spit-me-out

They spawn, always — no matter the age. Anxiety is a horrid bitch, and apprehension doesn’t exactly take into consideration the immense confidence breakthrough that’s occurred from gangly adolescence (spent gawking at the girl far out of your pizza-faced league from across the booth, hands trembling and leaving smudgy fingerprints over the condensation coating your milkshake) to adulthood (when you have a car, and a job, and a house, and you’re actually a rather good-looking bloke rather than a stringbean mid-puberty, flexing imaginary muscles into the mirror, only to be granted with disappointment at the sight). It’s a defense mechanism, apparently — nerves. All some evolutionary bullshit derived from the sole purpose of protecting you from a fatal threat. Like a tiger, maybe. You get nervous to crawl into the tiger exhibit in a zoo, because, duh — brain reads fatal threat, and for good reason. Which makes sense. Nerves curb you from participating in inane activities, or doing stupid shit, eloquently put. But Harry thinks that, perhaps, the side-effects of carrying jitters into a first date may as well seal a terminal fate. 

Harry’s not a man to often melt into the hysterics of apprehension. Not in a good, long while. It’s silly, he’s aware, and he dissects the root of the issue as he combs mousse through his tendrils with a meticulous touch — a dollop of foam over his fingertips. Just a smidge. Enough for the coiled pattern of his hair to become enhanced and morph pliable to his digits for precise positioning. Prim, proper, rugged, sexy. Perfect. It has to be. All of it. Each fragment must fall into its predisposed point of perfection. Each element must compose his ensemble and carry him in a way that’s inviting and has him seeping allure. She has to be enticed. She has to be. And wooing based on appearance is only a small (miniscule, practically) component of the process.

It’s fucking silly, Harry’s very aware, to care so deeply about the semantics when he’s already got her wound around his finger, the same way he twines a curl over his index, reinforcing its shape. He’s already got her, metaphorically, eating from the palm of his hand. She’d do it, literally, in the realm of Indulge, too, if he instructed it with that hard edge in his voice. She’d melt for him like putty. And she does, every Friday night. She crawls when he tells her to crawl. She kneels when he tells her to kneel. She slips her hands behind her back when he demands it, and keeps them there, obedient. 

He can’t instruct her to like him, though.  

Him — not Eros, because she likes Eros plenty, that much is evident. She perches on his thigh and runs the pads of her fingers over expanses of skin on show through his mask, and drinks in the mysterious facade like syrupy, artificially-cherry-flavored sugar. She likes the enigma with the stern cadence. That’s all there is, to Eros, after all. 

And tonight he’ll be tucked away in a booth with her, just Harry. And there’s no traces of enigma to Harry. He wouldn’t go as far as to say that he’s boring, by any means (he has been sporting a dirty little secret for vast years, after all, hasn’t he?). But Eros and Harry are, like. Well, they’re separate entities, nearly. He supposes that bit’s a load of shit, because Eros lives within him, and all that, tucked away in every circumstance beyond a fetish club. But there’s little similarity to draw between his actual persona and the rubber devil perpetually masquerading. 

There’s too much to dissect, almost, Harry finds, ogling his reflection as his touch falls from his hair. Isla must like him to some degree, right? She wouldn’t have agreed to a date, otherwise. And she must have her suspicions. At least to some degree, he muses, brows crinkled in the mirror, painting his expression in a way that bears resemblance to the stoic features he takes on in Indulge. He’s a walking double entendre, in her presence. Two and two fit together seamlessly. They should. She’s a smart girl. With a smart mouth. And that mouth has spilled virtually nothing on the topic, which makes him doubt the extent of his ambiguity. 

But she must like Harry at least a smidge, beyond Eros. He’s ruthlessly blunt and witty in both circumstances, so culling amusement from her isn’t all that difficult, considering the sheer amount of instances in which he makes her spew giggles in the club. And he’s rather charming, he’s been told. He’s well aware he’s got the physical attributes to entrance a woman, so there’s no insecurity in that department. 

Maybe she doesn’t want to explore any sort of relationship beyond a noncommittal exchange of services. Maybe she has the same doubts he’s had on the whole matter of harboring a spare toothbrush at his place and coming over on a whim with an extra overnight bag. Hey, baby, let’s go see a film and I’ll tie you to the bed, after. x 

Maybe she doesn’t want that. 

Insecurity sucks, because it’s such an uncomfortable sensation, firstmost — but that discomfort takes Harry under the wave tenfold, because the experience of dissecting his emotions isn’t a frequent endeavor. Especially not mushy, crush-y ones. He hasn’t had to deal with that nightmare in years, not since he’d applied for his Indulge membership and begun satisfying his penchants through stringless affairs. So yeah, he’s a bit chary on the topic, especially when he has this overwhelming urge to risk it and unveil it all, every time he’s faced with her. It’s ironic, almost, in a way, Harry thinks. Because he’s so fixated on talking things out — talking everything out, in the club. Except this. He doesn’t want to recognize this. Ever. But he can’t run from it forever, unless he’s keen on self-imposed heartache. Lovesick idiots who don’t acknowledge the love part just melt into sick, and the thought of everything going unsaid between them and the subsequent (he fears) result of Isla leaving their trial-run of a contract as a trial run, only to melt back into the hands of other Indulge members in her carousel of availability, makes him feel physically ill.  

No, Harry thinks, smoothing over his parted collar, the disgruntled residue from the thought process that has shaped his features melting away. None of that, thanks. The man redirects his train of thought, admiring his choice of attire in the mirror, with a smidge of skepticism. He’s opted for a playful, whimsical sort of route, deeming a plain dress shirt far too formal and one of his tees too bland. This piece, however, Harry reaffirms, as his pupils rake over the details in satisfaction, falls mid-scale. It’s a crochet long-sleeve with a series of buttons to clasp it together over his sternum — a muted cream in shade with slim, symmetrical patches of yellow as accents and purple detailing over the sleeve, in lines. Cut-outs in the shape of flowers scale the material and offer glimpses of the tanned skin and ink that lays beneath. Sexy, but modest enough, and honestly, the largest expanse of skin showcased lies in the vale he’s left unbuttoned, with purpose, drawing a V just between his pecs and offering a view of the swallows below his collarbones and the head of the butterfly etched into his abdomen. Tasteful nudity. In the naked glen of the shirt lies his golden cross, dangling from a chain — more to draw the eyes. He’s cuffed the sleeves, so a tad of his anchor peeks out, too. It reminds him of a big doily, kind of — like that kind grandmothers have on their archaic wooden dressers for knick-knacks to stand atop of, and it’s a profound turnaround from the clothing Isla knows him to wear. 

But purpose. 

The bottom sector of his outfit is far more tame; gray trousers with a brown tinge, scored with vertical, faint stripes, adorn his legs. The cut doesn’t hug his thighs in the manner that his tailored slacks do, but there has to be some element of mystery when he’s practically got his tits out, after all. Tasteful, remember? 

Though, when he ruminates on it, perhaps there is no element of mystery to shroud the nudity that’s already been put on the line with Isla. It’s all been out in the open, now. Literally, considering their last session. 

Harry finds he doesn’t mind that. 

And he’s already decided he’ll opt to stick his feet into his white vans — they’re a neutral, casual option, and they’ll fit the rest of the articles well enough. 

Sushi. That’s what they’re getting tonight — it’s a little out of the way, but it’s a killer joint, and when he’d texted her to gauge her opinion on the details and he’d learned that she was a self-proclaimed sushi fanatic, he knew he’d have to take her. Which. He’s not actually taking her, he supposes. They’re scheduled to meet up, in separate cars, but it was a first date, according to everything, and he hadn’t wanted to come off too forward by asking about her address and imposing a carpool situation. 

Casual. Collected. Purpose.

If she doesn’t already know — she certainly will tonight, Harry decides. Because, along with his tits, there’s a showcase of ink. Familiar, closely, considering she’d drawn her tongue over the butterfly, whose traces peek out through the bottom of the open V. Familiar in the anchor on his wrist, familiar in the cross by his thumb. Familiar in the swallows, whose beaks and feathers Isla’s eyes had wandered over, in his denuded state. Tonight, she’s going to know, and the ball will be in her court.

Harry sighs as his gaze slides over his reflection. He’s shaved, he’s pieced his outfit together, he’s in the process of fixing up his hair, so all that’s left after is to toggle his rings on and spritz some cologne onto the aphrodisiac points of his skin. Harry coils another curl over his finger and ruminates on everything that could go wrong. He figures, it’s like that episode of Lost — Jack Shephard was onto something. You let the fear in for five seconds, and then you let it go. Harry also supposes Jack Shephard was a surgeon and had far more on the line, and he weighs the fact that he’s actually not followed these words of wisdom whatsoever, letting this all-consuming fear over their first date swallow him for far longer than five seconds, but. 

He’s still simmering in it, actually, his heart racing a little on the drive over. The silhouette of the jealous moon hangs prematurely in the sky along the drive, like it aches to overtake the spotlight of the sun before the pale blue has faded to dusk. Harry switches the song to coax his mind from the precipice of composure. 

She’s going to see the tattoos, and she’s going to know it’s him. She’s going to see inky shapes and piece it together, she’s going to—

He gets a notification as he hurtles down the road, only a few meters from the turn, and his eyes scope over his LED display hastily, pupils bouncing between the text and the road. Those are shit safety measures. He’s aware. It’s Isla, and she’s beat him. The man scopes her white Corolla out in the lot of the plaza. It’s for the sake of avoiding a lengthy divulgence in their respective departures. There’s a spot open, only two cars down from the spot she’s settled into. How convenient. And when Harry parks his Range Rover, fingertip drumming over his teeth-swollen lips as he reverses in, he’s still a little fidgety. 

Jack Shepard’s advice was shit, Harry decides, because there’s simply no method to the madness. 

But it all kind of fizzles out when he steps out from his vehicle, and Isla does the same. The slam of their car doors is nearly in tandem, and he winds around, curbing the instinct to gnaw into his mouth. Isla looks quite pretty. She’s in a little, cream mini-dress, falling mid-thigh — lacy detailing — with a chunky, knit cardigan thrown over that, and the sight nearly makes him go feral, then and there. It’s a pretty modest dress, all things considered, but there’s something about her in a dress. And it’s like they’re matching, in shade. The unintentional coordination of attire makes his chest tight. Good tight. 

Isla’s heart thunders in the confines of her ribcage like it yearns to escape and beat its way out of her chest. He looks sexy — and he always looks good, but this is different. He’s always got this air to him, that sort of carries from his Indulge persona into his wear. Composed. Collected. Powerful. This is …well this is sex, simply put. That choice of shirt is debauched, in the most tasteful manner. It’s flimsy on bright beach-days as the wind billows sand particles, it’s ripe fruit peeled naked in his palms, leaking juice over his hands, down his wrists. It’s spring in wide, grassy plains and summer by the water with a peachy, alcoholic cocktail in hand. It’s sunglasses and a plump, strawberry mouth bitten swollen by teeth grazing, and as her irises sweep down his torso, she wants to pop each button through with her fingers and peel the fabric off of him. And then she recognizes that they’ve unintentionally color-coordinated, and the realization siphons heat into her cheeks.

When he tells her, “Hi,” the corners of his mouth buckling as he tries to ward away the nervous apprehension from manifesting as a pluck at his vocal cords, all that registers for Isla is the smooth baritone of his cadence and the soft dimples that rise awake beside his smile. This man is all soft divots, and pearly beams like brights on a car, and a flowy crochet top that glimpses of skin seep through. How is this the same man as Eros? 

“Hi,” the young woman chirps, and then they’re hugging and he’s all familiar, sturdy muscle beneath this outfit, and she’s granted the opportunity to bask in his tantalizing cologne firsthand, and that’s— that’s. 

“Drive was okay, darling?” his question is a murmur as he pulls away, and Isla wants to melt into the pavement. Yes. The drive was great. Only gnawed my nails into their cuticles for the entirety of it. 

Her answer spills on an exhale, “Yeah. Was good.” 

It wasn’t good. Isla had nearly driven over a pile of rubbish merging onto the highway, tearing her left hand, wet, from her mouth, and scrambling for purchase over the wheel. She avoided it. Narrowly. But she did, so that was fine. Except now came the true terror — a first date with Harry-slash-Eros. That she had to get through without embarrassing herself. Wonderful. 

In all honesty, Isla had spent the better part of her evening fretting — fretting as she’d peeled her layers off post the workday and showered, fretting as she’d combed through her hair, staring in the reflection, fretting as she sifted through her closet and weighed a variety of articles, fretting as she applied her makeup.  It was scary, all of it. Their last night at Indulge, almost a week prior, had ended on a good note. Well, a good note as any, with Harry’s enigmatic presence. It was all …unsaid, sort of. Neither of them brought up the contract. Neither of them expanded the topic, prodding to extend the date. He’d bought her a drink, post their session, they hung out in a lounge for a little while, just talking, and then he’d fixed her with a warm, tired smile, and they’d gone their separate ways. 

Maybe Isla should have pushed for more. Maybe she would have been the one to bring up the topic, to push for an extension, to pry into it, even a little, if she wasn’t well aware that she’d be seeing him in far less boundary-d form only a short six days later. And she did look forward to it — their date, (Christ, they were going on a date) — all week long. The same way she’d look forward to their Indulge rendezvouses, despite how terrifying it felt to mix the worlds. 

Maybe a little different. 

Because, the thing is, like, was she just… supposed to go back to Indulge the following evening? Was she supposed to ponder at the bar, and scope out a prospective play partner? Supposed to fall into someone else’s hands, and ignore the thoughts walloping about her skull, that Harry could be in the room neighboring her own, just across the thin border of a wall, railing another faceless submissive? Was she supposed to just… let it all go? Steal knowing glances as they passed each other in the halls, lock eyes from across the bar if they ever happened to venture, in passing, through an overlap of a window? 

Harry had asked her on a date, and she’d no idea what the purpose was, or what the future held. Maybe she didn’t want to know.

But, no. 

