Schlangenring

Your father had never stopped going. Even in his last years, when his knees complained and the walk to the church had become a small daily negotiation with his own body, he still went every Sunday and some weekdays besides, because — he told you, more than once, in the tone he reserved for things he considered simple fact — a person owed God the courtesy of showing up.

Whatever capacity you had once had for faith, you had inherited from him, before you let it go the way you let most things go that required upkeep you didn't feel you had hours to spare for. He'd mentioned the new priest to you once, years back, over dinner: a Father Baelor, transferred in from another diocese, young yet by his account, and by all reports a fine homilist. You made a noise of polite interest and never once, in all the years your father had left, went to see for yourself.

Then your father died — quickly, in the way that manages to feel both sudden and, in hindsight, inevitable for months beforehand — and it was only you and your mother left in a house that had never before had to hold just two people's worth of grief and now had far too much room for it.

Your mother wept in the kitchen at strange hours over recipes she had made a thousand times before and now, apparently, understood she was making for one person fewer. You held her. You made the calls. You signed what needed signing and discovered you could go entire days without anyone asking how you, specifically, were managing — because it had not occurred to anyone, least of all to you, that you might need managing too. You had not known, until that year, that loneliness could exist inside a house that still held another person in it.

On a Wednesday in the flat middle of an otherwise unremarkable week, for reasons you could not have fully explained under interrogation, you put on real clothes instead of the ones you had been sleeping and grieving in, and walked to the parish you had not entered in the better part of a decade.

The building had not changed, which felt like its own small insult. The same water stain crossing the ceiling beam over the side aisle. The same brass rack of votive candles, most of them lit by hands you would never know, guttering low in their red glass cups. You dipped two fingers into the stone font at the door out of a muscle memory old enough to embarrass you — you hadn't decided to do it, your hand had simply done it — and the water was cold enough to register up to your wrist. You took a pew near the back, out of an instinct you didn't examine too closely, and sat with your hands loose in your lap, turning your father's old verdict over in your mind. A fine homilist. You supposed you would judge that for yourself, if you managed to stay through the whole of it.

You laced and unlaced your fingers, conscious of how conspicuous your own restlessness must have looked beside the handful of elderly women scattered through the front pews, each of them still in the settled way of people who had done this ten thousand times before and expected to do it ten thousand times again. A small bell sounded once from somewhere near the sacristy — a clean, single note, felt more in the sternum than heard — and the women rose as one, the movement automatic, requiring no more thought from them than breathing did. You stood a half-beat behind them and turned toward the side door as he came through it.

He was not what you had pictured, though you couldn't have said what you had pictured instead. He was tall enough to duck fractionally beneath the door frame, an old habit worn smooth by however many years of practice, and built with a breadth through the shoulders and chest that the green vestments of Ordinary Time did nothing to disguise, and seemed, if anything, cut to accommodate. He crossed to the centre of the sanctuary, made his reverence to the altar, and for a moment before the Mass properly began you simply looked at him the way you might look at any large, unfamiliar object set without warning into a room you thought you knew by heart.

This, you supposed, had to be the Father Baelor your father had mentioned all those years ago, at a dinner you otherwise barely remembered. He looked, on the strength of nothing more than how he carried himself at the altar, like precisely the sort of man your father would have approved of.

The opening rites passed you in fragments — the cross traced automatically over your own chest, the responses arriving on your tongue half a second before you'd consciously recalled them, evidence that some part of you had never actually released any of this, whatever you had spent the last decade telling yourself. It was the Gospel that undid whatever fragile composure you had managed to assemble since walking in.

Father Baelor stepped to the ambo, made the small triple sign of the cross — forehead, lips, heart — that you copied without deciding to, and read from the Gospel of John: Christ's promise to his disciples, the night before he died, that he would not abandon them. I will not leave you orphaned; I will come to you.

It was a passage your father had read aloud to you more than once, in years you would rather not audit too closely, on nights neither of you could sleep for reasons you never named to each other directly. You had not thought of those nights in years. You thought of nothing else for the length of the Gospel, sitting with your spine very straight and your face arranged into the specific blankness you had perfected these last months for use at funerals, hospital corridors, and now, it seemed, church pews.

The homily was not what the voice had led you to expect. You weren't sure what you had exactly expected, to be honest, but it certainly fell somewhere more instructive, maybe, closer to a lecture. Instead, he spoke low and unforced, pitched to carry to the back pews without ever seeming to labour at it, and what he spoke of was loneliness: not as a sin requiring confession or a weakness requiring correction, but as a country nearly everyone in the room had crossed at some point, a good number of them more than once.

He told the story of the prophet Elijah, fled into the wilderness and certain he was the last faithful man left alive, so worn through by his own isolation that he begged God to let him die under a solitary broom tree — and how God had answered him finally not in the earthquake, nor the fire, nor the great wind tearing the mountain apart, but in what the old translations called a still, small voice, so quiet the prophet had to go silent himself and strain to catch it.

Presence, Father Baelor said, was rarely loud. It came, more often than not, in the smallest and least dramatic of forms — a hand set on a shoulder, a voice through a doorway, someone choosing, again and again, simply to remain. You are not abandoned, he said, near the close, his voice dropping lower still, and for one unreasonable, indefensible moment it felt aimed directly at the back pew where you sat with your hands gone white-knuckled in your lap. You are not orphaned. Even when it feels that way. Even now.

You heard little of what followed. You were aware, distantly, of standing and sitting in their correct places, of the practiced choreography of the Eucharist proceeding at the front of the church, but your attention had narrowed to the low cadence of his voice and stayed there, snagged, useless for much else, for the remainder of the hour. You did not go up for Communion. It did not feel earned yet — whatever grace required of a person who had spent ten years deciding this building had nothing left to offer her, you weren't ready to test in front of witnesses whether you'd been wrong.

When Mass ended and the small congregation filtered out into the ordinary Wednesday afternoon waiting for them, you stayed behind. You told yourself it was to pray, though when you tried to assemble the actual shape of a prayer in your head, you found you had lost the grammar of it somewhere in the years between. You could recall the posture without the words, kneeling with your forehead nearly against your folded hands, the old formulas half-remembered and abandoned partway through.

You were still sitting there, in the hush a church holds once everyone else has gone, when you became aware of a presence behind you, waiting with the patience of someone who had nowhere else in particular to be.

You turned. He had shed the outer vestments somewhere between the sanctuary and here, down now to the plain black cassock, and without the ceremonial weight of the chasuble he looked, if anything, larger rather than smaller — less an office now and more simply a man, broad through the shoulders and faintly stooped in the way tall men sometimes learn to stand, in rooms built at a scale for other people. He was smiling at you, and it was not the composed, public smile he had worn at the altar. This one sat a little crooked, tucked at one corner, like something he had not entirely decided to let you see. In the low light through the side windows his eyes read as two different shades entirely, and you couldn't have said with any confidence which one was closer to true.

You got to your feet too fast, some old reflex about remaining seated in front of a priest reasserting itself before you thought to question it.

"I'm afraid I haven't seen you before today." He offered his hand, and you registered, absurdly, how much larger it looked before you'd even taken it. "Are you new to the parish?"

"Not new." His palm was warm and dry, the handshake brief but not perfunctory. "Estranged is probably closer to it. I used to come here with my father, when Father Arlan had the parish."

Something shifted across his face — recognition, maybe, or just the private realization of years passing. "That was quite a while ago, then. I've had this parish almost ten years now."

"I stopped coming altogether, somewhere in there." You gave him a lopsided smile you didn't entirely feel behind.

He tilted his head slightly, looking at you from his considerable height in a way that felt like being properly seen rather than assessed, and when he spoke again there was no trace of the judgment you had braced yourself for out of old habit.

"It's a wonderful thing, coming back to Him."

"I'm not sure I'd say I've come back. Not yet." The admission left you before you'd quite decided to make it. You hadn't planned on honesty with a stranger, least of all one in a collar.

If the words troubled him at all, he didn't show it. "That's no trouble whatsoever." The corner of his mouth deepened. "Would you like me to hear your confession? I promise I won't make you feel judged. Friendly priest's oath."

You laughed, a small, surprised sound you hadn't produced in longer than you could easily place. "Maybe another time. I don't think I'm up for it today."

He nodded, unbothered, and the quiet that followed felt like permission rather than dismissal, so you turned and started toward the door, your footsteps loud against the stone in the emptied church.

You were nearly at the threshold when you heard him behind you again, his stride longer than yours, closing the distance without seeming to hurry at all.

"I'm Father Baelor, by the way." He held out his hand a second time, as though the first exchange hadn't quite counted, or this one meant something slightly different. "Though most everyone here just calls me Baelor."

You took his hand again and gave him your name. His closed fully around yours — warm, a little rough at the knuckles, engulfing rather than simply holding.

"It's been a pleasure, having you back."

You managed something close to a smile before you turned and let yourself out into the ordinary daylight, the door falling shut behind you with a weight that, for the first time in longer than you could say, did not feel entirely like an ending.

You had told yourself you wouldn't come back so soon — one visit had been forgivable, permitted on the strength of grief alone, and you had meant to leave it there. And yet here you were again, five days later, on your knees at the same back pew, arguing with a God you'd spent the better part of a decade insisting you didn't especially believe in.

"I really don't know why I'm back here," you said, low, to the wooden cross above the altar, the words barely clearing a whisper.

You'd meant it as prayer when you'd knelt. What came out instead was closer to an indictment: anger at your father for dying, resentment at your mother for being so thoroughly undone by it that there'd been no room left over for you to be undone too, something smaller and uglier aimed at yourself, for how little of what you were meant to feel you actually managed to feel most days. And underneath all of it, aimed at the cross itself like it might actually answer back — fury at God, plain and entirely unmanaged, for allowing any of it to happen in the first place. You knew exactly how this looked from the outside: a grown woman muttering to an empty chancel. You wouldn't have blamed anyone for thinking you mad. Fuck, you thought yourself mad half the time.

"I don't even know why I'm trying to talk to you," you went on anyway, some perverse momentum carrying you now that you'd started. "You've only proved yourself real by fucking up my entire family." You let out something between a laugh and a scoff, some small vicious part of you almost proud of the defiance. Your father would have killed you for saying it aloud. Father Arlan would have lectured you into an early grave, out of sheer patient disappointment.

You were still smiling faintly at your own blasphemy when a low chuckle sounded from somewhere behind you, and it startled a small, undignified sound out of you — something between a gasp and a curse.

"You really shouldn’t say things like that." Father Baelor's voice reached you before he did, warm and unbothered, that same lulling register from the pulpit put to entirely domestic use. "I hear there's a priest about."

You twisted around on the kneeler to find him a few pews back, tall even sitting, dressed only in the black of the cassock rather than anything more ceremonial. You recovered enough to manage a lopsided smile of your own. "I think the old ladies who come every single day are the ones I should actually be afraid of."

"There's one in particular who's appointed herself unofficial sacristan." He came forward and lowered himself into the pew beside you, his knees drawn up higher than the pew in front of him had been built to accommodate. "I'd be careful there, if I were you."

"Are you mocking your own flock, Father Baelor?" You'd turned fully around by now, still on your knees, to look at him properly.

He laced his hands over the back of the pew ahead and looked toward the altar rather than at you. "Merely observing." A trace of mirth touched the words. "Purely so I know what to brace for, come Sunday confessions."

You studied his profile while his attention stayed elsewhere, something you allowed yourself only because he wasn't looking. He was, you decided with a clinical honesty you rarely extended to strangers, a good-looking man. The beard did something generous for his jaw, and the collar, stark white against the black, framed the whole arrangement in a way that felt almost unfair — engineered for maximum effect on a face that presumably hadn't needed the help to begin with. You found yourself wondering, in a thought you filed away immediately as unhelpful, whether he'd have been just as striking without either — beard gone, collar gone, nothing left to signal what he was and wasn't allowed to be to you.

"I believe I heard you telling Him off, a few minutes ago." He turned his head and caught you looking, though he didn't seem to register it as anything worth remarking on. "Would you like to talk about it?"

"What is it with priests and confession?" You shook your head, grateful for the change of subject. "You're all just gossips with better outfits."

He laughed low in his chest. "This needn't be a confession. Mondays run quiet, around here. We could simply talk, if you'd rather."

"Free information, and you won't even absolve me for it?" You aimed a teasing frown his way. "Now I really know you're a gossip."

His smile deepened enough to finally reach his eyes, and you were certain, seeing it properly this close, that they weren't quite the same colour, though you couldn't have said in what way exactly they differed. Maybe one bluer than the other. "It would do you good. I promise."

You considered that for a few seconds, weighing something you couldn't entirely name. "If I'm doing this," you said finally, "I think I'd rather do it properly. In the confessional, I mean."

He only nodded and rose, offering a hand down that you took before you'd quite decided to, and led you toward the confessional set into the side wall — dark wood, a heavy curtain standing in for a door.

The interior smelled of old varnish and years of incense worked into the grain, close and dim enough that the mesh screen resolved him into little more than a suggestion: a dark shape, the pale smudge of his collar, one hand loose at rest against his knee. You settled onto the narrow kneeler, your knees complaining faintly at the thinness of the cushion.

"I don't actually remember how this starts," you admitted into the dark, feeling foolish for it. "It's been a while."

"Then we'll do it simply." His voice came low through the screen, closer somehow than it had been out in the pew, stripped of whatever distance the space was meant to enforce. "You needn't recite anything. Just tell me what's sitting on you. That's the whole of it."

You gathered what you could of your thoughts, which had scattered the moment you knelt, and started with the easiest one, because you didn't trust yourself yet to start with anything harder.

You told him about the anger — at God first, for allowing any of it, and then at your father, for the particular unfairness of an ordinary Tuesday becoming the day everything else stopped making sense. You told him about your mother, and the resentment you were ashamed even to name, at how completely her grief had swallowed the whole house, leaving you to manage the funeral home and the paperwork and her, on top of whatever you were supposedly still allowed to feel yourself. You told him, last and quietest, about the funeral itself — how you had stood dry-eyed at the graveside while cousins who'd seen your father twice a year wept without restraint, how at the reception after you'd caught yourself counting the sandwiches left on a tray instead of thinking about him at all, and had hated yourself for it in almost the same breath you'd been grateful for the distraction.

He was quiet for a moment once you'd finished, long enough that you nearly asked if he was still there. When he spoke, something in his voice had changed — pulled tighter, quieter, though no less warm.

"None of that needs absolving." A pause, brief, before he went on. "Grief isn't a sin. Neither is anger, however much it frightens you to feel it. God can bear a great deal more fury than you're capable of giving Him, I promise you that." Another pause, and when he continued, the words seemed to be reaching somewhere past the space between you, as though he were, in some way you had no means yet of naming, telling himself the same thing. "Loneliness convinces you that you're the only one who's ever stood where you're standing. You're not. You won't be, either, if you let anyone stand there with you."

You closed your eyes without deciding to, letting the voice move through you unbroken by the sight of him, and found you could feel each word land somewhere just beneath your sternum, distinct as a hand pressed flat there.

When you had said what there was to say, he walked you through a short Act of Contrition, feeding you the words a line at a time since you had lost the shape of them years ago, and then his voice dropped into the older cadence of formula — mercy and reconciliation folded into a rhythm that didn't belong to him alone, ending the way it always ended, your sins spoken loose from you and a cross traced in the air with steady hands somewhere on the other side of the screen. You said Amen because you remembered, at least, that much.

You heard him rise and draw back the curtain on his side before you trusted your own legs enough to do the same. It took you a few extra seconds — you told yourself it was your knees, stiff from the kneeler, and mostly believed it — to gather up whatever had come loose in you, listening to that voice low and unbroken by any obstruction, aimed entirely and only at you in the dark. You were fairly sure that wasn't the reaction the sacrament was designed to produce. You filed it away regardless, somewhere you didn't intend to examine too closely, and finally pushed back your own curtain.

He was waiting near the confessional, hands loose at his sides, and the smile he gave you this time didn't climb all the way to his eyes the way it had out in the pew. You couldn't have said what the difference was, exactly — something in the set of it, something you didn't yet have the information to name.

"Do you feel better?" he asked.

"I feel different." You wrapped your arms around yourself, an old habit you hadn't consciously chosen.

"Different bad, or different good?" Something in the way he held himself shifted, almost imperceptibly, closer — as though some string you couldn't see had drawn taut between you.

"Just different." You breathed the word more than said it. "Which is better than nothing. It's a start."

You started toward the main doors, and he fell into step half a pace behind you, quiet in a way that didn't feel like absence so much as consideration. Near the threshold, you turned back to him.

"Thank you. For listening."

He shook his head, easy, deflecting the weight of it. "It's nothing. It's the job."

He hesitated, though — long enough that you noticed, long enough that whatever came next had clearly needed the extra half-second to arrive at. "You know these doors are open to you. Whenever you need them. Not only on Sundays or odd Mondays."

You looked up at him, at the mismatched eyes, and something in how he'd phrased it — whenever you need them, not whenever you need Him — struck you as slightly too warm for something owed to any parishioner off the street. Or maybe that was only your own starved and unreliable judgment, filling gaps that weren't there with whatever it currently wanted to find.

"I know," you said simply.

"Good." He nodded, more to himself than to you, it seemed, some private thought being settled. "Good. Sunday, then? I'll see you at Mass?"

You let a smile pull at one corner of your mouth as you turned on your heel toward the door, already walking backward into the beginning of an answer he wasn't going to get easily. "Don't push it, Father."

Hypocrite.

The word arrived most mornings before his feet had properly found the floor, uninvited and precise, phrased the same way it had been phrased for longer than he cared to count. 

Bloody hypocrite. How dare you counsel anyone toward righteousness when you cannot walk two steps down that road yourself? How dare you comfort a soul in despair when despair is the country you've been living in for years?

It was not so much a thought as a visitor who had long since stopped waiting to be let in. It simply arrived, sat on his chest, and stayed there until he had wrestled himself upright and into the black. He had come to think of it, with the only kind of humour he still had reliable access to, as his cross. Not poverty. Not chastity, not obedience, though God knew those extracted their own toll daily. Hypocrisy. A priest who no longer entirely believed the thing he had given his whole life to proclaiming.

He told himself, most days, that this was temporary, a crisis of faith, the kind nearly every priest he'd trained alongside admitted to somewhere in the confidence of a rectory kitchen, late, after the wine had loosened something. Faith was a theological virtue, after all. A gift, not an achievement. He'd had it once, freely given, and a gift once given could presumably be asked for again.

The problem, as Baelor saw it, was that he had been asking for four years.

His faith had gone dry as a wadi in August, and no amount of kneeling had managed to run water through it since. He kept the form of the thing scrupulously — the Office, the daily Mass, the rosary some nights when sleep wouldn't come and there was nothing else worth doing with his hands — because he had learned, early in seminary, that discipline outlasted feeling, that a man didn't stop rowing simply because he could no longer see the shore.

He had read enough John of the Cross in seminary to recognize the shape of what he was in — a dark night, technically, textbook enough that he could have lectured on it — which didn't make the nights any shorter, or any less dark. Recognizing the disease in a book had never once, in his experience, cured a man of it. He knew, with the specific and humiliating clarity of a man who had studied theology long enough to diagnose his own condition and still be unable to treat it, that there was a difference between fidelity and faith, and that he had been running almost entirely on the former.

Loneliness was the part he told no one, not even in his own confession, which he supposed was its own failure of the sacrament if nothing else.

