No Thoughts

i just can't stop thinking about how BAELOR is older than the men you usually date, and the way he'd have you gripping the bedframe as he circles the tip of his tongue across your needy, throbbing, swollen clit.

it would be morning—the sun has barely risen and he's lying in bed, with your clothes thrown carelessly around the vintage frame and his arms circled around your thighs. sunlight, warm and golden, would seep in through the blinds, bleeding across the wooden floor little by little, occupying the space as a clock, somewhere nearby, ticks, and ticks, and ticks.

it had rained the night before: not too violently, not for too long, just hard enough for a faint chill to remain whenever the wind blew in through a set of wooden blinds that were left open half-way. it makes the beams creak and the walls whistle, and it brings a shiver up your spine.

it is, after all, the beginning of summer.

BAELOR’s hands, however, feel hot against your skin. his fingers are splayed along the expanse of your thighs, digits pressing into the plush skin as he circles them in a caress. and his tongue, running along your puffy, glistening folds, feels the warmest of all.

"look at how pretty she is," he murmurs, pointing his words with a lick. "how she throbs and leaks, begging for my touch. tastes so sweet, too. could just—mhm, could just lick her for hours, pretty girl."

he just about has been.

he’d started just as you were waking up, dragging his fingers along your slit under your sleeping shorts, sucking them into his mouth before asking you to ride his face instead. and how were you supposed to refuse?

"no, no," he hums, sucking your clit into his mouth as he pulls you down lower against his face. "i didn't say hover, pretty girl. i said sit."

a moan rips through your lips as his tongue enters your hole, and he circles it around as he revels in the sound. he gulps, savoring your taste, feasting on your slick, whimpering against your skin at the way you begin to move your hips over his head. he sucks around your hole as he kneads at the bottom of your ass, working his lips in tandem with his tongue.

his hands move again, making you gasp, making your teeth sink into your bottom lip the moment he uses them to land a spank just over the place he was kneading. and, as if feeding off of your response, as if growing only from your pleasure, does it again the moment you begin to move faster.

"that's right. mhm, take what you need. yeah, just take what you need," he moans against your skin, moving his face upwards to rest his tongue beneath your throbbing clit. he lays it flat, feeling you move against it, your cunt dripping down his chin.

and there’s a part of him that’s still ashamed. there’s a part of him that still whispers and grumbles in the back of his head, telling him that he’s too old for you, that you deserve better, that you should want better—

you quiet it, moaning over him. he puts it to rest, willing it away if only for a moment, nibbling on your clit as he treads a hand between your folds, collecting moisture with his fingers.

he moves his thumb back, digit dripping with your slick, and circles it, softly, tenderly, along your asshole. he hears you gasp, feels you tremble, and tongues at your clit as he applies more pressure with his finger. the tight, puckered ring of muscle clenches under his digit, and he presses in, and a moan, broken and hoarse, echoes across the room.

yours. or his?

BAELOR laps at your cunt, moving his finger in slow, delicate motions, accompanying your moans with the wet, debauched sounds of his sucking.

“i’m so—BAELOR, i’m—”

“gonna cum, pretty girl?” he groans, moving his finger in deeper, sucking your clit in harder. “soak my face, yeah? gonna do that for me?”

you want to answer. you try to.

but then BAELOR’s tongue flicks along your pearl once more, and you’re weightless, and you’re sinking down, and you’re soaring up. your hands grip the headboard so tight your knuckles begin to hurt, and you’re seeing blue, and pink, and white, and all the colors of the rainbow on the back of your eyelids as you move faster against his face, riding out the bliss.

your orgasm ripples through you in a way that has him all but feeling his, almost succumbing to it, almost coming untouched.

he’s careful when he pulls his finger out of your hole, caressing it once more when it starts to clench at the loss.

his cock rests over his stomach, soft and heavy, bright red and leaking. you lean back, opening your mouth as you spit on your palm, and he groans into your clit. your head is fuzzy with want when you take reach back and him in your hand, hot, throbbing, wet against your palm as you grip on his base.

“can i ride it?”

BAELOR stops. he halts in his movements at your question, his brain trying to make sense of the words as he tastes you on his lips.

“pretty girl, i can’t—”

“i know,” you say, noticing the way he moves his hand back up so they both rest on your hips. “i saw something online, and i want to try—you don’t have to be hard. and i’ll stop if it doesn’t feel good for you, i promise.”

there’s a pause.

seconds trickle by raindrops on his skin, and he feels them drip, drip, drip away as the voice, speaking louder, being meaner, pops back inside his head. you shouldn’t have to settle. he should be able to make you feel good, his cock should be—

“please. i really want to try it.”

and then, there’s that. there’s you, quieting it again, almost as if sensing his shame before he can let it fester. before he can let it burrow.

"alright,” BAELOR says, parting from your cunt so he can speak, breath hot against your tender skin. “try whatever you want, love.”

he presses one last kiss upon your clit, smiling when it throbs, and he knows he would have given in either way. you take in a breath, deep, and stretch your back to move down against his figure.

your fingers map down your descent: kissing his clavicles, feeling the mat of hair on his chest. they trail down his stomach, caressing his belly, following the path set by a graying happy trail.

and then, with your eyes set on his, you let yourself hover over his lap for a brief, fleeting minute. your skin is still buzzing in the aftershocks of your orgasm, charged with electricity, eager for more.

"go on, pretty girl. rub yourself off on my cock. make yourself cum on it again," a pause. he takes in a breath, moving an arm to have it rest under his head.

there is something he doesn't say—he does not need to. it lingers between you, restless, charged, and you lower your cunt onto his cock, your lips glistening with his spit, his cock covered in yours, and feel the head of it come in contact with your clit.

you don't need him to be hard get him off. it feels just as good, just as he is.

"that's it. that's my girl. rub that perfect pussy all the way along my cock. cum on my—fuck, cum on my cock."

it throbs under you, twitching as your clit runs all the way down from the base to his sensitive tip. you move your hips in a slow, circling motion, putting down pressure, and a moan catches in his throat. you move your hips back, rubbing yourself faster against him, and it breaks free.

and there’s no shame in this moment. he doesn’t overthink. he doesn’t let himself stray away from the way your tits move with each and every one of your movements. he doesn’t let himself stray away from the sound of your moans, soft and melodic, loud and violent, each and every one existing as a response to him.

he doesn’t let himself stray away from the way your folds, dripping and puffy, swallow the humiliation whole as they take on his cock.

he is not feeble. he does not fade away.

he watches as another orgasm rips through your body: making you shake, making you shiver, making you rut down against his cock in fast, desperate motions that have him choking on air. you look beautiful like this. otherworldly. he decides to treasure the sight for as long as he lives.

and he cums like that. you’re hunched over, stiff nipples pressing down against his chest, hips still moving down against his cock as he begins to spill. white messy ribbons paint the outside of your cunt, and you don’t stop moving, and he feels like he’s on fire.

your hands find his over the mattress.

a sound is born somewhere along the bottom of his stomach, traveling upwards, ripping past his lips as a breathless moan. he doesn't close his eyes, doesn't dare to miss a moment—just stares at you as he pants.

he looks at you, lost in your pleasure, with your eyes closed and your head laid to rest over his figure. his cock is soft, beating with a pulse, resting between your slit the way a heart would inside a ribcage. he still smells like you. his cum is smeared across the inside of your legs, warm and thick, and his fingers close in around yours, tight and sure.

and bringing these up again because #MyTruth

anyways!

