𖤓˚࿔

Your back hits the mattress hard enough to make the old springs squeal beneath you and Jack’s first hiss isn’t one of pleasure.

“Shut. Up.” 

His hand closes around your jaw before the laugh can properly make it out, fingers digging into the hinge just shy of painful. His thumb finds the soft under of your chin and presses until your mouth falls open for him.

It’s supposed to be corrective, presumably. Intimidating. To make you reconsider whatever smart thing you were about to say.

Instead, you turn your head just enough to catch the heel of his palm between your teeth. Salt. Sunscreen. Jack.

You bite down lightly and watch the quick flare in his eyes that says try me again.

It makes you want to try him again.

This is perhaps your most enduring character defect, the congenital need to worry at Jack Abbot until something gives, to poke one finger into every concealed pressure point and keep pressing until that pleasant facade finally fractures and you get the man underneath, irritated and looking at you like patience is a finite natural resource you have personally exhausted.

Conveniently, this defect has also made the two of you very easy to hide.

Wanting Jack has never looked substantially different than hating him. Same symptoms, really. 

At work it manifests as narrowed eyes across the nurses’ station, remarks delivered half an octave louder than necessary, shoulders knocking in hallways wide enough to accommodate two functioning adults.

In private, the argument merely changes medium.

You end up underneath him with your thighs spread around his hips while he fucks every complaint back into you, and somehow neither of you has to concede the point.

That is, more or less, what is happening now.

Jack is attempting to fuck a confession out of you, specifically the admission that he had been right when he told you not to challenge the ocean after three frozen margaritas and one declaration that rip currents were mostly “a mindset.”

In your defense, this had sounded perfectly reasonable at the time. The ocean disagreed.

You made it maybe six yards before a wave hit your broadside, folded you clean in half, stole your sunglasses, and deposited you at Jack’s feet with enough seaweed caught in your bikini to suggest the beginnings of marine conservation.

You called him an insufferable bastard for saying he told you so. 

Now he keeps insisting he “rescued” you because he hauled you upright by the waist while you sputtered saltwater.

He would like an apology. You would like him dead. Compromise remains unlikely. You would swallow your own tongue before giving him the satisfaction. 

You nip him again, sharper this time, then grin around his thumb. “Go on — make me. You’ve been trying all day.” 

“Fucking brat.” He drags his thumb free, replacing it with two thick fingers that press insistently at your tongue. “Keep talking and I’ll stuff you so full the only word you remember is sorry.” 

He’s close to delivering on that promise, hips battering the breath from your lungs until all you can do is claw the navy sheets below you.

You almost give him the noise he’s hunting for, but feeding Jack’s ego has never been on your to-do list, so you smother the sound and glare your defiance instead.

You clamp down on his fingers, hard enough to make him grunt, and he jerks back, slick digits slipping free. 

“Jesus — watch the teeth,” he growls, shaking the sting before flattening your wrist to the mattress. “You want a muzzle, sweetheart?” 

You swipe your tongue over enamel, savoring the residue. “So many threats, Doctor. I’m starting to think you’re all talk.” 

“Careful,” Jack murmurs with a hollow laugh. “You might hurt my feelings.”

He apparently decides conversation has exhausted its usefulness.

One second you are on you looking at him; the next he has you flipped facedown, dragged your hips into the air, and buried himself back inside you with enough force to make the entire bed complain in sympathy. 

His chest covers your back, breath searing the shell of your ear. A half-moan, half-sob cracks loose out of you, palms skidding for purchase as your pelvis jerks forward as if distance could blunt the stretch, make it more manageable.

Jack only laughs again, settling both hands over your shoulder blades as he lets his weight weld you to the sheets.

“Where d’you think you’re going?” Each thrust stakes you there, sensation cresting so hot the edges of the room tremble out of focus and into watercolors.

You mash your face into the pillow, trying to hide the choked noises bleeding from you but they seep through cotton and feathers just the same.

“Listen to you,” he croons, mock-tender, thumb stroking a false comfort along your spine. He grinds you down while he pushes in again, slow enough you feel the catch of every ridge. “So fucking mouthy until I start making you feel good.” 

His hand snakes beneath you, palm burning a trail down your stomach until two fingers find your clit. The first tight circle detonates in your core. Supernova heat.

“Pretty thing like you shouldn’t fight common sense,” he purrs. “Just admit it — You were right, Jack. Should’ve trust you. Smartest guy I know. That’s all I want.” Another figure-eight of his thumb, another planet collision behind your eyes. “I keep you safe, I make you feel good — why’s it so hard to give me a little credit?”

“Because — you’re such — a cocky — asshole,” you gasp, the insult dissolving into a helpless whine when his thumb presses harder. 

“Dirty mouth on you,” Jack tuts. “C’mon, honey. Be sweet for ten little seconds — tell me I’m right — and I’ll let you come.”

You give him nothing but a furious side-to-side wobble, hair stuck wetly across your cheeks.

He can make your thighs shake and turn your brain into warm soup but he cannot make you surrender a point you are still technically convinced is yours. 

The knot low in your belly winds tighter in retaliation, every muscle beginning that little climb towards something inevitable, and then Jack simply stops.

Fingers gone. Thrust halted. He holds himself inside you like a blade sheathed to the hilt, every inch throbbing but inert, punishment by deprivation. 

Your muscles fire once more on instinct, grasping at a phantom that’s already gone, walls twitching uselessly around empty air.

The knot loosens with insulting patience — twist, release, release — until climax slips from reachable to hypothetical. 

A brittle, involuntary sound hooks in your throat, proof that your body has accepted what your mind refuses to: Jack Abbot means to leave you suspended in this awful limbo until you fold. 

“Please — no.” You writhe beneath him in shallow arcs, powerless under the weight pinning you. “Need you — need you to keep going.” 

He slips a broad palm under your jaw, lifting your mouth off the pillow for your gasps to reach him unfiltered. “You know what I need, honey. Say the words, and I’ll give you everything you’re begging for.” 

“I — I’m sorry,” you finally spit out. “You were right, Jack. Always are. Just — please — don’t stop.” 

The words hit like blood in the water. He buries himself with a hoarse snarl, rhythm turning brutal, inexorable, as though the apology were a starting gun. Wood knocks hard against the plaster wall and your body jolts forward with every drive.

“Was that so hard?” His voice drips triumph while his teeth worry a shallow crescent into your shoulder. “Christ, sweetheart, what’re you always fighting me for? You know I’m gonna get my way.” 

The only reply you manage is a shaky “uh-huh — ah, Jack —” strangled into the pillow, every syllable climbing higher until it breaks apart in a thin, urgent keen that tells him exactly how close you are. 

“There you go, pretty girl. Give it to me — yeah, just like that.” 

That’s all it takes.

Your body locks, squeezes, and he answers with a raw-throated groan, bracing you inside the bracket on his arms while your trembling tries to shake both of you off the bed.

Then everything goes incandescent. A long, rushing hush, white and depthless, flooding every corner of your mind as you come all over his length.

Somewhere inside all that brightness, Jack loses whatever rhythm he had left.

He lasts two more strokes. 

“Fuck — sweetheart.” His hips snap tight against your ass, burying himself as deep as he can go, filling you in heavy surges that make your already-softened core flutter all over again. 

You barely understand it at first, only feel another strange wave roll through you, your body squeezing reflexively around every throb until his arms tighten and his forehead drops heavily between your shoulder blades. 

Jack stays folded over you until both your breathing begins to settle, the hard rise and fall of his chest gradually slowing against your spine.

When he finally moves, it is with considerably more care than anything he has done in the last thirty minutes.

He withdraws from you slowly, and your cunt manages one useless twitch at the emptiness he leaves behind. Pathetic, really, but apparently it's all the reaction your spent body can afford.

Sensing the weakness, the bastard takes advantage.

He rolls you onto your other side until you're nose-to-nose, the world tilting under the authority of a man rearranging furniture. Normally, you'd bark at him to ask first. Right now you just marvel that you're the furniture.

You blink at him through the pleasant cotton packed between your ears.

Jack studies the damage he's done, mouth curling like he's content with his handiwork, then lowers himself to press a kiss above your hipbone.

He works upward without hurry, lips brushing warm over skin still prickling with aftershocks, teeth occasionally catching in a light nip that makes you squirm before he kisses the same place better.

Your fingers slide into the silver-flecked hair at his temples, nails scratching lightly until you feel the growl rumble against your ribs.

“Funny how suddenly you like me again.”

“Like is generous.” You give the silver strands at his temple a tug. “Give me five minutes. I’ll remember everything I hate about you.”

“Mm. I can do a lot with five minutes.” He lifts his head just enough to give you that smug, crooked look.

“Four and a half now.”

Jack laughs, apparently delighted by the threat of your imminent return to hostility, and works his way up until there is nowhere left between you for him to kiss.

He folds down beside you and takes your mouth one final time before you can decide whether final kisses are perhaps too affectionate for people who supposedly cannot stand each other.

“Better use ’em wisely, then.”

He does, in fact, use them wisely. Spending what remains of his allotted minutes with his mouth between your thighs and apparently deciding there is some obscure world record for orgasms induced out of spite that he intends to break before sunrise.

But by breakfast, the consequences have arrived.

You sit at the island with a fork slack between your fingers, pancakes cooling untouched beneath a generous pour of syrup.

Your eyelids keep flirting with gravity; every time they drop Jack clears his throat in exaggerated warnings, as if falling face-first into breakfast would somehow be his fault.

It would be. Somehow. You'd make it so.

“Late night?” Frank asks from across the island, not bothering to look up from whatever he’s doing to his coffee.

Your head lifts approximately half an inch.

“No, I'm fine,” you say, far too quickly. You hear it the second it leaves your mouth, that bright little note of guilt you have apparently developed overnight, and clear your throat before anyone else can appreciate it. “I'm fine. Just tired. All that swimming yesterday wore me out.”

Dana, standing at the sink with her sleeves pushed up, lets out a thoughtful hum as she rinses a plate.

“Funny, everyone seems to be dragging this morning,” she remarks, flicking water off her wrist. “Can’t imagine why.”

“I can.” Robby lifts his mug. “Some of us were awake until two in the morning. Against our will.”

There is a tiny, merciful interval where you almost misunderstand him.

Of course people were awake. There are more than twenty coworkers crammed into one beach house, sleeping on couches and air mattresses and whatever other horizontal surfaces they could claim before someone else did.

Somebody is always awake. Somebody is always opening a refrigerator or flushing a toilet or talking too loudly in the hallway.

But when you finally drag your eyes up from your pancakes and find several people already looking at you with expressions ranging from tired amusement to outright accusation, the alternate interpretation arrives all at once.

They heard you. They heard Jack. Possibly extensively.

Fuck.

You lower your eyes and shovel another piece of pancake into your mouth.

Then again, maybe they're staring for some completely unrelated reason. A syrup stain, bed hair, the fact that you still haven't blinked in ten seconds.

“So, Jack,” Trinity suddenly says from the other side of the island, casual enough that for one stupid second you don’t hear the trap opening beneath your feet, “how's it feel being right all the time?”

You keep chewing.

“I mean, so right,” she adds, her voice climbing into a suspiciously breathy imitation. “The rightest man alive, apparently.”

The pancake becomes significantly harder to swallow as a hot ribbon of mortification slides up your throat. You manage a strangled cough and focus on sawing your next bite into pieces the size of atoms so you don't have to lift your head and meet anyone's eyes.

Without missing a beat, Jack wipes a smear of syrup from his thumb and shrugs. “Feels pretty nice, if I’m honest.”

“You are such a smug little —”

“Language,” Dana cuts in from the sink without even turning around.

You clamp your lips together, cheeks still burning, then lean just enough into Jack’s line of sight and mouth, shit.

His smirk cuts sideways across his face, eyes dropping briefly to your lips before coming back up darker than they were a second ago. His nostrils flare faintly, then his thighs spread another inch beneath the island as he leans back.

A minute repositioning of his hips that would mean nothing to anybody else and means everything to you because you know exactly what Jack looks like when his body gets ahead of his better judgment.

“Ew,” Trinity says suddenly, pointing between you and Jack with her fork. “This is flirting, isn’t it? You two have just been doing foreplay in front of us for, like, years.”

Robby grimaces. “Freaks.”

“I have no idea what you mean,” you insist, despite the heat steadily colonizing your entire face.

Jack undermines you immediately as he shoots you a wink. “It’s worked pretty well for us.”

Your eyes widen ten sizes. “Shut. Up.”

His grin only gets worse, teeth showing this time, and something about that makes you want to kick his ankle under the island just to restore the natural order of things.

Frank shakes his head. “Get a room.”

“We had one. Apparently that was the problem,” Jack says.

A chorus of disgusted groans answers him.

MARIA NOTE jack abbot getting pussy as a direct consequence of being annoying… terrible precedent to set actually 🍋🫧🌀 HOPE YOU ENJOY I LOVE YOU ALLLL

Your back hits the mattress hard enough to make the old springs squeal beneath you and Jack’s first hiss isn’t one of pleasure.

“Shut. Up.” 

His hand closes around your jaw before the laugh can properly make it out, fingers digging into the hinge just shy of painful. His thumb finds the soft under of your chin and presses until your mouth falls open for him.

It’s supposed to be corrective, presumably. Intimidating. To make you reconsider whatever smart thing you were about to say.

Instead, you turn your head just enough to catch the heel of his palm between your teeth. Salt. Sunscreen. Jack.

You bite down lightly and watch the quick flare in his eyes that says try me again.

It makes you want to try him again.

This is perhaps your most enduring character defect, the congenital need to worry at Jack Abbot until something gives, to poke one finger into every concealed pressure point and keep pressing until that pleasant facade finally fractures and you get the man underneath, irritated and looking at you like patience is a finite natural resource you have personally exhausted.

Conveniently, this defect has also made the two of you very easy to hide.

Wanting Jack has never looked substantially different than hating him. Same symptoms, really. 

At work it manifests as narrowed eyes across the nurses’ station, remarks delivered half an octave louder than necessary, shoulders knocking in hallways wide enough to accommodate two functioning adults.

In private, the argument merely changes medium.

You end up underneath him with your thighs spread around his hips while he fucks every complaint back into you, and somehow neither of you has to concede the point.

That is, more or less, what is happening now.

Jack is attempting to fuck a confession out of you, specifically the admission that he had been right when he told you not to challenge the ocean after three frozen margaritas and one declaration that rip currents were mostly “a mindset.”

In your defense, this had sounded perfectly reasonable at the time. The ocean disagreed.

You made it maybe six yards before a wave hit your broadside, folded you clean in half, stole your sunglasses, and deposited you at Jack’s feet with enough seaweed caught in your bikini to suggest the beginnings of marine conservation.

