"don't do anything stupid till I get back"

He turns his head to the side and down where his bicep has gone half numb under you. “H-hi,” he says.

“Hi yourself,” you say.

He can make out only the blur of your face tipped up at him. The sound of you is morning-rough, gummy at the edges, and his whole body goes at it with something brazenly pleased before his brain gets a vote.

“Um,” you add. “So—”

Dunk palms at you gently because his eyes are useless and he has to solve the room by touch. He is sprawled on his back, you nuzzled to his side, your feet somewhere around his mid-calf and one hand spread small over his ribs. The shirt has ridden up on you in the night. He feels bare thigh against his hip and has to look at the ceiling he cannot see.

“How’re ye feelin’?” he asks.

“Good,” you say. Your fingers twitch. “You?”

“Grand, but,” Duncan says, “blind.”

“Oh, right.” You twist away from him, and he keeps his arm loose enough to let you go. When you come back, he tightens. “Sorry, I took them off you," you say. "Here—”

The glasses get pushed onto his nose and the world snaps itself back together in lines and colours the names of he's no longer certain. “There ye are,” he says.

Seeing you makes him worse. More nervous, because now there are sharp edges. Your mouth looks bitten by sleep, eyes crusted a little from last night’s tears. Your hair has gone all mussed and flattened on one side, and the T-shirt collar hangs too wide on you. His T-shirt. The sight should be ordinary, because shirts are ordinary things, except Dunk has the distinct sense of having been granted back a morning that had been stolen from him once before. The first one. The one where he woke up with a body full of you and no you in the room to prove it.

Now you are here, frowning faintly with worry gathering between your brows, and he feels so lucky it borders on daft.

“You sure you’re good?” he asks.

You nod, then seem to check the answer against yourself. Your hand shifts under the cover, thighs move by a cautious inch, and your face does a small grimace.

Dunk sinks a notch. “Sore?”

“A little.”

He winces. “Ah. Shite. Was I—” Stops, then starts again, worse. “Was I too much?”

Your eyes flick up.

“I mean—” His ears begin to burn. “Too rough. Or too eager. Or—”

“Dunk.”

“—too heavy with my hands. Or just… too much of me.”

You stare at him, then soften in a way that makes him want to hide. “No. You weren’t too rough.”

He studies your face, searching for the lie out of habit. “You’d tell me?”

“Yes.”

“Properly?”

“Yes.” A pause. “I’m sore in a nice way.”

That phrase grabs him low and stays there. His hips seem to hear it first and some lazy pull starts under the ache. He shifts one shoulder against the pillow and hopes the blanket is being merciful. “In a nice way,” Dunk repeats, because he is an idiot.

You look embarrassed now, which helps nobody. “You know what I mean.”

Duncan does. He knows too well. His own body has woken all used and tender, cock sore from work, holding back and coming hard enough that some part of him may still be missing. There is a dragged-open feeling in him, though nothing of his has been entered except by wanting. He understands being glad for the ache. He understands wanting proof that something happened and stayed happened. “Aye,” he says quietly. “I know.”

Silence arrives then, thin and awkward, and lies between you with its eyes open.

“Was I too much?” you ask.

Dunk’s head turns so sharply the pillow drags at his ear. “What?”

“Last night.” You look at his collarbone rather than his face. “I was a bit… I don’t know. Mad.”

He nearly laughs from pure disbelief, except your face is too serious for that. “No.”

“You can say.”

“I am sayin’.” He reaches, then stops before the touch lands at your cheek, as if the rules have changed in the night and nobody has handed him the new sheet. “You were—” His throat tightens around several answers, all of them too large or too plain. Lovely. Wild. Good to me. Mine, some awful part supplies, and he shuts that door hard. “You were grand,” he manages. “More than.”

Your mouth pulls into something small. “Grand.”

“I’m not very articulate in the mornin’.”

You nod thoughtfully. “That explains it.”