She did. She was dying to know what all of it meant — the curiosity wrapped itself over her innards and coiled in her chest, snaking and spiraling as apprehension. Maybe that was in a bad way. She’d brushed through wet tendrils and blow-dried pin-straight, dark hair into place, and it brewed. She’d wracked through her closet and selected the dress, tried it on, opted for a cardigan to harbor the bracelet, and it bubbled. She’d applied her makeup, stroking through her lashes with a mascara-coated spooley, spritzed some perfume onto her neck, and it fizzled. She’d slid on her sandals, and grabbed her keys, and she got behind the wheel to follow the instructions offered by the GPS as she plugged in the address he’d texted her, and she cooked it in. She sat in the cauldron of curious despair for the entirety of the drive, and now, faced with him. It’s just. He’s just, so… 

It’s like he rubs it all away, with a sweep of jade over her figure. Like the discomfort retracts, withering and uncoiling, its limbs melting off into a blip in her chest at the sight of his perfect teeth, his perfect smile. 

Isla’s dying to know what the future holds, but then and there, she just wants to enjoy the moment. With him. Eros unveiled. No mask — cards on the table. It’s the closest, she thinks, she’ll get to enmeshing their worlds, for now, and she drinks him in for all that he is, then and there. 

And it feels like a safety net to keep it all apart and not worry about what it all means. 

“So did you color coordinate with me on purpose, then?” Harry pretends to ponder aloud, the corners of his mouth caving up as the young woman blinks in surprise at the blunt nature of the joke. His hands dig into his pockets with the cocky jest. 

He’ll give her credit. Isla only allows herself to balk for a moment before she snaps back, her wordless blink morphing into a weave of her brows as she intercepts, “Oh— of course. I mean. I figured, if I’m aiming to impress, I may as well take inspiration from the source, right?”  

His mouth twitches as her witty words sink behind his skull, into his brain. He inquires, after a moment, a little pinch drawing his own brows together as the edges of his muted berry mouth twitch, “Are you …politely calling me a narcissist?” 

“I—“ his question draws a low giggle from her as she narrows her eyes, “guess?” 

“I figured we were on better terms,” Harry feigns woe-is-me-disdain, theatrically shaking his head down at his spotless vans. His pouty lips quirk up at her eye roll, “Consider me humbled.”

Isla snorts, entirely aware he’s messing, but she doesn’t miss the opportunity to stroke his ego, just a bit. It’s not like he needs it, but, “Well. I’ll even it out, then. I like your shirt.”

“Do you?”  

There’s candor to her statement, he can tell with the way her irises trail and linger — like there’s something more to her statement, beyond the words Isla lets on. Despite the way her brazen ogle has his ego expanding like a balloon, more than that, Harry would be lying if he said the sentiment didn’t make something warm and fuzzy glow within him. Like her verbal approval of his attire pleases something deeper, something far more sentimental than carnal appreciation. 

She doesn’t say anything if it clicks for her, then. The tattoos. Hints of the light don’t even spark up through her features. 

“Looks really good on you,” Isla compliments, after a moment, her pupils finally finding their way from the vale between his pectorals — from bare skin and inky shapes — to his face, “You look really good.” 

Harry grins. Genuinely grins, dimples and all, before he casts his gaze down to the toes of his sneakers. 

“Thanks, love,” he tells her. 

The young woman fixes her purse over her shoulder as she follows his lead, weaving through the cars with the sidewalk in aim. Harry shoots her a glance, over his shoulder, and he keeps his gait slow and the steps few in part. He doesn’t hold her hand. He doesn’t reach back and offer to interlock their fingers, doesn’t wait for her to plant a palm onto his back as he guides her with a warm grip, as they squeeze through narrow alleys between parked vehicles, though he craves to do all of the above, desperately. He keeps it casual — it’s a first date, quote unquote. As casual as things can be, given the circumstances. 

She was bouncing on his cock last Friday, after all. 

“You’ve impressed, by the way,” Harry assures her, stealing a glance that bears raw similarity to the way he’d absorbed her upon first interactions, back at the bar where it all began. Except this time, she’s able to clearly witness the lopsided crook at the corner of his mouth, rather than to be faced with the first impressions of shadows and zippers, the dimpling that sets in beside his grin. 

“Yeah?” Isla pries, stepping aside as he wraps a large (so impressively large) palm over the door handle. 

“Mm,” the man hums. He keeps his compliments surface level, despite the way everything aches to break beyond the shallow layer of ice over the water, and his eyes roam over her freely, another insight into their Indulge double life, “S’a nice dress. Pretty color.” 

Isla huffs, playfully feigning that his glossing over the actual entirety of her appearance has nicked a nerve. Harry’s mouth crooks at her incredulous expression as he tugs at the door. 

She lingers just on the edge of the threshold before he tells her, “I’m messing,” and stares down at her all… (probably unintentionally) …sultry, gaze downcast to her face and lips crested with a soft smile, “You’re beautiful.” 

The compliment — earnest, and so timidly brushing on deeper sentiments, sentiments shrouded (literally) by Indulge, that her heart nearly skips behind her ribcage. The corners of the young woman’s mouth buckle bashfully. Beautiful. That’s always a nice word to hear, especially when it comes from the mouth of Eros, directed at her in a circumstance beyond something lewd. Yeah, maybe she’s blushing a bit, and yeah, maybe the innards of her abdomen are all buzzy like she’s a kid in junior high on a first date, again. 

“Thanks,” Isla tells him, taking a step through the doorway when the man cocks his head, still wearing that soft smirk, implying that he’s holding the door for her. “and — thank you — you’re not too bad, yourself,” she throws over her shoulder as he tails her. 

Harry keeps his hands to himself. He refrains from placing a hand onto the small of her back as they make their way and stop at the host stand, despite the fact that his hands have probably skimmed over every square inch of her skin, by now. Mapped it out, practically. Instead, he digs his hands into his pockets. Safer option. Less …inclined for handsy penchants. 

“Not too bad,” the man parrots, pursing his strawberry lips and nodding at the vague compliment, characteristically playful and fishing. Maybe just a bit. He didn’t spend a solid hour in front of the mirror for bare bones of appreciation, after all. 

“Very handsome,” Isla corrects, turning her chin to cast her gaze onto his, undeniably, very handsome face, just as the hostess makes her way back to the stand. 

When his hand hovers over the small of her back, just brushing, practically, she feels his touch drive through the entirety of her nervous system. Which is silly, because that same touch had been in loads of …not-safe-for-work-ier places, without a layer of clothing in between, (two, right now, in fact), but it’s just. Different. Different, here. 

“Hi,” his plush mouth sculpts over a smile, directed at the hostess, and Isla snaps her vision ahead, “Two.” 

Yes, here. They’re here, in a restaurant, for a first date (quote, unquote), and they’re maskless, and free to discuss any personal topic unbridled, and that thought just makes the warmth in her chest warmer. She’s on a date with her Eros. Except then, the hostess says some nicety and gestures for them to follow, and Harry’s touch presses, just a smidge, and then retracts altogether. And why does it have to do that? She’s aware, well aware, actually, that he can’t exactly have his palm glued to her for the entirety of the night, but why does it have to withdraw so soon? It’s a bittersweet revelation, because they tuck away into a booth and she’s faced with him, glorious and unveiled and unrestrained, on a date, but he can’t keep touching on her sweetly from across the booth. She supposes she’ll settle for what she can. 

Except they do touch, again. Unintentionally; the toe of her shoe skims the side of his calf, over his trousers, (“Sorry.” — “You’re fine, darling.”), and then again, his sneaker brushes her ankle when he shifts in his seat — (“M’sorry.” — “It’s okay!”)

Touch me, Isla thinks, touch me, graze the sole of your shoe over my shin. 

“I was a little… surprised,” her pupils trail over the menu, a slow, deliberate scroll to wane her nerves — the same ones that bubble to the surface and have her breath catching when her sight flickers back up to his face, “when you asked me to dinner.”

“Why?” 

“Well,” her shoulders rise, and she looks back to the menu. And then her eyes bounce back to him, all playful and narrowing on the latter of her statement, “You’re just so …handsome. And no girlfriend? No wife?” 

For a second, Hardy mulls over her quip. He opens his menu up, and his eyes skim over the broad list of specialty rolls. Because, yeah, girlfriend’s a bit of a heavy term for what they do, but he does have that …special person in mind. And she’s sitting across from him, in the same booth. Unbeknownst-ish. So far, it’s a dance over eggshells. A work in progress. The corners of his strawberry mouth curl. 

“No wife. No girlfriend,” he confirms, nodding, and Isla gives him this look, all with her eyebrows raised like she expectantly waiting for him to expand, and for a second, a brief glimpse of his tongue peeks out and nudges at the corner of his mouth. He can’t help but to wring the joke, a bit. “I know. S’hard to believe, what with all my charm and good looks.” 

“It is,” Isla contends, unfazed by the swollen-headed nature of his quip. 

“I just think,” Harry pauses, shrugging as he settles his forearms against the edge of the table, “When you know, you know,” he squints a bit, with a little smile, “you know?” 

“I,” Isla nods, her eyes go back to the menu with the testing tango of their dialogue, balls of feet pivoting among vaguely planted land mines, “think I do …know.” 

“Right. You get it,” he motions with his hand.

There’s so much to discuss, it feels like, and so little available to touch on, tentatively. Isla doesn’t know where to begin. Where she can begin. She eyes the swallows below his collarbones, carefully. Harry’s got his own on the menu, brow-bone creased in this sort of way that makes her heart speed up a bit. It’s not an uncomfortable silence by any means, but. 

“So, the weather?” 

“The weather,” the crease melts away, his eyebrows rise, and dimples rise awake beside a grin at the bare bones of small talk. Jade flickers up to her. “Is that— that’s what we’re doing?” 

Maybe. Though, it’s the furthest thing from what Isla’s keen to discuss. Childhood stories. Favorite songs. Pieces of his character she’s prior been unable to delve into — literally any personal details. 

“What would you like to talk about?” the young woman baits. 

And, well. The thing is, what he says isn’t something she’d been expecting, not exactly. She should’ve expected it, maybe. And it’s such an ordinary topic of conversation, too. One you’d hear at a check-out. A nicety.  

“How was your day, darling?” 

Except it’s not just a nicety. Because he asks that at the start of every Indulge session, something to sort of get the ball rolling and warmed up, before they start to slip into their headspaces. He always asks that — and he’s asking here, too. 

“My day was,” Isla nods, slowly, “good. It was good. Like, better now, obviously.” 

His mouth twitches. Harry hums, and tells her, eyes back on the menu, “I wonder why.” His gaze flits up to her, only a glance long enough to witness her playfully unimpressed expression, and he curbs his laugh. “Anything exorbitantly exciting?” 

“About you,” Isla jabs, still feigning unimpressed, “or…?” 

A knowing sort of smirk curls over his plush mouth. Always with the smart chat. “Your day.” But you can certainly list off all the things about me that excite you. Harry leaves that part unsaid.

Isla lifts a shoulder offhandedly, “Not, like, anything in particular. Just worked. Average Thursday. Oh— someone brought in donuts. That was a highlight.” 

“Did they? That’s always nice. What’s your favorite kind?” 

“Oh— the jelly ones. Easy.” 

His face creases up. “Jelly?” Harry parrots, tone lightly teasing her …odd nomination. 

“Yes! Are you kidding? They’re the best. What’s yours, then?” Isla prods. 

“The …what are they called? The curly ones,” he gestures, vaguely, with a laxly pointed forefinger, symbolizing a spiral until it clicks, and it’s her turn to shoot him a look of distaste. 

“Crullers?” Isla guesses, her brows all pinched up, and argues, passionately, after he’s nudged with his chin to confirm, “They’re so dry!” 

Harry’s scoffs, good-natured despite the jarring information, “What are you on about? They’ve got the glaze, and they’re good with tea.” 

The young woman blinks like the revelation has smacked her square between the brows, “Wow. That is… this might be a dealbreaker.” 

“It might be,” Harry sighs in agreement, nodding, all serious, down at his menu until he hears her giggling bubble. The corners of his raspberry lips jolt. He could listen to that sound on end. 

“I had a wonderful day,” Isla tells him, her shoulders all straight and prissy in jest (like she’s better than him for her blatantly superior donut preferences — because it is blatantly superior). There’s still mirth garbling her cadence, a bit, when she tacks on, for emphasis, “with my jelly-filled donut—“ (He rolls his eyes! How dare he!) and volleys the question back through laughs, “—What about you?” 

“My day was good, as well. Sort of dull, honestly. Just loads of phone calls and paperwork,” she watches his mouth as he talks, and then his tongue as it glides over his cushiony lips in pause. Her pupils snap back to jade, glinting in the light, when he tacks on (mirroring her earnest flattery), “Better now.” 

Despite the in to milk praise in the same manner her counterpart had, the window slips by as a server approaches the booth. He’s tall — maybe in his mid-twenties, with, possibly, the most impressive mustache Isla has seen, in person, to date. 

“Hey guys, my name’s Mark, and I’m going to be taking care of you tonight. I’ve got some waters here, for you—“ a stifled gap in his speech as he sets the respective glasses down, and receives subsequent thank you’s from the pair. “Any other beverages I can grab?” 

The young woman blinks when Harry casts his gaze to her.

“I think, just water, for me, for now,” she directs a polite, warm smile in the server’s direction. Did he …gel it, to curl on the ends like that? Mark gives a singular nod, keeping his notepad in hand, and pivots his attention onto her date. 

“Just water for me, as well.” 

Harry read the book. Partly because he was actually trying to read more, and mostly because he was curious. Because maybe, if he read hard enough into a book that Isla liked, maybe he could read more of Isla, between the lines.

“Sure thing — we’ve got an excellent variety of options on this little menu over here, if you change your mind,” Mark motions at the laminated, pamphlet-like list, stood on the edge of the countertop closest to the wall that — Isla assumes — is intended to stay out for the duration of their meal. Her eyes skim over blended margarita flavors and fruity cocktails. 

