Such is Life.

He’s cute. That’s the first thing you notice about the man bound to the interrogation chair in front of you. You raise an eyebrow at Melanie, who despite being your boss is a red-blooded woman with a shitty husband, and she smirks at you. “Yes, I know.”

“He’s really the guy?” You ask, circling him slowly. “This guy?”

She huffs. “Gideon seems to think so.”

“Did Gideon fuck him up?” The man is bloodied, lacerations and bruises and swelling covering almost every inch of exposed skin, but you can still see the taught, tanned muscles beneath. He flexes his fingers above his bindings, and you note the protruding veins over his large, scarred hands.

Melanie makes a disgusted sound. “He tried to reason with him.”

“And how did that go?” You know how it went. There’s only one reason they call in you, after all.

“How do you think?” She steps forward, fisting the man’s short bleached blonde hair and yanking his head up. You blink in surprise at how young his face is. Little more than a boy, really. “He’s mute apparently. Likely deaf, too.”

You frown, your mind sifting through all you know about the shaman. Why would he pick a disabled boy to train as his super soldier when the city was crawling with less difficult orphans to target? You lift your hand to his face and click your fingers beside his ear. No recognition passes over his face, but he does turn his eyes up to you. A bolt of pure arousal shoots through your core at the depthless fury in his wide green eyes. Pretty, deadly boy. “So who tried the big stick approach?”

Melanie huffs. “June.” She doesn’t elaborate, and you don’t need her to. In the holy triad of interrogations, you were the final point. Gideon had his words, his negotiations and his carefully scripted routines. June 27 had her blades and her batons and her endless thirst for violence. And then there was you, with your endless thirst for…

You tilt your head to the side, licking your lips slowly as you take in every rippling inch of the boy in the chair. “Not a peep, huh?”

“Not so much as a goddamn flinch.” Melanie sounds grudgingly impressed. “If it wasn’t so close to the show I’d say we should see if we could break him down for parts, but-“

“Sure,” you hum, lifting a hand to brush the hair back from his forehead. “If he’s been with the shaman all this time… I think my methods will be suitably disarming.”

Melanie rolls her eyes as she turns on her heel. “Just… clean up when you’re done. I don’t wanna hear the details.”

You don’t bother to say goodbye as she leaves the room. The Boy drops his head back to his chest as though defeated, but you know better. Every inch of him is taut, practically vibrating with energy. You were going to have your work cut out for you draining every last drop out of him.

You head to the far wall for a washcloth and fill a shallow bowl with warm water. You put this beside his chair, and the boy nudges his foot towards it as though he’s trying to kick it over. You can’t help the delighted smirk that spreads across your face at his defiance. He’s going to be so much fun to play with.

You pull up the other chair beside him and sit, soaking the sponge in water and drawing it across a deep cut on his thigh. He does flinch then, from the shock more than the pain, and you use your other hand to pinch his chin between your thumb and forefinger. “I’m not trying to hurt you.”

His face doesn’t change at all, and you wonder whether he can read lips. You’d only ever known one deaf-mute before, a girl from your home village, and she’d been able to.

“I need to clean these up before infection sets in.”

The boy hesitates, his eyes dropping to the sponge in your hand. You don’t appear to be armed, and there’s a gentleness to your face that he hasn’t seen on anyone since he stepped foot in this goddamn fortress. He nods, just once, and you smile.

“Good. Tell me if it hurts.” You lick your lips, and the boy’s eyes drop to your mouth. Good. “Or, you know. However you communicate.”

The boy reads the words on your lips before dragging his eyes back up to yours. You’re pretty. You might be the prettiest girl he’s ever seen. And that makes sense, on Van Der Koy soldier wages and Van Der Koy soldier rations. You’re not suffering from the famines and water contaminations of the outer sectors, because you’re the enemy. A muscle in his jaw ticks, and he pulls his face out of your loose grip as you glide the wet sponge up his thigh.

“That’s okay,” you coo, dropping your hand to your side. “I’ll be gentle.”

He closes his eyes as you glide further up, the stained shreds of his cargo shorts barely concealing the muscles of his thighs. Your fingers brush against his skin every now and then, and Boy feels his cock twitching to life with a sense of inevitable dread. It’d really fucking hurt if you decided to hit him there.

You dip beside him to resoak your sponge, wringing bloody water out before returning your attention to his thigh. You roam higher, higher, your fingers just grazing over the rapidly hardening bulge in his shorts, and you suppress a smirk. You’d barely touched him and he was already almost ripe for the taking. Nobody had ever been this easy, this sensitive. It was like he was desperate, like he’d never been touched so intimately, like he was a…

You pause, raking your eyes up his body as your hand settles over his erection. “Are you a virgin?”

The boy says nothing, of course, but his cheeks stain a deep red and his hips lift against the light pressure of your hand.

“Oh.” Oh, you were going to hug Melanie Van Der Koy. Not really, because she’d have you fired, but this was a fucking gift. This was better than paid time off or a pay rise. This was the best perk of the job anybody had ever fucking had. You press your palm flat against him, rubbing over the rough fabric of his shorts, and the boy makes a tiny, gravelly sound in the back of his throat.

You reach for his face again, cupping his jaw gently and tilting his head to yours. “Have you ever been touched here?”

And The Boy knows he should do nothing. He knows he should freeze, should retreat inside himself and wait for this to be over as he’d done so many times before under threat of violence. But your hand feels the opposite of violent, there’s a dull throb of pleasure building in his stomach and his cock aches.

He shakes his head, and the slow smile that curves over your mouth fills him with a heady mix of arousal and dread.

“You’re so pretty,” you coo, deftly unbuttoning his shorts and reaching inside for his cock. Your lips part on a moan as you wrap your fist around him, noting with a thrill that he’s both long and thick, the skin on his shaft smooth and warm and perfect. You feel arousal slick in your own underwear as you squeeze him, and The Boy’s mouth falls open as his head drops to watch the motion of your hand in his underwear.

He’s touched himself there before, obviously. He’d been thirteen the first time he’d woken up in the middle of the night with his cock sticking straight up, and he’d panicked as he tried to push it back down again. But the motion of his hand pulling on it had felt phenomenal, and he’d wrapped his fist around the length and dragged his hand up and down, up and down, the pressure building until he’d spurted goo and the stiffness had gone away. It had become close to a nightly ritual after that, because the hard ground at his back felt less uncomfortable when his body had released the pent up tension. And because jerking his cock felt good.

But now, with your hand pumping his length, The Boy wonders if he’d ever even done it right. Because there is nothing, no feeling he can name, no word in his dictionary that compares to the sheer, electric bliss of being touched by another person.

You run your thumb over the head of his cock, collecting the sticky precum oozing from his tip, and rub it into the underside of his head.The Boy whimpers, biting hard on his bottom lip as his hips lift off the chair to chase the friction of your palm against his length.

“No, no.” You chide, releasing him completely and pulling your hand out of his shorts. You lick your palm, tasting the musky salt of him, and The Boy watches with helpless desperation as his aching cock falls back against his stomach. “Not like that.”

You reach for your own belt, unhooking the complicated series of latches and letting it drop to the floor. You kick it away, and The Boy is reminded for a brief, sickening moment of the fact that he’s tied to a chair and you’re a fucking Van Der Koy soldier, but then you shove your pants down and step close enough for him to see the wet patch on the front of your panties and the slight sheen of slick on your thighs, and he decides maybe he doesn’t care about any of it right now.

“You’re a tough guy, huh.” You say, climbing into his broad lap and wrapping your arms around his neck. The Boy yanks hard on his restraints, the muscles in his arms rippling under the strain as his cock twitches against your core. “Wouldn’t break for Juney.”

The boy pulls his top lip back in a sneer, and you roll your hips down to drag your wet center over his cock. His lips pop open in an ‘o’ and you do it again, rocking back and forth against him.

The rough drag of your wet panties against his bare cock is both maddening and unbelievably hot, and he has to sink his teeth into his bottom lip just to stop himself from silently begging for more.

“You’re so hard,” you whisper, leaning closer to push your tits against his chest and tracing your tongue over the closed seam of his mouth. He parts his lips and you lick into his mouth, prodding against his teeth and further to the empty space where his tongue should be.

You pull away from the kiss, your fingers pushing into his mouth, and The Boy considers what would happen if he bit you as you reach back and brush against the scarred stub of his tongue.

“What happened?” Because you know this isn’t a birth defect. Rumors of The Shamans cruelty may have been exaggerated in some stories, but he was a demon capable of true evil. You imagine him pinning a small boy to the ground and hacking out his tongue, and a shiver of revulsion runs through you.

The Boy sees the change in your face, and shame washes through him even as you grind over his cock. He wraps his lips around your fingers, sucking hard enough to hollow his cheeks, and the disgust on your face morphs back into that strange, hungry look that fills The Boy’s stomach with butterflies.

You hum, and The Boy feels the vibration in his chest through yours. He wishes he could touch you. Even more than he wishes he could get out of here. Maybe even more than he wants to kill Hilda Van Der Koy, at least right now. Your breasts feel soft and warm against him, even with the little peaks of your nipples pressed to his vest.

“You don’t need a tongue,” you say, pulling your fingers gently from his mouth and tilting your hips back. The boy watches your eyes flutter closed and then he drops his gaze to where your own fingers have disappeared into your panties, your hips jerking softly against your hand as you touch yourself.

This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to The Boy. Well, okay, it isn’t. The execution of his mother and sister, the near-death experience of his own hanging and the many, many beatings he’d taken from The Shaman were arguably worse. But watching you fuck your own hand whilst sitting in his lap, so close he can smell your arousal and he can feel the dampness on his thighs is torture. He’d been taught to take a beating, but he hadn’t been taught how to handle this.

“You get me so wet,” you mumble. The Boy doesn’t really know what you mean, but he knows how the words make him feel. He strains harder, the ropes cutting viciously into his arms and legs, and you pull your hand out of your underwear and press your sticky fingers against his lips.

The Boy doesn’t hesitate to suck them into his mouth, hollowing his cheeks around the digits and drawing the essence of your arousal towards the back of his throat to pool on the stub of his tongue where he can still taste. You’re tangy and delicious, and his mouth waters in a demand for more.

Christ this is the best day of your life. The Boy is a mess beneath you, his hard cock leaking precum against your stomach where it’s trapped between your body and his, and he sucks on your fingers and looks at you with such pathetic desperation that you almost come, just from that.

“I wanna see what you taste like.”

You slide off his lap, settling onto your knees between his legs and wrapping your fist around his cock. He’s already very clearly uncomfortable, the head is an angry, swollen red and he’s leaking bead after bead of glistening precum. You trace your tongue over his slit, relishing the salt of him and the way this enormous man tries to jump out of his chair at the feeling.

“Hold still.”

He shakes his head, trying again to jolt away from the awful stimulation of your tongue lapping over his exposed, over-sensitive tip, but there’s nowhere to go and you’re just getting started. You wrap your lips around the head of his cock and suck hard, and the chair actually does skid back an inch with the force of him throwing himself backwards. You release him with a pop and narrow your eyes up at him. “Don’t make me bite it.”

The Boy does hold himself still then, because whilst your lips and your tongue feel agonizing, he knows your teeth would hurt so bad he’d blackout, and he doesn’t want to miss a single moment of this time with you. You run a hand up his thigh, skipping over the deep laceration you’d pretended to clean earlier and creeping your hand into the leg of his shorts to tickle against his balls.

The Boy’s jaw goes slack as you lower your head, drawing his cock over your tongue and further, further into your mouth until his sensitive tip nudges against the pulsing wet resistance of your tonsils. You hum then, and The boy feels the vibration so intensely that he swears he can hear the melody of it singing through his blood as his hips buck up against your face and his cock is squeezed into the tightness of your throat.

He makes a sound then, a beautiful, strangled yelp, and fresh arousal slicks in your underwear as you begin to bob your head in time with his erratic little thrusts.

You feel the tightening in his balls as he nears his orgasm, and you squeeze his balls a little too harshly as you pull off his length and let his cock slap back against his stomach.

The Boy could cry. He feels like he might, at the sudden loss of your mouth and the actual ache in his cock when he was so, so close to a release.

“Not like that,” you say again as if it explains anything. He glares at you, bottom lip jutting into an absurd pout, and you climb back into his lap and bite his lip into your mouth. The Boy feels the shift as you lift and resettle, but he’s too focused on the way you’re sucking his lip to really notice what you’re doing until –

You sink down on his cock, taking him in one long drop, right to the hilt, and The Boy gasps so sharply his lip is sucked right out of your mouth. His eyes drop to the point where his entire cock has disappeared inside your body, and he looks back at you with wide-eyed alarm.

But then you move, and The Boys entire reality shifts. If he’d thought your hand was good, your mouth had been phenomenal. But if he’d thought your mouth had been phenomenal, your cunt was transcendent. Nothing could compare to this. Nothing. Not even seeing Hilda Van Der Koy’s head on a pike.

“You’re so big,” you coo, rocking your hips back and forth as you’re stretched around his thick cock. “Feels so good, huh?”

He can only nod, his jaw tense and his heart thundering against his chest as he bucks up to meet the languid rolls of your hips.

You wrap your hand around his throat, pressing enough to restrict his airflow, and The Boy’s lips part on a soft gasp as he tries desperately to suck in a breath. “You’re so perfect,” you coo, your breath ghosting over his lips like a taunt as you plant your knees on the seat either side of his thighs and lift yourself off him only to bounce back down.

It’s new and it’s terrible and The Boy is close to his release with just a few sharp bounces. “Your body was made for me.” You moan, tightening your grip on his throat as you ride him. At this angle his length grazes against your sensitive walls with every drop of your hips, and you reach your free hand down to rub your clit as the cord of arousal in your stomach tightens.

Much too soon you see his eyes glazing over and feel the tell-tale twitching of his cock inside you, and you drop your hips to hold him deep and freeze, stilling your movements completely and stealing the moment of his orgasm from him for a third time.

The Boy’s head drops forward, his shoulders shaking with silent, agonised sobs as you squeeze harshly around his cock without providing any friction at all.

You press your fingers to his chin and tap, and he looks up at you with wounded puppy-dog eyes. You want to kick him. You want to ride him until he sees stars. Instead you rise up onto your knees and let his cock slip out of you, relishing the little gasp he makes as his sensitive tip brushes against his vest.

“Not like that,” you coo, and his pretty face contorts into a black fury that has you so feral you almost abandon the routine and drop to your knees again. He watches you step out of your panties, holding them close to your face as though you’re examining them before you catch his eye and hold his gaze. A thick, foamy glob of spit drops from your lips into the already slick fabric, and you approach him with lithe, predatory intent.

The Boy tries again to jerk away, already knowing that the feeling of the wet fabric against his cock is going to be the worst kind of torture when he’s already so oversensitive, but although the chair skids back another inch your fist is wrapped around his cock just moments later, and The Boy makes an audible sob.

You hum, lifting your free hand to card through his hair, scratching your nails lightly against his scalp as you drag your soaked panties over the head of his cock and rub your cotton-clad thumb over his slit. He sobs again, hips spasming helplessly against the intense stimulation, and it’s music. It’s off-key, strangled music to your ears.

You tighten your grip, jerking him fast and rough, feeling the drag of friction against his length and wincing a little at how uncomfortable it must feel. Not that you care, of course. You’d done far, far worse to other toys, though maybe none quite so pretty as this Boy.

The hand carding through his hair tightens into a fist, and you pull his head up. He swallows, the thick bob of his Adam’s apple making your mouth water as he looks at you with pathetic, defeated misery. “Oh, you wanna come so badly.”

He doesn’t even nod. Just keeps looking, his hips fucking gently up against your fist. He’s right on the edge. Right on the edge of being broken, and you think maybe it’s time to let him come. The release will be so sweet, and you think about the sounds he’ll make when you finally drag him over the edge, the way his face will go slack with pleasure the-

You’re so preoccupied with the own genius of your plan that you’d missed it. That The Boy had wriggled his fingers around to the pocket on his cargo shorts. That he’d found a thin, sharp-ended object. He remembers the moment Gideon had leaned close and brushed his fingers over The Boy’s thigh, and he’d assumed the guy was just a pervert. But no. Here it was.

He’d held himself still, let you coo and caress and torture him as he’d slipped the scalpel against the rope on the inside of his wrist and begun to work at the fabric until it frayed enough to break.

Your eyes go wide as he brings his arms up, the rope dropping to the ground and the chair buckling as he stands. You turn to run, and he hooks an arm around your waist and throws you to the ground. Your head hits the concrete floor, dazing you for a moment, and The Boy keeps one eye on you as he saws away the ropes tying his legs to the chair.

You aren’t moving, and he reminds himself that he doesn’t care about that as he frees himself and rummages in your cabinets for weapons. He glances back and sees you rolling onto your back, your hand lifting to your head and coming away bloody. He launches across the room, dropping over you and pressing the scalpel to your throat hard enough to bead a line of blood across your skin.

Your breaths come fast and ragged, your chest heaving with it, and The Boy can’t stop himself from looking. Your nipples are hard against your shirt, and he brings his free hand up, brushing his fingers against one stiff peak and then the other. Your lips part on a soft moan, he feels it through your throat where his hand rests, and you lift a leg to hook around his waist.

