ro

“Come over. I’ll order Thai. You can stay.”

As if it was some kind of prize. Like the offer of food and his bed was supposed to feel anything other than a pity invitation. Like that sentence wasn’t the exact same breadcrumb he’d been throwing your way for months, just enough to keep you following, never enough to satisfy.

He wasn’t saying I miss you. He wasn’t saying I’m sorry I hurt you or I didn’t know what I had until you were gone. He was saying Come over. Like this was still a game he was winning.

And maybe a week ago, hell, maybe even yesterday, you would’ve paused. You would’ve stared at the message with that same dull throb in your chest and thought maybe this time will be different. Maybe he means it. Maybe he’s trying.

But right now?

Right now, you felt done.

Done with making excuses for him. Done with confusing attention for affection. Done with dragging your heart behind you like dead weight every time he pulled you back in with nothing more than a half-assed promise and a takeout order.

Your fingers hovered for a second, just long enough to acknowledge the part of you that still wanted to believe he’d ever be capable of giving you what you needed.

And then you typed:

“No. We’re done, Simon. For real this time. Don’t text me again.”

Your thumb hit send before your brain could stop you, before your heart could scream, before the echo of what if could take root and grow into something dangerous again.

And then, without waiting for the three dots to pop up, without giving yourself a chance to hesitate or soften or let him back in even a little you blocked the number.

And that was it.

Your hand was trembling, your eyes burned, but the tears didn’t fall. And your heartbeat was steady in your chest, like it was relieved.

You looked up at the sky. Watched the clouds move slowly across the blue. They didn’t know what it meant to panic over someone who didn’t care.

You weren’t happy, not yet. But for the first time in too long, you didn’t feel chained to him anymore.

And that, in itself, felt like something.

...

You hadn’t seen him in over two weeks.

No texts, no calls, no sudden knocks at your door. No glimpses of him near your job, no DMs from new burner accounts, nor mutual friends trying to convince you he was “going through it.”

And honestly? You were starting to think he’d finally gotten the message. That maybe he’d realized what it meant when you said we’re done. That he’d felt the silence for what it was: a full stop, not a pause.

But then he showed up. Of course he did.

You were walking home from the grocery store, just a quick trip for bread and milk and some random snacks you didn’t need but bought anyway because the act of filling your cupboards made you feel happier. You’d just turned the corner onto your street, earbuds in, music low, mind somewhere else entirely, when you looked up and froze.

He was leaning against your building. And he had the nerve to be casual about it too, his arms crossed, head down like this wasn’t completely insane. He looked up when you stopped walking, and his mouth did that slow curl into a grin that used to make your stomach flip but now just made your jaw tighten.

You pulled your earbuds out and said nothing.

“Hey,” he said, as if this was normal or completely not out of bounds. “You’ve been hard to reach.”

“Simon,” you started, your voice flat, your pulse already kicking up. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

He shrugged. “You blocked my number and my backup email. You weren’t really leaving me a lot of options.”

You blinked, stunned at how casually he said it. “So you decided to stalk me instead?”

“That’s a dramatic word,” he said, pushing off the wall and walking toward you like you weren’t already backing away slightly, trying to hold onto your grip. “I just wanted to talk. You made that impossible.”

“I made it impossible because we broke up,” you snapped, dropping your grocery bag onto the steps with more force than necessary. “I told you not to text me. Not to call. I said we were done—done, Simon—what don’t you get?”

He smiled again, that infuriating smirk, like you’d just said something cute instead of trying to set a boundary.

“Yeah,” he said, cocking his head. “We broke up, sure. But that doesn’t mean you get to erase me.”

You stared at him, jaw slack. “Are you actually hearing yourself?”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Simon said, stepping closer now, his voice calmer, which, honestly, made you want to scream. “You think a couple texts and a blocklist are gonna make me forget what we were? You really think that’s enough?”

“I don’t want you to forget,” you snapped. “I want you to leave me alone. I want you to understand that this—whatever this was—is over. I’m not doing this anymore. I don’t belong to you.”

Something in his expression shifted then, just a flicker. A twitch of his jaw, a tightening of the eyes. You’d seen that look before, right before the walls went up. Right before the mask slipped into place.

“You keep saying we’re over,” Simon said slowly, “but you don’t get it.”

He stepped in so close you could feel the heat radiating off him, smell the scent of his skin, that cologne he always wore too much of, the one that used to make you ache but now just made your stomach turn.

“You and me?” he whispered. “We’re never really over.”

Your breath hitched, and for a second—for one stupid, fleeting second—you felt that pull again. That old, broken, magnetic force that lived in the space between his mouth and yours, in the memory of what it felt like to be wanted by him.

But you were so fucking tired of confusing that with love. So you stepped back.

You looked him dead in the eye, and you said:

“What do you want from me, Simon? Seriously. Do you want me to scream? Do you want me to cry? Do you want me to fall apart in front of you just so you can feel something? Because whatever this is—it’s not love, it’s not real. It’s you, trying to control me. And I’m done letting you.”

He didn’t say anything.

Just stood there. And you picked up your bag again, turned on your heel, and walked away. You didn’t look back, didn’t have to.

Because this time? You were the one leaving him behind.

...

It had been weeks.

Weeks of silence, weeks of healing, and pretending you were ready to move on, even when your heart still felt like a battlefield he’d walked away from without ever looking back.

So when your coworker asked you out—the nice one, the one who remembered your coffee order and always held the elevator—you said yes.

You didn’t feel fireworks, nor did you get butterflies. But you also didn’t feel dread, or the bone-deep exhaustion that came from chasing someone who only ever looked back when you were halfway out the door.

And maybe that was enough. Maybe soft was what you needed now. Safe and simple.

He took you to a cozy little restaurant tucked off the main street, the kind with candlelight and mismatched chairs and a menu written entirely in cursive. He held the door open for you, pulled your chair out when you sat, complimented your dress without looking at your chest. And you smiled, even if it felt a little forced. You laughed, even if it didn’t quite reach your eyes.

You tried...

Halfway through the meal, you excused yourself to the bathroom. The ladies’ room was down a narrow hallway in the back, quiet and dim, music muffled through the walls. You were halfway there when you felt it.

That shift in the air.

That awareness that only ever came from one person. And you didn’t even get the chance to turn around before he was there.

He stepped out from the shadows of the hallway like a fucking ghost, like he’d been waiting, like he knew you’d be here and timed it down to the minute. And before you could speak, before you could even breathe, he had you pressed up against the wall, one arm caging you in, the other sliding slowly along your waist.

His mouth was at your ear in an instant, voice low, thick, dirty.

“Really, sweetheart?” he murmured, breath warm against your skin. “This the best you can do?”

Your heart slammed in your chest. Your hands went to his chest, pushing lightly, but you didn’t move. Couldn’t.

He leaned in closer, body not quite touching yours but so fucking close, you could feel the heat radiating off him like fire.

“You think he’s gonna fuck you better than I do?” he whispered, and it wasn’t even a question—it was filth wrapped in confidence. “You think he even knows what to do with you? Bet he doesn’t even know how you sound when you beg. Doesn’t know how your thighs shake when I’ve got my mouth on you—”

“Stop it,” you hissed, voice shaking, but your knees were already weak and your throat felt tight.

Simon smirked, eyes dark and gleaming. “Can’t stop thinking about it, can you? His hands won't feel right, will they? Bet you’d picture mine every time he touches you.”

Your hands pushed harder now, but he didn’t flinch.

“And what about when he’s inside you?” Simon rasped, mouth brushing your jaw, teeth grazing skin just enough to make you gasp. “You gonna close your eyes and pretend it’s me?”

“At least he’ll fucking stay,” you snapped, louder now, anger burning through the haze. “At least he won’t leave the second he gets what he wants. At least I won’t wake up to an empty bed.”

That got him. His jaw clenched instantly.

But he didn’t move. He just stared at you, breathing hard, hands twitching like he didn’t know whether to touch you or punch a hole in the wall beside your head.

You shoved him. Hard.

“Get the fuck out of my way.”

Simon didn’t move right away. He just stood there, watching you like you’d gutted him, like your words had cut deeper than you’d meant them to—but you didn’t regret it.

Not this time.

You stepped around him, ignoring the way your legs trembled beneath you, head high, heart pounding like it was trying to tear its way out of your chest.

You didn’t look back.

You walked straight back to the table, sat down, and smiled at your date like your ex hadn’t just whispered filth into your ear in a hallway like a man possessed.

“Everything okay?” your date asked gently.

You nodded.

“Yeah,” you said. “The bathroom line was just long.”

...

The walk back to your apartment felt like an out-of-body experience.

Your date had walked you home, smiling the entire way, hands tucked into his pockets, making soft jokes that you tried to laugh at, even though your stomach had been turning since the second you stepped out of the restaurant. He was kind. He listened, he held the door open, and he even complimented your dress without leering. And when you reached your door, he leaned in and kissed you, soft and gentle, just like the kind of kiss you should want from someone like him.

And you felt nothing. Not even a flicker, not even a spark.

You kissed him back out of politeness, maybe even a little guilt, and when you stepped away and thanked him for dinner, he smiled like he’d had a good time. And you hated that you hadn’t. Hated that he was everything you said you wanted—safe, respectful, sweet—and all you could think about the whole fucking night was Simon’s mouth, Simon’s hands, Simon whispering filth and promises and pain in your ear like he was made to ruin you.

By the time you reached your door, your hands were shaking. Not from fear, but from rage.

From this endless, exhausting loop of trying to do the right thing and still craving the wrong one.

You fumbled with your keys, cursing under your breath, eyes burning. You wanted to scream. Wanted to punch a wall. Wanted to shove Simon’s face into the fact that he’d broken you so thoroughly that now, even when someone was good to you, it felt wrong.

The door opened. And there he was.

Simon.

Sitting on your couch but he didn’t look cocky this time. Didn’t smirk or lean back with that smug glint in his eye. He just sat there, elbows on his knees, head in his hands like he didn’t even know what to say anymore.

You dropped your purse.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” your voice cracked, sharp and loud in the quiet room.

He stood, slowly, but you were already walking toward him, hands clenched, eyes blazing.

“How dare you?” you hissed. “How fucking dare you be here again. After everything.”

“Just listen—”

“No!” you snapped. “No, you don’t get to talk. You don’t get to sit there and act like you’re confused about why I don’t want you in my life. You ruined me, Simon.”

He flinched, and good. You wanted it to hurt.

“You took everything I gave you, every part of me, and you made it ugly.” Your voice shook now, rage mixing with grief. “You used me when you wanted company. Tossed me when you were bored. And I kept coming back, like a fucking idiot, thinking maybe this time you’d mean it when you kissed me.”

He was quiet.

“I went on a date tonight,” you spat. “With someone who treated me like I mattered. Someone who held doors and remembered things I said and kissed me like he gave a damn, and do you know what I thought the whole time?”

Simon swallowed, barely whispering, “What?”

You shook your head, tears stinging your eyes now.

“I thought about you,” you said, voice cracking. “I thought about your fucking mouth, about your hands. I thought about how I’d rather have your soft kiss than his perfect one. And I hate myself for it.”

Simon took a step forward. “I never meant to—”

“Don’t,” you snapped, voice trembling now. “Don’t stand there and act like this just happened. You did this. You made me believe you’d never care, and now I’m so fucking broken I can’t even feel anything from someone who actually tries. I still picture you when I think about love, Simon. That’s the worst part.”

He was right in front of you now, his breathing shallow, his eyes wide as he just watched you split yourself open in front of him.

“I imagine you,” you whispered. “But better, softer, and kinder. I imagine you as the version I needed, the one I deserved, and it kills me, because I don’t even know if that version of you exists.”

Silence.

He reached out then, so slowly it made your breath catch, and placed one hand gently on your cheek, the lightest touch he’d ever given you.

“I can be him,” he said, voice barely above a whisper. “I swear to God, I’ll try. I’ll be him.”

You didn’t respond. Couldn’t.

Because he leaned in and pressed a soft kiss to your forehead.

And then another, on your temple. One on your cheek, your jaw, your nose.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered between them. “I’m so fucking sorry.”

You were crying now, full-on sobbing, body shaking like it had been holding this in for far too long. And he didn’t grab you, didn’t pull you into him like he used to. He just stood there, kissing every tear that fell like he was trying to wipe them from existence.

“I didn’t know how to love you right,” he murmured, voice breaking. “But I will. If you let me. If you give me a chance, I’ll change. I’ll do the work. Just… don’t shut the door on me yet.”

You didn’t answer.

Because even after everything, even through all the rage and resentment and raw wounds, his kisses still felt like home.

And that was the scariest part of all.

He kissed your tears like they burned him, as if each one that slid down your cheeks was proof of what he’d broken, and he was trying, pathetically, hopelessly, to piece it all back together with nothing but his mouth and the weight of his regret.

You didn’t say anything when he pressed his forehead to yours. Didn’t pull away when he wrapped both arms around you like he thought you might disappear if he didn’t hold you tight enough.

You just stood there and let yourself breathe him in, his warmth, his scent.

“Let me show you,” Simon whispered, voice raw. “Please, just once. Let me make it right.”

You didn’t nod, you didn’t speak, but you let him take your hand.

He led you to the bed and didn’t tear your clothes off like he usually did. He didn’t grab or push or bite. He just kissed you, like you were something fragile, something he didn’t think he deserved to touch but was begging to try.

His hands trembled when he slid your top up over your arms. He took his time with every button, every hem, because rushing would ruin it. When your bra fell away, he kissed the center of your chest—not your breasts, not your neck—your chest, right over your heart, and rested there for a second like he was trying to feel it beat.

“You don’t have to forgive me now,” he whispered. “But I need you to know I’m gonna earn it. All of it. Whatever it takes.”

You didn’t stop the tears. You didn’t hide from them. They slid quietly down your cheeks as he lowered himself between your legs and pressed his mouth to your stomach, your hips, your thighs—anywhere but the place you were already aching for him.

“I’m gonna learn how to love you right,” he murmured against your skin. “I’m gonna give you every soft thing I never thought you’d want. You won’t have to beg for affection anymore. You won’t have to guess if I’ll stay.”

He kissed the inside of your thigh, then the other, then finally pressed his mouth to where you needed him. It felt as if he was praying with his tongue. Like this was how he was going to worship you now.

You gasped, hands fisting the sheets, more tears slipping from the corners of your eyes.

And he noticed. Of course he did.

He looked up from between your thighs, his face a mess of want and pain.

“You don’t have to cry,” he said softly, crawling back up your body. “I mean… I know why you are. But I hate that I’m the reason for it. I swear, I’ll never hurt you like that again.”

You cupped his face, fingers trembling, and he leaned into your touch like it was the only thing holding him together.

He lined himself up, slow and careful, and when he pushed inside, he went still. Completely still. Just breathing against your mouth, his hands cradling your face like he couldn’t believe he was allowed this close again.

“You feel like home,” he whispered, voice cracking. “Fuck, you always did.”

He moved slowly, painfully slow. Like every thrust was an apology. Like he was rewriting the way he touched you, undoing every rushed, selfish fuck with something tender and earned.

Your tears didn’t stop. And neither did he.

He kissed your eyelids, your cheeks, and your jaw. Whispered everything he’d never said when it would’ve mattered most.

“I’m gonna do better.”

“I’ll take care of you. I swear I will.”

“No more games. No more pushing you away.”

You whimpered beneath him, arms wrapped tight around his shoulders, clinging to him like you didn’t know how to let go anymore.

He rested his forehead against yours and kept moving, slow and deep, every thrust sending something hot and unbearable through your chest.

“You deserve flowers,” he breathed. “And check-ins. And hand-holding and fucking morning texts and someone who doesn’t make you cry every goddamn day.”

His voice cracked again. You felt it.

“And I want to be him,” Simon said, nearly choking on it. “I need to be him.”

Your body trembled beneath him. You were already so close, not just because of his cock, but because of the way he was inside you.

You came with a broken sob, your nails digging into his back, your legs shaking.

He came a moment later, groaning into your neck, and holding you tightly.

He didn’t pull out and didn’t move.

Just wrapped his arms around you, face pressed to your shoulder, and kissed you again and again and again, believing that if he just stayed close enough, the damage might finally start to heal.

...

Morning came quietly.

You woke to the pale gray light bleeding through your bedroom curtains, the kind of early morning glow that made everything feel hazy. For a few seconds, it was peaceful. Warm.

And then you remembered.

The weight behind you wasn’t just a dream.

Simon.

Still here, and breathing steadily against your back, one arm draped around your waist.

Your stomach twisted.

It wasn’t that last night had been bad. It hadn’t. If anything, it had been too good. Too soft. Too vulnerable. It was the kind of night you used to pray for back when you thought he’d never give it to you.

And now?

Now it just felt like weakness.

You untangled yourself from his arm slowly, carefully, trying not to wake him as you sat up and slipped your legs over the side of the bed. But he stirred anyway, and you felt his hand twitch behind you, reaching for something that wasn’t there anymore.

You stood up and didn’t turn around when you said it.

“Simon… you need to go.”

Silence.

Then the quiet sound of bedsheets rustling behind you.

“...You serious?” His voice was rough from sleep, low and uncertain in a way you weren’t used to hearing from him.

You nodded, still facing the window. “Yeah. I am.”

He sat up, and you could hear it, the shift in weight, the creak of the mattress, the pause before the sigh.

“Last night—” he started, but you cut him off.

“Was a moment,” you said, finally turning around to look at him. “That’s all. A moment of weakness. It doesn’t mean everything’s okay.”

He blinked at you, eyes bloodshot, hair messy, mouth parted.

“I meant everything I said,” he told you quietly. “Every word.”

“I know,” you said. “But meaning it isn’t enough. Not yet.”

He was quiet again, looking down at his hands, he didn’t know what to do with them now that they weren’t holding you.

“Okay,” he said eventually, dragging a hand through his hair and exhaling slowly. “Okay. I’ll go.”

You watched as he stood, pulled on his jeans, his hoodie, his boots. He didn’t rush, nor beg. He just moved with weighted sadness, like leaving was physically hard to do.

But at the door, he paused and turned around. “This isn’t the last time you’ll see me.”

You opened your mouth, but he kept going.

“I’m gonna prove it to you. That I meant what I said. That I’m changing. You’re gonna look at me one day, and you’re not gonna feel stupid for loving me anymore.”

You didn’t reply.

You just looked at him, arms crossed, your heart pounding.

And then he opened the door and stepped into the hall, casting one last glance back over his shoulder.

“I’ll win you back,” Simon said, voice like a quiet promise. “Even if it kills me.”

The door clicked shut behind him.

And you didn’t breathe until you were alone again.

-----------------------------------------

@nightunite I'm not done with this bitch yet.

he exhales. slow. almost a growl.

“jesus. stop talkin’.”

“why?” you blink up at him, all wide eyes and flushed cheeks, far too innocent for someone who’s very much not being innocent. “am i makin’ you nervouuus?”

his head tilts just slightly, just enough to peer down at you again.

“no,” he says, and even drunk you hear the grit in it. “you’re makin’ me hard.”

he says it like he hates himself for it. like it slipped out - cut from the meat of some deep place the inebriation in his veins simply won’t let him keep inside.

and you?

you blink slow, lips parting in surprise.

“fuckin’ finally.” you exhale with a smile. slow and crooked and dangerous. “thought i’d have to be on my knees and naked for you to admit that—“

he doesn’t let you finish that thought.

“fuck’s sake, y’little minx.” he’s dragging you now, as if he’s realizing the dangers that are surfacing the more this conversation continues. by this point he’s half-carrying, half-hauling your giggling form down the hall like you weigh nothing. “y’need to stop talkin.”

“you like it,” you slur between unsteady steps. “y’like me like this cause you’re a freakkk—“

his grip tightens. morals in tatters. control evaporating.

“i’d like you more if y’were unconscious.” he huffs, hard. “or duct-taped.”

that makes you giggle more. worse, it eggs you on.

“was that supposed t’be a threat?” you ask, lips glistening. “cause if so, it’s workingggg.”

he grunts - some deep, violent sound in his throat like that one hit a nerve. “bloody hell.”

by the time you make it to your door, he’s breathing heavy. less from exertion and more from sheer fucking restraint. it takes two seconds before he throws the hinges wide, kicks it shut with his boot, and all but drags you onto your bed.

and you hardly even realize you’ve reached it until the cotton caresses the side of your cheek. but that feeling is quickly forgotten when simon, the gentleman that he is, leans over you - one knee braced on the mattress as his hands go to work on the laces of your boots.

your thighs tense. he notices.

“fuck, simon.” you can’t stop yourself. not even god himself could, at this point. “i’ve been into you for ages, y’know.”

he pauses. boot in hand.

“…what?”

he says it low. like a warning - like a don’t you fuckin start. but you’re too drunk to care - especially when all you smell is him and all you see are those shoulders, leaning over you while you’re flat on your back beneath him.

your lashes flutter.

“jus sayin- since, like. you’re in my room, on my bed above me like one of my codeine fever dreams.” you slur, brain sloshing. the room spins with it. “thought y’should know.”

he looks at you like you’ve hit him with a brick.

your head lolls. glassy eyes dragging up over the length of him. “used to think about it—you—when i couldn’t sleep.”

he swallows, and you watch his throat work with it. the grip he’s got on your ankle could shatter bone.

“….you tellin me y’think bout me when y’touch yourself?” he asks.

“god yes.” you don’t even realize you’ve said it. “you. your hands. bending me over the sinks. in the showers while muttering filth in my ear, tellin me to behave—“

“—fuck.” it punches out of him like it hurts.

the silence falls heavy. he doesn’t blink, breathe, or move for what feels like forty minutes, when in reality, it’s like forty seconds - just long enough for him clamp the leash back on whatever beast is tearing through him.

not fully, but enough.

you stretch like a cat, oblivious to it. arch your back. sigh. “d’you think about it?”

he doesn’t answer. not at first. then—

“only when i breathe.”

your stomach lurches. your thighs twitch. “you mean that?”

he looks at you, finally - eyes darker than the devils deal, filled with filth and heat from the fire you started without even trying.

he shakes his head, his jaw clenches with the effort of keeping the beast at bay. “i mean, if you don’t stop talkin, m’gonna fuckin’ fold.”

the alcohol in your blood just roars, at that. fuel to the flaming fire inside you.

“tell me.” you murmur. “you think about fucking me? what i’d sound like moaning your—“

before you can finish that thought, his hand is over your mouth. it swallows your face, makes you twitch in all the wrong places — and he sees it.

“enough.” it’s barely a whisper. “christ. fuck. you’re gonna make me do somethin’ stupid.”

you moan against his hand - it spills out of you, vibrates against his fingers. he curses.

“y’wanna know what stupid looks like?” he mutters, head dropping down until his lips near your jaw. “you, wakin up with my fuckin dog tags round your neck and nothin else.”

his palm silences everything but your pulse, which is roaring, at this point.

your fingers come up, shift a few of his digits until your voice finds room to leak out. “please.”

his eyes snap shut.

“y’dont know what you’re askin for, sweet’eart,” he mutters, grabbing the edge of the blanket with his free hand and yanking it over your hips. “ain’t gonna wake up with you hatin me.”

even drunk you realize he’s a man of morals.

“you think i’d regret it?” you whisper. stars in your eyes. he doesn’t respond. “simon. i just told you i’ve fantasized about fucking you. i wonder how big you are, if it’d hurt—“

his palm tightens over your lips again.

“one more fuckin’ word and i’ll forget every goddamn reason why i shouldn’t touch you right now.” he spits. “if y’even remember this tomorrow, y’come say it to me sober. promise on every grave i’ve ever stood over i’ll bend y’over on the spot and fuck the idea of regret right outta you.”

then he pulls back, moving slow like it hurts, and you smile.

“guess i’ll see you tomorrow.”

cw: this piece is actually super dark proceed with caution, dark!ghost, dark!simon, sunshine!reader, mature language and content, suggestive language and content, graphic depictions of violence + gore, smut, unprotected piv, cumplay, oral, simon is not a good or nice person (except to reader), reader also maybe isn't a good person who knows, reader has hair long enough to hold, curvy/plus-sized!reader, meet-cute until it's not, background breeding kink, size difference, size kink, military inaccuracies, references to simon's past canon trauma, 18+

Ghost does not believe in love at first sight.

The concept is for children; even when he was a child, he doesn’t think he would’ve believed it then, either. There was no love where he went, even to the places where it was owed to him. In his own house, he feared what love felt like. The kind he knew was pain and misery and the terrifying reality of what it meant to always be looking over his own shoulder.

Love at first sight chewed Simon Riley up—and what it spat out was terrible, big, and caged-off from the rest of the world.

Ghost is built of many layers. Not like an onion, no—onions are easy to manipulate. With the tip of a knife, you can cut right through its skin and tear it apart, but Ghost is not built the same way. He laid concrete out in front of himself a long time ago. The things around him are rotten, curled in on itself, and it would take too long to unbury him for anyone at all to want to spend the time and try. He prefers it this way. He likes it this way. Being alone means there are no surprises, and there is no one waiting for you. There is no one to disappoint, and there is no one to prove right or wrong. There is only today and tomorrow, because yesterday has already passed, and he doesn’t care to think about what already was.

It’s Johnny that’s brought him here. In a pub too loud, with watered-down drinks that cost a quid too much. He didn’t have an excuse today to turn him down. Johnny’s got a sister he needs to see, and his sister has got a friend—someone from her uni, taking the same chemistry courses, or something like that. He can’t really remember, he wasn’t paying attention too closely, but Johnny offered to pay if his lieutenant just gave him company in the long drive into the city.

The booth is too small. His bourbon tastes off. All he wants to do is smoke a cigarette, but he’s been staring daggers at the “No Smoking” sign that’s posted behind the bar. There’s a ringing in his ears that’s been following him since they got off their last op just a few days ago, and it feels strongest here in this room, with too many unknowns in too many dark corners.

“Johnny!”

A soft voice squeals. Simon’s eye twitches, and he looks over Johnny’s shoulder to see a pretty brunette with bright, blue eyes smiling wide as she hurries towards them. Johnny slips out of his seat to cradle the woman to his chest, rocking back and forth as he hugs her. His baby Emily, he hears Johnny mutter. She’s got that same square jaw and strong brows, and Ghost imagines that if Johnny were to grow out his hair, it’d grow in the same matching, bouncy curls that Emily has. She sounds so happy to see him, and Ghost swirls a gloved finger around the rim of his glass as he watches.

It tastes sour, looking at something that he used to have. He wishes that he didn’t want it as much as he thinks he does at this very moment.

“Oh! Sorry, forgot for a wee second there. This is who I told you about—”

Emily steps aside, and there you stand.

Glossy, pink-tinted lips. A cardigan that hugs your frame with a knit, sunflower pattern. Light wash jeans, baby blue boots. Your fingertips are painted glittery and pink, and your baby blue purse matches your shoes.