“Thank you,” the corners of Harry’s plush mouth curl up, “We’ll take a look.”

“Absolutely. Any appetizers I could get you started off with?” 

Mark stalls, sight flickering between the two, as Harry peers at Isla, “D’you want anything, love?” 

“I think I’m okay,” his date tells him, irises bouncing from her counterpart to the server.  

“I think we’re all good right now, if you could just give us a mo’,” Harry states, digits clasping over the glass and imprinting tracks of his fingertips in the wake of his warm touch. 

“Certainly.”  

And maybe he read it, just a little, because he was expected to participate in a two-party book club over a sushi dinner. Though, he doubts Isla even remembers the original purpose of their rendezvous, considering the wide-eyed look she returns when he starts, nonchalantly, once they’re left alone, “So is it set in a universe where Fifty Shades just... doesn’t exist?” 

He’s got impeccable timing. Isla nearly spits her water out, back into the cup to avoid choking at the reference. How inconspicuously ironic. 

“Sorry?” 

“The—“ Harry’s eyebrows are raised at how, apparently, the young woman’s been caught off guard, ducking his chin, his lash line narrowed with traces of mischief, “—book? For the book club. That we’re doing. I thought my homework was to get you a review?” 

“Right,” Isla nods, smoothing her hands over her thighs beneath the tabletop (why are they so clammy?). She swallows, clears her throat, and takes another sip from her cup. Yes. Hold Me Down. They were going to discuss that. Here. Right now. Right. 

“Well, because, my thing is, right, everyone is so judge-y of Talia, but they’ve never heard of S&M?” 

Despite the sensitive nature of the topic, in a public environment, (which coaxes heat to her cheeks — she should’ve expected nothing less out of a date with Eros), it’s actually a pretty solid point. The comment draws the corners of her mouth up. 

“Actually. I don’t know. I guess not?” 

“It’s weird, right?” Harry tells her, his brows pinched together, “I mean it’s fairly modern — the setting. But nobody’s heard of Fifty Shades. Which is a shit example but. Still.”

Isla sits back against the booth like the revelation’s stunned her. A pinch works between her brows before she tells him, slowly, “You know what? You’re so right.” 

Harry has delved deep with his theories on this one. The easiest write off would involve nulling Fifty Shades for the sake of the plot (because everyone’s got to be all weirdly judge-y over S&M, for some reason), but he’s got a personal favorite (which may or …may not involve the existence of Twilight in the Hold me Down universe — everybody knows the abomination of Fifty Shades has roots in a lewd, un-vampiric rendition of Edward Cullen weilding a riding crop. No Twilight, no origins of Christian Grey). It makes so much sense, …and yet so little. Which is kind of the amusing part.

“Well,” Harry cocks his head, a lead up to a playful fork in the discussion, “My personal favorite theory — and this is a bit of a laugh — but maybe it goes deeper, right? Like, maybe, Twilight doesn’t exist.” 

“Twilight?” just acknowledging his statement culls a huff of mirth the back of her mouth as she sits there, jaw unhinged. 

“Are you kidding?” Harry’s eyes narrow playfully from across the booth, “No Edward Cullen, no Christian Grey,” jade flashes back up to her, glinting with mirth from the overhang of buttery light, “No Fifty Shades.” 

Isla nearly sputters on the ice cube between her teeth. “Why are you aware that Fifty Shades was a Twilight fanfiction?” 

“Are you not?” Harry teases. 

Because apparently everyone knows that — everyone knows the butt of the joke is that Fifty Shades is all just a load of Edward Cullen, shirtless in jeans, and bad BDSM etiquette. Isla swallows. Yes. Because now they’re talking about filthy, vampiric fanfiction and subpar erotica. This is normal. 

When she doesn’t respond, Harry digs the pad of his forefinger into the table and declares, for emphasis, with his brows raised, “Did they ever reference Twilight in Hold me Down? I think not.” 

“Respectfully,” Isla gestures with her head, her speech morphing off into giggles (Harry blinks, the corners of his mouth twitchy and the tip of his index still on the table), “You are a …lunatic.” 

“It’s a valid hypothesis,” the man asserts, unable to curb the upturn of his own plush lips as the topic really sinks in, “Stop laughing— Moving on.” 

Isla watches him through giggles, witnesses him in all his dimples and soft curls, and thinks that, yeah. This man literally beat her with a strap, and devilishly tied her up in all sorts of contorted positions, and dug his digits into her scalp while she choked on his dick in some secluded fetish club with a mask on. Watched her cry with his mouth curled up, sadism flourishing behind rubber. And now he’s in a crocheted long-sleeve with his pecs out, talking about Twilight and the verse with Edward Cullen in a red room. This is the same man. Which is sort of boggling, she thinks, because this man — well, he’s got a singular curl flopping over his forehead, all spiral-y, and his grin is all warm and pleasant, and how is this the same man that digs his fingertips into her cheeks, harshly, and tells her to shut the fuck up? 

“I thought it was interesting,” he nods down at his hands, folding his fingers together. Isla eyes his rings, lingering on the chunky H and its subsequent counterpart, the S. His eyes meet her own. “Like, the whole message of the storyline, beyond, you know,” his hands unfold and motion, “the obvious — it can be applicable in a really beautiful way, to other circumstances. Finding yourself. But also, the emphasis on a support system, that even one person can change the perspective—” 

Despite his wholesome dialogue, the way his tongue peeks from his mouth feels pointed as he pauses to swipe out over his pink lips. Isla swallows. 

“You were right about that therapist, by the way,” he blinks, and as flinty jade rolls, dramatically, the tension over the tabletop dissipates, “my God.” 

Isla slouches back against the booth, her eyebrows climbing up her forehead, “I told you—“

“Heinous. License needs to be revoked, immediately,” Harry chimes in, coaxing a grin from his counterpart. 

“Asap,” Isla agrees, nodding down at her hands. 

The corners of his mouth twitch. He studies her. It’s odd. It’s really odd, because sitting across from Isla Cleery in a restaurant was, for the longest time, unfathomable. Because Isla Cleery has existed only in professional instances, in house tours, in small talk and brief glances. It’s a little bizarre to be on a date with Isla, as Isla. 

It’s bizarre to be on a date. 

Even only a few weeks ago, the idea of going on a date with a woman he was tying up and consensually marring with his fingertips, and his teeth, and toys catered for adults, in a fetish club, was uncomfortable territory to consider. But now, he’s on a date, and she’s all small smiles with a bashful gaze, and lashes grazing over the cresting apples of her cheeks. She’s in a dress, soft as opposed to the daunting cut of skimpy lace and garters over smooth thighs. She’s a cardigan and shoes that accidentally graze over his legs beneath the table. She’s Peitho reversed, like poles switched, and Harry likes it. This other side, this side that’s more. 

“But,” Harry nods, pupils gravitating to his glass as he reaches out to bring it closer and tuck the straw between his lips. He swallows. “On a more serious note, it was a good read. It was, like, fun literature,” Harry gives her a pointed look, aimed at the erotic (heavily centered, actually) nature of the novel, “But it also had, like. I dunno— this relatable quality to it. That doesn’t necessarily have to apply to what it applied to, in the story.” 

It’s funny, Isla thinks, fingers squeezing over the chill of her own glass from across the booth as she weighs his analysis. Any of her ex-boyfriends, had they read even a tidbit of the novel her eyes had pored over, again and again — they would have nervously laughed at the content, irises jerking hesitantly and eyebrows climbing practically into their hairlines. Bullwhips, and belts, even the word Daddy — one of her college boyfriends had thought Daddy was the kinkiest shit he’d ever heard (with a negative take on the matter) — those weren’t things that men like her ex-boyfriends were eager, or even open to explore. She thinks that, maybe, even seeing a word like bullwhip amidst erotica would have them clambering out of the booth, out of the parking lot, catching a plane onto another continent. 

And Harry thinks it’s fun literature. Her mouth twitches. 

Isla’s met loads of boys and loads of men over the timespan of budding womanhood — some, better than others at gauging and delivering on her interests. And sure, men like Artemis and Faunus wouldn’t blink twice at the use of a bullwhip in a fictional sex scene, because men like Artemis and Faunus probably own bullwhips of their own, strung up in closets and shrouded by clothes on plastic hangers. But she’s never been on a date with a man who owns a bullwhip (does Harry own a bullwhip? This feels like an insightful question) — just boys who thought missionary in the dark was as good as sex could get. 

Well. 

Her rendezvous with Dan Sever weren’t really dates, per se. Nothing beyond formalities. Dan Sever also didn’t own a bullwhip. 

It’s not outlandish. Pain’s been fetishized for eons, well before books like Fifty Shades or Hold me Down, and with the rapid spotlight the former had shed on the topic, loads of people are more outright with their interests, opting to explore rather than to hide it under the bed, tucked away in some cardboard box like they’re ashamed to like what they like. And anyone could like what she likes, Isla thinks. Maybe the random patron across the room, all silvery bob and circa-2012, sleeveless, ruby-red peplum piece likes to tie her sexual partner up and beat them with a flogger. Who knows? 

It’s just that every college boyfriend that she’s ever been on a date with didn’t, and they made her feel so off for it. Despite the existence of Fifty Shades. 

Anyways, it’s a little mercurial, the opposing reaction that …all of this incites from Harry. Mercurial from what she’s used to, in a way. What Isla is used to, as Isla — not Peitho. And despite the way she’s tentative to break the ice, tentative to accidentally toggle over a landmine with curling toes — she’s never felt more comfortable. 

“Good recommendation, then? What do you give it, like, out of five stars?” the young woman inquires playfully, raising her eyebrows a tad. 

The man across the table purses his mouth as if he needs to seriously ruminate on the topic, thumbing at the condensation over his glass thoughtfully. “Solid …four,” he nods eventually, a serious crease between his brows that lightens at the grin she sends his way. 

“Four?” 

“Well, I can’t give it five— not with that abomination of a therapist.” 

Isla laughs. The kind of laugh that shows lots of her teeth, the kind that crinkles lines in place beside her eyes, the kind where she juts her chin up a bit, and Harry drinks the song in like sweet nectar. His cushiony mouth is curled up when he asks, clearing his throat as he sets his hands ahead, pressed together like the beginnings of a serious business ordeal, “Alright. I did your homework. Did you do mine?” 

“I had homework?” Isla asks, her cadence still garbled with mirth as her smile grows bemused. 

“Mm. What do you think of the properties?” 

“The properties…” Isla sighs. Because, yeah. Harry is sort of her real estate agent, and he wants to talk business. I.e, she can’t spend the entirety of the evening drowning in the jade of his dreamy gaze. 

“The properties,” he confirms with an expectant sort of grin. 

“I need to…” Isla nods, her sight focused on the table before her pupils flicker up to him, “think on those a bit more.” 

“What are your thoughts?” 

“I don’t know,” the young woman sighs, picking up her beverage and siphoning the end of the straw between her lips before she sucks. She sets the glass down. “There’s a lot to think about. First time home-buying kind of…” a cinch works between her brows, a sound of amusement tying off the end of her statement, “…sucks.” 

“It can be stressful, for sure,” Harry nods along, the glint of his teeth friendly as dimples nestle into place against his cheeks, “Especially in California.” 

“Yeah,” Isla blows out a breath, simpering as his own smile widens. 

“Did you grow up around here?” Harry prods casually. Her eyes slide all the way to the tips of his fingers and back to his face.

“In California, yeah. But you didn’t,” Isla mentions, nudging with her chin. 

“No?” the edges of his smile broaden with the joke, and hers do the same to the question, “You don’t think so?” 

Isla shakes her head, her features all scrunched up, blatantly unconvinced by the quality of his dialect. Harry wants to smooth the creases in her forehead and the tiny lines over the bridge of her nose out with his thumbs. He laughs instead. 

”I grew up in England.” 

The thing with being on a date is that you talk about all sorts of things. The conversation ranges from small talk to intricate memoirs, and the thing with being on a date with Harry is that it uncovers loads of priorly discrete goodies. They’re details Isla would never hear from him when she’s cradled up in his arms at Indulge, and it feels like completing a puzzle in reverse, almost. Because she’s seen the whole picture, theoretically (and the picture is some cliche, uberly eroticized image of Harry with his black pleather gloves and his signature white button down) — these are the fragments. A corner of a cuff, a childhood memory; a fragment of a cheeky dimple, a favorite hobby. Everything the young woman learns feels like finding another edge to a puzzle piece, and they all seam together. 

Even the seemingly insignificant things are monumental discoveries. They talk about everything from family dynamics to current favorite past-times, and somewhere in between they manage to order food. And the food manages to show up somewhere in between Harry’s story, detailing the time he’d attempted to flush his older sister’s doll, and Isla sharing the way that when she was little, she’d stepped up into a drawer on a shoddy, otherwise empty dresser to change a VHS tape, and had nearly become Flat Stanley when the big box television slid out from the tip of the furniture, screen shattering all over the carpet. It’s small things, but it all sews everything together. 

What doesn’t manage to happen, however, is the click for Isla — that, yeah, when she’s on a date at a sushi restaurant and she orders sushi, the utensil to eat it with is an endeavor she’s purposefully avoided in public settings. So many nights spent plucking rolls of sauce-smeared sushi from a plastic to-go carton, in front of the TV, with the tips of her thumb and index like a shoddy, two-limbed claw machine. All to avoid the public humiliation of floundering with two measly, wooden sticks she can’t manage to rein at least some coordination over. Somehow, the young woman had managed to become so swept up in conversational topics like the time Harry and his sister had played hide and seek in some clothing racks of a store (and he hadn’t been found for hours), that it hadn’t even begun to dawn upon her that, yeah. You eat sushi with chopsticks. Which you never bothered to properly learn how to utilize. 

That’s why, when Mustache Mark brings out their respective rolls out on the plates, mid-conversation, and she unravels the neatly rolled silverware, cradled by the dark cloth napkin, only to discover chopsticks — a little part in her crumbles. She feels it wither, deep in her chest. Isla hides it as best as she can manage, though, directing her focus onto the man across from her and nodding in intrigue with every word that plucks at his vocal chords. 

