Sinning Among the Trees

"You need somethin', Riley?" John asked, never looking up.

Simon's mouth was twisted beneath his balaclava as he weighed his options. He wasn't especially eager to be John's second victim of the day, but it'd been miserable for weeks with no stop in sight. In the end, he decided to be straight—

"Y'need'a get laid, boss."

John's hands immediately froze.

That unyielding anger came up his chest right on schedule — insubordinate, out of line — and then couldn't quite find his footing in it because the truth was a trapdoor just under him.

His eyes flicked up and across the room, ears warming up just like Johnny's had an hour ago.

"Bloody ornery, you are," Simon went on. "'ave been."

Simon wasn't wrong, John knew that.

The work winds them all too tight — adrenaline that can't be spent, images that don't erase, choices made under duress that keep them questioning at three in the morning. And everyone's got a valve that lets the steam out. Johnny shouts his out at the football. Kyle has somewhere to be lately that he's cagey about, and Simon has whatever Simon has, no one asks.

And John drives home, shuts the door, and the house is quiet, his walls holding all the built-up pressure.

Ten months since his usual I'm-Home-Hookup found herself a steady bloke and stopped answering his calls. He'd told himself the whole time it was casual right up until it ended, when he learned it had actually been load-bearing.

And was that affecting his mood? Maybe.

His eyes narrowed on Simon and his jaw ticked at the hinge. He threw his chin toward the open door.

"Fuck off out've my briefin' room, Lieutenant."

Simon's chair scraped across the linoleum when he stood, sighing through the cloth over his face.

"I jus' think—"

"OUT."

The door clicked shut behind him, and John stood in the silence for a moment.

Then he squared the stacks again.

——

Johnny never volunteers to bring the beer, yet here he is at half seven with a box of glass bottles rattling on his shoulder, grinning under the porch light. Behind him, the headcount runs long by one. Three men when John only agreed to two. Kyle with a canvas bag full of crisps. Simon at the back, hands sunk in his pockets.

"Thought it was just you and Garrick?"

"Aye, well." Johnny shoulders past him into the hall, close enough that their shirts drag. "Simon heard there was football."

"Simon doesn't care about football," John retorts as the rest of them push their way inside.

"I care 'bout football," Simon lies through a simper no one can see, wiping his boots on the mat.

Unfortunately for John, his team is undoubtedly adept at what they've trained in and he doesn’t always catch when there’s fuckery afoot.

Under his nose, in his very own home, Johnny distracts him with talk about the match while Kyle lifts his phone from the side table just beside his elbow. Simon waits an appropriate amount of time before slipping away to the kitchen to guess the passcode, which he manages in one go.

"Gonna have to talk to him 'bout that…" Kyle mumbles as he swipes to the App Store.

"He textin' anyone?" Simon cranes his neck over Kyle's shoulder. "He used t’see tha’ one bird… wot was her name…?"

"Leah," Kyle answers flatly. "Laura?" he second-guesses as he thumbs in the passcode again to approve the install: Hinge Dating App. "M'not lookin' at his texts, mate. Be lucky he doesn't RTU us just for this. Plus, I think he said she started seeing some—"

"—y'know, Cap," Johnny's voice cuts through, a warning for the men in the kitchen. "I can get ye another beer, y'don't have…"

Simon and Kyle glance up from where they've leaned against the counter and freeze when John appears in the doorway, face screwed with suspicion. His eyes flick between the phone in Kyle's grasp and the faces lit behind it.

His initial thought is that the phone's got a nice, durable case, proper practical. His second thought is to start patting down his pockets with his free hand — which all turn up empty.

The room's gone still, a collective held breath to see which way the tension'll break.

"That's my phone."

"It is," Kyle agrees carefully.

Johnny appears at John's shoulder, squeezing past into the kitchen. "Cap, before you start—"

"When'd you nick it?" His eyes accurately settle on Kyle, the slickest of the bunch.

"Doesn't matter when, sir. We just—"

"It matters to me." John puts his empty beer bottle on the table and uses both hands now to pat down his pockets a second time, not quite believing his own team got the drop on him. "Professionally speakin',” he mumbles. 

"Wot really needs addressin' is your passcode," Simon grumbles. "0-0-0-6?"

"Christ," Johnny snickers.

John chooses to ignore them and holds his hand out, palm up. But Kyle doesn't fork it over. Instead, he looks back at the screen and watches the progress ring around the icon close in on itself.

"What're we doin' right now?" John presses, stepping closer.

"Jus' take a seat, boss," Simon suggests, gesturing to the kitchen table just as Johnny yanks a chair out, beaming something mischievous.

John looks at the chair, then looks at Johnny.

"Think I'll stand."

"Suit yourself," Johnny spins the chair around and drops into it, arms folding over the back.

Kyle checks the screen one more time before turning it around. A new little white icon sits on John's home screen, Kyle points at it. John squints to read the little letters beneath it.

"What's Hinge?"

"It's a dating app," Kyle answers and places the phone on the table.

A dating app….

Grown adults sorting through each other like they're shopping. Swipe, tap, Add to Cart. He's heard the lads chat about it for years — the 'ghosting', the games — and always thought: thank god that's not me.

Under the simmering contempt, the idea of typing hello to a stranger who might simply never reply (left on read, whatever ungodly hour of the soul that phrase was invented in) shoots something cold through him.

There's a beat of hesitation before his eyes snap to Simon, the scowl on his face carrying the weight of Wednesday's interaction.

"This is you, then?"

"Team effort," Simon corrects without a flicker of shame.

"It's no' the dodgy kind of app, it's for relationships," Johnny explains. "Says so in their slogan: 'designed to be deleted'. You make a profile, upload a few pics, answer some—"

"I know how online dating works, MacTavish."

Johnny squints. "Do ye, though?"

"You've been rank for months, sir." Kyle tells it plainly. "Whole teams sayin' it."

John feels like he’s been put on a rinse cycle in the wash. His nostrils flare as he snuffs his irritation back down his chest lest he prove them right in his own kitchen. 

"So that's what all this is? A Friday night welfare check?"

"It's no' a welfare check," Johnny defends poorly, voice cracking at a pitch too high.

"It's a bit of a welfare check," Kyle shrugs.

"Right." John reaches for his phone. "Well, thanks for the concern, lads. Truly. Warms the heart."

Kyle slides it just out of reach. "Just give it a shot, sir," he implores. "Try it for the weekend. If you still hate it, I'll delete it and we'll never bring it up again."

John's chin tucks to his chest and he glowers at him from under his deeply furrowed brow. "You'll delete it now," he orders, except these men have never listened to him off the field.

"I could," he agrees, wrestling a smirk. "And you can keep spending your Friday nights with us."

It's meant as a joke. It doesn't land as one.

Because John looks around at the three of them and knows in a few hours their engines will fade down the street and that hulking quiet will pour back in, the one he keeps calling peace. 

So… he pulls out a chair.

Simon pushes off the counter and Johnny's grin pulls wider.

"Go on," John surrenders, falling into the seat with a sigh. He does not look at any of their faces because whatever's on them’s going to make him cross. 

Chairs scrape and Kyle settles down at John’s arm, Simon looms over them from behind, all crowded around the one screen.

The basics go quick — name, age, pronouns. Kyle finds his rhythm working through the questions.

"Drinks? Socially. Smokes…?" Kyle seesaws his head a bit. "We'll say no."

"I smoke cigars," John protests.

"That's a personality trait, not a habit." Kyle scrolls. "Height?"

"Six-two," Johnny says immediately.

"He's six-foot," Simon corrects.

"Aye, and on the app he's six-two."

Kyle selects 6'. "Occupation?"

That one hangs in the air a bit longer than the rest, and John doesn't quite know why. His hands turn palm-up on the table with the question.

"Consultant," Simon offers.

"Civil servant," Kyle tries.

"Military," John answers irritably off the edge of a scoff.

Three sets of eyes come up off the phone — Johnny's eyebrows go high, Kyle's mouth opens to argue, Simon tilts his head just enough, as if to say: if you say so.

"It's not a state secret that I serve," John says, eyebrows pulling close with confusion.

Kyle types it despite whatever he's got hanging on the tip of his tongue. And in the little silence afterward, the obvious question finally comes to mind.

"What've you lot got on yours, then?"

The simple question sends a tidal wave of overlapping chatter and excuses over the table.

"Ah, well—" Johnny starts.

"I actually—" Kyle says, at the same time.

"Different app," Simon adds, under both of them.

"—see, it depends," Johnny goes on, trying to gain volume over the others, "I like to keep the profile fresh. Rotate the pics, the bio—"

"—don't have one," Kyle is saying over the top of him, "because me and Amara are— well, it's not official-official, but it's a thing, so—"

"Been usin' Feeld," Simon finishes.

