the raven reads

He's freshly showered, smelling like that cedar body wash he's been using since rehab, and his mohawk is styled the way he only bothers with when he's feeling good enough to exert the kind of effort that signals intent.

"Define 'a while,'" Kyle says mildly, not looking up from his phone beneath the table.

"Months, mate. Fuckin’ months." Johnny takes a long drink and scans the pub with the lazy, appreciative gaze of a man on the hunt. "I'm dryin' up over here. Witherin' on the vine. 'S embarrassin'."

"That's one word for it," Simon mutters into his whisky.

Kyle's thumb pauses on his phone screen. He doesn't look at Simon, and Simon doesn't look at him, but the silence between them is loaded with a practiced, wordless exchange refined over months of navigating nights exactly like this one.

Because Johnny has not, in fact, gone months without getting laid.

Johnny had sex with his wife four days ago. Kyle knows this because you'd texted the group chat—the one Johnny doesn't know exists, one labelled "Ops" on Kyle's phone and "X" on Simon's—to let them know Johnny was having a good week.

Remembering things. Sleeping through the night without nightmares. Being present.

Four days ago. And now he's sitting in a pub in Hereford telling his mates he's been in a drought, and his eyes are doing that thing they do when a bad episode is ramping up; brighter than usual, slightly too wide, running hot with a manic energy that looks like confidence if you don't know what you're looking at.

But Kyle knows what he's looking at.

He glances at Simon. Simon gives the smallest nod—a millimetre of movement, barely perceptible—and Kyle opens the Ops chat beneath the table.

Bad night. Swan. Come when you can.

Swan is the code. You'd all agreed on it together in the early days, back when the episodes were frequent and terrifying and no one knew the rules yet. Swan means he doesn't know you. Pub means to come find him. Home means they'll bring him to you immediately.

Your reply comes seconds later as if you’ve been bracing for it, which you have. Just in case.

Omw. 20 min. How bad?

Kyle replies,

Flirty. Scanning the room. Hasn't clocked it yet.

Three dots, then: Dress up or down?

Kyle looks at Johnny, who is now leaning back in his chair with his arms spread wide, grinning across the room, radiating the particular Scottish charm that made him dangerous in pubs long before the injury and wedding.

Up. He's in a good mood.

Three dots appear again, longer this time, and one simple word follows because Kyle hesitated sending it.

Horny…

Got it.

He puts his phone away and picks up his pint casually. "So what's your type again, Johnny? Since you're on the pull tonight."

Johnny snorts, mumbling into his glass. "Ye know my type."

"Mm. Remind me."

"Funny. Smart," he takes a sip of his drink, smacks his lips while his eyes keep scanning, “Can handle her drink. Someone who doesnae take my shite." He pauses, something flickering behind his eyes—a shadow, there and gone again, like a cloud passing over the sun. "Someone who laughs at ma’ jokes even when they're rubbish and rides me like it’s our last day on bloody earth." He grins; baby blue’s gleaming mischievously.

Simon turns away to roll his eyes while Kyle's chest tightens but smiles anyway. "High bloody standards for a man with that fuckass haircut."

"Fuck off, Garrick. This haircut is iconic."

Simon says nothing. He drinks his whisky, watches the door, waits.

You arrive in eighteen minutes.

You're wearing the deep green dress—the one Johnny told you made you look like "somethin' oot of a Bond film" on your second anniversary, the one you now keep in the back of the wardrobe now specifically for nights like this. Your hair is done. You're wearing the perfume he bought you three Christmases ago that he won't remember buying right now.

You pause outside the pub, sit in your car for thirty seconds, and breathe.

This is the seventh time. You know because you keep count, not physically, but in your body. In the specific way your hands shake when Kyle's text comes through while he is out with Johnny and the practiced steadiness you layer over it like gauze over a wound.

The first time was the worst. Two months post-injury, Johnny still in a neck brace, waking up in the hospital and looking at you with polite confusion and asking the nurse who you were. You'd made it to the corridor before your legs gave out, and Simon had caught you with one strong arm and no words, holding you upright against the wall while Price talked to the doctors and Kyle distracted Johnny.

You'd learned the rules since then. The triggers and early tells. The protocols. You'd built a system—you and his brothers in more than arms, the lot of you holding Johnny's world together like scaffolding around a building that keeps forgetting its own foundations.

On good days, Johnny knows you; he knows the house, the wedding photos, the way you take your tea. On those days, he calls you by the nickname only he uses and reaches for you in his sleep and laughs at the same terrible jokes he's been telling for years.

On bad days, you're a stranger.

Tonight is a bad day, even though it had started good initially. And sometimes that happens, too.

You check your reflection one more time; smooth the dress, tuck your wedding ring into your jacket pocket, because he can't see it yet, not until the timing is right, and you saunter into the pub, hips swaying.

You spot them immediately. Corner booth, usual spot. Kyle is facing the door, which means he sees you first, and his expression does a complicated thing—relief and grief and a non-verbal "Go on then, you've got this,"—before he schools it into easy neutrality.

Simon is beside him, facing away from the door now, though you know he clocked you the moment you walked in, always does. He can feel a change in a room's atmosphere the way other people feel a draft, and your presence has become one of the things he's attuned to, though he'd rather be waterboarded again than admit it.

And Johnny.

Johnny is mid-sentence, gesticulating with his pint, lit up and alive and devastating, and he hasn't seen you yet.

You order a drink at the bar. Gin and tonic. You position yourself where his sightline will catch you naturally—not too close, not too obvious, like setting a lure and waiting for the current to do its work.

It barely takes a minute.

His gaze sweeps the room, passes over you, and snaps back. You watch it happen in your peripherals; the double-take, the slight parting of his naturally pouty lips, the way his entire body reorients towards you like a compass needle finding north.

"Ho-ly shite," he breathes, still staring. "Lads. Lads. Two o'clock."

Kyle makes a show of looking when his arm is being nudged repeatedly. "Yeah? Which one?"

"The—Are ye blind?" He scoffs, offended on your behalf. "Her. Right there. At the bar."

"She's alright." Kyle shrugs, and the casualness of it is Oscar-worthy.

"Alright? She's fuckin'—" Johnny runs a hand over his mohawk, a nervous tell he's had since he was a teenager and will probably have until he's ninety. "She's fuckin' gorgeous is what she is."

Simon lifts his glass. Takes a slow drink, sets it down deliberately.

"Go talk to her then," he says with a shrug, and his voice is perfectly flat, perfectly controlled, and if anyone at this table could hear the hairline fracture running through those five words, they'd understand something that Simon has long decided to take to his next grave, because he's watched this happen too many times now.

He's watched Johnny fall in love with you for the first time seven more times after the real one, the first time, and each time, he involuntarily catalogues the way Johnny looks at you—stunned and reverent, immediately and irrevocably gone—and files it beside the thing he keeps locked in the deepest, most fortified room in his chest cavity.

He doesn't want you instead of Johnny. That's not what this is. It's worse than that, and quieter, and it has no name because he refuses to give it one.

What he wants is to be someone who could be loved the way you love Johnny; he wants to understand what it feels like to be chosen over seven times by a brain that can't hold onto anything else.

What he desperately wants—is to stop fucking wanting.

"Go on," Simon says again, when Johnny hesitates. "Before someone else does."

Johnny grins wider and slides out of the booth.

And he approaches you with more confidence than caution along with a smile that could talk its way out of an international incident.

"A'right?" He leans against the bar beside you with all his bulk, leaving just enough space for plausible deniability, and you almost laugh because it's exactly how he did it the first time—the real first time—at a pub in Edinburgh six years ago.

"A'right," you reply, letting the corner of your mouth lift.

"Johnny." He extends his hand. "John MacTavish."

You take it. His palm is warm and rough and so achingly familiar that you have to swallow hard against the lump that rises in your throat.

And you give him your name in return; no surname, because hearing his own last name come out of your mouth would raise questions you're not ready to choreograph around yet.

"Can I buy ye a drink?" he asks casually, nodding at your gin and tonic. "Or are ye waitin' for someone?"

"I might be."

"Oh, aye?" His eyebrows lift, and the grin sharpens. "Lucky bloke."

Your lips purse. "Who says it's a bloke?"

He barks a genuine laugh and the sound of it hits you right in the sternum because it's the same laugh, it's always the same laugh, whether he knows you or not.

"Fair enough. Can I buy ye a drink while ye wait for whoever's lucky enough to have ye, then?"

You hold his gaze, eyes crinkling in the corners as you suppress a smile before you cave in. "Go on."

Johnny buys you a cocktail, then a water, and you let him.

He tells you he's military—"Aye, the kind ye cannae ask aboot, sorry, love"—and that he's recently recovered from an injury he's vague about; he points at his two mates sitting in the corner booth who are "Absolutely shite wingmen, don't even look at ‘em." And he tells you that you have the best laugh he's ever heard, and he says it with such disarming sincerity that you almost believe he's saying it for the first time.

He might be. That's the thing. To him, he is.

You tell him you're a—and you pause here, every time, because this is the part where you have to build a version of yourself that's close enough to the truth that you won't trip over the details but far enough from reality that he won't start connecting dots prematurely. You tell him what you do, where you live, staying vague, and you make him laugh, and his hand finds the small of your back at some point and stays there, warm and heavy through the dress, and you let it because it belongs there.

At the booth, Kyle is watching with the practiced eye of a director monitoring a scene he's staged before. He tracks the beats—the body language closing in, the first touch, the moment Johnny leans down to hear you over the music and stays close—and he nods to himself, satisfied with the outcome.

Simon is staring at the table. His glass is empty. He doesn't order another.

"He's doing well tonight," Kyle says quietly, because someone should break the silence, and Simon sure won't.

Simon nods, not lifting his eyes from the sticky surface. "He always does well with ‘er."

The sentence hangs between them. Kyle looks at Simon and sees something in the set of his Lieutenant's jaw that he files away and will never, ever mention aloud.

"You good, LT?"

"Fine."

He's not fine. Kyle knows, but he chooses not to push it.

Johnny drives you home after assuring you he only had two pints.

This is the part that always makes your chest tighten—the navigation and logistics of getting him into his own house without it feeling like a trap. You give him directions, turn by turn, and he follows them cheerfully, one hand on the wheel of your car (his car, technically; the one you drove to the pub) and the other on your thigh, thumb tracing idle patterns on your skin.

"Nice neighbourhood," he remarks as you turn onto the street. His street. Your street.

"It's alright," you manage, and your voice is steady, which is a miracle.

He pulls into the driveway and kills the engine, and you watch his eyes move over the front of the house; over the garden you maintain together, the blue door he painted last spring during a particularly good month, the porch light that you left on tonight because you knew you'd be bringing him home.

"Lovely place," he says, and there's nothing in his voice but genuine appreciation, no recognition, no alarm, and the absence of it is a knife you've learned to hold without flinching.

"Come inside then," you tell him, and he grins genuinely. "Thought ye'd never ask."

The front door is where it starts getting tricky.

His boots are by the mat. Not a guest's boots—his boots, broken in and muddy, sitting beside a pair of your trainers in the easy domesticity of a shared household. Johnny glances down at them, and you see the first flicker; not quite recognition yet, just a stutter, a brief glitch in the narrative he's been building all evening.

"Those are—" he starts, then stops, and shakes his head. "Those look like mine."

He lets out a short laugh, but there's an edge to it. A hesitation. His eyes move from the boots to you, narrowing playfully, but you can see the question forming underneath.

"Ye're not married, are ye?" He asks it like a joke, but his gaze drops to your left hand—still bare, ring safely tucked in your jacket pocket—and then sweeps back to the boots. "Because I'm no' that kind of bloke, love. I don’t do that."

"I'm not married," you lie, and it tastes like glass shards in your mouth.

"Good." The grin returns full force, satisfied, and he reaches for your waist again. "'Cause I'd hate to have to fight some poor bastard for ye."

He moves on, pulling you towards him, and you let out a breath you were holding. Then he pauses, looks down at his own left hand, still resting on your hip, and you watch his brow furrow.

"What the—" He lifts his hand, turning it in the dim hallway light. The gold band sits on his ring finger, catching the glow from the porch light through the glass panel in the door. He stares at it like it appeared there by magic, and you always wonder if he only notices it at this point, because some part in his brain does recognize the terrain subconsciously.

"When did I—" He touches the ring with his other thumb, turning it as he mutters. "I don't—Why am I wearin' a—"

"Johnny," you say softly, and take his hand, folding your fingers over his. "Come to the bedroom with me."

He looks at the ring, then at you. The furrow deepens, but the panic hasn't arrived yet—just confusion surfacing, sitting like sediment at the bottom of a glass that hasn't been stirred yet.

"Aye," he says slowly, nodding. "Aye, alright."

The hallway is next.

You've learned to control the environment—certain photos stay up because removing them would make the house feel wrong, and a wrong-feeling house agitates him in ways that are harder to manage than the photos themselves. The wedding portrait stays on the wall at the end of the corridor, but the hallway lighting is dim enough that it doesn't register unless he's looking for it.

He's not looking at anything but you; one hand finding your waist as you move through the darkened house, his mouth is close to your ear.

"Ye smell incredible," he murmurs, nose brushing through your hair. "Been thinkin' aboot this all night."

You chuckle softly with a knot in your chest. "Have you?"

"Since the second I saw ye in that pub." His grip tightens, pulling you back against him, and his lips find the side of your neck. "Couldn't think about anythin' else."

You lean into him; let him hold you and his hands wander over the fabric of your dress while his mouth traces a warm, open path along your throat.

"Bedroom?" you whisper.

"Christ, yes."

You lead him by the hand. Down the hall, past the closed door of the bathroom where his toothbrush sits in the holder beside yours and the spare room where Simon once slept on the floor for three days during a particularly bad episode because he refused to leave either of you alone to deal with it and refused a bed on top of it.

The bedroom.

You open the door and let him walk in first, which is a deliberate choice—it lets you watch his face as the room registers. The king-sized bed you share. The nightstand with his book on it, dog-eared and half-read. Your wardrobe, open slightly, his fatigues visible on the shelf beside your clothes.

And on the dresser, in a simple frame—a photograph. Not the wedding portrait. A smaller, candid snapshot. Him and you, laughing at something you don’t even remember off-camera, his arm around your shoulders, your face turned into his chest. Kyle took it at a barbecue over eighteen months ago, back when things were still normal, back before the world broke.

And because his vigilance training is seared somewhere deeper into his brain, Johnny sees the photograph first.

He goes still. Not the easy stillness of before, but tighter and alert. The stillness of a soldier who's walked into a room and sensed that the intel doesn't match the terrain.

"What—" He drops your hand and crosses to the dresser to pick up the frame without asking. His brow furrows deeper while his thumb traces the edge of it.

"That's me," he says slowly.

Your stomach drops; you stay back, swallowing hard. "Yes."

"That's—" He looks at you. Back at the photo, then back at you. His breathing changes, shallow and faster now, and you can see the confusion calcifying into something harder, edged with the beginning of panic.

"Why is there a fuckin’ photo of me in yer house?"

"Johnny—"

"Why are my fuckin’ things here?" He's turning now, scanning the room with fresh eyes, and you watch the details hit him one by one—the boots downstairs, the book on the nightstand, the fatigues in the wardrobe. His toothbrush. His cologne on the bathroom shelf. The indent on his side of the bed.

"What the fuck is this?!" His voice pitches up and his chest is heaving, and you recognise the spiral; the moment the ground drops out from under him, and he can't find the edges of what is real. "Who the fuck are ye? What—Why do ye have—"

"Johnny." You step towards him, hands raised, palms open, the way you'd approach a wounded animal. The way the counsellor taught you. "Johnny, listen to my voice."

"Don't fuckin'—" He backs away and bumps into the dresser, and the frame rattles, and his hands are shaking. "Tell me what's goin' on. Now!"

"You live here," you say carefully, evenly. "This is your house. Our house."

"No. No, I've got a flat, I've got—"

Your expression drops to something pained yet soft. "You don't have a flat, sweetheart. You haven't had a flat in three years. You live here. With me."

He stares at you. His jaw is working, his fists are clenched at his sides, and his eyes are wild with the terror of a man whose own mind has suddenly become enemy territory.

"We're married, Johnny." You keep your voice steady and warm. You don't move closer yet, but you produce your own wedding band from your pocket and slip it on deliberately, matching his. "Three years. We got married at your mum's church in Glasgow, and you cried during the vows, and Kyle was your best man and he cried even harder."

Something flickers. Not memory, not quite yet, but a tremor, a fault line opening in the panic.

"Kyle—" he repeats, and his voice cracks on the name.

You nod enthusiastically. "Kyle Garrick. Gaz. Your best mate. He was at the pub tonight. So was Simon."

His blue eyes widen and flicker to meet yours. "Simon…"

"Ghost. Your Lieutenant. Tall, angry, won't take his mask off. He's probably sitting in his car outside right now making sure you got home safe, because that's what he does."

Johnny's breathing is ragged. His eyes are darting around the room, and you can see him trying to force the pieces together, grasping for edges that won't line up.

"I don't—" His voice breaks. "I don't remember."

