idk, there's something wrong with me

he doesn’t give you enough time to think about refusing him — he eases himself forward, body slipping past the threshold with a quiet sort of inevitability. he fills your space the moment he steps inside — just immense in his own body.

“what needs fixin’, dove?” he asks, shrugging out of his coat. he’s grown accustomed to you needing him for something. a plumbing leak, a burnt out bulb, a window that won’t latch.

you smile as you turn the lock behind him. “nothin’ broke this time.”

“shame,” he murmurs, he enjoys taking care of you.

john hangs his jacket on the hook by the door, movements unhurried and fluid. then he turns back to you.

the shift in the air is subtle but instant when his eyes fix on yours.

he reaches for you slowly, calloused fingers curling around your wrist, drawing you close, hips leaning in to meet yours.

your bare foot nudges the toe of his boot when you step closer. his other hand slides into the dip of your spine, broad palm settling there, steadying you like you might drift away if he didn’t.

he smells of smoke, the last cigar he must’ve had in his flat before wandering down the hall.

“you sleep at all?” you murmur, your voice barely more than breath.

his jaw shifts beneath his beard. the smile stays, but it pulls straighter.

“twenty minutes here and there.”

your expression softens before you can stop it.

“that why you’re knockin’ at two in the mornin’?” you ask quietly, your fingers tracing a languid trail up his arm.

instead of answering, he dips his head.

his nose pushes into the curve of your neck, slow and unhurried, beard grazing your skin in a way that you missed deeply, in a way that makes your skin pebble. his hand tightens almost imperceptibly at your back as he inhales you, like he’s grounding himself.

when he speaks, his voice is low and gravel-deep, you feel the vibration against your skin.

“y’know i can’t sleep without seein’ my girl.”

the words curl warm in your ear. it’s possession dressed as affection. you never quite know which one he means.

his lips part against your jaw and your back bends like a bow in response, a soft breath slipping from you as he sears a slow trail of open-mouthed kisses along your warming flesh. he rewards you with a hum, like you’ve done exactly as expected.

his hand drifts from the small of your back, sliding lower with a familiarity that makes your pulse quicken. roughened fingers slipping beneath the waist of your shorts, easing past the fabric to palm your ass.

your breath catches, fingers curling into the fabric of his shirt. you could stop him — this — you know that, he knows that.

but you don’t.

because this is the rhythm you two always fall into when he’s home — he arrives restless, and you unwind him inch by inch like a spool of yarn that never quite stops spinning. the string of him looping through your touch, tangling in your fingers, tugging you closer even as it loosens him.

he eases back to meet your gaze, his free hand comes up to your jaw, tilting your chin up. your eyes are flicking across his face, taking him in this close — the wrinkles adorning his ocean eyes, the half-healed cut on his forehead, the salt & pepper in his beard that seems to multiply every time he’s away.

“eyes on me, dove,” he murmurs the direction and your eyes flick to his immediately. “you gonna let me see my girl?”

“yes, sir.”

It smells like damp soil and the pinot noir stained in your mouth, a hint of the pumpkin beer that David from Planning managed to splash on your dress in the middle of a very animated impression of your boss. You’re in your good coat too, the burgundy wool one with the deep pockets bought on that questionable Saturday back in September – you remember the one, where you seemingly burned through an entire paycheck on new clothes ‘for the office’.

Your heels are echoing through the street, your cashmere scarf still half unwound from the heat of the pub, and you’re just turning the corner when you smell him.

A scent so distinctive now that your body knows it before your brain does and your steps begin to slacken before you’ve made the choice to. Cigar smoke furls through the brisk air – dark chocolate and fig jam spread beneath a layer of woody tobacco.

You’d like to taste it, you think.

It’s been four days since John kissed you, touched you.

Four days of passing each other on the stairs with his morning coffee from the corner and your bags sliding off your shoulder. Brief corridor conversations about nothing, really, but sometimes he picks up your falling straps without being asked, and you go down the stairs and he goes up them and the days continue on around you like nothing is different.

Except everything feels very different.

He’s leaning against the front of the building off to the side of the steps, one shoulder against the brick, cigar pinched at his side. He’s got his black coat on tonight, the collar turned up against the breeze, a knitted black beanie pulled low to his brows. He’s staring off at something across the street in that way people do when they’re sort of just existing in a moment.

He notices you over the hedges before you’ve turned down the path, the ringing click of your heels giving you away.

As you fully come into view his eyes make a single leisurely pass, taking in your listing gait and your cold-bitten cheeks, the lopsided scarf hanging tenuously around your neck. The tip of his tongue drags along the inner edge of his bottom lip before he forces his bawdy gaze somewhere into the middleground.

“Evenin’,” he says before you reach the bottom step.

“Hi!” you chirp, voice so bright it surprises even you, the word comes out far more enthusiastic than intended, and you watch the corner of his mouth twitch in response.

“Good night?” he asks.

“A very good night,” you confirm, nodding ardently, smile pulling wider than you can help. Your eyes fall to his hand, his index finger hooked over the cigar, and you gesture before you can think better of it. “Think I could have some of that?” you ask, lashes fluttering.

He looks at you and then, without comment, holds it out to you. His eyes stay on your face while you take it and bring it to your mouth, watching while your lips wrap around its head, while you draw in carefully and let the smoke sit warm and rich and sweet on your tongue.

The leaf is damp and you think about the fact his mouth was here first, and that you’ve been thinking about his mouth for four days straight. Something low in your belly pulls tight and you exhale up into the air, the smoke dissipating in the dark.

You hold it back out and he takes it from you, watching you as he brings it back to his own lips. Your fingers find the soft fringe at the end of your scarf and twist.

“How many?” he asks, smoke seeping out around the shape of his words.

You grin knowingly as you turn toward the door. “How many what?”

He’s still just watching you, patient, a brow raising imperceptibly. The cigar sends up a ghost of a thread between you.

“Two and a half,” you reply finally, gripping the railing as you negotiate the first step. “Which is a perfectly respectable amount.”

“It is,” he agrees mildly, in the tone of a man who just did the math on two and a half glasses in relation to your body and arrived at a conclusion he’s keeping to himself.

He pushes off the wall and follows you up the steps, stubbing his cigar out on the railing as he goes.

The foyer is toasty after the cold of the street, not dramatically so, but enough to defrost your fingers. You exhale into it gratefully, finally unwinding your unruly scarf, feeling your cheeks tingle as the chill dissolves. Behind you, the door shuts heavily, and John’s footfalls are one leisurely pace behind yours.

“You walked back?” he asks as you reach the bottom of the staircase.

“It’s only twelve minutes,” you say, which is an answer to a slightly different question than the one he asked – you learn from the best.

“Alone,” he adds, grumbling.

You glance over your shoulder at him as you take the first step up. “John,” you giggle, warning.

“I was only going to say…” he begins, and you sigh ruefully, “that it’s late.”

“It’s half ten,” you counter, walking up.

“And dark.”

“Well, it’s nighttime, so…”

“And you’ve had–”

“Two and a half,” you cut in as you pause, hand on the banister as you look back and smile, “which is a perfectly–”

“–Respectable amount. Yeah,” he finishes, and the tone of it is so dry you could use it as kindling if it were a tangible thing.

You laugh at him, bright and loose, the sound bouncing off the stairwell and coming back to you both tenfold.

He’s just coming up behind you when you take another step and your heel snags a rogue rip in the carpet. His hand instinctually finds the small of your back before you’ve even registered losing balance, and you right yourself with a murmured ‘thank you’ before you keep climbing.

The pressure of his touch, however, lingers after it’s gone.

Gone – which is the operative word and precisely the problem.

You think about it for exactly three more steps before deciding that it should come back.

You come to a stop on the stairs and turn to face him. Being a step up puts you almost level with him for once, close enough that you don’t have to tip your chin for the first time since you’ve known him, close enough to see that damn freckle on his nose and the way the light settles into the lines beside his eyes in a way that opens them up.

You reach out for his wrist, but he pulls back just out of reach, brows furrowing, an amused smile working its way up despite himself.

“No,” he chuckles, suspicious and fond all at once.

“I just–”

“You just nothin’,” he chastises, still smirking as he steps up beside you. “Keep walkin’,” he nods.

And you do, but not before your eyes slide to the side and you suck your teeth.

You manage to behave for four whole dignified steps. But on that fifth one, you make the mistake of looking at him, and he just looks so good in that fucking beanie that your body chooses for you.

You find yourself shifting and leaning into him, pushing your body against his until he’s got the banister at his back and you’ve got his full attention. He looks down at you with widened eyes and you look up at him grinning, your fingers slithering like snakes into his coat, palm meeting the solid curve of his stomach and sliding, sliding, sliding.

“Duck,” he warns, voice tight with restraint, you pause.

“I’m cold,” you sulk.

“You’re not cold.”

“I am.”

“You were fine thirty seconds ago.”

“Well, I wasn’t thinkin’ about it thirty seconds ago,” you argue.

He sighs something akin to a laugh and detaches your hand from his body, depositing it firmly onto the banister on your side of the step. His fingers close over yours, squeezing them around the painted wood.

“You’re bein’ awful cheeky,” he grumbles under his breath. “Hold it,” he insists, giving your hand another press.

“You’re bein’ bossy,” you inform him, tipping your head back so that he can fully appreciate your practiced pout.

“I know,” he replies, completely unbothered.

You both make it all the way to the landing outside his door before you’re turning to face him again, hands finding the lapels of his coat, and he looks at you like he saw this coming three steps ago.

“I just wanna–”

“No.”

“You don’t even know what I was gonna say!”

“I have a reasonable idea,” he exhales evenly.

“It’s quite rude,” you huff, “saying no to someone before they’ve even asked their question.”

John says nothing in return, he only looks at you. Then one hand comes up to pry your fingers from his coat.

“You’re not even a little tempted?” you whine exasperatedly.

You tilt your head, and the lights catch him at an angle that does nothing to help the humming under your skin. He is very handsome and the wine is simply making it harder to be normal about it.

“Eyes forward,” he says, pointing down the hall with two fingers. “Walk.”

“John,” you mewl.

“What did I say?”

“You’ve said a lot of things,” you point out. “You’re very chatty.”

He huffs before turning you firmly by your shoulders, one hand at your back, urging you, guiding you the last few steps down the hall.

At your flat, you spin on your heel and lean back against the door, he’s close enough that you have to tip your chin again. The wine has flooded your senses making your venture seem all that more attainable and you’re very much aware of how near he is and how much nearer you would like him to be.

Your hands find his lapels again, reaching out, fingers smoothing down the fabric, tugging once at the ends and staying like weights, it makes him shuffle a half-step closer.

“You could… come in,” you purr.

His eyes drop to your hands and then come back to your face, and for a split second he looks like he’s at war with himself, one that he’s only winning by a thin margin.

“Not tonight,” he says firmly, without leaving much room for argument.

But still, the pout arrives before you can stop it, tugging at the corners of your mouth, and you look up at him through the fan of your lashes, foot scooting forward until the front of your shoe taps the toe of his boot.

“Why don’t you want me?” you murmur, but something more genuine sneaks into it at the last second – too honest, too revealing, too indicative of his rejections up the stairs.

He goes still, two lines pulling deep between his brows, then there’s the quietest click of his tongue, and the knuckle of his index comes up beneath your chin, tipping it. He searches your face, cerulean eyes taking in your tipsy gaze when something pained moves through them.

“I think you know that I do,” he says gently, cocking his head. “Hm?”

Your eyes fall to his chest, cheeks glowing.

The calloused pad of his thumb traces an invisible line below your bottom lip, dragging it crooked before his hand drops back to his side.

He steps into your space now and dips his head, and when he speaks his lips are close enough to your ear that you feel the warmth of his breath against its shell, his beard lightly scratching at your cheek. A short breath escapes you and your fingers twitch toward him at your side, but you don’t touch him again.

“Go to bed,” he murmurs, low.

He doesn’t pull back right away though, he stays where he is, the round tip of his cold nose pressing to the soft place just below your ear. You can hear him breathe you in there, like he just couldn’t help himself – taking in the scent of you, your perfume gone tender from the heat of your flesh, vanilla and ginger mingling with the wine seeping through your pores.

He’s close enough to taste you if he’d let himself.

You feel him freeze after, the stiff spine of a man who’s realized exactly how far he just let himself go and is deciding not to go any further. A single measured exhale leaves him before he steps back again. The cold air of the hall rushes in to fill the space where he was as if it was just waiting for the chance.

You hold his gaze a heartbeat longer, fingers wrapped around the doorknob at your back, your pulse pounding at the place his skin met yours.

“Okay,” you concede, barely above a whisper.

“Night, duck,” he says, and the tenderness of it follows you through your door and stays with you long after you lock it.

On the other side, you stand in your dark entryway, coat still on, scarf loose in your hand, the wine warm in your chest, the ghost of his breath still sitting somewhere on your neck, and his voice rattling between your eardrums.

You hear the creek of his door open and close, and you stand there a moment longer, smiling at nothing.

––––––

The knock comes around nine o’clock.

The firmness of the raps reach you with the thick woolen weight of a hangover settled into your temples. You lie there, on the sofa, with your cheek pressed to the cushion, blinking at the coffee table as your brain reassembles itself to being awake.

Your flat, you notice, looks like Friday happened to it. Heels where you stepped out of them just inside the door, your coat and scarf thrown over the back of a chair, sloppily pooling on the floor below. Your purse is tipped on its side across the entryway bench, lipgloss and credit cards and loose change making a slow escape across the upholstery.

There’s a glass of water on the coffee table in front of you that Last Night You left for Morning You, and you reach forward to drain it in four long swallows before forcing yourself up, padding over to the door, and pulling it open.

John’s stood there in a soft grey hoodie beneath his leather jacket, light wash jeans, two takeaway coffees balanced atop each other in one hand. He takes up space the way he always does, like doorways weren’t quite built with men like him in mind.

He makes a quick pass over you, taking in your mid-thigh oversized band tee and the one sock rolled lower than the other. The corner of his mouth pulls up just slightly before he holds the top cup out.

“Thought you might need this,” he offers.

“Ugh, you’re an angel,” you murmur, taking it with both hands and stepping back from the door.

He follows you in without being asked, and when he crosses the threshold he stops short, and you watch him take in your flat the way you did his.

It’s the same bones of a completely different animal – colorful where his is less so, lived-in where his is bare, every one of your surfaces doing multiple jobs.

Your furniture runs in autumnal colors. A velvet sofa so deep a rust it goes almost copper in the morning light, an oak coffee table distressed at the corners from ware. Your bookshelves are painted the kind of green that takes some thought to name and is filled well past any reasonable capacity – books lined and stacked and shoved where they could fit. The rug beneath it all is an ochre and cream situation with an indescribable pattern, frankly.

Your walls are decorated with paintings you salvaged from secondhand shops – a large landscape canvas above the couch and beside it, a smaller old oil portrait of a young girl and a lamb in a tarnished gilt frame.

There are half-burned candles on every surface, their wax gone sculptural from use. The desk is a spectacular disaster – an old company mug bristling with pens and markers planted in the middle of a landslide of manila folders and loose papers, a laptop half-buried under it all.

The snake plant on the windowsill looks like it’s doing its best.

And after a single deep breath, John steps over your heels without uttering a word.

You drift back to the sofa and pull your feet up beneath you, wrapping both hands around your cup. John settles into the floral armchair across from you, ankle on his knee, entirely at ease in your space in a way that makes last night press a little closer to your beating temples – the stairwell, your hands on him, his breath on your neck, the wine-ache of wanting.

You take a sip of your coffee and look out the window.

“How’s your head?” he asks.

“Fine,” you lie. 

“Mm,” he offers, which you think means he believes you and also means he doesn’t.

You look at him over the rim of your cup. The side of his mouth is doing that little tugging thing again which suggests he might be thinking of last night a tad more fondly than you are. Your cheeks start to tingle and you take another sip and look back at the window.

“You didn’t have to get me coffee,” you say.

“I get coffee after my run every morning,” he replies. You look back.

“I didn’t know you ran.”

“I have a routine,” he shrugs.

“Every morning?” you press, which is less a question and more you doing the arithmetic of what that means about the hours he keeps while you’re still horizontal and useless across the hall.

“Every morning,” he confirms.

“And what does that look like?”

He wipes a hand down his beard and uncrosses his leg to bring his elbows to his knees, leaning forward with both hands around his coffee.

“Run eight, maybe ten clicks. Push-ups, pull-ups. Stuff I can do in the flat.” A pause. “More important work gets done elsewhere."

