

But when you step outside, you don't say any of it.

Instead, you leave a jug of fresh lemonade and a sandwich on the porch rail. Not because you owe him. Not because you're grateful. It's reciprocity. Basic decency. A gesture to balance the ledger. He doesn't touch them at first. Keeps working like the offering doesn't exist. You go back inside, pretend not to watch, and later, the sandwich is gone, save the tomato slice. The jug's half-empty, the wax paper folded neatly, tucked under the rail.

No tomatoes, got it.

(And the one time you do sort of ask for help, it's because the sunroom has a wall that's gone soft with water damage, half-rotted, and you'd assumed he'd offer tools, or a second set of hands, but Simon does nothing in halves. You're barely able to register what he means by stand back before he lowers his shoulder, squares his stance, and throws every ounce of his brutal weight forward. The sound is catastrophic— wood splinters, plaster cracks— and he stumbles through the wreckage, boots crunching over broken plaster, insulation clinging to his shirt as he pulls down the rest with his bare hands. Sun'll come in better now, he says. No, yeah, sure.)

It becomes a rhythm. Not quite a routine, but close enough that you notice it when the days feel stretched and raw. He fixes things you can't, and you leave things behind— food, drink, once a pack of smokes you found at the bottom of a drawer. He never comments, never asks. But he never leaves anything behind either, except for the absence of whatever you put out. It's like leaving offerings on a shrine to a god you're not sure you believe in.

The gate closes without complaint now. The new fence stands straighter, stronger. The woodpile remains high, always replenished. You don't have to ask, and he doesn't offer. There's only the cycle: you wake to find something mended or replaced, and by noon you leave something out for him.

At first, it was functional: a sandwich— peanut butter and jelly, ham and cheese, a BLT (hold the tomato), and something to wash it down with. Then, one morning, you set down a slice of pie you baked from a boxed mix that tasted faintly like cardboard. You'd hesitated to leave it, but when you checked outside at sundown, the plate was scraped clean, the fork in the middle. Bent slightly, like he'd eaten standing right there.

From there, the rhythm grew teeth.

He started appearing when you were outside. Not always close, barely ever speaking, but present. Working his field while you sat on the porch with a basket of beans to snap. Hauling hay when you hung laundry. He's there the day you plant a sad little patch of herbs— your hands deep in dirt, his eyes half on the seedlings, half on you.

When snow finally falls, it comes heavy, the kind that bends branches, and your boots aren't meant for it. Your sneakers are long ruined by the time you dig a path to the chicken coop, and your fingers are numb inside your gloves. The latch sticks, and the muttered threat of eating the fucking chickens is swallowed by the wind— and then Simon's there, the hood of his jacket pulled low but not enough to hide the shadow of his jaw.

You startle so bad you nearly drop the bucket in your hands. He doesn't say anything, just takes it from you, thick fingers brushing yours, heat even through your gloves. He ducks into the coop like it's his, tending to the feed and water.

You hover at the door, biting down on questions that feel too big in your mouth. When he's done, he doesn't hand the bucket back, just tips his chin toward your house, gruff, "Inside. Your lips are discolored."

Simon, you've come to notice, times himself into your hours.

The locals have noticed too. They notice everything in this backwater ass town.

It'd been subtle at first. The man who never showed his face in town unless he absolutely had to— the one who bought bulk feed once a season, grunted at the cashier and left— suddenly had reason to drive in more often. And each time, he drove because your car "wasn't worth piss on the highway".

The first time, you didn't even notice how people looked at you. You were too busy staring at the rows of canned peaches, trying to figure out why the labels looked different from what they did in the city. When you reached for one on the top shelf and almost knocked the display over, his one hand was at your back, steadying you, the other curling around the can like it was nothing.

You hadn't thought anything of it then.

But the cashier did. The woman stocking the bread did.

And in a town like this, where gossip travels faster than cell service, that gesture didn't go unnoticed.

By the next visit, the air had changed. You walked in beside him, and conversations in the store paused mid-sentence. Smiles tightened. The woman at the register went quiet the second she saw him standing close enough to reach you, but not close enough to touch. She didn't even greet you this time, just scanned the groceries quick, her eyes flicking between you and him.

Simon never said anything, but he carried the basket. Paid in cash. Held the door.

All of them knew.

All except for the milk boy— sweet-faced, all of twenty-something, fresh out of school— starts to show up at your door every other morning after signing up for their delivery service. Cheerful, chatty, hands you a crate of glass bottles that clinks gently as you brace the weight. He tells you about his mother's peach trees, about the new calf that came too early but survived. You like the normalcy, the friendliness.

Simon doesn't.

You don't hear him come up behind you. You never do.

The milk boy is mid-sentence, bright eyes and an easy grin, when Simon's arms close in around you, reaching for the crate. Your fingers are still curled around the handle when his hand closes over it, and his grip dwarfs yours. Your shoulder brushes his thickened middle, your head not even clearing his collarbone. You could tuck yourself into the space between his arms and still have room.

The crate lifts like it weighs nothing, but you know it doesn't. You struggled with it just two days ago. But in his hands, it's just another thing to take off yours. The milk boy's voice is thinner when he says that he'll see you next week, and all Simon gives him is a grunt, a dismissal.

And maybe that should’ve been the moment that everything shifts. But it wasn’t. 

It came later— when the sky cracked open and thunder rolled over the fields. You'd been out for too long, checking the shed roof before the rain came. You are halfway up the ladder, fingers cold and slick against the metal, when a hand clamps around your ankle, and the strength in it makes your knees nearly buckle.

"What the fuck are you doin' out 'ere?," his voice cuts through the wind, sharp and rough. "Get back inside— now."

The ladder screeches beneath you, unsteady, and for a split second, you're not sure if you're going to fall or be dragged. You look down and he's halfway up the ladder, one hand on your ankle, the other braced against the rung below. His face is rain-slicked and hard-set, jaw locked in that way that makes his cheekbones stand out sharper than usual. The water clings to him, dripping from his brow, tracing the furrow between his eyes, dripping from the edge of his nose.

His eyes are the worst of it. Not wild, not pleading, just furious.

Not the kind that burns hot and fast, but the kind that simmers, the kind that corrects.

Simon yanks you down.

His hand slides from your ankle to your waist and pulls you down like it's nothing; too easy, too practiced. Your boots scrape against the rungs, the ladder trembles, and then he jumps.

The drop isn’t far, but it’s fast. Sudden. Your breath leaves you in a jag as the ground rushes up, and then his boots hit the earth with a blow that rattles your spine. He doesn’t stumble with the extra weight, doesn’t sway. Then, before you can speak, before you can twist and wriggle in protest, he shifts— grabbing you higher, flipping your body with far too much ease, and throwing you over his shoulder like you’re nothing more than a bundle of kindling he’s hauling home. 

Your hands fist the back of his shirt instinctively, knuckles white against the soaked fabric. It clings to him, stretched tight across the broad plane of his back, rain dripping from the hem as he strides toward the house with a single-minded purpose. 

Simon tracks mud straight across your porch and through your house, leaving thick, wet prints across your clean floors— mud and rain trailing behind him like a second presence. He doesn’t put you down until you’re inside, when the walls close around you, and he peels the wet coat from your shoulders himself, hands moving rough and fast, but they don’t hesitate. They never hesitate. 

The flannel comes next, pulled from a bag you hadn’t seen him bring in. It’s thick, worn soft at the edges, smells like him. He doesn’t give it to you; he puts it on you. One arm is shoved through, then the other, like he’s dressing a child too stubborn to do it themselves. The fabric swallows you— too big, too warm, sleeves hanging long past your wrists— and he tugs the buttons closed with the kind of care that almost feels violent.

“Looks better on ya,” he mutters, tugging the buttons closed, “looks right.” 

His fingers linger at the last button, thick knuckles brushing your sternum, and when you finally find your voice, it comes out shaking. “You—”

“You tracked mud into my house.”

It’s not what you meant to say, but it’s what comes out, small, brittle, absurd against the sheer gravity of him. Simon bends until your back hits the wall, his large hands settling heavy at your waist, thumbs pressing into your soft stomach. His curls are soaked, flattened and heavy against his scalp, rainwater trailing down the buzzed edge of his neck, dripping into the collar of his shirt.

“Don’t care.” He rumbles, eyes flicking to the side of your throat where your pulse flutters like a tell. “I’ll drag ‘alf the field through this fuckin’ door if it means you’re inside when the sky turns.” You want to protest, say something practical, something sharp, something about how of course he doesn’t care, you’re the one who has to clean it up, but you can’t, not with his breath ghosting the corner of your jaw. He tilts his head, rainwater still beading in his lashes. “You don’t get it, do ya? Everythin’ I’ve done, haulin’ logs you couldn’t lift, fixed the roof you feared would cave in— ain’t ‘cause I’ve nothin’ better to do.” 

Your fingers twitch at your sides, wanting to push him back, wanting to stay exactly where he’s holding you. 

“The world’s simple, love. Hard hands do hard work. Yours are for the home, for rockin’ a cradle, not haulin’ seed. That’s the way of it.” 

Simon’s mouth slants, and it’s not a smile. His hand leaves your waist only to catch your wrist, dragging your palm up against the plane of his chest, the relentless beat beneath his rips burning your skin like a brand. “I keep ya warm. You keep me fed. I keep this place workin’ so you don’t ‘ave to.” 

You open your mouth even though your words are caught somewhere between your lungs and your throat, but he’s not done. 

“Y'want somethin’ to do? Mind the housework. Sweep the floors. Keep the porch tidy. I’ll do the rest. I’ll do everythin’ else.” 

The storm slams its fists against the roof, the wind howling like it’s trying to claw its way inside, but Simon doesn’t glance toward the noise. His focus is on you— on the way your breath trembles, on the way your pulse kicks beneath the delicate skin of your wrist. He leans closer, no hurry in the way he moves, but the tension in the air makes your own muscles coil, ready to react. 

"I said— everything else is mine to tend. Y'hear me?"

You nod, shaky, the movement barely a twitch, and that's all he needs, because he drops to his knees on the wet boards, dragging you with him until your back slides down the wall. "Your pulse kicks in your throat, too fast, too high, but when the heat of him crowds close, you can't stop him. Don't even want to.

Your jeans are still on, clinging damp to your thighs, but Simon's got no patience for barriers. He tears at the button with one rough twist of his wrist; the sharp pop lost under the thunder. The zipper follows in a slow drag, teeth grinding apart, and before you can blink, he's tugging— down, down, denim rasping over your hips, over your thighs. You lift instinctively, a half-second of cooperation you can't take back, and he doesn't miss it. His eyes flash up, catching yours, something satisfied yet so hungry burning there.

"Tha's it," he rasps. "Now you're listenin'."

Simon doesn't bother getting them all the way off, one shoe still hooked, a pant leg twisted around your knee. It doesn't matter. He's already back between your thighs, shoving them open with the weight of his shoulders. His mouth finds you, hot and slick, and your head slams back against the wall with a cry that feels ripped from your chest.

The pace is merciless. He licks you open with slow, leaden drags of his tongue, then sucks sharp and sudden until your knees quake. His hands are iron at your hips, holding you down, forcing you to take every pull of his greedy mouth, every grind of his tongue against the bundle of nerves that has you shaking apart.

You whimper, a high, desperate sound, and his growl rattles your teeth as your thighs tremble, threatening to close snug around his head. "Nice 'n open, sweet'eart, take wha' I give ya." One knee hooks just enough to tilt you toward him, keeping you spread, and you arch into him, fisting his damp curls. This earns you another ruthless suck, a dizzying roll of his tongue that has you choking down a sob. Simon laps at your pussy like it's the only meal worth taking in a lifetime of starvation. His nose grinds against your swollen clit, the scrape of stubble raw between your legs.

He doesn't stop when release finally hits you— violent, ruining, your hips riding his face, your vision white-hot. He doesn't let you shy away, doesn't let you twist free; he holds you down and drinks it all, devouring every last burst of pleasure like it's what he's owed.

Only when you're slumped on the floor, panting and syrupy, does he look at you. His mouth glistens, his jaw rough and wet, slick beading on his chin. Simon wipes his mouth with the back of his hand then presses his mouth over yours, teeth grazing, tongue pushing past your lips. It wasn't so much a kiss as it was a taking. When he pulls back, it's not clean. A thin, glistening strand of spit stretches from his mouth to yours, delicate, catching the light. It sways for a moment, suspended in the hush, then snaps with a soft, wet pop.

"Taste how sweet ya are?"

Every nerve is still buzzing with the aftershocks when he scoops you up, palms under your thighs, carrying you toward the bedroom, kicking the door closed, and setting you down on the bed with a roughness that rattles the frame. He peels off the rest of your damp clothes away with a single-minded intensity.

"Look at ya," he mutters, scorching gaze sweeping over your bare skin— he looks at you like he's a man with a sweet tooth looking for a cavity. His callused fingers trail down your belly, spreading over it wide and presses down until you start to squirm.

"Pretty little thing."

He tugs his shirt off in one go, and you drink in the scratches of moonlight on his pecs, the inner curve of his bicep— where his skin pulled taut, unable to keep up with him— and drag your eyes down to his treasure trail, a shade darker than the hair on his head. One hand works the button of his jeans open, while the other snakes lower, curling over your slick, thumb dragging along your slit, and you whine, hips bucking up.

And then you see the flash of him, thick, heavy— his length already straining, pulsing, impatient, eager. Simon catches the flicker of hesitation in your eyes because he mumbles a gentle, "Easy. You can take it." This stirs something in your chest, bright and hot, a fire that coils tight and refuses to be ignored. You snap at him, asking him if he can— if he can, you know, with his older age and achy back, that you've heard the way he grunts to tie his work boots.

Simon smacks your pussy, and you arch off the bed, knees knocking together before he forces them apart again. "Oh, poppet," he coos, "I'm gonna take it."

He positions himself, the blunt head of him nudging against your wet heat. "Relax," he coaxes, his hands resting on your knees. "You'll stretch for me jus' fine."

The first push steals your breath, your body clenching tight around him as he sinks in deeper, thicker. "Gotta let me in, love." He rolls his hips, once, and you can feel something inside snag, tight and hot, and he does it again, this time filling you the rest of the way, every inch of him stretching you taut and full.

From here each thrust is brutal, heavy, each one shoving you further up the bed. Your body strains under him, his pace rough and deep, the wet, sticky sound of your pussy generous, slick smearing along him. You can't move, can't breathe, can't think past him. His teeth graze your jaw, your chest rising and falling in ragged bursts. "This perfect little cunt— fuck."

A sob spills from your lips when he grinds his hips down, pushing impossibly deeper. He hisses at the feel, sweat dripping from his brow and onto your chest.

"Tha's it, fuck," His hand splays over your belly again. "Feel tha'?" The drag back of his cock burns, and the push in pinches. "Tha's me. All the way inside, deep enough to leave somethin' behind."

Your breath hitches. "Sim—"

"Shh." He bends, mouth hot against your ear. "Soon, You'll be carryin' me," he thrusts sharp, hard enough to make the bed creak, "carryin' us."

He wrenches himself back, the sudden pull leaves your pussy clenching around nothing, then with a quick, jerky motion, he flips you over onto your hands and knees. The change of the angle drives you forward, chest to mattress, palms scraping for purchase, and before your mind can catch up, he slides back in. You can feel his stomach— thickened by routine, by the meals you made— firm against your ass, a slight press of muscle and flesh that's almost bruising in its intensity.

Your protest tangled in a moan as his cock fills you with the kind of weight that presses you down, and your fingers tangle into the sheets, legs shaking under the merciless rhythm of him fucking you.

"I'll fuck you full. Deep. Fuck, you take me so good," your ass smarts from the smack he gives it, "might keep fillin' you 'til it sticks." He drags a hand up your spine, nails grazing. "Tha's wha' a man does for 'is wife."

"Tha's wha' I'll do for mine."

Simon doesn't fuck you like he's chasing his release, he fucks you like he's chasing yours, like he's determined to wring every broken noise out of you until you choke on it. Your slick drips and clings, tracing down from your swollen folds down over the soft skin of your inner thighs, slipping between the crease where your leg meets the bed.

His balls, heavy and taut beneath him, catch the heat and slick, coating him in your arousal. You can feel the way it sticks to him as he pounds into you, making him wetter, more slippery. The sticky friction pulls you apart and together at the same time.

Your body trembles, muscles tightening around him as your heat pools deep and molten, tears welling in the corners of your eyes as his pace turn punishing, borderline violent.

"There it is," he snarls, voice breaking as he drives you higher, the words as filthy as his thrusts. "Clench down on me. Milk me, make it messy. Don't wanna waste a drop."

The thought— terrifying, consuming, intoxicating— burns through you as he drives harder, faster, the sharp edge of his control slipping, and the fire is unbearable. Your pussy clamps down, reflexive, desperate, and you feel it snap— a shuddering release that rattles through your body. Your back arches and hands claw at the sheets as wave after wave of heat pulses down, dripping around him, coating him in your release. Your cry is raw, ragged, a mix of pleasure and desperation, and he grits his teeth, dragging it out, making sure he feels every tremor of your orgasm.

Your climax finally begins to ebb, leaving you raw and utterly spent when he groans, low and guttural, as his hips jerk, his cock swelling so thick this time it does hurt, and then he's pulsing inside you, feeling the heat bloom, thick and molten. His hands dig into your hips, holding you in place as he presses down heavier with every pulse, chest hot against your back, each pant rough, until he slows, still buried inside you.

Simon doesn't move immediately; he stays pressed against your back, chest heavy over yours, his arms curled near your head. His breathing is uneven and harsh, then slowly evening out as the aftershocks fade. You can feel the warmth of him radiating into your sweat-slick skin, the residual mess clinging where he still rests inside you. Your own breaths slow even if your pulse is still tight. His head drops, curls brushing the back of your neck, and you feel the rough, dry scrape of his stubble against your shoulder. A soft exhale escapes him, a low rumble, almost a sigh, and he nuzzles into the space between your shoulder blades.

Your eyes slip closed, the damp weight of your blanket pressing softly over you, and the world outside— the storm, the land, the day— shrinks into nothing, leaving only this, leaving only him. And then, finally, with a soft sigh that mingles with yours, you're swallowed entirely, drifting into sleep.

---

The storm had passed, but the air still smelled of wet earth and old wood. Pale light seeps through the cracks of your curtains. You woke sore everywhere, thighs burning when you moved, and the faint smell of him still clinging to your skin.

Simon was already up. You heard the heavy scrape of a chair, the quiet creak of floorboards. When you padded out the room, rubbing your arms to stave off the chill, you saw him at your table, shirtless, broad back hunched as he cleaned mud off his boots with intentional strokes.

He didn't look at you right away. Just kept working, quiet, steady. Then he speaks, voice deep.

"You'll wanna take it easy today."

You swallowed, tugging his oversized flannel tighter around yourself. "What?" you ask, voice hoarse from sleep and last night.

Now he looks over his shoulder, his eyes sweeping you, lingering at your stomach before they meet yours. "Best not push yourself today," he says simply. "Yesterday took a lot from you. Ain't no shame in stayin' in'."

You're not too keen on finding out what he's on about, but that's how it starts.

You'd tried putting your boots on, to head outside and look at the chickens, but Simon's shadow filled the doorway before you could even lace them. One glance down at your hands fumbling with the strings and his jaw set tight.

"Take those off," he said. Not unkind, just firm.

"Simon, the chickens—"

"No." He reaches down, pulling your shoe clean off your foot with little effort. You almost yelped when he hoisted you up in his arms, carrying you back inside. He sets you down gently, but the look in his eyes was steel. "No."

You aren't to lift, aren't to carry, aren't to sweat under the sun. Instead, he presses a different work into you— kneading dough at the kitchen table, stitching torn shirts he brings you, all the while, he looks at you like he's waiting for something to show. That something is settling. That it's taking.

“Shit.” 

You were unable to halt the regretful notion from falling out of you as he entered your line of sight. The air was stale, filled with nothing but mourning silence interrupted by the sprinting pierce of your heartbeat. You’d run when they’d told you, taken off with such a needy pounce that, if given the chance, you’d wince at your mannerisms. 

But the chances were irrelevant. Your sanity was dying alone in a room. 

Simon had been restrained, a solid silver band around each wrist, conjoined eventually by a common chain that was secured to a bar installed for this very purpose. His one allotted item, a creaky wooden chair that was too small to hold him, was filled by his slumping body. His balaclava had been torn and punctured, jawline exposed fully, joined by little samples of his face you could make out through the other heterogeneous holes. His skin was covered in blood, the edges of the fabric forced into crusted peaks from how much of the ruddy substance it’d been made to absorb. Bits of skin that he’d shot off the infected were stuck there, too; smeared across old lines and weighing down the mask. 

He looked at you when you opened the door, agonizingly indifferent to the situation. You’d be crying, you’d be panicking, you’d be many things if it were you. But he was just dirty. Sitting there soaked in residue sourced from the bodies that had lost to both the outbreak and to him. He took it like it wasn’t a problem, like it didn’t make him sick because he wasn’t granted the right to be. 

He grunted at your reaction to him, a discarding of the harm that happened with such a blunt exclaim. “Y’shouldn’t be here.” 

The rejection made your teeth scrape, prison bars aiding the limitation of all you wished to say. 

Simon had been put in the quarantine room, the sole occupant of an empty wing that you’d silently prayed you’d never have to use. Beyond the door, directly connected to it, were four more reinforced walls made for observation. It was home of a small control panel, a large window, a first aid kit, a sink, and whatever other miscellaneous things that were important enough to be demanded. 

You exited his part of what was ultimately a large rat cage and went into the half that would become your own. You filled a bowl with saline and rooted for one of the rags left lying around, walking back to him when you had what you wanted. 

“I had to see it for myself.” 

You set the dish down on the floor, squatting in front of him to submerge the cloth in it’s confines. You wrung it out, standing back up and stepping closer. 

“Can I?” 

You listen to him sigh, defeat sinking into his posture where function typically held it up. It took a lot to make a man out of Simon Riley, to make him see outside of his own technical wiring. He just nods at you, hands clenching once when your own make contact with face.

The glimpses you get of what lies under his covering feel risqué, disrespectful. They’re something you’re only getting on account of his victimhood, a glance at the nakedness of a man on the crux of death. You wanted nothing more than to see him under different circumstances; to be someone he granted the honor of witnessing him, not just someone he trusted wouldn’t speed up his current falling. 

You swiped the rag over all the dried livelihood, maneuvering the best you could around shredded cotton that stood sedentary when you shoved against it. You were making decent progress on his chin, wondering if it’d be possible to soften the mask as well so it wouldn’t make him itch as he rotted away. 

God, you were going to be sick. 

“You can take it off.” He was staring at you so delicately, sullied by the weight of loss but giving you this one thing in spite of it. “Won’t be alive enough to think about it when you leave.” 

You’d never been so internally polarized, needing so badly for this act to be a sacred thing and knowing there was no longer time for moments of sanctity with him. 

You lifted it from his face, breathing in the intimacy and letting it jostle around somewhere more contained within you. You couldn’t tell him how much this meant. You couldn’t tell him the gravitational upending that would take place in his disappearance. These last hours were for him, were for his suffering. You were just there to help carry it. 

It took copious effort to not gawk at him. You knew he didn’t like his face, didn’t like people’s eyes on it. Your vetting would have been nauseating, just like the judgment you’re sure he’d borne many times in the past. A lot of the skin was scarred, ranging from various deep velvet gashes across his cheeks to white nicks along his mouth and eyebrows. There were old burn marks crawling up the left side of his neck and kissing the underside of his correlating bit of jaw. His top lip beamed up in a small line, breaching the right side of his cupid’s bow and ending below his nostril. 

You thought he was beautiful. Enough to steal the air from your lungs, or line verses of poems with the kind of adoration meant for nautical deities or the things nature made but couldn’t explain. You wanted to tell him so, wanted him to know you meant it. 

But he wouldn’t look at you. And you understood, fatally, that it wasn’t something to be decided on, to be expressed. He had his facts, and you had yours. These two paths no longer existed in a world where crossing was possible. He’d die thinking he’d cursed your eyes with an offense equal to what lurked outside the lab walls; and you, inversely, would tuck the sight of him into your heart where the rest of him already lived. 

You made a point to see him, and to say nothing about it. You didn’t appear bothered, you didn’t appear shocked. You just tilted his head and began grating the guts off his forehead from where they’d soaked through the balaclava. 

The soreness in your throat could be rivaled only by the feeling of swallowing a golf ball, the impending lack burrowing greedily into the soft parts of you as you swallowed all urges to weep. 

You bent down again, rinsing off the first layer of grime that’d been removed, and watching the liquid turn murky and textured as it accepted the offering you’d placed within it. You wrung it out once more, returning dutifully to your pyre. 

“How’d it happen?” 

He sniffed, the question and it’s respective answer both equally insignificant. His own lack of care was beat out every time by the desire to fulfill your indulgences. Whether spouting bad puns when you were down or reciting the tale of how he’d lost the fight, he would do it with the same urge to satisfy you. To be someone you wanted around. 

“Crowd of ‘em got too close. ‘S my job to protect you, ain’t it?”

You felt your fingers tighten around the slick give of the rag. 

“It is.” It felt like poison, that dawning. How foolish it was to forget that growing fond of a shield didn’t cease it’s purpose, that eventually it would get hit so you wouldn’t. That there was no mercy in an apocalypse. “Just wasn’t expecting it, I guess.” 

He was shifting much more now that you were touching all he kept hidden. You worried, as you brushed over knife cuts and bullet grazes, that you were hurting him. That your attempt to increase his comfort was doing nothing but burdening him. 

He wasn’t hurt, not in the way you were thinking. 

Simon took no pride in being a hardened entity, simply did what it took to keep himself on his feet. An alien trapped inside the grubby hands of mortal needs. He ate plates of solid color, foods indistinguishable from each other in his busy brain. He trained and yelled and ran and shot. He didn’t choose. He didn’t think. He had routine and he had commands and that kept him dangling above the abyss instead of drowning in it. 

That’s part of the reason he found you so intoxicating. You were malleable in the areas he wasn’t, trusted with the fate of the world and still willing to mingle with those on the fast-track to infection. Those who stood outside the walls. 

You chose him. In more ways than he lets himself think about. You chose him to talk to at night, you chose his jokes to laugh at, you chose him to defend you. Now, you were choosing to meet such an ugly sight with a softness he was unaccustomed to. You saw his shackled hands and cleaned him, cared for him. 

He didn’t understand you. He was addicted to you. He couldn’t let any of that be known on the chance he’d lose it entirely. 

He was unsure if all monsters were unlovable, but even with the possibility of exception, he was certain the rule applied to him. 

This way, at least he got to die still in your good graces. You’d think of him kindly one day, after all of this was over and you got to settle down with someone far more worthy than him. 

It was painful, having you hold him like this. Knowing that, not only was he undeserving, but that he’d never get the chance to have it again. He’d never get the chance to have you at all. 

You’d gotten him as sanitized as you could, deciding that it was leagues ahead of when you’d first entered and feeling alright leaving it as it was. You let the washcloth rest in the solution, pushing it aside and speaking before you could talk yourself out of it. 

“Can I see it?” 

A lot of your reasoning was built purely on exposure. The more brutality you could physically view, the quicker it would sink in that he was really being taken from you. That, within a day or two, he’d be nothing but a subject you studied. A carcass housing a way out of the dark. 

He hesitated a moment, debating the damage of such a thing. He knew you’d seen pictures of it, knew you worked tirelessly to unpack the virus in an attempt to kill it. He knew you weren’t a child and were capable of handling unruly sights. 

The bare truth was simply that he didn’t want you to. But that wasn’t good enough to stand on it’s own, and he couldn’t explain it further. 

“Pull it up.” He extended his arms, hands unable to reach across enough to tug up his sleeve. 

When you did, the majority of the wound was revealed. It was square on his wrist, and you had to move the cuff up as much as possible to get a better look at it. 

It was so tiny. The fragile jaw of a fetal being. Each tooth perfectly outlined under his disdain and thick coat of hair, carved cruelly and resolute into his skin. The mark’s surrounding area was a blistering red, giving way to the sour yellow of an old bruise, then finally the inky black that was spreading venom upward in veined lightning strikes. 

The virus didn’t behave like the ones you were used to scoffing at in media. It truly was a sickness, slow to crawl and slow to kill. It had taken them all the time you’d been here just to get things in the world semi-orderly again, and figure out how to cope with the raging plague that was showing no signs of stopping. You didn’t know if it had mutated yet, if it could affect people in different ways, if there was even any hope of restoring normalcy. In most cases, infection went unnoticed until it was too late. 

“‘S ironic. Dyin’ to bloody baby teeth.” 

It wasn’t a joke, but you find yourself laughing small and wilted. Your eyes are locked on his penance, oblivious to the way his world’s axis is you. That it’s probably unhealthy and definitely nonreciprocal, but in the months he’s spent with you, you’ve redefined something in him. Some ancient belief he’d thought was set in stone. 

You brush your fingers over the injury, cupping his wrist and holding him like he’s tangible light. Like he’s something with substance. Like he’s not the hollow killer he is to everyone else who values his presence. 

You value him for this. For how he feels. For who he is. 

He watches as your lips start to tremble, despite the way you tighten them in a plea to make it stop. He knows it’s not the job of the condemned to comfort the innocent, but he can’t make himself not try.  

“Gettin’ off easy for all the things I’ve done.” He jerks his wrist, nudging your hand off him. You return his sleeve to how it sat before, taking the hint that he was done holding the weight of your sadness. “Far worse fates than bein’ your lab rat, yeah?” 

You give him a small smile, the kind that clearly means nothing to either of you but is done out of courtesy. A way of saying you see what he’s doing, that you’re not rejecting him, that you’re not happy but you’d fake it for him if he needed it. 

The image of the bite stays burned on your eyelids, replaying like tv static whenever you dared to blink. You look at him in a way you shouldn’t, a way not reserved for friends. You hope the grief can justify it. You know it never will. 

“Does it hurt?” 

You assume it does, you don’t know how something with that appearance could avoid being painful, but he’s so calm. He’s talking to you like he would’ve any other day where he was the half-alive hero he always had been. You know of his time in the military, you know he’s here because he can handle things. You suppose you’re more just asking for the sake of it. For the sake of hearing his voice respond cohesively to you before the sound of it slips away from comprehension. 

“Yes.” 

He stares back at you with that same undefined look, leaning too far for people of your status. You want him to push harder, you want to undo all that’s been done. 

“We’re gonna figure it out, you know. The cure.” Blind hope supplied by a blind leader. You were a pristine picture of deceit, but it was better than spewing the truth. You’d accept your lie if it hurt you less, you hoped he’d do the same. “You won’t be like this forever.” 

He eats up your sentences with the vigor of a man who’s been not living long before he was dead; assigning that fleeting assurance to every earthly craving he’d ever had beaten out of him, every instinct he’s ignored the screams of. With that meaning, it’s almost honest. He wouldn’t be like this forever, soon he’d be nothing at all. 

It helped, in it’s own right. Hearing those words straight from the mouth of his shepherd

He can’t offer you assurances of his own, he’s never had that power. He just nods. 

“I believe you.” 

His descent was every bit as unbearable as you’d been prepping for. It felt selfish to think about how hard it was for yourself given what was happening, but you couldn’t help it. You felt his absence every second it grew, a pinprick in your soul having it’s edges plummet until the gape was comparable to a trench. A bountiful plane that used to contain multitudes, now just ash.  

You’d gone out and retrieved a new mask for him, lacking his preferred signature, but a mask nonetheless. You knew what he’d told you, felt it rip at your sluggish insides as it sunk in, you just didn’t care. He wasn’t exposed because he wanted to be, and you figured it’s only right he die with his dignity. 

It made it more difficult to look at him, the covering making him look so close to the being you loved, yet holding within it nothing further. 

By the time you’d brought it back to him, the streaks of tar had reached his neck, and you imagined yourself draping your declarations and your affections over him just as you did the cotton. It was a stupid fantasy, fit for a schoolgirl or someone ignorant to the ways of the world, but it was all you had. 

You could have spoken every word you knew of. He was too far out to accept them now. 

You’d sealed the door shut with every internal promise you’d ever made to him still inside. You swore you’d meet the god responsible for the downfall that got you here. You swore you’d show that god just how much they’d taken. You swore you’d never move on, never forget, never leave this moment. 

You weren’t sure the longevity of the storm, but you promised to bear through it. That’s all he would want you to do.  

The sound of your door opening angered you. This was a classified unit, and you felt almost protective of the creature housed on the other side of the glass. You were the one studying him, you were the one he trusted to. He wasn’t for others to see, to prod at, to understand. 

You looked to your left, the critical interruption morphing into a brown-skinned man with buzz-length curls atop his head. He was dressed in the same tactical gear Simon often was, and the sight sickened you. You’d never see him in it again. 

“You can’t be in here.” It reminded you of what he’d said to you yesterday. You lacked the warmth he’d held, extending no kind greetings to this stranger. This projectile wasn’t for modesty, this was offense. “This area’s restricted access. You need to leave.” 

It was too harsh to sound real. You didn’t speak this way so unprompted. 

Grief did odd things to people. 

“No - I know, sorry. I’m Kyle.” He appeared slightly off balance by how short you’d been, probably hearing of you as someone different than who you were presenting as. “They flew me over to…you know, replace him.” 

Your face twisted, his audacity curdling the neutrality you’d been fronting. It didn’t surprise you that the organizers had already filled his position. You didn’t even think it was a bad thing to have done. It was just the way he’d said it. 

Replace him. 

How laughable. 

His fingers pushed into the sides of his legs, fidgeting in a way Simon never did. “They haven’t given me an updated badge yet.” 

Your distaste softens where your expression does not. It makes sense. You have no qualms, logically, with the strategy being presented to you. You know it’s not Kyle you’re mad at. You know your anger is somewhere irrational and undefinable; and that you’re really just coasting on fury until your flood gates open to something deeper. 

It doesn’t make you want to know him. It doesn’t sooth the bone-deep sting you’re nursing. 

You catch his eyes drifting to the same north star yours have been locked on for the past day. His face is tight, something you can’t read proudly residing there like it cost him nothing to feel for the chained corpse in the cage. 

He pays no mind to your resentment, speaking openly, “Did you know him?”

You angle your body back to Simon and debate not answering. You lose the argument. 

“We’re all trapped here. We all know him.” 

It’s not particularly true, but Kyle is not someone you deem worthy of knowing how far in Simon went within you. You wouldn’t explain your molecules to him, or your blood, or your brain. You wouldn’t explain your heart either. 

“Well, not everyone’s in here watchin’ him.” 

A test. An invitation. 

One you had no interest in fostering. 

“Nope.” 

You stare straight ahead at Simon, too still and too human. His chest was going up and down, mesmerizing in the cynical way every natural disaster is. It’s the one thing you had at the moment, watching him breathe and wondering if at some point he was going to start lashing out, running into walls. 

You didn’t leave room to elaborate on what your brief reply meant, but the new guard seemed to be unfazed. 

“We served in 141 together before the outbreak.” You pivoted your head, interest peaked. “Never thought I’d see him like this.” 

