#m: cod

Trying to keep quiet is another new thing, since there’s a sleeping child a couple rooms away, but he’s not letting go now that he has his hands on her. In fact, Frank has half a mind to run her over and try carrying her himself just so he doesn’t have to stop touching her. But then she’s opening the door wide for him and this is why he suffers that sadistic fucker of a nurse at physical, so he can still maneuver his ass onto the bed and his own damn pants off when he wants to fuck his wife.

Bell laughs under her breath, kicking off jeans and underwear, moving to straddle him where he finally settles against the pillows.

“What’s so funny, huh?”

“Here.” Her answer is half whisper, half moan and goddamn, she’s already slick for him. She arches, presenting her tits so Frank can manhandle them free and nose at the warm, soft space between them. “For your frown.”

Frank’s cock reacts before he does, so do his hips. There’s a delightful ache in sliding against her, twitching, pretty much on instinct. Pulling at her waist and groaning into her mouth.

“You’re a little minx, aren’t you?”

“I have good reason to be.”

He’s always been a sucker for Bell’s smiles, from way back when he expected to babysit Adler’s shiny new automaton and instead got a toothy grin in the middle of a firefight —that for a long time made him wish he’d just been hit. But the one she gives him, perched in his lap and rocking against him until his cock catches and slides smoothly inside her, spears him straight through the heart.

“Fuck, I’ve missed this.” She says and she’s wearing this ‘home after a long day’ kinda smile, with eyes narrowed so Frank can’t tell she’s tearing up until the drop escapes down her cheek. “I’ve missed you.”

And he’s right there with her, choked up to finally have a minute for just her, the same old Bell squeezing his heart between her pretty palms, no matter how everything has changed.

“You got me, honey. All of me.”

All that’s left of me, he doesn’t say, because it’s depressing when he’d really rather fucking not. What he does manage, comes out barely understandable, pressed against her mouth and it’s a little bit pathetic anyway, but Frank can’t care when she’s chuckling into a filthy kiss and tightening around him.

“Oh, you like that?”

Bell pulls back, laughter turning into a giggle as she wipes the tears. And this time the pressure of her muscles on his cock is purposeful.

“I do.”

“All that cock just for you, huh?”

She bears down at that comment, rides him so slow and deep that she has to shush the very loud groan it pulls out of his throat. 

“The cock and all the rest,” Bell doesn’t falter in the rhythm she starts, works him like her pride’s on the line, “your laugh and your eyes, and the way your beard burns. All mine.”

God, what a fucking sucker she makes out of him. Frank’s never been a man to speak his affections, it’s too much to put on the line, to have his heart out there like that. Especially now that he’s even more convinced that loving the likes of him is poison. So he sneaks a hand between their bodies, shifts their balance with firm circles over her clit and tries to squeeze the truth into a single word.

“Yours.”

Despite his better judgment and not exactly to her benefit, as far as he’s concerned, but it’s true. It’s enough. All it takes for Bell’s orgasm to hit full force. A thing of beauty, dimmed quiet but so intense, her thighs shake. Aching in the pit of Frank’s stomach for a long second because he can’t flip her under him anymore, give those pretty legs a break and pound her full while she melts into the mattress for him.

She laughs, though, breathless. And she kisses him with a sort of manic joy, face glowing and hair sticking to her forehead; picking back where she left off, rolling her hips ‘till he’s emptying himself inside her, panting like a dog and —for a single shining second— content to the bone.

Hers.

Suspended in a moment where it doesn't matter that they’re sort of sticky, staving off the chill only by virtue of clinging to each other. Then Bell climbs off for long enough to get a warm, wet towel that she uses to clean him and herself; before tucking them both in with easy banter. Talking up a storm in what Frank suspects is an effort to distract him until she’s curled sweet against his side.

In the morning, when it’s the sun bright through the window that wakes them, Frank finds it’s the first night David’s slept through without screaming his way out of a nightmare. He lets Bell wash his hair, in the brand new, spanking bench she got installed in the shower. And he figures he’ll find his way through this. Even if it’s embarrassing, even if it’s painful.

You’re soft and warm and he’s here far more sparsely than he’d like, so the time he spends in bed with you, he likes to spend inside you. It’s an impulse from the heart, not the gut. An ache to be as close as possible, enough that he can’t tell his skin from yours in the sacred centimeters between you.

