Dick

your wrists were bound above your head, your pretty eyes shut and covered with another silky tie. clark’s thick cock sliding into you with lewd squelches, his tip hits your g-spot every time without fail from its impressive girth and length. being restrained and blindfolded forced your senses to single out any other sensation and focus simply on the smallest touches. giving him full control over when and what you feel. his weight pinning your hips to the mattress, his palms forcing your thighs open. the soft tuft of his happy trail tickling your throbbing clit with each thrust. “fuck! mm- clark! feels so good! ungh!”

his brows furrow in pleasure and concentration, thumb rubbing your clit gently as he reprimands you, “o-oh my god, lan- ah! language sweetie.” although clark is certainly feeling good and he’s focussing on your pleasure too, he remains focussed on your heartbeat, using his super hearing to distinctively listen to the slightest change in rhythm. he uses it to always check up on you and ask you questions, “i can hear your pulse racing honey, don’t lie to me. tell me what your want.” he knows the exact difference between when you’re turned on and when you begin to feel startled or anxious. if it spikes in a way he doesn’t like, he will stop immediately and check up on you. thankfully that hasn’t happened yet because he knows just how to please you.

when you talked to him about spanking, it was veeeery hard to get to clark to follow through. because he can’t feel pain the same way humans do, he is extremely terrified of misjudging force. when he agrees(very hesitantly), he marks your skin with his oceanic eyes, searching for the slightest hint of a flush or bruise. the first time he spanked you, it was very gentle, almost like a little pat. you wiggled your ass at him whilst arching your back enticingly, peering at him over the curve of your shoulder, “cmooon clark, i can take more than that, that was nothing”, he gulps softly, “o-okay, if you’re sure about it…”, before really spanking you. you yelp immediately and your breath hitches. he stopped with a deep gutted fear, “are you okay? did i hurt you? was it too much??”, once you reassured him you were fine and actually liked it, he continued. every time he delivers a strike, he followed it up with the soft rub of his thumb on the curve your ass, asking for a “1-10” scale rating. when he gets even more comfortable with the concept, he praises you with each spank. “my good girl”, “you take it well don’t you? you’re so good for me.”

clark uses his superhuman endurance to completely control your pleasure, keeping you right on the edge of your sweet orgasm until he decides you’re ready. most of the time, it doesn’t really require force from from and instead relies on his unshakable self control. he’d be rutting into you with desperation one second, eager to be up in your guts. then he’d slow down to a stop the next. your wrists pinned down with just one of his hands as the other rubs at your clit. you whine immediately, huffing as your hips desperately try to squirm up, “noo! ngh, clark please! ah, please move”, you beg. clark leans down to press soft gentle kisses to your face, trailing down to your neck and jaw, “not yet, sweet girl..this pace isn’t so bad, feels good doesn’t it?”, he gently squeezes your pinned wrists, reminding you he controls the pace you reach your release.

he’s already extremely mindful of his grip strength when you ask him to pin down your wrists. but his poor heart almost left his soul when you asked him to choke you. he was fucking you just right, slow and deep, keeping your body pinned beneath him. until you called out to him softly, “hey clark?”, he looked to you immediately, scared he’d squeezed your wrists too hard until you smiled brightly, “choke me.”

he may as well have been a statue with how he froze. his jaw literally dropped and his eyes widened and he stared at you like you’d just asked him to throw you into the sun. “what?”, he asked immediately in pure panic.

“choke me”, you repeated casually, giving him an unbothered tilt of your head despite the heavy tension in the room, “just a liiiittle bit. cmon clark it’s hot!”

“absolutely not!”, he blurted out, hands instantly releasing your wrists as he sat up straighter in retreat, “honey, no. do you have any idea how fragile the human trachea is? i-i can literally crush titanium! if my grip slips for less than a second, oh golly i don’t even wanna think abo—“

“oh clark, stop it! it’s fine”, you groaned, rolling your eyes with a breathless giggle. you sit up forward and wrap your arms around his shoulders before pulling him over ontop of you again. “you’re literally just resting your hand on my throat, you’re not gonna hurt me you big worrywart.”

“the thought of putting my hands around your neck…i-it terrifies me sweetheart”, he whispered, his eyes wide with genuine fear and worry. you soften just a fraction, reaching for his hand and wrapping it gently around your throat, your legs crossing around his waist to inch his dick in deeper. “s’okay baby, you’re not gonna hurt me i just know it, cmon..”

bonus: good aftercare

the moment you two reached a blissful orgasm, with you completely satisfied and melting into the sheets, clark moved in quick blurs to ensure you were comfortable afterwards.

before you could even try to blink away the sleep crawling up your spine, the heavy weight of his body vanished and he moved across the bedroom with a hint of his super speed. he was back on the edge of the bed in a fraction of a second. his hair messy, a very light sheen of sweat on his dewy skin.

“here”, he rushed out, his voice a pitch higher than usual as he ushered a glass of water towards your lips.

“its room temperature, i read online that cold water can shock a sensitive human nervous system after an adrenaline drop. drink it please? slow sips, okay?”

you blinked at him, amused but also struggling to keep up with his speed, “clark, babe i’m—“

“and i brought these”, he interrupted frantically. completely ignoring your attempts to calm him down as he gestured to the snacks that were on the bedside table. wait..when did those get there? there were your favourite biscuits, sweeties and small treats. “your blood sugar might be low. i can hear your tummy rumbling sweetie, can’t you hear it? oh- or is that your digestion? do you feel nauseous? if you’re dizzy you should lie flat honey.”

he carefully eyes over your body, mentally noting down anything he’d question. “i just…i need to make sure you’re okay”, he added, gently draping a soft fluffy blanket over you. “is this too heavy? is the material ok? if you don’t like it i can always quickly fly down to linen shop and get you another one?”

***

Something’s missing. 

You’ve been bent over your stove for the past hour, tweaking your take on the classic Béarnaise sauce, but it’s missing something. 

Something you think you may never find. 

With a deep sigh, you look around at the Béarnaise sauce graveyard you’re in.

You had to get this right. 

Maybe it’s the fact that you’re under immense pressure, not just from yourself, and the expectations you’ve built up in your own mind. Maybe that’s why nothing makes sense right now. 

You take another spoonful, tasting, letting it coat your tongue, thinking that maybe this time, something will click. But no. 

It still feels hollow.

You stare at the pan, at the slow swirl of butter and egg and vinegar, and feel like giving up. 

Before you can continue to beat yourself up looking for answers, you hear the familiar squeak of the kitchen door. 

There stands Lois, hands on her hips, like she knows you’ve been driving yourself into the ground.

“You okay?” she asks, concerned. Without which you would have kept spiralling, or be found under a pile of dirty pans and half-finished sauces.

“I can’t cook. I’m a fraud.”

“I’m sure you’re being dramatic.”

“Am not. This stupid sauce is missing something,” you reply with a pout. You grab a fresh spoon, handing it to her. “Try it. It’s supposed to go with the porterhouse.”

She takes the spoon, blows on it slightly, and tastes, her expression softening instantly. That small look of satisfaction, that’s why you got into cooking. To make people happy.

“I may not have your highly trained palate, but I think it tastes delicious.”

“You’re too kind,” you mutter with a light giggle. You knew she’d say that, though it doesn’t bring you closer to what you're missing.

It’s not just the Béarnaise, it’s most of the menu. The restaurant has been steady, reliable to a fault, a well-oiled machine; you have a brigade of talented chefs who execute every dish with precision, though some of this place’s joie de vivre has gone. 

That fresh spark is fading, and ideas are starting to feel recycled.

You knew that it was bound to happen, but only three years in? The stress of it was starting to gobble you up, feet first. If you didn’t shake things up, business would slow to a crawl. 

You just knew it, it's a fickle business that thrives on innovation. But you could get it back, you just needed to keep trying, keep pushing, keep—

You hear a shuffle in the main restaurant and look towards the door.

“Is someone else here?” you ask inquisitively.

“Sorry, I brought my coworker with me. We were on our way to a café to work on an article when I thought I should drop by and check on you.”

“You’re not going to a café. Let me cook for you and your friend,” you demand, practically decided on the matter.

“I couldn’t—”

“It would be my pleasure.”

“Aren’t you under enough pressure?”

“It’ll be good practice. You could be my little guinea pigs.”

Lois hesitates, studying your face, as if she’s trying to calculate how many hours of sleep you’ve gotten from a single look. 

“You sure about that?”

You wipe your hands on a towel, already reaching for a fresh pan, ready to cook your heart out.

“I need this. Just something simple, y’know. Cooking for friends.”

“Alright,” she says, a small smile breaking through. “But if I get food poisoning, I’m writing about it.”

“Very funny.”

***

Clark waits by one of the tables, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. When Lois asked if they could drop by her friend’s restaurant, he agreed.

“She’ll probably be cooking herself into a coma right about now,” she told him.

It’s a beautiful place, intimate without feeling too small. He can’t believe he hadn’t come across it sooner. From the softly painted mural of the sky at sunset stretching across the ceiling to the polished wood of the tables and bar. It felt warm, lived-in even.

His ears perk up when you start to speak.

“I can’t cook. I’m a fraud,” he hears you lament.

Your voice…there's something about it. Clark feels his heart skip a beat. He's only heard you speak once, but it's like a hit of dopamine.

He tunes back in to hear Lois compliment your cooking.

“You’re too kind,” you say in response, followed by a soft giggle. Clark feels the tips of his ears start to turn a soft pink.

He wasn’t trying to listen. Really. But his super hearing didn’t seem to want to turn itself off all of a sudden. Complete coincidence. 

Though it doesn't hurt that the tones of your voice float through his head like a melody. He rubs the back of his neck, suddenly feeling like he’s intruding on something private.

He tunes the rest of the conversation out, focusing on the traffic outside and the light rain just starting to hit the pavement. 

Lois exits the kitchen and makes her way over, weaving easily between the tables. “My friend says we can stay and write here if you want.”

“Oh, uh, how kind of her.”

“Yeah, she’ll cook for us too, and before you try and protest, I’ve already tried to convince her not to, but she’s as stubborn as a mule.”

They settle down at a table, the cutlery neatly aligned and cute placemats matching the mural above them. 

He listens in again and hears your little mutterings to yourself, “Where did I put the shallots?” and “I need to put an order in for more tarragon…”

“Where are you?” Lois asks teasingly as she waves a hand in front of his face. Had he gotten caught swooning over a person he hadn’t even met yet?

“Just thinking, is all.”

It’s not a complete lie, just a lie by omission. 

With a deep breath like you’ve been running all over your kitchen, you step out into the main dining room area. Clark hears your footsteps before he sees you, light and swift. 

You come into view with a smile like sunshine, and it’s like he forgets to breathe. 

“You must be Clark. Forgive me for trapping you in my restaurant, but now that you’re here, I refuse to let either of you leave hungry.”

For a second, he just… stares.

Then, as if remembering how words work, he straightens, nearly knocking his knee against the table in the process.

“Oh—no, it’s fine,” he says quickly, fumbling with his glasses again, a faint flush still clinging to his ears. “Better than fine. Great.”

Lois snorts under her breath.

“You should’ve heard her five minutes ago,” she adds, leaning back in her chair. “On the brink of a total meltdown.”

“Lois,” you warn, though there’s no real bite to it.

You turn your attention back to Clark. “So what sort of food do you like?”

“I’ll take whatever you recommend.”

You pause for a moment to look him over and attempt to read his mind. With a soft hum, you note his slightly hunched posture, his kind blue eyes behind his glasses, the way he seems both confident and yet a little unsure of where to put his hands.

An interesting case.

“You probably wouldn’t like something super avant-garde, so I’ll leave the molecular gastronomy alone. How about something warm and comforting? You’re a real home-cooked meal kind of guy, right?”

“Right on the money.”

“I can work with that. Any allergies I need to be aware of? I don’t want to kill you, talk about a bad first impression,” you chuckle nervously.

“No allergies I know of.”

You give him a nod, already filing things away. “And the usual for you, Lois?”

“You know me so well.”

“Well…you’re such a Metropolis girl. Your order isn’t that hard to figure out.”

“And what is that supposed to mean?” Lois calls after you, only a little offended, as you walk away toward the kitchen.

Clark follows you with his eyes until you disappear behind those silver doors.

And without meaning to, he's counting down the minutes until he can see you again.

***

You cooked up a little storm in there. A carrot or two may have gone flying, but it was fun, though, no pressure of trying to be the most inventive chef Metropolis has ever seen. 

You lay the plates in front of them, that small pit of dread in your stomach as you debate whether they’ll like it or not. It sucks how your perfectionism can’t seem to let you go, or maybe it’s just a bout of imposter syndrome, or even better, a wonderful mix of both.

Though judging by the look on Clark’s face, you have nothing to worry about. 

“It’s a pan-seared chicken with creamy mashed potatoes, roasted corn, and a tarragon beurre blanc. Comfort food but dressed up a bit. I hope you like it, Clark. Now, dig in and be honest.”

“This looks amazing,” he says earnestly, his eyes wide with a kind of quiet wonder. 

“It’s nothing that crazy,” you downplay instantly.

“Well, I wish you could see what I see.”

“Ah,” you squawk in lieu of an actual response. Though you soothe yourself, knowing that if anyone else had experienced the downright heart-melting look he gave you, they’d be reduced to the speech capabilities of a bird too.

You give them a curt nod before disappearing into the back as quickly as you can. As soon as you enter the threshold of the kitchen, you press your back against the door. Then proceed to slide down it. 

Why didn’t Lois tell you the friend she brought was so… handsome and sweet?

After much deliberation, you call her the next day to find out more about this classically handsome man.

The phone trolls for a few moments before she picks up with a tired “hello”.

“Lois, what the fuck?”

“What did I do?” she groans, no doubt running a hand through her hair. You're constantly stressing her out like this.

“Be honest with me.”

“Always.”

“Clark.”

“...Uh huh?”

“Are you tapping that?”

There’s a beat of silence so complete you can practically hear her blinking through the phone.

“I’m hanging up now.”

“Come on! You said you’d be honest with me.”

“He’s single. Happy now?”

You kick the air in your kitchen like it personally offended you, grinning despite yourself.

“…very.”

“Is that the only reason you called me?”

“Uh… no? I wanted to check in on my best friend—”

“You’re so transparent,” she cuts in, amused. “Go back to cooking and daydreaming about Kent.”

“That’s not—”

The line goes dead mid-protest. You stare at your phone for a second, then lower it slowly.

“…Rude,” you mutter. 

You glance back toward your stove and a smile blooms on your face. You had every reason to celebrate. 

He’s single. 

***

He really wants to see you again. 

You’ve stayed in his mind for the past few days; whenever his mind was idle, it would all somehow circle back to you. Your nervous monologuing in the kitchen as you cooked, the soft laugh you tried to hide behind your hand, the way your heart skipped a beat when he complimented your food. His might have even skipped a beat too in response.

He’s even gone by your restaurant for dinner… more than once.

“Any exciting plans tonight, Clark?” Jimmy asks, spinning slightly in his chair.

“I think I might drop by Sky Avenue,” he muses casually.

“Wouldn’t this be the fourth time you’ve been there this week?” Jimmy asks with a raised brow, every thought clear as day.

He thinks he’s crazy and maybe he’s right. 