Once, a few weeks into being here, you’d been delirious with sleep deprivation, asking Simon to keep you company at an hour far too late to be hospitable. You hadn’t expected him to agree at the time, but he had. He sat down and let you rant about fear, about death. He talked back sometimes, and every syllable exchanged made you more certain you wanted him in your life. You asked how he was so put together in the face of global disaster, and he’d shared stories about his hardest deployments, about his team. 

He’d mentioned this one. Kyle. Gaz. 

It was nice putting a face to a name. It made it easier to share a space with him, knowing that the two of you were indirectly connected through a common name. 

You felt your lungs deflate, sighing with begrudging tolerance. 

“I work in Virology, and we got here around the same time. Formed a bit of a trauma bond, I suppose.” It viscerally disagreed with your system to speak of your relationship in past tense. Something that was no longer being added to, leather-bound and left to pick up dust. “Never worked in a place where you gain a test subject from your friend dying.” 

“Mm.” The sound rings in your ears, nonverbal agreement plucking the reminiscent strings of every question Simon had ever answered with grunts. “They’re makin’ you dissect him, then?” 

It’s so blunt that it makes you laugh a bit, spiteful and agonizing as you realize how little it takes to sum up your place here. 

“Something like that, yeah.” Your gaze flits to his gun, a single second distraction from your one-sided staring contest. “A lot of the military guys kill themselves when they get bit. I’ve been here almost five months and this is the first…” Your throat chokes up involuntarily as you have to categorize Simon as one of them. “um - infected, that I’ve seen up close.” 

He lets the statement simmer, making no movement to coddle the impact of the blow. You don’t either, in all fairness. Something like that earns no gentleness. Something like that must be felt in all it’s terror. 

You continue, despite knowing you shouldn’t. 

“I still don’t know why he let this happen to him.” You infer that, if he could see his face, he’d hate it even more with that sludgy midnight syrup pumping through his veins. “He was dying either way. He could have kept his body, at the very least.” 

Kyle’s nose twitches minutely, teeth clenching visibly at the speculation on someone he once considered a teammate. You wondered if you’d upset him, if he’d be short with you. He didn’t claim to know Ghost, wasn’t in his head quite like Price had been, but he’d understood the persistent trepidation. He’d understood pattern.  

“Dunno’ how connected he was to his body. He’s useful this way. Givin’ information.” He frowned so severely that slight lines snuggled into his forehead. “More useful than he’d be dead.” 

You could have cried at how cold it all sounded. At how it must have felt for him to make that choice. You didn’t want the information if this was the cost. You wanted him to find rest. You wanted him to feel like he deserved it. 

He certainly didn’t deserve to be used as some vessel for progress. To put himself through torture on the slim possibility you’d crack the code because of it. 

“He’s in pain.” That cracked tv screen replayed the traitorous image of his injury. You tried to calculate how long it may be before you saw anything else when you closed your eyes. You had no answer. “I saw it, it -” Your voice cracked, embarrassing and entirely too human. “It was horrible.” 

“‘S what he knows.” 

It’s said so casually, with so much finality. You feel the incision it makes, feel each individual letter press through that surgical slice and burrow into the most protected parts of you. You must wear it on your face, in your stance, how much it hurts. 

It was what he knew. You understood that before it happened, and you understand it now. He talked aimlessly on occasion about how many times he’d thought about pulling the plug. All the anti-hero bullshit about how much better off the world would be without his shadowy self clogging up all the good that gets done. You saw how carnally he needed to be given a purpose. The lengths he’d go to in order to fulfill it. 

It made sense that would extend to the most deadly of cases. How much he probably wanted it to extend that far. How much he wanted to prove he was devoted, could be worth something. 

He was as stubborn in death as he was in life. 

You let your chat with Kyle fizzle out, giving nothing but a hum back to him and bathing in the solitude that came after his exit. 

You’re not sure you’d ever felt so alone. 

The next 52 hours were charted meticulously, watching every mammalian spasm he used to be unable to suppress trickle out until he was nothing but methodical stoicism. He hadn’t moved, hadn’t given you any indication he was ever going to. The question of whether the bite had just fully wiped him out became prevalent. You had watched it spread, that you were sure of, but maybe it simply didn’t take. Maybe he was just done, and the melancholic metronome of his breathing body was a fluke. The remnants of a soul once activated. 

Those 52 hours had been without sleep, sheer will and adrenaline keeping your eyes peeled, nausea battling the boredom that was sure to seep in eventually. You wrestled many times with the rational prompt of leaving, of resting, of coming back as something that could actually be of use to him. It was just harder than it seemed. 

He didn’t know you were there. Your presence was unacknowledged by him as far as you were aware. The consciousness held by the infected hadn’t been mapped out yet, but by their brutality, it had been collectively assumed they didn’t have much. 

You stayed because you were selfish. Because you needed him even when he didn’t need you back. You needed to keep him in your peripheral, needed to keep your pen jotting down every inhale that each 60 second segment contained. 

You were obsessed. You could feel it. But obsessed people got things done. 

Your resolve gave way eventually, sleep beckoning you like a mistress you couldn’t refuse. You didn’t turn the lights off when you left. You couldn’t stomach walking to your room while he sat in the dark. 

Now, returning to your post, you wished you’d never deserted him. 

The vacant balaclava was torn down the middle, the gap for his eyes parting into sagging curtains that hung loosely on his cheeks. He was on the floor, hunched, knees as close to his chest as he could get them. Half of his chair was frayed and splintered at the base of the wall it’d been thrown against, the other half a few feet away from it. And, in his hands, one of it’s legs. 

His teeth were sunken into the wood like he’d bit through butter. He wasn’t gnawing at it, wasn’t doing this for the purpose of consumption. The treatment more resembled a newborn’s painful teething. Like there was an itching in his gums so unruly that he’d take any pressure he could just to sate it. 

The front of his face was visible because of what he’d done, and you saw how far that black had travelled. It danced behind each of his scar lines like the most elegant, insufferable backdrop. The bags under his eyes were enriched with the color, the once pink shine of his gums following suit. 

But, whatever the virus had bullied him into becoming, it hadn’t tainted his eyes. They were still doughy, still unwillingly soft. It hadn’t taken that from him. 

It hadn’t taken that from you. 

You understood, then, that his hunger would overtake him if not dealt with. 

The dreadful truth about the apocalypse is how apparent it becomes that human life has never been valued. Animals had been preserved and rationed as efficiently as possible once the pandemic hit an official status. Many insect species were killed in ignorance, not wanting the risk of quicker transmission. 

Everyone knew cannibalism would arrive sooner or later, once things got serious enough. And, when you’d been taken into the lab, they informed you that you were far closer to that point than advertised. 

You hadn’t had to eat human meat, not yet. But, as they’d told you, they’d taken the populations of those condemned to death penalties and life sentences and housed them in special facilities. It was a last resort for the living, with another off-book use. 

In the case of a quarantined infected, the prisoners could be pulled from as a food source. 

Your hands stopped trembling soon after you’d gotten here, fear deep enough to lick marrow but your determination equally as high. You’d squeeze when they shook, and eventually they stopped squirming without your permission. 

This was different. This brought the tremors back. 

Death took a separate form entirely when it was forced upon you. It was filthy work, staining what it came into contact with and leaving no room for petty analysts to decipher it.

An invitation, however, was impossible to manage without letting death into yourself, as well. You were calling it. You were stepping quietly to managers and speaking quietly in code. It was less irredeemable this way, they’d said. You weren’t organizing the violent murder of another person, you were furthering the research that could save the world. 

You would have to ask for a sacrifice. And you would have to track every millisecond that sacrifice spent in the bubbling maw of whatever monster awaited it. 

You should have accounted for this, realistically. Simon was obviously going to need sustenance at some point. He had a way of dulling your professionalism, even after his own demise. Surely you couldn’t be expected to think critically when that meant feeding your best friend the rusty spirit of some guilty sulker.  

Shock and horror had no home in the new world. Only work. Only survival. And that’s all this was. His survival depended on this. 

When you left this time, you did flick the lights off. If his face had to be bared, you wouldn’t prolong it. You wouldn’t be cruel to him. 

Travel that’s blessed with a stamp of necessity from the government is almost always done by aircraft. Driving is too noisy, draws too much attention to the goods inside. 

It took about a day, following your request, for the inmate to be delivered. You hadn’t been alerted when he’d gotten there. You were bracing for a call, for someone to be tasked with summoning you considering you’d been the sole jury on this decision. But you got nothing. 

You’d been where you always were now, in observation, when Kyle simply opened the door and dragged him in as unceremoniously as any prey would’ve been. The man was almost as tall as Simon, his width meek in comparison. You’d asked for larger bait if possible, not wanting Simon to remain peckish once done eating. 

This guy would do nicely. As unfortunate as it was. 

Gagged, bound, and blindfolded. Even through all that was inhibiting him, he wore his future like a brand. You could see that he was braced for the worst, that he knew this would be the last place he existed in. 

Kyle’s face was tense in the most minuscule of ways. Lips in too tight of a line, eyes hardened as though the space behind them was vacant. He seemed to be performing the role of a puppet, hands belonging to someone grander, using him to throw fish to a shark. 

He could not be responsible for the snap of that shark’s jaw. He did not choose this. 

You did. 

You knew that Simon had seen a considerable amount of death throughout his time in the 141, you assumed Kyle was much the same. You wondered what his kills had looked like in the past. If he’d held the handle of a blade and forced the sharpness into trapped skin. If it’d been in search of information or simply in search of emotion. Something to tell him he was still alive. 

That’s what Simon used to say to you. That he’d done what others had ordered; and that life was not a force, but a currency. What others lost, he gained. The dying flicker of someone’s soul would serve as kindling for the flame in his own. The one that always burned low and cold, no matter how much tinder he dumped onto it. 

Perhaps this man would produce a similar result. Perhaps he’d make Simon real again for the split second it took for fire to catch on wood. 

Kyle doesn’t look at you, nor you at him. He walks over to the door separating you from the end of the world and holds for your approval to poach it. You settle yourself at the panel, 2 buttons of red and green await the smudge of your fingertips on them. 

Red and green. Open and close. Good and bad. 

Yet another small nod at how critical harsh duality was clung to in the post-outbreak wasteland. You used to be either alive or dead. Life got harder when a grey area was added to these 2 opposites. It was overcompensation at it’s finest, but even you couldn’t argue that some things were not meant to have a compromise. 

Your index digs into the temple of the hard green plastic, the quarantine door opening with a hiss of steam and an audible crank of the track it’s on. 

The worm wiggles on his hook. You’re tempted to apologize but make no move to. 

“Kyle,” you say. He angles himself towards you, slightly upset at your prolonging of this act. “Chains are two feet long. Try to keep double that.” 

He nods, stepping forward into the make-shift den. Simon had stayed bundled up in his corner since you’d seen him yesterday.

Now, as direct wanderers approach something they cannot comprehend, his head raises in interest. 

He’s slow to process what’s in front of him. You watch his gaze soak Kyle in it’s heady toxin, the burden of being acknowledged by a predator. His fingers twitch, the first sign of unintentional movement you’ve seen from him. You write it down, breaking his existence down into bullet points like he’d never been conscious at all. 

When his stare shifts right, his whole body bolts up and forward, pouncing like a ravenous snake. It’s so violent that you jump back in your seat, that you worry for the structural security of the pipe he’s chained to. 

Kyle barely flinches, and the pure dichotomy of soldier and civilian instincts makes you question if you’d ever have gotten along with these men under normal circumstances. It makes you question how much humanity can vary. 

Simon flings his arms in another preening yank, trying to grasp the only meal he’s been offered in days. 

Kyle seems to remember where he is and what he’s there for, and shoves the former prisoner at the entity begging to kill him. The result is instantaneous. 

Kyle steps out as quickly as he can. You, alternatively, find yourself unable to look away. 

His hands plant firmly on the man’s shoulders, his teeth hooking like fangs into flesh that is far too eager to bend and break at the will of an undead being. You watch chunks of skin be torn off in long, narrow sheets. Blood careening out like the break of a hurricane when it finally hits the welcoming shore. It spills and spills; ignored by your friend, too focused on the gooey parts that he can bite into and tear apart. 

You track all the organs you see excavated from a corpse that still lashes like it’s ignorant to what’s being done to it. Liver, pancreas, kidneys, large intestine, small intestine. 

When he reaches the brain, horrifyingly, the only thought that manages to break through the haze is ‘how cliche’. 

And you beg to know, as he chews around bone and chomps through tendon, how it feels to be so unrestrained in your animosity. How it feels to be an animal in every right, with no hint of punishment from what used to be your peers. 

Simon is big, and he eats like a glutton until every ounce of that livestock is pearly calcium on the blood-stained floor, or cubes of the finest cutlet, churning wonderfully in his stomach.  

You only remember to close the door once he swallows his last bite and strays back to his chosen corner. You chastise yourself, obligatory jabs that this is not someone who would treat you warmly should you come into contact, that the door needs to be closed for the safety of everyone involved. 

And, shamefully, that no amount of unabashed brutality could make something beautiful. That not all things deserved admiration simply because they were unconventional. 

It was a disgusting sight, truly. Not something fit for the mind of a person hoping to remain unchanged. 

But Simon had already changed you. You didn’t know if you had it in you to be disgusted. 

“Is that all?” 

Kyle’s voice draws your attention to the door that led out of observatory. His back is to you, presumably had been for the entire duration of Simon’s feeding. 

Many of the military personnel you offhandedly spoke with used their tolerance as material they could boast. They could withstand the sight of any gore any living thing could produce. They were macho enough to kill, to be killed, to hate and vandalize. 

It was commonplace for them. 

The fact that Kyle had no interest in viewing whatever had occurred made you respect him more. It made you respect yourself less. 

It was your job to witness, not his. That was believable for now.  

“Yes - yeah, that’s all. Thank you.” You didn’t know if gratitude was appreciated or expected for something like this. He didn’t seem interested in it. “You can go.” 

Then, you’re all alone with him again. Moments you used to cherish and now have to justify with academia. 

You used to chat about movies, about the past, about how the future had never been guaranteed and how it’s shocking so many people lived like it was. 

You stare at him, at the mess he’d made, and question if he’d enjoyed what he’d eaten. If he still had flavors he kind of liked and vehemently disliked. If his texture preferences had persisted, or if they’d intensified. You questioned if you’d ever figure out a way for him to tell you so. 

You sit down in the same chair you’d condemned that inmate to death in. The seat you’d been glued to for almost a week. You probably wouldn’t depart for another few hours at least, still at odds with leaving him by himself. 

Still selfishly hoping he didn’t want you to. 

You’d fallen asleep on the console that night, fogged pupils burning harsh lines into the back of your brackish eyelids. Your hand was numb from the weight of your head, having rested on your folded arms. Your back hurt, as did your legs and neck alike. 

You felt no remorse, however. Ironically, you felt more comfortable around him than you did on your stiff cot in your stuffy quarters. 

You take a moment to stretch out the ache in your muscles, standing up to see what the dark had made of your forgone companion. You assumed he’d still be curled, still be hiding his face behind his knees. You expected the shame to beget itself once more, to force his hand even after he could no longer perceive it doing so. 

You didn’t know how to feel at the absence of it. 

His stomach was lovingly pressed to the floor, shirt riding up a bit to expose a sliver of rear midriff. His left cheek was much the same, cloth and skin mingling with the icy pressure of tile. His arms were spread up and out, as though mimicking the start of wings. A vessel posed in piety, holiness encased in immortal rot and rapture. 

Bones sat atop scuff marks on the ground, the smaller ones having been snapped in half from the frenzy he’d entered when feeding. Blood had claimed most of the territory for itself, now dried and waxy in a perimeter of sacrilege around the man. This, alone, was as loud of a warning as you could get.   

Crucifixion would have been a more merciful end than this. He had that going, at least. 

You saw no movement from Simon, his face resembling that of sleep. He hadn't exhibited this behavior in the days you’d been his guardian. You hadn’t heard of this phenomenon in any other infected, never heard a whisper of something this strange. 

It was more likely his body was done being puppeted. Though, you’re lost as to why it’d happen now, why it’d happen at all. 

His chest remains stationary, his fingers don’t twitch; and, for one paralyzing minute, you’ve well and truly lost him. It feels nothing like the news he’d been bitten, nor like the sight of his skin greying rapidly.

It feels like finality. Like his body being zipped into a bag and hauled away. 

And, like the fool you’ve proven yourself to be, you run towards the end in hopes of stopping it. 

You press the button, the door hisses open, and you know vaguely that you should have called Kyle. You know blatantly that this is dangerous, that you need protection, that you could die. 

It’s indescribable how little logic means when emotion is called into question. When the soul is at stake. 

You approach him slowly, the deafening thump of your heart making your blood feel thick where it sloshes in your veins. It weighs your limbs down, makes your head light in a way that feels lethal. 

You breach the safety barrier. You can see the line in the sand dissolving by filthy ocean waves. You can feel like lack of emanating heat, so far from human yet so close to mortality. 

You squat down, shaky where you balance and careful where you analyze. You remember how often you’d taken to this pose in your childhood, examining insects or rocks, watching nature eat and birth itself in the cyclical way it always had. You felt far from intrigue when doing it now, much closer to unfounded faith than fascination. 

You raised your arms to touch him and pulled back just as quick. It wasn’t certain if the virus was spread exclusively through biting. You didn’t know if it could be transmitted through touch, if you had any cuts his illness could sneak through. 

It was common knowledge not to put your bare flesh on a contaminant, especially one so unexplored. 

You rose, planning to snag the rubber gloves that you knew sat in one of the drawers in observation. You turned, in a rush, and were pulled back equally fast.

The palm of Simon’s capable hand grasped tightly at your ankle, knocking you off your feet. Your collision was violent, your reflexes being the only thing saving your forehead from meeting the floor. You felt the flex of his fingers, the mythological strength he used to yank you backward. 

You slid against grime and gore, thrashing and clawing. Flakes of that ruddy stain piled up under your nails as you fought, never standing a chance at victory. It took a couple of weak tugs to get you close enough he could release his hold, latching onto your hip and turning you onto your back. 

The switch costed you what little leverage you had, now completely separated from any attempt you could make at freedom. You couldn’t feel the temperature of the ground through your clothes, but you felt the pressure along your spine, a reminder of your mistake harshly digging into the back of your skull. 

He got on top of you, and you ready yourself for the never ending sting of sickness. For the pierce of his canines. The weight of his body on yours is more than enough to pin you down, and the slight twitch of his head has your hands flying up in defense. 

He doesn’t lunge, he doesn’t prod, doesn’t even scratch. His chest is heaving, and you can hear the slight whistle of a whimper on each harrowing exhale he makes. It reminds you of a dog, exerted and begging after a long day. 

Up close, you can see the blood spatters around his parted lips, sprayed on and blotted off but never fully removed. There are specks of it on every bit of him, dots of deep red with some having snail trails of where they’d dripped off of him. Scarlet lines trek towards his irises, and, though burdened and bloodshot, they trudge over your face with deep concern. 

Guilt, you think, burns there too. 

He leaves the fear on your face as is, sweeping down onto your useless hands, up as though they could make any difference should he actually choose to harm you. The sight seems to make him antsy, his breaths quicken, his own fingers flinch. 

And, for some reason that must only make sense in his mind, he nudges your hand with the back of his. It’s a simple tap, one he repeats multiple times until you finally see it as a call to action. 

Your fingertips slowly find the meat of his wrist, halting his movement and making him grunt at the contact. You curl them under his sleeve, pushing it down just enough to reveal the wound responsible for all of this. 

You remained gentle, touching the bite with a kind of respect you’d only ever give Simon. This disease didn’t deserve your softness, but he did. You couldn’t embody anything harder, couldn’t bring yourself to be scientific when someone you loved was trapped inside the thing you studied. 

He visibly calms with the affection, bowing his head like a worshipper as you caress the culprit of his undoing. This ugly, spiraling thing absorbing all the care you can muster and giving it to the internal being locked inside the beast. It’s disgustingly tender, private in a way that couldn’t possibly exist under the eyes of an outsider.  

You took a moment to breathe, to let yourself feel the semi-sturdy trust being established between the two of you. It was a reintroduction, a rekindling of something that once could have burnt down a forest it you’d let it. 

You start sitting up, tactile and timidly, giving room for him to adjust as you did it. Before long, slowly but surely, he inched his way off of you, chains chittering as he retreated back to the corner he felt safest in. 

You didn’t feel solid when you stood, extremities trembling with the force it takes to befriend something rabid. You walked backwards until you were beyond his reach, not in fear of what he’d do if you turned your back, but with desire to keep him in your vision. To keep this experience painted on you for as long as possible. 

The close of the door was excruciating, motorized monotony clashing hard with the pure nuance you’d just witnessed. 

Up to this point, you’d been working with the assumption that the illness was mindless. That it ate up everything one kept inside and filled the empty slots with a ravenous famine. That it built tools that did nothing but take, nothing but eat. 

You see now that it’s no such thing. His memories remain at least somewhat intact, with a newfound instinct that parallels animals on the brink of extinction. 

This is a new battlefield entirely, an extension of the mandated finish line proctored by clueless government leaders. This was life inside of death. Light inside of dark. 

This was hope. 

The next twelve hours curdled into a primitive hypothesis that your colleagues would have called you idiotic for entertaining. 

Simon’s insistence that you acknowledge his bite made you wonder if the cogs in his head were spinning the cracked frames of what happened in the last hour he was himself. If he was clinging on to the images he could see the clearest, the ones that were fairly recent but belonged to a timeline different than the one you were in now. 

And, consequently, you also wondered what kind of outcome you could produce by playing into it. 

You harnessed all the same materials you’d had on the day of reckoning, sulking into quarantine with a bowl of saline, a rag, and a quaint reverence that only ever became apparent in his company. 

It most likely wasn’t a good idea to be approaching him again so soon. You were still entirely in the dark about what mannerisms he would take to, about if the disease was still progressing, about if he’d grow tired of your hovering and put an end to it. 

He’d touched you yesterday, you’d touched him right back. You’d stroked criticality like the scalp of a cat, patient and enamored. You didn’t feel bad, didn’t feel affected. 

The virus was slow but it was not silent. It held pride in the scrape of it’s footsteps, every bootmark an indication of how happy it was to be invading. Surely, you would have seen the black dispersion, the bruising, something. You would have seen something if you’d been contaminated. 

And you hadn’t. So you came back. 

Moth to a flame.   

He stood up when you entered, stare falling to the items balanced in your shaky hands. You listened to his breath stumble a bit on it’s climb upward, a tremor forcing his head minutely to the left. 

A raspy exhale, a twitch. You didn’t know the connotations of these actions. You made a mental note to start forming a pattern with them for the possibility of translation. 

You stepped closer, back straight and shoulders squared in hopes of appearing confident. The solution rocked gentle waves in synchronization with your strides. You loved this being, you’d been in unnecessarily near proximity more times than you’d care to count. You could do it again. You wanted to do it again. 

You wanted to be someone he let help him. 

His back stayed hugging the wall, looking almost more scared of you than you of him. He had the fangs and the nails of something nasty, something that would delight in corruption. He’d developed these sinister assailants in his exile, but they didn’t register to either of you. He let you set the bowl in front of him without ever showing intent to use his strength, so you simply chose to believe he wouldn’t. 

He had no chair this time around, so when you bent to soak the rag, you rose again immediately after. 

All the vitriolic sayings you’d heard throughout your lifetime were rigid in nature, unforgiving and immovable in their purpose. Sink or swim. Do or die. Make or break. Everything harsh and everything happening right now. You moved or you fell, these were your options. This was the ideology that was taught to you. This was the ideology you were expecting when starting this interaction. 

When reeling in a feral entity, it would kill you or it would not. 

But here, with plumes of apprehension wrapping widely around you both, equal and equidistant in your conjoined hesitance, you understood black and white were things of fiction. He feared your ethos the way you feared his potential, each image incorrect and muddied with personal insecurity. 

He was not threatening you, and you were not saving him. 

This was just perseverance, a forged connection withstanding the trials of time and hardship. Just an elevated version of any other unifying issue. Just another thing to push through. 

His jaw felt rougher than it had back then, the unhinging weapon of a killer resting nervously in your palm. You slid the damp cloth through the sewing pin pricks of his incoming stubble. It was noticeably patchy, small planes being untouched by hair due to the abundance of scar tissue. It was endearing, in a way, seeing something so specific to him after watching him be eaten alive by something general. It made the blood cling harder to him, forcing you, in return, to scrub with more pressure. 

You didn’t mind it; angling him every direction you could, cleansing the sharp edges and dipping into the texture his skin held to ensure every bit of congealed plasma was gone. 

You heard that same hurt-dog whimper rattle around in the back of his throat, sounding out with every breath he took. He said nothing as he took you in, letting you control his movement, letting you take the reins for as long as you wanted them. He basked in the sting of you seeing the sins he had stamped all over him, in the fact you were choosing to absolve them. 

Once you finished his face, you raised his hands up, one by one. You let the rag suck up every bit of extinguished life that stained his fingers. And, by the end, they looked capable of kindness again. Callused and scuffed and too big for his own good, but still something that didn’t have to cause harm if he didn’t want them to. 

For that short time, you joined him in the state outside humanity. You were two of the same unearthly species, one grooming the other so they didn’t sit in filth alone. 

Simon allowed it to happen with all the eagerness of someone who’d been craving it. An idea based on complete nonsense struck you. Not scientific, not founded on principle, just the desperate coping of someone who couldn’t make themself give up. 

“I cleaned your face last week when you got bit.”

You didn’t look up at him. You were unsure if your speaking would affect his status, if it would make things better, if it would make them worse. Your biggest fear, you suppose, was that it wouldn’t affect anything at all. 

“Do you remember that?” 

Your eyes went from his collarbones to your own shoes, preferring the sight of a red-slicked floor to that of your best friend’s gaze holding no warmth for you. 

You stay that way, despite hearing sounds beckon back and forth behind his teeth, a verbal confirmation he can no longer enunciate. Frustration drives an increase in his breathing, words stuck inside a carcass with no way to escape. 

He settles for something else instead, turning his hand around where it sat in yours, now palm to palm. His fingertips press into your knuckles. He squeezes. 

Yes. 

You can feel the force seep into the gesture, a testament to the power he has just under the skin, a promise that he won’t use it on you. 

He squeezes again. 

I do.

The illness maintained a sentience you were unprepared for. 

Your curiosity was immense walking away from him, burning the edges of the picture you’d painted. It was a refusal of obedience, a deviation from all you’d seen portrayed. 

Simon responded to you. He showed proof of neurological processes you were certain he shouldn’t have access to. He showed food preference and emotional bandwidth. He made it clear to you, explicitly and undoubtedly, that he was alive under all the decay. That the man you’d known kept his wits about him while his body was whisked away.  

He knew what you were to him, and evidently held recognition for those he once loved. And, as a scientist, the urge you struggled with most of all was pushing. 

You wanted to trace every boundary this prospect held. You wanted to know if the registration stopped at some point, if there was an amount he had to have known you in order to know your face when it counted. 

He’d told you, only once, about a man he hated. 

Pre-outbreak, back in the 141, he’d been a part of a mission that sent someone to confinement instead of to the grave. It’s the most worked up you’d ever seen him, vagrantly going on about the atrocities he’d seen that man do, about how he’d asked for the clearance to kill him and been denied. How much it had gutted him to surrender him to higher power. To not have the assurance that execution brings. 

The apocalypse escorted that man out of his classified status and straight into the livestock pen of the common criminal. There was no hierarchy in the end, just puzzles and those who solved them. Just you and him. 

With some specific inquiry, you found the facility he’d been herded into. It took two minutes for his name to be searched, and with a rush order placed on his arrival, it took only a single night for him to be shipped. 

Kyle pulled his leash straight into your open arms once again. He didn’t give you any inclination that he remembered who he was leading, but the subtleties gave him away. He hadn’t been so harsh with inmate number one, he hadn’t wailed him about like he contained no value. This was a personal kind of disrespect, an intimate one. 

He looked almost disappointed when you dismissed him. He’d been so hellbent on avoiding the carnage before, but now resembled a child being denied dessert. It was almost comical, and it could have stayed that way, had he not pressed into your avoidance. 

He said it wouldn’t be safe to leave the job in your hands alone. You weren’t armed, you weren’t trained, you weren’t ready to take out an enhanced soldier who’s mind was muddied with unstoppable rage. 

You told him you knew what you were doing. He told you that didn’t bridge the gap. 

You only got him off your back when you exposed that a different plan was being followed through. That this wasn’t a routine feeding, that this was an experiment and he wasn’t needed for it. 

And, in that regard, it was your job. It was your job and it wasn’t his, meaning you held authority and could express it to the fullest degree. 

You swore you’d be careful, and that if you got ripped to bits it was on you and not him. He left very begrudgingly, letting the door swing shut instead of closing it himself. You didn’t make a move until the sound of his footsteps were no longer audible. 

The hostage was dressed as the last had been; blind, gagged, bound. All signs of power stripped away and stapled back on like a grievance personified. Power was nothing but proof of guilt around here. Power was nothing but restraint. 

And, in his case, it was nothing but a vow of hostility. A place to reap what he’d once sewed. 

He didn’t squirm as you walked him into quarantine. You’re sure if his mouth had been uncovered, some volatile exclaims would have flung their way out. In the moment, you felt only gratitude that you wouldn’t have to listen to the kind of words that come from a man like him. 

Simon, sturdy and in wait, clenched his jaw when the man finally looked at him. At the creature he’d grown into. 

He’d done the motion so abruptly that a small click sound echoed out into the dull air. A punishing threat and a humid promise that whatever storm was rolling in was guaranteed to be excruciating. 

For the first time since your brief introduction, you heard the man make a noise. A wet, petulant sob soaked through the wad of stitched cotton that’d been shoved into his mouth. You’d never seen someone realize they’re doomed. Not like this, not at the hands of another. 

The stink of fear was prominent, floating in bloated pulses off the sentenced criminal you currently held upright. There was such little distance from human to animal. The outbreak emphasized this heavily, how moronic it was to live as though you’re an elevated version of something. As though you share no commonality with a bear, with a rabbit. 

He was face to face with a predator, and he felt it just as the mouse did when squared against a cat, unavoidable and non negotiable.

You mused on that his arrogance put him here, that he could have ended up anywhere else had he kept his nose clean. But, deeper down, you would have given Simon anything. Anyone. 

This ruse was believable, a mask you didn’t mind wearing to keep up appearances, but it wasn’t authentic. You possessed a desire to explore the virus, yes. More than that, though, you wanted to know every detail of how it affected him. 

You weren’t doing this for generalization, to help the others. Not entirely. 

You just wanted to bring him back. You would have wrangled in any being, any object, that could aid that goal. 

It wasn’t right, you don’t think. It wasn’t moral. It wasn’t ethical. 

Looking at the man being glared at by the person you cared the most about, you found yourself void of care. Something prodded at your ribs from inside, an insidious declaration that you were just as much a monster. That this wasn’t instinct, or necessary. 

This was obsession. This was devotion. 

With that tidbit fully established, you shoved him forward past the four foot perimeter, much like Kyle had done days ago. 

You wondered if this was what true allyship felt like. If this feeling rivaled that of wartime destruction on the behalf of a government agreement. You didn’t know if this was something all friends would do for each other. Maybe Simon had never been a friend at all. Maybe he’d always been something more. 

This was far less mindless than it’d been previously. The second that man was in his reach, he was eviscerated. Simon tore limb from sternum, four times over just to watch the muscle stretch and break. Organs were torn out with his teeth, skin shredded with blunt nails and a fiery will. Above all else, agony was prioritized. He did as much as he could with the man still alive, grinding down sanity until he was hollowed out. Less substance than a zombie. Just a murderer begging to die. 

Not a single speck was swallowed. Simon wanted nothing to do with him. This was all justice, all anger. 

You watched, once more, as he lost himself in the elegance of a brutalist pursuit. This had been years in the making, and he was every bit as primed as he said he’d be. 

It was heated in the places it shouldn’t be. A lesson in eroticism and the thin line it walked between homicide and holistic vulnerability. Teeth met the thin veil of a neck for many reasons, all overlapping and interconnected. 

There shouldn’t be any joy in seeing such a thing, yet you were completely fixated on how easily he dismantled a being that was supposed to be superior. There shouldn’t be excitement in it, shouldn’t be arousal, yet that was no deterrence for the feelings that persisted anyway. 

He stood in the middle of it all, bloodied and heaving like a body put to work. Pieces of the enemy were scattered like snow around the spacious room. 

You stood just opposite him, right outside the reach of his arms. 

“You didn’t eat him.” 

It was a rather insignificant thing to commentate on. Though, that was valuable data, all things considered. His hunger wasn’t domineering, it couldn’t hijack his rage or his drive for penance. Death was death, and fuel was fuel. He was unwilling to cross those two wires. 

He agreed in a sound you were growing familiar with. He didn’t eat him. This you both were able to settle on. 

Your vision drifted toward the man’s head on Simon’s side of the room, sitting still in a viscous, honeyed puddle that you had no business gawking at. He’d been alive not minutes ago. Life was fickle like that. 

You jolted your gaze to where it’d previously been at the loud clash of chains. The shock forced you back a bit, laying in wait as he attempted to break his tether, attempted to get closer to you. You hadn’t even realized he’d wanted it. 

“Simon - hey -” 

It was continuous, longing tugs filled to the brim with every bit of supernatural strength he carried. The cuffs had been designed for someone with immense physical power, but even the designers hadn’t accounted for the variability of the virus. He’d been strong even as a man, let alone as something much more.   

Your breathing labored, your certainty balancing on the thinnest of tightropes. He wasn’t listening to your words, wasn’t listening to your warnings. He had a mission, and you’d never seen him disregard an order. 

You still held true to the belief he wouldn’t hurt you. He’d had many chances to do it up to this point and he hadn’t. He’d seemed saddened at the fear you embodied the first time you’d been in quarantine. He knew who you were. He didn’t want to kill you. He’d never tried to bite you. 

And, just when you were beginning to buy the snake oil you were peddling yourself, a snap ricocheted anywhere it could reach. It bounced off the door, off the blood, off the porcelain floors. It claimed every square inch it could reach, submerging you in a deadly concoction of terror and tantalization, blurring every line you’d ever let yourself have faith in. 

You made the mistake of staring him down, of meeting his eyes. It was a reflex, more than anything. A hindbrain plunder of assessing the threat you might be at risk of.

He took it, fondly, as an invitation. 

“Wait -” 

You couldn’t even see the end of your sentence before he was shoving you against the wall. Commands meant nothing, constraint meant even less. The sense of death just for the sake of it was intoxicating, and he was higher than he’d ever gotten while alive. 

You could feel the dig of his fingers into the fat of your hips, the blood that was saturating your clothes from how covered in it he was. Your upper back was flush against the cold, but he was tugging your lower half forward to slot against his. It was such a minor bend, but the distance felt lethal. 

You said his name again, the repetition sour on your tongue but your mind at a loss of what else to do. He was close enough that you could smell the metal and dirt that clung to his clothes, could feel the focal point of ruin and debauchery. It frayed like a cut cable, spitting out sparks hot enough to melt steel and yet palatable enough to fan your internal flame. 

