Heyyyy Baby

He thumbs it tenderly while sitting in his office. The last patient left satisfied with Viktor’s meticulous breakdown of the problem, the solid treatment plan, and the warm reassurance. Viktor, however, finds himself producing all of it automatically—like his brain has an idle muscle memory, and that was what took care of the patient while the part of him that’s alive and kicking was elsewhere.

He straightens the stationery he has already straightened. Aligns the pen with the blotter, the blotter with the desk’s lip. The cane leans where it always does—against the right front leg, ferrule kissing the rug. He touches its handle and the nerve under his ribs answers like a tuning fork.

It’s getting harder to choose whether he’s a joke of a doctor or simply a joke of a man. Possibly both. A clinician who watches transference develop frame by frame and not only fails to interrupt it, but lays himself down beneath the slow-moving carriage; a debauched man who cannot stop taking once the door is opened, and calls it treatment because she asked. Or is that precisely the grammar of the world you taught him—ask, receive, be changed? He does not know.

The last time, he told himself the humiliation was clinical—a necessary demonstration, a mirror held up. It felt right while he was inside the method; afterward, when he could not bear to offer the tenderness he had weaponised, guilt opened in him like a drained vein. The energy didn’t settle; it blew apart—no after-tenderness for you, none for him, and he knows the duty belongs to the one doing the breaking, too. In a final pantomime of being a physician, he sent you away to ‘sit with it,’ frightened and raw, while he failed to sit with anything at all.

He spent the night listening for a phone that was not ringing, lifting the receiver twice to find only the monotone of a line waiting to be used. He had hoped—weakly—that you would cross the boundary again and call, so he could pretend the trespass remained mutual. You did not. After crossing every line he drew, you kept the rest better than he did. Admirable, really. It leaves him with the only certainty he trusts: that he loves, and that this is wrong in principle. Which truth should govern him—principle or love—he cannot yet decide. He presses the blister on his forefinger and feels nothing resolve.

Tomorrow you will come, and he’s said you may ask for anything. And oh, Viktor hopes for so many things. He replays the cane landing on you, the ripple under wood; his palm remembers the heat each slap bleeds into skin—yours and his. He wants your weight on him. He wants to learn whether your mouth is as sweet as your cunt or as foul as the things you say about yourself. He regrets not letting you touch him back in the sanatorium. He wishes you’ll ask him to hold you—just once.

Persevere. Let it live in you until it dies and something else is born, he told you. Obedient, you let it live out its days to the very threshold of death. On that precipice, you clutch.

That night was long. You made it longer. You went home bare-legged and let the cold lick the places he’d licked. You scrubbed your toes and heels clean of his spit to get rid of the feeling. Not his tongue, no—the intention. You soaped your womb until it burned.

It’s only petty musings of meat, you told yourself. Phone in hand, the spiral cord cinched around your wrist—don’t call him, you told yourself. New tears fell before the old ones dried. Sleep refused to haunt you, so you lay awake until grey fingers of dawn pried through the curtains to announce there are two days left of this.

When you stare into the abyss long enough, your eyes adjust; you begin to see.

After last time you hate the way your chest behaves: buoyant at stupid moments, then knifed open by the memory of a mouth sealing over places you don’t deserve to have kissed. Love is the wrong word—too round, too pink—but something like it lurks, and you want to smash its teeth out. You miss him. You miss the man who can hold your head still with a hand and your mind still with a sentence. Viktor, you think against your will, and the name lands like an oath you never agreed to swear.

In that long and painful death, your darkness begins to tell you things. It says the missing piece isn’t the blow—it’s the aftermath. Not the cane, not the slap, but what comes later: the mouth that kisses tears away; the voice that lays a new law in your ear—It’s alright, you’re alright; the knuckles that push hair from your eyes as if you were something worth seeing. Other nights you came home full—sated and triumphant, whether you dealt the harm or took it. This time there were no blows. There were kind hands, and words like vines that won’t release, and you want more of that terrible mercy: a body beside you in the morning to prove you can be a good girl in daylight.

He promised to look at the beast with you. You’re looking now, and he is not here. The revelation cuts clean: he can look into it, yes—but he cannot stay. He will not sit vigil when the seeing turns into keeping. He will name your night and then return you to the day. And the worst part is knowing you want the keeping more than the strike. Knowing you’ve found the part of yourself that asks for aftermath—and that asking is the one thing he cannot give.

When it dies, you’re ready for another painful thing: the birth of a new thought. What would you be anyway—his secret? His ruin? A wife who can’t walk into daylight without a lie stitched across her chest? It doesn’t scale. As it is, kinship is not enough—there has to be a space to nurture and strengthen it. And the world doesn’t have that space for you.

On Friday, you put on the uniform—his favorite things: buttons he can rip, a skirt he can ruck, stockings he can keep.

At 17:59, the doorbell sings, and Viktor has to push himself up from the chair—his knees still ache from tormenting you. He buzzes you in without checking and waits with his door open.

“Right on time,” he says, smiling. “Welcome.”

To his utter terror, you smile back. No glee, no smirk, no smugness—just a smile, plain and simple and honest. Without prompting, you step in, sit in the chair facing his, and rest your hands in your lap—the perfect picture of calm.

“How have you been?” he asks, settling behind the desk, notebook open.

You weigh which version to give him—the one where you just managed, no details; the fabricated one where you passed the exam in flying colors; or the real one, where you chewed your cuticles down to the first knuckle and found it troublesome to breathe through snot.

From where you’re sitting, truth seems the least painful.

“Awful,” you say. “But then I was clear.”

“And you decided not to call me.” Not a question—a verdict. Viktor hides the small wound as best he can and suspects he fails. He watches you, pensive, waiting for a tease, an offhand dart; to his surprise he misses the sparring.

You watch him back—like the first time, your gaze holds, but something inside has fused. It feels as if both creatures are looking at him now: the one with teeth and the one that rolls to show its belly. “I wanted to,” you say after a beat. “But I decided I should do this alone.”

He clears his throat, slips off his glasses, folds the arms against his palm. “Would you like to tell me what you’ve learned?”

A breath; your shoulders rise, fall. “That I don’t take well to tenderness,” you say, voice steady, “because it scares me. I thought fear was the worst thing I could feel, so I always killed it fast—with noise, with teeth, with someone to fight.” Your fingers knot lightly in your skirt; you unclench them. “This time I didn’t. I let it sit. I let it gnaw and hollow me, and I waited until it burned itself out.”

You look past him, toward the window’s dull square, then back. “When it quieted, there was something under it I didn’t expect.” A small, incredulous smile ghosts your mouth. “I missed you. Not the cane. Not the ritual. You. I wanted… more than the falling-into-line part.” Your throat works; the words come clean. “I wanted someone to witness me after. To keep witnessing when it changes me outside the scene.”

Silence braids the room. You meet his eyes. “I could be loved, I think. As I am,” you say finally—careful, like setting a fragile thing on the desk between you. “I might want to try.”

Inside him, something answers too loudly—You’ve succeeded already. You are loved. You are worshipped. You live in me night after night—but he lets none of it loose. “I’m glad to hear that,” Viktor says instead, tone even while his chest sinks like a stone in a well.

His fingers drum once on the blotter; he tries to put the doctor back on like a coat. Anticipation is a curse—he knows too well what usually follows such confessions. Partings. He doesn’t claw to prevent it; he does the opposite, smoothing the air so it won’t break ugly. “Is there anything you need today?” he asks, the professional cadence laid over the tremor.

Movement, finally. You lean in, spread your fingers on the desk. “You showed me what you are when there are no restraints.” You watch his face—still, stubbornly. Recalibrate—a shake of your head, a glance toward the ceiling and then back to him. “Old restraints, to be clear. There are new ones now, aren’t there?”

“The therapy is for you, not for me,” the doctor says and lies by omission. “I’m trying to accommodate your needs.”

“My needs have been accommodated,” you answer, simple as water. “But you promised me you’d do whatever I ask today.”

“With some obvious exceptions,” he says softly—guardrails stated against requests that he wouldn’t be surprised with in the past (break my neck, rob a bank with me, let’s kill someone?)—out of habit, out of fear, out of feeling he won’t speak of. 

You circle the desk. Perch on its edge beside him. Your hand moves a lock from his forehead—a gesture so cruelly familiar it almost feels like domestic violence—and then rests along his cheek. “Show me again,” you whisper, gentle as a blade’s shadow. “What are you when you’re not a doctor?”

The touch lands and he doesn’t flinch. He leans into your palm; his eyes shut. It feels like permission granted both ways—your skin allowed to hold him, his body allowed to be held. Strange, the lack of fight in him. He remembers that time when he threw you off him—he would never do that now.

“What are you saying?” he asks, opening his eyes into yours.

You tilt your head, thumb stroking once along the hinge of his jaw. “What do you want?”

He lets out a small, hollow chuckle that halts its crawl mid-way his face. “There are many answers to that.”

You breathe through your nose—fond annoyance, the kind you save for evasions. “You have me—here, today. I ask for nothing. Only for you to do whatever you want.” A beat; you borrow his old trick and hand it back to him polished. “Imagine you are not my physician. Imagine we are not doing anything wrong. What then?”

What then? The words split him. He sees the world that won’t exist: no clinic, no notes, no oath hemming his hands; a room that could be a life. He knows it would never scale—would never pass daylight, doors, names on paper. Then—he is Faust, he thinks, begging the moment to stay. The Devil drags him where his dearest darling can’t follow.

He covers your hand with his own and closes his eyes as if to hold the vision steady. Joy breaks in him—bright, almost childish: you did it, you walked through the fear, you named a want that isn’t made of teeth. And right alongside it comes the countercurrent, black and honest: regret. If he hadn’t pressed, hadn’t shown you the door, you might still be his problem, his patient, his excuse. A selfish part of him wants to rewind the reel to the version where you are wild enough to need him and not yet wise enough to leave. But to wish you smaller would be a cruelty in the costume of love, and he can’t pretend not to see that. The truth pins him between two goods—your becoming, his loss—and he chooses you. When he speaks, his voice is threadbare and true. “I’m so proud of you,” Viktor says—and understands, with the clean pain of a blade turned upright—this is the last time.

Like that—with your palm on his cheek held by his—he stands. One hand stays braced on the desk; the other draws you a pace away. “Let me show you,” he says, solemn.

You stand under a spell. A scene begins—unlike any other. His touch ghosts your face first. Both hands cup over your ears, the world a hush, then his thumbs find your brows and trace them back and forth, mussing the fine hairs until they forget their training. Lower, to your lids: a tender press that is both gentleness and show-off: he’s in charge. He slides down either side of your nose, joins at the curve of your philtrum, pauses at your cupid’s bow.

Your mouth is next; there he lingers. His thumbs ease the corners wider, lifting them into a smile until a breath of laughter catches in your throat. One thumb draws your lower lip and lets it fall; again, slower, feeling how it yields. His fingers travel the curve of red as though reading a line of text; they map the edge, skim the ridge where your smile lives. He’s taking inventory, you realise.

Then, his thumb rests just inside and you suck it without thinking, the hollow of your cheek shaping around him. Knuckles tip your chin; his forefinger maps your teeth in a light pass, pausing at the sharp points before gliding along the rest. When his hand comes away it’s damp; one palm settles under your jaw, the other cups your crown and draws you closer. You close your eyes, then open, tongue ready. He tips your face, leans so near you can taste his nearness—and gives you a warm thread of himself to swallow, a quiet offering that slips down and leaves your throat shining.

“Say thank you,” he murmurs.

“Thank you.”

“Who are you thanking?”

“Thank you, Viktor.”

An intake of breath. “My good girl.”

The bloom in your chest is unstoppable. No one has ever touched you more intimately than this—and he’s had you bent over that desk, legs spread and leaking, more times than you can count. Months ago you would’ve flinched, slapped, laughed in his face. Now it’s him showing you himself, and you feel—God help you—honoured.

There’s a whisper at your collar—buttons giving way. He pops two, pauses at the suprasternal notch. His thumb fits there as if the body were made with a mold for it; another press, then a slow stroke along your collarbones. “Demure clothing.” A scoff, playful. "This is not chastity, is it?" He asks. "It's architecture." 

You tip your head. Show, don't tell, your eyes say. "I thought you liked my clothing." 

“I hate it,” he laughs softly. “It’s driving me mad. I want you naked today—new architecture.”

“Demolition, then?”

“Renovation,” he hums. “Do you consent?”

“Renovate away,” you say, “as long as I can renovate yours.”

You watch the gold of his eyes disappear in favour of dark want—only a thin ring remains. He nods, excited.

The work on you follows methodically downward, button by patient button, until the last pearl slips its loop and air touches skin that’s never met him in daylight. Your belly: there, unabashed, human. He doesn’t lunge; he looks—truly looks—like a man who’s been handed a map and intends to read it properly. His palms bracket your waist, thumbs drawing a shallow arc beneath your ribs as if testing the curve of a lintel. “I wondered how pretty that would be,” he says, almost to himself.

Your shirt falls off. “And what’s the verdict?” Ridiculously, you want the praise. He says it, or doesn’t say it—it changes absolutely nothing. Still, you want to hear your belly is pretty coming from his mouth.

“Mine—I’m a terribly unimaginative man,” he says, bending to mark the route. A kiss at the notch he pressed; another to the hollow where sternum becomes softness. He names the structure under his breath—xiphoid, costal margin, umbilicus—as if the language could steady his hands. His mouth follows the words: a warm stamp below your breastbone, a grazing breath to either side where your ribs ladder, then lower, a slow press of lips to the place that makes you want to flinch and doesn’t let you. You stand for it. You breathe through it. Something unclenches.

“Yours—” he says, his fingers finding your back where the bra helps you win that unfair game with gravity. He unclasps it with one flick, peels straps off, stares at the red indents its seams left in your skin, and sighs. “—a work of art.”

You bite your lip not to laugh stupidly. 

At your waistband, hooks lift; the skirt loosens. He lets it fall and doesn’t chase it, just watches the fabric puddle. Stockings next: he traces the garter strap with one knuckle, unclasps with a learned click, rolls the nylon down with a care that makes you dizzy. Shoes off, almost everything off.

For the next part, you close your eyes.

Warm palms, flat, slide beneath the lace wrapping your ass. He pulls, down, down, until the fabric reaches where your thighs narrow, and your knickers drop to your feet.

Bare, you feel the room find you; the air itself says stay.

You try to be proud. You think about dipping your spine, about lifting your breasts for him to admire—because you know he wants to—but the impulse feels gaudy, wrong for this light. So you just stand: feet easy under you, shoulders level, hands loose at your sides. No pose, no armour. You let the plainness of it—skin, breath, a body with ordinary angles—sink and settle into bone until it feels true.

He steps closer and places you, gently, between his palms—one hand warm on your lower belly, fingers pointing down, the other broad across your forehead. A lover’s grope, tender and sweet. “This,” he murmurs, an ardent confession that belongs in a chapel, “are the two favourite places of mine I’ve ever been to.” His thumbs rest—one over the soft pulse below your navel, one at the quiet centre of your brow—and you feel seen, not measured; held, not handled.

“Your turn,” he says then, the whisper covering a tremor. “Renovate away.”

You nod—and to your mild horror, you’re excited too. You’re about to see the catalogue you’ve been inventing: parts to memorize for the hunger-days when hands and necks and forearms stop being enough. Defiant by nature, you begin where he dreads: the brace. You sink to your knees and cradle his shin in your palms. One glance up to check the weather—he’s looking back, throat working. “Do you want to do it yourself?” you ask.

“No,” he says. “Go on.”

Brave man. You find the hinge at his knee and ease the clasps; the cage loosens with a tired sigh and you lift it free. His leg settles heavier into the carpet, a living thing reclaimed. You set the brace within reach in case he changes his mind. Then the practical work: shoes unknotted, slipped away; socks unrolled with a quick, efficient grace.

His feet are beautiful in their honesty—long and even, metatarsals pronounced like clean scaffold beneath the skin. One is flatter, the arch tempered by old compensations; the other keeps its curve, a quiet testament to the body’s math. Nails blunt and tidy. A faint map of pressure and toil darkens the heel. You run your thumbs once along the tendons that string the top, feeling the hum of him there, and his breath answers—a small, surprised, recognition.

Your hands ride up—belt, buckle, fly—so fast he laughs, a breathless, startled sound. You can’t mirror his slow liturgy, so you offer reverence as haste: trousers and briefs tugged down in one sure peel; he sets a hand on your shoulder for balance and steps free, first one foot, then the other. With the lower half of him bare, you let yourself look. Then you touch him the way he touched you where you are vulnerable.

One thigh is thinner. You hold that muscle in both hands, thumbs learning its edge, and bend to press your mouth to it—no flourish, just contact. Viktor goes very still. The laugh dies into a low exhale; his fingers hover, unsure whether to touch your hair or let the moment stand. When he does touch, it’s light—two fingertips at your crown. Something in his face loosens, an old vigilance stepping back. You can feel him understand what you’re saying without words: that you see the strength that lives in a body that sometimes won’t obey, and the fiercer strength in the mind that chose to meet you with nurture rather than crush you. His throat works; his eyes shine. “Thank you,” he whispers—unbidden, unperformed—and you feel the words land warm against your hands.

When you rise, it’s only his shirt left. You’ve said nothing all this time—couldn’t. Telling him he’s pretty when he’s dressed and about to examine you? Easy. Telling him you adore his weaker leg, his slanted hips, his asymmetrical feet? Insurmountably difficult.

You undo the buttons, making sure your fingers brush his chest. Lower, he’s half-hard, as if the body can’t decide what it wants.

At his collarbones, you slide the fabric off his shoulders and let it fall. Your fingers comb through his hair, then drift in one long pass down his face, his neck, the hollow of his chest and the ladder of ribs. Gooseflesh lifts where you go. From his waist your hands stray to his back, your eyes fixed on his. He’s flushed: cheeks pink, lips wet from where he keeps licking them. “A rather quick renovation,” he jokes, helpless.

You ignore the quip. Your palms map his back—the notches of the spine so pronounced you could count them blind—and land on his shoulder blades, sharp and winging under your touch. Your fingers tremble. You rise onto your toes, close, closer, until bellies meet and you’re nose to nose. “I knew you have wings,” you say, relieved.

He gasps. Something in Viktor snaps cleanly in half. His hands do what hands should do—wrap you tight, one on your ass, the other cradling your skull. He pulls and pulls and pulls until your mouths seal. He’s kissing you. And his dearest darling—his gentle beast—tastes sweeter than anything he ever let himself imagine.

You answer like fire answers air. He doesn’t peck or test—he takes, matches you beat for beat, teeth finding the places your mouth hides its heat and worrying them until you open wider. He kisses the way he fucks: intent, resolute, a little ruthless, and downright dirty. Tongue deep, then retreat; lips sealing, then breaking to drag breath from you; a low sound in his throat that vibrates through your jaw. His hand at your skull decides the angle; the other spans your lower back and learns the precise pressure that hollows you toward him. Sweet, yes—but sweet like fruit torn with the hands, juice on the wrist, nothing polite about it.

You meet him with your old ferocity and discover it isn’t old anymore. You bite, he bites back; you chase, he yields just long enough to make you chase harder. It is horribly familiar—your bodies have practiced this for months without lips—and yet it breaks something new and clean: a rule, a pose, a distance you thought immune to breach. You taste his breath and the faint ghost of tea, feel the wet edge of his tongue write your name on the roof of your mouth, and think, with a small shock, mine.

He walks you backwards, mouth never lifting, guiding you by the waist; his calves touch the couch. He doesn’t sit—he looms, kisses you through the balance shift until you’re swaying, then catches your lower lip between his teeth—ferocious, wonderful. 

“Do you consent—” he rasps against you, pulse beating under your fingers where they grip his ribs, “—to be fucked lovingly?”

“Yes,” your body breathes before you can stop it. “Yes,” you say again once brain catches up with blood.

He drops into the cushions and takes you with him, thumbprints finding the yellowing blooms on your ass as if greeting old friends. You settle astride—thighs spilling over his, his mouth busy at your throat, your jaw, the damp hollow under your ear. He lifts your arm and buries his face in your armpit—in salt, in soap, in skin—cataloguing you like a man who means to remember what he cannot keep. Lovely animal, you let him. The scales have tipped so many times you’ve lost track of what is good by nature, what he has made good, and what remains wicked but welcomed.

You slide against him—slow, claiming, wetting him without taking him—and when he drapes your arms over his shoulders and reaches to nudge, you go still. The post-scrub burn lives there, faint until now; it rises like a blush you can’t hide. Normally, you wouldn’t care. But there he is, pausing, reading your face with that infuriating talent and you speak before you know it.

“I’m… sore,” you say, absurdly embarrassed.

A flicker crosses him—blink, grimace, the ugly green thing trying to rise. “How—?” nearly leaps out. You cut it off with a look that knows too much.

“No one,” you say. “I tried to wash you out and found I couldn’t.”

Stricken, then soft—“I wasn’t there,” he whispers, remorse threading the words. “Forgive me.”

“You couldn’t be,” you answer. “You weren’t supposed to be.”

He nods once, something gentle and feral agreeing at the same time. He licks his palm, warm and thoughtful, and slides the wet lower, nose pressed to your neck. In the heat between your thighs his knuckles are respectful, fingers patient. “Slow,” he says into your skin. “Lighthouse if you want.”

“Slow,” you echo, and the word lands like a vow—huge, terrifying, right.

He keeps to it. Two fingers first—not in yet—stroking the seam, circling where you throb, easing the sting with wet. He learns the rhythm your breath asks for and follows it, murmuring nonsense that is somehow steadier than silence. When you soften, he parts you with careful pressure, mouth still at your pulse, and slides one finger inside—shallow, then a little more—testing, withdrawing, returning, teaching the ache to unclench. Your hands tighten at his shoulders; he waits. You breathe. He adds slick, slow as the hour hand, until the burn thins into need.

“Better?” he asks, not moving until your nod brushes his cheek.

“Better.”

He guides you, the base of him hot under your hand as you angle his cock to your entrance. The head kisses you, pauses—his eyes lift, asking again without words. You nod once more. He exhales, steadies your hips. “Slow,” he repeats—a promise this time—and begins to press—careful—until your body answers yes by opening.

New angles make your body feel new too—he’s close, he’s naked, his face is right there for you to kiss whenever you want—everything you’ve told yourself not to do. The breach feels different: full from the first inch, the length of him seating you wide and certain, as if this has always been the fitted place he was carved for. His hand finds your nape, warm and unyielding; the other brands your hipbone. “Eyes on me,” he says. Your thighs tremble where they bracket his hips; palms come to your waist and stay—firm, permissive, directing without taking.