Emily says your name, and you hold out your hand for Johnny to shake. It’s then that your eyes move to the shadow behind him, and Ghost licks over his teeth, satisfied, when you visibly swallow and your eyes widen a little.

“Ach, don’t mind ‘im. Tha’ scary bastard is just my lieutenant, Simon,” Johnny nods his head over his shoulder. “Simon, would ye introduce yerself, fer fuck’s sake? Stop brooding over there.”

Naturally, Emily sits next to her brother, already squeezing his shoulders and excitedly telling him about some fellowship opportunity she was up for. You slip your purse off your shoulder, shuffling towards the space next to Simon. You grip the edge of the booth to hoist yourself up onto the high seat, and you smile a little when Simon holds out his hand for you.

You take it, smooth palm in his gloved one, and it takes no effort at all for him to tug gently and get you up to sit. He sniffs, looking up when he finds himself staring a little too long at the curve of your jeans, but it’s hard not to when both of you take up the entirety of the booth. Just to fit, Simon has to lean back, and you adjust your cardigan over your shoulder when Simon stretches one big arm out behind you.

“So, uh…” You clear your throat. “What are you drinking, Lieutenant?”

“Piss water,” Simon says lowly. He cringes a little at the bite of his tone—he never means to be curt, but it always comes out that way. You purse your lips, tapping your nails on the wood, and you look at him over your shoulder.

“Hmm,” you make a face, “so Johnny made it?”

It takes a few moments for Simon to realize you’re telling a joke. The silence must mortify you, because you’re looking down and tearing a piece of yarn out of your sweater, and Simon realizes he’s wearing his mask, and you can’t see his face, and she’s trying to break the fucking ice—

“Nah,” Simon shrugs, shaking his head. “His tastes more like right shit.”

Your eyes flicker up, and you stare at him for just a few moments under your lashes before your hand goes up to cover your mouth. You giggle, cheeks warm, and he blinks at you slowly as your entire body relaxes. Your thigh touches his, and his fingers flex on the hand that’s thrown behind you, twitching as he thinks about letting them graze the skin peeking out from under your sweater.

When he gets the urge to touch you under your chin, he nearly curses out loud because fuck—

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

Simon knows it as soon as he lays his eyes on you again. Staring right into yours, hand fidgeting behind you as it wants so desperately to cup the back of your neck and tangle into the strands of your hair—fuck, fuck, fuck—he’s so fucked.

He knows it, too, when you’re in his bed. Sunflower sweater draped across his floor, boots in the hallway, glittered nail-polish piercing his biceps as he tilts your head back, bares your throat, sinks his teeth into the delicate flesh there. You giggle, and it’s the rainbow after a storm. The drink of water after days in the desert, the stitch that holds the seams together, the pins that will take his broken bones and put them all back together again—

He’s feeling his cum dripping between your thighs when you ask him about his scars. He adjusts the edge of his mask as soon as you ask, sniffing under it as you smooth a finger over a puckered scar on his chest left behind by the ricochet of a stray bullet, one of many. You squeeze your thighs together when his long fingers move in squelching circles over your cunt, and your back arches when he slips them inside of you. You take his jaw between a few fingers and grip it tight, pressing your lips against his mask as you whine and kick your feet in overstimulation.

He doesn’t want you to ask questions. He doesn’t want to burst this bubble of warmth and goodness and intimacy that he’s created, because then this will be something else. Right now, he’s the mysterious, black ops military man you’ve spent an incredible night with, and if you start talking, you’ll learn. You’ll understand. You’ll find out why he doesn’t want to talk much. You’ll discover what he is under the skin he wears, and he already knows he’ll terrify you. There is nothing good about what someone uncovers under the lid he keeps over his head.

“Where did you get this one?” You point to a particular nasty white gash on the side of his ribs. He rubs a thick hand down your bare back, cupping your ass and squeezing gently.

“Op in Baghdad,” Simon murmurs. “Hand to hand.”

You touch a small circular scar on his arm.

“And this one?”

“Cigarette.”

You push the blankets down a little and bring your knee up. Simon grips the side of your thigh, and you hike your leg up to give him a better look at the puffed scar across your kneecap.

“Look at this,” you giggle. “I fell off my bike when I was little.”

“Tha’ right, swee’eart?”

“Mhm. Just like you.”

“Just like me.”

You’re still there in the morning. Cheek smushed against his chest, leg tangled between his, arm curled around his middle. There’s a little drool drying on the side of your mouth, and Simon thumbs along your jaw as he watches you sleep. The glittery eyeshadow you were wearing last night has smeared across your cheek a little, and you’re glowing. A good shag and a good night’s sleep, and you look like a right angel in the early hours.

You look like one on his couch, too. You look like one in his shirt that barely fits over your tits, watching his telly, eating the shit plate of eggs he made you since he’s never bothered to learn how to cook. You look beautiful getting your clothes back on and smelling just like him as he drives you back to your flat.

You look like his when he crowds you against the door of your place, masked mouth against your open lips as you fumble for the doorknob and yank him inside to get his pants off.

Your flat blinds him. There’s different colors scattered across the place. A fluffy pink carpet in the living room. String lights hung everywhere, in different colors, twinkling gently. There’s plants of all shapes and sizes hanging from the ceiling and overflowing from their brightly colored pots. No plate or cup is the same shape or color or even matches one another, and there’s lamps in the shapes of mushrooms and fish sitting on your mismatched coffee and side tables. You collect everything—movie posters of all kinds on the walls, an entire wall of funny clocks, another wall of arts and crafts that must be homemade, framed and hung up.

Your home is what you are. Fun and colorful and happy and bright, and Simon hikes his mask up so he can bite and lick and nearly eat you as he tries to absorb all of it. There is nothing inside of this place that doesn’t incite joy, and he feeds on it like a leech. He must have it, because he never has before, and whenever he lets go, he feels it less, and that cannot happen, he won’t let it go.

If it isn’t your smile keeping him close, your pussy is the next best thing. You look incredible on your knees—perched on your elbows, ass up, pushing back against him as he fucks into you lazily. You’re so beautiful, in every position, but there’s something about getting to push your thighs apart a little and watch you take his cock that makes his belly clench as he watches you suck him in again and again and again. There’s a ring of slick gathering at the base, making it nice and easy for him to kiss your cervix, and you sound so pretty—soft whines of his name, little mewls that make his jaw tick.

“Simon—Simon, please—”

He doesn’t like to hear you beg. You deserve whatever you ask for, whatever you want. Those big eyes should never desire anything. He never wants to see you pout or blubber—he wants you relaxed and pleasured and incoherent from how fed you are in every aspect, and he’s going to fuck you right into this mattress until he gets you right where you’re meant to be.

You tell him he looks funny in your bed, surrounded by the squishmallows and fluffy teddy bears, but he doesn’t mind. He didn’t realize what a proper bed could do for his back, because yours has springs and memory foam, and his body just sinks into it just right.

He gets woken up in the middle of the night by his phone. Wheels up at 0500, and now he’s dreading getting into his truck. There’s something warm on his chest, and for a moment he thinks it’s you, but then he blinks into focus when the thing on his chest moves and stretches, staring down at him with curious green eyes. It’s a chunky tuxedo cat, and it’s wearing a black bedazzled collar.

“‘ello,” Simon mutters, scratching under its chin. The big thing just nuzzles against his hand before moving to the end of the bed to curl up between your feet.

Simon tries not to think about you on the drive back, and he tries not to think about you as he puts his gear on; but there’s a bouquet of fake sunflowers on a secretary’s desk mocking him, and when he goes to put his gloves on, there’s still glitter on his fingertips.

You are everywhere. You are in the warmth of the sand that gets under the fabric of his mask. You are in the water that sustains him on hour fifteen of sitting on a rooftop. He sees you in the bright red that trickles from the hole in his target’s forehead, matching the red of the strawberry plushie that you were holding the morning he left.

He notices himself more. How much space he takes up. How loud his voice is. He compares the way his cock looks in his hand now to the way it looked in yours, and he has to swallow the groan that threatens to break when he thinks about the way you thumbed at the tip and cooed about how pretty he was. Delicate, pretty hands, not at all like his own—not at all like the roughness of his palms, the scars along the backs of his hands, the blood against his raw knuckles from beating a hostile into the ground just to feel something.

Just to feel anything.

Standing next to you, it is all too clear what kind of man Simon Riley is. He’s not a man at all—he’s nothing more than an extension to his rifle, and when the trigger isn’t getting pulled, he’s just not that fucking useful.

Johnny is in a mood. Scowling like a brat. Glaring at the back of his head. Hitting him with his shoulder whenever they pass by each other. Simon is indifferent, and Simon pretends not to care, so he takes it in stride, but it makes his teeth ache with how annoyed he is.

“What the fuck is wrong with ye?”

He doesn’t like being scolded, especially not by his sergeant; but he sits there, and he takes it, because what Johnny is telling him isn’t a lie. There’s a girl that woke up in an empty bed—a sweet one, with glassy eyes, and she thinks he’s a two-faced asshole that slipped out when she wasn’t looking. A girl that can do casual, but not a girl that can tell him about the dreams she’s too scared to write down and lets him rest his head on the same pillow where she rests her own. Too intimate, too many words, too many times he came inside of her and told her that’s where it’s supposed to be—in y’r pretty pussy, baby, right there—

He’s never done this before. He doesn’t apologize. He doesn’t stick around where he knows he doesn’t belong, and he never thinks he’s done anything wrong enough to warrant some kind of apology. With Simon, you get what you get, and he doesn’t think he advertises himself as someone warm, empathetic, considerate; but he’s sitting here, his truck still running, and there’s a decaying plastic-encased bouquet of yellow tulips resting haphazard in the passenger seat.

He’s been waiting on your doorstep for more than five minutes. He sees you peeking through the window in your kitchen, and his eyes find yours through the blinds. He narrows his eyes at you, squeezing the bouquet until the plastic crinkles under his fists. It takes a couple more moments before you open the door, and Simon sniffs under the mask when he sees your eyes again. They’re big and wet and sad.

He never wants to see them like this again.

You’re sweet, so you take the flowers from him. You purse your lips as you stand there, trying to keep your lip from wobbling, but it’s very clear you’re trying not to cry. You hug the flowers close to your chest, and Simon brings his hand up, tucking his gloved fingers under your chin and tipping it up.

“‘ello, swee’eart,” he murmurs. “Were y’lookin’ for me?”

“N-No.”

“Y’r a bad liar, baby.”

It takes a few minutes to get you settled. Sitting on your couch, batting at your tears with the sleeve of your sweater as Simon turns the kettle on in your kitchen. The cat weaves between his legs as he steeps the tea bags, and when he comes back into your living room, you’re staring at the droopy tulips, rubbing a thumb over the petals.

“‘ere,” Simon murmurs, setting down a mug in front of you.

“I…” You wipe under your nose. “I-I don’t need your pity, Simon.”

“Not here for tha’.”

“I know Johnny said something to you, and I really don’t want to talk about it—a-and if that’s why you’re here, I really don’t want to talk about it.”

You pick up one of the stuffed animals that sits on your couch. It’s a goldfish, fat with stuffing around the middle, with a comical smile and rainbow-colored scales. You hug it, resting your cheek on it, staring at Simon through wet eyelashes as he stiffens uncomfortably. Crying, emotions, talking—he doesn’t do any of these things. This complicates things. Relationships make things more difficult, and connections mean he has obligations, and he’s already seeing now what this kind of thing will be between you.

It’s too much.

It’s not enough.

“He did say somethin’,” Simon mutters. He sniffs, looking down at his gloved hands. His fingers curl into fists as they rest on his thighs, and he lets out the breath he’s holding harshly, shaking his head. He doesn’t understand what he’s doing here, but the thought of getting up and leaving seems worse. “Didn’t sit right wit’ me.”

You tuck your legs underneath you, and he watches as you absentmindedly knead the stuffed fish. You hum lowly, sheepish, and then you open and close your mouth as you try to find the words to say.

“I know we…” You flinch a little. “It was just…I know it was just a day. A night.” You rub your nose. “I feel so stupid. I don’t want you to feel bad. I don’t want you to feel…like you h-have to come here and…explain, I…” You close your eyes. “I-I just…I really like you, Simon.”

I really like you, Simon.

He leans his head back against the back of your couch. Something in his chest squeezes tight, and he swallows hard as he listens to you say it again and again in his head.

I really like you, Simon. I really like you, Simon. Don’t you like me?

“Oh, love,” Simon breathes. He turns his head to look at you, and you’re already looking at him. You have the fish to your chest, hugging it tighter, and he reaches over and touches under your chin gently. “Y’don’t want this. Y’don’t want me. I know y’think y’do, and ‘s sweet, but y’don’t want this.”

“Tell me why,” you say softly. “Convince me, then.”

“Do you…do you even know wot we do?” He asks. “The kinds of things they ask us to do? Wot I’ve done t’get here?”

You shake your head, and when his hand opens up, your cheek finds his palm, resting there, nuzzling.

“We’re murderers with fuckin’ passes,” he whispers. “There isn’t a line we don’t cross. No boundary we don’t ignore. They killed my whole fuckin’ family, and then I came back for more, because tha’s the kind of life I live, and tha’s the kind of work I do. When I come home, I have someone else’s blood on my clothes, do y’understand tha’?” He leans closer, touching his nose to yours. “We go places tha’ no one comes back from. Even now—” He pinches your chin between two fingers, “—I strangled someone with these very hands, love, tha’s the kind of man I am. Look at me—”

You flutter your lashes, meeting his eyes, and he shakes his head.

“Tha’s wot I do, love,” Simon grunts. “And the worst part of it is tha’ I fuckin’ like it.”

You lift a hand up and wrap it around his wrist. There is no resistance as you draw his hand off your face and hold it instead, intertwining your fingers and resting them in your lap. His hand dwarfs yours—long, deft fingers and spread palm that covers your own completely. You scoot a little closer, getting up onto your knees, and Simon’s eyes follow you as you abandon the stuffed fish to put one hand on his shoulder and the other cupping his masked cheek.

“You didn’t say no.”

“Wot?”

“You won’t say no,” you whisper, sliding the hand on his shoulder up to caress the back of his neck. “To me. To this.”

“Because I can’t,” Simon groans. “Need you t’do it.”

“But I…” You lean down and press your forehead to his. “I-I do want it. I want you. You’re…” You kiss him through the mask, a soft press of your lips against his. You feel him kiss back, and you pull away slowly. “Please. Please, Simon?” You kiss down his cheek, thumbing under his eye, and he lets out a shaky breath as you fall into his lap, knees on either side of him. His hands come up easily, cupping under your thighs, and you whine as he drags your hips forward, a slow grind that makes you shake. “Won’t you try? For me?”

Getting Simon into your bed is too easy. He looks nice here, underneath you. You press down onto his chest for leverage, using it to help throw your hips back against his. He’s deep, pulsing inside of your cunt—your rhythm stutters every time he touches your cervix, but his tight grip on your ass keeps you moving.

You’re so wet. You’ve never been wetter with another man. Sweat, tears, slick—every part of you leaks when you’re with Simon. You dig your nails into his chest, and he grunts, when you start to feel your orgasm creeping up on you, you arch your back to get friction onto your clit and squeal when Simon gets the hint; he lifts you up and plants his feet against the bed to fuck up into you and force your eyes into the back of your head.

He tastes like you after awhile. After spending days in your flat, his kisses start to taste as sweet as the pastries you make, and he starts to smell like the citrus soaps you keep in your bathroom. You get a whiff of lavender from his clothes after using your laundry detergent, and he sleeps like the dead after round two inside of you. Cum cooling between your thighs, mouth fixed to your throat, fingers stuffed inside of you to keep warm as he breathes in a sigh of relief until he’s deep asleep. He still doesn’t take his mask off, but he gives you his mouth, and you fix yourself there, mouth against his, kissing him feverishly whenever he exposes his lips just for you.

“Will you miss me?” You ask. He’s standing at the door, pulling his jacket on. He flips the hood up over his head, clicking his tongue as he fits a hand into the back pocket of your jeans and squeezes, pulling you towards him and into his chest.

“Mhm,” he mutters. You giggle, cupping his cheeks, and when he puts his thumb between your lips, you let him open your mouth, tilting your head as he spits onto your tongue before kissing you wetly. You wrap your arms around his neck, charmed bracelets jingling as you try to climb up to him. He bends, gripping you under your thighs before he hoists you up and against the wall. You moan, scratching along his back.

“Do you really have to go?” You whisper between kisses, and he hisses in response.

“Got to,” Simon sighs, but you smile wide when you hear the sound of his belt buckle. “But I can be late.”

Like you, Simon feels like he’s seeing the world for the very first time—all in color. Food has taste. Views have beauty. His gun feels heavy, and his cot is cold to the touch. Time finally has duration—it hangs and drags now, minutes and seconds taking too long as he sits in a dark room and listens to his captain explain an op he could care less about. His leg bounces impatiently, fingers twitching as he watches the screen and tries to pay attention.

Complicated. Difficult. Not enough and too much.

You are so beautiful. Your name lights up his phone, several pink and yellow emojis beside your name that you entered yourself.

we miss u! xoxo

There’s a picture of you and your cat. You’re seated on your couch, a pink blanket in your lap, a selfie of you holding up your cat in one arm. Simon clenches his jaw when he sees that you’re practically naked—in just a yellow lace bra, blanket covering your lower half. You send another picture after a few seconds, and Simon licks over his teeth. Another selfie of you, cleavage on display, and he can see the little rhinestones that are sewn into your bra. He can also see the little butterfly clips you have in your hair and the darling smile you wear.

He comes in his fist later, selfie on display in one hand, his mind on the sound of your voice. It’s never happened so fast—just a few languid tugs, and he’s spilling over his thighs like a teenager.

It’s all he thinks about. The blood runs warmer, easier. His gun fires quicker. He’s got tunnel-vision now, eyes on his prize—the sooner he finishes, the quicker he gets home, so he sinks his blade into throats and keeps his feet moving. He keeps quiet, keeps steady, and as soon as he’s got his target in his sights, he pulls the trigger without a second thought.

“Got somethin’ on yer mind, LT?”

Simon narrows his eyes. Johnny looks smug—a ghost of a smirk on his face, face red from sweat and his own cheekiness. Simon just leans his head back against the side of the helicopter, looking outside as the ground gets farther and farther away.

“Never pegged ye fer the type.”

Simon’s hands dig into his rifle.

“Always liked tha’ one,” Johnny continues. “Got a sweet face. Always wondered why she never liked me. Guess she likes ‘em big ‘n scary.”

“Careful, Johnny,” Simon warns, glaring at him.

“I just—”

“No, listen ‘ere,” Simon snaps. “We don’t talk about ‘er. We don’t mention ‘er. She is off limits, to you or anyone else. As far as y’r concerned, she doesn’t exist, yeah? Repeat it back t’me.”

“Don’t know who yer talkin’ about, LT,” Johnny says after a few moments. Simon looks away, shaking his head.

“Good boy.”

He doesn’t go back to his flat. There isn’t anything there that he wants; everything he needs leads straight to you. You’re cooing when he comes through the door, murmuring lowly as he drops his duffel bag and shoves his masked face into the crook of your neck. He crowds you against the door when you shut it, and you giggle as he takes deep breaths of your perfume. His hands grab at your waist, sliding down the backs of your thighs, feeling over the soft skin and biting at your throat even through the mask.

“What happened, teddy bear?” You mumble, scratching the back of his neck. “What did they do to you, huh?”

Dog, mutt, devour. He’s been away for too long, been starving ever since he left, and you take it with a smile. Simon is never too much for you. Simon is never too rough or too loud, and he is never too far into your space or too attached. You drink it so lovingly, and you never push him away.

He watches you carefully as you help him take his gear off. You start with the weapons. You slip the gun out of its holster on his chest, emptying the chamber and taking the magazine out. His grip on your waist tightens at the sight of you handling it with such ease, and you just shrug as you set it aside.

“I’ve been practicing.”

You unload all of his throwing knives, from his thigh holster and from inside of his boot. You find another small pistol attached to his boot, and you sigh as you unload it the same. Your hands find the buckles of his thigh holsters, and when you slide it off of him, you settle on your knees and tip your head back to look up at him.

He caresses the back of your head, and you swear you hear him purr. You lean forward, pressing your cheek to where his belt is. You kiss there, right against his zipper, and his fingers tangle into your hair just enough for you to feel a little pressure. He’s still gentle, still kind, but his eyes are so dark. You wonder if the way he looks at you now is the way he looks at his targets. Is this hunger the same—the same for you as it is to get the job done? They say love and hate are so alike, so intertwined; is that why he keeps coming back? Does he chase this feeling all the time?

What is it that you are?

An addiction? Or a necessity?

You take his dirty clothes from him as he undresses in the bathroom. Shirt, jacket, belt, pants, socks, boxers—you eye him with a smile, biting your lip, and Simon winks at you from under the mask as he slides a big hand down his middle.

“Wot?” He asks. “Like wot y’see, love?”

It would be impossible not to. Thick arms, tattoos on display. Unforgiving muscle and fat. His hands ungloved, you can see the split of his knuckles and the bruising from where he must’ve hit something—someone. Then your eyes skim over the curls just over his cock, which hangs heavy and red between his thighs. Simon has no shame—his nakedness is not something he cares to hide, especially not to you. You stand on your toes and gives his cheek a kiss before taking his clothes to the laundry room.

You’re at the sink when he’s freshly showered. There’s a bottle of peroxide next to you, and you’re wearing gloves, and he watches as you have his pants half in the sink as you work on scrubbing at the fabric.

“Wot ‘appened?” Simon asks. You hum, shrugging, ringing out a bit of the fabric.

“Just some blood. I’ll get it out. What do you want to eat for dinner, baby?”

Simon thinks that’s the moment he knew he was in love with you. Hair pinned back, baby pink matching lounge outfit with the tiniest shorts he’s ever fucking seen, scrubbing out the blood from his clothes as you talk about supper.

He knows he was fucked from the moment he met you—but it’s now that he knows he’ll never leave.

He’s reminded again of that feeling when you call him angrily from your flat. He’s pushing a trolly in the store, eyes sweeping over the selection of chocolate in the baking section. You were baking chocolate scones and would be making some ganache tomorrow, and he’s squinting at the paper you gave him with your list when his phone starts ringing.

“‘ello, love?”

“Simon, are you serious?!”

“Wot happened?”

“There’s—Simon! There’s a grenade in…in the jar!”

“Wot’s tha’?”

“The jar with my powdered sugar. I found a grenade in there!”

“Oh. Mmm. Right. Leave it there.”

“Simon! And are you taping ninja stars under my tables? I found two already!”

“Dunno. But sounds like someone ‘ad a good idea, wanted t’be prepared, y’should leave them there.”

“Simon, you are—” There’s a pause, and then he smiles under the mask when you laugh. “Just get my chocolate and get back here, please.”

You have no idea what Simon was talking about. You don’t understand what it is that he was running from. There’s so much of himself that he was meant to show to someone else. He’s been hiding for so long, and not just underneath the mask he wears—but there’s a man under it all, and you love when he comes out to meet you.

Maybe he is a little terrible. Maybe he really is just the thing you don’t need. You think about that a little too long when the water in the sink runs red again, his shirt an entirely different color from whatever it is that he had done before he got home. Maybe he really is wrong for you—it crosses your mind when you’re dusting the shelves and find a loaded pistol in the vase that used to hold your apology tulips.

He lives an entirely different life than you. He drags colors into your home that you tried so hard not to embrace, all the black and blue and grey that you’ve always felt could swallow your entire self—but you don’t know what the alternative is. There is no one else in the world that looks at you the way that he does. There isn’t anyone’s hand that feels the way his does when it’s against the side of your face or tangled between the strands of your hair or warm between your thighs.

You don’t think anyone else would mean it if they saw you crying and threatened to kill whoever had made you so sad; because he does mean it, doesn’t he? He would do it if you asked, wouldn’t he?

That’s love; you’re convinced it is. Love is the boundaries you say you won’t cross that you step right over without thinking. Love is the places you say you could never go that are already behind you. Love—real love—is the doorway that Simon keeps passing through even though he promises you that this is the last time whenever he leaves.

“Look at me—ha, Simon!—look here.” You fit the headband onto over his head, fitting the cat ears on top of his head. He grunts a little, sighing through his nose, and you warm up the makeup remover between your hands. Delicately, you start to rub it into his face. He closes his eyes, and you carefully work your fingers against his skin as the eye-black begins to run easily. “Almost done.”

You use a warm cloth to wipe his face. The eye-black comes off, but the scars remain, and when he opens his eyes, you know that you haven’t really taken anything away from him. There’s still something that weighs heavy on his shoulders, and you lean forward to get closer to him, keeping your voice quiet.

“What was it this time?” You ask, putting both hands on his face and keeping his eyes on yours. He blinks, and he goes somewhere else. He’s thinking about it. There’s something he’s looking at, somewhere far away, over your shoulder.

“He begged me not to,” Simon murmurs. “Told me their names.”

Moms. Dads. Partner. Children. They always have names at the end—as if attaching themselves to another will make their deaths harder. Men are singular beings. Rarely are they life support for another.

“It’s okay,” you tell Simon. You close your eyes as you rest your cheek against his.

“It is?”

“Uh huh.” It’s so warm here, arms around him, face tucked against his. “I forgive you.”

It’s okay. I forgive you. Everything is just as it should be.

“Y’don’t know wot I did,” Simon counters. “Wot I…got outta him.”

“It doesn’t matter,” you say softly. You squeeze the towel out, wetting it again with warm water before passing it over his face again. You hold him under his chin, catching the droplets of water, and you smile as you kiss his nose gently. “It never does. Never will.”

“But—”

“I made your favorite,” you interrupt, plucking the cat ears off of him and tossing everything into the laundry basket. “There’s brownies in the kitchen. I want you to try.”

Is Simon really committing heinous war crimes when his reward is chocolate decadence and wet pussy?

You look so cute. You’re wearing a flowery pajama set, tiny shorts and cropped shirt, something that leaves nothing to the imagination as he pulls the gusset of your panties to the side and sinks into you easily. You brace yourself against the back of the couch, sitting up in his lap. Simon groans when your tits are right in his face, pebbled nipples poking through your shirt fabric, and he reaches up to pinch them between greedy fingers as you sit right down on his dick and take him to the tilt.

“Fuuuuuuuuck—” Simon breathes. The wet squelch is making his head spin. His wet girl, his pretty girl, his sweet girl. He sharpens his teeth when he leaves, and you dull them when he comes home, letting him sink his teeth into you and eat. You keep him in balance; the push and pull that he always felt he struggled with is nonexistent now that you’re here. When Ghost used to get put back into his duffel, Simon felt like what was left behind was almost too much to take. The nightmares, the torture, the disregard for what was moral in favor of what got the job done—it is gone with you. Your absolution resolves him of this debt.