You put your hands on his shoulders, intending to get him away from you, intending to do something that you’d be able to stomach in an hour. He only seemed to delight in the contact. 

He pushed against you, clothes failing to save you from the grind of his cock against the unbearable sensitivity that’d built up from seeing him in action. Your grip dropped, palms falling flat on his chest with no force behind them. It was new, touching him there. Damp with that keen scarlet and the steady beat of his heart. 

He fussed with the hem of your pants for nearly no time at all, gentlemanly remains no doubt peeking through the haze before being squandered by the fact Simon was nothing of the sort. The fabric came apart at the seams, sides ripping away from each other and landing as meaningless scraps on the ground. More shriveled rags to lap up the mess you’d made. 

It was an awfully loud thing to happen, your slight gasp burdening the space when it did. You hadn’t been expecting it. You hadn’t been expecting any of this.

It was occurring too fast to think about. He repeated the motion with your underwear, leaving you bare and him scrambling to catch up. His haste was a marvel, getting his pants down to mid thigh before losing care for the rest. 

He finally, finally had you. Months of unrest and weeks spent undead.

His love, his need, had been the only thing that stayed centered through everything. Stuff shifted around it, orbiting like the earth around the sun. But the sun had remained the same, had stayed whole despite the things that depended on it. You had remained as the same crushing totality, the same person he couldn’t help but indulge in. 

He wrapped his fingers around the back of your neck, stepping into the role of puppeteer, an escape from being the one on strings. 

He held your forehead to his and pressed into you, force and desperation stopping him from being the kind of lover he’d have rather been. Your nails dug into his chest from the stretch, a curse fleeing your mouth in a strangled whimper that he drinks up like he’s dying for it. He doesn’t let you hide from him, doesn’t let you run from the feeling. The tips of your noses are touching, and he’s hellbent on keeping your eyes locked with his. 

He’s close enough to kiss you, to delve into just how disgusting you’d let things get under the guise of loyalty, but he doesn’t. The blood smeared across his face has made it’s way to yours, and that feels more obscene than anything he could do on his own. A large, evident stamp of the levels you’d stoop to, of the way you could be owned by someone else. By him. 

Then, he moves, and you wonder how you’d ever avoided doing this with all the months you’d spent in his company. It’s torturous, fast and deep and all consuming in a way you hadn’t thought existed. 

The revolting things that the virus had done to him combined with the delicious sweep of him against that rough spot inside had you clenching hard enough to make the both of you cry out. The grey of his skin was even starker against the jet black of infection, and the reminder that this was the corpse of your best friend rained down on the last little bit of consciousness you had. 

“Mm - shit -” 

His teeth nipped along your jaw, the liquid bits of the man still on the floor smudging onto the skin there. It wasn’t enough to break it, wasn’t enough to make you one of him; it was just enough to remind you he could. That there was so much power and so much danger housed behind his six feet of bone and muscle. That he could make you miserable if he wanted, and all he desired was to make you feel good. 

That, you think, was what tipped you over the edge. The fullness and the heat and his unyielding reverence even in the face of dystopian challenges. 

It wasn’t a graceful fall by any means, months of stress and care and want all bubbling to the surface, begging to burst each time he thrusted back inside you. Letting go was euphoric, something you didn’t see a point in warning him about and something that spread through you quicker than sickness could ever strive for. 

He worked you through it, continuing the rhythm and inadvertently sending you quietly into slight overstimulation. You needed to feel closer, to feel Simon and not just the decomposing image of him. 

You reached up to the hand cradling your neck, stroking your fingers over the indents of his bite mark. A cotton-soft moment that added meaning to every moment you’d manufactured throughout the last week. 

He whimpered like it hurt, pace stuttering before halting entirely when his pelvis was fully nestled against yours. You felt warmth coat the new parts of you he’d touched tonight, the end and the beginning to something without set limits. 

You shifted, and he held tighter onto you, territorial to a fault in that unchanging way he’d always been. You kept your fingertips tracing over each divot of each mark where a tooth had once sunk, lazily basking in the afterglow like you were two normal friends in a normal situation. 

You didn’t know what kind of person this made you, but whatever kind it was, you’d be it for him. 

dark blue seemed mature. forgiving. almost responsible, if swimwear could be responsible. it had a low back that made you sit up straighter just looking at the model, and the top had little gold rings at the straps, small enough to pretend they were classy instead of slutty. the bottoms sat high on the hips, which nat called flattering and you called invasive. still, you ordered it. you even paid for express shipping, which felt like signing a contract with your own downfall.

now, standing in tony stark’s guest bathroom with the swimsuit cutting into places you had never invited fabric to develop an opinion about, the delusion had fully left your body. “this is a hate crime,” you mutter at your reflection, tugging the side higher, then lower, then higher again, like one of those positions will suddenly unlock a new body. “against me, specifically.”

the mirror gives you no sympathy. it just shows you exactly what you are trying very hard to survive. thighs. hips. stomach. skin. actual human flesh, very rude of it. you turn slightly, regret it, turn back, regret that too. the swimsuit is pretty. that may be the worst part. if it were ugly, you could blame the swimsuit. but it is pretty and soft and fitted, which means the problem is clearly you, and that feels legally actionable.

natasha knocks twice, then opens the door like locks are a decorative suggestion. she is wearing a black bikini and a loose white shirt, hair braided back, sunglasses resting on her head. she looks like she has never feared a changing room mirror in her life. maybe she killed that fear at sixteen and buried it in a forest. “if you’re dead in there, say something,” she says, leaning against the doorframe with a drink already in hand.

you glare at her through the mirror. “i’m suing you.”

“for making you look hot?”

“for elder abuse.”

“you’re younger than me.”

“for emotional elder abuse.”

her mouth twitches. she steps inside, closes the door with her heel, and turns you by the shoulders before you can protest. the inspection is quick and blunt, clinical in the scariest possible way, then her brows lift. “yeah. you’re wearing it.”

“you didn’t even pretend to think.”

“i did think. silently. very sexy of me.”

you pull at the bottom again, mostly so your hands have a job. it feels safer when your hands have a job. otherwise they might wander up and cover your stomach or your chest or your face, and then nat would make one of those sounds. a small sound, barely a sound, the kind that says she loves you and also wants to shake you until your bones make music. “it’s too much,” you say, quieter.

“it’s a pool party.”

“exactly. people will be near pools. with eyes.”

“tragic.” nat takes another sip. “people might also have necks. horrifying world.”

you make a face at her, but your fingers have started twisting the hem of the towel around your shoulders. the towel is the only thing keeping you from turning around, putting your shorts back on, and telling everyone you’ve developed a sudden aquatic allergy. chlorine intolerance. water-related moral conflict. any excuse with a medical-sounding word might work on steve. sam would ask questions. tony would ask if the water offended you personally, then offer to replace it with imported glacier melt.

bucky would look at you. that thought is the whole disease. bucky barnes looking at you in this swimsuit is either going to kill you outright or make you wish it had. he is already too much in normal clothes. jeans, shirts, those stupid henleys that cling to his shoulders with religious devotion. shirts in general seem desperate around him. fabric has never looked more underpaid. and now there is a very real chance that you will walk outside and find him shirtless by the pool, all broad chest and sun-warmed skin and dark hair falling around his face, and you’ll have to behave like someone who pays taxes and owns a toothbrush. impossible.

even worse, he may look at you and then look away. the thought is small. mean. familiar. he does that sometimes. looks away when you enter the room like your presence is a lamp turned directly into his eyes. you’ve built a whole religion around it. bucky finds you irritating. bucky tolerates you for nat’s sake. bucky can flirt with cashiers, grandmothers, dogs, possibly dangerous machinery, but when it comes to you, he either teases until you want to bite him or turns cold like you spilled something on his favorite memory.

“he’s already here,” nat says.

you blink at her. horrible woman. witch. spy. roommate. “who?”

“the pool boy.”

“tony has a pool boy?”

“no, but if he did, i’d respect his commitment to the theme.” nat watches you through the mirror. “barnes. he’s outside with steve and sam.”

your mouth goes dry. very mature reaction. very dignified. you deserve an award for remaining upright. “thrilling.”

“he asked where you were.”

“to insult me?”

“probably to write a poem.”

you snort despite yourself, then hate the sound for being too fond. bucky inspires many feelings in you, most of them medically confusing. rage, attraction, pettiness, fondness, the strange urge to press your face into his chest and stand there until society collapses. you used to think crushes were supposed to be fun. light. giggly. yours feels like chewing glass while a beautiful man laughs in another room. “i’m putting clothes on,” you announce, turning toward the pile you abandoned on the sink.

natasha catches the towel before you can turn it into armor. her face softens, which is alarming. she is much easier to handle when she is threatening people or calling men idiots. tenderness from nat tends to make you confess things. “you can wear whatever you want. but if you’re changing because barnes might see you, i’m going to be annoying.”

“you’re already annoying.”

“i have levels.” her hand squeezes your shoulder once. “he’s one guy.”

“he’s a large guy.”

“still one.”

“that’s debatable. he has the surface area of three men.”

she smiles into her glass. “come outside.”

you stare at yourself again. the gold rings at your shoulders glint under the bathroom lights. a soft breath leaves you, slow and unwilling. the girl in the mirror looks terrified, which is rude, because you were aiming for bored. maybe indifferent. possibly mysterious. something with less of a wet-cat energy.

bucky is one guy. one guy with eyes. one guy who probably won’t even look long enough to form an opinion. that is worse. “fine,” you say, grabbing the towel and wrapping it around your shoulders instead of your body. “but if i cry, i’m pushing you into the pool.”

nat opens the door, smug and fond. “deal. i swim beautifully.” you hate her. you follow her anyway.

sunlight hits you like a personal accusation. tony’s summer house is all glass, white stone, obnoxious wealth, and views so good they make you suspicious. the pool stretches across the back patio in a ridiculous blue sheet, bright enough to look fake, with lounge chairs lined along one side and a shaded outdoor kitchen on the other. music plays from speakers hidden somewhere in the landscaping, low and expensive. the air smells like sunscreen, grilled pineapple, chlorine, and the rosemary bushes tony probably paid someone to make look effortless.

everyone is already there. wanda is stretched on a lounger with sunglasses over her eyes, red hair spilling over one shoulder. vision sits beside her reading a book in the sun like a man who has never sweated once in his life. steve is by the grill, wearing swim trunks and a white shirt he left open, looking like a recruitment poster for sunscreen safety. sam is in the pool, arguing with clint over a foam football. tony is wearing sunglasses indoors, technically outdoors, but under the shaded bar, so spiritually indoors. bruce is speaking to pepper near a bowl of fruit like he has been assigned fruit diplomacy.

and bucky. bucky is near the far side of the pool, one foot up on the lower rung of a lounger, laughing at something steve says across the patio. shirtless, obviously. cruelly. swim trunks low on his hips, hair tied back in a loose half-bun, a pair of sunglasses hanging from the collar of the shirt he has abandoned on a chair. his skin is already touched by sun, golden at the shoulders, marked with faint scars and old history, and your brain takes one look at him and files for retirement.

of course. of course he gets to look like that near water. like some mythological punishment. like a sailor’s bad decision. like if marble got warm and developed a bad personality.

you stop near the sliding door. nat keeps walking. traitor. sam sees you first. “hey, finally! we were about to send a search party.”

“i was in the bathroom for seven minutes,” you call back, which is mostly true if you ignore the years spent negotiating with your own reflection.

“seven minutes in woman time,” tony says, lifting his drink. “so either twelve seconds or a fiscal quarter.”

“rich men shouldn’t speak,” you say, and tony points at you like you’ve wounded him.

“see, this is why i invite you. keeps the ego limber.”

that gets a few laughs, easy and warm. you can handle them. most of them. everyone here has seen you in pajamas, sick, angry, half asleep, and once crying over a video of a dog getting prosthetic legs. skin should be nothing. thighs should be nothing. a stomach should be nothing. human bodies have been happening for ages. terribly common things.

then bucky turns. it is fast. too fast. his smile is still there from whatever steve said, wide and relaxed, and then his eyes find you and the smile fades in pieces.

you go so still the towel slips down one shoulder.

he looks at your face first, then lower. hardly a second, maybe less, barely enough to count, but your body counts it. the line of his gaze touches your swimsuit, the bare places around it, the curve you have spent twenty minutes trying to negotiate with, and then he looks away.

just like that. his jaw tightens. his hand curls around the back of the lounger. his attention swings back to steve with such sudden force that you almost laugh. there it is. there it fucking is.

you knew this would happen. stupid, stupid girl. standing in a bathroom telling yourself he was only one guy when that one guy apparently needs to look anywhere else the second you show too much skin. amazing. beautiful. maybe you can walk straight into the pool and keep going until you reach a new continent. the patio sounds louder now. sam’s laughter, clint yelling about cheating, ice clinking in tony’s glass. everything keeps moving around you with obscene casualness. no one else saw it. no one else felt the tiny, sharp slice of it. bucky looked at you and looked away, and everyone else gets to continue eating fruit.

natasha glances back. you arrange your face into something flat and vaguely hostile. a familiar costume. better than the swimsuit.“drink?” she asks.

“yes.”

“alcoholic?”

“aggressively.”

tony hears that and brightens. “finally, someone with taste.”

you make your way toward the bar, aware of every step. the swimsuit feels too tight and too revealing and somehow too loud. bucky is across the patio, speaking to steve. he does not look again. that is fine. excellent. merciful, even. you hope he develops hiccups. tony slides a drink toward you. “for the lady with the aggressive liver.”

“thank you. sorry about your personality.”

“accepted. i bought another one.”

sam hoists himself out of the pool with a dramatic groan, water streaming down his shoulders. He grabs a towel, wiping his face, and his gaze flicks over your swimsuit without the weirdness men can sometimes bring to it. Just appreciative, warm, and easy. “Damn. Look at you.”

your fingers tighten around the glass. for one stupid second, praise lands in a place that has been sitting empty for too long. you lift your brows, aiming for casual. “is that surprise?”

“that’s respect,” sam says, pointing at the gold ring on your strap. “little fancy thing going on. i see you.”

“it’s swimsuit technology.”

“no, that’s a whole look. hey, buck.” sam turns his head before you can stop him. “you seeing this?”

murder becomes briefly understandable.

bucky’s shoulders go rigid. Steve looks between sam and bucky with the pained expression of a man witnessing a grenade roll under a picnic table. the second stretches. maybe two. your drink sweats against your palm. bucky does turn, but his eyes barely make it to your shoulder before skating away again. “yeah,” he says, voice rough enough that it sounds dragged from his throat. “i see it.”

that is worse than silence. you swallow. “fantastic. all votes counted.”

sam squints, sensing something in the air with the survival instincts of a man who has chosen chaos as a hobby. “you okay over there, terminator?”

bucky’s mouth moves into something that could pass for a smile in poor lighting. “fine.”

“sounds painful.”

“sam.”

“what? i’m checking on my friend.”

“check quieter.”

you take a long sip. It is sweet, cold, and strong enough to make your teeth feel clean. Wonderful. Tony Stark may be a public hazard, but the man stocks good alcohol. You let the burn settle on your tongue and decide, with the private little click of a door closing, that this is fine. Bucky can avoid looking at you. Great. Wonderful. Plenty of people have eyes.

Sam, for instance. Sam is grinning at you, towel around his neck, eyebrows lifted. He is handsome and safe and not Bucky, which immediately lowers his value in the ugliest part of your brain. But he complimented you. He looked at you without flinching. That counts for something. “you getting in?” sam asks, jerking his chin toward the pool. “or did you dress up to intimidate the tiles?”

“both can be true.”

“come on. clint’s cheating and i need a witness.”

you glance toward the water, then toward nat, who has settled beside wanda. Then, against all better judgment, toward bucky. He is looking at his drink. Very invested in it. Possibly falling in love with it. Good for them. your drink goes onto the counter. the towel slides off your shoulders and onto a chair before you can give yourself time to become normal again. Cool air brushes over your bare back. Too many places. Too much skin. Your arms fight the urge to cross over your middle.

Bucky’s head turns a fraction. You see it. You hate that you see it. The movement is so tiny anyone else would miss it, but you have a tragic little doctorate in James Barnes pretending indifference. His eyes make it to your legs this time. Then his mouth presses flat, and he turns away again.

Fine. Your chin lifts. “i’m a terrible witness,” you tell sam, stepping toward the pool. “i lie under pressure.”

Sam laughs and offers his hand from the water like he is helping royalty down from a carriage. “perfect. we’ll frame clint together.”

The pool is cold at first, a shock around your calves as you sit on the edge and lower yourself in. You bite back the sound that tries to escape, mostly out of pride. The water closes around your waist, then your ribs, and for a second the swimsuit stops feeling like a spotlight. Underwater, everything blurs kinder. Your hips, stomach, thighs. The body becomes a body again. Less evidence. Less argument. Sam tosses you the foam football. You catch it against your chest with both hands, splashing yourself in the face. “very athletic,” clint calls.

you wipe water from your eyes. “i’m preserving my mystery.”

“your mystery is that you suck at catch.”

“my mystery is that i haven’t drowned you.”

That gets a laugh from wanda. Nat smiles behind her sunglasses, proud and terrible. You start to loosen after that. The water helps. The drink helps. Sam helps too, in his loud, easy way, making you feel included without making you feel studied. He shouts fake strategies, accuses clint of crimes against recreational sport, and once spins you by the shoulders to aim your throw while you laugh so hard pool water gets in your mouth.

It should be enough. It almost is. Then you glance over and see Bucky watching. He is no longer pretending to listen to Steve. His sunglasses are on now, hiding his eyes, but his head is angled toward you. His arms are crossed over his chest, one shoulder leaning against a patio pillar, sun catching along the metal of his left hand where it grips his own bicep. There is nothing soft in his posture. Nothing open. He looks carved into place.

Caught, he turns his head slightly. Of course. Your laugh thins. Sam says something, but you miss it. Maybe your name. Maybe a joke. The pool sounds muffle, slipping in and out around your ears. Bucky can look from far away, apparently. From behind sunglasses. From a place where you cannot look back properly. The second you are close enough for him to have to acknowledge you as a body with feelings, he finds the nearest wall or drink or horizon.

There’s a special sort of humiliation in wanting someone who seems vaguely offended by the evidence of you. “you alive?” sam asks, splashing water near your arm.

You blink back to him. “unfortunately.”

“you looked like you were plotting.”

“I plot as cardio.”

“that explains the stamina.”

Bucky’s jaw moves across the patio. You see that too. Tiny. Annoying. Delicious, if you were a healthier person. A reckless little thing uncurls in your chest. It is petty and hot and stupid, so naturally it feels almost holy. You turn back to sam with a brighter smile, the sort that probably looks normal to everyone else and insane to Nat. Sam raises his eyebrows. Brave man. “teach me to throw better,” you say.

He narrows his eyes. “this a trick?”

“i’m asking for athletic help. cherish the moment.”

Sam laughs, then shifts behind you in the water, hands hovering over your elbows before settling lightly when you nod. It is friendly. It is nothing. It is two people in a pool with a foam football and a crowd of friends around them. But you feel Bucky before you see him. His attention has weight. A dark little weather system rolling over the patio. Sam adjusts your arm. “okay, elbow up. no, less like you’re threatening the ball’s family.”

“I am threatening its family.”

“gentle. release here.” His hand taps your wrist.

Across the patio, Steve says something to Bucky. Bucky does not answer. You throw. The ball arcs beautifully for half a second, then smacks clint square in the forehead. The silence is immediate. Then clint sinks under the water like a betrayed submarine. You clap both hands over your mouth. Sam loses his mind laughing, one hand braced on your shoulder as he folds forward. Wanda sits up. Tony lowers his sunglasses. Steve looks concerned. Nat looks delighted. Clint resurfaces, hair plastered over his face. “attempted murder.”

“self-defense,” you gasp, still half laughing, half horrified. “you had criminal energy.”

“You hit me in my innocent head.”

“no jury would convict her,” sam says, wiping his eyes. “that was art.”

A sound comes from the patio. Low. Short. You look before you can stop yourself.

Bucky is laughing. Not loud. Not like sam. Barely more than a breath, but his mouth has curved despite whatever terrible thing he has been doing with his face all afternoon. He is looking at you now. Fully. Sunglasses pushed up into his hair, blue eyes narrowed against the sun, and for one ridiculous moment, all the air in the day seems to gather in your throat.

Then he catches himself. The smile fades. His gaze drops to the water near your waist, moves away, and he reaches for his drink. It is a slap with no hand.

Your smile goes with it. The water suddenly feels too cold. “i need another drink,” you announce, heading for the stairs before anyone can see your face arrange itself badly.

Sam calls after you, still laughing about clint’s tragic head injury. Nat’s sunglasses follow you from the lounger. Bucky stays by the pillar, but the closer you get to the edge, the more you feel him there. A terrible awareness. Like walking past a stove you know is on. Your hands grip the metal rail as you climb the pool steps. Water streams down your body, cooler where the breeze hits. The swimsuit clings hard now, slick to your skin, making every curve more obvious instead of less. Wonderful design choice. Truly innovative cruelty. You reach for the towel on the chair, but it is farther than you thought, and the stone under your wet feet is slippery.

Your heel slides. For one bright, stupid second, you are suspended in pure indignity. Then a hand clamps around your upper arm. Not sam. Not nat. Not anyone safe enough to survive.

Bucky. His other hand catches your waist, broad palm spreading over wet skin, fingers pressing into the soft give above your hip. The contact goes straight through you with such force that your brain empties. Chlorine, sun, his skin, the faint spice of whatever soap he uses, all of it crowds too close. Your hand lands on his chest to steady yourself, and he is warm. Warm and solid and right there, which is deeply unfair for a man who has spent the afternoon treating eye contact like a hostage negotiation.

“careful,” he says.

One word. Low. Rough. Stupid. Your embarrassment catches fire. You laugh. It comes out bitter, thin at the edges, nothing like the easy laugh you gave sam. Bucky’s fingers tighten once at your waist, and that little pressure makes the whole thing worse. “relax, barnes.” You pull your hand from his chest, hating the wet print your palm leaves behind. “you don’t have to touch me longer than necessary.”

The whole patio seems to keep making noise, but in your little corner, the sentence has teeth. Bucky goes still. His hand stays on your waist for half a second too long, then leaves like he has been burned. The absence is immediate and awful. You hate him for touching you. You hate him more for stopping. His face has changed, though you refuse to name the change. His brows draw together, mouth parting slightly as if he has lost the next line. Good. Let him lose something. “What?” he says, quiet.

You grab the towel and pull it around yourself, too late to feel covered. “Nothing.”

His eyes narrow at that, and for once he does not look away. “That didn’t sound like nothing.”

“You’re very observant.”

“Don’t do that.”

A laugh tries to crawl out of you and dies ugly. “Do what?”

“Act like I did something to you when all I did was catch you.”

You look at him then. Really, probably too much. Big mistake. His skin is still damp at the temples from sweat or the pool water someone splashed earlier, and the sun catches the blue of his eyes so sharply you want to be mad at nature. His chest rises under your gaze. Your palm still remembers him, every warm inch. A handprint in reverse. “you looked away,” you say, and the words escape before pride can shoot them down.

Bucky’s face tightens. “When?”

You hate him. You hate him so much you could kiss him until both of you forget language. “Forget it.”

You turn away, but he catches the edge of the towel. Not enough to pull you back, only enough to stop the escape from being clean. “When?” he repeats, and the softness in his voice is so much worse than anger.

You should have kept your mouth shut. You should have stayed in the bathroom and sued Natasha from there. Instead you’re wet, half naked, humiliated, and Bucky Barnes is holding your towel like it matters. “When I came out,” you say, staring hard at the bar instead of him. “When sam called you. When I got in the pool. Pick one, you’ve been consistent.”

His grip loosens. For a second you think he will explain. He might laugh. He might say you’re imagining things. He might finally cut the whole sickness open and tell you he does not want to look, and then maybe you can be free through the healing power of public devastation. But he says nothing. Of course he says nothing.

Your eyes sting, which is unacceptable. Chlorine. Obviously chlorine. You pull the towel free and walk toward the bar with as much dignity as a woman can manage while dripping on expensive stone. Behind you, Steve says Bucky’s name. Low. Warning. Or concerned. You do not turn around. Tony is pretending very hard to examine a lime. “Drink,” you say, dropping onto a stool.

He pushes one over without commentary for maybe the first time in his life. “Hydration adjacent.”

“your discretion is unsettling.”

“i’m multifaceted.”

You take the glass. Your hand shakes once, barely. You curl it tighter until it stops.

Across the patio, Bucky remains near the pool steps, one hand low on his hip, the other rubbing over his mouth. Steve stands near him now, speaking quietly. Bucky shakes his head. His eyes cut toward you. This time, you look away first.

Pool parties become less fun once you have emotionally exposed yourself near a wet staircase. A tragic discovery. Someone should tell the youth. The afternoon drags onward with the mean persistence of a song you cannot skip. People eat. People drink. Sam retells the clint football incident with increasing betrayal of facts, making himself sound like a coach and you sound like a trained assassin. Clint claims he can see sounds now. Wanda orders him to stop making it tempting to hit him again. Tony brings out enough food for a wedding and calls it “light snacks,” which makes you wonder if billionaires understand hunger as a concept or merely as a branding opportunity. You sit with nat under the shade, towel around your shoulders, swimsuit drying tight against your skin. The drink has made you warmer, loose at the edges, but not enough to soften the place Bucky opened and then abandoned. He has stayed away. Not dramatically. Not in a way anyone could call obvious. He helps Steve with the grill, talks to Sam, lets Tony make jokes at his expense. He is normal.

That might be the ugliest part. You are sitting here with your nerves scraped raw, and he gets to hold a plate of grilled chicken. Do you want to talk about it?” nat asks.

“No.”

She hums, sipping from her straw. “Do you want to lie about it?”

“Desperately.”

“Go ahead.”

You stare at the water. Sam is trying to shove clint off a float. Clint has accepted death with more grace than expected. “I’m having a nice time.”

“Terrible lie. Try again.”

“I enjoy sunlight.”

“Worse.”

“Bucky Barnes is a normal man whose opinion does nothing to my blood pressure.”

Natasha’s mouth curves. “Almost funny enough to pass.”

You pick at a loose thread on the towel. The fibers are soft, expensive, probably worth more than half your closet. Tony’s towels have better career prospects than you. “He looked at me like he wished I’d worn a tarp.”

Nat says nothing for a second. Her silence is rarely empty. It moves around, checks exits, evaluates weak spots. “That’s what you saw?”

You glance at her, defensive already. “I have eyes.”

“Unfortunately, yes. Dramatic ones.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I.” She turns her head a little, and you follow her gaze against your will.

Bucky is standing at the grill beside Steve. His posture is casual enough for a stranger. Not for you. You know his casual. This is held too tight at the edges. His shoulders are set, left hand curled around a bottle of beer he has barely touched, eyes trained on the pool with such grim commitment that the pool may owe him money. “He’s been weird all day,” nat says.

“He’s always weird.”

“With you, yes.”

“That’s very comforting.”

She nudges your knee with hers. “You two are exhausting.”

“There is no two. There’s me, suffering heroically, and him, being confusing and broad.”

“Broad?”

“Don’t make me defend my vocabulary. I’m injured.”

“You slipped.”

“Emotionally.”

Natasha laughs softly, then reaches over and plucks the drink from your hand. “Slow down.”

You glare. “This is theft.”

“This is friendship.”

“Friendship would let me make poor choices.”

“I let you buy the swimsuit.”

“That was attempted murder.”

Her hand squeezes your knee once. “He’s looking again.”

Your entire body betrays you. It wants to turn. It wants to pretend it has not been starving for that exact sentence. You hold still with the grim focus of someone defusing a bomb under poor lighting. “Good for him,” you say.

Nat’s smile turns small and unbearable. “You’re allowed to like being looked at.”

“By normal people, maybe.”

“Barnes is many things.”

“Normal does seem optimistic.” The words come out light enough. The thought under them sits heavy. Bucky looking at you feels dangerous because you cannot tell what he sees. All day, you have been trapped between wanting his attention and being wounded by how he spends it. Too quick, too hidden, too late. You want him to look in a way that lets you rest, which is insane. A person should not need another person’s eyes to feel real in their own skin. There are self-help books about that, probably. You have not read them because they would tell you to journal and you would rather eat sand.

Tony calls everyone for food, and the shift saves you from Nat’s terrifying accuracy. Chairs scrape. People gather around the long outdoor table. You end up between wanda and sam, safe enough, with nat across from you and Bucky diagonally down the table beside Steve. Diagonally is awful. Diagonally means accidental glances. Diagonally means you can pretend to look at the salad and still see his hands. Diagonally means his knee might bump yours if the table were smaller, which it is not, thank God, or no thanks to God, depending on where you are in your moral development. 

Food helps. A little. Grilled corn, charred sweet at the edges. Watermelon with feta. Skewers. Tony’s obscene little sliders made with buns so soft you briefly understand wealth. You eat more than you expected, mostly to give your mouth a reason to stay busy. Sam leans closer while reaching for the corn. “You ever think about joining a league?”

You stare at him. “For what, pool homicide?”

“Foam football. You’ve got raw talent.”

“I injured one man.”

“That’s how legends start.”

You laugh, easier this time. Sam is lovely. Sam is safe. Sam has never once made you feel like a bug under glass or a prayer no one taught you how to say. His attention is warm and uncomplicated, and maybe that is why it fails to do the thing you wish it would. You want it to. That would be convenient. You could turn your head and smile at the man making you laugh, and your body could decide to be sensible for once. Across the table, Bucky’s fork scrapes softly against his plate.

You glance up. His eyes are on Sam’s shoulder, where it nearly touches yours. His mouth has gone flat again. When his gaze shifts to yours, it stays. No sunglasses now. No immediate retreat. You should feel triumphant. You feel pinned and furious and too warm under the towel.

Sam keeps talking. You answer. Probably. Words happen from your side of the table. Bucky looks away first, but slower this time, and that almost makes you angrier. 

After food, Tony declares a mandatory sunset swim like a man whose money has left him unfamiliar with the word optional. Wanda declines by pretending to sleep. Vision declines with such politeness that Tony thanks him. Steve gets dragged in by Sam. Clint goes willingly after shouting that the water may heal his head trauma. Natasha sheds her shirt and dives so cleanly that half the patio claps.

You mean to stay on the lounger. You really do. Then Bucky sits on the chair two spaces away with a beer and no intention of swimming.

You stand.

“Coming in?” sam calls from the pool.

“Apparently.”

Bucky’s head lifts. There. There it is again. That first startled drag of his eyes as your towel drops onto the lounger. This time you catch all of it. He looks at your shoulders, your chest, your waist, the high cut at your hips, the damp lines where the swimsuit still clings from earlier. His throat moves. His fingers tighten around the beer bottle.

Then he looks away. Again. The hurt comes faster now, less sharp and more tired. You have run out of ways to be surprised by it. “You coming?” you ask before you can stop yourself.

Bucky looks back. “What?”

“In the pool.” You gesture toward everyone else, voice mild enough to deserve applause. “That large wet rectangle behind you.”

Sam laughs from the water. Steve watches Bucky with the concerned patience of someone looking at a friend about to step on a rake. Bucky’s eyes flick toward the pool, then to you. “I’m fine here.”

“Tragic. We’ll notify the rectangle.”

That gets a laugh from Tony. Even Bucky’s mouth twitches, but it dies before it becomes anything useful. “You scared?” you ask.

The words are easy. The ache under them is less so. You want him to rise. You want him to refuse. You want him to look. You want him to leave. You want so many impossible things at once that your own skin feels crowded. Bucky leans back in the chair, jaw set. “Of you?”

“Of fun.”

“Terrified.”

“Figures.” You turn before he can answer, stepping into the pool with all the dignity you can scrape together. The water feels warmer now after the heat of the day, soft around your knees, your waist, your ribs. Sam splashes near you, and you splash him back half-heartedly. The game restarts in some altered form. Someone throws a beach ball. Tony judges from the side with a drink, claiming he is “morally participating.” The sky slowly bruises pink and gold over the trees.

You laugh again. You even mean some of it. But Bucky stays on the chair. He stays dry and distant, one elbow on the armrest, beer untouched, gaze roaming everywhere except you until it does not. Then you feel it between your shoulder blades, across the back of your neck, sliding down where the swimsuit reveals more than it hides. If he is disgusted, he has a strange way of torturing himself with it.

Maybe he is bored. Maybe he is judging. Maybe he is thinking about someone else. Maybe you are pathetic. That last thought arrives with such calm familiarity that you almost miss the ball flying toward your face.

“Duck!” Sam shouts.

You duck too late. The beach ball clips the side of your head, harmless but startling, and you stumble back with a laugh that turns into a yelp when your foot misses the pool step under the water. This time, you do not fall. This time, Bucky is already there.

The splash of him entering the pool sends water up over your arms. You barely process the movement before his hand catches your waist under the water, bare palm meeting bare skin, fingers firm enough to halt every thought you were trying to have. His other hand closes around your wrist, anchoring you while your toes find the step.

The whole pool erupts around you. Sam says something. Tony whistles. Clint declares another murder attempt. None of it matters.

Bucky is in the water. Bucky is touching you.

Bucky’s hair is wet now, loose strands clinging near his jaw. His chest is inches from yours, water beading on his collarbones, eyes fixed on your face with the sort of focus that makes you feel both held and dissected. The metal hand around your wrist is cool. The flesh hand at your waist is warm even underwater. Your body, treacherous little idiot, forgets every insult it has been rehearsing and leans a fraction closer. “Careful,” he says again.

The same word. Same roughness. Less distance. Your laugh barely works this time. It leaves your mouth thin and tired. “You need a new line.”

His eyes drop to your mouth. Stay there. Move back up. “You need to stop slipping.”

“I’m sure the tiles are honored you blame me.”

“Wasn’t blaming you.”

“No, you’re just leaping into pools now. Very casual.”

His hand slides half an inch on your waist as someone’s wave rolls against you both. The movement is tiny and devastating. Your stomach pulls in under his palm before you can control it, and his fingers flex like he felt the reaction and had to restrain his own. Sam clears his throat loudly. “Everybody alive?”

Bucky does not look away from you. “Yeah.”

“You sure? That looked like a rescue.”

“Wilson,” Steve says, warning plain in his voice.

“What? I’m just asking. Man moved like a torpedo.”

Your face heats, and that saves you. Embarrassment brings language back. “I’m fine,” you say, trying to step back.

Bucky lets go of your wrist. His hand at your waist lingers. You glance down at it. He follows your gaze and releases you, slow enough to feel intentional, quick enough to hurt. “Fine,” he repeats, almost to himself.

You step away, wrapping your arms around your middle under the water. The swimsuit feels nonexistent now, yet somehow everyone can see the exact place his hand had been. Maybe there is a mark. Maybe your skin has announced it to the patio in bright letters. “I’m getting out,” you say, mostly to the water.

Bucky’s brows pull together. “Again?”

“Try to survive it.”