Your sigh brushes sweet against his collarbone and something rises in him like a stream, dragging up the flotsam of his subconscious.

The thoughts he does his best not to have space for when he’s halfway across the globe. When he’s aching for your arms around him and your fiercely independent soul, your sharp eyes softening at the sight of him. He can’t help but wonder how he measures up against the new experiences, the people that are here everyday to share them with you.

How much can an absent husband really weigh in the full life you have?

John Price is not a man of prayer, he has no time or use for appeals to the universe or divinity or whatever might be listening. But he begs here, with your fingers drawing circles over the close crop at the back of his head and your hips rocking a barely there rhythm into his.

Please let her remember this, let her feel me when I can’t be here for her.

“What’s wrong?”

You whisper, so close he could taste it, tapping a thumb on his jaw to get his attention. And it isn’t until the drop slides across the bridge of his nose that he even realizes he’s been tearing up.

“Just missed you, love.”

John’s voice cracks against his will, that and the way he follows your face —stubbornly trying to keep your noses touching— tell you it’s not as simple as missing you, he’s aware.

“I missed you too.”

You just smile at him, hiking your leg higher over his flank and tightening your sweet cunt around him, a quick reassuring grasp like you’d do on his hand. It pulls a chuckle out of him that vibrates through your chest and comes as an echo out of your own mouth.

“I left the Champions on the other day, just to have the commentator chatter in the house.”

He tries not to stare. You, who don’t give a damn about football. Neither does he, being completely frank, he’s just come to associate it with not having to be on edge around the clock, with being home. And now you have, too.

You let him hide his face in the crook of your neck, tuck you tight into his body until any movement other than the good natured tensing of your inner muscles is virtually impossible.

I love you, he wants to say. But he can’t trust it not to break him, so he limits himself to rubbing his beard on your skin to make you laugh. Groaning out your name in bursts of stimulation.

That bit of personal joy sours after the first four hours of moving in starts and stops, trying to clear their way through these local defense forces that don’t know and don’t care that the Shadows aren’t here for them. Phillip glances at his watch for the millionth time, they’re a couple hours late for their first checkpoint and that’s assuming these assholes didn’t force that team to fall back too.

Fuck it, they’re exhausted. He chooses to take advantage of the relative safety of the semi basement they squirreled themselves into, for his team to catch a few hours of sleep. While he works with half of the first guard to liberate a couple vehicles.

As Phil sees it, the closer it gets to dawn, the messier this fight gets, which increases the Shadow Company’s chances to slip away in the confusion. So he waits for first light to haul ass in two stolen vans, blowing past the abandoned first checkpoint and hoping to hell that the gas holds out to the next one a hundred clicks away.

In the end, it takes almost a full day to get his ass to the relative civilization of the Shadow main camp, where Phillip and his team are welcomed as if they're coming back from the dead. Shouts and clapping shoulders as far as the eye can see, not to mention the medical set up with enough supplies to stitch them up. And God, he wishes he could sleep on the ride back, but that’s not even a possibility when he phones HQ and the first thing out of Vance’s mouth is that his wife is currently at the premises, terrorizing the home team. Well, terrorizing might be a strong word when, from hearing Vance tell it, she’s been locked up in Phil’s quarters, refusing whatever comforts they can offer beyond the privacy of his room.

It makes him antsy, knowing she’s waiting. He’d been planning a shower, at least, before showing up at the house with a win under his belt. Not her brilliant eyes on him the second he steps off the transport to more ruckus, the familiar chatter of a job well done despite whatever setbacks try to shit on their party. Phillip isn’t braced for the uncertainty of her, pretty as a picture in one of his shirts, watching as he hollers orders still, to check on the injured and account for the casualties. It’s a shock to get to the end of the long walkway and see the dark circles under her eyes. To hear her voice, quiet and breathy —for him and only him to hear—, call his name like a prayer.

“You win,” she whispers, reaching out slowly to try and brush the blood staining whatever skin of his neck is visible under his gear, “I missed you.”

His girl gives him the same smile she did, over a year ago, as if she’s making a joke at her own expense. There’s no victory in this, not really, Phil might have a fluid relationship with the truth in general, but he’s not in the business of lying to himself. It's been quite a long time since his ego was the only thing on the line. All he feels now is the rabid pleasure of being back in these hands that own him so completely.