Your heart breaks all over again; hands clenching and unclenching at your sides while you suppress the reflex to reach for him.

"I know."

"Why don't I remember?"

You sigh and your shoulders drop with it. "Because you were hurt. On a mission, ten months ago. You were shot, Johnny. In the head."

His hand moves before he's conscious of it—fingers lifting to his temple, searching, and you watch the exact moment they find it. The ridge of scar tissue above his left ear and temple, healed but tight, a furrow carved into the skin where the bullet grazed bone instead of passing through it.

He should be dead. The doctors said so. Kyle said so. Simon said so, once, in the kitchen at one a.m., in a voice so flat it sounded like a weather report. He should be dead. The bullet was two millimetres from killing him.

Two millimetres. The width of a pencil lead. The margin between a funeral and a life that keeps resetting.

Johnny's fingers trace the scar slowly, mapping the terrain of a wound he doesn't remember receiving. His face goes blank, not calm, but emptied, like the shock has pushed everything else out to make room for this one impossible fact.

"I was shot in the head," he repeats, toneless.

"By a man named Makarov. On a mission in," you sigh again, rubbing both hands over your face before regaining some composure. "It doesn't matter where. What matters is you survived, Johnny. You're here… With me."

"I don't—" His fingers press harder against the scar, like he's trying to push through it into the memory underneath. "I can't feel—It doesn't hurt."

"It pulls sometimes. When you're tired, or when the weather changes. You rub at it without realising. And then you ask me to put Bepanthen on it for you."

He drops his hand. Stares at it like it belongs to someone else.

A sound comes out of him that you've heard before and will never get used to—a small, gutted noise from deep in his throat, barely human, like something being torn at the root.

His gaze lifts. "I forget you?"

"Sometimes." Your voice is steady, but your eyes are not. "But you always come back. Every time, Johnny. You always come back."

He's staring at you with an expression that is no longer panic but something rawer, more exposed. The look of a man standing in the wreckage of a life he can't remember building and trying to find anything solid enough to hold on to.

"Come here," you say softly, finally, and you open your arms to him.

And Johnny doesn’t hesitate. He crosses the room in two strides and crashes into you.

His arms wrap around you so tightly it hurts, his face burying into the crook of your neck, and the ragged, broken sound he makes fills the bedroom and settles into the walls like a stain that will never come out.

You hold him like always. One hand on the back of his head, fingers carding through the short hair at the nape of his neck, the other arm banded around his broad back. You press your lips to his temple and breathe him in; cedar and sweat and the faint antiseptic undertone that hasn't fully left his skin since the hospital.

"It's okay," you murmur into his hair. "I'm here. I've got you."

"'M sorry—" He's shaking in your embrace. "I'm so fuckin' sorry, I didn't—I didnae know."

"You don't have to be sorry."

"I was chattin' ye up like some—like ye were some random—"

"I know." You pull back just enough to take his face in your hands, thumbs brushing over his cheekbones. His eyes are red and wet and searching yours desperately, looking for the anchor he can feel but can't see.

"You chat me up every time," you tell him, and you let yourself smile wetly because he needs to see it, needs to see that this isn't a tragedy to you—it's a Tuesday. It's the life you chose, and you'd choose it again. Every day for the rest of your shared life. "Same lines, same moves. You always lead with buying me a drink."

A wet, startled laugh punches out of him. "Aye?"

"Every time. Kyle says your material is tragic."

"Kyle can fuck off." He sniffs hard, blinking, and his hands are still gripping the fabric of your dress at your hips like he's afraid you'll evaporate. "Do I—Do I at least have good chat?"

You snort. "The worst."

His eyes widen comically. "The worst?"

"Absolutely appalling. I fall for it every time."

He laughs again, and this time it's closer to real and his forehead drops against yours as you breathe the same air, and the room settles around you like a held breath being released.

"Ye married me," he whispers, like he's testing the shape of it. "Ye actually married me."

You nod again, nuzzling your forehead against his. "Voluntarily and everything."

"Yer off yer heid."

"Probably," you brush your nose against his tenderly, "but you're stuck with me, MacTavish."

His hands slide from your hips to your waist, pulling you closer, and when his mouth finds yours, the kiss is tentative at first; careful and questioning, the kiss of a man who isn't sure what he's allowed to take yet.

You answer by threading your fingers into his mohawk, pulling him deeper, and kissing him back with every ounce of the love you've been carrying all evening behind the heavy mask of a stranger.

He groans into your mouth; his hands tighten on your waist, and the tentativeness dissolves into urgency, warm and achingly familiar.

"Tell me what ye like," he murmurs against your lips, and the earnestness in his voice—the genuine desire to get it right and learn you, not knowing he already has—makes your heart crack along an old fault line.

"I'll show you," you whisper. "I'll show you everything."

You undress him slowly.

The henley first, peeled over his head, and your hands trace the landscape of him; the scars he doesn't remember getting, the ink he doesn't remember sitting for, the topography of muscle and damage that your fingers have memorised over years of exactly this. Touching and mapping him; loving the body that keeps forgetting it's loved.

He watches you with wonder, his chest rising and falling unevenly. You trace each scar you find and when your fingers reach his jaw, you let your thumb drift up to his temple, brushing feather-light over the ridge of scar tissue there.

He flinches. Not from pain but from the strangeness of being touched somewhere he didn't know existed until twenty minutes ago.

"Does that bother you?" you ask, pulling your hand back.

"No." He catches your wrist and guides your fingers back. "Do it again."

You trace the scar slowly, gently, and his eyes flutter closed, and for a moment his face is so open and so unguarded that you have to bite the inside of your cheek to keep yourself together.

"Sounds aboot right," he murmurs, half to himself. "Hero and an eejit."

You push him back onto the bed, your marital bed, and he goes willingly, pulling you with him until you're straddling his lap, the skirt of your dress riding up around your thighs. His hands grip your hips, and he looks up at you with those bright blue eyes—burning with more than just lust.

"Christ, yer beautiful," he breathes. "D'ye know that?"

"You tell me." You lean down and press your mouth to the hinge of his stubbled jaw. "Every time."

"Good," he murmurs. "'S important ye hear it."

You kiss down his neck, his hairy chest, tracing the lines of his tattoos with your tongue and flicking one of his nipples. He groans and his hips roll up against you, the hard line of his fat cock pressing against your inner thigh through his jeans, and his fingers dig into the meat of your hips.

"Fuck. Ye don't have to—" You shake your head with a smile, shushing him. "I want to. Always do. I love sucking you off."

Johnny grins wolfishly. "I can see why I married ye."

And he groans with delight as you slide off his lap to kneel between his legs while the look on his face makes your eyes sting again, though you’ve become good at blinking it away. You undo his belt carefully, his button, his zipper, and free him from his briefs, and his cock springs up thick and hard.

You know this cock well; know the weight of it on your tongue, the exact pressure to stroke it that makes his abs clench, the spot beneath the mushroomy head where he's most sensitive. You know that he likes it slow at first and messy by the end, that he'll try to be polite about it until he can't, that his hand will find the back of your head and his hips will stutter and he'll warn you in a voice that's already gone before he comes down your throat in needy pulses.

You take him in your mouth, and the relieved, guttural sound he makes fills the room.

His eyes squeeze shut; his chest heaves. "Oh Christ—oh fuck—!"

You work him slowly. Tongue flat against the underside of his shaft, lips tight around the flushed tip, one hand wrapped around the base. You hollow your cheeks and take him deeper, and his hand flies to the back of your head—not pushing but needing to touch you—and his thighs tense on either side of your shoulders.

Johnny babbles through it, always does when you give him oral; accent thickening with random gibberish and praise.

You pull off with a slick pop and look up at him through your lashes, stroking him slowly from root to cockhead before you duck lower, and you lick a long, slow stripe over his balls, tonguing along the seam until you feel the exact moment his brain short-circuits.

"Holy shite—oh my God—nghh—" He grits his teeth, his eyes squeeze shut, and John MacTavish whines when you take one into your mouth gently, sucking softly, while his entire body arches off the mattress. His hand fists in the sheets; another sound comes out of him that is less word than sensation, more guttural and ecstatic.

"How did ye—Nobody does—How do ye know—"

You release him and press a kiss to his inner thigh, looking up at him with eyes that are bright and wet, but steadier.

"Because I'm your wife, Johnny."

The words land. You watch them hit; watch his expression cycle through shock and confusion and then something that isn't memory but is adjacent to it, deeper than recall, carved into the bedrock beneath the damaged circuitry.

Recognition.

"My wife," he repeats, and his voice is thick and full of awe.

You kiss his hip, nodding. "Your wife."

"Christ Almighty." His hand comes up to cover his mouth, and his eyes are shining as he pulls it back just enough to stare at his wedding ring again. "Oh my God, ye're my wife."

"I am."

"And ye—ye know—ye know exactly what I—"

"Everything." You crawl back up his body and straddle him again, cupping his face, pressing your forehead to his. "I know everything, Johnny. Every filthy, unhinged, ridiculous thing you're into, because you've spent years showing me, and I love it, and I love you, and you don't have to hold back."

And then Johnny kisses you hard and desperately; his hands suddenly everywhere at once—your hair, your waist, tugging at your dress, pulling it over your head with shaking fingers. He gets it off and throws it somewhere and then his hands are on your bare skin and the sound he makes is reverent.

"Ye're not—This isn't—"

"This isn't a hookup," you finish for him. "This is us. And I want all of it."

The dam breaks open behind his eyes, not quite memory, but permission, and the shift is seismic. His grip and breathing changes. The careful, polite restraint of a man on a first date incinerates, and what replaces it is raw, hungry, and known.

He flips you onto your back in one fluid motion, and the strength of it, the ease, makes you gasp. He's between your thighs before you can draw your next breath, yanking your underwear down your legs and tossing them over his shoulder, and then his mouth is on you without preamble, just his tongue on your clit, furious with intent.

Your head tips back with a shameless moan as he sucks and laps at your cunt.

"Tell me," he growls against you, the vibration making your hips buck. "Tell me what ye like, tell me everything, I wanna know—I wanna know every fuckin' thing—"

"Your fingers—Two—Hah, yes! Yes, like that—"

He drives two thick fingers into you, curls them, and your spine lifts off the bed. He reads you like a detonation sequence; adapting to your needs, adjusting pressure and angle and rhythm with the same tactical precision he brought to every mission, and within minutes you're shaking apart under his mouth, your hands fisted in his mohawk, his name tearing out of you on a scream.

And he doesn't let up but works you through the orgasm, licking you through the aftershocks, and when you drag him up by the shoulders and pull him over your body like a weighted blanket, his chin is slick and his eyes are blazing and the grin on his face is the most Johnny thing you've seen all night.

"Good?" he asks, like he genuinely needs the feedback.

Your hand curls around his nape as you pull him down, breathing against his lips. "Get inside me. Now."

"Fuck. Yes, ma'am."

He lines himself up, drags his cock through your drenched cunt and pushes in, slow at first, until your breath catches at the stretch and fullness, the feeling of home that hits you every time no matter how many times you do this, and he is fully sheathed inside.

Johnny cusses under his breath, his voice strained, and his arms braced on either side of your head; his face close enough that you can see every flicker of sensation crossing his features whenever you squeeze and clench around him.

"Move," you breathe. "Don't hold back. You never hold back with me."

"Don’t hold back," Johnny repeats and groans breathlessly, head hanging with the resigned realization that this will have a quick end, before he nods and folds your legs up, draping them over his shoulders. "Aye… I can do that."

And then his hips drive forward in a thrust that knocks the headboard against the wall, and the sound that punches out of both of you is obscene. He sets a relentless pace, hard and deep, fucking you the way you asked him to—with everything and nothing held in reserve—and the slap of skin on skin fills the bedroom along with your cries and his grunts and the rhythmic bang of the headboard.

"This what ye like?" he pants, one hand gripping the wooden frame for leverage. "This how I fuck ma wife?"

"Yes!" you cry out. "God, yes, please—Harder!"

"Harder she says—Fuckin' hell!" He adjusts your right leg over his shoulder, canting your hip up even further, and the change in angle makes you see stars, his cock massaging that spot inside you that makes your pussy tighten and your vision white out. "Look at ye takin' it. Fuckin’ look at ye. Yer a fuckin' dream, ye know that?"

"Johnny, 'm close," you mewl while your nails dig into his flexing biceps.

"Aye, I can fuckin’ feel it." His hand slides between your bodies, thumb rubbing your clit with unerring accuracy while a beads of sweat run down his chest, disappearing into the coarse hair. "C'mon, love. Gimme it, lemme feel ye."

And when he makes you tip over and your inner walls convulse around his cock in rhythmic, desperate pulses, Johnny follows you over the edge barely three thrusts later with a guttural moan and your name bitten into the skin of your shoulder as he buries himself to the hilt, spilling his load inside you.

He collapses over you, trembling, his face pressed into your neck while your legs slide off his shoulders with a satisfied sigh, and you hold him through the aftershocks the way you always did in nights like this one; a hand in his hair, the other on his sweat-slick back, feeling his heart pound against your chest.

For a long time, neither of you moves as the room settles. Your breathing evens out, syncs up, falls into the rhythm of two people who've been sharing a bed long enough that their bodies know how to find each other even in the dark.

"Hey," Johnny says eventually, muffled against your neck.

You smile despite everything, eyes welling up with tears. "Hey."

"I love ye."

You press your lips to his temple and whisper, "I love you too."

"D'ye think—" He lifts his head; his eyes are glossy and he suddenly looks unbearably young. "D'ye think I'll remember this tomorrow?"

The question sits between you, heavy and terrible but honest. You swallow hard, consider lying, but choosing not to.

"I don't know. Sometimes you do, other times you don’t," you say truthfully, because you promised yourself early on that you'd never lie to him about this. "But if you don't, I'll remember for both of us."

A tear slips down his face. Then another. He wipes them roughly with the back of his hand and lets out a wet, shaky laugh.

"And then ye'll just… What, fall in love with me again?"

"Johnny." You take his face in your hands and hold his gaze. "I've never stopped."

He makes a choked sound and kisses you again, slower this time, tasting of salt and beer.

He falls asleep with his head on your chest and his arms around your waist, and you stay awake longer than necessary, fingers carding through his short hair, listening to the slow rhythm of his breathing.

Outside, across the street, a black truck sits with its engine off.

Simon Riley watches the bedroom light go on through the upstairs window, and he watches it stay on for a long time before it’s switched off again.

And then he sits in the dark, in the quiet, and he wonders.

Not about what is happening inside. Not about them, specifically.

About the shape of a life where someone waits for you; where someone takes a phone call at nine p.m. on a Friday and puts on the green dress and drives to a pub and falls in love with you again because you asked her to, even though you didn't know you were asking.

He wonders what it would feel like to walk into a room and have someone's entire body reorient towards you; to be the answer to a question someone didn't know they were carrying.

And Simon wonders if he's capable of that. If the thing inside him that was broken long before any mission, long before any scar, is the kind of broken that someone could love around, the way you love around Johnny's.

He wonders, and he doesn't find an answer—somehow never does—and after a while, he starts the car and drives home to an empty flat.

He rolls you over with fluid strength. You straddle his hips, knees sinking into the mattress. The sheet falls away, leaving you bare to the cool morning light. His body sprawls beneath you, powerful and ready.

You rise up and guide him to your entrance. Hot, blunt heat against slick skin draws a sharp moan from you both. You sink down, taking him inch by excruciating inch until you sit flush against his lap.

Simon groans, hands gripping your waist like a lifeline. His head falls back, jaw clenched, the muscles in his neck standing out in sharp relief.

You begin to move; a slow, sinuous roll of your hips. Hands braced on his chest, you feel the firm muscle and the soft, solid power of him beneath your palms. Your hair falls forward, shutting out the world. You lean down, taking his mouth in a deep, languid kiss. A share of breath and taste.

The pace gathers heat. The bed creaks softly, a steady cadence beneath the sound of your mingled breathing.

"You're so beautiful, Si," you whisper against his lips.

He opens his eyes, raw and hungry. "Look who's talking," he growls, one hand moving up to cradle your face, thumb stroking your cheek. "You're the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. Riding me like this... Christ."

A whimper escapes you as the pleasure coils tight. You sit tall, changing the angle, and he hits deep enough to make sparks dance behind your eyes.

“Ohhh fuck, Si…”

"Shhh," he hushes, his grip on your hips guiding you, setting a pace that makes you see stars. "Gotta be quiet, doll. Johnny's right outside."

The threat of being heard sharpens every sensation. You bite your lip to muffle the moans tearing at your throat. Simon’s hand rests at your neck—a grounding, possessive weight. His hips drive upward to meet every downstroke, each movement devastatingly precise.

"I love you," you whisper.

His response is a choked groan. He pulls you tight against his chest, crushing you to him. "I love you," he breathes, his voice breaking. "My girl. My whole world."

The orgasm hits like a rolling wave, crashing over you from the inside out. You clamp down around him, a silent scream locked in your throat as shockwaves ripple through your body. He holds you through the tremor, whispering low praises until the shaking stops.

