Isabellaboo2025

He surfaces every so often, half-lucid, his hand groping across the blanket until it finds yours. He says your name, you tell him you’re there and he goes under again with something like peace on his gaunt face.

You sit with him for hours. Dylan stays beside you the whole time, refusing to leave, until finally around midnight he begins to list sideways with exhaustion, grief and the enormous emotional weight of a day that’s held both the worst fear and the greatest joy of his life. You make him go home with promises that his dad is still going to be there in the morning and he finally goes, but not before stopping in the doorway and looking back at the cot.

“We’re a family again, Mom,” he says thickly and you have to press your hand hard against your mouth and just nod, because you can’t say anything at all.

We're a family again.

You sit a while longer after he leaves, holding Matt's hand and watching his chest rise and fall. You try to feel your way through the thing that’s happened to your life, and you can’t because it’s too big. It keeps sliding out from under you. Every time you get hold of the joy – Matt's alive, Matt’s come back, the impossible thing’s happened, your son has his father – it turns in your hands into the other thing.

Into Joel's face in the doorway, into your place is here with him, into the low quiet way he said it and was then gone before you could answer. And every time you get hold of that grief it turns back into the joy, and you go round and round, with no top or bottom to it.

Dr Vee sends you home eventually telling you that there’s nothing more you can do tonight except wear yourself out. So you go, out into the cold clear Wyoming night, the whole town asleep, the stars enormous and indifferent overhead.

But your feet don’t take you home.

You don’t decide it and if anyone had asked, you’d say that you didn't know where you were going, that you were just walking, just letting the cold clear your head. But your feet know, and you come around the corner and find yourself looking at Joel's place, one window lit low and gold. You stop at the foot of the path, stand there in the dark and don’t know what you’ve come to say.

You know he’ll be awake. Two years of getting to know one another has led you to understand that Joel doesn’t sleep the night after a patrol’s gone bad, and this one has gone about as bad as a patrol can go without anyone dying. And besides, you know in your bones, that he’s sitting in there in the dark with a glass he isn't drinking, doing the exact same thing you've been doing at Matt's bedside, going round and round on a thing with no bottom to it.

You make yourself walk up the path, lift your hand and knock, quietly, your heart going like a rabbit's.

The door opens and you immediately realise that he’d known it was you. There’s no surprise in him as he stands in the doorway in the low light with his shirt untucked, his feet bare and his face doing the thing it does, showing you nothing. Behind him, you can see into the kitchen, see the lamp and the untouched glass on the table exactly where you knew it would be.

He looks at you, you look at him and for a long moment neither of you say anything at all, because the words have all been too big since the moment Dylan screamed across the yard.

"He's sleeping," you say finally, the first thing that comes to mind. "Matt. The fever's coming down. The doctor thinks…she thinks he'll be alright, given time."

"That’s good,” Joel says quietly. "That's really good. He's a strong man. I saw it out there. There wasn't a lot of quit in him.” He pauses. "How’s Dylan?"

"He’s at home, hopefully sleeping. He said…" You feel your throat close up and realise you can’t say Dylan’s words in front of Joel. "He's happy. He's so happy."

"Yeah." Something moves behind Joel's eyes and is gone. "He should be. The boy got his father back and that kinda things doesn’t happen. In all the years since the outbreak, I never once saw it happen, and it happened to him today."

He says it like he means it, and you know he does mean it, which is the unbearable part. There’s no bitterness in him. He’s standing there, having lost everything and he means every word of gladness for your son.

"That's a good thing. That's a rare, good thing."

You stand on his step in the cold and feel the tears come up again, hot, tears you can’t fight this time. "Can I come in?"

He steps back to let you pass and you walk into the kitchen, the room warm and small around you. A room you know. A room you thought you might call your own one day, depending on what you and Joel decided to do long-term.

He stands by the table with his arms loose at his sides and watches you, wary and careful, giving you room. You stand in the middle of his floor with your hands twisting together and no idea in the world where to begin.

"I don't know what to say. I've been trying to figure out what to say to you since the gate and I don't…Joel, I don't have it. There aren't words for this. There isn't a…there's no map for this. I don't know what I'm doing here…don't even know what I came to say."

"You don't have to say anythin’."

"I do, though. I do, because…" Your voice cracks. "Because of the way you looked at me. In the yard and in the doorway. You looked at me like…like you were saying goodbye. And you said my place was with Matt and then you were just gone before I could…Joel, you didn't even let me…"

"What was there to let you do?" He says gently. "What were you gonna say, standin' there with his hand in yours and the doc about to cut into his leg? There wasn't anythin’ to say. So, I said the one true thing and I got out of the way. That's all. That was the only kind thing left to do."

"The only kind thing…" You laugh, and it comes out wrecked. "God…even now. Even now you're…" You press the heels of your hands against your eyes. "Do you know what today was supposed to be? Do you remember what tonight was supposed to be?"

His jaw tightens, just barely. "I remember."

"I was going to tell Dylan.” Your voice goes to pieces. "I was going to tell him that I loved you tonight and that I wanted us to be a family – you, me Dylan and Ellie and…and here I am, standing looking at a kitchen that I might have…might have called mine…with a bed upstairs…”

He doesn’t move, but something happens to his face – a crack, fast, there and shuttered, but you see it, and when he speaks, his voice has gone rough at the edges for the first time.

"Don't. That’s not…it's not fair to either of us. Not now."

"When, then?" The tears are coming freely now, and you let them. "When's the fair time to talk about it? Because I don't think there's ever going to be one because now…"

You gesture helplessly, at the room, at the town, at the clinic across the dark where your husband lies stitched and fevered and sleeping.

"Now there's no clean time to say anything ever again."

"You have a husband."

"I buried a husband."

It comes out of you harder than you mean.

"I spent the last two years grieving him and…and finally letting him go, even though there were so many things stopping me – not least of all my son – and then you…you were so patient, you never pushed, you just…you were there and we finally…"

You rub your hands over your face.

“And now the man I buried is lying in the clinic thinking that he’s come back to me, to his family and… I don't know who I am. I honestly do not know who I am, standing here. Am I Matt’s wife? Am I…could I have been yours?"

Joel’s quiet for a long moment whilst, outside, the wind moves in the eaves.

"You love him," he says finally.

"I…I did.” You nod your head, helplessly. "I love…I loved the man I married before the outbreak, the man I lived in the QZ with, the man I conceived Dylan with, the man I raised my child with, the man…the man who wanted to get us here. The man I thought had given up his life for that very thing…”

You let out a shaky breath.

“And I’ve sat in Gail’s front room and told her I’m married and clung onto that because I thought it was what I wanted and who I am, and all the time…all the time these last two years I’ve been slowly letting him go and not really realising it. And that's the thing I can't untangle. I would have walked into fire for him, once. And when I saw him tonight, when he put his arms around me, my body just…it remembered. Some part of me that never stopped just reached for him and held on. And that was real. That's still real. I can't pretend it's not."

You look up at him, eyes streaming.

"But it's not now, Joel. It's memory. It's two years and a whole grief ago. And you…you're now. You're the man I was going to build the rest of it with. You're the one I…"

"Don't."

He turns half away from you.

"You need to think real careful ‘bout what you say next, cause there's a man over in that clinic who spent two years in hell holdin’ onto the picture of you. Who stayed behind to buy you and that boy your lives. Who crawled back from the dead. And he loves you. I watched his face in that camp when he realised who we were and I watched it the whole ride home. He never once stopped, that's what he kept sayin’, and he meant it. I've seen enough men to know when it's true. That man loves you the way…"

His voice catches.

"The way a man loves the thing that kept him alive. And he's Dylan's father so you can’t – you shouldn’t – throw that over for me on the worst night of everybody's life, when you ain’t thinkin’ straight, when none of us are. That ain’t a decision – that’s a wound talkin'."

"Then tell me what to do."

You cross the room without deciding to, close enough to him now to see the rough grey stubble on his jaw that you’ve stroked so many times. Close enough to see that his hands aren’t quite steady.

"You always know what to do. You’ve known…since that first day when you forced them to let us in here. You knew what to do out there today, you kept my son alive, you brought my…you brought Matt home even though…" Your breath hitches. "Even though it cost you. I know it cost you, don’t tell me it didn't. So, tell me what to do, Joel, because I don't know, I have never in my life not known this badly."

He looks at you then, full on, and lets it show, finally, just for a moment – all of it, the whole ruined depth of what he's been holding down since the gate – and it’s worse than showing you nothing, so much worse, because you can see how much it cost him to carry your family home over the wreckage of his own heart.

"You follow your heart," he says, low. "That's all I got. That's the only thing I know. Whatever it costs, wherever it takes you. You follow your heart and you don't let anybody – not him, not the town, not me – talk you outta what it tells you. Even if what it tells you is a thing I don't wanna hear. You follow it."

"That's the problem," you whisper.

"What?"

"That's the problem, Joel."

You’re crying openly now and you don’t care.

"I did. I have been. My heart's been telling me the same thing for weeks, maybe even months before I was able to properly hear what it was saying, and it didn't change tonight. It didn't change when Dylan screamed across the yard or when Matt put his arms around me. I stood there in his arms, and I was so happy and so torn apart and the whole time, the whole time, I was looking for you."

Your voice breaks completely.

"I couldn't stop looking for you. My husband, back from the dead, holding me, and I was looking over his shoulder for you. That's what my heart did. So don't tell me to follow it, because it's already…it already…"

And then you aren’t talking anymore.

You don’t decide it and neither does he – it just happens, the last foot of distance between you gone, his hands coming up to your face rough and gentle at once and yours fisting in the front of his untucked shirt, and his mouth comes down on yours or yours comes up to his, it doesn’t matter. It’s both, it’s the thing you've both been holding away from all night and it breaks over you like a wave.

He kisses you like a man who's told himself he'll never get to again, desperate and aching and full of everything he hasn't said. And you kiss him back with two years and a grief and a whole yard's worth of looking-for-him poured into it. Your hands slide up into his hair, his arm crushes you against him, and God, it’s true, that’s the terrible thing. It’s so plainly true – the way you fit against him, the way your whole body settles and answers, the way this is the thing your heart has been shouting at you across a crowded yard all night.

This. Him. Now.

For a moment there’s nothing else. For a moment the clinic and the town and the man asleep on the cot and the boy asleep at home all fall away and there’s only Joel's mouth on yours and his heart slamming against your palm and the low broken sound he makes into the kiss. The sound of a man who's braced his whole life for the thing to be ripped back and is, for one stolen instant, holding it anyway.

And then you feel him start to pull back at the same moment you do. You feel it in both of you at once, the same thought landing in the same breath. You break apart gasping, foreheads pressed together, both of you shaking, his hands still framing your wet face and yours still fisted in his shirt, neither of you quite able to fully let go and neither of you able to keep going.

Because it isn’t simple. Because it isn't just the two of you anymore. Because there’s a man across the dark with your name on his cracked lips who crawled out of two years of hell for you. Because there’s a sixteen-year-old boy asleep in your house with his whole heart shining out of him. Because whatever your heart shouts, there are other hearts now, real ones, wounded ones, and you can’t simply take the thing you wanted, not clean, not without tearing something in your son and in the man who fathered him.

Not without becoming a person you’re not sure you can live with being.

"We can't," you breathe against his mouth, and it’s the hardest thing you've ever said. "Joel, we can't. Not…not like this. Not tonight. Not with him lying there. It's not…"

"I know." His voice is wrecked, low, and his thumbs move once across your cheekbones, wiping tears gently before his hands come away. "I know. I shouldn't have…"

He steps back, makes himself do it. You see the effort of it move through his whole body, the same effort you saw in the set of his shoulders across the yard.

"That was mine. That's on me. You came here hurtin' and confused and I…I should've been the one holdin’ the line. I'm sorry."

"No."

You catch his hand before he can get all the way clear of you, hold it, refusing to let him take the whole weight of it onto himself the way he takes the weight of everything.

"Don't you dare apologise. I knocked on your door in the middle of the night. I crossed this whole town in the dark and I didn't go home, I came here. That was mine too. We did that together, same as everything else." Your fingers tighten around his. "Don't you go turning this into another thing you did wrong. Not this, please."

He looks down at your joined hands. For a long moment he doesn’t say anything, and you can feel him wanting to pull away and not doing it, letting you hold on, giving you that much.

"It doesn't change anythin’," he says finally. "That we…it feels like the truest thing I've done in years and it doesn't change one single thing about tomorrow. That's the hell of it. He's still in that clinic. Dylan still got his father back this afternoon. You're still…" His jaw works. "You're still married to a man who never stopped lovin’ you for two years in hell. None of that's less true ‘cause you kissed me in my kitchen. If anythin’ it's…" He shakes his head. "It just makes it worse. Because now we both know."

"Know what?"

"What it is."

He meets your eyes, and it’s somehow the most naked and the most tender you've ever seen him.

"That it's real. That it wasn't just…two lonely people fillin' a hole in the dark. I'd have given a lot for it to be that, tonight ‘cause it would've made this easier. But it ain't that. It's real. You're the…"

His voice roughens and breaks and he pushes through it, because Joel Miller says the hard things when they finally have to be said.

"You're the thing I stopped believin’ I'd get. And I got you for a short while before the world remembered itself and came to take it back. Same as it always does. Same as I always knew it would."

"Stop…”

You’re crying again, and you press his hand to your wet cheek and hold it there.

"Stop talking like it's already over. Like it's already decided. It's not. I don't…Joel, I haven't decided anything. I can't decide on anything, not tonight, not with Matt fevered on a cot and Dylan's whole heart hanging on it. But that's not the same as it being over. Don't you put yourself in the ground before anybody's even…"

"I'm not." His thumb moves on your cheek with that small unbearable tenderness. "I'm not decidin’ it for you. That's the last thing I'd do. You heard me – follow your heart. I meant it, even now, even though I know where your heart's pointed 'cause you just told me and it half killed me to hear it."

A ghost of something crosses his face that on any other night might have been a smile.

"But I'm gonna tell you the true thing, because somebody's got to, and it might as well be me, since I love you enough to say the thing that costs me."

He draws a breath.

"Whatever your heart says tonight, you've got a boy who spent two years grievin’ his daddy and got him back this afternoon. You've got a man who stayed behind so the two of you could live and paid two years for it. You can’t make this decision for you. Not clean. Not this time. There's too many people standin' inside it. And you're not the kind of woman who could live with herself if she tore up her son's family the same night it got put back together. That ain’t who you are. It's part of why I…"

He stops and swallows.

"It's part of it."

And the terrible thing, the thing that makes you press your face into his palm and shut your eyes, is that he’s right. He’s right and you know he’s right and you hate that he’s right. Hate that his decency reaches even into this, even into the thing that’s breaking both of you. That he’ll stand here with his own heart in pieces and use the last of himself to point you gently back toward the harder, better road.

Toward Matt. Toward your son's whole shining face. Toward the family that’s been handed back to you

"I don't want it to be right," you whisper. "God forgive me, I don't want you to be right."

"I know."

"I want…”

You can’t finish it. There are too many things you want, and they can’t all be true at once and wanting them anyway is the whole cruelty of it. So, you just stand there in his kitchen with his hand against your face. His forehead comes down to rest against yours, and you breathe him in – the warm familiar smell of him, and you feel the thin thread of the line you've both drawn, and exactly how little it’ll take to snap it.

"You should go home," Joel says, low, into the small space between you.

But he doesn’t step back. His hand doesn’t leave your face and you hear the way the words come out – not an instruction so much as a last, failing attempt at one, a man reaching for a decency he’s already losing his grip on.

"Joel…”

You turn your face into his palm, press your lips to the rough heel of it, and you feel him go still all through, feel the breath catch in his chest under your other hand.

"I can't…I can't walk out that door and go lie awake next to nothing tonight. Not tonight. Tomorrow I'll be whoever I have to be. Tomorrow I'll be at that clinic, and I'll do the right thing and I'll…"

Your voice breaks.

"But tonight I need this. I need you. One more time before the whole world takes it. Please, don't make me be good tonight. I've got the rest of my life to be good."