“Oh honey,” Phillip’s fingers close around her wrist, pulling her in by the waist until he can feel her heartbeat next to his and all it would take to taste the one, solitary tear that rolls down her cheek would be to lean in. And he manages to voice the aching truth at the end of his clusterfuck of a day, “All I thought about in that shithole was coming home to you.”

Her laughter shakes him, hiccuped and sudden, startling him into remembering there’s quite a few Shadows moving around them, trying to pretend they’re not paying attention to this reunion.

“Ryan, you’re team leader while I get reacquainted with the missus, alright? Don’t come looking for me unless the building is on fire.”

…

The walk back to his quarters is a blur. Phil’s half convinced that he died out there and his brain’s being sweet on him for his troubles before it conks out for good. His skin feels prickly all over, not just where there’s dried blood crinkling off in flakes, as he sheds pieces of his gear one handed, since he refuses to let go of his wife’s hip. 

His wife. It burns beneath his ribs in the residual adrenaline high, with the same bite as the twenty seven stitches he sports from shoulder to collarbone, tying together a cut deep enough to glance the muscle. A little agony every time he moves, now that the morphine’s starting to wear off.

But his wife, she’s here, for him. Kneeling between his feet, unlacing his boots. In his bed with the world on the other side of his locked door. Their door. Phillip could be bleeding out all over her smart fingers and not give a good goddamn about it. He crowds her against the pillows like he’s coming home after a normal day, as if he isn’t raining fucked up dry blood confetti all over both of them. And god, she fucking giggles into his kiss.

She minds his shoulder and cups his half chub over his jeans, until he can’t help the desperate little rocking of his hips into her palm. Then this monster he married pulls away, leaves him to stumble his way out of pants and underwear, while she pulls a burlesque slow slide off of clothes.

Phil straight up growls a complaint, full on rumbling in his throat as she straddles him, laughing. Wet enough that he slides home in a single thrust. Vaguely, his mind’s gearing up to worry he might come too soon, but the injury screams red behind his eyelids when he tries to readjust for leverage. It grounds him, makes him flop his back onto the mattress, half cackling. Only to see his girl smiling her pleased-cat smile, the happiest little camper he ever did see, riding his cock for all he’s worth.

“There’s my smile,” Phillip doesn’t register he’s saying it out loud until she squeezes around him and his name tumbles out of her a choked, airy sound. “That’s my girl.”

The claim turns her sharp, stretching her grin so it shows teeth and she picks up the pace of her hips. He’s not gonna last, Phil figures, even if she chose to dig her nails into his wound, so he resorts to rubbing tiny circles of his thumb, firm over her clit, to the deafening tempo of his heart.

Blessedly, she comes first, whispering his name against his mouth in two bites and tightening her pretty cunt around him on purpose.

Phill-ip. It sounds like ‘husband’ , like ‘darling’ and ‘I missed you’ and ‘you win’ as his orgasm hits, sudden like a shot.

He doesn’t know how long he lies there, boneless under her but for the hand he smooths up and down her thigh. It’s the first time in their marriage that he doesn’t hit the ground running on the clean up and, to be honest, he could get fucking used to doing this every time from now on. His wife —and he’s obsessed with the word now, holds it in a tight grip, like everything that’s his —doesn’t move much either, just settles into his side.

“We’re fucked, aren’t we?”

She laughs, the flakes turned to red smudges over her collarbones from sweat, and Phil understands what she means instinctively; hears the three words under the breathlessness and the flippancy.

“I believe we are, honey.” It’s a mumble against the crown of her head, followed by a kiss to her temple.

…

Your husband’s an insidious one. It’s in the way he folds his clothes and shines his shoes. In how he gently coils his belts to rest between your row of everyday handbags and the gun safe. Little things that speak of a marriage and make sure his presence is always here, in this house he bought you. All charm and a wicked mind. So you have to look at these things of his and think about his accent, the glint in his eyes when you misbehave, his mouth on yours.

Phillip Graves is more than you ever dared wish for. Yours in a way that sparks holy terror in your gut. Against your better judgment and against your will, he sneaks into the routine and makes the bed feel empty without the expanse of his back to curl into.

You crave him, wherever in the world he is at the moment, risking his hide as a way of life. Because of course, you had to find him in the line of fire. 

You’re not made for easy, you’re made for finding the perfect husband and being in constant danger of losing him. He has the scars to prove it too, so close to that sharp brain of his. And he wears them with the kind of balls that your friends back in Hudson Yards try to match with distressed jeans and design pre-scuffed boots. Worse is the joy he finds in the work: obvious, magnetic. Such an intrinsic part of him that you couldn’t even wish to stop him.

