Lay your head upon my knee.

This had seemed perfectly sensible to him in staff training. Plain, even. He had sat through the safeguarding slides with his big knees wedged under a table too small for him, nodding along while a woman from the council talked about thresholds and procedures and duty of care. He had understood it then as something clean and written down.

Now Daeron is standing by the low wall near the school gates, one hand on the wet stone, asking him why his brother can walk home alone in the pouring rain but cannot walk home with him.

“Go on, then,” he says. The words drag slightly through the side of his mouth. “Explain it t'me."

Duncan keeps his fingers twisted into the strap of the equipment bag.

Daeron sniffs. His eyes are too bright. He has a damp, blown-open look on him like he walked too quickly from somewhere warm. “Why can’t we jus’ say he’s gone on his own, yeah? An’ I’ve happened t’meet him on the way.” His tongue catches on the middle of it. He swallows. “Tha’s all, isn't it?”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that,” Dunk says.

Daeron blinks at him, then laughs once. “Afraid.”

The rain has been worrying at them for twenty minutes. It is the sort that looks thin from a distance and soaks everything through anyway. The summer training had finished late because Finn from 2B had skinned his knee and three other children had gathered round him with the interest of people witnessing a public execution. By the time Duncan got them packed up, the pitch had turned slick and the bags along the wall had begun to darken at the seams.

Most of the children had been taken away in the usual disorder. Egg had stayed sitting on the bench under the small roof by the changing rooms, and Dunk felt something was wrong then. He sat to wait with Egg and asked, multiple times, if Egg would like a lift, to which Egg had said no. Multiple times. It turned out that Daeron was supposed to pick Egg up and they were supposed to go to arcade on the pier.

Egg said it lightly, but Duncan heard the shape underneath it and stayed where he was. He went round collecting bibs and cones, then took too long putting them into the storage bag. He wiped down a ball, checked the lost property crate, locked the equipment shed, unlocked it again because he had left the whistle inside, then came back out and found Egg still on the bench with his feet tucked under it.

The rain came heavier. Duncan offered again. Egg refused again. This time the refusal had a hard shine on it.

“He said he’d come,” Egg said.

“I’m sure he did.”

Egg looked out towards the gate. Duncan did too.

Daeron arrived fifteen minutes later, though arrived might be too generous a word for it. He came through the main gate with his hood half off and his jacket open. His foot went on the loose stones by the driveway and slipped out from under him. For a second he seemed gone. His arms opened, his body tilted, and then some old drunken luck took over.

“Good!” Daeron called out, breathless. “All good.”

Egg stood. The hope went out of him so fast Duncan nearly looked away. Daeron came closer, smiling through the rain. “There he is,” he said. “C’mon, then. Pier’s waitin’.”

Egg looked at Duncan. Duncan stepped forward. “Daeron,” he said quietly. “Can I have a word?”

Daeron’s smile stayed where it was, though the rest of his face shifted beneath it. “Have one.”

“Over here.”

“I can hear ye fine.”

“I’d rather speak over here.”

Daeron stared at him, then made a loose little gesture with one hand. “Jesus. All right. Very official.”

Duncan moved a few steps away from Egg. Daeron followed, and the smell of drink came with him, sharp under the rain. “Have you been drinking?” Duncan asked.

Daeron’s face sank. The charm thinned, then the offence came through. “Ah, don’ start.”

“I’m askin'.”

“I know wha’ you’re askin’.”

“How much?”

“Had a pint.”

Now Daeron is looking away towards the road. His jaw works. Duncan just waits.

“Fine,” Daeron says. “More’n a pint. What of it? I’m walkin’, aren’t I? D’you see a car? There’s no car.”

“I can’t let him go with you.”

Daeron goes very still. “What?”

“I’m sorry.”

“He’s m’brother.”

“I know.”

“I look after him.”

“I know.”

“You don’t know.” Daeron points at him, but the hand does not hold steady. “You don’t know anythin’.”

Duncan takes that because there is nothing useful to do with it.

Daeron looks past him. “Egg. Come here.”

“No,” Duncan says.

Daeron’s head turns back to him. “No?”

“I need him to wait there.”

“You need him.”

“Daeron.”

“He can go home on his own, can’t he?” Daeron says. His voice lifts, then smears lower again. “Tha’s what he said. He told me. He can leave by himself if we say so. He can walk out tha’ gate on his own two feet in the pissin’ rain, but he can’t walk beside me.”

“It’s the policy.”

“The policy.”

“Aye.”

“The policy says he’s grand alone and in danger wi’ me.”

Duncan feels Egg behind him, too quiet under the shelter, and it gets to him. Egg has stood in mud all afternoon shouting himself hoarse over football, and now he has become careful as glass.

“I can call someone,” Duncan says.

Daeron laughs, ugly with hurt. “Listen t’you.”

“Someone Egg says is all right.”

Daeron steps closer. “Don’t you fuckin’ do that.”

Duncan lowers his voice. “I’m trying to help.”

“No, you’re tryin’ t’make me look like a cunt in front of him!”

“You’re drunk.”

“I had a bad day!”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry at me.” Daeron wipes at his mouth. Wet hair clings at his temple. “Don’t stand there bein’ sorry like that fixes anythin’.”

Duncan glances back. Egg is watching them. His bag hangs from one hand. The rain has darkened the shoulders of his top. He looks younger than he did on the pitch, and at the same time far older than he should.

“Egg,” Duncan says. “Go inside for a minute.”

“I’m fine.”

“Please.”

Egg looks at Daeron. Daeron looks back at him, and for a moment something passes between them that Duncan has no part in. A whole life of this, maybe. A whole set of bargains and repairs and promises made in kitchens, on pavements, outside places where other children get collected by adults who arrive steady on their feet.

Then Egg turns and goes back towards the changing rooms. Daeron watches him go. The drink loosens his face in the wrong places. Shame comes up through it, raw and plain. He presses his fingers hard into his eyes and breathes out through his nose.

“Look,” he says. “I’m sorry, all right?”

Duncan says nothing.

“I’m late. I know I’m late. I shouldn’t’ve had anythin’. I know tha’. I do know tha’.”

“I can call someone.”

“No.”

“Daeron—”

“No.” His hand drops.

“I can’t release him to you.”

“Stop sayin’ release.” Daeron’s voice cracks on it. He swallows hard. “He’s no’ a parcel.”

Duncan feels the words hit and cannot move them out of the way. “I know.”

“You don’t.”

“I know he isn’t.”

“Then don’t talk like tha’.”

“Aye, all right.”

Rain keeps falling, and Daeron breathes through his mouth as if he is trying to pull himself back into his own body by force. “I’m safe,” he says.

Duncan looks at him.

“I am.” His voice goes rougher. “I’m safe wi’ him.”

“I can’t make that call today.”

Daeron gives a short, broken laugh. “You jus’ did.”

Duncan’s hand tightens on the strap of the bag. He has a sudden, sick thought that this might be where something breaks. Between Daeron and Egg. Between Egg and him.

Daeron follows his glance towards Egg and shuts his eyes. “Come on,” he says.

Duncan says nothing.

Daeron opens his eyes. The anger is still there, but it has gone thin. What is left beneath it is worse to stand in front of. “C’mon,” he says. “Come the fuck on, don’ ruin the kid’s afternoon. Summer’s almos’ over.”

And once again, Duncan says, “I’m sorry.” He’s truly sorry.

That's when it all goes bloody sideways. Egg comes back out, impatient. Daeron sways on his heels and pulls out his phone. Squints at it and presses the button.

"I'll ring then," he says, and pointedly puts the whole thing on speaker so Duncan, presumably, can be humiliated by one of Maekar's tormented sighs. The signal cuts into someone appearing on the receiving end, and Daeron slurs, “Father. The oaf of a, uh—” He turns to Dunk, eyes working hard to arrange him into profession. “What are you anyway? A coach? Games-man? One of those whistle fellows?”

"P.E. teacher," Duncan grumbles.

Daeron snorts. "Right, right." He licks his lips and goes back to the phone. Practically shoves it into his mouth when speaking. “The oaf of a P.E. teacher is refusing to give up your son because he… he has taken, mm, personal offence at the look of me—”

Dunk's ears are fuming. "That ain't the reason, you—"

Daeron puts his hand up. "Shh, shh, shh, big boy. Adults are—are solving the issue you've caused." He straightens his neck as if Maekar could see him, and clears his throat. What comes next is the most schooled, lordly little chant that turns Dunk's gut over. "I am afraid you need to collect Aegon yourself," Daeron says, "as he won't be given to me. Just make sure you are freshly bathed and in clean clothes, for the bouncer seems to measure the ability to escort by their personal hygiene."

"You insolent—"

“You are either very drunk, or you have us saved by our surname, which is somehow worse,” comes an amused voice from the speaker. “Or perhaps you’re simply an idiot. Hard to know with you.”

Not Maekar's. Aerion's.

“Lucky for you, I have a spare moment. Oh, and Daeron,” Aerion says, and it sounds like he’s smirking. “I’ll make sure Father knows you can’t manage a task as mundane as collecting a child from school for peasants. Wait for me,” he orders, and hangs up.

"Fuck," Egg gasps.

Duncan frowns at him. “Oi, you mustn’t,” he says, pointing a finger at Egg’s large forehead. Egg only pouts and frowns back in what is most likely supposed to look intimidating. It pains Duncan all the same to be looked at like that.

“Alright, change of plan.” Daeron clasps his palms together. “Look, professor—Mr, uh… Pennytree. Let Aegon come with me and we’ll save ourselves a little scene here. Come on.”

Duncan scratches the back of his head. "I've told ye already. I'm sorry, I can't—"

"Dunk!" Egg protests. Daeron looks flabbergasted by a child calling their teacher by the first name.

"Egg, I'm sorry. I can't," Duncan pleas, ignoring Daeron entirely. "I can't, you know this. I can't let you go with a drunk caretaker, I can't—"

"Dunk, Dunk, Dunk, listen, listen, listen," Daeron says, coming at Duncan with his hands spread wide. Then, he sets them on Dunk's shoulders. "Aerion will be sober but he's demonic. Can you give a child to someone who's purely evil no matter their state?"

"I… I cannot let him go with you. Call your father then. But I—"

"Duncan." Daeron gathers Duncan's shirt between his fingers. "Please," he whispers.

"I could lose my job," Duncan says, growing annoyed.

"I will find you a new job."

“I don’t want a new job!” Duncan snaps. He shrugs Daeron off. “Why do ye think you can be drunk and get away with everything? Why can’t you be a better brother to him?” He points at Egg, furious. “Why do you send him to school with cuts on his head and a bruise on his arm, ye think we’re blind here? From what I’ve gathered, he’s the best man your family has, and ye treat him like—”

“Mr Pennytree!” Egg yells. Squeaks, more like, in his little child voice, and it strikes Duncan enough, but what strikes him more is his last name being used. He looks at the boy whose eyes are large and wet and whose mouth is set tightly, bottom lip wrinkling. The rain stops abruptly, like someone has turned the shower head off.

“Enough,” Egg says, being brave and not crying at all. “We will wait for Aerion.”

"Egg—" Dunk crumbles. "Egg, I'm sorry."

Egg ignores him and goes to sit on the wet bench, legs dangling above the ground, face set hard towards the pavement. Duncan takes one step after him, then another, but Daeron only shakes his head.

"No use," Daeron tells him. "He'll come 'round."

Duncan huffs, frowns, and decides to just stand there with his hands in his pockets. He knows Aerion coming will not improve matters, but does not realise how severely the matters will not be improved.

The second son arrives on a motorbike so loud the birds startle three streets down, and Dunk near groans at the sky. The helmet comes off. Aerion swaggers towards them as if there is a log-like weight dragging between his legs, his face so smug and rotten with conceit that leaves go brown on the nearby tree and fall onto the pavement.

Egg, despite currently holding him in disdain, rises from the bench and hides behind Duncan’s frame. Dunk looks over his shoulder. Egg is close enough to touch the back of his shirt but does not. “You don’t wanna go with him?” Dunk murmurs. Egg shakes his head.

Aerion comes close enough for Dunk to smell the petrol and whatever sharp expensive thing sits in his hair. “Well?” he says. His eyes move over Duncan first, then Daeron, then the empty bit of air beside the bench. “Where is the little prince? Has he crawled under something?”

Behind him, Egg takes a breath. Dunk hears it. Small, hard, all ribs. Then Egg steps out from behind Duncan and walks towards his older brother.

Aerion does not look at Daeron at all. “There you are,” he says. “For a moment I thought the little monk had taken vows against being collected.”

Dunk’s face does something on its own. A twitch, helpless and outright pissed. Aerion sees it. His mouth widens. He lifts one finger and curls it twice. “Come here, bouncer.”

Duncan knows it is a bad idea. His feet take him there anyway.

Aerion cranes his neck with a look of bright disgust, opens his mouth, and blows a long hot breath right into Duncan’s face. Dunk blinks through it. Aerion laughs. “Satisfied? I'm sober. Now, give me my brother.”

“I can’t let ye take him on that.”

Daeron bursts into giggle form the bench. Soon, the giggle grows into a cackle that folds him forward.

Aerion looks at the bike, then back at Duncan. “Please don't waste my time. I grow ill amongst commoners.”

Duncan ignores the quip. “There’s no spare helmet for him.”

For one second Aerion only stares. Then he laughs too, sharper than Daeron. “Have you seen the head on him? The boy is a helmet.” He reaches out and smacks the back of Egg’s bald skull. “There. Listen. Industrial.”

Egg flinches. That is all.

Duncan goes livid so fast it feels quiet. The schoolyard, the bike, Daeron’s laugh, all of it draws back to one small white point behind his eyes. These people, he thinks, with a kind of wonder. These people have had Egg all this time. Egg with his lists and questions, Egg who says fuck once and then looks guilty about it, Egg who corrects Duncan’s dates and tells younger boys to tie their laces before they fall on their faces. Maybe it is childish insolence. Maybe a child born into evil only needs to point himself the other way and call it rebellion. Maybe that is how goodness starts in some houses. Or maybe Egg is simply good.

Duncan grabs Aerion by the collar and lifts him onto the balls of his feet. Aerion makes a strangled, furious sound and claws at Duncan’s wrist. “Get your hands off me.”

“No,” Duncan says. He is near spitting into his mouth. “I won’t give him to ye.”

Aerion’s face goes red in patches. “My father will know of this.”

“Aye,” Duncan says. “He will.”

“You have no idea what you’re doing.”

“I do. And if ye don’t go right now, the police will know of this too.”

Aerion gives a nasty little laugh through his teeth. “And what will you tell them? That I failed to bring a helmet?”

“Child abuse,” Duncan says.

That shuts him up for half a second. Duncan nods at the courtyard camera. “There. It saw ye hit him. It’s seen plenty, I’d say.” He lets Aerion go with a shove that barely counts as one. “Go now.”

Aerion smooths his collar. His hands are shaking with fury, which Dunk enjoys and hates enjoying. He looks at Egg then, really looks at him, and Egg looks at the ground.

Daeron watches all of this bleary-eyed from the bench. When Aerion turns for the bike, Daeron lifts one limp hand and waves. “Bye then.”

Aerion spits at his feet. Daeron giggles again.

The bike starts with a roar that makes every window in the school look suddenly thin. Aerion tears out of the pavement like he expects the road to thank him for it.

For a while no one says anything. Duncan stands in the middle of the yard with his fists still wanting something. Egg stays where he is, looking down at his shoes. “I’ll just walk home,” Egg finally says.

“No,” Duncan says. “I’ll take ye. Come on.”

Egg does not move. Duncan looks at him. Egg looks back with that same tight, wet mouth, brave enough to make a person sick. Duncan gives him a glare because softness has failed him for the minute.

Egg sighs and comes along. Behind them, Daeron lifts himself from the bench in instalments. “Can I come too?”

Duncan stops, closes his eyes, and sighs. Daeron takes it for yes.

When they reach Duncan’s car, Daeron whistles. It is clear the whistle is a mocking kind, for no Volkswagen Passat has ever received a nod of approval from a rich male. Duncan fixes Daeron with one glance, then lets the boys arrange themselves. Daeron takes the backseat, of course. Egg sits in front, fastens his seatbelt and stares ahead as if there is road already to stare at.

At first, Daeron mumbles and hums to the radio. Then his mumbles morph into heavy breathing, until finally they become snoring. When Duncan looks into the rear-view mirror, he notices Daeron has not fastened his seatbelt, and that makes Duncan scoff for the nth time today.

He wishes desperately for Egg to say anything. Keeps grunting and smacking his mouth every time he thinks Egg is about to start a conversation, and then retreats, seeing the boy frozen next to him with his eyes looking farther than the horizon.

The ride is not long, just twenty minutes out of town, though to Dunk, entering the area where landed gentry lives is like entering a foreign country. He begins to feel out of place when the grass becomes exceptionally green and households start keeping cattle for the mere pleasure of leading a fabricated simple life.

Navigation shows him three minutes away from Egg’s home and that, to Dunk’s relief, is when Egg decides to speak. “I did not like what you’ve done today,” Egg says.

Duncan nods. Bites the inside of his cheek.

“But I like how you’ve dealt with Aerion,” Egg adds.

To that Duncan nods again, but smiles. “Ye cross with me?” he asks.

“A bit,” Egg says. “I told you I don’t want you to say anything to anyone.”

“Aye, well,” Duncan says. “As much as you might not like it, I cannot have folk hurting you. Even your own kin. It is my job to keep you safe.”

Egg’s head turns towards him. His face has gone careful, which Duncan has come to dread more than sulking. “You can only keep me safe at school.”

Duncan drives another few yards before sense catches up with him. Then he indicates, pulls over by a low stone wall, and stops the car. Daeron snores louder.

“What are ye saying to me, boy?” Duncan asks.

Egg scoffs immediately. “Don’t you boy me now.”

Duncan cannot help but smile, though it feels awful on his face. “Sorry,” he says. “Egg. What do you mean?”

“I mean that at home you ain’t there to keep me safe,” Egg says simply.

Duncan grips the wheel. He tries, with some effort, not to turn round and throttle Daeron on the back seat as a form of setting an example. Though, looking at Egg’s face, he suspects Daeron is the least of the boy’s troubles. Or the loudest and stupidest of them, which is not the same thing.

He exhales through his nose. “Do ye need someone at home to keep ye safe?”

Egg looks out through the windscreen. The road ahead is empty and expensive. “Sometimes,” he says.

Duncan nods as if this is ordinary conversation. As if his heart has not just tried to climb out through his throat and do something actionable in the lane.

“Right,” he says. “Right. What if, on Monday, you meet the school counsellor?”

Egg’s mouth twists. “What good would that do?”

“Maybe nothing,” Duncan says. “Maybe something.”

“That is not a very inspiring answer.”

“Aye, well, I’m a P.E. teacher. We’re not known for poetry.” He glances at him, then back at the road. “You could talk to her. Get some of it off your chest, like. Without being ashamed of it.”

“I’m not ashamed.”

“Grand. Then you can be not ashamed in her office.”

Egg gives him a look.

Duncan clears his throat. “Or, if there’s something that needs doing, she can help with that. She can speak to your da, or to whoever needs speaking to, without you having to stand in the middle of it waving your arms about.”

“I do not wave my arms about.”

“No,” Duncan says. “You point. Very accusingly.”

Egg considers this with dislike. Daeron makes a snorting sound in the back and rolls his head against the window.

Duncan waits. He has the sense that if he pushes any harder, Egg will turn into a little stone beside him and stay that way until winter.

“Okay,” Egg says at last.

Duncan nods once. “Okay.”

He starts the car back up and rolls onto the road before either of them can make the thing too large to look at. The gates appear soon after, black iron and stone pillars and a drive beyond them that seems longer than some people’s streets.

Duncan stops by the main gate. “Ye still cross with me?”

“Yes,” Egg says.

“Will it pass?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

Egg gets out and slams the door hard enough for Daeron to wake. Daeron snorts like a bear, rubs at his eyes, and looks around as if surprised to find he has remained alive through transport. “Oh,” he says. “Home.”

He unclips a seatbelt he has never clipped, fails to notice the problem, then leans forward and claps Dunk on the shoulder. “Cheers, mate. Five stars.” Then he gets out too.

Duncan sits there, squeezing the steering wheel too hard, and watches the two of them go through the gate. Egg walks stiff and straight. Daeron wanders beside him with one hand in his pocket and the other rubbing sleep from his face.

He drives a little way from the Targaryen estate. Then he pulls over again. For a while he just breathes. Badly. In and out, with a shudder in the middle he cannot seem to smooth away. Then he reaches for his phone and calls you.

You pick up on the second ring. “Dunk? Hi,” you say, smile all over your voice.

It warms him some. The sound of you alone puts a hand somewhere inside him and presses down. He sniffles, a little, or just sucks in a wet inhale. “You alright, luv?”

“Yeah, yeah, of course. Red rang me so we chatted for an hour or so, I’ve seen the physio, done laundry and now I’m reading,” you tell him.

Duncan closes his eyes and remembers things. Right, you are seeing a lady that tells you how to breathe properly with something called Winner Flow. It's a whistle, apparently, though it does no whistling. He's wanted to come with you once but you've told him no because it would be weird to have him around when the lady has her hand stuck up your fanny. There is a tight knot in his throat, mean as a fist, and he has to swallow round it twice. He tries for simple. Asks, “What’chu reading, hm?”

“Baby books,” you coo.

“Yeah? What about?”

“Did you know that newborns can recognise voices they heard before they were born? Like, properly. They prefer the familiar ones. So all your chatting and singing at him might actually do something.”

“Really? I—” His voice cracks. He brings a hand to his eyes and presses the heel of it there. “That’s so grand. I did not know that.”

“Duncan, sweetie, you alright?”

“Aye, aye, I’m just—” He sniffles again, then clears his throat again with more force than dignity. “Can I see ya, lassie? You busy?”

“Of course you can. I’m not.”

“Grand,” he says. “I’ll be there in thirty.”

“Okay. Good.”

Neither of you hangs up. He sits there with the phone against his ear and listens to the little living sounds of your flat. A page being touched. The washing machine doing something wet in the background. Your breath.

“Duncan?”

“Aye?”

“Can you get me Tayto?”

He huffs a soft laugh. “Tayto.”

“Cheese and onion.”

“Best perfume there is,” Duncan hums.

“Don’t start. And maybe a Club Orange.”

“Aye, course. Tayto and Club Orange.”

“And don’t get the multipack if the packets are tiny. I’ll know.”

“Terrifying woman,” he says, and means thank God for you. “I’ll get the big one.”

“Good. Drive safe.”

“I will.”

He hangs up, starts the car, and sits for one more second with both hands on the wheel. Then he turns the knob of the radio until We Will Not Be Lovers by The Waterboys comes up, and drives back towards town.

The rain starts again. Duncan listens to the song. Turns on the windscreen wipers. The day weighs down on him badly. He has kept Egg safe. He has got something resolved. Still, he feels like the lamest loser walking, a big dull man who followed the code so blindly he managed to hurt two people with it.

He gives no single bollock what sort of bad day Daeron has had. He doesn’t. Still, there had been a moment at the gate when he pitied him, and now that pity sits in him as another wrong thing. He wonders if there had been some other way through it. Something less stern. Something that would not have left Egg so apprehensive with him, and the whole thing turned circus by Aerion spitting like a small yapping dog.

Then he thinks about tonight. How bad it might get for Egg. Whether Aerion will hit him. Whether Duncan will be able to still walk this earth if Egg comes to school with any sort of bruise on him. Whether he will be able to keep himself from pushing Aerion’s eyeballs into his skull. Whether you will forgive him and visit him in prison.

It gets ridiculous very quickly, and proportionate to Duncan’s despair. By then he is sobbing, properly, with big, awful, childless sounds. He's wailing and bawling his eyes out, and he wishes there were windscreen wipers for the eyes because he can barely see. He only wants to get to you, curl in your arms and touch the belly when it moves, and it will all make him better. At the shop he's certain he is the saddest man to ever buy cheese and onion Tayto and a Club Orange, because the cashier looks at him with exaggerated compassion and asks if he'd like a discounted Red Bull.

By the time he gets to your building, the rain has started coming down hard again. The walk from the parked car to the door is short and still manages to soak him near through. His hair is wet. His jacket is wet. The paper bag from the shop is hidden under it and pressed to his ribs with one arm, and it is also wet.

He lets himself in with the key. The flat is much warmer to what his bones feel like. He stands in the entryway and shuts the door badly, too soft the first time, then harder when the latch does not catch. Water drops from him onto the floor.

You come out from the bedroom barefoot, book still in one hand, and freeze in the corridor at the sight of him.

“Duncan.” Your face changes. “Duncan, sweetheart—what happened?”

He opens his mouth. He has so much to say. Too much. A lot has happened, and somewhere on the drive over he had decided he was going to be a man about it and tell you everything calmly, properly, one thing after another. But the second you ask what is wrong, all that resolve falls apart. What comes out is just a boy. A boy who starts crying the moment he is asked.

Then you are on him. The book goes down somewhere. Your hands come to his jaw, his neck, the soaked front of his jacket, gathering him in whatever order you can reach him. He bends because you pull, and because he has wanted nothing in the world so badly as this. His face goes into the crook of your neck.

“Oh, love,” you say.

It damages him some more. He breathes badly against your skin with one hand braced on the wall and the other still trapped under his jacket. Your clothes take the wet from his. Your arms go tight around his shoulders, tighter when he makes a sound he would rather neither of you heard.

“It’s all right,” you say, though you do not know that. “I’ve got you.”

The packet hidden under his jacket crinkles between you. Duncan drags in a breath. “You’re crushing your Tayto, luv,” he croaks.

It's funny so you laugh. The rest is entirely unfunny, even more so—you laugh, since it is the only way to not give into the fright.

He's been strange on the phone. Morose and hollowed in a way he goes when some gargantuan issue of life's simple ordeal takes a seat on his shoulders. Sorrow that size can only come from a debacle around something that's very dear to him. Raymun, or Rowan, or his school-children.

For a grown man this large Duncan cries a lot, and to you it's a deeply beloved part of him. He cries when he cannot contain his joy. He gets moved easily and completely by the most mundane elements of life. There have been big moments, like the baby turning out to be a boy and then the boy kicking. And then, well—things that would get anyone with the kind of heart Dunk has (which, in retrospect, is a rare thing to be burdened with). Once there's been a sports interview where the football player thanked his mam first. All of those ads that try to sell a product through portraying perfect families. A video of a dog recognising its human parent after months away. Quiet phone calls he sometimes has with Raymun that end with love ya, big man. You've no idea what they talk about, but during those rings Duncan goes from snorting, through nodding solemnly, to hushing his voice and telling Raymun yer doing good mate. I'm proud of you. And honestly, it wets your eyes a little too.

The current grief is of the inconsolable kind. His eyes are so red and swollen he looks like he's been crying all the way here. The rain on him does not do him any favours either. He's weeping softly into your shoulder and trying his best not to snot on your sweatshirt and it grudges you greatly that he thinks you'd mind. You wouldn't. You'd give him your clothes to blow his nose into them if that would fix the matter.

"Shh," you murmur, rocking the whole mass of him side to side. You've got one palm on his nape and the other on his cheek, thumb brushing the damp undereye. "I've got you baby. It's alright, it's alright." Then, you cup his face and lift it a little. "Do you want a cup of tea?"

Duncan nods, but says nothing. He sniffs, reaches under his jacket and pulls out Tayto, all crinkled, and a can of Club Orange. You take both from him, mouth a small, genuine thank you, and seek his palm. It's cold and heavy and makes yours disappear in it. Hand in heartbroken hand, he follows you to the kitchen, lets you sit him on a stool and take off his jacket. You shake some water off it and hang it over the chair. Brush his cheek again. Put the kettle on and prepare cups. Then, you take a clean kitchen towel and dry his hair where it drips, adding to deluge of his eyes.

He sighs deeply, still quiet. Your hand combs the strands off his forehead. "What do you need, sweetheart?" you ask.

Instead of saying anything, Dunk reaches out. He pulls your hips and, once you step between his knees, wraps his arms around you. His face comes to your belly, hands span your back. "Jus' this," he mutters.

You stay like that for a few heartbeats until the kettle whistles. Tea gets made. He stands up after you and takes both cups, waiting for instructions. You realise, then, that he has no idea what to do with this feeling. It has got too big for him and he is waiting, almost politely, to be told where to put it.

“All right,” you say. “Shower, or just dry clothes?”

Duncan looks at you. He opens his mouth, then shuts it again. “Just change,” he says at last.

“Okay. We can do that.”

He nods. Then gasps a little. For a second it looks as if words are coming, and then he loses it. His face tightens. He looks ashamed of that too.

“It’s okay,” you tell him. “Whenever you’re ready. If at all. Or just,” you add, softer, “point me to who I’m murdering, hm?”

That gets a tired huff of a laugh, hardly there, but there. He hums after it, low in his throat, and nods again as if he is agreeing to be alive for the next ten minutes. “Can we just—”

"You wanna lie down? Watch telly? And cuddle?"

"A-aye," Duncan says, relieved. "Aye, that'd be grand, lassie."

You nod. Take him to the bedroom. He changes to some previously abandoned sweatpants and a T-shirt that both happen to be clean only because you've been two garments short from a full washing machine, no other reason. Then the pair of you gets into bed and Duncan's limbs find you like you've both been married for a decade. He pillows himself on your chest, throws a leg across your calves and puts a hand to your stomach. Telly's on with some nonsense but even if it were the most exciting program in the universe, you'd still be focused on his breathing. It rattles in his chest and comes uneven with leftovers of sobbing. When you think he's disassociated completely, there's a smack of lips.

"Egg's cross with me," Duncan rasps. And then it just goes.

Arrives in absolute chaos of his oversized feelings, but you grasp the gist. He's had a bad day, he tells you. It's been muddy and kids were slipping on the pitch all game. And then Egg had been left behind and Daeron had come to pick him up reeking of booze. And Dunk couldn't give him up, even though Egg could technically just walk home, but not when Daeron was drunk and would surely follow and Dunk knew it made no sense but that's them goddamn rules written in the school statue and he ain't gonna discuss it with a drunkard in a cloudburst anyway. And he doesn't care about Daeron's bad day, not at all, but the man looked so sad and sodden Dunk had a moment where he wanted to let Egg go and he feels bad for it. And he thinks he's hurt Daeron some, even though Daeron deserves to get hurt because he doesn't keep an eye on Egg and cuts him on his head and had got drunk on the day when they were supposed to go to the pier. And it had all gone so bad, because Daeron had been close to crying but instead of crying he called his da, but he was so drunk he didn't notice he was actually calling Aerion. And Aerion is a real cunt and a scoundrel and miscreant and Dunk had almost bashed his teeth in and he's glad he didn't, but wishes he had some, too. Because on the way home Egg had told him he's not always safe at home and Dunk can't stop thinking about it. And there's a whole weekend between today and Monday and he's only thinking about this small boy with his evil brother and his drunken brother and his absent father and he doesn't know what to do. And he feels so guilty for not doing more earlier, because he saw it all and could've done something, and instead he'd been worried Egg would be cross with him and now he's cross with him anyway. And Christ, he's done so badly. He's done so badly and he cannot understand it, for the love of him, he cannot, how can there be a family with so much land, so much money, so much opportunity, such a name to them and such futures to be had and so little love in it, and for a boy who you can do nothing else to but love him. If Egg was his he'd love him so terribly. He'd be so proud of him, he is so proud of him and he loves him so, so much and he just wishes he could do better—

"Dunk, my darling," you whisper into his hair. "My sweet, sweet darling. It's not your fault. Oh, baby, you've done nothing wrong. You've done nothing wrong, I promise you."

"How come then—" he gasps. "How come it's just so… horrible."

You cock his head so he'd look at you. His glasses are useless with all the dried out salt on them. "Because you're worried. Because you're good," you tell him. "You'll sort it on Monday. Is there anyone you can text there? Egg even?"

"A-aye, I could um—I could text him. Or Daeron. Or Maekar."

"Pick one," you say. "It's good enough."

"Uh…" He cringes. "Daeron, I guess. But… tomorrow. I can't today."

"Okay," you say. "It's okay."