Where’s the fork?

It goes on like that for a little while, and she keeps her arms raised and her hands folded up under her chin as he speaks, taking the occasional sip from her glass and dolefully watching as he takes bites of his own food. She’s not going to embarrass herself — she’s not going to embarrass herself. With each motion of a little sushi roll, tucked by the ends of his chopsticks, her pupils tail from the plate to his cushiony mouth. Sort of in wonder, honestly. How does he just do that so deftly? 

She’s making a pretty impressive effort on avoiding the subject entirely, up until the point that Harry has had about four and quirks a brow in bemusement. 

“You’re not hungry?” 

The young woman pauses, sinking in her seat. Maybe her plan of sushi-less solidarity, consisting of earnestly engaging him in discussion, has sort of backfired. The curly-headed brunette has a jolt at the corner of his mouth as he watches her, chewing slowly.

“Um— don’t make fun of me,” Isla huffs, the beginnings of the heat of humiliation rising to the surface of her cheeks — Harry’s expression is blank and interested — and she fixes him with a sheepish sort of half-smile, “But I… Well, I don’t know how to use chopsticks. Like, I love sushi, but I eat it like a maniac — I never learned how to eat it properly, and I don’t wanna just. Eat it with my hands, here.” 

“You—“ Harry’s eyebrows twitch together, and his plush mouth curls up, a smidge, “That’s okay. I can help you, if you’d like.” 

Help her, if she’d like — Isla wonders if that’ll entail that he feeds her the sushi himself. Her blush prevails. Meekly, the young woman nods. Harry doesn’t glean a roll of sushi for her with his own chopsticks and raise it to her mouth. He doesn’t do that. But what he does do is no better, because suddenly, the man has set his chopsticks down, and his hands are cradling her own palm, placing her set into her palm, encouraging her grip over the chopsticks to slacken, and then he starts to position her digits for her, and that’s— it’s. 

“I think, actually, there’s loads of ways to hold them, but I find this way,” her fingers are pliable for his grip, “to be the easiest. So maybe it’ll work for you, too.” 

And it’s no different, really. Because she’s felt his hands on her own, bare, even, gloveless, and those hands have done all sorts of things to her, but it is different. It’s different because he’s fixing her up the way she needs to be, with his touch, and it’s in an entirely different context. The last thing from lewd, and even still, it makes her heartbeat skip in her chest. His face is relaxed, yet riddled with traces of concentration. It’s all — wow. Especially when he steals a glance and finds her irises honed onto his face. His cushiony lips curve up. 

“Don’t look at me,” he chastises playfully, bridling soft laughter. Flirtatiously. He’s cocky — it’s all meant to make a dig at the fact that she’s been caught ogling. Her hand twitches in his grasp, a tad flustered. Harry notices. He wears a knowing, little grin when he nudges with his chin, returns his gaze to his handiwork, and tacks on, softly, “Look at the chopsticks. M’teaching a very important lesson, here.”  

It comes out before she can stifle it. It’s meant to be a joke — a joke. But when the “Yes, Sir,” soft and exaggerated in its tone, slips from her mouth, the sentiment that registers with Harry isn’t humorous, at all. Well. It’s a little humorous — the way the press of his fingers tightens, momentarily, over her own hand, the way his sight flickers to her face as he blinks, only to find her mouth sealed and her cheeks painted in pink. The way he diverts his sight back to the tabletop. Isla’s own eyes skid away. Fuck. Fuck. 

Harry clears his throat. 

“So, s’all in the technique, really,” he tells her, squeezing over her flesh, gently, to guide her through the motion, “You use these two to put them together — this one sort of stays still the entire time.” 

Per his instructions (and the bit of chagrin coursing through her veins), Isla keeps her eyes trained on their interlocked hands. She watches him with a newfound concentration etched in her face, lets him guide her through it a few times more, and then withers a bit when his hand withdraws. Hopelessly, she casts her gaze to him. 

“Alright. You try.” 

Hesitantly, the young woman attempts to mirror his motion, far less sure without the soft press of his touch over her own. The chopsticks split awkwardly, and Isla attempts to press them together in the air, her eyebrows pinching through the process. Harry’s mouth quirks as he culls his own set of chopsticks. He doesn’t reach for a piece of sushi, far too engrossed by the endearing display.

“So,” his tongue glides over his lips as he motions with his own, “typically, you find something you want to pick up with them first, right.” 

Isla tuts, her lash line narrowing with feigned indignation, “I’m practicing.” 

Harry bites into his cheek, the opposite corner teetering into flashing-dimple-territory, “Sure. F’course. Ignore me.” 

“I am,” Isla jabs, huffing when the chopsticks splay uselessly in her grasp. 

Her finger slips, and her mouth purses as she tries, hopelessly, to gather her bearings. Of course Isla fails — he’d little faith in her first attempt, and Harry scoops a piece of sushi into his own mouth as he watches, amused. He exhales through his nostrils, cheek bulging with his mouthful, and sets his chopsticks down again to aid her. Carefully, the man repositions his counterpart’s fingers, and then guides them to her plate. He chews, swallows, and assures her, after a moment, in a low cadence, “It’s easier if you’re picking something up, I promise.” 

So Isla follows suit, squishing the piece between the sticks as Harry moves her fingers for her, and when he retracts for her to take the reins in the uptake, the entirety of the technique they’d spent so much time building, just sort of fizzles out. She does try to save it, at first — the little piece of sushi. Isla clenches the chopsticks together, awkwardly, as the fragment of her spicy tuna roll slides and slides from between the narrow, weakened grasp. 

“Oh, noo,” she starts to say, mid its inevitable drop.

Alas, it crumbles from her artless, floundering grip, and Harry rightfully bridles visible mirth as the piece just …plops back down onto her plate. 

“Try again,” he encourages, his amusement hidden well behind the rasp of his voice. Isla’s chin twists toward her hand, and her features set with determined focus as the pads of her fingers slide over the chopsticks. Uses her opposite hand to help with the positioning, and everything, curious to try without Harry’s help. She does cast her gaze to him for approval once she’s cradled the sticks with, what she believes to be, the proper form, though. 

His eyes scope over her hand, and he gives her a short nod. Her mouth twitches in self-satisfaction, like she’s managed to surprise herself with the success, and she raises her eyebrows at him before she steers her focus onto the task at hand. Carefully, Isla takes the same piece that’d fallen back onto the plate, nestling it between the ends of the chopsticks. First step, down. Whew. Hard part; Isla holds her breath. Cautiously, her hand raises, until her elbow’s planted on the table and the piece only dangles with, partly, a sloppy excuse of a grip and, mostly, pure, telekinetic willpower. The young woman inches the sushi toward her parted mouth with a newfound level of prudence. She slinks her tongue out. Of course, Harry’s own is pursed in an effort not to laugh — she catches that in her peripherals. 

“Stop laughing,” Isla protests, pasting her eyes onto him. Her own mouth settles into an open-mouthed grin, her words garbled by amusement. 

“M’not laughing,” Harry retorts, though he’s ludicrously smiley given the circumstances. These are critical moments of concentration that require absolute seriousness! Her jaw slackens to encompass the sushi, but all she’s able to do, given the ridiculousness of the situation, is jolt with giggles. He’s just staring at her so expectantly. 

“Oh—oh!” Isla can’t hide her disappointment when the chopsticks hit a pressure point and send the bottommost half of the piece just …crumbling apart like wet sand. She stares at the messy remnants of sauce-daubed rice and seaweed in disdain, before her chopsticks are set back onto the plate with a huff.  

For a moment, neither of them say anything.

“It was a bad piece,” Harry reassures, eventually, “S’okay.” 

“It was a good piece,” a sound of appalled mirth wrests from the back of Isla’s throat mid-sentence, “and I …mutilated it.” 

The corners of his mouth twitch, and he succumbs, after a moment, ceasing his coddling to pursue the joke, “It did— I mean. It took a beating, yeah.” 

“This is so sad,” Isla tells him, gaze partly doleful, cast down to the mangled sushi. 

Harry’s mouth purses in an effort not to openly keep grinning at the situation. He nods, “It is, it is sad, yeah,” and he reaches across the table with his own chopsticks, culling a piece in his (far more deft) grasp, lifting it toward her mouth, “I can’t keep watching this.” 

And at first, Isla’s pupils just bounce from his face to the outstretched offering, as her chest tightens and her heart begins to race — a considerable turnaround in pace from its priorly (somewhat steady) patter. Her lips part and wrap over the sushi as gracefully as she can manage when he nudges it forward. And it’s like jade sticks to her lips — it’s probably nothing. He’s probably, entirely innocently trying to monitor and gauge precise aim, so as to not smear sauce all over her strawberry mouth. Except that’s not it, because once her mouth has slipped shut over the piece (and a bit of the chopsticks), as he withdraws them, the man’s sight still lingers. A ruddy heat teems over the young woman’s cheek bones. 

She shrouds her mouth with her hand and tells him, “Thank you.” 

Harry’s drift to her own eyes with the barrier, “You’re welcome.” 

There’s a sort of tension there. The kind that can only be drawn from unspoken words, from glances lingering on mouths, from sushi feeding that shouldn’t be nearly as close to erotic, as it is. 

“D’you want another?” the man asks, nudging with his chin towards her plate, utensils at the ready. What a gentleman. 

“Yes, please.” 

And so Harry gives her another. And another, after that. And the sensuality — unintended, entirely — is nearly palpable in the air around them. She feels like, if she had a knife along with that neat set of plastic chopsticks rolled up in her napkin, she could cut the tension in the booth with it. When the man sets the chopsticks down and the conversation flourishes again, it’s got its pros and cons. The former, specifically, leaving Isla with a little room to actually fucking breathe and not melt into a puddle in the middle of some booth tucked away at the back of a restaurant. The cons… well—

”D’you want some of the one with the little,” Harry motions, “tie thing on the end? Makes it easier.” 

He’s asking, partly, because he’s well aware he can’t keep feeding her across the table like some uber-sexualized scene from a rom-com (for both of their goods). But mostly, it has to do with the way (as the conversation’s progressed, and her own chopstick skills have consistently lacked), his date’s eyes have drawn to the rolls of seaweed-cradled rice and fish for longer and longer increments. He can only watch her subtle floundering (paired with fervent nods and an otherwise interested expression that becomes severed by frustrated interventions of her brows pinching, as her pupils hone for brief glimpses at her handiwork) while he speaks, for so long. 

The expression that her features settle into suggests he’s asked her a far more ludicrous inquiry. 

”Do I want— what, the ones little kids use?” Isla’s brows climb, before she sputters on a wry laugh, like his suggestion is ridiculous. 

Harry blinks, his blank expression and lack of immediate verbal response leaving Isla inclined to believe he doesn’t agree with her perspective.

Isla stares down at her lopsidedly strayed sushi pieces, rolled in variation over her plate like she’s been playing with her food. He’s trying to be nice. He’s trying to be helpful. Her irises jolt from side to side, nervously, before she tacks on, “I can’t eat with those, that’s so embarrassing.”

”Why?” he laughs. 

”Because… they’re— I… well, you’ll be eating all classy with your fancy adult chopsticks—“ Harry’s brows progressively climb as her statement continues, “—and I’ll look like…” 

”Like?”

Isla mulls over her answer hesitantly. 

”Like I don’t know what I’m doing.” 

Harry pauses, jaw working over the bite in his mouth, lips sealed, and his nostrils flare with the breath he expels as he sets his chopsticks onto the napkin beside him and rolls them up, tucking them away beside him against the end of the booth. And then he does the unthinkable. He waves Mustache Mark over. 

“No— no,” Isla clears her throat, sinking back into the leather of the cushion in woe as Harry ignores her. She smoothes her hands over her thighs and bridles her protests with a polite smile as the waiter makes it to the edge of the table. 

Her counterpart’s next words surprise her. 

“Could we please have two sets of the kid-friendly chopsticks?”

Mustache Mark doesn’t even blink funny. Instead, he juts with his chin — a nod, and answers, all friendly, “Sure thing.” 

Isla blinks. There’s loads of revelations she’s made tonight in a sushi restaurant. Little details about Harry, the way she finds him just as, if not more, alluring in baggy trousers as opposed to the usual of a skin-tight tailor that hugs his thighs. The way his eyes have this pretty glow every time she opens her mouth to speak, the way the green shimmers in the buttery light cast from the lamp hanging over the booth when he listens. Maybe the most jarring, a little blip that bubbles in her chest, when he purses his mouth and the corners crook up in this playful way, is that she’s in love. 

Realistically, in every sense of the phrase, she’s definitely not in love, but this little bud of flattered affection blooms in her when Harry raises his eyebrows and cocks his head at her, from across the table, in her mulling silence. 

“S’that easy.” 

And, she supposes, it is. It just is that easy. It’s easy for him, when it isn’t for her — he can just… figure it out. Find the solution, mend the issue, smooth it over, when she can’t. And he’s always done that. He’s always done that, so she’s not sure why she’s so surprised.

It’s easy with him. 

“Why’re you looking at me like that?” 

“I don’t know what you mean,” Isla tells him, spine straightening back against the booth in opposition to whatever he’d caught in her features. 

Harry’s mouth quirks up. 

“That was just …very chivalrous,” she ends up settling on as Mustache Mark wordlessly drops off the new sets (a polite upturn of his mouth below his intriguing stache, a dip of his head before he turns his attention towards the table beside them). 

The man unveils his set first, mindfully testing the simplified variation of the motion he’s evidently accustomed to. 

“You’re not off the hook,” he motions at her with his fresh, Isla-friendly set of chopsticks, a little smile playing over his mouth as he watches her cradle a piece of sushi (with far less struggle) and tuck it past her lips, “We’re working on— this. The chopsticks thing. I’m determined, now.”

“Oh, are you?” Isla asks, her cheek bulging. 

”Passionately.”

The young woman hums over a mouthful, chewing thoughtfully, and swallows the bite before she asks, “…Can I book you?” 

