sablefang

He hasn’t looked up, he’s too focused. And there’s something practiced and deeply troubling about the speed of which his hands are movings — it tells you more than his face even would.

“John?” you try, his back is to you now.

“Hey,” he says, a drawer slides open, he rifles through it, turns around, and whatever he took from the drawer disappears into his bag. “Listen to me a minute.”

“What’s happening? Wh- what’re you doing?”

You take a tentative step toward the bed.

“I have to go,” he says flat, pared down, slotted neatly into the rhythm of his packing. “Right now. Tonight.”

“Go where? You’ve only just got back. Is it a—,”

“It’s not work,” he cuts in roughly, then shakes his head, eyes squeezed shut.

His hands go still over the bag and he turns his head and finally, finally looks at you, blue eyes hooking under your ribs. He takes a steadying inhale through his parted lips, then out his flaring nostrils.

“It’s… it’s not a job, dove.”

You feel so behind him in this, like you’re still standing in the warm kitchen five minutes ago, still on the version of tonight where dinner’s almost ready. You can feel a tickle of dread crawling up the back of your neck.

You’ve never seen him like this.

He’s never like this — frantic.

“Then what is it, J—,”

“Shepherd’s dead,” he spills. He says it the way you’d pluck a splinter from a soft palm, all at once because slow is worse. “It was me, I did it. There’ll be people comin’ here to look for me, and I can’t be here when they come, and I can’t—” His throat bobs. “I can’t be anywhere near you. D’you understand me?”

You don’t.

His confession arrives in pieces and your hands rise to your temples as the words work their way into whatever corner of your mind is properly conscious.

He’s gone back to moving, the zip of the bag closing like something tearing in half. It’s the moving you can’t deal with right now because the moving means it’s already decided. It was decided before he came through the front door. You’re hearing the end of a conversation he’s been having with himself for god knows how long.

Sick turns over in your belly, hot and acidic as it ascends your esophagus, burning the back of your tongue before you swallow it back down.

“Stop.” Your hand closes firm around his forearm. “Stop, just— just look at me. Goddamnit, just— Stop moving!”

To his credit, he goes still for a moment, turning fully toward you now and lifts both hands to your face, cradling your jaw, and every scrap of that frantic velocity drains out of him. His forehead comes down to yours, warm, a little slicked. And suddenly you would give anything to have the frantic version of him back, because stillness means he’s made time for it. John doesn’t make room for things that don’t matter. He’s making room to say goodbye, and knowing that opens up beneath you like a trap-door.

His thumbs sweep the tears you didn’t even feel on your cheeks. “Look at me,” his hands stiffen and close tighter when they rest on your face, forcing your gaze onto his. “I need you to hear me.”

“No.” You’ve got two fistfuls of his shirt now, the cotton crushed in your hands, your head moving side to side against the cage of his palms. “No. No! You don’t get to do this, we’ll— we’ll fix it,” you try to sniffle but sob instead. “You’ll go to someone— Kate! There’ll be a way—,”

“There isn’t,” he murmurs, almost pleading.

“There’s always a way.”

“Not for this.” He says it so softly it takes the legs out from under you. His breath is warm against your mouth. “Not this one, dove. Not this time. I’m sorry.”

Part of you doesn’t quite believe the apology. It was tacked on at the end like an afterthought. You know John. Or, maybe you thought you did. The blood in your heart feels like it’s curdling, heavy, turning to tar as you continue to process exactly what’s happening here.

What he’s done.

You wrench your neck and free your face from the heat of his hands.

“How long?” you ask, voice breaking.

He doesn’t answer.

You strike his chest with the flat of both hands, again and again, then again. You can’t even shift him an inch and the both of you know it, it’s just somewhere for the fear to go as it bubbles. His chin tucks, watching with a curling devastation as you keep connecting with his body. In a flash, he’s got both of his hands on your wrists, yanking you forward against him. “How long, John?!”

You’re starting to learn how long.

He says nothing.

This isn’t a tour. It isn’t a season away with a date at the end of it. He’s running. There is no number because there is no horizon he can point to, no morning he can promise you he’ll be standing in this room again.

The realization comes out of you barely above a breath as you tip your head back to see him. “You’re not coming back.”

His eyes fall shut. He presses his mouth to your forehead hard and holds there, and when the words come they come muffled into your hair just above your ear, into the warmth of you he’s trying to memorize.

“I love you.” It’s not an answer to your question by any stretch of the imagination. He pulls back again to meet your eyes. “Whatever they say about me, whatever you hear — that’s the only truth, yeah?” His knuckles lift to your chin, the pad of his thumb pushing against the front of it, holding your gaze. “When they come, you tell them I was here, I threatened you, and I left in a hurry.”

