yourlovesickgirl

There comes a moment in every girl’s life that cements itself into her mind. It takes up a corner of her brain and becomes the foundation for every action she takes thereafter. It rewires her chemistry, ensuring that, years later, it will resurface unbidden, vivid and relentless.

She remembers it as though it’s happening right then. Every detail is etched onto the canvas of her mind with the precision of a master painter. She recalls every word, every inflection, every syllable. She feels again the rush of emotions, as if the pit of her stomach were reliving the moment in real time.

That was how it felt when your eyes landed on your boyfriend making out with your best friend, the girl who had been by your side since first year, the one you trusted implicitly. You stepped into the Hog’s Head that night, and your vision tunneled the second you saw them in the booth, lips locked.

The clinking of glasses around the pub sparkled mockingly in the dim light, a cruel contrast to the way your heart sank, your body shutting down as ice ran through your veins.

First came confusion. Perhaps you’d seen wrong, perhaps your mind was playing tricks. But as the seconds passed, certainty settled in, burning the image into your brain.

What do I do?

In any instance where you had been betrayed like this, your first instinct would have been to go to your best friend—the girl who had stuck with you since your first year when you were placed as dormmates.

Stuck in your place, your brain was short-circuiting, trying to, but in the end unable to do anything else but stare at them.

For fuck’s sake—are they scuba divers? Are they ever going to come up for air?

It seemed like they heard you, finally parting, and it seemed that your boyfriend—or rather, ex-boyfriend, and if he’s so lucky, not late-boyfriend—spotted you first, his face going pale the second he saw you.

You scoffed.

They were doing this in a public place, and he had the gall to look surprised when you managed to spot them?

And then you felt it—the emotion that managed to crush through all of the others like a tidal wave, filling your body and clouding your thoughts. Rage. Fury.

You spun on your heel, barreling through the crowd toward the door.

“(Y/N)!” Your boyfriend called behind you, but you ignored him, sidestepping another patron as you charged and left him in your dust. It seemed like your anger had managed to blur the edges of your vision, and you collided with another student.

“Watch it—!”

Theodore Nott stood at six feet tall, towering over you more than your boyfriend ever had, jawline so sharp it could cut you—if not for that, his words certainly would. He glared down at you with stormy eyes that you couldn’t quite call blue but couldn’t call green.

You heard your boyfriend call your name once more as he approached you, and it seemed the desperation on your face was apparent to someone as apathetic as Theodore, who only raised a brow at you.

And in that instant, you made one of the most reckless decisions of your life.

Your hands curled around the lapels of his jacket before you could even command your body to do otherwise, yanking Theodore toward you and leaning up on your tiptoes to close the gap, pressing your lips to his.

A split second passed, and your head was spinning, body coming back to life.

Have I lost my mind? I’ve just been utterly humiliated by my boyfriend and my best friend. Now I’ve kissed one of the notorious snakes—without consent, no less—which makes me literal scum. He’s going to push me away any second, probably hex me, and make this humiliation ten times worse.

All those self-deprecating thoughts came to a silent standstill the second his arm looped around your waist, another hand cupping your cheek as you tilted his head to deepen the kiss.

The moment stretched, every second dragging out as if the world itself had decided to pause and watch. His lips moved against yours with a deliberate, almost teasing patience that sent a shiver down your spine, making your knees threaten to buckle. You could feel the heat radiating from his body, the subtle press of his chest against yours, grounding you even as your mind screamed in disbelief.

Your hands tightened on his jacket, nails digging in slightly as if anchoring yourself to reality. Your mind screamed in protest, reminding you of every reason this was reckless—this was Theodore Nott, the last person you should be doing this with, and yet… you couldn’t stop.

The kiss was urgent, hungry, but also careful, as though he could sense the storm raging inside you and wanted to meet it without drowning you completely.

Finally, reality slammed back into you. You broke the kiss with a gasp, eyes still closed, trying to catch your breath after being so violently knocked out of orbit by a kiss you could only describe as divine.

When your eyes met his again, you were rendered speechless.

Oh, you better admit yourself into St. Mungo's tonight, you imbecile.

“Oh my—uh… I—I shouldn’t have—I'm sorry—” You stammered, tearing your hands from his jacket and stepping back. Embarrassment burned hotter than your anger had moments ago.

You swallowed, shamefully looking down as you moved toward the exit once again, "I'm gonna go—"

Your voice trailed off, choked by a mix of embarrassment and disbelief. You wanted to disappear, to vanish from the pub before anyone could process what had just happened. Before he could.

You pivoted toward the door, picturing yourself in the cool night air where your face might finally stop burning.

But before you could take another step, a firm hand caught your wrist. You froze, the warmth of his grip rooting you in place.

“If you leave first,” He said, his voice low and smooth, carrying that unmistakable edge of challenge, “you lose."

You didn't even know if your ex-boyfriend was still there, you had lost any awareness of your surroundings the second your lips met his.

Your eyes widened, and you stammered, “I… I’m not… I don’t—”

The corner of his lips twitched as though he was fighting a smile at your pathetic state, a teasing glint in those stormy eyes that made your knees threaten to give out again. “Why don’t you… join me and my friends?”

You swallowed, heart hammering, and glanced back at your ex. He was still standing there, awkward, flustered, clearly humiliated. It was… satisfying, in a small, dark way.

If you left now, before they did, it would look like you had something to be ashamed of. You didn’t deserve that.

They didn’t deserve to enjoy the rest of their night undisturbed. They deserved to squirm in their seats, to feel the weight of your stare drilling holes into them. They deserved their night ruined. Their lives ruined.

“…Fine,” you whispered, almost against your will. Your voice trembled with a mixture of exasperation and something dangerously close to thrill. “But only for a little while.”

Theo’s grin widened, that teasing glint in his eyes sharpening. “Oh… I don’t know,” he said, placing his hand on the curve of your waist, leading you to the table that had been taken by the other Slytherins, "We can be quite a fun bunch."

Theodore guided you through the Hog’s Head, arm casually looped through yours, like you’d belonged there all along. You couldn’t help but notice the way the pub-goers glanced at you, whispers flickering through the crowd. Your stomach fluttered with a mix of nerves, shame, and something you didn’t dare name.

When you reached the table, his friend's eyes immediately lit up. They were lounging casually, drinks in hand, and the smirk on Blaise’s face made it clear that they had clearly witnessed your make out session.

"Well, well, well, looks like someone’s been busy." Mattheo drawled, his wicked grin hidden half behind his glass as Theodore pulled out a chair for you and then slid his own closer.

It took everything in you to not look so startled when he wrapped his hand around your shoulder, trying to hide your incredulousness at how seamless this act managed to come to Theo.

You lowered your gaze from Mattheo's who was set on staring at you with an ear-to-ear grin like an imp, only to catch Theo’s eye—he seemed to read your thoughts instantly and, without missing a beat, chucked a fry at his best mate, "Stop ogling my girl, you prat."

“Ohhh,” Mattheo drawled, leaning back in his chair, "She's your girl now? That's the first I've heard of this."

Draco snorted, smirking at Theo, “Yeah, Theo, since when? You never mentioned a girlfriend before.”

Before you could even sputter, Theo’s calm, controlled voice cut through the teasing. “Yeah,” He said effortlessly, as if stating the weather, “We’re dating.”

You froze. What?! You were still reeling from the kiss, and now he was lying with such ease that it made your brain stutter. You were so caught off-guard, so out of your comfort zone that you couldn't even say anything.

He didn’t even flinch, "And we're not first-year girls that I should tell you everything."

Enzo let out a low whistle. “Wow… Theo, good for you, man."

You felt like your chest had been sucker-punched. How could he lie so effortlessly? So convincingly? You were still fumbling over your own thoughts, heart racing from the kiss, and he was… untouchable.

Theodore leaned slightly closer, voice low enough that only you could hear. “Relax. Just play along. Trust me.”

Trust him? You barely knew him. And the two people you’d trusted most in the world had just ripped you to shreds.

This was a bad idea.

But you didn’t move. You couldn’t. Because Theodore was right—if you left, your ex would see it, and you’d lose.

So you stayed. You plastered a grin on your face and let Theodore enjoy himself with his friends. You tried your best not to glance at the betrayers—refused to give them the satisfaction of knowing they occupied even a single neuron in your brain.

When tears threatened to prick your eyes, you bit the inside of your cheek hard and reached for Theo’s drink, taking a slow sip to ease the tightness in your throat.

Thankfully, it seemed they weren’t as shameless as you’d feared. They looked too uncomfortable to enjoy themselves, shifting in their seats, eyes flicking toward you before darting away. The sight of them leaving some time later brought you a sliver of satisfaction. However, that was made very bitter at the realization that they were leaving together.

You held out for another twenty minutes before finally turning to Theodore with a tired smile. “Walk me back?”

He didn’t hesitate. He stood immediately, earning a chorus of jeers from his friends about being a “simp” who couldn’t let his girl walk alone. Theodore just flipped them off before guiding you out with a warm hand at the small of your back.

The walk was quiet. Snowflakes gathered in your hair and clung to your coat, the world muted by the thick white dusting over Hogsmeade. Then, halfway down the path, you stopped abruptly.

Theodore turned to you, “What’s wrong?”

You stared down at the snow-covered road, tears burning at the edges of your vision, “She’s back at my dorm.”

You pressed the heel of your gloved palms into your eyes, your chest trembling with the sobs you’d been holding in all night, “And if she’s not… then I’ll be left wondering if she's with him for the rest of the night.”

Theodore sighed, steering you toward a small alcove behind the pub. It overlooked the rest of Hogsmeade, quiet and dim under the glow of lanterns. You sank down against the fence, not caring about the wet snow soaking through your clothes, hiding your face in your knees as the dam finally broke.

The image of them at the pub replayed relentlessly behind your closed eyelids, no matter how much you willed it away.

They’d done it so unabashedly, so arrogantly—her practically in his lap. Comfortable enough to humiliate you like that in public meant it couldn’t have been the first time.

Your mind reeled back to every time they’d both been absent, every “we just ran into each other in the hallway” excuse, every occasion they’d been “too busy” to join you in Hogsmeade.

They’d done this where other students could see. Had no one thought to tell you? Did your other friends just… choose to stay silent? Were they ever really your friends at all?

Theodore didn’t say a word. He just stood beside you in silence—until the soft clink of his lighter broke through your thoughts. You looked up, face blotchy and eyes raw, just in time to see him take a long drag from a cigarette, the smoke stark against the winter air.

“Can I have one?” You asked.

"No," He glanced down at you, “Take it from me, sweetheart—once you start, it’s very hard to stop.”

You exhaled sharply, lowering your forehead back to your knees. You tried to breathe deep, to steady yourself, to make sense of any of it, “What good even are you?”

There was another beat of silence.

“I’m sorry,” He said, and you looked up again, “I sprang that whole thing on you. If you don’t want to, I’ll take it back. Make it seem like I was the one mistaken. You don’t need to worry.”

“Why did you do it?” You asked quietly, “You could’ve easily pushed me away. I mean, I was the one at fault there.”

“Because,” He said, taking another slow drag, “you looked desperate.”

You huffed a humorless laugh, “I’m swooning.”

Theo’s mouth twitched—almost a smile, but not quite. “Besides,” He added, tilting his head so the dim light from the pub hit the sharp cut of his jaw, “I wasn’t about to let them see you run off like you’d done something wrong.”

You blinked at him, caught between wanting to roll your eyes and wanting to thank him, “So you just… decided to announce to half the school that we’re dating?”

“It’s better this way,” He said simply, like it was the most obvious thing in the world, “Rumors spread fast. By Monday, everyone will think you’ve moved on—and not just moved on, but traded up.” His gaze flicked to you, calm but deliberate, “Let them choke on it.”

Your throat tightened, but this time it wasn’t from wanting to cry.

"And what do you get out of this arrangement?"

Theodore glanced at you through the thin curl of smoke leaving his lips. His expression didn’t flicker, but there was a spark of something behind his eyes—mischief, maybe, or calculation.

“Let’s just say…” He exhaled slowly, the smoke catching in the cold air like ghostly ribbons, “…I have my reasons.”

You swallowed and then sighed, watching as your breath became visible in the cold air, tears now dry on your cheeks, “I want them to pay for it.”

Theodore smirked, the corner of his mouth curling like he’d just been waiting to hear those words, "And so they shall."

You pushed open the door to your dorm, ready to collapse onto your bed and pretend the last twenty-four hours hadn’t happened. After talking with Theodore for a while, you’d waited until well past curfew to sneak back into Hogwarts, hoping your ex-boyfriend and ex–best friend had either gone to sleep separately or she was holed up in his dorm.

Honestly, at this point, you didn’t care where they were or what they were doing. They’d been dead to you long before you saw them at the pub tonight.

All you wanted was a bed. Sleep. Silence.

Theodore had still given you the option to change your mind about him — told you he’d take the blame if you wanted to pretend you didn’t know each other. But you were too wrung out from crying, too hollow to think. Your body was ready to collapse the second your face hit the pillow.

Except the moment you stepped inside, sleep vanished.

She was there.

Sitting cross-legged on her bed, biting her thumbnail — that nervous habit of hers you hated that you knew.

Your mind started firing questions faster than you could breathe. Was she nervous? Guilty? Regretful? Did she feel anything at all?

Her head snapped up.

“Hey,” She said softly, eyes wide with something dangerously close to guilt, “Can we talk?”

You froze. Part of you wanted to say yes. She’d been your best friend, the person you’d cared about more than anything. You didn’t want to lose her.

Your heart almost opened the door. Your mind slammed it shut.

“No.”

She blinked, flinching like you’d slapped her, “Please, just—”

“I said no.” You moved past her toward your bed, shrugging off your coat, “Whatever you think you need to say, save it. I don’t care.”

“(Y/N), please! I didn’t mean for it to happen—”

You laughed—sharp, humorless, “You didn’t mean to kiss my boyfriend? How exactly does that work? You trip and fall face-first onto his mouth?”

Her jaw twitched. Then she scoffed, “Fine. If you’re gonna act like you’re so perfect, maybe remember you’re not exactly a saint either.”

Your head snapped up, “Excuse me?”

She crossed her arms, chin tilting higher, “We all saw your little show with Nott earlier. Don’t think you can sit there acting holier-than-thou when you cheated too.”

Heat surged under your skin.

“What I was doing with Nott is none of your business. But don’t you dare pretend that makes you right. You are the lowest, ugliest, skankiest slag I’ve ever met in my life.”

“That’s rich,” She spat, “Coming from the slag who spread her legs for the first guy she saw. Nott probably thought you were easy, didn’t he?”

You took a step forward. Then another. She backed up.

“Theodore has nothing to do with this, and neither does anyone else. The person I’m pissed at is you.” Your voice shook now, not from fear, but fury, “You were supposed to be my best friend! How could you betray me like this? Humiliate me in front of everybody? Go behind my back? I would never have done this to you. I wouldn’t have even thought about it!”

With each sentence, you jabbed a finger into her chest, until you finally shoved her, the force surprising even you.

She didn’t back down.

“You deserved it, didn’t you? Acting all high and mighty — then turning around and doing the same thing.”

Something in your chest cracked. You looked at her, really looked, and realized you didn’t recognize her anymore.

You laughed, breathless and disbelieving, “The only difference between us is I didn’t throw away seven years of friendship for some asshole who can only think with his dick. You think he won’t turn around and do the same thing to you that he did to me? You’re deluded.”

One more shove.

Then you straightened, voice quiet but lethal.

“If you ever approach me again, I’ll kill you. Until then?” You took a step back, smirking like she was something you’d scrape off your shoe, “Have fun with my sloppy seconds, slut.”

The next morning, the corridors were alive with the usual rush of students heading to the Great Hall, but your thoughts were still tangled in last night’s chaos. You tightened your coat around you, trying to focus on anything but the memory of their faces, when a familiar voice cut through the din.

“(Y/N)!” Your ex-boyfriend called, catching up just as you reached the entrance to the Great Hall. His face was flushed, a mixture of anger, embarrassment, and confusion, “What the hell was that yesterday?”

You froze for a heartbeat, then let a sardonic smile creep across your face, “Oh, that? I thought your tongue down my best friend’s throat was a pretty clear indication that we were both seeing other people.”

His face burned red, guilt and humiliation flickering across his features. You barely felt any satisfaction—what you felt yesterday had been raw, scorching, and unshakable. This was just a pale echo.

“Look, I—” He began, his voice tight, “I didn’t mean for it to happen.”

“Didn’t mean to cheat on me with my best friend? Or didn’t mean for me to find out?” You let each word land like a slap.

His jaw clenched, his gaze hard, “You’re one to talk, acting like you didn’t leave with Theodore Nott of all people yesterday.”

You tilted your head, cool and deliberate, “I did. So? That doesn’t give you the moral high ground to lecture me. If you think you’re the victim here… think again.”

He stepped closer, lowering his voice to a dangerous murmur, “Wait—are you serious? Are you actually—”

And then you saw him. Theodore Nott, leaning against the wall with that impossibly calm expression, arms crossed, watching like the world had paused for his amusement.

Your chest tightened, but you squared your shoulders. “Yes,” You said clearly, deliberately loud enough for both of them to hear, “I am dating Theodore Nott.”

The color drained from his face, the clever retorts dying on his tongue. You didn’t give him a chance to recover.

Theo’s smirk sharpened, eyes flicking between you and him, silently daring him to challenge your words, to give him a reason to rearrange his sorry mug this fine morning.

You started walking, leaving your ex behind, and Theodore fell naturally into step beside you. His presence was calm, confident, infuriatingly infuriating—and comforting at the same time.

“You promised, Nott,” You murmured, your voice low and dangerous, “We’re going to make them pay.”

Theo’s grin widened, the corner of his mouth lifting into that familiar, teasing arc. “Oh, don’t worry, mia cara,” He said smoothly, eyes glinting with mischief and you felt your ears get hot, “We're gonna make them regret ever messing with you.”

Side by side, you stepped into the Great Hall. Whispers began immediately, flickering through the crowd like wildfire. And as the students’ eyes turned toward you, you realized—the game had officially begun.

The chatter of students filled the Charms classroom as you stepped inside, your nerves buzzing the way they always did when eyes might follow you. You hesitated in the doorway for a fraction too long, scanning the rows of desks. Usually, your spot was second row, left side—the place you always shared with your best friend. But now? The thought of sitting there made your stomach twist. Should you take it anyway, claim your ground, and glare if she had the audacity to join you?

Before you could decide, a warm hand brushed against the small of your back.

“Over here.” Theodore murmured, voice low but commanding. He didn’t give you room to argue, guiding you through the rows with a confidence that ignored every curious glance that followed. You ended up in the second-to-last row, his chosen territory.

You dropped your bag to the floor and slid into the seat he indicated, shooting him a quick, reluctant smile. Almost instantly, you became acutely aware of the heat of his knee brushing yours beneath the desk.

Theodore leaned back in his chair with practiced ease, stretching his arm just far enough to rest casually along the back of yours. “That’s better,” He said, deliberately louder now, his voice carrying through the classroom. His smirk deepened, “Need my girl next to me.”

The effect was immediate. The two Hufflepuff girls in front of you whipped their heads around under the pretense of adjusting their books. They tried to be subtle, glancing sideways from the corners of their eyes, but the way their shoulders pressed together and their whispers turned sharp made it obvious who they were talking about.

Theo noticed too. His smirk widened, one eyebrow arching as if to say exactly as planned.

You resisted the urge to elbow him in the ribs, ducking your head instead as heat crept up your neck. Subtle was not in Theodore Nott’s vocabulary, apparently.

Your heart jumped when the door opened again and she walked in—your ex–best friend, sliding into the classroom like nothing had happened. She looked tired, as she always did on mornings like this; Charms was the earliest class on your schedule, and she never managed breakfast before dragging herself out of bed. No, instead she always smuggled in a handful of Honeydukes’ cockroach clusters, nibbling on them through class.

And sure enough, there they were, sitting in a paper bag on her desk.

Your lips curled into a knowing smirk.

How could she be so careless? She knew you better than anyone—had known every one of your tricks, your habits, your moods. She should have known you wouldn’t leave her unpunished.

You waited until Professor Flitwick had begun explaining wand movement on the board, until the room was full of the faint swish of quills and the scratching of parchment. Then, when her hand dipped into the bag, you flicked your wand under the table. A silent transfiguration. Smooth, clean, precise.

She popped the cluster into her mouth. Chewed once.

And then froze.

Her eyes widened just a fraction, and then she gagged, clapping a hand over her lips. You bit down on your own smile as, with a sharp cough, she spat onto her desk—not a melted chocolate, but a fat, wriggling cockroach that skittered across the wood.

The room erupted.

Screams, laughter, the scrape of chairs as people leapt away. Someone shouted, “Bloody hell, they’re moving!” as two more clusters in the bag twitched and burst into chittering, crawling life. Your ex-best friend shoved her desk back in panic, her face pale as the cockroaches spilled out in a wave across the floor.

You didn’t react like the rest of them, watching as chaos struck and she turned green in the face, barely able to breathe. You lifted your feet and bag from the ground, careful to avoid all the cockroaches that seemed to multiply from her bag—the replenishing charm you cast on the bag doing wonders.

Theodore didn’t even glance at the teacher; instead, his attention was entirely on you, on the way your chest rose and fell, eyes still sharp, just barely contained.

With a single fluid motion, he pulled your chair a little closer, resting your legs in his lap. You froze, breath hitching, heat crawling up your spine—but there was no time for that. The room still hummed with whispers and laughter, and you could feel every pair of eyes glancing back at the scene.

“Elegant work, sweetheart.” He murmured low, the words meant only for you. His fingers brushed lightly along your ankle, light enough to be intimate, heavy enough to claim attention.

You suddenly understood why in the olden days showing ankle was considered scandalous, judging by the set of shivers Theodore's thumb against your ankle had sent up your spine.

“Detention! For eating in class and causing this disruption! Minus ten points!” Professor Flitwick’s squeaky voice rang across the room.

You fought the grin tugging at your lips, eyes sliding back to your former best friend, who sat frozen, cheeks burning with humiliation.

Oh, poor girl.

That pitiful, shocked face only made you hate her more.

The library was quiet, the soft rustle of pages and the occasional scratch of quills filling the otherwise hushed room. You were bent over a stack of textbooks, notes scattered across the polished wooden table, eyes straining to keep focus as the afternoon sunlight streamed through the tall windows.

You were so absorbed in your work that you didn’t notice the shadow falling across your page. A soft, familiar warmth pressed against the back of your chair, and a low chuckle reached your ears.

“Can’t study forever, you know.” A deep voice murmured.

Before you could turn around, a pair of lips pressed gently against the top of your head. A small, contented sigh followed as Theodore rested his chin lightly on your shoulder.

“Missed you, sweetheart.” He said softly, his words meant only for you, though the air between you carried them enough for nearby students to murmur.

You froze for a heartbeat, pencil hovering mid-note, then tilted your head slightly, allowing him the small indulgence. His hand slid to rest on yours, fingers brushing against your notes, grounding you in the moment.

A few whispers floated through the library, subtle but unmistakable: “Is that…?” “Theodore Nott and—” “Wow.”

The heat rose in your cheeks, but it wasn’t embarrassment—it was the thrill of being seen with him, the quiet intimacy, the silent power you both held over anyone watching.

Especially the power it held over you.

You didn't know how he was able to touch you so intimately, pretend like you had a long history, hold you close and fake that look in his eye that made you feel like you were the center of his universe.

It was baffling.

Theodore rested his head for a moment longer before leaning back just enough to peer at your notes, “Though… you’re really focused, aren’t you? I’d almost feel guilty interrupting.”

You gave a small smile, eyes still on your parchment, “You could say that, yeah.”

He chuckled, nudging your shoulder gently with his own, “Then I’ll just keep you company… silently.”

And with that, he settled next to you, close enough that his warmth was constant, silent enough that you could still work—but every so often, he leaned in, pressing a gentle kiss to your temple or brushing a strand of hair from your face.

Then you sensed movement behind you. Glancing up, you caught sight of your ex and your former best friend sneaking into the room, eyes immediately locking on you and Theodore.

They didn’t just glance—they stiffened, shoulders squared, and suddenly it was like a performance. She leaned close to him, laughing a little too loudly, brushing against him in a way that screamed look at us, we’re happy, look at what you’re missing. Your ex mirrored her, puffing out his chest and whispering something that made her giggle.

It was painfully obvious—they wanted you to see them, to feel jealous, to react.

You didn’t.

Instead, you reached up, grabbed Theodore by the collar, and pulled him down into a deliberate, teasing kiss, letting them watch the undeniable spark between you. He responded immediately, moving his hand to your waist, deepening the kiss and cupping your cheek.

But of course, they weren’t going to give up that easily. Determined to “out-do” you, they moved to the far side of the library, your ex hugging her from behind and peppering kisses to her neck as she giggled. They ducked into the alcove at the back that was notorious for students fooling around.

Theodore raised a brow, lips curling into that maddeningly flirtatious smirk, leaning to press his lips to your ear, “What do you say, love? Feel like beating them at their own game? I’m sure we’d have a better time anyway.”

You chuckled, shaking your head, trying to ignore the heat crawling up your neck.

With a subtle glance toward the librarian’s desk, you caught Madam Pince’s attention. Quietly, you waved her over, corners of your mouth tugging into a grin.

Theodore’s eyebrows shot up, “Oh? You’re evil, bellissima.”

“Oh, you love it.” You murmured, still holding his hand. You pointed to the bookshelf where they were hiding, leaning back with a sly grin.

What happened next was beautiful chaos.

A shriek echoed through the library—sharp, furious, unmistakably theirs. Madam Pince’s voice rang out, shrill and indignant: “What on earth are you two doing in here?!”

You and Theodore exchanged a glance and stifled laughter as you heard her yelling, her wand flashing to confiscate their belongings, and chasing them down the aisles, half-dressed and completely humiliated.

The whispers and stares of the other students only added to the spectacle. You suppressed another laugh as you watched points being deducted from their house records, their humiliation complete.

For now.

The stands were packed, the cold wind whipping your hair around your face as you and Theo leaned against the railing, watching the match unfold below. You watched as your ex’s team began collecting points, you and Mattheo booing their every move at the top of your lungs.

“YOU CALL THAT FLYING?!” Mattheo yelled, and you cupped your hands around your mouth, “MY GRANDMA CAN FLY BETTER THAN THAT!”

You coughed—cold air and screaming taking their toll—before a scarf was gently draped around your neck. You turned in surprise to see Theodore, not even looking at you, more intent on wrapping it carefully so it covered your ears and nose without smothering your mouth. When it proved impossible, he conceded and settled for placing a warming charm on you.

You smiled bashfully, hiding your pink cheeks in the scarf, “Thank you.”

“Anytime, bella.”

“Disgusting behavior in public.” Mattheo muttered under his breath, earning a soft chuckle from you.

Everything seemed normal—until the golden blur began acting strangely.

Even for a snitch, its movements were erratic. But this was worse than usual. It seemed to purposefully avoid the opposing team, darting exclusively toward your ex’s side. The match ground to a halt as the players floated to a stop, confusion spreading across the pitch. Madam Hooch called everyone together, frowning as she tried to assess the situation.

When the groundskeepers and referees inspected the field, the truth became clear: the snitch in play wasn’t real. Someone had swapped it.

Confusion rippled through the stands as whispers grew louder.

“Where’s the real Snitch?” The head referee demanded, scanning the players.

A quick locating spell revealed it immediately—tucked neatly in your ex’s bag, as if he had accidentally carried it with him. The real snitch sat there, innocently gleaming in the sunlight, waiting to be discovered.

A collective gasp swept through the crowd. Every eye in the stadium turned to him.

Your ex’s face drained of color, hands fumbling over the bag in shock. “I—I didn’t—!” He stammered.

But the damage was already done. The spectators murmured furiously, teammates muttering accusations, and whispers of “he cheated” began circulating instantly.

Theo leaned back against the railing, smirk spreading across his face, and whispered in your ear, “Are you enjoying the show, my love?”

You bit your lip and nodded, trying not to laugh aloud, and reached for his hand under the railing, giving it a subtle squeeze. No words were needed—the humiliation was working exactly as planned.

“Due to tampering with the snitch, it’s an automatic loss for Ravenclaw—Hufflepuff wins!” Madam Hooch announced, confirming the disaster.

“Another impeccable plan. I’m impressed,” Theo murmured in your ear, voice teasing, “You make it look easy.”

The crisp Hogsmeade air nipped at your cheeks as you stepped off the train, Theodore’s hand sliding easily into yours. The village was bustling with students, their laughter echoing over the cobblestone streets, but all you could feel was the warmth of his grip and the soft pull of his presence beside you.

Theodore was actually the one to suggest that you guys spend the day together. At first, you were going to opt out, feeling bad that the last couple weeks had been revolving around you and wanting him to get some time with his friends but he insisted, saying that you couldn't spend your Hogsmeade apart or people would talk.

You couldn't argue with that.

But even then you found yourself looking forward to it.

Despite this being only a temporary arrangement with no feelings behind it, Theodore was actually great company. He was thoughtful and considerate, he liked hearing you talk and a quality people didn't really appreciate a lot was that he was hilarious.

You couldn't go five minutes without him prompting a belly laugh from you.

You paused in front of a small shop, your eyes catching a delicate necklace in the display window. A thin chain with a tiny, intricate charm glinting in the sunlight—it was beautiful. Your breath caught.

“Oh… that’s gorgeous.” You murmured, pressing your palm lightly against the glass.

Theodore leaned over, following your gaze. His eyes softened when he saw the necklace, “You like it?”

“I do… but…” Your voice trailed off as you peeked at the price tag. Your eyes widened, “but I do not love the price tag.”

The bell above the shop door jingled as you both entered. You wandered near the counter, trying to convince yourself it was just a dream. Theodore approached the shopkeeper, exchanged a few words, and before you could even process what was happening, the necklace was being handed to you in a small, neatly wrapped box.

You stared at it, then at him, “No… no, you can’t. This is way too expensive. I can’t—”

“It’s only ten Galleons.” He said, clearly perplexed by your reaction.

“Only… ten Galleons?” You repeated, your voice rising slightly in surprise, “That’s… that’s like… my entire pocket money for the next two months!”

Theodore smirked, as if your shock were the most amusing thing he’d seen all day, “Yes, and? You’re my girl. You like it, you get it. What’s the problem?”

The problem was you weren't really his girl.

So, why was he going out of his way to behave like you were? This was a question that had stayed in your head since that first night in Hogsmeade. What was he getting out of this? Why would he be so readily enthusiastic in your plan when it was clear you were the only one truly benefitting from this?

When you met his eyes again, stormy blue that looked green in some lights, the questioned died on your tongue.

Because whatever the reason, you weren't sure you wanted him to stop.

You stared at him, half in disbelief, half in awe, “You—really? You’re just… giving it to me?”

You laughed, shaking your head in disbelief as you let him fasten the necklace around your neck. The charm glinted against your chest, and the warmth of the gesture left you grinning.

When you turned to meet his eyes again, you smiled bashfully up at him before leaning in to press a soft kiss against his cheek.

Theo froze in surprise the second your lips touched his cold skin, and the sight of his startled expression made something warm bloom in your stomach.

It wasn’t like you hadn’t done more than that—in fact, in your persistence to prove to your exes that you were well past moved on, you’d taken to making out with Theo in nearly every public space Hogwarts had to offer. And if it wasn’t that, it was the way he always had an arm around you, casual and possessive, no matter where you went.

So the fact that something as small as a cheek kiss could knock him off guard made you smile. Made you feel like all the intimacy you shared wasn’t just a front. Wasn’t all fake.

“Thank you.” You whispered.

You settled cross-legged on the soft carpet of the Slytherin common room, leaning back against Theodore’s legs as he sat comfortably on the couch. His hands were busy in your hair, while his scarf lay draped across your lap. Carefully, you threaded the fringe at the end of the scarf, showing him how to braid it so he could mimic the motion on your hair.

“So then you take this left strand and bring it over—it becomes the new center strand—and then you bring the new right strand and bring it over.” You explained, feeling the occasional tug on your hair. You immediately noticed the braid slipping.

“It keeps slipping… your hair is too greasy.” He muttered, brow furrowed.

You scoffed, feigning offense, “I think you mean… smooth and silky.”

“This isn’t working.” He grumbled, letting go of your hair and starting over, separating it into three neat parts.

“Baby, this is the easiest braid ever. You’re going to faint when I teach you about a Dutch braid.” You teased, tugging gently on a strand to demonstrate.

Before he could respond, the door creaked open and Mattheo sauntered in, smirk plastered across his face. “Ohhh, what do we have here?” He drawled, “(Y/N) (L/N), Hogwarts’ first houseless student considering we never see her in her own common room, and Theodore Nott, her loyal… dog.”

He then grimaced at the sight of the two of you, “Can y’all not do this in a public space? Some of us think the sight of happy couples is enough to induce projectile vomiting.”

Theo didn’t flinch, though the corner of his mouth tugged into a small smirk. You felt a small thrill as his thumb grazed the space under your ear, leading to your neck, grounding you in the moment.

You raised a brow, voice dripping with mock menace, “You really wanna piss me off when I’m at prime height to punch you in the balls?”

Mattheo rolled his eyes and collapsed onto the couch, still grinning, “You’re coming to Theo’s birthday next Friday, right? Considering you practically live here.”

You hesitated, unsure, “I… I don’t know. I mean—”

Theo leaned over you, pressing a soft kiss to the crown of your head. “You'll be there right?” He murmured, voice low and coaxing, the simple gesture making your chest tighten, "Please?"

You bit back a smile, looking up at him, and realized there was no way you could say no—not when he asked like that.

You stepped into the Slytherin common room, barely able to hear your own thoughts over the bass that rattled the walls. It thudded deep in your chest, vibrating through your bones as you descended the staircase to the dungeons.

The room was packed, bodies moving together in a blur beneath the strobing lights, faces indistinguishable in the chaos. But your eyes found Theo instantly. He was surrounded by his friends, laughing at something Mattheo said, until his gaze landed on you.

His entire expression shifted—lit up like you were the only thing in the room. Without a second thought, he left them behind and crossed the room to meet you at the base of the stairs.

His eyes swept over your little black dress, the necklace he gifted you resting prettily on your collarbones, and his hands found their way to your waist—low, possessive, warm against the thin fabric, "Che bella, carissima."

"Happy birthday, Theo." You murmured, your palms resting lightly against his chest.

"Grazie, dolcezza." He replied, voice low and smooth as he leaned in. His mouth met yours without hesitation, your fingers sliding into his hair. Lip gloss smudged against his skin, and the artificial taste of lollipop lippie flooded both your mouths.

If you hadn’t been so caught up in the kiss, maybe you would’ve questioned it. Why you were kissing Theo when neither your boyfriend nor your best friend was anywhere in sight. Why you were feeding into the rumor mill in the shadowy corner of the common room instead of center stage where everyone could see.

Maybe you would’ve wondered why you shaved your legs, wore the dress that made your breasts look perfect, took extra time curling your hair, and reached for the expensive perfume you saved for special occasions.

But with Theo’s fingers brushing bare skin along your spine—thanks to the low back of your dress—those thoughts didn’t stand a chance.

You pulled away, laughing softly at the sight of glittery gloss smeared across his lips. You tried to wipe it away with your thumbs, but that proved nearly impossible when he kept catching your fingers in quick kisses.

"I have a present for you." You whispered, revealing the small gift bag you’d kept tucked behind your back. Theo pressed a kiss to your temple before taking it, digging through the tissue paper until he pulled out a steel flask—cool, heavy, and etched with intricate designs like something stolen from an ancient temple.