When the wave recedes, the full picture comes into view: Johnny reinvents himself on a cycle, Kyle has Amara, mentioned now for the first time ever. And Simon—

"What's Feeld?" John asks.

"No," Kyle says before the question has its punctuation, quick and stern, head whipping back and forth. “Absolutely not. We'll talk about that another time."

"It's not for you," Simon adds.

"Right," he mumbles, taking a pull of his beer, settling back against the chair. He inhales and looks off at the window. "M'glad it's amateurs running my love life."

"Enthusiasts," Johnny corrects.

The rest goes quicker.

"What kind of connection?" Kyle reads. "Options are: Long-term. Short-term. Short-term, open to long. Long-term, open to short."

"Short, open to long," John answers without hesitation.

Johnny opens his mouth but Simon glares at him just as quickly through his ragged eyeholes, and he closes it without a word.

His profile photos have to come off the lads' phones since John's camera roll offers nothing but screenshots of maps, car parts, and three random pictures of the K9, Xena, from another unit on base (he’s been trying to snatch her for his own team for months).

He watches the photos of himself go by and it's a strange census, seeing a year of himself entirely through other people's eyes. Makes him queasy, so he takes another bitter gulp to wash the feeling out. 

There's a short argument about the proper order the pictures should be presented, Johnny wins.

After, Kyle starts explaining what a good prompt does, how to choose one. He hardly gets any words out before John's holding his hand out the same way he did half an hour ago.

"I'll do these myself."

This time, Kyle hands the phone over.

The lads drift to the far end of the table to finally give John the space they've neglected to all night. 

Fresh beers are cracked open and a bag of crisps demolished as they fold into their own conversations. The match they’ve been ignoring comes first, then Amara, whom Kyle spends five minutes refusing to elaborate on, and somewhere in there Simon mentions an oddities shop he’s been meaning to stop by.

John sits with his reading glasses on, typing slowly, brows low in concentration.

When he finally sets the phone down, all three of them quickly move behind him.

"So, their profile comes up on screen," Kyle reaches over to demonstrate. "Have a look, read the bio. If you wanna chat to her, tap the heart. If you don't, hit the X, and you'll never see her again. Simple."

The first woman is on a beach holding a cocktail the size of a fishbowl. X.

"Okaay," Kyle drawls, mouth pulling straight. "Sure. Was there a reason, or…"

"No."

The next woman is at a festival covered in glitter and feathers. X.

So is the one after. X.

A woman in her work scrubs. X.

A woman holding a child. X.

A woman in a bikini on a lake (his eyes linger). X.

It's not that they're not lovely. Some of them probably are. But every picture is a performance — arms out, teeth out, look how much fun I am. Advertisements.

"The fish," Johnny mourns as another goes down, a woman on a small boat holding a big trout up. "Cap, she was fishin'. You love fishin'!"

"Wasn't her fish," he grumbles under his breath.

"Whose fish d'you reckon, then?"

"Bloke she cropped out," Simon says, and John tips the neck of his beer toward him.

"Give me criteria," Kyle pleads, both hands on the back of John's chair, gripping with restraint. "I can work with criteria."

"He's calibratin'," Simon says. "Let 'im work it out."

Simon's giving him too much credit. He's not calibrating. He's not reading these women, he's not even really looking at them. Each X is just the whole premise being declined, proof accumulating that he was right about the app all along, and if the profiles run out, well, he tried. Right? The lads witnessed it. He can get back to his peace with a clear—

His thumb stops and hovers, then pulls back to the outer edge of the phone case.

Huh. 

There you are.

Up a trail somewhere, hills of green grass rolling behind you, hood half-blown off, one hand trying to catch it. You're laughing at whoever's taking the picture, smile wide.

John's not sure he's ever seen eyes twinkle before, but that must be what yours are doing, shimmering even under overcast.

You're very pretty.

For the first time, John taps the profile open.

30. Executive Assistant. 4 Miles Away. Short-Term, Open to Long-Term.

Executive Assistant, so you likely work too much. That's familiar to him, something he understands inside-out. 

There's a photo of you in office clothes at what looks like a retirement party, smile an edge more saccharine than the one on the hill.

Another of you criss-cross on the floor, a black and caramel cat stretched out and content in your lap, belly-up. Shirt low cut, cleavage to feast on. He is sixty percent gentleman about how long he looks at it.

And at the bottom:

The best way to ask me out is by: using words.

I recently discovered that: I'm better in person than I am on here.

John huffs an amusement through his nose. He spent more time on his profile than he thinks you spent on yours. Seems like you're tired of the same things he's already tired of, one night in.

Behind him, the lads have gone silent, holding their breath.

John taps the heart and his screen goes bright with a wash of confetti, both your photos ringed together:

IT'S A MATCH!

"Oh, shit, she already matched with you," Kyle cranes his neck closer to inspect.

"Gimme that." Johnny plucks the phone from John's hand. "No way," he scoffs. "Fuckin' fit. A bit young for you, Cap, aye?" He looks at John, then back at the screen like the two won't reconcile in his brain.

"Careful," John warns mildly.

Johnny hands the phone back, muttering something in Scots only Simon could translate.

John doesn't hear much of it anyway. He's already looking at your photo again.

Better in person.

Yeah. He'd bet you are.

"Right, sir," Kyle says. "Now we wait. Midday tomorrow the earliest. Message her any sooner and it reads keen."

"It'd be accurate," he deadpans.

"There's rules, Cap," Johnny says. "No messagin' straight away, no double-textin', keep a wee bit of mystery."

John turns in his chair with a scowl to look up at the three of them.

"So, you're tellin' me a woman says she's interested in you and you… make her wait?"

Silence.

"I mean, when you put it like that…"

"Yeah, s'a bit fuckin' rude, innit?" John derides, turning back around.

He's already typing, screen tipped away.

"Sir," Kyle pleads. "At least let us read it."

"This is a two person conversation, not a five piece."

He presses send and quickly pockets the phone.

——

Four miles away, a phone lights up…

——

Your windows are open to the last of a long evening, warm air breezing through the sheer curtains. You’re finally on the couch. Shower taken, its heat still damp in your skin. A glass of off-dry riesling teeters precariously on the arm, cold from the fridge and sweating through its stemless glass.

Twix is a puddled tortoiseshell furnace against your thigh, one paw twitching through a dream, her purr winding down as she drops deeper. And on the telly, Last Christmas is on. You've seen it a dozen times, that's why you leave it — it's mindless.

The second glass goes down easier than the first, tart on your tongue, blooming warm in your belly and over your cheeks.

Somewhere in the lull, your thumb opens Hinge, a reflex to being bored. You don't really expect anything from it anymore. 

A man holding a fish, sunglasses on. X.

A man whose photos are all group shots. X.

A man who is 6'2" and it's his entire personality. X.

Your thumb knows the rhythm without you.

The next profile slides into view and you pause, thumb hovering.

He's handsome in that sort of rugged, classic way. His beard is salted at the edges, lines beside his eyes creased deep, cheeks faintly rosy. He's mid-laugh at what looks like a Christmas party, red and green tinsel drooping off the beams behind him; head slightly tipped, one heavy hand flat on the table. He's not cackling, you can tell it's more reserved, but it's probably still more than he usually offers.

John. 43. Military. Four miles away. Short-Term, Open to Long-Term.

The one thing you should know about me is: I'm gone a lot for work. But when I'm home, I'm home.

Most men bury the catch in the fine print, but he's leading with it.

You don't know yet whether that's honesty or efficiency. You suspect that with him they might be the same thing.

His second photo is of him on the tailgate of some enormous vehicle, fatigues taut over his thighs, thumbs hooked through his bulky khaki plate carrier, looking up from under the brim of his hat.

Two truths and a lie: I've never seen Star Wars. I have a lie-in every Sunday. I've had tea with a warlord.

The sky is pink with the morning in his third picture. He's thigh-deep in a lake, turned away from the camera entirely. (You're noticing it's a common theme that he does not look at the camera for any photo.) The sunlight catches the breadth of his back and shoulders, cotton molded around muscle.

Don't hate me if I: call instead of text. It's quicker.

You giggle just enough that Twix's ear rotates toward you in reproach.

It's kinda cute when older men put more effort into their profiles.

But the alarm is already going off somewhere in the back of your skull — too good, probably old photos, probably has a wife — it has never once failed to ring. But you're two glasses in, and the heart really costs nothing even if the conversation seems off.

You tap it, and put the phone facedown on your thigh.

On the telly, Emilia Clarke is busy falling for a man you happen to know has been dead the entire film. You mouth one of his lines along with him, not really invested, wine warm in your chest, Twix breathing slow against your leg.

Then your phone buzzes against you once, and you ignore it, because you have rules about lunging for male attention. But then it buzzes again, and, well, you just turn it over to have a look. Maybe it's your mum, you don't know!