How can he feel he’s done anything wrong when you’re calling him teddy bear and taking his cock like this?

You drag the hem of your shirt up slowly, and when your tits are bouncing, bare and sweaty in front of his face, Simon loses his train of thought. His mouth falls open, tongue hanging out, and you cup the back of his neck to draw him close until his lips wrap around your nipple and suck. You whimper, keeping him there, slowing your hips to watch him let go for just long enough to spit on your chest and lick it right back up.

“Feels so good, teddy bear,” you whine. “You’re so big…” You wiggle your hips until just the tip of him is inside you, and then you sit back down, drawing out a long moan from the both of you. His hands fall to cup under your thighs, and you feel like you’re melting as his tip prods against a squishy spot inside of you and makes you see double. You grab onto his shoulders, digging your nails in, crying. “Oh—right t-there, baby—right there—”

“Right there, swee’eart?”

“Mhm! M-More…”

“My sweet girl,” he mumbles, and you squeak when he grips the fabric of your shorts, grunting as he tears the fabric apart. His fingers cup both sides of your ass, spreading them, using the new leverage he has on you to start picking you up and bouncing you with nothing but sheer strength. You’re thick everywhere that he needs you to be—hips, stomach, thighs, all the perfect places he hopes any girl he’s with will be. They never quite had it the way you do; when his fingers dig and feel nothing but softness, he hisses because it feels so good to grab onto you. It makes his mouth water. It makes him so fucking hungry. It makes his cock ache and his balls heavy, and he’s going to come if he keeps seeing your breasts sway like that as you take his cock so well. “Fuck—” He shakes his head. “Fuck!”

You lick into his mouth just as he loses control. Fingers under his chin, tongue around his teeth as he holds you down on his lap and fills you nice and warm. Your hips stutter, and he lets you lean back just enough so you can touch your clit and squeeze around him. You look down between your bodies, touching tenderly where you’re connected, like you’re fascinated by how much of him fits inside of you.

You settle after a few minutes. You rest your palms on his chest, squishy muscle supporting you as you lift your hips and let him out. You lean over him, whining when you feel fluid slipping down your thighs and gathering underneath you.

“You’re thinking too much,” you whisper as you slip your shirt back on. Simon hums as he holds you in his lap, cock twitching as he watches you move your hair out of your eyes and lick your own fingers.

“Got a lot on my mind,” is all Simon gives you. You let your knee fall open, and you use your fingers to swirl between your folds before you guide them up and into Simon’s mouth. He chuckles, taking them, and you lean forward to kiss his cheek just as you pull your fingers back out.

“You’re not supposed to think about things,” you murmur. “How many times do I have to tell you, Simon?” You cup one side of his face, making him look at you. “You could never do something wrong. Everything is okay.” You smile. “You believe me, don’t you, teddy bear?”

It’s so easy to believe you when you look at him like that. You’re so pretty—you always are. There is nothing terrible about your mind. Your brain isn’t rotten between the flesh as his must be. There is no blood forever under your fingernails, and you don’t sleep thinking about the graveyards you fill with your heavy hand. You don’t know what it feels like to have a gun burn in your palm, and you’ve never heard the screaming of someone who only has one limb left to spare. You don’t know how long it takes before a father will give up his children, and you’ve never seen your tombstone so clearly that the callous of your hands feel like the rock it’s made of.

Whatever you say must be true. Whatever you forgive him of must be good enough. There is nothing you cannot give, and there is nothing you can say that won’t be absolute reality. He feels like he poisons you every time he touches you, but when he takes his hands away, the skin underneath looks the same, and your smile never fades. You don’t bruise like other people do when he puts a hand on them. You don’t flinch when he raises his arm. You don’t scream when he comes close to you.

He hears your laughter wherever he goes. He’s kneeling now, bone digging into the ground as he lifts up his arm that holds a blade high. The bullet would be quicker, but this feels better. It pierces the neck, flesh giving away to its sharpness like a hot knife through butter, and Ghost licks over his teeth as he watches something sacred leave their eyes. For a moment, he feels bad about what he’s done. He closes his eyes, squeezing them shut, looking for his alternate reality.

I am no good. There is nothing good in me. I am not made of it.

There you are. Sitting on your knees between his thighs, cheek nuzzled against his jeans, sparkly, glossy lips curled into a wicked smile as you fist his cock and coo up at him. When you kiss his tip, you leave it shining, and then your tongue comes out of your mouth, and it’s over for him. There is a heaven inside of you. When you suck, his mind blurs, and his jaw aches with how hard he clenches it as you dip your head and take him deep. You whine because you like it. No one’s ever liked Ghost the way you like him. No one’s ever seen the mask and giggled the way you do. There’s no one that looked at the layers he’s made of and thought to use their fingers to lift them up to tuck themselves inside. His shell is not a barrier, it’s merely an illusion, and there you are—blinking up at him, bouncing in that sunflower sweater, wet eyes like diamonds. He feels warmth in his hands, and he thinks it’s from how hard he’s just come, but when he opens his eyes, it’s merely blood soaking into the fabric of his gloves.

The house is dark when he comes home. The cat is staring at him from her spot by the window, blinking slowly as he toes off his boots and passes by her with a soft scratch under her chin. He finds you in your bed, face against your silk pillow, wearing fuzzy purple pajamas and hugging a well-loved stuffed bear. Your nightlight is on, casting soft shadows of a moon and her stars, and Ghost finds himself watching you for more than just a moment. He stays there in the doorway, rooted to the spot, watching the gentle rise and fall of your chest as you snooze.

You wake up when the bed dips from his weight. Groggily, your hand moves, searching for him, and when you find the fabric of his hoodie, you close your fist around it and pull him until he’s nearly on top of you.

You taste sweet. When you kiss, Ghost chases the sugar sweet that still lingers on your lips, and you seek the ash from the cigarette he smoked outside. Your knees fall open, and Ghost settles between them. Too big, but he forces himself there anyways, one big arm wrapping around you and under your back before he yanks it into an arch and bites against the side of your neck. Where he saw blood early, all he sees is the give of your skin under his teeth. Instead of begging, instead of screaming, he hears your soft whine, a breathy call of his name that makes his cock so hard, he has to yank down the zipper of his jeans before he cuts himself on it.

Where he saw death in their eyes, he finds nothing like it in your own. When he is inside of you again, he tells himself he’ll never leave. His body has new purpose, and this is it.

You’re sleepy all over again once you come. Draped over his chest, palm rubbing against his solid middle, legs tangled between his. You smile at him as he turns his head to look at you, and he slips his hand under the hem of your shirt to caress you at the base of your spine.

“Good day at work?” You mumble, snuggling into his side. Simon tightens his grip on your middle. When he feels the flesh squish under his hand, he breathes nice and easy. Just what he expected. Exactly as he prefers.

“Good day, love.”

“You got all the bad guys, teddy bear?”

Simon licks his lips. He thinks about who had the unfortunate opportunity of being at the end of his scope today, and he thinks about who it’ll be tomorrow. He likes this routine. It satiates something nasty in him, but he’s never been quiet about the way it makes him feel. It’s what you drew you to him, wasn’t it? He told you about all the horrible things that exist in his head, and you’re still here, you’re still in his bed—it wasn’t enough to push you away, so there’s no need to hide this dark truth from you. If anything, you might want to go again.

His cock twitches at the thought.

“No,” Simon tells you, and you shrug, closing your eyes.

“That’s okay. There’s still tomorrow.”

Simon feels something ache under his ribs when you say it—like taking the words straight out of his mouth. You are so in tune, it would scare him if he wasn’t already convinced that you were meant for him.

But even if you weren’t, I’d chain you to this bed. Never let you go.

He wonders what color your blood runs. He doesn’t think it would be red—you’re too pretty to have blood be such a color. Maybe it’s pink. Purple. Maybe it’s yellow. Maybe it glitters just like the sparkles you love to wear.

Maybe it runs black. Maybe, underneath it all, you and Simon are one and the same. Maybe you are rotten inside. Maybe you’re an illusion, too, maybe what he sees is just a mirror-view, and the real you hides and plays your limbs with puppet strings and masks the horrible, terrible, evil things that live inside of you—

You pat his chest a little, pouting, an annoyed breath leaving you as you close your eyes.

“Go to sleep, Simon. It’s late.”

It is late. You’re right. Always right, his smart girl, always telling him how he needs to hear it so his mind settles and his body relaxes.

It’s okay.

Isn’t it?

I forgive you.

He can never do anything wrong.

Everything is just as it should be.

“What?” you shout back, positive that you have misheard him. 

He shrugs. He won’t repeat himself. 

“Me—and you?”

He raises his brows, looking around the empty table as if to ask, Who else?

“Why?”

He takes another drink, and you see him mulling over his potential answers this time, sucking on his teeth as he thinks. What you wouldn’t give to be a fly on the wall in his head. He’s got you on tenterhooks, leaning forward onto your elbows, fingers absently (anxiously) playing with a condensation ring left by someone else’s drink earlier in the night. 

Finally, he says, “Why not?”

-

His hand rests low on your back as the two of you say goodbye to the others. You see the downright thunderstruck looks Gaz and Soap throw at each other at your announcement that Ghost is driving you home, but the deeper meaning hardly registers. Who cares if everyone knows that you’re taking Ghost home to fuck him? You’re both adults; you need no one’s permission. Still, as soon as you are outside, you press your palms to your heated cheeks, wondering how you will be able to face any of them in the future. 

“You driving?” you ask him. 

He lifts his hand, showing you the keys in his palm. He doesn’t open the car door for you—not that you had really expected him to. It isn’t as if this is a date. It’s just two adults hooking up.

Inside, he shifts the vents towards you and turns on the heat, soothing the goosebumps that had begun to bloom on your arms. He waits until you’ve buckled your seatbelt before backing out and onto the street. It’s only then that you remember what Soap says about Ghost’s driving. You wish you had a second seatbelt. 

“So what brought all this on?” you ask, feeling remarkably shy in the passenger seat. You’re beginning to sober up from your drinks at the pub, not that you had ever been that drunk to begin with. Maybe this was a mistake. You’re already suffering from nerves, and you haven’t even gotten back to your apartment yet. How were you supposed to fuck Ghost without looking like a fawn, your knees knocking together coltishly, nauseous from anxiety? 

“I’ve been thinking about it for a while,” he admits. 

Alright. Downright digestible news. Before tonight, you wouldn’t have even considered you and Ghost friends, necessarily. More like friend-adjacent, thanks to your mutual friendship with Johnny. It’s good to know that apparently you had caught his eye somehow, even if it was by being the only woman among a male-dominated group of friends. 

You can’t leave it alone. “But why?” 

“That’s what people do, isn’t it?” he asks, like he’s not a person, like he’s only ever heard about what it’s like to be one from a friend of a friend. “They think about fucking each other. Don’t you think about fucking me?” 

Your mouth goes dry. You do. You think about fucking Ghost a lot than one might expect for how few minimal interactions you’ve had. Being perfectly honest, tonight is sort of becoming a dream come true. You’d had an attraction for Ghost ever since you’d met him, even before he’d taken the mask off and you’d seen that he has such a pretty face underneath. 

You’d be willing to examine under a microscope your affection for aloof, seemingly unaffected men on a different day.

Ghost looks at you, trying to interpret your silence, the car swerving slowly into the other lane. You make a sound remarkably close to a screech and reach out to adjust the wheel, but he adjusts it before you do, batting your hand away softly. 

“We don’t have to do this,” he says, eyes firmly on the road now. “I’ll just drop you off.” 

“No, I want to,” you say. “It’s just—it’s been a while for me. I want to, though.” 

Ghost casts you a doubtful glance. He pulls into your apartment complex’s parking lot and the two of you head up together. True to form, you feel his eyes taking in all the new sights: the man behind the desk who doesn’t even look up as you both enter, the elevator that was last inspected two years ago, the proximity to the neighboring apartments.

After you unlock the door but before he crosses the threshold, he reaches up and runs his hand along the top of the doorframe—and easily pulls away your spare key. For a moment he holds it between you both, staring. He seems nearly as surprised as you are by his own actions. Reaching out, he sets it down on the end table just beyond the entry and says: “You couldn’t find a better hiding place for that?” 

“Goddamnit, Ghost,” you whine, slipping off your shoes. “You’re not here to assess my, my security measures. You’re here to fuck me. Will you get in?”

He comes in and makes a circle of the living space, his steps silent in a way you’ve never been able to replicate, not even here in your own living space. You cross your arms, wondering what he’s thinking. Does he think you a slob? A terrible interior designer? You told yourself that you didn’t care. The space was yours, and yours alone, and you liked it well enough. He could survive being in it for one night.

“What’s the verdict?” you ask after the silence stretches too thin. 

“It’s nice,” he says. Then he amends, or perhaps adds: “It’s you.” 

“I’m choosing to take that as a compliment. Do you…want a drink?”’ 

“No,” he says, taking off his jacket and resting it on the arm of the couch. “Want you to c’mere.” 

Your feet obey before your mind even thinks to question it, padding across the living room in your socks until you stand in front of where he has seated himself on your frayed, careworn loveseat. He looks up at you, eyes dark and all-seeing. His hands find your hips, testing the width of them, and he makes you feel like something small, something precious, something to be cradled in the palm of his hand like a gem or jewel.

“Sit down,” he says. So you sit beside him, close enough to breathe in his clean scent. 

“I’m going to kiss you,” he says, taking your chin between his thumb and forefinger. “As soon as you say you’ll let me.” 

“I’ll let you.” 

His lips are soft as they look, mouth warm and insistent as he coaxes you to part your lips and taste him—as if you need the incentive. He tastes like Price’s whiskey that he had sipped at the bar, like he would settle warm in your belly and everywhere else. His hand relaxes his hold on your chin, choosing instead to cup your jaw, suffusing warmth throughout your cheek. 

It turns into the longest makeout session you’ve had since you were a teenager. You kiss until your jaw aches, until your lips are raw, until you’re throbbing between your legs. Each time you try to move things along, Ghost gently deflects your advances, seeming content to kiss you for ages. If this is how he fucks, it will be an all night affair. 

“Ghost please,” you mutter against his mouth when you feel liable to burst, when he won’t even let you slip a hand beneath his t-shirt. 

“Here,” he mutters, hauling you onto his lap. That’s headed in the right direction. Your thighs spread obscenely wide to accommodate him, lowering yourself until you feel that hard line beneath his jeans. Instinct has you lining yourself up until you can rub off against him, a choked sound rising up in the back of your throat at the blissful friction. 

He sighs into your mouth, a trembling little exhale of air, his hands finding your hips and pinning you in place. Pulling back, he mutters: “None of that.” 

“Why not?” you pant. “Feels good.” 

“I’m trying not to embarrass myself. Work with me.”

The two of you move to the bedroom. You stand on legs that are already shaking, stripping clothes off along as you go: socks here, leggings there. The typical anxious thoughts have just started spiraling in your head—what underwear are you wearing? Have you shaved recently enough? Is the light flattering? When did you last change the sheets?—when Ghost catches you, looping his forearm around your waist and pulling you back against his firm chest. 

“I wanted to undress you,” he says against the nape of your neck. 

“I can put the clothes back on if you like.” 

“Think I’ll just do the rest myself, if it’s all the same to you.” 

His hands are remarkably gentle for his line of work as he helps you out of your shirt, your arms lifting obligingly to help him. The light from the lamp in the corner is actually quite flattering, casting shadows across you both in a way that is artful. His fingertips, calloused but careful, trace up the lengths of your arms and around to your back. 

He fumbles a little with the clasp of your bra. 

“I hate those things,” you breathe once he finally gets it figured out, coaxing the straps off your shoulders. 

“Me too,” he says in that dry, bland way that you’ve come to associate with his humor.

All that’s left are your panties. He presses you back onto the bedspread and hooks his fingers into the waistband of your underwear, peeling them off your thighs. Your legs try to close on instinct, but he is quick to wedge himself between them, thumbs finding the creases where your thighs meet your pelvis and stroking the sensitive skin until you don’t know whether to laugh from being tickled or cry from being teased. 

“Fuckin’ pretty, aren’t you?” he murmurs, eyes on your pussy. Maybe he’s talking to it and not to you. “Want to get my mouth on you. Can I?” 

God, how long has it been since you’ve gotten head? You nod, near frantic. Even if he’s no good, some effort will be better than nothing. Besides, a part of you has high hopes for Ghost as a lover; so far he has been thorough and careful, both points in his favor. He leans up and kisses you again, your nipples brushing against his t-shirt, reminding you that you are naked while he is still entirely dressed. He seems content, and as desperate as you are to see him naked, you’re even more desperate not to break this blissful little soap bubble you both have somehow managed to find yourselves in. 

Nudging your head up and to the side with the tip of his nose, he trails his mouth down your neck, tasting your skin and searching for your most sensitive spots. When he finds them, he drags his teeth against them softly until your heels are digging into the bed beneath you, hips up and searching for any kind of friction, even if you have to rub yourself against his jeans to find it. 

Ghost continues down over the plains of your chest, teasing first one nipple and then the other with his mouth and his hands, testing the heft of your breasts in his huge palms. He explores your body with an admirable single-mindedness, not the perfunctory, half-hearted way some of your past lovers had. His eyes are never far from your own, categorizing your reactions; for what purpose, you aren’t sure. 

After kissing a line right over your navel, he grips your thighs in his hands and spreads you wide. That close to your cunt, he must be able to smell how desperate you are, must be able to see the way it drips from you. He ghosts a thumb along your slit, turns it towards himself until your slick catches on the light. That thumb disappears into his mouth, and it takes all your breath and all your thoughts with it. His hum of approval vibrates against your calves which are pressed to either side of his chest. 

“Okay?” he asks. 

You nod, unable to trust your voice. 

He leans down and kisses your folds, chaste and sweet as he might have kissed your mouth. He uses the fingers of one hand to spread you open, and there is a rush of warmth as he lets the saliva pool on his tongue and then flood against your sex, leaning down to chase it with his mouth. 

He is all merciful tongue and lips, no hint of teeth as he licks and sucks at that hidden knot of flesh at the top of your sex. He barely pays your entrance any attention—which is fine by you, honestly, his tongue is direly needed elsewhere—but shifts an arm free to sling it over your pelvis, palm resting over your mons, thumb pulling back that hood that seeks to keep your most sensitive parts hidden from him. 

Your hands grip fistfuls of your bedspread, unsure if he’s willing to let you touch his hair. The noises—gasps and whines and choked groans—coming out of your mouth would have your soul leaving your body if only you could hear them over the sound of blood rushing through your ears. 

He’s strong, fighting against your natural urges to clamp your thighs shut around his head. Instead he presses you open wider, leaving no where for you to run to or hide as the pleasure in your pelvis blossoms, swells into some sweet fruit that bursts all over his tongue, your back arching into a neat bow. 

You find out then that Ghost eats pussy the same way he kisses. He seems content to lap you clean and continue sucking at your swollen flesh, and even though you don’t think you could cum again, it still feels good. You melt into the mattress, boneless. Against your better judgement, your hand finds his hair, tucking back the longest strands that just begin to tickle the tops of his ears.  

His mouth stutters against you at the touch, losing its easy rhythm. He pulls back until he is out of your reach. 

“Sorry,” you whisper, throat raw. Your hand falls to rest on your soft belly, feeling exhausted.

“You can touch. Just don’t pull. I don’t—“ he stops, like he is searching for the right words. “—I don’t want it to hurt.” 

“Not at all?” 

“No.” 

“Me neither. Would you kiss me again?” 

His only answer is to shift upwards so that he can meet your mouth. You taste yourself on his tongue. His cock, still confined in his jeans, brushes against your thighs. One of your hands wanders down his firm chest, down his belly, til you can map the shape of his erection with your fingers. His biceps tense around you where he braces himself on the bed to keep from putting his weight on you, head dropping til his forehead rests against the juncture between your neck and shoulder. 

“You should get undressed,” you remind him. 

He lets out a breath through his nose that sounds suspiciously like a sigh, leaning back onto his haunches to tug his shirt off over his head. You stare, awed. He’s so thick, all over: muscles hidden beneath a nice layer of soft padding, chest hair broken up by the odd scar here or there. You reach out toward his belt but he stops you. 

“I can do it,” he says. He stands and strips himself naked in one fell swoop, like ripping off a bandaid. He’s thick here too, just as you had suspected: thighs and cock included. Already you can feel the phantom stretch of him between your legs and in your jaw. It burns away the last bits of sleepiness your orgasm had given you. 

Throughout your perusal, he stands still, at attention, mouth turned downward in its most comfortable frown, meeting your eyes with an almost obstinate persistence. You kneel up and crawl to the edge of the bed, letting your legs dangle off of it. 

“Can I touch you?” 

“Alright,” he says. 

You start at his shoulders, tracing over the broad width of them. Everything about him displays his strength. Even his scars, which some might consider signs of failure, only showed his persistence for survival. You ran your hands across his pecs, pausing to toy with one pale, pink nipple, so soft beneath your fingers. With each breath he takes, his abs are thrown into sharp relief. 

“God, Ghost,” you mutter, tracing a line down to his cock. 

“I know,” he says dully, though what he knows, you’re unsure of. “Condom’s in my pants.”

“We don’t need one.”

“I don’t want any surprises.”

“You won’t get any. Here.” You take his hand and guide it to your upper arm where your implant sits just beneath the surface of your skin. He flinches, unsure what he is touching. “It’s my contraception.”

“That’s horrifying,” he mutters. 

“Do what I do—don’t think of it.” 

“Right.”

You shift backwards up into the bed, thighs falling open invitingly. Instead of filling the space between them, he lays next to you, rolling you til you both face each other. 

He runs his calloused palm up the length of your leg and grips your thigh, tugging it up and over his hip until you are spread open for him. There’s a question in his eyes, a slowness to his movement that gives you ample time to deny him this if you don’t want it—but you do. God you do. You ache for it—for him. 

He reaches down and slips two fingers into you, easy as anything in your wet, relaxed state. The fullness is divine, even more so when he decides you’re ready for that third finger, the one that stretches your entrance and makes you hiss a breath through your teeth. 

Ghost doesn’t even fuck you with them, just leaves you stuffed full of his fingers while he kisses you more. He waits until you’re the one shifting and thrusting against his touch before pulling out and wiping your wetness across your tender folds. 

He grips his cock, guides it to your entrance. Hesitates. 

“Please,” you mutter, face flushed with heat, hoping he doesn’t want you to beg. You’ll debase yourself, but it will be painful. 

Whether or not it was your word he was waiting for, he slips inside you, a near-unbearable fullness and pressure that has you burying your face in his chest. His own breaths are stuttered, shallow as he sinks as deep into you as your body will allow and no deeper. Once he’s inside you, he seems to relax, like some great race has been run, some threshold has been crossed and now he can rest. 

“Let me know when I can move,” he says, running his hand up and down the length of your back, down over the curve of your ass. 

“Not yet,” you beg. “Feels like you’re in my fucking throat. Jesus, Ghost.” 

His cock twitches. You both suck in a breath. 

“Don’t say that shit,” he mutters, breathless, fingers digging grooves into the soft flesh of your hips. “Lean back. I want to look at you.”

You uncurl yourself away from his chest, tilting your chin up towards him. The last twinges of pain in your cunt have receded until all that lasts is that ceaseless fullness. He moves at last, laying down his arm so you can rest your head on his bicep. Only then are you aware of how painfully intimate this position is. There is nowhere to turn away to, nowhere to hide. You’ve had sex with partners less intimate than this. 

“You can move,” you assure him, hoping for a distraction. 

He takes a breath so deep his chest brushes your own. The pace he sets is downright agonizingly slow, less thrusting and more of a solid grind against you that has you a shivering mess in his arms. There’s little chance you could cum at this pace, but it feels good, and all of it is strangely secondary to him. 

There’s a look in his eyes. You don’t understand it. Is it tenderness? Genuine affection? Gratitude? You’ve never had sex with this much eye contact before, never felt like breaking that gaze could take you out of the hazy headspace you’re in. Ghost finds your hand and grips it—doesn’t lace your fingers together but instead holds them like a tiny bundle of sticks in his giant hand.

He rests his forehead against your own. His eyes fall shut for just a moment, and it gives you the freedom to examine his features freely: the low brow, the curve of his nose, the pink scars tinged pale purple in the low light. You feel like you’re seeing him for the first time. You feel like you’re the first person to ever see him. 

That strange thought starts a domino effect in your mind, sets off a chain reaction, slides a dozen puzzle pieces into a Ghost shaped puzzle and all at once it hits you. 

“Ghost—stop.” 

He stills, eyes opening. Reverses, withdrawing from inside you. “What hurts?”

“Nothing,” you assure him. “But—I’m sorry. You’ve done this before, right?” 

He doesn’t respond. He’s meeting your eyes, but he has that obstinate, pained look again, like he’d rather be looking straight at the sun. 

Your voice pitches upward with a hint of panic. “Ghost??”

“Fucking hell,” he groans, rolling onto his back, cock slipping free and leaving you feeling bereft. The mattress dips, making you sway toward him. You shift away.  “What gave me away?”

“Oh my god. You’re kidding, right? Please tell me you’re joking.” 

“Bloody wish,” he mutters, arm thrown over his eyes. 

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“The fuck would I tell you for?” He sounds genuinely baffled. 

“So I could—I don’t know! So I could have known!” 

“Didn’t want you to fucking know,” he says, letting his arm down so that he can glare at you fiercely. At the sight of you huddled at the other side of the bed, naked, arms wrapped around yourself, the fury seems to melt out of him. His shoulders sag. He palms at his eyes briefly, like a headache is brewing.

“Fucked it,” he mutters to himself, going for his jeans and sitting on the edge of the bed to put them on. “Fucked it all.” 

“You didn’t,” you offer hastily, though it does feel a little fucked. Suddenly you realize that your chance to fuck Ghost is slipping through your fingers like so much sand. What had started as a dream come true was turning into a nightmare, and you couldn’t bear the thought of letting him leave. Not like this. 

At your words, he tosses you a look, and how a human can fit so much skepticism in a single expression is beyond your belief.

“Really. I just wish I’d known so I could have been better for you.” You don’t realize the truth of the statement until you say it. The last thing you wanted was for him to look back on this moment with disappointment. 

He shakes his head and mutters: “You’re mad.” 

“We could still—you know.” 

He stops, jeans halfway pulled up his thick thighs. “What, fuck?”

You find a loose thread on your bedspread and twist it around your finger, shrugging. Aiming for cool and missing by a mile. 

“You want to.” 

“Well, yeah.” You abandon the thread, feeling too exposed. Tucking your legs up toward your chest, you wrap your arms around yourself. “Like you said in the car. I’ve been thinking about it.”

“About fucking me.”

“Are these questions?” you ask, face warm. “Yes, I think about it. Thought about it. I have thoughts.” 

His lips twitch, a ghost of a smile, gone before you can imagine what a full-fledged grin would even begin to look like. “You’re serious.”

