Lay your head upon my knee.

❀ Principal Dancer → The highest rank in a ballet company. Principals perform the leading roles and are typically the company's most established artists.

❀ First Soloist → A rank below Principal Dancer. First Soloists often perform major supporting roles and may dance leading roles as first or second cast, depending on the production.

❀ Ballet Master → A former professional dancer responsible for rehearsing the company, coaching dancers, maintaining choreography and artistic standards, and acting as the link between the artistic director and performers.

❀ Barre → The handrail fixed along the studio wall, and by extension the first part of every ballet class. Dancers begin each class at the barre to warm up, strengthen technique and prepare for centre work.

❀ To 'mark it' → To rehearse choreography without performing it at full physical intensity. Dancers indicate the movement, spacing and timing while conserving energy and reducing injury risk.

❀ Pas de deux → Literally 'step for two.' A duet between two dancers, usually involving partnering work, lifts and coordinated choreography. Often the emotional centrepiece of a ballet.

❀ Marley → The specialised vinyl flooring used in most dance studios and theatres.

❀ Cast / Second Cast → Most productions have multiple casts for the same role. The first cast usually performs opening nights and the majority of performances, while the second cast dances selected performances and serves as cover.

❀ Partnering → The technical work between two dancers, including lifts, supported turns, weight-sharing and assisted balances.

❀ Corps de ballet → The ensemble of the company. Corps dancers perform in groups.

❀ Arabesque → A classical ballet position in which the dancer balances on one leg while extending the other behind them.

❀ Promenade → A partnered movement in which one dancer slowly turns the other while they hold a balanced position. Common in classical pas de deux.

As soon as posters for Onegin began to curl at the corners, a new casting was announced. Still second casting, but to Daeron it is a considerable relief to have completed a task and to be trusted with the next one. He gets to keep his job. And his partner. What the both of you have been cast in is another story.

"No, no, no, no, no!" Lyonel drags hands down his face. "This is so tepid my balls have undescended. Again."

No one in the room has any idea which person Lyonel Baratheon means. Possibly all ten of you. He's blessed the company which, as he states, made him into what he is today, with a guest reappearance and an exclusive piece he's choreographed himself. While describing it to the groups of lucky tens he's said something shocking about sex and abundance, and a lot of other bacchanal things, none of which have shocked or interested Daeron. There have been tons upon tons of visionaries with a wet dream they simply must recreate using stock of bodies comelier and more able than they themselves possess. He's seen the moves before, too—half of them are a direct Mayerling ripoff, only more debauched and vulgar.

What, however, does interest Daeron is the endless opportunities to touch you differently. And to be touched by you. The choreography includes impact, intentional knees between legs, ass-groping, hands on tits, one foot (yours, truly) on his chest, plenty of hair pulling and, most importantly, kissing. Passionate, desperate, aggressive making out. The prospect of swapping spit with you and being professionally absolved for the indulgence excites Daeron so much he's suckled on only one wine bottle this entire week (maintenance sips somehow do not count in his head).

Every pair has similar steps with a decaying twist towards the end of each sequence. The trick is to dance it precisely one count apart to depict, as Lyonel has called it, 'the erosion addictive desire inflicts on relationships.' Daeron suspects some wench has fucked Lyonel to another dimension and then broken the poor bastard's heart.

"I was told I am not getting a bunch of virgins, but you—" Lyonel points to a frightened-looking couple that's fourth in succession. "You two make embracing celibacy feel all of a sudden exciting."

The girl sucks her lips inward. Her partner keeps a reassuring hand on her lower back looking like he'd rather be somewhere else, throwing up.

Lyonel’s pointing finger travels down the line and arrives at the two of you. His voice lowers, which somehow makes him more offensive. “And whatever unresolved shit is going on here, I don’t care. I want burning passion.”

Daeron’s brows lift. Lyonel continues before either of you can defend the temperature of your private affairs.

“If you feel like killing each other, excellent. Remember that murder is very adjacent to praying-mantis foreplay and utilise it.” He looks between your faces, increasingly disappointed by both. “So far this has had all the emotional force of bird-watching with no birds in sight.”

You swallow. You have had versions of Lyonel before, choreographers who mistook public humiliation for rigour and spoke about bodies with the confidence of men who never had to lend their own. None, however, possessed Lyonel Baratheon’s status, which meant the others had occasionally been required to behave as though employment law applied to them.

Daeron’s fingers brush yours. The touch is small enough to hide behind the line of your thighs, and when he leans closer his mouth barely disturbs the hair beside your ear. “You’re doing well,” he whispers. “He’s simply incapable of recognising anything below a public indecency charge.”

Lyonel squints. One hand rises to scratch through his beard. “You,” he says to Daeron, “would be wiser to approach her as someone who seduced you, ruined you and rejected you. Stop making those—those fucking puppy eyes at her as if she’s standing on some unreachable pedestal.”

Your scoff is unpreventable. Lyonel’s attention shifts to you; one eyebrow rises.

“I like your energy better,” he says. Then he claps both hands, loud enough to startle the fourth couple. “Again. All of you, before I cut my dick off.”

The cassette is wound back. A blunt pulse starts beneath the strings, and the first pair step into the middle phrase.

She arrives one count ahead of him, turning beneath his arm with a look over her shoulder that promises something sweet enough to make an intelligent person stupid. He follows willingly. His hand finds her waist; hers slips behind his neck and draws him down into a kiss that is still only an indication, lips resting without pressure, yet the intention around it is lovely. She could take the soul out of him and return it washed and folded. He would thank her for the service.

The next couple inherit the movement one beat later. Their version has already lost some patience. The catch at the waist becomes a pull, the turn finishes too close, and she keeps him waiting for the kiss until his spine bends after her. When their mouths almost meet, affection has acquired blunt fangs.

Another count passes. The third woman strikes her partner’s chest before letting him take her wrist. He circles it hard enough to whiten the skin beneath his fingers, and the kiss here is expected to arrive as settlement rather than reward. Their bodies remain beautiful through the ugliness of it, lines kept long while the hands grow less civil.

The fourth pair begin with the frightened girl Lyonel has just accused of reviving chastity. Fear makes her precise. She twists out of her partner’s hold, lets him catch her again, then drives her knee between his thighs with enough conviction to earn a grunt from him. His reassuring hand has become possessive at her lower back. By the time she fists his shirt and brings his face down, both of them look surprised by how well disgust suits them.

Then the phrase reaches you.

Daeron catches your hips from behind. His palms travel lower on the next count and close over your ass, taking enough of it to satisfy Lyonel’s demand that he gets his hands dirty. The grip has grown competent over the week. He knows where the muscle gathers, how firmly he can pull before your balance changes, where his fingers may spread without making the movement look cautious.

You throw your head back beside his and drive an elbow towards his ribs. He avoids it by design, catches your forearm and turns you through. Your bodies separate for half a count before colliding chest to chest.

The shove lands squarely against his sternum. Daeron travels backwards, bare feet sliding, then returns with the delayed violence built into his sequence. One hand closes at your nape while the other finds your buttock again and drags you across the final step. You catch his jaw. His cheek compresses beneath your fingers.

All of that works. The impact has bite, the handling looks indecent, and the single-count delay between your movements gives the impression that each of you is learning cruelty from the other in real time. For a week the two of you have reached the final beat and placed your mouths together with the dry, conscientious restraint of dancers indicating where a kiss will eventually go.

Today Lyonel wants the eventuality.

The couple before you break apart. Your count approaches through the music, carried on the same phrase that has already swallowed four other pairs.

Daeron looks delighted. You can feel the smile trying to form beneath the hand holding his jaw, while your own mouth has gone dry enough to stick at the corners.

You pull him by the chin, feeling your fingers getting colder and colder, because there are people here, because he is heart-wrenchingly beautiful, and because you want this elsewhere. You want this, private and abashed, you want this in slanting rain while he's walking you home and you both linger by the main door for too long, you want this when his breath doesn't smell of spirits and cigarettes, when his smile is not so smug and after he's asked you please, can I kiss you? Please, I really want to.

What happens instead is Daeron's mouth touches yours, not because it wants to, but because it's been forced to. Your entire face calcifies into an expression of nothing.

Daeron remembers his late mother describing the kisses his stiff-lipped father gave her in public as 'corpse kisses.' They allegedly involved a cold, stagnant mouth and a thousand-yard stare that reached way past and through Dyanna's skull, and ever since Daeron learnt about the existence of such a dull form of kissing he's made a vow to himself to never kiss, or let anyone kiss him like that. Wanting to grant affection is one part of Daeron's life-long struggle. The affection being desired is another. You have just successfully made him break that given promise.

Your lips are deathly. Afflicted with numbness so prominent his tongue grows cold at the tip. It all takes such an unwanted direction Daeron feels mildly disgusted with himself for kissing a girl that seems like she'd rather drink piss than open her mouth for him. The kiss is not a kiss at all. It's Daeron fisting your ass cheeks, bowing over you and dragging his stupid fondness-starved maw on you, and licking across the tightly shut seam, while you stand, petrified, with your eyes gauging and all fingers spread like you've been dumb-struck to some crucial spot in your spine.

Lyonel groans loudly. "That's—" he starts. "I have no words. I think I've just been castrated."

Daeron touches your forearm. The gasp that leaves you is absurdly large for two fingertips, as if the nerves beneath them have reached into the coma and pulled you upright. You blink several times. His face has gone slack with hurt; even the red annoyance across his cheekbones has drained, leaving him pale around the mouth.

Your hand closes over his wrist. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what—”

“You don’t have to be so convincing,” Daeron says. His voice is quiet enough to sound private despite the room full of people. “It’s only work. Nothing else.”

“I know, I just—”

“I would like everyone to take a lunch break,” Lyonel announces, despite it being five in the afternoon. “Come back in thirty minutes. Except for you two, obviously.”

His hand gestures towards you both. Terror catches beneath your ribs. Daeron only looks displeased, which on him involves a slight flattening through the eyes and the sort of stillness that promises elaborate complaint later.

The others disperse through a low murmur. Bags are collected, jumpers dragged over damp heads, and the fourth couple leave together with his palm returned to its rightful place at her back. Lyonel waits with both hands clasped over his crotch until the last person shuts the door.

Then he lifts his head. “You are…” he says to Daeron, and scratches once through his beard. “I get it.”

Daeron’s mouth tightens.

Lyonel turns to you. “I believe there are many problems to unpack here, but I suspect an audience is one of them. Which is very unfortunate, given that the piece is meant to be seen. You will have to do it in front of people or you will lose the placement.”

You nod too quickly.

“However.” Lyonel looks directly into your eyes. “I understand that I seem to you a mad, extravagant, delusional man." A beat. "I am a mad, extravagant, delusional man, but I possess an ounce of empathy. Let us see whether you can manage it with fewer gawkers.”

He turns away and drags a chair from beside the piano. To Daeron it bears a ghastly resemblance to a cuck chair, particularly once Lyonel positions it several yards away and sits with his back to you, facing the mirror.

“I am not here,” he says. “I will say nothing beyond ‘again’ when required. I may sigh. You will have to let that slide.” He settles deeper into the chair and spreads his knees. “Daeron, you have thirty minutes to make her want to kiss you. Begin.”

You take your places. The sequence behaves until the final count, where Daeron hesitates. His eyes search your face. The force leaves his frame so suddenly that his chest sags away from yours and his cheek slides out of your hand before your mouth can reach him.

Pain twists across your face. Daeron sees it and steps back into position without Lyonel saying a word.

The next attempt ends with your foreheads meeting hard enough to produce a blunt knock. You both recoil, hands flying up, then stare at one another through watering eyes. From the chair comes a long exhalation which Lyonel would presumably classify as involuntary.

On the third run Daeron misses the turn before the shove. His foot crosses too far, the delayed count collapses, and he has to catch your elbow to keep you from travelling into the barre. He swears beneath his breath. You reset again.

The fourth attempt reaches no farther than the opening hold. “Wait,” Daeron says.

He comes towards you and places both hands on your shoulders. The contact is broad and warm, entirely still. He looks at you for so long that you have to crane your neck higher, searching his face for whatever instruction he cannot seem to arrange.

Air leaves through his nose. Then he bends towards your ear. “Can I kiss you?” he asks.

You suck in a wet breath. “N-now? Without—?”

Daeron nods. His hair brushes your cheek. “Here,” he says, reaching for your hand. He places two of your fingers against the inside of his wrist, then pinches a fold of skin beneath them. “Do this, anywhere, if you want me to stop. All right?”

You give a small bob with your head. Daeron drags his nose back from the warm place above your ear, down the ledge of your cheekbone and along the side of your nose. The hand he has been holding gets guided upwards and laid against his jaw, then he brings the rest of you closer by the waist until scarcely a breath remains between your mouths.

You pull.

The first meeting is gentle. Lips merely resting over lips, their softness compressed into a thin shared line. Daeron’s breath leaves him in a sweet little shudder and washes over your skin. Neither of you opens your eyes. You only drag your mouths against each other without parting them, slow enough to feel every small give.

He is remarkably soft-lipped today. You had expected something drier, a little sanded around the edges, because even occasional drinking leaves its tax upon the mouth. Instead, there is smoothness. Moisture. You could go as far as to accuse him of resorting to lip balm.

Inside, Daeron is roiling. He adores kissing. This is kissing. The timid beginning he knows will eventually fall apart, air slipping from your nose and tickling the peak of his cupid’s bow whenever your mouth brushes higher. He adores the delay, the pressure kept light enough to make every millimetre significant, the sense of another person deciding whether to let him farther in.

It is a tender language in which Daeron possesses embarrassing fluency. He has wanted to introduce himself to your mouth for so long that merely being allowed to linger upon it feels lavish. Given any place without counts, mirrors and your cucked choreographer seated politely in the corner, he could stay here and let the whole evening perish around him.

He has no idea whether you are enjoying this or simply acquainting yourself with the feeling of him. For the moment, he would accept either.

Then your fingers clamp over his jaw and draw him another inch closer. Your mouth opens. You suck his upper lip so hard Daeron nearly chokes on the groan climbing through him.

His hands recover their destination. They slide down your back, take fistfuls of your ass and use them to bring you flush against him. Standing this way, he has to curve his spine to meet your height, though he could easily tip your head backwards and kiss you halfway into the floor.

Your tongue comes out and licks over his.

Daeron is thrilled. You taste amazing. You taste like a lovely fucking girl, and one capable of getting aggressive with him, too, because your teeth catch the rouged flesh above his chin and make it sting. Then you lick over the bite, kind enough to soothe precisely what you have chosen to hurt.

He is a goddamn good kisser. With your eyes closed, you are alone with him. He has just asked whether he can come upstairs, and you have said yes, but kiss me first. His hair is soft where your fingers enter it. His jaw carries a crust of stubble too pale to see, though the coarseness beneath his nose and across his cheeks scratches your lips whenever they stray from his and begin devouring the rest of his face.

“Oh, fuck—” Daeron breathes when you pull at his roots.

The sound sobers you by a fraction, gently enough that desire remains undisturbed. You open your eyes and look into his.

The setting sun pours through the ceiling-high windows and strikes them strangely. You had thought they were blue. Up close, Daeron’s irises carry splodges of the most delicate lilac, mere specks of watercolour overbleeding across grainy paper. They are very pretty. A ridiculous urge comes over you to brush both thumbs beneath them.

“Now, that,” Lyonel begins.

Both your heads snap towards the mirror. He is still seated in his chair, chin propped in one hand, wearing an expression of dreamy contentment.

“That was fucking hot."

It was. God, it was. Daeron's cheeks are as pink as yours are hot. You give him another once-over before both of you have to get back to the meanness the piece requires and wonder how much tenderness sits hidden in him and whether holding it would be possible.

Lyonel gets to his feet and turns the chair round with one hand. “Let’s make it hotter by actually putting it together, shall we?” he says. “From the middle phrase.”

You return to position. Daeron comes behind you and settles both hands over your hips, palms broad enough to warm most of them. Before the music starts, he lowers his mouth beside your ear.

“Can I kiss you again?” he whispers.

You nod. His thumbs press once into the points of your hips, then release as Lyonel reaches for the cassette player.

The phrase begins. You move through the first collision with less force spent resisting what comes after it. Daeron receives your elbow, loses you for half a count, catches you on the delayed turn and lets the momentum pull both of you off-centre before the choreography rights itself. Your shove sends him backwards. He returns lowered through the knees, one hand finding your nape while the other closes over your ass and hauls you through the last step.

Your fingers catch his jaw.

The faces meeting at the end belong to different dancers now. Fear has loosened from yours. Daeron’s earlier delight has quietened into something hopeful and humble, and when he looks at your mouth he waits there, asking again without making a sound.

You pull him in.

Your mouths meet open. Teeth knock, noses crush together, and Daeron exhales through the collision with a hoarse little sound that disappears between your lips. His hands take greedy fistfuls of your flesh while his knees remain bent beneath him, leaving you the height and leverage to direct the kiss wherever you please.

You turn his face and bite. He follows the angle instantly, moulding himself to the front of you until the whole length of his body appears poured there. Each pass of your tongue draws a slow roll through him. The movement begins under his ribs and carries down through the hips, pressing him into you with the pelvic logic of sex.

Your breathing grows nastier. It saws between your mouths, wet and uneven, while you kiss too hard to preserve any clean line through the neck or shoulders. Daeron’s nose drags across your cheek. Your teeth catch his lower lip again, and the small moan he gives you lands directly on your tongue, quiet enough that it belongs to you alone.

His grip shifts lower. He pulls you into the next roll with both palms and opens his mouth wider beneath yours, pliant wherever you force him, hungry wherever you give. From the mirror, the two of you have already passed through undressing and reached whatever comes after. The clothes only make the indecency more concentrated.

The music moves on without you. He keeps kissing you through several counts that contain no kissing whatsoever, and you let him, one hand fixed around his jaw while the other knots in his hair. His body continues that slow, intimate grind into yours until Lyonel clears his throat with such forced politeness it sounds like he's enjoying the view in a way he shouldn't.

You break apart incrementally. Daeron’s mouth follows once before he remembers where he is, lips bitten red and breath still dragging through them.

“That will do for today,” Lyonel says. He looks between you with the exhausted satisfaction of somebody whose vulgar theory has just been proven right. “You have another month. So far, it looks promising.”

He waves both of you towards your things. Apparently the others are also being sent home, which will thrill them when they return from their five-o’clock lunch break and discover their only contribution was leaving.

Daeron gathers his jumper, pushes his feet into his shoes and waits while you pack. His hair remains disturbed where you held it, and when he speaks his voice has not entirely recovered. “May I walk you?”

You look at him for an embarrassingly long time. “Sure,” you say, spineless enough to make you dislike yourself.

This time the walk is unbearable in a completely new way. Daeron makes no attempt to fill the well of awkwardness with jokes or put-upon sightseeing. He walks silently beside you and stares at his own feet, sometimes yours, following their wet little trod along the pavement as if the answer to something might appear between steps.

You have to hold the umbrella higher for him. He still walks hunched beneath it, and still there is too much of him; one shoulder spreads beyond the edge and darkens gradually with rain. You consider telling him to come closer. You don't.

Three streets from your flat, the place where you told him here is good enough last time arrives and passes. Daeron notices nothing. Or notices and says nothing, which is worse. Your building appears around the corner before you find a voice capable of stopping him, and there it is: the precise door, the number above it, the chipped brass buzzer beside the frame. Daeron has acquired the complete knowledge of where you live.

You climb the first two steps beneath the shallow awning. He remains on the pavement, and the elevation brings your eyes nearly level. Perhaps yours sit a little higher now. It feels weirdly useful.

Rain ticks against the umbrella between you. Daeron looks like he wants something. His gaze stays on your face long enough for hope to become physically embarrassing, a warmth crawling under your collar while you prepare some useless thank you, see you tomorrow and begin turning towards the door.

Then he drops onto one knee.

Your mind performs such a disgusting trick that you scowl at it internally. He reaches for the sliver of skin between your ballet flat and the hem of your trousers. His fingers wrap around your ankle with careful, cool pressure.

“You’ve been favouring the other one,” he says. His thumb settles beside the tendon. “Is this one all right?”

You swallow. “Have—have I? I…I didn’t notice.”

There might have been a difference. You cannot remember one. He could also be making complete shit up for the privilege of touching you, in which case he might have invented a more useful concern involving your ass, or your waist, or a sudden medical necessity to pull you against him again and put his mouth—

“I must have imagined it, then,” Daeron murmurs.

His fingers leave you. He straightens, unfolding until the umbrella has to rise with him, and the new distance feels punitive.

“Sleep well, I suppose?” he says. His wet shoulder gleams beneath the streetlamp.

“Mhm.” You nod. “You too.”

Ask me, ask me, ask me, ask me. The words beat behind your face like a trapped insect. Ask whether you can come upstairs. Ask for tea, ask for water, ask to inspect the pipes, ask whether there is any more lipstick left in the flat that requires professional removal.

Daeron only smiles, lopsided and tired, then steps backwards into the rain.

You blink after him. He has travelled several paces before panic finds enough breath to operate your throat. “Daeron!”

He stops and turns. Hope moves through his body. It makes a small sway in your direction and sends water sliding from his hair.

“Do you, uh—” Do you want to come upstairs? Your grip tightens around the umbrella handle. “—do you want to take this?”

You push it towards him.

The sway reverses. Daeron looks at the umbrella, then at you, and lifts one hand in refusal. “Nay, it’s fine. Later.”

He turns again.

You stand beneath the awning and watch him go. Had he come close enough to take it, you might have found the courage. Had his fingers brushed yours again, had he looked at your mouth, had he said please in that careful voice, you might have opened the door and allowed the rest to happen without ever technically inviting it.

Daeron had hoped for the same cowardice from the opposite direction.

Every new thing with you is eye-opening, and he worries he will soon be lidless if he does not do something about it. First your fury reached him below the belt. Then comfort. Then came your apology and, surprisingly, ogling. Today you let him ask. Gave him an answer and a means of revoking it, then kissed him near bloody.

Now you know where his mouth fits against yours. He knows the little wet breath you take before opening. Both facts appear capable of obliterating him.

Dreams have grown so loud since he began drinking less they sometimes happen in waking. They return in longer pieces, whole enough to have him snap up before dawn with his sheets twisted around his legs. He sees faces clearly. Sometimes yours appears among them, which makes the prospect of closing his eyes tonight feel unwise.

Daeron reaches inside his coat. A few swallows. Enough to take the edge off and make sleep less ambitious. He tells himself this while unscrewing the flask, and the lie is so familiar it scarcely requires wording.