It wasn't for lack of company. There were the parishioners — the same handful of devoted, elderly women who left casseroles at the rectory door like offerings and asked after his health with more attention than his own mother sometimes managed. There were the other priests, the ones he saw at diocesan meetings and ordination anniversaries, men who clapped his shoulder and asked how the parish was doing and never once, in fifteen years, asked how he was doing, because none of them had been trained to ask that question of each other and neither had he. There was his family — brothers, more nephews than he could always keep straight at a glance, a standing invitation to Sunday dinner he took up perhaps twice a month, sitting at the end of a table crowded with other men's children, uncle to all of them and father to none, which had once felt like a clean and holy kind of sacrifice and now, some nights, simply felt like a room he was allowed to visit but never quite live in.

None of it touched the actual thing. He was lonely. So fucking lonely, if he let himself reach for the one word he'd never once used from the pulpit, in the one register no parishioner would ever hear, in the privacy of his own skull, where apparently no vow of composure held any jurisdiction at all.

He knew, in the part of his mind that still functioned as a theologian even when the rest of him had stopped functioning as a believer, exactly what was supposed to go in that hollow he felt in his chest. It had gone there before. He could remember — not abstractly, but with the kind of sense-memory that ambushed him at inconvenient moments — what it had felt like in his first years ordained, kneeling before the tabernacle at two in the morning because he simply wanted to, not because the breviary demanded it, and feeling something answer him that was not merely his own voice bouncing back. He hadn't imagined that. He was nearly certain he hadn't imagined that. But it had been a long time since anything had answered, and he had run out of new ways to ask.

Which was, he suspected, why he had not been able to stop thinking about her.

She had come to him unannounced, not quite a fortnight ago now, and confessed in the dark, through the screen, in a voice trying very hard to sound steadier than it was, to a loneliness so exact in its shape that he had sat on his side of that screen and felt, for one disorienting moment, as though he were somehow listening to himself. Grief for a father. Resentment she was ashamed of. The exact exhaustion of being the person everyone assumed was managing, because she had gotten so good at performing it that no one thought to check. He knew that exhaustion. He had built a fifteen-year vocation on top of it.

He'd told her, because it was true and because it was his job to say true things in that room: loneliness convinces you that you're the only one who's ever stood where you're standing. You're not. You won't be, either, if you let anyone stand there with you.

He had believed it, saying it. He still believed it, as doctrine. And walking back to the rectory afterward, hands cold in his pockets, he had been visited by the obvious, unavoidable question, arriving with all the cruelty of a thought that shows up exactly when a man is feeling pleased with himself: had he ever once let anyone stand there with him?

He hadn't. He knew that the moment the question landed. Not his brothers, who would have tried, who had tried — one of them, Maekar, had cornered him once after a dinner, quiet, asking if he was alright, really alright, and Baelor had said yes, of course, only tired, and watched the offer close itself back up like a door he had chosen, deliberately, not to walk through. Not the other priests. Not even, if he was honest, God — not really, not with the thing that was actually wrong, because admitting the actual thing out loud, even to Him, even in the dark, even where it was supposedly safe to admit anything, felt like the one betrayal he wasn't sure he'd survive committing.

He recognized something else in her, too, underneath the grief. That same instinct to manage her own drowning quietly rather than let anyone watch her go under, the same reflex against being a burden. He knew that instinct from the inside. He'd built a career on it.

It frightened him a little, watching it in someone twenty years his junior, because he knew exactly where that road went if nothing interrupted it early enough. He wanted, with an urgency that surprised him in its intensity, to reach her before she arrived wherever he currently was. Before the loneliness calcified in her the way his had done.

He simply didn't know how to do it without frightening her off entirely, without becoming one more authority figure informing her what she needed, which was, he suspected, exactly the kind of attention she'd spent her whole adult life quietly avoiding.

He was still turning the problem over, unsolved, on the Sunday morning he stood in the sacristy working his arms into the alb, the young deacon's voice carrying faintly from the sanctuary as the boy tested the bell.

The vestments went on in their fixed order, the way they had for fifteen years — the alb first, white and formless, the cincture cinched at the waist, the stole crossed over his chest the way it was worn by priests rather than draped straight the way a deacon wore it, and finally the chasuble, green for the long ordinary stretch of the year.

He murmured the old vesting prayers as he went, mostly from habit rather than intention, half in the Latin an elderly priest had taught him as a seminarian, before he'd properly learned to shave. He caught his own reflection, briefly, in the sacristy's dark window as he settled the chasuble across his shoulders — a tall man, greying now at the temples, dressed for a role he had once wanted with his whole undivided self and now simply performed, competently, the way a man performs any task he has done long enough to stop feeling much of anything while doing it.

Get it together, he told himself, in the tone he might have used on a nephew who'd skinned a knee and was making more of it than the injury strictly warranted. It's an hour. You've done this ten thousand times before.

The bell sounded, thin and clear, and Baelor walked out into the nave doing the practical arithmetic he always did on the way to the altar; a rough count of heads translated automatically into a rough count of hosts, a habit worn so smooth by repetition it required almost no conscious thought at all.

Except that his eyes, running the width of the church, caught on the back pew and simply stopped there, sum completely abandoned.

She was there. Sitting exactly where she'd sat the last two times, in the pew closest to the door, as though she wanted a clean line of retreat available at all moments, as though some part of her still hadn't decided whether she was staying. She looked, from across the church, like she'd apologize for existing in the space if anyone asked her to.

Baelor thought, with a conviction that arrived whole and immediate and slightly too fierce for a passing observation, that she could not have been more wrong about that if she'd tried.

The midday light was coming through the east windows at the low, slanting angle it only managed for a few hours that time of the year, falling directly across the back pews in long panels of colour, and it happened to be resting on her the moment he looked — gold and red and a deep, churchy blue laid over her like something intentional, though he knew perfectly well it was only the accident of architecture and the hour.

He thought, with the part of his brain that had apparently decided today was the day to stop cooperating with the rest of him, that he had never, in all his years at this altar, seen anything as purely, uselessly beautiful as her sitting alone in stained-glass light when she had no idea anyone was looking at her, and no idea, either, how much sorrow she carried visibly enough that a stranger could read it from forty feet away.

He lost, he would later admit to no one, a genuine portion of his own homily to the fact of her. He knew the passage well enough to preach it on autopilot — he'd written the thing himself three days earlier, in a version of himself that had apparently not accounted for this — but somewhere in the second point he caught himself having skipped an entire line of his own argument, recovered only by long practice and the mercy of a congregation too polite to notice a priest losing his thread. He watched her instead, in the gaps his voice could apparently manage without him. Watched her bite the inside of her cheek when something he said caught on some private snag of hers. Watched her brow pull together, briefly, at a line about mercy, as though mercy were a concept she was still deciding whether to trust.

Time did the thing it did during Mass, folding oddly, and he surfaced properly only at the Communion, distributing the host down the line with the automatic grace of long practice, until he registered, with a small, precise jolt, that she had risen from the back pew and joined the queue.

She had not, he remembered clearly, gone up the first time she'd come. He had noticed that too, at the time, and filed it away as simply information: she wasn't ready, and a priest who pushed a person toward the altar before they were ready did more harm than the waiting ever could. That she was standing now, moving forward a few careful people at a time, felt disproportionately significant for something so small — a woman joining a line — and he was aware, distantly, of being moved by it in a way that had very little to do with sacramental theology and a great deal to do with simply being glad, in some entirely personal register, that whatever had been keeping her back had loosened its grip a little.

She reached him a few communicants later, and knelt.

He hadn't expected the kneeling. Most of the parish took the host standing these days, the old rail rarely used except by the handful who'd never adjusted to the newer practice, but she went down onto the worn kneeler like it was a thing she'd done a thousand times before she'd ever stopped, muscle memory outrunning whatever else she might have decided about the morning, and he found himself praying, hard and specific and entirely impious in its motivation, that his hands would hold steady.

They did not, quite. Not enough that he thought anyone else would have caught it — fifteen years gave a man excellent control over the visible parts of himself — but he felt the small tremor in his own fingers as he lifted the host, and knew precisely why it was there, and hated himself for it with an efficiency that would have been almost funny had it not been happening to him specifically, in front of her, at the altar, during the single most sacred moment the day contained.

"The body of Christ," he said, and his voice, at least, held.

She opened for it the way most of the older parishioners still did, tongue offered rather than hands, and he registered the fact of it with a clarity he immediately, furiously, wished he hadn't. The pink, slight wetness of it, the plain vulnerability of the gesture, a woman kneeling in front of him with her mouth open and her eyes lifted to his through her lashes, trusting him with something that had nothing at all to do with what his body had apparently decided to make of the moment.

"Amen," she said, quiet, and he set the host down against her tongue, and for perhaps a quarter of a second, no more, the pad of his thumb grazed the wet warmth of it.

He felt the reaction low and immediate and entirely outside his own permission — his cock twitching hard against the front of the alb, an animal response to a moment he had spent his entire adult life training himself out of having at all, arriving anyway, uninvited, in the one setting on earth where it had absolutely no right to.

She rose. Crossed herself. Returned to her pew without a backward glance, entirely unaware, he was fairly sure, of anything beyond having received Communion for the first time in over a decade, which should have been the thing occupying the whole of his attention, and which he found he could not currently locate among the noise of his own reaction.

He had, God help him, an entire line of communicants still waiting.

He served the next in line, an elderly man who had been kneeling at that rail longer than Baelor had been standing behind it, with the effortful concentration of someone performing a familiar task while a separate part of his mind stood off to one side, arms crossed, informing him in no uncertain terms exactly what he was.

Hypocrite, the voice supplied, obligingly, and for once he couldn't argue with it.

He had spent the walk back to the rectory that first week convinced the problem in front of him was pastoral: a lonely, grieving young woman who needed someone steady to reach for, and a priest well-placed, by training if nothing else, to be that steady thing. He understood now, standing at his own altar with his body still humming with something it had no business feeling anywhere, let alone here, that he had gotten the shape of the danger badly, embarrassingly wrong.

The problem was never going to be knowing how to help her.

The problem was going to be whether he could stand this close to her at all without eventually wanting something from her that had nothing to do with helping, and everything to do with the plain, damning sin he had promised, fifteen years ago, in front of a bishop and his own weeping mother, that he would never again allow himself to want.

Something close to a week had passed since the confessional, and you had, despite every intention to the contrary, kept coming back. You told yourself it was for different reasons each time — the quiet, mostly, a kind of nothing that a weekday Mass demanded of you, ten minutes where nobody needed managing and your mother's grief could exist without an audience for once. In all four of those weeks, you had not planned to receive Communion. The plan, such as it existed, was to sit in the pew and let the ritual move around you, spectator rather than participant, the way you'd done as a child through the parts of Mass you were still too young to properly understand.

This Sunday was different, though you couldn't have said exactly when the decision got made. Somewhere between the Gospel and the final blessing, some quiet negotiation appeared to have concluded itself without consulting you, and by the time Father Baelor descended from the presbytery, distributing the host himself, your body had already decided the matter on your behalf.

You didn't remember deciding to stand. One moment you were sitting with your hands folded loosely in your lap, and the next your feet had committed you to the aisle, already three steps into the queue before the rest of you had caught up to ask what, precisely, it thought it was doing.

You told yourself the nerves climbing your spine were simply the ordinary nerves of the thing itself — ten years since you'd last done this, and your body apparently hadn't forgotten how much weight the act was meant to carry, even if the rest of you had spent a decade pretending otherwise. That explanation held for approximately four pews. By the fifth you were close enough to watch him working down the line, steady, unbothered, that same soft cadence repeating itself to each person in turn, and the nerves sharpened into something with a considerably more specific target.

You watched the woman two ahead of you receive the host into her open palm, easy, practiced, already turning away before she'd finished her Amen. That was how you'd meant to do it too — you'd decided as much, sitting in the pew, some sensible, unbothered part of you resolving to take the host in hand like a normal person having a normal religious experience.

The line moved with the same unbroken rhythm every queue like it seemed to share, and ahead of you his words repeated themselves at even intervals — the body of Christ, the body of Christ — until they nearly lost their shape entirely and became simply sound, a current pulling you forward rather than a sentence you were choosing to walk toward. And then it was your turn, and you were on your knees on the worn kneeler before you'd consciously authorized the movement, spine bent, chin lifted, and your tongue, God, your tongue was already out, waiting, and you were looking up at him through your lashes in a way that had nothing to do with piety and everything to do with something you didn't have a clean word for yet.

You had spent a great deal of your adolescence being taught, carefully and thoroughly, the difference between reverence and its imitations. You could probably still recite, if pressed, the specific ways a person's posture and intention were meant to align during the sacraments, the whole careful presence of a well-formed conscience. Nobody had prepared you for how completely that presence could collapse the moment desire decided to borrow its vocabulary. Kneeling had always meant one thing. It appeared to now mean several things simultaneously, and you had no reliable way of establishing which one currently governed your body.

You wondered, distantly, mortified, whether any of it read on your face the way it felt from the inside. Whether a man could look down at a woman kneeling in front of him with her mouth open and simply know.

"The body of Christ." His voice reached you barely above its usual register, quieter than you'd heard him use even in the confessional, and you had exactly long enough to wonder whether that meant anything before you ran out of time to wonder it.

You could have sworn — though you dismissed it in the same half-second you thought it, because surely you were simply looking for things now, seeing significance in whatever your own hunger handed you — that something moved behind his eyes as he looked down at you. Some fraction of dilation, dark spreading further than the low church light could account for. You told yourself you'd imagined it. A composed man, too many years a priest, did not come undone over a woman kneeling at an altar rail. You were, you reminded yourself, spectacularly good at inventing evidence for whatever you already wanted to be true.

"Amen," you managed, in a register you didn't entirely recognize as your own, and took the host onto your tongue. It tasted the way it always had — of nothing, faintly of paper, a blankness you'd forgotten could hold so much weight — and you drew the wet weight of it back into your mouth, uncomfortably aware, for the first time in your entire pious childhood, of every part of a gesture you had never once thought to be self-conscious about.

You crossed yourself, rose, and turned back toward your pew on legs you were no longer entirely confident belonged to you. By the time you reached it you had abandoned any pretence of composure and simply knelt again, forehead dropping toward your folded hands in a posture any observer would have read as devotion, and which was, if you were honest with yourself, mostly a structural decision. You did not trust your knees with your weight. Kneeling, at least, put the failure somewhere expected.

For however long remained of the Mass — ten minutes, perhaps, though it passed with the strange, syrupy slowness of time that refuses to behave when you most need it to — you were aware of a pair of mismatched eyes finding you, again and again, across the width of the nave.

You did not look back. You told yourself it was decorum. The truer answer was that you did not trust yourself either to survive whatever expression you found waiting for you there, and some cowardly, self-protective part of you had already decided, without evidence, what that expression would be. Disappointment, probably. A priest, watching a woman make a spectacle of an ancient, most-sacred rite because some starved, undisciplined part of her had wanted an excuse to kneel in front of him. You could not have named a single thing Baelor had actually done to earn that verdict. You handed it to him anyway, because it was easier to believe yourself pathetic than to consider the alternative: that he had looked, and kept looking, for reasons that had nothing to do with judgment at all.

It was, you supposed, a very on-brand mistake for you specifically to make: assuming the worst interpretation of yourself before anyone else had the chance to offer one, a habit you'd perfected over exactly the kind of year you'd just had.

When Mass finally released you, you gathered your things and made for the doors, only to find your escape blocked by the usual congregation of elderly women, several of whom had apparently decided the threshold was an ideal location for a leisurely post-Mass conference. Blasted old mules, you thought, uncharitably, easing your way through the knot of cardigans and hairspray with what you hoped read as patience rather than the quiet panic actually driving you.

The churchyard held its usual after-Mass scattering, knots of parishioners trading the same three pleasantries they traded every week, a couple of children weaving between legs, the sharp, cold smell of stone and cut grass that November insisted on despite the season otherwise doing its best to die.

You had almost recovered something like your normal footing when you spotted him, already outside, a few yards off, saying his farewells to a cluster of departing parishioners. You watched him for a moment before he saw you. Safe, for once, in the anonymity of simply being one more parishioner in a scattering crowd. He had a hand braced warm on some old man's shoulder, head inclined to catch whatever the man was telling him, nodding along at exactly the right intervals with the practiced attentiveness of someone who had spent years convincing an entire parish that each of them, individually, had his whole and undivided attention.

It was, you thought, uncomfortably close to the same trick you performed for your mother most days: competent kindness worn like a coat, covering whatever was actually happening underneath it. You wondered, watching him, whether he ever got tired of wearing his.

He must have slipped out through the sacristy door while you were fighting your way past the old guard. You prayed, with a fervency that would have embarrassed you an hour ago, that he hadn't clocked you yet, that you might simply slide past unseen and process the entire morning in the privacy of your own head, where it belonged.

God, apparently, was not in a forgiving mood.

"Wait—" His voice found you before you'd made it three steps past him.

This must be penance, you thought, aiming the complaint at God directly, for telling You off the other week. You turned anyway, because ignoring a priest calling your name across a churchyard felt like a significantly worse option than facing him.

He was still in the green chasuble, and you decided, with the kind of petty, deflecting focus you reached for whenever you needed somewhere safer to put your attention, that green wasn't his colour. Black suited him better — sharper, somehow, unfairly so, as though the absence of colour did something the vestments simply couldn't.

The two of you had drifted, without either of you seeming to choose it, a little apart from the general flow of departing parishioners, into a pocket of relative quiet near the low stone wall bordering the churchyard.

"You received Communion." He was smiling as he said it, easy, a little pleased, as though the fact of it were a small gift someone had handed him unexpectedly.

You nodded once, feeling suddenly, absurdly, like a student called on for an answer she wasn't sure was correct. "I thought it seemed appropriate. Sorry if I — I don't know, did something wrong."

His smile only deepened at that, wide enough to show teeth that weren't quite perfect. One canine set very slightly forward of the other, both slightly longer than the average, a small imperfection that somehow sharpened the effect rather than softening it. You found yourself thinking, with a specificity that alarmed you, exactly what those particular teeth would feel like against skin, and then you thought about the fact that you'd thought that, and wanted, briefly and sincerely, to walk directly into oncoming traffic.

This was, you reflected grimly, an extraordinarily inconvenient time to discover a specific interest in a man's teeth. You filed the discovery away next to the growing pile of other discoveries you'd made about yourself these last four weeks; a pile you were doing an increasingly poor job of pretending not to notice.

"You did nothing wrong." His voice gentled further, if that was even possible. "In fact, I'm rather proud of you."

Proud of you.

You blinked at him and felt the words land somewhere considerably lower than your chest, spreading out into a warmth that had nothing whatsoever to do with the Holy Spirit. You were, in that moment, sincerely and profoundly grateful for whatever biological quirk kept the more obvious evidence of arousal confined to men, because you would otherwise have been standing in a churchyard in a state no amount of decorum could have disguised.

You noted, somewhere beneath the more immediate crisis, that it wasn't only your body responding to the words. Nobody had told you they were proud of you in longer than you wanted to calculate. Your father had said it constantly, casually, about report cards and parallel parking and nothing in particular, and you hadn't realized, until a priest said it in a mostly unrelated context outside a church, exactly how much you'd been missing hearing it from anyone at all.

You must have taken too long to respond, because something crossed his face, a flicker of doubt, quickly papered over. "Sorry. That came out a bit strange, didn't it." He laughed, short, and for a moment looked almost boyish about it, which did nothing at all to help your current situation.

You laughed too, mostly to have somewhere to put the air currently trapped in your chest, and mostly to keep from examining the warm, insistent ache that had settled low in you and did not seem inclined to leave anytime soon. "Don't worry about it," you said, and then, because the silence that followed felt like it needed something in it, "it was nice seeing you."

"Nice indeed." He said it slowly, turning the phrase over like he was testing its weight, and you had the distinct, mortifying sense that you'd just stumbled into the kind of conversation you'd have mocked mercilessly in anyone else: two people standing a foot apart in a churchyard, trading pleasantries like teenagers who'd forgotten how words worked.

