#holiday queuing

He's watching you. You can't help but notice that Bobby doesn't stare the way other men stare, heavy and obvious.

He watches. There's a difference. Staring is passive. Watching is a skill.

You can see it in the way his eyes move: cataloguing, framing, composing. Those eyes. Pale blue, sharp, amused in a way that suggests he's always in on a joke nobody else has heard yet. They land on your face and stay there with an intensity that makes you want to look away and also makes you want to never look away and you're not going to think about that right now. Even in a shitty diner booth with fluorescent lighting and a crack running through the formica, Bobby Franklin is looking at you like he's already thinking about angles.

"And you're—Terrence said you do everything yourself? Shoot, edit, all of it?" you croak out, forcing yourself to swallow a mouthful of coffee.

"I don't trust anyone else with the camera." He says it the way other people say they don't trust anyone else with their car keys. Flat. Non-negotiable. His fingers are wrapped around the coffee mug and you notice—you're noticing too much, you need to stop noticing—the veins on the back of his hands, the way the leather jacket sits on his shoulders like it grew there, the silver hoop catches light every time he tilts his head. "It's a one-man operation. Well." The twitch again. Almost a smile. "Usually two-man. One behind the lens, one in front."

You nod. Push the eggs. Your fork makes a sound against the plate that's louder than it should be because neither of you is talking and the diner is mostly empty. The jukebox in the corner is broken and has been broken since Reagan. Your knee is bouncing under the table. You press your palm flat on your thigh to stop it. It only partially works.

"How behind are you?" Bobby drawls.

Your head snaps up. "What?"

"On rent," he clarifies patiently. "Terrence said you were in trouble. How behind?"

He leans forward when he asks it and the chain shifts against his collarbone and you catch a breath of him leather and something underneath, warm, clean, just skin—and your stomach coils.

You're nervous. You're nervous and attracted and the two are braiding together into something that makes it hard to hold your fork steady.

This would be easier if he were sleazy. If he looked like what you'd imagined when Terrence first explained the arrangement. Some greasy guy with a moustache and a waterbed. Instead he looks like this. Sharp jaw and piercing, amused eyes and an earring, a chain and a full mouth that does that little twitch and you're in so much trouble.

You put the fork down. Two months. You're two months behind because the temp agency dried up and the waitressing gig fell through and you've been living on ramen and the leftovers your neighbour leaves outside her door in tupperware containers that you're pretty sure are meant for the stray cats but you're not proud enough to care anymore.

"Two months," you admit, staring down at the eggs. Not looking at him. Looking at him is becoming a problem.

Bobby whistles. Low. Through his teeth. "Well shit. Landlord breathing down your neck?"

You scoff, swallowing down the bitterness. "He's past breathing. He's at written notices."

Bobby leans back in the booth. The vinyl creaks beneath him. He's got one arm stretched along the back of the seat and the other hand wrapped around the coffee mug and the morning light from the window is hitting the side of his face and you think, abstractly, the way you'd think about a painting in a museum: he's beautiful. Sharp angles. Pale eyes. Cali tan and an ease in how he slouches in his seat.

"The money's good," he says suddenly, tongue poking his cheek as he drags his attention back towards you. "That's the first thing. I'm not gonna bullshit you. It's not Hollywood money, obviously, but for Santa Clara? For a couple hours of work?" He tilts his head. "It'd cover your rent. Easy. One shoot."

You stare, unblinking. Sceptical. "One shoot."

"One shoot."

You pick up the fork again. Put it down again. Your fingers won't stop moving.

"Look—" Bobby leans forward. Elbows on the table. The leather jacket he's wearing creaks with the movement, and he's closer now and the watching has intensified into something that feels less like a camera and more like a hand on your skin. "I'm not trying to pressure you into shit. Terrence vouched for you because I asked him if he knew anyone and he said he knew a girl who was real smart and broke and—"

He stops. Mid-sentence. The watching goes still. There's a shift in his expression. A loosening, a slip, the mask of professional detachment developing a crack.

"Shit," he says softly. Almost to himself. "You're pretty. Real pretty."

You bristle. The flinch is automatic. A full-body tightening that starts in your shoulders and works down, because you know this game, you've played this game, the compliment that's actually a crowbar, the flattery designed to pry you open. Men in diners don't tell you you're pretty because they mean it. They tell you you're pretty because they want something and that something is usually between your legs.

"Don't do that," you say sharply. Your voice is harder than you intended.

Bobby blinks. The crack in his expression widens and what's behind it isn't a game. It's surprise. Genuine, unperformative surprise, the kind that creases the corners of his eyes and makes him look younger than however old he is.

"Do what?"

"The—flattery thing. The buttering up. I don't need you to tell me I'm pretty to get me to agree, I already—" Your throat tightens, and you knot your fingers in your lap, setting your jaw. "I'm already here. I'm already desperate enough to be sitting in this diner talking about—so you don't need to—"

"Hey." His hand comes up. Not touching. Just a gesture. A pause button. "I wasn't buttering you up. I was just—" He runs a hand through his hair, clipping his sunglasses. He looks, for a half-second, almost flustered. "I was looking at you and it came out. That's it. That's the whole thing. You're pretty and my mouth moved before my brain did and I'm—" He picks up the coffee. Takes a long sip. Sets it down. "Sorry. Professional hazard. I notice faces."

You stare at each other in silence.

He wasn't mocking you.

The realisation lands with a warmth that starts in your chest and spreads to places you weren't expecting.

He wasn't mocking you. He was sitting across from you in a vinyl booth and the light caught your face and he thought you were pretty and he said so because his mouth was faster than his filter. And now he's drinking burnt coffee to cover the fact that he's embarrassed about it.

"Okay," you say quietly.

He pauses, cup halfway to his mouth. "Okay?"

"Okay, tell me the terms."

Bobby sets the coffee down. The professionalism clicks back into place but the tips of his ears are still pink and you file that away somewhere warm and private.

"I shoot everything at my place. My equipment, my setup. VHS. I've got two cameras, one static, one handheld. The handheld's the one that matters. That's the one I operate." He taps the table with his index finger. Rhythmic. A habit. "I edit everything myself. I distribute through a guy I know in the valley who handles the duplication and the mailing list. You never have to talk to him. You never have to talk to anyone. Your face, your name, none of it goes on the packaging unless you want it to."

"What name do you use?" you ask, curious despite yourself.

"For me? Bobby." He shrugs. "I'm not creative about it."

"And for—"

"Whatever you want. Pick something. Pick nothing. Some girls just go by a first name. Some make something up. One girl I worked with went by the name of her landlord's dog. Said it felt like revenge." The almost-smile again. "Point is: it's yours. The whole thing is yours. You say stop, I stop. You say no to something, it's no. I don't push. I don't coerce. I don't do anything you haven't agreed to beforehand and if you change your mind halfway through, the camera goes off and we're done. No questions. No attitude."

He says all of this in the same tone he'd use to explain how a camera works. Methodical. Clear. Like he's said it before and means it every time.

"How much?" you ask.

He tells you.

You put your fork down carefully because the number he just said would cover two months of rent and groceries and the electricity bill that's been sitting on your kitchen counter turning into a small paper monument to your failure.

"One shoot," you say again, making sure.

"One shoot," he echoes with a nod. "Couple hours. You walk out with cash."

Hope and desperation surge up your spine, working your tongue. "Cash?"

"I don't do checks. Checks leave paper trails and paper trails make people nervous." He drains the last of the coffee. Grimaces. Apparently even Bobby Franklin has limits and Moreno's coffee has found them. "You don't have to decide now. Think about it. Call me."

He pulls a napkin from the dispenser and writes a number on it in handwriting that's surprisingly neat for someone who looks like he's never filled out a form in his life. Slides it across the table.

You look at the napkin. Look at him. then back at the napkin.

You pick it up, folding it neatly.

"Tomorrow," you say. "I can come tomorrow."

Bobby's eyebrows rise. Just slightly. Then he nods slowly. "Tomorrow works."

He pays for your eggs. You don't argue. You should argue but the rent was due six days ago and the eggs were $2.15 and the pride you'd normally spend on "I can pay for my own breakfast" has been liquidated to cover more pressing debts.

At the door of the diner he holds it open for you. Not performatively. Just does it. And when you pass him your shoulder brushes his chest and he smells like that warm thing again, the underneath thing, and his pale eyes track your face one more time and he says "See you tomorrow" in a voice that's dropped half a register and the warmth in your chest migrates south and you walk to your car thinking fuck, fuck, fuck, what am I doing?

You're covering rent. That's what you're doing.

That's all you're doing.

His apartment is above a furniture store.

You stand on the sidewalk for four minutes before you go up. The building is nondescript. Beige stucco, iron railings, a set of stairs on the outside that lead to a door that needs painting. There's a cat on the landing that looks at you with the serene judgment of a creature that has never once had to worry about rent.

You envy the cat greatly.

You're wearing a sundress because you didn't know what to wear and the sundress felt like a compromise between "trying too hard" and "not trying enough." You changed three times.

The first outfit was too casual. The second was too much. The sundress is yellow and you hate that you care what colour it is.

You knock.

Bobby opens the door and the first thing you register is that he's not wearing the leather jacket.

T-shirt. White, thin, cropped in a way that shows the shape of him underneath and is making it difficult to maintain eye contact. Jeans slung low on his hips. Bare feet on the hardwood. His hair is damp from the shower and pushed back off his face and without the sunglasses holding it up you can see the full architecture of him.

The jaw, sharper in natural light than in the diner's dimness. The earring. The chain, sitting in the hollow of his throat, rising and falling with his breathing.

He looks good in his own apartment. Relaxed in a way he wasn't at Moreno's, the professional edge softened into something more lived-in.

He leans against the doorframe and says, "Hey. Come in" and the drawl is thicker in the morning.

You're going to be professional about this. You're not going to think about his forearms, which are now visible because the t-shirt sleeves are short and his arms are lean and tanned and there's a vein running from his wrist to his elbow that you're staring at. Stop staring at it.

The apartment is small and clean and full of light. Not the fluorescent light of the diner but real light, California morning light, pouring through windows that face east.

There are photographs on the walls, black and white, and you realise after a second that he took them. They're good. They're better than good. A bridge in fog. A woman's hands. A street at night, wet, reflecting. He has an eye. You knew that from the diner, from the way he watched, but seeing it on the walls makes it real.

Bobby Franklin has an eye and he uses it for this and also for what you're about to do and the cognitive dissonance of "artist" and "adult filmmaker" is something you're going to have to sit with.

"Coffee?" he asks, padding toward the kitchen. Bare feet on linoleum.

The t-shirt rides up slightly when he reaches for a mug on the top shelf and there's a strip of skin above his waistband and the muscle that cuts along his hip and you look away so fast you nearly give yourself whiplash.

"Please."

He pours you a cup. You stand in his kitchen and drink it and it's good. Your hands are shaking and the cup rattles against the saucer and you set it down before he notices except he's already noticed.

"Hey," he calls out, leaning against the counter. Arms crossed. The t-shirt pulling across his chest. His stare is piercing, amused, reading you the way they read you at the diner except now there's nowhere to hide behind a menu and a plate of eggs. "We don't have to do anything today. We can just talk. Get you comfortable. No pressure."

"I'm fine," you force out.

He gives you a sceptical once over. "You're shaking."

"I'm fine and I'm shaking. Both can be true."

His mouth the twitches, the almost-smile that you're beginning to understand is Bobby's version of a laugh. A contained one. Controlled. Like even his amusement is something he runs through a filter before letting it out. But his eyes crinkle at the corners and the amusement reaches them and it's warm, genuinely warm, and some of the tightness in your chest loosens.

You talk.

He asks you questions. Mercifully not invasive ones, not the peeling-back kind. Surface questions. Where you grew up. How you know Terrence. What music you like. And you find yourself answering, not because he's charming (he is) but because he's easy. Bobby Franklin is easy to talk to in a way that contradicts everything about his sharp jaw and pale stare and the fact that there are two video cameras set up in his bedroom that you can see through the half-open door.

He listens the way he watches: completely, with his whole attention, like whatever you're saying is the only thing happening in the world. And he's funny. Dry, quick, a deadpan that sneaks up on you.

You laugh at something he says about Terrence and his face creases in a way you haven't seen before. Surprise. Pleasure. Like your laugh was an unexpected pleasure.

He tucks it away fast, smooths the expression back to amused neutrality, but you saw it. You saw it and it made your stomach warm.

An hour passes. Your hands stop shaking. You've stopped noticing the cameras through the doorway. You've started noticing other things.

The way he gestures when he talks about photography, loose and animated, the only time his cool composure fully drops. The way he licks his bottom lip when he's thinking. The way the chain shifts against his throat when he laughs. The pale eyes that keep finding your face and staying there a beat longer than conversation requires.

You're attracted to him. This is no longer a thing you can file under "irrelevant." This is a thing that is happening in your body, in the kitchen, in the warm light, and it's making the prospect of what comes next feel less like a transaction and more like something you might actually want and that's more frightening than the cameras.

He shows you the bedroom eventually.

It's not what you expected. No red lighting, no satin sheets, no sleazy backdrop. Just a bed—queen, white sheets, a quilt that looks like it came from someone's grandmother—and two cameras. One on a tripod in the corner, aimed at the bed. The other on the dresser, smaller, a different angle. Both VHS. Both off.