Duncan looks like he doesn't entirely believe you but he really wants to. He nods, then goes back to the shelter of your neck.

You let him stay there a little longer. There is no point trying to prise sense out of him while he is still clinging. So you keep combing through his hair and let him breathe against you until the breathing evens out by degrees. “Are you hungry?” you ask.

Duncan gives a wet little huff. “Always.”

“I made food before you came.”

He lifts his head enough to look at you. His eyes are still ruined, but his mouth twitches. “Is it a Tayto sandwich?”

You swat him on the chest. “No, you goof. I see you’re feeling better.”

“A little,” Duncan says. He looks at you for a moment longer, heavy and grateful and still too sad. Then his face softens in a way that makes your own chest ache. “Thank you,” he says.

You put your hand on his cheek. “No worries, Dunk. It’s nothing. I’ll be right back.”

In the kitchen, you warm the food and listen to him in the other room. The telly comes on louder. Then the low, familiar roll of sports commentary. You come back with the plate and find him watching it with the remote resting on his thigh. You huff, but let him have it.

He eats, though with less devotion than usual. That tells you enough. On any better evening he would clear the plate like he's trying to set a new record. Tonight he works through it slowly, one eye on the screen, and part of him elsewhere.

Afterwards he lies down on his side and looks at the screen. His hand rests on your thigh. Now and then it moves, twitching and rubbing a little, casual as sleep. Comfortable. It startles you sometimes, what you have become to him. You run your fingers through his hair again. Then you grip gently at the back of his head, enough to bring him nearer.

“Do you need anything else?” you ask. “Anything you want.”

Duncan looks up at you. The shyness comes over him slowly, boyish. He swallows. Then he rises enough to frame your cheeks between both hands and brings his mouth to your ear. There he hesitates. You feel the breath of it first. “Can I eat you out?” he whispers. “Please.”

It becomes clear that you can take care of him all you want and it will only fix a little, because Dunk metabolises distress through being useful. He finds a way, somehow, to make the filthiest request innocent and pure. Can I get my mouth between your legs because it's done no good all day and there it can do some good. You stare at him for a second, then nod.

It is only a permission, but Duncan takes it as an opportunity to thank you with his entire body. He starts at lips, the traditional ones, and you get hit—disturbed by your own lack of observance—with progress. He's got better at kissing, somehow. One hand is wedged under your neck, and either cocky (doubtful) or too consumed to notice, he slides it to your hair and closes into a fist. Tugs, a little. To that you moan, a little. So he tugs more, a little, until your throat straightens and spine arches. He does what a skilled lover would do with a mouth opened like that. Sucks on it and licks into it with his tongue broad and mellow and salty from tears. Rubs your back down to your arse and gropes there, and squeezes, and oh—gives you the gentlest slap. An appreciative one. It's pretty and mine, it says. Then gropes again and, briefly, you remember the night when he was too drunk to be considerate and delivered a scientific proof for his palms and your buttocks being made for each other.

You do your share of touching too. Your fingers crawl under his T-shirt to the belly. You start the scratching below the waistband, only to force him to give up some sounds. He surrenders them easily: first a sigh, then a raspy groan, then, "Girl."

"Yes?" you ask, raking up to his chest. The fuzz on his stomach catches under your fingernails.

"Yer distractin'," he says. "I wanted to—"

"I know, I just—" you say, wrapping your arms round his neck. "Kiss me some more. Please."

So he kisses you again, because saying no to you is not present anywhere in Duncan’s body. Not when you ask like this. Your mouth is warm and clean and easing on his sadness-bitten tongue, and he enjoys it like he would enjoy a jug of cold water on a hot summer day. You let him touch you and touch him back, exactly where he likes, which is anywhere. Grope him back, even. Your fingers sink into his chest and squeeze the pecs, then slide lower to abuse the flesh that hangs off his sides. The little puerile fat he’s sometimes insecure about, but when you touch him like this he forgets all about it. Only lets himself be fancied roughly, and it causes him a kind of inebriety, this closure of bodies in heat, because he bites you somewhat harder than he intended.

He does not apologise for that one. Instead, he takes off his glasses and starts sliding through your palms, and they stay, receiving his shoulders, then neck, then hair. He cradles your legs together and slips the shorts off them. Then wedges himself between your knees and lies flat on his stomach.

Your knees get knocked wide apart by the breadth of his shoulders and some tiny part, debased but alive in him because he’s only a man after all, enjoys your effort tremendously. Then the part that takes the most space in him, the one that feels guilty for his size most of the time, steps in and hooks your calves over his back, so that lovely effort can step down in favour of your hips relaxing.

You sigh for him some and caress the back of his head so he knows he’s done good.

Then it is just him and your cunt.

And he loves that cunt deeply. So much that calling it a cunt feels rude somehow, a wrong flavour of devotion, and he prefers to call it pussy. It sounds sweeter, especially when it comes with a his prefix. He might be a touch too sacrosanct about it, but today it is more than just a sweet thing to put his mouth to. At the risk of sounding sappy, to him it is shelter. Somewhere he can be useful and good to you and therefore proliferate some good into the world with his inept body.

He parts the curls at your mound with two fingers and, for a moment, just looks. You are clenching and it makes him feel smug. Seeping from the slit a little too, and that is even worse. You look like a fruit cracked open down the middle and Duncan thinks it is wildly accurate that pussies look like succulent, candied fruits, because that is what they are to him. And yours is his favourite. If somebody asked him what is the one meal he’d have for the rest of his days, he’d think your pussy first, then tell some lie to avoid making a complete pervert of himself.

He's thick and rigid at the base of his cock, and when he leans in to kiss off the dew from your clit, a pang of heat rattles his hips. They glue themselves to the mattress. The friction feels evil, almost. It scrapes his crown and suffocates him between his own thighs, but it is better than nothing. If he comes, at least there was something to come from.

Higher, he tries to focus. His mouth returns to you with the kissing still in it. He kisses first, because it seems rude to start with anything else, and your hips give a small unsure lift from the bed. That makes him set his palm low on your belly, holding you still with hardly any pressure, and lick where he kissed. You make a soft sound that goes down the back of him. He moves against the mattress and the scrape there turns meaner, sweeter. So he decides to stay put. Work has been granted to him. Better, work that makes you twist your hand in his hair and say his name as if the name has a handle on it.

“Dunk,” you whine while he can feel your feet moving on his back.

“Mm,” he mumbles into you, though there is no question.

He opens you with two fingers, careful and filthy together, and excessive too because he knows damn well he can make you come just on his mouth. But there is a growing need in him to slot himself deeper than his tongue can reach, so the fingers will have to do while his cock remains deprived. Greedy, you suck him in to the first knuckle and still want more, so he gives it, and puts his tongue to the place that makes your legs forget their sense. Slow at first. Broad. Re-learning the routes and the taste, though the latter he knows already and thinks knowing should prevent astonishment. It does not. You are slick enough that his mouth slips, and he makes an undignified chuckle against you because the slip pleases him.

Your fingers tighten. “There?” he asks.

You nod, he thinks, because the nod lives in the pull at his roots and the way your thighs close round his ears and deafen him for a second. He does it again. Same place. Less polite.

“Oh,” you say, thinly. “Oh, fuck—sweetheart—”

That is another ruinous thing. Sweetheart, while he is down here with his cock dragging itself sore against your bed and his tongue and fingers all stuffing your pussy. Sweetheart, as if this too is a kind of care. Maybe it is. Maybe care has rough skin and spit, and is man half-mad between your legs because the rest of the world has become unmanageable for him.

His hips roll once more. He grunts, annoyed by himself, and presses down harder, pinning the need under him. The pressure makes his breath stutter into you. You answer by pulling at his hair until his scalp aches. He likes it a lot. Hums, or chuckles, or grunts—he's undecided, but makes sure to let you know how nice it feels to get a little bullied by a loving hand. From above he can hear broken bits of don't stop, yes, oh darling, oh-something else, then oh and his name and soon it all becomes the only verity. He's got no plans on stopping, nor doing anything else. You are the law right now, so he works hard on obedience and on moulding his tongue into a shape that pleases you best. Spreads his fingers inside you and goes a little faster because by now Duncan knows that when you arch and tug him like that he can be a little rougher.

The bad day begins to peel off him like old skin from sunburnt shoulders. He's reduced from a teacher to a man, from a man to quick, wet boy, and from there he's just hot in the groin and slippery on the chin. He cannot save anyone from a house. Cannot repair a child's evening by force. But this he can do: stay here until you give up your tight little grief and spend on his mouth. Underneath him there is a shake and at first Duncan thinks it's only his body trying to get its share from the mattress when suddenly he hears your choked gasps and feels you clenching and riding it all out on his nose and cheeks while he's stuck between your quivering thighs.

His brain starts making offers, all of them bad. He could stay down and rut the rest of it out. The sheets have survived worse, even if barely. He could rise on his knees and take himself in hand, stroke and spend over your pussy like in porn videos he's watched exactly never, totally. It's hot, enough to kick his hips again, but something about it sits wrong tonight. Too lonely. Too much like being isolated in himself. Duncan has a one-body problem and wants, badly, to make it a two-body one.

He is crawling before a clear answer appears. His hand works at his pants to get his cock out and he comes back up to your face with your taste still on him, chin damp, breath all torn into bits. “I need ye,” he says. You roll to your side so he can kiss you. Sloppy and slow and wide-mouthed like he's saying look what you've done to me. You grunt and hitch your leg over his hip. Your arms go round his neck, locking him close.

Sweet lass. Good lass. His merciful lass, because now he is no longer left alone with himself.

"I'm sorry," he mumbles. "I'm sorry, I need ye. I need ye, sweetheart, ah—"

He slides inside and it's fucking tight, because of course, because you've just come. And you're warm and wet for him, and goddammit, he's just wanted to finish somewhere least useless, but now actually wants to fuck you some more. He sucks his stomach in and knocks your forehead with his and breathes some, one and two and three deep breaths, to get used to it. He will never get used to it. Absolutely never ever, not to your tits bouncing like that, not to his cock getting greeted inch by inch until his balls flatten against your buttocks and he just gets to throb inside you. Your arse too—he'll never reconcile with it. Despite being certain he knows you by heart, it hits him every time how right it feels to have his hands full.

He grabs you and moves you on himself slowly. Slow is a crueller invention than speed. Duncan learns this within the first three strokes and keeps choosing it anyway, because it lets him feel the whole spread of the agony. The head of his cock drags nearly out, catches at your slick lips, then sinks back in, and the bluntness of it shuts his eyes. The vein on his underside scrapes through the crevices of you, urging his hips to hammer. He forces them into a lazy grind, because poor behaviour is better than bad one.

"There," he mutters. "There, lassie, hold me."

Your arms tighten round the neck and a heel presses into the small of his back. Asking more. Somehow it is worse than begging and worse than talking, purely or dirty. He gives it to you with his teeth set, rolling in again, slow enough that his belly quakes before his hips finish the route.

“Ah, Christ. Sweetheart. Ye feel—” The rest dissolves against your cheek. “Good, that’s good. Let me—jus' let me—”

With fingers sunk hard where your arse is meatiest he holds and uses that hold to take you down on him by increments. That's hot too. Filthy and prurient and a little bit forbidden when he gets to be this possessive. He guides your body over the part of him that's gone dumb with want and the slide makes his mind scour blank. Hurt finds no room for itself when he is counting your cunt by inches.

You breathe his name into his mouth, and he kisses it out of you. "I know," he mumbles. "I know, I've got ye. Pretty girl, I've got ye."

He tries to mind his weight for the belly between you, but truth be told, he's full to the throat with you. Your cunt grips at him as if it owns the right, and God knows it does. He would sign it over with a clear head and decent penmanship if he had any of those right now.

He draws out too far and makes himself suffer for it. The crown of him stays caught, swollen and slick, and for a second he only rocks in that narrow hurt.

“Dunk—”

“Aye, I know. I’m sorry.” He pushes back in and the apology turns to a groan. “Fuck. I’m sorry. I need ye. Need ye so bad. My sweet lass, my girl—ah, fuck, I need—”

After that he gets less able to tell what he means. He's muttering, need you, want you, sorry, take it, please. It all keeps coming unbidden but necessary because he's all bloated with it. He's planting every word somewhere on you, wherever his face lands while he's focused on fucking himself out of his own misery.

“Right there,” he breathes. “Right there, sweetheart. Take it there. Take me there, aye, that’s it—fuck, that’s it.”

It gets rougher by accident, then with your help once you yoke him tighter. Grinding now. Careful lives where it must, where it makes sure you are not crushed and damaged around the parts that cannot take hurt yet, but the rest receives. Filling you and splitting and pinning himself in you as if depth might solve the terror of facing problems by his lonesome. It's near awful how a body can be used and become a place to hide. He had no warning for that.

"There," he says, feeling the head of his cock rub you mean. "Take it there. Let me give it to ye there."

He hears himself and feels filthy. Feels loved in the filth too, which opens a dangerous area. There must be a part of the brain that decides things outside of thought, and Duncan's currently in its custody. He wants to come, God, he wants to come. He wants rid of this. He wants with you. He wants to tell you. He can't tell you.

“Fuck,” he says, very softly, which is absurd because there is nothing soft in him. “Fuck, fuck, sweetheart—I'm gonna—can I—” A rasp of breath. Through the nose, loud and large, like him. "Can I come inside ye? Ah, please—fuck, sweetheart—"

"Yes," you breathe, sounding equally gone. Then, you pull him closer.

He rolls up and starts to shake before the finish even breaks. Orgasm climbs through his thighs with claws, into the hinge of hips, up where the marrow ought to be bitter and private, but feels like cloying sugar. For a second it's as if something has got hold of his spine and is wringing him out from the centre. It goes on long enough to frighten him a little, and empties him of everything until his bones seem hollow and Duncan realises he's weeping.

It is odd, getting used like that by him, though not unwelcome. You like it when Duncan forgets that he's supposed to act proper and lets himself be selfish for a few seconds. It only becomes scary when, in it, he forgets his own strength and grips you hard enough to make it burn some. Scarier still, when it's not in rapture but in abscondence. His jaw will do nothing but wobble. It rattles down through him and soon all of him shudders, then keeps shaking while he's still pulsing, spending inside you and higher he wets your neck with tears.

Then, laboured breaths become hiccuped ones. And then quiet crying becomes sobbing once more and he's mumbling some inaudible thing into your shoulder.

"God, Dunk," you say, nervous. "Sweetheart." Your hand comes into his hair and combs and tries to console him somehow, though it seems impossible. "Duncan, what is it? Darling, talk to me, please—"

"—love ye, I love ye," he says. "Jesus, I love ye. I love ye—"

Your eyes go wide, and you yourself go awfully quiet and still. It drops through you like a stone through a well. No bottom. Something you wanted attached to every little thing he does. To the kiss. To the first night. To the proposal and everything after it. Now it feels like it's been stolen from him and he's in terrible distress while saying it. So you grip his shoulders and shake him some.

"Duncan," you whisper. "Duncan, sweetheart, what is it? Are you hurt?"

He hears you as if through a bell jar. His name comes through first, then sweetheart, then hurt. It all arrives with edges blurred and goes huge in the middle. Both close and far off, while the last of the orgasm keeps leaving him in small, hard aftershocks. His hand is still on you, his dumbest flesh inside you. Tears have got into your skin and he can feel them cooling, which seems indecent. Everything seems indecent. Then he catches up with himself.

It just fucking burst him open. And fuck, fuck, fuck, Duncan has fucked up so badly. He means it. He knows he means it. He is terrified that saying it under these circumstances is unfair: you are pregnant, vulnerable, kind to him after a bad day, and he has just used your body to calm down. So he tries to make it disappear, ethically and immediately. Tuck it in for later, when the moment is right and the context kinder.

He starts rolling away and cringes when his hips remind him you are still locked together. His groin pulls on him, raw, and he twists until he lands half on his back beside you with one hand over his face. It's terribly wet.

"I'm sorry," he croaks. "I—I shouldnt've said t-that… I've… I've had a mad day, I'm—I'm all over the place—" He swallows and feels it click in his throat. "Didn't mean to put that on ye—"

"Dunk—"

“I’m sorry, lass. Forget I said it. I’m jus’—”

“It’s okay,” you say.

Oh God that sounds bad. He cannot see you, not through his hand, nor through the sight defect, and maybe that is for the better because that's the most lifeless okay you've ever said to him. The correction has botched the first mistake, somehow. Duncan's perturbed—he might just have sprinkled some salt into a stab wound. He drags his palm away and pats blindly for the glasses. Finds them crooked by the pillow, gets them on his face. Wipes under them with his knuckle, useless, for his eyes are so tired they do not know what glass is for.

“As long as you’re alright?” you mutter then.

It is very cautious. Duncan blinks. “Aye,” he says. Then has to try again. “Aye, I’m just. Just not the best today.”

He rolls back to you slowly. Gives you every chance to stay stiff, to stop him, to become some person he has broken the room with. When your body goes pliant, he pulls you into him and holds on. The embrace has an absence in it, and he hates it. His hand travels up and down your back in a poor attempt at tenderness. “Are ye alright?” he asks.

“Yeah,” you say. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

Silence, for a while. Near suffocating. Then, Duncan sucks in a breath and eases himself out of you. The loss feels harrowing. You shift away and sit up. “I’ll be right back,” you tell him.

He jerks up on one elbow. “Do ye need help?”

“No," you say. "Just bathroom. I’m fine.”

You smile at him sadly and walk out of the bedroom. Duncan is left there feeling like he has lost something.

He makes them play Gaelic football because it holds fifteen per team and whoever plays it does so purely for fun. Egg enjoys it tremendously. He’s small enough to sneak past larger kids, so the ball gets hard-passed to him often.

It has unfolded itself so that when someone scores, their teammates gather them by the legs and arms and carry them above their heads like an offering to some hedge god. Egg has just scored and is currently being presented to the sky, and Duncan stands there, watching the anarchy, and laughing.

He is in a dangerous state of happiness. It has begun to make claims on him. He is no longer just Dunk, he is now a dad-to-be, a father to his future son, a useful lad and a man stuck, and happy to be stuck, in an arrangement that pains him little but confuses him greatly.

The agreed label is a friend and co-parent who happens to be sleeping with you. There is some shape of a family within it and it is a better one than Dunk’s ever had, and to Dunk, who converts crumbs into meals because he learned early to be grateful for crumbs, this is a banquet with no obvious bill yet. Sometimes this breeds uneasiness.

Good mood clings to him for so long he mistrusts it. Things keep going well. You text him when you wake or simply talk to him, because oftentimes the waking is done next to each other. Most of what he wants he gets: feeding you, driving you, putting furniture together, hearing you complain and getting scolded and looked at by you. Even if he doesn’t acquire the full catalogue of his dream things, it is already good. Becoming chosen can only happen without forcing your hand, otherwise he does not want it.

His confusion is about permission, and fairness, and consequence. Not the feeling. The feeling itself is clear and Duncan sometimes worries he is achingly plain with it. He’s babbled I want this, I want you, and mine too many times to remain inconspicuous. Thanks to your kindness, your remarkable ability to explain everything with a shrug and by telling him that things are like this sometimes, that people are strange like this sometimes, they say stuff and do stuff when their brains shut off, Duncan’s intentions are currently an elephant in the middle of the room, considerately covered with a white sheet.

This is, generally, how he survives the sex, though it feels less like sex and more like being read aloud from. Besides you being gorgeous and dear to him even without his boy in your belly, you’ve managed to rewire him into a caveman creature who thinks good every time your tit spills out of the bra. Then yes, this, when you’re muttering put a baby in me into his ear despite having one ripening in you already. And well, he likes that it is like that. He likes being allowed near the consequence of his own coveting, even if how deep that goes embarrasses him terribly.

He has a key to your place and intends to give you one to his place today, for today is another mundane day in the lives of the happily unmarried. He’s setting up a baby space in his flat and you’ve offered to help, and there are a great many worries in Duncan concerning it. His apartment being a testimony to his bachelor status is one of them. Despite him calling the whole date a 'preparation', to him it is nearer to consecration. Then, you coming and picking him up is another story entirely, because there is a shade of a chance for you to meet Egg and that makes Dunk giddy for reasons he doesn’t understand.

“Oi!” he yells at a boy tackling a smaller boy to the ground. “Quit actin’ like a maggot, will ye?”

The children laugh collectively and start chanting maggot-maggot like an extremely potent little cult. Egg comes over to Dunk with mud smeared on his ears. He squints, shields his eyes with one hand, and points towards the outskirts of the pitch with the other. “Who’s that?”

Duncan turns. Then, for two seconds, he becomes useless.

You are standing there in a blue sundress with your belly hugged by it prettily, and waving at him. He waves back. To his utter terror, he giggles too.

“Oh, boy,” Egg murmurs. “It’s real bad, innit?”

“Wha—?” Duncan mumbles. When there’s no reply he looks at Egg and Egg is wearing a shite-eating grin, so Dunk decides to overcompensate by yelling at children some more. “Oh, quit it, you,” he says. “Get back in there, we ain’t done yet.”

“Aye, sir,” Egg says and starts towards the middle of the field. He arranges himself into a position that suggests he’s about to sprint off, but before that happens he cranes his bald head to Duncan and quips, “She’s much prettier than Miss Darry.” And he’s off. And Duncan’s cheeks fill with a snort.

He gets back into the mosh-pit after Egg and the closer he is to finishing the session, the more his mind ventures into wistful areas. He’ll be able to do that with his own boy, and soon. He wonders what kind of player his boy will be, then tells himself the boy can hate sport if he wants, that would be fine, probably, though Dunk would need a private minute. After that private minute, the boy can do whatever he pleases. Duncan’s own boyhood was lonely and patched together by whoever took him in for a while, so the most important thing is for his boy to not have that sort of life. Those kinds of musings are easier, because he can say my son without lying, and where it might be heard. The rest of what he’d like to call his still feels stolen: girl, wife, family, home, and those are said only where no one can hear.

“Is that Mrs Pennytree?” asks Finn from 2B.

“Yes!” Egg bellows, as much as a person his size can bellow. Duncan glares at him, and gets another grin in response.

“Eyes on the ball, please,” Duncan says in a flat tone, trying to ignore the matter, and failing.

Another squeaky voice comes from the middle of the field: “Is she having your baby?”

That one nearly kills him. “Aye,” he says, tormented. “And if any of ye kick that ball near her, you’ll be doing laps till September.”

It all just turns into havoc. The children stop playing and openly giggle, and whisper and stare at you and ask their child-sized questions and state their child-sized statements, which, in this case, are all enormous. When did you marry? What’s her name? She’s so pretty! Will the baby go to our school? Having a teacher-parent’s a bummer.

At some point, Egg asks, “Is it a boy or a girl?”

“Boy,” Duncan tells him, all fond despite himself.

“Cool,” Egg says with God-honest joy, and Duncan starts laughing, because he’s never heard Egg say cool before.

He turns to the maddening crowd. “Right, all of you,” he booms. “If one pregnant lady distracts you, I’ve no good news ’bout your futures. But it’s a wrap here for today!”

The kids disperse in various directions. Some go for the showers, some go straight home, and some make sure to come right by you and shout, “Goodbye, Mrs Pennytree!” with enough shrill sincerity to make Duncan redder than he has any right to be despite standing half a day in the sun.

He picks up the ball, though only the physical one, and trots towards you with Egg beside him. He wants to say hi, sweetheart. Egg is there, so what comes out is, “Oi.”

You smile. “Oi yourself.”

He smiles too, with one hand on the back of his neck and with the ball tucked under his other arm. “You good?”

“Yeah,” you say. “Warm, but alive. You?”

“Aye.” Duncan nods. “Grand.” Then nothing. For no proper reason, because you are standing on a school pitch and he has said hello to you before and Egg is only a child, except Egg is also looking between the pair of you with the attentive cruelty of a pensioner at a wake.

You cock your head to the side. “Are you the boy I keep hearing about?”

“Most likely,” Egg says. “I’m the favourite.” He squints up at you. “Are you the girl I keep hearing about?”

Duncan scowls.

“Oh?” you laugh. Then you turn to Dunk. “Uh, I hope so? Am I?”

Duncan has reached the sort of red that exists in nature only as a warning sign. He turns to the boy. “Egg, for Christ’s sake. Spare me, alright?” Then he turns to you and his voice softens at once. “Can ye wait another ten? I’m smellin’ all foul—”

You are grinning, clearly amused. “Yeah, no worries. I’ll wait.”

“Grand,” Duncan says. He turns to Egg once more. “Egg—” A finger gets pointed at the bald head. “No funny business, you hear me?”

“Aye, sir,” Egg says, and Duncan does not believe him for a moment.

He walks towards the building and you stare at his back a second too long.

You think, fervently, that you might just as well have been shot. The sight of Duncan with children is lethal. Patient, mock-stern, somehow gentle even when he is yelling across the pitch like he's calling cattle home. He corrects where correction is needed, encourages where encouragement has a place to land, and goes soft around the smaller ones without doing anything as obvious as softening. If you did not know him, you would think he was showing off.

Then again, who in their right mind would see this and not want it?

For one strange minute you feel a deep, wounded kinship with the maths teacher, whoever she is. Of course some woman who sees him every day in shorts and glasses and patience would lose her shite over it. It is a sensible injury.

You already know he is good with children. You have seen him with the bump, which is worse because the bump has no limbs and no eyes and no ability to thank him, and still he lowers his voice to it like it might be shy. You know he will be a good father. You know this with a grim force. But knowing a thing in your flat is different from seeing it here, in daylight, from the outside.

Here it gets embodied. It runs around in grass stains and shouts over him. Clings to his arm, ignores his authority, takes comfort from his largeness and abuses his kindness for sport. And naturally, because you are pregnant and therefore built from appetite and disaster, it all confuses you more.

Egg’s eyes on your face become heavier until they weigh a ton, so you break out from whatever stupor has taken you.

“And you?” you ask. “Not showering?”

“No,” Egg says. He looks you over with deep, thorough scrutiny, as if he has built a version of you from whatever Duncan has let slip, and is now comparing the product to reality. “I don’t get to be dirty as often, so I savour it,” he says, clearly thinking something else.

“That’s…” You press your lips together. “Very boy of you.”

He accepts the compliment with a small nod. Then keeps looking, which is both endearing and unnerving.

“So,” he says, in the tone of someone who has completed the formalities and is now ready to discuss dirt. “Why don’t you want to marry Mr Pennytree?”

The breath leaves you in one fast blow. “Oh Lord,” you say. “I see what Duncan means. You’re a real menace, aren’t you?” You shift the bag on your shoulder and try for stern. It comes out somewhat damaged by amusement. “I don’t think that’s any of your business, hm?”

“That’s exactly what he says,” Egg murmurs under his breath.

You glance at the sun reflected in his baldness. He looks down first, then up again, testing the fence.

“Did he propose badly?”

“Egg.”

“What?”

You mean to scold him. You do. It simply comes out far too fond, which is worrying for everybody involved.

“Fine, fine,” he relents. He digs his foot into grass. A beat passes. “All I mean is that he’s real good and he likes you a lot.” He says it off-hand, almost bored, which somehow makes it huge. “He only stares at this app of his and avoids Miss Darry like wildfire.”

“Miss Darry?”

“The maths teacher.”

The kinship with Miss Darry lives out its natural lifespan, which in this case amounts to roughly two minutes.

“I see,” you say, diplomatic in the way of someone who would love to hear more and knows perfectly well they should not invite a seven-year-old into gossip. Especially gossip about a woman who may well be guilty of nothing except having eyes and a workplace. “Well.”

“She wears red lipstick,” Egg says.

“Does she.”

“And laughs at everything.”

“I see,” you say again, less diplomatically.

Egg stares at you. His face has softened a little, impudence thinning into something more careful.

“You care about him, aye?” you ask.

Egg shrugs. “He’s alright.”

You smile. “I think the feeling’s mutual.”

He considers this, then smiles too. Small, quick, there and gone. His eyes drop to your stomach. “Can I touch your belly?”

The question catches you more gently than the others. “Yeah,” you say. “Of course.”

Egg steps closer. For all his nerve, his hand comes up with caution. It lands on the curve, light and flat, fingers splayed in a way that makes him look younger than he sounded a second ago. Both of you go quiet.

His hand is small. Warm from running. There is dirt crescented under one nail and a faint green smear at the heel of it. Your own boy will have hands like that one day. Small hands, damp from effort. Unreasonable with wanting things. Maybe grass-stained, maybe ink-stained, maybe sticky with jam or paint or God knows what. The thought warms you some and melts the borders of its surrounding countries through gentle invasion.

Egg’s brow pinches. “Can he hear me?”

“Maybe a little,” you say. “I’m not sure. I think mostly he hears my insides being rude.”

Egg nods as if this is useful scientific material. “Hello,” he says to your stomach.

You bite the inside of your cheek.

“He’s quiet,” Egg observes.

“He takes after his father in exactly one area, then.”

That makes Egg grin again. “What’s his name?”

“Oh.” You blink. “We actually haven’t decided yet.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Dunk has an app.”

“He does,” you say, trying not to squeal at being trusted enough that Egg now calls him Dunk instead of Mr Pennytree around you.

“With lists.”

“He does love a list.”

Egg hums to that, disappointed by adult incompetence but willing to continue living in the world despite it. His hand remains on your belly another moment, then drops.

Behind him, the building door opens hard enough to startle you both.

Duncan comes out with his hair still wet, cheeks and forehead a little sunburnt, shirt clinging damply at the collar. He has changed, but only just; there is still a streak of grass on his shorts and a look on his face that says he has spent the whole shower worrying what a small bald child might do with ten unsupervised minutes.

“Is he pesterin’ you?” he asks.

Egg straightens. “No.”

“He’s fine,” you say.

“She allowed me,” Egg adds, with great legal force.

Duncan looks between you. “Allowed you what?”

“To touch the baby.”

Duncan’s face does a thing dangerously soft before he throttles it and stuffs it behind suspicion. “Right.” He turns to Egg. “Have you been tellin’ her nonsense?”

“Some,” Egg says.

You laugh.

Duncan looks at you, panicked. “What sort of some?”

You lift one shoulder. “A lady never tells.”

“Ah, Jesus.” He looks to the sky, then back at Egg. “I knew it’d be trouble leavin’ ye two alone.”

Egg’s grin comes back in full. “You did say no funny business.”

“Aye, and?”

“I didn’t do funny business.”

Duncan folds his arms.

Egg thinks. “I did serious business.”

You laugh again, harder this time, and Duncan loses the fight with his own mouth. It twitches, then gives up. A limo pulls up to the parking lot.

“Into the car with ye,” he says, pointing towards the gate. “Before you start a union.”

Egg goes, but slowly, with one last assessing glance at you and then at Duncan, as if pleased with whatever private conclusion he has reached. You go too, because you're not sure if into the car with ye was intended for Egg, or you, or simply everyone who Dunk has marked as misbehaving.

Goodbyes are bid, and then into the respective cars, and then Duncan is driving you to his place and eyeing your knees every now and then, trying to come up with some last-minute reasons for carrying you through the threshold and setting you on the bed so your feet don’t touch the floor and you only conduct him while he does everything himself and then makes sweet love to you.

None of it happens, and the minute you set one slipper in his hallway, something in Dunk sinks with urgent vehemence, like he has been hoping for you to float three inches above the floor.

You look at him when the sigh leaves him. “Nervous?”

“A little,” Duncan says, because it is a white lie and the truth is insane.

He clears his throat and leads you to the kitchen. There are cups in the sink. Two, maybe three, and one spoon with tea dried round the bowl of it. The fridge door has ketchup smeared near the handle in a short red streak that immediately becomes the loudest colour in the room. Duncan sees you seeing the kitchen, then sees you being kind enough to not see the fridge, and feels a violent affection that makes him stupider than he already is.

“I’ll make tea,” he says.

“Oh, can I have coffee?”

Duncan turns to you.

“One,” you add quickly. “One coffee. The doctor said one is fine. The app said one is fine too.”

“Is it your first today?”

“Yes.”

“Proper first?”

“Yes, Dunk.”

“You sure?”

You look at him as if considering whether to bite. Then you put your hand on his bicep and say, “Please.”

