♡ ‧₊˚ ⋅ harper ₊˚⊹ ᢉ𐭩

key: pink is smut, purple is fluff.

JSchlatt:

Tuesday Afternoon:

Summary: You and your long time friend J have never been anything more than friends. When your car fails to start in your garage though, you don’t know who else to call. Annoyed, he comes. While working in your engine bay, you realized there’s an attraction to him that you never quite felt before.

Car Lights:

Summary: Your first date with Jay takes an unexpected turn when a sudden rainstorm strands you two in a parked car. As playful teasing gives way, undeniable chemistry draws them closer, transforming the night into something much more than originally planned.

Lucky Flips Pt. 1:

Summary: After a concert, you find yourself alone in a bar wanting what you usually do after a show. While making yourself entertained, you find yourself face to face with your ex boyfriend, J.

Lucky Flips Pt. 2:

Summary: After what could’ve been an insane, half drunk mistake, you find yourself submitting entirely to the idea of seeing your ex boyfriend, J again.

In For It:

Summary: On the car ride back to the hotel, J has had enough. He explodes, and you explode right back, and soon the whole car is a fireball of accusations and blame. Then, all at once, it’s over. The car is quiet. Your evening to follow, not so much.

When I Say So:

Summary: Early morning. Nothing planned. Orgasm denial. That’s it. That’s the summary.

1:17 AM:

Summary: You and Jay have been close friends for a while, but find yourselves closer than ever on the subway ride home from a friends dinner party.

The Fashion Show:

Summary: J spoils you with an allowance and you spoil him right back.

In A Tent. At A State Park:

Summary: Your old friend Ted asks you to come on a camping trip with his friend, Jay. You agree, but quickly find that you’re crushing on Jay. In a turn of events that night, you find yourself in a strangers tent not sure what’s about to happen next.

Mama's Boy:

Summary: After spoiling Jay all morning, he confesses a dream of his to you.

Ted Nivison:

This Must Be My Dream:

Summary: After hanging out with your friends, you and Ted are alone in his apartment. He’s acting weird, you insist. He won’t admit why. Until he does.

We Better Make it Good Pt. 1:

Summary: You and Ted have been tasked with filming your friend’s birthday party. After a drink or two, you find that you’re filming something much different from the original plan.

We Better Make it Good Pt. 2:

Summary: After a drunken hookup with Ted during a party, you wake up to find him gone but the camera used to film the encounter left behind.

Where The GPS Ends:

Summary: On a roadtrip, you and Ted end up lost and submit to the idea of a hotel room. Skinny dipping in the motel pool turns into stealing his glasses, and you find that you’re in over your head.

In A Tent. At A State Park:

Summary: Your old friend Ted asks you to come on a camping trip with his friend, Jay. You agree, but quickly find that you’re crushing on Jay. In a turn of events that night, you find yourself in a strangers tent not sure what’s about to happen next.

10/10:

The pancakes were a little lopsided, but you arranged the blueberries in a smiley face anyway, because Jay deserved smiley faces on a Tuesday morning.

You’d been at it since six—flipping bacon, squeezing fresh orange juice, tiptoeing around the apartment so you wouldn’t wake him. Now the tray balanced on your forearm as you nudged the bedroom door open with your hip, and there he was: Jay, still half-asleep, his dark curls smashed flat against the pillow, one arm thrown across his eyes like the morning light was a personal offense.

“Good morning, sleepyhead,” you whispered, setting the tray across his lap.

He lowered his arm. Blinked. Looked at the pancakes. Looked at you. His mouth curved into something slow and sweet.

“You made me breakfast in bed?”

“Of course I did.” You smoothed his hair back, pressed a kiss to his forehead. “Eat. It’s getting cold.”

Jay picked up his fork like he was handling something sacred. He cut into the smiley face—sacrilege—but the sound he made when he took the first bite was worth the destruction. You sat on the edge of the mattress and watched him eat, your fingers absently tracing circles on his knee over the comforter.

When he was halfway through, you asked, “What do you want to watch today?”

“Mm. Whatever you want.”

“No.” You plucked the remote from where it lay beside his thigh. “What do you want. You pick.”

He looked at you for a long moment. Something flickered behind his eyes—gratitude, maybe, or something warmer and more complicated. “The new sci-fi thing. The one about the space station.”

You found it. Flipped it on. Adjusted the volume. Set the remote on the nightstand where he could reach it but wouldn’t have to stretch.

“You’re doing laundry today, right?” you asked, already knowing the answer.

“Yeah, I was gonna—”

“I’ll do it. Your basket’s full. I saw it.”

“Babe—”

“Shh. Eat your bacon.”

You kissed his temple this time, lingering just a second longer than necessary, and he leaned into it like a flower turning toward the sun. When you pulled back, his cheeks had gone a shade pinker.

You gathered his laundry basket from the hallway—socks and t-shirts and the hoodie he’d been wearing for three days straight—and carried it to the machine. Sorted the darks from the lights. Started the first load. On your way back to the bedroom, you detoured to the kitchen and poured him a second glass of orange juice, fresh-squeezed, pulp and all, the way he liked it.

When you handed it to him, he set down his fork and took both your hands.

“You know what?” he said.

“What?”

“I love this.” His thumbs moved over your knuckles. “I love being treated like this. Being—spoiled. You’re so good at it. Like, freakishly good.”

You smiled. “It’s not hard. You’re easy to spoil.”

“No, I mean—” He paused. Swallowed. His gaze dropped to your joined hands, then came back up, and there was something hesitant there, something he was chewing on that wasn’t bacon. “You do such a good job. Taking care of me. Making sure I’m—I don’t know. Fed. Comfortable. All of it.”

“Jay.” You squeezed his fingers. “You okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m great. I’m—” A breath. A small, self-conscious laugh. “I’m actually kind of embarrassed right now, which is stupid.”

“It’s not stupid.” You sat back down on the edge of the bed. Waited. Didn’t push, just held his hands and let the quiet do its work.

The space station on the TV hummed with artificial gravity. The washing machine thumped rhythmically from down the hall.

“Can I tell you something?” he finally said.

“Always.”

He wet his lips. His eyes found yours and held them, and you saw the vulnerability there—raw and unguarded and a little scared.

“I’ve had this—thing. For a while. A really long time, actually.” Another pause. You didn’t rush him. “When you do stuff like this—bringing me food, kissing my head, taking the remote—it does something to me. Like, it hits this part of my brain that I don’t usually let anyone near.”

Your pulse picked up, but you kept your voice steady. “What part?”

“The part that—” He exhaled hard through his nose. “The part that wants you to call yourself something. During sex. When we’re—you know.”

You waited. Patient. Warm.

“Mommy,” he said, and the word came out barely above a whisper, like it cost him something to release it into the air between you. “I want you to call yourself Mommy. When we’re together. I’ve had a—God, this sounds so weird saying it out loud—a mommy kink. Like, a major one. Since forever. And the way you're taking care of me today, every day, it just—it makes me feel so safe, and so turned on—”

He stopped. Pressed his lips together. His ears were crimson.

You brought his hand to your mouth and kissed each knuckle, one by one.

“Jay.”

“Yeah?”

“You could have told me that months ago.”

His eyes widened. “Really?”

“Really.” You smiled against his skin. “But I’m glad you told me now. While I was already in full caretaker mode. It’s kind of perfect timing, actually.”

He let out a laugh—relieved, shaky, beautiful. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” You leaned forward and kissed his forehead again, slow and deliberate. Then you pulled back just far enough to meet his eyes, and you let your voice drop into something lower, something that made his breath catch. “Now finish your breakfast, baby. Mommy’s got laundry to fold.”

The washing machine chimed. You slipped away from the bed, pressing one last kiss to the crown of his head, and went to work. Every sock paired, every t-shirt squared and stacked, his jeans pressed flat along their seams. You carried the basket back to the bedroom and found him still propped against the headboard, the tray pushed aside, the sci-fi show playing at a low murmur.

You didn’t just put the clothes away. You reorganized. Took everything out of the closet—the mismatched hangers, the shirts shoved in sideways, the pairs of shoes that had migrated from the shoe rack to the floor. You hung the shirts by color. Folded the sweaters and stacked them on the upper shelf. Matched his socks and rolled them into neat little bundles. Found a box for the shoes and lined them up, toes facing out, like soldiers.

Jay watched you from the bed. He didn’t say anything. Just watched with his lips slightly parted, like he was witnessing something holy.

When the closet was done, you stepped back and surveyed your work. Then you turned and pulled a few pieces from the fresh stack—a pair of soft gray sweatpants, navy boxers with a thin white stripe, and a cozy navy crewneck that was still warm from the dryer.

“Alright,” you sighed, setting the outfit on the dresser and clapping your hands together. “Get up!” you chimed, with a smile on your face.

Jay didn’t move. He was propped on his elbows, watching you with an expression that was half amusement, half something more indulgent—like he was savoring the view, the sound of your voice, the entire performance. His mouth quirked at one corner.

“What?” you said.

“Nothing.” He shrugged, but the smile gave him away. “I’m just—enjoying this. You’re very bossy when you clean.”

You put your hands on your hips. “Mommy’s gotta get you dressed for the day, baby.”

The effect was immediate. His smile faltered. His cheeks flushed—not the soft pink from before, but something deeper, spreading down his neck and into the collar of his sleep shirt. He ducked his head, and you could see the shyness crawl over him in real time, the way his shoulders curved inward, the way his fingers twisted in the comforter.

You picked up the navy crewneck from the dresser. Held it open. He leaned forward, arms extended, and you guided it over his head, down over his shoulders, tugging the hem into place. Your fingers brushed the nape of his neck as you adjusted the collar, and you felt him shiver.

“There we go,” you murmured. “Good boy.”

His breath stuttered. You pretended not to notice.

You turned to grab the boxers and sweatpants from the dresser, and something in your chest shifted. Something warm and deliberate unfurled low in your belly, and you paused there with the fresh clothes in your hands, half-turned toward the dresser, half-turned toward him.

Then you pivoted.

You set the boxers and sweats on the edge of the bed and instead of reaching for the waistband of his old boxers, you let your hand drift to his knee. Slow. Casual. Like you were just adjusting the crewneck again. Your palm slid up the inside of his thigh, over the cotton of his sleep pants, and you let your fingers linger there—not moving, not retreating, just resting against the warm skin of his inner thigh while your thumb traced lazy circles.

Jay went very still.

You let your hand climb higher. Your fingers curled gently around the muscle, pressing into the soft give of him, and you felt the heat radiating off his skin through the fabric. Your fingertips crept another inch. Another. His thighs twitched, and a small, strangled sound escaped his throat—a huff, breathy and involuntary, like it had been punched out of him before he could catch it. His face flooded pink, spreading from his cheeks to his ears to the hollow of his throat, and he looked away quickly, jaw clenched.

“Does it feel good when Mommy touches you like that?” you cooed, your voice honeyed and low.

He nodded. Just barely. His eyes were fixed on your hand, tracking every micro-movement like he was hypnotized. Through the thin cotton of his boxers, you could see him hardening—the slow, unmistakable swell of him, straining against the fabric, and your heart kicked against your ribs.

You brought your hand up and palmed him through the boxers, rubbing your thumb along his length in one slow, dragging stroke. He was already so hard, so responsive under your touch, and you watched his mouth fall open, watched his chest rise and fall in shallow, stuttering breaths.

“All this?” you murmured, squeezing gently. “For me, baby?”

His eyes flickered up to yours—dark, dilated, almost glassy—then dropped to your mouth, then climbed back to your eyes. He couldn’t seem to hold your gaze for more than a second. His lips parted but no sound came out.

“Hmm?” you hummed, squeezing gently. “I asked you a question, sweetheart.”

“Yes, Mommy,” he whispered. The word came out cracked and reverent, like a prayer.

You hooked your fingers into the waistband of his boxers and drew them down in one smooth motion. He was fully hard now, flushed and straining, a bead of pre-cum already gathering at his tip, and the sound he made when the cool air hit him was small and desperate.

“I have a new pair for you to wear,” you said, glancing at the folded boxers on the bed. “But I think Mommy has to take care of you first, huh?”

He swallowed. His Adam’s apple bobbed. “Yes,” he breathed. “Please.”

You leaned down. Pressed your lips to the inside of his knee. Then higher—the soft skin of his inner thigh, the crease where leg met hip, your mouth open and warm against him. You kissed your way up slowly, deliberately, and when you reached his cock you nuzzled against it first, breathing him in, before placing the softest, gentlest kiss right on the tip. Then another. Then you let your tongue flick out—a kitten-lick, barely there—and he shuddered so hard the mattress creaked.

His fingers found your hair. Threaded through it. Not pulling, not yet—just holding, trembling.

You licked him again. Longer this time, from the very base—where he was hottest, where the skin was thinnest and most responsive—all the way back up to his tip in one long, deliberate drag. His hips jerked involuntarily, and his grip tightened in your hair.

Then you took him into your mouth. All the way. Slow and deep, your lips stretching around him, your tongue pressing flat against his shaft as you hollowed your cheeks. The moan that broke out of him was so soft, so broken, it sounded almost pained—a high, breathy thing that made your chest ache with how much he was holding back.

You pulled off with a wet sound, resting your chin against his thigh, looking up at him through your lashes. “You’re being so good for me,” you murmured, and your voice came out rougher than you intended. “So good, baby. Mommy’s going to take care of you. I promise.”

Another moan. Longer this time. His head tipped back against the headboard, the cords of his neck standing out, and his fingers tightened in your hair.

You took him back into your mouth, deeper this time, and you worked him with your tongue and your lips and the flat of your hand where your mouth couldn’t reach. His breathing changed—quicker, sharper, his hips starting to rock up into the wet heat of you in small, desperate thrusts. His grip in your hair tightened, and you could feel the tension coiling at the base of his spine, the way his thighs were shaking on either side of you.

You pulled off. His cock was glistening, straining, and his eyes were glassy when they found yours.

“I’m not done with you yet, sweet boy,” you whispered.

He whined—a real, honest-to-God whine, high and needy in the back of his throat. “Mommy—”

You stood. Your hands went to the waistband of your own bottoms—the soft cotton shorts you’d thrown on that morning—and you pushed them down your thighs, stepping out of them without breaking eye contact. You were already wet, you realized, had been for longer than you’d admitted to yourself, the ache between your legs sharp and insistent.

You climbed onto the bed. Straddled his lap, your knees sinking into the mattress on either side of his hips. His hands found your waist immediately, fingers digging into your skin, and you reached between you to guide him—sliding his length through your wet folds, pressing him against your clit, grinding down in slow, deliberate circles.

His head fell back. “Oh—fuck—”

“Language, baby,” you breathed, but you were smiling, and your voice was shaking. You rolled your hips again, coating him in your wetness, and the sound he made was something between a moan and a sob.

“Mommy—” he gasped, and the word was a prayer.

“Yeah?” You leaned down, bracing your hands on his chest, your hair falling around both of you like a curtain. “Use your words, sweetheart. Tell Mommy what you need.”

“I need—I need you to—please—”

“Please what?” You rocked forward, letting him slip through your folds again, and his hands flew to your hips, gripping hard.

“Inside,” he whispered. “Please, Mommy, I want to be inside you.”

You sank down another inch. His head fell back. “You want Mommy to ride you?”

“Yes—God, yes—”

“Is that what my good boy wants?”

“Yes.” His hands found your hips, fingers digging in, but he didn’t push—he held, he waited, he let you control it. “Please, Mommy, I’ve been so good—”

“You have.” You reached between you again. Guided him to your entrance. Held his gaze as you sank down—slow, agonizingly slow—taking him inch by inch until he was buried to the hilt and you were panting against his mouth, your forehead pressed to his. “You’ve been the best boy. That’s why Mommy’s going to give you exactly what you need.”

He was shaking. Actually shaking—his whole body trembling beneath you, his fingers digging bruises into your hips, his breath coming in short, broken gasps. You stayed still for a moment, letting him adjust, letting yourself adjust, the fullness of him almost overwhelming.

“You feel so good,” you breathed. “You feel so good inside Mommy, baby. Are you comfortable? Does it feel good?”

“Feels—” His voice cracked. He swallowed. “Feels so good, Mommy, you’re—you’re so warm, you’re so—”

“I know.” You rolled your hips, just a fraction, and his whole body jolted. “I know, sweetheart. You’re doing so well. You’re being so good for me.”

You started to move. Slow, deep, pulls that had him clutching at you, his face buried in your neck, his breath hot and ragged against your skin, as you pushed yourself back down. You felt every tremor that ran through him, every involuntary thrust upward, every broken syllable of your name.

“Look at you,” you murmured, cupping his face in your hands, tilting his chin up so he’d look at you. You let your hips find a rhythm—bouncing on him, slow and deep at first, then picking up pace, your thighs burning with the effort, the wet sound of your bodies meeting filling the quiet bedroom. You took his hands from your waist and lifted them to your breasts, pressing his palms flat against you, encouraging his fingers to curl and squeeze. His thumbs found your nipples through your thin t-shirt, and the groan that ripped out of him was so raw it made you clench around him.

“Deep breath for me, baby,” you whispered, your voice steady even though your body was trembling. “Use your words, not your whines.”

He looked up at you, his eyebrows stitched together like it physically hurt to form a sentence. His lips were swollen, his jaw slack, and the flush on his cheeks had spread down his chest, visible above the collar of the navy crewneck you’d dressed him in that morning.

“You feel so good—” he choked out, and his voice was wrecked, barely recognizable. “I think I’m gonna come.”

The words hung between you, desperate and honest. You slowed your pace immediately—dragging it out, rolling your hips in a deep, grinding circle that had him squeezing your breasts so tight it almost hurt. He whined into your shoulder, high and broken, his hips bucking up in short, aborted thrusts.

“Not yet,” you whispered, pressing your lips to his temple. “Not yet, sweetheart. Mommy’s not done loving you.”

“Please—” The word was muffled against your skin, wet and desperate.

“Please what?” You pulled back just enough to see his face, your hand coming up to cup his jaw, thumb stroking along his cheekbone.

“Please let me—I need—”

“You need to come?”

He nodded frantically against your neck, his curls tickling your chin. “Please, Mommy, I’ve been so good—”

“You have.” You rolled your hips once—deep and devastating, the angle hitting something inside you that made your vision blur—and he sobbed, a real sob, his whole body shuddering beneath you. “You’ve been perfect. But Mommy wants you to wait a little longer. Can you do that for me? Can you be patient?”