Before you can cool, he rolls you over, pinning you beneath him without ever slipping out. He braces himself on his forearms, caging you in, his iron composure completely shattered.

"Where...?" he pants against your skin.

"Inside," you whisper, fingers laced in his hair. "Always inside."

With a few hard, erratic thrusts, he follows you over the edge. The thick pulse of him fills you, a primal groan muffled against your shoulder. His body shudders against yours, then settles, heavy and warm.

You lie together as your heartbeats slow to a shared measure. Outside, the soft sounds of the kitchen continue, distant and irrelevant.

You kiss his temple. You feel his lips curve against your skin.

"I think I smell coffee," you murmur.

"You need somethin', Riley?" John asked, never looking up.

Simon's mouth was twisted beneath his balaclava as he weighed his options. He wasn't especially eager to be John's second victim of the day, but it'd been miserable for weeks with no stop in sight. In the end, he decided to be straight—

"Y'need'a get laid, boss."

John's hands immediately froze.

That unyielding anger came up his chest right on schedule — insubordinate, out of line — and then couldn't quite find his footing in it because the truth was a trapdoor just under him.

His eyes flicked up and across the room, ears warming up just like Johnny's had an hour ago.

"Bloody ornery, you are," Simon went on. "'ave been."

Simon wasn't wrong, John knew that.

The work winds them all too tight — adrenaline that can't be spent, images that don't erase, choices made under duress that keep them questioning at three in the morning. And everyone's got a valve that lets the steam out. Johnny shouts his out at the football. Kyle has somewhere to be lately that he's cagey about, and Simon has whatever Simon has, no one asks.

And John drives home, shuts the door, and the house is quiet, his walls holding all the built-up pressure.

Ten months since his usual I'm-Home-Hookup found herself a steady bloke and stopped answering his calls. He'd told himself the whole time it was casual right up until it ended, when he learned it had actually been load-bearing.

And was that affecting his mood? Maybe.

His eyes narrowed on Simon and his jaw ticked at the hinge. He threw his chin toward the open door.

"Fuck off out've my briefin' room, Lieutenant."

Simon's chair scraped across the linoleum when he stood, sighing through the cloth over his face.

"I jus' think—"

"OUT."

The door clicked shut behind him, and John stood in the silence for a moment.

Then he squared the stacks again.

——

Johnny never volunteers to bring the beer, yet here he is at half seven with a box of glass bottles rattling on his shoulder, grinning under the porch light. Behind him, the headcount runs long by one. Three men when John only agreed to two. Kyle with a canvas bag full of crisps. Simon at the back, hands sunk in his pockets.

"Thought it was just you and Garrick?"

"Aye, well." Johnny shoulders past him into the hall, close enough that their shirts drag. "Simon heard there was football."

"Simon doesn't care about football," John retorts as the rest of them push their way inside.

"I care 'bout football," Simon lies through a simper no one can see, wiping his boots on the mat.

Unfortunately for John, his team is undoubtedly adept at what they've trained in and he doesn’t always catch when there’s fuckery afoot.

Under his nose, in his very own home, Johnny distracts him with talk about the match while Kyle lifts his phone from the side table just beside his elbow. Simon waits an appropriate amount of time before slipping away to the kitchen to guess the passcode, which he manages in one go.

"Gonna have to talk to him 'bout that…" Kyle mumbles as he swipes to the App Store.

"He textin' anyone?" Simon cranes his neck over Kyle's shoulder. "He used t’see tha’ one bird… wot was her name…?"

"Leah," Kyle answers flatly. "Laura?" he second-guesses as he thumbs in the passcode again to approve the install: Hinge Dating App. "M'not lookin' at his texts, mate. Be lucky he doesn't RTU us just for this. Plus, I think he said she started seeing some—"

"—y'know, Cap," Johnny's voice cuts through, a warning for the men in the kitchen. "I can get ye another beer, y'don't have…"

Simon and Kyle glance up from where they've leaned against the counter and freeze when John appears in the doorway, face screwed with suspicion. His eyes flick between the phone in Kyle's grasp and the faces lit behind it.

His initial thought is that the phone's got a nice, durable case, proper practical. His second thought is to start patting down his pockets with his free hand — which all turn up empty.

The room's gone still, a collective held breath to see which way the tension'll break.

"That's my phone."

"It is," Kyle agrees carefully.

Johnny appears at John's shoulder, squeezing past into the kitchen. "Cap, before you start—"

"When'd you nick it?" His eyes accurately settle on Kyle, the slickest of the bunch.

"Doesn't matter when, sir. We just—"

"It matters to me." John puts his empty beer bottle on the table and uses both hands now to pat down his pockets a second time, not quite believing his own team got the drop on him. "Professionally speakin',” he mumbles. 

"Wot really needs addressin' is your passcode," Simon grumbles. "0-0-0-6?"

"Christ," Johnny snickers.

John chooses to ignore them and holds his hand out, palm up. But Kyle doesn't fork it over. Instead, he looks back at the screen and watches the progress ring around the icon close in on itself.

"What're we doin' right now?" John presses, stepping closer.

"Jus' take a seat, boss," Simon suggests, gesturing to the kitchen table just as Johnny yanks a chair out, beaming something mischievous.

John looks at the chair, then looks at Johnny.

"Think I'll stand."

"Suit yourself," Johnny spins the chair around and drops into it, arms folding over the back.

Kyle checks the screen one more time before turning it around. A new little white icon sits on John's home screen, Kyle points at it. John squints to read the little letters beneath it.

"What's Hinge?"

"It's a dating app," Kyle answers and places the phone on the table.

A dating app….

Grown adults sorting through each other like they're shopping. Swipe, tap, Add to Cart. He's heard the lads chat about it for years — the 'ghosting', the games — and always thought: thank god that's not me.

Under the simmering contempt, the idea of typing hello to a stranger who might simply never reply (left on read, whatever ungodly hour of the soul that phrase was invented in) shoots something cold through him.

There's a beat of hesitation before his eyes snap to Simon, the scowl on his face carrying the weight of Wednesday's interaction.

"This is you, then?"

"Team effort," Simon corrects without a flicker of shame.

"It's no' the dodgy kind of app, it's for relationships," Johnny explains. "Says so in their slogan: 'designed to be deleted'. You make a profile, upload a few pics, answer some—"

"I know how online dating works, MacTavish."

Johnny squints. "Do ye, though?"

"You've been rank for months, sir." Kyle tells it plainly. "Whole teams sayin' it."

John feels like he’s been put on a rinse cycle in the wash. His nostrils flare as he snuffs his irritation back down his chest lest he prove them right in his own kitchen. 

"So that's what all this is? A Friday night welfare check?"

"It's no' a welfare check," Johnny defends poorly, voice cracking at a pitch too high.

"It's a bit of a welfare check," Kyle shrugs.

"Right." John reaches for his phone. "Well, thanks for the concern, lads. Truly. Warms the heart."

Kyle slides it just out of reach. "Just give it a shot, sir," he implores. "Try it for the weekend. If you still hate it, I'll delete it and we'll never bring it up again."

John's chin tucks to his chest and he glowers at him from under his deeply furrowed brow. "You'll delete it now," he orders, except these men have never listened to him off the field.

"I could," he agrees, wrestling a smirk. "And you can keep spending your Friday nights with us."

It's meant as a joke. It doesn't land as one.

Because John looks around at the three of them and knows in a few hours their engines will fade down the street and that hulking quiet will pour back in, the one he keeps calling peace. 

So… he pulls out a chair.

Simon pushes off the counter and Johnny's grin pulls wider.

"Go on," John surrenders, falling into the seat with a sigh. He does not look at any of their faces because whatever's on them’s going to make him cross. 

Chairs scrape and Kyle settles down at John’s arm, Simon looms over them from behind, all crowded around the one screen.

The basics go quick — name, age, pronouns. Kyle finds his rhythm working through the questions.

"Drinks? Socially. Smokes…?" Kyle seesaws his head a bit. "We'll say no."

"I smoke cigars," John protests.

"That's a personality trait, not a habit." Kyle scrolls. "Height?"

"Six-two," Johnny says immediately.

"He's six-foot," Simon corrects.

"Aye, and on the app he's six-two."

Kyle selects 6'. "Occupation?"

That one hangs in the air a bit longer than the rest, and John doesn't quite know why. His hands turn palm-up on the table with the question.

"Consultant," Simon offers.

"Civil servant," Kyle tries.

"Military," John answers irritably off the edge of a scoff.

Three sets of eyes come up off the phone — Johnny's eyebrows go high, Kyle's mouth opens to argue, Simon tilts his head just enough, as if to say: if you say so.

"It's not a state secret that I serve," John says, eyebrows pulling close with confusion.

Kyle types it despite whatever he's got hanging on the tip of his tongue. And in the little silence afterward, the obvious question finally comes to mind.

"What've you lot got on yours, then?"

The simple question sends a tidal wave of overlapping chatter and excuses over the table.

"Ah, well—" Johnny starts.

"I actually—" Kyle says, at the same time.

"Different app," Simon adds, under both of them.

"—see, it depends," Johnny goes on, trying to gain volume over the others, "I like to keep the profile fresh. Rotate the pics, the bio—"

"—don't have one," Kyle is saying over the top of him, "because me and Amara are— well, it's not official-official, but it's a thing, so—"

"Been usin' Feeld," Simon finishes.

When the wave recedes, the full picture comes into view: Johnny reinvents himself on a cycle, Kyle has Amara, mentioned now for the first time ever. And Simon—

"What's Feeld?" John asks.

"No," Kyle says before the question has its punctuation, quick and stern, head whipping back and forth. “Absolutely not. We'll talk about that another time."

"It's not for you," Simon adds.

"Right," he mumbles, taking a pull of his beer, settling back against the chair. He inhales and looks off at the window. "M'glad it's amateurs running my love life."

"Enthusiasts," Johnny corrects.

The rest goes quicker.

"What kind of connection?" Kyle reads. "Options are: Long-term. Short-term. Short-term, open to long. Long-term, open to short."

"Short, open to long," John answers without hesitation.

Johnny opens his mouth but Simon glares at him just as quickly through his ragged eyeholes, and he closes it without a word.

His profile photos have to come off the lads' phones since John's camera roll offers nothing but screenshots of maps, car parts, and three random pictures of the K9, Xena, from another unit on base (he’s been trying to snatch her for his own team for months).

He watches the photos of himself go by and it's a strange census, seeing a year of himself entirely through other people's eyes. Makes him queasy, so he takes another bitter gulp to wash the feeling out. 

There's a short argument about the proper order the pictures should be presented, Johnny wins.

After, Kyle starts explaining what a good prompt does, how to choose one. He hardly gets any words out before John's holding his hand out the same way he did half an hour ago.

"I'll do these myself."

This time, Kyle hands the phone over.

The lads drift to the far end of the table to finally give John the space they've neglected to all night. 

Fresh beers are cracked open and a bag of crisps demolished as they fold into their own conversations. The match they’ve been ignoring comes first, then Amara, whom Kyle spends five minutes refusing to elaborate on, and somewhere in there Simon mentions an oddities shop he’s been meaning to stop by.

John sits with his reading glasses on, typing slowly, brows low in concentration.

When he finally sets the phone down, all three of them quickly move behind him.

"So, their profile comes up on screen," Kyle reaches over to demonstrate. "Have a look, read the bio. If you wanna chat to her, tap the heart. If you don't, hit the X, and you'll never see her again. Simple."

The first woman is on a beach holding a cocktail the size of a fishbowl. X.

"Okaay," Kyle drawls, mouth pulling straight. "Sure. Was there a reason, or…"

"No."

The next woman is at a festival covered in glitter and feathers. X.

So is the one after. X.

A woman in her work scrubs. X.

A woman holding a child. X.

A woman in a bikini on a lake (his eyes linger). X.

It's not that they're not lovely. Some of them probably are. But every picture is a performance — arms out, teeth out, look how much fun I am. Advertisements.

"The fish," Johnny mourns as another goes down, a woman on a small boat holding a big trout up. "Cap, she was fishin'. You love fishin'!"

"Wasn't her fish," he grumbles under his breath.

"Whose fish d'you reckon, then?"

"Bloke she cropped out," Simon says, and John tips the neck of his beer toward him.

"Give me criteria," Kyle pleads, both hands on the back of John's chair, gripping with restraint. "I can work with criteria."

"He's calibratin'," Simon says. "Let 'im work it out."

Simon's giving him too much credit. He's not calibrating. He's not reading these women, he's not even really looking at them. Each X is just the whole premise being declined, proof accumulating that he was right about the app all along, and if the profiles run out, well, he tried. Right? The lads witnessed it. He can get back to his peace with a clear—

His thumb stops and hovers, then pulls back to the outer edge of the phone case.

Huh. 

There you are.

Up a trail somewhere, hills of green grass rolling behind you, hood half-blown off, one hand trying to catch it. You're laughing at whoever's taking the picture, smile wide.

John's not sure he's ever seen eyes twinkle before, but that must be what yours are doing, shimmering even under overcast.

You're very pretty.

For the first time, John taps the profile open.

30. Executive Assistant. 4 Miles Away. Short-Term, Open to Long-Term.

Executive Assistant, so you likely work too much. That's familiar to him, something he understands inside-out. 

There's a photo of you in office clothes at what looks like a retirement party, smile an edge more saccharine than the one on the hill.

Another of you criss-cross on the floor, a black and caramel cat stretched out and content in your lap, belly-up. Shirt low cut, cleavage to feast on. He is sixty percent gentleman about how long he looks at it.

And at the bottom:

The best way to ask me out is by: using words.

I recently discovered that: I'm better in person than I am on here.

John huffs an amusement through his nose. He spent more time on his profile than he thinks you spent on yours. Seems like you're tired of the same things he's already tired of, one night in.

Behind him, the lads have gone silent, holding their breath.

John taps the heart and his screen goes bright with a wash of confetti, both your photos ringed together:

IT'S A MATCH!

"Oh, shit, she already matched with you," Kyle cranes his neck closer to inspect.

"Gimme that." Johnny plucks the phone from John's hand. "No way," he scoffs. "Fuckin' fit. A bit young for you, Cap, aye?" He looks at John, then back at the screen like the two won't reconcile in his brain.

"Careful," John warns mildly.

Johnny hands the phone back, muttering something in Scots only Simon could translate.

John doesn't hear much of it anyway. He's already looking at your photo again.

Better in person.

Yeah. He'd bet you are.

"Right, sir," Kyle says. "Now we wait. Midday tomorrow the earliest. Message her any sooner and it reads keen."

"It'd be accurate," he deadpans.

"There's rules, Cap," Johnny says. "No messagin' straight away, no double-textin', keep a wee bit of mystery."

John turns in his chair with a scowl to look up at the three of them.

"So, you're tellin' me a woman says she's interested in you and you… make her wait?"

Silence.

"I mean, when you put it like that…"

"Yeah, s'a bit fuckin' rude, innit?" John derides, turning back around.

He's already typing, screen tipped away.

"Sir," Kyle pleads. "At least let us read it."

"This is a two person conversation, not a five piece."

He presses send and quickly pockets the phone.

——

Four miles away, a phone lights up…

——

Your windows are open to the last of a long evening, warm air breezing through the sheer curtains. You’re finally on the couch. Shower taken, its heat still damp in your skin. A glass of off-dry riesling teeters precariously on the arm, cold from the fridge and sweating through its stemless glass.

Twix is a puddled tortoiseshell furnace against your thigh, one paw twitching through a dream, her purr winding down as she drops deeper. And on the telly, Last Christmas is on. You've seen it a dozen times, that's why you leave it — it's mindless.

The second glass goes down easier than the first, tart on your tongue, blooming warm in your belly and over your cheeks.

Somewhere in the lull, your thumb opens Hinge, a reflex to being bored. You don't really expect anything from it anymore. 

A man holding a fish, sunglasses on. X.

A man whose photos are all group shots. X.

A man who is 6'2" and it's his entire personality. X.

Your thumb knows the rhythm without you.

The next profile slides into view and you pause, thumb hovering.

He's handsome in that sort of rugged, classic way. His beard is salted at the edges, lines beside his eyes creased deep, cheeks faintly rosy. He's mid-laugh at what looks like a Christmas party, red and green tinsel drooping off the beams behind him; head slightly tipped, one heavy hand flat on the table. He's not cackling, you can tell it's more reserved, but it's probably still more than he usually offers.

John. 43. Military. Four miles away. Short-Term, Open to Long-Term.

The one thing you should know about me is: I'm gone a lot for work. But when I'm home, I'm home.

Most men bury the catch in the fine print, but he's leading with it.

You don't know yet whether that's honesty or efficiency. You suspect that with him they might be the same thing.

His second photo is of him on the tailgate of some enormous vehicle, fatigues taut over his thighs, thumbs hooked through his bulky khaki plate carrier, looking up from under the brim of his hat.

Two truths and a lie: I've never seen Star Wars. I have a lie-in every Sunday. I've had tea with a warlord.

The sky is pink with the morning in his third picture. He's thigh-deep in a lake, turned away from the camera entirely. (You're noticing it's a common theme that he does not look at the camera for any photo.) The sunlight catches the breadth of his back and shoulders, cotton molded around muscle.