His cock is still out, still painfully hard, and he lowers himself against you, already gravitating towards the tight, wet heat of your bare core.

“Go on,” you whisper, “Take what you want.”

The Boy knows he should run. Should knock you out and get the fuck out of here before the culling is over and he misses his chance. But you lift your hips, and the tip of his cock is nudged against your slick folds and he can’t. He growls, grabbing both your hands and pinning them above your head with the press of one wide palm as he angles his hips down and pushes into you again.

Being fucked by The Boy is an entirely different experience. You were used to being in the driver’s seat, to teasing and torturing and taking what you wanted from prisoners. But this was different. The Boy fucked into you with raw, animalistic hunger, his hips snapping against yours so violently you’re certain you’ll have bruises tomorrow.

He bares his teeth, the scalpel pressing a little deeper against your throat, and you flutter your muscles around his cock in an effort to distract him. It works, his jaw goes slack and the pressure on your wrists increases as he leverages his weight against his arm and drives deeper into you.

You feel the dull sting of his tip slamming into your cervix and you whine. It’s that – the rippling pressure of reaching the limit of your insides and the little whine that quivers out of your lips that sends The Boy hurtling over the edge. It’s the sweetest, most painful orgasm of his life as he shoots his load into you. His hips still against yours, grinding desperately down as his cock twitches and spurts and pulses and aches. It seems to go on for hours, and you watch in rapt fascination as his pretty face contorts with the agony of a long-denied release and he just keeps fucking cumming.

You squeeze around him, milking his sensitive cock for every last drop of his orgasm, and The Boy winces as he finally pulls out of you. The scalpel clatters to the floor as he rolls onto his back, chest heaving and mind completely empty of all thought. He feels weightless, boneless. He wonders if he’s dead.

He feels the shift beside him, and turns his head to see you on all-fours, crawling slowly towards the door. Your hips sway with the motion, your ass looking soft and supple as you move, and his cock twitches with fresh interest as he reaches for your ankle and tugs.

You go sprawling on the floor, the wind knocking out of you with an ‘oof’, and you barely have time to register the movement before he’s on top of you again. His rapidly stiffening cock presses against your ass as he leans down, the hard planes of his torso pressing against your spine as he nuzzles the sharp tip of his nose against your shoulder and plants his hands on your hips, digging his nails into the meat of them as he ruts against your ass.

The Boy reaches down and grips his cock, dragging it down the crack of your ass and finding the slick, wet hole that’s still leaking his release, a steady stream of it slicking on your thighs. He pushes into you, releasing his base as he bottoms out, and your back arches at the renewed stretch. The Boy wraps an arm around your throat, holding you tightly against him as he snaps his hips down against your ass over, and over, and over.

You can do little more than moan, drool spilling from your lips as the air is pressed from your lungs. There is a sharp sting as he bites down hard on your shoulder, and you clench around his cock. He’s much too sensitive for that, and he comes again with a broken moan against your neck as he buries himself inside you.

This time, you don’t try to move. You listen as he pushes to a stand, hearing the sharp intake of breath as he tucks his cock away, and you wait.

The Boy knows he should kill you. He twirls the handle of the scalpel in his fingers, watching his cum leak out of you and willing his cock to stay soft this time because he really, truly can’t do it again right now.

He knows the best chance of him getting out of here without anyone raising the alarm is to kill you, but he can’t do it. When he thinks about painting the floor with your blood it just seems like such a fucking waste. You’re too pretty. Too soft. Too his if he were capable of wanting things. He rounds your body, dropping to a crouch by your head and tapping your jaw. You lift your head, pushing weakly up on your arms until you’re resting on your knees. The Boy cups your cheeks, leaning in to press a soft kiss to your lips before pulling back and mouthing “don’t be one of them.”

You watch his lips form the words and you meet his eyes as you bring your fingers to your own mouth, pinching your thumb and forefinger together and drawing them across your closed lips in a zipper motion. The Boy smiles, a genuine, bright smile that steals your breath, before turning the scalpel in his expert grip and running for the exit.

You sigh as you watch him go, knowing in your gut that you’re letting the best toy you’ve ever had walk out on you.

You give him a five minute head start before sounding the alarm.

You can see his baby blue pickup parked across the street, and you hold your head high even though your hands shake badly on the bar of your shopping cart. He’s always there, though he doesn’t sit outside the house so much since your daddy levelled a shotgun at his cab and commanded him to stop.

Bobby doesn’t take no so good, never did. It had taken six months of misery for you to realize you deserved better, and it had taken him wrapping a hand around your throat and choking you until your vision blurred for you to realize you had to leave. And it had been ugly. It had been the ugliest thing you’d ever seen, the way Bobby Weston had devolved into frenzied madness. He’d threatened, he’d pleaded. He’d smashed through the windows at the schoolhouse where you taught second grade. He’d yelled at you in the street, tried to drag you back from the doors of the church on Sunday the first time you’d ever tried to go inside, figuring a little time with God might soften him to your cause.

The reverend had intervened, and even bobby Weston knew better than to hit a man of the cloth. It had been almost a year since you’d severed his hold on you, but the ghost of his possession remained. You hadn’t had a date. Not a single one, despite the hungry stares and the anonymous whistles sent your way anytime that blue pickup wasn’t around. You knew why; Bobby had put the word out. That you were off-limits. That you were still his, despite the pretty little fiancée he’d picked up three towns over.

You glance towards the street as you load your groceries onto the counter, and Pam gives you a sympathetic smile. “He out there again, hon?”

You nod. “I switched my shoppin’ day. I don’t know how he figured it out.”

“You want me to talk to Mac?” Pam’s husband was the deputy sheriff, and he’d spoken to Bobby on his wife’s request once before. Your families labrador had gone missing the next day, and turned up drowned at the bottom of the creek with a stone tied to his collar.

“No. Won’t do no good anyways.” You don’t say the other part, that the only thing that’ll stop Bobby Weston is your surrender or your death. People didn’t much like to hear that, even if it was true.

“There’s a parade this weekend for the boys who just got back from the islands.”  

“Yeah.” You muse absently. “Mama’s baking pound cakes like she’s personally responsible for feedin em all.”

Pam laughs. “My mummas had the stove on for three straight days. Guess she thinks they been on rations too long, need some southern hospitality.”

Your smile is more genuine as you think about a flock of fussing mothers force-feeding stew and cornbread into the exhausted boys. “No fightin; that, I suppose.”

The boy bagging your groceries dips his head as you hand over several bills. “Can I walk these out to your car, ma’am?”

You want to say yes, because the sun is beating down on the street and your bags are heavy, but if Bobby Weston sees this boy walking beside you he’ll shatter his kneecaps and that wouldn’t be fair at all when he was just being sweet.

“I got it. Thanks. See you, Pam.”

“See you at the parade?”

You shrug, hefting your bags against your chest. “Maybe.”

Maybe means no, it always means no. Being out in public, so exposed to a crowd with his hateful eyes on you just wasn’t worth it.

You almost make it to your car. You’re just a few paces away when the bag laden with perspiring bottles of milk and juice breaks open, wet paper splitting and your groceries spilling across the sidewalk.

“No, no, no,” you groan, placing your remaining bag down upright and scrabbling to collect the bottles as they roll away. You scramble forward as one makes for the road, stopping abruptly when it is pinned beneath a worn leather boot.

Your eyes travel up a leg, your stomach flipping over with anxiety until you meet the wide, green eyes of a stranger.

“Uh, thanks.” You mumble, reaching for the bottle beneath his shoe.

“No bother.” His voice is a low rumble of southern honey, and you swallow as you push up to a stand. He reaches out to steady you, long fingers wrapping around your wrist as he helps you to your feet, and you jolt at the contact, pulling out of his grip.

“I have to go.”

“I didn’t mean to…” he breaks off, agitation flashing across his features. “I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”

You force your breathing to regulate, meeting his piercing gaze again. “You didn’t. I just… need to go.”

The stranger picks up your forgotten bag, hooking his long fingers around two stray bottles on the ground as he follows you to your car.

“The bag boy will load your trunk for you. I don’t know much but I used to do that, and not just for the pretty girls.”

You flush, taking the bag from his hands with more force than you mean to. Your eyes dart to the side, to the pickup parked across the street. You can see his tanned arm hanging out the window, his fingers closed into a fist.

“Guess I ain’t pretty enough to qualify.”  You snap, and the man blinks at you, the soft smile on his face dropping.

“Now hey, I didn’t mean it like that. I mean, you’re pretty. You’re awful pretty.”

You swallow thickly, fingers brushing his as you take the bottles from his hand. “Well now you really are making me uncomfortable. You don’t know I’m not spoken for.”

The man’s eyes drop to your hand, the bare, delicate fingers. “No ring.”

“Don’t mean nothing.”

“No.” He agrees, taking your hand and bringing it to his lips. He presses a kiss to the back of your hand and you feel heat curl in your core at the contact. His eyes never leave yours, holding you hypnotised in his wide, unblinking stare. “You have a nice day, ma’am.”

You snatch your hand back, hurrying around to the driver’s side and climbing into the cab with your heart hammering against your chest. Your hand shakes as you reach for the key and turn it in the ignition, the familiar rumble of your daddy’s car helping to ease some of your anxiety. You lift your hand, examining the faint sheen of his spit on your skin, and you lift your hand to your own mouth to press a kiss over the phantom mark.

Willard watches you do it, watches you shake your head a little as you pull out of the spot and head down the street in a car old enough to have seen a time before the wars. He thumbs a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and lights one, licking over his lips once before taking a drag. His head had been full of gunfire for months, and he’d seen the bleeding, burned crucifixion of Miller Jones every time he closed his eyes until he’d learned to drink himself into unconsciousness. But now his head was full of the melody of your voice, and when he closed his eyes he saw your face, and it was the closest thing he’d felt to peace since before he’d enlisted.

A woman he vaguely recognizes steps out of the market, tugging a nametag off her blouse, and Willard flicks his cigarette to the ground. “Excuse me, ma’am?”

She looks up, eyes flashing with alarm before she squints at him. “Willard Russell? Emma’s boy?”

Willard ducks his head, though it’s strange to be called a boy by a woman he’s pretty sure was in the grade below him at school.

“Yes ma’am.”

“You back from the front?”

Willard nods, impatient to bypass the pleasantries and the inevitable questions about his time in the war. He doesn’t wanna talk about that. He doesn’t ever wanna talk about that, but certainly not right now.

“There was a girl just came outta the grocery store. Dropped her bags. He produces the singular jar of preserve he’d slipped into his pocket when it had rolled out of your sight. “She left this behind. I’d like to return it to her.”

The woman sucks her bottom lip into her mouth, eyes lifting to the street, where the blue pickup that had so captured your interest still idles. The man inside leans out of the cab, staring right at Willard, and the woman sighs.

“You give it to me, I’ll make sure she gets it. I see her for sewin circle at the church on Thursdays.”

“I wouldn’t mind stoppin’ in on her.”

The woman’s smile tightens. “It isn’t a good idea, Willard. You don’t wanna be getting mixed up in that.”

Willard feels a tightness in his stomach as his eyes flick again to the man in the truck. “She spoken for?”

“Not anymore, but it don’t matter much. You just got back to town and that’ll earn you a little leniency, but not much. That one is a nasty guy. He thinks you’re sweet on her, he’ll make you pay for it.”

Willard sees the terrified set to your pretty face as you’d looked past him at the truck, and an awful wave of deadly calm settles over him. “I see.”

“Good.” The woman relaxes. “There are plenty of girls lookin for a guy with some war glory attached. You’ll do alright.” She holds out her hand for the jar, and Willard slips it back into his pocket.

“I’ll be holdin’ on to this, thanking you kindly.”

“Willard.”

“You have a good day now, ma’am.”

He tips his hat in her direction before turning the opposite way. His route takes him across the street, and he passes the pickup slowly, getting a good look at the greasy little man inside. He doesn’t look so threatening up close, and though he doesn’t drop his eyes from the challenge in Willard’s he doesn’t make a move to step out, either.

Willard runs his thumb over the label on the jar in his pocket, rubbing at it like a lucky rabbit’s foot as he makes his way home and tells his mama he’s got the urge to pray again.

*

The heat creates an unbearable pressure-cooker of perspiration and dead air inside the church building, and no amount of sweet, iced tea makes so much as a dent in it. You fan yourself with the folded pattern for a new dress, your hair sticking to your face in little tendrils as you blink through the salt in your eyes.

The lively chatter of gossiping women breaks off as the doors to the church open, wafting a hot breeze through the room as a man steps inside. Men don’t go to sewing socials, preferring to stop in at the bar down the ways while they wait to pick up their wives, but this one strides in with purpose and judging eyes follow him as he stops right in front of you.

He removes his hat, and your breath hitches in your throat at those beautiful, big green eyes boring into you. “You’ll forgive my intrusion.”

You nod mechanically, politely, dazed as he produces a little jar of apricot jelly from his pocket and holds it out to you. “Your forgot this, outside the store. I wanted to return it to you personally and apologize again for my behaviour.”

This was bad. This was the worst thing that this peculiar, beautiful stranger could be doing right now. Because word would spread, ohh how it would spread. And Bobby Weston would pay him a visit and it would be all your fault.

“There was really no need, we don’t know each other.” You say loudly. “You coulda just put it in at the store.”

The man licks his lips, a small smile quirking at the corners. “If I did that I wouldn’t have got the chance to see you again.”

You can hear the collective intake of scandalised breath as the boldness of his words richoches around the room. You look helplessly to the side, catching Pam’s eye. Her shoulders slump, and panic straightens your spine. “There was really no need, I… we’re strangers to one another. Plain and simple.”

“I’m Willard.” He says softly. “Willard Russell. My mama Emma usually comes here but she’s still bakin for the parade. I got back from the Pacific Theater this week.”

You swallow, eyes raking over him again. He’d been to war. He had no way to know about Bobby Weston, no idea that you weren’t worth the risk or the hassle. “Well I’m awful glad you made it back in one piece. Glad for all the boys who made it back.”

Willard nods dismissively. “I guess I’ll be up on the grandstand on Saturday night, but I wanted to know if you’d do me the honor of bein my date anyways.”

You want the ground to swallow you whole. You want every single woman in the room to suffer a bout of collective amnesia so they don’t go home and tell their husbands and their sons about this. You want pretty, stupid, stubborn Willard Russell to take it back and skip town.

“I’m not sure I can do that.”

Willard’s smile falters only a little. “Well, that’s alright. I got time and patience. I’ll see you there, won’t I?”

You swallow thickly, feeling your cheeks heat. “Whole town is goin.”

“Yeah but I’m askin if you’re going.” He winks, and a curl of unfamiliar warmth spreads through your lower belly.

“I… yeah. I’m goin.”

He scoops your hand off the table, pressing the back of it to his lips in another kiss that sears its way into your memory forever as he holds your gaze in his. “Until Saturday, then.”

You watch him leave, noticing the broad expanse of muscles across his back under the stretch of his linen shirt, and you press your thighs together under the table unconsciously. You’d see him Saturday, if Bobby Weston hadn’t put him in the hospital or worse beforehand.

*

Willard combs his hair whilst his mother nags and nags and nags from the washroom door. “It just isn’t proper, Willard. Goin up like that in front of everybody. I’ve had three callers just this morning, and lord knows what people are sayin’ behind our backs.”

Willard hums, spinning on his heel and crossing the room to wrap his arms around his mother. She slumps against him, folding into the warmth of his touch as she’s always done. “I’m sorry for the scandal, mama. But I ain’t sorry for doin it. She’s the one.”

Emma Russell pulls back and fixes her only son with an exasperated look. “Willard, she’s the first girl you set eyes on since you’ve been back. Not to mention she’s trouble.”

“The ex, I heard.”

“No, you didn’t.” Emma shakes her head, nudging her nose against his chest before stepping out of his reach. “Bobby Weston’s put people in the ground over her.”

“She ask him to?”

Emma’s brows shoot into her greying hairline. “What does it matter?”

“It matters.” Willard says. “If she wants him to do it, then alright. I’ll step down. But that’s not the way it looks to me.”

She sighs, resigned. She knows her boy, and he’s stubborn to a fault. “She broke things off with him a long time ago. He used to beat her something awful, so I hear. He didn’t take kindly to her ending it, and he hasn’t let her go.”

Willard’s hands curl into fists. He thinks about you, about your wide eyes and the soft curves of you as you shrank low away from the man in the blue pickup, and rage hardens in his guts. “Well, I’m throwin my hat in the ring on this one. If he wants to tussle, I’ll put him down myself.”

He means it. Emma watches her son duck out of the doorway of his childhood bedroom, wondering when he got so tall and how she’d missed him becoming a man, and she wrings her hands with the heart-wrenching worry that only a mother can truly understand.

Willard doesn’t like the spectacle of it all. That the town wanted to do something nice for the boys coming home, he could abide. Many of the guys needed that, needed smiling faces and handshakes and validation that the horrors experienced in the cesspit of war weren’t for nothing. Willard knew better, and he didn’t want to shake the hand of the mayor or eat cotton candy hand delivered by a giggling high school girl. His eyes scanned the packed town square, looking for you amongst the crowds.

