Hopeless Romantic

He’s danced with you. Drunk with you, faced Lyonel for you, been awkward around you and now he’s here in all his fleshy abundance, redefining the shape of your face with his. If this is not the fucking moment when he finally kisses you, you are ready to swear men off forever. Given the scornful library of fiascos you probably should, but then oh—

He smells like sweet, needy sex and his mouth tastes of it, and his hands feel like it too when you can clearly tell he’s trying to invent a polite way to grope your ass. You lose the plot of it faster than you should. Maybe it’s the drinking, or the relief of finally finding somewhere to go after spending so long gathering speed. But he transforms in your hands: from Duncan, the friend who’s been made untouchable by one act of cowardice and a ton of compelling arguments to be, to this. A man who has spent the whole evening orbiting you, hot, sweet and eager, and then insisted on walking you home so hard you ended up wrapped round him like a snake and eating his face off in the street.

It does not feel like you talking anymore when you say, “Take me home.”

Take me to your bed, says the part of you that never got to say it to dainty men of culture, and Dunk reacts in the clean, immediate way you always knew they never would. Like wanting you has mass to it, and he happens to possess the strength to carry it.

He keeps kissing you all the way to his door. The key takes him two tries and a muttered curse. While he fumbles in his pocket, he presses you to the wood just so he does not have to set you down, and your legs tighten on his waist because there is no sensible reason not to. The door gives. For a second your back is free of pressure. Then there is pressure again, because Dunk only gets as far as the tiny hall before flattening you again, this time to plaster.

Something drops off him there. He forgets he is meant to be boyish and shy. His hands go under your dress and roll it right up to your waist with a haste that makes you gasp into his mouth. He answers by kissing you harder.

His hallway is narrow enough that you could straighten your legs and touch the opposite wall with your feet. It smells of what boys consider homely: washing powder, old building and man. His hands are enormous. They span more of you than seems fair. One keeps you pinned high and close by the backside of your thigh, the other slides over your knickers and stays there, stunned for a moment. He makes a noise then, breathy and a touch too high to come from someone this broad, and you feel it more than hear it.

You are not thinking about the morning. You are not thinking about friendship or the consequences it’s going to suffer if he takes those knickers off you. For one second you are thinking about your shoe and where it went in all of this, but the rest has gone watery at the edges.

Meanwhile, Dunk is caught between being polite and sliding the gusset aside, or being brutal and ripping the lace clean off. Any would allow him to join the good citizens of Ireland who’ve already seen your fanny. He goes over the things he knows girls like: they like their fancy uncomfortable lingerie. They like it when he shows the strength off but remains gentle. And most importantly: they like when he goes down on them. Which is brilliant, because he likes eating them out and Dunk appreciates when elements in the universe compliment each other.

All fevered with possibilities, he mutters, “Up, up,” and hikes you higher with both hands under your butt until your back skims up the wall. You’re so pliant he could throw you, so you just let him, while he slips down and out from between your kisses. He takes your thighs, sets them over his shoulders, and lands face to face with his beloved area. There, he opts for the latter: hooks a finger over the small patch of cloth that only pretends it’s covering anything and goes back to what seems to have been working, which is kissing.

Gone, is an understatement. He’s lost. He’s so missing the missing persons poster has stopped depicting him accurately and always gets one feature off. Under his mouth, your pussy feels less like a part of a body than the whole point of one. Hot, swollen, slick already and getting slicker by seconds, and there is nothing more joyful in life than thinking this is for him. It gives way and resists in turns. His tongue keeps finding one texture, then another: the inside of the lips, soft and smooth, the wet seam between them where you taste wildest, and then the firmer knot of nerves that makes your thighs lock him in the world’s filthiest and best sensory deprivation chamber. Robbed of sight and hearing, Duncan focuses on what’s before him—licks broad at first, seals his mouth on you, then narrows and gathers every ounce of steadfastness to not smile when your hips twitch and try to climb his face.

With the quiet around him, he gets greedier. Hums into you without thinking and feels the vibration come back through your cunt. One hand has wedged itself under the lace pulled at your hip, the other is fully devoted to kneading your ass cheek and proving he can fit all of it into a palm. He squeezes and rubs and stretches it until it spills over his shoulder and turns his skin molten over the shirt. Your weight feels lovely on him. It grounds him into the blessed nothingness. There are moments where he nearly forgets who exactly is attached to the thing in his mouth. It is just him and the pussy, and the increasingly urgent sense that the things have, for once, arranged themselves properly.

Then your fingers twist into his hair, and you let out a shuddering breath that seems to have been held this entire time. “Dunk!” you choke, and the room comes back around him. He returns to his body, and once more curses Raymun for making him wear the ‘good jeans’. They’ve already been tight in the crotch without the currently raging boner, and he can’t even press it into you.

The more awareness he regains, the worse everything starts to look. He licks his lips and it helps little to nothing, only gets more of you onto his tongue. Duncan looks up, all solemn, and mumbles, “Sorry.” You stare down, flushed and nearly naked, being so goddamn pretty in all of this he almost forgets what he’s apologising for. Then, he remembers. “I didn’t even ask you.”

You start laughing. The unpretty, full cackle appears, active and helpless, and Dunk’s heart grows so large at the sound it nearly bursts his chest because it is the very same cackle he heard two years ago in a pub. Then, he notices there are tears in your eyes. “Put me down so I can kiss you,” you say.

He has no intention of letting you touch the floor this evening. All things considered, this is going great because you have not, and in Dunk’s superstitious mind the connection forms immediately. From this point forward the floor of his apartment is lava to girls, and he is carrying all of them from the doorstep straight to bed. Then, he corrects himself, because the only girl he wants here is you. Then, he calculates, briefly, how achievable that is long-term and decides the wiser course might be to lock this in by moving out entirely and finding a flat with a new floor.

Then, he looks at you again and finds you staring, a little stunned, while he’s apparently been doing maths with his face. “Right,” he mutters. “Sorry.”

He unhooks one leg from his shoulder, then the other, and lets your body slide through the loop of his arms until he is holding you by the waist. Your toes flex and search for purchase on his feet but cannot reach, so they tickle his shins instead. He holds you tighter for it, returns to the business of kissing, and starts walking you towards the bedroom.

A brief practical worry cuts through him on the way there: the state of the room. Duncan has only the haziest memory of what he left out this morning, but the shortlist is bad enough—socks, half-drunk cups of coffee, sweaty gym clothes flung over the chair. So he makes a quiet, desperate decision to keep you busy enough not to notice any of it.

He lays you flat on the bed and goes straight for your neck. Sucking, kissing, licking, biting a little. He inhales the scent there and hopes the future holds at least one visit at your place so he can sneak off to the bathroom and inspect whichever shampoo or shower gel or lotion or other complicated thing girls use to smell like boy dinner makes you smell like home to him.

To his surprise you are just as eager. At one point you bite his lower lip hard enough that he backs out with a sharp breath and the both of you land on your sides, face to face.

You frown some. “I’m sorry—” Your fingers touch his lip. “Was that too hard?”

Your leg is thrown over his waist and Ireland’s best pussy is currently pressing into Dunk’s groin. “Oh, fuck—” he grunts, because the truth should be told. Then he shakes his head. “No. No, it wasn’t.” He swallows. “Can I take your clothes off?”

Your face changes in that quick, bright way his already-drunk brain could get addicted to. “Yes,” you say, and then, with a glance down at his shirt, “Can I take off yours?”

He nods and sets your hands to his shirt like he is helping you find the start of something. The pair of you undress each other by rough agreement. He reaches behind you and finds the zip of the dress. Gets it down. Palms the back of your bra and becomes convinced he is hallucinating, because the fucking thing is smooth.