It is the prettiest please he has heard in a week. He relents so thoroughly it is almost shameful. “Aye, alright. One.”

“Thank you.”

“One small one.”

“You’re a tyrant.”

“I’m responsible,” he says, reaching for the jar, and hears how pleased he sounds with himself. “There’s a difference.”

“Is there?”

He points the spoon at you. “Sit down.”

You do, smiling. It makes him feel warm in places he'd rather not think of now.

The baby things are mostly in his bedroom, he tells you while the kettle starts its work. Some are in the hall cupboard. Some are in the living room too because the box said changing table on it and Duncan did not want to risk carrying it somewhere wrong without your supervision, which is how he says he panicked briefly and abandoned it near the telly.

You accept the coffee as if it has been handed down by a benevolent saint. Duncan carries his tea and points you towards the bedroom.

He has got rid of the desk. It sits in the corner of the living room now, looking wrong and sulky under a stack of old training cones and a folded hoodie. In its place, by his side of the bed, there is a gap he has cleared and swept and stood staring at for an embarrassing amount of time. A baby corner. That is what he has called it. A corner makes it sound small and sensible and temporary, like a lamp or a chair. What it feels like is a claim being made in wood and cotton.

You both agreed on a bedside sleeper instead of a cot because there is not enough space. Duncan agreed too, with his mouth, and in all practical senses he knows it is the right choice. Still, a cot would have pleased him. Two cots, really. One at yours, one at his. Two solid, lovely places for the boy to sleep in and make up for the shitty one Duncan remembers only as a smell of disinfectant and old milk and other children’s noise through thin walls. He does not say this.

There is also the matter of Duncan’s sleeping. He has never trusted himself in full unconsciousness. He gets too hot, kicks the covers off, twists himself into them, wakes sideways, wakes sweating, wakes with one arm dead under him. The thought of a newborn within reach of all that makes his stomach knot. A cot has borders. It's a little country of its own. A bedside sleeper, to Dunk, looks like a compromise between closeness and disaster, with one side too open and the boy too near the weather of his body.

Though, of course, the boy will mostly be with you. Dunk knows that. Everyone knows that. For the first months especially, the baby will need his mother more than he needs a large man with hands too big for the buttons on newborn clothes. This whole mission might be some jury-rigged thing, a small structure built so Duncan can feel included in the early days. Your way of saying he can have his space too.

Why he would need space, he has no idea. He would be happy to stay over at yours as much as needed, which he hopes, privately and with no dignity, is every day.

“You know,” you start, while he is setting up the changing table and you are doing your terrible job of folding onesies. “Egg asked me about a name.”

“Has he?” Duncan asks. “And what did you tell him?”

“That we haven’t picked yet. But he said that you’ve got…” You glance at him. “A list?”

Duncan blushes furiously. “Little—” He looks at you and your face manages to marry mockery with fondness the only way yours can. “It ain’t a list. It’s just a few names written down, is all.”

“Well,” you say, folding one sleeve into a shape no sleeve has ever asked for. “Do you have any ideas?”

“I dunno,” Dunk says. “Do you?”

“I thought, uh—” You stop. Your fingers worry the little cotton foot. “Maybe you have someone in your family you’d like to name him after? I don’t—” Your face shifts, cautious around him. “I don’t really have anyone like that, but I thought—”

“I don’t really know,” Duncan blurts.

And he really does not know.

Duncan has never quite been his name. He was given away nameless, as far as he knows, and named by Uncle Arlan afterwards. It was plainly Dunk first, despite everyone later deciding that Duncan must be the proper thing and Dunk the nickname. Someone stopped it before Dunk could be put into documents and said that was no name for a child, so Duncan went down instead. But he stayed Dunk whenever Uncle Arlan would speak to him, angry or fond or needing something fetched. Duncan was reserved for serious talks.

One of those talks was when Arlan smiled at him, which was menacing enough by itself.

There was a family considering Dunk as their child. They would visit and try to get to know him better, even though, by Dunk’s reckoning, he has always been knowable at first glance and there is not much excitement underneath to dig to. He liked sports. He liked animals. That was about it on him. The woman was kind-eyed and slender and taller than her husband, who was some sort of an office job-haver and always came with a leather suitcase and a shirt and tie on him. She wanted Dunk very much. The husband was apprehensive first, then mild.

In the end, Arlan called him Duncan and told him the family had decided it was not a good idea after all to adopt a boy, and Duncan would be staying in the home a little while longer, which lasted until he was eighteen and left.

Another time was when Rafe died.

Dunk felt it in his gut that something bad had happened, even though Rafe only had an infection and it seemed unfeasible that she would fail to shrug it off because she was the strongest girl Duncan knew. When Arlan sat him on the couch in the playroom late in the afternoon and said, “Duncan. Duncan, boy, there’s something I gotta tell you,” Dunk already had this acrimonious feeling growing in his chest because surely some injustice had just happened.

The injustice was that Rafe, a girl who had made it to the orphanage in a state of severe malnourishment, had never really shrugged off her immune system being wonky. What was a hidden infection, and then bronchitis, and then pneumonia, had managed to build its own resistance to all antibiotics, and well, Rafe suffocated despite all the work the good doctors and good nurses at the hospital were doing.

Dunk took the news as Duncan, the version of himself made for the bad things, and that was the first time Uncle Arlan poured him a drink and said nothing when Dunk cried. And he cried a lot.

It became a whole thing, being called Duncan when something bad had happened. Caretaker Maeve called him that when she delivered the news of Arlan’s death too, so it took Dunk some time to not flinch every time someone called him Duncan.

He only has a few names in his inventory, and none of them are fit for his boy.

He does not want to call him Arlan, because Arlan was an old drunk, kind sometimes, cruel sometimes, taught Dunk a lot, and Dunk does not really want to think about him every time he looks at his son. He had thought of mentioning Rafe to you, but it is a haggard name, and it suited Rafe and only her, and therefore should remain hers.

He thinks people should be given their own names with no roots and no past, so that they can step into their lives fresh and with no burdens and shape their futures as they please.

So he has a list of names he has looked up and researched, and he likes some of them a lot, but none of them mean anything personal. They are just nice names his son could have for himself.

“Dunk?”

He turns and finds you looking at him over a defeated little pile of cotton. Your face has gone gentle in a way that makes him grateful, down to the bone, for being called Dunk in that moment.

“You okay, sweetie?”

“Aye, I’m grand,” he says. “Sorry, I jus’—I think I got a bit sunburnt, is all.”

You look at his face, then the abandoned onesie in your hands. “Do you want to do it some other day?”

“No, no.” He glances at the changing table as if it might defend him. “We’re nearly done. It’s one screw away from bein’ a thing.”

You smile faintly. “No. I mean the names.”

“Aye.” Duncan’s mouth goes dry. “That. Yeah, maybe?” He clears his throat, then pretends the screw packet needs his full attention. “Would ye mind?”

Your face changes by no great measure. Only the softness shifts a little deeper, and compassion sits somewhere in it. Duncan does not like that. Does not like the feeling of something compassionable having been found in him.

“Sure,” you say. “Of course. If you want to talk, though—about something else—I could—”

“No, no. There’s naught to talk about.” He gives you a smile that feels too large on his face. “I’m only tired.”

He says it while rising, which is where the trouble begins. His hand leaves the half-built changing table, and the half-built changing table, having no loyalty in it, folds slightly in on itself. The coffee cup you put there tips, rolls, and drops straight into your lap, spilling a brown stain all over the blue dress before tumbling down onto the carpet.

“Shite,” Duncan says, already moving. “Shite, lassie, I’m sorry—Jesus, I’m sorry.”

He reaches you in one ugly stride and crouches down, hands hovering first, then landing because panic makes decisions for him. He pulls the wet material away from your belly on instinct, heart thudding. “Was it hot? Did it burn ye?”

“It’s alright,” you say quickly. “It’s alright, Dunk. It wasn’t hot.”

“You sure?”

“Yes. I’m good. Just…” You look down at yourself. The stain has spread rudely over the front of you. “Wet.”

He stares at the dress as though it has died under his roof. “I’ll give ye something. Wait.”

He turns to his wardrobe, opens it, and immediately cringes at the small pile on the lower shelf. Clothes in that middle state between clean and dirty, rejected by both categories and left to govern themselves. He shuts that shelf in his head and looks at the hanging shirts instead.

For a second he only stands there. It becomes, terribly, a matter of choosing what he would like to see you in. The soft grey T-shirt. The old green one from a tournament years ago. The thick navy jumper that would hang off one shoulder if fortune chose to be kind. Then he remembers the business at hand and feels heat crawl up the back of his neck.

“Ye want a T-shirt or a button-up?” he asks, voice roughened.

You come closer and peek under his arm into the wardrobe, and it is so endearing that Dunk nearly makes a sound fit for a kitten. “Button-up,” you say. Then your hand appears, finger pointing. “Can I have this one?”

The blue one. His favourite.

The one he was going to give you anyway, if he had managed to do it without looking like a man handing over a ring in cotton form. So, in a way, things work themselves out.

“Anything ye want, m’lady,” he says.

He takes it from the hanger and shakes it once, then holds it up against you, pressing it flat to your chest as if checking if it suits you. The fabric covers the stain and half your thighs and sits blue against your skin in a way that makes his whole body go stupidly pleased. It does suit you.

"Thank you, good sir," you say, hugging the keepsake to yourself. "I'll be right back."

He points you in the right direction and you go, very calmly, into his bathroom with your dress sticking coldly to your thighs.

The bathroom is small and clean, though not in a way that suggests habit. More like he remembered you were coming and panicked. You peel the dress off and drop it into the basin so it can soak. Your bra follows, because it has also taken coffee in the war and is now damp across one cup in a way that feels terribly gross.

Then you put Duncan’s shirt on. The mirror only shows you down to the torso. You stand there in the blue of him, belly pushing the fabric forward, buttons sitting close over you, collar loose around your throat. The sleeves hang off your hands. You roll them up once, then twice, then a few more times, until your fingers come free.

You're ready to come out and somehow entirely unready. Maybe because Duncan has been cryptic today in a way that makes him feel locked from the inside, and maybe that is why you stay. Maybe you would have snooped anyway. You are wearing his shirt in his bathroom. There is only so much restraint a person can be expected to show.

His shower gel smells plainly of clean person in male edition. There is a toothbrush in the cup with its bristles near flattened from how furiously he must brush his teeth. The sight of it moves something in you. An affection with a small ache in it.

You start smelling more of his things. He has two colognes, both of them similar. One sharper, one warmer, both close enough to the same idea that you can imagine him standing in a shop, overwhelmed by choice, deciding to buy the thing nearest to what he already knows. There is also the deodorant he smells of often. The everyday one you know from his sweatshirts and from the place under his arm where your face sometimes ends up when he holds you after.

You open the cabinet. There is not much. Basic painkillers. A nail clipper. Spare razors. Something for indigestion. Plasters. No sunscreen, which is typical enough to make you shut your eyes for a second. But there is panthenol, sitting there ready to be useful, and it is adorable in some odd way. He's excellent at consequences, useless at prevention. You take the panthenol out and turn it in your hand.

His reaction to the names sits with you in the little tiled room. The way his face went strange and far away, and he reached for tired as an explanation, as though a question about family could be escaped by blaming anything but the family itself.

His must be real bad, you think, if this is how he reacts to the mildest door opening onto it. It would be good if you talked about it. Both of you. It might be a bonding ground, or at least some patch of shared earth neither of you could pretend away after. You are not fond of talking about your mother. You are not fond of even thinking of talking about your mother. There are things in you that still go rigid and childish around that subject, and it irritates you to know this about yourself. But maybe it would clear some things up. Maybe it would make him understand why you keep thinking love and suspecting a trap under the floorboards.

The only thing you cannot work out is how Duncan has turned out to be such a good man. You do not believe yourself to be simply good. You only try very hard. Sometimes you manage. Sometimes you fail and then try to make the failure less palpable. Most people, you think, are built out of that: effort, want, fear, apology, repeat.

Duncan seems to have come from somewhere with very little good in it and still made himself into this. You wonder if he is an exception, or if he simply tries infinitely better than you.

You come out, finally, having found not much, but enough to know what to do next. When you enter the bedroom he's sat on the bed and testing the sleeper, whether it folds and unfolds well, and once you appear in the doorway he freezes and gives in to staring.

The shoulders hang off your shoulders in a way that makes the stitching sit somewhere at your mid-arms, and the sleeves themselves end where Duncan cannot see, because you've got your hands hidden behind your back. Then there is a matter of your bra being lost and your tits filling the cotton in a way his chest could never dream of filling it. The whole thing reaches your mid-thighs, much like the sundress did, but is somehow more exciting to him because it is private. He's the only one who gets to see you like this, therefore he gets to be a little smug about it.

"What've ye got there, lass?" he asks, letting the sleeper fold and getting his hands free.

You show him the bottle with a shy smile. "For your face," you explain. Duncan hears face and tries, very hard, to keep his eyes there, though they seem to want to drop to where your belly is bulging the cotton out, and to spot whether you've been impish enough to lose your knickers too. Then, he scolds himself for this sort of thinking.

He huffs a laugh to shield himself, shakes his head and pulls out a ceiling-facing palm, to which you protest. You sit in front of him on your heels, and say, "Let me."

Your hand lifts to his glasses first, and Duncan goes still.

“They’ll be right next to you,” you tell him.

It hits him in the gut, fondly and with ridiculous force, this small reassurance. As if his own bedside table has become unknown country and you are kindly guiding him through it. He dips his chin a little and lets you take them off.

The room softens immediately. Edges go. Your face becomes a warm shape close to him. He hears the quiet click of plastic frames being set down within reach. Then you move somewhere in the blur, and from the amorphous shapes he can tell you are pressing foam into your palm and lathering it. Your hands come towards him, less and less visible the closer they get, and then he stops bothering to see.

You set both to his face. Duncan sighs very deeply. His eyes close. The panthenol is cool first, then quickly warms. You press it into his cheeks in soft little pats, careful around the red places where the sun has caught him worst. His skin drinks it greedily. For a moment the white sits in the fine creases beside his eyes, filling the little lines there and making them stand out. Then it disappears.

His lashes flutter. They tickle your fingers every now and then in quick dark brushes when your thumb passes under his eye.

“You really did burn,” you murmur.

“Aye,” he says, breathy.

You work more foam into the broad of his forehead, then across his nose, which has taken the sun hardest and feels rougher, almost crusted. He lets you move him. Sits there, large and quiet, and lets you turn his face by the jaw. You do his chin. The corner of his mouth. Then, because you are capable of great foolishness today, you pass your thumb lightly over his bottom lip.

His mouth parts. Only a little. Softly. Obedient to no audible order.

For a second you forget the sunburn altogether and it becomes foreplay. That mouth is far too delicate for a man built like this. Wide and bitten red, yes, but soft at rest. Kissable. So, so kissable.

You have to put more foam on your fingers to justify still being this close. His ears are blazing too, so you move there, and Duncan’s breathing changes.

It is small enough that you could pretend to miss it, which is probably kinder, but you feel it. Something catches in him when you slide up the side of his face and cup the ear away from his head. His skin is hot there, the outer rim is flushed red. You spread the panthenol over it with two fingers, careful, rubbing it along the curve, then behind where sweat and sun have made him frail.

He makes a sound low in his throat. You pause. “Alright?”

“Aye,” he says quickly, so you carry on.

Duncan keeps his eyes shut because opening them would make him answer for something, and they are useless anyway. He has been touched like this in pieces. Hands on him with want in them, with need in them, with your laughter, your hunger, your pain, your relief. But this is slower and worse. Care with no hurry to it. You are putting medicine on him. That is all. A decent person would know how to receive that without his cock making itself known in his shorts.

The trouble is that his body has never been decent about your hands. It takes everything as news. It takes everything as chance.

Your thumb rubs a small circle behind his ear, and his shoulders drop, which, begrudgingly, is noticed. You do the other ear with even more concern, and Duncan sits through it with his fists loose on his thighs. His face has gone slack. He looks younger without his glasses. Blind and sunburnt and, once again, trying very hard to be normal about being handled.

When you finish, you sit back a little and look him over. “Anywhere else?”

He blinks his eyes open, unfocused, then looks down at himself as if he has temporarily forgotten the shape of his own body. His arms move in answer, awkwardly offered, red along the forearms and up towards the bend of the elbow.

You take one wrist. Too big for this sort of nursing, which makes you want to nurse it more. His skin is warm and dry, the hair there bleached fair by the sun in a way it is nowhere else on him. It gathers the white of the panthenol when you spread it down from the elbow, stands up under your strokes, then lies back damply.

Then, rest. Bicep first, because the sleeve line has left him pink there and because his arm is in your hands and you are only human. The muscle shifts under your palm. He has the gall to look away, as though this is all very practical and nothing else, while the tendons in his forearm rise when you press your thumb down near the wrist.

“You’re very quiet,” you say.

“I’m being seen to,” he answers.

“Mm, and that's such a serious business, aye?”

His mouth tugs, but he stays quiet.

The other arm. Same path. Shoulder to bicep, bicep to forearm, forearm to wrist. He has little marks there you have seen before and some you have not. Old scratches, and a pale scar near the thumb. Red knuckles. His body keeps a record badly organised and in several languages. You take each hand in both of yours because you have to. There is no other way to hold the size of him and do the job properly.

His palms are darker than the rest of him, broad and lined and slightly rough at the base of the fingers. The spaces between are almost untouched by the sun. You rub the foam over the backs first, then the knuckles, then turn his hands over and press your thumbs into the meat below his because the bottle is in your lap now and the work has clearly travelled beyond medical need.

Duncan grunts. Your eyes flick up. “That sore?”

“No.”

You press again, firmer.

His fingers curl and then open again around nothing. “Christ.”

“Good Christ or bad Christ?”

He swallows. “The other one.”

You smile down at your knees and smooth through his palm again. His whole body seems to listen.

By the time you release him, Duncan looks both better and worse. Less dried out, somehow more endangered. He rubs one treated thumb against the side of his finger and then, with a sudden little pull of nerve, catches the neckline of his T-shirt and tugs it open.

“Here,” he says. “A little.”

The skin below his throat is pink where the collar has missed its duty. There is a sharp line where the burn stops and the usual pale of him begins. You look at it. Then at him. “Hm,” you say. “I think we should take this off, then.”

His brows lift. “Do ye? You’re the expert here, it would seem.”

You hum. “Take it off.”

Duncan obeys quickly enough to embarrass both of you. The shirt goes up and over his head, mussing his hair into rough copper tufts. He sits there bare from the waist up, blinking at you through the blur, big hands holding the discarded T-shirt as if he has been caught stealing it from himself.

You reach over and give him his glasses back. He puts them on. His face returns to itself piece by piece. Eyes first, then the crease between his brows, then the attention with which he looks at you and tries to read whether he has done something wrong.

You feel yourself go a little bashful under it. Ridiculous, given the circumstances. Still, the words come out shy. “I like you in those.”

Duncan blushes. A stupid thing to happen, because his face has already switched the palette, but his body finds a way. Redder over red. He glances down, then back up, and something very pleased and very helpless moves behind his eyes.

“They help me see,” he says.

“I gathered.”

“Aye, well.” His mouth twitches. “Important work.”

You put more foam on your hand and touch his neck, so he stops joking.

There is tender at the base of his throat where the T-shirt has gaped with movement. You work there first because that is what you have been given permission for. Your fingers slide over the heat, along the tendons, down to the hollow. His pulse jumps under your thumb. The panthenol makes a pale gloss of him before it sinks in.

He watches you now. The glasses make that worse. You can see him seeing you. His gaze catches on your mouth, then corrects. Drops to the place where his shirt hangs open a little over your belly, then corrects again. He is trying to behave.

You do his shoulders, though they need no doing. Then lower, though it needs no doing either, for he's pale where cloth kept him. The border gets crossed anyway. Your hands move from treated skin to untouched one, down over the top of his chest where the hair begins. Your fingers scratch lightly through it, gathering some of the foam, dragging it in thin streaks over him.

He could ask what you are doing. He should, maybe. He has used questions before as fences. Are you sure? Is this alright? Do ye want me to stop? Good questions, all of them. Useful ones. They keep the world decent.

But you gave him a token. You put it in his hand without knowing what he would spend it on. People want things, you told him. People are strange. People say stuff and do stuff when their brains shut off. You said he could want things too, or near enough that he has been living off it since, so he sits there and lets himself want this.

What he wants is to disenchant that superstition of his about you walking round his floor and therefore never wanting to touch him again. And here you are, touching him. And lovely, too. And your eyes look hazy, your breath sounds different and your hands are gentle. They move down on him to more dangerous country. Over his ribs where he's making an obvious case of himself, then toward the belly where it creases with some boy-fat he still carries. He sucks in a breath, ignores the pull at his groin, and asks, "Do ye have to be somewhere today?"

“No, silly,” you tell him. “I’m pregnant. I’ve nothing to do besides growing a baby.”

He nods to that thoughtfully. “Would ye stay then? Sleep here?”

Your eyes go all muggy and he knows it is a yes already. “Sleep?” you ask. “So soon? It’s not even eight yet.”

His legs knock a little wider apart. He does not bother hiding it. His hands settle on your thighs, heavy and warm. “I ain’t saying we should sleep right now.”

“What should we do then, hm?”

“Lassie, yer makin’ such a fool of me, ye know that?” Duncan says, leaning in and brushing your nose with his. His hands inch higher until they reach the hem of his shirt on you. “Have ye got your knickers on?”

“Dunk,” you squeal, but let him. “Course I do. Who do you think I am?”

“A minx, sometimes,” he hums. “Only sometimes.”

He kisses you with the laugh still caught in his mouth. It makes the first second silly; then your hand slides over his bare chest and whatever wisecracking held him together comes apart without a dramatic sound. His fingers first stay under the blue hem, then drift higher and find elastic.

A little tug takes the liberty of asking the question.

You understand so quickly it feels awkward. Rise on your knees and let him have the answer. The shirt drops loose around you. His knuckles graze your skin while he eases the underwear down your thighs. He has to work harder to wedge it from under your knees because his attention keeps lifting to the open slope of your belly. “Hold on,” he mutters, deeply engaged with the task.

“I am holding on.”

“Aye, smartarse.”

It comes free, eventually. He drops it without looking where it lands. Then his palm settles between your legs.

Flat and warm. Broad enough that your body has to make a place for him there. You open wider, and the small adjustment does dreadful business on his face. Duncan looks down with his mouth parted while the heel of his hand presses soft to your pussy and his fingers lie heavy over the hair. He finds you slick. Finds you ready. The finding climbs him visibly.

“Ye tell me if anythin’s wrong, aye?”

You smile at him from above. “Nothing will be wrong,” you say. “But alright.”

His thumb shifts, barely anything, though enough to make your knees take more of the mattress and your hand go to his shoulder for balance. The other reaches the buttons, and they give one by one. Tiny pops. A domestic striptease in reverse order of shame. The shirt opens down the middle and lets him see you in portions: belly, then skin above it, then the undercurve of your breasts held by gravity, affectionately. Duncan’s hand stays where it is, but his mind clearly leaves the room for a second and comes back carrying firewood.

You reach the last button. Then you're about to slide the shirt off your shoulders, when his hand catches your wrist. “Could ye keep this one on?” he asks.

You look down at him. His ears are redder than his sunburn now. Lovely thing, really, to watch a man built for hurling furniture blush over cloth. “You like it?”

“Aye.” He releases your wrist and puts both hands under the fabric, up your sides, then over your breasts with a slow pressure that makes your breathing misbehave. “I do.”

His thumbs stroke where you have gone fuller, heavier, and his eyes follow the movement with focus that has lost all right to call itself innocent.

“Sure,” you say, and hook a finger under the waistband of his shorts. Snap it against his stomach. “But you have to take those off.”

That gets him moving with a speed best described as unsafe. Shorts shoved down. Underwear with them. One ankle caught, a hissed fuck’s sake, then freedom, and him bare on the edge of the bed with his cock lifting hard against him. Wet at the head and a smear already printed where it has touched skin.

For once, chagrin arrives late and finds the room occupied. He sees you looking. He lets you look. Then reaches for you.

The gathering, regardless of what he's agreed on with himself, is still abashed. He draws you onto his lap by the hips and makes room for the belly between you without turning the matter solemn. Your knees sink on either side of him. The shirt hangs open and around you both. His cock gets caught hot between your thighs and his, and twitches when your leg brushes it, and Duncan kisses the corner of your mouth first, misses, corrects, then kisses you properly with a sound that comes from somewhere low and grateful.

You settle yourself against him. His hands stay on you, ready for work, ready for orders. “How do you want me, hm?” you ask.

His fingers tighten. Any way, says the whole of him. Any way you’ll give me. In the bed. On the floor. Cross with me. Laughing at me. Wearing my shirt until it smells wrong forever. Any way that keeps you here long enough for the flat to learn you.

“On top,” he says. “Wanna see ya.”

You take his chin in your hand. Your thumb crosses his lower lip again, and his mouth softens under it, opening by the smallest amount. “You sure you’re alright?”

There must be something plain in him tonight. Some bolt left visible. Names, children, coffee, all of it has knocked something loose and left him sitting there with the telling in his lap. He looks at your mouth. “Aye,” he says. “Aye, I’m sure. I just—” His breath catches, stupid honest thing. “Been thinkin’ ’bout you, is all.”

You nod. Accept it. Do not tease him for once. “I’ve been thinking about you too,” you say, and press yourself to his cock.

By now, Dunk should’ve learnt your weight and stopped being surprised by it. He is, however, a man of weak memory, or simply someone who stores recollections as a version that is endurable. You settle over him and he goes aghast all over again because your wet mouth frames his length until his spine forgets what it was made for. It is a snug fit, near throttling, and the memory of what it is like to get his cock throttled by your womb covers him until he's awash in it. More and more, he remembers, while you kiss him sweetly through it, and thinks, in some naive, unfledged way, that he would let you do worse than throttle him. Strangle him, more like. Anything, probably, so long as it involved your hands on him and your breath somewhere close to his neck. He wakes to the damp, exultant pressure of you working him in and starts throbbing with the same blood that has gone loud in his temples.

"Jus' like that," he tells you, hoping it will be good enough for you to stay a while. Come here and stay with me, Dunk wants to say. Screw me, wrap your legs around me. Warm me. I am hurt to be alone, because every time he goes away he does so with pieces of you sticking to him, and they are enough for him to survive, but not enough to live.

He knows naught of how a good day that's turned into a hard day has managed to turn itself over again. It would seem that upon inspection of his private life you've not recoiled. That, more than anything, abolishes his unfounded belief. It has never been about walking on his floor, not really. More about seeing his boy-mess and dust around the spaces in his flat he never touches, and deciding he is not good enough. You have not decided so. Nor are you disgusted. You are currently sinking down his cock with your hands in his hair. It knocks another wall inside him down.

"Dunk," you whisper. "Look at me, baby."

So he looks.

Split groins and burning loins are one thing, and the rest is an entirely different thing. He feels like he's scarcely looked so far and now he's looking. He's looking as if it is the first-ever glance, for your body changes every time he makes love to it. It grows and swells and plumps somewhere in secret, and Duncan is begrudged by the impossible ordeal of it and by not being allowed to sit somewhere under your clothes and observe the expansion he's the sole reason for and unforeseen architect of. Instead, he lives in perpetual expectancy of change and it hits him every time how much rounder your tits have become, how many millimetres they have dropped, how your thighs look fuller and your belly more ready for his hands.

"Ye should keep it," he says, meaning the shirt and himself. "It looks better on you than on me."

You smile at him, and then your mouth rounds on a small oh. You've taken him whole again, and his brain no longer holds space for feeble kinship of pasts getting their scabs scratched off them. You both dodge the verbal intimacy and choose an embodied one that is worse for its plausible deniability. It is worse, but it is easier, still. Because Duncan doesn't want to be pitied. He wants romancing, slow dancing, hand holding and balancing this fear of nearness, of stillness, of remaining unseen in his palpability until you truly want to look. Until you are ready to say stay. Stay for yourself, not because of something. Stay for me, because I want you to, because I want you.

There's an answer to that, and it arrives from your hips. At first slow enough to seem kind. Duncan receives it badly. That is, he receives it with the best behaviour available to him, which is a poor one wearing a clean shirt. His hands sit on your thighs but feel more like they have been set there by somebody else. They flex, go still, and flex again, fingers working in little disgraced increments as if every grasp has to pass through a committee of shame, manners and terrible starvation.

Receiving gives him too much time with himself. When he is working, there is work. When he is under you, all that remains is being taken into account. He can feel the waiting in his own body, want hurrying ahead of what's allowed, the terror of greed making a person ugly. So he tries to stay useful. Stays steady. Lets you set the pace with your hands in his hair and cock near giddy at being swallowed so cordially. The effort shows in his jaw.

You kiss it. The hard place near the hinge. Then his mouth.

He follows you up into it, and for a few strokes the kiss manages to cover everything. The shirt slips open wider. His breath hits your cheek. His fingers slide a little higher on your legs and stop there, arrested by some private law.

“Dunk,” you say into his mouth.

“Aye.”

He sounds cracked open already. It should satisfy you. It does, partly. Another part of you wants the rest of him to come out from under all that caution and put its hands on you. He hears that thought in passing, maybe, and takes your wrists.

For a second you think he means to move you away from his face, but he brings your hands to his throat and leaves them there.

"Touch me," he says. Looks almost cross with himself for saying it.

You set your fingers there, light. His pulse is ferocious. It knocks against your thumbs with all the subtlety that's absent tonight, and Duncan shuts his eyes as soon as your palms close with any pressure at all. He gives out a small sound, wrecked and worked up from the chest. His cock jumps inside you, and the pleasure of that little convulsion gets through you like a warm knife.

"Like this?" you ask, brushing your thumbs on his Adam's apple. It's a delicious-looking cartilage. Large enough on him to require your mouth opening wide if you were ever to bite him.

"Aye," he says, eyelids flickering. "Like that. Please."

The please is dangerous. It opens something in your belly that has little to do with the child and much to do with the man. It has none of the kidding courtesy of earlier in it. It is bare and wanting and somehow younger than him, and it makes you bend down and kiss him harder than you meant to. Your belly presses between you. His throat moves pliably. He opens for the kiss and lets you have his mouth, and you feel the shudder in him when your hips roll again and take him deeper.

You could stay there. Keep him like that, held and entered into, his touch restless on you while he tries to behave under the flood. There would be a sweetness in it, and a cruelty. He would let you. That is becoming clear. Duncan would let you do a great deal if it meant your hands remained on him.

So you take his wrists, and his eyes open. You slide his palms to your hips and fit them there where his grip can do some good. "You too," you tell him. "Touch me. And fuck me."

Something in him receives it as instruction and amnesty both. His fingers bite into muscle, surprised first, then purposeful, and he gives you a thrust in exchange for permission. Hard. Stops immediately, alarmed by his own force.

"Alright?" he asks.

You nod, then take his lower lip between your teeth since speech feels wasteful. Underneath it he melts a little and forgets what he's here for, so you tell him, "Again."

“Lassie—”

“Again, Dunk.”

So he does, shorter this time, testing the shapes, and when your hips come down to meet him the room loses its mildness.

There is a place sex knows how to go when words become too exacting. You find it together with freakish ease. All the unsaid matter stands aside and lets the body through: hands converse with skin where they rest and squeeze, cock's in cunt, intending to make nothing but respite, and his face, oh, his face. It keeps watching you. Even in greed he watches. Tenderness has rooted itself too deep in him to be pulled out for the sake of the rhythm, though the rhythm gets fierce enough to make the shirt slip off one shoulder and hang from your elbow.

He catches and fixes it back, letting you slip for a moment so you take a heavy sit on him and feel him brushing the spot that needs him most ardently. "Keep it on," he says, breathless.

You look down at him.

“The shirt.” His ears are red again. “Please. Keep it on.”

"Okay," you say, rolling your shoulders. "Okay."

He stares at it as if the sight is all that matters. His bed has you in it. His shirt has you in it. His hands have you under them. Later, if you go, the room will still know you have been here, and the thought makes him thrust up hard enough that your next sound breaks against his cheek.