He looks at you, and you watch the last of the line go in him – watch the careful holding-back crack straight down the middle and everything he's been damming up since the gate comes roaring through. His mouth comes down on yours and it isn't gentle this time, isn’t the aching stolen kiss from before. It’s hungry. It’s grief and a whole yard of looking-for-him and the plain animal fact of how much you want each other, and you give it right back, your hands fisting in his shirt, dragging him into you.

"Say it again," he growls against your mouth, his hands finding your hips and gripping hard.

"I need you. God, Joel, I need you…"

That’s all it takes.

He turns you fast and your back hits the wall beside the fridge hard enough to knock the breath out of you. Then his mouth’s on your throat and his hands are everywhere, dragging your shirt up, working the buttons of your jeans, and yours are just as frantic on him, shoving his shirt off his shoulders, palms flat against the warm broad plane of his chest.

You've done this so many times in the last month and it’s never once been like this, not even the night at the movies. Tonight there’s no time, and it makes every touch land like the last one.

He gets your jeans down your hips, you kick one leg out of them and then his hands are on the backs of your thighs, lifting you like you weigh nothing and pinning you between his body and the wall. You wrap your legs around him and feel him hot and hard against you and you’re already gasping, already gone, already saying his name over and over into the crook of his neck.

"Look at me," he says roughly, forehead pressed to yours, eyes dark and fierce and wet. "I want you lookin' at me."

And you do. You hold his eyes, and he pushes into you slow and deep and enormous, and the sound that tears out of you is half a moan and half a sob, his own breath punching out of him ragged. And for one suspended moment you both just hold there, joined, foreheads pressed, breathing each other's air. It’s so good it hurts, as good as it has ever been, every single other time, better maybe for the terrible sweetness of knowing.

Then he moves and thought goes out of you entirely.

He fucks you against that wall like a man saying everything he doesn’t have words for. Hard, deep, his hips driving up into you, each stroke wringing another cry out of you that you don’t try to muffle.

“God, yes, there, Joel…don't stop, don't you dare stop…”

Your back drags against the wood, your arms locked around his neck, your legs clamped around his waist. His hands grip your ass, holding you exactly where he wants you, angling you so that every thrust hits that place inside you that makes your whole body clench and shudder.

And he knows it, knows your body, knows exactly how to take you apart, and he does it now with a desperate, focused ferocity, watching your face the whole time, drinking in every gasp and every cry like he’s trying to memorise them.

"That's it," he breathes against your mouth, ragged, his rhythm never faltering. "That's it, come here, let me feel it, I got you…"

And you’re already climbing, already spiralling up fast and helpless, the heat coiling tight and unbearable low in your belly.

"Joel…Joel, I'm…I'm…"

"I know. I know, sweetheart. Let go. I got you…I got you."

The orgasm breaks over you, your whole body seizing around him, your cry muffled against his shoulder as you come, and come, and cling to him through it, shaking apart in his arms with his name in your mouth and your nails in his back.

He fucks you through it, hard and steady, drawing it out until you’re limp and gasping and oversensitive. Then his own rhythm goes ragged and breaks, and he buries his face in your neck and says your name – just your name, wrecked, reverent, like a prayer, like the only word he has left – and shudders, spilling into you, holding you crushed against the wall and against his chest like he'll never let go.

For a long time neither of you move. His forehead stays pressed to the wall beside your head, his breath hot and heaving against your throat, his arms locked around you, still buried deep, still joined, both of you slick and trembling and undone. You can feel his heart hammering against yours, the two of them slamming out of time and then, slowly, slowly, falling back into rhythm together the way they always have.

You hold the back of his head, your fingers in his damp hair, and feel the wetness against your neck and know it isn’t only sweat. You don’t say anything about it, just hold him tighter, because there’s nothing to say, because you’re both crying now, silently, wrapped around each other against the wall with the whole impossible morning waiting on the other side of the dark.

"That wasn't goodbye," you whisper into his hair, fierce and broken, because you need it not to be, even now, even with the truth of it settling cold and certain into both your chests. "It wasn't. Do you hear me? It wasn't goodbye."

He doesn’t answer. He just turns his face and presses his lips to your throat, slow, soft, lingering – and you feel the answer in the very tenderness of it, in the way he kisses you like a man laying something down that he doesn’t have the strength to keep holding. And you understand that he’s letting you have your not-goodbye the same way he lets you have everything, out of pure love, because arguing it will cost you more than the lie’s worth.

He sets you down gently when your legs can hold you again and steadies you with both hands until you’re sure. And then he finds your clothes and hands them to you piece by piece, quiet, careful, not meeting your eyes because he can’t.

You dress in the low light with your whole body still humming and your heart in ruins. Neither of you say the thing you both know, which is that this has been exactly what you've said it was and exactly what he's been too kind to name – one more time before the whole world takes it. The last one. The goodbye that neither of you will call a goodbye.

At the door he stops you, one hand light on your arm, then links his fingers through yours. You turn, he looks at you, and for just a moment he lets it all show again, everything, the whole loss and the whole helpless love of it, and then he leans down and presses one last kiss to your forehead.

"You should go home," he says at last. "You should sleep, if you can. And in the mornin' you should be at that clinic when he wakes up, because he's gonna wake up scared and hurtin' in a strange place and the first thing he's gonna want is your face. And Dylan’s gonna be there too, watchin' you both, and he needs…" His voice thickens. "He needs to see his mother be glad. However you can manage it. He's owed that. He's been through enough."

"And you? What about you, Joel? What are you owed?"

Something closes, softly, behind his eyes, something quiet and sad.

"I'm owed nothin'," he says, without a scrap of self-pity. Said like a plain fact he's made peace with a long, long time ago. "I never was. I got time I never expected. I got to sit with you and be a man who…that's more than I ever thought I'd get again. I got…I got what just happened and the memory of every time I’ve held you. So, I'm not owed a thing. I'm ahead, if anythin’."

He tries again, the ghost of the smile, and it doesn’t hold.

"Go on home, please.”

You don’t want to go. Everything in you rebels against it, against turning and walking out that door and leaving him alone with his untouched glass and his whole heart in pieces. You want to tell him to take you to his bed, to hold you in the darkness and whisper to you whilst his seed still lingers on your body.

But you make yourself let go of his hand, finger by finger, and make yourself step back, the cold of the room rushing into the space where his warmth has been.

"This isn't over," you say, from the doorway. You need him to hear it, need to say it even if you can’t yet make it true. "Whatever happens. Whatever I…however this goes. What we had, what this is…it's not nothing, and it's not over, and I'm not going to let you stand there and grieve it like it is. I don't know what tomorrow looks like. I don't know what any of it looks like. I told you I’m not saying goodbye to you tonight, I won't."

Joel looks at you across the whole impossible distance of everything, and for just a moment you see the time spent together in his eyes – the friendship, the porch, the coffee, the slow careful becoming, all of it, held and cherished and never once taken for granted by a man who's learned the hardest way that nothing lasts.

And you see him decide, out of pure love, to let you have your not-goodbye, to not argue it, to not tell you the thing you both suspect is true – that a woman does not, in the end, choose the man she's falling for over her son's own father risen from the dead, that the world had already made this choice for both of you the moment Dylan screamed it across the yard. That this, right here, is the goodbye whether you call it one or not.

He doesn’t say any of that. He just nods, one more time – the small nod, the one that undid you at the gate and undid you in the clinic doorway and undoes you now.

"Alright," he says softly. "Not tonight, then. Go on. I've got you…" and here his voice nearly goes, but he catches it and finishes it the only way he knows how. "I've got you safe to the corner from here. I'll watch you to it."

And he does. You walk out into the cold and the enormous stars and look back once from the path to see him standing in his lit doorway with one hand on the frame, watching you go the way he’s promised, keeping you safe across the last small distance the only way that’s left to him.

You lift a hand, he lifts his, and then you make yourself turn and walk toward home, toward your sleeping son and the clinic beyond and the fevered man who's crawled out of the dead for you and the whole hard tangled morning waiting on the other side of the dark.

And behind you, for a long time, you feel the warmth of that lit doorway on your back, until you turn the corner and it’s gone, and there’s only the cold, the stars, the sound of your own feet, and the terrible weight of a heart that can’t quite find its rhythm.

❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

You responded – he knows you did. He saw it in your eyes, felt in on your breath, recognised it in the way your body tried to move closer to his.

And your words – I feel something – couldn’t have been clearer if you’d yelled them in his face rather than whispered them on a breath of air.

He keeps his eyes closed and exhales raggedly, the hesitation in immediately returning to the warmth of the hall borne from the undeniable need to touch you again. He can still feel the heat of your cheek against his palm, feel it burn the way his finger burned from the night in the jeep, and he wants other parts of his body to burn the same way.

He knows it’s not gentlemanly to have such thoughts about a woman he barely knows, but he wants to feel you, pressed tightly against him, wants to feel the heat of your mouth, your hands, your thighs…

He said he would do what you asked because in the darkness, with the tears coming down your face there was nothing else he could say. The saying of any other thing would have been cruel and the last thing Frankie ever wants to be towards you is cruel.

So, he said he would do what you asked, but he hadn’t, in the small, honest part of him, meant it, and if he was any lesser a man he would go back through the door again and drag you into his arms.

Instead, he opens his eyes, straightens his shoulders and walks the length of the passage out into the hall, arranging his face into an expression that won’t be questioned by others when he emerges back into the music and the dancing and the socialising.

The first person he sees, when he steps back inside the hall, is Santi, watching the door. He puts his cup of tea down on the shelf at the side near the urn, and crosses the floor to meet him, putting his hand on Frankie's elbow.

“Fish…walk with me."

"I’m not…"

"Walk with me. Smile at Mrs Robertson and come out the front, now."

He lets Santi steer him by the elbow across the front of the hall past the line of coats, and past Mrs Robertson at the door who, of course, asks if everything is alright.

“Everything’s fine, thank you,” Santi replies with a broad smile. “We’re just taking some air.”

Fortunately, she doesn’t ask any further questions or seem in any way intrigued and Santi keeps his hand on his elbow until they’re fully outside in the street in front of the hall, lit only by the small, thin moon from above.

“What the fuck?” Santi says, dropping his hand. “You danced with her, then she went out the back door, and you followed her and…please…please don’t tell me you did anything.”

“Jesus, like what?”

“I don’t know – like, fuck her?”

“Pope!”

“What?” Santi stares at him. “The way you’ve been acting lately, I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“I did not fuck her!” Frankie replies, indignant. “I just…we talked, that’s all.”

“About what? What did she say?”

Frankie looks down at his feet for a long moment, watching the moon reflect off the sheen of his boot as he tries to assemble his thoughts.

"She said to stay away from her."

"Okay,” Santi lets out a breath of relief.

"And I told her I would."

"Good."

"But I'm not going to."

Santi doesn’t say anything for a long moment. The moon shifts behind a cloud whilst somewhere in the hall behind them, Mrs Cook starts up another quickstep on the piano, and he folds his arms across his chest, his expression tightening.

"Say that again?"

"I'm not going to do what she said."

"Frankie..."

"What?”

"Look at me."

Frankie lifts his face from his boots and looks at his friend, knowing without needing to see for himself, that the look he’s giving him is quiet and settled – the face of a man who’s made a decision in the dark, and isn’t going to be talked out of it, not even by his closest friend.

"Frankie, no."

“I don’t care what you…”

"Listen to me."

"I'm listening, Pope, because I always listen to you. I listened to you in the hut when you talked about Pilar and I understood, okay? I understood what you were telling me and why and I get it, I do. You did the right thing for you and the right thing for Pilar and good for you. Way to fucking go. But what you did isn’t the right thing for me, or her.”

"I’m just…”

"She feels something, Pope, okay? She told me she feels something and I had one hand on her cheek and the other on her waist and..."

Santi groans.

“…and she told me to stay away from her, and the way she said it…it wasn’t…she wasn’t…she wasn’t actually saying that she wanted me to stay away from her. She was saying she was afraid of what would happen if I didn't."

Santi shakes his head, “That’s the same damn thing.”

"No, it isn’t.”

"Frankie, it’s the same damn thing! A girl who tells you to stay away because she’s afraid of what will happen if you don't, is a girl telling you to stay away. The fear is the reason. You don’t get to decide what she means and what she doesn’t – that’s on her.”

"She said it doesn't matter. She said it can’t matter. She said he’s going to ask me to marry him. She said all of those things whilst she was crying and…and she was saying them to herself, Santi, not to me. She was saying them out loud because saying them out loud was the only way she had to make them be true, and…”

Santi steps closer to him. “Frankie, you’re doing the thing a man does when he wants the thing to be the thing he wants it to be. You’re listening to what she said and hearing what you want to hear and calling what you want to hear the truth of what she said, and that it is only going to make things worse!”

Frankie pauses, holding eye contact with his friend, before nodding. “Maybe.”

"Maybe?"

"Maybe I am doing that, okay? Maybe I am. But the truth is, I don't know, not for sure. I don't know if I'm hearing what I want to hear or if I'm hearing what's there. And I am telling you that not knowing is not a reason to stay away. Not knowing is a reason to find out."

"But it’s not your finding out to do, it’s hers!”

Santi sighs heavily and rubs a hand over his face.

"Frankie, the finding out is hers. She has to decide what she wants, not you, and if you don’t leave her alone, you’re not helping her find out. You’re taking the finding out away from her."

Frankie shakes his head. "Pope, if I stay away, she doesn't find out and she marries her boyfriend and..."

"Then that is her finding out and making a choice.”

"No, that’s her doing the thing she’s already doing. That’s her staying in the place she’s always been because it’s the easy place and the easy place is the place where I’m not, and her staying in the easy place because I’m in it is not her finding out anything. That’s her being left alone.”

He lets out a ragged breath.

“That’s her being left alone in this village in the middle of this fucking war and never knowing what…what she could have.”

Santi says nothing for a long moment, the only sound coming from the whisper of the evening wind and the piano from inside the hall. Somewhere in the distance, a dog begins to bark and then stops, the village settling once more, ignorant of the turmoil.

"Frankie, I told you about Pilar so you wouldn’t do this."

"I know.”

"But apparently you’re going to do it anyway."

"Yes.”

"Jesus…” Santi shakes his head. “You’re a goddamn fool, you know that?”

"Santi, you told me that you’ve asked yourself every day since you last saw Pilar whether saying how you really felt would have made it better or worse, and you told me that the answer every day is worse. And I believe you. But you almost said it, and the almost is the thing you have to carry, because you almost said it and you didn't."

Santi blinks.

"She’s not married yet, not even engaged – not properly. He’s just some boy she’s known all her life and…and if I stay away from her now, if I do what she said and what you’re saying and she marries him, then I’m going to be you. I’m going to be carrying the almost for the rest of whatever piece of life I get after this tour, and I’m not going to be you. Respectfully.”

“Glad you added that, you asshole.”

"I’m saying it because it’s true and because you’re the only man I can say it to, and I would rather say it to you than say it to myself in the dark."

Santi looks at him for a long moment before making a noise that might be a laugh and might be something else.

"Alright, Fish. I’m not going to talk you out of it because I’ve tried and you’ve thrown everything back at me, so – alright. But you need to be smart about this, and you need to be careful. You need to be careful that the thing you do is the thing you can live with.”

"I don't know what I'm going to do yet. I came out from behind the side door of the hall ten minutes ago having decided that I wasn’t going to do what she said, and that’s all the deciding I’ve done.” Frankie pauses. “I might wait. I might wait a long time. I might…I might never do anything."

Santi snorts. “You will. I don't know when or how, but you’ll do something because you’re not the kind of man who decides that he’s not going to do what a girl’s asked him to do and then doesn’t do something. So…you’ll do it. And all I’m saying is, when you do, be careful.”

Frankie nods. “Okay, thanks.”

“Don’t thank me,” Santi sighs. “If this all goes wrong…”

“You’ll be there.”

He huffs another laugh. “Yeah, guess I will be.”

They stand for one more long second in the dark, then Santi inclines his head back to the door. “Come on, let’s go back inside.”

