Yeah, Jack didn't even think he’d ever have one of those again—not seriously, not anything past something superficial, something situational, but then there you were appearing in his life like a beacon that couldn’t be stopped. So young. So beautiful. So pure down to your core. Inherently good, that’s what you were. And after all of maybe one week of you and your smile and the feeling of you pressed up against him, that’s all he wanted you to be. His. 

After so long, he forgot, forgot what it was like to feel this way about someone—to want them so badly to the point of not being able to sleep—and you couldn’t possibly fathom not having them in every way. To have them in every way possible, that you needed the world to know. As if there’s some sort of claim you need to put on the people you love. 

This is my partner. My husband. Fiancée. 

Girlfriend.

Jack, after just a few months, knew that he needed that label—needed those words to link the two of you together. 

Hi, I'm Jack, and this is my girlfriend. 

She just moved in with me.

Jack knows he sounds ridiculous and can only shake his head, unable to hide the smile that’s already tugging at the corners of his lips because you were his and because you were moving in with him. Because there in his room—his space—pieces of you were already finding their rightful place. Your robe on the spare hook in his bathroom. Your blue-light glasses tucked near the lamp on the spare nightstand he bought to go opposite his. A jewelry dish above his dresser, next to his watch. Hair ties fallen behind couches, his bookshelf, his hamper. 

All your stuff next to his stuff. 

Jack feels his chest tighten the more that he looks around and feels his senses be completely flooded by you, you, you. 

But it’s not in a bad way. Never is with you. Because you’re everything good, and this was good, and he’s never felt so fucking loved in his entire life. 

Steadying his breath and his hands, Jack cuts open one of the boxes stacked in the corner by your nightstand with his pocketknife, the sound of the tape being sliced open echoing across the walls. Opening it, he takes out the neatly folded stack of your hoodies and crewnecks—most, if not at least a third of them, were his. Many that he hadn’t even realized were missing. He laughs to himself when he finds one, the black material worn and all too familiar. He holds it up. Pittsburgh Pirates stitched onto the front. He's been missing it the entire time the two of you have been dating. 

The last time he can even remember seeing it was one of the first nights you spent with him. He came home from a long SWAT shift, bruised, having to intubate one of his friends, and dreading that he was about to be back at the PTMC for his night shift in just a few hours. Jack was tired and tense and not used to being there—in his home, and he wasn’t sure how to navigate it. 

He’d gotten as far as dropping his keys on the counter, an obvious gait in his right leg, after not only a full day of being on his feet but also moving too quickly—with too little thought. Wincing at the way his prosthetic pinched, he opened the cupboard and grabbed a glass. 

The TV was on, the sounds of the show Friends filling the dark hallway of his apartment. It wasn’t even evening yet, and all the curtains were pulled shut, the only light coming from candles that you bought. He’d gotten as far as filling the glass with water, the tap louder than he wished, when the TV paused. You didn’t call out to him, but he could hear your bare feet padding across his floors, and when you emerged, Jack almost choked mid-sip. 

Because there you were, in his apartment, only weeks into seeing one another, and you were wearing that damn Pittsburgh Pirates hoodie, the sleeves swallowing your hands, and the rest falling over the curve of your ass. You had nothing else on underneath it. Your hair was pulled up out of your face messily, your skin bare—all makeup and wear of the day washed away. 

It was the first time you’d ever stayed, showered at his place, started to treat it like it could be yours. And all he could focus on was the soft skin of your thighs that were glistening under the microwave light.

You were different that night. Even though it'd been such a short time, he knew you, knew how you, usually his little ball of energy, were always jumping up to greet him and unleash every single thought that came to mind during the day and your time apart. 

But, that night you stood so quiet. 

Without even a single word, you just looked, took him in, with no one else but the silence as a standing witness. Then you moved closer, so close that your toes covered in a pair of his socks pressed up against his. You reached up and cupped his cheek—your palm was warm, gentle, so soft against his skin. Always so soft. Always so good. 

You stared up at him, breathed him in, and looked at him in a way he didn’t know if he’d ever seen before. Your eyes were wide and full and just so, so understanding. It was almost like there was a part of you that recognized him, knew him, and for some odd reason wanted to claim him forever because you leaned forward and pressed a kiss to his lips. 

It was tender, almost tentative before deepening with the press of his tongue against the seam of your mouth. 

And like you’d never been surer of anything, your lips parted; a breathy sigh was all he could hear or feel as he complied slipping his tongue inside.

Jack smiles, really smiles this time, fingers tracing a hole in the collar of the black hoodie. He only looks away as he hears the familiar push of a button and then a beep from a speaker connecting. Jack stands still and holds his breath, waiting for… 

and there it is.

The click of a play button with the sound of a sharp, metallic clank appears, followed by a soft, auto-tuned vocal hum. Then the bass drops, and it feels familiar to Jack, like you've played this for him many times before. But all he can think about is how loud it is. 

Thought you were having wine over FaceTime with your friends. 

Because the two of you had been lying tangled on his patio, the cushions falling around you when you pushed him up and towards the door as your phone began to ring. You banished him inside to continue with unpacking, a small smile looping itself across his lips when he heard the familiar voices of your old college roommates, his name instantly becoming the topic of interest. 

But as far as he knew, he’d been a topic among them for a while, ever since you told them about your new boyfriend who was controversially older than you. 

Shoulders dropping, he holds the sweatshirt close to his chest and stalks out of the living room, already too interested to know about what you’d talked about with your friends. If they approved of the apartment—his espresso machine, the brick wall across from his flatscreen, the spare room filled with weights and his treadmill, how soft the new bedsheets were that he bought only because you mentioned that you liked them—or perhaps if they asked about how he had you bent over his kitchen counter that morning mouthing at your neck like a starved man, after he’d gotten off of a shift that took more pieces of him than he liked. 

The last one he knew you probably told them about anyway, being an oversharer; he realized one night when you were getting ready in his bathroom for a date night, and he overheard you explaining detail by detail of your last sexual encounter. His hand around your neck, squeezing as he took you, saliva coating your lips—your chin as he delivered on every desire and front you’d ever wanted out of a man.

That’s why he’s surprised when you’re already back inside. As he rounds the corner of the hall, his eyebrows raise as he’s met with the sight of you standing in the middle of the living room, a few boxes open and half picked through. The lights are once again dimmed, his apartment pulled back into darkness, but this time with a few lamps glowing bright on side tables that weren’t there before. Your hair’s thrown up messily, revealing the large hoop earrings that he thought you would’ve taken out by now, and he can smell the way the summer air clings to your skin. 

And sure enough, there sitting on the kitchen counter is your glass of white wine—topped off with a fresh heavy pour. You’re turned away from him, hips starting to sway, not having heard him enter the room over Jamie Foxx’s Blame It. 

Jack was about to announce himself too; he was, but then he feels any sort of acknowledgement or words die softly and quietly as your hip swaying deepens into a full swing. You’re dancing in a way he’s all too familiar with—seen in bars and clubs you’ve dragged him out to—in his bedroom when you insist on him trying sex to music for the first time. But not to just those basic bedroom playlists that everyone casually uses from YouTube—no, it’s to a playlist you curated, and loved, just because of him.  

He can’t help the way a grin deepens over his wrinkled face as your shoulders loosen and your head bops back and forth in time with the beat, completely letting go in a space that was not only his but yours too. 

Taking a long sip from your wine glass, you hum getting more into it now as the words of the song form in perfect lip-sync fashion. Jack’s head starts to move too, his shoulder finding the doorframe, falling into a kind of contentness that only ever came when he was watching you. 

But then you turn, eyes flickering up to where he stands in the doorway, and the words fall flat, your whole body coiling tight and jumping in surprise. A small splash of your wine escapes out of the glass onto your hand and the floor. 

“Jesus,” you whisper, hand clutching your chest. 

“Just Jack, actually,” he chuckles, stepping further into the room. 

Your eyes narrow over at him, lips pulling in a small scowl, and he can’t help but wonder how even your glare is so soft and adorable. He smirks at the sight of it, something in his belly flipping as you turn and place your wine back on the counter and grab a few paper towels. 

After your spill is cleaned, you’re back to ignoring him like he’d never stepped foot in the room and immediately fell back into the music, hips having a mind of their own again. 

Those must have been two tall glasses of wine. 

Jack laughs; it settles into his chest like warm honey. 

“Baby, what are you doing? I thought you were talking to your friends.” Jack places the sweatshirt down on the couch and steps even closer when you don’t answer him. “Instead, you’re in here… having a dance party.”

You ignore him some more, but the warmth never dissipates from where it loosens in his chest cavity only to slip down past his lungs, his diaphragm, and into the base of his stomach. 

Stepping closer to meet him halfway, you peer up at him through your lashes and start to mouth the words like this was a concert, and Jack’s your audience. 

“Blame it on the Goose. Got you feelin’ loose.

Blame it on the ‘Tron. Got you in the zone.” 

Lifting your arms up and over your head, your eyes flutter shut, suddenly unaware of the way Jack’s eyes begin to drift lower.

Or maybe you are.

But either way, he can’t help but notice how your colorful striped sweater slides up just enough to reveal the soft skin of your abdomen and the pajama shorts you’re wearing underneath. 

Another second or two passes and then you’re even closer, hands sliding up his forearms, leaving pebbled skin behind. They go up and up, skating around his shoulders as you lean closer, so close that your nose almost brushes his. You continue to sing along with the R&B song, hips and front brushing up against his every so often in tune to the pulsating 808 bassline. 

“You trying to open a club in our living room?” Jack asks teasingly.

You smile at that, dance moves faltering for only a second before you press against him, hips slowing to a gentle roll against his. Jack’s breath stalls in the back of his throat, but he encourages you with a small tip of his head, eyes sweeping down to where the two of you meet. His hands find your waist, and it takes everything in him to not shove them up and under your shirt. 

“Hm, jokes on you, I already have. Disco lights and a velvet rope are on the way. Will be here just in time for our opening night this weekend.”

“Yeah?” 

“Mh-hm,” you hum, lips brushing his only for a second before you’re pulling back, the color of your irises darker now. “Just trying to figure out the playlist. Dance with me, Jackie?”

He blinks down at you, his eyelids half-closed as his hands begin to wander lower from your waist down to your hips. 

“Seriously?”

You shrug, that enticing glint of yours forming. “Nothing like a little Jamie Foxx and grinding to say welcome home. Don’t you think?”

He’s smiling, can feel it in the way his cheeks are starting to ache, hands slipping into your pajama shorts so his fingers can trace your hip bones. When he doesn’t say anything, you press your hips forward, your front meeting his in a gentle rock. 

“You’re a brat, you know that?” 

He says as if he doesn’t love it.

But he does. Fuck, Jack loves every second of it. 

The way you tease him, push his buttons just to see how far you can go, how far he’ll let you go until you’re getting the reaction out of him that you want. Loves that you’re just as obsessed with him as he is with you—always needing to be as close to him as possible, touching him in some way because he knows if you could, you’d fold yourself into his skin and live there. He loves that your age shows sometimes in the small pout you’d give him when you don’t get your way or how your tone becomes a little more brazen when another woman—usually closer to his age than yours—leans too close or says something that balances across a fine line of friendly and flirting. 

Oh, and God help someone if they ever get it wrong and accidentally mistake you and Jack as anything other than what you are—partners, lovers, boyfriend and girlfriend—all of the labels that Jack loves so desperately. He’d seen it one too many times how something would overtake you, and your glare wasn’t nearly as soft as it was with him when you decided to put them in their place for getting it wrong.  

You were never sorry about it either afterwards.

Jack finally gives in, letting himself become pliable under your touch and move with you. His hands tighten around you, and it’s not much at first. Just a little sway from side to side. And you’re laughing, the sound so melodic like a siren call.

“She spilled some drink on me. And now I’m knowin’ she tipsy

She put her body on me.”

Your cheek brushes his whenever you turn your head, and now he’s laughing too, aware of how uncoordinated he is trying to grind into you. But you don’t seem to mind. You never seem to mind, going so far as to hike one leg high up on his thigh. 

Your center presses against his again, and at this angle he can feel all of you through your pajama shorts.

Jack’s breath hitches, his palm slipping around your leg to hold it there. But he’s still smiling because shit, you really are a brat. Supposed to be unpacking with the few days he has off, not getting him all hard and worked up like this. 

But then your eyes drop to the couch, and your movements come to a full-fledged stop, and a soft groan escapes from his lips. 

“Hey!” 

Jack’s nose brushes against your temple before following where you’re looking. 

“That’s mine.” You’re pouting, brows furrowing up at him almost like he’s betrayed you.

He glances down at the sweatshirt, then back at you, blinking and trying to ignore the fact that he was fully hard against you. 

“Oh, is it now?” Jack asks, raising a single brow as he slides your leg back down.

He reaches over and picks it up. 

“Yes, it is.” You reply, nose brushing his this time. 

A second later, you’re ripping the sweatshirt out of his hand, and Jack lets you take it after he notices the twitch in your jaw at how tightly he was holding onto it. Then you’re stepping back, your skin peeling away from his as you clutch the fabric flush against your chest instead—almost like you’re afraid he’s going to try and take it from you.

Jack’s ready to tease you again, but the words never land as you suddenly reach for your striped sweater and pull it up and over your head, taking your tank top underneath with it. His mouth goes dry, his lower half stirring beneath the fabric of his sweatpants, as beneath all of that is the thinnest, poorest excuse of a bra Jack has ever seen.

The straps are slipping off your shoulders, threads loose and tickling the bare skin of your torso, and it looks like it’s about two sizes too small. 

Before Jack can even reach for you, though, you’re pushing his hands away and sliding the sweatshirt up and over your head. It hangs loose on you, the worn cotton falling nearly to your thighs. 

Jack looks down. 

Then back up. That image of you in his kitchen over a year ago appears again. Your bare thighs, the way your mouth molded against his. How he fucked you over the island.

He’s smirking down at you again, his arms crossing over his chest, shirt tightening just enough to catch your eyes. He’s smirking because you’ve been hiding it from him. Probably only wearing it at your apartment, maybe even with your friends, but never with him because you’d acted like a straight-up thief stealing it after the first night you ever wore it. 

“Missing something, Swiper?” Jack asks, hazel eyes dark now and locked on where the sweatshirt swallows your bottoms.

Your brows furrow in confusion, but then you follow his gaze down toward the pastel-colored pajama shorts peeking out beneath the sweatshirt. The twitch in your jaw loosens, and your brows flatten, and like you hadn’t been annoyed with him before, a knowing smile spreads across your face. 

“Maybe.” 

You were just as pliable as Jack is, it seems.

Because within seconds, you’re reaching for the waistband and slipping them down your legs. You step out of them and kick them to the side. And just when Jack thinks you’re going to stop, so caught up in the way you look, and wondering if you have any underwear on, you’re slipping your arms in through sleeves.

A few seconds later, your bra drops out from under the sweatshirt and onto the floor with the rest of your clothes. Your arms slide back into the sleeves, and Jack suppresses a moan at the sight of the small threaded bra lying between the two of you. 

It’s too good to be true. 

Because there’s no way he’s not only moving in with his girlfriend, but she’s strip-teasing him to 2000s R&B that Jack hadn’t listened to in about twenty years. 

Fuck, you’re perfect.

Stepping back into his space, your hands guide his back to your hips, the worn material soft under his palms. Your hot breath collides with his, and you hum in satisfaction when you can feel how hard he is between your legs.