“Ah, there,” he says. “There, yeah?”

“Yes, there—” you wheeze. "Oh, Dunk—"

He follows the barometer of your thumbs. When they dig deeper it means your body is giving him a place. His hips learn it fast. Stomach flexes with every punch up, making him feel like he owns his body in separate drawers. He's caught between wanting to deserve you and wanting to fuck you through the mattress, and you feel that disagreement holding him by the spine. He groans some and stammers some and breathes through lips he's trying to stick together so you don't hear his dog-like panting, and does not at all realise you want it. The loss of manners, his mouth turning to greedy angles, a decline of goodness, mild at least. Make him a little worse, so he's easier to keep. So you feel less guilty for craving it.

"Don't go sweet on me now," you rasp.

His laugh breaks into a gasp. “I’m tryin’.”

“Try less.”

It means give me more, and Duncan understands. He wraps his arms around you, claiming the favourite things. He's inside you and around you, and that is how matters should be. He pulls you down on him and fucks up with enough force for your tits to get knocked into his face. His mouth takes advantage, catches one and has to bite down to keep it. Your body conducts some gut-wrenching business in response, clenching on him wildly and throwing your head back so your neck becomes long and all wired with hard tendons. One of your hands digs its thumb under his jaw, the other closes around the roots on his nape. He's almost defeated. It feels incredible.

“There,” he grunts. “Stay there. Just—fuck, stay.”

“I’m here,” you say, closing in on him.

Then, your hand moves from his hair, circles his head and keeps him there with his mouth open to your throat. It changes the work of him. The force comes from below now, from his thighs and arse. You hold him and yourself onto him and Duncan's body believes you scathingly well, for you are truly there and staying.

“Tell me you like it,” you say. He moves against your neck uselessly. Gets a little of your skin between his teeth and loses it again. You ride the next thrust down and make him feel the whole of you taking it. “Tell me you like fucking me hard. I know you’re all sweet and tender, but tell me you like this too. Tell me—”

“Aye,” he mumbles. Then, trying for stronger, though still muffled: “Aye, I like it.”

You breathe out through your nose, pleased and shaken.

“I like it,” he says again, and his hands go meaner with their gripping. “God, I like it. Like ye takin’ me. Like ye lettin’ me—fuck, lassie—like ye lettin’ me have ye hard.”

“Yes,” you whisper. “Yes, Dunk.”

“Mad with it,” he says. “With you. Lettin' me have ye like this.”

And he's doing it so. Just having you, while you're rigid and motionless and simply trying to survive his cock without telling too much on yourself. He's large enough to not have to pull out for you to feel him spreading you. He's brilliant, really. Willing and reliable. Hot and delicate where it matters. The work turns blunt and filthy and knowing that he can be this, this regular man who likes to fuck his girl hard once in a while when she asks nicely makes you lose it a little.

"Yes—" you whine. "Fuck, yes. Fuck me, like that. Right there. Fuck, Dunk, yes—"

He drives up and holds, then grinds, then gives you another hard stroke that catches so exactly your mouth opens and nothing comes out. It's pleasure only now. White and bodily, making you come with your face turned against his hair and air puffing fast through your nose and your hand pulsing at his throat.

Your cunt seizes round him, wild and vicious, and Duncan chokes on all of it. His cock manages to break into somewhere deeper than he's been all evening and finds that perfect place for post-bursting burial. This, and three arrows to the chest, Duncan's mind produces. He spills thickly, mumbling sweetheart, lassie, oh fuck's sake, Christ and all the other names that he's given you, and your own too, and then says only, "Fuck, yer so good. So good, my sweet girl—"

Blessed, he thinks, gone stupid with it. Blessed, blessed. Allowed to fill you with his cock and then with his cum. More so, allowed to sit here shaking afterwards, knowing it will leak from you when he pulls out. He will get to see it staining your thighs and will get to clean it off you, and he will try to keep his hands from showing how much he likes that too.

"Shite," you breathe. "Mm, Dunk? You alright?"

He's gone slack against you. You turn his face up by the cheeks and look him over. His eyes are beyond fucked-out, and when his head tips a little back you spot the red imprint of your fingers on his throat.

"Oh God, I've hurt you. Oh, Duncan, I'm so sorry—"

"Hush now," he tells you. "Hush, girl, let me catch a breath." Which would probably be funny if you weren't looking so frightened with yourself. He sees that on you and adds, "I'm grand, sweetheart. Promise. You?"

"I'm sorry—"

"None of that," he stops you. "I asked, aye?" He rests his forehead to yours, and tells you, secretively, "Besides. I liked it."

"You did?"

"Mm. Fiercely."

You go a touch abashed at that. Bite your lip and let your shoulders sink forward, folding around the pleased little damage of it. Duncan watches the shift of your breasts when you do. There is a souvenir from him too, just above the fuller curve of one: a small indent of his teeth, with skin risen at the edges.

He brushes it with his thumb. “I’ve hurt you some too.”

“I liked it,” you say. “Fiercely.”

He hums a laugh at that and hugs you closer. “You alright?”

“Yes.”

His eyes search your face. “Properly?”

“Yes, Dunk.”

“Hm. Your pussy alright too?”

You giggle. Sweet and girlish, and it does something awful to him after all that filth. “Yes. That’s alright too.”

“Good.” His hand moves, broad and warm, to your belly. “And here?”

You cover it with yours. “Everything alright.”

“All’s well then,” Duncan states, as if it has been entered into the record. “Let me sort ye out, hm?”

You murmur a small okay and rise off him.

He wanted to see it and the wanting still shames him some, though less than it used to. His come slips down your inner thigh in a pearly track and leaves his cock shining with you both. There is something strange in him after seeing it. A small confidence. He's less marooned, maybe. More at home in his own bed, in his own body, and in the flat too.

“I’ll get a towel,” he says.

He goes to the bathroom still naked and finds your dress filling the basin. The sight pleases him so much he has to stand there for a second and be an idiot about it. Then he lifts it out, squeezes the coffee water from it as best he can and carries it to the washing machine. He adds some of his own clothes because it seems wasteful to run it near empty, then sets the whole thing on a delicate cycle with immense joy at the knowledge of your things washing together.

The bra he handles separately. Very gently. He squeezes it out over the sink, careful with the cups and the little straps, because he remembers Rowan once complaining about Raymun ruining her lace by tumbling it together with his sweatpants. This bra is very pretty and Dunk would hate to ruin it for you. It is green too, or so he thinks. Darker now, wet and heavy in his hands.

He sets it over the radiator, then catches himself in the mirror.

There are five red stamps on his throat. He stops to stare some more.

Lovely, is the first thought. To be marked in a place he can see. To have your hand on him after your hand has gone. He has no idea what he is going to tell the kids if any of them notice, and briefly ponders a turtleneck in July, purely for the sake of keeping this private. Selfishness, that. Wanting the mark and wanting the concealment of it too.

He brushes his fingers over where yours have been. The skin is pink and calorous from the tissue torn small by squeeze and pressure. It makes hubris rise in him, a warm little thing with wings.

When he steps back into the bedroom again, you have made tea. You are still in his shirt, bare-legged at the edge of the bed, two mugs on the bedside table as if this is a life and not an incident. His seed has slipped down near your knee from walking, so he kneels in front of you with the wet cloth and puts one hand on your ankle to keep you still.

His cock stirs a little when he touches you, because he is naked and weak and recently benedicted. He ignores it with great professionalism. “Sorry,” he murmurs, and wipes the inside of your thigh.

You look down at him. “For what?”

“For bein’ pleased.”

You smile. “You’re very strange.”

“Am I?” He folds the cloth to a clean corner. “I think it takes one to know one, aye?”

To that, you simply huff and it's beyond cute.

He works gently. His hand rests on your belly while he does it. On his belly, he thinks for one cracked second, and then corrects nothing.

“Ye can use the bathroom,” he says after. “If ye want. I’ve put a fresh towel out for you.”

You nod and leave him for a moment. During that time he changes the sheets, tidies what he can without making a large performance of it, then puts on shorts because he is still a little shy about nudity once the emergency of sex has passed. And then, because he's still a coward, slips a spare key into your purse and decides to text you about it later. By the time you come back, the room has become ordinary in a painstaking way.

You order pizza. While waiting, the telly goes on with some old black-and-white film neither of you watches properly. Outside, the sky starts building itself into a storm, so Duncan opens the window wide. The curtain billows into the room and carries in the damp, charged smell of weather turning. You cuddle closer to him on the bed, tucked under his arm, fingers tangled into his hair.

He is happy like this. He knows there are talks to be had and confessions to be spilled. Names, families, homes, all the buried things with their hands under the floorboards, but for now he's happy like this.

After food, his lids grow heavy. He falls asleep on his back, with you nuzzled under his wing.

It is odd to sleep at Duncan's, but not wrong. You, too, fall asleep almost instantly after eating, and wake only to a terrible pressure in your bladder. Then, there is a matter of freeing yourself from underneath his gigantic arm. Thankfully Dunk sleeps like a bear in winter, and snores a little too, so even forceful shoving doesn't stir him.

In one of the rooms you pass there is a rack with washing hung out, which he must’ve done sometime during your nap. You do your business sleepily, come back, and find his windowsill bathed in rain. So you close the window and pull the curtains closed.

And then you feel it. A knock from inside. Small, firm, unmistakably separate from you. You stop with your hand still on the curtain, breath held in dark. It comes again, lower this time, a blunt little push against the wall of your stomach. There is intelligence in it, or your body invents intelligence for it so quickly that the difference does not matter.

You look down. For one second you do nothing, afraid that movement might scare it off. Then you unbutton Duncan’s shirt with clumsy fingers and pull it open over your belly. The skin there has gone taut and silvered in the rainy light. You stare until your eyes hurt.

Another push. Barely anything. A small bulge under the skin, there and gone. But visible. Visible.

You start crying before any other part of you offers itself. “Sweetheart,” you say, putting your hand over the place that moved. “There you are. Oh, there you are, my lovely. Hi.”

The baby answers with something softer. A brush, maybe. Or another kick made shy by your hand. You laugh and the laugh comes out wet and thin, almost frightened by its own happiness.

You take a few unsure steps towards the bed. Your knees have become of poor use. Duncan is still on his back, one arm thrown out where you escaped him, mouth slightly open, gone into sleep with the trust of a person who has never seen himself sleeping.

You sit beside him and shake him by the shoulder. “Hey, Dunk,” you whisper. “Dunk, sweetie, wake up. Wake up, please.”

He sucks in a breath as if hauled up from underwater. His eyes open, bleary and full of slumber. One hand pats blindly at the bedside table. “G-glasses,” he mumbles.

You find them before he does and pass them over, then set both hands on his cheeks before he can get spooked by the wet on your face. “He’s kicking,” you tell him. “He’s kicking, look—”

His whole face changes before he understands. Fear first, because you are crying. Then your words catch up with him. You take his hand and guide it under the fabric, press his palm to the place where the movement happened.

For a moment, nothing. Duncan lies there breathing through his mouth, eyes huge. He does not blink. His palm is so warm that the skin under it seems to wake in answer.

Then, the baby kicks. He sits up so suddenly the mattress jumps beneath you. “Jesus—”

“Did you feel that?”

“I felt him.” His other hand joins the first, too fast, then slows when it reaches you, spreading careful over the bump. “I felt him.”

The baby kicks again, right under the heel of the palm.

Duncan makes a sound that is almost a laugh until it breaks. He looks at your stomach. Rain bounces against the window behind him. His thumbs shift, following, trying to understand where his son has gone.

“Ah, lad,” he whispers. “There ye are.” His mouth trembles around the smile. “There ye are, ye little terror.”

You cry harder. Duncan looks up at you, already crying too, and laughs wetly at the state of you both. “He’s kickin’,” he says, uselessly, as if you might have missed the central fact. “He’s really kickin’.”

“I know.”

“He’s strong.”

“He is.”

“Course he is,” Duncan says, and one tear runs straight down into the sunburn high on his cheek. “Course ye are. Givin’ us a fright in the middle of the night. That’s grand, that is. Very polite of ye.”

His voice has gone soft and shredded. The next movement quiets him completely. He bends closer and his shoulders start to shake. “Hi, boy,” he says, barely above breath. “Hi. I’m here. Your mam’s here too. We’ve got ye.”

The baby shifts. Duncan swears under his breath. “Fuck’s sake,” he whispers. “Fuck’s sake, he’s real.”

It pulverizes him impossibly. There are words, obvious words, trying to get out with such violence it feels near like his throat is being sliced open from the inside. On the outside, the same throat is garroted into silence. It is all as if Duncan is holding a lung-burning breath, one that's hauled after exertion in the middle of freezing winter or one that begs out right before drowning. Christ, how badly he wants to exhale. How vehemently he wants to get rid of that breath and get a fresh one.

He leans to the belly and sets his mouth on it. "I love ye," Dunk says, and exhales, and then inhales again.

You regret telling Rowan you'll only keep her company the last time. It's just that maternity bras are scary and it was too cold still for summer dresses. Now you pray for no one to notice the bounce at your chest, long for shorts with a fucking rubber instead of buttons and dresses made of cotton so thin it might tear from lightest friction.

Otherwise, well—it's near damn lovely. Lyonel had been prescient about the exact moment of your limit's arrival. When you were elbows-deep in deluding yourself into another two weeks, then another two, he sat you down in a soft chair meant for the clients, and looked at you longingly. "Darling," he said. "I am going to miss you."

"You know you can't fire me when I'm pregnant, right?" Bastard laughed outright. "No, I mean it," you said. "It's against the fucking law."

"That would be something, wouldn't it," Lyonel hummed, turning his rings over. "I hope it hasn't eaten your brain, because I want you back once you've done all your child bearing and upbringing. For now—" He leaned in and rested his palm on your fist. "If you don't want maternity leave yet, I am forcing you into vacation."

"Oh my God," you sighed. "I want the maternity leave. I want it so badly. I was just scared to tell you."

"Aw, pet," Lyonel cooed. "I only look so scary. Inside, I am soft." You snorted at that. "Finish the week, alright? Everything's done anyway."

True. Raymun's cider had been a week away from arriving at the shelves. "Awesome. And hey," you said. "Thank you."

"Don't mention it. All you have to do is name your child Lyonel."

You cringed. "What if it's a girl?"

"Hm. Layla?"

"Ew. Yeah, no chance. Thanks for being a good boss, though."

And that was it. From there, a couple weeks of freedom have already gone to your head. Time has become relative. Mornings stretch from early to late ones with you trying to catch up on all the baby knowledge Duncan has been hoarding for months. You pretend, badly, that you are not fond of his private little curriculum. Your body, at least, turns kinder in the places that matter. The nausea leaves almost shyly. In its place come sore tits, a back that complains if you sit wrong for ten minutes, heartburn now and then, and a belly that begins to show under fabric with more confidence than you have given it permission for.

The mood swings are less easy to manage. They arrive with mood swings of their own, and Duncan takes them on as if they are only another pragmatic inconvenience to be managed. Cravings too. Those he treats seriously. If at half ten you mention chips, he is suddenly in the mood for a drive anyway. If you say orange ice lolly with the specific grief of someone naming a lost country, he is already looking for his keys. You get energy too, bright and wild and childlike, and it runs hard from morning until some invisible hand yanks the lead from the wall. Then you are finished. Properly finished. Duncan carries you from couch to bed at least twice a week and accepts the duty with suspicious good humour.

School has ended, but he still runs afternoon training sessions, so his days have loosened without becoming empty. He fills the cracks with you. Texting. Calling. Coming round. Bringing something you did not ask for but apparently need. Between one week and the next he stops making excuses for it, or perhaps both of you stop requiring them. Useful. Present. Romantic in the most deniable way a person can be romantic: with hands full of shopping, a phone full of appointment reminders, and the unsexy courage to ask whether you have taken your vitamins.

You do not mention catching him singing that first time, and he does not come out with it either. But he talks to the bump plenty now. So much that you start doing it too. First awkwardly, because you cannot really look your own belly in the eye. Then more naturally. Little check-ins in the morning, hand low on your stomach while the kettle works. (You all right in there, bean?) Idle aid during a particularly stubborn crossword, because apparently one brain is insufficient and you must now consult the tenant. (Seven letters, starts with S, and if you know it, start kicking.) Sometimes late at night, when Duncan has gone out on some ridiculous errand of your invention and you rest a palm there. (Your dad’s gone to get ice cream. I said it was for you, so don’t tell on me.)

It is all very marital to the point of ache, though it aches only occasionally. When he is not there for the night because Egg asked for help with early morning horse-riding lessons and sweet Duncan said yes, despite having no first idea what to do with a horse besides look large beside one. When he does not come over at all, because some veil of decency must be kept in circulation and you must both pretend you do not practically live together. When he comes back from training sweaty and streaked with dust across the forehead, gets on his knees before he has even showered, and eats you out with such growing skill that your skin prickles to say what you cannot, so you settle on a meek thank you and make him blush into your thigh. When sex is funny and clumsy, and something gets torn during (you've lost one sheet to his fist). When it's quiet, too. When he has to hide his face somewhere because it takes him so fiercely. When he needs it more than you. When his ears go red at your eyes rolling, no matter if it's to praise him for good fucking or scolding him for washing up shittily. When he remembers appointments better than you do, goes glassy-eyed during them, and hums his monumental Irish endearments under his breath as if another language makes them harmless. When he leaves clothes behind with the expression of someone innocent of all crimes, and you both know there is an ulterior motive of altruism in it—because you end up wearing them, and he ends up looking at you as if cotton were wicked.

It is better than it has any right to be. That is the trouble. It keeps proving the false arrangement by producing real comforts from it. Real laughter. Real sleep. Real warmth at your back when you wake confused in the dark and find his arm already there, heavy over your middle, careful even unconscious. Real little negotiations over breakfast about who has to wash the mugs, real irritation when he puts his enormous trainers in the way, real relief when his key turns in the door because he has started using the spare and neither of you has addressed what that means.

You are not together-together. This is known. This is agreed. This is the thing standing in the corner with a lampshade over its head. You are together in some form though, it is only that naming it is now the scariest thing.

"Christ, your aunt Rowan's gonna kill me," you mutter to your child who's yet to acquire concept of what it means to be late. "I hope she spares you so you can grow up and avenge me. Hi darling!" Your hand shoots up, waving above passer-by's heads once you spot the mass of Rowan's copper curls.

"Oi, you twat!" She wipes the sweat off her forehead. "You've got any idea what it's like to stand here in this heat?" she asks. Her nose scrunches at you. "What the fuck are you wearing?"

"Spare me, I beg you. I fucking beg you, lead me to ugly bras and elastic waistbands so I can burn those leggings, alright?"

Rowan smirks. "I wanna help," she murmurs. When you make the most miserable face possible, some relentment takes a seat where pout has lived. "Ugh, fine, you're forgiven. I've been where you are a month ago, or so, so I get it. Come on, then,” she says, catching your wrist. “Let’s get you out of whatever tragic situation is happening under that shirt.”

“It’s emergency,” you say.

“Aye, I can see that,” she snorts.

“Shut up.”

She laughs fuller and warm, and drags you through the sliding doors into cool air, perfume fog and the bleak glow of women’s underwear arranged by people who have never had to carry a living thing under their ribs. The maternity section sits at the back, beige and powder pink. Some shade of grey that suggests medical stockings. You stop in front of a rack and stare.

“This is underwear?” you ask.

“You will thank it,” Rowan says, already flicking through sizes. “Wait till your ribs start spreading.”

“My what.”

She gives you a look. “Oh, sweetheart.”

“Don’t sweetheart me in front of the bras.”

“I’m allowed. I’m further along.”

You scowl and touch one cup large enough to serve soup from. “How are you, anyway? Is my niece treating you with respect?”

“Oh, she's a terrorist,” Rowan says fondly. “She kicks whenever I lie down, hates onions, hates Raymun’s aftershave, likes cheese so much I think we've missed a business opportunity there.” She pulls two bras from the rack and holds them against you. "Here. These don’t look completely depressing."

“They’re fifty quid each.”

“Okay, they might be a tad financially depressing. At least try them on?”

You take them from her with a groan and she adds another, softer green thing with lace only where lace can still pretend to be ornamental. “Try that one too.”

The changing room curtain scrapes shut behind you. Inside, under light arranged by the devil’s own hand, you wrestle yourself out of Duncan’s shirt and into the first bra. The tag scratches your side immediately. “Christ. The price alone should make it behave.”

“You know what it is yet?” Rowan asks from outside.

“What?”

“The baby.”

“Oh. No, not yet.” You tug the strap, wincing at your reflection. “Hopefully today. Appointment later.”

“I hope it’s a girl,” she says. “Then they can be pals.”

You frown. “Can’t they be pals if it’s a boy?”

A pause. You can near hear her smiling. “Of course you’d say that. After all, you’re friends with the father of your child. How are things with Duncan anyway?”

Silence lands so thick you need to gulp it down. You pull the curtain open only a crack and look at her through it. “Yeah, good,” you say, too fast. Then, the heavy fabric opens wider. “What do you think?”

Rowan’s face changes into something professionally solemn. “Yeah, that’s lovely. Does it make having tits feel less punishing?”

You shrug. "Yeah, a little?"

"I'd take the little if I were you."

Both of you nod to each other as if something got solved and you disappear behind the curtain again.

“So,” Rowan says, and the word comes leaning against the partition. “Did you solve your horny issue?”

Fuck.

You stand there with three bras hooked over your wrist and your lip caught between your teeth. It’s not that you don’t want to tell her. It’s that telling her opens doors, and behind every door is Rowan with a clipboard and a lamp in your face. “Sort of?” you say.

“Oh?” Her voice sharpens. “Hinge, or—”

“Not… exactly.” You step out with the bras bundled in your hand. Rowan looks you over once and her whole face softens before you can decide whether to run.

“You know I won’t judge you for anything, aye?”

Your shoulders go. “Of course. But you’ll ask questions and I’m not sure I can answer them.” You look down at the stupid little hangers in your fist. “But yeah, it’s, um. Duncan. We’ve been—Jesus—”

Rowan’s hand comes to your shoulder at once. Warm, firm, no fuss. “It’s fine," she says. "Sleeping together, yeah?”

You nod.

“And?”

“And nothing,” you say. “He’s around. He wants to. Nothing’s defined, it’s just. I don’t know. It’s fine.”

“Fine?” Rowan repeats, already steering you towards the counter. “That’s all I get? Fine?”

“That’s plenty.”

“It absolutely is not.”

You pay too much for bras that look almost innocent in the bag, then Rowan herds you into the next shop with the purpose of a sheepdog. She keeps muttering about cotton, waistbands, and the dignity of dresses until you are half amused despite yourself.

“Come on,” she whines once you’ve disappeared behind another curtain with an armful of summer things. “Give me something. I’m hardly ever touchable, and when I think I am, I change my mind halfway through. I’m surprised Raymun is taking it so well, given how much he enjoyed making the baby—”

You breathe through your nose, which makes her stop rambling. “I just want to know if he’s treating you well, is all.”

“He is,” you say.

The green dress goes over your head with less violence than expected. You pull it down over your stomach and look at yourself. The fabric gives where it needs to give. Your belly sits in it plainly now. You smooth both hands over it, then over your ribs. It looks pretty. The colour has nothing to do with Duncan's preference.

“He’s very sweet,” you say, quieter. “Very caring. Ridiculous sometimes. He reads everything. Brings food. Stays when I ask him to. Leaves when I look too spooked, which is annoying because then I miss him.” You tug at the neckline, pretending concentration. “He talks to the baby like it can understand him already. Calls it wee things. Hums under his breath when he thinks I’m asleep.”

Rowan says nothing. You glance up at the mirror and catch her reflection beyond the curtain gap. The face she’s making is unbearable. “What?” you ask.

Her mouth pulls. “Oh, nothing. I just… knew it.”

Your hand drops from the dress. “W-what? What did you know?”

“You love him.” She looks nearly smug with relief. “And thank God, because from what Raymun brings home after those very subtle pub outings of theirs, it seems Dunk’s head over heels for you. So," Rowan says, "you just need to tell him.”

“No.” It comes out very fast and frightened. “No, Red.”

Her expression shifts. The teasing drains a little. “Hun, it’s all right. It’s great. It’s worked itself out. I’m happy for you.”

“What are you talking about?” You step out fully, barefoot, still in the dress, the tag scratching at your spine. “I just told you—”

“You told me he’s sweet and caring and ridiculous and you miss him when he leaves.”

“That’s—”

“That’s love, babe.”

“No.” Your throat tightens. “You can’t say that.”

“I can if it’s true.”

Thing is, you do not know if it is. You might. Or your brain might be terribly pregnant and therefore terribly attached to the person who made it that way. What had once been a crush may well be love now, only there is no checking it against a blank page at the moment. Would it survive without hormones, fear, and all his things that have moved into your life before anything vaguely resembling love was even mentioned? You. Don't. Fucking. Know.

“You can’t tell Raymun.” The panic gets ahead of you. You reach for her wrist. “Red, promise me. Promise me you won’t. If Raymun tells Duncan, then Duncan will—”

“Will what?”

“Stay.” Your voice drops to something wretched. “He’ll stay. If he thinks I want that, if he thinks that's a right thing to do, he’ll stay, and I’ll never know if it’s because he wanted to or because everyone pointed him at me and said go on, then.”

Rowan’s brows pinch. For once she doesn’t answer quickly. “Promise me,” you say again, fingers tightening.

She covers your hand with hers. “All right. I promise. I won’t tell Raymun.”

“Or hint.”

“Or hint.”

“Or make a face.”

“I can’t promise miracles.”

“Rowan.”

She sighs. “Fine. No face. No hint. No Raymun.”

You breathe out, though it doesn’t fix much. In the mirror, the green dress hangs beautifully over a body you are still learning by ambush. Rowan steps behind you and fixes the hair round your face with careful fingers.

“For the record,” she says, softer now, “I think you’re both being very stupid.”

“I know.”

“And for the other record, I do understand why.”

You meet her eyes in the mirror and nearly cry, which would be absurd after the mascara disaster already endured at home. Rowan sees that too, because everyone seems to see everything now. She presses her chin briefly to your shoulder.

“Buy the dress,” she says. “It makes you look like someone who might survive herself.”

You huff a laugh. “That’s your sales pitch?”

“It’s a good one.”

You look at yourself again. Your hands settle over the bump. “Yeah,” you murmur. “Okay.”

When the whole thing softens, Rowan bullies you into keeping the dress and one of the bras on for lunch which means changing in a restaurant bathroom while convinced every woman washing her hands knows exactly what has happened to your tits. After that she feeds you, forgives you again for being unbearable, and hugs you goodbye outside with enough force to make the new underwire announce itself against your sternum. You thank her for the dress, the bullying, and for promising not to tell a soul, then start toward the clinic with a faint lick of heartburn sitting behind your breastbone like a match refusing to go out.

Duncan is already there. He is spread on the outside steps like the building has grown him for decorative purposes, face tipped up into the sun. His eyes are closed. The light has got into his hair and made the blonde bleed auburn. One of his trainers is untied. You stop for half a second at the bottom of the steps and let yourself look. Then you climb the last few, and your shadow crawls over his face.

Dunk squints one eye open. Then the other. “Oi, lassie,” he says. "Look at ye now."

“Oi yourself.”

He gets up too quickly for a man his size, then steadies when he sees you properly. His hands come to hug you. Brief, because outside. Full, because Duncan. His face dips near your hair and stays there for one long second.

When he draws back, his eyes travel down and up again. Worse than leering. Pleased, caught, soft in a way that makes you want to kick the stair.

“I’m seein’ shoppin’ went well,” he says.

You nod. The grin just appears on you. “What do you think the colour is?”

He considers you a moment. “A pretty one,” he says at last. Then, quieter and bolder for it: “My favourite one.”

Your grin widens. "You're insufferable," you say, then—"Come on."

He’s giddy and tries to make himself look collected. Truthfully, he’s been giddy for weeks, because when nobody’s looking—purely to keep a fragile thing from breaking—he can touch you and kiss you and be close to you and run sweet little missions to make you happy. And because you touch him too. Take care of him too, by simply asking, rubbing his shoulders, letting him sleep folded into your neck, and somehow it all seems effortless. But today he’s giddy because he’s finally going to know what it is. He’s so giddy he told Egg, and Egg only looked at him, exasperated, because Dunk had the audacity to blabber while Egg was running after a ball that seemed enchanted to avoid every one of his limbs. Egg only asked him, annoyed, if it matters at all, boy or girl, if Dunk prefers one over the other, and Dunk doesn’t have a preference. He just wants to know. To have another thing to be happy with you about and another task to perform together. Picking a name and learning what is pink and what is blue.

Your hand wedges itself into his in the waiting room and he holds it proudly. Then the doctor calls your name. Usual greetings, usual procedures. Hello, how is nausea, mood swings, cravings, any pain, any discomfort, has there been any colostrum leakage, and that one surprises Dunk a little, but you say no. You are given a skirt made of see-through interlining, and then guided to the chair. The doctor turns off the lights, smears the gel and sets the ultrasound head to your naked belly.

The room goes blue-dark around the screen. At first it is all lunar geography to Duncan: grey ridges, black pools, a bright little flicker where the heart keeps doing its frantic labour. Then the doctor starts naming things and the strange nature of the image becomes a child by instruction. Head. Spine. Stomach. Kidneys. Four chambers of the heart. Femur. Feet. A hand that opens and shuts with eerie little purpose, as if already offended by being looked at.

You squeeze his fingers.

Dunk squeezes back with what he hopes is a human amount of force. He cannot trust himself on that front, so he loosens a little and immediately worries he has loosened too much.

“Everything looks appropriate for this stage,” the doctor says, sliding the probe lower, then tilting it with the kind of patience Duncan associates with trying to find the correct cable behind a telly. “Baby is moving a lot today, though you might not feel it yet.”

You make a small sound that's somewhere between laugh and grunt. On the screen, the baby turns in a blur of bone and shadow, then settles badly, showing an elbow, a knee, the curve of a skull. The doctor waits it out. Clicks something. Measures something. Dunk watches the small white line appear from one end of a limb to the other and feels his whole life being taken down in numbers.

“Let’s see if we can get a good look,” the doctor murmurs.

Your hand goes still in his. Dunk stops breathing for a second and only remembers because his chest begins to hurt. The doctor adjusts again. There is a pause, then a little satisfied hum.

“Here we are.”

Both of you suck in air so audibly the doctor smiles. He has the look of someone who has endured years of study, night shifts, impossible patients, and bad hospital coffee for this exact sort of reward: being able to hold a room by one sentence.

“It looks like…” he says, and then the pause becomes unbearable, “a boy.”

The words hit Duncan with such force his eyes fill before he can do anything about it. Until now he has been having a baby. Some beloved, floating, impossible thing with fruit sizes attached. Now, without warning, the future grows hands and knees and a little face in his imagination. A son. His son. He's going to be a dad to one.

The doctor says more. Something about certainty, position, the anatomy scan, all looking well so far. Dunk hears it through water. He turns to you because that is the only sensible place left to look.

You are being very brave about it. Braver than him for sure. Your eyes have only gone a little red, while his feel wet and hot behind the lenses. You look at him, mouth parted round a breath. “Are you happy?” you ask.

Dunk laughs, but it breaks halfway through and turns into something worse. He scrunches his face with the effort of keeping himself together, fails at it, and cups your cheeks in both palms before he remembers it's all happening in front of the doctor.

“Ah, you’re bloody mighty,” he rasps. His thumb strokes under your eye as if you are the one crying hardest. “Look what ye’ve done.”

“You’re saying that as if I did it on purpose,” you say, but your voice has gone too thin for sarcasm to do its job.

“Aye,” Dunk says, uselessly. “Well.”

The doctor, with great mercy, pretends to be very occupied with the screen. Everything looks good, he says. The baby is measuring as expected. You may begin to feel movement soon, though at first it may be easy to mistake for digestion, muscle twitch, gas, any number of unglamorous bodily functions.

Duncan hears all of it as if through cotton. Fine. Expected. Soon. Boy. Son. He keeps one hand on your shoulder while the doctor wipes gel from your belly with the briskness of returning holiness to ordinary flesh. You lie there very still, staring up at the ceiling, and every so often your mouth pulls in on itself as if holding a thread between the teeth.