It takes him entirely too long to find you, long enough that disappointment is churning his guts to silt and he’s considering heading home when there you are. Standing with the cashier from the grocery store, holding a softball in your hand as you eye the bottle pyramid in the game booth. You stick your tongue out of the corner of your mouth in concentration before flicking your wrist, and the pyramid topples with one hit.

Your friend claps and you grin at her, the smile so breathtaking that it steals the air right from Willard’s lungs. He’s picking his way through the crowd before he can think about it, ignoring the well-wishes and welcomes of town folk as he fixes on you.

“That was quite a shot.” He says when he’s close enough, and Willard is pleased to see that whilst your grin shrinks, you don’t stop smiling altogether.

“I got some practice in this area.” You say with a shrug.

“I’m glad you came.”

“Thank you for your service.” You say, your cheeks staining with blood as you blush. It’s the prettiest thing Willard’s ever seen, and he feels butterflies beat in his stomach at the teasing edge to your voice.

“I know about Bobby Weston.”

The smile does drop from your face then, the color draining from your skin as you knot your fingers together. “Then you know why I… why I can’t-“

“I’m not afraid of him. If that’s why you’re sayin no to me, I want you to hear it. I’m not afraid of him, and I wanna take you out on a date. On a whole lot of dates.”

“He put a guy in the hospital for sitting by me at church.”

“Let him try that with me. Let him try.” Willard steps closer, taking your hands and untangling your fingers. “I know we just met and we’re practically strangers. But your mama knows mine, I grew up here just the same as you. You’re the prettiest girl I ever seen in my life and I’m not in the habit of letting things I want slip away without a fight.”

You drop your eyes to the point where you’re connected, his big hands dwarfing yours completely. “Why me?” You ask quietly.

“Excuse me?”

You lift your eyes to his, biting your bottom lip in a way that sends a bolt of arousal straight to Willard’s cock. “I’m nothin special. I’m a little too plump and my hair never stays right and I got an ex boyfriend who’d rather see me dead than happy without him. You should find somebody else.” It’s the truest, most terrifying thing you’ve ever said out loud, and your hands shake with how scared you are.

Willard’s fingers tighten around yours, his thumb finding the point of your pulse against your wrist and tapping it in a steady rhythm. “You’re the prettiest girl I ever saw and that’s that. I respect your right to an opinion, and I know women are usually right bout pretty much everything, but I’m sticking firm on this one, darlin.”

Your core throbs at the use of the endearment, your palms slicking with sweat against his cool ones. Willard licks his lips, watching you squirm and blush for him, drinking in every blissful moment of it even as his cock thickens and presses against his…

He drops your hands suddenly, taking a deliberate step back and praying that the structure of his pants will hide the worst of his growing interest in you. It wouldn’t be proper, wouldn’t be remotely fair to you to make you look at that when you were being so soft and vulnerable with him.

Your eyes drop, following the path of his hands as he steps back, and your eyes widen a fraction when they come to rest on his crotch. “I’m sorry.” He mumbles, adjusting the fabric around his cock. “That isn’t… you’re just so pretty.”

You lick your bottom lip slowly, deliberately slowly, and Willard is fixed to the motion as his cock throbs and leaks. “Maybe I’m startin’ to believe you really think that,” you say, your voice breathy. Willard thinks about what you’ll sound like moaning his name, and the thought is almost enough to make him come without touching himself.

“Let me take you for a drink. Just a cup of coffee.” There’s a desperate edge to his voice, and you feel your underwear slick with arousal at the sound of it.

“He’ll break your legs. Or worse.”

“I’d like to see him try.”

“I’m not worth it.”

Willard smirks, shaking his head. “I disagree.”

You sigh, resigning yourself and him to the inevitability of your fates. “Alright. A cup of coffee. But you can call it off if you change your mind and I won’t be offended. Much.” You flash him a shy smile and Willard’s heart flutters in response.

“I ain’t gunna change my mind about you, darlin. You can count on that.”

*

You could count on Willard Russell. He’d shown up precisely when he said he would, helping you into the cab of his black truck and keeping one eye on you the whole ride into town. He seemed nervous, chewing absently on a little pick of wood, and you found yourself watching his mouth more than you should, imagining those lips on yours, that tongue…

He jogs around the car to open your door for you, offering his hand and not letting go of yours even after you’ve climbed down. He laces his fingers tightly through yours and tugs you towards the diner, and you feel the pulse of your panicked heart in the heat between your palms as people look up and stare at you.

“You two need a table?” The waitress asks, eyes dropping to your joined hands for a fraction too long before looking back up at you.

“Sure do. Something by the window if you don’t mind.”

She nods and scoops two menus from her station, and you follow her into the diner. Willard dips his head, lips almost brushing your ear. “Your hair looks so pretty in the sunlight. Forgive a man his pleasures.”

His voice is a low rumble of silk that sends shockwaves of pleasure through your core, and your eyes flutter closed as Willard guides you into one side of the booth and reluctantly detaches his hand from yours so he can sit opposite you.

“Can I get you some drinks to start?”

“Coffee, black.” He says, scanning the menu. “What’ll it be, darlin?”

“The same.” You say, looking at Willard and not looking at the waitress. You recognise her, and that’s a bad thing. It’s not a remarkable thing in a small town, but it’s a bad thing today because she’s dating one of the boys in Bobby’s crew, you’re pretty sure.

She offers Willard a tight smile before heading out the back, and you know there’s a payphone in by the store three doors down and you know you’re screwed.

“So tell me a little about yourself. You teach over at the school?” Willard, steeples his fingers below his chin.

“That waitress is gunna go tell Bobby we’re here.”

Willard frowns. “So?”

“So he’s gunna come here.” Your voice raises in pitch even as a whisper, and Willard reaches across the table for your hand.

“If he does, I’ll deal with it.”

You roll your eyes, a scoff pushing past your lips. “People don’t… deal with him. He deals with them.”

Willard’s fingers tighten on yours. “I may seem a way to you.” He says quietly. “But I seen things that’d send other men mad. I done things that’ll put me in the hellfire when the time comes. I ain’t afraid of your ex, darlin. I know you are and you got reason to be, but I ain’t. And he won’t touch you again. Not while I’m breathin, you understand?”

You swallow, your heart pounding in your chest. “I wanna believe it.”

“Then believe it.” Willard says with a shrug and a smile. He rubs his thumb over your knuckles and you lift his hand to your face, pressing a short, sharp kiss to his fingers in a gesture so bold you shock yourself.

“Well isn’t that nice.”

The voice slows the blood in your veins to an icy sludge as you turn to face him. Bobby looks murderous, his dark eyes rimmed in shadows as he sneers at you. “You goddamn whore.”

Your mouth opens as you drop Willard’s hand, and he lets you extract your fingers and drop your hands into your lap.

“Now there’s no need for that.” Willard says pleasantly.

“You’re new in town fella, so let me give it to you this once and we’ll say no more about it. You don’t want her. Shit, nobody wants her.”

“Seems like you want her awful bad.”

Bobby grits his teeth. “She tell you that? Delusional bitch. I got me a pretty young thing up in Sweetwater, ring on her finger and everything. What would I want with a fat old whore?”

“My experience folks always want what they can’t have. She ain’t yours no more and that kills you.”

The diner is so quiet you could hear a pin drop. You can hear the rough grating of Bobby’s breath wheezing through his chest. He only sounds like that when he’s really mad, like an engine about to explode. You shrink down in your seat.

“I’m bein as cordial as I can be,” Bobby says slowly. “But if you’re set on being a dumb fuck then I’ll make my point another way.”

“Not in here.” The diner’s owner and lead cook steps out from the kitchen, brandishing a frying pan like a weapon. “Not in my diner you don’t Bobby Weston. You never paid me back for the damages after last time.”

Bobby huffs a laugh, holding up his hands. “Alright Mac. Alright. Not here.” He turns on Willard, fixing him with a glare. “I’ll be seein you, boy.”

Willard’s blood heats at the challenge, and he almost gets up. Almost follows that piece of shit outside, but then you say “don’t” in a voice so small and desperate that he sits his ass back down and reaches across the table to take your hand. Your fingers shake against his palm, and he squeezes tighter. “None of what he said is true, you know.” Willard keeps his own voice soft and low, doing his best to soothe you as your bottom lip quivers like you might cry. That shouldn’t turn him on, but your big watery eyes turning up at him has his cock thickening in his pants and Willard knows he’s in deep. Way too deep, for a first date with a girl who took more than a little convincing.

“I don’t know why he can’t leave me alone,” you whisper. “If he thinks… all that.”

Willard hums. “He don’t think it. His pride is hurt by you movin on is all. Men are worse than little babies when their pride gets hurt.”

You nod, sipping black coffee so strong it coats your throat in tar. “Guess I’ll have to take your word for it, Willard.”

Willard. His name had never sounded so good, so pretty, so pure as it did coming from your mouth. “You go to church with your mama on Sundays?”

You look up then, brows furrowing at the change in direction. “Sure.”

“I been thinking I might do the same. My mamas been praying for my eternal soul more than usual, would be nice to give her knees a rest.”

You giggle, and the sound kicks up those damned butterflies in Willard’s stomach again as he grins back at you. He’d like to make you laugh like that every day for the rest of his life, if you’d let him.

*

The windows stand open and the doors ajar on Sunday morning, but the August heat leaves nothing at all unscorched and you’re practically sliding off the church pew as your mother huffs and puffs beside you. “Too hot,” she mumbles as she fans herself with the little bible she’s kept since she was a child. “They should hold church in the evenin’ when it’s this hot.”

You nod, because you do agree, actually. Weather like this is meant for walking in the forest or swimming in the creek, though you hadn’t done that so much recently. Not with the memory of your dog being dragged out of the shallows. Not with the threat of Bobby Weston lurking in the trees, waiting to pin you down and cut you or worse.

There’s a commotion at the end of your row, and you look down to see Willard having an animated disagreement with his mother. She tugs on his arm, trying desperately to pull him towards her usual pew where another girl sits waiting alone, but Willard doesn’t so much as glance in her direction. His attention is fixed on you, crinkles appearing around his pretty eyes as he smiles and begins picking his way over and between legs and bags until he’s squeezing himself into the little gap beside you.

“Ma’am,” he ducks his head to your mother, who stares at him slack-jawed. “I hope I’m not intruding.”

Your mother just blinks at him, utterly lost for words as he takes your hand in his and brings it to his mouth to press a chaste, lingering kiss against your skin. His lips sear hotter than the dusty heat outside, yet a shiver runs down your spine and prickles on the backs of your thighs.

“You know what you’re doing?” You whisper, leaning in just close enough for your breath to ghost against his neck. Willard tightens his grip on your hand, eyes fluttering closed at the sensation of being so close to your mouth. He could turn his head and connect your lips to his, and wouldn’t that be something?

“Declaring,” he murmurs, thumb rubbing circles against your hand. “Church ladies’ll get the word out.”

You sigh, slumping a little lower against the bench like it’ll do any good, and Willard chuckles under his breath. “You could at least pretend to be flattered.”

You don’t respond with words, but you part your legs enough to press your thigh flush to his own, and Willard stares at the soft spread of your skin moulded against his for so long that the sermon is over before he’s even registered it’d begun.

Willard doesn’t release your hand. Not when people start to shuffle out of their seats, greeting one another with handshakes and half-embraces, and not when his mama brings that poor girl over and presents her to him like a gift. “Willard, I want you to meet Helen Hatton. She’s been sitting with me all this time whilst you were away, keeping me company. I thought you might wanna thank her.”

Willard gives his mother a stern look like he’s about to argue, but you take one look at poor Helen’s scarlet face and extract your hand from his. “I need to say my goodbyes to a few folks anyway.” You slip away, and Willard looks longingly after you for a moment before his attention turns back to his mother.

“Well, I do thank you for minding mama for me.”

“It was my pleasure, of course. You were doin something so important.” Helen is soft-spoken and gentle in every sense of the word, and Willard can see the cogs ticking behind his mother’s calculated smile. She wants him to court Helen, and maybe if he hadn’t met you he might have done it. But his fate was sealed the moment he’d laid eyes on you and that was that.

“Well I do hope you’ll continue to sit with her from time to time, when I can’t make it to church.”

Emma’s smile tightens. “I thought we’d invite Helen back for lunch. Willard, you could take her in the truck, couldn’t you?”

“I got plans, mama.” He doesn’t mean to be disrespectful, but he does mean to be firm.

“With that girl?” Her voice is sharp, and Helen squirms like she wishes she were anywhere else at all. “I don’t think it’s wise to-“

She’s cut off by the sound of a scream, and Willard’s mind goes blank at the sound. He doesn’t know how he knows, but you made that sound. He shoves through the milling crowds, barreling down the steps and into the churchyard. His blood boils, his fists already curling into blunt weapons. He sees your bare legs scrabbling against the dirt, your dress torn and your palms split open from a smashed bottle littering shards of brown glass across the grass. He doesn’t remember much after that.

You wish you could forget it. You wish you’d stayed inside, stayed close to your mama or better yet that you’d never let go of Willard’s hand. But the air was stifling and you were sure there was a breeze outside, sure you could hear it creaking against the shutters. So you’d slipped out and stepped into the churchyard, just to breathe a little.

And that’s when you’d heard him, like a demon from the beyond as he stepped out around a tall headstone with a terrifying smirk on his face. “There’s the little jezebel.”

Your knees had buckled, and you’d looked frantically back at the church, but you’d have to pass him to reach the gate and you’d never get that far. “Please. Please don’t.”

Bobby’s smirk splits into a gloating grin. “You should hear the things people are saying about him.”

You blink, actually surprised. “Willard?”

Bobby flinches. “The other guys. You know they all get together all the time, got real close out there. Not him though. Russell’s weird. Unsettling. I mean he’d have to be, to take up with you, wouldn’t he?”

You bite your bottom lip, and Bobby’s eyes darken. “He’s been nothing but nice to me.”

“Yeah,” Bobby huffs a nasty laugh. “Only cuz he heard you’re easy, I’d bet. Word on him is he’d fuck anything that moved out there, man, woman or child. That he killed one of his own men, too.”

It’s your turn to flinch then. “If that were true they’d have marshalled him.”

Bobby shrugs like it doesn’t matter either way, and it kinda doesn’t. The court of public opinion would crucify him regardless.

“I don’t like seeing you paradin about town with him. Leaves a bad taste.”

You swallow thickly, eyes darting to the church again, but nobody’s looking for you and Willard hasn’t come out yet. Maybe he’s being charmed by the delicate, demure Helen Hatton after all. “Maybe you should stop looking, Bobby.”

He steps closer, each long stride narrowing the gap between you until he can seize your arms and shove you to the ground. “Maybe you should gimme something sweeter to chew on, huh?” He rips at your dress, the fraying seam unravelling at terrifying speed as you thrash against his body. Your foot connects with something fleshy and he grunts before dropping his weight on top of you, pinning your arms above your head as his furious face looms over yours. “You worried he won’t want you if he knows what a little slut you are for me?” He spits, saliva flying from his mouth. “Cuz you been ruined since long before I came along and you know it. His hand leaves your wrist to fumble with his zipper and you suck in a lungful of air and scream.

He cuts you off with a sharp press of his hand to your throat, and your vision explodes into a fantastic kaleidoscope of color. You think about how you never got to kiss Willard Russell, not even once, and that’s the saddest thing you can think of as you dip in and out of consciousness.

You’re weightless, limbs light as your eyes flutter open. There’s a dull, meaty thudding sound coming from somewhere, and you wonder if it’s the last beats of your own heart in your ears. But then your eyes focus, and you see Willard sitting astride a bloody, pulpy thing, and the thing whimpers like a wounded animal.

You drag yourself up, forcing words through your ruined throat. “Stop! Willard stop, you’re killing him.” Willard doesn’t stop, doesn’t even seem to register you’re there as he drives his fists into the unrecognizable slab of meat over and over. His eyes, those beautiful forests of endless green, never blink. Not until two of the men from the church drag him off, and he looks down at his ruined knuckles and then up at you, and the forests swirl into darkness as he drops to his knees.

Under the circumstances, the Sheriff determines to let Willard Russell go. Bobby Weston isn’t pressing charges, mostly because he doesn’t have enough teeth left to properly articulate an accusation and he’ll be eating through a tube for the foreseeable future. The town whispers about him, and about Willard, and about you. The blame, it had been decided, laid squarely with you for pitching two men against each other.

With your reputation in tatters anyway, you knock on The Russell’s front door in the middle of the afternoon, when just about anybody could see you doing it.

Emma Russell doesn’t smile when she opens the door, and she has half a mind to kick you to the dust when her son’s voice calls for you down the hall. “I saw her from the window, ma. Let her in or I’ll go out.”

Emma doesn’t want to be reminded of how awful he looks in the daylight, so she steps aside and lets you over the threshold.

Willard looks worse than you’d imagined. His hands are a mess, stained bandages tied roughly over his swollen, split knuckles. His bottom lip is little more than a fat bruise, having been forced into his teeth when Bobby had managed to get a couple of hits in early on in the fight. But he smiles when he sees you, his split lip weeping ghoulishly.