You catch the look on his face halfway through undoing the shirt and giggle. Abandon his chest for a second to show him: the bra unclipping at the front. Once it gives, though, you hold it in place and wait for his hands to take over.

He is absolutely astounded. “I didn’t know they could do that,” he says.

You grin. “You wouldn’t believe how crazy knickers can get.” Then, you get back to his buttons.

While Dunk is busy unwrapping your tits like they are a godsent gift, you try to hide that you are holding your breath as more and more of his chest comes into view. It is entirely unwise, invented, and put on by this man to act shy in daylight when this is what he has been wearing under those plain P.E.-teacher shirts.

He has two large pecs that would absolutely qualify as tits, though you will never call them that in broad daylight. They look firm to the eye, but when he shifts onto his side they crease a little and feel plusher under your hands than they have any right to. There is hair everywhere a person would hope for it, as if somebody drew him up with a practical little map of where to touch. On his chest it is neither sparse nor bushy, just enough to make him look unfairly, devastatingly ordinary in that area. The colour runs darker than the hair on his head, though it still leans red before brown. Lower down his belly softens, and there the hair thickens at the edge of the waistband, which, to your delight, is under disastrous strain.

When you drag the shirt off him properly his shoulders come free hard under your fingers. His forearms are dusted with golden-orange fuzz. He has nice hands too—large, long-fingered, with leaner nails than you would expect on a man built so much for blunt force. You only get a brief look at them while you fight the sleeves down his arms, because the minute they are free they come straight back to your boobs and he is already too far gone kissing your neck to notice any of the ogling.

He does, in the end, manage to get everything off you. The bra goes first under his amazed hands, then the dress in a tugging blur, then the knickers, which he treats with an attention almost touching considering what they went through ten minutes ago.

You repay the favour by going at his jeans with a little too much enthusiasm. Your fingers fumble at the button, drag at the zip, get bold, and he hisses once through his teeth. “Sorry,” you whisper, giggling.

“Careful, girl,” he says, half laughing, half wrecked. “I’ve plans for that.” From there he takes over, pushing the denim and the underwear down his hips and off with no more patience than you have. When he drops onto his back his cock springs free, fully hard, and slaps against his stomach.

For a second you can only look. He has the girth of someone’s wrist, easily, and lying like that the crown reaches nearly to his belly button. The distance between that and his pubic bone is a long one, because everything on Duncan is long. His arms. His legs. His fingers. Even his toes, which you find yourself staring at while he kicks the socks off with a graceless little scuffle that somehow only makes him more attractive.

Then, he rolls back onto his side and the weight between his legs drops in front of him and drags on the mattress. The scale of him staggers your thoughts. He is pretty there, too. Good-looking on every inch of him. If you were less drunk and less prone to gagging, you might have asked him to let you just play with it for a while. A small fright cools your spine for a blink: where is that going to fit, exactly?

A blink later you tell yourself you are drunk enough, which is near enough the same thing as brave, and get back to kissing him. You swing a leg back over his hip, and he answers by planting both palms on your ass like that is their dedicated place.

You wrap yourself round him and let the broadness of him do half the leg-spreading work for you. He fits there heavy and wanting, nudging and jerking between you both every time you tug his hair or catch his lower lip with your teeth. The sounds he makes keep changing shape—breaths, little groans, the odd swallowed swear—as if none of them are adequate to the fact that this is actually happening.

His hands get confused as to where to settle. Butt, waist, back, then butt again. He is trying to climb further into it through kissing. When your hips shift and the head of him drags against you, he lets out a rough breath and murmurs into your mouth, “Christ, girl. I’ve wanted you fierce.”

That gets you in the chest a little. You pull back to see him. His face is flushed all over. His hair is a mess under your fingers. He looks pretty.

“Do you—” you start, then have to stop and take a breath because he keeps kissing at your jaw. “Do you have a condom?”

Dunk’s movement hiccups, as if his whole kissing ability just malfunctioned. He gives one confused little peck to the corner of your mouth like he’s hoping that might count as an answer while his body seems to lose structural confidence under you.

“Uh—” he says. Another peck. Then, fully blushed: “I… I don’t think so.”

“Why?” you whine, and it is more a question for the cosmos than for him. For whoever sits up there and is currently cracking up at the fantastic joke of two people getting wasted enough to finally go for it, and forgetting the technicalities. “Why?” you ask again, and this time it’s for Duncan.

Dunk goes abashed so quickly it hurts to watch. “I—I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t really…” He swallows. “I don’t really do this much.”

Something in you gives at that. Not because it is tragic exactly, but because it sounds so plain in his mouth. I don’t have one night stands that often. 

He bites his lower lip. His eyes drop. You watch his lashes fan down—long, straight, lying flat against his cheek for a beat when he blinks. Then he looks back up, careful, and his pupils shrink from nebular to slightly enlarged. “D’you want to stop?” he asks.

No, you absolutely don’t. Practically crying from between the legs for him, and he’s weeping too, you realise, when his tip nudges the inside of your thigh. Instead of answering, you kiss him to stop that crestfallen expression from blooming across his face and wedge your nails so deep into his bicep he groans. He whispers your name to remind you there are still issues to resolve in this arrangement.

“N-no,” you say, letting your leg fall off his hip and trapping him between your thighs. “Just… let’s regroup.”

Dunk gasps. He likes thighs when they are soft like this. Likes hips with those useful little dips to hold onto, and buttocks with enough weight and hang to mould into his hands. He enjoys, obtusely, being wanted to the point where recklessness gets to win over sense for once. The only thing he would want more is to bury himself inside you, even if it were only half his cock. But if fucking your thighs is the next best thing you have pointed him towards, he is not about to complain. In fact, some sober future version of himself can sit down later and thank whoever needs thanking.

You are slick enough for him to slide freely. Tight enough that he can pretend, a little, that he has been let in. He holds your ass to angle himself better and keeps moving, dragged half by want and half by the pressure of you closing on him. Aside from the fronts of his legs and the underside of his belly losing contact with you on each thrust, the rest stays fused together. Your tits flatten to his chest. Your mouth and nose crush into his face. Your arms are locked round his neck.

He can tell the shape of you exactly from the way it frames his length. Still, he wants eyes somewhere else in the room. Wants to look. Wants to see the head of his cock spreading your pussy lips wide and dragging itself through you, from clit, through slit, to perineum and back. His balls tighten at the thought. 

“Jesus, lass,” he breathes into your cheek. “Look what y’do to me.” He kisses the corner of your mouth, goes back to the shallow push of it, then breaks again just enough to look at you. “Is tha’ good?” he mutters. “Tell me. Tell me what y’want.”

“Yes,” you say, thighs cinching on him by way of proof. “Fuck, yes—” Your voice goes softer, more broken. “I want—I want—”

Then you reach behind yourself and press your fingers flat to his underside. Dunk starts nudging at your entrance. Slows down. “Lass,” he rasps, his eyes searching your face. “What’re ye doin’?”

“What if we just—” You swallow. Drag him slower through yourself until the tip catches on the seam and every thrust he tries and fails to withhold becomes a shallow knock. “Just the tip—I want you to—”

Dunk squeezes his eyes shut so hard his eyeballs hurt. “Luv—” he chokes out, and even to himself it sounds like begging.

He can feel the promising warmth of you on him. The grip you’d have on him. He wants, with every ounce of his body, to just sink and drown and never breathe again if it means breathing without you anywhere near him. He tries to calculate risk, but can’t. Forgets, fully, what might happen, aside from himself dying if he doesn’t just fuck you.