“Don’t look away while you slide down my cock,” he says, quiet and absolute. You lift your gaze; it’s like stepping out on a ledge and finding the air holds. He rolls his hips once, a patient push that sets your breath to wobble. “Good. Now breathe. Take me how you want—slow.”

You rock, small at first. The drag is devastating—plush and exquisite—each descent giving you more of him, each rise showing you he’ll still be there. He hums when your chest brushes his, mouth tipping to taste—cheek, jaw, the corner of your lips—kisses that feel like signatures. His thumbs press, staking claim where softness meets bone. “That’s it,” he murmurs. “Show me. Show me how you get quiet.”

You find a rhythm—long slide down, pause to feel the fit, a shiver of tilt, then up—and he meets it with the barest lift from below, the restraint thrillingly obvious in his thighs. “Tell me if it hurts.”

“It doesn’t,” you manage, surprised. “Just… you.”

“Just me,” he echoes, pleased. One hand leaves your waist to cradle the back of your head; the other cups low at your spine, guiding the arc he wants. 

“Open your mouth,” he says, and when you do he kisses you, not like a doctor—like a lover, a husband, a confidant—wet and slow, tongue certain, not asking, taking, taking, and giving back in the same breath.

The furious thing inside you reaches out to the tender one. Stitched together, you ride him deeper, mean and sweet, feral and careful. The couch murmurs under you; your knees slip a little on the cushion and he steadies you, fingers spreading over the ache he gave you last week as if to bless it.

“Greedy girl,” he praises, voice rough with awe. “Sit—yes, like that—sit all the way.” You do, sheathing him to the hilt; both of you groan into the same mouth. He holds you there, chest to chest, blood pumping in both, until the want stops feeling like panic and starts feeling like arrival.

“What do you need?” he asks against your lower lip.

“More of this,” you say. “More… you.”

His smile is almost boyish and gone in a second. “You have me.” He angles your hips with two precise thumbs, finds the line that makes your breath break open. “There. Ride it. Nice and slow. Count in fours.”

You count—whispered numbers skimming his mouth—and each set he rewards with a deeper lift, a kiss to your throat, a quiet good. When your pace stutters he stills you with a palm at your sternum, simply reminding you where the centre lives. “Feel it,” he says. “No running.”

You’ve never thought fucking could feel this clean. No trick coiled underneath, no parts braced to be bitten off—just bodies slotting for the sake of it, for the bliss of it, for the simple animal pleasure of being fitted and met. The notion had never crossed your mind intact, and here he is making it good and solid and real—holding it steady as if you were worthy of it.

So you don’t run. You move like tide. The closeness undoes you—the way his eyes stay on your face, the way he swallows when you bite your bottom lip, the way he presses his forehead to yours and sighs like he’s come home. “Mine,” he says softly, as if testing the sound. “My miracle.”

“Say it again,” you whisper, sinking, rising, drowning.

“My miracle,” he grants, and his hands slide to your ass, guiding you down, holding you there while he pushes up—slow, loving, ruinous—until your body trembles and quiets in the same shiver. “That’s it,” he breathes. “Be here with me. Take it.”

By his command, or request, you don’t know—you chase it yourself—tilting your hips to find the seam, working small cruel circles that make him gasp and catch. One cinches his shoulder; the other slips between you, fingers slicking over the place his thrusts keep striking sparks. “Viktor,” you say like you’re learning how a mouth works, like the name is a step-stone in a river. “You’re—God, you’re the most beautiful thing that’s ever happened to me.” The words spill without craft, nonsense and truth together, and he looks broken with it—eyes hot, lips parted, worship-drunk.

The climb is steady, merciless—heat gathering, tightening behind your ribs, low in your belly, at the root of your spine. Your fingers move faster; he beckons for you to lift and sets you down in that exact rhythm, the head of him stroking the spot until your breath hiccups.

“That’s it,” he murmurs, forehead to yours, voice a thread you grip with your teeth. “There. Take it. Take me.”

The crest hits like a bell struck hard—soundless and total. Your body locks, clamps around him, then surges—hips grinding down, thighs shaking, mouth open on a cry that turns to his name. It rips through you in bright strips; you see white, you see him; you can’t stop saying thank you, can’t stop kissing whatever you can reach—his jaw, his mouth, his breath.

He ruts up into the squeeze you make, control thinning to a snarl. His hands grip—hard enough to bruise, delicious as always—and he drives in, holding you down on the length of him as if he can fuse you there. “Tell me what you are,” he rasps, almost begging.

You take his face in both hands, pull his mouth to yours. “Your good girl,” you whisper into him, and his answer is a sound you’ve never coaxed from him—low, raw, grateful.

“Yes—yes—yes,” he breaks, the word a litany, hips punching up, breath shattering. You feel it when he goes—heat flooding you deep, pulse to pulse, his body arching under yours while you kiss him through it and tell him he’s perfect, you’re here, you’ve got him. He holds you, still buried, the tremor running out to his fingertips, and the room goes very quiet around the two of you—tender, devastating, and finite.

Tears slip—a disobedient little army marching from your lacrimal lake—until your chin dampens his shoulder. Your breath comes heavy, difficult; you try to ease it under his hand spread warm over your ribs. “This is our last session,” you tell him, heartbroken.

“I know,” he whispers. A pause—thick, long. Then, with his mouth pressed to your skin: “I love you.”

You meet his gaze—clear, unbearably kind for once. “I know.” Your hands slide into his damp hair; you can’t stand how beautiful he is. “I’ll miss you so terribly.”

“You—” he starts, and breaks; his eyes cloud. He swallows, tries again. “You’ve ruined me—”

“I won’t tell,” you cut in softly. “I won’t tell anyone. You’re safe, I promise—”

“Wait.” His fingers find your mouth, gentle. “You’ve ruined me. Put me back together. Welcomed me as I am.” His breath shudders. “I will love you for it, always. Never let anyone make you small. Never let anyone shackle you.” Tears spill; you want to lick them up, cherish them, keep them. “Oh, I’m so unbearably proud of you.”

You smile wide and wet and let your own salt fall—ridiculous, mouth hauled open so all your teeth show, eyes pouring like a funeral. “This hurts more than I imagined,” you choke, and laugh, and sob, all at once.

“You’ve taken worse,” he manages a phlegmy chuckle. “My good girl. My gentle beast. Do you feel loved?”

“Yes.” You nod and purse your mouth into an ugly, wrinkled pout meant to dam the downpour.

“How does it feel?”

“Awful,” you say. “Only because I can’t keep it.”

Viktor tries—God, he tries—to be as strong as you see him. To stand tall and broad while he is just as gutted. A proud man with a brain the size of a planet, everything calculated—he thought he could pass through this unscathed. First he believed a neat pressure would be enough; then he believed he could tank the real blows. Wrong, at all times. He lets the wound open and widen and sting, salted with your tears and his own—and keeps it like the masochist’s most precious memorabilia.

Where fucking feels like death—both little and grand—aftercare is a funeral, and dressing back up feels like a wake. You hand each other garments like pallbearers shouldering minutes. Nothing of his stays with you; nothing of yours stays with him. What remains gets carved into marrow, invisible.

At the end of the day, you are both crushed by an efficiently succinct and impenetrable argument: the world won’t let you. Not without casualties neither of you can afford.

You part with the dramatics of the last kiss—deep and clean. His eyes walk you out until the door closes and it’s all quiet.

You take a walk home, let the puddles sog your feet. About half-way through you notice it—an expansive alien feeling, prying at the ribs. Despite the voluminous sorrow, despite the mourning, despite letting the only man you’d dare call dearest darling go—you feel it. Meek, trembling, like a wick not yet fully caught: contentment.

—

Journal Entry:

I will have to burn this, but not yet. I want to keep her with me a little while longer—on paper if nowhere else. If this is method, its first subject was me. It proved successful for her; I suspect it was a one-time fluke, more luck than reason, and more heart than either.

How undoing a woman can be. How she can be feral and gentle in the very same breath; how she can love the teeth and the balm equally, and be truer for the paradox. She answered structure with surrender and tenderness with courage. I watched the storm still inside her without disappearing. I did nothing so remarkable as cure; I only kept time while she found a rhythm that already belonged to her.

Then the social kind, uglier: the hunger to belong when your leg marks you out. The ache of benches where bodies shift to make room for anyone but you. He learned the workarounds—sharp tongue, sharper grades, carrying his own silence like a mouthguard. He fed himself on small acknowledgements: a partner who didn’t protest, a laugh that included rather than glanced off. Bare rations of kinship, eked out.

After that came the crackle in his head, the academic bite. Knowledge as protein; ambition as salt. Nights bled into mornings because discovery is a stimulant more reliable than coffee. He wanted a discovery one he could set on the bench and it would warm the room. Not ribbons, not applause—proof with a pulse, something that made the other hungers make sense. He pared himself to the quick chasing it and named the thinness discipline.

He thought hunger stopped there—stomach, tribe, mind—until his body finished with boyhood and unseated the neat accountant in his skull. A new appetite presented itself with no manners at all. Not romance. Not comfort. A need that ignores reason the way fire ignores furniture. He learned the true word for it and tasted how accurate the mouth makes it: lust.

None of that—alone or together—has prepared him for what hunger really is. It begins at his scalp, runs under his nails, prickles his soles, turns his spit sharp, licks his navel, makes him hard when he thinks about feeding. Death came once, draining, then rebirth; since then he has never been starved in the same way.

He woke as if skinned and reversed. The hollowing came after, clean and total, bones empty like those of birds. Grit in his mouth where there should have been blood—he knew instantly, a cruel programming of something genuine that escapes the laws of nature. After that there wasn’t a belly to feed—the belly was him: a yawning kiln of need, restless, self-powered, never shut off.

Then he met you.

Bottomless gut meets a walking feast—a human larder carrying the one thing he hunts, life, so bright it turns and hunts him back. If fullness was a myth before, with you it’s blasphemy. Love the brain inside the blood-bag and the feed sweetens past reason; every pull tastes like the first drink after drought, and he comes up hungrier than when he went in. He tells himself to ration. He can’t. You make the craving clever. You make it chase.

A reckless little thing, poor brakes on you. A merciless tease, too: you offer him bits of yourself—wrists, ankles, your soft lappet, the pad of a finger pricked with a needle, and whatever spot you’ve scratched or cut ‘accidentally’. Those starters are sand in the gears—his teeth itch, his tongue stings; he is more famished than before the crimson drop sinks into the grooves of it.

The main course comes when you decide he’s been tormented enough, when he’s worked hard enough for it, and—as much as he loves the game—sometimes impatience gets the better of him. At times he pins you with his newly acquired strength and threatens with a nib until it’s you begging to be bitten. The rite goes on until desire stops having owners. Everyone carries their own kind of hunger, he supposes.

Where he dines from depends on the day and the mood. The neck is the obvious, tasteful spot—elegant lines, delicious tendons—but banal in the way mythos dictates. He’s never been one for platitudes, and some habits carried over from his previous life remain—his lifelong fatal attraction to thighs among them.

Between quick meals at your wrists and shoulders, your chef-d’œuvre stays hidden from sight, meant only for him. It warms under skirts as your inner thighs rub—under stockings, marked by a garter belt and underwear—signposts pointing to where he belongs.

Tonight it’s the thigh again.

Whatever he took last time he sealed clean with his tongue; the skin gleams new, as if teeth have never spoken there. You made a meal of teasing him first—let him worry your lower lip and then drew back, laughed into his ear when his hips bucked under you, a soft wicked sound that took his breath out of step.

He snapped. Shirt torn, buttons skittering; bra yanked down until your breast spilled warm into his palm. The first bite he lays there, as gentle as he knows how: a neat ring around the nipple like a small tattoo, careful work on tender flesh. His hand holds the swell steady; your skin lifts in gooseflesh at the cold of his fingers.

When the points of his teeth meet skin the pain is dull to start with, a pressure that thinks about becoming hurt and then decides against it. The second the seal forms and he draws, the ache unravels into sweetness—heat travelling under the bite, a pulse turned liquid. Your mouth opens on a sound you don’t release and keep instead. He tastes it: salt, copper, a shock of you that makes his eyes shut.

He’s especially hungry and there’s no hiding it. Relief surges with that first mouthful—thick, bright, immediate—as if the world clicks into its socket. He makes himself slow. Counts. Keeps the circles of his tongue small and neat, keeps the pull shallow, lets your breath find its shape against his hair. But hunger is a grindstone and tonight it’s been working him down to the core. Your teasing still rings in his ear; your laugh lives at the base of his spine.

You stroke his nape; he forces himself to lift, to seal the marks with a working tongue, to admire the ring he’s drawn while it’s still there—clean, precise, a promise for later. “There,” he says, voice rough from being good. “Pretty.” You tip his face up with your knuckles, thumb the corner of his mouth, smear the pink.

And then he goes lower.

Kisses mapped down the line of your belly, a slow swirl of his tongue in your navel, the lick in the hollow of your hip where heat collects, the push of your skirt to your waist. Stockings whisper. Underwear peels, suspender marks arrow him in, faithful as ever. He splits your thighs open, presses his cheek to the inside of one, breathes you like he’s been above water too long. The skin here is warmer, thinner; his favourite hymn-book. He sets his mouth just shy of last week’s ghosts and smiles at how spotless the canvas is.

“Be good,” you murmur, which is a cruelty you both enjoy.

Red is your favourite colour, unironically. He knows what it means in your mouth: vision fuzzing, fingertips fizzing empty of circulation. Say ‘red’ and he stops—always.

He sinks his teeth. The pain blooms dull and round and then sweetens on the first draw, and his hunger—old, bottomless, obedient to no one—purrs like a machine finally given fuel. He takes a mouthful and the world brightens; he tastes iron, salt, something like fruit, something only you have. He pauses to breathe, to hold your thigh open with his palm, to listen to the little change in your breath that tells him you’re with him. Then another careful pull, measured, devoted, while his own body answers—hard, helpless—as if every swallow threads heat straight through him.

The sensation is nothing you’ve felt before and it might be your favourite. You can almost hear his thoughts settle—click, click—into their right places when he feeds. It feels indecently good to be this essential. The draw is a dull-edged ache that loosens into warmth; you dribble for him, not only blood. With his head between your thighs, your body misreads the brief and prepares you for what comes after dinner—slick, open, already there.

You look down. His eyes are shut; his cheeks—usually chalk—pink as if you’ve rubbed life into them with your own pulse. Some part of you is already moving inside him, swirling, making him rosier, more human-looking, and it’s all your doing. You never thought you’d meet a man who could make you feel fuller while draining you out.

You reach for him, seek his fingers; he laces them with yours without looking, drinks, breathes, drinks. The sight is mesmerising. ‘Red’ sits on the tip of your tongue and does not cross it. You close your eyes and breathe heavily. It isn’t unfamiliar: the body going spongy and weighty, a gentle absence in your hands, a hush in your feet. You tell yourself you have time. You keep telling yourself until a soft black washes under your eyelids and stays.

He holds your hand and is lost in it—the fit of your fingers, the small flex when he draws. Swallow after swallow, the belly he is fills, but never to the brim. Clarity shoves at hunger in his skull and, at the edge, something needles through: your skin is colder than usual. Your thighs hang apart, slack. The pulse that pours you into his mouth thins, thread-faint. He listens hard inside the roar—nothing. He didn’t hear ‘red.’ He would swear his undead life on it.

The wrong silence settles, and panic threads itself through his muscles.

He unseats his teeth. The first second is wrong in his mouth—air on enamel, a tender ache where fang met flesh, the cold of his own base temperature returning like a bad habit. He forgets to seal you with his tongue and instead, is already moving, crawling up, bracing your thigh aside with his forearm.

“Darling.” His voice is bent thin. He checks your face—water in his hands. When he lifts your shoulders your head lolls back, loose-necked. Another “darling,” sharper; two fingers at your throat, the other hand on your breastbone feeling for the rise. Breath, yes—shallow, stubborn. Pulse, there—small as a thread under water.

He fumbles the bedside—blanket, pillow. Legs up. He tucks your calves over his shoulder to raise them, presses, presses. “Come on. Come back. Come back, my darling.” 

His mouth tastes of guilt. He scrubs his thumb along your cheekbone, taps your chin lightly, angling your airway open the way he’s taught himself. The room is loud with his own heartbeat.

“Red,” he says for you, sick with it. “We’re stopping. We’re done.” He hears himself promising—never again, never this far, never—and hates the panic in the shape of the words.

About to call for help, the police for himself, about to rip his wrists open to give back what he took from you—

Your eyelids flutter once, then go still. He reaches for the glass on the bedside table, trembling, wets your lips, coaxes a little water in. A sweet catches his eye—a wrapped lozenge, ridiculous—he cracks it, tucks the shard under your tongue, strokes your throat until you swallow. He keeps your hand in his, trying to rub warmth into your knuckles. They are colder than he can bear.

“Please,” he says, low, tears blurring his vision. “I’m here. Come back.”

You gasp—a small, torn sound—and drag air. Your eyes open narrow, unfocused, then find him. He is already cupping the back of your head, already kissing your brow, already closing his eyes because relief hurts.

“Hi,” you manage, voice ragged.

“Hi yourself.” He laughs once, ugly with fear. “You went away.”

“Not far.” You lick your lips; the sweet sits glossy there. “Spun out. I should’ve—” Your fingers squeeze his. “I didn’t say it.”

“I didn’t hear it.” He swallows. “I should have heard.”

You breathe, deeper now, the colour walking back into your mouth in slow steps. “I’m fine.” You test your hands, flex your feet. “Head’s light. That’s all.”

He nods, fast. “I’m so glad.” He folds over you, all length and heat, mouth sealing on yours. “You wicked thing, I thought I lost you,” he says and you can feel the shape of it against your lips.

You taste yourself on the inside of his cheek—metal and spit—mixed with the sting of salt where tears have tracked to the corner of his mouth. It hits like a switch. Your hands are already in his hair, curling, tugging him closer; he answers with a low sound he doesn’t mean to make.

The panic unwinds between your teeth; relief comes in a rush and leaves want in its place, the way a storm leaves pressure behind. It’s that ordinary, that obscene—near-miss death and then the body remembering it’s alive and making a case for it.

He kisses you like he’s trying to put you back in, to keep you. No finesse, not at first; then the control returns in shards—his mouth softens, angles, opens for you. He shivers when your tongue finds the cut of his fang, when you thumb the hinge of his jaw. Your ribs learn his rhythm again, his weight settling you, and the shake in his hands goes somewhere you can use it. You breathe each other in. He noses your cheek, comes back to your mouth, stays there—hungry, grateful, unashamed; only breath now, the sounds of kissing, the long slow fact of not dying.

Hands work faster than brain—he palms between your legs, finds the wound still open. Unthinking, he smears blood and slick where he wants to claim you until it runs light red.

Fed and frightened, he shakes on the edge. Copper sugars the back of his palate, jaw aches from restraint, hunger and relief wrestling behind his eyes. Fear still gnaws, wants proof stronger than the rise of your chest under his palm. He needs function, not theory—to enter you, to have you warm around him and your muscles working.

“Tell me,” he manages, forehead to yours. His breath breaks. Hard still, thick with blood he drank, he grinds his hips between yours, scents of you and him so strong he nearly goes deaf.

Tell me anything, Viktor means. Tell me to stop, tell me to keep going, tell me you’re here.

“My darling,” you say, thighs coming to where he loves them—hugging his hip bones tight, ankles crossing in the small of his back. “Come now. Fuck me like you’re glad I’m here.”

His mouth opens just to drag across your face, brows knit. Crown already where it’s supposed to be, he enters you in one long drag and it’s another relief unspooling his loins. Hot, so hot it burns, he buries deep and stays until temperatures even out.

You lend body warmth to him—first shock, then bloom. He feels it: your cunt snug and wet around him, his cock cold at the tip, colder along the length, then—heat creeps in by degrees until he throbs with you. Your body teaches him back to 37—holds him there—while his hands learn the same lesson: backs of your thighs first, your neck next, chill giving way to human warmth once they’ve held long enough. He breathes against your mouth, shudders, waits out the burn like winter-bitten fingers under a tap, and when the ache thins to pleasure he moves again—still hungry and newly grateful.

“My sweet darling,” he rasps, hips settling into a pace that lets him listen. You answer with a drag of nails at his nape, a pulse squeezing around him that makes his vision grain at the edges. Each stroke lands like that proof he’s been searching: tight, alive, human. Fear sheds; brilliance crowds in; want blooms feral in its wake. He fits his mouth to yours, tastes iron turned sweet, and fucks you like you asked—like he’s glad you’re here.

It’s one thing to stop fearing hunger; another to be wanted for it—loved, even—by his beautiful-brained feeder. The first time he thought it a trick of biology, a mercy-chemical; now, with you under him and warm around him, he knows better. You don’t just allow the beast—you choose it, you choose him, and the choosing remakes him more completely than any resurrection did.

Once, he filed himself under unlovable at best, unkeepable at worst. No kin before; a creature after. He made peace with thinness and called it virtue. But the thought of losing you scours him clean. He would go hungry for millennia if you told him to; he would ration down to sips; he would take and then give it all back—time, warmth, every soft inch of himself—until the ledger balanced in your favour.

He moves like he’s signing that promise with his body—steady, listening; your name under his breath as if the sound could anchor him to you.

Pocket of your heat found, he works there—hips driving, rhythm tightening, breath breaking on your mouth. Your thigh slides higher on his waist; the bed knocks a small, regular protest. He catches your wrists, pins them above your head, not for power but for balance, for leverage, for the clean line it gives him to push deeper. You take him; you answer; his pace grows meaner, cleaner, the kind that steals language and leaves sound.

He wants your throat. Habit pulls him there—chin grazing your jaw, lips at the hinge, teeth testing the soft just under your ear. The urge bites back hard. He holds, shakes, chooses you over the itch. “No more marks today,” he says into your skin, an apology and a vow. You tip your head anyway, offering; he groans like a man punished and drags his mouth down, filling the need with kisses, with tongue, with the small bite his lips can give without breaking.

Heat climbs. He rocks you up the bed by inches, fingers learning you anew—one hand cupping your knee, keeping you close, keeping you his. Your chest brushes his; sweat gathers where your bodies meet; the cold he carried has nowhere to live now. He’s warm where it counts—inside you, mouth to yours, palms moulded to skin that welcomes him back.

