#ttp

It smells like damp soil and the pinot noir stained in your mouth, a hint of the pumpkin beer that David from Planning managed to splash on your dress in the middle of a very animated impression of your boss. You’re in your good coat too, the burgundy wool one with the deep pockets bought on that questionable Saturday back in September – you remember the one, where you seemingly burned through an entire paycheck on new clothes ‘for the office’.

Your heels are echoing through the street, your cashmere scarf still half unwound from the heat of the pub, and you’re just turning the corner when you smell him.

A scent so distinctive now that your body knows it before your brain does and your steps begin to slacken before you’ve made the choice to. Cigar smoke furls through the brisk air – dark chocolate and fig jam spread beneath a layer of woody tobacco.

You’d like to taste it, you think.

It’s been four days since John kissed you, touched you.

Four days of passing each other on the stairs with his morning coffee from the corner and your bags sliding off your shoulder. Brief corridor conversations about nothing, really, but sometimes he picks up your falling straps without being asked, and you go down the stairs and he goes up them and the days continue on around you like nothing is different.

Except everything feels very different.

He’s leaning against the front of the building off to the side of the steps, one shoulder against the brick, cigar pinched at his side. He’s got his black coat on tonight, the collar turned up against the breeze, a knitted black beanie pulled low to his brows. He’s staring off at something across the street in that way people do when they’re sort of just existing in a moment.

He notices you over the hedges before you’ve turned down the path, the ringing click of your heels giving you away.

As you fully come into view his eyes make a single leisurely pass, taking in your listing gait and your cold-bitten cheeks, the lopsided scarf hanging tenuously around your neck. The tip of his tongue drags along the inner edge of his bottom lip before he forces his bawdy gaze somewhere into the middleground.

“Evenin’,” he says before you reach the bottom step.

“Hi!” you chirp, voice so bright it surprises even you, the word comes out far more enthusiastic than intended, and you watch the corner of his mouth twitch in response.

“Good night?” he asks.

“A very good night,” you confirm, nodding ardently, smile pulling wider than you can help. Your eyes fall to his hand, his index finger hooked over the cigar, and you gesture before you can think better of it. “Think I could have some of that?” you ask, lashes fluttering.

He looks at you and then, without comment, holds it out to you. His eyes stay on your face while you take it and bring it to your mouth, watching while your lips wrap around its head, while you draw in carefully and let the smoke sit warm and rich and sweet on your tongue.

The leaf is damp and you think about the fact his mouth was here first, and that you’ve been thinking about his mouth for four days straight. Something low in your belly pulls tight and you exhale up into the air, the smoke dissipating in the dark.

You hold it back out and he takes it from you, watching you as he brings it back to his own lips. Your fingers find the soft fringe at the end of your scarf and twist.

“How many?” he asks, smoke seeping out around the shape of his words.

You grin knowingly as you turn toward the door. “How many what?”

He’s still just watching you, patient, a brow raising imperceptibly. The cigar sends up a ghost of a thread between you.

“Two and a half,” you reply finally, gripping the railing as you negotiate the first step. “Which is a perfectly respectable amount.”

“It is,” he agrees mildly, in the tone of a man who just did the math on two and a half glasses in relation to your body and arrived at a conclusion he’s keeping to himself.

He pushes off the wall and follows you up the steps, stubbing his cigar out on the railing as he goes.

The foyer is toasty after the cold of the street, not dramatically so, but enough to defrost your fingers. You exhale into it gratefully, finally unwinding your unruly scarf, feeling your cheeks tingle as the chill dissolves. Behind you, the door shuts heavily, and John’s footfalls are one leisurely pace behind yours.

“You walked back?” he asks as you reach the bottom of the staircase.

“It’s only twelve minutes,” you say, which is an answer to a slightly different question than the one he asked – you learn from the best.

“Alone,” he adds, grumbling.

You glance over your shoulder at him as you take the first step up. “John,” you giggle, warning.

“I was only going to say…” he begins, and you sigh ruefully, “that it’s late.”

“It’s half ten,” you counter, walking up.

“And dark.”

“Well, it’s nighttime, so…”

“And you’ve had–”

“Two and a half,” you cut in as you pause, hand on the banister as you look back and smile, “which is a perfectly–”

“–Respectable amount. Yeah,” he finishes, and the tone of it is so dry you could use it as kindling if it were a tangible thing.

You laugh at him, bright and loose, the sound bouncing off the stairwell and coming back to you both tenfold.

He’s just coming up behind you when you take another step and your heel snags a rogue rip in the carpet. His hand instinctually finds the small of your back before you’ve even registered losing balance, and you right yourself with a murmured ‘thank you’ before you keep climbing.

The pressure of his touch, however, lingers after it’s gone.

Gone – which is the operative word and precisely the problem.

You think about it for exactly three more steps before deciding that it should come back.

You come to a stop on the stairs and turn to face him. Being a step up puts you almost level with him for once, close enough that you don’t have to tip your chin for the first time since you’ve known him, close enough to see that damn freckle on his nose and the way the light settles into the lines beside his eyes in a way that opens them up.

You reach out for his wrist, but he pulls back just out of reach, brows furrowing, an amused smile working its way up despite himself.

“No,” he chuckles, suspicious and fond all at once.

“I just–”

“You just nothin’,” he chastises, still smirking as he steps up beside you. “Keep walkin’,” he nods.

And you do, but not before your eyes slide to the side and you suck your teeth.

You manage to behave for four whole dignified steps. But on that fifth one, you make the mistake of looking at him, and he just looks so good in that fucking beanie that your body chooses for you.

You find yourself shifting and leaning into him, pushing your body against his until he’s got the banister at his back and you’ve got his full attention. He looks down at you with widened eyes and you look up at him grinning, your fingers slithering like snakes into his coat, palm meeting the solid curve of his stomach and sliding, sliding, sliding.

“Duck,” he warns, voice tight with restraint, you pause.

“I’m cold,” you sulk.

“You’re not cold.”

“I am.”

“You were fine thirty seconds ago.”

“Well, I wasn’t thinkin’ about it thirty seconds ago,” you argue.

He sighs something akin to a laugh and detaches your hand from his body, depositing it firmly onto the banister on your side of the step. His fingers close over yours, squeezing them around the painted wood.

“You’re bein’ awful cheeky,” he grumbles under his breath. “Hold it,” he insists, giving your hand another press.

“You’re bein’ bossy,” you inform him, tipping your head back so that he can fully appreciate your practiced pout.

“I know,” he replies, completely unbothered.

You both make it all the way to the landing outside his door before you’re turning to face him again, hands finding the lapels of his coat, and he looks at you like he saw this coming three steps ago.

“I just wanna–”

“No.”

“You don’t even know what I was gonna say!”

“I have a reasonable idea,” he exhales evenly.

“It’s quite rude,” you huff, “saying no to someone before they’ve even asked their question.”

John says nothing in return, he only looks at you. Then one hand comes up to pry your fingers from his coat.

“You’re not even a little tempted?” you whine exasperatedly.

You tilt your head, and the lights catch him at an angle that does nothing to help the humming under your skin. He is very handsome and the wine is simply making it harder to be normal about it.

“Eyes forward,” he says, pointing down the hall with two fingers. “Walk.”

“John,” you mewl.

“What did I say?”

“You’ve said a lot of things,” you point out. “You’re very chatty.”

He huffs before turning you firmly by your shoulders, one hand at your back, urging you, guiding you the last few steps down the hall.