The first mouthful burns pleasantly. He walks as he drinks, with his lips still tender from you, and does not look back because he has already looked back twice since turning the corner.

You watch until the rain has swallowed him past recognition. Then you fold the umbrella, take out your key and shoulder yourself into the building. Make your way up by hoarding two steps at a time.

Daeron has never left. You take him with you, and he's more present the closer you are to your door. Your mouth remembers him perfectly. Then, the memory seems to spread lower. Bag slips from your shoulder in the hallway. You turn to lock up, then rest your back to the wood and press two fingers to the centre of your lower lip. The flesh gives, swollen from teeth and pressure. Daeron’s breath returns there in sweet little shudder followed by the rougher sound dragged out of him when you pulled his hair.

Your hand moves beneath the coat. Under the waistband. The leotard has gone damp between your legs. Its seam presses directly against your clit when you bend your knees and slide down the door, and the pressure recalls how he bonded himself to you with his body yielding wherever your hand directed his face.

This is new. A willing man, a vulnerable man has never happened to you before. All that height and talent and spoilt beauty made pliant, asking with his eyes even after you had already said yes. You wonder what it would take to make Daeron tender. To make his eyes water and his cock hard.

You slide two fingers beneath the gusset. Wetness coats them immediately. A breath leaves through your nose, terribly familiar to the ones he had adored against his cupid’s bow. You find the clit and begin small, firm circles, and then your mind improves the doorway by one line. Daeron turns when you call him and comes back beneath the umbrella, eyes lifted towards you on the steps. This time you ask properly. This time he climbs.

He asks, Can I kiss you?—and you put his hand between your legs instead of answering. The choreography didn't need to pretend it was about anything except fucking. You don't need to either. He comes to you in fragments, real, and made up, and improved. Mind supplies the image him discovering what he has done to you, the hopeful softness gone startled, then wolfish. You pull his hair until his mouth opens, and invent him with his clothes off and no opaque water around him.

He lies long-limbed and pale, sallow skin gaining colour by seconds. Your imagination begins in the little triangular hollow between his pectorals, where the muscle divides above the sternum and leaves a soft, thumb-sized place that seems to yearn for a mouth. A few pale hairs gather there. You put your tongue among them, then travel lower while his chest rises too quickly beneath your face.

Daeron’s body is made lean through labour rather than denial. His ribs show when he twists, but the belly has flesh enough to warm beneath your palm, a shallow softness over the hard lattice that appears whenever he breathes or laughs or pulls his knees towards himself. The hair below his navel refuses the tidy little line some men cultivate. It spreads in a fair, unruly rug over the lower stomach, thickening towards his cock as if all the fuzz on him has been slowly migrating there for winter.

You want to rub your face in it. The thought is so graceless it makes your fingers slip.

Wetness smears higher across your clit. You correct the angle and picture the hair rasping your cheek while Daeron watches, pink and swollen.

His arms look beautiful beside him. Long, veined, loose upon the sheets, the vessels rising blue-green beneath thin skin and travelling from wrist to elbow with the branching nature of roots. The same network shows through his calves and over the tops of his feet, made prominent by years of forcing blood through limbs worked past reason. You imagine pinning one wrist beside his head and watching the tendons pull when he tests your grip.

He would let you. The image of his strength does very little until you picture him giving it over.

You spread your knees farther on the floor. The door presses cold through your coat while your fingers circle faster, and Daeron’s invented hand replaces them with admirable ease. His thumb is broader. Calloused. It requires no lesson. The Daeron you have built has touched more cunts than you have female friends and, worse, has probably cared whether every one of them came. He finds the place with a foul little certainty, holds the pressure there, and looks horribly pleased when your hips begin to follow his hand.

“Here?” he asks in your head.

You answer by bucking against him. His mouth opens around a soft, boyish sound.

The rest of him assembles below your palm. Waist nothing short of slutty. Hipbones clean enough to catch light, with two deep cumgutters carved beneath them by muscle and low fat into ruthless anatomy. Those sharp channels run through the lean pull of his lower belly, guiding your eyes towards exactly what they have been named for.

You follow them. His cock lies hard against the fuzz, skin flushed darker through the length with a bright bead already glossing the head. Hard for you. Leaking for you. Daeron has his knees knocked apart and his face turned into the pillow, though his eyes keep finding you because he's not missing any of this.

“Kiss me,” he says.

You bend over him and leave his mouth untouched. Put your lips beneath his jaw instead, where the skin is thin and his pulse sells him out. “Please,” Daeron whispers. “Kiss me.”

You suck until he cries out.

The sound goes through your hand. Your fingers become his thumb again, dragging slick circles over you while you manufacture his neck afterwards: pale skin covered in red suction marks, one deepening purple beside the throat, another high enough to show above a rehearsal collar. You give him more. Hunger rid of professional limits. It bites down, mouths, worries every tender patch until Daeron is panting beneath you and trying to offer new places without appearing too eager.

“Ride me,” he says. “Please, lovely girl. I want—I want you.”

You climb over him.

The imagined bed never acquires a room around it. It floats somewhere dark and obliging, broad enough for his legs and soft enough to receive the restless knocking of his heels. He lies open beneath you, hair damp at the temples, chest blotched pink from excitement. His cock presses hot against your cunt while you drag yourself along it, coating him before granting anything more.

He looks ruined already. Ruined by kisses. Ruined by being watched. The lovely, hopeful softness has gone glass-eyed, mouth slackening each time your clit passes over the ridge beneath the head.

“You’re beautiful,” he tells you.

The praise makes your hand falter. You bear down harder to punish it.

“No, please.” His hips lift. “Please, keep going. You feel so good.”

He says sweet things while you use him. That seems important. Daeron would pour affection into the indignity until you could no longer tell which one made you wetter: his cock twitching helplessly, or his voice breaking around lovely, lovely girl as if you are doing him a kindness by grinding him into the mattress.

You imagine lowering yourself onto him. The thick push. His face forgetting its clever shapes. “Fuck me,” Daeron gasps.

Your fingers drive faster. The heel of your hand presses into the soaked gusset while two fingertips work the clit, and the fantasy begins to jump with your pulse: his forearm beneath your grip, the rough hair against your palm, grooves of his hips flexing as he tries to remain still for you.

“Fuck me,” he says again, almost crying now. “Please, I’ll be good.”

That does it badly enough. Your head strikes the door behind you. Pleasure clenches through your belly and folds you over your own hand, trousers biting into your thighs. Daeron comes apart with you inside the dark you have made for him, throat mottled and cock jerking deep while he keeps saying how good you are until language fails and leaves him making little helpless noises instead.

You stay on the floor until your breathing calms. Two wet fingers rest against your lower lip, and when you close your eyes, Daeron kisses them clean.

Well, fuck. Now you need a drink.

Day sleep has put the arrangement of life on hiatus and yourself in abeyance. Between two blinks there are boons of no time, no date and no order of events. For a second the hospital visit has not happened. You are neither pregnant nor not. Duncan's hands are steady and his voice has never risen.

You smack your lips apart. Tongue goes to worry a bald socket after a wisdom tooth you lost at twenty. Breath by breath, the world reinstates itself. A slow drip starts somewhere under the skin; the day finds a vein. Memory enters through the blood like some bizarre version of intravenous therapy, and by the time you sit up, the afternoon has reached every limb.

So—this is what it feels like to have a fight that didn't really resolve. Pretty hollow, if anyone asks you. For sure better than regaining lucidity in the middle of a battlefield but ominously vacant nonetheless. The flat is so quiet it feels like you've gone a bit deaf until the first audible inhale.

Yours. It comes dry through your nose. You listen again and hear nothing that belongs to him. “Dunk?” you call.

No answer. Your first instinct is to call him, but as you are about to, you notice his phone resting on the nightstand. So instead, you push yourself up to sit and let your mind be, for a moment, bereft.

There’s something absurdly sobering about this. It is normal for things not to come out perfect straight out of the bag. It is normal to have fear in you, and sadness, over something that objectively will settle. The fact that it all feels mildly humiliating is, you suspect, normal too. The suspension of outcome does something new: leaves you with a specific ache after confessing to a boy who does not confess right back in the way you have wished for. Makes you annoyed at your own dependency, and upset with how little control you have over it now. Pregnancy worsens everything, naturally, because Aodhán makes every emotional consequence feel physically lodged in you. One thing is positive, though: you do not feel abandoned. Just impatient.

You are sure he’s gone running. The evidence is ordinary and plentiful. It is clear he’ll be back because all his stuff is still here, because the place smells of him, because he has cleaned up, and because he left his phone behind and took his trainers. Dunk can be many things: guarded and sensitive, with a dramatic grain inside him, certainly, yet he is not someone who’d walk out and never come back. Your reasonable mind knows that. Your heart is very upset about his absence.

Duncan’s heart is giving him no peace either. By the time he reaches the canal, it has climbed into his throat, then dropped into his stomach, then started beating there as well. He runs too hard for the first ten minutes and spends the next five paying for it, cold air burning down the middle of him.

When he left, he had one objective. His body has taken him straight to his flat, then across the floor, then to his nightstand and the drawer where the ring he bought you was kept all this time. He sits on the mattress, pops the box open, and plucks the band out of its velvet bed. The wish remains unchanged—Duncan wants to marry you, and only you, with all his might, and has wanted the very same thing since the first botched proposal.

What hits him when he stares into the small blue iris is that everything has been backwards. The wish has been true. The order has been wrong. He has spent all these months trying to translate love into labour, as if enough work might finally make a sentence. His hands have done what they could. They have washed and carried, fastened and soothed, held the weight of your son up from your bones. None of that is cancelled. None of it turns false now that he understands the missing bits are still missing.

He has never taken you out anywhere besides the doctor’s office, antenatal classes and baby shopping, and even there, truly, it has been you who has taken him out. He has never dated you. He slept with you once, knocked you up, panicked his way into honour, and somehow forgot all about romance and courtship.

Under that shame, there is calm. He is loved. He believes you. He feels the same. The problem now is practical and terrifying: speech is the required act. He has frightened you. He has been saying the truth in every language except the one you asked for. He needs to go back and say it without defence.

He takes the ring with him. Runs back to your place at a much calmer pace, hoping you will still be asleep when he returns. He considers buying you flowers, but all the shops are closed, and a supermarket bouquet feels more like a crappy apology than a proclamation of love. Three streets away from yours, Duncan notices a patch of unmown grass in the park. There are daisies still, shy and dwarfed beside their summer versions, but undeniable. They will not make a worthy bouquet. He knows that as soon as he crouches. So Duncan picks one with the longest stalk, the most petals, and the clearest yellow eye. The rest of the way he walks, to keep from damaging it.

He opens the door quietly, blissfully unaware of what has gone on in his absence. In the entryway Duncan twirls the daisy between his fingers, then stops with one hand still on the latch. A thought comes to him. Corny, awful, bright enough to make him glance towards the ceiling as if the gods might have put it there for a joke.

His fingers are much too big for work of this kind. The daisy suffers for it. Two petals come off at once, then another when he swears under his breath and tries to thread the stem round the neck of the flower. In the end, by means he would not be able to explain under questioning, he manages to twist it into a ring. A poor one. A ring nevertheless.

“Dunk?”

Your voice startles him from the living room. He panics and shoves the daisy into his sweatshirt pocket.

When he comes through, you are on the couch with a book open on your lap. You have made some effort to look as though you have been reading, but Duncan knows by now. You have been waiting for him. Your face frightens him. It is uncertain and large-eyed, hurt kept very still so it will not spill over the sides.

“Lassie,” he says. “I only went for a run.”

You nod. “I know.”

It is the saddest I know he has ever heard. It sounds as if your head has accepted the facts and left the rest of you to suffer by itself.

“Look. Listen.” Duncan comes to sit beside you on the couch. His knee knocks yours. He takes one of your hands and kisses your knuckles. “You’ve got to pardon me for bein’ so dim-witted,” he whispers. “And so craven.”

“Dunk—”

He looks up. Places your hand on the side of his neck and leans in until your faces are close. Nearly goes cross-eyed with the effort of keeping your gaze. Small price. Looking at you, Duncan realises it is simple. There is no fear left in him. Only wetness under his lids.

“I love ye. So fiercely,” he says.

Breath knocks out of you, large and damp. The hand on his throat travels to the back of his neck. The tips of your fingers slide into his hair.

“But I’ve got it all wrong, lassie. All of it.” He sniffs. “I loved ye down that pub, and later too. And now I love ye, only more.”

You are looking at him with your eyes peeled wide. A tear overburdens the meniscus, rolls out, and falls down your cheek. Duncan wipes it with his thumb.

“Tá grá agam duit,” he says, and presses his nose beside yours. “Forgive me. Please forgive me.”

“Dunk,” you croak. “God, Dunk—” You kiss him, wet and laughing into it, hands clumsy in his hair. “Tá grá agam duit,” you say. “Tá grá agam duit.”

“Wait.” Duncan catches your hands again, though he has to kiss the heel of one first before he can manage anything else. “That ain’t all.”

Your smile trembles.

He looks at you long and serious. “I’ve got the ring on me,” he says, patting his trouser pocket. “The real one. But I want to do it proper. I want to ask ye when it feels proper.”

You brush the damp hair off his forehead. “Will it speed things up if I promise not to reject you this time?”

Duncan laughs. It comes out rough and relieved, nearly ruined by a sniff. “Well. A little, maybe.” He squeezes your hands. “It won’t take ages. I only want things settled enough that ye can enjoy it. That I can ask and ye can answer without wonderin’ if I’m askin’ out of terror.”

Your thumb moves over his cheek.

Duncan sighs. “But in the meantime, sweetheart—”

He reaches into his sweatshirt pocket and prays to every imaginable god that the thing has not been crushed. The daisy comes out slightly mangled. The petals have gone translucent where the cloth pressed them, and the stem is bruised, but the construction holds. More or less.

Your mouth opens.

“I know,” Duncan says. “It’s desperate.”

“It’s lovely.”

“It’s desperate and lovely.” He takes your wrist. “Will ye be my girl?” he asks, then slides the stem onto your finger with ridiculous care. “So I can tell folk I’m yours. That I’m—” He looks up. “I’m your man.”

Your eyes drop to the daisy. It has been made to suffer for love. One side is thinner than the other, the stem darker where he has twisted it, the whole thing softening already from the heat of his pocket. Still, it fits your finger perfectly, pale and gold and terribly dear.

“I love it,” you say. The corner of Duncan’s mouth trembles. “And I’ve got myself the best man,” you add.

That does him in more thoroughly than the first part. He bows his head, and you catch him by the neck before he can hide too far. Your thumbs run over his cheeks. He lets himself be held there, enormous and red-eyed, breathing through his nose.

“Aye to everything,” you say.

His eyes close. For a few seconds he stays exactly where you have put him, forehead on yours, noses close. Then, he clicks his tongue. “So if Ray asks now,” he says quietly, “I can tell him yer mine?”

“You can.”

“And I’m yours.”

“You can say that too.”

He nods, solemn. You watch it settle through him. His shoulders drop, then the tense place at his jaw, then something behind his eyes that has been braced since he walked through the door.

“We should tell Rowan,” you say. “So she doesn't feel guilty over something that ended well.”

His head's still cradled in your hands when he blurts, “Let’s ring her now.”

You laugh, soft and incredulous, and kiss his nose. “She pushed out a person this morning.”

“Aye.”

“She’s probably asleep.”

“Aye.”

“And if she isn’t, she should be.”

“Aye,” he says again, though he sounds sorry to be robbed of the mission.

You kiss his forehead. Duncan sighs through his nose and pulls you closer. He does it carefully, working round the belly, swinging your legs over his lap, supporting your back and tucking you into his chest. His palm settles between your shoulder blades and begins to rub there, slow and broad. His mouth fits to your temple. “Spend some time with me?” he asks.

“What have you got in mind?”

“Naught clever.” His lips move against your skin. “I just want to look at ye and kiss ye a bit.”

Your eyes close. “That sounds right.”

His hand comes to your belly. “How’s the babe?”

“Very considerate,” you say. “Outside of regular disregard for my internal organs.”

Duncan smiles into your hair. “Good lad.”

“He kicked my bladder earlier.”

“Terrible lad.” His thumb moves over the side of your stomach. “Do ye want anything? Food? Bath? Some place rubbed?”

You shake your head and let your fingers rest against the damp hair at his nape. “Getting kissed and looked at sounded good.”

Duncan goes still for a second, as if that has pleased him past speech. Then he tips your face up with two fingers under your chin and looks at you sombrely. “Aye,” he says. “I can do that.”

Eventually he has to unglue himself from you. He does it with poor grace, kissing your cheek, your mouth, the corner of your eye, then the place near your temple where he seems to think some final seal can be placed. “Come on,” he says.

He guides you off the couch, then comes round behind you. His arms slide beneath the drop of your belly and lift until the weight eases. The relief goes through you down to the softening knees. Your head tips back against his chest.

“There,” he murmurs.

You let him walk you to the bedroom that way. It is hardly walking on your part. More a gentle operation of limbs. Duncan moves behind you with his toes nudging your feet forward when yours forget what to do. His hands are steady under Aodhán as if carrying the child through you. The pair of you shuffle down the little stretch of hallway in silence, strange and married in every manner that has yet to be made legal.

By the bed, he lowers the belly slowly and waits until you have absorbed its return. Then he bends to kiss the side of your neck. “I need a shower,” he says.

“You don’t.”

“I do.”

“You smell fine.”

“I smell frightened and sweaty.”

“That’s my favourite.”

His laugh is small. “Won’t be long.”

So you let him go, though it seems a waste. While the shower starts in the bathroom, you sit on the edge of the bed and stare at the daisy on your finger. It has begun to wilt already. You are happy in a peculiar, undone way. A click, that is all it was. Some tiny internal thing moved half an inch into its proper groove, and the respite has come out massive enough to leave you loose in every joint.

You turn your hand one way, then the other. The ring looks ridiculous. You cannot imagine liking a thing more.

Before Duncan comes back, you ease it off and press it between the pages of the book on your nightstand. It leaves a pale wet mark on the paper. Good, you think. Proof of life.

Duncan returns smelling clean, hair damp, cheeks flushed from the run and the heat of the water. From there, everything becomes normal again. He gets into bed beside you. You reach for him. He comes easily. His mouth is warm and freshly washed, his jaw rough in places, and he kisses you for a long time without any great purpose beyond the kissing itself.

That, apparently, is all that is needed now. Looking and kissing. His hand at your cheek. Your thumb moving over the bridge of his nose. His mouth learning yours again without fear doing sums in the background. When your own mouth grows sleepy against his, he lets you drift onto your back and lies beside you with his head propped in his hand.

He watches you fall asleep and wonders whether there was another road to this. Some finer, cleaner route where he kissed you three years ago, or told you the truth after that first night, or learned early that silence could do harm even when filled with good intentions. Perhaps he has wasted three years being scared. Perhaps things have happened in the exact crooked order required to bring him here, beside your body in the evening, with his son turning under his palm and the ring he made you pressed permanent between two sheets of paper.

Objectively, nothing has changed between morning and now. Still, Duncan feels more complete. He has his beloved clementine-smelling girl. The one for him. Naught to fear now except the ordinary terrors, and those can be carried.

When your breathing deepens, he bends to your ear. “I love ye,” he whispers. “I love ye, I love ye.”

“I love you too,” you whisper back, and roll onto your side.

In the night you wake to his arm round your shoulders and his cock hard against your arse. For a while neither of you moves. Then your hips shift back with a sleepy question in them, and Duncan wakes into a rough inhale against your neck.

Wordless mouths find each other. His hand comes to your belly, then lower, then spreads warm over your hip. Permissions pass through breath. Through the way you reach back to touch his thigh. Through his mouth waiting until yours asks again.

He slides your knickers down with slow, fumbling care. You lift enough to help him. His hand returns to the soft underside of your belly, holding you as he fits himself behind you. “All right?” he asks.

You nod.

Then he pushes inside on a breath he nearly loses. Slow and deep enough that your eyes close. Nothing has changed, you think, except it has. The difference is small and everywhere. In the steadiness of his hips. In the way he holds you as though he has decided, fully, where he belongs. His nose breathes hard by your ear while he fucks you with aching patience. The quiet makes the thing larger until his mouth brushes your ear and there is no size you know that could describe it.

“I love ye so bloody much.”

It is one thing to be told and offered a sweet keepsake and a placeholder for a promised proposal. Entirely different when it's rasped while he fucks into a womb that's been made his and will remain his for as long as you are living and breathing. It burns straight down through you. The pleasure breaks instantly between your legs. Duncan hears the change in your breath and groans, tucking his face to your shoulder. He follows soon after, with one shudder and then another, keeping himself buried as deep as he can without hurting you.

Afterwards, he stays there until he softens. Even then he seems reluctant to leave your body. When he does, he cleans you with the same proficiency he brings to cups and hair and sore feet, then pulls you back to him. Sleep takes you both in pieces.

Life maintains this shape for a good couple of weeks. Calmer, fuller, quieter. The ordinary things remain ordinary, yet they seem to give more than they did before. Duncan texts when he is coming home. You complain about your hips. He takes complaint as plea and puts his hands where they are needed. The flat fills with washed baby clothes and steam from the kettle, with grocery receipts and folded towels, with kisses given in passing as if neither of you can cross a room without collecting one. One afternoon, you finally find the blanket Duncan stitched with Aodhán’s name and freeze over it with your mouth open. You bring it to him held flat in both hands, as though it has been planted there by some unknown force, and ask, eyes wet, “Did you do this?”

Duncan goes bashful enough to look ill and says, “Aye,” so quietly he sounds about five years old again; you kiss him so hard for it that Egg asks him the next day whether somebody got him in the mouth.

When the main thing arrives, Duncan is surprised by how little it resembles what he has seen in films. You start walking between the kitchen and bedroom, breathing through your mouth. You say the cramps would only go away for a few moments and then come back meaner. He knows it's about right, because somehow time has slipped from autumn to winter, from September to December and it’s been raining non-stop in Ireland and the bag’s been packed for a good two weeks. Even though by Dunk's calculations it should be another week or so, he calls the doctor, and the doctor tells him that it sounds like labour has started and that you should come to the hospital.

It unnerves him how calm you are. Sweaty, yes, and wincing every now and then, but smiling softly as if it's all just a small inconvenience. Until it's not.