When he felt the liquid slosh inside, he unscrewed the cap and took a sip, brows lifting in surprise when the familiar taste hit his tongue.

"I cast a replenishing spell on it," You explained, "When it runs out, it’ll refill on its own."

His lips curved in a slow smile, still holding your gaze.

"I was just thinking about that day you said you’d miss my cocoa," You added, "So…I thought you’d appreciate it."

Theo chuckled quietly, looking down at the flask with an expression you couldn’t quite read—something deeper than amusement.

"Do you…not like it?" You asked after a beat.

He shook his head immediately, "I adore it, pretty girl."

Before you could respond, Mattheo’s voice cut through the music. "If you guys are done ASSAULTING OUR EYEBALLS—" You both rolled your eyes in perfect unison, "—IT’S TIME FOR CAKE!"

You followed the crowd toward the long table where the cake waited, candles flickering under the dim lights. You expected to melt into the group somewhere between Enzo and Blaise, but before you could even drift in that direction, Theo’s hand shot out, curling firmly around your wrist.

“Where do you think you’re going, Dolcezza?” He murmured, tugging you to stand at his side—his spot—right in front of the cake.

“Theo,” You hissed under your breath, “it’s your birthday, I should be—”

“You're exactly where you should be.” He cut you off smoothly, eyes glinting in the candlelight. His hand didn't lift from your waist, keeping you pinned to his side, the faint smell of smoke and cocoa clinging to him like a second skin.

You didn’t have time to argue before Blaise slid over, holding out a small slip of parchment and a quill, “Here you go, mate."

Your brows furrowed, “What’s this?”

Theo took the quill without hesitation, his head bending low as he scribbled something on the paper in quick, sure strokes.

“It’s an old Nott thing,” Mattheo explained, “Birthday boy writes down a wish, folds it, and keeps it with him until it comes true. You’re not supposed to tell anyone what it is.”

Theo didn’t even glance up, just folded the parchment neatly, tucking it into the inner pocket of his jacket with deliberate care.

“And you keep it on you?” You asked, curiosity getting the better of you.

“Always,” Theo said simply. His gaze met yours, sharp enough to make your stomach twist, “A wish doesn’t work if you let it out too soon.”

You should’ve looked away, but there was something about the weight of his stare—like whatever he’d written down was more dangerous than anyone else in the room realized.

“Now,” Mattheo groaned, breaking the tension, “can we please sing so I can eat some damn cake?"

You laughed, but your mind was already racing, replaying the way Theo’s lips had curved just slightly when he’d sealed the parchment away.

And for the first time, you wondered if that wish had anything to do with you.

The common room was a haze of dancing bodies, flashing lights, and the faint tang of cider and punch. You’d just come back from the corridor with Theo, the warmth of his hand still lingering on your waist, when Mattheo leaned over with a mischievous grin.

“You need to try this,” He said, holding out a tall glass filled with a neon-colored drink. At the bottom, a small, bright candy rested like a hidden treasure, “It’s our latest cocktail—sweet and sour. The sweetness of the drink with the sour candy at the bottom is fucking good.”

You raised an eyebrow, examining the glass that looked radioactive, "This looks cursed."

"It's good, baby," Theo said smoothly, eyes sparkling as he handed you the glass, “You should give it a try.”

With a shrug and a laugh, you took a sip. At first, it was sweet, almost pleasant. Then your tongue hit the candy, and your eyes widened in shock. Your face scrunched up immediately.

“Oh—oh my god,” You choked out, spitting it back a little, "This is awful! I feel like I'm sucking on a lemon!"

Theo chuckled low, leaning closer, his hand brushing against yours as he reached for the glass. “Give it here.” He murmured, voice teasing.

You held the candy between your teeth, letting him tilt your head and take it into his mouth. The kiss that followed was slow, teasing, and intimate, the world around you fading as he skillfully removed the candy without breaking the connection between your lips. Your hands found their way into his hair, fingers tangling naturally like it does whenever you kiss.

When he finally pulled back slightly, forehead resting against yours, his eyes shone with playful delight, "You're crazy," He said, swishing the candy around in his mouth, "This is delicious."

"You two are disgusting." Mattheo muttered again, shaking his head.

You’d slipped out into the quieter corridor for a moment’s reprieve. The cool dungeon air was a relief after the heat of the crowd.

You were seated on one of the stairs, catching your breath, when footsteps echoed down the hall. You didn’t turn, but the scent of Theo hit your senses the moment he draped his jacket around your shoulders and settled beside you.

“Hi.” You murmured, leaning your head down to rest on your knees, offering a small, tired smile.

“Hi. You alright?”

You nodded, “Just a little tipsy. I needed some air.”

“Oh, I know just what to do about that.” He teased, reaching into his jacket and pulling out the flask you had gifted him. You chuckled as he opened it, handing it to you, steam curling into the cold air. You took a few sips, letting the warmth spread through you.

“When I said I was going to miss your cocoa,” He began, a hint of mischief in his voice, “I didn’t mean you should give me a lifetime supply.”

Your brows furrowed, a pang of worry settling in your chest. Did he not like the present?

"I don’t want the flask if it means you won’t be around to share it with me,” He said softly, leaning closer so only you could hear, “I’ve always just wanted you."

You took a sharp inhale, your heart beginning to pound against your ribcage.

"Are—Are you being serious?"

He didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he reached into his pocket and held something out between two fingers—a folded slip of parchment, worn at the edges, looking as though it might crumble if handled too roughly.

You frowned, “What’s this?”

“My birthday wish from last year.” He said simply.

You blinked, “Won’t giving it to me mean it won’t come true?”

His lips curved into that maddening, calm smile, “Take a look.”

You hesitated, then unfolded the paper. The ink was slightly smudged, but the words were unmistakable:

I wish for (Y/N) to notice me.

Your stomach flipped in disbelief, “Theo…”

“I’ve been in love with you for as long as I can remember.”

The air seemed to thin around you, your pulse loud in your ears, “You… you’re serious?”

He nodded, “I’ve felt this way for a long time. I thought last year would finally be the year I made my move, but then you started dating him, and I thought I lost my chance.”

“I didn’t know you felt that way.” You whispered.

“I was ecstatic when you finally turned your attention to me that night. Not the way I wanted at first, maybe, but I was never going to let that chance get away from me.”

You didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, your chest tightening with a mix of disbelief and relief. Theo’s eyes were locked on yours, calm and steady, but filled with something so raw it made your heart thrum.

Your hands trembled slightly as you reached up to brush a stray lock of hair from his face, fingers lingering at his jaw. “So… all of this—” you gestured between the two of you, “—the fake dating, the kissing, the… everything… it wasn’t just to get back at them?”

He chuckled softly, shaking his head, “No. That part was fun, I’ll admit. But it wasn’t the real reason I wanted to be close to you.” His hand slid over yours, palm warm against yours, grounding you, “I’ve wanted this… wanted you… for longer than you can imagine.”

Your heart lurched, a mixture of relief and longing flooding through you, “Theo…”

He leaned closer, forehead resting against yours, voice just above a whisper, “So, what do you say? No more pretending. No more games. Just… us.”

Something inside you broke—years of tension, uncertainty, and longing unraveling in a single heartbeat. You cupped his face in your hands, leaning into him fully, “Okay,” You breathed, “Just us.”

His grin widened, a triumphant glint in his stormy eyes, and he kissed you—slow, deep, and deliberate, every touch and press of his lips sealing the promise between you. No pretense, no lies. Just the two of you, finally, fully together.

The two of you stayed there for a while, wrapped in each other’s warmth, the distant thrum of the party fading into nothing. The world had narrowed to just you, just him, and the long-awaited start of something neither of you wanted to hide ever again.

Bonus:

Breakfast in the Great Hall felt different that morning.

You’d think that after months of this routine with Theo, another morning spent at his side wouldn’t feel so significant. But it did. Everything felt sharper, warmer. You didn’t feel like you had to prove anything anymore. You didn’t feel like you had to put on a show. The hand holding yours was hidden beneath the table, but you didn’t care if anyone saw—or if they didn’t. It didn’t matter anymore.

And yet, despite everything shifting, you and Theo were still the same—falling into that easy rhythm, voices low as you traded quiet jokes. Only now, you noticed the way it felt different. How intimate it was when Theo’s gaze lingered not just on your eyes but flickered, unconsciously, down to your lips. How he looked at you like you were the only thing in the room, even in the middle of the bustling Hall.

How had you missed all the signs before?

Theo was brushing a crumb from the corner of your mouth with his thumb when the bliss cracked.

“Everyone!”

The word boomed too loud, slicing through the clatter of cutlery and low chatter. Your entire body stiffened before you even turned around. Of course. Him.

Your ex stood in the aisle, puffed up with self-importance, chest thrown back like he’d just mounted a stage. He had that smug gleam in his eyes, the kind that screamed he’d practiced this speech in the mirror ten times over.

“I think it’s time you all knew the truth about Theodore Nott and (Y/N) (L/N).” He announced, every syllable dripping with fake triumph. He cut a sharp look at you, then Theo, then back to the sea of students now staring.

The Hall quieted, curiosity winning out. Even the Gryffindors craned their necks, waiting for drama.

“They’ve only been pretending to date,” He declared, letting the word hang in the air, “To make me jealous.”

His voice swelled with self-satisfaction, like he’d just solved some grand mystery.

Your hand tightened around Theo's.

“You don’t have to keep pretending just to get back at me. I get it. I was angry too when we ended, but—” He paused, putting on his most magnanimous smile, “I’ll forgive you. I’ll take you back.”

The silence that followed was… brutal. Half a beat too long.

Slowly, you let your gaze drift—not at him, but across the Hall, to where his so-called new love sat, her expression crumbling as her boyfriend publicly begged for you.

A smirk ghosted across your lips, satisfaction unfurling in your chest. I warned her, you thought. You told her he’d betray her the same way he’d betrayed you. You’d just assumed he’d run to someone new. But no—he’d come crawling right back. Pathetic. Maybe you really were just too good to forget.

A ripple of laughter broke out along the Gryffindor table. Somewhere down the line, a Ravenclaw girl snorted so hard pumpkin juice sprayed out of her nose. Even some of the Slytherins traded incredulous looks, smirks curling as if to say, is he serious?

"He has officially lost the plot." Someone muttered loud enough for half the Hall to hear. Someone else chortled in response.

Your ex’s confident smile faltered.

Blaise Zabini leaned lazily on his elbows, his voice carrying just enough to cut through the hush. “Pretending?” He gestured toward you and Theo with a casual flick of his hand. “Mate, the whole castle’s been gagging on their PDA for months.”

Someone else piped up, "Yeah. If that’s pretend, then they deserve Oscars. The way he looks at her—like she’s the only thing in the world—you’d have to be blind to miss it.”

You chuckled, dropping your gaze from the pathetic sight in front of you and turned back to your current boyfriend, who only smirked at you, though you could see the tenderness that lay underneath, "See? Everyone else could see I was gone for you before you did."

Bonus bonus: (Ten years later)

The day you first kissed Theodore Nott was arguably one of the worst days of your life, despite all the good that eventually came from it. The betrayal of seeing the person you loved cheat on you with your best friend was a wound so deep it had reshaped you.

Theo had always claimed he was glad he’d never experienced anything like it. Until the same thing happened to him.

“This is killing me,” He muttered, pacing the length of your shared bedroom like a man awaiting his execution. His hands dragged through his hair, his voice raw, “I hope you know that.”

Your throat tightened, but you forced an eyeroll, masking your sympathy with irritation, “Theo, it’s not that big of a deal. Will you stop getting your knickers twisted?”

He whirled on you, eyes blazing. “Not a big deal? Not a big—” He broke off, laughing bitterly, “You were so betrayed when this happened to you that you practically tore their lives apart. And now you expect me to just—what? Pretend I’m fine?”

You scoffed, folding your arms, “We are not comparing the biggest betrayal of my life with your daughter having a crush on Mattheo.”

The air went still.

Theo staggered back a step, like you’d struck him. His face twisted in horror as his hand clutched his chest. “Don’t say it out loud.” He croaked, his voice breaking.

He looked genuinely wounded, muttering under his breath as though mourning a death, “I raised her better than this…She used to want to marry me!”

Before you could roll your eyes again, the shrill ding-dong of the doorbell cut through the tension.

Theo froze mid-step, every muscle in his body going taut. Slowly, his head turned toward the door like a man staring down a firing squad.

And then—

“HE’S HERE!”

Your three-year-old's shriek echoed down the hall, followed by the thunder of little feet pounding against the floorboards. She practically skidded into the foyer, hair wild, socks sliding on the wood as she lunged for the door.

“Bianca, you know you're not allowed to open the door without us!” Theo barked, but it was too late.

The door swung wide.

Mattheo Riddle stood there, casual, self-assured, hands shoved in his pockets. A faint, rakish smirk tugged at his lips. With the leather jacket and helmet under his arm, it was easy to see why your daughter was utterly smitten. Had you not known the fool he was during school, you might have been just as captivated.

“Hi.” He drawled, eyes immediately landing on his god-daughter.

“UNCLE MATTHEO!” Bianca squealed, launching herself into his arms without hesitation. He caught her with practiced ease, lifting and spinning her once before settling her on his hip.

Mattheo shifted her higher onto his hip, grinning like he owned the place, “And who’s my favorite girl?”

“Me!” She squealed, giggling as she buried her face into his shoulder.

Theo’s jaw clenched so tight you swore you heard it crack. His knuckles whitened at his sides, and he took one menacing step forward like he was about to snatch his daughter back by force.

Mattheo, utterly unbothered, tilted his head, smirk widening. “I see someone’s cranky.” He teased lightly, holding Bianca closer with a teasing flourish.

"(Y/N) did not go through 14 hours of aggravating labour for this horrendous display."

“Now you know how I felt all those years back at Hogwarts, watching you two glued to each other’s lips like a bad romance novel.”

To be added to a taglist, please send me an ask! (I might respond to you in comments but I can’t guarantee that I won’t accidentally miss it)

Forever Taglist:

@simonsbluee

@notslaybabes

@superheroesaremyjam113263

@writers-whirlwind

@paankhaleyaaar

@superlegend216

@kaisupremecy

@ilovefictionallmenn

@aviwritessometimes

@devilslittlehelper

@notfckincreative

@workof-a-rr-t

@insideoutjulie

@tikitsune

Harry Potter Taglist:

@downbad4reid

@revesephemeres

@catiwinky

@goldfishinpainttubes

@psh-pjh

@honethatty12

@imkindofanaudiogeeksorry

@lilians17

@its-jennarose

@h1mawarii

@lookalivesunshiiiine109

@ivygreenonbricks

@navs-bhat

Theodore Nott Taglist:

@blonde-bansheee

Slytherin Boys Taglist:

@laufeysvalentine

@theodoresvalentine

@nottinmyheart

He readjusts you in his arms, tightening his hold under your thighs and back. You wince at the movement, a sharp pain radiating from your injured knee. He glances down when you hiss, a brief flicker of concern in his eyes before his gaze is back on the trail ahead of you.

He's been carrying you bridal style for miles and has yet to break a sweat. Saying you’re uncomfortable would be putting it mildly – your busted knee is throbbing and your neck is aching from nonstop effort to resist resting your face against his chest. But you don’t dare complain – not when you know he’s likely still irritated with you for being a fuckin’ klutz and getting yourself injured.

You're on thin ice as it is. One more smart-ass remark and it wouldn’t surprise you if he sits you on a tree stump and leaves you to hobble back to the car on your one good leg.

“Besides,” he continues as he looks up to the sky. “We need to keep going. It’s going to start raining soon.”

“Rain?” You follow his gaze up to the sky. It’s mostly blocked by tree branches, but from what you can see, it’s perfectly sunny. “The weather report didn’t say anything about rain this morning.”

“Can't always trust the weather report,” he sighs, shaking his head. “I trust my senses. And I can smell that it's going to rain.”

You roll your eyes with exaggerated annoyance. “And what exactly, Mr. Military Man, does rain smell like?”

You’re just testing him. He makes it too fucking easy sometimes. Plus, you need some entertainment for the last portion of this walk. Why did he have to park so far away?

“It’s… you know, earthy. Musky,” he shrugs, jostling you in his arms again. “The smell is produced by a chemical reaction with plant oils and bacteria when there’s an increase in humidity and moisture. There’s a name for it. It’s called, uh...”

“Petrichor.” You finish his sentence, and then purse your lips to resist smirking as you look up at him in amusement.

He looks down at you, eyebrows raised in surprise. “Yeah. That’s it. Petrichor.”

You find yourself staring at him for a split-second too long. “Maybe you’re smarter than you look, Walker,” you jab, trying to ignore the fact that you’d been thinking about how blue his eyes are in this lighting.

As soon as he opens his mouth to retort, a low clap of thunder rolls in the distance. You hear the pitter-patter of rain colliding against the canopy of branches above you a second before you feel the drops hit your skin.

“Shit!” you exclaim, futilely wiping the water off of your face with your arm that isn’t wrapped around his neck.

“Told you,” Walker grunts as he begins to increase his pace to a jog.

Despite the trees surrounding you acting as an umbrella, you’re both sopping wet within minutes. The rain starts as a drizzle and quickly turns into a downpour, soaking through your tactical suit. After what feels like an eternity, the red Jeep that you’d driven comes into view from where he had parked on a roadside pull-off at the edge of the woods.

He seamlessly opens the passenger side door and maneuvers you into your seat before running to the driver's side and hopping in.

“Jesus Christ,” you huff, as if you’re the one who just carried another human being through miles of woods during a thunderstorm. Walker turns the key in the ignition, violently shaking his head to rid his hair of some of the water dripping from his blond locks. The drops fly all over the leather interior of the rental car, and hit you in the face.

“What are you? A dog?” you groan, retrieving your cell phone from the glove box to call Yelena with an update.

“It’s not like you aren’t already sopping wet,” he snaps. “Now buckle up.”

You roll your eyes, only halfway paying attention to him as you scroll through your recent calls to find Yelena’s name. Just as you’re about to call her, he curses under his breath and leans over, reaching across you to yank your seat belt over your chest and lap, clicking it into the buckle.

You narrow your eyes at him, momentarily surprised. “That was unnecessary. All you had to do was say please.”

“Please stop making my job more difficult. How about that?”

“Good boy. Now, will you please drive?”

He stares at you, jaw clenched, and shifts into drive.

The two of you exchange only necessary words for the duration of the drive. You fill Yelena in on your current predicament – fucked up knee, drenched clothes, and a thunderstorm that is bordering on dangerous to drive in. She suggests getting motel rooms for the night and waiting until morning to catch a flight back to New York instead of traveling in such inclement conditions. Exhausted and uncomfortable, even you and Walker aren’t stubborn enough to put up much of an argument.

You're in a small town in northern Georgia – the kind of town that no one has heard of except for the thousand or so people that live there. One bank, one drugstore, a couple mom and pop diners, and yep, you guessed it – a singular small inn with a vacancy sign glowing in neon letters.

Walker parks as close as he can to the entrance, and then opens the door for you as you limp inside before going back out into the rain to get both his and your bags.

“Hi,” you greet the small, elderly woman behind the front desk. She looks up from her computer screen, eyes wide and brows raised when she takes in your wet, disheveled state. “I need to get two rooms for the night, please.”

She gives you a polite smile and nod before she starts clicking around the computer screen. Walker walks through the door a second later, a duffel bag on each arm.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” the woman apologizes, looking between the two of you. “We actually only have one room available right now.”

You dig your teeth into your bottom lip to resist the urge to curse out loud. Could one more thing go wrong today? What have you done to deserve such a string of bad luck?

There’s no other hotels within a ten mile radius, and this heavy rain isn’t safe to keep driving in. You’re wet, and tired, and your knee is screaming at you to lay the fuck down and ice it.

“Does the room have – is it – are there two beds?” You stutter out. Sharing a room with Walker isn’t ideal, but you figure you can cope if you have your own beds. He is uncharacteristically quiet beside you.

The woman, whose name tag reads Arlene, glances back down at the screen in front of her for a brief moment before looking back up at you with an apologetic smile.

“Sorry, dear. It’s only one bed. But it is a king…” she trails off, eyeing Walker up and down. “So there should be plenty of room.”

You exhale, brainstorming a solution to this predicament. One of you could take the room, and the other could sleep in the Jeep, you suppose. The backseat is pretty roomy…

“We’ll take it,” Walker tells her when you start to open your mouth. You look at him with furrowed brows. “What? I’m not driving anymore tonight. I’ll sleep on the floor.”

You don’t have the energy to protest. You pay for the room before you have the chance to overthink it.

It’s not like you haven’t shared rooms with your teammates before. Hell, you technically have shared a room with Walker before – Walker, and Yelena, and Ava. But never just Walker.

While you're relieved to have someplace dry and comfortable to sleep for the night, there’s a small part of you – a part deep in the pit of your stomach – that feels nervous. When it comes down to it, you trust John Walker with your life. But when faced with the realization that you're going to be sharing a bedroom with him, your thoughts flash back to being cradled against his chest for well over an hour.

You hate to admit it to yourself, but you didn’t exactly mind it. It felt secure. A little awkward at first, sure. But also safe.

And then there was the moment in the car when he took it upon himself to buckle your seatbelt. It should have pissed you off – he’s so damn bossy and impatient. It normally takes little to nothing for him to get under your skin.

Should have and normally being the key words.

You don’t know how to come to terms with the fact that it sent a rush of adrenaline through you. All you could think to do in that moment was deflect with sarcasm so that he wouldn’t pick up on the way you held your breath and your heart rate spiked at the small act of dominance.

You had every intention of catching a flight to New York and pushing those thoughts to the very back of your mind until you’re back home, where he will inevitably piss you off by leaving his dirty dishes in the sink or eating the last of your yogurts without asking you.

Instead, you’ll be spending the next twelve hours with him in a three hundred square foot room with only one bed while you attempt to not dwell on these sudden, unwelcome thoughts.

“I’m gonna go get some ice for your knee,” he announces as soon as you enter the room. He drops the duffel bags and his shield at the bottom of the bed as you begin to take off your combat boots. “There’s a diner right across the road. What do you want to eat?”

You shrug, slightly taken aback by the thoughtfulness. It dawns on you that the two of you haven’t eaten since before your flight this morning. “Oh, uh – just a burger and fries is fine. Or a salad. Or chicken sandwich. Thanks.”

He nods, not phased by your indecisiveness. “I’ll be right back.”

“Take your time,” you tell him as he starts to exit the room. “I’m just going to shower off really quick while you’re out.”

He pauses with his hand on the doorknob, turning to look at you like you’ve grown a second head. “No, you're not.”

“What?” you snap. “What’s the problem?”

“You have a bum leg,” he retorts like it’s obvious. “You can barely walk. The last thing I need is you falling in the shower and cracking your head open while I’m not here. Just wait until I get back.”

So fucking bossy. But for some reason, it doesn’t annoy you as much as it typically would.

“Fine,” you huff. “Don’t get washed away by the storm. I’m starving and can't fend for myself right now, after all.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he sighs, opening the door and rolling his eyes as he walks back into the motel hallway.

After the door clicks shut behind him, you take several deep, calming breaths. How dare you let yourself be flustered over Walker, of all people?

It’s a stretch to even call him your friend. Sure, the two of you technically live together. Go on morning runs together, and train together, and work together. Eat breakfast and dinner together most days, and spend a decent amount of free time together on your days off.

But you do all of those things with all of your teammates, too. None of them make you want to throttle their necks on a regular basis. So why is it that Walker has you so worked up?

All you know is that you need to get these wet clothes off of your body so that you can lay down without drenching the bed.

With your knee now swollen to the size of a softball, this proves to be a task that is easier said than done. You'd never admit it to him, but Walker is right – it’s probably smart that you don’t risk showering while he’s gone. You can’t put any pressure on your left leg and your balance is fucked.

Once you’re out of the wet tactical suit and changed into a pair of shorts and a crewneck sweatshirt, you finally plop down onto the bed and turn on the Roku television to find something to watch to pass the time. You prop an extra pillow beneath your knee to elevate it a bit, and silently wish that you had told Walker to stop by the Walgreens down the road to get you some ibuprofen.

You’re sure that he would if you’d just call or text him and ask, but you’ve already been quite an inconvenience today, and you don’t want to ask anything else of him right now. Maybe he has some in his duffel bag – though you highly doubt it, since super soldiers rarely have the need for over the counter pain relievers.

After losing track of time scrolling through movie titles on the TV, you select some generic looking action-comedy that you think is right up Walker’s alley. Checking the time on your phone, you realize that he’s been gone for quite a while. The diner is directly across the road from the motel, so you expected him to be back fairly quickly.

Maybe the diner is just busy? Sure, it's storming like crazy, but it is a Friday night and it’s one of the only restaurants in town.

Just when you open your and Walker’s message thread to send him a text and make sure he’s okay, you hear the beeping of a key card as it’s inserted and removed from the door lock. A second later, Walker enters the room with a few plastic bags, somehow even wetter than he was after your stroll through the forest just a little while ago.

You put your phone on the nightstand beside you, choosing to keep it to yourself that you were about to send him a message to check in on him.

Of course he’s okay. He’s a fucking super soldier. He can handle going across the road in a thunderstorm to get some food.

“Oh, hey,” he exclaims, looking at the movie playing on the TV. “I’ve been wanting to watch this.”

You can’t help but grin at the fact that you’d been right.

“Some schmuck forgot to log out of their Netflix account before they checked out.”

He passes one of the take-out bags to you. “One burger with fries and a side salad.”

You happily take the bag from him, your stomach growling at the smell of the greasy diner food.

“And,” he continues, reaching into a bag that you hadn’t noticed. “Some extra strength Tylenol.” He retrieves a small bottle from the bag and tosses it to you from where he stands at the foot of the bed.

“Oh,” you quip, catching the bottle. “Uh – thanks, Walker. I appreciate it.”

He gives an awkward shrug. “Can’t say I never did anything for you. Grabbed a few water bottles, too.”

You dig into your food in hopes that it will distract you from the way your stomach fluttered when you realized he had gone out of his way to get you the medicine – without you even asking.

It really isn’t a big deal. It’s a five dollar bottle of over the counter pills. But Walker doesn’t exactly go around anticipating the needs of others – especially not at the expense of his own convenience. Still, you know better than to read into it. You’re just tired and the events of today are clouding your judgment.

Clearly. That’s the only explanation for why you’re experiencing what can only be described as butterflies over John Walker.

Once you finish scarfing down your food, you cram the garbage back inside the take-out bag and force yourself into a standing position despite your body's protests. You desperately want to shower, even just to have a few minutes kind of alone with your thoughts.

Walker, still in the middle of eating his own burger at the small desk in front of the bed, turns his attention away from the movie and to you.

“I’m going to take a shower now,” you explain simply, grabbing your duffel bag before limping towards the bathroom on the other side of the small room. You pause at the door when you hear footsteps behind you, turning to face him.

“Are you wanting to join me? Or…?” You ask sarcastically.

“Jesus,” he huffs, taking a step back and throwing his hands up. His face flushes pink. “No. I'm just going to wait behind the door and make sure you get into the shower okay.”

You roll your eyes. “I promise I’m capable of getting in the shower.” You can tell by the hesitant look on his face that he isn’t convinced. “I’ll yell if I need anything. Okay? Sit down and finish your food.”

You step into the bathroom, shutting the door in his face as he tells you to be careful in an annoyed tone.

Holy hell. Has he always been such a mother hen?

No, there’s no way. You would have noticed it on any of the other dozen or so jobs that you’ve worked with him in the last few months. He’s being uncharacteristically protective and considerate, and despite the fact that there’s a small part of you that almost likes it, you don’t understand the sudden shift in behavior.

Once you’ve managed to get into the shower without any further injury, you stand beneath the scalding hot stream of water until your thoughts stop racing and your skin feels blistered.

•••••• By the time you finish your shower and post-shower routines, it’s just after eight o’clock. Walker retrieves some ice from the motel lobby and assembles a makeshift ice pack for your knee before going to take a shower himself.

You’re halfway paying attention to the fight sequence unfolding on the screen in front of you when he exits the bathroom in only a pair of black sweatpants. No shirt, hair dripping, and skin flushed pink from the heat of the shower.

Taken by surprise, your eyes freeze on him as he walks by you. Luckily, he doesn’t notice your gaze and you snap out of it before he turns to face you as he pulls a t-shirt from his bag and then yanks it over his head.

Six foot two and well over two hundred pounds of pure muscle – you’re not blind. He looks damn good, but you’re not about to let him know that you think so.

Fucker. There’s no way that was an accident. How does someone remember to take a pair of pants with them into the bathroom but somehow forget their shirt?

You bite your tongue, holding back the smart-ass comments that threaten to spill from your mouth. Something in your gut tells you that’s exactly how he’s hoping you’ll react, and you aren’t going to give him that satisfaction so easily.

“Are you ready to go to sleep? Or do you want to keep watching the movie?” You ask instead.

You’re ready to turn the lights off and pass the fuck out, but he'd been a good partner today, and only a fraction as annoying as he normally is, so you figure it won’t kill you to show a little consideration for his wants, too.

Maybe it's the tone of your voice or the look on your face, but he seems to pick up on the fact that you have no real desire to continue watching this movie.

“I’m beat.” He yawns dramatically, stretching for emphasis. “Carrying you for miles really wore me out.”

You grab the closest pillow to you and chuck it towards his head. “You know, I was going to offer to let you take the bed, but after that comment, I think I’ll stay right where I’m at.”

He catches it with ease and laughs as he tosses it to the ground, in between the bed and the motel door – directly beside you. He grabs a spare blanket that's folded at the bottom of the mattress and then sinks to his knees.

“I promise, I've had far worse sleeping conditions than this.”

You know he's just joking around, but something about the comment gets to you more than it should. All of the far worse places that he had to sleep during his time in the Army flash through your mind and make you feel a pang of guilt for hogging an entire king sized bed to yourself.

“What?” He asks, kneeling on the floor next to you. It hits you that you're just staring at him.

Before you can overthink it, the words are pouring from your mouth.

“Just get in the bed.”

“What?” He repeats, this time in bewilderment. He looks at you like he isn’t sure if he heard you correctly – or like you’re pulling a prank on him.

“You heard me,” you sigh, pressing the power button on the TV remote and turning it off. “This bed is huge. There's no sense in you sleeping on the cold, hard floor when you don't have to.”

His eyes flicker between you and the empty space on the bed beside you. “Are you sure? It's not that big of a deal. I can sleep on the flo—”

“John, get in the fucking bed.”

He closes his mouth, an indecipherable expression on his face. He hesitates for a second longer, and then stands up with the pillow that you'd thrown at him.

“Okay. Scoot over.”

“What?” you chuckle. “Why do I need to scoot over? Just take the other side.”

“Because I want to be closest to the door,” he says like it’s obvious. “In case someone tries to break in or something.”

You roll your eyes, reluctantly moving over to the empty space on the other side of the bed. You’re too tired to fight him on this one.

“How noble of you.”

He takes your place, slipping under the scratchy motel comforter and flipping the bedside table lamp off. The two of you are now encased in darkness – the only noise coming from a television playing in the neighboring room due to paper thin walls.

It’s silent for a moment, and you assume that you’re both going to drift to sleep without saying anything else, when he speaks into the darkness.

“You know, you called me John.”

You glance over your shoulder at him, though it’s too dark to see anything other than his silhouette. “Well, that is your name.”

“Yeah,” he replies after a loaded pause. “But you never call me John. You’ve only ever called me Walker.”

You purse your lips. He’s right – you don’t remember ever calling him by his first name in all the time that you’ve known him. Sometimes, it’s easy for you to forget that Walker isn’t actually his first name.

You exhale through your nose – something between a sigh and a laugh. “Sorry. It won’t happen again.”

“No.” His voice rises an octave. The response comes quickly, like he didn’t think before speaking. “I didn’t… I didn’t mind it,” he murmurs, his voice returning to its normal cadence.

“Oh,” you whisper.

The silence that follows feels heavy. You’re both completely still. A loud clap of thunder booms, shaking the building and breaking whatever tension was lingering between you. You exhale a shaky breath, ignoring the way your heart is beating in your chest.

“Goodnight, John.”

•••••• When you open your eyes, the room is dark except for white flashes of lightning that creep through the cracks of the motel room’s curtains.

You feel groggy and disorientated, so you know that you couldn’t have been asleep for very long. With the way that the storm is raging outside, you quickly piece together that it was a loud clap of thunder or the violent screeching of wind that must have startled you awake.

Goosebumps decorate the exposed skin of your legs and you shiver, wrapping the cheap, thin comforter tighter around your frame.

There's movement from your left and you’re reminded that you aren’t alone in this bed.

“Storm knocked the power out,” he mutters, his voice raspy with sleep.

“It’s fucking freezing in here,” you groan. Your teeth chatter involuntarily.

He snorts. “It’s not that cold.”

“Easy for you to say,” you huff. “Not everyone has super soldier serum turning them into a human space heater.”

You can practically feel the warmth radiating off of his body despite the good foot or so of space in between you. In your half-awake state, you fight the urge to move closer to the only heat source in the room.

“Well, if I’m a human space heater…” He trails off. The bed creaks as he readjusts his position, turning on his side to face you. “I could, uh.. I could help warm you up. Just until the power comes back on,” he adds quickly.

The offer takes you by surprise. If you weren’t so cold, you’d probably burst into laughter. But you’re shivering too much to find anything funny right now. Why the hell did you only pack shorts to sleep in?

Oh, yeah. Because it's spring time, and you’re in Georgia. It shouldn’t be this cold right now. But thanks to the heavy rain and the motel’s lack of proper insulation, it feels like the middle of a New York winter night.

“Really?” you ask lamely. You feel dumb for even considering the offer.

“I mean…” You feel him shrug. “Yeah, why not? You’re cold, I’m warm. You did me a favor by letting me sleep in the bed, so…”

Cuddling with Walker. If your teammates found out, they’d never let either of you hear the end of it. You can hear Alexei’s teasing now.

“Or you can just be cold. I’m fine either way,” he adds when you’re quiet for a moment too long. He starts to turn in the opposite direction when you grab him by the shoulder.

“No, wait,” you mutter, embarrassment creeping over you at the realization of what you’re about to do. “Okay.”

He settles back down, this time laying with his back against the mattress. He extends his arm closest to you, a silent offer for you to tuck yourself between it and his side. Before you can overthink it any further, you close the distance between your bodies and press yourself against him.

Your head rests against his chest, and you throw your arm over his stomach. He wraps his arms around you without any hesitation, and you have to remind yourself to breathe. When you do, you let out a noise that can best be described as a sigh of contentment.

He’s even warmer than you'd imagined. You instantly stop caring about how weird this is and focus on the relief that his body heat provides.

“Jesus, you’re shaking like a leaf,” he murmurs. He runs a large hand up and down the side of your arm, warming you further with the friction.

You snort. “Believe it or not, I wasn’t lying about being cold just to snuggle you.”

“Don't worry. Your secret is safe with me.”

You pinch him just below his ribcage in response to his teasing. His chest vibrates with silent laughter, but he doesn’t say anything else.

You're both fast asleep within minutes. The power comes back on at some point during the night, but you’re still entangled with each other when the sun pours through the curtains come morning time.

•••••• Neither of you mention your night in the small Georgia inn after checking out the next morning.

Not on the drive to the airport, or the flight back to New York, or at any point since returning home almost a month ago.

For the most part, things go back to normal between the two of you. You continue to work together, and train together, and banter persists as it usually does when your other teammates are present.