Don't hate me if I: call instead of text. It's quicker.

You giggle just enough that Twix's ear rotates toward you in reproach.

It's kinda cute when older men put more effort into their profiles.

But the alarm is already going off somewhere in the back of your skull — too good, probably old photos, probably has a wife — it has never once failed to ring. But you're two glasses in, and the heart really costs nothing even if the conversation seems off.

You tap it, and put the phone facedown on your thigh.

On the telly, Emilia Clarke is busy falling for a man you happen to know has been dead the entire film. You mouth one of his lines along with him, not really invested, wine warm in your chest, Twix breathing slow against your leg.

Then your phone buzzes against you once, and you ignore it, because you have rules about lunging for male attention. But then it buzzes again, and, well, you just turn it over to have a look. Maybe it's your mum, you don't know!

HINGE: You and John matched!

HINGE: 1 New Message

You open it.

Evening. Not much good at using the app, but I really wanted to chat to you. How's your Friday night?

You hum to yourself curiously. Not an innuendo or emoji in sight.

i actually volunteer helping the elderly with technology, happy to walk you through it.

friday's been average. wine and a movie on the couch. how's yours?

You put the phone back down and focus on the film, but his reply comes within the minute.

Ouch. Friday's alright. The lads invited themselves round for the match. Still here, unfortunately.

you're messaging me with guests in the house? terrible host.

They invited themselves. Hosting rules don't apply.

What movie are you watching?

You glance at the telly where a dead man is mid-song and weigh lying about it.

You could be watching anything. You could pick something more interesting, something with a deep lesson, educational, historical, something niche to come off cool and worldly.

you're not allowed to judge me.

Judging is sort of my life's work, but I'll do my best.

You snort. Twix relocates to the far cushion in protest.

it's called 'last christmas'. i don't know why it's on in july, but i've probably seen it twelve times. it's good background noise.

The reply takes slightly longer this time. You picture him all big hands, small phone, and then stop picturing him, because that's how it starts.

Twelve times? Must be decent.

it's objectively not. the love interest is dead the entire film lol

Dead?

it's a twist. it's festive!

You and I have very different definitions for "festive". I've got a few questions. But I'll save them.

You smile.

so, your lake photo. did you catch anything that day?

Not a thing.

hours in freezing water for zero fish?!

The fish aren't the point.

do tell, what's the point?

The mist off the water. The quiet. The no one expecting anything from you.

It's the first real answer a man has given you on this app in, like, six months. 

You feel oddly like you've been handed something and should keep your hands still so it doesn't spook.

that actually sounds really peaceful.

i've never been fishing, but i do love nature in the mornings. i have a trail by me that i like to trek early on weekends.

That the trail from your photo?

it is! my best friend actually made me go that day, i wasn't in the mood. complained the whole way.

Doesn't show.

Good photo of you.

Beautiful, actually.

You stare at the screen and feel warmth tickling your nape, sliding lower, molten and slow. 

Every instinct you have reaches for deflection.

oh! thank you. the wind did most of the work lol

No it didn't.

— and he just takes the deflection off you, like being returned something you've dropped. You press the cool curve of the wine glass against your cheek and remind yourself, sternly, that this is a stranger on the internet.

well, for the record your photo's not bad either. handsome smile.

Somewhere past ten, you notice the conversation keeps not ending. 

how long have you been on hinge?

It's my first night, actually.

first night???

Profile's about two hours old.

yikes, so i'm just the practice woman then, huh?

Practice implies I'm planning to do this again.

——

John's still at the kitchen table, reading glasses pushed up into his hair now, beer gone warm at his elbow. The lads have migrated to the living room doorway — close enough to monitor, far enough to pretend they aren't.

He knows they're watching, and he's been watched by better.

What he can't seem to manage is his fuckin' face — it keeps doing things beyond his control, and every time your reply comes he has to reel it back to neutral, and he can tell by the quality of the silence behind him that he's not reeling nearly fast enough.

"He's smilin' again," Johnny murmurs, elbowing Simon in the ribs.

"Shameless," John mumbles, without looking up. "All of you."

He's typing when the floor creaks jus to his left. When he glances up, Johnny has drifted to his shoulder under the pretense of collecting empties.

"Need another, Cap?"

"I need you three feet back, MacTavish," he replies, thumbs tapping away.

A minute later it's Kyle from the doorway, "If she asks about hobbies, don't lead with the cigars. They poll badly amongst females."

"'Females'?" John grimaces, face down, thumbs still at it. "Say it with me Garrick, 'women'."

Then Simon, who hasn't moved or spoken in twenty minutes, asks, "Wot's she sayin', then?"

John rolls his eyes and sets the phone face-down, pushing himself up out of the chair.

"Time to go, lads," he says with an obviously fake smile, gesturing his arm out towards his front door. "Goodnight."

"It's no' even eleven oclock!" Johnny complains.

"Then the night's still young. Go on, fuck off."

They go — bottles gathered, snacks cleaned up, Simon herding Johnny down the hall as he’s still negotiating.

Then their engines fade down the street, and the quiet pours back in, right on schedule. Except tonight it arrives and there's a phone lit on his kitchen table with your name on it, and the quiet — for the first time in a long while — has to wait.

He locks up, kills the TV, then drops into his armchair with the phone already unlocked.

did the football finish? who won?

He glances at the dead telly. Hasn't a clue. 

Couldn't tell you.

omg lol you had ONE reason for guests tonight!

I got distracted.

by what? 😇

I think you know by what.

Nothing comes back for a minute. He pictures you on your couch, that cat beside you, deciding what to do with it — and it occurs to him, mildly horrifying, that he's enjoying this. The wait. The little emoji with the halo, transparently unrepentant. He finds himself smiling at the ceiling like there's something written on it.

anyway!

Anyway.

He'll allow it: retreat granted. There's no rush.

The cat in your photo. Yours?

yes! that’s twix. she's a menace.

Good name.

she prefers men that ignore her.

Then we'd get on fine. I'm very good at ignoring cats.

It goes on just like that: easy.

You ask if he's a morning person and learn he's up at five most days by choice; he learns you consider five the middle of the night.

He talks about the Brecon Beacons — the actual Beacons, the ones he loves, not the ones that nearly killed him at twenty-two. You tell him you've always wanted to go, and he catches himself already planning the route he'd take you. Then quickly chastises himself. 

How's the average Friday held up?

certainly improved

Mine too.

He puts the phone on the arm of the chair and sits in his quiet house, and for once it doesn’t feel so desolate.

——

The following morning he's up at five. He starts drinking his coffee at the counter, looking out the window over the sink, the sorbet summer sky bleeding morning.

He thinks of you before he can stop himself. Asleep, presumably, five being the middle of the night and all. Then he takes the coffee out to his back step for some fresh air.

He wonders if he was any good with the messaging last night. It's the longest he's ever sat with his phone in his hand, period. Let alone chatting with someone. There's no debrief for it, that's the trouble. No one to tell him whether ‘I got distracted.’ read as charming or desperate.

He runs the entire two-hour exchange back over and over and finds no actionable errors, but remains unconvinced.

He goes for his run at six. The route climbs uphill around klick seven, and somewhere on the hill he thinks about your photo, your smile, your mouth. He wonders what you smell like, what you sound like when you're being sarcastic. 

By noon he's under the Land Rover draining the old oil, and he catches himself pondering what you might do on a Saturday. Whether you slept in properly. Whether the cat allows it; he grew up with one himself and knows how demanding they can be when they're ready for a feeding.

He hasn't messaged yet and neither have you.

He couldn't say exactly why he's held off. Something the lads said about being keen, and rules, and mystery lodged somewhere he can't reach to dig it out. He's not normally a man that takes doctrine from Johnny MacTavish, and yet… here he is. 

It's a stupid fuckin' rule.

The afternoon goes long and gets quiet in the old way.

The house at four o'clock has a particular acoustic he knows down to the plumbing, and today, for the first time, he notices himself noticing it. It never used to be so obvious. Years of Saturdays like this one and it took his phone going quiet for half a day to show him the loneliness so plainly.

By the evening he's got Chinese takeaway at the kitchen table, eating it straight from the carton, chopsticks shoveling fried noodles down his gullet while he does the crossword from the morning paper in his head.

That's when his phone lights up for the first time all day, buzzing three times in succession — he absolutely hates how quickly it's in his hand.

spent six hours wedding dress shopping with my best friend. i need a glass of wine and a lie down.

thought of you on the tube home

He reads the second message again.

Thought of you. 

He’d been drafting the same admission since noon and something in his chest going catastrophically hot.

are you still up? i know sundown is bedtime for your generation.

And there's the sarcasm. 

Outside the window, the sun is — he checks — still up. Barely. He's got that going for him, at least.

Just in time. Was about to take my dentures out.

Thought about you as well.

He types the second line fast before he can be a coward about it. If you can say it, he can say it. Fair's fair.

I do have a question now though. It's not your wedding we're shopping for, is it? That'd be proper inconvenient for me.

lol no! maid of honor. today was purely supervisory.

don't really see myself getting married anyway.

the dresses were stunning though!

He’s picking up on a pattern. Three messages arriving like one exhale — the vulnerable thing said flanked with distraction. 

Nothing wrong with that.

Successful trip then? Or is there another six hours coming?

successful! she found it. there were tears and champagne.

what about you, how was your saturday?

He’s had a day spent purposefully not doing the one thing he wanted to do.

Quiet. Nothing worth typing.

hm. sounds like you should ring me then…

He looks at that one for a moment and blinks, the inside of his cheek finds itself between his teeth.

For all their blabbering, the lads did not warn him about this bit. Not that he can't speak on the phone, he prefers it. You're essentially quoting his profile back at him. But he's been thinking about something since roughly the fourth time you crossed his mind today, and a phone call isn't the ask he's been building up to.

Could do.

Truthfully, though. I was just working up the courage to ask you for a drink.

Courage. He's used that word in citations, for men who ran toward gunfire, heroes. Now he’s using it to describe the act of asking a woman on a date, and the genuinely undignified part is that it's regrettably accurate.

Your reply takes a minute. He watches the dots start and stop, and start again. God, he's been shot at with less suspense.

Then your message comes through and it's just a number. Ten digits. It buzzes in his hand once more.

for logistics.

He stares at it for a beat and then he's up out of his seat. Takeaway abandoned, at the fridge with his phone still in one hand, snapping the cap off a beer on the lip of the counter, and then he's out the back door into the garden where the evening's gone navy and the air’s still warm from the day.

He saves your number first. Then he stands there a moment, beer sweating in one hand, thumb over the call button in the other.

——

You’ve just tipped the bottle over your glass when the phone starts buzzing against the counter.

Unknown Number. Local.

“John?”

“Evenin’.”

Fuck. 

His voice lands an octave lower than you were braced for. A honeyed gravel that seeps into your ear and slides thick over your spine, pooling somewhere behind your ribs.

You set the bottle down before you drop it.

“So you actually do ring,” you manage.

“Said so on the profile, I think.”

“I half thought it was a bit.”

“I don’t really do bits.”

“No,” you say through a grin, picking up your glass and drifting toward the couch. You drop your voice into a gravelly impression of him: “You’re a very serious man.”

The laugh that comes down the line is quiet — more breath than sound, warm at the bottom of it, like you’ve caught him somewhere he doesn’t usually go.

“That meant to be me?”

“It’s uncanny, I know.”

The line goes quiet a moment — the good kind, neither of you rushing to fill it — and in it you catch the sounds of his side: a whirl of breeze, the faint ring of a glass set down on iron. He’s outside. You picture a tidy yard with tall dark hedges, a big man pacing slowly with a beer.

“Am I interruptin’ the wine?”

“The wine and I are happy to share the time.”

“Good.” There's a pause that you can hear his smile in. “I have a beer out here. Seemed only fair we’re both suffering the same.”

“Are we having our drink right now? Is this it?”

“No,” he says immediately, unamused even — which is very amusing for you. “This one doesn’t count.”

The speed of his reply sends something fizzing under your sternum. You tuck your feet up under yourself and take a slow sip.

“No?” you tease.

“I had imagined I’d see your face.”

“Been imagining, have you?”

You are very glad he cannot see your face right now. Cheeks warm and strained, you press the cool of the wine glass briefly against them in turns

“Nothin’ mucky if that’s what you’re gettin’ at.”

“Mm, no, 'course not. You’ve been a proper gentleman. Haven’t even thrown me a cheeky pick-up line.”

“I could workshop somethin’ for you if you’d like.”

“No thanks,” you giggle into your glass. “It was a relief when I opened your first message and it wasn’t a riddles-three about your dick.”

You can hear his scoff and recoil on the other end.

“Is that what it’s come to?”

“Unfortunately.”

There’s a short silence you’d swear is him coming to terms with the modern world, and you bite down on a smile.

“Right,” he says, and there's a controlled shift in his voice. “My question...”

Your stomach does a free-fall, nauseating and fluttery, fifteen again on the Detonator at Thorpe Park.

“Mm?” you hum around a sip, deeply casual, a woman entirely unbothered, curled so tight around the phone that Twix doesn’t have a leg to lie on.

“There’s a pub about halfway between us, Lamb & Flag. I’d like to take you for that drink tomorrow. Will you come?”

Then you remember what tomorrow is and sigh, immediately irritated with your whole family.

“Ugh, I want to say yes,” you sulk. “But I’ve got Sunday dinner with my family tomorrow. My mum would hunt me for sport if I flaked.”

“Fair. Wouldn’t want that on my conscience.”

“I could do a weeknight? After work?”

There’s a pause on his end.

“I’d rather not promise you a weeknight,” he admits. “I rarely get away on time, and I’m not startin’ this by standin' you up.”

You go quiet for a beat, you were ready for the usual ‘ahh, well, we’ll figure something out’. But instead got a man mindful of your time; a unicorn, really.

“Also fair. And— and thoughtful.”

“Friday, then?” he tries hopefully, you catch the small lean in his voice.

“Friday’s perfect,” you agree. “It’s a date!”

“It is,” he agrees, smiling.

The conversation should end there but it doesn't.

You learn things no profile has a field for; that he talks slower than he types, that he hm's real low in his throat when he’s considering something, that when you make him laugh it rumbles, so rough at the bottom that you feel at the back of your knees.

Somewhere past the hour mark you stop scrutinizing the call for red flags and just talk, and you only notice you’ve stopped when Twix jumps onto the couch and you realize you’ve been lying down for a while, phone balanced on your ear like you’re seventeen.

Eventually, you yawn.

“Right,” he says, and you can hear him moving, standing up by the way he tries to muffle a stiff groan. “That’s my cue.”

“Aw, no! I’m fine, really.”

“It’s late, love. And you’ve got your family tomorrow.”

“True. And you’ve got… whatever it is old men do on Sundays.”

“Lie-in, according to my profile.”

“Ha!” you bark, vindicated alone in your living room, having forgot about his little 'two truths and a lie'. “That’s the lie, I bet. I don’t think you’ve ever had a lie-in in your life.”

A low sound of amusement rolls down the line. “Goodnight,” he says, declining to confirm.

“Night, John.”

You sit a minute in the amber shine of your lamp after the line goes dead, phone loose in your hand.

——

Sunday morning, you text him at 8:12 AM.

good morning. how was the lie-in?

Wouldn’t know. Been up since five.

the lie confirmed!

He doesn’t dignify it. You don’t expect him to. You grin at your phone while you wait for the kettle to boil.

Your mum will later describe you, over dinner, as ‘suspiciously cheerful’.

The day swallows you — the drive, the roast, your mum’s questions, your brother’s kids. It’s near ten when you’re finally home, shoes off, replying to the last thing he’d sent that morning.

survived. my mum sends her regards to whoever put me in a good mood. her words.

Regards received. Sleep well.

——

Monday morning, John’s at his desk with his coffee going cold because somewhere between the canteen and the walk to his office, his phone buzzed, and it was you and he hasn’t stopped looking at it. 

good morning :) big meeting today. does this say “promote me” or “she tried”?

[ PHOTO ATTACHMENT ]

You, in your hallway mirror — chin tipped, black short-sleeve blouse with a wide collar exposing the smooth skin of your upper chest and collar, grey pencil skirt stretched over the curve of your hips and thighs, one knee bent like you’d just been lowering your foot from fitting on your heel.

His eyes are stuck on the soft-looking flesh just above and between your knees when a rap lands on his door and forces a cough from his throat.

Johnny eases it open with Kyle behind him holding a folder, Simon's behind them both, holding nothing, not even a pretense.

His phone goes face-down on the desk at a compromising speed, shifting to sit up straigher.

Simon’s eyes go to John’s hand over the phone, then to his face before he leans in the doorway with his arms folded.

“Mornin’, Cap. Good weekend?” Johnny asks, falling into the side chair in front of the desk with a theatrical groan.

“Fine.”

“Aye? Do anythin'?” He smiles, waggling his eyebrows. “Anyone?”

“You’ve got thirty seconds to develop a work reason for being in my office, Sergeant.”

It's an empty threat and everyone in the room knows it.

Kyle sets the (empty) folder down and steps back behind Johnny. “How’s it going, sir? Did you have any luck with Hinge?”