“Pope, you…” Frankie takes hold of his friend’s sleeve. “You won’t…say anything to anyone else, will you? To Will or Benny or Tom…”

“I won’t say a goddamn word,” Santi replies. “But I’m guessing I’m not the only one who saw what happened after you finished dancing with her, so don’t blame me if the others ask you about it.”

“That’s fair. I guess I could’ve been less obvious when I followed her out.”

“Long as she hasn’t come back in crying, you’re fine.”

They cross to the door together and once back amongst the warmth and the music and the dancing, Frankie heads straight to the trestle and takes a cup of tea from Mrs Robertson and doesn’t look across the floor. He doesn’t have to, because he knows that you’re at the other side of the room with Margery, your back angled very slightly to him, drinking your own tea slowly and carefully, not looking across the floor at him either.

Mrs Cook brings the latest dance to a finish with a flourish, and the floor stands and claps and breaks up, bodies moving in different directions, a low murmur filling the air.

Out of the corner of his eye, Frankie can see Will flirting with the girl serving the teas, while Tom and Benny are in conversation with Mr Robertson, the younger airmen’s expression screaming to be saved somehow from the drudgery of small, English village talk.

“Oh Lieutenant Morales,” Mrs Hadley clucks as she approaches from his left side. “I hope you won’t think me presumptuous in hoping you might have a dance free before the end of the evening?”

“I don’t think you presumptuous at all,” he smiles at her, still refraining from looking across the floor. “I’d be honoured.”

****

On the other side of the hall you, meanwhile, are drinking your tea slowly and carefully, trying to stop your hands from shaking whilst attempting to field Margery’s questions as best you can.

When you’d come back inside, she had immediately pounced and subtly redirected you, having seen you leave after your dance with Frankie and him follow you outside almost immediately.

“And then…?” she asks, eyes as big as saucers as you recount him coming upon you in the dark.

“He asked if I felt something and then…then he moved closer and…he put one hand on my cheek and the other on my waist and I thought…. oh Lord Margery, I thought he was going to…to kiss me and I wanted him to but then I…I told him he had to stay away from me.”

A sound leaves Margery’s throat that resembles a half snort, half cry and you realise that, for all intents and purposes, you’ve spoiled what she’s been hoping was going to come next. But she instantly catches it, turns it into a cough and takes another mouthful of tea, smiling at Florrie Bates as she floats past in the arms of one of the other Americans whose name, at this precise moment, you’ve forgotten.

“And what did he say?”

“He said he’d do it. But then he said he’s been thinking about me, and I told him that I had Henry and that I couldn’t do anything about it but…” you inhale raggedly, the teacup shaking in your hand. “But I want to, Margery. I want to, more than anything and that makes me a terrible person and…”

“Hush, old girl, of course it doesn’t!” Margery says fiercely. “It makes you human, that’s all. It makes you a woman who’s attracted to a man who’s attracted to you and that’s the natural order of things. And I told you before that you should be exploring your feelings and not worrying about boring old Henry…”

“Margery!”

“I’m serious, old girl. Things have happened now and you’d be a fool to ignore them.” She looks at you squarely. “You’re not a bad person, I know that. So, you’ll have to end things with Henry before you do anything with Frankie.”

“I didn’t say I was going to do anything with Frankie,” you hiss.

“Yes, you are – you know you are. And doing something whilst Henry sits in the background is a recipe for disaster, I’m telling you that now. I mean, look at Annie Taylor – flighty piece that she is. Talk of the village walking out with that airman whilst Barry’s away with the navy and you don’t want to be talked about like her, do you? You want to be talked about as a woman who was decent enough to let her old boyfriend down gently before taking up with a new one.”

You drain the rest of your cup and turn it around in your hands, shaking your head in the process. “I can’t because…because I told him to stay away and he said he would…”

“That’s why he’s trying his hardest, once again, not to look over here at you,” Margery says, glancing over your shoulder. “That man has no intention of staying away from you, old girl. He doesn’t know how long he might have left in this world and, believe me, he’s not going to waste a chance like this just because you’re too proud to tell Henry you don’t love him.”

Your head flies up and you meet Margery’s gaze again, mouth open and ready to defend your relationship. Only, you can’t. She raises an eyebrow, almost daring you to disagree, and all you can do is duck your gaze away again.

“If you don’t intend to do anything about your feelings for Frankie, then look at him,” Margery says after a few beats of silence. “Look at him right now.”

“Margery…”

“I’m serious, old girl, look at him.” She puts her cup down on the side and rests her hands gently on your shoulders, appearing for all the world like a simple, friendly gesture. “Just turn and look. He’s over by the trestle – you can’t miss him. He’s not looking at you anyway so there’s no harm done. nothing wrong with looking, is there? It’s not as though you haven’t done it before.”

She exerts gentle pressure on your shoulders and you feel yourself turning incrementally, a half turn at first, your gaze sweeping across the room – to where Florrie’s aunt and Mrs Robertson are chatting in the corner, where Mrs Cook is rifling through her sheet music, her tongue stuck between her teeth – and coming to rest finally at the trestle where Frankie’s standing with Santi, his gaze on Mrs Hadley, whose hand is on his arm.

Almost immediately, you feel your entire body start to shake again at the memory of what transpired. His hand on your cheek, his hand on your waist, his breath ghosting over your face…what you might have been prepared to do if things were different…

Margery’s wrong – there’s something very wrong with looking. Because right at that moment, Frankie’s eyes move from Mrs Hadley, just a fraction of an inch, and meet yours, like they have done before, but this time you find that you have to physically stop yourself from crossing the floor towards him. Your right hand snakes backwards and grasps blindly for Margery’s, squeezing it tightly in yours, pulling her close to you in ungainly fashion.

“Steady on, old girl,” she hisses as she bumps into your back. “You’re making it…”

“I…I need to go,” you mumble faintly, gaze still locked on Frankie who’s looking at you now with a mixture of concern and confusion. “I need to leave, now.”

“But…”

You cross the floor before she’s finished speaking and don’t wait for her, keeping your eyes on the door in front of you, your hand reaching for your coat where it waits for you on the peg without ever glancing in Frankie’s direction.

“You alright my love?” Florrie’s aunt asks as you move past her.

“Yes, I’m fine. I just…need some air.”

You don’t wait to hear her response or consider whether she finds your demeanour and actions strange or concerning. You simply pull your coat on quickly, but carefully, pull open the door and step out into the night air.

You start to walk, quickly, back in the direction of home with your coat unbuttoned and, behind you, you can hear Margery call your name and the sounds of her shoes as she hurries to catch up with you.

“Slow down, old girl…"

"I can't, Margery."

You keep going, with Margery behind you, and suddenly you hear the sound of the hall door opening and closing again, followed by the sound of boots coming down the steps.

You don’t look back because you know whose boots they are.

You hear Margery stop and say in a voice that isn’t particularly loud or particularly quiet but said at a volume that she knows you’ll hear, "Lieutenant."

"Miss Cole."

You keep walking because you know that if you stop and turn now, anyone coming out of the door of the hall behind you or coming down the lane from the direction of the cottages is going to see the two of you.

His boots come up behind you – twenty feet, ten feet, five feet – and you feel his hand take your arm above the elbow through the sleeve of your unbuttoned coat. And whilst it doesn’t stop you walking, it turns you sideways off the lane behind the old hawthorn where the lane turns a small bend before the row of cottages starts.

The hawthorn is thick and wide and tall enough for the two of you to stand behind it without any part of you showing to the lane, and before you can so much as draw breath, or ask him why he’s following you or not doing as you pleaded with him to, your hands go up to the front of his tunic under his coat and close on the wool between the two brass buttons, and his mouth comes down on yours.

In that moment, everything breaks – everything.

➰➰➰➰➰➰➰➰🇺🇸➰➰➰➰➰➰➰➰

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You’ve known it was coming – of course you have. But when Joel had helped you up into James’s brougham for the ride home, you’d pushed the thought from your mind, consumed only with the true purpose of the stolen hours you’d been granted. And now…now reality looms like a harbinger of death over what has become so sacred.

It sits on the ranch like a shadow the whole day long. Joel had risen before dawn and done more work than three men – mended the pasture fence, reshod a mare, split a winter's worth of wood and stacked it under the lean-to against the day you might need it and he might not be there to swing the axe. You had watched him from the kitchen window through the long bright morning, stripped to the waist in the heat, driving himself at the work like a man trying to leave his hands' labour behind him in the very grain of the place, and you had understood that this was how he was saying goodbye to it.

To the ranch. To the life. To the small chance that he might not come back to any of it, despite how positive you’ve both allowed yourself to feel in the cocoon of one another’s embrace.

The afternoon comes too fast.

He comes in at four o'clock, washes, and puts on one of his good shirts. Then he comes into the kitchen where you’re stood at the table not doing anything at all, only standing with your hands flat on the warm scrubbed pine, and he stops in the doorway, looks at you, and neither of you say a word.

"Please,” you whisper, your voice coming out cracked. "Don't say it's time yet, Joel. Not yet."

He crosses the kitchen in three strides and gathers you into him.

You press your face into his chest, wind your arms around his ribs and hold on the way a drowning woman holds a spar. His arms come around your back, his beard presses into the crown of your hair and he holds you just as hard. For a long while the two of you stand there in the afternoon kitchen holding on and saying nothing, because there’s nothing to say that will make it smaller than it is.

"Darlin’, we have to go soon. If I ain’t through the Sheriff’s door by sundown he can send men out here, and I won't have men ridin’ onto this place after dark with you and Sarah in it. I'll go on my own two feet or not at all."

"I know. I just…I don't want you to go, Joel." The words tear out of you. "I know I have to let you. I know there's no help for it. But I don't want you to go and I’m not going to pretend that I do."

His arms tighten. "Good," he says roughly, "don't pretend. I couldn't stand it if you pretended. I’m done with any kind of pretendin’ for the rest of my life however long that turns out to be."

You laugh at that – a wet, broken thing – tip your face up, and he bends his head, and kisses you in a quiet and terrible way, a long careful pressing of his mouth to yours as though he means to learn the shape of it and carry the shape of it away with him into the cell. You kiss him back the same way, memorising, hoarding, and when he draws back at last his eyes are wet and yours are streaming.

"Where's Sarah?" you manage.

"Nappin’. Clean wore herself out helping me stack the wood." His thumb wipes at your cheek. "I know it goes without sayin’ darlin’, but if anythin’ bad does happen, Sarah’s yours – you understand me?”

"Joel…"

"When I'm gone, whatever happens at that trial – she's yours. You’re my wife, in every way possible now, so nobody can take her from you. She's yours. And this place is yours, free and clear, whatever…" His voice catches. "Whatever they decide about me."

"Stop." You catch his face in both hands. "Stop talking like a man saying goodbye, Joel Miller. Stop it! You didn't do the thing they're saying you did. You defended this family. Any man in the county would have done what you did, and you know that James is positive about the outcome. We have the town council on our side, and you are coming home."

"You believe that," he says, eyes searching yours.

"I believe it with my whole heart. And I thought you did too."

"I do, I…want it to be true."

He bends and presses his forehead to yours, and the two of you stand there breathing the same air in the afternoon kitchen until the light through the window begins to gild toward evening and there’s no more putting it off.

You wake Sarah together, which is the hardest part. She comes up out of her nap warm and rumpled and slow to understand, and when she does, she comes apart in a way you haven’t expected. She flings herself at Joel, burying her face in his neck, unwilling to let go. He sits down on the edge of her bed and holds her and rocks her, and his own face is a thing you have to look away from.

"Don't go, Pa, please don't go. I'll be good. I'll be so good. Don't go!"

"Babygirl, look at me." He draws her back and thumbs the tears off her cheeks. "You listen to me now. I have to go and talk to some men in town about what happened. That's all. And they're gonna talk it over, and they're gonna see that your Pa did right, and then I'm gonna come home. You hear? I'm gonna come home."

"When?"

"Soon."

"How soon?"

"I don't know exactly, babygirl. But soon. And while I'm gone you gotta help out, okay? And you say your prayers. And you know what you can pray for?"

Sarah hiccups. "A baby sister?"

Joel's face breaks and mends in the same instant. "You pray for whatever your heart wants, babygirl," he says, thick. "You pray real hard and God’s gonna hear you.”

He holds her a long while more. Then he stands, sets her small hand into yours, and looks at the two of you standing there together in the failing gold light and something passes over his face that you’ll carry with you the rest of your life.

"My girls," he says.

Then he nods and goes outside to help Tomás with the wagon.

****

The ride into town is made mostly in silence.

Joel handles the reins and you press against his side on the wagon bench with your hand tucked into the crook of his arm, the country going by gold and green and heartbreakingly beautiful in the last of the light, Tomás silent in the back.

For some reason, you find yourself memorising it – the way the live oaks throw their long shadows across the road, the way the cicadas saw in the heat, the way the dust rises gold behind the wagon wheels, the warm hard press of Joel's arm against your side, and the smell of him. You memorise his profile against the gold light, the rough dark beard, the eyes fixed on the road, the small muscle working in his jaw.

"Darlin’..."

"Yes?"

"When this is over…"

"When this is over," you interrupt, "we are going to have the rest of our lives, Joel Miller, and I intend to be a very great trial to you for every day of them."

The corner of his mouth pulls. "That so."

"That is so. I’m your wife proper now and you’ll be sorry you ever wished me to speak my mind."

"I'll never be sorry for that." His hand leaves the reins a moment to cover yours in the crook of his arm. "Never once. Whatever comes, I want you to know that. You're the best thing that's happened to me since I lost Tess and I need you to know it before I go through that door."

The gold country blurs through your tears.

"I love you, Joel," you say, “and I need you to come home to me."

"I'll do everything a man can do to come home to you," he says, not quite a promise because he’s too honest a man to promise what he can’t command, but as near a promise as the truth allows and you took it and hold it.

Sawyer’s Creek eventually appears on the hazy horizon. The same townsfolk who watched you leave a few days ago now watch you return with wide-eyes and whispers behind hands, but you lift your chin and look none of them in the eye.

Joel draws the wagon up before the sheriff's office and sets the brake. He sits a moment with the reins in his hands looking at the building, and you feel the breath go out of him. Then he wraps the reins, climbs down and comes around to lift you down, his hands spanning your waist and setting you on your feet in the dust of the street.

He nods to Tomás and doesn’t let go of your hand as you go up the steps to the door.

Inside, Sheriff Hayes is sat behind his desk, and when he sees you, he nods briefly, an acknowledgement of a bargain made and kept. In the corner, you see James leaning against the wall, a glint of satisfaction present in his eyes.

"Mr Miller,” James says, coming forward to shake Joel’s hand. "You're a man of your word. I told the Sheriff you'd be here by sundown on your own two feet and here you are. That counts for something."

"Mr Oliver." Joel nods in return.

"Well." Sheriff Hayes rises from behind the desk. “I'm as sorry about this as I was the last time, but I have to do it. Come on back, Joel.”

The moment arrives and though you thought you were braced for it, you realise you’re not. Not now, after everything. Joel turns to you, takes your face in both his hands, and looks at you as though he means to take the whole of you with him down the corridor and once more into the dark.

"Joel…" Your voice won’t hold. "Joel, I…"

"Darlin’, you listen to me now. You go home, take care of my girl and take care of yourself – just like you did last time. You eat and you sleep even when you don't want to because I need you strong and I need Sarah minded and I can't do either of those things from in here. Can you do that for me?"

"Yes,” you swallow hard, “Yes, I can do that."

"That's my girl." His thumbs wipe at the tears streaming down your face. "I'll be alright in here, just like I was before. It's a few days and then the trial, and then…"

"And then you come home."

"And then I come home," he says, and he kisses you, long, hard and desperate, one hand fisting in your pinned-up hair, the other splayed wide against your back crushing you into him.

You kiss him back with everything you have, both of you knowing it has to last and neither of you able to make it enough, and it’s Hayes clearing his throat who finally, gently, ends it.

"Come on now, Joel, before it gets harder.”

Joel draws back and presses his forehead to yours one last time, his breath shuddering against your mouth.