You sit with that, the image of him doing said routine, flushed and sheen. It does a hot, complicated thing in your chest that you choose not to examine on an empty stomach.

“Are you hungry?” you ask.

“I could eat.”

“There’s a place ‘round the corner,” you start. “I go every Saturday. Their eggs are life-changing and the coffee’ll sort you out even if you don’t need sorting.”

“Yeah, alright,” he replies simply, easier to convince than you thought. And you both put your half-drunk cups on the table and leave it at that.

It takes you twenty minutes to get ready, and when you emerge from your bedroom in jeans and a cream knitted jumper with your hair done and your face on, John is standing at your bookshelf doing what you did to his – head tilted slightly, reading spines, curious in a way he probably wouldn’t be if he knew you were watching.

You lean against the doorframe and let yourself look.

He pulls one out – slim, a little battered, Honored Guest by Joy Williams, a strange collection of short stories you’ve had since uni – and turns it over in his hands, eyes moving across the back cover. His thumb runs along the worn edge of the spine, just once.

You let yourself look for exactly as long as it takes him to finish.

“Ready,” you tell him.

He slots it back exactly where he found it.

––––––

You leave the building into a cold grey morning, the air sharp and clean after the comfort of your flat, and fall into step beside each other on the pavement, your shoulder occasionally finding his arm as you walk, neither of you adjusting.

Your breath fogs between you. John has his hands in his coat pockets, taking in the neighborhood observantly – the things that have been here forever, the things that haven’t – and saying nothing about any of it, which is very him.

“It’s just down here,” you say, turning the corner.

“I know,” he says, because he runs past it every morning, which for some reason makes you smile.

The café appears at the end of the next street, its windows glowing against the grey, and even from here you can smell the rich coffee and the butter, and something sickeningly sweet drifting from the pastry case.

It’s the kind of place that’s been here forever and won’t be going anywhere anytime soon. Mismatched chairs, intimate tables, handwritten specials on a chalkboard that hasn’t changed anything but its prices in twenty years. The air steamy from the kitchen, the windows fogged at the edges where the cold outside meets the muggy air within.

You watch John take it in from the doorway – a passing sweep of his eyes across the room, assessing and then releasing, his shoulders dropping by a fraction. He looks like a man who has been in enough new rooms for two lifetimes.

The hostess, Diane, looks up when you push through the door, her face doing its usual fond crease of recognition.

Diane is short and brisk, somewhere north of sixty, with cropped grey hair and the same thick-framed plum colored glasses she’s worn every Saturday since you’ve been coming in. She has a way of looking at you like you’re one of hers – which, by the accumulation of Saturdays, you suppose you might be.

“There you are!” she beams, already reaching for menus. “Your usual table’s free, come on then.”

Her eyes slide to John briefly, just once. A quick cheerful assessment, the kind that misses nothing after years of working a room. Her gaze shifts back to you, and her smile seems a bit wider than usual.

“Two this mornin’,” she chirps to herself, but pointedly enough for you to hear, already weaving through the tables.

She leads you both to your table tucked in the corner beside the window.

John is already shrugging out of his coat, his hand catching the back of your chair and sliding it out in a gesture so natural to him he doesn’t seem to notice he’s doing it, and you sit down and try to think about the last time someone had done that for you and come up empty.

He settles across from you and picks up the menu.

Diane returns with two mugs of coffee without having even asked. You wrap both hands around one and look at John across from you, properly, in decent light, outside the damp atmosphere of your building for the first time – and he looks almost the same out here. A little easier, maybe. His shoulders seem looser.

He’s looking at the chalkboard specials with a small frown of concentration.

“Full breakfast,” you tell him. “That’s all you need to know.”

He glances at you. “And if I want somethin’ else?”

“You don’t,” you say, grinning. “Trust me.”

He considers that, looks back at the chalkboard, then sets his menu down.

“Okay,” he agrees, and picks up his coffee instead. “I trust you.”

Diane comes back to take your order, addressing most of her questions to John with the deference of someone who has marked he is in charge, which he handles with a patience that suggests he has noticed and chosen not to correct it, and you hide your smile behind your coffee cup and say nothing.

The morning opens up around you, easy and undemanding. You find yourself telling him about last night in the way you do when you’re still a little lit up about something; Cerie from accounts, David from the planning team, the second bar, the questionable decision to order a round of shots. And he listens with that focused attention of his, asking the occasional question that somehow keeps you rambling longer than you mean to.

“David does this thing,” you start explaining, “where he’ll say something, just, bloody devastating about someone and then immediately follow it up with the most sincere compliment you’ve ever heard in your life. So we don’t ever know how to feel–”

Your phone goes off in your purse, a double ding and a buzz.

You reach into your bag, the reflex of it bypassing your brain entirely, and you’re already reading the email before you’ve consciously decided to, thumb moving across the screen to reply.

“–and I think that’s actually just his personality, like he’s not even doin’ it on purpose, he just– sorry, one second– he just has this way of– this’ll just take a–” your thumbs keep moving, “–yeah, no, I’m listening– he has this way of makin’ you feel like–”

The typing catches up with you somewhere in the middle of that sentence and your eyes flick up from your phone and land on John.

He’s got both hands loosely around his coffee cup, watching you with a patience that somehow, with a single word, communicates everything. Heat crawls up your cheeks and to your ears.

You put the phone face down on the table.

“Sorry,” you murmur, shamefaced.

“Mm,” he hums, which is not quite ‘it’s fine’ and not quite ‘it isn’t’.

You take your cup back into your hand, sufficiently chastened, and there is a beat between you that is just slightly sharp.

“What is it you do?” he asks, in the mild even tone of a man who has just watched you conduct half a conversation with your thumbs moving with another and would like to understand what he witnessed.

“Project management for a property development firm,” you say. “Which means I mostly live in spreadsheets and other people’s arguments about budgets until something actually gets built. And then I can go stand on site and feel like it was worth it.” You pause, coffee cup halfway to your mouth. “It’s exactly as relentless as it sounds.”

“Busy at the moment?” he asks.

“Honestly,” you shake your head. “New contract just landed. Big government client, so there’s a lot of paperwork before we even get on site.”

“Whereabouts?” he asks mildly.

“Can’t really say,” you reply, a little ruefully. “Which honestly feels a bit dramatic for a construction project but apparently that’s just how it is with this kind of client.”

He nods once and takes a sip of coffee, and that’s the end of it.

“You’re good at it,” he says like he already knows.

“I am,” you agree. “Which, most days, feels like enough.”

“Most days,” he echoes, just noting that he heard it. He turns his cup in his hands. “D’you like it?” he asks. “Or are you just good at it?”

The distinction lands somewhere you weren’t expecting it to and you go still, your finger tracing the handle of your mug.

“I don’t know,” you admit. “I think I’ve spent a lot of time being good at things other people needed me to be good at.” You shrug once and bite the inside of your cheek in thought. “I’ve no idea what I’d actually choose, if I was just, like, choosing for myself.” You laugh a little then, small and self-aware, cheeks heating. “That’s probably too honest for a Saturday morning.”

“No,” he shakes his head gently. “I asked.”

The way he says it makes the hair at the back of your neck prickle.

He looks at you, something considered moving through his face.

“You’ll figure it out,” he says plainly, a firm thing, like he’s assessed you down and arrived at a clear conclusion and sees no reason to dress it up to pretend otherwise.

You briefly look down at your hands and feel the words settle somewhere you’d like them to stay for a while.

“Yeah,” you say. “Maybe.”

Diane comes back with your food and the moment dissolves into the ordinary business of breakfast – plates set down, cutlery unwrapped, the rhythm of two people eating together.

The eggs are, as promised, life-changing.

And at some point the conversation drifts to the neighborhood and the way it’s changed over the years, the things that have come and gone.

“There used to be a proper hardware shop on the corner, family owned,” he says, nodding vaguely toward the street outside. “Before they put that… whatever it is now. The place with the green juice.”

“The wellness place,” you say, smirking around a bite of toast. “‘Bloom.’”

“Bloom,” he echoes with a disapproval so honest that your smile widens until teeth show.

“When was the hardware shop there?” you ask, curious.

He thinks. “Closed… must’ve been 2006, 2007 maybe.”

You look at him, nose scrunching, doing some math.

“John,” you prompt.

“Mm.”

“I was, like, nine in 2007.”

His eyes find yours over his mug.

His expression moves through several phases in the span of a few seconds, landing somewhere that is not quite discomfort and not quite amusement and not quite anything he seems to know what to do with.

“I genuinely have no memory of a world with a hardware shop on that corner,” you continue, pleasantly. “That corner has always been ‘green juice’ to me.”

He sets his mug down and shifts in his chair more than once, like he’s trying to both lean closer and move further away.

“Nine?” he grumbles, low and incredulous. Less a question than it is something he’s simply repeating back to himself to see if it changes.

You look back at him over your fork, steady and trying to stop the twitch playing at the corner of your lips. “Nine,” you confirm.

He picks up his mug. Sets it back down. Picks it up again.

“Right,” he murmurs to himself, and takes a long sip that suggests he’s using the coffee as something to do with his face.

You say nothing in return, which is its own kind of answer, and hide your smile behind your hand and let him sit with it.

He has another round of coffee and admits it’s the best he’s had outside of this one place in Lisbon – which opens up a conversation about… places.

Places he can talk about and the ones he can’t, the ones he describes only in terms of the food or the sun or the quality of the light, which you understand is the closest he can get to talking about them. He tells you about a market in Marrakech where he bought a spice he still can’t identify but has been putting in everything since. You argue briefly and enjoyably about whether Florence or Rome is the superior city and reach no conclusion and don’t need to.

The café empties and refills around you while you stay at your table. The fogged window beside you clouds and clears with the cold outside and the heat inside. Diane refills your waters with no fuss.

At some point, with no announcement, the bill simply ceases to exist. You notice this in a vague, delayed sort of way that you notice things when you’re mid-conversation – the black folder gone from the corner of the table, John’s wallet already being tucked into his back pocket like he’s done nothing worth mentioning.

You open your mouth in protest.

He picks up his coffee without looking at you, and something in the nonchalance of it closes your mouth again. You watch him take a sip, with no rush, entirely unbothered, and feel something grow into a ball at the soft center of your throat that you swallow down with the last of your water and say nothing about.

On the way out Diane catches your eye near the door and mouths ‘he’s lovely’ with an enthusiasm that requires your full composure to receive gracefully. You smile and nod and absolutely do not look at John, who is holding the door open.

Outside, you fall into step beside each other naturally.

“Thank you,” you say, after a while, “for coming.”

He looks at you from the corner of his eyes. “I wanted to.”

He faces forward again, hands in his coat pockets, the silence that settles between you is comfortable – easy and undemanding, like a quiet that knows it’s welcome.

––––––

On the landing outside your doors you stop, turning to face him.

He looks back at you, hands still in his pockets, the familiar air of the corridor circling you both.

“Same time next Saturday?” you ask lightly.

“Yeah,” he nods. “Alright.”

You grin to yourself and let yourself into your flat.

John stands in the corridor a moment after your door closes, looking at the space where you were. Then he turns and goes back to his own.

––––––

The week after breakfast is a good one, though, unremarkable.

There is the Monday morning stairwell – you running late as usual, coat half on, and him coming up as you’re going down with his coffee from the corner, and the narrow turn of the stairwell meaning he has to flatten slightly against the wall to let you pass, and you squeeze by him with a breathless ‘thanks’ and he says nothing, just watches you go, and you’re already at the bottom before the smell of his shampoo catches up with you in the stairwell and sits in your chest like his hand pressed against it.

There is the night you fall asleep to the low murmur of his television through the wall, your book open on your chest and the lamp still on in the corner, the familiar sound of him simply existing on the other side of the plaster carrying you under.

There’s Wednesday; you come home wrung out, coat slung over your arm, laptop bag cutting into your shoulder, a tension headache sitting directly behind your left eye. You eat a bowl of cereal standing at your kitchen counter because anything else feels nauseating. You think distantly about knocking on his door and then don’t, because there’ll be time, it’s not like he’s going anywhere.

Except that in that same very night – Thursday morning, really – you surface blearily from sleep to the sound of boots thumping. Heavy and purposeful, a rhythm of them that you know now without knowing you know it. And beneath that, faintly, through the shared wall, the muted sounds of drawers, of movement, of a flat being left in a hurry.

Your eyes fully open to the dark ceiling.

You lie there a beat, gauzy with sleep, the sounds filtering through without quite landing. Just him, up late, the way he sometimes is, you think.

You turn over. Pull the duvet up and go back to sleep.

It’s only when you come home the next evening – phone in your hand, still half-reading an email that should have been sent an hour ago – that you see it: a single envelope resting against his door.

You stop. Look at it like it doesn’t quite make sense, your tired brain turning the thought over. You can feel an ache in your stomach begin to prod at your insides, but… it’s just one envelope. Could be anything. Could be nothing!

You go inside, open your laptop to distract yourself with work, order from the Italian spot across town. Later, you watch an hour of television without absorbing any of it.

Before bed, you open your front door and look down the hall.

The envelope is still there.

The corridor is still in the way it gets still when it’s missing something – the air gone thin, melancholy again. Your stomach drops slow and absolute, answering a question you haven’t finished asking yet. You stand there in your doorway in your socks, one hand on the frame, the building settling and creaking around you in the dark.

Then you cross the hall and pick it up.

The post comes every day, and every day you collect it – sliding it from his doorstep on your way in, adding it to the pile on your table with a horrible familiarity you recognize from before. From those first weeks when he was just a name on an address line.

Except it’s different now.

Now you know the weight of his hands. You know how he takes his tea and how he laughs and what it’s like to have his attention when he’s really listening. The way he calls you ‘duck’ when he’s being gentle with you, and the way the whole building feels different when he’s in it.

The stack grows.

You keep picking it up.

––––––

He comes back seventeen days later.

You’re on your couch with your legs over the armrest, a throw pillow under your neck, and your laptop balanced on your stomach. You’re halfway through correcting a report that should have been finished two days ago with a half eaten bowl of pasta going cold on the cushion beside you when you hear it.

Just a key in a lock. The specific sound of it, the teeth of it turning, coming through the shared wall with the clarity that only old buildings and thin plaster allow.

You go very still.

The laptop screen blurs in front of you, the report suddenly irrelevant, your brain doing a careful pivot toward the wall like a plant turning toward sunlight.

You listen to the footsteps crossing his floor. The low thud of something being set down. The familiar creak of his floorboards in a spot near the kitchen that you’ve learned without realizing.

He’s back.

Then you close the laptop, set it on the coffee table, and turn your cheek into the cushion, look at the pile of envelopes on your entryway table.

––––––

John’s door opens on the second knock.

He’s still in his coat, tired around the eyes, a little rough at the edges, a shadow of seventeen days under his jaw, but solid underneath it all anyway.

His eyes find yours and the blue warms immediately.

“Hey–” he starts but doesn’t quite finish before you’re holding his post out. Both arms extended, all of it stacked between you, and you push it into his chest until he has no choice but to catch it, both arms coming up to gather it against himself, and you watch the burden of it register in his face.

He looks down at the pile. Then at you.

You stand in his doorway, swallowing around the ache that’s risen in your throat, close enough to see the slight furrow forming between his brows as he takes in your face properly. Your eyes are stinging at the corners and you blink against it once, hard, and hope he doesn’t catch it.

“Thank you,” he says carefully, testing the temperature.

You nod once before you turn around and walk back down the hall toward your own door, your arms wrapping around your middle.

His voice is behind you only seconds later.

“Hey,” he calls.

You keep walking. The seventeen days are sitting heavy and tender somewhere behind your sternum and you don’t trust your face to do anything reasonable if you turn around.

“Hey.” Closer now, and when you reach your door and put your hand on the knob he’s right there behind your shoulder. You can feel the shift in the air that happens when he’s near and you stop even though everything inside of you wants to put the door between the two of you.

“Come on, duck,” he says gently. Not pushing or persuading, just patient. Like he always is with you. “Let me come in.”

You stand there a beat longer.

Then you push the door open and go inside without looking back, leaving it open behind you and he follows.

You go back to the sofa and tuck your feet up beneath you. John settles into the armchair across from you, still in his coat, elbows on his knees, hands loose between them. His eyes find yours and stay there, you hold his gaze and feel the full sharp aggravation of his composure being more intact than yours.

“I heard you leave,” you say eventually, because one of you has to. “Wednesday night.”

“Yeah.”

“And then I got home Thursday and the post was there and I just–” you stop. Breathe through your nose. Keep your voice level. “I just thought, right. He’s gone again.”