“Talk to me,” he asks, not slowing. You breathe his name, high and wrecked, and it lands like petrol. He drives harder, finds the angle that makes you seize around him, holds it, works it, won’t let go until you wrench out from his grasp and drag nails down his back and say there. He gives you there again and again, head tipped, eyes blown. Control frays to threads and he lets it, chasing that proof you make with every clench.

The bite-urge surges once more when you arch—throat bared, pulse loud. He fits his open mouth over it, teeth sheathed, and hums against you instead, a helpless sound. “Red if you need it,” he murmurs, and your hand slides to his jaw, thumb stroking the place where fang aches. “Green,” you say, voice shaking. “Go on.”

So he does. Deeper, faster, rough with relief, careful with teeth. The mattress answers, the headboard ticks, your legs lock tight around his hips and hold him home. He loses the line between feeding and fucking and devotion; he just moves, chest to chest, mouth to mouth, as if he can write himself into you and stay there. When you go—when it takes you—he feels it grip and ripple and he follows blindly.

His hips punch deep, then falter; breath catching on a ragged sound he couldn’t choke back if he tried. It snaps somewhere in the middle of his spine; he drives once more and holds, buried to the hilt, every muscle strung tight while it steals him. The first pulse spills sharp and cold, a shock you feel bloom inside; the next follows—cool ribbons, then a slow flood that turns you goose-pimpled from the inside out. He trembles through the aftershocks, mouth open against your throat, grinding small to feed them, to empty everything into you until the shiver leaves his legs.

After, he keeps inside, nose to your neck, counting breaths without thinking, hands smoothing your hair, your ribs, your thigh as if polishing. Warmth holds. Home holds. He kisses the spot he didn’t bite and finally lets his jaw rest. “Still here,” he whispers, as much to himself as to you. “Still mine.”

Later he’ll call it a near-thing and tidy the ledger, but tonight he keeps the simpler count: your breath steady, the neat ring he kissed instead of broke, the word you didn’t have to spend, heat shared back into his bones, hunger turned quiet and domestic.

You forgot what it’s like to exist without the wretched, self-consuming parasite that would digest you from the inside out every time someone tried to put a gentle hand on you. Now, you are full of the imprints of this kind of hands—bruises bloom from the neck down, a prescription for malice signed by your Doctor.

It’s not the impact they recall—it’s the after. The way he touches the place where the strike sang, sweet and lurid, to check if the singing has quieted. No one ever soothes you. They try to be erotic and loving and it leaves no mark, or they manhandle and learn you bite back. You don’t bite him. You tell yourself the bruises belong to the washcloth’s pass, the back-handed brush of a careful knuckle, the pads of his fingers inspecting where wood flowered beneath your skin—that it’s the tending, not the blow, that stains you.

Food tastes like something again; sleep lands and stays. Want still prowls, but it paces inside a room with windows. When it shrieks, you offer it a schedule: Thursday, 18:00. It learns the word wait.

In the meantime, you have plenty to feed on. Week after week the sessions have mutated into a sacrilegious ritual: you dress prudently on the outside, promiscuous under all the modest layers—easy access doesn’t demand that you strip. The intimacy of nudity would be entirely uncalled for in a professional situation like this one.

He remains dressed too—as much as you’d love to see what rests under cotton and wool, the artificial chastity makes you discover a new quality in the flesh that is revealed. How erotic hands can be, or necks. Bare forearms—corded sinew stretched over bone so salaciously when he braces with effort and rolls his sleeves up. Cock, of course, doesn’t need to be introduced into the realm of fetishized body parts, but his, in particular, makes your stomach tighten pleasantly every time you catch a glimpse.

At first, he would send his receptionist away with the penultimate patient. Sometime around a month in, he’s stopped booking the hour preceding your scheduled visit. He’s the one who buzzes you in and holds the door open for you.

Every time you arrive, he’s fresh: hair combed neatly, teeth brushed, clean shirt smelling of washing powder. There is no courtship in it, only craft—he wears no perfume, doesn’t dress up or try beyond what could be called clinical.

Inside, the interview is brisk: how are you feeling, any changes in behaviour, dreams? He asks about your week. Pries into what still makes you angry. Questions land around everything a therapist would want to know: your relationship management (meaning: have you fucked anyone else this week?), the state of your body (meaning: have I hit you too hard?), any adjustments you might want to the treatment plan (meaning: do you want to stop?)—the answer to all of them is no, and every time the syllable leaves your mouth his chest seems to unfurl from its protective hunch.

The main course follows. Palms pressed to the desk, ass presented, skirt rucked up and bunched in the small of your back. He’s done cane, belt, and hand. Cane is your favourite—you know damn well he wouldn’t find anyone else who’d beg him for this, making it exclusive in a way that possibly breaches the initial terms of your arrangement, but you don’t care. Belt is delicious: unpredictable in where it snaps, and the marks it leaves are downright gorgeous. Winding loops and the imprint of its pointed tongue change colours throughout the week, having you admire a new stage of a living painting every next morning.

His hand—now that’s the most mundane, and somehow the most intimate. It hurts both of you. You can tell by the warmth that seeps from his palm into your waist when he’s done beating you and starts fucking you. And then again, when he tends to you and his skin is still red.

He always fucks you from behind—impersonal. You’re bent either over the desk or the couch’s armrest (and that angle is devastatingly deep; it has you keening with no hands straying to your centre). When he’s particularly exhausted by work, it’s you riding him—still from behind. His squeaky chair is too narrow for your hips, you’ve learned; instead, you let him sink onto the sofa, roll your skirt into your waistband, so he can push a thumb up your ass and make you take both lengths at once. With your head thrown back and hands braced on either side of his thighs, you grind down, taking every inch through burn. You wonder how insolent you would have to behave to have him split your ass open and call it medicine.

The miracle comes after: the long-locked, rattling drawers inside you opening, granting access to a whole range of feelings and expressions you haven’t allowed yourself to wear. You cry, sometimes. Other times you are calm and slightly thrown out of your own body. He’s there to dry your tears, ask follow-up questions, press a warm towel to where his instruments were heavy. He’s there to stitch your shadow back to your heel. He’s there to pat your back and smooth your hair—all within the bounds of your agreement.

And yet, sometimes you see it—when your angry, chaotic self is fed and goes to sleep, the part that is still soft notices something that disturbs you deeply: affection. You might be imagining it.

You clasp your stockings to a garter belt, button up your coat, and pull out an umbrella. There’s plenty of time: it’s 17:15. Hunger coiling slowly but unmistakably, you decide to walk to trick it for another three quarters.

Viktor listens intently—a curious case has landed on his desk. A patient called, desperate, so he had no heart to tell her no; hence the usual hour he sacrifices to prepare for you he’s now spending listening to what’s gnawing at another poor soul.

She sits on the edge of the sofa like a penitent. “A demon,” she says. “It’s in me.” Unfaithful to a husband she calls slothful, complacent; her body, according to her, walks itself to other doors and opens. The pleasures aren’t the household kind—she lists them in a whisper: pain, humiliation, impropriety. Dirty motels. Risks she takes as if rehearsed by something not-her.

She wants to be normal. A priest crossed her mind; a friend sent her here instead.

Viktor feels the familiar ache of compassion take its seat behind his breastbone. “There is nothing wrong with having desire,” he says, voice even. “What hurts is the silence around it. What’s needed is a dialogue.” He sketches a plan: first, language for what she wants; then a conversation with her husband—paced, bounded, safe. He rifles the calendar that is already a game of sliding tiles and finds her a date, salvaging the hour he keeps untouched for you.

Five minutes before that hour, the bell rings.

He apologises, rises, and goes to the door. When he returns he tears a slip from his pad—herbal calming tincture, dosage in his neat hand—and lays it in her palm. “If distress spikes,” he adds, offering a small card, “this is my emergency number.”

He sees her out.

And then—waiting room: you, one leg thrown over the other, foot bouncing against your calf, gaze already on him. “Thank you, Doctor,” the woman says, inclines her head toward you, and leaves.

Even though he can tell this—whatever it is—has made you angry, that terrible fondness blooms in his chest again. He missed you.

He knows the ground is slipping, and still every unoccupied hour tilts toward you. The fear of you has burned off; what remains is the fear of endings and discovery. His mind goes to impossible places when it strays—most shamelessly, a bed. He has counted, against his better nature, how many times he’s pictured you straddling him there, his hands roaming a chest he never bares in session, your mouth on his, his mouth at your nipples, your fingers stroking the soft place at his temple until his eyes half-close. Unfathomable, and yet his body believes it; it keeps the picture like contraband.

What you allow him to do—what you ask him to do—rewires him. You name it a need and he obeys, and in that obedience something inside him stands taller. Fucking you feels like being returned to himself: the way your heat takes him, the way your body answers structure with surrender, the way you quiet when the pattern is right. He thinks, sometimes, that you might already be perfect—awful, beautiful, finished in your own grammar. Some desperate, stupid part of him is willing to accept that perhaps neither of you is curable; that the only way you both exist without being damaged by the world is like this: paired damage, interlocking, a code written to run only on the other.

His journal would give him away now; it’s stopped pretending to be a chart and become a diary of affection. Full sentences where there should be numbers. Your body rendered like a gallery piece—line, colour, healing stages, the way heat pools under the skin like varnish—interleaved with passages that read like longing disguised as observation.

Once, in a lapse that felt like prayer, he wrote darling. The next day he crossed it out. Then crossed out the crossing-out, and kept at it until the paper bruised and the word collapsed into a black lake of ink that bled through to the page beneath. He hasn’t torn it out. He leaves it there, a wound you can see from both sides.

He stands in the doorway a moment too long, palm still hovering where the latch was, eyes adjusting from the velvet of compassion to the hard shine of you. A defensive perch of the glasses on his nose.

“Five minutes early,” he says, voice even, as if it hadn’t just been full of ghosts and marriage.

“One of my virtues,” you reply, foot still bouncing, gaze traveling—door, his hand, the edge of his sleeve—cataloguing.

He steps aside. “Come in.”

You rise, the skirt sliding like a thought you don’t say aloud, and pass him close enough that day-sweat cotton meets your perfume’s last hour. The office has shed the previous woman’s despair but not its shape; it hangs in the air like steam. You notice the second glass of water on the tray. You notice the way his notebook lies open to a page that isn’t yours. You notice the faint crease between his brows that means he has been working too hard and feeling too much.

“Busy?” you ask lightly, settling on the sofa without being told.

“A referral,” he answers, closing the notebook with two fingers. “A woman who believes herself possessed.”

Your mouth tilts. “By what?”

“Desire,” he says, and doesn’t flinch from the word. “We agreed to begin with a conversation—with her husband, and with herself.”

“A dialogue?” You raise your eyebrows. Something nasty unfurls in your gut—a bitter burn of possessiveness over your Doctor. “Or are you willing to test your method on other patients?”

A curious look crosses his face—had you not known better, you’d call it triumphant. Instead of sitting behind his desk, he takes a few steps and stands before you, cane planted firmly in the carpet. “Are you jealous?”

“Yes.”

Viktor smiles—warm. Unbidden, his hand brushes your cheek—a first breach, a reassurance. “I have many patients. You know this.”

“How many are like me?” It comes out honest. Insecurity pries between your ribs; the thought of him like this with anyone else sets you ablaze, the wrong kind. Your hands find his legs, slide up his thighs; he shifts.

“What do you think?” he teases—bastard. His breath quickens, giving him away.

You take the opening—you wanted to anyway. To brand him with your mouth, to claim the places he hasn’t yet taken. You grab his ass, draw him into your face, and breathe him in through wool and cotton. “You are mine,” you whisper, mouth trailing along the zipper.

Your reflection stares back at you from his lenses—you are small there, unthreatening. You wonder if that’s how he sees you now.

“Is this what you need today?” His thumb tests your cheek, tentative, a first note struck to hear the room.

You hum, and the zipper hums with you. “Hmm, my sweet Doctor,” you say, easing the belt loose, flicking the last button that shields him. “Would it be so terrible to admit this is also what you need?”

With your hands curled beneath the waistband, you wait.

“Yes,” Viktor whispers.

“Then,” you say, dragging pants and underwear down in one clean pull, “this is what I need today. Yes.”

“So take it,” Viktor breathes—relief cut with something rough. Cane thuds on the couch beside you.

He’s thought about it often. First, maliciously, back in the sanatorium—it’s the most obvious fantasy to shut the mouth that is, indeed, just mouth, with one’s cock—he thinks. Then, more frequently, as he got to observe the same mouth grimace in pain of emotion and lift in delight of pain—no malice left then, only a certain weakness for the particular shade your lips take when you lick over them too much or when your smile gets too wide. He’s thought of it so often that alone should’ve prepared him.

Nothing did, though. You take a greedy swipe of tongue all the way from the warm heft of his balls to the crown, and then your mouth seals over the head like you’re hoping to find a prize inside it. He shudders from root to crown; his hand tangles in your hair, not to steer but to survive it, and his thigh trembles against your shoulder at the shock of first contact.

You were right, though—glimpses were enough to assert his cock the prettiest you’ve seen, and yes, you were right. 

It’s proud even when flaccid, though it doesn’t stay soft for long. He’s long enough, deliciously thick, textured with veins exactly where you like it, decorated with beauty marks that make you feel special. The head—silken and tender—takes your teasing with teeth just for the fun of it; instead of fear he watches, transfixed, as if he knows the game of will I let you keep it doesn’t apply to him—he’s not one of the senseless brutes or weaklings. It fills you with pride how barely a few licks make him rouse and harden. Soon he’s all yours, whispering praise and nothings.

“Good girl,” he says, helplessly, and for once you take the praise without a blade hidden in it.

Emboldened, you want to show him more—take more, show him the meaning of true hunger. You open wide, obscene; tongue lolls like a panting dog as you slide down again, tracing the seam with the flat before you tilt and fit his whole sack into your mouth. He tenses hard—hips twitch, breath stabs—you release, slow, and feel the sweet spot land like a secret passed hand to hand.

Then you offer yourself up. You angle your head so he can set his weight along your face—measure himself against your cheekbone, your mouth, your jaw—drag his balls over the plane of your tongue as if branding you with heat and salt. Spit slicks everything; he glides and you hold for him, mouth open, eyes up. It’s filthy and ceremonial at once.

“Is this what you want?” he asks, voice thinned by wonder. “Degradation?”

You grin through the mess—spit webbed from your lips to the gleam of his cock, chin wet, cheeks hot. All teeth. “This isn’t degrading,” you say, perfectly clear. “I chose this. It’s empowering.” You kiss the head, smear your mouth with him like gloss. “You’re all mine.”

Viktor doesn’t even have it in him to mourn his dignity—indeed he is yours. But what you don’t realise, is that you are his too. You’ve just given him something so grand he cannot wait to execute it and call it treatment. With a lovely smile on his face he thrusts twice against your features, and then retreats, ghosting your lips with the tip. 

“Open,” he murmurs.

Blissfully unaware, it turns you devilish. One hand strokes low, knuckles grazing balls, the other twists in counterpart at the base—wet fist and mouth meeting in a rhythm that makes disgusting sense. You spit once, let it thread and snap, then drag your tongue under the ridge, linger at the slit until his breath stutters. You pocket the sound. You angle him to your cheek and rub, smearing heat along your skin like war paint, then swallow him again—deeper, slower—until your nose bumps his hair and his fingers flex hard in your scalp.

You pull back with a gasp and a string of slick, pulse your throat around the tip just to feel him jerk, then take him off-centre, cheek hollowing, tongue lashing the underside—right on that strip of nerve that makes his knees think about folding. Your free hand cups and rolls him, patient, a kind of worship you’d never tolerate anywhere else. You pack your mouth full, then starve him of it: two quick suck-sucks, a slow drag to the crown, a kiss to the head as if it were a sacrament, then down again, throat opening like a trapdoor.

He’s talking now, voice unravelled—your name, fragments of medical restraint turned useless blessing. You answer by setting a new pace: three long takes, one shallow tease; a corkscrew twist with your wrist as your mouth descends; a brutal seal-and-suck at the bottom that makes his hips try to chase. It’s almost inhuman how deep you take him. He checks himself—barely. The restraint is gorgeous on him.

You reach up, thumb the hollow at his hip where the brace’s straps sometimes bite, and feel him go soft in the face while everything else goes harder. 

“Eyes,” he murmurs, and you look up as you sink down, slow, letting him watch you ruin your own makeup on purpose. He cradles your jaw with his free hand, thumb pressing the hinge, not to open you—already open—but to mark that this is his to admire.

You smile around him—wicked—and flatten your tongue, mopping from base to tip before plunging again. You take him to the back, hold there, breathe through your nose, and flex your throat in tiny, merciless pulses. His head tips back; a sound escapes him not meant for any clinic. You ease off just enough to say, hoarse, smug, “Mine,” and then you bury him to the hilt and stay until his hand in your hair stops being a fist and becomes a grip that asks.

He’s close; you can tell by the way his belly tightens under the shirt, by the way the praise turns to syllables that don’t add up.

“Edge me,” he says, all broken lust, and it nearly does the opposite—spurs you into wishing for more throat so you can take him deeper—but you fish the restraint out from the bottom of your soul.

You slow for two heartbeats, draw him shining from your mouth and lap the vein like a cat, then swallow him again and work him with an authority that says I know your edge better than you do. Your cheeks hollow, your hand milks in countertime, your tongue flicks the seam in a quick, vicious beat—and he breaks on it, the sound he makes going straight to where you’re already wet and wanting.

You keep him in your mouth through it, take what he gives without flinching, suck him gentle as the tremors fade, then let him slip free with a final kiss to the flushed crown, dirty and sweet. You wipe your mouth with the back of your wrist, look up at him through damp lashes, and grin like a devil who’s found religion.

The look from above is devotion. His thumbs sweep the dark streaks from your cheeks. Not exactly the humiliation you aimed for, but you let him.

“Do other patients do that for you?” you ask, and hate yourself for asking it.

“For me?” Viktor smiles, faint and private. He tucks himself away, pulls up his trousers, zips with a neat bite of metal. “I thought you chose this.”

You give him a look—unguarded, fragile as wet clay. “That’s what I’m made for.”

“No.” His hands find yours; you let him pull you up. He guides you to the centre of the room and places you there like a figure on a board. Your eyes track him, confused—and you hate that too, the waiting for an answer that may not come.

He worries his lower lip between his teeth, removes his glasses, and sets them carefully on the desk. Limp slightly more pronounced, he drags your usual chair with him and stops a stride in front of you. Then—grunting with effort, using the backrest for balance—Viktor kneels.

“No other patients do that for me,” he says, breath even, gaze steady on yours. “Nor do I touch them the way I touch you.”

Relief blooms in your chest—stupid and huge. “What are you doing?”

“You’ll see.”

It’s mean really—he knows damn well worship is the furthest thing from what you want. But Viktor’s aim is to make you uncomfortable, make you whimper, make you stumble off this monstrous pedestal you’ve built for yourself.

Down on his knees, he skitters forth—brace scraping his skin as he advances—and reaches: ankle first. His fingers find the strap; with a slow, measured pull he lifts—heel to thigh—tongue of the buckle flicked free, your shoe gets plucked off. It’s a whorish little thing, moderate height stiletto:  enough to make your hips sway, not enough to make you taller than him—the most thoughtful, calculated tease imaginable. 

The womanhood’s bane set aside with care, he returns that foot to the floor and takes the other—physician’s hands quick to mirror the work. Then the skirt: deceitfully modest, kissing your knees when you stand, riding to mid-thigh when you sit.

Beyond the hem, his hands crawl—up the calf, soft; over the knee, firmer—until they reach the swell and the clip and undo what you’ve done not even two hours ago: tiny metal mouth releases the stocking and he rolls that nylon down as if unpeeling skin.

Interest piqued, you let him—watching with the patient malice of a predator that allows its prey think there will be no crushing of bones with the maw. You watch as he drapes your stocking over the chair and wait—stand there barefoot, garter straps dangling around your thighs.

And then—oh—Viktor does an unspeakable thing. His fingers wrap your arch, and he brings your toes to his mouth—eyes on yours the whole time, the dare held inches from your face. No struggle from your side, only wicked fascination, he pursues that hairline crack in you: his mouth closes over your toes, warm, humiliating—worship weaponised, exactly as he intended.

It feels atrocious. Not the absolute perversion of licking a part of you that spent the last hours sweating in non-breathable fabric and leather—that part blooms in your insula just right. Slick heat and a tugging suction that shoots up the arch to your calf, then lower belly; the faint rasp of his stubble pricking the ball of your heel; teeth skimming, not biting, until your toes flex against his tongue like they’ve grown minds. The tendon at your ankle flutters, your knee loosens, the sole goes glassy with spit. Sensation stacks until it’s nothing but nerve and pulse—simple, physical, good.

It’s the tenderness of it that prickles your skin: his gentle fingers, his little hums all slutty and pleased, the trust he puts in you by sharing this fetish and the way it makes you feel adored. Disgusting.

Incredulous, you laugh—a cackle full of teeth—but he doesn’t falter. He releases you with a soft pop, your foot supple in the cradle of calluses, and flattens his tongue to taste more.

He licks a path along your ankle, up the shin, slow enough to be insolent. As he goes he fists the hem, rolling the skirt higher, higher—crumpling fabric in his hands until it bunches at your waist. He has to hold you there to rise on his knees; one arm bands your hips, the brace creaks, and his mouth keeps climbing—over the dip of your knee, the tense line of your thigh—salting his lips with your skin.

Then he reaches the sweet, poisonous bloom of you. Another clean punch: his mouth closes over you through the lace, a fervent press—tongue and slick lips working devotion into indignity. Your breath jerks; his eyes stay on yours, daring you to call this ruin anything but a worship.

A man so beautiful on his knees before you, you should be glad. You should be pleased at this attempt at deification, but the way it tries to make you humble is repulsive.

Your fingers react first—they clutch his hair, ready to yank, and then pull him away with a force bordering brutal and another repulsive thing is that he lets you.

He smiles, smug, mouth all slimy, and flexes his jaw at you. “You will take this or you get nothing else,” Viktor rasps, beyond pleased with himself.

“Don’t make me come from this,” you say, and hate the way you sound—small, delicate. Like a girl.

“So disrespectful,” he says, wrapping the crotch of your knickers around his finger and pulling it aside. “You will take it. You will come on my tongue or I won’t touch you again tonight. Do you accept?”