He doesn't know when it exactly happens, but somewhere between blinks in which Duncan sees clothes being changed to a hospital gown and a room appearing and nurses coming, he finds himself knelt over a bed with you knelt on the other side, squeezing his palms like you're about to crush them. It is a wonder to him that such small hands can do so much damage to his knuckles.

"How are you, lassie?" he asks, and doesn't recognise his own voice.

"I'm scared," you wail. Tears streak your cheeks. Your hands claw his even tighter. "I'm so scared."

"I'm 'ere," Duncan tells you, though he doesn't feel it to be true. He kisses your forehead to comfort you and ground himself a little and suspects the gesture fails to achieve either goal. "Yer so brave, my girl. So damn brave."

He hears the midwife telling you what to do and he tries, God, he tries to be useful and remember what the midwife at the classes said a man should do during labour, but the blood is so loud in his ears all Duncan can muster is letting you press your face into his and absorbing your screams. He's never heard anyone screaming so loudly. Once, he tells you he loves you, and you laugh all ugly, thank him and tell him it's sweet but helps you very little right now. He doesn't take it personally.

It lasts hours or minutes, Duncan doesn't really know. Everything passes quickly, he believes, because it feels like he's only been allowed three breaths when the nurse says, "Almost there." He's looking at you, at your scleras disturbingly pink, your dry mouth and hair sticking to your forehead and neck, and then your eyes roll. And Duncan might as well have said, ye have to be jokin’, because a boy's a boy and a man's a man, and his body does what it always does when that happens. He exhales through his nose, a careful little stream, and that small theft of blood from the brain proves critical. Thought goes with it. Duncan remains kneeling only long enough to see your face change from anguish into bliss, to feel your hands holding his kinder, and to hear a baby cry. Then the room goes black.

He wakes confounded and lost. When he opens his eyes, it is all blue. Various spots on his body hurt, including his arm, which is currently hosting a needle. Next to him there is a tall stand with a clear plastic bag that says GLUCOSE hanging off it.

“Hey, sleepyhead,” you say.

Duncan turns his head. You are on the adjacent bed. In your arms there is a small bundle. It moves once.

“Christ,” he breathes, and nearly leaps to get to you before a tube plugged into his vein tries to stop him. “Shite. Wait, wait—”

He fumbles with the stand, then finally works out that it has wheels and he can bring it with him. Once that is made possible, Dunk is by your side with no intention of fainting ever again.

“Look,” you say, unwrapping some of the blanket. “Your daddy’s awake.”

It is a moment unlike any other in Duncan’s life. He nearly disintegrates under the largeness of how his body and yours have made this creature that gapes at him with blue eyes and a pout in the mouth. Intention has very little influence over whether he faints, he realises, because he goes light-headed and limbless almost immediately.

“Sit,” you tell him.

“Aye,” he says, and does so with his usual obedience. You place Aodhán into his hands.

Duncan takes him in both, though both seem absurd for something so small. His son lies there with his face screwed into a look of stern confusion, dark hair damp and soft against his head, fists tucked near his chin. His mouth works once. A tiny pink tongue appears, then disappears. The weight of him is nothing. The weight of him is impossible.

Duncan’s breath shreds. His shoulders start to shake. “He’s got—” He swallows, hard. “He’s got yer mouth, I think. Or mine. I can’t—” A sound leaves him, broken and laughing. “He’s both of us, isn’t he? Jesus, lassie. Look at him.”

“I am looking,” you say, as wobbly as him.

“I know, but look at him.”

“I am looking, silly.” Your hand finds Dunk's hair and brushes through it. "I know. We made him."

“Aye,” he says, and hears himself sobbing. “Aye, we did.”

A large tear drops onto the inside of his lens and smears Aodhán from view. Duncan blinks uselessly. Another follows. He bends his head until his nose touches the baby’s hair and breathes him in.

“He smells like ye,” he says. “Jesus—”

You laugh then, small and exhausted, and Duncan looks up at you over the bundle in his hands. That nearly ruins him worse. You are bleached of colour, swollen-eyed, damp still at the hairline, and more beautiful than anything he has the sense to describe. Your face glows in some deep, battered way. Your eyes are wet too, though with more dignity than his, which still seems unfair after everything you have just done.

When he is finished inspecting whether Aodhán is real and every soft piece of him has truly arrived and belongs to the world now, Duncan gives him back to you. It proves to be a mistake. The sight of you with his son against your chest devastates him all over again.

He wraps both of you in the span of his arms and presses his mouth to your temple. “Christ,” he whispers. “Yer so mighty. My mighty girl.”

Your face crumples a little against his cheek.

Duncan looks down at Aodhán again and lays one careful palm over the baby’s belly. It rises under his hand, tiny and busy. “Ye caused all that fuss, lad,” he says, voice rough with wonder, “and ye come out so little.”

You snort. “Dunk, he’s massive for a baby.”

“He looks tiny.”

“To you.”

Duncan smiles and rocks you both as much as the narrow bed and the glucose stand will allow. “Did ye have a hard time, my sweetheart?” he asks. “I’m so sorry for leavin’ ye.”

“It’s okay. The doctor said you passed out from hunger and stress. We forgot to feed you before leaving.”

“Grand. So I’m a dog now.”

“A very large dog with low blood sugar.”

He laughs into your hair, then goes quiet again.

“You were with me through the most important bit,” you say.

“Aye?” Duncan asks. His eyes move over your face as if he has to learn it again. “I can’t remember a thing.” His hand settles over yours where it cups Aodhán’s back. “Will ye tell me everything?”

Your voice is quiet and private. Dunk learns that the labour took ten hours from the time the pair of you settled over the bed, which adds up to about twenty-four he spent without eating. While you had your wondrous female hormones and adrenaline pushing you through everything you had to do, Dunk only had cortisol and an empty stomach, and those led him as far as they could. He slid clean off the bed the same moment Aodhán took his first breath on the other side, which was on December the 8th at 11:15 p.m. The injuries he feels in his body turn out to be real too, because you managed to dislocate a joint in his thumb, and while three nurses tried to transport him onto the bed and hook him up to an IV, his head got bashed twice. He minds it not. He listens to everything carefully, nods and laughs, because the alternative is to weep harder, and only keeps looking between his girl and his son.

When you seem about to doze off, Dunk calls for the nurse. She checks everything, puts the baby in a cot, tells him you’ll all be good to go in the morning, and asks Dunk if he needs anything. He needs nothing and tells her that. When the nurse leaves, he leans over you one more time. “Sweetheart,” he whispers. “Are ye all right?”

“Mm-hm,” you mutter, heavy-lidded. “You?”

He takes your hand and kisses the inside of it. “I have never been happier in my life. I’m so glad ye happened to me.”

“Me too,” you whisper, all sleepy. “And I’m glad he has your eyes.”

After all that, life changes shape, both marginally and tremendously. Each of you is the exact same person as before, only now poured into moulds with slightly different angles and dents. Having a baby around is one gift. Within three months Aodhán has grown exactly as he has been supposed to grow, cried exactly as he has been supposed to cry, and rearranged your and Duncan’s sleeping schedule into something resembling military orders.

Having Duncan is another gift. The more time passes, the more you are convinced he was born exactly for this purpose. Being a father ages him instantly, though differently from the way people age under stress. He's at full mast, finally. Wakes first when the baby so much as coos in the night, and even though you are essential for the ordeal of feeding, Dunk’s automatic response is to sleepwalk into the nursery. He makes a massive mess in the bathroom during baths, then cleans it solemnly. Snots himself all over when Aodhán smiles for the first time, not because he has just had a satisfying fart or barfed on Dunk’s shirt, but because he is almost two months old and that is when social smiles start happening. Because that is his dad right there, singing some nonsense song to him, and apparently they already share a sense of humour.

Despite being beyond tired, inked under the eyes almost all the time, with your tits so sore you would gladly sell them to someone, watching this swells in you so hard you wonder why you had your hands and legs braced against this sort of life. Why Duncan had too. He seems to have been hoarding joy of this kind inside him all those years, and now it has erupted somewhere unannounced. He is so contagious with it that even when you cry from exhaustion, you know the wish to hammer a nail into your ear is temporary, and your child will grow, and stop crying this loudly, and start using the toilet on his own, and become a wonderful man because he came from one just like that.

The challenges have been and are aplenty. The first phase of postpartum seems, in retrospect, impossible to patch into language. You are almost angry about it. Doctors told you, midwives told you, books told you, women with children told you, yet being told and having the thing happen are two different realities. There are no words for what it feels like to go for a piss after giving birth. No educational material prepares you for the belly still looking pregnant for the first weeks, soft and hollow beneath the skin, a strange emptied thing that remains yours while refusing to feel entirely attached to you. Nobody tells you with enough force that your organs will take their time travelling back into their physiological destinations. Nobody can make you understand the actual reality of the pads you have to wear, rivalling your baby’s nappies in size and indignity. Nobody tells you that gaining a little human you love so much it rips you apart may also mean feeling, for a while, that some part of yourself has been lost irretrievably.

Duncan is there through every bump in the road. He bathes you. Does all the leaning down for you, including the leaning required to put your underwear on. He washes your hair and feet. He tells you, all the way through, that you are the most beautiful thing to ever exist. That he loves you, loves you, loves you, loves you.

Somewhere inside those days, it becomes clear that the ring was the final useful thing he had left in his own flat. You ask whether he would like to move in officially; he cries a little, says, “Aye,” and cancels the rental the same day.

From there, new oddities present themselves. One of them is missing a man who is by your side whenever he is at home and awake. For the first few weeks you forget what horny means, despite the living result of it occupying your arms more often than not. Dunk, affectionate as he is, does not tip any of it into lewdness. He focuses on making you feel adored, and you try your best to give it back. Intimacy morphs into cheeks being caressed, hands being held, mouths and necks and knees getting kissed, bodies remaining warm beside each other in whatever sleep can be taken.

As time passes, you start regaining the little shards of yourself. There is more kissing, of a dirtier sort, if the wee menace of a lad is merciful enough to sleep four hours straight. Fingers stray below waistbands. Tongues go between legs. Nothing more, though. The line stays where it is until you give him a clear signal that your body has patched itself together into something you can say resembles a woman again.

It is hard. Some days, hard enough that you can barely see the far side of it. But with him it is endurable. With him, it is possible to get through this and feel truly happy in the middle of your own life, instead of only adjacent to it.

Aodhán becomes more and more limbless in your arms. You and Duncan have developed a ridiculous habit of singing to him, besides the traditional lullabies, the oddest songs there are, because your son has already developed an eclectic taste. Today it has landed on Rhiannon, a babied-up and hushed version of it at least.

You rock him side to side in the dim room until his breathing gets deeper and he is so loose he would pour out of your hands if you were not holding him. When you are sure sleep has taken him, you bend, supporting his tiny head in one of your palms, and place him in the cot. Then you just stare some over the railing. Tick the geese carousel into its dance. That is when Duncan makes himself known by giving a dry, quiet knock on the doorframe.

“Hi there,” you whisper, coming up to him. His arms go round you and his nose goes to your neck instantly. “How was work?”

“Mm, grand,” he hums. “Egg’s got his head frost-bitten because he wouldn’t wear a cap outside, and some lads made a snowman in the car park and signed it with the principal’s name.”

You snort. “How did the lads make a snowman when there’s barely any snow?”

“It’s a very tiny snowman,” Duncan says, giggling through his nose so as not to wake Aodhán. “How’s the wee menace this evening?”

“Only mildly menacing,” you tell him. “I reckon we have something like two hours? He’s just fallen asleep.”

“Mm, thank Christ,” Duncan murmurs. He cups the back of your head and gives you a slow, deep kiss. One of his arms bands round your waist and pulls you off the floor slightly. You have to climb onto his toes, until finally you surrender and let him lift you.

“If I take over when he wakes, will ye let me kiss ye for the next two hours?”

Before you get to say anything or even nod, Dunk’s mouth is back on yours. He breathes deeply through his nose and starts carrying you to the bedroom. Around his collar, he smells of cold, damp air from outside. His hair is flattened to his skull, so you decide to fix that with some clever fingers.

He groans and grips your arse more firmly, as though you have disturbed some central wire. You take that as praise and push deeper into his roots. He makes a helpless little sound through his nose at that.

By the time he gets you to the bed your legs have found his waist. He sets you down carefully, then crawls over you with his winter skin and big body made cautious by habit. His mouth stays on yours. He tucks you close to his chest as if the kissing requires shelter.

Your hands begin to wander. His seem so longing for your buttocks he doesn't let go of them once. He does his share of involuntary work too. Hips rolling in small, doomed punches. Sweet little moans caught low in his throat. His belly pressing in, then retreating, then pressing in again as if he has any authority left over it.

You realise you have no more patience for foreplay that remains foreplay. The whole thing sends you back to that evening when you practically begged him to fuck you and, in retrospect, that had gone beautifully. Life had been generous there. Mad, surely. Generous all the same. So perhaps there is merit in testing your luck again.

You go for his belt as if he has stolen it from you. Duncan grunts. His stomach pulls back under his jumper, and one large hand comes down to catch your fingers before you can make much progress.

“Lassie,” he breathes. “What’re ye up to, hm?”

What does it look like, you think. He’s so unbearably dear like this. Glasses skewed, his sweater rolled up to his belly button, your fingers clearly trying to claw their way to his cock, and still he’s all, Oh, whatever could be the meaning of all this, lassie?

“I want you so badly,” you hum into his mouth. “Mm. I miss you—” Then you kiss him again.

Duncan nods against you, dazed and willing. “Aye, sweetheart. I can—” His hand smooths down your side, searching for the familiar route. “Let me get my mouth on ye, aye?”

“No.” You catch his face. “No, I miss sleeping with you.”

His eyes sharpen behind the lenses.

“I love your mouth on me,” you say, quick and breathless. “I do. But I want your cock today.” Your fingers tighten in his jumper. “Please—”

God help him, Duncan wants you back so fiercely he nearly moans out loud. To put his cock in a kinder place than his own fist would be a blessing, and to put it in the kindest of all places could make him come on the spot. So, despite the core of his nature clawing at him to ask, are ye sure, are ye certain, are ye good already, Duncan can only bring himself to wheeze out, “Undress me. Please, undress me—”

You breathe out an airy laugh. Giddy and sweet, and Duncan does not know if he has ever seen you more excited to get your hands on him. He is topless within a blink, and then you are back to his belt, tugging on everything as if minutes are seconds and you are both on a timer. He is only a little ashamed of being half-hard before his pants come down, because how could he help it? He has apologised so many boners away to you, and you have done your share of eye-lodged apologies that Duncan hated himself for inducing.

There are, of course, boners he had no guts to say he was sorry for, because they happen in the oddest moments. When you stand at the sink in his old T-shirt with milk dried in a pale crescent on the front of it. When you sit cross-legged on the floor, folding clothes no larger than handkerchiefs. When you fall asleep with the boy milk-drunk against your chest and your free hand open on Duncan’s thigh, claiming him even in sleep.

They have grown worse over the last three months, those love-boners, because he cannot remember the last time a panic rose in him and had you at the centre of it. There has been fear, yes, over Aodhán’s little hands, over water in his ears, over holding his slippery body wrong in the bath. No old phantoms, though. Somewhere along the way it has lodged itself in Duncan that his place beside you is absolute.

He is naked and helpless very quickly. Then, not so helpless anymore when, mercifully, some blood does its last cartwheel in his brain and reminds him that it takes two in the nude for this sort of undertaking. He takes your top off with some put-upon patience, then huffs defeated at the hooks of your bra until you humiliate him with an endeared little aww and take it off yourself. Soon, Duncan’s skill with bra hooks ceases to matter, because your tits are out and they, without fail, make him forget any terror. He fits your back to his chest again, wedges his chin to the dip of your shoulder and cups you in both hands, murmuring, “How are ye here, hm?”

Your head tips, lower lip caught between your teeth when he rolls your nipples under his thumbs.

“Little sore,” you say. “But keep touching me.”

“Mm, I’m so sorry, sweetheart,” Duncan says, drawing along the tendon of your neck with his nose and not sounding sorry at all. He tries to. He is sure he is, somewhere deep down, because clearly the last thing Dunk wants is for his girl to be in pain, even though it seems counterintuitive to sulk about breasts growing bigger while there are plenty of other inconveniences to sulk about.

“Like I believe you,” you say, eyes closed. “Better stop talking and—”

You slide his hands down to your hips, then fold forward on the bed until your buttocks press to his groin.

Duncan’s hands twitch and squeeze those beloved dips of his. “Oh, girl,” he says. “Don’t ye tell me to breed ye, cause I bloody will. We ought to go slow, ye know.”

“Do we now?”

He breathes out through his nose. “I do,” he tells you. “I do, because I’ll end in seconds if ye keep offerin’ your arse like this—”

You chuckle, flustered, and crane your head, ready to tell him there are condoms in your bedside drawer. You went and bought them only because you knew he would be too shy to do it on his own, and you would be too awkward to outright ask him.

But when you look over your shoulder, Dunk is leaning down with a hiss, fishing something from his nightstand. He straightens with a foil packet caught between his fingers.

You stare at it. He catches your eyes, and your knitting brows, and stops with the thing halfway to his mouth.

“I, uh—” he starts, already going pink. “I bought some. Just in case. Didn’t want to say, case it felt like I was pushin’ ye.”

For a second you can do nothing with that. This ridiculous man. This enormous, bashful, terrifyingly dear man, making the buying of rubbers into some grand romantic gesture. It punches clean through your chest.

You scramble up, rise onto your knees, take the packet from his hand, and kiss him. “You’re the dearest lad, you know that?”

Duncan watches you tear the foil. His mouth has gone soft.

“Can I?” you ask, poising the ring at his tip. “I’ve never got to do this with you before.”

He nods. Then his hands come to your face, one on each side, holding you there while you roll the latex down over him. He looks you in the eye the whole time. You stroke him a few times once it is done, slow and careful, and Duncan closes his eyes. Breathes deeply. “I missed ye too,” he says.

You give him one more sweet kiss on the corner of his mouth, then go back where you were, cheek pillowed on your folded palms.

Duncan stares at his beloved.

At the hang of her arse cheeks and the curve of her spine. At the soft moue of her lips and her hooded lids. Devotion punches him so low he folds, fitting his cock to the pillow of your bum. He supports himself on one elbow and works an arm under your shoulders. “I need ye close,” he says into your ear.

You tense a little under the press of his cock, though his weight does a wonderfully grounding thing to you. It is silly, maybe. You know all is well. You have seen the doctor, and the midwife, and everyone keeps saying the body is doing its miracles and everything looks perfect. Still, you do not know. Pain has its place in the fear, but change frightens you more. Pregnancy had made desire easy in the strangest ways, nearly excessive, a thing living in the body with you. Now you have only had a week or two of feeling anything close to that old hunger, and the wanting arrives with caution built into it.

Before you know it, your nails have sunk into Duncan’s forearm.

His mouth moves near your ear. “You nervous, my love?”

You breathe out. “A little,” you say, unsure. “Just… tell me if it feels different?”

Something rough works through the back of his throat. Duncan adjusts over you, and your body sinks deeper into the mattress under him. He smells your temple first. “Am I crushin’ ye?”

You shake your head. “No.” And truly it feels the opposite of crushed. It feels as though all of you has been gathered in. Embraced and made safe beneath him.

Duncan’s mouth stays near your ear when he speaks again. Very quiet now.

“I’ve told ye once and I’ll keep tellin’ ye.” His hand comes to your hair, smoothing it off your cheek, then lower to cradle your jaw. “Ain’t nothin’ this body can do that’ll make me want ye less.” His thumb moves once at the corner of your mouth. “Ye though, tell me one word if anything feels wrong and we pause, all right?”

You relax. Forced to take deep, long breaths, you tell him, “Okay.”

Duncan hums. “Are ye good with me like this?”

“Yes. Stay like this.”

You push your arse out a little, and his cock rubs between your bodies. Duncan starts rocking himself between your buttocks and huffing so that the hair moves near your forehead. For a moment, his hand leaves your face and reaches between you. The angle makes him clumsy, broad fingers working carefully until he finds you and brushes them through your slit.

“This all right?”

You nod and wriggle, a little impatient.

His mouth breaks into a smile against your cheek. He has been wanted plenty by you, but the hiatus gives it a nice little pinch of novelty again. Then, he fists himself at the base and starts pushing where he wants to be.

Painstakingly slow. Cruelly slow, given the state of the both of you. Duncan closes his eyes when the covered head of him slips in, hardly more than that, and already it feels so staggeringly familiar his teeth find his lower lip. Your hands clutch his forearm. You moan out.

He trusts the rest of himself to do a good enough job feeding you his cock, so his hand returns to your face. His palm covers your mouth, gentle and broad. “Hush, my girl,” he whispers. “You’ll make me come quick and wake the babe.”

You groan into his fingers. Your thigh quivers when he presses in farther, then the whole thing settles into him being half-sunk and waiting for you to accept him.

Once again, you are confronted with his strength and how much of it he spends on restraint. He could fold you easily. Bend you where he wanted you. The weight of him has you pinned to the mattress, his arm is under your shoulders, his body yoked over yours with enough breadth to blot out half the room. Still, one wince would have him off you and checking for injuries before you managed to draw the next breath. That wisdom lives under the pressure. Makes it safe. Makes it worse.

Thankfully, it feels just the way it should. Your man, returning where he ought to be, and welcomed. Your body opens. First a sting so small it has more memory than pain in it. Then heat. Then the strange, full drag of him gaining ground.

Duncan feels each change as if it has been passed directly into his spine. The give and clutch, and the careful way your breath catches and releases under his hand. “There she is,” he says, so low it hardly makes it out of him. “There’s my lassie.”

Your eyes close. He feels it happen somehow. The softening goes through you and he has to stop and press his forehead near your temple. His hips hold still with a discipline that leaves his own thighs shaking. This is where he has missed you most, he realises. Past the want and the fist and the stupid ache of going to bed hard because you had bent over the cot in sleep shorts. Here. With your body taking him back, both of you hushed and listening for what it permits.

You take his wrist and pull his hand from your mouth. “More,” you breathe.

Duncan’s answer breaks in his chest. “Aye.”

He gives you another careful inch. Then another. The condom catches slightly, latex and heat and your body making him work for it in a way that has his mouth opening against your hair. When he is seated as deep as he dares, he stays there. His whole body sheltering yours, breath moving hard by your ear. “All right?” he asks again.

You nod against the mattress. “Move.” So he moves.

