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Dirty Work — Andrew ‘Pope’ Cody

pairing – andrew ‘pope’ cody x fem!reader

summary – you’d spent months loving andrew in the shadows because it was the only way to keep him. he knows smurf rots everything she gets her hands on, and you had to learn that as long as she’s still holding the leash, loving him in the dark was never going to be enough to keep him out of it.

warnings – [ 8.1k ] infidelity/emotional betrayal (no cheating, but reader sees pope with another girl), established relationship, reader and pope’s dynamic is Slightly Toxic (secret relationship, and it’s implied he’s the one who decided it), smurf and her Horrible Antics (sending women to pope), reader wishing smurf dies (Obviously!), talks about pope dissociating during unwanted contact, mentions of animal kingdom canon violence but nothing shown on page, reader’s lowk a crybaby, a Lot of this is her reflecting on the relationship, lots of hurt, no comfort/very Little comfort, pope mean and defensive for a few seconds, pope groveling and sad immediately, TWO seconds of pope being happy and domestic (savor it!!!)

notes – who is the AH or does NAH or ESH hmmm i thought i knew where this was gonna go but don’t know if i pulled it off buuuut i rly wanted to write this idea! also inspired by ‘dirty work’ by steely dan it’s what i listen to while i clean my messy room bc double entendre !!!

Your fingers had been singing an unmistakable itch for the last three hours that, on any other day, you would’ve considered to be born out of something medical. You knew better, for you’d diagnosed this months ago. It lived in the pads of your fingers and flared in proximity to Andrew Cody, and the only treatment was contact, and it never quite mattered where. The back of his neck or the dip of his spine, the belt loop you were allowed to hook a finger through at his apartment, in the daylight, in front of the windows, where nobody died from it. Here, you had to keep your hands busy with a beer and stand the regulation distance from him (close enough to hear him breathe if he ever breathed loud enough to hear, far enough that no one watching would think the word ‘hers’).

You’d kept rerouting your hand all night to your hair, to the can, to the chain between your collarbones that you wore inside your shirt at this house, because everything he’d given you lived inside something else. He’d handed it to you in a little box, at arm’s length, watching your face like you may refuse the box. When you’d lifted it out, he’d said, “If you don’t like it – ” and never finished the sentence, because you already had it on.

Across the room, Smurf held a glass of bourbon that caught the dim lights every time she laughed. It was a prop, you knew so. It was the same as the huge gold chain she wore around her neck. It was a prop like the arm she drifted around whichever son drifted into range. You’d watched her do it to Craig twice tonight. You’d watched Andrew watch her do it, hands in his pockets with his spine so straight and rigid.

Deran had told you that, “You’ve been lookin’ so fuckin’ sad recently.”

He’d looked half-worried through his grin, and you had your answer ready. “Work’s just been a lot.”

He’d nodded and clinked his can against yours. You stood there an accumulation of your little lies, calendar lies, where-were-you-Saturday lies, each one costing a coin of something you couldn’t stop spending. You were getting better at that than you would’ve liked. Work had been a lot, and no you weren’t seeing anyone.

You’d said the latter to some girl making conversation by the pool. The “no” had come out before she’d even finished her question while thirty feet away stood the man whose bed you’d woken up in this morning. No. You weren’t seeing anyone.

You needed a minute. Craig was high off his shit – or, maybe, someone else’s – telling a story. Your mouth curved when his did. But the noise pressed in from all sides – the house made it possible to feel like you were within twenty walls instead of four – and you needed just about thirty seconds where you could stop pretending you weren’t in love with the eldest Cody in this house. How many seconds could you steal with him? Ninety, maybe. You’d take forty.

Andrew’s door stood open, and it was a hand’s width of a gap. Through it, your eyes fell onto the gold lamplight laid down across the runner and that was the second you saw the shadows of movement play inside it.

It’d irked you, the fact that the house he grew up in – the house where you’d flocked into with Deran and circled around Andrew for years before you knew you were circling – had never once held the two of you the way you were. You’d been safe in this house your entire life, in the shadows where Smurf registered you as a mindless stray. And then you’d gone and fallen in love with the eldest son, and converted yourself into the only contraband ever smuggled through this house without Smurf sniffing it out.

You wanted – very badly – to hold Andrew. You wanted to get your hand around the back of his neck where he ran hot and press your thumb into that knot of muscle that never once in his life had come loose. You wanted to tell him that you loved him against his collar so his mouth would curve up just a degree like it always did.

Your hand was on the door and then the gap was wider. It was when the gold of his lamp spilled fuller that you saw Andrew’s rigid posture at the edge of his bed, his back to the door. With a girl.