The text exchange with Valarr took approximately four minutes and was, you felt, one of your better performances.

going over to yours to drop something off for your dad

His response came fast.

oh I'm out with kiera actually, won't be back til late. can it wait?

You looked at the book on your kitchen table. A first edition — not ancient, not priceless, but specific. The kind of specific that required knowing what someone was looking for, and you had known what Baelor was looking for since the bookshop three weeks ago when he had mentioned it in passing, the particular rueful tone of someone who had been searching for something for a while and had mostly made peace with the search.

You had found it in a secondhand shop two streets from your flat on a Tuesday and had stood in the aisle for approximately thirty seconds before buying it.

that's even better 🥴

The three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.

wait are you OH MY GOD please tell me you're not about to he's my DAD

You were already putting your coat on.

I don't know what you're talking about I'm just dropping off a book

YOU BOUGHT HIM A BOOK

it's just a book Valarr

people don't just buy specific books for people they're JUST dropping books off for

I genuinely have no idea what you mean

I am begging you

have a good one with Kiera

You sent your final text, and turned your phone face down in your bag and left before he could respond.

Your phone buzzed four times on the tube.

You did not look at it.

Baelor answered the door in reading glasses.

Just one pair, which was almost worse — there was something about one pair of glasses that was considerably more devastating than two, something about the specificity of it, the domesticity of a man who had been sitting reading in his own house on a weekday evening and had answered the door without thinking to take them off. He was also in a dark grey jumper that was doing things it had no business doing and had clearly not been expecting anyone because the composed public quality was not fully assembled — just him, in his jumper and his glasses, looking at you on his doorstep with an expression that moved from surprised to warm in about two seconds.

"I found something," you said, and held out the book.

He looked at it.

You watched the recognition arrive — the specific title, the edition, the fact of it existing in your hand on his doorstep — move through his expression in stages. He took it with the careful automatic reverence he gave books he considered important and turned it over and looked at the back and then looked at you.

"Where did you find this," he said.

"Shop near mine. Tuesday." You shrugged. "You mentioned it at the bookshop."

"I mentioned it once."

"You mentioned it specifically," you said. "The 1987 Ashgate edition. You said it was difficult to find secondhand."

He looked at the book. Looked at you. Opened his mouth and appeared to reconsider what he had been going to say and said instead: "Come in. I'll make tea."

His kitchen was warm and slightly cluttered in the specific way of a house that was lived in thoroughly rather than managed for appearance — papers on the table, a second book open and face-down on the counter which made you want to say something about spines but you restrained yourself, a mug that had clearly been there long enough to be architectural.

He filled the kettle with the focused attention he brought to small tasks and you sat at the kitchen table and watched him and thought about what you were going to do and felt, underneath the planning of it, the warm uncomplicated fact of how much you liked being in this kitchen.

"The 1987 edition has the corrected footnotes," he said, to the kettle. "The original 1983 printing had an error in the bibliography that propagated through most of the secondary literature for about a decade before anyone caught it."

"That's genuinely horrifying," you said.

"It is." He turned around and leaned against the counter while the kettle worked and looked at you with the glasses and the jumper and the warm composure of a man in his own kitchen on a weekday evening. "How did you know which edition to look for?"

"You were very specific about it," you said.

"I wasn't trying to —" He stopped. "I didn't expect you to actually look."

"I wasn't not looking," you said.

A brief pause in which he appeared to process the grammar of that and arrive at the implication and choose, carefully, not to follow it all the way to its conclusion.

The kettle boiled.

He made tea.

You were on your second cup when you said it.

"Can I say something without it being weird," you said.

He looked at you over his mug. "Probably depends on the thing."

"I find it really attractive," you said, "when someone is genuinely obsessed with something. Like intellectually obsessed. The way you talked about Byzantine iconoclasm in the café — I find that really attractive."

The mug lowered slightly.

"Right," he said, in the tone of a man who was not sure where to file this information.

"History nerds specifically," you continued. "There's something about someone who cares that much about something that's just—" you let the sentence do its work without finishing it.

Baelor looked at you with the expression of a man who had received information he was attempting to process through several different frameworks simultaneously and was finding the process slower than usual.

"That's—" he started.

"And the glasses," you said.

He stopped.

"Men in glasses," you said. "I have a thing. I'm aware it's not a particularly original thing but it's a consistent thing."

His hand moved very slightly toward the glasses and then stopped, which was the best thing you had ever seen another person do, the specific gesture of a man who had momentarily considered taking them off and had caught himself and now needed somewhere to look that was not your face.

He looked at his tea.

"You should probably—" he started.

"You're very attractive," you said. "I've thought so for a while. Since before the café, actually."

The kitchen was very quiet.

Baelor set his mug down with the careful precision of a man performing an action slowly enough to buy time for his thoughts to catch up with the situation. He looked at the table. Then at you. Then at the table again.

"You're Valarr's friend," he said.

"I know."

"You're—" He stopped. Started again. "This is complicated."

"I know," you said. "I've thought about the complicated."

"And?"

"And I'm still sitting in your kitchen on a Tuesday evening having told you I find you attractive." You looked at him steadily. "So."

He looked at you.

The composure was there but it was doing less than usual — the edges of it uneven in the specific way you had first noticed in the bookshop aisle. His jaw moved once. He opened his mouth to say something.

You leaned across the table and kissed him.

Not tentatively. You had been thinking about this for three weeks and tentative had not featured in any version of the thinking. You kissed him with the clear intention of someone who had made a decision and was implementing it, and felt in the first half second the specific quality of his absolute stillness — the shock of it, the composure going offline all at once — and then in the second half second the moment he stopped being still.

He made a sound against your mouth.

Low and involuntary and nothing like the curator or the composed man in the doorway with his book. Just a sound, pulled out of him by the simple fact of your lips against his, and then his hand came up and caught the back of your neck and he kissed you back and every careful principled argument that had been assembling itself somewhere in his head simply didn't.

He pulled back after a moment. Breathing slightly uneven. Looking at you from very close with the glasses slightly displaced and an expression that was trying to locate the counterargument and finding nothing available.

"I was going to say—" he started.

"Was it a good reason?" you said.

A pause.

"I can't currently remember what it was," he said.

"That's probably fine then," you said, and kissed him again.

This time he did not pull back.