“You’ve to tell me,” he says. “You’ve to tell me to get out, aye?”

All you can hear yourself thinking is please never get out of me. Please stay inside. Please, just hold me through it.

“Yes,” you say. Then again, when the tip stretches you wide open. “God, yes—”

You stay there a second. Breathe in the air Duncan has released from his mouth. Try to be good and keep it shallow enough for this to remain, somehow, explainable to Rowan when you tell her what you’ve done. But you start feeling so hollow it becomes unbearable. Soon, your muscles, dulled by alcohol and a bunch of other baffling things, adjust. Soon, your cunt simply begs for more of him. Soon, you are bargaining with yourself: he’s good, he doesn’t fuck that often. He’s for sure clean.

And most importantly, It’s not so easy to get pregnant nowadays. In your fuck-drunk brain, you manage to convince yourself it is not merely difficult but outright impossible. You cannot remember exactly how old you are either—thirty-one or two, less or more. What comes on the other side of that is absolute certainty: even if everything goes wrong, the only consequence will be the crushing shame of getting this worked up over a man you are still not entirely sure is into you unless he has consumed horse-tranquillising amounts of lager.

Duncan stays infuriatingly still while your hips wrestle with his size. You huff and breathe loudly and hair is sticking to your forehead, and by vicinity, his too. Your leg comes back to its favourite place across his hip bone. Bent in the knee so you can hook it over him and bring him closer. He groans for it, winces a little, and says, “Christ, girl, you’ll end me, so you will.”

“No-no,” you say. Take his cheeks into your hands and look him deep in the eye as you sink. “No ending.” An inch. “Just a little—” Another inch. “Just a little bit of fucking. Slow—”

It has to be slow. Your mind is already galloping into some deranged scenario where you are unbreakable and Dunk is thrusting into you hard and fast from behind, telling you sweet things in that thick voice of his so you can take it better. For now, though, slow. You stretch around him in small increments, and the terrible emptiness gives way to a gentle, euphoric fullness. By the time he is halfway in, you can almost breathe deeper. The pair of you look at each other as if some lucid parts still mean to communicate what a dreadful idea this is, only to lose to the parts made of want.

“Slow,” Dunk says, knowing exactly what he’s doing and enjoying every forbidden bit of it. He stares at you with eyes wide open and holds. Stays there, utterly still, treating slow as motionless, and the heat starts skittering all over his skin when you answer his needy throb with a vicious little clench. It nearly knocks the sense out of him. He swallows hard, keeps one hand braced at your hip and the other behind your back, and tries not to fuck up the good thing by losing his mind completely.

“Easy, lass, easy,” he says. “Fuck, let me jus’—”

He draws back a little. Not far. Only enough to feel the drag of you sending all of his nerves ablaze. The pressure of you seems to go straight through the body and find him somewhere lower and more basic than flesh. When he eases in again and feels the same resistance give, your mouth opens on a breath that lands hot on his face, and he has to shut his eyes for a beat.

“That’s it,” he mutters. “Tha’s it, luv.”

He does it again. Out a little, back in a little deeper. The rhythm wants to run off with him, but he keeps it on a short lead. Your hands are on him everywhere—shoulders, neck, hair, whatever bit of him seems nearest to hold—and each small reaction you give comes back through his cock magnified. A flinch. A sigh. The way your hips try to meet him even while the rest of you is still learning to live around the burn.

Dunk is used to things feeling tight. What he is not used to is the extra layer of meaning this comes with. That it is you round him. You, who have spent two years doing innocuous things in his proximity and making a meal of his mind with them. Laughing. Leaning over a table in a top cut too low for the peace of anybody present, because he is only a man. Brushing his forearm in passing, because he is a man who yearns. Sneezing, even, because he likes it when girls lose control of their bodies for a second. He prefers it when he is the one making that happen, but with you that had always been filed under impossible wishes, and he had taken what he got.

Now he wants everything greedy and domestic and unwell. To kiss you more. Eat you out again. Play with your hair. Study the nape of your neck properly and maybe leave a mark there small enough to show only when you wear your hair up. He gets so deep into the fantasy of keeping you here, of making sure you never touch the floor, that he does not quite register how deep he already is until you moan his name.

“Dunk!”

He comes back hard. Feels himself buried nearly to the hilt and suffers the oppressive sweetness of it. You are so fucking good round him. “Ah—sweetheart,” he coos, and kisses you because there is nothing else to do with that much feeling.

Your hips start seeking more. Rolling, nudging, trying to drag it out of him. Then your mouth starts going too, and that does him nearly worse. “You’re so deep—fuck, you’re so deep,” you breathe into his cheek. “Please don’t stop. Please—” comes next and then finally, “I want you so bad. I’ve wanted you so bad.”

Duncan’s breathing picks up from it. He had thought things could not get more dangerous than this. They can. They do.

Soon you are grinding into him in earnest, both of you slick with sweat, your mouth open against his, and he starts to fear the inevitable, but doesn’t dare to stop. He’s just fearing.

“That’sit,” he slurs, wrecked. “Talk t’me. Jesus, girl—”

When you come, you might as well have him punched to the gut. “Yes, yes, yes—” spills out of you in shuddering fragments, and you get so impossibly narrow around him his vision blurs. Through it he sees your eyes roll back until there is too much white in them, grotesque and strange and, to Duncan, the sexiest thing he has ever seen in his life. He prays to his drunk brain to keep the memory. Keep this. Keep your face. Keep the sound of his name mangled in your mouth. Keep the way your body clamps down on him like it has decided he belongs there.

His balls go from low-hanging to high-strung and he knows he has exactly a millisecond to pull out. But the distance his cock has to travel between being inside and outside is too much. Everything’s too much. He comes with a broken sound, loud enough to embarrass him in any other life. His whole body seizes round it. Shakes with it. You have told him nothing beyond how good he feels, and that, apparently, was not a clearly enough signposted get out. He feels it draining him while he is still inside you and the realisation lands in the same instant as the pleasure, ruining nothing and improving nothing and simply making the whole thing worse in a new direction.

He wrenches himself out that millisecond too late. The last of it spills hot across your inner thighs. “Shite,” he mutters at once. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry—”

“Shh,” you murmur, still shaking yourself. “It’s okay, it’s okay. I’m sure we’ll be okay. It’s alright, Dunk.”

You kiss his forehead. He has half a mind to gather you close and never let any harm touch you again, though he is aware with some fairness that he is currently the harm in question.

“Ah, fuck, that was—” you start.

“Reckless—”

“Incredible,” you whisper. “And reckless. We’ll be alright. We’ll be—”

You sound as if you are trying to convince the room as much as either of you. Dunk stares at you, pulverized and sweaty and still half inside the aftershock of it, wanting very badly to believe you simply because you have said it.

The thought of yours remains unfinished. Somewhere around be your voice trails off and your face begins to loosen. Dunk watches it happen in real time: the faint effort to remain lucid, the last stubborn little hold of wakefulness, then that lovely spent-melt sleep has been waiting to lay over you all along.

He winces inwardly, because he knows well enough what becomes of cum left to dry on skin, and yours is currently wearing a fair bit of his. Still, he does not dare move you. Anything that needs to be done can wait. Your head is resting on his arm and he does not mind that in the least. If anything, it is useful. It confirms you are real.

So he gives himself over to watching. Your jaw slackens. Mouth falls open just enough to make him wonder whether you are going to drool on him. He decides he would not mind that either. He keeps watching until his own lids grow too heavy to negotiate with, and the weight of his limbs settles further into the bed and into you.