“You saved my life.”

He swallows, shaking his head. “Anyone woulda done the same.”

“No, they wouldn’t. And they didn’t. You did.”

“And I’d do it again. A hundred times over.”

You cross the room then, cupping his cheeks in your hands and pressing your mouth to his in a soft kiss laced with the metal of his blood. “I thought I was gunna die, and the worst tragedy in my mind was that I was gunna die without kissin you, Willard Russell. Had to make it right.”

Willard lets out a strangled little moan, his injured hands lifting to rest on your wide hips as he tugs you closer. “Dangerous thing, to give a man a taste of something like that,” he murmurs, leaning in to inhale against your shirt. “Could get addicted.”

“I don’t mind if you don’t,” you whisper, dipping your head to kiss him again. Willard presses up into you, his lip bleeding steadily against your chin as he deepens the kiss and licks his tongue into your mouth. Your knees go weak and the hands on your hips brace to support you, even though doing so sends a sharp pain through his damaged fingers. You abandon reason, climbing into his lap instead of stepping back, and Willard makes a surprised little sound in the back of his throat as your hand finds his growing hardness through his pants.

He breaks the kiss, licking his blood from your bottom lip before dropping his eyes to watch your hand work against him. “You sure?”

“So sure,” you whisper, wrapping your hand around him through the fabric and squeezing. “If you’ll let me.”

Willard huffs, eyes fluttering closed as his hips lift against your palm. “I never wanted anything so much as I want you.” His words are a rough growl of sound, thick with arousal, and your own core pulses in response as you finally slide your hand into his pants and grip the silky, stiff flesh of his cock.

He moans then, the sound sending a bolt of heat to your core as you reach up to rub your thumb against the sticky head of his cock. “You’re leakin for me,” you murmur, tapping the pad of your thumb lightly against the slick. “I’m leakin for you too.”

Willard’s fingers tighten against your hip for a moment before dropping to cup your puffy, wet pussy through the cotton of your panties. “God,” he whimpers, pressing his lips back to yours. You moan against his mouth as his lip splits again. You shouldn’t like the taste of his blood in your mouth. It shouldn’t be slicking arousal in your underwear right now but it is, and you wonder whether anything Bobby Weston had said was true, and whether you cared if it was.

“Need you to touch me,” you whimper against his mouth, and Willard’s fingers slip into the waistband of your panties without hesitation. You gasp at the sensation of his long, bruised fingers gliding against you, seeking out the bud of your clit and rubbing it in slow, pressurized circles.

“You’re perfect,” he whispers, voice like molasses dragging over your skin and heating through to your blood. “Every damn inch of you.”

You swallow thickly, squeezing Willards cock before jerking him lightly from tip to base and back up again. “I’m nothin special.”

Willard clucks his tongue before pulling his hand from your underwear, lifting you off his lap and tossing you onto his bed. You squeal in surprise, and he covers your mouth with his palm as he presses his knee against your core. “You gotta stop sayin that, darlin.” He chides, peeling your panties down with his other hand and dropping them onto the floor. “There isn’t a thing I’d change about you.”

You whimper as his fingers glide over your folds, the sound of your slick lurid in the quiet of the room. “I wish you wouldn’t look at me so much.”

Willard drags his eyes away from your core to look at your face, licking over his wounded bottom lip. “I can’t stop looking. Can’t stop…” he pushes his middle finger into you and you suck in a breath as your muscles flutter around him. “Touchin you.”

You bite down hard on your bottom lip to suppress a whimper as he settles between your legs, lowering his head to press his lips to your clit. “Tastin you,” he mumbles against your folds, the sound vibrating through you and curling your toes.

“Oh God,” you whine, pressing your palm over your mouth where his had been moments before. His tongue pushes your folds apart and circles your clit in agonizing, slow strokes. Your hips lift against his face, soaking him in your slick, and Willard moans.

The split on his lip burns as he sucks your clit into his mouth, but the pain only serves to heighten every moment, every brush of his finger inside you and every throb of your aching, needy pussy against his face.

There’s a sharper stretch as he adds a second finger, but then he curls them against you, massaging the sensitive flesh of your walls and your back arches off the bed as a surprised groan spills past your palm. Willard looks up at you, his big green eyes hazy with lust as he laps at your clit and drives his fingers into you over and over again, and you come undone with a sob as your body writhes beneath him.

Willard laps up every drop of your release, extracting his fingers from inside you and dragging his swollen lips over your clit until you're whimpering with overstimulation. He rolls your underwear back up your legs and presses a single kiss to the damp fabric before helping you to sit up.

"I should-" you reach for his pants, and he takes your hand.

"There's no need for it."

You frown, trying to untangle your fingers from his grip. "That isn't fair, and besides I want to-"

"Darlin," his voice is low and strained. "You got an effect on me. Don't make me say it out loud."

You glance down, noticing for the first time that the front of his pants is a shade darker than before, and your eyes go wide. "Oh."

Willard leans in, pressing a soft kiss to your mouth, and then a second and a third. You lean into him, a moan rumbling up from your throat and into Willard as you deepen the kiss, tasting yourself on his tongue. Your hand is still resting on his crotch, and your own core rekindles at the feeling of his cock stirring to life beneath your palm.

“I think it’s time for you to go,” Emma says from the door, and you about jump out of your skin as you jump off the bed. She’s tight-lipped and firm, and Willard’s shoulders sag as he wipes his still-wet mouth with the back of his hand.

“There’s no use arguin with her on it darlin. I’ll call on you soon as I can, I promise.” You hover, and Willard pushes up from the bed, revealing the stiff tent of his new erection. His mama gasps, turning her face away as Willard cups your cheeks and presses his mouth to your own. “I’ll call on you.”

You swallow hard, curling your fingers against the hard muscles of his arms for a moment as you savor the feeling of his body against yours. “You’d better, Willard Russell.”

You’re escorted from the room and marched off the property, and you’d feel ashamed of it if not for the lingering tingle of Willard’s kiss on your mouth and the giddy, churning flutter of release in your stomach.

*

You wonder if you’ll ever be able to untangle the scent of popcorn from the scent of blood. “Possession is nine tenths of the goddamn law, motherfucker!” Willard hisses, his thumb pressing too far against the windpipe of a boy you maybe recognize from high school. “You see my jacket on her shoulders? See my goddamn hand on her waist? She’s mine. You don’t look at her and you sure as shit don’t touch her, you understand me?”

The boy makes an awful gagging sound, choking against the bruising in his throat as Willard finally releases him and pushes seamlessly to a stand. His eyes are hard chips of emerald and he’s clenching his jaw so tightly you worry he’ll crack his teeth, so you let him take your hand again, and if he notices the shake in yours he doesn’t comment.

“Willard,” you try quietly, coaxing him towards the parking lot at the back of the fair. “Lets go home.”

“He was gunna cop a damn feel.” He spits, cracking his freshly healed knuckles in a nauseating series of clicks. “I gotta protect what’s mine, don’t I?”

You hum in agreement, luring him through the turnstiles and onto the gravel beyond. “Let me have a look at those hands. Lets go to the truck so I can see em better.”

Willard follows you until you reach it, and then he stops. “You were enjoyin the fair.”

“No,” you shake your head. “I was just enjoying being with you. Don’t need all those lights and people to do that.” You tap the cab. “C’mon, open her up. It’ll be quiet and just for us inside.”

Willard walks you around to the passenger side and opens your door, helping you up into the cab. There’s fresh blood smeared over the splits in his knuckles, and he smudges it on the skirt of your dress as you settle into the seat. Willard had been in no less than a dozen fights in the three months since you’d met him. All over you, and all started by him. You were tired of wondering when he’d snap. You were tired of reassuring him on things in his head. And tonight? Well, that was the last straw and you were going to fix it.  

He drives out to the forest, to the little dirt lot by the clearing where you’d taken him for a picnic on your third date. His shoulders heave with exertion, and his fingers curl so tightly on the steering wheel you’re afraid he’ll break it in half. “Willard, honey.”

“I ruined your night.”

“You didn’t. I swear you didn’t. You just… you gotta cool off.”

He turns his head then, eyes burning into yours. “There’s a lot of no good sons of bitches out there. I got a… a right to protect what’s mine.”

“You said it,” you say softly, reaching across the seat to splay your palm on his thigh. “I’m yours. Nobody else matters.”

Willard looks down at your hand, the smoothness of your skin and the warmth of your palm, and he shifts. “You ever go with Bobby Weston?”

You swallow, but you don’t withdraw your hand. “If you’re asking if he… if we…-“

“I shouldn’ta asked, I’m sorry.” He chews his lip into his mouth, damp hair falling over his forehead, and you crawl over the seat and push him back so you can squeeze yourself into the gap between his body and the steering wheel.

“You can ask me anything. You can have anything, Willard. I never liked anybody the way I like you.”

His hands drop to your hips, kneading against your soft flesh. “I don’t think I was always like this.” He says quietly. You can feel the gentle stirring of his cock against you, but you resist the urge to grind down against him. “You got my head all messed up, darlin. Can’t eat or sleep or do anything without thinkin bout you.”

You cup his jaw, tilting his face up to look at you. “I’m nothin special.”

You watch his pupils expand, feel the twitching of his cock beneath you as a muscle in his jaw ticks. “You know how I feel about hearin you say that.”

“Yeah, I know.” You tease, finally letting your core drag over his erection. “You gunna do somethin’ bout it?”

A slow smirk spreads over his face. “You got ten seconds.”

You grab for the door and throw yourself out, launching into the woods with a breathless laugh. You hear the slam of the door behind you, the heavy thud of his footsteps, and adrenaline turns your blood to electricity as you race through the trees, deeper and deeper into the forest.

He whistles, low and long, and your heart pounds in your chest as you pelt towards the clearing you know is just up ahead, where the moon shines through the thinning trees. You can almost hear the sound of the rocky falls beyond, can taste the cool kiss of the water. An arm as hard as steel winds around your waist and you scream as the air is knocked from your lungs by the force of the impact. He hauls you against his body, your legs kicking out at him without ever making contact as he drags you into the clearing and drops you onto the ground.

“I win,” he says quietly, a dangerous, sinful smirk on his face. “You gunna give me my reward?”

You swallow, licking your lips as you scramble to your knees and look up at him through your lashes. “You gunna take it, Willard?”

Willard growls low in his chest as he reaches for your hair, tangling his fingers in the strands and dragging your face against his covered cock. “You’re mine, darlin.” He mumbles, the thick southern drawl of his accent turning his words to a slur with his arousal.

You reach for the buttons on his pants, freeing his cock from the confines of the fabric and wrapping your fist around the base. It isn’t the first time you’ve taken his cock into your hand or your mouth, but the sheer size of him sends a little jolt of anxiety through you every time anyway. It’s worse tonight, with the plan you have in mind. You’re not sure how all of that is supposed to fit inside of you, even though Pam had told you that men can always make it fit. If a baby can come out, a man’s thing can go in. You’d wrinkled your nose at that, but you believed her. It felt different when the thing was inches from your face, though. You wrap your lips around his tip, flicking your tongue against the salty stickiness beading at his slit, and Willard moans.

“That’s it,” he whispers, canting his hips forward to encourage you to take more of him into your mouth. “That’s my girl.”

You look up at him as your eyes water, Willard’s cock pressing against the entrance to your throat with agonising pressure, and you moan against his length.

Willard’s whole body freezes up at the vibration shooting through his cock, and he feels his balls tightening when he’s only had the pleasure of your mouth for a few moments. “You’re too much,” he whispers, a wry chuckle escaping as he pulls out of your mouth. “I need a minute.”

You sit back, licking his slick and your spit from your lips. “Willard.”

He doesn’t exactly answer, but he looks at you with pure, unadulterated hunger as he teases his fist up and down his own cock.

“I want more.”

His hand stills, and he cups your chin to bring your face up to his. “What do you mean by that?”

“I want… all of it. I wanna be with you like I never been with anybody before.”

Willard doesn’t move. He doesn’t even seem to be breathing. “You can’t take a thing like that back.”

Your stomach flips over with embarrassed indignation. “Who says I’d wanna take it back?”

“Darlin,” he sighs, caressing his thumb against your jaw. “Don’t take this to mean I’m saying no. I don’t reckon I’m capable of denying you a single thing.”

You turn your head to lick his thumb before taking it into your mouth, sucking gently against the iron of the blood on his skin.

“To ruin a thing like you.” He whispers. Your eyes narrow as you bite down hard, and Willard hisses as he withdraws. “Hell’d you do that for?”

He sucks his thumb into his own mouth, a bewildered expression on his pretty face.

You push to a stand, brushing dirt from your knees. “If you think that… that fucking me would ruin me then you’re no better than any of those other guys. Those… what’d you call em? Those no-good sons of bitches. You’re no better.”

Willard blinks at you, wondering how things had gotten so far off track so fast. “Darlin, I didn’t-“

“Save it.” You snap, turning on your heel. You’re not exactly sure which direction you’re supposed to go in; you’d run blindly into the forest under the certainty that Willard would catch you and he’d take care of getting you home. He would still, no matter if you’d bitten him and stormed away, but your pride is hurt and you won’t go back to him, not now.

You yelp in genuine surprise as you’re manhandled to the ground for a second time, but now you’re pressed flat to the damp earth, your cheek mashing into the first mulchy leaves of the changing season as Willard settles his weight over you and drags his hand down over your ass. “This is what you want?” He asks, cupping one generous cheek and then the other before delivering a sharp smack that cracks through the night like gunfire.

You make a keening sound at the sting, and Willard rubs his palm over the hurt before lifting his hand and spanking you again. “You want me to take you?”

You bite hard on your lip to stop yourself from crying out, but you push your ass up against his hand and you hear him chuckle as he delivers a third, blistering thwack to the fat of your ass. “Want it,” you sob, tears running to salt the earth beneath your cheek as Willard pushes your skirt up around your hips and drags your underwear over your thick thighs.

“Like I’d ever deny you.” He mumbles, dragging his thumb down the crack of your ass and round to press against your fluttering virgin hole. “Like I ain’t been thinkin about doin this since the first time I saw you.” He pushes his thumb into you, and you wriggle against the intrusion.

“Please,” you whimper, lifting your hips off the ground. “Please, I’m ready. I need it. Need you.”

Willard hums, withdrawing his thumb and sucking his fingers into his mouth to lubricate them. He pushes two into you, curling back against your walls to find your sweet spot. He has no intention whatsoever of just sticking it in you. Not for your first time. He works you open carefully, scissoring his fingers and trying very hard not to come at the tight, wet heat of you and the delicious little mewls and whimpers spilling from your perfect lips.

You’re a panting, groaning, drooling mess by the time he finally withdraws, and he kneels behind you, hands bracing on your wide hips and pulling you back onto all fours. Your legs shake with overstimulation, but you plant your knees firmly against the earth and brace yourself on your forearms as Willard drags the head of his cock through your folds, coating his length in your arousal before pressing it against your entrance. “This might hurt a little, but it shouldn’t hurt a lot. You’ll tell me if it does and we’ll slow down.”

You try to push back against him, try to force him inside you, but Willard taps your raw ass cheek in warning. “You’ll tell me.”

“I’ll tell you,” you whine breathlessly. “Just please.”

You’re not sure when the plan to make him feel better devolved into you becoming a desperate, needy little whore, but Willard’s perfect fingers and perfect mouth and perfect cock just had that effect on you.

He pushes in slowly, and you arch your back at the stretching. There’s a little bit of a burn at the thin skin around your entrance, but it isn’t really pain. Not like scalding yourself on a hot stove or steppin on a nail in the basement. You feel the press of his hips against your ass and the shuddering exhale of his breath over your back, and you flex your muscles around his length. He’s filled you completely, stretched you so tight that you can hardly breathe.

“You feel like heaven,” he whispers, his voice wrecked and reverent. “I ain’t gonna last with you feelin like this.”

“That’s okay,” you whisper back, wiggling your hips forward and back and feeling the fat head of his cock nudge against a spot deep inside you. “Just a little more. A little more, please.”

Willard huffs, flexing his fingers against your hips before pulling all the way out and pushing back in again. You groan, your forehead dropping to the dirt between your arms as he sets a rhythm. It’s slow at first, a comfortable, full drag in and out and you feel the coil of pleasure tightening gently in your stomach as the thick ridges on the underside of his length rub against your sensitive inner walls.

“I’m close,” he spits, his short nails digging into your skin.

“You gotta pull out then,” you mumble, remembering that piece of advice from Pam. The most important thing to remember, she’d said.

“Goddamn, you feel so good." Willard’s voice is little more than a strangled whimper, and he presses you further to the ground, your belly connecting with the dirt as he cages you in, his hips driving against your ass at a brutal pace that sets a dull ache in your stomach.

“Willard," you groan, "you have to pull out!”

He doesn’t listen to you, too far gone in the pleasure as he sinks his teeth into your shoulder and buries himself deep, deep, impossibly deep inside you. “I can’t, darlin.” He sobs. “I’m gunna fill you up. Put a baby in you, sweetheart. Make you mine for proper.” His balls snap sloppily against the slick of your pussy with each thrust, your clit aching at the attention as he mouths over your neck. “Gunna put a ring on your finger. Biggest rock I can afford, I promise you. Gunna make you mine… my wife… make you a mama… fuck!”