You could’ve sworn you’d seen her just earlier. She was someone from the party’s outer rings, someone Smurf had summoned out of the general dark. Andrew had told you she did that – “She brings girls around when she thinks I’m stressed.”

You’d thought it was history when he told you, something she used to do. You supposed the past tense had been your invention – your brain cradling you unknowingly – and that he’d never conjugated it that way.

Your breath came out heavy through your nostrils once, and you couldn’t be sure if you took a breath after that.

She was talking to Andrew; you could see her mouth moving close to the side of his face. You could see the little nods she gave herself between words. Her hand was on his shoulder, and then it moved up the side of his neck to the place your own hand went.

You knew what that patch of skin felt like from the outside, warm as bread. You knew what your hand looked like there, you’d thrown your head back against the couch and watched as his shoulders lowered as your fingers worked into it. Hers looked the same. It made you sick, that it looked no different when she did it.

Her fingers spread against his jaw and drew his face around toward her. It turned. A head is a heavy thing – Andrew’s had phantom in it besides, whole cemeteries of weight, Julia and everything this home had taken and done – and it came around under four of her fingers, easy as a door. All that weight, and she moved it with a wrist.

You had to swallow down a lump so your voice wouldn’t yell out. Andrew’s secret, you had to tell yourself. You were Andrew’s secret, and if you did anything that showed you knew him better than the guy you sometimes talked to – if the space allowed it – then Andrew wouldn’t be happy.

His profile came into the lamplight and his hands closed on his lap, knuckles blanching, then opening again. He pressed them flat against his thighs. His shoulders were up around his ears.

He shook his head once, the action so small you might have made it up. It was a fossil of a refusal.

She smiled – like he was growling at her from inside a kennel, fenced and adorable – at him. She kept her palm in your place and said something else, and his head stayed shaking its tiny trembling current of no, no, no.

She shifted closer to the mattress. For some awful reason, you heard the bedsprings creak even though you could hear none of what she was saying.

His weight tipped just an inch – toward the pull of her hand – one of his hands came up off his thigh, crossed the small dark between their bodies, and found her waist and rested there.

You found that nothing about his hand looked like the hand you knew, and that thought – the creepy, monstrous thought of something of Andrew’s that you’d thought was only ever yours to know being spent here, on another waist – had teeth. It bit you under your ribs, and there was a physical pinch that wrapped around your body.

Pope, you thought.

The name arrived from everywhere in this house, because the man on the bed wasn’t anyone you’d ever held. He’d never let you. Andrew was yours. Andrew had given you the chain that now felt like it was steaming up against your skin.

It was a little proof-of-ownership tag pressing its details into you at the precise moment his hand certified someone else’s waist. You’d worn it inside your clothes all night, hidden it like everything he gave you. It occurred to you that perhaps the girl’s hands on his neck was more public than anything the two of you had ever done.

His hand had gone, had done this small obedient thing his mother intended it to do. Some part of you believed – stupidly, tenderly, for months – that you had gotten there. You’d had this dumb little faith that you reached whatever was underneath and embalmed it so thoroughly that Smurf could never truly put her fingers back on it.

You hadn’t. You saw that now, that you hadn’t reached what lived under and made it yours in some way that predated his mother’s claim, that love didn’t go deeper than training. Andrew could love you when the air allowed it. The moment the air tangled with her breath, the love folded up and waited.

You were the newest thing in Andrew. You’d been pouring yourself into the top inch of a man and calling it the bottom.

You thought about it, nailed it into your stupid, stupid brain as your fingers closed on the steering wheel. You hadn’t even remembered getting into the car.

If Smurf had him pliant the way you knew she could, Pope would be above the girl right now.

You wondered if it was silly to carry that small little faith that Andrew wouldn’t fuck her. It felt childish in the face of the monstrosity. It was a girl’s faith. Silly girl, he’s not yours there.

You didn’t know. You’d left, coward you were. Now there was a room behind you that you couldn’t see into, and your brain – quick, disgusting – went right on ahead and finished it for you.

Even under it, you hoped that if it happened, it didn’t hurt Andrew. The enormous, completely ruined, loving part of you hoped that if he was in that room doing what she sent the girl for, then at least Andrew was spared.

You wanted the girl to be gentle with him, wanted her hands to be warm, wanted her to slow the way he needed. Because if his body had to be spent tonight on his mother’s errand, then let it at least be spent somewhere soft.

It had all the footage it needed; it remembered his hands in one fold, knew exactly what they’d do, and how that live wire running through your body would light up when they did.

That wire was crossed now, the light going somewhere else, curling in on itself like a millipede when it dies. You’d learned that with Andrew on a documentary. You’d been half-asleep against him and he’d been all-awake, and the millipede had done its slow curl on the screen. He’d said, into your hair, “That’s how they go.”