A breath of laughter leaves him, and you answer with your own, but the question remains where both of you can see it: What now. It sits on the bed with the clothes on the floor and the cold mugs from last night and the smell of sleep and sex and clementines.

You pull the cover higher over your chest. “We should probably talk.”

“Aye,” Dunk says, though every muscle in him files a complaint.

“Because I don’t want this to get… unclear.”

He gives a small nod. His hand lies open on the mattress beside you. “Right.”

“And I don’t want you thinking you have to.”

That brings his eyes back to yours. “Have to what?”

“This.” You gesture vaguely under the duvet, toward your bodies and the rest of the wreckage. “Me. Us. Whatever this is. Because I’m, you know. Pregnant.”

Duncan takes a second with that. He hears the sense in it, but hates the sound of it. “I don’t feel made to,” he says.

“You did a bit before.”

“With the ring?”

You wince. He hates that too. “Aye,” he says before you can soften it for him. “I know. I made a bollocks of that.”

“I didn’t say—”

“You laughed.”

“Dunk.”

“No, I know why.” He looks down at the blanket. There is a loose thread near his thumb and he worries it instead of your patience. “I think I do, anyway. I was tryin’ to put the house up before we’d even checked if the ground takes a nail.”

You go quiet.

“That sounded better in my head,” he adds.

“No,” you say. “I get it.”

He risks looking at you again. “I want to help. Want to be here. That part’s true.”

“I know.”

“And the other part—” His mouth goes dry. “I liked last night. I want it. I want… you. I’m sayin’ that plain enough, aye?”

Your face changes, then closes slightly, as if plainness has still found a way to hurt. “Aye,” you say. “That’s plain.”

“But I don’t want ye thinkin’ I’m only here for that either.”

“I don’t.”

“And I’d rather it be me than some stranger,” he says, then blushes so hard it nearly makes him dizzy. “Jesus. Sorry. That came out—”

“No.” Your voice has gone quieter. “No, I understand.”

“It’s safer,” he says, grabbing for the practical rope before he drowns in the other thing. “I mean, with the baby and all. If it helps you. If you need it. Or want it. I can—” His face burns worse. “I can be that. For you.”

Your eyes stay on him. “You can be that.”

“If you want.”

"I do," you tell him. “So um… if we’re being practical.” Your jaw works once. “Is kissing allowed?”

Dunk blinks. Looks at your mouth and immediately has no right to answer anything requiring thought. “I’d like it to be.”

“Touching?”

“Aye.” His voice lowers. “If you want me touchin’.”

“I do.”

He swallows.

“What kind?” you ask, then regret shows on you in a hot flash. “Sorry. That sounded like a form.”

“It’s all right.” His hand flexes against the sheet. “The kind where ye tell me if I’ve gone wrong.”

“That’s broad.”

“I’m a broad fella.”

You laugh, and the sound loosens something in him. Then your face shifts again. “Protection?”

“Aye,” he says, too fast. “I was thinkin’—maybe we should. Or could. If ye wanted. For mess.”

Your brows pull in. He sees the mistake arrive before he knows which mistake it is.

“For mess?” you repeat.

“Aye. Just—”

“If you’re planning to keep seeing other people,” you say carefully, already moving yourself away by an inch without seeming to notice, “then yes, obviously. That would be safe. I mean, I’m not saying you can’t. We talked about it, didn’t we? So if you—”

“No.” Dunk nearly sits up. “No, no, that’s not what I meant.” You only gape at him. “Jesus, lass, that’s not what I meant.” His hand reaches this time and lands on your wrist. “I meant the actual mess. Sheets. You. Cleanin’ up after. I thought maybe it’d be easier for you.”

“Oh.”

“I told ye I’m not seein’ anyone.”

“I know.”

“I’m not.”

“Okay.”

“And I don’t want to.”

Your eyes lower to his hand around your wrist. “Okay.”

“Are you?”

