and let me love you anyway

Your mouth purses and you drop your eyes, instead taking his index finger and twisting it petulantly between yours, first one way and then the other until Jack has to let his hand go limp.

“I dunno,” you mumble.

“Are you in pain?”

“No.”

“Is it interfering with your ability to work?”

“…Yes.”

Interfering might actually be putting it mildly. The question was largely ceremonial and both of you know it. You have done fuck-all since nine except follow him around from room to room like an imprinted duckling who has mistaken an attending physician for its mother.

“Tell me exactly what you need and maybe I’ll do something about this little crisis of yours.”

Jack has to work not to laugh when you immediately retreat. An entire evening spent attached to his hip, and now that he has finally asked you to name the obvious, you suddenly cannot bear to have a face.

You take his hand and hide behind it instead, pressing his palm over your mouth while your burning cheek fits itself into the cup of it.

Jack indulges you, fingers spreading gently along your temple.

“Need you, please,” you say eventually, muffled against his skin.

That is good enough for Jack. Several minutes later, he has the nearest consult-room locked behind you.

He sits you on the edge of the exam table and takes care of the rest himself. He would just like his functioning girlfriend back sooner rather than later.

Never mind that he gets to achieve that goal with his favorite activity — his fingers between your dripping thighs. One arm keeps you close, his mouth brushing your temple while he alternates praise with firm reminders that Shen is working close enough to hear you if you get careless.

“Quiet, angel. C’mon. You asked me to take care of you, let me do it.”

By the time he is fixing your underwear and smoothing your skirt back into place, you have gone pleasantly boneless beneath his calloused hands.

Jack checks you over once with intolerable satisfaction and says, “There. Think you can survive until we get home now?”

MICHAEL 'ROBBY' ROBINAVITCH notices the second you start to hover.

Suddenly his desk becomes the only viable place in the entire emergency department to sit, every trip past him requires some unnecessary little brush of your fingers over his arm, and tasks that should send you back to the front desk somehow end with you standing beside him again, blinking up saccharinely and asking if there's anything else he needs.

So very industrious and thoughtful. And entirely coincidental, surely. As though Robby hasn't learned your tells by now. That when you start taking your secretarial duties this seriously, what you actually want has very little to do with paperwork.

He has no intention of sharing that information with you, though.

That would be idiotic, handing you the answer key to your own behavior when half the fun is knowing what you want hours before you finally muster the courage to ask for it.

Much better to keep quiet. Much better, too, not to satisfy you immediately.

There is a particular sweetness to letting the problem marinate, to watching ordinary want become restless, fidgety desperation under his neglect.

He'll usually pull you somewhere private, like he's doing now, just to wind you tighter. Hand beneath your skirt, mouth against your ear, giving you exactly enough attention to make you think you'll get what you want, then he stops.

Smooths your skirt back into place, thumbs flat the little wrinkle he made at your hip.

Your face when you realize is almost worth the inevitable whining. Almost.

“Back to work.” He tips your chin up when you stare at him, wounded and incredulous. Fucking cute. “And don’t touch yourself. I mean it.” One last squeeze to your waist before he opens the door. “I’ll check later, sweetheart. You better be able to tell me you listened.”

His method has always been control. But not deprivation as you so often claim it to be.

Robby gives you plenty, eventually, but he likes deciding when you get it, likes watching your entire demeanor reorganize itself around the promise.

And it works well.

You spend the rest of the shift behaving beautifully. Phones answered, paperwork handled, not one smart comment when Frank starts needling you, because every so often Robby materializes beside your desk, bends down to look at you over his glasses, and asks, “Still being good for me?”

You nod every single time. A little quicker as the hours drag on.

By the time another quiet-ish stretch finally opens up, he decides you have suffered enough. And Robby is generous when generosity has been earned.

He takes his time despite having almost none of it, hands spreading your thighs wider while his mouth works between them with languid attention, licking through the slick mess of your pussy you have been carrying around all afternoon.

Every little attempt to squirm away from his tongue gets corrected with a firmer grip. He knows exactly what he withheld from you and apparently intends to repay it with interest.

“Knew you could listen,” he says when he finally looks up. His mouth is wet. “Much nicer like this, isn’t it? When you behave.”