John could make them work for it. He’d planned to. But all three of them are standing in front of him trying so hard to look casual it’s a wonder none of them have pulled something.

"Have a date Friday. Drinks."

Johnny is ready to blast out of his seat, but Kyle shoves him back down by the shoulders, digging his fingers into the pressure points on either side of his neck until he relents with a hiss.

"That's great. Same woman or…?"

"The same."

“Good, good, good,” Johnny says, and means it — John can hear that he means it, he can also hear the restraint he's keeping from unloading shite advice.

“We'll stop buy Saturday for the debrief,” Simon says, already turning around, and Kyle picks the folder back up like it had a purpose all along, and they file out the way they came.

"I'm not debriefing you on my date. Don't come!" John calls to them half-heartedly, but the door's already shutting on top of his words. 

He turns the phone back over.

Promote you, he types.

You look lovely.

Your reply comes before he’s picked his pen back up.

well now the meeting feels easy. thank you x

He gets on with his morning, but by noon he suspects he's looked at that damn photo a dozen times.

——

The rest of the week goes standard. Your Tuesday runs long and his Wednesday runs longer, and the messages carry throughout it all. His texts arrive before your morning alarm even sounds, your replies go mid-commute — nothing heavy, just remaining in each other's orbit of interest as Friday chugs slowly into view.

Thursday night, near nine, he rings you, having first texted to ask if he could, which you’re beginning to understand is just how he’s built. It’s a short call by your new standards with him. He only wanted to confirm you’re still on for the pub, but he had you grinning into your pillow until you fell asleep.

———

You leave work at five on the dot, and you’re in front of your open wardrobe by six.

The little black dress comes off the rail first. Goes back. Comes off again. Back. The floral one gets as far as your shoulders before you pull it off over your head and drop it on the bed, where Twix immediately sits on it.

The silky baby blue halter’s been hanging on the door since you bought it. You put it on like you hadn’t already decided and do the tie at the back of your neck twice before the bow sits flat and neat. You pull on some jeans and rummage the closet for your chunky heels. 

You press some strawberry perfume to your throat in the mirror and try to comfort the nerve-ridden woman in the reflection.

“It’s just a pub,” you tell her. 

She doesn’t seem convinced. 

———

The pub is exactly the kind of place you imagine he'd frequent — quiet, all old mahogany and low brass lamps, no telly anywhere. You claim a stool, hook your heel over the rung, and decide not to order anything yet simply because it just feels polite to wait.

You're fifteen minutes early which means you're left alone with your anxieties. 

The last of the sun lies across the bar top in warm stripes, and you trace one with a finger while you wait. 

You’ve done this before, and it almost never goes how the phone promises. There was the guy whose photos were six years out of date. The one who spent both drinks talking about his ex and then sent a payment request for half the tab. The one who, two hours in, hadn’t asked you a single question about yourself. And John has been too good to be true for a week, and you know how that saying ends. Tonight is where you find out how, find out he really is just a man between deployments looking for entertainment and a shag.

It felt good, though. All week. Being excited about something. You’d forgotten the feeling. 

You pick at the hangnail on your thumb until it stings.

You don’t have to wait much longer for him. 

He casts a shadow when he comes through the door. Broad. Tall. Smart olive polo fighting for its stitching across his chest and where it grips into his biceps. He’s tidied his beard in comparison to his photos, hair less kempt in a purposeful way.

He scans the whole room before he finds you and stops looking anywhere else. He smiles tight and restrained, pleasant, but like he’s pacing himself, and by the time he crosses to you, your tongue has gone dry and whatever you’d planned to open with has shriveled away.

“Hey,” he says.

“Hi,” you smile.

He smells clean, a bit like pine and amber, and faintly like there’s tobacco somewhere on his collar.

“You’re early,” he adds, almost pleased.

“So are you.”

“I’m always early.” His eyes drop to the empty bar top in front of you, then come back. “You haven’t ordered?”

You shake your head once, legs shifting to cross. “I wanted— I was waiting for you.”

The lines beside his eyes deepen and he holds out his hand, says your name for the first time, and his hand swallows yours — big and dry and calloused across the palm where yours is soft — and you hold on a beat too long. He doesn’t mention it. You add that to the list of things you like about him, which is getting embarrassing for something four minutes old.

“What’ll you have?”

“Uhm, whatever you’re having,” you decide.

He signals the bartender with two fingers and opens his mouth — and there’s a brief second where he looks at you first, and you notice for the first time that his eyes are blue, and you get stuck, and it seems so does he. By the time he looks back, he’s lost the name of the beer he’s drunk here a dozen times.

“Two of the, uh— the local,” he manages.

You pretend not to notice. He knows you did.

He pulls out the stool beside you, and more of his cologne wafts around you as he sits, turned to face you, legs spread, one knee pointing between yours.

The pints arrive wet from the tap, and for a second neither of you says anything at all. You trace a bead of condensation down your glass.

“Funny, isn’t it,” you offer, sheepish. “We’ve talked every day for a week, and the second we’re actually in front of each other…” You trail off, cheeks warming, eyes fixed on the fizz jumping over the rim of your beer.

“You’re nervous?” he asks, a cheeky lilt on it.

“A bit, yeah. Aren’t you?”

“Not at all.”

You squint at him. “I don’t know if I buy that.”

“Hm.” He takes a sip that lasts a little too long, and the tips of his ears have gone pink.

Your cheeks are doing about the same. You drink your beer — cold, hop-bitter, helping — and let him have his lie. It’s a generous lie anyway. It’s a lie shaped like a man trying, and you’ve been handed far worse shapes.

“So,” you start. “I haven’t asked why you’re even on Hinge. You don’t seem the type.”

“I’m not,” he chuckles, and offers nothing beyond it.

You wait. He just sips his beer. You hike a brow.

“That’s it? That’s your answer?”

“Well, it wasn’t my idea. The lads put me on it.”

“The lads — your guys from work?”

“Yeah.”

“They what, talked you into it?”

“No.” He turns his glass a degree. “They nicked my phone and made the profile behind my back.”

“And what made them do that?”

He takes a moment with that one. He could give you a cover story — you can almost watch him weigh one — but then he doesn’t.

“Their assessment,” he laughs to himself, “was that I’d been… cranky. Needed gettin’ out of the house.”

“Cranky?” you repeat, delighted.

“Their exact words were a bit different.”

“Hm.” You look at him — at ease, half a smile living in his beard, one arm resting along the bar. “You don’t seem cranky to me.”

“Yeah, well. Guess they were right, then.”

Your neck goes hot and you have to look away from him. “Well,” you manage. “They do good work, your committee.”

He huffs into his pint, and lets you recover.

“Okay, next one, then. Military.” You tip your glass toward him. “What do you actually do?”

He sets his beer down and you can see him carefully choosing which door to open. “What d’you want to know?”

“I don’t know. What’s your day look like?”

“Depends on the day. Paperwork, mostly. Meetings.” A beat. “Sometimes we go away.”

“Away?”

“Away.”

“For how long?”

“As long as it takes.”

“Doing…?”

“Whatever they need me to,” he says easily. “S’not me being mysterious. I’d tell you if I could.”

“That must be so strange, though. Having this whole— like, most of your life you can’t talk about.”

“You get used to it.” Then, because you’re still looking at him expectantly, not filling the space the way people usually do: “There’s loads I can say. Ask me what six weeks of rain in a jungle smells like. Or what a month in the desert does to your skin.”

“What’s a month in the desert do to your skin?”

“Nothing good, love,” he answers, shifting to face you better. “The beard’s load-bearing.”

You laugh into your beer, and it makes the next one easier to ask.

“Do you like it? Like, the whole life of it?”

He goes quiet on that one. Longer than he’s gone quiet on anything else you’ve asked. You can see him thinking on it. 

“It’s what I’m best at,” he says finally. And then, mostly to his glass: “It’s all I’ve known, really. Been doin’ it since sixteen.”

You turn that over. There’s a whole life folded up in that sentence and you notice you want to ask about all of it, which is not a thing you’ve wanted to do with a man in a very long time.

The second beers arrive, and the conversation stops keeping to lanes — his lads and your best friend, the wedding in October, the neighbor whose bins are apparently a whole saga. You’re midway through the story of your work feud when a birthday party arrives loud and glittering behind you, and John, without so much as glancing down, reaches down and hooks his hand under the edge of your stool, and pulls.

The whole thing drags six inches across the floor with you on it, your knee sliding neatly between his, close enough now that his voice drops to match the new distance. You’re looking up at him, pulse tapping somewhere that has your thighs pressing together. 

“Go on,” he encourages. “She said what?”

It takes you a moment to find your place, but you go on.

The bar only gets louder from there, the birthday table multiplying, and when a booth opens up in the back corner, John tips his chin at it.

“Go grab that,” he says, turning back to the bar. “I’ll get another round. Want the same?”

“Actually—” and you hesitate out of nothing but habit, out of years of a man’s face going tight when you complicate an order, “—could I do a vodka cranberry this time? I could get the round—”

His brows furrow with something akin to bafflement, brief and genuine. “You can have whatever you’d like,” he says, and suddenly you feel silly, your hand crossing to grip your elbow.

“No—I know. I just—”

“Whatever you’d like,” he repeats, gentler. “And—” he grimaces, like what he’s about to say pains him deeply. “Don’t ever offer to pay on a date with me again. Properly wind me up, that will.”

“S-sorry,” you shake your head, like you can rattle the habit loose.

“None of that either,” his eyes have gone crinkled at the corners, warm all the way through, and he raps two knuckles soft on the bar top like the matter’s settled. “Vodka cranberry. Go, sit.”

“Actually— I’m gonna go freshen up quickly. Two minutes.”

And you go, biting down on a smile, ears hot — embarrassed and looked after all at once, which is apparently a combination that works on you.

The bathroom is cooler than the bar and a quiet that leaves your ears ringing. You reapply some lipgloss and wash your hands and look at yourself in the dirty mirror, buzzing warm at the collarbones, eyes shiny, mouth half-curved.

It’s going well.

It’s going suspiciously well.

And every time it’s gone well before, this is exactly when you started hunting for the catch. So you dry your hands on the rough paper towel and leave before you can start.

He’s in the booth when you come back, settled against the wall side, the last of the evening gone from the windows and the lamp above him glowing gold over the table. Your drink is waiting — pink, iced, a lime wedged on the rim — set neatly across the table at the seat opposite.

You look at the seat opposite.

Then you slide in beside him instead. Your thigh a heated inch from his, reaching across to relocate your drink.

You don’t look at him, but you can tell John’s a bit curious of the arrangement. His arm comes up and settles along the back of the booth behind you, and it oddly feels like it was always going to end up here, his thumb grazing the bare skin of your shoulder. He picks up his beer with the other hand.

“Comfortable?” he asks, low, and with entirely too much satisfaction.

“I am,” you say, and the first sip of the vodka cranberry is cold and tart and sweet all the way down, blooming behind your sternum right where his voice has been landing all night.

The booth is easier than the bar, somehow — closer, quieter, the birthday party more muted — and the talk drifts wherever it wants, his low laugh arriving against your shoulder through the arm behind you. At some point the lull comes; ice softening in your glass, his thumb resting an inch from your shoulder. And maybe it’s the vodka, or the arm, or the running list of things you like about him that you’d need both hands to count now—

“How long ago was your last relationship? Like a real one.”

He takes a deep breath before answering. “Honest answer?”

“Preferably,” you giggle softly, and he smiles — most of it lost in the beard, enough that you wonder if there are dimples under there.

“Longer than what sounds good out loud,” he admits through the pull of it. 

“Say it out loud anyway.”

“I was thirty-two. So, almost ten years ago.”

“Ten.”

“Mm.”

“A whole decade.”

“You can stop countin’ the years to me at any time, love.”

“Sorry, sorry.” You’re grinning. He is too. “It’s just, quite the gap in romance.”

“It went quick,” he says, and it’s a joke, and it’s also not. “What about you?”

“Ended about a year ago, we were together four.”

“Mm.”

“It was fine. Amicable— mostly,” you shrug. 

“Mostly,” he repeats — not pushing, just setting the word down where you can see he heard it.

“Mostly,” you confirm, and leave it there.

The ice ticks in your glass. And the next question’s been sitting in your chest, so you take it out while you’re brave.

“Can I ask something and you not be offended?”

“Startin’ well,” he says, nodding on for you to continue. 

You settle further into the booth and your shoulders press against his warm arm behind you, his fingers brushing over your shoulder. You lean your head back, turned to his face. 

“What’s changed? Between thirty-two and now that you’re trying dating?” You mean just to ask the question, but you find yourself rambling on. “Because if the honest answer is nothing, and this is just— a-a hookup with, like, really good manners, that’s fine. Genuinely. I’d just rather know now.”

“Fair,” he says. “Asked myself the same thing this week.”

“Yeah? And what was the answer?”

“I’m tired of the quiet,” he starts, pausing as his eyes drift away in thought. They come back to you just as quick. “Used to come home to it like a reward. Now it just feels… empty.”

Something in your chest slides sideways.

“So, no. Not a hookup,” he continues with a breath. “But I can’t promise you’d be happy with the alternative either. I can be gone longer than I’m home.” His thumb brushes along your shoulder, once, like an apology.

“Guess I wouldn’t know unless I gave it a go.”

You say it lightly, and the exhale he lets out has a smile riding on it — and something in his shoulders comes down, some held thing you didn’t notice until it let go.

“No,” he agrees, low. “You wouldn’t.”

You’re suddenly aware of the distance between you — or the lack of it. Somewhere between sitting down and the vodka you’ve ended up awfully close: near enough to count the grey threaded through his beard, to catch the beer on his breath, near enough that the light between you has stopped reaching the space. Near enough that you can feel the heat coming off him, and your heartrate has picked up on it before the rest of you has.

His eyes flick down to your mouth. Quick — half a second, there and back — but you catch it, and it lands low in your stomach and stays.

Neither of you leans back.

And the pub carries on behind you — glasses clinking, the birthday table shouting, a till drawer slamming — all of it arriving from somewhere far off and dreamlike.

You move closer. Barely. Imperceptible. Your pulse is in your ears now, drumming out the last of your sense—

“You know,” you say, quiet, pitched for the six inches between you and nobody else, “you can kiss me. If you’d like.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Mhm,” you grin.

“Well,” he says, matching your volume, low enough that it lands somewhere below hearing, “I was going to be a gentleman about it. Wait til I walked you out.” His gaze drops to your mouth again, slower this time, no secret. “But if you’d rather have it here in the booth, I won’t argue.”

“I suppose I could be patient.”

“Mm,” he says, and doesn’t move.

Somewhere in the world, presumably, time is passing.

His jaw shifts. 

“I’ll go pay the tab,” he decides.

And you’re both up and out of the booth quick, and you watch him stand at the bar with his back to you, shoulders set, and you press one cool knuckle to your own cheek and find it burning.

You two make it out the door.

The night’s gone hazy and July-thick, and you get maybe four steps down the side of the pub with his hand a light at the small of your back before you glance up at him and he glances down.

Whatever was left of patient dies right there on the pavement.

He moves you.

One hand finding your hip, the other your jaw, and then your back meets brick, warm through the thin of your blouse and against your bare shoulders, and his mouth is on yours.

Whatever mindful version he’d planned for the end of his gentlemanly walk out must have been spent in the booth — this is the interest. The kiss opens on a low rumble out of his chest, one you feel travel through his ribs into yours, and his tongue slides against yours, all beer and him, and you grip the front of his shirt with both fists just incase the wall behind you vanishes.

He kisses you thoroughly, his beard catching along your chin, a chafe you know you’ll feel tomorrow. A thigh slots half between yours, not pushing, not touching, but it’s not any less inviting. You could bare down on it, get the friction your body is craving, he’d let you, but you restrain yourself. His thumb strokes a slow line along your jaw in obscene contrast to what his mouth is doing — and it blooms down through you, fervid, liquescent.

He pulls back just far enough to breathe — forehead near yours, both of you loud with catching your breath — and when you open your eyes his are dark.

“Very gentlemanly,” you croon.

“I walked you out first, yeah?” he says, unrepentant.

You giggle against his mouth, and he claims it for himself with one more gentle kiss, and then he steps back a seemly distance, hand smoothing once down over his beard, shoulders resetting, breath evening out, everything going back in its place except his eyes.

“Walk me home?” you ask.

“I drove. I’ll give you a lift.”

You look up at him, all vodka-warm and enjoying yourself. “Well, just so you know, I share my location with my best friend and she knows exactly what pub I’m at, and has your name and photo, so—”

“Good,” he replies, no hesitation. “Smart girl. Keep it that way.” He finds his keys, fishing them out of his pocket. “I’m taking you straight home. You have my word.”

He draws an X over his heart, your lipgloss shining at the corner of his crooked mouth. 

——

The car smells like-new — clean upholstery and faintly of engine oil, everything squared away, nothing rolling around in the footwells.

The drive is short. The radio murmurs. His hand rests easy on the gearstick a few inches from your knee — close enough that you spend two full streets aware of nothing else — and the streetlights slide over him in slow bars, catching the grey at his temple and the small satisfied set of his mouth. 