“Really serious,” you offer, sensing that he might be coming back around to the idea himself. Though you’re no vixen, you let your body unfold just to watch the way his eyes drop to look you over. You never knew eyes could be hungry. “Pants off? Please?”

He’s still and quiet for several long moments, but at length he shoves them back down his thighs, naked once more. He’s only half hard, but no less intimidating in this state. You eagerly shift to the edge of the bed and off, back down onto your knees in front of him, palms against his thighs. 

“Is this okay?” you ask, looking up at him from beneath your lashes, aware that this is one of your most flattering angles. 

“Go on,” he says. He sounds doubtful. You are too, unsure if you can find the same rhythm you both had going before. Unsure if you want to, now that you know him better. 

You take one of his hands and coax it into cupping your cheek, then slide it back and up into your hair. “Don’t pull. No pain, right?” 

Something hard in his expression softens marginally. His fingertips scratch gently at your scalp, a silent praise as he agrees: “No pain.”

Leaning forward, you nuzzle at his cock. It is velvety soft against your cheek. His scent here is more concentrated, masculine and warm. Above you, he sucks in a breath through his teeth. 

How much you enjoy giving head usually directly depends on your partner, and Ghost is brilliant to suck off. Some might find him stoic or unaffected, but his expressions are just understated. When you place an open mouthed kiss against his shaft, his fingers twitch in your hair. When you take the tip past your lips to rest heavily against your tongue, he lets out a shaky exhale. By the time he’s nudging the back of your throat while you work the excess inches of his cock in your fist, he is grunting in between in sharp breaths. You find yourself becoming hyper attuned to his reactions until each minuscule motion feels exaggerated to your brain. A twitch becomes a caress. A sigh a moan.  

“I’ll cum in your mouth if you don’t stop,” he grits out. 

You pull off, jaw aching, lips slick. “I’d rather you came inside me.” 

He pulls you to your feet and kisses you. All the kisses tonight, and this one has been the most honest, the most needful, the most raw. Had he never even kissed anyone before tonight? you wonder. It’s hard to believe that the answer might be yes. The way he kisses melts your brain, fizzles your thoughts. 

“Ghost,” you breathe when he gives you a moment to come up for air, his mouth dipping low to your collarbone where he sucks softly. 

“You know my name,” he says, mouth against your skin. “Use it.”

Simon. You have to say it in your mind first to get used to it. Simon. Simon. Then he finds one of those sensitive spots in the crook of your neck and you are whispering it, voice trembling more than you’d like: “Simon.” 

“I like the way you say it,” he admits. “You’ve got a pretty mouth.”

“So do you.” 

He snorts softly, shaking his head, like you have said something very silly. 

“Up.” He grips your waist and helps you up onto the bed. You scoot back, making room for him between your thighs, and he fills the space so fucking snugly. His cock nudges at your sex and reminds you of how you ache all anew. 

This time when he slips inside you, it punches a sound out of you that is remarkably close to a whine, your toes curling. 

“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuckfuckfuck,” you gasp, hands scrabbling for purchase against his broad shoulders, careful not to scratch him. 

His head drops, forehead resting against your own, eyes shut. “Fuck’s right. Not a chance I’ll last after being in your mouth.”

“Wait for me,” you choke out, working one hand between you both until your fingers can find your clit. The angle isn’t the best, not with him so close, but it’s made up for by how blissfully full you are, by how Simon’s arms are trembling where he holds himself up above you. Briefly you let your fingers take a side trip, teasing his cock where he stretches you open, and Simon groans. Fuck, it goes right to your head. It makes you feel like you could walk on water. 

You find his mouth and kiss him, kiss him til your head is light with lack of air, kiss him til your thighs are shaking with how close you are from your own expert touch. 

“Fuck me, now, fuck me please,” you beg into his mouth.

He draws back until just the thick head sits inside you, giving your fingers room to work for a moment before he thrusts back in slow and smooth, pinning your fingers against your clit and that simple pressure—it’s enough. Your body bows against him, choked sounds lost against his mouth as he swallows them whole, fucking you so softly through the peak of your pleasure. 

Simon stiffens not a handful of moments later, cock twitching inside you. The burst of warmth is pleasant, making you shiver. He drops down til his chest presses against your own, careful not to crush you with his weight. 

“Don’t pull out yet.” 

His softening cock twitches inside you. All he says is: “Alright.” 

You hum, warm and sated. Sleepy. “You sleeping over?”

“Didn’t plan on it,” he murmurs, lips against your shoulder. 

“But the walk of shame is a valuable part of the experience.”

“‘M not ashamed of fucking you,” he says. 

You’re strangely touched. “Me neither.”

“Did you fake it?” he wonders.

“I’m no good at faking,” you admit. He leans up so his eyes can scan your face, looking for any hint of deception. Whatever he finds must satisfy his curiosity because he lowers his head back to rest against your shoulder. 

He rolls you both onto your sides, and his soft cock slips free with a rush of seed. You make an unhappy sound in the back of your throat. Afterward is always your least favorite part, when you feel so empty.

Simon hushes you as he slips from the bed. “Bathroom,” he tells you. 

“Through there.”

“Not for me, for you.”

“Why?” you whine, tired and petulant. 

“Because pissing afterward is a valuable part of the experience for you. Can you walk, or did I break you?” 

When you don’t answer, he grips one of your ankles and pulls you toward the end of the bed. You shriek, rolling onto your belly, but it’s no use. Looping his arm around your waist, he tosses you over his shoulder and carries you to the bathroom like you weigh nothing more than a sack of potatoes, which is patently untrue. 

“Are you going to watch me go, too?” you ask. 

“Kinky,” he says, already disappearing into the other room. 

By the time you clean yourself up and take care of any “valuable post-sex experiences”, Simon has dressed himself. His clothes are gone from the floor in your bedroom. You can’t help but feel disappointed; a part of you really had been hoping he’d stay.  Slipping on your panties and a clean shirt, you chase after him hoping he hasn’t left only to find him toying with your spare key at your door. 

The way he reaches for your hand and draws you to him soothes some of the ache of seeing out. He thumbs your pulse and says: “I have to be ready to leave for work at a moment’s notice or I’d stay.” 

“It’s fine.” 

“You’re lying,” he says, pressing his thumb more firmly against your wrist. “Don’t lie to me, or I’ll know. Do you want tonight to happen again?” 

“Are you seriously copping a feel of my pulse to see if I’m being truthful?”

“Evading the question,” he says, clicking his tongue in disapproval. “Thanks anyway, for tonight. I’ll see myself out.”

“Yes! Alright, yes. Of course I do.” 

His mouth quirks upwards, his grin a little crooked thanks to the scar, but no less precious. His thumb strokes softly. “I don’t need your pulse to tell when you’re lying. I just like to feel it racing when you look at me.”

You groan, burying your face in his chest. How embarrassing is that? 

“Next time, I’ll stay,” he promises. “Alright? Repeat it back to me.” 

“Next time you’ll stay.” 

Yielding. Obedient. Pliancy answered everything you’ve ever asked for. 

So when you told him to never talk to you again, he didn’t.

And Simon does good on his promises – usually, anyway. When it counts. Matters.

Papers with a big, bolded ‘Divorce/Dissolution of Marriage Petition’ plainly labeled at the top were signed when thrusted into his face. Zero complaints. He didn’t fight you on it. He didn’t mention the damp dots scattered across the sheet or the redness in your eyes. He didn’t say anything at all during those six and a half months, cordially attending the required legal meetings with you, even paying all of the remaining fees.

In retrospect, maybe he should have said something. If not when you gave him the form in the first place or long before any of that, he should have done it some time during the entire week you spent packing your things because you insisted that he keep the house for himself. 

Even when you stood in front of your car, waiting for any last words he had before you drove off, all he offered was a bland farewell. He doesn’t blame you for the curses that left your mouth as you slammed your car door and left without a second glance, leaving your ring with him. 

At first, he assumed time would dust over it all like normal, fill the scars in with collagen, and make it easier for him to wake up in a bed that just felt too big now. Maybe it’d drown out in the amplitude of time.

It’s not an active effort Simon makes to forget it, but he’s also not fond of the way he keeps looking at closed doors, expecting you on the other side.

He’s been staring at you since you’ve gotten here. 

Three hours have passed, and his eyes are still trained on you. 

It’s been a long seven years.

Time has treated you like royalty, and he almost hates that it has. You don’t seem to be looking for him at all, despite returning to the same neighborhood you left him in. He studies you from afar, leg bouncing on his chair. You won’t see him embedded in the fringes of the yard, covered by people shuffling around in aromas of marinated meat and vegetables.

Nice view anyway. Chiffon flows down your chest to your calves, summer air whispering through the silk, and Simon drinks up the sight like an oaky bourbon. Years unburdened by him, and you’re prettier than ever. Happier too, looks like.

Something peels apart in his ribcage.

Tender, pulpy, mush like a rotting peach when he sees you move around, interacting with his world again.

Smiling at friends with those lips (he wonders if they still taste like pink grapefruit) and hugging them with warm arms (will they flare out and open wide for him too?). Crystallized sugar sparkling in your eyes. He hears them coo your name – their voices and faces surprised, elated, hugs wrapping around you tight. Confirming you’re real and just a few yards away.

The itch swirls around until it grows out of its cage again. Swells up with pus and singes until it’s deformed—waiting, waiting, waiting, screaming to be unfettered. 

Shame, because he’d been doing a pristine job at keeping it locked. Stuffed it away into the corners. Kept it hiding in the backs of his knees. Behind his ears. Between his fingers. All of it comes melting into the open the longer he stares – a mangled escape he allows himself from penance. 

He watches how care-free you are, as if all your doubts and troubles have been solved. He doesn’t look away when your eyes wander through the brushes of people and do land on him. Your voice thins out with whoever you’re talking to and you’re quick to excuse yourself. Simon watches you skitter away to the side of the house where the light blackens out.

It’s the hottest he’s felt since summer started.

“Didn’t know you’d be back ‘ere.”

Your body jumps when the familiar timbre swallows your ear, and you do your best to ignore the vertigo filling your world, adjusting your purse that shook off your shoulders at his arrival. Begrudgingly, you turn to face him, sweaty palms awkwardly clasping together.

“Si-Simon!” You gulp, managing a polite smile. “Hi.”

“Hey, love.” He half-expected a bitter response, something cold-shouldered that specially lacked any clemency for him, but his heart is pleasantly throbbing at the radiant smile you offer him. 

An olive branch. He uproots the tree and keeps it in his pocket.

Something else throbs when he sees your dress up close. The dress you’re trying to tug at now, covering yourself up. It doesn’t do anything to stop him from staring.

“You look well.” he says.

“Thank you. Um, you too.”

A sundew curls over you. Uncomfortable, you clear your throat, dragging his gaze back north.

He smiles. “You visitin’ someone? Or…” 

“—friends. Yeah. I’m just visiting for tonight. I was just about to leave.”

A gruff hum.

Your molars clamp over the meat of your cheek. You spoke too much, gave him too much information. It’s written on your face, in your features; you regret coming here. Visiting your old friend and attending the barbecue for her son’s birthday party. You had to have known he still lived in the same neighborhood, that he was still mates with your friend’s husband. 

It only makes sense that you wanted to see him too. For him to see you. 

“Ah, m’sure you’re a busy bird.” he comments. “Likin’ the city then, eh? You find anyone worth your time there?”

“...Sorry?”

Should be, he wants to say. But it’s alright. Mistakes happen. Everyone makes them. He’s taught more correctional exercises than he’s received, and he won’t mind passing those lessons over to you.

“Jus’ want to know if anyone’s been keepin’ you busy.”

The humid breeze in the air does little to cool the heat flowing into your face.

“Busy, as in…” you trail off, mind working to find the purpose of his words. You avoid the gleaming center of it.

“Y’know what I mean, pet.”

No small amount of disgust enters your eyes, and he doesn’t hide the flash of amusement his own gaze responds with. Each step you’re taking back is just another step he takes closer. There are no witnesses to the broadness of his indecency, not with the two of you stashed into the darkened part of the yard.

“I’m not sure it’s any of your business.” you clip out. “I’m happy now, genuinely. I didn’t come here to reconci-”

Your back bumps against the wall. The space around you is instantly crowded by his mass. You feel the air surrounding your body being inhaled by him, but you’re too distracted by his musk to notice that. Oud and bergamot rip through your body when he comes close, but he doesn’t touch you. It’s too hot—too volatile to breathe, to fight back.

His voice is lower now, eyes raking over you once more. “‘Course it’s my business. Should be knowin’ if some other bloke is fuckin’ my wife.”

There’s enough room for you to slip out. You don’t, nor do you correct him about not being his wife anymore. He doesn’t wonder why. He already knows why. Salivates at the troubled look in your avoidant eyes. 

For a long time, he’d been waiting for this – a shift of the universe to let gravity pull you back to where you belong. Time has baked the waiting dry out of him, and he can’t find a reason to keep the desire at bay anymore.

“Goin’ to answer?” He ducks his head, forcing you to meet his eyes. “C’mon, can’t blame a man for wantin’ to know ‘ow ‘is girl’s gettin’ on without ‘im.”

You want to slap him.

You want to claw at his face and tell him to leave you alone.

No matter how traitorously warm you become between your thighs from his words and how hard he tries to crawl back into your lap, you won’t harbor that same love for him ever again. Never again.

“If you don’t get away from me, I’ll scream.”

The words hurriedly claw out of your mouth and you regret them instantly. It’s scarce on his face, but you can feel the excitement shooting up and simmering beneath his skin. You shrink into the wall. He breathily laughs at the pathetic lie.

“You wanna scream?” he rumbles, “Got a bed you can scream jus’ fine in, love. You should know.”

“I’m not… I’m not interested. I have a new husband now.”

“Another lie, pet.” he tuts with a faint smirk, shaking his head at you like you’re just some petulant child. “I ain’t dumb. Tellin’ me tha’ if I check your cunt righ’ now, it’ll be bone-dry?” 

His hand dips and you smack it away before it can get too low. 

“Don’t fucking touch me—”

“So you’re wet.”

“No, I’m not anything!” you hiss at him, finally gaining the strength to push him off. He doesn’t budge, grabbing your trembly wrists in one hand before you can pull away and holding your hands against your abdomen, his body indifferent to your squirming. 

Still crude and blunt. 

The fronts of your bodies are pressing on each other now, the feel making your cheeks burn. Several little breaths escape you as you try to push in vain. Rendered flightless, you droop.

“Then feel it for me.” 

“Wh-what, feel what?” You’re confused, the whimper in your voice quelling the firmness of his grip by a fraction. 

“Either you slip your fingers into your cunt and show me tha’ you’re not wet right now, or I can do it at ‘ome.” He gently pushes your hands towards your hips. “Go on. I’ll even lift your dress for ya. Or I can jus’ go ahead an’ fuck you ‘ere. Let everyone hear ‘ow much you missed me, yeah? Doubt you’d be—”

“No! No, okay, okay, please, okay!” you softly cry, your voice so hushed and warm. “Let’s go, okay. Please.”

Light resumes in his eyes and he lets go of you.

He knows you aren’t stupid. You could run off, you could’ve done that minutes ago. You should’ve yelled the moment he started getting too chatty with you, but you didn’t. You don’t want anyone to see how shameful you look when you’re getting breathless, pressing into his contact. He doesn’t want anyone else to see it either. It’s for him. All of it. Always has been. Eternity knows it, but you seem to have forgotten. 

Even when you’re tucked in his arm and back in his place—‘our home’, he insists—you still find ways to protest.

You don’t know why you stay. You don’t know why you don’t want to run.

The door clicks shut and you shiver at the view inside.

Almost everything is the same. From the walls down to where you last left the fruit bowl on the kitchen table. Of course, the fruits have changed, fresh. Everything kept prim like he runs a restoration business. You tear your eyes away, an ache weighing in your belly when Simon palms your hip and guides you in.

The couch is the same. The carpet. The television and the stupid worn out controller you’ve told him to replace too many times. 

You blink and stop walking, feeling tears, wondering if it’s too late to get away.

“I… I slept with someone after you.” you try, breath catching when he turns you to him. “People, actually. Mul-multiple.”

He scoffs at you, “Multiple what, multiple of your fingers an’ silicone pricks?” 

All your next words are shushed away, but you’re still clinging to the weak vestiges of the fight you have left in you. Your chest rises and falls deeply when he kisses the top of your head and rubs your sides down. He scowls as you tip your face away from him.

“Alright. I’ll play along.” he murmurs, cupping your face and turning you toward him. He’s not amused by the endless string of lies, you can tell. But he doesn’t look crestfallen – not at the slightest. “You slept with a bloke. Fuck, multiple of ‘em. Le’s say, ten. Twelve. Tried to fuck the thought o’ me out your ‘ead. Did’ya like it? Did it work? They take good care o’ my girl for me?”

You begin to whisper, shaky. “I loved it, they—”

The words are lost from your mouth when his lips seal over yours. You cry into his mouth. The lies untangle and melt on your tongue when he kisses you rough and long. 

He grumbles and nips at your chin. “Even if y’did, bet you’d ‘ave t’fake it with ‘em all the time. Bite your lip to keep from crying out my name instead of theirs when you came.” 

A flustered hand smacks his arm. He laughs back into your mouth and apologizes by squeezing your ass.

The promised bed doesn’t come; he can barely get you to the living room couch when he starts stroking his hand down your torso to yank your dress up. It’s you who drags him down to the couch, getting him to lower himself onto you. The springs in the couch squeak—a sound that takes you back to those numerous, weary nights. 

Simon grunts when his kiss is reciprocated with a fervor. This is what should have happened years ago. This is what he should have had. Kept. Time doesn’t matter anymore. He has it now. He’s the one you’re back under – that’s all he really cares about. His mouth sucks and presses around the shape of yours before smothering them down to your neck, hand deftly sliding out of your dress to tug at your straps.

Same fucking lotion. Perfume. Shampoo. Feel. Noises. Everything. His heartbeat is tachy, licking and greedily suckling at your skin to taste you.

Dulcine on his tongue, mouth dripping with drool over you. A pang darts through the inside of his mouth from how hard he’s been sucking at your skin, licking spots dry before kissing them. Four, five, six kisses down, and you feel him making whorls on the swell of your breast with his tongue. Your body arches into his and he pins you back down with his hips. 

You groan. “Simon,”  

“Cryin’ for it now?” he quips, low-lidded when he gazes up at you from your collar. His hand doesn’t go near your hips, and you burn with such impatience that it’s absurd. Whines of desperation leak from you. Your hips buck, trying their best to gain some relief. 

When he notices the soft grinding on his thigh, he chuckles.

“Christ, baby, what’ve you been livin’ off of these past seven years?”

“Don’t ask me that.”

“Did’ya a’ least touch yourself while thinkin’ ‘bout me?” He kisses back up to your face, an uncharacteristic cockiness about him. “Can picture it already, pet. You lyin’ awake at night all alone in your bed, touchin’ yourself, wishing it was my cock splittin’ you open instead of your fingers."

“Don’t…” You look away, wanting to kick him off. “Don’t say that.”

A raspy chuckle melts into the warmth in your skin, lips pressing your closing eyelid. “Still keepin’ that up? What am I allowed t’say then?”

When you open your eyes, you’re looking at him fonder than you should. Sniffly with snot and a teary voice.

“Tell me you missed me.”

His hands are everywhere as soon as you say that with a sadness glossed over your eyes, thick and sinewy thigh lodging up between yours until there’s no more space between you, giving you the contact you need. Simon feels everything – your tremulous hips pressing harder with each roll, huffs of humiliated and wanting breaths exploding on his skin, hands pulling at the shoulders of his shirt. 

Coddling fingers rub over his muscles, tough and taut like a cinder block. Stress radiates from him. When you’re tossed away and abandoned, it’s not something you can help. It builds up like a landfill, drags on his steps. 

An approving grumble comes from him as you pet his head down on the sides and kiss him like you never left.

He hooks his arm under you and raises you just enough to pull your dress off, stripping you down to your undergarments. 

“‘Course I fuckin’ missed ya.” he mutters, sliding his tongue through the seam of your lips. He kisses you and kisses you until you’re sharing one breath, a throaty moan floating from him to you. “E’ery bloody day. Bed was too cold, too empty. House too fuckin’ big. Never stopped needin’ ya. Wantin’ ya.”

“Should’ve stayed away.” he tells you, licking back down the valley of your breasts, raising your pulse to a prestissimo. He pulls his thigh away from between your legs. “You knew I’d drag you back ‘ere if I saw you again.”

You don’t have a response. Just the tight line your lips form to suppress the moan fighting its way out, that coil in your lower belly squeezing tight as he cups your left breast through your bra, his other hand working your panties down your legs. Phosphenes sprinkle around your vision from squeezing your eyes shut too hard. His fingers crawl under the cup of your bra to slide it off, the tips of his fingers cold, turning your skin rough with goosebumps.

A sweet surprise greets him – he rubs your hard nipple with his thumb, brushing it over and over. A shrill squeak and moan garbles your voice, body flinching. Your hands fly to his arms and you grip, gasping his name.

“Please,” you cry, mouth parting in moans. Not even you are sure what you’re begging for. 

“M’gettin’ there.” He swirls his tongue around the soft areola before closing his mouth around it. You go stiff and cry out his name again. The ripened muscle in his chest skips a beat or two, its broken flesh healing over each time you cling to him tighter.

It feels sacrilege to do things so quickly after so long. If this were a perfect world and he were a perfect man, the savor would take until the next sunset. But neither are true, and Simon feels all the rotted parts about him dying off the longer you touch him. 

He’s already had long enough of a wait. So have you, he gathers.

Desperation drips from you through tears and syrup between your legs. The delicate fabric is pulled down your legs—digits prodded into the gusset, brushing through the thatch of hair—and he feels the wet, sticky smear on his fingers. Slick puddled up on the gusset of your underwear. Simon does his best to not yank it off and collect it with his tongue.

“Fuck, look a’ you.” he rasps, pulling the panties entirely off your ankles. Hot and gushing already. He slides a thick middle and ring finger into you with ease. Any semblance of logic in your head goes down the drains as his fingers stroke inside you, rubbing around and caressing your soft walls. "Never stopped thinkin’ ‘bout this little pussy. Wanked myself raw rememberin’ ‘ow fuckin’ perfect you feel squeezin’ around my cock."

Again, a lush whine from you. Then some half-hearted grimace as you take in his words. “You’re disgusting.”

“Felt ya squeeze up on me when I said tha’.”

His hand sprawls over the back of your thigh and he pushes up. Apart. Opening you up to his sight with your calves scraping on the sides of his arms, he sees the slick glisten as it leaks down into your ass. His cock aches and grows rigid. With a rhythmic pumping and curl of his fingers, you mewl and bend in half.

Something degrading and teasing almost falls from his tongue, interrupted by your searching hands on his pants. Picking at his belt loops and muttering half-coherent sentences.

“What, pup,” he hums, perching your leg onto his shoulder, pressing a kiss on the skin above your ankle. “I know, I know, I’ll be quick.”

The heel of his hand crawls behind you and plants into the slope of your spine, drawing you closer as his fingers slip from you - already slathered with a sheen of frothed white. He spreads your slickened lips apart, patting your swollen clit and rolling circles around it, eyeing the ottar that flows from you without restriction. His fingers withdraw to his mouth, quickly sucking the taste of you off of them with a hum. Sweeter than he remembers. 

He’s about to forget about it all and just spend the night with his face buried between these legs, but his girl keeps pulling and tugging at the creases at his jeans and the hem of his shirt. Whining, little cat cries, desperation flooding over in pleas.

The side of your fisted hand weakly pounds on his thigh, impatient for his bareness. “Your clothes.” 

Simon feels bigger than before. Heavier. Warmer.  The layer of fat over his muscles has thickened. Watching him tear his shirt from over his head makes you feel far away from your body. Everything looks glazed over with oil, sounds dimmed in your ears by your thundering heartbeat. Shameless, your eyes lick down his pectorals down to the trail of hair venturing into his pants.

Drool almost spills from the side of your mouth as he plucks his belt buckle apart, unbuttons, and then unzips.

Gentle is something he doesn’t give himself, calloused hands abruptly pushing his pants and briefs down—not giving you time to enjoy the view. Your legs fall from his shoulders and you keep yourself spread, shy under his gaze, burning because you’ve never stopped asking yourself why you let him take you home.

No amount of repetition can habituate you to this. 

It springs out like a jumpscare, the thickness unchanging from base to tip, the blunt head of it flushed and damp with precum. He handles it meanly, giving it a couple of dry tugs before scooting your hips closer—

“May-maybe we should go to the bedroom or something.” 

“No.”

“This isn’t how I want this to go, and you don’t even ha-”

“Stallin’ now?” He frowns and bends over to kiss your cheek, prodding his cock against your pussy like it’s lost. “We’ve fucked too many times in different places for you to complain about this, pet.”

“I—ju- I’m just saying that—” Your protest crumbles into a wordless whimper as he rocks his hips into the cradle of your thighs, coating the head of his cock with your stickiness. Shamelessly rubs his shaft down then back up between your messy folds, tip making slippery friction with your clit. “Oh…”

His jeans are scratching the backs of your thighs – you wish he’d at least do the courtesy of taking the entire thing off, but you don’t think he’ll hear anything you say now. A keening whine shreds your throat when the first few centimeters probe in, the loud noise kept inside your mouth behind pursed lips.

“Let it out, love, c’mon,” he gasps into your neck. Whittles down the remaining slivers of your resistance with kisses up your neck back on your mouth. “Le’ me come home. Done this so many times before, ‘aven’t we?”

It bullies into you in shallow thrusts, the drag so strongly stinging at first, despite how wet you’ve gotten. 

Finding an opening has stayed the same; Simon goes slow, sweet, soft until your arms raise and curl around his shoulders, pulling him close. When you do that again, his hips push up—

Full. The word can’t scrape the surface of the feeling of it – being stretched by familiarity, filled up until you can feel your spine tingle, so hot that you feel immolated and your only thoughts are messy prayers to the god upon you right now. You feel his balls pressing on the pillows of your ass. You feel where the head of his cock is inside you. 

You feel him everywhere—you want him everywhere forever. 

“Fuck…” he groans into your mouth, swallowing your sigh.

With every nail you dig into his back, every moan you give him, every tendon you use to keep him tight against you, he gives you a stronger thrust. Perfect fit, he hisses into you. He braces a forearm next to your head, fingers sliding under your head to hold you as he increases his pace. Hard, dirty, deep strokes that make your body rock back into his. Makes you babble through fleece-soft lips. 

“Si-Simon, oh fuck,” Those tears are finally streaming down, lids twitching and fluttering, mouth rounding into a cute shape as he finds the spot. “Yes—yesyesyes, mmph—”

"There she is," he gruffly rasps, triumphant. "Righ’ fuckin’ there."