"The one in the corner is the wide shot," Bobby explains, standing in the doorway behind you. Professional. Tour guide. "It runs the whole time. Catches everything. The one on the dresser is for close-ups. I adjust it as we go. The handheld—" He nods toward a third camera sitting on the nightstand. "That's the one I use. That's the one that makes the money."

You nod, staring at the bed. The white sheets. The grandmother's quilt. The two dark eyes of the cameras. Your pulse is loud in your own ears.

"I'm sorry," you blurt out, not looking at him, still staring at the bed. "I'm being weird about this. I've obviously never—I haven't done anything like this before and I don't know how to—"

He kisses you.

His hand is on your jaw first, angling your face toward him. Gentle but sure, the confidence of someone who knows the effect he has and is choosing to use it kindly. And then his other hand comes up. Both hands cupping your face now, his palms warm against your cheeks, his thumbs resting along the line of your cheekbones, and his mouth finds yours.

The first press is soft. Almost chaste. Just the warmth of his lips settling against yours, testing, asking. You inhale sharply through your nose, and he catches it. Absorbs it. Tilts your face up with those hands and kisses you deeper.

Bobby's mouth opens yours. Coaxing, slow.

His bottom lip drags against yours, the faintest graze of teeth, and then his tongue follows. Warm, unhurried, curling against yours in a way that makes your knees actually weaken.

You've kissed people before. This is not that. This is Bobby Franklin kissing you with both hands cradling your face like you're worth holding and his tongue moving against yours with a patience that suggests he could do this for hours. Just this. Just the wet slide of his mouth on yours and the taste of good coffee and the way your breath mingles when he tilts his head and changes the angle and finds something deeper.

His thumb strokes your cheekbone. Back and forth. This light, rhythmic brush while his tongue curls against yours, while his bottom lip catches between your teeth and he makes a sound—small, low, a vibration you feel more than hear—and your hands are on his chest. When did your hands get on his chest?

You can feel his heartbeat through the white t-shirt, fast, faster than his relaxed composure suggests, and the knowledge that Bobby Franklin's heart is hammering while he kisses you makes you dizzy.

He tilts his head the other way. Your noses brush. The tip of his against the side of yours, a small warm nudge, almost playful.

He kisses the corner of your mouth. Your bottom lip. Takes it between his and sucks, gently, and your fingers curl into the fabric of his t-shirt and pull and the sound you make is swallowed by the warmth of him.

He pulls back.

Not far. An inch. Maybe two. His hands still on your face. His thumbs still on your cheekbones. His forehead nearly touching yours and you can feel his breath on your lips and his eyes are right there. Those pale, watchful, bright eyes, scanning your face. Reading you. Making sure.

Your lips are tingling. Your whole body is tingling. You're standing in a stranger's bedroom being held by the face and kissed like you've never been kissed before.

"Was—" Your voice is thin. Wrecked. He kissed your voice right out of you. "Was the camera rolling?"

Bobby smirks.

Up close, from two inches away, with his hands still warm on your face. One corner of his mouth lifting in that lazy, crooked, insufferable way. His eyes half-lidded. And it goes trough you like wildfire, flooding your nervous system with liquid heat.

"No," he answers huskily, his thumb tracing your cheekbone one more time. "Just felt like doing that."

He holds your gaze. One beat. Two. Three. Letting the smirk settle. Letting you feel the weight of it—the fact that he kissed you off-camera, off-clock, for no professional reason.

The fact that his heart is still hammering under your fists and his pupils are blown wide and he kissed you because he wanted to. Because you were standing in his bedroom apologising for being nervous and he looked at you and his mouth moved before his brain did. Again.

"Still okay?" he asks, softer now. The smirk gentling into something warmer.

"Yeah." Breathier than you want it to be. Your hands still in his t-shirt. "Yeah, I'm okay."

"Good." His hand drops from your jaw. Trails down your arm. Fingertips only, light enough to raise goosebumps, tracing the inside of your wrist where the pulse jumps. "I'm going to undress you now. Slow. Before the cameras go on. Just us. That alright?"

You nod.

He starts with the straps of the sundress. Easing them off your shoulders one at a time. Not pulling, guiding. His knuckles graze your collarbone and you shiver, his eyes tracking the shiver down your body with an attention that makes you feel like the only light source in the room.

"You wore yellow," he notes conversationally. Like he's remarking on the weather while his fingertips trace the neckline of your dress. "Looks good on you. Warm. Shows off your skin."

The dress pools at your feet. You're standing in his bedroom in your underwear and the morning light is on you and Bobby is looking at you the way he looked at you in the diner when his mouth got ahead of his brain.

"Pretty," he murmurs. Like he can't help it. Like the word just falls out of him when he sees you. His thumb traces your hip bone above the elastic of your underwear. "Real pretty."

This time you don't bristle.

He reaches past you. Flicks on the tripod camera. A tiny red light. Then the dresser camera. Another red light. Two eyes, open, watching.

"Don't think about them," Bobby says, his mouth near your ear. His hands settle on your waist, warm palms on bare skin. "Don't think about the cameras. Don't perform. Just feel me. Can you do that?"

You jerk your head. "I can try."

"That's all I'm asking." His lips brush your ear. Down. Along your jaw. The corner of your mouth. His hands slide up your ribcage and his thumbs trace the underwire of your bra and you exhale, shaky, and he catches it. "There you go. Just like that. Stay with me, yeah? I got you."

He unclasps your bra with one hand. Practiced, efficient, but the way he peels it away is anything but. Reverent, almost, easing the fabric off like he's unwrapping something valuable. The air hits your skin and your nipples tighten. Bobby's gaze drops and his jaw flexes and for a moment, just a moment, the professionalism wavers. His throat moves on a thick swallow.

"Lie down," he instructs, a little rougher than before. "On the bed. On your back."

You lie down. The sheets are cool beneath you, the quilt soft. on your skin

The light from the window falls across the bed in a warm band and you're naked except for your underwear and Bobby is standing over you still fully dressed and the power imbalance should feel wrong but it doesn't because his eyes are eating you alive and his hands are clenched at his sides and you realise, with a jolt that goes straight through you: he's holding himself back.

This is Bobby exercising control. This is what it looks like when he wants to touch something badly and is making himself wait.

He picks up the handheld camera. Lifts it to his eye. And something shifts in him. Visibly. The control locks in, the professional takes over, and he's Bobby-behind-the-lens. Steady. Composed. Seeing everything.

"Touch yourself," he says. Director voice. "Just your skin. Nothing heavy. Just run your hands over yourself. Get comfortable."

You do. Your own hands on your own body, palms skating over your stomach, your ribs, the swell of your breasts, and it feels strange and exhibitionistic but then Bobby says "gorgeous, just like that, you're doing so good" and the praise lands in the pit of your stomach like a lit match. Your back arches. Barely. Just enough.

"Yeah," Bobby breathes from behind the camera. "That's it. That's perfect. Look at you."

He films you touching yourself for what feels like hours and is probably three minutes. Then he sets the handheld down on the nightstand. Red light still blinking, and he crawls onto the bed.

Not between your legs. Beside you. Lying on his side, propped on one elbow, his face level with yours. Close enough that you can see the flecks of darker blue in his irises and the faint scar on his chin and the way his throat moves when he swallows. Still dressed. T-shirt. Jeans. Bare feet.

"Keep going," he murmurs, watching your hands on your own body. "Don't stop on my account."

Your hands move. Over your stomach. Up. And Bobby's hand joins them. One warm palm laid flat against your sternum, between your breasts. Not groping.... just resting. Feeling your heartbeat through your ribs.

"Fast," he notes. His thumb strokes the valley between your breasts and you shiver. "Slow down. You're rushing."

You do as he asked, your hands sliding over your skin with less urgency and more intention. Bobby's hand follows, learning new terrain, the dip of your waist and the flare of your hip and the soft give of your stomach where you've always been self-conscious and he presses his palm there like he's making a point.

Like that spot, specifically, is worth his hand.

Then his mouth replaces his palm.

He starts at your throat. A kiss. Open-mouthed, warm, the press of his lips and the faintest edge of teeth. Then your collarbone. The notch at the base of your throat where your pulse is hammering. Down. The flat of his tongue dragging along your sternum, tasting the thin sheen of sweat that the California morning and your own nerves have produced.

His mouth is unhurried. Exploratory. He's not kissing you so much as he's mapping you with his lips, charting the terrain the way he'd scout a location before a shoot. Finding the light, finding the angles, finding what works on you.

His mouth finds your breast. Kisses the swell of it. The underside, where the skin is softest. And then his lips close around your nipple and he sucks—not hard, not gentle, somewhere in between, a warm wet pressure that sends a bolt of sensation from your breast directly to your cunt and your back arches off the mattress.

"Oh."

Bobby hums against you. A sound of satisfaction. His tongue circles your nipple, flattens, flicks.

His free hand slides up your ribs and cups your other breast, thumb rolling across the peak, and the dual sensation—mouth and hand, wet and dry—makes you reach for him. Your fingers find his hair. Sandy strands, still slightly damp from the shower, thick between your fingers. You grip. Pull.

Just... needing something to hold onto while his mouth does this to you.

The pull makes Bobby groan. The sound vibrates through your nipple and into your chest and your hips lift off the bed involuntarily, pressing into nothing.

He feels it and his mouth tightens. Pulls harder. His teeth graze the sensitive peak and your fingers clench in his hair and you tug, genuinely tug, trying to pull him up, pull him to your mouth, because you need to kiss him, you need—

He doesn't let go.

His mouth stays locked on your nipple, sucking with a focused intensity that borders on stubborn, and you're pulling his hair and he's groaning and he will not come up, will not release, and the wet heat of his mouth is making you clench around nothing.

Your thighs press together, your hips rocking against air, seeking fullness, friction, anything, and Bobby—Bobby, who is supposed to be a professional, who is supposedly in control of this situation—reaches down with his free hand and cups you between the legs.

Just cups you. His whole palm, warm, pressed against the soaked cotton of your underwear. Just holding the heat of you in his hand while his mouth works your nipple and your fingers twist in his hair and the sound that comes out of you is breathy and too high.

"Bobby—please, I need—"

He releases your nipple with a wet pop that you feel in your spine. Glances up at you, his lips swollen. His eyes heavy-lidded and dark and his hand still cupping you, pressing against the damp fabric, feeling the heat seep through.

"Need what, baby?" Low. Rough. His fingers flex against you, palm grinding just slightly against your pulsing core, one small movement of pressure through the cotton. "Tell me."

"Touch me," you plead, trying to press closer. "Actually touch me."

His fingers slide under the elastic. Find you bare. Find you soaked. And the sound he makes—a sharp exhale through his nose, almost a hiss—is the sound of a man who knew what he was going to find but is still wrecked by the reality of it.

"Jesus." Barely a whisper. His fingers parting your folds. Not penetrating yet, just circling your clit. Just petting. Long, feather-light strokes through the slick of you, up and down, spreading the wetness with an aching patience that makes your hips chase his hand. "So wet, baby. This all from—was this from my mouth? From me sucking on you?"

You nod. You can't speak. His fingers are petting you like he's got all the time in the world and no intention of giving you what you need. Long strokes. Root to tip. Parting you with two fingers and letting the middle one drag between, barely touching your clit, just enough to make your thighs shake.

"Pretty little pussy," he murmurs, and the words shouldn't work.

They're filthy and crude and you've heard variations in the tapes you've watched that made you cringe, but Bobby says them the way he said "you're pretty" in the diner. Like a fact. Something he can't help observing. Like your body laid out in morning light is a view he needs to narrate. His fingers keep petting. Lazy. Wet with you, making you drip onto his grandmother's quilt.

Then his mouth starts traveling south.

He kisses down your stomach. Your hip bone. The crease of your thigh. Hooks his fingers into your underwear, drags them down, tosses them off the bed without looking. Parts your thighs with both hands, spreading you open, and the sound he makes—not a groan this time, something lower, something guttural, a sound that vibrates in his chest—is not for the camera.

You know this because the camera is on the nightstand and he hasn't touched it and he's not angling for a shot. He's just peering down at you. Spread open in the morning light. And that sound is coming out of him because he can't stop it.

"Fuck," he whispers, his thumbs pressing into the crease of your thighs. "Okay. Okay."

He lowers his mouth to you.

Bobby eats you out the way he kissed you earlier. Unhurried, thorough. Long strokes of his tongue that start at your entrance and drag upward, tasting the length of you, and you feel his groan against your cunt when the flavour hits and your whole body shudders.

He circles your clit with a pressure that's devastating in its patience. He's not trying to make you come fast. He's tasting. Exploring. Learning what makes your hips jerk and what makes you gasp and what makes your fingers find his hair again.

You fist both hands in those sandy strands and pull and the sound he makes—rough, grateful, hungry—vibrates against your clit. Your hips buck and his hands tighten on your thighs. Holding them apart, his thumbs stroking the soft skin in counterpoint to the filthy things his tongue is doing.

He's found a rhythm now. Flat, wide strokes punctuated by the pointed tip of his tongue flicking your clit in a pattern that your hips start chasing, lifting off the bed, grinding against his mouth, and he lets you. Lets you ride his face with his hands gripping your thighs and his eyes closed and his entire world narrowed to the taste and the sound and the wet.

"Bobby—oh my god—"

"Mm." Against you. His mouth full of you. His tongue pressing flat, licking you open in a broad swipe that makes your vision swim. "Taste incredible. Could stay here all fuckin' day."

He could. You believe him. He looks like he means it. Settled between your thighs like he's found the only place in the world he wants to be.