You called him an insufferable bastard for saying he told you so. 

Now he keeps insisting he “rescued” you because he hauled you upright by the waist while you sputtered saltwater.

He would like an apology. You would like him dead. Compromise remains unlikely. You would swallow your own tongue before giving him the satisfaction. 

You nip him again, sharper this time, then grin around his thumb. “Go on — make me. You’ve been trying all day.” 

“Fucking brat.” He drags his thumb free, replacing it with two thick fingers that press insistently at your tongue. “Keep talking and I’ll stuff you so full the only word you remember is sorry.” 

He’s close to delivering on that promise, hips battering the breath from your lungs until all you can do is claw the navy sheets below you.

You almost give him the noise he’s hunting for, but feeding Jack’s ego has never been on your to-do list, so you smother the sound and glare your defiance instead.

You clamp down on his fingers, hard enough to make him grunt, and he jerks back, slick digits slipping free. 

“Jesus — watch the teeth,” he growls, shaking the sting before flattening your wrist to the mattress. “You want a muzzle, sweetheart?” 

You swipe your tongue over enamel, savoring the residue. “So many threats, Doctor. I’m starting to think you’re all talk.” 

“Careful,” Jack murmurs with a hollow laugh. “You might hurt my feelings.”

He apparently decides conversation has exhausted its usefulness.

One second you are on you looking at him; the next he has you flipped facedown, dragged your hips into the air, and buried himself back inside you with enough force to make the entire bed complain in sympathy. 

His chest covers your back, breath searing the shell of your ear. A half-moan, half-sob cracks loose out of you, palms skidding for purchase as your pelvis jerks forward as if distance could blunt the stretch, make it more manageable.

Jack only laughs again, settling both hands over your shoulder blades as he lets his weight weld you to the sheets.

“Where d’you think you’re going?” Each thrust stakes you there, sensation cresting so hot the edges of the room tremble out of focus and into watercolors.

You mash your face into the pillow, trying to hide the choked noises bleeding from you but they seep through cotton and feathers just the same.

“Listen to you,” he croons, mock-tender, thumb stroking a false comfort along your spine. He grinds you down while he pushes in again, slow enough you feel the catch of every ridge. “So fucking mouthy until I start making you feel good.” 

His hand snakes beneath you, palm burning a trail down your stomach until two fingers find your clit. The first tight circle detonates in your core. Supernova heat.

“Pretty thing like you shouldn’t fight common sense,” he purrs. “Just admit it — You were right, Jack. Should’ve trust you. Smartest guy I know. That’s all I want.” Another figure-eight of his thumb, another planet collision behind your eyes. “I keep you safe, I make you feel good — why’s it so hard to give me a little credit?”

“Because — you’re such — a cocky — asshole,” you gasp, the insult dissolving into a helpless whine when his thumb presses harder. 

“Dirty mouth on you,” Jack tuts. “C’mon, honey. Be sweet for ten little seconds — tell me I’m right — and I’ll let you come.”

You give him nothing but a furious side-to-side wobble, hair stuck wetly across your cheeks.

He can make your thighs shake and turn your brain into warm soup but he cannot make you surrender a point you are still technically convinced is yours. 

The knot low in your belly winds tighter in retaliation, every muscle beginning that little climb towards something inevitable, and then Jack simply stops.

Fingers gone. Thrust halted. He holds himself inside you like a blade sheathed to the hilt, every inch throbbing but inert, punishment by deprivation. 

Your muscles fire once more on instinct, grasping at a phantom that’s already gone, walls twitching uselessly around empty air.

The knot loosens with insulting patience — twist, release, release — until climax slips from reachable to hypothetical. 

A brittle, involuntary sound hooks in your throat, proof that your body has accepted what your mind refuses to: Jack Abbot means to leave you suspended in this awful limbo until you fold. 

“Please — no.” You writhe beneath him in shallow arcs, powerless under the weight pinning you. “Need you — need you to keep going.” 

He slips a broad palm under your jaw, lifting your mouth off the pillow for your gasps to reach him unfiltered. “You know what I need, honey. Say the words, and I’ll give you everything you’re begging for.” 

“I — I’m sorry,” you finally spit out. “You were right, Jack. Always are. Just — please — don’t stop.” 

The words hit like blood in the water. He buries himself with a hoarse snarl, rhythm turning brutal, inexorable, as though the apology were a starting gun. Wood knocks hard against the plaster wall and your body jolts forward with every drive.

“Was that so hard?” His voice drips triumph while his teeth worry a shallow crescent into your shoulder. “Christ, sweetheart, what’re you always fighting me for? You know I’m gonna get my way.” 

The only reply you manage is a shaky “uh-huh — ah, Jack —” strangled into the pillow, every syllable climbing higher until it breaks apart in a thin, urgent keen that tells him exactly how close you are. 

“There you go, pretty girl. Give it to me — yeah, just like that.” 

That’s all it takes.

Your body locks, squeezes, and he answers with a raw-throated groan, bracing you inside the bracket on his arms while your trembling tries to shake both of you off the bed.

Then everything goes incandescent. A long, rushing hush, white and depthless, flooding every corner of your mind as you come all over his length.

Somewhere inside all that brightness, Jack loses whatever rhythm he had left.

He lasts two more strokes. 

“Fuck — sweetheart.” His hips snap tight against your ass, burying himself as deep as he can go, filling you in heavy surges that make your already-softened core flutter all over again. 

You barely understand it at first, only feel another strange wave roll through you, your body squeezing reflexively around every throb until his arms tighten and his forehead drops heavily between your shoulder blades. 

Jack stays folded over you until both your breathing begins to settle, the hard rise and fall of his chest gradually slowing against your spine.

When he finally moves, it is with considerably more care than anything he has done in the last thirty minutes.

He withdraws from you slowly, and your cunt manages one useless twitch at the emptiness he leaves behind. Pathetic, really, but apparently it's all the reaction your spent body can afford.

Sensing the weakness, the bastard takes advantage.

He rolls you onto your other side until you're nose-to-nose, the world tilting under the authority of a man rearranging furniture. Normally, you'd bark at him to ask first. Right now you just marvel that you're the furniture.

You blink at him through the pleasant cotton packed between your ears.

Jack studies the damage he's done, mouth curling like he's content with his handiwork, then lowers himself to press a kiss above your hipbone.

He works upward without hurry, lips brushing warm over skin still prickling with aftershocks, teeth occasionally catching in a light nip that makes you squirm before he kisses the same place better.

Your fingers slide into the silver-flecked hair at his temples, nails scratching lightly until you feel the growl rumble against your ribs.

“Funny how suddenly you like me again.”

“Like is generous.” You give the silver strands at his temple a tug. “Give me five minutes. I’ll remember everything I hate about you.”

“Mm. I can do a lot with five minutes.” He lifts his head just enough to give you that smug, crooked look.

“Four and a half now.”

Jack laughs, apparently delighted by the threat of your imminent return to hostility, and works his way up until there is nowhere left between you for him to kiss.

He folds down beside you and takes your mouth one final time before you can decide whether final kisses are perhaps too affectionate for people who supposedly cannot stand each other.

“Better use ’em wisely, then.”

He does, in fact, use them wisely. Spending what remains of his allotted minutes with his mouth between your thighs and apparently deciding there is some obscure world record for orgasms induced out of spite that he intends to break before sunrise.

But by breakfast, the consequences have arrived.

You sit at the island with a fork slack between your fingers, pancakes cooling untouched beneath a generous pour of syrup.

Your eyelids keep flirting with gravity; every time they drop Jack clears his throat in exaggerated warnings, as if falling face-first into breakfast would somehow be his fault.

It would be. Somehow. You'd make it so.

“Late night?” Frank asks from across the island, not bothering to look up from whatever he’s doing to his coffee.

Your head lifts approximately half an inch.

“No, I'm fine,” you say, far too quickly. You hear it the second it leaves your mouth, that bright little note of guilt you have apparently developed overnight, and clear your throat before anyone else can appreciate it. “I'm fine. Just tired. All that swimming yesterday wore me out.”

Dana, standing at the sink with her sleeves pushed up, lets out a thoughtful hum as she rinses a plate.

“Funny, everyone seems to be dragging this morning,” she remarks, flicking water off her wrist. “Can’t imagine why.”

“I can.” Robby lifts his mug. “Some of us were awake until two in the morning. Against our will.”

There is a tiny, merciful interval where you almost misunderstand him.

Of course people were awake. There are more than twenty coworkers crammed into one beach house, sleeping on couches and air mattresses and whatever other horizontal surfaces they could claim before someone else did.

Somebody is always awake. Somebody is always opening a refrigerator or flushing a toilet or talking too loudly in the hallway.

But when you finally drag your eyes up from your pancakes and find several people already looking at you with expressions ranging from tired amusement to outright accusation, the alternate interpretation arrives all at once.

They heard you. They heard Jack. Possibly extensively.

Fuck.

You lower your eyes and shovel another piece of pancake into your mouth.

Then again, maybe they're staring for some completely unrelated reason. A syrup stain, bed hair, the fact that you still haven't blinked in ten seconds.

“So, Jack,” Trinity suddenly says from the other side of the island, casual enough that for one stupid second you don’t hear the trap opening beneath your feet, “how's it feel being right all the time?”

You keep chewing.

“I mean, so right,” she adds, her voice climbing into a suspiciously breathy imitation. “The rightest man alive, apparently.”

The pancake becomes significantly harder to swallow as a hot ribbon of mortification slides up your throat. You manage a strangled cough and focus on sawing your next bite into pieces the size of atoms so you don't have to lift your head and meet anyone's eyes.

Without missing a beat, Jack wipes a smear of syrup from his thumb and shrugs. “Feels pretty nice, if I’m honest.”

“You are such a smug little —”

“Language,” Dana cuts in from the sink without even turning around.

You clamp your lips together, cheeks still burning, then lean just enough into Jack’s line of sight and mouth, shit.

His smirk cuts sideways across his face, eyes dropping briefly to your lips before coming back up darker than they were a second ago. His nostrils flare faintly, then his thighs spread another inch beneath the island as he leans back.

A minute repositioning of his hips that would mean nothing to anybody else and means everything to you because you know exactly what Jack looks like when his body gets ahead of his better judgment.

“Ew,” Trinity says suddenly, pointing between you and Jack with her fork. “This is flirting, isn’t it? You two have just been doing foreplay in front of us for, like, years.”

Robby grimaces. “Freaks.”

“I have no idea what you mean,” you insist, despite the heat steadily colonizing your entire face.

Jack undermines you immediately as he shoots you a wink. “It’s worked pretty well for us.”

Your eyes widen ten sizes. “Shut. Up.”

His grin only gets worse, teeth showing this time, and something about that makes you want to kick his ankle under the island just to restore the natural order of things.

Frank shakes his head. “Get a room.”

“We had one. Apparently that was the problem,” Jack says.

A chorus of disgusted groans answers him.

MARIA NOTE jack abbot getting pussy as a direct consequence of being annoying… terrible precedent to set actually 🍋🫧🌀 HOPE YOU ENJOY I LOVE YOU ALLLL

Your back hits the mattress hard enough to make the old springs squeal beneath you and Jack’s first hiss isn’t one of pleasure.

“Shut. Up.” 

His hand closes around your jaw before the laugh can properly make it out, fingers digging into the hinge just shy of painful. His thumb finds the soft under of your chin and presses until your mouth falls open for him.

It’s supposed to be corrective, presumably. Intimidating. To make you reconsider whatever smart thing you were about to say.

Instead, you turn your head just enough to catch the heel of his palm between your teeth. Salt. Sunscreen. Jack.

You bite down lightly and watch the quick flare in his eyes that says try me again.

It makes you want to try him again.

This is perhaps your most enduring character defect, the congenital need to worry at Jack Abbot until something gives, to poke one finger into every concealed pressure point and keep pressing until that pleasant facade finally fractures and you get the man underneath, irritated and looking at you like patience is a finite natural resource you have personally exhausted.

Conveniently, this defect has also made the two of you very easy to hide.

Wanting Jack has never looked substantially different than hating him. Same symptoms, really. 

At work it manifests as narrowed eyes across the nurses’ station, remarks delivered half an octave louder than necessary, shoulders knocking in hallways wide enough to accommodate two functioning adults.

In private, the argument merely changes medium.

You end up underneath him with your thighs spread around his hips while he fucks every complaint back into you, and somehow neither of you has to concede the point.

That is, more or less, what is happening now.

Jack is attempting to fuck a confession out of you, specifically the admission that he had been right when he told you not to challenge the ocean after three frozen margaritas and one declaration that rip currents were mostly “a mindset.”

In your defense, this had sounded perfectly reasonable at the time. The ocean disagreed.

You made it maybe six yards before a wave hit your broadside, folded you clean in half, stole your sunglasses, and deposited you at Jack’s feet with enough seaweed caught in your bikini to suggest the beginnings of marine conservation.

You called him an insufferable bastard for saying he told you so. 

Now he keeps insisting he “rescued” you because he hauled you upright by the waist while you sputtered saltwater.

He would like an apology. You would like him dead. Compromise remains unlikely. You would swallow your own tongue before giving him the satisfaction. 

You nip him again, sharper this time, then grin around his thumb. “Go on — make me. You’ve been trying all day.” 

“Fucking brat.” He drags his thumb free, replacing it with two thick fingers that press insistently at your tongue. “Keep talking and I’ll stuff you so full the only word you remember is sorry.” 

He’s close to delivering on that promise, hips battering the breath from your lungs until all you can do is claw the navy sheets below you.

You almost give him the noise he’s hunting for, but feeding Jack’s ego has never been on your to-do list, so you smother the sound and glare your defiance instead.

You clamp down on his fingers, hard enough to make him grunt, and he jerks back, slick digits slipping free. 

“Jesus — watch the teeth,” he growls, shaking the sting before flattening your wrist to the mattress. “You want a muzzle, sweetheart?” 

You swipe your tongue over enamel, savoring the residue. “So many threats, Doctor. I’m starting to think you’re all talk.” 

“Careful,” Jack murmurs with a hollow laugh. “You might hurt my feelings.”

He apparently decides conversation has exhausted its usefulness.

One second you are on you looking at him; the next he has you flipped facedown, dragged your hips into the air, and buried himself back inside you with enough force to make the entire bed complain in sympathy. 

His chest covers your back, breath searing the shell of your ear. A half-moan, half-sob cracks loose out of you, palms skidding for purchase as your pelvis jerks forward as if distance could blunt the stretch, make it more manageable.

Jack only laughs again, settling both hands over your shoulder blades as he lets his weight weld you to the sheets.