Your guts feel hot, innards molten and barely kept together by your skin. Simon churns his hips, cock grinding on the gooey softness within you, and a squealing moan gets him to break the kiss, giving you air. It continues, the obscene drag back and forth, through your sobs and pawing.

Hit after hit, again and again, each thrust bruises inside you. You don’t feel the ache yet – you’re sure you will in the morning. But you take it and squeeze, clamping around him. Instinct. There’s always an instinctive pull with him, no matter how long it’s been. It’s why your eyes gravitated toward him earlier tonight, why you let him corner you until you were here all over again—it’s why you came back to town in the first place.

He grunts, beaded drool on his cuspids. "Gonna cream all over this cock, love? Jus’ like old times? Gonna soak the couch at this rate, filthy fuckin’ girl." 

The taunt gets your legs around his back, ankles crossed and drilling into his back. His hand snakes down to rub your puffed up clit, already covered in slick, coating his thumb. The ascent walks a thread-fine line, neither of you willing to pull off or slow down—his hips snap against yours and you take it with an upwards buck.

Most of these motions are old and trained between you – from the way he fits between your legs at all to how his hand strokes all your sharp edges into soft, rounded corners. 

But when you inevitably come – arching with a tsunamic blow that sends a tart taste to your mouth, the orgasm pulling what fight you have left in you out – nothing touches your favoritism like the way he kisses you when you do. Unpracticed, sloppy-hot, undoing you for a second time. Ribbons of pearly white fill you, pushed deeper from his slowing thrusts, still thick and hard inside you. Your bodies are sticky together with sweat, lips sucking one another, tasting how much sweeter you’ve both become.

All the drool pooled up in your mouth from him is swallowed as you drowsily pull back, sighs bouncing off his lips back onto your face. Foreheads pressed against each other. You keep your eyes closed, but you can feel him looking.

“I need…” You muster all the poor pieces of strength you have left. “Need to go home…”

“Home,” he muses with a dim smile, petting your head from hairline to the knob of your spine. “We’re already ‘ome, love.”

Depletion overtakes you in gentle waves.

In the beginning of morning, you awaken to early sunlight on your back. The only thing covering you under this blanket is a too-big shirt that you assume Simon slipped on you before he tucked you into bed. You’re grateful he still has the decency to clean you up at all.

The only source of warmth near you comes from Simon’s chest against yours and his arms draped around you.

A pallid hue pales the room as you blink to take in the light, sighing tiredly. Feels like your body is tethered to the bed, each tiny movement meeting the refusal of expended muscles. It’s the worst in your hips. Between your legs, a sore ache that was too busy taking his spend all night to get a break. It’s fuzzy, but you remember a hand massaging your inner thighs as you fell asleep. Eventually, it became lips pressing over the skin.

“Awake already?”

You hear it from above your ears, the same lips kissing you on the ear.

“No.” you sleepily answer, yawning into his chest. 

Sleep greets you with warm arms again.

Eventually, the sun rises to its highest point, and Simon pulls you to sit up when you wake. You’re more slouched against his chest as he leans back on the headboard, but he doesn’t fix it, enjoying that more.

Dry lips licked moist, you open them to take the sliced bits of persimmon he hand-feeds you. But you keep your eyes closed, too tired to remember when he got up to harvest it. You planted that tree together years ago. The persimmon is crisp and honeyed on your tongue. He still takes care of the tree.

You eat what he gives you and he makes you hold his hand to suck his fingers clean.

And when you open your eyes, something catches light on the base of your ring finger. A golden band. The golden band you left for him to throw away.

It's been years, decades, since he had a rut. 

(Broken Alpha. Ruined.)

Trauma, they tell him, will do that. Sever the drive in the back of his head, the one that rears—vicious and angry—each mating season, bringing with it the urge to breed. To claim. Own. 

A form of self-preservation. It pitches a plexiglass of protection between him and his instincts, not letting them merge. Join. Done so because to be in rut, to want, to need, is vulnerability. It costs hypervigilance. Turns man into beast. Animal. 

This bodily reaction makes an alpha extend themselves, like an overarching limb, to shield the omega they pick as a mate. Bearing their own neck to save another. 

Naturally, they say, if he couldn't help himself, how could he ever hope to protect a fragile little omega? 

They tell him it could be as permanent or temporary as he allows. Healing, they say. Time. Laughable, really. And utter nonsense because Ghost is fine. 

Trauma tampered. Revenge sought, found. There's no one out there who could ever harm him, and still—

His last rut was before the mission that buried him alive. That turned him into the living dead. A mockery of man. Frankensteinian beast. 

It's not something he cares much for, anyway. From what he remembers of his youth—vague snippets of memories, disjointed, blurred sensation; a profound need, an urge, to sink his cock into something, to plug them up, to bite—ruts have always been a nuisance. In the way. An annoyance that took time away from what he'd rather be doing. 

And as Johnny enters his—skin pallid, waxy; cheeks flushed, eyes darkening like a brewing storm on the horizon; snapping at anything that breathes, whining like a dog, miserable and hot, all the time (ahm’a bleedin’ furnace, s’what ah’m)—he finds he doesn't care very much to go reclaim what he lost. 

No skin off his nose. Nothing to concern himself with. 

Besides. Omegas know better. 

Even before he lost himself, dying, rotting in a tumulus, pretty little omegas with their soft hands and bashful smiles always went out of their way to avoid him. Miserable alpha. His scent alone wards them off—burnt leather, charred bones; sarcophagus dust, dirt—and he found himself alone during his burgeoning ruts more often than not. 

No pretty little thing to tender the sweat on his brow, or bend over and present for him—offering up a sweet little cunt he got to bury himself inside, tie up nice and tight on his knot. 

It was usually his hand. A bottle of bourbon. A printed porn stash he swiped from Tommy, who nicked it off their old man—

And when he did find a partner, it was always transactional. Hand to hand, an exchange of money. All clinical and detached. Empty. Fucking into a concept instead of a person; a vacuum eating away at his soul because he knew, then, that they wanted to be there almost as much as he did. 

But what choice did either have when their home was the rotted gullet of a dying beast?

(Simon told them to stay away from shitty men like him, who broke bones in the throes of his heat, snapped his jowls at anything that got too close, and had to be chained to the bed like an animal during it—)

Nothing to miss. Nothing to mourn. 

And it's not like he doesn't get the urge. Wanting to sink his cock into something warm, wet, is as recurring as a sweet tooth. A prickle in the back of his head after he devours his dinner that says, dessert might be nice. 

He can fuck, but his knot never pops. A worry the doctors had—unsure what the consequences would be in the long run for such a virile, young Alpha already experiencing nature's version of erectile dysfunction so early in life. 

(“pity the poor omega who has to deal with that rut,” they whispered. “might not be much of anything left of them when he's through.”)

Inconsequential now because he's pushing forty and his last rut was a false trigger. One dragged out of him by drugs and torture. The last true rut, natural and instinctual, was when he was eighteen. 

It's doubtful he'd suddenly be cured at his age. 

This is what he tells Johnny when he asks, pries. Broken fuck, ain't he? Unmated. Can't knot. Piss poor excuse of an Alpha. Doesn't he think it's—

“a shame,” Johnny grouses, words muffled slightly by the way he's hunched over the cheap plastic table in the canteen. His fingers dig harshly into his temple. “Alpha like you—” it's enunciated in clipped Queen's English, the barb makes Ghost scoff. “—ack! a waste. ma mam would be livid. no grandbabies t’show off? sacrilegious.”

—funny. If he's being honest. Laughable:

because for as long as Ghost can remember, he's always had a predilection to ruin his favourite toys. slaking his unquenchable lust on their tender skin, biting down to the bone, sipping on their marrow—

not really the sort of thing omegas today go for, is it? 

his want is as hideous as he is. as ugly as his goddamn mug—

Instead, he shrugs. “hardly.” 

“yer no’ missin’ it?” 

“missin’ what, Johnny?”

“knottin’, ye surly prick.” He jeers, then, jabs his elbow into Simon's arm. “a bonnie omega to stick yer prick in. ain't missin’ th’, no?”

“no,” Simon gripes. The last thing Price needs is another order of protection against his Lieutenant. But to humour the alpha in an early stage of rut, he jabs out, hollow and full of wretched derision. “i can barely remember what it felt like. must be heaven, though. is that your plans for tonight, Johnny? gonna go and knot some sorry omega?”

It's meant to prod, poke. Sharp barbs aimed at Johnny's threadbare control, the same one held in place by a fraying, unspooling knot. Alphas in the early stage of rut are considered safe enough to be around. Not yet mindless drones, hosts to an ugly little parasite; a being forced to obey a single, instinctual drive to mate, to gorge themselves into a post-rut stupor. 

Safe. Or so they say. 

But Ghost knows what Johnny's feeling in the same sense as a phantom limb. A broken, fragmented memory. So, he twists his mockery in deep. All in jest, of course. 

And Johnny pales suddenly. Wavers in his seat. The affirmative comes after a bout of contemplative silence. A jagged, choked yeah slips from his Sergeant’s mouth as he drops his head to the table, and groans. Miserable. 

“go fuck yerself, Lt.”

Simon intends on taking Johnny up on that offer, lazying out on the futon with his hand stroking lazily along his flaccid cock, thumbing through the latest series of snapshots Johnny—ever the photographer—snapped up during his previous rut. Images of pretty omegas dressed up in fine silk, blood-red lingerie, and coy little grins on their faces, a vixen pastiche of demureness. Jejune appeal in all its coquettishness.

Innocent sluts—Johnny's preferred type. Ones who'll bat their eyes at him, nervous and full of faux modesty, while they rock back and forth on his face, tugging on his mohawk to make him lick their cunts just the way they like. Sweet, like candy. Dressed in sin. 

He likes to take before and after photos of them—often with the pretty models unaware (adds to it, aye, Lt?). Ones with them batting their eyes at him, soft and shy in all their twee delight, and then fucked out, ruined and chewed up like a broken toy when he finishes with them. Bitten off more than they can swallow. Cheeky brats sobbing for mercy on his bed. 

Likes, even more, to send them to Ghost. A little tease. One he has no compunction about partaking in. Enjoying to his heart's content. 

Or—

Intended to, of course. Because what ends up happening is this:

Price calls just as he's getting into the new series sent to his phone—the tear streaks streaming down this omega’s face are particularly appealing, bound in intricate Celtic knots (Johnny, the artist), and gagged with their own panties—and tells him he has a job for him. 

Something simple. Discreet. And local, too. Bears have been sighted in town—a mama and her cubs. Dangerously close. 

The prelude to the phone call is a clipped take care’a it before the line goes dead. 

Ghost doesn't need to pack much—he can't remember the last time he unpacked his duffle bag, anyway—and stays in the recliner until the mission file comes in, idly stroking his thumb across the pixelated, tear-streaked face of the omega in Johnny's clutch. Moussed. Messy. They make the prettiest picture, don't they? Drool dripping down their chin, a spillover from what the lacy, white panties couldn't catch. 

Flesh peppered with jagged circles, bite marks. Johnny knows better than to claim them, and their neck is bereft of his teeth. Smooth. Unblemished. 

To claim is to bond. To bond—

Well. 

His earliest recollection of a relationship is his parents’. His mum, tied and trapped to a man she wanted no part of, but stuck. Unbondings, divorce, were rare during that time. Unheard of. Even now. 

And under his old man's influence, he's always seen claiming as ownership. As possession. A lingering remnant he’s told is wrong, but can't shake. Can't change. It glues in the fibrils of his mind. A rotten, pulsing scab that no amount of sanctioned reconditioning can ever seem to get rid of, to scrape out of his skull. 

(one he knows would be there no matter what because his sole purpose is exsanguination; bloodletting— 

in his warped desire to protect the things he cares about, he ends up smothering them in the end. a child holding a firefly too tight in its chubby fist.)

But Johnny knows better. Good Catholic boy. Knows to keep a muzzle on himself when he sucks desperate kisses into the small omegas' sweet neck, breaking apart the blood vessels of their scent glands, soaking himself in their musk—potent pheromones of a needy omega in heat. Aching for a bite. To be held down and conquered. 

It's wrong, they say. This ugly mass sits inside his chest like a foreign body. Scandalised eyes drilling into the side of his head like he's a monster for thinking this way. 

And he is. 

(always has been)

But he knows better. Knows to keep those uglier, rotten parts of himself hidden away from prying eyes. Got good at it, too. Enough that they let him into the brothels time and time again. 

Still—

He can remember the closest he'd come during a rut to biting a shrill omega who screamed in his ear until his head rang, ached. Nearly did it, too. Teeth razoring over their jugular, pinching delicate skin. 

Clarity came like a gunshot when he tasted blood. Chiselled a hole through his delirium, broke up the haze, and snapped his jaws up tight, locking them as he finished with a muffled growl, tongue swirling over his teeth for another taste. Another drop. 

His ruts have always been messy. Bloody. Got him banned from several centres, brothels, where they offered up betas drenched in the artificial musk of an omega in estrus. Ones resilient enough to withstand the harsh coupling of an unhinged Alpha in need. 

He had a problem, they said, with treating their workers like chew toys. Biting to break skin, drilling in deep enough to scratch his teeth on their bones. 

Deranged, they hissed. Fuckin’ mental, mate. Stay the hell away!

Some are just prone to violence. Need to be half-sedated before they can mate without ripping their partner to pieces. Ghost has always been that sort. Aggressive. Hard to control. Rabid. 

His appetite is bigger than the expanse of their skin. He sometimes thinks he could eat the whole world and still starve. 

He hums, thumb sliding to cover the omega's neck. Trapped in his hand, his clutch. They're cute when they're ruined like this. Begging. Whimpering. 

His cock gives a half-hearted twitch. His work phone chimes, signaling the end of his leisure. 

shame, he thinks, squeezing his hand until the metal dents, the screen cracks, splinters. Pops. Hairline fractures split across their distorted, tear-stained face. He closes his fist over it until it breaks. Goes black. 

really. such a goddamn shame. 

Some things are just not meant to be—

—but they have a habit of falling into his maw, anyway.

It's a simple set up. 

Man—

beast, monster, thing

—with his empty, growling stomach and teeth made to bite, tear, goes out hunting for a meal. In that search, he finds you. 

You, Persephone personified: damned (eternal), standing beneath a spruce tree. Limned, halo gold, in the waning sunset's bashful kisses, you lean on the rough bark, idling your timelessness away. 

Postcard beauty. Pinup demure. Alluring. 

(creature of sin

and oh, do you reek:

The air is saturated in the tantalising scent of honeybush, roasted hazelnuts, and clove. Saccharine—almost nauseatingly so—but with a hint of spice, black cardamom, cinnamon. He drags in lungful after lungful until it tangles deep within his chest, nearly suffocating. Smothered in this earthy sweetness. Drowning. Drowning—

the perfect dessert)

It unleashes something in him. Chips at the lock buried deep in his mind, cudgelling through the hinges until they pop. Rusted, slick with oxidising oil. It peels back from the gate, unveiling this gaping, ravenous chasm, polluted and gangrenous, rotten down to the marrow. Noisome. Noxious. This frothing pit sloshes, geyser-like, and greedily foams at the maw, the mouth, aching for a taste. Something to quench this gnawing hunger. 

This bottomless abyss hadn't seen light since he was eighteen, and—

The hollow space where his rib once sat throbs, aches. phantom bone. He holds his chest with his hand, feeling for the gap, the chasm, stolen from him. Ripped away, taken.

By you. you—

—so,

it's only fair that he steals something back. 

(quid pro quo, or something, right?)

You greet him with a small nod when he wanders close, eyeing him warily under the black rim of your ballcap. Tense. Small hands curl into fists, partially hidden under the rain-soaked windbreaker nearly two sizes too big. It smells like you—honeyed milk, molasses; lilac, lavender and warm bread—and he fights the urge to pull his mask down, to shove his misshapen nose into your neck, and breathe it in right from the source. Drinking, feasting, on it. 

This want is visceral. It coils in his guts, bubbling in his veins. His musk—heavier than yours, pungent—beads along his scent glands, mushrooming into the air like a fine mist. 

Your nostrils flare. He takes a step closer, eyes skewering into you, taking in everything you have to offer. The rucksack left at the bottom of the tree, stained with dirt and leaves. A sprig of Saskatoon berries peeks out from the lopsided flap. And—

Ah. 

Foraging is off-limits in this area unless granted a permit. One you don't seem to have based on the skittish way you keep avoiding his eye.

His scent thickens, tainted sour with faux suspicion, and you wince, ducking your chin, tucking it close to your chest, hiding from his spearing gaze. 

All it does is give him a voyeuristic view of your fragile nape, your vulnerable neck. 

His teeth ache. Jaw clenched up tight. 

It looks so bare. So naked. 

(Be a shame to keep it that way forever, wouldn't it?)

“Hi,” you stammer, seemingly oblivious to the musk you leak into the air, into his lungs. Forcing some sense of staid indifference into your tone. Like being here, out in the middle of the forest is normal. “Did you need something?” 

On the verge of a heat like this, wobbling where you stand—

He wants to chew you up. Spit out the pieces on the pavement. Drink from the gash he'll rip into your jugular,

quench this unbearable thirst. 

He doesn't know how you made it out here as long as you have, smelling like you do, and the thought burrows through the haze spuming, clotting, on the fringes of his muted periphery. Anger is an icy deluge of white water raging through his veins. 

Under the mask, the remnants of his scarred lip curls. His hands close into tight fists. Balled up. He feels the tension crackling along his muscles, his body. Coiled spring. Ready to leap—

But:

There's clarity. Focus. Where he was meant to become a mindless monster, driven by instinct, he instead feels the pieces of himself snap back into place. Missing puzzle pieces. It shifts. Settles. Locks. 

He wants you. Will have you. It's non-negotiable. Ironclad. You just—

Belong to him, don't you? Pretty little thief. And wandering around like this, reeking like you do, you must want him, too. Need him. 

(protect, protect, protect—)

Honed in, drilling into your face to catch every expression that flickers past, he sees the moment you take a sniff, when realisation blooms in the inkpools of your gaze that you are less than an arm's length away from a starving predator. Supple, soft. All plush flesh seated seamlessly against brittle bone. Fragile. 

“hi,” he echoes, and it sounds hollow. Garbled. Like he's speaking underwater. Thinks, for a moment, that he's buried again. Drowning under the crushing weight of dirt. His own tumulus. Suffocating. Choking on dirt—

But you twitch. Feral little thing. It breaks him out of this nightmarish obtundation; shaking the cobwebs loose. He tracks it like a viper. Attention narrowing, shrinking, into nothing but the way you move. Smell. You anchor him in his place, keeping him stable amid this horrific onslaught of emotions that rip talons down his chest. 

“I–” you breathe in again, lashes fluttering. Strains of silk batting over your etiolated cheeks. You breathe him in. Deep. He sees your chest grow, expanding with his air. His musk. Has to bite down on a growl before it forms, the lash of a whip in his throat. Aching. 

There's something spellbinding about you—caked in a layer of grime, briny sweat clogging your natural scent; wild and untamed. Uncharted wilderness, untouched by man and their dirty hands. A corrie after a rain shower. Snow melt. He wants to bathe in it. Carry it with him wherever he goes. 

As if scenting this thickening desire, your eyes widen. You take a step back, swallowing audibly when he follows. Marionette on strings. Your shadow. 

“I should go—”

And he knows he can't let you do that. 

Won't. 

He hums, a fickle, brittle thing in the far reaches of his chest. 

“Go?” he flicks his hand toward your bag, head cocking to the side in a mockery of contemplation. “Don' think you got a permit for that, do you?”

“A permit…”

He has you. Your eyes lower, falling to the badge on his chest. Game Warden. You stare at it, eyes widening. Swallowing thick. 

With you distracted, he leans in. Curves his body over you mockingly, like he's bending down to whisper a secret in your ear. Cupping a pretty little firefly in the palm of his hand. 

When his shadow falls over you—dark and damning—you flinch back, fists trembling under the hem of your jacket. Brows furrowed, knotted tight. Your lower lip wobbles. You try to hide that, too, by sinking your teeth into your flesh until it floods white under the strain. 

He wants to pry it apart with his own teeth. Take the bruised flesh into his mouth until you start to drool, whining from the abuse he inflicts on you in a mockery of a kiss. 

(wants to tear through it, taste your blood on his tongue—)

“An’ I don't reckon tha's a good idea, pet.” 

You shiver when he places his hand on the truck above your head. Boxing you in completely, nothing to spare—not even an inch. 

He hums at that, cock giving a vicious jerk inside his trousers at the almost impossible dearth between your sizes, at the way he swallows you up in an instant. Has to take a deep breath to steady himself, to keep the inkblack tendrils swirling, gathering, at the edges of his periphery from bleeding in. This starving murder of crows. 

When he speaks again, it's low. Deep. Kittenish licks from the tongue of a tiger; abrasive, rough. Mocking baritone of a shifting canyon, a mountainside, before it buries anyone alive under rubble. 

“Not reekin’ the way you do. Might ‘ave every alpha in a one square mile radius frothin’ at jaws for a taste. Ain't safe out there.”

And it's definitely not safe with him. 

He watches, transfixed, the moment this clicks. When your eyes waver between the hard bulk of his body—spread out, laxed; plumage unfurled—and the noisy clatter of the town just within reach. It's this thicket that cups your scent, that protectively curls over you, and keeps the Alpha's prowling about the market square from sniffing you out. A beaten trail. Hidden desire path no one was supposed to wander down. 

Except the bear problem in the woods, infringing on town, and him, the gun bolstered on his thigh still hot from his warning shots into the bush.

(lost little Lamb—

wandered too far from the herd.)

You take another step, cautious. Small. It brings you flush against the tree. Your polyester jacket whines at the friction. He can see indecision play out on your face. Oscillating between the badge on his uniform shirt, the gun on his massive thigh, and the clamour of muted noise from the town just within reach. Alphas prowling. Their acrid scent is unmistakable even through the dense foliage spreading around you.

It's an impasse. Neither option affords you much choice in the long run—it's either stay here with him, with the heady scent of want, of an Alpha on the incipient cusp of a voracious rut; or risk yourself in town. There are police officers patrolling. Ones who can sedate an alpha who gets too out of hand, but still. 

The mimesis of desire pooling around you might send you into heat sickness. That, or you'll get in even more trouble for fleeing a pursuing officer. Resisting arrest. Jail time, certainly. 

The pendulum wavers. Your knotted fists wobble. 

Then—

Your eyes leave his chest, the gun, trailing over his shoulder. Widening in surprise at whatever is there in the distance. 

He ought to commend you, really. The rouse is quite believable—

But: 

“Not bad,” he murmurs, leaning down further. If you won't jump, he'll push you—

He sees his mistake as soon as it happens. 

As he bends, you drop. Waiting until his attention seemingly drifts elsewhere, to when he's distracted and off balance. Lured in by your faux attempt at distraction. 

And it might have worked on a lesser being, but all Ghost has ever been is raw, unadulterated instinct.

He lashes out as soon as you move again, palm curling over your wrist in an instant. Snapping jowls of a defensive snake. Shackled. Locked. He tugs—

But the movement costs momentum. You use this against him, going limp. Forcing him to take the brunt of your weight on the spread of his fingers. Tricky little minx. His mouth breaks out in a feral smirk, tugging harshly on scars, on burns. Stretching skin. Distorting it under the mask, ugly and vicious. 

Your scent plumes up around him, sickly sweet. His jaw aches, gums itch. He wants to bite, snap his jowls around the scruff of your neck, chew on your skin until you sob out his name—

In seconds, you twist. Swinging your body back in a beautiful pivot, clumsy as it is. You're all animal now. Reckless in your pursuit to escape. Throwing out pheromones at him—purposeful, he realises a moment too late. 

And it works. Distracts him long enough for his grip to slacken. Your arm slips out of his grasp, and you're on your feet in an instant, darting through the thicket in a maddened dash to escape the heavy, starving alpha and his burgeoning hunger. 

Escape, or—

Weighed down by the afterbirth of his sudden rut, a prickle of his old self buoys, brims, from beneath the mess. He shouldn't chase you. Should leave you alone, call someone—Price, perhaps. Bark out between a clenched jaw that he needs a tranquiliser and chains. Will have to break Simon's teeth to stop him from biting into you like a man starved, famished. Tie him to the back of his pickup truck, drag him to the edges of the forest. Knock him out. Knock his teeth in. 

Anything.

Because they said this might happen. The doctors’ who poked and prodded. Therapists—all mandatory, non-negotiable, when he signed his name on the dotted line—murmured about unravelling. His self-control snapping like a twig. Sense of self retreating. All hiding away, protecting itself from the torrent of chemicals flooding his hindbrain. A heavy, unrelenting accumulation of a decades-long bout of rut celibacy all washing over him, all at once. 

Said to lock himself up if it happens. Chains. Shackles. Nuts and bolts. Heavy tranquiliser. Immediate sedation. 

And in Price’s office, in that messy filing cabinet he keeps, is a folder. A playthrough of everything that's supposed to happen if this happens. 

(“but that won't happen, will it, Simon?” 

and he'd rolled one massive shoulder in an easy, effortless shrug. 

“no.”)

The failsafe is that he's meant to call in if it does. Precious seconds of clarity, cognisance, enough time for him to dial the number, to bark out the order. To be hunted down, rounded up, and thrown in a pit. 

where he belongs. 

He should. Should. It's the book. Rules. Coloured in red ink. No option to negotiate. 

But as you slip through the dense foliage, angelic gold against the phthalo green bosky, the knot in his shoulders abates. Uncoils. In this sense of ease that permeates within him, he finds that he's shockingly cognisant. In full control. The plexiglass shatters, and in the ruins he finds purpose. 

You smell good. Too good. Any alpha will scent you in an instant, will claim you. Take you. It makes something in his broken, moulted head shift. Crack. He can't let that happen. Has to protect you the only way he knows how—

To wrap his paws around your throat before any other Alpha has the chance to sink their teeth into you. To claim you. 

All his. Little Persephone tucked tight against his ribs where you belong. 

And if the way the air clots with your cloying smell—heady, potent; the unmistakable ripeness of an omega in heat—then you must want him to chase you. Want him to follow. 

(escape, or—

a game.)

He tracks your movements, honed in on the rustle of the underbrush. When you're out of sight, Ghost flexes his hand, curling his gloved fingers over the leather on his palm. There's an itch in the back of his head. Festering. Rotting. He wants to reach in, rake his claws down the mass, shred it to pieces, but it affixes one simple truth inside of him: 

you need him. want him. why else would you run in the opposite direction of help if you didn't want him to give chase?

And so, he does.

You're a crafty little thing. To throw him off of your trail, you leave scent markers on the tree trunks you pass, doubling back to run in the opposite direction. 