Sleep is a black hole. You crawl out of it with that terrible phantom of vomit on your tongue, the kind that really wanted out at some point between Lyonel’s place and wherever you are now, and never got to leave. Your head is split. Your mouth is begging for a toothbrush and enough Listerine to send you straight back to being blind drunk. Your stomach is empty and growling. The rest of you—trapped.

When you open your eyes, the shape beside you is inconspicuous at first. Only large. Then he comes into focus, and the first thing your brain offers up is a rush of joy so immediate it nearly feels chemical. What exactly for—you being here, him getting home safe, the sheer fact of him—you do not know.

Then, awareness starts seeping back in. The night returns in vignettes. Dancing. Drink. The pavement tipping softly under your feet. One shoe gone missing. His shoulder under your middle. His mouth on yours in the street. Your mouth on his. His teeth flashing when he laughed. Hands. Your dress. The hallway. His voice. After that the details begin to smear again, not gone exactly, but too warm and close and bodily to look at head-on with a hangover this sharp.

You look down. Your face is pillowed on his arm. You are on your belly facing him, goddamn naked, with one leg caught under the enormous weight of his thigh. Duncan is asleep on his side, snoring a little through parted lips. In sleep he looks younger. Not smaller—nothing available to him suggests smallness—but younger in the face. Morning light lays the freckles bare over his nose and cheeks. There are lines at the corners of his eyes you only notice like this. They come from smiling or crying or both, and because your head is in its current state you nearly burst into tears over that alone.

He looks like a boy. A very large, naked, ruined-looking boy. And you are trapped in bed with him.

It is perfectly clear that you’ve had sex. And even if it wasn’t, the soreness between the legs would make it clear. What is less clear is the route by which you arrived there. You cannot remember it properly enough to trust yourself. You do not know who started it. You do not know how far it went before one of you suggested the rest. You do not know how drunk he was, whether he knew what he was doing, whether he knew who he was doing it with. Half of you hopes he did not, because there would be mercy in that. The other half would be heartbroken if that were true.

You know enough about Duncan not to picture him as some seasoned practitioner of one-night stands. The same, mortifyingly, goes for you. This is out of character in a way that would be funny if it were happening to somebody else. Instead it is happening to you, and Raymun is probably proposing to Rowan right about now, and Rowan will surely say yes, and soon your oldest friend will have crossed decisively into a life where she is paired off and chosen and occupied, while you remain what you have apparently always been: a woman with good copy, bad timing, and just enough loneliness in her to do something catastrophic with one of the very few decent men who ever decided to stay in her life, even as friends.

Because that is what the panic says this is. A terrible mistake that could cause damage to more than just you and him.

You lie very still, and think with mounting horror that you may have used the closest thing to a legend-level good person in your life to mute the sound of your own solitude for one night. That, if true, is vile. That, if true, is exactly the sort of thing you would never forgive in somebody else.

So: you ease yourself out of the prison of him with the care of somebody dismantling a bomb and trying not to be sentimental about the wiring. His thigh lifts off yours with a slow, reluctant drag. His arm comes free from under your face. You pause twice for no better reason than that the bed is warm and he is warm and your body, traitorous thing, is not at all convinced leaving is the correct administrative choice.

The room looks worse in daylight, which helps. Clothes in small disasters. Cups. The soft indecency of other people’s sleep. You gather your things, moving with the ugly, overcareful delicacy of a hangover.

Then you notice the drying crust high on your thigh and nearly smack yourself in the forehead.

Well. At least he pulled out.

Putting a little black dress, a plunge bra and yesterday’s mangled knickers back on the next morning ought to be a rite of passage belonging to a younger, more recoverable version of you. Even better late than never does not make it less sour. Never would, in fact, be considerably better. Especially after thirty.

You find one shoe by the bed and the other in the hallway, a little crushed and without much faith left in its own shape. Your phone, by some mercy, still has five percent battery. The clock says it is not even nine, which explains why you feel less like somebody who has slept and more like somebody who has been run over at low speed for several continuous hours.

You order a cab. Ten minutes of walking home outside looks like it would be punishment in excess of the crime.

While you wait, you stand in his hallway with one hand on the wall and the other clutching your phone, and try very hard not to think. The app pings. Your driver has arrived. You go back for one last look anyway.

Duncan is still asleep, peaceful in a way that feels unfair. He has a face that makes forgiveness seem structurally possible in the world. Maybe he remembers more than you do. Maybe he wanted this. Maybe he will wake up and be glad to find you here.

Before you can lean properly into any of that nonsense, the driver starts calling with offended persistence. You answer. Duncan stirs at the sound, only a little, but the jump of panic it sends through you is useful.

“I’ll be right out,” you whisper, and leave as quietly as you can.

“She said he’s gonna be there, an’ it migh’ be a good window,” Raymun says. He’s palming his pockets every now and then and sighing, relieved.

“Wai’, wait—” Dunk stops. “She’s gonna be there?” The sudden halt makes him dizzy. When he looks down he sees only one of his fingers, pointing vaguely forward.

Raymun stops too. He looks at Dunk, near offended by the change of topic. “Who?”

Duncan winces. “Don’t do that.”

“Do what?” Raymun smirks and slowly starts to walk again.

Dunk wills his feet to move. “That thing where y’act thick so I’ve to say it out loud,” he says, catching up to Raymun with merely three drunken swings on the wet pavement. One of his feet lands in a puddle. “Fuck’s sake—I’m askin’ a plain question.”

“You are physically incapable of askin’ a plain question in the state of ye,” Raymun says, and Duncan thinks with some long-forgotten sober part of his mind that they must look like the most basic comedic relief ever written into the backstory of some serious film.

He places a palm on Raymun’s shoulder and looks at him long and serious. “Ray.”

His friend’s eyes are dark and bleary. When Duncan focuses enough, they stop being four eyes and return to the normal human two. He wishes he wasn’t so malleable and didn’t let Raymun talk him into dressing up—contact lenses sting more if your eyeballs are suffering massive dehydration by buckets of lager. He’s also sweating horribly and is convinced it wouldn’t be so visible if he was wearing a T-shirt instead of an actual shirt. The collar became unbearable at the second pub they went to, and Duncan had to undo two buttons of it, which makes him feel too slutty for his liking.

All in all, Raymun is a good friend and he deserves all the best things. Duncan doesn’t remember exactly when the friendship happened, he just knows it was in a pub. Raymun doesn’t remember either—each of them states a different pub and a different date if asked, so when they want to celebrate their anniversary they do it twice, and in two different pubs.

Raymun looks at him a minute with an unbearable smugness plastered to his face until it melts away into a shrug of retaliation. “Aye, she’ll be there, yeah,” he groans.

“Ah, for fuck’s sake.” Dunk gives Raymun’s shoulder a gentle annoyed push and starts walking on.

Grand. Every opportunity he’s had to impress you, you were either occupied by getting impressed by someone else or Dunk was doing a terrible job of it. By now he’s sure you see him as a guy who always bumps his head on low-hanging lamps and spills the first part of the pint on himself before it reaches his mouth.

Once, Dunk thought he’d had a window open too. Or a hatch. A crack in the wall, more like. Some sort of opening big enough for a man to get his hopes through and then catch them on the way back.

It was shortly after you’d met, and a couple of weeks into Rowan and Raymun dating. They had dragged everyone to a pub quiz, then abandoned ship halfway through under the world’s thinnest pretext, leaving behind a sweating jug of lager, a half-filled answer sheet and a team name so stupid Dunk still cringes about it. You didn’t win, but you did manage to provide the most ridiculous answers to each question. By the music round Dunk was cracking up so hard he snorted beer out of his nose. He remembers you wiping his chest with a napkin and laughing with an absolutely adorable drunken cackle he’s never heard again after that.