Now that was ruined, too, wasn’t it? Now that little curling death was with you, in your chest, in the car, everything he’d handed you turning in your grip and pointing back at itself.

The weight of his mouth on yours. The weight of him going slack on you when he stopped holding himself up with his forearms. The sound, that little soft grunt. Your brain had all the memories, had held it close and swaddled it like something meant to be cherished forever. It was playing them on her, and you pressed the heel of your hand into your eye socket to make it go away.

Coward. Coward, you could have stayed. You could have stood in the doorway of his childhood bedroom and let him see you. You could have been the thing that stopped his hands for him, and instead you’d taken your stupid soft feet and gone, and bought yourself this reel that you’d never get to see the end of. Your head would have to keep guessing the ending forever, generous with the details, cruel as Smurf herself.

You let out a full-fledged sob, dropping your head against the wheel as you pulled over on some side. You were crying about it and wishing Andrew well in it, hoping a stranger was being sweet to the man she was taking from you.

Your love – somewhere along the way – for Andrew had stopped including yourself. You’d have lain down under the wheels of it if it kept him warm. You think you would’ve given him away nicely, if it was what he had to do.

The waiting sat low and ugly in you and wouldn’t resolve. You were sure it wouldn’t resolve unless you popped something bad for you to go to sleep. You’d swallow just about anything just to feel different.

There was nothing in your apartment for you to swallow. The ceiling was the only thing that was moving – headlights, then gone, then another – and you could feel the sour taste the one drink had left in your mouth. You lay there and hated your own spit. You hated the chain warming against your sternum. You hated, distantly, the specific idiot you’d been for him tonight, brushing your teeth for him, choosing your earrings.

He’d texted you an hour after you’d left, and then again. It was the grace of your routine. If you left without saying goodbye, it was normal. He’d show up whenever what needed to be done was done, and somewhere between then there’d be a text. Tonight, the first one had come in on schedule, lighting the ceiling blue for one second.

Andrew: Home?

He’d sent another one forty minutes later. There usually was never a second text.

Andrew: Shouldn’t be long. You good?

Your thumb hovered, wanting to type out a ‘yes.’ Your hand wanted to answer him the same way his hand had wanted that waist, muscle memory greased and aimed. You watched your own body try to be obedient now, to the same thing that was killing you. So, you put the phone face-down on the mattress.

You’d lay wondering if Andrew had done with the girl what his mother had sent her to him for. He could be inside her right now. Right now, while you lay here rationing your own breath. The thought went through you serrated, dragging its teeth. You let it, because some penitentiary part of you had decided that if you couldn’t know, you’d serve the worst sentence available.

You snorted softly to yourself through the tears. Wasn’t that the night’s filthiest joke? Smurf didn’t even have to know your relationship with Andrew to teach you how she could’ve hurt you. You were doing the work for her, free of charge, your brain cruel as the woman herself.

He sent another one later.

Andrew: On my way

Andrew was looking at your silence and noticed, if you were lucky. Maybe he hadn’t.

You heard the graceless fumble as he used his spare keys hours later, the metal worrying the other metal. Andrew who’d cracked safes and still had a difficult time working his own girl’s front door quietly when he was spent. The bolt turned and you felt the air sing through the house, then heard the long nothing of him crossing it in the dark, no lights, because lights woke people. He’d learned that it was the polite thing to do – he never turned on lights, choosing whatever default setting a person had chosen – and the fact broke your heart on a normal night and tonight it just sat there like dead weight.

You closed your eyes, never deciding to fake it but your body clearly wanted to. Coward, same as you. You arranged your face slack, and that was when you’d realized how every inch of your skin that could’ve scrunched up had been holding that position for the last three hours since you got home.

The room took him in and the mattress went down under his weight. His boots came off one at a time, and then he was lowering himself into the bed with his arms taking the load so the springs wouldn’t talk.

Somewhere along the way, Andrew’d stopped feeling the pressing need to shower before he got in bed with you. Eager, now. He used to scrub the day off before he’d let himself touch you, like he thought he’d track something in. It had taken you months to get him to stop.

Eager thing, you were, too. Dumb little wanting of wanting him now, now, now, after being starved of him for all the years he’d held himself back from you. The night he’d finally let himself climb into your bed smelling of work and himself, and let you have him unwashed, you’d understood it for the enormous surrender it was. Andrew laying down a guard he’d held since boyhood, trusting you now with the unrinsed version.

You felt bile rise to your throat at the thought now.

His knee found the back of yours, testing to see if you were awake. When he received no answer, his arm came over – the weight of it, God, the sheer heat and heft – and drew you back against the long line of him until there was nowhere left for the dark to get between you.