Sam says your name softly as you pass him, but you keep moving. The pool steps are kinder this time. You grip the rail, climb carefully, and grab your towel with wet hands. The sky has gone warmer, streaked with orange, and the air makes goosebumps rise along your arms. You head toward the house before anyone can ask.

The sliding door is blessedly close. The kitchen inside is cooler, dimmer, quiet except for the hum of Tony’s expensive refrigerator and the muted thump of music through glass. You leave wet footprints across the tile and feel guilty for half a second before remembering Tony could probably buy new tile by blinking. The towel goes tighter around you. Your face feels too hot. Your chest feels worse. Everything is tangled. Bucky looked away. Bucky watched. Bucky refused to get in. Bucky jumped in without thinking. Bucky touched you like instinct. Bucky let go like regret.

A normal person would accept complexity. You prefer suffering. The kitchen island has a bowl of cut limes, a bottle of tequila, and a tray of tiny desserts covered in plastic wrap. You peel one back and take a mini tart just to have something to destroy. It tastes like lemon and butter and wealth. You chew angrily. “stealing dessert before dinner’s fully over?”

You close your eyes. No. Absolutely no. The universe can go bother someone else.

Bucky’s voice comes from the doorway behind you, lower after the pool, rougher around the edges. You keep chewing. Swallow. Pick up another tart because dignity left hours ago and dessert is here now.

“Tell tony,” you say. “He’ll have me arrested by the pastry police.”

Wet footsteps cross the tile. He has followed you in dripping too, which should make him less intimidating. It does not. The room fills with him, chlorine and sun and that clean masculine smell under it, the one that has ruined many evenings and one perfectly decent pillow you once pressed your face into after he left it on your couch. He stops on the other side of the island. You look at the tart tray instead of him.

“I was checking on you.”

“Very heroic. I’m eating a tart.”

“So I see.”

“Then your work here is done.”

The old rhythm tries to come back. Snap, deflect, survive. Usually he takes the bait. Usually he smiles or scoffs or says something that makes you want to throw a household object. This time he stays quiet, and the quiet crawls right under your towel. You reach for a third tart. His hand covers the tray.

You stare at his fingers. Human hand. Calloused. Thick. The same hand that had been on your waist in the pool, warm through the water, possessive for one second before he remembered he did not want to be. Your own hand hovers uselessly near his. Lemon sugar sticks to your thumb. “Move,” you say.

“Talk to me.”

Your laugh is small and mean. “About dessert?”

“About what you said outside.”

“I’ve said many beautiful things today.”

His fingers press lightly against the plastic wrap, making it crinkle. “At the pool steps.”

The room cools further. Somewhere outside, Sam laughs. The sound reaches the kitchen thin and far away, like it belongs to another life where people can swim and flirt and enjoy fruit without turning into an open wound near a marble island. “I said you didn’t have to touch me.” You lift one shoulder. The towel slips a little. His eyes move to fix on your face with almost painful discipline. “Seems clear.”

“No.” His jaw tightens around the word. “It doesn’t.”

“It really does.”

“Is that what you think I’m doing?”

There it is. Softer than you expected. Worse, somehow. He sounds angry, but the anger has nowhere clean to go. It sits between you, wet-haired and broad-shouldered and too close. You pick at the sugar on your thumb. “Standing in a kitchen?”

“Trying to stop touching you.”

A humorless sound leaves you. “Aren’t you?”

Bucky’s hand slowly leaves the tray. He comes around the island, and you hate yourself for how fast your body registers each step. Wet tile under his bare feet. The shift of muscle in his thighs. Water slipping from his hair to his neck. He stops beside you, close enough that you can see tiny droplets on his lashes. “You think that’s why I looked away?”

Your fingers curl into the towel at your chest. “I’m very tired of talking about where your eyes go.”

“I’m not.”

“Congratulations.”

His voice lowers. “Look at me.”

“No.”

He breathes out through his nose. A patient sound. Not gentle. Not quite. “Please.”

That word does the damage anger could never do. You look up, furious with him for asking nicely. His face is tense, mouth set, eyes darker in the dim kitchen. He looks too serious for a pool party. Too serious for you standing here in a damp swimsuit and a towel, lemon sugar on your thumb, embarrassment turning your throat tight. “Happy?” you ask.

His gaze moves over your face like he is trying to read something written under your skin. “No.”

That almost gets you. Simple answer. No joke. No little smirk to save either of you. Your own mouth opens, then closes again.

Bucky glances toward the patio doors. Outside, the others are loud and bright and drunk on summer. In here, the air holds still around the refrigerator hum and your wet footprints. “I looked away,” he says, each word measured like it costs him, “because if I kept looking, everybody out there was gonna know.”

You stare at him. It takes a second. Maybe more. Your brain receives the sentence, turns it over, rejects it, picks it up again, then shakes it until meaning falls out. “Know what?”

His laugh is almost silent, rough at the bottom. “Don’t do that.”

“I’m asking.”

“You know what.”

“I really don’t.”

His hand lifts, then stops before touching you. That restraint again. Always that. A hand held back like your skin has rules written over it. You hate it more than anything, and maybe you have loved it too, which is inconvenient and humiliating. His fingers curl into his palm. “That I wanted you.”

The fridge hums. Music thuds through glass. Someone outside yells for Tony to stop cheating at whatever stupid rich-man game he has invented. Your towel slips another inch down your shoulder. Bucky notices. This time, he does not look away fast enough.

Wanted. Past tense? Present tense? A cruel grammar question at the worst possible time.

“You’ve been acting like looking at me causes physical pain,” you say, and it comes out less sharp than you need. More wounded. Awful.

His eyes cut back to yours. “It does.”

You blink. Bucky looks almost mad at himself now, which is satisfying for one brief second before it becomes sad. “You walked out in that thing and I had two choices. Look away, or sit there with everyone watching me stare at you like I’d lost my damn mind.”

“That thing?”

His gaze dips. Brief. Hungry. No disgust in it. None. The realization makes your stomach hollow out and fill at once. “The swimsuit.”

“You hate it.”

His mouth parts, then closes. His brows draw down. “I hate that Sam got to tell you first.”

That sentence finds a deep, stupid place in you and presses there. You hate that place. It has no pride. “He was being nice,” you say.

“I know.” in his mouth, right now, it is not reassurance. It is surrender. It is a man admitting something he does not want to resent and resenting it anyway.

“He looked at you like a friend,” Bucky says. “That made it worse.”

You set the tart down slowly, afraid any sudden movement might shatter the room. “Why?”

His eyes come back to yours. “Because I didn’t.”

The answer moves through you like a slow spill. Outside, someone opens the patio door. You both turn your heads at once. Tony leans in halfway, sunglasses still on though the sun is dying. His gaze takes in the water on the floor, your towel, Bucky’s expression, the tray of tarts, and he immediately lifts both hands.

“Fantastic. Haunted kitchen. Love that for us.” He reaches blindly for a bottle near the door. “Pretend I’m rich furniture.”

“Tony,” Bucky says, voice tight.

“Gone. Emotionally, spiritually, legally.” Tony backs out with the bottle and slides the door shut.

The interruption should break the tension. It does not. It makes it worse. Now the world has peeked in and retreated. Now privacy feels chosen. You wipe your sticky thumb against the towel, then regret it. “People are going to come looking.”

“Let them.”

Your eyes flick to his. “That’s a bad idea.”

“Yeah.”

“You’re agreeing?”

“Trying something new.”

Despite everything, a tiny laugh escapes you. Bucky’s face shifts at the sound. Not a smile, exactly. More dangerous than that. Like the laugh handed him proof he had been starving for and now he is trying to keep from grabbing.

“I thought you were embarrassed,” you say, quieter. The words scrape more than they should. “Of looking. Of me.”

His whole body seems to pull toward you without moving. “Jesus.”

You flinch at the roughness, and he sees it.

“Hey.” His hand finally touches your arm, just above the towel’s edge. Warm, careful, barely there. Still enough to ruin you. “No. I’m angry at myself. Not you.”

“You keep looking away.”

“I was trying to be decent.”

“That felt awful.”

His thumb moves once over your damp skin. You wish it did less. You wish it did more. “I see that now.”

“Great. Character development.”

He huffs, but there’s no real humor in it. His eyes have gone to the place his thumb touches your arm. “I’m sorry.”

You blink again. Bucky apologizes sometimes. To other people. Usually with grumbles and half-smiles and enough charm to make forgiveness feel inevitable. With you, apologies are rarer. Maybe because both of you prefer biting to bleeding. Maybe because he never seems to understand where the wound is. 

This one is plain. You have no idea what to do with it. “I don’t want your pity apology,” you say.

His thumb stops. “Pity?”

“Yes.”

“You think I’m standing here half naked in Stark’s kitchen, dripping on a floor that costs more than my first apartment, apologizing out of pity?”

“When you put it like that, it sounds stupid.”

“It sounded stupid before.”

You glare up at him, relieved by the spark of irritation because anger is easier to hold. “Careful.”

That word. His word. It changes something in his face, turns his attention heavier. Your mouth goes dry. Bucky’s hand slides down your arm, slow enough that you could move away. You do not. His fingers find your wrist, then your hand, lifting it between you. Lemon sugar still clings faintly near your thumb. His eyes meet yours, asking nothing aloud, and maybe you nod. Maybe your hand simply gives up and lets him.

He brings your thumb to his mouth. The first touch of his tongue is warm and wet and obscene in its quietness. He licks the sugar from your skin like he has all the time in the world, lips closing around the tip of your thumb for half a second before he lets it go. Your knees forget their duties. The island is behind you, so you lean back against it before your body can embarrass you further.

Bucky watches the movement. “There,” he says, voice rougher. “No pity.”

You breathe through your nose, which is impressive since your lungs appear to have resigned. “That was unsanitary.”

“Pool water’s worse.”

“Comforting.”

His hand stays around yours. “You always do that.”

“What?”

“Make a joke when you’re shaking.”

You glance down. Your fingers are trembling in his grip. Treacherous little things. You consider cutting them off. Too messy for tony’s floor.

“I’m cold,” you say.

Bucky’s eyes drop to the towel, the damp swimsuit, the little bumps risen along your arms. “Yeah?”

“Yes.”

“Want me to get you dry?”

There is nothing clean in that question. Maybe there could have been, from someone else. From him, with his mouth still wet from your thumb and his hand around yours, the words turn thick. You pull your hand back, mostly so you can breathe. “I can manage a towel.”

“I saw.”

“You saw me almost fall.”

“I saw a lot today.”

A pulse starts low in your body, slow and hot and deeply inconvenient. “You looked away for most of it.”

“I looked back.”

That shuts you up. His hand goes to the edge of the towel. He does not pull. Just touches the cotton near your collarbone, where it has started to sag from water and poor decision-making. “I looked back all damn day.”

You try to swallow. It takes effort. “Bucky…”

The patio door opens again. This time it is Nat. She takes one look at you, one look at Bucky, then at the wet floor. Her face gives away nothing, which means she has figured out everything.

“People are asking about dessert,” she says.

You stare at her helplessly. Bucky’s hand drops from the towel. He turns his head, expression suddenly murderous in a very contained, socially inconvenient way. “They can wait.”

Natasha’s brows rise. “Can they?”

“Yes,” he says.

Something about that single word, the calm certainty of it, makes your thighs press together under the towel. Nat’s eyes flick down for barely a second, then back up. You want the tile to open and swallow you. Preferably gently. With snacks. “Right,” she says. “I’ll tell them the kitchen is occupied.”

“Nat,” you hiss.

Her mouth curves. “What? By wet people.”

Bucky sighs like he is in physical pain. “Romanoff.”

“Relax, Barnes. I’m leaving.” She reaches for the tray of tarts, slides it away from you both, and pauses at the door. “Use one of the guest rooms. Tony has cameras in weird places.”

Your soul leaves your body. “What?” you choke.

Tony’s voice carries from outside. “I do not have cameras in weird places. I have cameras in strategic places.”

Natasha closes the door again. The silence after that is different. Less fragile. More aware of its own stupidity. You cover your face with one hand. “I’m moving.”

Bucky makes a sound that might be a laugh if he were less ruined. “Where?”

“Into the ocean.”

“Pool’s closer.”

“Too many witnesses.”

His hand returns to your waist, over the towel this time, and the casual possession of it melts the last few scraps of your brain. “Guest room’s closer too.”

You lower your hand. He is looking at you now. No retreat. No disgust. No careful sideways glance. He looks exactly how you had feared wishing for. Hungry and unsure and trying to make himself stand still. “This is a terrible idea,” you whisper.

“Probably.”

“People are outside.”

“Yep.”

“You were ignoring me two hours ago.”

His mouth tightens. “I was trying to keep my hands off you two hours ago.”

“And now?”

His fingers press into your waist, pulling you one inch closer. Not enough. Enough to make you greedy. “Now I heard what you thought.”

Your chest aches. “And?”

He leans in, slow. Gives you time. Too much time. Your eyes dip to his mouth, and he sees that too. Of course he sees that, the bastard. His lips brush the corner of yours, barely a touch, more breath than kiss, and your entire body answers like it has been waiting years for a command. “And I’m done letting you think it.”

The first kiss is almost gentle. Almost. That is what ruins it. Bucky’s mouth touches yours with restraint at first, warm and careful, and you stand there stupidly with your hand hovering near his chest. It has taken so long to get here that your body does not trust it. He kisses you once, then draws back just enough to look at your face, and something in that tiny pause makes you angry. “No,” you breathe, grabbing the wet hair at the nape of his neck.

His eyes darken. “No?”

“You don’t get to kiss me like I’m fragile after making me feel insane all day.”

The words are barely out before his hand slides behind your head and his mouth comes back harder. This kiss has teeth in it. Not cruel, not careless, but hungry enough to make your fingers tighten in his hair. He tastes like beer and lemon sugar from your skin. His other arm wraps around your waist, pulling you in until the towel is crushed between you and his damp chest, and you make a sound into his mouth that you would deny in court. Bucky answers with a low groan, and the sound breaks something open. The kiss turns messy fast. Your feet slip a little on the wet tile, and he catches you without breaking away, almost lifting you onto your toes. The island edge presses into your back. His hand spreads wide between your shoulder blades, then drags down over the towel, as if he hates every layer between his palm and the body he kept refusing to look at.

Outside, laughter rises. You jerk back. “Guest room.”

Bucky’s forehead touches yours for one second. His breathing is rough, uneven, gratifyingly ruined. “Yeah.”

He takes your hand. That simple thing nearly undoes you. His fingers lace through yours, warm and firm, and he leads you through Tony’s absurd house with far more purpose than a man dripping pool water should have. The hallway is cool and dim, lined with art that probably costs enough to rescue a small nation. You barely see it. You see his back, the muscles shifting under wet skin, the dark hair curling at his neck, your hand held in his like something he does not plan to misplace. A laugh bursts from the patio behind you, then the sound dulls as the hallway turns. Your pulse beats everywhere. Mouth, wrists, thighs, the places the swimsuit rubs too tight. You have spent hours wishing he would look, and now he is taking you somewhere private to do more than that, which means panic arrives right on schedule, prim little nightmare clipboard in hand.

What if he changes his mind when the door closes? What if this is heat and misunderstanding and chlorine? What if he touches you and finds every soft place you spent the day trying to hide? Bucky stops at the first guest room and opens the door. The room is airy, pale, ridiculous, with a king bed dressed in white and a view of the trees beyond the windows. Too pretty. Too clean. A room for people who have sex beautifully, probably, with matching underwear and no body anxiety.

You hover at the threshold. Bucky turns. His gaze drops to your face, then your hand still in his. “What?”

You hate the gentleness. You might start wanting it everywhere. “Nothing.”

He steps closer, slowly enough to make the hallway feel narrower. “Try again.”

Your fingers tighten around his. “I’m wet.”

His brows lift a fraction. “From the pool,” you snap, heat flooding your face. “Don’t look at me like that.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Your face did.”

“My face is having a day.”

Despite yourself, a laugh slips out, small and anxious. His thumb strokes over your knuckles, and the laugh fades into something softer. God, this is bad. This is tender now, and tender is much more dangerous than horny. Horny you understand. Horny has a beginning and an end and terrible decision-making in the middle. Tender grows roots. Bucky steps into the room and draws you with him.

The door closes behind you with a quiet click. For one second, neither of you speaks. The silence fills with water dripping from both of you onto the floor, distant music, your own uneven breathing. His hand leaves yours. You miss it immediately, which is humiliating.

Then he reaches for the towel. “Can I?”

You want to say something sharp. Something clever. Something that protects the swollen, nervous thing in your chest. Instead, you nod.

He unwraps you slowly. Not theatrically. Not like some polished movie scene. His fingers fumble once at the tucked corner, and that fumble does more to you than smooth confidence ever could. The towel loosens, slipping from your shoulders, down your arms, catching at your elbows before he pulls it free and drops it onto a chair.

Cool air touches your damp skin. Your hands twitch toward your stomach. Bucky catches them. The movement is fast, but his hold is gentle. Both wrists in his hands, lifted slightly away from your body. His eyes stay on yours. “Don’t hide from me.” The words are low, quiet, and absolutely devastating.

You try to laugh. It barely forms. “That’s ambitious.”

“I can be patient.”

“You? Since when?”

His mouth twitches. “Since about three seconds ago.”

You breathe out, shaky but almost amused. He lifts your hands and kisses the inside of one wrist. Then the other. Your throat tightens. It is so stupid, how much that gets to you. A kiss there. Not your mouth. Not your chest. Just the soft skin where your pulse is making an idiot of itself. “I’m going to look at you,” he says.

Your face burns. “That sounds like a threat.”

“It’s a warning.” His thumb moves over your wrist. “A fair one.”

“Very gentlemanly.”

“Trying.”

You swallow. “Don’t try too hard.”

His eyes darken. The shift is immediate, and you feel it under your skin. The little softness remains, but something hotter moves through it, something less careful. His hands lower yours to your sides. He waits. Gives you the chance to lift them again.

You don’t. Bucky looks. This time, he lets himself. His gaze starts at your face, maybe for mercy, then slips down your throat, over the thin straps, the gold rings, the wet fabric clinging to your breasts. You feel each inch like touch. He looks at the curve of your waist, the high cut at your hips, the soft places you wanted to fold away. His jaw sets hard. A slow breath leaves him, and the sound is not disgust. Not even close. It is almost anger, but turned inward, like he cannot believe he denied himself this all afternoon.

Your eyes sting again. “Oh,” you whisper, then immediately want to slap a hand over your mouth. Not a standalone reaction, you tell yourself absurdly. Put it in a sentence, idiot. “You actually…”

Bucky’s gaze snaps back to your face. “Yeah.”

“You looked away.”

“I was an idiot.”

“That’s established.”

His smile is brief and strained. “Fair.”

His hands come to your hips, bare now, no towel, no water softening the contact. Skin to skin. You inhale too sharply and his grip steadies, thumbs pressing near the swimsuit’s edge. “You thought I didn’t like this?” he asks, voice dragging lower.

Your eyes drop to his chest, safer than his face by maybe half a degree. “You looked like you were suffering.”

“I was.” His fingers slide along the high curve of your hip, then stop there, squeezing once. “Sweetheart, I saw you come out in this and forgot what language I spoke.”

That sounds impossible. It also sounds like him. Rough, a little annoyed, painfully sincere under all that heat. “You recovered fast.”

“I didn’t recover. I panicked.”

The laugh that leaves you is shaky and wet at the edges. “That was panic?”

“Steve asked if I was having a stroke.”

Your mouth opens. “He did not.”

“He did.”

“Was he concerned?”

“Very.”

You laugh fully this time, and Bucky’s hands tighten like he wants to hold the sound against you. The laugh fades when he steps closer. His wet chest brushes the front of your swimsuit. Barely. Your nipples tighten under the damp fabric, and his eyes drop just long enough to notice before returning to your face. The restraint almost kills you. “Sam complimented you,” he says.

You blink, following the turn. “Yes.”

“You smiled.”

“He was nice.”

“I know.”

There it is again. Acknowledgment. His thumbs move, small circles over your hips that turn thought into warm static. “You hated that?”

“I hated how easy it was for him.” Bucky’s voice goes rougher. “He could just say it. Stand there in front of everyone and tell you that you looked good. I stood ten feet away acting like looking at you too long was gonna put me in the ground.”

You study him, the damp hair, the tense mouth, the eyes that keep trying to fall and climb back up. “Would it?”

“Yeah,” he says, and this time he does smile. Small, wrecked, honest enough to hurt. “Maybe.”

That does something worse than praise. Makes you ache. Makes you stupid. Makes you lift your hand to his chest, pressing your fingers over the warm skin where your palm had landed earlier. He looks down at your hand like he wants to thank it. “You could’ve said something,” you murmur.

“I thought I had time to figure out how.”

“Figure out how to say you liked a swimsuit?”

“How to say I wanted to peel it off with my teeth without getting slapped in front of Steve.”

Your fingers curl against his chest. He watches your face. “Too much?”

The question is sincere, but barely. Mostly he is reading you now, and whatever he sees in your expression pulls his mouth into something darker. “No,” you say, and your voice sounds smaller than you want. “Continue.”

His laugh is quiet. “Continue?”

“You heard me.”

“I did.” One hand leaves your hip and comes up to your jaw, thumb brushing near the corner of your mouth. “Trying to decide if I wanna continue with my mouth or my hands.”

Your knees feel untrustworthy. “You’re taking suggestions?”

“From you?” He leans in, lips grazing your cheek, not quite kissing. “Always.”

The word slides down your body and settles low, hot, awful. You press your thighs together, barely, but he is too close to miss it. “Yeah?” His lips brush your ear now. “That where it goes when I say that?”

“Shut up.”

“Been trying all day.”

“To shut up?”

“To keep from saying worse.”

His mouth touches your neck. Your eyes close before you can pretend dignity. It is only one kiss at first, warm and damp from pool water, placed under your jaw with almost unbearable care. Then another, lower. His fingers at your jaw angle your face up, and the little stretch of your throat makes the room tilt through your body without the phrase in your head. You grip his shoulder, nails pressing into skin.

“Bucky,” you whisper.

He hums against your neck. “That sounded nice.”

“Don’t get smug.”

“Too late.”

You would scold him, but his teeth scrape lightly over your pulse and the scolding falls apart into a weak sound. He hears it. Of course he hears it. His hand on your hip slides around to the small of your back, pressing you closer, and the hard line of him through his swim trunks meets your lower stomach.

Your entire body pauses.

Bucky goes still too, but only to let you register it.

“Oh,” you breathe, then rush to fix it, face flaming. “That’s, um. That’s there.”

He pulls back enough to look at you. His eyes are nearly black. “Yeah. It’s been there.”

Your mouth parts.

“All day,” he adds, almost cruel now, and the hand at your jaw keeps your face tipped up. “You want the truth? I had to sit down after you got in the pool.”

A tiny, helpless sound leaves you.

His thumb strokes your cheek. “No. Look at me.”

You do, barely.

“I’m gonna say things,” he says, voice softer but dirtier somehow, stripped of performance. “And you’re gonna believe me this time.”

Your throat works around nothing. “That’s demanding.”

“Yeah.”

“Usually people ask.”

“I spent all day asking myself if I was allowed to want you.” His hand slides from your jaw to the back of your neck, fingers sinking into damp hair. “I’m done asking me.”

That should terrify you. It does, maybe. But it terrifies the part of you that has been begging for exactly this.

His mouth comes back to yours, and this time neither of you pretend at gentleness for long. You open for him almost immediately, and he groans into the kiss, the sound vibrating through his chest under your hand. His tongue slides against yours, slow at first, then deeper when your fingers dig into his shoulders. The kiss turns wet, hungry, breathing ruined between mouths. He walks you backward without breaking it, guiding rather than pushing, until your calves hit the bed.

The bed. White sheets. Guest room. Pool party outside. Bucky’s hands on you.

Your brain tries one last heroic effort at thought.

What if someone comes in?

Bucky’s hands move to your hips.

What if the door isn’t locked?

He turns you, sits on the edge of the bed, and pulls you between his thighs.

What if this changes everything?

His mouth leaves yours and moves down your throat, and your remaining thoughts scatter like birds.

He is sitting now, which makes him lower, makes your body the thing above him for once. It should help. It does not. His hands spread over your thighs, thumbs running along the place where the swimsuit cuts high, and he looks up at you with damp hair falling around his face. He looks wrecked. Actually wrecked. Like the sight of you standing between his legs has finished what the swimsuit started.

“You were hiding under that towel,” he murmurs, tracing the edge of the fabric at your hip.

You swallow. “It was cold.”

“Liar.”

Your face heats, but his mouth presses to your stomach before you can answer. Right over the swimsuit. Soft. Deliberate. You freeze.

He does it again.

Lower this time.

Your hands hover over his shoulders. You do not know what to do with them. Push him away? Pull him closer? Applaud? Cry? Move to Romania?

“Bucky…”

His eyes lift. His lips remain near your stomach. “Yeah?”

You hate the question. Hate how much room it gives you to stop him. Hate how badly you want him to keep going without making you beg for it. “That’s…”

“What?”

You glance away. “You don’t have to…”

He sits back so fast you regret speaking. His hands remain on your thighs, but the warmth of his mouth is gone. “Don’t.”

The single word is sharp enough to bring your eyes back.

His expression is serious again. “Don’t say I don’t have to. I know I don’t have to.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“I want to.” His fingers press into your thighs, almost too tight, then ease as he notices. “I have wanted to put my mouth on you since you walked outside.”

Your body responds so hard it feels unfair.

His eyes lower, following the tiny shift of your thighs. His jaw tightens. “Since before that.”

The room has become too warm. Your swimsuit is drying in patches, damp fabric clinging between your legs, and every tiny movement makes you aware of how wet you are under the pool water. Not just pool water anymore. Maybe not for a while. Horrible. Amazing. You may need medical attention. Or less medical attention and more of his mouth.

Bucky’s thumb slides along your inner thigh.

“You thought I didn’t wanna look.” He says it quietly, but the words carry a rough little bite. “You thought I looked away because I didn’t like your body.”

Your fingers curl into his hair. You do not answer.

He leans forward and kisses the inside of your thigh, just below the swimsuit’s edge.

Your breath leaves in a broken little rush.

His mouth lingers there. “I looked away because I wanted to do this in front of everybody.”

“Bucky,” you whisper, scandalized and so turned on you can barely feel your feet.

His lips move higher, still over skin, slow and warm. “Wanted to drag you out of that pool when Wilson had his hands on you.”

“He was helping.”

“I know.” His teeth graze your thigh. “Still wanted to.”

“You’re terrible.”

“Today?” His eyes flick up. “Yeah.”

His fingers hook under the swimsuit at your hips, then stop. The pause makes your skin prickle. He is waiting. Again. That careful, maddening decency under all the dirty want.

You nod, too fast.

His mouth curves, but it is not teasing. More relief than anything. “Words, baby.”

That name hits deep. Worse after the whole day of being looked away from. Baby means wanted. Baby means chosen. Baby means the towel can stay on the chair and the body you were trying to hide is now the only thing he seems able to focus on.

“Take it off,” you say.

Bucky closes his eyes for a second.

You almost laugh. Almost. Instead your fingers tighten in his hair, and that ruins him faster. His eyes open, and the polite thread in him snaps.

The swimsuit comes down slowly at first, peeled over your hips with such careful attention that you want to crawl out of your skin. The damp fabric resists, clinging where it can, and Bucky seems almost personally offended by it. He leans forward, mouth brushing your hip as he works it lower, then your lower stomach, then the soft skin above your mound. Every kiss makes the wait worse. Every inch exposed feels like a confession.

You expect him to look up at your face once you are bare.

He does not.

His gaze fixes between your thighs, and the sound he makes is quiet, dragged deep from his chest, almost pained. You try to close your legs on instinct, but his hands are already there, spreading warm over your thighs.

“Don’t hide,” he says again, rougher now.

“I’m not.”

“You are.”

“You’re staring.”

“Yeah.” His thumbs slide higher. “I missed a lot today.”

Your face burns so hot it almost hurts. “You can’t just say that.”

“I can.” He kisses the crease of your thigh, eyes still on you. “I am.”

The swimsuit slips lower, down your thighs, then to your knees. You lift one foot, then the other, and he drops the ruined damp thing somewhere on the floor. A wildly expensive room, white sheets, your swimsuit abandoned in a wet little heap. It should feel humiliating.

It does.

It also makes you throb.

Bucky’s hands return to your thighs. He sits there on the bed, still in his wet trunks, and looks at you like this is the first quiet moment he has had all day and he plans to spend it badly. Your arms cross over your chest, but he catches the movement at once.

“Hey.”

You glare, but there is no force behind it. “What?”

His hands slide around to the backs of your thighs. “Come here.”

“I am here.”

“Closer.”

“There is physically no closer unless I climb you.”

His expression changes.

Ah. Idiot mouth. Treacherous mouth. Mouth with no survival instincts.

Bucky leans back slightly, spreading his thighs more. “Then climb.”

Your body gives an almost embarrassing pulse at the command. “You’re very comfortable giving orders for someone who spent half the day staring at landscaping.”

“I had a hard day.”

“You had a chair.”

“I had you in that swimsuit ten feet away from me.”

“That must have been so difficult.”

He pulls you forward by the backs of your thighs, and the sudden movement makes your hands land on his shoulders. “It was.”

There is no joke in his voice now.

Your knees go onto the mattress on either side of him before you fully decide to move. Straddling his lap like this, bare while he is still partly clothed, feels obscene in a way full nudity might not have. His trunks are wet beneath you. The hard length of him presses up between your thighs, thick and hot even through fabric. Your hips jerk before you can stop them, and his hands clamp around you with a groan.

“Shit.” His forehead drops to your collarbone. “Do that again and I’m gonna embarrass myself.”

That should make you smug. Powerful. Instead it makes you needy in a way you did not agree to. You roll your hips again, smaller this time, dragging your bare pussy over the soaked fabric of his trunks. The friction is rough enough to make your mouth fall open. His hands grip your ass, helping and stopping at once, torn between instincts.

“Baby,” he says, warning and pleading in the same breath.

The word feeds something awful in you. You do it again.

Bucky’s head tips back, throat working, eyes squeezed shut for half a second. This beautiful, irritating man who looked away all day now looks as if your body might actually kill him. Good. Maybe balance exists.

“You like this?” you ask, and your voice is shaky, but the question still has a little bite. “Or are you going to look at the curtains?”

His eyes open.

You may have gone too far.

His hand comes up and catches your jaw, not hard, but certain enough that your hips still. “Say it again.”

Your lips part. “What?”

“What you said outside.”

The pool steps return all at once. Wet stone. His hand at your waist. Your own stupid voice, bitter and wounded.

“You don’t have to touch me longer than necessary,” you murmur, quieter now.

Bucky’s jaw flexes. His thumb strokes once along your lower lip, and the tenderness of it makes the shame worse somehow. “That.” His other hand presses at your lower back, bringing you down against him again. “Every time you thought that today, I want it back.”

You have no idea what that means until he kisses you.

It is not careful now. It is deep, claiming, his tongue sliding into your mouth as his hand guides your hips over him. The wet fabric drags against your clit, and you whimper into the kiss, the sound swallowed by him immediately. He does it again, rolls you down, grinds you over the hard shape of his cock, and the pleasure is dirty and sharp, mixed with the faint scratch of his trunks and the slickness between your thighs.

“Long enough?” he mutters against your mouth.

You clutch at him, face burning. “Shut up.”

His hand slips between your bodies, fingers finding your clit with such sudden precision that your whole body jerks. He rubs slow, tight circles, using your wetness and the water still on your skin, watching your face from inches away.

“Answer me.”

You shake your head, pride making a brave final appearance before dying in combat. “No.”

“No?” His mouth brushes yours, and his fingers press a little harder. Your hips chase the touch, humiliating you on contact. “Still not long enough?”

You hate him. You love him. You want to bite his shoulder until he says your name wrong. “Bucky…”

“That’s not an answer.”

His fingers dip lower, sliding through your folds, and his eyes go heavy at what he finds. “Fuck, sweetheart.” His voice drops into something rough and almost disbelieving. “You’re soaked.”

“Pool,” you manage, immediately ashamed of yourself.

He laughs then, a low sound against your mouth. “Yeah? Pool did this?”

His fingers push inside you, two at once, thick enough that your head drops forward to his shoulder. The stretch steals whatever joke you had left. Your hands claw at his back, and he groans like that hurts in the best possible way.

“Guess I owe the pool an apology,” he murmurs, pumping his fingers slowly. “Been mad at it all day for touching you more than I got to.”

Your laugh breaks into a moan. The sound is embarrassing, open, too needy, and he reacts to it with a thrust of his hips up against your bare thigh, his cock hard and trapped in wet fabric.

“Bucky,” you whimper, turning your face into his neck.

His fingers curl.

Your body goes liquid.

“There,” he breathes, and then seems to remember himself. “Yeah, right there?”

You nod into his skin, too far gone to be difficult.

“Use words.”

A sharp little pulse goes through you. He feels it. His laugh is quieter this time, almost awed.

“Oh, you like that.” His fingers press the same spot again, slow and deliberate, and his thumb finds your clit. “All that mouth at the pool, and now look at you.”

“I hate you.”

“No, you don’t.” His mouth moves to your ear, breath hot over wet skin. “You hated thinking I didn’t want you.”

That one splits you open more than his fingers.

You try to lift your head, but he holds you where you are, face tucked into his neck, body in his lap, nowhere to go but the truth.

“You hated me looking away,” he continues, quieter, filthy and tender in equal measure. “Hated Wilson saying you looked good because you wanted it from me. Hated that I sat there like an idiot when all you wanted was for me to come over and put my hands on you.”

Your thighs shake around his. The pleasure is building faster than you expected, pulled tighter by every word. He is too accurate. Too close. Too deep, and it is only his fingers, which makes you dizzy with terror over what the rest of him will do.

“I didn’t…” You try. Fail. “I didn’t want…”

He kisses under your ear. “Liar.”

“Bucky.”

“You did.” His hand around your waist slides up your back, holding you as his fingers fuck into you a little harder. “You wanted me jealous. You wanted me to see you. You wanted me to stop acting like a saint and do something about it.”

Your nails dig into him.

“There,” he says, sounding pleased and ruined all at once. “That one.”

You are close. Horribly close. Hips rocking into his hand now, your body making choices your pride would never sign off on. His thumb rubs your clit steadily, and his fingers hit that same spot until your vision goes soft at the edges. You bite down on his shoulder to keep from being too loud, and he makes a strangled sound, hips bucking under you.

“God, do that again.”

You do. Harder.

His fingers slip out of rhythm for one second, and that small loss almost makes you sob. “No, no, no, don’t stop.”

Bucky’s hand tightens at your back. “I’ve got you.”

“You keep saying things like that,” you gasp, words breaking as he finds the rhythm again.

“Yeah?”

“It’s annoying.”

He kisses your temple, and the sweetness of it almost tips you over. “Cum, then complain.”

That should not work.

It works.

The orgasm rolls through you hard enough to make your mouth open against his shoulder without sound at first. Then the sound comes, muffled into his skin, high and wrecked. Your hips grind down on his fingers, chasing every last pull of it, and Bucky talks you through it in a rough whisper that barely sounds like him anymore.