At first it's hardly anything. A roll of the hips, slow and testing, with the whole of him held rigid above you so restraint can travel down into the place where your bodies join. It nearly breaks him anyway, that snug, tender fit. Your body seems to remember him without needing to be persuaded. His jaw sets, then fails. A rough sound catches behind his teeth.

Your answer is immediate—fingers close round his wrist, feet shift against the mattress. You press back, small and hungry, and Duncan has to lower his forehead to your hair for one second so he does not disgrace himself.

For you, the shock is how familiar he feels. The same breadth, the same right depth and blunt stretch that has always made thought slip sideways in your head. The weight. So enormous it has you helpless beneath him with your shape pressed clean into the bed.

Yet the desire around it has altered. It comes slower now, and heavier. Less a wild thing in the blood than a claim written carefully into the dust of the bones. Mine, you seem to be saying. Mine you are. Mine, he answers. Slowly, legibly, with every deep press, so anyone who has ever seen his hand at your back or your mouth turned towards his would know the pair of you are spoken for and loudly.

Pleasure begins where it used to begin, too. In the rightness of his size and in how completely he fills you once your body has made room. You thought perhaps the change would be in one of you, in some terrible way, but no. It is all the life round you that has altered. The man above you is still the man above you, and your body receives him with an old, grateful greed.

Duncan feels that thought without being told. Or perhaps he only feels the way your cunt grips him when he starts giving more of himself to it. His hips gather confidence, then heft. The roll becomes a proper fuck, slow enough not to jar you, deep enough to pull a strangled little sound from the back of your throat each time he sinks in.

“God, sweetheart,” he mutters. “Ye feel—fuck. I missed this. Missed ye. Missed bein’ in ye.”

Your hand searches back blindly and finds his mouth. “Hush, you—”

He laughs against your fingers, very softly, then takes them in. Sucks on them, warm and wet, and bites the pads lightly enough to make your thigh twitch. It ruins your attempt at discipline at once. The next sound comes out louder.

“Ah,” Duncan whispers, pleased with himself. “So it’s me has to hush, is it?”

You push your fingers deeper into his mouth in punishment. He sucks them again, eyes closing for a beat, then lets them slide free. His mouth comes directly to your ear.

“Does that feel good?” he asks. “Aye, I know it does. I can feel ye pullin’ at me.” His hips press in and grind there. “Try and keep quiet for me, girl. Just a little. Can ye do that while I make ye come?”

You make some indignant, broken thing of a noise.

“Poor lassie,” he says, and there is laughter under it, love under that. “Need help, do ye?”

He lifts his hips off you, then pats your thigh. You follow without understanding fully, shifting just enough to give him space. His hand slides between you and the mattress with effort, palm trapped under the weight of you, middle finger finding you slick and swollen round him.

The first touch makes you jerk.

“There,” he says. “There ye are.”

He rubs with the flat of his finger with the same attention he brings to all useful things. You start squirming, pinned between his cock and his hand, unable to move away from either. It is hard to tell who is worse off. Duncan has gone nearly silent from the work of staying contained. You keep choking on your own sounds, swallowing them down and failing.

Then his mouth returns to your ear, and what comes next is worse than his hand. “I love ye,” he says. “I love ye so much. God, it hurts me sometimes, how much I love ye.”

Heat floods you, because he's discovered a new switch. Apparently being told you're loved while getting fucked is your new favourite thing.

Duncan feels the response close round him. His body gives one rough shove before he remembers himself, and the hand under you works harder, surer, because fuck, he knows. Knows exactly. His arm tightens under your shoulders and turns your head a little towards him. His glasses have slipped to the tip of his nose, and with both hands occupied he has to tilt his face back to see you over them.

He experiences it happen in layers.

Your cunt clenches first, hard enough to make his hips kick. Then your thighs start to quake and trap his hand between them. Then oh—your eyes roll, lids flutter, mouth opens round a moan that gets arrested halfway and comes out shackled for bad behaviour as his name. Duncan, Dun-can, Dunk, you keep gasping and all he can see is the white strip under your lashes and a clear bead of a tear escaping from under them. You spend on him fully. Make him go with you, too.

The last of him buckles. His hand drags free from beneath you and both arms come round you tight, one locked under your shoulders, the other wrapped low around your belly. He lifts you a careful inch from the bed as pleasure forces up through him. The sound that leaves him gets caught in your neck. His hips jerk shallowly, then press in and stay, all the strength of him turned to holding.

For a moment, he thinks he is done. Then you whisper, “I love you too,” and some mean aftershock still queued inside him snaps loose. His stomach seizes hard against your back. His thighs jump. Another pulse drags out of him, weaker and sharper than the first, and his groan breaks loose before he can bite it down.

“Shh,” you coo at him.

Duncan realises, with dim horror, that the noise is his. He buries his mouth against the back of your neck and clutches you through the last of it, giant frame shuddering over yours with no dignity left to save. Then he gathers you properly and falls onto his side, taking you with him, mindful even in collapse. His chest works hard against your back. His face stays hidden in your hair, where he breathes and breathes until some part of him remembers there is world beyond your body.

You turn towards him. The movement makes him slip out, and Duncan mislikes that very much. His face tightens with the small offence of it. The next thing amends the first wrong: your mouth finds his, sweet and warm, and your arms come round his neck. Your legs tangle with his. You cling to him with all the loose, pleased weight of yourself and keep whispering that you love him.

He laughs, a little ruined. His hand comes to the side of your face. “Are ye all right?”

You nod and hum into his mouth. The sound turns soft there, almost a purr.

“M’lady’s happy,” Dunk mutters. You smile against him. “Then I’m happy too.”

He gets about three seconds of this bliss. His heart has no time to stop running so frantically in his chest before the first little coo comes from the nursery. Aodhán, at least, has had the courtesy to wait until you finished.

Duncan presses the heel of his hand under his glasses and sighs deeply. “I’ll bring him. Ye wait here, lass.”

You watch the following awkwardness with a grin on your face. Duncan pulls the condom off himself, ties it, tosses it in the bin, then hunts for his shorts. He gets one leg in, nearly trips, recovers, and pulls them over his arse while already walking towards the baby.

The room stays warm after him. The sheets are a wreck under you. Your body feels opened and used and soundly yours. From the nursery, Aodhán gives another small complaint, offended by some mystery beyond adult comprehension.

You lie there smiling and think, perhaps life can be both. This, and whatever the pair of you must do in a minute to ease your son’s current misery.

EPILOGUE

You're almost late and you're ready to blame everything on Dunk who insists on driving responsibly even when there is not a single soul on the road, but Rowan seems so engrossed in being stressed she doesn't even notice.

Her hair is let loose and reaches down to her waist. A flurry of copper locks paired with a jewel-green dress makes her look like a very nervous fae about to marry her sweet, button-eyed human prince.

Raymun appears to be faring a bit better, though you suspect it is Lyonel's doing, because the scent of cider clouds his breath when he comes in to hug you.

The wedding is held in a private outdoor location under white pavilions and an insane amount of flowers, and since it's the middle of July everyone's sweating so hard you make a mental note to have yours, if it ever arrives, happen in spring.

You catch Rowan’s hand before taking place by the ceremony table. “You look gorgeous,” you whisper. “And it’ll be over soon. Only joy after.”

Rowan looks at you with red-rimmed eyes, breathing shallowly through her nose. “I’m going to be sick on the legal documents.”

“You won’t.”

“I might.”

You snort, then air-kiss her forehead to spare the lipstick. “Go marry your valet already.”

“Don’t call him that. I’ll cry harder.”

You steal Róisín from the woman holding her and go to take your place opposite Duncan and Raymun. The bridal party has doubled itself to two best men and two maids of honour arranged on either side. Duncan stands next to Raymun with Aodhán in his arms. Your son has one fist in Duncan’s collar and the other open in the air, conducting some invisible band. When Rowan starts down the aisle, Aodhán goes very still, stares at the moving green of her dress, and announces, “Da!” Loudly.

A small tremor passes through the gathered guests. You allow yourself only a little snort, because if you start laughing properly you will start sobbing, and that will help Rowan keep her composure naught. Duncan’s mouth tightens in the dangerous way. Raymun closes his eyes for one second and looks grateful to be loved by idiots.

The vows are sweet. Short and honest. They promise each other punctuality, patience, ordinary love, and making tea without being asked. Rowan gets through hers with one hand crushing Raymun’s and the other wiping under her eye with the knuckle of her thumb. When Raymun says his, he presses his forehead to hers first, as if the words need to travel through bone before they can be trusted aloud. By the time Rowan says, “I do,” Raymun breaks fully and cries. Then you look at Duncan’s red face, tight mouth, wet eyes, and start crying too. Róisín takes this as an opportunity to put your necklace in her mouth.

After the ceremony, there are photographs, prosecco, sweating under white canvas, and relatives behaving in ways that suggest blood is mostly something to endure. You dance with the groom, then the groom’s dad, then the groom’s grandfather, who tells you your son has a good head on him. You dance with Raymun’s terrible cousin because refusing would take more energy than surviving the dance itself. You dance with Rowan, briefly and badly, until she starts laughing into your shoulder. You dance with Lyonel, who smells expensive and looks very pleased with the whole institution of marriage when it has involved no direct labour from him.

Finally, Duncan manages to cut in. After that, he refuses to give you away again for the rest of the evening. A year ago, maybe, happiness of this size would have made you suspicious. Worse, guilty. Now it seems to have become one of the default settings of your life. Duncan’s hand rests at your back. Your cheek finds the front of his shirt. Above his shoulder, the white pavilions lift and breathe in the July heat.

When Aodhán starts crying with the imperious fury of a tiny monarch wronged by bedtime, you and Duncan hug your way out of the afterparty. Rowan leaves red smears on your cheeks and Aodhán’s, then cries over having done it. Raymun kisses the top of your head, claps Duncan too hard on the shoulder, and tells him something you do not catch because Aodhán has begun making his dissatisfaction public. You pack yourselves back into Dunk’s Volkswagen Passat and head home through the warm dark.

On the drive back, you put your cheek to the window and watch the streetlights drag themselves gold across the glass. Beside you, Duncan keeps one hand steady on the wheel while the other drifts, whenever the road allows it, to the back of his neck. Once, you think you catch him spacing out with a stare so thousand-yard you ask if he is all right, and he says, “Aye,” much too quickly.

Dunk has to admit he has been elsewhere any moment he has been allowed. As long as there were rings to focus on, or a drunk uncle to steer away from more alcohol, he did well. Whenever he was relieved from being a best man and left to be only a friend, a boyfriend and a father, his mind made him hot beneath the collar. He opens the car door for you with a lump in his throat, then leans to the back seat to retrieve his son, and the three of you make your slow way back into the apartment.

Aodhán wakes fully during the carrying and is furious about it. By the time you get inside, his outrage has become hysterical. Duncan warms a bottle while you undo buttons with one hand and hold the baby with the other, still in your wedding clothes. The two of you move through the small labour of him together: feed, change, burp, song, a walk from wall to wall while he blinks hard at sleep and fights it as though surrender will cost him. Eventually he goes heavy against Duncan’s shoulder. Gives one last damp sigh into his father’s collar and loses the war.

Duncan puts him down into the cot. He waits by it, bent in half and barely breathing, until Aodhán’s mouth opens in sleep. Then he backs out of the room and closes the door quietly.

“Tea?” he asks.

“Yes,” you say, eyeing him.

He catches the suspicion and retreats to the kitchen fast. You follow, though only as far as the living room, where you drop onto the couch with a sigh that comes from the soles of your feet.

Duncan comes back with two steaming mugs and a face arranged into innocence. He sets them down, then lowers himself to sit on the floor.

“What are you doing?” you ask.

“Naught.”

“Dunk.”

“Drink your tea.”

He takes your ankle in one hand and tries to be nonchalant about the tiny leather straps of your sandal. Unfortunately, they belong to the same club as bra hooks, and all conspire against him. He frowns down at the buckle. Turns your foot slightly. Turns it back. Squints. You watch all of this, visibly entertained.

“Do you need help?”

“No.”

“You look like you need help.”

“I’m grand,” he huffs.

Another long moment passes. The strap finally gives. Duncan gets the shoe off with a grunt of effort, as though he has defeated a beast in combat. Then his thumbs press into the sole of your foot.

You fold immediately. Your head tips back against the couch. “Oh, God bless you,” you whisper. “I’ve been dreaming of this since the first hour I put them on.”

He works his fingers along the sole of your foot for a while, firm through the arch, gentler under the ball, then back to the heel where the ache has gathered meanest. Your breathing changes before you know it. The whole evening loosens its hold. Your eyes close.

This, Duncan realises, is a problem. Lulling you to sleep had not entered the plan. He sets your foot down, then fumbles for his pocket. “Sweetheart,” he says.

“Mm.”

“Don’t pass out on me yet, aye?”

Your mouth curves without your eyes opening. “What do you need, baby, hm?”

For a few seconds there is nothing. A small shuffle. The soft knock of him rearranging. Duncan hears none of it, because blood has clogged his ears so thoroughly he fears deafness has come to keep blindness company. He gets the box out, opens it with both hands, positions himself at your feet, and steadies his wrist before the shaking can make a mess of the thing.

“Will ye look at me, lassie?”

You crack your lids open.

Duncan is kneeling on one knee before you, the familiar box open in his hand, the familiar ring resting against dark velvet. The blue iris catches the lamplight. He looks very close to passing out, with colour high in his face and his mouth held careful, yet his voice comes even.

“My girl,” he says. “I’ve loved ye bein’ my girl these last months.” His thumb moves once against the edge of the box. “I’ll love whatever name ye give me. But would ye do me the honour and become my wife?”

Your eyes well so quickly the ring blurs.

You push yourself up on the couch bit by bit then slide down until you are kneeling opposite him. Duncan lowers his other knee too, bending to meet you there. For a second you are sure you have answered already. Then you realise your head has only been nodding and nodding in place of speech.

“Christ, yes,” you choke out.

Then you climb into his lap so happy and eager your weight sends him backwards onto the floor. Duncan lands with a grunt and catches you. You kiss him hard. Your arms close round his neck until he makes another small, afflicted sound into your mouth.

He laughs all phlegmy. “Do ye want yer ring, ye mad girl, or what?”

“Yes,” you say, laughing too. “Yes, yes—”

You get off him enough to give him your hand. Duncan sits up on one elbow, then takes your fingers. His hands tremble as badly as they did when he gave you the daisy, the poor dried thing preserved for eternity in one of the important notebooks. The ring slides over your knuckle and settles there perfectly. Blue as your son’s eyes. Blue as your future husband’s.

You last perhaps ten seconds. Then you are all over him again, knees on either side of his hips, hands cupping his face while you kiss him wherever you can reach. “I love you,” you tell him. “I love you so much. You are so damn precious, Dunk.”

His eyes shine behind the glasses. You hold his cheeks between your palms and make him look at you properly. “You’re mine,” you say. “I’m not giving you to anyone.”

"I ain't going anywhere, girl," he tells you. Because where would Dunk go. This is his home. In this flat. In this girl's heart.

The two of you stay on the carpet for a minute, too pleased to organise yourselves. The mugs cool on the table. In the room next door, Aodhán sleeps through his father becoming yours.

I love you terribly, both of you think at each other and tell each other daily, blissfully oblivious to the thing that once lived under your sternums and has not once returned, because there is no space left for heartburn in hearts overflown with love so completely.

He swears, you're such a tease sometimes. Cuddle with me, let's watch a film, but your hand keeps performing a harrowing torment at his waistline. His shirt has 'ridden up', though it's actually you who's rucked it to his ribs. Little gentle strokes over cotton first, and then, before Duncan knows it, his belly's exposed, and your fingers twirl the hairs at his navel.

He's trying to keep his eyes fixed on the screen, but they drop, every now and then, to the crown of your head. It's sliding lower, he's noted. It started with resting under the wing of his arm, and now your cheek is below his sternum, mouth breathing hot over his ribs. He's forgotten what's on the telly. Your nails scratch round his belly button, and his whole stomach ripples, shaking strands of hair to fall onto your face.

A small, pleased mm falls from him when your fingers brush just below his waistband. You answer with one of your own, then stretch yourself long across the bed. Your legs straighten. Your free arm reaches overhead until the hand lands in his hair.

It's an excellent way to distract him. Duncan must be wired strangely there, for the slightest pull at the roots enters him far lower than it ought to. His eyes fall shut. Heat gathers behind his navel and sinks, slow and heavy, into his groin. You scratch his scalp once, then close your fingers and tug again. His hips give a small, involuntary shift towards you, and only when the side of him meets the warm press of your cheek does he realise how far you have slid. Your face has settled into the crease of his thigh.

He looks down. In the bottom part of his lenses you acquire an odd shape. Your nose corrugates so that its slope dips and makes the tip look smaller. Your eyes set slightly further apart. There's a hand resting over his stomach and that one has an uncannily thin wrist and fingers like warped spider limbs. Below those, he's getting warmer still. It's not so much the feeling, though Duncan's belly's sensitive to any little devotion, as the sight. There's something deeply sensual about having a mouth right next to his cock, no matter if it suggests something or not. He tries to not get outright hard by simply being breathed on. Tries to calm himself, because you've been having a good, low-symptom day and he wouldn't want to impose. How virgin of him. He's had you bent over, on his face, in his hands, and knows every crease of you, and still he ends up with a chubby.

“That is a very low place to cuddle,” he says, thinner than he would like.

"Hm," you purr. "But I like it here."

Duncan puts a hand to the back of your head, meaning only to keep you where he can see you, but your hair threads through his fingers and your cheek turns into his palm. Then, you kiss his groin through the cotton of his sweatpants. His hand closes round your upper arm. "Ah. Right. C'mere, lassie."

He means upwards. He always means upwards. Give him half a kiss below the neck, and he becomes anxious to return the favour, because he is the caretaker. He's had your tongue on his cock more than once, always with some secret fear of becoming selfish or triggering nausea behind it. He tends to stop you, somewhere halfway through it at the latest, and brings you where he can sort you out. There's so much pleasure in it for him that Duncan does not at all consider himself depraved. Lately, it's all been gentler, too. He keeps his mouth tender on you at all times. Keeps his hands wiser between your legs. When he fucks you, it's slow, and he enjoys it tremendously, because instead of seizing him, his orgasms bloom from leniently paced edging and sometimes he feels you coming on him twice while he's still deep in the buzz of his first rapture.

It has not, ever, crossed his mind, that sucking him off might be the end game you seek. You ignore the pull he gives you and put yourself closer to his crotch. Your hand leaves his hair, which Dunk mislikes so much he frowns. It reaches past him, snags a pillow from under his elbow, and tucks it under the side of your belly. You've somehow made yourself heavier so his grip loosens. He brushes a thumb under the sleeve of your T-shirt, and asks, "What're ye doing, girl?"

"Watching a film," you tell him, hooking your fingers under the ribbed band round his lower belly.

He blinks down at you. "Are ye?"

"Mhm," you hum. "Very invested."

He glances at the telly, stupidly. Two people arguing in a kitchen. He has no idea who they are or which of them is winning. Then, he feels a small tug. His hips go up, because this is an instruction and Duncan obeys those, even if the next thing that happens is him getting helplessly exposed. Both layers start going down. His stomach hollows, and to his attempt at sitting up you throw him a cute little glare.

"No moving me," you say.

"But I can—"

"You watch the film."

He sinks back into the pillows doubting he'll be able to tell you anything about the plot or the characters, because his eyes simply won't come off you.

His cock comes free reluctantly. You ease both the underwear and trousers down, then give yourself over to staring, and Duncan suffers it. He rests, half-hard but pulsing, against the crease of his thigh. Even partially sleepy he's still reaching his belly button. Foreskin cradles his polished head and begins to draw back by the slow industry of blood. One clear drop sits at the slit. The hairs covering his balls and groin gather themselves dark on the navel, then disperse again, making a pillow of his stomach. It's a lovely sight, and a rare one for you to admire unabated. Usually by the time you get him in full nude, he's already wanting so badly all of him is flushed and throbbing. Sometimes, you catch glimpses of him when he's changing or stepping with you into the bathtub. He's gorgeous in both forms, and everything that comes between, but soft, Duncan acquires a different kind of beauty. He's guarded and private. Keeps his arm nearby, ready to cover himself if your eyes stay too long. Still heavy, still wide, still large enough to slap loudly against his thigh, but gentle in a way that asks for delicate handling. Lots of him to hurt. Lots of him to love.

Above you, he stirs. "Don't inspect me like that, girl."

You glance up. His ears are red all over. "I've said nothing."

"I can hear ye thinkin'," he says.

"Can you?" you ask, disbelieving him slightly, because it's still odd to think that Dunk would have this sort of dirt in his mind. You know he's capable, based on everything that falls from his mouth when he forgets himself. You doubt, however, that he can tell you want him measured against your face. That you want him to slap you with it. To have him come all over from your forehead to chin, then spread it with his palm and kiss you. "Is there a point in me showing you then?" you say, pressing your lips to his tender side, still benign.

"Ah, fuck—" Duncan breathes. His palm closes over your nape. "You don't have to, girl. You don't have to—"

"Dunk," you say, brushing skin. You give him your heaviest-lidded leer and a girlish little pout. "What if I really, really want to?" Then, you allow your thinking flesh to take over and pat yourself on the cheek with his tip.

His face does a slow, wonderful thing. Such boyish bewilderment. He fights himself there. You can see all the but let me and c'mere and I want to sort ye out first appearing and passing, until all that's left is please. God, yes, please. Take me, please. Break me, pretty, pretty please and thank you.

"A-aye," Duncan says. "All right, just—just mind yourself, yeah?" He brushes hair off your cheek and bands it in his fist.

You nod. Adjust your belly over the pillow and bring your face closer to his lower stomach. It makes a warm bolster under your cheek. Then, you wrap your fingers round the thickening base and guide his hidden crown into your mouth.

"Ah, shite—" he hisses. His head knocks the headboard; thighs quake.

There, he's pliable still. Supple enough that you can press him to your palate, squeeze a little. You lick over him flatly, then tense your tongue into a tip and let yourself brush under the foreskin to taste whatever he's weeping out for you. Your fingers play at his balls—roll them, compress, then let the whole weight rest in the hollow of your hand. Higher, you start sucking him into hardness.

"Oh, sweet girl," Duncan breathes. It makes your cunt tighten some, because your favourite version of him begins to surface: rendered loud by incapacity to keep himself together. Unmanned, even before the main pleasure arrives. He massages the tendon of your neck with his thumb. Murmurs, "Christ alive, ye feel s'good. Ah God, right there. Right there, oh—"

You release him with a wet smack. Gather the spit from the top and guide it down in slow strokes, pulling on skin to reveal him bit by bit. When you look up, his glasses have slipped a little. There's damp above his upper lip, and his mouth hangs open.