“Just the reaction I was looking for,” you say. “I must really look better in it if it has you staring like this.”

Jack’s shaking his head then, trying to release his lower lip from where it sits tucked in between his teeth as his hands wander again. Waist. Hips. He grabs a handful of your ass.

“No,” he says, voice coming out all gravely. 

You look at him, a single brow raising. “No?” 

“Actually, I’ve decided I want it back.” Jack tries to keep a straight face as his other hand dances along your bare thigh. Your breath stutters as his fingers dip tracing the skin like it’s the most precious thing he’s ever touched. 

When his fingers meet the bottom of the sweatshirt, he pinches the lower hem between his thumb and index finger, smirking at the way you feign a gasp. That soft glare returns as your hands do some wandering of their own. Down his shoulders. Biceps. Over his chest.

Leaning forward again, your nose brushes his, lips whispering against his. “You can’t have it back.” 

No mercy. 

Your eyes light up when Jack’s lips part in shock. 

“It’s mine.” 

“Not anymore.” 

He shakes his head, but he’s still smiling as you push him towards the couch. The back of his calf and the metal of his prosthetic hit the plush of it, and he falls back under the small force of your palms. A small noise slips out of him as you climb on top of him, straddling his wide hips, the sweatshirt riding up ever so slightly to reveal more of your soft, tight skin. 

“That’s not how ownership works,” Jack huffs as you settle against him, your weight dropping down on his cock that’s starting to ache. 

“Pretty sure it is,” you argue, arms circling his neck as you give a small roll of your hips against his. 

“Oh, fuck,” Jack whispers under his breath, head tipping back to rest against the back of the couch.  

“See?” Your lips brush the corner of his mouth again. “You’d hate to never have me like this again.” 

Jack laughs, softly against your lips, hands settling more firmly around your waist. He catches your stare, the way your eyes are just as blown out as his, your bottom lip coated in a fine line of saliva from where you’d been chewing on it. And there’s a heat that’s evident across your skin—the alcohol warm and pooling in the base of your stomach, giving you the most delightful buzz and need to be filled. 

By him specifically. 

“You like wearing my stuff?”

“I do.” You mumble, kissing him deeply this time. Your tongue’s wet and wanting as it dives into his mouth and licks through it. 

You melt into him, hips speeding up, the thin material of your underwear underneath sliding up and down his shaft with only the fabric of his sweatpants operating as a barrier. You fist at the fabric of his shirt, pulling him as close as you possibly can, chest meeting his as the feeling of him rolling against your puffy clit sends shock waves down your spine. 

“And you like that I do?” You ask, and it’s so innocent-sounding, but he knows it’s anything but when you pair it with a soft smirk, hands lacing into his curls right above the nape of his neck. 

Jack looks at you for a moment, how your lips are flush and beginning to swell. Your chest rises and falls against his as sweat beads across your skin under the sweatshirt. His hands slide up further, past your upper thighs and your hips where the thin lace of your underwear clings. It taunts him, because those aren’t moving-in kind of underwear. Those are I want you to fuck me underwear. 

And suddenly Jack wishes he still had his pocketknife in his pocket so he could cut them off of you 

“I like it more when I get to take it off,” he finally admits, warm fingers pressing into your sides, hands splayed completely across the outline of your ribs. 

Your eyebrows lift in interest, a smile of yours returning that’s going to unravel him right then and there. Closing what space is left, your lips trace the outline of his ear, a smile forming as his hands tighten around you. 

“Well, Dr. Abbot. I think that can be arranged,” you whisper. 

Somewhere in between your hips grinding over his bulge and your teeth nipping at the lobe of his ear, the sweatshirt becomes bunched up and around your waist. You lean down to capture Jack’s lips again. Languidly. Deeply. Tasting them like it’s the last time. 

As if you hadn’t just moved in with all these boxes, your name written on every one. 

Jack whimpers in your mouth as your lips part from his to trace a path to his jaw, kissing his freckled skin softly. They trail lower toward his neck, and you press another right over his pulse point. Jack’s hands tighten around your ribcage, dragging you up and down his length, desperate to hear you. 

To have you. 

He doesn’t even hear the song change or what’s even playing anymore as he starts to feel you finding a rhythm against him. 

But then your head is lifting, and you’re whispering against his mouth like it was a secret just for him. “Boom, boom, boom, boom. I want you in my room.”

Jack blinks, laughing softly. “Excuse me?” 

You peck his lips once and then twice more. “It’s another song I like. I have a playlist.”

“For what?" He asks incredulously, looking down at his much younger girlfriend in his lap. “Fucking?”

And he knew you had him right where you wanted him. Because when it came to you, it never took too much with Jack. Bat your lashes. Suck on your lips. Tease him—the meaner the better. Pout only if it’s required. 

All it took. 

“I guess it could be.” You whisper against his lips, eyes locking with his as a small smile forms at the corners of your mouth. “If you want.” 

And Jack didn’t think he could possibly love you more than he did at that moment. And he knew he could never feel undeserving or unsure of himself again when every day going forward—he’d get to have you like this—actively dancing pressed against him and stripping to songs he’d plan to fuck you into the mattress to later. 

You, his girlfriend, so young; it was controversial to anyone outside of this apartment, this relationship, you and him. But Jack didn’t care; he couldn’t because all of this love had him planning out the rest of his life like how a planet orbits the sun. 

And you were crazier. Not about him – well. Also about him. But crazier as a baseline condition, a factory setting. You’d woken him at three in the morning by sliding one of his eyelids open with your thumb because you’d dreamt that he was texting another woman and needed to check his phone while the wound was still fresh. He’d handed his phone over, half-blind, and you’d scrolled through it sitting on his stomach. When you found nothing, you’d flopped down onto his chest and gone straight back to sleep. 

It was, frankly, a lot of crazy to be on the receiving end of, and Jack – who’d spent much too long being the most even-keeled, unbothered man in most situations – had taken one look at your little feral devotion pointed square at him and thought that yes, he wants in on all of that.

He would gladly take that your whole storm wrapped up in a package, had done just that, and was not planning on letting go. 

Being loved by you was full-contact, hands-on, and all consuming. You bit and you climbed him on the kitchen while he was holding hot pans; you pulled his face around by the jaw when you decided his attention wandered. He let you, always, going soft-eyed and pliant the second your hands landed on him, and had long ago stopped pretending otherwise. 

That wasn’t to say that he hadn’t had his moments, especially when it came to his girlfriend. He was, in all senses of the word, protective over you.

He’d known enough men – had been a different man through each decade – to know that you in the wrong hands would have ruined someone, like you had him.

He’d considered himself lucky to have your devotion – a thing so pure, presented with such ferocity – pointed at him. The thought of it being pointed at someone else made him sick simply because he knew how difficult it was to not fall in love with your claws. He knew how it felt to have you scruff him by the collar and inspect him for another woman’s perfume that even you knew did not exist, how it felt to be counted and guarded and kept, and he knew there was no single man alive who could feel that and walk away sane.

He’d take a bullet before he let anything happen to you and consider it a fair trade.

Jack was nothing less than smugly, bone-deep, sure of you. And a man that sure, holding a jealousy that pretty, developed habits. He’d learned (through research he’d conducted, very selfishly, for his own benefit) exactly which levers produced the show.

A waitress lingering around him for a second too long; a squeeze of your hand going tight in his, and him spending the next thirty minutes in the parking lot outside the restaurant making up for another woman’s slow legs.

Mentioning, idly, that a pharmacutical rep had been ‘friendly today’; good for a whole evening of you cross-examining everything about him, her, her tone, his response. 

He knew the difference between small provocations and the premium ones, and he deployed them the same way he planned date nights. He would’ve gone as far as to say they were date nights, impromptu, functionally; every match he struck brought him an evening of you staking your claim with both hands, and then the long, sweet business of being claimed. 

He’d never once found the bottom of it. He’d never once thought to even look for one, where the jealousy cut off and turned inward. It had never once pointed that direction. Your claws faced outward, out at the world, never once you, carrying them.

He didn’t know there was a depth where that happened. It was why he poked the proverbial bear. 

When he’d gotten off his shift at seven in the morning, tugging his bag over his shoulder, he’d leaned his hip against the driver’s door and opened your texts. Some people had a cigarette after a shift. Jack had you, delivered in installments, and he stood there in the cold biting down his smile as he scrolled through the night’s yield.

( a photo of a cat that lived outside the bar; a voice memo at 1:30 he already knew was you narrating something you’d decided was urgent; a link to a lamp with no explanation, which meant ‘buy me this lamp’ (he did, immediately, Apple Pay and its joys of quick payment); a text at 2:47 that just said that your feet were cold; and finally, a goodnight! i love you! sent at 3:15 am )

He’d thought, not for the first time, that he was genuinely a lucky bastard.

After years of pagers and reports and envelopes, somewhere his correspondence had started to include a nightly paper trail proving that somewhere in Pittsburgh, you moved through your night with him present in it. They were simply dispatches you sent because things weren’t fully real to you until he’d been notified.

A man could be told he was loved a hundred ways, but there was no proof on earth like being your first call about nothing. 

If he were a better man, he would have told you about the name that had popped up on his message thread under yours the second he’d unlocked the phone – right there, sandwiched between your goodnight and a spam text about his car’s warranty, a name he hadn’t seen light up his screen in the better part of a decade. 

Diane: Hey stranger. In town next week for a conference - would be good to catch up if you’re around. Coffee? It’s been too long. Hope life’s treating you well. 

It was a strange sort of vertigo of a past life reaching out to tap him on the arm. Diane – Jesus. He hadn’t thought about her in years; it’d been long enough that the name landed without a hook. It was a faint mothball smell of a version of himself he’d long since folded up and put away. No, he had felt near to nothing for her name for the only one that popped up in his head was yours. 

Jack had spent months getting fat and happy on your jealousy; he’d learned there was no sweeter sound than you getting worked up over nothing.

Jack had, right there in the parking lot, a plan because Diane was – he’d assumed, for you – not nothing. No, Diane had history, and it was a real, verifiable history. If a stranger’s coffee order could get you draped over him like a bodyguard, then this – Jack immediately thought – was going to be a show.

Before he’d got in the shower to start his ritual of getting in bed with you – the shower, the hygiene of it all – he found you sprawled across the entire acreage of the bed with the blanket cycloned around your legs. He crossed over and crouched at the edge of you, heart beating gratefully at the sight, because this part couldn’t wait for hygiene. 

He settled for tucking the hair off your face – two featherlight fingers, hooking it back behind your ear – and your nose scrunched in your sleep before it turned into his hand.

“Hey,” he whispered, not to wake you (secretly hoping you would, anyway), and leaned in to press his mouth to your temple that made you make a tiny sound at the back of your throat.

Your fist unclenched from under the pillow and groped out blindly to his forearm, fingers curling around it without opening your eyes. 

Jack stayed crouched there a moment longer than his knee approved of, grinning down at you. 

“I know,” he murmured, working your fingers off his forearm one at a time and folding them back against your palm, pressing them there with a squeeze. “Ten minutes.”

When he tucked himself into bed beside you, arms instinctively falling over your waist to pull you flush against him, you were half-turning to him before you’d even surfaced. You made a tiny sound, unintelligible words – something about the temperature of his hands – and burrowed closer, one leg sliding under his waist and over the mattress, your cold feet immediately seeking out the warmest available part of him. 

“You’re cold,” you mumbled, not opening your eyes, wounded.

“I know, right,” he murmured, pulling you in closer to his chest. “You, though, are warm.”

You wrapped yourself tighter around him, hand finding its way under his shirt to flatten against his ribs. “You can borrow me.”

His hand moved up your spine, thumb catching each notch, and he pressed his cold nose to your temple just to feel you flinch and swat at him, which you did, gorgeously, with a wounded utterance of his name that made his entire body feel like it’d gone under the sun. “Missed you.” 

You smiled, tipping your face up, eyes still shut as your mouth searched. He met you there, pressing a slow, morning-soft kiss that just stayed. When you finally pulled back and sighed, boneless, he cradled you to him. 

“Hey, so,” he murmured, thumb still stroking your back, “old friend of mine’s in town next week. Reached out this morning.” 

“All your friends are old.” You hummed into his chest, still processing the words, and he felt your body still in his arms. “What old friend?” 

“Just an old friend, baby.” 

You lifted your head off his chest at that, one eye cracking open then the other, the sleep burning off you so quickly. He exhaled a sigh as he watched that beautiful, familiar spark catching behind your face. You propped your chin on his sternum and narrowed your eyes at him.

“This old friend doesn’t have a name?” 

“Mhm. Does.” He kept his face maddeningly neutral, thumb still sweeping your spine, savoring the little furrow in your brows and the way your hand had started gripping the side of his waist, staking a claim. He loved you. “Diane.” 

Your lips pursed as you processed the name, as if checking everything you know about Jack in real time. Then you shook your head a little, lips curving up into what he could only consider your angry-smile. “Who the hell’s Diane?”

“We go back a ways.” He shrugged easily, that confidence of having done this a hundred times and always getting sweet, sweet you packing up in him. “Dated, for a bit. Long time ago.” 

You took in a sharp inhale, snorting softly as your hands left him completely. He tried to bite down his frown from showing.

“Dated,” you said, through a small breath with wide eyes. “You dated and she texted you?” 

“She did.” Jack laced his hands behind his head and settled back into the pillow. “Wants to grab a coffee. Catch up.”

“Well, are you going?” You were up on your elbow now, the blanket pooling at your chest, as your brows went up to your hairline in thorough dissatisfaction. 

No, he wasn’t. The possibility hadn’t even crossed his mind. He’d read the text, and moved on to the far more interesting business of what it could do for this morning. The coffee itself was nothing; he had no interest in sitting across a woman who hadn’t crossed his mind at all to trade summaries of decades.

You existed. There was, now, no hour anyone could offer that beat an hour of you doing anything at all. 

He had sat through watching you decide whether or not you’d return a sweater for forty minutes; trying it on over and over again, the same sweater, then tucking it into parts of your existing clothes to test it (into jeans, out of jeans, under the jacket, sleeves shoved up, sleeves shoved down, “should i just cut the sleeves off?” with the scissors already located, and he’d told you “do the crime and you can’t return it,” and watched you reconsider, setting the scissors down). You’d kept it and worn it while sitting on the couch for the rest of the day, then never again. 

“Thinkin’ about it,” Jack said, hooking a lazy finger into the strap sliding off your shoulder and tugging it back up, a tending gesture entirely at odds with the trouble he was stirring. “Just coffee, angel. She’s only in town a few days.”

“Well, your girlfriend is in town all days,” you said, swatting his hand away. “You can’t just get little catch-up coffees with women you fucking dated, Jack. That’s not – it’s not a thing people in relationships do.”

“No? But it was so long ago.” 

You’d pulled yourself upright now, cross-legged in the sheets, the blanket in your lap and the one strap already sliding down again. “Doesn’t matter, Jack.” You jabbed a finger at his neck. “You’ve got a girlfriend. A very good one –”

“Best one I’ve ever had,” Jack agreed, catching your finger and kissing the tip of it, entirely pleased. “I like her. Love her, even.”

“Then why think about it at all?” you asked as he tucked a piece of hair behind your ear, thumb grazing your cheek. 

“Just surprised, baby,” he said, shrugging. “We go way back. Before your time. It was – a real thing, for a while.” 