 You feel his cock twitch and thicken as it hollows out a new space inside you, and then the searing heat of his seed as he comes. It feels good, the sticky warmth washing through you and sending pulses of arousal to your clit, but panic creeps in at the edges of your consciousness because he was supposed to pull out!

You shiver on the ground as he pushes up onto his palms, holding his weight carefully off you as you try and fail to drag yourself back to your knees.

“There you go,” he mumbles, hooking his arms around your waist and your thighs and pulling you up to cradle against his chest.

“You were supposed to pull out.” You whisper, burying your face in the crook of his neck as hot, confused tears slip down over the full rounds of your cheeks.

“I never said I’d do that,” he coos, reaching between your legs to scoop up the thick ooze of cum sliding out of your hole. You whimper as he pushes his fingers back into you, dragging his release in and out of your body and pushing it in a little deeper each time. “We’re gunna be so happy, darlin.”

You swallow hard, clenching around his fingers, and Willard flexes his thumb up to rub at your clit. “We’re gunna be a family. You were made to carry my babies, you know that? God gave you this body. These hips, the soft safety of your womb. All for me.”

You feel your orgasm approaching at the rumble of words in his chest and the torturous stimulation of his fingers. “I… it’s too soon, we’re not…”

“I bought a little farm outside of town,” he says, pressing a kiss to your temple as his pace quickens, his wrist tensing with the strain as he fucks his fingers into you harder. “Nobody will ever get to look at you again besides me. That’s a promise, darlin.”

“Willard,” you whisper as you come, shaking sobs into his neck and staining the collar of his shirt with your tears as your release slicks on his hand and your muscles quiver around his fingers. “I… I just-“

“I know it.” He cuts you off, withdrawing his hand and wrapping his arms so tightly around you that your mouth is pressed to his sternum and you can’t speak at all. “I know you love me. Know you’re grateful. Know you can’t wait to be my wife. I love you too, darlin.”

You sag against him, the weak protest dropping out of you with exhaustion and relief. There’s no use denying him, not when he’s right. You do love him. You’d dreamed of exactly this, of being his wife and having his babies more nights than you could count over the summer of courting. And he really had taken care of your problems, hadn’t he?

You let him soothe you, leaning into the caress of his strong hands against your skin, and you drop into sleep dreaming of your future as Mrs Willard Russell.

It’s been a long day. There isn’t really a better way to describe it, and the weight of intrusive reporters and bright lights and holding a smile on his face has Bill’s shoulders slumping as he kicks his shoes off by the door to his hotel room.

He’s so tired. He’s so tired, and he’s so homesick, and he misses his person. He misses you so badly he can almost imagine you’re here, can almost smell your perfume lingering in the air and the warm, slightly fruity scent of the tea you’re always drinking at bedtime. There are few things that he wouldn’t do to be home beside you right now, actually.

He shrugs out of his jacket and hangs it up, running his fingers back through his hair to tease out some of the gel his stylist had applied that morning. He winces at his own reflection, the deep purplish bags under his eyes and the shadow already blooming across his jaw. What a way to spend his fucking birthday.

His phone buzzes in his jeans, and he pulls it out with a soft smile as he reads the message from you: Grattis på födelsedagen, älskling!

Your Swedish is improving every day, and Bill is beyond grateful that you’re learning it for him. He speaks perfect English, but ever since you’d agreed to move to Stockholm to be with him you’d immersed yourself in his culture and his friends and his family and now? Now he couldn’t imagine you not being by his side.

He’s about to shoot back a reply when he hears a sound from further inside his hotel room, and he freezes. Pocketing his phone he creeps silently into the main room, ready to… what? Startle the intruder? Fight them? What if it’s a fan who has followed him back from the EW studio? What if it was an autograph hunter? Bill swallows his anxiety as he rounds the corner, and all the fight simply drops out of him.

He hadn’t been imagining a damn thing. There you are, perched on the edge of his bed with two fizzing champagne flutes in your hands. The cork lies on the carpet between you and him, the culprit of the sound.

“Happy Birthday to you,” you sing, crossing one leg over the other and giving him a fantastic view of your bare thighs. “Happy birthday, to you,” you sing again, putting on a sultry, pouty voice and leaning forward to flash your perfect tits in the little white and red corset you’re wearing. Bill feels his cock stir at the sight of you, of the intense, hungry bedroom eyes you’re giving him. “Happy birthday, Mr. Pennywise.”

He rolls his eyes even as a blush heats his cheeks, and you finally rise from the bed, padding across the carpet and stopping just in front of him. “Happy birthday to you,” you finish on a note so low it’s almost a whisper, and Bill’s knees are actually fucking weak with how much he loves you in that moment. In every moment.

“How did you get in here?”

It’s your turn to roll your eyes, because you know damn well his mouth is asking a practical question whilst his heart turns to mush. Endearingly, pragmatically Swedish.

“You should maybe buy your manager a bottle of scotch.”

Bill thinks about the smirk and the wink his manager had given him as he announced he was heading back to the room, and he shakes his head a little. “He’s a pervert.”

You bite the corner of your bottom lip, handing him a champagne flute. “You’re a pervert.”

Bill takes a sip and licks his lips, eyes dropping to where your breasts spill over the frilled edge of your corset. “This is new.”

Your corset is a slutty replica of his Pennywise suit, silvery-white silk with red pom-poms made of taffeta running down the center. If you wiggle your hips, little bells tying the matching panties together jingle. You wiggle for him, and Bill chuckles as he brings his free hand to rest on your hip and pull you closer.

“You thought I was gunna miss your birthday?”

He licks his bottom lip, lifting his eyes to yours and swallowing hard. “I wouldn’t have blamed you. I’m never signing on to do press in August again. Ever.”

You reach up on your tiptoes, finally connecting your lips with his after six long weeks apart. “Baby goes where contract says.”

“Baby does not.” He huffs, before pressing his mouth to yours more firmly and deepening the kiss with a light trail of his tongue against your bottom lip. You wrap your free arm around his neck, holding him close whilst you try to not spill champagne on the carpet.

Bill is less careful, dragging you against him firmly and knocking his own drink onto your ass to drip down the back of your legs. You squeal at the sudden cold, and he smiles against your mouth as he kisses you through the shock.

You pull away first, fixing him with a pout. “I’m soaked.”

He hums, hand sliding down over your damp ass to cup a handful of your flesh. “That’s exactly what I like to hear.”

He walks you carefully back towards the bed, taking your glass with one hand whilst he pushes you gently down onto the mattress with the other, and you part your legs automatically. Bill stands between them, staring down at the damp patch on the front of your panties and wondering how he got so goddamn lucky.

“You’re staring.”

“I know.”

“It’s awkward.”

“It’s my birthday.”

You sigh, reaching a hand down to lightly rub yourself through your underwear. “Don’t you wanna unwrap your present, birthday boy?”

It doesn’t take more than that. Bill is on you in a second, fumbling with the ridiculous puffy pom-poms with a frustrated growl. You enjoy his shifting expressions of frustration for a moment before taking pity on him and revealing the hidden zipper underneath them. “Fucking genius.” He mutters as he yanks it down, your breasts practically bursting from their tight confines as you release the first proper exhale you’ve managed since you zipped yourself into the tightly boned garment. “There they are,” he coos, dipping his head to press a kiss to one nipple whilst cupping the other breast in his enormous hand. “My girls.”

You roll your eyes, reaching for his belt, and he flicks his tongue against your nipple in sharp little caresses as you drag his pants and boxers down. “There’s the little guy.”

Bill’s teeth graze against your nipple and you yelp as he lifts his head and glares. “Little? You wound me in this way on my birthday, älskling?”

“I’m sorry,” you coo, reaching for his cock and squeezing the stiffening length against your palm. “I’m being mean.”

Bill reaches down to hook his thumbs into your underwear and drags them down with a tinkle of bells, suppressing a moan at how slick and swollen your pussy is already. He’d like to take his time, to tease and edge you until you apologize properly, but he’s so, so desperate for you. His cock leaks sticky beads of precum, and he lowers over you and drags his tip through your folds, coating his length in your arousal. “You’re also being a liar.” He mumbles before pushing into you.

You gasp, the stretch bordering on uncomfortable after weeks of being apart. You’d had phone sex, but that had mostly involved your fingers or the hands-free vibrator Bill controlled with an app on his phone. You hadn’t had anything big inside you in six weeks, and Bill’s cock was big. “Shit,” you whisper.

Bill pulls back, his cock dragging half out as your muscles flutter around him. You’re a little tighter than he expected, and there’s a pinched look on your face that he absolutely does not like. “Too much?”

“Go slow.”

He bites his bottom lip as he pushes slowly back into you, ignoring his body as it demands he pound you into the mattress. The stretching burn changes slowly as you adjust to having him inside you, and it isn’t long before a dull pleasure begins to take its place. “Oh,” you moan. “Fuck, Bill. That’s it.”

Bill has never heard anything so beautiful in his goddamn life. He’s barely holding it together, he’s been desperate to come for what feels like hours whilst your perfect cunt tried to squeeze his orgasm out of him, but there was no way he was going to finish first.

“That feel good?” He whispers, jaw clenched tight as his thrusts become faster and he pushes a little deeper with each one.

You nod, mashing your bottom lip against your teeth as you reach between your legs to touch yourself. Bill knocks your fingers out of the way, pushing higher up onto his knees so he can watch you fall apart as he rubs your slick over your clit, circling the bud with just the right amount of pressure to make you whimper.

“Shit, Bill. Shit, I’m gunna come.”

“Yeah? Fuck, yeah. I wanna feel you come on my cock. C’mon, baby. You can do it.”

You whine as you come, your whole body locking up, your cunt locking him in as you flutter around him, and Bill couldn’t hold his own orgasm off if he tried. He spills inside you, hips bucking against you even though your body holds him prisoner inside you.

Your eyes lock onto his, pupils blown wide with lust and shock at the intensity of the feeling. With the way you’re squeezing around him you can feel everything; every spurt of his release and the throbbing of the vein on the underside of his cock and the ridge under his tip dragging against your sensitive walls.

“Fuuuuck,” he moans, unwilling to even blink so as not to miss a single micro-second of your beautiful, fuck-drunk face as you take his cock like you were made to do it.

Bill stays inside you for longer than is really comfortable, hovering over you on his elbows as he licks into your mouth and kisses you like you’re oxygen. Eventually your body starts to push him out, and he withdraws his softened cock with a little wince.

“I didn’t even bring you a birthday present.” You mutter, a stupid, pretty grin on your face as you stare up at the ceiling in your boyfriend’s hotel room.

Bill rolls onto his side, leaning in to press a kiss against your bare shoulder. “You are my birthday present. The best one I ever got.”

You hum happily, reaching for his arm and dragging it over your waist to settle as a comforting weight against your stomach.

“I really love you, you know.” You swallow thickly, your stomach flipping over with anxious butterflies. You’d said it before, and Bill had said it to you, too. But it felt different, your voice sounded different in the wake of you flying half-way across the world to be with him and in the aftermath of that sex. Bill lifts his hand from your stomach and cups your cheek, drawing your head to the side and pressing a soft kiss to your mouth.

“I love you more than I’ve ever loved anyone in my damn life.”

His eyes burn with the intensity of that love, and it’s the best moment of your life and it’s so charged you can’t stand it. “More than zyns?”

Bill huffs a laugh, leaning in and pecking your lips. “More than zyns.”

“More than black jeans and black tee-shirts?”

“Baby.”

“That isn’t a yes.”

He groans, rolling his eyes as he kisses you again. “I love you more than anyone or anything, inanimate or otherwise. Okay?”

You sigh, dropping your head back to the mattress with a smile. “Yeah, okay Bill.”

It’s so much easier to sleep with you in his arms, and Bill holds onto you like you’re a damned life raft in a storm. Tomorrow there will be more interviews, more press junkets, more stunts in and out of makeup. But if he gets to come back here to you? He’ll do it all with a smile on his face. You snore softly against his chest, and Bill closes his eyes. Happy Birthday Mr Pennywise, indeed.

A = Aftercare (what they’re like after sex)

Taking care of you is second nature for Willard. He’ll hold you until your breathing slows, and then he’ll clean you up himself, running his fingers over your muscles to see if he’s gone too hard. 

B = Body part (their favourite body part of theirs and also their partner’s)

Willard doesn’t like himself much, but you fell in love with his eyes so he’s grateful to them. He loves your hair, stroking it to send you off to sleep after he’s worn you out. 

C = Cum (anything to do with cum, basically)

All he thinks about is breeding you. About keeping you pregnant, over and over. So shooting his load, multiple loads even, into you and pushing the creamy slick back into you with his fingers sends him feral. 

D = Dirty secret (pretty self explanatory, a dirty secret of theirs)

He watches you sleep. He’s been doing it forever, just to feel the settling of calm over him with every soft rise and fall of your chest. Sometimes when he’s sure you’re asleep he’ll slip his fingers up between your thighs and drag them lightly over your clit until you’re soaked and sticky. 

E = Experience (how experienced are they? do they know what they’re doing?)

There was one girl, a local near where he was stationed who had a thing about deflowering soldiers. Willard had regretted it before she’d even gotten his pants off, but the other guys were waiting and he didn’t want them poking fun. He pretends he waited for you, because he so badly wishes he had. 

F = Favourite position (this goes without saying)

Willard likes to breed you like an animal, watching your ass bounce against him as he impales you on his cock. But his favourite is a deep mating press, with your legs up by your cheeks and your pussy sucking greedily at every inch of him. 

G = Goofy (are they more serious in the moment? are they humorous? etc.)

Willard can tease you a little when you’re so impatient and spoiled, but he isn’t goofy and he’ll stop if he thinks he’s upsetting you. His focus is always intense when he’s got you stripped down for him. 

H = Hair (how well groomed are they? does the carpet match the drapes? etc.)

Willard doesn’t groom his pubic hair. That’s a weird concept, he wouldn’t waste a good razor on something like that when you like his face clean. 

I = Intimacy (how are they during the moment? the romantic aspect)

Willard struggles with intimacy, he’s just been through a lot and vulnerability doesn’t come easy to him. But he’s so insanely, hopelessly in love with you that he can’t help but hold you close, pressing his forehead to yours so he can absorb every breathy whisper of his name that passes your lips. 

J = Jack off (masturbation headcanon)

Willard is so hell bent on getting you pregnant that he doesn’t waste any of his cum on jacking off. But there was that week you went and to visit your mama, and you left him a soaked pair of your panties as a parting gift. He’d wrapped them around his cock every damn night, picturing how naughty you’d looked touching yourself to get them so filthy. 

K = Kink (one or more of their kinks)

Breeding, breeding, breeding. Goddamn, Willard wants to put a baby in you so bad it consumes him. He can’t think about anything but filling you so full of cum that it leaks out of you for hours, and he’ll whisper filth into your ear while he does it. 

L = Location (favourite places to do the do)

The forest, at night. There’s the thrill of the danger and how pretty you look in the moonlight, and the way the dirt sticks to your skin and makes you seem like some wild thing for him to tame. 

M = Motivation (what turns them on, gets them going)

The way you peel your clothes off a layer at a time as the day heats up. Stepping into the kitchen to find you flushed and slick as you wilt in the steam from the stove in just your underwear, sweat sticking your hair to your face. He can’t stop himself from pulling you against him, licking the salt from your skin until your protests turn to moans.  

N = No (something they wouldn’t do, turn offs)

Williard won’t hurt you. He’ll press his palm to your throat in an act of possession or bend you over his knee for a spanking, but he just can’t be really, truly violent. He’s seen too much of that. 

O = Oral (preference in giving or receiving, skill, etc.)

You’re so pretty on your knees for him. Willard feels a little like a God when you worship him, licking so sweetly at his tip and looking up with devotion in your eyes. 

But going down on you is the real sacrament. Willard will pin you down and feast for hours, tasting the sweetness of your arousal and the sharpness of your sweat even after a long day in the August heat. Especially then. 

P = Pace (are they fast and rough? slow and sensual? etc.)

Willard mixes it up. Sometimes he’ll see you pushing your hair out of your face and fanning your pretty flushed skin and he’ll be powerless to stop himself bending you over the kitchen counter and taking you so roughly the dishes shake in the cabinet. 

But other times, when the night has cooled some and you’re soft and clinging to him, he’ll fuck you deep and slow, pulling back when he feels his release coming so he can prolong the experience. One time he did that over and over until the sun came up, and he suffered through a long shift with a smile on his face. 

Q = Quickie (their opinions on quickies, how often, etc.)

He works long hours, getting up before dawn and collapsing beside you after dark. Sometimes, especially when you’re fertile, a quickie is all he can manage. But he’ll always match it with a long session of taking care of you as soon as he has time. 

R = Risk (are they game to experiment? do they take risks? etc.)

Willard likes to take you out to the woods to commune with God. He likes to push you to your hands and knees on the forest floor and have you give thanks as he fucks you from behind. But if anybody ever saw you he’d have their eyes out, one for the violation and one for trespass. 