Worst is that when Vance shows up in the middle of the afternoon, after Phil’s been gone for weeks, you don’t even flinch.

“Mrs. Graves,” he says. Standing on your porch with the straightest back you’ve ever seen, looking for all the world like he’s carrying the metaphorical neatly folded flag.

The thought slides sluggish into your awareness. You don’t know if that still happens, Phillip being  a contractor, saving the ‘real’ military’s asses by doing their fucking dirty work. And it’s so inconsequential that it takes over —the question—, for another second of staring blankly. 

“Ma’am,” Vance tries again, gently herding you into the house by the elbow.

He’s not wearing gloves, you notice, and he seems to be trying to keep a hand on you, even if it feels like he’s not used to this kind of constant touching. It’s something you’ve seen Phil doing more than once, so it stops you dead, makes you stumble into the stupid decorative side table your in-laws insisted on gifting you.

“What happened?” It’s breathy, punched out of you. Two half words in a long exhale. 

“We lost contact with Commander Graves’ team at around o’ five hundred this morning—“

“It’s damn near six pm.”

“We have protocols—“

Of course they do, Phil is adamant about doing things right or not doing them at all. So it’s been twelve hours, plus the drive, of no one knowing where your husband is. And it’s not even that fact that makes Vance hesitate. It’s the next few words out of his mouth that turn this into a scenario that warrants the face he’s making.

“And— satellite images show signs of a fairly large explosion, close to their last known location.”

The shit table catches your weight once again, rattling up a storm. You lean on it, simply because, unlike Vance, it doesn’t look at you like you’re on the verge of exploding.

You might be, actually. Your head feels like a lit fuse, building pressure under your tongue. Anger simmers under the shock, an impulse to bite, to leave claw marks on what’s yours.

“We still have no concrete information,” Vance’s palm finds your elbow for the second time. 

Maybe he expects your knees to buckle, but he stays close. Phil close. So you take a couple steps back. 

“A team was dispatched for search and rescue, we should have news by tomorrow morning at the latest.”

Vance looks at you like you’re supposed to respond to that, fulfill the social contract in some way you can’t fathom right now. Are you meant to thank him for the bad news? This can’t be the first widow-to-be visit he makes, but it is yours, which makes the etiquette unclear. 

He moves, in the end; does that universal half turn, half vague gesture towards the door one does when trying to excuse themselves from something. Your body moves with him, follows on instinct.

You’ve never been one to wait— call it being a spoilt brat, but you need something to focus on if you’re going to simply hold out for any amount of time; your phone, a book, even people watching. But all your mind goes to at the moment is blood and fire and Phillip and every single black dress you own.

The rage in the pit of your stomach strains at the leash. At Vance, at the Shadows, at Phil. And you’re bound to demolish the house, if you’re left alone in it for more than the five minutes of this interaction. Might end up cutting into ribbons all your funeral-appropriate clothes.

“I’m coming back to base with you,” it comes out flat. Not begging, not a demand. Because it isn’t, it’s a statement of fact, a certainty that throws this Shadow off his game. Makes him sputter like an old chainsaw for an excuse he thinks you’ll take.

“I’m supposed to go right back, I— there’s no time to pack for the night…”

You hand Vance your phone, leave him there palm outstretched while you shove laptop, chargers and wallet into a bag. A process that takes all of five minutes, in which you’ve correctly assumed he won’t dare fuck off without you. Not before you pluck the device back from his very light grip, keys jingling as you unlock the truck in the driveway.

“I’ll follow you.”

…

It occurs to you, quite late, that the correct reaction to this would be to cry. Not that you can focus on it, with the strange bureaucracy of security checks and Vance’s unrelenting escort into the Shadows’ facility, but maybe you should.

You could probably try, in the same way that social deception usually comes to you. Second nature, beaten into your body by private schooling and parents that mostly think of you as an asset in whatever scheme they happen to be cooking up at the time. Whether that’s looking pretty at a charity ball or securing the Graves’ deep pockets for future political endeavors. 

Crying for the stony faced, hurried soldiers you pass by on your way to Phil’s office would be easy, all things considered; it just feels wrong under your skin. You’re not fucking here for them, you’re here for the husband that is definitely coming back. Because he made a promise to keep you and, despite the things your world has thought you about promises, you fucking trust him.