He exhales through his nose, a muscle shifting in his jaw. “I had to leave on short notice. It was–”

“I know,” you cut him off, your eyes squeezing shut. “I know how it works, John. I knew how it worked before any of this.” You gesture between you, which encompasses rather a lot. “I’m not asking you to have filed the flight plan with me. I understand that’s not…” you pause, “that’s not what this is.”

He’s watching you carefully, his head tilted just slightly, listening.

“But,” you continue, and your voice does something small and involuntary on the word that you wish it wouldn’t have, “you could’ve knocked. Even just to say you were going. Two seconds in the hall. That’s all I’m asking.”

“You’re right,” he says simply.

Which is not what you were braced for, and it takes the momentum clean out of you in a way that is almost annoying because you had more to say and now the air has gone out of it.

He looks down at his hands, turns them over once, like he’s checking something, and then back to yours. “I’m not used to–” a pause, longer this time, his thumb pressing along the ridge of his knuckle in a back and forth. “There’s usually no one to tell,” he admits finally. He scratches at his beard, his eyes flicking around the room before finding yours again. “There hasn’t been. Not for a long time.”

“How long?” you ask, gently.

He exhales. “Five years, give or take.”

You wait.

“Her name was Alyce,” he says. “We were married eight years. She left while I was deployed. Which–” the corner of his mouth moves, something that is not quite a smile but more like amusement, “–in fairness to her, I gave her plenty of reason to.”

“John–”

“No, it’s–” he shakes his head, eyes dropping briefly to the floor before coming back to yours. “It is what it is. The job is the job. It takes what it takes and there’s not much left over at the end. She needed someone who could give her more than I could.” He says it evenly, like he’s made his peace with it. “I don’t blame her for it.”

“But it hurt,” you offer quietly.

He looks at you, something moving across his face that’s weary along the edges. “Yeah,” he agrees. “It hurt.”

The rawness of it sits in the room and you look around your flat and think of his and something clicks into place.

“So you stopped having someone to tell,” you say knowingly, understanding.

“It’s easier,” he admits. Not easier because it’s better, but easier because it’s safer. Because the things that can’t be taken from you are never offered in the first place.

“I’m not asking you for anything you can’t give,” you tell him, meaning every word of it. “I just–” you pause, finding it, “I just want to know when you’re gonna be gone. That’s all. A knock at three in the morning, a note under the door. Even a text.”

He sits back in the chair, hands dragging from his knees up his thighs.

“Yeah,” he says. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay,” he repeats, nodding.

“Give me your phone,” you say, flopping your palm out toward him.

He goes into his coat and reaches out to put it in your waiting hand. You take it, put your number in, give it back. He looks at the screen, his thumb resting against the edge of it, and then at you.

“I’ll text you,” he says. “Before I go next time.”

“I’d like that.”

He nods once, certain, and pockets the phone.

“I’m… I’m glad you’re back,” you admit a bit shyly.

“Yeah,” he breathes. “Me too.”

And the armchair, you both seem to realize at the same moment, is very far away.

He unfolds himself from it slowly and crosses the room, and you tip your chin up as he reaches you, expecting something, you’re not sure what exactly. He dips down and presses his lips to the top of your head, your eyes shut. His hand comes up to rest against the side of your face, and you look up at him as his thumb grazes over your cheekbone.

“Night,” he says.

“Night,” you manage, which comes out considerably softer than you intended.

––––––

His flat is exactly as he left it.

He stands in the middle of it for a moment and the silence there feels different than it did before. Before he knew what your keys sounded like and what your laugh did to the air around him.

He makes tea that he doesn’t drink, even if he had, it wouldn’t have settled him. It’ll be a few days before he can sleep.

He sits on the sofa in the dark with his head hanging back. Thinking about the way you looked at him when he opened his door.

Five years of no one to tell, and then you.

He thinks about Alyce. Not with the old sharp pain – that’s long worn smooth – but with the clarity of knowing he’s made this mistake before and exactly what it looks like from the inside. He’s been through enough deployments to know what they do to the people waiting on the other side, and he has no business asking anyone to do that, least of all someone with her whole life still in front of her and no reason to spend any of it waiting around for him to come back from places he can’t even name. He’s being sensible.

He goes to bed. Lies on his back in the dark and stares at the ceiling.

He’s being sensible about this.

At some point the building settles into the stillness of the late hours, the city outside has found its lowest register, and he’s still awake, still staring at his ceiling fan, and the arithmetic he has been doing all evening has stopped producing the answer he needs it to and is producing the only answer it has been since the night you stood at his door with a bottle of whiskey.

He knows what he wants. He’s known longer than he’s willing to admit to himself.

He sits up on the edge of the bed for a moment, digging the heels of his palms into his eyes before he finally gets up.

He doesn’t think about it after that. Doesn’t give himself the opportunity to talk himself out of it. He pulls on a shirt and crosses his flat in the dark, opens the door, and takes those nine steps down the hallway, in his socks, to knock.

On your side of the wall, you surface from the beginnings of sleep, the knock finding you through the fog of it. You lie there in the dark with your heart already doing something that has nothing to do with being startled.

You know it’s him.

You get up without turning the light on, padding through your flat barefoot in your sleep shirt, your hair doing whatever it’s decided to do, and you don’t hesitate at the door, don’t stop to think about what time it is or what it means that he’s here – you just open it.

He’s standing there in the flickering light of the corridor, worn tee and dark joggers, hair slightly displaced, and your face does the thing it does before your brain has caught up – concern pulling at your brows, sleep lingering in the corners of your voice.

“Are you alright?” you ask, rubbing the cloudiness from your eye.

He looks at you. Then he exhales through his nose.

“I thought about you,” he admits. “When I left that night.” A pause, his jaw clenching. “Thought about you the whole time I was gone, actually.” His eyes hold yours, set and tired and very direct. “Still thinking about you now.”

You blink.

“Couldn’t stop,” he adds, a little quieter, like that’s the part that finally got him to this point.

You look at him standing there having apparently lost an argument with himself sometime in the last hour, and you can feel your heart kicking up.

You step back from the door and he follows, and before you’ve finished taking in the fact of him his hands are on your face, palms warm and sure against your jaw, tilting you up toward him.

He kisses you like he’s been thinking about it for, you don’t know, seventeen days, maybe.

He tastes like toothpaste and smells like cucumber.

It isn’t frantic or rushed. It’s deep and sure and heavy, and his thumbs trace along your cheek, and you feel the intention in every bit of him. 

You step backward again, and again he follows without breaking the kiss, kicking your door shut behind him, one hand leaves your face to find your waist and pull you in, and you go, your back bending to his will. You kiss your way out of the living room and down the short hall toward your bedroom with the certainty of two people who have been heading here for a long time and have finally stopped pretending otherwise.

The bedroom is dim, the sheer curtains doing little to keep the night out – moonlight pressing through in a pale wash, pooling across the dark wood floor, catching the edge of your wooden bed frame, the honey-dark shoulders of the vase on the nightstand where a bouquet has gone beautifully drowsy, petals loosening at the edges.

The duvet is a deep forest green, plush and slightly rumpled from where you threw it back, and the whole room has this energy, he’s learned, that could only belong to you.

He walks you back to the bed slowly, both hands at your waist, and when the backs of your knees find the mattress he stops. Pulls back from your mouth just enough to look at you properly, his chest rising and falling with a discipline that tells you his control is already working harder than usual, his hands finding the hem of your shirt, his fingers curling into the cotton.

“Can I?” he asks, low.

“Yes,” you answer immediately and breathless, and the corner of his mouth twitches.

He lifts it up over your head in one slow motion and sets it aside, and then he just… looks at you. Not hungrily, he’s just taking you in.

You stand there with your nipples already tight in the cool air of the room, his eyes dropping to them and lingering, and the flush that goes through you is half embarrassment and half something hotter underneath. The patience of him, the absence of urgency, makes you want to fold in on yourself.

His hands trace your shoulders, thumbs over your collar, down to the curve of your waist, his palms warm and slightly rough against your skin. You stand there, your fingers twirling into the fabric over his ribs, and let him do whatever he likes while you try to remember how breathing works.

He bends his head and his mouth follows where his hands had been – your shoulder first, then the place where your neck meets it, then lower, his tongue dragging hot and wet across one nipple before he draws it into the heat of his mouth. Your neck falls limp, chest pushing into him, and your knees go soft. One of his arms is around your back before you’ve registered that you needed it to be. 

“I’ve got you,” he whispers against your skin.

Your fingers find the hem of his tee and he lets you pull it off, his arms lifting to help, and then he’s in front of you in the dark. You’ve had your hands on his chest before but this is different. This is him, bare skin and the solid weight of muscle and a scar just below his ribs on the left side that your fingers find without thinking and trace, following the full length of it. He goes very still while you do, watching your face, something in his expression coming loose in a way it doesn’t often let itself.

Your hands drop to the waist of his joggers.

His jaw shifts. His breathing has deepened, every exhale measured in a way that tells you the measuring is costing him. You ease the waistband of his joggers down past the heavy ridge of him – he is hard, has been, the length of him pushing up against the cotton of his boxers – and he steps out of the joggers and kicks them aside. Then he drops to one knee in front of you, his hands finding the waistband of your underwear and drawing them down, all the way to the floor. Then he straightens, hands skimming back up the outside of your legs as he rises, and when he looks at you something darkened with desire moves through his face that you feel from your jaw to the backs of your knees.

“Come here,” he says, low, and draws you down onto the bed with him.

He settles over you braced on his forearms, the solid bulk of him bracketing you, and kisses you for a long time before he does anything else. Like he has every minute of the night to use and intends to use them, his mouth moving from yours to your jaw to your throat to your collarbone, tracing you like each inch of you is worth whatever time it takes.

Your fingers curl into his hair as he kisses the center of your stomach. His hand moves over you slowly – your waist, your hips, the soft inside of your thigh – and the room is hushed except for the sounds the two of you are making, the soft scrape of your sheets and your breath that’s gotten heavier.

You pulse has long stopped behaving itself.

When he finally looks up at you, blue irises glinting in the moonlight, chin resting lightly against your sternum, eyes finding yours, hair displaced thanks to your hands.

“How d’you like it?” he asks, genuine and entirely unhurried, and your breath catches on its way in.

“I–” you start, and stop, blinking the tips of your ears going warm.

He waits, chin still resting against you, eyes on yours, thumb tracing an idle circle against your hip.

The exposure of being asked and actually having to answer makes you look at the ceiling for a moment before you come back to him.

“From behind,” you admit, like a small and private thing being handed over.

His face softens and opens without judgment – and he moves up over you, one hand coming to rest against the side of your face, his thumb tracing the line of your jaw up to your ear.

“We can do that,” he whispers. “But not at first, love.” His eyes hold yours, darker than they were a minute ago, his pupils crowding out the blue. “I wanna see you.”

You reach up and pull him back down to your mouth, and he comes willingly, and the talking is over.

His hand slides down over your stomach, fingertips dragging down the seam of you for the first time, and you are already so wet for him that the first slow pass of his fingers through your folds makes the both of you go still for half a second. He exhales something hot and rough against your throat at the wetness of you, his middle finger gathering it and sliding back up to circle your clit, and your hips jerk up off the mattress into it.

“All for me?” he murmurs into the hollow of your throat, low and ruined.

“All for you,” you breathe, because you can’t lie to him about this with his fingers between your legs.

He works you slow, keeping the heel of his hand pressed against you while his middle finger slides in tight circles around your clit, then over it, light and then firm and then light again, reading every catch in your breath, every twitch of your hips. His mouth is still at your throat, his beard scratching at your skin. The sound of you against his fingers, the slick wet drag of it in the hushed room, is loud enough that you would be embarrassed by it if you weren’t already past caring.

“Please,” you breathe.

“Tell me,” he says, mouth still at your neck. Not teasing, really – just wanting to hear it.

“Inside,” you manage. “Please, John.”

He gives you what you asked for; one finger first, slipping into you with how wet you are, pressing deep and curling until your back lifts off the mattress and a sound escapes you that you couldn’t have stopped if you tried. The second presses in beside the first and the stretch of them pulls another soft moan that he catches with his mouth.

He works you open carefully, reading every clench and shift of your hips, until you are completely lost and soaking his hand, your fingers curling into his shoulders, the others into the sheet beside your hip, his name a breathy continuous thing behind your teeth.

By the time he shifts and leans back between your legs to hook his thumbs into his boxers and pushes them down you are already halfway gone. You reach down between your bare bodies, wrapping your hand around him.

The sharp breath he pulls in through his nose makes you feel powerful in a way that travels all the way to your fingertips. He watches your hand for a beat before flicking up to your face, your gaze is nowhere near his.

His cock is thick in your hand, heavier than you were prepared for, and the way he twitches against your palm makes drool pool under your tongue. Dribbles of him have already gathered at the head where you spread it down with the pad of your thumb. Your breath goes short and your eyes flick up to his face before you can stop them.

“John,” you breathe.

“Mm,” he hums.

“That’s–” you pause, eyes dropping briefly and then back up, “–that’s a lot.”

“Yeah,” he replies a bit too casually. His thumb comes up to brush your glowing cheekbone. “Alright?”

You nod and guide him to you, the head of him dragging through the wet of you once, twice, before you settle him against your entrance and look up at him. He breathes inhales hard.

“Still okay?” he asks, his voice rougher now, that control of his working overtime.

“Yes,” you tell him.

He comes forward, resting his mass against you, a forearm braced beside your head, the other hand slipping under the base of you neck. He eases in, watching your face the whole time, his thumb on the bone of your jaw like he’s trying to keep you present – and the feeling of him, the stretch, the overwhelming fullness of him opening you up inch by inch, tears a sound from you that starts quiet and builds into something much louder, your fingers digging into his back hard enough to leave marks, your head tips back into the pillow, eyelids fluttering closed.

“Look at me,” he coos, the pad of two fingers coming to press down on your chin to tip your face back to his.

You bring your eyes back and he holds them there, easy-like. He breathes in slow through his nose, and you follow his lead naturally. He doesn’t move until he feels you adjust, until the tension in your hands ease around his biceps and your breathing finds something closer to his own rhythm, until the tight resistance of your body softens around his length completely and your hips cant forward on their own, asking for the rest of him.

“Good girl,” he breathes against your temple, pressing his lips there as he fits the last inch of himself inside of you.

For a moment, he just stays there. Lets you feel every vein of him buried inside of you, the heat of his cock pulsing against your walls. His forehead moves to yours and he exhales something wrecked into the space between your mouths.

“Christ,” he huffs.

Then he moves deep and measured, his eyes staying on your face, reading every flicker, every catch of breath, every involuntary sound you willingly give him, shifting the angle of his hips, adjusting until he finds the place that makes your back arch off the bed and your nails scrabble at his shoulders and your mouth fall open around a moan that could wake anyone on the floors surrounding you.

“There?”

“There,” you confirm breathlessly, your whole body pulling toward it. “Th-there– right there, please–”

“Okay,” he says simply and gives you exactly that, again and again, deep and relentless and fucking precise. Again, until the room has narrowed to a dim square of your bedroom and the weight of him and the low quiet things he says against your skin make everything tighter and headier and more consuming.

The tension builds slow and inevitable from the ground up – and when it crests it takes you completely, your whole body drawing taut and then releasing all at once in a long shuddering wave, your cunt clenching, pulsing around him as you come, and you cling to his shoulders while he holds you through every second of it.

His lips find your ear, his voice barely above a murmur.

“You showin’ off, duck?” he breathes, nearly in awe, a grunt as he drags his cock lazily against the quiver of your walls. “Or does your pussy just do that?”

He sounds, insufferably, like he’s smiling.

“It did that for you,” you manage, shameless.

He stills, pressing his mouth to your temple again, then your cheek, the corner of your jaw, his beard brush at your firery skin.

“Alright?” he asks gently.

“More than,” you breathe, bringing your knee up against his hip.

You push at his shoulder and he understands it without a word, rolling onto his back and drawing you with him in one fluid motion, his hands settling at your hips as you find your balance astride him, the shift in angle pulling a sharp sound from you both.

You look down at him – hair thoroughly displaced, jaw tight, throat flushed, his hands warm and heavy at your hips, his cock buried so deep in you from this angle that you can feel the shape of him against something you’re not sure has ever been touched by any man before.

You feel the heaviness of his eyes on you as you begin to move, rolling your hips in a slow testing circle that pulls a low rumble from somewhere deep in his chest. The sound reverberates through your palms where they’re pressed flat against him and you feel it in your sternum.

“Jesus,” he moans. “Wish you could see what I see.”

A flush crawls up your spine to your face and you have to look away from him. “Stop,” you whine.