Your body betrays you first. A small, involuntary tremor runs through your thighs where they bracket his cheeks; your jaw tightens, then warps, as if the muscles can’t remember which mask to hold. “Yes,” you say—and it’s as if someone else says it. The girl inside you.

He smiles again—impish. Licks his own lips first, then yours—hums terribly when it becomes obvious you’ve been bleeding milk for him all this time.

“Ha—” Viktor huffs and kisses your cunt like he loves it. All mouth and tongue and teeth, he braces his hands on your ass and pulls you into him as if he’s trying to crawl inside. 

You gasp, clench, deafen him with your thighs, stomach coiling with shock of this pleasure flooding so soon. Like medicine meant to calm, it hits you in the gut and makes your neck wrench on its hinges.

Eating like he means to empty you, nose wedged under your hood, he grinds until it swells; his tongue goes flat and mops up from slit to clit, then points and drills, pushing inside and dragging back to circle the rim. He feeds you back your own slick, swallows, returns for more; saliva strings and snaps when you jerk.

Nothing pretty about this—a blunt, patient pressure that refuses to be poetic. Stubble rasps the crease of your groin; his jaw sets and resets against you, muscle ticking as if he’s chewing through a knot. Hard sucking, cheeks hollowing, drool leaking down his chin, down your seam, he’s a frenzied fanatic, a mean little believer that’s licking his way up the temple of your body.

It looks more like fighting than sex, which should suit you—but the forceful kindness of it strips you, plate by plate. Slow, crude licks: perineum to clit, one clean stripe. Then short, rude flicks that make your knee knock his shoulder. Your throat makes sounds you reserve for palms closing on windpipes and teeth on ears; all your hands can do is fist in his hair and guide.

He hooks one arm under your thigh to hold himself there; the other hand slides in from below. Two fingers push inside—no mercy—down, then up, curling until they find the dense, ridged patch. He sets a split rhythm: tongue tight and fast on the centre, fingers working deeper—hook, release, hook—the heel of his hand grinding the soft seam between. Wet knocks against wet; the garter straps tap his wrist. You’re open, shaking; he keeps you there, mouth sealed, breathing through his nose, taking every jerk and shove until your hips stop running and instead roll.

“There she is,” he purrs against your inner lips. “What are you?”

“Ah—” the sound fractures, then you catch it, bare your teeth. “An angry bitch.” You yank his hair, still defiant.

The first thing you notice is the hollowing—he takes back what he’s given, suction gone, tongue withdrawn so the air hits you cool. The second is his left palm leaving your thigh to part your seam, holding you open, heel digging into your lower belly to pin you. The third: a sharp, clean slap to your clit—wet, vicious.

You jolt; a yelp rips loose as your thighs flutter around his cheeks. Your fingers twist harder in his hair.

“What are you?” Viktor asks again, hand poised right where you throb and leak. You give him nothing—just a glance hot enough to burn through lens and bone—so he answers with another slap, just as precise. The wail that punches out of you can’t decide if it belongs to pleasure cresting or the pain you chased him for.

“What are you?”

You inhale, tremble, and the fight unhooks on a breath. “A good girl.”

He sighs, smiling so sweetly you might have just accepted a proposal. He kisses your clit—soft apology, exact tenderness—and his hand returns not with two fingers but three, sliding into the heat where you clutch, stretching you back open in a slow, steady push, then curling to bring you to ruin.

And from here it’s all kind—tongue slow and intent, patient circles that ease what he’s slapped, mouth sealing to suck until the ache turns sweet. His fingers work a steady pace—slide, curl, press; slide, curl, press—ripping you apart with how terribly lovely it is. He hums against you, a low motor; the vibration lands where you need it and you feel yourself loosen, then liquefy, then melt.

Your hips start to roll on their own. Breath shortens. Heat gathers and braids tight. “Yes,” you pant, already tipping. “Yes… yes—”

He nods—small, approving, as if he agrees with you. 

The rhythm never wavers. The garter taps his wrist in time. Your knees shake; your toes curl hard into the rug; your hands don’t yank anymore—they hold.

“Let it happen,” he whispers, and what else can you do than listen to your Doctor. The crest takes you clean—hips surging, belly clenching, pulse stamping against his mouth as your thighs jerk around his cheeks. The sound you make is raw and grateful; you ride it hard, and he stays with you, nodding once more like you’ve both reached the same conclusion.

When your knees give, his lower too. He sits back on his heels and watches you fold like a marionette until your fingers find his waistband and you lay your face in his lap. Tentative, he sets a hand on your head. “How are you feeling?” he asks, voice gone quiet.

You look up. The look you give him says what have you done to me without moving your mouth. Your eyes brim—this time not the body’s spill but the actual thing, an ocean-deep sorrow, fear shown plain. “Broken,” you say.

Something answers in him—abhorrently clean. He feels real in a way he’d almost forgotten, steady and powerful and very alive, and you’re beautiful like this: the wildness burned off, the mind unknotted, the face bare of its learned snarl.

“Are you angry with me?” he asks.

“No,” you sob, breath catching on the single syllable. “I’m just so, so sad.” You rise a notch, hands climbing, clawing at his shirt like you could get purchase on yourself through him.

For a moment something in him splits clean down the seam; the urge to say I adore you flares bright and ruinous. He shakes that devil off his shoulder. “It’s alright,” he says instead, covering your hands with his. “It’s normal. It’s human.”

You flinch at human. Your mouth forms an ugly grimace. You wrench your hands free and sit back, cupping your palms as if you could catch the tears and shove them back where they came from. “It’s too big,” you say. “Make it stop. Undo it.”

A breath that is almost a laugh—too thin to be comfort. “I can’t,” Viktor answers. “I told you I can look at the darkness with you. This is me looking.” His hand lifts, careful, to your cheek.

“No.” You shake your head, slap the gentleness away, then seize his wrist and set his palm at your throat. “This is what I want. Make me smaller. Make me nothing.”

“You will never be nothing, no matter how hard I try,” he says—quiet, a little too fond—thumb smoothing once over your larynx before he pulls back.

Heat snaps. You stand, begin to prowl, finger stabbing the air at him. “Do not try to save me. Use me properly or don’t touch me.”

He exhales like a parent counting to five, then rises too—slowly, knees protesting the time they spent kissing the floor. He finds his cane; you watch the movement, eyes lighting at the sight.

“None of this today,” he says, voice gone stern. He plants the ferrule to the rug, steady as a metronome. “I want you to stay with what you are feeling now.”

Just as you thought you could keep him, he does something despicable—makes you feel things. Disgusting things. Human things. Sadness and weakness you loathe. The anger that rises isn’t the fun kind, not fuel; it comes sour from fear as you feel a cage lowering—another one trying to fix you.

“I don’t want to stay here,” you scoff, betrayed.

“So you are angry with me,” he says, already turning toward the desk. He reaches for his notebook without looking at you, the gesture neat, dismissive.

You fold your arms across your chest. “If this is where you leave it—yes.”

“Good.” He smiles at the page; your scoff makes him lift his head. “Am I one of the weaklings now?”

“Yes.” Your mouth tips lopsided. A beat. Then you reach for the blade you trust. “If you go soft on me, I walk.”

Viktor pauses, measuring. “It is your right,” he says—knowing he is gambling with something that won’t be domesticated. He straightens, circles the desk, and perches on its edge. The cane rests against his knee; one ankle crosses the other. “Tell me—is this what you think going soft looks like?”

You make yourself vulnerable in the only way you can control. You walk to him with your chin tucked, lashes working, a performance as precise as clockwork. One finger drifts along his trouser seam—up, up—until it ghosts the rise beneath. Your smile answers itself. “Soft at heart doesn’t have to mean flaccid.”

“There you are,” Viktor murmurs, a flicker of relief crossing his face. “See? You are not broken.” Just as your palm opens to claim him, he stands and turns his back, moving to sit behind the desk. “I have a free slot in three days. Same time.”

You follow, quick, hand catching his shoulder. “Viktor, you are not being serious right now, I—”

“Enough.” He pivots; his hand closes around your wrist and draws you in, breath close, eyes hard. “I will not fuck you today. Nor beat you.” The cane taps once against the rug, a period. “Do not be a child. Sit with what the rest of us face daily—inadequacy, fear, the anger that follows. And do not insult me by implying you cannot handle it.”

“I—” you stutter. “I’m afraid.”

“I know.”

A breath sucks in. “What do I do?” you whisper, cheeks streaked in dark lines.

“Persevere,” Viktor murmurs; his grip gentles, loosening without leaving. “Let it live in you until it dies and something else is born.” He almost adds I’m afraid too. Almost tells you it is you who could destroy him, not the other way around; that he’s put years of careful scaffolding into your hands for one reckless experiment; that what he prays for is not that you won’t expose him—but that you won’t walk. Which is why he gives you a promise shaped like a hook.

“I will give you anything you want next time. Come in three days.”

“Anything?” Your usual self would conjure feral inventory on command—his cock shoved down your throat without mercy, hair yanked, the clever fingers that strike like they know you better than you do, his mouth naming you little and low, his heart—raw. But the you running the body now doesn’t know what it wants—only who. “Do you promise?”

“Yes.”

He is close; too close. His mouth is right there—you could lean in and steal the taste of this gentleness, kiss God through him, sip absolution. His lids hang heavy, thoughtful; he is so gorgeous it feels like an accusation. If you could only break the surface. If you could only—

You swallow, step back instead, straighten your spine like a blade sliding home. “I will see you in three days, Doctor.”

—

Journal Entry:

Status: Ongoing. Patient returned regularly; affect clearer, sleep restored, appetite present. Sessions proceed within agreed bounds; post-session responses include weeping, quiet, and a steadying of thought. No acute risk observed today.

Observation (clinical): Markings consistent with controlled impact; healing trajectories normal. Aftercare tolerated and, improbably, welcomed. Desire named plainly; compliance with structure remains high. Transference intensifying; countertransference undeniable.

—

I fear her not returning more than I fear my own ruin. Today I noticed the beauty of an open wound and I kissed it. She permitted it and despised it and needed it. I cannot tell which of those truths is most dangerous.

I have lost my way. I adore my patient—she gives me the piece I have felt missing my whole life. I do not wish to be her doctor anymore; I wish to be her lover. I wish for a world in which I could have her and she could have me back.

She asked if there were others, and I was a hair’s breadth from telling her I have only her or I have nothing. When she comes, I feel alive. When she is here, I feel tranquillity. I begin missing her before the latch has even caught behind her.

In your defence, the first hour looked like a real date: paper cups, slow lap round the quad, his jacket on your shoulders like a romcom prop. He asked about your course, pretended to care, deployed a smile so symmetrical it probably has sponsors.

Then the vibes tripped over.

Under the fairy lights stapled to the gazebo, romantic slid into oh, he’s weirdly panicked. The charm melted; the neediness didn’t. “You’re really hot, you know that?” he said, with all the conviction of a guy apologising to a traffic warden.

You said yes anyway. You wanted it—or at least wanted to want it.

It was quick. Underwhelming. Olympic-level fumbling, self-pumping, eyes clamped shut like he’d taken a vow not to witness any of this. You told yourself it was nerves, not the ick, right up until he finished in five minutes, grunted, then laughed like you’d changed his life.

“Er… we should do that again?” you said, being polite against your better judgement.

“Sure, hah—sure. Totally.” That cheerful tone men use when they’re about to disappear into a hedge.

Right. That’s when you knew.

Then the real headline walked out of the trees. Literally walked. From the dark, through the bin-bag rustle, a person-shaped problem putting one foot in front of the other like a metronome with an attitude. No expression. No hurry. Just fucking steps.

You waited for a normal cue—a phone check, a glance past you, a scratch at an itch—but nothing fired. The face held an almost-smile and then forgot to keep it. The blink ran a beat too long, like someone pressed and held a key. It didn’t look where it’s going; only adjusted—clean right-angles, a step over a root—without ever seeing them. Clothes hung fine; the body inside wore them like a coat on a stand. You said “hey,” soft, then louder. No flicker. No offence taken, either. Just the same measured tread, as if the night were a treadmill built for one, and you were the only end point it recognised.

“Can you see that?” You pointed.

Your date looked, laughed—big, relieved laugh. “No. Fuck no, I can’t see anything.” Practically giddy. “Yeah, so… you’ll get home okay? I’ve gotta scram.”

“I—”

“Thanks, that was sick,” he said, already reversing towards his car like you were a speed camera.

And it just kept coming. No pause, no blink, no boo. The world’s least imaginative Terminator.

So you ran. You kept running—past the gazebo, over the damp grass, trainers skidding, breath going glassy in your throat. You cut left, right, behind a hedge, into a service path that smelled like bins and bleach. You looked back once, twice—gone. Your pulse argued with your eyes. Maybe you’d made it up. Maybe it was a weird jogger. Maybe you were overtired and horny and stupid and hurt.

You slowed by the bike racks, hands on knees, trying not to be sick. That’s when another one turned the corner. Not the same face: a man this time, older, office shoes, campus lanyard swinging. Different skin, same steps. The steady, patient arithmetic of it. The blink that missed its mark by half a beat. The way the clothes wore the body, not the other way round. Your stomach dropped in a clean line. Some knowledge you shouldn’t have clicked into place like a bad tooth: you’d been fucked into this. Literally.

Not chlamydia. Not even something glamorous like a cursed bloodline. With mild, unsatisfactory intercourse, the hottest guy in school handed you a freakish thing that put one foot down and then another until it would reach you. And in its eyes—when they remembered to look—was only death.

Now you have to work fast. It shouldn’t be this fucking hard to get laid, but the one day you’d go with anyone there is literally no one within striking distance. You still smell like someone else, you’re in last night’s clothes, mascara doing modern art on your cheek, and the only plan you’ve got is: keep moving.

You manage to get to your car. Without thinking, you get in and drive until your town bleeds into another, then another. In a small spark of clarity you remember to text your flatmate—it’s barely dawn. Date went great, might be staying over. In the next spark you scold yourself: you could have left it. Let them report you missing. Let Mr Hottest-Guy get a fright when the police ask where you’ve gone. Too late now.

The fuel light blinks orange, then screams red. You pull into the first open petrol station, catch your face in the rear-view, and see exactly what you feel: on the run. You fill the tank, grab the refugee starter kit from the shop—deodorant, toothbrush, travel paste—and try to arrange yourself into someone who is merely exhausted, not fleeing a moral geometry problem in human skin. Coffee to go. You hit the till. Your card beeps its little accusation. Declined. You try again. Declined. And again. Nothing.

“I’m afraid your card doesn’t work, honey,” says the woman behind the till, chewing like she hates the gum. “Got any cash?”

You dig through your bag, every pocket, producing a tragic still life of coins, lint and one ancient receipt. You scrape barely half of what you owe onto the counter. “Please—can I transfer? I’ll come back. I just need to—”

“Love, that’s not how it works.” She reaches for the phone. “If you take it, that’s theft. I’ll have to call the police.”

“Please don’t.” Your voice goes thin. “Please. I just—”

A hand appears beside you, steady, holding out a card. Clean nails, a nick across the knuckle, corduroy jacket sleeve. “I’ll cover this,” a lilted voice says, calm as weather. “No need to call anyone.”

You blink twice. “T-thank you.” The card swipes through, the lady behind the cash register transforms her frown into a smirk and wishes you a good day, calls you darlin’. After sliding everything off the counter into your bag, you turn to look at your saviour and he renders you dumb right there and then.

He’s taller than you thought—long lines under a brown jacket, dark jeans clean but lived-in. His face is all angles smoothed by tiredness: sharp cheekbones, a clever mouth that rests in thought, eyes the colour of strong camomile tea catching at the light. Two beauty marks peppering above the lip and under the eye, making him more boy-like. His hair does the thing—dark, a little overgrown, parted and fallen across his brow as if he pushed it back five minutes ago and forgot. The cane you only clock now: black wood with a worn grip, braced against the floor in a practised way that says it belongs there.

He’s looking at you—properly, intently, not nosy so much as taking stock. Hands you your coffee. You realise you’ve been staring when sound drifts back in like a radio tuning. “—you alright?” Muffled, twice. The third lands.

“Are you alright?” he asks again, the same hand that saved you from the phone call touching your shoulder, light, steady.

Behind him, the cashier has put her frown back on. You nod, small, guilty. As if to shield you from a follow-up, he uses that hand to guide you a step, then another, and you let him, moving like you’re leading a blind man. The automatic doors yawn; cool air gusts your face and with it a slice of brain returns.

“I’m sorry. I’m just tired.” Your voice works now. “Could you give me your details? I’ll pay you back, I promise.”

“No need for that,” he says—honest, not grand. A beat. “Are you certain you’re all right?”

“Uh, yes,” you sigh and rub your forehead. “Please, I would really like to pay you back, I just need to—”

“I really, really insist.” He grabs your palm and rubs a thumb over it. Rough, work-hardened skin slides on yours and you shudder—it’s the first kind touch you’ve had in weeks. Then he grabs your arm again and turns you to face him, all gently. Over his shoulder you see a figure on the other side of the street—inconspicuous, staring blankly right at you. A shiver rolls down your back. A lorry drives past; when it’s gone, so is the person.

“Hey,” he says softly. “What is it?”

You shake your head, wrench yourself out of his hold, and rub your shoulders. “Nothing. I’m just really, really tired, I’m sorry.”

“Are you sure you’re all right to drive? I could drive you somewhere. Where do you need to be?” He stares at you, pensive and visibly worried. Hands splayed to make himself look harmless, one still holding his cane, he takes a step back to give you some space.

“What is your name?” he asks, and the simplicity of it cracks you open.

Suddenly you want a kind man to help you and drive you somewhere safe. You are strung tight as wire. Your eyes keep skittering round the forecourt—car wash, bins, road—like you’re waiting for a jump scare you can’t time. The skin behind your ears itches where you’ve scratched it raw; your jaw has been clenched so long it clicks when you swallow. The idea of handing over the moving part of ‘on the move’ feels like a miracle: ten minutes where your muscles can stop bracing and someone else can point the bonnet.

So, you tell him your name. “What is yours?” you ask, trying not to sound like you’re about to cry.

“Viktor.” He smiles and offers his hand. You take it and, stupidly, hope for his thumb to rub across your palm again like it did a moment ago. “Well then—do you need me to take you somewhere?”

“How will you get back home?”

He shrugs. “I’ll call a friend. So?”

“I’m moving south,” you tell him. “I don’t want to lose time so I should keep on the road, but I wouldn’t mind somewhere… less crowded?”

“I know just the place,” he says. “Shall we?”

And that’s how a stranger charms you into letting him drive your own car. You allow your eyes to close for one second, just long enough to feel your shoulders drop. The next, he opens the door for you, settles you in, drops the cane onto the back seat, and rolls the car out of the petrol station.

You let out a sigh so deep you can smell your own breath—it’s toothpaste enough to tell you’ve just brushed your teeth. From under heavy eyelids you watch him—movements certain and fluid, except for when he forgets your car is an automatic and there is no use reaching over to the stick. He’s pretty, you decide. Seems like a funny type, too. You could go on a date with him or be friends with him. In another life, maybe, where there isn’t an unexplainable stranger stalking you through the skins of normal people.

Sleep takes you without warning. You register the car easing to a stop and Viktor’s cool hand on your cheek. Your lips peel apart—stale spit making them stick—then you swallow, blink, and surface.

“Hello,” he says. “I thought perhaps some fresh air would do you good?”

You jolt and look round. It’s a secluded pull-off—midweek empty, a strip of cracked tarmac with two picnic tables and a council bin. Beyond the low rail the land falls away into a shallow valley; a town lies stitched below in small roofs and grey roads, the early light making everything look far and harmless. No other cars. No voices. Just wind worrying the hedge and the tick of your engine cooling.

You climb out, breathing too hard, check your phone: thirty minutes from the last town. You pace the edge of the lay-by, scan the verge, the path, the rail. Nobody. Or so you hope. Horror at yourself—at how you must look—flushes up; you slump onto the bonnet and hide your face in your hands.

It takes Viktor exactly as long as your little breakdown to scramble out. Uneven gait, he comes round slowly and nudges your shoe with his. “Hey,” he says. “What is it? What are you looking for?”

“I—” you hiccup. “It’s hard to explain, I just—”

“Shh.” There’s the clunk of wood braced against the car, and then his arms come around you. 

You tense at first—his chest covers your eyes and you can’t see if someone’s coming—but then you lift your palms to his shoulders, fingers hooking into corduroy, and hold on. A shuddering sob gets loose. He smells of pine soap and washing powder. His heartbeat is steady, a calm thud under your ear and at his throat where you press your nose in. He rubs your back and rocks you, slow. “You’re alright,” he says, one hand finding your cheek. “I’m here.”

You wrap yourself around him sideways, feel the hard plane of his stomach against yours. When the tired tears wear out there is silence, and for a moment you let yourself believe there is absolutely no one in the vicinity but the two of you.

“There,” Viktor says, all calm fondness. As if you are not a lunatic he found at the petrol station who is now snotting all over his jacket.

You let out a small chuckle. “You don’t even know me. Why are you so nice to me?” you say. “What are you getting out of this?”

He hums a laugh of his own. “Hopefully your number,” he murmurs, easing back. When he does your noses brush; breath meets breath. For a second you forget the rest of the world and see only his mouth—soft pink, that small beauty mark above the upper lip you want to taste. You brace, hands fisted in the collar at his nape, and push in, hopeful he’ll push back.

And oh, he does. A careful press at first, the kind used on skittish and breakable things. His lower lip gives; yours follows. He pauses just long enough to ask without words, and you answer by opening a fraction, catching his top lip between yours. Heat moves in at the edges. The wind ticks the branches; the cooling engine ticks back. His hand slides from your cheek to the hinge of your jaw, and the angle sharpens. You feel the quiet strength in his mouth—no showy force, just intention. You taste coffee gone thin, mint, something clean.

He breathes a small sound into you and you swallow it. Your tongue touches his, quick, a test; he answers in kind, not greedy, not coy, a measured give that makes your stomach drop as if the ground shifted a few inches down. You chase, he meets; your fingers pull at material and feel the warm seam of shoulder underneath. He breaks a hair’s breadth to say, “Alright?”—his mouth still against yours—then closes the gap when you nod, hungry. Teeth glance, a soft scrape; he mouths the corner of your lip like he’s learning it by shape. Your pulse climbs into your throat and stays there.

It deepens because you let it: longer pulls, less air, the sort of warmth that sweeps the spine clean. He anchors you by the waist, thumb finding the edge of your shirt, and you lean into the hold, into him, into now. The world stays quiet, and you forget the most important thing.