At your flat, you spin on your heel and lean back against the door, he’s close enough that you have to tip your chin again. The wine has flooded your senses making your venture seem all that more attainable and you’re very much aware of how near he is and how much nearer you would like him to be.

Your hands find his lapels again, reaching out, fingers smoothing down the fabric, tugging once at the ends and staying like weights, it makes him shuffle a half-step closer.

“You could… come in,” you purr.

His eyes drop to your hands and then come back to your face, and for a split second he looks like he’s at war with himself, one that he’s only winning by a thin margin.

“Not tonight,” he says firmly, without leaving much room for argument.

But still, the pout arrives before you can stop it, tugging at the corners of your mouth, and you look up at him through the fan of your lashes, foot scooting forward until the front of your shoe taps the toe of his boot.

“Why don’t you want me?” you murmur, but something more genuine sneaks into it at the last second – too honest, too revealing, too indicative of his rejections up the stairs.

He goes still, two lines pulling deep between his brows, then there’s the quietest click of his tongue, and the knuckle of his index comes up beneath your chin, tipping it. He searches your face, cerulean eyes taking in your tipsy gaze when something pained moves through them.

“I think you know that I do,” he says gently, cocking his head. “Hm?”

Your eyes fall to his chest, cheeks glowing.

The calloused pad of his thumb traces an invisible line below your bottom lip, dragging it crooked before his hand drops back to his side.

He steps into your space now and dips his head, and when he speaks his lips are close enough to your ear that you feel the warmth of his breath against its shell, his beard lightly scratching at your cheek. A short breath escapes you and your fingers twitch toward him at your side, but you don’t touch him again.

“Go to bed,” he murmurs, low.

He doesn’t pull back right away though, he stays where he is, the round tip of his cold nose pressing to the soft place just below your ear. You can hear him breathe you in there, like he just couldn’t help himself – taking in the scent of you, your perfume gone tender from the heat of your flesh, vanilla and ginger mingling with the wine seeping through your pores.

He’s close enough to taste you if he’d let himself.

You feel him freeze after, the stiff spine of a man who’s realized exactly how far he just let himself go and is deciding not to go any further. A single measured exhale leaves him before he steps back again. The cold air of the hall rushes in to fill the space where he was as if it was just waiting for the chance.

You hold his gaze a heartbeat longer, fingers wrapped around the doorknob at your back, your pulse pounding at the place his skin met yours.

“Okay,” you concede, barely above a whisper.

“Night, duck,” he says, and the tenderness of it follows you through your door and stays with you long after you lock it.

On the other side, you stand in your dark entryway, coat still on, scarf loose in your hand, the wine warm in your chest, the ghost of his breath still sitting somewhere on your neck, and his voice rattling between your eardrums.

You hear the creek of his door open and close, and you stand there a moment longer, smiling at nothing.

––––––

The knock comes around nine o’clock.

The firmness of the raps reach you with the thick woolen weight of a hangover settled into your temples. You lie there, on the sofa, with your cheek pressed to the cushion, blinking at the coffee table as your brain reassembles itself to being awake.

Your flat, you notice, looks like Friday happened to it. Heels where you stepped out of them just inside the door, your coat and scarf thrown over the back of a chair, sloppily pooling on the floor below. Your purse is tipped on its side across the entryway bench, lipgloss and credit cards and loose change making a slow escape across the upholstery.

There’s a glass of water on the coffee table in front of you that Last Night You left for Morning You, and you reach forward to drain it in four long swallows before forcing yourself up, padding over to the door, and pulling it open.

John’s stood there in a soft grey hoodie beneath his leather jacket, light wash jeans, two takeaway coffees balanced atop each other in one hand. He takes up space the way he always does, like doorways weren’t quite built with men like him in mind.

He makes a quick pass over you, taking in your mid-thigh oversized band tee and the one sock rolled lower than the other. The corner of his mouth pulls up just slightly before he holds the top cup out.

“Thought you might need this,” he offers.

“Ugh, you’re an angel,” you murmur, taking it with both hands and stepping back from the door.

He follows you in without being asked, and when he crosses the threshold he stops short, and you watch him take in your flat the way you did his.

It’s the same bones of a completely different animal – colorful where his is less so, lived-in where his is bare, every one of your surfaces doing multiple jobs.

Your furniture runs in autumnal colors. A velvet sofa so deep a rust it goes almost copper in the morning light, an oak coffee table distressed at the corners from ware. Your bookshelves are painted the kind of green that takes some thought to name and is filled well past any reasonable capacity – books lined and stacked and shoved where they could fit. The rug beneath it all is an ochre and cream situation with an indescribable pattern, frankly.

Your walls are decorated with paintings you salvaged from secondhand shops – a large landscape canvas above the couch and beside it, a smaller old oil portrait of a young girl and a lamb in a tarnished gilt frame.

There are half-burned candles on every surface, their wax gone sculptural from use. The desk is a spectacular disaster – an old company mug bristling with pens and markers planted in the middle of a landslide of manila folders and loose papers, a laptop half-buried under it all.

The snake plant on the windowsill looks like it’s doing its best.

And after a single deep breath, John steps over your heels without uttering a word.

You drift back to the sofa and pull your feet up beneath you, wrapping both hands around your cup. John settles into the floral armchair across from you, ankle on his knee, entirely at ease in your space in a way that makes last night press a little closer to your beating temples – the stairwell, your hands on him, his breath on your neck, the wine-ache of wanting.

You take a sip of your coffee and look out the window.

“How’s your head?” he asks.

“Fine,” you lie. 

“Mm,” he offers, which you think means he believes you and also means he doesn’t.

You look at him over the rim of your cup. The side of his mouth is doing that little tugging thing again which suggests he might be thinking of last night a tad more fondly than you are. Your cheeks start to tingle and you take another sip and look back at the window.

“You didn’t have to get me coffee,” you say.

“I get coffee after my run every morning,” he replies. You look back.

“I didn’t know you ran.”

“I have a routine,” he shrugs.

“Every morning?” you press, which is less a question and more you doing the arithmetic of what that means about the hours he keeps while you’re still horizontal and useless across the hall.

“Every morning,” he confirms.

“And what does that look like?”

He wipes a hand down his beard and uncrosses his leg to bring his elbows to his knees, leaning forward with both hands around his coffee.

“Run eight, maybe ten clicks. Push-ups, pull-ups. Stuff I can do in the flat.” A pause. “More important work gets done elsewhere."

You sit with that, the image of him doing said routine, flushed and sheen. It does a hot, complicated thing in your chest that you choose not to examine on an empty stomach.

“Are you hungry?” you ask.

“I could eat.”

“There’s a place ‘round the corner,” you start. “I go every Saturday. Their eggs are life-changing and the coffee’ll sort you out even if you don’t need sorting.”

“Yeah, alright,” he replies simply, easier to convince than you thought. And you both put your half-drunk cups on the table and leave it at that.

It takes you twenty minutes to get ready, and when you emerge from your bedroom in jeans and a cream knitted jumper with your hair done and your face on, John is standing at your bookshelf doing what you did to his – head tilted slightly, reading spines, curious in a way he probably wouldn’t be if he knew you were watching.

You lean against the doorframe and let yourself look.

He pulls one out – slim, a little battered, Honored Guest by Joy Williams, a strange collection of short stories you’ve had since uni – and turns it over in his hands, eyes moving across the back cover. His thumb runs along the worn edge of the spine, just once.

You let yourself look for exactly as long as it takes him to finish.

“Ready,” you tell him.