”Book me?” Harry stares down at his plate, the corners of his mouth curling softly. 

”You know,” Isla waves with her chopsticks, a set she’s far more comfortable with, “For tutoring. On, like,” she laughs softly, “chopstick use.” 

”I’m a busy man, Miss Cleery,” Harry sighs, siphoning a laugh from her as she cradles a palm over her mouth. “But— I’m a determined man. You do have my number.” 

Isla’s mouth quirks. She does have his number …and has definitely used it for things her mother would faint in sheer appallment from.  

“Did you always want to go into law, then?” Harry says after a moment. 

There’s a …distasteful shift in topic. It’s not that Isla hates her upbringing, or her work, but she doesn’t necessarily want to cloud the euphoria of their bubble by discussing work. 

“Well,” a crease works over her brow bone as the young woman waves with her chopsticks, “Not really.”

“No?” the man culls another piece of tuna and cucumber wrapped in seaweed and rice. It’s a wordless prompt to expand. 

“My uncle was a lawyer,” Isla says over a mouthful, a palm hovering over her mouth before she swallows and tells him, a little more coherently, “and my parents sort of …nudged me in, like, that direction. Law, I mean.” 

His head bobs as he nods in acknowledgement wordlessly, for a moment, and then he glances up and asks, “D’you like what you do?” 

“It’s …alright. It’s long hours. I feel like I’m underpaid. But I’m good at it,” the young woman picks with the ends of her chopsticks at the little pile of ginger thoughtfully, “and the work is interesting. But being a paralegal’s different from being a lawyer, so I might go back and do law school.”  

“But that’s not what you want to do,” Harry blinks, with this open sort of expression — this kind of curiosity melded with knowing. It’s just an observation — a pretty blatant one. 

“I don’t know. Maybe,” Isla shrugs. She takes another bite to stifle the discomfort of the truth. 

The man across her coats the bed of rice on his next piece with a warm shade of soy sauce, brows furrowed. “What did you want to do?” 

Isla swallows. There’s a flare that streams through her sinuses from the teensy lump of wasabi she’d applied. The heat’s in her voice when she responds, “I wanted to be a teacher.” 

“What kind of teacher?” 

Another bite. A long drink of water that does little to soothe the fire.

“Elementary.”

She clears her throat.

“Little kids. They’re sweet, and they, like, still listen when you tell them to do something. Most of them, anyways. I substituted for a little while when I was in college, and I just fell in love with it, a little.” 

“I think being a teacher’s quite noble,” Harry declares, pupils bouncing from the dollop of wasabi he scoops, and then back to her face, “You’re bringing up this whole new generation—“ His jaw works over his bite, and Isla watches it clinch and flex before he swallows and continues, “—providing them with the tools they need.” 

Isla swallows. Harry swallows again, too, and then he nods. “It’s an admirable ambition. But law’s admirable, too.”

“What about you?” Isla asks, sight dipping to her platter, “How did you get into real estate?” 

A cinch works over the man’s brow bone as he weighs what roll to go for with the end of the utensil, next, “I got into it to make ends meet, honestly.” 

Isla hums, gaze cast ahead and pasted to the bulge of his chew as she takes her own bite. Harry’s lengthy digits wrap over the glass and he takes a long drink, irises sweeping up and to the side with the bob of his throat. His lips glisten when he withdraws, and a pink tongue swipes out over them. 

“I visited a friend over here. Years ago,” Harry expands, palms splaying and motioning as he talks, “Just came by for a visit. And then …I liked the atmosphere. Just. Never ended up going back.” 

Isla swallows and points with her chopsticks, “Is your family still in England?” 

Harry takes another gulp.

“They are, yeah.” 

The young woman tells him, eyes streaking over her own plate before she plucks a sort of sad looking, half-crumbled piece, “It must be difficult. Being away from your family like that.”

He clears his throat. “It can be sometimes, yeah. But I started chasing a dream over here, and then. You know.”

She hears it in his voice, the way the undone ends, like thread not quite sewn off, of this dream are like a poignant memoir. 

“Anyways,” Harry nods. He tucks the unfettered ends back down. “I got into real estate through a friend of a friend. I was lucky enough to work under a mentor for a bit. I like working with people. Just, meeting new people. All sorts of people. And then I realized I was good at selling things, and it just. Worked out.” 

“What dream were you chasing?” Isla asks before she can stop herself.

“Music.”

She chews slower.

“I always had a passion for music, though. Always loved it. Mum had me playing the piano young, and then I got into guitar on my own.”

Harry nurses his beverage for a second.

“…At the time, Mitch was a drummer for this band out of his mum’s garage. We were kids, and he’d score gigs at hole-in-the-wall bars, and I’d crash on his couch,” he speaks with this fond sort of recollection, plush mouth curled up softly like the memories ignite warmth, “…And then their lead singer stormed off during a rehearsal one day, and I stepped in.”

Isla swallows. 

“You’d like him, I think. Mitch,” he tacks on, nudging into her direction with his chopsticks. The man takes another bite then, like it’s the most casual thing in the world to bring up the hypothetical circumstance of Isla and his friends co-existing in the same room. 

It sort of feels like it would be right, Harry thinks. 

“It was a lot of fun,” he tells her, but he doesn’t expand on why it didn’t work out. 

And Isla thinks it’s maybe not her place to pry. She thinks about him up on stage, though. She thinks about him in sultry, edgy clothing pieces, and she thinks about his hands cradling a microphone, and she ponders on what his singing is like. 

”A musician,” Isla muses, resting her chin on the backs of her hands. 

Harry culls a bit of wasabi on the end of his chopsticks, smearing it over a bed of rice as his mouth twitches, ”What’s that look for?” 

”What look?” Isla can't contain her coy, lash-flutter spectacle. 

The man grins. He shakes his head down at the bite he draws between the ends of the sticks, and then dips forward a tad as he latches his mouth over the piece and chews. Isla takes a slow sip from her beverage. She thinks about his digits smoothing over long, white keys, or deft fingertips plucking at taut guitar strings, the same way he toys with her body. There’s just something… about his… hands… 

“You’d be a sexy rockstar, I think,” she teases, mouth curved, subtle and sultry. 

“Yeah?” Harry’s mouth quirks. 

Her pupils wind over his knuckles, his cross, his rings, his short, blunt nails. She admires his fingers, tucked over the utensils, and watches his hand as it lowers the sticks to reach for water. Harry takes a sip and tells her, “I’ll have to show you some time.” 

”Show me?” 

”Mm. If you come by mine some time, I’ll play.” 

Come… by… his… sometime…

The proposition nearly has Isla’s eyeballs bulging in their sockets. She keeps it nonchalant and coy, though. Nonchalant and coy, nonchalant and coy, nonchalant and coy— that mantra plays on a desperate loop as she siphons another drink. That’s a whole thing, that’s a whole thing, (and the whole first thing aside), she knows he means the piano. She knows the man means fingers pressing on keys and siphoning sweet notes of song — that play, in this circumstance, has no implication of rope or handcuffs or floggers or mean, filthy words in roleplay. She knows he’s talking innocuously, entirely, about a musical instrument, but there’s something that’s become almost ingrained within her sordid mind, with the word play. Especially when he’s tangled in the mix.

The young woman’s response leaves more room to ruminate on double entendres, ”I’ll have to take you up on that. Maybe I’ll play with you.” 

Harry eyes her at the brazen insinuation, like there’s a sort of …knowing, there.

”The piano,” Isla tacks on, lashes fluttering, coyly, “I mean.”

”Oh, you play?”  

“Ish,” Isla squints, drawing a curious grin from him, until she expands, “I did. I took lessons as a kid. But I’m — I was never any good at it. Probably because I didn’t want to be. That’s what my mom used to say, anyway.” 

“Well, I used to take piano lessons, for, like, a solid chunk of time. A few years. But I hated it, and,” her mouth quirks up, like she’s about to share a fond memory, “When I was really little, I used to cry on the drive. Every time. Like, to,” she motions with her forefinger, driving a horizontal line through the air, “and from. Every time—“

Harry’s brows pinch, and his tone brims with partly amused pity, “Oh, no—“

“Without fail. I was so adamant about it, I remember,” Isla shakes her head, no longer bridling her soft laughter, “And she was so nice, too! My teacher. Mrs. Duvall. She was such a nice lady, like. So wholesome, and you could just tell,” Isla motions, “you know, when someone is passionate about something. And this lady was passionate about piano, and she loved kids. And I was rolling up, sobbing, every lesson—“

Harry can’t help his sputter of laughter. 

“—And thank God this poor woman didn’t see me leaving in tears, because I’d wait until we got in the car — my mom and I — and I remember, I’d always wait until the birch tree on the end of the street,” Isla nods down at the table, sucking her bottom lip into her mouth like she’s curbing a smile at nostalgia, “always the tree…” 

“And then you’d cry,” Harry makes an educated guess. 

“And then I’d cry,” Isla sighs in confirmation, melting back into the seat until their soft laughter enmeshes, “Every time, after we passed that fucking tree, it was the waterworks.” 

She shakes her head up at the ceiling, “It’s, like, you know. My mom must’ve had a little thought, in the back of her head, that this woman must’ve been slamming the lid on my hands, or something. Poor Mrs. Duvall.” 

Poor Mrs. Duvall. Harry has inklings of suspicion that Mrs. Duvall wasn’t the one carrying the brunt of the stress in this story. He clears his throat, still wearing a smile with his lips sealed, “So the lessons went well? I mean, otherwise.” 

“Oh,” Isla shrugs, “Great. I mean, Mrs. Duvall was really nice, and like I said, I mean you can tell when someone loves kids, and that woman loved kids. And piano.” 

The man’s lashline narrows with bemusement — innocent in his inquiries — as he prods, “Then why the crying?”

Isla stares at her half-eaten spicy tuna roll like she’s pondering, but there isn’t much to really ponder over. But it’s, like — who wants to get into their mommy issues on a first date? 

“I think I just really didn’t wanna do the lessons, in the first place,” Isla tells him, cradling her priorly discarded chopsticks between her fingers and poking at the remnants of her food, masking a nervous habit of fidgeting by feigning intent to use the utensils. 

And Harry knows she can’t use the chopsticks for the life of her. 

“Why not?”

There’s a fine line to walk, Isla thinks, with nudging kids to achieve the highest successes. Coaxing straight A’s and a full schedule of extracurriculars, demanding perfect hair and perfect attire and the perfect poise of a child — there’s a balance. It’s one that was always difficult for her to find in childhood. Isla loves her mom. She loves her mom. 

“My mom was… she was so big on the,” Isla motions with her free hand, fingers crooked in a manner that suggests a …suffocating nature of affections, “whole thing. Of, like, I don’t know. Have you ever heard of a tiger mom?” 

“Sure,” Harry nods, a single motion of his chin, his features serious with concentrated interest in her dialogue. 

“Well, she was like that, sort of. My parents always pushed me really hard, as a kid, and,” the young woman pauses, licking her lips, gaze downcast, before her pupils meet his own, “I’m grateful. Like, really grateful, you know. That they always pushed me to do my best, in everything. And I’m grateful for everything that they’ve done, that they,” she sighs, “keep …doing. But, you know, for a kid, it’s, like.”

Her hands fall into her lap as she peers up at the overhanging light and looks for the words, like she’s searching in the stained glass of the lampshade for the syllables, “I don’t know, it was a lot, at times.”

Isla shrugs, “But she was really big on all of it, it had to be the highest grades,” she gestures, “it had to be… a second language, an instrument,” the young woman waves, listing extracurriculars Harry can’t fathom a child bearing the combined pressures of, “ballet here, tutoring there, gymnastics, and piano, and cello, and…”

He sounds gentle and earnest when he expresses, “It sounds like it was a lot to handle.” 

Isla ruminates. Her answer is exceedingly honest.

“I think maybe,” she gnaws into her bottom lip, “I never had control over anything as a kid.”

There’s a little twitch to her brows. He wants to smooth it away.

“Like, kind of …nothing at all? And then I grew up, and now I have to control everything. Like, because of that.” 

Harry nods. 

“But sometimes …I don’t want to control anything at all,” Isla admits quietly.  

Details unspoken.

He feels as if he’s nearly using a watered down form of code language when he tells her, “You don’t have to.”

Not with me unsaid. 

The young woman looks over him for a long moment, almost like she’s prying for that untold in his features. In green, in the slope of his nose, in his pores. He knows she is. 

The sole of his shoe grazes her shin.

She blinks. She smiles.

“—Sorry,” Harry tells her softly.

The bulb of warm yellow beats down on Isla — she thinks, it’s hot. It’s stuffy, and it’s searing, and the air feels tight. Her heart hammers. 

Unsaid, untold, unspoken, unexpanded. She doesn’t want to say anything more at all. Harry ogles back, quiet.

“Is this… breaking some code of ethics, for you?” Isla ponders aloud, veering the topic into something so sudden and anticlimactic, the flurry of breaching undiscovered unsaid’s settles down in the pit of him. 

It’s oddly …disappointing.

”What do you mean?” 

”I mean …isn’t there some… protocol against going on a date with a …client?” Isla says the words before her brain can muzzle her away from categorizing what they’re doing as a date. 

People have business dinners all the time, in all sorts of places, with bottles of champagne while they talk business. But this doesn’t feel like that. This feels like he’s fed her sushi, and made her laugh beyond the minimum requirement of politeness, and asked her of her origins and childhood memoirs. This feels like everything between lines. This feels like a first date. 

Harry doesn’t tell her that if dinner was stippling into unethical territory, then the sex they've had would be breaking all sorts of protocol. 

Before she can backpedal in a rigorous, probably far more embarrassing manner than the actual factor of her using the word date for what they were doing, Harry purses his mouth, almost thoughtfully, and tells her, “I don’t think so.”

There’s a discomfort in the unknown. Maybe moreso, there’s a discomfort in the known and unsaid. There’s something uncomfortable in the known but unspoken, trapped between the lines. It gnaws at him until the check comes.