But more and more often you’re noticing that as soon as you find yourselves alone for more than a few minutes, John suddenly has every excuse to be elsewhere.

It’s not as if you used to spend all of your free time together – but the fact that he suddenly wants to take the stairs up to the twentieth floor of the Watchtower instead of taking the elevator with you is a little odd.

It doesn’t bother you at first. You think it’s weird, but why should you let it get to you? You weren’t exactly the best of friends to begin with.

Then, there starts to be moments that you find your thoughts drifting to him when they shouldn’t. When you get caught in the rain and you think back to how he looked with raindrops dripping from his hair and beard, and when you wake in the middle of the night and it’s a little too chilly and you remember how it felt to be pressed against him in the freezing motel room.

You’ll lie awake at night, wondering if he’s in his bed, directly across the hallway, thinking about the same thing as you.

It's fucking stupid.

Like right now – you’re all at a lavish gala, thrown in celebration of Sam Wilson’s Avengers and The New Avengers(z) coming together to form one big, happy super team.

There’s a full service bar, unlimited hors d’oeuvres, and good music – you should be having a good time.

Instead, you’re staring across the room at the back of a dumb blond super soldier’s head while a reporter attempts to ask you questions about who designed the dress you’re wearing.

“I’m so sorry,” you interrupt her. “I just remembered I have to… go to the bathroom. Will you please excuse me?”

You don’t wait for her to answer before you begin walking across the dance floor without a concrete idea as to what you’re going to say or do when you reach him.

“Hey,” you greet him casually. He turns to you at the sound of your voice, a look of mild surprise on his face. There’s a sudden, undeniable fluttering of butterflies in your stomach. He looks too handsome with his suit and tousled hair.

“Did you try the goat cheese and salami stuffed dates?”

“Uh – no,” he shakes his head, confusion taking over his features. “No, I guess I must have missed those.”

“That's too bad. They’re fucking delicious.”

He cocks a brow at you. “That’s good to know.”

Well, there goes your ice breaker.

It’s the longest conversation the two of you have had by yourselves in weeks, but there’s a level of awkward tension that you just don’t know how to shake – and it obviously isn’t going to go away on its own.

You toss the rest of your drink back before biting the bullet. “Can we, uh – do you mind if we go somewhere a little more quiet so that we can talk?”

As soon as you get the last word out, Valentina walks up and grabs you by the arm.

“There you are,” she says through gritted teeth. There’s a smile plastered across her face, but her voice gives away her irritation – at what, you never really know or care. “I have been looking everywhere for you.”

You sigh, unable to hide your irritation at her timing. “What is it, Val?”

She fake laughs, waving to someone off in the distance. “John, would you be a dear and get me another drink while her and I have a short chat? Thanks so much.”

John's annoyance is palpable. He glares at Valentina with daggers, clenching his jaw as he storms off in the direction of the bar.

As soon as he’s out of ear shot, she turns to you. “I need a favor.”

You resist rolling your eyes in case there’s any cameras pointed in your direction at the moment. “I’m here, aren’t I? Is that not enough of a favor?”

She ignores your quip, pointing to where Sam, Joaquín Torres, and Bucky are mingling with a few random attendees.

“I need you to dance with him.”

“Dance? With Bucky? Why?” You sputter the words out, not expecting that to be her request.

“Not Bucky,” she shushes you, plucking your empty martini glass out of your hand. “The young, cute one in the middle.”

“Joaquín?” You exclaim. “I barely know him.”

You can count on one hand the number of conversations you’ve had with Joaquín. You have no problem with him – he's good at his job, a team player, and he’s enjoyable enough to be around. But the last thing on your mind right now is dancing with a man you hardly know.

“That’s the entire point of this whole thing.” She gestures dramatically to all of the people around you. “Bringing the two teams together. It’ll show people how well everyone is getting along. Ava has already agreed to have a dance with Sam.”

“Jesus Christ,” you mumble beneath your breath.

“I’ll give you an extra week of paid vacation days,” she offers before you can argue any further.

You know she isn’t going to let up. Valentina is nothing if not persistent. Truthfully, you just want her to leave you alone so that you can get on with your night – the extra paid time off is just a bonus.

“One dance and one dance only.”

You walk away from her before she can give you any half-assed words of gratitude.

On your way over to where Joaquín is talking to Bucky and the others, you glance around the crowded room for John. You don’t see him anywhere, and you can’t help but feel the slightest inkling of disappointment.

What would you say to him even if you did happen to run into him right now, anyway? Valentina is making me dance with Joaquín and I really hate dancing but for some reason I don’t think I’d mind it nearly as much if I was dancing with you?

Yeah, right. You’d probably just make awkward small talk about the fucking appetizers again.

You do your best to pretend that there's nothing else on your mind for the few minutes that you talk to Sam, Bucky, and Joaquín, but you can’t stop yourself from glancing around the room every other minute.

“Are you ready to give all of the reporters something super exciting to take pictures of?” You ask Joaquín as he guides you to the middle of the dance floor.

There’s a few other couples slow dancing to the live, classical piano music that fills the venue, so you shouldn’t stick out too much, but of course reporters start flocking around with their cameras when they see a member of the New Avengers(z) and the new Falcon slow dancing.

“Don’t be nervous,” he tells you as he takes one of your hands in his, placing the other on the small of your back. You lift your arm to his neck and begin following his slow, rhythmic steps to the music. “Sam and Ava are going to dance any minute now, and then all eyes will be on Captain America and the infamous Ghost.”

“Me? Nervous?” you scoff playfully. “I’m not nervous.”

“Could have fooled me,” he shrugs. “You looked like you might puke when Valentina first asked you.”

He guides you into a gentle spin, clearly far more experienced with all of this than you. When he does, you catch a brief glimpse on John. He’s standing several yards away with his hands in his pockets and a stoic expression on his face – looking right at you and Joaquín.

You nearly trip over your own foot, but Joaquín catches you and quickly gets you back on rhythm.

“I’m sorry,” you mumble. “I hope you don't take it personally, because it's nothing against you. At all. Dancing just isn't my forte, and I've kind of… had a lot on my mind.”

He looks behind you for a moment before meeting your eyes with a curious smirk. “Would that happen to have something to do with why Walker is looking at me like he wants to bash my head in with his shield?”

“What?” you exclaim, nearly stumbling again. You have to resist the urge to look over your shoulder where John is standing. “Don’t be crazy. He… wouldn't do something like that again.”

Joaquín throws his head back in laughter. “I don’t know about that. I think he just might over you.”

You roll your eyes. “I think you just might be exaggerating.”

“Maybe,” he shrugs. At that exact moment, Sam and Ava begin dancing just a few feet away from you and Joaquín. All of the reporters suddenly lose interest in the two of you.

“Or maybe not. Only way for you to find out is to chase him down and ask him, I guess.”

“Chase him down?” you repeat, looking over your shoulder to see John walking directly towards an exit.

Shit.

“Go on,” Joaquín encourages. “I think it’s safe to say we have given Val the photo op that she was hoping for.”

You give his hand a grateful squeeze before letting go. “Thanks, Joaquín.”

You really fucking wish you weren’t wearing heels right now. As fast as you can without twisting an ankle, you make your way across the dance floor, heading straight towards the hallway that you saw John enter just a few seconds prior.

There's a voice in the back of your mind screaming that you don't even know what you’re going to say when you manage to catch up to him, but that doesn’t stop you from putting one foot in front of the other until his large frame comes into view.

“John!” You call. He stops right away, though he hesitates for a moment before turning to face you. His face is relatively expressionless, but there's tension in his jaw.

“You okay..?” You ask. “Where are you going?”

“I’m fine,” he snaps. “I just need some fresh air. Is that okay?” He starts to walk away again, but you reach out and grab him by the hand.

“Is it okay if I come with you? I could use some fresh air, too.”

He pulls his hand out of your grasp – not violently, not harshly, but yet it still stings.

“You sure about that? I would hate to keep you from Torres for too long.” There’s a hint of venom in both his stare and tone. He starts to walk away again, and it takes you a moment to react.

Maybe Joaquín was right, after all.

His strides are long and quick. By the time you start walking after him, he’s already turning the corner of the hallway and out of your sight.

“Fuckin’ hell,” you mutter. You pause long enough to yank off the obnoxious stiletto heels that had been killing your feet since you’d taken your first steps in them tonight. With your shoes in hand, you all but sprint down the hallway after him.

The second that you turn the corner of the hallway, it feels as if you have collided with a brick wall.

A brick wall that smells like sandalwood and cedar.

“Jesus!” John exclaims, barely even stumbling when the front of your body slams into his back. “What the hell are you—”

“I like you,” you interrupt him. His mouth snaps shut, and his eyes go wide. The martini that you you’d finished earlier threatens to come back up, but you swallow and force yourself to continue.

“I like you, John,” you repeat, softer. “I was only dancing with Joaquín because Valentina told me to. I know things have been… weird, ever since Georgia. You can go back to avoiding me like the plague, if that’s what you want. I just needed you to hear—”

The next thing you know, his large, calloused hands are cradling your face and his lips are on yours.

It takes you a second to realize what is happening, but when you do, you're kissing him back like there’s no chance of an unsuspecting stranger walking down this hallway at any moment. You drop your shoes to the floor so that your hands are free to trail up his chest. You grip fistfuls of the satin material of his suit in your hands and pull him closer to you.

Without ever taking his lips off of yours, he backs you against the wall of the corridor. His tongue dances along your bottom lip and you open up for him, your brain turning to static white noise as he slips inside your mouth.

He tilts your head, deepening the kiss. He’s all you feel, smell, and taste – the two of you may as well be the only two people in this entire building right now. It's too easy to forget that you’re at a very public gala, and that any person with a camera could snap a picture of him pinning you against the wall and kissing you senseless.

You let out an involuntarily whimper into his mouth, and he pulls away as if it physically pains him to do so.

“The only reason I’ve been avoiding you like the plague,” he quotes your words, using the pad of his thumb to trace the swell of your bottom lip. “Is because I haven’t been able to stop thinking about doing that for the last month. Ever since you fell asleep with your head on my chest. Ever since I carried you through those woods…”

He trails off, leaning down to bring his lips to yours once more.

This kiss is slower – delicate and intentional in a way that the first one was not. As if he's trying to commit it all to memory. His hands rest on your hips, and yours in the short tufts of his hair.

“This is all I have wanted to do.”

“So…” you start with a nervous laugh. You smooth the fabric of his suit that you had bunched in your fists back to its original state. “You like me too, then..?”

He laughs, tilting your head up to meet his gaze. “I’m sorry, did I not make that obvious?”

“Nah. I think I need to hear you say it,” you hum.

He sighs, and then places another gentle, soft peck to your lips that ends sooner than you’d like. “I like you. You drive me crazy, but I like you so much that it hurts.”

▪︎▪︎▪︎▪︎▪︎▪︎

He feels the burn up the sides of his neck to his ears as he stammers, clamoring to put his bag down and straighten out his suit. You look nice today, he notes. You look nice every day, even as you stand before him, scowling. All he can think about is how pretty you look and how mesmerizing the red of your lipstick is.

“Y-yeah, sorry,” he finally apologizes, snapping to as he realizes you were waiting for him to respond. “The fight with Superman this morning ended up shutting down the A-Line, so I had to walk.”

You don’t even try to disguise the way your eyes roll at his excuse. “Superman, of course,” you mutter under your breath before raising the manila folder you were holding. “Here are the edits for the article you gave me yesterday, and remember, you still owe me the draft for the Crane case.”

“Geez, let the guy breathe for a second before jumping down his throat as soon as he gets in,” Jimmy Olsen comments with a grin as he saunters over, grabbing another cup from the holder on Clark’s desk. He pats Clark on the shoulder with a faint ‘thanks, man’ all the while pretending you’re not glaring daggers at him as he falls into his chair, sipping happily on his coffee.

You point the folder at Clark, who stands there awkwardly as you turn your fury to Jimmy. “He wouldn’t need a chance to breathe if he got here on time like the rest of us,” you fume. Jimmy holds his hands up in surrender, sending a sympathetic smile to Clark before ducking his head and turning back around to face his monitor. As much as Jimmy loves Clark, he was not going to put himself in front of your wrath for him.

When you turn back to Clark, he at least has the decency to look apologetic, hunched in a way to make himself appear smaller, and the corners of his lips pulled into a remorseful smile. You curse his dimples silently in your mind. “I was hoping getting you a coffee might soften the blow of me being late… again.”

You look down at the two remaining cups and see your name written in Clark’s chicken scratch handwriting with a wobbly smiley face drawn next to it. The sticker with the order on it displaying that he’d gotten you your favorite from the shop down the road that you loved to go to whenever you managed to pull yourself away from your desk for longer than ten minutes. That is to say that it is a luxury around here.

Your eyes narrow and lips purse for just a moment before you shove the folder into his chest, and he scrambles to catch it before it hits the ground. “I’m serious, you better have it to me by six P.M., Perry has been on my ass about it,” you assert before plucking your coffee from his desk and turning to walk back to the editor block, the click of your heels like a siren song that has his eyes following after you trailing up your form before settling on your plush backside before he realizes what he’s doing and looks away quickly, suddenly very interested in the broken ceiling tile above his desk.

He hears a snort of laughter and glances back over at Jimmy, who is not even attempting to hide his shit-eating grin. “What?” Clark asks.

Jimmy shakes his head in disbelief. “Dude, you have it so bad.” Clark dares to look confused as to what Jimmy is referring to. He motions to you and Clark can’t help but to sneak another peek at you as you’re stopped in the middle of the bullpen talking to one of the summer interns, the stern brow you’d had with him has softened as you’re inevitably explaining something you have already gone over at least twice with her before with far more patience than you ever afforded Clark.

Clark doesn’t even realize the dopey smile that works its way onto his face as he stares until Jimmy snaps his fingers. “Yeah, see! That!” He points at Clark’s face, which has now settled into what could only be described as a pout.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Clark insists.

Jimmy groans as he spins in his chair. “Just ask her out already, the worst thing she could say is ‘no’.”

Clark’s brows furrow. “Actually, the worst thing she could say is ‘you’ll be hearing from HR’.”

Lois rolls out from behind her desk, looking a bit more chipper than five minutes prior, cup of coffee still securely in her hand. “Fired for sexual misconduct would look really bad with future employers,” she teases.

Clark gives her an exasperated look, and Jimmy waves his hand at both of them dismissively. “I’m telling you, there’s no way she’d say no or report you to HR.”

“Jimmy, I hate to break it to you, but she cannot stand Clark,” Lois informs.

“Yeah, she can’t—” He whirls around to look at Lois, a distraught look on his face. “What do you mean she can’t stand me?”

“Clark, you’re always submitting drafts to her late —” “Yeah, because I get really nervous and end up re-writing it like five times before I give it to her.” “— You’re also always showing up late for work—” “I can’t help if the city is attacked and an entire subway line gets shut down!”

Lois gives him a sharp look, and he swallows, something unspoken between them that Jimmy at least doesn’t pick up on.

“Listen, some women just aren’t impressed with the whole… naïve farm boy vibe you got going on,” Lois finishes with a shrug. “Don’t take it so personally.”

Clark looks to Jimmy for some backup, and luckily, the redhead takes pity on poor Clark, coming to his friend’s rescue. “Lois, I respect your opinion on this matter as a woman, but trust me, she may seem like she’s not impressed, but—”

“Oh, don’t even give me that she’s playing hard to get spiel,” Lois rolls her eyes with a disbelieving smile on her face.

“—But, I think she’s playing hard to get.”

“Oh my god, you’re both HR violations waiting to happen,” she chides before taking another sip of her coffee.

“Aw, c’mon, look, you made him sad.” Jimmy gestures to a very downtrodden Clark, who is simply staring in the general direction where you had disappeared back into the editor block with a visible frown on his face.

Guilt creeps up Lois’s spine, and she sighs. “Listen, if you really like her, then just ask her out already and spare us having to endure the puppy dog looks.”

“There ya have it,” Jimmy nods. “Lois Lane approved office romance.”

Lois lets out a bark of laughter as she and Jimmy dive into their own conversation, leaving Clark to his thoughts. He drops into his seat, starting to look over the edits you’d handed him. The amount of markups on the page doesn’t even surprise him. Bright blue ink scratches out entire segments of sentences, circling others, neat handwriting tucked into the margins explaining each cut and need for clarification.

The first article you edited for him had been even worse. There was more blue penned onto the page than black printed ink. You had torn his article into shreds, the one he had shyly placed into the tray on your desk after he had tried to email it to you, only to be told you only accepted printed copies of drafts, something none of the other editors requested.

(Lois would later tell him that you preferred having something physical in your hands when you edited, and she’d made the same mistake in her first week)

He had been so proud of that article when he’d handed it over. Less so when you’d given the folder back to him with nothing more than a raised eyebrow before walking back to your desk, it took all of five minutes before he’d shown up in front of you, the marked-up draft crinkled nervously between his hands, clearly upset by the sheer amount of edits.

You had stared at him, unblinking, as he stammered all over himself, waiting until he talked himself into an awkward silence before saying anything. Dealing with uppity journalists who took personal offense to edits was nothing new to you. “If you don’t make the edits, then I won’t approve it and it won’t go to print,” you’d said simply. “Unless you’d like to make an argument for the run-on sentences?”

There wasn’t any malice in your voice, and that was the moment Clark realized it wasn’t personal, it was just your job, and you were not just good, but great at your job. He must have been as red as a tomato by the time he turned and fled back to his desk with his tail tucked between his legs.

He made the edits, and when Perry walked by his desk the next day, he was complimented on the pacing and tone of the piece. It didn’t make the front page… not even second or third, but it was his first article in the Daily Planet.

You had even smiled at him and congratulated him on his first article when you were making your rounds that morning.

That was where this inconceivably tiny, bite-sized crush started.

Because even when you shredded his article into pieces, his heart sang at the tiny compliments left in the margins.

‘Good pacing here.’

‘This passage really shines.’

‘Beautiful.’

And of course, it doesn’t help that you are pretty. Walking around the office with your face done up and hair perfectly styled in outfits he doesn’t think he has seen a repeat of since starting here almost three years ago. He always feels like a mess in front of you, especially when he comes in late (which is often) and sees you standing there, arms crossed, looking like you want to go up one side of him and down the other (which you have before).

There is also the fact that you hate Superman.

Well, maybe hate isn’t the right word.

Strongly disapprove of?

He remembers the first time a clip of Superman played while you all had gathered in the newsroom. When everyone else was oohing and ahhing at Superman’s heroics (which Clark may or may not have been preening a bit at), you stood there, sipping at your overly expensive coffee with such an unimpressed look.

“Just what we need, another jackass in tights wandering around.”

Clark deflated at that.

While you never explicitly said you disliked his caped alter ego, you definitely never had anything kind to say either. The articles he submitted to you about Superman? If he had gotten those edits when he was a freshman in high school writing for the Smallville High newspaper, he would’ve never written another article again.

Entire paragraphs marked for deletion or simply ‘TONE’ in all caps next to specific passages. The worst had been when you crossed out a sentence and just put ‘No’ next to it in the margins.

“It’s a feature, not an op-ed, Kent.”

It was brutal. Even Lois couldn’t help the grimace whenever she happened to catch sight of those drafts, her and Jimmy saluting Clark when they knew he was walking over to the editor block to submit a Superman article to you.

Despite that, he looked forward to seeing you every day. You had become the person he looks for the moment he enters a room, without him even realizing it.

So much about you and the way you move through the world has been noted and categorized by Clark.

He loved the moments when he caught you while editing, two or three pens stuck in your up-do because you kept forgetting you’d placed them there and grabbed a new one each time, chewing on your bottom lip as you carefully marked up whatever draft you were working on.

He loved how you took care of the people around you in your own, sometimes standoffish, way.

“Have you eaten?” You’d asked him one day, his second year of working at the Planet. It was late, and it was just you two and a handful of others in the office working towards deadlines that were creeping far too close for comfort. He’d been having the hardest time with the beat Perry had assigned him and had worked through his lunch and any subsequent breaks.

“O-oh, I don’t really have money to order out right now,” he said, almost embarrassed. He’d just paid rent, which meant he would be living off of cup noodles and breakroom coffee until next week when his next paycheck hit.

You glanced up at him from your phone that you were tapping on. “I didn’t ask if you had money, I asked if you’d eaten,” you replied pointedly before returning your attention to your phone. “Beef and broccoli, yeah?” You confirmed, and he was a bit stunned but managed to nod in response. Warmth rolling through his chest that you remembered his food order. “I’ll get those eggrolls you like, too.”

“I can pay you back next week,” Clark offered, and you just waved your hand at him, not looking up from your phone.

“I’m not worried about it, Kent.” You walked off, calling out to the others in the office that you were ordering food, leaving Clark’s heart to simmer in your wake.

He loved how unafraid you were. How confident you were in your convictions. There weren’t many people at the Planet who would go to bat against Perry, but you did constantly. So many times, he’d walk into the newsroom to see you two having a screaming match about whether or not an article should go to print.

“We are not printing this!”

“Oh, come off it, Perry, if you want to play it safe, go work for Newstime Magazine!”

The article almost always went to print. Not without a lot of griping from Perry, and you never were smug about it. Satisfied, yes. But it was about journalistic integrity. It was about publishing articles that no other company would touch with a ten-foot pole due to the fear of backlash because no one else would do it. There were many other employees at the Planet who shared the sentiment, but you were consistently the one who fought for it, loudly.

So yeah, Clark Kent had a crush on you because why wouldn’t he? And maybe Jimmy was right, and he should ask you out.

(Or maybe he was wrong and Clark would be looking for a new job by Friday)

By the end of the day, he decides he will ask you out to dinner. Hyping himself up in the moment as he starts to finish the article that he has already rewritten twice now.

Except he doesn’t end up asking you out at all. Instead, it is five P.M., and he stands in front of your desk, freshly printed draft clutched in his hands as he watches you type away at something on your monitor.

You don’t even look up at him, and he knows that you know he is standing there.

Time stretches on for what he could only imagine to be an eternity, and he can feel his heartbeat in his throat as he waits until, finally, you push back from your desk, turning to face him. “Is there something you need, Clark?” The eye contact you make sends his heart sputtering, but the way his name rolls off your lips has his knees so weak he almost falls against your desk in a heap. Your gaze flickers down to the papers in his hand. “Is that the Crane case draft?”

“O-oh! Yeah!” He says dumbly, and when he doesn’t do anything but continue to stand there, you blink, briefly wondering if he’d suffered some head injury in the last few hours.

“Can I… have it?” you question, brows furrowed in confusion as you stare up at him.

You watch a flush creep up his cheeks, and he practically slams the folder onto your desk. “Y-yeah, of course! I’m sorry it took so long to get to you, I was having some trouble with one of the sources and…”

“I’ll have the edits to you tomorrow morning,” you confirm. “Try to get here on time, Perry wants this to run for the evening issue.”

He nods, pushing up his glasses as they slide down his nose, and pretends not to notice as you follow the movement. “Don’t worry, I’ll be on time, I promise.” You stare at him for a pause before turning back to your computer, muttering something akin to ‘I’ve heard that one before,’ and Clark is struck by the way the setting sun backlights you, wisps of gold brushing against your profile. His heart his hammering in his chest as he tries to will himself to say something, anything else to you.

“Okay, bye.”

Not that.

“Have a good night,” you call out, not looking up from the screen.

Clark shuffles away, already mentally beating himself up as Jimmy appears behind him, bag swung over his shoulder. “That was rough to watch, buddy.”

“Shut up,” Clark groans as he grabs his things from his desk. “I don’t know why there’s such a disconnect between my brain and my mouth when I’m around her.”

“Hey, I get it, man,” Jimmy nods. “She is scary, but in a really hot way—” Clark’s head snaps up, and he gives Jimmy a sharp look because he knows Jimmy’s reputation. “Relax, relax. She’s all yours, I can assure you. I think she’d eat me alive.”

As Clark follows Jimmy to the elevator, he glances back over his shoulder, seeing you still sitting at your desk as everyone else has begun to pack up for the night. You give a smile and bid another editor goodnight as she tells you not to stay too late.

He knows you will anyway.

As they step into the elevator with a handful of their coworkers, all conversing about their plans for the rest of the night, Clark decides that tomorrow he will definitely ask you out.

He does not end up asking you out tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after, as a matter of fact. Every single time he resolved himself to doing so, he felt the words turn to mush in his mouth the moment he saw you.

Once, because you had been standing with Lois in the breakroom, laughing in a way he’d never seen before, the snort of laughter so uncharacteristic and unexpected, he had walked straight into the mail cart, sending envelopes and parcels flying all over the place.

The second time, he had gone into the archives to grab some old records to reference for a story he’d been working on, and turned the corner to see you up on a stool, half bent as you tried to wrestle with a box buried on the shelf. Clark could only focus on the swell of your backside in the tight slacks you were wearing and didn’t even register that you had turned to him.

“Clark? Help, please?”

Whatever words that came out of his mouth were unintelligible as his body went into autopilot, grabbing the box you’d been battling with ease, nodding like an idiot as you thanked him before turning on his heel and walking out, completely forgetting about the entire reason he’d gone in there to begin with.

The third and final time, you weren’t even doing anything special, just sitting at your desk, humming along to the desk radio you had quietly going, sorting through papers. Clark was determined this time. He’d spent the entirety of last night rehearsing what he was going to say, all the while fighting an interdimensional creature that was terrorizing downtown.

He had approached you with confidence, and then you’d turn to face him, lips wrapped around a cherry lollipop that one of the secretaries had given out as extras from her daughter’s birthday party over the weekend.

Whatever confidence he had rapidly warped into panic as words fell out of his mouth in a jumble. Indiscernible and certainly not a sentence asking you to go to dinner with him. He stood there as you stared up at him, and he could see the stain of the lollipop on your lips and tongue.

“Clark, what?”

And then he made some sort of noise and, with haste, fled the vicinity, leaving you there blinking, wondering what just happened.

It is that afternoon that he hears you in a quiet conversation with Lois as he is once again unjamming Printer 4. You perch on her desk, leaning close to whisper to her, completely unaware that Clark can hear every single word you say.

“I think Clark has a concussion,” you inform with a solemn look on your face.

Lois almost laughs at that, but keeps her face trained in faux concern. “Why do you think that?”

“I don’t think that man has said a coherent sentence to me this entire week,” you explain. “He’s basically resorted to communicating with me in grunts like a caveman.”

That has Lois snorting with laughter, trying to hide the smile with her coffee cup as she takes a sip of the lukewarm liquid that’s been sitting on her desk for the better part of the morning. “I can assure you he does not have a concussion.”

You give her a pursed look, clearly not believing her. “Then what is his deal?”

It is at this moment that Lois makes eye contact with Clark from across the newsroom. He feels the dread build up in him as a smirk tilts its way onto Lois’s face, and he can almost see the exact moment the thought formulates in her head.

And then the building shakes, lights flickering as a deafening ‘boom’ echoes from somewhere outside. Silence settles in place of panic, as everyone listens with bated breath, hoping it was nothing to be concerned about, perhaps just some construction down the road. Until the second explosion rocks the building, and then chaos erupts.

People are scrambling all over. Clark sees you grab Lois and push her towards the stairwell, yelling at the gaggle of people who are trying to file into the elevator. “Are you idiots? Use the stairs!” That gets them moving, and Clark is moving with everyone else.

As you all get to the ground floor, you can see the source of the explosions, Green Lantern, Mr. Terrific, and Hawkgirl are fighting some idiot on a hoverboard who keeps tossing explosives around like he’s giving out candy on Halloween. Another one detonates, and a building down the street crumbles from the explosion. Debris and dust are scattering through the streets as people run from the epicenter of the fight. Cops are trying to divert traffic away, and the wail of ambulances approaches.

It’s pandemonium.

“C’mon, Kent, move it!” There’s a hand on his arm, and he looks down to find you pulling him along. The crowd around you is a shifting sea, but you’re firm and steady beside him despite the chaos. He realizes he’s going away from where he needs to be, but he lets you pull him anyway.

And then an explosion hits from somewhere above, and suddenly the air is filled with dirt and smoke, and the crowds push forward even as people sputter and try to regain their bearings. You lose your grip on Clark after getting knocked around by the surge of people, and that’s when panic sets in for you as you stop amidst the mass of people, shouting for him. “Clark?” You don’t see his massive form in the crowd of people, and your throat constricts. “Clark?!”

Someone behind you pushes, and you keep moving because it’s either that or be crushed by the swath of people. There’s a barricade another block down, and by the time you make it there, the crowd has begun to disperse, and there’s still no sign of Clark Kent. You feel nauseous as you think of the plethora of things that could’ve happened to him, though the thought of him lying dead in the street with people rushing over him is at the forefront of your mind.

You ask people as they rush by you.

“Excuse me, have you seen a guy, about this tall?”

“A man, curly hair, and glasses?”

A sonic boom cuts through the chaos, and people cheer as Superman flies onto the scene. You don’t, though. Your phone is in your hand as you search for Clark’s number, which has been unused until now in your contact list. It rings once, twice, all the way until the voicemail picks up.

“Hey, you’ve reached Clark. I can’t come to the phone right now, but leave a message and I’ll get back to you.”

You hang up and try again, ignoring the tightness in your throat when it goes to voicemail once more.

“Hey, you’ve reached Clark. I can’t come to the phone right now, but leave a message and I’ll get—”

You feel your lip wobble. And again.

“Hey, you’ve reached Clark. I can’t come to the phone right now, but leave a message—”

With Superman coming to their aid, the heroes make quick work of the lone villain. You barely notice that the crowd has waned as the heroics come to an end. Instead, you’re pacing under the awning of a building, being met with Clark Kent’s voicemail message again and again each time you call him.

You had already called Jimmy and Lois, both of whom hadn’t seen their friend, though Lois tried to convince you that he was fine. You couldn’t help the worry that nagged at you.

“Are you okay, ma’am?” Someone asks from behind you.

You whirl around, pulling the phone from your ear, and you can’t even help the wide-eyed look that appears on your face. Superman himself stands before you, bathed in the light of the setting sun that creeps through the skyline of Metropolis behind him. He’s bigger in person, you realize. Broader than you thought he’d be.

“Ma’am?” There’s concern on his face when you don’t answer.

“Yes,” you reply quickly. “Yes, I’m sorry, I’m fine.”

“Hey, you’ve reached Clark. I can’t come to the phone right now, but—.”

You look back down at your phone and press the ‘end call’ button, biting your lip.

“I’m looking for Clark,” you tell him. “Clark Kent. You know him, he’s interviewed you before. He was beside me, and then an explosion hit above us, and I lost him in the chaos, and I can’t find him, and he’s not answering his phone—” Your voice cracks, and you don’t even notice the way Superman’s face crumples with it.

“Hey,” he calls out softly as he steps closer. You feel a warm hand on your shoulder, and you look up, your eyes meeting an earthshattering shade of blue. “It’s alright,” he assures. “I’ll find him. Why don’t you go home and rest? I’ll make sure he’s okay.”

You shake your head. “No, if something happened to him, I—”

“Nothing happened to him,” he promises. “I’ll find him, and when I do, I’ll make sure he calls you, how about that?”

You want to be stubborn. You want to tell Superman to shove off. But you’re tired, and there’s a burn in your lungs from all of the dust and smoke. Gripping your phone harder, you shove the edge of it into his chest, and he looks a bit surprised, if not a little amused by the action. “You make sure he calls me,” you order, and there’s a fragility in your voice that Clark doesn’t think he’s heard before, despite the way your jaw is set. You’re putting on a brave face.

A soft smile spreads on Superman’s face. “Yes, ma’am.”

An hour and a half later, just as you fit your key into the deadbolt of your door, your phone rings. The name ‘Clark Kent’ flashes across the screen, and pure relief floods you as you pick up on the second ring. “Clark?”

“H-hey,” his soft voice comes through the other end, and you never thought you would be so happy to hear that Kansan accent. “I’m so sorry, I left my phone at the office and I finally just went back to get it.”

“Are you okay?” you ask as you close your door behind you.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m okay,” he replies.

There’s a pregnant pause between you two. You think you should say ‘okay’ and hang up, not draw out the conversation any longer than it needs to be. But you don’t. The bizarre want to hear his voice some more, tugging at you in a way you’ve never experienced before. “Don’t think you get to be late to work tomorrow just because a couple of buildings on our street exploded,” you tease, breaking through the tension of the quiet.

He laughs, and even though you’re silent, he can tell you’re smiling too. “Wouldn't dream of it,” he says.

“Goodnight, Clark.”

“Yeah, goodnight.”

Clark surprises you the next morning by not only arriving on time, but arriving early. He’s so early that it is just you two in the newsroom. The shock is written on your face as you spot him walking from the elevator while standing at the copier, eyes wide and mouth agape.

He gives a shy wave, cheeks dimpling as he smiles at you. “Good morning,” he calls out.

What he does not expect is for you to grab the stack of papers off the copier and march towards him, smacking him repeatedly with the pile of papers. “You can’t just disappear like that during a crisis!” He doesn’t flinch as he is hit. You don’t even notice how gently he’s looking down at you, too busy giving him a piece of your mind like you always do. “Like, what the hell, Clark? I thought something happened to you!”

You run out of steam surprisingly quickly and meet his gaze.  “I really am sorry,” he whispers, and you take a moment to study his face and the blue of his eyes, and you’re struck by a thought that leaves your mouth dry.

Clark is handsome.

“Don’t do it again,” you warn, giving him one final half-hearted swat to the chest that has him giving you a laugh that leaves you lightheaded. “You’re sure you’re okay?”

He smiles and nods, and when you go to leave, he can feel the end of the moment between you two rapidly approaching. He doesn’t want it to end. “Would you wanna go out to dinner with me?” he asks before he can even think long enough to get nervous about it.

You blink once, then twice as though you’re not quite sure you heard him correctly. “Dinner?”

He nods, swallowing the lump in his throat.

“Is this a date?”

He nods again and can feel his palms begin to sweat.

“Yes,” you say after a beat. He grins, dimples and all, and warmth spreads through your chest, a feeling you’re hesitant to embrace.

“Friday? Seven P.M.?” He asks.

“Gino’s?” You suggest, a lilt to your voice that isn’t normally there, and he’s mesmerized by the look in your eye as you do, by the way you’re trying to disguise the smile that itches at your face. He nods, leaning in a bit. The papers in your hand are a shield between you two, and you step back. “Don’t be late.”

“I won’t be.” He wouldn’t be.

Gino’s Italian Restaurant, Metropolis - 7:43 PM

He was late.

You didn’t miss the sympathetic looks the hostess and waiters sent you every time they passed by your table for two, which was occupied by one. Your glass of wine was nearly empty, and the bread basket was alarmingly full despite the hunger that gnawed at your insides.

You had been trying not to glance down at your phone for the last half hour, knowing that if you had gotten a text, the screen would light up. However, it had remained dark since you sent Clark your last message, asking where he was.

With one final swig, you empty the glass, catching the eye of the waiter, waving him over. “Can I have the check, please?” you ask.

After paying for your singular glass of wine, once you were out in the cool breeze of the summer night, you finally recheck your phone. The absence of any new message sent a trill of fury through you, only amplified by the news report notification about Superman fighting some gigantic monster in midtown.

“Great,” you grumble. “Let’s hope they don’t knock out the T-Line this time.”

The trek home takes far too long with people getting diverted away from the kaiju battle, and the pleasant buzz you had from the glass of wine had long since worn off as you shove through your apartment door, flinging it closed behind you as you kick off your pumps, breathing in the relief for your aching feet.