You were already half-turned to go when he spoke again. "We'll be getting the church ready for Christmas soon — decorations, the nativity, that sort of thing. We could always use another set of hands, if you were interested."

You hadn't expected that. Some vague, formless plan on your part had involved politely declining further entanglement with this parish beyond whatever your body had apparently already committed you to this morning, and here he was, casually assuming a future in which you'd be back, repeatedly, with a staple gun and a box of ornaments.

"Sure." You turned fully back to him, caught slightly off guard. "I mean — yes. I'll see what I can do."

He looked, for just a moment, more hopeful about that than the offer strictly warranted, though he recovered fast enough that you might have imagined it too, the way you'd apparently decided to imagine everything else about him today.

He looked as though he meant to say something further, but an elderly woman intercepted him first — the sacristan-adjacent one, you suspected, from the sheer righteousness of her posture — and launched into what appeared to be less a conversation than a fully prepared monologue on the subject of the Advent wreath.

Baelor towered over her, patient, nodding along to whatever she was saying while his eyes found yours over the top of her head, faintly, helplessly amused.

You mouthed good luck at him and turned to leave, and caught, in the last half-second before you did, the flash of one more toothy, uneven, entirely unpriestly grin aimed directly at you.

You walked home with absolutely no memory of the walk itself.

It was only much later, sitting at your own kitchen table with a cup of tea gone cold in front of you, that you let yourself think properly about any of it. The kneeling, the eyes, every feeling that came onto you without your permission.

You thought about the fact that you'd gone looking, four weeks ago, for the specific comfort of being comprehended without judgment, the thing you remembered feeling as a child and had wanted back badly enough to sit through your own grief to get it.

You had not, at any point in that search, accounted for the possibility that the comprehension might arrive wearing a Roman collar, or that wanting it might eventually stop feeling like faith and start feeling like something considerably harder to confess.

You thought, too, about the Christmas decorations, about staple guns and small nativity figures and days of proximity you had apparently just volunteered yourself into, without any of the caution the last hour should reasonably have taught you. You told yourself you'd think more carefully about that later. But you did not, in fact, do it.

You simply marked the date in the calendar on your phone, and found, when you looked at it sitting there among your mother's doctor's appointments and your own overdue dentist visit, that some small, traitorous part of you was already looking forward to it.

Christmas had a way of crawling under your skin, the way old songs do. You could go months without thinking of it at all, and then a single carol drifting out of a shop doorway would drop you straight back into a kitchen you hadn't properly stood in for over a decade. You remembered good Christmases, the kind that still arrived intact in memory without needing much reconstruction: the house loud with cousins, someone's dog underfoot, your grandmother's insistence on a specific brand of nougat nobody but her actually liked, the whole extended chaos of a family that hadn't yet learned how to lose people. Those years had been good in the uncomplicated way only childhood afforded. You hadn't yet understood that a table could shrink, that the chairs pulled out each year could simply, one by one, stop being needed.

You thought, unbidden, of the last Christmas Eve you'd spent with your father whole and healthy and utterly unaware of what the coming year held for him — the two of you assembling a jigsaw puzzle at the kitchen table past midnight because neither of you could sleep and neither of you wanted to admit it, some ridiculous thousand-piece rendering of a lighthouse he'd bought on a whim and insisted on finishing before morning, as though the deadline mattered to anyone but him. You'd found the last piece around two, and he'd made you both cocoa to celebrate, badly, too much sugar and not nearly enough milk, and you had not known, sitting there in your pyjamas laughing at his terrible cocoa, that you were spending the last ordinary, uncomplicated Christmas you'd ever get with him.

You would have paid considerably more attention, you liked to tell yourself, if you'd known. You weren't entirely sure that was true. You suspected you'd have taken it for granted regardless, the way you seemed to have been built to take most good things for granted right up until they were gone.

They had started thinning sometime in your teens, the guest list first, then the feeling itself, until Christmas became something you observed rather than inhabited — a season that happened around you while some quieter, more adult part of you took inventory of who was missing. You supposed that was simply what growing up did to a holiday built entirely on presence. This year the table would seat two, and one chair would stay pushed in on principle rather than practicality, because neither you nor your mother had yet found the courage to actually put it away.

Which was perhaps part of why you found yourself, on a Tuesday evening in the beginning of December, standing on a folding chair in the nave of a church that wasn't strictly yours, marvelling at the old women who'd spent the better part of the afternoon transforming the place into something out of a Christmas card. They'd draped garland along every available surface with a fervent, uncomplicated joy you found yourself envying more than you were entirely comfortable admitting.

You glanced toward the altar, toward the plain wooden cross presiding over all of it. You could spare me a little of whatever they've got, you thought, directing the request at Him with the blend of irony and genuine hope you'd become fluent in these past almost-two months. He didn't answer, which by now you'd come to expect. Silence, you'd decided, was simply His preferred register of correspondence with you.

You supposed you owed whatever had brought you back to this parish in October a debt you hadn't properly paid yet. Somewhere in the weeks since, without your quite noticing the transition, the building had become something closer to a bunker than a place of worship; somewhere you could exist without the performance the rest of your life currently demanded of you. You didn't have to be the strong one here. Not because you necessarily were the strong one everywhere else, but because here, specifically, nobody was paying close enough attention to require it of you.

The old women, you were fairly certain, didn't particularly care for you. You'd become something of a fixture over the autumn — reliably present, reliably unwilling to stay for the rosary, reliably uninterested in the small, warm currency of parish gossip they traded so easily among themselves — and you supposed that reticence read, correctly, as a kind of standoffishness.

You couldn't entirely blame them for the verdict. In the interest of honesty, which spoke poorly of whatever devout young woman a stranger might have glimpsed in you at first glance, you found you didn't much care for them either. It wasn't unkindness, exactly. You simply had nothing left over, most days, for the effort community required, and the women had sensed that absence the way people always seemed to sense exactly the thing you were trying hardest not to show.

You'd lost track of the hour somewhere in the effort of getting the wreath symmetrical — a task that had absorbed you far more completely than its actual importance warranted, the satisfying tyranny of a problem with a correct answer, unlike most of what currently occupied your days.

By the time you next surfaced enough to notice your surroundings, full dark had settled outside the tall windows, and the women who'd spent the afternoon polishing candlesticks and dusting the reredos had long since collected their coats and gone home to their own, presumably fuller houses. There was one stubborn corner of the wreath that refused to sit flush against the beam, and you stapled it into submission with more force than the task strictly required.

"You know, every single one of those will need to come out again come January." The familiar, lulling voice found you from somewhere near the floor.

You looked down from your perch — you'd had to stand on the chair to reach the beam over the door — and found him below you, his face arriving at roughly the level of your waist even accounting for the height the chair gave you. Why was he so fucking tall, you thought, not for the first time since October.

"I'm sure you'll find some other charitable soul to deal with it," you said, aiming for breezy and mostly landing there.

He laughed, low, and the sound did something to the base of your spine you'd rather not have examined closely.

You fixed the last staple and pivoted on the chair to face him properly. "Besides," you added, smirking, "I think some of these staples are older than I am."

His own smirk answered yours, quick and easy. Over the weeks you'd known him, you had arrived at the settled, private conclusion that Baelor was, against every expectation you'd walked in with that first Wednesday, a genuinely good priest to know.

Nothing like Father Arlan's gentle, uncomplicated warmth. Baelor's register was drier, more grounded, quick, despite it, to turn a homily's more solemn point into something almost funny, or at least as funny as a man in his position could reasonably manage without causing a diocesan incident. He'd once, memorably, described a visiting bishop's homily as spiritually correct but tragically overlong, pitched just quietly enough for only you to catch during the coffee hour afterward, and you'd had to disguise your laugh as a coughing fit for the better part of a minute.

But there was something else, too, something you'd started cataloguing without quite meaning to.

You'd caught it first during a November homily on the Prodigal Son, of all things. A pause where his voice simply stopped, a beat too long even for effect, his gaze gone somewhere past the back pews entirely before he recovered himself and finished the line. You remembered, too, a Tuesday afternoon that same month when you'd found him alone in the sacristy long after any practical reason for him to still be there, hands loosely folded, eyes fixed on nothing in particular, so thoroughly somewhere else that he hadn't heard you knock. It had taken him a full three seconds to resurface enough to greet you; three seconds in which his face had held an expression so nakedly exhausted you'd nearly turned around and left rather than intrude on it. By the time he'd properly noticed you, the mask was back in place, warm and unbothered, and you'd both pretended, with the same silent, mutual courtesy, that you hadn't seen anything at all.

There was a darkness sitting behind those mismatched eyes that had nothing to do with the warm, careful light he'd clearly spent years learning to project for public consumption. Something you recognized, with an unsettling flash of kinship, because you'd been living behind a similar performance yourself for the better part of a year. Even now, watching him smile at your staple joke, you could see it there underneath, patient and entirely unmoved by whatever surface amusement was currently crossing his face.

You had, on more than one uncharitable evening alone in your room, caught yourself wanting to reach up and kiss that darkness straight off him; an urge that arrived, inconveniently, with startling specificity, and that you suppressed each time by picturing, with deliberate cruelty toward yourself, the exact white of his collar glowing that much brighter in your mind's eye. A small and effective penance you'd invented all on your own.

"Here." You held the staple gun out to him, resigned. "Take this and help me down."

He reached for it with a half-smile still playing at his mouth, but instead of taking your hand, he simply set the staple gun down on the nearest pew and stayed exactly where he was, making no move whatsoever toward a helping distance.

"You got yourself up there," he said. "I'm reasonably confident you can manage the trip back down unassisted."

"And you can manage the very interesting phone call to the coroner," you shot back, "when I crack my skull open on these charming marble floors."

He shook his head, something between exasperation and fond disbelief crossing his face, but he came to help you regardless.

You'd expected a hand; his palm extended for you to brace against as you stepped down, the same practical courtesy any decent person would offer someone perched too high on unstable furniture. What he did instead rewired something in your chest before you'd fully registered it was happening. His hands came to your waist, both of them, spanning nearly the whole width of you with room to spare, and closed there with an easy, certain strength that lifted rather than merely assisted.

You came down off the chair already caught. His hands didn't release you once your feet found the floor, they stayed exactly where they'd landed, warm even through the fabric of your sweater, and the momentum of the drop left you standing closer to him than either of you had ever managed before, the backs of your knees still grazing the chair's edge, your front nearly flush against the solid wall of him. You had to tip your head back to find his face at all, the angle sudden and unfamiliar even after two months of knowing exactly how tall he was in the abstract.

And when you found it, his expression wasn't one you had a name filed away for. Not the easy mirth from a minute ago. Not the quiet darkness you'd just spent an entire private paragraph of your own thoughts cataloguing. Not even the careful, generic kindness he handed out to every stranger who walked through the doors. This was something else, something focused entirely on you with an intensity that made you feel, absurdly, like the only thing left standing in the building.

The church itself had gone very quiet around you both — no children running, no old women's chatter, nothing but the two of you and the faint, resinous smell of fresh pine garland strung along every surface that afternoon, incongruously festive against whatever was actually unfolding here.

"We wouldn't want to have to explain to our self-appointed sacristan why she'd need to clean blood off her floors, would we?"

His voice, when it finally arrived, had dropped somewhere you hadn't heard it go before. Low, rough at the edges, scraped clean of the careful, cultivated softness he used from the pulpit and in the confessional alike. Fuck, you thought, with the kind of clarity reserved for genuine emergencies, and had to physically bite the inside of your cheek to keep something considerably less dignified than a word from escaping you.

Your brain, which had apparently decided this was the correct moment to abandon you entirely, produced a single unhelpful thought at top volume: that whatever you were currently feeling qualified, by any reasonable Catholic accounting, as a sin already fully committed, whether or not your body ever got around to acting on it. His hands were still at your waist. He had not moved them, and you found you had absolutely no intention of pointing that out to him.

"I can only imagine the headlines," you managed, aiming for something like your usual register and landing somewhere considerably shakier. "Beloved cool local priest murders parishioner over minor stapling dispute."

He laughed at that — a low, private sound you felt as much as heard, given how little distance currently separated the two of you — and in the same motion your own hands found his wrists, not to push him away, you noted with some private alarm, but simply to have somewhere to put your hands that wasn't the fabric of the cassock that covered his chest.

"Finally," he said, something almost boyish slipping into his voice despite its lower register, "you admit I'm a cool priest."

"Never said the opposite," you managed, and were fairly certain your heartbeat had become audible at this point, some frantic percussion filling your own ears loudly enough that you half expected him to hear it too, if he simply stopped talking long enough to listen for it.

He didn't stop talking. He also didn't step back.

What you noticed, in the strange, suspended quiet that followed, wasn't the words at all: it was the small, controlled way the distance between your faces kept shrinking, inch by inch, so gradual you might have missed it entirely if every nerve in your body hadn't been standing at full and humiliating attention.

His eyes had dropped, briefly, to somewhere south of your own eyes, and you felt the weight of that gaze land on your mouth like a physical touch you hadn't known a look alone could carry. You didn't move away. You were fairly sure, standing there with his hands still warm at your waist and the whole of him leaning steadily closer, that moving away had stopped being something your body currently had access to as an option.

Then thunder cracked somewhere close enough to rattle the stained glass in its leading, and the spell broke apart all at once.

Baelor recoiled like he'd been struck, stumbling half a step backward and nearly catching his heel against the kneeler of the pew at his back. His hands left your waist so abruptly the absence of them registered as its own small shock, cold rushing in where his palms had been. He put several feet of distance between you with the swift, overcorrected urgency of a man putting out a fire he'd only just noticed was burning him, and you stood exactly where he'd left you, rooted to the same patch of marble floor, arms hanging uselessly at your sides because you couldn't immediately think what else to do with them.

He turned toward the nearest window, ostensibly checking the weather, though you suspected the actual view held considerably less of his attention than whatever was currently happening behind his own eyes. You watched his shoulders rise and fall once, twice, some private negotiation being conducted entirely without your input.

"I should be going," you said, into the silence neither of you seemed inclined to fill, wrapping your arms around yourself in a gesture you recognized, distantly, as purely defensive, though you couldn't have said exactly what you thought you were defending against at this point.

He looked back at you then, and you caught the specific effort it took him to swallow whatever he'd been about to say instead of the thing he actually said, which was, "Right." A short, laboured breath followed the word, like it had cost him something to produce. "Have you got an umbrella?"

You nodded, not trusting your voice with anything more elaborate, and busied yourself gathering your coat and bag from the pew where you'd left them, grateful for the excuse to look at literally anything besides him.

"I'll come back tomorrow," you said, to the buttons of your coat rather than to his face, "to finish whatever's left."

He said nothing to that. When you finally made yourself look up, he was watching you with an expression you didn't have the emotional bandwidth left to interpret, and you decided, with the last reserves of self-preservation currently available to you, that you didn't especially want to try.

"Good night, Baelor."

You hadn't called him that before — not to his face, not without the Father in front of it — and you felt the shape of his name leave your mouth like something you'd been keeping in a drawer you'd forgotten you owned. You didn't wait to see what it did to his expression. You turned and walked to the doors, footsteps too loud against the marble in the church's electric hush, and did not look back once — not through the doors, not into the wet dark of the churchyard, not all the way to your bicycle.

You weren't sure, if you had, that you would have found the will left in you to actually leave.

What exactly are you doing?

Baelor asked himself the question kneeling at the side of his bed, in the small, plain bedroom of the parish quarters that had been the whole of his home for ten years now. Narrow bed, a crucifix above the headboard he'd hung there himself his first week, a desk crowded with breviaries he increasingly opened out of habit rather than hunger.

Are you out of your mind entirely?

For the first time in longer than he wanted to calculate, he knelt not performing the posture but actually reaching for what it was meant to produce — comfort, or something adjacent to it, anything at all that might quiet the chaos currently occupying his skull.

"Our Father, who art in Heaven—"

His voice wavered on the fourth word and gave out entirely somewhere in the fifth.

"Our Father—"

Her laugh arrived instead. Not summoned, simply there, whole and uninvited. The exact pitch of it from an hour ago when she'd made the joke about the coroner, and behind the laugh, inevitably, her face: chin tipped back to find his, mouth still curved with the last of the humour, eyes doing something he hadn't yet found a word brave enough to use.

He lowered his head further, forehead nearly meeting his own clasped hands. He had heard that laugh perhaps a hundred times over these past two months. He could not account for why it should return to him now, tonight, with such insistence, refusing to be filed away with the evening's other ordinary noise.

He knew the shape of temptation well enough by now to recognize its usual visitors. Fifteen years he'd been fighting it in one form or another, and for most of that decade and a half it had arrived the way temptation was supposed to — faceless, fleeting, a passing current easily broken by discipline and the plain stubbornness of prayer. This was different. This had roots. And prayer, tonight, was not coming to him with anything like its old ease.

When, he wondered, had those roots first taken hold? He turned the question over the way a man probes a bruise to test how deep it goes, expecting each interaction between them to yield the same comfortable diagnosis he'd been offering himself for weeks: compassion, simply. A priest's ordinary, sanctioned care for a grieving soul.

How readily the heart baptized its own sins, dressing them in vestments respectable enough to walk past its own conscience unchallenged.

He knew, kneeling there with the evidence assembling itself against him one memory at a time, that this had never been only compassion. Compassion had not made him remember, with the specific clarity of a man cataloguing evidence, the warmth of her palm the very first time they'd shaken hands beneath the vestibule light, both of them strangers still. Compassion had not made him look at her, weeks later, sitting alone in stained-glass light, and think she resembled something closer to a miracle than to a parishioner. Compassion, God knew, had nothing whatsoever to do with the way his own cock had throbbed, mortifyingly, at the memory of her kneeling before him at the altar rail, tongue offered, so entirely disposed toward receiving him — not the capital-H Him she'd knelt for, but him.

No. This was not compassion. This was desire.

Baelor wanted her.

The realization did not arrive first as language. It existed, before he dared give it words, as a certainty his soul appeared to have recognized considerably ahead of his conscious mind's permission. When he finally did put language to it — silently, without moving his lips, though it felt no less spoken for the silence — the shape of the thought landed like blasphemy against his own teeth.

I want her.

Not merely the light she brought into a parish that had grown grey and administrative around him. Not merely the sharp, unpredictable wit she threw at him like a dare. Every part of her. Even, and especially that, the darkness she carried behind her own carefully practiced eyes, the same darkness he had recognized, the very first time he'd glimpsed it, as an exact echo of his own.

He wanted her wholly. Wanted, with a specificity that frightened him, to imagine some entirely different future, one in which she crossed a room not toward the confessional but toward him. Wanted to wonder, with a tenderness that felt more dangerous than any simple hunger could have, what it might be to hear her say his name in some context that had nothing whatsoever to do with prayer. And, God help him, wanted to hear her moan it.

He squeezed his eyes shut.

"No." The word left him barely above a whisper.

But no to what, exactly? To himself? To God, wherever He currently was? To the relentless, unwelcome honesty currently dismantling him from the inside out? To the hardening evidence, even now, of exactly how little his own body cared for the word he'd just spoken?

His vows had once felt like architecture: stone, load-bearing, built up patiently over years until they no longer required conscious thought to remain standing, because conviction itself had become the mortar holding every course of them in place. Tonight they felt like glass instead. Transparent enough that he could see straight through to an entire unlived life on the other side of them. Fragile enough that he feared one careless touch of longing might be all it took to shatter the whole structure at once.

He searched, kneeling there, for disgust. Certain, if only he could locate it, that it would be enough to save him. He tried to name what he was feeling as corruption. As weakness. As the plain, ordinary failure of a man who had simply stopped being strong enough to want what he'd promised to want instead.

What he found, reaching for disgust, was grief.