HINGE: You and John matched!

HINGE: 1 New Message

You open it.

Evening. Not much good at using the app, but I really wanted to chat to you. How's your Friday night?

You hum to yourself curiously. Not an innuendo or emoji in sight.

i actually volunteer helping the elderly with technology, happy to walk you through it.

friday's been average. wine and a movie on the couch. how's yours?

You put the phone back down and focus on the film, but his reply comes within the minute.

Ouch. Friday's alright. The lads invited themselves round for the match. Still here, unfortunately.

you're messaging me with guests in the house? terrible host.

They invited themselves. Hosting rules don't apply.

What movie are you watching?

You glance at the telly where a dead man is mid-song and weigh lying about it.

You could be watching anything. You could pick something more interesting, something with a deep lesson, educational, historical, something niche to come off cool and worldly.

you're not allowed to judge me.

Judging is sort of my life's work, but I'll do my best.

You snort. Twix relocates to the far cushion in protest.

it's called 'last christmas'. i don't know why it's on in july, but i've probably seen it twelve times. it's good background noise.

The reply takes slightly longer this time. You picture him all big hands, small phone, and then stop picturing him, because that's how it starts.

Twelve times? Must be decent.

it's objectively not. the love interest is dead the entire film lol

Dead?

it's a twist. it's festive!

You and I have very different definitions for "festive". I've got a few questions. But I'll save them.

You smile.

so, your lake photo. did you catch anything that day?

Not a thing.

hours in freezing water for zero fish?!

The fish aren't the point.

do tell, what's the point?

The mist off the water. The quiet. The no one expecting anything from you.

It's the first real answer a man has given you on this app in, like, six months. 

You feel oddly like you've been handed something and should keep your hands still so it doesn't spook.

that actually sounds really peaceful.

i've never been fishing, but i do love nature in the mornings. i have a trail by me that i like to trek early on weekends.

That the trail from your photo?

it is! my best friend actually made me go that day, i wasn't in the mood. complained the whole way.

Doesn't show.

Good photo of you.

Beautiful, actually.

You stare at the screen and feel warmth tickling your nape, sliding lower, molten and slow. 

Every instinct you have reaches for deflection.

oh! thank you. the wind did most of the work lol

No it didn't.

— and he just takes the deflection off you, like being returned something you've dropped. You press the cool curve of the wine glass against your cheek and remind yourself, sternly, that this is a stranger on the internet.

well, for the record your photo's not bad either. handsome smile.

Somewhere past ten, you notice the conversation keeps not ending. 

how long have you been on hinge?

It's my first night, actually.

first night???

Profile's about two hours old.

yikes, so i'm just the practice woman then, huh?

Practice implies I'm planning to do this again.

——

John's still at the kitchen table, reading glasses pushed up into his hair now, beer gone warm at his elbow. The lads have migrated to the living room doorway — close enough to monitor, far enough to pretend they aren't.

He knows they're watching, and he's been watched by better.

What he can't seem to manage is his fuckin' face — it keeps doing things beyond his control, and every time your reply comes he has to reel it back to neutral, and he can tell by the quality of the silence behind him that he's not reeling nearly fast enough.

"He's smilin' again," Johnny murmurs, elbowing Simon in the ribs.

"Shameless," John mumbles, without looking up. "All of you."

He's typing when the floor creaks jus to his left. When he glances up, Johnny has drifted to his shoulder under the pretense of collecting empties.

"Need another, Cap?"

"I need you three feet back, MacTavish," he replies, thumbs tapping away.

A minute later it's Kyle from the doorway, "If she asks about hobbies, don't lead with the cigars. They poll badly amongst females."

"'Females'?" John grimaces, face down, thumbs still at it. "Say it with me Garrick, 'women'."

Then Simon, who hasn't moved or spoken in twenty minutes, asks, "Wot's she sayin', then?"

John rolls his eyes and sets the phone face-down, pushing himself up out of the chair.

"Time to go, lads," he says with an obviously fake smile, gesturing his arm out towards his front door. "Goodnight."

"It's no' even eleven oclock!" Johnny complains.

"Then the night's still young. Go on, fuck off."

They go — bottles gathered, snacks cleaned up, Simon herding Johnny down the hall as he’s still negotiating.

Then their engines fade down the street, and the quiet pours back in, right on schedule. Except tonight it arrives and there's a phone lit on his kitchen table with your name on it, and the quiet — for the first time in a long while — has to wait.

He locks up, kills the TV, then drops into his armchair with the phone already unlocked.

did the football finish? who won?

He glances at the dead telly. Hasn't a clue. 

Couldn't tell you.

omg lol you had ONE reason for guests tonight!

I got distracted.

by what? 😇

I think you know by what.

Nothing comes back for a minute. He pictures you on your couch, that cat beside you, deciding what to do with it — and it occurs to him, mildly horrifying, that he's enjoying this. The wait. The little emoji with the halo, transparently unrepentant. He finds himself smiling at the ceiling like there's something written on it.

anyway!

Anyway.

He'll allow it: retreat granted. There's no rush.

The cat in your photo. Yours?

yes! that’s twix. she's a menace.

Good name.

she prefers men that ignore her.

Then we'd get on fine. I'm very good at ignoring cats.

It goes on just like that: easy.

You ask if he's a morning person and learn he's up at five most days by choice; he learns you consider five the middle of the night.

He talks about the Brecon Beacons — the actual Beacons, the ones he loves, not the ones that nearly killed him at twenty-two. You tell him you've always wanted to go, and he catches himself already planning the route he'd take you. Then quickly chastises himself. 

How's the average Friday held up?

certainly improved

Mine too.

He puts the phone on the arm of the chair and sits in his quiet house, and for once it doesn’t feel so desolate.

——

The following morning he's up at five. He starts drinking his coffee at the counter, looking out the window over the sink, the sorbet summer sky bleeding morning.

He thinks of you before he can stop himself. Asleep, presumably, five being the middle of the night and all. Then he takes the coffee out to his back step for some fresh air.

He wonders if he was any good with the messaging last night. It's the longest he's ever sat with his phone in his hand, period. Let alone chatting with someone. There's no debrief for it, that's the trouble. No one to tell him whether ‘I got distracted.’ read as charming or desperate.

He runs the entire two-hour exchange back over and over and finds no actionable errors, but remains unconvinced.

He goes for his run at six. The route climbs uphill around klick seven, and somewhere on the hill he thinks about your photo, your smile, your mouth. He wonders what you smell like, what you sound like when you're being sarcastic. 

By noon he's under the Land Rover draining the old oil, and he catches himself pondering what you might do on a Saturday. Whether you slept in properly. Whether the cat allows it; he grew up with one himself and knows how demanding they can be when they're ready for a feeding.

He hasn't messaged yet and neither have you.

He couldn't say exactly why he's held off. Something the lads said about being keen, and rules, and mystery lodged somewhere he can't reach to dig it out. He's not normally a man that takes doctrine from Johnny MacTavish, and yet… here he is. 

It's a stupid fuckin' rule.

The afternoon goes long and gets quiet in the old way.

The house at four o'clock has a particular acoustic he knows down to the plumbing, and today, for the first time, he notices himself noticing it. It never used to be so obvious. Years of Saturdays like this one and it took his phone going quiet for half a day to show him the loneliness so plainly.

By the evening he's got Chinese takeaway at the kitchen table, eating it straight from the carton, chopsticks shoveling fried noodles down his gullet while he does the crossword from the morning paper in his head.

That's when his phone lights up for the first time all day, buzzing three times in succession — he absolutely hates how quickly it's in his hand.

spent six hours wedding dress shopping with my best friend. i need a glass of wine and a lie down.

thought of you on the tube home

He reads the second message again.

Thought of you. 

He’d been drafting the same admission since noon and something in his chest going catastrophically hot.

are you still up? i know sundown is bedtime for your generation.

And there's the sarcasm. 

Outside the window, the sun is — he checks — still up. Barely. He's got that going for him, at least.

Just in time. Was about to take my dentures out.

Thought about you as well.

He types the second line fast before he can be a coward about it. If you can say it, he can say it. Fair's fair.

I do have a question now though. It's not your wedding we're shopping for, is it? That'd be proper inconvenient for me.

lol no! maid of honor. today was purely supervisory.

don't really see myself getting married anyway.

the dresses were stunning though!

He’s picking up on a pattern. Three messages arriving like one exhale — the vulnerable thing said flanked with distraction. 

Nothing wrong with that.

Successful trip then? Or is there another six hours coming?

successful! she found it. there were tears and champagne.

what about you, how was your saturday?

He’s had a day spent purposefully not doing the one thing he wanted to do.