“I—I’ll try—” His voice cracked on the last word, and his hands trembled where they gripped your breasts, like he was physically holding himself together.

“That’s my boy.” You kissed him—properly, deeply, your tongue sliding against his, tasting the orange juice and the salt of his sweat—and you felt him moan into your mouth, his entire body shivering beneath you like a leaf in the wind. “That’s my good, patient boy.”

You pulled back just far enough to speak against his lips, your forehead still pressed to his. His eyes were squeezed shut, and you could feel the effort it took him—the rigid tension in his thighs, the way his fingers kept flexing against your skin, the way his cock twitched inside you with every heartbeat.

“I know it’s hard,” you murmured, pressing a kiss to the corner of his mouth. “I know, baby. But Mommy needs you to hold on just a little longer. Can you do that for me?”

“Yes, Mommy.” The words came out strangled, like they’d been pulled from somewhere deep in his chest.

“Good.” You kissed him again—softer this time, lingering. “So good for me. You’re always so good.”

You shifted your weight, lifting yourself almost all the way off him before sinking back down in one long, torturous slide. His hands flew to your hips, gripping hard enough to bruise, and a sound tore out of him that wasn’t quite a word—something guttural and wrecked, vibrating against your collarbone where his face had buried itself.

“Shh,” you breathed, carding your fingers through his curls. “Shh, sweetheart. Mommy’s got you. You’re doing so well.”

“I can’t—” he gasped, and his voice was so small, that something in your chest cracked open. “Mommy, I can’t—it’s too much—”

“You can.” You stilled your hips, just held him there, full and deep, and you felt him shake and shake and shake. “You can, baby. Mommy’s so proud of you.”

His lower lip trembled. You kissed it. Held his face in both hands like he was the most precious thing you’d ever touched, and maybe he was.

“I need to move again,” you told him. “Can you handle it? Can Mommy move?”

“Y-yes—”

“Use your words.”

“Yes, Mommy. Please move. Please—”

“Good boy.” You began to ride him again—not the bouncing from before, but something slower, something that undulated through your whole body, your core tightening around him with every downstroke. His hands moved onto your breasts, and you covered them with your own, showing him how to touch you, how to squeeze and roll and press.

“That’s it,” you breathed. “Just like that. You’re learning so fast.”

He made a sound that wasn’t quite a word—something between a moan and a whimper—and you felt his cock jump inside you, but you didn’t slow down this time. You kept going, kept rolling, kept whispering into his ear—good boy, so good, you’re doing so well, Mommy’s right here, Mommy’s got you—until his breathing changed, until the shivers became full-body tremors, until his hands left your breasts and grabbed your hips and held on like he was drowning.

“Tell me what you need,” you whispered. “Use your words.”

“Just—” He swallowed. His throat worked. “Just—keep talking to me. Please. Keep calling me—”

“Calling you what?”

“Your boy,” he whispered. “Your good boy.”

Your heart clenched so hard you thought it might stop. You pressed your lips to his forehead, then his temple, then the bridge of his nose, then the corner of his mouth.

“My good boy,” you repeated, and the words came out thick and warm and certain. “My perfect, patient boy. The best boy Mommy’s ever had. You’re doing so well. You’re being so brave.”

He made a sound—half laugh, half sob—and his grip on your hips loosened, just slightly, like he was finally letting himself trust that you wouldn’t let him fall.

That’s it,” you breathed. “That’s it, baby. Just like that. You’re taking Mommy so well. You feel so good inside me, you know that? So perfect.”

His expression cracked open—something raw and unguarded flashing across his face—and you knew, in that moment, that you had him. Completely. Utterly. In the palm of your hand, in the cradle of your hips, in the soft space between one breath and the next.

“Mommy,” he gasped, and it was the most beautiful thing you’d ever heard.

You rolled your hips once more—deep, deliberate, final—and you felt the dam break. You felt it in the way his whole body seized, the way his cock swelled and pulsed inside you, the way his mouth fell open against your neck and a sound came out of him that was beyond language—raw, guttural, stripped of everything except need. His release hit you in waves, and you rode him through every one, your own orgasm building on the momentum of his, cresting and breaking and pulling you under in a rush of heat that left you gasping against his shoulder.

“Good boy,” you whispered, and you felt him cry—really cry, his chest heaving, his face buried in your neck—and you held him through that too, your hands in his hair, your lips pressed to his temple, your voice a steady murmur against his skin. “My good boy, coming for Mommy.”

The space station hummed on the TV. The apartment was still, and warm, and full of the smell of pancakes and sex and something softer—something that felt like home.

You didn’t move. You stayed exactly where you were—straddling him, his face still against your neck—and you rocked him gently, your hand cradling the side of his face, your lips moving against his hair.

“That was—” He stopped. Swallowed. His voice was hoarse, scraped raw. “That was a lot.”

“Yeah.” You smiled against his curls. “It was.”

He pulled back. Looked at you and there was something in his expression that made your chest hurt—something so open, so unguarded, that it felt like looking directly at the sun.

“Can we—” He paused. Licked his lips. “Can we do that again? Like—regularly?”

You laughed—quiet, warm, a little breathless. “Yeah, baby. We can do that regularly.”

He buried his face back in your neck. His arms came around you, holding on tight, and you felt him smile against your skin.

The afternoon sun warmed your shoulders as you strolled beside Ted along the cobblestone path. First dates should feel awkward, you thought, but this one didn’t. His fingers intertwined with yours, and you couldn’t help but to notice how your hand disappeared completely within his grasp. 

You’d made it through lunch without spilling anything on yourself or saying anything catastrophically stupid—a minor miracle given the way your hands had shaken when he’d pulled your chair out—and now you were walking the two blocks back to his car, and he was holding your hand, and you were trying very hard not to think about how many nerve endings were currently firing in your palm

His hand engulfed yours. That was the only word for it. Your fingers disappeared inside his grip like a child’s, and you found yourself sneaking glances down at the contrast—your slim fingers dwarfed by his broad palm, his knuckles rough and squared where yours were smooth. His thumb traced a slow, absent circle on the back of your hand, and you felt that circle travel straight up your arm and settle somewhere behind your ribs.

“You’re staring,” he said, and his voice had that low, amused quality to it that you’d already catalogued in the first hour as your favorite.

You laughed, and it came out too bright, too breathy, and you hated yourself a little for it. “Your hand is just—” You held them both up, side by side, and the size difference was almost comical. His fingers stretched nearly two inches past yours. “It’s enormous. Do you play basketball? Is that what this is?”

“Volleyball, actually.”

“Of course you do.”

He grinned, and the crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes deepened, and you decided right then that you would never recover from this man, and it had been exactly one lunch.

When you reached his car—an old Toyota Tacoma, that somehow suited him perfectly—he opened your door, old-fashioned, sweet, the kind of thing that made your chest tight, and you slid into the passenger seat while he circled around to the driver’s side. 

He started the engine. Some soft indie folk thing came on—his playlist, you assumed, curated and careful—and he glanced at you as he pulled out of the spot, his eyes doing that thing where they lingered a beat longer than necessary.

“So,” he said. “Rate the date. Scale of one to ten. Brutal honesty.”

“Seven.”

His eyebrows shot up. “Seven?”

“I’m leaving room for improvement. You’ve got the drive home to bump it up.”

“Oh, I’ve got to perform now.” He shook his head, but he was smiling, both hands resting loosely on the wheel, thumbs tapping in time to the music.

The road unwound ahead of you, and you remembered the way he’d lifted that camera at lunch, the way it had looked like a toy in his grip, this chunky DSLR that should have been substantial, rendered miniature by the span of his fingers curling around it. You’d watched him frame the shot over the table, his thumb working the shutter button, and the whole apparatus had looked like something a child might hold.

“Your camera,” you said, and you were staring out the passenger window but you could feel him glance over. “When you were taking pictures at the restaurant. It looked so small in your hands.”

“Small?”

“Tiny. Like you were holding a deck of cards.” You turned to face him, and the late sunlight caught the side of his jaw. “Everything looks small next to you, I think. That’s the thing.”

You said it lightly, the way you’d say anything lightly, but you felt the weight of it settle between you in the cab of the truck. Your pulse did something stupid against your throat.

Ted was quiet for a moment. Then he looked at you—a slow, sideways glance that started at your eyes and traveled down to your mouth and back up again—and his lips curved into something that wasn’t quite a smile. Something more deliberate than that.

“Noted,” he said quietly.

Your face went hot. You turned back to the window and pressed your forehead against the cool glass and wondered if the glass could feel your heartbeat through your skull.

The drive passed in that warm, charged silence, the playlist doing most of the work, and before you’d fully prepared yourself, he was pulling into your driveway. 

He put the truck in park and left it running, the engine ticking softly underneath you, and you both sat there for a beat too long.

“Thanks for lunch,” you said.

“Thanks for the seven.”

You laughed, and it was real this time, not breathy, and you looked at him and he looked at you, and the air between you felt like it had been stretched thin.

“So,” he said. “I’ll text you?”

“Or.”

“Or?”

“You could come in.” You said it too fast, and then you backpedaled immediately because that was what you did, that was your whole thing. “To look at the photos. On the camera. Since you took them and I haven’t even—I mean, I’d like to see them. If you want to show me. On the camera screen. Not like—on a computer. Obviously.”

You were babbling. You knew you were babbling. Ted was watching you babble with an expression of deep, delighted fondness, and you wanted to die, but also you wanted him to come inside more than you wanted to stop babbling.

“The camera screen,” he repeated.

“Yes.”

“You want me to come inside and show you photos on a two-inch screen.”

“Yes,” you said. “It’s a very compelling two inches.”

He killed the engine. Just like that. The silence that followed was enormous, and you were already unbuckling your seatbelt, already climbing out of the truck, already walking up your front path with your keys jangling in your stupid shaking hand, and you could hear his shoes on the gravel behind you, unhurried, steady, the sound of a man who had all the time in the world.

You got the door open, and you didn’t trip over the threshold, which felt like another small miracle, and you flicked on the lamp beside the couch because the living room was dim and warm and you didn’t want to commit to overhead lighting, not tonight, not with him standing in your doorway filling the frame like he’d been designed to.

“Come in,” you said, which was redundant, because he was already in, already toeing off his shoes by the door the way someone who’d been raised right always did, and you gestured vaguely at the couch. “Sit. Wherever. There.”

He sat. You sat beside him. Not close—not not close—but close enough that you could feel the heat coming off him, this steady ambient warmth that seemed to radiate from everywhere his body occupied space. The couch dipped under his weight, and you felt yourself tilt toward him, just slightly, just enough to notice.

He pulled the camera from the bag at his feet and settled it across his thigh, and the screen flickered to life, casting a pale blue glow across the lower half of his face. The first photo loaded—a shot of the restaurant ceiling, abstract, probably accidental—and you both laughed at it, and then the next one was better, and the next one was better still, and you found yourself leaning in, drawn by the warmth and the light and the way his arm pressed along the length of yours where you sat.

He was angled toward you now, his shoulder dipping into your space, and even though you were both sitting on the same couch, you could feel him leaning over you, this gravitational pull that had nothing to do with physics and everything to do with the particular way he occupied air. His thumb hovered over the review button, about to advance to the next shot, and before you could think about it—before the thinking part of your brain could catch up with the part that had been noting the shape of his hands since lunch—you laid your hand over his.

Your palm pressed flat against the back of his hand, and you pushed your thumb overtop of his, and you pressed the button through him, advancing the photo yourself. Your skin was warm against his, and his skin was warmer, and you felt the fine tremor that ran through his wrist at the contact.

It was a small thing. A nothing thing. A flirt so minor it barely qualified. But Ted went very still beside you, and you felt the stillness in the way his breath caught and held, and then he turned his head to look at you, and his eyes were dark and amused and something else entirely.

“Look at that,” he murmured, and his voice had dropped half an octave, and you felt it in your sternum. He shifted the camera to his other hand—casual, unhurried—and held his free hand up between you, palm out, and you placed yours against it, fingers spread, and the difference was obscene. Your hand covered barely half of his palm. Your fingers reached only to the middle knuckle of his. It was like comparing a sparrow to a hawk.

“You’re so little,” he said, and the word landed somewhere between wonder and mischief.

“I’m average-sized. You’re the anomaly.”

“Am I.” He wasn’t asking. He was turning his hand over, catching yours in it, folding your fingers gently into his grip until your fist disappeared inside his palm. He laughed—this low, warm sound that vibrated through the couch—and then, with that same unhurried deliberateness, he lifted his free hand and pressed his palm flat against your face.

His hand covered everything. Your nose, your cheeks, the ridge of your brow. Your whole face fit inside the span of his fingers, and you could feel the cool metal of his rings against your temple, and you could see him through the gaps between his fingers, grinning down at you with that terrible, delighted expression.

“I could cover your whole face,” he said. “Look at that. One hand. Gone.”

“Ted—”

“Just—gone. Poof. Where’d she go.” He was laughing properly now, and you were laughing too, or trying to, your breath warm against his palm. “You’re like a little thing. A little—I don’t know. A little person.”

You grabbed his wrist. Your fingers didn’t even close all the way around it—you felt the tendon shift under your grip, felt the steady thrum of his pulse against your thumb—and you pulled his hand away from your face, and you held it there between you, and you looked at him.

You didn’t break eye contact. You brought his hand to your mouth, and you took his index and middle finger between your lips, and you drew them in, slow, deliberate, the way you’d been thinking about since he’d first wrapped that hand around yours on the cobblestone path. You felt the cool press of metal against your tongue—the silver band on his middle finger, the thicker one on his pointer—and you tasted salt and skin and something faintly electric, and you took him deeper, past the second knuckle, until your lips brushed his rings, and you held there.

His breath left him in a rush. You heard it—felt it—the sharp intake cutting off halfway through. His fingers went still against your tongue, and then, very slowly, they curled, the pad of his middle finger pressing against your tongue, and the sound he made was barely a sound at all. More of a vibration. A low, wrecked hum that traveled from his chest through his arm through his fingers and into you.

Your eyes never left his. His had gone dark, the pupils swallowing the warm brown almost entirely, and his jaw was set, and the muscle in his forearm was tight under your grip, and you could feel the tension running through him like a current.

You released his fingers slowly, your lips dragging over his knuckles, and a thin strand of saliva caught the light between your mouth and his hand before breaking. You were breathing hard, and he was breathing harder, and the camera had been forgotten entirely, lying screen-down on the cushion between you.

For a long moment, neither of you moved. The indie folk playlist was still playing faintly from his phone in his pocket, some distant guitar, and the lamp beside the couch cast everything in warm amber, and his hand was still suspended in the air between you, fingers glistening, and you watched him look at them—at the wet shine of your mouth on his skin—and watched something shift behind his eyes.

“Okay,” he said quietly. His voice was wrecked. Absolutely wrecked. “Okay, that’s—”

“Seven,” you said. “Remember? Room for improvement.”

He made a sound—half laugh, half groan—and his hand came up to cup the back of your neck, and his fingers threading into the hair at your nape, and he pulled you forward with a gentleness that belied the way his pulse was hammering against your temple.

“I think I can do better than a seven,” he said, and then he was kissing you.

His mouth found yours and the kiss was slow and deliberate, nothing frantic about it, nothing rushed—just the steady, devastating pressure of his lips parting against yours, his tongue tracing the seam of your mouth until you opened for him, until you were tasting him back, and his hand was cradling the back of your skull like you were something he was afraid of breaking. 

You made a sound into his mouth that you didn’t recognize as your own, and his free hand found your waist, and his fingers spread so wide they reached nearly from your hip to your ribcage, and you felt yourself being drawn sideways, pulled into his lap without either of you seeming to decide it. His hands settled on your hips and you felt how his thumbs nearly met across the valley of your hipbones, and you were kissing him with your hands in his hair, your fingers buried in the dark thickness of it, and his mouth was hot and sweet and perfect.

The adrenaline was electric—a first date, your living room, this enormous man beneath you—and your pulse was doing something arrhythmic and stupid against your ribs. You could feel his heart too, hammering through his chest against yours, and you thought, he’s nervous too, and the thought made you bolder, made you shift your weight forward until you were pressed flush against him, and his hands slid from your hips up your sides, slow, proprietary, mapping the curve of your waist, the dip of your ribs, the swell of—

His palms found your breasts and you gasped into his mouth.

His hands were so big. That was the only thought your brain could produce, looping on repeat like a broken record—so big, so big, so big—because both of his hands covered you entirely, his fingers curling around the sides, his thumbs pressing into the soft center, and you felt the heat of his palms through the thin fabric of your shirt and your bra and your skin, and you arched into it involuntarily, and he made a sound against your lips that was almost a growl.

“Jesus,” he breathed, pulling back just far enough to look at you. His eyes were dark, his lips wet, and his hands were still on you, over your t-shirt, still holding you, and you watched his gaze drop to where his fingers disappeared around the curve of your breast. “Look at this. Look at how—you’re—” He flexed his hands, gently, experimentally, and you felt your breath stutter. “You fit in my hands. You just—fit.”

“Ted—”

His one hand slid down from your breast, down your stomach, and he caught your right hand where it rested on his thigh. Your fingers disappeared into his grip. He lifted your hand—your tiny, manicured, absurdly small hand—and brought it between you, and placed it, palm down, flat against the front of his jeans.

You felt it. God, you felt it. The hard, thick length of him straining against the denim, impossibly large, impossibly warm, and your hand—your stupid little hand—barely covered half of it. The ridge of him pressed into your palm and extended past your fingers on both sides, and your mouth went dry, and your pulse was hammering so hard you could hear it in your ears.

“Ted.” Your voice came out strangled. “Ted, that’s—”

“Mm?”

“You’re—” You looked down at your hand, at the way it looked resting against him, dwarfed, ridiculous, and then you looked up at his face, and he was watching you with an expression of such naked, uncomplicated want that your chest ached. “That’s not fair. That’s not—nobody told me.”

“Told you what?”

That you were built like—like that.” You pressed your palm flat again, feeling the heat of him through the denim, feeling the sheer impossible scale of what you were touching, and something between panic and desire twisted in your gut. “I don’t—I don’t know if my hand can even—”

“It can.” He said it quietly, firmly, his thumb stroking the back of your hand where it rested against him. “You’re a big girl, you can take it.”