Because beneath the desire there was love. He could see it now that he'd stopped looking away from it: the faint, unbearable outline of an entirely different life. One with someone actually beside him rather than merely near him. Unwavering loyalty, offered and received both. Being loved, and — this was the part that undid him most completely — being able to see it happening, to actually feel it landing, rather than simply trusting it existed somewhere beyond his ability to perceive it, the way he'd spent fifteen years trusting God's love existed without ever quite managing to feel its weight.

It had accumulated so quietly he'd missed the accumulation entirely. In conversations that ran twenty minutes longer than either of them had any real reason to justify. In the uncomplicated comfort of simply being near her, which asked nothing of him and somehow still gave him more than most of his days currently offered. In the way his own schedule had begun rearranging itself, without his conscious permission, around the mere possibility of crossing paths with her — a Tuesday errand that could easily have waited until Thursday, suddenly urgent, suddenly today. In the strange emptiness that settled over the whole parish on the days she didn't come.

He understood, kneeling there, that he was thoroughly and completely finished.

Because lust, at least, could be confessed. Named, absolved, resisted with enough discipline and enough distance. But what was a man supposed to do with affection that had stopped being distinguishable, at some point he couldn't pinpoint, from prayer itself?

His lips trembled around the next attempt.

"Lord—"

The word broke apart before it finished forming.

He had spent years — his whole vocation, really — teaching other people that grace was never withheld from anyone who sought it honestly, that God did not turn away an honest accounting of a struggling heart. And yet honesty, tonight, felt like the single most impossible thing currently available to him. Because if God were to search his heart in this exact moment, He would find no noble struggle waiting there to reward. Baelor already knew that much. He was already lost, and some new, terrible clarity in him suspected God knew it too, and had simply chosen, as He had for four long years now, to say nothing about it either way.

Perhaps that was what finally pushed him across whatever threshold remained between kneeling there in honest, wretched prayer and what he did next. Perhaps it was simply exhaustion, years of dryness and denial collapsing all at once under the sheer weight of wanting one particular, unrepeatable woman rather than some abstract, manageable temptation. Whatever the mechanism, his hands moved before the rest of him had finished deciding to let them. He undid the drawstring of his pyjama trousers with clumsy, hurried fingers, wrapped his hand around his own cock — already full, already aching — and began, without further ceremony, to work himself with long, rough strokes.

He turned his face into the mattress at the last second, some final scrap of habit or shame driving him to muffle the sound rather than let it fill the small room the way everything else about tonight already had.

In the dark behind his own closed eyes, only one image held. Her face. Not exactly as she'd looked tonight, though the memory of tonight fed everything that followed. Her eyes, specifically, the way they'd caught his after she'd teased him, some light living in them that he had spent two months telling himself he was imagining, a light that might, if he let himself believe it even for the length of this single traitorous hour, have meant she wanted this too. He held to that possibility the way a drowning man holds to whatever debris happens to be floating nearest.

He held, too, to the image his own imagination built for him next, unbidden and merciless in its detail: her, entirely undone beneath him, her spine arched at some impossible, desperate angle, her mouth open around sounds that had nothing left of teasing in them. He imagined the give of her, imagined thrusting into her again and again, deep and unhurried and then not unhurried at all, imagined that every stroke of it might somehow reach past her grief and turn it, briefly, into something closer to pleasure — as if he alone might be capable of giving her that, as if wanting it badly enough might make it true. He imagined her nails finding his back, dragging half-moons into skin that had not been touched with anything like hunger in longer than he could accurately remember. He imagined her voice breaking around his name, over and over, in a register that had nothing whatsoever to do with confession.

What finally undid him — what tore the last of his composure loose entirely — was not any of it. It was the imagined shape of her mouth releasing three specific words in his direction, words he had no right whatsoever to imagine anyone giving him, let alone her, and yet there they were anyway, vivid and unbearable and entirely his own invention: I love you.

He came hard around his own fist, a broken, guttural sound tearing loose from somewhere low in his chest before he could catch it against the mattress, his whole body drawing tight and then breaking apart at once, the mess of it spilling hot over his knuckles.

He stayed exactly where he'd fallen, face pressed into the bedding, and breathed. Once. Twice. A third time before anything like steadiness returned to him.

He raised his face eventually, feeling the cool, unmistakable patch where his own breath had dampened the sheet beneath him, and stared up at the ceiling instead, at the water stain shaped vaguely like a rowboat he'd been meaning to have looked at for the better part of a year.

A thought arrived, quiet enough that he nearly missed the size of the blasphemy folded inside it: if loving her brings me closer to creation than years of praying ever brought me to the Creator, what exactly am I meant to do with that.

He covered his face with his free, cleaner hand.

Perhaps that, he thought, was the actual sin waiting underneath all the others he'd been so carefully cataloguing tonight. Not the desire, or not only the desire. The realization — arriving now, with nowhere left to hide from it — that somewhere along the long road toward this particular altar, he had gone looking for God, over and over, for years, and found only silence waiting at the end of every attempt.

And that tonight, for the first time in longer than he dared admit even to himself, some other voice — hers, or the idea of her, or whatever she had quietly become to him in the space where God's silence used to sit — had finally, unmistakably, answered.

You hadn't slept well. You'd known it the moment you opened your eyes, before your body had even finished the transition out of whatever half-formed dreams had kept you turning most of the night. You had the unmistakable heaviness behind the eyes that came from too little rest rather than too much of it. You'd drifted in and out of something that wasn't quite sleep for hours, catching yourself somewhere between waking and dreaming with your own pulse doing something inconvenient, replaying, on an unwelcome loop, the weight of his hands at your waist and the taut, terrifying stillness of the half-second before the thunder broke whatever had been about to happen between you.

What had kept you awake, if you were being honest with the version of yourself still too groggy to construct a better lie, was a pair of eyes. Blue, though not quite matching, one shade lighter than the other even in memory. And a proximity you still hadn't fully accounted for.

Or that's what you told yourself, dressing for the day, that it was simply eyes and proximity keeping you up, nothing more specific than that, nothing requiring further examination before coffee.

Your mother had been lighter that morning than you'd seen her in longer than you wanted to count — humming something tuneless over the stove, actually eating the toast she made rather than simply making it and leaving it to go cold on the counter. She'd even mentioned, unprompted, something about clearing out your father's side of the closet before spring — not today, not this week, but someday, spoken aloud for the first time since the funeral, which felt like its own small, cautious miracle. You knew better than to expect it to last.

Grief, in your admittedly limited experience of managing hers alongside your own, didn't improve in a straight line; it simply had good days scattered unpredictably among the difficult ones, and you'd learned not to read too much promise into any single morning. Still, you let yourself enjoy it while it lasted.

December seemed to have settled properly over the town by now — breath visible in the cold, the last of the leaves finally surrendered from the trees lining the route you'd walked perhaps thirty times since October, familiar enough now that your feet found the way without requiring much input from the rest of you.

You held the memory of your mother's laugh at something on the radio the whole walk to the parish, turning it over like a stone in your pocket, and told yourself, with the kind of deliberate optimism you rarely trusted yourself with anymore, that today was going to be a good day.

You repeated the thought enough times that it started to feel less like a hope and more like a small, private incantation — as if enough repetition alone might be sufficient to summon the thing into being.

That confidence lasted exactly as long as it took you to push through the church's side door and see two teenage boys — the Dustin brothers, you'd learn shortly, though you didn't yet have names to put to their faces — already up on a stepladder, stapling ornaments to the exact beam you'd left unfinished the night before, their staples crooked and their banter loud and entirely unbothered by the fact that this had been, as far as you understood things, your job.

Something twisted low in your stomach, sharp and disproportionate to the actual size of the slight. You told yourself it didn't matter who finished the ornaments. You did not, in fact, manage to believe yourself.

You shrugged out of your coat in silence, watching the boys' cheerful, careless work a moment longer than necessary, and made your way toward the sacristy, brow already furrowed before you'd even reached the door. The room smelled, as it always did, of candle wax and old wood polish, vestments hanging in their orderly rows along one wall like a wardrobe built for a much stranger kind of theatre.

Baelor was there, alone, occupied with something at the shoulder seam of a violet alb, the colour of Advent, penance and waiting both folded into a single shade of cloth.

"Good morning." You kept your voice light. "What needs doing?"

He turned to look at you, and what met you in his eyes was so entirely unlike what had been there mere hours ago that you nearly took a physical step back from it.

Where warmth had stood the night before — warmth you'd felt with your whole body, warmth that still had your pulse doing something complicated whenever you let yourself think about it — there was now only a careful, deliberate distance, the kind a man constructs on purpose rather than simply falls into.

"Garrick and Harlan are already tending to it. Don't trouble yourself." The smile that came with it didn't make it anywhere near his eyes.

You tried to swallow around whatever his voice had just done to your chest and forced something like a smile of your own. "I brought climbing equipment today. In case it was needed."

"They're handy boys. I'm sure they'll manage." He turned his attention back to the alb, the conversation apparently concluded from his end.

You stood there a moment, fidgeting with your own fingers, looking down at them rather than at him. "Right," you said, mostly to fill the silence. "Well — there must be something else I could do."

"There always is." He offered nothing further, and you waited, foolishly, for an elaboration that simply never arrived.

You tried once more for something like the warmth that had, or so you'd let yourself believe, been growing steadily between the two of you these last weeks. "You look tired," you said, arms coming up to wrap around yourself, the gesture more defensive than you'd intended it to read.

His hands paused over the fabric for the barest fraction of a second. "Do I?"

"A little," you admitted, the faintest smile tugging at your mouth despite everything.

"Occupational hazard." He laughed, politely, and it landed less like genuine amusement and more like something he believed himself obligated to produce. A pause followed, longer than the joke warranted. "Would you mind helping Mrs. Reed in the parish hall? They're sorting donations for the Christmas drive."

You agreed, because there was nothing else on offer, and turned to leave.

The afternoon passed in an accumulation of small, catalogable evidence. The way he found reasons to be in whichever room you currently weren't. The exact, careful politeness he extended to you precisely as he extended it to every other volunteer that afternoon, nothing more, nothing that marked you as separate from Mrs. Reed or the Dustin brothers or anyone else currently sorting canned goods into cardboard boxes. At one point you both reached for the same box of ornaments at the same moment, and he withdrew his hand so quickly, so completely, that you nearly dropped the box entirely, fumbling to catch weight he would ordinarily have simply helped you carry.

You thought, sorting through a crate of secondhand ornaments while Mrs. Reed chattered pleasantly beside you about the parish's fundraising goals, of the specific way his voice had dropped the night before — rough-edged, stripped of its careful public register — and wondered whether you'd imagined the whole of it after all. Wondered whether desire had simply invented a version of events flattering enough to suit itself, the way desire apparently could, given half a chance and a dimly lit church.

By mid-afternoon you had started, despite your own best efforts not to, hunting for a cause. You ran through the obvious candidates and discarded most of them quickly enough — nothing you could point to, no specific offense, no moment you could identify as the hinge everything had swung on. And then, unbidden, unwelcome, one possibility surfaced and refused to submerge again: maybe I made him uncomfortable yesterday.

The thought should have landed like something manageable. Instead, it landed like a stone dropped into still water, and once it had broken the surface, every ripple that followed reshaped how you read the entire day. His hands at your waist, longer than strictly necessary. The way he'd looked at you before the thunder cracked. The whole suspended, tortuous length of that almost-moment you'd spent half the night convincing yourself you hadn't misread. Perhaps you had misread it after all. Perhaps you'd made a decent, well-intentioned man deeply, understandably uncomfortable, and this — the distance, the exact politeness, the careful redirection to donation boxes — was simply the kind, considerate way he'd chosen to handle your mistake without ever having to name it aloud.

By the time the afternoon's volunteers had gathered their coats and gone, dusk pressing early and blue against the windows the way it did this time of the year, you found him sitting alone in one of the front pews of the small side chapel, facing the tabernacle. Not praying, as far as you could tell. Simply sitting, spine slightly bowed, hands loose in his lap.

It occurred to you, watching him from several pews back, that you had never once actually seen him pray. Not properly, not in all the days you'd come here, though you'd certainly seen him perform every other visible function of his office with total competence. The votive candles nearest the tabernacle had mostly burned down to stubs by now, small orange points holding on against the gathering dark, and you found yourself wondering whether any of them had been lit by him.

You stood there a few moments longer than was probably polite, looking at the width of his back, the black cassock making him seem larger somehow in stillness than he ever did in motion. From this angle the collar was entirely invisible, hidden beneath the fall of black fabric at his throat, and for one strange, guilty moment you were glad of it; glad, however briefly, of the illusion that the man sitting in front of you belonged to no one and nothing beyond himself.

"Everything's finished," you said, quiet, from where you stood. "I think everyone's gone."

He didn't turn. You noticed, though, the small, almost imperceptible way his head dropped a fraction further. "So it seems," was all he offered.

You took a few steps closer and sat yourself in the pew directly behind his, close enough now that you could have reached out and touched his shoulder if you'd had any idea what you would have done with that kind of contact.

You fought, for several long seconds, the pressure building behind your teeth and the humiliating need to simply ask, to stop guessing and hunting through the day's evidence and just ask. You eventually lost.

"Did I do something wrong?"

Your own voice arrived in the same register a child might use bracing for a parent's disappointment, and you hated yourself for it even as the words left your mouth, already too late to call them back.

He turned then — properly turned, for the first time all day giving you the whole of his attention rather than some careful, rationed fraction of it — and his expression shifted through several things in quick succession: confusion first, and then something that looked, unmistakably, like guilt. Real guilt. Immediate and undisguised.

"What?" The word came out on an unsteady breath.

"Yesterday—" You laughed, quiet and humourless, more embarrassment than amusement, and didn't finish the sentence. You tried again, choosing your words more carefully this time, leaving him room to answer honestly rather than simply defensively. "I don't know. You've hardly looked at me all day."

It worked better than a direct accusation would have. You watched him understand that too; watched him recognize the door you'd left open for him to walk through without having to admit to anything more than he was ready to admit.

"I'm sorry." Not defensive. Not brushing past it. Simply, plainly sorry, and something about the sincerity of it hurt considerably worse than deflection would have.

You searched his face for something you didn't have a name for yet. "You don't have to apologize, Baelor."

Something moved across his face at the sound of his own name in your mouth, something you couldn't have fully described if pressed, though you filed the reaction away regardless, another entry in a ledger that was growing longer than you knew what to do with.

He opened his mouth. Closed it again without producing anything. His eyes dropped to his own clasped hands, and you watched, with a strange, suspended clarity, his thumb begin moving absently over the opposite knuckle, back and forth, some private and wordless working-through of a thing he couldn't say aloud. A breath came and caught somewhere in the middle of itself before he managed to release the rest of it. His shoulders sagged, incrementally, as though something he'd been carrying alone for years had finally, briefly, allowed itself to be felt as weight rather than simply as habit.

For one long, suspended moment, it genuinely felt as though he was about to tell you something enormous.

"I'm just tired," he said instead, very quietly.

You studied him for a long moment before you answered. "That isn't the whole truth, is it?"

Another silence, longer than the first. When he finally exhaled, it sounded less like an ordinary breath than something closer to surrender.

"No."

Your heart skipped, actually skipped, one single missed beat, because for the length of that one heartbeat you were entirely certain he was about to tell you. That whatever enormous thing had been sitting behind his eyes all day was finally going to be given words, right here, in the blue dark of a side chapel neither of you had bothered to light.

Instead, he smiled. Weary. Apologetic, in a way that felt like its own small, insufficient penance.

"But it's the only answer I can allow myself right now."

You let the silence sit between you after that, unwilling to push further into a door he'd just as good as told you he wasn't ready to open. You weren’t satisfied with that answer, not at all, but you understood, watching the tension still sitting in his shoulders, that pressing further tonight would cost more than either of you currently had to spend.

You said good night instead, quieter than you'd meant to, and left him there in the blue dark with whatever he wasn't yet willing to hand you, telling yourself, without much confidence, that there would be another evening for it.

There always is, he'd said, hours ago, about something else entirely.

You hoped, walking home through the cold, that it was still true and applicable to the space that seemed to separate you all of a sudden.

The Vigil Mass had let out a little after eight, though the building did not empty of people so much as slowly leak them, handshake by handshake, through the side door into a churchyard gone silver with frost.

Baelor had stood at the threshold the better part of an hour receiving the currency of Christmas Eve and had absorbed all of it with the same trained warmth he produced every December, until the last car pulled out of the gravel lot and left him alone with a stack of foil-covered dishes he had no real intention of eating and several hours yet before Midnight Mass would require anything further of him.

He did not go to the rectory. He told himself, locking the front door rather than the side, that the walk back through the nave would do him good — some vague and unexamined instinct toward penance, though he was long past pretending he still knew the difference between penance and simple avoidance.

He crossed the dark church lit only by the sanctuary lamp and the ranks of votives still guttering red beside the Nativity scene the altar guild had finished dressing that afternoon: the manger no longer empty, the way it had sat through the whole of Advent, waiting. Mrs. Reed had processed the Infant in sometime during the Vigil — she claimed the honour every year, and no one had yet found the courage to contest her for it — and laid Him at last in the straw, small and plaster-pink, catching what little light remained in the building.

Baelor did not know why the sight of it undid something in his chest tonight of all nights, when it had failed to manage the same in ten Christmases prior at this altar. He suspected he knew precisely why, and declined, as he had declined nearly everything else worth confessing this month, to look at it directly.

He took the back pew. Her pew, though he would not have said so aloud to anyone, and had in fact spent three weeks pretending the association had never lodged itself in him at all. Baelor has tried to convince himself of the fact that any pew, chosen at random, might have served just as well for a man wanting a few hours alone with a God who had gone conspicuously silent on him for longer than he currently had the patience to calculate. He, almost always, failed spectacularly.

It had been three weeks, now, since he had watched her walk out that same side door and told himself, with the conviction of a man constructing an alibi, that he had done the decent thing. A priest who could offer a woman nothing but scandal owed her, at minimum, the mercy of not letting her get any closer to a life that would cost her considerably more than it ever gave back.

He had told himself, that last afternoon in the sacristy, that the coldness had been a kindness; a controlled withdrawal engineered for her benefit rather than his own. The responsible action of a man who understood, better than she currently could, exactly how much damage he was capable of doing to a young woman who had already lost enough. He had held onto that story for the better part of a week, turning it over each night like a stone worn smooth from handling, comforted by how reasonable it sounded, how selfless.

He had built that justification brick upon carefully mortared brick, reinforced with enough real theology that it had held, more or less, clean through the third week of Advent. It took him nearly ten days to notice the story had a hole in it large enough to walk through and that the architecture he had thought as precise was clearly not holding tonight.

He braced his forearms against his knees, the cassock pulling taut across his shoulders, and made himself do what he had been circling for three weeks without ever quite landing on: the full accounting. Not the version he preached — love that costs nothing was never love, only convenience wearing love's vestments — but the version underneath it, the one he had apparently reserved for no one at all, not even himself, until an empty church at this particular hour finally cornered him into it.

He had not gone cold to protect her.

He had gone cold because for one suspended half-second three weeks ago, with her spine curved back against his own hands and thunder cracking the stained glass loose in its leading, he had wanted. Wholly, specifically, with an intensity that bore no resemblance to the manageable, textbook temptation he'd spent fifteen years training himself to weather. And the wanting had frightened him more than any sin he had ever been taught to guard against from that pulpit.

Lust, Baelor had been telling himself at the moments he felt more vulnerable, he could have managed easy enough. Lust had its own liturgy: name it, confess it, do the penance, watch it pass the way weather passes. He knew the path.

What had actually moved through him in that sacristy would not pass, though, because it was not lust. He had known that even as he fled it, his own hands leaving her waist so fast the absence carried its own small violence, and the knowing had done considerably more to terrify him than any fear of scandal ever had.