"I love you," he says low, just for you. "Don't watch me go through that door.”

You shake your head fiercely. “I watched last time and I’ll watch this time too.”

"Darlin’…”

"I'm not going to look away from you, Joel Miller. Not now, not ever. If you're walking through that door I'm going to watch you do it with my eyes open, and I'm going to be standing right here when you walk back out of it. That's my promise."

Something breaks and blazes in his eyes.

"God, I love you," he says.

Then he lets go of your face, steps back, squares his shoulders, and turns to Hayes.

“Let’s get this over with.”

Hayes nods and opens the door. You watch your husband walk through it, watch as he turns back once and lifts his hand, before the door closes behind him.

Then comes the sound of the cell door - the iron scrape and the heavy clang and the turn of the key, ringing down the corridor into the office, into your chest, into the marrow of you. You stand and listen to your husband being locked away, and something inside you that had the fortitude not to break the last time, but doesn’t possess that same fortitude now, gives way.

James catches you before you can fall and sits you in a chair by the window. He crouches in front of you, letting you weep and not saying the useless things men say. Not telling you to hush or be brave or that it will all come right, only staying there, crouched before you, with a steady hand on your shoulder while the storm of it goes through you.

Because he knows what these few days have meant.

Hayes reappears, and, seeing how it is, pours a tin cup of coffee and sets it wordless on the ledge near your hand, retreating behind his desk to give you what privacy the small room allows.

It passes the way even the worst of things pass. You come back to yourself by degrees and wipe your face with the back of your wrist, drawing in a shuddering breath.

"Forgive me, Mr Oliver."

"There's nothing to forgive, Mrs Miller,” James replies. "I've done this work for a long time with a good many wives. There's not one of them didn't do exactly what you just did. You go ahead and feel it. It means you've got something worth feeling it over. That'll serve you in the days coming."

“But…before…”

“No talk of before,” he shakes your shoulder gently. “We’re living in the here and now.”

You nod and meet his gaze. "How many days? Don't spare me because I would rather know the shape of the thing than imagine it worse in the dark."

His eyebrows lift with something you might call amusement.

"That is exactly what I wanted to tell you. Word came in on the noon rider to say that the judge will be here in three days' time."

You stare at him. "Three days?”

"Yes,” he nods. “Three days and then we can hold the trial. I know three more nights in that cell sounds like a cruelty when you'd take him home this minute if the law let you, but this is a good thing. And if I do my work the way I mean to do my work, then at the end of the fourth day, your husband walks out that front door on his own two feet and rides home with you."

“You truly believe he'll be acquitted?”

“Mrs Miller, I’ve already been given a letter from the leader of your town council vouching for your husband.”

He looks at you levelly, and you understand that he’s a man who chooses his words with care and doesn’t spend hope cheaply.

"I don't tell people what they want to hear. I tell them the truth. Three days, and then we have a fight I mean to win."

You close your eyes.

Three days.

It has a shape now, a bottom, and an end you can see – with hope shining.

"Thank you," you say calmly. "Thank you, Mr Oliver. You cannot know what it is to have a shape to hold onto instead of the dark."

"I have some idea." He rises and offers you his hand, drawing you to your feet, steadying you until he’s sure your legs would hold. "Now, I saw your man through the window, and he’ll be able to drive you home. I'll come out to the ranch tomorrow to go over the particulars of the day with you – what to expect, where you'll sit, what the lawyering will look like so none of it takes you by surprise. Between now and the trial you're not going to sit alone at that ranch imagining the worst. You're going to be busy helping me build the thing that brings your husband home.”

You look toward the mouth of the brick corridor, where the shadow had swallowed Joel whole.

"Sheriff,” you say tightly, regaining the strength you know you possess. “Before I go, may I say goodnight to my husband?"

Hayes looks up, mouth opening as if to refuse, then sighs and rises from his chair. “You seem to like asking me to break the rules, Mrs Miller.” He shakes his head. “Two minutes.”

You nod and wait for him to open the door, then move pass him down the now familiar corridor, the other cells empty on either side, until you reach the bottom. Joel rises from the cot to greet you, his hands going around the bars.

“Darlin’…”

“I had to tell you,” you say hurriedly. “Mr Oliver says the judge will be here in three days. Three days, Joel. He says if he does his work you'll walk out on the fourth day and come home."

You felt the breath go out of Joel, the naked relief of finally having a date to keep in mind.

"Three days.”

"Three days, my love."

He shakes his head. "I thought it might take longer. I thought…but this way, Sarah won't hardly have time to miss me again. Three days and it's decided, one way or the other. I can do three days standin’ on my head. Three days is nothin’. You go home tonight, and you tell my girl it’s only three more sleeps and then her Pa’s comin’ home.”

"I will,” you nod.

“Then, maybe…” he pauses, almost bashful, “maybe we can get to workin’ on that baby sister she asked for.”

Emotion swells in your chest, tears jump into your eyes and all you can do is nod.

“Three days,” he says, bending to kiss your fingers. “And then I don't ever leave you again as long as I live."

You press your mouth to the gap in the bars and Joel presses his to it in somehow one of the truest kisses you’ve ever been given. And when you draw back, you’re both weeping and both, underneath the weeping, lit up from within by that hard bright number.

Three.

"Go on now,” Joel says. “Go home to my girl…our girl. I'll see you first thing, when they bring me to wherever it is they’re plannin’ on holdin’ this thing. You be in the front row where I can find you."

"I'll be in the front row. Eyes open."

"Eyes open." The old lazy, crooked smile pulls at his mouth. "That's my girl."

You make yourself let go of his hands and it’s the hardest thing you’ve done all that long hard day, harder than watching him walk through the door, because now you truly know the shape of what you’re letting go of and you know it’s only for three days and even three days is three days too long.

But you let go, and you step back, keeping your eyes on him until Hayes’s broad body comes between you and gently turns you back up the corridor toward the office and the door and the purpling evening beyond.

James walks you out into the evening light and Tomás immediately jumps down to help you into the wagon.

“Thank you,” you say to the lawyer. “For everything.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he nods sagely.

Then Tomás clicks his tongue and the wagon leaps into life, setting off up the Street and out of town. You don’t look back. You look ahead, up the darkening road toward home, toward Sarah, safe with Maria, who needs to be told three sleeps, toward the ranch and the split wood stacked under the lean-to and the bed you’ll lie in alone tonight.

But only three more nights, only three, and then the trial, and then Joel will come riding home to his girls at last.

The first stars come out over the live oaks, and you ride home through the warm Texas night holding the hard bright number against your heart like a coal against the cold.

Three days.

➰➰➰➰➰➰➰➰❤️➰➰➰➰➰➰➰➰

Outside the viewport, hyperspace streaks itself into long blue threads, ribboning past in their hypnotic slow-motion lunge. Your boots are up on the console and one hand rests on the swell of your belly because lately your hand finds its way there on its own, like it's been reassigned without asking.

Six months and you still catch yourself startled by the shape of you. By the way you have to lean back a little further in chairs now and the way your centre of gravity has wandered off somewhere ahead of you, like a small impatient scout. By the way Din looks at you when he thinks you can't tell he's looking, which – honestly – is most of the time, because he’s wearing a helmet, and you can never tell where his eyes are, he knows it, and he uses it shamelessly.

You can feel him looking now.

He's in the pilot's seat beside you, gloves off, the instruments murmuring to themselves. The nav display blinks its slow blue pulse and somewhere behind you, in the hold, something settles with a small metallic clink, which you decide not to think about because you don’t have the energy to go and investigate.

"You're quiet," you say.

"Mm."

"That's quieter."

The modulator carries a breath that might be a laugh.

"I was thinking about the bunk," he says.

"Romantic."

"About the bunk," he repeats, patient, "and where the cradle goes."

You smile, because you’re glad he’s at least on board for that. Again, not that you haven’t accepted that, practically, the cabin will be your baby’s primary home, but you can’t help the slight thrill that runs through you at the thought of your little family roaming the galaxy together.

He's been sketching one for a week, lines and angles, beskar reinforcement at the corners because of course if there is any problem in this galaxy Din Djarin does not believe can be solved by the application of beskar, you’ve yet to find it. You've watched him erase the same curve four times trying to get it right – the slope of the inner wall, where a tiny shoulder might rest. He thought you were asleep at the time, but you weren't.

"There's room by the ladder," you offer. "If we move the crate of detonators. Which, incidentally, we should probably move regardless of the baby."

"Mm." The blue light slides across his visor in a long, unbroken stripe. "I was thinking closer to the bulkhead. It’ll be warmer there and when she’s old enough to stand, the rungs will be in reach."

"Old enough to stand and climb a ladder on a gunship. I mean, that sounds..."

"She’ll need to learn the ship."

"She’ll need to learn not to fall out of the ship."

He tilts his head – that small Din gesture that on anyone else would be a shrug. "Both."

You let your hand drift in a slow circle over your belly. The baby's been still for an hour, which always feels longer than an hour. Any minute now she’ll wake up and start kicking your bladder like it personally insulted her, and you're almost looking forward to it. You like the moving better than the not-moving because the not-moving makes you hold your breath and think about scenarios you’d rather not think about.

"We could put the chest under the bulkhead bunk," he goes on, thinking out loud, which is rare for him. It means he's been thinking for days and the thinking has overflowed as the time when the thinking requires to crystallise comes closer. "We can move the spare ration crates to the lower hold. The vibration is less near the bulkhead so she’ll sleep better."

"You've thought about this a lot."

"Yes," he replies, as though not thinking about it would be farcical.

You laugh, and the laugh catches in the soft fullness of your ribs and turns into a hiccup. His hand twitches toward you on the armrest, is she alright, is she alright, is she alright, the muscle reflex of a man who’s spent the last few months unsure whether you breaking would be something he could fix. You take his hand before he can decide whether to extend it, and put it on your knee, because his hand on you anywhere calms him, and tonight you want him calm.

"Tell me more," you say. "About the bunk and the cradle. Tell me what you're picturing."

He doesn't answer fast, turning questions over the way he turns a blaster over before he cleans it. You used to find that maddening, but as the months have gone on, you find it tender.

"I picture her small first," he says. "Small enough for me to carry against the chestplate. I’ll need to pad it, on the left side, where the seam’s rough, but I have an idea for a liner.”

"You've already designed a liner?"

"Yes.” He pauses on your look. "You asked."

"I did, so keep going."

"I picture her learning the sound of the engines the way I learned them as a foundling. The Tribe ship was bigger, but the principle’s the same. A child should know the sound of their home well enough that they wake when it changes. And I picture her learning the tools next, when she’s four, perhaps. She’ll know the names – the difference between a hydrospanner and a fusion cutter. She’ll know not to touch the carbonite controls and by six, she should be able to strip a blaster and reassemble it. Slowly, with help."

"Okay."

"By eight she’ll begin the resol'nare…"

At that, you go still.

It's a tiny stillness, the kind he probably doesn't catch through the wall of the beskar. Your hand stops moving on your belly, the hum of the Crest seeming louder all of a sudden, filling the cockpit like water filling a cup. Like the sound has nowhere else to go and so it goes into you.

"The resol'nare," you repeat carefully.

"The Six Actions."

He says it like he's reciting something he learned before he could read, because he is, and he did and seems excited at the prospect.

"Language. Armour. Defence of self and clan. Raising children in the Way. Contributing to the welfare of the clan. Rallying to the Mand'alor when called."

He pauses.

"The first two come earliest. It’s best to start with Mando'a in the home from infancy. Her first words should be ours. I've been…I've been practicing so I don't fumble the lullabies."

Something in your chest does a slow, awful tilt – half a melt, half a stagger.

The melt is for the image of him alone in some quiet corner of the ship, mouth shaping syllables behind beskar, getting the cadence right for a baby that doesn't exist yet.

The stagger is for the rest of it.

"Din."

"She’ll have a small set first. Soft pieces, foundling-grade, until the bones thicken."

He's still talking, and you realise with a kind of slow horror that he's not pitching this to you, he’s sharing it. The way you share a plan with a partner you assume is already inside the plan with you. The way you talk about repainting a room you both already agreed to repaint.

The way he did when he made the lists.

"The helmet comes later and not until she asks for it. The Armorer was clear with me about that. It's not the same for a biological child as it was for me. There's a…a ceremony. I've already spoken to her about…"

"Din."

The second time stops him. He turns his head, the visor finding you, and you take your boots off the console and slowly set them on the deck. You sit up, as much as a six-months-pregnant body sits up, which is to say you list forward like a cargo ship adjusting its load, and look at him.

"When did we decide that?"

There’s a long pause and you can almost hear him reviewing the conversation, looking for the moment he might have missed it.

"Decide what?"

"That our child is being raised Mandalorian."

The cockpit goes very quiet. Even the hum seems to hold its breath, though that's probably your imagination.

"I…" He stops and starts again. "I’m Mandalorian. My child is Mandalorian."

"Our child."

"Our child is Mandalorian."

"Din, we’ve never had this conversation."

"We’re having it now."

"No, we’re having a fight now, because you skipped the conversation."

His hands have gone still on the armrests and you know him well enough to know that means he's recalibrating something deep. Something he didn't know needed to be recalibrated until just now.

"I assumed," he says finally.

"Yeah."

"I…" He shakes his head. "I didn’t realise there was an assumption to make."

"That's the problem."

"Cyar'ika…"

"No, don't cyar'ika me into agreeing with you. I'm not…Din, I'm not saying no. I'm saying I never said yes. There's a difference and it's a big one and you don't get to skip over it because you've already picked out the lullabies."

You sigh heavily.

“We’ve been here before, with your assumptions.”

"You don't want the child to be Mandalorian,” he says, flatly.

"I didn't say that either."

"Then what are you saying?"

You exhale and feel the breath all the way down in your back, somewhere beneath the place where your spine has been protesting for two weeks. The baby chooses this exact moment to wake up and roll, a long slow somersault that punches a knee into your ribs, and you make a small involuntary sound and press your palm flat against the curve.

Din's hand twitches toward you and then stops, hovering, uncertain whether comfort is allowed mid-argument. Uncertain whether he's still allowed to touch what he might have just lost a little ground with.

You take his hand and put it on your belly. Because that part, at least, isn't in dispute, and you would never let him think it was.

"I'm saying," you tell him, quietly, "that this baby is half me. And you have a whole Creed, Din. You have a whole…a whole world you want to hand her. Language and armour and a clan and a Way. And I love that you want that. I love that you've been practicing lullabies, don’t get me wrong…”

"I didn’t…"

"I love that you want to give her what saved you,” you barrel on. “I love that you have a tribe that would catch her if anything ever happened to us. I love that you've thought about the padding on your chestplate. Do you understand how soft my whole body went when you said that? Don't answer, I'll tell you. Very soft, embarrassingly soft."

"Cyar'ika… "

"But I have things too. I have where I came from. I have stories my mother told me at night that I want to tell our child – stories that are not in Mando'a and don't have any armour in them. I have a name I want to give her that isn't Mando'a. I have…”

And this is perhaps the biggest part of what you need to say.

“Din, I have a face. I want to be able to nurse our baby without taking a vow first. I want to look at her while I'm feeding her in the middle of the night, and I want her to look at me. I want her to see my face when I sing to her. I want to know what her face looks like when she smiles at me. And I don't know if any of that fits inside the Way you're describing, and I need you to not assume.”

His hand is still on your belly. The baby kicks against it, you both feel it at the same time, and his fingers twitch – that small involuntary marvel he can't help, even six months in, that small oh of a man who keeps relearning that there is a person in there, an actual person, who will one day have opinions and preferences and possibly bad taste in music.

You watch his thumb stroke once against the cloth, slow, like he's apologising to the baby for the volume of the adults around her.

"I don’t… " he starts, and stops, choosing words like he's choosing stones to cross a river, testing each one for whether it will hold his weight. "I haven’t raised a child before."

"Neither have I."

"I was raised by the Tribe."

His voice through the modulator has gone lower, the way it does when something costs him to say.