The kiss is still thrumming under your skin like a struck glass, low in your belly, at the back of your knees — and you catch yourself doing the thing you swore off doing: imagining forward. Him in your doorway. Him in your kitchen on the weekend. Him coming home from wherever away is and it being your door he— 

You look out the window. Four miles has never taken so long.

He pulls up outside your building and sets the handbrake, and the engine idles, and neither of you move.

The dashboard glow makes everything blue. 

You want to ask him up. That's not the question; that got settled somewhere around the second kiss in the alley, possibly earlier, possibly around the moment he walked into the pub, or whatever. But there's the other thing you can't evict from your head: do you really want to sleep with him on the first date?

"So," you say.

"So…”

You look at him — streetlight in the grey of his beard, arm along the wheel, he’s in absolutely no hurry to resolve you.

"Did you have a good time tonight?"

His head turns. There's a beat where he just looks at you, and you watch him physically decide not to make a joke of it.

"Yes. Best night I've had in a while," he says. 

"Would you—" and god, you're thirty years old and your heart is doing this anyway, "—want to see me again? Like this?"

"Was already plannin' to ask you to dinner." A small crease starts at the corner of his eye. "Was workin' out whether to do it now or ring you tomorrow, so I didn't seem overly—"

"Keen?"

"Keen," he confirms, gravely, like the word's been a burden to him all week.

And that lands warm and the relief does something reckless to your mouth, which is that it stops guarding it.

"Okay. Then I'm going to say something, but you can't look at me while I say it."

“Right.” He scrubs a hand over his twitching lips and looks out the windshield, obedient.

"I want to ask you up."

"Mm."

"And I'm having a whole debate about it."

"I can hear it," he says. "Been losin' to the engine for about a minute now."

"Just—,” you sigh, “—shut up." But you're smiling at the dashboard. "It's just— I spent all week wondering if this was a hookup thing for you. And you answered that, and I believe you, I do. But there's this small, paranoid part of me that's like, well, that's exactly what a man would say at the pub, isn't it? And then there's this other, stupider part that thinks if you come up, you'll—" you take a deep breath, your fingers hooking into each other on your lap, and make yourself finish it, "—think less of me. First date and all."

He's quiet for a second, lips pursing. 

“Can I look at you now?” he tries.

“Yeah.”

"You want to know where I'm actually at?"

"Truly just desperate for a man to be honest so I know what headspace to put myself in."

“Alright.” He shifts to face you, wrist still hanging over the wheel. “I want to come up. Badly, if you want some extra honesty.”

The badly goes straight between your thighs.

“Okay,” you manage. “Noted.”

“I haven’t lied to you once tonight. And I’m takin’ you to dinner whether I come up or not.”

“And, like— you wouldn’t think—”

“Think less of you?” He frowns, like the math’s not mathing. “For doin’ the same thing I’d be doing? Together?”

“When you put it like that…”

“For what it’s worth, I’m sat here havin’ a version of the same debate. Been out of this a long time. Didn’t want you thinkin’ that’s all I came for. So if you’d rather I kiss you at the door and drive home, I’ll do that and consider it a perfect evening.”

And maybe it’s the ease of him, the total absence of pressure you’re always braced for on nights like this, that settles it for you. 

“Would you like to come up?”

——

The stairwell smells of somebody's late dinner and warm dust, the day's heat still trapped in it, and you take the stairs ahead of him to the second floor.

John is a gentleman.

John has been a gentleman all night.

John gives himself the length of one flight of stairs off the clock — the sway of you in those jeans, the shift and give of you with every step, the smooth line of your bare shoulders under the halter's little bow — and by the landing he's a gentleman again, and if you felt his eyes like a brand on you, and by the half-smirk you throw over your shoulder you did, neither of you says a word about it.

Your flat smells like you — the perfume he got to know at the pub, but underneath it, clean laundry, a candle burned down sometime this week — and a blur of black-and-caramel bolts across the living room and vanishes down the hall before he can so much as get a look at her.

"That was Twix," you say, her paws still pattering away. "She'll start her background check and circle back."

"Sensible."

And then the two of you are standing in your living room with the whole car’s worth of honesty sitting in the middle of the floor, and you look at him, and look at the kitchen, and say:

"Do you want a drink? I have wine. Or, um. Tea? I might have a beer from—"

"I'm alright," his mouth pulls at one side. 

"Water? I'm gonna have water."

"Then I'll have water," he says like he’s surrendering. 

He watches you go — and he could laugh, not at you, but because he knows exactly what he’s looking at. The two of you agreed in plain English on why he’s standing here, and now you’re in your kitchen filling glasses neither of you want, and wiping down a counter that, from where he’s stood, was already clean. 

So he gives you room. Settles against the arm of the couch, takes a slow lap of your shelf with his eyes — you and a woman he guesses is the October bride, you on a hike somewhere sunny, you and Twix bravely on the balcony — and he wants you the whole time, low and patient, in his back teeth, but doesn’t move on it.

 Your pace. Your move.

You come back with the waters, and hand him his, and hold your own in both hands like you might drop it. He takes a sip, looks at you over the rim of it.

“You’re nervous,” he says.

“Not at all.”

“Mm.” He nods slowly, deeply unconvinced and taking a page from your own book. “Don’t know if I buy that.”

He watches it land, watches the laugh come up out of you before you can stop it, head tipping back, throat bare, and half your nerves seem to leave with it.

He likes that. 

He sets his glass down. Then, gently, he takes yours out of your mid-fidget hands and sets it down too — he tips your chin up with one knuckle, and kisses you.

Easy-like, cold from the water, cranberry still faint on your tongue, your breath catches once against his mouth and then lets go. Your hands slide flat up his chest and stop over his heart — which is going quicker than he’d care to admit, and he feels the exact moment you find it out, the little hum of discovery you make.

When you pull back to look at him, whatever nerves were left in you are gone from your eyes, and they’re twinkly a lot like the first photo he ever saw of you. 

You take his hand off your waist, lace it through yours, and guide him backward toward the short hall.

In your bedroom he finds the tie of your halter at the back of your neck and pauses with the ends between his fingers, silk warm from your body. One pull and it gives, the fabric sighing loose, and he follows it slide down with his eyes first, then his mouth — the slope of your throat, over your shoulder, then the soft skin below your ear that tastes of strawberry perfume and salt. His beard drags over your neck and a shiver flows through you so he does it again, slower. You shiver harder, fingers curling into the front of his polo.

Good.

You tug the hem of his shirt up and he reaches back, pulls it off over his head one-handed, and drops it somewhere he’ll look for later. He unhooks your bra just as easily, and when your palms spread into the coarse hair over his bare chest and down his toned stomach, the muscle jumps under your fingertips, he hears his own breath go rough.

“Okay,” you say, a little wonder in it. “Wow, yeah, that’s….”

“Mm?”

“Nothing. Just— I knew military, just didn’t realize… this much military.”

“Lodging a complaint?” he askes, amused.

“Definitely not.”

The rest goes gradually — his belt, your jeans peeled down warm thighs with his calloused palms flat against your skin the whole way, a hop and a giggle when the denim catches your ankle and he steadies you by the elbow — and then you’re bare in front of him, lamplight pooling gold along your shoulder, your hip, the soft curve of your stomach. He stops with his hands at your waist and looks.

“Say something,” you murmur, half a laugh, shy at last under the attention. “You’re oggling.”

“I am.” His thumbs press slow arcs into your hips. “Give me a minute. Been picturin’ this since Tuesday and I did you no justice.”

You pull him down onto the bed by way of an answer, and the mattress sinks with a soft complaint, and then it’s just skin — so much warm skin, soft everywhere he’s hard, giving under his hands, smelling of perfume and the clean sweat July dampens into everyone.

He stretches out alongside you, one heavy thigh over yours, and takes his time. The curve of your waist. The full weight of your breast, thumb dragging over your nipple until it peaks and your breath stutters. The inside of your thigh, where the skin is finest and the heat pools. You move under his touch the whole time, restless and rising, fingers in his hair, at his shoulders, and the small sounds you make land somewhere at the base of his neck and prickle there.

Then he shifts down the bed, kisses the soft of your stomach, the plush crease of your hip, and looks up the length of you.

“Can I?”

“You— yes,” you breathe, trembling feebly. “Yes, obviously, you don’t have to a—”

His mouth is on you before the sentence ends.

You’re sweet and slick against his tongue, already so wet the first slow lick slides easy, and the sound you make is high and caught somewhere low, thigh twitching against his ear, one hand flying to his hair. He hums — feels you feel it — and settles in. No rush. Long soft strokes of his tongue until your hips learn the rhythm and rise to meet it, then his lips close warm around your clit, sucking gently, and your whole body pulls tight.

“Oh my god— okay— okay—”

“Mm.”

“Don’t be smug—” and your voice climbs off the end of the sentence as he slides two thick fingers into you, curling them, tongue still working, and whatever the rest of that scolding was, he never learns it.

“Could do this all night, sweetheart,” he murmurs against you, and feels the words land in a shudder. Your breathing changes. Your thighs start trembling, your hand fists in the sheets — and he keeps the pace exactly the same until you’re pulling at him. Hair, arm, anything you can reach.

“John— John— come— I want you. Now,” you whine, “Please.”

He comes up the length of you slow, mouth mapping stomach and sternum and throat on the way, and settles over you on one forearm—

"I should've said this in the car," he starts, eyes on yours. "I don't have a condom. Wasn't assuming tonight would end up here."

"I don't have any either. I actually checked the drawer before I left tonight." You push his dampening hair back off his forehead. "I'm on the pill, and I trust you. But I'd still feel better if you pull out. Is that okay?"

He nods assuredly. "Then I'll pull out," he says flat and plain. "You have my word."

"You and your word—" but you're smiling, and then you're not smiling, because he's already moved and taken himself in hand and dragged the head of his cock through your folds, coating himself in you, and notched against your entrance, and the smile falls open into something much, much better.

He pushes in slow, watches your face the entire way — he couldn't look elsewhere if a grenade went off — your brows drawing up, your lips parting around a breath that doesn't finish, your nails biting little crescents into his forearms — and fuck, the feel of you: scalding, soaked, tight enough that he has to stop twice, jaw clenched, sweat sliding at his temple, feeding you his cock an inch at a time and pulling back, then giving you more; the slick easy give of you around him unspooling something in his stomach.

"Talk to me," he murmurs, gravel-low. "Alright?"

"Yes." Your voice has gone breathless and small and blissed. "You're— god—"

"Christ, you’re snug," he exhales shakily, eyes finding yours. “Relax for me, baby. Breathe.”

"I am breath—oh. Oh—shhit—"

John’s seated all the way, hips flush to your backside, and both of you go quiet — a shared beat of stillness, you fluttering around him hot and full, his body coming down, forehead dropping to yours, ten months of silence pulling a sound up out of his chest that he couldn't have stopped if he knew it was coming.

Then you shift your hips, experimental, a slow grind up against him, and that stillness is over.

He moves slowly; long level strokes dragging all the way out so you both feel every hot stretch of the return, your breasts pressing soft against his hairy chest. Your heels slide up the back of his thighs and he budges his hips closer, holding deep and pressing the head of his cock into your furthest wall. Your hands squeeze the meat between his shoulders and his neck as he pushes a small squeal out of you. 

"Right there—right there—right there, don't—"

"I won’t," he murmurs against your jaw. “I won’t move.”

"—okay maybe move a little—"

He breathes something restrained through a smile. "Make your mind up, darling," he grunts. 

“It’s hard to— mmm—think like this,” you half-moan against his cheek. 

“Don’t think, then.”

It’s all your talking that undoes him more than anything, he realizes distantly. He’d forgotten there was a version of this with laughing in it; a version with a woman eagerly gripping him and grinning against his cheek in the second before a moan carries her voice away — and every time you say his name, breathed and broken, something in his chest cinches another notch tighter.

He draws back and drives home again, and whatever you’d been about to answer with comes out as a punched huff.

You don’t think.

He feels the difference in you immediately — your body dropping the manners, hips rising to meet him harder than he’s giving it, heels dragging him in by the thighs on every stroke, a low frustrated sound building in your throat when he keeps the same controlled pace. You’re not asking for anything. You’re taking it in inches, greedy and unaware of yourself, nails dragging down the small of his back, pulling—

“Harder?” he asks against your ear. 

"Yes, please."

He hooks your knee up over his hip and opens you wider—“So polite.”—and gives it to you deeper, his weight behind it, your headboard cracking against the wall. You go loud and lovely underneath him, clutching, slick heat and plush skin and your nails scoring lines down his back that he hopes, viciously, will last long enough to admire.

He works a hand between your bodies, thumb finding your clit, riding the motion you’ve bkth created.

"That's— John— You’re gonna make me come," you sob. 

"I know. I feel you. Squeezin' me like— Christ. Go on—fuck."

He watches it arrive before you do, a shiver running ahead of the wave; your spine arches up off the bed, your cunt clenches around him in long pulsing, aching, waves —  it takes you under, and you pull him with you.  

He holds you, murmuring filth and praise in equal measure against your ear—

How good—

How gorgeous—

You’re mine now, you know that? Hm?—

It’s watching you eagerly nod along with his babbling that finishes him. He lasts maybe ten more strokes on borrowed time, heat gathering alacritous and irrevocable at the base of his groin — and he rears back onto his knees, pulling out of you with a growl that tumbles from his throat, fist working his cock over, soaked with you, spilling hot across your stomach and hip in thick ropes, head hanging, shoulders heaving, your thighs still bracketing his knees.

When he lifts his head, you’re already looking at him.

Glowing down to your chest, lips parted and kiss-swollen, wearing him low on your stomach — and neither of you says anything. Neither of you looks away either. His chest is still heaving. Your knee presses in against his side, and the corner of your mouth starts to curl, and his does too, helpless about it.

He comes down on his side, careful of the mess he’s made of you, one arm heavy across the pillow above your head. The curtain breathes at the window beside the bed and the night comes in and cools the sweat on his back, and he can see your heartbeat going hard at your throat, the rise and fall of your stomach not yet settled. He gently fits his thumb against your pulse, just to feel it going. 

He kisses you, your mouth lazy under his, and then your temple, and the crown of your head, and you make a low, boneless sound and turn your face into his hot neck, and the two of you just lie there breathing each other in, tangled and settling, your finger drawing slow shapes on his forearm.

"John?" Small, against his throat.

"Mm?"

"Would you mind grabbing me a cloth? Bathroom's just across the hall."

He's up before the sentence finishes, annoyed at his own carcass the whole three steps to the door, ten months out of practice and it shows, he used to know this part, the part where he takes care of you before you have to ask.

You bathroom is small and smells of your shampoo, fruity, herbal. He runs a flannel under the warm tap, wrings it out, catches his own eyes in the mirror over the sink — wrecked hair, beard ruined and shiny with your lipgloss. He turns, craning his neck spotting a blooming red scratch coming up nicely at his shoulder.

He comes back and cleans you up properly, kneeling on the edge of the bed, one hand steady at your hip while the warm cloth moves over your stomach — thorough about it, frowning slightly the way he does when he’s concentrating — and you watch him do it propped up on your elbows with an expression he can't quite read and doesn't need to. It's warm, whatever it is. And it’s aimed at him, so.

"You're staring," he says, not looking up. 

"You're tidying me."

"Should've done it before you asked." He folds the cloth, sets it on the nightstand, and stretches out beside you again, this time gathering you into his chest. "Out of practice."

"I'll allow it," you say, magnanimous, settling your cheek against his pec. "The rest was very in-practice."

He huffs into your hair.

Your fingers trail idle through the hair on his chest, down over old pinked scars, and you ask him about them — whether the jagged line at his shoulder hurt, what caused the puckered one under his ribs — and he answers more honestly than he means to, your weight settling heavier against him as the adrenaline drains.

There's a soft thump from the hallway, then, and a moment later a small shape appears in the doorway — sits, tail wrapping her feet, and surveys the wreckage: the trail of clothes, the stranger man in the bed, you draped over his ribs.

She stares at John.

John stares back.

"We have an audience," he says.

You look over him to see your cat, "Twix, John. John, Twix."

Twix holds his gaze a moment longer, supremely unimpressed, then steps delicately over his discarded shirt and exits the way she came and he feels you giggling before he hears it, the shake of it against his chest.

"That went well," you say, overly pleased. 

“Yeah?”

“Mhm.”

"Well, consider me chuffed."

Some comfortable minutes later he feels you surface a little out of the drowse, feels your breathing change, going careful; feels your face arrange itself against his skin before you speak. 

"You don't have to stay, by the way." Light. Smooth as eroded stone, polished by use, he imagines. "If you'd sleep better in your own bed. No pressure either way."

And there it is — the same maneuver from your texts, the honest thing dressed up so you can't be caught caring — except this time he can feel your heartbeat while you run it, quick against his ribs, betraying the whole performance from inside. 

He keeps his hand moving on your arm, slow, so you know nothing's landed wrong.

"I'll head home," he says. "Not because I want to," he clarifies.

“No?” you ask. 