Quiet. Nothing worth typing.

hm. sounds like you should ring me then…

He looks at that one for a moment and blinks, the inside of his cheek finds itself between his teeth.

For all their blabbering, the lads did not warn him about this bit. Not that he can't speak on the phone, he prefers it. You're essentially quoting his profile back at him. But he's been thinking about something since roughly the fourth time you crossed his mind today, and a phone call isn't the ask he's been building up to.

Could do.

Truthfully, though. I was just working up the courage to ask you for a drink.

Courage. He's used that word in citations, for men who ran toward gunfire, heroes. Now he’s using it to describe the act of asking a woman on a date, and the genuinely undignified part is that it's regrettably accurate.

Your reply takes a minute. He watches the dots start and stop, and start again. God, he's been shot at with less suspense.

Then your message comes through and it's just a number. Ten digits. It buzzes in his hand once more.

for logistics.

He stares at it for a beat and then he's up out of his seat. Takeaway abandoned, at the fridge with his phone still in one hand, snapping the cap off a beer on the lip of the counter, and then he's out the back door into the garden where the evening's gone navy and the air’s still warm from the day.

He saves your number first. Then he stands there a moment, beer sweating in one hand, thumb over the call button in the other.

——

You’ve just tipped the bottle over your glass when the phone starts buzzing against the counter.

Unknown Number. Local.

“John?”

“Evenin’.”

Fuck. 

His voice lands an octave lower than you were braced for. A honeyed gravel that seeps into your ear and slides thick over your spine, pooling somewhere behind your ribs.

You set the bottle down before you drop it.

“So you actually do ring,” you manage.

“Said so on the profile, I think.”

“I half thought it was a bit.”

“I don’t really do bits.”

“No,” you say through a grin, picking up your glass and drifting toward the couch. You drop your voice into a gravelly impression of him: “You’re a very serious man.”

The laugh that comes down the line is quiet — more breath than sound, warm at the bottom of it, like you’ve caught him somewhere he doesn’t usually go.

“That meant to be me?”

“It’s uncanny, I know.”

The line goes quiet a moment — the good kind, neither of you rushing to fill it — and in it you catch the sounds of his side: a whirl of breeze, the faint ring of a glass set down on iron. He’s outside. You picture a tidy yard with tall dark hedges, a big man pacing slowly with a beer.

“Am I interruptin’ the wine?”

“The wine and I are happy to share the time.”

“Good.” There's a pause that you can hear his smile in. “I have a beer out here. Seemed only fair we’re both suffering the same.”

“Are we having our drink right now? Is this it?”

“No,” he says immediately, unamused even — which is very amusing for you. “This one doesn’t count.”

The speed of his reply sends something fizzing under your sternum. You tuck your feet up under yourself and take a slow sip.

“No?” you tease.

“I had imagined I’d see your face.”

“Been imagining, have you?”

You are very glad he cannot see your face right now. Cheeks warm and strained, you press the cool of the wine glass briefly against them in turns

“Nothin’ mucky if that’s what you’re gettin’ at.”

“Mm, no, 'course not. You’ve been a proper gentleman. Haven’t even thrown me a cheeky pick-up line.”

“I could workshop somethin’ for you if you’d like.”

“No thanks,” you giggle into your glass. “It was a relief when I opened your first message and it wasn’t a riddles-three about your dick.”

You can hear his scoff and recoil on the other end.

“Is that what it’s come to?”

“Unfortunately.”

There’s a short silence you’d swear is him coming to terms with the modern world, and you bite down on a smile.

“Right,” he says, and there's a controlled shift in his voice. “My question...”

Your stomach does a free-fall, nauseating and fluttery, fifteen again on the Detonator at Thorpe Park.

“Mm?” you hum around a sip, deeply casual, a woman entirely unbothered, curled so tight around the phone that Twix doesn’t have a leg to lie on.

“There’s a pub about halfway between us, Lamb & Flag. I’d like to take you for that drink tomorrow. Will you come?”

Then you remember what tomorrow is and sigh, immediately irritated with your whole family.

“Ugh, I want to say yes,” you sulk. “But I’ve got Sunday dinner with my family tomorrow. My mum would hunt me for sport if I flaked.”

“Fair. Wouldn’t want that on my conscience.”

“I could do a weeknight? After work?”

There’s a pause on his end.

“I’d rather not promise you a weeknight,” he admits. “I rarely get away on time, and I’m not startin’ this by standin' you up.”

You go quiet for a beat, you were ready for the usual ‘ahh, well, we’ll figure something out’. But instead got a man mindful of your time; a unicorn, really.

“Also fair. And— and thoughtful.”

“Friday, then?” he tries hopefully, you catch the small lean in his voice.

“Friday’s perfect,” you agree. “It’s a date!”

“It is,” he agrees, smiling.

The conversation should end there but it doesn't.

You learn things no profile has a field for; that he talks slower than he types, that he hm's real low in his throat when he’s considering something, that when you make him laugh it rumbles, so rough at the bottom that you feel at the back of your knees.

Somewhere past the hour mark you stop scrutinizing the call for red flags and just talk, and you only notice you’ve stopped when Twix jumps onto the couch and you realize you’ve been lying down for a while, phone balanced on your ear like you’re seventeen.

Eventually, you yawn.

“Right,” he says, and you can hear him moving, standing up by the way he tries to muffle a stiff groan. “That’s my cue.”

“Aw, no! I’m fine, really.”

“It’s late, love. And you’ve got your family tomorrow.”

“True. And you’ve got… whatever it is old men do on Sundays.”

“Lie-in, according to my profile.”

“Ha!” you bark, vindicated alone in your living room, having forgot about his little 'two truths and a lie'. “That’s the lie, I bet. I don’t think you’ve ever had a lie-in in your life.”

A low sound of amusement rolls down the line. “Goodnight,” he says, declining to confirm.

“Night, John.”

You sit a minute in the amber shine of your lamp after the line goes dead, phone loose in your hand.

——

Sunday morning, you text him at 8:12 AM.

good morning. how was the lie-in?

Wouldn’t know. Been up since five.

the lie confirmed!

He doesn’t dignify it. You don’t expect him to. You grin at your phone while you wait for the kettle to boil.

Your mum will later describe you, over dinner, as ‘suspiciously cheerful’.

The day swallows you — the drive, the roast, your mum’s questions, your brother’s kids. It’s near ten when you’re finally home, shoes off, replying to the last thing he’d sent that morning.

survived. my mum sends her regards to whoever put me in a good mood. her words.

Regards received. Sleep well.

——

Monday morning, John’s at his desk with his coffee going cold because somewhere between the canteen and the walk to his office, his phone buzzed, and it was you and he hasn’t stopped looking at it. 

good morning :) big meeting today. does this say “promote me” or “she tried”?

[ PHOTO ATTACHMENT ]

You, in your hallway mirror — chin tipped, black short-sleeve blouse with a wide collar exposing the smooth skin of your upper chest and collar, grey pencil skirt stretched over the curve of your hips and thighs, one knee bent like you’d just been lowering your foot from fitting on your heel.

His eyes are stuck on the soft-looking flesh just above and between your knees when a rap lands on his door and forces a cough from his throat.

Johnny eases it open with Kyle behind him holding a folder, Simon's behind them both, holding nothing, not even a pretense.

His phone goes face-down on the desk at a compromising speed, shifting to sit up straigher.

Simon’s eyes go to John’s hand over the phone, then to his face before he leans in the doorway with his arms folded.

“Mornin’, Cap. Good weekend?” Johnny asks, falling into the side chair in front of the desk with a theatrical groan.

“Fine.”

“Aye? Do anythin'?” He smiles, waggling his eyebrows. “Anyone?”

“You’ve got thirty seconds to develop a work reason for being in my office, Sergeant.”

It's an empty threat and everyone in the room knows it.

Kyle sets the (empty) folder down and steps back behind Johnny. “How’s it going, sir? Did you have any luck with Hinge?”

John could make them work for it. He’d planned to. But all three of them are standing in front of him trying so hard to look casual it’s a wonder none of them have pulled something.

"Have a date Friday. Drinks."

Johnny is ready to blast out of his seat, but Kyle shoves him back down by the shoulders, digging his fingers into the pressure points on either side of his neck until he relents with a hiss.

"That's great. Same woman or…?"

"The same."

“Good, good, good,” Johnny says, and means it — John can hear that he means it, he can also hear the restraint he's keeping from unloading shite advice.

“We'll stop buy Saturday for the debrief,” Simon says, already turning around, and Kyle picks the folder back up like it had a purpose all along, and they file out the way they came.

"I'm not debriefing you on my date. Don't come!" John calls to them half-heartedly, but the door's already shutting on top of his words. 

He turns the phone back over.

Promote you, he types.

You look lovely.