“What are you doing with that?” Harry questions, curiosity peaking as she reaches into her purse and withdraws a smaller clutch. 

Isla blinks.

“It’s my wallet,” she tells him, deadpan in decibel, “to …pay.” 

“Put that away,” the man frowns. 

An incredulous sort of laugh bubbles from her, “You’re not paying for mine. There’s no way, I mean—“

“Isla.”

He’s still frowning. He’s still frowning, and his gaze is all serious, those vibrantly expressive eyes she’s become so accustomed to, pinning her. Those eyes she’s seen like that, all stern and ungiving in stance, with no room to argue, so many times before through a rubber hood. And she’s going to pay her part, she’s going to open her wallet, and cull her card, and lay it out onto the table, and wave it at the waiter against his own, just to spite him, and—

“Isla. Put it away,” except then, he gives her that tone. 

The hard one that bears similarity to his bedroom voice, all smooth baritone of authority. The one where he tells her to do something, and she just does, melting and succumbing. He raises his eyebrows and blinks, the same way he’s done at Indulge, so many times prior, while her hand stays frozen on the outskirts of the wallet. 

And all Isla thinks about, in that moment, is how good her real name sounds doused with that stern cadence. The yes, Sir is practically on the tip of her tongue when she bites into her cheek and slowly slips the wallet back into her purse. 

And the good girl is nearly on the tip of his, while he watches her do it. 

“To pay,” Harry scoffs instead, like the concept is absolutely ludicrous, “Ridiculous.”

“It’s not ridiculous, mine was a lot—” she starts to say, characteristically argumentative from the opposite end of the booth, but her argument softens and melts off when he takes a sip of his water, and his eyes narrow. 

God. He’s even all sexy nursing his beverage with his brows pinched in frustration. Why? Why, why, whywhywhy—

“You are ridiculous. I’m paying. End of discussion.” 

“Feels kind of dictator-ish.” 

“Does it?” Harry culls his card with, evidently, no remorse, given his tone. It becomes more evident with the sardonic note his cadence takes on as he slides the card into the folder and tells her, “S’unfortunate.” 

“At least let me get the tip,” Isla argues, the headstrong nature of her request wavering with the …practically petulant whine that weaves into her words. 

Her counterpart makes this sound of wry mirth, like the suggestion amuses him. Or maybe it annoys him more. He’s shaking his head down at the folder as he slips it shut. 

“Let’s call it even, alright?” Harry says, after a moment, in a much kinder cadence. “I invited you out. So I’ll pay. …And then next time…”

“Oh?” the young woman teases, eyes narrowing playfully as she peers over the cheeky dimpling beside his smile, “there’s going to be a next time?” 

And Harry thinks, if he had it his way, there’d be more than just a next time. More of this. Unsaids untethered, and unraveled, and explored, cards on the table that aren’t cradled by hands from peering gazes. He thinks he wants her like this, in little dresses, sat across from him at a table, sharing stories with eyes lit alive. He thinks he wants the roll of the seasons, through the months, new moon to waning crescent, all encompassed, over and over, again and again. 

And he doesn’t want to just truss her up and smooth the backs of his knuckles over her flesh. He doesn’t want to just meet in the middle at the end of the week, and he doesn’t want to just spend that time ogling the way her tits bounce, or the way his palm splays between her ribcage, arched out, when she plants her hands back against his thighs and rides him. He thinks he could just sit there and listen to her talk, and he wants that. 

And that’s a fucking scary revelation, kind of. 

“I hope,” Harry tells her. He swallows. It’s clawing at him from the inside, a little. He tacks on, “You’ll have to initiate it though, I’m afraid. If you’d like to take your wallet out.” 

“Right. Got it, got it.” 

Just say it. Just imply it. It claws at him all the way to the parking lot, until the knot of discomfort tightens and grows like a knot in hair that morphs into matting. Because the timers been stretched thin and all the sand from the hourglass has nearly spilled through. He keeps in tandem with her steps, or maybe she keeps up with his, at first. But by the end of the short walk, he’s still keeping his hands to himself and a cinch of worry has managed to work over his brow bone, out of her sight. 

Isla Cleery turns to face him. When she casts her gaze into his direction, it smooths his features out. 

“Thank you,” she tells him with this… tired, dreamy sort of lilt. 

“What for?” 

“For dinner,” the young woman responds, after a moment, but the moment’s stretched just long enough to where Harry thinks she might be thanking him for something more. “I had a really nice time.” 

“I had a really good time, too,” his beam is soft, the corners of his mouth upturned just enough for dimples to rise awake in his cheeks. He tacks on, playful, “You’ll have to have your homework done by next time, though.” 

The properties. 

Isla blinks and tells him, familiar notes of that nonchalant testing to her words, “…And what will you do if I don’t?” 

His mouth quirks like he’s trying to bite back a smile, eyes narrowing a tad at the familiarity of the insinuation. For a moment, he doesn’t say anything. And then he tells her, soft and matter-of-fact, “I can’t help you buy a house if you don’t pick the house.” 

The young woman bites into her cheek. He’s managed to get awfully close in the quiet, and a nearby streetlight lights the shape of little strands gone unruly around his head alive from behind. 

Maybe she’s the one who’s inched closer. 

“I guess you’re right,” Isla agrees, feigning a sigh. 

There’s this moment of lull then, this fragment of time where unsaids are everything and the only thing between them, where Harry just admires the way her eyes shine in the cast of the light. 

“I had a really good time,” he repeats, eventually. 

Isla grins. “Yeah, you said that.” 

“I know,” his own beam widens, mirth and honestly overlapping in his timbre, “but I had a really good time.” 

And he smells good. He smells really good, and he’s really close, and Isla thinks that maybe he’s going to kiss her. That won’t be new, not from her Eros, not to Peitho. But Harry’s never done that. Isla’s never kissed Harry. 

He doesn’t. 

The man parrots, like the phrase has grown into an inside joke he can’t let go of, “I had a really good time.”

But it sounds drawn out, like Harry doesn’t want to say goodbye. And she doesn’t want to say goodbye either, not really. 

Instead she says, “I had a really good time, too.” 

Harry thinks, this is it. It’s still clawing at him, and his Peitho is slipping through the cracks of his parted fingers like water. 

Touch me, Isla thinks. Touch me, touch me, touch me, touch—

His hand cradles over her waist like she’s cracked telepathy. Like she’s willed it there, practically, and everything below the fabric grows hot. He’s closer, and her head tips up, and if she tips it up a bit more—

“Can I kiss you?”

“Please,” she beckons, nearly a whisper. 

His mouth is dishy cherry, and rapture, and everything familiar and new all in one. Because she’s felt this kiss, because she’s felt the hands on her waist, the ones that slide up her silhouette, the one that lingers over the side of her neck. Because she knows him, but she doesn’t know this side of his intimacy. Not like this. 

Because his mouth against her own is everything she’s used to and everything she’s not. Because when the long one withers off, he says against her mouth, like a desperate croon between softer kisses, or maybe a declaration, “I don’t wanna…play…games.” 

“I’mnotplayinggames,” she lets out in one sigh that he swallows, distracted by the bliss of everything she’s been yearning for the entirety of the night. 

His mouth moves against her own and then it doesn’t. Because then, it’s gone. Her eyes are still closed when he strokes over her cheek. 

“Because you know, baby—“ there’s a warmth to his touch that she clings to when her insides practically coil and wrench together at his words, when her heart rate picks up. She blinks her eyes open. “I know you know you’re my Peitho.” 

Everything freezing up and morphing cold and anxious is, perhaps, not the reaction she’d anticipate at the inevitable admission. Because she knows that it was always sort of inevitable, plays these games like trailing up and down a seesaw.

She can’t fathom what feels wrong, or why. She doesn’t understand why, instead of basking in the safety net of his confession, she feels kind of sick. His thumb strokes over her mouth in his fond way. She thinks if she hears the answer to how long he’s known that she’ll just. Implode. 

Her heart hammers behind her ribcage, and Isla stays quiet. The thumb ventures to her cheek, and his index builds a makeshift cradle over her face. It’s like she’s felt before. Like when he squeezes her cheeks together with the tips of his digits dug into the flesh. Only this time, they don’t dig. They just linger, in this careful way. 

“I wanna see you tomorrow night,” his voice is soft and there’s a faint crease over his brow bone, “Will you come?” 

Tomorrow’s Friday. Tomorrow is their night. 

There’s this queasy feeling fondling at her insides still, but she chalks it up to being startled, and she holds onto his wrist when she tips her head up and tries to merge their mouths in lieu of answering. Isla thinks that if she were to try talking, nothing would come out. Not right now. 

He doesn’t let her make it all the way. He tips his own head back, strawberry lips quirking, and beckons, “Will you come see me?” 

Faintly, she nods in his grasp. And Harry chalks it up to her being desperate for another kiss. His own heart’s still racing a bit, and he feels dizzy, but it’s good, he thinks. 

“Good,” the man tells her, and rewards her with the mesh of their mouths. He doesn’t give her everything he thinks she wants, though, pulling off too early to speak, and leaving her tipsy off of unprocessed emotion. “And we’ll—“ he pastes another kiss, and then slides his thumb back over her wet lips, “talk about everything tomorrow. Yeah?” 

Because it’s a lot to process, probably. Because tomorrow they’ll talk more. Isla doesn’t even nod. He sees it in her face, then — something …off. 

“Alright?” Harry asks, soft touch softening further. 

Like he’s asking if everything’s okay. And it should be, Isla thinks. Yeah. Only, she thinks when he lets her go that she’ll just crumple onto the pavement, maybe. 

“Yeah,” the young woman responds eventually, but it does little to soothe the crease that’s worked its way back between his furrowed eyebrows. “All good.” 

She clears her throat when his touch slips away, just barely cradling at her scalp, like he’s unconvinced. She carves a false smile with her mouth, and blinks up at him, “Yes. I promise.” 

His expression stays clear, but there’s processing to his gaze, and he idles like he ponders over every thought that’s behind her skull. Like Harry tries to search for it with his eyes, bouncing from feature to feature. Isla rolls forward onto her toes, and then slips back on the flats of her soles. Her mouth still curls up a little.

“You’ll drive safe,” Harry tells her, eventually.

She feels like she has to repeat it back. “I’ll drive safe.” 

“You’ll text me when you get home,” her Eros coaxes, “Yeah?” 

“I will…” Isla breathes, “do that.” 

“And I’ll see you tomorrow?” 

Isla blinks. She holds onto his forearms, “You’ll see me tomorrow.” 

Isla thinks that maybe the queasy feeling will melt away as she processes everything on the drive home. Everything’s fine. 

It doesn’t. 

Seren doesn’t know how she’s ended up strapped to some horribly uncomfortable stool in a rocking room that’s wood, ceiling to floor. 

Well. 

She knows that the boat she was on was a victim of piracy. She knows that the ship, aimed for Holland, met an unsightly demise at some point, in open ocean, between Rotterdam and Harwich. She knows she’d been in a cabin of the Mary when the first strike landed, when flames erupted over the forecastle, when the deck turned to screams and a beautiful morning of calm skies, wisps of white she’d admired minutes prior, meant virtually nothing to the tightening in her chest. 

The pirate leans back against the wall. His eyes, like emeralds, wind over her shape. She grits at the balled fabric between her teeth, chest heaving. He’s a man — a man’s man, unlike in appearance to the men she’s used to spending her pastime around, back home. The kinds who wither at the sight of the wrong fork at the dinner table or something, and turn their noses up at the thought of carrying something heavier than forty pounds. The kind whose hair coils pristinely, seemingly solidified rock in place. The kind who carry umbrellas to ward off the glaring rays of the sunlight as they stroll through the courtyard of shrubbery in their fancy shoes and fancy garments. This man is not that type of man. 

He’s different, she can see it just in the way he carries himself. He’s not scared to get his hands dirty, he’s not scared to do the work. The crest of his left cheekbone wears a scar, a nick, so small she wouldn’t see it had he not stepped into the buttery beam of the daylight cast through the little window on the precipice of wall and ceiling, particles of dust dancing in the makeshift spotlight. His fingers, adorned with chunky rings, his hands — they’re calloused, like a laborer. She can see it from her view. His garb is simple, clad over his skin for purpose and comfort, solely. 

But simple isn’t the term she’d deem best to describe him, not with his myriad of accessories, from the trinkets glinting from his holster, to his plethora of rings, to the mysterious, rusted key that dangled in the glen between his pecs. That one’s highlighted against bare skin in the vale of his haphazardly unbuttoned shirt. From there, she can see ink over his torso, carved in shapes over swarthy flesh. All sorts of pictures; beaks, and wings, lines of careful shading and others of jet emphasis; thicker, deeper sketches in contrast.  

He’s clean shaven, which is unlike any pirate Seren’s ever heard tall tales of. His mouth is pink, cushiony in shape, and when the corners of his mouth turn up, dimples wink awake beside the curl. An even slope of a nose, and jade irises that brew with mischief. Seren can almost see the way that the flinty shade would brew with a storm, like the sea. If he wasn't a pirate of the boat that’d throttled her own, sent it spiraling into the ocean as nothing but husks of chipped wood and dying ember, maybe she’d find an alluring quality to him. But it’s not food for thought. 

“Should we try again?” he prompts, in his tantalizing cadence. 

When she’d heard him speak, for the first time, she was floored. An Englishman. An Englishman, youthful and spry,  sailing a pirate ship, and pillaging when so much more could be in the books for such a man. So much potential, wasted. What a crying shame. She’d heard of pirates, of brutish criminals from her homeland, but they were always, for some reason or another, older, unprepossessing, scarred and crude with unkempt beards and a lack of morals, too far gone to redeem. They had eyes much too hungry for riches, and lewd, groping hands that were much too focused on flesh. Seren eyes his hands. They’re colossal. He hasn’t touched her in that way, not like that, but the lazy smirk over his plush mouth, the way his irises rake over her neckline, down the meshified front of her dress — that practically urges her not to count her blessings too soon. 