By the time you sit up, Duncan has recovered only enough to pass you your things in the wrong order. Shoes. Your bag next. Wipes last, though they have been by his arm the whole time. You give him a look that should be withering and only manages damp.

“Hopeless,” you murmur.

“Aye,” he says, and grins because even hopeless sounds good from you today.

You get home with heads full of news and hands full of each other’s hands. Duncan carries your shopping and does his best to keep from looking into the bags, though the handles gape and rustle against his knuckles with the secrecy of stage curtains. He sets them on the coffee table in the living room, straightens them twice for no reason, then goes to make tea because tea is good for everything.

“What d’ye want to do?” he asks from the kitchen.

You stand in the middle of the room a moment, one hand resting low on yourself, the other worrying the seam of your new dress. “Just hang out?” you say. “Maybe watch something?”

“Aye.”

A pause. Then, smaller: “Cuddle?”

Dunk turns with the mugs not yet filled and the kettle still working itself up behind him. His face opens widely. “Aye,” he says. “I’ll be right there.”

When he gets to the bedroom, the dress is already flung over a chair. He mourns its loss, but only briefly, because the plain T-shirt and knickers prove worthy successors. The telly is on, and you are spread across the bed, so he strips down to match you for garments and joins you.

There is no watching done. As soon as he gets next to you, you say, “Hi,” and glue yourself to his chest. Duncan breathes in deep and gathers you back. His hand goes into your hair, smoothing. His mouth fits itself to your forehead. For a while the telly chatters to itself and neither of you give it the dignity of attention.

“You’ve done so well today,” he murmurs.

You shift under his chin. “I haven’t done anything.”

Dunk huffs. “You’ve made us a boy.”

“I think you had some small part in that.”

“Aye, well.” His thumb moves through your roots, slow enough to be thoughtful rather than fidget. “Didn’t exactly require my finest scholarship.”

That gets a laugh out of you, soft and a little stunned still. It pleases him so badly he has to tip his head back and look at the ceiling for a second, to put the size of it somewhere harmless.

“I hope he has your eyes,” he says.

You go quiet. The hand you have on his ribs stops moving. Then, in a voice made smaller by whatever it costs you to say it, “I hope he has yours.” A pause. “And more than eyes.”

It sounds like what love might sound like.

Dunk doesn’t think on it too much. If he speaks or asks, the answer might kill him, so he simply allows himself the unnegotiated boldness and lets his hands go places. The one in your hair is composed enough—he flexes his fingers against your scalp, makes it so his nails scratch you gently, and Duncan could swear you purr a little at that. The other wanders the swells: it passes your thigh, your hip, stalls at your belly and drags his index finger there until your shirt rides up a little and reveals the skin stretched over the baby bump. Despite the whole thing already being unbearably erotic to him, he does his best not to tip it into lewd.

The struggle is unfair. You sigh and stretch and twist a notch so your breasts spill under the T-shirt. Then, you hum some small thing squeezed out from the throat. “What’re you doing?” you ask, and Dunk, almost caught, has half a mind not to take his touch away.

“Jus’—” he says. Stammers somewhere near your ribs. “I dunno.”

“You can touch. It’s fine,” you tell him.

“Where?” he asks.

Something climbs your face then, a sweet little girlish abashment that makes Dunk smile.

“Given that there isn’t much you haven’t—” you hitch a bit because his fingers keep moving, “—anywhere you want.”

It’s a conscious game, plainly to see where it is that he’s going to stray towards. You could just as well have said everywhere, but some importunate part of you wants to know if he’ll be sweet about it or horny, or whether he’ll figure out a way to be both at the same time.

Dunk answers fast enough to flatter and slowly enough to taunt you. He takes his hand out of your hair and brings both palms up to your chest. There they meet, framing your breasts, and he gives them the lightest squeeze, a grunt catches in him with it. “Here all right?”

“Yes,” you say.

He smirks, barely, and brushes his thumbs over your nipples through the shirt. “Mo chroí,” he murmurs.

Sweet and horny it is, then. “What was that?”

“Nothing,” Dunk says. He moves his face close to yours and shuts his eyes as if he’s trying to focus on judgement by the feel alone. His hands lift the weight, flex, turn and cup you, fondling with more wonder than skill, which only makes it worse. His nose wedges next to yours. “They’ve grown bigger,” he announces. “Heavier.”

You nod, grinning. “Yeah.” Close your eyes too and arch for him. “That’s… good, I take it?”

To that Dunk only hums and jerks his head once, squeezing you some more. He swallows. “Can I kiss you?”

“If you want.”

Yes.

The concepts of casual and fleeting are alien to him. Always a little too serious with his mouth, Dunk behaves as if kissing should either matter or not happen. He opens wide, flattens his tongue against yours and lets his teeth catch your lower lip. “It is very good,” he mumbles. Hands busy, busy, busier by seconds when he rolls his thumbs and gropes and lets himself become bewildered by how wonderful an ounce of flesh can feel between his fingers. There, he breathes, “It’s so, so good.”

It makes you giggle. Makes you want to thank him or fuck him or tease him some more, just to see how far his tongue can loosen. “You like big tits so much?” you ask, careful to not sound like you know you own him.

Dunk pulls back. Goes pink across the cheeks and you get treated to a magnified view of the way his eyes wrinkle when he tries to hide embarrassment behind a smile. “Well,” he says, “aye? Obviously.” A beat, filled with your stare and his brows frowning. “I’m a man,” he says, as if that explains everything.

Since whatever you do next can only make him redder, he gets back to kissing. You laugh into it, and he kisses over it, then slides his mouth from the corner of yours to the side of your jaw, and there he finds the courage to say, “I like everythin’, for the record.” Confirms it by abandoning your boobs in favour of ass and belly. Ass he treats like it exists merely to be held by him, while the belly receives a gentler treatment. Flat palm, large over it, and heavy over it too, but tender all the same. “I like you like this,” he whispers. “Hot as hell, you are.”

“Do you like that it’s yours?”

“That part too. Knowin’ I did it. Gets me in ways I’m not proud of.”

A smug, dangerous thing strolls through your face. “What did you do, Dunk?”

“Girl—” he warns.

“It’s alright,” you say. Put a hand on his cheek, and the hope that there might be some mercy in you gets mocked right away in his head when your thigh presses the bulge between his legs. “You can tell me. I can feel how hard you are, you know?”

“Luv. You won’t spare me, will ye?” Dunk pleads. Waits, and only makes it more miserable for himself because the pressure turns from sweet to mean. “I put that baby in ye, haven’t I?” he groans.

“Mhm, you have,” you say. “Do you think about it when we sleep together?”

“Ah—” His eyes squeeze shut. "Sweetheart, I—"

"You do, don't you? Dunk—"

There's another kiss. He's trying to escape, or perhaps interrupt enough so you forget answers are due, but fails completely. His body has answered already—he's kicking against your thigh, a little wet, very hot and very heavy, and the throbbing wastes itself on his underwear instead of becoming useful inside you. His mouth hardens, teeth become inept and clack against yours, and he's breathing through his nose, rough and loud. Betrayed on all fronts, Duncan stops at your cheek, and murmurs, "You say things like that." Sucks in some air. "An' I'm not answerin' for what happens after."

Your fingers find his hair and tug him away from where he's hidden. You look at him long, searching how far you can push. He reveals himself near cracked open. "You've done no answerin' at all so far," you say, smiling.

His acquiescence is palpable. Dunk makes a face of someone who's been tortured enough.

"Aye, well," he says, pressing his forehead to yours. Gives you a near iris-less stare with the blue rim existing only out of courtesy, and breathes it all out fast as if the bravery could be taken from him. "Yes," he says. "Since ye want it plain. I like it. I like thinkin' about puttin' our baby in you. I like lookin' at you and knowin' I did that. I like that it's mine." His hand twitches on your belly. "You happy now?"

"Adjacent," you tell him, and move your thigh a little higher between his legs. "Are you?"

He's very hard. Blood fills his cheeks so completely his freckles near rise off the skin and acquire texture. A sound leaves his mouth, a little high-pitched, somewhat boy-like, and when he speaks his lips are moving on your skin between the words. "Can I?" he asks. "Can I touch you proper?"

"Where?"

"Everywhere, girl," he says. "Everywhere I can reach." Slips his hand lower, to the hip, then down to the outside of thigh where it dips. It has all gone to his head, the allowance of touch. He thrums with it, gets bolder in it, and starts talking in a way that sounds unrecognisable to the default shy version of him.

"This," he says, squeezing the meatiest part. "I like this soft here. Drives me half-mad." His thumb strokes the inside of it where wetness almost clings to his finger pad. "An' this because I get to hold it when you're on top of me. Helps me keep my manners."

You huff a laugh. "Manners?"

"Aye." He smiles. "Aye, manners. Vital equipment."

Then, more touching. Everywhere touching, as he promised. He wedges himself under your shirt and touches your back, one hand from under the neckline, the other joining from the lower hem, and both of them meet where the bra usually dents you. Now there's no bra. Now, Duncan only has to slip to the front to cup his beloved tits again, and he does so, and feels his own face shifting with it, getting warmer, more gone, less guarded. When he has his arms wrapped round you, he mutters, "These are cruel."

You smirk. "You were saying you liked them."

"I do."

He lowers himself to kiss the top of one through cotton, then the other. Presses his face into your chest fully and hums through a deranged laughter that he'd have to kill himself to make stop. "That's the problem," Duncan says. "I like how heavy they feel now. How they spill into my hands. I think about—" He swallows. Adjusts his grip. "I think about puttin' my mouth on 'em more than is probably decent."

Your hips buck into him. "Dunk—" you breathe, with your fingers fully twisted into the roots of his hair, making him wish for a tug so fierce he'd lose some strands with it.

"I ain't done, girl," he says. "I ain't done yet, mo ghrá." Opens his mouth round one nipple and grazes it with his teeth. Groans. Moves his hands—untangles them from you and puts both, spread wide, over your belly like he's about to take it from you.

His breath fattens. “And this,” he says. “I like this because it’s you. Because I did it and you kept it.” His thumbs sneak under the fabric. “I want to kiss it. I want to talk to it. I want to put another in you when I’m allowed. There, that’s me told on.”

Dunk's succumbed to the fantasy fully. He's got one boy promised and wants a next child to keep him company maybe. Or because large families in his head are the happiest ones. He lifts his head and finds your face again. Through the water in his eyes he can still see you, but barely. Your brows are pulled, that he can tell for sure. Mouth parted, and perhaps worried slightly.

"Another?" you ask him, searching.

"Hush, girl, hush," he says. Blinks through it and licks his mouth. Presses his damp lips to yours and starts begging, because what else is there left to do. "Pretend. Just pretend I could. Just for now."

"Duncan," you say. You shield his ears with your palms. Brush through the hair at his temples and once he sees you nodding in the dim light, he lets himself get gone with it. "Keep talking to me. Keep—"

Happy-adjacent, he puts a thumb under your chin and tips your head back. Dives head-first into your neck, licks the whole column of it, rests there to speak some more. "I like your neck because I can smell you here," he says. Then, he puts you back face to face with him. Covers your mouth with three of his fingers and rubs on it until it flattens and spit drags its shine after where he's been. "I like your mouth because you laugh at me and then let me kiss you anyway. I like your hips because they fit in my hands." His palm fumbles blindly until he pulls himself out of his underwear and just slides between your thighs. Hot, eager cock, much like the rest of him. A flare runs up his spine, settles somewhere in the throat and punches out a grunt. "I like your belly because it's ours," Duncan grits. "I like your tits because I'm alive. An' I like between your legs because you get wet when I talk like this and I'm trying not to disgrace myself over it."

He wants you so badly he could scream to the whole of Ireland about it. Instead, he makes his body scream it. I adore you, girl, can’t you see? say his hands, everywhere. I’d give you everything I’ve got, can't you see? Kiss you till my mouth falls off, can't you see? Put myself wherever you ask and thank you kindly for the use of me after. See it, see it, see it—

Want gone rogue shows in the way he keeps gathering you back under his palms as if you've ever threatened to spill of out reach, in how his mouth remains undecided on biting, licking or siphoning you in, and the way his cock keeps jumping hot and furious, trying to shelter itself and remain decent about it.

It seems to work in small increments, because indeed all this talking, verbal and non, gets you wet for him, and your cheeks warm with it. You writhe under whatever part of him reaches you and start giving back those small, torn-off bits that always hit him harder than any grand noise would. “Yes,” you mutter. “Yes, Dunk. Do it—”

“Do what?” he asks, knowing damn well. The boyish part of him wants it from your mouth anyway, shaped prettier now that you are the one asking.

“Put a baby in me,” you say. “Pretend. Just for now.”

He hauls a large breath into his nose and exhales it through his mouth. Feels himself thickening with it, in the sense of mind and the body, where the mind becomes stupider and his cock larger. His hand goes wide over your belly as if he's saying mine, it's mine, and he bows over you, muttering, "Aye, I can do that. Christ, I can do that."

He's past trying very much, so when you nod and start clawing at his T-shirt, Dunk simply rearranges himself for you to undress him and mourns the absence of roundness under his palm only a little. Naked from the waist-up, he splays himself flat and watches you sit up and take your top off. Again, he is hit with how beautiful shapes are underneath it and how keenly he notices the tiniest shifts. Since last week your tits have gone from fuller to voluminous in his eyes, belly from raised to noticeable, and face from pretty to prettier.

His hand searches in the covers for yours. He finds it, squeezes it, and whispers, “Say it again.”

You sit there staring at him, dumb-struck. Watch his chest swell round the ribs and cave when he breathes out. Then, you lift the hand he is holding and press it into the mattress, pin it there under yours so you can lean on it while the other travels the whole longitude of his torso. Flat. Catching a little because tacky sweat does not make for easy sliding, until you land at his navel and see it jump under your nails. They drag through the coarse hairs there—darker than anywhere else on him before they give way to the softer vellus on the sides—and every one of them, no matter the length, the colour, the thickness, stands right up where your touch has been. Under it all the muscle flexes visible through the sweet layer of boyish body fat. Cosy and strong both. Perfect, really, for a head to rest there and hands to play with him. But that sort of comfort would tell too much. It is easy enough, still, to pretend the storm in you is purely hormonal so long as it ends with him stuffing you and doing whatever you ask. So long as he remains under the firm belief he is easing some bodily grievance, at least while he hasn't decided on himself yet. Falling asleep with his cock in your mouth and your head cradled by his belly would expose the pain that lingers in the abstract area of the chest.

There's a lump in your throat shaped like you're lovely. You're pretty and handsome and your body does things to me. And beyond everything, he's good and a good father-to-be, and what that does to your pregnant brain is unimaginable. So you go back to what works. Lean in, hide him for a moment under the curtain of your hair, kiss him gently, and say, "Put a baby in me. Properly." Your nose rubs his. "Fuck me from behind."

His half-mast lids fan slowly. Lashes rest on the tops of his cheeks and come back up and he's a changed man within that one blink. "Lass," he breathes. "Can ye get on all fours then?"

All he gets is a smile. Then movement—you pushing off him, your hand leaving his, which makes him near whine. His fingers curl after you in the sheet like a stupid animal’s paw. You turn away on your knees with quick gracelessness of wanting something sorely; hair falling forward, spine rounding, then lengthening when your palms find their place in the mattress. The bed gives under the redistribution. Ass towards him, hips lifted, one knee dragging wider until you seem settled enough to survive him.

Duncan lies there and takes the sight badly, as if it breaks him a little. Your back is bare all the way down, made stranger by afternoon light and familiarity. At the waist the skin is pulled by the swell of the belly. Dunk knows it's going to get bigger, and knows it is big already because his genes are at work here. With gravity added to the mix it looks fuller, and therefore makes him dizzier. Arse, with knickers stretched over it, is offered with such terrible common sense that his mouth goes empty of every clever thing he hoped to say.

“Jesus,” he manages, but that too comes out injured.

“Come here,” you say, looking back over your shoulder.

It strikes some last useful part of his brain hard enough to wake it. “Aye,” he says. “Aye, I’m comin’.”

He gets up behind you with all the poise of a felled tree being asked to reverse the process. Hands go to your hips, stop there, grip once, then loosen as if remembering you are flesh and temper and already carrying one consequence of his enthusiasm. Underwear is a ridiculous little scrap tasked with guarding what Duncan is looking at like it contains all the answers to life, death, God and Thursday afternoons.

His fingers hook under the elastic. “Easy now. Let me get these down,” he says.

The fabric peels down your thighs. Over the round of your ass first, where he stalls because he is weak and honest about being so, then lower, past the place where your legs touch, cotton dragging wet at the centre before it gives up possession. That small proof near takes his head clean off. He sees you then: open by posture, slick by wanting, held in the middle of yourself so prettily his mouth floods and dries in the same second. The whole of you given with your elbows sunk into the sheet and your cheek half-turned towards him, waiting.

Dunk puts one large hand to your ass and spreads you, just a little. “Oh,” he says, helplessly. “Girl.”

The sound you make is smugness turning on its own wreckage. “What then?”

His grip tightens, involuntary but with teeth nevertheless. Then, he bows his head and kisses one cheek. A warm, slow press, absurdly tender on a place where tenderness has no business arriving first. “Can’t just,” he mutters against you. “I hurt you last time.”

“You didn’t.”

“I did.” Another kiss, lower, close enough to make you tense. “You said you were sore.”

“I liked it.”

He makes a sound that might be pain, though it masquerades poorly—pride's seeping all over it. “That’s worse,” Dunk says. His hand leaves you for his mouth. He is halfway to licking his fingers when you drop lower onto your elbows, push your hips higher, and look back at him with your mouth parted.

“Let me.”

He stops moving altogether. “Lass.”

You turn your head more. “Hand.”

He gives it to you, uncertain at the wrist, as if it's dangerous to grant your wishes so eagerly. Two fingers first, held at your lips until you open for him. The change in his face is immediate and oddly fulfilling. You take them in, tongue lifting under the pads, cheeks drawing enough to make his shoulders hitch. His free hand lands beside your head, then changes its mind and cups your cheek instead, thumb stroking under the place where your jaw moves around him.

“That’s—” His voice gives out. He watches his own fingers disappear to the second knuckle and looks destroyed by the physics of it. “Ye wanna be bred so bad,” he says, too softly to give out anything other than wonder. Then louder, because the first time teaches him what it does to your body. “There. Sweetheart, there.”

Your eyes flick to his. You're wet-mouthed, wicked, looking far too pleased for the position you are in.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he tells you, while meaning never stop looking at me like that.

The surprise is how easily contentment expands in him. How little it asks before it takes over his hindbrain. Some past version of Duncan, poorer in all the ways that matter, looks at the present one with both hands up, asking: how did we get here? How on earth did we carry on without it?

He is content often, contemptuous rarely; life started him with so little that every good thing arrives miraculous and every bad thing feels, privately, like payment for the miraculous ones. Now, he tries very hard to stay inside the minute. Then inside the smaller minute. Then inside the smallest one, which is your mouth with his fingers in it.

Warmth seeps off you. He could live right here, except the task at hand has become urgent and your thighs are shining for him and your eyes have gone glassy with yearning.

Dunk allows himself one more slow circle of your tongue, then withdraws. Between his hand and your lower lip, spit webs bright, holds for half a second, then breaks on your chin. He wipes it with his thumb before he thinks better of it, near dazed by the privilege. Then, his hand goes between your legs.

Careful, with a certain ounce of boldness about it, he starts with two fingers and drags them through you from front to back, gathering what you’ve made of his talking. You shift back towards him, impatient. He fights to keep the smugness from winning outright, though it is difficult to not celebrate being asked for so openly.

“Want these inside?” he asks.

Instead of answering, you bury your face in the crook of your arm and let your body betray you. Muscles clench. Thighs give a small shake. Your breath comes out wet. “Dunk—”

“There,” Dunk says, softly triumphant. “There ye are.”

He pushes in, slowly enough for you to know which knuckle is currently being sunk. The deeper he gets, the more you want him. Bordering clinical with how conscientious his touch is, it never reaches impersonal. Everything about Duncan kneeling behind you, holding himself upright so he can finger you and pet you at once, is personal. The breadth of him there. The heat. The other hand moving up your side as if checking, by touch, that you remain in one piece.

Something in you settles with a painful click. The body, traitor that it is, accepts him as instruction. These hands, then. This weight near you. This voice behind your shoulder. His cock as the obvious cock, his mouth as the obvious mouth, his body as a permanent article. The comfort of that thought is so unbearable you nearly push it away with your hips alone.

He bottoms out and you catch, from the corner of your eye, the shy start of a smile.

“Needed this, did ye?” he murmurs. “All worked up and bossy. Askin’ me to put another baby in ye when you’ve already got one.” His fingers curl.

“Dunk—”

“I’m here.”

Then he starts to move. In and out, awfully patient, drawing himself back until the tips almost slip free, then pressing in again with the same focus. It makes you want to kick him, kiss him, and possibly lodge a complaint with whoever designed men this earnest. The stretch is manageable first, then good, then better when he changes the angle of his wrist and finds the place that makes your spine lose sense.

“That all right?”

“Yes.”

“Say if it ain’t.”

“It is.”

Dunk’s mouth twitches. “Say if ye need more.”

“I need more.”

“I like ye like that,” he says, and the praise lands worse than filth would have. “Knowin’ what you want from me.”

You wish for something to bite, urgently. Upset with how legible you are, you say, “You started it.”

“I did,” he says, working steadily, in and up, in and up, catching your clit with the heel of his hand where he can. “I did start it. Started a fair bit, didn’t I?”

Your cunt seems to love that talk. It tightens round him and he goes silent for a second, stunned by the compliment. Then, he leans over you as far as his size allows, hips pressing into nothing useful, belly brushing your back. The angle folds him awkwardly, but his mouth reaches your shoulder and his free hand reaches your cheek, and somehow he manages to make this snug instead of crushing.

“You’re so beautiful,” he says. “You know that?”

You make a sound that means no and yes and don’t stop and please shut up and please keep going, all crammed into one poor syllable.

“Beautiful like this. Beautiful when you’re laughin’ at me. Beautiful when you’re cross. Beautiful when you’re carryin’ my boy,” he says, and slides the third finger in.

You moan, loud. Open in small, grudging allowances—around him, through the hips, and finally somewhere higher and stranger, where the ache has been trying to pretend it's homeless. He keeps stroking into you, slow enough to be kind and firm enough to be believed. His thumb finds you from underneath, inept for one second, then clever by accident or instinct, and your breath punches out.

“Girl,” he says. “I was right then, hm? You like bein’ sweet-talked?”

“Duncan—”

“Aye?”

Low in you, everything starts taking heat. A pull first. A pulse. The whole shape of pleasure gathering itself with maddening obedience, as if your body has been waiting for his voice to give it permission. “You’re going to make me come.”

“Good,” he says. “Do that first.”

“You’re so—”

“What?”

You turn your head enough to see him. Pink-faced, wet-eyed, jaw clenched, hips making aborted little rocks against the air because he has forgotten he is allowed to want anything for himself while occupied with you.

“Good,” you say, accusingly.

He blinks. Almost smiles. “I’m tryin’ my best.”

“You’re succeeding,” you tell him.

It spurs him on—makes his mouth open around nothing, his fingers curl some more, his whole body strain in sympathy. Prayers for a thing to bite remain unanswered, so you bite your own forearm instead. Thighs tremble. The moment folds into something wholly physical, with your stomach tightening and lovely, humiliating surge of right there skittering and tipping. You could say his name as you come, but somehow now it feels forbidden enough to wedge your whole face into the crook of elbow and breathe there.

Duncan blinks through it and breathes through it as if he's the one getting fucked. He catalogues it all, from the belly jumping, through your cunt pulsing to all the little cries you refuse to let run freely. His only complaint is that he cannot see your face. He thought he wanted the view but now it is clear that the one view has cheated him of another. The crude angle and sounds have to do the memory's work on him, so he closes his eyes to brace through the inconvenience. Under his lids, he assembles the face: mouth rounded and framed by his hands, hair sticky at your temples, and his beloved whites showing every time he either exasperates you or manages to unearth you.

The realisation comes to him with dangerous gentleness: you are easy for him. This is a bad thing to learn, perhaps. A life-changing thing to know about a woman who keeps insisting he is her friend and a good person and other terms made to keep him warm but outside the house. He has no business feeling haughty over it, yet a grain of vanity runs through him all the same, coarse and bright. His fingers have done this. His voice has done this. The clumsy things he says because they are true have reached some private gear in you and made it turn.

He bends to check in, swipes hair off your forehead, and asks, "All right?" You give him a long sigh. "Need a minute?" To that you hum and shake your head. "No?" Duncan huffs and gets surprised by how much it reminds him of coaxing creatures that are smaller and more stubborn than you.

Your head turns to the side, lips smack a little. You look so fucked out Duncan is certain you'll ask for two minutes or a cuddle, but instead you say: "Can I have your cock now?"

Laughter punches his ribs so suddenly he spits on you some. Blunt as a hammer, but unfairly sweet-looking with your hair this messy and eyes so drowsy you swallow, and have the gall to rush him: "Dunk."

He nearly tells you aye, anything, I told ye I’d give ye anything, before he catches the harrowing fact that he has said none of that aloud. Only thought it at you for months until the thought had worn grooves in him.

"Aye," Dunk says after a moment. "Aye, you can."

Getting his fingers out of you feels like discourtesy. Your give them up slowly, wet and reluctant, and the sound of it makes his stomach drop. He wipes them nowhere. Cannot even think where to put his hand, so he presses it flat to your hip and keeps it there, slick cooling against your skin while the other shoves at his underwear with all the dignity of someone two sizes too big for the world.

His cock shines ridiculously. Has been crying for so long the slick managed to grow tacky and wet itself again and now the cotton at his crotch bears testimony of it in a form of dark, damp patch. Suddenly Duncan is glad your face has been hidden at times, because at least you missed this. He has been leaking through all his better intentions. Patient, conscientious Duncan, soaking himself while explaining kindness to your cunt.

"Jesus Christ," he mutters, and really means Jesus Christ himself as he is calling to complain at having been made into a man so weak.

You wait, forbearance thin and want so fat you are swelling with it, and turn your head to see him sheened satin with sweat. He catches your eye and softens immediately. His face melts of focus, hand comes to spread on the side of your belly and some dim, animal part of you wants him to keep touching what brought you here.

"I'll take care of ye, girl," he says. "I'm 'ere."

Your eyes shut.

He fists himself at the base, and even his own touch feels like a punch to the temple. He stares at your parted thighs, at the glisten between them, guides his cock there with a tremble in the wrist. Slides his head through your slit, and all the neglect he had forgotten about while occupied with you returns in one violent account. The sensation of bodies meeting assaults him with remembrance of how long he's been stuck in wanting and how badly. He pushes in slow, because he must, because if he lets his hips decide anything they will ram through all sense and shame him terribly.

A broken little inhale. Your body seizes first, then melts all over him. Your spine lengthens and dips, one arm extends on the sheets and a hand grips it, and you push yourself onto him, moaning, "Fuck, Dunk—" Another breath. Then: "Yes. God, yes—"

You open around him with no easy, but eager effort. There is slickness, plenty, a give where before there had been resistance, and such maddening welcome Duncan's eyes near cross. It is a serious matter, the feel of you, tight, hot, and pulsing from what he has just wrung out of you, and he has a grim thought that if heaven exists, someone ought to have warned him it might be found behind a woman with one knee sliding wider on the sheet.

He gets halfway in, stops, and breathes heavy through it, bracing both hands on where your thighs hinge and realising he's squeezing for his dear life. You make an offended sound into your arm. “Dunk.”

“I’m tryin’ to be good,” he mutters.

“You are," you say. "You're good, you're good, Dunk. C'mon—"

“Am I?” He laughs, without humour or oxygen.

Your hips push back and it is enough. It is near murder. He sinks deeper before he can decide against it. The last of him goes in with a pressure that empties his head cleanly, as if someone has opened a window in a burning room.

He bows over you and stays, seated fully, shaking. Wonders if your womb is this generous because it is for him, or simply because he's put enough mind to it. His mouth finds your shoulder again because it has to go somewhere. “There,” he says, ruined with the size of it. “There now. Got me now.”

“I want more of you,” you tell him, dragged from some lower shelf in the body.

His answer is movement. He gives one careful thrust and finds out he has misremembered his own need by several degrees of severity. The ridges of him slide through you with awful, intimate detail.

You feel the whole path of him, blunt head pressing at places so private they seem to have been discovered only just now. He leaves you by an inch and you clench after him, misliking the departure, eyes watering for reasons that have sex as their nearest excuse and nothing like their full explanation.

“There,” he mutters, though there is no there broad enough for what he means. “That’s it.”

He moves again. Slow. So slow it becomes unreasonable. Every withdrawal gets some slick from you, the return makes your hips push back before you can pretend dignity has remained employed. Your fingers twist in the sheet. He feels it. Of course he feels it, because Duncan has become a creature made entirely of attention and poor stamina.

For a second, he gets the whole of it from too far above himself. He is inside the life he helped make. Inside your body, your day, your bed, your pregnancy, this ordinary room with light on the wall and sheets shoved halfway off the mattress and the smell of sweat, milk-warm skin and sex thick enough to saturate air in his mouth. Filthy and domestic together. Impossibly plain. Impossibly much. The thought opens too wide in him, so he returns to useful things: angle, pressure, you all over his cock, and your face hidden where he cannot have it.

That last one becomes intolerable and too incomplete. “C’mere,” he says. You make a small complaining sound when he stops. “I know," Duncan says. "C’mere.”

His hands shift, large and uncertain only for the first second. Then, he bands one arm across your chest and draws you upright with him, careful of the belly, of everything except himself. His thighs spread under yours. He settles you between them, snug and held, and the new angle makes him swear under his breath because he has been a fool and there were still ways for the situation to worsen.

Your back is slick against his front. Your head can turn now. Your mouth is near enough to be taken. His arm lies across your breasts, the other hand open on your belly, and he starts moving up into you from underneath, short and deep, each thrust softened by the fact that he has you folded into him and therefore cannot pretend this is merely fucking.

“There,” he says again, quieter. “Wanted ye close.”

You grip his forearm. Nails find him, make half-moons, threaten blood if he earns it. “Dunk.”

“What?” His mouth skims your temple, cheek, the wet line beside your ear. “Can’t have ye facin’ away from me when you’re lookin’ so pretty. Cruel thing to ask.”

You shudder so fully he feels it through the belly under his hand. Then, Duncan rules it can no longer be his blind luck. He learns. Takes the lesson straight into the marrow and uses it with the responsibility of a man entrusted with nuclear codes.

"Beautiful girl," he says. “Mother of my child,” and it lances you straight through harder than his cock does.

You nearly lose it right there. A gasp breaks in your throat. Your nails dig into his arm and your hips make a useless little search for more, though he is already in you, giving you all his size and all his patience and that dangerous, earnest mouth.

“Fuck,” you whisper. “How are you all shy and then—” He thrusts and you lose the middle. “And then know what to say to me all the time?”

His breath hits your cheek in a rough laugh. “I don’t.”

“You do. You walk around looking sorry for yourself and then fuck like this.” Your hand flies back, searching blind until it catches in his hair. “Do you know what you feel like?”

“No,” he says, honest and helpless with it. His hips keep their upwards rut, measured until your cunt grips him and ruins the measure. “I only tell ye the truth.”

It really ought to be less devastating, or just plain enough to survive. Instead, it clamps its teeth around you and takes a large chunk of where self-preservation should live.

Makes you tell some truth, too. Worse one, the one you kept throttled last time you praised him. The agreement between you is performance and permission borrowed from the body. He is allowed to fuck you this way because it falls under the list of things he has agreed to do while you are pregnant. Because you are allowed to need it. Because pretend has become the cleanest door in this building that's currently on fire. Truth is dangerous when it arrives dressed as itself, so you send it through the dirtiest mouth you own.

“I love it when you fuck me,” you say.

Dunk’s hips stutter, hard enough to make both of you grunt.