He slots it back exactly where he found it.

––––––

You leave the building into a cold grey morning, the air sharp and clean after the comfort of your flat, and fall into step beside each other on the pavement, your shoulder occasionally finding his arm as you walk, neither of you adjusting.

Your breath fogs between you. John has his hands in his coat pockets, taking in the neighborhood observantly – the things that have been here forever, the things that haven’t – and saying nothing about any of it, which is very him.

“It’s just down here,” you say, turning the corner.

“I know,” he says, because he runs past it every morning, which for some reason makes you smile.

The café appears at the end of the next street, its windows glowing against the grey, and even from here you can smell the rich coffee and the butter, and something sickeningly sweet drifting from the pastry case.

It’s the kind of place that’s been here forever and won’t be going anywhere anytime soon. Mismatched chairs, intimate tables, handwritten specials on a chalkboard that hasn’t changed anything but its prices in twenty years. The air steamy from the kitchen, the windows fogged at the edges where the cold outside meets the muggy air within.

You watch John take it in from the doorway – a passing sweep of his eyes across the room, assessing and then releasing, his shoulders dropping by a fraction. He looks like a man who has been in enough new rooms for two lifetimes.

The hostess, Diane, looks up when you push through the door, her face doing its usual fond crease of recognition.

Diane is short and brisk, somewhere north of sixty, with cropped grey hair and the same thick-framed plum colored glasses she’s worn every Saturday since you’ve been coming in. She has a way of looking at you like you’re one of hers – which, by the accumulation of Saturdays, you suppose you might be.

“There you are!” she beams, already reaching for menus. “Your usual table’s free, come on then.”

Her eyes slide to John briefly, just once. A quick cheerful assessment, the kind that misses nothing after years of working a room. Her gaze shifts back to you, and her smile seems a bit wider than usual.

“Two this mornin’,” she chirps to herself, but pointedly enough for you to hear, already weaving through the tables.

She leads you both to your table tucked in the corner beside the window.

John is already shrugging out of his coat, his hand catching the back of your chair and sliding it out in a gesture so natural to him he doesn’t seem to notice he’s doing it, and you sit down and try to think about the last time someone had done that for you and come up empty.

He settles across from you and picks up the menu.

Diane returns with two mugs of coffee without having even asked. You wrap both hands around one and look at John across from you, properly, in decent light, outside the damp atmosphere of your building for the first time – and he looks almost the same out here. A little easier, maybe. His shoulders seem looser.

He’s looking at the chalkboard specials with a small frown of concentration.

“Full breakfast,” you tell him. “That’s all you need to know.”

He glances at you. “And if I want somethin’ else?”

“You don’t,” you say, grinning. “Trust me.”

He considers that, looks back at the chalkboard, then sets his menu down.

“Okay,” he agrees, and picks up his coffee instead. “I trust you.”

Diane comes back to take your order, addressing most of her questions to John with the deference of someone who has marked he is in charge, which he handles with a patience that suggests he has noticed and chosen not to correct it, and you hide your smile behind your coffee cup and say nothing.

The morning opens up around you, easy and undemanding. You find yourself telling him about last night in the way you do when you’re still a little lit up about something; Cerie from accounts, David from the planning team, the second bar, the questionable decision to order a round of shots. And he listens with that focused attention of his, asking the occasional question that somehow keeps you rambling longer than you mean to.

“David does this thing,” you start explaining, “where he’ll say something, just, bloody devastating about someone and then immediately follow it up with the most sincere compliment you’ve ever heard in your life. So we don’t ever know how to feel–”

Your phone goes off in your purse, a double ding and a buzz.

You reach into your bag, the reflex of it bypassing your brain entirely, and you’re already reading the email before you’ve consciously decided to, thumb moving across the screen to reply.

“–and I think that’s actually just his personality, like he’s not even doin’ it on purpose, he just– sorry, one second– he just has this way of– this’ll just take a–” your thumbs keep moving, “–yeah, no, I’m listening– he has this way of makin’ you feel like–”

The typing catches up with you somewhere in the middle of that sentence and your eyes flick up from your phone and land on John.

He’s got both hands loosely around his coffee cup, watching you with a patience that somehow, with a single word, communicates everything. Heat crawls up your cheeks and to your ears.

You put the phone face down on the table.

“Sorry,” you murmur, shamefaced.

“Mm,” he hums, which is not quite ‘it’s fine’ and not quite ‘it isn’t’.

You take your cup back into your hand, sufficiently chastened, and there is a beat between you that is just slightly sharp.

“What is it you do?” he asks, in the mild even tone of a man who has just watched you conduct half a conversation with your thumbs moving with another and would like to understand what he witnessed.

“Project management for a property development firm,” you say. “Which means I mostly live in spreadsheets and other people’s arguments about budgets until something actually gets built. And then I can go stand on site and feel like it was worth it.” You pause, coffee cup halfway to your mouth. “It’s exactly as relentless as it sounds.”

“Busy at the moment?” he asks.

“Honestly,” you shake your head. “New contract just landed. Big government client, so there’s a lot of paperwork before we even get on site.”

“Whereabouts?” he asks mildly.

“Can’t really say,” you reply, a little ruefully. “Which honestly feels a bit dramatic for a construction project but apparently that’s just how it is with this kind of client.”

He nods once and takes a sip of coffee, and that’s the end of it.

“You’re good at it,” he says like he already knows.

“I am,” you agree. “Which, most days, feels like enough.”

“Most days,” he echoes, just noting that he heard it. He turns his cup in his hands. “D’you like it?” he asks. “Or are you just good at it?”

The distinction lands somewhere you weren’t expecting it to and you go still, your finger tracing the handle of your mug.

“I don’t know,” you admit. “I think I’ve spent a lot of time being good at things other people needed me to be good at.” You shrug once and bite the inside of your cheek in thought. “I’ve no idea what I’d actually choose, if I was just, like, choosing for myself.” You laugh a little then, small and self-aware, cheeks heating. “That’s probably too honest for a Saturday morning.”

“No,” he shakes his head gently. “I asked.”

The way he says it makes the hair at the back of your neck prickle.

He looks at you, something considered moving through his face.

“You’ll figure it out,” he says plainly, a firm thing, like he’s assessed you down and arrived at a clear conclusion and sees no reason to dress it up to pretend otherwise.

You briefly look down at your hands and feel the words settle somewhere you’d like them to stay for a while.

“Yeah,” you say. “Maybe.”

Diane comes back with your food and the moment dissolves into the ordinary business of breakfast – plates set down, cutlery unwrapped, the rhythm of two people eating together.

The eggs are, as promised, life-changing.

And at some point the conversation drifts to the neighborhood and the way it’s changed over the years, the things that have come and gone.

“There used to be a proper hardware shop on the corner, family owned,” he says, nodding vaguely toward the street outside. “Before they put that… whatever it is now. The place with the green juice.”

“The wellness place,” you say, smirking around a bite of toast. “‘Bloom.’”

“Bloom,” he echoes with a disapproval so honest that your smile widens until teeth show.

“When was the hardware shop there?” you ask, curious.

He thinks. “Closed… must’ve been 2006, 2007 maybe.”

You look at him, nose scrunching, doing some math.

“John,” you prompt.

“Mm.”

“I was, like, nine in 2007.”

His eyes find yours over his mug.

His expression moves through several phases in the span of a few seconds, landing somewhere that is not quite discomfort and not quite amusement and not quite anything he seems to know what to do with.