“Where d’you think you’re going?” Each thrust stakes you there, sensation cresting so hot the edges of the room tremble out of focus and into watercolors.

You mash your face into the pillow, trying to hide the choked noises bleeding from you but they seep through cotton and feathers just the same.

“Listen to you,” he croons, mock-tender, thumb stroking a false comfort along your spine. He grinds you down while he pushes in again, slow enough you feel the catch of every ridge. “So fucking mouthy until I start making you feel good.” 

His hand snakes beneath you, palm burning a trail down your stomach until two fingers find your clit. The first tight circle detonates in your core. Supernova heat.

“Pretty thing like you shouldn’t fight common sense,” he purrs. “Just admit it — You were right, Jack. Should’ve trust you. Smartest guy I know. That’s all I want.” Another figure-eight of his thumb, another planet collision behind your eyes. “I keep you safe, I make you feel good — why’s it so hard to give me a little credit?”

“Because — you’re such — a cocky — asshole,” you gasp, the insult dissolving into a helpless whine when his thumb presses harder. 

“Dirty mouth on you,” Jack tuts. “C’mon, honey. Be sweet for ten little seconds — tell me I’m right — and I’ll let you come.”

You give him nothing but a furious side-to-side wobble, hair stuck wetly across your cheeks.

He can make your thighs shake and turn your brain into warm soup but he cannot make you surrender a point you are still technically convinced is yours. 

The knot low in your belly winds tighter in retaliation, every muscle beginning that little climb towards something inevitable, and then Jack simply stops.

Fingers gone. Thrust halted. He holds himself inside you like a blade sheathed to the hilt, every inch throbbing but inert, punishment by deprivation. 

Your muscles fire once more on instinct, grasping at a phantom that’s already gone, walls twitching uselessly around empty air.

The knot loosens with insulting patience — twist, release, release — until climax slips from reachable to hypothetical. 

A brittle, involuntary sound hooks in your throat, proof that your body has accepted what your mind refuses to: Jack Abbot means to leave you suspended in this awful limbo until you fold. 

“Please — no.” You writhe beneath him in shallow arcs, powerless under the weight pinning you. “Need you — need you to keep going.” 

He slips a broad palm under your jaw, lifting your mouth off the pillow for your gasps to reach him unfiltered. “You know what I need, honey. Say the words, and I’ll give you everything you’re begging for.” 

“I — I’m sorry,” you finally spit out. “You were right, Jack. Always are. Just — please — don’t stop.” 

The words hit like blood in the water. He buries himself with a hoarse snarl, rhythm turning brutal, inexorable, as though the apology were a starting gun. Wood knocks hard against the plaster wall and your body jolts forward with every drive.

“Was that so hard?” His voice drips triumph while his teeth worry a shallow crescent into your shoulder. “Christ, sweetheart, what’re you always fighting me for? You know I’m gonna get my way.” 

The only reply you manage is a shaky “uh-huh — ah, Jack —” strangled into the pillow, every syllable climbing higher until it breaks apart in a thin, urgent keen that tells him exactly how close you are. 

“There you go, pretty girl. Give it to me — yeah, just like that.” 

That’s all it takes.

Your body locks, squeezes, and he answers with a raw-throated groan, bracing you inside the bracket on his arms while your trembling tries to shake both of you off the bed.

Then everything goes incandescent. A long, rushing hush, white and depthless, flooding every corner of your mind as you come all over his length.

Somewhere inside all that brightness, Jack loses whatever rhythm he had left.

He lasts two more strokes. 

“Fuck — sweetheart.” His hips snap tight against your ass, burying himself as deep as he can go, filling you in heavy surges that make your already-softened core flutter all over again. 

You barely understand it at first, only feel another strange wave roll through you, your body squeezing reflexively around every throb until his arms tighten and his forehead drops heavily between your shoulder blades. 

Jack stays folded over you until both your breathing begins to settle, the hard rise and fall of his chest gradually slowing against your spine.

When he finally moves, it is with considerably more care than anything he has done in the last thirty minutes.

He withdraws from you slowly, and your cunt manages one useless twitch at the emptiness he leaves behind. Pathetic, really, but apparently it's all the reaction your spent body can afford.

Sensing the weakness, the bastard takes advantage.

He rolls you onto your other side until you're nose-to-nose, the world tilting under the authority of a man rearranging furniture. Normally, you'd bark at him to ask first. Right now you just marvel that you're the furniture.

You blink at him through the pleasant cotton packed between your ears.

Jack studies the damage he's done, mouth curling like he's content with his handiwork, then lowers himself to press a kiss above your hipbone.

He works upward without hurry, lips brushing warm over skin still prickling with aftershocks, teeth occasionally catching in a light nip that makes you squirm before he kisses the same place better.

Your fingers slide into the silver-flecked hair at his temples, nails scratching lightly until you feel the growl rumble against your ribs.

“Funny how suddenly you like me again.”

“Like is generous.” You give the silver strands at his temple a tug. “Give me five minutes. I’ll remember everything I hate about you.”

“Mm. I can do a lot with five minutes.” He lifts his head just enough to give you that smug, crooked look.

“Four and a half now.”

Jack laughs, apparently delighted by the threat of your imminent return to hostility, and works his way up until there is nowhere left between you for him to kiss.

He folds down beside you and takes your mouth one final time before you can decide whether final kisses are perhaps too affectionate for people who supposedly cannot stand each other.

“Better use ’em wisely, then.”

He does, in fact, use them wisely. Spending what remains of his allotted minutes with his mouth between your thighs and apparently deciding there is some obscure world record for orgasms induced out of spite that he intends to break before sunrise.

But by breakfast, the consequences have arrived.

You sit at the island with a fork slack between your fingers, pancakes cooling untouched beneath a generous pour of syrup.

Your eyelids keep flirting with gravity; every time they drop Jack clears his throat in exaggerated warnings, as if falling face-first into breakfast would somehow be his fault.

It would be. Somehow. You'd make it so.

“Late night?” Frank asks from across the island, not bothering to look up from whatever he’s doing to his coffee.

Your head lifts approximately half an inch.

“No, I'm fine,” you say, far too quickly. You hear it the second it leaves your mouth, that bright little note of guilt you have apparently developed overnight, and clear your throat before anyone else can appreciate it. “I'm fine. Just tired. All that swimming yesterday wore me out.”

Dana, standing at the sink with her sleeves pushed up, lets out a thoughtful hum as she rinses a plate.

“Funny, everyone seems to be dragging this morning,” she remarks, flicking water off her wrist. “Can’t imagine why.”

“I can.” Robby lifts his mug. “Some of us were awake until two in the morning. Against our will.”

There is a tiny, merciful interval where you almost misunderstand him.

Of course people were awake. There are more than twenty coworkers crammed into one beach house, sleeping on couches and air mattresses and whatever other horizontal surfaces they could claim before someone else did.

Somebody is always awake. Somebody is always opening a refrigerator or flushing a toilet or talking too loudly in the hallway.

But when you finally drag your eyes up from your pancakes and find several people already looking at you with expressions ranging from tired amusement to outright accusation, the alternate interpretation arrives all at once.

They heard you. They heard Jack. Possibly extensively.

Fuck.

You lower your eyes and shovel another piece of pancake into your mouth.

Then again, maybe they're staring for some completely unrelated reason. A syrup stain, bed hair, the fact that you still haven't blinked in ten seconds.

“So, Jack,” Trinity suddenly says from the other side of the island, casual enough that for one stupid second you don’t hear the trap opening beneath your feet, “how's it feel being right all the time?”

You keep chewing.

“I mean, so right,” she adds, her voice climbing into a suspiciously breathy imitation. “The rightest man alive, apparently.”

The pancake becomes significantly harder to swallow as a hot ribbon of mortification slides up your throat. You manage a strangled cough and focus on sawing your next bite into pieces the size of atoms so you don't have to lift your head and meet anyone's eyes.

Without missing a beat, Jack wipes a smear of syrup from his thumb and shrugs. “Feels pretty nice, if I’m honest.”

“You are such a smug little —”

“Language,” Dana cuts in from the sink without even turning around.

You clamp your lips together, cheeks still burning, then lean just enough into Jack’s line of sight and mouth, shit.

His smirk cuts sideways across his face, eyes dropping briefly to your lips before coming back up darker than they were a second ago. His nostrils flare faintly, then his thighs spread another inch beneath the island as he leans back.

A minute repositioning of his hips that would mean nothing to anybody else and means everything to you because you know exactly what Jack looks like when his body gets ahead of his better judgment.

“Ew,” Trinity says suddenly, pointing between you and Jack with her fork. “This is flirting, isn’t it? You two have just been doing foreplay in front of us for, like, years.”

Robby grimaces. “Freaks.”

“I have no idea what you mean,” you insist, despite the heat steadily colonizing your entire face.

Jack undermines you immediately as he shoots you a wink. “It’s worked pretty well for us.”

Your eyes widen ten sizes. “Shut. Up.”

His grin only gets worse, teeth showing this time, and something about that makes you want to kick his ankle under the island just to restore the natural order of things.

Frank shakes his head. “Get a room.”

“We had one. Apparently that was the problem,” Jack says.

A chorus of disgusted groans answers him.

MARIA NOTE jack abbot getting pussy as a direct consequence of being annoying… terrible precedent to set actually 🍋🫧🌀 HOPE YOU ENJOY I LOVE YOU ALLLL

"Do you feel anything there?"

You shook your head.

Dr. Robinavitch—Dr. Robby, sweetheart, he'd corrected when you'd called him that the first time. Everyone calls me Dr. Robby. And no, you would absolutely not be unpacking the way the pet name had made your spine tingle approximately thirty seconds into meeting him—made a small noise in his throat as his hands cupped underneath your breasts.

He looked so focused, too. His eyes fixed on your ten thousand dollar investment, his hands big enough to nearly engulf the soft flesh of each globe as he lifted them carefully, testing their weight in his palms. When you'd first untied your hospital gown to let it fall into your lap, he'd studied your incisions, even praised your surgeon's work. But you'd come into his ER in such a state after your hookup last night that you'd barely heard the compliment.

Because your Hinge date from last night—a gorgeous, gorgeous man, truly, which only made this entire thing more devastating—had put his mouth over your nipple. Something you used to love. Something that could get you going embarrassingly fast, enough that you'd sometimes twist them yourself when you were getting off alone.

And you'd felt absolutely nothing.

You'd kicked him out mere hours ago, too panicked to explain or even reach any sort of climax—only for you to stare at the blue screen of your phone to begin the frantic Googling. Then you’d called your surgeon's office three separate times despite being fully aware it was 2am. And, finally, pulled on sweatpants and presenting yourself to a Level I trauma center at three in the morning with a chief complaint of, ya know, numb tits. Luckily, the woman behind the desk had barely blinked at your nonsensical needs, as if she'd heard far more dramatic injuries anyway.

"Dr Robby—" you said timidly, and his big brown eyes flickered up to yours, a little hmm? coming from his throat. "Do you think—" Your face started heating before you'd even gotten the sentence out. "Do you think I'll ever… feel anything again? Like—"

Your eyes widened—Jesus Christ, that had sounded bleak. But God forbid you were concerned about losing one of your favorite sensations forever.

"Like… what if I can never…"

"Never what?" he asked. His voice had gone lower somehow, a little hoarser.

And you hadn't missed the fact that his thumb had begun stroking along the side of your breast, the latex of his glove sliding smoothly over your skin while he watched your face for any reaction.

"Well… it's just that… before my surgery, I was always able to… y'know. Just from…"

Your face felt like the surface of Mount Vesuvius.

Shifting in the exam chair, your fingers found a loose thread where the vinyl cushions met in the corner and wound it around your fingertip.

"Sweetheart, I'm a doctor." He said kindly, patiently. "You don't need to be embarrassed. Go on."

"I…" Your lips pressed tightly together before you forced the words out. "I used to be able to have an orgasm."

His eyebrows lifted.

"From nipple stimulation?" Dr. Robby clarified, his head tipping slightly.

You nodded, embarrassment making all your nerves in your body heat in a line of wildfires.

Whether it was the clinical concentration of something new to discover or something considerably more interesting, his expression changed— his mouth pulling downward at the corners in an impressed little frown before his eyes dropped back to your breasts.

"Wow," you heard him mutter under his breath, and your stomach flipped.

"Well," he continued, adjusting his hands around you, "then I think we need to be a little more thorough."

"Okay," you croaked out.

"I'm going to try stimulating the nerve endings directly now and see what you can feel. Is that okay with you, sweetheart?"

There it was again— that stupid little pet name from a stupidly handsome doctor. You were so fucked.

You nodded your head, a little too quickly, if you were really paying attention to notice. You hoped he didn't realize your enthusiasm.

Dr. Robby's hands moved then, pushing your breasts together a bit more, his eyelids dropping considerably as he took in your chest again.

"Talk to me. Tell me what you can feel, okay? Scar tissue can take a while to heal, to be able to feel anything, really. Did you massage your scar lines? Apply ointment to them or anything, sweetheart? Especially around here?" he asked, his gloved hands moving so he could bring his pointer finger to one areola, circling it carefully around the scar.

You squeaked a little, the visual of your doctor playing with your breast making your belly flip, and you could feel the involuntary clench between your legs. But you still couldn't quite feel the sensation of touch. "Mhm, yes, I did. Um—but I can't—can't feel—um—"

"Close your eyes. Concentrate now," he ordered. "Tell me if you can feel this."

You obeyed his order, holding your breath as you waited for the feeling. It was odd—you could feel the pressure of being touched, could tell that his hand was there, but you couldn't actually feel the line of his finger tracing your areola.

"No, I can't feel anything. Oh god, what if it's really gone forever…" you whined, legs kicking a little petulantly, brows pinching at the realization that your favorite orgasms might never be within reach again.

"S'okay, relax. What about—this?"

You took a deep breath, shoulders dropping, and then you felt a sudden pinching sensation that made your eyes open wide. When you looked down, Dr. Robby's blue gloved forefinger and thumb were pinching the skin right around your nipple.

"Yes, I can—I think I can feel that!"

He grinned up at you, eyes crinkling with amusement.

"Excellent," he said, nodding. "Close your eyes again, now. What about… this?"

Your back arched slightly before you could stop it, another pinch, but directly to your nipple, making your mouth fall open.

"Ohh," you moaned, then immediately caught yourself, clearing your throat. "Yes. I can feel that."

"Very good," he said, and you were thankful for him giving you the grace of not commenting on your growing state of arousal. "On a scale of one to ten, how much?"

"Like…" You had to think about it. "A three? It's mostly just—pressure?"

"Right, okay. I'm going to increase it now. You tell me how it feels, and especially if it hurts, okay, sweetheart?"