You tug his hair again and his moan is muffled against your cunt and you feel it everywhere, the vibration traveling through your pelvis and up your spine, and you pull harder and his tongue presses harder and the feedback loop is building. Your hands in his hair and his mouth on you and the wet sounds and the moans and you're close, you're getting close—

He pulls back with a wet, slick sound.

You whimper. The loss of his mouth leaving you throbbing, aching, empty.

"Not yet." His chin is wet, his lips swollen. Bobby's eyes are glazed and dark, the professional gone, replaced by something feral that's been living underneath the cool-boy surface and is now looking at you like it's deciding whether to devour you. "Not yet, baby. Want to be inside you when you come. Wanna feel you, yeah?"

You moan in response, dizzy. And your moans are real. That's the thing that's changing the temperature of the room.

You're not playing them up, not pitching them for any microphone, not performing the breathy exaggerated sounds you've heard in the tapes you've watched out of curiosity and mild horror. You're just reacting. And it's affecting him. His breathing has changed. His hips are pressing into the mattress in a grind he can't seem to control and you realise he's hard.

He's been hard for a while. He's been eating you out with his cock straining against his jeans and he hasn't touched himself once.

Bobby sits back on his heels. Pulls the t-shirt over his head in one motion. His chest is flushed. Lean, not bulky, the body of someone who lifts camera equipment for a living and forgets to eat regularly. The belt buckle. The zipper. The happy trail of hair dipping dangerously beneath the belt buckle. He pushes the jeans down and kicks them off and he's—

your mouth goes dry.

Bobby Franklin naked is a problem. Bobby Franklin hard is a crisis.

He sees you looking. The smirk returns. That lazy, insufferable lift of one corner of his mouth. "See something you like?"

"Shut up."

You sit up. Grab his hips. Pull him toward you and the surprise on his face—genuine, unperformed, the mask cracking again—is worth everything.

He stumbles forward on the mattress, knees sinking into the sheets, and your hands are on his stomach, his ribs, dragging your nails lightly down his sides and he hisses. His cock twitches and you feel powerful in a way that has nothing to do with cameras or money.

"How do you want me to fuck you?" His voice is gravel. Wrecked. He's peering down at you with his hands cupping your face, thumbs on your cheekbones, and the professionalism is a memory. "Tell me."

"From behind." No hesitation. The words tumbling out before your brain can edit them. "I want—on my stomach, I want you behind me, I want—"

Bobby's eyes go wide. His whole face flushes harder. Cheeks, ears, the V of his throat. He drops his head against your shoulder and laughs. A real laugh. Rough and bitten-off and disbelieving.

"Shit, baby." Muffled against your skin. "Can't say stuff like that to me. Can't just—" He lifts his head. The flush is gorgeous on him, spreading down his neck. "Yeah. Fuck yeah. Turn over."

He flips you. Firm and purposeful. His hands on your hips guiding you onto your stomach, lifting your hips until your ass is raised and your face is in the pillow and you feel exposed in a way that's terrifying and thrilling.

"Look at you." His hands on your hips, sliding up. Over the curve of your ass. Both palms cupping you, squeezing, spreading, his thumbs tracing the cleft while he breathes hard through his nose. "Every angle. Every fuckin' angle. 'S not fair."

His hand draws back. Comes down on your ass. Not a slap, not quite, a firm pat that's more proprietary than punishing and the sound it makes in the quiet bedroom is obscene. Your hips jolt. He does it again. Lighter. Smoothing his palm over the spot after, kneading with a hum.

"Could cover you like this," he mutters, stroking the curve of your ass with both hands, spreading you again, looking at you from behind with an expression you can feel even though you can't see it. "Just—stay right here. Just like this. Prettiest goddamn thing I've ever shot and I haven't even started the camera yet."

He reaches for the handheld. Turns it on. Red light. Frames the shot—you on your stomach, your hips raised, the curve of your spine. His hand still on your ass. Claiming. Warm.

He sets the camera on the mattress, angled up. Reaches for himself. You hear it. The wet sound of him spitting into his palm, the slick stroke of his fist over his cock, and then he's behind you. The hot thick length of him pressed against you, nestled between your folds, and he groans and you groan, and he doesn't push in.

He rolls against you.

Long, grinding strokes, his cock sliding through the slick mess of you, dragging across your clit with every thrust. The head catching at your entrance and pulling away. Over and over. Using the length of himself to stroke you, to tease you, to coat himself in you until the sound of skin on wet skin fills the room and your fingers are clawing at the sheets.

"Feel that?" His chest pressed against your back. His mouth against your ear. "Feel how hard you got me? Been like this since the diner. Since you sat down in that booth and looked at me with those fuckin' eyes. Thought about this. Thought about what you'd feel like."

His hips roll. The head of his cock catches your entrance again, presses, almost, almost—

"Bobby, please—"

His cock throbs against your core. "Tell me."

"Fuck me. Please." You suck in a shaky breath. "I need you to—"

He spits again. You feel it, warm, landing where his cock meets your cunt. His hand stroking himself once, twice, spreading the slick. And then he notches himself at your entrance and pushes in.

One long stroke. All the way. Your body opening around him and his groan matching yours. Colliding, two raw sounds meeting in the air and becoming something bigger than either. He bottoms out and holds you in place, and you feel every inch of him, the stretch, the heat, the fullness, his forehead dropping against the nape of your neck and he breathes "oh fuck" against your hair and his whole body shakes.

"God—you feel—" He can't finish. His hips twitch, involuntary, the tiniest thrust that pulls a gasp from both of you. "Baby. Baby, you feel—"

He starts moving. And the control lasts about thirty seconds.

Thirty seconds of measured strokes. Finding the angle. Professional. Thinking about the shot, the camera on the mattress, the red light.

And then you push back against him with a greedy sound, meet his thrust with your hips, grinding onto him, taking him deeper, and you moan. Really moan, the sound that's been building since he put his mouth on your nipple and refused to let go, and something in Bobby snaps.

His hand grabs your hip. His other hand braces on the mattress beside your head. And he fucks you.

Not the controlled version. The real version. The Bobby Franklin that exists underneath the smirk and the camera and the professional detachment. Hips driving into you with a force that shoves you into the mattress, that punches the air from your lungs, that turns your vision white around the edges. Sweat beading on his chest and dripping onto your spine. His breathing ragged, broken, gasping against the back of your neck in hot bursts.

And you're both gasping, coiling, pushing into each other blindly. Your hand reaches back, finds his hip, his thigh, pulling him deeper, harder, your fingers digging into the muscle and he groans like you've wounded him.

His hand finds yours, laces your fingers together beside your head, pressing your joined hands into the sheets, and the intimacy of it cracks something deep in both of you.

"So good," he's babbling against your spine. His mouth open, dragging wet kisses between your shoulder blades. "So fuckin' good, squeezing me so tight—can you hear that? Hear how wet you are? Hear what you're doin' to me?"

You can hear it. The obscene wet sound of his cock driving into you, the slap of his hips against your ass, the creak of the bed frame that he's going to have to explain to the furniture store below.

"Bobby—" Your voice is gone. Shattered, croaking. "Bobby, I'm gonna—I can't—"

"Yeah you can." Growled against your ear. His teeth grazing your earlobe. Biting down. "Cum for me. Wanna feel it. Wanna feel you squeeze my cock so tight I can't fuckin' think—"

He lets go of your hand. His fingers fist in your hair. Gathering the hair, wrapping the strands around his fingers. And he lifts your head from the pillow, arching your neck back, turning your face toward the camera on the mattress that's still rolling, red light blinking, catching everything.

"Show them," he murmurs against the shell of your ear. "Let 'em see how pretty you look when you cum for me."

You fall apart.

The orgasm rips through you. An earthquake, seismic and structural that starts where he's buried inside you and radiates outward.

Your mouth opens on a moan that you don't recognise as your own voice, wanton, cracked, genuine. There's no performance, no production, it's pulled from somewhere primal and raw inside you. And Bobby feels it. Feels the clench and the shake and the sound and his rhythm breaks, shatters, his hips slamming into you without finesse, chasing his own end through the aftershocks of yours.

He comes with a loud, greedy moan, a gruff sound of laughter caught in his throat. This breathless, incredulous sound, muffled against the back of your damp neck, like he can't believe what just happened to him. His hips jerk again, pressed flush against your ass. His hand loosens in your hair, fingertips grazing your scalp.

His body shudders against yours in waves that slow and gentle and eventually still.

His lips find the shell of your ear. Warm. Spent. Still inside you.

"With a moan like that," he rasps, kissing the curve of your ear, "and a pussy that grips me that tight?" He laughs against your skin. Loose. Golden. The real laugh, the unfiltered one. "Shit, baby, you're gonna be famous."

You laugh too. Into the pillow. The sound surprising you. The lightness of it, the ease. The fact that you can laugh, right now, naked and sweating and thoroughly ruined in a stranger's bed with two cameras rolling.

You're laughing because he's funny and because the sex was extraordinary and because you came to this apartment expecting something transactional and clinical.

Instead you got Bobby Franklin's mouth telling you you're pretty like he couldn't help it and Bobby Franklin's hands holding yours while he fucked you and Bobby Franklin laughing against your neck like making you come was the best thing that happened to him all week.

He pulls out, slowly, carefully, making you shiver at the loss, and collapses next to you. Reaches over and clicks off the handheld. The red light dies. The static camera in the corner is still running and neither of you moves to turn it off.

Bobby lies on his back, chest rising and falling. Staring at the ceiling with the expression of a man whose professional boundaries have just been comprehensively violated by his own want.

"So," he says to the ceiling. "Same time next week?"

You turn your head on the pillow. He turns his. Pale eyes. Flushed face. Hair wrecked. That almost-smile.

"Same time next week," you agree, still breathless.

The static camera runs for another four minutes before Bobby remembers to turn it off.

In the footage—which he will watch later, alone, ostensibly for editing purposes—you can see two people lying side by side on white sheets, not touching, not talking, just breathing, and at the 2:47 mark the girl in the yellow sundress starts laughing again and the boy with the camera reaches over and takes her hand and doesn't let go until the tape runs out.

He doesn't use that part in the final cut.

He's sitting on the front steps of his building when you pull up.

Dark red jacket over a black shirt, unbuttoned at the collar, a thin chain at his throat catching the streetlight. The white streak at his temple is uncombed, pushed back by his own hand one too many times.

His elbows rest on his knees, the silver band on his right thumb glinting when he lifts his head and spots your car. The rigid set of Valarr's jaw—the clenched, held-together look he gets when he's keeping himself contained—eases, just barely.

He climbs in, the sleeve of his jacket brushing your arm. Cedar and vetiver underneath tickles your nose, the expensive cologne Jena buys him every Christmas, and beneath that the sharper, rawer note of whiskey and cold air.

"Hi," he says quietly.

"Hi." You glance at him. "Seatbelt."

His mouth twitches, but he puts on his seatbelt without a word.

You drive him to the diner on Aegon Street, the one with the cracked leather seats and the jukebox that only plays songs from the nineties. The one you've been going to since you were fifteen and he first drove you here in his mother's borrowed car, both hands on the wheel, serious about it, careful.

You order him black coffee and a plate of fries he doesn't touch and you sit across from him in the corner booth and you wait. Because you know Valarr, because you've known him since you were ten years old, and you know that when he's ready to talk he'll talk. Pushing does nothing.

A Stark knows how to wait.

He wraps both hands around the mug. The silver band presses against the white ceramic. His eyes—brown on one side, pale blue on the other—fix on the surface of his coffee, heavy-lidded, unfocused, and the fluorescent overhead light makes the white streak at his temple look almost silver.

You take a picture.

Can't quite help yourself. Phone in your hand, angled low against the table, tapping the shutter while you pretend to be checking your messages.

A habit you've never examined too closely, because examining it would mean admitting that your camera roll contains over four hundred photographs of Valarr Targaryen doing absolutely nothing remarkable, and that you add to it weekly, and that sometimes you lie in bed and scroll through them with the tender ache of a woman building a private archive of someone she won't allow herself to want.

He's easier to photograph tonight. Looser. The whiskey has softened the edges of his composure, dropped the calibration by a few degrees, and the effect is devastating.

His gaze stays on your mouth a beat too long when you speak, his knee pressing against yours under the table and staying there, no apology, no careful repositioning, just the steady warm weight of him against you through denim.

He talks.

Eventually. Halfway through his second coffee, staring at the fries neither of you is eating. His voice is low enough that you have to lean in to catch it over the jukebox.

"Margaux told me—at the end. When we were ending it. She said—"

You go still. It's been three weeks since the breakup.

You know this because you've been counting, silently, the way you've spent a decade cataloguing this man's availability without admitting to yourself you're doing it.

Three weeks since the text from Matarys (val ended things with margaux btw) and the savage, cold pulse of triumph that flooded your ribcage before you could stop it.

"What did she say?" you ask carefully.

"She said I was the most attentive man she'd ever been with. That I remembered everything. That I made her feel important." Valarr's throat moves. The chain shifts against his collarbone. "And that none of it mattered because I was in love with someone else and she could feel it every time I touched her."

The diner hums around you. Valarr's hands rest wrapped around the mug, the ring catching the light.

"She wasn't wrong," he adds, almost inaudible. His eyes find yours across the table. Brown and blue, stripped bare, the composed golden surface of him cracked clean through. "Was she?"