You keep your hand in his hair, twist a little, make him listen. “You’re good at it. Your cock is wonderful. You are—” Your voice hiccups when his fingers come under your chin and tip you towards him. His eyes are too close, wet and startled and dark at the middle. “You are wonderful,” you say.

The courage (or a momentary case of brain becoming so lustful it malfunctions into recklessness) pays off. It's forbidden, like emotional trespass is forbidden, and incredibly thrilling all the same. Especially when his cock moves inside you like that. When he looks at you as if you've put him in some trouble he cannot solve with either manners or muscle, so it spends itself through his body. He's so overwhelmed he becomes easy and scared enough that he seems to simply must shut you up with his tongue.

It's deep and clumsy for the first second because he is too full of feeling to aim neatly, then hungry, then almost sweet when he remembers the shape of you. He presses in while his hips keep working, and the two motions start arguing with each other. He slows to kiss you properly, then loses patience and thrusts harder, then makes a wounded sound because harder means your mouth slips from his. Sweat slickens where your shoulder blades rub his chest. Finally, it all gets so sloppy you just let him hold you, lick into you, rut into you, and feel the wetness of it drip down your thighs.

When he breaks from your mouth, you put one more truth where filth can carry it safely. “I’m glad it’s yours,” you say.

He hiccups, pained, and hears the extra weight in it, but is too far gone to handle it wisely. His hand tightens on your belly. His mouth goes to your ear and breathes out, "Me too." A swallow. “Me too. Christ, me too.”

Your cunt tightens on him. He feels that too, poor observant beast, and it tips something in him past the last fence. “Keep makin’ them for me,” he says, and sounds shocked by his own mouth even as it keeps going. “I want many. Want them with your eyes. With that smart mouth of yours. Stubborn too, likely, and I’ll regret that, but I don’t care.”

“Dunk—”

“I don’t,” he says. “I want ‘em. Want you. Want this.” The hand over your belly strokes once, broad and covetous without ever losing gentleness. “Want to know I put ‘em there. Want to see ye full with it and mad at me and pretty and—ah, girl, you’re makin’ a mess of me again.”

He laughs, breathless and disbelieving, then moans into your skin because you clench on the sound. Filth trips over tenderness and neither of you is in any state to separate the bodies on the floor. Trapped in what seems like perpetual climax from how good it feels to tell you, he fucks up into you with his cheek pressed to yours, with your hair sticking to his mouth, with his arm locked across you as if the world has developed a habit of stealing things and he has decided to take preventative measures.

“Say that again,” he begs. “That you’re glad.”

Your head tips back against his shoulder. “I’m glad it’s yours.”

His hips jerk. “Again.”

“I’m glad it’s yours, Duncan.”

“Jesus.” His forehead knocks against the side of your head. “You can’t be sayin’ my name like that.”

“I can feel you when I do.”

“Aye, I know.” His breath comes loud, almost angry with the effort of keeping himself together. “Tellin' on myself like a green boy.”

You choke on a laugh, broken and hot and half-mad. He catches it with another kiss, messier, teeth at your lip, tongue in your mouth, hand climbing from your belly to cup one breast as if he has remembered another beloved article in the catalogue of your unmaking. He rolls the nipple under his fingers and you jolt, bearing down on him with a sound so open it embarrasses you after it has already escaped.

“There she is,” he says, soft and ruined. “There’s my girl.” The possessive slips out too naturally. You both hear it, and neither has the strength to object.

“Duncan—”

The name changes in your mouth and he loses another useful bolt from the machinery. “Aye,” he says, driving up into you with a rougher snap. “Aye, I’ve got ye.”

“Duncan—”

“Give it,” he tells you. “C’mon, lass. C’mon.” His hand leaves your breast to cup under your jaw, keeping your head tipped where he can get at the side of your face. “Let go. Tell me what you need.”

You pull his hair hard enough to make him grunt straight into your cheek. Hips working, greedy and clumsy, you take what he gives and grind yourself down on the return, using him with such blunt want that his teeth near chatter.

“Fuck me,” you say, broken small. Then, worse, because you have learned how easily he shatters. “Breed me. Please—”

The please gets him in the gut. Gets him in the balls too, a heavy, low tightening that makes his next thrust stutter. “Ah, girl.” His voice slips thick. “That’s it. Take it from me. Take what ye want. Beautiful thing, you make me stupid with it.”

Pleasure detonates in you and stays spread. It seems to forget a clean outward spill or graceful blooming. It is only a bright, brutal lock of muscle, fast enough to make your breath vanish. Your cunt seizes on his cock in hard little pulses, each one dragging through your belly, your hips, the backs of your thighs. The heat has nowhere to go, so it holds you in place and burns. You tremble over him with your mouth open and no sound coming out at first, then too much sound, a torn, wet laugh that breaks into a moan.

Dunk starts tipping with you. You feel it before he says anything: the throb of him inside, the sudden loss of rhythm, the way his arm bands tighter across you as if he can hold his own body back by holding yours. His breath comes loud at your ear. Hips punching up shorter, less chosen, more like it's all just happening to him.

“Fuck,” he slurs. “Fuck, I’m—sweetheart, I’m gonna—Christ, ye feel so good. S'good, I can’t—”

You are still coming when the next wave begins to gather, indecently quick, fed by the panic in his voice and the thick drag of him through you. Your body has turned unreasonable. Given one thing, it asks for two. Given two, it starts building a third out of spite and gratitude.

“Dunk, fuck—”

“I’ll breed ye, girl,” he says, wet and gone. “Want you so fierce. Want you full of me. Want—ah, God, want you like this all the damn time.”

The sentence knocks through you and leaves every defence misfiled. “Keep going,” you gasp. “Keep—I’m gonna come again.”

His whole body roars at that. He tucks you closer and thrusts up into you with a hard, trembling grind that has begun to fray at the edges. Sweat covers you so thoroughly his grip slips. His glasses are fogged, thighs are wide under yours, solid enough to make a seat of him, ruined enough that you can feel the shudders running through the muscle and meat.

“Fuck,” he says. “Fuck, yes—give me another. Let me feel it.”

The next one rises lower, meaner, with less warning. It starts where he is thickest inside you and claws outward. Your cunt clamps down before the rest of you understands, and Dunk makes a sound at your neck that barely belongs to language. His hips jerk up and bury deep and stay there as the orgasm takes you both by the throat.

You come around him and feel him go with it. Feel the first kick of him, hot and helpless, then another, his cock pulsing hard in you while his balls draw tight against you, emptied by degrees that make him shake. He keeps trying to move through it and cannot do it properly. Half-thrusts, aborted rocks, mouth open against your shoulder, his breath punching damp into your skin.

“There,” he groans, almost angry with how good it is. “There, take it. Take it, lass. Fuck, fuck, fuck—”

There is nothing left to decline with. You take him clenching and slick and shaking, the weight of his arm and the wide burn of his hand on you, take the vulgar kindness of being held upright while he pumps you full as if that can truly make you more pregnant than you already are.

Silence for a while. Between it, breath and muscle. Him, buried deep and twitching and softening painfully when your body keeps closing around him. He rests his forehead to the side of your head. His voice, when it comes, has been dragged over shredder and then forgiven for it. “Jesus,” he whispers. “Girl. Jesus.”

“Yes, Jesus,” you sigh. You sag, hang yourself off his arm fully, and Duncan just collapses to the side with your back plastered to his chest.

“Are you… are you well?” he asks, suddenly feeling his heart grow too heavy.

“Yeah,” you say, patting behind yourself to find his face. You cup his cheek and brush your thumb over it. “Yeah, I am. Are you?”

“Aye, jus’—” Dunk swallows. “That was—”

“Incredible,” you cut in. He gets an odd sense of flashback. “You know it’s just, um—”

“Yeah, I know. Just the sex. I’m just a little… I dunno.” He hates that he sounds scared.

You start shifting. Pull yourself off him, and it feels wrong on too many levels. You grunt a little, turn to face him, and catch him glancing nervously at the sheets.

“Don’t worry about it right now, okay?” you tell him. “Dunk, um. It’s alright.” Your hands go to his neck, gentle. “People want mad things during sex. Doesn’t mean anything has to—you know. Come true.” You look at him for a long second. “I’ve told you already. You’re allowed to want things.”

Dunk stays a bit stunned. Can I just want you? Do ye mean pretend breeding or can I want more babies with you because I want you? he thinks frantically, and when you start frowning, he forces a smile.

“Aye, I remember,” he says. “Well, I… I liked it fierce. Obviously.”

“Okay. Me too. Obviously.” You smile back at him, a little sad. Then, you wipe under his glasses with your thumbs. “Yeah, I was right," you say. "I want him to have your eyes. They’re much prettier than mine.”

He cackles from tension and abashment, then tucks you close, because this could have gone worse and has somehow landed safely enough. “Lass,” he whines. “Don’t tell me I’ve fucked ye into madness.”

You bash a funny fist on his back.

It has settled nothing in him beyond the fact that sex can be mad if people want it mad. He wonders if it is possible for it to get this mad and still have the participants remain friends. Being himself, Dunk reaches for the pool of old knowledge instead of the new. The new has you with all your quirks and tells and sweetness, and should point him towards the conclusion that he is wanted back. Instead, Dunk leans on what he knows about girls in general, and he does not know that much after all.

“What I need, Adrian, is for you to fucking listen to me in the field!” you exclaimed, kicking the wastebasket that was suddenly in your way. Adrian’s eyes tracked it as it skidded across the floor and into the filing cabinets. “Do you have some kind of fucking complex or something? It’s like you’re physically incapable of hearing anything I say when we’re out there. We’re supposed to be a team but every mission becomes The Adrian Show. Like, we get it. You’re a man.”

“Well, I’m sorry that I can’t help my genetic makeup. Frankly, I think being a woman would be awesome. I mean, aside from all the misogyny and systemic oppression. But I’ve kind of always wanted to know what it would be like to be a mother,” he rambled.

You stared at him in disbelief. “Can you please, please shut the fuck up?”

A small part of you felt bad for saying it. You didn’t usually mind when Adrian went off on one of his rants. He was like a cute black hole, and you knew all too well what it was like to be sucked in. Adrian Chase - the man you sat next to at work, who always brought you a cup of coffee without being prompted; who could talk ad nauseum but listened when you had something to say; the coworker whom you always found yourself tucking in the tag at his collar was not the issue.

The issue was who he became in the fucking suit. Vigilante put blinders on him - and not just because of his stupidly limited field of vision in the mask.

You started undoing the clasps of your body armor and tossed your chest plate onto the nearest chair which you promptly threw yourself into. You hunched over and mentally prepared yourself to start unlacing your boots - you’d gotten kicked hard as shit in the ribs out there. They were sore, not broken. Probably. But before you could manage the task, Adrian rolled his chair in front of yours, brushing your knees with his. He reached down and started untying one boot, gently knocking your tired fingers out of the way in the process.

You sat up, stunned, and merely watched as his head dipped between your knees and he unlaced both boots, then slowly took them off and gently set them aside. He sat back up and pushed his wireframes up the bridge of his nose and just looked at you. It was unnerving to have him so silent. 

“Where the hell is this in the field?” you asked quietly. He cocked his head slightly, almost like he didn’t understand the question.

“I don’t have to worry about you in the field,” he said simply. “Except when you get kicked so hard I think you’re going to start coughing up blood.”

“Of course you don’t have to worry about me in the field, I can hold my goddamn own. But you put that fucking suit on and it’s like I don’t know who I’m dealing with anymore.”

His brow furrowed slightly. “I don’t understand, I feel like we work really well together.”

“You don’t listen to me. It’s like you’ve got a one track mind and it’s your way or the highway. We work because I’m always having to adapt to you.” 

He seemed to consider this. “But that’s because I know what I’m doing?”

You barked out a laugh that hurt. “Oh and I don’t?”

“I’m pretty sure I just said I don’t have to worry about you? I’m confused.”

His green eyes were wide and bewildered. You took a sharp breath through your nose and pushed your chair slightly back. You needed space - a thing Adrian did not know how to give. You unzipped your compression jacket, hoping it would alleviate the hot prickle of anger at the back of your neck, but instead all it did was cause Adrian’s gaze to drag across your chest like a jolt of electricity. 

“What did you say about my heart rate earlier?” you asked, your mouth feeling suddenly dry. 

“Huh?” he asked, gaze raking up the column of your throat before he seemed to remember you had a face. 

“Not listening once again, I see,” you taunted, this time with a sly smile. Adrian pouted slightly. 

“Okay, this was different. I’m not thinking about your tits when we’re in the field,” he said, as if that was some sort of sound argument and not a confession.

“Good to know my feminine wiles aren’t causing your fucking problem,” you drawled sarcastically.

“Oh, no, they definitely are. But like, a different sort of problem,” he said, voice low in the same sort of way it got when he was drunk. Then, he seemed to regain an ounce of focus. “Hey! I don’t have a fucking problem. You just don’t like taking orders from me.”

That wasn’t entirely untrue. Though calling them orders was perhaps a bit generous. More like improvising based on Vigilante’s unhinged decision making. “You seem to like giving them.”

“When I’m Vigilante, sure! You’re acting like I don’t take orders aaaaall the time when we’re not in the field,” he complained. “I like it when you tell me what to do.”

You paused. “You like it?”

“Is that not what I just said?”

You turned all the new information over in your mind. “What’s my heart rate, Adrian?”

“How should I know?” he retorted. “Your resting heart rate is normally 56 beats per minute. Cool as a fucking cucumber. I’ve actually been trying to train mine to be somewhere like 45 beats per minute because I read somewhere that really good athletes can have a bpm as low as 40bpm. And, I mean, we basically are athletes and I want to be at the top of my game. Actually, the Guinness World Record for slowest resting heart rate is 27bpm and I feel like if I worked really hard I could probably beat that.”

You laughed again and then winced. “Adrian Chase, you will only have a resting heart rate lower than 27bpm when you’re fucking dead.”

You weren’t sure you wanted to know how he knew your resting heart rate, but your brain supplied the image of his fingers gently pressed to your throat so easily. He must have checked it while you were sleeping - whether that was on one of his “sweeps” of your apartment in the middle of the night, or while you were napping on the bedraggled office couch, or the time you two had had to share a bed on a mission, well…he’d had plenty of opportunities to collect data you supposed.

“Adrian,” you repeated again, your hand moving slowly towards his. “Take my pulse.”

“Oh!” he said, sitting up slightly straighter, something attentive in his posture. Then he nodded. He grabbed your wrist and pulled it towards him. He looked down at your hand in his lap and seemed to short circuit.

“Might help if you take your gloves off,” you suggested.

“Right,” he replied, nodding vigorously. He ripped a glove off with his teeth and then pressed his warm, slightly sweaty fingertips to the pulse point in your wrist.

“Your radial pulse isn’t very strong,” he commented, his brow furrowed in concentration.

“Try here,” you said, bringing his hand to your throat. You rolled your chair just slightly forward so that his knees were trapped between yours. 

But he met your gaze evenly and those wide, shining eyes of his took you in as he counted silently, his pink lips moving around the shape of each number. You could practically see two pastel hearts pasted where his eyes should be. You were probably, almost definitely going to regret this all later. But the pure curiosity of it overtook all common sense. 

“75,” Adrian said, voice a hoarse whisper. 

“What?” you asked, too busy lost in the swirling green pools in front of you. You really were doomed, weren’t you?

“Beats,” he clarified. “Per minute. Actually, that’s an average over the course of two minutes. You didn’t stop me and I thought I might as well be thorough.”

You nodded as if that made perfect sense but you couldn’t stop thinking about how you’d both let two minutes pass uninterrupted while you stared into each others’ eyes with his warm fingers pressed at your throat. You leaned slightly further forward.

“Your turn,” you said gently and touched your fingers to the side of Adrian’s neck. “But you have to be nice and quiet for me so I can focus. Can you manage that?”

Adrian made a small noise somewhere in the back of his throat. “Fuck - uh, yes?”

Again, he wordlessly locked onto you in a way that made something terrible and wonderful brew inside you. The corner of his lips twitched like he wanted to speak but he managed to wrangle it in. You weren’t wearing a watch, so you pulled Adrian’s hand into your lap and started counting meticulously. You dragged your gaze from his watch to his face for just a moment and enjoyed the spike in his pulse. He frowned at you and then whispered: “Shouldn’t you be focusing?”

“I’m very focused, Adrian,” you replied, voice low. Adrian shifted his hips in his chair. You winked, causing him to curse under his breath. Satisfied with the taste of excitement in him, you looked back at his watch.

“95 and climbing,” you said when the minute had passed. “What’s got your heart in such a patter?”

“My pulse is usually, like, way lower, I swear,” Adrian said quietly. “But you’re making me nervous.”

“Nervous?” you asked, pulling back slightly, worried you were misreading the whole thing. Adrian’s fingers caught your wrist in a flash.

“Not nervous. I’m fucking horny. Fuck! I mean, uh, I’m fucking happy. That you want to touch me.”

“Oh?” You couldn’t help the giggle that bubbled out of you. “So you’re not horny, or?”

He groaned and pressed his forehead into your palm instead of his own. 

He dragged your hand down his face, over the front of his throat and then slid it up towards his jaw. You let your fingers explore, catching against the slightest stubble. Suddenly, Adrian opened his mouth and looked up at you with big, pleading eyes. 

You narrowed your gaze, uncertain what he wanted, until he moved his head so that your fingers were just inside his lips, resting against his tongue. Oh. You slid your fingers into his wanting mouth, gliding over the velvet expanse of his tongue. He closed his lips around your index and middle finger, and you pushed them further in, testing, before you slowly withdrew, feeling how he hummed around them.

“I’ve always wondered what that would feel like,” he admitted once your fingers had slipped free. A small thread of spit connected you still. He turned his head again and pressed a kiss to the inside of your wrist innocently like he hadn’t just begged for your fingers in his mouth. You wanted to say fuck it, to lean forward and capture his mouth with yours, to strip him out of that stupid costume and ride him until you both came hard, but more than that you wanted him to work for it. To beg a little. Adrian owed you nothing, but Vigilante on the other hand…

“Apical pulse,” Adrian said suddenly.

“What?” you asked, snapped straight out of the delightful idea of his face between your legs.

“Apical pulse is the most accurate,” he said matter-of-factly. 

“And where is that?”

He reached forward and brushed his fingers against the front of your shirt, slowly dragging until they rested just beneath your breast. His fingers hooked into the fabric idly.

“Can I try again?” Adrian asked breathlessly. “Please? For science.”

Your lips split into a grin. “Well, if it’s for science how can I say no?”

Adrian released his hold on your shirt and sunk to the floor between your knees, causing your breath to hitch in your throat. He dragged his fingers down to the hem of your shirt and dipped his trembling fingers beneath the fabric. His breath was hot against your throat as he leaned even closer, his other hand coming to your waist. You weren’t sure if it was to ground himself or hold you down. Either way it made something hot and wanting unravel in the pit of your stomach.

The callused pads of his fingers were deliciously warm against your skin as they slid up and cupped your breast over your bra. He gave it a tentative squeeze before he dipped his index and middle finger beneath the underwire. His fingers dragged along the underside of your breast until he found the right spot. You were sure he’d find your heart rate had increased again, despite your attempts to the contrary. The last thing you wanted was Adrian to know he rattled you, though, you suspected you may have blown it entirely on that front. 

You ran your fingers up Adrian’s neck into his curls and gripped tightly. Adrian hissed and then looked up at you with glassy eyes, pupils blown wide. “I - I lost count.”

You laughed, then yanked Adrian up to your mouth by the hair. Your lips had barely touched when he moaned into your open mouth. He kissed with the exact kind of frenzy you expected: wet, tongue-forward, frankly sloppy. It was a kind of eagerness that stirred a fondness in your chest. His hand slipped, conveniently, up your breast, pushing your bra up and out of his way. 

Adrian leaned closer still, following your mouth like he was afraid you were going to take it away from him for good at any moment. You gripped his hair tighter still and Adrian seemed to be speaking into your mouth, but you couldn’t make heads or tails of what he could possibly be saying. He slipped his hand out of your shirt, fingers dragging gently across your skin and sending a shiver down your spine. He grabbed your tank top and ripped it straight down the middle. 

“Adrian!” you gasped, pulling back to punch him in the shoulder. 

“I’m sorry!” he exclaimed and then immediately began peppering your face with kisses. “Sorry I just couldn’t stop picturing what your tits look like and I needed to see them immediately.”

You snorted a laugh and unhooked your bra and tossed it aside. “Happy?”

“I think I’m the happiest I’ve ever been in my entire life. Like, I could die right now and I would be content. Thank you. Thank you for sharing these with me. I’m the luckiest man in the whole wide – ”

“Adrian, shut the hell up,” you ordered.

“Yes ma’am,” he agreed with a salute before grabbing ahold of your hips and sliding you closer to the edge of your chair. He danced his fingers lightly over the ugly bruise forming across your ribs before he kissed the top of each of your breasts. Then, he paused, staring at your chest with a look of pure consternation. “How am I supposed to pick just one?”

“Oh my god, Adrian,” you started to groan but then Adrian took one of your nipples into his warm mouth and the disparagement left your brain entirely. His teeth grazed your skin slightly and then he looked up at you through his lashes, his glasses slipping down the bridge of his nose again. You gently repositioned them for him and were rewarded with a blinding smile. 

“Is this okay?” he asked, his breath hot against your sensitive skin.

“It’s fine,” you replied, trying to assure him. But he seemed to take that as an assessment of quality instead. He sat back on his heels and pouted.

“How can I do better? Tell me what to do and I’ll do it. I’ll do anything,” he pleaded. 

You pressed your thighs together slightly, desperate for some sort of relief. You were both a goddamn mess. Desperate for distraction from the sight of him begging, you twisted your fingers into his curls and pulled his mouth to yours again, leading him into a slower, more languid kiss. Somewhere in the back of your brain you reprimanded yourself for kissing him so much - letting him think this was something other than what it was was dangerous. But the idiot was a good goddamn kisser.

You guided him to his feet, pulling him closer still until suddenly he was straddling your lap, ass perched firmly on your knees. Your fingers traipsed over him, undoing buckles and zippers and snaps as you went. You knew Adrian’s armor intimately from your agile study of his form, his fighting style, and from looking for weak points. He wasn’t open to your notes, but it helped you know how best to cover his ass at a moment’s notice in the field.

Your fingers finally found smooth skin as you helped him out of his last layer, leaving him and his tightly muscled form in just a tank top. Part of you wanted to rip it off with your teeth, another part of you wanted to sit back and watch him slowly strip the rest away. All thoughts left your head as Adrian’s mouth moved to your neck. His tongue laved at the skin, teeth pinching flesh just slightly, when he suddenly drew back, as if rousing from some kind of haze.

“Aren’t you supposed to be on my lap?” he asked quietly, his gaze fixed on your lips. His chest was heaving and barely anything had happened. You worried suddenly that if you let him put his dick in you he’d drop dead.

“Way to give into gender stereotypes, Adrian,” you taunted. His eyes snapped up to meet yours. “I’m teasing. Mostly. I think it’s kind of hot that you’re on my lap.”

“You do?” he asked. You nodded. “Okay, good. Because I like it, too. A lot.”

“I have an idea,” you said suddenly, tilting Adrian’s chin with your index and middle finger. “How about a little lesson in taking orders?”

Adrian nodded furiously, at a loss for words. He looked so happy - kind of like the way he did when you complimented him on a kill. And now you were imbued with a kind of power you hadn’t really been anticipating. But you were certainly going to make it worth both your whiles.

You sat back slightly and dragged your gaze over him. “Shirt off, please.”

Adrian wasted no time at all. When he untangled himself from the fabric eagerly he looked back at you. “You don’t have to ask nicely. I’ll do anything you say even if you ask not-nicely. Actually don’t even ask. Just tell me.”

You blinked back at him. “I just want to make sure I have this straight - you really want me to tell you what to do?”

“I’ve been told I do really well with clear instruction,” he said, grinning. 

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” you retorted with a roll of your eyes. 

Adrian sighed. “You’re still mad about earlier? God, maybe Peacemaker was right - you really do need to get laid.”

You could feel the frustrated heat crawling up the back of your neck. Of course fucking Peacemaker was - “I’m sorry, why exactly were you and Chris talking about my sex life?”

“I just said I thought you’d been a little tense lately and I wondered if I could do anything to help and he said that you ‘probably just needed a good fuck’.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“If it makes you feel any better he said I ‘definitely wasn’t man enough for the job’,” Adrian said with a shrug. You weren’t really sure how that was supposed to make you feel better or instill any confidence in you.

“Look, I know he’s your friend, but that’s fucked up all around. And I’ll kick his fucking ass for you…if you want?” you offered with a wince. Might as well have stapled your bleeding heart straight to your arm for everyone to see.

“I’d like to see it,” Adrian said with a thoughtful expression. Then he leaned down and kissed the corner of your mouth almost daintily. “Just promise not to hurt him too bad?”

“I will make no such promises.”

Adrian gasped like he was scandalized. “God, you’re so fucking hot.”

You preened a little under his praise. “Anyway, are you going to do something about proving Peacemaker wrong or are you just going to sit there on my lap looking pretty all night?”

“Definitely not!” Adrian replied, kissing you again, this time his open mouth on yours, hot breath mingling. He reeled back, your head held in his hands. “Wait, fuck, I mean definitely not going to sit here looking pretty all night. Definitely going to fuck you.”

His mouth returned to its sloppy conquest of your neck and he slipped his hand into the waist of your pants, wasting no time in dragging his fingers between your legs, pushing your underwear aside. Your hips lifted into his touch and you pulled his hair harder than you intended.

“If you keep pulling my hair like that I’m gonna come in my pants,” he said, half complaint and half desperate need. He bit down on your collarbone. “You’re so fucking wet. Sick.”

You couldn’t help but laugh. Adrian pouted again but you reassured him with your tongue in his mouth and your fingers grasping at him through the fabric of his pants. He let out a hiss and gave up all other priorities to fumble with his pants. You pressed a hand against his smooth, warm chest.

“Are we really about to fuck on a wheelie office chair?” you asked, interrupting the flow of the moment.

“Uh, yeah? It’s kinda cool. I can like…slide us around to different places.”

“Why would you need to do that?”

“I don’t know, don’t you like options?” he argued, seeming utterly confused that you didn’t see the merit in transportation-based fucking. You rolled your eyes.

“You’re a fucking idiot.”

His hips rolled against you slightly. Of course he liked that.

“Fine, we can fuck somewhere else. Maybe the couch? Nah, Peacemaker and Harcourt have definitely fucked on that couch and I don’t want to encroach on the sanctity of that…”

“What?”

He plowed ahead, eyes scanning the room. “Oh! We could fuck on your desk. Wait, no, let’s fuck on my desk! There’s a real risk that every time I look at it after this I will get hard, but that’s a risk I’m willing to take.”

“I hate you.”

“Maybe,” he retorted with a grin. “Now can I please go down on you? It’s actually all I can think about. I’ve been told my pussy eating could make anyone love me, so let’s see if you still hate me after.”

“Adrian, no one has ever told you that,” you accused. He grinned, something crooked and impish.

“Okay, so maybe no one has said it to me, but I think it was implied. All I’m saying is satisfaction guaranteed for services rendered!”

The blatant honesty took you by surprise but not any more than suddenly finding yourself on your back on the desk with Adrian’s hips between your legs. He yanked you closer to the edge of the desk and then made quick work of undoing your pants, taking them and your underwear in one go in a way that almost made you dizzy.

Whatever you were about to say died on your lips when Adrian dropped to his knees again with a decisive thud and threw your legs over his shoulders. His warm hands pressed into the tops of your thighs, grip tight but not painful. He kneaded at your skin for a moment before he looked up at you through those pretty, stupid eyelashes of his.

“May I?” he asked, voice a low whisper.

You pressed your lips into a firm line to keep from laughing. If you were being honest, Adrian asking for permission was really doing something for you. You propped yourself up on one elbow so you could reach down and run your fingers through his curls adoringly. He had the same intense energy at the prospect of eating you out as if you’d given him a present to unwrap. He was vibrating with excitement. He dragged his cheek along the inside of your thigh and kissed your knee as he waited, patient and postulant.

“You may.”

The speed with which Adrian plunged forward to lick between your folds needed to be studied by science. He approached the act like he was well and truly starved. Your thighs tightened around his head, an involuntary clench of your muscles, but Adrian seemed to love that too. He hummed his approval against you, the sound of his tongue on you and in you positively obscene. 

“You’re so wet,” Adrian managed, catching his breath for a moment. 

“Please remember to breathe down there, Adrian,” you replied, deeply aware of the way it was harder to even out your own breathing. You twisted a curl around your finger and then another and his eyes fluttered shut. You hated how pretty he was. How was it possible that the beautiful, hapless, devotee between your legs was also the same man you wanted to choke to death with your bare hands in the field? 

You gave his hair another little tug.

“I like when you pull my hair,” he groaned. You smiled wickedly and pulled a little harder.

“Like that?” you asked, watching him carefully, calculating. He was so much easier to read out of the Vigilante suit. 

“Yeah, just like that,” he confirmed. He reached down, adjusting himself within his tactical pants. You really needed to do something about getting him out of those, didn’t you? You dragged your gaze up his torso to find him staring at you, wide-eyed and grinning. “You make me feel like a sexy Ratatouille.”

“Please tell me you did not just reference a Disney movie while you’re giving me head, Adrian!”

“It’s a Pixar movie, first of all,” he argued with an expression that seemed to convey that he thought you were an idiot. “And second of all, you told me to breathe. So I’m breathing! If you want me to not talk about how you make me feel like a sexy Pixar character you have to explicitly say that. Did you not want me to say that?”

“Not really!” you complained, slapping a hand over your eyes. You couldn’t bear to look at him, because even though he was yapping about goddamn Ratatouille of all things, he still looked painfully hot. “By the way, his fucking name is Linguini. Ratatouille is the name of the movie!”

“I thought Ratatouille was the name of the rat?”

“His name is Remy!” you exclaimed, sitting fully upright on Adrian’s desk. Fuck. You knew this was a bad idea and then you went ahead anyway and indulged Adrian’s weird shit. “I can’t believe this.”

“Wait, wait!” Adrian’s fingers pressed desperately into your hips. “Let me make it up to you. I’ll bravely drown between your legs if it means you’ll forget everything I just said.”

“Adrian…”

“Please, please, give me one more chance. I wanna make you feel good. I know I can make you feel good,” he begged. Those stupid green eyes were so hard to say no to. Who were you to deny him – and more importantly, yourself – a long overdue orgasm on Adrian Chase’s tongue?

“Fine.” Adrian smiled wide. “Now make me come, Adrian Chase.”

He kissed at the inside of each of your thighs this time, not rushing into it like before. He nosed at your clit and then kissed it softly before taking it into his mouth, sucking gently. His tongue slid through the warmth between your legs with an eager conviction, even if he was taking his time in his hard-won second approach. He was noisy as hell - moaning and muttering sweet-nothings as if you had your own hand around him. Your back arched off the table as he slipped a finger in you, and then another, pressing deeply inside. 

“Harder,” you urged, and he took that directive with fervor. For a few moments, he kissed the crease of your thigh, the crest of your pubic bone, nuzzled his face against the soft hair between your thighs as his fingers adjusted their pace and their depth and their pressure. You weren’t sure how it was possible, but Adrian was a fucking scholar in pussy. 

“Fuck,” you whispered, before managing to clamp down on your lower lip. Adrian smiled against your skin at the way your body – and you – responded.

You were hesitant to wind your fingers in his hair again, but you didn’t know where to put your hands. Your palms, sweaty, slid across the surface of the desk. You pawed at your own breasts to no avail, it wasn’t as good as his mouth and his calloused, warm fingers. Speaking of fingers – Adrian crooked his inside you and, at last, both your hands tugged at his sweaty curls. You pressed him slightly closer, and ground your hips against his face. In response, he cursed against you and removed his fingers so he could firmly grab your hips in both hands and press you flush against his face. 

For a brief moment you genuinely did worry about him suffocating between your thighs. All thought leeched out of your brain the second Adrian merely pressed his thumb over your clit with a practiced pressure and you came hard. You were aware of the moan that dragged from your lips, dredged from somewhere deep in your core by Adrian Chase of all people. You were also faintly aware of the sound of Adrian hissing a whine through his clenched teeth. 