You don’t know what propels you forward—whether it’s the moment itself or the pathetic human need for something kind to happen to you. Whether it’s the pulse that yells yes in your veins, or his charming voice and nice-smelling neck—you pull at his collar, then down, easing the jacket off his back to feel more of him under your fingers.

As if an unspoken agreement has passed, he does the same for you—his hands find the hem of your sweatshirt and tug up, and you lift your arms obediently. You use that little shift to let him in between your legs, invite him to press further. Your feet rest on the bumper; your calves hug his thighs while he smooths the hair that stuck to your face when the top came off.

“I hope you’re not a criminal on the run?” he jokes, then kisses your neck.

“Would you stop if I was?” you ask, untucking the shirt from his trousers.

“No,” Viktor mutters. “I’m certain you’re innocent, anyway.” He smiles; you smile back. You are on a date in a car park with a boy who likes you. And he probably won’t even give you chlamydia. That’s all that matters.

His hands find your hips and then ass, attractively certain; he draws you down the bonnet a few inches until your bodies line up—groin to groin, a neat click. He’s hot exactly where you’re wet. The engine ticks beneath you. Adam’s apple bobs deliciously when he swallows and his fingers begin a shy crawl under the hem of your skirt. “Can I—?” he asks, breath close, tips ghosting the soft of your thighs.

You answer in kind: palms sliding down his chest to that sliver of stomach peeking out from where his shirt has come loose and unbuttoned. You hook a finger under his belt and tug, once. “Can I?”

His breath leaves on a laugh he tries to swallow. “Yes.” 

Like the cool girl you wish you were, you slide the leather tongue out of the buckle and pull the belt free from its loops. His trousers sag, treating you to the V-lines cut into the taut rise of an otherwise hollow abdomen, pointing exactly to what you want. The very obvious tent under his fly is about the only thing keeping him dressed from the waist down; you help with that too—button pops, zip slides, and his cock is out, warm in your hand. You stroke once, this time for the pure joy of it. It tickles your ego that there’s no grim motivational pumping needed; he’s already there, heavy and ready to be useful. Ready to fuck you.

His hands come back to your thighs, practical now. He drags your skirt up and hesitates that bare second at the edge of your knickers. “Mm?”

You answer by shifting, opening, a small grind that says get on with it. He hooks the cotton aside and finds you with two fingers first—quick check, slick proof—then he looks up, mouth a little open, like you’ve surprised him. Good.

He tests the entrance and then works them in—shallow, then deep—pads pressing up until your breath hitches, the heel of his hand snug where you need it. You give back what you take: fist around him, wrist economical, base to tip with a tight twist at the crown. He’s slick in your hand already; you smear it, thumb the slit, and he stutters against your palm. He answers by curling his fingers just so and dragging them out slow; your hips lift to keep him, a stupid, honest reach that makes him swear under his breath.

“Fuck, you’re so wet,” he murmurs, and it sounds so wondrous you moan his name.

Emboldened, he works you harder, knocks your rhythm out so all you can do for him is hold his cock and try not to squeeze too tight. The car squeaks beneath you and you spread wider. He braces one hand on the hood and gives himself fully to the task—thumb on your clit like he knows what he’s doing, fingers pushing a knuckle deeper with every slide. It feels good, and it keeps building in your lower belly into something even better. You pray he can’t tell what’s crusted on your knickers from the night before.

And then you remember—last night. You remember why you’re here in the first place. Something different kicks in—an instinct, not the horny one that wants you to let a good man who saved you from grief finger you in a scenic pull-off, but the one that wants you alive. So you sacrifice the oncoming orgasm and say, “Please, fuck me.”

It feels like it’s happening to you rather than by you—limbic system kicking the door in, pulling rank on whatever free will you pretend to have. You know exactly what this comes with, where it leads, what it sticks to. And still, when he pauses, blinks once, and nods like a man handed a job, you open your thighs wider. Guilty.

You keep his balls busy in your fist while he steps closer in, the neatest thing either of you will do this morning. When he lines up you’re already hiking your skirt, heels digging the bumper for leverage; the bare strip of your ass where your knickers have ridden into the buttcrack catches on the warm bonnet, a scrape that promises tomorrow’s burn. No matter—at least you’ll have a tomorrow.

In another dull moment of malice you tell him, “I want you,” and hate yourself for it. But as if it’s another call to be saved, Viktor does what he’s told. His first push is careful because you were tight around his fingers, second push not careful at all. Heat bites; he fills you in a clean, mean slide that makes your spine thrum against the metal. You grab his ass cheeks—they hollow when muscle tenses—and pull him down to you. He answers with short, efficient strokes, hips and breath and the soft rubber squeak of the bonnet under your body, morning light making the whole thing look stupidly honest.

“Good?” he asks, voice rough.

“Don’t talk,” you say, and rock up to meet it.

He adjusts—tiny limp closer, hand under your bum to angle you just right—and the next pass hits dead on. Your mouth opens on nothing. He watches your face like it’s instructions, jaw working, sweat at his hairline already. His thumb finds you again, learns the circle, presses when you jerk. You take him, take the scrape of it, the pace edging from tidy to necessary. This isn’t romance; it’s relief with a pulse, the necessity of violence that comes with a sweet extra step.

You see it plain in the thin strip of mind you’ve left yourself: villainy with a pretty face. The campus god only picked a girl who was already keen—lazy sin. You, though. You’re here using the nicest man you’ve met, grinding survival into him and calling it a favour. It’s worse. You know it. You keep going.

Your eyes glass; your breath hitches on a quiet sob. Viktor misreads it as bliss and takes it for a yes, driving a shade harder. His cock hits that high socket inside you where all the wires meet; the circuit closes and everything lights. You clamp around him in pulses, the taste of it bitter at the back of your tongue. “Fuck, yes—” slips out, traitor soft, and you roll to ride it, because it’s coming inevitable like weather and there’s no manual for a sex-borne curse—no rule that says stopping would save him now.

You come with your nails in his shoulders and your thighs shaking against his hips. “God, you’re so tight,” he gets out, half-laugh, half-groan, bracing for the grip of you. His hand leaves your clit; both arms band round your back, hauling you close. He’s slick with sweat; the cotton is damp under your fingers. A stray thought knives in about his leg—how it’s taking this—then you nearly laugh at your own sudden concern. Too late to be decent.

He doesn’t slow. If anything he chases it, breath rough at your ear, rhythm short and mean. “I’m going to—I can’t—” he manages, not really a question.

“Do it,” you say, and that’s mercy enough.

He sets his jaw. The limp is there in the stance, a hitch that makes his hips angle just so; it works. You take the drag and fill, the push that slides you an inch on the bonnet, the ugly little squeaks of paint and rubber. He’s close; you can feel the tremor building, the way his abdomen hardens under yours and the swallow bobs in his throat like a warning.

“Look at me,” he says, and you do—because you will give him that, at least. His eyes are blown wide and strangely gentle, as if this were tender and not two strangers getting their fix at the edge where two towns meet. His hand fists in your shirt to anchor himself; the other spreads at the small of your back. He thrusts through the last tight inches—voice breaking on a sound he bites down—and then he goes, body jolting against yours, breath held, warmth flooding you in heavy pulses while he says your name like he’s testing whether it fits in his mouth.

He stays there a moment, shuddering, forehead to yours, breath hot and fast. The bonnet ticks. The hedge hisses. Morning keeps happening, indifferent. He laughs once under his breath, shaky, and kisses you—quick, off-centre, pleased and dumb with it—before he eases out, careful, his hands still steadying you as if the world might tilt.

“I—” he starts, tumbling words while he snaps the rubber off and tucks himself in. “That’s not what I usually do on first dates, I promise.”

“Me neither,” you say, and manage a small, dismissive smile.

He comes to help you off the car. The pang hits when his limp’s a shade worse; guilt lands clean. The cane’s skittered under the car—you stoop, fetch it, pass it over. He takes it and steals a quick kiss against your cheek, neat as a stamp.

“I should probably just drive you home, hm?” you offer.

“What about your great escape?” Viktor hums.

“I just needed a change of scenery, is all. Come on,” you tell him. “It’s the least I can do.”

He nods and follows you to the car. The drive is padded with awkward small talk. You make your voice sound normal and not like you’re about to be sick. Disgusted with yourself, you repeat his turn-by-turn and will each one to fade the second you take it. He points—left, then right, third exit—and you say “Got it” like you mean it.

Outside his block he exhales, long. He gives you a look that’s almost shy. “So. How about that number of yours?”

You laugh. Right—this started with spare change and a number. “Give me your phone,” you say, and type a string that won’t ring for anyone, then hand it back.

Palm on the door handle, he leans in. The kiss is a clean farewell, soft and tidy on your mouth. “Will I see you again?” he asks.

“Totally,” you hear yourself say.

He nods, steps out. You watch him cross the pavement and pause on the doorstep to give you a small, sweet wave. Sorry, baby, you mouth, voiceless. Stomach lighter, heart heavier, you pull away and head for home. At every slip road you have to stop your hands turning the wheel, talk yourself out of the easy loop-back that would take you straight to him. You keep going. You make yourself keep going.

You inch home and the regret fattens in your mouth until it tastes like metal. A sweet boy—chivalrous, pretty—stepped into your mess and you ground him under it. You try to weigh sins: keep it on you and let it walk you into the ground, or pass it on and live with the aftertaste. Neither scales right. God knows what happens if it catches you; you’ve seen enough to guess. But living with yourself now? Also impossible. You grip the wheel and swallow hard, like that will keep anything down.

Viktor watches you go with the funniest lift in his chest. He should have asked more questions. Should have stopped you in the drive and made sense of it. But he hasn’t been this smitten in years. Despite the odd knot in his gut, he smiles, turns the keys in his palm, and is about to face the lock when—

It’s a late screening on Friday evening—professors by day, Viktor picks you up from your side of campus, his bag stuffed with students’ papers to mark and library books, tilting him to one side as he walks. You share a brioche and a takeaway coffee on the ride, both sitting on single seats, your backs pressed against the cold windows. Streetlight-coloured raindrops smear across the glass as the tram rattles through the turns.

“What are you taking me to this time?” you ask, mouth full of pastry.

He takes the brioche from your hand, now badly mangled, and exchanges it for a paper cup. “Morgiana,” he says. “By Juraj Herz.”

“A Czech film?” The tram rattles on the tracks and a splosh of your coffee lands on the next seat—thankfully empty. “You know I’m not fluent yet.”

Viktor shrugs. “It’s a good film.” He points a finger at you, playfully. “And you should be, by now.”

“You should be by now,” you parrot, trying to mimic his accent, and he snorts crumbs onto his coat. Your smirk is triumphant a touch too soon.

“I’ll tell you what—” He brushes his knees clean and braces on the cane to get up. “I will translate for you,” he says, offering an arm as you approach your stop. “And later I will check how well you listened.”

There’s an impish smugness on his face that you’ve learned to adore—it usually heralds your doom, only to offer a last-minute plot twist toward a happy ending. Depending on how defiant you choose to be, it arrives after an hour or two of merciless teasing. Innocence flooding your face, you bat your lashes at him, take the gentleman’s forearm pretending it’s for your balance, not his—and coo, “I would love that.”

“I thought as much,” Viktor mutters, leading you out of the tram, the shells of his ears pinking.

Inside, you duck past the poster gallery to the café window and order mulled wine instead of your usual glasses. Steam and cloves; his mouth quirks. Tickets torn, you slip into the auditorium to find your row. The place is almost empty—two, maybe three people scattered across distant rows. No one is keen to sit beside a couple.

With your coats bracing the seats to either side, you sink into your chair and rest your head on his shoulder—a perfect spot for your temple despite the bone, softened this season by thick wool. He sighs and absently runs his fingers through your hair, whispering, “Was your day good?”

“Hmm.” You half-nod. “Though it seems I need to specify that when I require an essay, it has to have more than three hundred words.”

Viktor snorts. “Did they at least prove their point in those three hundred words?”

“Not even close. More the ‘That’s what I think it is, and I think I’m right’ sort of thing. And how was yours?”

He huffs. “Half the seminar cited Wikipedia; the other half cited each other—and one footnote referenced my mate Tom.”

You laugh a little too loud, but before you can actually answer, the lights dim and the screen flickers. You’re high enough to catch, at the corner of your eye, the white beam knifing out from the projection booth. 

It rolls in with the first images of mourning—thankfully no language needed to recognise a funeral when a coffin descends into the earth. You presume the next scene is the will being read and the assets being divided between two women—who gets what, though, you can’t tell.

Names settle in by context—sisters, Klára and Viktoria. You edge forward in your seat, elbows on knees, hands cupped round what’s left of your mulled wine. Colours pulse—crimson, violet, a lacquered black that makes skin look like porcelain. A low angle glides behind a Siamese cat; the world tilts through its gaze, blue eyes glinting. You miss some tart asides, but not the shape: Viktoria’s jealousy coiling tight as a ribbon on a hatbox.

After twenty minutes—give or take—you’ve mapped the atmosphere enough to follow even when a phrase runs away from you. Your cup is empty before you realise. Viktor leans in, breath warm against your ear. “Are you following so far?”

“I—” you hesitate. “I’d pass, but barely.” A flash of teeth in the dark, and then that one-of-a-kind tsk.

“Barely pass won’t do, Professor,” he says, placing both palms on your shoulders and urging you to sit back. “You were supposed to tell me if you needed help, no?” His tone drops to that register of salacious mockery he uses for flirting—lips tickle your earlobe with every word.

“Oh, I’m so out of practice with exams, though,” you tease, but your hand obediently surrenders the cup into his. “What kind of help do you have in mind?”

Mouth smugly curved, movements elegant, he slides the empty cups beneath the seat in front. When the screen blooms white, his face betrays him: a quick pinking at the cheekbones; then shadow returns and composure follows. He finds the pin at the crown of your head and tugs. Your updo loosens and spills; his fingers rake gently through, spreading until the heel of his palm cradles the skull’s base. A slow curl of his hand tilts your face a fraction, aligning your ear with his mouth.

“I could lend you my hands-on experience,” he mutters in a tone that tells you his brows are all knotted into a picture of innocence.

You huff a nervous laugh. “Alright then, Professor. Tutor me.”

The hand at your head guides you towards the screen. “Eyes forward,” he breathes. “Quiet. And no fidgeting.”

The other—fingers clever and precise—finds your knee and rolls your skirt so it rests high on your thighs. On-screen, the woman is on the telephone. “She says she won’t come. She’s thirsty all the time. But she thinks it will pass,” Viktor murmurs. The touch on your skull slides to the nape—pressing, firm and gentle at once. The other inches higher, scrupulously prudent, maddeningly so: almost nothing but a ghost of impropriety over nylon.

You hold still. The projector hums. Fabric hisses as your leg shifts; a tremor jumps in your thigh. For a moment you’re sure he’s already there, and you steal a look down—only to find his hand nowhere near where you felt it. He catches the glance, of course. Another soft hiss of a scold, then his knuckles tap the inner side of your knee before a light, corrective smack.

“Good girls don’t peek,” he says. “Good girls watch and listen.”

With his voice threading into your nerves, you tilt toward one objective—behaving. Eyes on the screen, you watch, and try your best to listen. But the images—lush close-ups, shallow focus, overlays of fabrics ghosting across the frame—melt his translations into heat. He could be reciting filth or the catechism; either would needle you just the same.

Touch turns exploratory. Knuckles trace the fine arc of bone, then drift higher by a breath, then retreat—so patient it borders cruel. He finds the back of your knee and presses lightly, a secret lever; your calf slackens at once. “That’s it,” he murmurs, amused and gentle, as if coaxing an answer. The other hand keeps you facing front: a cradle at your neck, thumb stroking the hairline in a slow, absent rhythm that contradicts the precision below. 

He doesn’t hurry—part of his fun comes from the sluggishness. Each pass up your thigh stops early, skates away, returns by a different path—inside, then outside, then a line straight up the seam that never quite arrives. A loving provocation that has you breathing through your nose, shoulders square, muscles trembling despite your best discipline.

“Translation,” he whispers, mouth shamelessly pressed into your ear. “Envy requires restraint.” 

His tone is low, deliciously professorial, the consonants a quiet scrape. He tilts your chin, lips close enough to graze yours but choosing not to. “You are practising restraint, yes?” 

Your answer is a small hum. He rewards it with the lightest rake of nails over nylon, barely-there pressure that lights every nerve along the route. When you shift a millimetre, he scolds once—corrective, fond—and smooths his palm down to the kneecap as if ironing away your impatience. “Look at you—so focused,” he coos, “and so pretty.”

Mouth quirks—whether it’s an involuntary reaction to praise or composure wearing thin, you don’t know. It must be well past the midpoint of the film, but how could you tell? Your brain slips into a space so tight it can fit only Viktor’s voice—he mutters translations you don’t give a single fuck about, so long as he keeps talking. It’s reached a ridiculous point at which he might as well be writing the words into the grooves of your ear with that tongue tip of his, he’s so close. It’s enough to make you forget the no-fidgeting rule—your hips seek out his touch like the parched seek water.

But Viktor is merciful. He recognises a need when it saturates the space around you and makes you quiver helplessly. He actually recognises it sooner, but enjoys the little display of torment. The hand at your throat slips to your collarbone—steadying—while the other glides up, up, to cup you through those offensive layers of tights and knickers in one soft press. A pretty little gasp slips free between lips bitten together. No rubbing—he just holds: broad palm, tolerant weight—letting your body speak first.

The plea comes in the form of hips rolling and eyes closing, despite the directive to watch. Viktor, the diligent bastard, keeps feeding you the dialogue, in the same calm cadence with which he tells you to spread your legs wider and take him.

You find the seam and work it. Small circles at first, the sort you could pass off as a shift for comfort; then a longer, slower drag that turns cloth into grit and burn. He doesn’t move so much as allow—a fractional tilt of his wrist, the heel of his hand angling just-so, the barest counterpressure that turns your motion into a circuit. The nylon bites pleasantly; cotton blurs it; underneath, you’re ablaze. 

He keeps you framed: one palm a collarbone bracket, thumb stroking an idle rhythm at your throat while he murmurs passages that are only shape and breath. His voice has the grain of paper rubbed thin.

Public quiet becomes a flavour. The auditorium holds its breath with you: a cough two rows down, a shoe scuff, someone rustling a sweet wrapper. Your mouth is closed because it has to be; it makes the feeling brighter, like wire drawn through a die—tighter, finer. 

You count the slide and catch, the give and catch, and ride it with neat economy, because neat is all you can afford. He approves in the small ways: a faint nudge higher, a knuckle rolled a favourable angle, the ghost of a chuckle that nobody hears but you. You’re sitting properly, ankles crossed, looking like a woman watching a film; meanwhile you are grinding yourself open on his palm in micro-motions, a secret done in the light of a projector.

Near the top of the climb your vision picks up stray lights like flotsam. A body swaying. A cat on a windowsill. A couple kissing in the centre of the screen, staged and passionless. The score hushes; your pulse doesn’t. And then—oh—KONEC blooms on the screen, pale blue to white, and your loving bastard of a tutor pulls his hand away.

“You bast—” The -ard is swallowed as what was withdrawn returns to seal your mouth—knuckles firm, scented with your crotch.

“Quiet,” Viktor purrs, smiling like he’s keeping a secret. “It’s a public place, after all.”

A long pause follows in which you measure each other, pupils blown in the dark. Your eyes narrow; the corners of his mouth climb until he’s all glee. Eventually you huff through your nose and let your lids fall—sweet surrender.

He accepts it. His hand retreats; both come up to frame your face. He kisses your forehead. “My dearest darling, this is just a pause.” His lips move against your skin. “I shall check what you’ve learned tonight and grade you accordingly.”

“You’re impossible,” you murmur—light and unbearably fond. 

Outside, the air is knife-cold and clean. He hooks your arm in his and is all softness—thumb warming your knuckles in his pocket, chin tipped to listen as if the tram schedule were poetry. 

“Did you enjoy the film?” he asks, terribly mild. “The colours? The… tension?” He kisses your hairline at the stop; on the tram he nudges your knee with his, threads his fingers through yours, asks if you’re warm enough, if the mulled wine was too sweet. Every courtesy lands like a match struck. By the time you reach your street, your pulse is doing its own brisk walk.

Across the threshold he is household neatness itself: cane hung on the rack, coat slid from his shoulders, scarf coiled, shoes aligned. Nothing at all has happened, if you believe his face. You just stand there, cheeks hot, watching him. He straightens, breath drawn to speak—

But you get there first. Mouth on his, tongue in deep, fingers wrecking his hair. For a beat he melts—eyes closed, a long, low hum—then hands find your hips, ruck your skirt. One palm slides under, and under again—beneath your knickers. First a squeeze, possessive; then he prises you open, long fingers teasing both holes at once, a maddening see-saw of touch that buckles your knees. You walk him backwards blind, the flat a blur, steering for the bedroom. Your hand finds his collar, ready to drag.

He bites your lower lip—pitch-perfect, right on the thin line between playful and mean. “You don’t think you’re getting away with this, do you?”

“It was worth a try,” you hum, licking the little rise of flesh beneath his cupid’s bow.

“What’s that now?” Viktor feigns grave injury. “Don’t you want to see what an A gets you?”

“I would love to,” you say, scratching his chest lightly. “But I’m fairly sure I’m sitting at a C, at best.”

“That’s for me to decide, isn’t it?” He catches your wrists and pins them in front of you with one hand. “Now strip, my beloved. And lie on your back for me, will you?”

You obey in layers. Sweater first—lifted over your head and dropped aside—then buttons, one by one, your shirt parting to cool air and his warmed attention. The skirt unhooks; you shimmy it down your hips, tights following in a whisper. You’re not stalling so much as savouring the way his eyes eat every inch of new skin, the tiny, audible swallow when your knickers slide to your ankles and off. Denuded, you ease back onto the mattress. He stays at the foot of the bed, fondness first, then a small, wicked smirk; his belt slides out of the loops. He wraps it around your wrists and snug-ties it to the headboard.

You pout. He kisses the centre of your palm. “It’s just so I know you won’t cheat.”

Then, he strips to a halt halfway: sweater off, shirt open and shrugged, trousers unbuttoned and pushed to his thighs where they are cinched by the brace—nothing else. Your gaze slips down: his cock is shyly roused, not yet hard, rising in small, involuntary pulses. You can’t decide which you love more—him soft and inviting, all tender vulnerability, or flushed with need, the head shining with a pearly bead.