“Undo my belt,” he said.

Not a question. Not a demand, exactly—something gentler than that, something that left room for you to say no, that left every door open—but spoken with a quiet authority that made your stomach drop straight through the floor. His thumb was still stroking the back of your hand, slow, steady, patient. You looked at him—his jaw set, his eyes dark, his hand still warm over yours where it pressed against him—and you nodded, because your voice had apparently abandoned you somewhere around the time he’d said big girl.

Your fingers found the buckle. The leather was thick and worn, and the metal was cool under your fingertips, and your hands were shaking so badly you fumbled the first pass, the prong slipping free and then catching again, and Ted didn’t rush you. He just watched, his chest rising and falling with slow, deliberate breaths, his hand coming up to brush a strand of hair behind your ear with a tenderness that made your throat tight.

He lifted his hips, just slightly, just enough, and you hooked your fingers into the waistband of his jeans and tugged, and the button came undone, and the zipper sang its low metal song, and you pulled the denim down past his hips, just far enough, just to the middle of his thighs, and there was the dark cotton of his boxers underneath, strained tight, and the shape of him underneath that—

You couldn’t breathe.

He hooked his thumbs into the elastic and pulled his boxers down, and he sprang free, and you actually made a sound—a small, involuntary sound, barely a word, something between a gasp and a laugh—because the jeans had lied. The jeans had been a filthy, dishonest intermediary, because what was in front of you now was something else entirely.

He was huge. Obscenely, impossibly, almost comically huge. The shaft was thick, veined, flushed dark, curving slightly to the left, and the head was broad and smooth and glistening at the tip, and the whole thing rested heavy against the lower ridge of his stomach, and you were staring, you were staring the way you’d stare at a natural disaster, with a kind of horrified, fascinated awe.

He reached down and took your hand—your stupid little trembling hand—and he wrapped it around the base of his cock, and your fingers didn’t close. They couldn’t close. Your thumb and your middle finger didn’t meet, not even close—there was a full inch of gap between them, maybe more, and the shaft was hot and heavy and alive in your grip, and you could feel his pulse throbbing against your palm, a slow, deep rhythm that matched the one hammering in your chest.

“Look at that,” he murmured. He was looking down at where your hand gripped him—or failed to grip him, really, because your fingers couldn’t wrap around him, couldn’t contain him, and the contrast was obscene. He lifted his own hand and wrapped it around himself, right above where yours was, and his fingers closed neatly around the shaft, his thumb overlapping his index finger comfortably, the way a man might grip a baseball. Easy. Casual. Like it was nothing.

Then he placed his hand over yours—his palm covering your knuckles, his fingers wrapping around yours, holding your grip in place—and the difference was so stark it was almost funny. His hand engulfed yours completely. Your fingers disappeared inside his grip, wrapped around his cock, and his fingers wrapped around yours, and you were both holding him, and you could feel the heat of him and the heat of his hand and the sheer impossible scale of what you were touching, and your brain short-circuited.

“See the difference?” he said, and his voice was rough, wrecked, and he was squeezing your hand gently around him, and you could feel the blood rushing under the skin, feel the way he pulsed against your palm. “Your hand doesn’t fit. Yours can’t even—look, your thumb doesn’t reach.”

“I can see that, Ted.”

“Say it.”

“Say what?”

“Say you can’t reach. Say your hand can’t wrap around me.”

You looked up at him, and his eyes were dark and steady and patient, and his hand was still covering yours, and his cock was hot and heavy in your grip, and you felt the words catch in your throat before they came out.

“I can’t reach,” you whispered. “My hand—it doesn’t wrap around you. I can’t even—there’s a gap.”

“Mm.” The sound he made was low, satisfied, almost reverent. “There it is.”

You shifted. You slid off the couch—off his lap, off the warm cushion—and your knees hit the carpet, and you were kneeling between his thighs, and he was above you, enormous, his cock standing thick in front of your face, and you tipped your head back to look up at him, and you felt small. You felt properly, genuinely small, the way you’d felt when he’d covered your face with his hand, and the feeling should have been terrifying but it wasn’t—it was something else entirely, something warm and electric and desperate.

You leaned forward. The first touch of your lips against the head was electric—hot and smooth and impossibly broad—and you opened your mouth and took the tip, and even that was almost too much. Your lips stretched around him and you could feel the weight of him resting against your tongue, heavy and insistent, and you bobbed your head, just over the head, just the first inch, and it felt ridiculous. It felt like trying to fit your mouth around a fist.

You pulled back and you looked up at him, and his eyes were dark and fixed on you with an intensity that made your skin prickle.

“I don’t—” Your voice cracked. You swallowed. “I don’t think I can take all of you, Ted.”

“You can.” His hand found the back of your head, his fingers threading into your hair, gentle, impossibly gentle for a hand that size. “You’ll take what you can. We’ll go slow.”

“I don’t even know if my mouth—”

“Shh.” His thumb traced a slow arc behind your ear, and the gentleness of it made your eyes sting. “Just open for me. Just a little more. One inch at a time.”

You opened your mouth. You took him back in, the head pressing against your tongue, and you let yourself sink forward, and the first inch stretched your lips, and the second inch hit the back of your mouth, and your eyes watered immediately, and you made a sound—a wet, overwhelmed sound—and Ted’s hand tightened in your hair, just fractionally.

“There you go,” he murmured. “There you go, baby. Look at that. Look at that little mouth trying to take me.”

You sank another inch. Then another. The stretch was obscene—you could feel your jaw trembling, feel the ache spreading into your temples—and you were barely halfway, barely past the midpoint, and you could feel the thick length of him pressing against the roof of your mouth, and your throat clenched around nothing, already anticipating.

His hand was steady on the back of your skull. He wasn’t pushing—not yet—just holding, just guiding, his thumb stroking slow circles at the nape of your neck while you worked yourself down, inch by inch.

“Jesus,” he breathed, and his voice had gone rough, wrecked, the words barely holding together. “Look at your face. Look at how small your mouth looks around me. You’re—fuck, you’re barely halfway and you look like you’re choking on it.”

You were. You kind of were. Your eyes were streaming, and your jaw was shaking, and you pulled back, gasping, a thick line of spit falling from your lower lip to your chin, and you pressed your forehead against his inner thigh and tried to breathe.

“Hey.” His hand was in your hair, lifting your head, tilting your face up to look at him. His eyes were soft and dark and utterly destroyed. “You’re doing so good. You’re doing so fucking good.”

He shifted and then his hands were under your arms—both of them, his palms spanning your ribcage like he was lifting a doll—and he stood. Just like that. He stood up from the couch with you still kneeling between his thighs, and he brought you with him, your body rising as if you weighed nothing at all, and your feet left the carpet and for one suspended moment you were airborne, and then he was walking.

Two steps. Three. The wall hit your back—the cool plaster against the small of your back where your shirt had ridden up—and Ted pressed into you, and the size of him, the sheer scale of him pressed against the front of your body, made your breath stutter and stop.

He towered. That was the only word. He was above you, his chest blocking out the lamplight, his shadow swallowing you whole, and you had to crane your neck to look up at his face, and his hands were everywhere—on your hips, your waist, your ribs—and his fingers were pulling at fabric, impatient now, the patience from the couch abandoned. Your shirt first, over your head in one smooth motion, his knuckles grazing your cheek on the way up, and then your bra, the clasp popping between his fingers like it was made of thread, and then his hands were on your skin, bare and hot and enormous, and you gasped into his mouth when he kissed you again, hard this time, nothing gentle about it.

He worked your jeans down your hips, and you kicked them off, and then you were standing there in nothing, pressed between him and the wall, and you could feel the heat of him through his open jeans, the hard ridge of his cock pressing against your stomach, and your skin was prickling everywhere, every nerve ending firing at once.

He lifted you. One hand under your thigh, the other at the small of your back, and you were rising again, rising until your face was level with his, and your legs wrapped around his waist instinctively, your ankles locking behind him, and his arms held you there like you weighed nothing, like you were made of air, and your back was flush against the cool plaster and his body was flush against yours, and you could feel the solid wall of his chest against your bare breasts, feel the steady hammer of his heart through his sternum.

His free hand laced between you, and you felt his fingers at your center, testing, circling, and you were so wet it was embarrassing, so wet you could feel it against his palm, and he made a sound—this low, wrecked growl—and his fingers pressed inside you, two of them, thick and rough, and they filled you almost completely, and your breath left you in a rush.

“Ted—” Your voice was barely a whisper, barely a sound. You looked up at him, and your eyes were wide, and your hands were shaking where they gripped his shoulders. “I don’t—Ted, I don’t think it’ll fit inside me.”

He looked at you. His eyes were dark, his jaw set, his breath coming in slow, deliberate pulls. His fingers were still inside you, stretching you, working you open with a gentleness that seemed at odds with the size of his hands, and he pressed a kiss to your forehead—slow, lingering—and then his lips found your ear.

“We’ll make it fit,” he said. Quiet. Certain. Like it was already decided, like the physics of it had been settled before either of you walked through the door.

His fingers withdrew, and you felt the sudden absence, the empty stretch, and then he was positioning himself—the broad, slick head of his cock pressing against your entrance, and the stretch was immediate, was devastating, was so much more than you’d braced for that a sound tore out of you—half gasp, half sob—and your fingers dug into his shoulders, your nails biting into the cotton of his t-shirt.

He pushed in. Slow. Inch by inch, the way he’d said, and your body resisted and then yielded and then resisted again, and the fullness was astronomical, was impossible.

“Look at me,” he said, and his voice was wrecked, absolutely destroyed, and you forced your eyes open and found his. “Look at me. You’re doing it. You’re taking it.”

“Ted—” Your voice cracked. “Ted, you’re so—you’re so big, I can feel you—I can feel you everywhere—”

“I know.” His forehead pressed against yours, and his arms were shaking where they held you against the wall, and he was still pushing, still sinking deeper, and you felt the moment the last inch seated, felt the heavy press of his hips against yours, and you were full. Impossibly, completely, devastatingly full. “I know, baby. I know. You’re so full of me right now. Look at your face.”

You couldn’t even feel your face. You couldn’t do anything except feel—the stretch, the heat, the impossible scale of him inside you, and the way his body cradled yours, held you, pinned you between himself and the wall like you were weightless.

He pulled back. Slowly. Then he drove forward, and the sound you made was obscene—a wet, broken cry that echoed off the plaster—and he did it again, and again, and the rhythm built, and your body learned him, adapted to him, stretched around him, and you could feel every ridge, every vein, every pulse of blood through his cock, and your legs tightened around his waist and your back scraped against the wall and you were nothing but sensation, nothing but the feeling of being filled and held and overwhelmed.

“Tell me,” he breathed against your neck, his breath hot and ragged. “Tell me how it feels.”

“It’s—” You couldn’t form sentences. Your brain had stopped producing language. “You’re—you’re so big, Ted, you’re splitting me open, I can feel you in my—I can feel you in my stomach—”

“Good.” He drove deeper, and you sobbed. “That’s good. That’s exactly where I want to be.”

His mouth found your neck—the junction of your throat and your shoulder—and his teeth scraped, and then he bit down, hard, and the pain was bright and sharp and electric, and your body clenched around him involuntarily, and he groaned against your skin, and you felt the heat of his mouth, the suction, the deliberate press of his teeth, and you knew he was marking you, claiming you, leaving a bruise that would last for days, and the thought made something possessive and desperate twist in your chest.

“You’re mine,” he murmured against your throat, his lips moving over the mark he was making. “Look at this. Look at how you fit around me. You were made for this. You were made to take me.”

“Please—” You didn’t know what you were asking for. Your hands were in his hair, pulling, gripping, and your hips were moving against his, matching his rhythm, and the wall was cool against your back and he was hot against your front and you were so full you could barely breathe. “Please, Ted, please—”

He shifted his angle—one hand sliding under your thigh, adjusting, tilting your hips—and the next thrust hit something inside you that made your vision white out, and you cried out, and he did it again, and again, and the pleasure was building so fast it felt like falling, like the floor had dropped out from under you, and you could feel him getting harder, thicker, could feel the rhythm of his thrusts losing their precision, and you knew he was close, and you were close, and the tension was coiling so tight you thought you might break.

“Come for me,” he breathed into your ear. “Come on my cock. Let me feel you.”

You broke. The orgasm hit you like a wall—a white-hot, all-consuming wave that started where you were joined and radiated outward, through your belly, your chest, your limbs, and your whole body clenched around him, spasming, pulsing, and you felt him shudder against you, felt his arms go tight where they held you, and then he was coming too, his hips driving forward one final time, his cock pulsing inside you, hot and thick and endless, and you felt it—felt the flood of him, the impossible fullness growing even more impossible—and he buried his face in your neck and groaned your name against your skin, and the sound of it, wrecked and reverent, sent a second wave crashing through you.

You came together. Your bodies locked, trembling, shaking against each other, and the wall was cold and solid behind you and Ted was hot and solid in front of you, and you were suspended between them, held in his arms and filled with him.

Then he was moving. Not pulling out—not yet—just shifting his weight, his arms tightening around you, and he took one step, then another, carrying you away from the wall, your legs still locked around his waist, your body still wrapped around him, and the couch caught the backs of his knees and he sank into it, and you sank with him, settling into his lap, his cock still buried inside you, still hard, still thick, and you felt the shift of him as he adjusted, felt the impossible fullness settle deeper, and you gasped against his neck.

Your forehead dropped to his shoulder. His arms came around you, one hand spread wide across your lower back, the other cradling the back of your head, and you could feel his heart hammering against your chest, still racing, still wild, and you could feel yours doing the same thing, the two rhythms tangled together, indistinguishable.

The lamp was still casting its warm amber glow. The indie folk playlist had moved on to something softer, a voice you didn’t recognize singing about distance, and Ted’s breathing was slow and deep beneath you, his chest rising and falling against yours, and you could feel every point of contact between your bodies—his cock still hard inside you, his hand on your back, his chest against your breasts, your cheek pressed into the warm hollow of his throat.

“I change my mind,” you said.

His hand stilled on your back, and he exhaled, “Huh?”

You lifted your head, propping your chin on his collarbone, and you looked up at him, smiling at each other,

The text came at 2:14 AM, which was Ted’s favorite hour to pretend he still lived in your time zone.

come camping with me and jay this weekend. i miss your face

You stared at the message for a long time, thumb hovering over the keyboard. Ted didn’t ask anymore, not really. He told. He’d gotten good at that somewhere between the third viral video and the podcast that turned him into a household name for twenty-two-year-olds who drank too much cold brew. You’d watched it happen from the cheap seats—his follower count climbing in numbers you couldn’t even parse.

You’d stopped being a witness somewhere around year three. The DMs got shorter. The visits home got rarer. You’d watch him on your phone in bed, his laugh the same but the room behind him bigger, and you’d feel something complicated that you refused to call loneliness because that would mean admitting the distance was real.

But he still texted at 2:14 AM. He still called on your birthday. He still remembered your mother’s name and the time you broke your arm falling off the roof of the Perkins’ shed when you were fifteen, and he’d carried you three blocks to the urgent care because neither of you had a car.

So you typed back: you don’t even know what my face looks like anymore!!

His reply was immediate: it’s the same face, idiot

You’d heard about Jay for years. You had a picture of him in your head already—stocky, maybe, with the kind of unflappable patience that people who work behind computer screens tend to cultivate. Quiet. Competent. The kind of friend who shows up with the right tool at the right time and doesn’t need to be thanked. At least, that’s what you thought.

Jay was tall. That was the first thing. Tall enough that he ducked under the low branch at the trailhead without thinking about it, the way people who’ve spent their whole lives being tall learn to do. He had dark hair that fell into his eyes and he kept pushing it back with the heel of his hand, a gesture that was already, within the first hour of knowing him, making your chest do something embarrassing.

“Hey,” he said when Ted introduced you at the parking lot, and his voice was lower than you expected, warm in a way that felt like it was meant just for you even though that was insane, you’d known him for four seconds.

“Hey,” you said back, and your voice came out fine, which was a small miracle.

The hike to the campsite was two miles of switchbacks through old-growth pine, and you walked in the middle—Ted ahead, Jay behind, which gave you approximately two miles of feeling like someone was watching the back of your neck. You kept your eyes forward. You did not turn around. You were an adult with a graduate degree and a functional understanding of your own emotions, and you were not going to develop a crush on your oldest friend’s oldest friend within the first forty-five minutes of a three-day trip.

By the time you reached the clearing where Ted had reserved the site, you had developed a crush on your oldest friend’s oldest friend.

It wasn’t rational. You knew that. Jay had done nothing except exist competently—he’d set up his tent in under ten minutes, offered you the better sleeping pad without being asked, produced a lighter from somewhere on his person when the campfire refused to catch. He told a story about a bear encounter in Yosemite that made Ted laugh so hard he sprayed seltzer out of his nose. He asked you questions—real ones, not the polite ones—about what you did and where you’d been.

You caught yourself staring at the line of his jaw during dinner and made yourself look at the fire instead. The fire was safe. The fire didn’t have hands that knew exactly how to split firewood.

“Earth to you,” Ted said, waving a marshmallow stick in your direction. “You’ve been zoning out for like ten minutes.”

Jay glanced at you over the rim of his coffee mug—he drank coffee at night, which was either a red flag or the most charming thing you’d ever witnessed, you hadn’t decided—and something passed across his face that looked almost like recognition. Like he could see exactly what was happening behind your eyes and found it amusing.

“I have to pee,” you laughed, looking at the fire again. The fire, the safe fire, which was currently doing nothing to help you.

The bathroom situation was, in Ted’s generous assessment, “rustic.” There was one facility for the entire loop of campsites—a cinder-block building with a men’s side and a women’s side.

You squinted at Ted across the firelight. “Which way is it?”

“Jay can show you,” Ted said, not looking up from the marshmallow he was turning with the focused precision of a jeweler inspecting a stone. The marshmallow was developing a skin of golden-brown that he seemed to find deeply compelling.

Jay raised an eyebrow. “Um. The marshmallows too important?”

“It’s fine. He’s got big s’mores money now.” Ted waved the stick vaguely in your direction as you spoke. 

“It changed him.” Jay laughed out.

You snorted, and Jay stood, brushing pine needles off his knees. “Come on. It’s not far.”