Your reply comes before he’s picked his pen back up.

well now the meeting feels easy. thank you x

He gets on with his morning, but by noon he suspects he's looked at that damn photo a dozen times.

——

The rest of the week goes standard. Your Tuesday runs long and his Wednesday runs longer, and the messages carry throughout it all. His texts arrive before your morning alarm even sounds, your replies go mid-commute — nothing heavy, just remaining in each other's orbit of interest as Friday chugs slowly into view.

Thursday night, near nine, he rings you, having first texted to ask if he could, which you’re beginning to understand is just how he’s built. It’s a short call by your new standards with him. He only wanted to confirm you’re still on for the pub, but he had you grinning into your pillow until you fell asleep.

———

You leave work at five on the dot, and you’re in front of your open wardrobe by six.

The little black dress comes off the rail first. Goes back. Comes off again. Back. The floral one gets as far as your shoulders before you pull it off over your head and drop it on the bed, where Twix immediately sits on it.

The silky baby blue halter’s been hanging on the door since you bought it. You put it on like you hadn’t already decided and do the tie at the back of your neck twice before the bow sits flat and neat. You pull on some jeans and rummage the closet for your chunky heels. 

You press some strawberry perfume to your throat in the mirror and try to comfort the nerve-ridden woman in the reflection.

“It’s just a pub,” you tell her. 

She doesn’t seem convinced. 

———

The pub is exactly the kind of place you imagine he'd frequent — quiet, all old mahogany and low brass lamps, no telly anywhere. You claim a stool, hook your heel over the rung, and decide not to order anything yet simply because it just feels polite to wait.

You're fifteen minutes early which means you're left alone with your anxieties. 

The last of the sun lies across the bar top in warm stripes, and you trace one with a finger while you wait. 

You’ve done this before, and it almost never goes how the phone promises. There was the guy whose photos were six years out of date. The one who spent both drinks talking about his ex and then sent a payment request for half the tab. The one who, two hours in, hadn’t asked you a single question about yourself. And John has been too good to be true for a week, and you know how that saying ends. Tonight is where you find out how, find out he really is just a man between deployments looking for entertainment and a shag.

It felt good, though. All week. Being excited about something. You’d forgotten the feeling. 

You pick at the hangnail on your thumb until it stings.

You don’t have to wait much longer for him. 

He casts a shadow when he comes through the door. Broad. Tall. Smart olive polo fighting for its stitching across his chest and where it grips into his biceps. He’s tidied his beard in comparison to his photos, hair less kempt in a purposeful way.

He scans the whole room before he finds you and stops looking anywhere else. He smiles tight and restrained, pleasant, but like he’s pacing himself, and by the time he crosses to you, your tongue has gone dry and whatever you’d planned to open with has shriveled away.

“Hey,” he says.

“Hi,” you smile.

He smells clean, a bit like pine and amber, and faintly like there’s tobacco somewhere on his collar.

“You’re early,” he adds, almost pleased.

“So are you.”

“I’m always early.” His eyes drop to the empty bar top in front of you, then come back. “You haven’t ordered?”

You shake your head once, legs shifting to cross. “I wanted— I was waiting for you.”

The lines beside his eyes deepen and he holds out his hand, says your name for the first time, and his hand swallows yours — big and dry and calloused across the palm where yours is soft — and you hold on a beat too long. He doesn’t mention it. You add that to the list of things you like about him, which is getting embarrassing for something four minutes old.

“What’ll you have?”

“Uhm, whatever you’re having,” you decide.

He signals the bartender with two fingers and opens his mouth — and there’s a brief second where he looks at you first, and you notice for the first time that his eyes are blue, and you get stuck, and it seems so does he. By the time he looks back, he’s lost the name of the beer he’s drunk here a dozen times.

“Two of the, uh— the local,” he manages.

You pretend not to notice. He knows you did.

He pulls out the stool beside you, and more of his cologne wafts around you as he sits, turned to face you, legs spread, one knee pointing between yours.

The pints arrive wet from the tap, and for a second neither of you says anything at all. You trace a bead of condensation down your glass.

“Funny, isn’t it,” you offer, sheepish. “We’ve talked every day for a week, and the second we’re actually in front of each other…” You trail off, cheeks warming, eyes fixed on the fizz jumping over the rim of your beer.

“You’re nervous?” he asks, a cheeky lilt on it.

“A bit, yeah. Aren’t you?”

“Not at all.”

You squint at him. “I don’t know if I buy that.”

“Hm.” He takes a sip that lasts a little too long, and the tips of his ears have gone pink.

Your cheeks are doing about the same. You drink your beer — cold, hop-bitter, helping — and let him have his lie. It’s a generous lie anyway. It’s a lie shaped like a man trying, and you’ve been handed far worse shapes.

“So,” you start. “I haven’t asked why you’re even on Hinge. You don’t seem the type.”

“I’m not,” he chuckles, and offers nothing beyond it.

You wait. He just sips his beer. You hike a brow.

“That’s it? That’s your answer?”

“Well, it wasn’t my idea. The lads put me on it.”

“The lads — your guys from work?”

“Yeah.”

“They what, talked you into it?”

“No.” He turns his glass a degree. “They nicked my phone and made the profile behind my back.”

“And what made them do that?”

He takes a moment with that one. He could give you a cover story — you can almost watch him weigh one — but then he doesn’t.

“Their assessment,” he laughs to himself, “was that I’d been… cranky. Needed gettin’ out of the house.”

“Cranky?” you repeat, delighted.

“Their exact words were a bit different.”

“Hm.” You look at him — at ease, half a smile living in his beard, one arm resting along the bar. “You don’t seem cranky to me.”

“Yeah, well. Guess they were right, then.”

Your neck goes hot and you have to look away from him. “Well,” you manage. “They do good work, your committee.”

He huffs into his pint, and lets you recover.

“Okay, next one, then. Military.” You tip your glass toward him. “What do you actually do?”

He sets his beer down and you can see him carefully choosing which door to open. “What d’you want to know?”

“I don’t know. What’s your day look like?”

“Depends on the day. Paperwork, mostly. Meetings.” A beat. “Sometimes we go away.”

“Away?”

“Away.”

“For how long?”

“As long as it takes.”

“Doing…?”

“Whatever they need me to,” he says easily. “S’not me being mysterious. I’d tell you if I could.”

“That must be so strange, though. Having this whole— like, most of your life you can’t talk about.”

“You get used to it.” Then, because you’re still looking at him expectantly, not filling the space the way people usually do: “There’s loads I can say. Ask me what six weeks of rain in a jungle smells like. Or what a month in the desert does to your skin.”

“What’s a month in the desert do to your skin?”

“Nothing good, love,” he answers, shifting to face you better. “The beard’s load-bearing.”

You laugh into your beer, and it makes the next one easier to ask.

“Do you like it? Like, the whole life of it?”

He goes quiet on that one. Longer than he’s gone quiet on anything else you’ve asked. You can see him thinking on it. 

“It’s what I’m best at,” he says finally. And then, mostly to his glass: “It’s all I’ve known, really. Been doin’ it since sixteen.”

You turn that over. There’s a whole life folded up in that sentence and you notice you want to ask about all of it, which is not a thing you’ve wanted to do with a man in a very long time.

The second beers arrive, and the conversation stops keeping to lanes — his lads and your best friend, the wedding in October, the neighbor whose bins are apparently a whole saga. You’re midway through the story of your work feud when a birthday party arrives loud and glittering behind you, and John, without so much as glancing down, reaches down and hooks his hand under the edge of your stool, and pulls.

The whole thing drags six inches across the floor with you on it, your knee sliding neatly between his, close enough now that his voice drops to match the new distance. You’re looking up at him, pulse tapping somewhere that has your thighs pressing together. 

“Go on,” he encourages. “She said what?”

It takes you a moment to find your place, but you go on.

The bar only gets louder from there, the birthday table multiplying, and when a booth opens up in the back corner, John tips his chin at it.

“Go grab that,” he says, turning back to the bar. “I’ll get another round. Want the same?”

“Actually—” and you hesitate out of nothing but habit, out of years of a man’s face going tight when you complicate an order, “—could I do a vodka cranberry this time? I could get the round—”

His brows furrow with something akin to bafflement, brief and genuine. “You can have whatever you’d like,” he says, and suddenly you feel silly, your hand crossing to grip your elbow.

“No—I know. I just—”

“Whatever you’d like,” he repeats, gentler. “And—” he grimaces, like what he’s about to say pains him deeply. “Don’t ever offer to pay on a date with me again. Properly wind me up, that will.”

“S-sorry,” you shake your head, like you can rattle the habit loose.

“None of that either,” his eyes have gone crinkled at the corners, warm all the way through, and he raps two knuckles soft on the bar top like the matter’s settled. “Vodka cranberry. Go, sit.”