FRANK LANGDON has very little tolerance for your neediness because it tends to expose his own.

Wanting you is manageable when you’re across the department, reduced to glimpses between curtains and the occasional flash of your smile over somebody’s shoulder. Those he can quarantine alongside hunger and exhaustion, banal inconveniences he will deal with later.

It becomes harder when you follow him into the supply room and wrap both arms around his waist before the door has even settled shut behind you.

“Missed you,” you say against his back.

Frank keeps looking at the shelf in front of him, though he has stopped reading any of the labels.

“We saw each other twenty minutes ago.”

You make a small, unconvinced sound and edge nearer, fitting yourself along his spine, turning breathing into a shared activity.

Your mouth rests just below his shoulder blade; he can sense the question gathering there before it arrives, “Didn’t you miss me?”

“I think we need to start working on this attachment issue of yours,” Frank snorts, though the hand that finds the lock does so with pathetic urgency. “You’re spoiled, you know that? Nobody ever taught you you can’t get everything the second you want it.”

The lecture might carry more authority if he weren't already turning around and walking you backward, one hand closing around your waist until your shoulders meet the wall.

“What’re you gonna do when I take a vacation?” he asks, mouth grazing your cheek.

His fingers are already working his belt loose. He gets the button open, drags his zipper down and pushes his pants lower with one impatient shove, proving absolutely nothing about which of you missed the other more.

Frank maintains the fiction anyway.

Every little sound you make against the supply-room wall while he fucks you earns some irritated huff against your cheek, a muttered Jesus, baby, like your whining is an inconvenience being inflicted upon him rather than the entire reason his pace keeps changing whenever he finds one he particularly likes.

The hypocrisy lasts all the way through, right up until he walks you back into the department himself with you looking very obviously debauched, prompting Robby to stare at him and Jack to ask whether Frank understands the meaning of discretion.

Frank does not.

Your back hits the mattress hard enough to make the old springs squeal beneath you and Jack’s first hiss isn’t one of pleasure.

“Shut. Up.” 

His hand closes around your jaw before the laugh can properly make it out, fingers digging into the hinge just shy of painful. His thumb finds the soft under of your chin and presses until your mouth falls open for him.

It’s supposed to be corrective, presumably. Intimidating. To make you reconsider whatever smart thing you were about to say.

Instead, you turn your head just enough to catch the heel of his palm between your teeth. Salt. Sunscreen. Jack.

You bite down lightly and watch the quick flare in his eyes that says try me again.

It makes you want to try him again.

This is perhaps your most enduring character defect, the congenital need to worry at Jack Abbot until something gives, to poke one finger into every concealed pressure point and keep pressing until that pleasant facade finally fractures and you get the man underneath, irritated and looking at you like patience is a finite natural resource you have personally exhausted.

Conveniently, this defect has also made the two of you very easy to hide.

Wanting Jack has never looked substantially different than hating him. Same symptoms, really. 

At work it manifests as narrowed eyes across the nurses’ station, remarks delivered half an octave louder than necessary, shoulders knocking in hallways wide enough to accommodate two functioning adults.

In private, the argument merely changes medium.

You end up underneath him with your thighs spread around his hips while he fucks every complaint back into you, and somehow neither of you has to concede the point.

That is, more or less, what is happening now.

Jack is attempting to fuck a confession out of you, specifically the admission that he had been right when he told you not to challenge the ocean after three frozen margaritas and one declaration that rip currents were mostly “a mindset.”

In your defense, this had sounded perfectly reasonable at the time. The ocean disagreed.

You made it maybe six yards before a wave hit your broadside, folded you clean in half, stole your sunglasses, and deposited you at Jack’s feet with enough seaweed caught in your bikini to suggest the beginnings of marine conservation.

You called him an insufferable bastard for saying he told you so. 

Now he keeps insisting he “rescued” you because he hauled you upright by the waist while you sputtered saltwater.

He would like an apology. You would like him dead. Compromise remains unlikely. You would swallow your own tongue before giving him the satisfaction. 

You nip him again, sharper this time, then grin around his thumb. “Go on — make me. You’ve been trying all day.” 

“Fucking brat.” He drags his thumb free, replacing it with two thick fingers that press insistently at your tongue. “Keep talking and I’ll stuff you so full the only word you remember is sorry.” 