You didn’t think to grab your phone. Neither did he. The trail to the bathroom was dimly marked by reflective strips nailed to trees at waist height, and the woods swallowed the light from the campfire within about thirty feet. You walked behind him, watching the shape of his shoulders move against the dark, and you told yourself this was fine, this was normal, people walked to bathrooms in the dark all the time.

The cinder-block building materialized out of the black like something that had always been there, squat and utilitarian. Jay pointed. “Women’s side’s on the left. I’ll wait.”

You pushed through the door into absolute darkness. The restroom had no lighting—no overhead bulb, no window, nothing. You did what you needed to do by feel and by God, and when you pushed the door open to leave, you forgot about the single concrete step that dropped from the threshold to the ground.

Your foot found nothing. You pitched forward with a small, involuntary sound—not quite a scream, more of a whoa—and then hands were on your waist, steadying you, pulling you back from the edge and falling into the dirt.

Jay caught you. Of course he caught you. He was tall and his arms were long and he’d been standing exactly where a person would stand if they were waiting for someone to stumble.

You didn’t fall. You ended up pressed against his chest instead, his hands still on your waist, your face tipped up toward his because of the angle of the catch. In the dark you could barely make out the outline of him—the shape of his jaw, the white gleam of one eye catching what little starlight made it through the canopy. Your faces were inches apart. Maybe less. You could feel his breath on your mouth.

“Oh shit,” you breathed.

His mouth found yours and yours found his and the kiss was immediate and electric and stupidly, embarrassingly good—the kind of good that makes your knees do something structurally unsound. His hands tightened on your waist. You grabbed the front of his jacket. The woods were very quiet and very dark and there was nothing in the world except the heat of him and the rough sound he made against your lips.

He pulled away first. Not far—just enough that his forehead pressed against yours, both of you breathing hard.

“We can’t,” he said. His voice was wrecked. You could feel his pulse through the hand that had migrated to your jaw, thumb tracing the line of your cheekbone.

“Jay—”

“He’s gonna find out.” His thumb stopped moving. “We’ll be gone too long.”

“I really don’t care.” You meant it. You meant it with every molecule of your body, which was currently operating on a frequency that had nothing to do with reason and everything to do with the way his thumb had started moving again, slow and deliberate, like he was memorizing you by touch. “Ted’s my friend. He’s your friend. He’ll—I don’t know. He’ll get over it.”

Jay pulled back further. You could feel the distance between you now—cool air rushing into the space where his body had been—and something in his posture changed. He was still holding you, but the grip had shifted from wanting to something that felt almost like bracing.

“I’m such a bad friend,” he said, and the words came out rough, like they’d been sitting in his throat for a while. “Fuck.”

“Jay-”

“Ted has feelings for you.” He said it fast, like ripping off a bandage. “He always has. Since—I don’t know, since forever. That’s why he wanted you here. That’s why he texts you at two in the morning. That’s the whole thing.”

You couldn’t see his face. The dark was absolute. But you could feel something shift in the air between you—a recalibration, a new shape forming from the wreckage of the old one. Your heart was doing something complicated that you didn’t have the bandwidth to interpret.

“I have an idea,” Jay said. His voice had gone quiet in a way that wasn’t shy. It was deliberate. Calculated. “You have to trust it, though. And you have to let me handle it. I need you to just let it transpire.”

“Transpire,” you repeated, because your brain was still stuck on Ted has feelings for you and always has and the particular way Jay’s mouth had felt against yours.

“Trust me.”

You walked back to camp in silence, side by side, the trail markers catching what little light they could. Your hand brushed his once and neither of you pulled away. When the firelight came back into view—Ted still hunched over his marshmallow like it contained the secrets of the universe—Jay’s posture changed. You could feel it more than see it: his shoulders squared, his chin lifted, something almost smug settling into the set of his mouth.

You had no idea what the plan was. You sat back down on your log and accepted the s’more Ted handed you—the marshmallow perfectly golden, because of course it was—and you ate it and you tasted nothing because your brain was a pinball machine and every thought was hitting every bumper at once.

Jay sat across from you. He picked up his coffee mug, took a long sip, and over the rim his eyes met yours. There was something in them—something patient and hungry and quietly, dangerously pleased—that made your stomach drop in a way that had nothing to do with fear.

He held your gaze for one beat. Two. Then he turned to Ted.

“Hey,” Jay said, casual as anything, like he was commenting on the weather. “You remember that conversation we had in Big Sur? About the thing?”

Ted looked up from his marshmallow. His expression went through something complicated—surprise, recognition, something that might have been hope before he schooled it back into neutrality. “Yeah,” he said carefully. “I remember.”

“Maybe we should talk about it again.” Jay’s voice was light. Conversational. He took another sip of coffee. “All three of us. At some point this weekend.”

Ted’s gaze flicked to you, then back to Jay. Something passed between them—a whole conversation compressed into the space of a breath—and then Ted’s mouth did something that wasn’t quite a smile but wasn’t not one, either.

“Maybe,” Ted said.

You sat there with marshmallow on your fingers and your pulse in your throat and the distinct sensation that you’d stumbled into a room where the walls had been rearranged without your knowledge. The fire popped. A log shifted. Ted went back to his marshmallow with the kind of focused nonchalance that meant he was thinking about it—whatever itwas—with every cell in his body.

Jay stretched his legs out and crossed them at the ankle, the picture of ease. He caught your eye again, just for a second, and the corner of his mouth twitched. Not a smile. A promise. Or a warning. You couldn’t tell the difference anymore and you weren’t sure you wanted to.

The conversation lulled after that. Not awkwardly—or maybe it was awkward and you were just too far inside your own head to tell the difference. Ted asked about your job. You answered. Jay made a comment about the fire needing another log. Ted added one. You watched the sparks climb and disperse and tried to find something normal to say and came up empty.

Ted yawned first, stretching his arms above his head until something in his back cracked audibly. “I’m calling it,” he said. “The s’mores have spoken.”

“Bed,” Jay agreed, and he was already gathering his mug, his motions easy and unhurried in a way that made you think he’d been waiting for the opening.

You helped douse the fire—pouring water from the collapsible jug in careful circles while Ted stirred the embers with a stick—and then the three of you moved to your separate tents with the kind of exaggerated casualness that people use when they’re trying very hard not to look like they’re thinking about anything at all.

“Night,” Ted said, and there was something soft in it, something almost careful, before he ducked into his tent and the zipper sang its long metallic note.

“Sleep well,” Jay said to you, and his hand brushed your elbow—brief, deliberate, gone—before he disappeared into his own shelter.

You crawled into your tent and zipped it shut and lay on your back on the sleeping pad Jay had given you, staring at the nylon ceiling, which was doing absolutely nothing to distract you from the fact that your body was still cataloguing the exact pressure of his hands on your waist. You slept. You think. It was the kind of sleep that happens in increments—twenty minutes here, forty there, interrupted by the sound of your own heartbeat and the particular, insistent question of what the actual fuck is going on.

You woke to darkness and silence and the slow, creeping realization that you were not going back to sleep. You checked your phone. 3:47 AM. The woods were doing that thing woods do at four in the morning, which is nothing. Absolutely nothing. As if the whole world had agreed to hold its breath.

You rolled onto your side and that’s when you saw it—the pale blue rectangle of light bleeding through the fabric of Jay’s tent, maybe fifteen feet from yours. His silhouette was visible in the negative: the curve of his shoulder, the angle of his elbow, the phone held at a distance that suggested he was reading, not scrolling. The light shifted as he moved—a thumb swipe, maybe, or a turn of the wrist. He was awake. He was awake and he was right there.

You were out of your sleeping bag before the thought fully formed. You unzipped your tent with the exaggerated care of someone defusing a bomb—one tooth at a time, holding the fabric taut so the zipper wouldn’t snag and announce your intentions to every living thing within a quarter mile. The cold hit you immediately, sharp and pine-scented, and you were wearing nothing but a t-shirt. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except the shape of him through the nylon and the questions stacked up in your chest like planes on a runway.

You crawled. You actually crawled, on your hands and knees across the dirt and pine needles, because standing up felt like too much commitment, too much visibility. The ground was cold and uneven and a small, reasonable part of your brain was saying this is insane, you are a grown woman, you pay rent, and the rest of your brain was saying move faster.

You found the zipper pull in the dark. You pulled it.

The sound was quieter than yours had been—Jay’s tent was better quality, of course it was—but the movement of the door flap was enough. He startled violently, his phone flying sideways into the corner of the tent, and you caught the brief flash of wide eyes and a hand pressed to his chest before the blue glow went dark against the sleeping bag.

“Jesus Christ-”

“Shh, shh, shh,” you hissed, already crawling inside, already pulling the zipper shut behind you with the urgency of someone sealing a submarine. The tent was small—smaller than yours, because of course Jay had given you the better one—and you ended up half on top of his legs, one knee planted in the space between his shins, your face maybe eight inches from his.

“Are you crazy?” His voice was a strangled whisper. “You can’t just—people don’t just crawl into other people’s tents—”

“People do when those people have been cryptic all night and made out with them behind a bathroom and then dropped a bomb about their mutual friend’s lifelong crush and then said trust me and then maybe we should talk about it and then went to bed.” You got it all out in one breath. You were proud of that. Your graduate degree was in literature, not rhetoric, but you’d managed a pretty decent run-on sentence under pressure. “So. What the hell is going on, Jay?”

He blinked at you. In the faint residual light from his phone, which was now glowing uselessly from the corner of the tent, you could see his expression cycling through several states of alarm before landing on something that looked, irritatingly, like amusement.

“You came into my tent to interrogate me?” he said.

“I came into your tent because you’re awake and I’m awake and I have questions that are not going to wait until breakfast.”

“Ted is literally twenty feet away.”

“Ted is asleep. Ted sleeps like the dead. Ted slept through a car alarm at a house party in 2014 and when we told him about it the next morning he thought we were making it up.” You shifted your weight, which brought your knee closer to his thigh, and you watched his throat move when he swallowed.

You were whispering, but the words had teeth. “What was that back there? The thing in Big Sur? The way you two looked at each other—that was a whole conversation. A whole lifetime of a conversation.”

He was quiet for a moment. The phone’s screen dimmed further, then went dark, and you were left in near-total blackness, just the shape of him and the sound of his breathing.

“You’re interrogating me in my own tent,” he said.

“I’m interrogating you in your own tent.”

Another beat of silence. Then, very quietly: “You’re going to make me say it.”

“I’m going to make you say it.”

He exhaled. It was long and measured and carried the weight of something he’d been carrying for what felt like a long time. When he spoke, his voice was low and even and completely without pretense.

“A threesome.”

The word landed in the dark between you like a stone dropped into still water. You could feel the ripples of it expanding outward, touching every corner of the small space, rearranging everything they touched.

“You—” You stopped. Started again. “You want to have a threesome with me and Ted?”

“We’ve talked about it.” He said it the way someone might say we’ve discussed the weather—calmly, factually, like it wasn’t the most destabilizing sentence you’d ever heard spoken aloud in a tent.

You didn’t move. You couldn’t. Your knee was still planted between his shins and your hands were braced on his sleeping bag and the air in the tent was thick enough to cut.

“Ted has feelings for you,” Jay said again, and this time the words landed differently, softer, because he was looking at you in the dark and you could feel the shape of his gaze even though you couldn’t see it. “Real ones. The kind that don’t go away. And tonight, when you kissed me back—” He stopped. His hand found yours on the sleeping bag, covered it. His palm was warm. “Tonight, when you kissed me back, I thought maybe we could stop pretending that any of this is going to resolve itself neatly.”

You sat back on your heels. The sleeping bag rustled beneath you. Somewhere outside, an owl called—one long, low note that hung in the air and then dissolved.

“You kissed me,” you said. “Behind the bathroom. You kissed me knowing—”

“I kissed you-” His voice was very quiet now, stripped of everything except the raw honesty of it. “I kissed you because I wanted to. Because I’ve wanted to since Ted showed me your Instagram six months ago and I thought, oh, that’s going to be a problem.”

“Six months ago.”

“I have a type.” A thread of humor, thin but real, wound through the words. “Apparently my type is people my best friend is in love with.”

You were quiet for a long time. The cold was becoming impossible to ignore, your arms prickling with goosebumps, and you could feel Jay’s warmth radiating from the sleeping bag beneath you—close enough to reach, close enough to touch. You didn’t touch.

“So the plan,” you said slowly, “is that you tell Ted that you kissed me behind the bathroom, and then the three of us sit down and have a conversation about whether we all want to—”

“Sleep together.” He said it plainly. No euphemism, no coyness. “Yes.”

“And if Ted says no?”

“Then it doesn’t happen.” The answer came immediately. “End of story. We go back to being three friends who went camping, and I apologize for overstepping, and we all move on.”

“And if he says yes?”

Jay didn’t get to answer.

The rustling came from outside—the unmistakable sound of nylon against nylon, a zipper pull being worked with the clumsy urgency of someone who’d been asleep thirty seconds ago. You froze. Jay froze. The tent was too small for either of you to move without the other knowing, and the zipper was already singing its metallic song—too fast, too loud, the sound of a door being opened without permission.

Light flooded in. Not much—just the dull gray of pre-dawn filtering through the trees—but enough.

Ted’s face appeared in the opening. Sleep-rumpled, hair flattened on one side, eyes puffy and unfocused in the way of someone who’d been dragged from REM sleep by something they couldn’t name. He blinked once. Twice. His gaze traveled from Jay—propped on his elbows in the sleeping bag—to you—kneeling on the sleeping bag in nothing but your t-shirt, your hair wild, your face inches from Jay’s—and something in his expression began to change. The fog of sleep lifting, clarity arriving like a blade, the slow, dawning horror of comprehension.

You didn’t think. You moved.

You surged forward on your knees, grabbed Ted by the shoulders—his bare shoulders, because he was wearing even less than you, just boxers and the kind of confusion that could curdle into something irreversible—and you pulled him into the tent. The physics of it were terrible. He was heavier than you and off-balance and the tent was catastrophically small, but you got him inside, got your hands on either side of his jaw, and you kissed him.

You kissed him like his life depended on it. Like Jay’s life depended on it. Like whatever fragile, impossible thing the three of you had been orbiting all night was a bubble and this was the only way to keep it from popping. His lips were chapped and warm and he tasted like sleep and the faintest trace of marshmallow, and for one terrible second he was rigid against you—stunned, unresponsive, his hands hovering at your sides without landing—and you thought you’d made the worst mistake of your life.

Then he kissed you back.

It was sudden and graceless and perfect—his mouth opening against yours, his hands finding your waist, pulling you into him with the kind of desperate certainty that told you he’d been imagining this exact moment for longer than either of you would ever admit. His fingers pressed into the small of your back and you made a sound into his mouth that you would spend the rest of your life pretending you hadn’t.

Behind you, Jay exhaled. It was a sound you felt more than heard—a long, shuddering release of breath that carried the weight of every held moment from the bathroom to the fire to the dark of his tent.

You pulled back from Ted just far enough to look at him. His eyes were open, wide, the sleep completely gone now, replaced by something bright and searching and almost frightened. He was looking at you like you were a dream he was afraid of waking from.

“Jay,” Ted said. Not a question. A confirmation.

“Yeah,” Jay said. His voice was rough. He was sitting up now, close enough that you could feel the heat of him against your back. “Yeah, Ted.”

Ted’s hand was still on your waist. Jay’s chest was still warm against your back. The three of you breathed together in the small gray space, and then Jay moved—slowly, deliberately—his hand coming up to rest on the back of Ted’s neck, fingers threading into the short hair at his nape. Ted’s eyes shifted from yours to Jay’s, and something passed between them that was older than you, older than this tent, older than the confession behind the bathroom. Something that had been building in the dark spaces of their friendship for years.

Jay pulled Ted forward and Ted went, and then they were kissing—right in front of you, right over your shoulder, Jay’s mouth finding Ted’s with the kind of practiced ease that told you this wasn’t the first time, that the thing in Big Sur had been more than a conversation. Ted made a sound—low, surprised, almost wounded—and his hand tightened on your waist as Jay’s other hand came up to cradle Ted’s jaw, thumb stroking along the hinge of it.

You watched. You couldn’t not watch. The tent was too small for spectatorship to be anything but participatory. Their mouths were open and sloppy, the angle awkward because Ted was half-kneeling and Jay was sitting up and the sleeping bag was bunching between them, and you could hear the wet, obscene sound of it filling the space where words should have been. 

“Jesus,” you breathed, and it came out wrecked.

Ted’s hand found your hip, fingers digging in, and he pulled you sideways—rotating you, rearranging the three of you in the catastrophic geometry of the small tent. You ended up on your back, the sleeping bag bunched beneath you, and Ted was above you, his weight on one elbow, his mouth finding yours again while Jay pressed up behind you, the back of your head in his lap.

“Take your shirt off,” Ted said against your mouth. It wasn’t a request.

You pulled the t-shirt over your head in one motion, and the cold hit your bare skin and was immediately replaced by heat—Ted’s mouth on your collarbone, his hand sliding up your ribs. The sleeping bag was rough against your back. The tent smelled like pine and sweat and the particular, intoxicating musk of three bodies occupying a space built for one.

Jay’s phone was still glowing in the corner. He reached for it, the movement shifting all three of you—and turned it face-up, the blue-white light flooding the tent with something almost clinical, sharp-edged and merciless. You could see everything: the flush on Ted’s neck, the way Jay’s hair fell across his forehead, the absolute wreckage of your own expression reflected in the dark of Ted’s eyes.

Ted kissed down your stomach—open-mouthed, unhurried, his tongue tracing the dip of your navel—and his hand hooked into the waistband of your underwear. You lifted your hips. He pulled them off in one motion, and the cold air hit you everywhere and then Ted’s mouth was between your thighs and you made a sound that was definitely too loud for a campsite at four in the morning, and you did not care.

“Christ,” Jay breathed from behind, hands dragging over your breasts, eyes dark, blown wide, fixed on the place where Ted’s mouth met you. He stroked your hair and gathered it to the side, leaning down to plant kisses on your neck. “Ted, look at her.”

Ted hummed against you—the vibration traveling through your entire body—and his tongue did something deliberate and obscene and you arched off the sleeping bag with a gasp that Ted swallowed with his mouth.

Ted pulled back just enough to look, his gaze traveling down your body with an openness that made your face burn. His hands followed his eyes—palms sliding over your ribs, thumbs tracing the curve of your waist, one hand settling on your hip while the other came up to cup your breast. He was staring at your nipple like he’d never seen one before, like it was a marvel of engineering, and then he leaned in and took it into his mouth and your back arched, pushing your head further into Jay’s lap.