This time his hand slid from the back of your neck into your hair and he kissed you like a man who had found the counterargument and assessed it and decided it was insufficient, thorough and unhurried in the way he did everything, and you made a sound against his mouth that he swallowed and responded to immediately.

At some point the table stopped being between you.

There was a period of rearrangement that involved chairs and the brief navigation of the table's corner and his hands at your waist — and then you were against the kitchen counter and he was in front of you with his hands braced on either side and was looking at you with the glasses still on and the jumper and the expression of a man whose counterargument had not returned and did not appear to be coming back.

"On the counter," you said.

His brow furrowed slightly. "What about—"

You put your hands on his shoulders and pushed yourself up onto it. Something happened in his expression.

"Oh," he said quietly.

"Yes," you smiled and bit your lip.

He kissed you again and this time it was different — the composure fully gone, replaced by something more direct and more urgent and considerably less managed, his hands sliding from the counter to your thighs with a purposefulness that made your breath catch. You pulled at the jumper and he shifted to help you get it off and you pushed it up over his head and threw it somewhere and then—

You stopped.

His ribs. The left side. Dark ink against warm skin, the letters precise and deliberate and clearly old enough to have settled into him like they had always been there.

Γνῶθι σεαυτόν.

You stared at it for a moment. Then you looked up at him.

Something in his expression had shifted — a different quality of vulnerability, not the composure being stripped away but something more specific, the particular exposure of something private being seen for the first time by someone he had not planned to show it to and found he did not mind showing it to.

"How long have you had that," you said.

"Twenty years," he said. "Approximately."

"Know thyself," you said softly.

Something moved in his face. "You read Greek?"

"My grandmother," you said. "She had opinions about a lot of things."

He looked at you for a moment with that expression — the unguarded one, the one that kept arriving and staying longer each time — and then you reached out and traced the letters with your fingertips, following the curve of them against his ribs, and felt him exhale sharply at the contact.

You then pressed your lips to it.

The sound that left him was low and immediate and completely unmanaged, his hand flying into your hair, and you felt him shudder under your mouth and filed the knowledge away with the specific satisfaction of someone who had found something important and intended to return to it.

"You are going to be the end of me," he said roughly. To the ceiling.

"Not yet," you said, and pulled him back.

This time when he kissed you it was with the full unmanaged weight of someone who had stopped looking for the counterargument and had no intention of finding it. His hands worked at your shirt with a focus that was no longer patient in the unhurried sense but patient in the specific sense of a man doing something he intended to do thoroughly, and your shirt ended up somewhere and his hands were on your skin and he exhaled against your mouth like the contact had knocked something out of him.

"God," he said quietly. Not to you. To the situation. To the fact of his hands on your waist and yours on his chest and the kitchen warm around you.

"Still thinking about that counterargument?" you said.

"There is no such thing in my brain anymore," he said, and kissed your jaw and then your throat and you tipped your head back and felt his mouth open against your neck — warm and deliberate — and then he did something and you gasped and felt his teeth and his mouth and then the specific bloom of pressure that meant—

He pulled back. Looked at your neck, then looked at your face.

"I'm—" he started, the composure making one last valiant attempt to reassemble itself. "I didn't mean to — I should—"

You grabbed him by the back of the neck and pulled him down and bit his throat.

Not hard. But deliberate. Specific. In the exact register of what he had just done to you, your mouth open against the warm skin of his neck, your teeth grazing the muscle there, and you felt the full body shudder that went through him and heard the sound — low and rough and dragged from somewhere he had not given it permission to come from — and when you pulled back his expression had nothing of the apology left in it.

Just — gone. All of it. The composure, the apology, the counterargument, the curator.

"Right," he said. His voice was wrecked. "Alright."

The bra went somewhere. His hands cupped your breasts with a directness that made you arch into him immediately and he made a sound at that — low and immediate and specifically responsive, like your body's reactions were doing something to him that he had no management available for.

"You're—" he started.

"Tell me," you said.

Something shifted in his expression. The specific thing he had with praise that you suspected was right there, sitting just under the surface, and you had put your finger directly on it and he knew it and was not even slightly trying to deflect anymore.

"Beautiful," he said, rough and specific, his hands moving. "I've — since the café. Since the bookshop. I kept thinking about—" his mouth dropped to your collarbone and the sentence dissolved into the warm press of his lips against your skin— "this. Exactly this. Whether you'd—" he kissed across your chest— "whether you'd make sounds. What sounds you'd make."

"And?" you managed.

"Better," he said against your skin. "So much better than whatever I—"

He kissed your breast and his tongue found your nipple and the sound you made was immediate and unguarded and he groaned against you — a genuine moan, low and resonant, vibrating through his chest into yours — in direct and unmistakable response to the sound you had made, like your pleasure had a direct line to something in him that bypassed every system he had.

"There," he breathed. "God — there—"

"Baelor—"

"I know," he said. "I know, I—" another moan, lower, as you shifted against him— "you have no idea what you sound like. What you feel like. I've been — Fuck, I've been trying not to think about this for weeks and it's—"

His hands found your jeans.

He dealt with your jeans and your underwear with hands that were steady and purposeful and not entirely in his control — the steadiness of focus rather than composure, the focus of a man doing something he had thought about and intended to do properly. His fingers found your clit and you grabbed his shoulder and made a sound that echoed off the kitchen tiles and he moaned in response — low and broken and entirely involuntary, his forehead dropping to your shoulder.

"You're so wet," he said, rough. Wondering. Like the fact of it was doing something specific to him. "God. Already — I've barely—"

"The hickey helped," you said.

A sound that was almost a laugh and almost not. His fingers moved and your hips rolled forward and the almost-laugh dissolved into something lower and more wrecked. "I'll keep that in mind," he said, against your throat, and did it again — the deliberate press of his mouth to the mark he had already left, tongue tracing it — and the sound you made was embarrassingly immediate.

"Baelor," you said.

"Mm," he said, not stopping.

"If you keep doing that I'm going to—"

"I know," he said. Warm. Certain. His fingers working with the focused attentiveness of a man who had decided this was worth studying thoroughly. "That's the idea."

He learned you quickly and used what he learned without mercy — the specific pressure that made your hips roll, the rhythm that made your breathing go ragged, the precise application of his thumb that made you clench around his fingers and made him moan against your throat like your body's responses were the best thing he had ever encountered and he intended to catalogue every one.

"You feel—" he started.

"Tell me," you said again, because you had found the thing and you were not letting go of it.

His breath caught. "Perfect," he said, low and rough and deliberate. "You feel perfect. Every time you clench like that — every time you make that sound — I can't—" a low moan as you did it again— "I've been thinking about having you like this since — fuck, since before I should have been and I can't—"

"Don't stop," you said.

"I'm not stopping," he said.

He didn't stop.

You came with his fingers inside you and his mouth on the hickey he had left on your neck and his voice in your ear saying your name and then saying perfect, exactly that, god, you're— in a low broken stream that your brain was going to be replaying for a very long time, and he held you through every shudder of it with his free hand spanning your lower back, steady and certain, and the sounds he made while you came apart around his fingers suggested that your orgasm was doing as much to him as it was to you.