He had told himself he was protecting her. What he had actually done was protect himself and dressed the cowardice in a cassock respectable enough that even he had been fooled by it for most of a month.

A man protecting her would have found some way to remain honest with her. Distant, yes, but certainly careful and honest. He had rather manufactured a performance of indifference precise enough to convince a perceptive young woman that she had imagined two months of something. He had watched her work it out in real time, that terrible afternoon in the parish hall — watched her hunt for the offense she must have given him, watched her land, wrongly and with visible pain, on herself as the cause — and he had let her sit inside that wrong conclusion for three weeks rather than correct it, because correcting it would have required naming what was actually true, and naming it was the one thing he had not yet found the courage to survive.

How readily the heart baptizes its own sins, he thought now, recognizing the shape of it — recognizing, too, that he had thought nearly the identical sentence three weeks prior, kneeling at the side of his own bed, and had apparently learned nothing from the thought except how to think it a second time with a fresh coat of shame applied.

None of this recognition had made the following days any easier to survive. If anything, the clarity made it worse: he no longer had the comfort of believing himself noble about it, only lonely, and specifically, deliberately lonely this time, having manufactured the loneliness himself with his own two hands and then had nowhere honest left to put the blame for it.

He had not known misery like the misery of the past twenty days. Not in fifteen years of vocation, not in four years of dry, wordless prayer. He had simply not accounted for the weight of an absence that was entirely his own doing, a door he had closed with his own hand and then had to walk past, every day, in his own church, knowing exactly whose fault it was that it stayed shut.

Now it was the twenty-fourth of December, and he had not seen her since the day he'd given her nothing but a cold shoulder dressed up as tiredness.

The church clock ticked over its quarter-hour somewhere above the belfry. Soon, he thought. Midnight, the bells, the whole parish arriving half-frozen and candlelit for the one Mass of the year that still filled every pew he owned. He had perhaps two hours left of whatever this currently was — solitude, penance, cowardice examining itself in the dark — before duty required him upright and vested, singing the old proclamations over a congregation with no notion that their priest had spent three weeks failing every single thing he had ever told them love was supposed to look like.

He sat in the back pew — her pew, he admitted again to himself — facing the tabernacle, alone in every sense of the word he currently had access to. He was not praying, not exactly. He had stopped pretending, these past weeks, that sitting in front of the tabernacle and praying were reliably the same activity.

He heard the side door before he heard anything else. It had a particular three-note complaint at the old hinge before it settled that Baelor registered and did not turn. Parishioners came and went from the church at every hour on Christmas Eve; some private, unshakeable devotion drew the lonelier half of his flock back through those doors long after the Vigil crowd had gone home to their families, chasing whatever the empty nave offered that the full one hadn't. He assumed, hearing the door, that this was simply one more of them, and kept his eyes on the tabernacle, and did not turn.

Footsteps crossed the stone toward his end of the church, measured and quiet against the marble, and stopped at the pew he currently occupied. He felt, before he processed it as thought, the small shift of weight as someone settled onto the bench beside him.

He smelled her before he saw her.

Jasmine. Not perfume exactly, or not only. Something warmer than that, something that seemed to rise off her skin rather than sit on top of it the way scent from a bottle usually did, faint and green and just short of sweet, the note he had spent three weeks failing to name in memory whenever he tried and failed to recall precisely what it was about being near her that had always, since the very first handshake in the vestibule, made something in his chest go quiet in a way incense never once managed.

Baelor had never told her he loved that smell. He had never told her anything close to the truth of what moved through him when it reached him, and it reached him now, sudden and total, a full second before she rounded the end of the pew, and by the time she sat down beside him — close, in the way of someone who had chosen him rather than simply taken the nearest available seat — whatever composure an hour of brutal honesty had cost him to assemble had already abandoned him entirely.

He turned.

She was watching him already, had been, he suspected, for the length of those footsteps, and the smile she offered did not come anywhere near her eyes. It sat crooked at one corner instead, apologetic and uncertain in a way that made his chest contract sharply enough that he nearly reached for her before he'd decided to do anything of the kind.

He knew that smile. It was an expression he recognized immediately because he'd been wearing some close cousin of it himself for nearly three weeks.

He said nothing. He had spent twenty days rehearsing, in odd, unguarded moments, some version of what he might say if he ever got to see her again, and found now, faced with the actual reality of her sitting an arm's length away, that every rehearsed line had evaporated completely, leaving him with nothing but the plain, humiliating fact of having hurt her and no adequate words assembled anywhere in him to address it.

They simply existed there together for a while, in a silence that should have been unbearable and somehow wasn't. He could feel the warmth of her radiating against the side of his cassock where her shoulder nearly, not quite, met his. A sweet, ordinary heat that stood in stark and almost startling contrast to the last time they'd been this close, weeks ago, with thunder cracking overhead and his own hands still burning at her waist. There was nothing carnal in it now, or nothing only carnal. It read instead as something closer to relief given a temperature, comfort with a pulse behind it.

Three weeks ago, in this same building, a comparable warmth and a comparable proximity had ended with his own hand around his own cock and a confession he could not bring himself to make even in the dark, even to God directly. What moved through him now bore almost no resemblance to that night's hunger. It was not smaller. If anything it occupied more room in him, sat heavier. It simply was not, tonight, primarily a thing his body wanted. It was something considerably more dangerous.

He looked at the plain wooden cross above the altar and let himself think, for the first time without immediately flinching from the thought, that he still wanted her. He thought, with a clarity that would have frightened him a month ago and now simply arrived, quiet and total, that he could have gone to his knees right there on the cold marble and prayed at the altar of her. He could ask, again and again, for an absolution only she was positioned to grant him; plead, in whatever language a man used for a thing this far past reasonable, that she never left again the way these twenty days had made him believe she might.

He did none of it. He sat, frozen by the sheer size of what he'd just allowed himself to think and let the silence continue instead.

"I hope there weren't too many entitled women today," she said finally, her voice landing somewhere between uncertain and hopeful, testing the ground before committing her full weight to it.

He huffed something close to a laugh and turned to look at her properly. "Let's just say I won't need to cook for myself for at least a week." The joke came easier than he'd expected, some old, grateful muscle memory taking over where his more careful faculties had failed him entirely. "I could see myself through to Epiphany on goodwill alone."

She smiled at that — a real smile, however small, climbing further up her face than the one she'd walked in with — and he could have sworn, absurdly, that his own heart actually moved in his chest at the sight of it, some physical lurch he had no theological vocabulary adequate to explain.

They held each other's eyes a moment longer than the joke strictly required, and the silence that followed felt entirely unlike the one that had come before it — warmer, though not yet safe.

"I actually wasn't sure about coming." Her eyes stayed on her own hands, folded in her lap. "After the other day, I thought — I don't know. I didn't want to be the sort of person who doesn't take a hint. I thought that maybe I needed to give you some space. In case I was becoming a bit too much."

"Don't be silly." The answer left him faster than he'd intended, almost tripping over itself in its hurry to correct her. "It's me who owes you an apology. My behaviour that day was—" he searched for a word that wouldn't require explaining the whole of what actually lay beneath it and settled for an inadequate one. "Poor. It was poor, and it was unfair to you, and I am sorry for it."

She nodded, faint, more to herself than to him, and something in the set of her shoulders told him she wasn't finished. "You had me believing I was unwanted here." Her voice cracked on the last word, just slightly, and he felt the crack land somewhere in his own chest like a physical blow. "Which is stupid, I know — you don't owe me anything, you never did — but I'd started thinking of this place as somewhere that was actually mine. Somewhere I got to just exist, without anyone needing managing from me, for once. And then you—"

She didn't finish it. She didn't have to. He watched the first tear break loose and travel the length of her cheek before either of them had acknowledged what was happening, and something in his own chest gave way at the sight of it more completely than three weeks of solitary, brutal honesty had managed on its own.

He turned fully toward her then, his whole body pivoting on the pew, and his hands found hers where they sat clenched in her lap, covering them before he'd consciously decided to. Her warmth beneath his palms did something complicated and inconvenient to the rest of him, some low, insistent pull he chose, deliberately, to ignore in favour of the considerably more urgent thing happening in front of him.

"You will always have a place here." He got the words out before she could continue, though it turned out not to matter, because she spoke straight over him anyway, the sentence already building too much momentum to be stopped by anything as small as his interruption. "That was never in question. It will never be in question."

"I thought that I understood you." Her breath was coming faster now, catching unevenly between words. "Your loneliness — that sadness you keep locked up behind everything else, that feeling like you have to carry the whole weight of everyone alone — I thought I understood that, in you, because I recognized it. And I thought you understood me too, and I — I—"

Her breathing had gone properly ragged now, words fracturing apart faster than she could assemble them, and he stopped her the only way he could think to in the moment: lifting both hands from hers to her face instead, thumbs coming to rest against the wet tracks already cutting down her cheeks.

Her name left his lips — the only solid thing he had left to offer her, thrown out as deliberately as a lifeline to a drowning woman — and it worked exactly as he'd hoped. Her eyes found his again, properly, holding there instead of skittering away.

"I understand you," he said, quiet and entirely certain, the first fully honest sentence he'd managed to give anyone in longer than he wanted to calculate. "And you understand me. And I am so ashamed — so genuinely ashamed — of having caused you even a fraction of this pain. I—"

He didn't finish. She closed the remaining distance between them in a single motion, the whole of her colliding into his chest, her face burying itself in the black fabric over his heart, and whatever he'd been about to say dissolved, unimportant now, into the more urgent business of simply holding her.

He wondered, distantly, whether she could feel how hard his heart was currently working against her ear, pressed as she was directly over it. He was fairly certain she could, because Baelor didn’t bother trying to still it.

His arms came around her without any further input required from the rest of him, holding her shaking frame together while her sobs worked themselves out against the fabric already growing damp beneath her face, and he stayed exactly like that — steady, present, entirely hers for as long as she needed him to be — for considerably longer than he bothered counting.

Her sobs thinned eventually, then stopped, and she drew back from him at her own pace, wiping at her face with the back of one hand in a gesture that struck him as almost childlike in its simplicity. "Sorry," she managed, on a breath still not quite steady.

"Don't be. Please." He shook his head, meaning it entirely.

She nodded, more to herself than to him, some private decision apparently being finalized. "How about we just — forget this happened. All of it." Her eyes found his again, searching. "Stop apologizing to each other and go back to where we left off. I promise I'll still believe you're a cool priest."

The laugh that pulled out of him was real, surprised out of him despite everything the evening had already asked of him. "I'm holding you to that." His hand found the back of her neck, gentle, tilting her face back up to his when it had started to drop. "I’ll remove you from wreath-duty until next year."

"What?"

"The wreath. You're off the hook until next Advent."

She laughed at that too — a real laugh this time, breaking through whatever was left of the tears — and the sound of it did something to the whole of him that fifteen years of careful discipline had absolutely no defence prepared against.

He turned back toward the altar eventually, leaning into the worn wood of the pew behind him, and she shifted beside him a moment later, settling her weight against his side with an ease that suggested she'd stopped questioning whether she was allowed to. His arm found its way around her shoulders without any real deliberation on his part, and her head came to rest in the crook of it, cheek against the side of his chest, close enough that every breath she took registered against him.

He breathed her in. Jasmine, warm and close and entirely real this time, no phantom trace left to chase down a stranger's collar or a shop aisle.

He fucking loved jasmine.

A.N.: sooooo, what do we think? i warned it would be a slow burn, but they're getting there... i will work on the next parts along the weeks, they will be shorter (or at least i'll try) because proofreading this behemoth was a workout in itself lol. as always, comments and feedback is very much appreciated. i love you all <3

TAGLIST: @qardasngan @nerdyinfluencertastemaker @princessphilly @shyravenns @loveslide @dulcebloodhnd @caitlynluna @sacha1slytherin @alternarabuda @jjubilee-fluff @a-sunflower-in-bloom @heieufh @karakatitsa-sonya @eleventhboi @celestialsonglines @xglittergoddess @warpedlilium @themoonseroticoracle @hrh007 @fraaiefreule91 @hannisreading @samthegreenapologist @dont-try-pesticide @thorins-queen-of-erebor @outpostsworld @sotragedynut @nicoall12 @escapic-mezzanine @m0th-g0th @noble-17 @bbjkfnmc @sol-in-wonderland @sem-ra @mitth-eli-vanto @justmasblack @coff33mug

The skirt is short. Very short. The kind of short that makes mirrors feel judgmental and photographers feel blessed.

You look at yourself one last time in the hotel mirror, smooth your hands over the fabric, tilt your head, and smile.

Perfect.

Toto is sitting in the armchair near the window, phone in one hand, glasses low on his nose, pretending to read something important. Pretending.

Because he has looked at your legs at least four times in the last thirty seconds.

You catch him on the fifth. “Problem, Mr. Wolff?”

His eyes lift slowly. Too slowly. “No.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

“You look like your strategy model just crashed.”

“My strategy model is fine.”

You turn slightly, just enough for the skirt to shift higher. Toto’s jaw tightens. Very satisfying.

“I can change,” you say sweetly.

“No.”

The answer comes too fast.

You grin. “No?”

“No.”

“You didn’t even pretend to think about it.”

“I am an efficient man.”

“You are a predictable man.”

His mouth curves. “With you? Never.”

You walk toward him, boots clicking softly against the floor. His gaze follows you with the focus of a man watching a qualifying lap on fresh softs.

You stop between his knees and adjust his collar. “Will this cause a scandal?”

“Yes.”

“Will Bradley cry?”

“Yes.”

“Will you do anything about it?”

Toto leans back, looking up at you like you are the best mistake he has ever made.

“No.”

You beam. “That’s my man.”

His hand finds the back of your thigh, warm and steady, just beneath the edge of the skirt.

“Careful,” he murmurs.

You bend closer. “You first.”

He exhales through his nose, half laugh, half warning. “You enjoy making my life difficult.”

“I keep you young.”

“You keep Bradley medicated.”

“Same thing.”

By the time you arrive at the paddock, the cameras are already hungry. The first flash comes before you even step fully out of the car. Then another. Then twenty.

You feel Toto behind you, tall and calm, his hand settling at your waist as if he is personally signing the scandal into existence.

The paddock turns. George sees you first. His eyes go from your face to your outfit, then immediately up to the sky like he is asking for divine intervention.

“Nope,” he says. “I am not commenting.”

Kimi appears beside him, looks once, and turns around. “I saw nothing.”

“You both saw everything,” you say.

George points at Toto. “Your girlfriend is trying to get the FIA involved.”

Toto looks bored. “The FIA has no jurisdiction over skirts.”

“They will after today.”

You smile at George. “You like it?”

“I like keeping my contract, so I will say you look very nice and also I have a race to prepare for.”

Kimi nods. “Smart answer.”

You blow them both a kiss.

George mutters, “Mascot behavior.”

Toto’s hand slides slightly lower on your back. “Strategic emotional support asset,” he corrects.

From behind, Bradley appears with a coffee and the expression of a man already experiencing a migraine in preview mode. He sees you. Stops. Blinks once. Then looks at Toto.

“No.”

You grin. “Good morning, Bradley.”

“No.”

“You don’t even know what I’m going to do.”

“That is exactly why I’m saying no.”

Toto raises an eyebrow. “She is wearing a skirt.”

“She is wearing a headline.”

You glance down. “A cute headline.”

Bradley points at you with his coffee. “That skirt is going to have its own hashtag by lights out.”

“Great,” you say. “Organic engagement.”

Bradley turns to Toto. “Please tell me you understand the optics.”

Toto looks at you. At your legs. At your smile. Then back at Bradley.

“I understand them.”

“And?”

“And I like them.”

Bradley closes his eyes. Somewhere nearby, James Allison walks past, takes one look at the scene, and keeps walking.

“No,” James says without stopping. “I’m an engineer. This is outside my department.”

“You’re all cowards,” you call after him.

James raises his coffee in surrender.

The paddock has always stared at you, but today it stares with commitment. You feel eyes on your legs, on Toto’s hand, on the way he walks just close enough for everyone to know exactly where he stands.

Beside you. Always.

A few journalists whisper. A photographer nearly walks backward into a tyre trolley. One mechanic from another team forgets what he is carrying and has to be redirected by his colleague.

Then Lando appears, because apparently chaos has a subscription service. He slows down dramatically when he sees you.

“Oh,” he says.

Toto’s face immediately loses all humor.

“Careful.”

Lando lifts both hands. “I was going to say nice shoes.”

“No, you weren’t,” you say.

“No, I wasn’t.”

You laugh. Lando grins at you. “Respectfully, this paddock has suffered enough. You can’t just arrive looking like that next to him. It confuses the young drivers.”

Toto looks at him. “You seem easily confused.”

“I drive for McLaren. Emotional confusion is part of the job.”

You snort. Lando points at your skirt. “Anyway, if Mercedes gets tired of being scandalous, we offer papaya.”

“I look terrible in orange.”

“You don’t.”

Toto’s arm tightens around your waist. “She does.”

You look up at him. “Toto.”

“You said you hate orange.”

“I do, but I enjoy being complimented.”

“I compliment you.”

“You glare at men who compliment me.”

“Yes.”

Lando nods. “Healthy. Mature. Very post-divorce.”

Toto’s smile is sharp enough to cut carbon fiber. “You have somewhere to be?”

“Far away from your midlife crisis? Probably.”

You gasp, delighted. “Oh, that one made Twitter.”

Lando winks. “I read the classics.”

Toto leans down slightly. “She is not my midlife crisis.”

Lando’s grin softens just a little. “Yeah,” he says. “We know.”

And then he disappears before Toto can decide whether silence counts as murder.

*

The race begins with noise, heat, and the kind of tension that makes even your jokes come out quieter. At first, you stand beside Toto in the garage screens, arms crossed, watching the timing gaps.

You understand enough now to follow the strategy. Enough to know when Toto’s jaw tightens. Enough to know when George is managing tyres. Enough to know when Kimi is about to get told something deeply unhelpful like “push now.”

The opening laps are messy. A virtual safety car. One bad pit stop from Ferrari. A Red Bull complaining about traffic. Normal Sunday religion.

Toto stands behind the monitors, headset on, one hand resting on the table, completely focused.

You watch him more than the race. That is your own problem. There is something unfair about him like this. Controlled. Commanding. Untouchable to everyone else. Yours in every way that matters.

After lap twenty-two, the race settles. Mercedes is in a decent position. Nobody is actively ruining Toto’s blood pressure for once.

You glance around. Bradley is away dealing with journalists. George is on track. Kimi is on track. James is in engineering mode.

Toto is standing behind his chair. Perfect.

You step closer. He notices without looking away from the screen.

“What are you doing?”

“Watching the race.”

“You were already watching the race.”

“I want a better seat.”

His eyes flick to you. Then to the chair. Then back to you. There is one second of silence. One small, dangerous second where he could choose wisdom.

He does not. Toto Wolff, team principal, billionaire, grown adult, public figure, man who should absolutely know better, sits down. And lets you slide onto his lap.

The garage freezes. Truly freezes. A race engineer looks at the screen with such intensity he might burn through it. Someone drops a pen. Someone else whispers, “Oh my God.”

Toto adjusts his headset calmly. You settle sideways on his lap, one arm around his shoulders, legs angled neatly enough to keep the skirt from becoming a national incident. Mostly.

His hand rests on your thigh. Casual. Protective. Possessive.

The cameras find you within five seconds. You know because Bradley’s voice comes through somewhere behind you.

“No. No, no, no. Absolutely not.”

You turn your head and smile at him. He looks pale.

“Toto,” Bradley says, voice strangled. “There are cameras.”

Toto keeps watching the timing screen. “I know.”