“Fuck,” you gasped.

“Pull her up,” Jay said to Ted, and Ted slid his hands under your ass and lifted, and you were suddenly propped against Jay’s chest, your back to his front, his arm across your stomach holding you in place. The angle was obscene. Your legs were spread over Ted’s shoulders and Jay’s erection was pressed against the small of your back and Ted’s face was right there, inches from where you were aching, and the phone light was casting everything in sharp, merciless detail.

Behind you, Jay’s hand slid down your stomach—slow, deliberate, giving you time to feel every inch of it—and then lower, his fingers tracing the inside of your thigh. You were wet, embarrassingly wet, and when his fingers found you and slid through the slickness you heard him exhale against the back of your neck.

“Jesus, she’s—” He didn’t finish. His fingers circled your clit once, twice, and then he was pressing inside—two fingers, deep and steady—and your hips bucked and Ted’s mouth stayed leaving marks on your inner thighs, his tongue finding a rhythm that matched Jay’s fingers, and the coordination of it—the way they moved together without speaking, like they’d choreographed this in some conversation you weren’t privy to—made your head spin.

“You two—” you panted. “Have you—planned this—”

“No,” Jay said, and his voice was strained, his fingers curling inside you in a way that made your vision white out at the edges. “Just—talking. A lot of talking.”

“God,” Ted said against you, and his breath was hot and wet and you felt the word more than heard it. “Jay, you should—I can’t—”

“Switch,” Jay said. It wasn’t a question.

They rearranged you with the clumsy urgency of people who had waited too long. You ended up on your hands and knees, the sleeping bag bunched beneath you, and Jay was behind you—you felt him, the heat of him, the press of his hand between your shoulder blades, gentle and firm at the same time—and Ted was in front of you, his back against the tent wall.

“Open,” Ted said to you, and his voice was ruined, completely destroyed, and his hand was on the back of your neck, guiding your mouth down to him. “Please, I need—”

You took him into your mouth and he made a sound. Cracked open, dark, raw, unguarded, the sound of someone who had been holding something back for years and could not hold it for one more second. His hand tightened in your hair. Behind you, Jay was pressing in—slow, so slow, filling you inch by inch while you were full of Ted—and the sensation of being between them, filled at both ends, was so overwhelming that your vision went white at the edges.

“Jesus Christ,” Jay breathed from behind you, and his hands found your hips, his thumbs pressing into the dimples of your lower back. “Jesus Christ, fuck—”

Ted’s hips moved. Small, involuntary thrusts that pushed him deeper into your mouth, and you relaxed your jaw and took it, took him, your hands braced on his thighs. Jay began to move behind you—long, rolling strokes that drove you forward into Ted, and Ted’s hand tightened in your hair and his other hand found your face, his thumb tracing your cheekbone, pushing against the place where your mouth stretched around him.

“Look at me,” Ted said, and his voice was a wreck. “Look at me, please—”

You looked up. His jaw was clenched. The phone light caught the bead of sweat that tracked down his temple and disappeared into his hair, and you made a sound around him—not a word, nothing coherent, just need—and he moaned, a single broken sound that Jay echoed from behind you with a groan that vibrated through your spine.

Jay’s pace increased. His hands tightened on your hips, pulling you back onto him with each thrust, and the sound of it—skin against skin, the wet obscenity of your mouth on Ted, the ragged symphony of three people breathing in a space too small to contain them—filled the tent until there was nothing else in the world.

“I can’t—” Ted’s voice was breaking apart. “I’m gonna—”

“Do it,” Jay said from behind you, and his voice was commanding in a way that made something in your chest crack open. “Right in her mouth. She wants it. I can feel it—she wants it so bad—”

Ted came with a sound like something tearing—your name, maybe, or Jay’s, or both—and you swallowed, your throat working, your eyes on his the entire time, and the sight of his face—wrecked, ecstatic, undone—was the hottest thing you had ever seen. His hand went slack in your hair. His head tipped back against the tent wall. His chest heaved.

Jay pulled out of you and you made a sound of protest that was immediately swallowed when Ted pulled you up to your knees—your mouth still wet, your body still trembling—and kissed you, deep and filthy, his tongue pushing into your mouth like he was chasing the taste of himself. Behind you, Jay’s hand found the back of your neck, his thumb pressing into the tendon, and you felt him shift—reposition—and then he was pushing back into you from behind, one hand on your hip.

“Keep kissing him,” Jay said against your ear, and his voice was rough, commanding, the kind of voice that didn’t invite negotiation. “Don’t stop.”

You kissed Ted. You kissed Ted like the world was ending, which it was, in a way—the old world, the one where you were just friends who texted at 2:14 AM and pretended that was enough. Ted kissed you back with the desperate gratitude of someone who’d been starving, his hands on your face, his thumbs tracing the line of your jaw, and when Jay thrust into you from behind you broke the kiss just long enough to gasp.

“Oh fuck—”

“Feel that?” Ted said, and his voice was right against your ear, low and rough and wrecked. “Feel how deep he can get you like this?”

Ted’s mouth found your jaw, your neck, the sensitive spot just below your ear, and his hand slid down between your bodies—down your stomach, past your navel—and his fingers found your clit with the kind of unerring accuracy that suggested he’d been thinking about this exact location for years. He circled you once, twice, and then pressed, firm and deliberate, and the sound that left your mouth wasn’t a word at all.

“Jay—Jay, he’s—” You couldn’t finish. Jay was hitting something inside you with every stroke, deep and relentless, and Ted’s fingers were working you in tight, practiced circles, and the two sensations were converging like weather systems, building toward something catastrophic.

“You gonna come on my cock?” Jay’s voice was wrecked, ragged, his forehead pressed between your shoulder blades. “Tell me. Tell me what you need.”

“I need—fuck, I need—” You couldn’t form a sentence. Ted’s mouth was on your collarbone and his fingers were on your clit and Jay was inside you, stretching you, filling you, and the pressure was building in your belly like a wave cresting. 

“Oh god—” your forehead dropping to Ted’s hair. “Oh god, Ted, right there, don’t stop—”

Ted pressed harder. His hand found a rhythm that matched Jay’s thrusts—forward, circle, press, release—and you shattered. The orgasm tore through you from the inside out, your whole body going rigid, your mouth falling open against Ted’s shoulder, a sound coming out of you that was so raw it didn’t belong to you—it belonged to the woods, to the dark, to the space between stars. You clenched around Jay and felt him groan, felt his hips stutter, felt the way he held himself back through sheer force of will.

“Fuck—fuck, you’re so tight—” Jay’s voice cracked.

You were still shaking when he pulled out. The loss of him made you whimper—a small, involuntary sound that Ted swallowed with his mouth. Your body was liquid, boneless, every nerve ending firing in the aftermath of something that had rearranged you at a cellular level.

“Easy,” Jay said, and his hands were on your shoulders, guiding you onto your back. “Easy, I’ve got you.” Ted was already moving—positioning himself between your thighs, his eyes dark and focused and hungry in a way that made your stomach flip even though you’d just come hard enough to see colors.

“You good?” Ted asked, and his voice was soft, careful, his hand on your knee gentle in a way that was almost worse than rough.

“More than good,” you managed. “Ted, please—”

He pushed into you and the sound you both made was obscene—wet, heavy, the sound of something fitting together that had been built to fit. Ted’s weight settled over you and he started moving, slow at first, his forehead pressed to yours, and you could feel every inch of him, could feel the way his breath hitched on every thrust.

Jay moved beside you. You felt him before you saw him—the shift of weight on the sleeping bag, the warmth of his body against your arm. His hand found your jaw, fingers curling under your chin, and he tilted your face toward him.

“Open,” he said, and it was the same word Ted had used but different—deeper, rougher, carrying the weight of everything that had happened in the last hour. You opened your mouth and he pressed in—the head of his cock against your lower lip, then past it, filling your mouth with the taste of salt and skin and something that was just him and you. You moaned around him and the vibration made his hand tighten on your jaw.

“God, your mouth—” Jay’s voice was barely recognizable. “Fuck, Ted, she’s—”

Ted was moving above you, his pace increasing, his breathing going ragged. His hand found your breast, thumb brushing your nipple, and you arched into it, which pushed you further onto Jay, and Jay groaned—a low, guttural sound that you felt in your teeth.

“You feel so good,” Ted panted above you. “You feel—fuck, you feel like—”

“Tell her,” Jay said, and his hand was still on your jaw, his thumb tracing your lower lip where it stretched around him. “Tell her how long you’ve wanted this.”

“Years,” Ted said, and the word broke in half. “Years, I’ve wanted—I’ve thought about this every single—”

Jay’s hips moved. A shallow thrust that pushed him deeper into your mouth, and you relaxed your throat and took it, your hands finding his thighs, fingers digging into the muscle. You could feel him getting closer—the tension in his body, the way his breathing changed, the barely controlled jerk of his hips.

“I’m gonna—” Jay’s voice cracked. “I’m gonna come—fuck, swallow it, swallow all of it—”

He came in your mouth—hot, pulsing, the taste of him flooding your tongue—and you swallowed. His face did something extraordinary in the phone light—jaw clenched, eyes squeezed shut, every muscle in his neck standing out in sharp relief—and he made a sound that was almost a sob, his hand trembling against your jaw.

“Inside,” Ted managed, the word barely a word at all. “I’m gonna—inside—”

“Yeah?” you breathed, and your voice was wrecked, your mouth still wet with Jay, and Ted drove into you one final time and came with a groan that seemed to come from somewhere beneath his ribcage. You felt him pulse inside you, felt the heat of it, felt his whole body shudder and then go slack.

For a long moment, none of you moved. Ted was still inside you, his weight heavy and warm. The three of you breathed together in the ruined silence of the tent, and then Ted pulled out with a wince that made you both laugh—a shaky, incredulous sound that broke the tension like a glass hitting a floor.

You collapsed sideways—there was no other word for it—your body simply giving up the pretense of structure, and you ended up half on Jay’s chest, half on the sleeping bag, your face pressed into the damp hollow of his throat. His arm came around you automatically, heavy and warm, and his chest was still heaving beneath your cheek.

Ted crawled up beside you, fitting himself against your back like a puzzle piece you didn’t know you were missing. His arm draped over your waist, and the three of you lay there in a heap—limbs tangled, breathing synced.

“Okay,” Ted said into the silence, his voice muffled against your shoulder blade. “So. That happened.”

You snorted. The sound was wet and undignified and it came from somewhere so deep in your chest that it startled all three of you. Jay’s arm tightened around you.

“Eloquent,” Jay said. “Very podcast-host of you.”

Ted laughed—a real laugh, the kind you hadn’t heard from him in years, unguarded and slightly unhinged—and the vibration of it traveled through your body where you were pressed between them.

Ted’s fingers were tracing idle patterns on your hip, his chin hooked over your shoulder. “Just to be clear. That was—”

“A threesome,” Jay supplied helpfully, “In a tent. At a state park. At approximately four-thirty in the morning.”

You sighed, the kind that originally formed as a smile,

The pink bag in your hand was already heavy, and you hadn’t even made it to the good stuff yet.

J’s text had come through that morning like a gift wrapped in a notification—a screenshot of his banking app with a number that made your eyebrows climb. Shopping allowance, the message read underneath, followed by a single winking emoji. Go get yourself something nice. My treat.

Something nice had quickly become something naughty the moment you’d walked past the Victoria’s Secret display in the mall, the mannequins wrapped in lace and silk. You’d told yourself you were just browsing. That the black lace set in your hand was purely academic. That the red push-up bra and matching thong were research materials.

But here you are, standing in the dressing room with the door locked behind you, your phone already raised at a flattering angle, and the first text already sent.

You’d gone with the lace first. Black panties, cut high on the thighs, bra with a plunging neckline that made your collarbones look like they belonged to someone else entirely. You’d snapped the photo quickly—chin tilted down, eyes up through your lashes, one hand resting on your hip in a way that was practiced but never felt like it. You sent it before you could talk yourself out of it.

Three dots appeared almost instantly.

J: keep going

You changed into the red set next—the bra that made your chest look like a magazine cover and the thong that was more suggestion than fabric. You turned, caught your reflection over your shoulder, and took another. Sent it.

J: holy fuck

J: you’re killing me

J: how many did you get

You bit your lip and typed back: just getting started. there’s a blue one. a black one with the garters. something that’s barely a scrap of fabric they’re calling “bottoms.” your money is in good hands. literally.

The three dots danced. Stopped. Danced again.

J: alright

J: go crazy. get whatever you want. the whole store if you want it

J: BUT

J: stop sending me pictures

You blinked at the screen. Frowned.

why??? you typed.

J: because if you keep sending those I’m going to leave right now and meet you in that dressing room and security is going to have to escort us both out

J: and I want the full show

J: I want to watch you walk out of the bedroom in every single thing you bought. one by one. take your time. make me wait

J: that’s what I’m paying for. the fashion show

You bit your lip. Hard. There wasn’t much to protest—not when he’d said it like that, not when the promise of his eyes on you later was already doing something dangerous to the pit of your stomach.

noted, you typed back. no more pics. but you asked for this. don’t blame me when you’re ruined.

J: I’m already ruined. that’s the point

You set the phone down on the little bench in the dressing room and went through the rest of the pile. The blue set came next—a pale, barely-there blue that looked like it had been painted onto the mannequin—and then the black one with the garters, the little clips cool against your fingertips as you worked them up your thighs. The scrap of fabric they’d called bottoms was exactly that—a scrap, a whisper of satin that covered nothing and suggested everything. You tried it on and stared at yourself in the mirror and understood, with perfect clarity, why the price tag had been what it was.

You changed back into your jeans and t-shirt and gathered everything up. The pile in your arms was heavy now—three bras, four panties, the garter set, the scrap, a robe you’d grabbed on impulse because it matched the black lace. You pushed the dressing room door open and made your way to the register.

The girl behind the counter had the practiced smile of someone who’d rung up a lot of lingerie in her day. She ran the scanner over each piece with a steady hand, and the total climbed on the little screen in front of you—$40, $80, $140, $220. You watched the numbers climb and didn’t flinch. Not your money. Not today.

The final number blinked. $347.16.

You handed over J’s card—his actual card, the one he’d slid across the kitchen table that morning with a kiss pressed to your temple—and watched the cashier run it. Approved. Of course it was. You signed the little screen with a smile you couldn’t help, tucked the receipt into the bag, and walked out into the mall with the pink bag swinging from your wrist like a trophy.

The drive home was quick. Fifteen minutes, give or take, and you let yourself picture it—walking out of the bedroom one piece at a time, the way he’d asked. The look on his face when the garters came out. The way his jaw would tighten when you’d turn around in the scrap of satin.

You let yourself into the apartment with your key, already calling his name. “J? I’m home. You are not going to believe what I—”

Silence.

An errand. He must have run out for something.

You stood in the entryway with your Victoria’s Secret bags dangling from your fingers and the silence pressing in around you, and the disappointment was sharp and immediate—a cold splash after the warm anticipation of the drive. You’d been so ready. You’d been counting on it.

But then the idea came—slow at first, then all at once, like a match catching.

You smiled to yourself.

You carried the bags upstairs, peeled off the day’s clothes—the jeans, the plain cotton bra, the underwear you’d put on this morning without a single thought—and stood in front of the full-length mirror in nothing but the afternoon light filtering through the blinds. You opened the first bag. The tissue paper crackled like a promise.

You picked the red set. The one that had earned the holy fuck. You pulled it on carefully—the bra first, adjusting the straps, watching your reflection transform. Then the thong, hooking your thumbs under the lace and drawing it up your thighs. You turned. Looked over your shoulder. The mirror gave you back exactly what you wanted—sharp angles, soft curves, the red lace doing the work it was designed to do. You looked like a secret. You looked like the beginning of something.

You opened the second bag and pulled out the robe. Black, satin, the one you’d grabbed on impulse because it matched. You slipped it on and let it hang open, not bothering with the tie. The robe whispered against your thighs as you walked to the top of the stairs and looked down at the living room—the couch, the coffee table, the armchair he always sank into with a groan at the end of the day.

The living room.

Not the bedroom. Not behind a closed door. Not walking out one piece at a time the way he’d asked. You could do better than that.

You padded down the stairs barefoot, the satin trailing behind you like a shadow, and settled onto the couch. You arranged yourself the way you’d seen it in your head—one leg crossed over the other, the robe falling open just so, the red lace catching the light from the window. You set your phone on the armrest. You waited.

The clock on the wall ticked. Five minutes. Ten. Fifteen. You adjusted the robe. You uncrossed your legs and recrossed them the other way. You pulled the tie of the robe between your fingers and let it slip, then pulled it tight again, then let it slip again.

Twenty minutes. Twenty-two.

The sound of his key in the lock was soft, almost tentative, and you sat up straighter without meaning to. You heard the door push open, the soft click of the deadbolt, the creak of the hinges. You heard him step inside, heard the rustle of a plastic bag being set down on the entryway table, the jingle of keys.

“I’m home,” he called out, his voice echoing off the empty walls of the foyer.

You didn’t answer. You let the silence do the work.

His footsteps moved through the kitchen, then paused. You could picture him standing there, noticing the absence of your usual greeting, the missing sound of you puttering around. The fridge door opened and closed. A cabinet. Then nothing.

The footsteps started again, moving toward the living room. Slow now, uncertain.

You kept your eyes on the doorway, your body perfectly still, the satin robe draped just so across your thighs. The red lace peeked from beneath the black fabric like a secret being kept.

When he appeared in the doorway, grocery bag still in hand, you watched his face cycle through recognition—confusion, then surprise, then something hotter, darker, that made his hand tighten around the bag’s handle until the plastic crinkled.

“Jesus,” he whispered.

“Hi,” you said, and your voice came out lower than you’d intended, sexier.

He set the bag down on the floor without looking at it. His eyes never left you—tracing the line of your throat, the curve of your shoulder, the way the robe fell open at your chest. His gaze lingered on the red lace visible beneath.

“You weren’t supposed to start without me,” he said, but there was no real complaint in it.

“You were taking too long,” you pouted, pushing yourself off the couch in one fluid motion. The satin whispered against your skin as you crossed the distance between you, closing the gap before he could take another step. Your arms wound around his neck, fingers threading into the hair at his nape, and you felt him exhale—a shaky, deliberate breath—as his hands found your hips, palms pressing flat against the bare skin just above the lace.