You’re desperate to get out of the dress you’d squeezed into (after spending far too long debating what dress Clark would like better on you), but the desire to get absolutely shitfaced after being stood up by your coworker was overwhelming. And that’s how you found yourself lounging on your balcony, watching Big Blue himself battle an enormous alien creature from across the city with nothing but a bottle of chardonnay to keep you company.

You stay there until long after the light show ends, just taking sips from the bottle every so often, sitting in your sorrow. Honestly, you don’t even know why you’re so upset. It’s not as though you even liked Clark all that much; you were just looking forward to a free meal.

Like, yes, he was objectively good-looking, and yes, he always remembered your coffee order. And, yes, maybe you prodded him just a little more than you did others because you liked watching him get flustered.

But you didn’t like him.

(You could have, though)

A loud knock at your door startles you from your thoughts. Your bare feet pad against the floor of your apartment as you softly step to your door, peeking through the peephole, finding none other than Clark Kent himself standing outside of your apartment.

If you were any other person, you might have just ignored the knocking, letting him stew in the silence, but you were not any other person, and with half a bottle of chardonnay in your system, you want nothing more than to give him a piece of your mind.

When you rip the door open, Clark looks at you wide-eyed and sputtering. “I’m so—”

“Oh, absolutely not,” you interrupt, shoving your finger into his (startlingly firm) chest. “You have a lot of nerve, Clark Kent.”

“I know, I know, please just let me—”

“Let you what? Explain? Explain how you left me waiting at Gino’s for forty-five minutes for you? Explain how now at—” You lean back to glance at the microwave clock in your kitchen. “—9:57 PM, nearly 3 hours after we were supposed to meet for our date, you show up at my door expecting to grovel at my feet for me to what? To forgive you?”

“No, that’s not it, please just let me explain,” he begs.

You don’t, though. “You made me look like an idiot.” Your voice is soft, and there’s vulnerability, the bite you had seconds prior, leaving your body rapidly. You can feel the way your throat tightens, and the pit in your stomach feels like it could swallow you whole. You hate feeling like this, feeling this small. Clark looks at your eyes and realizes they’re tinged red and clouded with unshed tears. He wants to throw up. “You made me feel like an idiot.”

“I’m really sorry.” His voice cracks, and it looks like he wants to reach out to touch you, but he doesn’t.

“Me too,” you say back, tone empty and despondent.

“I got you these.” He holds out a lightly crumpled bouquet that’s been hanging limply at his side this entire time. You stare at it. It wasn’t one of those grocery store bouquets, no, this one is full of your favorite flowers, clearly and explicitly curated for you.

You blink back tears and grab the bouquet, holding it close to your chest. “Thank you.”

“You look really pretty.”

“I know,” you whisper. “Goodnight, Clark.”

He doesn’t say anything as you shut the door, your gaze catching your reflection in the hallway mirror. It’s almost pathetic, you all dolled up with a bouquet of all your favorite flowers, looking like you were a moment away from the dam breaking.

And then there’s a burn at the back of your throat that you can’t ignore, and you can’t help as the tears finally fall from your eyes, you suck in a deep breath on instinct, feeling the sob try to wretch out from you. You don’t know that Clark is standing on the other side, jaw clenched, nostrils flaring as he blinks away his own tears.

The weekend passes by horridly fast. As much as you had wanted to waste away and lament about the date that never was (that you would definitely not admit you had gotten your hopes up for), you would not let being stood up consume your entire weekend; they were a precious commodity after all.

So, after spending Friday night ugly crying into your pillow, you pulled yourself together by Saturday morning. You went out to a boozy brunch with some of your college friends, took yourself on a walk around the park to enjoy the sunshine, and spent some time in your favorite bookstore buying books that you promised yourself you would read and not let sit untouched on your bookshelf like the entire neglected pile of others.

By Sunday, you were feeling better. That is, until you were getting ready for bed Sunday night and the dread hit you.

You spent the night tossing and turning, feeling like you wanted to crawl out of your skin at just the thought of having to see Clark again. By morning, it took a generous application of concealer to hide the bags under your eyes and a heavy pep talk in the mirror to even think about stepping out your door.

As with most Monday mornings, as soon as you walked into the bullpen, it was a cacophony of chaos, but at least it was chaos you were familiar with. You make your way to your desk, offering halfhearted greetings, and feel slight relief as you settle into your seat, hoping that work will keep your brain busy enough not to let the anxiety ruin your day.

Then your gaze fixes on the paper coffee cup placed in front of your keyboard. Your name is written in a familiar chicken scratch handwriting. Swallowing the lump in your throat, you swivel in your seat, looking back at the writer block to see that Clark Kent is already sitting at his desk. Hunched and fidgeting with a stack of Post-it notes as he catches your eye. His mouth tilts up into an uncertain smile.

You purse your lips, a scowl forming on your face as you grab the coffee cup, maintaining unblinking eye contact as you proceed to drop it directly into the garbage can next to your desk, and then you spin back around.

Clark grimaces. “Yeah, I deserve that,” he mutters as he looks back at the blank Word document that’s been taunting him since he got in this morning.

It wasn’t any surprise how quickly word got around about Clark’s spectacular failure. Steve had walked by his desk after the morning meeting, giving a ‘womp womp’ that made Clark nearly snap the pencil he was writing with.

“So, let me get this straight,” Jimmy slides over, munching on some yogurt and granola. “You finally ask out the woman you’ve been pining after for who knows how long, then proceed to miss the date entirely without texting her that you wouldn’t be able to make it, and then show up at her apartment with flowers, thinking that would make up for the complete lack of communication?”

Clark sighs. “Yeah, that about covers it.” His voice is muffled as he buries his face in his hands.

“Buddy,” Jimmy starts. “You really fucked up.”

Clark groans, leaning back in his seat. “Yeah, Jimmy, I know.”

He didn’t even want to look over at Lois because all she kept doing was sending him looks of disappointment the whole morning. She had stopped by your desk this morning with a grin on her face that quickly morphed into a look of horror as you recounted Friday night’s events.

Even Cat, who was usually all honeyed words with Clark, had been giving him the stink eye.

Honestly, though, no one else could make Clark feel as bad as he made himself feel about the whole thing. He had spent the weekend agonizing over how badly he had messed up with you. The sound of you crying on the other side of the door replaying in his head like his own personal version of hell.

He even called his parents.

“Oh, Clark, honey,” Martha soothed. “You wounded that woman’s pride, you just gotta give her some time to cool off.”

“I don’t know, Ma, I think I really messed this one up,” he said, pinching at the bridge of his nose as he felt the telltale pressure of tears building up.

“Now, Clark, no problem worth fixin’ is ever easy.” He couldn’t see them, but he knew Pa was nodding along. “If this girl is everything you’ve made her out to be, she’ll come around.”

The week passes by, and you coming around is nowhere in sight. Every cup of coffee he left on your desk went directly into the trash, the bouquets of your favorite flowers were pawned off to the secretaries, and the lunches were donated to the breakroom on a first-come, first-served basis.

When he went to drop off drafts for you to edit, you pointedly ignored him. To your credit, the edits you made were not as harsh as he’d thought they’d be in light of everything, though there was an apparent lack of any compliments in the margins that he always found himself looking forward to reading (and re-reading).

“Why don’t you come out tonight?” Lois asks on Friday morning. You give her a look, knowing the standing invite for Friday night drinks includes everyone in the office. “C’mon, he won’t be there, he never shows up.”

You pause, chewing at the inside of your lip, internally hemming and hawing. “I’ll think about it,” you finally concede, which is enough to get Lois to grin, a little pep in her step as she makes her way back to the writer block.

Friday afternoon, Jimmy comes sauntering over to you like a cat that got into the cream. He plants himself on your desk, ignoring your look of indignation when he crumples a few drafts you were working on with his ass. “Check out these photos I just finished developing,” he says as he spreads a handful of photos of Superman in front of you. They’re remarkably clear, some of the best pictures you have ever seen of Big Blue. “I was testing out that new lens I just got.” They were from a fight earlier this week in uptown.

Despite your frequently voiced objections to Metropolis’s favorite hero, you give Jimmy a hum of approval, picking one up to closer inspect it. “These are pretty good, how’d you get such a good shot of him in the air?” you ask.

“Climbed up a light pole,” he informs nonchalantly, grabbing some M&Ms from the candy bowl on your desk.

Your neck snaps to look at him. “James!”

“What?” He shrugs his shoulders. “Gotta do what it takes to get the shot.”

You let out a huff. “Unbelievable, you’re gonna break your neck one of these days.” You continue to sort through the photos, setting aside the ones you know Perry will submit for the front page.

“Haven’t yet,” he says, cheekily popping a few M&Ms in his mouth with a wink.

The final photo is a zoomed-in shot of Superman’s face. He’s smiling down at a few children who have gathered around him in the aftermath of the battle, a familiar softness to his face. You straighten up a bit, holding the photo closer to examine it.

“What’s up?” Jimmy asks when he sees your shift in posture.

You feel like you’ve seen it before, the blue of his eyes, the gentle tilt of his lips hinting at dimples, but the rest of the face is… wrong.

Maybe you’re losing it.

“Nothing,” you reply. “Really great work, Jimmy. Perry is definitely going to run this on the front page.”

Jimmy gives a grin.

You end up at the bar, thinking it might be good for you to let your hair down, literally and figuratively, for the night. Lois lights up when she sees you making your way through the Friday night crowd, and Jimmy has a drink in your hand before you even get a chance to sit down.

You’re listening to Cat go on and on about the guy she’s seeing, and given the debacle of the last week, it should annoy you to hear someone gush about their dating life, but the giddiness on Cat’s face is infectious so instead you sit there resting your chin on your hand with a smile on your face as you nod along asking all the appropriate questions.

It’s loud in the bar between all the people and the music playing, so you barely register the bell above the door ringing. You do, however, clock Jimmy turning to Lois and saying, “He never comes out.”

Instinctively, you turn in your seat, immediately locking eyes with Clark. He looks like he just left the office, suit coat slung over his arm and tie loosened. He’s moving through the crowd towards you, not breaking eye contact as though he’s scared you’ll disappear if you do, only to be intercepted by Lois. “Hey, Clark,” she greets, a tight fake smile plastered on her face. “Didn’t expect to see you here.”

“Uh, yeah, well, not a lot going on tonight, so I figured I’d come… socialize,” he says lamely. You don’t see the flat look that Lois gives him.

Both of them look back at you. You catch Lois’s eyes and give her a little nod of your head, calling off your (very effective) guard dog. However, she narrows her eyes at Clark in a silent warning before returning to her conversation with Jimmy, who had been watching the entire exchange while taking a very long sip of his fruity cocktail.

Clark takes the empty seat next to you. “Can I buy you a drink?” he asks, fidgeting with his tie.

You stare at him as you play with the straw of your nearly empty cup, unabashedly tracing the slopes and contours of his face. He shifts nervously under your gaze, and you can’t tell if the flush creeping up his neck is due to you or the stuffiness of the bar. You still don’t say anything as you lean forward, and he’s too stunned to move away as your hand reaches out, fingers pressing through the curls hanging on his forehead, brushing them back into a tidier position, spending maybe a bit too long smoothing back the sides. The caress of your nails against his scalp sends a tingle down his spine, and his breath gets caught in his throat.

You don’t say anything for too long, just maintaining eye contact with him, like you’re searching his eyes for something.

“Vodka cran,” you say, resting back into your seat, and Clark wonders if you found what you were looking for.

His ears are red, and he quickly turns to the bartender to wave them down and grab you another drink, getting a soda for himself. Conversation flows between the two of you in a surprisingly easy manner, given the events of the past week. Work-related mostly. Clark is doing a better job of not stumbling all over himself, something he’s silently patting himself on the back for.

“You’ve been on time all week,” you note. Clark tries not to focus on how your lips wrap around the straw or how your gloss has stained the plastic.

“Yes, ma’am,” he confirms, the gentle lilt of his Kansan accent slipping through.

You fall silent for a moment, looking at him with such clarity in your eyes that it’s almost startling, and Clark can’t help but feel like he ground your entire conversation to a halt with just two words. “I’m gonna head out.” And then you’re grabbing your purse, tossing a few crinkled bills onto the bar as a tip before standing up.

“O-oh, okay,” Clark stammers, disappointment creeping up in him.

You’re about to step away until you glance back over your shoulder at him. “Are you going to walk me home?” You ask as though that had been the plan all along and he had just forgotten.

He blinks owlishly at your question like he’s not sure he quite heard you right. “Y-yeah!” He scrambles up, nearly knocking over his barstool, and you both head out after bidding your coworkers a goodnight. Lois cocks an eyebrow at you, but you just wiggle your fingers in goodbye.

Jimmy is giving Clark some waggling eyebrows with an enormous grin on his face that Clark is pointedly trying to ignore.

The walk home is quiet. The cool summer air is refreshing on your skin after sitting in the humidity of the bar, and the couple of drinks you had have left you a little light in the head, though it’s not an unwelcome feeling; you figure you’re going to need some liquid courage tonight anyway.

When you arrive at your apartment building, Clark walks you up to your apartment. You still don’t say anything as you take out your keys to unlock your door, and Clark swallows the lump in his throat, already preparing to say goodbye. “You coming in?” You question as though it’s the most obvious thing in the world, as you step into your apartment, leaving room for him to follow in after you.

“I—” He looks like a deer in the headlights. “You sure?”

You give a nod, and he steps in, albeit hesitantly, closing the door behind him. As soon as it clicks shut, you’re on him, hand pulling at the tie loosely around his neck, jerking him forward despite the other hand firmly on his chest pushing him back until he hits the door with a thud.

He looks shocked, face flushed and pupils blown wide as he doesn’t know what to do with his hands that hover at your waist but do not touch. You’re leaning up and he’s leaning down, gaze darting back and forth between your eyes and your lips. He thinks the strawberry smell is your lip gloss, and his heart won’t stop beating symphonies into his ribcage.

He doesn’t cross it, though, the invisible boundary that’s between you, even when he feels your breath fan against his lips. “I’m giving you the chance to be honest with me,” you whisper like it’s a warning, your voice husky in a way that has his insides twisting and turning.

“Okay,” he says softly.

You don’t move away as though you’re afraid he might try to run if you do. He can hear your own heart hammering in your chest. You’re nervous, he realizes. “You’re Superman.” Your tone doesn’t suggest it’s a question. It’s a statement. You know he’s Superman, and you’re allowing him the opportunity to be honest with you about it.

“Yes.”

Your heart rate speeds up. “That’s why you missed our date.”

“Yes,” he breathes like it’s painful to remember.

You finally blink, breaking eye contact to look down, lashes fluttering against your cheeks. “You really like me?” This one is a question. This one you’re unsure about.

Clark’s hands finally find purchase at your waist. The boundary between the two of you is barely hanging on by a thread. “Immensely.” Your grip on his tie loosens, and both hands are pressed gently against his chest. It wouldn’t take much; he would just have to lean down another inch or two to bring the whole thing crumbling down, but he doesn’t. “How’d you figure it out?” he asks.

“Your eyes,” you murmur like it was an evident thing, “—and your little… Midwestern-isms.”

He can’t help the smile that spreads across his face. Oh, he was in so deep. “My Midwestern-isms?”

“’Yes, ma’am,’” you mock with a bad accent, not at all what he sounds like, and you bite your lip to hide your grin. “How does it work? Your face is… different than Superman’s.”

“The glasses,” he informs, tilting his head. “They’re hypno-glasses, make me look a little bit different, just enough.”

Your hands surge upward before you even know what they’re doing, stopping just shy as you look to Clark for permission, and he nods. As you take off the glasses, it’s like his face comes into focus when you never even realized it had been blurry before. Edges sharpen and define, his nose a little straighter, lips a little fuller, jaw a little squarer.

Moreover, he stands differently when the glasses come off. His shoulders rearrange, and he’s taller now, more confident… broader.

Superman.

“You know everything is starting to make sense,” you ponder as you set the glasses on your entrance table, fingers playing with the collar of his shirt. You’re still standing close, his hands on your hips, not allowing you to wander too far from his orbit.

“Yeah?” Even his voice seems crisper, deeper now.

“Mhm,” you hum, “—you’re constantly being late, disappearing whenever some crisis pops up…” You laugh a bit. “I’m actually kind of mad at myself for not realizing it sooner.”

“I thought you might’ve thrown a shoe at me or something,” he admits.

You pull back, giving him an incredulous look. “What?”

“With you not liking Superman and all,” he elaborates. “Figured you would read me the riot act, at least.”

You scoff, rolling your eyes. “It’s not that I don’t like Superman.”

“Oh?” Eyebrows raise on his forehead. “First time I’m hearing this.”

You shove him, lightly, though he doesn’t move, solid under your touch. “It’s this… dependency we have on him—you,” you correct. “Superman—you—you’re not our savior, and we shouldn’t rely on you to fix every problem or to always show up. We should be able to stand on our own two feet.”

“But I want to help,” he insists, and you see it in his eyes, the earnestness in them. It’s so… Clark. “When things get hard and the world needs someone to lean on, I can carry that weight.”

“And what happens when you need someone to lean on? You may have super strength and can fly and shoot lasers out of your eyes, but you’re still—”

Human.

He doesn’t pretend the implication doesn’t crash around him like tidal waves.

You pull away a bit, not out of reach, not with his hands still wrapped around your waist. “Who’s going to carry the weight for you?” There’s sincerity in your question, and he doesn’t know how to respond because he doesn’t have an answer.

“I—”

You bite your lip as if you’re uncertain whether you should say the next part aloud, nervous to speak those feelings into the universe. “I can,” you say softly.

“I couldn’t ask that of you.”

“But I want to help.” You throw his words back at him, and he’s at a loss for what to say. “You don’t have to carry it alone.”

He opens his mouth to say something, but nothing comes out, and he’s looking at you like you hung the moon. He wants to kiss you so bad, but he’s afraid of being the one to cross that line.

“Clark.”

He doesn’t know if there’s a sweeter sound than his name on your lips.

“Just kiss me already.”

Except maybe that.

He’s surging forward in the next moment, mouth hot against yours. The barrier is dust between you. He tastes like the remnants of the sugary soda he’d ordered at the bar, and a quick swipe of his tongue against your lips confirms that your lip gloss is strawberry flavored.

You walk backwards, unsteady but confident, hands firmly tugging him along by his shirt, all the while not breaking the kiss that has your brain in a dizzy fog. You can’t help the giggle that escapes as you bump into your destination, the couch, causing your teeth to clatter together.

Clark smiles against your lips as his hands lower, gripping at your thighs as he lifts you off the ground so effortlessly that it has you letting out a quiet ‘oh’. His deep laugh goes straight to your core, and he settles onto the couch with you on top of him, your hands running through his hair, gripping it in a way that has him giving a low groan.

“Is this okay?” he asks in between kisses as though you’re not actively grinding down onto him.

A whimper escapes you as his hard-on catches the seam of your pants just right. “I will actually kill you if you stop.” The normal bite of your tone has given way to desperation. Clark’s entire body warms at that.

“Yes, ma’am,” he murmurs into your mouth, hands wandering to your ass, pressing you harder down onto him while bucking up into you. He leans back for a moment, placing another peck on your lips as his fingers start making work of the buttons on your blouse. When your cleavage comes into view, accentuated by your bra, something plain and practical, you hear Clark let out a shaky breath followed by an ‘oh, golly’ that has you a giggling mess on top of him. He grins, grabbing hold of the side of your neck as he pulls you back into a kiss. “You’re so pretty.”

You nip at his bottom lip. “I could tell by the ‘oh, golly,’” you tease, though your smugness doesn’t last for long as Clark has you on your back against the couch pillows a second later.

You watch reverently as he unbuttons his shirt, shrugging it off before pulling off his undershirt. He’s like a peacock, the way he fluffs up as your mouth goes slack, seeing what he was hiding underneath oversized button-ups and baggy suits for the last three years.

“Jesus Christ,” you breathe. “What the fuck were they feeding you in Kansas?”

He shakes with laughter as he leans back down, slotting himself in between your legs so he can reconnect your mouths, hand sliding up your side to palm your breast, not waiting long to slide underneath the cup of your bra. You arch up into him as his thumb brushes against your nipple, moaning quietly into his mouth, a sound he eagerly swallows down.

He trails kisses to your cheek, down your neck, spending a bit more time nipping and biting there when you give a shaky gasp. He continues down, pressing kisses to the top of your breasts, before trailing down to your ribs to your stomach until settling right above the waist of your pants.

You barely register him unbuttoning your pants until he drags them and your underwear down in one fell swoop. You cant your hips, letting him take them the rest of the way off, trying not to giggle as he throws the heap across your living room. A problem for tomorrow you.

Self-consciousness pricks at your brain as he spreads your legs, fingertips biting into your thighs, and in the glow of the moonlight streaming in through your apartment windows, you watch him lick his lips as he stares down at you, suddenly, any self-doubt fizzles away. One hand trails up your inner thigh to your core, spreading you so he can take in more of the sight. “You’re so wet,” he murmurs before he bends down.

A breathy moan escapes you as he licks a stripe up your center. “Fuck, Clark.” That eggs him on, and he swirls his tongue around your clit in a way that has you reaching down and gripping his hair. There’s a finger prodding at your entrance and then two that are curling into you at just the right spot.

Your chest heaves as you sink further into the couch, eyes fluttering to the back of your head as your apartment is filled with the obscene noises of Clark eating you out, groaning as he mutters about how good you taste. The feeling of his spit mixed with your own liquids trailing down your ass is overwhelming, and then he sucks at your clit in a way that has your toes curling.

“Clark, please,” you beg. You can feel the band at your core tightening with each swipe of his tongue and thrust of his fingers.

He pulls back slightly, now three fingers deep, hitting a spot inside you that has you seeing stars. “C’mon, sweetheart,” he coaches. “Cum on my fingers.”

Your breath hitches at mild-mannered Clark Kent telling you to cum on his fingers. He dives back in with enthusiasm, which is all it takes as your hips buck up into his face, and he gladly lets you grind against his mouth, especially with the sounds you’re making as you tighten around his fingers. His fingers continue pumping in and out of you as you ride out your orgasm, his name on your lips like a prayer as his lips greedily drink up all you give him.

He leans back, cheek resting against your inner thigh as he watches you catch your breath and give a little whine when his fingers don’t relent, tugging on his hair. A grin works its way onto his face, and he takes pity on your overstimulated self, pulling his fingers out as he presses a kiss to your thigh before crawling back up to kiss you. You can taste yourself on his tongue as he licks at your bottom lip.

Your hands find purchase on his shoulders, drawing him deeper into the kiss, and you can feel the heavy weight of him against your thigh.

“Good?” he asks as he draws back from you, breathless.

“I think I blacked out at one point,” you respond, still feeling a little lightheaded, which is only exacerbated when he grinds his hips against yours and nips at your neck. “Now take your pants off.” You order as you push him back, propping yourself up on your elbows.

“Bossy,” he teases as he stands, unbuttoning his slacks, letting them drop to the floor. You don’t even have time to register anything else when he pulls down his briefs, and you can only stare with your mouth wide open and brows raised high on your forehead at the size of him. Clark looks a bit uncertain. “Is this okay?”

You surge to your feet and pull him down into a kiss. “It’s always the quiet ones,” you murmur more to yourself as you push him back onto the couch with no resistance and climb up onto his lap. He practically whimpers when you grind onto him. “Seriously, what the fuck were they feeding you?” You question against his lips as you slot yourself against his cock. Naked against him, you really take in how large Clark is in every capacity.

His hands have settled on the globes of your ass, letting you take the reins as you move your hips against his, the wet friction has him moaning into your mouth. “You feel so good,” he breathes. “Thought about this so much.”

“Yeah?” You ask. “Thought about me on top of you a lot, huh?” He nods and tilts his head back as you jut your hips against just at the right spot. You kiss down his jawline, whispering into his ear. “What else have you thought about? Stuffing me full of your cock?”

He stammers a bit, his brain short-circuiting at your dirty talk, and heat spreads up to his ears. “Y-yeah, thought about how good you’d look with me inside you,” he admits.

You reach down between you, grabbing hold of him, and his hips stutter up against your hand, moaning at the feel of your soft skin against his cock. The next thing he knows, you’re sinking onto him and he’s committing the hot, wet heat of your pussy to memory. The burn is expected given his size, and you whine with each inch of him you take.

Clark is a whimpering mess beneath you, brows furrowed in concentration as he tries not to move, letting you set your own pace, though the iron grip he has on your waist is going to leave bruises tomorrow. “So good, so good,” he repeats as he presses kisses into your shoulder. “Gosh, you’re so tight.”

You let the ‘gosh’ slide, given how full of him you are right now. It’s almost overwhelming the size of him, and just when you’re sure you’ve taken him all, you feel yourself slide down another inch. “Christ, you’re so big,” you whine, and you can feel his cock twitch inside of you at that.

“You can’t just say that,” he practically begs, voice cracking slightly, and he’s so tense, you can feel how taut all of his muscles are beneath you.

It’s sweet relief when you feel him bottom out in you and you stay there for a moment, letting yourself adjust, the stinging pain of the stretch not unpleasant, and when you feel more confident you’ve adjusted, you give an experimental thrust of your hips that has you both gasping.

You give another, and you can practically hear Clark grinding his teeth together, and then you raise yourself up, thighs shaking, before slamming back down. Your hands find purchase on his shoulders as you set a rhythm, a little sloppy at first as you lean forward to mash your mouths together, Clark whispering praises against your lips.

Every now and then, he leans back to take in the sight of you bouncing on his cock, completely hypnotized by the sight of your pussy swallowing him and the noises you make each time he bottoms out in you.

The rubber band begins to pull tight in your belly, and your thighs wobble, the rhythm faltering. “Clark.” It comes out as a plea. “Fuck me.”

Whatever restraint Clark has snaps at your words. One hand reaches up, grabbing hold of you by the back of your neck as the other digs into your waist, and then he’s forcing you up and down on his cock, hips jutting up to meet yours halfway, setting a bruising pace that has you keening, “Fuck—” you gasp out. “Oh god, I’m gonna—”

Your orgasm rips through you before you can even finish your sentence, and you feel like you’re drowning in the sensation as the world turns to white noise around you. “That’s it, sweetheart, you’re so good for me.”

Clark doesn’t even give you time to come down from your high as he manhandles you off of his lap, the sudden emptiness is jarring, but it doesn’t stay that way long as he bends you over the couch, hefting your ass into the air and sliding back in.

“Such a good girl,” he groans as he resumes the hard thrusts that have you gripping the back of your couch for dear life. The only thing you can focus on is the delicious slide of his cock into you, and you think you feel tears gathering at the corners of your eyes.

You’re whining, overstimulated as all hell, already feeling another orgasm beginning to bubble to the surface. “Clark, oh God, fuck—” You’re arching your back, and he hits it just right. “Ohmygod.”

A loud ‘smack’ echoes through the apartment, and you barely even register the sting on your ass cheek. “Gonna give me another one, baby?”

“Mhm,” you whine pathetically into the couch cushion. Body shaking, just trying to keep yourself up, though Clark is doing most of the heavy lifting. He reaches down, fingers circling your clit once, twice, and that’s all it takes as you buck back into him, a long, breathy moan escaping you as you cum again. It feels like every nerve in your body is on fire, and you think you’ve forgotten how to breathe.

You barely register him asking, “Where do you want it?”

Your mouth automatically babbling out, “Inside—fuck—cum inside me.”

That has his hips stuttering before he buries himself to the hilt, groaning lowly, and you can feel the warmth spread inside you. You’re both frozen like that, breathing heavily, and then Clark pulls out with a low hiss, gathering you up in his arms before collapsing back onto the couch, you cradled on top of him, pressing a kiss to the crown of your head.

“Jesus Christ, farm boy,” you finally breathe after a moment of silence, and you can feel his chest shake with laughter. You tilt your head up to look at him, and he captures your lips with his before pulling away, reaching up to caress the side of your face, tracing the contours of your cheekbones with his thumb.

“You’re so beautiful,” he breathes, and you feel your heart stutter in your chest—a feeling you welcome with open arms.

“So, if I agree to let you take me out to dinner again, think you’ll show up this time?”

He grins. “Yes.”

The weekend passes in a blur of tangled limbs and soft confessions. You tease Clark about all it took was you on top of him to get him to talk to you in full sentences, finally. He stammers and blames you for being so pretty.

On Monday, when Clark comes in late, he does so with a cup of your favorite coffee, and you give him a hard time, despite the smile on your face, with no real bite to your words. Clark is on the receiving end of some light teasing from Lois and Jimmy, who, quite frankly, are relieved they won’t have to deal with a pining Clark any longer.

(They quickly realize, though, that even being together, he still stares after you as you flit about the newsroom, possibly looking even more lovestruck)

You don’t notice him at first.

It’s a small mercy, the way New York folds its famous people into its noise. The Baxter Building is the kind of place where delivery guys take selfies in the lobby and a school field trip turns into a stampede when Ben Grimm waves from the mezzanine, but you’re only here for the public lecture in the little auditorium, “An Evening With the Fantastic Four: Science for a City.” Extra credit if you write a reflection. You came alone. You always do.

There’s a coffee cart tucked behind a structural pillar on the second floor, where the atrium’s light pours down like honey. You’re in a line of four, scrolling through a reading about mythic syncretism you’re absolutely not going to retain, and you order without looking up. Iced, oat milk, one pump vanilla. The barista slips a lid on and pushes it across the counter.

A warm shape moves into your peripheral vision. You step back to make space and a man says, soft, “That’s your order,” like maybe you’ve grabbed the wrong drink.

You look up because something in you answers to that voice, like a struck match turns. He’s got the kind of face that looks familiar because you’ve seen it on a hundred magazine covers and in a thousand reaction memes. But it’s not the celebrity recognition that knocks the breath out of you. It’s how he’s looking.

He knows how to be looked at. You can tell from the slow, careful way he stands, an instinctive framing for cameras. But right now he isn’t performing. He’s bracing.

His hand hovers an inch from the drink. The way people do when they’re offering something sacred and asking permission. When your eyes lift to his, the blue hits first—clear as pool water at noon, rimmed with dark lashes, so bright they look almost impossible in this dull fluorescent halo. Those eyes lock on you like they’ve found a star they thought burned out.

“I, uh— sorry,” he tries again, and there’s a half-smile that doesn’t know if it has the right to exist. “You always put the lid on before the straws here. I forget. Every time.”

“Every time?” You don’t mean it to sound like a challenge, but it slips out dry and curious. “You’re a regular?”

“Painfully,” he says. The corner of his mouth twitches. There’s a small rustle behind you as the line shuffles forward. He sidesteps to clear the lane without taking his eyes off you, like moving too fast might spook something. “You like it iced. Oat milk. One pump vanilla.”

You blink. “Do I?”

He flinches like you’ve thrown a pebble that found a bruise. “I— it’s on your ticket.” He nods toward the little sticker. “Sorry. Not a— not a weird thing to say.” His voice lowers, careful. “Are you here for Sue’s talk?”

The auditorium doors sigh open down the hall. You bounce the cup against your palm to shake the ice and study him. He doesn’t push. And that’s what makes you believe him a little. The ones who want something push.

“I am,” you say. “You?”

“Every time,” he repeats, softer, as if he’s decided to lean into whatever this is. “I’m Johnny.”

“I know.” You smile because it feels rude not to. “I’m… Y/N. Hi.”

His mouth pulls into a genuine curve that looks like sunlight caught in the crook of his lips. The blue of his eyes warms, like the color itself leans closer. “Hi, Y/N.”

He lets you walk ahead. He follows with that averted, attentive air— a careful distance that feels like orbit, not chase.

In the auditorium you sit in the aisle because you hate being trapped in the middle. You open your notebook and date the top corner like you always do. He slips into the row behind you and one seat over like maybe you won’t notice him if he’s not directly behind your shoulder. He doesn’t take out a phone. He looks at the stage with his hands folded, as if sitting in a church pew. When the lights dim, a bit of glow from the exit signs finds his profile, and for one weird second you think, those eyes would be so easy to believe.

Susan Storm enters with Reed and Ben, and the place erupts. She laughs and raises a hand, calm and generous. Reed fumbles with a remote, grimly cheerful. Ben whoops. The kids scream. The lights dim. The talk begins.

You take notes on superconductors and civic infrastructure. You draw a little diagram of a bridge that could cool itself. You don’t turn around. But you know he’s there. You know the precise shape of his quiet.

When the Q&A ends and the crowd dissolves toward the doors, you feel a weight like a hand pressed to your back. You expect he’ll leave you alone. Famous people don’t have to linger. But in the hallway you catch a glimpse of him standing a little off to the side, as if he’s waiting for someone who might not arrive, and when your eyes flick, his do too. He brightens like a struck match and then dims himself, like he’s trained not to burn too bright.

“Did you like it?” he asks.

“I did.” You shoulder your bag. “Your sister is intimidatingly cool.”

“She is.” He sighs like it’s the best worst problem in the world. “You here for school?”

“Yes.” You almost add: just trying to get through. Instead you say, “A paper. I’m on a deadline.”

“You like deadlines?”

You snort. “No one likes deadlines.”

“I do.” His smile turns lopsided. “They make things real.”

He keeps making room for you. It takes you longer than you’d like to realize that’s what it is. He falls into step without crowding. He presses a hand to the elevator door for a woman with a stroller. He tells a kid who waves that the kid’s Spider-Man shirt is objectively the best on the market right now, and when the kid screeches, Johnny winces and looks at you like he’s been too loud. Like he’s afraid to scare you away. Those blue eyes keep flicking to you, easing every time you don’t bolt.

“Do you—” he starts when you reach the lobby, then stops. “Never mind.”

You pivot, slow. “Do I what?”

He swallows. You watch his throat move. “Do you want me to call you a car? It’s late and… the cabs around here are—”

“I’m taking the subway,” you say.

His smile is immediate and helpless. The blue brightens; it’s almost unfair how readable he is. “Of course you are.”

You lift a brow. “What does that mean?”

“Nothing.” He raises his hands. “It’s just very… you.”

“We’ve known each other for fifteen minutes.”

“Some things,” he says, barely audible, “you just know.”

You study him a beat too long. His eyes— bright summer, clear and impossible. There’s a look in them you can’t name, and you don’t trust things you can’t name. You tuck your hair behind your ear and step back. “It was nice meeting you, Johnny.”

He nods, a careful nod that says he’s leaving you the choice. “It was nice. Y/N.”

He doesn’t ask for your number. He doesn’t chase you to the revolving doors. He stands in the middle of the lobby and watches you go as if you’re a constellation he has to memorize before the clouds come in.

You don’t think about him on the train.

That’s a lie. You think about the way he stood like he’d been taught to hold still. You think about the hunger he didn’t let show. You think about the way you wanted to ask him why he looked relieved when you said oat milk, one pump vanilla, as if you’d confirmed a secret password. You think about the blue of his eyes like a secret his face forgot to keep.

You drink your coffee through melted ice and tell yourself it doesn’t matter.

Two days later, you see him again.

It’s at the campus café this time, because the city is a series of spirals and you always eventually wind up at the same points. You’re in a booth with a stack of printouts, highlighter uncapped, a headache simmering behind your eyes. The line winds past your table, and the room smells like espresso and dust. When a shadow falls across your page, you look up expecting a stranger asking for the spare chair.

“Please don’t be mad,” he says quietly, already braced for it. The blue looks almost gray in the indoor light, cautious, dimmed. “I asked Sue if it was okay to swing by. She said it was a free country and to tell you hi from her because she thinks you’re smart.”

You blink at him. “You talked to your sister about me?”