"I don’t know another way. When I imagine our child, I imagine…I imagine teaching her what I was taught because it’s what saved me. There was a moment, when I was placed in that bunker by my parents when I thought no one was coming. I remember it. I remember the sound…the sound of monsters coming to take me. And then they came. And after that, I was never alone again. I don’t know how to give our child less than what saved me from that. I wouldn’t know how to look at her and know I had withheld it."

You hear yourself make a small sound that isn't quite a word and put your other hand over his, on your belly, so both of yours are wrapped around his one. His fingers shift, just a little, threading through yours, and you can feel the slight tremor in them.

"That's not less," you say softly. "What you want to give them isn't less. I'm not asking you to give them less. I'm not asking you to leave any of that out. I'm asking you to make room. For me and mine. So our child gets both of us, not just the louder one."

"You think I’m the louder one?"

"You're the one with the helmet. The acoustics alone…"

He laughs properly this time and the hand under yours flexes once in acknowledgment.

"I don’t know how to do this," he says, looking down now, the visor angled toward your joined hands. "I don’t know how to raise a child in two ways. The Creed is…it’s not a thing you do halfway. The resol'nare is six actions, not three. I can’t teach her to defend the clan only on the weekdays. I don’t know what it looks like to…to share this. To make the Way one ingredient in a larger meal. I don’t know if it’s even possible. The Armorer would say it’s not..."

"What would you say?"

"I would say," he says slowly, "that I don’t want to lose either of you. Not to a question I refused to ask."

You feel the heat rise behind your eyes and blink it back. You’re determined not to start crying in the middle of this conversation because you have a thread to hold and you mean to hold it.

"Okay," you say. "Then we start there. Not with the answer, but with the question. With the willingness to ask it out loud, with words. Probably more than once. Probably a lot of times, between now and when this child is old enough to strip a blaster."

"I should’ve asked."

"Yeah."

"I’m asking now."

"I know."

"I just…don’t have an answer to give you tonight.”

"I'm not asking for one tonight."

He's quiet and the Crest continues its comforting hum. The blue threads streak past and somewhere behind you, you hear another clink of metal and make a mental note to investigate once this conversation is over.

"What are you asking for tonight?" he says finally.

You look at the visor and the long blue threads beyond it. You think about the cradle he's sketched four times, trying to get the curve of it right and the padding he's designed for the chestplate. You think about the lullabies he's been practicing in private so he wouldn't fumble them, alone in some quiet corner of the ship, for a person who doesn't exist yet but who he’s already preparing to love out loud.

You think about the boy who remembers the sound of the monsters.

"Tonight I want us to sit here with your hand on my belly until she goes back to sleep and you to lean your helmet against my forehead. And I want you to know that we're going to figure this out, you and me, because we have three more months and then the rest of our lives, and I’m not doing the rest of my life with someone who decides things about our family without me. And you’re not doing the rest of your life with someone who decides things about our family without you. That part goes both ways, I promise."

"You promise?"

"I do."

Slowly, the way he does everything that matters, he leans forward. The beskar catches the blue light in a slow-moving stripe as he lowers his head. You lift your chin to meet him, and the smooth cool curve of the helmet's brow comes to rest against your forehead. One hand stays on your belly and the other reaches up and cups the back of your neck under your hair, thumb settling against the small hollow behind your ear where he knows – because he’s learned you the way he learned the Crest, sound by sound – you like to be held.

You close your eyes.

His breath through the modulator is a soft, even rasp. The beskar between your foreheads is a small held boundary, and somehow, tonight, it doesn't feel like a wall – it feels like a promise he’s keeping, a thing he hasn’t asked you to be part of but hasn’t asked you to give up, either. He’s here. All of him he can give tonight, he’s giving. The parts of him that are yours are yours, and the parts that are the Creed's are the Creed's, and tonight, sitting here in the blue hum, that division doesn’t feel like a wound. It feels like the shape of the man you chose.

You breathe it in, your hand tightening on his over your belly.

The baby chooses that moment – because your baby has, apparently, a sense of theatre already – to give a slow luxurious roll under both your palms. Din's fingers twitch, he tilts his helmet down and his voice through the modulator goes softer than you’ve ever heard it, softer than the static should allow, softer than any machine ought to be able to make a voice.

"Su'cuy, ad'ika," he says. “Hello, little one.”

His mouth shapes the word behind the beskar, careful and unhurried, like he's been practicing this too.

"Buir and buir are here. We’re talking about you. About what to give you. It’s a long conversation that we’ll have many times. But don’t worry, you’ll know us both – know both our voices."

Buir and buir. Both parents. He says it out loud, puts you in the same word he uses for himself, and it lands in you like a small warm stone at the bottom of a well.

"Buir," you echo softly, trying the shape of it. "That's me too?"

"That’s you too." The visor lifts, finds your face again, and even through the black of it you can feel him looking. "If you want."

"I want."

His thumb strokes once across your belly whilst the other, at the back of your neck, curls into your hair.

Nothing is decided. Nothing is fixed. The conversation isn't over – there will be more of them, dozens, hundreds, a long quiet careful thread of them woven through the next three months and the rest of your lives, every one of them a small renegotiation between his Way and your stories and the small third person who will, eventually, have a Way and stories of her own to add to the pile.

But his forehead is against yours through the beskar, and his hand is on your belly and yours is on his, and he’s just called you buir through the vocoder with his voice cracked, and you have just called yourself the same. And somewhere between the two of you a third small heartbeat is doing its quiet competent work of becoming a person, untroubled by Creeds, untroubled by names, untroubled by anything except the warm dim sound of two voices it already knows, finally talking to each other instead of around.

"Stay like this a minute," you whisper.

"As long as you want, cyar'ika."

"A minute. And then another minute. And then… "

"And then another."

"Yes"

You don't move and neither does he. The beskar between your foreheads is warmed by the closeness of the man inside it. His breath through the modulator is a soft even rasp you match yours to, without meaning to, the way you’ve long since learned to match his. His hand is warm on your belly. His hand is warm on your neck. The baby is still.

Outside, the stars stretch on, blue and patient and uninterested in any of it, which is, somehow, exactly the right audience.

➰➰➰➰➰➰➰➰🚀➰➰➰➰➰➰➰➰

Taglist: @thelittlebats @sassythejedi @millercontracting @porganas @lovely-kitsune-exe @themilkhasjustexpired @dream-alittlebiggerdarling @seikamuzu

The day Javi adopted a dog, he had gone out to buy a burrito.

He was walking peacefully through downtown, the neon sign of his favorite takeout spot just a few steps away, when he heard a voice say, “Do you want to adopt a dog today?”

It was afternoon, just before sunset.

He turned around and saw you, wearing jeans and a T-shirt from a local animal shelter.

“Are you talking to me?” he exclaimed, surprised.

A small van was parked on the street and had the same logo you had on your shirt on the side.

“Would you like to adopt?” you smiled, gesturing toward the dogs in a pen next to you.

It was a temporary metal structure, set up on one side. Water bowls, cooling mats and dog toys were scattered here and there, and a few puppies were scampering and chasing each other inside.

He looked at you again, back at the puppies, then at you once more.

Beautiful eyes, a nice smile—your jeans hugged your hips perfectly, and despite your oversized T-shirt, he could see your curves.

You held out your hand and told him your name and the shelter where you volunteered.

Whoa,well now this is a sight to behold, he thought while shaking your hand.

But the puppies? Oh no.

“I’m sorry, I don’t think I’m the right fit” he tried to say.

He saw a glimmer of disappointment in your eyes that you tried to hide right away.

“I understand,” you murmured, lowering your gaze, and Javi immediately felt guilty. “It’s just… I’m sorry, it’s not your fault—I’ve been here all afternoon and no one has stopped by.”

He found you delightful and hated hearing that hint of sadness in your voice.

So he looked at the puppies again, just to make you happy.

“How old are they?”

“Four months now; they’re already weaned, dewormed, and vaccinated.”

There were five of them in all, short-haired—four black with white spots and one brown.

“We found them in a trash bag when they were just born, you know, it was horrible.”

Javi wasn’t surprised; he’d seen enough horrors in his life to know that certain people have no scruples at all—not for anything or anyone, not even the most defenseless beings.

It hadn’t stopped disgusting him, he was simply aware of it.

But you seemed genuinely concerned, so sweet as you looked at him with a hopeful half-smile that Javi didn’t have the heart to disappoint you completely.

“I could make a donation to the shelter,” he suggested, thinking he could at least give you some satisfaction.

“Oh, thank you, that’s very kind of you,” you replied gently.

You couldn’t stop watching the puppies chase each other with sad eyes, though, and Javi knew what you were thinking.

He’d had a dog when he was a kid, down at his father’s ranch. Lola, a sheepdog. Chuco had gotten her to help with the livestock, but Lola was a little too unruly and lazy, so she’d simply become the family dog.

She’d lie under their porch taking long naps and run through the cornfields with Javi. And Javi adored her. He hadn’t thought about her in years, but at that moment he remembered those days as if only a glimpse had passed since Lola had died.

They hadn’t gotten any other dogs because Javi was inconsolable—and so was Chuco, even though he would never admit it.

His father was gruff, but he had a big heart. He caught him that evening, sitting in his armchair watching the football game, wiping his eyes. They’d buried Lola that afternoon.

“Want to hold one?” you tentatively asked.

Oh man, now he was really in trouble. If he’d said no and just handed you some money, what would you have thought of him? He stopped his hand just as it was about to reach into the back pocket of his jeans to pull out his wallet.

“Okay,” he replied. He heard it echoing in his head as if someone else had said it.

Why did he care so much, anyway? Sure, you were cute. But Javi had never had any trouble finding someone to hook up with.

And anyway, after Colombia, he wasn’t really interested in getting even the slightest bit attached to anyone. But there you were, leaning against the fence, picking up a brown puppy with a gentleness that was practically impossible to miss. And that struck him. You were a volunteer—no one was paying you to do this—and yet you did it with a care he’d seen in few other people. The puppy was calm and quiet, unlike the others, who were all scampering around yelping.

“I think this quiet little lady might be just right for you,” you smiled as you handed her over. “She’s the smallest— she was probably born last—but she’s strong, healthy, and well-behaved. Isn’t that right?” you chirped in a goofy but lovely voice as you scratched the puppy behind her right ear “yes, you’re a good girl”

Javi held her for a moment, awkwardly, not quite sure what to do. He hadn't felt so clumsy since the occasional times Steve had asked him to hold his daughter.

Javi wasn’t the type to be all mushy—he never had been. But he was the type to stand up for the weak. It was his job, after all, to fight for what was right. And with that puppy in his arms, he felt something: tenderness, a sense of protection.

You adjusted his grip, touching his arms without even thinking about it, completely focused on the puppy. “From underneath, like this,” you instructed him patiently, “rest her on your forearm.”

Javi adjusted his position and watched the little one settle in, her head resting on Javi’s bicep, her little paws dangling down the sides of Javi’s arm. She seemed calm and serene.

“There you go. Perfect,” you winked at him with a very satisfied look. “You’re much better than you think.”

“She’s warm. And heavier than I thought.” He looked into those lively, curious little eyes reflected in his own, stroked her back with his other hand, and felt her soft fur beneath his fingers. She happily licked his hand, bumping her little nose and rubbing her muzzle on his skin.

“She likes you” you said, grinning softly.

You were so sweet, watching him, happy with what you’d accomplished.

You invited him to sit down in the back of the van and he spent some time with you chatting and playing with the dog.

The puppy was a little bundle of joy and he found himself enjoying himself more and more. She was playful and gentle despite being so young, no excessive biting and jumping around with no awareness of her surroundings or her own strength.

“She’s smart” he observed “and very cute”

“Yeah, she is. Sure you can let her down?” You smiled, very softly.

He couldn’t tell if it was your fault or the puppy’s, but he found himself again saying something that he didn’t think would ever come out of his mouth: “Well…uhm..I’ll need some help, though—I don’t know how to train a dog.”

“I can help you. When someone adopts a dog, we have to make sure that everything goes well in the following weeks and that the person is truly committed. I can come by to check on things and bring paperwork to sign.” You told him in that honeyed voice of yours that Javi felt dipping into his chest.

“Well, I think you should, it’s your fault I’m bringing this little girl home tonight” he chuckled.

And it felt right, when he said that.

Your eyes immediately lit up at the realization that you'd made it, and your smile spread across your face like a ray of sunshine. You moved as if to hug him, before limiting yourself to a pat on the shoulder, but you were excited. And happy. It showed, and Javi was happy too.

“Okay, I have a lot of tips to give you then. Let her sleep with you, at least at first, because she needs to feel like she's not alone and she needs to get used to you, your house, the smells, and then—well, then let her out often, especially—” you were chattering, caught up in the excitement, and Javi thought it was so beautiful.

If he could have, he would have taken them all home at that point, just to keep you happy. He couldn’t quite explain it, but you were the first person he’d met since returning who knew nothing about his past, his job, or what he’d had to do in Colombia.

During the time he'd lived with his father, upon his return, he'd continued to have nightmares and smoke like a chimney. Then he'd gone to therapy, and now he was using nicotine patches. The urge to search his pocket for the pack was still strong, but he had to admit he was feeling better, breathing easier, and being more helpful to his dad when he visited him at the ranch.

He’d seen old friends again, met with relatives, and everyone was well aware that he wasn’t the same person he’d been when he left.

But you—so easygoing, fun, and simply genuine—made him think that maybe there was still a chance for him to live without being crushed by the ghosts of his past.

And clearly you’d seen something in him, judging by how you’d insisted he pick up the puppy. Maybe you knew it would do him good. Maybe you’d noticed that veil in his eyes. And you knew that little creature would do much more for him than he could ever expect, if only he were willing to open up.

“Sorry to interrupt, but I'm afraid I'll forget everything you're telling me as soon as I get in the car,” he admitted, scratching his beard.

You chuckled and agreed that you were talking too fast. “It’s just that I really needed this, you know. But I want you to be ready, it’s a big responsibility.”

“Sure, you’re right,” he said, looking at the little girl in his arms, already feeling a sense of duty toward her. “I want to do a good job, I promise. I was just thinking… what if you came over tonight?”

It was obvious from your expression that you weren’t expecting an invitation so soon, but you accepted willingly.

You pulled a notepad out of your bag and wrote down the address, asking him his name as Javi kept admiring you.

“Javier,” you repeated, and his name sounded incredibly soft on your lips. “I like it.”

The little one was sleeping in his arms as if she’d always been there, and he was starting to think that maybe it really was fate that he’d met both of you.

It was a wonderful feeling—all of it. You, the little one, and the way it felt as if someone had lifted a heavy weight off his heart.

“Listen, I have to drop off the others at the shelter and get what I need for her. I only have this with me,” you said, handing him a leash and collar. “But I'll bring you food, bowls and other stuff in a couple of hours, okay?”

“Yeah, that’s perfect”

You put the collar on the little one and attached the leash, Javi put her on the ground and she immediately tried to climb up his leg to get back into his arms.

Javi looked at her and laughed like he hadn't laughed in a while.

He insisted on making the donation he’d promised.

“You’ll see, you’ll be able to find someone for them, too,” he felt compelled to reassure you, “and we’ll be waiting for you, right, young lady?” he added, gently lifting the puppy into his arms again and placing a gentle kiss on her forehead “Yes, we will.”

You thanked him, promising to meet him at his house to teach him how to get through the night. Javi was thrilled even though he knew he wouldn't get much sleep.

He didn't intend to hit it off right away, he just wanted to talk to you again and get to know you better and savor once again the carefree feeling you had just given him.

“Hey” he turned around and called you as he was walking away, the puppy happily trotting at his side “Does she already have a name?”

You smiled and said, “Lola.”

You try to throw yourself into work – you really do try. After you bid Maria goodbye, you head straight to your shop and busy yourself with all the orders that are already backed up, the repairs that people are expecting done in time for Christmas. You sew and mend like the devil’s nipping at your heels, pricking your finger more than once until it starts to resemble a pin cushion.