“No.” Your answer comes quickly enough to calm some ugly thing in him. Then, quieter: “I’m obviously not seeing anyone either.”

“Good,” he says, then hears himself. “I mean—”

“It is good,” you say.

There is another silence. Different this time. Warmer and more dangerous.

“For what it’s worth,” you add, staring somewhere near his shoulder, “I don’t mind the mess.”

Dunk’s body takes the sentence disgracefully. He feels himself stir under the blanket with enough interest to make his soul sigh and leave him to it. You notice. Of course you notice. Your mouth parts by a fraction.

He shuts his eyes. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

“I’m tryin’ to have a serious conversation.”

“You can be hard during it. Multitasking.”

He laughs, boyish and powerless. You smile properly then, and for one small stretch of morning the thing between you becomes almost simple. Almost.

Because you are still looking at him with that carefulness. Because he is still holding back half the sentence in his mouth. Because both of you are making a shape around the same missing word and pretending the shape itself will do.

“So,” you say. “We keep it… between us?”

“Aye.”

“When I need it.”

“When you want it,” he corrects, then looks startled by his own nerve.

Your face softens. “When I want it,” you say.

“And if you don’t, ye say.”

“Yes.”

“And if I do something wrong—”

“I’ll say.”

“And if I get too—”

“Dunk,” you say, then put your hand on his chest. “You’re allowed to want things too.”

He lies very still under that, because the sentence has teeth. After a moment, he covers your hand with his. “Right,” he says, though it comes out clipped.

You nod, as if that has settled anything. Then you look down at your own body under his shirt, at your knees under the cover, at his hand on yours. “So this is very mature of us.”

“Aye,” he says. “Terribly.”

“Awful.”

“Near bureaucratic.”

It gets you. You press your face into his arm to hide the laugh, and Duncan lets himself turn into it, nose brushing your hair. Biscuits. Sleep. Skin. A trace of him, too, caught in cotton and warmth. His chest goes very full.

“Tea?” he asks after a while, because he has to put the feeling somewhere.

“Tea,” you agree. Then, smaller, before he can move: “And maybe stay here for another minute.”

Dunk closes his eyes. “Aye,” he says. “One minute.”

One minute becomes two, then God knows how many, because Dunk shifts, huffs softly through his nose, and fishes your hand out from under the duvet. He starts cautiously. Thumb over your knuckles. A rub at the side of one nail. The rough pad of his finger traces the crease where yours bends, nervous enough to make the whole thing feel less like idling and more like inquiry. How much of this is he allowed, when it is neither useful nor filthy. How long until one of you names it and ruins the little shelter it has made.

Then he opens his own hand beside yours and rests you against it.

The comparison is so unfair you nearly laugh. Your fingertips only reach the middle knuckles of his, and his palm sits beneath yours with room left over, warm and scored with small lines that look deeper for belonging to someone who does practical things badly and often.

“You’ve such small hands, lass,” he says.

“No I don’t.” Your voice wobbles at the edges, which is horrible of it. “You’ve giant paws.”

He smiles, but only barely, as if too much face might startle the permission away. His thumb slips into the hollow of your palm and tickles there once, then again, slower. You curl a little round it. He watches that happen with a dazed, soft sort of attention that makes you feel discovered in the worst place.

You roll closer. His arm tightens under you, then stills. For a second he goes careful all over. “How d’ye get anything done with such tiny hands, hm?” he murmurs.

Instead of answering, your other hand creeps from under the duvet and lands on his thigh. The muscle under it jumps. “I think you know how much I can get done with such tiny hands,” you say.

Dunk hiccups. Then, to his obvious horror, giggles. He clears his throat so hard it becomes a cough. “You’re a wee menace.”

“Mhm.” You close his hand around yours, then let him have it. “Go make that tea.”

It all works. Sort of. His feet touch the floor, and Duncan realises he's got exactly one T-shirt in here that's currently occupied, and worse, that he's naked and half-hard.

