#ets stuff

Outside the bathroom, you stand there with the expectation of seeing two pink lines on the pregnancy test, a positive result. If you have that expectation, it’ll be easier to accept it.

You can do this. You weren’t expecting it, but you can do it. It’s you and Sy here. You can do anything together.

Sy’s still got your hand in his while he asks, “Want me to go in an’ look first or you?”

You take a deep breath. “I’ll go.”

And so you step into the bathroom, and you instantly put the toilet lid down. Sitting on the toilet, you stare ahead at the shower curtain, trying to get your heart rate to go down. Right now it’s loud enough and fast enough for you to physically hear it in your ears and feel it in your chest. Not caring that you’re probably coming across unhinged to Sy, you begin box breathing–in through your nose for three seconds, hold for three seconds, out through your mouth for three seconds.

Sy remains a sentinel at the doorway, protecting you–and maybe also your baby–from any outside threats. There are none, of course, but his position is obvious and evident. You’re safe in here. With him, you're always safe. 

“No matter what,” Sy says, “we’re gonna be alright.”

And he’s not saying you’re going to be alright, he’s saying we’re going to be alright. Like if this test beside you is positive, if you’re really pregnant, he won’t flip his shit or anything. He won’t freak out. That it’s not just you alone in this thing; there’s a “we”. 

The applicator sits on the bathroom counter as if its radioactive, alone and untouched. Slowly, you reach out to it, lifting it without glancing at it to twist back around on the toilet and set it on your lap. Only after taking a deep, audible breath do you dare look down at the tiny box in the middle, unblinking. There's one pink line already there. You’re looking for either the presence or the absence of a second. 

You don’t blink for such a long period of time that your eyes get dry, and you feel like they’re almost crossed. Finally, you turn your head towards Sy. He’s wearing the expression he reserves for only you–eyes warm, mouth soft, face devoid of any judgment. 

“I think it’s positive,” you murmur, only for Sy to slightly lift an eyebrow. 

“You think?”

Slowly, you stand up just as he’s stepping forward. You meet in the middle of the room, and you offer him the stick. “Um. You’ve got better eyesight than I do.”

Sy looks down and then right back up at you. Your vision isn’t bad–not without your contacts in, at least–and he knows this. You know what you saw. You just want him to confirm you’re not crazy.

After placing the applicator onto the counter beside him, Sy instantly reaches out to wrap his arms around you. You fall into him instantly, closing your eyes and trying to burrow yourself in his shirt, seeking out all of his comfort. 

Women have been getting pregnant since the beginning of time. This shouldn’t feel like your world is condensing to nothing but loud static. The fact that there are two pink lines shouldn't be such a huge shock.

You don’t cry, but you hear Sy making soothing sounds to you regardless. 

“What’re you thinkin’ right now,” he murmurs, not even lifting his voice with the inflection of a typical question, keeping everything calm. You feel the brief pressure of his mouth on the top of your head.

“Tryin’ to not get overwhelmed.”

Sy starts running little circles atop your back with his thumbs, and when your heart feels less like it’s about to break out of your chest, you get a little distance between your body and his. Looking up at him, all you can get out is, “Sy.”

“I gotchu, baby,” he whispers. 

You let out a shaky breath. “Yeah.”

“We’re in it together,” he reminds you with conviction, his eyes steady while yours feel almost frantic unless closed. “There’s nothin’ you’ll have to go through alone.”

And obviously, growing life inside you is something you’re going to have to go through alone, and labor is something you’re going to have to go through alone, and–all of it. The body changes and the pain, all of it–it’s all on you. 

“I don’t know what to do,” you whisper. 

Sy’s quiet for a moment, then he brings you back into his arms. “That’s okay,” he murmurs after clearing his throat. “You don’t have to know right now.”

With your face resting on Sy’s chest, you eventually match his breathing, and your earlier panic starts to loosen its grip. It’s not gone, but it’s quieter. The loud static in between your ears gradually dissipates, letting you expand from panicfearpanic to actual level-headed thoughts.