“Not like that.” He flushes. It’s disarming, actually— how quick it rises under his skin, the honesty of it. “I mentioned you. She asked if I made a friend. I said I didn’t know if— I—” He exhales. Abandons the sentence. “Can I sit?”

You should say no. You know you should. But some stubborn, suspicious part of you wants to know what he’ll do if you say yes. Will he push? Will he take? Will he turn you into a story he tells his friends?

“Okay,” you say, and tilt your head at the opposite bench. “For a little.”

He slides in like he’s been asked to take communion. He doesn’t crowd your papers. He sets his hands on his knees, leans forward, and looks at the highlighted paragraph like it might explain you. A lock of hair falls into his eyes. The blue flicks down and up with your page, tracking. You try not to notice the way his lashes are absurd.

“What are you reading?” he asks.

“Stuff I don’t understand yet.”

“Do you want help?” he says, reflexive, rueful. “I can’t offer any, I’m just— it’s a thing I say.”

“You like being useful,” you say without meaning to.

He goes still. The blue steadies, focused. “Sometimes,” he admits, slowly, like he’s learning what he means as he says it, “it’s the only time I feel like myself.”

You look at him properly. Not like a famous face, not like a story. Like a person who said a thing that felt truer than maybe he meant to. His hands are steady on his knees. His joints look held together by will.

“What do you feel like the rest of the time?” you ask softly.

He meets your eyes. For a heartbeat, the blue is bare—no tricks, no stage lights. Like a door cracks in a corridor you didn’t know you were walking and light hits your shoulder.

“A memory,” he says, and then he looks away. “Sorry. That got weird.”

“It didn’t,” you say, and it doesn’t.

He orders nothing. He doesn’t mention the coffee you’re not drinking because it’s gone watery. He sits for forty minutes while you pretend to read and actually learn his stillness. His phone buzzes once and he silences it without checking the screen. When you close your folder he straightens, brightens, and then immediately tamps it down like he’s on a dimmer switch.

“Walk you out?” he asks.

You sigh, but not at him. At yourself, maybe. “Sure.”

He doesn’t reach for your bag. He keeps pace with your steps. He asks you what class you’re headed to and listens to your answer like there isn’t a single thing in the world he’d rather do.

At the corner, you stop. He stuffs his hands in his jacket pockets, shoulders curling like he’s cold. He’s not. He radiates heat enough to blur the air on summer days; the tabloids have prints of wide-eyed girls, hand over hearts, sweaty-faced and delirious after he’s given them a high five. But right now he looks like he’s standing on a dock staring at a boat he’s not sure will let him onboard.

“Johnny.” You say his name before he says yours, which makes him look like he might drown. “Are you okay?”

He nods too fast. “Yes.”

“You sure?”

He nods again, and this one is smaller. He looks at your mouth like he’s learning the shape of a word he’s never said out loud. “If I do something wrong, tell me.” He swallows. Those blue eyes flicker up, naked and pleading and stubborn all at once. “Please.”

“Wrong?” you ask, wary.

“If I call too much and you don’t like it,” he says, and then flinches, corrects himself without your prompting. “If I call. At all. If I show up where you are. I—” He squeezes his eyes shut for a breath. “I’m trying not to be too much.”

“What if I’m not mine?” you ask lightly, and then wince. You didn’t mean to cut him like that. You didn’t mean to throw a knife at a soft underbelly you don’t even know yet. “I mean— I didn’t mean—”

He watches you with a sorrow that’s too old for his face. The blue softens, goes dark around the edges. “You are,” he says. “You are yours.”

You don’t give him your number that day either. He doesn’t ask.

He finds you anyway.

Not like a shadow, not like a watcher. More like a recurring dream. He appears at the ends of your days, when the library flickers its lights and you feel like the last person awake in a sleeping city. He walks you to the subway and talks about nothing— about Ben learning to make sourdough, about Reed’s ridiculous attempts to build a toaster that can calculate bagel density, about Sue teaching Franklin to braid. When you laugh— and you do— his eyes go bright and glassy, summer-sky blue after rain, like he’s hearing a song he thought he lost.

Every time you catch him looking at you, it’s the same look. Men have looked at you a lot of ways. You know guilt when you see it, lust, classification, curiosity. Johnny’s gaze is none of those. It’s reverent. And scared. Like he’s memorizing a prayer, afraid someone’s going to snatch the book out of his hands. The blue in his eyes holds a cathedral’s quiet.

He doesn’t touch you, not really. The back of his hand might graze yours when you turn the same way in a revolving door. His shoulder might bump yours when a delivery guy barrels through a crosswalk and he moves you without thinking. But he never assumes. He never reaches.

You ask him why, finally, because the question sits in your mouth like a pebble and your teeth have been grinding. You’re on a bench in the park near your apartment, his cap pulled low and your knee bouncing under your coat. A boy skates past with a dog towing him. The last of winter turns to slush under shuddering trees.

“Why won’t you—” you start, then catch your own breath and reconsider the shape of the ask. “Why do you act like I’m… breakable?”

He looks at your hands. His voice is roughened down. “Because the last time I held you,” he says, a confession, not an explanation, “you were.”

The world blinks.

You stare at him because there are a thousand answers you expected, and none of them were that. “The last time you… what?”

He swallows. A muscle ticks at his jaw. He looks like a man standing at the edge of a cliff with the understanding that to jump will hurt and to stay will kill him slow. When he lifts his eyes, the blue is raw, storm-lit. He’s not hiding behind it anymore.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he says. “I don’t want to make you carry something that isn’t yours.”

“Try me,” you say, because the truth is you are a person who hates doors left half-open, and if he’s going to haunt your evenings, you need to know what ghost he’s carrying behind his ribs.

He nods once. You watch the movement like you’ve been waiting for it.

“Not here,” he says softly. “Please.”

He takes you to the Baxter Building like you’re an invited guest. The guard greets him by name and looks at you with a quick, friendly curiosity, the kind that doesn’t assume. In the elevator he stands right beside you without touching, the way someone stands beside a hospital bed and prays without letting their fingers brush the sheet. The stainless walls throw back a thin reflection; the blue of his eyes shocks you again, small and bright in the mirrored metal.

He leads you not to the atrium or the lab with its gleaming chatter, but to a smaller room with a slanted ceiling and a window that cuts the dusk into blue pieces. There are framed photos on the wall and a shelf of records. A couch with a crocheted blanket. It’s home, not show.

“Johnny,” you say, because something about the way he closes the door as if he’s sealing a mouth makes your heart climb into your throat.

He sits— no, perches— on the edge of the couch and clasps his hands between his knees. His eyes go somewhere you can’t follow, and then he drags them back with visible effort to look at you.

“I knew you,” he says. “Not you. Another you. A different… world.” He doesn’t check to see if you believe in multiverses. He doesn’t cushion it. He says it like he’s naming the weather. “They called it Earth-828. I don’t know if that’s true or just what Reed wrote on a whiteboard. You were…” His mouth pulls. “You were famous.”

You raise a brow because this is the point where a person you might be in another universe would laugh and say of course I was. But the look on his face stops you, because it’s not fond. It’s not proud. It’s a memory that’s wearing grief like a winter coat.

“You sang,” he says, soft. “You had this dress with a scalloped hem. You liked your coffee iced, oat milk, one pump vanilla. You laughed like someone who grew up in kitchens and learned to talk over boiling pots. You—” He breathes. The blue thins, goes watery with unshed heat. “You liked me.”

For the first time since you’ve known him, his eyes lift to meet yours and don’t drop away. If anything, they climb.

“I did not tell you,” he says, and the ragged admission tears something in your chest, “that I loved you. And then the sky broke.”

He tells you like he’s talking through a door, not to the past but to the person he used to be. He tells you about sound like a cathedral collapsing, about light that burned without heat, about Reed shouting numbers he could taste in his mouth like metal. He tells you about a teleporter misaligned by forces they didn’t yet understand, a room that he’s walked into a thousand times since but only remembers in a single blink because the second blink didn’t happen fast enough.

“She laughed,” he says, and he’s not looking at you anymore. The blue is far away, lit by a different sun. “You laughed, because you always laughed when we were about to do something stupid and brave. And then—”

He lifts his hands, palms up. There are no burns on them. That day left him whole in every way that matters and ruined him in every way that counts.

“And then the light took you,” he says. “And I didn’t tell you. And I didn’t get to— I didn’t get to hold your hand and say your name in the way that means all the things it needed to mean. And I have been—” He gropes for the word and finds one too simple. “I have been tired since.”

You sit down slowly. The couch gives. The blanket scratches the back of your knee. You taste vanilla and summer on a winter night and wonder when you drank anything last.

He looks at you, and there it is again— that look. Not need. Not hunger. A cathedral of sorrow and a pew saved for you. As if he’s the old man on the porch with the high school photo, and he’s finally allowed to tell someone the story of the girl he loved. The blue settles back on you, not pleading—faithful.

“I’m not her,” you say, because you have to. It comes out gentler than you expected. “Johnny. I’m not her.”

He nods like the sea. He nods like prayer. He drops his eyes and nods again. “I know.”

“Do you?”

“Yes.” He licks his bottom lip like he’s tasting the right next word. “You wear pants more than skirts. You hate anyone taking a picture if you didn’t mean to be in it. You have a chipped mug with a fox on it. You love street fairs but you don’t like fireworks. You… you tell the truth even when you don’t want to. You don’t sing when you wash dishes.”

Some traitorous part of you wants to say I sing sometimes, but that’s the part that loves to hurt itself, so you clamp your jaw and breathe.

“You’re trying to make me the same,” you say. “Even if you don’t mean to.”

“Yes.” He doesn’t move to deny it, doesn’t dress it in better clothing. The blue goes unflinching. “I am. Because it hurts less that way. Because it means I’m not crazy. Because it means the story gets an end I can breathe around.”

“And what if I don’t want to be your ending?” The edge in your voice arrives like rain; you didn’t feel it building until you’re soaked. “What if I’m not your second chance, Johnny? What if I’m just— me. What if I never sing or wear scalloped hems. What if I graduate and move and you’re not on the way to anything.”

His face is a wrecked shoreline. You can see the wave hit and pull back. Those blue eyes shine like glass tossed in surf.

“Then,” he says hoarsely, “I’ll be happy you lived.”

You don’t realize you’re crying until you taste salt. He doesn’t move to wipe it away. He watches like he doesn’t trust his hands. You hate him for that, a little. You hate him for respecting a boundary you didn’t draw in marker.

“Don’t look at me like that,” you whisper. “Please.”

“Like what?”

“Like I’m going to disappear if you blink.”

His voice is sandpaper and cinnamon. “It’s hard to unlearn.”

You nod once. “Try harder.”

He does.

It looks like space. That’s the thing that surprises you. Grief clings. It whispers that if you loosen your grip, everything you held will float away. But Johnny is— stubborn. You can feel it in the way he changes. He stops appearing and starts asking. Can I see you. Can I call. Can I send you something that reminded me of you. He does not share everything he feels, because it would drown you. He shares less than you can tell he wants to, because he is learning which words are yours to ask for.

He shows you the room with the slanted ceiling and teaches you how to drop the needle on a record without scratching it. He lets you pick an album without making a sound about what you pick. He brings you coffee that’s iced even when it’s snowing, because that’s how you like it, and when you order it hot one day because your throat hurts, he adjusts reality in the middle of a sentence as if he’s changing plane mid-flight.

You learn his quiet in different languages. There’s the quiet that means I’m thinking about you and trying not to say it out loud because I promised. There’s the quiet that means I remembered something I can’t bring to the table because it isn’t food, it’s a wound. And there’s the quiet that means I am here, all the way, and I want to put my hand on the couch cushion next to your thigh and feel the heat through the space between.

The world knows him as wide-open. His friends know him as loud. But you get something else, a sliver of winter sun through a kitchen window. You sit in it until your bones are warm. Sometimes when you look up from your book and catch him watching you, the blue is soft as dusk, like the color itself is exhaling.

Then you break his heart.

Not on purpose. But cleanly. Which is worse, maybe.

It happens in the lab, because Reed offered to let you see the observatory deck and you said yes because the view of the river on certain afternoons makes the whole city look like it’s been set in amber. You go through a room with a glass wall and a scaffold of silver running up to the ceiling. There’s a faint smell like ozone and orange rind.

Johnny slows as you pass the door and goes very still, and then keeps moving, too quick. You catch his sleeve.

“What’s that?”

“Nothing,” he says, like a liar who hates himself.

You look again. There’s nothing remarkable about the room if you don’t know what to look for. But you’ve lived long enough beside other people’s ghosts to recognize a tomb when you feel one. The hair on your arms rises.

“What is it,” you say, and your voice isn’t gentle because some truths scatter if you whisper them and you don’t intend to let this one get away.

He looks at the floor. He looks at the ceiling. He looks at your mouth. You can watch the arguments array themselves and fall apart. Finally, he opens the door.

The quiet inside is a different species. It clings to the corners, charged. Reed has kept it sterile. Sue has kept it simple. Ben keeps sticky notes on the console with his blocky handwriting: don’t forget to eat, hotshot. And don’t forget to breathe.

Johnny steps inside like he’s stepping into a church, hat in hand. He presses his fingers to the console and then takes them away. The blue of his eyes goes rimmed in red.

“This is where,” he says, and swallows, “we lost her.”

Not you. Her. The pronoun is an amputation made holy by the way he holds the stump to his heart.

“I shouldn’t have brought you here,” he adds, almost to himself. “I promised—”

You turn and walk back out, because if you stay your lungs will fold. He follows, panic under his skin like sparking wire.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

“You don’t get to keep both,” you say, and it’s cruel, but kindness would gum up the gears. “You don’t get to keep a shrine and ask me to be a person.”

He flinches like you’ve slapped him. “I didn’t ask you to—”

“You did,” you say. “Every time you looked at me like I was a miracle and a miracle you can lose at any minute. Every time you told me something about her like I might adopt it. Every time you didn’t touch me because your hands remember what it felt like to hold a girl who was breaking.”

His eyes shine. He rubs his thumb across his palm like he’s trying to erase old heat. “I never wanted you to—”

“You wanted her back,” you say, and the truth lands between you with a sound like a dropped plate. “And you can’t have her. I can’t be her. I won’t be her.”

There are a thousand ways the world teaches women to make other people comfortable. You know them all. You have performed them like monologues in rooms where it didn’t matter. You do not perform them now.

“Johnny,” you say, softer because you aren’t cruel, not by nature. “Either you learn to love me or you go back to your shrine and you light your candles and you let me leave.”

He looks at you like you’ve stolen all the air and he can’t decide whether to ask for it back or thank you. The blue steadies—less panic, more choice.

“Okay,” he breathes.

“Okay what?”

“Okay,” he says again, like agreement is a password he’s learning on the spot. “Okay. I— I’ll… what you said. I’ll do that.”

“You can’t fix grief in a week.”

He nods. “I’m not going to fix it,” he says, and for the first time you believe him. “I’m going to stop asking you to carry it.”

You give him your number that night.

He doesn’t send you a barrage of texts. He sends you two a day, maybe three. One in the morning that is sometimes a photo of the sky and sometimes a screenshot of something ridiculous Franklin said. One in the evening that is sometimes a link to a song that makes him think of the way you tap your index finger against the lid of your iced coffee when you’re thinking. There are days he sends nothing. You find that you miss him in a way that doesn’t scare you. You find that you want to tell him when you see a dog on the subway wearing a sweater with strawberries.

He takes you to a street fair and doesn’t flinch when a vendor shoots confetti into the air. He takes your hand when the crowd surges and his palm is warm and steady, and he doesn’t grip like he’s afraid you’ll go. He just… holds you. Like a person moving through a crowd with another person they like. When you glance up, his blue eyes are crinkled, content; no fear in them, just the pleasure of being where you are.

Ben finds you in the kitchen one afternoon, leaning against the counter eating half a sleeve of cookies because you forgot lunch, and he says, “So you’re the one,” in a voice that would be gravel if gravel could be gentle.

“I’m a one,” you say. “I don’t know about the.”

He grins. “Good answer. He’s a good kid.”

“He’s older than me.”

“Not where it counts.” Ben tips the cookie box at you. “He’s an idiot about the big stuff and a genius about the small stuff. Don’t let him get away with it. He needs bosses in his life.”

“I’m not here to parent him,” you say. “I’m here to—” You stop, cheeks warming, because you don’t know what word to pick. Date. Try. Heal something that isn’t yours by letting the air touch it.

“Uh-huh,” Ben says. “You like him.”

“I… do.”

“Scary, that.” Ben’s eyes soften in his rock face. “For you and him.”

“Does he… do this a lot?”

“Feel things?” Ben shrugs. “He’s a feeler. He just doesn’t always know how to say them without setting something on fire. This time he’s trying not to set you on fire. That’s new.”

“High bar,” you mutter.

Ben laughs. “Listen. He’s a good kid. Don’t let him tell himself he’s a story somebody told him. Make him be the guy in the room. You get me?”

“I get you,” you say, and you do.

Reed is a different conversation, as it always is. He corners you near a whiteboard and starts a sentence in English and finishes it in theory. “It’s extraordinary,” he says in a tone that could be about astrophysics or the weather. “The multiversal recursion of personality traits. Not total— of course not, we’re not— but the echoes. The coffee order alone— statistically improbable that your palatal preference would—”

“Reed,” Sue says from the doorway, fond and exasperated. “People are not lab notes.”

“Sorry,” Reed says, not sounding sorry. He clears his throat. “It is incredible luck that you and Johnny have crossed paths in this way.”

“She’s not a coincidence,” Sue says, and kisses her husband’s cheek as she passes him a mug of tea. She looks at you the way an older sister looks if she’s decided to be on your side before you’ve earned it. “She’s a person. A good one, if she can handle Johnny’s… intensity.”

“I can handle my own intensity,” Johnny mutters, but when he meets your eyes he looks grateful that someone else said it. The blue does that soft, shy flare that makes your chest ache.

Franklin tugs your sleeve and shows you a drawing he made of a rocket ship with a stick figure inside waving. “Is that you?” you ask.

“It’s Uncle Johnny,” he says. Then he leans conspiratorially, loud-whispering, “He was sad, but now he’s not so much.”

“Why?” you whisper back.

“Because he found something,” Franklin says, and then considers. “Maybe someone.”

You look away because your face is going to do something embarrassing. Johnny is at the counter, passing Sue the bowl of salad, his mouth soft, his shoulders low. The look on his face when he glances over his shoulder and catches you looking is not a miracle someone’s going to take away. It’s the ordinary pleasure of seeing the person you like in your kitchen. The blue brightens a fraction, like an answer you can read.

You wait for the other shoe and you don’t have to wait long.

It drops on a Tuesday in April, a drizzle day where the city is the color of old nickels and your phone battery keeps lying to you. You’re walking toward a café because you told him you’d meet there after his press thing, and you’re thinking about nothing in particular because if you think about the future you start planning for contingencies and you promised yourself this time you’d let a day be a day.

Johnny steps out of a black car in a navy suit like the sky put on clothes. Photographers pop like hail. He does what celebrities do: he makes it look easy. And then his eyes cut through the crowd like a field bending in wind and find you.

It happens in the space of a subway breath. You see it as clearly as your own hand: the way his gaze slams into you and then softens like taffy under heat. He tells the world, with his face, the thing he hasn’t said with his mouth. The photographers see it, because part of their job is reading eyes, and for a second the snapping slows. The blue is unguarded, so nakedly relieved that you have to look down.

Then a flash goes off right in his face. He startles, actually startles, like a horse, which would be funny if it didn’t send a jagged line through your sternum. His hand lifts, reaches. Not for you— not to drag you into the story— but for something that isn’t there at all. A phantom rope. A hand he didn’t get to hold.

Your stomach drops into your shoes.

You sidestep into a doorway and breathe like you forgot how for a minute. When he arrives— because of course he does— you let him kiss your cheek and you smell rain on his collar. His laugh is too easy. The way he says hey is too much like please.

“What?” he says, pocketing his hands like a boy who doesn’t know what to do with them if they’re not holding fire. “What is it?”

“You panicked,” you say.

He blinks. The act drops out of him like a shell. “When?”

“When the light hit.” You consider your words with care, because you have learned that there are detonators only he can disarm. “Who did you reach for?”

He looks like he wants to lie. You watch him choose not to. “You,” he says, and the word is a question and an apology and a wish.

“Which me?”

He closes his eyes. When he opens them, the blue is sea-deep and bare.

“Johnny.” You put your hand on his sleeve because you’re not heartless. “Look at me.”

He does. It costs him something and you feel it hit your bones like the dull thunk of an elevator calling its floor.

“I need you to hear this and actually hear it, not to be brave about it,” you say. “I will never be her. I will not sing her songs. I will not die her death. I will not wear her dresses or laugh because she laughed at that part of a joke. I will not stand in the doorway of your worst day and let you call me a second chance.”

He is so still that for a moment you imagine he’s gone. He is not. He is the opposite of gone. He is a man learning very fast how to hold one truth and one hope in the same ribcage without breaking something.

“Okay,” he says, almost inaudible. “Okay. I am too in love with a ghost.” He lifts a hand and stops it at a polite distance from your cheek. The blue flickers—fear, want, respect—then steadies. “I am trying to fall in love with you.”

The world tilts. Not because of the words. Because of the order.

“Trying?” you say, and your voice is not the voice of a saint. It is a girl’s voice. A woman’s. A person with blood and time and a life that does not revolve around other people’s grief. “If that’s what this is, don’t. Don’t try.”

He steps back like you’ve pushed him. “I didn’t— I don’t mean—”

“You mean you want to choose me because I’m close enough,” you say. “Because it would fix something if I fit.”

“No,” he says, quick and desperate. “No, that’s not— God, please— that’s not what I meant.”

“What did you mean.”

“I mean,” he says, and the words roughen with a sudden, furious gentleness, “that I am already falling and I have been trying to do it in a way that doesn’t drown you. I mean I have loved you since you made fun of my elevator pitch for the cafeteria sandwiches because you said the aioli wasn’t real. I mean I am trying to learn how to let it be this and not— not the day the light took you.”

The rain chooses that moment to stop. It’s obscene, the way the sun pokes its finger through the cloud belly and presses a spot of gold on the street. A horn blares. A woman laughs into her phone. The world continues with or without you.

“Then say it,” you whisper, because there are doors that only open if you demand the key. “Say it to me. Here. Now. Because I’m not going to chase a man through a multiverse. I’m going to take a midterm on Thursday and fold my laundry and text my friend pictures of weird dogs I see. If you want me, you can want me in this world or you can go haunt yours and light your candles and I’ll hope you find peace someday. But I won’t be it.”

The flinch is there. And then it isn’t. He straightens like a boy caught slouching who remembers he comes from a home with soft hands and a line in the sand. His eyes are very, very blue.

“Okay,” he says. “Stay there.”

You aren’t going anywhere. He takes one step closer, and then another, careful, a man approaching a wild animal who is not wild at all but simply free. He lifts his hand and holds it palm-up in the six inches between you.

“Y/N,” he says, and his voice breaks once and then steadies. “You. You who hate fireworks but love street fairs. You who drink hot coffee when your throat hurts but iced when you want to think. You who wear pants and don’t sing while you do dishes and have a mug with a fox on it and remember the names of the security guards and talk to your mother on Tuesdays even though she drives you crazy. You who are not a second chance. You who are not a miracle. You who are a person with a life I am lucky enough to have been let into. I love you.”

The city doesn’t pause the way movies do. It stumbles and spills and keeps going. But in the small circle you occupy with him, there is a hush that feels like a dome lowered over your heads. His blue eyes shine like someone turned a light on behind them.

You don’t realize you’ve been braced to run until your shoulders drop and your breath comes easy. You put your fingers in his palm because you have never been a person who takes something carefully offered and throws it back. His hand closes around yours with a care that’s not fear anymore. It’s respect. It’s debt paid in softness.

“Johnny,” you say, and you watch his eyes widen like you’ve said the right password in the right order. “I am not going to be a ghost you get to keep. I am going to be hell to love some days. I am going to change my coffee order because I can. I am going to make you late because I tried on three outfits and then wanted to go home. I am going to tell you if you’re doing too much. I am going to leave if you ask me to be her again.”

“Okay,” he says, like a vow. “Okay.” He swallows. “Can I— may I— can I kiss you?”

“You may,” you say, because the word feels like it belongs in your mouth.

He kisses you like a person who has been practicing what tenderness looks like and has finally been allowed to show his work. He kisses you with both hands cradling your jaw and a restraint that is not fear, not anymore, but reverence. Up close, those blue eyes flutter shut, open, find you again like you’re the horizon. When he pulls back his breath stutters against your cheek and he laughs, shaky and sudden, and something unknots behind your sternum so hard it makes your eyes sting.

“Hi,” he says, ridiculous.

“Hi,” you say back, equally ridiculous.

It isn’t magic. It isn’t a spell that lifts when you put your mouth on someone’s and makes all the old griefs obedient. But something shifts. The shrine in the lab remains a room with a door he can close. The way he looks at you changes. The miraculous panic evaporates and leaves something steadier. He still memorizes you— the way you tuck your foot under your thigh when you read, the way you frown at your laptop like you’re negotiating with it— but the memorization loses its edge of terror. It becomes a pleasure. He learns you the way you learn a route through a city you love.

He tells Sue almost immediately, because of course he does, because he has never been good at keeping his happiness to himself when it is honest. She hugs him hard and then takes his face in both hands and says, “I am happy for you and I am going to worry about you anyway,” and he says, soft, “I know,” and she looks at you over his shoulder and mouths thank you like you’ve done a kindness to a stranger she loves.

Reed shakes his hand solemnly for reasons you don’t pretend to understand and then asks if the coffee preference persists across universes because he’s building a graph. You roll your eyes and he looks delighted that someone has rolled their eyes at him without resentment. Ben brings a cake and says nothing about it when Johnny eats three pieces and then says, around a mouthful of frosting, “I’m happy, big guy,” like he’s explaining why the cake tastes better.

Franklin takes your hand and drags you to see the fort he built in the corner of the living room with sheets and chairs. “You can come in,” he says, serious and benevolent. “No adults allowed.”

“I’m an adult,” you say.

“Not if you’re in a fort,” he says. “The rules.”

You duck under the blanket and Johnny follows, even though he is objectively too big for the space, and you all lie on the floor and look up at the underneath of the sheet, which is dimpled by rubber bands and clothespins and the hook of a houseplant. Johnny’s shoulder presses yours. He doesn’t flinch. Neither do you. His blue eyes peek at you through a triangle of fabric and go soft in the kind of way you don’t recover from; you have to grow around it.

You go home to your apartment one evening after a movie and your phone lights up with a photo you weren’t expecting. It’s the shrine room, but different. The console has been moved. The sticky notes are tucked into a box. The room is still the room, but it isn’t a chapel. It’s a room where something happened and where other things can happen now.

You sit down on your bed and the mattress sighs. Then you text him, because he didn’t send the photo to make you say good boy and he didn’t do it to earn points. He sent it because you asked him to stop asking you to carry it, and he wanted you to see that he heard you.

I’m proud of you, you send.

His reply arrives after a minute. Thank you for not making me do it alone.

You don’t.

You go with him when he visits the room the next time. You stand beside him with your hand in his and say nothing. You don’t need to.

After that, the slope of your days changes almost imperceptibly, the way seasons tip without asking your permission. You stay over; he keeps an extra toothbrush in the cabinet and never tries to throw your hair tie away when he finds it on the nightstand. He starts to text you good morning like he’s been doing it in his head for months and finally got a phone plan. You find yourself reaching for him without thinking when you get to a crosswalk and you don’t stop yourself. He fits your hand like he’s been holding it across timelines.

He doesn’t call you angel. He calls you by your name like it’s his favorite word. The first time he says “Y/N” in his sleep, into the pillow, you feel something old in you turn to face the sun.

The happy ending isn’t fireworks. You still hate those. It’s smaller and better. It’s a Tuesday night in June where the city smells like cut grass and the windows are open and the fan makes the curtains breathe. You’re at his place, the room with the slanted ceiling and the box of records, and he’s on the floor with his back against the couch, legs sprawled, hair going ridiculous in the humidity. You’re on the couch, bare feet pressed to his thigh, and you’re both reading. The lamp turns everything gold. The clock is wrong because Reed took it apart and never put it back together.

Johnny looks up from his book and watches you. Not like a man who is checking on something expensive or breakable. Like a man making sure the joy is real. The blue of his eyes is easy, unguarded—like the sky after a storm when you finally trust it won’t crack again.

“What,” you say, because he’s smiling.

“I was just thinking,” he says.

“Dangerous.”

“Very,” he agrees. He puts the book on his chest and tries words on in his head before letting them out. “I used to think love was a story I owed someone. That it was— I don’t know. A promise you make because the world is unstable and you grab what you can and swear you’ll never let go.”

“And now?”

“And now,” he says slowly, “I think love is being allowed to keep looking. Not for a fixed thing. For a changing person. A person who will wear pants on Tuesday and a skirt on Wednesday and drink hot coffee when her throat hurts and iced when she has to write. A person who will let me be useful and will tell me when I’m making myself into a saint instead of a man. A person who will let me love her without being the answer to questions I should be asking myself.”

“You got all that from a book?” you tease.

He shakes his head. “I got it from you.”

Your chest hurts in a good way. You reach down and touch his cheekbone with your thumb. He leans into it like a cat, blue eyes fluttering shut for a second as if the color itself is grateful.

“Say it again,” you say, because even miracles become real through repetition.

“I love you,” he says. He says it in a tone that makes the lamp flicker like maybe electricity is susceptible to truth.

You don’t just say it back. You say it too. Different word. Same meaning. “I love you.”

The epilogue is a Saturday. There’s a barbecue on the roof of the Baxter Building because Ben insisted and Sue ordered a tent in case it rains and Reed made a grill that can monitor the internal temperature of ribs and the building’s core system at the same time. Franklin is in a kiddie pool with a water gun and a crown of tin foil he made because he’s the King of Summer. The city is behaving like it forgave itself for winter.

You arrive with a bowl of pasta salad you bought because you ran out of time to make it and intend to pass off as yours. Johnny steals a noodle and declares it the best thing he’s ever eaten, which is a lie and the truth both. He has a hand tucked in your back pocket like it grew there. No one comments except Ben, who clasps Johnny’s neck and says, “Look at you,” in a tone that makes you look too.

And there he is. Not the hollow-eyed boy at the edge of a bright room. Not the man praying you won’t disappear if he blinks. He moves through the party like a person inside his skin. He sings along, badly, to whatever song Reed foolishly let Ben put on. He flips a burger and burns it and eats it anyway. He keeps looking at you as if to confirm that you are still here, but the look isn’t desperation. It’s gratitude with its feet up. The blue of his eyes keeps catching the string lights; every time, he looks a little awed, like he can’t believe this is the version of the universe he got.

Sue presses a lemonade into your hand and steps into your space the way sisters do. “He’s different,” she says, eyes on her brother.

“So am I,” you say, and she bumps your shoulder with hers in agreement.

Reed appears and informs you both, delighted, that the ambient rooftop temperature has increased exactly two degrees since Johnny arrived because of thermodynamic anomalies, and you and Sue stare at him until he says, “In other words, he’s happy,” and you both soften and Reed looks very pleased to have translated science into human.

Franklin squirts you with the water gun and then solemnly anoints your knee. “You are part of the team now,” he declares. “Please sign here.”

“Here where?”

He presents a napkin. You sign your name. Johnny watches, then looks away quick, then looks back because he can. When your eyes meet, the blue is bright and playful, not haunted—like a promise that decided to stay.

Later, when the sun slips behind buildings and the fairy lights along the railing blink on, Johnny pulls you into the quiet corner by the herb boxes Sue planted. Basil and mint brush your legs. He puts both hands on your waist like he can’t help it. The city hums. Your life does, too.

“You look like a man who got what he wanted,” you say.

“I look like a man who got what he didn’t know to ask for,” he corrects, gently. “I would’ve asked for a miracle. I got you.”

You put your forehead to his. “Don’t make me your miracle.”

He smiles against your mouth. The blue right there is almost silly, because you’re so close you can see the tiny ring of darker color around each iris. “Never again,” he says. “I learned.”

And you believe him, not because he’s on his best behavior or because the night is soft, but because the next day will be regular and you’ll be there for it and he will too. Because he still flinches sometimes when someone drops a glass and it shatters, and you put your hand on his back and he breathes. Because grief has not exited the building; it just found a seat that isn’t the head of the table. Because he loves you, not as an answer, not as a remedy, but as yourself.

On your way home you pass the coffee cart in the Baxter lobby. He presses his chin to your shoulder while you order and hums in agreement when you choose hot because your throat hurts. He pays in cash because he likes how it feels to tip too much in bills. He carries your cup until you hold out your hand for it, and when he gives it back he doesn’t look relieved that you like it the way she did. He looks pleased that you like it, period.

“Every time,” he says, when you tease him about being a regular.

“Every time,” you echo, and the words don’t mean what they used to. They don’t mean habit as shrine. They mean habit as practice. Something you do on purpose, over and over, because choosing is how love stays.

On the sidewalk he kisses your cheek and then your mouth and then your hand. You let him, because you don’t fade when he touches you. You get brighter. He does too. His blue eyes crinkle when he laughs into your kiss.

Someone snaps a photo. The world will see it tomorrow and say Johnny Storm looks at his girlfriend like she hung the stars. It will be an easy story and a sweet one. The truth is better and smaller. He looks at you like you are a person he loves in a world he almost lost. Like you are not a miracle or a ghost or a second chance, but a first choice he keeps making, in this universe, on this day.

You finish your coffee on the train. You look out the window at your city. You text him a picture of a dog in a sweater with strawberries. He sends back a voice memo of laughter that sounds like a summer kitchen.

It is not the ending he dreamed when the light took you. It is the life he has now, and he lives it like a man who learned— finally, stubbornly— to let love be present tense.

The cameras clicked like cicadas on a summer night, all chirping in rhythm to catch the perfect angle of the Fantastic Four. You stood near the back of the Baxter Building’s press room, notebook in hand, heels clicking softly against the polished floor as you edged closer.

This was your first time covering them — the Fantastic Four. Three years into their rise, and still, they looked like they’d stepped out of a comic strip and into technicolor reality. The press called them explorers, heroes, geniuses. You called them your assignment.

Reed Richards, ever the picture of precise intellect, adjusted the microphone like he was recalibrating a telescope. Beside him, Susan Storm stood poised in light blue, all calm and practiced charm. Ben Grimm, rock-skinned and stone-faced, gave the occasional grunt that counted as a full sentence in his world. And then — of course — there was him.

Johnny Storm leaned back, with his arms crossed. He didn’t even blink. He looked like he belonged in the sky — or maybe just on the front cover of a magazine. Probably both.

You rolled your eyes before you could stop yourself.

“Thank you all for being here,” Reed began, his voice clipped and professional. “We’re happy to report that the Mad Thinker has been officially turned over to the authorities, along with his robotic enforcers and classified tech. As of 0600 hours this morning, he is in custody.”

A round of polite applause followed, tinged with the kind of awe that only came with the phrase “Mad Thinker neutralized.”

You took notes. Clean, detached. That was your job. You weren’t here to fawn or flirt or feed the fandom. You were here to write a clean feature for The Daily Observer. One that made your editor forget that this was your first major assignment. One that didn’t give the Human Torch a single ounce of the attention he so obviously craved.

Except, when it was time for questions, and Johnny finally leaned forward to speak, your pen hesitated mid-stroke.

"Guess he didn't think that far ahead," Johnny said with a smirk, referring to the Mad Thinker. A few reporters laughed. His smile deepened — satisfied, but not smug. “Not even his big brain could predict the Human Torch flying through his security grid at Mach 2.”