When he squats just ahead of her, watching her in pause, his eyes glinting with this sort of condescension, because she’s indisposed and at his whim, Seren wishes her legs weren’t bound to the legs of the chair. She’d kick him, if she could. She’d scream, and kick, and claw, and—

“Are you going to start shouting again? Is that what you’re thinking about?” he murmurs, the corners of his mouth buckling. When she’s unable to respond, for obvious reasons, the man cups his palm over the shell of his right ear and twists his head a tad, leaning towards her a smidge. 

“M’gonna need an answer, if you’d like to me to un-gag you. M’specifically gonna need a no,” the pirate prompts, a jesting air to his tone that Seren would love to crush. Her chest is still heaving from the last screaming fit, from the first time he’d tugged at the rope pressing to her cheeks and pulled the smushed fabric off of her tongue. His mouth twitches wryly. 

He plants his forearms onto his thighs, casting his gaze to her as he weighs out the options, lips crooked, but eyes narrowed, just a bit, in a way that wordlessly suggests she comply. 

“Let’s give this another go.” 

When the man digs his forefinger under the abrasive rope and yanks it down, over her chin, and then plucks at the outside of the makeshift gag, Seren doesn’t nip at his fingertips. She’d tried that, the first time, but he’d retracted before her teeth could come into contact, his mouth jolting at the fire within her he’d underestimated. She expected a smack, she’d expected her neck to twist as her cheek bruised in response to the attempt, but he’d just stuck his tongue against his cheek, all mirthy, until she’d started to scream. Then he’d gagged her again. 

So. 

That was a failure. 

The second the back of her throat meets the air, rather than the garbling cloth, the young woman starts screaming. Again. He’d kind of expected it. It’s a very lovely attempt, she’s quite loud, and all, but unfortunately, her efforts are sort of moot. That kind of thing tends to happen when you’re miles, and miles, and miles out in the open sea aboard a ship of men who work for the opposing team. Harry would clap if he wasn’t putting on a show of tucking a finger into his ear at her shrill cries. Eventually, he just watches her, letting her scream for a bit, and she holds seething eye contact as her help rises in pitch. 

“Okay— alright,” Harry shakes his head, balling the cloth, daubed with her saliva, and shoving it past her lips haphazardly. She attempts to spit, but can only wriggle as he presses the rope back over her mouth like the task is effortless. 

For a moment, neither of them say anything. The princess can’t. Harry tuts. 

His tone carries notes of amusement when he tells her, “You’re quite pitchy. D’you know that?” 

Seren stares him down. 

“Have you got rocks in your head?” his lips nearly jolt up at the blunt nature of his own inquiry. They don’t. “I tell you not to scream,” he waves with an arm, “you scream anyways. I say, let’s try one more time, because— you know. Maybe you didn’t get the memo, the first time.”

The princess watches him talk, bemused. He gestures with his arm like a tired parent, stressed and lecturing a menacing, little child. 

“And you yell again. So I’m wondering, have you got rocks in your head?” 

Seren says nothing. She does wriggle in the restraints, like his question has insulted her enough to launch at him. But she stills when he squats ahead of her, once more, her heart hammering behind her ribcage. 

“Who’s going to rescue you?” the pirate asks. It’s obviously rhetorical, and he knows she can comprehend that much. When the roll of her chest slows and she settles back, he can see it in her eyes that his point has left her crestfallen. His mouth quirks, and Harry presses again. “Who?” 

When he knows that the message has sunk in, when she stares at the wall behind him, blankly, the only evidence of her consciousness being her glazed over gaze and the flare of her nostrils on every inhale, Harry sighs down at his palms and shakes his head. 

“I’d just like a chat.” 

Seren twists her head away. As much as the binding over her neck and face allows for, anyways. Harry tuts. 

“So glum. You’re alive, aren’t you?” he cocks his head, voice low, “You’re not at the bottom of the sea. Not like your little boat.” 

Those words hit a nerve, he can see it in the way she side-eyes him, the flame reignited, kindling in her scorching gaze. The pirate nods down at his hands, twisting a ring with a ruby red gem, like a shitty mockery of a moment of silence. 

“It can’t possibly be comfortable, sitting with your mouth full, like that. And you must be thirsty, what with all that saltwater you were gargling,” he raises a shoulder, a coy reasoning to his speech. 

Seren doesn’t want his stupid water. He’d probably poison her, have his way, and roll her off the ship, back into the raging waters he’d pulled her from. Harry blinks. She doesn’t offer an inkling to show that she’s willing to comply, but he stands and reaches for the rope, digging the pads of his fingers under the binding, over her cheek. His forefinger brushes the corner of her parted lips. 

“Third time’s the charm.” 

Though, he doesn’t sound the least bit convincing, not even to his own ears. He cradles the square of cloth between his fingertips and listens to her screams for a moment. 

And then he startles her when he starts to harmonize with her screeching pleas. The first one is enough for her vocal chords to stutter, for her to jolt back in her seat, alarmed. 

“HELP!” Harry calls, stretching the vowel outweighing her own scream in volume as the young woman’s own dies off, and the princess balks, startling in the ropes at the sound. He takes a pause for a deep breath, and screams again, “HELP!” banging on the wooden beams over the ceiling, bumping with his palm loudly, in an outrageous display that’s clearly meant to taunt. The sound of him striking it, alone, causes her to jump in her restraints.

He’s unhinged. Seren is convinced. Her spine straightens out like an arrow, and her shoulders square as she ogles the bizarre display, watching him strike over the ceiling, the walls, stamp the soles of his boots against the floorboards. After a second, he settles down. His hand is crooked against one of the beams overhead, and his gaze roves over her slowly. Purposefully. The corners of his mouth curl up sardonically. 

“It’s not a very nice sound, is it?” 

He’s deranged. His screws are loose, Seren decides, her eyes still wide as the racing pace of her heart settles in her chest — but any man who sinks ships for fun, in the open sea, who sails and pillages, and murders innocents with a hunger for riches, has screws loose. These aren’t insightful revelations. Maybe she’d just expected him to be less …bizarre, in their interrogation. He was going to get his answers out of her — they were his, they were going to be, and there’s no kidding about it — but the young woman is unsure of what answers he’s looking for or why. Why, why, why. Why did these pirates sink her boat? It was nothing but a small ferry in comparison to the opposing monster of a galleon. It wasn’t even a merchant ship, there were no riches to be stolen. Ironically, the pirate reaches a hand out, and Seren fidgets until his fingers clasp over her ruby pendant. He lifts it from her skin with prodding fingertips and a gaze of scrutiny. 

She won’t give him answers, the princess decides. Whatever dialogue he may want from her, she won’t comply. She doesn’t know what he has in store for her lack of subservience, but she doesn’t care. She will not bend her will for this mangy brute. 

“This is a pretty piece.” 

Loose tendrils, clumped wetly, sway as she jerks her neck to tug the pendant from his grasp. She fails. His digits twitch and flex over the pendant, and the chain digs into the skin at the back of her neck with the faulty motion. The corners of his mouth quirk up as the princess makes an mmph. 

That’s a pretty sound. 

“M’not going to steal it. What kind of a man do you take me for? We’re good men here, on this ship,” the pirate declares, a sort of vehement passion to his statement, but the crook of his mouth says it’s an unlikely story. 

So do the remnants of her boat, somewhere at the bottom of the sea, Seren thinks dryly. Maintaining eye contact, he lets the pendant settle back between her collarbones. It is a pretty piece, Harry wasn’t lying. Real gold, too — no princess would wear something less. But he’s got no need to pilfer it from her. Every molecule of her being, every cell, will pay out tenfold the cost of the necklace. It’s with that thought that he fixes the gag back into place and leaves her, trussed to that chair in the cabin. 

“Ta,” the pirate bids in his slow roam towards the door, a glance aimed over his as he tucks his fingertips into the belt holstering his array of daggers, one handle bejeweled. The look he fixes her is sure, the kind that’s relaxed, but showcases that his word is final and will be the outcome. “Chat soon.” 

Fun fact; being tied to a shoddy, little wooden chair for hours on end fucking blows. Especially when your hands are bound, in such a way where the rope weaves through the pegs of the back of the chair, keeping your joints wrung together tightly. It’s really aggravating to have a coarse rope, its weaving splintered with pinprick-y tufts, stuck up over your cheeks to hold some sordid rag in place between your teeth. 

It’s safe to say that the experience is not one of Seren’s most favorite past-times. She’s not sure how much time has passed before that heavy wooden door creaks open on its hinges, again. Only a few hours, it must be. The crack of a window behind her hasn’t broken with nightfall, though the light cast through its opening has dimmed, if only a little. 

It’s the same pirate as before. All glimmery jade and the bare vale of tanned skin from the unbuttoned sector of his shirt, where she makes out a faint dusting of chest hair, between his pecs. 

The princess is still a gorgeous view, in Harry’s opinion. Her thighs are still splayed, but her cream dress has dried some, now, and so has her hair. It’s wild, mussed and frizzy. A half-soaked clump rests over one of her eyes. 

“Hello to you, too, darling,” he says in response to the glare she fastens him with through the one that’s visible, like instant daggers. The corners of his mouth crook. He ambles toward her with a steel cup of …something. Something mysterious, something unknown, something she eyes warily up until the point where he’s towering over her. The young woman tears her gaze away, casting it up to his handsome face, instead. 

He pries and tucks his digits up under the rope that’s settled over her cheeks and drawn ruddy hues, but he pauses before he pulls it down. 

“Y’gonna get loud?” 

Seren doesn’t say anything. In fact, she sort of can’t, which is quite nice, Harry thinks, but she doesn’t even make a garbled sound to appease or amuse him. The captain is thankful for what little fragments of peace he’s been granted before he’s forced to endure her ludicrously grating screeching. He weighs his options for a moment, but ultimately, tugs. 

Of course, the second he’s pulled the cloth out, the young woman is screaming, of-fucking-course she’s screaming. And at this point, it’s so obviously a ploy to irritate him, and Harry would laugh if the whole display wasn’t so vexing. There’s a tick in his jaw when he sets the lip of the tin cup to her parted, strawberry mouth, roughly — and he wouldn’t be so rough if she wasn’t so fucking loud — and tips. Instantly, that shout is garbled by liquid. It morphs into a cough and a much more tolerable string of sputters, as water leaks over and drenches down her chin, her chest, the front of her dress. 

“There we go,” the pirate says, the smooth baritone of his cadence louder over the fit of her coughing, “Attagirl. That’s much better.” 

He doesn’t tip more of the beverage into her mouth — a ransom on a princess who’s drowned in her own lungs is worth virtually nothing — and lets her cough and sputter a little longer. She strings together a sequence of breaths he deems good enough, before he smushes the rim of the metal cup back against her bottom lip. 

“Drink,” Harry advises and nudges the tin back in a way, again, so that the liquid sloshes and spills out into her open mouth. 

This time, she doesn’t cough. She expects it, the water. The princess affixes her top lip lower to siphon the beverage and takes a few swallows. Harry watches her throat bob, and he watches a little rivulet escape, too, dribbling down the corner of her mouth in a little streak. It drips down her chin, down her neck. His pupils follow the trail. He gives her a little break part-way, once the tin is close to empty and her neck is craned back with the swallows. He draws it away. Good. That was good, nice and easy. As easy as it could be, given the circumstances. 

Except she fixes him with this horrible glare, again, as he pulls the cup away. This glare that speaks volumes, this glower that should warn him of his error before he lets it happen. Harry doesn’t catch the drift. Only a glimpse of her cheeks puffing before she puckers her lips and spits the remnants at him, coating the bottom-most half of his linen with a mist of the water. His belt too, and a bit of his trousers. 

And then her mouth is empty and she’s just scowling at him, head tipped down in a way so that the chunk of her frizzy tendrils settles back over an eye. Harry doesn’t waste a second before angling the cup, miffed, and flinging what little water is left in the cup right back in her face. 

And the way her eyes screw shut, the way her lips fall open in silent appall the second he returns the energy, (except, he’s far more polite, in his humble opinion. He doesn’t spit at her like an improper animal), when she’s doused in the chilled liquid, and it coats the face-framing layers of her hair, her lashes, and drips down her chin — that’s the highlight of his day. 

He doesn’t instantly fix the gag back into her mouth, or slip the rope back over her irritated skin. He watches her, his jaw set, and when the young woman opens her eyes, she sees that storm brewing, manifesting — the kind she’d only imagined prior, in the flinty green of his irises. Like he’s harnessing his own composure. But then he takes a step back, and just. Leans against the closed door. Like he’s scoping her with his gaze. Like she’s just this shiny thing for his sight to pore over. 

And Seren thinks that feels worse than if she were to face the bite of his skin against her own, the swat of his palm against her cheek. She’d rather that, honestly. 

Her skin is cold from the water. She’s still sort of reeling that he’d done that, to begin with. He’s drumming the pads of his fingers against his bicep, over the nearly-sheer, cream sleeve of his shirt when he asks, a serious note of authority to the molasses of his speech, “Do you know who I am?” 

Seren curbs parroting the question wryly. As much as she’d love to tell him her father will torch the ship he rides upon and hang every member of his crew, him and his stupid fucking dimples included, she’s sure that all she’ll receive in response is a grating twitch of his pink mouth. 

“Hm?” he prods, making a show of cupping a palm behind his ear and steering his torso forward a smidge, half-expecting her response to be a series of shrill cries, for the hell of it.

Her answer is not one he expects. Frankly, the man doesn’t expect an intelligible response, the history of her opting for incoherent shouts, considered. But she speaks, afterall. It’s soft in decibel, feminine, and pleasant — her voice, unlike the aimless yelling he’d become accustomed to. Even still, it carries that undeniable note of derision. 

Seren tells him, “Someone …terribly disturbed.” 

Harry almost can’t help the way his cushiony mouth quirks. 

Almost. 

“Disturbed?” he scoffs, sardonically mirthy, “She spits at me like a fucking …filthy animal, and I’m disturbed. Aye, I’m disturbed.” 