That rumbling inside you didn’t care what you’d seen; it only knew the heat of him against your back and wanted to turn to it.

His face went to the back of your neck, and he breathed out. The breath went on and on and on, billowing raggedly against your skin at the end of it, everything in him coming down at once. You felt his body get heavier against you with the relief of having arrived.

His hand found your fist under your chin and capped it, thumb going into the groove below your knuckles. His mouth moved on your nape, his lips resting there like they’d found home.

He breathed you in slowly, so rationing constantly. He never took anything at the rate he wanted. You could only feel the true rate underneath – in the pressure of his fingers when they curled and then remembered themselves and went flat, in the abortive flex of his arm that wanted to crush you to him and delivered, instead, a gentle cinching – held at the gate, metered out in doses he’d decided you could survive.

You’d seen it as reverence for much too long. It had felt like being cradled by somebody who tried to remember you constantly.

Tonight, lying rigid inside his heat, you realized you’d only gotten halves of Andrew. The withheld remainder lived somewhere, didn’t it? Everything unspent had to go somewhere, and now you knew where.

“Hate that house,” he murmured quietly. “Whole night. Wanted to get back here.” His thumb moved once in the groove of your knuckles. “To you.”

His knee pressed into yours. “Shoulda left earlier,” he murmured, after a minute. “Looked for you after. Asked Deran – you were already gone.”

It’d taken so long to place Andrew into himself, for him to find the version of his body that could lie in a bed. Years he’d spent flinching. Years learning the flinch back down to nothing, learning the bed you were in was a place the past couldn’t reach through the floor and grab his ankle. His heart was going slow and unafraid against your spine. You’d built that heartbeat, he’d told you once. You’d built it with all of the halves Andrew brought you.

You didn’t want it to go. You wanted to keep being the house he came into, the one where he was unclenched and humming with arrival, happy. You’d made a place out of yourself where he could fall into, and you were only now learning what it cost to be it.

You kept your breath long and level, which was the mistake. It was too level, too clean. Andrew’s thumb stopped for a second, and he blew out another soft breath against your skin.

“Playin’ possum?” The corner of his mouth moved against your neck, and you could feel that little thing he’d started doing more, the closest to a grin he could get. “Nah. C’mon.”

His arm cinched tighter to haul you back flush into him, and there was a low gruff of breath in your hair that was his laugh. His nose dragged up behind your ear and his hand slid off your fist to spread wide and warm over your stomach.

“Waited up f’me?” he murmured, pleased, “and won’t even say hi. What sort of welcome’s that, huh?” He pressed a true kiss under your jaw, lingered there for a moment too long that you could feel his lips curve downwards against your skin, the frown arriving inside of the kiss. “Say hi.”

His mouth dragged up from your jaw hesitantly, testing on your skin. His tongue touched down at the corner of your jaw – savoring the salt he thought was just your skin – and that was the exact second it went wrong on him. His lips flattened again, and you could feel his body go still as he held his breath against you. Andrew knew the taste of tears.

He drew back an inch, enough to break the seal of his mouth from you, and the cool of the room rushed into the space where his warmth had been.

His palm lifted from your stomach and came to your cheek and dragged a thumb – slowly, the pad of it rough – through the track running down toward the pillow, and stopped at the wet gathered at your lashes, and turned it. Against your back, his heart kicked once, then found a faster gear. A swallow went down his throat where it pressed to your shoulder, and his breath developed a small hitch at the top of each inhale.

Andrew had never been one to keep his fear where you could reach it, but you could always feel it anyway. You felt it now, the tell of it thumping against your back.

He made a sound in his throat, like he was clearing it but instead only managed to lodge it more.

“You’re crying,” he said, thumb at your lashes. “Why?”

His hand slid from your cheek to your jaw, cupped it, and pressed, suggesting a turn with a quarter-ounce of pressure. Then, he waited like he always did with you. He proposed, and you completed.

When you didn’t complete it, he applied the tiny pressure again, saying, “Please.”

You let him turn you, because you couldn’t not. That please had that boy in it, and because you were done being a coward in one direction only to be one in another.

You turned in his arms and saw his face for the first time, the memory of his hand around her waist surfacing behind your eyes even as you looked at him. For a second you saw both, his face here, creased and worried in the grey light, and his hand there, resting and obedient on skin that wasn’t yours.

He made a small, confusedly wounded sound in his throat as his eyes went back and forth along your face. His thumb wiped once at your cheek, catching what was leftover, and he didn’t even seem to know he was doing it. You leaned your cheek into his hold, and his palm came to your cheek immediately, brows furrowing.

“What?” he murmured, and it came out in a breath like it’d been punched out of him.