“It's a nice restaurant.”

Admittedly, he’s never been the type to frequent the same place over and over, but there’s just something about the food you make. It’s like one bite could transport him somewhere completely new, somewhere where the sun always shines and the air smells of roses; somewhere closer to you.

“You should join me. The food there is really good. Lois can vouch for it.”

“Uh huh. The food,” Jimmy grins.

Clark exhales through his nose, already regretting opening his mouth.

“Yes, Jimmy. The food.”

“Right,” Jimmy says, unconvinced. “And I suppose the chef has nothing to do with it?”

Clark doesn’t answer right away. He just fumbles with his tie a little, loosening it unnecessarily.

“…She’s talented.”

Jimmy laughs at his coy response; he’s more obvious than he thought. Turns out, when it comes to you, Clark can't hide a thing. “Oh, you’ve got it bad.”

“I do not.”

“You’ve been there three times in one week, and you want to go a fourth.”

“It’s a nice restaurant,” he asserts again.

***

The two of them sit by the window, the restaurant bustling, the sound of good conversation and the smell of good food in the air. 

It’s strange just how at ease Clark feels here, like he’s seeing into a world you’ve created for others to enjoy.

“So it's not about a girl?” Jimmy asks, still unconvinced.

“No.” 

A moment passes as he sees your face flash in your mind. Bright with golden backlighting that most certainly wasn’t there in real life. Or maybe you could just do that, he wouldn't put it past you.

“Not necessarily.” 

Clark takes a deep breath as your laugh rings in his mind. Maybe he does have it bad. 

“Not entirely.”

Before Clark can defend himself any further—

“Clark. You’re back!”

He startles slightly, looking up, genuinely surprised. He didn’t even hear you walk up.

Where’s his super-hearing now?

“I hope it’s not an imposition,” he says, standing a little too quickly.

“Not at all,” you reply easily. “Spend all the money you want at my restaurant. Plus, in all honesty, the waitstaff are always happy to see you.”

“They are?”

You tilt your head, a playful smile tugging at your lips. “It’s always nice to see a handsome face, right?”

That steals the air from Clark’s lungs in an instant.

“And you must be Jimmy. Lois has mentioned you,” you move on, not privy to the mental breakdown you’ve just caused. 

The two of you converse, but he's still caught in the fact that you called him a “handsome face.”

He tries to focus, but then you look at him again, and whatever thought he had just… disappears. He blinks, catching himself, and gently tunes back into the conversation.

“It’s an honour, Clark.”

“What is?” he gulps.

“That my restaurant is your…coup de coeur.”

“Coup de cœur?”

“It's like…”

You tap your chin as you try to find the words, your eyes widening when you finally do.

“It's like you have a crush on my restaurant.”

“That's a good way to put it.” He smiles but thinks what he’d dare not say out loud, “Not just the restaurant.”

***

You're still buzzing from seeing Clark last night. You had heard that he's been by, but he's always been too in the weeds to go out and say hi.

And he looked just as good as you remembered, like the kind of guy you'd end up in a whirlwind romance with. Though you might be getting ahead of yourself.

It’s a slow lunch, the usual clientele lining the tables by the windows, lingering over wine and quiet conversation.

When a rumble shakes the floor—

And when there’s a rumble in Metropolis, there’s bound to be property damage.

You step out of the kitchen into the front, eyes darting to the windows just in time to see Superman.

He’s darting through the sky, a streak of red and blue, lifting debris, carrying people to safety.

Though you're afraid, you feel your heart start to calm. He’d keep you safe, you knew that.

Later, when the worst of it has passed, he lands nearby, scanning the area one last time.

You step outside before you can overthink it.

“Uh, Superman?” You squeak as you walk right up to him.

He turns to you with that million-dollar smile, “Yes?”

He can sense him assessing you for any injuries, ready to help at a moment's notice.

“I—”

You pause, head tilting slightly, thinking, or rather, knowing, you heard something. It’s like your chef instincts kicked in, tuned like a sixth sense for anyone hungry in the vicinity.

“I think your stomach just grumbled.”

“My stomach? Impossible.”

Right on cue, another distinct grumble echoes through the air.

“…Wait.” You point at him, already backing toward the door. “Right here. I mean it, okay?”

Before he can respond, you’re gone.

The bell above the door chimes wildly as you rush back out five minutes later, slightly out of breath, a plate balanced carefully in your hands.

“I’m a chef, so you can trust me. This is like top-tier stuff,” you say, holding it out to him. “Slow-roasted beef, toasted brioche, plus my signature herb butter sauce. And forgive me for sounding a little cocky, but it’ll knock the socks off your grandma.”

He laughs, and butterflies flood your chest like they were activated by it.

Something about it feels warm…familiar.

“Thank you.”

“Long day?”

“You have no idea.”

He takes a bite, and you hold your breath. You might just die if he hates it. The guy saves lives, he deserves a decent lunch.

“This is amazing,” he beams.

“My first job was at a sandwich place, so I've had a lot of practice.”

“I should—”

You know what he's going to say, so you stop him in his tracks and put your hand on his.

“No, no, no, it's on the house, Superman. You just stopped the whole street from becoming a pancake; it's the least I can do. Plus, I doubt you have anywhere to put a wallet. Unless there are pockets I can't see.”

“No pockets.”

“Thought so.”

***

You found yourself inspired yet again, ideas bubbling over faster than you could keep up, churning out sandwich after sandwich after Superman’s visit the day prior.

So inspired, in fact, that you found yourself making a sandwich for a certain journalist you couldn’t quite stop thinking about, sending it to the Daily Planet with a note: “Since you like my food so much.”

As you cool down from your lunch service, your phone buzzes. It’s a text back from Clark, with the cutest slightly off-centre picture of him holding the sandwich, a thumbs up taking up half the frame, like he’s just discovered selfies.

You snort at it, typing out a quick, “Don’t let it get cold.”

He’s such a dork.

You feel yourself brimming with ideas nowadays. You can’t stop them; you’re a fountain of inspiration. Everything just makes sense, like it’s just clicking into place. The puzzle in your mind slowly completes itself. Everything that new feeling goes straight into what you’re cooking.

As you bounce ideas off your sous-chef, pacing slightly, hands moving as fast as your thoughts, she chuckles.

“I haven’t seen you this inspired in a while.”

“Yeah, something’s changed, I guess,” you mumble. 

“Or someone?”

“Hm?”

“The super hot guy that’s shown up three or four nights this week?”

You roll your eyes, turning back to your prep for dinner. “It’s nothing.”

“Sure it isn’t.”

You try to ignore the way your lips betray you, curling into a smile so bright that someone could see it from the moon.

***

As if to prove your sous-chef right, Clark’s here again, just stepping in as you clear down. Your head snaps up at the sound of the cars rushing by, becoming muffled as he closes the door behind him.

“Clark?” Your voice jumps an octave, far too excited to hide it. He looks good, almost good enough to eat.

“Hey, I was just in the neighbourhood… I thought I’d visit. Are you busy?"

You blink, then gesture vaguely behind you. “No, I’m just clearing up. About to head out.”

“Have you eaten?”

“Ironically, no. Why? Are you offering?” You chuckle. 

“Maybe?”

Seeing him outside the restaurant?

You know you’d be a fool not to say yes. 

“You’re on.”

***

After a brisk walk, you reach his apartment.

It’s all comfy and lived-in, books and newspapers strewn across his coffee table, a quiet view that overlooks the city skyline, a wide array of ambient lamps glowing softly in the evening light.

“So what are we doing?” you ask, stepping into the kitchen, leaning lightly against the counter, arms crossed.

“We are not doing anything. You’re sitting back as I cook for you.”

You think of arguing, but that thought quickly dies when you think about how distractingly appealing it would be to watch him cook, sleeves rolled up, his forearms flexing as he moves, completely focused on pleasing you, and decide to acquiesce.

“And what are you making for me, Chef?”

“Breakfast for dinner.”

“I’m sorry, did you just say breakfast for dinner?”

“Just sit back and relax.”

“Most days, I skip breakfast, so this will be a nice change of pace.”

“Skipping meals, especially breakfast? That seems illegal for a chef, no?”

“Oh, shut up.”

He leads you to his kitchen island, and you sit, watching him from your perch, chin resting in your hand, eyes following every movement whether you mean to or not.

He makes quick work of clearing space, pulling ingredients together, taking out pans and bowls with an ease that feels almost practised, starting on eggs like he’s done this a thousand times before. Though the thought that he’s made breakfast for someone like this does have you feeling a little jealous. 

“How do you like your eggs?” he asks, interrupting your pouting. 

“Soft-boiled,” you reply, a little too quickly, like you’ve been waiting to be asked.

He moves around the kitchen with quiet confidence, tossing bacon into a pan with a sharp sizzle.

“Why do you come by my restaurant so often?” you ask, trying to sound casual.

“It’s like you said. It’s my coup de cœur.”

“Is it just my food?”

He pauses and turns from the stove to look you in the eyes. It's so distracting that you think they should be registered weapons.

“It’s not just your food.”

You look away, knowing that if you looked any longer, you’d end up a puddle on his floor.

“Someone once told me that cooking is an act of love,” you murmur, almost like you’re letting him in on a secret.

“Yeah?” he asks softly, turning down the bacon as he approaches the kitchen island, leaning across from the other side, bringing himself just a little closer. 

Eye to eye.

"It was a chef I met when I studied in France for a bit. It was this super-intense French kitchen. I felt like throwing myself in a blender half the time."

You chuckle at the memory of the head chef throwing a pan of coq au vin into the trash just as you were completely it after a single look at it. It wasn't funny haha then, and it isn't funny haha now, so maybe the chuckle is a trauma response.

“Fresh out of culinary school, it was like being on a different planet. My French was shit, I barely understood half the orders being shouted at me, but even being what felt like a million miles away, I cooked my way through it. Made the soup that my mother would make me when I got sick, or the ridiculous overloaded grilled cheese sandwich that my dad called a ‘five-star meal’. And after that one bite, it felt like I was right back there with them.”

Even now, you can taste the salty warmth of broth and melted butter on toasted bread, the memory bringing a soft smile to your face.

“And I… held onto that, knowing that they made them because they loved me. And with every dish I make, every dish I eat, I hold the idea that no matter how far away you are, one dish can make you feel right at home. It’s cheesy, I know.”

“I happen to love cheese so…”

“You love cheese?”

“My favourite’s gouda,” he admits, a little sheepish, and you lightly punch his arm.

“Of course it is. So… what's the Kent family speciality?"

“Biscuits and gravy… takes me back to potlucks and Sunday mornings with more food than anyone could reasonably eat.” 

“You'll have to make it for me sometime so I can add it to my mental recipe rolodex.

“I’ll see what I can do,” he says like it's a promise.

His hand inches toward yours. You notice him hesitate like he wants to hold it, but isn’t sure if he should.

“Is that why you cook?” he asks.

“I’d say so. I don't know, I just like to take them to places they’ve never been or places they haven’t been in a while, all through food. I find it interesting, like the association of taste and memory…”

“Are we making a memory, right now?”

You nod, your mind wrapped up in a soft haze. “I think so. Breakfast for dinner will always belong to you, Clark Kent.”

Taking the leap, his hand finally closes the distance, and you feel your heart bloom like a red tulip in spring. He toys with your hand, the rings on your fingers, tracing the small scar you got from the first time you tried cutting onions too fast and nicked yourself for it. 

"Cooking is an act of love..." He repeats.

You huff, nudging him lightly with your free hand. “You’re such a dork.” 

"You're the one who said it."

"Yes, yes, that's true but..."

You look up from your intertwined hands, catching his eyes, just as smitten with you as you are with him. "There's just something about you saying it."

Letting out a slow breath, your body visibly relaxing as the moment settles around you.

“Makes it… dorky.”

He chuckles before taking your hand and kissing it lightly, the tenderness of it, sending your heart into overdrive. It was a soft brush of his lips against your hands. Hands which work so hard day after day, to feel him kiss them as if they were something precious, made you feel like you were melting. 

The moment is interrupted as you both hear the bubbling in the background start to get quite ferocious, “The eggs!”

With a rush, you both fumble back over to the stove, nearly bumping into each other in the process.

“The soft-boiled eggs might be slightly hard-boiled now.”

As he lifts the lid off, the steam gets in his face, so, like the kind person you are, you reach for him on instinct. Just a simple, absent-minded gesture.

“Won’t your glasses fog up?”

Without thinking too much about it, you take off his glasses to de-fog them.

Clark doesn’t move.

You don’t even notice that Clark has become a statue as you wipe off his glasses with your sleeve, humming to yourself oh-so innocently. 

Looking back up, you freeze too. 

It's like you’ve both looked at Medusa.

If you weren’t mistaken, Superman was now standing right in front of you, but that can’t possibly be, right? The whole world starts to tilt on its axis as you fumble with Clark’s glasses.

What the fuck is going on?

Slowly, almost mechanically, you put his glasses back on his face. “Sorry about that.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

Internally, you are absolutely not okay.

Out loud, you add, “Though we should probably talk about what I just saw.”

“…Probably.”

“You let me take them off,” you sputter out, trying to rationalise what you just witnessed.

“I didn't see it coming.”

“You're Superman. I’m sure I was practically moving in slow motion.”

“Are you mad? Scared?” he asks carefully. 

“Wait, mad? Scared? Why would I be scared?”

“I can hear your heartbeat.”

“My heart isn't racing because I'm scared. I guess I'm just surprised…”

You twiddle your fingers, toying with your rings, “Excited?”

“Excited?” he repeats back to you, his eyebrows quirked up in confusion. 

“Okay,” you add, slightly breathless. “Maybe a little overwhelmed. This is a lot, you’re a lot. In an amazing and kinda batshit crazy way. I mean…you’re Superman.”

“I’m still me,” he says.

“I know, I know. It's just going to take some or a lot of getting used to, I guess, because, well, holy shit.”

You gesture at him wildly, trying and failing to get your breathing back to normal.

“You’re taking this better than most people.”

“Yeah, well. Most people haven’t had their best customer turn into a superhero while they’re trying not to over boil eggs.”

He laughs at your joke, and you feel yourself ease up. Not only was he a cute journalist, but a superhero?

Jackpot.

“Did you like the sandwich I gave you yesterday…Superman?” you ask as you step into his space, your hand brushing against his.

“Yeah, it was absolutely delicious.”

Like “delicious” was your activation word, you step forward and pull him in by the tie before you can think better of it, pulling him slightly off balance. 

He says your name breathy, almost desperate.  You gulp, fuck, it sounds too good on his lips, those words of his. 

Without delaying for another second, you kiss him like you've been starving for him all your life. 

His hands find your waist, holding onto you as you try to climb him like he’s a tree.

The soft moans that escape his lips only urge you on. If you didn't need to breathe, you never would've let go.

You separate to catch your breath, your eyes locked onto one another. You're both hungry but not for pancakes or hashbrowns.

“So you’re okay with me being Superman?” he asks.

“If the way I just attacked your face is any indication, yes. Now, kiss me before I lose all my nerve.”

Like he's been waiting for it, he pulls you back in, all but melting against you. He kisses you as if his life depends on it, like he never knew it could feel so good.

Behind you, the stove clicks softly as you turn it off without looking.