He was hard against your thigh and had been for a while and the specific evidence of it when you reached for him made him say your name in a way that had clearly been waiting to sound like that.

You got his boxers out of the way.

He made a sound that came from somewhere deep and his hips pressed forward into your hand involuntarily and he made another sound at that, lower, his forehead dropping to your shoulder while you wrapped your hand around his cock and felt him twitch and felt him breathe and felt the specific shudder that went through him when you moved your hand.

"Christ," he said.

"Good?" you teased.

"Don't be smug," he answered, voice completely destroyed.

"I'm not being smug," you said. "I'm asking."

"Yes," he said. "Obviously yes. You feel — your hand feels—" he made a sound that interrupted whatever he had been going to say and you filed the sound somewhere permanent. "I need to—" He stopped. Gathered himself with visible effort. "If you keep doing that this is going to be embarrassingly short and I have — I have specific intentions."

"Specific intentions," you repeated.

"I'm a thorough person," he said roughly.

You released him. He exhaled shakily.

Then he was between your thighs and positioned and looking at you with the glasses still on — crooked, both lenses catching the kitchen light — and the hickey you had left on his throat and the tattoo on his ribs and the completely dismantled expression of a man who had retired the counterargument and every system downstream of it.

He pushed inside.

The sound he made was—

Long. Low. Broken entirely open, dragged from somewhere below every layer of management he had ever built, arriving with the helpless totality of something that had been contained for too long and had finally, completely, stopped being contained. His head dropped forward to your chest. His jaw was working and his eyes were closed and he stayed there for a moment just — breathing, or attempting to, his chest rising and falling unevenly.

"Baelor," you said softly.

"Give me a moment," he said. His voice was unrecognisable as the café voice or the bookshop voice or any voice you had previously catalogued. "You feel — Christ, you feel — I need a moment or I'm going to—"

"Take your time," you said.

"I intend to," he said, and then he moved and you both made sounds simultaneously and the intentions became very clear.

He fucked you slowly at first, with the specific deliberateness of a man who had said he was thorough and intended to prove it, and made sounds that you were going to think about for the rest of your life — low and continuous and arriving one after another with complete disregard for composure or management or anything else he had previously used to keep himself contained. Every movement produced something from him. Every time you clenched around his cock he moaned — properly, openly, the sound resonating through his chest into yours.

"You feel—" he said, against your throat. A low moan interrupted him. "God. Every time you — when you do that — I can't — you're so—"

"Tell me," you said.

His breath caught.

"Perfect," rough and specific and chosen with the care of a man who selected words deliberately. "You feel perfect. Your pussy feels — god — every time you clench I can feel exactly—" another moan, longer this time, as you did it intentionally— "there. Exactly there. You have no idea — I've been trying not to think about this and it's so much — you're so much better than—"

"Than what," you managed.

"Anything I—" he started, and his hips found a rhythm that interrupted the sentence and made you grab his shoulder and hold on.

He fucked you on his kitchen counter with his hands on your hips and his glasses crooked and the Greek tattoo on his ribs catching the light and made sounds that belonged to nobody you had met before this evening — unguarded and unrestrained and arriving in response to everything, your sounds, your movements, your hands in his hair, every time you said his name which you did frequently and with purpose because of what it did to him.

"Say my name, please," he said at one point, breathlessly, against your jaw.

"Baelor," you said, deliberate.

The moan that left him at that was long and low and you felt it everywhere.

"God," he said. "Again."

You obliged.

"Fuck," he said, and his rhythm deepened and you stopped being able to say anything coherent for a while.

You came a second time somewhere in the middle of it, which you had not planned for but which arrived with the inevitability of something that had been building since the kitchen wall and the edging and the hickey and the tattoo and all of it, clenching around him with his name on your lips and your nails in his shoulder, and the sound he made at the feel of it—

Was the most undone thing you had ever heard from another person.

A long low broken moan that he pressed into your throat and that shook through his entire chest and that had absolutely nothing of the museum curator or the composed man on the doorstep in it — just Baelor, stripped entirely down, making sounds he had never made in front of another person because nobody had ever gotten past the composure far enough to find them.

"You feel so good," he said, rough and wrecked and honest. "When you come around my cock — fuck — I can feel everything — you feel so—"

"Baelor," you said, and pulled him closer.

He came shortly after with your name and then perfect and then something that was not quite a word pressed into your throat, shuddering through him completely, his hands holding you like you were the thing he was anchored to and he intended to stay anchored.

The kitchen was quiet after.

Both of you breathing.

His forehead against yours.

The glasses — still on, still crooked — catching the kitchen light in a way that made you feel something specific in your chest that you were choosing not to examine until you were in a better position to handle it.

You reached up and straightened them.

He looked at you.

The expression on his face was entirely, completely undone and entirely, completely unbothered about being undone, which was new from a man who had been managing his expression for as long as you had known him.

He reached up and touched the hickey on your neck. Lightly. Just his fingertips.

"I should probably—" he started.

"Don't apologise," you said.

He looked at you. You tilted your head and traced the one you had left on his throat. Something in his expression did something entirely unmanageable.

"Fair point," he laughed.

Your phone was in your bag. Valarr had sent approximately seventeen messages. You did not check your phone.

You traced the tattoo on his ribs instead and felt him exhale slowly against your hair.

Know thyself.

You thought, with the warm certainty of someone who had just watched a man find out something true about himself on his own kitchen counter, that he was getting there.

(i'm truly sorry i did not find a gif that vibed with the vibes)

Daeron was, by any reasonable metric, completely gone.

You had established this approximately forty five minutes ago when he had attempted to explain to you why the Fibonacci sequence was secretly a conspiracy and had made, briefly and alarmingly, a compelling case. Since then he had progressed through several distinct phases — philosophical, then mournful, then inexplicably delighted by a lamppost — and had arrived at the current phase which was primarily characterised by his inability to walk in a straight line and his arm around your shoulders being the only thing keeping him approximately vertical.

"You are," you told him, dragging him up the front path, "an absolute disaster."

"I am having," he said, with great dignity, "a very good evening."

"You can barely walk."

"I'm walking fine."

"Daeron. I am carrying you."

"That's very kind of you," he said, and attempted to pat your head and got your ear instead.

You rang the doorbell with your elbow.

The door opened after about thirty seconds and Maekar stood there in a dark t-shirt and jeans with the expression of a man who had been doing something else and had come to the door expecting approximately anything other than this specific situation.

He took in Daeron.

Daeron, to his credit, attempted to stand up straight. He managed about forty percent of upright before gravity reasserted itself and he leaned back onto your shoulder.

"Hi dad," he said.

The silence that followed had considerable weight.

"For the love of—" Maekar started, and then said several other things in rapid succession that were not appropriate for general audiences and that you were filing away for later because the specific combination and delivery was genuinely impressive.