Sy’s always so…Sy. He never pressures you. He never looks at you like he’s expecting a certain reaction from you. He just lets you be you–even if that means holding you while you have a miniature anxiety attack after finding out you’re pregnant. And to him, with family being such a huge staple in his life, you know that this reaction risks being misunderstood if it were anybody else but him.

Suddenly, you look up at Sy and take a quick step back. “Wait–did you think that I meant, like, I didn’t know what option to choose from or something? When I said I don’t know what to do?” you ask. “‘Cause I mean, I–I just meant in general that I don’t know what to do, 'cause there are just so many freakin' things I've got to do,” you shake your head and explain, probably not making sense.

Sy’s mouth parts.

“I’m not gonna..I mean, I’m keeping it,” you say. “If there was confusion about that.”

This time, when Sy wraps his arms around you, it’s not calm–it’s almost fierce. “God,” he whispers, cradling your head to his chest with one hand.

You stay like that for a long, long time.

“I never thought this would happen," Sy eventually utters.

That has you wanting to apologize. “I didn’t know that antibiotics messed it up, Sy.”

“No, stop,” he wetly replies. “I–I never thought I’d get to be a dad. Always–you know, always wanted it, and with you…It’s you–Fuck.”

You strain your neck to look up, and you notice Sy’s eyes shining. “Sy, are you–”

Sy can always control himself right up until the second he’s about to come. You’ve learned that he’ll only thrust his hips upwards when he’s right on the edge. He’s too considerate otherwise, even going so far as to entirely back out of your mouth if he hears you choking even a little.

You encourage it, reaching over his hip to grip his asscheek, but with tightly-coiled legs and firm grip on your hair from out of nowhere, everything suddenly stills. Though you try to resist, Sy’s strong when he pulls you off his dick with a loud popping sound, and a long string of saliva trails from your mouth as you look up at him. He swears under his breath, but you can’t hear what he says. You just keep looking at him.

"C’mere, baby,” he mutters, nudging your hair. “C’mere.”

You climb back up to straddle his waist, feeling his hands instantly settle on your hips. Heavily breathing, your lips are parted when you wipe your hand across them. “You good?” you shyly ask.

Again, Sy’s hands begin to move everywhere, and they won’t stop. They run up and down your sides, around to your back and then to your ass, then back up your back again only to slide around to your breasts.

Just feeling around your skin, he groans, slow and deep. “You’re so perfect.”

You want to say No, I’m not, but you remind yourself that to Sy, you are, so you just offer a small smile and lean in to kiss him. With pillows behind his back, he’s somewhat propped up, and you move until you’re entirely smushed against his chest.

Wrapping your hands around his thick neck, you tilt your head to the side and deepen the kiss. Minutely, you begin moving your hips in little circles against Sy’s skin again, just something to ease the ache, and then he starts talking into your mouth every time he inhales a small breath.

"Fuck.” Sy’s hands come to rest on your ass, and he squeezes each cheek generously. “You’re so fuckin’ hot. So pretty.”

With a whine, your eyes close instantly. You’re rubbing your bare cunt across his stomach and you both have the taste of his dick in your mouths, and he’s calling you pretty.

Behind you, Sy reaches downwards and takes hold of himself. You feel a smear of liquid against your ass-cheek then the slow tell-tale movements of his hand pulling up and down, and it gives you the brief burst of confidence you need to brace a hand on his chest to lift your upper body up. While Sy’s lazily stroking himself behind you, you start grinding your hips again, a little more evidently this time. It feels like it should be dirty, but with your eyes trained intently on one another’s, all it feels is right.

A few moments of pleasure later, you scoot downwards over his thighs and beckon Sy to move his hand from himself. You move further down onto his thighs until you look down and see his cock pointing at his belly button, and carefully, carefully, you cover it with your pussy and start to slide your wetness upwards from root to tip.