As if reading your mind, he pulls back just a little bit to murmur in a husky voice, “Jump.”

You follow his order, and he lifts you up into his arms, your legs wrapping around his waist. 

“Fuck…” you mumble to yourself.

You could get used to this.

“Bedroom?” He asks, searching your face for any hesitation.

You nod excitedly, “Please.”

The world outside can wait.

***

Morning greets you happily, and you greet it back with a big smile. 

Everything that Clark did to you last night is still fresh in your mind, just thinking about it makes you feel tingly.

You find your face pressed against Clark’s chest, his arms wrapped around you protectively. 

And you must admit, his pecs make good pillows.

You sneak out of bed, successfully not waking him, ready to cook a breakfast to end all breakfasts.

Clark wakes up a while after you to the sound of a busy kitchen.

He follows the noises to see you already cooking and humming to yourself, completely at ease.

In that moment, he wonders to himself if you know just how wonderful you are. It’s like everything you do only makes him fall that much more. 

“Morning,” he drawls, his voice deeper from just waking up. Your head snaps up, pupils dilating the moment you lay eyes on him.

“Good morning to you too.”

He rounds the kitchen island to wrap his arms around you from behind.

“Unfortunately, due to you keeping me up last night, we have to have breakfast for breakfast,” you tell him as you crack an egg.

“I'm sorry,” Clark murmurs against your neck, kissing your skin lightly. He just can't help himself.

"How are you making our eggs today?" He asks as he lifts his head from the crook of your neck.

“I was gonna make us omelettes. How do you normally like them? Scrambled? Poached?”

“Sunny side up.”

“I should've known.”

Among the ingredients spread across his countertop, he notices something he doesn't remember buying.

He looks between you and the bread, “This was not in my pantry.”

You shrug at him, "So what if I snuck out to go buy a baguette? It’s going to taste divine, my bread guy baked it just this morning.”

“Your bread guy?” Clark chuckles, the laugh vibrating against your back.

“Oh yeah, fresh ingredients are my love language. Just you wait until I drag you to a farmer’s market, I'll be bouncing off the damn walls.”

He kisses your cheek lightly.

“It's a date.”

***

A little over a month has passed, and you've fallen head over heels.

Farmer’s market dates have become a routine, Sundays spent perusing stalls as if you’ve always done it.

Of course, Clark has been showing up at the restaurant just as often, sometimes helping carry crates when you don’t ask him to and coming to keep you company when you're up late doing prep.

He even surprised you one night by sliding a bowl of beef noodle soup straight from your favourite restaurant in Taiwan. You had been dreaming of this soup since your trip last year. 

“Did you fly there?” you asked, mouth agape.

“You told me how much you missed it and I—”

Safe to say you didn't let him finish his sentence, practically leaping into his arms and kissing him senseless.

Some nights, you fall asleep at his apartment without meaning to. Just sitting beside him for a moment that turns into hours, your head on his shoulder, as he reads to you.

And now, you’ve never been more inspired. Ideas don’t feel like something you have to force, freeing yourself from the likes of the Bearnaise sauce graveyard.

 Love will do that to a person, you suppose.

The pressure you used to carry like a second spine continues to loosen. You’re not digging yourself into a little hole. Instead, you’re taking it one plate at a time.

Your restaurant is closed, it’s late at night, and you’ve already said goodbye to the last of your staff. You enjoy the kind of quiet that only comes after a full service settles over the dining room, after a job well done. 

You walk out of the kitchen and stop still.

Standing among the empty tables is Clark, a smile blooms on his face the moment you step into view.

“What are you doing here?”

“I had to stop by.”

“You had to.” Looking him over, like he stepped out of your wildest dreams, “With flowers?”

He shifts a little, suddenly a touch sheepish. That dimpled smile appears like it always does when he’s trying to charm you. It works every single time. “Yes. With flowers.”

“I would be insane if I left things the way we have.”

You hold your hands behind your back with an easy smile and an even easier lilt in your step.

“And how have we left things?” you ask with a tilt of your head.

“It has been a month, a wonderful month, and we've never said the words. Never put a label on it.”

You continue to weave through the tables, footsteps soft against the floor, until you’re standing just close enough to feel his heart beating in time with yours or at least imagine it.

The dim amber light spills over his handsome face in a golden wash, like he's stepped straight out of a painting.

Outside, rain begins tapping gently against the windows, a familiar pitter-patter.

“And you want to?”

One more step, your shoes are just short of his.

“Put a label on it?”

“I do, you have no idea how much.” He reaches out and takes your hands in his softly. “If I could be so lucky, I would like to be your boyfriend.”

“I’d like that. A lot.”

He exhales like he’s been holding his breath for weeks without realising it, then leans in and presses a tender kiss to your knuckles.

“Are you going to call me a dork again?”

“It’s a term of endearment, Clark,” you say, smiling as you lean in to kiss his cheek. “You’re my dork… and I’m yours.” 

Then your eyes brighten as if you’ve just remembered something very important. 

“Oh! I have something to show you!”

You pull back just enough to grab a menu from the nearby table and wave it at him with unmistakable pride.

“Now serving breakfast for dinner, once a week.”

“Really?”

“What can I say? You inspired me.”

He wraps his arms around you and picks you up, spinning you around. 

“Clark!” You chuckle before returning to the ground. 

Though you don't get a moment to catch your breath as his lips find your neck, intent on covering every square inch of it with his touch.

“Let's go to my office.”

“I'll follow your lead.

With a smirk, you grab onto his tie and pull him towards the doors at the back. Making things official between the two of you deserves a proper celebration.

“Oh, my sweet boy!”

You watch—tight-jawed, pulse climbing your throat—as the mother, a blonde woman with deep, practiced smile lines and a cloud of rose perfume that hits you like old-money nostalgia, flutters dramatically over her son. She looks somewhere in her late fifties, wearing a hat so aggressively decorated with fake flowers it could double as a centerpiece, and her tears—god, her tears—shine with the delicate artificiality of someone who has rehearsed this moment in the mirror.

“How could he do this to you?!” she wails, gathering her child in arms so theatrical they might as well come with stage directions.

You keep your mouth closed. Because if you open it now, you’re not entirely convinced something civil will come out. You clutch your purse so tightly your knuckles ache, feeling anger simmering beneath your skin in a way that is heavy and protective and dangerously maternal.

To your left sits Jason—your Jason—looking scandalously unbothered in his perfectly tailored suit, as if headmasters’ offices are just another Tuesday morning coffee shop to him. Almost bored, even, his eyes drifting lazily across the room, taking in every detail with that quiet, practiced predator-awareness you know sits beneath his nonchalance.

To your right sits Damian.

Each child who was involved had their own chair, a little sized down to fit the tiny elites. The other two boys have been wailing and complaining to their mother since she had arrived, whispering and looking anywhere but Damian. 

And to you both, Damian hasn't said a word.

His head bowed, palms pressed together like he’s trying to hold himself still, like movement might make everything worse. And you hate—hate—that he looks older than the other children in this room while still being just a boy, shoulders tight, jaw clenched, pretending he isn’t afraid.

You and Jason share a two-person chair, knees brushing. You don’t know what to do. You don’t know what to say. The entire train ride here, Jason kept telling you to trust him, to follow his lead, to let him handle it.

He sounded so sure—the same way he sounds sure when telling you to close your eyes before he steals a kiss, or when he pulls you closer in bed like it’s the easiest thing in the world for him to love you.

And on the train, it was so easy to believe him. To believe you could walk in here and be composed, controlled, steady. To believe you could face Gotham’s elite and not buckle under the weight of their carefully sharpened gazes.

But now…

Now you look at the headmaster’s desk.

At the sketchbook—the one you spent a full day’s salary on because he finally seemed to open to you both fully. At the pages now warped, stained with mud and juice, torn and stomped on, crushed into something unrecognizable. Your heart cracks a little, even if you know its fixable. Because while to you it might be, the moment to a ten year old boy must have felt soul crushing.

And all that belief drains right out of you.

“Can we get started now?” Jason's voice comes in at last, his voice sharp enough to slice clean through the woman’s theatrical sobbing, drawing every eye in the room as the man awkwardly pats his wife’s shoulder like she’s about to faint dead away from grief.

“Ah—yes…” the headmaster stutters, already thrown off balance, already fumbling with his papers as though they might shield him. “Well, ah—as you can see—”

He points at your day's salary.

“—was the cause of the situation.”

You feel your heartbeat spike—sharp, furious, protective—because the casual way he says it, the way he glances at the ruined pages like they’re an inconvenience rather than a cruelty, makes something hot coil low in your stomach. Your fingers clutch your purse so tightly the faux leather creaks, and beside you Damian shrinks even further into his too-small chair, folding himself into silence like it’s armor.

To your left, Jason does not shrink, does not move and does not even blink.

He simply leans back in the chair—slow, controlled, almost bored—crossing one ankle over the other like he’s lounging in a smoking room instead of a battlefield. The picture of calm. The picture of money. The picture of someone who grew up in Wayne Manor and learned exactly how to make people feel small with nothing but his posture. You envy it. God, you envy it so much it hurts.

Because your body feels too tight, too full of nerves, too close to snapping, while Jason looks like he’s reading a menu at a fancy brunch, not sitting in a room where ‘your’ kid is being picked apart by rich snobs.

“Cause,” Jason repeats slowly, tasting the word like it’s rancid.

His jaw flexes and his gaze falls to Damian. 

Damian doesn’t lift his head, but you see the tiny exhale he lets out—the smallest, smallest sign that he's giving Jason persimmon to act.

Jason’s calm is the only thing keeping you stitched together, the only anchor beneath the growing urge to stand up and scream for someone.

Meanwhile, the headmaster clears his throat and prattles on, blissfully unaware of the way Jason’s patience is thinning by the second.

“And from what the other students reported, after the sketchbook became… ah… shared, young Mister Wayne responded with—well, with—ah—physical force.”

Jason tilts his head back against the chair, the picture of a man who appears relaxed but is actually choosing every breath with dangerous precision, and his smile curls slow and sharp, polite in a way that sends a shiver down your spine.

“Shared,” he repeats, tasting the word like something sour, stretching it out with a drawl so deceptively pleasant you swear the room temperature drops. “Do you want to explain that part further?”

But before the headmaster can even inhale, one of the boys—the pudgy one, red-faced and shiny-eyed, the one whose mother just fake-sobbed loud enough to shake windows—blurts out in a rush of panicked indignation.

“How was I supposed to know it was valuable! It—it looks like the cheap ledgers the maids keep—I-I only wanted to draw!”

The boy’s voice wobbles through the room, thin and reedy and desperately eager to sound innocent, yet the words themselves drift into the air like a slow-spreading stain, something sour that settles in the corners and sinks into the floorboards.

And besides you on one side Jason seems to relax, like a suspicion he had was confirmed. And on the other side, Damian goes even more still, like hes trying not to breathe.

Not the rigid, disciplined stillness he wears like a assassin's mask, not the carefully curated poise he uses to hide his age and his size and his fear of being underestimated—no, this is something quieter, something smaller, something that curls inward and tucks itself behind his ribs where no one can see it. His hands, already pressed together so tightly they tremble, squeeze even harder, knuckles whitening like bone beneath parchment.

You feel the shift in him like a thread snapped taut.

Because the boy hadn’t just insulted the sketchbook—he had dismissed it, dismissed the value of something Damian cherished, something he poured himself into in the only soft way he knows how.

And it hits you, sharp and terrible, that you always scold him for not sharing. For refusing to let Kori have a sip of his tea. For refusing to let Dick teach Titus any tricks. For clutching the blanket a little too tightly when Jason tries to tug it away. For stiffening whenever anyone reaches for his things.

It’s mostly Jason he refuses, and Jason laughs it off, or calls him “dragon hoarder,” or ruffles his hair until Damian hisses like a feral cat—but every time, Damian’s grip on whatever he’s holding gets just a little stronger, as if the world might suddenly take it from him if he loosens his fingers for even a second.

Now you understand.

Of course he guards what’s his.

Of course he claws around the small pieces of gentleness he’s allowed himself to keep.

Of course he doesn’t share easily—not because he’s bratty or spoiled, but because this world, this school, these people treat what he loves like it’s disposable.

Every day, in some small way, you’re reminded that despite all the hours you’ve poured into this boy—teaching him softness, teaching him stillness, teaching him that safety can exist outside the battlefield—you do not know him as fully as you wish you did, and moments like this only underline how much of him is still a mystery waiting to be unspooled.

You told him to try sharing, gently, patiently, in that soft earnest way you reserve only for him, and he listened with all the reluctant effort of a child who hates being wrong but wants to make you proud anyway.

And now this.

“...How did it—” you begin slowly, your voice stretched thin with confusion, and Jason, as though snapping out of some private calculation in his own head, lifts his gaze toward the headmaster just as you finish, “—get to that state?”

One of the boys shifts, small and fidgety in his polished shoes, before speaking again in a tone that wobbles between indignation and fear. “My brother was drawing with him for a moment,” he explains, eyes flicking everywhere except at Damian. “I ran to get more pencils from my bag. I turned around and—and he was beating him up. So I hit him back.”

And that—finally—that pulls Damian’s head up.

He snaps so fast you almost miss it, and his voice, usually so sharp-edged and controlled, cracks with the bright, unmistakable pitch of a little boy trying too hard not to sound like one.

“He wouldn’t give it back!” he bursts out, cheeks flushed, eyes shining with fury and embarrassment all at once. “And don’t act all high and mighty like you were able to land a shot that didn’t feel like a teddy bear was hitting me!”

You stare.

Because you don’t know what you were expecting, but it wasn’t this—not the simple, painfully mundane truth of childhood.

Maybe you had imagined something far more sinister, something orchestrated, something cruel—that the boys had stolen the sketchbook from his bag and passed it around until it was ruined beyond recognition, laughing while he stood by helplessly. Maybe you thought their wealthy parents had instigated something, turned their sons into little soldiers of some type of bigotry, weaponizing privilege the way adults in this city always do.

It would have been dramatic. Understandable. Something you could grab onto without your mind stumbling.

But instead—

Instead you watch the pieces fall into place, and everything becomes shockingly, achingly clear.

You finally understand why Jason was so calm, leaning back with that slow, quietly amused look like he’d already read the ending of the story while you were still stuck on the first chapter. He had full utter confidence in his hunch that this was how it was going to go.

Because while you spend nearly every waking moment trying to guide Damian toward softness, encouraging him to act his age, reminding him—gently, endlessly—that he is allowed to be ten…

You forget.

You forget that he is ten.

He is a brat, sometimes—a brilliant, stubborn, prideful, quick-to-spark little brat who bristles at losing and flares up at being embarrassed. He is arrogant, occasionally unbearably so, and he can change his loyalties within ten seconds flat if someone annoys him enough. He can turn a friend into a foe and a foe back into a friend with the reckless, dramatic speed that only children possess.

Jason didn't forget that he's ten, because in ever time he dismisses, teases, spars, argues and insults Damian—he does it because Damian is ten.

The boys didn’t destroy the sketchbook maliciously.

It was ruined in a scuffle—an honest, thoughtless, childish tumble of limbs and pride.

And Damian—

Damian looks ashamed because he knows it.