"Do you like it?" you ask.

Duncan nods.

“Talk to me,” you say.

His eyes jump to yours. “About what?”

Your wrist moves up until you close his crown in your palm. You twist there. Watch him suck in a sigh and feel his hips lift towards you. "That," you say.

He laughs weakly. Duncan knows the charm of a lover saying exactly what they want. He adores it on you. Every time he hears fuck me harder, or worse, breed me, put a baby in me, he has to squeeze his eyes shut and invoke all sorts of unsexy things in order to last. He knows you like it on him too, so he tries, despite the way getting so exposed has him burning all the way from chest to scalp.

"Fuck," he grits when your thumb presses on the fold under the head. "Ah, fuck, make me hard girl. Put yer mouth back on me, please—"

So you take him back. Since he's asked so nicely. You flatten your tongue and drag it slowly through the tender join beneath the crown. The right there. His belly jerks so sharply that the hairs on it brush your forehead. And then you just… keep him. Suck on him and warm him up until you can feel the flesh getting hotter and roping with blood that swells his veins. He's breathing audibly through his nose. Below, you cradle his thick root in your hand. Massage it, and scrape your nails through the fuzz. Right where he grows out from his groin you press your fingers down and rub them in circles, making his balls come up tightening in response.

Slowly, he begins to fill your cheeks. It feels safe to be there. Special too, because despite Duncan always nodding to your you are allowed to want things, he's still learning. It's almost as if he's used to taking second-hand pleasure from whatever service he's providing. So, you don't tell him this is for you as well. That there is a whim underneath it to check if you are able to wring your man clean without opening your legs.

His thigh firms beneath your cheek. “Slow,” he breathes. “Aye, like that. Christ, look at ye.” A thumb passes over your temple.

Your eyes take him in. Belly bare and quivering. One knee knocked wide to give you room, foot planted as if he needs to brace against the bed. His face has gone helplessly honest. Every stroke of your hand travels visibly through him. “Do ye like it?” he asks.

You let him slide from your mouth, wet and darkened. “Very much.” Then, you kiss the vein on his underside. One small peck. Another, bolder, until your lips part and tongue comes out to make out with his cock. He moans, loud, and squeezes your neck. "Too much?" you ask.

“N-no." He shakes his head. "That’s lovely. Do it again.”

"Mm," you hum, guiding your nose lower. It lands in the webbing of his sack and hauls air greedily. There's a whine, so pretty-sounding you have to rub your thighs together. You lick him all the hard way between the two seams: balls to slit. There, you stop and tell him, "You keep talking."

"Jesus," he whispers. "What're ye doing to me, girl? Put your tongue on me again."

His fingers thread through your hair. His fist closes. There's a small tug you feel at your roots. It makes you moan against him, and Duncan throws his head back.

Yes, this, you think. Show me, tell me. Bear your throat to me. He's not the one to manhandle you, despite having all the necessary equipment. Even when he hauls you, lifts you, holds you, it's all done so considerately sometimes you want to outright tell him that bodies don't break so easily. That it is sometimes nice to nurse a bruise a lover has left you. The hand in your hair is a first. There's an itch within it, a small wicked urge to guide you down. Maybe choke you on him, a little. You pretend he's pushed harder than he did, and swallow as much of him as you can.

“Oh, fuck me,” he whispers. "Oh, my good girl. My best girl, oh fuck—" His pelvis rolls into your mouth. You look up again, waiting. "Yer so—" he manages. "So soft. And warm. I like it when—ah—when ye use your tongue like that. Round the head. Aye, just—" His eyes go shut when your tongue circles his crown. Fingers twitch. "There," he pants. "Oh God, there. God, ye know."

Oh, you do know. You know exactly where his skin pulls tight, where the vein underneath makes him shudder, how far you can take him without your jaw beginning to ache. You know the sound he makes when you play with him like that. You know he will hold his breath until you touch his thigh and remind him to let it out, and still, hearing all that you know already makes it so much sexier. Makes him, in some profound way, even more yours than he was to begin with, and for a moment you forget there is a pregnant belly between you. It's just you, pleasuring your darling in the evening of some nameless day, because you both forsake calendars on the weekends.

Duncan's getting lost in it. It's difficult for him to remain this useless, and near impossible to comprehend that someone would pay his cock so much attention. It makes him want terrible things. He yearns to see your hand jerk him off until he's all sloppy with his own body's drool, preferably while you bite on his lip and have your palm round his neck. When he closes his eyes, an entirely scummy image forces itself into his mind: his cock, sliding in and out of your mouth. Just a little. Shallow, but enough to see your cheeks filling and hollowing. He rubs his fingers on your scalp. “Can ye look at me?” he asks.

You lift your eyes.

His brows draw up. “Oh, girl.”

He's meaning to ask you. His thumb strays to the corner of your lip, right where it shines with spit. He wipes it and spreads it towards your temple. With that tiny pressure your jaw slacks. Tongue lolls out. You lower yourself onto his belly and keep looking up. He gives one, shy roll of his hips. Your mouth pulls in a soft smile. "Is that all right?" he asks.

There's a nod. A hum, too. Your hand stays banded round his base, so when he moves, he's sliding through both things at once. He keeps staring at you, searching for anything that would tell him no, and finds yes everywhere. "Sweet girl," he murmurs. "You've such wicked mouth. That's so fucking lovely." All of it whispered, though there is no one to overhear him.

"Ye always make me feel so good," he says. Cradles the back of your head again. "And yer so pretty. Keep lookin' at me." A swallow.

There is one more thing Duncan wants, but it will give him away horrendously. He starts touching you. Rubbing your back. Brushing through your hair, like he's trying to coax it out of you by begging with his body. You only hum some more and stroke between his root and balls. It's all very maddening. Finally, he brings himself to mumble, "Will ye—would ye roll your eyes for me? Like ye do when you're cross, or when… when you come—oh, please—"

He watches it happen like it's a car crash he's about to be in. Your eyes widen first. Then, recognition settles in them, horrifying and gorgeous, and then oh—your lids flutter and irises travel from one side to the other, and Duncan gasps out your name. "Fuck," he grits. "It's my favourite sight in the whole world. God, I'm close. I'm so close—"

He keeps fucking himself through your fist to your mouth, and reaches the breaking point. His back leaves the pillows. "Fuck, keep going," he breathes, bowing over you. "That’s it. That’s my girl.”

There's a familiar marrow-wring, just this time Duncan is mildly guilty for arriving at it. Stomach ceases to feel like it belongs to him and for a split second he is weightless and stuck in a moment right before the warmth spilling. It's so good already he keeps gasping and moaning, until he ceases to move altogether and just watches the pulsing tip of himself, entirely sure the sight of him filling your mouth is going to destroy him.

Cock stiffens against your tongue. You feel the pull in his sack against your hand, and then the first spurt lands hot and salty; another follows. He groans through various things: your name, countless instances of shredded yes, sweet endearments, all that while you swallow, stroke, and his length throb between your fingers. His belly quakes, and the wave of it moves the whole of his torso. Below the shirt, his chest shudders too. You fix your eyes there and see his heart beating frantically below the breastbone.

Some of the spent slips out of your mouth onto his skin. It milks over the hairs covering his body. You're so enamoured by each of sights that you notice his hands on your shoulders only when he whimpers.

"Too much," he says. "Too much, girl, oh God—"

So you release him. He smacks against his stomach heavily. The shine of him spills around and you can't help yourself—you lick the softened head once and he jerks so violently the bed complains.

“Mercy,” Duncan wheezes. "Sweetheart, please—"

Whether the mercy comes or not, Duncan is certain he could take it. He will never again refuse you if you so much as breathe next to his cock. He knows exactly what he's getting out of going down on you. It's a thing that makes him feel most man of all, to have you clawing at his scalp and suffocating him with your thighs. To hear his name wrapped into moans is his favourite way of being called. That is his purpose in it. Now, he's dazed and confused and beyond blissed, and he's staring at you, staring at his softening cock.

"You're so fucking pretty," you tell him, all serious. "You have the prettiest cock I've seen."

It's so absurd, he giggles. Then laughs out loud, until you frown. Both of his hands get under your arms, and this time you let him lift you. He brings you up with great care and no grace, deposits you across his chest, then catches your jaw and kisses you. The inside of your mouth tastes of him. It's hot. The whole scene excites him so much, Duncan near loses his wits.

"I—" he starts. Hesitates. Dips a thumb in a bit of cum drying on your cheek. "Ye make me so bloody happy, lassie."

You sniff. Smile, then study him with a long glance coming from under heavy lids.

He's looking unbearably dear. Sweaty and pink all over his cheeks. His freckles stand out against the canvas of skin with blood flowing underneath it. You could bust him right there. Tell him you've just learned an extra soft spot on body that's already full of softness. But you decide to keep that one and instead make a mental note to roll your eyes at him in some near future.

Your finger taps his lips. "You know how pretty you are, right? And handsome too."

"Lass." It is at all possible for Duncan to go a deeper shade of pink, it seems. "Don't ye tease me now. I'm already finished."

"'m not," you say. Again, serious. You shift so that your belly fits next to his side. Your hands come to take his glasses off and cradle his face. "I find you incredibly attractive."

It comes out stupidly official, but somehow feels very important to get across. Your thumbs press below his eyes, where the skin is warm and damp. He keeps looking at you, though you suspect he hasn't hidden behind a wince yet only because without the glasses he cannot properly see. Maybe that helps. Maybe it can land cleaner if he does not have to read the whole look on your face.

“You are so handsome, Dunk,” you say. “And just… kind, and—”

The words begin to feel unsafe in your mouth. He's gone awfully still under your touch, shy and pained, as if praise is something that has to be suffered first and enjoyed later in private, when nobody can catch him needing it. This is your way of telling him. A smaller road to the same place. Something that might make him more secure without asking him to repeat it back.

These last few days have been better. Sleepy, sluggish, heavy in some obvious aspects, yet better all the same. The contractions are rare, nausea has left you near entirely, and life has settled into something gentler. You have managed to talk to Rowan a lot. She has been merciful enough to curb her own panic for your sake and lean instead toward being giddy about meeting her girl soon. Duncan has gone out with Raymun twice, and each time he came back with a one-pint flush on his cheeks and an overwhelming urge to kiss you, as if him and Ray had sat on bar stools talking about you and Rowan until missing became physical. Since then, both of you have been waiting for the sign from Ray that labour has started.

Besides that, some old grudges have been vanquished. Your complaints about Duncan coming and going have lost their place. Now he simply comes back, every time. He texts home in 10 when he is on the way, and you know it is only a figure of speech, yet it makes you excited all the same that he has started calling your flat home.

So now you try to tell him. Try to convey, somehow, that he means the world to you in flesh and soul, and all the other worlds you are not sure exist, though the science says they might. He has been doing and saying all the right things, except one. It is almost as if he is too stubborn to say it and his body decided to bleed it out through his pores instead. You know he asked for more time. That is all right. Still, the question of what exactly frightens him gnaws at you. If it is you, you reckon you can make yourself as innocuous as possible.

“Your mouth is lovely,” you say, trembling.

You kiss him once. He lets you. Sits there stunned beneath it, lips soft and parted, breath caught somewhere in the middle of him. You clutch his shirt and kiss him again. Then his cheek, then the place below his eye. “And your teeth,” you whisper. “I love your teeth. And your eyes. Especially when you can’t see a bloody thing.”

“Lassie—”

“You look so sweet without the glasses.”

Your breathing starts to go wrong: shuddery, uneven, too full for the size of your ribs. That animates him. His arm comes round your back, hand firming over your shoulder, and then he plucks you off him just enough to look at you.

“Stop, girl,” he says, frightened. “Yer makin’ yourself cry. What are ye cryin’ for?”

You blink at him. Feel the wetness only then, hot at the corners of your eyes and slipping down. Stupid. You want to tell him properly. Want it so badly your whole body feels too crowded with it, yet the fear of his face changing makes the words retreat. You do not want to corner him or make him feel he has to answer. “Because I need you to know,” you say instead. Your fingers stay twisted in his shirt. “Do you know how dear you are?”

Duncan blinks. His eyes are hazy without the lenses, looking into yours, then away, then back again as if the room keeps moving. He pulls you into him and tucks his face into your neck.

“I don’t,” he says there, muffled. “Not properly. Feels strange hearin’ it.” His mouth presses warm under your jaw. “But I like ye tellin’ me. Even if I look scared while ye do.”

Your hand comes to the nape of his neck.

That is when his phone buzzes on the nightstand. Once, then again. Three more pings come close behind. Duncan keeps holding you while he reaches for it, squinting painfully at the bright screen. “Shite,” he mutters. “I can’t see a thing.” He turns the phone towards your face. “Is it Ray?”

You read the texts with his arm still round you. “Yeah.” Your heart lifts and drops together. “God, it started. They’re at the hospital. He says to come in the morning.”

Duncan goes still for a second. Then he kisses your temple. “Will ye be fit to come? Are ye feelin’ all right?”

You nod and settle against his chest. He puts the phone down blindly and rubs your back, quiet now.

“Dunk?”

“Mm?”

“Will you let me do that more often?”

His hand pauses. “What?”

Your cheeks go hot. “Make you feel good.”

Something changes in the way he breathes. He reaches for his glasses then, gets them on, and looks at you for a long moment. “Sweetheart,” he says, rough and soft together, “how can ye even ask me that?” His thumb comes to your cheek. “I’d beg ye for it if ye didn’t offer." Then, quieter: "Will ye… let me?"

"Yes," you say.

You're not sure if this has settled anything or not. But is assuages enough. Afterwards you let him fuss, despite him being the one with his cock out and cum dried all over it. He showers quickly. Walks around the flat killing all the lights in his very dad-like fashion. Sets the alarms for tomorrow, then comes back to bed and gathers your back to his chest. His hands are wise: one rests on the belly over Aodhán's little kicks, the other covers the crown of your head. He's got his nose wedged into your shoulder and breathes there. The last thing you hear from him is a very sleepy, "You smell so nice, lassie."

Sleep comes easy. Waking not so much. Your bladder practically screams, so the alarm is merely a courtesy that saves you from bursting. You wring yourself out from Duncan's embrace, and by the time you're back he's sitting on the bed and staring at his phone with a hand over his mouth.

"Look," he says. "Fucking Christ, she did it."

You sit beside him and he tilts the screen towards you. There's a picture of Rowan, her red hair looking like some large bird's nest, cheeks and neck flushed, dark circles under her eyes. She's passed out. In her arms there's a baby, also asleep. Long eyelashes and incredibly bushy eyebrows for something so small. Below, caption says: Meet Róisín. Raymun sent it at 4 a.m.

"She looks like Rowan," you say, taking the phone from Duncan's hand to study the picture up close. "She looks exactly like her." It hits you, boulder-heavy, that in approximately four weeks you too will hold a small copy of Duncan and yourself.

Dunk blinks at you. "Ye alright, sweetheart?"

“I’m all right,” you say, and find that it is true enough to count. The feeling is large, yes. Unfriendly in scale. But there is no room for a meltdown when Rowan has just become someone’s mother. “Just strange. Seeing her.”

Duncan watches your face for another second. “Aye.” Then he takes the phone back and looks at the picture again.

It has touched him more than he expected. First, Raymun Fossoway, his best friend in the whole crooked world, has become a father sometime around four in the morning while Duncan was sleeping with his nose against your shoulder. That alone is enough to make the day feel split open. Raymun, who forgets where he puts his wallet twice a week and once tried to dry trainers in an oven, now has a daughter with furious eyebrows and a name. Second, there is the smaller matter of Duncan being next in line.

Soon. Soon enough that the word has begun to lose its general shape and sit on his chest.

You get up to pee again, then wash your face, then start talking from the bathroom about whether Rowan would want food brought in, or if flowers are stupid, or if flowers are allowed, and Duncan sits there a moment longer with the phone cooling in his palm. Last night returns by quieter routes. Your thumbs under his eyes. Your voice saying dear as if the word had been chosen with care. He heard it. He hears it still. He only wishes his body had not been so full of everything else that he sat there useless and never managed to say, You are dear to me too.

The words look simple now. Criminally simple.

“Dunk?” you call.

“Aye.” He rubs a hand over his face and moves. “I’m comin’.”

He dresses in the clothes nearest the chair, then changes the jumper because it has a stain on the cuff, then changes it back because the clean one has a neckline he hates. You pass the bedroom door with your hair half-pinned and one shoe on, and he feels the old fondness strike him in the side. After that he finds the car keys under yesterday’s newspaper, locks up, and follows you out.

In the car he hums under his breath. It takes him three streets to notice he is doing it. You notice sooner and look out the window with your mouth trying not to smile. He stops at a small shop near the hospital and comes back with flowers that are yellow and a little daft-looking.

“No lilies,” he says, getting back behind the wheel. “Thought they’d smell too much.”

You look at the bouquet. “That’s oddly thoughtful.”

“Oddly?”

“Deeply. Terribly. Very thoughtful.”

He gives you a glance and pulls back into traffic.

In the hospital there are white walls, blue signs and floor polish. It's too warm near the lifts and too cold in the corridors. Duncan takes your hand in the car park and keeps it. Across the road. Through the sliding doors. Past reception, where you both speak more quietly for no reason except that everyone else does. In the lift your fingers tighten round his when another family squeezes in with balloons and a foil packet of something that says IT’S A BOY. He rubs his thumb once over your knuckles.

By the maternity ward your palm has gone warm in his. Raymun appears before either of you finds the room number, looking as if somebody has shaken him violently and filled him with light.

“You came,” he says, then laughs at himself. His hair is flattened on one side. His shirt is buttoned wrong. There is a tiny white cloth over one shoulder like a military rank.

Duncan lets go of your hand to hug him.

It happens for a reason. There is a hug, then the flowers to pass over, then Raymun’s nervous pointing towards sanitiser, then the door handle under Duncan’s palm. Still, when he looks back, your hand is empty at your side. The fingers close slowly round the strap of your bag. Your face remains pleasant.

“All right?” he asks.

“Mm.”

Raymun, mercifully too dazed to notice weather in other people, opens the door.

Rowan is sitting propped up in bed like she has survived a duel and intends to give inaccurate statements about it later. Her hair has doubled in size since the photograph and now sits round her head in red disorder. Her lips are dry. One shoulder of her hospital gown has slipped. There is a water bottle on the table large enough to hydrate livestock, a half-peeled banana beside it, and the unmistakable square outline of a pad under the blanket. She looks ruined and victorious.

“Oh my God,” you say, and go to her.

“Careful,” Rowan says, already reaching. “I’m barely held together, hun.”

You bend awkwardly around your own belly and hug her anyway. Rowan shuts her eyes when your cheek touches hers.

“You did it,” you whisper.

“Apparently.” Her voice comes out hoarse and pleased with itself. “I kept asking if I could resign. They said no, can you imagine?”

Raymun makes a helpless sound from near the sink. “She told the midwife she was reporting her to management.”

“I was in pain.”

“You told her birth was a pyramid scheme.”

“It is.”

Duncan laughs, and Rowan’s eyes find him over your shoulder.

“Dunk,” she says, softening all through the exhaustion. “Come here, you massive thing.”

He comes carefully, though he has no idea what danger his largeness presents to the furniture, the baby, Rowan, or the air itself. The room has gained a new centre. He feels it before he properly sees it: a small bundled shape in the clear bassinet beside the bed. Róisín sleeps with one fist by her mouth, scowling hard in her dreams. One ear is folded at the top. Her eyebrows are Raymun’s, ridiculous and dark on a face still deciding what face means.

“Look at her,” Raymun says, and his voice breaks on nothing.

Duncan looks. The baby makes a thin squeak, not quite a cry. More hinge than voice. His heart gives such a stupid jump he nearly steps back.

“She does that,” Rowan says. “It’s normal. Everything terrifying is normal, they tell us.”

“She’s beautiful,” Duncan says.

Rowan sniffs. “She looks like a furious old man.”

“She does,” you say, laughing wetly. “She really does.”

“She’s so beautiful,” Duncan says again, stubborn about it.

Raymun’s face changes. He goes to the bassinet and spends far too long arranging his hands before he lifts her. Already he has the strange care of someone trained for this. Supporting the head. Checking the blanket. Moving with slow cautiousness and panic held between the teeth. He brings her to Duncan.

“Want to hold her?”

Duncan’s mouth opens. “I—”

“Ye don’t have to,” Rowan says.

“No, I want.” He clears his throat. “I want to. If that’s all right.”

Raymun places Róisín into him.

She nearly vanishes against Duncan’s chest. His arms make a fortress round a parcel. For a moment he looks horrified by the difference in scale. Then she settles. Her scowl deepens, as if she has found his heartbeat objectionable, and one tiny pink foot shifts under the blanket.

“Oh,” Duncan says. That is all.

You are standing beside Rowan’s bed with one hand over your mouth. Duncan sees you from the corner of his eye and looks down quickly, because something in your expression makes the room tilt. Love, maybe. Fear too. A look from the shore at incoming storm. His son moves in your belly under the dress, or perhaps Duncan only imagines it because he has another child in his arms and the future suddenly has weight and cheeks and tempers.

He looks at Róisín again. He sees naught of the furious old man Rowan speaks of. Only a child, precious and small enough to fit comfortably in his palms alone. To Duncan, she’s beautiful in some profound way. He holds her for a mere minute and already feels how hard it will be to give her back to Raymun. Then a horrific thought strikes him: how little love must there have been in the person who made him, if they looked at him and did not feel even a poor cousin of this. Or else what an ugly specimen of child he must have been. Red, strange, wrong in the face somehow. A thing easy to set down and leave. His eyes begin to sting.

“You look good with one,” Rowan says.

Duncan coughs and pretends he's red because of embarrassment.

Raymun sits on the edge of the chair beside the bed, then immediately stands again to fetch Rowan’s water. Rowan reaches for it too late. He is already there, cap unscrewed, straw angled towards her mouth. She drinks like she's been rescued from the desert.

“See?” she says after swallowing. “This is what they don’t tell you. You get a baby and also a valet.”

“I was always a valet,” Raymun says.

You laugh. Duncan looks at you over Róisín’s head. Your face has gone soft in a way that makes him want to walk across the room and press his mouth to your forehead for being so loving. He stays where he is. The baby’s folded ear is nearly touching his thumb. He would rather cut the hand off than jostle her.