He'll be fine, you tell yourself as you wrestle with a shirt, they'll all be fine. Joel won’t let anything happen. You can’t help but feel your insides melt just at the thought of him, because you trust him the way you trust the ground to be there when you put your foot down. Joel doesn’t give his word lightly nor does he break it, and you know he’ll walk through fire to make sure Dylan comes home safe and sound.

At noon, you raise your head, wince at the stiffness and take a brisk walk down to the square, breathing in the cold, crisp air, marvelling at how life simply goes on around you whilst your whole world is beyond the wall facing down whatever horrors are lurking.

“He’s out on patrol then,” Gail says when she comes upon you waiting in line in the dining hall. “How does that make you feel?”

“Are we doing therapy right here?” you ask, glancing around to see who might be listening.

“No, just asking,” she replies, blinking steadily, her gaze remaining trained on you.

“Honestly – I’m terrified,” you admit. “But he’s with Joel, so I know he’s going to be alright. And no…” you add hurriedly, as she opens her mouth. “I don’t want to talk about him here.”

Fortunately, Gail seems to take the hint and after you’ve eaten your venison, you head back to the shop for another few solitary hours where you try to focus on what’s happening right in front of you, rather than what could be happening in the snow-covered hills.

Finally, the afternoon bleeds gold toward evening and you quickly close up and make your way back to the gate. Eugene, standing guard with his rifle, waves down at you, but refrains from issuing one of his legendary quips because he can clearly tell how you’re feeling right now. Then he gives you a look that’s kind enough to make your throat tight and goes back to scanning the tree line.

You watch the gap in the trees where the trail comes down until your eyes ache and you think, the way you've been not-quite-letting yourself think all day, about tonight.

You’ve practiced the words a thousand times, thinking about your posture and tone when you deliver them. You want Dylan to know that you’re not letting his father go – you’re simply making space for someone else – Joel – a man you know your son admires and respects. You want him to know that it’s a good thing, that love and family are things to be cherished, not rejected.

That you can all be happy together.

God, you hope he sees it that way, not just because you’re anxious about the future, but because desire is already simmering deep inside you.

Eugene whistles suddenly, indicating incoming riders and your heart goes straight up into your throat. You’re on your feet at the rail before you've decided to move, and there – out of the gap in the trees, small at first and then resolving – come three horses. You count them twice, three times, your whole body a held breath, and then you see the shapes on them, and your knees nearly go.

Dylan’s at the front, alive, whole, sitting his horse looser now than he did this morning, Ellie beside him. And Joel…

Your heart swells so hard it hurt, and you feel your inner core clench. There he is, a pace or two behind, broad and steady in the saddle with that unmistakable set of his shoulders, bringing your boy home exactly like he promised. You want to laugh and cry all at the same time. You want to be down at the gate before it even finishes opening so you can put your hands on your son and then, God help the both of you and never mind who sees, put your hands on the man who's kept him safe.

The man you’re going to spend the rest of your life with.

Eugene calls the gate open and the big oak doors begin to swing. You skip down and hurriedly cross the packed dirt of the yard, your face splitting into a grin you couldn't have stopped for anything…

And then you get close enough to see Joel's eyes, and the grin dies on your face.

You know this man. You know every set his face can take, have made a study of it over the last few months, and what you see in his eyes as he rides through the gate is something you've only seen a handful of times, in the worst moments – the day a patrol came back one man short or the night he told you a piece of his own history that left him grey and hollow.

It’s grief. Held down hard, locked behind that stone face he wears for the world, but there, unmistakable, aimed – and this is the part that stops your heart – at you. He finds your face across the yard and there’s such naked sorrow in the look that your first, wild, animal thought is that something’s happened to Dylan, that the boy sitting alive on the horse is somehow not alright, that…

"Mom!"

Dylan's voice cracks across the yard and your eyes snap to your son, instant relief filling you at the sight of him. He’s fine, better than fine, his face lit up like the sun, his body half-falling off his horse in his hurry, stumbling toward you across the yard with his arms already coming up to embrace you.

"Mom! Mom, you're not gonna – you have to…"

He can’t get it out for laughing and crying at once, and behind him, another rider swings down, someone you can’t quite see past Dylan's shoulder – and your son’s shaking you, gripping you, his eyes enormous, and he screams words into your face like the best news that has ever existed in the history of the world.

"It's Dad! Mom, it's Dad! We found Dad! He's alive!"

The yard tilts.

For a second you genuinely don’t understand. The words arrive in your ears as sounds with no meaning attached, a sentence in a language you've forgotten, because the thing they describe is not a thing that can happen, is not a category of thing that exists. It’s something that’s closed and buried and grieved and gone.

“No,” you hear yourself say softly. “No, Dylan…”

And then the rider steps out from behind Dylan's shoulder into the low gold light of the yard, lean and sun-dark and bearded and older, so much older than you remember, his face a ruin of hope and disbelief and two years of hell.

It’s him.

"Hey," Matt says, his voice breaking on the single word.

He stands there ten feet from you with his hands hanging useless at his sides, tears already spilling down into his beard, looking at you like you’re water and he's been dying of thirst for two years.

He says it again, wrecked, barely a sound. "Hey, sweetheart, it’s me.”

Something comes up out of you that isn’t a word, but rather a sound you haven’t known you can make. Your hand goes to your mouth, and you realise you’re shaking your head – not in denial, just a helpless side-to-side, the body's refusal to hold something too large for it – your eyes streaming.

Dylan’s saying something as he grips your arm, and you can hear the pure delirious joy in his voice. Your boy, who has struggled so much with the loss of his father, made whole in a single afternoon. And some enormous part of you is breaking open with a joy to match his, because Matt’s alive. Matt’s standing in front of you, the man you had loved and married and made this child with and buried is standing in Jackson's yard like an angel’s vision.

And yet, underneath the joy, in the same instant, so fast and so quiet and so shameful that you try not to feel it even as it happens – your eyes go to Joel.

He hasn't moved from his horse, still standing at the edge of the scene, reins loose in his hands. He isn’t looking at Matt or Dylan, but rather at you, and when your eyes find his, he doesn’t look away or let anything show. He just holds your gaze for one single heartbeat then gives you the smallest nod, like he's read the whole thing off your face already, all of it, the joy and the horror and the guilt and the love and is telling you it’s alright.

Telling you to go to your husband.

You tear your eyes off him and then Matt closes the last of the distance between you, pulling you into his arms, and you both cry, standing in the middle of the yard with Dylan wrapped around you, the whole grief collapsing in on itself.

Matt says your name into your hair over and over like he's forgotten every other word he's ever known, and God help you, your arms come up and hold him, because your body remembers him even where your mind is in freefall. Because you had loved this man once with your whole young heart and buried him and here he is warm and breathing and real and clutching you like you’re the only solid thing in a dissolving world.

"I never stopped," he says, ragged, into your hair. "Two years, sweetheart, and I never once stopped. Every day I pictured you safe, with a wall around you. That's the picture that kept me breathing, and you're here, you're really here, and you kept him, you got him here and you kept him…"

He pulls back just enough to look at you, both his hands coming up to hold your wet face, his eyes move over you starving and reverent.

"Look at you, sweetheart. Oh my God, look at you. You're okay. You're really okay…"

"Matt…" His name comes out of you cracked and thin. "How…I don't…we ran, we ran like you told us to and then we waited. We waited and watched the gate because we thought you were coming and…”

"I know." He presses his forehead to yours, and his is hot and damp and shaking. "I know…you did right, you did everything right. You got our boy to safety and there is nothing – hey, look at me – there is nothing you have to explain to me, you hear? Nothing. You saved him. You've been saving him for two years while I was…" His voice fails briefly. "You did everything right."

Dylan presses against your side, one arm around you and one around his father, laughing wetly. “We’re a family again, Mom, a whole family…”

And every word of your son's joy is a gift and a blade at once, because over the top of both their bowed heads, your traitor eyes go looking, one more time, for Joel.

He's dismounted by now and started seeing to the horses, making himself useful, giving you the yard and the moment and taking himself out of the frame of it. He has his back half-turned, loosening a cinch and, even from here, even through the blur of your own tears, you can see the effort in the line of his shoulders. The effort of a man holding himself very, very still, bracing for something to be ripped back.

You’ve done this to him. It’s your face he's been bracing against since the gate, your joy he's made himself nod at, your husband whose arms you’re standing in. And you want, with a desperation that shames you in the middle of your own reunion, to cross the yard, take his face in your hands and say something, anything.

But what would you even say? There are no words for this, no shape for this. You’re standing in the arms of the husband you buried, with your overjoyed son clinging to you both, watching the man you meant to build a life with tend to horses with his back turned so you won’t have to see his face. The whole thing is so far past anything language can hold that you just stand there, shaking and crying, letting both feelings tear through you at once – the joy and the ruin. There’s no choosing between them, because they’re both true, because your heart has gone and gotten too big to sit whole in your chest anymore.

People start coming, the yard beginning to fill as word moves fast. A patrol coming back with a stranger doubled up on a horse is news, and a stranger who turns out to be a man raised from the dead is the kind of news that empties buildings.

Maria suddenly appears, Tommy behind her, both of them looking from Matt to you to Joel with shock on their faces and Dylan pulls free of you to rush forward and grab Tommy’s arm, yelling that Matt’s his dad and that he’s finally come home.

All of a sudden, Maria’s gaze meets yours and you can see the naked pity within it, the sheer irony of the fact that having finally accepted you’re a widow, entitled to move on with another man, your husband has now reappeared.

You don’t have time to think more on it however, because Matt suddenly sways.

You feel it before you see it – the sudden lean of his weight against you, heavier than it should be, his hand tightening on your arm and then not so much gripping as clutching, hanging on. You pull back to look at him and see the light draining from his face, his skin going grey and slick with a sweat that isn't just weeping, his eyes having trouble finding yours.

"Sorry," he slurs. "Sorry, I'm…I'm alright, I just…"

"Matt?" Your hands come up to hold him. "Matt, hey…"

"He's hurt."

Joel's voice is sharp, and suddenly he’s there, his hand under Matt's other arm, taking his weight and easing him down.

"He took a knock in the leg two days back that he didn't tell me ‘bout til we were halfway home. It's gone bad."

His eyes are flat and professional and don’t once now meet yours.

"It's infected. Not the kind that turns, the regular kind. The kind that kills you slow if it ain’t seen to. He's been runnin’ a fever and hidin' it." A muscle moves in his jaw. "Stubborn son of a bitch wanted to make it home before he said anythin’. Wanted to make it to you."

"I wanted…" Matt gets out, half-conscious now, his head lolling toward you. "Wanted to come in on my own two feet. For you. I didn't want you to see me…carried in…" His eyes roll, find you and hold on with the last of his strength. "Made it, though, didn’t I? I made it home."

"You made it," you tell him, your voice breaking clean apart, and you don’t know anymore which of the two griefs it’s breaking over. "You made it, Matt. You're home. You're home."

"He needs to get to the clinic."

Joel’s already got Matt's arm across his own broad shoulders, is already taking the dead weight of him like it’s nothing, the way he's carried God knows how many broken people out of God knows how many bad places. He hitches Matt higher, steadying, and his voice never lifts, never cracks, but instead stays flat and certain.

"Tommy, get the other side of him. Dylan…”

“I’m coming,” Dylan says, his voice high-pitched and panicked. “Dad, you’re going to be okay. You’re going to be okay.”

The crowd breaks and reforms into a corridor and Joel and Tommy carry your husband across the yard toward the clinic with his boots dragging twin lines in the dirt. You and Dylan follow, your son’s face white with a new terror, the earlier joy curdling into the oldest fear he owns – that he's got his father back only to lose him in the same day.

Dr Vee appears the moment Matt’s carried through the clinic doors, barking directions to the nearest cot. Joel steps out of the way when his weight is no longer needed, moves back into the corner of the room and becomes a still shape against the wall with his arms folded and his eyes on the doctor's hands.

You kneel at the head of the cot with Matt's hot damp hand crushed in both of yours, Dylan crowding in beside you. Dr Vee cuts Matt’s trouser leg away and the smell of it hits the room. It’s bad and deep, but she nods with almost grateful satisfaction.

"I can work with this," she says grimly. "His fever's high but he's strong – God knows how, look at the state of him. I need room. I need everyone who isn't holding him down out of my light." She looks up and finds you. "You stay. He's going to need someone he knows when I start, and this is going to hurt him. I need you to talk to him, keep him here."

You kneel in the lamplight with Matt’s hand in yours and you talk to him, low and steady, the way you once talked Dylan through his nightmares many years ago.

“You're safe now, you're home. I've got you. I've got you, Matt, stay with me…”

Matt's glassy eyes cling to your face like you’re the only fixed star in a spinning sky, and every so often his lips shape your name, and you answer it every time because you can’t not. Because he’s crawled up out of two years of hell holding the picture of you safe and you won’t let go of his hand now, not for anything, not for the whole world.

At some point, Joel moves to the door. You catch him at the edge of your vision, unfolding himself from the wall and crossing the room quiet as weather.

“Dylan,” he says softly. “Come with me.”

“No,” Dylan says, “I want to stay. Mom…”

“Go with Joel,” you say calmly. “I promise I’ll come and find you the moment it’s over.”

“But…”

“Go, Dylan, please.”

Stepping forward, Joel tugs gently on Dylan’s sleeve and even though you can tell he’s desperate to stay, he eventually nods, rises and follows Joel. Sliding his hand onto Dylan’s back, Joel gently manoeuvres him back out through the door, then he pauses and looks back at you.

For one moment – one single moment stolen out of the middle of the worst and strangest afternoon of your life – your eyes meet his over the whole ruined distance of everything that’s changed.

You want to say his name. You want to ask him to wait. You want to say, I don't know what this is, I don't know what happens now, don't go, please, just – don't go yet, don't decide it all standing in a doorway, don't take yourself out of my life without letting me even…

But you don’t say any of it. You can’t because your husband's hand is in yours and the doctor’s reaching for the first instrument, and there are no words, only Joel's face showing you nothing, holding it all down hard and being the man who doesn’t let his own grief become anyone else's burden.

And then he says it, quietly, just for you, under the doctor's murmur and Matt's ragged breathing. He says it gently, kindly, like a man laying something down that he doesn’t have the strength to keep holding. It’s the last thing in the world you want to hear and yet the truest thing he can say.

"Your place is here, with him."

He doesn’t wait for you to answer, because there is no answer and he knows it. He gives you one more look, and in it you see, just for the length of a heartbeat before he smooths it away, everything he isn’t saying. You see all of it cross his face, get folded down and put away, never once believing he would get to keep it.

Then he nods to you, one last time, steps back through the doorway and disappears.

You turn back to Matt’s fevered face, squeeze his hand, and tell him you’re there, because you are. Because that’s the truth too. Because both things are true and will go on being true. Dr Vee bends to her work, Matt cries out, gripping your hand hard enough to hurt, and you hold on.

Meanwhile, out in the yard somewhere in the gathering dark, a man who’s brought your whole family home to you is standing under the first cold stars, his arm across your son’s shoulders murmuring words of comfort, breathing in, breathing out, and beginning, very quietly, to let you go.

❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

You don’t like Reed Richards.

You tell yourself this the moment you meet him. He barely acknowledges your existence. He doesn’t shake your hand. Doesn’t even make eye contact.

You say something polite—something like, "Pleasure to meet you, Dr. Richards."

He says, without glancing up from the display in front of him, "The data’s unstable. Did you notice the gravitic skew in quadrant six?"

Oh.

Okay. That kind of guy.

Later, you categorize him like you’re filing a report: Brilliant. Socially stunted. One of those too-smart-to-be-nice types who treats human interaction like a necessary evil.

It makes your job easier. You’re not here to be liked.

You’re here to assist with the joint-mutant initiative. Quietly. Professionally. Keep your head down, do your work, keep the mental channel muted unless someone explicitly asks for help. Your mutation makes people nervous. Not everyone wants to know what they’re broadcasting.

But Reed Richards?

Reed Richards is broadcasting filth.

The first time it happens, you think you’ve misread. You’re across the lab, checking output from a cracked containment dome, and his thoughts slip past your mental wall like a hot breath on the back of your neck:

God, what those lips would look like around my cock.