He pulled you in, and the kiss was deep from the first touch—his mouth warm and insistent against yours, one hand sliding up your spine beneath the robe, fingers spreading wide against your bare back. You kissed him back with everything the dressing room had built up in you, the anticipation of the drive, the twenty-two minutes on the couch—all of it pouring into the press of your lips and the way your body curved into his.

When he broke away, his mouth moved to your neck, lips brushing just below your ear. “What’s the damage?” he whispered, and the words sent a shiver through you that had nothing to do with the cost.

You pulled back just enough to look at him, your arms still draped loosely around his neck. “How about I bring the receipt out with the next outfit?” You winked, slow and deliberate, and watched his eyes darken.

Your arms slipped from his shoulders as you stepped back, and he sank into the couch behind him, his eyes tracking you the entire way to the stairs. 

The blue one. The barely-there, painted-on blue that had looked like it was melting on the mannequin. You slipped the robe off and let it pool on the floor, then worked the bra on first—adjusting the cups, the thin straps that felt like thread against your shoulders. The panties came next, and you tugged them up your thighs with both thumbs, the fabric so light you could feel the air through it. You tucked the folded receipt between your teeth, the paper cool and sharp against your tongue, and you turned for the stairs.

He was exactly where you’d left him—sprawled on the couch, one arm thrown across the back cushions, his eyes fixed on the staircase like he’d been counting the seconds. When you appeared at the top of the stairs, you saw his jaw tighten. His hand dropped from the cushion to grip the armrest.

You walked down slowly. Each step deliberate. The blue lace caught the light with every movement, and you kept your eyes on him the whole way down—watching the shift in his expression, the way his throat worked when he swallowed.

When you reached the bottom, you crossed the living room and stopped in front of him. He was seated, and you leaned down over him—close, so close that there was barely any air between your faces. The receipt was still between your teeth, and you held it there, your lips slightly parted, your eyes locked on his.

His hand came up slowly, fingers brushing your jaw, and he took the receipt from between your teeth with the careful deliberation of someone unwrapping a gift. He unfolded it, glanced down at the number, and looked back up at you with an expression you couldn’t quite read.

“That’s it?” he asked, and there was something almost like a complaint in it—the edge of a whine beneath the roughness of his voice. “Three hundred and change?”

You straightened up, putting a few inches of distance between your faces, and looked down at him with a smile that was all innocence and no innocence at all.

“Well,” you started, and you let the word hang in the air between you, savoring it, “I figured if this was fun enough...” You reached behind you and unhooked the bra with one hand—not taking it off, just loosening it, letting the straps slide down your shoulders like a suggestion. “We could have a part two later.”

His hand shot out and caught your wrist—not hard, but firm, his fingers wrapping around the delicate bones like he was afraid you’d disappear.

“Part two,” he repeated, and the words came out rough, almost broken.

“Part two,” you confirmed. You tugged your wrist free and stepped back, and the bra straps slid a little further. “But first—” You turned on your heel, the blue lace catching the last of the afternoon light as you moved toward the stairs. “I have three more sets to show you.”

You have three more sets,” he said, but his voice had changed—gone was the easy sprawl, the lazy anticipation. Something had shifted behind his eyes, a current that pulled tight beneath the surface. “Come back here.”

You paused at the foot of the stairs, one hand on the banister. “What?”

“Come back.” He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to. The words carried the weight of something that had been building since the first photo, since the holy fuck, since the receipt between your teeth. He crooked two fingers—come here—and the gesture was so simple, so casual, that it sent a spike of heat straight through your chest.

You let go of the banister. Turned. Walked back to him.

“Sit,” he said, and he patted the space between his spread thighs. Not the couch cushion beside him. Between. The implication settled over you like a second skin.

You sank down onto your knees on the carpet, the blue lace tight against your thighs, and settled yourself between his legs. The position put you at eye level with his chest, and you looked up at him through your lashes—the angle deliberate, the way you’d angled the phone in the dressing room.

He looked down at you, and the expression on his face was something you wanted to frame.

His hands came up to your shoulders—large, warm, steady—and his fingers hooked under the straps of the bra. He slid them down, slow and deliberate, one millimeter at a time, and the blue lace pooled at your elbows like water. You held still, your breath coming shallow, your eyes locked on his.

The bra hung there for a moment—loose, useless, the fabric catching on nothing. Then he brought one hand back up and caught it on a single fingertip, the strap draped over the tip of his index finger like something delicate and precious. He held it there, suspended between you, and the rest of the garment dangled against your stomach, barely covering anything.

“Three more sets,” he said, and his voice was barely above a whisper. He tilted his head, studying you—the flush creeping up your chest, the way your lips had parted without your permission. “That’s what you said?”

You nodded. Your throat had gone dry.

He let the bra slide off his fingertip. It fell into your lap and the cool air hit your bare skin like a confession.

“You’re going to kill me before we get to any of them.”

He leaned forward. Both hands came up to frame your face, thumbs brushing along your jawline, and he tilted your chin up until you were looking directly at him.

“Change of plans,” he said. His voice was barely above a whisper, and his thumbs traced slow circles against your skin. “We’re not doing the fashion show anymore.”

You blinked. “We’re not?”

“No.” He shook his head, and the corner of his mouth curled into something that was half smile, half threat. “Because if I watch you walk out in one more thing, I’m going to lose my mind.” 

His thumb dragged across your bottom lip. “Because you know exactly what you’re doing to me, don’t you? Standing there in all that lace like you don’t know what it looks like. Like you don’t know what those pictures did.”

You opened your mouth to answer, but he pressed his thumb down, gentle and firm, silencing you.

“Shh. Don’t even. Don’t pretend you’ve got something clever to say. We both know that’s not what you’re good for right now.” His eyes dropped—slow, deliberate, heavy—down to your chest, and stayed there. “Look at these. Fuck. Look at what you’ve been carrying around all day. Walking through the mall like this. Trying on bras for these.”

The words shouldn’t have done what they did. They shouldn’t have made your skin go hot and tight, shouldn’t have made something behind your ribs flutter and clench. But they did. They absolutely did.

“You sent me those pictures,” he continued, his voice dropping lower, rougher, “and you want me to believe you weren’t thinking about this? About right here? About what these were going to do to me?” His hand left your face and came down, one palm curving around the side of your breast, his thumb brushing over your nipple so lightly it was barely there. “You knew. That’s all you know. That’s the only thing going on behind those pretty eyes right now.”

You made a sound—small, involuntary, somewhere between a protest and a surrender—and his grip tightened.

“Uh-uh. None of that. I’m talking.” His other hand reached down and grabbed your wrist, pulling it away from where it had drifted to your own thigh. “Use your hands. Feel this.”

He guided your hand down—down past his stomach, past the waistband of his jeans, until your palm pressed flat against the hard ridge straining against the denim. Your fingers curled instinctively, and he hissed through his teeth, his head tipping back.

“Jesus. Jesus. You just—you just do it, don’t you? You don’t even think about it. I say feel, you feel. I say sit, you sit. I say spend my money, you go drop three-fifty on lingerie like it’s nothing.” He laughed, breathless, his hips pushing up into your hand. “You’re so good at that. So good at following directions. At being exactly what I tell you to be.”

Your palm dragged along the length of him through the rough fabric, and you felt him twitch, felt the dampness already seeping through the denim.

“Pull it out,” he said. Not asked. Said. His voice was wrecked. “Go on. Pull it out for me. Show me how good you can be.”

Your fingers found the button, the zipper, the waistband—working on autopilot, shaking just enough to make the metal teeth catch. You dragged his jeans down just far enough, and then you were pulling him free, and he was hot and heavy in your hand, already leaking at the tip.

“Good girl. That’s—fuck, that’s—” His hand came to the back of your head, fingers threading into your hair. “Now I want you to—”

You didn’t hear the rest.

You leaned forward and took him into your mouth before he could finish the sentence, and the sound he made—a broken, guttural groan that started in his chest and cracked somewhere in his throat—was worth every second of waiting on that couch.

Your lips stretched around him, wet and sloppy, and you let your tongue drag along the underside on the way down. Your hand worked what your mouth couldn’t reach, and spit was already pooling at the corners of your lips, dripping down your chin, trailing in a wet line down to your bare chest.

“Oh my God—you dumb—you perfect, brainless—” His fingers tightened in your hair, not pulling, just holding, and his hips shifted forward involuntarily. “Look at you. Look at you just—doing it. Didn’t even let me finish telling you what to do. Just opened your mouth and went for it like that’s all you were built for.”

You gagged around him, your eyes watering, and he groaned like you’d done something perfect.

“Fuck—fuck, look at you,” he panted, and his hand guided your head with rough, uneven strokes. “Look at your mouth. You don’t even know what you’re doing, do you? You just—you hear ‘pull me out’ and your brain shuts off. That’s all it takes.”

You hum against him, gagging the more he slid into you.

“Yeah—yeah, there it is. That’s the sound. That’s the sound I wanted to hear from you.” His hips jerked up, and you took it, your throat clenching, your hands braced against his thighs. “Such a pretty little thing. Can’t even keep your mouth shut for five seconds. Can’t even wait for me to tell you what to do next.”

You pulled back, gasping, a trail of spit running down your chin, and he caught your jaw in his hand, tilting your face up.

“Open,” he said, and you did, your mouth falling open, tongue resting against your lower lip, and he slid back in with a groan that rattled the couch.

“You’re so fucking dumb,” he breathed, and the word landed like a kiss. “So fucking empty-headed. So perfect. Do you know what you are? Do you know what you’re good for?”

You shook your head, your eyes glassy, your lips stretched around him.

“You’re good for this,” he said, and he thrust up into your mouth. “Just this. This is what you’re built for. This is what those pictures were for. This is what that three hundred dollars was for.”

You gagged again, harder this time, and he pulled back, his cock sliding free with a wet pop. A string of saliva hung between your lips and his tip, and he watched it break with something like worship in his eyes.

He cupped your face in both hands, his thumbs wiping the spit from your chin with a tenderness that made your chest ache.

“I want to fuck your tits,” he said, and the words were quiet, almost gentle, like he was telling you a secret. “Those perfect tits you sent me pictures of. The ones that made me leave work early. The ones that made me drive home with my hand on my cock in the parking lot.”

He leaned down and pressed his forehead against yours. His breath was ragged, hot against your mouth.

“Can you do that for me?” he asked, and his voice had gone soft in a way that made your chest ache. “Can you put these together for me? That’s all I need you to do. Just hold them together. That’s your whole job right now. Can you do that? Can my pretty girl do that one simple thing?”

You nodded. Because you could. Because that was all you had to do, and it was so easy, and his voice was so warm, and his hand was so gentle on your jaw.

You pressed your breasts together with both hands, the soft flesh spilling between your fingers, and his groan was almost pained.

“There. There they are. There are those perfect tits. The ones that cost me three hundred and forty-seven dollars.” He reached down and gripped himself, dragging the head through the valley you’d created, leaving a wet streak across your skin. “Worth every fucking penny. Worth ten times that. Look at them. Look at what I bought.”

He pushed forward, his cock sliding between your breasts, and your hands tightened instinctively, holding him there.

“That’s it. That’s my girl. Just hold them. Don’t think about anything else. Don’t need to. Nothing else matters right now except these.” He pulled back slowly, the head of his cock catching against your collarbone, then pushed forward again. “You sent me those pictures and I couldn’t—I couldn’t think about anything else. All day. Couldn’t focus on a single thing. And now I get to have em’, huh?”

The wet sound of his skin against yours filled the room—slick, rhythmic, obscene. A bead of pre-cum rolled down the shaft and disappeared between your breasts, and you watched it happen with the same dazed, unfocused attention he’d accused you of.

“You’re doing so good,” he breathed, and his hand came up to brush your hair back from your forehead. “So good. Just standing there holding them together like that’s all you know how to do. That’s all you need to know how to do. My perfect, empty, beautiful—”

He thrust harder, and your back arched, pushing your chest up into him.

“God, you’re even doing that without being told. You just—you just know, don’t you? You just know what feels good. What looks good. What makes me lose my mind.” His free hand came down and cupped your breast, his thumb circling your nipple. “These were made for this. You were made for this. Standing there in the dressing room taking pictures of these—you knew. Somewhere in that pretty head of yours, you knew exactly what they were for.”

You whimpered—a small, broken sound—and his grip tightened.

“Yeah. Yeah, that’s what I thought. That’s what I knew.” He was moving faster now, his rhythm losing its careful control, his cock sliding wet and heavy between your breasts. “You’re not thinking about a single thing right now, are you? Nothing in that head. Just—present. Just here. Just being good.”

You weren’t. You really, truly weren’t. The world had narrowed to the heat of him between your breasts, the sound of his voice, the pressure of his hand in your hair. Everything else had gone quiet and far away, and what was left was warm and close and exactly enough.

His breathing was ragged now, coming in short, sharp bursts. His hips stuttered.

“I’m gonna—fuck, I’m gonna—” His hand left your hair and grabbed your wrist, pulling your hand away from your breast. “Open. Open your mouth. Look at me.”

You opened your mouth, your tongue falling forward, your eyes lifting to his. His face was wrecked—jaw clenched, brow furrowed, lips parted around sounds he couldn’t quite form.

He came across your tongue and your chin, thick and hot, and the groan that tore out of him was so raw it sounded almost painful. Your mouth filled, and you swallowed automatically, your throat working around the bitter salt of him, and the rest spilled over—down your chin, onto your chest, pooling in the valley of your breasts.

His chest heaved, and he looked down at you with an expression that was equal parts awe and devastation.

“Jesus Christ,” he whispered. “Jesus fucking Christ.”

You sat there on your knees, his come cooling on your skin, your lips swollen and wet, your chest heaving beneath the mess he’d made of you. 

He looked at you the way he’d said he would. He took his time. His gaze moved from your mouth to your eyes to your chest, where his release had dripped down between your breasts, following the curve of your skin like a map. He watched it pool in the hollow of your throat, and his thumb came up to wipe it away, then pressed it against your bottom lip.

“Open,” he said again, and you opened, and he pushed his thumb into your mouth, and you closed your lips around it and sucked. The taste of him was sharp and warm and you hummed around his finger, your tongue working against the pad.

“Jesus Christ.” He pulled his thumb free with a wet sound and pressed his forehead against yours again. His breathing was still ragged, his chest rising and falling against yours. “You’re going to be the death of me. You know that, right? You’re going to actually kill me.”

He pulled you up and forward by your hands, and you folded against his chest like something made of liquid. His arms came around you—both of them, tight and shaking—and he buried his face in your hair.

He pulled back just enough to look at you, his hands framing your face again, his thumbs wiping the wetness from your chin with a gentleness that made your eyes sting.

“Okay,” he said, and his voice was wrecked but steady. “Okay. Fashion show. Let’s go.”

You blinked. “What?”

“Fashion show.” He nodded toward the stairs, his hands dropping to your shoulders. “You said three more sets. I want to see them.” His mouth quirked into something that was almost a smile. “I want to see every single thing you bought me.”

You looked down at yourself—the ruined blue lace, the drying streaks on your skin, the mess between your breasts. “Like this?”

“Exactly like that.” He leaned in and pressed a kiss to your forehead—soft, lingering, reverent. “Go get changed”

At the top of the stairs, you turned. He was still on the couch, one hand resting on his stomach, his jeans still shoved down around his thighs, and he looked at you like you were the last thing he’d ever want to see.

The road stretched before you like an endless black ribbon, and your phone’s navigation system had given up thirty minutes ago with a cheerful “GPS signal lost.” You glanced over at Ted, who was still filming, narrating the vlog as if this detour was somehow part of the plan.

“So, folks, sometimes the adventure finds you, not the other way around,” Ted said into the camera, turning it toward you with a grin.

You rolled your eyes. “Ted, we’re lost. Completely, absolutely lost.”

“Lost is a state of mind,” he replied, but even he was beginning to look concerned as the last signs of civilization disappeared behind you.

After another hour of aimless driving, you finally spotted the neon glow of a motel sign through the trees. The place looked like it had been built in the 1970s and never updated, but the vacancy sign was lit, and your body ached for something that wasn’t a car seat.

“Roadside Americana, folks! Authentic travel experience!” Ted was already narrating again as you pulled into the cracked parking lot.

The desk clerk barely looked up as you checked in, handing over two plastic key cards with faded numbers. Your room smelled of stale cigarette smoke masked by industrial-strength air freshener, but at least the beds looked clean.

“We should get something to eat,” you suggested, but Ted was already setting up his camera equipment on the small desk.

“I got some great footage of that abandoned gas station we passed. Real vintage vibe.” he joked.

You left him to it and went in search of vending machines, returning with an armful of chips and soda. When you got back, Ted was peering out the window.

“Dude, check it out. The pool is right outside our door.”

Sure enough, a shimmering rectangle of blue water sat just beyond the parking lot, surrounded by a chain-link fence. You noticed the posted hours: 9 AM to 9 PM. It was nearly midnight.

“Gate’s open,” Ted whispered, as if someone might overhear. “And I don’t see any cameras.”

You should have said no. You should have reminded Ted that you were both exhausted from driving all day, that you needed to be up early to continue your journey. Instead, you heard yourself say, “We could just dip our feet in. Cool off before bed.”

Five minutes later, you were standing at the edge of the pool, the warm night air caressing your skin. “It’s like our own private oasis,” Ted said, toeing off his shoes. “Come on, the water looks perfect.”

Before you could protest, Ted had already pulled off his shirt. His shorts followed, then his glasses—set down last, carefully, on top of the pile. He dove in without looking back, surfacing with a splash and squinting up at you through the dark.

“Your turn!” he called, shaking water from his hair.

Something about the freedom in his gesture made you reckless. You stripped down, adding your clothes to a second pile, and slipped into the water. It was cooler than expected, raising goosebumps on your skin.

“That’s what I’m talking about!” Ted shouted, his voice carrying across the still water. He punched the surface with both hands, sending a spray of water toward you. “Living in the moment!”

You splashed him back, a sharp arc of chlorinated water catching him square in the chest. “This is a dumb idea, Ted. We’re trespassing at a roadside motel at midnight.” you laughed.

Something shifted in his eyes. A competitive glint replaced his relaxed expression. “Oh, you think so?” He splashed back, sending a wave crashing against your chest.