“That’s it, baby. Fuck, there you go. Just needed someone to touch you right, huh? Needed me to stop being stupid and put my hands on you.”

Your body shakes in his lap, every muscle loose and trembling. His fingers slow but do not leave right away. He lets you ride the last of it, forehead pressed to the side of your head, breath rough in your ear. The patio music is still going somewhere far away. Someone outside cheers. Maybe a game. Maybe a toast. The world is criminally unaware that you have just collapsed into a man you were pretending to hate this morning.

Then Bucky starts to pull his fingers free.

You whine.

The sound is pathetic. Immediate. You wish to file a complaint against yourself.

Bucky freezes, then laughs under his breath. “Greedy.”

“Shut up.”

His fingers slide out fully, wet and obscene between you. You mean to look away. You fail. He watches your face as he brings them to his mouth, licking them clean with a slow, dirty satisfaction that makes your cunt clench around nothing.

His eyes darken. “Saw that.”

“You see too much.”

“Not enough.” His hands go to your hips again, turning you carefully and laying you back on the bed before you can protest. The white sheets are instantly doomed, damp under your body, but Tony’s laundry issues are not your ministry. Bucky kneels between your thighs, still in his trunks, cock straining hard beneath the clinging fabric. “I’m making up for it.”

A nervous laugh leaves you as your head sinks into the pillows. “By staring at my vagina?”

His brows lift.

Your face burns. “Don’t.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Your face again.”

“My face likes you.”

“Your face is an idiot.”

“Yeah.” He presses a kiss to your knee, then lower, then lower again, hands sliding under your thighs to open you wider. “It’s got company.”

The first touch of his mouth between your legs almost makes you levitate.

He does not ease in. Not really. Maybe he means to, maybe he has some beautiful plan involving patience, but the second his tongue parts you, his control seems to go with it. His hands hook around your thighs, dragging you closer to his mouth, and the sound he makes against your pussy is so filthy you cover your mouth with one hand.

Bucky stops.

Your eyes fly open.

He lifts his head, mouth wet, eyes furious in the best way. “Move your hand.”

Your fingers loosen over your lips. “They’ll hear.”

“Let them hear the pool wasn’t the reason you left.”

Your whole body clenches. He sees that too. Obviously. Curse him and his newly unleashed observational skills.

“Bucky,” you whisper, scandalized.

He kisses your inner thigh, close enough to make you twitch. “Move it, baby.”

Slowly, your hand drops to the sheets.

He smiles against your skin. “Thank you.”

Then his mouth is back on you, and gratitude becomes a weapon. He licks into you with slow, messy strokes at first, tasting you like he has been denied water and blames you personally. His tongue drags from your entrance to your clit, lingering there until your thighs tense around his head. Then he does it again. Again. Learning with horrifying speed what makes your hips jerk, what makes your fingers twist in the sheets, what makes your mouth form his name without quite saying it.

You understand, distantly, that he is good at this.

Of course he is. Of course Bucky Barnes eats pussy like he has a vendetta against sanity. Of course the man who looked away all afternoon now has his face buried between your thighs with a concentration that feels almost insulting. Like he is determined to win an argument you did not realize your body had started.

His metal hand slides up your stomach, cool against heated skin, holding you down when your hips lift. The contrast makes you moan. His eyes flick up. He does it again, palm pressing lightly between your ribs as his tongue circles your clit.

“Please,” you breathe, though you have no idea what you are asking for.

Bucky hums into you.

Your back arches. The hum vibrates through every over-sensitive nerve he has already ruined, and your hands shoot to his hair. He lets you pull. Encourages it, maybe, with another wet, open-mouthed suck that makes your thighs clamp around his ears.

“Sorry,” you gasp, trying to loosen your grip.

He pulls back just enough to speak, lips shining. “Do it again.”

“What?”

His teeth scrape your thigh. “Pull my hair again.”

You stare at him, then obey with trembling fingers.

His eyes close for a second, and the expression on his face is so openly pleased that something inside you folds. This is him. Not the cold look-away version from the patio. Not the teasing version with everyone watching. This man, wet-haired and greedy, kneeling between your legs like he has found religion and plans to be terrible about it.

He lowers his mouth again, and this time you pull when his tongue presses inside you.

Bucky groans into your cunt.

The sound is enough to make your hips jerk up against his mouth. He holds you down, but barely. Like he wants the fight. Like every needy movement makes him worse. His tongue fucks into you, then slips back to your clit, alternating until you cannot predict anything except pleasure. It grows too quickly. Your last orgasm has left you sensitive, swollen, every touch brighter than it should be.

“Bucky, I can’t,” you gasp, then hate yourself because you absolutely can and probably will.

He lifts his head, but keeps his thumb moving over your clit in lazy, devastating circles. “Can’t what?”

“Again. I can’t…”

His mouth curves, wet and wicked. “You can.”

“You have too much confidence.”

“I have evidence.” His thumb presses a little harder, and your legs shake. “Look at you.”

“No.”

“Yeah.” He leans up over you, thumb still moving, mouth hovering above yours. You can smell yourself on him. The realization makes you clench so hard his eyes drop. “You gonna get shy now? After soaking my fingers? After grinding all over me like you were trying to ruin my life?”

“I was making a point.”

“You made it.” His lips brush yours. “Very persuasive.”

You mean to roll your eyes. He kisses you before you can, pushing the taste of yourself into your mouth while his thumb keeps working your clit. The kiss makes it dirtier. More intimate. Your hand wraps around his wrist, but you don’t pull him away. You hold him there, grinding up in tiny helpless motions as the pressure builds again.

Bucky’s mouth leaves yours only to speak against it. “You’re gonna cum on my hand, then I’m gonna fuck you. If that’s what you want.”

If. Somehow that word remains. A door, not a trap. It makes your eyes sting again, which is so deeply inconvenient while naked with a man’s hand between your legs.

“I want it,” you say, voice shaking.

His forehead touches yours. “Yeah?”

“Yes.” Your grip tightens around his wrist. “I want you. I wanted you all day. I wanted you before today, and you were horrible and confusing and shirtless, which was unnecessary, and I hate that you looked away, and I hate that I cared, and I want you to fuck me so badly I can’t think about any of it.”

Bucky stares at you.

For a moment you regret speaking. Then his mouth crashes into yours, and regret becomes impractical.

His fingers replace his thumb, sliding down and pushing into you again, three this time, the stretch sharper after his mouth. You gasp into the kiss. He swallows it, pumps his fingers deep, heel of his hand grinding against your clit. The pleasure turns immediate and rough, your body already primed by his mouth and his words and the unbearable fact of being wanted after hours of believing the opposite.

“That’s it,” he mutters against your cheek. “There’s my mean girl. Thought I lost you under all that pouting.”

You whimper and slap weakly at his shoulder. “I was wounded.”

“You were jealous.”

“You were avoidant.”

“I was hard enough to see God.”

A shocked laugh bursts out of you, then breaks as his fingers curl. “That’s vulgar.”

“You asked for honesty.”

“I did not ask for theology.”

He laughs into your neck, and somehow the warm sound mixed with the filthy rhythm of his hand tips you closer. You clutch at his shoulders, then his hair, then the sheets. Nothing helps. The orgasm comes slower this time, dragged out of you with cruel patience. Your thighs tense, stomach pulling tight, and Bucky feels the change before you can warn him.

“Yeah, baby. Give me that one too.” His mouth presses near your ear, voice a wrecked whisper. “Need it. Need to feel you cum before I get inside you.”

Need. From him. Bucky Barnes needing anything from you.

Your body gives in.

The second orgasm is messier, wetter, less contained. You cry out before you can bite it back, hips bucking into his hand, and Bucky groans like the sound goes straight through him. His fingers keep moving, slower but deep, dragging the pleasure until you are shaking and trying to push at his wrist.

“Too much,” you gasp.

He stops at once.

The loss makes you whine again, and he laughs softly, kissing your cheek, then your jaw, then your mouth with absurd sweetness for someone who just fingered you into temporary stupidity.

“You’re impossible,” he murmurs.

“Your fault.”

“Yeah.” His hand smooths over your thigh, gentle now. “I’m starting to like that answer.”

You open your eyes. He is above you, wet hair falling forward, mouth swollen from kissing and eating you, eyes on your face with such naked affection that it scares you more than the hunger did.

Affection is hard. Desire has a script. Affection looks at you afterward.

Your hand lifts before you can stop it, touching his cheek. He turns slightly into your palm. That tiny movement ruins you.

“You really wanted me?” you ask, hating the softness in your voice.

His expression tightens. “All day.”

“Before today?”

He presses a kiss to your palm. “Yeah.”

“How long?”

A pause.

The room becomes too quiet again, but this silence is not empty. It is full of him deciding whether to lie. He does not.

“Long enough to act stupid about it.”

“That could be any amount of time.”

“Months.”

Your chest squeezes. “Months?”

“Maybe longer.”

“You’re terrible at flirting.”

“I panicked,” he says again, like that explains the whole tragedy of him. Maybe it does.

You laugh softly. He smiles this time, real and quick, then kisses you. The kiss starts gentle, then deepens when your legs wrap around his waist. His cock presses against you through his trunks, and the teasing drag makes both of you go still.

He looks down between your bodies. “I need these off.”

“Finally, a smart idea.”

His hands go to the waistband, then pause. “Condom?”

Reality returns in a less catastrophic way. Important. Practical. You gesture vaguely toward the side table, then remember this is Tony’s guest room, not a hotel minibar for sex supplies. “Unless Tony keeps them next to the complimentary existential dread, I don’t…”

Bucky drops his forehead to your shoulder with a pained groan.

A laugh bubbles out of you, helpless and mean. “Very prepared seduction, Barnes.”

“I was supposed to be ignoring you by the pool.”

“You did great.”

He bites your shoulder lightly. You yelp, then laugh harder. His own laugh shakes against you, warm and frustrated, and the absurdity of it makes the room feel human again.

Then he lifts his head. “I have one in my wallet.”

You stop laughing.

His brows draw together. “Don’t look at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like you’re judging.”

“I am judging.”

“I’m a grown man.”

“With pool-party condoms?”

“One condom. Singular. Emergency.”

“What emergency did you anticipate?”

He gives you a look. “Apparently this one.”

You should make another joke. You truly should. But the thought of him having one, of this actually happening, drains humor out of you and leaves want in its place. “Wallet,” you say.

Bucky’s eyes darken again.

He climbs off the bed, and the loss of his body makes you cold for exactly three seconds before he turns toward the chair where his discarded shirt must be absent, then remembers his wallet is out by the pool with his things. His face changes into genuine despair.

You clap a hand over your mouth.

“Don’t,” he warns.

“You left your emergency outside?”

“I didn’t plan to need it indoors.”

You dissolve into laughter. It is quiet, desperate, half muffled, but laughter all the same. Bucky stares at you, then shakes his head, smiling despite himself. He looks younger like this. Less impossible. Still shirtless and wet and hard in his swim trunks, which does complicate the innocence.

“I’ll go,” he says.

“You are not going outside like that.”

His gaze drops to the obvious tent in his trunks. “Fair.”

You look around the room and spot a folded robe near the bathroom door, white and plush. Perfectly Tony. “Robe.”

“I’m not wearing Stark’s sex robe.”

“Guest robe.”

“Same thing.”

“You want the condom or a philosophical debate?”

Bucky points at you. “Stay there.”

You sink back into the pillows, naked and grinning like an idiot. “Where would I go?”

“Knowing you? Window.”

“Only if things get worse.”

He grabs the robe, pulls it on with visible resentment, and the sight of Bucky Barnes in a plush white guest robe with wet hair and a furious erection is so absurdly beautiful that you almost cry. He catches your face and pauses at the door.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

He narrows his eyes. “That smile says something.”

“It says hurry.”

That works. He leaves, closing the door behind him.

The second he is gone, you become aware of yourself again. Naked on white sheets. Swimsuit on the floor. Body cooling, thighs damp, mouth swollen. The laughter fades slowly, leaving a trembling little silence behind it.

This is real.

Bucky wanted you. Bucky is coming back. Bucky went to fetch a condom wearing Tony’s guest robe like some obscene, damp ghost of poor planning.

Your hand presses over your stomach. Not hiding now. Just grounding. It feels different under your own palm after his mouth, his hands, his eyes. Still yours. Still soft in places. Still carrying every insecurity from the bathroom mirror. But his wanting has touched it now, and you hate how much that helps. Hate how badly you needed someone else’s hunger to quiet the awful little voice in your head. Maybe you can work on that later. Maybe growth can wait until after orgasms.

Voices rise in the hall.

You freeze.

Sam: “Barnes, why the hell are you wearing a robe?”

Bucky, low and deadly: “Move.”

Tony, delighted somewhere farther away: “That is Egyptian cotton, by the way.”

Natasha laughs. “Let him live.”

Sam again, audibly grinning: “Is there a fire?”

Bucky says something too low to hear.

A beat of silence.

Then Sam barks out, “Oh my god.”

Your soul exits again, does a lap, returns out of morbid curiosity.

The door opens. Bucky steps in, face red, jaw tight, wallet in hand, robe still tied around him. He closes the door and locks it this time.

You stare.

He points at you again. “Don’t.”

“I said nothing.”

“You’re laughing with your whole face.”

“I would never.”

He stalks back toward the bed, tugging at the robe tie with enough aggression to threaten the cotton’s lineage. “Wilson knows.”

“Oh no.”

“Tony knows.”

“Tony knew before we did.”

“Steve looked proud.”

That breaks you. You roll onto your side, laughing into the pillow. Bucky tosses the wallet onto the bed and grabs your ankle, pulling you back toward him. The movement turns your laughter into a gasp. The robe falls open as he kneels on the mattress, and there he is, absurdity gone in a single second, his body over yours again, desire returning like a hand around your throat.

“Laughing at me?” he asks.

“Yes.”

His hand slides up your calf, over your knee, spreading your leg aside. “That’s brave.”

“I’m very brave.”

“You slipped twice today.”

“Physically brave and spatially cursed.”

His mouth twitches. He bends down and kisses the inside of your knee, then the thigh, and the laughter fades into a softer sound. “You okay?”

The question is quiet. It stops the teasing better than any command could. You look down at him, fingers resting in his wet hair.

“Yes,” you say. Then, more honest, “Nervous.”

His hand stills on your thigh. “About me?”

“About you seeing me.”

His face changes again, but he does not use any of the easy lines. No polished praise. No smooth answer. He moves up your body instead, covering you with his warmth, bracing one arm beside your head. His other hand cups your cheek, thumb damp against your skin.

“I see you,” he says. “I want you. Same sentence.”

Your throat tightens. “That’s unfairly effective.”

“Trying to be clear.”

“Terrible habit.”

His mouth brushes yours. “Can I keep seeing you?”

You nod. “Yeah.”

His lips press to your cheek, your jaw, your neck. “Can I keep touching you?”

Your legs part wider around him. “Yeah.”

His hand slides down between your bodies, and your hips lift when his fingers stroke through your folds again, gentle now, checking. Teasing. Both. “Can I fuck you?”

The bluntness sends a hot pulse through you. Your fingers tighten on his shoulders.

“Yes,” you breathe. “Please.”

Bucky’s eyes close for a beat, and when they open, patience is hanging by a thread.

The robe is shoved away. His trunks follow, dragged down his hips with a wet, clinging sound that would be funny if you had enough brain left. You do not. You are too busy staring. He is thick, heavy in his hand, flushed at the tip, and your mouth goes dry so fast it is almost comic.

Bucky notices. Naturally.

“Still judging my emergency condom?” he asks, tearing the foil with his teeth.

You look up at him. “Less now.”

“Thought so.”

The condom rolls on. His hand pumps once, twice, and your thighs press together around empty air. He sees that too, then settles between your legs and guides them open again. The head of his cock drags through your wetness, and both of you go quiet.

The first press against your entrance is almost too much.

He pauses there, forehead lowering to yours. “Tell me if you need slow.”

You hate that. You love that. You want to ruin him for it.

“I need you to stop talking like a responsible adult,” you whisper.

A short laugh leaves him, strained. “Sweetheart, I am hanging on by a thread.”

“Then stop hanging.”

His hips push forward.

The stretch is slow and full and immediate enough to make your mouth fall open. Bucky watches your face as he enters you, jaw clenched, breath breaking through his nose. He gives you the first inch, then another, then stops when your nails dig into his arms.

“Okay?”

You nod too quickly, body caught between ache and hunger. “More.”

His control slips for half a second. His hips roll deeper, and the sound that leaves both of you is ugly and perfect. He is bigger than his fingers, thicker than your imagination had kindly prepared you for, filling you in a way that makes thought stagger. Your legs wrap around his waist. His hand grips the sheet beside your head.

“Fuck,” he breathes, almost helpless. “You feel…”

You wait for the line. Pretty. Tight. Perfect. Something dirty and easy.

He lowers his face to your neck. “I’m gonna lose my mind.”

That is better.

You clench around him, and his hips jerk. His teeth press into your shoulder. “Do that again and this ends fast.”

“Maybe I want that.”

He lifts his head, eyes dark. “No, you don’t.”

Your body gives you away, warmth spreading under your skin. “Annoying.”

“You want me to take my time now.” He pulls out slightly, then pushes back in, slow enough that you feel every inch. “You wanted me to look, right? Wanted me to stop looking away?”

Your hands twist in the sheets.

He does it again, dragging the pleasure into something deep and almost unbearable. “I’m looking.”

You cannot answer. There is no room. He fills too much of you, his body heavy over yours, wet hair brushing your cheek, the scent of chlorine and him wrapped around every breath. His eyes hold your face as he starts a slow rhythm, each thrust smooth and deep, his mouth parting when you tighten around him.

“Bucky,” you moan, and his name sounds ruined.

His hand slips under your knee, hitching your leg higher. The angle changes, and his next thrust hits so deep your back bows off the bed. He groans, dropping his head to your shoulder.

“There?” he asks, already doing it again.

You nod, frantic. “There, please, there.”

“Yeah, baby.” His pace picks up, still controlled but rougher now, bed shifting under both of you. “Knew you’d sound pretty begging.”

Your face burns. “I’m not begging.”

He thrusts harder.

The words vanish.

“That sounded like begging.” His mouth presses to your cheek, deceptively sweet while his hips drive into you with enough force to make your fingers claw at his back. “Pool made you mouthy. My cock’s fixing it.”

The filth of it makes you clench.

Bucky laughs, but it breaks halfway into a groan. “Shit, you like that.”

“You’re so smug.”

“I’m inside you,” he says, breath hot against your mouth. “I earned a little.”

You would argue, but his hand slides between you and finds your clit. The first touch makes you jolt. After his mouth and his fingers, you are too sensitive, every nerve overfed and greedy. He rubs tight circles as he fucks you, watching your expression collapse.

“Oh, that’s it.” His voice turns thick, affectionate in the dirtiest possible way. “There’s my girl.”

My girl.

You fall apart a little just hearing it.

His eyes sharpen. “Yeah? That one?”

“Bucky…”

“My girl,” he repeats, and his hips hit deeper, harder. “Mine to look at. Mine to touch. Mine to pull out of the pool when she’s trying to make me jealous.”

You shake your head, but your body is a liar and both of you know it.

“No?” His thumb presses harder on your clit. “You didn’t like me jumping in after you?”

“You looked ridiculous,” you gasp.

“Yeah, well. You looked wet and half naked and mad at me. I wasn’t thinking clearly.”

A laugh escapes you, then turns into a moan when he rolls his hips. He smiles against your mouth, kissing the sound away, and for a few seconds the rhythm becomes messy. Kissing, thrusting, breathing into each other, his hand working between you, your nails leaving half-moon marks in his shoulders. No clean choreography. No grace. Just damp skin, white sheets, the slap of his hips against yours growing louder, the ridiculous fear that someone outside might hear and the worse realization that you want them to know he came after you.

You turn your face into the pillow to muffle yourself.

Bucky catches your jaw and pulls you back. “No.”

“They’ll hear.”

“Good.”

“Bucky.”

His eyes are dark, almost feverish. “Spent all day watching you think I didn’t want you. Let them hear me prove it.”

Your orgasm rises so fast it scares you. It starts low, tightening through your stomach, then spreads until your thighs tremble around his waist. He feels it. His thrusts lose some smoothness, turning heavier, more desperate.

“You close?”

You nod, helpless.

“Say it.”

“I’m close.”

His mouth brushes yours. “Ask me.”

Your eyes open. “What?”

“Ask me to make you cum.”

The request should annoy you. It does. It also sends pleasure twisting sharply through your body, so your irritation lacks credibility.

“You’re impossible,” you whimper.

“Ask.”

His hips slow.

That is evil.

You grab at his shoulders. “Don’t slow down.”

“Ask me, baby.”

A second passes, filled with the obscene pressure of him buried deep and almost still, his thumb barely moving over your clit. You glare at him with whatever strength remains.

“Please,” you say, hating how breathless it is. Loving how his face changes. “Please make me cum.”

Bucky groans, and the restraint goes.

His hips drive into you hard enough to shove you up the bed, one arm hooking under your back to keep you close. His thumb works your clit faster, and his mouth moves over your jaw, your cheek, your lips, wherever he can reach while he fucks you. He is talking now, rough and uneven, less like performance and more like words escaping under pressure.

“Wanted this so bad. Wanted you so bad, sweetheart. Sitting out there in that fucking swimsuit, looking at me like you wanted to scratch my eyes out. Thought I was gonna snap when you smiled at Sam. Thought I was gonna drag you inside when you said I didn’t have to touch you. Stupid thing to say to me. Like I haven’t been thinking about putting my hands on you for months.”

Months. Again. The word breaks over you with the thrusts, with the pressure, with the hard heat of him inside you.

Your orgasm hits with his name in your mouth.

It is bigger this time, deeper, pulled from every place he touched and every place he looked. You cry out, hips lifting into him, cunt clenching around his cock so hard his rhythm stutters. Bucky curses against your throat, fucking you through it with short, rough thrusts that make the pleasure keep sparking long after the first wave should have ended.

“That’s it,” he groans. “That’s it, baby. Fuck, you feel so good when you cum.”

You cannot answer. Your body is trembling too hard, arms wrapped around him, face pressed into his neck as he loses the last of his rhythm. His thrusts turn desperate, deeper and less controlled, and something about that undoes you almost as much as your own release. Bucky, who spent all day looking away, is now buried inside you and shaking apart over it.

“Where?” he rasps.

The condom. Practicality. Again, somehow.

“Inside,” you breathe. “You have the condom, inside, please.”

He makes a sound against your skin, broken and almost grateful. His hips slam once, twice, then bury deep as he comes. His whole body tenses over yours, breath caught against your shoulder, hands gripping you like he needs somewhere to put the force of it. You feel the pulse of him through the condom, feel the weight of him, the shudder that runs across his back under your hands.

Then he softens by degrees.

His forehead rests against your shoulder. His breathing is rough, warm, damp over your skin. Your own body feels boneless, wrung out and too sensitive, thighs still locked around his waist like they have not received news of the ending.

Outside, someone cheers again.

Bucky huffs a laugh into your neck. “If that’s about us, I’m moving to Siberia.”

You laugh weakly, fingers combing through the wet hair at his nape. “That was my plan.”

“We can carpool.”

“After you get off me. You’re heavy.”

He lifts his head, affronted and beautiful. “You wound me.”

“You crushed me.”

“You wrapped around me.”

“You were available.”

His smile comes slowly this time, soft and disbelieving, and the sight hurts in a new way. Not bad. Just big. Too big for a guest room during a pool party. Too big for a body still buzzing from sex.

He kisses you once, gentle and quick. “I’m gonna move.”

You make a deeply embarrassing sound of protest before you can stop it.

Bucky pauses. The smugness returns in miniature. “Yeah?”

“Don’t start.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Your face is speaking.”

“My face has been through a lot today.”

He eases out carefully, and even that makes you wince. His hand strokes your thigh in apology, and the tenderness of it makes you look away. He handles the condom, ties it off, finds a trash bin in the bathroom, washes his hands. Normal things. Human things. Meanwhile you lie in Tony Stark’s guest bed naked, damp, and fucked so thoroughly that your bones feel rearranged.

When Bucky returns, he grabs the towel from the chair and wipes gently at the wetness on your thighs. The care makes your throat tighten.

“You don’t have to do that,” you murmur, then immediately regret the phrasing.

His eyes lift.

Right.

You both hear the echo.

This time, he does not get angry. He leans down and kisses the inside of your knee. “I want to.”

The answer settles over the old wound quietly.

You nod, unable to make a joke fast enough.

He cleans you with warm water from the bathroom after that, careful between your legs while you try not to squirm from sensitivity. Then he finds another towel, pats the sheets around you with the resigned air of a man who knows Tony will make comments for the rest of his life. Your swimsuit remains on the floor. He picks it up, holds it between two fingers, and gives it an unreadable look.

You lift your head. “Don’t insult it. We’ve all grown.”

Bucky’s mouth twitches. “I owe it an apology.”

“You owe me an apology.”

“I gave you one.”

“I want another.”

He climbs back onto the bed beside you, still naked, shameless in a way that should be illegal. The mattress dips under his weight. “For what?”

“For being weird at the pool.”

“I’m sorry.”

“For looking away.”

“I’m sorry.”

“For making me think you hated it.”

His face softens in that unbearable way again. He reaches for you, then pauses until you shift closer yourself. Once you do, his arm slides around you, pulling you against his chest. His skin is warm now, less wet, still smelling faintly of chlorine. “I’m sorry.”

You rest your cheek against him, listening to his heart. It is beating fast. Not hammering. You refuse to give it dramatic language. Just fast enough to comfort you.

“And for making me feel like I needed sam to tell me I looked nice,” you add, quieter.

His arm tightens.

A few seconds pass. Not empty. Not awkward. Full of that sentence sitting between you and breathing.

“You looked beautiful,” he says, voice low. “You looked so good I forgot how to act like a person. And that’s on me, not you.”

Your eyes sting again, which is becoming repetitive and rude. “You need to stop saying decent things after sex. It’s confusing.”

His lips press to your hair. “Would it help if I said something indecent?”

“Yes.”

“Your thighs almost killed me.”

A laugh bursts out of you, wet and startled. “Bucky.”

“I’m serious. National threat.”

“You’re so stupid.”

He kisses your forehead, smiling against your skin. “Yeah, but you like me.”

You go still for half a second.

He feels it.

The words sit there, too close to another word neither of you has touched yet. Like. Want. Months. My girl. All safer than the one with teeth. Bucky’s hand moves slowly over your back, giving you somewhere to put the panic.

“You like me too,” he says, softer, almost cautious beneath the tease.

You close your eyes. “Maybe.”

“Maybe?”

“Don’t get greedy.”

His chest moves under your cheek with a quiet laugh. “Too late.”

A knock hits the door.

Both of you freeze.

Tony’s voice comes through the wood, bright with theatrical politeness. “As the owner of this house, its Egyptian cotton robe, and several traumatized guests, I would like to announce that dinner part two is happening in twenty minutes. Clothing encouraged. Applause optional.”

You bury your face in Bucky’s chest.

Bucky sighs. “Go away, Stark.”

“Gladly. Also, Wilson owes me fifty dollars. Carry on.”

Footsteps retreat.

Your face is burning so badly it may light the bed on fire. “I hate everyone.”

Bucky’s hand slides possessively over your hip. “Want me to get your clothes?”

The thought of walking back outside in the swimsuit after everything makes you want to dissolve. But then again, the old shame does not bite quite the same now. The swimsuit is still a damp heap on the floor. Your body is still your body. Your friends are still awful. Bucky is still a confusing, broad disaster.

Only now he has seen you. Touched you. Wanted you. Said it clearly enough that even your mean little brain has to work harder to ruin it.

“Eventually,” you say.

He hums. “Eventually sounds good.”

“You can’t keep me in Tony’s guest room forever.”

“No,” he agrees, hand moving lazily over your side. “But I can try for another ten minutes.”

“That’s ambitious.”

His mouth finds your neck, and the smile against your skin is warm enough to melt whatever was left of you. “I can be patient.”

“You said that before.”

“I lied.”

You laugh, and he kisses the sound before it can get away.

You have been the perfect day shift intern for five months. Five freaking months of listening to mostly constructive criticism, five months of adapting and learning on the go with not a single complaint voiced, five months of diligent note-taking, studying, and practice. Five months of weaseling your way into the list of interns-slash-young-doctors that your residents actually respect. Five months of grueling shifts, hard losses, and never saying no when someone needs you to do something.

Five months of being the untouchable, “perfect” intern. Robby’s newest addition to his growing list of “work-wards.”

Five months of unflinching effort and dedication and it took four hours of your third night-shift to reduce you to a miserable, snotty mess on the supply closet floor. Tucked into the space between the two shelves, just the toes of your blood and snot and god knows what else covered shoes peeking out, the rest of you obscured.

Five months, four hours, and back to back fuck-ups that escalated into Dr. Jack Abbot, the man you may or may not have had the hugest crush on since beginning your intern year, removing you from a case. Five months, four hours, and two parents screaming at Dr. Abbot, telling him that you’re not fit to be a doctor.

Tonight isn’t the first night a patient has yelled at you. Tonight isn’t even the first time you’ve been removed from a case. It’s not the first time Dr. Abbot has had to correct you, and it’s certainly not the first time you’ve made a mistake.

You’re an intern. It’s your job to fuck up, learn from it, and keep going. That’s what Dr. Mohan said to one of the other interns awhile back. They’d ended up flunking out, but oh well. It was good advice. It wasn’t meant for you, but hell if you don’t say it to yourself every night like a prayer.

But right now, the usual calming mantra is doing absolutely nothing. You’re stifling ugly sobs into the tops of your knees, arms wrapped around and squeezing as tight as you can, your chest shaking and shuddering with the force of your complete and total freak-out.

The patient isn’t dead. Despite your mistakes, they didn’t die. There’s really nothing to cry about. Nothing to hide in the supply closet for.

And yet, here you are.

Your first mistake wasn’t terrible, but it was ridiculously stupid and incredibly embarrassing. Triage room, emergency measures being taken. And you, tired and off kilter from being so used to the day-shift, broke the sterile field. Like some dumb medical student, not a fairly seasoned intern who’s drilled sterile protocol into her head until it’s muscle memory.

For a scalpel. You dropped a scalpel. Arguably the worst thing to drop. And then, like an idiot, you picked it back up.

And, well. There’s no time to re-scrub, so there wasn’t a need for you in the triage room anymore.

Your second mistake was equally stupid and avoidable, if you’d focused more. Dr. Garcia was kind enough to let you scrub in on an emergency appendectomy.

It was a test. Not your first.

And you ripped the fucking purse strings.

Once again, you were unceremoniously booted from the room (being kicked out of an OR feels a hell of a lot worse than being kicked out of a triage room) and sent back to the pit. Dr. Abbot immediately caught wind of it and demoted you to scut work until “you get your head back in the game.”

And, well. You tried really hard to devote yourself to your new task, but you had to keep blinking tears out of your eyes every five seconds and you absolutely refuse to cry in front of literally any of your coworkers, lest they think you some weak-willed weak-stomached intern who can’t handle some criticism and correction. You’re a hard worker. You’re good at this. You have to be.

So yeah. Crying in the supply closet.

You’ve always been a frustrated cryer, which is annoying on a good day and downright awful on a bad one (case in point.)

You’re just so upset with yourself. You’re better than this. You know you are. You’ve proven that you are. You don’t drop scalpels. You don’t break the sterile field. You don’t rip purse strings.

But you did tonight. And maybe one day you’ll laugh, but today is not that day.

You just don’t get it. Day shift? Incredible. Manageable. You’re on top of things, put together, and worthy of Dr. Robby’s respect.

But tonight? Quite literally the exact opposite.

You can’t be burning out, right? That’s not how burn out works. There’s like, signs, and you start to feel terrible and awful and exhausted and sure you definitely feel all of those things, but that’s because you work in medicine. And you’re an intern. You’re supposed to feel terrible and awful and exhausted. But maybe you’re not? You do enjoy your work, and it’s exhilarating, especially when you try something for the first time and execute it well, because you always do, you always get things right on the first try, obviously, so that means that this can’t be burn out. You don’t burn out. That’s not you. Right? No. Of course not.

You gasp a particularly rough sob into your knees, air feeling like knives as you inhale, making you cough horrendously. You must be quite a sight.

Unfortunately, due to your alternating hacking coughs and dramatic crying, you don’t quite hear the door open.

You do, however, hear the quiet “Oh.” that’s mumbled a few moments later.

Of-fucking-course.

You scramble upright, aggressively wiping at your face and attempting to make it look like you weren’t just crying on the ground.

“Dr. Abbot! I’m so sorry, this is very unprofessional and I know you have me on scut work but I promise I’m still working on it—“

He holds up a hand, and you slam your jaw shut with an audible click.

“Just needed some four by fours, kid.”

Always one to be helpful (especially to the guy you have a crush on who also happens to be your boss, aka the same person who professionally told you to get your shit together about forty minutes ago) you reach beside yourself and hand him the package of gauze, an awkward smile fixed on your face.

“…Those are three by threes.”

Bitch. Motherfucker. Fuck your life.

“Right,” You mumble, dragging your hand down your face. “I’ll just get out of your way. Sorry.”

You turn to walk past him, attempting to go quick enough that he might not notice the new tears shining in your eyes before a hand lands on your shoulder.

“Look,” Dr. Abbot starts. “You’re one of Robby’s adopted interns, right? Robby-Junior?”

“That is one of the rumors Santos has been spreading, yes.”

His hand is on your shoulder. His hand is on your shoulder. (!!!)

You don’t know what to do. He’s looking at you. Your boss doesn’t fluster you. You’re chill. You’re normal. You’re cool as a cucumber, yep yep yep.

“Robby doesn’t adopt interns lightly. Don’t let one bad shift mess you up. It happens to everyone.”

You purse your lips. You should let it go. Take his advice. Thank him.

The all-consuming-guilt and ever-present-need to prove yourself itches too painfully to ignore.

Dr. Abbot seems to notice, and he catches your gaze again.

“What, it doesn’t happen to you?”

A jolt of panic stabs your chest. “No! Of course it happens to me, I didn’t mean to imply that I’m like, above making mistakes or having bad shifts at all—“

Genuinely what is wrong with you. Why the fuck does he do this you. You’re a smart, confident woman who apparently chucks her brain into the garbage bin whenever her boss is around.

Dr. Abbot, probably picking up on a pattern of behavior by now, levels you with another look that shuts you up fairly quickly. He’s got a sort of impish grin on his face, and it shouldn’t be hot, but he’s got his hand on your shoulder and you’re having a ridiculously shitty night. Does anything matter anymore?

“Usually, we try to mix up interns schedules so you don’t get into a rhythm on one specific shift so that when you inevitably switch, the change doesn’t mess up your flow. But I'm sure your knack for keeping your head down and doing good work let you fall through the cracks.”

He takes his hand off your shoulder and shoves it into his pocket, but you almost don’t notice because he said you do good work.

Abbot gives you another grin. “And I didn’t stick you on scut as a punishment. Mindless work tends to be calming, which in turn helps focus your mind.”

“But I ripped the purse strings,” You blurt like a Catholic school girl in a particularly rife confessional, “Like an idiot.”