“I genuinely have no memory of a world with a hardware shop on that corner,” you continue, pleasantly. “That corner has always been ‘green juice’ to me.”

He sets his mug down and shifts in his chair more than once, like he’s trying to both lean closer and move further away.

“Nine?” he grumbles, low and incredulous. Less a question than it is something he’s simply repeating back to himself to see if it changes.

You look back at him over your fork, steady and trying to stop the twitch playing at the corner of your lips. “Nine,” you confirm.

He picks up his mug. Sets it back down. Picks it up again.

“Right,” he murmurs to himself, and takes a long sip that suggests he’s using the coffee as something to do with his face.

You say nothing in return, which is its own kind of answer, and hide your smile behind your hand and let him sit with it.

He has another round of coffee and admits it’s the best he’s had outside of this one place in Lisbon – which opens up a conversation about… places.

Places he can talk about and the ones he can’t, the ones he describes only in terms of the food or the sun or the quality of the light, which you understand is the closest he can get to talking about them. He tells you about a market in Marrakech where he bought a spice he still can’t identify but has been putting in everything since. You argue briefly and enjoyably about whether Florence or Rome is the superior city and reach no conclusion and don’t need to.

The café empties and refills around you while you stay at your table. The fogged window beside you clouds and clears with the cold outside and the heat inside. Diane refills your waters with no fuss.

At some point, with no announcement, the bill simply ceases to exist. You notice this in a vague, delayed sort of way that you notice things when you’re mid-conversation – the black folder gone from the corner of the table, John’s wallet already being tucked into his back pocket like he’s done nothing worth mentioning.

You open your mouth in protest.

He picks up his coffee without looking at you, and something in the nonchalance of it closes your mouth again. You watch him take a sip, with no rush, entirely unbothered, and feel something grow into a ball at the soft center of your throat that you swallow down with the last of your water and say nothing about.

On the way out Diane catches your eye near the door and mouths ‘he’s lovely’ with an enthusiasm that requires your full composure to receive gracefully. You smile and nod and absolutely do not look at John, who is holding the door open.

Outside, you fall into step beside each other naturally.

“Thank you,” you say, after a while, “for coming.”

He looks at you from the corner of his eyes. “I wanted to.”

He faces forward again, hands in his coat pockets, the silence that settles between you is comfortable – easy and undemanding, like a quiet that knows it’s welcome.

––––––

On the landing outside your doors you stop, turning to face him.

He looks back at you, hands still in his pockets, the familiar air of the corridor circling you both.

“Same time next Saturday?” you ask lightly.

“Yeah,” he nods. “Alright.”

You grin to yourself and let yourself into your flat.

John stands in the corridor a moment after your door closes, looking at the space where you were. Then he turns and goes back to his own.

––––––

The week after breakfast is a good one, though, unremarkable.

There is the Monday morning stairwell – you running late as usual, coat half on, and him coming up as you’re going down with his coffee from the corner, and the narrow turn of the stairwell meaning he has to flatten slightly against the wall to let you pass, and you squeeze by him with a breathless ‘thanks’ and he says nothing, just watches you go, and you’re already at the bottom before the smell of his shampoo catches up with you in the stairwell and sits in your chest like his hand pressed against it.

There is the night you fall asleep to the low murmur of his television through the wall, your book open on your chest and the lamp still on in the corner, the familiar sound of him simply existing on the other side of the plaster carrying you under.

There’s Wednesday; you come home wrung out, coat slung over your arm, laptop bag cutting into your shoulder, a tension headache sitting directly behind your left eye. You eat a bowl of cereal standing at your kitchen counter because anything else feels nauseating. You think distantly about knocking on his door and then don’t, because there’ll be time, it’s not like he’s going anywhere.

Except that in that same very night – Thursday morning, really – you surface blearily from sleep to the sound of boots thumping. Heavy and purposeful, a rhythm of them that you know now without knowing you know it. And beneath that, faintly, through the shared wall, the muted sounds of drawers, of movement, of a flat being left in a hurry.

Your eyes fully open to the dark ceiling.

You lie there a beat, gauzy with sleep, the sounds filtering through without quite landing. Just him, up late, the way he sometimes is, you think.

You turn over. Pull the duvet up and go back to sleep.

It’s only when you come home the next evening – phone in your hand, still half-reading an email that should have been sent an hour ago – that you see it: a single envelope resting against his door.

You stop. Look at it like it doesn’t quite make sense, your tired brain turning the thought over. You can feel an ache in your stomach begin to prod at your insides, but… it’s just one envelope. Could be anything. Could be nothing!

You go inside, open your laptop to distract yourself with work, order from the Italian spot across town. Later, you watch an hour of television without absorbing any of it.

Before bed, you open your front door and look down the hall.

The envelope is still there.

The corridor is still in the way it gets still when it’s missing something – the air gone thin, melancholy again. Your stomach drops slow and absolute, answering a question you haven’t finished asking yet. You stand there in your doorway in your socks, one hand on the frame, the building settling and creaking around you in the dark.

Then you cross the hall and pick it up.

The post comes every day, and every day you collect it – sliding it from his doorstep on your way in, adding it to the pile on your table with a horrible familiarity you recognize from before. From those first weeks when he was just a name on an address line.

Except it’s different now.

Now you know the weight of his hands. You know how he takes his tea and how he laughs and what it’s like to have his attention when he’s really listening. The way he calls you ‘duck’ when he’s being gentle with you, and the way the whole building feels different when he’s in it.

The stack grows.

You keep picking it up.

––––––

He comes back seventeen days later.

You’re on your couch with your legs over the armrest, a throw pillow under your neck, and your laptop balanced on your stomach. You’re halfway through correcting a report that should have been finished two days ago with a half eaten bowl of pasta going cold on the cushion beside you when you hear it.

Just a key in a lock. The specific sound of it, the teeth of it turning, coming through the shared wall with the clarity that only old buildings and thin plaster allow.

You go very still.

The laptop screen blurs in front of you, the report suddenly irrelevant, your brain doing a careful pivot toward the wall like a plant turning toward sunlight.

You listen to the footsteps crossing his floor. The low thud of something being set down. The familiar creak of his floorboards in a spot near the kitchen that you’ve learned without realizing.

He’s back.

Then you close the laptop, set it on the coffee table, and turn your cheek into the cushion, look at the pile of envelopes on your entryway table.

––––––

John’s door opens on the second knock.

He’s still in his coat, tired around the eyes, a little rough at the edges, a shadow of seventeen days under his jaw, but solid underneath it all anyway.

His eyes find yours and the blue warms immediately.

“Hey–” he starts but doesn’t quite finish before you’re holding his post out. Both arms extended, all of it stacked between you, and you push it into his chest until he has no choice but to catch it, both arms coming up to gather it against himself, and you watch the burden of it register in his face.

He looks down at the pile. Then at you.

You stand in his doorway, swallowing around the ache that’s risen in your throat, close enough to see the slight furrow forming between his brows as he takes in your face properly. Your eyes are stinging at the corners and you blink against it once, hard, and hope he doesn’t catch it.

“Thank you,” he says carefully, testing the temperature.

You nod once before you turn around and walk back down the hall toward your own door, your arms wrapping around your middle.

His voice is behind you only seconds later.

“Hey,” he calls.

You keep walking. The seventeen days are sitting heavy and tender somewhere behind your sternum and you don’t trust your face to do anything reasonable if you turn around.

“Hey.” Closer now, and when you reach your door and put your hand on the knob he’s right there behind your shoulder. You can feel the shift in the air that happens when he’s near and you stop even though everything inside of you wants to put the door between the two of you.