You could feel his fingers curl to the shape of your face, cradling, the closest he could get to gripping without letting himself grip. Your jaw sat on the heel of his palm as his thumb brushed along your cheekbone while the pads of the others curled behind your hair.

It was the sick tender wretchedness of it, letting the same hands that made you almost throw up bile only hours ago cup your face in the dark, leaning into it, because your body had never known what else to do with the enormous nearness of Andrew. You turned to him like a plant to the window even now, even knowing, and you hated that you couldn’t stop it.

You heard his teeth clench together in your silence. His forehead came down, wanting to touch yours, and you let that, too. The weight of his head rested against your hairline and his breath billowed unevenly against your mouth. It was your first touch, you remembered with such tender cruelty. It was the only one he could do, his oldest word with you.

“Somebody do something?” His thumb swept your cheekbone in haste, gathering another one you hadn’t even registered falling.

Your throat wouldn’t work. His fingers curled behind your ear, pads pressing lightly, counting something.

His breath stalled at the top of an inhale, holding it there, and then it came out slowly as he moved closer, nose grazing yours just barely. His tongue peeked out slightly between his lips, and you felt his breath quilt. His head made the smallest motion against yours, no.

His palm flattened some hair back from your face, and his lips pressed to the bridge of your nose and you felt them tremble there. He pressed harder to stop it. When he pulled away, his lips twisted slightly.

“I do something?” he asked, voice cracking in the middle.

You opened your mouth, and your voice came out broken out of disuse. “How was the party?”

His hand tensed up against your face and he tugged his lower lip between his teeth, eyes pinching shut. You felt the second he took his hand off your face like it was burning you, felt the exact millisecond he realized the hand he was touching you with.

Andrew, who reached for you like people did railings on staircases, curled his hands into a fist against the sheet beside you. The whole hand you knew so well – and not at all – held away from you like he’d decided he’d forfeited his right to it.

“Bad,” he murmured. “I didn’t like it.”

You breathed in sharply through your nose at Andrew being the picture of himself, always meeting the worst things in life with the smallest words. You pushed your face further into the pillow, leaving his head hanging with the tiny gap between. Even with his eyes shut, his lips twisted into a small frown. And even as your own heart felt like it was burning up with something ugly and violent, you wanted to press your mouth at the edge of his self-flagellating scowl.

He sucked in a sharp breath and from the corner of your eye, you could see his fists curl tighter on the sheet. You heard the cotton strain under them, threads ticking. One of his fists came up and pressed its knuckles hard against his mouth, like he was stopping words at the gate.

Tell me, you tried to telepathically communicate. Tell me so I don’t have to say it for you.

“How was it – ” he tried, coming out past his knuckles. His lip curled off his teeth a flinch, and his head one hard motion like it was shaking off a fly, hating the question. He put his fist back down and picked a spot on the pillow an inch from your face and spoke to it. “How was it for you?”

“Andrew – ” He tilted his head to the side, brows furrowing at your voice, the tremble in it. You continued, forcing yourself to ask the question. “Did anything – ”

“I’m sorry,” he said, overlapping your voice. His head went back, throat curving long and pale in the light. From here, you could see the curve of his throat bob as he swallowed. His eyes had come open and found the ceiling, shining wet along the bottom lids as he blinked hard, furious little shutters.

“I’m so sorry.” He kept going, repeating it. “Sorry. M’so sorry. Sorry, sorry,” he said, each one softer and faster than the last.

His hand came up and dragged down his own face, knuckles scrubbing at his jaw.

Your body, quicker than your heart, turned to stone. Your head reared impossibly back. If it was possible, you would’ve gone into the pillow. Your nose started to burn and you felt a new pressure build up in your eyes all over again, jaw clenching.

He looked down again, trying to meet your eyes when he felt your body go stiff. His hand came up off the sheet to cradle your face again, but just as quickly as he reached, he put it away.

“I shouldn’t be here. Put my hands on you. Didn’t even –” he rambled on, voice crumpling. “Came here ‘cause I missed you so much – sorry. I’m sorry.”

Your mouth opened as you let out a breath, sounding close to a defeated laugh. Your wires were crossed and you suddenly felt the stab of a thousand sharp knives as the images that had been playing on repeat came to your mind again.

“What happened?” you asked, tearing out through the middle of his words in a voice you weren’t sure even belonged to you.

When he continued apologizing, the words tumbling over yours, you said, “Did you – did you fuck her?”

His head came up and he looked like he’d been struck, horrified and gutted all at once; the answer was in the line between his brows before his mouth caught up. But you needed the mouth, you needed to hear the word, so you held his eyes with your whole body gone rigid.

“No,” he said, voice trembling on the word. “What?”