How tight she’d be, wet and warm and surprised.

Bet she tastes sweet. Fuck, I’d drag it out. Make her beg.

She wouldn’t beg. She’s too proud. I’d make her anyway.

You jolt. Your pen jerks off the page. A shaky line across your log sheet. You don’t dare look up. You’ve never heard him speak like that. You’ve barely heard him speak at all. Reed is curt. Precise. Dismissive, even. But now you hear it in his head, like it’s on a loop, layered with vivid images — your thighs spread across his desk, his fingers prying you open while he murmurs clinical observations that make your cheeks burn.

She’d be wet already. I’d test her reaction time. Graph her pulse. Hypothesize what makes her shake.

You swallow, shift in your seat, force your hands to stay still. You should block him out. You usually do. No one wants to hear what people are really thinking. It’s invasive, and it’s dangerous, and it’s too much to carry.

But this? This is—

“Is something wrong?” His voice cuts across the room. Crisp. Flat. Like he doesn’t have his hand buried in your imaginary cunt.

You look up. Just once.

He’s watching you. Eyes sharp behind his glasses. No heat in his expression — none of the filth you just heard. He looks the same way he always does. Unreadable. Detached.

“No,” you say. Too quickly. “Nothing’s wrong.”

Reed nods once and returns to typing, but his thoughts don’t stop.

I wonder if she’d moan when I touch her or bite her lip to stay quiet.

Bet I could break her composure. Bet I could ruin her neat little posture.

You grip the edge of the counter until your knuckles ache.

You’ve made a huge mistake.

Because now that you’ve tuned in, you don’t think you can stop.

-

The worst part isn’t how filthy it is.

It’s the contrast.

Reed Richards — Dr. Richards, to everyone — never even swears in conversation. He refers to the human body like it’s a schematic. He’ll say “pleasure response” instead of orgasm, and you’ve heard him refer to Sue’s divorce attorney as “a challenging presence,” which you think is his version of calling someone a dick.

So the first time you hear him think the word cunt, your brain short-circuits.

Bet it’s tight. Warm. Slick around my fingers. Her cunt would grip me like it knows me.

You grip the edge of the lab table.

Reed hasn’t moved. He’s still typing, back straight, posture annoyingly perfect. A model scientist. The embodiment of control.

But in his head—

I’d stretch her out with my tongue first. Just to taste. Just to make her shiver.

Then I’d fuck her open with two fingers. Maybe three. Just to see how much she could take.

You feel your face flush hot.

His voice in your head is the same one he uses when he’s narrating quantum anomalies. Methodical. Fascinated. Detached.

Like your body is a phenomenon he wants to understand. Just for the data.

She’s got sensitive tits, I think. Would need a gentle mouth. Then a rough one.

I’d chart how many licks until she breaks.

You turn away before he can see the expression on your face. Not that he’d be looking.

Reed doesn’t look at you.

Not unless you speak first. Even then, his gaze usually lands near your shoulder or just past your head — like you’re a part of the room’s architecture. Necessary. Functional. Forgettable.

Which is why you can’t fathom the sudden, overwhelming specificity of his thoughts.

Would she come if I sucked on her nipples and slid my thumb over her clit?

Or would she need to be fucked?

Deep. Slow. Me inside her while she tries not to cry out.

You have to leave.

You mumble something — “back in ten” or “need a break” — and Reed doesn’t respond. He doesn’t glance your way. Just lifts a hand absently in acknowledgment, still facing the board, still immersed in whatever algorithm or image his mind is chewing on.

Except now you know that algorithm is you.

Your wet heat. Your thighs. Your pulse as he imagines pressing his mouth to it and whispering, “Come for me. Let me see.”

You flee to the hallway, breath stuttering in your throat, shame and heat and disbelief running a relay race in your chest.

You’ve heard dirty thoughts before. You’ve had them.

But never from someone so composed. So quiet. So far removed from the possibility of ever touching you.

And that’s what makes it dangerous.

He has no idea you can hear him.

And worse — he’s not trying to stop.

-

The rest of the day, you try to block him out.

You build mental walls. Steel-plated. Brick-layered. Reinforced with every ounce of discipline you’ve learned since puberty, when people’s thoughts started bleeding into your skull like background noise you couldn’t shut off.

But Reed’s thoughts don’t bleed. They pierce.

They stab through.

You’re elbow-deep in diagnostics when it happens again — no warning, no break in his typing cadence, no shift in posture.

Just a whisper inside your head like a hand between your thighs.

She’d come so pretty if I rubbed her clit just right. Not hard. Just enough to make her beg.

Your knees go weak.

You drop the calibration tool.

It clangs against the lab floor and rolls under a counter.

Reed doesn’t turn around. He never does.

But in your head:

Imagine her on my desk, shaking. Panting. Just a little ruined.

Would her thighs tremble when I pull out, or when I sink in?

Fuck. I’d edge her until she sobs.

You squeeze your eyes shut. Grip the counter. Count backward.

Ten. Nine. Eight.

It’s not enough.

I wouldn’t even fuck her the first time. I’d make her ride my face. Learn how she moves. What makes her lose rhythm.

You suck in a breath and drop to your knees, fumbling under the bench for the runaway tool. Your fingers shake as you grab it.

You’re burning from the inside out.

He’s just standing there — chalk in one hand, the other curled around the lip of the console, muttering numbers under his breath.

As if he doesn’t know what he’s doing to you, like he isn’t narrating how he’d make you come.

You crawl out from under the counter, wiping your palms on your lab coat. Try to focus. Try to breathe.

But the thoughts keep going.

She probably moans softly. Gasps, maybe. One hand on my wrist, the other gripping the sheets.

Would she let me come on her face? Or just in her mouth?

Your hand slips on the console. The system glitches — an alert flashes red on the screen.

“Everything okay?” Reed says, without turning.

His tone is bland. Neutral. The same one he uses when he’s asking about error margins or component failures.

You force your voice to steady. “Fine. Sorry. Just bumped the interface.”

“Run the sequence again,” he says.

You do.

But your fingers tremble the whole time. And every time you glance up, you see the line of his spine, the tension in his forearms, the methodical tap of chalk against board — like he’s not thinking about bending you over the lab bench and pressing his mouth between your thighs.

But he is.

And now you know.

-

It’s not supposed to be a social thing.

You’re huddled in the lab with Reed, Johnny, and a visiting biophysicist from MIT who talks with his hands and keeps spilling his coffee. It’s late afternoon. The conversation’s circling around particle harmonics and neural feedback delay — nothing you haven’t heard before.

Reed, as usual, is silent. Focused. His back to the room, one hand scrolling equations, the other holding a piece of chalk he hasn’t used in fifteen minutes.

You think maybe you’ll survive the day without hearing anything from him. You’ve built the walls again. Brick by brick. You’re not letting him in.

And then Johnny goes, “I still don’t get why you didn’t just read her.”

You blink. “What?”

Johnny laughs. “Come on, don’t play dumb. You could’ve. You always say that trick comes in handy when people lie.”

Your blood goes cold. You look up slowly. “Johnny…”

“Oh shit. Was that not public knowledge?” He raises both palms in mock defense. “Sorry. I mean, I thought everyone knew.”

They don’t. Not everyone. But Sue, Ben, Johnny — they do. Reed, you’d assumed… maybe. But not definitely.

Until now.

Because Reed goes still.

Not visibly. Not to the average eye. But you see it.

His hand halts mid-scroll. The chalk pauses just before touching the board.

He doesn’t turn around. Of course not. He never does.

But the entire current in the room changes.

The MIT guy, oblivious, whistles low. “Telepathy? That’s incredible.”

“Yeah,” Johnny says, grinning. “She’s like a human lie detector. Except it’s not like she goes digging, you know? She just picks stuff up.”

The scientist nods. “Is it active or passive?”

“Both,” you say, voice light, controlled. “Depends on the day. And the person.”

“Must be fun.”

You shrug. “Sometimes.”

Johnny leans on the console. “Sometimes not, huh?”

Your eyes flick briefly to Reed’s back. His hand is still frozen in midair, like he’s been caught in amber.

You look away.

“Yeah,” you murmur. “Sometimes… not so much.”

The conversation moves on.

Someone cracks a joke about lab gossip being unsafe around you. The MIT guy asks a question about psi-shielding. Johnny starts talking about that one time you ruined a poker night by knowing someone’s cards.

But Reed doesn’t speak, doesn’t move.

For the first time in days, his thoughts are silent.

You feel the absence like a blow.

No whispers. No fantasies. No wondering what your cunt tastes like or how you sound when you come. Just—

Nothing.

A void. You should be relieved.  Instead, you feel like you’ve been locked out of something you didn’t know you needed.

Behind Reed’s still frame, you can sense it — the slow, dangerous coiling of tension.

Not shame, not guilt. Only awareness.

He knows, and now he’s thinking about what you’ve heard.

-

You don’t sleep that night.

You lie in bed with your mind reeling, blankets too heavy, your chest too tight. The silence in Reed’s head echoes louder than any of the filth that came before. You didn’t realize how much you’d come to expect his thoughts. Not want them — not exactly — but… count on them. Like a metronome. Like proof he was human under all that restraint.

Now?

Nothing.

No late-night fantasies. No secret hypotheses about your body. Just a wall — colder and more deliberate than anything you’ve ever put up yourself.

He knows.

And now you’re waiting for the fallout.

You think about packing.

You think about going to Sue and getting ahead of it — telling her you’re sorry, you didn’t mean to listen, you never asked for the thoughts to come in like that, you tried so fucking hard to block them out.

You think about how Sue would tilt her head, lips pressed together in that gentle, unreadable way of hers, and say, “I’ll talk to Reed.”

That thought alone makes you want to crawl out of your skin.

You don’t go to the lab the next morning.

You call in sick — stomach flu, maybe food poisoning.

You spend the day in your apartment, curled on your couch with a half-drunk mug of tea and the soft buzz of muted news. You try to distract yourself with papers, textbooks, even an old simulation of Mars terrain scans.

None of it sticks.

Because the only thought that plays on repeat is this:

You’ve ruined it.

You had one shot. One internship. One thread of hope that could’ve led to something real — something bigger than the lab, bigger than Earth.

You’ve wanted space since you were old enough to name constellations. You were supposed to be part of the next crew rotation. If you did well, if you impressed the right people, if Reed thought you were worth keeping—

But now all he sees is a liability. An intruder. A mind he can’t trust.

Maybe he’s already filed a report. Maybe by Monday you’ll be reassigned to inventory. Or security compliance. Some corner of the building where they can keep you out of people’s heads and off the launch manifest.

You curl tighter. You don’t cry but your throat aches like you might.

You’d rather he shouted. Rather he confronted you. Rather he called you invasive or perverse or unprofessional.

Instead, he just disappeared.

That silence — the absence of his voice in your head — feels like the worst kind of punishment.

-

You come in early the next day.

Earlier than usual. Earlier than anyone else should be there.

Except he’s already in the lab.

You hear the soft click of the console keys before you see him. The low whir of cooling fans. The faint scratch of chalk across board.

When you step inside, Reed doesn’t turn.

He’s where he always is — back straight, eyes forward, sleeves rolled, a shadow of stubble softening the sharp lines of his jaw. His body is still, but his mind—

His mind is deafening.

F=ma. ΔS = Qrev/T. Entropy is always increasing. Entropy is always increasing. Entropy is always increasing—

You press your hand to the doorframe.

It’s not that he’s shut you out.

It’s that he’s replaced the thoughts. Stuffed the filth back into its cage and barricaded the door with math. With precision. With the cold comfort of numbers.

But it’s loud. So loud.

Equations loop over and over, like static, like punishment, like he’s trying to drown himself in calculus and thermodynamics until there’s no room left for want.

You don’t say anything.

You just take your seat. Log into the console. Pretend the silence is normal. That the walls haven’t shifted. That this isn’t your fault.

But then, after twenty-eight minutes of stillness—

He turns.

Slowly.

His eyes meet yours for the first time in days.

And then, like the flip of a switch, the equations stop.

The noise cuts.

And what follows is even worse.

“I owe you an apology.”

The words land like glass.

You look up — stunned, unsure you heard him right.

Reed continues, voice stiff, almost formal. Like he’s reciting something practiced.

“I was unaware that my thoughts were… accessible. To you.”

He swallows. His gaze doesn’t waver. “If I caused any discomfort, or crossed any boundary—”

“You didn’t,” you say, too fast.

But he doesn’t stop.

“I understand if you wish to leave the internship. I will personally ensure a neutral letter of recommendation and full academic credit, if you—”

“No.” You shake your head, your throat tight. “I don’t want to leave.”

Silence.

Your breath trembles in your chest.

“I’m not upset,” you say, softer. “I never was.”

Reed stares at you.

You’ve never seen him look so unsure.

“I should not have allowed those thoughts to form,” he says, quieter now. “I certainly shouldn’t have repeated them.”

You offer a breath of laughter — too hollow to be real. “You didn’t say them.”

He blinks. “I thought them.”

You nod. “You did.”

A pause.

Then you add, “But I heard more than what you thought.”

His brows draw together. “Meaning?”

“I heard how hard you tried not to.”

“I’m truly so, so sorry,” he says.

The words sound foreign in his mouth — like he doesn’t quite know how to say them aloud. His voice drops as he says it, too, like he wants to bury the sentence somewhere low between you.

“It was unprofessional.”

You blink. It hits different when it’s said that plainly — not just the apology, but the weight of the word.

Unprofessional.

He means it. You can hear it in his thoughts now, the edge softening — shame curling in the quiet corners. He’s not just sorry you heard him. He’s sorry he thought it at all. Sorry he let himself want. Sorry his discipline failed.

“Reed,” you say, gently. “It’s alright.”

He doesn’t move, he doesn’t breathe, for a second.

It’s not the kind of apology that’s waiting for forgiveness. It’s the kind that assumes none is possible.

“I should have—” he begins, but the sentence crumbles.

You step closer before you can think better of it. Not too close. Just enough to catch the tiniest flicker in his eyes — a shift, like he’s bracing for something more than your words.

“I’ve heard worse,” you say, lips twitching in the ghost of a smile. “You just think very… graphically.”

His mouth parts — just slightly.  For the first time, you see something almost human flicker behind his usual impassivity.

Embarrassment.

He opens his mouth to speak again, but nothing comes.

You reach for the console behind you, just to give your hands something to do.

“If you’re wondering whether I was offended,” you say, “I wasn’t.”

His gaze lifts to yours slowly. “You weren’t.”

You shake your head. “I didn’t say it wasn’t… surprising.”

Something changes in the set of his shoulders. The faintest drop. Like a gear slipping in a machine.

You can hear it again, too — faint, fainter than before, but real: She’s not angry. She’s not leaving.

You lean back against the edge of the table, arms crossed loosely. “I’ve had these powers my whole life, you know. You hear people think things they’d never say. Half of them wouldn’t even admit it to themselves.”

Reed doesn’t respond. But you feel the shift. The stillness that isn't emptiness anymore — it’s presence. It’s him, fully here, not hiding behind data or circuits or chalk.

“It can be fun sometimes,” you admit. “Other times…” You trail off. “Not so much.”

His fingers flex slightly where they rest at his sides.

You almost expect him to end it there. To nod, turn away, retreat to the board, drown himself in equations again.

But instead, he says, quietly:

“I didn’t mean for you to feel like an object.”

Your chest tightens.

You meet his gaze.

“I didn’t.”

You watch him for a moment, unsure what to say next.

The lab is quiet. Still. The hum of the equipment blends into the background like white noise. Reed hasn’t moved since his last apology — hands loose at his sides, eyes lowered just enough that you can’t quite tell if he’s looking at you or through you.

You shift slightly on the edge of the table.

“Are you okay?” you ask, softly.

It’s the gentlest question in the world. You don’t expect much. A nod, maybe. Or the barest deflection.

Instead, he huffs a laugh.

Short. Quiet. Almost self-deprecating.

And so out of place coming from him that it draws your eyes back to his face immediately.