Before you could react, Ted was on the move, circling you like a predator, creating ripples with each deliberate step. You tried to back away, but the edge of the pool cut off your retreat.

“Ted, don’t—” Your warning came too late.

He launched himself forward, arms creating massive arcs of water that drenched you completely. Laughter bubbled up from somewhere deep inside you as you retaliated, cupping your hands to maximize your splash attack.

The game escalated quickly. What began as playful splashing turned into a full-blown water war. You dove beneath the surface, swimming toward Ted’s legs to pull him under. He anticipated your move, catching you around the waist as you surfaced.

For a moment, everything stilled. His body pressed against yours in the cool water, warm skin against warm skin. Your heart hammered in your chest, and you wondered if he could feel it through the points where you touched. His eyes locked with yours, and something unspoken passed between you.

And then you weren’t fighting anymore.

Your mouth found his with a desperation that surprised you both, clumsy and urgent, tasting chlorine and midnight air. You both moved simultaneously, neither wanting to be the first to pull away, neither wanting to acknowledge what this proximity meant. Your hands found his shoulders, then slid down to his waist. His fingers tangled in your hair as you both struggled for dominance, for something neither of you could name.

The water lapped around you as you both struggled for breath, gasping between kisses like you were drowning and the other’s mouth was the only oxygen available. Ted’s fingers threaded through your hair, pulling you closer even though there was no closer to get. Your hands mapped the ridges of his spine, the taut muscles of his shoulders, the dip of his lower back where his skin was smooth and impossibly warm.

When you finally broke apart, the world seemed tilted on its axis. Ted stared at you, water droplets clinging to his eyelashes, his chest rising and falling rapidly.

“So,” he said, his voice uncharacteristically husky, “was that part of your authentic travel experience, too?”

You splashed water at his face. “Shut up, Ted.”

“Make me,” he challenged, that familiar mischievous glint returning to his eyes.

Something clicked in your brain. A plan. A terrible, wonderful plan.

“Maybe I will,” you replied, backing toward the pool’s edge.

Before Ted could react, you pulled yourself out of the water in one fluid motion. Water streamed from your body as you scooped up his pile of clothes—shirt, shorts, everything—and bolted for the motel room door.

“Hey! That’s not fair!” Ted called after you, but you were already giggling as you fumbled with the key card. The door finally clicked open and you slipped inside, Ted’s clothes clutched to your chest. You turned just in time to see him appear in the doorway, completely naked and dripping on the motel carpet.

“Give those back,” he demanded, stepping toward you.

You backed away, holding his clothes behind you. “Make me.” you laughed.

Ted advanced slowly, water still running down his chest. Then he stopped, a smirk spreading across his face. “You know what? Keep them.”

Your eyes darted to the desk where your own clothes should've been. That’s when you realized. Through the window, you could see your clothes untouched, still in their little pile on the deck. Then back to Ted. A second realization hit you simultaneously—you were trapped, completely exposed while he had the perfect vantage point.

“That’s just cruel,” you muttered, feeling heat rise to your cheeks.

Ted leaned against the door frame, crossing his arms. “What’s wrong? Suddenly shy?”

Your gaze swept the room, searching for anything to even the playing field. That’s when you spotted them—his glasses, sitting neatly on the desk beside your abandoned clothes. You lept for them, slipping them onto your face in one fluid motion.

The world blurred immediately, Ted’s naked form becoming nothing but a shapeless smudge. But you had what you needed.

“If you want to see me like this,” you said, gesturing to your naked body, “you’ll have to come get these yourself.”

Ted squinted at you, momentarily confused. Then he seemed to understand, his expression shifting from surprise to determination. He crossed the room in three quick strides, his hands finding your waist and lifting you effortlessly.

Ted was on you in an instant, his body pinning yours to the mattress. His hands captured your wrists, pressing them gently but firmly above your head. The position left you completely exposed to him, your skin still damp from the pool.

“Now what?” he asked, his voice low as he adjusted the glasses on your face with his free hand.

You struggled halfheartedly against his grip. “This seems a little one-sided,” you managed, your pulse racing.

“Does it?” Ted leaned closer, his breath warm against your neck. “I seem to remember you stealing my clothes. And my glasses.”

“They look better on me anyway,” you whispered, tilting your head to give him better access to the sensitive skin below your ear.

Ted chuckled, the sound vibrating through his chest and into yours where you were pressed together. “You know, for someone who’s completely at my mercy, you’re awfully cocky.”

“Not at your mercy,” you corrected, flexing against his grip. “I let you catch me.”

“Is that so?” His grip tightened slightly, not painfully, but enough to make your breath hitch. “And why would you do that?”

You met his gaze, the world fuzzy around the edges through his glasses. “Because I wanted to see what you’d do next.”

Ted’s expression softened. He released one of your wrists, his fingers trailing down your arm, leaving goosebumps in their wake. “And now you know.”

“Not yet,” you replied, reaching up to remove the glasses. “But I’m looking forward to finding out.”

The glasses came off, and suddenly Ted’s face was crystal clear again—his eyes dark with want, his lips parted slightly. Ted’s hand caught yours as you moved to set the glasses aside. “No,” he murmured, guiding your fingers back toward his face. “Put them back on me.”

Something shifted in your chest as you carefully placed the frames back on his face, your fingers brushing against his temples. Ted blinked, adjusting to his restored vision, and you watched his eyes sharpen as they focused on you.

“Better?” you ask sweetly, like you hadn't known what you've been doing.

“Better.” 

His sureness makes your heart hammer against your ribs as his free hand traced a path from your collarbone to your navel. 

Ted captured your wrist again, bringing your fingers to his lips. “Much better,” he said against your skin before placing a gentle kiss there.

The tenderness of the gesture caught you off guard. All evening had been playful banter and escalating tension, but this—this was something else entirely. Something that made your chest ache with an emotion you weren’t ready to name.

You shifted your hips, and suddenly you were acutely aware of Ted’s arousal pressing against your thigh—hard and insistent. Your breath caught in your throat as you pressed closer, feeling the full length of him against you.

“So,” you whispered, your voice husky with desire, “are we going to talk about this?” You rolled your hips deliberately, dragging yourself against him.

Ted groaned, his grip tightening on your wrist. “About what? Your terrible judgment in stealing my clothes?”

“About this,” you countered, pressing yourself more firmly against his erection. “About how you’ve got me pinned to this bed, completely at your mercy.” you mock.

Ted’s eyes darkened behind his glasses. “You’re the one who stole my clothes and ran off. I think you’re exactly where you want to be.”

“Maybe,” you conceded, lifting your chin defiantly. “But I’m not the one who’s been hard since we got out of that pool.”

Ted’s mouth curved into a dangerous smile. “No? Then what do you call this?” He released your wrist only to slide his hand down between your bodies, his fingers finding your heat, making you gasp at the contact.

“That’s—that’s different,” you managed, your body already responding to his touch.

“Different how?” he asked, his fingers exploring you with deliberate slowness. “Because it seems pretty equal to me.”

You arched into his touch, your body betraying your mind’s desire to maintain some semblance of control. “It would be,” you breathed, “if you’d actually do something about it instead of just teasing me.”

Ted withdrew his hand suddenly, leaving you bereft. “And why would I do that?” he asked, his voice deceptively casual as he positioned himself between your thighs. You felt the head of his cock pressing against your entrance, not pushing in, just resting there.

“Because I want you to,” you said, trying to sound commanding despite the way your voice trembled.

“That’s not a very compelling argument,” Ted replied, using the tip of his cock to paint slow, maddening lines through your folds, dragging it against your clit with just enough pressure to make you whimper.

“Please,” you whispered, hating how desperate you sounded.

Ted smiled, his glasses catching the dim light from the bedside lamp. “I have an idea,” he said, his tone condescendingly sweet, “why don’t you beg for it?”

You whimpered, the sound more disbelief than frustration. How had you ended up here, completely at his mercy?

“Hmm?” he cooed, circling your entrance again without entering. “Tell me you think you deserve it.”

The words should have angered you, but instead, they made something primal awaken within you. You wanted this. Wanted him. Needed him.

“I deserve it,” you gasped, feeling yourself growing wetter as he continued his maddening tease. “Please, Ted. I need you inside me. I’ve needed it all night.”

“Better,” he murmured approvingly, still not giving you what you wanted. “But I think you can do more.”

“I deserve to be fucked,” you gasped, your hips bucking against his hand. “Please, Ted, I’ve been so good, so patient. I deserve to feel you inside me.”

Ted’s pace quickened, his cock sliding through your folds with increased urgency. “And what if I decide you don’t deserve it?” he asked, his voice strained with his own restraint.

“Then take what you want anyway,” you pleaded, your voice breaking. “Use me. Make me yours. I des—”

Your words cut off mid-sentence as Ted finally, mercifully, sank himself into you in one smooth thrust. Your expression transformed instantly—eyebrows that had been stitched together in desperate concentration relaxed, your mouth falling slack, eyes fluttering closed as pleasure radiated through you.

Ted paused, fully sheathed inside you, watching your face with something like wonder. “And to think,” he whispered, brushing a strand of hair from your face, “I would’ve missed that face without my glasses.”

“Ted,” you whispered, not sure what you wanted to say but needing to say his name.

“Like this?” Ted whispered, his voice strained as he established a rhythm that had you clutching at the sheets. “Is this what you wanted when you stole my clothes?”

You could barely form words as pleasure rippled through you with each thrust. “Yes,” you managed to gasp.

Ted suddenly stilled, his body trembling with restraint. “Do you know how fucking lucky you are right now?” His voice was low, dangerous. “After what you pulled at the pool? Stealing my clothes? My glasses? You should be begging for forgiveness, not getting fucked senseless."

You whimpered, your body trying to follow his retreat.

“Splashing me in the pool,” Ted continued, punctuating each accusation with a shallow thrust that never quite reached the spot you needed. “Stealing my clothes. Taking my glasses—” he pushed deeper, making you moan, “—and making me practically blind while you stood there totally naked.”

The change in his tone sent a shiver down your spine that had nothing to do with the room’s air conditioning. “Then punish me properly,” you challenged, your voice breathless but defiant.

“Turn over.” Something in his commanding tone made your body respond before your mind could process the command. You rolled onto your stomach, then pushed yourself up onto your hands and knees, feeling exposed and vulnerable in the new position.

The mattress dipped as he positioned himself behind you, his palm coming down hard on your ass with a sharp crack that echoed through the room.

“One,” he counted, his voice stern. “For splashing me when I wasn’t looking.”

You yelped, more from surprise than pain, the sting quickly turning to heat. Before you could catch your breath, another slap landed on the opposite cheek.

“Two. For stealing my clothes and leaving me stranded by the pool.”

“Ted-” you gasped, but your body was already responding, pressing back against his hand.

His palm connected with your flesh again, harder this time. “Three. For taking my glasses when you know how blind I am without them.”

“Four,” you managed, your voice shaking with something between embarrassment and arousal. 

Ted laughed, the sound dark and rich. “Counting for me now, are we? Good girl.” His hand came down again. “Four. For making me chase you from the pool to our room.”

You groaned, burying your face in the pillow as your body responded traitorously to each strike. The pain was already transforming into something else entirely—a building heat that spread through your core with each impact.

“Five,” Ted continued, his voice growing huskier. “For being such a brat when you’re the one who started this.”

Ted’s hand gentled, running soothing circles over your reddened skin. “Six,” he whispered, his touch suddenly tender, “for being so fucking beautiful tonight.”

“Seven,” he said, his voice barely audible as he positioned himself at your entrance once more. “Because you’ve been so good.”

He slid inside you in one fluid motion, deeper than before, and you cried out at the fullness. The combination of your stinging skin and the delicious stretch of him inside you created a perfect storm of sensation that made your vision blur.

“Please,” you begged, not even sure what you were asking for.

Ted gripped your hips, setting a punishing pace that had you gasping with each thrust. “Tell me what you want,” he demanded, his voice rough with need.

“You,” you managed between thrusts. “Just you. More.”

His pace increased, driving into you with an intensity that made your fingers clutch at the sheets. The angle changed slightly, and suddenly he was hitting that perfect spot inside you with each stroke, making stars burst behind your eyelids.

Ted leaned over you, his chest pressing against your back, his lips at your ear. “You’ve been so good,” he whispered, his breath hot against your skin. “So perfect, taking your punishment.”

You whimpered, beyond words now, reduced to nothing but sensation as Ted fucked you with purpose, each stroke hitting exactly the right spot inside you. Then his hand slid around your hip, his fingers finding your clit with unerring accuracy.

“Look at you,” he murmured, his breath hot against your ear as he leaned over you. “So desperate.”

You nodded frantically, unable to form coherent sentences as his fingers circled your clit in perfect counterpoint to his thrusts.

You couldn’t respond, could only whimper as pleasure built to an unbearable peak. Ted’s fingers never faltered, his pace never slowed.

“I think” he whispered, his voice thick with desire, “you deserve your reward.”

His words pushed you over the edge. The orgasm crashed through you like a wave, making your entire body tremble. You clenched around him, drawing a groan from Ted as he continued to thrust through your release.

“That’s it,” he coaxed, his fingers still working your oversensitive clit. “Take it all. You’ve earned it.”

Your second orgasm hit before the first had finished, more intense than anything you’d ever experienced. You screamed his name as pleasure consumed you completely.

Ted’s rhythm grew erratic, his fingers digging into your hips as he chased his own release. With one final thrust, he buried himself deep inside you, his body shuddering as he came with your name on his lips.

For several moments, neither of you moved, both trying to catch your breath. Then Ted gently pulled out, helping you turn onto your back. He brushed the hair from your face, his touch impossibly tender after what had just transpired.

“Still think you deserved that?” he asked, his voice soft with something that sounded suspiciously like affection.

You turned to face him, gently removing his glasses and setting them on the nightstand. “Maybe I did,” you admitted, tracing the line of his jaw with your finger. “Maybe I deserved even more.”

Ted’s eyes widened slightly, then narrowed with renewed interest. “Is that so?” His hand trailed down your spine, coming to rest on your still-warm backside. “We’ll have to remember that for next time.”

“Next time?” you asked, unable to keep the smile from your voice.

Ted kissed you gently, his lips lingering against yours. “The road trip isn’t over yet,” he reminded you. “And there are plenty more motels between here and home.”

The subway doors sigh open with all the enthusiasm of a tired office worker.

You and Jay step inside, still laughing about something one of your friends had said over dinner—something stupid, exaggerated, impossible to explain to anyone who hadn't been there. He drops into one of the plastic seats with a dramatic groan.

"I'm eighty years old," he announces. "I'm never leaving my apartment again."

"You said that last weekend."

"And I meant it last weekend."

The doors slide shut.

The train starts forward.

For a minute, neither of you notice how empty it is. It's late enough that the city has thinned out, but New York rarely ever feels this deserted.

At the next station, the train slows.

The doors open.

No one gets on.

No one gets off.

The fluorescent lights on the platform hum against bare concrete before the doors close again.

"Huh," you murmur.

Jay glances around dramatically, lowering his voice.

"Congratulations! We survived the apocalypse."

You snort.

The next stop comes.

Again, empty platform.

Again, nobody boards.

"...Okay," you say. "This is starting to feel like the setup to a horror movie."

He points toward the security camera in the corner of the car.

"Some intern is watching us right now hoping we do something funny."

Without another word, you stand, grab the nearest pole, and spin around it with all the grace of someone who absolutely shouldn't.

Jay barks out a laugh.

"Oh, we're doing bits now."

Another stop.

Still empty.

By now you've migrated from opposite seats to the same bench, shoulders bumping every few seconds as the train rattles beneath Manhattan.

The conversation drifts.

From your friends.

To old stories.

To college.

To that awful apartment he used to live in where the radiator sounded possessed.

Somewhere along the line, the laughter gets quieter.

Comfortable.

You don't notice exactly when your knees start touching.

Only that neither of you bothers to move.

The train rocks gently through another tunnel, lights flashing across the windows in rhythmic bursts.

He smiles. To himself, but you catch it.

Small.

Unusually genuine.

You've known him long enough to read the shifts in his face before he speaks.

He knows yours just as well.

Your eyes flick down, almost involuntarily, before meeting his again.

Outside, another station slides past.

The doors open.

No one enters.

The doors close.

The train moves on.

It's just the hum of the rails beneath you.

Just the two of you.

You don't remember who moves first.

Maybe you lean in.

Maybe he does.

The distance between you disappears so naturally it feels less like a decision than something that had been happening for years without either of you noticing.

His hand finds yours where it's resting on the seat between you, fingers interlacing without urgency.

The city rushes unseen beyond the windows while the subway car sways gently around you, forgotten for a few quiet moments.

When you finally separate, you're still close enough to feel each other's breath.

Jay lets out a soft, incredulous laugh.

"...Well."

You blink at him.

"Well?"

The train rattles onward into the next tunnel, carrying the two of you through the sleeping city, neither quite ready to unpack what had just changed between you.

Then his hand is on your wrist, quick and impulsive—the way he does everything, half-decided before the thought fully forms—and he's pulling you forward, tugging you sideways until you're falling onto him with a yelp.

Your knees land between his thighs, one on either side. One hand braces against the window behind his head. The other lands on his shoulder for balance. You're straddling his leg before your brain catches up with your body.

"We've been friends a long time—" you hear yourself say, even as your hands continue to find his shoulders for balance.

"An embarrassingly long time."

"—and we're on the subway—"

"The empty subway."

"—and you're—"

"What am I doing?"

He's grinning up at you, and you're grinning back, and you realize you haven't said stop. You haven't said not now. You haven't said slow down, because the word is sitting somewhere in your throat and it won't come out. It won't come out because it isn't true.

God—you've thought about this. Late nights in your own bed, staring at the ceiling, replaying the way he laughs with his whole body. You've thought about it and you've shut it down every time because Jay was the one person who knew exactly how to make you laugh when you wanted to cry, and losing that felt like losing a lung.

But his mouth is warm and insistent, and his fingers are tracing lazy circles through the fabric of your shirt where it's ridden up, and there's absolutely nothing awkward about any of it. No fumbling. No second-guessing. Just the easy chemistry that's been there since the first night you met at that terrible karaoke bar, except now it has somewhere to go.