Your eyes quickly flickered down to his chest, mouth opening, then closing again. “How long were you together?”

He clicked his tongue, brows furrowing as he genuinely tried to reel back the memory. It was funny the way time did that.

“Couple years,” he murmured. “Give or take, three. Yeah. Around three.”

Your eyes had gone slightly wide as you looked at a spot on the blanket with your bottom lip tugged between your teeth.

“Three years,” you murmured, more to yourself than him, huffing slightly through your nose. 

Your eyes flicked up to him, and Jack’s hand went still against your spine. They eyes were wide, glassed, and lost, blinking up at him with some unguarded confusion. You looked at him the way you did when a word went missing on you mid-sentence (your fingers snapping restlessly at the air like you could catch it, ‘you know the one, Jack, the word – the – the thing,’ while he supplied guesses just to watch you swat them away), except there was no word being hunted now. 

“That’s – a long time, right?” you asked him then, tilting your head to the side, looking at Jack like he had some sort of conversion chart on what three years were ought to weigh. 

Jack’s eyes landed on your fingers tugging closer to him on the blanket, not landing on him. They stopped an inch short of his ribs, curling back into themselves. 

His eyes went from your fingers, to your face, which was still waiting for his answer. He sucked in a small exhale, buying a second, though he couldn’t have said for what. 

There was some low-grade, humming static on his skin, and he forced himself to override it, because you’d asked him so gently, and he always answered your questions. You asked him things at all hours, in all states, with your mouth full, from the other room, half-asleep on his shoulder blade.

( What’s the worst thing you ever ate? You’d help me hide it, right? What’s your favorite planet? If we were both dogs, who’d be walking who? Am I the funniest person you know? Would you still love me if I couldn’t talk, only hum? Who taught you how to drive? ) 

He’d answer every single one thoroughly, treating them all like he would’ve a question for boards, because early on he’d discovered your asking was an act of love; you collected his answers, kept them somewhere in that beautiful head, stored him. Nobody had ever wanted his mind so thoroughly before. 

So when you asked, he answered.

It was who Jack was to you. It was maybe his favorite thing to be, just Jack. Jack and all the little things he thought about all the little things he’d given little to no thought to. 

“Felt both long and short, if that makes sense,” Jack mused, wandering back into it, because you’d asked and the memory was a harmless thing to ignite. It was cold hearth, ash-dead, nothing in it did a single thing to a single fold of his brain.

“We took some trips – did two weeks through Italy one summer.” He shook his head slightly, blowing out a short breath at that fact of his life. “And her sister’s wedding in Maine.” 

“Italy,” you said, lips curving around the little word. Your eyes flicked down to his chest, then his torso. “You went to Italy?” You breathed in softly, and your head tilted again. Jack wondered if this was where the claws came out – Italy. “I didn’t know that.” 

“Lots you don’t know about my misspent youth,” he said, lips curling in a casual smile. His fingers reached out then to catch yours and folded them in his palm, bringing them up to his mouth to press a kiss to the knuckles. 

“What was it like?” you asked, brows rising slightly. “I’ve never – I don’t really know what it’s like there.”

“Rented this Fiat, did the coast. Amalfi, Positano – she had the Italian, so she handled the talking. I just drove and pointed.” A huff moved through his chest where he’d trapped your forearm. “She’d order. I’d eat whatever showed up.” 

He waited for the strike. She ordered for you? Then your fingers would go to his throat. Nobody orders for you. What did she order? Was it good? 

Your lips had made this small shape of an ‘o’ as your eyes had snagged on him as he spoke, criss-cross and those small inches away from him on the bed. 

“What’d she – where’d you even find the time?” you said through a short laugh, shoulders coming up slightly.

“We’d come out of residency and the schedules just –” He’d left your fingers for a second to lace his own loosely over his chest in the air, two combs of a zipper missing. “Lined up.” He retrieved your hand automatically, repocketing it to him. “Traded calendars at the start of the month, find the overlap. Italy was a big overlap we got lucky with. Had a little cash for once, and somebody said to go now or never go.”

The word ‘residency’ had barely left his mouth when he heard you take in a small inhale, your lips jutting out slightly.

Now? Jack wondered dumbly. Now you’d get mad, say something territorial, something pretty and unhinged about schedules. I’ll make your schedule. He readied his face for it, schooling the grin down in advance so you wouldn’t catch him enjoying it. He also would have let you make his schedule, had you asked, even though he wasn’t sure how that would’ve worked. He’d have found some compromise between his job and you. He’d have nodded along solemnly, and asked you when it was effective.

“I didn’t know you’ve been to Italy,” you murmured, almost musing, as your eyes went to the desk beside the bed, past his shoulder. He followed your gaze to the little basket where you kept your folder of documents he’d made you organize last spring. 

“Long time ago,” Jack said, because it was. It was a very long time ago, and he felt the need to clarify that. He didn’t know why he was elaborating like he’d been accused. He hadn’t. You hadn’t accused him. “Very long time ago.”

His palm tightened over your fingers – a small, reflexive press – and got no answering flex back.

Your fingers lay there in his hand, warm, accounted for – like Jack always needed them to be – but absent. Jack found himself pressing again, interrogatively this time, you in there?

“That’s –” you started.

Jack’s eyes snapped back you again, like a dog hearing it’s name. Your mouth twisted, working like you were deciding on a seed and what to do with it.

You gave a small shrug – one shoulder, half-mast – and reached over with your other hand to roll a little lint of fluff off the blanket around your finger.

“That’s really far to go with someone,” you said, softer. “Italy. That’s like – a whole thing to do.”

“It was,” he said, absentmindedly, though, as he watched you.

There was something about the set of you he didn’t quite like, though he couldn’t have said what. The way your shoulders had come in a little? The way you seemed all gentle and docile now, when a minute ago you’d been jabbing him in the throat?

Jack prided himself on knowing you; he’d taken it up as a personal study. Your spine, usually all insolence, all sprawl, had gone considerate. Even your knees, criss-crossed under the sheets, had tucked in closer. 

“You okay, baby?” he asked, feeling that need to poke at it directly.

“Mhm.” You nodded quickly and looked up at him with a smile.

His fingers immediately reached up to settle under the hinge of your jaw, as if to hold your smile there, thumb laid along your cheek.

“Yeah, I just didn’t know it was – so serious. That’s all. I thought it’d be, like, some girl you dated a few months.” You let out a little breath of a laugh. “Not an – Italy person.” 

Jack’s brows furrowed. He didn’t really know what an ‘Italy person’ entailed, but he didn’t like how it sounded in your voice. 

You sometimes said things that made him want to burrow into your mind. They were little nothings, coinages, a whole private mint going on up there.

( It feels like a July day, when it was very clearly December and you were snowed in; he’s looks like a Tuesday guy, about a stranger at the DMV on a Friday; my feet are homesick, which turned out to mean you wanted to go to the beach, and also somewhere deserted sometimes, and a hike. ) 

He never asked you to translate. Half the time, it was impossible for you to do so, anyway; the words just arrived to you whole, and he’d learned to hold them up in the light until they made sense.

They always made sense, for there was always a ‘you’ inside of them. And he’d found that whatever came from you, it was worth keeping to dig into. 

( Sometimes, it made sense days later. Like when you’d said, one night in the car, engine off, “I like you when you park.” 

He’d laughed and asked, “As opposed to what?”

You’d had no answer, but he understood, days later, that you liked Jack in-between things. You liked him with the engine off, day done, night not started, with nowhere to be just yet.

He supposed it meant you liked the little pockets of nothing that every life has and nobody claims; idling, as opposed to mid-shift, the one where there was no overarching function making him do something. He’d found he liked those little pockets of nothing, too. )

He supposed that ‘Italy person’ would turn out to mean something exact, too. 

He waited, again, for the claws. What am I, then? with a finger at his chest, and he’d catch the finger and kiss it again and tell you what you were – everything – and you’d pretend it wasn’t enough, and demand he phrase it better, and he would.

Jack would phrase it better then better than that, mouth at your knuckles, your wrist, working up the arm between clauses. 

Mine, obviously, don’t be stupid. You’d hum, and he’d say it slower – mine, ob-vi-ous-ly – and you’d call him useless, and somewhere you’d end up bickering about whether Italy even had good food. He’d take your side on, traitor to decades in under a minute, and your sulk would die of neglect without either of you watching it. 

“I don’t know what that means, sweetheart,” he said, trying to force a casual smile through a small, chuckle. He shook his head confusedly. 

Your lips pressed together as you shrugged. “I don’t, either. Not really,” you said.

Before Jack could respond, you reached over and patted his chest twice and said, “Long night?” 

It took Jack a second. He heard actual sound, cogs audibly changing gears, because you’d been in Italy, and now you were in his shift, and the border between those two had been crossed with no warning. He’d been asked this normal question a thousand times; it was a fine question, a normal one. He’d answered it a thousand normal ways.

“Uh, yeah – middling,” he said, hand now coming to find your waist where you sat and tugging slightly, getting you back down into him. “Don’t wanna talk about the shift, though.” You landed against his chest and his chin fell to your head, some unscripted instinct in him kicking in. “Wanna talk about you.”

“Me?” You laughed slightly. “Nothing to report here.” 

“Disagree.” His hand started running over your spine, pressing his mouth to your hair for a second, breathing you in. “Missed you today,” he said, almost in a whisper. “Listened to your voice memo twice on the way back.” 

“Really?” 

His arm tightened around you, bring you up closer to his face, where he could reach your temple without any work. He pressed one, then another, and another kiss against them slowly, mouth lingering against your skin on the last one as he waited. For what? He had no idea. 

Your hand traveled up from his ribs to his jaw, cupping it, then running your thumb against the stubble once against the grain, the way you liked. It usually came with commentary (you’d make such a good beach, Jack; this is my favorite texture on earth; Jack, keep it like this always) and tonight he got none of it.

Jack turned his mouth to it on reflex and pressed a kiss to the middle of your palm, and felt your fingers curl slightly on the contact, gathering the kiss like you were keeping it. 

“Love you,” you murmured. “Go to sleep, Jack.” 

“Love you, too,” he said.

He couldn’t ignore how you’d practically shut off right in front of his eyes. So, he asked, “You tired?” he asked, feeling some base need to clarify.

“Yeah,” you whispered between your faces, and you did sound tired. Tired, Jack knew how to work with. 

“Good,” he murmured, softer, relieved to hear it was that. “We’ll be tired together, then we won’t be tired.” 

Your breath billowed softly over his mouth, something like a laugh, and his hand slid down to your arm to find your hand, tucking the whole laced knot of it down between your chests where it lived. Your head ducked slightly to go under his, burrowing in his neck, and he smiled as his chin came to rest at the top of your head. 

“Sleep,” he said gently, with all of the command he could muster whilst three-quarters gone himself. “We’re gonna sleep the whole day away.” 

You did. Sleep – that is. Or stayed in his arms until his breath went long and even and unmistakably out. When you were sure – when that deep untroubled weight of him told you he was really under – you extracted yourself out of the bed.

You didn’t want to, but sleep wasn’t coming easy with Jack tonight. It sucked; sleep always came easy to you with Jack. Getting out from under him, too, wasn’t easy. He slept like he meant it now, all of his weight poured over you, one heavy arm slung across you like a seatbelt. 

You lifted his arm by the wrist, an inch at a time, and slipped out from underneath it. He stirred and made a rough sound of protest and reached for the warm gap you’d left, patted once, then again, searching, and you winced at the sight of it.

You hurriedly fed your pillow to his arms and watched him gather it against his chest, watched him settle, thinking it was you. 

You should have gone outside now, like you’d planned, and instead you leaned in over the mattress, drawn back down by some law you had never once repealed.

Because – even now – you couldn’t leave Jack Abbot undecorated, you weren’t functioned that way.

Every time you left his vicinity, you’d paid a toll at the door; a kiss to the knuckles, the shoulder, the one time you pressed his closed eyelid so gently he’d told you about it during breakfast, thinking he’d dreamed of it, that it’d felt nice.

You picked the stubbled jaw and pressed the smallest kiss there for half-a-second, and he hummed just as you leaned away. His arms pulled the pillow tighter.

You felt heat build up behind your eyes at it. Jack was, somehow, reassuring you unconsciously, four fathoms down. You blinked at the ceiling, because this was just Jack sleeping with a pillow. Normal girls do not cry about things like this. 

When you successfully made it to the kitchen to make some coffee, which you didn’t end up making, you scrolled through your phone absentmindedly for a few minutes.

Your teeth were digging into your lower lip, and you were sure they could’ve left a permanent dent on them because of how long you’d been sitting on the countertop next to the coffee 

You were being mature. You were being so very mature about this.

Any second now, the maturity would kick all the way in and you’d feel it; the maturity, the security, the calm, grown-up ease that’d let you hear about your boyfriend’s beautiful doctor ex-girlfriend and their beautiful accomplished Italian holiday and simply nod. Maybe you’d be glad he’d had love before you, had something great enough it’d taken a tour across oceans.

You wouldn’t be this.

She was three years to your year.

You’d been counting since the bed, some sick little voice in the back of your head clicking away – that’s longer than you, so much longer, it’s double! and then one more!

She got a whole coast and you? Every time you tried to set the voice down, it just picked itself back up and started again.

You had – after a year – found the one proof that you’d always been, cruel-to-yourself, looking for. Jack Abbot had lived a life before you, several lives, and he’d had love.

So much time she’d had with Jack.

When you reached for your enormousness, for the claws, for the whole arsenal, you found your armor completely empty.

She predated you; you had no way to be big at her. You couldn’t bodyguard Jack from his own past, though you wished he’d have been a bodyguard to it from you. It was an insane thing to wish. All he did was answer your questions, because you’d come knocking.

An unfair, childish, foolish part of you wished he’d lied and decided the truth was too heavy for you and carried it himself. 

She had Jack, and she let him go. You could hardly let Jack go for the length of a shower. You’d have died.

What did she know that you didn’t? What was it like, being a woman who could afford to lose him? She’d walked away from Jack and was whole; if you’d lost Jack, there’d be nothing left.

You knew it was dramatic, that it didn’t work that way. It wasn’t true, but it sure felt like it. Jack had filled your life completely, and you didn’t ever want that space ever again.

Nothing about that is romantic. You’re just a girl who bet everything she had on the first big thing she saw. 

Jack had lived a whole entire grown-up love – the real kind, the serious kind – with her.

Your cruel brain wondered if there were others. You’d never heard about Diane before, what was one more name he’d never mentioned? He had decades you knew nothing about.

It all happened before you’d ever set your eyes on him and thought he was the only man that existed. It had happened before you’d seen him and thought he could be the one, then wished that he would be the one. He’d had that before.

You’d always known that, abstractly. But the idea of years and years of Jack being loved by great women who understood his work, women his own age, women who’d been there for parts of him you never got to meet. That a door swung open all the way tonight. 

You were the latest in a line you didn’t even know the length of.

You’d never even thought about Italy – it was so far away, and you didn’t even think you’d said the country’s name out loud until tonight.

Italy was – you always thought – a thing that happened to other people. It happened, you understood, to Jack. Not your Jack, another woman’s Jack, back when he was somebody’s whole future instead of their past.

He had been loved over there. He'd been to Maine with a family who’d probably thought he was the one.

You were holding the frayed end of a rope whose length you’d never wanted to measure, because you’d assumed stupidly, sweetly, that the rope started when you’d grabbed it, that Jack began the night he met you.