You didn’t laugh. But your eyes flicked up, just for a second.

And he caught you.

His gaze landed on yours like sunlight through a magnifying glass — warm, focused, too sharp for comfort. He cocked his head slightly, curious. Amused. Like he already knew you didn’t like him, and he found it funny.

Your spine straightened. You looked down, scribbled something unimportant, and didn’t look up again.

Not even when he said, “We’ve got time for one more question,” and Reed nodded.

Not even when he added, “Let’s hear from the new face in the back.”

You froze.

Oh, you hated him already.

You lowered your notebook slowly. The entire room turned toward you, the chorus of murmurs dying into anticipation. Damn him.

You cleared your throat, standing straighter. “Johnny Storm,” you began, deliberately skipping the title, “your maneuver through the Mad Thinker’s drone grid — you mentioned flying through it at Mach 2. Given the adaptive AI those drones are equipped with, what was your contingency plan if the AI recalibrated mid-flight and blocked your exit trajectory?”

Silence.

It hung in the air like static — thick and heavy with implication.

Johnny blinked once.

Then leaned into the mic.

“Well,” he drawled, grinning, “I figured if it came to that, I’d just punch through the wall and make my own exit. Y’know, big flamey boom — very cinematic.”

A few people chuckled. You didn’t.

Reed, however, stepped in without missing a beat. “To clarify — the team ran multiple simulations prior to Johnny’s entry. I programmed a counter-scrambler pulse that temporarily blinded the AI’s recalibration process. It wasn’t just a brute force plan. Johnny was operating with full sensor override and two automated failsafe routes if the main trajectory failed.”

You nodded, polite. “Thank you, Doctor Richards. But the question was for Mr. Storm.”

Reed hesitated — just long enough for you to feel the ripple of surprise move through the room. Then he nodded once, stepping back from the mic.

Johnny leaned forward again, that lopsided grin creeping back onto his face like it lived there.

“Well,” he said, voice lower now, just for you, “guess I gotta brush up on my tech lingo if I wanna impress the press.”

“You could start with not dodging questions,” you replied, just loud enough for him to hear.

The smallest twitch touched the corner of his mouth. Not offense. Not irritation. Just interest. Huh.

“Duly noted…?” He dragged the word out like an invitation.

You flipped your notebook shut. “You’ll read it in the byline.”

And with that, you sat back down.

You didn’t see him watch you as the next question was called — but you felt it. Like heat from a fire you weren’t supposed to enjoy.

The morning after the press conference, the Baxter Building’s kitchen smelled like burnt toast. Johnny lounged in the living room, flipping through the day’s stack of papers.

Reed was already dissecting a gravity anomaly from the upper stratosphere, Sue was reviewing her own quotes with the cool detachment of someone used to headlines, and Ben was elbow-deep in a bowl of protein-enhanced cereal. Johnny skimmed until his name popped out.

“Fantastic Four Thwart Thinker’s Terror Once Again!”

One paper described Reed’s leadership as “flawlessly calculated.” Another hailed Sue as “a vision of grace and tactical finesse.” Even Ben got a glowing paragraph about “raw strength tempered with loyalty and control.”

Then came his part.

Johnny’s jaw moved a little slower as he read.

“—while Johnny Storm, ever the Human Torch in name and temperament, played his usual role of chaotic spectacle. Though undeniably brave, one wonders how much longer recklessness can be mistaken for confidence.”

He blinked. Re-read it. His chewing stopped altogether.

“Hey, Stretch,” he said, lifting the paper and squinting at the byline, “you remember that new reporter? The one with the notebook and the spine made of steel?”

Reed didn’t look up. “Hmm? The one who cornered you about the AI drones?”

“Yeah. She wrote this.”

Ben grunted without looking. “What, she get your flame-retardant undies in a twist?”

Johnny folded the paper and tossed it onto the counter. “Just funny how I save the day in a ball of fire, and all I get is ‘reckless spectacle.’”

Sue took a sip of her coffee. “Maybe she’s not wrong.”

He turned. “Et tu, sis?”

She shrugged. “She didn’t say you weren’t brave. She just said you’re the kind of brave that forgets plans exist.”

“She called me a ‘spectacle.’ That’s basically ‘show pony’ in journalist speak.”

Reed finally looked up, adjusting his glasses. “She also made you sound like you belong in a pulp serial. That kind of language sells papers.”

“Thanks, that really soothes my ego.”

But he wasn’t angry.

If anything, he was... annoyed that it got under his skin at all.

He'd been flamed before, literally and figuratively. But something about the way she wrote it — so clean, so sharp, like she wasn’t trying to insult him… just calling him out — it stuck.

Johnny leaned back, arms folded behind his head.

“All right,” he muttered to himself, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth, “game on, byline.”

The Daily Observer newsroom buzzed with the usual mid-morning chaos — the clack of typewriters, hum of fax machines, and cigarette smoke curling toward the ceiling like it had deadlines of its own. Reporters darted between desks, arguing over column space or chasing coffee that tasted like burnt despair. Your desk was tucked near the back, wedged between the city beat editor and a storage closet that had mysteriously started leaking toner last week.

You were rereading your latest draft when a shadow fell across your notes.

You didn’t even need to look up.

The air smelled faintly of fire.

You sighed, set your pen down, and slowly lifted your gaze.

Johnny Storm stood there — in the middle of the bullpen — like he hadn’t just walked into the lion’s den with zero clearance and a ridiculous amount of self-confidence. Dressed in a bomber jacket and aviators pushed up into his hair, he looked more like someone on his way to a photoshoot than a surprise visit to a newsroom.

He gave you a smile that probably melted at least three interns behind him. “Hey.”

You stared at him for a long beat.

Then: “You’ve never had PR training, have you?”

He blinked. “Wow. Not even a good morning?”

You leaned back in your chair, arms crossing slowly. “You think walking straight into the bullpen of the city’s most stubborn newspaper — unannounced, by the way — is the best idea to change my opinion of you?”

“Maybe not best, but I’d say boldness counts for something.”

You tilted your head. “So does common sense.”

His grin didn’t falter, but there was a flicker of hesitation behind it now. Just a second. Just enough to tell you that he didn’t come here only to be charming — he actually cared about what you wrote. That stuck with you more than it should have.

“I just figured,” he said, stepping closer and lowering his voice so only you could hear, “since you already called me a reckless spectacle in print, maybe I should live up to the part.”

“You know that wasn’t personal, right?” you replied, quiet and cool. “That was professional observation.”

“And here I thought journalists were supposed to be unbiased.”

“I am.” You pointed to the article. “You think I wrote that to get under your skin?”

“Mission accomplished,” he said, with a smirk.

You studied him — really studied him this time. The golden-boy posture was still there, but something else simmered underneath. Less flame, more... frustration? Not anger. Not arrogance. Something genuine.

“Sit,” you said, motioning to the empty chair across from you. “If you’re going to try to argue your way into a rewrite, you’ll need better lines.”

He looked surprised for a second. Then he pulled out the chair and sat down like it was a negotiation table at the Future Foundation.

You picked up your pen again, tapping the end against your notepad.

“Start talking, Torch.”

He sat down like he’d just won something. Legs spread, arm slung casually over the back of the chair — like he didn’t just march into a den of cynical columnists with a mission taped to his chest.

You raised a brow. “So. Talk.”

Johnny opened his mouth… then closed it again.

You watched him falter, just slightly, like the words weren’t lining up the way he rehearsed them. The bravado dimmed by a notch, the way a flame might lower when the wind shifts.

“I guess I just…” He scratched the back of his neck, expression almost sheepish. “I thought maybe you misunderstood me.”

“I quoted you exactly.”

“Right, no, I mean—not the words. Just… what they meant.” He leaned forward a little, lowering his voice. “I’m not trying to be some reckless hothead out there.”

You didn’t say anything. Let the silence stretch.

He looked down at your notebook, like maybe it would help him organize the jumble in his brain.

“You write like someone who actually thinks before they speak,” he said. “And the way you wrote about the others — you got them. Sue’s calm. Reed’s brain. Ben’s grit. It was… fair. It was real.”

You tilted your head. “And you didn’t feel represented?”

He hesitated again.

“I didn’t feel seen.”

That surprised you. Not because it was dramatic — but because it wasn’t. There was no fire in his voice. No defensive snap. Just quiet truth. Like he was finally saying something he didn’t let out often.

You watched him carefully. “So you came here to… what? Change my mind? Charm me into writing a nicer paragraph next time?”

He met your eyes. “No. I came because I don’t want to be a punchline in the press just because I don’t talk like a science textbook.”

You almost smiled.

Almost.

“Maybe stop acting like one, then.”

That made him laugh — a real laugh. Not the smug kind from press conferences or photo ops. This one was low, quick, and caught him off guard.

“I walked right into that,” he said.

You finally leaned back in your chair, tapping your pen once more before setting it down.

“I’ll say this,” you murmured, voice softer now, “you care more than you let on.”

Johnny looked at you — just looked — and for once didn’t smile. He just nodded.

“I care about the mission. I care about the team. And yeah,” he added, eyes flicking to your notepad again, “I care about how we’re remembered.”

You sat with that for a moment. Then picked up your pen.

“I’m not rewriting the article,” you said flatly.

“Didn’t ask you to.”

“But…” You met his gaze again. “If you’re really not the guy I described, then prove it next time you’re out there. Show me something I have to write about.”

He stood, slower this time. “You got it, Byline.”

“And for the record,” you added as he turned to go, “you’re lucky none of the editors saw you walk in. A man literally on fire would’ve caused less panic.”

He grinned, one foot already backing toward the hallway. “Then I’ll save the fire for next time.”

You rolled your eyes again, but this time… you were smiling too.

The streets still smelled like scorched pavement and ionized air.

Broken glass glittered on the sidewalks, cordoned off by bright orange pylons and the occasional floating police drone buzzing around like oversized flies. The Red Ghost had made a mess of Midtown with his intangible tricks and hyper-intelligent apes — again. But the Fantastic Four had driven him off before anyone was seriously hurt.

Now the smoke was clearing, the crowd was thinning, and your notebook was nearly full.

You were crouched beside a frazzled street vendor whose hot dog cart had been overturned by an invisible monkey. She spoke with a tremble in her voice but kept glancing down at her half-burnt umbrella like she wasn’t sure what to be more upset about.

You nodded, murmured something comforting, and jotted down the last of the quotes. Then you stood, brushing soot from your pants and squinting up through the haze.

That was when you felt the heat before you saw him.

“Careful,” a familiar voice called above you. “Your shoes are standing in the middle of a melted bike rack crime scene.”

You turned slowly, not surprised in the slightest to see Johnny Storm hovering just a few feet above the street, his body still faintly glowing with post-battle embers. He landed with a soft thud beside you, steam curling from his shoulders like breath on a winter day.

You stared at him.

He grinned.

“Hey, Byline.”

You raised a brow. “Are you gonna keep calling me that?”

“Only when you’re working,” he said, brushing soot from the sleeve of his uniform. “Didn’t think I’d see you out here this fast.”

“I’m a journalist. You lot punch holes in buildings, I show up to document it.”

“Fair.” He looked around at the half-destroyed plaza, then back at you. “So… I was thinking. If you’re not too busy cataloguing melted lampposts, maybe you could do something different.”

You narrowed your eyes. “Different how?”

He gave a small shrug, more casual than cocky. “Interview me.”

You blinked. “You’re asking me to interview you?”

“I figured I owe you one good headline before you make me the villain in another paragraph,” he said with a half-smile. “Besides, Reed’s great, Sue’s diplomatic, and Ben’s Ben. I’ve got stuff to say, too. Might as well say it to someone who doesn’t let me off the hook.”

You studied him for a moment, then flipped open your notebook to a fresh page.

“All right,” you said, uncapping your pen. “What are the team’s plans on catching the Red Ghost? Or are you just going to wait around until he crashes another brunch hour?”

Johnny’s posture shifted, just slightly. Straighter. Focused. His grin faded — not into a scowl, but something serious. Intent.

“We’re triangulating the residual energy signatures from the primate phasing tech,” he said. “Sue’s helping Reed map out a possible pattern in the Red Ghost’s movement based on his prior attacks. It’s not random — he’s testing different types of tech defenses, seeing what reacts to his phase modulation. He’s not just stealing — he’s scouting.”

You blinked, surprised at the sudden shift in tone. It wasn’t over-explained, but it was technical. Clear. Strategic.

“So this wasn’t a one-off.”

“No,” Johnny said, meeting your gaze. “He’s escalating. And next time, we won’t just be reacting. We’ll be ready.”

You stared at him a beat longer than you meant to, then jotted the words down — slower this time.

“Well,” you said, a touch more genuine than you’d planned, “you obviously came prepared.”

He gave a crooked smile, but didn’t say anything right away. Just let the silence settle.

Then: “Told you I wasn’t all spectacle.”

You gave him a sideways glance. “One quote won’t change my mind overnight.”

“Then I guess I’ll just have to keep giving you better ones.”

Then, casually — too casually — he said, “Maybe… we could talk more. Over some coffee?”

You looked up at him. Not sharply. Not cruelly. Just… professionally.

“No.”

And just like that, the moment cracked.

He blinked once, fast, and straightened a little like he’d been bracing for impact. There it was — the end of the attempt, the polite rejection. You could see it settle behind his eyes.

But before he could nod, turn it into a joke, or retreat behind the easy charm—

“Maybe ask me,” you said, sliding your pen behind your ear, “while I’m not at work.”

His head tilted slightly. Brows lifted.

The faintest flicker of a smile returned, slower this time. A little stunned. A little boyish. Like the fire hadn’t gone out, just dimmed long enough to make room for surprise.

“Oh,” he said. “Right.”

You raised an eyebrow. “You’ve heard of boundaries, haven’t you, Storm?”

“Vaguely,” he said. “I’m trying this new thing where I respect them.”

You hummed, not fully smiling — but not hiding the twitch at the corner of your mouth either. “Let me know how that goes.”

He took a step backward, hovering just an inch off the ground now, arms crossed like he was resisting the urge to take a victory lap.

“I’ll see you around,” he said, warmth curling into his voice.

“Not if I see you first.”

He laughed — short and surprised — before blasting off into the sky, a streak of orange light burning through the last of the smog.

The city hummed in low light as the workday dissolved into evening. Neon signs flickered to life, casting their glow on chrome bumpers and damp sidewalks. The Daily Observer office emptied out one tired body at a time, heels clicking and shoulders loosening under trench coats and rolled-up sleeves.

You stepped out the glass doors with your bag slung over one shoulder, rubbing the back of your neck as you finally — finally — clocked off.

And there he was.

Johnny Storm, leaning against a deep blue Pontiac GTO parked just outside the building like he’d stepped out of a magazine spread. The headlights were off, the street quiet. He wore a bomber jacket over a white tee, no flame in sight — just a casual confidence, hands in his pockets and a grin playing at the corners of his mouth.

You stopped on the last step and stared at him.

“You’re really persistent, aren’t you?”

Johnny pushed off the car with a shrug that was almost bashful — almost. “I waited until you were off the clock, didn’t I?”

You narrowed your eyes. “That’s dangerously close to ‘stalking.’”

“I prefer the term ‘timed entrance,’” he said. “And before you accuse me of another headline-worthy stunt — this isn’t an ambush. It’s an invitation.”

“To what?”

He nodded toward the passenger door. “Coffee. Conversation. Possibly a slice of pie so good it makes you rethink your whole evening.”

You raised an eyebrow. “You drive around with a backup pie plan?”

“Wouldn’t you, if you were trying to win over someone who called you a cocky spectacle in print?”

You exhaled through a quiet laugh, surprised even at yourself. The part that would’ve bristled, retreated, shut the whole thing down — it didn’t speak up this time. Instead, you glanced at the car, then back at him.

This was definitely a date.

And surprisingly, you didn’t mind.

You stepped forward and opened the passenger-side door. “Just so you know,” you said as you slid into the seat, “if the pie is bad, I’m writing a review.”

Johnny grinned as he rounded the front of the car and climbed in. “That’s fair. But you’ll probably be too impressed to hold a grudge.”

You shot him a look as he started the engine. “Don’t push it, Storm.”

He just chuckled, the engine rumbling to life beneath the neon skyline, and pulled away from the curb like he had all the time in the world.

The diner Johnny picked wasn’t flashy. It sat tucked between a laundromat and a 24-hour flower shop, its windows fogged just enough to make the neon signs outside blur like watercolor. Inside, it smelled like coffee, butter, and cinnamon — a place where time moved slower. A place you didn’t expect Johnny Storm to know about.

You slid into the booth across from him, still not entirely convinced this wasn’t a joke or some bet he’d made with Ben Grimm. But then the waitress came over, already knowing his order. You raised a brow at him.

He just shrugged. “Told you. Great pie.”

The first few minutes were casual — light teasing, a few too many glances at the menu you weren’t actually reading. Then your reporter instincts kicked in.

“So,” you said, leaning forward a little, “why hero work? Out of all the paths someone could take after getting hit with cosmic radiation—”

Johnny cut you off with a grin. “Hold up. Nope. Not tonight.”

“What?”

“I’m not letting you interview me,” he said, pointing his fork at you. “You do that with everyone else. I wanna flip it this time.”

You leaned back, crossing your arms. “You wanna ask me questions?”

“Exactly.” His smile softened. “I mean… if that’s okay.”

You blinked, surprised. “Fine.”

He took a sip of his coffee like he was preparing for something important. Then:

“Where are you from?”

You blinked again, not expecting such a normal question. “Syracuse.”

He nodded like he’d guessed right. “Upstate. Cold winters, right?”

“Brutal,” you said with a slight smile. “Scraped ice off windshields half my life.”

Johnny laughed softly. “Okay. And what’d you study?”

“Journalism. Minored in international studies.” You glanced at your pie, cutting it slowly. “I thought I wanted to be a foreign correspondent. Cover wars, revolutions... real stories.”

“Is that why you became a journalist?”

You hesitated. It was rare someone asked that and actually wanted to hear the answer.

“Sort of,” you said. “I guess I liked the idea that people could read something and understand the world differently. That I could help make sense of the chaos, even a little. Shine a light on things people didn’t want to look at.”

Johnny watched you closely. Not in that performative, flirty way he had in front of cameras. It was quieter now — like he’d turned something off and let something else show through.

“That makes sense,” he said. “You’ve got that kind of presence.”

You smirked. “What kind?”

“The kind that gets people to talk. Even when they weren’t planning to.”

The conversation had drifted to music by the time his watch beeped.

It wasn’t loud, just a sharp beep-beep that cut through the low hum of the diner. Johnny glanced at it with a sigh, and just like that, you saw his posture shift. He was still sitting in front of you, but something behind his eyes had already left.

“Shit,” he muttered, rubbing the back of his neck. “I’m so sorry, I—”

“You have to go,” you finished for him, not even mad—just… mildly surprised. “Right. Saving the world and all that.”

He looked sheepish, standing up, pulling out his wallet to toss a few bills on the table. “I really didn’t want to leave. Not now. This was—” he paused, then grinned. “Fun.”

You tilted your head, fingers tapping the side of your coffee mug. “Is this gonna be a pattern?”

You didn’t mean for it to come out like that. But his smile turned lopsided, cocky in that infuriatingly charming way.

“So there’s gonna be a next time?”

You rolled your eyes, sipping your coffee to hide the smirk tugging at your lips. “That’s not what I said.”

“Didn’t have to.” He took a step back, right before pushing out the door. “I’ll make it up to you, Syracuse.”

You shook your head, watching him flame on in front of the diner and fly away with style.

You didn’t know what surprised you more — that he had to leave… or that you kind of hoped there would be a next time.

You were halfway through transcribing your notes from a city council hearing when a voice called out from just beyond your cubicle wall.

“Someone’s got fancy mail today,” the mail guy sang, leaning over the divider with a mischievous grin. “Baxter Building, huh? You got friends in high places or something?”

You blinked, reaching for the envelope he held out. Thick, expensive stock. BAXTER printed in bold navy lettering at the top.

“Oh god,” you muttered under your breath.

“Is this what happens when you write about superheroes? They write back?” he teased, laughing as he walked away.

You tore it open. Inside was a folded card—of course it was glossy, and of course there was fire-printed trim on the edges. Typical.

Lunch? Saturday? Baxter Building. Noon. Dress code: Something pretty.

– J

You scoffed. But your lips tugged into a smile before you could stop them.

It was so Johnny.

Ridiculous. Dramatic. Bold.

…Charming.

You tucked the note into your drawer before anyone could sneak a peek, and returned to your typewriter, trying to remember what the deputy mayor said about parking enforcement while your brain was already halfway to Saturday.

The Baxter Building loomed as impossibly tall and sleek as she remembered—though it felt different this time, somehow. Less like the intimidating center of scientific innovation and more like… a place she was invited to.

You approached the security desk, where a man in a dark suit stood behind a glass panel. He looked up, not unkindly.

“Can I help you?”

You held up the invitation. “I—uh. I have an appointment. With the Human Torch.”

He arched a brow, then glanced at the envelope in your hand. The moment he saw BAXTER in bold font and the ridiculous fire-themed trim of the invitation, something flickered in his expression. Recognition. Amusement, maybe.

“Name?”

You gave it. He checked his screen, nodded.

“You’re on the list. Elevator to your right. It'll take you straight to the top level. Enjoy your… lunch.”

The pause was deliberate. You didn’t blame him.

“Thanks,” you muttered.

As you stepped into the elevator, the doors closing around you, you took a breath and tried not to think about the fact that you were on your way to have lunch—with Johnny Storm.

Not an interview. Not a headline.

Just… lunch.

And maybe that was what made your pulse skip a little.

You stepped into the living quarters, still holding onto the last remnants of skepticism—because no way Johnny Storm had actually cooked anything himself.

But there he was.

Dressed in a now-spotted white shirt, sleeves rolled up, a dish towel hanging off one shoulder like he was hosting a cooking segment instead of whatever this chaos was. The smell hit you first—something tomato-based, maybe? It wasn’t awful, just... suspicious. A sleek robot you recognized from news clips—HERBIE—stood beside him, handing over utensils with mechanical grace.

Johnny turned when he heard your footsteps. His face lit up immediately, a little too brightly, like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

“You’re early!” he said, then caught himself. “I mean—you’re right on time. Totally on time. I just thought I had, like, five more minutes to make this less of a disaster.”

You raised an eyebrow, arms folding across your chest as you took in the scene—the splatter on the stovetop, the open container of sauce, the cutting board with... were those strawberries?

“You call this cooking?”

He grinned sheepishly. “Okay, first of all, rude. Second of all, Ben’s usually the one who handles the food part. But I thought I’d try.”

HERBIE beeped and rolled over to you, offering a glass of water. You accepted it without breaking eye contact with Johnny.

“At least someone here knows what they’re doing,” you muttered.

Johnny put a hand to his chest, feigning offense. “Herbert’s just following my lead, thank you very much.”

HERBIE beeped again—this time, with a tone that sounded oddly like an apology.

You bit back a smile. This was already ridiculous.

He finally declared the meal done—with an exaggerated “Ta-da!” and a proud look at his slightly overcooked but still recognizable pasta dish. Then he pointed at his stained shirt, muttered something about “presentation,” and jogged upstairs to change, leaving you alone in the sleek Baxter kitchen with HERBIE watching over the food like a judgmental sous-chef.

You leaned against the counter, eyeing the plates. The food didn’t smell bad, but you weren’t getting your hopes up. Still, the thought of Johnny Storm actually making you lunch—not catered, not restaurant takeout, but his own clumsy, messy attempt—made something flutter in your chest. You pushed it down.

He came back ten minutes later in a clean tee that hugged him in ways that felt a little unfair for lunchtime. He moved like he hadn’t just nearly set the place on fire twenty minutes ago, sliding into the seat across from you like this was just a regular Saturday. Maybe it was.

You took your first bite, preparing yourself for the worst.

It was... edible.

Actually, kind of decent.

You blinked at him across the table. “Wait—this isn’t terrible.”

Johnny grinned, leaning forward like he’d just won a bet. “High praise. I’ll take it.”

“Did HERBIE actually cook it while you stood nearby and took credit?”

He put a hand to his heart. “Ouch. You wound me.”

You both laughed. It came easy. Effortless.

The conversation flowed just like it had at the gala. He asked about your week, what stories you were working on, and you asked about his latest mission—though he kept it vague. The banter was there, the teasing, the gentle nudges. It felt like another date, not that either of you had called the first one that out loud.

He never made it feel like he was showing off. Not the apartment, not his name, not the security you had to pass just to sit across from him. He just looked at you like he genuinely wanted to be here. With you.

You hadn’t expected that. But here you were.

And you weren’t rushing to leave.

Somewhere between the last few bites and your second glass of water, the conversation drifted into quieter, more thoughtful territory.

“So,” you started, poking at the last piece of garlic bread with your fork, “what was it like… the first time you went to space?”

He blinked, caught off guard—not because you asked, but because of how gently you had. You weren’t asking for the spectacle or the news headline. You really wanted to know.

And something in him shifted.

Johnny leaned back in his chair, eyes softening, mouth tugging into a quiet smile that wasn’t showy or flirtatious. Just real.

“It was… insane,” he said after a beat. “But not in the way people think.”

You tilted your head, curious.

“I mean, yeah, it was loud and chaotic. Reed was spouting numbers no one but him understood, Sue was trying to keep everyone calm, and Ben was yelling about how the thing looked like it was held together with duct tape. And maybe it was.”

He laughed a little to himself. His gaze wandered—not away from you, but somewhere just behind your shoulder, like he was watching a memory replay.

“But then we broke through,” he said. “Past the clouds. Past the blue. And it just… opened.”

He gestured vaguely with his hands, like he was trying to shape the size of the universe.

“It was the quiet that hit me. The kind of silence you can’t even describe. And the stars—they weren’t twinkling or cute or whatever. They were alive. Like watching a fire that never went out. There were so many of them, and I felt like I was just… nothing. A spark. A breath.”

You stared at him, almost forgetting to blink.

“I’ve never felt so small in my life,” he continued. “And I loved it. That kind of smallness—it humbles you. And then…” He chuckled, shaking his head. “Then we got hit with cosmic rays and everything changed. But that moment—that first break into space—that still lives in my chest.”

His voice had softened by the end. He looked at you again and found you watching him with quiet awe.

You’d seen Johnny Storm smirk and pose for cameras. You’d seen him flirt and laugh and play up his reputation.

But this—this was the fire.

And it had nothing to do with his powers.

After lunch—surprisingly edible, despite your doubts—Johnny wiped his hands on a towel, told HERBIE to “clean up,” then he offered his arm dramatically and said, “Madam Journalist, would you care for the grand tour?”

You tried not to smile, but didn’t stop yourself from accepting.

He led you into the common room first—the one you’d seen in pictures but never expected to step foot in. The sunken lounge area was a cozy crater of plush teal seating, curved like a spaceship’s command deck. A fireplace on the center, doubling as a TV console. The tables were sleek white, dotted with forgotten magazines and half-eaten snacks. The walls arched in warm wood panels that made everything feel strangely futuristic and homey.

Johnny jumped over the back of the couch to land beside one of the yellow stools, grinning like a kid in a candy store. “This is where Ben and I fight over the TV and Sue pretends not to be watching.”

Then it was the lab—less cozy, more “ANSA meets mad scientist.” He showed off a few gadgets he claimed to have helped build, tossing around science terms like he actually knew what they meant, you suspected he did, but exaggerated for flair. He hovered near buttons he didn’t press and screens that blinked codes you couldn’t read.

When you raised a brow at one of his particularly grand gestures—something about a neutrino stabilizer—he caught it.

“Don’t roll your eyes at me like that,” he teased, nudging your arm as you walked. “You know I’m impressive.”

You rolled them anyway. But it came with a quiet little smile.

Eventually, the tour wound back to the elevator near the front. You checked your watch, sighing. Time to go.

“Thanks for today,” you said as you stopped at the elevator, bag slung over your shoulder.

He leaned on the frame beside you, arms crossed casually, looking every bit the boyish hero with too much charm for his own good. “Anytime. Seriously. I mean that.”

You nodded, reaching for the elevator button. Then—impulsively—you leaned in and pressed a quick kiss to his cheek.

Just a soft touch, a flash of warmth.

By the time he turned toward you in surprise, you were already stepping into the elevator, calm as ever.

“See you around, Storm,” you said as the doors started to close.

He stood there stunned, his hand drifting up to where you’d kissed him, the faintest smile blooming on his face like it couldn’t help itself.

“…Yeah,” he murmured. “See you.”

With every date, the walls came down.

Not all at once, of course. You still rolled your eyes when he got too smug, still shot down his more ridiculous one-liners with a well-placed look. But the lines between professional skepticism and personal affection blurred a little more each time.

Eventually, you exchanged telephone numbers. Written on the back of a matchbook you kept in your purse, and his scrawled on a napkin that lived pinned to your corkboard.

You told yourself you were just getting to know him better.

You told yourself someone needed to stay objective around all that fire.

You told yourself you were the only woman in the city who wouldn’t fall for Johnny Storm’s charm.

Oh, how wrong you were.

You got spotted together a handful of times. First, coming out of a downtown restaurant, laughing at something he said. Then again in the park, sharing a hot dog under the early autumn sun. And then at a late-night movie, when he tried to wear a hat and sunglasses as if that would stop anyone from recognizing him.

The headlines started coming fast after that.

“The Human Torch’s New Flame?”

“Johnny’s Got a Girl—But Who Is She?”

“Blazing Romance!”

Your name appeared in fine print under photos where your face was slightly turned, or blurry, or hidden by sunglasses—but that didn’t stop it. A few gossip rags even tried to dig through your background. One misspelled your name. Another called you “plucky.” You were still mad about that one.

Your coworkers had a field day.

Every time you walked into the newsroom, at least one person would clear their throat and hold up the morning paper like it was a trophy. The whispers weren’t cruel—just amused. Wide grins. Wiggling eyebrows. A few wolf whistles when you passed the bullpen.

Even your editor joined in once, muttering, “Better make sure our fire alarms are up to date.”

You’d sigh, flick your press badge onto your desk, and mutter the same thing each time, fighting a smile.

“Mind your own business.”

Of course, that only made them laugh harder.

But in the quiet moments—when the tabloids were silent, and the crowds were gone—it was just you and Johnny.

Talking on the phone late at night, your voice low as you curled the spiral cord around your fingers. Sitting close on your couch, listening to one of his records crackle while he tried to explain how a rocket launch works in too much detail. Sneaking glances at him across diner booths, thinking about how stupidly warm he always was, like he was made to be held.

Each date stitched the two of you closer together.

You, the no-nonsense journalist. Him, the fireproof heartthrob.

And even if the whole city had their opinions, you knew the truth of it:

You hadn’t fallen for the idea of Johnny Storm.

You’d fallen for him—messy, loud, brilliant, kind.

And there was no denying it now.

You were supposed to be covering a gala.

That was the entire reason you were here—tucked into a sleek, borrowed dress, notepad and micro-recorder hidden neatly in your clutch, playing polite while industry bigwigs talked about progress and philanthropy like they weren’t drinking champagne that cost more than your monthly rent. The venue gleamed, all chrome and glass, bathed in soft light from floating chandeliers and robotic servers weaving through the crowd with practiced ease. You were halfway through mentally drafting your opener—“Progress is plated in gold and served with a smile.”—when the windows rattled.

It started with a low boom.

Then a tremor.

Then screaming.

The crowd moved like a single, terrified organism—heels clattering, glasses shattering, voices rising in chaos. Someone yelled about the Red Ghost. Someone else screamed about the apes.

And that was when you saw them.

Out past the crushed cars and fractured pavement, under the strange glow of the city’s skyline, the Red Ghost stood like a specter reborn—gaunt, furious, with that deranged spark behind his eyes. His super-powered apes crashed through structures with terrifying ease, one of them ripping a streetlight from its socket and flinging it toward the building like it weighed nothing. The gala crowd surged again, pushing toward emergency exits and shattered doors. You tried to follow, but something caught your eye—a child, maybe six or seven, crying near the base of a toppled sculpture.

You didn't hesitate.

Your heels cracked against the marble as you ran toward him. You scooped the boy up and covered his head with your hands just as another explosion ripped through the street outside. The blast knocked you clean off your feet, sending you tumbling across the floor. Marble crumbled beneath your palms. The child wailed and clung to your arm, but he was alive. You were alive.

Barely.

Smoke filled the air. Your ears rang. Somewhere above you, the ceiling groaned.

And then—

A streak of fire tore through the sky.

The building's front cracked wide open in a burst of light, and figures descended like gods. Sue’s forcefield shimmered in the dust, Ben’s voice boomed as he barreled into one of the apes, and Reed stretched across the wreckage, directing civilians to safety.

Then came Johnny.

He flew in a comet of flame, banking hard through the ruined archway, flames licking at the smoke. His expression was tight—focused—until his eyes swept across the wreckage.

And landed on you.

There was a flicker of disbelief on his face, then something sharp—panic, maybe—cutting through the bravado. He dropped the flame mid-air, landing hard in front of you. You could see the moment he registered the dust on your face, the scrape on your brow, the child clinging to your side.

“You?” he breathed, stunned. “What the hell are you doing here?”

You blinked at him through the dust, chest rising and falling.

“I was working,” you rasped, your voice hoarse. “I didn’t exactly plan for gorilla warfare.”

Johnny swore under his breath. Then he knelt beside you, his hands checking your arms, your side, like he wasn’t even aware he was doing it. “Are you hurt?”

“Nothing major.”

He looked at you like that wasn’t good enough.

Another crash echoed from outside. He flinched, eyes flicking toward the chaos, then back to you.

“Stay behind the barrier,” he said, rising to his feet. “Reed’s pulling people out. I’ll be back.”

You nodded, still holding the child.

Then Johnny turned, and with a roar of flame, shot back into the smoke.

You didn't have time to process the way Johnny looked at you—not when the building groaned again, not when another blast from outside shattered the last intact window. He was gone in a flash of flame, and the child in your arms whimpered as you stumbled to your feet.

“Come on,” you whispered, voice rough as you tightened your grip. “We’re getting out of here.”

Smoke swirled in thick waves as you made your way through the ruined lobby, weaving past debris and toppled furniture. Your heels were long gone, left somewhere in the chaos, and your knees stung with every step, but adrenaline kept you moving. Emergency responders were beginning to push through from the far side—drones first, scanning for vitals, followed by medics calling out over the noise.

You passed the boy to one of them, ignoring the sting in your palms as you steadied yourself against a cracked column. You were shaken, bruised, and probably inhaling a lifetime’s worth of concrete dust—but alive.

Outside, the air was sharper, colder. The sky above the city flickered in orange and red, lit not by the neon lights of the skyline but by fire. You joined the crowd of survivors gathering at a safe distance, behind hastily raised barriers and the metallic hum of a forcefield dome deployed by ReedTech units. People clutched each other, crying, coughing, whispering in disbelief. Cameras from hover news drones blinked red as they hovered, broadcasting the chaos to every home in the city.

And there, right in front of it all, they stood.

The Fantastic Four.

Ben charged first, unstoppable in a suit that barely held together over his rocky frame. He tackled one of the apes—a massive one with cybernetic implants along its spine—sending both of them crashing through a concrete wall like it was paper.

Sue moved like light itself, her shields flaring in perfect synch with every attack. She pushed back rubble with invisible force, guided civilians to safety, protected a pair of officers pinned under a crumbling awning without breaking stride.

Reed extended high above the scene, body arcing and twisting as he flung some kind of tech device toward the Red Ghost—a trap, maybe. A pulse erupted from it, briefly flickering through the air, but the Red Ghost phased just in time, his form flickering like static. His maniacal laugh echoed across the block.