"He's fine," you said. "Just drunk."

"He's absolutely hammered," Maekar said flatly.

"Okay he's absolutely hammered," you conceded. "But fine. He didn't do anything stupid, he just had about four drinks too many and started explaining mathematics to strangers."

Something moved through Maekar's expression that was exasperation and reluctant parental resignation in equal measure. He held the door open. "Get him in."

Getting Daeron up the stairs was a collaborative project.

You had his left side and Maekar had his right and Daeron contributed by providing commentary on the staircase, which he found architecturally interesting, and by stopping twice to make points about things that had not been raised.

"Dad," he said, at the second landing, with the abrupt subject change of the extremely drunk.

"What," said Maekar, in the tone of a man concentrating on a task.

"She thinks you're really sexy," Daeron said, conversationally, then turning his face to you. "That's the thing you said, right?"

You stopped walking.

"Keep moving," Maekar said, apparently to both of you.

"Like, really sexy," Daeron continued to you, with the relentless honesty of someone for whom the filter between brain and mouth had completely dissolved. "You told me. After the pipe thing. You were like Daeron— wait no that's me. You were like your dad is—"

"Daeron," you said, through your teeth.

"What? It's a compliment. I'm sure dad will take the compliment."

"I'm going to fucking kill you," you told him pleasantly.

"You're literally carrying me, you're not going to—"

"I will drop you on this landing."

"But you said—" Daeron started.

"He's fine," you said loudly, to Maekar, who was — you checked — focused entirely on navigating Daeron through the bedroom door with the focused efficiency of a man who was too irritated at his son to be processing anything else. His jaw was set in the specific way of someone managing several feelings at once and prioritising the most immediate one, which appeared to be get this man horizontal before he falls over.

Good.

Fine.

He had not heard. Or had heard and dismissed it because Daeron was drunk and Daeron said things and the more pressing concern was the logistics.

You were going with that.

You got Daeron onto his bed with the cooperative efficiency of two people who had identified a shared goal and were pursuing it without further conversation. He landed with the boneless satisfaction of someone whose relationship with gravity had become philosophical rather than practical, made a sound of profound contentment, and was asleep within approximately ninety seconds.

You both stood at the foot of his bed looking at him.

"He'll be fine," you said. "Water and paracetamol in the morning."

"I know," Maekar said, in the flat tone of a man who had done this before with various combinations of his six children. He reached down to pull the duvet up and his t-shirt rode up at the back—

You saw it.

Just the bottom edge of it — the tail, curling at the base of his spine, scales rendered in deep red and black with the fine detail of something that had taken serious time and serious money and serious commitment. The colour was extraordinary even in the low light of Daeron's bedroom, vivid and deliberate, and it disappeared back under the t-shirt when he straightened but it was too late.

You had seen it.

You were thinking about what was above it.

"Right," Maekar said, turning around and finding you with an expression that was still mostly parental irritation and some baseline tiredness and not whatever your face was currently doing. "Tea? Or I've got whisky if you need it after that."

"Whisky," you said immediately.

His kitchen was warm and quiet and he poured two glasses with the economical ease of someone who knew his own kitchen and did not need to perform anything in it, and you sat at the table and took the glass he set in front of you and felt the whisky do its immediate work and thought about the tail of a dragon at the base of his spine.

"He's an idiot," Maekar said, sitting across from you.

"He's your idiot," you said.

Something that was almost the almost-smile. "Unfortunately."

You drank your whisky. He drank his.

The kitchen was quiet in the specific way of two people who had just performed a task together and had not yet decided what happened next.

You were happy tipsy — the warm uncomplicated kind, the kind that made you feel slightly more yourself than usual rather than less — and the whisky was good and Maekar was sitting across from you in his t-shirt with the dragon underneath it and you had been thinking about this for weeks and Daeron had, drunk and disastrously, already said half of it anyway.

"He wasn't wrong, by the way," you said.

Maekar looked at you over his glass. "About what."

"What he said on the stairs."

A pause. The quality of Maekar's stillness shifted slightly — not the irritated-at-Daeron stillness, something more attentive than that.

"He said a lot of things on the stairs," Maekar said. "He said the banister was load-bearing in an interesting way."

"The other thing," you said. "I think you heard."

He looked at you, eyes doing that funny thing they do when they grow darker. You looked back.

"You're Daeron's age," he said.

You rolled your eyes. "You're not that old."

"I have six children."

"I know. I've met them. They're fine." You swirled the whisky. "That's not actually a reason not to."

"It's a context."

"Still not a reason, is it?."

His jaw tightened slightly. He set his glass down. "You should probably—"

"Probably what?" you said, and tilted your head, and watched him clock the tone and reassess.

There was a beat.

"Don't," he said. Flatly. The specific flat of a man who has identified a dynamic and is issuing an early warning.

"Don't what?" you said, with the complete innocence of someone who knew exactly what.

His eyes narrowed fractionally.

"You're being a brat," he said.

"I'm asking a question."

"You're being a brat," he said again, and this time it was not a warning exactly, it was something else — something that had arrived from a different place, lower and more specific — "and you know it."

You smiled at him over your glass.

Something shifted in Maekar's expression with the finality of a decision being made.

He stood up.

He crossed to your side of the table with the direct purposeful movement that characterised everything he did physically and you stood because sitting while he was standing felt suddenly like a tactical disadvantage and then you were both standing in his kitchen at a distance that was not a distance anymore and he was looking at you with those violet eyes that had stopped being the grumpy-at-everything eyes and had become something considerably more focused.

"Last chance," he said. Not a threat. Just — information, delivered with the flat certainty of a man who meant what he said.

"I don't buy it" you said staring directly at him.

He kissed you.

Not the way you had imagined it — you had imagined it various ways over various weeks — but harder than any of the imaginings, more immediate, with the specific quality of a man who had been holding something at arm's length for too long and had decided, definitively, to stop. His hand came up and caught your jaw and he kissed you like punctuation, like a full stop at the end of something, and you kissed him back with equal fervour and felt his other hand find your waist and pull you in and the size of him was—

There. Immediate. Real. His hands spanning you, his chest against yours, the specific overwhelming quality of being pulled against someone that much larger and feeling it in every nerve.

He broke the kiss and looked at you.

"Still being a brat?" he said, low.

"Oh, abso-fucking-lutely," you laughed.

His jaw moved. "Right."

His hands moved to your hips and walked you backward with a calm deliberateness that left you no input into the direction of travel, and your back met the kitchen wall with a solidity that was not rough but was very definite, and Maekar braced one hand beside your head and looked at you with the expression of a man who had made several decisions and was implementing them in order.

"Maekar—"

"You wanted to be a brat," he said. "Fine."

His other hand slid down your stomach and your breath caught.

"You can be a brat," he said, his mouth dropping to your throat, "and I'll teach you what happens."