He remembers exactly what you were wearing and exactly what you smelled like—clementines, mostly, and something warm and cake-like. He remembers your hand wrapped around his wrapped around a pen when you were changing the answers last minute. He remembers pulling a strand of hair out of your mouth. He remembers cowarding out and giving you a pat on the back instead of kissing you when the moment was right. There were enough that night to furnish a small flat. A week later Rowan was chatting utter shite about your new boyfriend, and that was that.

A person would think two years is enough time to get over a thing that never happened. Duncan has instead gone through it in phases. At one point he decided his attraction to you felt so fierce only because some extraterrestrial force had marked you off special and unreachable, same as stars or the moon or discounted flats with south-facing windows. Then he thought he simply needed to meet more women, because he is not dead and in fact finds plenty of women cute. He found Rowan cute the first time he saw her—palming the back of one of his students’ fathers in the car park. Long before Raymun. He gave it further thought when, a week later, she was palming the back of a different father with equal commitment and better posture.

It took Duncan some time to piece together Rowan’s actual occupation, and then an amount of moral fortitude bordering on sainthood not to sell her out to Raymun the minute they were introduced proper. Dunk tries not to judge people too harshly. It paid off, because to Duncan Rowan is living proof that life throws people in different directions and love can straighten a lot of things out. Raymun is happy with her.

Right. Raymun.

“Oh, don’t start,” he calls after Duncan. “You’ve been moonin’ over her for the better part of two years.”

“I have not!” Duncan shouts.

“You have so,” Raymun pants from catching up with him. “Every time she walks in a room your face goes all… I dunno. Big.”

Dunk huffs. “My face is always big.”

“Don’t be smart with me. I’m nervous.”

“You’ve checked the ring six times since we left the last pub.”

Raymun winces. “Seven.”

“Jesus.”

“I’m serious, Dunk.” He grabs Duncan’s arms above the elbows and tells him the plan for the fourth time. “Lyonel samples the cider, likes it, gives me a meetin’, I get somethin’ real started. Somethin’ proper. Then I ask Rowan.”

“You were always askin’ Rowan,” Dunk blurts dimly.

“Not with a business plan, I wasn’t.”

“That’s not why she loves you.”

“Lovin’ someone ain’t enough to spend a life with them,” Raymun says, and Dunk strongly disagrees. He finds loving someone the very first reason to spend a life with them. “We’re ‘ere. Look—”

Gold light from a neon washes over Raymun’s face. Dunk looks at it first, then up, where the sign blinks the name Laughing Storm. He remembers what he was told about it in pieces: that it’s Lyonel Baratheon’s new venue. That Lyonel Baratheon is a rich man who was born rich and smiling, and who manages to multiply his fortune through multiplying fun. That the plan includes Dunk and Raymun crashing Lyonel’s opening party, catching him half-drunk and pliant, and charming him with a sample of Raymun’s cider and a pair of crooked, working-class smiles.

It doesn’t explain at all why Raymun keeps palming the pocket with the ring instead of the one with the bottle. Dunk wonders if Raymun, once this works out, is going to march off into the night and kneel for Rowan right then and there, or whether the ring is just a token for luck.

“Right,” Raymun says, putting his phone away. “Ready?”

“For what?” asks Dunk, and the same second he does, the door creaks open. Things pour out through that slit: a spill of orange light, low thumping music, and a foot dressed in a slipper, and Dunk knows this foot by sight only. When he looks up, you’re measuring both him and Raymun with a baffled glance.

“Lads,” you say. “I said you need him drunk, not yourselves. What the hell have you dragged yourselves through?”

“‘Twas a quest for courage,” Raymun says. He sways a little. Gives you an innocent shrug, and Dunk gets to see you cracking.

“Fine.” You roll your eyes. Sweet. “God, I’m so happy for you,” you squeal then, throwing your arms round Raymun’s neck. “She’d say yes without any of it, but just know I’ve prepped him up for you a little.” There’s a wink.

“Wha’did you do, lassie?”

“Ah, nothing,” you say, opening the door wider. “Just went on and on about how this shithole has a great potential for a summer garden, and with summer coming we’d need a summer drink—” You give an inviting motion and Raymun takes a step through. “And how apple cider mimosas would be perfect for that.”

“There’re apple cider mimosas?” Raymun asks, already inside.

“There are now,” you tell him. Then, you turn. “Hi, Dunk. Long time.”

“Yeah,” Duncan nods. He leans in for some sort of greeting, forgetting no such thing is needed nowadays. During the descent, he sees up close how long you must’ve been up and how chaotic the evening is proving. Your hair is a bit unruly, and your makeup a bit smeared. There’s a crust of mascara in the corner of your eye, and the middle part of your lipstick is eaten off. Forehead and chest glow with sweat a little. Before he gets to say anything else, you’re hugging him.

“It’s good to see you,” you say into his shoulder. “Hm, you look nice.”

“I’m so drunk, lass,” he says, of all things. He’s bowed over you, with his hands holding your waist, and his nose melting into the crook of your shoulder. It might be that you smell like the inside of a butter almond biscuit packet, he thinks. And clementines.

“Dunk,” you say. “You alright? Do you need some water?”

“N-no, I jus’—” He straightens and gets dizzy and hot all of a sudden. “Maybe, yeah.”

“Come on, then.” You take his hand, lead him inside, and Dunk wishes his palm wasn’t so clammy.

The place looks strange and hits him from several directions. Warmth first. Then smell. Meat, wax, citrus peel, singed rosemary, perfume expensive enough to smell faintly bored with itself. A band is sawing through some quick Celtic thing in the corner hard enough to make the fiddle sound like it’s going to fall apart in the player’s hands. Long tables run the length of the room under cloth draped low from the ceiling, and every inch of wood not occupied by candles has been burdened with food. There are pears gleaming under sugar glass, oysters on silver, dark bread torn open by hands better moisturised than Duncan’s, and bottles standing about with the confidence of things bought to be seen before they are drunk.

Lyonel, apparently, has chosen to decorate the place as if a stag fucked a theatre troupe and they all came here to celebrate it. There are antlers fixed to walls, antlers hanging from chains, antlers worked into candelabras. Half the guests seem to have interpreted the invitation as a dare. Velvet capes. Gold masks. Bits of armour worn over silk for no practical reason. One woman passes in something sheer and medieval enough to make Duncan worry she might catch cold in a draught and sue the organisers.

You are wearing a little black dress. Dunk, who had spent the walk here feeling overdone in a shirt, feels suddenly underdone in it too.

You bring him to the bar and park him by the brass rail. Up close the counter is one single slab of lacquered dark wood, polished enough that the candlelight sits on it like liquid gold. A bartender appears the instant your fingers lift. Dunk has never seen service move that fast outside a hospital and even then only if someone is actively bleeding out.

“Water,” you tell the bartender, then glance at Duncan. “And maybe something with salt in it before you pass out on Lyonel’s reclaimed oak.”

The glass set in front of him is cold enough to hurt. He drinks. The water tastes of lemon and cucumber and money.

For a minute he just stands there swallowing and looking. He never knows what to do with wealth when it stops being theoretical. To him ownership has always meant a thing that does a job and keeps doing it. A kettle. A car. A lock. A pair of shoes with another winter left in them. Here, half the objects seem to have been acquired to prove they had no need to be.

He looks at you again. At your bare arms mostly, the neck under the updo, and then the sensible shoes beneath all this lunacy. “How come you’re not dressed like the rest of the circus?” he asks.