“Broadcast cameras.”

“I know.”

“International broadcast cameras.”

“I know.”

You lean into Toto’s shoulder. “He knows, Bradley.”

Bradley looks like he wants to resign and become a florist. James removes his glasses and rubs his face. “I miss when our biggest problem was tyre temperature.”

George’s radio crackles faintly. “Why is everyone laughing on the pit wall?”

Nobody answers. The silence that follows is suspicious.

You bite your lip. Toto’s mouth twitches. “Don’t laugh,” he murmurs.

“You started this.”

“I sat down.”

“You gave me permission.”

“You took initiative.”

“You like initiative.”

His hand squeezes your thigh once. “I do.”

You shift slightly, getting comfortable. His breath changes. Only a little. Enough for you to notice.

You smile against his shoulder. “Problem?”

“Behave.”

“I am watching the race.”

“You are sitting on my lap during the race.”

“And?”

“And your skirt is very short.”

“That sounds like a design feature.”

His jaw moves. You love when he is trying not to react. It is your favorite hobby.

Lap thirty-one. George gains a place. The garage cheers. You clap softly, still on Toto’s lap, and kiss his cheek.

The camera catches that too.

Bradley makes a sound behind you that might be the death of hope. Toto says nothing. He just turns slightly and presses a kiss to your temple.

The paddock, the internet, and every gossip account in existence probably combust at the same time.

You lean closer to his ear. “Do you think they’re still calling me an accessory?”

His fingers trace a small, slow circle over your knee. “They can call you whatever they want.”

“And what do you call me?”

His eyes stay on the screen. “Mine.”

Your stomach flips. Ridiculous. One word from him and you are done. Absolutely pathetic.

You lower your voice. “Careful, Mr. Wolff.”

His thumb stills. “Why?”

“Because when we get on your jet tonight…”

He turns his head slightly. Just enough. His eyes meet yours. Dark. Focused. No longer on the timing screen.

You smile, innocent as sin. “I have plans.”

His fingers tighten against your thigh. The race keeps happening. Somewhere. Probably.

“What kind of plans?” he asks quietly.

You lean closer until your lips brush his ear.

“The kind Bradley doesn’t need to schedule.”

His jaw tightens. You continue, whispering just enough to ruin his concentration. “The kind where you stop pretending you’re calm.”

Toto inhales slowly. “Tread carefully.”

You smile. “The kind where that black shirt does not survive the flight.”

His eyes close for half a second. Tiny. Barely visible. A victory.

Then he opens them and looks back at the screen like a man trying to remember he runs a Formula 1 team. “You are dangerous.”

“You knew that before you took me home.”

“I underestimated the operational risk.”

You nearly laugh into his neck. “Want me to stop?”

“No.”

The answer is immediate. Again.

You grin. Toto turns his head slightly, his mouth near your ear now. “When we get on that jet,” he says, voice low and rough, “you will behave until we are in the air.”

Your breath catches. He continues, calm enough to be cruel. “Then you can tell me every single one of those plans properly.”

Oh. Well. Your brain leaves the paddock. Possibly the continent.

You blink at the timing screen. “Copy.”

His mouth curves. “Good girl.”

Your heart performs a qualifying lap.

Behind you, James says, “I am going to pretend I heard none of that.”

Bradley sounds like he is seconds from spiritual collapse. “I am calling communications. And legal. And maybe a priest.”

You sit up straighter. “Bradley, relax. We are helping engagement.”

“You are creating a scandal.”

Toto’s hand settles more firmly around your waist. “She creates many things.”

James stands up. “No. I draw the line. I am leaving.”

You laugh so hard you have to hide your face against Toto’s shoulder. Toto, traitor that he is, looks deeply pleased with himself.

The race ends with George and Kimi on podium, and Mercedes avoiding disaster. A miracle.

The bigger miracle is that Bradley has not fainted. The second Toto stands, he keeps you close, one hand at your waist while cameras flash from every angle.

You know what the photos will look like. You on his lap. His hand on your thigh. Your mouth near his ear. His face calm, but his eyes giving him away.

By midnight, every social platform will have opinions. By morning, there will be articles.

Toto Wolff’s Girlfriend Causes Stir in the Mercedes Garage. Young Partner Sits On Mercedes Boss’s Lap During Grand Prix. Paddock Romance Or PR Nightmare?

You can already see the comments.

She’s embarrassing him. He’s embarrassing himself. She knows exactly what she’s doing. He should know better.

You glance at Toto as you walk back through the paddock. He looks completely unbothered. Actually, worse. He looks happy. Warm. Proud. Like the whole world can point and laugh, and he will still pick you every time.

“You know this is going to be everywhere,” you say.

“Yes.”

“You’re really not worried?”

“No.”

“Not even a little?”

He stops near the Mercedes hospitality entrance and looks down at you. His fingers brush your chin gently. “I spent too much of my life worrying about what people think.”

Your smile softens. “And now?”

“Now I worry whether you had lunch.”

You roll your eyes, but your chest goes warm. “You are impossible.”

“You love me.”

“I do.”

His expression softens. Still, after all this chaos, those words do something to him. Every time.

You step closer and fix the collar of his shirt. “Also, I did have lunch.”

“Good.”

“And I’m still thinking about the jet.”

His eyes darken instantly.

“Toto?”

“Yes?”

“You are blushing.”

“I am not.”

“You are.”

“I am planning logistics.”

You laugh. “Is that what we call it now?”

His hand slides to the small of your back. “Careful.”

You rise on your toes and press a kiss to his cheek. “Never.”

Bradley appears from nowhere, holding his phone like a weapon. “Please tell me there will be no more incidents today.”

You look at Toto. Toto looks at you. You both look at Bradley.

“No promises,” you say.

Bradley turns around and walks away. James, passing by with coffee, mutters, “Smart man.”

Toto watches them go, then leans down close to your ear. “Jet leaves in two hours.”

Your stomach flips again. You look up at him, smiling sweetly. “Plenty of time to create one more headline.”

Toto’s laugh is quiet, dangerous, and entirely yours. Then he takes your hand and leads you inside, while the paddock watches, whispers, judges, and burns with curiosity.

Let them.

"Will you teach me how to hold a gun ?"

Frank almost chokes on his lasagna.

Frank coughs, fist smacking against his chest as his free hand reaches for his cup, unable to swallow the bite that is now lodged in his throat. Frank coughs so hard he nearly knocks over his water. He manages to grab it, downs half the cup, and looks up at you.

"Christ- What ?" Your cheeks go red and you look down at your lap, shaking your head.

"I-I mean, i know how to shoot one, that's not the issues- I just-" You groan, burying your face in your hands to hide the evidence of your blushed cheeks. "I think it'd be smart for me to learn how to hold one properly if one day I need to use one." You attempt a glance up at Frank.

His face has fallen as he's staring at you, his lips parted.

"Baby.." He reaches across the table for you. "I don't want you to ever have to hold a gun- let alone shoot someone."

"But what if someday I have to ? What if all the shit out there catches up to me and I need to defend myself-"

"Mama, do you not feel safe ?" Your body locks up.

"What ?" You look at Frank, and he looks devastated. As if you'd just kicked his puppy.

"Do I not make you feel safe anymore ?"

"Frank." The hurt on his face gets worse.

"Baby."

"No." You immediately reach across the table and grab both his hands. "No, no, no." His jaw tightens. Because Frank isn't hearing the words.

He's hearing something else. He's hearing that after everything he's done, after every promise he's made, after every nightmare he's fought through to build a life with you— You still think you need protection from somewhere else.

"Frank."

"You wanna learn how to hold a gun."

"That's not—"

"It kinda sounds like that." Your heart squeezes. Because suddenly you understand.

"Oh." Frank looks away. And somehow that's worse. Much worse. "Frankie." His eyes immediately flick back to yours. You rarely call him that. Only when you're being serious. Only when you're trying to get straight to the heart of something. "You make me feel safer than anyone ever has." The tension in his shoulders eases. Just slightly.

"But?"

"There is no but." His eyebrows pull together.

"Then why?" You sigh. Searching for the words. The right words.

"It's because of you." Frank blinks.

"What?"

"It's because of you."

"That don't make any sense."

"It does." You squeeze his hands. "Frank, before I met you, I never thought about stuff like this." His expression softens. Just a little. "I didn't." You shrug. "I assumed bad things happened to other people." A humorless smile touches your mouth. "Then I met you." Frank groans immediately.

"Jesus Christ."

"I'm serious."

"I know."

"You showed me what the world actually looks like." Silence. "The good parts." More silence. "And the bad parts." Frank's eyes drop to your intertwined fingers. You continue softly. "You taught me to pay attention."

"You shouldn't have to."

"Maybe not." Your thumb brushes over his knuckles. "But I do." Frank swallows. Hard.

"Baby."

"I'm not asking because I think you'll fail me." The words land. You see it happen. Like something unclenches inside him. "I'm asking because life is unpredictable." His eyes meet yours. "What if you're not there?"

Immediately:

"I'll be there."

"Frank."

"I will." You can't help smiling. Of course that's his answer. Of course it is.

"You know what I mean." His jaw tightens. Because he does know. He just hates it. Hates even imagining it.

"What if you're deployed?"

"I'm retired."

"Okay, well- What if you're at work?" Silence. "What if you're hurt? What if someone is trying to hurt me ? What if someone takes me- and my only way to get out of there is to shoot ?" More silence. "What if something happens and I have to protect myself before you can get to me?" Frank looks down. You watch him think. Really think.

Not as a soldier. Not as a fighter. As your husband. As the man who wants to wrap you in bubble wrap and personally fistfight every bad thing in existence. Finally he sighs. Long and heavy.

"You really thought this through." You nod.

"Yeah." His thumb brushes yours.

"You ain't scared?" The question is quiet. Honest. You shrug.

"A little." Frank stares at you. Then laughs softly. Not because it's funny. Because that's exactly what he'd expected. Your fear has never stopped you from doing things. That's one of the things he loves most about you. And one of the things that drives him absolutely insane.

"You're stubborn."

"So I've heard."

"You got any idea how much I hate this?"

"Yep."

"You care?"

"Nope." That finally earns a laugh. A real one. Frank shakes his head.

"Unbelievable." You beam.

"Thank you."

"I didn't say yes."

"You were about to."

"I wasn't."

"You absolutely were." Frank points at you.

"You are a menace."

"And?" His mouth twitches. Then he sighs. Again. The sigh of a man surrendering to his fate.

"Fine." Your face lights up immediately.

"Really?"

"Yeah." You nearly launch across the table. Frank catches your wrist before you can.

"Hold on." You freeze.

"What?" One eyebrow rises.

"If we're doing this, we're doin' thing on one condition." You nod rapidly.

"Okay."

"You listen to every single thing I say."

"Okay."

"No arguing." You hesitate. Frank narrows his eyes. "No arguing."

"Okay."

"No smartass comments." You gasp.

"Frank."

"Nope."

"That's unreasonable." His grin appears. Slow. Victorious. "See? We ain't even started yet." You groan. Frank laughs. Then his expression softens. Warm. Affectionate. The look he only gets when he's looking at you. His thumb brushes across your knuckles.

Frank looks at you for a long moment. Then lifts your hand and presses a kiss against your knuckles. Slow. Tender. Protective. And when he finally lets go, he points his fork at you.

"Saturday." You grin.

"Saturday."

"And sweetheart?"

"Hm?"

"If you point the thing at me, I'm takin' it away."

-------

Saturday rolls around a bit too soon for Franks liking, but nevertheless, he waits for you to return from your weekly brunch with Karen, guns spread out on the dinner table. Frank keeps many pistols stashed around the house for easy access incase something horrible happens, and seeing them all taken from their dedicated hiding spots makes his stomach churn, like his body is telling him today is the day all those bad things will come beelining for this apartment.

Like he's tempting fate.

Like the universe is watching.

The sound of keys jingling outside makes him glance toward the door. A second later you walk in.

"Hi, baby." Then you spot the table. "Oh." Frank immediately stands.

"You can still change your mind." You shake your head.

"Nope."

"Still time."

"Frank."

"I'm serious."

"I'm not." His mouth twitches.

"Yeah. I know." A few minutes later you're seated beside him at the table. The actual lesson starts much slower than you'd expected. Frank doesn't even let you touch a gun at first. Instead he talks. And talks. And talks. By the time he's finished explaining safety rules, basic handling, storage, ammunition, trigger discipline, and approximately fourteen thousand other things, you're pretty sure you've aged three years.

"Frank."

"What?"

"I know."

"No, sweetheart." His eyes narrow. "You don't." You groan. He ignores you.

"Rule number one."

"I know."

"Tell me." You immediately straighten.

"Treat every firearm like it's loaded." Frank nods.

"Good." The lesson continues. Eventually he slides one of the unloaded pistols across the table. Your stomach flips. Not because you're scared. Because suddenly this feels real. Frank notices immediately.

"Hey." Your eyes lift. His expression softens. "We're just learning." You nod.

"Okay."

"Okay?"

"Okay." Finally he stands.

"Come here." You follow him toward the living room. Frank positions you facing the far wall. Then takes the pistol back from your hands.

"First thing." His voice drops into that calm instructor tone.

"The way you hold it." You nod. Trying very hard to pay attention. Trying. Frank steps behind you. And immediately your brain short-circuits. Because now he's close. Very close. Close enough that you can feel his body heat. Close enough that you can smell his soap. Close enough that your heart starts doing stupid things.

"Alright." His voice rumbles beside your ear. Your pulse jumps. "Shoulders relaxed." You swallow.

"Okay." One of his hands settles lightly against your upper arm. Guiding. Adjusting. The touch is completely innocent. Unfortunately your brain is not.

"Not so stiff." Frank gently nudges your elbow. "There." You stare straight ahead. Very determinedly. Then his hands move again. Large. Warm. Calloused. One wraps around your wrist. The other adjusts your grip. And suddenly all of your concentration evaporates. Completely. Gone. Missing. Presumed dead. "Like this." Frank's fingers curl over yours. Guiding them into place. Your throat goes dry. "Got it?" Absolutely not. You have no idea what he just said. You are staring at his hands.

Which is becoming a problem. A serious problem. Because Frank's hands have always been distracting. The veins. The scars. The roughness. The ridiculous size difference between his hands and yours. Normally you can manage it.

Today? Not so much.

"Sweetheart." You blink.

"What?" Frank pauses.

"You listenin'?"

"Mhm." He nods against your neck, as if only half believing you- and his hands travel down to your waist. Frank's hands settle on your waist.

Warm. Heavy. Completely ruining your ability to think.

"You're gonna wanna stand at an angle," he says, nudging your hips slightly. "Helps distribute the recoil."

"Right."

"You ain't listenin'."

"I am."

"You absolutely are not." You clear your throat.

"I'm listening." Frank hums. The sound vibrates through your back and right down to your core. Dangerous. Very dangerous. Because now he's close enough that every time he talks you can feel it. His hands leave your waist only to reposition your arms.

"Straighten this one." You immediately do. "Not that much." He chuckles, his breath hot on your neck. Your own breath hitches and you nod, shifting your weight from leg to leg. His hands are back on your waist, steadying you. The heat of his palms seeps through your thin shirt, and you have to fight the urge to lean back into him.

"Easy there," he murmurs, his lips brushing against the shell of your ear. "Don't wanna fall over before you even shoot. You'll end up shooting yourself and not your target."

"I'm not going to fall," you manage, though your voice comes out shakier than you'd intended. Frank's chuckle is low, rumbling through his chest and into your back.

"Could've fooled me." His fingers press gently into your sides. "Now. Eyes forward. Hold it steady, baby." You force your gaze to the blank wall ahead, trying to focus on anything other than the man pressed against you. It's a losing battle.

"Good," he says, though you're pretty sure you're doing a terrible job of following instructions. "Now, I emptied the chamber, so, when you're ready to shoot, you're gonna want to exhale slowly. Don't hold your breath."

"Right." Exhale. You can do that. You try, but your breath catches when his hands slide from your waist to your hips, positioning you exactly how he wants.

"Like this," he says, his voice dropping to that low register that makes your knees weak. "Feet shoulder-width apart." You shift your feet, trying to follow his guidance while your brain short-circuits.

"Almost there," he encourages, and you wonder if he's talking about your stance or something else entirely. "Now, bring the pistol up." Your hands shake slightly as you lift the weapon, and Frank's hands immediately cover yours again.

Your finger finds the trigger, and you try to follow his instructions. You exhale slowly, just like he said, and begin to squeeze. Your heart jumps into your throat and you shake your head.

"Frank," you start, turning towards him. "I don't—"

"Hey- hey," His hands palm your waist as he spins you around, pinning you to his body as he straightens out your grip. "Focus. You're the one who said you wanted to learn." You bite your lip, trying to concentrate.

"Yeah, how to hold it- not how to shoot it. I know that part."

"Baby." His hands tighten slightly over yours. "Knowing how to hold it as it goes off will help you to not dislocate your shoulder at the recoil."

You take another breath, trying to ignore the way his thumb is stroking the back of your hand. You exhale. You squeeze.

Click.

The sound is unnaturally loud in the quiet room. It's not the boom you expected, but a sharp, metallic snap. You're panting, staring at the gun in your hands. Your body is on fire. And Frank's head hand resting on your stomach is not helping.

At all.

For a moment, neither of you says anything. The click of the empty chamber seems to echo through the apartment. Then Frank exhales. Slowly.

"See?" he murmurs. "Didn't kill anybody." You laugh weakly. The sound comes out a little breathless. A little shaky. Frank notices immediately. Of course he does. His hand slides away from your stomach. Not far. Just enough to take the pistol from your grip. The second it's out of your hands, he sets it carefully on the table beside him.

Safe. Out of the way. Then he turns back to you. And suddenly there's nothing left to focus on except him.

His eyes drop to your face. Your flushed cheeks. The way you're still breathing a little too fast. The way you won't quite meet his eyes.

"Sweetheart." You finally manage to meet his gaze, and what you see there makes your breath catch even more. His eyes are dark, intense, and focused entirely on you.

"What?" you ask, your voice barely above a whisper. Frank doesn't answer with words. Instead, he closes the small distance between you, his hand coming up to cup your cheek. His thumb strokes gently across your skin, and you lean into his touch without thinking.

"I think," he says, his voice low and rough, "that's enough gun lessons for today." You nod, unable to form coherent thoughts as his face inches closer to yours.

"Okay."

"Okay?" he asks, his lips hovering just above yours.

"Okay," you repeat, and then he's kissing you. It's not gentle or tentative. It's hungry and demanding, exactly like you imagined it would be. His other hand slides around your waist, pulling you flush against his body as he deepens the kiss. You respond eagerly, your arms wrapping around his neck as you melt against him. His mouth is all heat, all greed, teeth dragging your lower lip until you whimper. The sound sets something loose in him; both hands move to your waist again, hoisting you up with such little effort that your sneakers barely scrape the hardwood before your ass meets the edge of the dining table. Frank cages you between his hips and the tabletop, mouth trailing from your lips down your jaw and the sensitive skin below your ear.

“You been listening so good,” he mutters, voice thick with pride. “Always do, don’t you, sweetheart?” Your response is a mewl, which you vaguely hope translates as affirmation. Frank bites at the hinge of your jaw, then moves lower, nosing aside the neck of your t-shirt so his lips can find your collarbone. His hands are on you everywhere—raking up the line of your thighs, squeezing the back of your neck, up under your shirt to palm your ribs. His devotion to safety doesn’t extend to your clothing. Frank is careful with weapons, meticulous with ammo, and utterly heedless with cotton and lace. Your shirt is shoved up and off, your bra unhooked and tossed aside before you can protest. He palms your tits, running his thumbs over your nipples until you arc into his touch.

“You don’t even know what you do to me,” he groans, giving a gentle twist that sends a bolt of heat through your core.