Because for once in his short, regimented life, he acted not like an assassin or a soldier or an heir.

But like a normal ten-year-old boy.

And he doesn’t know whether he’s allowed to.

“Well.” Jason leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees, chin cupped in his palm as if the weight of the world—or at least this absurd meeting—is something he can hold in one hand, “now that we have a clear essence of the situation, I highly doubt we need to escalate this to pressing charges—”

“My little boy’s legs are broken!” the woman cries, her voice slicing across the room like shattered glass, pointing at her son cradled in her arms with such melodrama that it nearly tips the balance of the room, “and he can’t see out of his left eye! Can you, baby?!”

She pivots sharply to her other son—the one who had run for pencils—while her husband sits frozen, trying to parse whether this is real or just a performance he’s obligated to witness, “and my oldest has a broken arm! What kind of mother would I be if I—”

“You didn’t immediately take them to the hospital,” Jason interrupts, tilting his head lazily with the kind of calm that seems effortless and infuriating all at once, “instead of waiting for a parent–teacher conference to be over to collect apology money?”

“That—” she sputters, her words tripping over themselves as the older boy hides a stifled giggle in the crook of his arm, a tiny betrayal that seems to make her panic even more pronounced.

“Huh,” you murmur under your breath, barely containing a smile as you glance at Jason, whose expression doesn’t change even an inch, the corners of his mouth twitching with quiet amusement.

“Daniel!” the woman yells at her son, her voice cracking with exasperation, a note that teeters somewhere between anger and embarrassment, but before she can continue her tirade, Jason interjects, leaning back slightly in his chair as though the entire theater of this meeting is merely background noise to him.

“I’d have to say the tabloids would absolutely love this,” he hums, slow and deliberate, with that infuriating air of someone who knows exactly how to push buttons without ever seeming malicious, “owners of a children’s hospital in central Gotham, don’t even trust their own children to be admitted—needing the Wayne family to personally apologize just so they can pay for the child’s injuries after a scuffle between children.”

His words hang in the room, absurdly calm, perfectly composed, while the mother sputters once more, flustered into silence. Damian shifts slightly in his chair, finally daring to peek at Jason and you with wide, uncertain eyes.

There’s no real blame to be assigned in this farce—the fight itself was chaotic, ridiculous, and entirely ten-year-old in nature—but to the outside world, to the casual observer, the only ones who could be faulted are the parents, a truth Jason delivers with such quiet, infuriating precision that it almost feels like a private joke just between the three of you.

No one is over here expecting Bruce Wayne to be a good father.

Owners of a children's hospital? Eh. Different story.

“I do hope—” Jason begins, his voice slow, deliberate, eyes sweeping over the woman with that calm, measured weight that makes it impossible to ignore him, because he knows exactly how much sway she has over her husband and just how much she’s enjoying every second of it, “that we have come to some sort of agreement.”

She leans in, lips curling like she’s somehow still savoring some private victory, and you glance sideways at the poor headmaster, whose shoulders slump, a sigh escaping that feels remarkably like Alfred’s when he’s about to threaten to resign for the thousandth time that week, the kind of exasperated patience that is entirely over matched by the spectacle in front of him.

“I do hope, Mr. Wayne, that your family will continue to show their everlasting generosity in providing my boys—”

“Oh, fuck off,” you think, letting the words press against the inside of your skull with all the force of a hammer you never meant to swing aloud, feeling your scowl deepen before you even realize it.

And then you notice: everyone’s eyes are on you, the room frozen for the briefest heartbeat in stunned disbelief, as if the universe has paused to consider the audacity of your interruption.

Oh.

Oh.

You said it with a scowl.

Your face immediately flushes, heat blooming across your cheeks like sunlight spilling over frost. You instinctively dart your gaze toward Damian, because you’ve always made it a personal rule to never, under any circumstances, let a curse pass your lips in front of the little boy—because he is, undeniably, still just a little boy, a truth that has been pounding at the edges of your mind all day, louder than any reprimand or reminder.

And there he is, sitting there in the child-sized chair with his shoulders stiff and his hands pressed together in what was almost habit. Yet despite everything, despite the chaos of furious parents, scowling adults, and ruined sketches strewn across the headmaster’s desk, Damian is smiling.

Not smirking, not grinning with that sly, calculating edge you’ve seen too often in him before.

Just smiling. Purely, vulnerably, with a kind of wide-eyed sincerity that makes your heart lurch, so wide in fact that you can see one of his tiny, wiggly baby teeth, jutting out as if daring the world to be mad at him.

You don't even realize that Jason has de-escalated the situation, mumbling that ‘my wife is a little protective you see’ because you're so absorbed in the little boy next to you.

When the three of you are walking side by side in the Gotham streets later the time is around 6:00pm. There was still paper work that needed to be signed and acknowledgments you would adequately discipline the boys at home. Jason forged Bruce’s signature easily.

You finally hear the full story of the fight: the boys at the edge of the rock climbing wall, tumbling down, and the sketchbook—the precious, mud-and-juice-soaked sketchbook—caught in the middle of it all. The boys are grounded from the playground for a week. You suppose that’s fair. Damian, however, is still embarrassed, still clutching his bag with the same iron grip he uses on a sword, but his body carries a stiffness that is almost unfamiliar, the kind that speaks of shame and self-awareness rather than strength.

“So…” Jason draws out, his voice lazy and teasing, making the three of you halt in the middle of the street, the moon casting a silver glow over his dark hair, the wet pavement reflecting the city lights, the night air just cool enough to make every breath feel like a gift. 

You and Damian blink at him in unison, small, delicate movements like fireflies caught in glass, and the warmth that spreads through Jason’s chest is quiet but steady, because he was right: no matter what, they still have this—this end-of-day calm, this survival, this fragile little victory—and it is enough.

And he was right: Damian is a child. And a child isn't something to stress over when they act like one.

Jason kneels before Damian with deliberate patience, legs wide, elbows resting on knees, making himself eye level with the boy so that the gravity of the moment is shared equally. "Time for your first punishment baby-'B'."

Damian's breath actually catches, his brows furrowing as he looks down at the pavement. “...Fine.”

Because he's too embarrassed at acting like a child to think he doesn't deserve it.

You watch as Jason’s smile spreads, warm and easy, the corners of his eyes crinkling into perfect little crescent moons as he flicks Damian lightly on the forehead, “Hot chocolate, little man. I’m going to make your first hot chocolate—not be made by our lovely girl over here.”

He gestures casually toward the little café at the end of the block, the same one where you had your first date, a small family-run shop that somehow manages to sell Christmas treats far too early every year, the kind of place that smells like cinnamon and sugar and home, even in the middle of Gotham.

Because the last thing either of you would do now is punish him.

Because while it might be fitting, maybe even just, to reprimand any other child in the world in a effort to teach what they don't know, Damian is not any other child. Damian knows what he did and he's more embarrassed then he could possibly explain.

But, under the two of you, he would never be punished for being ten, for being stubborn, for being messy, for being alive in the small, chaotic ways that he thinks the word wont allow of him. 

“…Can I…” Damian’s voice is small, hesitant, almost swallowed by the evening air as he tilts his head up to you, eyes wide and unsure, before finally mumbling, “Can I have the stuff Jason had on his?”

You blink down at him, caught off guard that he even remembered—the whipped cream and marshmallows you’d piled on Jason’s mug just a week ago, a detail so small it could have been forgotten in a blink.

“The… whipped cream?” you murmur softly, words catching on the edge of your tongue, “Or the marshmallows?”

Damian’s gaze slides away, careful and deliberate, and then he lets his voice drift back toward you, quieter, yet with the tiniest spark of hope, “…Can I have...both?”

You can’t help the smile that spreads slowly, deliberately across your face, warmth curling from your chest to your lips, and Jason—watching, always watching—thinks he has never seen anything so small and perfect and utterly beautiful in all his life.

“Of course. Of course, anything you want,” you reply, voice soft, gentle, unshakable, because you are not his parents. Because for once, he is allowed to be greedy, allowed to take, allowed to be ten and loud and small and bright all at once, and no one in the world is going to scold him for it.

“What about me?” Jason pouts, springing to his feet with the effortless ease that makes you simultaneously want to sigh and laugh, looping an arm around your waist while letting his other hand settle protectively, almost ceremoniously, on Damian’s head.

You squeal, swatting his hand away before curling Damian’s tiny one into yours, letting the warmth of your gloves seep into his fingers. “Absolutely not! You had one this morning!”

“That was over twelve hours ago!” Jason counters, a laugh bubbling from his chest, a grin tugging at the corners of his mouth as he leans a little closer, “And I did a lot of negotiating, so I think I deserve it!”

“You won’t sleep at night, Jason,” you sigh, shaking your head with a fond, teasing smile as the three of you start moving toward the cafe, the wet Gotham pavement reflecting the golden street lamps like liquid honey. Your heart feels full of that honey. Jason's smile does too.

“Like I sleep at night when I’m with you anyway,” Jason fires back, smirking, and Damian lets out a very theatrical, very fake gag that sends your chest lifting with a soft, breathy chuckle.

You huff again over your shoulder, your fingers tightening slightly around Damian’s hand, warmth curling through you as you glance down at him. Yeah. You’re going to buy Jason one too, because you cant deny the love of your life anything.

Then, because it’s you and life is cruelly generous in ways only Bruce Wayne can engineer, you’re going to text Bruce a joke about needing a Venmo for babysitting two of his sons when he asks how the meeting went.

And, of course, Bruce Wayne sends back five hundred dollars with a text that reads, succinctly, “I talked to the cafe owners—just give them my name any time you want to go.”

Jason, of course, abuses this new privilege without hesitation, sneaking extra marshmallows every single time now.

You would have argued back against your boyfriends father if the image of Damian trying whipped cream for the first time—him swaying back and forth in his seat like a boy his age, doing it subconsciously too–wasn't already engraved to your heart.

Jason put whipped creme on your nose and licked it off when Damian wasn't looking. Just like he did on your first date.

please please please let me know what you think it gives me so much motivation to write and you will be getting a new work sooner if you do ; (◞‸◟)

"glitter pens and hot chocolate." master list !

tag-list [ reply to the master list to be added ദ്ദി˶ｰ̀֊ｰ́ ) ] ᯓ★ @marenyearlylover444, @psysgr, @sourstrawburry, @bloomfaery, @prettysweet02, @r-4-y-v-3-n, @backtonormalthings, @milam03, @animegamerfox, @tamyyyy2005, @arachniis, @k-pevensie28, @thetruecardinalsinner, @dreammarereads, @lllucere, @vieenr0se, @deadbeatphobos, @k-pevensie28, @nyxisnotok,@lemmonpiie,@yo-soy-yo, @starfiremylove, @whosmev, @avlizio, @indigoscribe, @yo-soy-yo, @appalost, @c4xcocoa, @mystic-is-here-to-love, @its-me-mila, @nightlights-and-twiklingstars, @smiithys, @oh-buttercup, @jcks29, @naessheart, @bungunz, @atomicpeachmaker, @lulasgna, @givemefinganame, @dap11, @screamingsilence3, @woderfulkawaii, @radicalcannoliqueen, @itachisrealm, @missmillivanilli, @fluffalorianflash, @koibleufish, @liuope, @athenalive, @idiotussupremus, @foquest, @justamarsbar, @lordbugs, @rosehoneycomb, @bibiznbyler, @andraax2, @lemmonpiie,

One might call them demons, although they are not Demon Kings like you or members of the demon species. They desire the story as much as dokkaebi would yet despise the dokkaebi just as much. If someone got expelled from the scenario as you did, the only hope you have of surviving in this wasteland is their mercy.

That is what you hope to achieve, or at least trade one fable for another to get into an area adjacent to the scenario form because you had no intention of letting the egg fall into a Wenny Man’s grimy hands no matter how much it begs. Why? Because beings born from the egg in your pocket can create a ‘channel’, allowing you to have your own Star Stream outside of the jurisdiction of the Bureau. The ability to create countless stories without inference from the Bureau or the Constellations.

You really thought it was a brilliant, meticulous plan, but there were two variables you hadn’t counted on happening.

First, when you tried to turn off the Fourth Wall.

You thought the bastard was being annoying as hell and way too expressive for your own liking in the current situation. When it asked if you wanted to quiet the skill’s effects, you told it to do so without even thinking about the consequences. Within seconds of the Fourth Wall being gone, you felt hands coiling around your neck, their grip tightening slowly and painfully. That was when you realized why the Fourth Wall was so chatty.

It kept talking to you to keep you alive by telling you a story, because beings in a story cannot exist without being part of one. Expelled from the story to a place where TWSA is non-existent, is the same as a death penalty. The Fourth Wall immediately turned itself back on, calling you a reckless idiot and telling you it couldn’t keep you alive for too long because of an oncoming Plausibility Storm and its Scenario Cleaners.

You were running out of time, and fast. You had to hurry. The Demons of the Horizon were coming. You couldn’t miss this chance, or you would fade from existence, and you would never see your companions again -

Another screen popped up in front of you. What alarmed you immediately was that it was pink and golden, with black cursive lettering. This wasn’t part of TWSA or the Star Stream. Was it something else entirely? A trap? The context sure looked fishy.

[Greetings, Demon King of Salvation. Your criteria and extensive knowledge led to your selection to complete an incomplete Story. The Creator wishes to salvage this world but needs help to preserve its existence. Your acceptance of this scenario will allow you to return to the Scenario after completing the Story.]

You frowned. “How I can trust you?”

Fourth Wall Activated: [First Name] thought, How is this even possible? Can another Star Stream hack into the main one? No, if that ever happened, the Scenario Cleaners would eradicate an unknown anomaly or, at best, the Bureau would receive immediate notification. The Bureau would not risk angering the Constellations if the Star Stream’s compromise were discovered.

Another screen popped up. It was a contract, formatted with clauses and conditions similar to how you made Pildu come work for you in exchange that you would take care of him, per his Constellation’s request. In this contract, the anomaly says it will provide you with a system to help you navigate through the Story by completing scenarios and the usage of the Fourth Wall to look at Character Profiles. The primary aim is for the Story to be finished, with a happy ending that the Readers would love and be ‘something different from the generic ones'.

To put it simply, a beautiful wedding with the Story’s female and male leads surrounded by loved ones is out of the question.

Your brow twitched. So much for the easy way out. You glanced up ahead at the oncoming Plausibility storm, uncertainty bubbling in the pit of your stomach in sync with the egg’s heartbeat. You had to return to your companions, to that damned sunfish protagonist, and see that TWSA gets an ending. But is it worth risking your existence to go into another one, a world that’s completely unknown with a Star Stream that seems to know you?

Fourth Wall Activated: [First Name] didn’t have the luxury of time on her side. Accepting meant she would be trapped in another novel, never seeing her companions again; refusing meant the Demons of the Horizon might not be as magnanimous as she, as a Reader, believed. The risks and rewards were there, right in front of her and she was hesitating. De cide you mo ron.

“Shut up.” You hissed.

You looked through the contract again, and after a moment, you made your choice. You weren’t sure how it would work out…but you were going to take a gamble. You inhaled a deep breath, staring at the screen in front of you.

“Where do I sign?”

A feathered quill materialized out of nowhere, levitating in the air. You took it and signed your name on the dotted line. Upon doing so, the screen vanished, and another one popped up.