"Yes, Dr. Robby."

He was silent, and you peeked through your lashes, not opening your eyes fully, only enough to take in his face as he looked at your chest.

But as your lids opened, you happened to glance directly into his lap as he pulled the stool a little closer.

And the obvious tenting of his scrubs.

You closed your eyes very quickly, pushing your own legs together.

His fingers pinched a little harder, and you jumped. "Oh!"

"How's that, hm?"

His voice had gotten significantly hoarser the more you reacted to his touch. You were just plainly happy that you still had feeling at all, even if the doctor testing it was apparently having a reaction of his own.

"That's—really good—" you murmured, licking your dry lips where they'd remained parted around little gasps of air.

You also hadn't realized that your back had been arching into him further and further, seeking more of his hand every time he changed pressure.

"I want to try one more thing, really test these little nerve endings, okay? Can you keep your eyes closed for me?"

You nodded. "Yes, sir."

Your eyes opened despite the command, a little ashamed at the sudden moniker, but he was smiling to himself, his tongue dipping out to moisten his bottom lip.

"Eyes closed. You're doing so good."

You did as he said.

The pressure alleviated, his fingers releasing you, but you could just barely feel the tip of one tracing around your areola again. Then came a puff of cool air across your chest that had you jumping beneath his hands. He must've licked his finger first, wetting your nipple with his own spit before blowing gently over it.

"Oh, fuck—" you moaned.

"That's good. What a good girl. Stay just like that."

His voice had gone completely husky now. Your brain had just started to short circuit between the difference of you’re doing so good and being a good girl when —

— you felt his mouth on you.

Instead of opening your eyes, pushing him away, calling for help like a normal fucking person might do when her ER doctor decided to put his mouth on her tit, your hands flew straight into his hair.

Robby groaned.

His lips latched around your nipple then, sucking—and sucking hard. It was nothing like last night. Last night, you'd freaked out when your date couldn't get any sensation out of you, his mouth working gently yet uselessly against numb skin until panic had swallowed whatever arousal you'd had.

You didn't have time to wonder why this was different, because Dr. Robby's teeth caught your nipple and nipped.

Your mouth opened around a throaty moan, your back bending almost inhumanly toward him as your fingers clawed deeper into his hair.

"Oh fuck, yes, just like that—" you mewled, your hips beginning to rock against the hospital bed beneath you.

Robby moaned into your chest, his slightly hooked nose pressed against your sternum while he kept up his ministrations, his other hand coming up to take your other nipple between his fingers and pinch even harder.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck—" It was all you could manage, moaning into the room even louder. "That's so good, so good, Dr. Robby, oh, please don't stop—"

Instead of listening to you, though, he pulled his mouth away.

"You gonna come just like this, young lady?" His breath hit your wet nipple before his thumb rolled over it again. "Fuck, that's so good. Come on, rub that pussy on my hospital bed. I can see how badly you want it. C'mon now."

"Yessss—!" you whined, pulling at his hair in hopes he'd lower his mouth again.

Instead, he brought up both hands, catching your nipples between his fingers and pinching even harder, pulling them forward and up, making your chest follow him instinctively for reprieve from the pressure. The pain shot pleasure through your chest, like sparks into your belly and was so fucking delicious that your eyes opened, mouth hanging loose, brows pinched as you stared down at him.

"Yeah, you like that?" Robby's darkened eyes dragged over your face, head still tilted as he looked up at you on the bed. "See? These beautiful tits are just fine, baby. C'mon, let me see you come from me playing with these cute nipples. Your surgeon took good care of you." His fingers pulled again, making you gasp. "I'm gonna do the same. Come for me, baby."

Your head fell back, chest pushing out even further into his hands, one hand still buried in his hair while the other gripped the side of the hospital bed. Your body locked up, pussy clenching around nothing while your chest tingled and your breasts remained helplessly in his clutch.

"She must be feeling so neglected, huh?" His thumbs pressed over your nipples harder, eyeing your rocking hips. "Pussy all wet from me playing with your breasts, sweet girl?"

You nodded, breath catching as your orgasm finally tore through you, your body jerking against the hospital bed while his hands stayed firmly around your breasts.

"Yeah, bet she is."

He watched you twitch and convulse, moaning in his hold while an unmistakably pleased little look settling over his face.

"That's okay. I can check her next."

Your mouth stayed open as you finally were able to full in a few steadying breaths as the swell of your orgasm died down, your heart still beating hard and trying to catch up with the licks of pleasure still making you twitch. Dr. Robby's hands became softer, no longer pinching or pulling but just tenderly soothing to your skin. His palms were so warm and greedy even through the gloves as he massaged them gently, thumbs moving in small circles along the lower curves and around the scar lines without touching the nipples he'd just thoroughly proven were still very much functional.

"There you go," he murmured, quieter now. "Easy. Just breathe for me."

You let out a breath that turned into a helpless little laugh somewhere in the middle. "Jesus Christ." you smiled, "that was… crazy."

Robby smiled back. "Feeling better?"

You cracked your eyes open and looked down at him.

He'd somehow ended up between your legs, still on the stool as your knees rested over the edge of the bed, ankles hanging loose, the insides of your calves knocking lightly against his thighs every time you kicked them anxiously around. His hands had moved down to either side of your hips, fingers twitching to touch while he watched your face with an expression far too pleased with himself for a man who had supposedly been conducting a neurological exam five minutes ago.

"A little." you said sheepishly.

"A little?"

"Okay." You swallowed another laugh. "Considerably. I was, uh, pretty freaked out earlier. Thank you.”

His hands slipped from the mattress to your thighs, rubbing slowly over the skin just above your knees. You looked down at them, then back at him.

"So…" you started, still catching your breath. "Professional opinion?"

Robby's mouth twitched. "Your breasts work."

You snorted.

"That's your official diagnosis, doctor?”

"That's my preliminary diagnosis." he corrected.

"Oh, preliminary." you nodded, as if, yes of course how could you have been so silly?

"Mhm." His hands moved a little higher along your thighs. "I'd hate to make any definitive statements without a complete examination."

You were still smiling down at him as his hands gently pressed into your skin, settling around the soft flesh of your hips, your knees spreading another inch around him as he leaned in further without either of you acknowledging it.

There was suddenly a voice calling for him outside the door, followed by the swell of hospital noise and the metal clacking of the curtain being pushed aside.

"Robby, brother, you good in here?"

You lifted your hands to cover your chest, Robby turning slightly to see who was coming in.

But you already knew.

Because you recognized his voice even before his hand slid the curtain open and his eyes landed on the scene in front of him.

Standing there, one hand still wrapped around the fabric of the only thing keeping the rest of the emergency department from seeing your exam with the chief attending, was the gorgeous—and I mean, gorgeous—man you'd kicked out of your apartment approximately five hours ago.

Jack Abbot stared at you.

You stared back at Jack Abbot.

His eyes flicked down to Robby between your legs, then back up to your face, and instead of looking surprised—or horrified, or even remotely confused—his mouth curled into a smug, amused smile.

"Guess we skipped the part where we talked about what we do for a living." He chuckled. “Could’ve saved you the trip, sweetheart.”

ok sorry for the corny one liner at the end i didn’t know what to doooo!!! thank you so much for requesting and reading! ilysm!!! my requests are currently open :)

When Jack had asked you for drinks you'd been overjoyed that your lingering glances and petty touches had been enough to convey your interest. However, you then had to explain yours and Robby's arrangement.

You'd been fucking quietly (as in on the down low, nothing about the way you fucked was quiet) and needed to make sure Jack was okay knowing that wouldn't be stopping just because he was taking you on one date. As much as you'd been looking at Jack, hoping for his attention, you couldn't stop the attraction you had to Robby. It had come first, afterall.

You'd said as much to Robby with his cock deep inside of you. Your hands on his shoulders as you bounced, the plap plap plap of skin bouncing off his bedroom walls. “Jack- Jack asked me for drinks,” you gasped.

Robby's skin glowed in sweat. His hands dug into your hips, helping you move up and down at a brutal pace. “My Jack?”

Something about the way he insisted Jack was his had you moaning out, your walls tightening around him.

“Fuck, don't do that,” Robby grunted, head thrown back on his headboard with a whack.

“Your-your Jack. Yes!” Your hands reached back to his thighs, fingernails digging into his skin.

It thrust your chest in Robby's face and he didn't miss a beat to trail his tongue messily across your chest, tasting your sweat and groping at your breast to take your nipple and swirl his tongue around the bud. He moaned around it, sucking like a baby and sending stimulation through your body.

“Fuck-fuck, Robby,” you moaned, dragging your core over him in delicious circles.

He hummed and watched you with encouraging nods. He pulled away from your breast and took your neck, bringing you in to him sharply. He nodded along with the movements of your body. “Come on my cock, scream my name, then we can talk about your date with Jack.”

Come on his cock you did, body shaking, mouth hung open soundlessly as Robby held you close into his chest and rutted up into you till he finished, painting your walls and biting down on your shoulder.

Moments later you were tucked into his side, Robby twirling bits of your hair with his head rested against yours.

“So Jack, huh?” he'd asked. “You want to go.” He wasn't looking at you but at the empty space at the bottom of his bed. There was a chest at the bottom with the essentials for such activities: towels, wipes, condoms, lube, maybe even some toys you'd slipped in as a joke all well within reach for him.

“Yeah I do,” you said. “We're only casual right, I'm within my rights to see who I want, aren't I?”

It was all teasing. You knew Robby didn't really want to share you but couldn't commit either so until then you'd be exercising your freedom.

Till he broke, because you knew he would.

That's how you ended up at a bar with Jack, crowded together in a small booth in the corner just days later. A few empty glasses sat around you, as well as an empty basket of chicken wings you'd shared earlier in the night.

Jack's arm was thrown around the booth, finger so close to touching, thigh almost pressed to yours but he kept just beyond touch. Either out of respect for yours and Robby's arrangement, or to drive you crazy.

“How long's this thing with you and Robby been going on?” he asked.

“Few months. We both needed a release with no strings attached kind of thing and it just happened that way.” You weren't ashamed of it. Not embarrassed that you'd given in to Robby the way you'd always wanted to. You didn't care that he was your boss or older than you by some decades. If stuff like that bothered you, you wouldn't have been sitting in the bar with Jack.

“You ever thought of asking me?” he asked with a smirk.

“If you were there that day, I just might have.”

It wasn't like you could ever ignore how attractive Jack was. Just as you couldn't ignore how attractive Robby was.

“And if I wanted to take you on more dates,” said Jack. “How would that work with you and Robby?”

You took your time in running your fingers over the rim of your glass.

The fact of the matter was you thought it wouldn't get better than Robby. Same hours and the same needs bled into sex that had your body shivering and never left you without pleasure. You liked it. You hadn't thought about changing it. You didn't know if you could find as deep a knowing as you had with Robby.

“I-I don't know,” you said, frowning to yourself at your own admission.

“Hey-hey,” said Jack, hand brushing back your hair and cradling your cheek. “I'm not asking you and Robby to stop.” Jack shuffled closer, finally touching you. “I'm just asking if you had room for one more.”

That's how you ended up in the back of Jack's truck pulled around to the dark corners of the bar, sprawled naked along the backs of his seat, legs spread and his mouth hot and heavy on you.

He'd got an orgasm from you pressed up against the wall, fingers curling and circling in the ways you liked like he'd been studying for this.

“Yeah... yeah...” Jack talked down to your pussy, your arousal coating his lips and almost dripping down before he dove back in, fingers spreading you wide and tongue slotting in.

“Jack! It's-it's too much!” you cried, desperate to close your thighs but his hands darted out and kept one high up on the back seats and the other limp on the floor. “Jack!”

His tongue fucked into you. “Just come. Come for me baby and I promise I'll stop, I promise-”

Condensation rolled down the windows of his truck, your body moving against the seats as you withered in pleasure. You had come on his tongue, not that it stopped Jack as he promised it would.

You had to explain to Robby the next time you saw him why there were bruises he definitely didn't leave at your thighs and why the pussy he'd memorised the taste of had something different to it.

That's how the challenge started.

Your time was split three ways: Work, Robby and Jack. Downtime was spent in Robby's apartment or Jack's place. You had a perfectly divided sets of your favourite clothes in each wardrobe, had given enough hints for each of them to get in your favourite snacks and a toothbrush in each bathroom.

You had, you would say, perfectly trained them.

They knew it. They knew they'd somehow become your toys. They knew if you weren't with one of them you'd be with the other and they used your body like a telegram to read each others messages, but as far as you knew they'd never brought it up with each other in person.

“What are you doing tonight?” asked Robby, hovering next to you, looking down at the tablet in hand.

Around the two of you the Pitt carried on moving. The doctors and nurses conversed and walked, the patients complained and crashed and nobody looked twice at the boss talking to a resident. If they'd looked too close they might have realised how often the two of you did speak in work.

You stood, staring at the board, trying to find a blank spot to slide into. “Uh, dinner with Jack.”

From the corners of your eyes you spotted Robby shifting his weight, head lowering as he huffs.

“Dinner with Jack, second time this week, huh,” he said. “Wonder how this place can manage without him.”

A smirk graced your lips as you turned to consider him.

“Someone feeling neglected?”

“Noooo,” he said, dragging it out and finding something on the tablet cover that was much more important than staring at you. He quipped his head to the side. “Just... you and Jack been going on dinners a lot, this week.”

“Our second one?”

“I could take you for dinner too.”

“But you never do.”

“Do you want me to?” he tried to sound casual but his brows rose at once.

You shrugged. “Ask me.”

“Got to book in time to see you now?” Robby asked. His head bent lower to your ear until you could smell the mint on his lips and feel the heat of his breath ghost the shell of your ear. He blew on it lightly, knowing how it sent shivers down your spine and made your body curl closer into his. “I was here first.”

You tried to hold back a smirk as you stepped back, turning to him. “Is someone jealous?” you teased.

Robby pulled his lips into a frown and shook his head, but he couldn't meet your eyes.

Casual was what Robby wanted, what he thrived on and the only thing he thought he was consistent at. So consistent it was his only relationship. Really, he had no right to be jealous and yet you saw the way his eyes narrowed when patients flirted with you. You knew he felt it when he fucked you hard after doctors on higher floors came down and stared too long at the way you leant over a computer. Casual was what Robby was good at, so he'd never admit he was getting it wrong.

“I'm a single girl,” you reminded him.

“That you are,” he trailed every word longer than it needed to be, saying it as if he didn't quite believe himself.

“And I'm allowed to have dinner with whoever I want?”

“It's not about the dinner,” he said, eyes following a nurse that walked a little too close to the two of you. “It's the fact that I want you in my bed tonight and you tell me you have plans.”