Stop. You’re being crazy – like always. A part of you always had known Jack liked getting a rise out of you, and you liked giving him one. Get a rise out of him, the petty, young part of your brain supplied. 

You laughed softly to yourself, clutching your arms around your waist as you folded over, forehead dropping to your knees.

With whom? If you looked for ammunition, you found no Diane.

The guy before the last guy whose last name you couldn’t even remember anymore; a handful of small-time relationships that had lasted one season and ended not because they were wrong but because they were nothing.

You had no great, grown love in your belt that you cold hold up to the light and make Jack ache over. 

You had Jack. Jack was your Diane and Jack was your Italy – your three years, your coastline, and your entire globe, probably even more – the biggest love you’d ever had by a distance so vast it was hardly a competition.

Jack knew about your entire life and every supplementary information about you that held no weight on you, or only very little.

Jack knew about your first pet’s name, and its cause of death, and the movie you still couldn’t watch because of it. He knew your worst subject’s grade and, worse, the teacher’s name, and had once gotten angry at that man on your behalf.

He knew the reason you hardly talked to your family; he knew it all by now, because you’d kept handing out pieces over this year, and somewhere around the eighth month you’d realized he knew the story completely now. 

He’d learned it all, greedily, like each fact was worth having. You’d hand him a dusty nothing – a camp story, a recurring dream since seven, your opinion on cilantro – and watch it get written down somewhere behind his eyes. Weeks later, he’d produce it at the right moment. No cilantro, she hates it.

It had felt like Jack had opened your junk drawer and thought of it as treasure.

Your life was small and short enough to fit into his hands entire. It was a carry on. He held all of it and had room left over for more. You just didn’t have any more to give him.

Jack had finished reading you.

You’d been collecting him, too, greedy in your own right, thinking you were getting, at the very least, to the hallway. Now, you were wondering if you’d only just walked up the porch to the door.

You could produce Italy in your brain now; Jack against some sun-warm railing over water; Jack driving a little car on the wrong side of the road with confidence; Jack looking longingly at a woman who was speaking a language he couldn’t understand, holding him up.

Some parallel-Jack, out in the corner of your mind, who’d married the doctor.

Jack who was, right now, in some other version of this morning, drinking coffee, happy, whole, entirely fine. Jack, who was talking about some case from a journal – in his fluent doctor-language with someone who never needed the glossary – never pausing to translate English into – well, English. He was never smiling patiently and having to shrink his work down to a bedtime-story size like he did you. That Jack’s wife could meet Jack in the dark after his bad shifts instead of standing at the edge with a flashlight, calling in.

You couldn’t even imagine parallel-Jack lonely with something missing at his table. Your imagination – which loved him, which had only ever been able to love him – refused to even draw him sad. It kept handing you Jack complete; a whole finished Jack, out there in the corner of your mind.

This Jack’s completeness had to require your absence. It needed you to put yourself out of this world and into the crevice of your mind that hated you.

You had to widen your eyes on the floor. Your heels knocked the cabinet.

No. No. Your Jack – the real Jack – was thirty feet away and had never once been anything but certain of you.

Jack had never once not been certain of you. You were sitting on the countertop in his sweatpants right now. Your fingers were curled into the cotton of the pants, holding it like it was his hand, because Jack himself suddenly felt like too much to deserve.

You were getting homesick of him, getting jealous of women in your own head, grieving trips that had already happened, creating an entirely one-girl production in your mind that was only cruel to you, and the man who’d done nothing to put it there.

Go to him, you tried to tell yourself. Go to Jack. Wake him up. Talk to him.

He never turned you away. You had come to him with nothing, a whole lot of nothings, and he had never once turned you away. 

( You’d had a terrible dream that your childhood house was empty. It was the whole dream. You’d walked through it, room-by-room, and everyone was gone and the furniture was gone and your voice didn’t work. It was classic dream-physics. You’d woken up with shaky breaths, body tensing up over, well, nothing. Over the fact that the wallpaper was gone. You’d lain there for four minutes being reasonable about it, then you’d poked Jack. 

Poked him once, then again. Then again – his hand caught your finger, eyes still shut, reflexes working. He folded your finger in his fist and kept it there, on his chest as one eye dragged open, looked at the little digital clock, looked insulted, then looked at you. 

“What?” At your silence and the sight of your small pout as your body went still, both his eyes opened, everything in his face shifting around not making this worse. “What happened?”

“Bad dream,” you said, and because he’d wait all night without asking, you added, “My old house. Everything was just gone. It’s stupid, it’s not even –”

“Not stupid.” His arm had come up to haul you down onto his chest in a drowsy motion, your ear landing conveniently over the slow bass of his heart as his hand rubbed over your skin. “Empty house,” he murmured, clicking his tongue. “Yeah. That’s not a great one.”

He always agreed with you. Then, he added, “This place has got everyone we both need in it. Go back to sleep.” )

Your mind had, finally, gone quiet. Finally. Even it knew overkill when it saw it. 

Fuck, maybe you were fucking crazy. Jack should have gone running. If he had any sense, he’d have looked at you and walked calmly in the other direction. He hadn’t. He had stayed.

This morning your enemies included a hypothetical, a memory, and Europe al-fucking-together. 

He hadn’t let you go, you had to remind yourself. He’d kept you. Had, a few times, put a foot on the door to keep you there.

You slid off the kitchen counter to make your coffee, almost distantly. You made it this time, too. By the time the machine started its slow gurgle, you’d forced yourself to wrestle the whole thing back where it belonged, blinking your eyes clear and dry. It was the deal you’d made with yourself, you supposed, when Jack had said Italy and that she was a doctor, just like him. 

You weren’t going to be the crazy, young girlfriend who spiraled over an old flame. You were going to be so graciously secure about all of it that Jack would never, ever know the morning had touched you at all.

You’d nearly convinced yourself of it, too, as you settled on the couch with the mug on the little glass table beside you as you scrolled through your phone. Then, you’d heard the bedroom door, and the soft knock of crutches against the floorboards as Jack shifted his weight. 

You felt your heart drop at the sound of it, and had to force yourself to look up at the ceiling for a few seconds before he materialized, because you had never – not once – felt that feeling in your body in the three-sixty-five and a few more days you’d loved him.

No, you had to tell your body. We don’t feel this way for Jack. There’s no need to start now.

He came around the corner a second later, crutches under his arms and squinting against the light, hair flattened up on one side of his head from all of forty minutes on the pillow. His eyes swept across the room quickly and landed on you, face easing slightly.

“There you are,” he said, voice rough with sleep. He stayed there for a second looking at you, head-to-toe, checking. “Woke up to a pillow,” he said, one brow going up, dipping his chin at you in soft accusation. 

“Jack –” You pushed yourself up off, padding over to him on instinct, because you were you, it was now nine in the morning and he’d hauled himself out of bed after only one tiny blink of sleep after his shift. Every single step he was taking on those crutches was a step he shouldn’t have been taking. “What are you doing up? Go back to bed –”

“Could ask you the same, baby. You’re never up this early.” When you got close enough, his eyes immediately came down to yours and stayed, moving over slowly. Then, he flicked his gaze to the entirety of the living room behind you.

“You get lonely out here? Something wrong? Should’ve come got me.” he fired off at once, so quickly that your mind had to catch up to process it.

“Not lonely. Nothing’s wrong. You needed sleep – ” 

False. False. True. You were a liar more than half the time today, and you knew you were making this bed all by yourself.

“I need lots of things.” His hand came up off the crutch grip – balancing himself there on one – and reached out to you, knuckles first, dragging down your cheek slowly as his head tilted to look at you. The touch was so, so tender it almost undid the whole act you had running. “Sleep’s like – fourth.” 

You leaned into his hand before you could stop it, and his face flickered for a second – relief, there and covered – and his thumb pressed in to hold it, keeping it. 

“I just couldn’t sleep,” you said into his palm, because half-truths were easier to say to his palm. “You can, though,” you said quickly. “You worked all night. I’d already slept before you came home.” 

He appeared to weigh this, and when your eyes finally moved back to his face, it was tilted slightly to the side, lost. Like a dog, hearing a new sound. It was a new sound, you realized the second it left you. It sounded like exactly what you had decided you were going to be – reasonable and considerate – and you had never once been reasonable about Jack going to bed. Sending him off to rest, so generously, without you, sounded – to you and him both – like another person’s girlfriend talking. 

He took in a small breath, a chuckle dying in his throat, and his head dropped closer, the stubble catching in the light.

“Counter-offer?” he murmured. His hand slid from your cheek to the back of your neck, settling there. “Couch. Both of us. Nobody sleeps. Nobody does a single thing.” 

“Like gremlins,” you murmured. 

The crease in his brow lost a little bit of its altitude. “Exactly like gremlins, angel,” he said gravely, instantly. 

Your lips moved hesitantly, and your hands came up to his bare chest, pressing slightly. “You’ve been up all night, Jack,” you said through a short laugh, fingers skating around the breath of his chest to sit at his ribs, trying to turn him. 

“Stop it – please, no.” He stayed put, eyes flicking down to where your hands had come up and lips twisting in, what you could only describe as a snarl. “I’m not tired.”

It was such a bald, indefensible lie that you visibly shook your head at him. The evidence was all over his pretty face, the pretty, lying face. The curls were silvering mess flattened on one side and standing at attention on the other, and you had to physically stop your hands from going to them.

The morning stubble had come in along his jaw in that salt-and-cinnamon scatter you’d once spent a full minute petting against the grain while he sat there letting you, patient as a trained dog. Still, tired lived well on him. Everything lived well on him. You’d told him once, and he’d thanked you, because he’d found himself tired a lot and hadn’t quite found a way to ease it. He’d tried.

“Jack,” you tried, voice warming a touch.

“What?” he drawled, shaking his head at you now, like he was deciding to show how scandalized he was now by all of this. “I’m not allowed to sit with my girl?”

He started moving to the direction of the couch – crutches finding their rhythm – without giving you any time for defense. “Man works a night shift and isn’t allowed to sit with the prettiest thing he’s ever seen?” 

You huffed. “Thanks.” 

“Don’t thank me,” Jack called over his shoulder. “Come sit.”

You trailed after him, because what else could you do? Dig your heels in, tell him no? That would’ve been a tell the size of five fucking houses. The second you were in range, his arm left the cushion and hooked over your waist mid-step and hauled you onto his lap. Your yelp was swallowed by the drop, and you landed sideways across his thighs with his arm already snaked across your back. 

“Your leg, Jack – ”

“My leg’s thrilled.” His other hand collected your knees and folded them up toward his stomach, tucking you in closer, arranging you into the compact bundle he preferred, until you were sitting in the wide, warm bowl of him with nowhere to look that wasn’t him. His hand then came up to your back and pressed, instructively, until your cheek gave up and landed against his shoulder. He let out a long, slow breath at the contact, chin coming to rest on your hair. “There we go.”

You breathed in a lungful of air as you settled against him, his presence like fire and water over you right now. You were so scared of someday losing this, this exact thing. His chest hair scratching at your cheek; the weight of his head – carrying so much – on your head; the way he smelled like your soap because you’d asked him to once and he’d never gone back, and now this man walked around his emergency department smelling like pink fruit all day and let everyone at work deal with it.

It was so, so unbelievably simple to be with Jack, to be in this flowery presence of this gruff man, being his. Jack had come along and he’d made you put everything down – the checking, the second-guessing – and you had, you’d put everything down, and dumped both arms around his neck instead. 

“How do you wanna use our nights off today, hm?” he asked softly, moving his head to press a quick kiss to the top of your head. 

This was your event. You knew that was why he was asking, dangling it, because the planning was half the having for you and he’d learned to just hand you the whole day and watch you go. You always had opinions.

Before you’d tucked yourself into bed last night, you’d thought maybe you and Jack would go to the diner whenever you woke up, breaking fast in the afternoon like degenerates. 

Maybe the flea market afterwards, because Jack, at a flea market, haggled in such a nice, slow voice that made grown sellers fold like the lawn chairs they were selling. He’d followed you around from table to table for two hours, never once questioning why you were suddenly looking at doorknobs. You could’ve looked at gravel, and he’d have carried it. Then you’d come home, couch, a game on, his head in your lap – heavy, trusting, king of some small kingdom – while you messed with his curls.

It all seemed so unbelievably wrong now. It seemed nice at the same time, the same as before. But the diner. She probably never made him eat at diners. The flea market; she went to Positano. You had no idea what Positano even looked like, exactly. It was probably the most beautiful place on all of earth and Jack had stood in it, years before you existed to him, being well-loved, and you’d spent this morning secretly hoping it was ugly. 

You pressed your cheek harder into his chest and he hummed, appreciatively, and adjusted his arm to noodle you.

She got this, too.

You had to stop yourself from groaning at your own voice, from yelling at it altogether. The thoughts were just pushing you closer and closer to him, your cheek nuzzled against his chest, shifting slightly like the bare contact of his skin could just scrub it all out; your cure and disease were Jack. Every awful, awful thought sent you burrowing closer into his exact chest that had caused it, and he kept receiving you, warm and obliging, having no idea he, right now, was both your wound and bandage. 

You just wanted your day back. You couldn’t tell anyone how insane this was, least of all Jack. You’d have crawled inside his ribcage if it zipped.

You knew that Jack had been trying to get under your skin – you knew that he liked it – but you’d figured this game was one that was built for you to win. Every round was just Jack setting up an excuse to spend the afternoon demonstrating with his mouth, his eyes, his face, that there was no contest to even worry about.

Because you couldn’t very well go to Positano today, and because you suddenly felt like a kid handing over a macaroni necklace to someone who owned diamonds, you said, “I don’t know,” into his chest. “You decide.”

His thumb paused on your skin for a second, then it resumed.

“Me?” he murmured, chin tilting for a second to press his lips to the top of your skull again. “I wouldn’t have the first clue, angel.” 

“Try,” you said. 

He huffed slightly. “Alright, then. Bear with me – first day on the job. We stay here till noon, then the diner with your jams. Then that stretch by the river you like, lemonade from the good cart guy.” He squeezed your arm and pressed another peck to your head. “Home by dark and it’ll be the best outing in the world.” 

It sounded so perfect. You pressed your whole face down into his chest, even as you thought about how his outings were once grander, with people who’d done grander. With a doctor, no less. “Sounds perfect.”

For a moment, the two of you just breathed there. It may have been the fact that when it got quiet when you were with Jack – instead of quiet with just yourself – things seemed a little easier, but you found yourself saying, against him, “Jack?”  

“Yes?” he said instantly, chin lifting off your head and you felt his attention come down on you, whole and immediate, like he was summoned.

“Are you gonna get the coffee?” you asked. 

“Huh?”

“With her,” you said. “You know –”

Your words cut off as you shrugged, suddenly feeling stupid all over again. Saying it made it real again, and now you’d brought the topic to the couch. It happened on the bed, and you’d carried it to the kitchen, and now it was on this lovely couch. You were going to taint it all with it.

“You should probably go. To catch up.” You lifted your head up to meet his eyes, forcing your voice even. “I don’t mind.” It felt like it’d come out with steel; you almost winced at your own words. 

Jack blinked at you, then his head tilted, and the softest, most confused grunt left him. 

“Baby,” he started gently, amused, almost, reaching for the joke in it at first. His knuckles came up to brush against your cheek for one second. “I’m not going anywhere near that coffee – you’d have me chipped like a dog by Tuesday.” 