It happens so fast. A crash. A flash. A scream. Your scream.

The exact visual of those commercials that try to push you into buying some new auto insurance–except alone. A happy moment singing along to the radio in the front seat of your car, suddenly catapulted into another moment–a different moment, a Horrible Moment. The scene of an accident.

It happens so fast. Like a person snapping their fingers.

Like a glass falling to the floor.

Like a gasp.

Like a vehicle running a red light.

Spinning inside the metal cage, there's no time to cuss like you usually do when startled unexpectedly. Like that time at Johnny's bonfire last year when Garrison accidentally bumped into you with all his dead-drunk body weight, sending you down down down to the hard and warmly-glowing dirt quicker than you could register what was even happening. You'd let out something so crass and spontaneous that you didn't even have memory of it until Sy brought it up months and months later. How impressed he'd been at your choice of words.

But this isn't like that.

This, you find out in the blink of an eye–a gasp, a glass falling, a finger-snap–is even quicker than falling to the ground. It's: one minute you're driving, and the next, your car is facing another direction, still. The air is still. Your once-jerking body is still. The world stops for a while. For you.

In between the two realities of Before and Right Now, your only physical ability is the high-pitched shriek you emit. A crash, a flash, a scream. Your scream. Nothing else–no colorful cussing, no rude Nice Job, Dumbass at whoever just crashed into your car. There's just the scream.

Just like being on a ride…like the rides at the county fair Sy had taken you to last week. Was it last week? It was recently. There's the same clanky propulsion. There's the same hands-gripping-whatever-they-could-to-get-through-it sensation. The same tightness. The inertia.

You let your head droop while your mind wanders off. The Now is still. But The In Between was just like the fair. Sy got you the prize there.

You and Sy had watched the scenes of last year's carnival together from one of the mountain overlooks. He'd driven you there in his loud truck that never got in wrecks. You'd had a picnic together. He asked if you were upset that you weren't down there with the fair people at that time, asked if you'd wanted him to win you a prize. Maybe a bear, he'd said. You don't remember. You don't remember much…

But he'd gotten you a prize this year. Or–last week. You already forget what it was, but it's home in the living room. A stuffie. A big one. Huge. And your brain hurts trying to think of the animal's face.

That was the Past, though, and now it's the Present, this new reality. This moment of you–once driving the car, now sitting in the car–with your seat-belt digging into your neck and your body that hurts like hell and a strange dust floating everywhere and two large airbags taking up so much space you can't even see anything.

So you just close your eyes again.

For something happening so quickly and propelling you into a strange new reality, everything else is–not quick. Or maybe it is and you're just too lucid, too stuck on remembering the fair. While your other senses dull, your sense of hearing only grows, and you listen as a repeating clicking sound inside your car slowly replaces the hum from the Beach Boys harmonizing.

Outside, voices loudly speak. You hear and feel the vibrations of the car door directly beside you being touched. Lights seem to flash behind your closed eyelids, and you have no option but to just listen to everything and wait.

As if you're sleeping, you seem to sit immobilized for a long time. You have nothing to go by, really, but your phone would tell you. You should get your phone out of the bag next to you. To figure out the time. And to call people to let them know that you're stuck in your car. Especially Sy.

You fight the powerful urge to actually fall asleep solely because you want to speak to him so much. He's suddenly all you see. He’s waiting on you.

When you try to blindly reach out towards the seat beside you, a shooting pain not in your arm but in your abdomen instantly hinders you. Your car door coincidentally opens immediately after that, though, and all the distant voices you've been hearing grow louder until it's just one. A male voice. A deep voice that sounds like Sy. Getting closer and closer. Looking directly at your wincing face. Speaking directly into your left ear.

He’s here. You can't open your eyes, but you try to. You try to ask, What time is it? You try to say his name.

The man–Sy, you mean, because he's big and large and who else would be this close to you?--snaps open a pocket knife with a flick. You know that sound. Sy has a pocket knife.