Half naked, he climbs between your legs, plucks your ankle and sets it on his shoulder. “Let’s start with easy questions.” A kiss to your calf. “Who is Klára?”

First obstacle reveals itself: hot tongue dragging up the inside of your leg. You reach for the answer, but whatever knowledge you had flees higher than his mouth. “One of the sisters,” you manage.

“Hmm. Which one?” He stops, and a gust of cool air hits the slick trail. You twitch; he chuckles. “Focus, my darling.”

Focus, the bastard says—as if he weren’t the one cleaving your mind in two. The part that remembers the first twenty minutes gets shouldered aside by the part that makes your cunt clench around nothing, begging to be touched, to be kissed.

“The prettier one,” you grit, sweat pearling at your temple.

“Mmm.” Another kiss, higher. “And the other?”

“Viktoria.” Your breath snags on the last syllable; his smile curves against your skin.

“Good. And what is the main conundrum?” His thumb strokes the hinge of your hip, absent-minded and cruel as a cat. You skitter forward, tilt your pelvis as far as the belt allows, and catch it—the glint in his eye, the lashes fanning once, a second too long to claim he’s unaffected. He comes lower—lies on his belly, arms hooking over your thighs, hands bracketing your waist. And then nothing: his mouth hangs an inch away, breath warm on skin, ruffling the curls at your mound.

An unbearable beat. You bully your synapses into firing and, in the spark, one word lands—temporary absolution. “Envy.”

He hums, pleased. “Strong start. Borderline B.”

Then his mouth lands—one precise kiss to your clit, no more than a press and a parting. It’s the pilot light catching. Your hips jump after the heat like metal to a magnet, chasing the spark he’s already pocketed.

He’s gone before you reach him. The arm looped round your thigh loosens; his hand slips between your legs with the patience of a watchmaker. A fingertip brushes your entrance as if checking the weather there, then detours to trace along each lip, gathering, redistributing—never settling. Two fingers shape a tidy V—self-portrait, the ego of him—spreading you so the air cools and your womb answers with another flood. He smiles into the work as if this were note-taking.

“Name the lodge,” he says, voice mild.

“Green… Flute.” Your ankles tense against his shoulders.

“Mm. And the cat?” His knuckles skim the seam without breaching it.

“A witness.” You pant. “Judge. Familiar.”

“Close.” He dips just inside—single syllable of touch—and withdraws with a quiet click of the tongue, pleased with the syllable you make in reply.

He traces the rim again, slow circuits that turn need into ache into temper. “What delivers the doom?”

“The glass,” you whisper. “The—bubbles.”

A soft, approving noise. His fingers draw you wider, the V tightening, and he drags the pad of his thumb through everything that isn’t the centre, careful as a man edging paint along moulding. Your belly stutters; your wrists pull reflexively against leather.

“And what colour carries her?” he asks, eyes up, lashes low.

“Red,” you breathe, then flinch when he only grazes the hood and leaves it at that. “Crimson.”

“Good girl.” He keeps you open with one hand and worries the soft edges with the other—little strokes at the periphery, a deliberate refusal of the obvious. He is infuriatingly calm about it, the tip of his tongue wetting his lower lip as if considering a footnote.

You answer what you can; when you reach for cleverness, you get it wrong. He rewards failure with more almosts: a nudge at the perineum, a drag that stops a millimetre shy, the slow circle that never closes. Heat puddles under you. You roll your hips in tiny thieves’ motions; he lifts his brows, indulgent, and continues to draw maps you cannot read.

“Why thirst?” he murmurs, stroking just beneath, where everything is helpless.

“Because—” Your voice trips. “Because jealousy dries the world.”

He smiles, the professor with a gold star he refuses to stick. “Poison, darling.” A kiss to the inside of your thigh, chaste and cruel. “Though I admire the poetry.”

By now the mattress tells on you. Wet creeps aft; you feel the trickle slip from cleft to sheet, wicked and slow. He notices—of course he does—and his expression warms with proprietary satisfaction. Still he withholds, fingers steady in their perimeter patrol, questions continuing in that unhurried register until the damp has traced a line down your ass and into the cotton below. Only then does he glance up, pleased as a man finishing a paragraph, and let the silence say what your body has already confessed.

“Eh, and whatever am I to do with you, hm? It’s starting to look more like a C,” he murmurs, pouty mouth perilously close.

“Viktor, I beg you.” You look down and catch him pink to the ears, pupils wide. Only now do you notice his trousers have slithered lower; his hips worry the mattress in small, unmeant pushes—at least you’re not the only one tormented.

“Already?” he says—and what was meant as a tease comes out hopeful.

The hope costs him. He inhales, reins himself in, eyes sharpening. “Answer me properly, then.” Two fingers slide in to skim your slick and return to your clit in a single, ruinous stroke, slow as honey. “Spell it.”

“P—please.”

“Full sentence.” His thumb flattens and lifts, never constant, like a tide he commands.

“Please, Viktor. Please touch me.”

“Better.” He rewards you with pressure, not speed—drawing a lazy figure that makes your thighs climb his shoulders. Heat climbs with it. He watches your face the whole time, greedy and soft, as if your breath were a gauge he’s learning to read. Another pass—lower, then back—enough to make you see white at the edges.

He smiles, that small, helpless kind. “B minus,” he says, and circles once more, tighter. “Keep going.”

“Please—your mouth.” The word scrapes out raw. “I want your tongue. Anything.”

His eyes flare; his smile says earned. He ghosts a breath over you, then gives you nothing, hovering until your hips reach for him on their own. “Open for me,” he murmurs, and waits until you do—thighs loose, belly soft, the pull turning inside out.

The first touch is a taste, not a stroke: the tip, a quick flick, then gone. Another—longer, flatter—drawing from bottom to crest without finishing the job. You feel the shape of him—the wet heat, the stubbornness—before he truly starts. He makes a seal and works, patient at first, slow—tongue broad, then narrow, then firm again—learning the angles by your breath. His hand slides up, two fingers finding the hood and coaxing it back, exposing you to his mouth. You jolt, swear softly, and he hums into you as if agreeing.

“More?” he asks, voice damp.

“Yes. Don’t stop.”

Viktor doesn’t have it in him to stop, at least not yet. He feeds on you: tongue pushing in, shallow, then deeper, a greedy thrust that has nothing to do with gentleness. He fucks you with his mouth, steady, jaw working; his fingers ride higher to circle your clit with small, ruthless strokes that never slip. The lap and pull turn animal. You start to shake—tiny, uncontrollable flutters in your thigh and ass—and the belt creaks against the headboard when your wrists drag for purchase. He sounds wrecked now, breathing through his nose, cheeks flushed, eyes half-lidded but fixed on the work.

“Darling,” he pants into you. “Tell me.”

“You—your tongue—oh fuck—don’t—” The rest breaks into noise. Wet spreads; the bed takes it. Your hips climb him; you’re right there, the edge under your feet, nothing left but fall—

He stops.

Not completely—his mouth stays open against you, a hot insanity—but the rhythm is gone, the pressure gone, his fingers easing off to a feather that does nothing but tease the nerves he’s just lit up. A torn sound leaves you, half sob, half snarl. A muscle jumps hard in your glute; your thigh kicks once, helpless.

“Fuck you,” you gasp, stunned and shaking.

He laughs, quiet and smug, lips slick, chin glossy. “Language,” he says, and gives you the softest lick imaginable—nothing like mercy. “I don’t think B minus earns you a finish, would you agree?” A kiss lands off-centre on your pubic mound.

“Vik.” Your chin wobbles.

The state hits you hard—open, ridiculous, sweet as bruised fruit. It’s not cruelty; it’s the place you only go with him, where wanting feels like trust turned sideways. He sees it at once—brows easing, mouth kind.

“Děvče moje,” he croons, sliding up until his chest settles on yours. “I’m only teasing. Would you like your hands back?”

“Please,” you choke.

One tug and the belt loosens. Pins and needles spark through your fingers. He kisses the hollow of your palm and guides your arm over his neck; then, his heft presses along your crease, hot and eager, the weight of him obvious through the smear he’s made of you.

“Would you like my cock now?” He noses your temple.

Yes—it’s plain and urgent. He’s the only one who can do this to you—tip you into that imperative where being fucked is not dramatic, just necessary. It’s fun, even with tears pricking, silly and young and right. “Yes.”

“My good girl,” he hums, and the promised cock finds you blindly—your bodies have known each other for years; no introductions needed.

He notches, nudges, slides. The first inch is heat and pressure; the second is the hinge giving way. You open around him, slow, the stretch running a line through you like a seam being picked. He holds until your breath steadies, then presses again—patient, full, unshowy—until he is buried and your pulse is thudding in his mouth where it rests at your throat. Your legs hook the small of his back on their own; heel to him, calf tightening, the lock set.

It starts with a grind rather than a thrust—deep millwork, hips drawing a careful ellipse that keeps him seated and works the inside edge. You feel it in the belly first, then lower, a slow wheel turning. He breathes through his nose, measured, the sound of it brushing your cheek.

“There,” he says, not for himself. You exhale, ragged and it breaks on a small sound. He does it again, same arc, letting the friction thicken without chasing speed.

Muscle to muscle: his back under your legs, the clench and ease; your thighs tightening in pulses; his stomach firming as he holds the depth; the give of you around him when he rolls up and in. No ornament, just work done right. He keeps one hand at your jaw to hold your gaze, the other under your shoulder to anchor you. “Look at me,” he murmurs, close enough that the words imprint themselves into you by shape. The look itself is a cable; you travel it back and forth with your breath.

You talk in scraps. “More.”

“Like that?” He proves it, slower, heavier.

“Yes.”

“Good.” His mouth finds the corner of yours for a quiet press that tastes of wine. He draws nearly out—threat, promise—and sinks again with a low sound that wants to be a groan. Your body clutches, making both of you swear under your breath.

He lengthens the stroke by a finger’s width each time until the rhythm settles—long in, weight down, small lift, circle, set. The bed ticks. Your shoulders inch higher on the pillow; he follows, chest to chest, and the slide between you is warm and inevitable. You catch his earlobe with your teeth, brief, and he laughs into your cheek, then goes deeper, the angle changing so that something bright sparks every time he lands. Your hands move—nape, shoulder blade, spine—touches that say keep going.

Your name falls from him once, full, as if read from a page. You breathe his back into your palms—knobs of spine under skin, the narrow ladder of muscle working like rope pulled hand over hand. Not large, but built for endurance: patience stitched into fibre, a strength that comes from showing up, again and again. He is like that—steadfast, forbearing, kind—and the proof is in the quiet labour of his body over yours.

He deepens by degrees. Long stroke, set; long stroke, set. Your heels press into the small of him; he tilts until the angle finds the bright place and holds it. The sound between you changes—less breath, more body. He slides a hand between you and finds your centre with two fingers, snug and sure, working small, exact circles that keep time with the weight of him. Your throat opens; a noise climbs out that you can’t tidy into words.

“Ready?” Low, a thread at your ear.

“Yes.” It lands like consent and confession both.

“Then take it.”

Heat stacks quick—layer on layer—until your belly flickers hard and won’t stop. Muscles seize, ride up; he groans like something’s got pulled from deep but doesn’t let the pace slip. The room thins to pulse and pressure. Your back arches; breath snaps; the shake starts in your thighs and runs the length of you. When it hits, it’s clean—hard pulses that catch and release, catch and release—his hand steady through it, his mouth on your cheek saying nothing but staying.

He follows right after, driven by the grip you’ve got on him. One last push seated all the way, a shudder, a warm flood you feel even before his breath breaks against your neck. His spine bows under your hands; you keep him close and ride the afterbeats together—small shocks, slower draws—until the noise in your ears settles and the bed stops counting.

He feels heavier after, though the true weight is mostly left inside you. He slackens and pours himself into your hollows, edges gone soft, as if the angles melted on release. It’s a sweet burden—an anchor you tie yourself to while the world reconstitutes.

“How are you?” he asks after a beat, his head tucked beneath your chin.

“So good,” you say, twirling a lock of his hair around a finger. “So, how did I do?”

“Ah, well, that depends.” His voice returns to that private, professorly lilt, the one no real student gets. “There is one final question—what’s the name of the cat?”

Blank. A ridiculous laugh pops free. Your mouth opens and closes on air; the answer has been rubbed clean out of you. He lifts onto his elbows, one brow cocked. His lips start to shape the first letter, but somehow, you are faster—

The encounter has made him two sizes at once. Bolder, because you answered to his voice and went still under his hands—proof that method can be made from ruin. Smaller, because you smiled while he was believing in it. That smile—satanic, luminous, amused—tells him progress was a costume you let him try on, and he wore it like a child parading in a father’s coat.

He cycles the feelings like beads. Anger, first: at you for playing him, at himself for being playable, at the world for making a cage and teaching you to rattle it for sport. Then sorrow—thin, constant—as if he’s misplaced something he never owned. Curiosity follows, the most dangerous one; it sits low in the body and asks for more data, more exposure, more you. Pity tries to rise and he kills it on sight. Kinship refuses to die; it taps inside his ribs like a moth against glass.

He tells himself he was a good physician trying not to bolt you under the wrong label. That he attempted what no one else had—refusing the lazy taxonomy, making space where you could be more than a diagnosis. That he discharged you because sometimes mercy is an unlocked door. The story is elegant. It fits in a note.

The truth is uglier. Ambition got there first and put its hands on the wheel. He wanted the case that proves a theory, the miracle of a mind untied by precision. He wanted the feeling of being right. Under that, older and harder to look at, is the thing you woke in him: a heat that doesn’t belong to medicine, a covenant with his own darkness he has been dodging for years.

He knows what boils over in him when he stops counting. He knows how often he chooses not to look. With you, there was an offer—transactional, exact—to look together: your abyss for his, a fair trade cut at the nerve. You didn’t want that. You wanted use without witness; you wanted to burn, not be seen. He signed the papers like a surgeon tying off a vessel and called it clean work. It still bleeds in him.

The city practice steadies him. Narrow stair, frosted door, his name in gold leaf that time has blunted. Inside: walnut desk, two chairs that never relax, a small sofa, a rug that hushes feet, the window facing another building and a small square he’s grown to prefer over nice views. He splits his days the way he always has—sanatorium in the mornings, city in the afternoons—stacking appointments until thought runs like a train on greased rails. He keeps his hands on files, his eyes on symptoms. He does not think of grass stains or of a wrist settling beneath his thumb.

This evening he has two left. The penultimate is a woman whose migraines cause her to pick skin until blood beads. Before he lets her in, he tells his secretary, “When the last patient arrives and signs, you may go home. I’ll close up.” She nods, gathers her scarf, leaves the desk lamp on. The patient sits, says her part, and he listens, adjusts the plan; the talk is careful, finite, graspable. Everything by the book.

The doorbell sighs. The last patient signs. He hears the secretary’s cheerful goodnight, footsteps fading down the stair, the click of the street door. Almost there—almost through another day.

He smiles with that warm smile that tries to say you are going to be alright to people who have no idea what alright means. The woman smiles back, nods, accepts the invitation for next week’s session, and steps out, leaving the door ajar.

Viktor checks his list and frowns—a new name. It’s not ideal to have an introductory session as the last one of the day, but so be it. “Come in,” he calls, and the hinges creak. He’s hunched over notes—preparing a fresh journal page alongside the official file. When he’s done writing the name down, he pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose, looks up and—

The script—Your name, and what brings you in?—dies in his throat. One look at you and he knows you’ve been busy.

And oh, you’ve been so busy.

When you leave the sanatorium, you leave angry. Not at him—at what you’ve decided he refused. The truth. Or your truth, which is the only kind that counts. You fold the stamped discharge into your pocket like a curse and ride home with the window cracked, scarf tight, air needling your eyes until they stop trying to water.

You spend the first night proving him wrong in absentia. Lipstick too bright, bar too loud, a man with hands that shake until they don’t. You tell him what to do in a voice you want Viktor to hear, and when he tries tenderness you laugh in his mouth. When he tries roughness it’s clumsy, mean in the wrong place. You go home raw and righteous and untouched in the way that matters.

You run. Streets, parks, dirt that still remembers rain. You run until the lungs cut you open from the inside, until your knees go tacky with green and your calves sting. You think fast as you run, then not at all.

You hone yourself like a blade: nails longer; heeled shoes that change your walk; stockings that make you choose your steps. You wear lace because the mirror admits it suits you in a way that feels like losing an argument. You sleep in it alone because that feels like winning.

You keep busy the way people pray: regularly, with faith you don’t name. You collect mouths. Some learn. Most don’t. You try a therapist share. You sit on a springy chair and dare him to diagnose you. You speak in riddles for forty minutes and leave before he can say time. In the hall you write someone else’s name on the contact card and take satisfaction from the way the letters look on the line.

You sleep badly. When you do, the dreams taste of iron. You wake laughing the wrong way and drink water straight from the tap, hand pressed hard to your throat to feel something steady.

You rehearse cruelty in a bathroom mirror at four in the morning. You practice the exact tilt of your head for when you accuse a man of being afraid. You try on smiles until you find the one that feels like a weapon again.

You tell yourself you didn’t go back because of him. You went back because the quiet existed and now doesn’t, because you tasted stillness between your own ribs and want it again, because you can’t forgive him for being right in a way that made you feel small and mercifully alive.

You choose a name with edges. You give it over the phone in a sweet voice you learned for teachers you intended to destroy. You hear the secretary leave. You step into the room you pretended to forget. One look at you and—of course—he knows you’ve been busy.

You wear your hedonism like cologne: a skirt that looks modest until it sits, stockings that insist on choreography, a blouse buttoned exactly where it will draw the eye. Your mouth is newly careless. There’s an old bruise blooming in an unconvincing shade of makeup at the hinge of your jaw. Your nails are longer. Your eyes are brighter and emptier at once.

He doesn’t ask where you’ve been. He doesn’t need to. Across the missing weeks he can read the ledger: the bar bathroom with the good mirror; a man whose hands were clumsy where you wanted them precise; another who tried tenderness and earned your contempt; running at night until your lungs were knives; the nasty little stunts you pulled to see if any of it would turn the key the way his no had. It didn’t. You brought yourself here instead.

“Your name,” he says, because the ritual has shape and he clings to shape.

You look past him as if the bookshelves were an audience. “It’s written in the book.”

“It is not yours.”

A shrug climbs and falls. “You keep telling me to try new things. I did. New name. Old doctor.”

“Leave,” he says—without heat, and it is the lack of heat that sends a hairline crack through the moment. “This is a private practice. I cannot treat strangers under false entries.”

Your smile slides in like a blade. “You could call the police. Or my parents.” You click the door shut behind you, drift farther into the room, his desk ahead—territory he only ever yields on purpose. “Or you could hear me out, Doctor.”

Viktor sighs, slips off his glasses in a small performance of fatigue, rubs the bridge of his nose. “I know you’d be thrilled by the attention,” he says, “but you refused my help. You signed yourself out; I presume you no longer need my expertise.”

You ignore it, prowl toward him. “Did you miss me?” You take the chair without asking, lashes fluttering. “I sure missed you.”

He swallows. “That seat is reserved for my patients.”

“I am your patient.”

“You are not.”

A beat. “I want to be.”

“Why?”

“Because—” Your eyes glass; your mouth pulls wide in a helpless, toothy smile. “I need to be put down.” He looks at you, brows knitting; studies the set of your jaw, the tremor you try to hold back. “This whole world hurts me. It rotted me and now it denies me. You understand me—I am evil, but even evil things deserve to rest.”

Viktor stares for a few slow blinks. “You are not evil. Just—” he draws a breath, “troubled.”

You laugh—sharp, a little unhinged. “I thought you could do better than this.”

“Fine.” He sighs, nudges the glasses on the desk, pushes the files aside. “Tell me what you’ve been up to these few weeks, then,” Viktor says, leaning back in his chair.

“I’ve been looking for you,” you say. “Everywhere I could go. Pieces of you. But their hands were not right. Their mouths were too sloppy. They didn’t speak as nicely as you do.”

A small, ugly pang bites low—anger at strangers’ hands on you, at their incompetence, at the thought that if anyone is to put you in place it should be his hands. He catches it, collars it; the face he shows is neutral again.

He says your name, soft warning. “You cannot attend sessions if this is the only reason for your return.”

“Why not?” You coo. “Can’t I get attached to my therapist?”

“Not like this, no.”

“Why? Does it bother you? That I fucked other people thinking about you and they didn’t meet expectations? You should be proud—”

“Stop.” His palm cracks the wood; the sound is clean and final. “If you wish to tell me what bothers you, I will listen. If your only intent is to tease me and catalogue your conquests, I am not interested.”

You smile—but your eyes are still wet. It’s that smile, the one that means trouble. “I’ve been lonely without you,” you say softly. “Are you jealous?”

Exasperation flares; he smooths it into quiet, though his jaw ticks once. “Leave. Now.”

You catch the flicker—the small tick in his jaw, the thinness in it—and smell it: loneliness dressed as duty. You picture the quiet flat, the single mug drying by the sink, the shirts folded like apologies. Altruism feeds him but doesn’t fill him; you know that hunger by its careful manners. So you set the bait. You slide your bag aside like a chess piece, cross your legs so the skirt climbs one exact inch, loosen one button you can plausibly deny, soften your voice to bedside temperature. The trap is nothing but an open table and the promise of being studied.

“You also go home to no one, don’t you, Doctor? Fold your white shirt just so and climb into a bed that smells like antiseptic and need. No Mrs. Doctor to rinse the angel off your cuffs.” A tilt of your head, sweet as poison. “So you marry your cases instead. Girls who come in feral and leave stitched in your tidy thread. Do you keep a piece of us in a jar, or just in your notes?” You let your smile sharpen. “Tell me—are we at the part where you teach me to behave, or the part where you finally admit you want to see how far I’ll kneel?”

He stands so fast the chair skates back and bites the bookcase. In no time, Viktor is around the desk, the lamp throwing his shadow forward like a second body. His hand closes on your jaw, not cruel, not gentle—exact. “Enough,” he hisses, the word warm against your cheek.

You smile as if you’ve been offered a pear. Your hand drifts, knuckles nudge his belt, palm settling where the heat is; he’s already half-hard, the weight alive under cloth, thickening when you cup him. The intake of breath is small and satisfying.

“You want it too,” you murmur, smug.