The train hits a bump and you jolt forward, and your hips grind down against his thigh, and you both freeze for a half-second—eyes wide, mouths still inches apart—

"Did you just—"

"That was the train." you correct.

"That was absolutely the train." he mocks.

"It was."

You kiss him again, and this time it's slower, less frantic, his thumb tracing a small arc against your hip bone. The train turns, and you slide just enough that you feel him—the hard line of him through his jeans, pressing against the inside of your thigh.

"Jay."

"Mm."

"People ride this train."

"Not tonight they don't."

He's right. The windows flash with the dark walls of the tunnel, and the fluorescents overhead flicker once, twice, and the car keeps swaying through the emptiness of the city at this hour. His hands tighten on your hips, pulling you closer, and you rock against him with the motion of the train like it's the most natural thing in the world—like you've been doing this for years and just forgot to start.

His mouth moves to your jaw, then the soft spot below your ear, and he murmurs something you don't quite catch over the rumble of the tracks.

"What?"

He pulls back just enough to look at you, and his eyes are dark and bright and full of something you've never let yourself name.

"I said," he whispers, "it's not every day you're alone on the subway."

A nervous laugh escapes you before you can catch it—breathy, half-disbelieving, the kind that comes from a place of not knowing what comes next. Your fingers curl into the fabric of his jacket, and you search his face for whatever he's implying, if he's implying anything at all, because the night has already spun so far off its axis you're not sure you'd recognize a straight line.

He reads it immediately. Of course he does. That's always been the thing about Jay—he watches you closer than anyone, catches the micro-shift in your expression before you've even finished feeling it.

"Hey," he says, softer now, one hand coming up to cup the side of your face. His thumb traces the line of your cheekbone. "I know that look."

"I don't have a look."

"You have every look. This one's your 'I'm about to have a small panic attack on public transit' look."

"I'm not—"

"You don't even need to unbutton your jeans," he says, and his voice is low enough that it barely registers over the hum of the tracks. His thumbs trace slow circles against your hip bones. "You don't need to do anything you can't take back. The cameras up there—" he nods toward the corner without looking, "—they just see a girl in her friend's lap. That's it. Nothing to flag. Nothing to write up."

You swallow.

"The car's empty," he continues, and his hand slides from your hip to the small of your back, pressing you forward just an inch. Just enough. "It's a crime to waste it."

"Jay—"

"I'm going to take care of you." The words come out almost reverent, like he's been rehearsing them in his head and they slipped out before he could stop them. "Through your clothes. That's all. You grind on my thigh and I'll talk you through it, and when you're done we get off at your stop like nothing happened."

You should say something smart. Something quippy, the way you two always volley. But your brain has gone quiet in a way it almost never does, and all you can manage is a nod—small, deliberate, entranced. You trust him. Completely. The realization sits warm and undeniable in your chest, and you don't question it.

"We can't fuck on the train," he mumbles against your collarbone, almost to himself, like he's making sure he believes it too. "That's crazy. You know that. So it's my thigh or nothing."

He starts slow. Rocks you forward with the next sway of the train, pulling your hips down against his thigh, and the friction—even through denim—sends a sharp, bright shock up through your spine. His mouth finds your neck, then the curve of your collarbone, pressing soft kisses into skin that's still warm from dinner, from wine, from the walk to the station.

"Is that it?" he murmurs against you, barely audible over the rumble of the tracks. "That feel alright?"

You make a sound that isn't quite a word.

"That's it," he says, answering for you. "There you go."

The train takes a corner, and the momentum pushes you harder against him, and a groan hiccups out of you before you can swallow it—followed immediately by his own stifled sound, then the both of you breaking into laughter, foreheads pressed together, breathless and ridiculous.

"Sorry—"

"The train," he echoes, grinning.

"Absolutely the train."

Another bump. Another involuntary rock of your hips. Another shared sound that dissolves into quiet, shaking laughter against each other's mouths.

His hands slide up under your shirt—slow, giving you every chance to stop him—and when you don't, his palms flatten against your ribs, his thumbs brushing the undersides of your breasts with a tenderness that makes your chest ache.

"You're so soft," he murmurs, and the word lands somewhere below your sternum and stays there. "You have no idea what you do to me."

His hands keep working—steady, deliberate, learning you in real time—and his mouth finds every patch of exposed skin it can reach while his voice stays low and close against your ear. He tells you how good you feel. How pretty you look like this, flushed and disheveled on a subway seat at—he glances at his watch—one-seventeen in the morning. How he's thought about the sound of your laugh in bed more times than he'd ever admit to anyone, least of all you.

Another bump. Another involuntary grind. You bite your lip to keep the sound in and he reads it on your face anyway.

"Don't do that." His thumb grazes your nipple through your bra. "Let me hear you. Nobody's here."

"Jay—"

"I know. I know, baby. Keep going."

Baby. The word shouldn't undo you. You've heard him call a sandwich baby. You've heard him call his phone baby when it wouldn't connect to the Wi-Fi. But his voice is rough and low and he's looking up at you like you're the only thing in the entire empty city worth looking at, and something behind your ribs pulls tight.

His hands are everywhere. Gentle, unhurried, mapping you through fabric like he's memorizing the route. He circles your nipples until they're tight and aching, then soothes them with the flats of his palms, then circles again, and every time the train shifts he uses the momentum to press you harder against his thigh, and every time you gasp he murmurs something sweet and filthy into the skin below your ear.

"You're doing so good," he breathes. "You feel incredible. You have no idea—"

Your fingers curl into his shoulders, nails digging into the fabric of his jacket, and the pressure is building low and deep and inevitable, the kind of slow climb that makes your thighs tremble and your breath go ragged.

"Jay, I'm—"

"I know. I've got you." His hands still on your hips, holding you steady, guiding the rhythm. "Right there. Stay right there."

The train rounds another corner and your hips roll and the world goes white at the edges—a slow, rolling wave that crests and crests and crests before it finally breaks, and you bury your face in his neck to muffle the sound that tears out of you. He holds you through it, one hand cradling the back of your head, the other pressed flat against your lower back, and he's whispering things you'll replay for weeks—good girl, that's it, you did so well, you're so perfect—and when you finally sink against him, boneless and shaking, he presses his lips to your temple and doesn't let go.

The train announces your stop.

The doors open, and the night air hits you like a cold hand against a warm cheek. You disentangle yourself from his lap with considerably less grace than you'd mounted it, legs shaky, and he stands beside you, steadying you with a hand on your elbow that lingers even after you've found your balance.

He walks you home. Of course he walks you home. His hand finds yours on the sidewalk the way it found yours on the train—naturally, like it had been there all along and he'd only just noticed. Neither of you talks about what happened. Neither of you talks about what hasn't happened yet. The city is quiet around you, just the distant wail of a siren and the occasional taxi rolling past.

You stop in front of your building.

He stops with you.

He looks at the front door. Looks at you. Looks at the front door again.

"I should probably—"

"Come inside."

The words come out before you've decided to say them. Your voice sounds strange to your own ears—steady, but barely.

He pauses. Something shifts behind his eyes.

"You want me to come inside."

"I don't want you going home tonight."

He studies your face for a long moment, and whatever he finds there makes the corner of his mouth lift—soft, almost shy, nothing like the grin he wears on stage or in front of your friends.

"Okay," he says quietly. "Okay."

He doesn't make a joke. Doesn't deflect. Just squeezes your hand and follows you up the stairs, and when you fumble with your keys at the door—still a little unsteady, still buzzing from the train, from him, from the night that keeps refusing to end—he presses a kiss to your temple and waits. Patient. Present. Entirely, unmistakably yours.

Upstairs, your apartment sits exactly as you left it—neat, clean, nothing out of place. The throw blanket folded over the arm of the couch. The single coffee mug drying upside down on the dish rack. No second toothbrush in the bathroom. No unfamiliar jacket hanging on the back of the kitchen chair.

Jay's eyes sweep the room with a thoroughness that borders on suspicious—the bookshelf, the kitchen counter, the empty side of the closet visible through the half-open door. You watch him take inventory, and something in his posture relaxes by degrees, like he'd been bracing for evidence of someone else and found none. Like he'd been scared to find otherwise.

He'd been here before. Dozens of times. Movie nights and hangouts and that one disaster of a dinner party where the smoke alarm went off and you both ended up on the fire escape eating takeout off paper plates. It wasn't new. The layout wasn't new. The smell of your apartment—laundry detergent and the candle you burn too much—wasn't new.

But right now it was. It was new and his hand was still warm from yours on the stairs and the air between you had a different weight to it, dense and humming, like the moment before a thunderstorm.

"Um," you stumble, already moving toward the couch because standing still feels impossible. "Did you want to watch a movie?"

He doesn't answer with words. Just follows, sinking into the cushion beside you with a quiet exhale, and there's space between you—real, deliberate space, the kind that didn't exist on the train. Like a first date. Like whatever happened in that empty subway car belonged to different people in a different universe, and the two of you sitting on this couch right now are still figuring out the handshake.

You reach for the remote on the coffee table, thumb the power button, and the TV blinks to life. The first streaming platform fills the screen—bright, cheerful, aggressively neutral—and you let it sit there because choosing something feels like choosing a direction, and you're not ready to choose a direction.

Jay isn't looking at the TV. You can feel him overthinking, the weight of his attention fixed somewhere on the carpet, burning a hole through the fibers. His knee is bouncing. Subtle, but you notice, because you've always noticed.

You break the silence before it calcifies.

"Do you want to pick?" You extend the remote toward him, arm outstretched, and his fingers close around it—slow, deliberate—and your hands brush against each other, skin to skin, and he swallows hard. You watch his throat work. You watch the way his jaw tightens for a fraction of a second before he turns to the screen.

He scrolls. Not far. Just enough to land on the first horror movie that loads—some generic title with a dark poster and a rating that neither of you read—and he clicks it without hesitation, like the decision was a Band-Aid he needed to rip off.

Then, without preamble, he closes the gap.

In one fluid motion, he closes the gap between you, pulling your legs up and across his lap, adjusting you until you're half-sprawled against the arm of the couch with your calves draped over his thighs. He settles back, not quite touching, but close enough that you can feel the warmth of his skin through your shirt.

The movie begins. A cold open. Rain on a windshield. A radio crackling with static.

Neither of you is watching.

His thumb traces absent patterns against the side of your knee—small, unconscious circles that make your skin prickle beneath the denim. You watch his profile in the blue light of the television—the sharp line of his jaw, the way his mouth quirks at something on screen that isn't actually funny.

"You okay?" he asks, not looking at you.

"Yeah." Your voice comes out steadier than you expect. "You?"

"I'm great." He says it like he's trying to convince himself. His thumb stills on your knee, then resumes. "I'm just—processing."

"The train."

"The train." He lets out a short, quiet laugh. "And the walk. And the stairs. And now your couch."

On screen, someone screams. The sound is distant, irrelevant, background noise to the quiet intensity of his gaze.

"I've wanted this for a really long time," he says. The admission comes out rough, almost reluctant, like he's been carrying it around and finally set it down. "Longer than I should probably admit."

His eyes search yours for a beat, two beats, and then something in him softens.

“I have to” you smile softly.

He moves like he's been thinking about this all night. Maybe longer.

One hand slides down to the bend of your knee, fingers curling warm and certain around the joint, and he guides it up—slow, deliberate—until your leg is folded against his chest. Then the other, mirroring, until both knees are bent at either side of his waist and you're bracketing him on the couch with the movie still murmuring nonsense in the background.

His hair has fallen forward, hanging in a curtain off his forehead, and in the blue flicker of the television his eyes are soft in a way you've never seen them. The kind that doesn't know it's being watched.

It hits you all at once.

He's being loving.

The realization lands somewhere behind your ribs and stays there, heavy and warm. He's being loving. Jay—the guy who deflects every serious conversation with a joke, who's built his entire public persona around being untouchable, who once told you with complete sincerity that feelings were "gross, actually"—is looking at you like you hung the moon and he's just now noticed it. His hands are trembling, just barely, and his eyes are bright with something that looks dangerously close to devotion.

And it's you doing this to him. You. The realization makes something hot and shy bloom behind your sternum, and you have to look away for a second because the weight of it is almost too much to hold.

He hesitates. You see it in the way his jaw tightens, the way his gaze drops to your mouth and then back up, like he's asking permission without saying the words. Like he's not sure if you want this—not the sex, not the physical, but the this. The thing that comes after. The thing that changes everything.

You don't let him finish the question.

You pull him down by the front of his shirt and kiss him like you mean it—because you do. Your hands frame his face, thumbs brushing the stubble along his jaw, and you kiss him with everything the subway hadn't given you room for. Slow. Full-bodied. Meaningful in a way that makes his breath catch against your mouth.

He breaks away first, but only to press his lips to your collarbones. Then lower. The flat plane of your sternum, where your shirt has ridden up. Your ribs, where his hands had been. The dip of your navel, exposed now as he pushes the fabric higher with his nose. The waistband of your jeans, where his mouth pauses, warm breath ghosting across the skin just below.

His hands slide down the outside of your thighs, then back up—smoothing over denim with a patience that borders on maddening. Fingers tracing the seams, the pockets, the belt loops, like he's trying to map every detail before he touches what matters. When his thumbs finally graze over the button of your jeans, he pauses. Waiting.

You nod.

"Okay," you whisper.

He undoes the button with a carefulness that feels almost surgical. Slides the zipper down tooth by tooth, watching your face the entire time. Then he pulls—jeans and underwear together, one long, slow drag—and you're bare beneath him on your own couch.

He kisses the inside of your knee. Your thigh. The crease where your leg meets your hip. And then his mouth finds you, and the sound you make isn't quiet at all.

"There she is," he murmurs against you.

He doesn't rush. That's the thing that undoes you. His tongue is slow and deliberate, and every time you gasp he makes a sound of his own—low, almost greedy—like he's been craving this without knowing it.

"Jay—" His name comes out broken.

"I've got you." The words vibrate through you. "I've got you."

The pleasure builds the way it does when someone isn't pushing you toward the edge—cresting and receding, each wave a little higher than the last. Your hand finds his hair without deciding to. His arms wrap around your thighs, holding you still when your hips won't cooperate.

"Please—" you manage. "Please, I need—"

"I know." He doesn't stop. "I know what you need."

When you finally collapse back against the cushions, trembling, he presses a kiss to your inner thigh and looks up at you with an expression so open it makes your throat ache.

He shifts, pressing another kiss to your hip, then your stomach, then your ribs as he works his way back up your body. His eyes find yours, dark and searching, and his hand hovers at the waistband of his sweatpants—not pushing, not pulling, just asking.

"Can I—" he starts, then swallows. "Do you want this? As much as I do?"

"Yes." No hesitation. No second-guessing. "Yes, Jay."

He pulls the sweatpants down just enough, and then he's pressing into you—slow, achingly slow, his forehead dropping to yours as he sinks in inch by inch. The sound he makes is barely human—something raw and broken and full of a feeling neither of you has named yet.

"Okay?" he breathes against your lips. "Tell me if it's—tell me if you need—"

"I'm okay." Your voice cracks on the second word. "I'm more than okay."

He starts to move, and it's nothing like the frantic energy of the train. This is slow and deep and present, every thrust deliberate, every withdrawal measured. His hands cradle your face, your neck, your ribs—touching you like you're something irreplaceable. His mouth finds yours between breaths, kissing you with a tenderness that makes your chest ache.

"You feel so good," he murmurs against your jaw. "You have no idea—god, you have no idea what you do to me."

"Tell me." The words slip out before you can stop them. "I want to hear it."

His breath hitches. His hips stutter. Then he's talking—really talking, the way he talks when he's nervous, except the words aren't jokes or deflections. They're real. They're him.

"I think about you all the time. When I wake up. When I go to sleep. In the shower, which is—" a shaky laugh, "—embarrassing, actually. You laugh at something stupid I say and I carry it around for days like it's a fucking souvenir." He thrusts deeper, and you gasp, and his voice drops to something barely above a whisper. "You make me want to be better. You make me want to be the kind of person who deserves—this. You."

"Jay—"

"Is this okay? Am I—are you—"

"I'm right here." You pull him closer, wrapping your legs around his waist. "I'm right here with you."

He buries his face in your neck, and you feel something wet against your skin—not tears, not quite, but the kind of dampness that comes from holding something back for too long and finally, finally letting go. His rhythm never falters, steady and deep, and the pleasure builds again—slower this time, fuller, like the first wave was just the overture and this is the symphony.

"Look at me," you whisper.

He does. You kiss him—slow, deep, unhurried—and his hips press forward one final time and he breaks apart against you, his whole body shuddering, his name falling from your lips like a prayer neither of you knew you'd been holding.

For a long moment, neither of you moves. The apartment is quiet except for the sound of your breathing and the distant drone of the movie, still playing forgotten on the television. His weight settles against you, warm and solid, and you feel his heartbeat slowing against your chest.

Then he shifts—carefully, always carefully—and gathers you into him, pulling you sideways until you're curled against his chest, your head tucked under his chin, his arm wrapped around your shoulders. The position is instinctive, practiced, like your bodies had been rehearsing this for years without your permission.

You reach for the throw blanket folded over the arm of the couch and pull it across both of you, tucking it around his shoulders and over your legs. The fabric is soft and warm and smells like your laundry detergent, and beneath it Jay's skin is warm against yours, his heartbeat steady and reassuring beneath your ear.

He reaches for the remote on the coffee table, thumb hovering over the screen. On the television, the horror movie has progressed to a scene neither of you has been paying attention to—something dark and atmospheric, completely irrelevant.

"Should I bother restarting this?" he asks, his voice rough with exhaustion and something sweeter. "We missed the whole first act."

You tilt your head to look up at him. His hair is a mess. His jaw is stubbled. His eyes are soft and drowsy and completely, unmistakably content.

(this is kind of just to organize my brain)

(And cuz im slowing down a little) (srry)

-boob guy big guy

-teddy chokehold

-brat schlatt

-stealing Ted’s glasses (fucking hot tbh)

btw someone requested cody ko farting and I BLOCKED them nuh uh none of that

og fics in the making:

-MY THIGHHHH OR NOTHING

-snowed in by the fireplace but maybe also mirror?

-fckn camping (eye roll) (vlog never ig)

- empty nyc subway train (that one emoji with its tongue out im on my laptop so)

And uhhhhh a I'll have two number 9s, a number glarge, a number 6 with extra dip, anumber 7, two number 45s, one withcheese, and a large soda