Except…as he leans in close again, you realize it's not Sy. Sy smells different. He's nicer-smelling than whoever this is. Suddenly near you. Speaking in your ringing ear.

You groan. You don't want someone besides Sy this close to you. Touching your shoulders. Talking to you.

"Don't move," Not-Sy tells you, and he slices your seatbelt where it's locked in place at your neck.

Right away, your chest feels better, but everything else–everything else hurts.

There's actually more pain than you've originally registered once something hard is fastened around your neck and you're pulled out of the car, like your very bloodstream is poisoned and throbbing, like every tiny bone you have within you is snapped in two, like the sinews of your neck are combusting. Even your skin feels melted.

"Keep those eyes open for me."

The ache consumes you as you find yourself suddenly flat on your back but somehow high up with people on both sides of you, floating in mid-air like they’re all keeping you from falling.

Right away, you prefer sitting back in the car to whatever this is. You had almost been asleep.

"Sy…"

But the people looking down at you aren't Sy. They're Not-Sy. You blur out their faces and focus on the night sky next, at all the stars floating far away, until you're jostled around so much that the starlight goes away entirely.

The next space you're in is small and cramped. Figuring out that the new set of people looking down at you are Not Sy either, you try to sit up to seek him out, to grab your phone, but you can't. Then you try to turn your head to look to the left, but you can't. Then you try to turn your head to the right–not happening. Your neck is immobile. You're entrapped.

"Can you tell me your name?"

While squinting up at the white metal roof, tears drop down your face and into the crevices of your ears.

"What hurts?"

Your head. Your neck. Your stomach. Your head.

You remember again after that–Sy's at the restaurant waiting for you. Your date. Your Friday night date. He'll think you stood him up. He won't have any idea where you are.

Not that you’d be able to eat dinner right now, anyway. Your stomach.

As much as they hurt your head, the voices around you continue speaking. They just won't go away.

"You're okay. You're alright. You're gonna be just fine."

and you grimace while there's another–

"Check her pupils…"

and then a soothing and calm–

"Stay with me, hon."

But you'd rather not. You'd rather just…close your eyes. Telepathically, you tell all the people in the back of the van that you're going to sleep now.

And you do.

When you find yourself opening your eyes again an indiscriminate time later, you’re in an entirely different environment. There's another white roof to look at, and there's still a bunch of people staring down at you, but this time, fluorescent lights shine down on you, too. Bright lights. Much too bright.

The lights are seriously just way too bright, and these people surrounding you are entirely too close, and you're–you’re waking up extremely fucking mad.

You're angry. Not even understanding why, you're pissed off. At every thing and every one–at every single person surrounding you–at every single object you can see. Even though you don't know who they are or where you are or what's even going on, you just know you're mad.

Impulsively, you lift your right arm and swing at the woman closest to you. You swing hard. Someone on your other side gasps and then restrains your wrists beside your face, but that just makes you fight back worse.

But you wouldn’t be able to get entirely free, anyway. They've put tubes in you. You've got fucking tubes in your arms.

“Get–off-me!” you yell while you begin kicking your feet.

An urgent and familiar feminine voice says your first name, but you don’t seek out the source, instead choosing to examine your arms in a panic.

Things are around your wrists. Plastic things–you don’t know the word. Colored wristbands. Tubes are connected to the back of your hand.

"Leave me the hell alone," you warn the people around you again. "Get off!"

“Y/N, calm down,” a voice distantly yet loudly calls out. “Ain’t no one try’na hurtchu here.”

No one's trying to hurt you, but people are actively restraining you? While you're hooked up to some –some machine beeping behind you? While one woman is touching your shoulder and the other is messing with the tall metal pole beside your bed? While only more are appearing from out of nowhere?

“Let-ME-GO!” you shout again, chest now moving rapidly as you try once again to get off the slender bed you're on.