If you hadn’t experienced alternate universes yourself you might have thought you were in one.

Adrian’s ministrations between your legs didn’t stop. His tongue laved slowly at you, dragging between your folds like he wasn’t quite done cherishing his last meal on death row. 

“Adrian,” you vaguely moaned, or at least, you hoped his name had come out of your mouth coherently. You really couldn’t be sure.

“C’mon, one more. I owe you for saving my life,” he murmured. You looked down at him, his chin wet, his lips swollen, his glasses slightly askew, his hair a hopeless mess. Somehow, he still looked good. If this was what he looked like making you come on his tongue, then what the hell would he look like when he was coming inside you?

You inhaled sharply as his index finger dragged between your folds and slipped toyingly into you for just a moment before withdrawing. You bit back an embarrassingly wanting groan. “What are you talking about? When did I save you?”

Adrian frowned, like he was almost offended that you didn’t remember. “You save me every day.”

Then he looked up at you through his lashes as he ran his tongue up your thigh, his other hand drawing his nails across your chest, and made you come around his mouth and his fingers one more time. 

When he was finally satisfied he dragged himself up to standing between your legs and kissed you deeply, brain still too fuzzy to properly taste yourself on his tongue. The rough fabric of his tactical pants dragged almost painfully against your core. You felt his index and middle fingers press flat against the inside of your thigh while he kissed you lazily. Finally, he pulled back and looked at you with big, glassy eyes.

You skated your hand along his jaw, dragging your thumb across his lower lip tauntingly before pressing it between his lips. You pressed down, sliding your thumb across the surface of his tongue and then let him close his mouth around you. You would have squeezed your thighs together at the sight, had he not been in between them. He mumbled something and you withdrew, grazing against his teeth, smearing spit across his chin. His chin dipped forward slightly, like he might try to trap you again. He was so hungry. 

“What’d you say?”

“Femoral,” he said, as way of explanation. “110.”

Your brow furrowed further in confusion. “What?”

“Your heart rate,” he said simply, with a little shrug of his shoulders. “I can do better than that, too. Promise.”

To you, that was a goddamn invitation for more. You wanted him to prove it to you. You wanted him to bend you over his desk and fuck you hard, treating your heart rate like a personal best score every time. You ran your hands down his torso and reached for the zipper of his pants but he pushed your hands away.

“I’m good,” he said sheepishly. You frowned, studying his flushed expression. Then your eyes widened and you nodded in understanding.

“Hey, that’s okay,” you replied softly. You dragged your hips slightly against the rough fabric with intention this time. You couldn’t help that the idea of him coming in his pants made the whole thing strangely hotter. 

“I really do want to fuck you, you know,” he said, tilting his head slightly, his gaze dragging down your body. “I dream about it.”

“You do?”

He laughed in disbelief. “Are you kidding me? Of course I do. I’ve been dreaming about it for like…as long as I’ve known you.”

“You’re so confusing, Adrian Chase,” you said, holding his face in both hands. “You’re like two different people. When you’re in the suit you don’t listen to a fucking thing I say, but when you’re just you, I think maybe you’d lick the ground if I told you to.”

“Do you want me to?” he asked, beautifully pathetic. 

“Listen?” you asked.

He shook his head. “Lick the ground.”

“I don’t know what I want from you. To kill you or to fuck you.”

Adrian laughed. “You couldn’t kill me if you tried.”

“Is that a fucking challenge?” you asked lowly, wrapping your legs around his annoying narrow waist. The distinct sound of Peacemaker’s voice outside the building startled you two back to reality and Adrian tossed clothes at you faster than you could put them on. You hadn’t been expecting the team back so soon - usually cleaning up Vigilante-related messes took a little longer. 

In the conference room, Adrian sat beside you for the debrief, the stillest you’d ever seen him, a dopey grin on his face the entire time. While everyone was distracted reviewing footage of Vigilante plunging into a spray of gunfire without you to cover him, you studied his profile. Soft, sweet, devoted Adrian had given you more than you could have asked for. But, you couldn’t help but wonder… 

You leaned yourself against the arm of his chair and gestured vaguely at the screen.

“Maybe next time you wear the suit.”

Back in the field, you were calling out orders - Harcourt gave a nod and peeled off, taking Peacemaker with her. But Vigilante turned back over his shoulder and you could tell even through the mask he was fucking grinning. 

“Vij, don’t you fucking dare!”

Your eyes widened as he pulled the pin from the grenade you hadn’t even known he’d had and tossed it into the warehouse. There was no time to process as he was too busy tackling you to the ground, draping his body over yours. Heat roared over the two of you and Vigilante wrapped his arms around you tightly, his mask tucked into the crook of your neck. Somewhere not far away you heard Harcourt cursing him out.

Vigilante panted, breath hot against your face even through the mask. His grip slid to your waist as his hips adjusted slightly against yours.

He turns his head to the side and down where his bicep has gone half numb under you. “H-hi,” he says.

“Hi yourself,” you say.

He can make out only the blur of your face tipped up at him. The sound of you is morning-rough, gummy at the edges, and his whole body goes at it with something brazenly pleased before his brain gets a vote.

“Um,” you add. “So—”

Dunk palms at you gently because his eyes are useless and he has to solve the room by touch. He is sprawled on his back, you nuzzled to his side, your feet somewhere around his mid-calf and one hand spread small over his ribs. The shirt has ridden up on you in the night. He feels bare thigh against his hip and has to look at the ceiling he cannot see.

“How’re ye feelin’?” he asks.

“Good,” you say. Your fingers twitch. “You?”

“Grand, but,” Duncan says, “blind.”

“Oh, right.” You twist away from him, and he keeps his arm loose enough to let you go. When you come back, he tightens. “Sorry, I took them off you," you say. "Here—”

The glasses get pushed onto his nose and the world snaps itself back together in lines and colours the names of he's no longer certain. “There ye are,” he says.

Seeing you makes him worse. More nervous, because now there are sharp edges. Your mouth looks bitten by sleep, eyes crusted a little from last night’s tears. Your hair has gone all mussed and flattened on one side, and the T-shirt collar hangs too wide on you. His T-shirt. The sight should be ordinary, because shirts are ordinary things, except Dunk has the distinct sense of having been granted back a morning that had been stolen from him once before. The first one. The one where he woke up with a body full of you and no you in the room to prove it.

Now you are here, frowning faintly with worry gathering between your brows, and he feels so lucky it borders on daft.

“You sure you’re good?” he asks.

You nod, then seem to check the answer against yourself. Your hand shifts under the cover, thighs move by a cautious inch, and your face does a small grimace.

Dunk sinks a notch. “Sore?”

“A little.”

He winces. “Ah. Shite. Was I—” Stops, then starts again, worse. “Was I too much?”

Your eyes flick up.

“I mean—” His ears begin to burn. “Too rough. Or too eager. Or—”

“Dunk.”

“—too heavy with my hands. Or just… too much of me.”

You stare at him, then soften in a way that makes him want to hide. “No. You weren’t too rough.”

He studies your face, searching for the lie out of habit. “You’d tell me?”

“Yes.”

“Properly?”

“Yes.” A pause. “I’m sore in a nice way.”

That phrase grabs him low and stays there. His hips seem to hear it first and some lazy pull starts under the ache. He shifts one shoulder against the pillow and hopes the blanket is being merciful. “In a nice way,” Dunk repeats, because he is an idiot.

You look embarrassed now, which helps nobody. “You know what I mean.”

Duncan does. He knows too well. His own body has woken all used and tender, cock sore from work, holding back and coming hard enough that some part of him may still be missing. There is a dragged-open feeling in him, though nothing of his has been entered except by wanting. He understands being glad for the ache. He understands wanting proof that something happened and stayed happened. “Aye,” he says quietly. “I know.”

Silence arrives then, thin and awkward, and lies between you with its eyes open.

“Was I too much?” you ask.

Dunk’s head turns so sharply the pillow drags at his ear. “What?”

“Last night.” You look at his collarbone rather than his face. “I was a bit… I don’t know. Mad.”

He nearly laughs from pure disbelief, except your face is too serious for that. “No.”

“You can say.”

“I am sayin’.” He reaches, then stops before the touch lands at your cheek, as if the rules have changed in the night and nobody has handed him the new sheet. “You were—” His throat tightens around several answers, all of them too large or too plain. Lovely. Wild. Good to me. Mine, some awful part supplies, and he shuts that door hard. “You were grand,” he manages. “More than.”

Your mouth pulls into something small. “Grand.”

“I’m not very articulate in the mornin’.”

You nod thoughtfully. “That explains it.”

A breath of laughter leaves him, and you answer with your own, but the question remains where both of you can see it: What now. It sits on the bed with the clothes on the floor and the cold mugs from last night and the smell of sleep and sex and clementines.

You pull the cover higher over your chest. “We should probably talk.”

“Aye,” Dunk says, though every muscle in him files a complaint.

“Because I don’t want this to get… unclear.”

He gives a small nod. His hand lies open on the mattress beside you. “Right.”

“And I don’t want you thinking you have to.”

That brings his eyes back to yours. “Have to what?”

“This.” You gesture vaguely under the duvet, toward your bodies and the rest of the wreckage. “Me. Us. Whatever this is. Because I’m, you know. Pregnant.”

Duncan takes a second with that. He hears the sense in it, but hates the sound of it. “I don’t feel made to,” he says.

“You did a bit before.”

“With the ring?”

You wince. He hates that too. “Aye,” he says before you can soften it for him. “I know. I made a bollocks of that.”

“I didn’t say—”

“You laughed.”

“Dunk.”

“No, I know why.” He looks down at the blanket. There is a loose thread near his thumb and he worries it instead of your patience. “I think I do, anyway. I was tryin’ to put the house up before we’d even checked if the ground takes a nail.”

You go quiet.

“That sounded better in my head,” he adds.

“No,” you say. “I get it.”

He risks looking at you again. “I want to help. Want to be here. That part’s true.”

“I know.”

“And the other part—” His mouth goes dry. “I liked last night. I want it. I want… you. I’m sayin’ that plain enough, aye?”

Your face changes, then closes slightly, as if plainness has still found a way to hurt. “Aye,” you say. “That’s plain.”

“But I don’t want ye thinkin’ I’m only here for that either.”

“I don’t.”

“And I’d rather it be me than some stranger,” he says, then blushes so hard it nearly makes him dizzy. “Jesus. Sorry. That came out—”

“No.” Your voice has gone quieter. “No, I understand.”

“It’s safer,” he says, grabbing for the practical rope before he drowns in the other thing. “I mean, with the baby and all. If it helps you. If you need it. Or want it. I can—” His face burns worse. “I can be that. For you.”

Your eyes stay on him. “You can be that.”

“If you want.”

"I do," you tell him. “So um… if we’re being practical.” Your jaw works once. “Is kissing allowed?”

Dunk blinks. Looks at your mouth and immediately has no right to answer anything requiring thought. “I’d like it to be.”

“Touching?”

“Aye.” His voice lowers. “If you want me touchin’.”

“I do.”

He swallows.

“What kind?” you ask, then regret shows on you in a hot flash. “Sorry. That sounded like a form.”

“It’s all right.” His hand flexes against the sheet. “The kind where ye tell me if I’ve gone wrong.”

“That’s broad.”

“I’m a broad fella.”

You laugh, and the sound loosens something in him. Then your face shifts again. “Protection?”

“Aye,” he says, too fast. “I was thinkin’—maybe we should. Or could. If ye wanted. For mess.”

Your brows pull in. He sees the mistake arrive before he knows which mistake it is.

“For mess?” you repeat.

“Aye. Just—”

“If you’re planning to keep seeing other people,” you say carefully, already moving yourself away by an inch without seeming to notice, “then yes, obviously. That would be safe. I mean, I’m not saying you can’t. We talked about it, didn’t we? So if you—”

“No.” Dunk nearly sits up. “No, no, that’s not what I meant.” You only gape at him. “Jesus, lass, that’s not what I meant.” His hand reaches this time and lands on your wrist. “I meant the actual mess. Sheets. You. Cleanin’ up after. I thought maybe it’d be easier for you.”

“Oh.”

“I told ye I’m not seein’ anyone.”

“I know.”

“I’m not.”

“Okay.”

“And I don’t want to.”

Your eyes lower to his hand around your wrist. “Okay.”

“Are you?”

“No.” Your answer comes quickly enough to calm some ugly thing in him. Then, quieter: “I’m obviously not seeing anyone either.”

“Good,” he says, then hears himself. “I mean—”

“It is good,” you say.

There is another silence. Different this time. Warmer and more dangerous.

“For what it’s worth,” you add, staring somewhere near his shoulder, “I don’t mind the mess.”

Dunk’s body takes the sentence disgracefully. He feels himself stir under the blanket with enough interest to make his soul sigh and leave him to it. You notice. Of course you notice. Your mouth parts by a fraction.

He shuts his eyes. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

“I’m tryin’ to have a serious conversation.”

“You can be hard during it. Multitasking.”

He laughs, boyish and powerless. You smile properly then, and for one small stretch of morning the thing between you becomes almost simple. Almost.

Because you are still looking at him with that carefulness. Because he is still holding back half the sentence in his mouth. Because both of you are making a shape around the same missing word and pretending the shape itself will do.

“So,” you say. “We keep it… between us?”

“Aye.”

“When I need it.”

“When you want it,” he corrects, then looks startled by his own nerve.

Your face softens. “When I want it,” you say.

“And if you don’t, ye say.”

“Yes.”

“And if I do something wrong—”

“I’ll say.”

“And if I get too—”

“Dunk,” you say, then put your hand on his chest. “You’re allowed to want things too.”

He lies very still under that, because the sentence has teeth. After a moment, he covers your hand with his. “Right,” he says, though it comes out clipped.

You nod, as if that has settled anything. Then you look down at your own body under his shirt, at your knees under the cover, at his hand on yours. “So this is very mature of us.”

“Aye,” he says. “Terribly.”

“Awful.”

“Near bureaucratic.”

It gets you. You press your face into his arm to hide the laugh, and Duncan lets himself turn into it, nose brushing your hair. Biscuits. Sleep. Skin. A trace of him, too, caught in cotton and warmth. His chest goes very full.

“Tea?” he asks after a while, because he has to put the feeling somewhere.

“Tea,” you agree. Then, smaller, before he can move: “And maybe stay here for another minute.”

Dunk closes his eyes. “Aye,” he says. “One minute.”

One minute becomes two, then God knows how many, because Dunk shifts, huffs softly through his nose, and fishes your hand out from under the duvet. He starts cautiously. Thumb over your knuckles. A rub at the side of one nail. The rough pad of his finger traces the crease where yours bends, nervous enough to make the whole thing feel less like idling and more like inquiry. How much of this is he allowed, when it is neither useful nor filthy. How long until one of you names it and ruins the little shelter it has made.

Then he opens his own hand beside yours and rests you against it.

The comparison is so unfair you nearly laugh. Your fingertips only reach the middle knuckles of his, and his palm sits beneath yours with room left over, warm and scored with small lines that look deeper for belonging to someone who does practical things badly and often.

“You’ve such small hands, lass,” he says.

“No I don’t.” Your voice wobbles at the edges, which is horrible of it. “You’ve giant paws.”

He smiles, but only barely, as if too much face might startle the permission away. His thumb slips into the hollow of your palm and tickles there once, then again, slower. You curl a little round it. He watches that happen with a dazed, soft sort of attention that makes you feel discovered in the worst place.

You roll closer. His arm tightens under you, then stills. For a second he goes careful all over. “How d’ye get anything done with such tiny hands, hm?” he murmurs.

Instead of answering, your other hand creeps from under the duvet and lands on his thigh. The muscle under it jumps. “I think you know how much I can get done with such tiny hands,” you say.

Dunk hiccups. Then, to his obvious horror, giggles. He clears his throat so hard it becomes a cough. “You’re a wee menace.”

“Mhm.” You close his hand around yours, then let him have it. “Go make that tea.”

It all works. Sort of. His feet touch the floor, and Duncan realises he's got exactly one T-shirt in here that's currently occupied, and worse, that he's naked and half-hard.

He contemplates options but one where he asks you to hand that shirt over doesn't even make it to the waiting list. He decides that if you could climb into a bath in front of him he can show some courage too.

So. Dunk mans up, or tries to. His feet touch the floor and he pushes himself upright to stand. He keeps his back to you and crosses to where his boxers have been abandoned on the floor. Crouching for them is a mistake in several directions, but he gets them hooked in his fingers, steps in and drags them up minding to sort his dick in there so that it doesn't look like it's screaming I'm needy first thing in the morning.

When he turns back, you have your face aimed very carefully at the window. Your mouth has gone into a put-upon, thoughtful pout, as if the curtains have presented you with some riveting theory. Dunk looks at you for half a second, then smiles. “Aye,” he says. “Very respectful.”

Your eyes flick to him and away again. “I’m looking at the light.”

“Course ye are.”

A grin. “What?”

“Mm.” He pushes the glasses up his nose with one finger, and lets himself enjoy the fact that you have to hide your face under the blanket. “I’ll be right back.”

You only hum to that. Wait for his footsteps to hush once he reaches the kitchen and allow yourself a little squeal into the pillow.

The girlishness he manages to drag out of you by existing near a kettle is ignominious. You are not sure he knows he spent half the night with his face pressed into the bend of your neck, humming and purring sweet little unconscious things like stay and smell nice whenever you shifted too far from the furnace of his chest. Then morning comes and he stands there abashed over a perfectly ordinary tent under the covers, as though your own body would not have betrayed you just as plainly if God had granted women the same crude signage.

All of it lays another brick in the awful construction of Duncan’s sexiness, which is strong and, frankly, a little lethal because he has no earthly notion of it. He is shy until pining gets the better of him. Needy enough that the shyness cannot survive long. Once something is given, he handles it with care. Listens. Anticipates. Looks for the place where your body has begun to ask once your mouth starts failing. It should make him less dangerous, that kindness. Somehow it makes him worse.

When he got up, you had taken to ogling his gorgeous round arse with such immediate appetite you forgot, for half a second, that both of you are here through necessity, accident, and one long chain of poor judgement. The rules are useful. Emotionally fraudulent, maybe, but useful all the same. They let you believe you are protecting the two of you from the version of intimacy that grows thorns later and cuts as resentment. They let you take what mirrors the thing you want while keeping a cloth over the contaminated parts.

Still, Dunk is right. This is better than strangers. If it stays inside this out-of-time pocket pregnancy has made for you, perhaps it is survivable. Perhaps it is even sensible. You remain close. You have somebody to lean on. Dunk misses less, you explain to yourself, staring at the pale scratch of sunlight on the floorboards. The two of you can practise easing into the strange family-shaped arrangement that will be waiting once your body finishes one labour and the rest of your life begins another.

You sit up in the bed and look towards the window. A husk hangs from the sill on a translucent thread, gutted clean by whatever abandoned it. It's split down the back, papery and crumbling, and the thing that has rearranged itself in it has cut its way out and flown off without your eyes on it.

Duncan comes back with two steaming cups and a mean reminder of how broad his chest is. He sits at the foot of the bed and turns the cup in his hand so that you can take it by the ear. "I've put toasts on, too," he says.

You nod with your mouth hidden into the rim. "I'll give you your shirt back in a minute," you say, seeing how he curls into himself. It's a large pity, large enough to rival him, for you'd love to just keep him around like this. "I have uh… spare towels and toothbrushes in the bathroom. If you want to, I mean—"

"I thought," Dunk starts. "It's Saturday. I thought we could still sort out the nursery. If you want."

"Really?" you say. "That'd be great. Yeah, I would love that. The room's ready, we just need to put things in it."

"Grand." His cup finds yours and they clink.

You smile into your tea. Get up. At the wardrobe you open one door and disappear half behind it, bare legs visible below the wood. “We could probably do the same thing at yours,” you say from in there. “Sometime later. When you feel like it. A nursery, I mean, or a corner?”

Dunk nods before he remembers you cannot see him. The thought lands strangely. It reminds him painfully that the arrangement will be divided into two households. That, inevitably, you will come to his flat and set your feet on the floor and, to Duncan, symbolically, it means things getting crossed off. Your voice reaches him. “Dunk?”

He blinks. “A-aye. Yeah. We ought to do that.”

You come out in cotton shorts and a T-shirt still large on you, though much smaller than his, and kneel beside him on the mattress. “Here,” you say, passing him back his one. Then, after a beat, softer: “You can stay over here as much as you want when the baby is born, you know that, right? I just thought it’d be good for you to have things at your place too.”

Dunk takes the shirt from you. “I know,” he says, though his throat has gone a bit narrow with it. He hands you his cup and ducks into the cotton to get sucker-punched by his private version of tangerine dream. The whole thing is warm from you. Smells of sleep and your skin and the sweet rot of whatever lotion has survived the night. It settles over his shoulders as if it has learned him from inside your body and came back altered. He has to sit still for a second with his head only half through the neck-hole, sightless and enormous, before he can finish pulling it down.

When his face reappears, you are looking at him with your mouth tucked in. “What?” he asks.

“Nothing.”

“That’s not a nothin' face.”

“It is.” You reach over and tug the hem straight for him, fingers brushing his stomach through cotton. “You looked very heroic, fighting your own shirt.”

“Mm, a hard battle,” he says, grave as he can manage.

He listens to your laughter with focus meant for the speech of people wiser than him. Finishes his tea and waits for you to finish yours. Then, you show him around the bathroom while Duncan pretends he doesn't know where things are and nods thoughtfully at every stop of the tour. Once it's wrapped, he quells an urge to kiss your forehead and maybe slap your ass lightly. He showers with the soap he's used that one time before, then joins you in the kitchen for breakfast.

First, Dunk snorts at the disparity of plates. Yours holds one sad toast while his overflows with bread, eggs and sausages. When he shots you a questioning look you only shrug and send a don't judge me face in his direction. So Duncan sits. Eats. Tries to not think much about hands that made it for him.

In this mundane moment, Dunk’s memory manages to dim all the girls he has ever smothered into hurting him. Compared to what he feels now, those loves seem skinny. Starved at the ribs. This one is embryonic but ever-growing, blind and hungry and insisting on itself without any shame.

He watches you nibble at the bread’s crust and chase every bite with a sip of tea. One leg perched on the seat of the chair, you do not look at him, only scroll through emails on your phone with your mouth set flatter by the second. He sees how it fleeces the morning bliss off you, bit by bit. Then decides to take the role you keep offering. Someone who has a say in it. Someone who can want things.

“Have ye thought about takin’ leave already?” he asks.

“Hm?” You lift your head. “Oh, yeah, I just…” Your gaze drops back to the phone, then away from it. “I don’t know what I’d be doing with the time, you know?”

Dunk considers that a minute. Wipes his greasy mouth, cringes a little, then rests an arm across the table, ruling halfway through the movement to leave you untouched after all. His fist closes instead.

“We could… I dunno.” He takes a sip of coffee. “We could figure that out. Together, I mean. I’ll have more time soon.”

“Oh?” you say. “Right. School’s ending.”

“Mhm. Few weeks.” Dunk nods. “I’ll still have summer coaching and the activity programme with the kids, but it’s not full-time. We could prepare a bit better. Meet Ray and Red. Maybe you could…”

“What?”

“Come to a game,” he says, quieter. “Meet Egg. If ye want.”

You go still for long enough that Dunk regrets it. Then, you put your phone face down and rest your palm over his fist. It loosens under you. His fingers thread through yours.

“That sounds good,” you tell him. “I probably could use some time off.”

Dunk nods.

You look down at your joined hands, then back at him. “You ready for the nursery?”

Dunk sweeps the room with vacant eyes. “Aye,” he says. “Think so.”

The nursery has been waiting with its door closed. He doesn't know when the painting was done, nor does he ask by whom, because each possible version delivers a small resentment. Had it been you alone, Dunk would scold you for not seeking help. Had it been anyone else, he'd be wounded about not being the first choice. When the door opens, both of you lean on the frame as if bare walls might turn and ask what exactly you think you are doing here. There are boxes stacked by the skirting board, a rolled rug, cot in the exact middle, a changing table flat-packed in a carton with arrows pointing which side is up for some reason. A lamp shaped like a moon. Three soft baskets that smell of new rope and shop dust.

You tell him the changing table should go under the shelf. Dunk measures the wall again though it's been measured twice already, then lifts the table as if it has no weight and puts it exactly where you point. “There?” he asks.

“A little left.”

He shifts it a little left.

“No, your left.”

Dunk's mouth quirks. “That was my left.”

“Your other left, then.”

He gives you a look over his shoulder, wounded by female sense of directions, and you laugh hard enough that he smiles fully. The room eases by one small notch.

After that, the two of you become very serious about things that are very serious only to new parents. Which drawer gets the vests. Whether nappies should live closer to the wipes or closer to the little bin with its impressive system of odour containment. Dunk folds three tiny sleepsuits. You unfold one, refold it worse, and he says nothing, only fixes it when he thinks you are looking elsewhere.

“I saw that,” you say.

“I didn’t do anythin’.”

“You think I can’t fold baby clothes.”

“I think,” Dunk says, eyes on the drawer, “there’s a chance the baby will want its legs in the leg bits.”

You stare at him.

His mouth twitches. “That’s all.”

A muslin hits his head. He catches it without looking, which is so irritatingly impressive you have to turn away and busy yourself with the baskets.

Slowly, the space stops looking like storage and begins to acquire intent. Sheet goes on round the mattress. The little blanket folds over the rail. The lamp finds the corner. Books line up on the low shelf, bright spines and silly animals and one about a tractor Dunk claims is important because children ought to have options. You put the first packet of nappies in place, then stand there with your hand still on it. “Yeah,” you say, to no one.

Dunk looks up from where he is kneeling by a drawer. “What?”

“No, just. Yes. This looks… fine.”

“Aye.” He follows your gaze, then nods too hard. “Yeah. It does. Looks nice.”

There's a hollow, mouth-biting silence after that. Nice is a stupid little word for a room that now contains future. It's too small to express the enormity of the folded clothes that wait for a body neither of you has held yet. Nice is what's said because the real thing is a cutthroat.

Dunk gets up. You both stand in the middle of it with your foreheads set into brave shapes. “This is nice,” you say again, worse this time.

“Aye,” Dunk says. “I like it.”

You glance at him, and his face destroys you. His eyes are red-rimmed behind the lenses, magnified into bareness. Nothing held back on him. Duncan is a pretty crier because nearly none of him frowns. He just sweats tears out of those baby-blues until they adorn his lashes and drop onto cheeks. There's no attempt at hiding, only a fist at the ready to wipe the excess had it blurred his vision.

A complete opposite of you. Mouth slicing itself into a lopsided crescent from the force of trying to keep it inside, then plain ugly sobbing. It erupts from bawling eyes to a painful choke on the back of a mouth. Then snot comes thick and unstoppable, smears the upper lip with salt, and all of you becomes shiny in a way that would cake up any powder.

“Why are you crying?” he asks, voice breaking.

“I’m not crying,” you say, immediately crying. “You’re crying.”

His mouth twitches, then fails. “Am I?”

"Yes, Duncan," you wail. "Visibly."

Duncan steps in as if called by it. The room does a strange thing to a private wound in him. Bursts open the scar tissue that's grown round abandonment. Tends it, cleans it, stitches the evened edges and kisses it better. Small things do that to people. He feels welcome to walk barefoot on the fluffy rug and flick the carousel of geese into a stroll. There's a family for him somewhere in here, and you are a third of it. He doesn't know what kind of wrong has its fingers around your throat, but steps in all the same, because it doesn't really matter.

He gathers you against his chest and the two of you stand there leaking stupidly into each other. “Lass,” he murmurs, palm at the back of your head. “Hey. C’mere.”

“I’m here,” you say into his shirt, which now carries an imprint of your face like it's a fucking Veil of Veronica. “I’m very clearly here.”

“I know.”

“Why’re you crying?” you ask again.

His hand stills, then moves again. "Happy," he lies. “Jus' happy."

You pull back. “Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Lie badly.”

Dunk's face works. For one flicker you think he might tell you something. Something old. Then he only cups your face in both hands and wipes beneath your eyes with his thumbs. His own are worse. Damn tender and unfair in their size. “And you?” he asks. “Why’re you cryin’?”

You try to answer like a normal woman with control over her organs. The effect is half-strangled, half-mangled through teeth and comes out jittery. “I’m—" you hiccup, "scared I… I won’t be… a good mum.”

He stares at you, genuinely baffled. "Sweetheart," he says, as if it's all dead simple. "You'll be an incredible mam."

Laughter comes abrupt and deranged, hitting the surface of his lenses in wet little spots. Duncan says it like the matter has been already inspected and passed. It makes the idea briefly possible. "You don't know that," you tell him.

“I do.”

“You don’t.”

“I do,” he says again, with the same conviction he's used to persuade you municipal swamp is green. He brings your hand to his mouth and kisses your knuckles. Then knuckles of the other one. Then the hollow of it while your fingers brush his nose. Then your wrist, where the pulse knocks and knocks. "I do know."

“Dunk—”

A kiss on the forehead cuts you off. Long and determined. It makes you gasp and you hope that Dunk will read the gasping as one of the necessary phases for calming down. You clutch the shirt on his stomach, then, with no better plan than needing less fabric between you, you push your palms underneath it. Touch the life of his ribs. His muscles jerk.

“I only trust you,” you say, staring at the damp hollow at the base of his throat, “because you’ll be a great dad.”

He does that thing in the face that heralds the slackening of the whole body. Galvanised within himself to push past the layers of fear, Duncan bends and kisses you deep enough to make the both of you stumble. His hands frame your face, then neck, then shoulders, undecided. "Girl, what are you doin'—" he mutters into it. "What're you doin' to me?"

Loving you, you think, unbidden. You mumble a thing that has a shape of his name but doesn't survive the journey from throat to mouth. Set your fingers on his back and try to pull him closer.

He hums and starts walking. Stops kissing, but stays mouth to mouth. His thumbs and forefingers cuff round your elbows, twitching. There are heavy nasal breaths and working throats and between one swallow and the next Duncan stares at you through those damp, heifer-like lashes as if the answer might be printed somewhere on your face.

"Where's this goin'?" he asks.

"To the—" you stammer. "To bed. If you want."

His whole chest sinks on the exhale. "Thank God," puffs out of him.

Then—arms. A strongman’s foreplay begins with Duncan’s palms finding your arse like it’s signposted. He gets you up with a grunt that nurtures relief where effort should be, and your body remembers the route with alarming ease. It's the third time now. Three times out of three, you have failed to get yourself to bed under your own power where Duncan is concerned. The thought brings another one behind it, bad and quick-footed: perhaps this is simply what he does with women. Perhaps all that size has made a habit of carrying girls through doorways and making them feel singular for the length of one corridor.

You shut that down with both legs round his waist and both hands at his neck, because thinking has done very little for you lately besides invent pain. This belongs to me, you tell yourself, with no court of appeal available. The lift, the hands, the breath punched out of him when you settle against his stomach. Him. All of it yours for as long as he keeps walking.

He kisses you through it. The shape of him between your thighs, already interested, makes a hard bid against you. In the bedroom he lowers you to the mattress with care so anxious it turns clumsy at the last inch. Your back bounces, and he follows you down halfway before catching himself on both arms. There, he hovers, huge, open-mouthed, and trembles for it, and you know damn well it is not from the weight on his shoulders because you tremble too while holding nothing.

Your fingers hook in the hem of his shirt and lift. Dunk straightens enough to help you; yields his arms and head so you can drag it off him. On the other side of cotton he's a mess with his glasses endearingly askew. "There," you say, placing a palm on his cheek.

He huffs, embarassed, scrunches his eyes and smiles with a tongue pushed against the backs of his teeth. Then his hands find your shorts. He searches first, gets your nod, and that is all it takes. The waistband drags down your hips by the work of patient fingers, resists where you're sunken into the bed so you lift, and you could swear he breathes out a little yes.

Around nudity, you tense. Duncan sees it. "There," he says and bends to press his mouth to your stomach.