Nausea, on the other hand, comes a lot more naturally. Bile climbing up your throat like an awful tide you have to pause to fight every couple steps. It burns in your throat and threatens to make you tear up out of nothing but physical discomfort, but it just doesn’t have the same flare, doesn’t get the same reaction.

“The bathroom next to Phil’s office is private, right?” Vance levels you with a look so strange that you feel the need to add the truth at the end, amend your question, “—I’m gonna be sick.”

Even now it’s unbearable to be assumed as a fragile little greenhouse flower that can’t cope with a shared toilet. Especially when he already looks at you out like you’re an alien learning how to act human and not quite hitting the mark.

“Commander Graves has his entire private quarters back there, not just the bathroom,” Vance doesn’t stop, doesn’t even slow down his pace, but this is the most surprised you’ve seen him. “He used to spend a lot more time here, before he met you. You’ve bumped up time off for all of us.”

Your expression must be a sight, with the chuckle it gets out of him. It loosens his stance some, makes him look at you like you’re a person and not a grenade he has to jump for the first time today. The silence suddenly not so fucking tense between you, until he punches in the code to your husband’s office and he stands there a foot away, starting and stopping a sentence for a couple times.

“He always comes back, Commander Graves,” Vance settles for in the end; not empty assurances, just what he knows from experience.

You can appreciate it, can take the hand he settles on your shoulder amicably. Though he’s not Phillip and hasn’t earned the privilege to comfort you.

He leaves you, promising an update on first light, no matter how much you insist on ‘as soon as you have one’. You’re not gonna sleep anyway.

Even after you shower and rummage around drawers for one of Phil’s spare shirts, you settle on the office chair with your laptop to try and pretend to work. Your husband’s desk is clean, sparsely furnished with a pen holder, a couple stacks of post it’s and presiding over all, a framed copy of your wedding photo.

Sure, he’s seen her bleeding out, sweat drenched and bruised from several rounds of interrogation. Feverish, mumbling, staring into his soul like she could tear into him with her eyes alone. And she still slides silk soft over the ridges of his brain.

It was easy to ignore, all things considered; in that dark room with nothing but the microphone and the bell. To watch her, past whatever attraction he can’t shake, looking closely for results. But now she’s out in the world, fully convinced that she’s known him for decades; now she remembers a different Russell Adler. The one he was before the crooked line of his life proved to him that he wasn’t one for an easy ride; the man who would banter mid firefight, with the kind of gusto that makes him roll his eyes coming from Park and Lazar over comms. 

And sure, that means she’s comfortable enough to follow his instructions without much back-talk and she's amenable enough that she’ll take initiative to do what’s best for the mission on her own. She’s efficient and useful; and she claws that old playfulness out of him kicking and screaming. Even if he tries to resist, to ignore her easy jabs, the gallows humor, it’s those damn eyes and the light of affection in them that forces him to respond just to focus on something else.

It’s so obvious that even Sims commented on it, how he hadn’t heard chatter like that from him in years. So maybe that’s why Adler wanted this meeting to be private; why he asked Bell to slip away from Park when he called. Selling it as an added challenge when he dared her to find him in London with nothing to go on but the arrival time of his flight. A test of skill and loyalty.

Just as Park’s had Bell here for a week. Officially, for a briefing of the few leads MI6 has in Berlin. Off the record, offering proof of concept to the powers that be: one shining, sweet success to prove what programming can do. Work. That’s what’s behind Adler standing alone in a no name club, not the impulse to hog Bell all to himself, or the unspeakable notion that he misses her.

He’s too professional to let it show, and he knows what needs to be done, but that’s the filthy truth of him, the way his hands itch for skin on skin contact. The manufactured familiarity that allows her to touch him all the time —hands solid on his shoulders or her thigh pressed against his in the back of a cab. All the more tempting for being forbidden. More nagging in the back of his mind because he’s stealing her from the man he’s hunted for so long. 

The sensation makes Adler lay his palms flat on the bar top, check his watch. All he can do at the moment is wait. 

Two more minutes to his midnight meeting with Bell. Two minutes that are nothing in the grand scheme of his standing stakeout record of several months. Minutes that he watches tick like molasses over his wrist. Anticipation settling horrible in the pit of his stomach with the possibility that, once out of Park’s watchful eye, Bell will abscond back to Perseus. And won’t that be a fun one to explain. A betrayal he can already taste, that hurts in a way that it shouldn’t. Burning as it goes down like the whiskey that’s suddenly shoved his way over the bar. 