The princess makes daggers with the gaze she sends in his direction. He lets her simmer in the wake of the light insult, for a moment, just drumming over his bicep, his mouth twitching in a kind of way that doesn’t quite reach his eyes. 

“I’m the captain of this ship,” Harry supplies softly, jade narrowed. 

There’s a twitch to her face then, something that slots by and withers in the blink of an eye. Something like recognition. And, fucking finally, Harry thinks — he can practically hear the angels croon at the crumbs of reception, from her, to his authority. 

“That means,” he motions out with the cup, his other arm still crossed, fingers wrapped about his waist now, “I’m in charge.” 

His voice is soft-spoken, a croon that spells it out for her, if she hasn’t already caught the drift. 

“I’m in charge of this ship. This crew,” he takes a step forward, ducking his chin as his eyebrows tip up a bit, “And you. And that means I’m in charge of what happens to you. So don’t you think it’s in your best interest to behave?” 

If he expects her to bow down and kiss the toes of his scuffed boots, the young woman doesn’t bite the bait. 

“You’re nothing but a mangy sea brute,” Seren declares, then, her chin held audaciously high, despite the ropes binding over her breasts and the foreboding ocean that sways beyond, with ravenous threat. He could lug her off onto the deck and chuck her off the plank, tied just like this. 

He doesn’t.  

He just stays leant against the wall, arms crossed over his bare chest. 

“Mangy sea brutes,” the pirate weighs her words, nodding slowly as he purses his lips in deliberation. And then his brows pinch together, “that’s quite insulting, actually. I take pride in my appearance, I’ll have you know.” 

“Mangy,” the young woman confirms, venom in her tone. 

The pirate props himself up and off, taking a languid step, each syllable of his cadence laced with condescension, “Now, rugged—“ and open mouthed smirk, a nudge with his chin, “I’ll accept. You don’t think I spend time in front of the mirror, darling? Mangy. What a rude word. I wasn’t aware that Siren, Princess of Essex was so abrasive.” 

There’s a flicker of something in her eyes when they flash to him — something like sharp surprise, mottled with pique. Like she didn’t expect him to know who exactly he was harboring upon his ship. The corners of his mouth crook. She’s seemingly appalled that he’s done his research. The glint of shock is gone, as soon as it shows itself. 

“Oh,” the captain takes a slow step forward in this sort of way, as if his body language is entirely meant to taunt her, hand in hand with his tongue, “I see. You thought I didn’t know who you were. Just some nameless, pretty little thing on my ship.” 

It’s a purposeful dig — the mispronunciation of her name. It’s only a vowel off, it could be chalked up to simple error, but it’s blatantly to mock her. Really, it’s a funny little dub since she enjoys spending so much screeching like the nuisance of a blaring alarm that just won’t shut off. It’s meant to demean her, to belittle her, because not even her name, blue-blooded and all, is worth correct pronunciation. That’s what she seems to hone on from the whole revelation, Harry finds. 

“Seren,” she corrects with bite, that same glower she’d worn prior reincarnated. 

The man takes another step. He cups behind his ear, and Seren promises herself that the moment she’s freed, she’ll personally chop off his stupid fucking ear for all the times he’d cupped behind that shell of it that way, so condescending. “What was that?” 

“Seren,” the young woman scowls, “Seren, Princess of Essex.”

He pauses, a cinch in his brows with this patronizing nod, like he’s weighing her correction, and then he tells her, motioning with an arm as the cinch relaxes, “Siren, Seren. Tomato, tomato.”

He motions with his palm nonchalantly. She wants to bite at his fingers. She doesn’t. 

“How dare you?” the young woman says instead. 

Harry’s mouth quirks. How dare he? What a pompous inquiry, molded by prissy lips. 

“How dare I?” the pirate repeats, and then just lifts his shoulder in a casually apathetic shrug. He takes a third step forward, raspberry lips smug and curled, “I just… dare.” 

And before the princess can voice her obnoxious protest, he shoves the cloth into her mouth and tugs up the rope, plucking a garbled sound of anger from her in the process. 

The silence is wonderful. 

By the time Harry returns to her for the third time, it’s well past nightfall. Light stops leaking from the crack of the window. Seren watches the shift, the way it rolls as the hours tick by, in the room. It morphs from behind her, its bright gold slipping into a darker orange, mottled with pink, and then dimmer, and dimmer, and dimmer, as minutes leak away, until all that’s left is dusk and the glow of the moonlight. 

The door creaks. She almost doesn’t see it, but she hears the pad of his boots over the wood and twists her neck to catch the sight of his legs as he steps through the threshold. 

“Honey, I’m home,” the pirate calls. 

Her eyes strain their sockets to catch the moonlight cresting off his cheekbones as his head dips, the dimpling that rises awake beside the corners of his mouth as they turn up at his own jest. He’s holding something. The captain winds around her, through the coat of darkness, and settles somewhere she can’t see. A thump, like something being set onto a table. Then, soft breaths fill the void of the silence. A strike of a match. Her eyes are forced to adjust to a warm, buttery glow as the little beam of fire, merged to a lantern, and then another, sends gold bouncing wall to wall. 

That’s when Harry sees that she's managed to make a home for herself on the floor, the chair she’s been restrained to tipped on its side. He almost doesn’t think anything of it, for a split second, but then, as the pads of his digits work buttons through their slits to disrobe, the pirate casts his gaze up for a double take. A twisted coil of satisfaction blooms in his chest as he observes her, the thought that whatever faulty maneuver she’d made to escape had resulted in this, and, well. That makes something joyful and mean bud. 

Seren listens to his boots, the step of them slow against the floorboards, until she sees him towering over her, in her peripherals. Her pupils shift. 

“Comfortable?” his brows climb with emphasis. The work of his fingertips over the buttons on his shirt are sluggish. Tired. She notes that motion, too — that fact that he’s actively shedding clothes. Nonchalantly. And it must show in her eyes, then. Something vulnerable, something uncomfortable, something raw, and petrified, because, yeah, she’s a petulant, little princess strapped to a chair in his cabin, against her will, and she fights him tooth and nail in every instance that he comes to visit her. But she’s a princess strapped to a chair, against her will, and it’s nightfall, and his skin is growing more bare, square inch by square inch, as the seconds pass. 

He must note that — whatever that shows, because the quirk of his priorly mirthy, strawberry mouth slips a tad. And then his features shape something relaxed. Something tired, again. Like he’s too worn. 

The sarky comment has those same traces of exhaustion seeping into it as his dismissive gaze disengages, honing on the work of his digits as he loops the final button through, “Don’t flatter yourself, sweetheart. You’re not my type.”

The cloth slips apart, showcasing more skin. A line of hair from below his belly button, in soft, dark wisps that melts off behind his belt. Sturdy muscles of his abdomen that ripple as he moves, chin ducked—

His palms cup over the belt of holsters, and that clinks as he discards it, too, winding around to, she assumes, set it somewhere. And then, more skin to pore over when he returns, the sharp cut of a V, decorated with laurels, emphasized by the low hang of his trousers. He cocks his head down at her, like he’s contemplating. Contemplating what, Seren’s unsure. He moves out of her line of sight again. 

Her arm aches. She’d tipped over onto it what felt like hours ago, and it’d taken the brunt of the fall, lodged against the side of the chair with the situation of her joints being married in the bindings, behind her. She’d managed to roll forward on her shoulder, just a tad, so that the press against it wasn’t constant, but it still fucking hurt. Her palms, down to the tips of her digits, were numb, she had this heinous crick in her neck, and she’s sure that the moment she’s able to stand her tailbone will hurt like hell. If she’s ever allowed to stand again. Maybe he’ll hurl her into the open ocean, strapped to this godforsaken chair, afterall. 

For now, he just hauls her up. His touch — warm — skims the opposite arm before his palm wraps over the beam over the back of the chair and tugs, leveling her with ease. The young woman squeaks against the gag as she hovers, terrified to drop straight onto the limb again. She doesn’t. The pirate sets her straight with a tired grunt. His sight scales her arm, the one she’d toppled onto, and Seren can’t see, but she assumes it’s not in the most pristine condition. And then his touch smooths over the ache, a crease over his brow bone as his eyes pry, and she bristles. 

His mouth twitches, but it’s tired. Tired after having to deal with her, tired from whatever he’d spent his time doing beyond the cabin. Tired after sinking her ship and taking her hostage, Seren thinks bitterly. How exhausting. And Harry takes his hand away. 

From her new, upright view, she can see that little metal cup — the same one he’d brought her hours earlier. He’s set it onto the table, and she knows it wasn’t there before, which means he’s brought it with new water. Seren turns her head to face it. It’s the most she can manage given that she can’t tell him what she wants, what with the gag and all. 

“Thirsty?” he notes, chin over his shoulder in her direction as he shimmies the sleeves of his shirt off. Seren eyes the expanse of naked skin as it expands, from cuts of muscle to ink sunk into the flesh of his arm. Certainly, if she wasn’t before. 

The princess doesn’t answer. She can’t, and she’s not going to resort to a string of pathetic hums to get his attention. The captain sets his shirt onto the table in a pile of disarray, beside his belt, and takes the cup. When he makes his way over to her, Seren’s eyes don’t follow his figure. And for a moment, there’s only a deliberative sort of silence. She doesn’t look until he talks, until his tone is far more serious than she’s heard thus far. 

“If you spit it at me again, I will personally make sure you lick it back up, off the floorboards.” 

And wisely, she doesn’t spit the liquid back up at him when he tugs the gag free and tips the rim of the cup against her mouth. Seren doesn’t doubt he’s the type of man to follow through on his words. But that’s not why she drinks — she drinks because she’s fucking thirsty. Her tongue’s gone dry, and the back of her throat pinpricks with an uncomfortable soreness, and because the lukewarm liquid feels good spilling down her throat. She cranes her neck back, throat bobbing, and doesn’t stop until he’s pulled the cup away himself, and a little rivulet of water dribbles down the corner of her mouth. She takes a big gulp of air and expels it. 

And then, with angry sorts of eyes, the princess declares, “I’m hungry.” 

“You’re hungry,” the pirate mirrors, but it’s only wryly amused — his tired, sardonic smile doesn’t reach his eyes, and he sets the cup back onto the table with little urgency to get her food. “We don’t offer room service.” 

“You haven’t fed me once today,” Seren declares indignantly when he winds behind her, out of sight. And then there’s a sigh and a creak, the kind that seeps from mattress springs compressing. “This is— this is cruel, I’ll have you know. This is torture, this is—“ 

“Thank you for your honest review, we’ll make sure to take your feedback into account,” Harry chimes at her in true, facetious fashion, scrubbing over his eyes with a palm as he knees his way onto the bed. And then the pirate tells her, with a more serious note to his drawl, before she has a chance to interject with another complaint, “If you’re going to talk all night, I’m going to put your gag back in until the morning.” 

Seren doesn’t say anything. Finally, she doesn’t say anything at all, and it’s splendid. It’s peace and quiet, and all he hears, for a perfect moment, is the creak of the wood and the subdued roar of the waves. 

“I don’t want to stare at the wall,” the princess speaks, eventually, like a petulant child. “Why am I staring at the wall?”

“Because …that’s the way the chair’s facing,” Harry responds, matter-of-factly and almost instantly, sure that a note of irritation has managed to teem into the words despite his best efforts. He will not let her know that her efforts of poking are chipping at his composure, he won’t. 

And for another moment, Seren doesn’t say anything. He lets his eyes drift shut. 

“I want to face you,” the princess says, eventually, and her tone implies she’s taken the bridge of silence to build the phrase up into something more demanding, something royal and authoritative. If he wasn’t so fucking tired he’d laugh. 

“You want to watch me sleeping?” she hears the pirate from behind her, his honey-smooth drawl grown raspy and lower from, seemingly, exhaustion, “That’s an odd request.” 

Her brows furrow as a scowl paints her mouth. The bed creaks in the gap of quiet. Every hair stands on end when, suddenly, he’s inches from her, his presence looming and warm from behind, with calloused fingertips brushing the side of her neck in their venture towards that godforsaken gag. 

“Just turn me!” Seren shrieks, “Just turn me, and I’ll be quiet!” 

He doesn’t put the gag in. He winds around her, hand still on the rope, his features shaped with apathetic seriousness, “If I turn you because you want me to turn you, what good am I at putting my foot down? Hm?”

Seren blinks up at him.

“Please,” the princess tells him, hushed and earnest, “I don’t feel …safe.” 

His brows twitch. There’s something that blooms in the jade at her admission, but it flits by, gone as quickly as it’d appeared. And then his brows furrow, and he looks absolutely exasperated, the subtle downturn at the edges of his mouth emphasized with the roll of that same jade. The pirate scoffs, and his boots stomp over the wood, each step an inclination that his frustration has leaked into his body language. 

“I told you—“ the legs of the chair screech against the floorboards — he doesn’t even grunt as he maneuvers her with ease, the motion rough like it’s a chore, “—that you’re not my type. Not everybody wants to fuck you, your highness.” 

Seren blinks, pupils poring over the priorly unseen sight of the opposite end of the room. A slit of a window, brushing the edge of the wall that merges into the ceiling. A bookshelf of literature and knickknacks. A dresser, a queen-sized mattress on the floor. The pirate still looks absolutely miffed when he walks toward the table with the lantern, bare shoulders squared and the muscles in his back rippling. He sets the light out, kicks off his boots, and falls into the bed unceremoniously. 

It’s a victory. 

And for a moment, Seren thinks he’s just going to wordlessly roll over to avoid her prying gaze. He doesn’t do that. They bask in the crash of the waves outside, the darkness, and their quiet breaths. He’s got this knack — Seren’s learned. This skill of morphing from sarcastic and teasing to broodingly serious, and it’s mercurial, sort of. She wonders if this brooding side’s what’s brought him to lead an entire ship. 

“Be quiet now,” the pirate drawls from the sheets, in that broodingly serious cadence, “If I hear another word, I’ll personally carry you out onto the deck, and you can sleep in the chair out there.”