[Please stand back.]

You took five steps, and as soon as you did so, a black digitized tear in the world outside of TWSA appeared.

[Step through the portal. You have two minutes.]

Your knuckles were probably white from tightly clutching onto Unbroken Faith’s scabbard, but it was better than accidentally damaging the egg. You ran a hand over its warm shell, trying to reassure it that everything will be all right before you steeled your own resolve. Then, without a second thought, you sped towards the portal, leaving the world as you knew behind to fix another one.

[You have existed The Ways Of Survival and entered the World-Line.

Destination: The Chronicles Of An Imperial Princess.

Objective: Refer to the Contract.

Failure: Death.

Good luck, Demon King of Salvation.]

Your heart plummeted into the pit of your stomach at the title on the screen. Oh, you have got to be fucking kidding me. Of all the novels I’ve read when TWSA was on a hiatus, it’s this half-assed romance one?! Goddammit!

He watched you like a hawk; maybe that should be his name instead. An overbearing stare on your back that made your head tingle. His expression did not betray his thoughts; his stoic face was like a wall.

He followed you back to the lockers, perched up on the one opposite yours. His dark scrubs are covered with a thick jacket that falls quite nicely over his shoulders.

“Come home with me.” He said, indifferent. You froze, hand hovering over your bag. Your eyes briefly turned to his; he looked as he always did. A bleak look, straight brows, impassive eyes. His mouth was turned inwards like he was disappointed; you’ve learned over the past few months that’s just what he looks like.

“What?”

“You heard me. Sleep in my spare bedroom. I know you live far out of the city and that you take the bus.”

Has he been watching you? How would he know that without watching you? Oh god, your surgeon is stalking you. Maybe it’s true what they say: this job never escapes you.

“Dr. Park, that’s highly—” you start, concern written all over your face,

“I don’t care. I don’t need you getting lost somewhere this late.”

He doesn’t let you finish, slipping off the locker with ease. He doesn’t even turn to look if you're following; he knows.

Silence takes over the interior of his car. It’s a nice vehicle, the nicest you’ve ever been in. It seems new too; it still has the fresh smell. His grip is tight over the steering wheel, fingers creasing into the hard leather. The drive to his place is short, a couple turns and stops from the hospital. If you were to take the bus home, you would get there within an hour and a half, so this was new. He pulls the car up to a tall building, glass windows lining the wall. The apartments parking garage is filled to the brim with pricey cars: Mercedes-Benz, Land Rovers, and BMWs. The only car you’ve owned was older than you. It sits broken in a storage container somewhere, listed for a couple hundred bucks on Facebook.

Public transport has become your saving grace; it's easier to ignore any grimy walls or cracked windows than to take out a loan for something that properly won’t even drive. You considered buying a bicycle or one of those electric scooters, but enough patients come into the ER with collision-related injuries for it to put you off the decision.

You're caught off guard when Dr. Park reaches over and unbuckles your belt; the strap swings over your arm, knocking you out of the daze. His fingers had brushed right over your thigh; it made your heart skip a beat.

He hasn’t said anything since leaving the Pitt; you are too afraid to start any conversations with him. It’s different now; you’re not at work, and he’s not the one that has to keep bossing you around, so why do you still feel so out of control?

Dr. Park is scary. A forceful presence that moves through surgical theaters and emergency rooms with an unaltered ease. People lower their heads when he passes, too scared to look him in the eye. He attracts a respectable audience; everyone knows who he is and what he can do. But you notice something the moment he unlocks and opens his front door.

It’s like a blanket of snow falling to the ground. He sighs deeply after throwing his keys into a lone dish bowl on the kitchen counter.

“There’s food in the fridge. Eat something. I’m going to have a shower.” He confirms, voice like a commanding officer. “The room is down the hallway; make yourself at home.”

He doesn’t let you respond like always, but he does turn to look at you. His head tilts, not like he’s confused, more like he's asking a question he already knows the answer to. You want to protest; you don’t want to eat his food despite how hungry you are. You don’t want to make yourself at home; this is his home, and yours is much smaller and much more familiar.

Dr. Park shucks his jacket off and slips it over a hook where others sit. The dark grey North Face windbreaker sticks out to you, and so does the matching puffer vest. You can’t wait until the day you’re able to spend so much money on such simple things.

His fridge is taller than you, with shelves lined with fresh fruit and expensive meats wrapped in paper. There’s a stack of glass containers, each containing a portion of prepped food. You take one out and lift the lid. Inside is an array of proteins, chicken and beef, alongside some roasted root vegetables. It makes you snicker under your breath, of course. Of course this is what he eats. Probably pairs it with a post-workout smoothie or something.

Even the microwave is fancy, stainless steel, and sleek.

The meal is good—of course he can cook too—but you're too tired to think much about it. Dr. Park comes back out once you're done, his hair slightly damp and messy. There’s a faint blush on his cheeks, the heat of the water warming his blood. You hum to yourself, cute.

He pauses in front of you behind the counter, brow twitching. You choke. That wasn’t said aloud, right? His face quirks, not quite a smile, but still an amused look. Oh god.

“Taste alright?” He asks, and you bite down on your tongue. What?

He notices your silence and chooses to ease your panic. “The food.”

“Oh, yes. Thank you.”

He nods, looking at you in a way you can’t possibly explain. He always seems to be doing that, enough to the point where others have taken notice. Princess, one of the day shift nurses especially. She was an observer. Or noisy, one would say. A couple of weeks ago was when she noticed your predicament with Dr. Park.

“Are you sleeping with him?” She questioned, leaning over the computer you were typing on. Scandalised, you denied it with warm cheeks. Princess laughed, a belly laugh that caught the attention of others around. You were not sleeping with him; that was crazy. He’s your superior; it’s not even legal. Well, maybe it’s not technically illegal, but it’s still wrong.

But the truth of it was clear to anyone with eyes. You liked him; he was good-looking and very smart. Your mother would be proud, a rich man with focused hands. You never quite figured out how he felt about you, though. It didn’t matter; it was just a simple crush on your side, proximity gained. Though the way he talked to people warmed parts of you much lower.

The spare bedroom was as big as your living room and kitchen combined. The bed was neat, with the sheets and duvet tucked tight into the mattress. On the opposite side there was a chest of drawers, dark oak and heavy like the tree it came from. You can’t sleep. You should be sleeping; it’s late, but you don’t even feel tired. Your mind is racing with memories of the week and events of the past evening. You're in his house. Sleeping in his spare bedroom like it’s normal. It’s not normal, not in the slightest. But why does it feel so normal? Like maybe, one day, it could be? You roll over, the layers moving with you as a car honks in the distance.

The parking garage is nearly empty. The late night shadows and overhead fluorescents are doing their usual thing- that sickly amber wash that makes everything look darker and more jaundiced, turns concrete pillars and painted lines into something out of a liminal space photograph. Your shift ended nine minutes ago. You've been sitting in this car for three of those minutes and you're no closer to leaving than you were when you got in.

You try the ignition a third time because you are a person who went to medical school, which means you are clinically incapable of accepting a result without attempting to replicate it, and the result is the same.

Silence.

The dashboard stays dark. The engine stays dead. Your car, the one last reliable thing you have left in your life has chosen today- today- of all days, to stop working.

Something behind your sternum cracks, a seam letting go, a thread that's been holding two pieces of fabric together finally giving up under the accumulated weight of seventeen hours of Park's voice in your ear, Park's corrections on your chart, Park's particular way of standing just inside your peripheral vision so that you could never fully forget he's watching. The sound he makes when you do something wrong, a small exhalation through his nose that somehow communicates more disappointment than a full sentence. The way clicks his tongue when you fumbled the angle of the retractors, not loud enough for the scrub nurse to hear, pitched just for you, intimate in its cruelty.

You get out of the car.

The concrete is gritty under your sneakers. The garage has that particular underground acoustics thing where every sound arrives twice, once directly and once as an echo off the low ceiling, so the slam of your door comes back to you a half second later, duller, like the garage is mocking you. You walk to the front of the car. You pull the hood release. You prop the hood up with the little metal arm and you stare at the engine.

You have no idea what you’re looking at.

You know this. You are aware, in a detached and increasingly unhinged way, that you possess exactly zero mechanical knowledge, that the greasy labyrinth of hoses and reservoirs and metal components in front of you might as well be quantum mechanics for all the good looking at it is going to do. But you’re looking anyway, because the alternative is standing in an empty parking garage at eleven pm and crying, and you are not going to cry. You are not. You’ve made it through seventeen hours without crying and you are not going to let a dead battery or a seized alternator or whatever the fuck is wrong be the thing that-

Your eyes are wet.

You blink. Hard. Twice. You sniff, once, sharp, and press the back of your wrist against your nose and stare at the engine and try to convince yourself that you are absolutely, categorically not falling apart in a parking garage. The fluorescent light catches the moisture on your lashes and turns it amber. A tear escapes down the side of your nose and you swipe it away with your knuckle so hard the skin stings.

Headlights bloom across the concrete behind you.

The light stretches your shadow forward, elongates it across the front of your car, and for a second you’re just annoyed; someone pulling through on their way out, someone who got to have a normal end to their shift and get in their functioning car and leave. The engine behind you is idling, smooth and low, and it doesn’t pass. It slows. It stops.

A door opens.

You don’t turn around because some self preserving corner of your brain already knows. Before the footsteps, before the particular rhythm of that walk-  unhurried, deliberate, the gait of a man who has never once rushed to be anywhere because everywhere he goes adjusts to accommodate his arrival-  you know who it is.

You know the way you know a headache is about to become a migraine. The way you know a patient is about to code before the monitors catch up. A full body premonition, cellular and certain.

Park’s footsteps stop somewhere behind your left shoulder.

You keep staring at the engine. Your vision has gone blurry, half tears, half exhaustion, half the flat refusal of your eyes to focus on anything that isn’t a pillow. You can feel him behind, the shift in pressure and temperature that changes the quality of the air against the back of your neck.

He doesn’t say anything for five seconds. You count them.

Then he leans past you.

His arm enters your field of vision from the left and he reaches into the engine compartment with the casualness of a man who reaches into open body cavities for a living and finds a car engine charmingly simple by comparison. His shoulder is close enough to yours that you can feel the warmth radiating off him through his clothes. 

You catch it then, his cologne, or whatever it is, something clean and warm and slightly woody that cuts through the garage smell of concrete and motor oil and settles into the space between your throat and your chest with an specificity that makes you want to bite down on something.

He smells good. Offensively, inappropriately good. And you hate him for it with a purity that borders on religious, that causes you to jerk back, take several steps away with your arms crossed over your chest and your teeth clenched so tight your jaw is clicking. 

He doesn’t let you get very far before. “Come here.”

He says it without looking up from the engine compartment, one hand braced on the frame, the other buried somewhere in the tangle of hoses and cables, and he says come here like he’s calling a dog that pissed on the carpet. 

You don’t move.

“I said come here. I’m not going to say it again.”

You move and he grabs your wrist, fingers closing around delicate bones, and pulls you forward until you’re standing beside him with your hip against the bumper and your face approximately eighteen inches from an engine block you couldn’t identify at gunpoint.

“Look.” He positions your hand over a cable terminal crusted with greenish white buildup. Presses your fingers down onto the corroded metal and holds them there. “Feel that?”

You feel it. Gritty. Calcified. Wrong.

“That’s neglect.” He says it close to your ear. Not whispering. Just close. “Months of it.”

He lets that sit for a second. His thumb shifts against the inside of your wrist, a small, almost idle adjustment that drags across your pulse point and there’s absolutely no way he doesn’t feel how fast it’s going.

“When did you buy this car?”

“Two years ago.”

“Two years.” He drops your wrist like he lost interest in holding it, and straightens up. Pulls a cloth from somewhere- his back pocket, his jacket, the fucking ether- and wipes his hands with slow, methodical attention, finger by finger, knuckle by knuckle, while you stand there with engine grease on your palm and the residual ghost pressure of his grip still pulsing around your wrist bones. “And you’ve never once popped the hood. Not once. You’re telling me you’ll spend six hours memorizing the branches of the brachial plexus but you can’t spend five minutes making sure the thing that keeps you alive on the highway actually works.”

He’s not looking at you. He’s looking at his own hands as he cleans them, like they’re the only thing worth his tim,  has all the time in the world and you are not a factor in how he spends it.

“I mean, it’s almost impressive.” He glances at you. Just a flick of his eyes, there and gone. “The commitment to not giving a shit. You’re consistent, I’ll give you that.”

“That’s not- ”

“Your positive cable’s loose. Terminals are shot.” He’s still cleaning his hands. Still not looking at you. “The whole system’s been dying for weeks and you just- what? Turned the key every morning and assumed it would keep working because it always had?” He folds the cloth. Tucks it in his pocket. “That’s not optimism. That’s not even denial. That’s just being stupid about the things you depend on.”

The word stupid lands different coming from him. Not like an insult. A fact. Like a lab value being read off the chart, something they can’t be interpreted in any other way, just is, and always will be. 

“You’re smart in the OR. I’ve seen it.” He says flatly, without investment, a concession that costs him nothing. “You’ve got good hands when they’re not shaking. Good instincts when you’re not choking on them. But then you do this- ” He nods at the engine. “And I have to wonder if the OR version of you is the anomaly and this is the baseline.”

He lets that hang.

“Get in the car.”

“What?”

“My car.” He says, an instruction, not an offer, delivered with the expectation of immediate compliance.

“I can call a- “

“It’s eleven at night, you’re not calling a tow from a parking garage, and you’re not sleeping in your car. Get in.”

“But-”

He’s already walking away. He doesn’t wait, doesn’t look back. Just walks to his car- a dark Lexus that looks like it costs more than your annual salary- and gets into the driver’s side and sits there with the engine running and the passenger door unlocked and the absolute unshakeable certainty that you will follow. 

You follow. 

The inside of his car smells like him. That’s the first thing you register as you pull the door shut, the contained, ambient version of whatever you caught leaning over the engine, multiplied and warmed by the closed space. 

You put on your seatbelt. You stare straight ahead. You give him your address in a voice that comes out smaller than you intended and you feel him register that, feel the quality of his silence change as he files it away. 

He pulls out of the garage. 

He doesn’t speak.

You wait for it- braced- shoulders locked, breath held, every nerve ending oriented toward him. You’ve spent enough time in his proximity to know how he operates: silence first, then the observation, then the correction, delivered with the flat, unhurried precision of a man who learned a long time ago that volume is unnecessary when accuracy will do. You know it’s coming. You sit in the passenger seat with your hands in your lap and your spine so straight your lower back is already aching and you wait.

A minute passes.

Two.

The streetlights strobe across the windshield in rhythmic amber intervals. The road noise fills the car, a low, constant hiss of tires on asphalt, the faint vibration of the chassis transmitting through the seat into your femurs, your pelvis, the base of your spine. The heater is on. You can feel it against your shins, a warm current that smells like clean filters and leather conditioner.

Three minutes.

He’s not going to say anything.