That made your nose burn even more, the complete brokenness in his voice at the insinuation, discovering you believed him capable of. You had to roll your eyes to the ceiling to get away from his face, and that let the pool gathering at your waterline spill slowly once again down your cheek.

“Why would you think that?” he asked, pushing his face closer to get back into your eyeline, hunting it, needy to be seen completely for the first time maybe his entire life. “Why would I do that?”

You turned your neck so your cheek fell onto the pillow and away from him. He made a pained sound at you turning away from him, also maybe for the first time in your life.

“I would never do that,” he said, firming his voice. “Don’t want anyone else. Don’t want anyone,” he said, rougher, correcting himself in the same breath down to the barest true thing. “S’only ever been – doesn’t work like that with me. You know that. Doesn’t work with anyone that’s not – that’s not you. You know that,”

The words all came out like he was drilling it back into you, like he thought that some base mechanism in you had been accidentally tossed over the hours you’d been away from him, and if he said the words with enough torque he could reseat it, will it back true.

It hadn’t been. The mechanism was still wired and running charged, so completely charged. You knew Andrew down to the bone, loved him down to the phantoms in his brain and the loving hadn’t dimmed a watt for what you’d seen. If anything it’d gone sharper, meaner, more itself, the way a burn brightens a nerve. You lay there charged to the teeth with it and it did you no good at all, because being wired for Andrew didn’t mean the same as having him, and tonight the gap between those things was the whole width of the bed.

Loving him hadn’t been enough to keep his hand off another waist when his mother willed it there. You could know him to the bone and love him to the phantoms – you knew you would, forever – and still lose him to a pull that predated you by a womb and answered to a name that wasn’t yours.

“What’d you do with her?” you murmured, voice falling onto the pillow under you, because God it was easier to focus on the girl than the shark of a mother behind her.

“I paid her,” Andrew said quickly, the words tumbling out in his haste to explain, “to tell Smurf it was done and go.” His breath came quickly through his nose. “Didn’t do anythin’ with her, I swear. It stopped – I stopped it. Just gave her cash and got her out the door.”

There was a horror in the competence in the transaction, how he’d had a procedure to it. Was this the rest of your life? To protect your relationship from Smurf’s claws, was this what it would take – forever? A lifetime of Andrew keeping a folded stack of bills ready like a fire extinguisher, of the two of you building your whole love in the negative space around a woman who’d never been told once it existed? You saw the stretch out ahead, year after year of him coming to your door, of you lying awake wondering if tonight had been just like this, and something in you buckled at the length of it.

“How –” you said, voice going small, embarrassment clawing at your throat. “How many times has this happened?”

“A few,” he mumbled.

Your brows rose, and you felt fresh heat crawl behind your eyes again.

“Since we’ve been – ?” His eyes went somewhere else, out past your shoulder. You tried again at the silence, pulling your brows back down so as to not let any more tears fall. “Andrew?”

“Doesn’t matter.” He shook his head, and his eyes found yours again. His tongue pressed into his cheek, molding a small hill there, and left. “They come. I handle it, they go. That’s all,” he said, leaning down just slightly as if to press the words onto you. “It’s handled.”

There was a quiet sort of bell that rang in your mind the same second he hesitantly let his forehead drop back to yours, reaching, reaching, reaching for the same old ease. You pushed your arms up from your sides, palms finding his chest, stopping. You were shaking your head, eyes fluttering as you tried to slide the picture of Andrew – your Andrew – back into your mind, to feel it whole like it always did.

His eyes went down to your palms as if to make sure he wasn’t imagining the weight. “Stop,” he murmured. “Please.”

Your eyes forced themselves shut. “And it’s gonna keep happening.”

“I don’t care about any of them – ”

“I care,” you said. “I care that your plan was always just – hope I don’t find out. Say the plan, Andrew. There’s no part where it stops.”

“You weren’t,” he said, voice going rougher. “You weren’t supposed to find it. Got nothing to do with you.”

You knew one day Smurf was going to die. One fateful fucking day, she would. Andrew may not believe so, but even Smurf would rot into the ground some day, same as anything that lived. She wasn’t god, however she’d built herself into one in the person of him. She was just a woman who one day would face the same fate anyone else does, and the string she kept through Andrew’s ribs would go slack for the first time in his whole life.

Fuck, you felt selfish. Was it so wrong to hope for an Andrew that only existed on the far side of his mother’s grave? To lie in your own bed wondering – her age, her habits – while her son shook beside you? You were wishing a woman dead so you could love her son openly.

You always came up empty. Smurf could die tonight, next year, or tomorrow, and it wouldn’t matter. She took from Andrew without lifting anything heavier than an intention. A dead woman kept that kind of reach. The string through his ribs didn’t need her hands on the other end of it anymore, for it’d learned to pull all by itself.