His fingers found the waistband of your jeans and dealt with the button with one hand and the efficiency of someone who was not performing patience because he had the real thing, and then his hand was inside your underwear and finding your clit with a directness that made you grab his shoulder and make a sound that was embarrassingly immediate.

"There," he said, against your throat. Not pleased exactly — satisfied, in the specific way of someone whose assessment has been confirmed. "That's it."

His fingers moved and you stopped being able to think about much else.

He was — thorough. That was the word. In the way the garden spreadsheet had been thorough, in the way the pipeline had been thorough — focused and attentive and completely committed to the task with a patience that was somehow more intense than urgency would have been. He learned what made you gasp and returned to it. He learned what made your hips roll forward and used it deliberately. He paid attention with the same quality of attention he had given the raised bed and the isolation valve except directed entirely at your clit and it was — a lot. It was a frankly unreasonable amount.

"You're close," he said, low. Not a question.

"Yes," you managed. "Yes, keep—"

He stopped.

You made a sound.

"What—" you whined.

"Told you," he said, against your jaw. Calm. Completely, infuriatingly calm. "Brats don't get to come that easily."

"Maekar—"

"Mm."

"That's not—"

"Not what?" he said, and his fingers moved again, barely, just enough, and you grabbed his shirt with both hands.

"Not fair," you said.

"No," he agreed, and did it again — built you up with that focused relentless patience, got you to the edge with the specific efficiency of someone who knew exactly where the edge was and had decided to park you there indefinitely, and then stopped again.

The sound you made was not dignified.

He made a low noise against your throat that was the closest thing to satisfied you had heard from him and you were furious about how much you liked it.

"Maekar," you said, with feeling.

"When you're ready to stop being difficult," he said pleasantly.

"I am not being—"

"You walked into my kitchen at midnight and told me you knew exactly what you were doing," he said, pulling back enough to look at your face. His eyes were dark and completely focused and there was nothing grumpy-at-inanimate-objects about his expression now, just — direct, and certain, and very specifically aimed at you. "You were being difficult on purpose."

"Maybe," you managed.

"So." He tilted his head. The movement was so deliberate it made something in your stomach clench. "Consequences."

He edged you a third time against the kitchen wall.

By the end of it you were gripping his shirt with both fists and making sounds that had nothing to do with dignity and he was pressing his mouth to your temple and saying there, that's it, stay there in a low voice that was simultaneously the hottest thing you had ever heard and the most aggravating and when he stopped for the third time you actually whined.

"Please," you said when he removed his hand from your jeans entirely.

"Please what?" he said.

"Please, you absolute—"

He picked you up.

Not with ceremony, not with warning — simply put his hands under your thighs and lifted you off the floor with the casual ease of someone for whom this was not a significant physical undertaking and carried you out of the kitchen while you were still processing the fact that you were no longer on the ground.

"I hate you," you informed him.

"No you don't," he scoffed, and sat down on the sofa with you in his lap.

The living room was dark except for the light coming through from the hall and Maekar was solid and warm underneath you and you were straddling him and looking at each other and the aggravation had transmuted into something else entirely in the twenty seconds it had taken to get from the kitchen wall to here.

He kissed you again.

Slower this time. His hands on your hips, thumbs tracing small movements against the fabric, and you kissed him back and felt the kiss change as it went — finding its own depth, its own pace — and then you were pulling at his t-shirt and he lifted his arms and you got it over his head and threw it somewhere in the dark and—

You stopped.

The dragon covered his entire back. You could only see the front of him from where you sat but the tail curled around his ribs on the left side and there were scales at his collarbone and it was — in the living room dark with the hall light catching the colour — extraordinary. Deep red and black and the fine detail of something built over years, the kind of tattoo that had been added to incrementally, that had grown with him.

"How," you said.

"How what," he said.

"This." You traced the scales at his ribs. Felt him breathe in. "How does nobody know about this."

"People know," he said. "They just don't see it unless I—" he stopped, because you had leaned forward and pressed your mouth to the scales at his collarbone and his sentence dissolved.

"Unless you what?" you said against his skin.

"You're still being a brat," he said, low.

"Yes," you smiled, and kissed across his collarbone to the scales on his ribs and felt him exhale sharply, his hands tightening on your hips, and heard the low sound he made that was different from the gruff default and considerably better.

You pulled back and looked at him.

"Your turn," he said.

He dealt with your shirt with the same one-handed efficiency as before and unclipped your bra and looked at you with the direct thoroughness he brought to things he was assessing seriously, which should not have been as effective as it was.

You laughed at the way he was staring at you. "That look is getting dangerously close to a compliment."

"And you're getting dangerously close to being pleased about it," he said back, this time the smile almost coming fully to his face.

"Says the man who hasn't looked away from my tits."

"If I had looked away, we both know you'd be disappointed," he said, which was so flat and so Maekar that you laughed, and he watched you laugh with that fractional almost-smile and then pulled you in and kissed you and his hands were everywhere and you stopped laughing about anything.

Clothes ended up in various parts of the living room over the next several minutes — yours, his, everything — with the mutual efficiency of two people who had both been thinking about this and were done with the intermediary steps. His jeans went somewhere near the coffee table. Your underwear ended up on the arm of the sofa.

You were straddling him again, properly now, and he was looking up at you with those dark focused eyes and his hands were on your hips and the size of him was — there. Present. Impossible to be casual about.

"Well?" he said.

"Well what?" you mimicked.

"You wanted to be a brat," he said, low. The almost-smile at the corner of his mouth, barely there, completely deliberate. "Show me."

You held his gaze.

"You're a brat too, you know," you smirked.

"I know," he answered. "So show me."

You sank down onto him slowly and the sound he made was — long and low and entirely without the management of any of his usual composure, his head going back briefly, his jaw clenching, his hands gripping your hips with a pressure that was going to leave something and that you were entirely fine with.

"Fuck," he said. Rough. Genuine.

"That good?" you breathed, because turnabout was fair play and because you wanted to hear what he did with it.

His jaw tightened. His eyes, which had closed briefly, opened and found yours. "Don't push it."

"I'm just asking," you chirped sweetly, and moved, and the sound that left him then was—

Not managed at all.

You rode him with his hands on your hips and his eyes on your face and the low continuous sounds he was making against every instinct to contain them, and it was — the power of it, the specific pleasure of being the one setting the pace while he sat there and took it and made those sounds — was something you had not anticipated and intended to revisit extensively.

"You feel—" he started, low.

"Tell me," you said.

His jaw worked. His fingers dug into your hips. "You feel—" the words seemed to cost him, dragged out by the combination of the movement and something else, something more fundamental— "good. Christ, you feel—" he stopped. Made a sound. Started again. "Perfect. Exactly—" his hips rose to meet yours and you both made sounds simultaneously— "exactly what I—"

"What you what?" you said.

"Thought about," he managed roughly. "For weeks. Christ."

That was the most words you had ever heard Maekar say in a single emotional direction and you filed it somewhere permanent and moved again and felt his entire body respond.

One of his hands left your hip and found your clit.