“No,” he breathes through a smile. “You– you’re fuckin’ gorgeous.”

“John,” you warn, unable to receive a compliment under any circumstance, but especially this one. His hands tighten on your hips and he digs his thumbs into the meat of them.

You look back at him and his eyes seem to be everywhere – your face, your throat, the bounce of your tits as you find your rhythm above him, the place where his cock disappears inside you, wet and shining in the low light. A thumb moves from your hip to your clit, and at the first slow circle of it you gasp, tempo stuttering, hips jerking forward.

His hands slide up your sides, calloused palms dragging warm over your ribs, his thumbs grazing the underside of your breasts before settling at your shoulderblades. He draws you down to him, your chest meeting his, kissing you, his cock still buried to the hilt, his hand cradling the back of your head, fingers tangling in your hair.

Then his mouth moves to your ear.

“Hands and knees.”

The authority of it goes straight through you. He helps you up off him with one hand at your hip as you lift, the slow drag of his cock leaving you pulling a moan from both of you. You’re already turning before your knees have found the mattress, his promise being kept, your body moving for him without thought.

His hand smooths up your back and eases your chest down to the pillow, his palm hot.

His hand drags the length of your spine. His mouth follows it part of the way down, between your shoulders, and you feel him exhale against your sensitive flesh at the sight of you laid out for him like this.

Then the head of his cock is dragging through you again, notching into your dripping well, and even after everything you’ve already taken, the stretch of him from this angle has you gasping into the pillow before he’s even fully seated.

“Mmmmm,” you keen, high pitched, “John.”

“Still with me?” he asks, his lips at the back of your neck, his breath warm against your skin.

You take a deep breath and exhale slow.

“Very much with you,” you say into the pillow.

He sits back on his knees and his hands find your hips again, fingers pressing far past gentle in a way you will feel tomorrow and are already glad of.

He makes good on his promise.

He starts slow, pulling almost all the way out before sliding back in to the hilt, every inch of him dragging against your walls, letting you feel the full length of him with each stroke. His grip on your hips holds you exactly where he wants you, not letting you push back to chase it, just feeding you his cock at the pace he chooses. The first few thrusts are deliberate, almost careful, like he’s learning what this view does to him before he lets himself have it.

Then he finds it, hips canting just so, and his cock drags against something that has you sobbing into the pillow, your whole body lighting up from your tailbone outward. You feel his answering exhale against your back and his pace begins to climb. The sound of him fucking into you slick and obscene in the hushed room, the quiet slap of his hips meeting the back of your thighs, the wet drag of him pulling out and pushing back in.

The room goes away completely.

Not because it isn’t happening – it is very specifically and overwhelmingly and in vivid and consuming detail happening – but because the feeling of him like this, the depth, the full length of him from this angle, the low unrestrained sounds he’s making behind you, is simply too much to hold with a conscious thought.

He keeps it precise then, hitting that exact plave on every stroke, and you are vaguely aware that your fingers have found the headboard, that your knuckles have gone white against the wood, that you have been making sounds for minutes now that you have no memory of.

One hand is splayed warm at your hip. The other slides up the length of your spine, vertebra by vertebra, and into your hair, not pulling, just resting there, grounded, his fingers curling gently at the nape of your neck. He says your name once, low and wrecked, like it got out before he could even think about it. Then you feel his chest pressed to your back.

“You feel...” he starts low against your shoulder, then stops himself. Like the rest of it isn’t something he’s ready to hand over yet. But he does anways. “Made for me.”

You feel the truth of that in his hands and his mouth and the way he presses his forehead briefly to the back of your neck like he needs a second to collect himself.

His control begins to give way – shorter strokes, harder, like he can’t bear to leave you for even a moment – and you can feel him losing himself in you, the discipline of him fraying with every thrust, until your thighs are shaking, hands fisting into the sheets as his hand slides around your hip and finds your clit. His fingers work you in slow tight circles. That in combination with the bullying of his cock grows to be too much.

Too much, too much, too much…

“That’s it,” his voice breaks at the back of your ear. “I got you, duck.”

And you let go.

It takes you completely – longer and deeper than before, cresting in a long consuming wave that pulls every muscle taut before releasing all at once, your whole body shuddering through it, your cunt clenching around him so hard he groans against your shoulder – and you press your face into the pillow and let the sound of it go muffled while he holds you through every second of it.

He follows not long after – his rhythm losing its precision, his breathing ragged against your shoulder, your name one last time in that low completely wrecked voice – and then he stills, his cock pulsing inside of you as he comes, his forehead pressed between your shoulder blades, both of you breathing like you’ve forgotten how and are relearning it together.

The room comes back slowly.

The distant hum of the city. The press of the pillow against your cheek. The solid weight of him, his heartbeat gradually quieting against your back, his hand moving after a moment to rest loose and warm at your waist like it belongs there.

Neither of you speak for a while.

He moves eventually – pressing his lips to your temple before rolling to his side and drawing you with him so you’re tucked against his chest, his arm settles around you naturally.

His hand moves in a slow idle path along your arm. Up and down, not asking anything.

“Hi,” you say softly, into the quiet.

He reaches up and tucks your hair back from your face.

“Hi,” he says back.

You lie there together in the quiet of it, his arm around you, your hand flat against his chest where you can feel his heartbeat slow beneath your palm, and the whole evening sits around you like something you’re both still figuring out the shape of until you both drift off.

––––––

He’s still there in the morning.

His arm is around you, heavy and warm, and you lie very still for a moment in the early hush of your bedroom and take stock of it – of him, of the dull ache reminding you of last night.

You try to move carefully, extracting yourself without waking him, which turns out to be optimistic as his arm tightens slightly before you’ve gone anywhere, a reflexive, unconscious thing, and you go still and wait and after a moment it loosens again and you ease out from under it and sit on the edge of the bed in the soft morning light.

You look back at him.

He’s on his back now, one arm where you were, his face slack with sleep in a way it never is when he’s awake – the lines of his face softer, younger somehow, the silver at his temples catching the pale light filtering from the curtains. He looks, you think, like a person who doesn’t sleep enough finally sleeping.

You get up, grabbing his tee shirt from the floor to pull over yourself, and head to the kitchen.

The kettle is just coming to a low boil when you hear him in the hall, you turn toward his footfalls and he appears in the kitchen doorway shirtless, last night’s joggers slung low on his hips. He leans against the frame, arms crossing loosely.

“Morning,” you say, reaching for two mugs from the shelf.

“Morning,” he replies, voice rougher than usual from sleep, and you feel it in the backs of your knees which is genuinely inconvenient at this hour. “Was lookin’ for that,” he says, tipping his chin at you.

“For what?”

“My shirt,” he smiles sleepily.

“Oh,” you say, leaning back against the counter.

“Oh,” he mocks.

“It’s very soft,” you explain, glancing down at it.

“Mm,” he hums. “S’why I wear it.”

“Would you like it back?”

He looks at you for a long beat, eyes moving down the length of you in his shirt and back up, and the corner of his mouth pulls.

“No,” he says simply. “Looks better on you.”

The kettle clicks off behind you. You turn to pour, conscious of him still watching. You slide his mug across the counter toward him, and he steps into the kitchen to take it, the warmth of him passing close behind you on his way to lean against the opposite counter.

“Hungry?” you ask, already opening the fridge.

He looks at you with an expression that suggests he’s already aware of your limitations in this area.

“I’ve got eggs,” you say, grabbing the carton. “I cannot promise anything about what state they’ll be in when I’m done with them, but…”

The corners of his eyes crinkle. He sets his mug down and pushes off the counter. “Move over.”

“John, I can make eggs–”

“Move over,” he says again, the same way, and you move over.

He ends up making the eggs, showing off while you sit on your counter and drink your tea, just watching him occupy your kitchen on a Sunday.

He leaves mid morning.

Shirtless and in his socks.

“I’ll see you,” he says, which is not a specific plan and both of you know it, but it’s right for the moment.

“Yeah,” you say. “See you.”

He looks at you for a moment, kisses you once, and steps into the hall.

“Lock it,” he reminds you, pointing.

You lock it.

––––––

The days that follow have a gauzy, suspended feel – humming and languid, like the week is holding its breath around something new.

Tuesday evening you’re halfway through a bowl of pasta on his sofa when he comes back from the kitchen with two mugs of tea and sits beside you, close enough that your knee rests against his without either of you adjusting, and you watch something on his TV that neither of you are really watching and it is, you think, almost unbearably nice.

Wednesday he knocks on your door at half seven with leftover curry he made too much of, and you eat it at your kitchen table and he fixes your kitchen drawer that has been sticking for three months without being asked, just notices it sticking when you open it and gets up and sorts it while you’re still talking, and you watch him do it with a feeling in your chest that you’re running out of room to not examine.

Thursday morning you pass each other on the stairs and he’s got his coffee and you’ve got your bag sliding off your shoulder as usual and he steadies it with one hand without breaking stride and says something low and dry about the weather that makes you laugh all the way to the office and occasionally at random intervals throughout your entire working day.

It feels, in short, like something.

But neither of you call it that.

Friday night he mentions the pub.

You’re at his kitchen table after work, shoes off, a glass of wine in hand, watching him cook, when he brings it up.

Casual, offhand, not quite meeting your eyes as he says it.

“Got plans tomorrow night,” he says. “Havin’ drinks with some of the lads.”

“Oh yeah?” You trace the rim of your wine glass. “Kyle and them?”

He glances at you. “Yeah.”

“Can I come?” you ask, which comes out more naturally than you intended, and you watch him shift on his feet before he turns back to the stove.

“It’s just–” he starts, talking into the pot.

“Just lads having drinks, yeah,” you finish, easy. “That’s fine, I just thought–”

“It’s not that,” he cuts in, setting the spoon down before he turns around, and his expression is careful in the way it gets when he’s choosing his words more carefully than usual. “I just think–” he pauses. “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. About what this is.”

The kitchen is quiet.

“What is it?” you try, keeping your voice light.

He looks at you. “I like what we have,” he says. “I just– I’m not in a position to be–” he stops. Tries again. “You’re not my– I can’t give you–”

“A relationship,” you say, for him, because he clearly needs the help.

Something in his jaw shifts. “Yeah.”

You look at him for a moment over your wine glass, he’s trying so very hard to be honest with you at the expense of something sitting visibly behind his eyes.

“John,” you say. “I know. And I’m not askin’ you for anythin’ you haven’t already given me,” you tell him, simply and honestly. “I know what this is.” You offer him a genuine smile. “I’m a big girl.”

He looks partly relieved and partly still wrestling with something more complicated underneath it, neither of which he examines out loud.

“Right,” he says, after a moment.

“Right,” you agree.

He picks the spoon back up. The kitchen settles around you both, easy, like a thing that needed saying has been said and the air is cleaner for it.

You finish your wine and he finishes cooking and you eat at the kitchen table with your feet tucked up under you, the conversation finding its usual easy rhythm, and it is fine. You are fine. You meant what you said and you know what this is and that is enough.

“Finally getting on site Monday,” you say at some point, pushing a piece of bread around your plate. “The MoD job. Been buried in paperwork for weeks, it’ll be good to actually see it.”

He glances at you for a moment. “Nervous?”

“A little,” you admit. “First time managing something like this so...” You pick up your wine. “Should be interesting, to say the least.”

“You’ll be alright,” he says, in the tone of a man who has been paying close enough attention to have formed a very firm opinion about what you’re capable of.

Then he goes back to his dinner like that’s simply the end of the matter.

––––––

Monday morning the cab is idling outside the office at half eight, Cerie already in the back seat with a coffee balanced on her knee and a folder open in her lap, David loading the boot with more equipment than any of them will need. You slide in beside her, your own folders clutched against your chest, the weekend still sitting in the back of your mind.

The driver glances in the rearview. “Address?”

You read it off the top sheet without looking up.

“Stirling Lines,” you say. “Hereford.”

––––––

By the time you reach the second floor, the cold has settled into your bones.

The landing on your floor sits directly outside your neighbor’s flat, the brass 2A tacked there a stark contrast against the black door. The hallway runs narrow and straight to your own door, the dim fluorescents overhead cast a flickering pale glow that never quite reaches the corners. An earth-toned floral runner threads throughout the entire length of the building, its pattern long faded, fibers worn thin and frayed down the center where tenants have passed in and out for years. The white walls that contain it all are scuffed dirty and nicked, marked up by furniture and careless feet.

Your neighbor’s flat is always giving the impression that it might be back on the market.

Most front doors offer some indication of life – a welcome mat, a potted plant, a pair of muddy trainers set to the side.

Not his door, though. Right now, his door offers post.

It began modestly enough, a single envelope resting against the door. Then more joined it as the days passed – thick envelopes, junk, rolled up circulars and magazines that curl at the edges after a few days of being stepped over. The stack grows and grows, leaning against the wood as though it expects, at any moment, to be scooped up by the man whose name is printed on the address line.

You notice his absence before the absurd amount of post clues you in, though. Once you’ve learned his rhythms, his comings and goings are impossible to miss. When he leaves it’s the hurried weight of heavy boots stomping, doors and drawers slamming shut in the early hours. It’s always followed by a melancholy sort of silence, not the daily hush of an empty home, but a stretched quiet that haunts behind your shared wall for weeks on end.

Then when he returns, you’re greeted with the rush of water through the pipes, the pungent curl of cigar smoke creeping through the vents, and the sounds of his TV carrying through the wall until nearly four in the morning.

He’s never introduced himself, never offered you more than a polite passing nod. You don’t know what he does, not really, and until now, you never really gave him much thought. 

And only now because you nearly break your wrist because of him.

Your fingers are aching from grocery bags, your thoughts are already drifting toward dinner, and just as you hit the landing your shoe catches the slick edge of a magazine on the floor. The loss of balance is immediate, and unfortunately, graceless. The hallway tilts, the floor rushes up, and oranges spill across the hall and down the stairs. The carton of eggs bursts open against the carpet with a tragic crack. One of the bags split entirely, spilling its contents in every direction. 

For a long moment you just kneel there, the traitorous copy of ‘Guns & Ammo’ that caused your fall lies beside you, addressed to one: Jonathan Price. An incredulous breath of a laugh escapes you before you bat the cover out of sight. 

You flex your wrist carefully — achey, but it moves. So, you get yourself to your feet and collect your groceries piece by annoying piece, salvaging what you can, muttering to yourself about why you should stick to takeaway as you coral oranges back into the torn plastic bag.

Before heading inside, you bend to straighten the stack of mail beside his door, patting it neatly into the frame so it no longer sprawls across the carpet.

However, the post continues to arrive.

And Jonathan Price continues not to.

As the days pass, the stack inevitably builds thicker. Something about weeks of untouched post just feels wrong. So, when pass his door on your way back from work, on an unconscious whim, you gather his post up and take it inside with you. And you continue to do so, piling it on the table in your entryway, every single day.

Except Sundays. There’s no post on Sundays. 

Six weeks pass in total before, one evening, the pipes in your shared wall suddenly gurgle to life.

You’re standing at your sink, hands submerged in sudsy dishwater when the rush of plumbing vibrates through the plaster with the unmistakable sound of his shower warming up.

You wait until the pipes quiet again before gathering the stack of envelopes and ads. It’s heavier than you expect when you lift it. Thick enough now that it takes both arms to hold it all securely against your chest.

Down the short corridor, you make your way to his door and knock once. The rap lands quieter than you meant it to, swallowed by the heavy wood almost instantly. You hesitate, second-guessing yourself until you lift your hand to try again when there’s a metallic click and the door opens just enough to shroud your neighbor in shadow. For a second, he’s only an imposing shape, but then the light catches him properly as he leans forward a bit.

He fills the frame without even trying. You have to tip your chin just to meet his eyes, this close he’s far broader than any glimpses you’ve caught in passing allowed you to register. He’s thick through the shoulders, forearms corded beneath the long sleeves of a worn grey tee that looks softened from years of washing. It clings where it stretches across his chest, molded to him in dampened patches like he pulled it on too soon after stepping out of the shower.

His jeans are loose everywhere except around his thighs, slung low enough that a strip of black elastic and milky skin catches your attention. Your gaze unintentionally trips over the trail of dark hair that whispers up and beneath his shirt.

You can feel your ears starting to warm before you flick back up to his face, meeting a set of ocean-deep irises ornamented by crinkling lines at the corners, tired purple crescents stamped underneath. His beard is grown out past neat — thick and slightly unruly along his jaw, salt and peppered throughout. 

Steam drifts out lazily from behind him, carrying the clean scent of soap into the corridor — it's mild, fresh, a little spice beneath it all.