Andrew watched your face as you watched the stretch of your life you’d have if it kept going on just like this. “This is why. Anything to do with her’s only gonna hurt you.”

You reeled back at that, pulling your body to sit up so quickly Andrew flinched away, making space.

“This is why?” The sheet fell off you and the cold hit your shoulders, the cotton of your tank top doing nothing to help. “Andrew, I don’t like this.”

“Stop,” he murmured, reaching a palm across the distance as he sat up, even though his jaw was clenched. “I know. I know you don’t, just –”

“There have been girls who’ve been with you, god knows how many,” your voice cracked, and you had to crane your neck to look at the ceiling at the thought. “Why haven’t you just told her to stop sending them?”

His jaw shifted, a flinch. His lips pushed out slightly, shoulders coming up into a small shrug like you’d just asked him to walk through a wall. “It’s nothing. I don’t do anything with them. It’s – two minutes of my life, Smurf thinks she won. It costs nothing – ”

“It costs me,” you interrupted, the words coming out of you louder than anything you’d said all night. You both froze at the sound of your voice, and his head snapped back to your face. Your fingers went up to find the chain around your neck, clasping. “You might be fine with it, but I’m not – not when you’ve been hiding this from me the entire time. I can’t spend my entire life wondering if there’s another girl – another chance for you to –”

“It wouldn’t – ” he started, shaking his head. “I’d handle it.”

“I’m tired, Andrew,” you said, head dropping slightly. “I don’t know how to deal with this.”

His breathing had gone shallow. His eyes were on your fist, and his lips were pursed like he was fighting himself out of saying something – the softness trying to surface as the fear shoved it back down – and after a moment, he said, “You knew what you were getting into.”

“I knew about the jobs,” you said quietly. You breathed in one small pull through your nose and your fingers came off the chain.

“I knew about the guns under your pillow and how you do things you can’t tell me at three in the morning. I knew that and I have never once – ” you had to click your tongue to process the sudden disbelief at yourself, “ – asked you anything you didn’t want to answer.”

He opened his mouth, as if to argue. You raised your palm, and his teeth clicked together audibly, obedient to your hand in a manner that on any other night would’ve undone you.

“I didn’t know about the girls. How many times you must’ve come here after – ” Your voice shook, and you had to push yourself off the bed, away. Suddenly, you felt too aware of the enormity of Andrew. You’d welcomed it, loved it, made a home out of the sheer size of him. Now the bed felt too close to standing next to a parked truck. “I don’t know what else I don’t know.”

Your arms crossed over your chest, hands gripping your elbows. You looked at the window, the parking lot lights coming through the blinds in stripes, and started flipping backward through the years like a rolodex to see if there were any hints.

“There’s nothing else,” he said, voice going quieter. He’d moved himself to the edge of the bed, feet on the floor, palms fisting the fabric of his pants as he watched you. “Nothing else. I’ll tell you if it happens again.”

“If it happens again,” you said, the words coming out through a resigned chuckle. “It’s going to happen again.”

“What do you want me to say?” Your heart kicked as he said the words, his eyes wide and wet and lost. “I can’t – I don’t know what you want me to do. I don’t know what I can do that isn’t already – ” His hand vaguely motioned between the two of you. “I’m already doing everything. This is everything.”

“I want you to tell me when this ends.” Your own voice cracked throughout the entire sentence, your shoulders coming up to your ears as you folded yourself further away from him, like your asking the question was enough to fill the space. “I’d wait, Andrew. I’d wait forever if I knew there was – I just, if I’m staying, I need to know it’s going somewhere.”

He craned his head up to look at you then, brows furrowed and lips parted, and you watched how his breathing kicked up.

“Don’t,” he murmured, the words coming out more to himself than you. “Stop that.”

“Stop what?”

“That,” he murmured, pulling himself off the bed. His hands hesitantly reached up to your face, both palms cupping unsteadily, as he dropped his forehead to yours. “Don’t gotta put an ‘if’ in it. Don’t. Please.”

You pressed your lips together, eyes clenching shut as you tried to pull away from his hold. His grip tightened just slightly, pressing his forehead impossibly closer into yours.

“Please. Hey. Please.” He tapped your cheek once desperately, forcing you to open your eyes. “Why’re you thinkin’ of leaving? Stop that – nothing happened. Nothing’s gonna happen.”

You let out a pained sound at the words, feeling yourself weaken in his desperation. Nothing happened, nothing was going to happen. No, it was going to be exactly how it was. The good, and the hiding it came wrapped in.

“S’good here,” he murmured. “Don’t take the whole thing for one night.”

Was this enough?

The selfishness, the greed crawled through your body like the largest organ. Was this enough for a life, to have Andrew when you could, while he lived another?