“Come on, duck,” he says gently. Not pushing or persuading, just patient. Like he always is with you. “Let me come in.”

You stand there a beat longer.

Then you push the door open and go inside without looking back, leaving it open behind you and he follows.

You go back to the sofa and tuck your feet up beneath you. John settles into the armchair across from you, still in his coat, elbows on his knees, hands loose between them. His eyes find yours and stay there, you hold his gaze and feel the full sharp aggravation of his composure being more intact than yours.

“I heard you leave,” you say eventually, because one of you has to. “Wednesday night.”

“Yeah.”

“And then I got home Thursday and the post was there and I just–” you stop. Breathe through your nose. Keep your voice level. “I just thought, right. He’s gone again.”

He exhales through his nose, a muscle shifting in his jaw. “I had to leave on short notice. It was–”

“I know,” you cut him off, your eyes squeezing shut. “I know how it works, John. I knew how it worked before any of this.” You gesture between you, which encompasses rather a lot. “I’m not asking you to have filed the flight plan with me. I understand that’s not…” you pause, “that’s not what this is.”

He’s watching you carefully, his head tilted just slightly, listening.

“But,” you continue, and your voice does something small and involuntary on the word that you wish it wouldn’t have, “you could’ve knocked. Even just to say you were going. Two seconds in the hall. That’s all I’m asking.”

“You’re right,” he says simply.

Which is not what you were braced for, and it takes the momentum clean out of you in a way that is almost annoying because you had more to say and now the air has gone out of it.

He looks down at his hands, turns them over once, like he’s checking something, and then back to yours. “I’m not used to–” a pause, longer this time, his thumb pressing along the ridge of his knuckle in a back and forth. “There’s usually no one to tell,” he admits finally. He scratches at his beard, his eyes flicking around the room before finding yours again. “There hasn’t been. Not for a long time.”

“How long?” you ask, gently.

He exhales. “Five years, give or take.”

You wait.

“Her name was Alyce,” he says. “We were married eight years. She left while I was deployed. Which–” the corner of his mouth moves, something that is not quite a smile but more like amusement, “–in fairness to her, I gave her plenty of reason to.”

“John–”

“No, it’s–” he shakes his head, eyes dropping briefly to the floor before coming back to yours. “It is what it is. The job is the job. It takes what it takes and there’s not much left over at the end. She needed someone who could give her more than I could.” He says it evenly, like he’s made his peace with it. “I don’t blame her for it.”

“But it hurt,” you offer quietly.

He looks at you, something moving across his face that’s weary along the edges. “Yeah,” he agrees. “It hurt.”

The rawness of it sits in the room and you look around your flat and think of his and something clicks into place.

“So you stopped having someone to tell,” you say knowingly, understanding.

“It’s easier,” he admits. Not easier because it’s better, but easier because it’s safer. Because the things that can’t be taken from you are never offered in the first place.

“I’m not asking you for anything you can’t give,” you tell him, meaning every word of it. “I just–” you pause, finding it, “I just want to know when you’re gonna be gone. That’s all. A knock at three in the morning, a note under the door. Even a text.”

He sits back in the chair, hands dragging from his knees up his thighs.

“Yeah,” he says. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay,” he repeats, nodding.

“Give me your phone,” you say, flopping your palm out toward him.

He goes into his coat and reaches out to put it in your waiting hand. You take it, put your number in, give it back. He looks at the screen, his thumb resting against the edge of it, and then at you.

“I’ll text you,” he says. “Before I go next time.”

“I’d like that.”

He nods once, certain, and pockets the phone.

“I’m… I’m glad you’re back,” you admit a bit shyly.

“Yeah,” he breathes. “Me too.”

And the armchair, you both seem to realize at the same moment, is very far away.

He unfolds himself from it slowly and crosses the room, and you tip your chin up as he reaches you, expecting something, you’re not sure what exactly. He dips down and presses his lips to the top of your head, your eyes shut. His hand comes up to rest against the side of your face, and you look up at him as his thumb grazes over your cheekbone.

“Night,” he says.

“Night,” you manage, which comes out considerably softer than you intended.

––––––

His flat is exactly as he left it.

He stands in the middle of it for a moment and the silence there feels different than it did before. Before he knew what your keys sounded like and what your laugh did to the air around him.

He makes tea that he doesn’t drink, even if he had, it wouldn’t have settled him. It’ll be a few days before he can sleep.

He sits on the sofa in the dark with his head hanging back. Thinking about the way you looked at him when he opened his door.

Five years of no one to tell, and then you.

He thinks about Alyce. Not with the old sharp pain – that’s long worn smooth – but with the clarity of knowing he’s made this mistake before and exactly what it looks like from the inside. He’s been through enough deployments to know what they do to the people waiting on the other side, and he has no business asking anyone to do that, least of all someone with her whole life still in front of her and no reason to spend any of it waiting around for him to come back from places he can’t even name. He’s being sensible.

He goes to bed. Lies on his back in the dark and stares at the ceiling.

He’s being sensible about this.

At some point the building settles into the stillness of the late hours, the city outside has found its lowest register, and he’s still awake, still staring at his ceiling fan, and the arithmetic he has been doing all evening has stopped producing the answer he needs it to and is producing the only answer it has been since the night you stood at his door with a bottle of whiskey.

He knows what he wants. He’s known longer than he’s willing to admit to himself.

He sits up on the edge of the bed for a moment, digging the heels of his palms into his eyes before he finally gets up.

He doesn’t think about it after that. Doesn’t give himself the opportunity to talk himself out of it. He pulls on a shirt and crosses his flat in the dark, opens the door, and takes those nine steps down the hallway, in his socks, to knock.

On your side of the wall, you surface from the beginnings of sleep, the knock finding you through the fog of it. You lie there in the dark with your heart already doing something that has nothing to do with being startled.

You know it’s him.

You get up without turning the light on, padding through your flat barefoot in your sleep shirt, your hair doing whatever it’s decided to do, and you don’t hesitate at the door, don’t stop to think about what time it is or what it means that he’s here – you just open it.

He’s standing there in the flickering light of the corridor, worn tee and dark joggers, hair slightly displaced, and your face does the thing it does before your brain has caught up – concern pulling at your brows, sleep lingering in the corners of your voice.

“Are you alright?” you ask, rubbing the cloudiness from your eye.

He looks at you. Then he exhales through his nose.

“I thought about you,” he admits. “When I left that night.” A pause, his jaw clenching. “Thought about you the whole time I was gone, actually.” His eyes hold yours, set and tired and very direct. “Still thinking about you now.”

You blink.

“Couldn’t stop,” he adds, a little quieter, like that’s the part that finally got him to this point.

You look at him standing there having apparently lost an argument with himself sometime in the last hour, and you can feel your heart kicking up.

You step back from the door and he follows, and before you’ve finished taking in the fact of him his hands are on your face, palms warm and sure against your jaw, tilting you up toward him.

He kisses you like he’s been thinking about it for, you don’t know, seventeen days, maybe.

He tastes like toothpaste and smells like cucumber.

It isn’t frantic or rushed. It’s deep and sure and heavy, and his thumbs trace along your cheek, and you feel the intention in every bit of him. 

You step backward again, and again he follows without breaking the kiss, kicking your door shut behind him, one hand leaves your face to find your waist and pull you in, and you go, your back bending to his will. You kiss your way out of the living room and down the short hall toward your bedroom with the certainty of two people who have been heading here for a long time and have finally stopped pretending otherwise.