“You ripped them like an intern doing something for the first time.”

“I practiced hundreds of times to make sure it didn’t happen!”

He tilts his head, almost cat-like. “Did you also practice on a live person in a higher stakes situation while your body is messed up from a sudden and huge sleep schedule change?”

“…No?”

He snorts. “Exactly. Dr. Garcia probably won’t hold it against you. She’ll give you shit for it, but it’s not like she’s never going to give you another chance.”

You wipe the last bit of wetness of your cheeks with the back of your hand, embarrassment heating your face. Despite the awfulness of being caught crying in the supply closet, the beginnings of pleasant warmth is spreading through your chest, Dr. Abbot’s reassurances echoing in your head.

“Thank you, Dr. Abbot. Um. Sorry about the crying. I promise I don’t usually do that.”

Dr. Abbot snorts as he saunters towards the door. “Wouldn’t judge you if you did, kid.”

—

Dr. Jack Abbot is bored.

He has his work, which is great. He became a doctor after being discharged because he’s always been the kind of man that needs something to do. Something to mind, something to watch, something to fix. Robby and him and much the same in this way.

Working at the ED was enough for a while. There was a certain challenge to it, an unpredictability that itch sated, kept him sane. And, well. Now he’s an attending. Night shift lead.

He started to get restless again.

He thought a pet might work. He was going to get a dog, but it didn’t sit right with him to get an animal built for companionship and then leave it at home for over twelve hours a day. Then he thought a cat might do the trick. He looked online first, saw beautiful, well bred felines that could probably compete and win for best in show for whatever the cat equivalent is for the Westminster Dog Show.

And then he made the mistake of going to the shelter and seeing an old, one eared tuxedo cat that stared at him with something in between fear and spite and its eyes. And well. The shelter attendants assured him that the cat in question prefers being left alone and having its own space, but might warm up eventually, and he brought him home that day.

And then it was just Jack, occasionally Robby, and now his asshole cat who might not love him back.

That also worked for a while. Having Charlie was fun. It was nice having another living creature in his house that wasn’t him. Even if he did have a habit of chewing on power cords when left unattended and eventually progressed into attempting to destroy Jack’s stethoscope if he left it anywhere he could find.

Minding the cat gave him something to do that wasn’t tedious, and it was a special sort of bonus to wake up every now and then and see the cat sprawled at the foot of the bed, snoring away. He didn’t actually know cats could snore like that.

Around the time that the itch came back and Jack was considering adopting a second cat from the shelter (well on his path to becoming a crazy cat lady, as Robby said in the park over beers) he met you for the first time.

Sometimes Jack slips quietly into the ED and watches the chaos of day shift’s conclusions. He’s picked up a very special language of gauging what he’s getting into based on the body language and behavior of the rest of the hospital staff. Robby had told him about the latest intern— a motivated, stubborn sort of girl that frequently went toe-to-toe with Santos but without any of the pushback when receiving correction or criticism. He’d heard that you were smart, capable, and well on your way of becoming a great doctor.

Robby failed to mention that you were pretty.

He’d watch you, comparing notes with Mohan with a certain intense focus on your face, worrying your lip between your teeth and repeatedly tucking a piece of hair behind your ear because it’d fallen out of your disheveled pony tail he thinks ‘Oh.’

And then, a few months later, he finds you crying in a closet, subtly confessing fears of failure and falling short of expectations, and then he thinks ‘Well, there’s something to do.’

Jack tries not to think about you, at first. You, looking up at him with red-rimmed eyes, bottom lip jutted out just a bit, hugging your knees. He tries not to think about how you’d looked at him when he’d assured you that you did good work, the awkward thank you, and the way that for the rest of the shift, all the annoying menial tasks that get forgotten in the chaos were all mysteriously taken care of.

He tells himself that he’s just going to keep an eye on you. For Robby’s sake. He’d do the same for Whitaker.

The next time you have a night shift, you’re clearly more prepared for the exhaustion, and when he finally sees you in true, proper action, he understands immediately why Robby likes you and Mohan frequently attaches you to her cases. Skill, patience, and focus.

When he watches you trach a patient with a certain ease that only comes from practicing hundreds of times, Ellis shoots him a knowing look. Raised eyebrows and smirk. When she passes him in the hall a few hours later, she jabs her thumb behind her shoulder at where you’re diligently filling out a chart.

“That one yours, then?”

Jack shakes his head. “It’s not like that. You make me sound like a creep.”

Another raised eyebrow. “Sure it isn’t.”

“She’s Robby’s intern.”

“Mhm.”

“She’s way too young.”

Parker shrugs. “She’s good.”

“She is.”

The senior resident cuts a glance back to you. “Think she’ll burn out?”

“Maybe.”

Parker crosses his arms. “Are you gonna let it happen?”

“She’s not my intern.”

Up to three Parker Ellis looks and counting.

“It’s an HR nightmare.”

Parker shrugs. “You just said she’s not your intern.”

He narrows his eyes. “You know what I meant.”

“Do I? It’s been awhile, Jack. No one would really judge you for having some fun.”

“Parker.”

“Jack.”

He shakes his head, walks towards the boards. “You’re the worst.”

Parker just laughs. “Sure I am.”

To your credit, he doesn’t find you crying in a supply closet again to see evidence of you doing so for a solid few weeks. But, like most things in the ED, the peace doesn’t last.

You came into work soaking wet, which is odd, considering the fact that he knows you drive, and the walk to the parking lot isn’t far enough to account how you’re shivering in your freshly changed scrubs. He brushes it off, chalks it up to freakish Pittsburg weather.

Some night shifts are relatively slow and mild. Tonight is not one of those shifts. Patients are extra irritable at late hours, which is to be expected, but what he’s not expecting is to walk by South 15 and see a 50-something year old man slap you.

Jack blinks, and in the next second he’s in the room, standing in between you and the patient.

“Excuse me, what the fuck is going on here?”

Gloria will probably give him shit for his language later, but right now all he can think about is the startled look on your face and the echo that the contact made.

“I said I want a real doctor, not this fucking—“

“Get the fuck out of my hospital.”

Shen peaks his head in. “Security’s on their way.”

Jack reaches behind him to where you’re still standing, your hand covering your cheek, and gently pushes you towards Shen, towards the door. You stumble over your feet a bit, but truly, Jack’s never been more thankful for his residents because then Parker is right there, ushering you out the door with a hand on your shoulder. Jack resolutely ignores your mumbled “I’m fine, really, he just surprised me.”

Thankfully, security doesn’t take that long to get to the room, and the second Jack is finished explaining, he’s out the door and scanning the ED for your face. Nurse Young jerks her head towards the break room, and he thinks he manages to give her what he hopes is a thankful smile before he’s beelining for it.

When he opens the door, you’re sitting on the floor again, holding an ice pack to your cheek with one hand and dabbing at your lip with a paper towel. Like you’ve never heard of medical protocol in your entire life.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

You jerk your head up, a kid caught with its hand in the cookie jar.

“Dr. Abbot!”

Lowering himself to the ground is awkward, physically. Prosthetics don’t lend to much mobility and he’s too old to be doing this, but he just. There are little beads of blood collecting and then sliding down your chin, dripping onto the leg of your scrubs. At the same angle of the split in your lip, there’s a little cut he can see peaking out from under the ice pack.

He reaches forward, fingers itching towards the deep scarlet dripping steadily. He pauses, remembering things like words and questions and sees the wild look in your eyes.

“Can I…?” Jack’s voice trails off, the words clunky and useless in this bubble that’s seemed to form around the two of you, on the probably disgusting floor of the ED break room.

You slowly drop the napkin, let the ice pack lower to your lap and nod.

“He had a ring on. I guess it caught me. I didn’t really notice until I got here.”

“Parker and Shen didn’t notice?”

You look at your lap. “I told them I was fine… And covered it with my hand. There are other patients. It’s just a little cut.”

Jack’s fingers finally reach your face, and he almost takes them back when you flinch on the initial contact, shaking ever so slightly.

But then, with noticeable effort, you relax into his palm, his fingers curling around the side of your jaw. He should grab gloves. He should get up, take his hand off your face.

Anyone could walk in right now and call Gloria on his ass.

His thumb sweeps across your cheekbone, just below the cut, which does have some faint bruising around it. And truthfully, the split in your lip doesn’t look that bad either.

But there’s still little dots and trails of scarlet and he doesn’t think he’s going to be able to calm down until he fixes it. He needs to fix something.

“If I leave you here so I can get supplies,” He starts, voice a little rough, “Can I trust that you’ll stay here and not do anything stupid?”

“Uh, yes? Should I move to a real chair though?”

Jack huffs as he hauls himself to his feet. “That’d be preferable.”

Later, when he’s at home in his bed, he’ll assure himself that the night shift wasn’t truly that busy and he trusts his residents to handle things while he’s busy.

No one stops him on his way to the medical supply closet (the irony of the location is not lost on him) and he makes it back without interruption. Upon opening the door, you have in fact moved to a chair, and it seems the bleeding slowed in his absence.

What he should do is sit down in the chair opposite of you and handle this situation like a professional, like the Dr. Abbot, night shift attending, not Jack who’s got a thing for fixing.

He does try to remove his emotions and feelings from the situation, he really does. It’s something he’s generally very good at —which is where he and Robby differ; Robby would prefer to feel too much and Jack would prefer to feel nothing at all— but you’re looking up at him and there’s something really dangerous in the air and it must’ve gotten into your blood stream or something cause it’s swimming in your eyes and he realizes that removing his feelings is not going to be possible.

He decides he could at least tone it down. You’re an intern. Robby’s intern. So what if you’re bleeding all over the break room? Jack’s just doing his job as the attending to look after the doctors and nurses under his jurisdiction or whatever. That’s all.

“Tilt your head up.”

He sets to work cleaning up the cut and split as detached and clinically as possible, even puts on gloves so there’s no skin to skin contact, just protocol, but he can feel the warmth of your skin through the latex and you keep sucking in these tiny little breathes when something stings and he can’t get the sound of the slap out of his head and it’s all just kind of a lot.

He readjusts his hand on the side of your face, sort of holding your forehead now to have better access and control over the cut on your cheek and wow. Your skin is really warm. It kind of feels like you’re burning up.

Jack tosses the piece of gauze he was using and rests the back of his hand against your forehead. Shit, you are burning up.

He thinks back to you, walking in today, soaked to the bone.

“Did you walk to work today?”

You wince. “My car kind of died? On the way here? I was only a mile away. But I called a towing company, so I didn’t just leave my car in the middle of the road.”

He blinks.

“Your car died, so you had it towed and walked a mile to work, in the rain, late at night, and didn’t tell anybody?”

You just keep staring at him, brows furrowed.

“Yeah? I carry a knife and I’ve taken self defense classes, and my car was just towed back to my place, so. I had a shift to work.”

There’s… a lot to unpack in your answer.

“Kid,” He starts, wondering why Robby never thought to give him a heads up before you started working more night shifts, “What was your plan to get home?”

“Walk, probably. I was thinking about taking the bus. Dr. King knows the bus schedule, so I’m probably going to text her.”

Jack decides to just finish cleaning you up, before he does something stupid like shake you by your shoulders and ask why you didn’t think to let your boss know that your car broke down and you’d be walking home in the rain. Or that when a patient slapped you in the face, his ring cut your face and lip open.

God.

“It’s really fine though,” You say, gesticulating animatedly with your hands. “My place isn’t that far, and it’s not the first time my car’s died. The battery’s kind of shot, but I guess my car has a weird battery, and it’s like, crazy expensive to get a new one, so. Besides, I like walking. I’ve been meaning to catch up on my audiobooks.”

He wishes you’d stop talking so he’d stop hearing things that make him want to do things he can’t and shouldn’t do. Like find out what car you drive so he can buy you a new battery. Or buy you a new car all together.

Christ, you have him wrapped around your fucking finger.

“I’ll drive you home. If you’re fine with that.”

Jack has to fight a grin at how comically wide your eyes grow at his suggestion.

“Oh no, you really don’t have to. I promise I’m—“

“Please stop saying you're fine,” He begs, “You don’t have a working car, a patient slapped you in the face, and I think you’re coming down with something.”

The smile that’s seemed permanently fixed on your face since he came into the break room falters, for a bit.

“Well,” You grimace, hands fisting the hem of your scrub top, “Things certainly aren’t… great, but I’ll survive. I’m not like, incapable, or anything.”

Jacks quiet for a bit, not just mulling over your words but the way you said them; the cadence and tone.

He hums. “Is that what you think? That I or someone else here will think you’re not competent or that you’re weak if you take a break or ask for help?”

Your face falters again. “No, no, of course not I just… I don’t know. I’m an intern. It’s my job, supposedly, to mess up and have to be looked after in case I accidentally kill someone and stuff like that. I just don’t want to be someone that people think they have to worry about. I need— internships are competitive. They’re competitions, really. And I want to win.”

Jack Abbot knows what it’s like to want to win. That need to prove yourself, prove that you’re capable and strong and unfailing.

So Jack also knows how quickly that can all go south.

“You’re a smart kid,” He says, voice ever so slightly soft in the quiet tension of the break room, empty except for the two of you, “And you’re going to make a great resident, and one day, a damn good attending. But none of that means shit if you burn out or get run yourself into the ground before you get there.”

He avoids eye-contact while he carefully applies the bandage to your cheek. “This industry will chew you up and spit you back out if you don’t take care of yourself. I get it. We’re doctors. We make the worst patients. But you got slapped in the face during a shitty day. It’s okay to… not be okay for a minute.”

You huff a watery laugh. “Isn’t that what energy drinks are for?”

He shakes his head. “What, trying to die faster?”

“Anything to shake those student loans. Can’t be in debt if you’re dead.”

“Don’t they just pass it to your family? Next of kin or whatever?”

“I don’t think they can give student loans to a cactus. I mean, I consider her my daughter, but I hardly think it’ll hold up in court.”

Jack mentally files that information away for later. What later is, he isn’t sure.

He stands, pulls off his gloves and tosses all the used gauze and shit in the trash can.

“I gotta get back out there,” He jams his thumb towards the door, “But feel free to take five. No one’s judging you. Matter of fact, as your boss, I’m telling you to take a break.”

You roll your eyes. “Whatever you say, Dr. Abbot. But thank you. For the…”

You gesture to your bandaged cheek and lip. “…And for the advice.”

He shrugs, like taking care of you hasn’t become a persona fantasy he may or may not fall asleep imagining most nights. Like it doesn’t matter, like he’s just doing his job.

“Offer for the ride’s still open. Just let me know by the end of shift.”

And with that, he’s out the door.

It’s the end of shift, and you’re staring at the double doors that lead to the outside world, and beyond that, absolutely fucking miserable weather for walking, a dead car, and cold as shit apartment.

You’re not exactly rushing out the door.

You’re clutching at the strap of your bag, regular clothes on, still damp despite the fact that it’s been over thirteen hours since you originally took them off, begging the universe to strike you down where you stand. Spontaneous lightning bolts happen indoors too, right?

The doors just stare back at you, unchanging in their miserable-ness, and after a solid ten minutes of staring, you feel rather than see Jack sidle up next to you.

“Still raining out there?”

“Yep. Looks worse now.”

“Not great weather to walk in. Especially considering the low-grade fever.”

“Mhm.”

“Did you text Dr. King for the bus schedule?”

“No. I didn’t want to wake her up.”

Jack huffs a breath, then jerks his head towards the doors that lead to the employee parking lot.

“Come on, kid.”

The ride is quiet and awkward. Well. Dr. Abbot probably doesn’t think it’s awkward, because he seems like the kind of man not to be bothered by long stretches of silence. Or silence at all.

He’d been kind enough to turn the heat on full blast (you started shivering the moment you stepped outside) and the radio is softly playing, and it’s only thanks to Sabrina Carpenter’s voice that you don’t feel like completely freaking out.

You mouth along to the lyrics, quietly humming the chorus under your breath.

“—I get wet at the thought of you being a responsible guy—“

“—Treating me like you’re supposed to do, tears run down my thighs—“

By the time you’ve realized that perhaps this isn’t the best song choice to sing along to, considering the situation and who’s car you’re currently riding in, the words “I get wet” have already left your mouth so there’s no real point in stopping.

On a completely unrelated note, Dr. Abbot starts smiling a little bit when you hum.

Pittsburgh traffic is terrible, so the drive kind of drags on. The radio is playing Chappell Roan now. Casual specifically. You’re considering changing the radio station because god.

“So,” You start, just to say anything that drowns out “knee-deep in the passenger seat and you’re eating me out, is it casual now?”, “Did you… have a good shift?”

That was a terrible question. Jesus. What the hell is wrong with you? How did you get through medical school?

Dr. Abbot snorts. “Shouldn’t I be asking you that question?”

Ah. Right. The Incident.

“I told you I’m—“

“Didn’t I tell you to stop saying that?”

Your lap has never looked more interesting. Wow, is that a loose thread on your sweats?

He continues. “Fine or not, a patient assaulted you. Even if he didn’t leave a mark, that’s still shitty.”

“Have you been hit by a patient before?”

He huffs. “Hell yeah. It happens to everyone eventually. It’ll happen again. You get better at keeping your cool.”

“Sorry you had to step in. I’ve been hit by a patient before and I was fine.”

“Oh yeah?”

You nod. “It was during my Pedes rotation, actually. I’ve always known working with kids probably wasn’t going to be for me, but, well. Kid came in for intussusception, and she was screaming and writhing in pain, and I failed to restrain her properly.”

“What, did she slap you too?”

“Nope. Kicked me in the chin. Ended up biting almost clean through my tongue.”

“Fucking hell, kid. What’d you do?”

You shrug. “Kept my blood in my mouth until we finished sedating the patient. Ended up with three stitches.”

Dr. Abbot lets out a low whistle. “Always the patients you least expect.”

“The importance of proper patient restraint was thoroughly impressed upon me, I assure you.”

The silence after your short conversation is slightly more comfortable, and thankfully the radio station has decided to play less pointed music.

Between the warmth of the car, the smell permeating the seats that smells distinctly like Dr. Abbot, and the drumming of rain outside, it doesn’t take long for drowsiness to begin to overtake you.

Your last thought before falling asleep is that you don’t remember if you gave Dr. Abbot your address or not.

Someone is gently shaking your shoulder, and you feel like shit.

“What?” You attempt to say, but the side of your mouth is pressed against the seatbelt and your shoulder so it comes out sounding like: “Whamfgh?”

Opening your eyes is a herculean task, like someone sewed miniature weights to your eyelids while you were asleep. You’re absolutely freezing, despite the steady hum of the car's heat, still on high, and you vaguely recognize the street the car is currently parked on.

Oh right, your apartment.

“Oh,” You yawn, hauling yourself semi-upright, aiming for woman who has it together, and less disheveled swooning woman in a Baroque painting.

Dr. Abbot is staring at you with equal parts humor and concern.

You rub at your eyes. “How long have I been asleep?”

“Little over forty minutes. You looked like you needed it.”

“It doesn’t take that long to drive to my place, even with traffic.”

Your brain is moving like molasses, so it takes you a second to catch up with the implication of his statement.

“Did you just… park in front of my house? So I could keep sleeping?”

He just shrugs. “Like I said. You looked like you needed it.”

Embarrassment and a touch of something else floods through your body, hot and cold at the same time.

“Sorry. You didn’t have to wait.”

“If I didn’t want to, I wouldn’t have.”

Still moving slowly, you gather up your bag from where it partially spilled on the floor all over your feet, shoving old receipts and pads and chapstick back in with the reckless abandon of a person who isn’t nearly aware enough of social cues to be in a car alone with their hot boss.

Whilst you're grabbing and shoving, Dr. Abbot reaches into his back seat, rifles around for a bit, and then drops something rather unceremoniously over your head and shoulders. After a quiet “hey” you pull it into your lap, and then that hot feeling is back in full force.

It’s a rain jacket. Clearly Dr. Abbot’s. You can see his name written on the inside pocket. It’s nice too. Definitely not the kind of rain jacket you could afford on an intern’s budget.

“For the next time your car dies,” He clarifies, as if the jacket’s purpose is the thing that’s stupefied you, not the fact that he’s the one giving it to you, “In case of rain.”

“You really don’t have to,” your words are rushed and clunky in your mouth, tumbling over each other in your haste to say something, anything, “I mean, I can just buy my own—“

“First of all,” He cuts you off, voice smooth and rough at the same time, “Do I seem to be the kind of guy in the habit of doing things I don’t want to? And second of all…”

He tilts his head, gaze sharp. “Are you really going to buy one for yourself?”

Your mouth goes dry.

“I was planning on looking online—“

Dr. Abbot interrupts you. “Now you don’t have to.”

Like it’s that easy. Does he want it to be?

“Dr. Abbot, I—“

“Jack.”

His grin goes from mild to shit-eating as you stare at him, obviously radiating confusion.

“Jack,” you start, testing out the name in your mouth, hearing how it sounds in the air. “I can take care of myself. You don’t need to give me your jacket. I’ve been doing just fine on my own.”

“Kid—“

The prickling of perceived weakness makes anger spark in your chest.

“Don’t call me kid like I’m stupid.”

Dr. Abb— Jack seems simultaneously impressed that you interrupted him for a change and vaguely put out.

He holds up a finger, effectively silencing anything else you were thinking of saying.

“I don’t call you kid because I think you’re stupid. I don’t think you’re stupid. You’d know if I thought you were stupid, because I would tell you. ‘Kid’ is a…” He trails off, free hand tapping thoughtful rhythms on the steering wheel, “…Nickname. Term of endearment. Whatever you want to call it, but it’s not derogatory.”

Jack holds up a second finger.

“You have not been taking care of yourself. If you were, you wouldn’t have a low grade fever, and you would’ve called me as your boss or one of your friends to drive you instead of walking after your car died. You’ve been surviving. There’s a difference.”

Shame burns white hot through you— all your recent failings laid out by the person you want least to notice them. Clearly, he has.

Possibly out of pity in response to your no doubt miserable expression, Jack continues.

“Don’t beat yourself up about it. It’d be an honest-to-god miracle if any intern managed to properly take care of themself. Hell, residents don’t do it either, and neither do attendings. Does Robby strike you as the kind of man who takes perfect care of himself?”

“That depends. Is my answer going to make it back to him?”

Jack huffs a quiet laugh. “Exactly. Doctors make the worst patients, in and out of a hospital setting. Knowing better doesn’t actually make us all that inclined to do better. Terrible misconception.”

He nudges the jacket on your lap. “So just take the jacket. One less thing to worry about.”

Emboldened by his recent streak of kindness towards you and the flush of fever running through your veins, you look over to him.

“You worry about me?”

Something dances in his eyes for a split second, gone before you can blink.

“I worry about all the interns and residents on my service, but especially the ones my best friend has taken a liking to.”

Right. Of course. He only cares because of Robby. And Robby only cares so he can add another doctor to the already short-staffed PTMC. It’s not like Jack actually likes you or anything.

You clutch the jacket to your stomach, finally finding the energy to get out of the car. Jack’s car.

“Well. Thanks for the ride, Dr. Abbot. And the jacket.”

“No problem, kid.”

And if later on that evening, in the safety of your tiny apartment, you take in the deep, fresh, almost spicy smell that makes up Jack, lingering on the jacket, that’s no one’s business but yours.

—

From that night on, it feels like Jack Abbot is everywhere.

Whether it’s something he’s doing on purpose or you’ve just developed a heightened sense to his whereabouts— it doesn’t matter. Sometimes it’s a whiff of his cologne (eerily similar to Dior Sauvage, which makes you shudder. Certainly he didn’t choose a cologne similar to the number one male manipulator scent on purpose?) or seeing his handwriting on a whiteboard or his notes in a chart, he’s there.

You’re being scheduled for night shifts fairly regularly now, in addition to the 24-hour shifts you have the pleasure of being put on as an intern.

Working a double isn’t horrific, really. Exhausting, sure, but Robby and Jack’s solid presence makes the shifts more bearable. Plus, you’re quickly becoming friends with the fresher residents, Whitaker and Santos, plus some of the older residents like Mohan and King. Even Dr. Langdon gives pretty solid advice and mentorship, despite the tension in the air whenever he happens to be working with or near Robby.

Normally, 24 hour shifts are grueling, but not impossible. Somewhere around the 15 or 16 hour mark, the sleep deprivation hits, and you can just coast on stress-induced inertia and a healthy does of energy drinks and mania.

Today, though, has been particularly fucking awful. Maybe it’s the fact that the fever never really went away, or the fact that you started your period the day before (being sick on your period should be illegal.) It’s probably both of those things.

But there isn’t really anything to do but grin and bear it. The day will pass, and you have the next two days off anyways. Just survive the next however-many hours of the shift and then you can go home, dress in exclusively fluffy clothes, and binge watch tv whilst eating heart-stopping junk food.

You’re distracted from your charting, propped up on the counter at the nurses station by a light tap on your shoulder and someone saying your name.

Dr. Langdon has sidled up next you, voice hushed.

“Hey, uh. I just wanted to let you know that you seem to have… bled through.”

If a spontaneous earthquake could open a chasm beneath your feet and swallow you whole, now would be the time.

“Fuck fuck-ity fuck fuck,” You mumble, wiping your hands down your face. “Right. Yeah. Of course. Thank you for letting me know.”

In a moment that is as mortifying as it is kind of sweet, Langdon passes you a hoodie that is clearly his.

“To tie around your waist,” He clarifies, holding the object out across the meager space between the two of you, voice a bit awkward and stilted, like you might decide to spit in his face or something.

You don’t actually know what it is that Dr. Langdon did before your arrival that makes the break room go quiet when he walks in (unless Dr. King is there) but you don’t particularly care. If it was truly something horrific that you should be worried about, he wouldn’t be working here. Robby wouldn’t let that kind of thing slide.

So you take the offered hoodie with a strained smile (can this shift just be over) and speed-walk to the break room, praying no one decides to snag you on the way there.

What you should do is go to your locker where your stash of pads, tampons, spare underwear, and extra scrubs are, and then probably the bathroom to get changed, so you can keep on going but you also just saw Dr. King go into the break room and you just really need a hit of her specific brand of optimism.

The woman in question perks up when she notices your arrival, hastily eating the same snack she always eats around this time— a tiny bag of pretzels.

She watches as you collapse into the chair across from her, letting your head thunk onto the table.

“Bad shift?”

“Bad life,” You grumble. “Dr. Langdon had to give me his hoodie to tie around my waist because I bled through onto my scrubs. Like a middle schooler who doesn’t know what pad sizes are for.”

Dr. King nods thoughtfully. “He asked me if it would be weird of him to let you know and offer his hoodie. To which I replied that periods are a normal bodily function and he’s a doctor.”

“Here here,” You half-heartedly cheer, any actual cheer or enthusiasm severely lacking in your voice. “How did you survive your intern year, Dr. King?”

“We’ve been working together for awhile, you can call me Mel,”

She pops another pretzel in her mouth before answering. “But to answer your question, I mostly just kept telling myself that failing wasn’t an option. Which. Probably isn’t helpful, or good advice, but it worked for me. Something that’s nice is if you have a fellow intern or doctor that you enjoy working with. I know the other two interns who matched into the PTMC dropped out of the course, so it’s just you, but you have Dr. Robby, right?”

You nod, picking absently at a spot on the table and ignoring the way that it wasn’t Robby who popped into your head, but Jack.

Your teeny, ignorable crush on him has become a full-blown thing, with semi-weekly dreams about him in various… situations, and casual daydreams at all hours of the day of what it would be like to just be with him, or hear him, in any capacity that couldn’t be qualified as work or a boss checking on his employee. Intern. Whatever.

Hormonal and fever-ish, you suddenly feel like you’re going to explode and die if you don’t have someone to confide in right this very second. You haven’t heard Mel really talk about anyone you work with outside of professional doctor-to-doctor conversation, not even about Dr. Langdon, who she seems almost suspiciously close with.

“Mel,” You start, voice a little too thick and watery to just be talking about your stupid, annoying, one-sided workplace crush, “Can I tell you a secret?”

She seems to consider the pros and cons first, and looks fairly caught off guard, but she answers. “Um. Sure?”

“Have you ever had a crush on a coworker before? Or like, a boss or mentor?”

Mel sets down her bag of pretzels. “Is this about Dr.—“

“I have the biggest crush on Dr. Abbot and I think it’s ruining my life.”

The words burst out of you all at once, and Mel’s expression goes from shocked, to confused, before finally settling in abject amusement.

“Ah,” She says, sliding the pretzels across to you. “Um. Well I personally don’t have a crush on Dr. Abbot, but I think I understand the sentiment.”

You bury your face into your hands and groan. “It’s awful. It’s so cliche. It’s so fucking Grey’s Anatomy.”

“I’ve never actually seen that show. Becca likes it though.”

Mel allows you a few moments of wallowing and pretzel eating before she speaks again.

“Have you… acted on it?”

“No!” You snap your head up. “I mean. No, I haven’t. I’m not naive enough to think that he would reciprocate. He’s an attending and I’m an intern.”

She leans in. “But…?”

“But sometimes… I wonder? I don’t know. I’m probably crazy. He drove me home the other day, cause my car died, and it was raining, and I got slapped by a patient, and that was when I first came down with this stupid fever, and like, that’s normal, right?”

Mel nods. “Fr— Langdon drives me to work when we share shifts, and sometimes when we don’t. I think Dr. Santos and Dr. Whitaker carpool too. So maybe?”

“Right. Yeah.”

She takes the pretzel bag back. “Is there more evidence that makes you feel crazy?”

Your skin flushes hot at the memory alone.

“He gave me his rain jacket. To keep.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

Mel once again takes a few minutes, and the rest of her pretzels before responding.

“I’m honestly not the best person to ask for advice about this. I’ve been told I can be… dense when it comes to romantic endeavors.”

You shrug. “You’re a great listener, and you haven’t steered me wrong in the past.”

She brightens. “That’s good! I think my advice would be to talk to Dr. Mohan. She has experience with your… particular situation.”

Mel tosses the empty pretzel bag and heads toward the door. “I’ll let Robby know you’re taking ten, so don’t worry about someone looking for you while you’re changing.”

“You’re the best. I love you.”

The resident flushes at your gratitude, and then ducks out the door, leaving you alone to stew on her advice.

—

Talking to Dr. Mohan proves difficult, at first. How exactly do you start that conversation? “Hey, I heard you had advice on having a world-ending crush on your boss, got any tips?”

Additionally, she’s kind of hard to track down. You greatly respect Dr. Mohan’s work ethic and truly aspire to her unflinching devotion to patient care at the PTMC.

After a few days (which turns into a few weeks, because you are an emotional coward) of trying (and failing) to find a moment to talk, Dr. Mohan actually ends up finding you.

“Hey!” She jogs up to you as you’re walking to your car, a too-bright smile on her face for the fact that you both just got off a fourteen hour shift.

“Sorry to be that annoying coworker who talks to you in the parking lot, but I wanted to catch you before you left. Mel said you wanted to talk to me?”

“Right!” You stammer, slightly mortified. You admire Dr. Mohan so much and really want her to think you’re capable but you really need some advice on Jack Abbot as a whole, and it sounds like she’s the only expert around. “Yes. That. It’s a really normal question, you know.”

Dr. Mohan just nods, a smile still fixed on her face, like this is a totally normal conversation. “Uh, sure?”

There’s a beat of silence where you both stare at each other, and then she gasps.

“This is about Abbot, isn’t it?”

You groan, throwing your head back in defeat. “Am I that obvious?”

She laughs goodnaturedly. “No. Probably not. You’re just the only intern in the ED right now so I try to make it a habit to keep an eye on you. Plus, Mel is literally the only person in the world who knows about my now-dead crush on him, so. I just connected the dots.”

“He’s so hot, Dr. Mohan. I feel like I’m dying.”

She makes a noise of sympathy. “He is. It’s fucking annoying, at a certain point.”

“Thank you!” You shout, “Like it’s just so there. It should be illegal to just walk around and look like that. I should be focusing on like, studying and learning, but instead I’m just harboring this stupid crush on an attending.”

“Have you ever seen Grey’s—“

“Yes. I know. I can’t be Meredith. Meredith was like, always a mess. Am I a mess?”

Mohan purses her lips. “Well. You did just say you felt like you were dying.”

“I know,” You sigh. “It makes me feel… shallow. I like being a doctor. I was so excited to get matched into the PTMC, and this stupid crush is throwing me off my game.”

“It can’t be that bad.”

“On my first night shift rotation I dropped a scalpel, picked it back up, and then ripped the purse strings on my first appendectomy.”

She winces. “Oh. That’s not… great.”

Your hand finds its way to your comfort necklace. “He found me crying in the supply closet like some medical student, and then he comforted me. It was terrible.”

Mohan starts ambling towards the direction you assume her car is in. “Well, if it’s any consolation, I’ve been caught crying in the supply closet several times. I think it’s a right of passage. And as for that second part…”

She shrugs. “Abbot gives credit where credit is due, but he won’t coddle you. If he actually offered real comfort or advice or whatever, then he meant it.”

“That’s what he said. It just didn’t really help the whole crush-on-him part. And then there was the slapping incident, and he drove me home, and now I have his rain jacket in my backseat in case my car dies again.”

Mohan actually looks taken back.

“Okay. It sounds to me like this is a situation that is in serious need of wine. Do you drink?”

“Whenever I have a spare twenty dollars.”

She grins. “I happen to have a couple bottles at home that might do the trick. Follow me back to my place?”

“Yes please.”

Wine and, eventually, takeout at Samira’s is much more enjoyable than you expected— considering the fact that you’re an intern and she’s a resident. She confides that she doesn’t have very many friends outside of the ED and was excited at the opportunity to have “real girl-time”.

She shares how she weathered her own seemingly life-ending crush on Jack, gasps and screams at the appropriate times when you tell her about the slapping, the events that occurred in the break room afterwards, the drive home, and the jacket.

You leave her apartment feeling lighter than ever. Like life might be worth living. Like you could survive your intern year.

Maybe everything will be okay.

—

Everything is not okay.

You’re now two full weeks into a never-ending fever, you keep getting stuck with shitty shifts (how many times a month can one person possibly be scheduled to work a double?) and top it all off, you’ve been pissed on not once, but twice in the same fucking shift.

Santos snorts when she sees you go by in your third set of scrubs for the day.

“Careful. You’re gonna replace Huckleberry pretty soon.”

You shoot her a look. “Supportive as ever, Dr. Santos.”

“I try.”

You sink into the chair next to hers, taking a moment to press the heels of your hands into your eyes and maybe, like, take a thirty second nap.

It doesn’t help much.

There’s a particular misery in watching the day-shift rotation handoff with the night shift and not being able to join in the process. Because you’re still there. And will be, until you see them again for your handoff, in twelve fucking hours.

Patients tend to get bitchier the later it gets, and it’s one of those nights where every patient bleeds into the next in a never-ending sea of complaints, pain, and fixing.

The fixing is fine. You like the fixing.

You’re just… having a hard time keeping up with everything while the fever perpetually runs you down. It’s the kind of thing where no amount of sleep can help you. Unless it was for 48 hours straight and then you got another 48 hours off after that to relax while you’re awake, and then another 48 hours to be productive.