“Actually— I’m gonna go freshen up quickly. Two minutes.”

And you go, biting down on a smile, ears hot — embarrassed and looked after all at once, which is apparently a combination that works on you.

The bathroom is cooler than the bar and a quiet that leaves your ears ringing. You reapply some lipgloss and wash your hands and look at yourself in the dirty mirror, buzzing warm at the collarbones, eyes shiny, mouth half-curved.

It’s going well.

It’s going suspiciously well.

And every time it’s gone well before, this is exactly when you started hunting for the catch. So you dry your hands on the rough paper towel and leave before you can start.

He’s in the booth when you come back, settled against the wall side, the last of the evening gone from the windows and the lamp above him glowing gold over the table. Your drink is waiting — pink, iced, a lime wedged on the rim — set neatly across the table at the seat opposite.

You look at the seat opposite.

Then you slide in beside him instead. Your thigh a heated inch from his, reaching across to relocate your drink.

You don’t look at him, but you can tell John’s a bit curious of the arrangement. His arm comes up and settles along the back of the booth behind you, and it oddly feels like it was always going to end up here, his thumb grazing the bare skin of your shoulder. He picks up his beer with the other hand.

“Comfortable?” he asks, low, and with entirely too much satisfaction.

“I am,” you say, and the first sip of the vodka cranberry is cold and tart and sweet all the way down, blooming behind your sternum right where his voice has been landing all night.

The booth is easier than the bar, somehow — closer, quieter, the birthday party more muted — and the talk drifts wherever it wants, his low laugh arriving against your shoulder through the arm behind you. At some point the lull comes; ice softening in your glass, his thumb resting an inch from your shoulder. And maybe it’s the vodka, or the arm, or the running list of things you like about him that you’d need both hands to count now—

“How long ago was your last relationship? Like a real one.”

He takes a deep breath before answering. “Honest answer?”

“Preferably,” you giggle softly, and he smiles — most of it lost in the beard, enough that you wonder if there are dimples under there.

“Longer than what sounds good out loud,” he admits through the pull of it. 

“Say it out loud anyway.”

“I was thirty-two. So, almost ten years ago.”

“Ten.”

“Mm.”

“A whole decade.”

“You can stop countin’ the years to me at any time, love.”

“Sorry, sorry.” You’re grinning. He is too. “It’s just, quite the gap in romance.”

“It went quick,” he says, and it’s a joke, and it’s also not. “What about you?”

“Ended about a year ago, we were together four.”

“Mm.”

“It was fine. Amicable— mostly,” you shrug. 

“Mostly,” he repeats — not pushing, just setting the word down where you can see he heard it.

“Mostly,” you confirm, and leave it there.

The ice ticks in your glass. And the next question’s been sitting in your chest, so you take it out while you’re brave.

“Can I ask something and you not be offended?”

“Startin’ well,” he says, nodding on for you to continue. 

You settle further into the booth and your shoulders press against his warm arm behind you, his fingers brushing over your shoulder. You lean your head back, turned to his face. 

“What’s changed? Between thirty-two and now that you’re trying dating?” You mean just to ask the question, but you find yourself rambling on. “Because if the honest answer is nothing, and this is just— a-a hookup with, like, really good manners, that’s fine. Genuinely. I’d just rather know now.”

“Fair,” he says. “Asked myself the same thing this week.”

“Yeah? And what was the answer?”

“I’m tired of the quiet,” he starts, pausing as his eyes drift away in thought. They come back to you just as quick. “Used to come home to it like a reward. Now it just feels… empty.”

Something in your chest slides sideways.

“So, no. Not a hookup,” he continues with a breath. “But I can’t promise you’d be happy with the alternative either. I can be gone longer than I’m home.” His thumb brushes along your shoulder, once, like an apology.

“Guess I wouldn’t know unless I gave it a go.”

You say it lightly, and the exhale he lets out has a smile riding on it — and something in his shoulders comes down, some held thing you didn’t notice until it let go.

“No,” he agrees, low. “You wouldn’t.”

You’re suddenly aware of the distance between you — or the lack of it. Somewhere between sitting down and the vodka you’ve ended up awfully close: near enough to count the grey threaded through his beard, to catch the beer on his breath, near enough that the light between you has stopped reaching the space. Near enough that you can feel the heat coming off him, and your heartrate has picked up on it before the rest of you has.

His eyes flick down to your mouth. Quick — half a second, there and back — but you catch it, and it lands low in your stomach and stays.

Neither of you leans back.

And the pub carries on behind you — glasses clinking, the birthday table shouting, a till drawer slamming — all of it arriving from somewhere far off and dreamlike.

You move closer. Barely. Imperceptible. Your pulse is in your ears now, drumming out the last of your sense—

“You know,” you say, quiet, pitched for the six inches between you and nobody else, “you can kiss me. If you’d like.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Mhm,” you grin.

“Well,” he says, matching your volume, low enough that it lands somewhere below hearing, “I was going to be a gentleman about it. Wait til I walked you out.” His gaze drops to your mouth again, slower this time, no secret. “But if you’d rather have it here in the booth, I won’t argue.”

“I suppose I could be patient.”

“Mm,” he says, and doesn’t move.

Somewhere in the world, presumably, time is passing.

His jaw shifts. 

“I’ll go pay the tab,” he decides.

And you’re both up and out of the booth quick, and you watch him stand at the bar with his back to you, shoulders set, and you press one cool knuckle to your own cheek and find it burning.

You two make it out the door.

The night’s gone hazy and July-thick, and you get maybe four steps down the side of the pub with his hand a light at the small of your back before you glance up at him and he glances down.

Whatever was left of patient dies right there on the pavement.

He moves you.

One hand finding your hip, the other your jaw, and then your back meets brick, warm through the thin of your blouse and against your bare shoulders, and his mouth is on yours.

Whatever mindful version he’d planned for the end of his gentlemanly walk out must have been spent in the booth — this is the interest. The kiss opens on a low rumble out of his chest, one you feel travel through his ribs into yours, and his tongue slides against yours, all beer and him, and you grip the front of his shirt with both fists just incase the wall behind you vanishes.

He kisses you thoroughly, his beard catching along your chin, a chafe you know you’ll feel tomorrow. A thigh slots half between yours, not pushing, not touching, but it’s not any less inviting. You could bare down on it, get the friction your body is craving, he’d let you, but you restrain yourself. His thumb strokes a slow line along your jaw in obscene contrast to what his mouth is doing — and it blooms down through you, fervid, liquescent.

He pulls back just far enough to breathe — forehead near yours, both of you loud with catching your breath — and when you open your eyes his are dark.

“Very gentlemanly,” you croon.

“I walked you out first, yeah?” he says, unrepentant.

You giggle against his mouth, and he claims it for himself with one more gentle kiss, and then he steps back a seemly distance, hand smoothing once down over his beard, shoulders resetting, breath evening out, everything going back in its place except his eyes.

“Walk me home?” you ask.

“I drove. I’ll give you a lift.”

You look up at him, all vodka-warm and enjoying yourself. “Well, just so you know, I share my location with my best friend and she knows exactly what pub I’m at, and has your name and photo, so—”

“Good,” he replies, no hesitation. “Smart girl. Keep it that way.” He finds his keys, fishing them out of his pocket. “I’m taking you straight home. You have my word.”

He draws an X over his heart, your lipgloss shining at the corner of his crooked mouth. 

——

The car smells like-new — clean upholstery and faintly of engine oil, everything squared away, nothing rolling around in the footwells.

The drive is short. The radio murmurs. His hand rests easy on the gearstick a few inches from your knee — close enough that you spend two full streets aware of nothing else — and the streetlights slide over him in slow bars, catching the grey at his temple and the small satisfied set of his mouth. 

The kiss is still thrumming under your skin like a struck glass, low in your belly, at the back of your knees — and you catch yourself doing the thing you swore off doing: imagining forward. Him in your doorway. Him in your kitchen on the weekend. Him coming home from wherever away is and it being your door he— 

You look out the window. Four miles has never taken so long.

He pulls up outside your building and sets the handbrake, and the engine idles, and neither of you move.

The dashboard glow makes everything blue. 

You want to ask him up. That's not the question; that got settled somewhere around the second kiss in the alley, possibly earlier, possibly around the moment he walked into the pub, or whatever. But there's the other thing you can't evict from your head: do you really want to sleep with him on the first date?

"So," you say.

"So…”

You look at him — streetlight in the grey of his beard, arm along the wheel, he’s in absolutely no hurry to resolve you.

"Did you have a good time tonight?"

His head turns. There's a beat where he just looks at you, and you watch him physically decide not to make a joke of it.

"Yes. Best night I've had in a while," he says. 

"Would you—" and god, you're thirty years old and your heart is doing this anyway, "—want to see me again? Like this?"