It was a gift, you could see his words wrapped and extended – him invoking your domestic insanity, holding it up like the reason the sky was blue – and all you had to do was accept it. The morning would become the, in all senses of the word, usual.

You would’ve preened at the portrait of you, and now you heard it from the morning’s new ears – he’s got an ex who speaks Italian and you think it’s fun to threaten him with 24 hour surveillance. 

“I wouldn’t, though,” you said quickly.

When his knuckles paused on your cheek, questioningly, you continued, “You should go. I won’t be mad at you.” Your lips pressed together for one second. “I promise.” 

Jack’s hands went to your hips and his jaw shifted from side to side, as he looked away from your face for a second. “Yeah. Okay. I’m not grabbing coffee with another woman.” 

“She came all the way. You guys are old –”

“Stop,” he interrupted with a laugh – disbelieving and no humor in it – as his head reeled back.

“Stop it – I don’t want this.” His hands flexed on your hips, then came up to wave in the general direction, then fell back down. He looked at you really, really upset, or baffled, or both. “Who cares how far she came? People fly places. I don’t want to have coffee with anyone.”

You shrugged, letting your head drop into his chest again. “If that’s what you want. You don’t have to do it because of me.” 

“I am absolutely doing it because of you.” His arm came around you, bringing you back close to him. “I’m not going ‘cause my girlfriend exists. That’s a whole reason. It’s a great one. So don’t talk me out of it.” He pressed his lips to the top of your skull. “Not your reason to give away. And you can get me chipped, if you like.”

You opened your mouth, then closed it. What could you even say to that? You felt him nod over you at the silence, felt some hesitance creep into his body, as he pulled you in. 

“Actually,” he said after a moment. “Let’s put a pin in the plan.” One hand lifted off you and made some small motion, you couldn’t see it but you felt the absence where it had been, before it came back. “We’ll do it tomorrow. Next week. River’s not goin’ anywhere.” His arm resettled around you, snugger than before. “Today we’ll stay in.” 

“Jack –”

“Blanket, couch, girl.” He counted your day off your spine, three soft taps of his fingers. When you made a sound of protest, his said into your hair, quieter, “I’ve got all I need. I’m not feeling the outside today. That okay?”

“No, it’s not – let’s go. I’m just tired right now. I’ll be up later.” 

You felt him breathe, then, the gust of air pooling into your hair.

“Then come to bed,” he tried weakly, and he sounded so broken you wanted to cry. You could hear him knocking at the door of you. “Sleep. Let’s sleep together, if you’re tired.”

“Not sleepy-tired,” you said, and heard how little it made sense even as it came out of you.

Then, you pushed yourself up off him, palms to his chest, trying to keep the motion casual. “I think I just need to wake up properly. Move around a little.” You stood, angling your face away, blinking fast as you looked at the dark TV screen. “I’m gonna get in the shower, if that’s okay?”

When you tried to look over your shoulder, he’d straightened up, palms falling down to his sides on the couch as he looked up at you. 

“Course it’s okay,” he said, hands following up then to settle for your hand, thumb passing over your knuckles. He gave your fingers the gentlest tug and pulled his head back, catching your eyes for a second before you could look away again, and the look on his face was so, so soft. “Do you want breakfast?” 

You nodded quickly. “Yeah – thanks.” 

He made a small sound, then pressed his lips to your knuckles, then let your fingers go one at a time. You made it four steps down the hallway with his gaze heavy on your back, and you couldn’t stand it.

There was a great, large, incessant bug in you that couldn’t stand Jack back there with his worried face and scared smile. So you half-turned over your shoulder, your eyes down at the baseboard, and called out, “Love you, Jack.” 

You’d told Jack you loved him at full speed, into his mouth mid-argument, into the phone before you’d even said hello, at grocery stores, at funerals, at red lights, six times a day minimum. It was the surest sentence you owned. This time, it went out like a paper boat, pushed onto the water with two fingers, and watched all the way across. 

“Love you, too,” he called back warmly, after what felt like a hundred years.

Jack had once spent a very, very long time to get you to believe that even if you held onto something good loosely, it won’t run away. He’d had to get you to believe that even if your grip on him loosened, even just for a second, even for a month, he would still be right there. Why was he feeling the need to hold you so tightly now? 

He set your plate at your spot, and his at his. He poured the coffee, saw the first coffee you’d abandoned on the counter, full and stone cold, and stood there looking for a second longer than the mug deserved.

He’d put on his prosthesis after plating the food, a part of him too large and hopeful – instead of its usual, content, un-worried hum – expecting you to come out of your shower wanting to do something, the diner, the river, after all, trying to change his mind.

He’d hoped you’d come out wanting to be carried somewhere on his back. He wanted to be ready, he always was now. He kept himself pre-approved for whatever you thought of next.

The inside of your head was a busy little harbor, boats coming in at all hours, and he’d been granted a standing spot on the dock. You’d let him become the first to hear about octopus, cats, furniture, which part of your body felt cold, warm, or lukewarm. A year of receiving your pretty cargo and he’d never once been bored. 

He, decades your senior, had seen the world be made interesting again by you just narrating it at him. He had the sneaking suspicion he’d follow your voice wherever it went, into traffic, a dock, into old age, and the shower.

The water kept running. He wasn’t the kind of man that’d track your showers, but years of working in emergency and emergency-adjacent situations had honed up his internal clock eerily well, smoothened out his pattern recognition.

He had to tamp down the urge to deploy it, to use this innate, terrible, awful instinct in his brain on you – you, who he felt more than monitored, who he’d only ever read with love, no grains of salt, no instruments. 

You were the girl who rearranged things in his cabinets by feeling and left in it a system he still couldn’t crack and refused to fix. Opening a drawer looking for a spatula and finding your hair ribbons had become one of the small startling joys of his one life.

He’d been a clinician for so long, and you’d built with him a corner of the world where he was just a man, holding a girl, and being completely in love with her.

Jack, bring me the towel even though it’s right there. Jack, come look at this bruise. Did I not wash out the conditioner out properly? Jack – Jack, Jack, come and just sit with me while I shower.

His knee bounced under the table, and he stopped it. 

Your eggs had gone cold, glossy, and began settling into themselves. The toast had lost its heat, and the jam sat unopened with its little lid on – the grape, the good one – and the jam was a small purple fact that he could not find himself liking to sit across from. You’d have opened it by now and started walking the length of the place, spoon in your mouth, talking. 

A year of you had taught him what mornings looked like when they were going right. He knew this one had gone wrong so quietly and terribly, that he’d been able to hold you the entire time it was happening. 

It was the bitter feeling of the surge he’d had in his chest this morning at the thought of your instincts.

He’d read a woman’s name off his screen and come home with it like it was a match to your pretty fire. He’d carried it into bed with you, and all Jack knew was that at this morning, his girl had been in his arms so sweetly, and minutes later, her fingers were hesitant to press into his skin. The only thing that happened in between was his own mouth, having fun. 

Jack wasn’t sure when he’d stood up, but he was walking to the bedroom now, to the ensuite bathroom. A year ago, this hallway had been a hallway. Now, it was a museum of you mid-motion, and he moved through it with his heart going at a pace he hadn’t earned sitting down, past the bed still holding the shape of the forgery you’d left him in, a pillow. He had to look away from it like the sun. 

He told himself that the bathroom door being closed was normal. Steam, privacy, nothing; all of it were real things. 

“Hey,” he said to the door lightly, knuckles going in two soft taps. It was the same knock he used with the you in the bath going pruny as he was happily serving you wine. “You fall asleep in there? S’been a minute.”

He tried to force his lips into something close to a smile even though there was a door between you right now.

Perhaps it was because Jack – even now, even morbidly confused – knew you, and knew that the door would be locked before he confirmed it with his shaky fingers. 

( You, who talked to him through the glass of the shower, sat cross-legged on the counter while he shaved – you missed a spot, no, the other spot, how do you have a medical license, genius – and stole his coffee between critiques and made him laugh hard enough he’d nicked his jaw and you’d gasped like the injured party, then kissed it before pronouncing him stable.

You, who had once flung the shower door open mid-rinse to tell him that you’d figured out what you both were in a past life. He never got to hear the answer. You’d seen him standing at the sink in his towel and lost the thread altogether, and the past lives were never mentioned again, and Jack had walked around for the next twenty-four hours unreasonably pleased about being distracting at his age to you. 

A door had, simply, never existed in your relationship. )

The key was right there. He’d put it there himself, two summers before he’d ever met you, the day the door had swung shut at its own draft and locked an empty bathroom. He’d forgotten it existed, but his hand went up and found it first try, blind, and came down holding this tiny cold thing. 

His fingers were unsteady fitting it in, which was new. He’d threaded needles into people in moving vehicles. Now, in his home, his fingers trembled over a privacy lock like a first year, because on the other side of the door was the whole of his one life, in falling water, hiding from him – him – and every second the key took was a second you sat in there believing you had to do so. 

“I’m coming in,” he said to the door, softer than an announcement this large should’ve been, like some part of him was afraid of the wrong reaction at your response to it. “Just me. I’m coming in, okay?” 

His chest caved – folded in on itself, turned over – because there you were, on the floor of the shower, curled up under the pour of the water, your knees to your chest and your arms wrapped around them, your face hidden down against them. His girl – the loud one, the strongest person he’d ever let himself love – made small and quiet and hidden on the floor of the shower. He had seen you in this place a thousand times and never once, not ever, like this.

“Oh – baby. No, hey –”

Your head snapped up at his voice, and just that sharp little movement of you made him tilt back slightly. Your face – wet and swollen, eyes red at the rims, gone raw and young and caught in a way he’d never seen it – did something terrible when it saw him in the doorway. It crumpled then hardened, both at once, a door slamming behind glass, and you scrubbed the heel of your hand over your eyes like you could take back the last thirty seconds if you were quick enough about it.

“No,” you said quickly, the word cracking out of you with a sharp edge under the thickness. Your hand came up between you, a flat little barricade under the steam. “No – get out, Jack – I told you I’ll be – please, get out –” 

You didn’t push him. This wasn’t a thing that happened. You pulled – you reeled him in by the shirt, you climbed into his lap, you fought tooth and nail for every inch of distance he’d tried to keep, whose entire love was a set of hands hauling him closer, closer, closer.

He had spent all this time being pulled by you, gladly, helplessly, and he did not have – had never needed – a single instinct for being pushed. 

“Hey – hey, no – don’t –” His hand came out to the glass, pushing slightly. “It’s just me. It’s me. Look –”

“I don’t want it to be you right now,” you said, and the words were so awful and completely jagged.

You turned to face away, like you were trying to push yourself out of his sight entirely. “Please. Please, just go and get out. I don’t want you here – please, Jack.” 

“No, don’t ask me that,” Jack said immediately, voice breaking clean in half as his eyes went glassy and desperate. “It’s me – you don’t hide from me – we’re not that –”

“Please,” you said, voice barely audible over the running of the water, and his nose burnt as he caught sight of you shaking. “Please, just give me a minute – a minute. I’m – I’m asking you to leave.” 

Jack’s hand hung empty in the air as he looked down at you, heart in actual pieces on the tile, and he understood – quietly – that the only thing you were begging him for was the single thing he’d have rather died than do, to turn around and leave you crying. 

So – because you’d asked, because pushing past a plea like that would only carve you open worse, because loving you had never once meant taking what he wanted when it wasn’t what you needed – he made himself.

“Okay,” he said, voice coming out in ruins. “Okay, baby. Okay. I’m going – I’ll go.” He reached up and took your towel off your rail and set it closer to the shower. “I’m right outside. I’m not far – I’ll be right there and you come get me the second you want me, you hear? The second.”

You stayed silent, so Jack, clumsy with grief in a way his body never was, made himself turn his back on you. At the door, he paused, eyes pinching shut to make himself not look over his shoulder. Instead, he said, “I love you.”

He pulled the door behind him, left it breathing half ajar with the steam sighing out through the gap, and pulled himself to sit at the edge of the bed, facing the bathroom. Like you were going to run from him, like some part of him needed both feet under him and the door in his eyeline needed to be ready. For what? He couldn’t have said. To catch you, he supposed. To get you the second you’d let him. To not be caught sitting down when you finally opened the door and needed him standing. 

He sat there with his elbows braced on his knees and his hands pressed together against his mouth and waited, and it was the longest ten minutes of his recent life.

Every second of it was stretched unbearably, because he was learning there is this particular hell in loving someone past all sense and being made to sit on the other side while they hurt. He didn’t know what to do with this feeling, had never had to think it was a possibility between the two of you.

When the door opened, Jack was on his feet before he’d decided to be. There you were, towel-wrapped, hair dripping onto your shoulders, face swollen and turned just slightly away, eyes on the floorboards. You crossed your arms over your chest, gripping the towel closed.

“Hey,” he said, breathing through it, his voice half-ruined, shaking. He caught it and hauled it down a register by force, into the very low, sure place his voice lived when everything depended on it.

He made himself stay planted – made himself open his arms instead of using them, wide, a whole doorway of him – while every muscle strained against its leash, because his body had exactly one theory about you crying and the theory was to go, and he stood on that theory with all his weight. 

“Come here,” he said instead, begging with a steady voice, a whole vacuum sealed into two words. 

Your eyes climbed as high as his chest and gave up there, arms tightening. You shook your head dimly, water flicking. He nodded to himself, made himself stay standing, without letting an ounce on his face where you’d have to carry it. 

“One step. That’s all I’m asking.” His arms turned palm-up at the ends of his open arms, still, though nothing behind his ribs was. “You don’t have to talk. Or explain anything. Not tonight, or ever. I’ll die curious – but I’m standing here figuring out I don’t work right until I know how you feel in my arms and I haven’t known for hours and I am asking you –” His voice strained, and the words came out bare, “ – Please, I am asking you to come let me hold you.” 

You let out a small sound, eyes pinching shut, and he watched a whole war happen on your face. Jack thought, uselessly, hopelessly, that he’d have stood there through a winter or as the building came down, holding a door ajar in himself for as long as doors took.

You crossed, though. Your body came to him hard, all at once, like you were dropped from a height, and Jack caught you with one arm crushed around your towel-wrapped back. The other flew to your wet hair, his palm rounding the whole back of your skull, pressing you into his heart, gathering you in and in and in, past where space existed, trying to find one more setting past where proximity itself existed. He let out a sound that was – dangerously – close to sob into your hair, finding himself completely undone for the first time in a very, very long time. 

“There you are,” he murmured, rocking you slightly as his mouth pressed to the top of your dripping hair. “I’ve got you. Got you now.”

You shook against him, and Jack winced at the feeling of it, gently reeling both of you down onto the edge of the mattress, then back, then over, until he had you sideways across his lap, your knees folded over his thigh, your face tucked into the crook of his neck, his arms locked around you like a cage. The towel gave up at under your shoulder, so he pulled the corner of the blanket up over the bare curve of it – wrapping you precious – and then his arm closed the last of the circuit and locked. 

For a while, he simply let his hand move up and down your spine while you cried into his throat, and every shudder that went through you went straight through him, too. He pressed his lips to your temple and left them there and rode it out with you, breathing slow on purpose, loud enough for you to borrow the rhythm off of his nose, an old medic’s trick he was running on the only patient he’d loved past all sense. 