You snort. “Because I told Lyonel I’ve done enough work on this place without having to come as part of the decor as well.”

Dunk smiles into the rim of his glass. “He took that well?”

“He said I was wounding the atmosphere.” You accept your own drink from the bartender without looking, like this sort of obedience is ordinary to you. “I told him the atmosphere could survive one woman dressed like she has rent to pay.”

That gets a proper laugh out of him, and it comes easier than he’d expected. Dangerous, really. He hasn’t been alone with you in months and his body takes to it at once like a bad habit.

He looks out over the room again. “D’you like it?”

You follow his gaze. The lights. The costumes. Lyonel’s curated idea of old fun done up with modern plumbing and a monstrous budget. Duncan hears himself think the mean thing. Of course maybe you do. Why wouldn’t you. This sort of life probably explains the men: journalists with interesting hair, photographers who own scarves, editors who say things are seminal and nod seriously. Not many primary-school P.E. teachers in a room like this, unless they’ve come to unclog something.

You lean one shoulder on the bar. “I like looking at joy,” you say. “And at love. And Lyonel likes sharing it.”

Dunk turns to you. The answer lands deeper than the question deserves it and for a second he can only look. You say those things as if they are visible substances. Joy. Love. Things a person might spot glinting in a room if they stood in the right place.

Before he can recover himself, Raymun’s voice cuts across the band. “Dunk!”

He looks over and finds Raymun standing near the far end of the room with the bottle in one hand and all his nerves in the other, and next to him—of course—is Lyonel Baratheon. Even from here he looks like some well-fed pagan deity somebody has tricked into a button-down. The deer antlers are real enough to be frightening. His face is all amusement. His eyes are fixed on Dunk and nowhere else.

Dunk feels, with perfect clarity, that he would rather be hit by a slow bus.

You touch his forearm. “Go,” you say.

“He’s lookin’ at me.”

“Yes, Dunk. That is generally how eyes work.” He cuts you a look. You smile, but kindly. “He’s not that scary,” you say. “Just… be yourself.”

Duncan glances down at his shirt, his glass, his large damp hand, then back at the antlered millionaire waiting across the room. “That seems a harsh ask.”

You give him a playful push and watch the crowd part around him in two obedient lines. He apologises to everyone. Staggers once, corrects. You expect him to get smaller the further he goes, but somehow doesn’t. There’s a wet patch blooming between his shoulder blades and you catch yourself thinking it would not look half so appealing on a smaller back.

Why your soft spot for Duncan keeps getting softer every time you see him, you have no idea. He has signposted lack of interest in someone like you often enough by now, mostly by letting every offered chance pass him by in broad daylight. Whenever he gets an opportunity to know you better, he asks the sort of questions that tell you exactly what he thinks of you: that you are an ambitious girl with one eye on the next rung and both hands busy climbing. Which is, of course, nonsense.

Working for Lyonel, with Lyonel, has been a blessing in a world where brand management and copywriting usually get done by some important person’s ambitious daughter or cousin or nephew, or a girl the important person badly wants to see in their bed. Lyonel does not even have room for you in his bed. There is a waiting line and you are not blessed with eternal youth to make it there in time. Being treated like someone whose brain is worth respect feels better anyway.

So, you are grateful for your job. A list of things you are grateful for begins with Rowan dropping out of university. Her escort work had been insane, but it fed your poor, stuck-in-a-tiny-flat lives with stories nobody puts in magazines unless they have first scraped all the truth off them. It also gave her enough contacts that, after squeezing yourself through several very tight sieve openings, you got to first offend, then impress, then charm Lyonel into giving you a job.

And then there is Duncan. Another thing to be grateful to Rowan for, and maybe sometimes curse her a little, too. 

He looked at you like he was afraid about his soul getting eaten, which at first, you thought was a good sign. Then, he turned out to be someone who's fuelled by gentleness and vastly different to all the places you had gone looking for love before. Which, perhaps, should have made him easier. Instead it made him rare, and therefore difficult in the way things become difficult when they are decent.

Once you thought, with the sort of certainty that usually precedes humiliation, that this was it now, this was a window, this was a man finally about to kiss you if you only angled your face right and did not lose your nerve first. You all but gave yourself neck trouble trying to beam the invitation into his skull. He patted you on the back goodnight.

A week later you were on a date with a magazine editor who spoke warmly about political despair and had a dick as spiritually robust as a noodle. After him there was the photographer with beautiful wrists and the emotional stamina of a tired five year old. Then a journalist who said your writing was ‘surprisingly muscular,’ by which he meant that he was alarmed to find a woman had written it. There were others. Good coats, limp spines, jobs that looked impressive typed out in black on white. You kept trying, largely out of habit. Repetitive insanity starts looking like a plan after enough years. By your books, still better than fucking up a friendship.

You’ve heard yourself sound unbearably sad in your response to Dunk’s question and hope he will either not notice it or file it under everyone having had too much to drink in this establishment. This is about helping Raymun propose to Rowan so you at least have an example of a happy couple to look at and be around while managing your recurring heartburn.

Across the room you can see Lyonel pouring the offered cider into an elaborate golden goblet. Raymun is pale as chalk except for the furious carmine blush on his cheeks. Duncan stands right behind him, hunched, hands in pockets, his temple glistening in the candlelight. He looks like he’s holding his breath while Lyonel brings the glass to his mouth.

He takes one sip. Looks inside as if the contents are going to reveal spiritual knowledge, then downs it all in three large gulps and gargles on the last one. You giggle from your spot—you know by now he’ll invest, just make the boys sweat for it a little longer.

Then, Lyonel puts the goblet down and looks straight at you. He crooks two fingers.

You finish your drink because there is no point in pretending not to understand a summons delivered with jewellery that expensive, then weave your way through the room towards them. People are already watching. They always do when Lyonel is drunk enough to become ceremonial.

You pass Raymun first, who looks on the verge of either securing his whole future or vomiting on it. Duncan is beside him, still with his hands in his pockets, though the posture has changed. Less hunch now. More brace.

By the time you reach Lyonel, he is beyond wasted in that particular rich-man way which still leaves enough coordination for trouble. He opens his mouth, seems to think better of words for a second, and slaps your ass.

You react immediately, but Duncan reacts too. He pushes Raymun clean out of the way and leans over Lyonel, blinking through murder.

For one beautiful beat the whole thing hangs there. The band keeps scraping away. The candles’ wicks pop. Lyonel, sunk in his chair under the antlers, looks up into the face of a man who could probably fold him into a more useful shape.

You put a hand on Duncan’s chest, and give him one glance that says wait. The alcohol in your system has turned recklessness into bravery, so you reach sideways for the nearest glass of water, and throw it in Lyonel’s face. “Now,” you say, “we’re even.”

Lyonel gapes. First at you, then at Duncan. Water runs from his lashes and into his beard. Then, he starts laughing.

“Sorry, darling,” he says. “I’m so—wasted.”

“You are,” you agree.

“But not so wasted I haven’t noticed this extraordinary coincidence between you not shutting up about cider all afternoon and this cider now finishing me off.” He points the wet rim of the goblet vaguely at Raymun, then more precisely at Duncan. “Do you know the lads?”

“Did you like the cider?” you ask.

“I did,” Lyonel says, grinning. “Do you know the lads?” He points again with two ringed fingers towards Duncan, who is still standing there like a storm in a shirt, and Raymun, who has now achieved a full and even red.

You fold your arms. “Does it matter?”

A beat. “Only if they don’t dance,” Lyonel says. “Because we’re all going to dance now, and tomorrow you will remind me about this, yes?”