S = Stamina (how many rounds can they go for? how long do they last?)

Willard can go for hours. He’s used to denying himself even the most basic of pleasures, and no matter how much he wants to bury his seed inside you right away he won’t do it until you’ve come a good few times. 

T = Toys (do they own toys? do they use them? on a partner or themselves?)

No. Willard doesn’t have any knowledge of or use for toys. Where would you even buy something like that without going into the city, anyway? But when it’s awful hot he’ll buy a box of ice and trail cubes over the feverish curves of you, licking the wet trails from your skin until you whimper. 

U = Unfair (how much they like to tease)

He teases you all the time. You just look so pretty when you beg for it, your lips quivering as tears fill your eyes. God knows he’ll never deny you a damn thing, but he lets himself drag it out sometimes for moments like that. 

V = Volume (how loud they are, what sounds they make, etc.)

Willard is a man of few words, and he grits his teeth against the sounds he wants to make when he’s inside you. Even though you’ve begged him to tell you how good it is, he just can’t. Blame it on his religious upbringing. 

W = Wild card (a random headcanon for the character)

Willard likes it when you take control. He’s so big and he’s used to being the man of the house, so the few times where you’ve gotten impatient and aggressive and taken from him have been some of the best orgasms of his life. He wishes you’d do it more often. He wishes you’d use him. 

X = X-ray (let’s see what’s going on under those clothes)

He works a manual job and it shows, because Willard is broad and dark, his torso and arms rippling with muscle from hauling meat. His cock is huge, and sometimes he has to look away when you’re choking on it to stop himself from sobbing. 

Y = Yearning (how high is their sex drive?)

Willard Russell invented yearning. He can’t start a conversation without saying “my wife” and he knows with certainty that if you died he’d simply cease to exist. 

Z = Zzz (how quickly they fall asleep afterwards)

The nightmares used to wake him every hour, sweating and sobbing as the ghosts of mutilated boys haunted him. But with you beside him, your warmth and the scent of your lingering arousal on the sheets beneath him, Willard’s been sleeping as good as he did before it all. 

You’re brushing your teeth, eyes straying to catch the last of the sitcom rerun on your TV when you hear it. The faintest tapping, so quiet you think you might have imagined it, but you step out of the bathroom and mute the TV anyway. A pause, and then the sound again, tap, tap, tap.

You spit a mouthful of minty foam into the sink and rinse it down before heading into the hall, tugging the hem of your tank top down where it’s ridden up over your stomach.

You check the chain is on before lifting up onto your toes, your stomach flipping over at the sight of his downturned face. You unhook the chain with shaking fingers, pulling the door wide and staring at the dishevelled man on the other side. “Eric?”

“Can I come in?”

“You… Roman isn’t here.”

“I know.” He lifts his head, licking over his lips as his eyes drop down the length of your body. “Can I come in anyway?”

“It wouldn’t be appropriate. If you’re here to dropoff you can do that, but otherwise you’ll have to come back when he’s home.”

… is what you should have said. But instead Eric is sitting on your couch, his long legs bent at the knees as he slouches back against the expensive leather and he worries at the frayed corner of a hole in his jeans. You hand him a beer, and he tips it in your direction before taking a sip. You sit down beside him, folding your leg underneath your body as you turn to face him. “What’s going on, Eric?”

“I… shit.” He sighs shakily, lifting his free hand to rake back through his messy dark hair. “I know I shouldn’t have come.”

“I don’t mind.” You say softly, laying your palm against his thigh. “If you’re in trouble… if you need to talk.”

The look he shoots you is agony as he groans. “It’s not… shit.” He takes another sip of his beer before leaning forward to put it on the coffee table. The perspiring bottle leaves a ring immediately, and you think about the disdain you’ll see on Roman’s face when he notices. Not that he can ever know about this visit, obviously.

“Eric, c’mon.” Your voice is low and soothing, and you tickle your fingers against his thigh. “Talk to me.”

Eric wraps his hand around your wrist, snatching it off his leg. You jump with the shock of his sudden movement, but he doesn’t release you. He turns your hand over, eyes dropping to your palm as he chews his bottom lip into his mouth before lifting your hand to his face and pressing his lips against your fingers.

“It’s been a month.” He says quietly, lips ghosting the words over your hand. “Almost to the day.”

“I know.” Your core throbs with a sudden burst of arousal at the feeling of his mouth on you and the memory of his mouth on you.

“You haven’t been back.”

“Roman… thought it was best he find another dealer.” Your voice is little more than a whisper, and Eric’s cock twitches at the wrecked edge to it as you press your thighs together.

“That’s what Roman thinks, huh?” He lifts his eyes to yours then, endless pools of green rimmed in messy dark liner. His lips pull into a crooked smirk. “What do you think? You wanted to stay away from me too?”

You press your lips into a tight line as he returns his mouth to your hand, dragging his full lips lazily over your palm before pressing a firmer kiss to your wrist. “Things have been good. With him.” It isn’t a denial exactly, and Eric lets himself feel a little sting of hope in his chest as he pulls you closer and peppers soft kisses up the expanse of your forearm.

“I can’t stop thinking about you.”

You freeze, the breath turning to ice in your lungs as you stare at him. “You can’t say that to me.”

“I can.” He releases your arm finally, and you shuffle back against the opposite side of the couch, bringing your knees up to your chest. This gives Eric a view of your ass in your tiny little hot-pant pajamas, and he shifts in his seat as his cock thickens in his jeans. “I just did.” His smile is almost playful, but his heart is hammering in his chest as he analyzes every micro-expression passing over your pretty face.

“You can’t think about me like that. It isn’t… it isn’t possible.”

Eric pushes a breath out through his mouth before facing you again. “I can’t fucking stop thinking about you, actually. I've tried.”

You make a little sound then, and Eric’s eyes snap to your mouth as your lips part around it. So close to a moan and a little like a sob. He wants to hear it again.

“Try harder.”

He shakes his head as he climbs properly onto the couch, pinning you against the armrest as he hovers over you. He braces his strong hands beside your head, the muscles in his arms flexing under the ink on his skin as he leans in close enough to kiss you. “Been trying for a month, princess. I can’t do it. Can’t quit you.”

You don’t think. You lean up, feeling the hard planes of his body against your chest as you press your lips to his, and Eric dissolves into you with a single, delicious exhale. It’s like the first fix after a stint in rehab, both a comfort and a curse as his blood thrums too fast in his veins and his stomach churns like he’s gunna throw up. Addict, addict, addict. He’s an addict through and through and he’s addicted to you. Inconvenient, when you have a boyfriend you love more than anything. Downright suicidal when that boyfriend is Roman Godfrey. But kissing you, feeling the creeping of your fingers around the back of his neck as you pull him closer, and the taste of your tongue when he licks your lips open is worth the risk. Is worth any risk. His cock is hard now, and he lowers himself flush against you to grind his erection down against your core through your little damp pants.

You gasp, breaking the kiss and tugging on his hair, and Eric forces himself to pull back. “Eric,” you whisper, your eyes fluttering closed at the feeling of him rutting against you. “Oh fuck, Eric. We can’t.”

“Leave him.” Eric moans, cupping your jaw and letting his palm press against your throat. “I could make you happy. You know I could.”

You whimper at the press of his palm and the hot, possessive curl of his fingers against your jaw as you soak the thin cotton of your pants. “I can’t just—I love him.”

Eric growls, the sound coming out like frustration even as his heart aches over the admission. “You want me, too.” He doesn’t dare suggest you love him, not when he’s terrified to hear you disagree.

“Yes,” you whisper, tugging harder on his hair. “Oh fuck yes, I want you.”

He pulls back properly then, bracing against the arm of the couch at your back as the leather creaks in protest. “Let me show you. Let me show you how good I can be for you.”

He licks over his lips, eyes so dark with lust that you’re drowning in them. This is it. This is the last moment to stop him, to kick him out, to call Roman and beg him to come home and remind you why you’re his.

You feel the heavy twitching of his cock against you, and your eyes drop to where he strains against the distressed fabric of his black jeans, and your fist closes in the front of his shirt as you pull him back against you and wrap your legs around his hips.

Eric undresses you with reverence. It isn’t like before, when nerves and the weight of Roman’s fury had made his hands shake. Now he has you all to himself, looking up at him with parted lips and blush-stained cheeks, and he takes his fucking time. He rubs carefully over your core, biting his lip to suppress a moan at how soaked you are, and you wriggle against his hand. “Goddamn,” he whispers. “You’re so wet already and I’ve barely touched you. This all for me?”

“Yes.” You tilt your hips up towards him. “Please, Eric. Please, I need… more.” You swallow as your cheeks heat with embarrassment, but Eric rewards you with his thumbs in the waistband of your pajamas as he rolls the fabric down your thighs and your exposed core drops down onto the dark leather beneath you.

“Yeah,” he hums, pushing two fingers against you to part your folds so he can watch your slick glisten against your swelling clit. “Just like I remember.” He watches his own tattooed fingers disappear inside you, and your back arches off the couch with a little moan. He’s aching now, and he tugs his button and zipper loose so he can pull his cock out of his boxers and squeeze his base to relieve a little pressure.

“Please,” you whimper, trying desperately to grind down against his hand. Eric wiggles his fingers inside you, testing the tight resistance of your muscles as his thumb finds your clit and taps it lightly.

“You should leave him,” he says again, voice like gravel as he curls his fingers and tugs them half out before pushing back in. “He’s no good for you.”

“Yeah?” You moan, head dropping back against the hard arm of the couch. “He loves me.”

“He’s selfish,” Eric mumbles, leaning forward to dribble a thick slick of spit onto your pussy before rubbing it into your clit. “Don’t like how he talks to you.”

You grit your teeth as his thumb coaxes your clit to swell to the point of pain, the rough in and out drag of his fingers pulling you back and forth against the leather sticking to your exposed skin. “You just don’t…” You break off with a choked little moan as Eric hits your most sensitive spot, and your legs try to clamp around his arm. He holds you open easily, and you watch the taut ripple of muscle and ink as he pushes your thighs apart. “Know him.”

Eric hums, pulling out of you and rolling your clit between his thumb and forefinger. “I know his type. Spoiled little rich boy, treats everybody like the fuckin help.” A muscle ticks in his jaw, and you feel your stomach flip over with anxiety at the severe knitting of his brows as his mouth pulls down into a frown.

“There’s more to him than that.” You don’t know why you’re still arguing, why you’re defending the most spoiled man you’ve ever met. Eric releases your clit and gathers your arousal on his fingers, leaning back to wrap his hand around his cock and slicking himself up.

“He pimped you out for a fucking ego trip,” he says, voice a low growl of sound. “He doesn’t know what he’s got.”

You swallow, hips lifting as though you can draw him back to you. “Please, Eric. Don’t you wanna touch me?”

Eric bites his bottom lip, eyes glazing over as he works his fist up and down his leaking cock, and you feel a fresh slick of arousal soak the couch beneath you as you watch him touch himself. “I wanna be inside you. Wanna fill you up again.”

You whine, sitting up and reaching for him. You tug his hand away from his cock and guide him closer, pulling him over you as you settle back against the couch. You feel the hot press of his cock against your entrance, and you bear down to pull him into your heat. “I want it too. Never been so full.”

Eric moans, pressing his lips to yours as he sinks his considerable length into you. “Just for us,” he whispers into your mouth, pulling half out and pushing back in. You wrap your legs around his hips, clamping down on his cock with shameless need as Eric ruts against you. “Not because he wants it.”

Your eyes roll back as his length grazes against your sensitive walls with every thrust, and you reach down to rub at the swollen bud of your clit as arousal tightens in your stomach. “Cuz we want it,” you whimper, and it’s music to Eric. It’s the best fucking thing he’s ever heard.

“You deserve better.” He spits, sitting back on his heels and lifting your legs to brace against his shoulders. You’re split open at this angle, and Eric pushes your fingers away to touch you himself as you writhe beneath him.

“I’m so… fuck,” you groan. “So full, Eric.”

He loves it when you say his name like that. His thumb rubs silky circles against your clit as his cock twitches and thickens inside you, and he knows it won’t be long. Not when he’s been jerking off and thinking about exactly this for weeks. Not when you look up at him with tears beading on your lashes and absolute, carnal hunger in your pretty eyes. “I’m gunna come,” he whimpers, hips snapping hard against yours.

There’s a burning stretch along the backs of your calves, but your own orgasm is right there and you focus on that building pleasure.

“Me too,” you whisper, biting down hard on your lip. “Don’t stop. Please, please, please, please-ohhh.” You cum with a moan, your walls clamping down so hard on Eric’s cock it almost hurts. He feels the fluttering pulse in your clit as you ride against his hand, and his own orgasm is dragged out of him by the prison of your body as you milk every drop of his release into your greedy cunt.

“Don’t stop, don’t stop,” you wail, pleasure rolling through you in endless, electric waves as he pulses and spills inside you. Eric holds on as long as he can, even as his cock softens and the relentless pull of your muscles starts to hurt.

Eventually you sigh, dropping boneless to the couch, and Eric slips out of you with a grunt of discomfort.

“Oh, well don’t stop.”

*

Your blood turns to poisonous sludge in your veins at the cruel, cold drawl of his voice from the doorway. Eric’s eyes meet yours, his own alert and wide, and you scramble to pull your shorts back up as Eric tucks his cock away and turns to face your boyfriend.

Roman’s leaning against the door, a mean smirk fixed on his face even though his insides are churning with such potent rage he can barely even see you. Eric stays right there, staring him down whilst shielding you from him, and the fury in Roman’s blood ignites as he pushes away from the door and crosses the room.

His eyes do flick to Eric’s beer on the bare table, his lip curling up in distaste as you knew it would, but then his unsettling eyes fix on you and your stomach bottoms out. “Roman, it’s not-“

“Shut your lying whore mouth.”

Your lips snap shut, your teeth knocking together with the force of the command, and Eric’s shoulders square as he blocks your body with his own. His hair is a little damp with sweat, the shaggy ends of his mullet curling against his neck, and he looks thoroughly fucked. At least you’d made it count.

“She didn’t ask me to come here.” Eric says slowly. “This just happened.”

“Yeah, I just watched it happen.” Roman says, his hands curling into fists at his sides. “For a big guy you really don’t have the stamina, do you?”

A muscle ticks in Eric’s jaw, and Roman feels a little thrill of adrenaline from poking at the bear. “You just stood there watching?” He snaps. “I guess I shoulda known.”

Roman steps closer, hinging at the waist to bring his face so close to Eric’s he could lean in and bite his fucking nose off if he wanted to. That’d serve the piece of shit right. “Watch it.”

“Yeah. You do, don’t you, Godfrey? You like to watch. You like to be cucked.”

Roman’s fist swings, connecting with the side of Eric’s face and sending him reeling. His head snaps back, eyes on fire as a scarlet welt blooms across his sharp cheekbone.

Roman won’t admit that punching him had hurt, that his knuckles feel like they’ve been shattered against the sculpted bones of the other man’s face.

If you hadn’t been sitting so close, if Eric hadn’t been able to feel how terrified you were, he’d have hit back. He’d have beaten Roman’s privileged ass until he begged for mercy. But with you sitting there he can’t do it. He just can’t.

“The last guy to hit me like that ended up in the hospital.” Eric says carefully, his voice low and disconcertingly calm. “Do it again and you’ll be breathing through a tube if you’re breathing at all.”

Roman smirks, even as his cock twitches at the thought of his blood filling his mouth and splashing over Eric’s face and your slutty bare thighs. “You want her?”

Eric blinks at him, at the complete shift in the tension from violence to something else. “What?”

Roman’s eyes rake over you, and your force yourself to meet his indifference. “Do you want her?”

“I… I just… I mean…” Eric rubs a hand over the back of his head, hating himself even as he’s drawn in. “What do you mean?”

Roman sighs like Eric is slow, like it’s the most obvious thing in the goddamn universe. “Do you want her? Do you want me to dump her whore ass so you can make her your slutty little girlfriend?”

Eric swallows, shoulders tensing as his heart hammers in his chest.

“Roman, you can’t just-“ Your voice is sharp and wounded.

“Yes.” Eric cuts you off, and you slump back against the couch. You hadn’t thought Eric would entertain… whatever this was.

Roman’s smirk widens. “You play a little game with me, and you can have her.”

“A game.” Eric repeats slowly.

“Just a game,” Roman coos, stepping closer and reaching past Eric to cup your jaw. Your eyes close at the contact and you lean into his palm. Roman hums in approval, thumb stroking over your mouth. “I love her, you know.” Your eyes open, brimming with hope so openly vulnerable it almost makes Roman sick. “I want her to be happy. Want her satisfied.” A throb rocks through you, your clit pulsing with fresh desire as his words settle over you. “So show me.”

Eric licks his lips. “Show you… make her cum?”

He’s already moving, his hands reaching for your thighs.

“Noooo,” Roman coos, palming his growing bulge until Eric’s eyes drop. “Show me. Make me cum.”