"Was already plannin' to ask you to dinner." A small crease starts at the corner of his eye. "Was workin' out whether to do it now or ring you tomorrow, so I didn't seem overly—"

"Keen?"

"Keen," he confirms, gravely, like the word's been a burden to him all week.

And that lands warm and the relief does something reckless to your mouth, which is that it stops guarding it.

"Okay. Then I'm going to say something, but you can't look at me while I say it."

“Right.” He scrubs a hand over his twitching lips and looks out the windshield, obedient.

"I want to ask you up."

"Mm."

"And I'm having a whole debate about it."

"I can hear it," he says. "Been losin' to the engine for about a minute now."

"Just—,” you sigh, “—shut up." But you're smiling at the dashboard. "It's just— I spent all week wondering if this was a hookup thing for you. And you answered that, and I believe you, I do. But there's this small, paranoid part of me that's like, well, that's exactly what a man would say at the pub, isn't it? And then there's this other, stupider part that thinks if you come up, you'll—" you take a deep breath, your fingers hooking into each other on your lap, and make yourself finish it, "—think less of me. First date and all."

He's quiet for a second, lips pursing. 

“Can I look at you now?” he tries.

“Yeah.”

"You want to know where I'm actually at?"

"Truly just desperate for a man to be honest so I know what headspace to put myself in."

“Alright.” He shifts to face you, wrist still hanging over the wheel. “I want to come up. Badly, if you want some extra honesty.”

The badly goes straight between your thighs.

“Okay,” you manage. “Noted.”

“I haven’t lied to you once tonight. And I’m takin’ you to dinner whether I come up or not.”

“And, like— you wouldn’t think—”

“Think less of you?” He frowns, like the math’s not mathing. “For doin’ the same thing I’d be doing? Together?”

“When you put it like that…”

“For what it’s worth, I’m sat here havin’ a version of the same debate. Been out of this a long time. Didn’t want you thinkin’ that’s all I came for. So if you’d rather I kiss you at the door and drive home, I’ll do that and consider it a perfect evening.”

And maybe it’s the ease of him, the total absence of pressure you’re always braced for on nights like this, that settles it for you. 

“Would you like to come up?”

——

The stairwell smells of somebody's late dinner and warm dust, the day's heat still trapped in it, and you take the stairs ahead of him to the second floor.

John is a gentleman.

John has been a gentleman all night.

John gives himself the length of one flight of stairs off the clock — the sway of you in those jeans, the shift and give of you with every step, the smooth line of your bare shoulders under the halter's little bow — and by the landing he's a gentleman again, and if you felt his eyes like a brand on you, and by the half-smirk you throw over your shoulder you did, neither of you says a word about it.

Your flat smells like you — the perfume he got to know at the pub, but underneath it, clean laundry, a candle burned down sometime this week — and a blur of black-and-caramel bolts across the living room and vanishes down the hall before he can so much as get a look at her.

"That was Twix," you say, her paws still pattering away. "She'll start her background check and circle back."

"Sensible."

And then the two of you are standing in your living room with the whole car’s worth of honesty sitting in the middle of the floor, and you look at him, and look at the kitchen, and say:

"Do you want a drink? I have wine. Or, um. Tea? I might have a beer from—"

"I'm alright," his mouth pulls at one side. 

"Water? I'm gonna have water."

"Then I'll have water," he says like he’s surrendering. 

He watches you go — and he could laugh, not at you, but because he knows exactly what he’s looking at. The two of you agreed in plain English on why he’s standing here, and now you’re in your kitchen filling glasses neither of you want, and wiping down a counter that, from where he’s stood, was already clean. 

So he gives you room. Settles against the arm of the couch, takes a slow lap of your shelf with his eyes — you and a woman he guesses is the October bride, you on a hike somewhere sunny, you and Twix bravely on the balcony — and he wants you the whole time, low and patient, in his back teeth, but doesn’t move on it.

 Your pace. Your move.

You come back with the waters, and hand him his, and hold your own in both hands like you might drop it. He takes a sip, looks at you over the rim of it.

“You’re nervous,” he says.

“Not at all.”

“Mm.” He nods slowly, deeply unconvinced and taking a page from your own book. “Don’t know if I buy that.”

He watches it land, watches the laugh come up out of you before you can stop it, head tipping back, throat bare, and half your nerves seem to leave with it.

He likes that. 

He sets his glass down. Then, gently, he takes yours out of your mid-fidget hands and sets it down too — he tips your chin up with one knuckle, and kisses you.

Easy-like, cold from the water, cranberry still faint on your tongue, your breath catches once against his mouth and then lets go. Your hands slide flat up his chest and stop over his heart — which is going quicker than he’d care to admit, and he feels the exact moment you find it out, the little hum of discovery you make.

When you pull back to look at him, whatever nerves were left in you are gone from your eyes, and they’re twinkly a lot like the first photo he ever saw of you. 

You take his hand off your waist, lace it through yours, and guide him backward toward the short hall.

In your bedroom he finds the tie of your halter at the back of your neck and pauses with the ends between his fingers, silk warm from your body. One pull and it gives, the fabric sighing loose, and he follows it slide down with his eyes first, then his mouth — the slope of your throat, over your shoulder, then the soft skin below your ear that tastes of strawberry perfume and salt. His beard drags over your neck and a shiver flows through you so he does it again, slower. You shiver harder, fingers curling into the front of his polo.

Good.

You tug the hem of his shirt up and he reaches back, pulls it off over his head one-handed, and drops it somewhere he’ll look for later. He unhooks your bra just as easily, and when your palms spread into the coarse hair over his bare chest and down his toned stomach, the muscle jumps under your fingertips, he hears his own breath go rough.

“Okay,” you say, a little wonder in it. “Wow, yeah, that’s….”

“Mm?”

“Nothing. Just— I knew military, just didn’t realize… this much military.”

“Lodging a complaint?” he askes, amused.

“Definitely not.”

The rest goes gradually — his belt, your jeans peeled down warm thighs with his calloused palms flat against your skin the whole way, a hop and a giggle when the denim catches your ankle and he steadies you by the elbow — and then you’re bare in front of him, lamplight pooling gold along your shoulder, your hip, the soft curve of your stomach. He stops with his hands at your waist and looks.

“Say something,” you murmur, half a laugh, shy at last under the attention. “You’re oggling.”

“I am.” His thumbs press slow arcs into your hips. “Give me a minute. Been picturin’ this since Tuesday and I did you no justice.”

You pull him down onto the bed by way of an answer, and the mattress sinks with a soft complaint, and then it’s just skin — so much warm skin, soft everywhere he’s hard, giving under his hands, smelling of perfume and the clean sweat July dampens into everyone.

He stretches out alongside you, one heavy thigh over yours, and takes his time. The curve of your waist. The full weight of your breast, thumb dragging over your nipple until it peaks and your breath stutters. The inside of your thigh, where the skin is finest and the heat pools. You move under his touch the whole time, restless and rising, fingers in his hair, at his shoulders, and the small sounds you make land somewhere at the base of his neck and prickle there.

Then he shifts down the bed, kisses the soft of your stomach, the plush crease of your hip, and looks up the length of you.

“Can I?”

“You— yes,” you breathe, trembling feebly. “Yes, obviously, you don’t have to a—”

His mouth is on you before the sentence ends.

You’re sweet and slick against his tongue, already so wet the first slow lick slides easy, and the sound you make is high and caught somewhere low, thigh twitching against his ear, one hand flying to his hair. He hums — feels you feel it — and settles in. No rush. Long soft strokes of his tongue until your hips learn the rhythm and rise to meet it, then his lips close warm around your clit, sucking gently, and your whole body pulls tight.

“Oh my god— okay— okay—”

“Mm.”

“Don’t be smug—” and your voice climbs off the end of the sentence as he slides two thick fingers into you, curling them, tongue still working, and whatever the rest of that scolding was, he never learns it.

“Could do this all night, sweetheart,” he murmurs against you, and feels the words land in a shudder. Your breathing changes. Your thighs start trembling, your hand fists in the sheets — and he keeps the pace exactly the same until you’re pulling at him. Hair, arm, anything you can reach.

“John— John— come— I want you. Now,” you whine, “Please.”

He comes up the length of you slow, mouth mapping stomach and sternum and throat on the way, and settles over you on one forearm—

"I should've said this in the car," he starts, eyes on yours. "I don't have a condom. Wasn't assuming tonight would end up here."

"I don't have any either. I actually checked the drawer before I left tonight." You push his dampening hair back off his forehead. "I'm on the pill, and I trust you. But I'd still feel better if you pull out. Is that okay?"

He nods assuredly. "Then I'll pull out," he says flat and plain. "You have my word."