“I think I have an idea,” you gasp, watching the way his eyes go molten when you lean in and kiss him again, needier now, tongue pressing against his, hair tangling in his rough fingers. His hand lifts your thigh, hiking it up his hip so your center presses flush to his jeans. You can feel how hard he is already, and the knowledge only makes you squirm. Frank’s mouth finds its way back to yours, barely giving you time to catch your breath.

“Turn around,” he growls, all gravel and steel, and you do, bracing your palms on the table. He steps in behind you, pressing his body along yours, hot and heavy, aligning your hips until you’re bent over just right. The guns, piled artfully in a wide fan near the centerpiece, glint with threat; Frank’s got you bent over just beside them, and the implication—of violence, of danger, of how terrifically safe you are in his hands—hits you in a wave so shivery you have to tighten your grip on the edge. He’s careful with his hands, but nothing else. Frank grabs your wrists, holds them pinned to the tabletop, and brings his other hand under you, slow at first, using two big fingers to stroke between your legs over your still-on shorts. His hand is huge, almost comically so; his touch reaches everywhere at once. The denim is quickly too much—it’s all friction, not enough skin.

“Please—Frank,” He hooks his finger in the waistband and peels your shorts down, panties going with them. He kneels briefly to help you step out, then stands and runs a palm down your back, lingering at the base of your spine.

“Still with me?” His voice is low, but there’s an edge of concern, as if he could break you by accident if he isn’t careful.

“Yes,” you say, desperate, rocking back against him. Frank’s zipper lowers and you hear the sound, the little click of metal teeth, followed by the hiss of fabric as he guides his cock out. He leans over, chest covering your back. He nips at your shoulder, the edge of your jaw.

“You know I’d never let anything happen to you, right?” he murmurs. The question isn’t rhetorical; he waits for you to answer. You nod, swallowing, because you do know. There is nothing in the world Frank wouldn’t kill or die for, except maybe you. For you, he’d do both, then come back and do it again. His body is a wall against your back, his cock already nudging wetly between your thighs, thick and hot and so much more than your memory has managed to ever do justice. You gasp as the blunt head pushes in, stretching you wide. It isn’t gentle, exactly, but it isn’t rough, either—Frank’s hand is spread wide between your shoulderblades, keeping your chest against the cold wood of the table, and you feel the tremor in his fingers as he slides home, inch by inch.

“Shit,” he grits out, folding over you, the stubble on his chin scraping your cheek, “I’ll never get used to how fuckin’ tight you are.” He rocks forward, locking you in place with both hands, pushing you open until you’re gasping, spread around his tip. You whine at the stretch, and he kneads your ass in his hands, kissing his way up your spine. He rocks his hips with slow, devastating patience, half in and half out, making you feel every goddamn inch.

“That’s it, baby,” he croons, rough and unbearably tender all at once, “take it.”

You try, but he’s too thick, the stretch almost overwhelming—almost, but not enough to make you want to stop. Frank knows it, senses it, reads every hitch in your breath and every squeeze of your walls. He goes deeper, steady and inexorable, spreading your trembling legs until you’re flush to his pelvis.

“You’re doing so fuckin’ good for me, honey,” Frank says, and the pride in his voice makes you clench even tighter around him. “Keep going. You got it. Let me in.” One hand leaves your shoulder to guide your hips, holding you exactly how he wants you, keeping you still as he ruts forward. Each thrust makes you moan, shameless and desperate. When he hits bottom, you cry out, and Frank stops, hips pressed tight to your ass, just holding you there while you adjust. His arm wraps around your middle, massaging slow circles into your stomach, grounding you.

“Breathe,” he orders softly, nuzzling behind your ear. “You can take it, I know you can. You always take it so fucking good, pretty girl. C'mon, be good f'me.” His hips start again, a little faster, a little rougher, and now the whole table is shaking in time with his rhythm. The guns rattle. It sends a thrill of fear and want through your bloodstream; you could get shot with safety off, he could fuck you through a wall—none of it would matter as long as his hands stayed on you.

You arch, bracing yourself on the table, and whimper as he picks up his pace, a deep feral growl building in his chest. He lets go of your wrists but you don’t move—couldn’t if you tried. Your body belongs to him, every nerve and muscle and cell. He strokes your clit with two fingers, fast and precise, and the jolt of pleasure makes your knees weak. You gasp and buck against his cock, chasing friction, and his praise keeps coming:

“Atta girl. That’s my girl. That's my good fuckin' girl.” You can feel the heat and throb of him, so deep you swear you must be leaking down your thighs.

“Frank—oh my god—” He doesn’t fuck you hard, not at first. He moves inside you like he’s afraid you’re going to slip away, each thrust slow and measured. Your forehead bumps the table and you can see your reflection in the polished wood, cheeks flushed, eyes wet, mouth a shocked-perfect O. He’s in you deep, and you feel impossibly full, clawing at the wood grain for leverage. You gasp, and Frank’s palm comes up, gentling for a moment as he strokes the side of your face, his thumb working slow circles over your cheek.

“Too much?” he asks, gravelly-soft, and you shake your head, greedy for every inch. The stretch is obscene, and your body shakes with it—you curse, and Frank shushes you, praises you, tells you how fucking good you are for him.

“That’s it, that’s my girl,” he pants between gritted teeth, his hips angling just so as he works further inside, the slide somehow both torturous and perfect. You’re split around him, slick and hot and pulsing. Every time he pulls back, you feel the pop and drag; every time he thrusts in, he knocks all the air out of your lungs. He keeps you pinned with one hand, the other spreading over your ribs, holding you in place as if you might really try to scramble away. He rocks forward, slow and relentless, and the slap of your skin echoes off the high ceiling, punctuated by your desperate little moans. Each thrust rocks you on your toes, your knees buckling as he goes deeper, driving you against the edge of the table with enough force to bruise.

You feel drunk on it. Your mind floats, hollowed out with pleasure; you’re nothing but sensation, nothing but the feel of Frank covering you, bounding you, putting you exactly where he wants you.

“Look at you,” he breathes, “so needy—so fuckin’ perfect f'me.” He works his cock and his fingers together, a brutal combination, rhythm never faltering. You arch, hips stuttering, and he laughs, a low, feral sound. Your eyes blur with tears and the world narrows to a point: the rough drag of his cock, the swirl of his fingertip, the sweet, ruthless pressure building in you. He hammers into you until he groans, shaking his head.

“Fuck, I can’t-” He rasps, choking on his words. “I can’t come like this,” He manages. You whine.

“What ?” You manage.

“Need t’see your face, pretty girl.” he chokes, then pulls out so fast you yelp in shock. You’re empty, shaking, and then he’s flipping you over, manhandling you onto your back against the table. He hikes your knees to your chest, spreads you wide; the edge of the table bites into your ass as he lines up and slams back inside, making you scream and clench your thighs together. The sound you make is something animal, clawed out of you by brute force. Frank’s hands are everywhere: two bear-paw palms bracketing your calves, shoving your knees up to your ears. He folds you flat, leans over until you’re nose to nose, his breath tangled with yours.

“Easy, baby, easy,” he pants, and the careful sugar in his voice runs rough against the filth of what he’s doing to you; he’s barely inside and you’re already quaking, legs braced on his shoulders, arms flailing for purchase until he grabs your wrists and pins them above your head, shoving you down with the whole weight of his body—hot, barely restrained, trembling against the bunched muscle of your thighs.

“Shit, honey, you’re squeezin' me fucking tight i can barely get in,” he groans, and you feel every inch of it, the monstrous stretch of him, as if he’s splitting you open. “Look at you,” he demands, eyes narrowed and wild. “C’mon, pretty girl. Open up f'me.” He wriggles his hips, inching deeper, and you curse out a desperate sob, forehead slick with sweat and eyes rolling back in your head.

“Baby,” he whispers, and you think maybe he’s proud, proud because he’s made you fall apart so completely. His hand comes up, thumb gentling over your cheekbone, touch so achingly tender you almost miss the next snap of his hips, the way he sinks into you full length, grinding down until your body is flush against the table and his balls are pressed tight to your ass.

“Frank,” you gasp, but he’s already bending to kiss you, mouth bruising and rough, tongue pushing into the back of your throat. He lets go of your wrists so he can frame your face with both hands, holding you steady as he fucks you deeper than you thought possible. You feel him everywhere: in your cunt, in the pulse behind your eyes, the low hot ache blooming in your pelvis.

“Just like that,” he says, a little breathless, voice gone low and awed. “Taking it so goddamn good. My best girl. Oh, fuck—yeah—there you go.” Every word is a stripe of heat across your scalp, every hum of praise tightening the coil in your belly. He holds you open, grinding deep, and you swear you can feel him in your core, pressing against something high and perfect and devastating. He starts to move, slow at first, withdrawing just enough to really feel the drag, and you sob into the side of his head, nails digging desperate crescent-moons into his back.

“Frank,” you whimper, not sure what you’re asking for, only that you want—need—more. He eggs you on, crooning,

“You want it, honey? Want it harder?” You nod, helpless, and then he’s slamming into you, rhythm brutal and relentless. The table protests, legs scraping the floor, and every thrust knocks another gasp from your lungs.

“Good girl,” Frank rasps, driven, sweat sliding down his brow. Frank holds you wide open, his forearms bracketing your thighs, massive hands palming the undersides of your knees. You catch a glimpse of his cock driving into you, thick and slick and devastating, and then you squeeze your eyes shut, overwhelmed.

“Yeah, baby, just like that. Take all of me.” His voice is a spike right to your core; you whimper, hips bucking as he pounds you into the tabletop, the world reduced to the creak and slap and thunder of Frank inside you. He’s all the way in, bottoming out, the pressure so intense you think you might split apart—and you want it, have never wanted anything more in your life.

“That’s it, sweetheart. Fuckin’ made for me, weren’t you?” His hands are everywhere, fingers fanning along your thighs, stroking your calves where they’re hitched over his shoulders, big palm cupping your face with a tenderness that doesn’t match the brutality of his fucking.

“Frank,” you sob, desperate for air, desperate for more. The look on his face—full of awe, and hunger, and a gutted, worshipful softness—punches all the breath from your lungs. You wonder how a man so gentle can fuck so hard.

“You’re takin’ it so good,” he rasps. “So fuckin’ tight, Christ.” Frank slides in and out, deeper, each thrust more relentless, more perfect, his words winding around you like a hand at your throat. “Tell me if it’s too much, baby. I can slow down.”

"Don't you dare. Please, Frankie.” And it’s true, you want to feel him everywhere, want him to ruin you forever. He grins, wolfish and sweet, and suddenly he’s angling his hips just so and the whole world explodes into fragments of color and heat. You cry out, surprise and pleasure crashing over you in a tidal wave. Frank fucking loves it, groans low in his throat and rocks harder into you.

“There you go,” he grits out. “So smart, so brave. Didn’t think you could take all of me, did you? But here you are, baby. You fuckin’ did it.” You can’t speak, just whimper and grab at his forearms, your hands dwarfed by the cords of muscle flexing beneath his skin. “Just a little more. Can you give me a little more, sweetheart?” You nod furiously, tears leaking from the corners of your eyes. Frank wipes them away with his thumb, then fucks you harder, punishing and blissful.He bows his head, mouth hot against your clavicle, biting down to muffle the sound he makes when you clamp down on him, milking his cock for every drop.

“Fuck, fuck,” he groans, hips grinding brutal circles. “You’re so tight, baby, s’too much.” He braces both hands flat beside your shoulders, the whole weight of him caging you down, and fucks you harder, shoving the table an inch with every slam. You’re slick and overstretched, cunt fluttering in aftershocks as you try to process the sheer size of him, the way he molds your insides around his cock. You want to tell him it’s too much, but he’s right—you can take it, you want to take it, even when the world goes white and your body locks up, seized by an orgasm that breaks you wide open. Frank’s breath is ragged, desperate. He’s staring at your face, like he can’t believe how good you look coming undone.

“You’re a fuckin’ miracle,” he says hoarsely, and the raw edges in his voice threaten to break you apart. You don’t just feel claimed, you feel worshipped—destroyed and remade, everything you are held together by the force of his hands and the heat of his mouth. He slows, just barely, when it seems like you can’t take anymore. Presses in, slow and mean, making you feel every unbearable inch, his cock so thick it burns and then soothes as you adjust. He smells like soap and skin and sweat and Frank, every inch of his body radiating heat. He wipes your tears away with his tongue, sucks your lip into his mouth, and his cock keeps you stretched so wide it warps your sense of time and space.

“There you go. That’s my good girl. Fuckin’ takin’ it all, you’re perfect—knew you could do it, knew it.” His hand skims your throat, thumb pressed to your pulse, gentle and careful and still commanding. You whimper, helpless, body desperately trying to keep up with what he’s asking of it.

“Frank—” you sob, voice cracking. You don’t know what you’re begging for. Maybe mercy, maybe more of the same. He just drinks it in, grinning like he’s got a fever.

“C’mon, sweetheart. Squeeze me, just like that. Shit—Want to fill you up so bad, baby.” He fucks you, cock punching deep and unyielding. You’re split apart on him, an obscene fit, and it drags another broken sound from your throat. He lets go of one knee, and the hand goes straight to your clit. He circles you in ruthless, obscene patterns, never looking away from your face. You clench around him again, and his composure unravels a little. He lets go, pace stuttering into ragged, needy thrusts that get rougher and rougher, chasing the end. Your nails dig into your own thighs as you grip your legs close, whimpering as your orgasm builds.

"That's it," he groans, voice dropping to something feral and wrecked. "Let me feel it, baby. Come for me." His thumb presses down harder, rubbing tight, frantic circles that make your vision blur at the edges. You're so full, so stretched around him, every thrust hitting that spot inside that has you seeing stars. "Fuck—look at you. Taking me so good."

Your head falls back against the mattress, a keening cry tearing from your lips as the pressure snaps. Your orgasm crashes through you in brutal, relentless waves, your body locking up, muscles clamping down around his cock in rhythmic pulses that make him snarl. He doesn't stop—can't stop—fucking you through it, chasing his own release with single-minded desperation now that you're coming apart beneath him.

"Shit, shit—" He buries his face in your neck, teeth sinking into your shoulder as his hips slam forward one last time, pinning you open as he spills inside you. His cock throbs, pulse after pulse, and he groans your name like a prayer and a curse, body shuddering against yours as he empties himself completely. For a moment, there's nothing but the sound of ragged breathing, the sweat-slick press of skin on skin. He stays inside you, still half-hard, pressing sloppy, breathless kisses to your jaw, your throat, anywhere he can reach.

"God," he mumbles, voice wrecked. "You're perfect. You know that? Fucking perfect." Your thighs are shaking when he lowers them back down to rest near his hips. Your body feels like it weighs like a bag of rocks, and you feels so blissfully fucked out that you would fall asleep right then and there, if it wasn't for the sensation of his come dripping down your thigh making you shudder. You dread him having to pull out, so you wrap your arms around him, desperate for him to stay close, trying to avoid that painful sensation. He feels you cling, feels the tremor in your arms, and he hushes you immediately, big hand cupping the back of your head, fingers threading through your sweat-damp hair.

"You did so good. You were such a godd girl f'me, baby." He shifts his weight, careful, settling more of himself over you so his warmth blankets you completely. His cock twitches inside you, still thick enough to keep you stretched, and you whimper at the sensation, oversensitive and raw. Frank kisses your temple, your eyelids, the corner of your mouth. His big hand massages your thigh, as if trying to get your body to focus elsewhere, to distract your brain from the stretch as he starts to slowly pull out. You whine, tears flying up to your eyes. He kisses your cheek.

"I know. I know. M'sorry." He hisses, his eyes closed. This part always makes you feel hollow, and the ache that settles into your guts right after he's pounded you like this always gets worse whenever he pulls out. The drag of him leaving is torture—thick, insistent, every vein and ridge catching on your tender flesh until finally, finally, he slips free with a wet, filthy sound that makes your face burn. You gasp, hollowed out, and immediately feel the rush of him spilling out of you, hot and copious, slicking your thighs, pooling beneath you. The ache blooms deep in your belly, a throbbing emptiness where he used to be, and a sob catches in your throat before you can stop it.

"Hey, hey," Frank croons, already there, already knowing. He doesn't pull away—never pulls away. Instead he presses closer, thighs bracketing yours, one hand sliding down to cup you possessively, palm warm and grounding against your sore, swollen cunt. "I got you, baby. I know it hurts, i'm so sorry." He holds you through the shudders, through the embarrassing spill of his release dripping out of you, his hand applying gentle pressure like he can somehow keep you together, keep you full. He kisses your tears, murmuring praise and apologies against your damp skin—"So good, so brave, took me so well"—until your breathing evens out and the worst of the ache settles into something manageable, something warm.

"Let's get you up, hm?" He moves carefully, sliding an arm beneath your shoulders and another under your knees, lifting you from the mess you've made of the table. You whimper at the shift, at the fresh spill of wetness down your legs, and he shushes you, pressing his face into your hair. "I know. I got you." He carries you to the bathroom, sets you on the closed toilet lid, and runs the tap until the water steams. You watch him through heavy-lidded eyes as he wets a cloth, his movements efficient but tender, and then he's kneeling between your knees, spreading your thighs with gentle hands.

"Gonna clean you up, sweetheart," he says softly, and then the warm cloth is there, pressing between your legs, wiping away the evidence of what he did to you. You hiss at the contact, still so sensitive, and he pauses, checking your face, waiting for your nod before continuing. He's thorough but gentle, worshipful almost, cleaning his come from your thighs, from your folds, from everywhere he marked you. When he's done, he presses a soft kiss to your hipbone, your navel, the inside of your knee. He stays there for a moment, kneeling in front of you, one hand resting on your knee, the other smoothing absent-minded circles over your calf.

Neither of you speaks.

The bathroom is quiet except for the soft rush of water from the faucet.

Frank looks up at you. Really looks at you. Checking for the little things. The way your breathing is evening out. The way your shoulders are relaxing. The way your eyes are beginning to lose that distant, overwhelmed look.

His thumb brushes across your knee. The soft smile that follows is enough to make your chest ache. You reach for him immediately.

Frank takes your hand without hesitation. Always. His fingers lace through yours as he rises to his feet.

"Come on, sweetheart." Your legs feel a little shaky when you stand. Frank notices instantly. Of course he does. One arm wraps around your waist before you can even pretend you're steady.

"I got you." He guides you back into the bedroom at an unhurried pace, one hand rubbing slowly up and down your back.

When you reach the bed, he sits you down on the edge of the mattress.

"Stay there." You immediately narrow your eyes.

"Bossy."

"Mhm." Frank disappears into the closet. A minute later he returns carrying one of his old t-shirts and a pair of soft sleep shorts. Your favorites. The ones you've stolen so many times they're basically yours now. The sight of them makes you smile. Then he kneels in front of you.

Not because you can't dress yourself. Because he wants to.

Slowly, carefully, he helps guide your arms through the oversized shirt. Pulls it down over your shoulders. Smooths the fabric flat against your sides. His touch is gentle. Almost absent-minded. Like caring for you is second nature. Like breathing.

"There." You glance down at yourself.

"My hero."

"Damn right." He helps you into the shorts next, tugging them into place before pressing a kiss against your knee. Then he stands and finally remembers he's still half-dressed himself. You laugh as he looks down.

"Nice outfit." Frank glances at his state and groans.

"Not a word."

"I didn't say anything."

"You were thinkin' it."

"I was." He points at you.

"Menace." You beam. Frank disappears long enough to pull on a pair of sweatpants and an old t-shirt. When he comes back, you haven't moved. Just sitting there watching him. The look in your eyes makes him pause.

"What?" You shake your head.

"Nothin'."

"That's a lie."