He’s close to delivering on that promise, hips battering the breath from your lungs until all you can do is claw the navy sheets below you.

You almost give him the noise he’s hunting for, but feeding Jack’s ego has never been on your to-do list, so you smother the sound and glare your defiance instead.

You clamp down on his fingers, hard enough to make him grunt, and he jerks back, slick digits slipping free. 

“Jesus — watch the teeth,” he growls, shaking the sting before flattening your wrist to the mattress. “You want a muzzle, sweetheart?” 

You swipe your tongue over enamel, savoring the residue. “So many threats, Doctor. I’m starting to think you’re all talk.” 

“Careful,” Jack murmurs with a hollow laugh. “You might hurt my feelings.”

He apparently decides conversation has exhausted its usefulness.

One second you are on you looking at him; the next he has you flipped facedown, dragged your hips into the air, and buried himself back inside you with enough force to make the entire bed complain in sympathy. 

His chest covers your back, breath searing the shell of your ear. A half-moan, half-sob cracks loose out of you, palms skidding for purchase as your pelvis jerks forward as if distance could blunt the stretch, make it more manageable.

Jack only laughs again, settling both hands over your shoulder blades as he lets his weight weld you to the sheets.

“Where d’you think you’re going?” Each thrust stakes you there, sensation cresting so hot the edges of the room tremble out of focus and into watercolors.

You mash your face into the pillow, trying to hide the choked noises bleeding from you but they seep through cotton and feathers just the same.

“Listen to you,” he croons, mock-tender, thumb stroking a false comfort along your spine. He grinds you down while he pushes in again, slow enough you feel the catch of every ridge. “So fucking mouthy until I start making you feel good.” 

His hand snakes beneath you, palm burning a trail down your stomach until two fingers find your clit. The first tight circle detonates in your core. Supernova heat.

“Pretty thing like you shouldn’t fight common sense,” he purrs. “Just admit it — You were right, Jack. Should’ve trust you. Smartest guy I know. That’s all I want.” Another figure-eight of his thumb, another planet collision behind your eyes. “I keep you safe, I make you feel good — why’s it so hard to give me a little credit?”

“Because — you’re such — a cocky — asshole,” you gasp, the insult dissolving into a helpless whine when his thumb presses harder. 

“Dirty mouth on you,” Jack tuts. “C’mon, honey. Be sweet for ten little seconds — tell me I’m right — and I’ll let you come.”

You give him nothing but a furious side-to-side wobble, hair stuck wetly across your cheeks.

He can make your thighs shake and turn your brain into warm soup but he cannot make you surrender a point you are still technically convinced is yours. 

The knot low in your belly winds tighter in retaliation, every muscle beginning that little climb towards something inevitable, and then Jack simply stops.

Fingers gone. Thrust halted. He holds himself inside you like a blade sheathed to the hilt, every inch throbbing but inert, punishment by deprivation. 

Your muscles fire once more on instinct, grasping at a phantom that’s already gone, walls twitching uselessly around empty air.

The knot loosens with insulting patience — twist, release, release — until climax slips from reachable to hypothetical. 

A brittle, involuntary sound hooks in your throat, proof that your body has accepted what your mind refuses to: Jack Abbot means to leave you suspended in this awful limbo until you fold. 

“Please — no.” You writhe beneath him in shallow arcs, powerless under the weight pinning you. “Need you — need you to keep going.” 

He slips a broad palm under your jaw, lifting your mouth off the pillow for your gasps to reach him unfiltered. “You know what I need, honey. Say the words, and I’ll give you everything you’re begging for.” 

“I — I’m sorry,” you finally spit out. “You were right, Jack. Always are. Just — please — don’t stop.” 

The words hit like blood in the water. He buries himself with a hoarse snarl, rhythm turning brutal, inexorable, as though the apology were a starting gun. Wood knocks hard against the plaster wall and your body jolts forward with every drive.

“Was that so hard?” His voice drips triumph while his teeth worry a shallow crescent into your shoulder. “Christ, sweetheart, what’re you always fighting me for? You know I’m gonna get my way.” 