“If you wanted me in your bed more you could just make me your girlfriend?” you said, biting down on your lip to stop your smile.

You watched a glimmer of panic flash in front of his face before it gave way to relief. He knew you weren't really asking because casual worked for you too. Not having to remember dates, or buy anniversary presents or text constantly. It was what you needed. And yet, you loved to tease him with the G and B words.

“I don't have to. You'll come around,” Robby shrugged. “You always do. Tell Jack I said hi.” He walked past you then, hands grazing your elbows as he shuffled by like there wasn't plenty of space.

The small touches he teased you with through out the day was never enough to sustain you. That's why he did it: to keep you coming back for more.

Your dinner with Jack ended how it did almost every night, you in his lap in his apartment, lips moulding against yours, hands running up your back.

Jack always took it slow like the pleasure of you was something to savour, like he didn't believe he'd ever get the chance again. But it had been three months of going back and forth between the two, three months of your body bathed in their kisses and walking around with your head in the clouds.

As much as you loved being with Robby, Jack was new and you were still learning.

“Grinding down on my lap?” he teased slightly breathless, pulling back enough to speak.

You hadn't even realised you were until you felt your panties dampening, till you felt the tension in your hips and the smirk on his lips.

Jack seethed in a breath and went back into you, hand catching the back of your head to draw you in as he encouraged your movements. “Does Robby not satisfy you?”

You smiled against his lips, nipping. “You boys,” you muttered, shuffling closer into his hardening cock, hidden behind his jeans. “Really want to out-do one another, huh?”

“Just want to make sure you're not wasting your time,” he said. Jack pecked your lips over and over again as his hands found the buttons to your jeans, deftly popping them. “With either of us.”

“Let me be the judge of that.”

It didn't take long for Jack's fingers to wriggle themselves into your jeans, running lines against your clothed pussy that cried for him. He loved to watch how you moved against his smallest of touches, how you reacted slowly, needy.

“Jack,” you gasped, tilting your head back as his thumb pushed down on your clit, circling slowly. “Robby-Robby says hi.”

Jack hummed. “Does he?” his middle finger slid past the elastic of your panties, finding a home in the warmth of your walls. “He can come say it to me, no good using our girl for messages.”

His lips kissed sweetly at your temple, his endearing move that would catch you off guard in the dirtiest of moments. When he was coaching orgasms out of you through curling fingers or driving into you with your cock, his lips would find your forehead and stay there, mumbling encouragements and compliments that had your body grow fuzzy in a different way.

It was the same way Robby pulled you into his side, fingers twirling around your hair or knuckles grazing your forearms.

They had ways of surprising you, still.

“I got you something,” said Jack, pulling back to get a look at you.

“Oh?”

Jack nodded and tilted his head to nudge against your hose like some horse begging for attention before he withdrew his finger from you. He patted your thighs and you climbed off, falling back into his sofa and letting the cushions swallow you.

You watched as he put his finger in his mouth, licking off the taste of you as if it was a taste of his favourite dish.

Your eyes trailed down his body as he disappeared. The swing of his hips, the pull of his pants over his crotch and the veins that pulled in his arms that had you drooling.

When Jack returned there was a small box in hand and he settled down next to you, throwing an arm around the back of the sofa and offering you the box.

“What is it?” you asked without taking the box. The instinct to sit on your hands to not reach out was a hard one to fight against.

You didn't do gifts, at least not with Robby. His gifts came in litters of kisses and drawn out pleasure throughout long nights. The only present he'd ever got you was a set of lingerie that had only ended up in strips and tears of fabric sprawled along his bedroom floor.

Jack shrugged. “A puppy. You want him to suffocate?” he teased.

With a roll of your eyes you pulled the lid open as Jack tugged your legs into his lap, running his hands up and down.

A thin chain lay on a small velvet, black cushion, a delicate J hanging on the end.

You could feel Jack's eyes on you, watching and waiting for a creation. You were scared to reach out and touch it. Terrified that you'd reach out and the lid would snap shut, that the chain would strangle you. It was as if you'd never been given a gift so beautiful. You hadn't. “Jack, I... I don't know what to say.”

Was it too much? If you and Jack were as casual as you and Robby how could you wear his initial on a necklace?

But you didn't want it to disappear.

You thought about the J hanging over your heart, the chain dangling when you slowly sank onto Jack's cock. You imagined Robby finding it, the way his fingers would push down on the letter till J was etched in there. Or when you rode him, lingering over him to watch his pleasure, would he take the metal letter into his mouth and keep it warm?

“I think you should say-” said Jack, taking up the chain and slowly moving, resting it around your neck. “I love it.”

You moved your hair aside, allowing him to clasp it and relishing in the cooling metal against the flush of your skin. “I do. I love it.”

Jack kissed over the clasp against your skin. “Yeah?”

When your head turned his lips were there, waiting and kissed yours sweetly, hand crawling up to your neck to lay you flat against him. He tested the taste of you with his tongue. His hand ran down your front, pulling at your shirt and exposing the skin only just healing from your last night with him.

“This way,” he said, lips moving against yours with enough time to find words. “When you're with Robby, I'm there too.”

Robby caught sight of the necklace a week later.

“Hey,” he said, eyeing Samira who stood over your shoulder. “Can I borrow you? Ten minutes? Fifteen, tops?”

Sometimes with how well you and Robby played co-workers you couldn’t tell the difference between needing to see a patient and him needing you.

“Course.” Your chair scraped back as you bid a see you later to Mohan and followed after Robby.

He was making a hard line through the department, wearing out his trainers as he didn’t once look back to see if you were hot on his heels. You were.

“Everything okay?”

He led you out the doors and past the stairwell where the on call room was tucked in a corner. It was a room you’d grown familiar with. You knew the desk was rickety and wasn’t best for the kind of activities you and Robby got up to in the room. You knew it was best to cushion the headboard with a cushion, not because there were neighbours to worry about, but to stop anyone else passing by from hearing the thud.

Robby pressed his key into the door and held it open for you, checking the coast was clear before nudging you in and slamming it closed behind the two of you.

His hands were on you, fisting your scrub top, lips claiming yours like he wanted to share his very breath with you.

In spite of the patient you had waiting on discharge, the chairs that you never seemed to quite catch up on and the monitors still ringing in your mind, you held onto Robby with just as much fever. Your hands gripped his shoulders, finding his scruffy hair and pushed your tongue against his.

“You know better than to tease me at work,” he said.

You bit down on his bottom lip, tugging it out.

Robby guided you back to the bed with steady hands on your hips. “Or at least I thought you did.”

When the back of your knees met the bed frame you fell back, dragging Robby with you.

“I have no idea what you're talking about,” you mumbled, hands winding under his top, scraping at the roundness of his belly and feeling the bristle of his hairs.

He hummed, pressing his weight into you. “No?”

“Nuh-uh,” you said.

Robby pulled back enough for you to catch the darkness in his eyes, your slightly tinted lip balm smudging his lips. “I thought you were clever, huh?”

Teasing. You'd only been leaning over charting, maybe jutting out your hips a little more. Maybe grazing against Robby more than you needed to.

There was little time to reply before Robby was licking into your lips again, groaning at the taste and the push of himself into you. He opened your mouth and sort your tongue, hands pushing and pulling up your scrub top until skin gave way to skin and he could feel the plains of you, the warmth you were giving off. He tugged and moved at the skin and pulled off your scrub top.

You knew how it would go. In ten minutes Robby would work you up, have you teetering on the edge of insanity and want then send you back out to the ward. He'd demand you to double up on patients and get them all discharged before you left. He'd get you begging by the end of the night.

Your scrub top was thrown to the corner and Robby's hands grabbed your breasts, groping and moving, licking over what spilled from your bra and nipping.

Your legs wrapped around his waist, tugging him in closer-

Then- he grew cold and still, his lips moving away from his chest.

“Huh? Robby, what?” You shook yourself out of your haze and looked at him.

“What's this?” his voice was low in his throat as he pulled back.

There was cooling metal rested on your chest. Your spine tingled as a finger traced the letter there.

Robby was staring down at the necklace with a frown, eyebrows pinched together and mouth twisting.

You'd imagined Robby finding out about the chain a dozen times, but you didn't expect the look of hurt or anger there. “It's nothing. It's just- Jack, a gift.”

“Gift?” he questioned.

You nodded and gulped, suddenly worried. What if Robby said he couldn't do it anymore? He couldn't share you? Would he insist upon you ending it with Jack to have you all to himself, or would he ditch you and leave you to Jack's capable hands.

The both of you shuffled. Robby swung his legs over the bed, running a hand through his hair as he hunched over and you sat up.

“It's nothing, just a gift, I promise, Robby. I promise,” you said, holding onto his shoulders and pressing a kiss into his shoulder.

Robby stared down at his hands. “It's pretty,” he grumbled.

“You're prettier,” you said, resting your chin on his shoulder.

Robby turned and pulled a face at you.

You smiled and kissed his shoulder again. “Don't think anything of it.”

He inhaled, body moving against yours as he did. “Hard not to. His fucking letter of his name is sitting in between my favourite place.” His eyes flickered down to where your chest was lying in temptation.

You stilled as his hand darted out, picking up the J and fiddling with it.

There was an odd look to him. There was a clench in his jaw and you could feel his body tense but that familiar darkness was still in his eyes. He still licked his lips like he wanted to take a bite from every bit of your flesh and he wasn't letting go of the initial at your chest.

You'd seen the ways your boys acted. When you mentioned the dinner with Jack and watched Robby try to act like he didn't care. When Jack stripped you bare and eyed the bites Robby had left the nights before. Jack would give time to making those marks worse, deeper in colour and mixing Robby's dried spit with his own. How even with his cock deep inside of you Robby would go the lengths of asking for excruciating details on your dates with Jack.

“Well, I have a theory,” you said, swinging yourself into his lap. His hands fell upon you, working like velcro. “You quite like it, the challenge.”

His brows rose, hands casting up and down you. “Challenge?”

“You and Jack. Sharing me.” To test the waters, you rolled your hips against him and felt his cock answer. “The back and worth. Wanting to do better than the other.”

“Don't I?” he asked, kissing over the chain between your shoulder and neck. He picked it up between his teeth and dropped it back down.

“You both have your talents,” you whispered, tilting your neck back and grinding down on him.

“Yeah?”

“Your favourite things... your favourite parts...”

“Parts?” Robby's eyes were wide and pleasing, looking up to you.

You nodded and closed your eyes, chasing the feeling of him. “Jack... he likes to be down there more,” you said with a particular roll down on your hips. “You like to be up here.” You brought your hands up and squeezed at your breasts to bring them together.

Robby's eyes practically bulge out his head and he latches himself between them, groaning into your skin like this was the only rest bite he craved. The only place he needed to be.

“Jack's staking his claim,” you moaned. “Making sure... you see him.”

His tongue left a trail of his saliva over your chest. “Then I guess I better stake mine.”

Three days later, Robby's head was between your thighs, nudging his tongue in deep, rubbing his nose into your wetness.

You were calling his name, moaning his name when a new smaller cold chain wrapped around your ankle. You pushed yourself up on your elbows, looking through the haze of pleasure to see a band around your ankle, a delicate R hanging there.

Robby's eyes flicked up to you, smirking and your arousal wetting his lips.

“An anklet, huh?”

“You started it,” said Robby. “A necklace?”

Jack shrugged. “It was something nice.”

“It was a dig.”

Jack shook his head innocently. “No.”

The two of them were leant casually over the counter, stealing a few minutes of relative peace before Robby had to lead him room to room and tell him who was going home and who was not. Who had good chances of living a normal life and those that did not.

Their idea of peace was staring at you from across the floor, where you lingered with Dana. You were talking, just talking with the occasional smile but it was enough for the two of them.

They kept their conversations timid regarding you. They could say everything they needed to say by leaving little bits of each other on your skin.

It seemed the new gifts suddenly sprang on you was encouragement enough.

“So what do we do about it?” asked Jack.

Robby was reluctant to tear is gaze away from you as he slowly dragged his gaze to check on Jack. “On what?”

Jack nodded toward you. “We gonna do this forever?”

“Seems to be working,” said Robby.

“Forever?”

Robby nerves grew on him. He turned his body to Jack, considering him as he considered you. “Has she... said something?” Robby knew he wasn't what made boyfriends or husbands, but were you not happy with what you had?

“No,” said Jack, moving to look down at his hands. “We just gonna keep sharing her? I don't like the idea that I'm stealing your guys time from you.”

“We make it work,” said Robby.

The both of them returned to observing you.

“I like her,” said Jack.

Robby agreed. “Yeah. More than me?”

Jack's eyes ran up and down from you. “Only time will tell.”

“If you're worried about her time we can work something out,” said Robby.

He had the feeling you'd like something like that too. Your time together exhausted him in the best way possible before work so he wasn't sure how you managed splitting your time between him, Jack and work and supposedly getting some rest all between it.

“Work something out?” asked Jack, frowning at the words. It seemed the both of them were stubborn about you. “What? Like a schedule?”

Robby's head fell side to side. “Something like that.”

It took two more weeks of shared dates and beds before you, Robby and Jack could finally be in the same room that wasn't the hospital.

You'd noticed the two of them were talking about each other more. It wasn't unusual for one to bring up the other with arms firm around you, lips etched to your neck.

“Has Jack found that little spot that gets you whining yet?” Robby would ask, sucking on said mark with thick fingers curling into you.

Jack had but you didn't need to answer that for him to know.

“Mmh, mmh, I love this pussy,” Jack said one night when he'd already spent fifteen minutes in lucking and sucking up your pussy. “Can fucking taste Robby in here.”

It was becoming apparent to you, even if it wasn't them, that they really, really liked seeing each other in you. Liked kissing over the same marks and tracing the same path.

Robby had invited you over under the pretence of just casual drinks. You'd said you had plans with Jack (his nights off getting increasingly more likely) and saw the tick in Robby's jaw that you had plans again. Plans that meant his time with you was limited to what he could steal in the staff lounge and on-call room.

Which was why Robby had invited you and Jack around to his. For drinks. Casual.

It didn't stay casual for long.

“Oh, come on,” said Jack taking a swig of his beer, all sweaty from how he'd held it most of the night. “If both of us approached you at a bar, who you picking?”

“I'm not answering that,” you laughed.

You were sandwiched between the two of them on Robby's sofa, curled up between the meat of their thighs that were spread to touch you. Around the back of the sofa, Robby rested his arm while Jack watched you with his head rested on his arm propped on the back of the sofa.

“What? You have to,” said Robby.

“No, I don't,” you said again with a laugh, taking a sip of beer.