"Maybe." His expression softens. The teasing falls away.

"What is it, baby?" Your throat tightens unexpectedly. Because it's such a simple question. Because after everything, he's still looking at you like you're something precious. You hold out your hand. Frank doesn't hesitate. He takes it immediately. Then lets you pull him down beside you. The moment he's close enough, you curl into him. Frank wraps both arms around you and settles you against his chest.

Safe. Warm. Home. A kiss lands in your hair. Then another. Then another.

Neither of you says much.

You just stay there together beneath the blankets, tangled up in each other, while Frank slowly rubs your back. Like he's making sure you're comfortable. Like he's making sure you're okay. Like he's making sure you know he isn't going anywhere.

The room is dim now. Quiet. Peaceful. The kind of peace that only exists when you're exhausted and safe at the same time. Your eyes drift shut.

For a while, all you hear is Frank's heartbeat beneath your ear.

Steady. Strong. Familiar. Home.

One of his hands moves lazily through your hair. Untangling little knots. Massaging your scalp. The motion is so gentle it almost hurts.

Not physically. Emotionally. Because nobody has ever taken care of you quite like this. Frank notices the hitch in your breathing immediately. Of course he does.

"You okay, sweetheart?" You nod against his chest.

"Mhm."

"Liar." The word is affectionate. Warm. You laugh softly. The sound muffles against his shirt.

"I just love you." The hand in your hair stops. For a second. Just one. Then it resumes. Slower this time. Gentler. Frank swallows. Hard. As if those three words still catch him off guard every single time you say them- even if you've been married for years.

"Yeah?" You nod again.

"So much." A long silence follows. Then his arms tighten around you. Not enough to hurt. Just enough to pull you impossibly closer. His nose brushes your temple.

"I love you too." The answer comes immediately. Certain. Like breathing. Like gravity. Like something that simply exists. You smile. And Frank feels it against his chest.

"There she is."

"What?"

"That smile." You groan.

"You're ridiculous."

"Mhm."

"You say that every time."

"'Cause every time you smile at me I feel like I won the lottery." That earns a laugh. A real one. Frank grins against your hair.

"You're cheesy."

"You're in love with me." Unfortunately, he has a point. You pinch his side. Frank barely reacts.

"Ow."

"That was the worst acting I've ever seen."

"I thought it was pretty convincing."

"It wasn't."

"Damn." The two of you fall quiet again. This time comfortable. Easy. Outside, the world keeps moving. Cars drive by. People go about their lives. Problems wait for tomorrow.

But in here? None of that matters.

Carefully, he reaches over and pulls the blanket higher around your shoulders. Tucking you in. Making sure you're warm. Making sure you're comfortable. Making sure nothing can touch you. Then he settles back against the pillows and wraps both arms around you. Holding you close. Like it's the easiest thing in the world. Like it's exactly where you're both supposed to be.

"Frank," you whisper.

"Yeah, sweetheart?" He hums, lips pressed to your hairline.

"I think I'm starting to like guns." He laughs, full and genuine, and the sound vibrates through his chest and into yours.

"Is that right?"

"Mhmm," you murmur,"Maybe we should have lessons more often." Frank shakes his head, though you can feel the smile pulling at his mouth where it's pressed against your hair. His hand keeps moving through your hair.

Slow.

Steady.

Comforting.

The kind of touch that always makes you sleepy.

Then—

"You were terrible, by the way." Your eyes snap open.

"What?" Frank snorts.

"During the lesson."

"I was not."

"You absolutely were." You sit up enough to glare at him.

"I followed every instruction."

"Bullshit."

"Frank."

"You spent half the lesson starin' at my hands." The heat that rushes into your face is immediate.

"Did not."

"Sweetheart."

"I didn't." He raises one eyebrow. The exact eyebrow. The one that says he knows you're lying.

"Baby, you were so distracted out lesson ended with me fucking you on our kitchen table." He says, kissing your nose. You try to swat him away, but then you just sling your thigh up and straddle his lap, trying to hide the wince as your core protests.

"It was a good fuck though." You mutter, wrapping your arms around him. Frank grins against your shoulder.

"Mama, any chance I get to be close to you is amazing. Especially when it's like that."

"My husband, the sex addict." You grumble, kissing that soft spot under his ear. He laughs, shaking his head, his hands trailing your spine and massaging the joint where your back meets your hips, as if he already knows it's sore from the way you were folded earlier. 

"Says the one who was screaming my name less than an hour ago."  You immediately smack his shoulder.

"Frank!"

"What?" he asks, entirely too pleased with himself.

"You are impossible." He grins.

"And yet."

"And yet nothing."

"And yet you're currently glued to my side."

You glance down. Unfortunately, he's right. You're wrapped around him like a particularly stubborn blanket. Your face heats.

"That's different."

"It is?"

"Yes."

"How?" You open your mouth. Then close it. Because you don't actually have an answer. Frank laughs. The sound is low and warm and entirely unfair.

"You got nothin', huh?"

"I hate you."

"No, you don't."

"I dislike you very strongly."

"There she is." You roll your eyes. Frank just smiles. For a while, neither of you says much. The room is quiet except for the distant hum of the air conditioner and the occasional creak of the bed when one of you shifts. His hand keeps moving over your back.

Slow. Comforting.

The kind of touch that always makes you feel sleepy. You look up at him, and. you smile, your finger coming up to graze his jaw.

"You're so beautiful, Frankie." The effect is immediate. Frank's entire face changes. Not dramatically. Just enough.

That little softness that only ever appears when you're looking at him like that. His eyes narrow slightly. Suspicious.

"Alright." You blink.

"What?"

"What do you want?" A laugh escapes you.

"I can't just compliment my husband?"

"You can."

"Then why are you lookin' at me like that?"

"'Cause every time you get sweet outta nowhere, you're usually about to ask for somethin'." You gasp.

"Frank." You smack his chest. He doesn't even flinch. The giant. "I am being serious." His expression softens again.

"I know, sweetheart." His hand slides up to cup your cheek. "And for the record?" You hum. "I think you're pretty beautiful yourself." Your face immediately heats. Frank grins. "Oh, now you're shy?"

"Shut up."

"Nope." You groan and bury your face against his shoulder. A second later, fingers suddenly wiggle against your side. You jolt.

"Frank." The fingers wiggle again. Warning. "Oh no." His grin turns positively evil.

"Oh yes."

"Frank."

"Sweetheart."

"Don't."

"Don't what?" His fingers dig into your ribs. You shriek.

"Frank!" He laughs so hard he nearly misses when you try to escape. Nearly. A massive arm catches your waist.

"Oh no you don't." You immediately dissolve into helpless laughter as he starts tickling you properly.

"Frank—stop—"

"Nope."

"I hate you!"

"Liar." You kick and squirm and try to shove him away. Frank barely moves. The unfairness of it all only makes you laugh harder. Eventually your attempt to escape turns into both of you getting tangled in the blankets. One second you're trying to crawl away. The next Frank is pulling you back toward him. And both of you end up toppling backward onto the mattress. You land half on top of him with a startled yelp. Frank's laughter fills the room. Warm. Happy. Completely unguarded. The sound makes your chest squeeze.

"You done?" he asks.

"Maybe."

"Maybe?"

"I might require revenge."

"Threatening a decorated veteran?"

"I'm very brave."

"That's one word for it." You poke his chest. Frank catches your hand immediately. Then brings it to his mouth and presses a kiss against your knuckles. Just because. Your heart does that stupid little flip it always does. The one he still causes after all these years. Frank notices the look on your face and smiles.

"You're thinkin' about how handsome I am." You groan dramatically.

"You're insufferable."

"I'll have you know, Mr Castle- That I know how to shoot and hold a gun." Frank immediately starts laughing.

"Oh no, Mrs Castle. Should I be scared ?"

"Terrified."

a/n- okay i know the ending is long but i looooove writing aftercare guys soft!frank is my safe space

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rain taps softly against the cabin roof, against the windows, against the world outside, creating that peaceful sort of white noise that makes it impossible to know what time it is. the room is dim and gray, wrapped in the kind of soft rainy light that makes staying in bed feel less like laziness and more like a perfectly reasonable life decision.

under the blankets, everything is warm. your feet are tucked beneath the comforter, your head resting against frank's chest, one of his arms around your waist while the other is trapped somewhere beneath the pillow. at some point during the night you'd apparently stolen most of the blanket, because it's wrapped around you like a cocoon while only half covers him. somehow he doesn't seem to care.

you stir first, pressing your face deeper against his shirt for a moment before opening your eyes. frank is still asleep, or at least he looks asleep. his breathing is slow and even, his jaw relaxed in a way it rarely is when he's awake. outside, rain continues falling through the forest surrounding the cabin. the trees sway gently in the wind, their dark silhouettes visible through a gap in the curtains.

it's cold enough outside that the windows have started to fog slightly around the edges. meanwhile inside the bed feels impossibly warm. you shift your legs, searching for a more comfortable position, and accidentally brush against a colder spot in the sheets. immediately you pull back with a small shiver. the reaction is tiny, barely noticeable. unfortunately, frank notices everything. his eyes open immediately.

"cold?" he asks, voice rough from sleep.

you smile. "good morning to you too."

"you cold?"

"maybe a little."

his arm tightens around your waist before you've even finished speaking. then he shifts, pulling you closer until you're practically draped across him. one large hand slides slowly up and down your back through the fabric of your shirt, sharing warmth without even thinking about it. you feel his chin settle lightly on top of your head.

"c'mere," he murmurs. "lemme warm you up." there's something so simple and automatic about the way he says it that your chest immediately feels lighter. you tuck yourself closer against him and feel his arm tighten a little more.

"better?" he asks after a minute.

"a little," you admit.

"little?" he repeats skeptically. "a little aint enough."

"frank, i'm fine." you smile up at him and hide your face in his neck.

the rain continues outside while the room remains perfectly still. frank's fingers trace lazy patterns along your arm beneath the blanket, absentminded and comforting. eventually you glance up and discover he's looking at you. he kind of look that says he's checking whether you're comfortable. checking whether you're happy. checking whether you're still cold.

"what?" you ask.

"nothin'."

"you're staring."

"so what? can't stare at my girl anymore?" he lets out a sleepy huff that sounds suspiciously close to a laugh. then his gaze drifts toward the rain-covered windows. "don' wanna get up," he mutters.

you blink. "what?" he doesn't answer. "did frank castle just admit he doesn't want to get out of bed?"

now he looks annoyed. "don't start." frank simply pulls you back down onto his chest before you can continue arguing. "discussion over."

the rain grows heavier as the morning continues. every now and then water slides down the windows in long silver streaks. the cabin feels smaller in the best possible way. cozy. sheltered. hidden from the rest of the world. neither of you has checked your phone in hours. there's nowhere to be. nobody expecting anything.

just the two of you wrapped beneath warm blankets while the weather does whatever it wants outside. frank's hand remains settled against your back the entire time. whenever you shift away even slightly, he unconsciously follows.

when your feet brush against his legs, he immediately moves closer. at one point you try creating a little distance just to test something. less than thirty seconds later his arm automatically pulls you back.

"you know you're clingy, right?" you tell him.

he looks genuinely offended. "says the person usin' me as a pillow."

another long silence followed, the comfortable kind. the kind married couples have after years together where neither person feels pressure to fill every second with conversation. rain taps against the roof. the blankets are warm. frank's fingers lazily trace circles against your shoulder while your eyes drift toward closing again.

every so often one of you says something random. comments on the weather. wonders whether there's enough coffee downstairs. debates whether breakfast counts as brunch if neither of you gets out of bed before ten. the conversation goes nowhere and somehow that makes it perfect.

you leaned in for a kiss slowly, hesitantly, like you weren’t sure if frank would even allow it. but the second your lips touched his - soft and chaste, the air between you shifted.

frank didn’t hesitate for long. within a breath, he deepened it, tilting his head just slightly to angle better and pressing back. his large hands slid from your cheeks down to cradle the sides of your neck.

his lips moved against yours with tenderness. each press was deliberate, a soft parting of mouths before meeting again deeper this time, testing how far you’d let him go.

the kiss lingered - long, peaceful and unhurried. frank’s mouth stayed warm and patient against yours. frank shifted carefully beneath you, not pushing you down or pulling you closer too fast, but simply adjusting so he could hold your body better.

his right arm slid around your shoulders while his left hand came up to rest low on your back, palm flat between your shoulder blades, cradling every curve gently as if afraid of breaking something precious.

eventually you tilt your head up and find frank already looking at you again. this time neither of you says anything. he simply brushes a strand of hair away from your face before pulling the blanket a little higher around your shoulders.

"there," he mutters.

"frank, I'm not cold anymore."

his expression softens slightly. just enough for you to notice.

eventually, despite neither of you wanting to move, the promise of coffee becomes impossible to ignore. it starts with frank glancing toward the bedroom door, then toward the window, then back at you as though calculating whether staying in bed is worth the caffeine deprivation.

judging by the reluctant look on his face, the answer is very nearly yes. unfortunately, you know him well enough to recognize the exact moment he gives in.

"okay, let's go, c'mon" he lets out a long sigh, the kind that sounds personally offended by the existence of responsibilities, and carefully shifts upright.

cold air immediately slips beneath the blankets, making you pull the comforter tighter around yourself. before standing, frank pauses long enough to tug the blanket around your shoulders, making sure it's wrapped securely despite the fact that you're perfectly capable of doing it yourself.

when you point this out, he simply ignores you. his hand briefly squeezes your shoulder as he climbs out of bed, and for a moment you find yourself watching him move around the room while snow continues drifting outside the window.

the cabin feels warm and cozy, the kind of place that encourages people to move slowly. sunlight filters through the clouds in pale silver beams, catching on the snow-covered branches outside. everything feels peaceful in a way that seems increasingly rare.

downstairs, the cabin is even cozier than the bedroom. the fireplace has long since burned down to embers, but the lingering warmth remains, mixing with the scent of cedarwood and old pine.

the kitchen sits beside a large window overlooking the forest, and through the glass you can see snow piled high on the porch railing and scattered across the surrounding trees. while frank starts the coffee maker, you begin gathering ingredients for breakfast.

neither of you is particularly talkative yet. it's the comfortable quiet of two people who don't feel the need to perform wakefulness for each other. mugs are set on the counter.

drawers open and close. somewhere outside, a bird lands briefly on a branch before disappearing again. by the time you begin mixing ingredients, the smell of fresh coffee has started filling the entire cabin.

frank appears behind you before you even realize he's left the coffee maker. one moment you're focused on cooking, and the next two familiar arms are wrapping around your waist from behind.

"clingy frankie"

"shush" his chest settles against your back, warm even through both layers of clothing, and his chin comes to rest lightly on your shoulder.

he simply stands there holding you while you continue trying to work around him. it would be easier if he moved. significantly easier. unfortunately, frank seems perfectly content where he is.

every time you shift to reach something, he shifts with you. every time you step sideways, he follows. at one point you attempt to open a cabinet and discover that doing so while dragging an attached six-foot-tall man around the kitchen is surprisingly difficult.

still, you can't really find it in yourself to complain. there is something deeply comforting about the quiet weight of him against your back. one of his hands remains loosely clasped over your stomach while the other occasionally rubs slow circles against your side.

he doesn't seem to need conversation this morning. just proximity. every now and then you glance over your shoulder and find him watching you with that soft, sleepy expression he only ever wears in private. his eyes follow your movements around the kitchen.

when you smile, something faint and almost invisible tugs at the corner of his mouth. it isn't quite a smile. more the beginning of one. the possibility of one.

by the time everything is finished, steam curls from both mugs of coffee and the entire kitchen smells warm and inviting. outside, snow continues falling in lazy drifts, transforming the forest into something that looks almost unreal.

the two of you settle at the small wooden table near the window, and for a while the only sounds are the clink of silverware and the occasional creak of the cabin settling around you. sunlight briefly breaks through the clouds, scattering diamonds of light across the snow outside.

"your hands are cold." frank mentions.

"they're fine."

he reaches over and grabs one anyway. "cold." frank rubs his thumb across your knuckles.

you find yourself staring out the window, mesmerized by the view. when you look back, you catch frank watching you rather than the scenery. his gaze shifts away almost immediately when he realizes he's been caught, but not before you see the softness there.

there is something about winter mornings that seems to make time slower. breakfast stretches comfortably into late morning. coffee is refilled. conversation drifts lazily from one topic to another without any urgency. plans for the day are mentioned and then abandoned.

"you're smiling." you point out. he looks away toward the trees. which only proves your point. "frank."

"what."

"you like me."

he groans immediately. "married you, didn't I."

"that doesn't answer the question."

"pretty sure it does." he lets out a breathy chuckle as he kisses your temple.

neither of you seems particularly interested in doing much beyond existing in the same space. eventually you push your chair back and start gathering dishes, only for frank to stand at the exact same moment and quietly take the plates from your hands. there isn't any discussion about it. there rarely is.

he simply takes over with the calm certainty of someone who has already made up his mind. while he carries dishes to the sink, you lean against the counter watching him for a moment.

there is something oddly domestic about the sight. sleeves rolled up. shoulders relaxed. warm winter light filtering through the kitchen window while snow falls outside. frank standing at the sink washing dishes should not affect you as much as it does, and yet it always seems to. perhaps because it is such a normal thing.

he catches you watching and lifts an eyebrow in silent question. you shake your head with a smile he narrows his eyes slightly, unconvinced, but returns to cleaning anyway.

when the dishes are finally done, you carry your coffee onto the front porch. the cold greets you immediately, crisp and clean without being unpleasant. the wooden boards creak softly beneath your feet as you settle into one of the large chairs facing the forest.

from here, the view is breathtaking. endless trees draped in white. snowflakes drifting lazily through the air. distant hills softened by winter haze. the world looks untouched. peaceful. as though someone has pressed pause on everything beyond the cabin.

you wrap both hands around your mug and breathe in the scent of coffee while watching the snowfall. for several minutes you're alone, listening to the gentle hush of winter. then the front door opens behind you. you don't need to turn around to know it's frank.

his footsteps are instantly familiar. slow and steady across the porch boards. a second later he appears beside you carrying his own mug, and rather than choosing the empty chair farther away, he drags the closest one directly beside yours before sitting down.

the legs scrape softly across the wood. close enough that your shoulders touch. close enough that you can feel his warmth even through your coat.

for a long time neither of you says much. the silence isn't empty. it's shared. the kind of silence built through years of knowing each other. frank leans back in his chair, one hand wrapped around his coffee mug, his gaze fixed on the snowy landscape stretching beyond the porch.

the cold has painted a faint flush across his cheeks. his expression is calm in a way few people ever get to witness. there are no sharp edges here. no tension. only quiet contentment. every now and then he takes a sip of coffee, and each time he lowers the mug his shoulder brushes lightly against yours again.

"if a bear showed up right now, what would you do?"

frank looks at you over his mug.

"why."

"just answer."

"depends."

"on what?"

"whether he's bothering us."

you immediately start laughing. "you're gonna evaluate the bear first?"

"maybe he's minding his own business."

"frank."

"what."

"that's insane."

eventually you shift closer, resting your head against him as you smile. immediately frank adjusts without looking away from the scenery. his arm drapes across the back of your chair. his shoulder angles slightly toward you.

somehow he manages to make the space between you disappear entirely. you watch snowflakes tumble through the trees while warm coffee heats your hands and winter air nips gently at your face. behind you, the cabin glows with warmth. ahead of you, the forest stretches endlessly beneath fresh snow.

and sitting there together, wrapped in winter silence and the comfort of familiar company, it becomes impossible to imagine a place you'd rather be. some mornings aren't memorable for anything extraordinary. just coffee, snowfall, a quiet cabin in the woods, and the simple comfort of sharing it with the person who feels most like home.