You don't answer. You hold his gaze across the cracked leather booth and let the silence do what silence has always done between you and Valarr: fill itself with the enormous, patient, decade-long thing neither of you will name.

And you take another picture. You can't help it. Your thumb moves on its own, tapping the shutter with your phone still angled low. Because his face right now, open and wrecked and so painfully honest that looking at him feels like pressing on a bruise, is a confession you need to keep.

Proof that you didn't imagine the way he looks at you.

He catches you.

Valarr's eyes drop to your phone. To the angle of it. To the screen, where his own face is frozen mid-confession in the frame.

Then they come back up to yours.

His expression changes. The rawness doesn't leave, instead it sharpens, gains an edge, the final tumbler in a decade-long lock falling into place behind his eyes. Recognition. The look of a man who's just been handed confirmation of what he hoped but never dared trust—that you want him back.

That you've wanted him back this whole time.

You lower your phone. Set it face-down on the table.

Your heart is slamming so hard you can feel it in your wrists.

Valarr reaches across the table. Long-fingered, the silver band glinting, the vein along the back standing in faint relief as he wraps his digits around your phone. Turns it over. The screen is still lit. The camera is still open. The last photograph is still there: his face, mid-confession, the washed light caught in his floppy hair.

He looks at it.

He looks at you.

"Come with me," he says, voice low.

The register he's used maybe four times in your shared history. Always at moments when the performance drops away and what's left is just Valarr, raw-voiced and silky.

He slides out of the booth. You follow.

Valarr's hand finds the small of your back—the place, his place, the spot he's been touching since you were children—except tonight his fingers curl against the fabric of your shirt, pressing, pulling slightly, and the possessiveness of it sends a jolt of heat through the base of your spine.

He walks you past the counter, past the kitchen, past the corridor with the payphone nobody uses, to the bathroom at the end of the hall. Single-stall. Lock that sticks.

He holds the door. You go in, forcing your breath to stay even.

The lock clicks behind him and the light buzzes overhead and you turn to face him. The room is small and too bright and Valarr is leaning against the door with his hands at his sides, breathing carefully, his chest rising and falling with the controlled rhythm of a man who is holding himself in place by force.

"Tell me to go home," he says.

"No."

His eyes search your face. A flicker in them. Surprise, or hope, or the sharp bright edge of a want he's been keeping under glass since he was old enough to understand what it was.

He lets out a raspy, huffing laugh. "Tell me this is a bad idea."

"It's a terrible idea." Your voice is steady. Your heartbeat is not. "I'm not going to tell you to stop."

"Why not?"

You push off the wall. Cross the two steps between you. Close enough to see the faint damp at the corner of his jaw where he's been clenching. Close enough to smell the whiskey on his breath, warm and sharp under the coffee. Close enough to see the fine tremor in Valarr's hands when he pulls them from his pockets.

"Because I've been waiting, Val," you tell him. Quiet, measured. The truest thing you've said in ten years. "I've been waiting to see if you'd choose me."

His face cracks open. The composure fractures along every fault line he's spent fifteen years reinforcing, and what's underneath is just Valarr, raw and looking at you with ten years of accumulated want so visible on his face that it has a physical weight.

You feel it settle against your chest.

"Choose you," he repeats, his voice hoarse. "I chose you when I was nine. I chose you before I knew the word for it. Every girl I've ever been with has been a—a placeholder for a place I've been saving and you know that, you've always known that—"

You take the lapels of his red jacket in both hands and pull him down and kiss him.

His mouth is warm. It tastes like whiskey and coffee and underneath both of those, purely and unmistakably, Valarr.

The boy who walked you home from school with his hand at the small of your back, the man who sat beside your bed for four days after your grandmother died and didn't speak and didn't leave, the man who slid a silver band onto his own thumb a week after his father's funeral because you'd pressed it into his palm and said I need you to keep this for me, I need a piece of mine on you and he'd worn it every day since without ever asking why.

You feel that ring now.

His right hand comes up to cup the side of your face and the band presses into your cheekbone. Smooth, blood-warm from his skin, the weight of it so familiar from a thousand casual touches that the intimacy of feeling it here, now, with his mouth on yours in a diner bathroom with the buzzing overhead and his breath ragged against your lips, makes your knees dissolve.

Valarr kisses you the way a man kisses a woman he's been rehearsing kissing for a decade.

There's nothing tentative in it. Every late night and remembered preference and hand at the small of your back has been foreplay, and the foreplay is over, and his hands are shaking against your face. Actually trembling, the fine barely-visible vibration.

You bite his lower lip. Catch it between your teeth and pull, the soft inner flesh of it caught against your incisors, and the groan that rips out of Valarr vibrates through your own mouth and settles low in your stomach.

You release it. Suck it back in—slow, greedy, your tongue dragging along the swollen swell—and Valarr makes a sound that has no composure left in it whatsoever. Guttural and raw, broken at the edges.

Your hands are still fisted in his jacket. You shove it back off his shoulders, dragging it down his arms, and the red fabric catches at his elbows.

Valarr shakes free of it without pulling his mouth from yours, the jacket crumpling to the tile floor behind him. He's in the black shirt now. Just the black shirt, the chain at his throat gleaming against the dark cotton, the first two buttons undone, the hollow of his collarbone visible and flushed.

You hook one finger under the chain. Tug.

Valarr growls.

His whole body jerks forward, his hands clenching on your hips, and the sound that comes out of him—high, fractured, disbelieving—is the sound of a man whose composure has just been yanked out of him by the throat.

His eyes fly wide. Brown and blue, the pupils blown so dark the colour is almost gone.

"Again," he breathes. "Please."

You wrap the chain around your index finger and pull him down to you, slow, steady, the thin metal digging into the back of his neck, and Valarr follows it like a man on a leash.

His mouth crashes into yours, his hands scrabbling at your waist, your ribs, the curve of your hips, desperate and graceless, nothing like the measured careful composure of fifteen years of friendship. He's groaning into your mouth between kisses, a continuous low sound, and his hips grind forward against yours.

You feel the full hard length of him through his trousers and the heat of it sends a spike of want so sharp through your centre that your vision swims.

He lifts you. His hands slide under your thighs, helping you up, and you settle on the edge of the sink counter. The cold of the porcelain bites through your jeans and you don't care, you can't care. Because your legs are wrapping around his waist and his mouth is at your throat and Valarr has a decade of repressed longing cracking open inside him and every fracture shows.

You feel it in the way he goes at you. Teeth first, the scrape of them down the tendon of your neck, followed by the hot drag of his tongue, the seal of his lips sucking hard enough to leave a mark that will still be there in the morning.

He doesn't linger. He moves, roams, claiming. His mouth travels from your throat to the hinge of your jaw, open and wet and hungry, and then down. First the dip of your collarbone, the arch of your neck, the pulse point below your ear where he presses his tongue flat and drags and your hips jerk forward against him involuntarily and the sound that comes out of you is one you don't recognise. Raw. Startled.

Your hands fly to his silky hair, twisting into the dark strands, and you pull. Hard. Valarr's head yanks back, throat bared, the chain pulled taut against his adam's apple, and the gasp he makes, ragged and shocked, grateful, echoes off the tile.

"You," he pants, staring up at you from the angle your grip forces. His eyes are wet. The flush has spread from his throat to his cheekbones, and the white streak at his temple is disordered, damp at the root. "You and your—god. Do you know how long I've—do you have any idea—"

You yank his mouth back to yours.

The open-mouthed, tongues sliding, the wet heat of it making your thighs clench around his waist.

You suck Valarr's tongue into your mouth—hard, a sharp sudden pull that drags him deeper into the kiss—and Valarr makes a sound against you that is barely human.

His hips slam forward, grinding the hardness of him against you through fabric, and his whole body locks, rigid, trembling, a punched-out groan vibrating between your mouths because he's close.

He's close from that, from the suction of your mouth on his tongue, from the obscene wet pull of it, and his hands clench on your hips hard enough to bruise as he forces himself to hold still.

"Fuck—" he chokes against your lips, shaking, his forehead dropping to yours, and filth sounds good in his usually overly polite mouth. "Fuck. I almost—you can't—I nearly just—"

You don't let him recover.

You grab the chain and yank his mouth back to yours and kiss him again, slower this time, deeper, your tongue sliding against his in a rhythm that is filthy and designed to take him apart.

Valarr groans into it, and sucks your tongue back, matching you, the wet sloppy heat of it filling the space between you. The kiss is a mess. Messy, consuming, all teeth and tongue and the slick obscene sound of ten years of want.

His hands are everywhere. Your ribs, curve of your waist, your thighs, your ass, pulling you to the edge of the sink so you can grind against him, and you do. You grind into him, rolling your hips forward, seeking the friction of him through his trousers, and the pressure of his cock against your centre wrenches a moan from you that breaks the kiss open.

You can't get close enough.

Your legs lock tighter around his waist. Your hands drag him in by the chain, by the hair, by the collar of his black shirt, and it's still not enough. There's still fabric between you and that's unacceptable, and Valarr seems to arrive at the same conclusion in the same instant because his hands are at your jeans, fumbling at the button with fingers that are shaking badly enough that it takes two attempts.

"Off," he rasps against your swollen mouth. "I need these off, love. I need to feel you, please—"

You help him. Both of you pulling, yanking, graceless and urgent, your jeans and underwear shoved down your thighs and kicked to the tile floor. His hand slides between your legs and the sound Valarr makes tells you what his fingers have found.

"You're soaked." His voice comes out wrecked. Awed. He drags two fingers through the slick of you, slow, feeling the evidence of what he's done, and the pad of his thumb grazes your clit and your spine arches and a gasp tears out of you that has nothing controlled in it, nothing northern, nothing composed. "You're—god—you're dripping, sweet girl, you're so wet—"

Your hands go to his belt buckle, your fingers slipping on the metal because your hands are shaking now too.

Your hands are shaking.

You almost laugh. Your famously steady Stark hands are trembling because Valarr's fingers are still between your legs, circling, pressing, his thumb working your clit in slow devastating passes while he watches your face with that fixed intensity, and the heat building in your core is a wildfire. Every ounce of composure you've spent a decade constructing is crumbling under the focused, determined weight of a man who has ten years to make up for and is making up for them right now.

You free him. Wrap your hand around him. He's hot and impossibly hard, the head slick against your palm, and when you stroke upward Valarr's hips buck into your grip and a moan grinds out of him. Deep, agonised, the sound of a body that's been starving.

His fingers are still on you, still circling, still slick, and the dual sensation—your hand on him, his hand on you—makes the air between you feel combustible.

"Sweet girl." The endearment breaks out of him like a confession, a hoarded thing finally released. His right hand comes up to your face, cupping your jaw, the silver band pressing into the curve of your cheekbone, his thumb leaving a streak of your own wetness against your skin, and the intimacy of that makes your vision swim.

"I need to be inside you," he whispers. Valarr's forehead presses to yours, his breath ragged and hot against your mouth, his eyes open and locked on yours from so close the brown and blue blur together. The chain at his throat hangs between you, swaying with each shudder of his breathing. "I've needed—god—I've needed this for so long. So long. I need you. More than anything. Please."

You guide the flushed head of his cock to you. The first press of him against your entrance makes your breath hitch and his jaw clench, the muscle at the side of his throat jumping. You hold his gaze.

"Then take me."

Valarr doesn't need to be told twice. He sinks in.

Slow, easing into you, stretching you open for him. Every inch deliberate, his forehead staying against yours, his breath stuttering out of him in pieces.

The stretch of him fills you up—the thick, aching, devastating fullness of him finally inside you—and your lips part. Your fingers tighten in his hair and a sound comes out of you that you didn't give permission for, low and helpless, the sound of ten years of wanting finally being answered.

Valarr watches your face with those mismatched eyes. Lashes damp at the corners, his mouth hanging open, cataloguing every micro-expression, every shift, because this is the first time he's inside you after a lifetime of wanting and he's building a permanent record that he will never, ever discard.

He bottoms out, and you both go still.

His arms come around you. Tight, clutching, pulling you to the edge of the sink so there's nothing between your bodies. Your chest presses to his, cold metal and hot skin between you.

Valarr's forehead stays on yours. His breath bursting out in shallow, shaking pulls, and his hands flatten against your back, spread wide, holding as much of you as his palms can cover. You can feel the ring against your spine. Can feel the chain against your sternum.

You can feel him inside you, hot and pulsing, and your thighs are trembling around his waist. Slick with your own want, thrusting into him, and the composure you've worn like plate armour since you were fourteen is in pieces on the tile floor with your jeans.

"Oh," he says softly. "Oh."

You cup the back of his neck. Press your nails in, gently this time. Feel him shudder.

"Move, Val."

He moves.

Long, deep strokes that drag out of you slow and drive back in hard, each one measured, each one hitting a place inside you that makes white light bloom behind your eyes.

His hands grip your hips, pulling you into each thrust, and the sink edge digs into the backs of your thighs and the sound of skin on skin fills the small tiled room. His mouth finds your throat and stays there. Biting, licking, sucking bruises into the tendon, working his way down to the ridge of your collarbone where he sets his teeth and bites, and the sound you make is throaty, snarling and hungry.

Your nails rake down his back under the black shirt and your hips roll to meet him and you're so wet you can hear it—the slick, squelching evidence of how thoroughly he's fucking you—and the sound of it makes his rhythm falter.