Rowan follows his gaze. Then she follows yours back to him. Her eyes narrow with a new, exhausted brightness. “Christ,” she says, stretching and sighing. “I’m glad you two finally got on with it.”

Raymun freezes with the water bottle in hand.

You blink. “Red.”

“What?” Rowan says, flushed with the righteousness of operating on no sleep and several hormones at full volume. “I am. The circling was exhausting. I can say shite about Ray all day, and I will, but at least he was blunt with it. He saw me and went, right, you, and now look—” She gestures too widely towards Róisín. Raymun lunges for the water before it tips into the blanket.

“Easy,” he says. “Jesus, Red.”

“I’m only saying.” Rowan’s eyes have gone shiny. “People waste so much time pretending they don’t know what they know. It’s stupid. Look at them. They’re lovely.”

Duncan’s throat closes. The baby gives another little creak in his arms. He looks down at her, then at you, then at Rowan. Heat climbs his neck so fast it feels medical. “Ah,” he says, and tries for a laugh. It comes out wrong. “No, we haven’t—”

Raymun shuts his eyes.

Rowan stops smiling.

You do too.

Duncan burns under it. Three women looking at him, one of them fresh from labour and no less lethal for it, another tiny and wrinkled in his arms, and you with your face gone still in the way that means something has landed and will have to be found later.

“I mean—” he tries. Nothing useful follows. Róisín coos once. A wet, birdlike sound. Then her face folds on itself and she begins to cry. Duncan starts breathing heavily. “Oh, I’m—” He looks down in alarm. “I’m sorry.”

Raymun is there in a second. “It’s all right, mate.” His hands come out. “She’s just hungry. Wasn’t you.”

“A-aye,” Duncan stammers, and gives her back.

Raymun passes Róisín to her mother. The baby roots blindly into the blanket. “Ray, sweetie,” Rowan says, eyes still on Róisín. “Will you bring me a Twirl from the machine?”

“Aye. Course.”

“And take Dunk with you, hm?”

Duncan nods too quickly. Truth be told, he is ready to leave the room for a minute or forever. He cannot quite look at you. His gaze drops to your shoes. “Do ye want anything?”

“Just water is fine.”

“Aye.”

Raymun clasps his shoulder on the way out and steers him through the door.

For a moment the room is held together only by Róisín’s hungry little noises and Rowan arranging herself with a wince. Then Rowan looks up at you. Her face crumples at the corners. “I’m so sorry, hun,” she says. “I’ve said some awful things in the last twenty-four hours, but I had no idea. I saw you two and I thought—”

“It’s fine.” You sit on the chair near her bed and let your hand come to Róisín’s head. Her hair is unbelievably soft, damp in places, warm as something kept under a wing. “I think he’s just… overwhelmed.”

“I caused you grief, haven’t I?”

You do not want the room to turn towards you. Rowan is pale under the flush, and her hand keeps twitching near the baby’s back, counting, checking, learning. You take that hand instead and squeeze it.

“It’s all right,” you say. “It is what it is.” Then, quieter, “Now. Be honest with me. How was the labour?”

“It was fine,” Rowan says flatly.

“Do not lie to me.”

She sighs through her nose and looks at the ceiling. “It was horrible. But not as horrible as I thought it would be. All those stupid exercises they told us to do? They make sense. I hate admitting that. The breathing and the positions and the pelvic floor nonsense. It really helped.” Her eyes come back to you. “You’ll do good.”

You go quiet.

Rowan studies your face. “Are you scared?”

“A little.” Your palm settles over your belly. Beneath it, Aodhán shifts slowly. “I got so used to this.”

“The next thing is better,” Rowan says.

You look at her.

“It is,” she insists, hoarse and certain. “I promise you. I’ve never loved Ray more than I do now.”

That makes you smile. Rowan reaches out and touches your cheek with the backs of her fingers.

“He loves you,” she says. “I can see it.”

The door opens. Raymun comes in first with the Twirl and a bottle of water. Duncan follows behind him, looking so frightened that your chest hurts. Then he sees your face. The smile still there. The absence of disaster. He relaxes by one careful inch.

A thing happens then. For the first time, Duncan has a full conversation with you without either of you opening your mouths.

You give him a look that says act normal, calm down.

He blinks. Are ye cross?

Your eyes drop. Inconclusive. Then you look up again, and Duncan understands: later.

He can do later. He can do this much.

You stay another thirty minutes. Rowan eats half the Twirl and complains that nobody warned her newborns made such aggressive faces in their sleep. Raymun says he did warn her, actually, because he had googled it at six in the morning. Rowan tells him to not act so smart. Duncan stands near the foot of the bed with his hands in his pockets until you pat the chair beside you, and then he sits.

Róisín falls asleep in Rowan’s arms, mouth open, brows still drawn as if dreaming of some adult business. Not long after, Rowan’s head tips back into the pillow. Her eyelids lower mid-sentence.

You rise first. “We’ll go.”

Rowan opens one eye. “Come again.”

“Try and stop me.” You kiss her forehead. She catches your wrist for half a second and squeezes.

Raymun walks you both to the corridor. He hugs you hard and careful round the belly, cheek pressed to your hair. “Missed ye,” he says. “Love ye. You’ve got this.”

Your arms tighten round him. “You too. I love you too.”

Then he turns to Duncan. They clasp forearms first, formal for one second, and then Raymun breaks rank and leans into his chest. Duncan grunts under the contact, then pats his back. “Good man,” Duncan says, rough.

Raymun nods against him. “Yeah.”

When you walk down the corridor outside, Duncan’s chest feels awful. In the courtyard he wants to take your hand again. Instead, he twirls the car keys in his fingers and asks, “How are ye?”

“I… don’t know,” you say, hollow. Your steps slow. “Is there anything I should know about?”

He gulps down a thick glob of spit. “As in—?”

You stop completely. Then you look down at your feet. “How do you—Have you, um. Changed your mind?”

Duncan watches your hands. They keep fidgeting with your rings. “Or not,” you say, “and I just don’t know what’s been on it?”

He is taken aback slightly. It is not that Duncan does not know what he wants. He knows exactly. He just did not want it dissected publicly. “Nothing’s changed,” he says. “I’ve had my mind made a long time now.”

“I don’t understand what that means.”

“Lass,” he sighs. “I’m bein’ as plain with you as I can.” It comes out pained, and Dunk regrets it in an instant.

You huff. Nearly stamp your foot on the pavement, though the movement stops halfway and turns into something smaller and sharper. “You’re not.”

Duncan looks at you, surprised.

“You’re not,” you repeat, more annoyed now. “You say things round the actual thing. You do everything round the actual thing. Then someone says it out loud and you look horrified and start stammering about how we haven’t.”

His mouth opens, then closes again.

“You said you needed time. And I understand that, I really do. But I’m a month away from giving birth and would like to at least have an option to prepare for what comes next,” you tell him. “And being earnest doesn’t equal plain or honest.”

Something odd goes through him. Cornered, maybe. Frustrated, surely, though more with himself than with you. If he had only fallen to his knees and said I love ye madly, perhaps the whole thing would have settled itself. Instead he stands there with the keys biting into his palm and his heart making hard work of the obvious. “I ain’t lyin’,” he says, desperate.

You scoff and kick a small stone across the pavement. “You are not telling me the truth either. You’re not telling me much outside of when we sleep together.”

Something in Duncan boils over. “How else do you want it said, girl?” he asks, and hears his own raised voice too late. “I’ve been there all those months. I proposed. For God’s sake, I sleep with ye every other day and bathe ye and I am there all the damned time, and gladly.”

His voice breaks at the edge. Breath runs short. You only stare at him. “I’d be a real piece of shite if there was nothing coming afterwards,” he says.

There is no response. Duncan wishes, badly, that he could hold your hands now. His voice is very thin when he speaks again. “Ye really think that of me? Ye think I’d… I’d touch ye like that? That I’d braid your hair and sleep next to ye if I was preparin’ to go back to bein’ pub mates?”

“Dunk, I—” You hiccup. Your eyes begin to burn. “I don’t know. It happened to me before, so—” Your hands open uselessly between you, then drop back to your sides. “And you proposed right after I got pregnant. With, if I remember correctly, should we, not I would like to.”

His face tightens all over. “Since when does it matter how it’s done?”

You know where the thing is. It is right there for you to reach. A fistful of mud, a buried little pebble that will hurt him terribly if you throw it just right. So you reach. And you throw.

“Since you fucking tell me you love me while you’re still inside me and while your baby is inside me too and then you take it right back!”

Duncan chokes on something invisible. His chest heaves. His mouth moves once, then again, with no sound coming from it. Then his face cracks. “Because it was badly done!” he yells. “It was cowardly done.”

He turns away, rubs hard at the back of his head, then turns back again. “And I thought I’d been sayin’ it plain all the bloody time.” His hand lifts, pointing at you, though the accusation seems to fail halfway through the gesture. “Fucking shite—”

Then, he turns once more. Starts walking back and forth, one hand at his neck, breathing too hard through his nose. When he speaks, it sounds almost addressed to the pavement. “I thought—I thought you’d be with me after that first damned night, for Christ’s sake.”

“H-how?” you whine, patience snapping clean through. “If I don’t even remember what happened?”

Duncan stops. Scoffs, sharp and disbelieving. “You enjoyed it.”

“What?”

“You enjoyed it,” he says. “You enjoyed it so much you got pregnant with me. You came on my face first. Then I carried you to the bed. Then you said to carry on even though I had no rubber on me. And ye fucked me and told me we were goin' to be all right. Then you left and said you remembered naught of it.”

The words keep coming once they start. Too fast and entirely bare. Duncan looks almost sick with them, and unable to stop.

“Because I—” You gasp. “Because I don’t. Most of it, I don’t. You remember it? Dunk, how could you—”

The hurt comes up hot. Fury too. If only he had been brave then. If only you had been brave and asked outright. Months and months of both of you walking round the same buried thing, each with a different map. God, your head is spinning.

“What?” Duncan says, clipped. “Not tell ye? After that text you sent me, how could I not tell ye, is that it?”

“Well, yes?” He shakes his head. You reach for his arm and he slips away, too wound up to be held. “You don’t believe me,” you say. “Duncan, I was drunk—”

“You weren’t that drunk. You weren’t that drunk, lass.” His voice wobbles, then thickens. “You told me you wanted me. For a long time. And then you didn’t want me, and then you come back and we’re having a baby together and ye ask me if I wanna be around as if I would ever—” He wedges a hand beneath his glasses. His next words come wet. “Don’t do this to me.”

You go still.

“Don’t tell me ye were too drunk to be yourself when you said all that to me,” he says. “Don’t tell me I fucked one girl and got a different one pregnant. I’m bein’ plain. I’m bein’ honest, I’m just—” His breath hitches. “I just. I don’t know the right words.”

You stand there, stunned. Heartbroken, and oddly close to understanding. No matter how ridiculous all of this is, you both seem to be saying the same thing, just badly.

“I’m being plain too. I’m being honest too. So why are we here?” you ask. “Why did you never tell me?”

“Ye’ve always had someone,” Duncan mutters.

“Not when I got pregnant.”

“Cause I—I didn’t want to lose this. I want a… a family. Whatever shape it’s goin’ to have.”

Air puffs through your nose, unbidden.

“What? Don’t ye scoff at me, girl.” His eyes flash, hurt and cross. “Think on it a second before you tell me I’m thick. Look at the men yer with and look at me. Look at how ye acted when I finally got you into my bed—”

You step into his space and put both hands on his chest despite the size of him there, the heat coming off him, and the fact that he looks almost frightening with all that fear turned outward.

“Duncan,” you say, trying to find out if bravery still counts when it comes late. “Three years ago I wanted you to kiss me so badly. And then you didn’t, and avoided me like plague, and grew all judgemental on me—”

Your belly seizes. “Ah, shite—” You fold over the pain.

Duncan catches your shoulder immediately. “What’s wrong?” His tone changes entirely.

“It—it hurts,” you say, cringing. “Fuck, I need to sit—”

“Shite, sweetheart. Luv, c’mere.” He guides you to the nearest bench, one hand at your back and the other under your elbow. “C’mere. Fuck, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” He sits with you. His palm comes to your stomach. “Where does it hurt?”

You close your eyes. “Here, it’s just—just a cramp.” You breathe through your mouth. “It’s just a cramp, but it hurts badly.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“It’s not your fault, it’s a contraction,” you tell him. “Fuck—”

“Take my hand.” He grabs your palm and squeezes. You squeeze back, hard. “Breathe with me, aye?” You nod, though your chest has started to shake. “Girl, I said breathe, not cry.” His face bends in distress. “Why are ye cryin’?”

“I’m sorry, but—” You wipe clumsily at your eyes. “I’ve been—I’ve been eating at myself over whether I’m baby-trapping you all this time.”

“What?”

“You’re so fucking obliging you’d stay if I asked you. Don’t look at me like that, you know you would—”

Duncan stares at you as though you have just told him the shite-coloured onesie he bought was green all along and everyone has been lying to him for sport.

“And I do not remember shite because I’m fucking smaller than you and I don’t eat well, okay?” you grit. “Doesn’t mean anything I said wasn’t true. If I said I wanted you, it means I do.”

You keep squeezing his palm. His free hand rubs your back. Eventually the cramp loosens its teeth and goes. You draw a deeper breath, then look him in the eye.

“Duncan, I…” Your voice breaks, then holds. “I love you so damned much. I mean every word I say to you. But I want you to stay because you want to. Not because it’s proper or honourable.”

For a second Duncan hears nothing. His ears ring. His mouth goes dry. Deep inside him, it feels as though someone has put a blanket over his heart.

He is loved. So damned much.

All the anger and inadequacy lose their shape. What comes in their place is tranquility. Clean enough to frighten him less than it ought. Duncan breathes out, and the next breath comes easier. He cups your jaw, thumb resting near the wet corner of your mouth. “I want to,” he says.

You search his eyes. Then you nod. “Good.”

He nods back. His hand moves down to your stomach. “How’s yer belly?” he asks. “Ye want me to take ye home?”

“Please,” you breathe.

He helps you up slowly. “C’mon, sweetheart.”

For a while there is only the sound of walking. Your hand rests on his arm. His keys sit trapped in his fist. Three steps away from the car, you say, “Rowan’s so insane.”

“Aye,” Duncan says, and smiles. “I know.”

He helps you in, gets your seatbelt settled below the belly, then shuts the door. On the drive back, you doze with your cheek against the glass and one hand tucked under the curve of yourself. Duncan keeps the radio low. Every few minutes his eyes flick from the road to you, then back again.

At home, he carries you from the car. When you make a sleepy objection by the door and try to get down, his hold firms.

“Leave it,” he murmurs. “I’ve got ye.”

Somehow he manages the keys with you still in his arms. Gets the door open, kicks it shut behind him, and walks you straight to the bedroom. There, he sets you on the mattress and pulls the blanket over your legs.

“Sleep, my girl,” he says. “Rest some.”

You blink at him, bleary-eyed. A small sound of surrender leaves you, and then you turn into the pillow.

It is early afternoon, though October has already lowered the light. Duncan stands by the bed until your breathing evens. Then he goes quietly through the flat. Dishes first. Cups, plates, a fork with dried egg on it. He puts the washing on, checks the bin, folds the towels from the radiator. Small works. His hands know this part.

When there is nothing left requiring him, he changes into running clothes. At the door he pauses, listening back towards the bedroom. You do not stir.

Duncan takes one long breath, then steps out.

He knows the right words, after all. He has known them all along. His hands have carried them for weeks, passing them from task to task, hiding them in water, buttons, towels, food, the steady place beneath your belly. Now his mouth knows too.

"I told you I can try doing it myself," you say.

"Hush, girl," he huffs. "You've such tiny toes, is all. I don't want to hurt ye."

"I still maintain it's you who has huge paws," you murmur. Duncan lifts his head. Hair has sneaked under his glasses and falls into his eyes. He's frowning in what you mark as an attempt at looking stern. "You won't glare me out of a fact, darling."

He sets the nail clipper down. Slides his hand down to your Achilles tendon and raises your foot so that it levels with his chest. There, he sets his free palm flat to your sole. The tips of his fingers reach slightly beyond your toes. "See?" he says. "A wee little foot. With wee little toes."

"Proves nothing," you say. "Only that you are a giant."

Air puffs out through his nose. He hangs his head down, and for a second you're ready to celebrate your victory. But then you notice him bowing lower and lower while your foot is being raised higher and higher, both by near imperceptible increments. Before you know to wrench out, his teeth sink in the ligament of your arch. Lightly. Sweetly.

"Dunk!" you squeal. Jerk your knee, but his grip is too strong.

His jaw unclamps, but lips stay where they are. He kisses over the bite. Higher, on the joint of your biggest toe. Then, he sucks the toe itself into his mouth and hums. His eyes close. Yours stay wide open as you watch him.

It's been plenty of this recently—small acts, little gestures of devotion Duncan keeps doing to attach action to his declaration of not going anywhere. It feels nice. He's able to turn the most wicked things into something hallowed. The sucking continues until he's satisfied with your silence. He releases your toe with a soft pop, and sets your foot back down onto his lap.

"That's better," he says. Then—click. A strip of your toenail falls onto a towel he has spread on the floor.

You've been needing someone as your loving lackey more and more as of late. The belly has become an unfamiliar ballast and an obstruction impossible to compare to anything from the past, no matter how violently your weight has been fluctuating between late teens and late twenties. It makes some elements of necessary daily maintenance, and an unnecessary (but missed) portion of grooming, unachievable alone.

Which is how you end up under Dunk's compromised, but still watchful eye. It's been two weeks since he brought his bag and announced he would stay here for a bit, which in reality meant simply moving in.

At first, the arrangement rubbed somewhat ill-fitting. The punishment you both had invented on the bed stretched itself into smaller punishments and kept finding Duncan in odd places. In the kitchen, the hall, beside the washing machine with one of your bras held between two fingers and a resigned expression of someone wronged by situations needing an instructions unclear label. You became quippy with him without meaning to. Sometimes sharp, sometimes, embarrassingly, cruel without a point to it over the angle of a pillow or the way he asked if you wanted tea. It rarely came from any great store of resentment towards him. More often it sprouted from the grand insult of needing witness. Your body had become a public inconvenience, and Duncan, by caring about you enough to stay, had also become the nearest official representative of the court.

He took it bravely. Came home straight from school, hair upset by weather or children or both, and answered every ridiculous text as if responding to a distress flare. I feel like death. I’m so tired and I have a headache. I think I’m hungry but I can’t eat. My back is broken. The baby is punching my ribs. Never mind, I just ate a banana. To all of it there would come the little typing dots, then: Do ye want me home? Or: Have water, please. Or: Left side, lassie. Try left side. Sometimes just: I’m sorry. I’ll be there soon.

He made an effort with the rest of it too. His clothes went into the drawers and shelves you had freed for him, instead of breeding bachelor-style over the chair and floor. The toothbrush settled in the cup beside yours. His gym bag stopped waiting by the door making it look like he's going to go eventually. Every few days he would ask, awkwardly, if something was in the way, if he’d put it wrong, if you wanted him to move it, and every time you had to suffer the fact that he meant himself as much as his socks.

It grew uglier, more intimate, less dignified. The test turned out to be an ordinary pressure only. Indigestion tablets on the bedside table. Damp towels. Your temper. His patience. Your snoring, which he called breathing with courage and got a pillow thrown at him for it. His terrible habit of standing in the middle of a room until he remembered why he had entered it. The repaired thing between you had seams, and every day found some new way to lean its weight on them, but it kept enduring.

Then, last week, Duncan’s carefulness seemed to leave the room. For one whole evening, it had almost felt easy again. He came home from school, dropped his bag by the door, and kissed you in the hall with his coat still on and one hand cold from the outside. “Good to be back,” he said, quiet into your cheek, then went pink as if the sentence had shown too much leg.

Dinner was only reheated leftovers, though Duncan watched you stir the pot with his chin propped in his hand. “What?” you asked.

“Nothin’.”

“You’re staring.”

“Aye.”

“That’s generally something.”

“I like looking at ye,” he said, and no apology followed. That was new too. Small, but new.

Afterwards, you sat together on the couch without the telly swallowing the room. Talked, even. Real talk. Little talk. You asked about Egg, and Duncan told you things seemed good, or good enough, though Egg had never been one to let much slip unless the feeling came wrapped in a complaint. There was some school nonsense after that. A child who had tried to dry a wet sock over a radiator and nearly started a fire. You laughed more than the story deserved and Duncan looked pleased with himself for the next ten minutes.

Then the talking thinned. Duncan took to staring again. This time he did something with it. His hand came to your jaw, and he kissed you without the shy little request that usually came first. Unprompted. Unasked. Welcomed so quickly your body seemed to have been waiting ahead of you. It was lovely for a while. Lovely in the plainest sense. His mouth warm, his fingers careful, the couch creaking under the work of his knees as he turned towards you. It felt present instead of like a substitute for something, pure attraction and I want to kiss and touch my girl moment.

You got lost in it, and properly too. One hand in his hair, the other fisted in his shirt, legs opening for him because what else were legs meant to do in a situation like this one. Then his fingers found your waistband.

You caught both his hands. Then: “No.”

Duncan pulled back immediately. All the colour left his face in a clean drop. “I’m s-sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

“Oh God, Dunk—”

“I just. It’s fine if ye don’t want—”

“No, wait.” You kept his hands between yours, though now neither of you knew what to do with them. “That's not what I mean.”

He stared at you with that wounded obedience that made everything worse.

“It’s just that I kind of...” You swallowed. Heat rose into your face, neck, and ears. “I can’t reach certain territories anymore.”

Duncan blinked. “Territories,” he repeated.

“Don’t make me say regions.”

“’m not.”

“You are looking very region-curious.”

Duncan's brows pulled. “I’m trying to understand what’s happened to the territories.”

You shut your eyes. “I haven’t shaved my legs since the last time. And they were already a bit unshaved then.”

For a second, he just breathed. Then he breathed out so long it almost became a laugh.

Your eyes snapped open. “What’s so funny?”

“Nothing.”

“It can be silly to you, but—”

“It’s not silly.” He shook his head quickly, hair falling into his glasses. “It's not. I’m relieved, is all. I thought ye were cross with me.”

You stared at him.

“I mean, ye may be cross with me as well,” he added. “Wouldn’t blame ye. But I thought I’d pushed too far.” Then, he looked down at your joined palms. “Would ye like to? Otherwise?”