In current circumstances it is such a strange place to be kissed right before sex that you laugh like an idiot, and ugly too—phlegmy and cracked and wet in a way that you're certain is not attractive. But Duncan looks up with his eyes gone red for entirely different reasons than five minutes ago. "You said kissin's alright," he says.

"I did."

“So—” His palm smooths down your thigh to the knee, broad and calloused like low-grain sandpaper. He gets under the joint and makes it bend, lifts until the leg opens from the hip and leaves you spread in a way that has both of you breathing through the nose. Mouth set judiciously where your belly swells from the pubic bone, he mutters, “—I’m kissin’.”

His body starts moving like communicating vessels: one crawling thing follows another. Crawling palm kickstarts lips. “Still kissin’,” Duncan says, and lies, because now he’s licking. He has his tongue set broad across your navel, travelling upwards until it meets the border of your shirt’s hem.

That invites his other hand to lift it. He bunches the cotton above your tits and continues the kissin’ between your breasts. His hips creep up too, first to your mid-thighs, then level with yours, and the weight of him releases some tension from your loins. He’s wide enough to keep you open by his presence alone, so the hand at the hinge of your knee remains soft. Thumb brushing the side of it. Small. Careful. Damning.

Your palm and finds his hair. Fingers apart, you comb through the roots, then become meaner with the pulling once his stubble brushes your nipple. “Dunk,” you say. “Come here.”

He does, badly. Too much of him for grace, he comes there fast and heavy. Hooks your leg around his hip and presses his clothed, warm cock to your cunt. “Shite,” he hisses when you tug the hairs at his nape. He looks at you, and when you think there will be more kissin’, he stays frozen, just gaping.

“Don’t look like that,” you say.

“Like what?”

“Like I’ve done something to you.”

His eyes drop, then lift. “Haven’t ye?”

He seems a bit shocked by his own answer, so to save him from it you reach for his face and pull him down. Allow yourself the wet and neatless pass of tongue through his mouth. Your leg tightens round him because your body is quick to throw invitation now the brain is ridden with persistent fuck it. Fuck me instead.

Duncan’s hand goes down between you and gets stupid with the practicalities. He could have thought this through better. Could have undressed properly, could have come to bed with some sort of sequence in mind, but details of lovemaking keep leaving him the second your mouth opens under his. He only wants to be close. The rest is laces, waistbands, cloth, mortal hindrance. He shoves at his boxers one-handed, gets them low enough to make use of himself, and winces when the cotton scrapes the head of his cock.

Then, skin meets skin and a sigh falls out of him in one long, shattered piece.

He fits his fist round the base to guide himself. Thumb pressed just under the head, he squeezes until the dew pearls out, slick and clear, then drags it through you. Slow first, because he deludes himself that slow might save him. The crown parts the wet seam of you bluntly, slides up, catches over your clit, and comes back down to nudge at the entrance with no entering done. Your whole body gives a small, greedy twitch to that. His does worse.

“Christ,” he says into your mouth.

Again. A little firmer. His cock learns the route by the fractions: clit, slit, soft clutch of the opening, back up through the mess he has made wetter by being in it. He mixes himself with your sweet sap until the slide acquires sound. The tender parts of you speak through glimmer and greed, while his answer is held in the wrist, in the rippling stomach, and the balls drawn tight enough to feel like someone's holding them.

You bite his lower lip because you cannot think of a sentence worth the effort. He groans, and that makes more of him leak into his own hand. It gets spread back through you on the next pass. There is something near argumentative in it, the way he keeps refusing to give you the thing both of you are braced for. Your hips keep lifting to steal it from him. His knuckles brush your pussy lips each time he works himself down. The heel of his palm grazes the damp hair. He shudders as if the contact keeps running up his spine and knocking something loose behind the eyes.

“Duncan,” you breathe.

“Aye,” he says, uselessly. “Aye, I know.”

He does know. Knows, because your fingers seem dead set on claiming some of his hair for themselves with how viscously you tug. There's a flex to your thigh, hips canting restlessly once the tip of his cock presses where it ought to go but slides away. The tenderest parts of the both of you keep quarrelling, negotiating, resolving, while the faces are busy enduring the wait. Duncan watches yours as if watching a match held to paper.

"Come on," you say, looping both arms round his neck. "Dunk, please."

"But, luv—" he strains, resting his forehead to your mouth. But you're so tight, Dunk wants to say. He laughs, and thank God, you read it as I'm on it. While what Duncan means is I'm sorry for this. Sorry for putting you here. Sorry for liking you so much I forgot to pull out. Sorry for every inch of me and the exact opposite too. "Okay," he says. "Okay."

His hips adjust to stop lying about themselves, and he breaches you slowly. You take him in laborious, exerting shards that make his spine empty of sense. Warmth closes around his length stern as a stubborn mouth and his own puffs out air so suddenly his cheeks swell with it.

He's halfway through when you whine from the bottom of your furious body and cant up for more. "Aye," he says. "Aye, I'm here."

Another inch. The grip is so snug and living the whole of his chest becomes devoted to the passage. His brain too, and his hands, and skin that reddens under your touch and Duncan wonders if scalps can bruise from hair being gripped too ardently. He sinks the last of himself, and when his lower belly meet you, Duncan stops breathing. His body arrives late to the place his heart has been making a fool of itself over for weeks. "There," he says. "There ye are."

You relax around the fullness. Yes, this is right. Your eyes scan him, and find that the lens nearest you is fogged at the edge. And suddenly, you want him bearer, just to see him plain. So you reach for the glasses, and ask, "Can I take those off?"

Dunk huffs a breath. The movement shifts him inside you by some wicked measure and both of you pretend to endure it normally.

"I won't see a thing," he says.

"I know." You slide the glasses off and set them somewhere safe by your pillow. Without them, his face changes. Equally handsome, but transmuted into another kind of comeliness. He's less goofy, more exposed. Somehow more mature and vulnerable. His eyes lose their hard outline, start searching badly and wrinkling where he tries to squint. You cup his jaw and bring him down until his ear is at your mouth. "How about you just listen to me?" you whisper.

The twitch inside you is immediate. "Oh?" you say. Duncan only breathes out a fragmented chuckle. You stroke his cheek with your thumb. "You like that?"

His throat works, excruciatingly thorough, to swallow that gulp down. His hips slip again, then stop, as if there is someone outside of him scolding the misbehaving parts. "Girl," he pleads.

"You do." Your mouth brushes the shell of his ear and his whole back sets until some hard-working vertebrae clicks. "That's good to know."

He pulls back enough to sweep your face and finds, possibly, the shape of your smile. His eyes narrow, poor useless things, and he looks set up by the natural order of things. “You’re very pleased with yourself,” he says.

"A bit."

"Aye, well." He swallows again. His voice has gone thick where he's meant for it to be firm. "Mind yourself then."

You bring him back down. Dunk comes willingly, like he always does when something's been asked of him. His mouth opens against your neck as if that's a grounding thing to do, and he thrusts carefully, deep enough to make your leg flex against his side. The pressure against his ribs is warm, the hand at his nape warmer, and the lips next to his ear border torrid.

"You feel so good," you tell him.

He groans, surrendering the baritone to a higher pitch. "Jesus—"

"So good, Dunk."

"Don't say it like that."

"Like what?"

"As if—" He takes another breath and moves through it. Cock drags slow and proper, particular enough for you to feel the whole thick length of him leaving and coming back. "As if you know."

"I do know."

You might not be an expert on how to execute the part after winning men that makes them brave enough to tell you all the things you yearn to hear (I love you, I love you, I love you), but this—this, you know. You know where they are softhearted. You know how to find this part. Despite what your mother said, it is not wicked. It's listening for key words that quieten their voices, and looking where eyes ought to be set. Dunk seems to be good at this too, because he reads the cues with surprising proficiency. Whether by guess or wisdom, it eludes you, but he manages to be there when you need a hug, a good word, a joke, a shoulder, or now, a fuck. What kind of fuck, he understands quickly too. You don’t yet pass judgement on the intention behind it: if he means to stay for long, or if he has simply recognised the means to an end. The version in which this is just the way he has sex, unperformed and therefore wholly aligned with you, doesn’t even make it to your head.

And Dunk is softhearted in many places. He’s unbearably tender when it comes to tending bodies, as if each part of you deserves kindness. It’s only natural to conclude he’d like that back, in one form or another. He reacts to praise as though it puts ground under his feet. Keeps finding ways to be useful, offering himself in small practical pieces, as if saying notice me, notice me, I am here, without understanding at all that it is impossible to not notice him. If someone in his past failed to see the easiness to love him that he comes with, they were either dumb or cruel in the throat. The only thing in him that halts the loving is the fearful nature of frail hearts. You recognise that like you are both made of similar clay, even if you cannot put a finger on the exact place where it hurts. In cases such as Duncan and yourself, bravery arrives in steps. Valour blooms rather than surges, so you give him a small brick for the lifeblood to keep building. Praise him for the way he is. Just this.

"I do know," you tell him. "You're so patient with me. So careful. I like that."

It costs him some. The hand under your knee pulses, fingers pressing, loosening, pressing again. His stomach jumps against yours, fills with a deep breath, then corrects itself to not flatten you.

"See?" you coo. Pour the sweetness straight into his ear canal so the only thing received by cochlea is that he is being good. "I love how heavy you are. How well you fill me. Fuck, Duncan—" He hits you just right, on the right there. You tighten, and keep muttering, "You're so good to me. So fucking good to me, my good boy."

"Ah—f-fuck—" he snaps, shocked and half-pained.

"Duncan."

He makes the mistake of lifting his head when you say his name. Blind as he is, he still finds your mouth. Kisses you hard, then badly, then breaks to inhale. His hair has fallen over his forehead. Without the glasses he looks dismantled in a more private way, as if you have caught him between skins. "Say it again," he mumbles.

You blink. "What?"

His ears turn crimson. He keeps thrusting. Stays deep, because that's when your body keeps rewarding his with blissful little clenches. Discipline fleets him, and Duncan forgets altogether how to keep himself in reins. It feels too good. Brushes the cords too accurately. "What you said," he rasps.

"That you're good to me?"

He shuts his eyes.

Oh. So that is where it lives.

You pull him closer with the heel of your foot and start speaking into his lips. "You're good to me," you say, slower. "You're good at this. Perfect at this. You make me feel—oh—" You have to stop there, because the next stroke takes the end of the sentence and folds it under your tongue.

Dunk hears enough. Perhaps more than enough. His face comes down beside yours and he starts fucking you with his mouth at your cheek, breathing there, taking the praise like punches he intends to keep as bruises.

"You're beautiful," you whisper. "You know that?"

"N-no." He shakes his head.

"Yes." Your fingers push into his hair. "You are. So handsome. You're so pretty like this."

"Girl," he wheezes. "Girl, I can't—"

"You can." You kiss the corner of his mouth. "You can take it."

You break some working piece in him. He gives one fuller push, then another, and a sound, too open, too surprised, leaves him. His whole body locks above you. "Shite, I—" he gasps. "Shite, wait—"

It takes him too early. You afflict him, his ears and nose and neck with those delicate touches that make the roots of Dunk's hair buzz. With your voice, so fucking loving, it makes his brain melt and threaten to leak. It's all too much. He comes, hideous for trying to withhold it, strong for you being the cause of it, and shivers violently through his every giant muscle. His cock kicks deep with each wrung out spill, face drops to your shoulder, then whole of him follows the drowning to fold around you. The noise he makes there is loud enough to shame him later, if you let it.

You do nothing except hold him. For several seconds Duncan doesn't speak. He focuses on breathing instead and maybe not turning to ash under the blaze of shame. Not one, but a title of few-pumps-chump has finally been handed to him with a shitty confetti and a stale flute of cheap champagne. He stays seated inside you and trembling through the last of it. When he tries to lift himself, his arms disagree.

"I'm sorry," he says, hoarse. “I didn’t mean to—” His pelvis shifts by accident and he winces, oversensitive and still hard enough to make the smallest movement count. “Fuck.”

"Dunk." You press your mouth to his temple. Smooth the hair off his forehead. "Don't be. There's nothing to be sorry for, hm?"

"But you didn't—" he huffs, sounding furious with himself and deeply far away.

A smile, or so he thinks. "I'm okay," you say.

"You didn't finish."

"No," you say. His brows knit. It makes him look so abysmally disappointed that for a beat you consider scraping that and lying.

He lies back down, nuzzling his face to your neck. "Then talk to me," he says.

Your stomach does an unbecoming, joyous little flip. "What?"

“Talk to me,” he says again, quieter. His voice has rawed its own edges, embarrassed and determined both. “Please. I can stay. Jus'—tell me things.”

You smirk. “What things?”

Duncan scowls. “Cruel woman.”

Your hand starts playing with his hair again. Scratching at the scalp, pulling gently. “You want me to praise you back into fucking me?”

Dunk’s eyes close. “Aye,” he says. “If you’re offerin’.”

What moves through you borders unkind. You hook both legs along his sides, cross them on his arse and turn your face to his ear. "So listen," you say.

He's so obedient his entire body slackens as if hearing is achieved through epidermis. For a while, he does just that. Listens with his lashes lowered since sight has become a luxury, and useless to him anyway. He's just touch and sound.

"You're so hot like this," you whisper. His fingers twitch on your shoulder. "You are. All fucked out and sorry for yourself." Against your neck his lips move and draw the shape of Christ. You brush the sweaty curl at his temple. "Your cock feels so good inside me," you say, softer, because it's a less generic truth. "See? You came and I'm still full of you."

Dunk makes a sound rid of consonants. His face turns an inch, mouth opening at your throat because it needs to be put somewhere to not grow loud. You feel him pulse once, tired and sore, and then another thing starts under it. A tiny return. Thickening that makes you rethink your approach on I can take you once again.

“I like it,” you tell him. “The mess you make. I like knowing it’s there.”

“Lass—”

“Makes me feel special.”

That one hurts him. Pleases him too, which may be the hurt of it. He gives the smallest aborted press, an insidious tremor of a body that wants to eat more than it can hold, but it drags through you slickly enough that both of you go quiet. He hisses through his teeth. The overburden of senses has him by the nerves. You can feel it as an argument within the muscles. Pleasure with a hot little blade tucked inside it.

You slide your palm down his back. Sweat has pooled at the dip of his spine and over his shoulders. “I like how big you are,” you say. “How you spread me open just by being there.”

Duncan shudders. His cock gives another slow, disbelieving throb.

“Oh,” you coo. “There he is.”

“Mean,” he mutters, but stays exactly where he is with his ear offered. He wants the cruelty by handful. Wants it ladled warm into the hollow places. Wants to be destroyed by kindness because kindness is the thing he has least defence against.

“You like it?” you ask. He nods once. “Can you tell me with words?”

A pause. His throat works against your skin. “A-aye.”

“Good.”

His whole body rises to that, a rough tightening from shoulders to arse. He moves by mistake, a shallow slip in and out, and the noise bursts from him with such pained sweetness your fingers tense in his hair.

“Careful,” you murmur, though care has begun to look like a strange medicine.

There's a laugh, short and bitten. “Tryin’,” Dunk says.

He always does, which might be a thing that turns you more sombre. “I know you are,” you say and get taken off-guard by how lovesick you sound. You plant a kiss at the place behind his ear. “That’s what I like.”

Duncan goes still again. Listening so hard his body seems to have turned all its chambers towards you. “I like your shoulders,” you say, and let your hand prove it. Sweep over one broad slope, then the other. “I like your sweet face. Especially when you’re inside me.” At that, his breath leaves him in pieces.

There is more. There is a daft, impossible amount more. It crowds up on your tongue in unsayable particulars. I like that your front teeth face inward a little and seem slightly too large for the civil architecture of your mouth. I like the freckle on your left cheek. I like that your left eye crinkles more than the right when you laugh. I like your feet. I like the soft of your stomach. I like your voice in the morning and what you feel like in bed beside me. I like. I like, I like, I like—

You spare him and do not spare him at all. “You’re so pretty, Duncan.”

His hips jerk again. There. No use pretending that one missed. Inside his head the answers to each of your praises start piling up. I like your sweet face too. He bites the thought down and tastes your skin instead. I like your shoulders too. I like your hands. I like them in my hair. I like your laugh when it turns to cackle. I like when you cook and get cross at the pan. I like when you go snotty while crying. I like your tits. I like your arse. I like your thighs. I like the weight of you. I like waking up with one of your hairs stuck to my mouth. I—

“F-fuck,” Duncan hisses through an involuntary back-stabbing twitch.

It's slippery. Lovely. He moves through his own spent and feels the sting prickle from the tip of his cock to the base of his spine like thousands of insects' wings fluttering between layers of skin. His mouth goes so wide the jaw clicks, hand finds your hip, grips, releases, then grips again with a gentleness that comes out more desperate than on purpose.

“Too much?” you ask.

He shakes his head. “N-no.”

In a quick assessment Duncan realises he is fully hard again. Worse than before, somehow. His cock feels harder than it has any right to, bigger too for the swell of deliciously tormented tissue. Blood fills him so utterly he gets light-headed with it and has one fleeting, cowardly thought that maybe men go soft after disgracing themselves for a reason and ought to leave their luck alone. Because this feels stolen. Forbidden in how sweetly it spreads through him. He is bathed in himself and your slick, trembling with it, and still some jurisdiction of the hips returns to him. Enough to roll them into you heavily and whisper, "Keep talkin'. Keep talkin' to me, sweetheart. Please."

It arrives so raw you nearly lose your nerve. Nearly. With the shift inside, your body, faithless and bright, remembers what it was promised. "You're doing so well, Duncan. You're so good. Look at me, darling."

He goes where your palm orders his chin and looks vaguely at where your face should be. It's blurry and he's not certain a case would be different if he had his glasses on. "I want ye to feel good, lassie. I want to be good for you. Oh, fuck—"

Your chest tightens like a hand closing round glass. You smooth your thumb under his eye, where he is hot and damp. “You are,” you tell him. "Kiss me."

He lowers his mouth to yours and lets them meet with too much gratitude, open lips driven by poor coordination. The kiss makes him move into a shallow glide. He is filling out properly, impossible and worried inside you, honed through the overbright ache because praise stomps on every other version of comfort and laughs at it.

"There you are," you say. "Oh fuck, there you are. Right there—"

"Yeah?" Dunk says. Starts pulling back farther, enough to make you protest the loss. When he slides in again both of you feel the second life of him. He brushes the rawest depths. The mess you claim to like so much gets pumped back in with a sound so wet and filthy the burn in Duncan's ears begins to feel cold.

"Yes—" you moan. Clench around him as if welcoming the insult. "God, you're so good—"

He whimpers. Quiet and punched out. Buries his face into your shoulder immediately after as if a noise so vulnerable doesn't have the right to exist in his body.

The sound spills across your chest and bleeds into your fingers. “Oh, Dunk.”

“Don’t make a thing of it.”

“I’m making several things of it.”

“Lass.”

“You sound beautiful,” you tell him, with a face so soft it could kill him.

His whole body flinches. “Jesus, woman.”

“You do.” You pull at his hair until his face comes back where you want it. “You sound beautiful when you want me.”

Duncan stares in your general direction, eyes narrowed and wet, lips parted around breaths he has forgotten to ration. Then his hips move again, and again, each stroke careful out of necessity, each one less careful because you keep rewarding him for it.

I like when you want me too, he thinks, frantic with it. I like when you need me. I love—

He squeezes his lids shut. Whole cliff edge waits under one syllable.

You kiss him before he can fall off it and murmur, “Good boy,” against his mouth.

The last of the strategy leaks off with the sweat at Dunk's temple. He thrusts deeper, shakes harder with the cost of it, and your back arches clean off the bed. Pleasure opens low and hot, fed by the weight of him, the broken sounds, the knowledge that you have put your mouth to some hidden hinge in him and made it swing wide.

“Again,” he says, barely there.

You smile against his lips. “My good boy.”

His cock jumps inside you so hard you gasp. He hears that too. Even without sight, he is learning you by damage and reward. He finds the rhythm by your sounds and keeps his face so close your words have nowhere to go except to him.

“Perfect,” you whisper. “I'm so close, Dunk. Keep fucking me like this. God, you're lovely—” A groan, then another careful stroke. Your thumbs brush under his lower lashes in a sweet little I'm here, I'm here with you. It's not really fair to be able to see his face opened so cleanly while he can't see yours, but the partial anonymity pours some courage down your throat. "I don't know who taught you to be ashamed of wanting," you say, "but they were wrong."

Duncan whines out your name. Torn and bruised by his teeth. The sound of it said like that tips you. You cradle his head to your neck and come with your mouth full of his hair. It seizes you crude and complete, legs and arms locking so hard he has nothing left to do but stay buried and take what your body milks out of him. “My good boy,” you whisper through it. “Duncan, my good boy—”

Good boy. Good boy is what Dunk has always wanted to be, and has tried to be, and still nobody has told him so. Good boy said with conviction by both your mouth and body is what lures him into following you into his second orgasm. He comes again, and worse for it. Loud this time, and costly. His whole body fights itself over where to put the force of it, lower stomach clenching, calf near mangled from the effort of keeping his weight off you. His voice breaks somewhere above his own size. “Ah—Christ, girl—ah, fuck—” Then he spends another load inside you, bathing his cock hot, while your cunt keeps pulling at him in ruthless aftershocks as if it has claimed him now and wants payment.

You keep him trapped by every limb you have. Keep him there while he shudders, while his hips give their last helpless stammers into yours, while his breath falls apart against your throat. It feels brutal for how close it is. For how much of yourselves you have both put into the other without saying the sensible things first.

When it passes, Duncan stays braced over you, trembling. His mouth works near your skin. “Y-you—you—” he stammers. “You make such a mess of me.” He blinks, then palms the mattress for his glasses. Finds them and manages to slide them on one-handed, though not entirely well for they sit on his nose crooked. But at least he can see you again. And Jesus fucking Christ—

The love is no longer embryonic. It has managed to gestate into some sort of Leviathan in the span of one fuck. He looks at what he's done to you and cannot believe his eyes. All of you looks warm. Face melted of every wrinkle it could produce, you lay below him blissed and gorgeous and Dunk feels as if he's going to need to step out from his own skin if he doesn't thank you. For this. For listening. For seeing him and guiding him when he's blind.

"God, girl, what was that?" he says. "What've you done to me?"

You regain the ability to frown. Your brows knit, worried, and you perch yourself higher on one elbow. "Are you not well?" you ask, brushing his cheek. "Have I—"

"No." Then, Duncan laughs. Not because he's happy, though he is, and not because anything is being particularly funny. His body chooses laughter for him. He puts his palm to your jaw and touches your lower lip. Presses on it, stretches it, and it's so glossy it slips away. "Yer not real," he says. "Yer an impossible girl."

A smile splits you, weird and uncanny. It lacks the eyes. Confused, you whisper, "Duncan?"

He answers the sound of his name with his mouth. Poorly at first. A little startled, a little overbrave, a kiss dragged from some place in him still smoking. He catches your lower lip, lets it go, comes back for the corner, then the whole of you, and the further he gets from the post-nut clarity, the more careful he becomes. His hand settles at your neck with a tenderness that feels borrowed from later life.

You let him. Let the kiss calm into something with breathing in it. When he pulls back, his forehead stays close to yours. “How d’you know me so well?” he asks, almost accusing.

Your eyes soften. “I could ask you the same,” you say.

If you did, you'd hear that I love ye, and it cannot be right of you. Duncan goes still above you. “Aye,” he says, though it barely counts as speech.

You brush your thumb over the corner of his mouth. “What?”

“I’ve never had it like that in my life,” he says, blushing fiercely. “I don’t know what it means, or if it has to mean anythin’, but I just—shite, I’m sorry, I jus'—”

“Me too,” you say. He blinks. You nod, because he looks like he needs the second strike of it. “Me too. I wasn’t lying about anything.”

“Thank you,” Dunk says. It is the first thing he can find that is small enough to fit his mouth. Then he shifts, and the small thing gets ruined. “Ah—shite.”

He tries to pull out carefully. Careful does not save either of you. The slip of him leaving is uncomfortable and cold. He hisses. You hiss too, then both sounds turn into sheepish laughter. Dunk sits back on his heels with hands hovering over you as if there is still a correct place to put them and he has not found it yet. "S-sorry," he says.

“Stop apologising for having a dick, okay?”

That makes him look at you in scandalised silence, which is worth the ache. He groans, and looks down since your face is a bit too much. His hands find your knees. He closes your legs gently and rocks them once as if settling something very important and badly made.

You sigh, loose and thready, and your whole lower body goes into a tired little tremor.

“There,” he says. His gaze catches lower. Sticks. “Shite,” he says. “I’ve, uh—”

“What?”

Instead of answering, Duncan leans in and, with the same care, straightens your legs leaving them slightly parted. The air finds you. You make a protesting noise, but he is already lowering himself between your thighs, ungainly and tender about it, until his cheek settles in the crook of one leg and one huge hand smooths over your navel.

“Don’t get any ideas,” you warn him. “I’m still very much untouchable.”

“I—I know.” His voice grows rougher, muffled near your skin. “Me too. I jus’—”

He moves his mouth close and kisses you. There. Low, over skin, without asking anything more from your nerves. His cum is seeping out. Your slit is filled white and wet enough that his spent drips lower, down the swell of buttock and onto the sheet. The sight ought to shame him, probably. Instead, it quiets something in his bones and wakes something worse.

“Relax,” he murmurs. “Just a kiss, lass.”

You try, though relaxation has become a complicated act. His breath warms where everything is swollen and used. He only rests his mouth in small presses, nose close enough to take in the scents bleeding over each other. The newness of it makes him oddly proud. Animal-proud. Kind of proud that probably only another beast would understand.

Duncan ought to leave it there. He knows this from the very recent, first-hand education in what happens when a body is pushed past what it can politely take, and he has no wish to be cruel with you. Still, curiosity implores him. He lets his tongue out only a little and touches you near the entrance, where the trickle has thinned enough to seem less like a dare. Just the tip of it. Just once.

The concoction meets him badly alloyed, both of you discoverable in it. He is salt and water, almost insipid were he to perform alone. You are richer. Sharper. Creamy in the way he remembers from the drunken night that got the two of you here, with that same wild edge underneath. Together it is stranger than either of you apart. Overwhelming, but with a door in it.

He licks again. Small and careful. More reverential than useful, though he would sooner bite off his own tongue than call it that. If romance is a place, Duncan thinks, it is here. Then, he stops thinking much at all. Your fingers find his hair after a moment. You comb once through it and leave your hand there, too tired to do anything finer. When your thigh starts twitching from the weight of his head, he lifts it and looks up at you. “Go shower?” he offers, hoarse. “I’ll change the sheets.”

You stare at him, a little stricken, than let him embrace the weirdness with dignity. Nod. His hands are there to help you when you try to rise and get off the bed. He pulls his T-shirt over you, though only the head, forgetting to put arms into their respectable holes.

"The sheets are—" You start pointing and it's only a finger vaguely poking under cotton.

"I know," Dunk says. "Go, go."

While you're gone, he does things automatically and with his head elsewhere. A man who is a friend and a co-parent and a willing, but ultimately rejected fiance, can only extend his stay this long. Even though for a moment Duncan has felt like an actual lover, there is no argument in him that would sound appropriate aloud. He looks at the dirty sheet in his palms and here he can no longer tell which part of the stain belongs to him, and which to you.

He's stood with a pillowcase half-fixed when you return. Sleepy-looking and warm from the shower, you come closer. Help him with one decisive shake and throw the pillow onto the bed. Then, you crane your head up, and tell him, "Stay? If you want."

Duncan sighs. Bends to kiss your forehead, and says, "Aye." You breathe out too, and the air dilutes int something more chewable. "I'll be right back," he says.

It feels natural to the point of danger. Cuddling in the morning, breakfast together. Setting up a room. Having a mild breakdown over it, which reforges itself into emotions too messy to be talked over so they lead to sex instead. The sex is mind-blowing and leaves Duncan both full and hollow. You take shower first, he goes second. He knows where the sheets are and where the towels are. He knows to wipe his feet before stepping onto the tiles, otherwise you huff so loudly he can hear you across the flat. You gave him a toothbrush. His cock feels a bit scraped, balls empty, but both things are pleasant and sit agreeably on the hips. He walks down the corridor to the bedroom and hears the telly muttering. He can tell exactly which episode of Sapphire & Steel is playing, because he's seen it many times. He cannot remember the plot of it properly, but it's the one with people disappearing into the photographs. In the bedroom you've passed out on your side of the bed, curled, with one arm invading beyond the middle, and the other wedged under your chin. He has his side of the bed. He sits, puts your hand on his thigh, watches the episode and remembers one afternoon when he watched it with Rafe. When the show ends, he turns the telly down and lowers himself so his face is level with your belly.

He's nervous. There's a human inside the size of an avocado, and when Duncan thinks of an avocado in his palm it all seems improbable to him. He's got no idea if the baby can hear him, but feels it is seemly to introduce oneself. "Hello in there," he whispers, quiet to not wake you. "I am your da. We'll meet in uh—" He takes out his hand and counts the remaining time. "In five months," Dunk says.

It all feels very silly but very necessary. He pulls air in through his nose and continues, softer, as if low volume is the thing that might make it less strange. “I, uh… I’ve read babies like when ye sing to them. So I’m gonna—jus' quiet. We won’t wake your mam. She’s asleep.”

There is no answer from above. Only your thick breathing and the small shift of your knee. Dunk takes that as permission. He adjusts himself with one arm folded under his head and legs hanging off the mattress from the knees down. His eyes rest on a place where the child is doing its secret dark work. Then, he clears his throat, feels foolish, and starts with a hum so low it near stays in his chest entirely.

"I wish I was on yonder hill," Duncan croons, half-swallowed for shyness. “‘Tis there I’d sit and cry my fill, until every tear would turn a mill.” He shuts his lids. It's not really a lullaby, but it's the first thing that comes to his mind. The old language feels borrowed and worn smooth enough by other mouths for him to express something Dunk doesn't understand yet.

“Is go dté tú, mo mhuirnín slán… Siúil, siúil, siúil a rúin… Siúil go socair agus siúil go ciúin…"

And may you go, my darling safely. Walk, walk, walk on, oh love. Walk steadily and walk softly.

His voice deepens where it warms. It starts coming quieter, and somehow fuller, and your eyes open somewhere inside the dark of sleep. Unmoving. The room has gone that thin afternoon hush where a body can pretend it is still dreaming if it keeps still enough. Dunk does not know you are listening. That makes it worse. Better. One of those.

There's a hand resting near you, shy of touching until he forgets himself and lets two fingers settle on the cotton. The pressure is almost nothing, but you feel it.

“Siúil go doras agus éalaigh liom,” he sings. The line makes a door appear in your head. An escape. Come away with me. Elope with me, without him having to say anything modern enough to frighten either of you.

When he sings that part he misremembers Gaeilge briefly and lets the thing be just sound, for the true matter and its recipient are, for now, only wishful thinking.

The last blessing comes. “Is go dté tú, mo mhuirnín slán.”

You keep your eyes half shut. Watch him through the blur of your lashes.

“I’ll sell my rock, I’ll sell my reel,” he goes on. “I’ll sell my only spinning wheel to buy my love a sword of steel.” His thumb moves against your shirt. You doubt he notices, or that he understands what his own voice is doing. Making vows out of other people’s grief, putting shape round something he has no courage to hold up in daylight yet. Love, maybe, dressed as a folk song so it can walk past both of you unsearched.

Your throat tightens. Stupidly, completely.

“Is go dté tú, mo mhuirnín slán.”

He hums the chorus this time more than sings it. The Irish turns soft in his mouth, almost sleepy.

“Siúil, siúil, siúil a rúin…”

You let your eyes close before he can catch them open. Let him have the kindness of being unseen. Let yourself have the worse kindness of hearing him.

“Siúil go socair agus siúil go ciúin…”

His fingers spread a little wider over your shirt.

“Siúil go doras agus éalaigh liom…”

By the last line, his voice has thinned to nothing much. A murmur. A breath laid carefully where his hand is.

“Is go dté tú, mo mhuirnín slán.”

For a while after, he only hums. Then even that fades. His hand grows heavy on you, and you know he's fallen asleep. You let out the long-trapped gasp, and with it, a tear falls down your cheek.