His eyes settle on you with a subtle recognition, view slightly narrowed before, almost immediately, dropping to the stack of paper you’re gripping.

“Evenin’,” he says almost cautiously, voice roughened, like it hasn’t been used in a while. Or used too much, maybe.

You clear your throat.

“Hi,” you manage, “I’m next door.” You tilt your head toward your flat, never under the assumption that anyone remembers who you are.

His gaze lifts again, meeting yours. There’s a vague hint of amusement glinting in his eyes, it reaches the corner of his mouth, pulling up.

“I know,” he nods gently, almost encouragingly, like he’s urging you to continue with your spiel. 

You shift the weight of the envelopes and extend them toward him before you can overthink it.

“Right, erm… your post,” you swallow thickly, then proceed to ramble, “It kept piling up. For, like, a long time. And, anyway, I ended up slipping on a magazine a few weeks ago, and then I thought it might be better if someone kept it from takin’ over the hall until you were back.” You inhale through your nose, catching a breath before continuing despite yourself. “And now you’re back, so…”

His eyes widen before he reaches his arms out to takes the heap from you, the simple transfer of weight draws you a half-step closer to him. His fingers brush yours in the exchange — callouses scratching softly, warm. The contact is brief, but it’s also entirely impossible to unfeel.

“You slipped,” he repeats lowly, not accusatory, more like confirming he heard you properly.

“I’m fine,” you assure him quickly. “I just meant… like, it was a lot of post, is all,” your voice tapers off as your mouth starts to feel dry.  

“You’re not hurt?”

You shake your head, “No.”

“You’ve been takin’ it in,” his eyes scan the envelopes before lifting back to you, like he’s quietly calculating something. “All of it?”

“Yeah.” You hesitate, then add quickly, “I knocked once. But no one answered.”

“Yeah, I, uh, had t’work.”

“I didn’t open anything,” you continue, suddenly aware of how that all might’ve sounded. “Obviously.”

He smirks at that, his voice becoming something far smoother than it was when the door first opened. “I didn’t think you had.”

There’s a subtle warmth in his tone now. It does something curious to your pulse. You can feel it tap-tap-tapping just below your jaw.

He balances the pile in one large hand and steps back, widening the door.

Your gaze drifts past him inadvertently and into his flat. It’s uncluttered and tidy – not unlived-in exactly, but lacking the charm that makes a place feel claimed. The furniture is purely functional and dated, the walls bare, the floor impossibly clean, the hardwood shines like it was just buffed. 

“M’grateful for that,” he adds after a beat, head bowing enough to move into your line of vision and catch your eye, smirk still prevalent. 

“It was startin’ to look abandoned,” you babble before you can stop yourself.

“Abandoned,” he echoes, gaze sharpened.

“I just meant— it didn’t look like anyone was coming back.”

Something in his expression settles, one of his shoulders roll. 

“Oh, I always come back, love,” he croons just over a whisper and unhurried, like he knows something you don’t. 

Your cheeks warm and your head can’t decide between shaking and nodding, fingers twirling into the soft threads of your jumper.

“No, yeah, of course. I didn’t mean—”

“I’m John, by the way.”

He adjusts his weight again, shifting back under the shadow behind him. This interaction feels like it should be over already, you’re almost wishing it was, but you give him your name in return. He repeats it back slowly, like he’s testing the shape of it on his tongue. There’s something deliberate in the way he says it, like it’s being filed away somewhere permanent.

“Would y’like to come in?” he nods his head. “Least I can do is make you a cup’a tea.”

You hesitate, a pause small enough to miss if he wasn’t watching for it. He notices your hesitation without pushing it. There’s no persuasion from him, no charm turned up for effect. Just patience, like he already figures you will. 

Your eyes flick from his, past him, and back again. You step inside before you even understand why, just, caution to the wind. Survival instincts at an all time low. But there’s something about him that draws you there. 

His flat smells clean – shower steam still clinging to the air, layered over something warmer. Smoke, maybe. Something musky and grounded that feels likely distinctly his. The door clicks shut behind you.

The place is spare. A brown leather sofa floats in the center of the room, the cushions perfectly aligned as though they’re reset after every use. A low coffee table in front of it holds nothing but a neatly stacked set of coasters and a remote placed dead center.

To the side of the TV, a tall wooden bookcase stands in the corner, books neatly arranged, spines perfectly even, each shelf organized by size. There are no pictures on the walls, no decorative clutter on the tables or mantel. It’s as if you’ve stepped into a hotel, but even they put artwork up. 

John moves toward the kitchen with an ease that wasn’t there in the hallway, shoulders a little looser. You follow, watching him push the rescued post neatly into the corner of the counter — probably the messiest part of his flat now. 

The kitchen is very similar to yours, appliances a little more dated, but just as compact. A short galley space with a small honey oak table at the end beneath the window.

“I meant to put a hold on it,” he says, glancing down at the envelopes. “But I left on such short notice...”

“You travel a lot?” you ask, leaning against the doorway, hands coming together in front of you, fingernails scratching at your palm anxiously. 

He’s already filling the kettle at the sink, water rushing loud for a moment before he shuts it off.

“More than I’d like,” he admits. 

“For work?”

“Yeah.”

The burner on the stove blooms blue beneath the kettle with a soft tick-tick.

“You don’t exactly look like someone who works from a laptop.”

That earns you the faintest chuckle before he fully turns around, resting his hip against the pristine white countertop. 

“No?”

“No.” You shake your head. “You’re gone for long stretches.”

His eyes travel your form, a single brow perking with an interest.

“You keepin’ tabs on me, then?” he asks curiously.

You shrug at that, allowing a small smile to spread.

“Hard not to when you’re the only other person on this floor.”

He offers a short hum then reaches into the cupboard, his shirt riding up with him, you get a peek of his toned tummy as he pulls two mugs down. The ceramic clinks.

“And what d’you do when you’re not monitorin’ me?” He looks at you again just as the kettle begins a low, building thrum. 

Your head tilts involuntarily. “I work normal hours and take it home with me. Watch shit TV and order too much takeaway.”

He tsks before he asks, “Don’t cook?” An edge to his tone that’s not quite judgmental and not quite disappointment, but somewhere in the middle.

“I can,” you defend. “I just don’t always see the point.”

The kettle clicks off and he pours the water slowly over the tea bags, steam rising in soft spirals. “There’s always a point,” he says.

“Do you cook?” you ask after a beat. 

“When I’m home.”

“Which isn’t often,” you add. 

He sets the kettle aside and finally meets your eyes again. “Not often enough,” he agrees, his features softening.

“And when you are?” 

He leans back against the counter again. “When I get home? First few nights are rough. Might get pizza,” he admits casually. 

“Jet lag?” 

The corner of his mouth twitches faintly. “Somethin’ like that.”

“Can’t sleep?”

“Not well,” he shrugs. “Cup’a strong tea helps.”

“Tea?” you quirk a brow. 

“Yeah, it’s almost the only thing that settles me.”

You step further into the kitchen without thinking, drawn in more by his incredibly vague answers. “Settles you from what?”

He bites the corner of his cheek, like he’s assessing how much you’re actually asking for, or maybe how much he’s willing to divulge — which doesn’t seem like much at the moment.

“Lack of noise,” he answers at last, nudging one of his chairs out with his foot, wood stuttering over tile. He gestures to it and you move to sit without question.

He brings your mug, leaning over your shoulder with a large hand placing it right in front of you, you notice a few partially healed scrapes across his knuckles.

“Sorry, don’t have any milk yet. Just got back.” 

“S’alright,” you reply quietly, wrapping your fingers around the ceramic. It’s nearly too hot to hold, but you welcome the burn; the tingle that blooms its way into the soft of your palm.

John doesn’t sit. Instead, he stays leant against the counter across from you, mug resting in hand, watching you take your first cautious sip.

There’s something steady in the way he looks at you. You only came over to deliver his post. You’re still not sure how it turned into this.

“You live alone?” he asks suddenly. 

You pause mid-sip and peer at him over the rim of your mug, lips pursing. “And what exactly do you plan on doin’ with that information, John?”

His eyes widen just slightly before the tips of his ears grow pink 

He exhales through his nose amusedly. “Poor choice’a words,” he concedes, scratching at his beard. “Mind’s still in work-mode.”

“You interrogate people for a living?” you tease, unknowingly.

That has him choking around his tea, forcing down a cough that has him hiding behind the mug as he gathers himself. 

An unbridled laugh slips free before you can stop it, and something in his posture relaxes at the sound.

“Sorry, you okay?”

“Mm,” he nods far more than he needs to. 

“Well,” you turn back to your tea, “I do live alone. But I know how to use a knife, so don't be weird about it.”

He absorbs that quietly, tongue pressing briefly to his cheek, a thoughtful hum low in his throat.

“Right.”

You narrow your eyes and huff. “That’s all I get? Just ‘right’?”

He sets his mug down, gaze lingering on you longer than necessary. “Place next door’s quiet,” he says slowly. “Jus’ wasn’t sure if you had someone in there I hadn’t clocked.”

“But you’ve clocked my noise levels?” you press, unable to help it.

“Shared wall,” he reminds you.

“And?”

“And,” he says, eyes steady on yours now, “it’s good to know who’s on the other side.”

And after that, the conversation slips into something easier. You learn small, unremarkable things about each other, the kind that don’t really feel important at the time. Like how he prefers mornings to nights. That you can’t even make toast without burning it. That neither of you necessarily trust the boiler in the winter time. It’s nothing intimate, not really. But the way he listens makes it feel like everything you tell him is a secret he’s learning, like each answer matters.

Time warps in his kitchen without either of you noticing. The tea cools in both of your mugs before it’s finished, warmth from the kettle fizzles out, and the distance between question and answer shortens. The conversation stretches easily until you glance toward the door and you’re reminded that this isn’t your flat. 

“Well,” you say softly, “I should really let you finish settling in.”

He doesn’t answer immediately. Just watches you stand and carry your mug to his sink.

“I’ve interrupted long enough,” you add with a polite smile.

“Hardly,” he breathes, pushing off the edge, leaving his own mug on the counter in his wake.

He moves to the door with you, pulling it open and leaning against the frame, hand resting loosely on the knob.

You stop halfway into the corridor and turn back toward him. 

“Try to get some sleep,” you tell him gently. 

Something shifts behind his eyes, like he wasn’t expecting you to remember anything he’d said to you. But his silence after that makes you feel like you’ve misremembered things.

“You said it’s harder when you first get back, yeah?”

“Yeah,” he admits, before averting his gaze to the floor. 

“Well, good night.”

“G’night.”

You don’t look back as you step into your flat, but you don’t hear his door close until yours opens. And even then, it takes a second longer than it should.

—————

John can’t sleep.

He didn’t sleep the night before either, despite how heavy his lids were. He laid there on his back, staring up at the slow rotation of his ceiling fan, listening to the quiet eerily settle around him. He thought of you more than he likely should have — the way your skin seemed to glow under his gaze, how your smile pulled the apple of your cheeks up and round, how soft your fingers felt when they brushed his.

Your perfume, too. Fruity, light. How traces of it lingered in his kitchen for so long after you left he couldn’t tell if he was imagining it, if it was something his brain cooked up to fill the silence in your wake.

John really wants to sleep tonight.

But on the other side of that godforsaken wall comes a sharp clatter followed by muffled swearing. Then something else hits the floor with enough force that he sits up before he’s even aware he’s moving. If he closed his eyes he might even believe he’s back on base at this point – and that certainly does nothing to calm his mind.

Another thud. Louder this time.

It’s enough to make him swing his legs over and push himself out of bed. Hurriedly, he steps into the jeans he left folded neatly on an armchair in his bedroom. Boots on but untied, he heads out and down the hall. The sounds grow louder the closer he gets to your door, and though two decades of training have taught him to assess chaos with haste, he can’t quite decipher what he’s hearing.

He knocks once, and the door creeps open a fraction on its own. He frowns instantly, jaw tightening – you’ve left it, not only unlocked, but completely unlatched.

You appear seconds later, rushing forward to pull it open the rest of the way. Your hair is wet, plastered to your temples, chest rising and falling too fast. There’s panic humming under your skin, but John barely registers your appearance at all. His eyes are still on the door a moment longer before they meet yours, and even then, he’s really just thinking about how it was unlocked. 

“You’ve a habit of leavin’ that unsecured?” he asks, voice edged in a tone that’s harsher than he really means.

You blink at him, dazed. “Huh?”

“That latch isn’t decorative, duck.” He nods toward the deadbolt. “I could’ve walked straight in.”

A beat passes where you just stare at him, wheels turning and trying to catch up.

Then, he blinks a few times himself, and he finally sees you. Taking in your appearance, remembering why he’s here in the first place, his spine stiffens.

“What happened?” he asks, sharper now.

“I—uh, the— the sink—” you stammer, eyes squeezing shut briefly before you step back and sweep an arm vaguely toward the disaster behind you.

He shifts his gaze past you and to the kitchen faucet spraying in erratic bursts. Water ricochets off the basin and across the counter, a pot teeters on the sink’s edge, your cabinets are streaked dark where it’s soaked into the wood. The floor has its own shallow tide.

John steps forward without a word, you move aside instinctively. The space narrows as he passes, his arm brushing your chest.

He reaches the counter in, what seems like, two strides, boots squelching across the tile. One large hand clamps around the base of the faucet while the other tests the handle. It jerks violently in response, spraying harder, drenching the front of his white tee shirt.

“Christ,” he mutters.

He bends, reaching beneath the sink cabinet, keeping one hand steady on the fixture to redirect the spray. Water splashes down his forearm, soaks into his denim and leaks into his boots. His cheek presses briefly against the counter edge as he feels blindly for the valve underneath.

Behind him, you start to hover — unsure, a little guilty. He can feel you there. Aware of the way you shift your weight, the tension in your breath. Of the way you’re watching him. Of the fact that your door was unlocked when you were alone. How anyone could have walked in. That thought lodges somewhere unpleasant in his chest.

But there are more immediate and pressing matters at hand, so he files it away for later.

“Did this just start?” he asks, voice echoing faintly in the cupboard.

“Yes. It just— it wouldn’t turn off properly and then it—”

His fingers find the valve and he twists harder, effectively closing off the flow. The spray sputters, the pipes groan and then it all just… stops.

The silence that follows is almost disorienting, going from overstimulation to nothing but a slow drip of water and some breathing.

“Oh my god,” you huff, letting out a shaky exhale. “Thank you— seriously— I… I don't know what I would've done.”

John straightens slowly, bracing his hands against the edge of the sink to center himself. He looks down at his saturated clothes, the faint ripple in the water around his boot as he shifts.

“Drown,” he replies evenly, “by the looks of it.”

You grin, a soft laugh slipping out despite yourself. If you weren’t so exhausted, you probably would’ve snorted. “I was handling it just fine before you showed up, actually.”

His shoulders rise as he slowly inhales. “I’m sure you were,” he answers mildly.

“You don’t sound convinced.”

He glances down at the shallow tide circling his boot, then at the cabinet door hanging slightly crooked from where you must’ve wrenched it open in a panic.

“I’m reservin’ judgement.”

“On account of what?”

He tips his chin toward the floor, shifts his boot as if to prove his point. “On account’ve the evidence.”

You follow his line of vision and heat creeps into your cheeks.

“Okay, so it escalated,” you concede.

A short laugh slips from him before he reins it in.

“So I see,” he replies, this time there’s no hiding the amusement.

You move behind him, water splashing underfoot. “You didn’t have to come over, you know,” you say – saccharine sweetly, John thinks.

“I don’t know. The noise suggested otherwise.”

You cringe. “Was it that loud?”

“I only knocked because it sounded urgent,” tone less teasing now.

“You could’ve ignored it,” you nearly sing-song, the corner of your mouth twitching with the threat of a grin. He could have stayed in his flat, but he didn’t. 

He looks half over his shoulder again.

“Is that what you would’ve preferred?”

“No.”

“Right then,” he murmurs, nodding once. 

You go to take a step forward at the same time he pushes off the counter, reaching for a towel just as he turns toward you, and there isn’t enough space in the kitchen for both of you to correct in time. Your palms land flat against his chest with a wet slap before you can stop yourself.

His shirt is soaked through, the cotton warm and heavy beneath your hands, bonded to the breadth of him in a way that makes it impossible not to feel the shape of what’s underneath; muscle that doesn’t need to flex to be felt. Your palms flatten, pressing, fingers splaying unabashedly as if to test the reality of him. You can feel the steady rise and fall of his breathing under your touch, the heat of him, his solidness, close enough that if either of you leaned even slightly forward there would be no space left between you at all. The thought is tempting.