He still doesn’t smile. Of course he doesn’t. But there’s a flicker at the corner of his mouth, like he might have once, in another life, remembered how.

Your chest eases — just barely — and you smile at him. Tentative. Careful. The kind of smile you give a wounded animal when you’re holding out a hand.

Reed blinks, and this time his gaze meets yours without hesitation.

He doesn’t say yes, or no, or I will be.

But he doesn’t look away.

He doesn’t turn back to the board.

You take that as enough.

The air between you settles, not warm exactly, but less charged. Less sharp.

You glance down at your tablet, then back up. “Do you want to… work on the gamma dispersion scan?”

A pause. Then he nods.

It’s quiet again as you both fall into rhythm — screens blinking softly, files opening, measurements calibrating. For ten minutes, it almost feels normal. Like none of this happened. Like your body hasn’t been the subject of his private curiosity. Like you haven’t heard, in his own voice, the words tits and cunt wrapped in awe like he’s discovering a new element.

But every so often, you catch the stillness in him.

The way he doesn’t quite type as fluidly as before. The way his thoughts — no longer loud, no longer obscene — hover just out of reach. Reined in. Scrubbed clean.

Control, you hear him think, a little later. Keep control.

You bite the inside of your cheek.

Because now that you’ve forgiven him — now that you’ve stayed — he’s afraid he’ll slip again.

He’s afraid of wanting.

Of letting you hear it.

And maybe, more than anything, he’s afraid you won’t look at him the same if you do.

You wait until the next lull. After the data finishes compiling. After you both fall into quiet, careful work, pretending the air isn’t thick with everything unsaid.

Then, without looking up, you ask:

“What are you really thinking?”

The words slip out like a whisper. Not a demand. A coaxing.

You hear him stop breathing.

His fingers freeze on the console.

You look up.

He’s staring down at his hands like they belong to someone else. His brows twitch — the smallest knot of conflict pulling across his forehead.

You don’t press. You wait.

He swallows hard.

“I—” His voice is rougher than you’ve ever heard it. “I don’t think I should say.”

You nod slowly. “I know.”

There’s a pause. The kind that feels like a coin balanced on its edge — waiting to tip.

Then, finally, Reed lifts his gaze to meet yours.

It’s not a sharp glance. Not a command or a calculation. It’s vulnerable. Raw.

“Are you sure?”

You nod before your brain can stop you. “I’m sure.”

Your heart hammers against your ribs.

The silence that follows isn’t heavy. It’s charged.

And then—soft, almost reverent, like he’s saying it for himself more than for you—his thought brushes your mind.

She’s the most astonishing thing I’ve ever seen.

You don’t move.

She’s smart. Composed. And when she smiles at me like that, I want to get on my knees and put my mouth on her cunt until she forgets every name but mine.

Your breath catches.

Reed’s eyes are still on yours. Steady. Honest.

I want to see her fall apart. Hear her. Feel her thighs around my face. I want her to let go with me. Just once. Just to know what it’s like to make someone like her come.

You’re frozen.

Flushed.

His thoughts echo again, softer now, barely there:

I would be gentle. At first. I’d learn her rhythms. I’d listen.

You part your lips, but no sound comes out.

Reed doesn’t look away.

You see the tension in his jaw. The restraint. The ache he’s too careful to name aloud.

But this time, he’s not hiding.

He’s giving you the truth.

And your whole body sings with it.

The silence stretches, but it doesn’t break.

Reed watches you like he’s waiting for you to flinch. For you to run. For you to laugh it off or look away or say no.

You don’t.

Your breath is shallow. Your pulse pounds behind your ribs like a warning, like a promise. But you don’t move.

You stay.

Reed’s fingers flex slightly at his sides. A twitch. A tremor. And then—carefully, like he’s unsure the ground will hold—he takes one slow step forward.

Your heart leaps.

He pauses.

Then another step.

Still watching you.

You straighten, knees brushing the edge of the console. Your hands—useless at your sides—curl instinctively into the hem of your coat. You feel like a held breath. Like one word might shatter you.

And then he’s close enough that you can see it in his face—the nerves he’s trying to hide. The deep ache folded into his silence. The apology still lingering beneath his restraint.

But also the want.

So much want.

You reach out.

Just a little.

And that’s all it takes.

His hand lifts—slow, hesitant—and finds yours midair. The contact is gentle. Barely there. Your fingers brush his palm and his thumb curves awkwardly over your knuckles, like he doesn’t know if he’s allowed.

But you link your fingers with his.

You squeeze.

His breath shudders.

You’re close now. Not quite touching chest to chest. Not yet. But his body radiates heat like a solar flare, and your joined hands hang between you like a thread you’re both afraid to tug.

He doesn’t say anything.

He doesn’t have to.

His thoughts are quiet, but open. Not graphic. Not filthy this time.

She’s here. She’s still here.

You lift your other hand—slowly, carefully—and touch the crook of his elbow. His arm tenses for half a second, then relaxes under your touch.

His hand in yours tightens. Just a little.

You smile at him. Tentative. Like before.

And this time, Reed exhales like it breaks something loose inside him.

You lean in slowly.

No rush. No sharp breath or whispered question. Just instinct. Trust. The press of his fingers wrapped in yours.

Your lips find his.

A soft, fleeting brush.

So light you could pretend it didn’t happen.

But it does.

He stills.

For a heartbeat, maybe two.

Then something inside him snaps.

Reed surges forward—still silent, but no longer hesitant. His free hand lifts to cup your jaw, fingers spanning your cheek with a trembling kind of reverence. His mouth crashes into yours again, firmer this time, open, hungry.

You gasp, and he takes it.

Takes you.

His lips drag over yours like he’s starved. His body leans into yours, chasing heat, chasing breath, chasing something he’s kept buried under equations and silence for too damn long.

You kiss him back, matching his pace, your fingers gripping the front of his shirt just to stay grounded.

It’s not perfect. It’s messy.

Teeth clash once. Your nose bumps his. He exhales sharply against your mouth, and you laugh, surprised and dizzy.

Reed groans low in his throat like it drives him wild.

His grip shifts—hand sliding to the back of your neck, the other pressing firm at your waist, tugging you closer. There’s no more distance now. You’re chest to chest, breath to breath, his mouth working yours like it’s a formula he’s been dying to solve.

You reach blindly for something—anything—to anchor yourself.

Your fingers find the edge of his belt.

Not teasing. Not intentional.

Just need.

A way to keep your feet on the ground while the rest of you unravels.

You clutch the leather and kiss him deeper.

And Reed—God, Reed—moans softly into your mouth like he’s the one overwhelmed.

His thoughts flood through you again, all barriers down now.

So soft. So warm. She kissed me first.

I want to lift her onto the desk. Get my hands under that coat.

I want to taste her. Right now. Right fucking now.

Your knees buckle slightly, and he catches you with both arms, tugging you flush against him, the hard press of his belt against your stomach making your skin spark.

You don’t speak.

Neither does he.

But you kiss like you’re telling secrets. Like you’re breaking rules. Like every second is borrowed time. 

Reed drops to his knees.

It happens fast. One second his mouth is pressed to yours, the next he’s sinking down like gravity’s claimed him — like he’s meant to be there. At your feet. Between your legs. Worshipful and wild.

His hands slide up your thighs, warm and unhurried. He lifts your skirt like he’s unfolding a secret he’s only ever dreamed of touching. You brace one hand against the console behind you, the other tangled in his hair, fingers trembling.

He doesn’t speak.

He stares.

Like your thighs are a formula. Like the space between them holds the answer to every question he’s never let himself ask.

Then his hands slide higher, thumbs brushing the crease of your hips, and he leans in.

He kisses the inside of your knee. Then higher.

Your breath catches as his mouth moves up your thigh—soft, open-mouthed kisses dragging heat across your skin. He hums low in his throat, like he’s cataloging every inch, and you feel it all the way to your core.

“Fuck,” you whisper, your head tipping back.

Reed doesn’t stop.

He kisses just beside the place you want him most. Once. Twice. Then his hands shift—firm on your hips—and he nuzzles against your panties, dragging his nose along the damp fabric like he needs to breathe you.

And then—his thoughts, finally, finally back:

She’s soaked. God, she’s so wet. All for me.

Your legs shake.

He pulls your panties aside and exhales softly at the sight.

Perfect.

And then his mouth is on you.

You cry out—sharp and helpless—the sound echoing off the walls of the lab. He licks a slow stripe through your folds, groaning like he’s tasted something he’ll never recover from.

You grip his hair harder.

Reed doesn’t stop. Doesn’t hesitate. He licks you like he needs it, tongue dragging up to circle your clit, then back down to press flat against your entrance. His thoughts are a blur—lust, wonder, obsession—louder now, less composed.

You whimper.

She’s so sweet. Want to keep her like this. Want her coming on my tongue.

He moans against you, the vibration shooting through your whole body. His mouth moves faster, more deliberate, like he’s testing responses, building a pattern. Every flick of his tongue is data. Every gasp from you is a new variable to study.

Your knees threaten to give, and he only grips your thighs tighter, pulling you closer, mouth never leaving you.

“Reed—fuck, I—”

You shatter.

Come for me, he thinks, right as his lips wrap around your clit and suck.

Your cry rips through the air, your body spasming against his mouth. He doesn’t let up. He holds you through it—tongue coaxing, soothing, tasting every twitch and shake as you come undone.

And when it’s over, when your chest is heaving and your thighs are trembling, he looks up at you.

Mouth wet. Eyes dark.

Ravenous.

He stands, slow and steady, hands dragging up your thighs as he rises. When he’s eye level again, you see it—his mouth slick with you, his chest rising hard like he’s been holding his breath the whole time.

He doesn’t say anything at first.

Just pulls you in and wraps both arms around your waist, pressing his face into your neck. He inhales deeply.

And fucking hell, he smells like you.

“Are you alright?” he murmurs, voice low and gritty in your ear.

You let out a breathless laugh, your chest still fluttering. “You’re seriously asking me that?”

He lets out a sound — not quite a laugh, not quite a groan — and you feel it more than hear it, vibrating against your throat. His hips are right against you now, belt biting into your lower stomach. He’s hard. So fucking hard.

You push against him, mouth near his jaw. “Reed.”

He pulls back just enough to look at you. And when he does, your hands come up to frame his face.

Not tender. Hungry.

You drag your thumb across his bottom lip. His eyes flick down to your mouth like he’s about to lose it.

“What are you thinking?” you ask.

A pause.

Then his gaze darkens, and the answer bleeds out of him—wordless but clear.

I want to fuck her right here. I want to bend her over this table and hear what she sounds like when she’s cock-drunk.

Your knees go weak.

And he sees it.

You don’t say a word.

You just drop your hand from his face, trail it down between your bodies, and reach for his belt.

Reed doesn’t stop you.

Doesn’t even blink.

He watches, jaw tight, as you tug the leather loose, then work open the button and drag the zipper down. The metal teeth part with a low rasp, and he exhales sharply when your hand slips inside.

You wrap your fingers around him.

Hot. Heavy. Hard as hell.

“Jesus,” you murmur under your breath, stroking him once, slow and deliberate.

Reed’s head tips back.

His hips jerk forward slightly, chasing the friction, but he still doesn’t touch you. Just lets you have him, your hand moving over his cock like you’ve been thinking about it for weeks.

(You have.)

His thoughts are a mess—fractals of want, raw and unfiltered.

You squeeze a little tighter.

She’s touching me. She’s—fuck—she’s got her hand on my cock. I’m not going to last.

His breath catches.

“You’ve been thinking about this?” you ask, voice low, thumb swiping the head.

“Every goddamn day,” he grits out.

You jerk him faster.

He growls.

And then—too fast to brace for—he grabs your hips and spins you around.

Your palms slam against the console. You gasp, but you don’t stop him—not when you feel him crowding up behind you, not when his hands drag your skirt back up to your waist, not when he rips your panties down your thighs in one fluid motion.

One hand slides up your spine, pushing between your shoulder blades until your chest is flush to the table.

The other guides his cock to your entrance.

“Say you want this,” he breathes out, the head of him nudging against your slick folds.

You push back into him.

“Reed,” you pant, “just fuck me already.”

He groans like it’s ripped out of his throat and then he slams into you hard.

Your gasp turns into a choked moan as your body jolts forward from the force of it. One of his hands clamps tight around your hip, the other braced beside your head on the console. His cock drives into you again, again, again—deep, punishing thrusts that make your breath stutter with each slap of skin on skin.

The sounds echo off the lab walls—your gasps, his ragged breath, the obscene wet suck of your cunt taking him over and over.

“Fuck,” Reed growls, hips snapping, “you feel even better than I thought.”

Your eyes flutter shut.

His mouth is right at your ear now, breath hot and filthy.

“I’ve been thinking about this since the day you walked in,” he pants. “That face. Those sweet thighs. Wanted to bend you over this table and fuck you stupid.”

You cry out—high, breathless—when he grinds into you just right, cock dragging over every swollen nerve inside you.

“I knew you’d be wet for me,” he growls. “But this?”

His fingers slip down, find your clit, and rub fast, hard, cruel.

“You’re soaked. So fucking messy.”

You brace yourself on trembling arms, the pressure building fast—too fast. He’s everywhere, filling you, touching you, whispering things he should never say out loud.

“You gonna come for me, pretty girl?” he grits out, voice tight and close.

You whimper, legs shaking. “I—fuck, I think I—”

“You’re close,” he hisses. “I can feel it.”

His pace goes brutal. He fucks into you like he wants to break you, the slap of his hips against your ass echoing over every surface, every panel and beaker forgotten. Your cunt clamps down, fluttering, and your voice breaks into a cry as your climax rips through you.

You don’t just come. You gush.

A warm burst sprays out of you, splashing down your thighs, hitting the tile with a wet splatter. You cry out, humiliated and wrecked and still twitching, your walls milking his cock in desperate aftershocks.

Reed groans like he’s dying.

“God damn,” he breathes.

You can’t speak. Your cheek is pressed to the console, mouth open, panting, whole body slick and trembling.

He doesn’t stop. He fucks you through it, harder now, more ragged. You feel the way your slick coats his cock, dripping down onto the lab floor with every brutal thrust.

You feel ruined. Your legs give out.

There’s no warning. No graceful slide. Just the quivering collapse of overstimulated muscles, your knees hitting the tile with a soft thud, skirt bunched around your waist, panties still tangled around your thighs.

You don’t care, you don't think you could.

Not with your cunt still twitching from the last orgasm, your thighs sticky, the lab floor glistening with the evidence of just how hard he made you come.

Reed groans above you and you glance up.

He’s flushed and wrecked, shirt untucked, cock still slick with your arousal as he strokes himself, fast and frantic, hand gliding over the mess you left behind.

“Fuck,” he breathes. “You look—Jesus.”

You open your mouth, just slightly.

Not coy nor innocent, but ready.

You brace yourself on one arm and tilt your chin up, eyes locked on him. The unspoken invitation hits him like a punch.

His grip falters. He bites down a moan. You see his whole body jerk with restraint.

“Please,” you whisper, voice hoarse and aching. “I want it.”

That does it.

He grunts, cock twitching in his hand. “Fuck—fuck—”

He steps forward, the tip of him flushed and slick and angry-looking, and you hold steady even as your thighs tremble. His breath goes wild, chest heaving as he pumps himself harder, faster, your name breaking on his tongue like a prayer.

“Gonna come,” he pants. “Fuck, I’m gonna—”

Thick, hot ropes paint your cheek, your lips, your chin. One lands across your chest, the rest splashing across your flushed skin. You close your eyes as the first drops hit, lips parted as you gasp at the heat of it.

He moans—deep, guttural, undone.

You feel it drip down your neck, cooling already.

When you blink up at him again, his hand is still wrapped around his cock, his chest still rising like he’s run a mile. His eyes meet yours—dark, dazed, hungry—and the raw possessiveness isn’t there.

There's only you. 

His gaze drops to the mess he’s made of your face, and then to your mouth.

You swipe your thumb across your bottom lip, tasting him.

His breath stutters again.

“Holy shit,” he whispers.

You smile, slow and blissful.