Somewhere in the middle of it, with your tears running down his throat and pooling at his collarbone,

Jack thought, helplessly, that even this was somehow yours and somehow beautiful; you cried like you did everything, with your whole body, holding nothing residual, generous, so generous, even in grief. You’d never given him a partial anything, and Jack tightened his arms around the full, shaking entirety of you and thanked the universe, genuinely, that when you’d finally fallen apart, you’d walked the few steps and done it on him. 

When your crying wore itself down, Jack made himself stay silent. The questions, fully formed, seventy versions of them and redrafted since the kitchen, he swallowed, because he had a feeling he had pushed enough for one simple morning. He’d pushed this morning smiling. He held you and let the question live in him like a swallowed stone and, apparently, he was less subtle about it than he thought.

Your voice came up out of his neck, waterlogged and small, as you said, “I know you want to ask.” Your fingers moved faintly against his chest, a fidget with no strength in it. “It’s okay. You can.” 

Jack had to close his eyes at your first full sentence being a door held open for him; you’d crawled out of your own wreckage to check on the driver. 

“I do,” he said into your hair, honestly. “But I’m not gonna spend your turn. So here’s mine first.” 

He felt you go still against him – attention gathering, a tiny tilt of your head at his collarbone – and he breathed in heavy, big enough to lift you where you lay, to pay up. 

“I got really scared today,” he said, voice going into a whisper as he leaned down to talk to you. “I woke up to you not in my arms and my whole chest felt – wrong. I do this for a living, I’ve got all the words. It wasn’t – wasn’t sick. It felt wrong, you not being somewhere you’re supposed to be. First time in – forever, if I’m being honest.” He tapped you skin twice, to hold himself. 

“And when I found you, I couldn’t reach you. And now – seeing you –” He felt you stiffen up at that, and he nodded in understanding, skipping over. “I’m thinking of getting rid of all our doors.” His hand kept moving down your spine, and he faced your head then. “Bathroom’s the priority. Bedroom might be load-bearing, but. Front door stays. Everything else is beaded curtains by Friday.” 

You made a small sound against his neck, and Jack had to stop himself from crushing you into the tightest hug at the bridge of a laugh. He pressed his mouth to your temple for a few seconds instead. “Another thing while I’ve got the floor. Telling me to go get coffee with an ex – don’t do that again. I’m not gambling with you. I’ve only got one of you. So, I’m never going to coffee with anyone else again.” 

“You’re allowed to cry,” he said, setting the joke aside. “I’m sorry I made you feel you couldn’t do it with me knowing about it. That’s mine, and I’m gonna find it and fix it if it takes me the rest of my life.” 

“You didn’t do anything,” you protested, sounding wounded. 

“It’s okay,” he murmured. “That’s mine. That’s what I felt today. You don’t have to give me yours.” 

His arms adjusted, and some helpless, incurable corner of him – the one that had flirted with you through every disaster you’d ever handed each other – added, “But, if you wanted to trade, I can make it worth your while.” 

You laughed at that again, and the two of you stayed silent again for sometime. Your fingers crawled up his chest, up over his collarbone, curling loosely around his neck, your palm settling in like you needed contact to speak. 

“You went to Italy,” you said. 

Jack’s brain did one, full lap around the words, and came back with nothing. He did the only thing he could when you handed him a coin he couldn’t read, which was holding it up to the light and keeping his voice soft and not dropping it. 

“I did,” he said, carefully. “Long, long time ago, baby.”

“Was it nice?” you asked, the words coming out so small. In the same breath, like a small dam breaking, you added, “Do you miss it?”

Jack never had to look for a trap in your words, not like this.

There was none now, either. You’d asked about Italy like you asked him about bad days, ready to receive whatever came back, your thumb doing a nervous sweep against his neck like you were comforting him in advance. You’d found the one grief in the world with his fingerprints on it and your first instinct was to ask if he wanted it back. 

For an ugly second, he thought he could have lied. No, it was overrated, beds were weird, bad food. You’d have heard it, and Jack thought that it would’ve taught you that you couldn’t survive the truth. 

“It was nice,” he said quietly, hands moving up and down your spine. “I was young. Younger, anyway. Whole trip was –” He exhaled, shaking his head as he tried to hunt for the honest size of it. “It was a trip, baby. It was nice.” 

He pressed his lips to your hairline. “I don’t miss it. There’s nothing in there to miss. Like –” He clicked his teeth, searching for the words. “Driving past a house I used to live in. Half the time, can’t even remember which window was yours. You just keep going, ‘cause everything you own’s at the new place now.” His fingers tightened on you. “Think if I’d known what this was, back then, I’d have kept missing this, there.” 

Your breath shifted against his throat, and you nuzzled your face into his neck.

“What’s got you worried?” he murmured. He closed his eyes, letting his head lean to rest against yours, palms moving from your waist to your nape, then down. “I can get us to Europe by Thursday, just say the word. I’ve got PTO and miles I’ve been sitting on for years. I think they were for this.” 

“I don’t wanna go to Italy,” you said, smiling against his neck. “I think this is something I have to get through myself. It’s not anything you’ve done to me.”

Jack felt that familiar twist in his chest. It’d come to him for the first time today, and it kept coming up and up and up, and he couldn’t help but want to claw at his own mouth for his selfish, cruel little game, for every grinning careless word he’d dropped on you like they weighed nothing. And now you felt that you had to deal with it yourself, like it was yours to carry alone, off in a corner, someplace he couldn’t get to. Because he had done this. 

You were, simply, acting like the two of you weren’t the two of you; you had spent a whole year proving to him that ‘by yourself’ was a thing that, now, never existed. 

He drew you back, fingers threading through the back of your hair, trying to physically take you back from wherever – whatever – this by yourself was. He put your face in the light, wet-lashed, trying so hard to keep it together, and his thumb swept the damp while his own face did whatever it was doing, open and scared and thoroughly past the point of keeping it in check. 

“You don’t have a ‘yourself’ anymore, sweetheart. I don’t have that anymore. You woke me up at three in the morning to tell me how you fell off the monkey bars in third grade – remember? You didn’t think twice about it.” His forehead came down, brushing your nose with his. “And now you’re gonna sit here and tell me this – the saddest thing that’s crossed that pretty head all year – this one you’re keeping alone?” 

“Jack–”

“What is going on in that head of yours?” he interrupted, words soft but pointed, suddenly having given up all pretense of coaxing and gone straight to needling.

He watched you open your mouth as you took in a breath, and maybe it was the closeness or the way his thumb kept moving along your jaw, but you said, “I don’t know if I’m the real one.”

Jack’s brows furrowed, feeling heat build up behind his eyes as he looked at you with a pained, confused expression.

“I don’t know if I’m the one you do it for real with, Jack, or if I’m just – the young one. The one you get before – or after – I don’t even know how it works.”

Your hands came up between you, aggravated at yourself, at him, at the lack of vocabulary. 

“You’ve done so much. You’ve got countries. Experiences. So many of them. And I’ve got –” Your shrug came out tiny. “– you. You’re my biggest everything. You’re my Italy and I feel like I’ve been with you for three years and my – you’re all of it, Jack. I’m terrified I’m just the person that came after your big thing.” 

You blinked, and Jack’s fingers reached up to catch the little tear falling over your lashes, his own eyes blinking furiously. Jack wanted, so badly, to reach to you and press your kiss to your mouth to stop this, to to kiss this whole wilted garden you’d created in your head out of you.

He shook his head. “I hope I’m not your – her,” he said, a wince in the words, finding it difficult to even get them out. “Or your Italy.”

“You are –” you said, with so much conviction, chin coming up, ready to fight him for the honor of it, “you are – that’s what I’m telling you –” 

“I’m your Jack.” His hands tightened on your face, voice coming out slightly cracked. “I’d forgotten about this woman until this came up. I don’t want you to forget me. I’m your Jack and I’m the luckiest man for it everyday. So you pick a better word soon, and don’t take that title away from me.” He shook his head. “I like it. I like it a lot.”

You bristled slightly, your eyes shining into his as they went wide, the whole of you locking up at the words. He tapped his palm gently against your cheek once, then again, frowning as he thought he really ought to tell you this more, for a girl who kept a running tally of everything else.

You’d created a museum out of things he’d said, and somehow this one, the biggest one – the luckiest man of it – he’d been rationing. He’d been handing it over in the glances and over eggs, assuming it was arriving, that a girl who read him so fluently was taking what he’d said to you over and over again, so simply because it was just a fact. 

Never again. He’d tell you daily now, remind you of it while making you look him in the eyes. 

“I tried to make you jealous,” you said, the words coming out through a sad, shameful laugh. Something in his chest broke hearing you confess it like it was a crime. “I’ve got nothing, Jack. You won’t care about Sam, or Dave, or – I don’t even remember one’s name. That’s all. You had a doctor you went to Italy with.” 

His eyes fluttered for a second, the muscle in his jaw clenching as his fingers ran over your cheek. The nature of it all was too backwards. Jack had made a very sad sort of peace with himself – he’d known what he was – and somehow, at the end of all that, at the bottom of the ninth of his whole entire life, you’d walked into it glowing like something confiscated from heaven. You’d looked at the full of him, and decided you wanted him. You, dished out to him probably because of some fate-giver who’d been asleep at the desk, who had let the single best thing walk out to him.

If a single one of those guys had stayed awake one more hour, asked one more question, been at the right angle to see who was sitting across them, you’d be – Jack grimly, awfully thought – somewhere else right now. And Jack never would have known; he wouldn’t have known to miss you. You’d have been long gone and loved properly, early, by someone with the sense to do it. 

Jack would have worked his nights and run the bay, choosing every day to enter a new crisis, and never known the whole time that the best thing that would ever happen to him had happened to somebody else instead, on time, the way it properly should have. It was their loss, and he was going to make his entire life out of it. 

His arms moved before the thought even finished, hauling you in impossibly closer, resettling the whole, true warm weight of you against him. “Stay right here,” he murmured.

You did. Your lashes stuck wet in little points and your fingers resettled on his neck. You were wearing his shirt, drowning in it. Jack had been the steadiest set of hands in many rooms, he knew it without vanity. But nothing in his skill set covered you; steady hands didn’t win a girl who lit up rooms; being good in a crisis didn’t earn a woman who made every ordinary Tuesday feel like a celebration. He’d spent so long getting excellent at the exact things nobody falls in love with – triage, containment, blood – and you’d walked into his life and fallen for him anyway, for reasons he couldn’t successfully point to, and he’d stopped asking why out of superstition. You, he was not in the mood to reasonably place; Jack knew when a person was handed one, that they should keep showing up for a miracle, quietly hoping it stayed. 

Jack, falling apart at every seam of him, eyes hot and jaw aching, huffed. It was one, soft breath of a laugh, and your eyes snapped up to his, betrayed, and he shook his head fast, thumb pressing to your cheek to stay with him. 

“I’m not laughing at you,” he said, shaking his head softly, thumbs framing your face to tilt it up. “I promise. I’m laughing ‘cause you’ve got no idea what I’d give to have your problem.” 

You blinked at him, mouth curved into a frown. That one, he was sure, was aimed at him. His hands were shaking slightly against your jaw.

“I mean that I am very, very glad that you’ve got no Italy to wave at me. You think I want you to have another big grown love in your pocket? Some guy you crossed the country with?” His hands tightened on your face, eyes shining. “It would ruin me. I’d never sleep again. And I’m sorry for waving mine at you this morning, because I didn’t think it’d make you not sleep.” 

He held your eyes through it, taking his medicine looking at you. “I said it ‘cause I love you jealous. It makes me feel nice to know you care about me.” His lips curved into a sad smile. “I didn’t think what it’d do when I brought this up. I will be very, very sorry about that for a long time.”

When you smiled softly, eyes hooded as you looked down at his mouth, he nodded to himself.

“And I had a nice trip with a woman a hundred years ago, and it ended, and I have zero photos of it. That’s a thing that happened to me. You are not a thing that happened to me. You are what it was all for. All the years, the whole time, all the wrong turns. That was just me taking the long way to find you. You are my biggest thing – biggest one that’s ever happened to me – and I want you to know some pretty life-changing things have happened to me.” 

You stared at him, mouth open, tears going uncaught now, because Jack had gone completely still, needing you to see all his years on his face at once. 

He huffed, mind flicking through this haze of memories. He could reach back and find the years, the apartment, and it all came as nothing. He’d loved women, had meant it completely, with everything he’d had on hand, and he may not have been wrong. And now he can carry the tender knowledge that a person can feel absolutely certain there is everything to be felt and be off by a whole magnitude; he’d stood inside his biggest feeling and called it the biggest and had simply, innocently, not met you. 

“And since you told me yours,” he said, quieter, eyes going down because he found he couldn’t quite hold your gaze for this.

“I know what it feels like to think you’ve found what good love is, and then to find out how it is to love someone bigger. That the thing you could’ve sworn was everything was just – nothing, in the grand scheme.” 

He turned his face to the side as he held your face, suddenly finding the enormity of this simplicity pressing at the back of his eyes. Everything – he was sure of it – had just been the longest drive over to you.

“But you got this first. You’ve got nothing to check it against.” His thumb swept your cheekbone, and his eyes came back to you. 

“I know how big this is because I’ve got my whole life to look at it against. And you just have to take my word for it.”

He tugged his lip between his teeth, searching your eyes with question, checking whether the words were pushing through, whether they had the gap to push through. Your face was tilting toward him, listening with every feature at once; he could see the whole war playing out on your face you had never once been able to conceal from him. You had no poker face, at least to him, you didn’t.

“This is the one,” he said, nodding just barely. “There was never a morning I woke up and had to think about anything before you. You are the reason I know what you think is the big thing is small.” 

Your breath stuttered, and your chin trembled once before you caught it from gritting your teeth inside your mouth. 

“And sometimes –” He nodded, more to himself, as he forced himself to continue. “– I have felt a similar thing. I see you, and I wonder if you’ll think about some guy your own age, out there somewhere. Standard legs. Normal hours.” He shrugged. “No years of the stuff I’ve carried. And I think, someday, you’ll look over at me and think you settled for the –”

“That’s crazy,” you interrupted, the words shooting out of you instantly. Your fingers flew up to grip both his wrists. “That’s crazy, Jack – I don’t want – I would never. There’s no guy, I don’t want standard legs. I want your legs – leg – fuck, Jack.” Your voice broke off as you let out a small, pained groan. “I would pick you over any person who has ever lived.” 

“Yeah, see,” he murmured, a small smile coming up as he let the weight of your words land on him. “Can you see how it sounds crazy when it’s coming at you?”

He brushed his nose against yours at your stunned silence. “I feel the exact same way about what you said. It’s crazy.”

He had to blink over and over as he settled on the weight of your words, said so simply and furiously with no build up. The biggest sentences of his life just slipped out of you, unwrapped, and you had not the first clue what they weighed. Any person who had ever lived. God, you’d waved off the whole crowded history of the species in one breath to pick a tired man in Pittsburgh.  

“Let’s go,” he murmured, wrapping you up and pulling both of you back against the cushions, resettling you on his chest. Your ear was at his heart. The blanket was up to your shoulder. “We’re gonna lie here a while now. I think we both need it.” 

“It was a weird morning.” 

“Mhm.” His hand went to your spine. “Top five weirdest.”

And he should have let it be, but there was still something sitting in him. 

Jack pressed his lips together as he once again said, “I am sorry for this morning. I was –” He breathed in through his nose, fingers coming up to your head, tapping it twice to get you to look up at him. You did, chin pressing into his chest and your eyes tired yet focused. “Immature.” 