“I didn’t order this.”

“Your missus said you looked thirsty.”

The bartender tosses a wry smile his way too, nodding in the general direction of a very smug Bell. Who, at least, has the decency not to appear out of the smoke like this is a private eye movie, she just simply is there, close enough to touch, when she wasn’t the second before.

“You made it,” he greets her, watches her grin grow slow and tilted over her mouth. Her hips angled to squeeze in next to him, lean her weight on the bar and steal a sip off his drink. And Adler hates how proud he sounds, how his shoulders lose tension when she takes the first, poison-taster gulp of liquor like a half apology for ambushing him. 

“You doubted it?” 

“Park can be hard to sidestep.”

Bell outright giggles then, smile blinding in her satisfaction, but she doesn’t offer anything else. She won’t spoil the magician’s trick. 

“So what’s your story?” She asks instead, dipping closer still, until Adler can feel the ghostly touch of her hair against his cheek. “If this were to go tits up. Who are you tonight?”

“Well, you already told the bartender, I’m your husband.”

“Got you sore about that?”

There’s laughter in Bell’s voice, a tease of her fingertips straightening the collar of his jacket. Of course he’s fucking sore, with the way the thought goes right between his legs, aches in the pit of his stomach. Here with her lips on the rim of his glass, her body nudging insistently into his personal space like picking at a wound.

“Just wondering how believable it’d be for me to have a wife so beautiful.”

“Please, Russ, you’re the most attractive man I know.”

She moves, digging out a cigarette and flagging the bartender for an ashtray, and the extra inch of distance is such a deep relief that it takes Adler half a second to realize she’s smoking when they were supposed to have culled that out of her.

“I thought you’d quit,” he tries, as a thin, icy stream of uncertainty slides down his spine. He tries to be rational, smoking is the least dangerous of Bell’s old habits; complicated by the physiological dependence on nicotine to boot. This doesn’t have to be a sign of impending doom, he just has to keep an eye on it.

“In this line of work? It wasn’t meant to last,” she pauses, takes a drag and holds the smoke for long enough to notice she’s having his exact brand, familiar and comforting. “Besides, you give me cravings.”

The eyes, it’s always the fucking eyes. The way they catch on his scar, climbing along until she’s staring him down with nothing but open, honest desire, and a sort of sadness underneath. Like she’s given up on the magnetic pull she feels for him as soon as she admits to it.

Bell knows he’d put the job above anything, knows that’s what nuked his marriage. She knows because he told her, made her privy to things the likes of Sims only suspect. It was easy too, once he got started, to let the words get away from him; maybe not during the first session, but by the twentieth? The fiftieth? He’d find himself in the jungle of Vietnam and in the weeds of his personal hang ups all the same. 

We fought together, bled together. 

A mantra that to a degree poisoned him too. Enough to make him need this, once at the very least, to hold Bell steady by the back of the neck, tasting the smoke and the surprise on her lips. Then he has to do it again, since Bell’s crushing the cigarette out so she can pull herself closer by his lapels, run her fingers through his hair with a whisper of ‘fuck Russ’. And he is absolutely fucked in so many ways.

Fucked in the ease of walking beside her back to his hotel. And in how she sighs against his mouth when her cold hands sneak under clothes in the elevator. Adler feels his heart beating in double time as he finally works himself inside her, inch by inch so he can’t hide from this. He could regret it, he already does, as he struggles to make this last as long as he can, but he can never pretend it didn’t happen. 

He’ll always have the way she clings to him, his name stumbling out of her when he hits the angle that makes her melt, to weigh on his conscience. He’ll keep coming back to her shoulder, still slick from the shower as he rested his forehead on it, because that was the third time he’d come that night and it never lost its edge to feel her around him.

These are the things Adler knows will haunt him. Keep him up at night until he finds the next excuse to have her, in a different hotel and a different city, with the same burning desperation.

And it’s what he sees, clear as day, playing in her mind that night as he tries to drag Perseus’ location out of her. Every kiss and every single time he drew meaningless shapes over her skin while she was curled up against his side.

“You brought it up,” she breaks the frost, moving to settle on the edge of the bed, right next to him. Her towel is warm, he realizes, as she works it over where he’s drying itchy with sweat and cum. Barely wet and gentle on his skin.