"Baby, lay back an’ stop fightin’," you hear Sy command in the gentle but firm way you're so used to. "You're okay. They're here to help you."

Sy's voice usually calms you, but you're not even sure if it is Sy's voice, so your eyes start burning with angry frustration. It's probably Not-Sy again because the actual Sy is waiting for you at the restaurant. The place with the gluten-free pizza.

With your chest heaving, you desperately kick your feet in the air until you find that you’re physically no longer able to. A fire burning in your veins halts any and all movement you attempt after that.

Starting around your arms and then smashing into your head and exploding there, the burn travels everywhere inside your bloodstream until at last reaching your fingertips and the tips of your toes and the insides of your ears. With a limp wrist, you unconsciously settle back in bed as relaxation is forced upon you.

When you finally see Sy next to you among the retreating nurses, you heavily blink up at him. “Are you real?”

Almost grimly, Sy nods. He takes your decrepit hand in his and holds it while the both of you just stare at one another.

You glance away to look around the room. You’re obviously in a hospital, but you don’t know which one. The town has two of them–one with an okay reputation and one with a shitty one–but since you’ve never been a patient at either place before, you have nothing to go by.

You shift your focus to your body. Your leg isn’t suspended in mid-air with a cast on it. You're not missing any body parts. No giant chunks of your skin are missing or burned or weird-looking. Nothing seems out of place. Nothing even hurts.

But at the same time, everything hurts. You feel so strange.

"Nurse Ratchet bullshit," you mutter while Sy’s thumb caresses the back of your hand, careful of the thick tape keeping the IV in place. "Better not come back in here an' touch me."

Sy fails to hide a chuckle at you, and you cast him a scowl. “Are you really Sy?” you ask. "Are you real?"

“Real as the day's long.”

You sigh. “Yeah, you’re real, alright. You and these southern analogies,” you slur.

With a fondness you can sense, Sy smiles down at you. If you can call it a smile. His face is wrinkled in worry.

“Y’all Georgians love to compare everything y’all can to some, like…Green Acres fresh-from-the-farm….shit. 'Yup, I’m fine as frog hair'," you pull a long face and say in a deep, heavily-accented voice. "'Happy as a pig in shit. Mad as a wet hen.'”

Sy continues to laugh. You snatch your hand away from his and place it on your stomach, right on top of the weird gown they've got you in. It hurts. "Stop makin' fun'a me."

"Ain't my intent." He holds up his hands in apology. "Never seen you like this, 's all."

You pout. "It's not my fault."

"I know it's not," Sy earnestly replies with zero ounce of condescension whatsoever, and in response to his gentleness towards you, you start to cry.

You hurt, and he is really real.

Suddenly, you're back in your car, alone and dazed and immobilized and confused, just wishing for some sort of comfort or familiarity. For Sy himself. And now that he's here, you're still hurting.

Still, you know it’d be worse if he weren’t here at all.

"I don't know what happened,” you squeak out as you shake your head side to side, tears dripping from your eyes, “but I don't like this, Sy. I don't–I don't feel right."

Sy’s face falls as he watches you. “They…You…They gotchu on painkillers."

"I don't wanna be on painkillers," you whine like a child. "I don't wanna be here at all. I wanna go home."

"I know, baby,” he murmurs apologetically.

"I wanna go home to our bed and our chickens."

He nods at you shortly. “I don't like hospitals either."

Questions run through your mind–What even happened? How long will you be here?

Sy's hand on your forehead feels nice enough for you to close your eyes and relax into. With his thumb caressing your hairline, your breathing settles.

Soon, you hear Sy's phone buzz from his back pocket. He keeps his hand on your forehead as he answers it.

"Hey, yeah. Liana was able to let me inside the recovery room."

Recovery room?

"She’s comin' off the anesthesia now," you hear next while your eyes squint open again. "Yeah…Damn near gave the nurse a broken nose."