"Oh—" you started.

"You're going to come," he stated, low and flat and completely certain. "And then you're going to come again. And we're going to see—" his thumb moved and you grabbed his shoulder— "how difficult you feel like being after that."

"Maekar—"

"Yeah," he said. The almost-smile. Devastating. "Yeah."

His thumb worked your clit with the same focused patience he had employed against the kitchen wall except now there was no stopping, no edging, just — direct and relentless and entirely committed, and you rode him and felt everything build simultaneously and heard his sounds and felt his hands and looked at the dragon scales on his ribs and came with his name in your mouth and your nails in his shoulder and everything clenching around him and the sound he made when you did—

Was the best thing you had ever heard from another person.

Low and rough and entirely wrecked, his head dropping back, his hands gripping you like you were the only fixed point available.

"Again," he said roughly. "You can—"

"I literally just—"

"Again," he insisted, and his thumb was still moving and you found out he was right.

You came a second time somewhere shortly after with less warning and more intensity and said something that you would have been embarrassed about if you had had any available capacity for embarrassment, which you did not, and Maekar said your name and then said there, exactly— and followed you over the edge with a roughness and a totality that shook through him completely and left you both in the specific stillness of people who have just dismantled something and are taking stock of the wreckage.

The living room was quiet. Your forehead was against his. His hands had moved from your hips to your back, large and warm and spanning you completely, holding rather than gripping.

"Still being a brat?" he teased.

His voice was completely wrecked.

"Ask me in a minute and we'll see," you said.

The almost-smile. Full this time. Real. Directed entirely at you in the dark living room with the dragon on his ribs and his hands on your back and the evidence of your underwear on the arm of the sofa somewhere to your left.

"Tea," he asked eventually.

"Yeah," you said.

"Then you're staying." Not a question. The flat certainty of a man making a reasonable determination.

"Feel like you'll need me again that much?" you teased.

He looked at you.

"Brat," he scoffed.

"You love it," you said.

He said nothing, but the almost-smile stayed.

The text came at half eleven the following morning.

You were in Maekar's kitchen drinking coffee while he read the paper with the focused attention of someone who had entirely recovered their composure and was pretending the living room situation had not occurred, which was belied only by the coffee he had made you without being asked and the way his hand had rested briefly on the small of your back when he passed.

Your phone lit up.

so daeron targaryen here your best friend??? who you dragged home last night??? and who apparently passed out in his room while something was happening on his sofa???? i have no memory of the stairs but apparently i said some things anyway i need you to know that i heard you last night specifically i heard you say [and then a direct quote of the thing you had said while riding his father that you were not going to repeat even internally] i just want you to know that i will never recover ever are you okay? are you alive? do you need extraction?

You looked at the message for a moment.

You looked at Maekar, who was reading his paper with his coffee and his recovered composure and that fucking hot dragon underneath his t-shirt.

You typed back.

get used to it i'll pay for your therapist x

And then you added an emoji that left absolutely nothing to the imagination.

Daeron's response was a string of increasingly unhinged capitalisation followed by what appeared to be genuine laughter rendered in text.

i literally cannot believe you okay fair enough is he making you coffee tho

You looked at the coffee.

yes why

He waited a few seconds to reply.

good he only makes coffee for people he likes. he made mum coffee every morning for fifteen years

daeron

I'm just saying

daeron

okay okay I'm going back to sleep my head is KILLING me

drink your water

Three dots. None. Three dots again.

yes mum also oh my god I cannot believe you rode my

You turned your phone face down on the table. Maekar looked up from his paper.

"Daeron?"

"Daeron," you confirmed.

He looked at you for a moment with those violet eyes and the recovered composure and the almost-smile sitting at the very corner of his mouth.

"How bad?" he asked.

"He'll be fine," you said. "Mostly horrified."

"Good," Maekar said, and returned to his paper. "He should have kept his mouth shut on the stairs."

You laughed and picked up your coffee.

Outside the morning continued with its business entirely indifferent to the fact that you were sitting in Maekar Targaryen's kitchen the morning after, drinking coffee he had made without being asked, while he read his paper and pretended to be completely normal about it.

You were both completely normal about it.

You were both, underneath the completely normal, not even slightly normal about it.

A.N.: listen i had a very productive day and couldn't stop writing. also, there's a little ✨extra✨ coming tomorrow (if i can proofread it). how do y'all feel about sexting Baelor and Maekar???

Taglist: @qardasngan @nerdyinfluencertastemaker @princessphilly @shyravenns @loveslide @dulcebloodhnd @caitlynluna @mongrelcryptid @sacha1slytherin @faithfullyvigilantsliver @alternarabuda @jjubilee-fluff @hrh007

GIF by @sakuraspoke

The thing about Valarr, sweet, naïve Valarr, was that he had absolutely no survival instincts.

"He's just reading," he said, from beside you on the kitchen counter, stealing grapes from the bowl between you with the casual ease of someone who had decided you were close enough friends that your food was his food. "It's not that interesting."

"He's got two pairs of glasses on," you said.

"He does that." Valarr ate another grape. "He loses one pair, so he puts on another and then he finds the first pair and instead of swapping them he just—" he gestured vaguely, "stacks them."

You looked back through the kitchen window into the living room where his father was arranged in the armchair by the lamp with the particular quality of a man who had achieved a level of comfort he intended to defend unto death. Dark hair, threads of white catching the warm lamplight. Two pairs of glasses. A book that appeared to be roughly the size of a brick, held with the careful reverence of someone deeply personally invested in its continued structural integrity.

He had a cup of tea on the side table that he had not touched in forty minutes because he kept forgetting it existed.

"What is he reading," you said.

"Something about Byzantine military strategy."

You stared.

"For fun," Valarr added. "He does it for fun."

Baelor turned a page. The lamplight shifted across the lines of his face — the strong bearded jaw, the particular set of his brow when he was concentrating, the slight movement of his lips because he occasionally read difficult passages quietly to himself without realising he was doing it, a habit Valarr had told you about once with the fond exasperation of someone who had grown up watching it and could no longer imagine its absence.

He reached for his tea without looking. Missed it by four inches. Patted the table twice, frowning faintly at his book, and then looked down with an expression of mild surprise at the existence of the cup, like he had genuinely forgotten he had made it.

"Oh no," you said quietly.

"Yeah," said Valarr.

Baelor took a sip of the tea, realised it was cold, made a face of profound personal betrayal directed at no one, set it back down, and returned to his book.

You were experiencing something you didn't have a clean word for. It sat somewhere in the vicinity of I would like to bring this man a fresh cup of tea every day for the rest of my natural life and considerably south of that as well, if you were being honest with yourself, which you were trying not to be.

He turned another page. Murmured something to himself. The lamplight caught the line of his jaw and the silver in his hair and the careful way his hands held the book, and you were, genuinely, a little embarrassed about yourself at realizing that you were, in fact, biting your lower lip.

"Valarr," you said.