Your lips twisted slightly, then you tugged them with your teeth once and looked away, like you were trying not to agree. 

“I was,” he said, easily, agreeing for you. His thumb traced your hairline. “Good thing for me, I happen to be with a girl who likes getting her revenge. Even when I don’t think I did anything.” 

“You do –”

“I do. I do. You’re not wrong,” he said, the opposite of a complaint in it. “You know how to settle a score. And this morning I racked up a real big one. And you’ve just been sitting on it, being gracious.” His nose wrinkled, his fingers going to cradle the side of your face. “You keep that up, you’ll start minding your business and I’ll be living with a stranger.”

At your small, hesitant smile, Jack continued, “I know you don’t like the paintjob of my truck.” You nodded at that, honest as ever. “What I’m thinking is, you key it.”

Your eyes widened.

“Go nuts on the thing. Do some drawings. Write nice words. I drive it around after, everyone sees it. And when we’re good and done with that show and tell,” he continued, fingers threading into your hair, “we take it in. You pick a new color. Any color. Change the seats if you want, too.”

“People will think –”

“People will think a woman loves me enough to key my truck. Do we have a deal?”

you were curled up on the corner of the sectional asleep. the exhaustion of waiting for him must have caught up to you because your head was pillowed on your arm, your breathing soft and even. right beside your hand on the cushion, your phone lay unlocked, the screen still glowing brightly.

jack’s steps were silent as he crossed the room, a tired frown settling across his face as he reached down to grab the device so the battery wouldn't die.

his eyes caught the text on the screen before his thumb could hit the power button.

“sweat beaded across his wrinkled skin, a drop slipping from his temple as he leaned over you, grunting with exhaustion before pressing his hand on your lower abdomen feeling his cock through—”

jack froze.

he stared at the screen, his eyebrows pulling together. for a second, his brain—exhausted from trauma bays and complications—just tried to process why his girlfriend was reading smut about an older man when she was already dating one.

he didn't lock the phone; he kept it in his hand and carefully lowered himself onto the edge of the sectional beside you, taking the weight off his tired legs. he reached out, his warm fingers gently brushing a stray lock of hair away from your face.

you stirred sleepily, blinking against the morning light, your eyes fluttering open to find jack sitting right there on the couch, looking down at you with a fascinated expression.

“hi,” you mumbled, your voice thick with sleep. "what time is it?"

“just got off,” jack murmured. he didn't move away, resting his hand on the edge of the couch right beside your hip. “i have a few diagnostic criteria to sort through.”

you blinked up at him, disoriented. “wait, what?”

jack tapped the screen, his eyes scanning the visible text as he scrolled upward with casual precision.

scroll. “doctor.” scroll. “scrubs stay on.”

jack went still as his eyes scanned the tags, then flicked back up to meet your gaze.

a slow, profoundly amused smirk began to tug at the corner of his mouth. the rigid tension in his shoulders completely melted away, replaced by the unmistakable satisfaction of a man who had just acquired ammunition.

you looked at him, still confused, still waking up.

“let me make sure i understand this,” jack said, his tone entirely too calm, too analytical. “i work at the hospital, come home in scrubs, and find my girl reading smut about an older man.”

“you could’ve just called me, honey.”

“you said emergencies only!” you shot back.

“this seems like one to me,” he deadpanned, his eyes dipping to your chest, watching your breathing give you away.

your face instantly flushed a brilliant, burning red. you pulled the edge of the blanket up toward your chin, groaning softly. “i hate you.”

“yeah, i always read suspiciously specific smut that practically describes someone i hate too,” jack said dryly.

"...wrinkled?" jack repeated, eyebrows lifting. "i know you're not thinking about me."

"please don't."

“i mean, i’ve got a few,” he admitted, glancing at his reflection in the screen with a smirk. “but wrinkled? is that how you view me? because this feels personal.”

jack reached out and smoothly pulled the blanket down, exposing your mortified expression.

“let’s tally up the diagnostic criteria. older man? check. doctor? check. still in his scrubs? unfortunately, check. girlfriend at home apparently requiring supplemental reading material? glaringly fuckin’ obvious, check.”

“leave me alone,” you hissed, reaching out to snatch the device back.

“solid work finding parallels.” he clicked his tongue, looking far too pleased with himself.

jack effortlessly tilted his hand out of your reach, scrolling back with one thumb, one eyebrow lifting at a particular tag.

“tsk. you follow the ‘age gap smut’ tag. color me shocked.”

“ugh, i am begging you to drop it,” you huffed, your thighs pressing together as heat gathered low in your stomach.

“nothing to be embarrassed about,” jack said, his smugness ratcheting up another notch. he shifted closer on the sectional, stretching one arm along the back of the couch, his knee pressing firmly against yours. “explain the logic to me, though. why are you reading about an older doctor when you have a perfectly functional one living under your roof?”

“i miss you when you're at work, jackie,” you muttered defensively, a small, humiliated smile breaking through your embarrassment.

jack went still for half a second. then his eyebrows lifted.

“sweetheart.”

you immediately looked away, staring hard at the throw pillow.

“look at me, pretty girl.” jack’s fingers caught lightly beneath your chin, turning your face back toward him with gentle, inescapable pressure. “so while i’m at work, you sit here and read this, imagining it’s me?”

“i never said that,” you protested weakly.

“that’s cute,” jack replied, his smile widening into something dangerously pleased as he watched the utter regret settle over your features.

as your unspoken admission hung in the air, his hand shifted from the back of the couch, sliding down to rest casually over your knee, making your eyes flutter shut for a second.

“well,” jack murmured, his thumb tracing a slow circle against your knee. “since the real thing apparently can't compete with whatever the hell kind of literature you've got queued up on this phone... read it to me.”

“jack!”

“you were comfortable reading it earlier. don’t let me stop you.”

“fine!” you huffed, snatching the phone back. you scrolled backward until you found the part you wanted, your voice trembling as you started to read.

“‘i’ve been such a good girl—i didn’t touch myself while you were at work! i promise, i swear—just please!’ you say as he pushes two fingers into your dripping—”

jack’s brow furrowed. he glanced down at his scrubs, then back at you.

“two?” jack asked, interrupting you.

you stopped reading, glaring at him. “that’s what you’re taking issue with?!”

“currently,” jack said smoothly as his hand drew higher on your thigh.

you paused, staring down at his hand before looking back up at him.

“go on,” jack prompted, his tone innocent.

“i can’t read when you’re doing that,” you protested, your face burning even hotter.

jack glanced down at his own hand like he’d completely forgotten it was there, his mouth twitching with wicked satisfaction. “you went back to it.”

“what?”

jack glanced at the screen. “sweetheart, you just scrolled backward specifically to read me that part. you like it.”

groaning, you dropped your head back against the cushions. “just let me off the hook.”

“not until you finish.” jack smirked, his thumb drawing lazy circles against your thigh.

“you're so mean, jackie,” you muttered.

“and you're a brat that likes it,” jack countered softly, his hand sliding slightly higher up your thigh.

“no! i don’t!” you huffed, knowing damn well you were lying.

jack’s eyes dropped deliberately to where his hand rested against your thigh, dangerously close to the crease of your hip, before returning to your face.

“right,” he cooed, entirely unconvinced. “and i’m sure your search history is full of evidence proving just how much you hate it.”

➶➴ a/n: this was my dream last night, everyone thank my subconscious for the material. hope you enjoyed xx

*the banner was created by me in photoshop. no ai was used.*

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.

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"Thank you, handsome," you reply, sauntering over to the couch.

Perching yourself on his knee, you get comfortable as a big hand reaches out to steady your back. You wrap your arms around his neck, pulling him in to rest your forehead against his.

He puckers his lips, and you place a finger over them.

"Not now, lip gloss," you whisper, and he groans.

"Baby, y're killing me," he croons, ghosting his lips over your face.

Scrunching your nose, you giggle as you try to dodge him, only for the sake of your meticulous makeup.

"Mikeyyyy," you whine, wiggling around on his lap. "Spent too much time on this face, no kisses!"

Your heart breaks as his face falls, a small pout jutting his lips. You mirror him, glossy lips teasing him as you squeeze his bicep with your manicured fingers.

"Love you so much, Mikey," you purr, tracing a nail up his skin. Goosebumps erupt across his skin at your touch, and your heart flutters with love, and a small sense of pride. "So patient," you praise, and his eyes flutter shut.

"Love you, my sweet girl," he whispers, burying his face in your neck.

His lips ghost over your skin, a shiver unzipping your spine. The tip of his nose follows, dragging up the length of your neck, then back down again.

"Can I kiss you here?" He asks, placing a tentative kiss to your collarbone. "Don't got any shit on down here, do you?" He asks, dotting kisses along your chest.

Closing your eyes, you arch your back into him, emphasizing his favorite parts of you. Your plush tits rustle against the silk fabric of your dress, nipples peeking through the fabric.

Robby catches this, and it seems to snap him out of whatever reprieve your perfume put him in. The room turns cold, but not dreadful. In fact, a jolt of excitement races up your spine, the darkness in his eyes all too inviting.

"You're going out without a bra on?" He growls, sinking his teeth into the curve of your breast.

All he's afforded are the parts that peek out of the low cut fabric, the plush upper cut of your tit nearly hypnotizing him.

"Yeah," you answer, scraping your nails along the back of his neck. "That okay, Daddy?"

"Fuuucckk," he rasps against your skin, nipping and sucking along your neck. "Can't fuckin' say that to me when we don't have the time for me to rip you apart."

His hand slides up your thighs with his words, resting at the apex of them, just to tease you. Butterflies erupt in your tummy at his touch, the sweet, sadistic twinkle in his eye.

"I look pretty?" You goad, knowing the answer.

He tells you this, his head craning to the side before he confirms your question anyway.

"So pretty, honey," he presses another kiss, now to your shoulder. "My pretty girl, yeah?"

"Yeah, Daddy," you whine, your earlier teasing completely removed from your tone now.

He chuckles, a mean, low rumble in the pit of his chest. You wiggle on his lap, whining and squeezing him closer to you.

"You're really gonna go out like this, baby?" He asks, playing with the flimsy strap of your dress. "Gonna really go show your tits to everyone? Thought those were just for your daddy."

He's pouting, eyes shining as he rests his cheek against your chest. He looks up at you through his lashes, and your heart positively pounds against your ribcage.

"Love you, Mikey," you coo, stroking his cheek. "They're always for you, y'know that, honey."

He pouts, closing his eyes and pressing his lips against your skin.

"But you're leaving," he whines, and your breath is knocked from your chest.

This is a new side of Robby, his whining, his thrashing underneath your thighs. His hard length is prominent, too, rubbing against your dress, desperate and heady.

"Yeah, I am," you mutter, sticky sweet and dripping with syrupy love. "But you're gonna be okay, hm?"

He nods against you, wrapping his arms around your waist, squeezing you tight.

"Gotta wait so long to cum, baby, fuck," he complains. "So mean to me."

"I know," you pout, pinching his sweet cheek. "I'm so mean…so unfortunate that you have a hot girl half your age on your lap sticking her tits in your face."

He barks a laugh at this, your joke breaking him out of his seemingly-subby daze. You can't help but join in, a wide smile cracking your lips, heart immensely full with the love you hold for the man worshiping you.

"Don't be long," he mutters, releasing you from his grip. "I'll be thinking about you the whole time."

You look down at him, your skin warming above his intense gaze.

"Same here," you quip, heart shining with his affection. "I love you, Mikey."

"I love you too," he calls back on your way out.

"Keep the Viagra nearby!" You chirp on your way out, chuckling to yourself at his heady groan.

- A few hours later, you stumble back across the threshold, the little bit of tipsiness wearing off with each step. Robby's still in the same spot you left him in, though this time he's got his phone to his ear, pouty lips and glossy eyes.

"Oh thank God," he groans, rolling his eyes and hanging up the phone, tossing it on the other side of the couch.

"Hi, baby," he smiles up at you, hands crawling over your hips. "Missed you so much, Jack was about to kill me."

You giggle, cupping his face in your palms.

"Were you on the phone with him this whole time?" You ask, brows shooting into your forehead.

"I made it about ten minutes before I called him, but basically, yeah," he mutters, cheeks tinting pink as he settles into your tummy.

"Love you, Mikey," you whisper, pressing a kiss to his head. "Missed you."

"Missed you so much," he whimpers, pressing a kiss into the silky fabric of your dress. "So pretty, missed this body, honey."

"I was only gone for a couple hours, big boy," you tease, knowing full well you missed him just as much.

You sink to your knees, in between his legs, now at eye level with him. You take a moment, reveling in his desperate face. Wide, brown eyes, pouting lips, tired brows.

"Still missed you," he rasps, leaning forward to bury his face in your neck. "Missed your pretty tits, honey."

He cups you through your dress, his callous hands rasping through the thin fabric.

"Just walked around letting anyone see you like this? So fuckin' unfair, baby," he groans, pressing sloppy kisses to your skin. Your eyes flutter shut atop your cheeks, a deep breath racking your chest.

"Bunch of guys your age…" He rambles, slinking your dress strap off your shoulder. "Probably looking at my girl's tits…" He mutters, the other strap coming free. "Wishing they could get their mouth on you…"

"Michael-" You whine, and he tuts his tongue.

"Am I wrong?" He cuts you off. "Am I wrong? Look me in the eyes and tell me guys weren't staring at you."

You twist your lips, knowing you can't, and he sees it in your eyes. He smirks, an evil, sardonic expression that takes over his entire face.

"Y'wanna know how I know that, baby?" He asks, pushing the dress down your torso, standing you up to bury his face in your tummy again.

"How, Mikey?" You relent, shaky and watery.

"Because," he peppers kisses across your tummy, massaging your tits. "I see how guys look at you when we go out. I see the men who look at you on my arm, who wish they could take you from me."

You shudder, butterflies erupting in your tummy at his words, his rough palms dragging along your nipples.

"Imagining it when I'm not there?" He laughs at the sheer thought. "It's enough to make me sick, baby. You're just so pretty, can't fucking help it."

He looks up at you then, eyes shining with a desperation you don't think you've ever seen before. It breaks your resolve, that look, crashing your lips to his.

You melt into each other, frantic hands sliding your dress the rest of the way off, leaving you in nothing but a lacy white thong.

Robby pulls away, registering what lies before him, before letting out a long, tortured groan. He buries his face in your tummy once more, pressing kisses along the waistband of your panties.

"You're so fucking pretty, baby, oh my God," he moans, hooking his finger beneath the waistband, letting it snap against your skin.

You jump, a small whimper falling from your lips. This satisfies Robby, who places his two, large hands on the globes of your ass, pulling you onto his lap.

You slot into his body like a puzzle piece, eager to get him undressed, inside you. You lick your lips as you look down on him, his hands gathering at your breasts once again.

Pressing your foreheads together, your heart flutters at the proximity. He's so close, his woodsy cologne and smoky aftershave flooding your senses — a devastating combination that leaves you weak in the knees, and wet between your thighs.

He shoves his hands there, next, delving into your wetness with a selfish greed that sends your eyes rolling into your skull. Expert fingers find your clit, swirling over your nerves with fervor.

"Ah!" You whine, clutching his neck in your arms, wrapping yourself up in him. "Mikey, that's so good."

It's whispered against his neck, sends shivers down his spine. You smile against his skin at the way he reacts to you, pressing sweet kisses along his thick shoulder.