“We're big guys, we can handle it,” said Jack with a shrug of indifference.

You doubted they could, whoever you picked. The other would take you to bed and fuck you into the mattress and lick their name against your spine.

Robby's finger prodded into your shoulder for an answer.

“Okay,” you said. You leant forward and ditched your can on the coffee table before settling back with their bodies closer to you. “How does it work?”

“How does what work?” asked Robby, very intrigued by the prospect of who you'd go for.

You rolled your eyes and flattened your feet on the floor. “Dress it up for me. What's the bar like? Who am I with? What are the two of you doing?”

Robby made some sort of pfft sound and laid back.

Jack rubbed a finger over the bottom of his lip and dedicated time to think about it. “The bars dark, low, that kind of thing you'd find downtown,” he recited like he'd thought about this a hundred times. His hand comes to your knee, circling it till you jerked at the tickle. “You'd come with a bunch of your girlfriends and Robby and I-”

“- at the bar,” interjected Robby. His eyes drifted from Jack to you. “We met for a couple drinks, tired from work.”

“Oh, this is very realistic,” you smirked.

Robby gave his own back. “And then you walk in. Little dress, like that black thing you wear sometimes.”

“Practically begging to be noticed,” said Jack. “How could we not? Two old men, down on their luck and a pretty, young thing like you walks in.”

The tingle down your body ran deeper, fuzzier than ever with Jack's hand on you and Robby's eyes lingering. Their breaths and heat co-existing drove you slowly mad.

“Then you start throwing down favours? Is that it?” you asked quietly.

“Rest of the night carries on a bit,” said Robby, drawing your attention to him. He shifts his head side to side as if weighing up the different ways this hypothetical night could go. “Jack and I are having drinks, keeping an eye on you all night.”

“Some of your friends decide to call it early but you want to keep having fun,” said Jack, his hand travelling further up your leg. “Wild girl.”

You had no time to retort before Robby was reaching for you, talking again.

“Jack and I had been waiting for you all night, watching, thinking about buying you drinks every time you got out your card out.” His voice was low, body leaning into you.

“I approach you at the bar, some cheesy line I know you'd secretly like-” added Jack.

“You come sit with us,” said Robby, “Stuck between the two of us just like you are now.”

Robby's breath fanned your pulse thumping in your neck and Jack's hand travelled to the height of your thigh, rubbing his hand up and down. You could imagine it. The bar with the lights down low, catching the eye of the two men who leaned in to talk to each other. Maybe Robby would spot you first as he was saying something to Jack and un-able to take his eyes from you Jack would just have to take a look also.

From there you'd dance with your friends, swing out your hips more than needed, brush back your hair with every sway. You'd check they were watching, enamoured by you every once and in a while and of course they were. How could they not?

“I'm sitting with you now?” you ask, voice breathless as you struggled with knowing who to look at.

Jack's head nodded as his hand came up, popping the button of your jeans. You didn't rise to meet him, nor did you try and stop him.

Neither did Robby.

“Just like now. A good girl, sat between two men who are just slowly, slowly trying to get a taste.” Robby's voice dropped lower and lower, head ducking until he brushed hair from your neck and pressed light kisses along there.

You could feel your own chest heaving, see the the quick moves of it under your hooded gaze.

Jack's hand had slid down your pants and was making a slow observation of your clothed pussy, wet like he'd never known it to be.

You leant your head back for Robby as another warmth spread along the other side of your neck. “Do I let them?” you asked. “Get a taste?”

“Oh yeah,” said Jack, on the account of Robby finding a home in your neck and kissing and licking over his favourite spot. The spot that had your panties growing wetter. “Yeah you let them try, you're so sweet like that.” He pressed a kiss onto your clothed shoulder.

“Whose do we go back to?” you asked, your hands coming up to cradle each of their heads.

“Mine.”

Both of their voices were muffled from lips pressed to different parts of you, but both were just as possessive.

Your fingers curled delightfully around the backs of their heads.

The two of them retreated, looking to each other.

“No cat fights now, boys.”

You leant into Jack first just to grate against Robby's nerves. You pressed your lips into his, holding his face to yours as your lips parted his and you swallowed the sound of surprise he gave you. He groaned and moaned into your lips as he fingers prodded at the gate to heaven under your panties. You were sure he was making more of a noise and more of a show of it because Robby was at your other side.

You didn't know if you'd expected Robby to groan and complain about the show the two of you were putting on. Whether or not he'd get up from his sofa and demand you both leave, ending what you'd been teetering on for months.

Instead, you felt him remain steady and close behind you, his eyes burning into your skull.

You pulled back from Jack slowly, the wet smack of lips leaving the room.

Robby eagerly took you in his arms when you leant back into him.

He sighed at the taste of your lips but as soon as your mouth opened up he moaned at the taste of you mixed with Jack, some forbidden fruit he'd taken the first bite of and become addicted to.

“Oh my god,” Jack groaned from behind you, finally slipping two fingers past your panties and into you folds.

You gasped against Robby's mouth, teeth clashing with his. He held your neck, holding you in to draw out the kiss as his tongue flicked against yours.

You felt Robby's arm stretch out and you expect the feel of his warm embrace, of his hands cupping your chest or pulling back your hair. Instead, he moved past you and wrapped his fingers around Jack's wrist, urging him to move his fingers inside of you in a steady pace.

“Oh-” you moaned, back arching up into Robby was he dropped his head to your neck.

“You're squeezin' me like that, honey,” Jack mumbled against your ear. “Feel like you're already gonna come, huh?”

Robby made a noise into your neck. “We got her excited.”

With your eyes closed in bliss and focusing on not rocking into Jack's hand you blindly reached out. A hand gripped onto Jack's thigh that tensed under your claws digging in and the other to Robby's cock that strained against his jeans.

“Please,” you said, breathless.

Any other time maybe Robby would have put up a fight, make you work for just a glimpse of himself but he smiled and clicked his tongue before he shifted in his seat and started to pop the buttons slowly.

Jack bit down on his lip, his finger working you open and curling but eyes on where Robby's hands fumbled for the belt. “Yeah, that's what you wanted? Wanted Robby's cock?”

“Yes,” you said with a lick of your lips.

Jack brought out his fingers and spread you arousal all around you before circling that small bundle of nerves.

Your head was thrown back, stretching out the skin of your neck. “J-Jack!”

His teeth scraped your neck.

“Gonna come already?” asked Robby, amused at the state of you. He'd never had a front row seat to the effect Jack had on you and by what you'd felt through his boxers and jeans, he was enjoying it.

You shut him up when you bypassed his layers of clothing and wrapped your hand around his cock.

Robby seethed and laid back as you reached around for him, taking what arousal was leaking for the head and dragging it down him.

“You're so good at that, aren't you, baby?” asked Jack as set a steady rhythm upon you. “So good.”

“Jack,” you panted. “Please, I wanna- I wanna-”

He nodded against you.

“You wanna come?” asked Robby from behind you, a hand running up and down your back. “So soon?”

“Let her finish,” said Jack pulling back and staring at you. He worked his fingers over your clit faster, dipping into your heat to drag up your want and repeat it until you were starting to tremble. “Not her fault she's excited by the both of us against her.”

Robby grumbled but couldn't find the words to say much else as your thumb swept the tip of him repeatedly.

“J-Jack!” you came onto his hand with a breath of a moan, your hand squeezing Robby.

“Fuck!” he groaned as he watched you come down from your high.

Jack sent a smirk over your shoulder. “What? Gonna come so soon?” he teased, licking a finger into his mouth and cleaning you from himself.

You caught your breath, slowly taking away your hand from Robby's cock and sitting up straighter. Your heart hammers, your ears were left ringing like you'd just gone through something life changing. You think you had.

Both of the men at your sides shuffled to sit up on either side of you.

“What's up?” asked Jack. “No regrets?”

You looked between the two of them and shook your head.

Before you knew it Robby took to one side of your neck, Jack the other. You were left sitting there as they held you up for them to do their diligent work.

Your eyes closed as you focused on the rub of Robby's beard as he sucked a deep mark onto you. On the other side Jack's slight stubble grazed as he scraped his teeth against different spots of you, unable to settle.

Their hands were hot as Robby's ran over the length of your back, coming around to squeeze at your breasts and earn noises of relief as reward while Jack focused on pulling down your jeans, on pulling open your thighs, desperate to be slotted in between them.

You guided Robby up by his chin, kissing him with a heavy tongue and eager lips writing everything you wanted him to do to you. His cock was still out, protruding and begging for attention with every messy swipe of your lips.

Jack was still on you, making a work at your neck.

You pulled away from Robby, his eyes still almost black from need when you moved to Jack, to kiss him and give him a taste of Robby.

You didn't know if it was just the adrenaline of the two of them kissing you, working you open and apart but you swear you'd never felt the two of them kiss you like they did then. With the other watching, with the other just within reach and with their lips still on the soft skin of yours.

You kept like that for a while, in between them, kissing each one moment, the other breathing hard on you. At some point Jack had gotten his own hardening cock out, rubbing it up and down leisurely as if you had all night to enjoy everything.

Delicately, you dragged your nails down their necks, cupping their chins and kept them steady and like putty in your hands.

Enamoured and under you spell neither realised when there wasn't just one tongue but another. When your smooth skin gave way to stubble neither blinked and when the hands became gruff and coarse, they relished in it.

All until you could guide Robby and Jack's mouths in together, settling back on the sofa like you were about to watch your favourite show.

You watched as Jack's grey and Robby's brown brows furrowed in as they focused in on the new taste, the rougher lips and hotter tongue. Their hands were searching these new bodies with grips and grasps.

Their cocks bobbed with their movements and you watched, mouth salivating.

Noises you'd never heard them make before left them but you weren't even jealous. You were wet and trying to remember what they looked like caving into each other to keep in the back of your mind for months to come.

Only when their faces were reddening and you feared they might fait from suffocation and you'd have to call PTMC and explain why their cocks were out, you clapped your hands once.

Their eyes opened, mouths still against each other as they caught their breaths before looking to you slowly, eyes hazy and faces red, lips swollen.

“Well, this has been fun,” you said, patting their thighs and wedging yourself out from between them. “But I should call it, work tomorrow, early night and all.”

The two were frozen, dumb-founded like teen boys realising they might like their guy friend a little too much.

You were already at the door, throwing your hair over your shoulder and showing the beautiful litters of marks they'd left on you. “See you in work!”

You left gratified. You'd got to come by Jack's hands once and had watched them make out. And even though you were accustom to a drawn out night of pleasure, you were more than set up for the rest of the night with the image of the two of them safely stored away.

taglist (if you want to be added or took off just say the word!):

it shouldn’t hurt. it shouldn’t. you should’ve gone in there and let him see how happy you were to find him here. since, it was his day off — he was supposed to be on another job as a SWAT physician. then your joy would’ve turned into worry the moment you saw him being patched up by dr. mohan. was he hurt? how bad?

you shouldn’t feel like this too. this ugly, horrible feeling of jealousy. it’s not fair to samira. you like her. whenever you pick up doubles, you have grown closer to her. everyone you’ve worked with in the night shift was lovely, but samira — she’s the only one who fully understood you. 

you admired how kind she is to her patients, how understanding she is. she doesn’t hold the ‘doctor with the highest patient satisfaction scores’ title for nothing. she is confident, beautiful, sweet, and. . . maybe even the right fit for jack.

you quickly marched to the nearest toilet and bolted the door shut. 

you paced back and forth, grinding your jaw, willing yourself not to cry. don’tcrydon’tcrydon’tcrydon’tcry. oh, damn it. 

the first sob was painful. it felt like a twenty-two-thousand-pound elephant was standing on your chest. you gritted your teeth, scrunched your face, and let the tears fall freely. 

there’s anger, mainly aimed at yourself — because why do i have to be so sensitive? 

you cry a lot, you become sensitive about dozens of things, you overthink, you worry. 

you never thought, never in your life would you have expected that jack would admit his feelings for you, that he never cared how much of a crier you are. you were surprised he even liked you in the first place. 

he liked to call you his ‘little crybaby’, you didn’t get it at first, you thought he was being ribbing but assured you it came from a place of love and fondness — not malice. 

maybe he grew tired of it, he’d gotten sick of providing you comfort all the time. the thought made you cry even harder.

you exited the bathroom once you’d calm yourself down enough to function again as a respectable, professional doctor. your eyes were still puffy and wet with tears, and you were sniffling. anyone could tell you’d been crying.

all of a sudden, dana stopped you in your tracks. “sweetheart! where have you been?! what’re you waitin’ for, christmas? your patients are startin’ to pile up, and dr. abbot is– hey, you alright?” she held a hand out, but before she could reach your shoulder, you stepped back. because if she touched you, if she knew something was going on, there’d go your waterworks again.  

the mention of his name almost made you run inside the bathroom again, but you recovered. clearing your throat, “i–i’m fine, dana. . .thanks. and, sorry, i was just taking a breather. y’know, these damn allergies. haha.”

of course, dana didn’t look convinced. she shook her head a little bit, thinking that it’d be better to not ask anything else as it wasn’t the best time to have a heart-to-heart, but the concern was still there. 

“alright, hon. but just letting you know, abbot’s here. brought in one of the SWAT officers and a bullet grazed him.”

you gasped. “is he okay?!” there was fear in your voice. he almost got shot?! 

“hey, hey. . .he’s okay.” her tone was gentle. she held a hand out again, as if trying to soothe a frightened animal. “dr. mohan looked after him. he’s as good as new.”

dr. mohan looked after him. not you. 

“i’m glad to hear that.” you offered a tight-lipped smile. 

you felt your phone vibrate in the pocket of your pants. you tapped your screen to see jack had sent you a series of texts.

jack: hello, beautiful. just letting you know i’m here. brought in a patient and a bullet almost got me. 🤯

jack: but! before you freak out – i’m okay. it was barely a scratch. 

jack: been trying to find you amongst the chaos but kept missing you. 😔

jack: i’m taking you home, alright? i’m just gonna go get some shut-eye before your shift ends.

jack: only a few hours left! can’t wait to see you, beautiful. ❤️

you exhaled a laugh through your nose. he’d been getting into emojis, lately. his messages made you feel better. . . almost.

you met up with jack by the locker area. his face lit up as he jogged over to you, grabbing you by the waist and pressing his lips against your hairline. he lingered there, then murmured, “mmm. missed you so much. you smell good.” he pulled away slowly with a sigh, his fingertips trailing down your side.

“jack. . .” 

“what? i mean it. you smell and look beautiful. . like you hadn’t even done a double shift.”

you wrapped your arms around yourself, feeling a bit self-conscious out of nowhere. 