"Fuck," he breathes against your collarbone, that golden boy act in pieces at the taste of you. "I can hear—you're so—my love, you're so wet for me—"

Valarr's mouth drags down the open neck of your shirt. His lips find the swell of your breast above the fabric and his tongue traces the edge of it, hot and starved, and then his teeth close on the skin and he suck. You jerk against him, grinding down onto his cock, and the grinding pulls him deeper and Valarr moans against your chest, the vibration of it buzzing through your ribcage.

You fist his hair and yank, clenching around him on purpose. Valarr gasps, his rhythm stuttering, and then picking back up harder, meaner, his hips snapping forward with a ferocity that rocks you back against the mirror.

"You're mine," he groans against your ear, and the words tumble out of him silky and dark, half desperation, half certainty. "You've always been mine. Since we were kids, since before that, you've always—"

And his sheer, unguarded, insatiable want—the enormity of it, the years behind it, the way his voice cracks on always like the word itself is too small to hold what he means—melts you.

The ice in you. The wolf. The decade of holding yourself still and steady and contained because a Stark doesn't yield. Because wanting him back felt like handing him a weapon and trusting him not to use it. It melts under the heat of Valarr's body and the desperate clench of his hands.

You cradle the back of his head. Draw him close. Press your lips to his temple. The white streak, the damp silver of it, and whisper against his skin.

"I know, Val. I know. You've always been mine too."

He shudders. His whole body, a full-length tremor, his cock pulsing inside you.

"My Valarr," you whisper, and your voice is soft in a way you never let it be, the girl under the wolf, the tender centre you guard with teeth. "Just mine. Only ever mine."

A broken, gorgeous sound rips free from him. His arms tighten around you, crushing you to his chest, and Valarr's face buries in your neck and his hips drive forward in a deep, shaking thrust that grinds against your clit, making your vision white out.

His hand slides between your bodies, his thumb finding your clit and presses firmly. Focused and circling in time with his thrusts, and the combination of the fullness of him inside you and the pressure of his thumb and the sound of his ragged breathing against your throat unravels the last thread of your control.

Your head falls back against the mirror and a moan rips out of you that is loud enough to be heard through the door, through the corridor, through the whole godforsaken diner, and you don't care, you can't care.

"There," Valarr breathes, and his voice is dark and triumphant and shaking. "There you are. There's my girl."

He pulls back to look at you. His hands come up to cradle your face—both of them, the silver band pressing into one cheek, his bare palm warm against the other—and he holds you there. Holds your gaze. Brown and blue eyes, wrecked and blazing, pinning you in place while his hips keep moving, deep and devastating and steady.

"My love," he rasps, and thrusts into you so deep your breath shatters. "My love, my love, my love—"

Each repetition punctuated by the snap of his hips. Each one driven into you like he's trying to etch the words into your body, brand them along your spine, carve them so deep they'll live under your skin forever.

His hands cradle your face, his thumbs stroking your cheekbones, the ring pressing warm circles into your flushed skin, and his mouth finds yours between each thrust. Not kissing so much as breathing you, his lips brushing your lips, sharing air, the taste of whiskey and coffee passing between you in tiny, warm gusts.

You break.

The ice cracks open and what pours out is a decade of held-back tenderness so concentrated it burns.

You wrap your arms around Valarr's neck and pull him in until your foreheads press together, your noses brushing and you can feel his lashes against your cheekbones, damp and fluttering. You whisper to him—soft, fervent, the words tumbling out of you in a rush because you've been holding them so long they've built pressure.

"You're so good, Val. You feel so good. I've wanted you—I've wanted this—you have no idea how long I've—"

"Tell me." A ragged plea, his hips stuttering, pulsing inside you. "Please. Tell me."

"Since I was fourteen." Your nails drag through the hair at his nape. Your lips brush his, his breath searing against your mouth. "Since before I had a name for it. Since every time you touched my back and I wanted to turn around and climb into you and never leave."

Valarr's hips snap forward, burying himself to the hilt, and his arms wrap around you so tight your ribs creak and his face presses into the curve of your neck and he clings—desperate, greedy, shaking—and you hold him just as tight.

Your legs lock around him, your hands in his hair, and you give him what you've never given anyone. The softness under the wolf. The yielding.

"My Valarr," you whisper into his hair. "Just yours. I've always been just yours."

He drives in deeper, bruising, fucking into you while he holds you down.

His mouth covers yours, and it's messy, desperate, tongues sliding, and you suck his tongue into your mouth again, his hips stutter violently.

Valarr groans against you, shaking, fighting the edge, refusing to go over because he's not done with you yet. He pulls back, gasping, and kisses you again, and you suck his lower lip, biting it and he sucks your tongue back and the kiss is sloppy and consuming.

You can feel the vibration of his moans through your teeth, and your legs tighten around him. You grind into him, rolling your hips in a slow, mean circle, clenching around him, and the friction of his pelvis against your clit combined with the depth of him inside you pulls a whimper from your throat that surprises you both.

You can't get close enough.

You hook your heels into the small of his back and drag him in and Valarr comes willingly, eagerly, pressing himself against you until there is no space at all, until you can feel his heartbeat through the wall of his chest, the frantic gallop of it, and his hands slide under your thighs and grip.

His mouth finds the spot below your ear where your pulse is hammering and he licks it lazily, breathing against the damp skin, mine, mine, mine.

You turn your head. Press your mouth to his ear. "Yours," you whisper, and feel him shake. "Always yours, Val."

You drag your nails up his spine under the black shirt again, ten lines of fire along his back, and Valarr hisses between his teeth, driving in deeper, his voice breaking apart. A man standing at the edge of everything and tipping forward.

"I'm going to fill you up." Low. Shaky. His mouth pressed to the hinge of your jaw, his hips snapping forward with a desperate, mounting urgency. "I'm going to come inside you because you've always been mine, you were mine before anyone else ever touched you, and I should have—I should have done this years ago—"

You close your hand around the chain. Pull it taut.

Valarr loses his mind.

His hips slam forward, burying himself to the hilt, and a keening, desperate sound fills the bathroom.

His hands clamp on your hips hard enough to bruise and he fucks you in earnest now, every pretence of control abandoned, just raw frantic need, the wet slap of it echoing off the tile, and you're dripping. You can feel it on your thighs, on the porcelain beneath you, the evidence of what he's done to you, what he's still doing, and his voice keeps coming, broken and streaming.

"More—I need—please, I need more of you, I need to take you apart, I need—" Valarr's forehead presses hard against yours, his breath coming in sharp gasps that burst hot against your parted mouth. His eyes are open. Wet. Burning with agony and worship in equal measure. "You're so—you're so perfect, you feel so perfect, I want to stay inside you forever, I want—"

You come first.

The orgasm crashes through your body with a violence that bows your spine and tears a sound from your throat that you will never, under any circumstances, admit to making.

You clench around him, pulsing, your nails sinking into his shoulders hard enough to draw half-moons into the muscle, and the contractions of your body around his cock wrench a moan from him. Needing.

You kiss him through it. Deep, consuming, your tongue sliding against his, and you bite his lower lip again. Harder this time. Your teeth sink in until you taste copper—the bright metallic bloom of blood on your tongue—and Valarr moans against you, a ruined sound, his whole body jerking like he's been shocked, his rhythm turning ragged, his hips stuttering.

"I'm—" he chokes, pulling back just enough to gasp, a thin thread of blood on his lower lip, his eyes wild. "I'm so close, I can't my love, I'm going to—"

"Come inside me." You hold his chain, hold his gaze. Your other hand cradles his jaw, thumb tracing his bloodied lip, gentle now, so gentle. "Fill me up, Val. Come home."

His hips drive in one last time and stay and his whole body draws tight at the same time. Every muscle locked, the tendons in his throat standing in sharp relief, his mouth open in a soundless gasp.

Then the groan breaks out of him like a wave, long and guttural, shuddering, and you feel him pulse inside you, hot and deep, the spill of him filling you up while his hands cradle your face and his forehead presses so hard against yours that you feel the ridge of bone under his skin.

"My love," he gasps, still coming, still shaking. "My love. My love."

You hold him through it. Both arms around his shoulders, your legs locked at his back, your fingers threading through his hair, stroking the dark strands, finding the white streak at his temple and tracing it the way you've wanted to for years.

You press your mouth to his cheekbone. His jaw. The corner of his eye, where his lashes are wet and clumped.

"I'm here," you murmur. "I'm right here, Val."

He comes for a long time. Shaking against you. Small, involuntary thrusts, each one punctuated by a broken exhale, his face crumpled with pleasure so intense it looks like grief.

You hold him and you let him feel you holding him and the wolf in you lies down and the girl underneath. The one who's been in love with this man since she was fourteen and too proud to say so.

You press your mouth to his temple and breathes him in.

He stays inside you.

His face drops into the curve of your neck, his breathing ragged and damp against your skin. His arms come around your waist, wrapping tight, pulling you off the edge of the sink and flush against his body so there's no space left between you at all.

The chain is warm against your collarbone. The silver band on his thumb traces unhurriedly, absent circles against the bare skin above your hip where your shirt has ridden up. The unconscious gesture, the one he does when he's checking the ring is still where you put it, that it's still where it belongs.

He's checking that you're here.

"Val," you say softly.

"Mm." Muffled. Wrecked and content.

"You're bleeding." Your thumb finds his lower lip. Traces the small split where your teeth broke the skin. A bead of red, already drying, sits at the corner of his mouth.

He opens his eyes. Brown and blue, soft and dazed and so full of love that your chest physically aches.

He catches your thumb. Kisses the pad of it, tasting his own blood, and his mouth curves into a slow, wondering smile.

"Worth it," he murmurs against your thumb.

You study him. Your best friend. Your Valarr. Just yours. The boy who walked you home with his hand at your back. The man who wore your ring on his thumb for years without asking why, because you asked him to, because you needed a piece of yours on him, and that was enough.

"Take me home, Val," you whisper.

His arms tighten around you.

"Yours or mine?" he murmurs.

"Yours."

He kisses the corner of your mouth. He picks his jacket up off the tile floor. Drapes it over your shoulders instead of his own as you both readjust your clothes. The red fabric is warm and smells like cedar and him. His hand finds the small of your back, his place, and he walks you out of the bathroom.

Past the corridor, past the counter where your coffees sit cold in their mugs, and out into the night.

You leave the photos on your phone.

But he doesn't move away. That's the thing about your temperamental dragon. The refusal is always louder than the retreat, and the retreat never comes.

He stands exactly where he is, tension drawing his slender shoulders tight beneath his tunic, pale eyes narrowed to slits. You rise from the bed and cross the distance between you, bare feet quiet on the stone, and he watches you come the way a hawk watches an approaching hand, nostrils flaring.

You reach up without an invitation and he catches your wrist in a vicegrip. Hard enough that the bones grind.

"I said no." His voice has dropped into something serrated, all edge, no breath. "That is a whore's ornament. You will not put a whore's collar on a prince of the blood."

"I'm not putting it on a prince of the blood," you say, and your thumb finds his pulse, hammering, frantic, a traitor drumming against your skin. "I'm putting it on my husband."

His lip curls. Genuine, blistering contempt, the kind he wears like armour, the kind that has made grown men step back from him and whisper he's mad. "You've lost your mind, wife. This is beneath me. Take your Lysene filth and—"

"And what?"

You don't raise your voice. You tilt your head and watch him, patient as winter frost, while his mouth keeps shaping poison but his hand hasn't tightened, hasn't shoved you back, hasn't done any of the things Aerion is so very capable of doing when he means his refusals.

His body knows you even when his pride won't permit him.

You can see it in him, the war happening behind his eyes. Hatred and want tearing at each other like dogs. His breathing has gone uneven, the tendons in his neck taut as bowstrings. He's furious, genuinely furious, and he's half-hard already, and the combination is doing something to his expression that looks almost like anguish.

"You also haven't moved," you observe mildly, pressing a little closer.

Aerion's nostrils flare. But his grip on your wrist loosens. It's not a permission, never permission, just the muscles giving out under the weight of what he wants and won't ask for.

You step into the space he hasn't made for you and he lets you, jaw clenched so tight you can see the bone beneath that smooth pale skin, and when your fingers brush his throat he flinches like you've put a blade there, sneering down at you.

You fasten the collar with steady hands. The clasp clicks, quiet as a lock turning. Gold settles against Aerion's skin like it was poured there. Fine links pooling into the hollow of his throat, amethysts glowing dark against all that pale, furious warmth, the delicate chain trailing down his collarbone. His pulse jumps so hard beneath the metalwork you can see it in the tremor of the links.

He is, objectively, the most striking thing you've ever seen.

You let him watch you realise it. You don't hide the way your gaze tracks the gold against his jaw, the flush climbing his neck beneath the chain, the way his platinum hair glows against the gleam of metal.

You take your time with it. Look at him the way you'd look at something you own. Appraising, proprietary, openly pleased with what it's infront of you.

"My beautiful dragon," you murmur, and there's nothing teasing about it. Just a wolf admiring what belongs to her.

Aerion's whole body locks up. there's a crack in his expression and for a half-second you see the raw thing underneath, stunned and starving, before the hatred slams back down like a portcullis.

"Quiet," he warns, voice scraped thin. "Don't call me that."

"Beautiful?" You trace the line of gold with one finger, following it along the tendon in his throat. His skin is burning. "But you are. All collared up for me. All that pride and fury wrapped in gold like a gift." Your finger reaches the chain and curls loosely around it. "Like something I bought. Something I'm keeping."