"Believe me. This is about the last place I want to leave." His hand doesn't stop, slow up, slow down, steadying you through it. "I'd like at least one proper dinner between us before I go makin' a habit of your bed."

You lift your head off his chest and look at him — hair wrecked, eyes searching his face for the trick — and he lets you look as long as you need to because there's no trick to be found. He meant it. 

“Alright," you agree. 

“Yeah?”

“Yes. Dinner sounds nice.”

"Mm," he hums, contented. He presses a kiss into your hair and untangles himself, face scrunched with visible reluctance, and dresses while you watch from the bed with the sheet gathered loose around you.

At the door he stops. 

"C'mere."

You come to him in the sheet, and he kisses you properly, one hand cupping your face, thumb at your cheek. You go languid against him. He takes his time. Long past politeness. Long enough that leaving starts to look renegotiable, and he breaks away before he starts. 

"G’night," he says, low, still holding your face.

"Goodnight."

"I'll ring you about dinner tomorrow."

——

The flat is quiet. But it's a different quiet than the one you left this morning and you stand in the middle of it grinning.

Twix reappears at the edge of the counter and stares. 

“I don’t need the lecture, I’m grown,” you tell her and start walking back to the bedroom, you hear her little jump to the floor and her feather steps catching up with you, “I can have sex. I deserve it, even.” You drop into your bed with a sigh. “You’d understand if you still had ovaries.”

Your bed-frame and mattress arrived today, hauled up three flights by a pair of delivery men who eyed you with something like pity, top floor in a victorian converted to apartments, old attic space with sloping ceilings, could maybe slide a credit card between the toilet bowl and tub, stove and fridge in beat to shit landlord white, state of the art circa 1980.

You lay in your newly assembled bed and stare up into the rafters, muted green glow of several hundred tiny plastic stars that some previous tenant applied. Across town from your old life, but it might as well me on the far side of the moon. Still have to work, still have to pay off your credit cards and child support. He used your insane work schedule against you in the custody fight, never mind that you did all that for them, used a DUI from a decade ago as a reason you were a shit parent. You have to pay your partner support which is fine, you only have Bug every other weekend which hurts like being cut every time you have to give her back.

He can’t even be bothered to pick her up most times, sends his shiny new girlfriend who always grabs Bug a little too hard by the elbow to pull her towards the car.

Music thumps up from below and the highway screams a few blocks over, and this is not where you ever imagined yourself, but it’s yours, new place, new you.Thirty minutes separating you from what you thought was going to be the rest of your life, but looking up at some college kid’s glow in the dark stars, you feel something that might become peace over time.

The day is for exploring, for seeing what’s in walking distance. The library seems like a good place to start, shares a building with the rec center, tennis and pickle ball courts tucked against the parking lot.

It’s hot for spring and the air conditioning hits you all at once, prickling your arms in gooseflesh, relatively dim cave of the lobby offering relief from the sun’s light sizzling up from the sidewalks, baking up from the asphalt.

The lobby is lined with signs thumbtacked to cork boards, fringed in tear off tabs with phone numbers, a missing cat, a lawn and landscaping service, gentle tai chi lessons for seniors, dotted with QR codes, summer sci fi book club, seed exchange. Flyers and tacked up menus. Schedule of classes offered at the rec center next door. They look like a pair of riotous quilts, shouts of competing text and color. You take a picture on your phone, one side and then the other.

“Well, I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house in-" Soft, southern drawl rising to a growling crescendo and squeals of little kid laughter. Bug would eat this right up, you think as you head towards the sci-fi section. Bug loves when you do voices.

you shouldn’t call her bug. what if it sticks? she’s four. still.

“Well that is an impressive armload of stories.” The man with the drawl grins at you from behind the help desk.You plop a good stack of science fiction bricks on the counter. Your eyes find his, deep and warm and bracketed in crows feet, all scruffy cheeks and dimpled smile, errant streak of brilliant white among his dark curls, like a splash of cream in black coffee. “I’m guessing you need a card before we get down to business.” “Yeah. How’d you know?” “Haven’t seen you around before,” he says, “Library patrons tend to be creatures of habit. And folks who are new to the library system or are returning after a long absence tend to grab as much as they can carry.” “Guilty. I’ve got more time to read these days,” and you feel your eyes drop from his, catch on his badge hanging from a lanyard around his neck, thundercloud eyes, and bright red scar across one cheek. Ezra Broussard.

“-a photo ID and proof of-Miss? Ma’am?” You shake your head. The time you don’t have with Bug opens up in your mind like a gaping maw, a black hole that can drink you down if you think about it too much. “You went somewhere just now,” says Ezra, “Are you okay?” “Yeah. Sorry. It’s been a week. Here.” You hand him your driver’s license. He reaches across his body to take it, and you see the sleeve of his rust-colored henley tied in a knot where his right arm ends, just below his shoulder. “Hmmm. Out of state. You really are new to these parts, huh?” “Is…” you raise your eyes to his, “Is that a problem?” “Do you happen to have a utility bill with your name on it? Some proof of residence?” “No, not on me,” You shake your head, slide your stack of books towards him, “I’ll come back some other-“ “Write your info down for me, darlin. Mailing address and good phone number if you don’t mind.” He slides a sheet of printer paper across the counter, “It makes my hunting and pecking less tiresome.” “I don’t want to get you in trouble--“ “You won’t. I’ve been known to pull this trick a time or two, and the most blowback I get is a gentle ‘Now, Ezra, you know you’re not supposed to do that.’ Accompanied by some rolling of eyes.“

You write your address down, have to open your phone and look at your maps, it’s all too new, street number, apartment number, none of it has had time to stick-- “Sorry I’m so discombobulated,” you say, sliding the sheet of paper back to him, “This isn’t where I thought I’d be, you know?” “No need for sorrow,” says Ezra, “Especially not when you’ve got all these science fiction yarns to keep you company. Sorry if this takes some time. Before my mishap I had more hunters to peck with.” You snort laughter despite yourself, an apology spooling up in your throat but when you meet Ezra’s eyes they glitter with mirth, lopsided grin sinking a dimple in his stubbled cheek. “That’s terrible,” you say and feel yourself smile. Ezra’s grin widens. “When the littles inevitably ask why i’m down a limb I tell them something different each time, depending on what I’m reading that day.” “What did you tell them today?” “That I too was fool enough to build a house of straw and the Big Bad Wolf blew my house in and bit my arm clean off. It gets them real invested in the story. With the older kids I just make stuff up because they’re smart enough to know that i most certainly did not attempt to wrestle an alligator because i lost a bet or get struck by a falling bit of space junk on my way to work. Here’s your card. This is good for our entire library system.” He hands you a bit of perforated plastic, one for your wallet, one for your keychain.

And the man can talk. You swear he could sell snow to an Eskimo, but he saves that silver tongue for you. He’ll whisper sweet, filthy promises in your ear in a thick Scottish burr that leaves your knees weak. He’ll tell you you’re beautiful when you first wake up, hair a mess and face puffy with sleep, and he’ll say it with such conviction you actually believe it. He calls you his “wee hen” or his “bonnie lass”, and it should sound ridiculous coming from a man his size, but it just melts you into a goddamn puddle.

There was this one time, after a particularly rough few weeks, when you were feeling small and insignificant. You didn’t say anything, but he knew. He always knows. He didn't push. Instead, he took you to the roof of your apartment building, spread a blanket out under the stars, and held you while he pointed out constellations, tracing the wild, dramatic myths behind them. He didn't try to fix your sadness; he just sat with you in it, his presence a warm, steady weight reminding you that you weren't alone in the vast, dark universe. He kissed your temple and murmured, "Stars are just like us, bonnie. They burn bright, even when no one's watchin'."

Naturally, you cried.

Your Johnny’s not perfect. He’s gone for long stretches, and the worry can eat you alive. There are days when the silence is too loud and the bed is too cold. But then he comes back, and he’s all sunlight, noise, and energy, filling up every empty space he left behind. He’ll scoop you up, spin you around, and press his forehead to yours, eyes closed as he breathes you in, as if trying to absorb your very soul.

When he makes love to you… God, when he makes love to you, it's as though he's trying to pour every fractured piece of himself into your willing body, to remake himself within your warmth until you are both indivisible.

Some nights, it unfolds with the slowness of honey, his hands tracing the landscape of your body. His calloused fingertips, which have known the cold steel of weapons and the brutal force of combat, now worship your skin with a reverence that catches the breath in your throat. He kisses you with tenderness, his thumbs stroking the delicate skin beneath your eyes as he moves inside you with a rhythm that speaks of timelessness, of a patience born of waiting through too many lonely nights. His blue eyes, normally alight with mischief and fire, burn with an intensity that sears through you, and in their depths, you see everything he cannot shape into words; the bone-deep relief, the desperate gratitude, the absolute certainty that you are his sanctuary.

Other times, making love is frantic and raw, a desperate reclamation after close calls and near misses. He'll take you against the wall of your entryway, still half-dressed in his tactical gear, the rough fabric scraping against your oversensitive skin as his mouth claims yours with a hunger bordering on violence. You taste the lingering bitterness of adrenaline on his tongue, drinking him in like he's the only thing that can quench a thirst you never knew you had. His hands grip your hips hard enough to bloom purple across your skin tomorrow, and you welcome the marks, welcome the beautiful pain that proves he's real, that he survived another day to come back to you. In those moments, there's nothing gentle about the way he drives into you, just the need to feel alive, to feel connected after staring death in the face and walking away.

But it's in the aftermath, when you're both breathless and tangled in the damp sheets, that your emotions finally overflow. Not from pain or sadness, but from the love that threatens to burst from your chest like a supernova. You'll press your face against the skin of his shoulder, inhaling the scent of him as your body shakes with sobs. Johnny will just hold you tighter, his strong arms wrapping around you like armor, his large hand rubbing soothing circles on your back to ground you in the reality of his presence.

"Shhh, bonnie," he'll whisper, his voice thick with emotion as he presses soft kisses into your hair. "I've got ye. Always."

And in those moments, you know you're not just loved, you're cherished. You're the anchor that keeps this wild, wonderful Scottish bastard grounded in a world that's tried its damnedest to break him. You are his homecoming, his peace, his everything.

Duncan the Tall

Is the designated driver because everyone trusts him the most (no one asked Aerion). Drives carefully, both hands on the wheel, never speeds, insists on stopping whenever someone says they need a break (despite Maekar groaning they're losing valuable time). You will never see this man road-rage. Uses blinkers, honked twice in his lifetime, once when the guy overtaking him nearly crashed into oncoming traffic, the second time when a kid on an electric scooter crossed the road in front of him, on a red light. Prefers windows cracked open over the air conditioning. Fusses over seatbelts, stopped for 25 minutes after Aerion unbuckled and refused to continue, until Maekar threatened his son and buckled Aerion himself. Brought his own toolbox and jump cables, if necessary. Partial to old rock and folk music, but happy with whatever is playing, as long as the arguments around him stop. At rest stops, he's the one who wanders into a gift shop and buys souvenirs for others, because it somehow reminds him of them: a keychain for Egg, a bookmark for Valarr, a mug for Baelor, etc. Prefers practical snacks: beef jerky, trail mix, apples, bottled water, and sandwiches, but always sneaks in onion crisps and Jaffa cakes. Mishaps are rarely his fault. He misses exits because everyone is arguing behind him or because Baelor and Lyonel are discussing directions in too much detail. Just shrugs, laughs, and turns it into an unexpected detour. Favourite place they visit is the Reach - Dunk loves rolling green countryside, farms, orchards. He'd stop at roadside bakeries and farmers' markets. Will spend hours talking to local farmers about tractors and livestock. Excellent s'mores maker.

Aegon "Egg" Targaryen

There is no fear of Dunk falling asleep at the wheel, because Egg is there to yap. Wasn't supposed to sit in front, but after asking "are we there yet?" for the hundredth time in the first hour (he was in the back row), they put him between Dunk and Baelor so that he sees the road ahead. Downside is, now he constantly wants to play "I spy". Endlessly curious, wants to know who built every castle and keep they pass, why rivers bend the way they do, could dragons actually land on mountains, what's that tree called, and so on. If someone gives him an answer (Baelor, with his infinite patience), he'll immediately ask three more. Quiet only when he sleeps. Packs his own little backpack and is incredibly proud of it. Colouring pencils, notebook full of drawings and observations, a Nintendo Switch, a stuffed dragon he insists isn't for comfort, but is there nevertheless. Counts cows on the drive, makes up stories about other cars they pass, is genuinely excited when he gets everyone else to participate, especially Maekar. Collects rocks on the way. His favourite snack is anything sugary, so it's up to Baelor and Dunk to prevent him from having too much of it. At every souvenir shop, he wants everything. Snow globes, keychains, plush animals, wooden swords, knight helmets, toy shields. Maekar has to remind him he can only choose one thing. Ponders on it for twenty minutes, makes everyone wait for him. Later proudly carries his new treasure for the rest of the trip. His biggest mishap is simply being a kid: wanders off because he spotted an interesting bug, leaves his backpack in the restaurant, forgets where he left his dragon plushie. When they reached Dornish shores, enthusiastically fed seagulls, despite being warned not to, resulting in half the flock chasing Aerion across the parking lot while everyone else laughs. Every time they leave a place, proclaims that was his favourite. If he spots a Lego shop, forget leaving for at least two hours.

Baelor Targaryen

Organizer, peacekeeper, and a GPS all-in-one. Basically planned and organized this whole thing. Researched and rented the van, planned the route, reserved accommodation and restaurants. Diplomatically settles every argument, offers to switch drivers with Dunk when he's tired, rotates DJs every hour because it's the fairest solution. Emergency cash, extra phone chargers. Somehow makes the van feel calmer just by being in it. If Aerion complains about Lyonel's singing, Baelor suggests headphones. If Matarys complains about being cold, offers the extra jumper he packed. His conversations are thoughtful rather than loud - history, travel, books, funny childhood memories. He's happy to listen more than he speaks, but when he tells a story, everyone actually goes quiet to hear it. Broad music taste, will happily listen to anything, partial to movie soundtracks. Packs mixed nuts, dark chocolate, fancy sandwiches, and good coffee. Enjoys sparkling water. Sometimes trying to diffuse an argument leads him to enter the argument, so he finds himself debating whether pineapple actually belongs on a pizza or not (team no, fyi). Even though he made a schedule, he is incredibly flexible with it, due to his travel companions, e.g., Lyonel derailing them two hours in to stop at a castle festival. Baelor quietly handled their hotel reservation because they'll be late, and adjusted the amount of bathroom breaks due to the amount of drinks everyone had. By the end, even though they complained about his 'rules', secretly they're grateful he was there to maintain order and handle things. Buys sensible souvenirs: leather-bound notebooks, local-made pottery, handcrafted pens, bookmarks, and small pieces of artwork from local artists. Handmade>mass-produced in Baelor's opinion. Buys a postcard at every place they visit, and on the back writes the date, where they went, who was with him and one funny thing that happened that day. He has an entire box of postcards that tell the story of every trip he's ever taken. He enjoys museums, botanical gardens and historical landmarks, appreciates the quiet beauty of old architecture and art galleries. Disappears in bookstores and emerges with three books and a cup of tea. Favourite stop is Dorne, due to its incredible history, architecture, gardens, and food. Secretly, he also loved just lounging on the beach. Everyone got jealous because they had to hide from the sun, and he ended with the best tan. Ensured Myriah and Daeron received obligatory family photos of the trip.

Daeron Targaryen

A sleepy extra navigator who keeps accidentally predicting disasters. Sits behind Baelor. Starts the journey intending to stay awake, but within thirty minutes is asleep against the window, wrapped in a hoodie or a blanket, one earbud in. Wakes occasionally to ask if they've arrived, grab another snack, or make a strangely specific comment like, "don't stop at that gas station." His music choices are acoustic melancholy songs and indie music. Wakes up long enough to mumble, "we're going the wrong way," falls back asleep, and twenty minutes later they discover the GPS really did reroute them incorrectly. Or makes a strangely specific comment like, "don't stop at that gas station", and for some reason he's right (they later discover someone's been ambushing people there and robbing them). He's right for reasons no one can explain, but they listen nonetheless. Doesn't enjoy loud games, but he'll quietly join Twenty Questions or riddles. Somehow wide awake in the dead of the night, when almost everyone else sleeps. Turns philosophical, discussing dreams, fate, and strange coincidences in a way that leaves everyone thoughtful (if they're awake, that is; most likely he's talking to the moon, and Dunk because he's driving, but he doesn't know how to answer Daeron, so he just hums in agreement). Brings energy drinks, chocolate bars (Kit Kat guy over here), and cola-flavoured gummy worms. Half his snacks melt because he leaves them in his hoodie pocket. Spills drinks in the car; Maekar looks like he's about to have a stroke. Likes quirky souvenirs: vintage postcards, pressed flowers, little glass bottles filled with sand from beaches, dreamcatchers, second-hand books with handwritten notes inside, or tiny trinkets that simply "felt right." Disappears inside record stores on the way. Also enjoys old cemeteries and abandoned castles, any place with a slightly mysterious atmosphere. Favourite spot are the Riverlands, with their small riverside towns, misty forests, and peaceful lakes.