A vacation. A week off. You’re describing taking a week off work. It’s comical, actually. Imagine requesting a week off from work. Gloria or whoever it is would never grant that. Not as an intern.

You notice Jack lingering around your general vicinity, which is fairly normal on a night like tonight. Technically, as the only intern on shift, you’re the only liability he has to really worry about.

Somewhere around the eighteen hour mark, he slides into the chair next to you while you’re charting.

“You’re flagging.”

Your eyes burn as you tap information into the tablet, then check on the computer in front of you. “I’m fine. I just need a Redbull or something.”

He slides the tablet out of your hands. “Part of being a good doctor is knowing when to take a break. Can’t be a good doctor if you’re falling asleep during the exam, right?”

“I would never fall asleep during an exam.”

He shrugs. “I’ve seen it happen.”

Jack jerks his head towards the break room. “Take five. Get an energy drink or whatever. Then I want you on chairs for at least an hour.”

“Yes sir.”

He rolls his eyes. “Get going.”

Chairs don't prove to be as uneventful as you (and probably Jack) hoped it would be. You get vomited on by a teenage girl, who apologizes profusely when she finally manages to stop throwing up, narrowly avoid a swing from a patient that quickly becomes a behavioral case, and become an unwilling participant in another patient’s doctor fantasy.

Security had to get involved with that last one. It was. Something.

Your shift ends with little fanfare. It’s honestly a miracle you survived. You’re exhausted, achey, and still feverish. The only thing you can think about is crawling into your bed, indulging in a rare expense of turning your heat up, and sleeping until your next shift.

Walking into your apartment ends up being a slap in the face. First of all, it’s fucking freezing. As if you left every single window open while you were gone. Secondly, it’s dark. Like, not even the clock on the microwave is on.

“Fuck,” you mumble under your breath, tears beginning to burn with unshed tears digging through your bag and fumbling with your phone, about to text your landlord when you see that he’s already texted.

Eric (Landlord): Power and AC is down. Might take some time to fix. Power should be back on by tonight.

And that’s just the last straw, really.

You slam the door behind you, not even bothering to go inside your apartment at all, chest tight and face hot, you race down the stairs, trying to find Samira’s contact through blurry eyes. When you think you’ve found it you click call, collapsing on the curb with your body doubled over, crying like a crazy person into your knees, at something like nine in the morning.

The phone rings for a bit, and you’re about to give up when the line finally stops and somebody picks up.

“Hello?”

It’s not Samira who answers. It’s Jack.

You sniffle. “Why are you answering Samira’s phone?”

“I didn’t. I answered my phone. Because you called me. Are you okay?”

“Oh,” You decide to ignore his question, “I meant to call Samira. Sorry.”

“Wait,” Jack’s voice comes out all rough and tinny through the speaker, but even distorted through a phone, you could listen to it for hours, “Answer the question. Are you okay?”

Your bottom lip wobbles dangerously.

“The power’s out in my building. And the heating went out too. My landlord said the power won’t be on until tonight, and I just wanted to go to sleep, but it’s cold and I'm tired and this stupid fever won’t go away.”

“Do you have a place to stay?”

Always a man of action, Jack is.

You shrug, then make a non-committal noise when you remember he can’t see it. “I was supposed to call Samira and see if she’d let me sleep on her couch.”

“I have a guest bedroom.”

The statement hangs in the crisp morning air. You think of Jack’s encouraging advice, Jack’s steady presence, Jack’s warm car and his nice smelling rain- jacket. Jack, Jack, Jack.

“Jack?”

“Yes?”

“What’s your address?”

The drive over involves bawling your eyes out to Vienna by Billy Joel. It’s just that kind of day.

You have no problems finding parking (miraculously) and no one stops you as you head up to Jack’s apartment as directed.

It’s… fancy. Like, polished floor lobby, lounge area adjacent to the front desk fancy.

The actual building itself isn’t very tall, nothing like a skyscraper, so it’s not exactly surprising that Jack’s apartment is the penthouse. It’s just suddenly very awkward standing in front of the door, in the same sweatshirt you’ve had since high school, sweats that have seen better years, looking exactly like the kind of girl who sobbed on the ride over to Billy Joel.

Jack opens the door almost immediately after you knock, and.

If seeing him in scrubs was bad, it doesn’t hold a fucking candle to him in a tight, army green shirt and grey sweatpants. Grey sweatpants. That couldn’t have been intentional, right? Is he online enough to know these things? God.

His features soften when he takes in your tear-streaked face and disheveled appearance.

He makes a low noise in his throat.

“Oh, you poor thing. Come here,”

Jack had actually been gesturing to the apartment, saying ‘come inside’ but the dam breaks the moment he says “poor thing” and you don’t have the wherewithal to think anything more complex than “Jack=Comfort and Safety".

Your bag drops with a dull thud onto the ground and then you’re crashing into him, face pressed into his chest and arms wrapped around his middle. You can barely find it within yourself to be embarrassed.

Jack doesn’t react at first, going completely stiff in your hold, and you think maybe you’ve gone and fucked this up too, like everything good in your life, but right when you move to pull away a hand finds its way to the back of your head, and another rubs circles on your back.

“Poor girl,” he murmurs, voice a soothing rumble with your ear close to his chest, “They been running you ragged?”

You nod uselessly, feeling raw and cut open— like you’ve been smashed against a rock and everything you keep tucked inside is spilling out and you can’t stop it.

“I’m so tired.” You half-mumble-half-sob into him, a sentiment that feels too light to convey everything that’s happened since you became an intern at the PTMC, and everything else you don’t talk about that happened before.

“I know sweetheart, I know,” Jack is solid beneath your cheek and arms, a lifeboat in a storm. “How about we get you inside and get you warm, huh? That sound nice?”

At the promise of warmth you finally detach from him, shame burning through you when you eye the wet spot on his shirt.

“Sorry,” You say, voice barely above a whisper. “I think I got snot on your shirt.”

“Trust me kid, it’s seen worse.”

He grabs your bag before you can even make a move for it, and you trail behind him into his apartment, attempting to ground yourself by looking around his apartment.

It’s nice. Lived in, not sterile. It doesn’t, actually, look the inside of a dentist’s office, like you were half expecting. Most new apartments have that doctor’s office lobby feel. Not exactly comfortable when you’re a doctor and the goal of home is to not remind you of your job.

Jack hangs your bag on a hook by the door, right next to his own. Something twinges in your chest at the sight.

There’s a feeling under your skin you can’t place as you shuffle into his apartment, something warm and skittish that aches for this to not be a one time thing, to be able to compare the pale morning light you’re watching now to late afternoon sun. To know where he keeps his mugs, what drawer the silverware is in, if he’s got a junk drawer with random shit in it, and what the random shit is. What it feels like to be in his kitchen, shoulders brushing.

But that’s a lot of complicated things to name or voice just past the threshold of the foyer, so you wrap your arms around yourself and toe your shoes off, then pad quietly after him.

Jack is— inviting, or maybe enticing; all those words that beckon the skittish thing closer and it feels just on the tip of danger to obediently sit on the couch he ushers you to.

“By the way,” Jack says somewhere behind you, maybe in the kitchen? “I have a cat. His name is Charlie. He probably won’t come near you, but be warned, he’s an asshole when he wants to be.”

“Oh, that’s fine. I like cats. Especially the asshole ones.”

“That explains a lot of things.”

His statement is kind of loaded, chock full of subtext you don’t care to parse through at the moment.

“Um,” You start, feeling a bit unsteady, “Is— Do you mind if I shower? I kind of smell gross probably, and I feel… grimy. Your apartment seems clean and I’d hate to get my hospital grime on anything.”

Jack just chuckles. “One, I wouldn’t care if you got ‘hospital grime’ on anything because that would be a very hypocritical thing to care about, and two, of course you can shower. Do you have spare clothes?”

“I might’ve forgotten to grab those.”

Another huffy laugh. “That’s fine. You can borrow some of mine. I’ll leave them on the bed.”

That’s like. Wow. Yeah. You’re just gonna borrow some clothes from him. From Jack. You’re going to shower in Jack’s shower and use whatever bodywash he has (hopefully not 5-in-one) and then put on his clothes and you are totally capable of being Completely Normal about these things.

“I already started on dinner when you said you were coming over. Should be done by the time you get out of the shower. Chicken noodle okay?”

Damn Jack Abbot and damn your shitty emotional regulation and damn your life for putting you in these situations.

“Yeah,” You croak, thinking about things like soup and family and being cold and strong and alone, “Yeah that’s fine. Thank you.”

Jack politely does not comment on the fact that soup is reducing you to a tangled heap of emotions and tears, and instead directs you to where his shower is and says to use whatever you want and take however long you want. He says want, not need. You’re not sure if there’s an intention behind the word choice.

Once in the shower, you allow yourself time to cry, to feel awful and self-pitying and all those things that are terrible to go through in front of another person. His shower is expensive and the water is warm and he does not have 5-in-one. There’s a litter box nestled next to the toilet, and it’s not funny, but it kind of is, because Jack would be the kind of guy to look at a litter box and put it right next to the toilet. Everything in its place.

Maybe that’s your problem. You haven’t felt like anything is in the right place in years.

You want to stay in the shower, in the bubble of protection it provides, but the idea of running up Jack’s water bill is enough to guilt you into getting out. You shiver, dry, aggressively attempt to make yourself look less like a wreck at the sink, and then tip-toe into the attached bedroom and carefully pull on the clothes Jack left for you on the bed; a faded, oversized college shirt, and a comfy pair of sweatpants.

They smell like him. You smell like him, like his body wash. The house smells like him. Everything you take in is a pleasant assault of Jack, Jack, Jack.

Enough guilt to fuel an entire room of ex-Catholic’s is the only thing keeping you from snooping around his room. The idea of stumbling upon something private or hidden away makes you feel slimy and gross, so you exit the bedroom and pretend like you don’t feel like a foster dog on its first night home from the shelter.

(Do shelter dogs miss the shelter? Do they miss its familiarity? Do dogs miss anything at all?)

The apartment smells of more spices and good smelling food than you privately thought Jack capable of. You’d read him as the kind of guy to subsist on takeout and maybe like, protein bars. But he’s dutifully stirring a metal pot with all the diligence of the military man that he once was.

Quietly, as if he might throw the wooden spoon he’s stirring with if you make too much noise or take up too much space, you carefully pull out a barstool in front of his kitchen island, the one closest to the door, and haul yourself onto it.

He gives you an examining glance over his shoulder, turns a knob on the stove, then rests his forearms on the island counter across from you. His rather delicious looking forearms, you might add.

“Feeling better after your shower?”

You hum an affirmation, folding your arms and resting your chin on them.

“Isn’t it kind of weird to make soup for breakfast?”

He shrugs. “It’s dinner for us. Or, well, me. I’m not sure your body knows what meal it is.”

He taps a pointer finger rhythmically on the counter. “Any word from your landlord?”

“No. Sorry for… all of this. I know you’re tired.”

“I wish you’d stop apologizing for things I don’t mind doing for you.”

You don’t really know how to respond to that, or what to do with how it makes you feel, so you elect to save it for later. Good at compartmentalizing, ED doctors are.

You clear your throat. “I can call Samira whenever. She’d probably be excited to have girl time. So you know. Don’t feel like— I have other options. If or when you want me to leave.”

“Do you want to leave?”

You wish he’d stop asking questions you don’t want to answer.

You try to play it off, smother your fear and exhaustion with humor. Robby’s kid, through and through.

“Well, I can’t have you getting sick of me. You’re the only person I know who has a very rob-able house if this whole internship doesn’t pan out.”

Jack straightens, shoulders pulling and flexing. “Who said I’d get sick of you? Maybe I like the idea of you in my house.”

“Do you?”

You ask the question before you’re aware of how terrified you are of the answer. But you’ve already said it, and it feels nice to be the one asking the hard question instead.

Jack, likely experienced in this sort of thing, doesn’t look outwardly bothered by it, but he gets a sort-of-sad look on his face, almost like he’s disappointed that you had to ask.

“Have I given you any reason to think otherwise?”

“I don’t know,” You look down, picking at a hangnail to avoid his expression and his eyes and his everything, “I don’t want to assume anything.”

“You’ve already assumed quite a bit.”

You scrunch your face. “That’s different. Those are safe assumptions.”

“Are they?”

“Obviously, it’s safer to assume that you don’t want me to stay here, or at least not for very long, because if I assume that I do I’ll bother you and I want you to—“

You cut yourself off, jaw shutting with a firm click, but the end of the sentence hangs in the air unspoken anyways. It’s not hard to figure out what you were going to say.

I want you to like me.

Jack sighs, and alarm blares are going off in your head and your chest starts to feel tight and cold despite the warmth of his apartment, and then he’s rounding the island and you turn your body to follow him —never turn you back, never let your guard down— and then he’s standing in front of you, over you, and you’re not sure if you want to run or metaphorically curl up at his feet, tail tucked.

It’s pathetic. It’s embarrassing. It’s impossible to ignore.

(What does a shelter dog think, on that first night? Do they hope? Do dogs hope?)

He raises a hand, slowly, giving you a chance to lean away, and when you don’t, it comes to rest on the side of your face, his thumb swiping at the barely-there wetness from earlier tears.

It’s cleaning the cut from the slap, it’s a kindness you can curl into, and it might be a threat. Might be bad, might turn harsh and painful, might leave without a word.

Unlike that day in the break room, there’s no fluorescent lights to suck any heat out of the room and no gloves as a barrier; as a reminder of who he is, of what you are, of how things work.

It’s just you and Jack, in Jack’s apartment, wearing Jack’s clothes, and pretty soon you’re going to eat food that Jack made. Just for you.

And you think maybe, possibly, if he stops here you could kind of hold onto this moment for the rest of your life and it would get you through being alive and strong and alone, and you’d make it through this, whatever this is, if he stops here.

He doesn’t. He starts talking.

“I like knowing that you’re safe. That you’re taken care of. I like knowing with certainty that these things are true because I’m the one making sure of it.”

Your breath hitches in your chest.

“That’s kind of a lot of work, though.”

He hums. “It is. Luckily, I just so happen to be a pretty hard worker.”

Everything about the current situation is a lot and your nerves are over-taxed and dialed up to hundred, so it’s not surprising that you start crying again.

Jack brings up a second hand to the other side of your face and gently wipes away the tears as they come. It feels sort of like the physical version of everything he’s been doing for you since that day in the supply closet.

“You don’t have to do anything, or say anything, or make any kind of decision right now, okay? We can do whatever you want. I’ll do whatever you want.”

There’s the word choice again; want, not need. Is there a difference? What does the difference mean to him? What does he mean? Why is he doing any of this?

Jack's phone goes off in his pocket, and he steps back, drops his hands, and goes back to the stove.

Jack said you don’t have to make a decision right now, but you kind of feel like if you don’t do something you’re going to be sick with everything that’s swirling and clawing inside you, threatening to burst. Like the very essence of you is going to explode, and your soul will be painted on Jack’s perfectly decorated walls.

That would be something, wouldn’t it.

You stay seated at the island, turning to stare at Jack’s back while he adds the final touches to the soup. He doesn’t talk anymore, but he keeps looking back every few minutes, like he’s making sure you’re still there.

Eventually Jack turns the stove off, dishes up a bowl of soup for you, and sets it gently in front of you. He uses his pinky to cushion the placing of the bowl, so there’s no loud clinking noise when he sets the bowl down.

There’s a tiny sprig of parsley on top of the soup, right in the center. Like a Panera ad for soup in September.

You start crying again, in earnest.

“I’m sorry,” You gasp, pressing the heels of your hands into your eyes. “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I’m— I don’t know. I don’t know.”

You’re hoping the last sentence encompasses an entire lifetime of events, accidents, mistakes, and memories that have never been able to find a place in your head except dead center, at the forefront of your mind at all times, stamped on your forehead for anyone with eyes to see.

Your life hasn’t been wants or choices for a very long time. And here Jack is, giving you an array of both, and saying things like he wants you to want.

“I’ll do whatever you want.”

“Hey, hey hey hey, shhh,” Strong arms wrap around you, tucking your head into a warm chest, effectively shutting off all sensory input that isn’t Jack. “You’re okay, you’re safe, you’re okay, I got you.”

He rubs circles into your back, then switches to tracing shapes, and he lets you cry into him again and he doesn’t tell you to stop, or to calm down, or you’re being too much too fast.

“You’re okay, you’re gonna be okay sweetheart. Take your time. I’m not going anywhere.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

—

You, embarrassingly, fall asleep right there, sitting at the kitchen island over a bowl of soup and twenty-something years of holding up your life with hands that never quite seemed big enough to do it.

You wake up in Jack’s bed, his comforter pulled up to your chin and the clock at the bedside table reading 8:17 p.m. There’s the muffled sound of several voices coming from beyond the door.

Holy shit. What the fuck.

Deciding to ignore the implication that Jack carried you to bed, you mentally take stock of what’s around you.

In front of the clock is your phone (plugged in to charge), a glass of water, and a note with Jack’s handwriting on it.

Kid-

I’ll probably be in the ED for the night shift by the time you wake up. I called Mohan (who called Mel, who was with Langdon, for reasons unknown) to go to your place and grab you some things. There may be people in the apartment when you wake up. You are in no way obligated to interact with them. They have to leave eventually.

Charlie is in the room with you because he hates strangers, but he probably won’t leave the bathroom. Probably. Drink water and eat something, if you can. Text me if you need anything.

The voices beyond the door are, more than likely, the aforementioned individuals who have now seen the glorified closet you call home. It’s not ideal, but you’re wrung out and don’t have the energy to really care. Besides, Samira and Mel are too nice to judge you that hard (you hope) and from what you’ve heard, Langdon isn’t really in a place to say anything.

On one hand, going out there requires socializing. Which, ew. On the other hand, Samira and Mel are the best. Langdon is maybe okay.

Before you can talk yourself out of it, you shuffle out of bed and then continue shuffling to the door, hoping that whatever you look like isn’t too terribly awful.

Samira, Mel, and Langdon are standing around the kitchen island, various takeout containers and bottles of alcohol littering the space. For some reason, Trinity, Dennis, and Robby are also present.

Samira and Langdon are engaged in what looks to be a rather animated discussion-slash-argument, and Mel is standing just a little closer to Langdon than what could be considered normal for friends. Trinity is very obviously ignoring Langdon’s general existence, bickering with Dennis on the couch, and Robby is seated in the armchair by the window, nursing a beer and watching both conversations unfold.

You sniff aggressively, and all heads snap to you.

“There are more of you here then there’s supposed to be,” You grumble, scrubbing at your face. “Why are you all here?”

Mel is the first to speak.

“It was Frank actually!” Trinity rolls her eyes, and part of you wants to share the sentiment, “He figured Trinity would be upset that something happened to you and he knew and didn’t tell her, so Trinity decided that me and Samira would get your stuff while everyone else stayed here in case you woke up before we came back!”

Wow, okay, that’s. A Lot.

You squint. “That doesn’t explain why you’re all here. I mean it does, but only like, why you’re here physically.”

Robby frowns. “We heard that you were going through a rough time and you had to stay with Jack, so we came.”

Trinity snorts on the couch and Dennis, next to her, looks like he’s about to have an aneurysm.

Robby shoots her a look, but continues. “We care about you. We— I don’t want you to feel like you have to do everything on your own. In or out of the ED.”

Trinity blows out a loud sigh and low whistle. “Jee-zus Robby, give the woman some time to wake up before trying to induce tears again.”

Robby does look a little apologetic, maybe a teensy bit chastised (and annoyed that Trinity was the one doing the chastising) and turns his deep brown eyes back to you.

"Sorry. Can't help these Dad tendencies, you know."

Your face gets hot, maybe a tiny, wet prickle behind your eyes forms while Robby smiles, and the tension leaves the room all in one go, and you start to think that maybe things are in the right place.

–

At the ED, Jack Abbot, who's been checking his phone whenever he gets a free moment like a highschooler with a crush, opens the first text that pops up on his screen after hours of waiting.

It's a picture from Robby. You, with your head thrown back in a cackle of a laugh, not a single bit of stress evident in any of the lines of your body. There's one text accompanying the picture:

Please don't make me give you a shovel talk. I think you already know what's at stake here.

Jack snorts and pockets his phone, because yeah, he does.

–

When Jack finally gets back to his apartment, he's half-expecting to see the kind of mess that a large grouping of obnoxious people leave behind. Trash, maybe a few red solo cups, empty takeout containers, someone asleep on his couch, someone passed out on the floor.

He's not expecting to see a clean space. The only evidence that people were there at all is some rearranged pillows, a half-empty bottle of wine on the counter, and some new takeout menus on his fridge.

And then there's you. You're lying on the couch, eyes glued to the TV, watching a show he doesn't really recognize. There's a well-loved backpack on the floor, just under the coffee table. The shocking bit is Charlie, his resident asshole, is 'loafing' right on your chest, purring away.

You lift your head when you hear the jingle of his keys, a smile immediately brightening your face. He mentally takes a picture, right there, so he can remember this exact moment forever.

"What'd you bribe him with?" Jack says instead of something much more neurotic, like 'You don't have to go back to your place when the power comes back on.'

You shrug, unaware of his emotional and romantic pain. "You were right. He came out from under the bed after everybody left. He kind of growled at me for a little bit, but once I settled down here he just kind of... came right up."

You plant a little kiss to the top of his head, right in between furry ears. Great, now Jack's jealous of a senior cat with one ear who licks his own butt. "How could I resist this face? I see why you brought him home."

Jack rounds the end of the couch, shuffling by, and Charlie opens his eyes just enough to shoot him a look that Jack takes to mean: If you make her get up and move me, I will kill you in your sleep.

Jack does not disturb his cat as he sits down on the couch. There's a moment when things almost get hairy- you pull your legs back when he goes to sit, slightly jostling The Asshole, who pins his only ear back in annoyance.

Jack solves this problem by taking your legs, clad in some soft flannel pajama pants and pink fuzzy socks, and lays them across his lap. There. Problem solved.

The warmth of your legs on his lap and the look on your face is reward enough for him. He can't think of a way he'd rather spend his time.

Jack, in a rare show of mercy, does not tease you, and decides that you've probably had enough excitement for one day.

"So," He says instead, looking up at the TV and grimacing at the mutilated corpse on the screen, "What are we watching?"

He watches you shrink into yourself. He hates it when you do that. He hates that you feel like you have to.

"Uh, Bones. I can turn it off, though. I'm sure you don't want to watch this."

He doesn't answer the question you've not-subtly voiced, instead choosing to redirect the conversation.

"Why did you put it on?"

You start chewing on your lower lip. Your signature 'I don't want to answer this question so I'm going to think really hard about it' move.

"It's kind of my comfort show? I don't know. I watched it a lot growing up. We didn't have cable, but the hotels I stayed at sometimes did. I'd wait until my dad fell asleep and then I'd turn on the TV and watch from the sci-fi or drama channels. Watched a lot of Bones. Supernatural too, and sometimes Doctor Who, if it was on. But Bones was my favorite."

The characters on the screen are involved in some sort of car chase now, police siren flashing on a black SUV. Jack isn't paying attention to that at all, because this is the first time since the day you walked into the PTMC and introduced yourself that he's ever heard you talk about your childhood.

"How come?"

"I don't know. I've always liked procedural shows. Had a huge House MD phase. Death and bones and corpses and stuff has never really grossed me out, which is part of the reason I became a doctor. But also..."

You point to the male character. "You see him? That's Booth. Seeley Booth. They all have kind of crazy names. He's an FBI agent, and his partner is that woman there. Temperance Brennan. Booth calls her Bones."

"She doesn't look like an FBI agent."

You smile. "She's not. She's a forensic anthropologist, but she consults on murder cases and stuff like that because she's kind of a genius. She's smart, strong, and capable. She and Booth don't always get along, because they both can be headstrong and stubborn. But he respects and trusts her, implicitly. No matter what. They love each other."

Your throat bobs, but your voice is steady when you speak.

"And when Brennan needs him, if she's in trouble or she needs him by her side, even if she doesn't know she does, he's always there. He always saves her."

Jack can picture it, in his mind. You, small and alone, watching these characters on some shitty hotel TV and getting it into your head that this kind of thing only exists in TV shows. He pictures you dreaming of having a Booth, of having someone to be there for you, to pick you up when you fall. He thinks of you crying in the supply closet and how quietly you'd done it. Almost silent.

He thinks of what happens to a person to make them learn how to cry without making a sound.

He rests a hand on your ankle, fingers instinctively drifting towards the pulse point there- posterior tibial. He keeps two fingers on it, even though he can't feel it through your fuzzy socks. With his thumb he makes circles, because he's seen how you lean into Robby's shoulder grabs, how you preen at physical and verbal praise, how you'd slumped like a marionette with its strings cut into his arms just yesterday.

"Jack?" Your voice is tentative, unsure.

"Hmm?"

"Am I..." You start chewing your lip again, "Are you— I don't to assume anything. So if I fuck this up and make you uncomfortable—"

"I want to kiss you."

Jack has learned how to speak fluent you. He knows how to stop an incoming spiral, how to soothe old wounds rearing their heads.

He continues when you don't speak.

"I want you to wear my clothes. I want to take care of you. I want you, in whatever way you'll let me."

"Oh."

"I was laying it on pretty thick, kid."

You look away from him, and this is another moment he'd like to keep forever.

"I thought I was just reading into things!"

"Do you think I call every intern sweetheart?"

Jack is positive Charlie's presence on your stomach is the only thing keeping you from actively squirming in place.

"I thought maybe you were just one of those guys. Samira said it was possible!"

He rolls his eyes. "You can't ask Mohan for romantic advice. She's you in a different font."

"I'm going to take that as a compliment."

You turn back to your show, losing yourself in the plot for a while. When the murderer has been caught and the credits are playing, you look at him again.

"We don't. Um. Can we just keep doing this? For now?"

For the first time since meeting you, Jack gets to say exactly what he's thinking.

"We can do this forever. We can do whatever you want."

“Hiya, neighbor. We just saw yer text and wanted to make sure you were alright,” Johnny replies. Hearing his voice after these few days away sparks a fluttering in your chest, though it’s mostly smothered out by the more tumultuous emotions that have a stranglehold on you.

“Oh, I’m fine. He just asked me some questions. Questions about that night at the bar, I mean,” you explain with a hurried clarification. “I didn’t recognize the person he was looking for, but I did tell him about that guy I met.”

You pause, but there’s only dead air over the line. A slow stream of crimson dribbles from your cut, so you press on it with your thumb. Simon’s voice eventually pierces the silence.

“That all?”

You increase the pressure until it stings.

“They asked if I’d be able to identify him,” you answer promptly, no time to decipher how much you think they know. Gambling with the partial truth that you can always add to later. “Like in a lineup, I guess? I was a little nervous, so I didn’t think to ask for details.”

Johnny hums, which buzzes through the phone and directly against your ear. “Must’ve been a real shock for the police to show up at yer door, hen.”

There’s not much concern in his tone, just thinly veiled amusement, as if there’s truly no reason why the cops would ever make a visit to the neighborhood. It’s better than suspicion, though, or worse, anger, but it’s not enough for you to drop your guard, not when their wrath is a venomous snake slithering unseen through tall grass.

“It was pretty unexpected, yeah. And a little scary to hear that someone actually went missing that night...” You trail off with an uneasy laugh because you really hadn’t processed how your paranoid fear of almost being kidnapped was completely justified. Though you really shouldn’t be so surprised when peril is always cozied up right next to you, knees bumping against yours. Skirting danger might just be in your nature. “Like, could you imagine if that was me? Crazy, right?”

It’s your own version of their favorite joke. Ha-ha-ha, who amongst the people you know would want to lock you up in a dark and scary place?

But they don’t laugh.

Simon scoffs instead, and you stiffen, fearing that fangs have pierced your skin without you realizing.

“If you’d disappeared,” he declares gruffly, like the jagged edge of your hunting knife, “we would have found you and brought you home already.”

It’s dizzying, hearing how serious he is. You’re so lightheaded you worry that you’ve lost more blood than you realized, but when you glance at your cut, you see the bleeding has stopped.

“Really?” you ask, so softly and meekly that you think they might not hear you over the phone. Your thumb fidgets, smearing the remnant blood around and letting it soak into your cuticles.

“‘Course, love. We wouldn’t let anyone snatch up our favorite neighbor and get away with it,” Johnny proclaims, sleek and sharp as your knife’s honed edge. Treacherous joy surges. 

“Oh. Thank you,” you squeak. “That’s sweet of you to say.”

It’s this sweetness that makes your teeth ache and drags the truth to the tip of your tongue. Tempts you to spill your guts, to inform your neighbors about the detective looking into a second missing person who vanished a year ago. To reveal the name and phone number you squirreled away.

But once you start, you might not be able to hold back the torrent of other things you’ve kept hidden from your neighbors. Desire and desperation to seek warmth they might share. Envy towards what’s kept in the basement, fear of becoming its replacement. And your dream, the same dream that invades your sleep and pins you down, again and again, each and every night, leaving you haunted and unfulfilled. It all dangles on the precipice, almost ready to tumble from your lips.

“When will you be back?”

Temperance wins out, though. If you lean in too closely just because they’ve shown you benevolence, the eventual whiplash will break your neck.

“Soon,” Simon replies. Another vague, non-answer, but you hadn’t expected anything else. It was a question to nudge the conversation in a safer direction.

“It must be nice out there,” you remark. Nice enough to keep them away, you comment only to yourself.

If they detect any of your childish resentment, Johnny doesn’t give it away. “Sure is, hen. Nothin’ quite like it.”

Their camping destination was also kept a secret from you, so you use your imagination to fill in the blanks. Crisp air and stillness. Lush greenery of a seemingly endless forest. Peaceful scenery for a weary mind that wakes before dawn and is battered with adversity at every turn. A place to rest.

While you’re caught in a daydream, control slips. “Would you take me there sometime?” you ask aloud instead of in your head. Your eyes widen in horror at your blunder. “Wait, no, I was just kidding, you don’t have to—”

“That would be up to you, neighbor,” Simon responds, ignoring your shoddy attempts to backtrack. You don’t understand what he’s implying, but you’re too mortified to ask anything else, sewing your lips together instead. Your silence backfires, though, because it gives your neighbors the opportunity to change the subject. “Been over to the house yet?”

“No,” you assert, too quickly, too curtly, heart beating at a wild speed. Your fingers clutch your phone even tighter, the cut on your other hand nearly splitting open when you ball up a fist. Johnny might have chuckled, but the blood in your ears muffles the sound. “There hasn’t been any reason to.”

“Really?” Johnny waggles the question like a teasing schoolboy, holding something just out of reach. “Weren’t tempted to take a wee peek inside?”

You know he’s only winding you up, but you’re already coiled so taut, you can’t help but react. “No. Never.”

“Hmmm,” Johnny contemplates, like he’s stretching the thought over a rack. You feel the strain in your own muscles until a laugh snaps it in half. “Just pullin’ yer leg, neighbor. We know you wouldn’t snoop.”

“Wouldn’t have given you the keys if we thought you would,” Simon adds.

Their trust in you burrows into your chest and nibbles on your heartstrings like a parasite, though you’re somewhat dubious about whether they truly trust you. For all you know, there could be a trap laid out in their home, waiting for you to slide a key into a door. Still, the iron grip on your phone loosens by the slightest amount.

“I’m glad to be your...” (Good, good, good girl—) “...reliable neighbor.”

“That ye are, love,” Johnny proudly attests, and you have to remember to battle the enticing heat that flares at his praise. Don’t let it scorch you, don’t let it boil the pot they’ve placed you in.

Sweat forms on your palms, adding another uncomfortable sensation on top of the tackiness left by blood and peach. While you’d love to wash your hands of everything that stains your skin, diverting any of your attention away from your neighbors is never a wise move.

“Well, I’d better let you two get back to enjoying your trip,” you dare to propose, thinking it’ll be more productive to pry yourself loose from this conversation first. But you’ve never been very successful at ending things on your own terms. Simon reminds you of that.

“Hold on there, neighbor,” he rumbles with halting authority. Your hackles rise, swift to detect a threat.

“While we’ve gotcha on the line...” Johnny hums, a hint of malicious glee in his voice stringing you up. “There's something we need you to check on at the house.”

In a heartbeat, your knees weaken. You lean on the counter for support because they’ll hear it if you collapse, and loudly crashing to the floor is not polite, neighborly behavior. You know what’s coming, but you hope you’re wrong for once.

Johnny casually manifests your worst fears. “Simon thinks I left a light on in the basement, but I know I turned it off. Need ye to settle this for us.”

You bite back what could have been either a devastated whimper or a defeated laugh. It’s a comically flimsy reason for you to enter their home, not much better than the texts you’ve been sending them to report where you’re going when you leave the house. The minimum pretence for a forceful instruction.

You’ve proven you know how to stay out of the basement; now, your neighbors want to see if you’ll go in it on command.

You’re not ready. You’ll never be ready. The stars could be falling from the sky, hellfire could be raining down, and you’d still take your chances above ground if given the choice.

“Still with us, hen?”

But you aren’t really given the choice, and great calamities can’t compel you quite like Johnny and Simon can anyway. It’s another fork in the road, but when you cast your tired gaze down either path, they both lead to the same place.

“Yes. Sorry, got distracted for a second.” There's a warble in your voice that you couldn’t suppress, so you tightly shut your eyes in concentration. “You need me to...check on a light in your basement.”

“Turn it off while you’re at it,” Simon tacks on, ensuring you can’t just get away with a peek from the top of the stairs.

Johnny tuts impishly. “If it’s on. Which it won’t be, of course.” You can practically hear him winking.

“Of course,” you parrot back instinctively, anxiety gnawing on you like a starving animal. “I’ll let you know either way.” Out of habit, you start to wrack your brain for an ill-conceived excuse to put this off for as long as you can, but your neighbors know your tricks too well.

“Don’t keep us waitin’ now,” Simon directs, cutting off any chance of delaying the inevitable. They hang up before you can respond, and you’re alone again with a bloodied finger and a mutilated peach.

...

...

...

It’s an unusual thing when you approach your neighbors’ front door and it doesn’t open by the time you reach the front steps. There’s no one on the other side who’s able to let you in today. You hold the house key in a death grip between your thumb and index finger. The basement key dangles off the keyring, swinging like a noose.

The pair of keys, your phone, and a phone number stashed away in your memory—that’s all you’ve brought with you. You left your hunting knife at home because you’re not about to give yourself or anyone else the opportunity to use it. After a deep, forlorn breath, you unlock the first hurdle of your accursed duty.

Silence greets you in place of Johnny and Simon when you step inside. All the tranquility of a graveyard in this seemingly empty house. Familiar rooms are now uncanny spaces when your neighbors aren’t occupying them. A sense of malaise builds with each small, quiet step you take towards your destination.

You’ve never known fear quite like the bone-deep terror of standing before your neighbors’ basement door. This unbearable fear sinks its claws into you and drains the blood from your veins until you’re a listless husk without the strength to slot a key into a lock. You dream of this door so much that you almost expect it to fling open on its own and drag you inside.

If only it were that simple. Instead, you have to open it with your own free will.