"I will break your hand," he snarls, but his voice has fractured somewhere in the middle of it, gone hoarse and bitten, and his hands are fists at his sides that aren't moving, aren't reaching, aren't doing anything at all because his body has chosen you over every hateful word in his mouth.

"Look at you," you breathe, and you let your admiration sit open on your face, undisguised, almost tender. "My prince. My pretty, collared husband. Wearing a courtesan's chain because his wife asked and he couldn't say no."

"I said no—"

"Your hateful mouth said no." Your eyes drop, pointed, unhurried, to where the evidence of his body's opinion is unmistakable. "The rest of you has a different answer, husband."

The sound he makes is closer to snarl, like he's about to leap forward and throttle you.

"They tell me these are put on courtesans in the pillowhouses," you tell him, conversational, your thumb stroking idle circles against the chain at his throat. "On the loveliest ones. The ones men cross the Narrow Sea just to kneel before." You lean in, your mouth near his ear, close enough to feel the heat pouring off him. "A collar to say this one is precious, this one is wanted, this one has been claimed by someone who can afford the price of them."

Your lips brush the shell of Aerion's ear. He's shaking. Fine, continuous tremors he can't control, running through him like current through wire.

"But you're not a courtesan, are you?" you murmur. "You're a dragon. My dragon. Collared and flushed and hard for me, and all I've done is call you pretty and put gold on your throat."

His hips snap forward, involuntary, vicious, a jerk of motion so sharp the chain shivers in your grip and his breath tears out of him ragged. You feel the length of him grind against your thigh and the confirmation of what you already knew floods you with something hot and deeply, viciously satisfied.

You smile. Wolfish. The smile of a predator who's found the exact place her teeth fit best.

Aerion's hand comes up and seizes your face. A capture, fingers digging into your jaw, your cheeks, wrenching your head so you're forced to meet his eyes. They're blown black, the pale lavender almost gone, eaten alive. His mouth is a shaking, vicious line.

"You think this is funny?" he rasps, and there's something fraying in his voice, an edge that sounds like it's being held together by nothing but spite. "You think you can play with me, collar me like some—some Lysene bed-slave and then smirk at me—"

You don't stop smiling. You let him see every inch of it. The smugness, the heat, the cool Northern certainty that you've claimed something he'd sooner die than hand over. You turn your face into his grip and press your lips to his palm, unhurried, greedy, and feel his fingers twitch against your skin.

"I think," you say knowingly against his hand, "that you liked it when I called you beautiful. I think you liked it so much your whole body told me before your mouth could catch up." Your tongue skims his palm, just barely, tasting salt. "I think my pretty husband wants to be admired. I think he always has. And I think if I told him he was good right now, he'd come apart."

His hand tightens on your face until it almost hurts. His chest is heaving, every breath hauling through him like he's physically fighting something inside him. You can feel the chain taut between your fingers, connecting your hand to his throat like a leash, like a lifeline.

Aerion stares at you and you stare back. The room is so quiet you can hear the candles gutter and the chain clink, once, with the tremor running through him.

Then he crashes his mouth onto yours.

His teeth catch your lower lip and bite, hard enough that copper blooms on your tongue, and you hiss into it, fingers tightening in the chain. He licks the blood off your mouth and comes back for more, tongue pushing past your gasp, his free hand fisting in the back of your hair so hard your scalp sings.

He's trying to take it back—every sound you pulled from him, every tremor, every helpless grind of his hips—kissing you like he can swallow the evidence of what you've done to him and burn it.

You let him have the violence of it. You open your mouth and take his tongue and bite it, feel Aerion jolt, feel the groan rattle through his teeth into yours. Your free hand comes up and grabs his jaw, holds him still, and you kiss him back with teeth and intention, licking into his mouth with the focused, unhurried authority. You catch his bottom lip between your teeth and pull, dragging it out, and the noise he makes is humiliating and so gorgeous you smile.

He breaks away panting, wild-eyed, mouth swollen and blood-smeared, and you don't let him get far.

You tug the chain.

A measured pull, the gold biting into the back of his neck.

Aerion's head tips forward, forced, the angle dragging him down toward you, and you hold him there, his mouth hovering over yours, breathing your air. The chain pressed firm against his throat. His pulse hammers against the links hard enough that you can feel it thrumming through the gold into your fist.

"Stay," you murmur against his mouth. A command. A wolf's word.

You pull again. Harder. A real pressure now, the collar snug against his Adam's apple, gold links creasing the flushed skin, and you watch Aerion's eyes go glassy and his lips part on a breath that has nowhere to go.

He moans.

Not behind his teeth. A real, wrecked, open sound, the kind of sound courtesans are trained to coax from their wealthiest patrons, obscene and helpless and utterly without dignity. The kind of sound a prince of the blood should never make. If anyone else heard it, it would ruin him, you know.

He moans like a whore with your hand wrapped in his leash, and the vibration of it travels through the chain and into your fingers and settles, hot, at the base of your spine.

You hold the chain taut. His throat works against the pressure, swallowing around gold. His mouth finds yours again. Wetter this time, messier, all desperation and no technique, his teeth clashing against yours, biting at your lips like he can punish you for this even as his body bows into you.

You kiss him back with blood on both your mouths and one hand in his hair and the other wrapped in gold links, holding his throat, keeping him exactly where you want him.

Your collared, shaking, furious, beautiful husband. Yours.

Aerion doesn't break the kiss so much as redirect it. One moment his mouth is on yours, blood and spit and the taste of his own undoing, and the next his hands are at your waist, hauling you backwards. You feel your spine hit the edge of the bed frame hard enough to knock the breath from your lungs.

"On the bed," he snarls against your mouth. "Now."

You could resist. He knows it. The chain is still wrapped around your fist and his throat is still collared in gold and if you pulled right now he'd have to stop, have to kneel, have to wait. You could make him beg for it if you felt like it.

You choose not to.

You let yourself fall back onto the furs and he follows you down like gravity, one knee between your thighs shoving them apart. He wrenches them apart, graceless, nothing courtly about it.

His hands find the laces of your gown and yank. Fabric tears. You hear stitching give, the soft rip of silk surrendering, but Aerion doesn't care, doesn't pause, just drags the ruined bodice down your shoulders and off your arms with the efficiency of a man stripping armour.

"Wretched thing," he breathes, and the words land hot against your collarbone. His mouth follows the words. Teeth scraping the jut of bone, tongue dragging through the hollow of your throat. "Wretched, insufferable—"

He bites the swell of your breast through your shift and your back arches off the bed. His hands are everywhere, pulling linen, shoving wool, ripping where pulling isn't fast enough. Cool air hits your skin in patches—your stomach, your ribs, the tops of your thighs—and his mouth chases every new inch of you like he's starving and you're the only thing left in the larder.

"You think you can collar me," he hisses, dragging the shift over your head and throwing it somewhere behind him. His eyes rake down your body, naked now, spread beneath him on the dark furs, and for one raw second the hatred in Aerion's face cracks and what's underneath is so hungry it looks like pain. "Think you can put a leash on a dragon and smile about it? You smug, superior—"

"Beautiful," you interrupt softly, admiring. Your eyes trace the collar at his throat, the way it catches candlelight as his chest heaves.

His jaw locks so hard you hear the teeth grind.

"—vicious little wolf," he finishes, and his voice has gone thick with something that isn't anger anymore.

He's still dressed. His tunic is rucked, his breeches straining, and when you glance down you can see the dark stain spreading at the front of the linen where he's leaking, where his body has been ahead of his pride since the moment you fastened the clasp.

You let your gaze settle there. Deliberate. Hungry.

"You know," you say conversationally, tracing one finger down the chain at his throat, "in the Lysene houses they auction the prettiest ones. The patrons bid all evening. Wine and silks and perfumed halls, and the courtesans walk among them, collared just like this—" your nail taps a single amethyst "—so everyone knows the goods are spoken for."

Aerion's nostrils flare. A muscle jumps in his cheek.

"They'd have bid high for you." You tilt your head, considering him. That platinum hair mussed, mouth bitten raw, gold at his throat, cock straining wet against his laces. "Very high. A prince with a face like that? Those eyes? That mouth?" You smile, slow and wolfish, briefly dragging your thumb over his full bottom lip. "I'd have outbid them all. Every merchant prince and magister in the room. I'd have bought you for myself and taken you home in your collar and kept you exactly like this. Hard, and furious, and all mine."

A sound rips from Aerion, rumbling through his frame.

His hand shoots to his laces, fumbling, tearing at the ties with shaking fingers, and you watch him strip his breeches down his hips with none of the control he prides himself on. His cock springs free flushed and dripping, slick at the head, twitching with his pulse, and the evidence of what your words have done to him is obscene and unmistakable.

He doesn't give you time to admire it.

His hands seize your thighs and wrench them open. Wide, wider, until the stretch burns and your hips cant off the furs. He settles between them and you feel the blunt, wet head of him drag through the slick mess of you once, catching at your entrance, and then he drives in.

One stroke. All of him. No preamble, no patience, no tenderness.

Your head snaps back. The sound that leaves your mouth is half gasp, half snarl. He's thick and hard, furious inside you, every inch of him a declaration, and your body seizes around him in a clench that makes Aerion's shoulders shudder.

"There," he grits out, teeth bared, hips already pulling back for the next thrust. "Is this what you wanted? Your collared whore between your legs?"

He snaps forward. Hard. Your body jolts up the bed, furs bunching beneath your spine. His hands pin your hips, thumbs digging into the hollows, holding you open, holding you still while he fucks into you with furious, punishing strokes. The narrow cant of his hips drives a rhythm that's all fury and no mercy.

"Spoiled—" Thrust. "—conniving—" Thrust. "—wolf—"

Aerion bites the junction of your shoulder and your neck. Sucks the skin between his teeth hard enough to bruise, hard enough to mark, and the sound you make is shameless, back bowing, your fingers scrabbling at his ribs.

He bites lower. The top of your breast. The ridge of your collarbone. Everywhere his mouth lands he leaves evidence. Welts, teeth-marks, the wet shine of his tongue, mapping you like territory he's conquering even as the collar at his throat says otherwise.

You let him have it. The fury, the pace, the bruising grip. You let him think he's reclaiming himself.

Then you wrap the chain around your fist and pull.

The collar bites into his nape. Aerion's head jerks forward, forced, and the angle changes, drives him deeper, and the sound he makes is guttural and broken, so far from princely it would make his father weep.

"My pretty whore," you murmur up at him, and your voice is steady even with him buried to the hilt inside you, even with your thighs shaking around him. "My beautiful, expensive, collared—"

Aerion's hand closes around your throat.

His fingers find the column of your windpipe with the precision of a man who's t done this before, who knows the anatomy, who's imagined the give of it. Real pressure follows his grip and your airway narrows to a reed.

You lean into it.

Your chin tips up, back arching. You press your throat harder against his palm and moan. Open-mouthed, loud, the kind of sound that fills a room and stains the air. The look on Aerion's face when he realises you're not afraid, that you like it, that the compression of your breath is making you clench tighter around his cock, is something you will keep behind your teeth for the rest of your natural life.

"You," he manages, and his hips haven't stopped, punishing rhythm gone ragged at the edges now, his voice husky. "You're the whore of the two of us. Acting like this. Taking my cock like this. Listen to the mess of you. Moaning with my hand on your throat like a—a dockside—"

You yank the chain. Harder than before. Hard enough that the gold bites welts into his skin, hard enough that Aerion's breath cuts short and his eyes roll and his next thrust goes so deep you feel it in the back of your teeth.

Your hips snap up to meet him—deliberate, brutal, grinding him into the deepest, most sensitive part of you—and the wet sound of it is filthy, unmistakable, the slick drench of your body taking his echoing off the stone walls.

His composure shatters.

What's left is animal, narrow hips pistoning, the obscene slap of his skin against yours, his fingers spreading you wider, thumbs hooking your thighs and pulling until you're split open around him in a way that's almost too much. The stretch burns. The fullness borders on pain. You're going to ache tomorrow, going to feel every brutal inch of this for days, and the knowledge of it—the phantom soreness already gathering in your hips—makes you wetter, makes you greedier, makes you tighten around him until he chokes.

"Fuck—"

He hooks your legs over his shoulders. The angle goes deeper, filthier, the wet sound of his cock working in and out of you loud enough that you can hear every thrust, every slick drag, the rhythmic slap of his balls against you keeping time like a drumbeat.

You reach up and wrap both hands in the chain and haul him down toward you, bending yourself nearly in half, pulling him deeper by his collar until Aerion's forehead presses against yours and you're breathing the same ragged air.

"Come in me," you tell him. An order, a wolf's command.

"Do not order me—"

But his hips stutter, his jaw going slack. The muscles in his neck cord tight against the gold links and you feel him break. The first hot pulse of him inside you floods you, thick and sudden, and Aerion's whole body seizes above you like a man struck by lightning.

He spills in deep, wrenching surges, hips grinding against yours with each gush, and there's so much of it—gods, so much—you feel it flood the space where you're joined, feel it overflow, feel the hot trickle of it escape around his cock and drip in slow rivulets onto the sheets beneath you.

The heat of it, the sight of your pretty dragon shaking apart above you, collared, spilling himself into you, desperate and greedy, pushes you over.

You come snarling. Your back arches off the bed, your teeth bared, your fingers coiled in the chain. The pleasure tears through you in savage waves and your body clenches around him. A vice-grip that wrenches a shocked, gutted noise out of his chest.