And John doesn’t mean to look at you the way he is. It isn’t deliberate. But your black tee is no better off than his, soaked through, cotton clinging to the soft curves of your body, outlining you in a way that requires very little of his imagination. The lights catch the damp fabric and he’s tracing swells and valleys he has no business tracing. 

He has to force his eyes upward only for it to snag on a single droplet of water slowly rolling down the column of your neck, it travels over your clavicle and disappears beneath the stretched edge of your collar.

You pull your hands away from his chest once you notice the moment tipping. 

“Sorry,” you exhale, and it breaks the spell.

He steps to the side a full step, creating space deliberately, dragging his gaze upward successfully this time.

“You, erm… you keep a mop?” he asks, voice cracking and a little rough, heel of his hand rubbing his bearded jaw. “Towels, maybe?”

You blink at him once, twice, like your brain needs a second to rejoin your body.

“Yeah,” you manage. “I do.”

You step around him this time with more caution than before, suddenly aware of how narrow your kitchen truly is, how little room there is for any more miscalculations.

“In the hall closet,” you mutter, disappearing around the corner, leaving him alone in the quiet of the kitchen.

The room somehow feels smaller than it did before – not because of the water or the mess, but because something in the air has shifted and neither of you have decided what to do with it yet. John exhales slowly, dragging a hand down over his face as if he can physically wipe the moment away. 

From the hallway comes the muted thud of a closet door, followed by something scraping against drywall and the soft rustle of movement.

“You alright back there?” he calls, voice steadier now, back in control of itself.

“Fine,” you answer, slightly breathless. “Found it.”

When you reappear, you’re clutching a mop in one hand with an armful of towels gathered haphazardly against your chest. You look determined in an endearing sort of way that makes something in his chest yawn. He clears his throat quickly before the feeling can settle into something more dangerous.

“Alright,” he says, stepping toward you and relieving you of the mop before you can protest. “Let’s get this sorted before your floor decides to buckle.”

You look up at him, face scrunching, reaching back out for the handle. “Oh, you don’t have–”

He pulls it out of your reach and sighs. “Humor me.”

He works methodically, soaking up what he can while you kneel beside him and press towels into the worst of the puddles, the fibers darkening beneath your hands. The air smells faintly metallic now, musty from dirty water.

The only sounds for a while are the soft scrape of the mop, the quiet rustle of fabric, the steady rhythm of shared movement in a space that feels too small.

John wrings the mop out over the sink, forearms flexing as he twists the handle and squeezes out the excess water. You have to remind yourself not to gawk at the way his shirt pulls tight across his back, shoulder blades rolling as he moves.

When most of the water has been cleaned up, he crouches to inspect the pipes beneath the sink again. One knee rests against the tile, sleeves pushed higher now, brow drawn together in concentration as he checks the valve with deft hands.

“Cartridge in the tap’s gone,” he mutters, tightening the valve again. “Handle can’t shut the water properly anymore. Maintenance’ll replace it in five minutes.”

“I wouldn’t even know what to tell them,” you sigh, wiping your temple with the back of your wrist and leaving a faint streak of wet there.

He turns to you, blue eyes softening almost imperceptibly. “Just tell ‘em it won’t shut off fully. They’ll know what that means.”

You nod, committing the issue to memory as if it’s more complicated than it is.

He rises and reaches past you to push the window open a few inches, letting a swirl of cool night air slip into the room. It curls around your ankles and lifts the damp edges of your shirt, carrying the scent of wet pavement and the distant hum of traffic.

“Keep it open till it’s dry in here,” he says, brushing his hands together lightly as if to rid them of the last of the mess.

He heads toward the door, and you follow. On the other side of the threshold, he pauses. He peers over your shoulder – to the sink, the cabinet, the open window, the floor – checking each detail like he’s committing it to some internal list. Only after that does he land on you, but he quickly skips to your door, to the deadbolt you hadn’t turned earlier.

He tips his chin toward it. “Lock it properly behind me.”

You follow his gaze, fingers already reaching for the lock. “I will,” you say, trying and failing to keep the smile from pulling at the edges of your lips. “Thanks again. I don’t even know what to say,” you breathe a nervous laugh. 

“Don’t have to say anything,” he shakes his head. “Just… don’t touch it until maintenance comes, yeah?”

“I promise you that I won’t,” you giggle quietly. 

“Good,” he takes a small step backward, eyes lingering for a beat. 

“Night, John,” you murmur. 

“Night.”

You close the door, sliding your latch into place as promised. And on the other side, he waits just long enough to hear it catch.

————————

Two days after the flood, you’re stepping out of your flat, tote bag sliding off your shoulder, phone unlocked in your hand, half-reading an email you should have responded to last night, when your hear the creek of John’s door opening at the same time, stealing your attention.

He’s standing there with his keys still in the lock, coat on but open. There’s a faint flush in his cheeks likely from being outside, a takeaway coffee balanced loosely in his free hand.

There’s a split second where you both recalibrate. He blinks a few times as you walk in his direction, taking his keys out and slipping them into his coat pocket, foot planted to hold his door from shutting. 

“You alright?” he asks, tone casual, like nothing unusual has ever happened between you.

“Yeah,” you reply, equally steady. “Are you?”

He nods once. “You get your sink sorted?” he asks as you drift toward the staircase. 

“Oh, yeah. Landlord sent someone ‘round yesterday.”

“Any good?”

You huff a faint laugh. “Very enthusiastic about pipes. Less enthusiastic about fixing them.”

He scowls slightly. “They fix it?”

“Yes,” you say. “Apparently I ‘over-rotated the cartridge.’ Which sounds a lot like something you say to avoid admitting it was old.”

“It means you forced it.”

“I did not force it,” your jaw falls open slightly in offence. 

“You forced it,” he repeats dryly. 

“It was an old tap!” you insist.

He studies you for a second, eyes glinting with an admiration for the way you stand your ground over something so inconsequential. 

You reach the the stairwell landing, passing by him closely as you take the first step down, hand on the banister, turning sideways to keep him in your sights. 

“You call straight away?” he asks casually enough that it should feel that way, but there’s something in his tone that’s almost challenging. “Or did you try fixin’ it again yourself?”

“I called straight away.”

“Good girl,” he replies absently, the words folded so naturally into the rhythm of the conversation that they almost disappear. Almost.

Your breath hitches quietly, every nerve inside of your body coming alight with a current that zips up your spine, tingling the base of your neck before spreading through your jaw until every bit of flesh above your neck begins to glow. Your belly tightens with a molten fever that begins to reach places far lower than it should.

He’s not even looking at you, he just adjusts the lid on his coffee like he hasn’t altered the chemical composition of the air between you.

“Off to work?” he continues mildly, eyes flicking to yours.

You clear your throat, steadying your voice before you answer.

“Y-yeah.”

“Right,” he says, as if concluding the world’s most ordinary exchange. “Have a good one.”

You nod once, adjusting the strap of your bag higher on your shoulder, mouth running dry.

“Yeah, you too,” you manage as he pushes his door open and steps inside. 

He glances once more from the doorway, offering a tight line of a smile before the door closes and separates you.

——————

The sun’s an orange yolk dropped into the cradle of a purpling sky. You’re halfway home from the office when you notice the liquor store’s neon sign buzzing red against the early dark.  You slow on the sidewalk, hands tucked into your coat pockets, breath fogging in front of you.

There’s no obligation, of course. He saved you from your untamed sink because that’s just the kinda guy he is. But the memory of it, of him, has lingered with you for days now, slipping in uninvitedly while on calls with clients, during meetings with your boss, fingers flexing unconsciously against your thighs as you remember the solidness of his chest beneath them that night.

The distraction was at its worst today, with John’s ‘good girl’ chanting like a feverish prayer that only the devil themself could’ve conjured and stitched into the back of your skull – his voice, the bass of it, reverberated between your ears for so long you found yourself wishing the vibration would travel lower.

He looks like a whiskey man, you decide.

Inside the store, the air smells like cut cardboard and oak, a little dusty. You wander longer than you should, reading labels you can’t pronounce, lifting one bottle after another, circling the aisle with the indecision of someone pretending to know what she’s doing. Your shoes stick faintly against the hardwood as you pace.

The clerk notices your hesitation eventually.

“Need a hand?” he asks.

“I’m just looking for something… smooth,” you decide, though it comes out more like a question than an answer.

He nods as if he’s heard that a thousand times before and points you toward three options just in front of you. You choose the one priced in the middle, not too expensive, but enough to be considered a gift, you think. You carry it to the counter with an anxious flutter beneath your ribs.

The building’s stairs feel longer tonight. Each step echoes louder than the last, paper bag crinkling in your grip with every movement. By the time you reach your floor, your pulse has climbed into your throat. You pass his, going to your own door first, stepping inside just long enough to set your purse down on the table and search deep into the pit of your gut to find some bravery. 

You could leave it at his door with a note, you consider.

But you won’t, because that’s not really what you want to do, is it?

The hallway between your flats feels like it begins to narrow with you in it, the overhead light flickering ominously as it always does. His door is only a few steps away, and yet the walk toward it feels more like a trek.

John hears your door before he hears the knock.

The old building carries sound in that way old buildings do. Your door opening and closing is a sound he’s come to recognize now. The soft chime of your keys too, because everyone’s keyring sounds different, the jingle is unique, yours are no exception.

So when the knocks come a few seconds later, he already knows it’s you. 

He stands at his kitchen counter, rag still in hand, his heartbeat behaving in a way it hasn’t outside of work in a number of years. He doesn’t know how, in less than a week, he’s gone from not knowing your name to timing his morning coffee run with when you leave for work just to get a glimpse of you, to catch the scent of your perfume in the stairwell.

By the time he reaches the door, he’s aware of the way his shoulders square on their own, the way his hand smooths over his beard, the way his fingers rake through his hair before he turns the handle.

And when he finally opens the door, you’re right there. It takes him half a second too long to draw in a full breath. 

Your work coat is still on and hanging open at the collar, the fleece folding over just enough to reveal that hollow at the base of your throat that he just can’t keep himself from finding every time you’re in front of him. Your cheeks are glowing from the stairwell, clothes still carrying the cold, hair slightly mussed from the wind, perhaps.

“Hey,” he breathes, voice getting caught in the folds of his chords enough to crack on its way up. 

You lift the brown bag in response, that crooked little smile he’s starting to recognize appears like you can’t quite decide whether to commit to it or not.

“A thank you,” you present it to him, the base of it resting in your hand precariously.

His eyes land on the bag and then return to your face.

“Should I be concerned?” he asks with a teasing lilt.

You step closer to the door, holding it out for him to take.

“It’s just whiskey, John,” you giggle and instantly wish you could take back the hyenic sound that leaves you.

He takes it from you and peers into its depths, letting out a low appreciative whistle.

“That’s… very generous.”

“I didn’t know what you liked,” you admit, aware of how exposed this feels, almost embarrassing now with how slick your neck is beginning to feel. “The man at the store said this one was smooth. I figured that was safe.”

He studies you for a moment in a way that warms your skin even more beneath your coat. Like he’s weighing your intention behind the gesture.

“Be a shame,” he starts, moving to the side of the doorway, “to let it sit unopened.”

“You invitin’ me in?” you ask, aiming for lightness and landing somewhere breathless instead. 

This was the idea, wasn’t it? That he would invite you in? So why do you want to run back down the hall now?

“I am,” he nods. “If you’d like.”

He opens the door wider, and when you step past him the air changes in that way it always does when you cross into someone else’s space. Not just in temperature, but in atmosphere and energy – the smells change, the lights change, the sounds change.

He puts the whiskey down on his entry table, holding his hand out while he asks for your coat. You shrug out of it so he can hang it on the hook beside the door. 

You quickly notice, however, it doesn’t smell like soap tonight.

It smells like food.

Butter and garlic and something a little smoky, like an iron pan that got a little too hot on the burner. There’s rosemary in there somewhere, you think. It makes your stomach rumble a little, suddenly aware that you left work on a granola bar and a few cups of lukewarm coffee.

“Oh…” you murmur before you can stop yourself, gaze drifting into the kitchen. “Were you eating?”

“Was about to. Just finished cookin’.”

You look closer this time, there’s a plate on the counter with a steak resting in its own juices, some mash beside it still holding the groove of the spoon, green beans piled neatly on the side.

It looks good, but you instantly feel guilty.

“I’m sorry,” you apologize, taking a small step backward toward the door. “I didn’t mean to interrupt. I can come back.”

He exhales a faint huff of amusement from behind as he slips around you, his hand brushing along the small of your back as he passes toward the kitchen. “You didn’t interrupt anything.”

“I did,” you insist, following behind him now like you're being pulled. “You were literally about to eat.”

“And you were ‘literally’ about to go home and order takeaway,” he counters mockingly without even looking.

You stop short in the threshold, a hand finding rest on your hip. “Excuse me?” you scoff.

At the counter, he looks over his shoulder, one brow lifting. “Let’s not pretend.”

He’s still faintly smiling as he reaches for a knife.

“I wasn’t,” you lie, though even to your own ears it sounds a bit defensive. You were definitely planning on ordering palak paneer for the third night in a row.

“S’that why I see Indian outside your door every night? I thought it might be becomin’ part of the decor…”

Your mouth falls open despite the grin yanking at your edges. “First of all, that’s, like, borderline stalking.”

“Shared hallway,” he replies entirely unapologetic.

“Second of all,” you continue, undeterred, “sometimes it’s Italian.”

He hums thoughtfully. “Right. A woman of culture then.”

He slices into the steak with an adept sort of ease, cutting it into even strips before he reaches into the cupboard to bring down a second plate. It takes a moment before what he’s doing dawns on you.

“John,” you step further into the kitchen, hand reaching out before pulling it back. “You don’t have to feed me.”

“I know,” he says, back still turned. “But I reckon you’re hungry…. So, have a seat.”

He transfers a few pieces of steak to the second plate, adds another spoonful of mash without asking whether you want it, then nudges a few green beans alongside it.

“I didn’t come to eat your dinner,” you continue your weak protest. 

He doesn’t wait for you to say anything else, he just slides the plate along the laminate countertop towards you and then tips his head to the small table by the window.

“Sit,” he says, not too firmly, just with an expectation that you will.

And you do, which is something you’ll have to dissect later.

You hesitate half a second before taking the plate and floating toward the chair. You lower yourself into it, perched on edge stiffly, feeling a little unsure of yourself despite having sat here before. 

You can feel John notice your tentativeness, a quick sideglance from him as he finishes up pricks at the hairs on your arms.

“Sit comfortably,” he corrects pointedly, as though amending the first instruction. His voice is low and even, commanding even when he isn’t trying to be.

Heat creeps up your spine, but you reposition anyway, scooting back until your shoulders touch the wooden stiles, tucking one leg beneath the other. Only then does he set a fork and knife beside your plate, fingers brushing yours in the exchange. He places a glass of water in front of you too, condensation pooling around the base of it almost instantly, leaving a ring that distorts the grains in the honeyed wood. 

He grabs his own plate and sits across from you.

The table isn’t very large, you become acutely aware of that very quickly. Beneath it, his knees hover close enough that you can feel the warmth radiating from them. If you extended your leg any further, it would press against his without any effort.

“There,” he murmurs, voice quieter now, eyes lifting to yours across the small space. “Eat somethin’ proper for the first time this week, will ya.”

You take a bite mostly to busy your hands. The mash is still warm, butter melted into salty pockets. The steak all but melts between your teeth, tender in a way you’ve never managed to get it yourself, seasoned simply and perfectly and with the confidence of someone who has never once second-guessed himself over a pan.

“This is so good, John,” you say, before you’ve even fully swallowed. “Like — really good.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” You nod, watching one brow lift. “And not ‘I’m being polite’ good. Actually good.”

“Mm. High praise from such a cultured young duck,” he replies, dry as anything.

“I don’t just hand it out willy-nilly,” you say primly, the tips of your ears tingling.

That draws a soft breath of laughter from him. “No, of course not,” he agrees. “You don’t strike me as the type.”

“And what type is that?” you ask before you can stop yourself. 

“Stubborn,” he answers, a little too easily, eyes steady on yours.

You tilt your head. “Think you’ve got me all figured out then?”

“It’s kind of my specialty,” he says. “Believe it or not.”

“Is it?” you press. The fork turns between your fingers in thought, like you might actually learn something deeper about him right now. “And what else have you figured out?”

He considers you for a moment. “That you ask a lot of questions.”

“I’m curious,” you say. “There’s a difference.”

“Is there?”

“Yes.” You lean forward slightly, elbows finding the table. “Asking questions means I’m interested. Asking a lot of questions means I’m very interested.”