"Mm."

"Your dad is—" You stopped. Tried to start again. Stopped again.

"Is…" Valarr prompted, with the patience of someone who had been watching this unfold for the better part of an hour and had popcorn, metaphorically speaking.

You watched Baelor reach for his tea again. Miss it again. The same four inches. The same faint frown. The same expression of mild existential surprise upon locating the cup.

Something in you gave way entirely.

"Valarr," you said. "I want to fuck your dad."

The grape Valarr had been eating went somewhere it was not supposed to go. He coughed. You waited. He held up a finger, collected himself, and turned to look at you with an expression that cycled through several distinct phases — shock, offence, processing, reluctant resignation — in the space of approximately four seconds.

"That's my father," he said.

"I know."

"You just said that about my father."

"I'm aware of what I said."

"He's reading about Byzantine military strategy."

"I know! But him being a nerd isn’t helping," you yelled-whispered to your friend.

You looked back through the window. Baelor had found his tea again, remembered it was cold, and was now looking at it with an expression of genuine philosophical sadness, as if looking at it would eventually warm its content again.

Valarr stared at you for a long moment. Then he looked at his father through the window. Then back at you. The reluctant resignation had settled into something that looked almost like the beginning of a plan.

"He needs a fresh cup of tea," he said slowly.

"He really does."

"Someone should bring it to him." A pause. "He likes it with a splash of milk. No sugar. He'll look up when you come in and forget what he was reading for a moment because he's polite like that, and when he takes his glasses off to look at you properly he'll probably—" Valarr stopped himself. Pinched the bridge of his nose. "I cannot believe I'm doing this."

"Valarr—"

"The kettle's right there," he said, getting off the counter and leaving the kitchen with the dignity of a man washing his hands of a situation while absolutely enabling it. "I'm going to be upstairs. Not hearing anything. For a very long time."

You were already filling the kettle.

GIF by @prettysharwood

You had come over to study.

That had been the plan. That was still, technically, the plan, in the same way that standing in Daeron's kitchen doorway staring into the back garden while your notes sat untouched on the kitchen table was still, technically, adjacent to studying.

"What are you looking at," said Daeron, from somewhere behind you, in the tone of someone who already knew and was choosing to witness it anyway.

"Nothing," you said.

"You've been looking at nothing for six minutes straight."

Through the kitchen window and the glass of the back door, Maekar was in the garden.

He was doing something to a raised bed that appeared to involve a great deal of focused activity — kneeling in the dirt in old jeans and a worn grey t-shirt that had not survived contact with the garden soil in any meaningful way, hands dark to the wrist, white hair shoved back from his face with what appeared to have been a forearm and was now sticking up at an angle that should have looked ridiculous and did not. He was frowning at the soil the way, Daeron had once told you, he frowned at everything that failed to immediately cooperate with his intentions.

He said what seemed like a profanity by the look on his face under his breath. Adjusted whatever he was doing. The frown deepened fractionally.

The t-shirt was doing a lot.

"He's been out there since eight," Daeron said, now beside you with a mug of coffee and the expression of a young man who had made his peace with his life. "Something about the drainage not being right."

"Does he garden a lot?"

"He acts like it's a tactical problem he's been assigned to solve." Daeron drank his coffee. "Last month he made an Excel spreadsheet."

"A spreadsheet."

"For the tomatoes." A pause. "It had conditional formatting."

Outside, Maekar sat back on his heels and looked at the raised bed with his arms resting on his knees and dirt on his beard and the particular expression of a man reassessing a situation and preparing a revised approach. The late afternoon light was doing something entirely unreasonable to the line of his shoulders. His forearms were right there. Existentially. Just present in the world, doing that to your composure.

You needed to get a grip.

"He looks like that when he's cooking too," Daeron said conversationally. You wondered if he wore an apron. "And when he's parallel parking. And when he's doing the crossword. Basically, whenever he's concentrating on anything he gets that—" a vague gesture toward the window— "face."

"The face," you repeated.

"You know the face."

You knew the face. The face was a problem. The face combined with the forearms combined with the dirt on his bearded jaw combined with the knowledge that he had made a colour-coded spreadsheet for his tomatoes was creating a situation inside your chest that you were not equipped to manage.

You did not get a grip.

"Daeron," you said.

"Mm."

The words were out before you made a decision about them. "I want to fuck your dad."

The silence that followed had genuine texture.

Daeron lowered his coffee mug with the slow care of a man buying himself time. He looked at you. You looked at the garden. Outside, Maekar was frowning at the soil again, entirely unaware that his drainage problem was the least of what was currently happening in his kitchen.

"That's—" Daeron started.

"I know."

"He's my dad."

"I know."

"You came over here to study."

"I am studying."

A long pause during which Daeron appeared to conduct an internal debate of some complexity. You watched Maekar stand, brush the dirt from his jeans, push his hair back from his face with one forearm, and survey his raised bed with his hands on his hips. The t-shirt. The forearms. The hair. The frown.

"He's going to be insufferable about the drainage for the rest of the evening," Daeron said finally. "He needs something to redirect his attention."

You said nothing. You let that sit.

"He doesn't know you're here," Daeron continued, in the tone of a man constructing a case for something he will deny constructing. "I could go tell him. He does this thing when he's surprised — not bad surprised, just caught off guard — where he kind of—" another vague gesture— "resets. Stops frowning. It's a good moment."

"Daeron."

"I'm just providing information."

"You're facilitating."

"I'm going to go tell my dad you're here," he said, setting his mug down and heading for the back door with the air of someone who has made peace with their choices. "And then I'm going to remember that I have somewhere else to be. Urgently." He paused with his hand on the door. "He likes it when people are direct, by the way. He has no patience for anything else."

"I know," you said.

Daeron looked at you with suspicious eyes, like how long has this woman been observing my father without me noticing kind of eyes. He preferred not to walk down that line of thought and went to open the back door instead.

"Dad," he called, "look who came to visit!"

Maekar looked up from his raised bed. Found you through the glass. The frown shifted into something else — not quite a smile, but the suggestion of one, that fractional movement at the corner of his mouth that you had learned was as much as you usually got and had discovered was entirely sufficient.

Daeron brushed past you back into the kitchen, collected his jacket from the chair, and pointed at you on his way to the hall.

"I want absolutely no details," he said. "Like ever. Under any circumstances."

"Obviously," you said.

"Not even a look. Not a grin. Nothing."

"Daeron."

"I mean it,” he directed one final look to you from the front door. He turned on his heels and, with that wicked smile he usually saved for when he wanted to get under your skin, said: "Go on, pup, go get your toy."

Your eyes widened at the audacity of the man. But, when the front door closed behind him and you looked back through the glass at Maekar, who was still watching you with that fractional almost-smile and the dirt on his jaw and the forearms, you smiled and decided, for maybe the first time in your friendship, to not argue with Daeron.

So, you opened the back door.

I am completely normal about these men. Yeah. Completely normal.

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