There was a small nod. His thumb moved over your knuckles. “Right,” he said. “Then if that’s the issue, we can sort it.”

He led you to the bathroom, and by hand, as if something either huge, or very small was about to happen. There, he sat you on a stool and turned the taps. You watched the whole scene—him squinting at labels before deciding what to pour into the tub, checking the temperature, preparing a towel, finding the razor with a little ha!—like he was about to perform some shamanic ritual. He noticed your staring and came down in front of you.

"What?" you asked.

His hands went to the soft place where your thighs and arse met the wooden rim of the stool, and rubbed there. Then, he looked up at you. "Can I shave your legs for ye, sweetheart?"

And well—grace decided to abandon you whatsoever. "I—oh—" you stammered, then just remained with your mouth open and full around words that would be useful and were, in that instant, impossible to produce.

"Are ye all right?" he asked.

"Y-yes? Yes, I—I am," you said, wondering at the same time when you’d become such a terrible liar. Your chest felt shallow where it ought to let you breathe deeply, and you realised you were fucking flustered. Just shy of giggling, and so unbecoming when he was gaping at you like that, with the sheer sincerity of his face bowing towards you.

The corners of his mouth did something uncertain. "Yer breathing funny."

"I'm… I'm fine, really," you said, putting your hands on his wrists. Your lips pressed together, futilely so. For it was beyond erotic to imagine him performing an act of service so ordinary and useless, driven purely by a whim. An indulgence. He would be doing it for no reason except that you had wished to feel smooth under his hand, and, to undignify you further, he was already kneeling for it. Your laugh came out strangled.

He narrowed his eyes, concerned. "What is it?"

You shook your head.

Then Duncan frowned even more, until something terrible bloomed on his face. Recognition. Either you had been so obvious that one needed no bottle-bottom lenses to spot it, or he just knew you this well by now. "Are ye—" He paused, visibly seeking the gentlest route through the thought. "Are ye excited?"

Your hand came to cover the treacherous mouth. The other squeezed his knuckles through the altering of his eyes. At first wonder, swiftly followed by an intimate softness that brought salt under your lids. "Yes," you whispered, nodding.

"Oh, girl." He rose on his knees and came close. His nose brushed yours, and then cheek. He pressed his face into you and let out a deep breath, all worn down and fond. "My sweet girl," he murmured. "If I knew some razor work would make ye this happy, you'd never shave your legs on your own."

That's when you cackled, fully. Duncan kissed your scrunched cheek, then stood and offered both hands. You let him pull you up. He undressed you briskly enough to have passed for confidence if his ears had not gone red-hot in spirit. By the time the fabric came away, his face had gone quiet.

He took you by the waist and elbow and led you into the tub. "Step in," he said. "I've got ye."

The water was warm if you were being generous, but such were the constrictions of pregnancy. You held onto his shoulders and let him guide you down, ungainly both with belly and need. When you were all settled and partially covered by foam, he exhaled through his nose and gave your jaw one small stroke with his thumb.

Then, Duncan straightened and turned away to tug his jumper and T-shirt over his head. After that, his trousers, worked down with one hand braced on the sink because he nearly stepped on the hem and took himself out with them.

You watched him slit-eyed. He noticed halfway through folding the trousers over the toilet lid. “What?”

“Are you getting in with me?”

Duncan snorted. “I think ye’d need something more pool-like to fit us both, lassie.” He pushed his glasses up, glanced at the bath, then at the floor, calculating. “I’m only gonna—” His foot stepped into the water, then the other, and he lowered himself to sit on the edge with a careful grunt. "—sit 'ere. Jus' so I can reach ye proper."

"O-okay," you said, feeling your cheeks blazing. He paddled under the surface searching for your ankle, grasped it gently and set your foot on his calf. "Oh—"

"Is that alright?" he asked.

"Yep," you mumbled, leaning back so the belly had more space to exist.

"Mm." Duncan nodded. He reached behind himself for his shaving cream, which in itself was another sexy part of the whole scene, and loosened the cap with a thumb. A blue gel line painted on your shin began to puff up into a white foam. He set the bottle on the edge of the tub and put his hands to you. Started to spread it gently until the whole of your leg was evenly covered, up to slightly above the knee. Your muscle flexed under his touch. "Nervous?" Duncan asked. "I won't hurt ye," he said. "I'm good at this."

"Are you now?"

"Aye," he said. "Arlan taught me. Have ye ever seen me with a razor burn?" You shook your head. “Well, then.” He turned the razor once between his fingers, absurdly confident for a man sitting half-dressed on the side of your bath. “Ready?”

Your hand went to his thigh, warm and damp. “Yes.”

Duncan gave you a last searching look, then set the razor to your shin. Slow, immaculate stroke. Foam parted under the blade and gathered at the sides of its head, leaving a clean strip of skin behind, glossy and newly bare. You watched the pass of metal with strange attention. His thumb kept holding the flesh steady, making a narrow road appear through the white. What should have been ordinary, and had been ordinary all your life when done in a rush with one leg propped badly on a sink or a bath edge, had gained new weight in his hands. He bent over with his head slightly tipped, and kept looking through the lower part of his lenses. Sometimes his tongue touched his upper lip. Sometimes his teeth caught it. All that size brought down to a single strip of your shin.

“There,” he murmured, rinsing the razor in the bathwater. “Grand.”

Another stroke. Then another. He kept them even and light, working up the leg in patient lines. Around the ankle he slowed. Around the knee he changed to short little passes and smoothed the place after with his thumb, checking the skin by touch. His hands had nothing vulgar about them, but they were not purely medicinal either. There was no sting, nor a scratch, just as he'd boasted, too.

A person could say I love you and then panic. A person could need more time and mean it. A person could kneel anyway, could take up a razor and your foolish wish and make a vow out of tending to it. The minding of nothing. The willingness toward anything. You looked at him leaning over your leg. The hair on his chest was damp and curled, cheeks pink. Between his legs he was slightly tumescent, making the cotton at his crotch stretch over the bulge. You felt some part of you go quiet with receiving.

“For the record,” Duncan said, still concentrating, “I like all versions. Hair or naught.” His thumb went over your knee again. “But this is nice.”

“Nice, hm?”

He glanced up. Your fingers slipped beneath the hem of his boxers and found the hotter skin there, high on his thigh.

“Mm.” Duncan’s mouth pressed itself into a line. “Is it nice for ye, girl?”

You nodded.

His eyes held yours a second longer, then they went back down as he finished the last pass over your calf. When the first leg was done, smooth and slick, he rinsed the razor again.

You gave him the second one yourself. Set your heel against his calf, then shifted until your foot rested closer to his groin. Pressed there, lightly. Duncan looked down at it. At you. A small smile came and went, older than his panic used to be. More fluent. “Yer trouble,” he said.

His fingers wrapped round your ankle and squeezed. He took the shaving cream and drew a new line along your shin. This time, when he spread it, his palms travelled higher. Over knee, over thigh, inward by a careful inch. Your fingers answered by slipping deeper under the cotton.

“Lassie,” he said, low. “You shouldn’t distract me, ye know.”

“I’m not doing anything.”

“Mm. Right.”

His hands were less steady on the second leg. Only a little. Enough for you to feel his restraint labouring through the task. He shaved you with the same care all the same, but his breath kept growing heavier through his nose. At the knee he slowed until it almost tormented you. Short stroke, thumb, rinse. He did not nick you once.

When he finished, he set the razor on the far edge of the tub beside the bottle, out of reach of both your feet. Then, he swept you whole with his eyes, and asked, "Are ye feeling better?"—all while he was visibly throbbing, the sweetheart.

You shifted in the bath. Skidded a bit closer and rested both palms on either of his thighs. Your thumbs brushed the creases where leg became underbelly and one of them, inadvertently, grazed over the base of his cock. Just the side of it, and only a little, but the little was enough for him to jerk.

"Yes," you told him, and smiled when he propped himself on the edge of the tub and lolled his head back. "You?"

"Fuck, please—" Duncan grunted, budging his hips forth. "Please, touch me."

Yes, this, you thought. This was correct and, in some sweet, safe way, unremarkable. With him, it was the pressure and the fissure that gave off the feeling of wrongness. So maybe, for once, you could exist in the oblique a while and give him time to voice what his body had been screaming for months upon months. Because no one, ever, had got this hard this quickly around you, not to mention purely from performing a mundane action of grooming.

"Like this?" you asked, parting the fly of his boxers and pulling him out. You ran a finger on the broad, top side of his length all the way to the seeping slit. It was odd to think that this was your new default. Duncan wasn't the type to aim at ruining you for other men, though he did precisely that, stronger for being innocently unaware of his own virility. His cock deserved no other word than magnificent and met every promise his body made. Size, yes, staggering in girth and proportion, but also delicacy where it mattered. Softness of skin over the hard-working flesh beneath. Full of blood, full of life, coursing through veins that roped it, some slight, some fuller and blue. The root sat wide in a thatch of dark hair you loved running your nails through until his breath came in torn out shards. Toward the head the foreskin lay soft and pale, flushing darker where your fingers drew it back; the tip itself looked tender enough to scold you for touching badly, silken under finger and tongue, quick to shine, quick to suffer.

Another maddening thing was that he had always been clean. In an ordinary way of soap, laundry and warm body, even after a long day. Rarely, the need to get to you exceeded his quickness to wash the training off, and he came to you with sweat dried in the hair at his temples and under his shirt. Even then the afternoon was not enough for the salt of him to turn. There was a span in which Duncan smelled private and living, and the first time you had asked him to leave it on himself, to come without showering, he had looked at you first with bewilderment, and then as if he saw a creature of incarnate kinship.

There was a twitch in cotton. You glanced down to where the rest of him was held by the boxers. His balls hung blurred in the fabric, heavy and kept from you for the time being by the same cloth your fingers had already invaded. Exposed him more, somehow, that contraption, and made him into a man partly presented and partly caught. You ran your thumb under the crown and watched his stomach tighten.

“Lass,” he said, voice gone careful in the wrong direction.

You looked up from him. “What?”

His hand had clamped round the tub's edge. The other hovered near your shoulder and never landed. You lowered your gaze again.

There was a note you made then, solemn as any law proclaimed in a bathroom could be: if the two of you came out the other side with something steady, if the days stopped behaving like bridges with missing boards, you would make up for the months in which your stomach rebelled at anything surpassing the tip of your tongue. Get him into your mouth more, for he was fuckable, yes, monstrously and sweetly, but he was also made for being sucked. For the lip of your mouth under the head of him, for spit and patience and feeling that caution give out to hips that want and thighs that shake.

You drew a circle over the place beneath the head with your index finger. Small, slow, almost scholarly, though there was no learning left to be done there. The frenulum gave under the lightest pressure, and Duncan’s thigh jumped against your palm. One clear bead had gathered at the slit; when you swiped it away, another followed immediately, already formed, glossy and round. Poor thing. As if dryness offended him. As if he could not bear to be anything except wet and soppy in your hand.

To make him even easier you made your mouth water. Not that the task was difficult—the eyes saw a gorgeous thing and gossiped to the tongue in no time at all—so gathered the spit, eager and charmed. You bent your head enough to let it fall. It landed on your knuckles first, warm from you, then slid between them and onto him. You spread it with two fingers, over the crown, under it, down the thick ridge of him until he shone.

“Oh, fuck, yes,” Duncan blurted.

Your hand closed round him. He got worse immediately. Hips gave a rough little shove, stomach drew tight, hand blanched on the bath edge. His cock filled your grip with a heat that felt almost separate from the rest of him, some blunt animal portion of the heart dragged through the soma and placed where you could answer it. You gave one slow stroke, only one, and felt him pulse all the way through your fist.

“Lass,” he whined.

You looked up. Saw his open mouth and glasses slipping down his nose. His knees kept drawing further apart until the seam at the crotch creaked. “What?” you asked.

Duncan swallowed. His eyes went to your palm, then back to your face. “Will ye—” He stopped, breathed hard through his nose, and tried again. “Will ye take me in hand, sweetheart? Proper.”

Your fingers tightened. "Like that?" you asked softly.

That hurt him beautifully. His head tipped back a little, throat working. “Please,” he said. “Please, girl.”

"Baby," you cooed. "Of course. How is this?" You gave him a thorough stroke. Your fist slid easily through the mess of spit and him. Already he was panting, stomach drawn into tight ridges and the softer flesh over them trembling with every pass.

“Yes,” he muttered. “Yes, yes—” Choked and strained, as though the word had to be dragged out of the same place pleasure was lodged.

You paid special attention to the head, where he was tenderest. Shielded him whole there, held him, squeezed until he gave up more of his soot, then returned it to the length where the veins girdling it pulsed hotly. “Tell me, Dunk,” you whispered.

He bit his lip and chewed on it for a second. One hand came to you and spanned your neck. Only resting. Thumb below your jaw, fingers warm over the side of your throat, his palm was absurdly large and careful. Through a loosened jaw, he said, "Good." A breath. "It's bloody fucking amazin'." Another wheeze of air through his nose, then, slurry: "Ye can do whatever ye want with me, woman." He gave you a stare near lidless and irisless, pupils dilated as if you were the drug and this was sensation entering bloodstream.

An impish thing seized your throat. “Can I do this?” you asked, and cupped the whole of his sack through the wet cotton.

Duncan folded in the spine. “Oh fu-huuck, girl—” His hips rolled forward until he almost slipped off the edge and into the bath. His feet kicked water against your hip; the grip on your neck tightened by instinct, then steadied there, still aware despite the rest of him going to pieces. “Yeah. Like that. Oh fuck, please—please keep touchin’ me, mo ghrá, I’m—oh—oh—”

So you did. Massaged him through the fabric while your other hand kept him in a slow steady rhythm. Your thumb teased the crevices and the hole of his crown whenever you reached the top. Added spit when he needed it, and he did need it, poor thing, kept using it up on you as fast as you gave it. You had all sorts of unuseful thoughts. How perverse it was that his cum had proved itself so potently dangerous it got you knocked up after the first time. What a waste it would be to have it vanish into bathwater. How you might at least get it somewhere it would look pretty. Somewhere he'd appreciate and blush over it sweetly for you.

Duncan shook under your hands. Sweat gathered on his stomach and began to run down his thighs, searching for ways through the fine hair there. His chest lifted in broken pulls. The hand on your throat slipped higher, thumb brushing the hinge of your jaw, and all the while he looked at you as if looking had become another kind of fucking.

He began to grow harder, everywhere too. You felt his balls riding up and straining in their supple flesh, cock kicking against your palm and all the tendons roping under skin. “I’m gonna—” he said, though naught needed to be announced. By then you knew him backwards and sideways, and when he was looking like that, breathing like that and rasping as if this was honest labour instead of pleasure, you would soon be granted that lovely split on the face, the rounding of mouth, the pulling of brows, and him whispering, yes, yes, yes, all slut-like and grateful.

The nail in the coffin was your Good boy. Offered last minute and so wickedly that Duncan groaned out a loud fuck, bucked up into the cradle of your fingers, and you only had a second to point him where you wanted him. You shifted closer in the water and pressed your chest out for him. Duncan saw. His eyes dropped, mouth still open from the shock of his own rapture, and then the first spill of him came over your tits in a hot white stripe.

“Oh God,” he choked. “What did ye—”

Another wave took him. Wrenched him by the spine, by the stomach, by the wet ruined thing in your hand. His seed kept spilling through wheezes and whines, opaque and lovely, painting you in broken lines while Duncan stared as if witnessing some private miracle he had caused by accident. “What did ye do, oh sweetheart. Oh, look at you.”

His hands came to your breasts. Transfixed, he touched the mess of himself there, thumbs dragging through it first, then whole palms, smearing him over the heavy swell of tits. You released his cock and caught his wrists. Guided him higher, over your collarbones, then your throat, then your face, until his thumbs rested near your mouth. You licked over both. Duncan's throat clicked.

“Did you like it?” you asked, looking up at him with the most innocent doll-like eyes you could manage.

Duncan nodded. Then he smiled, defeated. Then grinned fully, crooked and helpless and bright enough to make your lids wet. “You wicked thing,” he said. “Wee fucking menace, I—yes. Oh, fuck.”

You had never heard him swear so much. Perhaps ever. It made you vain in the warmest possible way. You cupped his face with one hand, thumb slipping a little on the damp of his cheek. “I like when you are like this,” you whispered.

“Fucked stupid?”

“Pleased,” you said. “Because of me.”

His gaze softened all over again, though his breathing stayed wrecked. “Ye like pleasin’ me, lassie?”

You nodded.

“Well,” Duncan said, and turned his face enough to kiss the heel of your palm. “All ye do is please me, sweetheart. Nothin’ else.”

Click. A swipe of hand over your toes. "There ye are," Duncan says, beyond pleased with himself. "Not too shabby, aye?" Then he presents you your own foot as if it has gone through a dazzling makeover.

"It's great," you say, smiling. "Thank you."

"Mm." He kisses your sole once, then lowers it onto his lap. Gives you a glance. "Ye all right, girl?"

"Yes, just, um—" Your hand swipes over your throat. "Just heartburn. It comes and goes."

Duncan grins. "Ye know that means the baby's growin' hair?"

"Shut up," you snort. "We've got the same app and mine said no poppycock like that."

Duncan frowns, though the tips of his ears go incriminatingly warm. “It ain’t poppycock.”

“No?”

“No," he says. "It’s a thing people say.”

“A thing people say.”

“Aye.”

“People also say a lot of stupid things.”

He narrows his eyes at you, still holding your foot. “I’m telling ye, there’s something to it.”

You look at him and realise, with unreasonable fondness, that the -cock part of the poppycock itself has wrong-footed him a little. The great father of your child, undone by folklore and a nursery-level obscenity. It suits him tremendously.

“Well,” you say, settling deeper into the mattress, “with the amount of heartburn I’m getting, he’ll come out with hair to braid.”

Duncan’s face opens in spite of himself. “Maybe he will.”

“He’ll need conditioner by week two.”

“Could have curls.”

“Could have your hair,” you say.

His smile goes quieter. He looks down at the foot in his hand and rubs his thumb under your toes. “Poor wee thing.”

“Excuse me, your hair is beautiful.”

“Aye, and mad.”

“Beautiful and mad.”

“Grand. That’ll do him well in life.”

You laugh, then the heartburn climbs again and turns the laugh into a small, irritated breath. Duncan notices instantly. His thumb stops.

“Ye good?”

“Mm.” You gather yourself with some effort and shift your feet to the floor. “I’ll be right back.”

His hand comes up near your knee, ready without touching. “Do ye need—”

“No, it's okay.” You stand, test your balance, then point down at him. “I’m giving you a five-star review.”

Duncan’s mouth twitches. “For the toes?”

“For the full service.”

He smiles fully and suspects he's looking far too pleased with that. Watches you leave and when he loses sight of your calves in the hallway, Dunk spreads himself on the floor and breathes deeply. His shirt has ridden up a bit and the wood is cool against the strip of skin above his waistband.

Duncan thinks he may have redeemed himself a little. The thought embarrasses him for its size and for how quickly it spreads through him with warmth and hunger for belief. He performs small works, foolish works, maybe, to anyone looking from the outside. To him they feel near holy, and that is part of the trouble. He keeps making altars out of tasks because tasks do not turn round and ask him what he means.

He knows what he means. That has never been a matter of doubt. Saying it, though, feels adjacent to asking for something, and Duncan hates the prospect of causing discomfort with all his might. I love ye, and then the whole injured beast of him rises behind the sentence with its old begging: keep me, choose me, make me a place and do not change your mind. There is the wound itself, old and blunt, and then the smaller cuts round it made by other hands, by women who had wanted him until he became too much work, by rooms where he learned to stand near the door, by the first proposal with the ring shaking in his pocket and your kind, frightened no laid carefully between you.

Logic has been trying its best with him. Logic points to your drawers with his socks in them. To the toothbrush in the cup. To the way you let him kneel and fuss and get underfoot, the way you reach for him in sleep, the way you say his name when pain or pleasure has taken the manners out of you. Logic tells him naught would go wrong if he said it now, softly, with no bed ruined by grief and no apology chasing after. A different thing in him pulls back until the words go tight in the throat. Some guard at the gate, half-starved and loyal to bad orders.

He thinks of the ring in his flat more often than is sensible. Whether he could go back under some pretence and bring it here. Whether he would have it in him to ask again, properly this time, with fewer wild eyes and less duty making a mess of devotion. Whether you would take him now. Everything seems to be saying yes, but he has been turned down once, and once is plenty for Duncan. Once is enough to put a mark on the place.

Still, he is happy. God help him, he is. He has got himself a lovely girl, sweet and sharp and heavy with his son, and he finds you so sexy sometimes that it makes him daft with gratitude. If you decided to keep him under your slipper, he thinks he would bear it grand. Fetch, carry, kneel, take correction. Yet that is another thing about you. You do not seem to want him flattened. You leave room for the rest of him. His wants, his foolishness, his ugly jumpers, his hunger, the bit of him that chooses the wrong onesie because the pattern made him smile.

He remembers himself smiling terribly upon finding the very shite-coloured one tucked at the bottom of the drawer. Recognised it by the chest alone. You had hidden it away with the good things. Kept it. That should tell him something and it does tell him something.

Duncan covers his eyes with the heel of his hand and breathes again. The floor holds him flat and honest. He thinks that, maybe, he could be braver sometime soon, when a loud clatter from the bathroom makes him near bite his tongue.

He surges up so fast his little toe falls victim to the bedframe. He swears some, shakes his foot in the air and rushes down the corridor with sweat already pearling in the well of his back. The closer he gets to you the better he can hear the sounds and once Duncan is three steps away from the bathroom it is clear that you are crying. He calls out your name.

"What happened?"

The door gets shoved closed when he's about to barge through, and your voice comes pained from the other side. "Please, don't come in!"

Duncan hesitates. He rests both hands on the wood and puts his ear to it. "What's happening?" he asks, softer.

There is no answer. Blood starts pumping loud in his temples. He reaches one palm to the doorknob and stops there. "Lass," he says. "Lass, did ye fall over? Are ye hurt?"

"N-no," you weep, unconvincing. He can hear water running in the sink and your hiccuped breathing.

A barbed swallow forces its way down Dunk's throat. "Is… is there blood?" he asks, eyes squeezing shut. Nothing again. Likely, you didn't hear him, but likely is not doing it for Duncan now. He wraps his fingers tight round the knob and tells you, "Sweetheart, I’m coming in unless ye tell me you’re safe." Whether you're about to tell him or not, he doesn't have time to check, for he cracks the door open with breath held in his lungs.