And then Johnny.

You spotted him above the others, a streak of fire trailing behind as he looped through the air, darting between attacks, drawing the apes’ attention like a comet refusing to fall. Every burst of flame from his body lit up the street like fireworks—controlled, precise, nothing like the chaotic flair you remembered from the first time you saw him in action. This wasn’t showmanship.

This was war.

You couldn’t tear your eyes away.

He banked hard to avoid a projectile, then scorched down the side of a building to protect a group of people still trying to flee. He shouted something to Ben—then flicked a blast of flame so fast and sharp it seared the ground in a line, forcing one of the apes to retreat.

A woman near you gasped. Someone whispered, “That’s the Human Torch,” like they were seeing him for the first time.

And for some stupid reason, your heart skipped, and you smiled.

You swallowed hard and stayed behind the barrier, watching the chaos unfold with a journalistic eye—but this time, it wasn’t just about the story.

It was about him.

And whether or not he made it out in one piece.

It last longer than you'd hope.

The Red Ghost had fallen, neutralized by one of Reed’s devices. The apes—what was left of them—were either tranquilized or subdued, dragged into containment pods that sealed with a heavy hiss. Emergency lights painted the scene in flashes of blue and red as more responders arrived, swarming the wreckage with stretchers, scanners, and press drones.

You stayed where you were, arms crossed tightly against your chest, watching the dust settle with a hollow thrum in your ears. Your dress was torn at the hem, your knees scraped, and your hair probably looked like you’d crawled through a wind tunnel. But none of that mattered.

You scanned the sky for flame.

And then you saw him.

Johnny dropped out of the air in a smooth arc, landing just beyond the emergency barrier with his suit still smoking faintly around the collar. His hair was tousled, soot streaking across his cheek, and his brow glistened with sweat. But he was upright. Whole. Breathing.

Your heart punched your ribs in relief.

He looked around—eyes darting past crowds and medics and shattered architecture—until they landed on you.

You didn’t hesitate.

You shoved past the barrier and met him halfway, the momentum pulling you forward until your arms wrapped around him, solid and warm and alive. You didn’t care that he was sweaty or scorched or smelled like smoke. Your cheek pressed against the fabric of his suit, and for a second, you let yourself breathe.

He hugged you back instantly, arms winding around your shoulders like muscle memory. “You’re okay,” he murmured, half to himself, half to you. “God, you’re okay.”

You pulled back just enough to look up at him. “Are you okay?” you asked, eyes scanning him, checking for injuries, burns, bruises—anything. “Did you get hit? Broke anything important? I swear if you—”

Johnny grinned.

That maddening, familiar grin.

“You were worried about me,” he said, smug and sing-song.

You rolled your eyes, but didn’t let go of him. “Don’t make me regret it.”

“You care,” he teased, voice warm and soft now. “That’s cute.”

You gave him a gentle shove, but your fingers curled back into the sleeve of his suit like they didn’t quite want to let go. “You almost got vaporized, Torch.”

“Almost is the key word,” he said, then added with a wink, “Besides, can’t die before we make it official.”

You gave him a look.

He wiggled his eyebrows.

And despite yourself—despite everything—you felt your lips twitch upward.

The office buzzed in that usual midday lull—typewriters clacking, phones ringing, someone two desks down arguing with a source who apparently “didn’t say it like that.” You sat hunched in your cubicle, half-finished coffee going cold beside your elbow as you typed out a rough draft for an exposé that had nothing to do with supervillains, collapsing buildings, or fiery superheroes.

You were almost grateful for the normalcy.

Almost.

Then a shadow loomed over your desk.

“‘A blaze of brilliance—controlled, focused, the Human Torch proved himself more than just a hothead that night.’”

You turned, already cringing a little.

Johnny Storm stood there in a leather jacket, tousled hair, and the unmistakable smirk of someone who knew they were being quoted.

Tucked under his arm: a folded copy of The Daily Observer. Your paper.

“Let me guess,” you said dryly. “You read it fifteen times and had someone frame it already?”

“Twenty-three, actually. And I’m still waiting on the frame,” he replied, pulling the paper out with a flourish. “But really—‘a blaze of brilliance’? You’re gonna make me blush.”

You leaned back in your chair, arms crossed. “I was being professional.”

He raised an eyebrow. “That was professional?”

“Yes.”

“Because it read more like someone with a slight crush.”

Your eyes narrowed. “I could’ve just called you ‘reckless’ again and left it at that.”

“But you didn’t,” he said, stepping into your cubicle like he owned the place—which, technically, he did not, but Johnny had never let small things like boundaries stop him. “You called me focused. Smart. A hero. That’s basically poetry, coming from you.”

You grabbed your coffee, took a sip, and made a face. Cold.

“I call it ‘objective reporting,’” you said.

“Right,” he said, tapping the paper. “Totally objective. Nothing at all to do with the fact that I saved a bunch of people, including you—and maybe looked insanely cool doing it.”

You let the silence hang just long enough to make him twitch.

Then you smirked. “You did look cool,” you admitted.

He blinked.

“Oh my God—say it again,” he said, clutching his heart like you’d just proposed.

“Don’t push your luck, Storm.”

Too late. He was beaming now, folding the paper carefully like it was a love letter. “I’m getting this laminated.”

“Great. Hang it in your bathroom.”

“I was thinking above my bed, actually.”

You rolled your eyes. “You came all the way here just to fish for compliments?”

“Nah,” he said, shrugging. “I came to ask if you’re free for dinner. But the compliments are a very nice bonus.”

You paused. Your fingers curled slightly around your mug.

“You’re asking me out. Again.”

He tilted his head. “You gonna say yes?”

You studied him—still smug, still cocky, still every bit the firestorm he’d always been—but underneath it, there was something softer in his eyes. The same look he gave you after pulling you out of rubble, after promising you he was okay.

You set your mug down.

“What time?”

The knock came at exactly six-fifteen.

You were still smoothing down the fabric of your dress, glancing one last time in the mirror, when it sounded—two sharp knocks and a pause, like he was trying to be both confident and considerate. You opened the door with a breath caught halfway in your throat.

Johnny Storm stood there in a white tee and charcoal jacket, hair slicked back just enough to pretend he hadn’t spent five minutes tousling it right after. He held a bouquet in his hands—vivid, almost comically large, all fire-colored blooms in reds, oranges, and golds.

You blinked.

He beamed. “You like them?”

You raised an eyebrow. “Did you rob a botanical garden on the way here?”

“They’re thematic,” he said, holding them out proudly. “Like me. On fire. But in a romantic way.”

You took them, fighting a smile as you buried your nose in the blooms. They smelled like summer evenings and warm hands. “You’re ridiculous.”

“You say that every time you see me.”

“Because it’s still true.”

He offered you his arm with an exaggerated flourish. “Your ride awaits, Byline.”

Dinner was surprisingly quiet—tucked away in a retro-style rooftop restaurant with soft jazz humming from corner speakers and skyline views so clear it looked like the city had paused just for the night. You picked at a dish you couldn’t pronounce. Johnny ordered something with way too much heat, then insisted it was “barely spicy” until he nearly choked on it.

You laughed. A lot.

And when the check came, he insisted on covering it—said it was his turn, said it like he genuinely meant it, like it wasn’t some macho gesture but just… him wanting to give you something.

Afterward, neither of you were ready for the night to end.

So you walked.

Central Park stretched quiet under the early evening stars, its pathways lit by the soft golden glow of vintage lampposts. Leaves rustled gently, and the buzz of the city felt like a distant hum.

Johnny walked beside you with his hands in his pockets, jacket open to the breeze. Every now and then, your fingers brushed as your arms swung—and each time, he didn’t pull away.

“Y’know,” he said after a few minutes, glancing sideways at you, “I think this is the longest I’ve gone on a date without being interrupted by a supervillain, a fire, or Reed needing me to hold a wrench.”

You smirked. “Don’t jinx it.”

“I won’t. But if a portal opens up and a robot army marches out, I just want it on record that I tried to have a normal night.”

You laughed—soft and real.

Then it got quiet again, but not uncomfortably so.

Just enough quiet to notice the warmth in your chest, the way your steps slowed, the way you wanted to say something before the moment passed.

You stopped near a bench, looking out toward the pond where the moonlight shimmered against the rippling water. He stopped beside you.

“Hey,” you said softly.

Johnny looked at you, hands still tucked in his pockets. “Yeah?”

You hesitated.

Then, with a sigh, you said, “I didn’t think this would happen.”

His brow creased. “Dinner?”

You gave him a look. “This. Us. You.”

Johnny tilted his head, curious but quiet.

“I thought I had you figured out,” you continued, voice low. “Thought you were just ego and fire and headlines. I told myself I wasn’t gonna be the type to fall for that. For you.”

He was silent, eyes fixed on you now.

“And I don’t know how it happened,” you added. “But… I really like you, Johnny.”

Your words hung in the air—bare, brave, and terrifying.

Then, slowly, the corner of his mouth lifted.

“Yeah?”

You nodded.

He took one hand out of his pocket, stepped closer, and said, so quietly it made your heart stutter, “Good. Because I’ve liked you since the moment you called me reckless in front of a hundred reporters.”

You let out a breathless laugh—half-relieved, half-overwhelmed.

Then he cupped your cheek gently, eyes searching yours. “Can I kiss you?”

You didn’t even answer.

You leaned in.

And the kiss that followed was warm and slow, more tender than either of you expected. It tasted like rooftop wine and burnt pepper, like all the things you hadn’t let yourself feel until now. His hand slid to your waist, anchoring you gently. Your fingers curled into the lapel of his jacket like maybe you’d melt without something to hold onto.

When you finally pulled apart, your forehead rested against his, and for a second, the world stopped spinning.

Then you smiled—soft, teasing, fond.

“Well,” you said, voice barely above a whisper, “The Flaming Hearts is really gonna hate me now.”

He laughed, arms looping around your waist. “They already do. I read the forums.”

You snorted. “You read your fan forums?”

“I like to stay informed,” he said with a wink.

You groaned, burying your face in his chest. “God, I’m dating a dork.”

“You’re dating this dork,” he corrected, smug as ever, resting his chin atop your head.

You stayed like that under the Central Park sky—wrapped in warmth and something that felt like maybe, just maybe, the start of something real.

It had been a few months since that first kiss under the quiet glow of Central Park.

Since the night you let your guard down and finally let him in.

Now you were his. Officially.

Not that the tabloids had let you forget it. Every coffee run, every blurry sidewalk kiss, every slightly windblown post-battle cuddle was plastered across newsstands like you were part of a pulp serial. You’d stopped reading them after “The Torch and the Truth-Teller: A Love Story in Flames” hit the stands.

But today wasn’t about that.

Today, the city was nervous.

The Frightful Four had made themselves known in a very public, very destructive way the day before—leaving Central Avenue cratered, several civilians injured, and even the Fantastic Four pushed to their limits. The new villains weren’t just chaos for chaos’s sake. They were calculated. Aggressive. Dangerous.

So, of course, the press conference at the Baxter Building was standing room only.

You stood near the back, arms folded around your notepad, trying not to feel weird about covering a press event for a team you technically had dinner with twice a week. Your press badge still held weight, but now it hung alongside a relationship that blurred lines more than you liked to admit.

Still, you kept it professional. You always did.

Even if Johnny winked at you the second he spotted you in the crowd.

The conference began like any other—Reed detailing the attack in his usual clinical tone, outlining the measures they were taking to analyze the threat, reinforce the city’s defenses, and “neutralize the ongoing presence of the Frightful Four.” Sue followed up with diplomacy and calm reassurance, while Ben added something about “clockin’ that wizard wannabe next time he shows up.”

Then came the Q&A session.

You didn’t plan to raise your hand. Not at first.

But the question burned at the edge of your tongue, and when Reed nodded to the press corps, your hand lifted almost instinctively.

You saw a few heads turn.

So did Reed.

He gave a tiny smile. “Yes, you—go ahead.”

You stood tall. “In light of the Wizard’s tech matching several known Fantastic Four signatures, is the team considering the possibility of a breach in security—or worse, that the tech was reverse-engineered from a previous mission?”

The room went silent.

Tough. Fair. Pointed.

A few reporters turned toward Reed, pens poised. Reed, after all, was the one who usually answered tech-related questions with a thousand syllables and no punctuation.

But then—

Johnny stepped forward.

He didn’t wait for Reed. Didn’t look back for a signal.

Just shifted to the mic, adjusted it once, and looked straight at you.

“We’ve already considered that,” he said, voice steady—not cocky, not performative. “And Reed’s running diagnostics through every system in the Baxter Building as we speak. We’ve seen tech imitation before—it’s not new. But this was something else. The Wizard wasn’t just copying us—he was testing us. Learning our limits.”

He paused. The room leaned in.

Johnny continued, hands relaxed on either side of the podium. “That’s why we’re not just going back to old defenses. We’re adapting. Evolving. If someone wants to play smart, then we play smarter. That’s what we do.”

A flicker of surprise rippled through the crowd.

You felt your lips curve, slow and warm.

He wasn’t improvising. He wasn’t trying to steal the spotlight.

He was stepping up.

And it wasn’t just about being brave. He was prepared. Thoughtful. Clear.

God, he really had been listening all those nights you stayed up editing stories and picking apart soundbites. He’d absorbed it all.

When he stepped back from the mic, Sue gave him a quick side-eye that was both impressed and suspicious. Reed nodded, faintly approving. Even Ben muttered something like “Look at Flamebrain, gettin’ all articulate.”

Johnny didn’t look at them.

He looked at you.

And when he saw you smiling—really smiling—he smiled back like that had been the only audience he was trying to impress.

You shook your head slightly, eyes narrowing in mock disapproval, but your grin didn’t fade.

You didn’t leave when the press conference ended.

While the others packed up their cameras, chased quotes, and filtered toward the elevators, you lingered near the edge of the Baxter Building’s main hall, pretending to reread your notes. In truth, your pen hadn’t touched paper since Johnny spoke. You just stood there, professional façade cracking at the edges, watching the crowd thin and the team scatter toward their usual post-briefing routines.

Eventually, the lights dimmed to their usual state and the last guest reporter filed out. The hush that settled over the room felt different—less urgent, less public.

Just quiet.

And then you heard footsteps.

Booted, sure, and too familiar by now.

Johnny appeared from the side corridor still in his white and blue suit, the chest insignia slightly scuffed from yesterday’s battle. His hair was tousled, his cheeks still a little flushed from the heat of the day, but his eyes—those troublemaking, earnest, too-honest eyes—found yours instantly.

You didn’t wait.

You crossed the space between you and your arms looped around his neck before you could stop yourself, pressing your lips to his without a word.

He kissed you back just as easily, as if he’d been holding his breath through the entire press conference and this was the first time he got to exhale. His hands rested gently on your waist, grounding. Warm.

When you finally pulled away, your forehead rested against his for a moment, both of you breathing slow in the dimming room.

“You really gotta stop asking me the hard ones,” he murmured, his voice low and a little playful, but still soft around the edges.

You smiled, brushing your thumb lightly along the seam of his suit at his shoulder. “It’s my job.”

“Yeah, well,” he said, leaning in to nuzzle your temple once, “remind me to start bringing a flashcard with smart-sounding words. Just in case.”

You laughed quietly, still close. The suit was warm under your fingers—not from his powers, just from him. Being near him always felt like this now. Like a space you didn’t realize you needed.

Then, softer, you said, “You did a great job.”

His eyes flicked back to yours, and for a second, all the cocky charm vanished. What was left was raw and real.

“You think so?”

“I know so.”

He smiled at that—not his usual smirk, not a teasing grin, but something gentler. Something that belonged only to you.

“You looked proud,” he said. “When I answered.”

“I was proud,” you whispered.

Johnny leaned in again, kissing you this time with less urgency—just warmth. Familiarity. Gratitude.

You let your hands slide from his collar to the back of his neck, your fingers brushing the edge of his hairline.

“You keep doing things like that,” you murmured when the kiss broke, “and I’m gonna run out of critical things to write about you.”

He laughed against your cheek. “Guess I’ll just have to do something reckless again. For balance.”

You rolled your eyes, but your heart was already full.

“Mhm,” you feigned and turned back to your work.

Materials laid askew before you in the most unorganized manner. Articles half edited remained inked in red while photographs of worthy news were plagued by post-it notes with reminders of what, where, and why.

Lucy walked around your desk. Her fingers gliding along the top of it before stretching out in observation.

“I think you actually like him,” she said matter-of-factly. “Is it the eyes? They’re so blue that they just swallow you whole like the sea. Or! Or is it that he’s a funny guy? I love men who can make me laugh.”

“Yeah, well,” you scoffed, “you laugh at everyone’s jokes so it’s not that impressive.”

“But he’s a hero! And a rich one—you see the tower? And the car… don’t even get me started on the car.”

You hummed. “Every girl just wants to be picked up in an invisible floating object.”

She narrowed her eyes accusingly. “Do you just hate fun or what?”

Shrugging, you picked up a photo and held it to the light. Lucy took you in as you distracted yourself from answering her accusatory question.

By all standards of the word, Lucy thought you fit the definition of “beautiful woman” but your beauty stumped her with your lack of social life. You had no husband, no boyfriend, no guys circling on the side. You lived alone in a decent apartment where your late nights in the office were more important than getting home at a reasonable hour to someone willing to treat you right.

You were good at your job—great, even. But you were lonely and even a single star in the farthest galaxy could see it.

Lucy wasn’t implying that Johnny Storm was going to sweep you off your feet or ride in on a golden carriage to save you from a desolate nature. You weren’t going to fall in love with him after one interview. She took your vocal objection to as a win, however. Getting you out of your comfort zone, exploring something new, and hell, he just happened to be the attractive guy at the subject of your piece.

It was different, new, and it was perfect for you.

“$300.”

You kept your eyes glued to the photograph.

“$350,” Lucy propositioned instead.

“$400?”

Your face curled up in polite decline. “I mean, I’d go through so much trouble. Not to mention the traffic and then the extra fare for the train ride home… I’m losing free time and precious seconds I could be completing other articles for Friday’s edition…”

“$500 extra, final offer.”

Dropping the photograph, you folded your arms in front of you seriously.

“There are twenty other girls who would love to be an inch away from his breathing space. Why are you asking me?”

Lucy gawked, looking around the cubicles for other reporters to share an incredulous look but no one dared look at their boundary-crossing boss. Her curly black hair whipped back around to you in seriousness.

“They don’t have a spect of talent that you do. And besides, what story is going to benefit from a fan writing about their idol or someone they wish to become their husband?”

“You think the other girls would try to… you know, sleep with him?”

“I think every person who had a mutual attraction with Johnny Storm would try and fuck him.”

“Jesus,” you muttered. “We’re at work you know.”

“I know you won’t though,” she smiled mischievously. “Even though you won’t admit he’s cute.”

“Lucy,” you sighed heavily. You put a hand to your forehead as if she was stressing you out.

“But I wouldn’t blame you if you did. I mean get it where you can.”

“I’m a professional,” you reminded her.

“Exactly.” Her eyes told you a million reasons to take the job against your better judgement.

Do it: there was plenty of money involved. Do it: imagine the publicity your writing would gain if you did. Do it: it may be published in a fan club publication but it will fly off the shelves and will bring money into the organization.

Do it: it’s only one, fifteen-hour session following around Johnny Storm for a “Day in the Life” feature that would be the first of its kind for any of the Fantastic Four.

Why couldn’t it have been Ben? Or Reed? You thought. At least with them you fathomed you’d be treated like an actual reporter, not just a set of eyes, boobs, and ass with two legs and a mouth that smiled pretty.

“$800.”

Shit.

Your eyes flicked up immediately, locking onto Lucy’s with a determination you didn’t have ten minutes ago. Now that was a bonus.

“Alright,” you sighed and nodded your head in agreement. “You’ve got a deal.”

The Baxter Building was a towering shadow in the center of the city. Scaling into the sky with reflective glass, the world bounced back from it like a mirror. Anyone could spot it from the edge of the river—the spaceship docked in its back lawn didn’t help hide it from view.

The four residents were something of a spectacle. In your opinion, they were the center of the universe when it came to politics, space exploration, and the general news. They brokered deals and were looked to by actual leaders to just about anything regarding the world’s most serious problems.

And they were handed that because they once rode through a cosmic storm and were transformed with abilities that brought forth a more dangerous era of life on Earth. You didn’t know how to reconcile the fame they achieved when dangers now lurked everywhere. You wished Earth would go back to the way it was. Boring news stories, a few interesting STEM articles, and an entertainment section that didn’t make the front page everyday.

It was easier. Simpler.

But there you were: standing anxiously outside of the Fantastic Four’s home to write an entertainment feature for the front page.

You adjusted your bag’s strap on your shoulder, straightening your spine and titling your chin higher in faux confidence. Finger lifting to the call button, you breathed out, breathed in, and pressed.

“This is the Baxter Building. Please state your name and matter of business at the tone,” a robotic voice responded.

As instructed, you relayed the information necessary. You tried to focus in on the glass before you but nothing of its contents inside appeared. Just you, your reflection, and the city still bustling behind you. The faint whizz of a police ship passed by above.

“Mr. Storm has been informed. Please wait patiently at door number 2.”

You stepped back to eye the numbers above the doors. You were at door number six and in your purview, another police ship flew by in the sky. Was it always this noisy for them?

Nevertheless, you positioned yourself outside of door two with space left for it to swing open and not hit your toes. Your heels were shiny, catching the light of day in polish while the woolen fabric of your dress beneath your coat caught the February chill.

How long would he make you wait? You fathomed he would take his time. Slowly descending from his golden palace, swiping at his hair to land in a perfect Ivy League wave, he’d wink at the few building employees he’d cross paths with along the way and send their body’s into nothing but a puddle of wooed soup to step over.

He was a hothead—that much you knew, or heard, rather. Boisterous, self-centered, and expectant. It was the why of Lucy’s ask of you. You wouldn’t melt into a puddle. Johnny would surely sense your displeasure of being there and give an honest, professional interview… at least, you imagined that was her “why.”

A minute ticked by and then two. You shifted again on your feet before giving up at standing straight and relaxing with a slouched hip. Three. Four. Five. A third police vehicle soared by and in a flash, a searing heat erupted from the middle of the building and poured down onto the street below. Your head whipped up so fast it gave you whiplash as the brightness of Johnny Storm’s body consumed by a fiery blaze flew off the side of the building.

You’d never been in the presence of any of the Four in their element, but it was magnificent, if not inconvenient. The heat melted snow around you and you realized that no one ever talked about it. He couldn’t touch anyone with the flames even if he wanted to. There was no way he wouldn’t seriously injury someone while fully lit.

However, for as quickly as he followed after the police, you knew the clock was ticking again. Service over duty, a little reporter isn’t going to halt the saving of those in danger. You looked around the courtyard and set at its center was an art piece depicting the powers of the family. It sat elevated enough for you to sit and you did: for fifty-three minutes while Johnny Storm saved the city.

Goodness was it cold outside.

Your feet had lost feeling long ago and your hands were locked together frozen. Your shoulder’s shook, legs bouncing to keep the blood flow alive.

At fifty-five minutes, the door to the Baxter Building opened with a start.

And by the heavens were you irritated by the tiny sliver of relief the intrusion offered. A small white and blue robot with eyes made of film reels appeared in the doorway.

It beeped at you from afar. You looked around. You were alone and the sole focus of the robot. With a finger, you pointed to yourself.

It sounded a robotic cheer and pointed a metal finger back.

“Hello,” it said loudly.

Alright then.

The robot had a four at the center of its chest and as you approached another decal became clear. In zigzagged letters it spelled out H.E.R.B.I.E.—its name.

“H.E.R.B.I.E.?” You inquired. It beeped. You were familiar with its design and its features. H.E.R.B.I.E. had been featured in a recent edition of Good Housekeeping and the “Four Favorite Meals” of the team were entombed into the social strata.

“I’m here to interview Mr. Storm. It was supposed to have begun an hour ago but—“

H.E.R.B.I.E. sounded again in acknowledgement.

“Johnny,” it said clearly. “Follow.”

H.E.R.B.I.E. led you through the doorway and into the spacious lobby you recognized from press conferences aired on the nightly news. The room was empty sans another lone robot watering a potted tree near a set of steps.

H.E.R.B.I.E led you to a bank of elevators and pressed the button labeled “up”.

“Upstairs,” H.E.R.B.I.E.’s static voice relayed.

“Upstairs,” you repeated. “Is Mr. Storm in now? I would rather wait—“

“Saving people,” H.E.R.B.I.E. answered. “Helping people.”

You nodded and it must have registered it as the end of the conversation because the bot wheeled itself to the panel, stuck its hand in a slot, and pressed floor twenty.

When the doors reopened, they opened up to a home.

The floor was magnificently built with floor to ceiling windows stealing the most treasured views of New York City. It was furnished and colored in aesthetic perfection. A central television, a sunken living space, the art of science hanging on the walls. It was gorgeous.

You logged a mental note at the lived-in nature of the vicinity. It didn’t feel unapproachable. This space and the rooms that flocked it were a true home. It wasn’t flaunting wealth or power, just a space to live and build the strange life they walked.

And it wasn’t what you had expected.

As someone without pomp and circumstance or a penny to spread far, you’d only seen the Fantastic Four as “heroes” and not “people.” That was a hard admission to swallow when the familiar heat met the side of your face again and the man of the hour landed softly on the balcony just outside of the tall living room windows.

When his flames extinguished, your breath caught in your throat.

Johnny Storm was handsome. He was the kind of handsome that the word seemed too light to apply—beautiful was more apt. His blond hair was perfectly molded in a suave, stylistic groom that left his face framed for viewing. Beneath the high swoop of his gelled bangs, his blue eyes shined brightly. The winter did nothing to dull them. The flames only ignited them to glow orange until he showed his true self and back to blue they went.

They seemed to go right through your skin and into your bones. Blue meeting the red blood inside of you only to make your heart jolt and pick up its pace.

As your eyes trailed his figure now landed and walking inside, his lips curled into a small, barely there smirk before attempting to play at professionalism. His tongue wet his lips; catching your eyes and pinpointing exactly what shape they took when pulled back and forming into soft curves again.

My. Your palms grew sweaty, back taut in sudden speechlessness. Johnny entered the living room and jogged up the small set of stairs to meet you. Jogged. He rushed up knowing his duty prevented you from doing your job.

“Hi,” his voice was out of breath.

Johnny held out his hand for you to shake. You glanced down at it, registering its purpose before wiping your palm on your coat discretely and filling the space between you.

A singe of heat lingered from his power.

“Hello,” you introduced yourself. “Thank you for meeting with me.”

“It’s not a problem,” he waved off but his eyes, God… his eyes… they seemed to keep your feet planted to the floor. They gleamed further, crinkling at the sides. “I wanted to apologize for… that,” he jabbed his thumb toward the window. “We never know what it is they need us for.”

“I see.”

“You’ve met H.E.R.B.I.E. I take it?”

Johnny motioned to the robot beside you and put his hands on his hips. H.E.R.B.I.E.’s head looked from Johnny, to you, and back to Johnny.

“I think he saw me freezing to death outside and felt a little bad about it,” you admitted and bristled at the thought of being left outside for so long. “Are any other members of the team around today?”

Johnny gave a click of his tongue and walked around you to the kitchen just off the living room. H.E.R.B.I.E. followed after him obediently with a whirl.

“Reed’s in his lab today and Sue and Ben are off… somewhere. I’m afraid it’s just you and me today, sweetheart.” He shrugged in normalcy.

He didn’t comment on leaving you outside for an hour in the cold. You didn’t want to make it a problem but your toes were icicles even inside and your coat still burrowed the chill.

And sweetheart. He didn’t even know you! You were there for work and only work. Even if addressing your question, sweetheart wasn’t going to cut it.

You repeated your name. “It’s not sweetheart.”

Johnny pulled a box of cereal from a shelf and turned back around. “Force of habit. Sorry.”

“It’s alright.” It wasn’t. But you wondered, unprofessionally, if you’d be alright with him saying that off the clock.

“What paper do you write for?”

“For the New York Chronicle,” you replied and putzed with the strap of your bag to keep your hands busy. “We own the Flaming Hearts magazine.”

“I was expecting…” he didn’t finish the sentence.

“An adoring fan?”

He nodded and pulled a bowl out from a top shelf. As he reached, his shirt pulled on the muscles of his arms and your eyes attached to them like magnets.

Get a grip, you thought.

Johnny was handsome, you knew it—you got it. You weren’t blind and your body registered it in the way that the world already knew, you were just catching up. It just took you until this very moment to admit that Johnny Storm was perhaps the most beautiful man you’d ever laid eyes on.

That realization was distracting.

It didn’t stop you from thinking of your purpose here or the fact that superheroes weren’t really your trademark of writing, however.

“I’m here to write about you truthfully. My editor didn’t think a fan could write without bias.”

“That’s nice,” he said sarcastically while pouring himself a bowl. Did you sour it? By not admitting you’re a fan of his? “I guess you’ve got a list of questions for me then?”

“I do,” you joined him the counter with ease as he settled on the other side by the sink.

His eyes tracked you like a foreign object. A woman, a pretty woman, here for him with a very different intent than he was familiar with. You hadn’t even bothered to take off your coat as you sat on a stool and unearthed a pad of paper and a pen from your bag.

The muted colors of your clothes differed from the space around you. You looked like a journalist, he thought. Yet you were pretty and the way you straightened out your back and brushed at your forehead with a manicured nail captured his attention more than he was expecting.

Gorgeous. He wasn’t sure of any other word.

“My editor said that this is supposed to be a… informal, formal interview. I will ask you questions that are casual and people want to know, make you seem like an everyday guy, and then write it as a feature piece of the magazine.”

“I think I’m an everyday guy,” he quirked his head to the side.

You looked up from your paper and gazed at him seriously. Johnny was eating a bowl of cereal after igniting into flames and saving a small part of the city. That was not normal. It didn’t make him an “everyday guy” and maybe he, like you, also has some grappling to do.

“Yeah,” you lightly snickered. “I think we have different ideas of what makes someone normal.”

You didn’t mean to call him abnormal. But it came out and he took it that way.

Shit.

“What I meant was—“ you attempted to clarify yet his face already merged into one of abject offense. The interview hadn’t even started, you only met not five minutes ago, and you already know your name was at the bottom of the Do Not Let These Reporters In List.

“I know what you meant,” Johnny said chewing. “I’ve heard it before just not from someone cute.”

“Mr. Storm—“

“Johnny,” he clarified.

“Mr. Storm,” you insisted, “I didn’t mean offense. I think it’s clear that we lead two very different lives and I am just here to get a story.”

It didn’t even register to you that he called you cute.

His spoon clattered to the edge of the bowl. You wanted to do nothing more than climb into Sub-Terrania and hide forever. Why did you take this job? Why did Lucy have to offer that much money?

“You’d think a reporter from my own magazine would at least like me a little bit,” he said and you furrowed your brows.

“Excuse me?”

“Well, you don’t exactly look like you want to be here right now.” He gestured to your coat and rigid body.

“I told you,” you reminded him, “I work for the Chronicle, not your magazine. And it’s not yours, per se. It’s just about you. And what does my dress have anything to do about wanting to be here? I am here, aren’t I? I waited outside in the cold for an hour just to do this job.”

“Take off your coat,” he ordered passively and walked back around the corner. From your sitting position, he leaned up against the chair beside you. He was so close now.

His body heat radiated. It was natural now, the warmth he gave off absentmindedly.

“I like my coat,” you answered as the frigidness melted away.

“You’re going to be here all day and I would rather you not snag it on any of our projects while we take a tour.”

“A tour?” He was being considerate—not something you considered about him at all.

“What better way to figure out who I am?” He looked down at you. He wasn’t towering as he stood beside you but he wasn’t short either.

Your eyes met. Both meeting a challenge of what this day was going to be like.

A girl who doesn’t like heroes or abnormal attractive guys with flirtatious banter battling a boy who doesn’t like being underestimated and thinks said girl is the most attractive reporter he’s ever seen.

“All the secrets that make Johnny Storm brilliant are hidden here,” his gave small smile and leaned in close. “Aren’t you the least bit curious how the magic happens?”

“I’m a bit afraid of what magic you’re implying.”

His mouth shifted into a truthful grin. It was the kind that pulled at the edges of a person and cracked them open wide for the world to see.

“And I thought I was the one with the dirty mind. I guess trait belongs to you, sweetheart.”

That name again. You sucked in a fast breath.

“That’s not my name.”

Johnny tapped the back of the stool he stood at in a melodic pattern. H.E.R.B.I.E. rolled up beside him like a dog beside its owner.

“I know.” He tilted his head toward the staircase to the left. “Come on. Leave the coat. I promise it’s warmer here.”

The only thing you knew for certain was the warmth didn’t spread from the outside in. It was felt in your cheeks and your face, burning at his comfortable commands that would certainly be replayed in a different manner once this interview was done.

You had to keep reminding yourself that Johnny Storm was not a man who you wanted to woo you. This was all work and no play. None.

You just had to promise yourself that this was it all it was going to be.

“Out of all of the rooms in the building, this one is my least favorite.”

Johnny paused before a door labeled “Do Not Enter” about an hour into the tour.

Every room that you had passed thus far had been accompanied by a lengthy description of what was beyond the door and if you were lucky, Johnny would open it for a tiny peak. You were informed that three weeks ago, the apartment had been deep cleaned for an interview that Reed and Sue had done which featured the home.

It seemed everyone and their mother wanted to know where the family ate, slept, and spent all their free time.

You’d asked how he felt about being at the center of the universe but he just smiled at you and neglected to answer—only leaving the door open for you to follow through to the gym on the seventh floor.

Reed’s office was closed off when you went by but you could hear the static going off behind the door.

“Any reason why?”

Johnny wiggled the handle. It didn’t budge.

“My brother-in-law loves to keep me out when the experiments get too… involved.”

“Aren’t you a scientist too?” You asked and he turned his head with a surprised amusement.

“Scientist?”

“Well you did go to space so I assumed.”

“Mechanic,” he clarified. “Or I guess an engineer of sorts. I shoot pretty good too. And I can fly a spacecraft, if asked.”

You wrote down his reply and he waited silently as you carefully worded the response. H.E.R.B.I.E. rolled up to his legs, knocking into him slightly with the loud beep.

“I swore I read you have a degree somewhere,” you mumbled.

“I do,” Johnny’s eyes widened in surprise. “A couple years back, before… you know, everything, I studied in California.”

“Stanford.”

“That’s the school,” he replied lightly. He was impressed to say the least. You knew something about him and remembered it enough to bring it up.

“Question,” H.E.R.B.I.E. output to Johnny.

H.E.R.B.I.E. was the most intelligent of robots but neglected to understand that this was an interview. H.E.R.B.I.E. nudged Johnny again expecting him to ask you questions in return.

“What about you?” Johnny asked uncertainly as he looked down at the robot and motioned in confusion at the question he posed.

“What about me?” You replied still writing.

“Are… you? A…” again, he looked down at H.E.R.B.I.E., “scientist?”

H.E.R.B.I.E. groaned and you laughed. You laughed. For the entirety of the interview he’d come to expect you to never give in to his jokes and while his question was worded poorly and he didn’t actually mean to say scientist, he felt his world relax at the sound.

The melody of your laughter laid softly inside of his mind like a lullaby. It was natural and free and completely you—something you’d yet to show him during the short time you’ve spent together.

You’d been professional and kept your kindness at an arms length. You were curt and serious, not playful nor buying into his comments that bordered on suggestive.