Your lip wobbles as you look at him, your throat is so tight it hurts.

“Say it back to me.”

“Y- you were here, you left in a hurry.”

“I was here, I threatened you, I left in a hurry,” he repeats.

“You were here, y-you thre- threatened me, you left in a hurry.”

“Good.”

He kisses you and you can almost taste both halves of him in it at once: the half that’s yours, and the half that's already gone. You give it back to him like you can hold him in the room by your mouth alone. But you can’t. And you feel the precise instant he decides to stop, the breath he takes to force himself away.

“Lock the door behind me,” he says.

And the velocity is back. He swings the duffle bag up onto his shoulder, and he’s past you before you’ve turned, out the bedroom door, and you spin and rush after him with his name tearing out of you, your bare feet slapping against the hardwood.

“John! Please! John!”

But he’s already at the foot of the stairs, already crossing the hall, always faster than you, and you’re only halfway down when the front door swings open and the cold of the night pours in over the threshold to meet you. You reach the bottom step, lurch for the door.

The street is empty.

You look left, you look right. It’s as if you dreamt the whole thing. As if you made him up, boots to beard.

“Come ‘ere.”

You glance over your shoulder, “Why?”

He shifts in the doorway to stand straight, arms unfolding so he can direct you with his index and middle fingers, pointing down to the space of carpet just in front of him. “Come. Here.”

You sigh exaggeratedly and pad barefoot over to him. The second you’re in reach his hand catches your waist and pulls you flush against him. You hit him with a low ‘oof!’ escaping your throat. You can instantly feel him hard against your hip. You blink up at him.

“It’s, like, nine in the morning.”

He pulls back enough to have another gawk at you.

“Mhm,” he hums satisfactorily, and you’re not sure if he’s replying to your comment or simply pleased with whatever he’s got rattling around in his imagination at the moment.

A hand begins a slow migration up to your chest, cupping one of your breasts, holding there, pressing the rough of his palm against your flesh. His thumb strokes slow over your nipple until it tightens beneath it. “Fit perfectly in my palm,” he muses.

“Simon,” you sigh, amused.

His palm slides down then, over your ribs, splaying wide across the side of your belly, kneading, pressing his thumb into the pudge of you. He makes a low sound at the back of his throat. “Whose fault’s it m’hard at nine in the morning, then?”

“Your own,” you giggle.

“Yours,” he corrects plainly before he dips down and nudges your jaw up with his nose to kiss you, licking his tongue over yours while his hand continues to stroke the curve under his fingers. The other hand comes back to your chest like it just can’t stay away. “Walkin’ ’round in front of me like this. These pretty lil’ tits out. Belly all…” he squeezes once, gentle and possessive “…soft,” he finishes.

“S’just my body, Si,” you breathe, breaths becoming shallower.

“I know wot it is,” he smiles against your mouth. “Drives me fuckin’ mental. But y’knew that, di’n’t you?”

You did know that.

You also know what happens when you push into his hands instead of away, and you do it now, arching just slightly into his palm, and the noise he makes is honestly embarrassing for him.

He walks you backward to the bed in three steps and you go down on the edge of it. He’s on his knees on the floor before you can blink, big hands skirting up the outside of your thighs, fingers hooking into the cotton of your underwear and yanking them down and off. His hands come back up, slipping between your legs and parting them wide for the looking. His mouth’s already wet and your bottom lip tucks between your teeth.

“Eyes up here, Sergeant,” you giggle.

“No,” he grunts. His mouth finds the inside of your thigh, rolling your flesh between his lips, kissing and sucking higher and higher. “I’ll look where I want.”

A calloused hand comes up to span your stomach, one wide palm pressing into you, the other hand taking a hold of your hip while his mouth finds your center. You gasp, and fall back to your elbows.

His tongue is slow, working you open, and he keeps that hand on your tummy the whole time like he just can’t stop touching it, fingers spreading and gathering in the softness.

You moan and he hums against your clit, too pleased with himself. The vibration goes straight through you.

“Si— fuck—,”

The hand on your hip reaches up to your chest, palming one of your breasts again, his massive hand covering every bit of it. He fits you like he was measured for it. At least, that what he always says. You drop a hand into his hair and his eyes close.

He laps at your pussy like you both don’t have to get to work. He pulls back just long enough to drag his mouth low across your stomach, open-mouthed, sucking a mark just under your navel where nobody else will ever see it, and you feel him groan against your skin.

“Could spend the whole day on you,” he says, rough. “Jus’ like this.” His hand kneads your belly again. “You any idea what you fuckin’ do to me?”