"Don't look," you say when he steps in, and it works like a spell because his eyes go straight to you.

You are standing with your back to him, a towel held to your chest. In the mirror Duncan sees your face first. Tear-streaked, mouth pulled tight, eyes swollen with the effort of staying quiet. He comes to you because he must. His body has no other instruction. On the way he checks the floor, the sink, the edge of the bath, the hard corners of everything that could have taken a piece of you. There is naught. No blood. No broken glass. No wet print of a fall.

He bands one arm round your shoulders from behind and draws you back into him. His mouth lowers to the side of your head. “Are ye hurt?” he asks. “What happened, lassie? Talk to me.”

You only weep harder. His gaze drops. The towel is pressed to your breasts, clutched there in a fist gone pale round the knuckles. A different fear enters him, smaller and stranger.

“Is something wrong here?” he asks, touching the back of your hand.

Your eyes shut. After a few seconds, you lower the towel. There are two damp stains on the front of your shirt.

The relief unspools through Duncan so fast he nearly goes weak with it. He has to breathe out through his nose and make sure no laugh comes with it, because the laugh would only be terror leaving him in the wrong shape.

“Lassie,” he says. “Oh, sweetheart. My sweet girl, that’s normal.” He turns you in his arms despite the small sound of protest you make, and gathers you close. “It’s normal. C’mere.”

“It’ll get on your shirt,” you say, brokenly.

“I want ye on my shirt,” Duncan murmurs. “C’mere.”

That does it, or at least enough of it. Your body comes into him slowly, stiff first, then less so, and he feels the warm damp bloom through cotton where your breasts press to his chest. His hand cups the back of your head. The other stays wide across your shoulders. He knows this is normal. Knows it within one blink, the way he knows the whole of the app now. Third trimester and another function arriving early, another piece of yourself declaring new management without asking permission. No wonder it has frightened you. No wonder it has made you cry.

Duncan ponders if there is a way to say I love you that can neither spook you nor tear open the guarded thing in himself. Some new road to the same place, through a quieter gate. His mouth finds your ear. “Will ye let me take care of you?”

Your hands close into fists in the back of his shirt.

He shifts a little and you hiss through your teeth. Duncan stills. Smooths his palm down your hair until you lift your face to him. He can't really bear the sight of your welling eyes, but he keeps himself upright in the important places.

“Are ye tender?” he asks.

You nod.

“I’ll be very gentle.”

“It’s just that—” you hiccup. “It’s just another thing and I—”

“I know,” he says. “I know. Yer so strong, my sweetheart. Nothing bad’s happenin’.”

Your back gives by one notch under his hand.

“Let’s clean ye up, hm? Come, wee thing.”

He takes your hands and brings you to the sink. Pulls the stool out from under it, then gets a clean washcloth from the cupboard. He washes his hands properly, hot water and soap to the wrists, drying them on a towel he knows is clean because he folded it there himself that morning. Then he wets the cloth and wrings it out until it is soft and warm in his palm.

You watch him with a look that makes him feel twelve feet tall and useless. He is nervous too, in several directions. Smaller humans have depended on him plainly enough. Children with scraped knees. Egg with his clenched jaw and silences. This is different. You are grown, clever, and proud, and he has big hands made rough by work. He feels in his element and terrified of failing you in the same breath.

He sits on the stool. It is low enough to make foolish angles of him, knees high and spread, elbows awkward, yet even there your chest is near level with his face. He looks up at you first.

“Tell me if anything hurts, aye?”

You nod again.

With careful fingers, he rolls your shirt higher. Underneath, your breasts sit heavy and glossed around the nipples, the skin damp where milk has gathered and strayed. Duncan keeps his face steady. Something low in him, older than thought, purrs out a wicked good at the sight of you like this: mother of his child, body working early, needing him enough to help. He lifts his eyes back to yours.

“Still all right?”

“Yes.”

He brings the cloth to the underside of one breast and only presses it where a drop has wandered down. Waits. You breathe out. Another nod.

So he continues. Small touches. Cloth held, lifted, folded to a clean corner, held again. He does not rub unless he has to. Uses his free hand to support the weight of you from below, fingers spread wide. His glasses steam over a little. When he moves higher, the cloth brushes the nipple and you flinch hard.

Duncan stops immediately. “Hurts?”

“Shit,” you whisper. “Yeah, it actually hurts.”

“All right.” He lowers the cloth. “Do ye want to ring the doctor?”

You shake your head.

“Are ye sure?”

“It’s just sore. I looked it up. It can be sore.”

He studies your face, then the skin, then your face again. “No fever? No bad pain inside?”

“No.”

“No… red patch?”

You glance down with a miserable little sniff. “Dunk.”

“I have to ask.”

“I know you do," you say. "No red patch.”

“All right,” he says, though the worry stays working in his jaw. “All right. We’ll go slower.”

His hand starts shaking a little in the wrist. He could find something softer or pack you into the tub again and then wrap you in a blanket and tell you it is no matter if you leak through it. Yet something tells him the misery of it does not lie in the leaking itself but in your body giving up its woman post while the mother post takes over.

He drops the cloth in the sink and hangs his head low for a second. There is shame, loud and striking and bitter as a bitten tablet, in the part of him that has noticed the shine on you and answered it. You are crying and sore, frightened too, by a thing your body has done, and still some ancient, pre-verbal creature in him has lifted its head. Something older than sex, maybe. Or older than any sex he has known what to do with. His tongue gets all confused by aching to go places that are not for him. Want shapes in him from lacking this kind of warmth, and from the tug at the sight of you standing there with milk on your skin, carrying his son and needing him to be good enough with his hands, good enough with his mouth, good enough in any way a man can be useful.

He wipes his palms on his thighs, then reaches for your hips.

“Come here a bit,” he says. You look at him with wet eyes. “Only closer," Duncan says. "That’s all.”

You let him draw you in between his knees. Your belly gets there first, high and full. Duncan lays one hand on the side of it since that place is known and safe, and there everyone understands what his tenderness means. Aodhán shifts under his palm, faintly, or perhaps Duncan only hopes he does.

Then his gaze moves higher. To your tits spilling heavy over the bump, with their nipples damp and sore and their skin slick in small tracks where the milk has gone. It strikes him near like a bite in the neck, reverential and sharp like canines both, and it makes him want to bow his head again simply to pay respects to the body he's been adoring more and more with passing months. At this point he's the one needing, though the need does not feel wicked when it reaches you. It feels like a thing looking for the correct work. Give it a task and it may yet become mercy.

You make a small sound, and his eyes snap back to yours. “Sorry,” he says. “I’m here. I’m with ye.”

Your fingers twitch at your sides. Duncan brings his hand slowly up from your belly to your ribs, then stops below the curve of one breast. He does not touch the tender part yet. Only waits there, palm open, asking the skin before he asks you. “Will ye let me try something?”

Your mouth tightens. “What?”

“The towel hurts,” he says. His voice comes out rougher than he means it to. He clears it badly. “Mouth might be softer.”

To that, there's a stare. A tremor sprints his back and has nowhere decent to go. He keeps his face lifted, keeps his hands still. Lets you see the whole awful truth of him as far as he can bear: frightened, aroused, careful, wanting to make this easier for you and wanting you both.

“If ye don’t like it, I stop,” he says. “If it hurts, I stop. If ye say my name wrong, I stop. All right?”

Your throat works. Duncan’s thumb moves once over your rib, barely there. “Do ye trust me?”

"I do," you breathe. "I do, just—"

"C'mere then," Duncan says. "C'mere, sweetheart."

He pulls you down to sit sideways on his thigh. You come slowly, wrap one of your arms round his neck and balance the other on his knee. Duncan grunts under your weight, because it feels grand already to have your arse spilled over his leg and your side pressed to his chest. He's ashamed, a little, of the hard-on he's got going on in his shorts, and knows damn well you can feel him twitching. "I'm sorry," he rasps. "I'm sorry, lassie, I promise ye this ain't nothin' wicked, I jus'—"

"I know, sweetheart," you tell him. Coo it into his temple, and Duncan cringes at the fact that within one minute the roles get reversed and it's him getting comforted away from thinking he's a deviant.

"It's jus'—" He swallows. Runs a finger on your sternum. "There ain't nothin' this body can do that will make me want ye less, ye understand me?" Then, his palm lies flat over your heart. "Here's what I—what I care about. Do ye know what I'm sayin'?"

Your hand wraps in the roots of his hair. "I do," you whisper, and rest your cheek on his forehead. "I do."

It is as close as he can make himself standing next to a verbal proclamation. The sweet thing of it is that it serves you both. You've already relaxed another notch. What Duncan wants to say, desperately, is that he recognises the fear in you and you should fear not. He knows what comes after, he knows you're working your arse off to save your womb from suffering the consequences of his oversized genes, and he wants to tell you it does not matter in the slightest. He's got a cock big enough and a heart hungry for you enough to love you through all the shapes and stages you will fit yourself into. Himself, Duncan returns to something that was never present in his life, but ought to be. His body receives it as memory, though his life has given him none.

He wedges his hand under your breast and cups it whole. Handles its ballast, then brings his mouth, gossamer-light, to where your skin stretches from collarbone and swells into a curve. His tongue comes out above the nipple first. One slow swipe through the shine gathered there. The taste is faint and warm, sweeter than he expects, with something soft and bodily under it, almost creamy yet too slight to call rich. It finds him as a shock of recognition without recollection. Duncan stops with his mouth still close, breath passing over the wet place he has made, though all he wants is to fill himself and take more, and more, and more.

“How’s that?” he asks.

Your hand tightens in his hair. You shift on his thigh, and his palm settles along the inner side of the leg nearest him, holding you steady.

“Good,” you say. “Doesn’t hurt.”

“That’s grand,” he murmurs.

Then, he returns to it with his mouth opened wider. Drags his tongue over the gloss, flat and careful, gathering what needs gathering. His eyes close. The nipple is tender and warm against him, softened by the wet, so welcoming that some brutish part of him wants to press his whole face into your tits and stay there until breath becomes somebody else’s concern. The memory of your flinch keeps him measured.

He hums against you. Does not notice his hands growing firmer until one has filled itself with your arse and the other is gripping high on your thigh. His mouth becomes less tentative too. Tongue circling, lips closing softly round the nipple, drawing just enough to make more of that thin sweetness come out for him. Soon he is making out with your breast in earnest, wet and hungry, while the first little sounds begin leaving you above him.

"Dunk—" you breathe. "Oh, fuck—"

At that, he releases you, and noses upward, over the warm rise of your chest, along the hinge of your jaw, until he finds you. He kisses you once. The taste on his tongue passes back into you and it excites him horrendously that there is a way to give you back a piece of yourself like that.

“Are ye good, my girl?” he murmurs.

You nod and catch him again, softer this time. “I am. Thank you,” you whisper.

His brows pull sharply. It slices him like praise would, seizes low in his stomach and draws the muscles there into a hard cramp. His cock twitches against your hip.

“Christ, lassie.” He presses his forehead to yours. “Yer gorgeous. Ye know that? I always want ye. Every bit.” The fingers high on your thigh flex. He feels the heat held between your legs and keeps himself where he is, though the hand wants to travel. “Can I touch ye?” he asks. "Do ye trust me still?”

He is sure he has leaked through the cotton by now. The wet has cooled against him, then warmed again, and he cannot decide whether he hopes you have noticed.

You swallow. Your face passes beside his, lips grazing his cheek on their way to his ear. Duncan goes rigid beneath you. “Touch me then,” you whisper. “And put your mouth back on me.”

It’s a fragile thing he’s handling, he knows this much. Duncan has never thought himself an adept lover, though by now he likes to believe he is somewhat versed in the language your body speaks to him. It has told him plenty about how you like him sometimes pliable and sometimes bolder. He tries to merge the two, because having your tits this close and served to him like the finest meal makes being in charge out of the question. Still, he knows when you need guiding. Knows encouragement works on you much the same way it works on him, reaching places touch alone cannot quite get to.

By some earnestness in him that has survived every reason to lose it, Duncan believes you whenever you tell him things that would sound unthinkable from any other tongue. That he is pretty. That he is good. That he does things well and pleases you. The words barge into him whole, free of malice, and he keeps them with a devotion near embarrassing. So he gives them back now, hoping the exchange stays even. Hoping you believe him too when he tells you how gorgeous you are, how badly he wants you, how every change in your body only gives him something new to learn and adore. God help him, he means it. He knows how to hold you when shame makes you stiff, how to wait until you soften, where to touch when soreness has made the usual routes impossible. Knows how to please you because you have taught him, and because every lesson has ended with pleasure answering in his own body too.

“Yer maddening gorgeous, my girl,” he slurs, coming back down to your chest. His breath rasps over the damp skin. He's licked most of the milk off and taken it and eaten it, and now the fervid part of him needs to know whether you are milking for him elsewhere too. His hand moves higher and presses flat between your legs, over the gusset of knickers. Warm. Damp. He loves it terribly, that answering thirst gathering under his palm while his lips close round your nipple again.

“I’ve put a baby in ye,” he mutters against where you're tender. “I’ll take care of ye through it and after.” His fingers drag the material aside. The first touch of your pussy makes his jaw lock. “If ye let me, I’ll put another in ye,” he says, half-mad with it. “I won’t go anywhere, sweetheart. Where the fuck would I go?”

Your hips buck into his hand. The fingers in his hair tighten, release, then close again while your breath breaks over the crown of his head. “Dunk, fuck—please—”

He rushes naught. This time he means to make the whole of it yours, and if he comes in his pants like an idiot, he will survive the indignity. His forefinger traces the shape of your cunt first, follows the swollen seam through its slickness, learning what he already knows and finding it changed by whatever he's managed to make of this moment.

He's humming with how good it feels to have his mouth full though an urge to bite down on something pulls his spine tight. Put his teeth into the sweetness of you and hold. He knows better. His tongue comes out instead, flat and broad, and drags from your nipple over the slope of your breast, up the centre of your chest, along your throat. At the side of your neck the restraint wears itself out and Duncan bites.

You moan again, and your groin presses harder into his hand. Fuck yes, he thinks. "Take me," Duncan says and feeds you his finger down to the second knuckle. Your cunt takes it with a greedy clutch. Duncan feels each small yielding round the joint where the swollen tissue drags close around him. It reaches straight into his gut, that feeling. He curls his hand and watches your face alter.

“There ye are,” he breathes.

Your eyes close. “More.”

“Aye?”

“Aye, more, Dunk.”

He brings the second finger alongside the first and enters you patiently. The stretch pulls a broken noise from your throat. Duncan stills inside you, fingers buried deep enough to feel the pulse working there unsteadily.

“Tell me," he says.

“It’s good.” Your grip twists in his hair. “Keep going.”

He listens. Crooks both fingers toward the front of you and draws them back through the wet grasp of your body, learning the pressure from every change in your breath. Question and answer, conducted under the skin. When he finds the place that makes your knees soften, he returns to it, presses with the pads and holds until your hips begin seeking him like you've forgotten the predicament entirely.

“Like that?” he asks.

“Yes. There.”

“Here?”

“Duncan.”

The sound of his name harms him further. His head moves along your chest, kissing wherever he can reach. Soon, your tits are all glossy again, and Duncan realises he's drooling. There's something in milk-heavy breasts that turns him depraved, and it's him who needs to nurse his sore, blunt tongue on you. You're both wounded, but he's the one needing this to breathe. In this symbiosis, you let go too, and become warmer in his hands and heavier across his thigh. Trust has weight, apparently. It spills over his leg and puts its arms round his neck.

He adds the smallest turn of his wrist. Your cunt closes hard enough to make the bones in his hand feel caught. “Christ,” he mutters. “Ye feel—”

Speech fails him again. Soft would be a lie. Tight says too little. Hot belongs to kettles and sun. This is a living hold, drawing at him with a strength hidden inside yielding flesh.

His hips begin their own labour against the side of your thigh. The wet front of his shorts rubs there in short, helpless twitches. He barely registers starting. His body has never shown much obedience around you unless you give it a direct order, and now you give him naught except his name in scraps.

“Dunk—ah—Dunk.”

“Aye. I’m here.”

He works his fingers deeper when your pelvis tips. Slower when your mouth tightens. Firmer when you pull him closer. Every small easing he draws from you returns through his own nerves sharpened, almost painful. Service has always been the safest shape of his hunger: carry this, fix that, hold still. Let him put his hands where the hurt lives and he will tear himself open gladly over being allowed.

“You like this,” you breathe near his ear.

Duncan’s fingers falter once. “Aye.”

“Taking care of me.”

His forehead presses to your shoulder. “It does terrible things to me.”

Your moan breaks loose when he rubs that place again. “You’re good at it too.”

“Lassie—”

The word comes out with enough force to embarrass him, though embarrassment has little country left in him now. His cock strains and leaks against your skin through cotton. Everything in him has been given employment.

A fool arrives at the holy well by taking the wrong road. Mud on his boots. Hands too large for the cup. Thirst making a spectacle of him. That is Duncan here. You open because he asks, tell him where, give him the weight of your want without making him earn it through suffering first. He receives the gift with the bewilderment of someone who has spent his life expecting every good thing to be withdrawn upon closer inspection.

His thumb finds your clit. He touches lightly, watches your whole belly tighten, then circles with growing certainty when your nails graze his scalp.

“Oh, yes,” you whisper.

“Aye?”

“Yes. Just—keep—”

“Aye, I’ve got ye.”

He says it into the side of your neck and believes it for the length of the sentence. Your body begins to lose its separate pieces under him. Thigh, belly, breast, throat: all drawn into the one effort, all sending the same message. Duncan follows the signs faithfully. He knows when your hips need holding and when they need freedom. Knows the sound that means softer, the one that means deeper, the sudden silence that means he has found something worth staying with.

Your hand pulls his face up. He comes willingly, lips parted, breath spoiled.

“Kiss me,” you say.

He near breaks his neck for it. You take his lower lip between yours, and the intimacy of it cuts stranger and deeper than the sex. Your tongue touches his. Your cunt tightens. Duncan groans straight into you.

“There,” you whisper against him. “My good boy.”

His stomach caves. His fingers drive upward, wanting more of whatever this is, and your cry catches between your teeth and his.

“Say it again,” he begs.

You look at him through wet, heavy eyes. “Good boy.”

Duncan near comes in his shorts. Mind supplies him with unbidden images. Him, returning home to you, no matter where you've both made it. Late at night with everything quiet and you all warm for him and your tits full of milk so he can put his mouth to them and get his chin all white and sweet from you. His cheek pillowed against you and hands damp with what he squeezes out of you. And there, him making love to you, kissing your soft post-labour belly, kissing between your legs, kissing your neck, your temple, your mouth until it's plump. Telling you he loves you without fear, and calling you his wife with pride in his chest.

“Girl,” he whines. Turns his hand inward with two fingers crooked inside you and making a slow wheel there while his thumb keeps circling. You draw yourself tight round his knuckles then hold, and Duncan feels every change as if your body is closing its fist round him. He keeps the pressure steady, wrist working in patient little turns, eyes fixed on your face through his smeared glasses. Your breathing begins to break. “C’mon, sweetheart,” he rasps. “Let me feel ye. I'm, ah—"

There's a quiver in your thighs. First some small, treacherous shivers against his hips, then hard enough that Duncan has to brace you firmer. Your cunt begins to pulse, drawing him deeper while the rest of you arches away from it. He works through the first break until your head falls back and the sound in your throat loses all shape.

The hand holding his knee leaves it and comes down between his legs. It closes over the unbearable bulge there. Your mouth finds his ear. “Good boy,” you gasp, still coming. “Fuck, my good boy—oh, Dunk—”

So, in the end, Duncan does come in his shorts. Bursts into your fingers with his tongue plastered to your breast and palm fisting your buttock. It's unpretty and loud with whimpers he's trying to muffle against you. He feels his balls emptying and sees the confirmation of it blooming wet and glossy under cotton.

"Shite," he gasps. "Sweetheart, I—" A swallow. "I didn't mean to. Oh, I didn't mean to, I—"

"I know," you say. Breathe heavily. Your head lolls on his and your body sags until you're cradled between his spread thighs. "I meant to, though."

"I made a bigger mess of you." A beat.

"You made me feel better," you say. "Does that count for something?"

"Aye, it counts for everythin'," he says. Then, he laughs. "Fucking Christ, I'm like a virgin every time with ye, ain't I?"

A deep sigh comes from you. "A virgin would run from me." You cup his chin and tilt it to look him in the eye. "You're just… yourself."

Duncan feels terribly perceived, though out of the two, it is you who is more exposed and damper. You look at him as if he's good enough the way he is, even if it means sometimes a man grown, and sometimes a green boy who finishes into a P.E. teacher's attire.

"I—" he stammers. Swallows. Traces a thumb over your neck. "Can I—can I sort ye out? Properly."

"Does it involve licking?"

"Wicked girl." He blushes furiously. "If ye want."

You smile at him with all of your teeth.

So he sorts you out, and himself in the process. Steps with you into the shower. He lets you lean your back to his chest, near sag against him, while his hands wander. He cleans. He licks too. Once, he bites the ball of your shoulder and you give him a little uh in response. After, he pats you dry, gently, and leaves you for a moment, wrapped in the towels and sat on the edge of the tub, while he walks through the flat, naked, to get clean clothes. Since now he's in charge and has a say in it, he brings you his T-shirt. A bra that feels softest in his palm and some nursing pads as well. You let him dress you and it feels as intimate as touching you intimately does. Everything is private. Everything is his. Everything is privilege.

In the bedroom he steps in behind you and fits himself along your back. His hands travel down your sides, spread beneath the belly, low, then meet there, palm over palm, taking its weight. “Tell me if—” he starts, and lifts.

You groan. Your knees slack and your head drops back onto his chest. “Oh God. How did you know?”

“Saw it online,” Duncan says into your neck, bashful about the usefulness of his own hands. “A midwife showed it. Said it can take some pressure off.”

“Christ, can you stay like that till I deliver?”

“Ye know I can,” he mutters.

He holds you there, your son raised a merciful inch away from the bones he has been bearing down upon, and begins to rock. A small movement from foot to foot, broad body taking yours with it. You give yourself over until your spine has hardly any employment left. His chin settles near your shoulder. First comes a hum, low enough that you feel it through his chest before you properly hear it. It's plainly Too-Ra Loo-Ra Loo-Ra.

Duncan sings quietly, rough in places, carrying you from side to side. By the second verse your eyes have closed. He sings the third anyway and keeps you lifted until sleep has made you heavy against him.