It might have worked on someone else, but Ghost has spent half of his life buried in this thicket, and knows better than to follow smells in the forest. A vacuum, a great chasm; it plays tricks with sounds. Distorts scents wafting through the canopy, mingling with the natural loam, the disturbed humus underfoot. 

Instead, he hums at your cleverness—his smart little omega—and shifts his gaze to the forest floor, roaming over the footprints sinking into the soft soil, the peat and moss. A breadcrumb trail leading right to you. Broken twigs, crushed bushes. 

Ghost follows it. Places each foot down carefully, nose angled upward to catch the fresh wave of your heat leaking through the tangled furze. It beckons him forward. Calls out to him. 

(come, come, come—)

This lost little lamb needs a shepherd. 

He intends to give you just that. 

(—find me)

The path you cut through the forest is a twisting sawtooth meant to throw him off your trail. Traps laid out in tall tussocks, weaved through sweetgrass all drenched in your scent. Pieces of your clothing torn at the hem, the shorn fabric pressed on pine needles and tangles furze. 

These breadcrumb trails—a neat nest of wile, it seems—are cunning, he'll give you that. 

Even with his eyes to the forest floor, he finds himself throwing a wayward glance in the opposite direction, snagged in your webbed subterfuge. Somewhere between the visitors centre and the first trail meandering into the thick taiga, you seemed to have realised that your boots leave indents in the mor. He follows the deep impressions in the podsol until he finds them shoved under a Saskatoon berry bush. Another dead end. 

Clever little thing, aren't you?

But even when strays from the path, he's right on your tail. Confident in his scenting abilities. His prowess has always been tracking down wily little rabbits when they try to flee, picking them off in stasis from high above. The layout might have changed—his perch closer to the ground instead of a deer stand—but his eyes are just as keen. Your winding trail is ingrained in his mind. A long loop through the eastern trailhead, and he knows, instantly, that you'll try to throw him off at the placard where the west trail branches off through the dense conifers, and the east meanders downslope to the hidden stream where hunters like to trawl. 

He feels a pinch of pride simmering low in his guts. Anyone else would have lost you three pitfalls back. He's enraptured by this pursuit. Smitten by you. Your clumsy little escape. Your sweet little ploys. He wants to chew into you, let his teeth leave jagged scars, false starts, on your bones. Permanent. Starlight—dusting meteor showers in milk white. 

Ghost’s belly gives a tremendous growl. He huffs at the ache clawing against tissue, ravenous and unbearably empty. 

He'll have you soon. All to himself. 

The thought makes fresh blooms of pleasure spume from the rot in his chest, prickling through the layers of muskeg and peat, etiolated little sprout. Germinating in wet gangrene. Feasting on necrotised flesh. 

He swipes his hand over a honeybush, catches the lingering scent clinging to the leaves. You must have fallen here. Tangled yourself in the furze, overcome by your heat. 

Poor thing. Tired already. 

He holds his hand up to the fading gossamer of twilight trickling through the dense canopy, clenching the lingering remnants of your scent in his fist. It's fresh. He wants to tuck it in his pocket, carry it around with him. 

He finds you in a small clearing, bent down with your palm resting on the trunk of a tree. Nails digging into the rotting bark, desperately struggling to catch your breath. Your heat is a wildfire. It scorches the earth. Burns his nose. 

You're no longer on the cusp of it anymore, but in the throes. 

His rut, he finds, isn't too far behind. 

Perfect synergy. Meant to be. You call to him, and the gaping, gnarled chasm inside of him answers with a growl—

Before you can blink, he moves.

He falls over you, felled timber. The earth shakes under his indomitable weight. Palms slam into the rough bark of the gnarled spruce you've taken respite against, boxing you in. 

You fall against it with a gasp, hands pushing against his broad chest as he backs you into the tree. Little fists pounding on his sternum, mouth pinched, twisted in a snarl. There are pieces of bush caught on your clothes, tangled in your hair. Leaves. Sticks. A spot of dirt on your nose. 

It's mesmerising. 

The ballcap falls first. Morning sunlight over a boscage in bloom. Pitfalls, ravines. The canyons of your eyes quiver; this new topography shifting, sliding. Tectonic beauty in muted midnight. 

He wants to reach in, feel these granite walls of yours with his bare hands. Clamber up the colluvium, the scree, until he reaches these rugged peaks gleaming at him, angry and feral, in fading twilight. 

Time is endless. There's no limit to how long he has to know you—drink from your rivers, feast on your valleys; find all the hidden nooks, the crannies, shaded under the towering monoliths of your body. Chart your couloir. Defile your flume. Bathe in your estuary. Tangle himself inside your dells. Tame your chaparral. 

Fastidiously. Expertly. Until no part of you is unknown to him. 

Your chest heaves, mouth open as he crowds you further. Pressing into you. Over you. 

He wedges his broad thigh between your legs, presses it tight against your pussy. Your thrashing stills when he touches you, when he angles his knee up, up—

There. Through the layers of clothing that separates his bare skin from your cunt, he feels the heat bleeding out against him. The wetness from your sodden panties. Undeniable proof of how much you want him. Need him. 

 “All wet f’me?”

“Fuck you—!” You spit, angry and feral, but you arch into his touch, pushing your pussy onto his thigh. Aching for friction. 

It makes him hum. A low growl caught in the back of his throat. 

“Reckon I'll be the one fuckin’ you, pet.” 

And he will be. This is fact. 

You shudder, brows notching together in a vicious glare. “I don't want you.” 

It's hissed between the sliver of your clenched teeth. Full of heavy conviction. Forging truth out of lies—

And that's all it is. A lie. A fallacy. 

(and even if it wasn't, unlikely considering the way you arch into him, needy despite the disdain dripping down your brow—he really just can't find it in himself to give a fuck; he'll make you want him—)

Ghost leans down, muzzle pressed against your neck. He inhales deep, audible. Chest expanding, lungs swelling. Full of the aroma bleeding out of your pores. Proof of just how much you do, in fact, want him. Betrayed by your own body. 

He huffs out, paints the air with his derision. “Is that so?” 

Ghost drags his hand down the solid line of the tree, dropping it to rest against the jut of your hip. He ducks his head, watching. Staring at the way his palm nearly swallows you up when he rests it over your waist. Spanning nearly the entirety of it—hip to hip. 

It bludgeons into him. Knocks the air clean from his lungs. 

He's always had a hunger for things he can cup in his palm. The barrel of his rifle. The hilt of a knife. Your wrist in his hand. The curve of your hip. 

His gloved fingers slip under the hem of your shirt. Pads ghosting over your skin. Warmth bleeds through the leather, an unmistakable tell of your heat reaching its first equinox. It'll be all fire, all smoke, from this point onward. Desperate. Feral. 

Groaning deep, wanting, he pushes into you further. Chest rumbling. Eager. 

It takes a great deal of effort to pull his hand away. To bring it up to his mouth, fingers hooking over the edge. 

The fight in you abates—marginally—and you watch him with a keen look of suspicion dancing in the moulted dirt spread over your nullah. Wary. Anticipatory. 

He fights the urge to laugh—deep and delirious—and instead works on prying his mask down over his crooked nose, his mangled mouth. Letting the hem snap under his chin, kept there. Bearing himself to you for the first time. Naked. Exposed. 

Your eyes widen, trailing down the jagged lines, mauled ridges of scar tissue. Drinking in everything he offers in the fading embers of a summer twilight. 

He grins—a rivened, ugly thing—when you let out a heavy, quick breath, and your hips drop, rutting your sopping cunt over the wide heft of his thigh. Gyrating subconsciously. Quietly pleased by the way he looks—as maimed, as beastly as he is. He lets you. Lifts his knee, pressing his cap tight into the bark, and bumping the top of his flexing quadriceps at the apex of your groin, right where he knows your clit sits. 

The breath you take is pulled in through clenched teeth, biting on the rind of a moan. Its shapeless silhouette ducks, hides from sight. 

He lets you have it. Lets you run. 

But it's not without recompense. 

With his upper lip curled, he sinks his teeth into the leather tip of the glove above his middle finger. Letting you see them for yourself—these thrawn teeth he'll bury into your neck. Claiming you entirely as his. 

Your pupils start to eclipse your irises. Lagoons of liquid black blotting over rugged peaks. 

Ghost slowly tips his head back, dragging the glove with him. Eyes setting along his lashline, he drinks in the sight of you swallowing thickly, your gaze darting between his teeth, his mouth, and now—his bared neck. Voracious, greedy, in the way you feast on him. Drilling into the stretch of skin slowly unveiling itself to you. 

The muscles in his neck flex against rimy skin. Adam's apple bobbing with his slow swallow. 

You follow it all, but your gaze seems to fix itself on the brawny arch of his neck, falling—and then glueing— to the thick vein protruding from his flesh, pulsing with the steady rhythm of his heart, and the small, swollen bump of his scent gland beneath it. 

Hunger, he finds, paints such a pretty picture on your face. The greedy, anfractuous glances a bludgeon into him; so heavily affixed with desire that the shake of your head when he pulls the glove free, letting it dangle from between his teeth, and drops his hand back to your skin, is minute. Meaningless. 

You want him as much as he wants you. 

The clause in this, the axiom, is ironclad. Irrefutable. Bound in brass when you shiver at the touch—feverish skin on feverish skin—and arch into his palm for more. Panting through clenched teeth, each hiss striking against that fraying coil leashing his threadbare control. To distract himself from the unspooling knot, the ache in his gums, he charts the first inch of skin he passes with his thumb, committing the sloping plains of your body to memory. The jut of your hip, the stutter in your breath when he runs the rough pad of his forefinger over the slope of your underbelly. 

It's easy to marvel at the sheer enormity of his size compared to yours. Simon hitches his thigh firmly into your clothed cunt, nearly lifting you up off the ground. You teeter on the tips of your toes, falling forward into his chest to stabilise yourself. Little fists curling into the fabric of his jacket, knuckles tight against his the last rungs of his ribcage. Your head lifts, a glare chiselling into the soft fields of your face. 

You hiss something at him—feral and scathing. He drops the glove, leans down to meet you in the middle, and eats your feeble protests from your lips in a bruising kiss. Scorching. His teeth knock into yours. Tongue lashes out to catch the vitriol dripping from your fangs. You make a noise in the back of your throat, and he swallows that, too. Devours it all. 

It's a vicious kiss. All teeth, tongue. Bullying. He lets you sink your teeth into his tongue, huffing into the seam of your lips when you coo, victoriously, at the first drop of blood spilled. 

In retaliation, he sets his hands over your ribs, and lifts you up off the ground. Making you gasp. Mewl. Your legs kick out as the back of your head catches on loose bark, raining it down over your shoulders in flakes. He doesn't stop kissing you throughout. Eyes half-mast, still open, as he drinks in the sight of yours rolling back in your head when his thigh, one the width of both of yours—fuckin’ hell—catches the perfect angle on your clit. 

Loose-limbed, caught, you have no choice but to wrap your ankles around his waist, curl your arms around his broad shoulders. Clinging to him desperately to remain grounded, held aloft. 

His hand falls down, cups the back of your thigh, fingers spanning the entire curve of your cheek. Held tight in his palm. He bucks into you—quick, hard. Letting you feel the unmistakable bulge of his stiffening cock, leaking spend already in the tight confines of his trousers. This groin, inner thighs, already sticky with the mess dribbling out. 

You fall apart at this. Head tipping back, crown thudding against the truck of the tree. He has your lower lip between his teeth, and it pulls, skin stretching until he huffs out another breath, mocking, and unhinges his jaw, letting you go. 

Mewling, whining low in the back of your throat, you clumsily rut your cunt into the hard press of his cock. Eyes hazy, liquid, with your blooming heat. 

Its approach is quicker than he thought it would be, and he hums, tongue rolling over his teeth to catch the lingering taste of you. Under his hand, your skin burns. Singing with the urgency of your desperation. He answers it with a grunt, falling forward to smother you under his weight. 

There's a flash of clarity in your eyes when they crack open. Brief. Fleeting. He feels your sluggish attempt to push him away, to free your hands from between your chests, and he has to dip his head to stifle another groan. It feels good to have you under him like this. Covered entirely in his bulk, his shadow. 

His hand pulls away from your flesh, snaking between your bodies to catch your wrists in the palm of his hand. Only one swallows them up, and the easy way he subdued you—effortlessly—has him nearly coming undone in his trousers. Untouched. 

“Fuck, want it bad, don't you?” he snarls, hips bucking into you. Chasing pleasure. He pulls your hands out, lifting to arm to trap yours in the shackle his fingers make high above your head, and—

It's devious, this. 

Somewhere in the loosening agency of his self, his autonomy, he knows this is becoming dangerous. Something that ought to be stopped before he rips into you with a rabidness that promises nothing at all will remain intact when he's finished. When he's had his fill. He needs to clear his mind. To get away from the way you fit against him so perfectly. Tiny in his wicked embrace. 

Like you were made to fit between his ribs. His teeth. 

He gnashes them together, trying to stem the ache in his gums. 

He wants to fuck you. Needs to—

But as ripe as you smell to him now—tender melon, warmed honeycomb—he knows that you're not yet ready to take him. 

Ghost steps back, letting your feet drop to the soil below. With the sparse inch of space between your bodies, he breathes in the lingering scent of your breath—sharp, burning; imbued with a heady thrum of adrenaline electrifying your nerves—and finds the musk a near-perfect pantomime of ozone. The arid tang in the air just before the air. A lightning strike. It rolls over his tongue, tastes of wet pennies in the back of his throat. Heavy with anticipation. 

Something he feels very keenly as well. An eagerness he hasn't met in decades. Absolutely famished for it, for this familiarity of want. Potent desire. 

He mourns the loss of the way your ass fits in the cradle of his hand when he pulls it free, fingers trailing over the feverish skin of your hips, your belly, as he goes. He doesn't stop until he comes to rest on the button of your trousers, eyes flickering down to catch your gaze. Purposeful, now. Intent clear. 

Nothing is stopping him from taking. Your protests are paper-thin, dissolving the moment it touches the dense blanket of humidity in the air, but he wants your submission. Wants to see your resolve break, crushed by your own hand. 

The gossamer wings of a butterfly, crumpled up in your palm, and offered to him for the taking. How sweet—

You seem to realise his intentions when his thumb dips below the hem of your pants. Just a tease. Brushing against the soft skin he finds there with the curve of his nail. 

Your glare is instant. The sharp tug of a drawstring pinching tight between your brow. Mesmerising as it closes over your lax expression. A fierce snap. He wants to pry it apart. Wedge himself between the seam. Create a gap wide enough for him to fit. 

“I won't beg,” you grind out, acidulous. Firm. 

He huffs, quietly amused by the fight still sparking in you despite the evidence of your arousal, your want of him, evident in the stain at the seam of your pants. His other hand rests on the trunk of the tree above your head, boxing you in when he leans closer. Taunting. “That so?” 

You don't respond, but your glare sharpens, mouth tugging downward in a harsh frown. Displeasure sparks in the air. Cutting into him like fine glass shards. He lets it graze his naked flesh, the warning ghosting over him in needlepoint pinpricks. Entirely too captivated by you to notice the sting. 

Your ire is a heady, tangible thing dripping down your brow, slashing over your cheeks. Anger, however misguided it might be, paints a pretty picture over your face. Darkens the inlets nestled in the corner of your eyes. Drenches the ravines, gorges in a startling chiaroscuro. Limns the alpines, the valleys, in a halo of golden starlight. 

He wants to drink it down. Hold your fury in the palm of his hand—

Crush it between his fingers. 

Because despite the dissent, your desire cuts through, and hews the air in a thick tapestry of want. 

mutinous, teeth bared, but your eyes burn, rage against the prison walls, and scream, please—

His fingers dig into the bark above your head, catching flecks of sap between his nails. Knuckles turning white under the flaxen hair dusting over them, strained. The grip is unintentional. Unconscious. He keeps thinking about you beneath him. The heat of your thighs around his waist was a mere tease. A morsel when he wants a meal—

The pressure in his knuckles grounds him. Cuts through the phosphenes blanketing the edges of his vision, smothering the clarity, the cognisance, that lingers in the centre. Threadbare as it is. 

There’s an ache in his jaw. 

(the need to bite—)

He pulls it off, and shoves his hand tight between your thighs, cupping your cunt in his palm. Feeling the heat bleed through the gusset of your pants. The touch is harsh. Firm. He bullies his fingers into your flesh, letting out a mocking chuff when he feels the fabric dampen.  

“Somethin’s’ tellin’ me otherwise.” 

Your hand lashes out, grabbing the thick of his wrist. Holding firm. It should be a warning, but the obvious gap between your middle finger and thumb makes him groan instead. 

“You're wrong.”

“Am I?” 

You twist away from him when he leans down, chin ducking to your shoulder. Hiding. Denying him your mouth, your taste. This meagre measure of control you grapple for is easy to give. He presses his lips to the shell of your ear instead, letting you run. Flee. For now. 

His voice is thick when he continues, husky. He pitches it low, lets it swirl into the seashell coil of your inner ear, earning him a shiver in response. Your nails biting into the skin of his wrist. Holding tight. 

“‘m a lot of things, pet—” rucked gravel, sodden with his derision, spills into your ear. Your shudder makes him want to bite, to maim. “Wrong ain't usually one of ‘em. But you'll learn that soon enough.” 

Your breath hitches. Expression morphing, shifting. Changing into something adorably beleaguered as he encircles you like a tiger, eyes drilling through the tussock, aimed directly at your head. With his body boxing you in, coiling over you like a hideous shadow, he has you trapped, caught. Little lamb writhing between the paw of a tiger.  

You seem to be keenly aware of this. Your eyes are shrewd, searching, as you probe around for any escape route, but he's a bulwark around you. Inescapable. 

Finding none, you suck in another breath, and slowly lift your chin, glancing up at him through your lashes. The look on your face is—

Enigmatic. 

Something changes in the morphology of your mien. Fracturing. Cracking. 

“Yeah?” You breathe, soft and goading. Your hips buck into his hand, rutting shallowly against the tops of his fingers. Unconscious. Like you just couldn't help it. 

And he supposes you can't. 

A fine sheen of sweat has been building since he took after you into the forest. Gathering around your temple, your hairline. The harsh reminder of your festering heat, once dammed by your raw disdain for him—hatred, he'd say, and doesn't the thought just make him want to laugh; you're all bark, no bite, and he knows he'll have fun breaking you in, breaking you apart—but flooded over by the primal drive to mate. 

And he's perfect for you, isn't he? 

Hideous bastard that he is. It's a sharp juxtaposition to your prettiness, your earthly beauty. 

Under the spinel sky, you break. The hand on his wrist tightens, your hips flexing into his palm. Seeking friction. Needing pressure. Needing him. And pissed off about it. Delicious. 

“Prove it,” you snap, irritation blanching the corners of your eyes arsenic white. Edging into a frenetic desperation hot enough to burn the threads of your resolve. But there's a gleam of reluctance pushing through the syrupy murk folding over you, heavy molasses. You want to give in, but there's something about him, his appetite, that makes you hold back. That makes you visibly sick at the sight of him—

Unfortunately for you, he has no such compunction to shelf his barbarity. To leash his desire, to muzzle the overwhelming urge to crush you under the weight of his accumulated need. It's decades of listless apathy. Divorced from anything resembling human emotion at the root. Carved out, scraped off bone. He was left to stagnate. A misfortunate creature submerged in a bog, dead but unable to rot. 

The deluge of his savage, bestial hunger rages in his veins. It's corrosive, vile, and—

unrestrained. 

Ravenously esurient. He wants to sink his teeth into you and never let go—

but first: 

he needs to eat. 

His meal is a feast, it turns out. Simon gorges himself until he's full. Promises that he'll stop as soon as he's satiated. 

(but he's lying to himself, and to you, because he never is—

never will be.)

Tears pebble along your lash line as he feasts on your sopping cunt, licking at your fluttering rim, slurping up your slick. Your clit is pressed tight against the crooked arch of his nose, sliding and catching on the jagged ridge each time he moves his jaw to dig deeper inside of you as if he's trying to taste the seal of your womb. You pant, whine. The noise muffled half-heartedly behind your palm. Teeth sunk into your skin, lodged against your bone. 

Angry rivulets rain down your cheeks, dangling like fine beads, gems, on your jaw. He wants to taste them next, as soon as he fills his gullet with the earthy tang you release. 

Your tears remind of that pretty omega Johnny sent to him—a brat, he'd said; the best, Lt—and it churns in his stomach, dredging up something awful. Terrible. He wants to make you weep harder. Wants you sobbing, begging. His own little brat to take over the knee whenever he wants—

But that's where the uncanny resemblance ends. 

You're not a brat. No. You're a headache. The kind that will have him written up, sat like a bad dog in his best suit, as they level him with charges, and orders, and the like. The sort of thing that even the old man wouldn't be able to string him out of—not that he would. Price is three days away from a much-deserved retirement to the mountains and sitting on his hands to keep from snatching up the pretty conservation officer who moons at him whenever he passes by. 

He won't be much help to get Ghost out of trouble. That leaves only Gaz and Soap. And while he's sure they can swing it, he doesn't really want to be under their ahh, guess ye/ya owe us one, Lt/Riley. 

So—

It stands to reason then that he should have you tamed before dawn. Shackled down, locked up tight. Only right considering he's the best in town to keep bears at bay. Do you really want to deal with a mama grizzly and her defenceless cubs? Or a starving male clumsily pawing his way out of hibernation? 

Probably not. 

So. So. 

He pulls back, rests his chin on your thigh. 

“Gonna be good for me, pet?” He asks, lowering his tone considerably until it catches on the gravel below. 

He's not surprised when you hiss through a cloud of tears. “Go fuck yourself—”

Ghost tips his head, suckles your clit into his mouth. Tongue laving over your flesh. Blunt teeth pressing flat against the swollen bead, a tease. You tense, gasping. Hand pushing his head back, back—

“Don't, don't—” you're mewling, nails raking over his scalp. Hips bucking, pulling back. Struggling to get away. The bite marks along your thighs weep fresh blood in your struggle, filling his nose with the heavy scent of iron. 

They serve as a harsh reminder of what he can do with these jagged teeth of his. 

He chuckles, mouth still closed around your clit. The vibrations have you choking, spine curving into a beautiful arch. 

Fingers digging into your hips, keeping you still. Trapping you. He's not quite done with your cunt, yet. And all this wriggling is something he can do without. With his hand pressed to your hips, he notches the other down your thigh. Tracing his index finger over your soft skin, dragging it close to your outer lips. Catching the tacky slick drying on your flesh with the tip. 

Tiny fists rain down over his shoulders. Urging him forward, eager for more. Selfish, spoiled little thing. 

What a monster he's made—

“Patience, pet,” he coos, mocking and mean. Likes the way you react to the patronisation in his tone. All taut shoulders, shaking fists. Bearing your teeth at the slight, the stinging barb. Shaking in an amalgamation of embarrassment and shame. 

You seem to like it when he's a little awful to you. A little mocking. Cruel. 

“Shut up—!” You hiss, lips curling as you glare down at him. “I'm not your pet—”

He ignores you. Bends down to sniff at your cunt instead, and finds his answer is the white hot desire he can taste in the back of his throat when he breathes you in. 

His fingers pry apart your folds, and he greedily drinks in the sight of your drenched hole, clenching down on nothing. Poor you. His heart thunders in his chest, rages. He wants to sink inside of you—impossibly deep—until the beginning of him and the end of you ceases to exist. Rolled into a single being, atoms merged. Bodies fused. He wants to take everything from you. All of it. Eat it out of the cup of his hand like pomegranate seeds, let the skin get stuck in his teeth. 

He wants to devour you whole.

(to eat—)

Settles, instead, for pawing at your cunt. 

Pressing the width of it against your slit, feeling the heat of your core on the palm of his hand. Branding himself with the intensity of your desire. Another scar among many. An uncountable number of jagged asteroids cratering along his flesh, making a home out of a ghost. A shell. 

Reinforced, too, by the absurdity of how terribly contrasted his flesh is to yours. Monstrous. His scarred hand rests over your pussy, encompassing it entirely with extra digits to spare. Folding each finger on top of the other to wedge between the basin of your thighs. And as his gaze comes to rest on the way he swallows you up, he is struck by the garishness of his hand—hideous scar tissue, burns—falling over your pretty cunt. 

Sinful. Frankensteinian beast palming the sweet pussy of a pretty, human woman, and—

Fuck. 

His cock twitches, spits out a thick glob of pre-cum.

Ghost has never wanted to ruin something as badly as he wants to ruin your cunt. You. Mess you up so badly that everyone will know you belong to him, and him alone. To brand you with the tattoo of his teeth on your mons; force a claiming bite on the pillowy skin above your clit. His ownership bracketed between your thighs, at the very apex of your hip bones. Buried into tissue right under the bulge of your womb. A fecund valley for him to lay waste; for you to grow beauty from the rot, the ash. 

Cinder scraps over his nerves. Fells his resolve in a brutal sweep. 

He comes undone at the seams, unravels. 

Simon curls his fingers into a loose fist, passing the rugged peaks of his bone over your soft flesh. Gathering slick on thick, scarred knuckles. He holds it there, folds pried apart by his hand, content to luxuriate in the softness of your flesh, the scorching heat.

Possessively, he unhitches his thumb from the coil of his fist, and swipes it over your clit. More slick leaks out as you keen. 

“Sweet omega like you should ‘ave been claimed by now,” he rumbles evenly despite the sour twist in his guts at the thought. “Might not ‘ave ended up ‘ere, would you ‘ave? Beggin’ the first alpha you see to fuck this sweet little cunt.”

“Begging?” 

“Practically gaggin’ for it, weren't you?” And even though the words are his own, they sit in his gut like a stone. An angry knot tangled in his intestines, snaking its way up his gullet. Bitter. It's quelled by the sight of your bare neck. Ripe for his teeth. And his alone.

But even if you had a pretty ring made by another alpha, Simon knows that wouldn't have stopped him from taking you, anyway. Biting over the claim. Breaking it between his teeth. Precious, loving union shattered by his crooked greed. He'd have relished in it, too. Basked in the way you sobbed as he tore your alpha into pieces. An obstacle turned into a pretty effigy at his feet. Wicker pyre burning to keep him warm.

(he'd have caught dinner for you, too; hunted caribou, moose, and roasted it over the open flame. Fucked you under the blume of orange. Let the fire lick across your skin as he sunk in deep—)

He rocks back on his haunches. Mood labile, quicksilver, as his rut grows. Festers. 

You deny it, breathless, as he slips the mountainous peak of his bent middle finger into your hole, stretching your rim around the scarred cartilage. You pulse around him like the fluttering wings of a hummingbird. Rapid, quick. Wanting. It draws him in. Makes him want to spit on your pretty pussy, and then break you apart on his cock—

“Such a needy cunt, eh? Starving for a good knot, ain't it?”

You hiss out your protests, but clench tight around his knuckle. He chuckles, and it's liquid. Wet rot. Lungs polluted, spitting nocuous, black smoke into the air. 