The bedroom is dim, the sheer curtains doing little to keep the night out – moonlight pressing through in a pale wash, pooling across the dark wood floor, catching the edge of your wooden bed frame, the honey-dark shoulders of the vase on the nightstand where a bouquet has gone beautifully drowsy, petals loosening at the edges.

The duvet is a deep forest green, plush and slightly rumpled from where you threw it back, and the whole room has this energy, he’s learned, that could only belong to you.

He walks you back to the bed slowly, both hands at your waist, and when the backs of your knees find the mattress he stops. Pulls back from your mouth just enough to look at you properly, his chest rising and falling with a discipline that tells you his control is already working harder than usual, his hands finding the hem of your shirt, his fingers curling into the cotton.

“Can I?” he asks, low.

“Yes,” you answer immediately and breathless, and the corner of his mouth twitches.

He lifts it up over your head in one slow motion and sets it aside, and then he just… looks at you. Not hungrily, he’s just taking you in.

You stand there with your nipples already tight in the cool air of the room, his eyes dropping to them and lingering, and the flush that goes through you is half embarrassment and half something hotter underneath. The patience of him, the absence of urgency, makes you want to fold in on yourself.

His hands trace your shoulders, thumbs over your collar, down to the curve of your waist, his palms warm and slightly rough against your skin. You stand there, your fingers twirling into the fabric over his ribs, and let him do whatever he likes while you try to remember how breathing works.

He bends his head and his mouth follows where his hands had been – your shoulder first, then the place where your neck meets it, then lower, his tongue dragging hot and wet across one nipple before he draws it into the heat of his mouth. Your neck falls limp, chest pushing into him, and your knees go soft. One of his arms is around your back before you’ve registered that you needed it to be. 

“I’ve got you,” he whispers against your skin.

Your fingers find the hem of his tee and he lets you pull it off, his arms lifting to help, and then he’s in front of you in the dark. You’ve had your hands on his chest before but this is different. This is him, bare skin and the solid weight of muscle and a scar just below his ribs on the left side that your fingers find without thinking and trace, following the full length of it. He goes very still while you do, watching your face, something in his expression coming loose in a way it doesn’t often let itself.

Your hands drop to the waist of his joggers.

His jaw shifts. His breathing has deepened, every exhale measured in a way that tells you the measuring is costing him. You ease the waistband of his joggers down past the heavy ridge of him – he is hard, has been, the length of him pushing up against the cotton of his boxers – and he steps out of the joggers and kicks them aside. Then he drops to one knee in front of you, his hands finding the waistband of your underwear and drawing them down, all the way to the floor. Then he straightens, hands skimming back up the outside of your legs as he rises, and when he looks at you something darkened with desire moves through his face that you feel from your jaw to the backs of your knees.

“Come here,” he says, low, and draws you down onto the bed with him.

He settles over you braced on his forearms, the solid bulk of him bracketing you, and kisses you for a long time before he does anything else. Like he has every minute of the night to use and intends to use them, his mouth moving from yours to your jaw to your throat to your collarbone, tracing you like each inch of you is worth whatever time it takes.

Your fingers curl into his hair as he kisses the center of your stomach. His hand moves over you slowly – your waist, your hips, the soft inside of your thigh – and the room is hushed except for the sounds the two of you are making, the soft scrape of your sheets and your breath that’s gotten heavier.

You pulse has long stopped behaving itself.

When he finally looks up at you, blue irises glinting in the moonlight, chin resting lightly against your sternum, eyes finding yours, hair displaced thanks to your hands.

“How d’you like it?” he asks, genuine and entirely unhurried, and your breath catches on its way in.

“I–” you start, and stop, blinking the tips of your ears going warm.

He waits, chin still resting against you, eyes on yours, thumb tracing an idle circle against your hip.

The exposure of being asked and actually having to answer makes you look at the ceiling for a moment before you come back to him.

“From behind,” you admit, like a small and private thing being handed over.

His face softens and opens without judgment – and he moves up over you, one hand coming to rest against the side of your face, his thumb tracing the line of your jaw up to your ear.

“We can do that,” he whispers. “But not at first, love.” His eyes hold yours, darker than they were a minute ago, his pupils crowding out the blue. “I wanna see you.”

You reach up and pull him back down to your mouth, and he comes willingly, and the talking is over.

His hand slides down over your stomach, fingertips dragging down the seam of you for the first time, and you are already so wet for him that the first slow pass of his fingers through your folds makes the both of you go still for half a second. He exhales something hot and rough against your throat at the wetness of you, his middle finger gathering it and sliding back up to circle your clit, and your hips jerk up off the mattress into it.

“All for me?” he murmurs into the hollow of your throat, low and ruined.

“All for you,” you breathe, because you can’t lie to him about this with his fingers between your legs.

He works you slow, keeping the heel of his hand pressed against you while his middle finger slides in tight circles around your clit, then over it, light and then firm and then light again, reading every catch in your breath, every twitch of your hips. His mouth is still at your throat, his beard scratching at your skin. The sound of you against his fingers, the slick wet drag of it in the hushed room, is loud enough that you would be embarrassed by it if you weren’t already past caring.

“Please,” you breathe.

“Tell me,” he says, mouth still at your neck. Not teasing, really – just wanting to hear it.

“Inside,” you manage. “Please, John.”

He gives you what you asked for; one finger first, slipping into you with how wet you are, pressing deep and curling until your back lifts off the mattress and a sound escapes you that you couldn’t have stopped if you tried. The second presses in beside the first and the stretch of them pulls another soft moan that he catches with his mouth.

He works you open carefully, reading every clench and shift of your hips, until you are completely lost and soaking his hand, your fingers curling into his shoulders, the others into the sheet beside your hip, his name a breathy continuous thing behind your teeth.

By the time he shifts and leans back between your legs to hook his thumbs into his boxers and pushes them down you are already halfway gone. You reach down between your bare bodies, wrapping your hand around him.

The sharp breath he pulls in through his nose makes you feel powerful in a way that travels all the way to your fingertips. He watches your hand for a beat before flicking up to your face, your gaze is nowhere near his.

His cock is thick in your hand, heavier than you were prepared for, and the way he twitches against your palm makes drool pool under your tongue. Dribbles of him have already gathered at the head where you spread it down with the pad of your thumb. Your breath goes short and your eyes flick up to his face before you can stop them.

“John,” you breathe.

“Mm,” he hums.

“That’s–” you pause, eyes dropping briefly and then back up, “–that’s a lot.”

Something moves in his expression that is considerably worse than one. “Yeah,” he says, like you’ve just commented on the weather. His thumb comes up to brush your glowing cheekbone. “Alright?”

You nod and guide him to you, the head of him dragging through the wet of you once, twice, before you settle him against your entrance and look up at him.

“Still okay?” he asks, his voice rougher now, the careful control of him working harder than it has all evening.

“Yes,” you tell him.

He comes forward, resting his mass against you, a forearm braced beside your head, the other at the base of your neck. He eases forward, watching your face the whole time, his thumb on the bone of your jaw like he’s trying to keep you present – and the feeling of him, the stretch of him, the slow and overwhelming fullness of him opening you up inch by inch, pulls a sound from you that starts quiet and builds into something much louder, your fingers digging into his back hard enough to leave marks, your head tips back into the pillow, eyelids fluttering closed.

“Look at me,” he coos, the pad of two fingers pressing down on your chin to tip your face back to his.