The realization doesn’t bring relief. It brings something worse, a vacuum. The silence that Park deploys in the OR when a resident has made an error significant enough that commentary would be redundant. The silence that says I’m not going to dignify this with a response. The silence that forces you to sit inside your own failure without the scaffolding of his criticism to push against, without even the dignity of being yelled at, because yelling would mean he cared enough to raise his voice and Park does not care enough to raise his voice. Park has never cared enough to raise his voice. He saves his volume for the things that matter and you, apparently, do not meet the threshold.

Your throat is doing something. Tightening. The muscles along the anterior triangle contracting in a slow, involuntary squeeze that you recognize as the precursor to crying and you clench your jaw against it so hard you feel your masseter pop. You are not going to cry in this car. You are not going to give him the satisfaction of watching you cry in his car with his cologne in your lungs and his silence pressing against you from every direction like something with weight.

You stare at the dashboard. The blue numbers of the clock. The GPS display showing your route- a clean, illuminated line from the hospital to your house, nineteen minutes, no traffic, as though the journey is simple, as though the distance between where you are and where you’re going can be measured in miles.

“The tibial plateau.”

His voice enters the silence without disturbing it. No change in his posture, no preliminary breath. Just the words, arriving with the same flat, unremarkable cadence he uses to call out hardware sizes mid-procedure.

“You hesitated.”

That’s it. That’s all he says. He doesn’t elaborate. He doesn’t explain which moment, which hesitation, which specific fraction of a second he’s referring to. He doesn’t need to. You know. He knows you know. The sentence is a key inserted into a lock you’ve been trying not to look at all day, and it turns with a click you can feel in your back teeth.

The silence returns.

It’s worse now. It has a shape. The two words gave it a frame and now the quiet is no longer empty, it’s full- full of every specific thing he could have said and chose not to, every elaboration he’s withholding, every detail of your performance that he catalogued and filed and is currently letting you imagine instead of stating outright. Your brain fills the silence the way fluid fills an enclosed space, expanding into every available cavity until the pressure builds against the walls.

You think about the tibial plateau. You think about the oscillating saw in your hand and the way your fingers tightened on the grip a half second before you made the cut and that half second is what he’s talking about. That imperceptible pause. That flicker of uncertainty between intention and execution. Anyone else would have missed it. The scrub nurse didn’t see it. The anesthesiologist didn’t see it. But Park was standing across the table with his hands resting on the sterile drape and his eyes on your hands and he saw it, he felt the hesitation, stored it, and now he’s taken it out of storage and placed it between you in the car like an exhibit.

Your eyes are burning.

“And the hardware count.”

Four more words. Still no elaboration. 

Flat, observational, a statement of fact that requires no emotional emphasis because the gravity is inherent. He keeps his eyes on the road.

You know what he’s referring to. The post-op notes. Six screws documented instead of eight. A discrepancy in the record that could follow the patient to every subsequent surgery, every future scan. He caught it. He corrected it. He didn’t report it.

He’s telling you now, in this car, in the dark, with nineteen minutes of road between you and your house, and the telling is worse than a formal write up because a formal write up would have structure. A formal write up would have a process: documentation, a meeting, a remediation plan, something to do with the failure. This has nothing. This is Park dropping two facts into the silence and letting you drown in the space around them.

Your left hand is trembling. You flatten it against your thigh and hold it there, pressing the tremor into the muscle, willing the vibration to disperse through the fascia and the quadricep and the femur beneath it. Your dominant hand. Your operating hand. The one that held the saw. The one that miscounted the screws. The one that’s been shaking on and off since hour six of a seventeen hour day and you’ve been hiding it by keeping it busy, keeping it occupied with tasks and tools and the physical business of the job so that nobody- so that he- wouldn’t see.

“You should have asked for a break during the reconstruction.”

You close your eyes.

“Your hand was fatiguing by hour four. You compensated by overtightening your grip on the retractor, which changed the angle.” A pause. “You knew the tremor was developing and you chose to hide it rather than ask for relief because you were more concerned with how it would look than with how it would affect the surgical field.”

That’s the most he’s said at once. Three sentences. They land in your chest like hardware being placed in sequence- tap, tap, tap-  each one seated precisely, each one load bearing, the cumulative construct designed to hold a specific weight.

Silence again.

The thing that’s happening in your chest is not something you can name with language. It’s too large and too formless and it keeps changing shape, contracting into something hot and dense behind your sternum and then expanding outward into your ribs, your clavicles, the soft tissue of your throat where the tightness has progressed from uncomfortable to actively painful. You swallow against it. Your throat clicks. The sound is audible in the quiet car and you hate it, hate the way your body keeps betraying you in small acoustic ways, producing evidence of its own distress for him to collect.

You think: say something back.

You think: defend yourself.

You think: tell him he’s wrong, tell him the hesitation was clinical judgment not fear, tell him the hardware count was a transcription error not negligence, tell him the tremor was fatigue not incompetence, tell him he doesn’t get to sit there in his seventy-two-thousand-dollar car smelling like that and sounding like that and dismantling you with seven sentences spread across ten minutes of silence-

You don’t say any of it.

You don’t say any of it because your throat is closed and your eyes are wet and your hands are shaking and everything he said is true. Not approximately true. Not partially true. Not true-with-caveats-you-could-argue-if-you-had-the-energy. True. Completely, specifically, documentably true, and the fact of its truth is sitting on your chest like a sternum retractor, cranking you open one inch at a time.

A tear escapes. It tracks down the side of your nose and catches at the corner of your mouth and you taste salt and you don’t wipe it away because wiping it away would require moving your hand and moving your hand would require admitting that you’re crying and you are not admitting that you’re crying. You are sitting in this car looking straight ahead and the moisture on your face is condensation, it’s a physiological response to dry air, it’s anything other than what it is.

Park doesn’t look at you.

He knows. You know he knows. The quality of his silence has shifted again- it’s softer now, or not softer, that’s not the right word, it’s attentive. The silence of a man who is aware that something is happening beside him and has decided to let it happen. To let you sit in it. To not offer a tissue or a word or even the small mercy of turning up the radio. He just drives, steady and unhurried, and the road unspools, and you cry without sound in the passenger seat of his car while he navigates the route to your house.

You wait for the rest. The elaboration. The lecture.

It doesn’t come. Instead, after a long moment, he says something worse.

“You know what’s funny?”

You don’t answer.

“You’re actually not bad.”

The sentence lands wrong. It lands wrong because it sounds, for one disorienting half second, like a compliment, and your starved, exhausted brain almost reaches for it before the rest of him catches up- the tone, the timing, the particular way he says not bad. A minimum. A floor. The lowest possible bar of acceptability, offered with the cadence of praise so your body responds to it like praise while your brain is still trying to decode that it isn’t.

“You’ve got a feel for the work. I’ve seen you read a fracture pattern faster than most of my third years. Your spatial reasoning’s above average. Your hands- ” He pauses. You feel the pause in your sternum. “When your hands are right, they’re right.”

He’s building something. You can feel it assembling in real time, each sentence another load bearing element, and you don’t know what the structure is yet but you know it has a weight it hasn’t distributed.

“That’s what makes it hard to watch, actually.”

There it is.

“Watching someone who could be good just… ” He makes a sound. Not a sigh. Something smaller. Something almost like amusement, which is so much worse than disappointment that your vision blurs. “It’s like watching someone with perfect pitch sing off key on purpose. You want to fix it. But you can’t want it more than they do.”

He turns onto your street.

“And I’m starting to think you don’t want it at all. I think you want to want it. I think you like the idea of being good. But when it actually costs you something, when it means admitting the tremor, asking for the break, counting the fucking screws, you’d rather protect your ego than protect your patient. And that’s- ”

He pulls into your driveway.

The engine idles. The blue dashboard light hums. Your house is dark. The porch light is off because you forgot to set the timer this morning, because this morning happened to a different person in a different version of your life.

“That’s not a skill problem. I can fix a skill problem.” He’s looking straight ahead. Blue lit profile. One hand on the wheel. “That’s a you problem. And I can’t fix you.”

I can’t fix you.

Four words that shouldn’t feel like anything. Four words that are, technically, a statement of professional boundaries, an acknowledgment that his role has limits, that your development is ultimately your own responsibility. That’s what they are on paper. That is not what they are in this car at eleven pm with salt drying on your face and his cologne in your lungs.

I can’t fix you means you’re broken. It means I looked, and what I found isn’t worth the effort. It means he assessed you the way he did with the engine and the prognosis is: not salvageable. Not worth the parts.

You should get out. You should open the door and walk inside and lock it behind you and shower and sleep and come back tomorrow and be better, be sharper, be the version of yourself that doesn’t hesitate on the approach and doesn’t miscount hardware and doesn’t sit in a man’s car at eleven pm leaking tears onto her own scrub top.

Your hand is on the seatbelt release.

“The hesitation,” Park says.

You stop.

He’s looking straight ahead. His profile is blue lit, jaw set, one hand resting on the steering wheel at twelve o’clock. His index finger taps the leather once, a single, idle percussion that might mean nothing and might mean everything.

“It’s going to get someone killed.”

Six words. Delivered without emphasis, without cruelty, without any of the sharp edges that have characterized everything else he’s said today. That’s what makes them worse. The previous comments were barbed, they were designed to cut and they cut and the cutting was something you could be angry about, something you could push against, something that gave the pain a direction.

This is different. Neutral. Factual. Almost gentle in its certainty.

It’s going to get someone killed.

Not it might. Not it could. Going to. Future tense. Inevitable. A definitive, not a warning.

You sit there with your hand on the seatbelt and the salt drying on your upper lip and you feel the sentence settle into the shape of your self concept like a fracture propagating, a slow, branching failure that spreads outward from the point of impact into every adjacent structure until the whole system is compromised.

He doesn’t say anything else.

He just sits there. Engine idling. Blue light. One hand on the wheel. And the silence after the sentence is the worst silence of the night because there’s nothing left to wait for. He’s said the thing. The final thing. The thing that all the other things were building toward- the corroded terminals, the loose cable, the tremor, the miscount- all of it was scaffolding for this, the load bearing statement at the center of the construct, and now that it’s in place the scaffolding falls away and you’re left sitting in the bare, terrible clarity of what he actually thinks.

He thinks you’re going to kill someone.

He thinks it with the same certainty that he had when he looked at your engine and found the problem in four seconds. He looked at you the same way. He looked at your hands the same way. He’s been looking at you for months, confirming what he already suspected, and tonight- the car, the drive, the prognosis- tonight was the consultation where he tells you the findings.

Your seatbelt is still buckled. Your hand is still on the release. Your body is doing something that doesn’t align with the plan your brain is trying to execute, which is: unbuckle, open door, leave. Simple. 

Three steps. Motor planning so basic a first year anatomy student could diagram the neural pathway. But the signal is getting lost somewhere between your prefrontal cortex and your extremities, scrambled by the interference of everything else your body is processing- the smell of his cologne in the warm car, the blue light on his hands, the tear track tightening on your cheek, the ache in your trapezius, the tremor in your dominant hand, the sound of his breathing.

His breathing.

You’re listening to him breathe. You’ve been listening to him breathe for the entire drive, you realize, a low, even rhythm that hasn’t changed once, that maintained the same rate and depth through every cruel observation and every silence and every tear you failed to hide. His respiratory rate is probably twelve. Maybe fourteen. Resting. Resting. He’s been resting this entire time. His nervous system has been in parasympathetic mode for the entirety of this drive, calm and regulated, while yours has been in full sympathetic cascade- tachycardic, diaphoretic, pupils dilated, hands trembling- and the asymmetry of it, the sheer physiological unfairness of it, lights something in the back of your skull that isn’t sadness and isn’t defeat.

It’s rage.

Not the sharp, vocal, defensible kind. Not the kind that generates arguments and rebuttals and righteous indignation.

Something lower. Something that lives in the body, not the mind. Something that has nothing to do with what he said and everything to do with the way he’s sitting there, breathing his twelve fucking breaths a minute, resting his hand on his thigh, occupying his leather seat with the boneless ease of a man who has never once lost sleep over the things he’s said to someone while you sit fourteen inches away vibrating at a frequency that might actually be damaging your soft tissue.

You want to hit him.

The thought arrives without preamble. You want to hit him in his calm, blue lit face. You want to put your fist into the hinge of his jaw and feel the impact travel back up your metacarpals and into your wrist and you want him to feel something, anything, any disruption at all in the flat, metronomic equilibrium of his goddamn resting heart rate.

You don’t hit him.

You look at him.

You turn your head and you look at him and he must feel the weight of it because he turns too, slow, unhurried, and his eyes find yours in the blue dark of the car and they’re steady. Completely steady. No tension in his eyes, no furrow in his corrugator, nothing in his expression that suggests he’s experiencing any version of the catastrophic internal event currently leveling every structure in your chest. He’s just looking at you. The way he looks at the surgical field. The way he looks at a fracture pattern on a film. Assessing. Reading. Processing the data without any visible emotional response to the findings.

But there’s something else. Something you almost miss because it’s buried so deep in his face that you’d need to be exactly this close, exactly this wrecked, exactly this far past the boundary of professional distance to catch it.

His gaze drops.

To your mouth.

It’s fast. A quarter second. Maybe less. And then it’s back, steady and clinical and blank, but you saw it and the seeing rewires something in your brain so fast you feel it as a physical lurch, a tilt in the axis of the car, the sudden sickening recalibration of a system that just received information it doesn’t know how to process.

He looked at your mouth.

He has spent the last twenty minutes telling you that you’re negligent and broken and dangerous and going to kill someone and he just looked at your mouth.

And the thing that breaks you isn’t the cruelty. It isn’t the silence, or the criticism, or I can’t fix you, or it’s going to get someone killed. It’s the quarter second glance. It’s the knowledge that somewhere inside of this man who has spent seventeen hours making you feel like the smallest, most incompetent person in the building, there is a circuit that looked at your mouth. That the same eyes that catalogued your hesitation and your tremor and your miscounted screws also, in the same sitting, looked at your mouth. And he thought you wouldn’t catch it. And you did. And now you’re both sitting in the knowledge of it and the air in the car has changed entirely.

And something about the way he can sit here in the aftermath of everything he’s said and look at you with the same detached focus, cracks the last load bearing wall in whatever structure was keeping you upright.

Your body, which has been running on cortisol and adrenaline and seventeen hours of accumulated fight-or-flight with no outlet, moves without conscious thought. Your hand comes off the seatbelt release and goes to the back of his neck and your fingers close in the short hair above his collar and you pull, and your mouth finds his in the dark, and it’s not a kiss so much as a loss of structural integrity. Catastrophic failure at the point of highest stress. The break you saw coming but couldn’t prevent because the forces were already in motion before you understood what they were.

He doesn’t flinch.

That’s the last thing you register before everything goes: he doesn’t flinch, doesn’t pull away, doesn’t stiffen. His mouth is warm and the sound he makes against your mouth is quiet and short and so unsurprised it makes your blood run sideways.

He was waiting for this.

The knowledge doesn’t stop you. It should. It should be the thing that makes you pull back, that trips the wire between mistake and trap, but his mouth is already moving against yours and your brain has been demoted to a purely observational role, a bystander taking notes while your body runs the operation.

You kiss him like you’re trying to hurt him. Teeth and pressure and the graceless, artless force of someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing and doesn’t care, and for a second- a long, terrible second- he lets you. He sits there and he takes it, your mouth on his, your hand fisted in his collar, your breath coming in sharp little pulls through your nose, and he doesn’t move. Doesn’t reciprocate. Doesn’t push you away. Just absorbs it, and the passivity of it is so much worse than rejection that you feel your eyes sting behind your closed lids.