“why are you trying to butter me up?”

he playfully rolled his eyes. with an endeared smile, he gently guided you towards the exit. 

“i wasn’t. now can we please go home so we can relax and cuddle?”

you were unusually quiet on the drive home. you just stared out of the car window, your chin resting on the palm of your hand. jack started getting concerned, he thought you were still upset about what happened to him. so he filled the silence for the both of you.

“i’m so sorry i made you worry, baby. but like i said it wasn’t bad at all.” 

he let out a heavy breath. “i’ll be more careful next time. and dr. mohan was there to treat the wound so you know i was in good hands but–”

he heard sniffling coming from beside him. his forehead creased and his mouth tightened. 

“hey. . . sweetheart, don’t cry. i’m okay. i’m here, see?” he reached out for your thigh and gave it a comforting squeeze.

but you just silently cried to yourself. 

“my little crybaby was worried for me that much? i’m flattered, sweetheart.” stupid, clueless jack tried to lighten up the situation.

“please don’t call me that.” you whimpered. “i hate that name.”

“what?” he whipped his head towards you, he pushed down on the brakes and the vehicle came to a sudden halt. 

conveniently, you were already by the driveway to your home. you pushed his hand away that was sitting on top of your thigh and hurriedly got out of the car.

“wait! ah – damn it.” jack called out to you. he got disoriented — everything was happening too fast. 

you fled up to the master bathroom, slammed the door shut, and locked yourself in. 

you could hear jack’s heavy footsteps approaching. with hesitation, he knocked on the door — careful not to startle you.

he could hear your sobs and cries. . . breaking his heart. he never meant to hurt you in any way. he absolutely hated it when you’re upset, especially with him.

“sweetheart. . . i– i’m sorry for calling you that. i– i didn’t mean to tease you. it’s just– now that i think about it – it’s a stupid name! i’ll stop. i’ll never call you that ever again. just please. . . don’t cry.” his voice broke at the end. he could feel his chin wobbling, ridden with guilt.

“she took care of you.” your soft voice muffled by the barrier.

jack’s head snapped up, eyes staring at where your lovely face would’ve been. “she?”

realisation dawned on him. 

he pressed his palm flat against the door, he yearned to hold you. “baby, open the door. please.”

he wanted to see you — wanted to look at you in the eyes as he explained. explain that it was nothing, that he’d never wanted anyone else but you. 

when you didn’t move, he let his head fall against the door too, joining his palm with a thud. 

“i wanted it to be you.”

he shook his head and continued, “in the car. what i wanted to say was i wanted you to be the one to treat me. yes, dr. mohan is a very good doctor but. . . it’s you who i want. what am i gonna say next is gonna sound terrible but – i’m glad we brought the injured officer to the pitt. because i’d get to see you.”

“i was looking for you. i asked dr. mohan if she knew where you were but she had no idea either. i guess you were occupied – better to look after the others first before me. that’s good. then she asked what was wrong and i told her. and she offered to help.” 

“i swear to you, baby – there’s no one else. you’re it, sweetheart. i love you so fucking much it hurts.”

if there’s a doctor you trust the most other than jack — it would be samira. you were relieved to know that she was the one who helped him. 

you cracked the door open a sliver. “i love you too.” you hiccuped.

“listen–” he looked at you, determination in his eyes. “don’t feel bad for crying all the time. it shows how much you care about others – it’s what makes you such an incredible doctor. never feel bad for being sensitive. not many doctors have what you have. just keep being you, baby.”

you opened the door the rest of the way, eyes still wet. “okay but. . . you’re the only one who gets to call me a crybaby.” 

jack released a burst of laughter, relief written all over his face. “i promise.” he pulled you into a tight embrace. ♡

Your back hits the mattress hard enough to make the old springs squeal beneath you and Jack’s first hiss isn’t one of pleasure.

“Shut. Up.” 

His hand closes around your jaw before the laugh can properly make it out, fingers digging into the hinge just shy of painful. His thumb finds the soft under of your chin and presses until your mouth falls open for him.

It’s supposed to be corrective, presumably. Intimidating. To make you reconsider whatever smart thing you were about to say.

Instead, you turn your head just enough to catch the heel of his palm between your teeth. Salt. Sunscreen. Jack.

You bite down lightly and watch the quick flare in his eyes that says try me again.

It makes you want to try him again.

This is perhaps your most enduring character defect, the congenital need to worry at Jack Abbot until something gives, to poke one finger into every concealed pressure point and keep pressing until that pleasant facade finally fractures and you get the man underneath, irritated and looking at you like patience is a finite natural resource you have personally exhausted.

Conveniently, this defect has also made the two of you very easy to hide.

Wanting Jack has never looked substantially different than hating him. Same symptoms, really. 

At work it manifests as narrowed eyes across the nurses’ station, remarks delivered half an octave louder than necessary, shoulders knocking in hallways wide enough to accommodate two functioning adults.

In private, the argument merely changes medium.

You end up underneath him with your thighs spread around his hips while he fucks every complaint back into you, and somehow neither of you has to concede the point.

That is, more or less, what is happening now.

Jack is attempting to fuck a confession out of you, specifically the admission that he had been right when he told you not to challenge the ocean after three frozen margaritas and one declaration that rip currents were mostly “a mindset.”

In your defense, this had sounded perfectly reasonable at the time. The ocean disagreed.

You made it maybe six yards before a wave hit your broadside, folded you clean in half, stole your sunglasses, and deposited you at Jack’s feet with enough seaweed caught in your bikini to suggest the beginnings of marine conservation.

You called him an insufferable bastard for saying he told you so. 

Now he keeps insisting he “rescued” you because he hauled you upright by the waist while you sputtered saltwater.

He would like an apology. You would like him dead. Compromise remains unlikely. You would swallow your own tongue before giving him the satisfaction. 

You nip him again, sharper this time, then grin around his thumb. “Go on — make me. You’ve been trying all day.” 

“Fucking brat.” He drags his thumb free, replacing it with two thick fingers that press insistently at your tongue. “Keep talking and I’ll stuff you so full the only word you remember is sorry.” 

He’s close to delivering on that promise, hips battering the breath from your lungs until all you can do is claw the navy sheets below you.

You almost give him the noise he’s hunting for, but feeding Jack’s ego has never been on your to-do list, so you smother the sound and glare your defiance instead.

You clamp down on his fingers, hard enough to make him grunt, and he jerks back, slick digits slipping free. 

“Jesus — watch the teeth,” he growls, shaking the sting before flattening your wrist to the mattress. “You want a muzzle, sweetheart?” 

You swipe your tongue over enamel, savoring the residue. “So many threats, Doctor. I’m starting to think you’re all talk.” 

“Careful,” Jack murmurs with a hollow laugh. “You might hurt my feelings.”

He apparently decides conversation has exhausted its usefulness.

One second you are on you looking at him; the next he has you flipped facedown, dragged your hips into the air, and buried himself back inside you with enough force to make the entire bed complain in sympathy. 

His chest covers your back, breath searing the shell of your ear. A half-moan, half-sob cracks loose out of you, palms skidding for purchase as your pelvis jerks forward as if distance could blunt the stretch, make it more manageable.

Jack only laughs again, settling both hands over your shoulder blades as he lets his weight weld you to the sheets.

“Where d’you think you’re going?” Each thrust stakes you there, sensation cresting so hot the edges of the room tremble out of focus and into watercolors.

You mash your face into the pillow, trying to hide the choked noises bleeding from you but they seep through cotton and feathers just the same.

“Listen to you,” he croons, mock-tender, thumb stroking a false comfort along your spine. He grinds you down while he pushes in again, slow enough you feel the catch of every ridge. “So fucking mouthy until I start making you feel good.” 

His hand snakes beneath you, palm burning a trail down your stomach until two fingers find your clit. The first tight circle detonates in your core. Supernova heat.

“Pretty thing like you shouldn’t fight common sense,” he purrs. “Just admit it — You were right, Jack. Should’ve trust you. Smartest guy I know. That’s all I want.” Another figure-eight of his thumb, another planet collision behind your eyes. “I keep you safe, I make you feel good — why’s it so hard to give me a little credit?”

“Because — you’re such — a cocky — asshole,” you gasp, the insult dissolving into a helpless whine when his thumb presses harder. 

“Dirty mouth on you,” Jack tuts. “C’mon, honey. Be sweet for ten little seconds — tell me I’m right — and I’ll let you come.”

You give him nothing but a furious side-to-side wobble, hair stuck wetly across your cheeks.

He can make your thighs shake and turn your brain into warm soup but he cannot make you surrender a point you are still technically convinced is yours. 

The knot low in your belly winds tighter in retaliation, every muscle beginning that little climb towards something inevitable, and then Jack simply stops.

Fingers gone. Thrust halted. He holds himself inside you like a blade sheathed to the hilt, every inch throbbing but inert, punishment by deprivation. 

Your muscles fire once more on instinct, grasping at a phantom that’s already gone, walls twitching uselessly around empty air.

The knot loosens with insulting patience — twist, release, release — until climax slips from reachable to hypothetical. 

A brittle, involuntary sound hooks in your throat, proof that your body has accepted what your mind refuses to: Jack Abbot means to leave you suspended in this awful limbo until you fold. 

“Please — no.” You writhe beneath him in shallow arcs, powerless under the weight pinning you. “Need you — need you to keep going.” 

He slips a broad palm under your jaw, lifting your mouth off the pillow for your gasps to reach him unfiltered. “You know what I need, honey. Say the words, and I’ll give you everything you’re begging for.” 

“I — I’m sorry,” you finally spit out. “You were right, Jack. Always are. Just — please — don’t stop.” 

The words hit like blood in the water. He buries himself with a hoarse snarl, rhythm turning brutal, inexorable, as though the apology were a starting gun. Wood knocks hard against the plaster wall and your body jolts forward with every drive.

“Was that so hard?” His voice drips triumph while his teeth worry a shallow crescent into your shoulder. “Christ, sweetheart, what’re you always fighting me for? You know I’m gonna get my way.” 

The only reply you manage is a shaky “uh-huh — ah, Jack —” strangled into the pillow, every syllable climbing higher until it breaks apart in a thin, urgent keen that tells him exactly how close you are. 

“There you go, pretty girl. Give it to me — yeah, just like that.” 

That’s all it takes.

Your body locks, squeezes, and he answers with a raw-throated groan, bracing you inside the bracket on his arms while your trembling tries to shake both of you off the bed.

Then everything goes incandescent. A long, rushing hush, white and depthless, flooding every corner of your mind as you come all over his length.

Somewhere inside all that brightness, Jack loses whatever rhythm he had left.

He lasts two more strokes. 

“Fuck — sweetheart.” His hips snap tight against your ass, burying himself as deep as he can go, filling you in heavy surges that make your already-softened core flutter all over again. 

You barely understand it at first, only feel another strange wave roll through you, your body squeezing reflexively around every throb until his arms tighten and his forehead drops heavily between your shoulder blades. 

Jack stays folded over you until both your breathing begins to settle, the hard rise and fall of his chest gradually slowing against your spine.

When he finally moves, it is with considerably more care than anything he has done in the last thirty minutes.

He withdraws from you slowly, and your cunt manages one useless twitch at the emptiness he leaves behind. Pathetic, really, but apparently it's all the reaction your spent body can afford.

Sensing the weakness, the bastard takes advantage.

He rolls you onto your other side until you're nose-to-nose, the world tilting under the authority of a man rearranging furniture. Normally, you'd bark at him to ask first. Right now you just marvel that you're the furniture.

You blink at him through the pleasant cotton packed between your ears.

Jack studies the damage he's done, mouth curling like he's content with his handiwork, then lowers himself to press a kiss above your hipbone.

He works upward without hurry, lips brushing warm over skin still prickling with aftershocks, teeth occasionally catching in a light nip that makes you squirm before he kisses the same place better.

Your fingers slide into the silver-flecked hair at his temples, nails scratching lightly until you feel the growl rumble against your ribs.

“Funny how suddenly you like me again.”

“Like is generous.” You give the silver strands at his temple a tug. “Give me five minutes. I’ll remember everything I hate about you.”

“Mm. I can do a lot with five minutes.” He lifts his head just enough to give you that smug, crooked look.

“Four and a half now.”

Jack laughs, apparently delighted by the threat of your imminent return to hostility, and works his way up until there is nowhere left between you for him to kiss.

He folds down beside you and takes your mouth one final time before you can decide whether final kisses are perhaps too affectionate for people who supposedly cannot stand each other.

“Better use ’em wisely, then.”

He does, in fact, use them wisely. Spending what remains of his allotted minutes with his mouth between your thighs and apparently deciding there is some obscure world record for orgasms induced out of spite that he intends to break before sunrise.

But by breakfast, the consequences have arrived.

You sit at the island with a fork slack between your fingers, pancakes cooling untouched beneath a generous pour of syrup.

Your eyelids keep flirting with gravity; every time they drop Jack clears his throat in exaggerated warnings, as if falling face-first into breakfast would somehow be his fault.

It would be. Somehow. You'd make it so.

“Late night?” Frank asks from across the island, not bothering to look up from whatever he’s doing to his coffee.

Your head lifts approximately half an inch.

“No, I'm fine,” you say, far too quickly. You hear it the second it leaves your mouth, that bright little note of guilt you have apparently developed overnight, and clear your throat before anyone else can appreciate it. “I'm fine. Just tired. All that swimming yesterday wore me out.”

Dana, standing at the sink with her sleeves pushed up, lets out a thoughtful hum as she rinses a plate.

“Funny, everyone seems to be dragging this morning,” she remarks, flicking water off her wrist. “Can’t imagine why.”

“I can.” Robby lifts his mug. “Some of us were awake until two in the morning. Against our will.”

There is a tiny, merciful interval where you almost misunderstand him.

Of course people were awake. There are more than twenty coworkers crammed into one beach house, sleeping on couches and air mattresses and whatever other horizontal surfaces they could claim before someone else did.

Somebody is always awake. Somebody is always opening a refrigerator or flushing a toilet or talking too loudly in the hallway.

But when you finally drag your eyes up from your pancakes and find several people already looking at you with expressions ranging from tired amusement to outright accusation, the alternate interpretation arrives all at once.

They heard you. They heard Jack. Possibly extensively.

Fuck.

You lower your eyes and shovel another piece of pancake into your mouth.

Then again, maybe they're staring for some completely unrelated reason. A syrup stain, bed hair, the fact that you still haven't blinked in ten seconds.

“So, Jack,” Trinity suddenly says from the other side of the island, casual enough that for one stupid second you don’t hear the trap opening beneath your feet, “how's it feel being right all the time?”

You keep chewing.