A smirk splits your face. You lean, close enough to be eye to eye with him, and say, “They dance.”

Raymun makes a sound so hopeful it nearly qualifies as religious. Duncan turns his head and looks at you with the frightened expression of someone who has been told his mortgage depends on rhythm.

You catch his hand before he can decide to flee, and give it a squeeze. “It’s alright,” you mutter.

It isn’t, exactly. It is Lyonel. Nothing around Lyonel is ever quite alright. It is, however, survivable.

Lyonel lurches to his feet with the confidence of the extremely rich and the very drunk. One antler catches the lower tier of a candle chandelier and nudges it swinging. Somebody yelps. Lyonel doesn’t notice. He takes two steps towards the dance floor, then turns, as if struck by an afterthought, and slaps Duncan’s buttock with a crack loud enough to turn heads three tables over.

“You looked upset not to get one, lad.”

For a second Duncan just stares at him. It is an expression you do not know how to read. His eyes are fully engaged, measuring and bright, while the rest of his face has gone dead plain, as if it has stepped out for air and left the bones behind. Then something in him gives.

He laughs.

Lyonel points at him, delighted. “That’s what I’m after.”

Before you can keep hold of Duncan, Lyonel steals him clean out of your reach. He drags him by the wrist towards the centre of the room and shoves the antler crown off his own head onto the first passer-by willing to accept temporary authority. The band, sensing an event the way bands always do, kicks the tune into something faster and more violent.

People begin clearing space before anyone asks them to. Raymun, with the survival instincts of a man who has just seen investment and possible marriage open on the same hinge, vanishes sideways to the edge of the floor and starts clapping above his head. Duncan gets spun once by Lyonel’s grip and nearly misses his footing, catches it, then squares himself with a look of deep suspicion, as if dancing were a trap set specifically for the broad.

Lyonel beams at him like he’s about to either bless or mug him. He stomps on Duncan’s foot once, and the crowd holds its breath. Then, he misses every other time. They fucking chase each other across the boards. Bump into people, nudge the candlesticks and rattle food on the tables, until it’s Dunk’s heavy foot that lands on Lyonel’s and everything goes quiet.

For a second, you forget how to breathe too, because your boss folds in half and looks like he’s about to retch on Dunk’s shoes. Then this absolute madman flips his hair, braces himself on Duncan’s chest and laughs so loudly the Laughing Storm turns to tempest.

People flood the dance floor. Raymun snags you by the waist and pulls you in too. The world starts spinning dangerously as you’re passed from one person’s arms to another’s, until everything settles on Dunk. He reaches you and cheats the queue by simply not letting go once he has you. One turn becomes three. Somebody else reaches for your hand and Duncan keeps it anyway, grinning like a thief who’s decided theft is legal if done with enough charm.

You have never seen him smile this much. He has pointy canines and a crooked grin that suits an adolescent boy better than a man his size, and somehow that only makes him more handsome. His hair burns copper in the candlelight. His cheeks are all scrunched by laughter. You could kiss him now and suck some of that purest joy out of him for yourself.

Instead you let him swing you round again.

His arms nearly lift you off the floor anyway. There is very little dancing in it and a lot of being steered. Dunk seems to know only three moves: stomp, turn, and catch. The last one he does very well. Every time your footing goes a bit uncertain on the boards he puts you right again with both hands, as if setting something back on a shelf. Once he gets bold enough to spin you out by one hand and back into him and looks so pleased with himself after that you laugh in his face.

Soon things go soft around the edges in the way they only do when a party has passed whatever point people usually mean by party. You and Dunk drink more. So does Raymun, out of triumph now instead of nerves. At some point someone produces little fried things with herbs on them and Duncan burns his tongue and pretends he hasn’t. At some point Lyonel gets his antlers back and wears them backwards. At some point the band slows to songs with more sway in them than beat, and the room begins thinning not by the door but by dissolution. Coats appear on arms. Lipstick migrates onto glasses. Candles shorten. The rich begin looking tired exactly like the poor do, only better dressed.

By the time Lyonel climbs onto the edge of one of the long tables and sits there like a king at the end of his own feast, he is very nearly asleep into his hand. You come up to him and touch his knee. “I’m calling you a taxi.”

“Mmph,” he says.

“You’re done.”

One eye opens. “Am not.”

“You are sat on the food.”

Lyonel glances down at himself, considers this, then waves a hand in the general direction of agreement.

Raymun comes over with the bottle tucked under one arm and gratitude written all over his face. “Lyonel, I—”

Lyonel lifts one finger. “T’morrah,” he says thickly. “T’morrah, boy. ‘Fore noon if y’like pain.”

Raymun laughs in relief hard enough to bend.

Between the three of you—and mostly Duncan—you get Lyonel off the table, into his coat and outside into the damp night, where a taxi is already idling at the curb. He folds into the back seat with the solemnity of a very wasted emperor being removed from battle. Before the door shuts, he points vaguely at you.

“Garden,” he says.

“Yes, Lyonel.”

“Cider.”

“Yes, Lyonel.”

Then, he is gone.

The street feels strange after all that heat. Cooler than it should be. Quieter too, though the music still seems to be beating faintly in your bones.

Raymun turns to you first and hugs you so hard you nearly lose a shoe. “Thank you,” he says into your hair.

You hug him back just as hard and, annoyingly, feel your eyes sting. “Now you’ve no excuses,” you tell him. “She’s waiting for you.”

He pulls back, smiling in that dazed, hopeful way people do when their lives are about to split into before and after. Then he looks between you and Duncan. “You two gettin’ home alright?”

“I need t’walk it off,” Duncan says.

You nod. “We’ll walk.”

Raymun studies the pair of you for half a second too long, like he suspects the night has one more idea left in it. Then sense, or drink, or Rowan wins. He points down the road.

“Right then. Pray for me.”

“As if you need it,” you say.

He laughs, squeezes your shoulder once, claps Duncan on the arm and heads off into the dark. When he’s gone, the quiet settles properly. Beside you Duncan shifts his weight and looks down the street, then at you.

Right. Dunk’s head is buzzing and the streetlights sway a little. His hair feels stiff from sweat and wherever his body has perspirated to make the shirt damp he’s now feeling the night licking him and making goosebumps rise on his skin. He hopes he doesn’t smell too badly.

“Aye, so—” He clears his throat. Looks down at you to find you trembling and holding your bare arms. “Cold, are ye?” he asks. Your head shakes with exaggerated nods. “We can share a taxi, if y’want.”

“N-no,” you say. Then sigh, sheepish. “I’ll throw up if I get into a car.”

Duncan nods, smiling. He will too. “I’d offer ye my shirt, only it’s manky.”

You nod as well, though he does not think you mean to. You are mostly just shaking. You look him over as if weighing something in your head, mutter, “Jus’—” and sway hard enough that he catches you by the waist before the pavement does. Your arms come round his middle, firm and familiar in a way they have no business being, and you nuzzle into him.

“Let’s just do this, alright?” you mumble into his shirt. “It’s not far if I… remember correctly.”

He stands there with his arms hovering off you for a beat like a fool, then puts one round your shoulders and the other hand on your forearm. “Sorry,” he says. “For the smell.”

You huff a laugh against him. “I think we’re evening out, if you mean the sweat.”

You smell nice no matter what you smell of, he thinks, then prays with unusual speed that the thought has indeed stayed in his head where it belongs.

You both start walking, crooked together. For a little while the silence is easy. When it stops, both of you speak at once.

“You did a good thing for Raymun today—” you say, like normal people do.