You stare up at Sy through glossy eyes. "Who is that? What d'you mean?" you almost slur. "What anesthesia?"

"Just lay on back and relax," Sy directs his attention to you again and instructs quietly. While he ends his phone call with You-Don't-Know, anxiety tries to break through whatever medicine you’ve got in your system.

"Why ana–" You swallow to try to help your dry throat. "Why anesthesia?"

A moment. Sy waits a moment. "You just got outta surgery."

Hastily–or so you think–you sit up and look down at yourself again.

"Baby, you gotta lay back."

"Surgery for what?!" you ask, but your words are difficult to formulate, and your throat is dry as hell, and surgery means a huge fucking medical bill. And pain. And–And–Just what kinda surgery is he talking about?

You’re able to get out: “What kinda surgery’re you talkin’ about?”

"I'll tell you soon," he promises.

"Why not now?"

"'Cause you still ain't yourself."

"Well, who the hell am I, then, Sy?" you ask without any bite, already settling back onto the pillow beneath your head.

"You're comin’ off anesthesia,” he says.

"Yes. You said that."

"You…"

As a team of nurses and assistants enter the room, things begin coming back to you like you've been on amnesia medicine that's been somehow reversed. You remember what Sy's saying. You remember now. You were driving, and then there was a crash, and then your airbags exploded. It's still unclear exactly what happened after that, but you remember people helping you, and now you're in the hospital.

After having surgery.

You hate every second of this. People seeing you like this. People watching you. You're a spectacle. You're on display. You try to hide your face with your hands, but it just makes machines beside you beep.

"This is too much attention."

"It'll be over soon."

"I hate this, I hate this, I hate this…"

"Y/N, look at me," Sy instructs. He waits until you do and murmurs, "It'll all be over soon."

Slowly, you nod. You guess no one else watching you really does matter.

But it's such a small town and people are gonna know and they're gonna talk and–

You take the hand that Sy puts on the bed and just squeeze it.

Within the next thirty minutes, your mind defogs entirely, and more bits and pieces of how you landed in this place come back to you in snapshot scenes in your mind's eye. You try to avoid them entirely by dozing off to sleep.

"How ya doin', Champ?"

You open your eyes to find Liana in your room.

"Feel like I've been hit by a bus," you groan, not even able to smile at her.

She and Sy share a look. Sy's face is grim.

"Yeah, well," she mumbles.

You remain quiet while trying to remember if you're supposed to know what vehicle hit yours. You don't think you ever found that out.

"...Did I get hit by a bus?" you ask.

"A van," Sy answers.

"A van," you repeat.

Sy affirms your question with a nod, and you can tell he's less than happy.

"But-but my car…"

"Gone," Sy utters.

"Seriously?" You groan long and heavy.

Sy blows out hot air from between his lips. Then he steps into the hallway with his arms crossed across his broad chest.

"Can you tell me what even happened, please?" you ask Liana. "Sy's bein' all closed-off."

She pulls a sympathetic face. "He hasn't left your side…Hasn't been sleepin'," she explains. "Probably just a combination of stress and exhaustion. And…anger."

"Why anger?" you ask. "'Cause he's stuck in a hospital?"

"No, Y/N, at–" She sighs instead of answering. "So listen. I got paged Friday night–"

"Wait, what day is it?" you interrupt.

"It's Sunday."

“Finally. Where’ve you been?” Michael asked when you stepped inside and kicked off your shoes, and you gave him a funny look before glancing down at your uniform.

It had been a long, long shift at work. Mean customers who demanded to speak to a manager, stupid customers who couldn’t follow simple directions to locate things and required you to do their shopping, gross customers who pulled dollar-bills out of their bras… You had had a day.

After your shift ended, you’d stayed in the parking lot with some of your co-workers for a while, venting about everything you'd all gone through. Leaning on your vehicles and sharing story after story with one another, time simply got away from you.