“I'm not—”

“You are.” 

He pulls back, pursing his mouth, and spreads your lips apart, opening you up wide and vulnerable to his prying eyes. Saliva puddles on his tongue. He gives you a moment to clue into what he's about to do, your fingers tightening, nails digging into his scalp as you do on a shallow gasp of disgust. Then, brutish, he leans forward, and spits. Lets the glob hit your clit, and he has to hold you still when you jerk, cringing away from him, snarling out your displeasure.

“You're disgusting—”

The protests are weak. Your knees tremble, giving away the growing slickness gathering on the insides of your thigh. 

He hums, watches as it oozes down between your folds, over your fluttering hole, before it falls to the ground between your legs. He lets his hand fall back over your cunt, middle finger gathering his spit. Rubbing it around your pebbled clit. It's done detachedly, perfunctory. A means to an end with hardly much concern for your pleasure. Not yet, anyway. 

You've given him nothing in return yet. 

He intends to change that soon. 

As you grapple with the harsh reality he presents to you—one of ownership, humiliation, and pleasure on his whim—he drags his finger down, sliding it between your soft lips until he reaches your hole once more. Petting around the drenched entrance slowly, softly, humming under his breath about how wet you are. 

Your hips drop, greedily chasing after his finger. You won't ask—not yet—but he likes the way you rut against him: all hateful, spiteful. Like you can't decide on what you want more—to bash his head in, or keep it locked tight between your thighs. Sweet thing. 

“Need me, don't you?” He sinks his finger in. Nearly whites out at the pressure, the tightness, he feels. Soft, wet. Squeezing him in a vice as you yowl, whimpering into the stretch like it matters. Like his thick, scarred finger is the most you'd ever taken before. Sweet girl. So naïve. 

He drinks in the sight of your flesh forcibly being parted around his knuckle, matting the wisps of blond on his skin as it leaks down to his wrist, until that, too, is pushed up into you. His whole finger now engulfed in the wet heat of your body as you squirm around the stretch, pulsing around him like a heartbeat. 

He groans when he tastes your discomfort on the back of his tongue. 

“Don't worry, lovie. M’gonna take good care’a you.”

You watch him with slitted eyes as he pushes you down to the forest floor, glaring over your shoulder as he adjusts you the way he wants. Maneuvers you around like a little toy. Forearms braced against the trampled grass, knees sinking into soft moss. Thighs spread. Cunt bare, drenched. Ready to be claimed. Taken. 

He drops to his knees, shuffling close from behind you. His hand drops to your lower back, pressing your torso down further into the ground below. His cock aches between his thighs. Heavy, fat. He reaches down with his other hand to where it droops, smearing pre-cum over his inner thigh. He catches it in his fist, flushed the colours of a fresh bruise—angry red, purple—and strokes along the sensitive skin of his shaft, dragging it up and over his engorged head. Pre-cum weeps from the tip, drools long strains down to the forest floor. Puddles thick between your knees. 

A prelude, perhaps, for what's to come. When he has you tied like a bow around his knot, milking all the pent-up spend from his heavy, full balls. 

It's been decades since he had this—

(“shame.”

he concurs.)

Simon pulls his cock up, taps it against your pebbled clit. Drinks in the sight of you keening, cunt gushing more slick out of your empty hole, dribbling down your thighs. Mingling with the mess he already started making. 

It shocks him how good it feels just to tap his cockhead on your pretty pussy. To drag it through your slit, teasing it against your fluttering hole that drools copious slick over him. 

He wants to make a mess of you. Fuck your pussy until you cum, until all you can feel is the split of him inside of you. Filling you. Ruining you. 

Until all you can think about is the thick drag of him against your stuffed walls. Empty without him plugging you up. Desperate for his cock, his knot—hungry little slut just for him. All for him.

He presses the head of his cock against your rim, letting it catch. Holding it there. A tease. Just a little taste. 

Likes when you whimper, head hanging between your shoulders, fingers curling into the moss below. You make such a pretty picture like this—the expanse of your back bare for his eyes to roam, locking on the dimples of your hips, the curve of your waist. The plump shape of your ass inviting him in—eager for a bite. Your flesh looks bare, lonely, without his mark. The contrast of his own inked palm—fingers webbed with faded lettering, some slogan he picked up in his youth. Hands etched in black. Lines bleeding, bulky. The unmistakable tremble of an incipient artist’s first brush of a needle on real skin. Jagged, garring. Ugly. He lets his hand rest against the small of your back, groaning at the way it looks. 

Sinful.

You're made for soft silk and a fluffy bed. Head resting on a plush cushion instead of your arms, forehead braced over the uncomfortable squeal of your polyester windbreaker that he didn't even have the courtesy to let you take off. No. Just trousers. Panties. Pushed haphazardly down your legs, left in a pile by the spruce tree so he could throw your ankle over his broad shoulder, feasting on your cunt. 

There's a spot of dirt on your asscheek. The curve of it is scraped from the bark, red and raw. 

The glare you aim at him from over your shoulder is venomous. There's a smear of moss on your cheek. 

You're made for epsom salt baths. Being tended to by a besotted alpha who treats you like fine china, only to be taken out on special occasions. Brushed, always, in a fine layer of dust from disuse. Sweet, tender lovemaking under the waning summer sky. Your alpha apologising for ruining you like this, for making you take the brunt of his rut. Poor thing. Gentle kisses, and hands clasped together. 

He can see it so vividly in his eye. So viscerally that it almost feels like a crime when he glances down at his cock, the weeping, engorged head almost comically too big for you. The thick of him could easily swallow your cunt up if he flattened his length against you. Covering you wholly by his girth. 

It's a thought that makes his hand tighten, and nearly chokes him on a moan. 

Even his thighs bracketing the backs of yours is hideous to look at. Bigger, broader—there's a considerable gap on both sides of his legs that he thinks nearly his whole fist can fit there, notched against the outside of your thigh, covering the expanse of his own. Garish. 

He can't wait to lay you down on your belly, lock his thigh tight on either side of your own and rut into you like that. Crushing you under his weight. Swallowing you whole. Until anyone misfortunate enough to wander by thinks he's fucking the cold ground. 

His thumb strokes along your fevered skin, collecting the sheen of sweat building up on the pad. Rubbing it in. He feels it too. This unrelenting swelter. A cage, pushing down from all sides. Inescapable. 

The only way to quench it is on you. In you. 

“Ready for me, pretty girl?” The words are mangled in his throat, thick with want. 

Your shoulders tremble. In worry, he thinks. Scents the air like a viper, letting your emotions curdle in the back of his throat. “Just get on with it—”

He meets you in the middle of that taunt, teeth against your throat. 

Ghost pushes inside with a groan, eyes rolling back at the way you swallow him up. Stretching around the considerable girth, fluttering around him. Pulsing like a heartbeat. 

It's heaven. 

Nirvana nests between your thighs, bracketed by rings of blood. Red. Absolution imbued in tender flesh, parting perfectly around his cock in a loving embrace. 

You haven't confirmed it for him, but the tightness of your cunt around his fingers, the heady scent of discomfort burning the back of his throat when he buried them inside of you, make him mutedly aware that you're inexperienced. A fact he pockets for later because if he thinks about being the first alpha, the first man, to ever claim you, take you, then he might lose his mind, he might fall down that yawning chasm that reeks of damnation, of brimstone and ash, and never recover—

So, he doesn't. Won't. 

Can't. 

His pace is slow as he feeds you the fat length of his cock, eyes drilling into the way you swallow him up. Rim stretching taut, flesh paling under the strain of taking him. With one hand anchored against your hip, holding you tight, and the other curled over your shoulder, fingertips resting on your collarbones, he slowly, slowly, sinks inside of you, bottoming out with a deep groan. 

The outstroke drags with it an iron scent in the air. He huffs, nostrils flaring. Greedy for more. There's discomfort leaking from your pores. His girth is more than you can conceivably take, even with the preternatural help from your heat, leaking slick down your inner thighs in thick rivulets. 

He holds himself there, breathing—heavy, tremulous—through his nose. His hands shake. The pressure, the pleasure, is indescribable. It coils in his guts, spumes liquid bliss in his veins. The way you feel pulsing sweetly around him is—

Equilibrium. 

Every misfiring synapse inside himself is slowed. Imbued with a potent sense of ataraxia. His mind comes to a standstill. Thoughts looping over themselves, tangling into the gossamer threads of control floating in stasis. Unmoored. You unravel him. 

It's further proof that you are his missing part. His ruts in the past have been calamitous. Snarls wrenched from the trenches of his chest; a gluttonous feast—a sacrifice to Hēdonē. Violent, vicious. 

But this—

It's drinking ichor from the vein of Anteros.

There's a crack in the back of his head. The sound of everything, all of it—

Falling into place. 

His hands tighten. Tighten some more. He holds you, sure and firm, keeping you nestled in the anchor of his embrace, unable to run, to flee. You're his. Settled. The caveat is ironclad, bound in permanence. 

And Simon moans. Deep, and low. The noise jutters out of his chest, and seeps into the evening air. Fine mist, crystallising in front of him. Phosphenes of ice cemented his decision, gluing to his cheeks. The nape of his neck. 

His ears burn. 

“Fuckin' hell, sweet thing,” it's a guttural growl in the hollow of his throat. “Where ‘ave you been all my goddamn life?”

It's a nauseating confession, one scraped out from the vacancy between his ribs. It peppers the air in a soft, saccharine kiss. Makes you shiver beneath him, gasping in lungfuls of loam, dirt in your throat. 

He grunts. Stills. He doesn't want that for you. Ever. Would rip off his own limbs before he ever let you feel the crushing weight of dirt congealing inside of your lungs. 

The way he arches over you is damning. Nauseating. He curls his arm around your shoulder, your chest, traps a heaving breast in the palm of his hand, holds tight. The other falls from your hip, closes over your mons. Greedily feeling your slick, hot sex pulsing wildly around him when he passes over your clit, toying with your stretched, swollen rim. It's perfection, this. 

He pulls you up, up, leaning back on his haunches until you're balanced on your knees, nearly sat on his lap. Taking him deeper than before. He drops his head back with another moan when he feels your slick gather, dripping down to coat his balls. 

Everything about you is just—

Perfection. Absolution. 

Your hands fly up, curling over his forearm, mewling when he pinches your nipples between his middle and ring finger. 

“C’mon,” he rasps, leaning forward to press his face into your nape. You smell sweet. “Play with ‘em for me, pet.” 

Nails bite into his skin. You whimper. Squirming around on his lap. But you do as you're told. Slowly, slowly, reaching up. Touching yourself the way you like. Fingers ghosting over your flesh, brushing across your nipples. Pulling, petting, the way you like. He hooks his chin over your shoulder, watches. Devours. Commits each movement to memory. Every sound, every breath. Everything. 

He keeps a slow, languid pace like this. Content to just feel you pulsing around him, listening to the slick, wet squelch of him filling you up. Over and over again. A lazy rut. 

It's unexpected, he knows. You've been bracing yourself this whole time, fingers digging into the podsol, spine tightening up. Waiting for the savagery to befall you. 

When it doesn't come, he feels your quiet acquiescence come in a soft breath. In the way you slowly drop down to meet the deep rut of his hips. Taking your pleasure, pulling him in deeper. There's an edge to your voice, one still dipped in threads of discomfort, a waning pain that rings out, shrill, in the satin spill of moonlight over the indigo forest. 

It's good like this. Tender. Not something he'd have ever imagined for himself, and the reality of it is dizzying. 

Reedy, he groans. Nuzzles his misshapen nose into your scent gland. His gums pulse, ache—

But he ignores it. Swallows it down. 

He's not sure what compels him to do so. Spellbound, maybe, by this unnatural softness that spools silken threads between you. Sutured in tenderness—so unbefitting of the man he is. The monster—

His hips stutter. Jerk. 

“Simon—!”

You whine into it, arching back. Sweat gathers, drips down your spine, smears into his chest, belly. Matts the thatch of hair running in sparse, patchy clusters down the thickness of his midsection. A bountiful spring fattened him up. Made him soft and pillowy over his abdomen. Something you can't seem to get enough of—pressing the flat of your back against him, leaning into it. Groaning when his arm shifts, boxing you in. Crushing you to him. 

Wily little kitten, purring so sweetly in his lap. 

He draws lazy circles over your clit, grunting with each clench of your cunt. You're soft in his arms. Malleable. He slides his hand up from beneath your breasts, catches your jaw in his palm. Fingers spanning from cheekbone to temple and, oh—

Doesn't that just make him preen. 

He drags your chin to the side, catching your mouth in a sickening kiss. All tongue, teeth. He wants to taste, to devour, every part of you. Bones and all. 

It's a fight, though. You tense in his grasp, lidded eyes snapping open, wide and around. Cheeks bulging between his fingers when you twist, trying to pull away. 

“Don't—I don't want to—” he bites the protests from lips. Messy, sloppy. He flicks his tongue over yours, wrapping it around you like a satiated snake burrowing in after a heavy meal. “Don't—f–fuck—”

It earns him a nip. Teeth digging into his bottom lip. Drawing blood. 

He huffs into the seam of your mouth. Only fair, he supposes, and then pulls you down—hard, fast—onto his cock. The air is punched out of your lungs, flooded into his esophagus. 

“Be a good girl for me,” he warns, bucking into you. It's harder this time, deeper. Tempo increasing. Growing. He feels himself thicken. Knot fattening up. Each piston of his hips seems to knock something inside of his head loose. Common sense, maybe—

The fraying knot of his self-control winding tight. Pulling taut. 

He huffs again, feeling himself slip. Lost in the sensation dripping down his spine, the unified pleasure blooming in the pit of his stomach. 

The air plumes with the thickening tang of your arousal—all sweet, spice. You can take it, now, he knows, and tries not to growl when you hiccup his name wetly into the air. 

The muscles in his thighs bunch tight. Corded and powerful. He arches up, up, forcing his cock deep inside your cunt, splitting you apart. Rutting desperately, edging into something animalistic. 

It runs a knife along the thin skin of his hindbrain. Come out, come out, come play—

He moves you again, pulling his hand away from your jaw and pushing you back down the forest floor. He stays glued to your back. Tucks his arm under your chin, and smothers you under his bulk, groaning when your thighs give out, sliding on the sweat-slicked moss below.

“Simon, ah—” your voice tapers off into a breathless cry when he pulls his hand free from beneath you, wrapping it around to join the other. Holding on, clinging to you. Keeping you locked tight against him, under him. You can't move at all like this—

The swell of his knot bumps against your stretched rim. He presses the brunt of his weight into each thrust now, spurned on by the needy way you yowl into his forearm, drooling all over his skin. Begging for it. 

“Please, please, please—”

Your body is jostled forward with each harsh buck of his hips as he gives you everything he has, feeding his cock into your sopping cunt over and over again. Eager now to fill you up, to flood you with his cum. Make you swell with it. Overstuffed. 

Perfect little omega, you rut back into him with each thrust, taking his thick cock to the root. Mewling sweetly when his knot begins to catch. Too much, he thinks. It might just wreck you for good—

pomegranate seeds splitting over your teeth, blood red juice leaking from the tear. spilling into your mouth. just a drop. just a drop, and Persephone is all his

—Perfect. 

He teeters on the edge of ferality and control. Spinning, spiralling. Loosefooted on the wobbling chossy. Coming undone in a magmatic end—wicked heat, ashes, brimstone; he catches fire, and smoulders you under his heat. Letting the flames lick across your skin until you whine his name, desperate and needy, in the back of your throat. The thrill a bludgeon against his skull, spilling pleasure, bliss, in the broken hole you wrought. 

You tighten like a vice around him—tight, tight—and he pistons into you, burrowing deep. Deeper still. Until you thrash around beneath him, soundlessly screaming his name into the dark forest. Begging for mercy, mercy, please—

He won't. Can't. 

He can't get enough of the way you feel wrapped around him like this. Silken, whitehot. Tight. Tight—

It squeezes the air from his lungs. Static in his head—

And then you let go. Pulsing, throbbing around him. Pulling him in deeper, blanketing his mind in white noise. In nothing but magmatic pleasure. 

“Fuck—!” He snarls, almost angry. Vicious. Chasing after his end in the aftermath of yours. Instincts are at war within him, banging against his skull. Demanding recompense. Paid it's pound of flesh. 

It's what he's promised. What it's owed. 

(and he always keeps his promises, doesn't he?)

Most describe their ruts as mindless, driven by instinct. No control. But Ghost has never felt more present, more alive, than when he sinks his teeth deep into your nape, nearly choking, drowning, on your blood.

For the first time in decades, he feels the crater inside himself, suffused with spare, broken parts, seal when you yield with a mangled yowl of his name, raw and fractured as it splits between your teeth. Pretty pussy swallowing up his knot when he bullies it in deep, locking you together.

pretty little lamb—

a perfect fit between his teeth.

His rut is a voracious thing. 

Ghost has you on your back for the second and third round, heels resting on his shoulders as he bucks into you. Makes you stare at him—don’t look away from me, pet—as he commandeers your body with an ease that seems to break apart all demurrals as they form, rendering you sweet, malleable, beneath him to do with as he pleases. 

And you are, aren't you?

So fuckin’ sweet. 

(“gonna give me a cavity,” he rasps, thick with pleasure, into your ear. he has you on your belly now. holds you down with his weight, crushes your chest against the soft moss below, thighs squeezed tight between his own. you can barely make a sound with his forearm digging into the dirt right above your crown, swallowing you whole under his bulk. 

(owns you like, he finds. no one would be able to see you beneath him if they wandered by. encompassed wholly by every iota he has to give—

he cums like that. nose buried in your crown, moaning low, scorched, in the back of his throat as you twitch beneath him, unable to move at all—)

It's early in the morning when he finally finishes, when his rut begins to slowly recede, and a fresh bloom of clarity yawns over his periphery. Moonrise peppers soft kisses over his aching shoulders as he glances at you curled up against his side, sleeping soundly. Exhausted by the hours and hours of mating, fucking. Taking him, his knot, drinking down everything he has to offer. 

The sight that greets him is gnarled fingers wrapping around his rotting heart, affection peeking out between the brackets of his ribs. His appetite for you is dizzying. Unquenchable. He wonders if he'll ever be able to look at you without wanting to crawl inside your body. To reshape your tender flesh around his bulk until it is indiscernible from himself. 

This want is agony. It's dread, desire. Greed. 

His shoulders bite back in protest when he reaches up to drag his dirt-crusted nails through the prickly hair on his scalp. As dawn slowly unfurls across the midnight blue aether, he knows he'll have to leave soon. Can already feel the creeping heat gnawing in the pit of his belly. His rut starting anew. The scant hours he has of mental clarity, moments meant to eat, to feed, and regain strength for the next marathon of fucking, are needed to feel out his next move. 

He glances at you again, and feels the same covetous tug in his chest as he did before, when he was thickly entrenched in the urge to mate. But as the burnt orange of the sun smears hazy fingerprints across the moulted sky, he sees you in a new, cleaner light. You're young. Much younger than he is. 

It's something he ought to worry about. To feel some shred of shame, of despondency over shackling you to himself—a defective alpha with more scars than morality—when you're in the burgeoning bloom of your freshly untethered youth. All jejune beauty outclasses nature itself. Snow melts on the alpines, trickling down to feed the valley below. Life itself—

But you are his. 

The ugly rings around your throat—mangled tissue swelling in the morning dawn, caked in a thick river of blood—all signify that you belong to him. And while it's a little extreme as far as claiming bites go—one would suffice, but he buried his teeth in you over and over again, biting down on both sides of your neck, your jugular, your nape; inner thighs, mons, wrists—it’s proof enough that you are meant for him. Made for him. 

His pretty omega. 

The rest doesn't matter. He ought to feel shame, but instead he luxuriates in it. Stares down at you with a needy sort of possession spuming in the putrid remains of his chest, mapping out the marks he put on you. And the ones he'll add to later, not stopping until covered in the perfect impression of his crooked teeth. Tattoos of his ownership all over your body. 

Mutual, of course. There's a scant patch of skin, restive and empty, above his heart, save for a fine, jagged line from a serrated dagger. He'll have you bite down on the flesh until your teeth meet inside his muscle. Scarring down to the bone. He'll go, then, to the man who inks him up whenever he has the whim to desecrate scar tissue, and have him etch midnight black against fine silver. Permanent, forever. Always. 

And anyone who kicks up a fuss—stupid as they might be—he’ll sort them out. Prove to them that you are meant to be his. 

(unshakeable:

his spend leaks out of you, drying, tacky and thick, on your thighs. under the sleepy citrine of the dawning sun, it's tinged pink, and looks just like pomegranate juice.)

Ghost rolls his shoulder, and reaches for his discarded trousers. He's covered in a thick layer of dirt, and reeks like soil. But the thought of being buried alive is miniscule compared to the want of being buried inside you again. The urge. Insatiable. He groans with it, cock throbbing already. 

He leaves you naked. No point in dressing when he plans on going home and sinking back inside of you before midday, anyway. An unneeded obstacle, really—

The clearing is close to his truck, and he sets a leisurely pace, yawning into the dawn, as he gathers you into his arms. Carrying you to it as you drool on his chest, brows pinched at the soft jostle of him trudging through the thicket until he reaches it. 

He's not in a rut when he stretches you out in the back seat, spreading your sticky thighs around his hips, sinking inside, bottoming out just as you come to, waking up with a gasp. 

The intense fucking from before lingers in the air. You're soft, molasses; arching into his chest, whimpering out the name he hissed into your nape only hours ago, folding into him with a somnolent submission. It won't last, of course—

You're a vicious little thing, and his back and chest twinge with the rivers you carved into his flesh when he didn't move the way you liked. Wolfish, aren't you? Spitfire hiding under the soft pelt of a slain lamb. He wants to devour you, bones and all. 

He takes his fill of your malleable concession, rutting into you with a sluggish ease. Mapping out the starlight sparking in the depths of your glossy eyes. Magnetic. It pulls him deeper. Unravels him at the seams. 

His hand spans the expanse of your jaw from ear to ear. He holds you like this, thumb buried in the tender embrace of your soft tongue, and begins to understand the reason behind Johnny's niche appetite when you toy with his flesh, coquettish and sweet, suckling him in—pretty seductress—and then mewl when he pushes in too deeply, bringing crystalline gems to corners of your eyes. 

Angelic innocence. The type that demands he prostrates himself at your altar, let his bones be picked clean when you so wish it. And he'll give it to you—body, blood, tissue; all of it. The entirety of him, however broken, shattered the fragments might be. 

He promises it all to you without a word, drilling holes in the gaps of your eyes, chasms wide enough for him to fit. When he cums, it's to a songbirds sonata. Your moans are a whisper, your pleasure swallowed down as it ghosts over his lips, clenching around him like a vice. Pretty bow. He doesn't hold back—groans, baritone; woodsmoke, into the gathering symphony, filling you to the brim. Thick, copious. He wants it to stick. To root. 

When the blood sputters back to his head, he gathers you in his arms once more. Keeps you seated on his lap—shush, pet; s’alright, jus’ close your eyes an’ I'll ‘ave us home in a bit—as he starts the old pickup, and puts it into drive. One hand on the wheel, knuckles blanching white in the glimmering sunrise; sparse forests of muted blond catching, limned in the coruscating light. The other is placed on the small of your back, holding your belly to his. 

Quietly, your body eases. Melts. You press your face into his chest, fingers curling into the fabric, and nuzzle into the heady scent of his sweat, his musk, still clinging to his shirt. Signing, soft and twee, in the cup of his embrace as you slip back to sleep. 

He drives home like this. Mind a quiet place for once. Silent in its contentment, it's comfort. There's an itinerary still left to do, but he pushes it back for now, gaze roaming the dense green of the forest bracketing the road. 

You'll like it, he knows. There's a fen on the outskirts of his territory, a little pond where wild rabbits have been known to make burrows. Deers, elk. Bears. They all come and go. You'll amuse yourself in the untamed wilderness of his abode, drawing delineations of your own as you carve out places in his home just for you. 

And as he makes the turn to his hidden driveway, this buried sanctuary, he can't help but glance down at your crown, and think—

Persephone, finally home.

He finds your identification in your rucksack, nestled underneath the contraband you smuggled from the park—mushrooms, berries, bark, feathers—and sears your name to memory. Every part of you will be unravelled in the coming days, pulled from the depths of your being until it's all ingrained in his head. A gaping chasm chiselled into bone just for you. All for you. 

Your address is a rental. He'll have to call them later today to cut your lease. Your job, too. They'll need to be notified on both your off time for his rut (and your burgeoning heat), and to update your contact information. 

But that's later. Now, he just wants to get home. Sink down into his bed with you beneath him, and fuck you until sundown all over again. Stain the house with the scent of you. With the potent tang of your coupling. 

It's yours too, after all. Should smell just like you. 

And when you wake up later to him fucking his tongue into your drenched hole, fingers toying with your pebbled clit, Johnny will be busy packing the rest of your things into the pack of his pickup truck. The majority of it is already stacked on the porch, waiting for you to rearrange it all in your new house. Lease cut. His name added to your contacts as spouse, husband. Address updated. Marriage certificate laying on the table, only one line unsigned. Waiting for you. 

Maybe it's too fast. You'll certainly protest like it is, bearing your teeth and hissing at him from across the room about too much, too fast, slow down, you don't even know his last name—

(“Riley,” he grouses, arms folded over his broad chest. Eyes burning in the cresting twilight. “S’your last name now as well, pet.”) 

Fast—sure. He might think so too for a brief moment when he as you purring against his chest, submissive and docile after he fucked the fight right out of you, bullied you into agreeing to everything—it's for the best, after all. No one could ever protect you like he can. 

Made for each other. Reinforced when he presses your fingers to the soft spot where his last rib once hung—

(“stole it,” he murmurs into the seam of your lips. “right from under my nose. only fair that i get to steal somethin’ right back, ain't it?”

the look on your face is rapturous when you press your hand to your side, eyes widening when you feel the extra rung—)

He's had decades of waiting. Waiting. And now that he's found you—

He's never letting go. 

You're it, he knows. Feels the certainty in that statement simmering in his hindbrain, in his essence. He'll have you—now, forever. Non-negotiable. Where you go, he will follow. 

Eden is a home.

It is a person. A place. A community

It is the scent of old musty books, and the quiet peace before the rising dawn.

You work by candlelight in the silent hours, an open book resting on the table in front of you. Wearing gloves to protect it, you carefully turn the page, gaze scanning the faded lettering. Most of it is legible, and with some time and care, you’ll be able to replicate it on new paper with fresh ink.

Preservation.

Not of your mortal life and those that live in your community, but the preservation of humanity, culture, and human history. Five years since the world fell apart, and yet you remain, carrying on with purpose, restoring books, transcribing those that are close to falling apart, and keeping records of the years that came before.