It hits before he can cauterise it—a betraying twitch against your touch, a bright pulse that runs down his spine like a poured waterfall. His shoulders go very still; his breath catches once, then remembers itself. He holds your gaze for three long heartbeats, and you feel something inside him tilt in your direction. Then: “Bend over the desk.”

A moan almost breaks free at the command. Sweet victory floods your veins, slow like tar—it fills your mouth until you are full of it. 

You rise, eyes on him, and lower yourself, unhurried on purpose, palms flattening on the polished wood. Out on the corridor the building has emptied; last appointment, last light. The blinds throw grey bars over your hands.

“Not yet.” His voice has returned to its clinic register. You hear the lock turn; you hear him move—a jacket unbuttoned, a drawer’s soft slide, the rubber bump of something set on wood. When he speaks, the air tightens. “Use your words. Do you consent to me touching you now?”

“Yes.” Your breath feathers back from the desk.

“More than touch,” he says, steadying himself with the thought. “Impact. My hand. The cane.”

“Yes.” It comes out too quickly, greedy.

“What is off-limits?”

“Face,” you say, eager but precise. “No hitting my face. No… no leaving me unable to walk out when we’re done.”

“Good.” The word lands like a seal. “Safeword?”

You close your eyes, fish for something that tastes like mercy and won’t embarrass you to say. “Lighthouse.”

“You will use pause as well,” he adds. “If you say ‘lighthouse’, I stop. If you say ‘pause’, I slow or back off. Understood?”

“Yes.” Your hands press harder into the desk, as if agreement itself were a weight.

He moves into your periphery: the brace’s soft complaint, the cane’s familiar tap. You sense him lift it and lay it, idle, across the small of your back—cool lacquer and the faintest pressure. Your shoulders ease as if they’ve been waiting for exactly that line.

“Tell me what you want,” he says.

“Instructions,” you breathe. “Order me.”

“Arch.” You do. “Feet apart.” You comply; the wood creaks. “Good.”

One word drops through you like coins into a deep well. Your exhale turns ragged.

A pause; then a clean, ceremonial crack as the cane meets the empty air above the desk. He is testing the noise, the room, the way sound alone floods you. He rests the rod across you again, taps once, a pacemaker’s kiss.

“What does that do to you?” he asks.

“It’s exciting,” you say, surprised at the accuracy. “Makes everything… line up.”

He reaches for the hem—only the fabric—and rucks it up without grazing skin. A small, deliberate ceremony: he shakes the skirt loose, fans it wide, and drapes it over your back like a cloak. The cloth pools at your shoulders; the edge kisses the nape of your neck. It makes a little room inside the room, a hush you can breathe in.

“Focus on my voice,” he says. “On the count of three.” 

A beat. “One.”

You grip the edge. Viktor’s gaze skates down the backs of your legs—scratches, grass-welts, the faint map of yesterday’s flight. Running fast is what you like, he remembers.

“Two.”

The air hums with the waiting. Lace hugs your ass—indecent in its obedience, you fucking minx. Garter straps cut the flesh into neat sections, running to mid-thigh where the clasps bite the stockings. All of it makes you look like a gift—wrapped and ready to be torn.

The thought rises before he can choke it down: mine. To mark, to claim, to spit on and split open and fuck—to take you to the point where tenderness blooms. He exhales once, hard, to bleed it off. He’d love to see you tender again. His throat is dry.

“Three.”

The stroke lands on the curve of your thigh—measured, not exploratory; not cruel, not soft. Heat blooms in a clean bar. Your mouth opens; a sound like gratitude slides out.

He listens to that sound the way some men listen to music. “What say you?”

“Keep going,” you say, already wanting the next.

Again, slightly lower. Crack. The pain is a bright, domestic thing; it knows where to sit. Your shoulders drop. Your eyes blur with something that is not quite tears and not quite joy.

“Speak,” he says.

“Please,” you manage. “Please again.”

Astonishing, the speed of it—the way you roll to show the soft of the throat as soon as the rhythm finds you. The please isn’t a trap this time; it lands clean, unbarbed, honest enough to sting. Feeling the urge to gentleness rise, he strangles it into precision.

He alternates thighs, then returns to the first, creating parallel tracks until your skin thrums like a tuned instrument. Nylon ladders when the hits repeat their landing in the same spot. Between strikes he lays the cane flat across hot flesh, as if cooling it, and you hear your own breath fall into discipline.

Shifting the line, he trails the cool handle over the swell of your ass—circling, teasing, mapping. “Now—here,” he says, and you mutter, “Yes—yes, yes,” mouth wet against the wood, breath fogging the polish. Viktor inhales and keeps the breath, a held chord in his chest.

You hear it before you feel it—the brief whff as the rod parts the air—then impact: bright, clean. It slices through clutter—through hunger, through the crackle of every violent thought—until what’s left is simple obedience, purring with delight. Your pupils bloom; your lungs open wide as if the room just found a window.

The muscle twitches—ripples from the struck curve down the back of your thigh—shuddering the whole limb before it loosens. Heat flowers into a vivid bar. He watches the red arrive, watches it saturate, and something unspools in his chest that does not belong to the doctor.

“How is that?” he asks, voice roughened.

“More,” you beg—teeth in your lower lip, voice borrowed from the creature that lives under your ribs. “Please—more.”

He answers with a set—measured, liturgical—laying stripes that crosshatch into heat, then two quicker kisses that make your knees skitter against the wood. Your thighs won’t stop trembling; the lace darkens where want soaks through, a bloom he clocks with clinical precision and something far less. The scent rises—sweet, heavy, almost buttery at the edges—and tells him he’s tuned to the right frequency. He settles the cane for a cooling touch, taps twice like a metronome.

“Look at me,” he says, and you lift your head enough to find the pale line of his shirt in the window’s reflection. His face is stern, yes, but lit from inside by focus—no pity, no apology. You could live in that look.

“Hands,” he says, and you push yourself off the desk, palms presented up. He lays the cane across them very lightly. “These are not the hands of a demon,” he murmurs, as if repeating an old conclusion. “They’re shaking because they know what they want.”

“They want you,” you say, shocked by how simple it is.

He puts the cane down. The sound of wood kissing wood is obscene. His palm finds the back of your neck; his other hand anchors your hip. He doesn’t press; he places. The contact is a benediction and a claim.

“Words,” he reminds, though the command has softened. “Tell me.”

“I want you to use me,” you say. “I want you to ruin me kindly.”

He exhales, a laugh flayed of humour. “Kindly,” he repeats, as if learning the shape. His hand leaves your neck, returns to your cheek, and turns your head so he can see your eyes. “I will not hurt you beyond what we agreed.”

In those eyes Viktor sees you, and for the first time he isn’t afraid to look. Beyond the lacquer of defiance, past the hide of the feral, frightened thing you wear, there you are: small—not because you were made small, but because you feel safe enough to shrink. Solemn in the way of someone who has been told they may stop running—and, for a breath, believe it.

“You won’t,” you say. “You’ll make me quiet.”

Something akin to pain passes through his expression—recognition or surrender; you don’t know. His palm cracks against the side of your thigh—sharp, open-handed, a punctuation mark—and the sound turns the room inside out. He watches the way your hips settle toward the sting.

“Pause?”

“No,” you say, relieved, submissive.

What follows is not a blur; it is a sequence. He bends you back over, structures it the way he structures an assessment: warm, strike, wait; breath, check, strike. He has you count in fours. On four, he gives you what you asked for. On the next four, he takes it slower to hear your nerves talking. He lets his hand teach your skin he can hurt and stop, demand and soothe, and your mind does what minds do when given a consistent pattern—it settles. He talks you through it—quietly, as if you are the only person who will ever hear this voice.

“Good. You’re here. You’re not bad for wanting this. Breathe. Breathe now,” he says and you wonder who is it for exactly—you or him.

When it threatens to tip from sacrament to static, he stops. The absence is deafening. You find yourself pushing back into his grip like a horse seeking the bit. He strokes down once with the back of his knuckles, barely there.

“What are you feeling?” he asks.

“Clear,” you say, and it’s ridiculous and true. “Myself.”

He laughs softly, disbelieving and unbearably fond. “You’re a menace.”

“You’re an angel,” you whisper, and the word doesn’t taste like mockery anymore.

He steps back a fraction, guided by the brace’s temper and his own restraint. The cane returns not as punishment but as a line he draws on your body: here is the edge, here is the centre, here is where you meet me.

And there you indeed meet him—eyes swimming and tender, as he imagined. There you are, soft for him, so he can smooth a hand from the small of your back to your neck and make you fall in line. For a moment he simply admires his signature painted on your flesh.

You feel the curved handle hook beneath the waistband of your underwear and pull—down, down—until the crotch unglues from your skin, from where you weep, from the last place he’s kept empty.

Metal teeth whisper; the zipper opens with a sound that runs a bright nerve through your skull—delicious, mechanical, perfect. A buckle sighs, fabric parts. He frees himself and steps in, heat finding the seam of you; the heavy warmth of him settles snug between your cheeks, not pressing forward, just there, claiming the cleft as a resting place. The weight is vulgar and merciful at once.

You make a sound he has never catalogued before. Not the cat’s jeer; not the fox’s scream. Something human and relieved.

“What do you want?” he asks, mouth near your ear.

“Fuck me,” you whisper. “Bend me, break me, please—”

He straightens, one hand guiding, the other steady at your hip, fingers wrapping under the garter’s strap—a convenient handle on an animal like you. The head finds you easily—hard flesh meeting the soft one—and he sheathes himself on a single, punishingly slow thrust. You feel the stretch take, incredible, brilliant; it burns in a way that bleeds into the sweet sting singing across your skin. He keeps going until there’s nowhere left to go. His cock feels rich, luxurious; your back arches to drink more of it.

He looks down to where he’s vanished into you—what a sight, salacious and holy. For a moment he forgets he is your physician. He feels powerful, whole. Below, your cunt gulps at him like a greedy little thing while your welted skin glows for his attention. He breathes out hard and sets his hands into the creases of your thighs, thumbs brushing the raised warmth he’s painted there. You clamp down; his grip answers, firmer.

“Patience,” he says, voice low.

He retreats all the way to the tip—slow enough to make you keen—and drives back in, hard. The strip of bare skin at his waist slaps your ass; the desk answers with a wooden gasp. He holds there, deep, until the quake in your legs steadies into a hum, then draws back again, slower, testing your edges.

“Pause?” he asks, a thread of control through the heat.

“No,” you breathe, breaking on it. “No, don’t stop.”

“Good.” His thumbs press, staking claim. He sets a rhythm—long, measured pulls that leave you hollowed, then solid, then hollowed again—each thrust aligning something that used to snarl. Your breath locks to it, steady as tide; his follows, coarse and human.

Viktor doesn’t notice the moment something in him aligns as well. The sunken void he carries fills by increments with every push and pull. He feels taller, broader; the room seems to make space for him as your bodies become wetter, sloppier. He watches the shimmer where you meet, the way it stretches in fine threads when he draws back, then gathers again. In his chest, ribs widen; air lands easier, cleaner.

Your back arches; your hips lift to greet him, chasing the angle that lets him land deep and decisive. Hit after hit, he fucks the wildling out, making room for the ingenious creature beneath.

His hand climbs, finds your hair, gathers it into a firm braid at the nape and lifts—your spine bows, your shoulder blades wing. You push off the desk, muscles singing. He leans, catches your jaw with free palm, mouth close to your ear. “What are you?” he whispers.

“A menace,” you breathe, broken-light and proud.

He pats your cheek—more punctuation than pain, the sound a little bell. “Wrong,” he murmurs, heat fanning your skin. “You are a good girl. Say it.”

“I’m—ah—” Your breath flares as the rhythm hits just right; your body clenches on instinct, voice skittering.

“Tell me what you are,” he says, fingers steady at your jaw, the other hand holding your hair just so—lifting, so he can see your face.

“A good girl,” you get out, the words catching and then slotting into place.

“Again.” His thumb strokes once along your cheek, not kind, not unkind—directing.

“I’m a good girl.” Your eyes gloss; your mouth softens around the consonants.

“Keep saying it.”

“I’m a good girl,” you repeat, voice lower now, steadier—“I’m a good girl,” breath hitching, lashes trembling—“I’m a good girl,” the last syllable turning to a small sound that isn’t fear and isn’t laughter but something beautifully, terrifyingly quiet.

Heat slicks everywhere—between your thighs, along the welted bands where his thumbs sat, down the crease he claims with every drive. He fills you indecently, a thick, deliberate pressure that stretches and drags and seats deep until your body clamps like a fist, milking on its own; the desk shivers under your palms, your breath saws, you leak around him in strings that catch the light when he pulls back. Each slap of skin is a wet comma, vivid in the blasphemous paragraph that writes about a girl fucking her therapist; each stroke redraws your edges until you’re nothing but mouth-open gasp, hips tipping to chase the angle, greed humming through muscle and marrow.

And then the tenderness slips in behind the filth, quiet as a hand over a fevered brow. The pain and want braid into something clean; the animal that never settles does, turned toward his voice like a compass finding north. You feel held without being caged, watched without being judged, remade into a shape that can breathe. It is unbecoming how grateful you are for it—how the word good lands like water—how, in the heat and the noise, you recognise the rarest thing you’ve ever known: a place inside your own body that feels like home.

Pleasure splits your tissues open—forceful, inevitable. Your orgasm builds and builds, blending pain and want and heat into one blinding wave. Your mouth loses restraint; your throat tears on moans fit for an A-class whore. At the edge of the roar you catch his voice, low and intent: “What do good girls say?”

You know what they say—you are one of them. “Thank you,” you keen.

He chuckles, all darkness. “Who are you thanking?” The lilt says he’s on a knife-edge too.

Another thrust—deep, splitting—you brush absolution. “Thank you, Doctor.”

He could leave it there. He is a doctor, after all—this could vanish into the clean ledger of duty. But something ugly and bright and human spreads its wings low in his loins, and the word slips past his better sense. “Wrong,” he murmurs. He wants you to remember him, not the catechism. “Say my name.”

“Viktor,” you breathe, and it is the only thing he can hear. “Thank you, Viktor.”

He punches in devastatingly deep and you break—hard and helpless. The orgasm rips through you like fabric torn on a nail: hips bow, spine bows, your cunt clamps and milks in fierce, involuntary pulses that ladder up your belly and shake your thighs. The wood squeaks under your grip; your voice goes raw and bright; heat flashes white behind your eyes and then floods down, leaving you shaking, emptied and refilled at once.

He drags himself back from the brink by a last, fraying thread. The feral urge to mark you—to seed you, to stamp himself into your body—rears up and he cuts its head off at the final second, pulling free. He spills over you in hot ropes, painting your welted skin—red banded under watery white—while his breath saws and stutters.

He watches the ripple take you—muscles clenching, unclenching—and holds you through it: one hand steady at your hip, the other a quiet weight at the back of your neck. He counts twelve beats in the hush. He does not speak. He does not let go until your legs remember you and your fingers flex against the wood.

Then he steps back, tucks himself away, smooths his shirt. “Water,” he says—clinical again, already moving—but you are faster. He doesn’t notice until your knees touch the rug and your arms lock around his legs. The fabric of his trousers darkens where your face presses. And then he hears it— 

“Thank you.”

A small, trembling gratitude, ridiculous and pure, pouring straight from your eyes. He stands there, floored, his palm hovering over your crown, unsure whether to bless or withdraw.

“Thank you,” you say again. His hand finds your chin; gently, he tips your face up. Your eyes are glass-clear; your mouth is soft in a way he has not seen on you, perhaps on anyone. Words assemble themselves without drama.

 “I have never felt like this,” you say.

Something unguarded breaks in his face—pride, horror, a terrible gladness. He wants to say me too and instead says, “We stop here.” He lowers his hand before it can caress your cheek. “Sit. Breathe. Tell me if anything hurts that shouldn’t.”

It’s the opposite—everything that should, hurts; nothing that shouldn’t. You sit inside it and, for once, there’s something to hold. Pain plaited so tightly with pleasure it feels dangerous, exciting, true. You wonder if it’s his magic hands, or simply this: the first time you asked for something and someone listened—named it, measured it, gave it back with care. Still, it was delicious to be cracked open by angel hands and then taken by a sacrilegious cock. Both can be true. Both are.

Only now do you notice you’re crying. Not joy, not sorrow, not relief. Tears that simply are—arriving because your body keeps replaying what just happened—like a bell that hums after the strike.

He guides you to the sofa; each tap of the cane sends a pleasant buzz up your spine, a tuning fork struck somewhere low. He presses a glass into your hand and watches you drink as if he might have to fish you out of water. A clean cloth appears—of course it does—and he turns you gently, lifts your leg, hooks your foot over his shoulder. He dabs the backs of your thighs where the cane sang too loudly. His hands tremble once and then remember their trade.

You watch all of it in silence. There is tenderness in his touch, but no indulgence. Clinical, the way a good doctor is: comfort without familiarity, exact without fuss. A nearly perfect transaction. You search yourself for where the breach might be and realise it happened a long time ago—back in the first session when you told him he was pretty and meant it.

And Viktor watches you back—the way you look around the room like you’ve never seen it square. There is no glee in you, no needle-mouthed triumph. You are intelligent in a new register—articulate, present, wickedly calm.

“You’ll write this down,” you say suddenly, almost smiling.

“I have to,” he answers, and for once the duty feels like a blessing.

“What happens now?”

He realises something must come next. If he’s enough of a fool to call this therapy, he should say: same time next week and pretend the words mean what they used to. Reason squares its shoulders; the other thing—what he keeps baptising curiosity—moves lower, heavier, and refuses to yield. He ought to tell you to leave and not come back. He ought to threaten, to set you free. At the end of the silence he discovers, not for the first time, that he is still a coward—so he passes the reins to the one of you whose recklessness can masquerade as courage.

He lowers your foot from his shoulder to the carpet, steadying the ankle with two careful fingers. “Do you wish to continue?” he asks.

“Yes.” No embroidery, no smirk. Just the word.

“I will keep this slot open for you,” he says. “You may come; you may not. Same time next week. I’ll be here.”

You nod—short, impersonal. You smooth your skirt, rise, and offer your hand. He stands to meet you, levels with you, accepts the shake; the pressure is firm, brief, absurdly formal, and it seals something neither of you will name.

“See you next week, Doctor.” You smile, and for a moment he could swear that behind your eyes he sees it—the creature—deep in slumber, purring, content.

—

Journal Entry:

The patient returned for further evaluation, signing under an alias. Presentation: composed, provocative; boundary-testing; language used as both weapon and invitation. Self-report of the interval: “searching for me,” multiple unsatisfying encounters, poor sleep, sustained anger, episodic loneliness admitted only when cornered. No explicit suicidality voiced; recurrent fantasies of self-erasure framed as relief.

I reframed the session around structure and consent: explicit limits, clear stop/slow signals, directive voice, paced breathing, graded stimulus and recovery, then standard grounding (hydration, inspection for adverse effects). No terms of endearment; no comforting gestures beyond clinical care.

Immediate response: rapid reduction in agitation; organised speech; tearful without disorganisation. Self-descriptions included “clear” and “myself.” She requested continuation; a recurring slot was offered with contingencies.

Risks noted: boundary erosion; reinforcement of a relational pattern centred on power and “use”; significant countertransference (anger, sorrow, curiosity, an unwelcome sense of kinship). Mitigations: explicit rules, ongoing documentation, readiness to terminate if harm emerges.

I have attempted an unconventional method. It proved effective.

They bring these things to appease him, or to pay for what they take—his water for their wheels, his fish for their pans. He rules only a small pond where the river slows into weed and silt, a poor kingdom stitched to the slough by a narrow runnel. Still, it is his. In summer he counts their gifts and lets the water run clear. In winter he sleeps—keeps their names in his mouth like pebbles and waits for the sting of salt,  taste of bread, the burn that loosens a lonely night.

The others are more malicious—greedy and mean; they play tricks on humans, frighten their children, and steal their chickens for a pure jest of it. He is only curious. Malice sits ill with a creature scorned by spirits, marked by weakness and desolation.

He was born with a mangled fin and a looseness in the muscle; the smallness of his kingdom is a blessing in that sense. Foolishly, they grant him faith reserved for a deity, but there is only so much he can do. Sometimes he takes gifts that are not meant for him—chains, pendants—and threads them along the cave to catch the light. He cannot guarantee a family’s health, or see that the miller’s daughter marries well. People put too much faith in what they do not understand.

He collects the offerings anyway—a small tally for letting them bathe untroubled, or for letting them foul his shore with their noises of lust when the months are hottest. Then curiosity peaks. He lies long in the weed-shadow and watches: hands fumbling and sure by turns, skirts hoisted, trousers pushed to the thighs, the quick scrape of bark against a back, a belt’s little chime before it is lost to breath. He watches mouths open and close like fish, watches the tilt of a throat when pleasure climbs it, the set of teeth in a lower lip, the way one plants their feet for leverage, the way the other forgets to be careful. He counts the beats between gasp and cry. He listens for the words that break them open—please, oh god, yes, harder—and for the names that spill at the end, bright as coins.

The sounds move the skin of the pond and go through him. His bad fin jerks and drags; his tail stirs against stone. Heat gathers low and stubborn, a slow tide; his body answers in spite of him, thickening in the sheath, blood knocking at the roots. He presses his belly to the warm slab, lets the current work along him until it blurs thought. Shame and pride come together like silt in a turn of water. He hoards the roughened pleas and the soft thank-yous, keeps them on his tongue for later, because voices are the richest gifts of all.

The one that rings in his chest, he shares seldom. He sings because that is what his kind do when the blood is up and the air tastes sweet—a lure meant to bring a mate. He stopped entertaining this whim long ago. His kingdom might be forlorn, but it is safe; the people who wander here are the wrong shape for his appetite, or already paired—and he knows better than to cross young stags, however much tail, even misshapen, beats leg in water.

So he sings out of habit, something carved into him by weather and current, a joke the elements won’t stop telling. Alone on the flat rock with the sun flashing on the surface, eyes shut, one hand tracing lazy circles, he hums what his throat remembers better than his mind—the old five-note run with the little hinge where breath turns. The day inhales and holds: flies hang, reeds drowse, the weir mutters to itself. He is part of it until a single rustle goes through the weed on the shore. He startles, folds, and slips from the stone into the green without a sound.

On dry land he’d be prey within seconds—that much is certain—but under the surface of this verdant lagoon nothing outclasses him. And he aches to see who does not know any better than to stalk the best hunter here.