While you remain motionless in the face of your greatest adversity so far, scrutiny prickles the back of your skull as if there were curious eyes upon you. It wouldn’t surprise you if your neighbors are watching you through a camera hidden from view, not wanting to miss out on all the amusement your struggles provide. It also wouldn’t surprise you if they aren’t, where the idea that there are two ever-present observers of your life has just been hammered into you.

Either way, there’s only so much more stalling you can get away before you start accumulating consequences. You’ve got to keep up your pretense of a neighbor who lives in a world where everything is fine and nothing is wrong.

Rigid, mechanical movements bring the basement key up to the lock. When it slides in and turns without a problem, you feel the last of your hope dry up. Before you proceed any further, you remind yourself of your plan.

Whatever’s down there, you won’t acknowledge it. Even if it screams and cries and begs and begs and begs, you’ll ignore it. You’ll pretend like it’s not there, and you’re very good at pretending, so why stop now? Hopefully, it’ll understand that you can’t help it. No one can.

You’re just there to turn off a light and leave the room in darkness.

The key slips out just as easily as it was inserted. You tuck it away in a secure spot on your person where it couldn’t be carelessly grabbed from you. With a jittery hand on the doorknob, you open the basement door.

CREEEAAAK.

You thought you’d be ready when the door lets out its signature creak, but you flinch anyway. It goes to show that all the preparation in the world can’t save you. But now the gate to hell has been opened, and your arrival has been announced. There’s no turning back.

A dim light from below is waiting for you. It faintly illuminates the staircase, but all you can see from here is an unfinished wall at the bottom. You stretch your arm out over the threshold to flip a nearby lightswitch, which only turns on the light above the stairs. Another desperate hope squashed.

The first step is the hardest. You timidly shuffle a foot across the doorway and sluggishly drag the rest of your body along with it. Now that you’re solidly in the basement, you close the door behind you. Your neighbors never leave the door open, so you can’t either.

Clutching the banister for support, you keep your eyes locked on the ground as you descend, counting each step down. When you reach the bottom, you take a brief moment to silently hyperventilate. But you can do this, you have to do this. You have no choice.

You finally raise your head to face the monster in the basement, and...

It’s empty.

Your eyes dart around the room in crazed vigilance, but there’s no one here but you.

It’s empty!

There’s the light you’re supposed to turn off—a single lightbulb mounted to a wooden beam on the ceiling with a simple chain pull. Beneath it...is nothing! Sweet, glorious nothing. On the whole, there’s practically nothing in here. A mostly bare shelf fastened to a wall, two folding chairs leaning against a wall. A small bathroom in the corner and a broad pillar in the middle. But otherwise, empty.

Ah hah hah, the basement is fucking empty, and you’ve never been so happy to be dead wrong about something. It means they’re gone! The one who was here before is gone and...

The one who was here before?

An image of someone in this room flashes behind your eyelids when you blink. Frigid ice shoots through your veins as your gaze crawls around the basement and recognition creeps in.

There’s an exposed copper pipe running across the back wall and up into the ceiling. You know that pipe, how it bends just so and has a section that’s been cut out and replaced. This pipe and the grid of pipes it joins is a newer addition to your dream that you see as you fall through the basement door. Wandering over to it, you tap on the pipe and hear a familiar tink tink tink.

And the pillar in the center of the room is so familiar to you as well, but it’s missing something. You take hesitant steps closer and spy a spot where a hole has been recently patched over. Your fingers brush over it until you remember what’s missing—a bulky, metal chain bolted into the pillar.

It’s more than just your imagination. It’s the unearthing of a memory. And one not from a dream, but from reality.

You’ve been here. You’ve been here before, and when you were last here, there was a person in this basement chained to that pillar. As hazy as your recollection is, you’re certain of that fact. And if there was someone here before, and they’re gone now, then...

A plastic tarp, a cord of rope. Two new knives, not counting your own. Remote, unspoiled wilderness stretching for miles in every direction. The verdant foliage you’d envisioned surrounding Johnny and Simon suddenly withers and becomes the ground beneath their boots, decomposed and returned to earth.

You can smell it now too, a faint scent of bleach rising from the concrete floor. It makes you gag, and you fight the urge to vomit because you can’t spew bile all over your neighbors’ freshly cleaned basement. Lightheaded and swaying, you lean against the pillar to stay upright. You remind yourself that someone could be watching, so you need to keep it together.

Ignore it, don’t acknowledge it, pretend like it doesn’t exist. You have to keep doing what you always do, and if you persevere, you’ll survive. What you’ve discovered was always a possibility, it’s just not the possibility you expected to confront when you stepped into the basement. You couldn’t help them before, and you definitely can’t help them now.

Still resting against the post, you reach up with a trembling hand and grasp the chain for the lightbulb. With a swift tug, the light is extinguished, and your task is complete; there’s no reason to stay here any longer. You aren’t about to become the basement’s next resident now that there’s a vacancy.

Legs wobbling like an injured fawn, you stumble over to the stairs and claw your way towards the surface. When you reach the door, against all odds, it opens. You hastily flip the lightswitch on the way out, and the basement is fully engulfed in darkness.

The door squeals like a gutted pig when you slam it shut behind you. Both hands press against it to steady yourself while you get your ragged, uneven breathing under control. But you’ve done it, you’ve escaped.

“So was the light on, neighbor?”

Johnny’s voice is a knife plunged into your back. When it’s pulled out, it rips an earsplitting scream from your lungs. You whip around in a frenzy, head bashing against the door in the process.

Your neighbors stand before you in the flesh, backpacks still slung over their shoulders, hunting knives on their belts, fresh mud on their shoes. Your legs buckle at the sight, and you crumple to the ground with a loud, harsh THUMP. Neither of them make any move to help you up.

“Well?” Simon prompts, the corner of his mouth pulled into a sinisterly entertained smirk. Johnny grins with the same ghoulish amusement.

Your brain buzzes with the proper response—an awkward laugh at your overreaction to their little surprise and a simple report that the light was on. But you’ve been flailing and struggling and fighting to keep up this inane charade of a blissfully ignorant neighbor since you entered the basement, since your neighbors called, since the cops showed up. Since you moved in next door.

You’re wound so tight that you’re suffocating yourself. You open your mouth to speak, but all that comes out are choked, staccato gasps. Johnny’s head tilts curiously while Simon raises an eyebrow.

The next sound out of you is a wounded hiccup. Then the tears start. Overflowing and blurring your vision, they pour out of you uncontrolled, where every effort to stop them forces them out faster. Raw, pure emotion streams down your face, unfiltered and fully on display.

You gaze up at Johnny and Simon with fear that you’ve forgotten how to hide.

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and of course it only gets worse when you finally make it to your feet - teeth brushed twice after two whole water bottles and a shower hot enough to burn the devil out of hell - and notice something silver glinting on the table by your door that most definitely wasn’t there yesterday morning.

“oh…god.” your heart flips up into your throat.

his dog tags.

you’ve known simon long enough to know what this is. he didn’t forget them. he didn’t misplace them. he left them there to tell you he heard every fuckin word you said and he’s not letting you off the hook for it. it’s a test. if you meant it - which you did - you’ll bring them to him. you’ll say it to him sober like he asked.

a man of morals. who knew war criminals had it in them.

you spend what has to be a full ten minutes just staring at them - like maybe you’re still drunk, maybe you’re seeing things and they’ll vanish if you focus hard enough. maybe you can unsay every devastatingly honest thing you said with sheer mental fortitude alone and they’ll magically fly back to him on their own.

spoiler alert: they don’t move. because of course they don’t. and it takes another ten before you finally stuff them into your pocket.

it’s probably best to just rip the bandaid off. bring them to him before you have to face him infront of the others in mess or briefing - damage control before the rest of the world finds out about the stunt you pulled. you don’t even know what you’re going to say - sorry? thanks? let’s just pretend i never told you i fantasize about fucking you when i can’t sleep?

fuck. it doesn’t matter. you know you owe him the return. a peace offering, a penance, a silent white-flag kind of knock on his door.

and so you walk the hall like it’s the green mile. you’ve never done a walk of shame but you imagine this has got to be as close as it comes. his door is shut when you reach it, and you stand in front of it like a coward for another unnecessary amount of time - complexion almost ill. ghostly. like you could float right through the fuckin wood if the wind blew hard enough.

finally, you knock.

it’s a moment, and then he answers, filling his doorframe with those thick shoulders stretching a tight black t-shirt, looking right as rain besides damp hair and bloodshot eyes.

you wonder, fleetingly, if he even slept. but then his gaze drops over the length of you and you busy yourself with fighting the urge to run for your fucking life.

you clear your throat. “can i..uh. can we talk?”

he nods and pops the door open, gesturing for you to come in. you take a few steps into his room - dark, organized, rather sparse - and nearly jump out of your flesh when the door shuts behind you. the click of a cell door closing, announcing your sealed fate.

you spin to face him once his boots have stopped dragging across the tiles, and find him leaning back against his desk - ankles and arms crossed.

you swallow, and pull the tags from your pocket. “i um. i think you forgot these.”

his brow twitches, barely, as he takes a glance at your hand. a flash of something behind his eyes you can’t name.

“did i?” he doesn’t move.

you shift your weight. the mortification could eat you alive. you’re certain it currently is.

“figured i’d bring them back.” you add, quieter now, trying your fucking hardest to sound normal. like you didn’t just spend the night saying all kinds of unholy things into the palm of his hand. “incase…uh, you were looking for them.”

he still doesn’t take them.

“strange,” his lips tilt. the first sign he’s shown that he's enjoying this. “coulda sworn i left em’ somewhere on purpose.”

your stomach flips. you try to laugh but it’s brittle. “right. sure.”

he shrugs. “not the kinda thing i usually misplace.”

you bite the inside of your cheek so hard you think it might bleed, unsure how to respond to that. it’s hard to even breathe with the way he’s watching you - like he’s taking notes - reading everything you’re not saying in the line of your mouth, in the way your fingers tremble around the chain of his tags.

“shaky this mornin, yeah?” he says, just casually knocking the rest of the wind out of your chest.

“i-“

you falter, because what the fuck are you even supposed to say? no, i’m fine. i’m totally good, actually. i definitely didn’t spend all morning curled fetal, praying to gods who’ve certainly damned me for a head injury so i can forget the mental car crash that was last nights events.

simon waits, eyes blazing like you’re a twitchy little experiment. trying to see which wire makes you spark the hardest.

you clear your throat. try again. “m’just tired.”

“mm.” he hums with a lazy nod. “musta been all that talkin you were doin.”

and there it is. here it comes.

“can’t really remember, but i’m sure it’s part of it.” you lie with a forced laugh. lie so awkwardly it hurts. “tequila. you know how it is.”

“do i ever.” he replies, dragging a hand through his damp hair.

silence stretches thick, after that. it’s so thick it makes the walls feel closer, the floor feel further away. you avert your gaze, and realize almost immediately how big of a mistake that is because the motion pulls your eyes across his forearm - his bare, inked forearm, tendons flexing with the movement he’s making.

you remember that arm last night, wrapped tight around your waist. pulling you close before you moaned god yes and please beneath the big hand attached to it like fucking gospel.

when you flinch, he smirks. not even pretending like he didn’t notice. “y’remember nothin from last night, then?”

your eyes snap up to his. you hate yourself for the fact that all of last nights confidence seems to be no where in fucking sight.

“well, uh, it’s fuzzy but…i remember bits.”

“bits.” he echos. nodding. “yeah. must be a shame.”

oh god.

“shame?”

“shame t’forget all that detail.” he lets the words sink in, watching your face as he leans a hand on the desk behind him. “pretty interestin things. real deep. could write a bloody novel, the way y’were goin on.”

“oh.” you choke, again, and mentally slap yourself. get it together. “well. thats-“

he hums again. “suppose i could walk y’through it.”

“walk me-“

earth tilts. he doesn’t let you finish. “y’know. help piece it together. fill in the gaps.”

“you don’t-you don’t have to-“

he lifts a hand to gesture vaguely toward his bed. your pulse races to the moon.

“your room, y’were right there. lookin at me like i was gonna eat y’alive.” his voice lowers. you swallow and it tastes like sin. his finger shifts to the space before his bed. pointing at the edge. “and i was right there, tryin’ like hell t’be a fuckin gentleman.”

you could laugh, maybe cry, or just absolutely combust right there on the floor because it all floods back in an instant. the way you moaned his name when he knelt over you to undo your boots. the way your thighs tensed as you told him you think about him. the way you stared at him while your brain short circuited and your mouth betrayed every secret you thought you’d die with.

part of you did die, you suppose. the part with your dignity. right there on the floor of your room, next to your boots he took off.

“look, simon-“

he steps closer now. just a step. “y’said you’d been into me for ages.”

you blink, holding your breath.

“said y’think bout me when y’cant sleep.” his voice is a rasp now, the muscle in his jaw ticks. “i asked y’a question, then. d’you remember it?”

fucking hell.

“yes.” you exhale.

“what was it.”

your heart is a jackhammer, breaking through your sternum.

“you-you asked if i think about you when…” you hesitate, and he cocks an eyebrow. “…when i touch myself.”

“yeah.” he says lowly. a breath, not a word. “tha’s right.”

your skin is burning and your limbs feel foreign, at this point. you feel nerve endings pulsing in place you didn’t know you even had nerves.

“d’you remember your answer?” he continues, taking another step toward you.

and it’s then that the anxiety takes over - you blink twice and bite down until you taste blood, shaking your head no. not because you’ve forgotten - fucking hell you remember everything - but because saying it out loud feels like jumping out of a plane without a parachute.

he doesn’t buy it.

“mm, sure y’do.” he calls your bluff, says it so soft it’s almost a coo. “y’know i know your tells - two blinks while bitin the inside of your cheek.” his eyes gleam as his lips twitch. “y’can’t lie t’me, princess.”

christ, you can’t help but laugh at that. it’s exactly the reason why you’ve been into him - he’s perceptive and cunning and cocky all at once.

this is the man you’ve thought about fucking for months.

“yes.” you whisper in admittance. “i said yes.”

“god yes.” he corrects with another step until he’s so close you have to kink your neck back to meet his eyes. his shoulders swallow the edges of your vision until all you see is him. “…still true?”

you nod. a broken thing. “yes.”

“yeah?” his head tilts, the heat of him sweltering. “y’think bout me when y’put hands on yourself?”

“simon-“

he hushes you with a shake of his head, eyes dipping to your lips. “tell me.”

it’s then that you realize dragging this on is for nothing. whatever drunken confession you made last night clearly cracked open whatever restraint simon’s been exercising for months.

clearly whatever you feel, he’s feeling it too.

“yes.” you confess, as firm as you possibly can. nothing coy in it now. “yes, i think about you when im alone. when i touch myself…doesn’t even feel right unless im picturing you. your hands. touching me.”

it all comes out of you in a rushed whisper, desperate and dripping sweet from your lips like it’s been saturating behind your teeth for too long. when he doesn’t respond right away, you realize you’ve stunned him, and pull on whatever courage you have left to press forward.

“i’ve wanted you for so long ive stopped tryin to figure out when it started.” you murmur, lost in his eyes. “and you?”

his breath catches. just the faintest hitch, like he wasn’t prepared for the edge of your honesty to turn and face him instead. it’s delectable, the slight composure tilt, but it doesn’t last long. because slowly - slowly, his mouth curls into something wrecked. something that says fuckin hell, it’s on.

his knuckles come up to graze your jaw, he lowers his head until his lips find your ear—

“y’askin if i think bout you when i’ve got my fist wrapped round my cock?” you inhale sharply, then choke on it when his mouth brushes your lobe. “course i fuckin do.”

your hands lift timidly to find his shirt, curling into it, dog tags still clinking between your fingers.

“y’think i haven’t been losin sleep over you?” he continues, dragging his mouth along your jaw. “think i didn’t cum with your name in my mouth last night, after you begged so nice n pretty f’me to fuck y’senseless?”

your lashes flutter. his free hand slips around your waist. “fuck, simon-“

“i know, sweet’eart.” he murmurs it, almost gentle, like it’s something you share. “tha’s what y’need, ain’t it? f’me to admit you’re not the only one losin mind here.”

you nod, partly frantic and partly delirious, and he exhales something strained - something from somewhere deep, catching on the parts of him dying to stay patient.

“good.” his hand slides up the back of your shirt, while the other finds the one of yours still holding his tags. “y’really come here just to return these, then?”

“no.” it chokes out of you instantly, mouth tilting toward his. “you wanted me to say it to you sober. made a promise bout what you’d do if i did?”

something feral flashes over his face, at that. translated through the grip he tightens on your waist, the exhale he washes over your jaw.

“yeah.” he says, tight. “i did.”

his mouth is barely a breath from yours.

“well here i am. sober.” you whisper. “wanting you more than i did while drunk.”

he makes a sound you’ve never heard before. not a groan, not a moan, something deep and feral punched straight out of his chest.

“fuckin hell.”

and then he’s kissing you.

no more waiting, no more games. simon’s a man of his word and it shows in the way his mouth crashes into yours - hungry and bruising and impatient - teeth knocking, one hand fisting in the back of your shirt and tearing it off you while the other pulls you in. he spins you both so your ass hits the edge of his desk, and then breaks away - trailing spit slick lips down your jaw and throat, thick fingers working to tease the band of your sweats.

“tell me where y’want me, sweet’eart.” he growls into your pulse.

you blink, dazed. “i-what?”

his teeth graze just enough to make you whimper, before his mouth drags back up beside your ear - ruinous in the inflection.

“tell me how you’ve imagined it,” his finger tips slide under your waistband, just teasing. “what you’ve pictured when you’re thinkin’ of me like this. right ‘ere.”

“oh god, simon.” you moan by his words alone, too wound to be embarrassed, fingers cinched tight in the fabric of his shirt. “your-your fingers. your mouth. your cock-“

that sound again. deep and devastated. restraint being ripped out by the roots.

“fuck. filthy thing f’me, aren’t you?” he says, as two fingers slide lower, slipping under heat soaked fabric and finding your slit, pressing in no further than they need to before circling back up - spreading the mess you’ve made just to feel it. “you’re fuckin soaked.”

you whimper as he teases your clit. his mouth finds your throat again, teeth grazing where your pulse stutters wild beneath flushed skin. you don’t trust your legs to hold you upright under the weight of it all - his touch, his voice, the feral gleam in his eye when he looks at you like you’re some prophecy being fulfilled.

“s’this what i do t’you?” he murmurs. “just from talkin t’you like this?”

you nod, a frantic little thing. “yes-god, yes.”

he exhales hard like it's kicked out of him, tugging your sweats down until they slide off your ankles before he lifts you back onto his desk and parts your thighs with hands so big they nearly span the entire width of them.

you fucking moan at the sight.

and of course it only fuels him - braces you back on your elbows, spine arched, breath caught in your throat as he steps in close between your legs. his eyes drag down to where you glisten in the dim light - slick, flushed, waiting - and he lets out a curse before returning his fingers to your aching cunt.

he presses in one digit slow, then adds another. knuckle deep until your eyes roll, hips jerking at the stretch.

“oh, fuck-“

he hisses through his teeth. “tight little cunt. fuckin meltin f’me.”

his thumb catches your clit in the same motion - rubbing soft circles, pushing you closer, dragging you toward the edge with every brutal curl of his fingers inside you.

“that feel good?” he growls against your jaw. “touched y’self in bed thinkin bout me between your thighs like this?”

you’re panting now. shaking.

“i-“ you gasp. “yes, simon-yes-“

“yeah?” his thumb speeds up, his fingers pump deeper, your head spins. “and did y’cum like this? like you’re about to f’me now?”

you don’t answer fast enough. he bites at your jaw.

“tell me.”

“no-n-never like this—”

he growls something vile under his breath. “poor thing. s’okay. i’ve got you.”

your walls flutter around him, your thighs shaking where they frame his hips, and he feels it - feels the beginning of the end stutter through you.

“simon-“ you whinge.

he cuts you off. “look at me.”

you do. barely.

“tha’s it,” he breathes. “cum on my fuckin fingers. show me what i’ve been missin.”

you’re starved for it, beyond saving, and its only a couple more deep pumps before you break.

it floods through you - white hot and searing. you cry out his name as you clamp around his digits, trembling apart on his desk while he watches you like you’re art - jaw clenched, pupils blown - his fingers still moving, dragging you through it until you’re sobbing into his shoulder.

“there we go.” when it passes and you’re limp, blinking up at him stunned - he withdraws slowly. “attagirl. s’fuckin good.”

you swallow, watching wide eyed as he brings those same fingers to his mouth and sucks them clean.

“been dreamin bout that taste, knew it’d be sweet.” he purrs as he leans down, wiping his spit slick digits over your cheek. “gonna need it proper soon.”

you don’t even have time to question or respond to that, because then he’s unbuckling his belt.

when you finally look back up, his eyes are wild.

“s’this what y’want?” he murmurs, tugging leather through loops before undoing the button at his waist. “when you came t’me this mornin, all flushed and pretendin t’be innocent. was this it? wantin’ me to bend y’over and take what y’fuckin offered?”

you choke as he tugs himself free - thick, leaking at the tip and throbbing - bigger than anything you’ve ever seen, nevermind taken.

the nod that follows is compulsive desperation. “holy fuck-yes-“

he smacks light at your thigh. “stand up. bend over f’me.”

you do as you’re told without hesitation - legs shaking as you stand spin and lean forward over the desk - breath still stuttering in your chest, heart going a mile a minute. your hands barely meet wood before he’s on you - no preamble. no breath between. grabs your hips like it’s instinct, like his hands were molded to hold you like this, and yanks you back against him with a roughness that steals whatever’s left in your lungs.

you shudder when he slides his cock against your slit once - twice - dragging the head through slick and stalls notched just shy of your entrance, breathing hard like it’s killing him to wait.

“y’remember what else y’said last night?”

you barely manage a nod. your mouth opens, but nothing comes out. he exhales something like a laugh.

“not compliments. not the fantasies. not the whining.” he drags through your mess again, slower this time. deliberate. “you said—“ his hips press forward just enough to make you gasp. “—you wondered if it’d hurt.”

you whine, embarrassed, but god it shoots straight through you. he bends low now, chest flush to your back, mouth to your ear.

“truth is, it might.” his lips curl into a smile. “so don’t fuckin run now.”

and then - only then - he pushes in. you gasp so hard your chest deflates on impact, thick head stretching sopping walls wide and dragging deeper than you’ve ever imagined - too much and not enough all at once.

“ohfuck-simon-“ your head drops toward the desk, eyes stinging.

“mm. tha’s it.” he groans, loud, burying himself halfway before pausing there. “tightest fuckin—bloody hell.”

he presses forward a little more - just enough to make your knees shake as he steadies you with one hand at your hip and grits his teeth. he pulls out just to feel you clench, then shoves back in - hard enough to jolt the desk and feed you all of him before you can even brace for it.

“ffffuck-ohfuck-“ you wail, knuckles bloodless where they clutch the desk. “you-you’re-“

“deep.” he bends over you, grabs a fistful of your hair, and drags your head back to his mouth, voice hot on your skin. “i fuckin know.”

he thrusts once. hard. then again. slower. deeper.

“jesus christ,” he undoes your bra with his free hand, paws at your tits until it hurts. “walked around this whole time with this cunt made f’me and didn’t say a fuckin word.”

“fuck simon-“

“yeah.” he grits against your ear. “tha’s how you moaned it last night. just like that.”

it’s punishing, the pace he sets. each snap of his hips smacking against your ass drags stars down into your retinas - body rocking and cervix kissed with each thrust - his grip is bruising and his mouth works at your neck, forcing noises out of you loud enough to rattle the fucking walls.

it doesn’t take long before your chest collapses onto slick wood, drool coated cheek pressed to the desk - vision bleeding white around the edges. he’s relentless - driven, brutal in rhythm, like he’s trying to fuck the memory of your voice out of his head, the memory of your thighs pressed together last night when he walked away instead of dropping to his knees and giving in.

he groans, open-mouthed, flushed everywhere. he’s not just fucking you. he’s wrecking you. dragging you across the edge by the throat and holding your broken pieces together with his own.

“mmf-fuck.” he snarls, burying his fist back in your hair. his palm cracks hard across your ass before snaking around your thigh to find your clit. devastating. “this. this is what i thought of for months. you. fuckin boneless f’me.”

he pulls out slow with a shuttering exhale, just enough for you to whine before he roars back in - hard and fast, fingers never slowing.

you shriek, squirming with no where to go.

“y’got no fuckin clue what y’did to me last night.” he’s panting, fingernails burning your scalp. “sat there slurrin filth. darin me t’do somethin bout it. tested every fuckin moral i’ve got.”

your second orgasm is a charging tide - and god, you know he feels it. you know by the way he rolls his fingers faster to chase it, moans in your ear when your walls flutter around him, fucks you deeper and slower just to drag you over by your hair.

“cum f’me. give me another.” he grits. “let me fuckin feel it sweet’eart.”

“ff-fuck simon! yes-yes-“

you sob, and then it hits you - violent and wet and cataclysmic - like every single one of your fantasies brought to life, like every pathetic orgasm you gave yourself to the thought of him and his fuckin hands all combined to create this. it’s stratospheric depths of bliss, all the colours of the rainbow erupting behind your eyes as he fucks you through it, not stalling his fingers until you’re sobbing.

“mhm. messy little thing.”

he growls with it before pulling out just enough to slap his cock against your soaked cunt, watching the slick stretch, the way you whine and arch out of pure fuckin instinct.

“look at this pretty cunt,” he rasps, teasing his tip over your clit. “drippin. tremblin. fuckin cryin f’me.”

you try to say something, try to catch a breath, but that all falls void as he thrusts back in without warning - one brutal, complete thrust, pushing everything out of you. screams, his name, your fucking soul. he groans as his hand finds your jaw, forcing your head to turn just enough so he can see your face. cheeks flushed, tears caught in your lashes.

“shh. don’t run—don’t fuckin run,” he growls against your mouth, arm cinched tight across your waist when your hips jerk away like it’s too much. “y’asked for this. said it t’me sober.”

“si-simon. please.” it’s breathless, ruined, wrecked beyond meaning, your mouth falling open on another sob when his hips grind deeper, when the head of him kisses a spot that has your knees giving out entirely. “fuck. s’good. s’m-much-“

“yeah?” he snarls. “s’good, huh?”

you nod something pathetic, lost for words. broken around him.

“want y’to think bout this when you’re alone.” his free hand drags down to your stomach, rests just high on your pelvis, feeling where he’s drilling. “how deep m’buried in this tight little cunt. how good my name feels in your fuckin throat.”

another nod. another hiccuped moan dragged out of you. “y-yes-yes i’ll think about it-mmff-“

“mhm,” he kisses you once. fleeting and viscous and hot. “good. s’good.”

a few more ragged thrusts and a sound gets torn from him, pulled from somewhere deep, feral and hoarse and ragged. his hips punch forward one final time, burying himself to the hilt, and then—

“fuck—fuck.”

he lets go.

he groans, voice breaking at the edges, forehead falling to the space between your shoulder blades. he pulses deep inside you, all of his pent up heat flooding you full until he’s spent, until he’s got nothing left to give and collapses against your back in one shuddering, boneless exhale.

and when it’s over, it’s just breathing - a long quiet moment full of everything neither of you know how to say before you register that he’s moving - leaning over you to grab at where his dog tags were discarded on the desk.

he slips them around your neck, and then pulls out.

sukuna laughs again, low and full. “aw, shit. that was adorable.”

you shoot him a look. glare weak, eyes watery.

“you okay, sweetheart?” he asks, already brushing your back, soothing in a way that shouldn’t feel as good as it does.

“i’m fine,” you mumble, embarrassed. your voice cracks.

he grins again, mouth all smug and soft. “wanna try again?”

“…maybe.”

he watches you this time. doesn’t say anything when you steal another puff, smaller this time. still a little rough. still not good. but you don’t choke. not as bad, anyway.

“attagirl,” he says, and something in your stomach twists.

you hand it back.

“tastes weird,” you admit.

“you’ll get used to it.” he takes another hit, exhales toward the sky. then he glances over. “bet you’d like it better from my mouth.”

your heart skips.

“w-what?”

he shrugs, casual. “shotgun. ever tried?”

you shake your head.

he taps ash into an old beer can on the railing, then takes one more drag. when he looks back at you, it’s all heat.

“c’mere,” he says again, voice lower. slower. “i’ll show you.”

and you do. you hesitate, which only makes him smirk deeper. cocky. knowing. like he can feel your pulse skipping through your wrist.

“relax,” sukuna murmurs, voice thick with smoke. “just open your mouth for me.”

you shouldn’t listen. you know that. but your lips part before you can think twice.

he steps in closer. impossibly close. one arm braces against the railing beside your head, his other hand holding the joint with two lazy fingers, almost burned down now. the smoke clings to him, to the collar of his shirt, to his breath. he brings it to his lips again, inhales slow—then leans down before he exhales, catching your chin between his thumb and forefinger like he’s done this a hundred times.

his mouth barely grazes yours.

and then he breathes it out.

warm smoke floods your mouth, your lungs. it’s smoother than before, still hazy, but your focus is too scrambled to register the burn. because sukuna’s lips are hovering over yours, eyes half-lidded, watching you like he’s already undressed you with his gaze.

you swallow, hard. his mouth lingers, breath mingling with yours, lips not quite touching.

“good girl,” he says, so low it’s almost a growl.

your stomach flips violently. the praise settles between your thighs like heat.

“see?” he adds, thumb dragging down the curve of your jaw. “tastes better like that, doesn’t it?”

you nod. or try to. it’s barely a motion, just enough to make him grin again.

“one more?” he offers, already moving in again, like he doesn’t need your answer.

and this time—this time when he exhales, your lips brush. soft. smoky.

he’s not kissing you. not really. but it feels like one anyway.

your knees wobble. his mouth hovers again, so fucking close.

and then he licks his lips. eyes flick down to your parted ones. waits.

“you wanna taste me again?” he asks, almost amused. “or you gonna be shy on me now, sweetheart?”

you don’t realize how warm you are until you’re back inside. maybe it’s the way the room tilts a little. not enough to scare you, just enough to feel like the floor’s moving soft beneath your socks. maybe it’s the bass still thumping through the walls. maybe it’s him, still pressed against your side.

you’re not even high, really.

just… warm. tingly. floaty. like a fizzy drink. like your mouth tastes like smoke and sugar and you’re not sure if it’s from the shotgunning or just him.

he doesn’t move away. his hand finds the small of your back when you wobble slightly. not to steady you. just to touch.

“you good?” he asks, lips brushing the shell of your ear.

you nod. too quickly. then blink up at him.

and then—god help you—you giggle.

his brow arches. “oh?”

you don’t even know what’s funny. the way his shirt’s positioned? the way his necklace dangles right at your eyeline? the way your body feels like it’s made of candlewax?

you can’t stop staring at his mouth.

and he knows it.

“you’re high,” he says, a smirk twitching at the corner of his mouth.

you shake your head. “no,” you whisper, though you sound more breathless than you mean to. “just a little… floaty.”

he hums. fingers brushing your side, lower now.

“floaty,” he echoes. “that what we’re calling it?”

you nod again. but slower this time. eyes still locked on his mouth like it’s the only solid thing in the room.

“you’re staring,” he murmurs.

“m’not.”

“mmhm.”

you’re still staring. especially when his tongue flicks across his lip, like he’s daring you to do something about it.

and—god. you do.

you lean in.

not a kiss. not yet. just close. your nose grazes his. your breath catches. your hand fists the front of his shirt like you need something to hold onto, and his eyes flicker, half-lidded.

“you’re actin’ different,” he murmurs, voice dipped in something low and amused.

“noooo,” you whisper, lashes fluttering.

“no?” his hands slide down to your hips, pulling you snug against him.

“you’re just… really sexy,” you say. it slips out too fast. too soft. the moment it leaves your mouth, your eyes widen in horror.

he laughs. full-on.

you cover your face with both hands, mortified.

he pulls them down, gently.

“don’t hide,” he says, grinning now. “i like this version of you. high and horny.”

your mouth drops open. “am not—”

“baby,” he interrupts, dipping his head until your noses bump, “you’re grinding on my thigh.”

you freeze.

then blink down.

you are. barely. just a little. soft and slow, like you didn’t even notice. and now your hands fly back up to your face.

he groans, deep in his chest.

“fuck,” he mutters, voice ragged. “you’re gonna kill me.”

he presses a thigh up firmer between your legs and watches your lashes flutter.

“damn,” he murmurs, pulling your leg over his lap, “who knew my girl just needed a little smoke to show me how she really is.”

you squirm, half-embarrassed, half still riding whatever fuzzy, low-buzz high is humming in your limbs. you press your face into his shoulder, but he’s already grinning, hand dragging up the inside of your thigh like it’s second nature.

“don’t get all shy now,” he teases, voice dipped in that lazy charm. “too late for that.”

your legs tighten around him.

and he feels it.

he groans under his breath, head falling back for a second like he’s collecting himself, before his eyes drop back to you—a little heavy, a little wild.

“bathroom,” he says.

you blink. “what?”

“bathroom,” he repeats, already shifting you off his lap, steadying you when you stumble slightly. “unless you wanna grind my thigh in front of the whole fuckin’ party.”

your eyes widen, heat climbing up your cheeks. but your hand still finds his, fingers lacing without thinking.

the walk is a blur. music thudding behind you, hallway lights too bright. you barely notice people talking. laughing. someone calls his name but he doesn’t answer, just tugs you down the hall, his hand firm on your waist like he owns it.

you hadn’t even realized how bad it’d gotten until he locked the bathroom door behind you.

until the echo of the party vanished, muffled through tile walls and music-thick floors, leaving you both in this tiny, hazy space that smelled like weed and faded cologne and something sweeter—him. you were dizzy. not just high, not just warm from the smoke still coating the back of your throat, but dizzy from the way he’d been looking at you all night. since the shotgun. since the way your lips had brushed and you’d looked up at him with glassy eyes, pupils blown wide.

you don’t remember who kissed first, only that your back hit the counter and his hands were already everywhere. under your skirt, gripping your thighs, lifting you like you weighed nothing and sitting you on the edge of the sink.

“can’t believe you,” he muttered, pulling your panties down to your knees. “you’re fuckin’ soaked. this from one hit?”

you whimpered—barely nodded. it wasn’t just one. it was him. the heat of his palm against your neck. the heavy drag of his voice every time he called you baby in front of the other guys. the way he looked at you like he wanted to ruin you, just so he could build you back up again.

his rings were cold when they brushed your folds, but the burn of his mouth made you jolt. he knelt between your legs like he had something to prove, mouthing at your pussy like it was the only thing in the world worth praying to.

and fuck, you wanted to cry—his tongue was slow, thick, greedy, curling inside you while his thumb circled your clit just the way you liked. you could feel yourself dripping down the curve of his wrist, making a mess all over his hand, but he didn’t care. didn’t pause. just kept groaning into your cunt like he was starving and you were the only meal he’d ever wanted.

you tugged his hair. moaned his name. rocked your hips against his face and choked out a high, half-sobbing plea when your thighs started to shake.

“’kuna—fuck, wait, i’m—”