Something shifts in his expression at that, a subtle recalibration, like he hadn’t expected you to say it so plainly. His eyes hold yours for a beat before he glances down at his plate, the corner of his mouth doing something restrained and infuriating.

“Careful,” he says, low and easy.

“Maybe I don’t see what there is to be careful about.”

He looks at you again then, and there’s something in his eyes that is slightly too warm to be neutral.

“No,” he says, almost to himself. “I don’t suppose you do.”

You hold his gaze, refusing to be the first one to look away, even as the back of your neck starts to prickle pleasantly. Eventually, he picks up his fork again, and you take it as a small victory.

“So,” you say, after a moment, tilting your head like the thought has only just occurred to you. “How long have you been holding out on me like this?”

He glances up. “Holdin’ out? On you?”

“Yeah.” You gesture lightly at your plate. “I’ve been living next door to this for how long, exactly?”

“Fourteen months,” he answers, immediately and without blinking, like the number was already sitting on the tip of his tongue.

Taken aback, your hand goes slightly clammy around your cutlery. Less than a week ago you were fairly certain he barely registered your existence.

A faint exhale of amusement leaves him at your silence, eyes dropping briefly to his plate. “Didn’t realize I was under an obligation to feed you.”

“I think, legally, you are now,” you counter, recovering.

He studies you over the rim of his glass as he takes a sip of water, eyes narrowing slowly. “Are you always this demanding?”

“When properly motivated.”

He nods once, like he’s filing that away somewhere. 

“You like to cook?” you ask then, watching him.

“I do.”

Frustrated, you drop your fork and knife down with a little more force than intended, the sound of it clattering, ringing out in the small kitchen. His head snaps up at you.

“That’s so vague,” you whine almost indignantly. “Why are you always so vague?”

John sits back slowly now, arms crossing over his chest, fingers tucking beneath his beefy biceps, pushing them out to strain against the sleeves of his shirt. His head tilts, forehead creasing with many lines. “I’ve answered every question you’ve asked me,” he says, tongue licking over his canine behind closed lips. 

“You’ve responded to every question,” you correct. “It’s not the same thing.”

Something twitches at the corner of his mouth.

“Men and their refusal to elaborate,” you mutter, rolling your eyes before landing back on your dinner.

“I’d argue it’s more like ‘women and their refusal to be satisfied’,” he returns mildly.

“How can I possibly be satisfied, you give me nothing to work with!” You can feel yourself getting animated now, leaning forward again, and beneath the table your knee presses into his without you even noticing.

He notices, though. And he makes no move to change it. 

“Every time I ask you something real you just— you do this thing where you answer juuust enough to qualify and then you stop. And I can see you stopping, John, I can physically see it!”

That gets you a real laugh, fuller than you’ve heard from hin before, it’s gravel-deep and a little raspy, the lines at the corners of his eyes deepening as his teeth show just long enough to catch. It dissolves the tension so suddenly you almost feel cheated out of it.

“Alright, alright,” he placates, reining himself back in, still smiling faintly. “What d’you want to know?”

You blink at him, recalibrating your attitude. “Oh, now you want to cooperate.”

“Ask your question before I change my mind.”

You study him for a second, aware that this is a small window of opportunity that may not open again given his track record.

“Okay,” you say carefully. “What do you actually do? Not ‘I work,’ not ‘I travel’.  What do you do?”

He exhales slowly through his nose, his smile fading into something more straight lined. His thumb traces an idle line across the back of his knuckle, back and forth across those healing scrapes.

“Special forces,” he admits. “That’s— that’s about as much as I can give you.”

The answer gives your pause. You’re not particularly surprised by it, somewhere in your gut you already knew. So you absorb the information quietly. It reframes him in a way, things you’ve already half-noticed about him like his posture and his stillness, the way he speaks, the way he gives these subtle orders that you never know how to read.

“Okay,” you settle on simply, his answer still swimming around in your head like disconnected puzzle pieces slowly attaching to one another. 

He looks at you like he expected more. “Okay?”

“Okay,” you repeat, shoulders shrugging smally. “Thank you for telling me.”

Something in him settles before he picks up his fork again, and for a moment you eat in a comfortable quiet, only the soft scrape of cutlery filling the room.

“Does that bother you?” he asks eventually, without looking up.

“No,” you answer honestly. “Should it?”

“Some people find it… complicated.”

“I imagine the right people don’t.”

He looks at you then, eyes shifting from his plate cautiously, something unreadable flickering across his face before he glances away again.

Outside the window beside you, the sky has gone fully dark, the glass reflecting an image of the kitchen, the two of you small and warm inside of it.

“How old are you?” he asks suddenly, like he’s been holding the question back for a while. Your eyes snap over to him again.

“Twenty-six,” you tell him. “How old are you?”

A puff of air exhales slowly from between his lips. “Old enough to know better,” he murmurs to himself, which, again, is not an answer.

“Know better than what?”

He doesn’t reply to that either, just looks at you with that steady expression he has, the one that makes the back of your throat go dry and the tops of your thighs squeeze.

And it’s now, in the quiet of his kitchen, under the gaze of blue eyes, that you realize he is perfectly aware of  what he’s doing to you. And probably has been for longer than he’d even admit.

“You’re insufferable,” you inform him pleasantly.

“You’re not the first to think so,” he agrees, unbothered.

Afterwards, you insist on helping with the dishes despite his objections.

“You’re stubborn,” he says.

“You like it,” you push. 

John sighs like it pains him as he hands you a dish towel. 

There’s something about the domesticity of it that feels intimate. Standing hip to hip in the narrow galley, light above the sink draping you both in a golden curtain, him washing and you drying, neither of you talking very much but not minding the quiet either.

He passes you a glass and his shoulder brushes yours as he reaches past you to set a fork in the drying rack, neither of you move away afterward. The inch that used to be between your arms stays closed now, pressed to each other.

“D’you do this often?” he asks.

“Dry dishes in strange men’s kitchens?”

His mouth twitches. “Yes.”

“No,” you hum through a smile. “You’re the first.”

“First strange man or first time drying his dishes?” He reaches past you again.

“First time drying his dishes,” you chuckle. “Jury’s still out on the other one.”

He makes a sound that might be a laugh, low, suppressed, eyes crinkling as he keeps his gaze on the sink. 

When the last dish is done and the towel is damp in your fingers and the tap has gone off, the kitchen settles into a silence that buzzes with something unspent. John dries his hands and leans back against the counter, looking at you in an unhurried sort of way.

“C’mon,” he says, tilting his head toward the living room.

——————

He moves to the sideboard where the whiskey is waiting and you drift naturally toward his bookcase, drawn there by the same restless energy that’s been humming under your skin all evening. It’s something to do with your racing thoughts while he’s occupied with the bottle.

“Am I allowed to snoop,” you ask, fingers already trailing over the spines of his books, “or are there rules?” squinting at a title, tipping the text out of line to have a brief look at the cover. You look back at him. 

“There are always rules,” he replies, glancing up from the glasses in front of him.

“Naturally,” you murmur, and return to it.

It’s mostly as you remember from that first night in his flat — books arranged by size, spines perfectly even — but you look more carefully this time, now that you know more about the hands that arranged them. History, mostly. A few novels with cracked spines that suggest they’ve actually been read rather than kept for show. A dog-eared paperback in a language you don’t recognize, the cover worn soft at the corners.

There’s a small brass compass that sits at the end of one shelf. A scattering of foreign coins too, silver and copper that don’t match anything in your wallet, currencies from places you probably couldn’t even find on a map.

You lift one, turning it over in your palm. It’s smooth from handling, warm from the ambient heat of the room.

“You’ve got coins from everywhere,” you observe.

“Habit,” he says from behind you. You can hear the quiet glug of whiskey meeting glass.

“Of picking them up?”

“Of keeping them.”

You set it back carefully, exactly where it was. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” he admits, and then he pauses, thinks about it. “Reminds you where you’ve been,” he says. “When everywhere starts to look the same.”

You turn that over for a moment, looking at the small scattered collection with different eyes now.

“That’s either very philosophical or very sad,” you decide.

“I think it’s a bit of both, no?”

You glance over your shoulder at him. He’s watching you with an almost smile. He holds out a glass toward you and you cross the room to take it, your fingers closing around the cool curve of it, pressing over his fingers in the exchange.

“The books,” you say, nodding back toward the shelf. “Have you read all of them?”

“Most of them.”

“Which ones haven’t you?”

“The ones that were gifts,” he says, after a thoughtful pause.

You don’t push that one. Just let it sit between you as you both settle onto the sofa — you first, then him, and the distance he leaves is careful and deliberate and already smaller than it probably should be, honestly. 

“You’re very minimal,” you say, cradling the glass in both hands.

“You’ve mentioned,” he says before taking a tight-lipped sip. 

“I’m saying it again.” You tilt your head. “Does it ever feel lonely?”

Something moves across his face — not offense. More like the question landed somewhere real and he wasn’t quite expecting it to. “Sometimes,” he says, which is more than you expected him to give you.

“But you keep it this way anyway.”

“Easier when you’re never sure how long you’ll be back for.”

You look at him for a moment, this big, careful, frustratingly guarded man, and you feel the particular ache of understanding someone just enough to know how much you don’t.

“That’s a very lonely way to live, John,” you say not unkindly, just honestly.

His jaw shifts. “Maybe,” he concedes, and the word is low and a little rough at the edges.

You take your first cautious sip of whiskey. The burn blooms along your tongue and spreads slow and deep into your chest, and your eyes sting just slightly at the corners. A small cough escapes despite your best efforts to hold it back. 

He watches you over the edge of his own glass, amusement soft in the lines around his eyes. “It’ll settle,” he assures you gently. 

“That’s what everyone says right before it doesn’t,” you answer, though you take another sip anyway, slower this time, letting the heat spread rather than fighting it.

A low chuckle leaves him at that, and something about the sound in the dim room makes the space feel smaller, the careful distance between you on the sofa somehow already less than it was a moment ago. You’re not entirely sure which of you is responsible for that. 

Outside the window the city carries on in its distant, indifferent way — the low hum of traffic, the occasional sweep of headlights across the ceiling — and in here the lamp burns warm and the whiskey is settling into your chest exactly like he said it would and the space between your knee and his thigh has quietly, incrementally ceased to exist without either of you making a conscious decision about it.

You look at him to find he’s already looking at you. His eyes are very blue even in the dim light of the room. Ocean deep and sparkling with amber flecks from the lamp, carrying something unguarded for the first time, simmering on the surface. 

“You’re staring,” you say softly.

“Am I.”

It isn’t a question though, not the way he says it. His glass rests loose in his hand, and he makes no effort whatsoever to look away.

“You are,” you nod, the edge of your mouth quirking as you look back into your glass.

His thigh is solid and warm against your knee. And you can smell him this close. Dish soap and whiskey, something musky and spicey, something you’ve decided must belong distinctly to him.

Your pulse is conducting itself with an embarrassing lack of composure that you hope, without much conviction, isn’t visible.

He reaches up toward your face and, regrettably, you flinch gently. Certainly not because you want him to stop, you just weren’t expecting it. And John seems to register that, he pauses instantly when you do. His hand flexes slowly in the air beside you, palm opening unhurried and safe, like an apology before he continues his gingerly movement forward and tucks a strand of hair back from your face. His knuckles just barely graze the line of your jaw as his hand drops.

It was such a small thing, barely anything at all, and yet your whole body responds to it like a held breath finally releasing, like something that has been wound tight behind your ribs all evening just gave way.

“Still think I’ve got nothin’ to say for myself?” he murmurs.

All you can manage in a small shake of your head, your fingers twisting into the wrinkled fabric of your skirt. 

The corner of his mouth lifts. And then his eyes drop to your mouth and stay there. He doesn’t pretend otherwise, and you feel the intention of it like a change in pressure, like what the air does in those calm minutes before a storm. 

John moves slow enough that you see it coming and still aren’t ready. He leans inward just a fraction, almost imperceptible. It’s the kind of movement that could mean nothing, that could be dismissed totally if you were inclined to do so.

But there is nothing incidental about the way he’s looking at you, and nothing accidental about the way the distance between you continues to melt. He stops short, just close enough that all either of you would need is the smallest shift and there would be nothing left between you at all.

There he waits, close enough you can feel his breath, close enough to admire the freckle on his nose. He’s infuriatingly patient and unbearably still, like a man who has made his intentions very clear and is now perfectly content to let you decide what happens next. In the span of a single held breath, you learn he isn’t going to close the gap.

So you do.

Your mouth meets his and he kisses you carefully. Like he’s learning the shape of you. One large hand comes up to cradle the side of your face, his thumb resting at the curve of your jaw, and the touch is so steady that something in your chest just — gives. It comes loose like a knot that’s been tied tight all evening finally being pulled free, its tension unraveling all at once, its ribbon fluttering to floor with an exhale that he swallows. 

The whiskey is warm on his lips, a faint sweetness beneath the heat of him, and it mingles with the warmth already blossoming in your chest. 

You feel him reach, it’s followed by a soft clunk of his glass setting on the table. Then you feel his hand on yours, prying your cemented fingers from your own cup so that he can place it beside his. All the while his lips continue to capture yours, his beard scratching at your chin when he tilts to deepen it.

Your newly freed hand finds the front of his shirt. Fingers curling into the soft of it like you need something solid to hold onto while the world around you tilts ever so slightly off its axis.

He pulls back, and for one terrifying second you think it’s over, your eyes open, but he’s only paused, his thumb tracing a slow arc along your jaw. His eyes open to find yours and they are blown dark, grey and navy, pupils fighting for space with his irises.

“Alright?” he murmurs lowly, the word barely more than a vibration between you.

“Yes,” you breathe embarrassingly quick, which makes the corner of his mouth curve, and then he comes back to you and this time he’s a little less careful.

His hand slides from your jaw into your hair, fingers curling at the nape of your heated neck, the kiss deepens by degrees, his tongue pushing through to sweep along yours like a tide coming in high.

Your fingers tighten more in his shirt, closing into a fist that twists the cotton tight across him. You can feel the heat of him through it, and it’s so much better than the memory from that night in your kitchen, so much realer, and something akin to lava in your belly responds to the realness of it in a way you feel all the way down to your thighs.

When his other hand finds your neck, the pad of his thumb traces the line of your jaw until he finds your pulse just below it, pressing into it until a soft squeak escapes your throat and he’s grinning against you. 

You push into him without thinking about it, closing whatever distance is left between your bodies, your free hand finding his jaw, scratching through the short coarse hair of his beard. He makes a low sound against your mouth that you feel at the back of your teeth, in the base of your throat, in places further south than either of those.

The hand at your neck slides slowly, tracing down over your collarbone, your shoulder, coming to rest at your waist, fingers pressing in through the fabric of your blouse with a firmness that makes your thighs press together. He pulls at you just enough to 

communicate something without saying it, and you follow.

Swinging one leg over him, your pencil skirt rides up over your thighs as you stretch across his wide lap, it bunches just under your hips, leaving a salacious bit of fabric between his zipper and the thin lace covering your center. 

You pull back just far enough to look at him, to catch your breath, lips swollen, chin chapped. His hair is slightly displaced, your doing. His mouth is bitten-red, also your doing. 

His hands are warm and heavy on your hips, fingers pressing into the fat of them.

“Hi,” you say softly, which is an absurd thing to say and you know it the moment it leaves your mouth.

Something like amusement crosses his features and he reaches up to tuck a strand of hair back from your face for the second time tonight.

“Hi,” he says back, voice rough with restraint.

But not too much because then his hands are sliding from your hips to the backs of your thighs, calloused palms grazing across your skin.

“Okay?” he asks, thumb tracing that slow arc against the inside of your knee.

“Very,” you manage.

The corner of his mouth pulls up and his hands begin, with absolutely no hurry whatsoever, to move.

He kisses you again, slower this time, deeper, no longer learning. His hands move from your thighs to your waist, sliding under your blouse, palms meeting hot skin.

You press into him greedily, hips shifting forward, chasing something instinctive, a feeling so insistent it makes you rock again, and then again, and you feel him — solid and unmistakable — beneath you, the heat of him coming through the denim. The breath that attempts to leave you hitches in your chest and sticks there. 

His hands tighten at your waist and you roll into it again, his jaw tightens and he exhales a groan into your mouth. 

The kissing gets away from both of you quicker than you can even keep up with it. His hand climbs your back, fingers spreading wide between your shoulder blades, pressing, pulling you closer until your chest is firmly to his and your back is arched like a bow.

Your fingers fist his hair and then his beard and the warm column of his neck, touching everything you can reach.