"Love you honey," he confesses. It's breathy, his eyes fluttering shut with his words.

"Take my panties off," you beg against his neck, kissing and kissing and kissing him. "Please, wanna feel all of you."

"Got you, baby, I got you," he assures, slipping the fabric down your legs. "Don't ever gotta beg with me, understand?"

You nod against him, and he lands a harsh crack on your ass. You lurch further into him, a whine ripping from your throat.

"Words, princess," he demands. "Do you understand me?"

"Yes, Daddy," you whine, wiggling your hips further into his touch. "I'm sorry, feels so good."

The newfound freedom Robby finds with your panties off is exhilarating, his fingers maneuvering your folds any way he likes.

"Good job," he coos, sweet and loving. "So good for me, always so good. Love you so much, hm?"

You nod against his neck, murmuring a sweet, "Love you too, Mikey, love you so much."

"Yeah?" He whines, his still-clothed length throbbing against your thigh. "You do? You love me so much?"

You nod, desperate and eager.

"So much, angel, you're my guy, love you so much," you croak, watery from the pleasure.

"God, fuck!" He nearly shouts, squeezing his eyes shut as he turns his head, pressing a kiss to the first piece of you he can find. "I'm your guy, baby? I'm your fuckin' guy?"

"Yes- oh!" You gasp, the tip of his middle finger pressing into your entrance. "Yes! Yes! The only one for me, my only guy, I love you."

"That's what I like to hear, baby," he croons, pressing sweet kisses along your shoulders, your back. "You're my girl, you know that? My best girl, I love you so much honey. So fucking lucky to have you, you have no idea."

Tears prick at the back of your lids, a culmination of the pleasure and love Robby brings you. It's overwhelming, and yet you can't get enough.

"Please, I need more, Mikey, please give me more," you whine, sinking your hips further onto his hand.

"Yeah? Want another finger, honey?" He asks, slipping in his ring finger before you can give him an answer.

"Oh my God!" You wail, squeezing your eyes shut as the tears finally fall. "Thank you, Daddy, thank you, thank you-oh!"

You jolt, his fingers pressing into your sweet spot with just the right amount of pressure.

"I love being your girl, Daddy," you whine against him. "You were right, y'know? Guys were looking. Some even approached me-ooh!"

Robby's fingers speed up, electricity running through your veins.

"Are you fuckin' serious, baby?" He growls, cracking hand down on your ass.

You sniffle, whining at the pleasure that courses through you.

"Yeah," you say, sweet and innocent. You rest your cheek on his shoulder, enough to look up at him, and for him to look back at you.

He melts when he sees your watery eyes, the mascara streaks down your cheeks. He presses some kisses there, tongue darting out to trace the dark tracks along your face.

"Yeah," you sigh. "There were a lot of them, maybe six different guys tried to buy me a drink."

He growls under his breath, thumb finding your clit to get you even closer to the edge. He ruts his hips up into your ass, his length hard and bulbous, throbbing against your warm skin.

"All I could think about was you, Daddy," you finish, the coil in your belly pulling tight. "Told them all no, told them my old man was waiting at home for me."

He groans, squeezing his eyes shut and throwing his head back.

"Fuck!" He shouts, fingers moving now at lightning speed. "You already have me fucking close, baby, holy shit."

You breathe out a laugh, pressing a kiss to his jaw.

"Love you Daddy, can I cum?" You ask, just to push his buttons a little more.

He presses his thumb into your clit a little more, unzipping a shiver down your spine as you creep closer to the edge.

"What did I say about fuckin' askin' me questions?" He growls against your temple. "Hm? You gonna cum? Please, honey. Want to taste you, you gonna let your old man taste this pretty pussy?"

"Oh fuck, oh Jesus, fuck yes, there, just like that, yes!" You wail, squeezing your eyes shut, a fresh wave of tears rolling down your face as you give in to the ache, the release.

The world stops on its axis as you explode into the pleasure. A blinding ache rolls through you, guttural whines racking through you as you wiggle your hips against Robby's fingers.

"That's it, thaaat's it, good girl, good girl," he coos, pressing endless kisses against your temple as the waves shock your body.

"Oh, fuck, oh my God," you whimper, the last few trails of fire running through you.

Slumping against him, you let him chuckle, lift you and bring you to your bedroom. Locking your legs around his waist, you cling to him and let him maneuver you.

He plops you on the bed, ripping his shirt over his head as you prop yourself up on your forearms. His tongue pokes the inside of his cheek, a sardonic smile forming.

"Get your pants off, old guy," you tease, his brows shooting into his forehead.

"Ohhhohoho," he chuckles, sliding them down his hips. "First the Viagra, now this?"

He kneels on the bed, the sheer size of him imposing, dizzying. You nod, teeth sinking into your lip.

"Bad fuckin' girl," he rasps, stroking his cock once, twice, three times before lining himself up with your entrance. "But you like being my bad girl, don't you?"

You nod, resting your cheek on your palm, looking up at him with your sweetest eyes.

"Love it, love you, Daddy," you breathe, puckering your lips for him. "Love being with you like this."

That last part is a whisper, a soft confession of your affection, your devotion.

"God," he breathes, shaky and raspy. "Love you so much, God, you're fuckin' perfect. Do you know how perfect you are?"

You shake your head, cheeks heating, still not used to his ever-present love for you, your body.

"That's so fucked up," a sardonic chuckle escapes his chest. "Maybe I'm not lovin' on you enough. 'S that it?"

He pushes his head in, your jaw going slack, a gasp echoing from your throat. Your eyes flutter shut, head falling back into the pillow.

"Hey, look at me," he demands, a sweet little tap against your cheek breaking you out of you reprieve. "Look up at Daddy, look at me and answer my fuckin' question."

"No, God! Daddy it's enough, you're enough, Daddy, love you so much," you wail, wiggling your hips in a sad attempt to swallow more of him.

"Ooh, we're desperate tonight," he coos in awe. "I love you, baby. but y're lyin' to me. Clearly I'm not doing enough, or else you'd realize how sexy you are."

You're so distracted by his words, that you barely even register that he's bottomed out inside you, brain fuzzy.

"Daddyyyyy," you draw out, lips pouting. He kisses it away, starting to rock his hips.

"I know, I know, honey," he coos, tilting his head to the side. "Such a good girl, my fuckin' good girl."

You nod, digging your fingers into his shoulders as he finds his rhythm. Jaw going slack, your eyes flutter shut as his thick length works you out.

"God, you should fuckin' see this, baby," he grunts, eyes trained on his cock slipping in and out, in and out. "Pussy swallows me up so perfectly, so proud of you, love you so much."

You whimper, clutching his plush hips, pressing him further into you. This new angle sends his tip right into your g-spot, punching out a sharp whine from your lips.

"Ooh, there's your spot, good job, honey, way to take what you want," he rambles, dipping his tongue into your collarbone.

He picks up his speed, not changing his angle so he pounds into you over and over and over again. You're dazed, light headed and drowning in the pleasure, even dizzier when he stimulates your clit.

The pressure is unrelenting, intense as you thrash underneath him, kicking your legs out while your tummy flips.

"You got it," he encourages, knowing your body better than you do. "You can do it, please let go for me, baby."

You whine, brows furrowed sweetly. He coos, kissing you all over your face.

"Daddy, it-I feel like I'm gonna pee," you look up at him with wild eyes, the pressure in your lower belly almost too much.

"That's okay," he coos, kissing your nose. "Tell me if you want to stop, but even if you do pee, I don't care. As long as it feels good, get Daddy as wet as you need."

You squeeze your eyes shut, relenting into the pleasure that continues building inside you.

"I know you're close, you can do it. I love you so much, can you show me how much you love me? Can you cum on Daddy's cock?" He asks, voice sticky sweet.

The release is intense, more so than normal. Squeezing your eyes shut, you groan, desperate and guttural. You relax into the mattress as a warm, gushy splash echoes between you and Robby.

"Holy shit! Oh fuck, ohhh fuck! Good fucking girl, I'm gonna cum, yes! Fuck!" Robby grunts, hips stuttering into your own as his cock throbs inside you.

"Yes! Yes, Daddy! Oh God, Daddy, it's so much, feels so good," the tears are back again, rolling down your cheeks as you wail, thrash around him.

The pressure of your release is unrelenting, all consuming as it wracks through you. Luckily, Robby's there, kissing you and cooing at you and shushing you.

"Fuck yes, pussy's so sweet, baby, squirted all over me, good fuckin' job," he grunts, hips stuttering as he comes down from his own high.

It takes a moment for his words to sink in to your brain, and when it does, your eyes shoot open.

"I squirted?" You ask, only earning you a laugh from the man above you.

"Yeah, y'did baby, so proud of you," he leans down to kiss you, and you melt into him.

An intense relaxation falls over you, your eyes unable to open, even after he pulls his lips away.

"Love you, Daddy," you whine, wrapping your arms around his neck, keeping him close. "Love making you proud."

"Yeah, you do, everyday, you're my good fuckin' girl," he praises, running his hands up and down your thighs, up to your ass.

He slips his length out, and you whine at the new wave of vulnerability that hits your pussy, the cool air making you shiver.

"Oh, honey," he frowns, sardonic and condescending. "Oh my sweet girl, I'm gonna get you cleaned up in a little bit, here, just gotta watch this for sec, good God."

You whine, thrash around the bed as his spend leaks out of you, his animalistic gaze refusing to let up.

"I love you, Mikey," you whine, and he smiles.

"Love you too, baby," he slots over you once again, pressing a sweet kiss to your lips. "Wanna go shower? Maybe I can lick you clean while we're in there."

Your mouth purses and you drop your eyes, instead taking his index finger and twisting it petulantly between yours, first one way and then the other until Jack has to let his hand go limp.

“I dunno,” you mumble.

“Are you in pain?”

“No.”

“Is it interfering with your ability to work?”

“…Yes.”

Interfering might actually be putting it mildly. The question was largely ceremonial and both of you know it. You have done fuck-all since nine except follow him around from room to room like an imprinted duckling who has mistaken an attending physician for its mother.

“Tell me exactly what you need and maybe I’ll do something about this little crisis of yours.”

Jack has to work not to laugh when you immediately retreat. An entire evening spent attached to his hip, and now that he has finally asked you to name the obvious, you suddenly cannot bear to have a face.

You take his hand and hide behind it instead, pressing his palm over your mouth while your burning cheek fits itself into the cup of it.

Jack indulges you, fingers spreading gently along your temple.

“Need you, please,” you say eventually, muffled against his skin.

That is good enough for Jack. Several minutes later, he has the nearest consult-room locked behind you.

He sits you on the edge of the exam table and takes care of the rest himself. He would just like his functioning girlfriend back sooner rather than later.

Never mind that he gets to achieve that goal with his favorite activity — his fingers between your dripping thighs. One arm keeps you close, his mouth brushing your temple while he alternates praise with firm reminders that Shen is working close enough to hear you if you get careless.

“Quiet, angel. C’mon. You asked me to take care of you, let me do it.”

By the time he is fixing your underwear and smoothing your skirt back into place, you have gone pleasantly boneless beneath his calloused hands.

Jack checks you over once with intolerable satisfaction and says, “There. Think you can survive until we get home now?”

MICHAEL 'ROBBY' ROBINAVITCH notices the second you start to hover.

Suddenly his desk becomes the only viable place in the entire emergency department to sit, every trip past him requires some unnecessary little brush of your fingers over his arm, and tasks that should send you back to the front desk somehow end with you standing beside him again, blinking up saccharinely and asking if there's anything else he needs.

So very industrious and thoughtful. And entirely coincidental, surely. As though Robby hasn't learned your tells by now. That when you start taking your secretarial duties this seriously, what you actually want has very little to do with paperwork.

He has no intention of sharing that information with you, though.

That would be idiotic, handing you the answer key to your own behavior when half the fun is knowing what you want hours before you finally muster the courage to ask for it.

Much better to keep quiet. Much better, too, not to satisfy you immediately.

There is a particular sweetness to letting the problem marinate, to watching ordinary want become restless, fidgety desperation under his neglect.

He'll usually pull you somewhere private, like he's doing now, just to wind you tighter. Hand beneath your skirt, mouth against your ear, giving you exactly enough attention to make you think you'll get what you want, then he stops.

Smooths your skirt back into place, thumbs flat the little wrinkle he made at your hip.

Your face when you realize is almost worth the inevitable whining. Almost.

“Back to work.” He tips your chin up when you stare at him, wounded and incredulous. Fucking cute. “And don’t touch yourself. I mean it.” One last squeeze to your waist before he opens the door. “I’ll check later, sweetheart. You better be able to tell me you listened.”

His method has always been control. But not deprivation as you so often claim it to be.

Robby gives you plenty, eventually, but he likes deciding when you get it, likes watching your entire demeanor reorganize itself around the promise.

And it works well.

You spend the rest of the shift behaving beautifully. Phones answered, paperwork handled, not one smart comment when Frank starts needling you, because every so often Robby materializes beside your desk, bends down to look at you over his glasses, and asks, “Still being good for me?”

You nod every single time. A little quicker as the hours drag on.

By the time another quiet-ish stretch finally opens up, he decides you have suffered enough. And Robby is generous when generosity has been earned.

He takes his time despite having almost none of it, hands spreading your thighs wider while his mouth works between them with languid attention, licking through the slick mess of your pussy you have been carrying around all afternoon.

Every little attempt to squirm away from his tongue gets corrected with a firmer grip. He knows exactly what he withheld from you and apparently intends to repay it with interest.

“Knew you could listen,” he says when he finally looks up. His mouth is wet. “Much nicer like this, isn’t it? When you behave.”

FRANK LANGDON has very little tolerance for your neediness because it tends to expose his own.

Wanting you is manageable when you’re across the department, reduced to glimpses between curtains and the occasional flash of your smile over somebody’s shoulder. Those he can quarantine alongside hunger and exhaustion, banal inconveniences he will deal with later.

It becomes harder when you follow him into the supply room and wrap both arms around his waist before the door has even settled shut behind you.

“Missed you,” you say against his back.

Frank keeps looking at the shelf in front of him, though he has stopped reading any of the labels.

“We saw each other twenty minutes ago.”

You make a small, unconvinced sound and edge nearer, fitting yourself along his spine, turning breathing into a shared activity.

Your mouth rests just below his shoulder blade; he can sense the question gathering there before it arrives, “Didn’t you miss me?”

“I think we need to start working on this attachment issue of yours,” Frank snorts, though the hand that finds the lock does so with pathetic urgency. “You’re spoiled, you know that? Nobody ever taught you you can’t get everything the second you want it.”

The lecture might carry more authority if he weren't already turning around and walking you backward, one hand closing around your waist until your shoulders meet the wall.

“What’re you gonna do when I take a vacation?” he asks, mouth grazing your cheek.

His fingers are already working his belt loose. He gets the button open, drags his zipper down and pushes his pants lower with one impatient shove, proving absolutely nothing about which of you missed the other more.

Frank maintains the fiction anyway.

Every little sound you make against the supply-room wall while he fucks you earns some irritated huff against your cheek, a muttered Jesus, baby, like your whining is an inconvenience being inflicted upon him rather than the entire reason his pace keeps changing whenever he finds one he particularly likes.

The hypocrisy lasts all the way through, right up until he walks you back into the department himself with you looking very obviously debauched, prompting Robby to stare at him and Jack to ask whether Frank understands the meaning of discretion.

Frank does not.