And John knows what she means, can still feel the words on his tongue: I’ll fill you, love, fill you ‘till it takes. He doesn’t regret them, doesn’t want to regret them because it gets him there in record time, does the job so well for him that just thinking about them has his cock hardening again to the warmth and the wetness and the subtle pressure of her hands.

But that’s all it is, a fantasy that ends here, when he cums. He doesn’t spend his days imagining his wife pregnant in his daily life. In fact, now that he thinks about it, the thought’s strange, leadens his stomach with an irrational sort of anxiety. He spends too much time away, too far removed from this unstoppable woman, to think of her vulnerable and not feel a certain kind of madness tugging at the threads of his self control.

“Do you want children?”

He counters, buys time, though he knows it’s unfair to twist the question on her. They talked about it, once, before the marriage, when they felt younger and the future seemed so terribly malleable. John said it might be good to have a couple. But he didn’t want to be a Christmas dad, seeing his offspring every four to six months and have them cry in his arms because they don’t recognize a man who’s more thought than father to them.

He’d planned to retire, cut back at least, before he’d consider any children. And now he can’t, not with so much to do. He couldn’t sit by a desk and watch other people forced into the kinda shit only he —and Kyle and Soap and Simon— will voluntarily sign up for. So it’s looking more and more like it might not happen for him, and he’s comfortable with that.

But they’d agreed, back then, on an indefinite but small amount of kids. And now his wife, the one with an actual life and a home where she welcomes him, is not looking at him as he refuses to answer. Not until he hooks his fingers in the crook of her knee and smooths his thumb over her thigh. She sighs at the touch, leaves the towel in favor of drawing nonsense patterns over his stomach.

“I don’t think it would be a good idea for me to have children, John”

He frowns, but waits in silence. There’s something sad hiding behind the fleeting smile she gives him, something guilty that makes him brace himself for movement. The impulse he’s felt since the moment he fell in love with her, to fight for her, against the world. Like he’s an attack dog, built for violent resistance in her name.

“My body feels off, some days, like I don’t belong in it. I skip breakfast sometimes, I leave the metro a station back, for the walk.”

Her voice is soft, but her eyes are unrelenting, now that she’s started. And she rushes through the admission, makes it a simple stating of facts, like making the shopping list.

“I don’t think I can survive having someone else in this body without hating them, and a baby doesn’t deserve that. I don’t deserve that. I’m sorry.”

John’s heart balloons in the quiet of the moment. He can’t help the lopsided smile that tugs at the corners of his mouth, which he realizes isn’t a reasonable reaction. But it’s this, the clarity and the unflinching honesty, why he adores her so completely.

Whatever ache is in the confirmation of closing this particular door, outweighed by the pride of knowing she trusts him with the naked, uncomfortable truths of her. And that, John supposes, is what burns at him and he doesn’t know how to put into words when he talks about filling her up, when he thinks about breeding, in the most primal, basic sense of the kink. He just wants to make himself a part of her, wants to know her to the last little cell and live in the spaces between them.

“So if you want to have children, I think we would have to consider other options.”

That comment brings John’s focus snapping back to her hands, to the way she spins her wedding band, tugs on it until it hits the speed bump of the knuckle, a gesture he isn’t sure is conscious but that telegraphs exactly where her head is at.

“You’re all I want, love. No hypotheticals.”

“John—“

“No,” he catches her hand, pulls it back to his chest. He uses it to anchor himself, sitting up to kiss away whatever objection she’s cooking up. “I don’t say what I don’t believe in, right?”

“Right,” her stance slackens and her body tilts forward so her torso slots against his, a perfect fit.

“Won’t bring it up again, love.”

“I like it,” it’s a mumble against his neck, his jaw, that turns into kisses that follow the line of his beard. “Just wanted to let you know, in case—“

John simply hums, keeps the groan in his throat, the one she likes best; because however tempting her sweet weight is on him, he’s weighing his options for breaching the other touchy subject this impromptu conversation raised, on a cold morning in the middle of his first week home in a while.

“About the eating—“

“I have it handled,” she says, stretching and twisting until her legs end up on each side of him again, "I'm trying."

"Ok. But you'll let me know if you need something from me, right?"

She nods, pulls back from him just to grin like she's misbehaving, or just about to.

"Could I have another round for now?"