It is enjoyable, fulfilling work but you serve a greater need to your community. Here, within your sanctuary of several hundred people, you provide them entertainment and education. The children come to you for picture books and story time, and the adults visit when they need an escape.

You are but one piece of a large whole.

“What are you doing here so early?”

You glance up, smiling at your assistant. “Could ask the same,” you laugh, pushing back from the table. Standing, you remove your gloves and set them next to the book.

Sam, your archiving assistant yawns. “Thought I’d get here early since you’re going out today with Zac and his group.” They rub at their eyes. “Shouldn’t you be at the gate already?”

“Shit,” you mutter, checking the mechanical clock hanging on the wall. Sam is right. You should be at the gate right now. “Double shit,” you groan.

Sam laughs and reaches for their own gloves. “I’ll handle this.” Putting them on, Sam settles into your chair. “We doing a refurb on this?”

“No,” you say, running around the room, grabbing your jacket and backpack. “Some of the pages are too faded. Binding is also bust.”

“Transcribe then,” murmurs Sam, gently closing the book to inspect the integrity of the cover. “Where are you going again?”

“Zac mentioned a small town they scoped out. No activity.” You walk over to Sam, yanking your jacket on. “He said there’s a library.”

Sam’s head pops up. “Seriously?”

You nod excitedly. “Said the place was locked up tight. Windows still intact.”

“Untouched?” asks Sam, eyebrows rising in surprise. You nod. Sam whistles lowly. “What a fucking find.”

“I know!” you exclaim. “Could really use some encyclopedias.”

“And dictionaries,” adds Sam longingly.

Tugging on the front of your jacket and then smoothing the front, you zip it up. “Zac said I can bring back as much as I want.”

“Did he really?” Sam shakes their head and opens the front cover of the book. “That man is sweet on you.”

“Which is why I take advantage,” you giggle.

Sam bursts out laughing. “Go. They’ll leave you behind.”

With a grin on your face and a hop to your step, you wave at Sam before heading out the side door and into the early morning. The sun is just starting to rise. Most people are still asleep or starting their day. You walk by the communal buildings where the earliest risers are preparing breakfast. You sigh when you get a whiff of what they’re cooking, wishing you could snag a meal before departing.

As you approach the gate, Zac raises his hand in greeting.

“Have I held everyone up?” you ask tentatively, glancing around.

“Not at all. Still loading up a few things. Your timing is perfect.” Zac smiles, and though you find him pleasant, nothing stirs within you. There is no lust or even romantic interest.

You observe the line of cars queued at the gate. Usually there are only one or two, but there are at least ten vehicles here including the salvaged U-Haul. “Taking a whole convoy?”

“We’re going to need it.”

“For a small town?”

Zac chuckles. “I’m dropping you off at the library. Ben will come with you.”

“I get a security detail?” you ask excitedly and Zac nods. “Fancy.”

Zac scratches at his neck, gaze roaming over the convoy. “There’s a car assembly plant a few miles outside the town. Gonna strip what we can. If things go well, we’ll come back.”

“No activity then?”

“None,” confirms Zac. “We’ve had a scouting team out there for the last two months. Not a soul has passed through.”

“That’s fortunate,” you murmur.

While your community has been largely untouched and unbothered by the outside world, there are still so many unknowns. There have been stragglers that have shown up, and while several have been accepted in and integrated, there are many more that have been turned away or shot on sight. Sometimes you think it cruel, but there are all sorts of horrors in the world now.

Ben walks around the front of the nearest car, and beams in your direction. “Hear I’m looking after you today,” he says, going in for a hug.

You accept it easily. Ben is the comedian of the community, always having a kind word and funny joke.

“And helping me haul books,” you add.

Ben winks in your direction and then turns to Zac. “We’re ready.”

Zac nods. “Load up!” he shouts.

Everyone around you heads to their designated vehicle. Engines roar and car doors slam. You follow Ben, hopping into a dusty Jeep Wrangler.

It’s several hours of open road and clear weather.

You and Ben pass the time by singing songs and playing car games. It’s a good distraction until Zac comes on over the radio and tells Ben their exit is coming up. The rest of the convoy drives on as Ben cuts away to take an exit ramp. A few more minutes and he’s coming to a stop just on the edge of town, parking the Jeep amongst a cluster of trees. The vehicle is completely hidden.

“Ready?” he asks, sliding the keys into his pocket.

“Backpack? Check. Gun? Check. Foldable wagon? Check.”

Ben blows raspberries. “Can’t forget the foldable wagon.”

You playfully smack him on the arm. “You want to haul all those books back yourself.”

“No thank you,” he mutters.

The walk is pleasant, but overall silent. Ben carries an M4AI. The arsenal back home is massive, and whenever there are trips outside the compound, the military-grade weapons come out. He keeps his head on a swivel, but other than the occasional animal sounds and the rustling of leaves, all is quiet.

“Here it is,” sighs Ben, extending one arm toward a stand-alone building at the corner of an intersection.

The library isn’t overly big. If anything, it’s what you’d expect from a small town.

“Now I know you’re excited,” he begins, slightly leaning in your direction. “But you stay close. We’re entering from the back.”

All you can do is nod eagerly, words escaping you. It’s been almost six years since you’ve been inside a library. This is a treat. It takes an insane amount of self-control to not skip all the way to the back of the building.

While the front of the building faces the intersection, behind the library is a small parking lot and two dumpsters. Ben does a slow sweep of the lot as the two of you walk toward the employee entrance. Satisfied that nothing and no one is around, Ben lowers his gun. Removing his backpack, he sets it on the ground, and rummages around inside before withdrawing lockpicks.

Adrenaline surges within you.

A few wiggles.

And then—

Click.

Grinning like an idiot, Ben slips the lockpicks into his backpack and puts it on. Grabbing his gun, he presses himself to the brick wall. Slowly, Ben opens the door with the tip of the rifle. It gives under his touch easily, the hinges even silent as the door swings inwards.

“Draw your weapon,” whispers Ben. “We need to do a sweep first.” As you reach for your Glock, Ben shakes his head. “And leave the damn wagon.”

Leaning the foldable wagon against the wall, you remove your gun from its holster. Ben enters and you follow, shifting your body to watch for anything coming up behind you. It’s a slow sweep. Starting along the wall, the two of you walk the perimeter, checking the back offices, and then finally the center-most area.

Ben comes to a stop near a collection of dusty chairs. Lowering his gun, he sighs with relief. “It’s clear.” He turns in your direction. “I’ll be keeping a lookout at the door. If anything happens, you come directly to me.”

“Got it,” you say with a mock salute.

Ben rolls his eyes but he’s smiling. “And don’t drag those books along because I know you will. Leave them.”

You stare him down but Ben doesn’t budge, matching your stare with one of his own. “I mean it. If someone or something comes barreling through the front doors, you fucking run to me. Understood?”

“Sure. Got it. Understood.”

Ben checks his watch. “We have a few hours before we’re expected back at the meet point. Take your time.” He starts to walk away, and then abruptly pivots. “Wife packed a few sandwiches. Promise I’ll share.”

You snort and wave him off. “Bring me my wagon, Ben.”

“On it,” he calls over his shoulder.

As his footfalls recede, you linger in the quiet, dusty library, taking in the significance of the moment. Six years since you’ve stood inside an actual library. Five years since the world fell apart but a year before, third places were quickly disappearing. No one could spend money when wages were low and all the government’s resources were going toward the war effort. Libraries and free spaces shuttered first, losing all their funding.

This place is precious. Special. A rare opportunity.

Of all the books in your community’s collection, they’ve all come to you by the way of others, collected on routine trips and scavenging missions like today. Since stepping inside the walls you now call home, this is the first time you’ve left it. All the stories you receive of the outside world come from the mouths of those who witness it firsthand.

Like a jubilant child, you want to run around—to touch everything. The tips of your fingers buzz with an incessant itch. But you don’t dare remove anything from the shelves. Resisting is almost physically painful as you float through the aisles, taking it all in. To remove a book off the shelf, to open it up, the smell it and feel it would be paradise.

But you know better. You do.

Disturbing them without the right tools and care might cause damage or undo exposure. What you can do is look, to read the spines, and consider your options. Once you know what you want, you’ll drag your little wagon behind you and go about taking the books you want off the shelves.

Ben does leave you alone, and you’re left to wander.

Each step is light but purposeful as you move about the space. You think of everyone back home, of their likes and dislikes, of their needs and wants. More picture books would be helpful as well as some young adult novels. Some of the women have been asking for romance and few of the older folks would like some historical nonfiction.

“Where are you?” you mutter, digging around in your jacket pockets.

Crumpled paper brushes against your fingers. Withdrawing it, you smooth it out as best you can. Using the little light available to read your scribbled penmanship, you pull the wagon behind you, mentally reordering your notes by priority.

Sam wants dictionaries, and you need to grab a set of encyclopedias. Finding the “Reference” section, you survey all your options. Dictionaries and an encyclopedia set are a must, but you also consider the selections of atlases and then the thesaurus collection. The school could really use those resources, and your wagon is large enough to accommodate a few last-minute additions.

Kneeling, you admire the different editions of encyclopedias. Some appear a little worn but otherwise fine. Even though this place hasn’t had power or temperature control in five years, the place was sealed and untouched until you and Ben. It’s likely that everything inside is fine, and all you and Sam will need to do is a rebinding.

You’re completely absorbed, so focused on the tomes in front of you, that the whisper of your name has you spinning around and reaching for your gun.

Ben has his hands up in front of him in a placating gesture. A snarky remark sizzles on your tongue. Ben brings a finger to his mouth in a gesture of silence. Whatever you were going to say dissolves, leaving behind an acrid aftertaste.

Slowly, you swivel your head from side to side but see nothing.

Ben shifts closer, leans in, a glint of fear in his eyes.

“There are people outside,” he whispers.

That’s when you hear it. Distantly, you hear a car door slam, and a muffled shout. The marrow in your bones becomes ice. There are people. There shouldn’t be people.

You swallow, mouth becoming dry. “How many?”

Ben shrugs. “Not sure. But there’s two groups.”

“Two—” You shake your head slightly as that’ll clear your racing thoughts. “What do you mean two groups?”

Ben’s mouth turns downward. It’s an I’m sorry but even that is loaded.

We’re not getting out of this.

There’s a distant hoot of laughter, and then the breaking of glass as if someone’s thrown a beer bottle. It’s still far enough away that you cling to that one comfort. But if they stick around, they might come sniffing. If that happens, you and Ben will be cornered.

Ben nods his head in the direction of the front of the library. Staying low, the two of creep toward the front of the building. There are two sets of double doors. The first set open up into the library and the secondary set of doors lead directly outside. Sandwiched between them is a small atrium. Above the doors are massive windows that bring in natural light.

Out front in the intersection are several beaten up trucks. From what you can see, it’s all men, at least a dozen or two in total. They look haggard. Mean.

“Is that them?” you ask softly.

Ben doesn’t look back at you as he answers. “Just the one. These guys came in loud.” Ben shifts slightly to glance over his shoulder at you. “Surprised you didn’t hear them.”

“Lost in my books.” Ben snorts, and returns his attention to the glass doors. “What about the second group?” you ask tentatively. “Our people?”

Ben eases back a bit. He sits down on the floor, checking over his rifle. “No. Not sure who they are.” He licks his lips, gaze focused on the gun. “They’re all in black. Militarized by the look of them. Organized.”

Two groups. Two different groups.

Ben removes the clip and checks the cartridge. “Only noticed them when one of these guys went around back.” He gestures toward the men directly outside the front doors. “Fucker came out of nowhere and knifed him. Dragged his body away too.”

“Who are they?”

Ben shrugs and rummages in his backpack for a new clip. “No fucking idea. The ones out front might be marauders or slavers or—”

He pauses, gaze growing distant.

“Or what, Ben?” you prompt.

He doesn’t answer, only readies the rifle. “All I know is we need to go.”

All this work, all this effort, suddenly gone.

Your shoulders sag as the reality of the situation sets in. “I have to leave the books. Don’t I?”

“Afraid so,” replies Ben. But he smiles, and though he’s trying, you see the strain. “Next time I’ll make sure to bring you and Sam some books.”

“Promise?”

“Promise,” he affirms. “Let’s go.”

At the back door, you withdraw your Glock, posting up beside Ben. He cracks it open. Pauses. Opens it a little wider. He carefully sticks a small hand mirror out the opening. He turns it left then right then back again.

“Clear” he says, voice barely above a whisper.

He exits slowly, and then gestures with his hand. You step outside, squinting slightly as your eyes adjust to the light. Ben starts to cross the parking lot, heading for the exit furthest from the intersection.

The voices of the men are louder out here. A tiny bubble of panic blooms. Then simmers. Then boils.

There is no one around. No one. And yet—

A loud crack splits the air. The wall next to Ben explodes, tiny fragments of debris bursting outward. Ben stumbles backward. He grabs for you. And tugs.

You’re yanked to the side, and then spun around.

Time seems to slow, and yet everything occurs so quickly you don’t entirely comprehend what’s happened until Ben shoves the two of you behind a nearby dumpster.

“Oh, fuck,” you breathe. “Ben. We—”

Horror floods your lungs.

Blood.

Everything. Dripping from tiny holes in Ben’s body.

“Oh my god. Ben.”

You reach for him, but there are so many impact points. Too many.

“Go,” he gasps. “Go.”

“I’m not leaving you here.”

As the words leave your mouth, a barrage of bullets bite into the wall directly over your head.

“Here,” he rasps, handing you the keys to the Jeep. “Leave me and fucking run. I’ll distract them.”

Shouting breaks out nearby followed by what seems like a never-ending deluge of gunfire.

Your eyes burn. “You promised me books.”

He smiles, and there’s more red than white. “You know I always deliver on my promises.”

With a groan that’s more a cry of pain, Ben stands and reloads with a new clip.

“Go,” he whispers just as he steps out from around the dumpster, gun firing.

You turn. Take off. Gunfire follows.

It comes from everywhere, but you don’t falter, don’t pause to check your surroundings. You’re not a raging bull or an agile cheetah. You are pure frenzy, pure panic, like a rabbit running from fox teeth.

“Fucking grab her!” someone yells. “Grab her!”

You don’t know if it’s the marauders or the men all in black, but there is little reason to consider who.

Survival is paramount. Survival is eternal.

In a world like this, survival is lifeblood.

It is everything.

With lungs burning and muscles screaming, you aim for the houses, knowing you can lose them if you scuttle through the overgrown backyards.

The blow comes out of nowhere.

You witness a brief taste of freedom.

And then it’s yanked right from under you.

A body barrels into you, knocking you sideways. The ground comes up fast. You throw up your arms to protect your head and face. It cushions but protects little else. You hit hard.

“Come here,” growls a male voice. Hands are on you. Grabbing. Twisting. “Let me get a good look at you.”

You kick out. Throw your fists in all directions.

“Stop your fussing.”

A quick blow to the face and you’re circling, everything becoming temporarily blurry as the person atop you brings your vision skyward.

 “Look at you,” he laughs.

It’s one of the marauders. He smiles down at you, teeth brown and grey from decay.

“Pretty thing. Gonna look cute choking on my—”

His nefarious smile drops as the rest of him stiffens. You freeze, staring up in shock as you try to figure out what’s happened. It’s a slow unfolding. A trickle. Blood begins to pool in his mouth and then it drip drip drips onto your face.

With a soft cry, you wiggle out from under him as he tips over, falling into the grass. Scrambling backward, you start to push up onto your knees, muscles poised to keep moving.

“Don’t move.” A gun barrel presses into the back of your head. It’s still warm. “Get up.”

A pair of black boots come into view. Your gaze slowly ascends. Black boots give way to black pants to a black bullet proof vest to a black balaclava. The only part of him you can see are his eyes.

Someone grabs the back of your neck. It’s a harsh hold, and you’re yanked to your feet. You twist your neck and find another man, this one almost identical to the one in front of you. This is the other group Ben spotted, the ones tracking the marauders.

The one holding your neck squeezes and the other reaches for you. “Fucking move and I’ll shoot you.”

You remain perfectly still—perfectly silent as he pats you down. The knife in your boot is confiscated along with your Glock. When they snatch the Jeep keys, you instinctually reach to take them back.

“Told you not to fucking move.”

The man slaps your hand down and you feel the muzzle return to your head.

“Sorry,” you murmur.

He stares you down for a long moment. It gives you an opportunity to observe him, and his companion. They both wear identical all-black tactical even down to the patches attached to their biceps. The bottom one you recognize. Both American flags. The one above it is eerily similar but you can’t entirely place it. It’s an azimuthal projection of the earth but a top view from the North Pole. Beneath it are two olive branches.

The stranger’s gaze shifts to just above you. He jerks his head, and then you’re shoved forward without warning. With each of them holding an arm, you’re half-dragged back to the intersection the marauders were at.

While their rusty trucks are still there, they aren’t alone. Four armored trucks are parked in a semi-circle around the marauders’ cars. More men in all-black tactical gear prowl the area. Of the first group to arrive, those that aren’t dead have been zip tied and lined up in a row on their stomachs, faces pressed into the asphalt.

When one of them moves, they’re kicked until they fall back into compliance.

“Found this one out by the houses,” says the man holding onto your left arm.

Soldiers. They have to be. This isn’t some ragtag group. They wear uniforms, all of which are perfectly maintained. Even the armored trucks are in decent condition.

A small trio of them standing nearby turn.

The centermost soldier speaks. “A woman?” His surprise is clear. And like the two men who hold you, this man too has an American flag.

He nods toward the group of facedown marauders. “These fuckers don’t let their breeders out of their sight.”

Breeders.

You almost snarl, bite back with an insult. But you keep your mouth shut. Their intentions are unclear, and you’re without a weapon. Entirely powerless.

Survival. Always survival.

He takes a few steps forward, approaching you, gaze assessing. Behind the balaclava, he gives you a once over. “Looks healthy,” he observers. Without warning, he grabs your face. You jerk back, and he clucks his tongue. “Stop moving.”

Turning your face to the left and then to the right, the middle of his brow creases. “Open your mouth.”

You glower, and don’t comply.

He grabs your nose, shutting off your air. You gasp, mouth opening.

“Has all her teeth,” he announces, dropping his hand. “Can’t be one of theirs.”

“We need to show the Lieutenant,” says the soldier to your right.

The man before you stares, and keeps staring. “Do we?”

You don’t like the implication.

“What’s this?”

A deep, masculine voice cuts through the air. It is accented. British. Every head turns, and the soldiers straighten, shoulders back and heads held high.

The man holding your left arm speaks up. “Found her running toward the houses, Lieutenant.”

All the soldiers wear plain black balaclavas. Simple. Straightforward. But the man who steps into view has a skull face stitched into his. A fucking skull.

Instead of an American flag, it’s a Union Jack.

His brown eyes behind the mask narrow. “They don’t bring their women out.”

“That’s what I said.”

“Are their numbers that low?”

“With how we’ve been picking them off I wouldn’t be surprised.”

They bicker back and forth, arguing about you but not actually talking to you.

“I’m not with them,” you say, and they all go silent.

Skull Face glowers. “You’re not?”

“I was running from them.” You glance between the soldiers who shot the man. “They’ll tell you. They’re the ones that shot him.”

Skull Face appears unmoved. “Doesn’t mean you’re not with them.”

You laugh, and it sounds a bit hysterical. “Why would I be fucking running if I were with them? Wouldn’t I be shooting back at you?”

“No,” he replies flatly. “If you were with them, you’d be bloody running from them. Not shooting at us.”

“She has to be with them. There’s no one else here.” The man who speaks up this time is directly to Skull Face’s right. The accent is different. Scottish.

“I came with one other. Those men shot at us.”

Ben. Oh. Sweet Ben.

“And where are they?” asks Skull Face.

You swallow, knowing the truth. “Behind the library. Parking lot. Near the dumpster.”

Skull Face locks gazes with another solider and nods. Two men break off, heading in that direction. He returns his attention to you. “Who are these men?”

“What?” you ask, perplexed.

“These men.” He points to the facedown marauders. “Who are they?”

These men are strangers to you. “Slavers?” When no one confirms or denies, you guess again. “Cannibals?”

“She’s playing dumb,” mutters the Scots.

“Hush, Soap,” mutters Skull Face.  “Who are they? What name do they go by? It’s an easy question. Everyone knows it.”

You shake your head. “I—I don’t know.”

Lieutenant Skull Face leans in, lowering his voice. “If you don’t answer truthfully, you and I can have an extended chat in the back of one of these trucks.”

“She had these.” The Jeep keys are tossed, and he catches them without looking. “And this.” The Glock is presented.

Soap takes the Glock. He turns it over. “They don’t give their women weapons, Ghost.”

So, Skull Face is named Ghost. Fitting.

“No,” he agrees. “Makes it easier for them to fight back.”

The very idea sobers you.

“Who are they?” you ask, feeling safe enough to do so.

Ghost glances up from the car keys. “Your worst fucking nightmare.”

“Lieutenant!” The two men that left for the library return. Jogging forward, they speak in low voices.

Ben is not with them. Ben is—

Ghost nods and steps back. “We’re taking her with us.” The two men holding onto your arms let go and Ghost immediately grabs hold of your shoulder, pulling you forward.

“Pick three of these bastards at random,” he announces, gesturing toward the facedown men. “Put them in Delta truck. Shoot the rest.”

Ghost’s hand at your shoulder slides up, grasping the back of your neck. He leans in close—so close you can pick out the little flecks of gold in his brown irises.

“You’re riding with me.”

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Made from China glass. Painted in pink and tulip pollen. She’s got your nose, curving into small nostrils that breathe amateurly. Cheeks that swallow the crease of her lips and eyes that have not yet opened.

Simon is terrified that when they do, they’ll be his.

He is built from barnacles and the bottom bricks of a lighthouse. Iron that’s been fed to a kiln a dozen times until its edges sport burnt, flaking edges. Salt strung upon a wire until the saline coats his teeth when he speaks.

He probably looks ridiculous, holding a newborn. Even if she’s his.

Because nothing about him is soft, or new. He is decades beyond cradles, velvet rabbits and the grass that will undoubtedly grow when she takes her first steps. He is what happens to a man when you feed him hours not made by God. He is old and mean and none of that belongs to a baby.

But he pulls her from the incubator anyway, maybe with the hopes of proving himself wrong.

She stirs before settling between the crook of his elbow. A small thing, hair like thin field callows over her head, thumbs the size of mouse ears. Barely a beginning, despite it feeling like ages ago since you revealed the pregnancy. Hardly possible, to be looking at almost a year of his life, only for her to be as fresh as the morning and blissfully unaware of who she is. Who her father is.

And God, she’s warm. Practically burning him. Warm enough to ignite the ugly fire in his chest that he’s spent the more active, awake years of his life keeping at bay. A desperate creature that drools when softness offers itself to him. Bone marrow to a set of canines.

Told himself he’d only indulge it once- his marriage. To the bread dough and the goodnight kisses and the fresh clay that you envelop him with. The arms that wait for him. Something he really wasn’t made for. But something you fit him in anyway. Put your two hands on his shoulders and looked him in the eye and told him,

“I want you and everything that comes with it.”

If that’s not a confession of love, damn the fairytales he’ll raise his daughter on. Knows shit about what it means to give and expect little. To take knowing you don’t deserve it.

Thunder blossoms outside, and the baby jolts. Her face scrunches, and Simon stiffens at what he knows will follow.

He’s never really been…fond of children. Too fussy, too loud, too pink in the face and too fresh. All delicate rounds, emotions nonsensical and unpredictable. Manifestation of a love he hadn’t understood. Not when comrades talked about it, not when Price had, not even, admittedly, when you had.

Held a peculiar, unviolent anger towards them. An ugly disquiet that had him convinced for years that children were his anthesis. The North of his South.

All of this dissipates when she starts crying.

Bounces her gently and pulls her closer against his chest. Swears quietly when she worsens, the poor, pathetic, toothless mouth opening wider to choke on her own sobs.

“I know, I know…” He shakes his head, “’don’t like the rain, either.”

She doesn’t stop, but neither does Simon. Guess she inherited his stubbornness, too.

“C’mon now…Is’alright I gotcha. Can’t get you from inside,” leans his head back when the cry rattles his teeth, “Just loud-shit…just loud…”

Re-adjusts her in his arms, and she chokes again, before her crying becomes a long, drawn-out thrum. Waters his ears until he’s looking over at you, praying you'll stay asleep and that his daughter will begin to like him.

Won’t blame her, if she doesn’t. Looking like the personification of danger probably doesn’t convince her he’ll protect her from it. He didn’t realize how quickly he was going to have to learn to be gentle. Kind.

She wails again, and he sighs, accepting defeat. Letting the exhaustion drown him before being pulled from the waters by her shaking, fat fingers. But Simon is void of the anger that attaches itself to interrupted peace. He couldn’t fathom looking at the swaddled thumbprint in his arms and feeling anything but immense…gravity.

A pull. The moon to the waves, waves to the shore, shore to the land he built his house on and will bring her home too. Not anger, not grief, not even joy. It was-

“Mm…love…” Simon’s head snaps up, and stares to where you have rolled over, eyes blinking away tear crust, “Is’at you?”

“I’m ‘ere darl,” a baby cry, “’m sorry I couldn’t get ‘er to…she won’t…”

“Si…” you reach out your hand and beckon him closer. He stands slowly, making sure not to stir the baby more than she has been, and starts to hand her back to you. But you shake your head, hand out to stop him. “Sit down.”

He blinks, before taking a seat next to the hospital cot. His jaw reaches the head bar, and he leans up against the beside table with the weeping child. You mumble something unintelligible, voice and body still plagued by sleep, before reaching over the mattress and stroking the top of the baby’s head. She still cries, and Simon sends you a desperate look.

Your hand travels down, before settling your palm over the baby’s chest. Make slow, small circles, and begins humming like you would when you bake, or when you read. Tiny normalcies amongst chaos.

And it’s a miracle. She stops crying. Hiccups a few times, fades into sniffles, and eventually a dove coo. Hands rest over yours, barely twice the size of your knuckles. Simon doesn’t take his eyes off his daughter.

“You did it.”

“We did it,” you correct, “You’re the one holding her.”

“Yeah, but it wasn’t working before.” Still staring, watching for a crack, a fissure in this carefully crafted peace. It doesn’t come.

“’Cus you were doing it alone, Si,” You look at him, really look at him, and Simon feels young again for the first time since exchanging vows, “She needs the both of us. Should’ve seen her when it was just me ‘n her.” Laugh to yourself, before yawning.

Simon nods, even though he doesn’t understand. It feels like he won’t for a long time. Maybe he never will. But staring at his daughter, all pink in the face and fresh and fussy and loud, he feels like trying.

“’gonna be alright, Simon.”

He looks up, mouth twitching into a dry smile, “Me or her?”

You reach across with your other hand and stroke under his cheek. “Us.”

And at least for this moment, Simon will let himself believe it.