Then his hand moves.

It goes to the back of your neck, fingers closing around the nape and gripping, thumb pressing into the tendon beside your spine, the rest of his hand spanning the width of your neck, and he holds you there. Holds you mid kiss, mid breath, mid everything, and the grip says stop. Not stop kissing him. Just… stop. Stop thrashing. Stop fighting. Stop moving.

You stop.

He pulls you back. Just enough to break the contact. An inch of cold air between your mouth and his, and you can feel the heat of his breath against your wet lower lip and you can see his eyes, close enough to make out the individual fibers of his iris contracting in the low light, and he’s looking at you with something that makes your animal brain go very, very still.

He doesn’t say anything.

He just looks. And the quality of the looking is- you don’t have language for it. Something pre-verbal, pre-civilized, something that belongs in a context where the lighting is firelight instead of dashboard glow and the power dynamic is measured in muscle mass and jaw strength rather than titles and institutional hierarchy. 

He looks at you like he’s deciding where to bite down.

His grip on your neck tightens. Fractionally. A compression you feel in your molars.

Then he kisses you.

And it’s different. Everything about it is different. Where yours was frantic and desperate and searching, his is slow. His mouth moves against yours with a patience that feels predatory, that feels like the unhurried gait of something that doesn’t need to chase because it already has what it was after, and his hand on your neck isn’t holding you still anymore, it’s steering. 

Tilting your head where he wants it, adjusting the angle, his thumb pressing under your jaw until your chin lifts and your throat is exposed and the sound that comes out of you is something you’ll hear in your own head for weeks.

Your fingers scramble against his shoulders. Your nails catch the fabric of his scrub top and drag and you feel the muscle underneath shift in response, a twitch, a contraction, involuntary and brief, and that one small proof that his body is responding makes you desperate in a way you don’t recognize.

You need to be closer. The thought is incoherent and absolute. There’s a center console between you and fourteen inches of dead space and it’s intolerable, physically intolerable, your body rejecting the distance, urgently, violently, without higher input.

You pull back. Fumble the seatbelt. The buckle snaps free. You get one knee on the console and your hand on the headrest behind him and you’re climbing, graceless, desperate, your shin banging the gear shift, your elbow catching the rearview mirror, and the logistics are terrible and you don’t care. You don’t care because his hands have dropped to his sides and he’s not helping you, he’s just watching, his head tipped back against the headrest, his eyes half lidded, tracking your clumsy, frantic movements in the space with something that isn’t amusement and isn’t patience.

It’s hunger.

Controlled, banked, hunger behind glass.

Your knee finds the seat beside his thigh. Then the other one. You settle into his lap and the steering wheel cuts into your lower back and his thighs are solid beneath yours and you’re breathing too hard, chest heaving, hands shaking where they grip his shoulders, and he’s… still.

Completely still.

Looking up at you. His hands at his sides. His jaw set. The only thing moving is his chest, rising and falling with breaths that are marginally faster than they were ten minutes ago, and you fixate on that the way a drowning person fixates on a piece of floating debris.

You wait for him to touch you.

He doesn’t.

The seconds stretch. Three. Five. Seven. You’re sitting in his lap and his hands are resting on the seat on either side of his thighs and he’s looking up at you with that banked, glass walled hunger and he is not touching you. 

He is making you sit in it, in the wanting, in the desperation, in the raw, humiliating fact that you just climbed into your attending’s lap in a driveway and he’s giving you nothing back.

Your hips shift. You can’t help it. A restless, involuntary roll that presses your cunt into his cock, and you feel his abdomen tighten beneath you, a hard, sudden contraction that he controls almost immediately but not before you feel it, not before you register the proof that his body is doing things his face won’t admit to.

His jaw tightens. You see it. The masseter flexing, the tendon standing out below his ear.

Then finally- finally- his hands move.

They don’t go where you expect. They go to your hips. Both of them. Settling over the bones with a grip that is immediately, unambiguously possessive, not exploratory, not tentative, not the careful hands of a man testing boundaries. He grips you like you’re his. Like you’ve always been his. Like the last four months of corrections and cruelty and silence were just the long, patient process of wearing you down to this, to the moment where you’d put yourself in his hands because you had nowhere else to go.

His thumbs dig into the hollows inside your hip bones. The pressure is just on the edge of pain, right at the threshold where sensation tips from one thing into another, and you gasp and his hands tighten in response and you realize with a full body lurch that the sound you made didn’t concern him. It fed him.

He pulls you forward. Down. A controlled, forceful drag that seats you flush against his him, and the contact makes your vision white out at the edges and one of his hands goes from your hip to your hair and he's gripping it, pulling it, fingers twisted strands at the crown of your head, yanking, exposing your throat, and the sound he makes rewires something fundamental in your nervous system.

His mouth finds your neck, teeth grazing the tendon that runs from your ear to your clavicle, a slow, dragging pressure that leaves a trail of heat in its wake, and then he bites down, hard enough to make you jolt, to make your fingers tighten on his shoulders, to make your hips roll forward again in a motion that is completely involuntary and that he responds to by pulling you into his clothed cock harder, fingers digging into the meat of your hips with a strength that’s going to leave marks. 

You know it’s going to leave marks. You know because his hands are surgeon’s hands, hands that crack bones into alignment and drive hardware through cortical shell, and they are currently clamped onto your body like he’s setting a fracture and the thing he’s reducing is you.

He doesn’t let go of the bite. He holds it. His jaw flexing against your throat, his breath hot against your pulse point, and you can feel your own heartbeat hammering against his teeth and he can feel it too; you know he can feel it, your pulse trapped between his mouth and your skin, and he stays there. Counting it, maybe. Tasting it.

Your hands are moving without thought. Down his chest, pulling at the fabric, trying to find skin and not finding it fast enough. You’re making sounds- small, fractured, desperate things that you’ve lost the ability to be embarrassed about because embarrassment requires a functioning prefrontal cortex and yours left the building sometime around the moment you smelled the cologne on him in the parking garage.

He releases the bite. His tongue passes over the indentation once, flat and slow and then his mouth is at your ear and his breathing is different now. Ragged at the edges. Fraying. The composure that he’s worn like a second skin all day is coming apart in increments you can measure by the roughness of each exhale and the tightening of his grip.

“You should eat more,” he says and his hands slide under your scrub top, palms flat against your bare skin and the heat of them is obscene, radiating a constant steady warmth that seeps into your tissue, spreading outwards from the points of contact and into the muscles beneath. His hands slide up your sides, palms dragging over abdominal muscles, calluses catching against your skin, and his thumbs find the ridges of bone, thumbs tracing your ribs, counting them. “I can feel every one of these.”

It’s not tender. It’s not concern. It’s inventory. He’s cataloguing what’s his and finding it insufficient and the disapproval is so tangled up with the want that you can’t separate them, can’t tell where the criticism ends and the desire begins because in him they’re the same thing. The same impulse. He wants you and he’s angry about the state of what he wants, angry when something he’s claimed isn’t being maintained to his standard.

His hands stop. Bracketing your ribcage, fingers splayed across your back, thumbs resting in the shallow valley between bones. The heat of his palms is sinking through your intercostal now, settling into the spaces between your ribs like something poured, and you can feel your own lungs expanding against his hand with every breath, pushing into the warmth, your body leaning into him without your permission because its been so long since anyone touched you with this much sustained focused heat.

His hands drop to the hem of your scrub top. He pulls it up, bunching the fabric at your ribs, exposing your waist, your stomach, the line of your hip bones above the drawstring of your scrub pants until your shirt is pulled above your head and dropped somewhere to the side. The air in the car hits your bare skin and you shiver and he flattens his palms against your stomach.

“Someone needs to feed you,” he mutters. His thumbs press into the soft tissue below your navel. “Make sure you actually sleep.” His hands drag down, hooking into the waistband pads of his fingers against your lower abdomen, the weight of his grip tilting your pelvis toward him. “You’re a goddamn mess.”

You are. You are a goddamn mess. You are shaking and crying and half undressed in your attending’s lap in a parked car and his hands are on your bare skin and his teeth marks are throbbing on your neck and every word out of his mouth is an insult wrapped in something that sounds, horribly, like a promise.

A promise that he’s going to fix what you can’t fix. That he’s already decided. That this- the car, the drive, the cruelty, the bite, his hands inside your waistband- this is just the intake assessment. The preliminary exam. The first step in a treatment plan that he’s been designing for months, one that ends with you exactly where he wants you, which is right here. Underneath his hands. Dependent on his attention. Unable to function without the particular combination of damage and repair that only he provides.

You should be terrified.

His hands tighten. He pulls you into him again, harder, and your breath leaves your body in a rush and your forehead drops to his shoulder and your teeth find the muscle where his neck meets his trapezius and you bite down because it’s the only language your body has left.

He groans. The sound travels through his chest cavity into yours, a vibration you feel in your sternum, and his hand slides up your spine and fists in your hair again and pulls, arching your neck back, exposing your throat, and he looks at you, looks up at you from below, his lips parted, his breathing finally, irrevocably wrecked, and the expression on his face is the most honest thing you’ve ever seen from him.

It’s not the mask. It’s not the bored superiority. It’s not the carefully metered cruelty he portions out across an operating day.

It’s greed.

Simple, uncut, undisguised. The face of a man who found something he wants and is currently in the process of closing his hand around it and he does not intend to open that hand again.

“Come here,” he says, for the second time tonight, and this time it means something completely different and exactly the same.

You come, your body answering the order the way it answers every order he’s ever given- before thought, before shame, before the part of your brain that still pretends it has dignity can raise an objection, and you lean in, mouth crashing against his.

You hate yourself for it. You hate the speed of it, the automaticity, the way your knees dig harder into the leather on either side of his thighs and your mouth finds his again. You hate that you’re shaking and he’s not. You hate that your hands are fisted into his collar and pulling and desperate and his are still, idle, unbothered, a man being kissed by someone while he decides whether or not to kiss back. 

He tracks you. Every tremor of your lower lip, every frantic slide of your tongue against his, every wet graceless sound you make when his teeth catch your bottom lip and tug. Controlled. Proprietary. Taking this in like he takes in everything, filing it, noting it, adding it to whatever mental inventory he maintains of all the ways you embarrass yourself in front of him. 

You pull back. Your chest is heaving. His isn’t.

“Fuck you,” you say.

It comes out wrecked. Shaking. Nothing close to the strength you want it to be. He looks at you flatly, unimpressed. 

He hooks two fingers into the drawstring of your scrub pants and pulls. One motion. The knot gives. The pants slide down your thighs and you should stop this. You should stop this right now. You should climb off his lap and open the door and walk into your house and lock it behind him and never look at him again. You know this. The knowledge is clean and certain and completely irrelevant to what your body is actually doing, which is lifting one knee, then the other, kicking cotton of your ankles, while your hand stays fisted in his collar like letting go would kill you. 

His hand goes behind your back. One flick of his thumb and the bra releases and the straps slide down your shoulders and you feel the air hit your skin and the humiliation is so acute it tastes metallic, like biting down on foil, like blood from a split lip. 

He doesn’t even look. 

He lets the fabric fall and his palms settle over your breasts and his thumbs brush across nipples already tight from the cold and the adrenaline and he does it with absent focus, like this is a step in a sequence, like your body is a series of tasks to be completed on the way to something else. 

“You’re an asshole,” you whisper. Your voice cracks. “You know that? You’re a completely fucking-”

His hand slides down your stomach. Hooks into the waistband of your underwear. Drags. The fabric catches on your thighs, resists, then gives away with a tear. 

“- asshole.”

“Yeah,” he says. That’s it. Yeah. One syllable. Bored. His eyes haven’t changed. His breathing hasn’t changed. You are sitting in his lap in nothing but the blue dashboard light, stripped and shaking, every flaw and rib and tremor illuminated, and his pulse is resting. 

You want to claw his face off.

You want to rake your nails down his cheeks until he bleeds, until something in his expression breaks, until he shows you one single shred of evidence that this is affecting him even a fraction as much as it’s affecting you. But he’s still dressed beneath you- scrub top, scrub pants- and the obscene imbalance of naked and clothed, wrecked and composed, is doing something to the power dynamic that you feel in the base of your skull like a boot on your neck. 

One hand leaves your hip. You hear the shift of fabric, the elastic drag of a waistband, and then he’s there, cock pressing against the inside of your thigh, hard and hot. He wraps his hand around himself and strokes once, slow, lazy, and you watch the muscle in his jaw flex and that’s it. That’s all he gives you. One flex of one muscle while you’re sitting naked in his lap with tears drying on your face and your whole body vibrating like a plucked string. 

Then he lines the head of his cock up, blunt insistent pressure of him against the entrance to your cunt, and your body- your traitorous, mutinous, shame soaked body- is already wet. Has been wet. Has been wet since the you smelled his cologne in the parking garage, maybe earlier, maybe since the OR, maybe since the moment you were first introduced to him as your attending and the knowledge of that is so humiliating you actually close your eyes against it, squeeze them shut like a child who thinks not seeing makes them invisible. 

“Sit.” A command. Like he’s speaking to a dog, like you’re a dog, like you’re a misbehaving mutt caught doing something you shouldn’t and he’s issuing a command to correct. Sit, heel, lay down, roll over-

Don’t, you think. 

You sink. 

The stretch is immediate. Obscene. A slow, relentless parting that you feel in your cunt, your thighs, your abdomen, your teeth, and you hate every inch of it and the contradiction is going to break you in half. He fills your cunt the way he takes up any space around him- completely, unapologetically, without any interest in whether you were ready to accommodate him or not. 

Your hands fly to his biceps. Nails through fabric into muscle. And for one heartbeat you sit there, trembling, adjusting, feeling the way you body has to restructure around him, and your eyes are open now and burning and you’re looking directly at his face and his expression is…

Calm. 

He looks calm. His dick is buried inside of you to the hilt and his face is the face of a man sitting in traffic. Waiting for the light to change. Reading a notification on his phone. And you want to scream, wrap your hands around his throat and squeeze until something in those steady, half lidded eyes shows you that he’s here, that he’s present, that this is costing him anything at all. 

His hands find your hips again. Thumbs pressing bruises into bone. And then he moves you. 

Up. Down. Controlled. Like you’re nothing more than a doll, an instrument, something he can use and play until he’s had his fill, and that pisses you off.

You start to move on your own and the first roll of your hips without his guidance is yours, angry and hard, grinding down onto him with a force that’s closer to violence than fucking, and you watch his face for the flinch, for the flutter of his eyes, for his lips to part open, for any crack, any goddamn indication that you’re getting to him. 

His eyes lower. Barely. The faintest contraction around the corner of his eyes. 

That’s it. That’s all you get. 

His hands tighten and he takes back control of the rhythm, pulling you down on his cock hard, forcing the depth, and the sound that rips out of you is something between a sob and a moan and you hate it, hate the wet broken sound, hate that he heard it, hate that his expression doesn’t change when he hears it. 

“This is what you’re good at.”

The words are like a slap and you feel them behind your eyes, in your lungs, in the slick slide where your body is betraying you again, again, again.