You’d continue trusting that the women got paid at the door. You’d continue learning about them at doorways, by accident. You’d get older inside a few hours’ worth of a man. There were women who did it – you knew there were, whole quiet populations of them, mistresses to marriages, to churches, to armies – who took the visiting hours and meant it when it was love. Maybe they were happy. Maybe the trick was to stop measuring and stop waiting on something.

“We’re good,” he said again, voice going softer as his chin dipped slightly, and you realized he was repeating it because you weren’t.

He took in a sharp breath of air at your silence, fingers moving from your face down to your arms.

Your eyes focused on his collar instead, at the top button of his shirt. It never sat right. You thought you’d fixed it about a hundred times without thinking, your fingers at his throat while he stood statue-still and let you, letting you be the only person allowed to be the one to fuss over him. Your hands stayed at your side.

“I hate this,” he said after a moment. His thumbs moved at your elbows in small circles. “Hate that I made you cry.”

His arms went up again, over your shoulders, up the sides of your neck, until he was tilting your face in both hands up to him, thumbs sweeping under your eyes to clear it. His fingers were moving in haste now, the desperation overriding the second-guessing.

“Will you look at me?” he murmured, and you did.

His mouth came down to your cheekbone, then higher to the corner of your eye, kissing along the damage slowly. His hand loosely slid back into your hair, tilting your head to the other side, doing it again. His breathing was ragged against your skin as his body crowded you, chest brushing yours with every breath.

“Will you let me?” His mouth moved to your temple and pressed there, voice breaking slightly. “Will you let me make you feel better?” His nose dragged along your hairline and his lips landed just under your ear. “Know how. Please let me.”

You knew he would, he always did with every good intention. He’d make you feel better tonight like he’d made you feel better a hundred nights, and tomorrow you’d remember how much Andrew you had, and how much he kept. The next party would still come, and there would always be another better to make you feel because that was one thing he could manufacture and changing anything was not.

You cleared your throat, and hated how his entire body perked up at the small sound.

“I’m gonna sleep,” you mumbled, slowly prying your body away from his hold.

You moved your body on autopilot and got onto the bed again, facing the window. The mattress dipped, and he placed himself at your back.

His mouth pressed against your shoulder, then an inch higher at the curve of your neck. His breath shuddered against you. “Been so good to me.”

You sucked in a shallow breath, turning your face slightly to meet his eyes, “Andrew – ”

His hand slid along your jaw and his mouth came down onto yours, swallowing his own name from your lips. He kissed you so slowly, hope running the length of it, as his fingers stroked whatever inch of skin it could find in its haste.

You matched it, trying to move when he did, body feeling completely weightless. Somewhere in it, as his fingers reached up to your hair, your breath broke, one small wet hitch against his mouth, and the tear went hot, down onto his palm.

Andrew halted against your mouth, then pulled away to angle his head to rest on yours. He let out a short breath through his nostril, and pressed one last peck against your lips.

“Don’t cry while kissin’ me,” he said, voice so broken. “Please.”

His thumb moved through the dampness collected on your cheek again, then pressed slightly into the track. His eyes went down to your mouth, and his throat moved as he swallowed hard.

“It feels bad now?” he murmured, eyes trained to your cheeks.

“No,” you said quickly, hands finding his wrist. “No, Andrew.”

His thumb stayed there, and his eyes stayed down. His lips moved slightly as you watched his brows furrow in understanding, watched him not believe you.

“M’sorry,” he said quietly, jaw clenching. “Been hurting you all night. You’ve been crying all night–”

“No.” Your hand came up to his face, palm to his cheek, and he flinched into it. “No. It’s not bad – never been bad. You could never feel bad to me.”

“Look at you,” he said, voice coming out in a whisper. “Why’re you letting me be – ”

“Because I love you,” you said, leaning up slightly to meet his eyes properly. “I love you, and that doesn’t change just because – ”

You felt like you were both understanding it at once. His tongue came out to press against his own lip. He scrunched up his whole face – eyes screwing shut – before silently turning his face down and away, into the pillow, hiding even now.

You took in a shaky breath, and your hand came up to land at the back of his head, palm curving to his skull. He rolled into you, knee knocking into yours. His arm hauled you in too hard and then flinched, correcting himself. His face pressed into your chest, into the cotton over your sternum, over the small shape of the chain, and the entire weight of his skull rested against your heart. You felt the warmth soaking to your skin as he let out a sob, pooling around the metal. His fists gripped your shirt at the ribs, both sides, holding on, and his shoulders moved in that arrhythmic way.

“Please don’t leave,” he said, muffled against you.

Your throat closed as you let out a close-mouthed sob, hands moving in his hair. “Stay tonight.”

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