The only reply you manage is a shaky “uh-huh — ah, Jack —” strangled into the pillow, every syllable climbing higher until it breaks apart in a thin, urgent keen that tells him exactly how close you are. 

“There you go, pretty girl. Give it to me — yeah, just like that.” 

That’s all it takes.

Your body locks, squeezes, and he answers with a raw-throated groan, bracing you inside the bracket on his arms while your trembling tries to shake both of you off the bed.

Then everything goes incandescent. A long, rushing hush, white and depthless, flooding every corner of your mind as you come all over his length.

Somewhere inside all that brightness, Jack loses whatever rhythm he had left.

He lasts two more strokes. 

“Fuck — sweetheart.” His hips snap tight against your ass, burying himself as deep as he can go, filling you in heavy surges that make your already-softened core flutter all over again. 

You barely understand it at first, only feel another strange wave roll through you, your body squeezing reflexively around every throb until his arms tighten and his forehead drops heavily between your shoulder blades. 

Jack stays folded over you until both your breathing begins to settle, the hard rise and fall of his chest gradually slowing against your spine.

When he finally moves, it is with considerably more care than anything he has done in the last thirty minutes.

He withdraws from you slowly, and your cunt manages one useless twitch at the emptiness he leaves behind. Pathetic, really, but apparently it's all the reaction your spent body can afford.

Sensing the weakness, the bastard takes advantage.

He rolls you onto your other side until you're nose-to-nose, the world tilting under the authority of a man rearranging furniture. Normally, you'd bark at him to ask first. Right now you just marvel that you're the furniture.

You blink at him through the pleasant cotton packed between your ears.

Jack studies the damage he's done, mouth curling like he's content with his handiwork, then lowers himself to press a kiss above your hipbone.

He works upward without hurry, lips brushing warm over skin still prickling with aftershocks, teeth occasionally catching in a light nip that makes you squirm before he kisses the same place better.

Your fingers slide into the silver-flecked hair at his temples, nails scratching lightly until you feel the growl rumble against your ribs.

“Funny how suddenly you like me again.”

“Like is generous.” You give the silver strands at his temple a tug. “Give me five minutes. I’ll remember everything I hate about you.”

“Mm. I can do a lot with five minutes.” He lifts his head just enough to give you that smug, crooked look.

“Four and a half now.”

Jack laughs, apparently delighted by the threat of your imminent return to hostility, and works his way up until there is nowhere left between you for him to kiss.

He folds down beside you and takes your mouth one final time before you can decide whether final kisses are perhaps too affectionate for people who supposedly cannot stand each other.

“Better use ’em wisely, then.”

He does, in fact, use them wisely. Spending what remains of his allotted minutes with his mouth between your thighs and apparently deciding there is some obscure world record for orgasms induced out of spite that he intends to break before sunrise.

But by breakfast, the consequences have arrived.

You sit at the island with a fork slack between your fingers, pancakes cooling untouched beneath a generous pour of syrup.

Your eyelids keep flirting with gravity; every time they drop Jack clears his throat in exaggerated warnings, as if falling face-first into breakfast would somehow be his fault.

It would be. Somehow. You'd make it so.

“Late night?” Frank asks from across the island, not bothering to look up from whatever he’s doing to his coffee.

Your head lifts approximately half an inch.

“No, I'm fine,” you say, far too quickly. You hear it the second it leaves your mouth, that bright little note of guilt you have apparently developed overnight, and clear your throat before anyone else can appreciate it. “I'm fine. Just tired. All that swimming yesterday wore me out.”

Dana, standing at the sink with her sleeves pushed up, lets out a thoughtful hum as she rinses a plate.

“Funny, everyone seems to be dragging this morning,” she remarks, flicking water off her wrist. “Can’t imagine why.”

“I can.” Robby lifts his mug. “Some of us were awake until two in the morning. Against our will.”

There is a tiny, merciful interval where you almost misunderstand him.

Of course people were awake. There are more than twenty coworkers crammed into one beach house, sleeping on couches and air mattresses and whatever other horizontal surfaces they could claim before someone else did.

Somebody is always awake. Somebody is always opening a refrigerator or flushing a toilet or talking too loudly in the hallway.

But when you finally drag your eyes up from your pancakes and find several people already looking at you with expressions ranging from tired amusement to outright accusation, the alternate interpretation arrives all at once.