You pull back from his mouth, breathing unsteadily, your forehead tipping toward his.

“John,” you breathe, and it comes out lower than you intend.

“Mm,” he answers, his lips finding the hinge of your jaw, the soft patch just beneath your ear, and your eyes close.

“I want—” you start.

“I know what you want,” he whispers against your neck, and you can feel the curve of his mouth against your flesh as he says it.

Your fingers tighten in his hair. Your hips shift again, more pointed this time, and his breath comes out slow and controlled through his nose in a way that tells you it’s costing him his currency of composure.

“John.” More insistent now, your hand fitting between your bodies, fingers crawling to his belt, making yourself clear.

He pulls back to look at you, eyes steady, his hand catching your wrist gently before you get any further.

“Easy,” he says, low. His thumb strokes across your pulse point once before he pulls your hand aside.

“I want—”

“I know what you want,” he says again. “But, not tonight,” he finishes, tone on the edge of pleading.

You make a sound of frustration that dissolves as his hands slip to the backs of your thighs and up, kneading the flesh of your exposed backside.

“Here’s what’s gonna happen,” he starts, very quietly, like he’s telling you a secret, his eyes holding yours with a steadiness that makes your stomach drop toward the floor. “You’re gonna stay right where you are.” His fingers trace the hemline of your underwear, just enough to make you very aware of where they are and where they are not. “And I’m gonna take care of you.” He takes a pause, eyes searching around your face. “Properly.”

Your bottom lip catches between your teeth and you nod. 

“Yeah,” you breathe. “Okay.”

“Okay,” he echoes softly. “Lean back, duck.”

He helps shift you back to give himself enough space to get a look at you, to soon fit his hand between your already spread thighs.

He doesn’t look anywhere else, only your face, as he gingerly slides his big hands the length of your thighs, his thumbs pressing into the meat inside on their way up until they hit the hot crease that meets your core. 

You look down at his hands, your own finding purchase on his wrists — he doesn’t seem to mind. He moves one to your hip, the other descends, the heel of his palm pressing against your lace. He takes his time, moving in excruciating circles, like he’s learning the shape of you through fabric first. You try very hard not to come apart immediately but it's a losing battle from the start given how long it’s been since anyone has touched you like this.

Your head falls back with a soft, helpless sound and your hips push into the pressure, chasing it, making your own friction. 

“There she is,” he murmurs, and you can hear the smile in it.

“John,” you whimper, hips rocking, asking for more without words.

He answers by hooking a finger into the hem of your underwear and pulling them aside. He traces through your folds at a pace that makes your thighs tremble. You can hear your slick separating around his digits, you try not to think about how embarrassing it is to be this wet.

“Look at me.”

And it’s hard. It’s hard to lift your head back up, to meet his wrecked gaze, but you do. You can feel the blood rushing around your cheeks, the whiskey bubbling under your skin. 

When he finally — finally — plunges one thick finger into the well of you, your whole body folds, your forehead dropping to his. Your hands move to his shoulders, finger nails digging half-moons through his shirt and into his skin. 

“Good?” he asks, low.

“Yes,” you manage, “yes, please—”

He works you open slowly, one finger and then, after he’s made you wait, two. And the stretch of it, the fullness of it slipping in beside his index, pulls a moan from you that bounces off every surface in the room.

He finds a rhythm that unravels you. He pushes deep, until each knuckle is nestled into your heat. He moves them, curls them, pumps them achingly slow until you are completely and utterly lost, rocking into his hand, face buried in his neck, panting. 

The tension builds inside of you like a spring, coiling tight and hot. Your breathing goes ragged and your grip tightens.

And then, when you’re already spinning, when there’s nothing left in you capable of forming a coherent thought about anything, he turns his head, his lips at your temple. 

“This is why you came ’round, yeah?” The words drop like molten silver into the shell of your ear. “This is what you wanted?”

You can’t answer him, and he knows that, so you just press closer, and let the last of it break over you in a long, consuming wave that starts somewhere deep and radiates outward until you feel it in your fingertips, your jaw, the backs of your knees, and up the length of your spine. Your walls pulse around him, and you can feel how damp it’s all left you in his hand. 

You stay where you are, forehead against his shoulder, your breathing coming back to you. His free hand moves in a slow idle path up and down your back.

You lift your head eventually and look at him.

There’s a warmth in his expression that’s more unguarded than anything you’ve seen from him all night, his careful composure worn down, and it does something to your chest that has nothing to do with what just happened and everything to do with who he is.

“That was—” you start.

“Yeah,” he agrees, before you’ve finished.

You laugh softly at that, and he almost does too, that almost-smile making an appearance.

Outside a car passes, headlights sweeping briefly across the ceiling before disappearing.

“I should go,” you say, which is true, but it’s also a little bit of a shame.

He doesn’t argue with you. He nods once, and the arm around your back loosens.

You clamber off of his lap with less grace than you’d like, your skirt fighting with you before it sits correctly again. You feel him watching you fix yourself with a composure that you find deeply unfair given that he’s largely responsible for the state you’re in.

“Not a word,” you warn, without looking at him

“I wasn’t gonna say anything,” he croons in a tone that suggests he absolutely was. He reaches for his long forgotten whiskey and takes the last of it down in one gulp. 

You smooth yourself out, retrieve your shoes from where they’ve ended up beside the coffee table, and carry them with you to the door. He stands, straightening his shirt, and you notice with some indignation that he looks entirely unruffled. Like the last hour happened to you very specifically and left him more or less untouched.

“Ready?” he asks.

You huff a small laugh, and find you’re unable to look him in the eye, your face turning to your bare feet on his rug.

“You don’t have to walk me,” you say. “It’s literally a hallway.”

“But I’m going to,” he says, and moves to the door anyway.

The corridor is dim, the floral runner threadbare underfoot. You count the paces between your doors. It’s nine. 

At your door you turn back to face him.

He’s standing just behind you, hands tucked into his front pockets. 

“Thanks for dinner,” you say.

“Thanks for the whiskey,” he returns.

“Yeah, that— It was good.”

“It was,” he agrees, and you both know neither of you are talking solely about the whiskey.

“Night, John,” you say softly.

“Night, duck.”

You turn and let yourself in, the door swings shut behind you, and you stand in the dim of your own flat for a moment just… breathing. Just letting this electric air calm around you.

Your coat is still on his hook. You’ll get it tomorrow.

On the other side of your door, John doesn’t move immediately. He stands where he is and waits. Waiting for the click of your deadbolt to slide home.

But it doesn’t come.

He even waits another moment, just in case, gives you the benefit of the doubt, which he notes is more than past events warrant.

He exhales slowly through his nose, tips his head back briefly toward the ceiling, and turns back around.

Three steps, his hand finds your door handle, turns it, and the door swings open without resistance, which is exactly what he was afraid of.

You’re in the entryway still, back against the wall in thought. You turn your head to the side when the door opens, eyes going wide, lips parting with confusion.

He leans against the door frame, arms crossing slowly over his chest, looking at you with the hard expression of a man who is being very patient. His chin is tucked and his forehead creased three times over. 

“I—”

“Second time,” he says over you. “Second time I’ve found that door unlocked.”

“I was literally ten seconds behind you—”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Nothing was going to—”

“Doesn’t matter,” he says again, the same way.

You look at him for a moment, shoes still in your hand, and he looks back, and you let out a breath through your nose that is not quite a sigh and not quite a laugh and is mostly a concession.

“Fine,” you say.

“Lock it,” he says. “Tonight and every night. Are we clear?”

“We’re clear,” you mutter.

He holds your gaze a beat longer like he’s making sure the message has actually taken root this time, and then he nods once and pushes off the door frame.

“Good night,” he says, pulling your door closed from the outside.

You stand there in your entryway listening. You can hear him waiting, the impatient shift of his weight against old floorboards.

You reach out and turn the deadbolt.

Then all that’s left to hear are his retreating footfalls heading back down the hall to his own door.

You stand there, fingers still on the lock, a smile pulling at the corners of your mouth.

-------

Correction, you weren't really one of his students so much as you were a stray duckling who'd wandered in on a campus-wide guest lecture one misaligned evening and stayed too long for the post-talk reception. You joke sometimes that it was fate; John thinks it has more to do with the throngs of International Relations students at the door that ensnared your intrigue than any divine intervention. What kind of deity would put a sweet thing like you in his undeserving hands?

It's a stain on his so-called clean start, one which he hasn't had the wherewithal to wash his hands of despite the many mental promises. Fraternizing had always seemed beneath him; Price knows better. He's a pragmatic. Academia befitted a man like him for that reason, only now the notion was beginning to sound like pure ego.

Donning oxford shirts and polos to lectures and wearing Tag Heuer timepieces instead of his favorite hat didn't do much for the reptilian part of Price that kept him alive on the battlefield. Price is animal-brained and has a penchant for getting his hands dirty. Pragmatism is survivalism is primitive.

To maintain some form of logic, Price has his rules, just so he can tell himself he's still reasonable. He needs the rules for stability, for his ego. No talking on campus, no pictures, minimal online communication, no coming to campus together even if you've spent the night, and several other no's that have kept you under the ethics committee's radar.

You may dislike the rules, but amidst this world of academia and polish, he aches to keep this sacred—you, and this feeling—the same one he used to have when looking down the barrel of a loaded gun.

Turns out, the war strategist in him—now thought good only for PowerPoint slides and case studies—also serves to keep alive the animal he believed he left behind on the field.

The beast you rouse, stripping him down to his baser self.

A twitch runs through his finger on the polished walnut surface, his attention still locked on the steady rise and fall of the duvet over your sleeping form. For Price, the better of the two worlds lies under his sheets at present, only a few feet from his desk.

Price sighs deliberately, sliding his glasses down his nose bridge and setting it aside with a clatter. A hazy ribbon of acrid smoke unspools from the end of his abandoned cigar as it rests in a notch of the ashtray while Price crosses to the bed, his highback desk chair left slightly crooked.

His half-hard cock stirs in the confines of his slacks as he thumbs the semi-sheer fabric of your worn pantyhose, left draped over the back of his accent chair with the rest of your clothes.

The knowledge that he'd been the one to take off your clothes doesn't sate him so much as knowing what lies beneath them leaves him on edge.

He peels away the duvet neatly to find your nightdress hiking up your thighs, greeted by the fragrance of your shampoo, the round undersides of your cheeks exposed, your slit just barely peeking out. The nightdress itself is a simple cotton voile affair; a gauzy babydoll with a lace wide-scoop neck and a ribbon bowtie hanging down the front as the only flourish. There's another one in his bottom drawer.

The hand-tufted mattress dips under his weight, holding its shape beneath him as he hoists one leg over your body. Almost absently, his hand starts seeking the throbbing bulge in his pants, palming himself as a hiss slips through his teeth. You stir—only enough to hitch your leg higher around the pillow clutched to your chest, nearly rolling onto your front.

A bead of precum gleams on the mushroom head of his girthy cock, the shaft flushed and corded with throbbing veins. The fabric of your nightdress rustles with John's movements above you, his knuckles grazing your thigh as he dry-fucks his fist with abandon. He runs his calloused fingers back-and-forth along your exposed folds and coats them in your essence before spitting in his palm for good measure and returning his hand to his cock.

Once his dick is wet from tip to base does he notch himself at your entrance—pretty and gaping slightly from the thorough fucking he gave you hours back. He stiffens as your hole sucks him in, bracing his palm next to your head, and silently holds his breath. Watches your lashes cast shadows across your cheeks and your breath whistle past your lips before he moves again.

His hand hovers—then clamps over your mouth as he sinks into you, fingers biting into your cheeks while you thrash beneath him. Your half-waking scream catches against his palm, his meaty hand dwarfing your entire face.

The startled spasms traveling through his cock from your cunt elicits a guttural groan from the older man, his voice strained. “Atta girl... atta girl...” Price coos as he feels the flailing gradually settle beneath him, grunting with each pass as he plows the last of it from your body with heavy, punctuated thrusts, your smaller feet kicking out between his.

Your eyes roll back as his other hand holds down the top of your head, his burly arms surrounding your head as he flattens you into the sheets. “Price-” you squeak out in surprise, your voice slightly garbled from the weight of his limbs on you. He doesn't bother making excuses for helping himself to your cunt while you were asleep, already reaching under your dress to knead your cheeks and spread your pussy wider for his cock while you gawk back at him in sleepy bewilderment.

You work your mouth soundlessly for something to say only for a gasp to catch in your throat. You clutch the pillow under your head and brace yourself as Price pulls out, leaving only the tip inside, a weeping, Oh my god, spilling from your lips when he bottoms out with a loud groan. Your legs tremble as the wide head of his cock hits your cervix, quivering like a teacup about to tip over.

You realize you’re content with how quickly it ignites between you—no words needed before you’re already caught up in something hot and heavy. His hips pummel into you with a wordless, single-minded intensity and the filthy chorus of his pelvis snapping against your ass cracking through the air, his humid breath huffing in your ear. Tears sting your eyes at the sheer fullness in your cunt, the rim of your pussy raw from the rapid friction, a milky string dribbling down your slit.

“Fuck, such a good girl,” he grumbles into your hair—speaking for the first time in minutes, his voice sounding scratchy from grunting in your ear like an animal in heat. “Good fucking girl.”

“Look at that—already filled you up once and you're dripping for it all over again. That's what I love about a sweet, ripe cunt.” His palm cracks against your ass hard enough to sting, his thumb sliding under the cleft of your cheek. His big hands sprawl across your asscheeks, pulling them apart slightly and making the stretch marks on your skin go taut, his tongue poking the inside of his cheek as he marvels. “You know I couldn't keep my hands off. This tight cunt was practically begging for it.”

The indignant (or rational) part of you wants to protest your innocence—you were asleep, blameless—but as you peer back at his dark, blurry silhouette with tears swimming in your vision, you can only babble your assent. “Y-yessir, yes, sir, please.” You blubber tearfully—pathetically—barely audible over the lewd squelches as he sinks into you. “More, please, sir.”

You can almost see the pity in his blue eyes—the color so stark it's all you can make out with the tears blotting your vision—the appreciative tilt of his brows for taking him so good even when you can't. It doesn't take much to convince you, does it? And why should it? You two fit like a puzzle, it was preordained—surely.

He tuts at your tears—endeared, you think—swiping away a teardrop on your cheek while he continues to roll his hips into you. An oxymoron, when every thrust just draws another whimper from you, exacerbating your tears. “Ssh, baby,” he hums, “Daddy's gonna fill you right up. You can go back to sleep right after.”

His palm bears down on the side of your head, drawing these staccato 'hah-hah-hah's from you as he pounds your cunt, your cheek smushed into the pillow. “Almost there, baby. I'm gonna give it to you.” He bundles the gauzy fabric of your dress in his fist and bunches it over your ass, the silly ribbon splayed out on the sheets.

He feels the quiver of your head under his palm, which he assumes is a nod—yes, please—his lips curling back into something that's either a grin or a snarl. Usually, you know Price is close—even before words are exchanged—when his rhythm turns staccato just before he's plowing you through the mattress. He pulls you further down the mattress, never mind you clawing at the sheets, and aligns his hips right over your ass before pushing back in. The feverish grind of his pubic bone against your backside borders on discomfort if only your cunt wasn't so eager to milk him, pulsing around him rhythmically as his sack slaps against your swollen cunt.

Toes curling and your calves flexing with a delicious burn, your legs are spread pretty and wide for him, his cock pumping into your hole with heavy-handed precision. Your cunt squelches as his hot seed overflows down your folds, painting a messy, sticky ring around his shaft. Price's wanton, guttural groans vibrate through your back, the man's body heat stifling as he holds himself above you, palms braced next to your head. “There we go...” Price grunts raspily, sawing his cock inside of you and continuing until you shudder around him and mewl into the pillow with your high, your tears blotting the pillowcase as he shoves your head down.

He lets you lie back on your side after he pulls out and smooths your babydoll back into place, supporting his weight in one arm as he strokes his twitching cock over you lazily, squeezing the last drop into his fist. Your cheek spills onto the pillow as you stay on your side—shaped like a cherub, he muses—gaping your mouth and letting him feed his sticky fingers between your lips. He rubs them on your tongue liberally, drool collecting in the corners of your mouth just as your jaw starts to protest.

“What do we say?” Price asks after freeing his fingers from your mouth with a pop.

“Thank you, sir,” you slur drowsily.

What a good student.

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୨୧ ( 𝐚uthors/note. ) reupload bc i privated the first one out of insecurity and iʼm not sure if it'll show on ppls dashboards after that, sorry

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