“If you consider writing a science, sure. Most people would consider it an art. So, I’m an artist.”

“Right.” He cleared his throat and patted H.E.R.B.I.E.’s head as he stepped past.

“But about the mechanic thing,” you looked up from your paper and Johnny forgot what he said before.

Every time you looked at him, he felt himself grow fonder of the way it made him feel. The silly feeling of love at first sight being marred as ridiculous in his perspective yet he swore that’s what it was.

He could listen to you talk all day.

“Do you have a shop or anything here? Or is it more isolated to here,” you motioned to the lab door. “Does he let you in to work?”

“I have a room,” Johnny said quickly. His excitement poured through his speech. “It’s not here. It’s a shop just off 4th and Wash Square—“

“I know of it.” Your eyes lit up in recognition. “I take the train from there to work everyday.”

Small world.

“Really?” He said honestly.

“That’s a far way from here,” you added. “Any reason why?”

“I guess because it’s my own little place.” He put his hand on the door handle again casually. His grip was strong.

Your eyes caught sight of his hand as it strained on the handle nervously, like he was admitting something for the first time. Had he never talked about this before? You knew he had talked about vehicles and that he’d love to race cars one day but that was Q & A session on the back of an entertainment rag at the grocery store.

“There’s nothing but me and the car and it’s kind of peaceful. It’s peaceful here but it’s a fishbowl, you know? Everyone feels like they know us when we are here but when I go there, it makes me feel like they don’t really know me. They just know The Human Torch, not Johnny. The shop makes me feel like me.”

“I’m not going to write that.”

His face dropped.

“Why? Didn’t you say you wanted this to be human? Or that you’re trying to make me sound more personable?” Johnny grew defensive.

“I’m not going to write that because once they,” you tipped your head to the windows, “know about that little shop, you won’t have one day of peace for the rest of your life.”

Oh. Oh. He hadn’t thought about that.

“That’s…” he tried to find the words.

The shop was his little slice of paradise. He could tinker away and no one would come looking because they knew that not only was he safe, he was alone.

Sue let him have his space there because it made him happy. It was the most happy she’d seen him since they were kids and while you might not have known that, it meant more to him that your integrity wasn’t going to jeopardize his peace.

He’d given you a part of his humanity and you’d shown him mercy. A trade off of the hour.

“That’s real nice of you.”

“It’s what a decent person would do,” you brushed it off casually and held the pad of paper to your chest.

“You’d be surprised by how few of those exist.”

You smiled at him softly. A blush bloomed on his cheeks and he looked off towards the city outside his home. H.E.R.B.I.E. whirled by toward the direction you were heading next.

Breathing in deep, you took the first step and barely brushed Johnny’s shoulder as you walked by.

“Can’t keep H.E.R.B.I.E. waiting, can we?”

Johnny shook his head and bit back his smile, peaking down at his shoes to hold it in. He played with the handle of Reed’s lab once more before turning on his heel and walking a step behind you.

“Did you always want to be a reporter?” He felt his confidence return in bounds.

You hummed. “Since I was a little kid.”

“Why the news and not books?”

“I’m not that creative,” you admitted. “And aren’t I supposed to be asking you these questions?”

“Just curious.” Johnny pulled his hands together behind his back. “Besides, this isn’t going to be fun if I don’t learn about you too.”

“But that’s not the purpose of this.”

“Are you always a rule follower or only when interviewing superheroes?”

You stopped walking and turned around. He caught himself before crashing into you.

“I’m not a rule follower,” you told him. Johnny wasn’t convinced. “I’m on the clock.”

“I’m always on the clock but I have a good time too,” he skirted around you and began his walk backwards.

You huffed and followed.

“It’s inappropriate.”

“It’s prudish,” he countered, hands still bound behind his back.

“It’s a boundary,” you challenged.

“It’s an imprisonment.”

“That’s a strong word.”

It was Johnny’s turn to shrug. “I don’t take it back, if that’s what you’re waiting for.”

“I didn’t ask you to take it back. That’s your opinion, not mine.”

“So you’re making this a challenge for me?”

“A challenge?” Your brows shot up and then came together.

“For you to admit you had a good time hanging out with the one and only Johnny Storm by the end of the today.” He referred to himself in third person and you weren’t sure if that was inducing a wince in response or a short track to the answer.

You already knew what your response would be.

Your heart hadn’t stopped thumping, hands still sweaty. Your stomach grew with butterflies every time he looked in your direction and no matter if you sat in silence the rest of the day, today would be the most entertaining experience you’d ever had.

But Johnny didn’t need an ego boost right now.

“We are already a couple hours in,” you checked the small golden watch at your wrist. “You have twelve hours to change my mind it appears.”

“I could have sworn I had gotten a smile out of you earlier.” Johnny’s teeth grazed over his bottom lip. “And maybe even a laugh too. Those are pretty good signs to me that I’m winning this.”

“I don’t recall—“

“Yes you do.” His voice grew louder in amusement. You peered away from him, not willing to gaze into those blue beacons because you knew that he’d see a liar.

You did smile and laugh with him. That was a sign of enjoyment if there ever was one.

“You smiled and laughed and you don’t want to admit it because it means you’ve already lost and I’ve won.”

“You didn’t win anything. I don’t even know what we’re playing for!”

“To prove that you—“

“No,” you let a breathless chuckle escape your lips as his misunderstanding and his eyes pinned you in the hallway laughing again.

Point: Johnny.

“I meant the prize. What’s the prize if you win or if I win?”

“I don’t know,” he shook his head. “I didn’t think that far out yet.”

“Oh,” you played disappointment. “So, I guess that means the smarts only extend to engineering then?”

Johnny’s mouth dropped open in surprise. Did you just make an attempt at a borderline offensive joke that he would totally love to hear?

You did.

“You’re going to wish you never said that,” he teased.

Were you really doing this?

“Well you didn’t name your price, Mr. Storm.”

“Mr. Storm,” he muttered like he’d never been called that before. “You’re obedient, you know that?”

“Like a dog.”

“Fine,” he put his hands on his hips. “You wanna know my price?”

“Name it.”

“If you enjoyed yourself by the end of today—really, truly enjoyed yourself—you gotta let me take you out on a date.”

“A date?” You confirmed.

Never in your wildest dreams did you think you’d have the gall to banter with Johnny. If Lucy could see you now she’d be asking to collect her winnings in the office betting pool. You were emotionally weak to Johnny’s charm and you hadn’t expected that.

“That’s all? Just a date?”

Both of your minds raced to that appetizing place. It stirred with from within, billowing into full blown fantasies of the dark. Imaginations painted a lustful affair; the tugging of lips and the grasping of skin. Polished nails digging into heated flesh and the sounds of two bodies combining rung deeply in echos of the hallway.

“I mean,” his face turned pink and his right hand rubbed the back of his neck. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

Too late.

There was far more interest in the fantasy than either of you let on. You let the blushes fall apart and dared your minds to venture into that place again.

“Fine,” you agreed. “But if I have a terrible time… a really, horribly agonizing time, you have to… be my assistant for a day. Like come to the office and everything. Get my coffee, make my copies, all of it.”

Amused, Johnny dropped his hand. “That’s it?”

“What?”

“Your assistant? That’s the best you could come up with?”

“Well… yeah,” you replied. “I don’t have time to think of something worse.”

“Either way I think I win, though,” Johnny stepped forward again but this time with his hand extended similar to how he had greet you two hours before.

Yet his hand was offered with a renewed sense of enthusiasm. Every time he reached for it, the purpose was different.

“And why’s that?” You accepted his hand and relished the way it perfectly encapsulated your own. His hand was soft and cooler than it was prior.

You wondered if he could still feel the sweat the settled in your palm.

“Because no matter what I get to spend more time with you and I think that’s a win.”

You didn’t know what to say to that but your heart surely responded with a thump.

Johnny’s bedroom is not where you thought you’d end up after imagining what it would be like to fuck him.

He had lingered by the door at the end of the hall with his own curiosity threatening to change the atmosphere. It wasn’t like being in his bedroom was automatically leading you to a rumble in the sheets.

His room was the essence of him. If Johnny really wanted the world to see a normal guy, his bedroom is where he surely showed it.

It was clean and shared the same views overlooking the city as the rest of the apartment. Amidst the wooden paneling and the filled shelves, a round bed sat centered and an elevated seating area with the nicest record player you’d ever seen was placed adjacent.

It was well used based on Johnny’s collection of vinyls that bathed the room on either side.

He offered you the chair overlooking the city and made himself comfortable on the floor across from you. Having taken off his shoes, his socked white feet were constantly moving from side to side like he couldn’t sit still with every question you asked.

The clock ticked away.

“Sports team?”

“I’d say the Mets but I don’t want to make anyone mad, so Yankees.”

“If you could have any other job in the world, what would it be?”

“Race—“

“—car driver,” you finished his words for him. “I should have known that one.”

“Yes.” Johnny’s fingers traced the edges of his lips as he fought a grin. “You know me so well.”

His lips pulled and you thought about how nice they’d be to kiss. They appeared soft and pink, just plush enough to leave a lingering tingle in the spots he’d lay delicate memories to your skin.

Someone once said that the beauty marks on a person’s body were the remnants of places their lovers had once kissed.

Maybe in another lifetime the ones on your own were lives lived with Johnny. You shook away the thought when reality snapped back in. You were rushing and only fools did that.

You read through question after question to get a full extent of who Johnny was. These questions, the mediocre ones, were the kind that people wanted to read about.

“First love?”

“Oh.” His tone dropped an octave. “Look who’s trying to learn about my exes now.”

“It’s not me,” you reminded him, again. “It’s the readers, remember?”

“I don’t think they’re the ones coming up with them.”

“Then it’s my editor. She’s obsessed, move along. First love?” You asked again.

“Ramona Mitchell—second grade. She shared her animals crackers with me and broke up with me at the water fountain.”

“Tragic,” you fought the indulgence chuckle.

“Favorite food?”

“Anything Ben makes.”

“That’s not a food,” you countered.

“He makes a mean pasta,” he thought on it. “But I’m from Long Island and you can’t beat some restaurants there.”

“I’ve never been to Long Island.”

You said it passively. Solely focused on writing his response down, your face inclined toward the paper and not to him. Watching him sit there casually was making this feel more and more like a choice rather than a job.

He sat up straighter on the floor.

“What do you mean you’ve never been to Long Island? It’s like… right there!?”

You put the pad of paper down on the table beside you. Crossing your legs, Johnny’s eyes followed them as you settled into the new position.

“I’ve been to Brooklyn before.”

“That’s not Long Island,” he said as if he was a geography expert.

“It’s on Long Island so maybe it counts a little.”

You leaned back into the chair and folded your arms across your chest. This was comfortable. Johnny was surprisingly easy to talk to and you’d be remiss if you said you weren’t loose to the idea of someone to talk to. He listened, he asked, and he looked like he was interested in anything and everything you had to say.

“But you wouldn’t say that Manhattan is the same as Brooklyn as to Queens or as to the Bronx.”

“No,” you agreed. “I suppose I wouldn’t.”

“And I’m talkin’ deep Long Island,” he emphasized his words with an extension of his hand. “Like the kind where your favorite deli is owned by the cousin of the ex-boyfriend of your mother’s best friend and they know you by name kind of deep.”

“That sounds like it’s from experience, not a universal trait.”

“I guess we’ll have to go see and ask them then,” he smirked as though he knew he’d prove you right.

“Time isn’t on our side today.” You glanced down at the watch on your wrist. You’d been talking in his room for nearly five hours—seven hours to go.

“Another day then.” Johnny crossed his feet at his ankles. “I’ll show you our old stomping ground and take you to one of those delis.”

You laughed not out of amusement but out of nerves. It sounded a hell of a lot like a date.

“Is this the part where I ask you what you think is the perfect date? According to the survey, our readers really want to know how Johnny Storm would make them fall in love.”

“What’s your ideal perfect date?”

“I’m not the one being interviewed here.”

“Amuse me,” Johnny bartered. “And then I’ll ask H.E.R.B.I.E. to make us some lunch.”

You sighed, gazing out the window in thought at the question. What constituted the “perfect date?” You weren’t entirely sure there was one concrete answer because everyone had a different opinion.

However, if Johnny could be open and honest for the sake of a magazine, you could be honest for him.

“I guess it would be doing something that interested me.”

“Go on,” he urged. Those interested blue eyes bore into you.

“I don’t know… I would hope that before I am asked out on a date that a guy would listen to me. Ask me about my interests and discover things I like so that when we go, they choose a place that I would like to go to. Someone says they like art and they go to a museum; someone likes music, they go to a show—that kind of stuff.”

“But what about you? Not someone else, you.”

“I like going to the pictures. Museums and the city zoo is nice too. But sometimes I don’t want to make a big fuss about it all and a diner is nice. Just a little hole-in-the-wall place where the coffee is stale but the food is good and the company doesn’t care that it’s not a five star establishment.”

“That doesn’t sound too bad,” he nodded his head in agreement.

“Dating doesn’t have to be flashy. I see the kinds of things that are written about your sister and her husband. I couldn’t imagine being under that microscope.”

“It’s a choice they made—to be open about everything. I’m not sure they like the constant guessing of what the baby is going to be, but they don’t mind the interest in their lives.”

“What about you?” You asked him. “The perfect date? Being in the public eye?”

“I don’t mind it,” Johnny said with little thought. “It’s just part of the job and people have been pretty nice about it all. It’s not everyday you have to trust someone like me to help out.”

“So you admit it,” a small, rewarding grin played at your lips. You saw his gaze flick to them and back to your eyes. “You’re not normal then?”

His eyes narrowed playfully. “Was that a trick question?”

“No. Just an honest one. Date?”

He sat with his response for a minute, falling back against the record player’s built-in. Johnny liked having you here. It felt normal and easy and not like anyone else he’d ever known.

“Mr. Storm?” You pressed.

“You don’t give a guy any time to think, do you, sweetheart? And it’s Johnny.”

“I don’t have forever,” you reminded him. He wished you did.

“What you said.”

“Excuse me?”

Johnny’s smug face was rewarded with your surprise. His head tilted up as he rephrased, “you described my perfect date.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Yes,” he dug in further, “you did.”

“But that’s my perfect date. We are two very different people.”

“Opposites attract and all,” he commented. “I want her to feel comfortable and safe. If I take her race car driving on the first date, she might never speak to me again or if she’s someone I really, really like, then I want her to feel like I’m making an effort to get to know her. Getting to know me can come later. Preferably here, in this room, with a record on and very little taking.”

You felt that warmth invade your body once more.

Your band of resistance was starting to snap.

“Mr. Storm,” you started.

“Johnny.”

“You know I can’t write that down.”

“It wasn’t for you to write down,” he said seriously. “It was for you to know.”

“Why would I need to know that?”

The space inside of his room shrunk. The only thing that existed was the small, elevated section you both sat upon: you in the chair, he on the floor.

Your comment sat heavy in the hair. Hanging there above your heads, it twirled into a storm of those savory thoughts from a few hours ago. Neither of you had forgotten about it—how your minds automatically raced to imagine what it would be like to sit just a little closer, inch your hands toward the other.

He knew what your palm felt like in his and it was perfect. Slotted to a perfect puzzle piece and he knew this feeling was the ultimate one that Sue told him about. It was the universe opening portals to emotions he didn’t know existed and stretching him in directions he didn’t anticipate going.

“I know we don’t know each other well,” Johnny started slowly as he broached the topic.

“We don’t know each other at all,” you clarified.

“People have done a lot more knowing a lot less.”

“I feel like I’ve had to remind you that I’m working several times,” you uncrossed your legs and moved to stand.

Johnny scrambled to his feet and that line had been crossed. He didn’t know how to return to the other side and wasn’t sure if he wanted to.

All that talk of a perfect date and he just wished someone would give him a real chance to show off. You listened and maybe right that second you didn’t feel like you knew him, but you did.

Johnny had given you more answers in seven entire hours than he’d allowed anyone else to hear in his life besides his family. You cracked a part of him open without waving the slightest finger in attempting to do so.

“I’m sorry if I gave you an impression that it wasn’t professional.” You gathered your paper and pen from the table and aimed for the door.

He rushed toward you frantically. Johnny cut off the path to the door by standing in front of it. The look on your face immediately sent him into orbit. He was spiraling.

“Sorry!” He said quickly. “I’m sorry if I crossed a line. I just… I just thought that, well, I don’t know! I felt something, okay?”

“Mr. Storm, please—“

“You gotta stop with that Mr. Storm shit.” He let out a stressed groan, a hand wiping over his face in duress. “You’re tellin’ me that you haven’t felt it too?”

God did you feel it. You felt the pull so strong that it was sending your own synapses into overdrive. You couldn’t be here any longer. He pushed open the flood gates and allowed those feelings to spur deeper, rising into that forbidden territory you couldn’t come back from.

This was what all those other reporters wanted and the one thing that you weren’t expecting. You were attracted to Johnny. Immensely. He was charming and sweet—far more interesting and curious than you realized. He was the one guy that was as engaged with your own answers as he was with his own and it was a drug. A highly addictive drug that wouldn’t last because he was a hero and you were a journalist.

Those two things didn’t mix.

They couldn’t mix.

It was wrong. It was inappropriate. But fuck, did it sound so, so good.

“It’s not appropriate. I don’t sleep with my clients.”

“Then end the interview,” he said like it was easy. “I’m not a client anymore.”

“Is this just for you to get your rocks off?” Your eyes narrowed and he held up his hands defensively.

“No! No!” He exclaimed. Maybe you were being too harsh. “If you want to leave, go ahead.” Johnny backed away from the door and settled at its side.

There was a pathway out now.

“I’m not trying to make you break any rules,” he said softly. “That wasn’t my intention. But tell me you don’t feel it too. It feels like you stuck dynamite in my chest and it’s ready to explode.”

You knew the sentiment well. But you couldn’t. You couldn’t be what Lucy and all the rest of them wanted to be.

“I can’t, Johnny.” He melted at the sound of his name falling from your lips. “I’m not trying to be like those other girls.”

“So you’re not like the rest of them, huh?” He joked.

“No,” you replied painfully. “Unfortunately I’m just like them it seems because I can’t stop thinking about what it would be like to kiss you.”

You threw your hands up in defeat and paced around his room in circles. He just stood by the door and watched amused as you worked through what he already figured out.

“I guess that means you won, right? It’s not even the goddamn end of the day and I’m already throwing in the towel because I don’t have a little more self control.” You let out a rueful snicker. “And to think I was so certain that I could do this!? I mean, it’s not like you’re my type or anything.”

“And that is…?”

“Nice!” You answered loudly. “And not one to say crude things all the time.”

“They weren’t crude, they were suggestive. For a writer I would hope you would know the difference.”

You stopped pacing and looked at him with your mouth agape. “Why you—“

“Careful,” he held up a finger, “your name calling game isn’t that strong. Might I suggest ‘most handsome man on the planet’ or ‘hero of my heart’ instead?”

“Oh my god,” you wailed. “I can’t believe I am even the slightest bit attracted to you!”

“I think it’s a little more than slight, sweetheart. You were ready to burn this building to the ground at the mere thought of sleeping with me and I think that means you’ve at least thought about it before.”

“I have not!”

“You’ve thought about kissing me.”

“That’s different,” you emphasized. Of course you thought about fucking him too. He’s Johnny fucking Storm and he’s been giving you “fuck me” eyes for the last five hours.

“It all leads to somewhere else in the end.”

“So you were implying that. I’m not crazy.” Your eyes widened like you were.

“I didn’t say you were. And you’re not, by the way.”

Johnny just settled against the wall and crossed his arms against his chest. The muscles of his biceps strained at the short sleeves of his white tee and invited you in.

“Having a little bit of fun doesn’t make you less of a journalist,” he said your name for the first time. Not sweetheart or any other pet name.

Johnny. You. It was personal now.

“I’m not going to make you do anything you don’t want to do. I’m not that kind of guy and I hope you didn’t get the idea that I would be that kind of guy. You’re nice, real nice, and I really enjoy talking to you. There aren’t many people who are willing to listen and take things with an open mind.”

God. He needed to stop talking.

“Plus I think H.E.R.B.I.E likes you. He felt real bad about leaving you out in the cold like that.”

Stop talking, Johnny.

“And I do too. Sorry about that, by the way,” he laughed slightly at the predicament. “I’m not used to putting people that aren’t my family first but I’m open to the idea…”

His blue eyes beat you down. Stop fucking talking.

“If we had more time I would have—“

You couldn’t take it anymore. Dropping your pad of paper and pen to the ground, you closed the distance between the two of you in a few long strides and grasped his face between your hands, planting your lips onto his in a heartbeat.

His words halted.

Fusing together like atoms, the electricity of your mouths falling into sync quieted both minds. It was tranquil. His face cupped between your hands tilted, angling to the side and opening up further. Johnny’s tongue begged for mercy between your lips, melding together with yours in tune to the beating of your hearts.

Something sprouted inside of you. Building from your toes to your mind, it tingled your limbs into numbness where nothing else but Johnny’s hands weaving around your waist and cradling the back of your head mattered.

This is what it felt like—attraction.

It was all consuming and all knowing. It recognized parts of you that had been sleeping and awoken to a giant tower ready to climb. His smooth face fell from your hands as they dropped to his neck; trailing the edges of the scoop of his shirt and feeling the molds of his chest before settling there. One hand turned into a fist to gather his shirt with a tug, drawing him closer and leaving no space between you.

His lips were as you imagined: soft and inviting. There were no words needed to accept the fact that you were holding everything back for nothing. This was as it should be. He was kind. He was considerate.

He was charming, funny, nervous, clumsy, confident, handsome, smart, entertaining, and didn’t force you into this.

It fell into place. As two objects in motion collided, the motions continued on.

Johnny’s hands groped you tightly, barely allowing you time to breathe as your lips parted. His hands paved a path down your body and tested the waters with bated breath. You didn’t stop him. You craved the feeling of his hands on your body.

You pulled back from his lips but he chased after them, drunk on the feeling. You knocked your nose gently into his as you breathed in deep breaths.

“You can touch me,” you reassured him. His eyes stayed focused on your mouth.

“As long as you’re sure.”

“More than sure.”

Johnny’s hands slid down to your ass and cupped you roughly. His grip pulled you flush against him and with a groan, your lips caught his chin and dotted kisses along the column of his neck.

He thought he was dreaming. Five minutes ago he was certain you were going to flee the apartment and speak his name into forbidden existence because of his brash assessment. Here you were, kissing him mad and he was imprinting a picture of your body forever in his mind. You were luxurious and finite. There was only ever going to be one of you and he was never going to forget what this moment caused.

The rapture within him was cemented.

“You know,” he murmured against your kisses when your lips returned to his. “I did really want to take you out on a date before all this.”

“I told you that I don’t follow the rules,” you nipped at his chin playfully.

“You surprise me.”

“Good,” you smiled. You backed away from him and his hands fell to his sides loosely. “And I’m not going to write an article about you anymore either.”

“No?”

You hummed and shook your head. “Can’t now. I’m too biased in my storytelling to be truthful.”

Johnny took a step forward and you took one back.

“And the honest truth is what, sweetheart?”

“That Johnny Storm isn’t the man everyone thinks he is.” Another step forward, another back. “He’s a good man with a good family and similar morals. He likes to have a fun time but within the bounds of his duty and he’s a romantic at heart—not a womanizer.”

“I would really like to womanize you, however.”

Johnny bit down on his bottom lip. You extended your hand and he gladly took it, leaping into your space again and tumbling with you onto his bed at the center of the room. You fell back with a thud and his body weighed heavy on top of yours.

“Johnny Storm defies the expectations we have of him,” you continued on.

The hand not entwined with his own came back to his face and brushed stray blond bangs from his forehead.

“And the lucky few who get to know the real Johnny will always know his true heroism lies within.”

Johnny’s smile widened. “That’s real cheesy—you know that, right?”

You grinned back and returned your hand to the back of his head where the shortened hairs weaved between your fingertips. Johnny pulled your intertwined hands up above your head.

“I think it’s a perfect story.”

His story or this one playing out now, he wasn’t sure which was better.

“Yeah,” he placed a soft kiss on your lips. “Me too.”

“You’d sacrifice the world for your family and I admire that.”

“Now you’re getting sappy on me,” he laughed. He laid a peck beside your ear. “You don’t need to butter me up to make something happen.”

“I’m not buttering you up.”

You titled your head to the side to give him access to the side of your face, neck, and when his hand tugged at the top of your dress, the bit of clavicle he was able to reach.

His touch set you ablaze. Burning from the sensations his gentle lips left behind, Johnny knew how to touch a woman and make her feel good. It was something he’d perfected in his thirty years on Earth.

“You remember what I said about my perfect date?” His voice was muffled by the wool of your dress.

“Oh,” you gave an awe inspired sigh. “Was that you buttering me up? How you got me here?”

“You did that all on your own.”

Johnny’s head turned back up to face you and he rested his chin at the curve of your breasts. You hadn’t realized he had moved down that far on your body. He slowly slipped his lean frame to the edge of the bed, kneeling at its base and letting his hands fall to the backs of your knees. They glided down your calves and to your ankles, playing with the straps of your shoes.

“Tell me that you don’t want this and I’ll stop.”

You sat up on your elbows. His hands grasped your right foot. Slowly pulling at the buckle of your heel and undoing the strap to where you shoe fell off your foot with a small clunk when it hit the floor.

Johnny’s gaze didn’t escape yours. He waited for you to change your mind. The anticipation of your soft rejection pounding at his ribcage.

His hands moved to your left leg and when the second shoe dropped, Johnny’s hands caressed the skin of your shin.

“I wouldn’t have let you do that if I didn’t,” you told him.

“When I said that your perfect date is how I see my perfect date, I also should have said that I want her to be satisfied when it’s all over.”

You swallowed a lump that had formed in your through from the promise. God. You couldn’t believe you ended up here.

“I’m not asking you to give out to me,” he nodded at you. Johnny asked you to give him the confirmation he needed. “So if it’s not today, it will be another time.”

The ghosting of his fingertips on the backs of your knees sent a chill up your body.

“Don’t you think that’s a little presumptuous?”

“I mean…” he smirked, lips placing peppered kissed along your kneecap. “I think I may have won the bet.”

He did. He knows he fucking did.

Johnny’s hands roamed to the end of your dress. His thumbs pushed the fabric that had grown far too warm on your body upwards, watching you in permission that every inch higher was not crossing the boundary of what you were willing to give to him.

His position between your legs prevented them from closing in bashfulness. His tongue wet his lips as the curve of your hips forced his hands harder to give him access. Johnny paused again.

“You’re sure?” He asked quietly.

You nodded, running a hand through his short hair. The hesitancy you had yesterday seemed like a distant memory. Johnny enraptured you and while you were breaking every rule in the book, you couldn’t stop here. Not when he was kneeling for you. Not when he wanted to taste you.

“Yeah. I’m sure.”

Putting your free hand atop his, you guided it to the top of your panties in invitation.

“Lay down,” he ordered and you complied. Obedient. “Relax.” Came next and in a mere whisper as the fabric slipped from your body and the cool air now exposed to your body made you aware of how wet you were.

“I’m gonna take care of you.”

Kissing the inside of your thigh, you stared at the ceiling in disbelief. You felt his piercing gaze upon you; he measured your body in the way it folded and it heaved.

And he kept a promise of taking care of you—not himself. As much as the sight of you, bare and wanting before him made his soul burn, he knew this wouldn’t be your last meeting.

His kisses drew closer. Johnny’s hot breath met the crux between your legs before any other part of him did. His lips barely grazed you and your thighs trembled with his head stuck between them.

Johnny didn’t miss the sharp intake of your breath when he finally lowered his mouth to you. And my, he had never tasted someone as sweet as you. His tongue glided along the wetness that had already gathered and focused his attention to your clit. He gave in to a merciless pace; circling and sucking—your toes curled to hold you back.

Your hand wrapped into his hair and tugged at the strands. His arms held onto your sides and tracked the curve of your body as he pulled you closer. The response he was receiving was Pavlovian. Forever he’d bend at the sounds of your sighs, of the feel of your nails raking against the base of his skull. He’d dream of the flesh he devoured and sing songs of the pleasures he took.

Johnny Storm hadn’t believed in love at first sight until today.

And you hadn’t imagined giving him a chance until he had greeted you that morning.

His tongue increased its pressure on your bud. Pressing down as he lapped the wetness of his saliva and your arousal into his method and used it to lower himself smoothly.

A whine escaped your lips when his fingers left your side and helped open you up to him. Splitting you open and allowing his tongue to pin you to the bed. Your knees shook, legs coming to bend beside his head as his shoulders lurched to catch them. Johnny’s opposite hand held you down, settling at the base of your stomach.

“Holy mother of—“

He hummed and it sent a vibration through you.

As he had kissed you before, his tongue flicked inside of you in a passionate rhythm. His eyes closed to relish in the sounds of your neediness. Johnny didn’t tell you to be quiet because he didn’t want you to be. You could shout, scream, or cry out and he’d ask you for more. Give him everything, he wanted to imply, but he couldn’t ask for everything at that very moment.

You were taking everything he was giving like it was made for you. Hell, maybe he was.

The fingers he had used to help open you up remained rubbing up and down the sides of your pussy while his tongue explored the horizons beyond it. You felt one move, his middle finger, and it joined his tongue, curling into you gently.

“Oh god,” you groaned. His mouth curved into a smirk, backing away centimeters.

“Johnny is fine,” his voice had turned gravely. “But I’ll take being a god any day.”

And that laughter. It filled him so deeply that not even the strain in his jeans could distract him from the innate pleasure of hearing you respond to him. He continued on, letting his finger work against your plush walls and master the craft of you.

His mouth refocused to your clit which he did not abandon on purpose. Johnny quickened his pace, unrelenting and fixed on assisting you to the end. It built, like a flame kindling from a spark and tingling every cell in your body.

Your shoulders tensed, anticipating a release but infatuated with the way his ministrations only pulled back when he knew you were getting too close. He was keeping you on your toes. Johnny let you feel and experience the pleasure outside of simply working toward an orgasm.

Earn it. You had to earn it.

“You gonna keep teasing me like that or what?” You whined.

“I’m just not done with you yet.” His finger left you empty before coming back with its neighbor. “We’ve got time.”

“I don’t think we have time today,” you seemed to always remind him that you had a deadline. “Maybe another day.”

“Now who’s asking for a second date?”

“This isn’t a date.” His fingers reached lengths you were unable to do yourself. Your back arched in his grasp and his grasp tightened.

“Then our first date will be amazing.” Cocky son-of-a-bitch.

“Jesus,” you couldn’t help the spattering of words that flew from your lips as the precipice gained on you again.

“Johnny,” he repeated.

“Johnny,” you cried back. “I—“

“I can feel you, sweetheart.”

The familiarity of your orgasm climbed the mountain of your thrill rapidly approached. Recalling the minutes he spent prior being agonizingly slow, then picking up his pace, your ears captured the most bawdy sounds of excitement. His fingers were coated in your slick, chin glistening in the slightest with remnants of what he’d take as a prize.

You turned your head to watch his fingers disappear inside of you and your chest nearly caved.

“Come here,” you breathed in heavy. Johnny’s brow furrowed.

“Wha—“

“Just kiss me.”

With his fingers still pumping frantically inside of you, Johnny pushed up from the ground and let your hands pull his face toward yours. You had never tasted yourself on the lips of a lover before and you cherished the intimacy of the notion.

He felt your shoulders stutter, your body shaking in need. His mouth opened to allow you in.

One. Two. Three additional thrusts of his fingers and he felt you tighten around him. A wave of immense pleasure washed over your body in bliss. Arching into him, Johnny held onto you tightly, never once letting you fall apart without him.

You could hear him whisper words of praise in your ear except nothing but a kaleidoscope of colors seemed to match the tremors of your lower body. Legs shaking, toes curled as one leg wrapped around his own waist and laid lax once the shaking subsided.

“I’ve got you,” he murmured. He retracted the two fingers. Resting them on your thigh, he patted the skin there. “You’re fine, sweetheart.”

Johnny laid his forehead against yours and let you breathe before his mouth couldn’t help but run again.

“I would have called you a good girl but I think sweetheart is the only nickname you can take right now.”

You opened your eyes and met his glinting with amusement. Did you want to take back everything u out said? Pretend this never happened and go find someone who can keep a moment serious for longer than a minute?

“You are—“ the words couldn’t form. There were too many words to describe Johnny Storm and even a journalist as great as yourself couldn’t come up with one.

The next morning you were at the office bright and early. No article had been prepared, no pictures of Johnny in his space, and nothing to report to Lucy.

Your mind was racing, however.

When you unlocked the door to your apartment later that night, you did so with a smile plastered to your face. You felt like a school girl with her first crush. Johnny enamored you and left you feeling like jell-o and your limbs acting on their own accord was proof of it.

But you had to keep a lid on it. So, when you sat down at your desk and flipped on the light to wait for the inevitable, you pretended you weren’t hopelessly crushing on the hot-headed hero.

An hour after you settled in, Lucy rushed to your desk to gossip. Her eyes were wide, expectant for you to spill all of the details of what makes Johnny tick. Every secret you gathered from the contents of his bathroom cabinet to the food he liked to eat, she wanted to know.

“So?” She said incredibly fast. “How was it? Where is it?” The draft.

“I don’t have it.” You preoccupied yourself by typing out a different article. The keys on your typewriter filled the space of her mouth hanging wide open in confusion.

“What do you mean you don’t have it?”

“I didn’t it write it,” you clarified. “It’s not happening.”

“We—“ she started and stopped in a stutter. “What, well… what happened? Did you even go??”

“Of course I went.” The page reached its end with a ring and you shot it back to the opposite side. “I just don’t have the story for you. I’m not going to write it so ask someone else.”

Lucy watched you carefully. “Please tell me you didn’t make our paper look bad.”

“Oh just awful,” you drawled. “I think we’re banned from ever covering them.”

She didn’t catch the tone. Lucy had been so preoccupied with wanting a big, newsworthy feature that she didn’t think of anything else. She joked about you falling into bed with him but figured you were too much of a straightened arrow to try it.

You didn’t have a hickey, you weren’t sweating at the temple, or drinking the largest coffee. In fact, you didn’t even have a coffee.

“Did you…” she trailed off, neck jutting out in curiosity.

Before you could look her in the eyes and lie, a delivery man with a bouquet of flowers was making a b-line to your desk caught your eye.

Shit. So much for discreet.

He said your name aloud and held up the flowers as if you didn’t see them. They were magnificent. A collection of winter favorites perfectly curated in a massive bouquet.

“I have a delivery.”

“From?” Lucy asked bewildered.

“There’s a card,” he informed. The man set the flowers on your desk and you stood, straightening out your blouse as you plucked the card from the small spokes elevating it above the petals.

“Who’s it from?” Lucy pressed.

“Geez,” you mumbled. “Care to give me a minute or would you rather just read it yourself?”

“Go ahead,” she motioned.

You slipped the card from the envelope and slid it out. In personal handwriting, a short message relayed a simple message without a signature.

You couldn’t fight the grin this time. It filled your face with a joyous, girlish glow and Lucy smacked her hand on the surface of the desk.

“Holy shit!”

And holy, flaming fucking shit indeed.

Saturday, 9 AM. My shop. Wear something nice, it’s a date.

And you knew right where to go.

A/N: a Joe Quinn character breaking me out of a writing slump? 2022 me is not surprised. His Johnny is *chef’s kiss* and I love him, your honor.

P.S. all writers love to hear from readers and it’s the one thing I love more than anything. Thank you for taking the time to read this!