You bring your eyes back and he holds them there, easy-like. He breathes in slow through his nose, and you follow his lead naturally. He doesn’t move until he feels you adjust, until the tension in your hands ease around his biceps and your breathing finds something closer to his own rhythm, until the tight resistance of your body softens around him completely and your hips cant forward on their own, asking for the rest of him.

“Good girl,” he breathes against your temple, pressing his lips there as he fits the last inch of himself inside of you.

For a moment, he just stays there. Doesn’t move. Lets you feel every vein of him buried inside of you, the heat of his cock pulsing against your walls. His forehead moves to yours and he exhales something wrecked into the space between your mouths.

“Christ,” he huffs.

Then he moves – deep and measured, his eyes staying on your face, reading every flicker, every catch of breath, every involuntary sound you willingly give him, shifting the angle of his hips, adjusting, until he finds the place that makes your back arch clean off the bed and your nails scrabble at his shoulders and your mouth fall open around a moan that could wake anyone on the floors above and below you.

“There?” he asks, voice rough.

“There,” you confirm breathlessly, your whole body pulling toward it. “Th-there– right there, please–”

“Okay,” he says simply and gives you exactly that, again and again, deep and relentless and fucking precise. Again, until the room has narrowed to a dim square of your bedroom and the weight of him and the low quiet things he says against your skin make everything tighter and headier and more consuming.

The tension builds slow and inevitable from the ground up – and when it crests it takes you completely, your whole body drawing taut and then releasing all at once in a long shuddering wave, your cunt clenching, pulsing around him as you come, and you cling to his shoulders while he holds you through every second of it.

His lips find your ear, his voice barely above a murmur.

“You showin’ off, duck?” he breathes, nearly in awe, a grunt as he drags his cock lazily against the quiver of your walls. “Or does your pussy just do that?”

He sounds, insufferably, like he’s smiling.

“It did that for you,” you manage, breathless and completely shameless about it.

He stills, pressing his mouth to your temple, your cheek, the corner of your jaw, his beard brush at your skin.

“Alright?” he asks gently.

“More than,” you breathe, bringing your knee up against his hip.

You push at his shoulder and he reads it without a word, rolling onto his back and drawing you with him in one fluid motion, his hands settling at your hips as you find your balance astride him, the shift in angle pulling a sharp sound from you both.

You look down at him – hair thoroughly displaced, jaw tight, throat flushed, his hands warm and heavy at your hips, his cock buried so deep in you from this angle that you can feel the shape of him against something you’re not sure has ever been touched before by any man.

You feel the heaviness of his eyes on you as you begin to move, rolling your hips in a slow testing circle that pulls a low sound from somewhere deep in his chest.

His jaw tightens. His hands grip harder. The sound reverberates through your palms where they’re pressed flat against him and you feel it in your sternum.

“Jesus,” he moans. “Wish you could see what I see.”

A flush crawls up your spine to your face and you have to look away from him. “Stop,” you whine.

“No,” he breathes through a smile. “You– you’re fuckin’ gorgeous.”

“John,” you warn, unable to receive a compliment under any circumstance, but especially this one. His hands tighten on your hips and he digs his thumbs into the meat of them.

You look back at him and his eyes seem to be everywhere – your face, your throat, the bounce of your tits as you find your rhythm above him, the place where his cock disappears inside you, wet and shining in the low light. His thumb moves from your hip to your clit, and at the first slow circle of it you gasp, tempo stuttering, hips jerking forward.

His hands slide up your sides, calloused palms dragging warm over your ribs, his thumbs grazing the underside of your breasts before settling at your shoulderblades. He draws you down to him, your chest meeting his, and kisses you once, slow and deep, his cock still buried in you, his hand cradling the back of your head, fingers tangling in your hair.

Then his mouth moves to your ear.

“Hands and knees.”

The authority of it goes straight through you. He helps you up off him with one hand at your hip as you lift, the slow drag of his cock leaving you pulling a moan from both of you. You’re already turning before your knees have found the mattress, his promise being kept, your body moving for him without thought.

His hand smooths up your back and presses, easing your chest down to the pillow, his palm warm and broad.

His hand drags the length of your spine. His mouth follows it part of the way down, between your shoulders, and you feel him exhale hot and rough against your sensitive flesh at the sight of you laid out for him like this.

Then his cock is dragging through you again, the head of it notching into your dripping well, and even after everything you’ve already taken, the stretch of him from this angle has you gasping into the pillow before he’s even fully seated.

“Mmmmm,” you keen, high pitched, “John.”

“Still with me?” he asks, his lips at the back of your neck, his breath warm against your skin.

You take a deep breath and exhale slow.

“Very much with you,” you say into the pillow.

He sits back on his knees and his hands find your hips again, fingers pressing far past gentle in a way you will feel tomorrow and are already glad of.

He makes good on his promise.

He starts slow, pulling almost all the way out before sliding back in to the hilt, every inch of him dragging against your walls, letting you feel the full length of him with each stroke. His grip on your hips holds you exactly where he wants you, not letting you push back to chase it, just feeding you his cock at the pace he chooses. The first few thrusts are deliberate, almost careful, like he’s learning what this view does to him before he lets himself have it.

Then he finds it, hips canting just so, and the head of his cock drags against something that has you sobbing into the pillow, your whole body lighting up from your tailbone outward. You feel his answering exhale against your back and his pace begins to climb. The sound of him fucking into you slick and obscene in the hushed room, the quiet slap of his hips meeting the back of your thighs, the wet drag of him pulling out and pushing back in.

And the room goes away completely.

Not because it isn’t happening – it is very specifically and overwhelmingly and in vivid and consuming detail happening – but because the feeling of him like this, the depth of him, the full length of his cock from this angle, the low unrestrained sounds he’s making behind you, is simply too much to hold alongside conscious thought.

He keeps it precise, hitting that spot inside you on every stroke, and you are vaguely aware that your fingers have found the headboard, that your knuckles have gone white against the wood, that you have been making sounds for minutes now that you have no memory of deciding to make.

One hand is splayed warm at your hip. The other slides up the length of your spine, vertebra by vertebra, and into your hair, not pulling, just resting there, grounded, his fingers curling gently at the nape of your neck. He says your name once, low and wrecked, like it got out before he could think about it. Then you feel his chest pressed to your back.

“You feel...” he starts, low against your shoulder, and stops. Like the rest of it isn’t something he’s ready to hand over yet. But he does, regardless. “Made for me.”

You feel the truth of that in his hands and his mouth and the way he presses his forehead briefly to the back of your neck like he needs a second to collect himself.

His control gives way by inches – shorter strokes, harder, like he can’t bear to leave you for even a moment – and you can feel him losing himself in you, the discipline of him fraying with every thrust, until your thighs are shaking.

Your hands fist into the sheets as his hand slides around your hip and finds your clit, fingers working you in slow tight circles. That in combination with the bullying of his cock grows to be too much, too much, too much, too much…

“That’s it,” he whispers, broken, at the back of your ear. “I got you.”

And you let go.

It takes you completely – longer and deeper than before, cresting in a long consuming wave that pulls every muscle taut before releasing all at once, your whole body shuddering through it, your cunt clenching around him so hard he groans against your shoulder – and you press your face into the pillow and let the sound of it go muffled while he holds you through every second of it.

He follows not long after – his rhythm losing its precision, his breathing ragged against your shoulder, your name one last time in that low completely wrecked voice – and then he stills, his cock pulsing inside of you as he comes, his forehead pressed between your shoulder blades, both of you breathing like you’ve forgotten how and are relearning it together.