“Fuck you- “

“Not the tibial plateau.” His hips drive up. “Not the hardware count.” Again. “Not even remembering to get your fucking car serviced.” His hands drag you down so hard onto his cock that your clit grinds against the base of him and your vision whites out and your mouth falls open with a sound you can’t control, high pitched and needy. “This. This is the only thing I’ve never seen you hesitate on.”

“I hate you- “ Your voice splinters with another thrust, that grinds his cock against the spot that has your nails digging into his shoulders hard enough to break skin through fabric. “I hate you, you fucking-”

“I know,” he says. Quiet. Unbothered. Like you just told him the weather. And then he rolls his hips up into you with a hard grind that makes your spine arch and your head fall back and the I hate you dissolves into a whimper you’ll never forgive yourself for. 

“Look at you,” His breathing hasn't changed. Twelve per minute. Resting. While yours comes ragged and sobbing, chest heaving, your whole body shaking on top of his. “Seventeen hours of your hands shaking. Seventeen hours of being unable to hold a retractor steady. But you can ride cock like this. Perfect rhythm. No tremor. No hesitation.” He pulls you into another downstroke, meets you with his hips, punches the breath from your lungs. “Maybe this is what I should have had you doing all along instead of letting you pretend you’re a surgeon.”

You hit him. 

Your palm connects with his face, an open handed strike that lands hard enough to make a sound in the car, and he doesn’t flinch, doesn’t tense, just absorbs it the way he absorbs everything, and his hands on your hips don’t even stutter. 

He smiles. 

Not wide. Not warm. A thin, asymmetric thing, one corner of his mouth pulling up in the blue dark, and it’s the first genuine expression you’ve seen on his face and it’s the worst thing you’ve ever looked at. Because the smile says he liked that. The smile says do it again. The smile says he has been waiting, patiently, methodically, for the entire duration of the encounter, for you to hit him, and now that you have he can file it alongside every other piece of evidence that you are exactly as out of control as he’s always suspected. 

“There she is.” His thumb slides between your bodies. Finds your clit. Circles it in a way that makes your spine lock and your teeth clench. “There’s the good girl I knew was buried under all that incompetence.”

“Don’t call me- “ Your voice breaks, hips moving faster not, frantic, beyond your control. “Don’t you dare-”

“Come on.” His thumb presses harder. His other hand drags you down into the next thrust. “Show me the one thing you’re actually competent at.”

“I fucking hate you- “

“You keep saying that.” His mouth is close to your ear. His breathing is finally, finally different- rougher, a fraction faster, the composure fraying at the thinnest edges- but his voice is still steady. Still controlled. Still the voice of a man who is winning and knows it. “And yet here you are.”

And yet here you are. 

The truth of those words- the bare, unarguable, catastrophic truth of them- hits harder than anything else he’s said all day. Here you are. In his lap. In his car. In his hands. Naked and shaking and full of him and crying and still moving, still rolling your hips into his, still chasing the orgasm that’s building in your lower abdomen, because he told you to and because you want to and because the wanting and the hate have fused into something singular and molten that you couldn’t separate even if you had the higher brain function to try. 

The car is rocking on its suspension. The windows are opaque. Sweat slides down the valley of your spine. Your breasts move with every thrust and his eyes track them and the shame of being watched makes something tighten in your lower belly and you hate that too, hate the wiring of your own body, hate that humiliation and arousal are using the same neural pathways and you can’t tell where one stops and the other starts. 

“This is what you’re good at,” he says again. Quieter now. Almost fond. And the fondness is worse than the cruelty because the cruelty you can fight but the fondness seeps in and finds the soft tissue and stays. “Not saving lives. Not pretending to be a doctor. Just this. Just taking what I give you until you forget you ever had anything else to fuck up.”

“Shut up.” You’re crying openly now. Tears and sweat and the sounds coming out of your mouth are wet and broken and you can’t stop them and you can’t stop moving. “Shut the fuck up-”

“Make me.”

Two words. And they’re not said like a challenge. They’re said like a dare, and underneath the dare is something that sounds terrifyingly like affection, the way someone would talk to a small animal that keeps trying to bite them, amused and patient and completely unthreatened. 

Your orgasm is building. You feel it in every trembling muscle, the quiver in your inner thighs, the tightening low in your abdomen, the involuntary clenching of your body around his cock that makes his breath hitch for one unguarded second before he smooths it over. 

You’re close. You’re so close it’s blurring the edges of your rage, softening the anger into something needier, something that wants to collapse forward against his chest and be held and the wanting of that- the wanting to be held by the man who’s been destroying you- is the most humiliating thing that’s happened all night and that is a competitive field. 

His grip adjusts. His thumb digs in deeper. His pace doesn’t falter. 

His mouth finds your ear. 

“Don’t you dare come until I tell you you’ve earned it.” His thumb circles your clit and the contradiction- don’t come while his hands do everything to guarantee you will- is so perfectly, characteristically cruel that a laugh rips out of you, unhinged and wet and bordering on hysterical. “You don’t get to be good at anything unless I say so.”

And you keep bouncing, because he told you to. 

Because somewhere between the parking garage and the engine and the drive and the months of him taking you apart and breaking you down like you were a failed construct, you stopped being a person who makes her own decisions and became a person who waits for his. 

You hate him.

You don’t stop. 

***

The hospital smells the same. 

That’s what gets you. The absolute, insulting sameness. You walk through the door at six thirty and the air hits your face with its standard cocktail of antiseptic and recycled ventilation and floor wax and the distant, perpetual ghost of coffee, and it is exactly, precisely, atomically the same as it was yesterday morning when you walked in as a person who had not yet detonated her entire life ion the front seat of a Lexus. 

Your neck hurts. 

Not the muscular ache of a bad night’s sleep, though there’s that too- you slept maybe ninety minutes, in twenty three minute increments, each one interrupted by the sensation of waking up inside a body that still smelled like him despite the shower. The shower that was too hot. The shower where you stood with your forehead against the tile and your hands flat on the wall and mentally assessed the damage- bruise on your left knee, bruises on your hips in the shape of his fingerprints, raw patch on your lower back from the steering wheel, and the bite. The bite on your neck, which you examined in the bathroom mirror, reddish purple, visible above the collar of a scrub top. Visible above the collar of anything you own. 

You’re wearing a turtleneck under your scrubs. In September. 

You keep your head down. Badge clipped. Hair pulled back so tight your scalp aches. You walk with a posture that says normal day, regular morning, nothing to report, and you’re almost to the locker room when another resident steps into the hallway and says, “Admin wants you.”

Every drop of blood in your body goes cold. You stare at him. 

“Underwood’s office.” He says. “Now.”

You don’t ask why. You don’t ask why because your body already knows. Your body already knows before he opened his mouth, maybe before, maybe the moment you walked through the doors and the air tasted the same and the hallway looked the same and nothing was different except everything was different. 

The walk takes ninety seconds. You count your footsteps because counting is something your brain can do while the rest of it shuts down. 

You see him through the open door. 

Park is in the left chair. One ankle crossed over the opposite knee. He’s holding a coffee, steam curling from the lip, which means its fresh, which means he stopped on his way here, which means he budgeted time into his morning for this.

He doesn’t look up when you walk in. 

Gloria Underwood is standing beside her desk. She’s holding a manilla folder. It’s thick. Too thick for something assembled this morning. Too thick for a single incident. The thickness of it does something to the air in your lungs, displaces it, compresses it, makes the next breath feel like trying to inflate against a weight. 

Gloria’s face is arranged in the express you’ve seen administrators use when they’re about to change the trajectory of a person’s life. Controlled. A mask of professional compassion that has been practiced in mirrors and refined in meetings and has nothing to do with whether the person wearing it actually feels anything at all. 

“Please sit down.”

You sit. The chair is identical to his. Your elbow is inches from his elbow and you can smell him, smell the coffee, and the soap, and the cologne, and your body responds with a full system lurch of sense memory so violent you have to press your fingernails into your palms to stay in the chair. 

“A formal complaint has been filed,” Gloria says, opening the folder. Turns to a page that’s already been flagged with a colored tab, pre-marked, pre-organized, the administrative infrastructure of a process that was set in motion before you arrived. “Regarding conduct of sexual nature directed at Dr. Brendon Park by a subordinate member of the surgical team.”

Directed at. 

The preposition enters your ear and detonates. 

Directed at Dr. Park. Not by Dr. Park. Not between you and Dr. Park. At him. By you. 

“Dr. Park has reported that over the course of several months, he has been subjected to escalating patterns of inappropriate attention from an intern under his direct supervision.” Gloria’s eyes move across the page but she’s not reading. She memorized this. “Including persistent attempts to initiate physical proximity, repeated instances of unprofessional fixation during surgical procedures, and recently, an incident of unsolicited sexual contact initiated in his vehicle after he offered professional assistance with a mechanical issue in the hospital parking garage.”

Persistent attempts to initiate physical proximity. 

That’s- standing near him. In the OR. Where he assigned you to stand. 

Unprofessional fixation during surgical procedures. 

That’s- watching him operate. When you were assisting. 

Unsolicited sexual contact.

That’s-

The room is doing something. The walls aren’t moving but the space between them is contracting, the air thickening, the fluorescent light taking on a quality that feels granular, particulate, like you’re trying to see through something that’s settling between you and the rest of the room. 

“The complaint has been supported by documented observations,” Gloria continues. She turns another page. Another colored tab. “Dr. Park has provided a written timeline of concerning behavior, including specific dates and incidents.”

A timeline. 

He kept a timeline. He’s been keeping a timeline. Every shift, every surgery, every moment you stood too close or looked too long or held your breath- he was writing it down. Dating it. Building a file. Constructing a narrative in which every single thing your body did in his presence was evidence of you pursuing him, and the evidence is in Gloria Underwood’s hands right now, and it’s thick, and it has colored tabs, and it’s been here since before you walked in the door. 

“Given the nature of the supervisory relationship and the severity of the allegations, you are being placed on immediate administrative suspension pending investigation, effective as of this meeting.”

You open your mouth.

Nothing comes out. 

You try again and what emerges is a sound that isn’t a word, is a breath, a fragment, the beginning of that’s not what happened that stalls in your larynx before your larynx has done the math that your brain hasn’t finished yet. 

The math is:

He is a senior attending. Board certified orthopedic surgeon. Ten years at this hospital. Published. Respected. The kind of name that appears on department letterheads and in the acknowledgment section of textbook chapters. He has a reputation. He has colleagues. He has a record, spotless and long and documented in the same filing system that is currently absorbing this complaint. 

You are an intern. Four months in. No publications, no tenure, no institutional weight. You have a shaking hand and miscounted screws and a performance record that he has been personally authoring for your entire rotation. 

Who is Gloria going to believe?

Who is anyone going to believe?

The intern who can’t hold a retractor steady? The one who freezes on approaches and forgets to count hardware and cries in parking garages? The one who ended up naked in her attending’s car at midnight? 

Or the attending who has spent months carefully, meticulously, documentably expressing concern about a subordinate’s fixation. 

“During the suspension period,” Gloria is saying. “You are not to enter clinical areas, access patient records, or make contact with Dr. Park directly or through intermediaries.”

You turn your head. 

Park is looking at Gloria. He’s been looking at Gloria the entire time. Sitting in the chair with his coffee and his crossed ankle, and his face arranged in an expression of restrained concern; brows drawn, mouth set, carefully composed like a man navigating a difficult situation with professionalism and grace. He looks like someone this is being done to. He looks like a man who tried his best with a troubled intern and is now dealing with the unfortunate consequences of his own generosity. 

He is sitting in this chair, hours after his teeth were in your neck and his cock inside you and his hands on your hips dragging you down onto him while he told you that riding him was the only thing you were competent at and he looks troubled. 

Something happens behind your face. Not tears. Something past tears, something drier and more dangerous. A sensation like the moment before something snaps, the last frame of structural integrity, the instant where the material is still holding its shape but the forces have already exceeded its capacity and the failure is inevitable, just not yet visible. 

“Do you have anything to add,” Gloria asks you. 

You're still looking at Park. 

He turns his head. Finally. Slowly. Meets your eyes for the first time since you walked in. 

His face is still wearing the mask. The concern, the gravity, the restrained compassion of the Wronged-Mentor. It’s flawless. Every muscle recruited, every micro expression calibrated, the kind of performance that could only be produced by someone who’s been rehearsing it for a very long time. 

But his eyes.

In the space behind the performance, in the deep architecture of his gaze, where the mask doesn’t quite reach, there’s something looking back at you that makes your blood crystallize in your veins. 

It’s not guilt. It’s not satisfaction. It’s not even cruelty.

It’s patience.

The bottomless, immovable patience of a man who built something and is now watching it work. 

He holds your gaze for two seconds. Then he turns back to Gloria and picks up his coffee and drinks and the meeting continues, and the folder stays open, and your badge is collected, and you walk out of the hospital at seven forty one am wearing a turtleneck in September and it’s sunny outside and the sky is very blue and you don’t remember driving home.

(And Park watches you leave, coffee in hand. You look very small. Smaller than you looked in scrubs, which is saying a lot, because you already looked like a stiff breeze would snap you in half-

(And the first part is done. Solved. He doesn’t have to watch you bite your lip when you concentrate anymore, doesn’t have to correct the angle of your hands and pretend the contact is clinical. Doesn’t have to stand behind you during a procedure and smell your shampoo and keep his hands professional while he vividly imagines what he’d do to you if the room was empty- 

(Four months of that. Four months of keeping his hands on the instruments instead of on your waist, of watching your throat move when you swallow and thinking about his teeth there, of memorizing the exact pitch of your voice when you’re nervous because he wanted to know what it would sound like under him, or fucking his fist to the memory of the little punched out breath you made when you startled coming out of the supply closet, imagining you making that sound with his fist in your hair and his cock grinding against your cervix-

(And you’ll spiral. That’s fine. That’s the design. You’ll go home and fall apart and burn through the anger hot and fast the way you burn through everything, and then the anger will run out and what’s left will be the silence. No OR. No corrections. No one watching. No one who knows you hold your breath when you’re nervous or that your left hand shakes first or that you haven’t been eating enough or sleeping enough or taking care of yourself the way someone should be taking care of you. The way he would, if you’d stop being so fucking difficult about it-

(Give it three weeks. Maybe four. You’ll reach for your phone. You won’t call, not yet. But the intervals between looking at his name and putting the phone down will shrink every time until eventually you just stop putting it down. And he’ll answer when he’s ready, and you’ll be crying, and he’ll listen the way he always listens to you you- completely- because that’s the drug and he’s the only supply you’ve got left. 

(Pavlov’s dog with a prettier face. He spent four months ringing the bell- every correction a tap, every silence a withhold, every rare scrape of approval timed to land when you were most desperate for it- and now that the bell is gone and you’re salivating into nothing, confused and aching and reaching for the only hand that ever fed you even though it’s the same hand that kept you starving-

(He’ll feed you. Get your weight back up. Move you into his place once you can’t make rent. He’ll frame it as practical. You’ll be grateful. And in six months you’ll be standing in his kitchen in his T-shirt and you’ll look up when he walks in with that open, searching expression- the same one you used to give him across the operating table- checking his face for what he wants you to do next, his pretty obedient wife, trained so fucking well-