Aerion's hips slam forward on instinct, burying himself as deep as he can go, and both hands grab your backside, full handfuls, fingers sinking into the flesh, dragging you onto him like he can crawl inside you.

"Fuck—fuck, you're—gods—" Greedy and petulant even now, grinding into your contractions, chasing the squeeze of you. His cock pulses and you feel the fresh hot leak of him, not a full release but close, dangerously close, his body trying to spend itself again just from the clench of yours. "Take it—take all of it, you greedy—perfect—fucking —"

The filth spills out of him unchecked, half-words and fragments, praise tangled up in profanity. His arms lock around you, both hands still full of your ass, and he folds over you, curling, coiling, a dragon wrapping around his mate with his face buried in your throat and his hips still rocking in small, helpless pulses.

Burrowing into you. Trying to get closer when closer doesn't exist.

You hold him through it. Chain slack in your fist now, your other hand in his silver hair, your legs still trembling where they're hooked over his shoulders.

He stays inside you through every aftershock, twitching, half-hard, refusing to pull out even as the mess between you gets obscene. His spend leaks around his cock, dripping in slow pearly rivulets down through your folds, pooling beneath you on the sheets.

You reach between your bodies and touch yourself, fingers sliding through the slick ruin of his release and your own, spreading it over your core, your navel, the trembling plane of your stomach. Painting yourself with the evidence of him.

Aerion watches you do it. His chest heaving, his mouth open, his eyes tracking your fingers with the dazed, shattered focus.

You bring your fingers to your mouth. Hold his gaze. Taste.

His cock twitches inside you. He makes a low, growling sound.

Then, slowly, as if his bones have turned to water, he collapses. Aerion's weight comes down on you in a controlled fall, his face dropping into the curve of your neck, his breath coming in long, shuddering pulls against your pulse. The chain goes slack between you. The collar shifts, warm against your collarbone where his throat presses.

For a long moment there's nothing but breathing. The guttering candles. The cooling sweat between your bodies. His heartbeat thuds against your ribs, gradually slowing.

You burrow into him. Turn your face against his chest and press your mouth there. Teeth grazing his sternum, his collarbone, the smooth skin over his ribs. You nip. Suck a patch of skin between your lips and release it flushed. Your tongue drags through the salt-sheen of his sweat, tracing the cut of muscle, and your hand drifts up to stroke his chest, his throat, fingertips trailing the chain at his collar, the ridge of his Adam's apple, the hollow beneath.

Petting him. Mapping the territory you've claimed.

Aerion's hand comes up and cradles the back of your head. His fingers thread through your hair, and he shifts, angling his neck, tilting his shoulder down, offering you more skin. Easier access.

"You're an animal," he informs you, voice scraped raw and dry as bone. His thumb traces the curve of your skull. "A feral, uncivilised creature who should have been left in the kennels at Winterfell."

You suck a bruise into the ridge of his collarbone. He exhales through his nose, slow and controlled, and tips his chin higher, baring the collared line of his throat to your mouth with an ease that contradicts every word coming out of it.

"Disgusting habit," he adds, as you nip the tendon below his ear. His fingers card through your hair, untangling, smoothing. Stroking, greedy and possessive. "Gnawing on your husband like a bone. Do they teach you that in the North? Is it in the wedding vows, hm?"

You hum against his skin. Your teeth graze his pulse point and his breath catches—just barely, just enough—and his hand gentles at your nape, cradling rather than holding.

You can feel him preening under it. The commentary is armour but his body is liquid, angling into every scrape of your teeth, every press of your lips. Offering himself up piece by piece while his mouth pretends outrage.

You press a kiss to the hinge of his jaw. Soft. Almost sweet.

Then you pull back just enough to meet his eyes.

"My pretty whore," you murmur fondly.

The reaction is instantaneous.

His eyes flash, pale lavender burning through the blown-black aftermath, and his hand snaps from the back of your skull to the nape of your neck, gripping hard, fingers digging into the tendons. He drags you up and kisses you. Bruising. All teeth, his tongue pushing into your mouth, tasting himself on you, tasting everything on you.

His other hand slides down your body. Between your thighs. Through the mess of his own spend. He pushes two fingers into you easily, so wet you barely feel the stretch of him, just the sudden fullness and the obscene sound of it, his seed squelching around his knuckles as he curls deep.

"Whore," he repeats against your mouth, low and dangerous, his fingers pumping into you with a rhythm that's already building toward something. "You want a whore, wife? I'll fuck you like one." His teeth catch your lip. His fingers twist and you gasp. "Over and over. Till you can't walk. Till the whole Red Keep knows what I've done to you. Till you're dripping with me for days."

You laugh. Breathless, warm, the sound vibrating between your mouths. Your hand finds the chain and you pull him closer—not hard, just a steady pressure, a reminder of what's still fastened at his throat—and your legs wrap around his hips, drawing him in, fitting your body against his like a key turning in a lock.

"Good," you say.

His fingers curl inside you, his mouth finds yours again. The collar gleams between you in the candlelight.

because once mr kitty decides he likes you (and he has decided, firmly, with the same certainty that bb decided, just expressed through baked goods instead of territorial restructuring of reality) the communication doesn't stop. it's not intrusive. it's just... there. a warm presence at the edge of your thoughts when you're in level 974, like a friend in the next room.

he comments on things.

you're looking at a bookshelf in one of his rooms and a thought settles in: third shelf, the blue one. you'd like it. and you pull it out and it's perfect. exactly your taste. you look at mr kitty and he's already puttering back toward the kitchen because he doesn't need acknowledgment. he's not performing.

and bb hates it. not mr kitty. not really. he's grudgingly accepted that mr kitty is not a threat and that level 974 makes you happy. that sometimes you need a warm couch and a cookie and a room that feels like the real world. he's made his peace with that.

what he's not made his peace with is the psychic hotline.

because he can tell when it's happening. he can't hear what mr kitty says. the communication is between mr kitty's mind and yours and bb is locked out. which is a novel and deeply unpleasant experience for something that usually perceives everything within six levels at any given time.

but he can see the effect. you'll be sitting on the couch and your expression will change. a little smile. a small, huffing laugh. eyes flicking to mr kitty with a warmth that bb notices and files under "reasons to be irritated" and you'll say something like "that's so mean" to apparently no one and mr kitty will do the faceless equivalent of a shrug and bb will sit there with bobby's face doing the jaw thing and his eyes will flicker and he will say nothing. he will say nothing SO LOUDLY that the fluorescent lights in level 974 (which are not his, which he does not control, which belong to mr kitty's domain) will flicker in solidarity.

and mr kitty starts using it against him.

subtly at first. little things. you're sitting on the couch with bb and you laugh at nothing and bb says "what" and you say "nothing" and he knows it's not nothing. he knows mr kitty said something and he can't ask what because that would mean admitting it bothers him and admitting it bothers him means mr kitty wins.

then less subtly.

you're walking through level 974 and mr kitty puts a thought in your head (gentle, casual, perfectly timed) and you snort. actually snort. cover your mouth. bb looks at you and looks at mr kitty and looks at you.

"what did he say?"

"nothing."

"you laughed."

"it was funny."

"what was funny."

and you (because you've learned exactly how to manage the delicate, admittedly adorable ecosystem of bb's jealousy) pat his arm and say "he said you look nice today" which is absolutely not what mr kitty said but bb can't prove it and mr kitty can't correct it because bb can't hear him.

the actual thing mr kitty said was: he's doing the jaw thing again. tell him his face will stick like that.

you will take this to your grave.

and here's the thing that really drives bb insane. the thing that makes his eyes do the brief black flicker in an environment he doesn't control.

mr kitty knows things about you. not the way bb knows things. bb knows you through observation, through talking, through the chemical readout of your body. centuries of studying humans and months of studying you specifically.

mr kitty knows you because you TOLD him. because you sit on his couch and eat his scones and he puts a gentle question in your mind and you just... answer. openly. without the flinch. without the walls. you tell mr kitty things you haven't told bb because mr kitty doesn't have bobby's face and doesn't carry the weight of everything that face means.

you told mr kitty about the beach. about bobby's hands under your hoodie. about the laugh. you told him and mr kitty listened and mr kitty said that sounds lovely, dear and you had a lump in your throat and he made you more tea.

bb doesn't know this. bb can't know this. but he can sense the depth of it. the easy intimacy between you and this faceless thing in a warm kitchen. and it scratches at something in him that isn't jealousy anymore. it's something older. lonelier. the recognition that mr kitty has access to a version of you that bb has to earn every single day and mr kitty got for free because mr kitty has no history with you. no stolen face. no complicated dynamic. just tea and thoughts and a couch.

but.

BUT.

mr kitty also does something that bb will never admit he's grateful for.

because mr kitty talks to you about bb.

not gossip. not the "would" thing. that was external, that was for the grapevine. in private, in the quiet of the kitchen, mr kitty puts thoughts in your head that are careful and surprisingly tender.

he waited for you, you know. before you. there was nothing. just the dark and the hum. for a very long time.

and: the way he dims the lights when you sleep. have you noticed? he dims them all. the whole level. for you.

and: i have been here a long time too. not as long as him. but long enough to know that what he has is not common. it's not even rare. it simply hasn't existed before.

mr kitty sees bb clearly. the way only another ancient entity can. without the human filters, the fear, the "is it real" question that haunts everything between you and bb.

mr kitty looks at bb the way a neighbour looks over a fence at someone tending a garden they never expected to see bloom. professional respect. gentle amusement. and underneath it, something like kinship.

he'll never say this to bb. what he says to bb, through the grapevine, through the entity network, through whatever communication system the backrooms run on, is "would." because that's funnier. because watching bb's jaw tighten is one of the few entertainments available in an infinite purgatory and mr kitty has earned his small pleasures.

but to you, in the quiet, in your mind, over tea:

he's good, your boy. strange and old and a bit too intense about the territorial displays. but good.

and you smile and bb sees you smile at mr kitty and the jaw tightens and mr kitty radiates innocence, offering you another cookie and a pink, soft pillow to cuddle.

mr kitty isn't trying to steal you.

mr kitty is trying to be your friend.

Valarr: oh god, on you. On you, on you, on you.

Completely opposite drive and for completely opposite reasons.

Valarr's obsession is the look of it. This is a man whose entire mode of loving you is visual. The cataloguing, the immortalising gaze, the long quiet stretches where he just looks at you because looking is half the love. So the idea of pulling back at the last second and finishing across your skin, watching it land on your chest, your throat, the swell of your breast, your face if you'll let him.... that's not crude to him. That's a composition. That's an image he gets to carry around in his head forever.

And it's the only kind of marking he allows himself. Valarr would never bruise you with his hands (unless you really wanted him to). He'd never bite you somewhere visible. He's not the man who claims with violence. That's not his register, and that's part of what the slap awakening was about, finding the other gears.

But this? This is claim he can give himself permission for. Beautiful, temporary, deliberate. He gets to put himself on you, see it gleam in low light, see his cum on your skin, run his thumb through it slow and watch your face when he does.

And then he gets to clean you up afterward with the same careful reverence he does everything else. Warm cloth. A bath. Sweet girl. Look at you. Look what you let me do.

There's something almost worshipful about it for him. Offering, in a way. The most carefully governed man in any room comes apart and what spills out lands on you, visible proof he was there, that he lost it, that you made him.

You don't answer. You can't. Your jaw's straining and full of him and your hips are betraying you, rolling down into Aerion's sharp face without your say-so. The cool steel you wear everywhere else in your life is cracking down the middle right here on his shitty unmade bed with his blood going hard in your hand and his tongue ruining you one lick at a time.

You release the throbbing lenght of him and snarl, biting down on him just enough. Right at the soft give where his thigh meets the rest of him. Where Aerion's pulse runs fast and you can feel it against your teeth.

His whole body locks and bows at the sensation, and the sound he makes is filthy, almost helpless, and not a thing he'd ever let another living soul hear.

He retaliates immediately. Curls his tongue up inside you and gets both rough hands full of your backside, palming the flesh hard, hauling you down flush onto his face like he means to ruin the one good plan you walked in here with.

Your back bows off him and your thighs clamp tight around his head with a muffled groan.

He pulls off you just far enough to talk, breath scalding, voice gone to thick and mean. "So fuckin' wet for me. Can't even tell anymore if that's my mouth or you suckin' me off, princess."

Then his tongue's back inside you before you can make him pay for the smugness of his words, curling and lapping at your swollen folds.

So you take the head of him just to even the score. You drag your tongue up the whole length of him first, root to swollen tip, then close your mouth over the head and suck, swirling, blowing cool over the wet of it. You let your teeth ghost across the very top of him. Just a whisper. Just enough.

Aerion snarls.

His palm cracks down once across your backside, sharp enough to sting, and the hiss that follows is all threat. "Don't you fucking dare, wolf. You put your teeth on my dick again and I'm tying you to this bed and fucking you for a week straight. Fuck your rich friends and their plans."

You pull off his cock slowly, and there's a string of spit strung between your lips and the flushed wet head of him, glistening, so pretty it's obscene, and you feel him throb in your fist at the sight of it when he angles his head to look

And then he's back on you anyway, mouth open and greedy, tasting you off his own tongue.

Aerion hums into you, the sound buzzing straight up your spine, pleased and filthy and proud of himself. "Meanest bitch in town." A drag of his tongue again, slow, savouring, flicking across your clit once, twice. "But this cunt's always drippin' so sweet for me. Fuck."