He slips into motion, silent, first a wide circle until his ripple irons flat. Then, he sinks into the bloom of yellow water-lily, threads himself through hornwort and duckweed beneath the fringe of reedmace, and waits. Time draws; all seasons pass their hands over him. Then—there—a human. A girl.

He watches without blinking. Youth sits on you like a quick light; womanhood shows in the way you hold yourself, the purpose in your hands, the sure, unafraid tilt of your attention. It catches him clean. In your hands is a garland of wildflowers, rich and meticulous. You scan the basin, brightening whenever a fish tricks you; crestfallen when it proves only fish or frog. You lay the garland on the shore, look once more, and then run the way he knows the village lies.

When the white stain of your dress is swallowed whole by the green of the trees, he swims to the shore and inspects the wreath. It is a beauty: plaited rush and willow-bark, stitched with meadow-sweet, cornflowers, wild thyme, and yarrow, the stems turned all one way, the heads faced like a small choir. He has never been given anything so carefully made. No request is bound to it, no scrap of writing, no knot to untie—only payment. For what, he cannot tell.

He carries it as if it were alive to the grotto and sets it in the place of honour among the trinkets, hoping the flowers will not wither too soon. Then he waits, and the waiting is a kind of hunger; he hopes you will come back.

They say lake spirits are mean and wicked. Some drown whatever steps into their water. Others are tricksters who talk you into throwing a fat hen to a barren harvest or blessing you with a husband who drinks and breaks things. The old warnings are tidy and hard as stones.

Only elders and young lovers with nowhere else to go come to the pond they told you to avoid. It is overgrown, green-bloomed more often than not. You’re certain the scum is just from the stale bread some fool keeps tossing in. 

Because what you’ve heard from the water is nothing like a threat. It is near-angelic, more beacon than voice: a low, clean hum with a rasp of iron to it, the soft click of thought between phrases, vowels warmed as if by sun on metal, consonants shaped with care. It rides your spine the way heat does, a hand at the back, and you find yourself turning toward it before you know you’ve moved.

When you first saw him it was from afar, mostly a band of light kicked off his tail before someone hauled you back with a finger that threatens and a voice that warns children about bogeys. This time you bring a gift—seven afternoons in the making. You want to give him something worthy before Kupala—the shortest exhale of the night when creatures come out, wishes take, and impossible flowers bloom.

He is splayed in the sun like a god. Long—bigger than any man—yet lean through the arms and chest. His hair is damp and swept back from his brow. Along his ribs fine slits open and close; smaller combs lie where a man’s neck would be smooth. At the place his waist turns to tail he narrows, taut as a drawn bow. And there, below, he’s unreal: mother-of-pearl, colours sliding as the light moves—pond-green to smoke-blue to bruised violet, a sheen like beetle wing and rain on stone. He looks strong and breakable at once. He sings, solemn as a priest with no congregation, not luring anything, only keeping himself company.

It is so spell-true your bare foot slips on the wet grass. You flinch, look up—and he is gone, the stone he lay on rocking once, widening rings taking him back into water.

You wait for moments that stretch so long you are certain you’ve grown older. When nothing but a lazy frog surfaces, discouraged, you set the garland by the shore and go back to the village.

Expecting to find a bundle of withered flowers where you left it, you return a week later—three days before the solstice. Barefoot, in linen, hands grimed by work and feet sore from carrying, you scan the bright skin of the pond for anything that could have taken your gift. Probably animals.

You dip one foot into the water—clean today, cool as well. Carefully, you pick a path, rock to rock, until you reach the stone where he rested, hoping for a pearly scale to prove your mind did not conjure the whole scene.

It wobbles under your weight, then settles as you crouch. Knees rasping on the harsh surface, you reach into the water and bring up a handful of pebbles, feeling for the flat ones to skim across the surface.

You pick the best stones, hunch over your haul, then flick the round ones back over your shoulder. A small, offended hiss answers the splash. You start; muscle jumps; you begin to turn—and an unseen hand closes on your ankle and yanks. The world tips. Belly first into the water.

He has been watching you the whole time. From the shade he caught a splodge of white against the green—footsteps so soft on the undergrowth he would have missed you if not for the dress. He lies under the pondweed, corpse-still. You make straight for his favourite rock—of course. He is near found when you lean and bring up a fistfull of mud, but you are so intent on sorting it that he is spared. He slides closer to see what you are about just as a flurry of pebbles patters onto his head. The hiss is out before he can swallow it, and then his hand acts before he can stop it.

Underwater, a human is all promise. Cloth loosens and thins; your dress bells and breathes, showing the idea of skin, the slope and hinge of limbs. Warmth leaks from you in a slow bloom. His fingers find your wrist—the give of it, the live pulse—and the shock goes through him as if he had put his hand to a struck hive.

For a creature he has long counted feeble, you are hard to hold. He pins your hands; you wrench and kick, heels drumming his tail. One lands where he is weakest. Pain lights him; he yelps, teeth bare, and lets the anger rise and simmer—who are you to kick at him in his own water?

He drives up with you clawing at his shoulders and bursts onto the shoal that makes a low island in the pond’s middle. Water drains to your neck; you cough and drag air. He slams you onto the silted crown and hisses again. “You think you can attack me where I live and walk unharmed?”

At his voice, you go still. Just stare up at him, eyes so wide it seems they might fall. Droplets break from his nose and hair and patter your face, slipping down your cheeks like tears. Or are you crying?

“I didn’t mean to hurt you, I just—”

“You meant to hunt me,” he hums, accusing. His tail flicks once; the splash makes you flinch.

“No! No, I just—”

He presses you deeper into the silt. “Came to throw pebbles at me? Or did you come from the village to ask for things, hm?” His mouth is close, the words stroking your lips. “Good fortune? A babe? A husband?” A beat. “To complain the bloom sullies your bread?”

Even barbs sound bright in his throat; the notes land clean. Heat climbs your neck. Your jaw loosens; your hands stop fighting of their own accord.

Seeing his look sharpen, you scramble for sense. “No, I—” a breath, raw with embarrassment, “I was wondering if you liked the gift.”

His eyes narrow as he considers. “What gift?” he asks and it’s clear to you he does not know how to lie.

“T—the flowers. The garland, I…” You swallow, trying for steady. “I made it to—”

“—to buy something with it,” he mutters, his fingers easing on your arms.

“No. By the gods.” You sigh, roll your eyes despite yourself. He cocks a brow, surprised—almost amused. “To thank you. For the singing. It’s beautiful.”

The gills at his neck flutter; his mouth parts. In a blink he shifts from menace to something tender—brow pinched, face softened, caught between angel and boy, between animal and man. He searches your features for any seam of deceit and, finding none, slides off you and turns coy: belly to the wet ground, chin propped in his hands, tail flicking in the sun until the colours bleed into one another. “I enjoyed your gift,” he says, lashes long and drowsy.

“I’m glad,” you say, pushing up on your elbows. His gaze drops to you—two gold rings, shameless—and drags. It takes your mouth, the hollow at your throat, the small jump of your collarbone. It lingers where the wet linen clings and turns thin: the quiet press of your nipples, the shallow of your navel, the pull of fabric over the soft lower belly. It follows the line your dress makes at the tops of your thighs, where it rides close and shows the shape beneath; the hem is dark with pond water, pasted to your skin. He watches the spread of your ribs as you breathe, the flex of your calves, the scuff on a knee, the clean run of tendon at your ankle. His pupils notch; his gills twitch for more air. The tail lifts and settles, a lazy fan, as if to taste the sight again.

You bite down on the urge to tip your hips and offer yourself when his purr startles you again. “Will you bring more?”

“Yes. Yes—” you stammer. “I was going to give you one on Kupala night.”

The shiver runs him where you can see it. His eyes lower; something moves under the skin as if a current passes through. The gills along his neck and ribs sigh open and close; his tail quivers, then curls at the tip, slow and salacious. 

Kupala night—he could have a girl on Kupala night. A mate. Lure her to the shallows, let the claws show, take a mouthful at the neck and mark her as his. Unless—she walks into the water herself.

He comes close, close enough that you could kiss his cheek if you wanted. You shut your eyes, shape your mouth, keep the breath held—about to—when:

“I smell blood,” he says, studying your arm. Fingers light as will-o’-the-wisp slip around your elbow and lift, and there it is—a thin red line carving a path. “Forgive me,” he says softly. “I did not mean to hurt you either.” His fingers follow the red, gather it, smear it; then he brings them to his mouth. His tongue—long, deft—flicks out and licks you clean.

He sighs as if pain had lived in him and you were the cure. “Do you have any wish?” he whispers.

“Sing for me again,” you say.

He gives a small, humming laugh—a lovely little thing. “Of course, sweet girl.”

With the promise of three days, he goes to find you a gift too. Something to charm, to seduce, to keep you. He cannot help the natural thoughts that follow the echo of your blood on his rough tongue—oh, to have your belly full of him; he never thought a chance like this would come.

He scouts the lake first: things people dropped that once shone and are now filmed with algae, but could be cleaned. He finds a silver bracelet and a single earring. Not enough. He works the shore next for pebbles and snail shells; the pebbles are dull and all the shells are lived in. He leaves them where they are.

At last, the grotto. All he has hoarded through his years of rule gleams and sulks there: ground glass, odd bits of jewellery, forks fretted with rust, and a particularly cruel joke—a pair of shoes. Then he sees it: a rowan-berry necklace on a red string. Someone left it hanging from a branch; he took it before the birds could, just before winter fell white and hard on his water. He threads one of his own scales onto the string for luck, or whatever humans believe.

The rest of his time he spends grooming for you: scrubs his tail clean, teases out the elflocks with a comb he found crawling the muddy bottom, rinses his mouth with crushed mint. When the sun drops on the longest day, he waits on the flat rock and watches the light die so the moon can burn. The sky spatters with stars and, where it meets the dark rim of the world, other stars appear—fireflies lifting—until it is hard to tell which is earth and which is not. He begins to sing and the woods sing with him.

Like rivers running to sea, you come to him, beguiled—a bright beacon in the dark. His song lifts when he sees you; the tail twitches without his leave. In your hands: a gift of gold. A crown woven from yellow wheat, fit for a king of the pond. He swells his hollow chest and his gills flutter with air as your feet take the water and the linen begins to darken.

You wade slow, holding the crown high. He keeps humming while you cross to him, though his body is wild with waiting. Your face is a gift by itself—open, smitten, lit from within. The hem climbs; the dress drinks; the shape of your breasts comes clear and he aches to touch, to weight them with his wanting until they’re heavy with milk.

You climb onto the rock and offer a timid smile. He answers with one of his own—teeth flashing, sharp, feral. You reach out; he bows his head for the coronation. The wheat sits heavy at his temples and smells like sun, like fresh bread, like safety. You lay your fingers on his cheeks, his neck; warm, careful touches brushing the places where he breathes. He hums low, a purr that moves through bone and into your skin.

“I have a gift for you as well,” he says, and shows you the necklace. In his pale hands the beads burn—rowan red with a thin moonflash of scale among them. You are struck dumb for a heartbeat.

You take him in and he looks unearthly in the light—skin taken up by the moon, tail sheened to milk and smoke, edges softened, hollows deepened. Only now you notice the beauty spots, one above his lip, one under his eye—so frankly human you forget he is not. You bow your head and let him anoint you. The rowan is cool at your throat, the knot neat at the nape. “Thank you,” you say, small.

His tail flops into the dark and slaps water up the rock as he moves in. His hands come to your ribs. You see his throat work; his pupils widen fast. He slides his palms upward, gathering wet linen, and sets them as a frame around your breasts. He draws you in, chest to chest; your heart beats against him, hard and bright. His tongue flicks—salt, clean—along the line of your neck, and when he finds your ear he breathes, “Will you give yourself to me?”

Suddenly coy, instead of answering, you reach out for his tail—smooth, taut, a body braced. When your fingers find one of the small fins he flinches, splashes you without meaning to.

“Are you scared of me?”

“No,” he says at once, stung. He doesn’t want you near the weak place. “You should be scared of me.”

You tilt your head. “Why? Will you eat me?”

“I could eat you. Your blood is sweet enough,” he says, running a finger over your chest. You look down in time to see the claw ease from his index, worrying the linen until it parts. He drags, lengthening the tear; night air slips to your skin. “Or I could just… take you.”

He holds your gaze and you lift your mouth to his—a silent yes. The kiss startles both of you—your lips soft, searching; his a hard line that doesn’t know what to do. For a beat he stays rigid, teeth dangerous at the edges, breath held as if the act itself were a trap. 

Then his eyes fall shut. You taste salt and clean water. Your tongue meets his—yours smooth, warm; his long, clever, shy at first and then curious. He lets you map him: the ridge behind his teeth, the newness of his palate, the little click at the hinge. When his tongue wakes it moves like current, slow and thorough, stroking along your mouth to the molars, down the arch, back again. You make a sound into him; he drinks it as if sound were something to swallow.

His hands go to your shoulders and peel the wet cloth aside. Dampness gives way to living heat; you’re bared to the night. He reaches for the curve of you and draws you onto him, fingers set deep, lifting until the two of you meet squarely. The want between you finds its join—your weight, his upward pull—and something in him answers.

At the seam where scale becomes lower belly, a hidden slit wakes and opens. Inner flesh shows—opal-pale, flushed with blood. From it rise two lengths, not quite human, not fish: twins sharing a root, slightly curved, the undersides ridged for purchase. They come up already slick, beaded with clear brine that strings when the night air takes it. Pulse finds them; they throb against your belly, one angling higher, one nosing lower, as if to bracket and fit. Heat runs his spine. His gills flare—neck, ribs—a faint shiver passing under the skin; the tail gathers and loosens, the weak fin trembling but not failing him. He breathes as if he’s been running, pupils nebular, crown of wheat rustling with each small move.

You take both of him in your hand, stacking your fingers so the lengths lie top to the underside. They’re hot and slick; your thumb finds the ridges beneath and strokes. He makes a choked sound—half click, half moan—and his eyes drop to watch. His hand slips from your hip, down the cleft of your ass. The claws draw back of their own accord when he touches you—something old in him going soft at the feel of tense flesh that promises tenderness within.

He finds your hole with a careful fingertip and circles. You’re tight; the ring resists, gripping at nothing. The resistance lights him. A clear wash beads along both cocks at once, stringing to your knuckles; he gathers it, returns to slick you, circles again, presses. You feel the first push—burn and pull—and then the pad of his finger is inside to the first joint. Your breath chokes, hand tightens on him without thinking; he jolts, pupils shining briefly, then going back to darkness, a low sound loose in his chest.

“Will you open to me—everywhere?” he asks, voice near your ear.

You nod, nervous heat climbing your throat. He sees it; his palm steadies at your belly. He draws more slick from himself and works it over you, patient, small turns and shallow entries until the muscle learns him. The sensation steals down your body—sharp, then sweet; the answer is a throb you can’t stop. He presses deeper, slow, then eases back, letting you breathe. One hand strays between your thighs, your fist moving on him; the other works at your rear, coaxing, matching the pace to your breath. When he curls his finger just so, a bright tug runs through you and your mouth opens on a sound. He takes it, shivering, and his tail gives a pleased pulse under you while he flexes and weeps fresh in your palm.

He hums, pleased, and drags you into another kiss—feral, edged—where teeth threaten and deliver. Sharpness nicks; your lip beads red to match the rowan. He licks the drops, eyes falling shut, tongue clicking soft against your palate as if tasting a note he’s been hunting. Need takes him clean. He hauls you forward, grinding your groin along himself; wetness mixes between you, yours and his, a warm glue that strings and breaks. The musk of it rises—iron-sweet, river-cool—and he sways, dizzy on the scent.

“Sing for me,” he breathes. Not a plea—an order softened by want. You give him the promise of the song he’s heard in the reeds: breathy, wrecked, the little rises and catches, and he aches for the chorus he’s imagined since spotting you on the shore.

You lift onto your knees, bracketing his tail, and set him where you want him. One hand at the root to guide, the other steady at his shoulder. Slick webs from him to you—fine as drawn sugar—stretching, snapping, reforming. The higher cock nudges your entrance and finds it open, eager; your body pulls, hungry for the push. The other slips lower, riding the entrance, brushing the finger-slick he’s left where you are tight. You feel the difference—one part of you calling, taking; the other braced and stubborn, only now learning to yield.

There, you sit on the crowns and stay, thighs quivering, breath confused between being held and sawing. He gets his hands under you to hold you up and purrs through it—low, steady—rocking you in small arcs so the burn can ease. Each shallow slide lets you down a fraction more; heat gathers, then loosens; your body learns the shape and asks again.

For him it is as if he carries two hearts. One is held inside you, cradled and squeezed with every tremor; the other waits at your gate, knocking, answered by the grip of your rim and the pulse in his own length. His gills flare—neck to ribs—in little shutters he can’t control; air feels thin, water loud. His fingers bite and soften on your hips; points threaten, then retract, his hands spreading to take your weight. The tail under your calves tightens and releases, the weak fin doing its best to hold him upright.

“Easy,” he murmurs, voice a warm thread in your ear. The second crown strokes the ring and pauses, strokes and pauses, asking. He could just take you, of course—split you open, clean and dirty, and not wait for permission. But the song he wants to hear is not the one of pain, so he’s patient as a hunter.

You ease your knees wider; he feels it. He rocks you again, kind, until the rim yields by a breath and the first inch is in—burn, then bloom. Your hands seize on him and he groans—short, ragged—everything in him braced not to drive. He keeps you steady, hums to you, and together you let the next small depth happen, then the next, until he’s seethed deep, breathing hard and fighting the urge to bite into your shoulder.

You sit there, full to the brim. Your body flickers around him and each small clutch pulls a sound from his chest. “I will make you all mine,” he says—quiet, solemn as a vow. 

Need runs your spine. “Yes,” you breathe, and start to move.

You rise a little, slow, then sink, slower—your thighs trembling on the way down. He answers with his hands sliding from your hips to your ribs, spreading wide as if to claim the cage that holds your heart. Each descent stuffs you sweet and complete; the deep one drags along the front wall and makes your belly flutter, the other strokes the tightness behind and keeps you open. The ridges work you both ways—lift and press, pull and settle—until your breath staggers into little bursts that sound like agreement. He hums back, low in his throat, and your pulse goes to meet it.

Sweat beads at your neck. He follows it with his mouth—laps the salt where it gathers, soothes and sharp in the same lick—then noses under your jaw to listen to the pace he’s set inside you. His gills tick your skin. The crown of wheat rustles when you rock, and he steadies you by the ribs, thumbs riding the swell beneath your breasts. 

“That’s it,” he grates. “Take me. Take all of me.” 

You nod, breath breaking. “More.”

He answers with his body—hands hauling you and setting you, a hard pulse up into you and a drag back that keeps you full. The slide fattens as you work him; the ridges tug and rake in all the right places until your hips learn the rhythm and indeed, take it. He sucks air through his teeth. “Do you feel that?” he pants. “You tight little thing—made to keep me.”

“Yes.” You move again—down, take, up, starved—and he groans, raw. Through the thin wall inside you he feels himself meet, the two of him rubbing like flints—glorious, maddening—each stroke striking spark along his spine. 

“I’ll flood you,” he rasps. “Fill you. Keep you warm with it till morning.”

“Do it,” you pant. “Make me keep you.”

Something old unlocks in him at that. A rightness. As if the world had been out of true until now and your body set it straight. He sees you heavy with him—kept, carrying—and the thought drags a sound out of him he has never made. “Say yes again.”

 “Yes.”

“Say mine.”

“Yours.”

He sets you to a deeper rhythm, hands sure. Drives you down to meet it, chasing the thick press, the promise of spilling and keeping, of making you his in the oldest way there is. The lengths inside seat and seat again; they ride your holes and slick them, teaching them open while you work him harder. Wet gathers where you join; heat climbs; your breath snags on every bottoming and lets go in little cries he answers with rough yeses of his own. He holds you wide for the next greedy drop.

And when it comes, you crest—the ache, the burn, blooming into light. Your body tightens and ripples, heat breaking open, the pulse dragging through you in clean waves. He holds you wide and lets it take you, shoulders set, jaw shaking as you squeeze and squeeze.

Ruined by it, instinct flaring, he turns you into the water. The world tips cold; sound goes soft. Your hair lifts and halos; your cries come out as bubbles that bump his cheek and slide away. He sets you on his length again and thrusts, feral, the pond closing over you. 

Buoyancy changes everything—your hips float, angle shifts—and the tightness yields another breath. He takes it, careful for a beat, then certain; both of him seat, deep and deeper, and you clutch around the pair with a shock that makes you keen into the green.

The pressure piles; the water bears you and he uses it, forcing you that last inch, hunting the heavy seat, the lock and seal that says you are his. Your nails rake his shoulders; his gills flare along neck and ribs in urgent shutters; the wheat crown slips free and spins on the surface above.

He breaks at your throat. Teeth set—skin gives—blood smokes into the water in two thin threads. He groans against you and floods you at once, both cocks hard as oarlocks, pulsing deep—again, again—the heat of it unmistakable even in the chill. What he pours into you, he takes in blood—iron on his tongue, your name not spoken but held. He stays there through the aftershocks, sealed to you, breath dragging like oars through silt.

When he tips you up and breaks the surface, you’re gasping, head thrown back to the moon. He floats on his back with you lain along him, still joined; the rowan beads are cool at your throat; the wheat crown drifts in a slow circle nearby. The pond moves around you in quiet rings while his hands keep you close and the night goes on glittering.

Calm comes on him like clear water—quiet, spreading, sure. Your weight settles into the hollows of him and feels right, as if the place were made for it. He softens in that safety; with your small answering hum he slips from you, both lengths ebbing, and with a last shiver they hide back into the slit.

Something unfamiliar lifts in his chest, sharp as a new tooth and tender all at once—an urge to guard what is his. He runs his knuckles down your spine, gathers a palm of cool water, and rinses the tear at your neck until the red thins and the skin lies clean. You nestle closer, boneless-warm. “Are you well?” he asks, voice low.

 “Yes,” you murmur, and the word warms him more than the sun ever could.

He floats and hums, the old five-note run turning soft against your ear, a lull made only for two. The reeds tick and answer. He thinks of the grotto, of the necklace on your skin, of the pond made quiet by your breathing, and the feeling in his chest grows until it fills him like tide.

Morning unrolls in pale strips along the trees. He watches you go, the ache in him bright and new, and though he has no word for it in the weed-speech of his kind, he has heard people name this thing. He mouths it once, just to feel its shape, and lets the sound sink.