The room comes back slowly.

The distant hum of the city. The press of the pillow against your cheek. The solid weight of him, his heartbeat gradually quieting against your back, his hand moving after a moment to rest loose and warm at your waist like it belongs there.

Neither of you speak for a while.

He moves eventually – pressing his lips to your temple before rolling to his side and drawing you with him so you’re tucked against his chest, his arm settles around you naturally.

His hand moves in a slow idle path along your arm. Up and down, not asking anything.

“Hi,” you say softly, into the quiet.

He reaches up and tucks your hair back from your face.

“Hi,” he says back.

You lie there together in the quiet of it, his arm around you, your hand flat against his chest where you can feel his heartbeat slow beneath your palm, and the whole evening sits around you like something you’re both still figuring out the shape of until you both drift off.

––––––

He’s still there in the morning.

His arm is around you, heavy and warm, and you lie very still for a moment in the early hush of your bedroom and take stock of it – of him, of the dull ache reminding you of last night.

You try to move carefully, extracting yourself without waking him, which turns out to be optimistic as his arm tightens slightly before you’ve gone anywhere, a reflexive, unconscious thing, and you go still and wait and after a moment it loosens again and you ease out from under it and sit on the edge of the bed in the soft morning light.

You look back at him.

He’s on his back now, one arm where you were, his face slack with sleep in a way it never is when he’s awake – the lines of his face softer, younger somehow, the silver at his temples catching the pale light filtering from the curtains. He looks, you think, like a person who doesn’t sleep enough finally sleeping.

You get up, grabbing his tee shirt from the floor to pull over yourself, and head to the kitchen.

The kettle is just coming to a low boil when you hear him in the hall, you turn toward his footfalls and he appears in the kitchen doorway shirtless, last night’s joggers slung low on his hips. He leans against the frame, arms crossing loosely.

“Morning,” you say, reaching for two mugs from the shelf.

“Morning,” he replies, voice rougher than usual from sleep, and you feel it in the backs of your knees which is genuinely inconvenient at this hour. “Was lookin’ for that,” he says, tipping his chin at you.

“For what?”

“My shirt,” he smiles sleepily.

“Oh,” you say, leaning back against the counter.

“Oh,” he mocks.

“It’s very soft,” you explain, glancing down at it.

“Mm,” he hums. “S’why I wear it.”

“Would you like it back?”

He looks at you for a long beat, eyes moving down the length of you in his shirt and back up, and the corner of his mouth pulls.

“No,” he says simply. “Looks better on you.”

The kettle clicks off behind you. You turn to pour, conscious of him still watching. You slide his mug across the counter toward him, and he steps into the kitchen to take it, the warmth of him passing close behind you on his way to lean against the opposite counter.

“Hungry?” you ask, already opening the fridge.

He looks at you with an expression that suggests he’s already aware of your limitations in this area.

“I’ve got eggs,” you say, grabbing the carton. “I cannot promise anything about what state they’ll be in when I’m done with them, but…”

The corners of his eyes crinkle. He sets his mug down and pushes off the counter. “Move over.”

“John, I can make eggs–”

“Move over,” he says again, the same way, and you move over.

He ends up making the eggs, showing off while you sit on your counter and drink your tea, just watching him occupy your kitchen on a Sunday.

He leaves mid morning.

Shirtless and in his socks.

“I’ll see you,” he says, which is not a specific plan and both of you know it, but it’s right for the moment.

“Yeah,” you say. “See you.”

He looks at you for a moment, kisses you once, and steps into the hall.

“Lock it,” he reminds you, pointing.

You lock it.

––––––

The days that follow have a gauzy, suspended feel – humming and languid, like the week is holding its breath around something new.

Tuesday evening you’re halfway through a bowl of pasta on his sofa when he comes back from the kitchen with two mugs of tea and sits beside you, close enough that your knee rests against his without either of you adjusting, and you watch something on his TV that neither of you are really watching and it is, you think, almost unbearably nice.

Wednesday he knocks on your door at half seven with leftover curry he made too much of, and you eat it at your kitchen table and he fixes your kitchen drawer that has been sticking for three months without being asked, just notices it sticking when you open it and gets up and sorts it while you’re still talking, and you watch him do it with a feeling in your chest that you’re running out of room to not examine.

Thursday morning you pass each other on the stairs and he’s got his coffee and you’ve got your bag sliding off your shoulder as usual and he steadies it with one hand without breaking stride and says something low and dry about the weather that makes you laugh all the way to the office and occasionally at random intervals throughout your entire working day.

It feels, in short, like something.

But neither of you call it that.

Friday night he mentions the pub.

You’re at his kitchen table after work, shoes off, a glass of wine in hand, watching him cook, when he brings it up.

Casual, offhand, not quite meeting your eyes as he says it.

“Got plans tomorrow night,” he says. “Havin’ drinks with some of the lads.”

“Oh yeah?” You trace the rim of your wine glass. “Kyle and them?”

He glances at you. “Yeah.”

“Can I come?” you ask, which comes out more naturally than you intended, and you watch him shift on his feet before he turns back to the stove.

“It’s just–” he starts, talking into the pot.

“Just lads having drinks, yeah,” you finish, easy. “That’s fine, I just thought–”

“It’s not that,” he cuts in, setting the spoon down before he turns around, and his expression is careful in the way it gets when he’s choosing his words more carefully than usual. “I just think–” he pauses. “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. About what this is.”

The kitchen is quiet.

“What is it?” you try, keeping your voice light.

He looks at you. “I like what we have,” he says. “I just– I’m not in a position to be–” he stops. Tries again. “You’re not my– I can’t give you–”

“A relationship,” you say, for him, because he clearly needs the help.

Something in his jaw shifts. “Yeah.”

You look at him for a moment over your wine glass, he’s trying so very hard to be honest with you at the expense of something sitting visibly behind his eyes.

“John,” you say. “I know. And I’m not askin’ you for anythin’ you haven’t already given me,” you tell him, simply and honestly. “I know what this is.” You offer him a genuine smile. “I’m a big girl.”

He looks partly relieved and partly still wrestling with something more complicated underneath it, neither of which he examines out loud.

“Right,” he says, after a moment.

“Right,” you agree.

He picks the spoon back up. The kitchen settles around you both, easy, like a thing that needed saying has been said and the air is cleaner for it.

You finish your wine and he finishes cooking and you eat at the kitchen table with your feet tucked up under you, the conversation finding its usual easy rhythm, and it is fine. You are fine. You meant what you said and you know what this is and that is enough.

“Finally getting on site Monday,” you say at some point, pushing a piece of bread around your plate. “The MoD job. Been buried in paperwork for weeks, it’ll be good to actually see it.”

He glances at you for a moment. “Nervous?”

“A little,” you admit. “First time managing something like this so...” You pick up your wine. “Should be interesting, to say the least.”

“You’ll be alright,” he says, in the tone of a man who has been paying close enough attention to have formed a very firm opinion about what you’re capable of.

Then he goes back to his dinner like that’s simply the end of the matter.

––––––

Monday morning the cab is idling outside the office at half eight, Cerie already in the back seat with a coffee balanced on her knee and a folder open in her lap, David loading the boot with more equipment than any of them will need. You slide in beside her, your own folders clutched against your chest, the weekend still sitting in the back of your mind.

The driver glances in the rearview. “Address?”

You read it off the top sheet without looking up.

“Stirling Lines,” you say. “Hereford.”

––––––