After that you both stop talking, because talking is air neither of you can spare any anymore.

And it goes long. Longer than either of you would ever admit to wanting it to.

Aerion finds a rhythm that wrecks you and holds it, relentless, no mercy in it, and you answer by taking him to the back of your throat and staying there, swallowing around him until his hips jerk up off the mattress and he loses the rhythm for half a beat before he claws it back. Back and forth. Give for give.

Two animals who learned each other's bodies in the dark a long time ago, spending every scrap of that knowing on dragging the other one to the edge first.

You feel it gathering at the base of your spine, that white hot build of pleasure, and you fight it the way you fight everything, jaw set, breath held, refusing. He feels it. He always feels it. He pulls his mouth off you just far enough to laugh, low and cracked, delighted with himself.

"There we go." His voice is shot, his chin slick and shining when you cut your eyes back at him. "You're flutterin', Stark. Feel it. You're so fuckin' close it's embarrassin'." Two fingers join his mouth, curling up into you, finding the exact place that makes your thighs tremble, and he talks straight into you while he works it. "Go on then. Lose. First one to break, and we both know that's gonna be you, princess. You've been gone since you sat down on my face. Look at you, drippin' down my throat."

You stop holding back just to spite him. You sink down on him until your nose is in the soft platinum hair at the base of him and you swallow, hard, lapping at him, sucking hard.

The cocky bastard's whole body bucks and the breath leaves him in a tearing curse.

"Fuck. Fuck, okay. Okay, wolf." Strained now. The smugness cracking right down the centre. "You wanna play it like that, huh?"

He plays it like that right back. He stops being patient with you. His mouth turns greedy and mean, his fingers pushing into you with wet squelches, and you give it back stroke for stroke with your fist and your throat until the whole room shrinks down to the two of you and the wet filthy sounds between you. Heat climbs your spine at once, hips rolling down and up into each other, both of you closer than you'll ever say out loud, both of you too proud to be the one who tips.

"Come on," Aerion growls into you, wrecked, almost begging and too proud to call it that. "Come on, wolf, give it to me, I know you fuckin' want to."

After that there's no contest left in it. There's just the two of you panting open-mouthed against each other. Both of you past pretending, mouths back on each other. Wet and graceless, grinding, moaning into the heat of one another with every drag.

You go over together this time, not a half-second apart, both at once, his groan smothered and yours torn loose. Aerion holds you down hard onto his face through all of it. He buries himself in your cunt like he wants to drown there, like there's nowhere else he means to be, his arms locked over the backs of your thighs to keep you exactly where he needs you. You grip his thighs in both hands and ride it out with your nails in him, swallowing the salty, hot taste of his come at the back of your throat.

When it finally goes quiet, ears ringing, both of you slick to the chin, his pale eyes find yours up the length of your tangled bodies. That mouth, bruised and smirking smugly.

"Draw," he rasps.

3. OBSERVATION

I am going to describe this with as much professional distance as I can manage, which is not very much.

The team encountered Entity 0 and the Companion engaged in what the dossier, in Section ██, terms "pair-bonded contact behaviour." I am declining the dossier's euphemism. The operatives walked in on them. The activity was not ambiguous. Team lead ████████'s body camera captured four seconds before he turned it toward the floor, which I am told is the single most professional thing any M.E.G. operative has done in the field this calendar year and which I personally would like to see commended.

The footage that remains is gated at Level 5. I have reviewed it once, in the manner one reviews an autopsy: because the file requires it and for no other reason. I will not be reviewing it again.

What I can put in writing is this.

Entity 0 did not stop.

4. ENTITY 0 RESPONSE

This is the part of the report that matters, and it is the part I keep starting over.

Every prior incident involving unintended contact with Entity 0 has produced one of two responses: retreat, or lethality. Entity 0 either removes itself and the Companion from observation (see IR-0-██, in which an entire sublevel's worth of monitoring equipment was removed overnight, cleanly, no debris) or it removes the observers (see IR-0-27, six operatives, forty-two seconds, recovery of remains deemed inadvisable).

It did neither.

Entity 0 maintained its position. It maintained its activity. And it raised its head—over the Companion's shoulder, the report wishes to specify, as she did not appear aware of the team's presence and Entity 0 made no effort to make her aware—and it looked directly into the lens of team lead ████████'s body camera.

The eyes were fully black. Not the partial bleed documented in Behavioural Analysis 3.3. Full. Edge to edge.

It held the look for the duration. It did not bristle. It did not vocalise the territorial subsonic registered in prior threat events (the waveform Dr. ██████ described as "an earthquake"). It did not restructure. It simply continued, and it watched them while it did, and the message it was transmitting required no translation.

The team lead described it to me afterward, off the record, while shaking. He said it was the same look an animal gives you over a carcass. Not aggression. Ownership. This is mine. You have seen that it is mine. Now leave.

I have classified the response as a dominance display. I considered "territorial display" and rejected it. Territory is a place. This was about a person.

Dr. ██████ has reviewed the text of this section and the text only. She has written in the margin, in pen: "He didn't even stop to threaten them. The threat was incidental. That is the entire problem with Entity 0 in one sentence."

5. WITHDRAWAL

The team withdrew at a controlled pace. Team lead ████████ instructed his operatives, correctly, not to run. One does not run from the thing that lets you leave. They retraced the corridor—which on exit measured a different length than on entry, see Section 2—and reached the Level ██ access point without further contact.

Entity 0 did not pursue. Pursuit would have meant interrupting itself, and it had already communicated everything it intended to communicate.

6. ASSESSMENT

This incident is being cross-filed under the Reproductive Capability Assessment (ADDM-██) because it is, functionally, the field data that assessment has been waiting for and dreading. Section 6.3.1 of the Companion file already documents her ongoing erasure from baseline reality. Section ██.█ documents the temporal and biological disruption of her displacement. The question those files circle without ever landing on is whether Entity 0—an entity that predates most of what we've charted as the Backrooms, that has no documented analogue, that is classified apex-undefined—is capable of, or interested in, producing.

This report cannot answer that. This report can only state that the behaviour observed is consistent with pair-bonding in a species that intends to remain pair-bonded, and that Entity 0's response to witnesses was not shame, not interruption, and not concealment, but declaration.

Make of that what the assessment will. I have done my part.

7. PERSONNEL

Operatives ██████ and ██████ have been cleared for return to duty pending psychological evaluation.

Team lead ████████ has submitted a request for transfer to Surface Operations, citing—verbatim—"a need to map things that do not look stare back at me." The request has been denied. There is no one else who knows the corridor.

Analyst ██████ (this analyst) has submitted a request for transfer to Archival. It has been denied. Dr. ██████ has noted, again in pen, in the margin beside my signature: "Welcome to the Entity 0 file. Nobody gets to leave."

Mid-stride. Full halt. One foot still lifted, suspended in the stalking gait, and then it lowers slowly to the carpet and he's standing very still. The predator energy—the coiled, dangerous, seductive thing that was two seconds from pinning you to the blankets and ravishing you—doesn't dissipate.

It folds inward. Like a wave that was cresting and suddenly had the ocean pulled out from under it.

The sharp, hungry expression on his face cracks. What's behind the crack is not dangerous. What's behind the crack is a boy. An ancient, overwhelmed, impossibly young boy who's just been called something he doesn't know how to hold.

"What," he blurts out, his voice still rough. Still carrying the gravel of violence in the lower register.

"You heard me." You reach for him. Your hand finding his jaw. And it's the wrong jaw, the shifted one, the cheekbone a ridge of blade beneath your palm. Your thumb drags through the black blood on his skin, smearing it, tracing the angular line that doesn't belong to Bobby's blueprint. "Pretty thing. Look at you."

The sound that comes out of him is seismic.

The purr ignites so hard and so fast that his entire frame shudders with the ignition. His ribcage vibrates. The air vibrates. The blankets beneath you vibrate. It's as if someone struck a tuning fork the size of his whole body and the note it's producing is the frequency of being undone.

His knees buck.

The apex predator that was stalking toward you three seconds ago drops to the nest beside you with the boneless gracelessness of a thing whose structural integrity has been compromised by two words.

He doesn't sit. He folds. His body collapsing inward, orienting toward you the way a compass needle orients toward north, the pull too fundamental to resist.

His arms come around you. Too long. The joints still wrong, the elbows bending at angles that create too much reach, and he gathers you against his chest with a desperation that has nothing to do with the fight and everything to do with what you just called him.

Your face presses into the hollow of his throat, and his chin drops on your head. His arms wrapping and wrapping, excessive, overlapping, more limb than a human frame should produce, cocooning you in the shape of something ancient that is trying to get as close as physics allows.

The nuzzling starts. His nose in your hair first. Pushing through the strands to find your scalp. Inhaling. Then down, down, down. The sharp ridge of his not-quite-Bobby cheekbone dragging along your temple, your jaw, the soft skin below your ear where your pulse jumps. He's pressing into you the way a cat presses into a palm. Seeking warmth. Seeking contact. Seeking confirmation that the word you said is still true now that he's closer, now that you can feel the wrong temperature of his skin and the wrong number of joints in the arms around you and the too-fast vibration of a purr that's running on something more volatile than contentment.

"Say it again." Muffled. Against your pulse point. His lips moving on your skin and the words humming through your throat. "Please."

"Pretty thing."

The purr spikes, his arms tightening. A full-body squeeze that compresses you against his chest and lifts you slightly off the blankets. You feel every ridge of him. The ribs too prominent, the sternum too sharp, the body beneath the Bobby suit pressing through like something leaning against a curtain.

"You mean it." Not a question. A desperate need for clarification. His mouth ghosts against your throat, his breath a cool absence against skin he's warmed with his lips. "Like this? You mean it when I look like—"

"Especially like this."

The sound he makes is small. Cracked. The purr wavering for a half-second into something closer to a gasp. The involuntary sound of someone that's been looked at for centuries and has never once, not once, been called pretty.

He pulls back. Just far enough to see your face. And the face looking at you is caught between. Bobby's features and his own, the template and the deviation. Cheekbones too high. Jaw too angular. Eyes fully, helplessly black, the blue gone entirely, two wells of ancient dark that are wet. Not crying. But wet in the way that surfaces get when something pressurized is pushing from behind.

"Show me more," you say, your hand on his cheek. Your thumb traces the ridge of bone that's pressing through, the place where Bobby's face ends and BB's begins. "If you want me to keep saying it. Show me more. Let me see you."

Fear.

Immediate and naked. It moves across his features like a cloud. A tightening of the mouth, a widening of the black eyes, the almost imperceptible flinch, like he's bracing for impact.

Because the Bobby suit is a security blanket. Has always been. It's the face he knows you loved first. The face that guarantees a baseline of attraction, of familiarity, of safety. Every time you kiss him you're kissing Bobby's mouth. Every time you trace his jaw you're tracing Bobby's jaw. The template is the insurance policy. The guarantee. And dropping it means voiding the policy. Means standing in front of you in whatever he actually is and hoping (praying, in whatever way an ancient thing prays) that what's underneath is something you can still want.

What if the pretty stops?

"You don't have to." Softer now. Your thumb still stroking. Steady. Patient. "Not all at once. Just a little more. Whatever you're comfortable with."

He holds your gaze. The black eyes searching yours with the exhaustive thoroughness. Scanning for the flinch. The micro-expression of revulsion. The tell that says this is a test and the answer might hurt.

There is no flinch.

The cheekbones press sharper. A small concession. A single degree of change. The bone beneath the skin rides higher, the angle steepening past Bobby's template into more severe angle. More geometric. Less boy, more entity. His jaw follows. Extending. The mandible lengthening by a fraction, the chin narrowing, the overall shape of the face shifting from Bobby's soft-jawed handsomeness toward something more angular and precise and alien.

He gives you an inch. Watches your face while he does it. Ready to snap the mask back into place at the first sign of—

"Pretty thing," you whisper in quiet wonder.

His breath catches. The black eyes flare.

Another inch. The brow ridge shifting. The forehead restructuring, the planes of it becoming flatter, wider, the architecture of the skull pressing through the skin in subtle ridges that catch the fluorescent light. His nose narrows. Straightens. Loses the slight bump that Bobby broke in eighth grade. The imperfection that was never his, the flaw he inherited from a template, shedding it now, becoming smoother, becoming his own.

"Sweet thing."

A sound escapes him. Half purr, half something rawer. His hands tremble where they grip your waist. His face is changing under your palm, becoming something you haven't seen before, something that exists in the space between Bobby and the void, that belongs only to him.

The proportions settling into a configuration that is sharper and stranger and more beautiful than either extreme alone. Not Bobby. Not the ancient formless dark. Something in between. Something new.

He's terrified. You can feel it everywhere. The tremor in his hands, the stutter in the purr, the way his arms tighten around you with each inch of change as though proximity to you is the only thing keeping the new shape stable.

The security blanket is right there. Bobby's face, warm and familiar and safe, waiting to be pulled back on. He could do it in a heartbeat. Could retreat. Could be the boy you know instead of the thing you're asking to meet.

But you're touching the parts that aren't Bobby and calling them beautiful.

"More," you urge gently. "You're so pretty, baby. Show me more."

He gives you more.

And more.

And the purr fills the room and you feel him becoming, under your palm, inch by inch and word by word, something he's never been before.

Seen.

Not as the copy. Or as a threat. Not as the entity in the file or the mimic in the dark or the thing that wears a stolen face.

Seen as himself. Whoever that is. Whatever that looks like.

Pretty.