It was like that sometimes when there were just so many fucked-up things that happened while working. Sometimes you equated it to it being a full moon. Sometimes you'd say that Mercury was in retrograde. Whatever it was tonight, though, the people that came in the store were fucking nuts.

Not thinking anything of it, when everyone said goodbye, you got in your little car and drove to your apartment like you would on any other evening.

(It was yet another time you realized how small decisions you’d used to consider insignificant were actually really big deals for Michael. Enough to impact his entire mood, really. Enough to fight over.)

You held out your arms and looked down at your uniform. "Work..."

“You got off an hour ago,” he replied, and you looked up at the clock nonchalantly.

Apparently it was too nonchalantly. An argument had ensued after that, leaving you even more exhausted, but mainly just confused. You didn't know how many different ways you had to say it. Of course you weren’t somewhere other than work. Of course you weren’t talking to anyone besides your co-workers. You promised, you swore, you swore you'd never do that. You were in the parking lot!

You ended up staying up for entirely too long arguing with Michael, feeding into his accusations by yelling back at him when you had exhausted all other efforts of calm and rational communication, turning into someone you weren’t as a way to defend yourself from the outrightly crazy things he was making you out to be.

The argument eventually moved from the living room to the bathroom to the bedroom.

“It’s just, I’m out doing sales pitches all day and I was looking forward to you being home when you said you’d be home from your retail job,” he’d told you, and the emphasis on “retail job” came across as if your position wasn’t even substantial. “But as always, I’m not important enough.”

“I didn’t mean to make you feel unimportant!” you raised your voice and yelled, nervous-system on hyperdrive after telling the truth for so long only to have it repeatedly misbelieved. “Just–I had just got off work and I wasn’t think–”

“Wasn’t thinking,” Michael finished. “‘Cause I’m not important enough for you to remember!”

You choked on a sob. “That’s not what I said, that’s not–that’s not what I meant!”

He began pacing with his hands on the back of his head. “I guess I just care about you more than you care about me. I guess that's all it is.”

You wiped your puffy eyes only for them to fill with tears again. "That's not true," you croaked.

Michael whipped his body around. "Then fucking act like it, Y/N."

Your lower lip wobbled. “I had a really rough day, okay? I was just talking about what happened at work with my co-workers, I swear. I was just talking. That's all I was doing.”

“With who?”

You sniffed. “Shane and Tim and Gena.”

Michael rolled his eyes at that because you knew he didn’t like Shane, but luckily said no more.

You changed clothes quietly and sat down in bed in an old t-shirt and loose shorts, leaning backwards against the headboard. You yearned for sleep at this point. You just wanted peace.

Michael got in bed next to you. He reached out to play with your hair.

“I’m sorry,” you whispered. “I really didn’t mean to be inconsiderate or anything.”

He sighed. “I’m sorry, too,” he told you. “I just hate that we haven’t been spending as much time together as we used to. And when I don’t know where you are, it...it worries me, Y/N. It's best with you right here, so I know nothing bad'll ever happen.”

You kept trying to get your eyes entirely dry. It came easy as Michael began running his hand up and down your bare leg. You felt better within seconds.

It was nice that he felt like his role as your boyfriend, in a way, was to protect you. Even though you didn't need that, you couldn't deny that a part of you still wanted that, still longed for that. You wanted to feel like no matter what, your partner would always be there to just...take care of you. To love you. To make sure nothing bad happened to you.

Just like Michael had said.

“Yeah,” you murmured, now laying down horizontally and finding a pillow to rest on. “I get that. It’s been so much going on lately, hasn't it?"

Michael started to caress your stomach with broad circular motions, soothing your skin underneath your shirt.

"But it won’t be like this forever," you closed your eyes and imagined.

“Nope,” he said. “Not when I’m gonna be makin’ the big bucks.”

That got you to smile just a little.

Michael rolled on top of you shortly after that, and after a few honey-sweet words, you took your clothes off.

After you were done having sex and he'd come, you got up to make yourself something to eat for dinner.