“I mean, so right,” she adds, her voice climbing into a suspiciously breathy imitation. “The rightest man alive, apparently.”

The pancake becomes significantly harder to swallow as a hot ribbon of mortification slides up your throat. You manage a strangled cough and focus on sawing your next bite into pieces the size of atoms so you don't have to lift your head and meet anyone's eyes.

Without missing a beat, Jack wipes a smear of syrup from his thumb and shrugs. “Feels pretty nice, if I’m honest.”

“You are such a smug little —”

“Language,” Dana cuts in from the sink without even turning around.

You clamp your lips together, cheeks still burning, then lean just enough into Jack’s line of sight and mouth, shit.

His smirk cuts sideways across his face, eyes dropping briefly to your lips before coming back up darker than they were a second ago. His nostrils flare faintly, then his thighs spread another inch beneath the island as he leans back.

A minute repositioning of his hips that would mean nothing to anybody else and means everything to you because you know exactly what Jack looks like when his body gets ahead of his better judgment.

“Ew,” Trinity says suddenly, pointing between you and Jack with her fork. “This is flirting, isn’t it? You two have just been doing foreplay in front of us for, like, years.”

Robby grimaces. “Freaks.”

“I have no idea what you mean,” you insist, despite the heat steadily colonizing your entire face.

Jack undermines you immediately as he shoots you a wink. “It’s worked pretty well for us.”

Your eyes widen ten sizes. “Shut. Up.”

His grin only gets worse, teeth showing this time, and something about that makes you want to kick his ankle under the island just to restore the natural order of things.

Frank shakes his head. “Get a room.”

“We had one. Apparently that was the problem,” Jack says.

A chorus of disgusted groans answers him.

MARIA NOTE jack abbot getting pussy as a direct consequence of being annoying… terrible precedent to set actually 🍋🫧🌀 HOPE YOU ENJOY I LOVE YOU ALLLL

Your back hits the mattress hard enough to make the old springs squeal beneath you and Jack’s first hiss isn’t one of pleasure.

“Shut. Up.” 

His hand closes around your jaw before the laugh can properly make it out, fingers digging into the hinge just shy of painful. His thumb finds the soft under of your chin and presses until your mouth falls open for him.

It’s supposed to be corrective, presumably. Intimidating. To make you reconsider whatever smart thing you were about to say.

Instead, you turn your head just enough to catch the heel of his palm between your teeth. Salt. Sunscreen. Jack.

You bite down lightly and watch the quick flare in his eyes that says try me again.

It makes you want to try him again.

This is perhaps your most enduring character defect, the congenital need to worry at Jack Abbot until something gives, to poke one finger into every concealed pressure point and keep pressing until that pleasant facade finally fractures and you get the man underneath, irritated and looking at you like patience is a finite natural resource you have personally exhausted.

Conveniently, this defect has also made the two of you very easy to hide.

Wanting Jack has never looked substantially different than hating him. Same symptoms, really. 

At work it manifests as narrowed eyes across the nurses’ station, remarks delivered half an octave louder than necessary, shoulders knocking in hallways wide enough to accommodate two functioning adults.

In private, the argument merely changes medium.

You end up underneath him with your thighs spread around his hips while he fucks every complaint back into you, and somehow neither of you has to concede the point.

That is, more or less, what is happening now.

Jack is attempting to fuck a confession out of you, specifically the admission that he had been right when he told you not to challenge the ocean after three frozen margaritas and one declaration that rip currents were mostly “a mindset.”

In your defense, this had sounded perfectly reasonable at the time. The ocean disagreed.

You made it maybe six yards before a wave hit your broadside, folded you clean in half, stole your sunglasses, and deposited you at Jack’s feet with enough seaweed caught in your bikini to suggest the beginnings of marine conservation.

You called him an insufferable bastard for saying he told you so. 

Now he keeps insisting he “rescued” you because he hauled you upright by the waist while you sputtered saltwater.

He would like an apology. You would like him dead. Compromise remains unlikely. You would swallow your own tongue before giving him the satisfaction. 

You nip him again, sharper this time, then grin around his thumb. “Go on — make me. You’ve been trying all day.” 

“Fucking brat.” He drags his thumb free, replacing it with two thick fingers that press insistently at your tongue. “Keep talking and I’ll stuff you so full the only word you remember is sorry.” 

He’s close to delivering on that promise, hips battering the breath from your lungs until all you can do is claw the navy sheets below you.

You almost give him the noise he’s hunting for, but feeding Jack’s ego has never been on your to-do list, so you smother the sound and glare your defiance instead.

You clamp down on his fingers, hard enough to make him grunt, and he jerks back, slick digits slipping free. 

“Jesus — watch the teeth,” he growls, shaking the sting before flattening your wrist to the mattress. “You want a muzzle, sweetheart?” 

You swipe your tongue over enamel, savoring the residue. “So many threats, Doctor. I’m starting to think you’re all talk.” 

“Careful,” Jack murmurs with a hollow laugh. “You might hurt my feelings.”

He apparently decides conversation has exhausted its usefulness.

One second you are on you looking at him; the next he has you flipped facedown, dragged your hips into the air, and buried himself back inside you with enough force to make the entire bed complain in sympathy. 

His chest covers your back, breath searing the shell of your ear. A half-moan, half-sob cracks loose out of you, palms skidding for purchase as your pelvis jerks forward as if distance could blunt the stretch, make it more manageable.

Jack only laughs again, settling both hands over your shoulder blades as he lets his weight weld you to the sheets.

“Where d’you think you’re going?” Each thrust stakes you there, sensation cresting so hot the edges of the room tremble out of focus and into watercolors.

You mash your face into the pillow, trying to hide the choked noises bleeding from you but they seep through cotton and feathers just the same.

“Listen to you,” he croons, mock-tender, thumb stroking a false comfort along your spine. He grinds you down while he pushes in again, slow enough you feel the catch of every ridge. “So fucking mouthy until I start making you feel good.” 

His hand snakes beneath you, palm burning a trail down your stomach until two fingers find your clit. The first tight circle detonates in your core. Supernova heat.

“Pretty thing like you shouldn’t fight common sense,” he purrs. “Just admit it — You were right, Jack. Should’ve trust you. Smartest guy I know. That’s all I want.” Another figure-eight of his thumb, another planet collision behind your eyes. “I keep you safe, I make you feel good — why’s it so hard to give me a little credit?”

“Because — you’re such — a cocky — asshole,” you gasp, the insult dissolving into a helpless whine when his thumb presses harder. 

“Dirty mouth on you,” Jack tuts. “C’mon, honey. Be sweet for ten little seconds — tell me I’m right — and I’ll let you come.”

You give him nothing but a furious side-to-side wobble, hair stuck wetly across your cheeks.

He can make your thighs shake and turn your brain into warm soup but he cannot make you surrender a point you are still technically convinced is yours. 

The knot low in your belly winds tighter in retaliation, every muscle beginning that little climb towards something inevitable, and then Jack simply stops.

Fingers gone. Thrust halted. He holds himself inside you like a blade sheathed to the hilt, every inch throbbing but inert, punishment by deprivation. 

Your muscles fire once more on instinct, grasping at a phantom that’s already gone, walls twitching uselessly around empty air.

The knot loosens with insulting patience — twist, release, release — until climax slips from reachable to hypothetical. 

A brittle, involuntary sound hooks in your throat, proof that your body has accepted what your mind refuses to: Jack Abbot means to leave you suspended in this awful limbo until you fold. 

“Please — no.” You writhe beneath him in shallow arcs, powerless under the weight pinning you. “Need you — need you to keep going.” 

He slips a broad palm under your jaw, lifting your mouth off the pillow for your gasps to reach him unfiltered. “You know what I need, honey. Say the words, and I’ll give you everything you’re begging for.” 

“I — I’m sorry,” you finally spit out. “You were right, Jack. Always are. Just — please — don’t stop.” 

The words hit like blood in the water. He buries himself with a hoarse snarl, rhythm turning brutal, inexorable, as though the apology were a starting gun. Wood knocks hard against the plaster wall and your body jolts forward with every drive.

“Was that so hard?” His voice drips triumph while his teeth worry a shallow crescent into your shoulder. “Christ, sweetheart, what’re you always fighting me for? You know I’m gonna get my way.” 

The only reply you manage is a shaky “uh-huh — ah, Jack —” strangled into the pillow, every syllable climbing higher until it breaks apart in a thin, urgent keen that tells him exactly how close you are. 

“There you go, pretty girl. Give it to me — yeah, just like that.” 

That’s all it takes.

Your body locks, squeezes, and he answers with a raw-throated groan, bracing you inside the bracket on his arms while your trembling tries to shake both of you off the bed.

Then everything goes incandescent. A long, rushing hush, white and depthless, flooding every corner of your mind as you come all over his length.

Somewhere inside all that brightness, Jack loses whatever rhythm he had left.

He lasts two more strokes. 

“Fuck — sweetheart.” His hips snap tight against your ass, burying himself as deep as he can go, filling you in heavy surges that make your already-softened core flutter all over again. 

You barely understand it at first, only feel another strange wave roll through you, your body squeezing reflexively around every throb until his arms tighten and his forehead drops heavily between your shoulder blades. 

Jack stays folded over you until both your breathing begins to settle, the hard rise and fall of his chest gradually slowing against your spine.

When he finally moves, it is with considerably more care than anything he has done in the last thirty minutes.

He withdraws from you slowly, and your cunt manages one useless twitch at the emptiness he leaves behind. Pathetic, really, but apparently it's all the reaction your spent body can afford.

Sensing the weakness, the bastard takes advantage.

He rolls you onto your other side until you're nose-to-nose, the world tilting under the authority of a man rearranging furniture. Normally, you'd bark at him to ask first. Right now you just marvel that you're the furniture.

You blink at him through the pleasant cotton packed between your ears.

Jack studies the damage he's done, mouth curling like he's content with his handiwork, then lowers himself to press a kiss above your hipbone.

He works upward without hurry, lips brushing warm over skin still prickling with aftershocks, teeth occasionally catching in a light nip that makes you squirm before he kisses the same place better.

Your fingers slide into the silver-flecked hair at his temples, nails scratching lightly until you feel the growl rumble against your ribs.

“Funny how suddenly you like me again.”

“Like is generous.” You give the silver strands at his temple a tug. “Give me five minutes. I’ll remember everything I hate about you.”

“Mm. I can do a lot with five minutes.” He lifts his head just enough to give you that smug, crooked look.

“Four and a half now.”

Jack laughs, apparently delighted by the threat of your imminent return to hostility, and works his way up until there is nowhere left between you for him to kiss.

He folds down beside you and takes your mouth one final time before you can decide whether final kisses are perhaps too affectionate for people who supposedly cannot stand each other.

“Better use ’em wisely, then.”

He does, in fact, use them wisely. Spending what remains of his allotted minutes with his mouth between your thighs and apparently deciding there is some obscure world record for orgasms induced out of spite that he intends to break before sunrise.

But by breakfast, the consequences have arrived.

You sit at the island with a fork slack between your fingers, pancakes cooling untouched beneath a generous pour of syrup.

Your eyelids keep flirting with gravity; every time they drop Jack clears his throat in exaggerated warnings, as if falling face-first into breakfast would somehow be his fault.

It would be. Somehow. You'd make it so.

“Late night?” Frank asks from across the island, not bothering to look up from whatever he’s doing to his coffee.

Your head lifts approximately half an inch.

“No, I'm fine,” you say, far too quickly. You hear it the second it leaves your mouth, that bright little note of guilt you have apparently developed overnight, and clear your throat before anyone else can appreciate it. “I'm fine. Just tired. All that swimming yesterday wore me out.”

Dana, standing at the sink with her sleeves pushed up, lets out a thoughtful hum as she rinses a plate.

“Funny, everyone seems to be dragging this morning,” she remarks, flicking water off her wrist. “Can’t imagine why.”

“I can.” Robby lifts his mug. “Some of us were awake until two in the morning. Against our will.”

There is a tiny, merciful interval where you almost misunderstand him.

Of course people were awake. There are more than twenty coworkers crammed into one beach house, sleeping on couches and air mattresses and whatever other horizontal surfaces they could claim before someone else did.

Somebody is always awake. Somebody is always opening a refrigerator or flushing a toilet or talking too loudly in the hallway.

But when you finally drag your eyes up from your pancakes and find several people already looking at you with expressions ranging from tired amusement to outright accusation, the alternate interpretation arrives all at once.

They heard you. They heard Jack. Possibly extensively.

Fuck.

You lower your eyes and shovel another piece of pancake into your mouth.

Then again, maybe they're staring for some completely unrelated reason. A syrup stain, bed hair, the fact that you still haven't blinked in ten seconds.

“So, Jack,” Trinity suddenly says from the other side of the island, casual enough that for one stupid second you don’t hear the trap opening beneath your feet, “how's it feel being right all the time?”

You keep chewing.

“I mean, so right,” she adds, her voice climbing into a suspiciously breathy imitation. “The rightest man alive, apparently.”

The pancake becomes significantly harder to swallow as a hot ribbon of mortification slides up your throat. You manage a strangled cough and focus on sawing your next bite into pieces the size of atoms so you don't have to lift your head and meet anyone's eyes.

Without missing a beat, Jack wipes a smear of syrup from his thumb and shrugs. “Feels pretty nice, if I’m honest.”

“You are such a smug little —”

“Language,” Dana cuts in from the sink without even turning around.

You clamp your lips together, cheeks still burning, then lean just enough into Jack’s line of sight and mouth, shit.

His smirk cuts sideways across his face, eyes dropping briefly to your lips before coming back up darker than they were a second ago. His nostrils flare faintly, then his thighs spread another inch beneath the island as he leans back.

A minute repositioning of his hips that would mean nothing to anybody else and means everything to you because you know exactly what Jack looks like when his body gets ahead of his better judgment.

“Ew,” Trinity says suddenly, pointing between you and Jack with her fork. “This is flirting, isn’t it? You two have just been doing foreplay in front of us for, like, years.”

Robby grimaces. “Freaks.”

“I have no idea what you mean,” you insist, despite the heat steadily colonizing your entire face.

Jack undermines you immediately as he shoots you a wink. “It’s worked pretty well for us.”

Your eyes widen ten sizes. “Shut. Up.”

His grin only gets worse, teeth showing this time, and something about that makes you want to kick his ankle under the island just to restore the natural order of things.

Frank shakes his head. “Get a room.”

“We had one. Apparently that was the problem,” Jack says.

A chorus of disgusted groans answers him.

MARIA NOTE jack abbot getting pussy as a direct consequence of being annoying… terrible precedent to set actually 🍋🫧🌀 HOPE YOU ENJOY I LOVE YOU ALLLL