“—and how’s your boyfriend?” Dunk asks, like the idiot he is.

It makes the pair of you slow a little. Chuckle around the awkwardness, and Duncan wonders how uncomfortable he’s managed to make you. He does not answer your thing. You let him get away with it too.

“I’ve given that up for now,” you say instead.

He perks up, because all logical parts of his brain are currently out of order. “Run out of dainty men of culture, have ye?”

You slap him lightly on the stomach. “You’re so mean.”

Dunk grins down at you. “Mean, am I?”

“It’s not fair,” you say. “I’ve nothing to be mean to you about.”

“How’s that?”

“I don’t see any honest women hanging off your arm, do I?”

That gets him in the cheeks a bit. He grumbles something low and useless and decides he should move the conversation before it does him harm. “What about Lyonel?” he asks. “Is he always that handsy?”

You laugh, then glance up at him in a way that makes him sorry he asked and glad he did. “You’d like that, would you? My protector. Ready to smash his teeth.”

Dunk frowns. “It’s no way to treat a lady.”

You make a small sound at that and press in closer, which he accepts very seriously. Then, with dawning terror, he feels you inhale deeply at his shirt.

“Lyonel’s not bad,” you say. “I can manage a bit of HR violation.”

It makes something in him sink for a minute. That you should have to manage it at all seems to him a rotten arrangement.

By the time you turn onto his street he is feeling sorry in advance that the walk is ending. It has been the best part of his night, which is saying something, because the night has included music, nuclear mix of alcohol, and a wealthy man in antlers trying to break his toes. Just holding you like this, though, and having you to himself a while—it puts the rest in the shade.

He slows without meaning to. “That’s me,” he says.

You unglue yourself from his side and pat his chest. The place you were against goes cold straight off. Dunk looks at you and wants, with unusual clarity, to kiss you stupid.

“Thanks for the escort,” you say. “Make sure you drink some water before bed.”

He blinks at you, confused. Baffled, a little, because it comes to him all at once that he has just been walked home and you still have blocks to go alone. “Wait,” he says. “No, I’ll walk ye. C’mon.”

He starts forward. You put both hands to his chest and stop him, smiling like this is all very funny. “I can manage,” you say. “It’s not far. And I feel a bit better.”

“No, you’re not walkin’ alone.”

“Yes I am,” you say. “Stop this.”

You are standing right in his way. Duncan breathes out hard through his nose. “Don’t push me, girl,” he mutters, and bends. Then, his arms go round the backs of your thighs and he swings you over his shoulder.

“Duncan!” you yelp. Bat your funny little fists against his back and kick one foot so hard your slipper falls off. “Dunk, my shoe! Bloody hell, put me down!”

“That’s what y’get for bein’ stubborn,” he says, giving the backs of your thighs one firm settling pat as he walks on.

You keep fighting him, but you laugh all the way through it, bent over his shoulder and kicking your remaining slippered foot at the air. “What has got into you?”

“You. Apparently.”

“Dunk!” you bark another laugh. “You’re showing my fanny to the good citizens of Ireland!”

“There’s no one about.”

“There could be!”

He is half gone by now. Your weight on his shoulder feels too good. Warm and live and trusting in spite of all put upon evidence. The backs of your thighs are soft under his hands, and when his fingers keep brushing too high, near where thigh turns into ass, he is not nearly sorry enough.

Your chest knocks lightly against his back with each step. He has the absurd thought that he could carry you straight into his bed like this and not even mind the state of his flat unless the state of it were biblical. He tries to remember if there are socks on the floor. There definitely are. He also thinks, with much greater urgency, that he would not make it all the way to the bed if he got you there. He would end up pressing you to the wall first.

“Please,” you whine, the laugh breaking thin through it, “I’m going to puke all over you in a second. If you have to be such a knight, at least carry me with a little more dignity, for fuck’s sake.”

That, he relents to. Not fully, because he is still drunk and still himself.

He slides you down off his shoulder by degrees, keeping hold of you so your feet never find the ground. One arm shifts under your thighs, the other braces your back, and you do the rest without needing told—arms round his neck, legs coming round his waist, your body settling against him with a closeness that wipes the grin off his mouth for a second.

You are face to face now. You look pretty. Too pretty for the state of the hour and the amount of drink in both of you. Your hair is a mess. Lipstick mostly gone, and he could make it fully gone. You’re breathing hard, and your chest is flattened against his enough that he can feel the shape of each breath.

“That dignified enough?” Dunk asks.

You stare at him, then let out a helpless little laugh. “You have to come back for my shoe,” you whisper. “You’re insane.”

He shakes his head. “I’m drunk.” Then, because there has to be some thread of practicality left in the world, he says, “Now. Where’s that precious shoe?”

He turns back the way he came, but his eyes stay on you. Your face changes a bit. Solemn, maybe. Or tired. Or maybe just close enough now that he can no longer pretend not to see when a thought moves over it. Your mouth is right there, glistening and sweet-looking in the streetlight.

He swallows. “Where’s the shoe?” he asks.

“Right in front of you,” you say.

Still looking more at you than the pavement, he crouches with you in his arms and feels for the thing one-handed, patting the cobbles until he finds the soft little shape of it. He lifts it up between two fingers.

“Is that the one?”

You nod.

He stands again. You slip a little in his hold and he hoists you back up with one small bounce, instinctive, easy. Your noses brush.

“Dunk—” you breathe.

“Shh, shh,” he says, though he has no idea what he is shushing. Himself, mostly. The whole night. The bit of him that will lose nerve if given even five more seconds.

Your hands tighten at the back of his neck. “Hush, girl,” he says. Breathes hard for it, like the shoe has just added a ton to carried weight. He decides to let himself sink into it in small increments. Rests his forehead on yours a minute and there’s no protest. Presses his nose into you, and no protest either. “I’m never gonna be that brave again,” Dunk says.

You close your eyes. Thighs round his waist twitch a little like you’re kicking a horse to start. Your tongue comes out to wet your lips and wets a little bit of his as well. Heat spears through him, from the top of his head down to heels. “How’re you brave now?” you ask.

“Like this,” Duncan says. He flattens his mouth to yours. Slow. Drunken a bit, and like he’s holding back the eagerness to not make himself look too foolish. He squeezes his eyes shut and pushes on. Your mouth opens and tastes of sweet warm alcohol and dancing. He wedges his tongue inside, licks yours and nearly drools from it.

You answer so ardently he could die. Your hand slides into his hair, fingers scraping his scalp just enough to make something ugly and helpless tear out of him. He groans into you. The sound comes back through your lips hot. His fist closes round the shoe and the soft leather yields under his grip.

“Dunk—” you moan, and then, God help him, roll your hips.

His breath rasps through his nose. He keeps kissing you because stopping would mean thinking, and thinking would finish him. Your tongue catches his again. Your teeth graze his lower lip. The whole of him seems to go liquid and feverish around the fact of you in his arms, warm and willing and moving.

“Dunk,” you say again, pulling back only enough to get the words out. “Take me home.”

He freezes. His eyes open, but he does not unslot his mouth from yours. Something in him drops clean through. He thinks you mean your home. Thinks of letting you down at your door and going back to his own flat with this still on his mouth, this still in his hands, and has to swallow against the misery of it.

You look at him, dazed and shining. “Your home, silly,” you whisper. “Your bed. Take me—” You kiss him again, quick and wet and hungry. “Take me there. Now.”

For half a second Duncan just stares. Then, whatever poor part of him was trying to keep the night decent slips its lead. “Aye,” he says, trying not to shake with it. “Aye, lass.” Then, he turns for his building with a purpose no sober version of him would recognise.