“No.” The word is out automatically, even if Eric’s own cock is growing stiffer by the second. Even if Roman’s blissed out face and the long, tanned lines of his unblemished body flash in Eric’s head sometimes when he’s touching himself at night. Even if he can still taste the ghost of Roman’s lips on his every time he smokes weed.

“I thought you wanted her badly,” Roman teases, squeezing the outline of his cock through his slacks. “You’re willing to be a fucking homewrecker but you’re not willing to suck a cock to get her? Tragic.”

He turns to you, pushing his thumb into your mouth. “I guess he isn’t willing to go the distance for you, baby.”

You suck obediently on his thumb, and Eric feels a flash of panicked jealousy surge through him as he knocks Roman’s hand away from you and yanks his pants open rough enough to break the zipper.

Roman huffs a little chuckle, flicking hair from his eyes as Eric tugs his cock from his boxers and jerks him roughly. It’s different, the callouses on Eric’s fingers and the sheer fucking size of his hand wrapped around his length. “Yeah.” Roman huffs. “Good fucking boy.”

Eric’s cock leaks fresh precum into his jeans as he runs his thumb over the head of Roman’s cock and drags his fist down, flexing his long fingers against the underside as he works Roman’s length. “This how you touch yourself when you think about my girl?” Roman asks, his voice rough with building pleasure. “You think about her when you jerk your filthy fucking cock?”

Eric licks his lips, squeezing impossibly tighter until Roman yelps. “Yeah, I think about her.” He spits. “Think about how good she felt cumming on my cock whilst you cried about it.”

Roman reaches for Eric’s hair, fisting the choppy dyed strands and dragging his face against him. Eric releases his grip on Roman’s cock, and the sticky head of it bobs against his closed lips.

“Suck it.” Roman spits. “Suck my fucking cock, you pathetic piece of – shiiiiit,” Roman breaks off with a moan as Eric wraps his lips around the head of Roman’s cock and sucks hard enough to melt Roman’s brain.

He hums against Roman’s length, surprised that he doesn’t hate the musky taste of his precum or the feeling of his cock in his mouth. Eric had always considered himself a little biflexible, though he’d never much explored it outside of make-outs at parties when he was usually too wasted to know who he was kissing. But he thinks maybe, maybe he likes this. He wishes it wasn’t Roman Godfrey’s cock in his mouth, even as his own cock throbs at the sight of the man’s face dissolving into pleasure.

Roman’s fists tug harder on Eric’s hair as he pushes his face down against his crotch, and Roman’s tip hits the back of Eric’s throat. Tears spring hot to his eyes, streaking through the messy kohl ringing his eyes, and he’s about to tap out when he feels a featherlight touch on his cheek. He glances to the side as best he can with Roman Godfrey fucking his face, and you’re there. Your own eyes brimming with tears, your lips parting on a little moan as you lean in and kiss the corner of his mouth, right where Roman’s cock is driving in and out of the stretch of his lips.

“So good, Eric.” You whisper. “You’re taking him so good.”

Eric’s eyes roll back at how completely, violently depraved this whole thing is.

“I know,” you soothe. “I know exactly how it feels. Keep… fuck, keep doing that. Let him use your throat, Eric. Let me tell you what he likes.” Eric’s half listening, half trying to focus on not reaching between his own legs to touch himself. But then he hears the slick, wet sound of your fingers working in and out of your hole, and he looks down to confirm that your hand is moving erratically inside your pants and he moans around Roman’s cock.

“Goddamn,” Roman groans, snapping his hips faster as his length pushes into Eric’s throat. “You’re such a little fucking slut.”

You look up at Roman, biting your bottom lip as you work your fingers against your clit. “I can’t help it.” You whimper.

“No.” He rolls his eyes, yanking hard enough on Eric’s hair that he practically sobs as Roman withdraws his cock from his throat.

“You’re hard, Draven. From sucking my cock?”

Eric scoffs, but he doesn’t try to hide the prominent jut of his erection against his jeans. “It’s for her.”

You flush, reaching out to run your fingers over his swollen mouth and collect the slick of saliva and precum from his lips. “My heart fucking bleeds for you.” Roman drawls. “You think you can take my load before she takes yours?”

Eric swallows thickly, feeling the sting in his throat where Roman had already brutalised it. “I don’t know, man.”

Roman hums, rubbing his thumb teasingly over the head of his cock. “Just her hand. She’s got nice hands, doesn’t she?”

Eric bites his lip, and Roman reaches to pinch his chin and force his mouth open. “Go on, sweetheart.”

You reach for Eric’s cock, tugging it out of his jeans and wrapping a fist around him. “It’s okay, Eric.” You whisper. “It’ll be over soon.”

Eric isn’t sure if the churning in his stomach is because you’re wrong or because you’re right. He leans in to wrap his lips around Roman’s cock again, laving his tongue against the underside. The benefit of having a cock is knowing roughly what feels good, and Eric employs every bit of his own experience to the task as he pushes his tongue into the salty slit at Roman’s tip before flicking against his frenulum.

You shimmy down between his legs to suck his cock then, and Eric moans at the feeling of your mouth on him as you slick his length with saliva.

“Not your mouth.” Roman warns, and you pull away, licking over your lips as you wrap your hand around Eric’s cock and jerk your fist up and down his length.

Eric’s eyes roll back at the feeling of your slicked hand on him, and he rocks back and forth to thrust into your hand as Roman’s hips begin to tilt towards his face to meet each bob of his head.

“Make him cum, baby.” He orders, and you twist your fist over the head of his cock with each rough jerk. Eric whines around his full mouth, spit spilling from the corners of his lips as Roman’s cock pushes into his throat again.

“You look so good,” you whisper to Eric, pecking his cheek and feeling unbearable waves of arousal roll through you at the sight of your boyfriend’s cock hollowing out Eric’s cheeks. “You’re doing so well.”

Eric hums, and Roman’s hips stutter as the vibration nearly tips him over the edge. “Tell him you want him.” He spits through gritted teeth, pulling back enough to let his cock rest against Eric’s tongue as you swallow thickly.

“I want you, Eric. How could… how could I not?”

Eric sobs as he cums, spilling over your fist and staining the dark fabric of his jeans as your words undo him. He’s still so sensitive from being inside you, and the weighty meat of Roman’s cock against his tongue is simultaneously grounding and so impossibly hot he can barely stand it. Roman pulls roughly out of his mouth, and Eric slumps against the front of the couch, chest heaving as his cock twitches in your palm.

“Good girl.” Roman says, offering you a tiny, terrifying smile as he wraps your hair around his fist and pulls you up. “Go get cleaned up.”

You don’t want to. Don’t want to leave Eric alone with him, don’t want to leave either of them alone without you. But Roman’s grip in your hair tightens to the point of pain, and you stumble from the room on shaking legs with shame and anxiety churning in your stomach.

“You couldn’t just leave it alone, could you?” Roman sighs, dropping into a crouch beside Eric and running his fingers through the cooling cum splashed across his thighs before roughly taking Eric’s cock in his hand and jerking him with such violence that Eric actually does cry a little.

“You thought you could steal from me? From me?” Roman asks, releasing his cock and wrapping his slick fist around his own cock again. “Thought you could come into my house and steal my girl like a fucking gypsy in the night?” Fury builds in Eric even as Roman laces his fingers into his hair and pulls his face close again, pressing the man’s cheek against his thigh as his fist becomes a blur against his cock. “You thought I’d give her to you?”

Roman scoffs, the sound morphing into a broken moan as he comes, spurting his release over Eric’s face and committing the disgusting sight of the man’s lips coated in him to memory. “People like… people like you don’t get people like her.” He stammers, squeezing every last drop out of his tip before releasing himself and smearing his cum over Eric’s face. “Maybe I let you fuck her from time to time, if I’m feeling like it. But you can’t have her. Nod if you understand.”

Eric is thinking about all the ways he’s going to make Roman Godfrey pay for this, even as he nods against his thigh and licks Roman’s cum from his lips. Because he will pay for it. For the disrespect, for the deception. For awakening a new hunger in Eric Draven that will only be satiated by taking more than just you from the entitled piece of shit.

Because he is going to take you from Roman, as an act of love and one of mercy. But he isn’t going to stop there, not anymore. He isn’t going to stop until he’s had Roman Godfrey, too.

The shower shuts off, and you pad into the room in just a towel. Your hair is damp, your skin scrubbed clean and still steaming. Roman tilts his head to the side, just looking, before he pats his thigh. You hesitate for only a moment, glancing at Eric slumped against the couch on his other side. His shoulders rise and fall steadily, so you know Roman hasn’t killed him at least. His eyes are glassy as he looks up at you, lips slick with cum and spit and swollen from Roman’s rough treatment.

“You really wore him out,” Roman murmurs, snatching a handful of your bare thigh as you settle onto his knee. “But you didn’t get to cum, did you? You had to jerk his pathetic cock and watch me get sucked off and nobody touched you.”

You swallow, eyes darkening at the teasing tone in Roman’s voice as his fingers crawl up your thigh. “No. It’s okay.”

“Noooo,” he coos. “I heard him before. Telling you to leave me. Telling you how happy he’d make you. Filling your cunt with his filthy fucking cum without my permission. Isn’t that right?”

You can only nod, eyes fixed on Eric where he stares up at you with a dazed expression on his face. You know that look. You’ve been that look. It’s the look of a person whose been forced into a subspace they didn’t know they had the capacity to exist in, under Roman Godfrey’s control. Your stomach twists with anxious sympathy for him. Nobody survives Roman. Nobody.

“So lets see, huh?” He continues, pulling you against his chest so he can nuzzle the sharp point of his nose against your neck. “Lets see who can make you fucking happy.”

You moan softly at the brush of his lips against your skin as his fingers disappear under your towel and cup your pussy. “Whatever you want, Rome.” You sigh.

“What do you say, Draven?” Roman asks, using his free hand to pinch Eric’s chin and turn his face up. He doesn’t even bother to look down at the man, focused solely on nipping at your exposed throat. He doesn’t see the hardening glint in Eric’s eyes as he nods in his grip.

“Whatever you want, Godfrey.”

Roman hums, satisfied with his pretty, slutty little dolls. “You wanna go to Paris, baby?”

Your breath hitches in your throat, and you look at Eric again. His eyes are fixed on you now, and he bites the corner of his lip into his mouth. “I… I’ve never seen the Eiffel tower.”

Roman chuckles, the sound sending skitters of heat down your chest to pebble your nipples. “Oh sweetheart. You’ll see it tonight. That’s a goddamn promise.”

He lifts you off his lap, depositing you on the couch as he pushes up to a stand and clicks his fingers at Eric. “You’re taking her mouth. You’ve had her cunt already.”

Eric doesn’t mind, not at all, and he rises to his full height on legs that ache from being bent against the floor for so long. You look up at the two men, comparing them. Eric might have an inch on Roman, but he might not. He’s certainly broader, a product of late nights at the gym, and all his ink makes him look older, more rugged. Roman’s face is a little fuller, not yet completely rid of the softness of adolescence, and you wonder how much older Eric is. Five years? Seven?

The men stare at each other for a moment, a smirk on Roman’s face and a calculated look of something disquieting on Eric’s. It’s like they’re having a silent conversation, a battle of wills, and you feel an absurd pang of jealousy.

“Please.” You say, and both men turn their heads to look at you. The similarity in the way they move is eery, and you press your thighs together.

Eric’s face softens first, and he reaches for you without permission, cupping your jaw and hinging at the waist to kiss your mouth. You can still taste Roman’s cum on his tongue, and you moan into the kiss at how hot and disgusting and disgustingly hot that is. Roman wraps his hand around your wrist and pulls you up, the towel dropping onto the floor as he manouvers you to press against his chest.

You break the kiss as he plants a hand on the small of your back and pushes you down, bending you in half as his hand grips your hip and pulls you back against his cock. “I think you’re too short for this.”

You make an annoyed sound of protest, and Roman delivers a little tap to your bare ass. "Get on the couch.”

You obey immediately, climbing back onto the couch and settling onto all fours.

Eric’s cock is out again, angry and red from his previous releases as he runs his fingers up and down the stiffening length. “You gunna let me in that pretty mouth, princess?”

Roman grits his teeth as you nod, his own cock leaking sticky droplets of precum as he climbs onto the couch behind you and brushes his cock through your folds. You’re not as wet as he’d like, having wasted it on the fucking shower. “I’m not gunna go easy on you,” he murmurs softly as he pushes into you. “You wanna behave like a whore and I’ll treat you like one.”

You whimper at the sudden stretch, the overwhelming fullness arching your back, and Roman groans as he pulls all the way out and slams back in.

You wince, and Eric feels a bolt of fury rock through him. You watch the tension in his face, the way his hands ball into fists at his sides. “Eric, please,” you whisper. “Please let me taste it.”

Eric swallows, his cock leaking in his fist even though he’s still half focused on the pain on your face. “You don’t have to.”

“She does.” Roman spits, snapping his hips against your ass so fast his balls make a slap, slap, slap sound against your neglected clit.

“I want it.” You lick over your lips. “C’mon. Make me happy.”

Eric sighs as he guides his cock towards your face. He knows it’s not right, that none of this has been right since the moment Roman crashed the fucking party, but at the feeling of your wet, warm mouth wrapping around his tip all thoughts of right and wrong dissolve into desire.

His fingers thread into your hair, not to push but to caress, scratching his nails lightly against your scalp until you hum against his length. “Shit, princess. Shit, you’re so good at that.”

You look up at him through your lashes, injecting every bit of desire into your gaze as you press forward, dragging his length along your tongue as you let the head of his cock press against the tight entrance to your throat.

“Up top, Draven.” Eric forces his eyes away from the frankly transcendent sight of you swallowing his cock to look at Roman, who has his hand up for a fucking high five.

“What?”

He rolls his eyes, flicking damp hair off his forehead with an agitated jerk of his head. “Eiffel Tower, man.”

Eric almost ignores him, but Roman’s being playful and not awful right now, so he untangles one hand from your hair and slaps his palm against Roman’s.

“Fuck yeah!” Roman laughs, returning his hand to your other hip and dragging you back against him harder. “God, baby. You want me to rub your clit?”

You moan around Eric’s cock, and Roman bites his lip at how good you sound before he fumbles around your body to roll his thumb over your clit.

You spasm around his cock immediately, your muscles fluttering as you whimper against Eric’s cock, and both men grunt in surprised approval at the change in your performance.

“Shit, I’m not gunna last if you keep doing that,” Eric mutters, his stomach tightening as you swallow around his cock and squeeze the sensitive head into the tight column of your throat.

“You gotta cum for me,” Roman coos, circling the sensitive bud with the exact pressure he knows you like best. “You want me to fill you up you gotta cum for me first.”

You hum, and Eric’s fingers tighten in your hair as he shoots his load down your throat. He hadn’t had time to warn you, his orgasm taking him completely by surprise, and he makes a strangled yelping sound as he comes. Roman watches him fall apart, watches him stroke your hair back from your face even as he’s in the fucking middle of his orgasm, and his stomach tightens with a mean jealousy.

He runs his fingers against your folds, collecting your slick and rubbing it back up over your clit until your legs begin to shake and your cunt flutters around him in a steady, pulsing rhythm.

Eric pulls his cock out of your mouth and you suck in a sharp breath. “Close, Roman.”

“I know,” he says with a breathless chuckle. “Come on now, let it go.”

Your eyes roll back as you focus on his fingers, on unravelling the tight knot in your stomach. You look up at Eric, whose eyes are flitting from your face to Roman’s and back again with a hungry longing that’s so fucking desperate that you lose it, tumbling over the edge and sobbing a garbled string of praises and pleas and thank yous, all mixed in with their names.

Roman fucks you through the aftershocks, only releasing your clit when you’re actually crying, and he buries his cock as deep as he can as he comes, coating your insides with the final claiming of the night, as it fucking should be.

Your knees give out and you drop heavily onto your stomach, turning your face to the side and pillowing your cheek on your arms as your eyes droop.

“Think we broke her.” Roman mutters, and you feel his familiar touch ghosting over your spine.

“You okay, princess?” Eric asks, and you feel his familiar, careful touch smoothing your hair away from your neck.

“Why do you call her that?” Roman snaps. “She isn’t a fucking princess.”

Eric sighs, and you try so, so hard to remain conscious, desperate to hear the ending of this conversation. “Roman, man. The fact that you can’t see just how fucking special she is, is exactly why you’re gunna lose her.”

“Fuck you.”

“I’m not trying to be a dick.” Eric reaches out to smooth a stray lock of hair away from Roman’s face, and Roman hates the way his heart skips a beat at the casual affection. “But if she was mine? I’d worship her. All the time.”

“I love her.” Roman mumbles, tracing patterns on your bare skin. “I don’t think I can give her more than that.”

“And that’s been enough for a long time.” Eric says carefully. “But I’m not going anywhere.”

The two men sit in silence for a moment, caressing your skin and your hair as you're lulled into sleep.

“I’d give you this.”

Eric’s brows furrow as he looks at the pinched desperation on Roman’s face.

“Give me what?”

Roman’s fingers glide down your spine, coming to rest on the curve of your ass. “We could do this. Together, I mean. Not all the time, but-“

“That’s fucked up, Godfrey.” Eric hates that he’s considering it.