Matarys Targaryen

Morale officer. Starts the games, tells jokes, gets everyone talking. Treats the road trip like one long adventure. Sits in the second row between Daeron and Maekar, literally in the middle of the car. Tries to keep Daeron awake so he doesn't miss the scenery. Keeps taking candid photos of everyone sleeping, laughing, or making ridiculous faces, and playfully threatens to post them on social media. Secret dynamic duo is him and Lyonel, both keeping the energy up. His song choices are rock anthems and energetic pop songs that everyone knows the lyrics to, even Maekar. Counts on Lyonel to start a sing-along, the two of them singing the loudest. Mastermind behind games like "license plate bingo", charades at rest stops, or making absurd backstories for people in passing cars. Keeps a running list of inside jokes from the trip and laughs the hardest every time one comes back later. Gets Egg and Lyonel to do TikTok dances with him. Sour candy aficionado, loves slushies even if they give him brain freezes. Is the main reason they have to pay a cleaning fee to the rental company (Lyonel makes him laugh, the blue slushie ends up all over the ceiling, Daeron's blanket, and, unfortunately, Maekar). Goofy souvenirs are his go-to: funny T-shirts, snow globes, rubber ducks dressed as knights, disposable cameras, and joke gifts. (This guy would thrive in Buc-ee's. And Egg would too.) Spends most of his pocket money on claw machines trying to win a stuffed dragon. Will insist he's getting closer, even if he loses each time. Adventure-seeker, will sign up for any activity: climbing, ziplining, mountain biking, you name it, he's doing it. Oddly enough, had a blast in the North and wants to stay another whole week because he enjoyed snowboarding so much. Won all the snowball fights. Would be able to convince Lyonel to jump into an icy lake "just to see what it's like." And he would join him.

Maekar Targaryen

Keeps asking himself what is he doing there. Tells people to stop making noises. Secretly enjoys himself by day three, but refuses to admit it. Has a printed itinerary. Sits behind Dunk and next to the door, so has to get up for everyone who wishes to exit the van. Insists nobody needs another bathroom break, then is the first one asking Dunk to pull over. Says he would prefer they drive in silence, but secretly hums to the music playing. If he has to pick a song, it's something classical, most importantly instrumental. Spends half the time grumbling and the other half reminding people to buckle their seatbelts, stop eating messy food, and quit distracting Dunk. If he sees someone with a flat tyre, he will be the first to help, or to lift heavy luggage. His way of caring is practical, not affectionate. Had a 20-minute discussion with his sons before the trip to be on their best behaviour. That warning went out the window in less than half an hour. Criticised everyone's packing, "who needs ten pairs of shoes?" Was the one who placed the luggage in the boot so that everything fit. Despite acting annoyed by road trip games, somehow knows every answer to the trivia questions. His snacks of choice were plain crackers and unsalted nuts, and black coffee. By day 4, he was eating sour gummy worms from Matarys, and indulged in prawn cocktail crisps. Kept the coffee, though. Absolutely forbids ice cream inside the van. "Eat it outside." "But it's thirty-five degrees." "Then eat it faster." When the bill arrives at the restaurant, doesn't care about splitting or paying for his meal, so he pays for all the food (splits with Baelor and sometimes Lyonel; they are the richest of the bunch). Even though he restricts Egg to only getting one thing from the gift shop, secretly buys some of the other things he was looking at. He'll only get something practical for himself, like a pocketknife, locally made leather gloves or a thermos. Says Aerion and Daeron have their own money to spend, still covers their expenses. Makes sure Daeron drinks enough water. Is a travelling pharmacy. Daeron's sleeping pills, motion-sickness medicine, ibuprofen, vitamins, bandages, a thermometer, sun cream, you name it, he packed it. No one lets him forget how he spent 15 minutes lecturing everyone about not spilling drinks, only to dump an entire coffee into his own lap after hitting a speed bump (Dunk did warn them it was approaching). Says he doesn't care about sightseeing, then spends two hours fascinated by an exhibit at an aviation museum. Claims theme parks are ridiculous, forced to go with Egg; the camera catches him smiling. Was the reddest of the bunch after getting sunburnt in Dorne. Favourite place was the Stormlands, with their dramatic landscapes, old castles, cliffs and stormy coastline. Suggested hiking along the coast, no one dared to say anything because they were surprised he requested something for himself. Loved it, even though he had to stop Aerion (twice) from pushing Egg down. After the trip was over, had pictures developed and put in an album. Has one Polaroid pic with his sons while in Crownlands' market, and one with Baelor in Dorne that he put in his wallet.

Aerion Targaryen

Captain Complaints. Pissy because they wouldn't allow him to drive, claims he would be better than Dunk. Speed is too slow, too fast, the route is wrong, he's bored. Sulks because no one pays attention to his whims. Wants to control the air conditioning. Brought the most luggage. Keeps trying to connect his phone to the van's radio, claims everyone's music taste is trash. When it fails, tries to skip other people's songs. Refuses to admit he is having fun, yet somehow ends up participating in every roadside game and every singalong after insisting they were childish. If someone falls asleep, threatens to draw on their face with a marker (usually Maekar or Baelor stop him, but once, after a terrible rendition of 'Highway to Hell' from Matarys and Lyonel, they pretended they didn't see him. That's how Matarys ended up with kitten whiskers and Lyonel with glasses drawn on them). Awfully sea sick while on the ferry to the Iron Islands. Groans dramatically when they stop for fuel and remarks every restaurant they chose looks disappointing. Stocked on expensive chocolate and truffle chips, refuses generic-brand sodas, splurges on ridiculous iced lattes and frappuccinos, says he won't eat fast food, yet is unable to resist McDonald's fries. Tries to steal Lyonel's, doesn't succeed. Once, Baelor and Dunk decided to listen to his advice because he insisted he knows a better shortcut. They lose forty-five minutes, end up on a gravel road, and no signal. He blames the GPS. They don't listen to him again. His souvenirs are extravagant, to say the least: designer sunglasses, expensive watches, crystal whiskey glasses, or whatever looks the most expensive in the gift shop. Secretly buys himself a dragon plushie, hoping no one sees him. Baelor does, but keeps quiet, smiling to himself (because he bought one as well, ok?). Keeps asking why they couldn't fly there. First-class, of course. Has the time of his life in the Westerlands. In Westeros' wealthiest part, Aerion feels right at home with the luxury shopping district and the fine-dining restaurants overlooking the sea. Tried to buy a yacht, but was stopped when Maekar's head vein threatened to burst. Goes into overprotective mode when he overhears someone complaining about Egg's enthusiasm while waiting in line for the rollercoaster.

Lyonel Baratheon

Mister Entertainment himself. Loudest laugh in the van. Sits in the back row, between Aerion and Valarr. Starts sing-alongs with Matarys, whether people want them or not. Wants spontaneous detours to "see something cool." Requests classic rock, stadium anthems, and drinking songs everyone can shout. Always hungry. Every fuel stop turns into a half-hour adventure. If everyone else is tired, Lyonel is the one who gets them laughing again, usually by telling an outrageous story or dramatically reenacting something that happened on the trip. Puts his feet on the seats. Fiercely competitive in every game, accuses everyone of cheating, tries to cheat, but gives himself away, because he finds it funny. Once, Aerion fell asleep in the van, so Lyonel immediately started stacking crisps on him to see how long it would take him. He got to twenty-three before they slid down Aerion's face, and Maekar scolded him for making a mess. Buys enough snacks for the entire van, and then some. Hot dogs, barbecue crisps, onion rings, giant sodas, sausage rolls, ice cream, more crisps, another soda because the first one is gone. Never gets carsick; everyone wonders how he does it after all that food. If they pass an amusement park, a giant roadside statue, or suspicious-looking sign, he's already halfway out of the van yelling, "come on, it'll only take five minutes!" It doesn't. Second most amount of luggage, after Aerion. He answers 'yes' to anything; he's here for a good time, not a long time. Doesn't care about prices. His souvenirs are as excessive as he is: oversized stuffed animals (spent an absurd amount of money on a high striker at a fair they stopped at because he saw they had a stag plushie), ridiculous hats and T-shirts, inflatable swords, humorous aprons and foam crowns, anything that makes others groan. He finds a life-sized cardboard knight, which they strap to the roof of the van. Lyonel drags everyone to local pubs, county fairs and outdoor markets. Enters pie-eating contests and a pub crawl on the same day. If he sees a mechanical bull, you bet your ass he's riding it. Convinces everyone to buy and wear matching T-shirts. Drives for a while when they reach Stormlands and acts as the group's tour guide. Surprised by how much he loved the Iron Islands; surfing, sailing, sea festivals, cliff diving (whether allowed or not), and every loud harbour pub full of music. Responsible for most of the jokes on Matarys' list.

Valarr Targaryen

It was his idea they go on a road trip. Most responsible of the 'kids', but still causes mayhem. Doesn't complain and keeps mess to a minimum; reads while people sleep in the car. Sits behind Daeron, allows him to recline his seat. Points out picturesque landscapes or old castles they pass. His music taste is relaxed - soft rock, orchestral soundtracks, jazz - but will absolutely belt out Queen, best singer of the bunch. Isn't overly competitive, but loves to rile up Matarys and Aerion. Really good at geography quizzes. Sarcasm king. When conversations become heated, he'll make one dry joke that breaks the tension. Stocks on iced tea, salt and vinegar crisps, strawberries, and pastries from local bakeries. The type to suggest eating at local spots rather than another chain restaurant. Absolutely devours KFC strips, though. Likes spicy food, but can't quite handle Dornish-spice level yet. Wants to try all the available ice cream flavours. Remembers to buy a Dornish spice blend his grandmother Myriah once mentioned in passing. His souvenirs reflect his love of history: beautifully illustrated books, museum replicas, bookmarks, antique coins and maps. Buys a fridge magnet at every place they visit. While Matarys excels in snapping embarrassing moments with his phone, Valarr brings his camera and takes breathtaking photos of places they visit and candid photos of his travel companions: Dunk and Egg sharing a funnel cake in the Stormlands, Daeron, Aerion and Matarys jumping in the sea in Dorne, Lyonel on the mechanical bull in some dingy bar in the Reach, Baelor and Maekar clinking their pints at a pub in the North. He develops the photos and gifts them for their birthdays. Buys guidebooks before visiting because he wants to know more about the place he's visiting. Persuades everyone to go to an escape room. Has the best time in the Vale, is mesmerised by its natural beauty, clean air and imposing mountains. Usually shares a room with Daeron, and they end up in the most absurd philosophical conversations at 3 AM. Makes everyone stop rushing and take in the views from time to time.

Your hand reaches back blindly, fingers brushing his stubbled jaw. "I am real," you whisper, leaning into his touch. "And I'm not going anywhere, baby."

His movements are unhurried but heavy, laden with a terrifying hunger. It is the desperation of a man who knows any day could be his last, clinging to his only sanctuary. Each time he pulls back, you feel the empty ache of his absence; when he pushes back in, the powerful stroke fills you so completely it steals your breath.

"Steamin' Jesus, you feel so good," he groans, burying his face in your neck, inhaling you as if you are the only clean air he has left. "Always so warm. So soft. My girl. You save me, darlin'."

Your hands are trapped beneath you, useless against the mattress. You can't touch him now. You can only lie there and take this heavy, possessive worship, a man desperately begging for his life through your body. The thought that you are his peace, his only shield against the demons of the field, makes you tremble.

His hand slides down, rough fingers trailing through the slick heat between your thighs before finding your clit. He simply presses down with constant pressure, anchoring you as his cock ruthlessly claims your depth.

"Johnny," you whine, your hips twitching back against him. "Oh fuck, Johnny…"

"Shh, now, darlin'," he soothes, his voice a low, coaxing purr, though his breath is ragged. "Easy. Just feel me. Feel how deep I am, how I'm fillin' you up. I love hearin' my name on your lips when I'm buried in ye. Makes me feel like I actually made it home."

The pace remains relentless. His cock drags heavily against your inner walls, the head of it kissing that sweet, sensitive spot with every deliberate, bruising thrust. You are a slick, hot mess, creating wet, squelching noises that echo in the quiet room, dirty sounds of friction that make your pulse race with a dizzying heat because you are so desperately grateful for his weight.

"You're shakin', hen," Johnny murmurs, his lips brushing your temple, his grip tightening until his knuckles are white. "Am I hurtin' you?"

You shake your head, choking on a sob. It isn't pain; it is the sheer, terrifying volume of him.

Everything narrows down to this exact, suffocating space. You are intensely aware of the rough calluses on his palm anchoring your clit, the heavy, sweat-slicked drag of his chest hair against your bare back, and the faint scent of the field still clinging to his skin. You are being completely consumed by a man who lives on the edge of a blade.

Every heavy slide of his cock feels like a countdown, a desperate imprint of his existence into your very bones. You are memorizing him, the exact thickness stretching you, the dry heat of his throat against your collarbone, the ragged catch in his chest. If he doesn't make it back next time, this is the weight you will have to carry. The thought is sharp, dirty, and devastatingly beautiful. It coils in your lower belly, pulling so tight it aches.

"Good," he rumbles, his hand pressing firmer, driving you ruthlessly over that cliff. "I want you sensitive for me. Let me make you come, darlin'. Just let go."

And you do. Your body arches back against him as the orgasm finally breaks, a violent, sobbing wave of ecstasy that clamps your pussy desperately around his length, trying to lock him inside you forever. You gasp his name, your head thrashing against the mattress. Johnny groans, his hips stuttering, his cock twitching violently as your tight, pulsing heat milks him, holding him captive until you are a whimpering mess beneath him.

"Tha's my girl," he whispers, his voice thick with raw possessiveness. "Always so perfect."

The sleepy haze is entirely gone, replaced by a desperate, aching need to hold him. "Johnny," you gasp, trying to turn. "Please, I need to see you."

With a low grunt, he helps you roll over, keeping his thick length buried deep within your wet heat. Now you are face to face, legs tangled, your hands finally free. You scramble to grab his broad shoulders, your fingers sinking into the hard muscle of his back, before tangling desperately in his mohawk, the proof that he is here, alive, and yours.

His eyes are dark, intense, and shining with tears in the dim morning light. "Fuck, I love it when ye look at me like that," he groans, his hips resuming that deep, rolling grind. "Like I'm your whole world."

"You are," you whisper, pulling his head down.

The kiss is wet, messy. Your tongues slide together in a panting, frantic rhythm. The new angle shifts everything, his cock pressing ruthlessly against a devastatingly sensitive spot deep inside you. Your moans are no longer muffled; they are loud, uninhibited cries of pleasure.

"Johnny, oh my god, Johnny... don't stop, please don't stop."

"Never stoppin', my heart," he rasps, resting his forehead against yours, his gaze locked onto yours with a fierce, burning love. "I want to fill you up so completely. Tell me you want me. Tell me you're mine."

"Yes," you sob, the word torn from your throat as you cling to his neck. "I'm yours. Fill me up, Johnny. Please."

"My beautiful girl," he chokes out, his thrusts turning harder, more purposeful, the bed creaking loudly in time with your bodies. "Gonna leave my love so deep inside you that you'll feel me with every breath you take today. You'll never forget who you belong to."

The dirty, intensely romantic promise throws you over the edge. Another orgasm crashes through you, a blinding wave. You cry out his name as your pussy tightly milks his thick length, your hands scrabbling for purchase on his sweat-slicked back, desperately memorizing the feel of his skin.

"Fuck, that's it, that's it," Johnny growls, his rhythm faltering as your body convulsively clamps down on him. "Come on my cock, sweetheart. Take it all."

He buries his face in your neck, his own groans vibrating against your skin as he lets go. You feel the hot, thick pulses of his release deep inside you, an intimate, searing heat that seems to go on forever. He fills you completely, his body tensing and shuddering with each powerful spurt.

Johnny doesn't pull out. He collapses on top of you, his weight a welcome, grounding pressure. The air is thick with the scent of sex. You can feel his cum, a warm, sticky pool inside you, and the sheer, fleeting safety of this moment brings tears to your eyes. You hold him tighter, your arms locked around him as if you could physically keep him from ever leaving.

You run your fingers through the short, soft hair at the sides of his mohawk, tracing lazy circles on his back. He is still inside you, softening but lingering, a constant, comforting presence.

"Bad dream, huh?" you murmur after a long silence, your voice trembling slightly.

He lifts his head to look at you, the tough sergeant completely stripped away, leaving only a vulnerable, raw affection in his eyes.

"Aye, well. Woke up in a cold sweat, thought I'd lost you," he admits quietly, brushing a stray tear from your cheek with a rough thumb. "Had to make sure you were real. That I was still allowed to love you like this."

You pull him down for another slow, sweet kiss, tasting the salt of your own tears. "I'm real, Johnny," you whisper against his lips. "And I'm yours. Always."

He sighs, a sound of pure, melting relief, and settles back down with his head on your chest, listening to your heartbeat. "Best fuckin' dream I ever had, then," he mumbles, his eyes already drifting shut.

You smile, stroking his hair, feeling his warmth leak slowly inside you.