They heard you. They heard Jack. Possibly extensively.

Fuck.

You lower your eyes and shovel another piece of pancake into your mouth.

Then again, maybe they're staring for some completely unrelated reason. A syrup stain, bed hair, the fact that you still haven't blinked in ten seconds.

“So, Jack,” Trinity suddenly says from the other side of the island, casual enough that for one stupid second you don’t hear the trap opening beneath your feet, “how's it feel being right all the time?”

You keep chewing.

“I mean, so right,” she adds, her voice climbing into a suspiciously breathy imitation. “The rightest man alive, apparently.”

The pancake becomes significantly harder to swallow as a hot ribbon of mortification slides up your throat. You manage a strangled cough and focus on sawing your next bite into pieces the size of atoms so you don't have to lift your head and meet anyone's eyes.

Without missing a beat, Jack wipes a smear of syrup from his thumb and shrugs. “Feels pretty nice, if I’m honest.”

“You are such a smug little —”

“Language,” Dana cuts in from the sink without even turning around.

You clamp your lips together, cheeks still burning, then lean just enough into Jack’s line of sight and mouth, shit.

His smirk cuts sideways across his face, eyes dropping briefly to your lips before coming back up darker than they were a second ago. His nostrils flare faintly, then his thighs spread another inch beneath the island as he leans back.

A minute repositioning of his hips that would mean nothing to anybody else and means everything to you because you know exactly what Jack looks like when his body gets ahead of his better judgment.

“Ew,” Trinity says suddenly, pointing between you and Jack with her fork. “This is flirting, isn’t it? You two have just been doing foreplay in front of us for, like, years.”

Robby grimaces. “Freaks.”

“I have no idea what you mean,” you insist, despite the heat steadily colonizing your entire face.

Jack undermines you immediately as he shoots you a wink. “It’s worked pretty well for us.”

Your eyes widen ten sizes. “Shut. Up.”

His grin only gets worse, teeth showing this time, and something about that makes you want to kick his ankle under the island just to restore the natural order of things.

Frank shakes his head. “Get a room.”

“We had one. Apparently that was the problem,” Jack says.

A chorus of disgusted groans answers him.

MARIA NOTE jack abbot getting pussy as a direct consequence of being annoying… terrible precedent to set actually 🍋🫧🌀 HOPE YOU ENJOY I LOVE YOU ALLLL

he lets you do your best, his hand quickly becoming more than than simply guidance as he maneuvers you himself, a pretty little doll for him to use.

you'll try to get yourself off for hours if he'd let you, but he never does. he only indulges you up until your moans turn to whimpers and then to straight up whines. cause jack knows you'll never be able to give yourself what you need. he's just too big for you. so deep inside, filling you up so full that you can't move fast enough, never able to make it feel as good as he can.

but it's okay, because that's what he's here for. he smiles up at you all sweet like and ask, "you getting tired, pretty girl?"

and the moment you nod he's turning you over, hand splayed wide on the small of your back to keep his length fully inside you. jack situates himself so he's right between your spread legs, his hips grinding against yours. he lays his whole body weight on top of you, making you feel all warm and small and smothered in the very best ways.

jack abbot who laughs when he wraps those big, strong biceps around your head and smushes you between them, delighting in the excited little squeal you give in response. he fucks you just like that, holding you in his embrace, so close he can feel your heart beating fast against his sternum. 

his belly is soft, pressing into yours as he ruts his cock into your syrupy heat. you can feel and smell and see nothing but him, engulfed in all his safety. the graying curls at the base of his cock grow slick with your arousal, providing just enough friction against your clit that it only takes minutes before your walls clench around him.

jack abbot who talks you through it each and every time. who presses tender kisses against your cheeks and nose and forehead and whispers, "yeah, that feel good, baby? there you go. that's better, hm? just needed a little help. s'okay. i've got you. feel how deep i am? squeezin' me so tight." 

he pumps you full of cum and stays inside of you until his cock softens in the mess he's made, giving a last few slow, deep strokes before he finally pulls out.

jack abbot who holds you in his arms and smiles to himself when you lay your head on his chest and start snoring a few short minutes later, sleepy and sated and satisfied.