"You and your word—" but you're smiling, and then you're not smiling, because he's already moved and taken himself in hand and dragged the head of his cock through your folds, coating himself in you, and notched against your entrance, and the smile falls open into something much, much better.

He pushes in slow, watches your face the entire way — he couldn't look elsewhere if a grenade went off — your brows drawing up, your lips parting around a breath that doesn't finish, your nails biting little crescents into his forearms — and fuck, the feel of you: scalding, soaked, tight enough that he has to stop twice, jaw clenched, sweat sliding at his temple, feeding you his cock an inch at a time and pulling back, then giving you more; the slick easy give of you around him unspooling something in his stomach.

"Talk to me," he murmurs, gravel-low. "Alright?"

"Yes." Your voice has gone breathless and small and blissed. "You're— god—"

"Christ, you’re snug," he exhales shakily, eyes finding yours. “Relax for me, baby. Breathe.”

"I am breath—oh. Oh—shhit—"

John’s seated all the way, hips flush to your backside, and both of you go quiet — a shared beat of stillness, you fluttering around him hot and full, his body coming down, forehead dropping to yours, ten months of silence pulling a sound up out of his chest that he couldn't have stopped if he knew it was coming.

Then you shift your hips, experimental, a slow grind up against him, and that stillness is over.

He moves slowly; long level strokes dragging all the way out so you both feel every hot stretch of the return, your breasts pressing soft against his hairy chest. Your heels slide up the back of his thighs and he budges his hips closer, holding deep and pressing the head of his cock into your furthest wall. Your hands squeeze the meat between his shoulders and his neck as he pushes a small squeal out of you. 

"Right there—right there—right there, don't—"

"I won’t," he murmurs against your jaw. “I won’t move.”

"—okay maybe move a little—"

He breathes something restrained through a smile. "Make your mind up, darling," he grunts. 

“It’s hard to— mmm—think like this,” you half-moan against his cheek. 

“Don’t think, then.”

It’s all your talking that undoes him more than anything, he realizes distantly. He’d forgotten there was a version of this with laughing in it; a version with a woman eagerly gripping him and grinning against his cheek in the second before a moan carries her voice away — and every time you say his name, breathed and broken, something in his chest cinches another notch tighter.

He draws back and drives home again, and whatever you’d been about to answer with comes out as a punched huff.

You don’t think.

He feels the difference in you immediately — your body dropping the manners, hips rising to meet him harder than he’s giving it, heels dragging him in by the thighs on every stroke, a low frustrated sound building in your throat when he keeps the same controlled pace. You’re not asking for anything. You’re taking it in inches, greedy and unaware of yourself, nails dragging down the small of his back, pulling—

“Harder?” he asks against your ear. 

"Yes, please."

He hooks your knee up over his hip and opens you wider—“So polite.”—and gives it to you deeper, his weight behind it, your headboard cracking against the wall. You go loud and lovely underneath him, clutching, slick heat and plush skin and your nails scoring lines down his back that he hopes, viciously, will last long enough to admire.

He works a hand between your bodies, thumb finding your clit, riding the motion you’ve bkth created.

"That's— John— You’re gonna make me come," you sob. 

"I know. I feel you. Squeezin' me like— Christ. Go on—fuck."

He watches it arrive before you do, a shiver running ahead of the wave; your spine arches up off the bed, your cunt clenches around him in long pulsing, aching, waves —  it takes you under, and you pull him with you.  

He holds you, murmuring filth and praise in equal measure against your ear—

How good—

How gorgeous—

You’re mine now, you know that? Hm?—

It’s watching you eagerly nod along with his babbling that finishes him. He lasts maybe ten more strokes on borrowed time, heat gathering alacritous and irrevocable at the base of his groin — and he rears back onto his knees, pulling out of you with a growl that tumbles from his throat, fist working his cock over, soaked with you, spilling hot across your stomach and hip in thick ropes, head hanging, shoulders heaving, your thighs still bracketing his knees.

When he lifts his head, you’re already looking at him.

Glowing down to your chest, lips parted and kiss-swollen, wearing him low on your stomach — and neither of you says anything. Neither of you looks away either. His chest is still heaving. Your knee presses in against his side, and the corner of your mouth starts to curl, and his does too, helpless about it.

He comes down on his side, careful of the mess he’s made of you, one arm heavy across the pillow above your head. The curtain breathes at the window beside the bed and the night comes in and cools the sweat on his back, and he can see your heartbeat going hard at your throat, the rise and fall of your stomach not yet settled. He gently fits his thumb against your pulse, just to feel it going. 

He kisses you, your mouth lazy under his, and then your temple, and the crown of your head, and you make a low, boneless sound and turn your face into his hot neck, and the two of you just lie there breathing each other in, tangled and settling, your finger drawing slow shapes on his forearm.

"John?" Small, against his throat.

"Mm?"

"Would you mind grabbing me a cloth? Bathroom's just across the hall."

He's up before the sentence finishes, annoyed at his own carcass the whole three steps to the door, ten months out of practice and it shows, he used to know this part, the part where he takes care of you before you have to ask.

You bathroom is small and smells of your shampoo, fruity, herbal. He runs a flannel under the warm tap, wrings it out, catches his own eyes in the mirror over the sink — wrecked hair, beard ruined and shiny with your lipgloss. He turns, craning his neck spotting a blooming red scratch coming up nicely at his shoulder.

He comes back and cleans you up properly, kneeling on the edge of the bed, one hand steady at your hip while the warm cloth moves over your stomach — thorough about it, frowning slightly the way he does when he’s concentrating — and you watch him do it propped up on your elbows with an expression he can't quite read and doesn't need to. It's warm, whatever it is. And it’s aimed at him, so.

"You're staring," he says, not looking up. 

"You're tidying me."

"Should've done it before you asked." He folds the cloth, sets it on the nightstand, and stretches out beside you again, this time gathering you into his chest. "Out of practice."

"I'll allow it," you say, magnanimous, settling your cheek against his pec. "The rest was very in-practice."

He huffs into your hair.

Your fingers trail idle through the hair on his chest, down over old pinked scars, and you ask him about them — whether the jagged line at his shoulder hurt, what caused the puckered one under his ribs — and he answers more honestly than he means to, your weight settling heavier against him as the adrenaline drains.

There's a soft thump from the hallway, then, and a moment later a small shape appears in the doorway — sits, tail wrapping her feet, and surveys the wreckage: the trail of clothes, the stranger man in the bed, you draped over his ribs.

She stares at John.

John stares back.

"We have an audience," he says.

You look over him to see your cat, "Twix, John. John, Twix."

Twix holds his gaze a moment longer, supremely unimpressed, then steps delicately over his discarded shirt and exits the way she came and he feels you giggling before he hears it, the shake of it against his chest.

"That went well," you say, overly pleased. 

“Yeah?”

“Mhm.”

"Well, consider me chuffed."

Some comfortable minutes later he feels you surface a little out of the drowse, feels your breathing change, going careful; feels your face arrange itself against his skin before you speak. 

"You don't have to stay, by the way." Light. Smooth as eroded stone, polished by use, he imagines. "If you'd sleep better in your own bed. No pressure either way."

And there it is — the same maneuver from your texts, the honest thing dressed up so you can't be caught caring — except this time he can feel your heartbeat while you run it, quick against his ribs, betraying the whole performance from inside. 

He keeps his hand moving on your arm, slow, so you know nothing's landed wrong.

"I'll head home," he says. "Not because I want to," he clarifies.

“No?” you ask. 

"Believe me. This is about the last place I want to leave." His hand doesn't stop, slow up, slow down, steadying you through it. "I'd like at least one proper dinner between us before I go makin' a habit of your bed."

You lift your head off his chest and look at him — hair wrecked, eyes searching his face for the trick — and he lets you look as long as you need to because there's no trick to be found. He meant it. 

“Alright," you agree. 

“Yeah?”

“Yes. Dinner sounds nice.”

"Mm," he hums, contented. He presses a kiss into your hair and untangles himself, face scrunched with visible reluctance, and dresses while you watch from the bed with the sheet gathered loose around you.

At the door he stops. 

"C'mere."

You come to him in the sheet, and he kisses you properly, one hand cupping your face, thumb at your cheek. You go languid against him. He takes his time. Long past politeness. Long enough that leaving starts to look renegotiable, and he breaks away before he starts. 

"G’night," he says, low, still holding your face.

"Goodnight."

"I'll ring you about dinner tomorrow."

——

The flat is quiet. But it's a different quiet than the one you left this morning and you stand in the middle of it grinning.

Twix reappears at the edge of the counter and stares. 

“I don’t need the lecture, I’m grown,” you tell her and start walking back to the bedroom, you hear her little jump to the floor and her feather steps catching up with you, “I can have sex. I deserve it, even.” You drop into your bed with a sigh. “You’d understand if you still had ovaries.”