“Don’t take her from me.” Roman’s bottom lip juts out in an absurd, pathetic pout. “I know she’s too good for me. I know I’m not good, and I do shitty things and I don’t fuckin know why I do them. But don’t take her from me, Eric.”

Eric can’t believe he’s feeling sorry for Roman fucking Godfrey, but the man looks so broken and pathetic as he pleads, his big green eyes unblinking and miserable. “She’s not a thing, man. I can’t take her. But I won’t stop her if she wants to leave you.”

Roman hangs his head. “Then you should get the fuck out of my house.” When he lifts his face to Eric’s the mean, hard set of his expression is back and Eric feels his spine straightening with the challenge of it. “And if I catch you sniffing around my girlfriend again I’ll kill you myself. Nobody’d miss a junkie street rat anyway.”

Eric swallows, his knuckles curling into his fists, but then you mumble something in your sleep, your pretty mouth curving up into a soft smile, and Eric sags. He isn’t going to beat Roman Godfrey into a bloody pulp, even if he deserves it. Because for an inexplicable reason Eric can’t figure out, you love the bastard. And until he can convince you that loving Roman Godfrey is a bad habit, he’ll have to play nice. He’ll have to play the game.

So he slips off the couch, rebuttoning his jeans and allowing himself one last look at how sweet and soft and warm you look curled up against a man who doesn’t deserve any of it. “She said you’d switched supplier.”

Roman shrugs.

“I just got a shipment of pills like you wouldn’t believe. Come by if you want a freebie.”

Roman shrugs again, but there’s a spark of interest in his eyes that Eric recognizes. Addicts know addicts, and he’s certain he’ll be seeing Roman Godfrey, and by extension you again very soon.

You twirl in the mirror, admiring the soft flow of tulle and lace over your curves from every angle. The assistant peeks her head around the curtain and hums approvingly. “A perfect fit.”

You meet her eyes in the mirror and smile. “I think my boyfriend will really like it.”

“He’d be crazy not to. Just make sure he doesn’t pull on the straps too hard. This piece isn’t as… robust as the garments we usually charge to Mr Godfrey’s account.”

You flush, thinking about the assortment of thickly banded teddies and corsets and bras Roman has picked out for you in the past. Everything black, often leather and lace. One particularly vicious-looking corset studded with little steel spikes that he likes to feel needling against his balls when he fucks your tits.

You press your legs together, biting the corner of your lip into your mouth. “He might… this might be a little too…”

“No.” The assistant says firmly. “Men like variety. For most couples, the other items would be spicing it up. For Mr Godfrey… this is different. This will surprise him.”

You nod, running your fingertips down the carefully embroidered butterflies on the floaty bodice. “He might laugh at me.”

The woman scoffs. “Honey, if a red-blooded man sees you in this and laughs, I’d be questioning more than his taste in lingerie.”

*

The lights are off when Roman gets home, and he drops his bag to the floor beside the door with a sigh. He’d missed dinner, and the leftovers he knows you’ll have put in the fridge hold little appeal. He’s cold, cold from being stuck in the clinical environment of the White Tower for much too long, enduring meetings and emails and mindless office chatter whilst you wandered around his home, curled up in his bed.

You’d sent him pictures today. You didn’t do that all the time, like you were afraid your constant contact would bother him, and Roman had never corrected you on that even though he missed you almost all the time.

But you’d sent him pictures today, and every new image had clenched at his heart and sent throbs of desire through his cock. Your morning tea, sunning on his counter. The little moustache of cappuccino foam on your pretty mouth as you took a selfie in the coffee shop in town. And then a picture of your pretty, delicate fingers wrapped around the handle of a very familiar bag from Roman’s favourite store. He’d know the elegant black bag with the embossed golden script anywhere, and his cock had perked up at the sight of it. You’d captioned it simply ‘come home to us’ and Roman hadn’t been able to think about anything else for the rest of the day.

He slips his shoes off and pads silently upstairs, following the waxy scent of candles and the sound of soft acoustic pop filtering out of the bedroom. His breath hitches as he pushes the door open, but you’re not on the bed. The sheets are rumpled like you’d just vacated it, and Roman crosses the room and sinks down onto the still-warm mattress, running his fingers over the pillow that smells like your perfume.

“Is that you, Roman?” You call from the adjoining bathroom, and Roman sighs.

“Yeah. Sorry I’m so late.”

“It’s okay.”

“I kept fucking things up.” He says, loosening his tie before pulling it from the collar of his shirt. “You sent me that picture and I checked out.”

He hears your giggle echoing in the bathroom and feels a stupid smile spreading over his face.

“Should I say I’m sorry?”

“No.” He unbuttons his shirt, his cock twitching and thickening at just the memory of the photo like he’s developed an overwhelming pavlovian response to that fucking store.

“Good, because I’m not.”

“You gunna come out and show me what you bought, or am I going to have to come in there?”

“I…” you break off, and Roman tenses at the sudden shift in your tone, even when you’ve only uttered a single syllable. “I bought something different.”

“Okay,” Roman says slowly, shrugging out of his shirt and rubbing his palm absently over his hardening cock to relieve some of the pressure. “There isn’t anything you could have bought in there that I won’t like.”

You huff a laugh. “Not even a monster strap-on?”

Roman almost chokes on his own surprised laugh, though the thought of you bending him over and railing him isn’t as unappealing as he expects it to be. “Did you buy a monster strap-on?”

You sigh loudly, cracking the door open and poking your head out. “Worse.”

“Worse,” he mumbles, palming himself harder as he takes in your artfully styled ‘messy’ hair and the soft warmth of your skin. “Color me intrigued.”

“Promise not to laugh.”

You sound shy, and Roman’s heart throbs along with his cock. “Scouts honor.” He holds up three fingers, and you sigh before pushing the door wide and stepping out.

You brace for the laughter, the teasing, but it doesn’t come. Roman doesn’t make any sound at all, and you open your eyes to find him frozen, unblinking eyes fixed on you. “Well don’t say nothing. That’s worse.” You mumble, fiddling with the delicate hem of the teddy where it brushes against your thigh. “Roman.”

He blinks, shaking his head. “Baby.” The word comes out low and strangled. “It’s pink.”

You feel your cheeks heat as you bite your bottom lip into your mouth. “I know you like black, but I thought-“

Roman is up and across the room before you have a chance to finish the thought, his hands searing against your skin through the fabric as he pushes you back against the wall. “I like this.”

He dips his head, pressing open-mouthed kisses to your neck as his fingers roam over the floaty fabric covering your body. He finds the hem of the nightdress and slips underneath, moaning against your skin at the softness of your stomach as he brushes over the underside of your breasts.

“I thought… I was worried that you’d think,” you mumble, breaking off with a gasp as Roman presses his stiff cock against you, prominent even through the double barrier of his pants and boxers.

“You thought what?” He asks, lips swollen as he pulls away to rake his eyes over your body. “Goddamn, you’re so fucking hot.”

You flush, arching away from the wall and reaching to rub your hand over the bulge in his pants. “I was worried you’d think it was dumb. Like, babyish.”

Roman scoffs, eyes darkening as he watches you fondle his cock. “Babyish?” His hips tilt forward against your hand and a soft moan slips past his lips. “You look like a virgin. Like a… fucking slutty virgin.”

You lick your lips, slipping your free hand under your nightgown to tease against the soaked lace of your own panties. “You make me so wet.”

Roman groans, knocking your hand away from his cock as he reaches for your face with both hands and pushes his tongue into your mouth. You slip a finger past the barrier of your underwear and find the swollen bud of your clit, caressing against it with light little touches that have you whimpering into his mouth.

He pulls back a little, nipping at your bottom lip. “You’re still touching yourself? You that desperate for me?”

“Yes,” you whisper, dropping all pretence as pleasure washes through you. “I need you. I needed you all day.”

Roman hums, stepping back enough to watch the frantic movement of your hand in your underwear. “You look so pure,” he groans, lowering slowly to his knees until his face is just inches from your covered core. “But you’re so fucking filthy for me.”

You whine, reaching your free hand to cup his jaw. “Please, Roman.”

He licks his lips, pupils blown so wide his eyes are almost black. “You want me to touch you? Taste you?”

You nod, sucking your bottom lip into your mouth. “Please.”

Roman reaches for you, pushing the hem of your nightgown up before carefully taking your wrist and pulling your hand away from your pussy. “I can’t promise these little panties are gunna survive the night.”

You moan, your head dropping back against the wall. “That’s okay. I… that’s okay.”

Roman hums, hooking his fingers into the thin waistband and tugging. The panties don’t move, not with the string of the thong wedged in your ass and your slick sticking the lace to your folds. “Fuck, look at this.” He traces his fingers over the soaked fabric. “I’ve never been jealous of underwear before.”

You giggle, a drunk, hysterical little sound, and Roman flashes you a feral grin before he dips his head under your floaty skirt and sucks the soaked fabric into his mouth and between his teeth.

Your eyes roll back at the sensation of his breath so close to your sensitive core, and you fist his hair. “Please, Roman.”

He huffs against you as he pulls back, and there’s a stretch, a sharp sting as the straps securing your underwear cut against your soft flesh. And then a snap. Roman rocks back, emerging from beneath your skirt with your panties still secured in his teeth.

“Fuck, Roman,” you gasp, releasing his hair to rub at the chafe mark on your hip. “That hurt.”

Roman drops your panties into his hand, pocketing them before leaning back in and kissing your clit. “Sorry, sweetheart.” The smirk on his face suggests he’s not sorry at all, and you roll your eyes as he latches his lips to your clit and sucks it into his mouth.

“Roman,” you whisper, fingers threading back into his hair to pull him close you as you roll your hips against his face. “God, please don’t stop.”

Roman grunts in affirmation, pushing two fingers into you without warning and curling his fingers back towards himself in a fluttering motion. You feel your arousal slicking his face, drenching him, but his eyes are wide and dark and glassy as he looks up at you through his lashes, and your clit throbs incessantly at the delicious sight of him.

He pulls away long enough to mumble a “come for me,” before licking you aggressively in long, wide stripes, encouraging the friction as you rock against his face. It doesn’t take long for the coil of pleasure in your stomach to tighten into an unbearable tension, and your legs shake as your release washes through you with a cry of his name.

Roman swallows every drop of you greedily, mercilessly sucking and licking and nipping at your clit as you twitch first towards him and then away, pressing your ass back against the wall to escape the overstimulation.

“Roman please,” you whimper, pulling on his hair harder than you ever have before. “Please stop.”

Roman moans against you at the sharp tug against his hair, his cock twitching in the confines of his pants at the pain. He pulls away, looking up at you with big, innocent eyes. “Too much?”

“Too much.” You agree with a huff, “And you broke my panties.”

Roman’s smile morphs into a smirk as he pushes to a stand, wiping his mouth with his palm and using the slick to rub over the bulge in his pants. “Sorry, sweetheart. I couldn’t help it. It’s just all so… pink.”

You feel your cheeks heat, and your fingers return to toying with the gauzy hem of the teddy. “Too pink?”

“Too pretty,” he hums, dropping his big hands to your waist and turning you to walk you backwards towards the edge of the bed. “Too distracting. You think I’d be able to go to work every morning if you looked like this all the time?”

“Roman,” you sigh. “You don’t go to work half the time anyway.”

Roman winks, pushing you until your knees hit the mattress and you drop onto your back with a little gasp.

“Then I really can’t afford to stop going the other half of the time, can I? We’ll be out on the street. No more fancy pink lingerie for either of us.”

A picture of him wearing your pretty pink teddy and thong flashes in your mind, and you can’t stop the little bubble of laughter from spilling out.

“What?” He asks, his own smile indulgent and soft.

“You wanna wear it after me? I’m not sure you’ve got the tits for it.”

Roman’s grin pulls lopsided as he drops over you, pushing your legs apart and kneeling between them as he works his belt free. “I think I could rock it. You’re always saying I got a nice ass.”

You hum, lifting your leg to graze your shin against his ass as he shoves his pants and boxers down to his knees and settles against you. “You do have a nice ass, Roman.”

Roman thinks again about the joke you made earlier, and his cock leaks fresh precum at the thought of you pushing your fingers into his ass. Maybe something to explore, maybe not.

“You look like a fuckin angel,” he murmurs, taking in every perfect, pretty inch of you. Your hair rests on the pillow like a halo, and you’re looking at him with soft, hungry eyes, and Roman positions his cock and sinks into you without ever taking his eyes off your face. Your lips part in an ‘o’ as he bottoms out, your pupils expanding and your breath catching in your throat as he fills you completely, and Roman knows you love him.

You tell him all the time, but he’s so used to people saying one thing and doing another, or pretending to like him so they could get to his money or his drugs or his cousin. But your pupils expand when you look at him, and your heartrate picks up. He can hear it, and you can’t fake that.

He pulls half out and pushes back in slowly, relishing in how your eyes flutter closed and you sigh, your hands lacing behind his head. “Roman,” you whisper. “Rome, you feel so good.”

Roman dips his head and presses his lips to yours, bringing one hand down the front of your little nightgown to trace the carefully embroidered butterflies covering your stomach. You shiver and whimper with each brush of his fingertips, and Roman wants to send the designer a fruit basket. “So pretty,” he coos, voice low as his hips snap against you faster and harder. “My pretty girl. Pretty in pink.”

You suck your bottom lip into your mouth, leaving little indents in the pillow of it, and Roman’s mouth waters as he traces along the silky edge of the fabric and lower to rub gently at your clit. “No, no, no,” you whine. “No, I can’t again, please.”

Roman takes your bottom lip into his mouth, nipping at the flesh before laving his tongue over the hurt and releasing you. “Yeah you can. Gimme one more.”

“You… it hurts.” There are tears in your eyes, but your pussy flutters erratically around his cock and Roman knows your close. Knows this doe-eyed babydoll act is all part of it.

“I know,” he coos. “You’re doing so good for me. Look how pretty you are, sweetheart. Dressed up like a little virgin for me? You wanna…” he groans as you clamp down hard, almost trapping him inside you. “You wanna make me… come.” He grits out. “Shit, shit baby.”

You release your muscles, batting your eyelashes at him. “You ruined my panties.”

“I always…” Roman punctuates his words with hard, brutal thrusts, fucking right up against your cervix. “Ruin your panties. Or…” he pinches your clit between two fingers and you buck violently into his hand, angling his cock down so his length is dragged against your g-spot with every thrust. “You ruin them… for me.”

You come with a sob, your overstimulated body on fire as your clit spasms under his fingers and your muscles milk Roman’s cock so forcefully he actually sees stars.

He buries himself as deeply inside you as he can, shooting his release against your insides as you try to swallow him whole, your fingers clawing through his hair with a delicious sting that heightens every moment of his orgasm.

He’s shaking when he pulls out of you and rolls onto his side, and you’re so fucked out you can’t curl up against him like you usually would. Roman waits, his arm tingling with the anticipation of holding you, but unease begins to settle in his stomach the longer you lie there silently. “You really pissed about the panties?”

You swallow, considering this. There’s real apprehension in his voice, and that’s so rare from Roman Godfrey that you decide to play with him, just a little bit.

“They were nice. I really liked them.”

“I made you cum twice.”

You turn your head to the side to fix him with what you hope is a condescending look. “They were my favorites.”

“You bought them today.” He argues, rolling onto his side and propping himself up on his elbow. “How could they be your favorites if you bought them today?”

“I loved them.” You say, pouting your bottom lip out. “I loved them and you broke them.”

Roman hums, catching on to the game and running his free hand down your side to hitch your teddy up around your hips. “I think you look better without them.”

“I can’t wear this without the thong, Roman. It’s a set.”

“I’ll buy you a replacement.”

You lick your lips, eyes sparkling. “More pink?”

Roman rolls his eyes, grinning indulgently at you. “Any color you want, sweetheart. I’ll buy out the damn store and you can put on a private runway show for me.”

You twist your mouth to the side, and Roman can’t stop himself from lacing his hand into your hair, just to feel the silk of it between his fingers.

You lean into it, shimmying up the bed until you’re close enough to brush the tip of your nose against his own. “I’d never get through all the outfits without you ripping them to shreds with your teeth.”

Roman’s cock twitches at the low, teasing tone to your voice. “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

“You’re an animal, Godfrey.”

Roman leans in and captures your lips with his own, coaxing your mouth open so he can glide his tongue against yours. You moan softly, pressing your body against his and feeling the growing interest as his cock thickens against your stomach.

Roman pulls away first, glancing down to where you’ve curled your hand around his cock. “I’m the animal? You’re insatiable. You’re a succubus. A demon, a-“

You cut him off with a kiss and a twist of your wrist over the head of his cock, and Roman gasps into your mouth.

“I’m all those things for you,” you whisper against his mouth, swiping precum and your drying arousal from his tip and jerking it down his length. “But I look fucking pretty in pink, don’t I?”

Roman huffs a laugh as his hips buck into your hand, and he feels an overwhelming, all-encompassing need to marry you. “Fucking pretty,” he says instead, tickling his fingers against your scalp and keeping your mouth close to his as you work his cock with your slutty, perfect hand. It’s all he’s got right now, all he can afford to say, and it’ll have to do. For now, at least.