He contemplates options but one where he asks you to hand that shirt over doesn't even make it to the waiting list. He decides that if you could climb into a bath in front of him he can show some courage too.

So. Dunk mans up, or tries to. His feet touch the floor and he pushes himself upright to stand. He keeps his back to you and crosses to where his boxers have been abandoned on the floor. Crouching for them is a mistake in several directions, but he gets them hooked in his fingers, steps in and drags them up minding to sort his dick in there so that it doesn't look like it's screaming I'm needy first thing in the morning.

When he turns back, you have your face aimed very carefully at the window. Your mouth has gone into a put-upon, thoughtful pout, as if the curtains have presented you with some riveting theory. Dunk looks at you for half a second, then smiles. “Aye,” he says. “Very respectful.”

Your eyes flick to him and away again. “I’m looking at the light.”

“Course ye are.”

A grin. “What?”

“Mm.” He pushes the glasses up his nose with one finger, and lets himself enjoy the fact that you have to hide your face under the blanket. “I’ll be right back.”

You only hum to that. Wait for his footsteps to hush once he reaches the kitchen and allow yourself a little squeal into the pillow.

The girlishness he manages to drag out of you by existing near a kettle is ignominious. You are not sure he knows he spent half the night with his face pressed into the bend of your neck, humming and purring sweet little unconscious things like stay and smell nice whenever you shifted too far from the furnace of his chest. Then morning comes and he stands there abashed over a perfectly ordinary tent under the covers, as though your own body would not have betrayed you just as plainly if God had granted women the same crude signage.

All of it lays another brick in the awful construction of Duncan’s sexiness, which is strong and, frankly, a little lethal because he has no earthly notion of it. He is shy until pining gets the better of him. Needy enough that the shyness cannot survive long. Once something is given, he handles it with care. Listens. Anticipates. Looks for the place where your body has begun to ask once your mouth starts failing. It should make him less dangerous, that kindness. Somehow it makes him worse.

When he got up, you had taken to ogling his gorgeous round arse with such immediate appetite you forgot, for half a second, that both of you are here through necessity, accident, and one long chain of poor judgement. The rules are useful. Emotionally fraudulent, maybe, but useful all the same. They let you believe you are protecting the two of you from the version of intimacy that grows thorns later and cuts as resentment. They let you take what mirrors the thing you want while keeping a cloth over the contaminated parts.

Still, Dunk is right. This is better than strangers. If it stays inside this out-of-time pocket pregnancy has made for you, perhaps it is survivable. Perhaps it is even sensible. You remain close. You have somebody to lean on. Dunk misses less, you explain to yourself, staring at the pale scratch of sunlight on the floorboards. The two of you can practise easing into the strange family-shaped arrangement that will be waiting once your body finishes one labour and the rest of your life begins another.

You sit up in the bed and look towards the window. A husk hangs from the sill on a translucent thread, gutted clean by whatever abandoned it. It's split down the back, papery and crumbling, and the thing that has rearranged itself in it has cut its way out and flown off without your eyes on it.

Duncan comes back with two steaming cups and a mean reminder of how broad his chest is. He sits at the foot of the bed and turns the cup in his hand so that you can take it by the ear. "I've put toasts on, too," he says.

You nod with your mouth hidden into the rim. "I'll give you your shirt back in a minute," you say, seeing how he curls into himself. It's a large pity, large enough to rival him, for you'd love to just keep him around like this. "I have uh… spare towels and toothbrushes in the bathroom. If you want to, I mean—"

"I thought," Dunk starts. "It's Saturday. I thought we could still sort out the nursery. If you want."

"Really?" you say. "That'd be great. Yeah, I would love that. The room's ready, we just need to put things in it."

"Grand." His cup finds yours and they clink.

You smile into your tea. Get up. At the wardrobe you open one door and disappear half behind it, bare legs visible below the wood. “We could probably do the same thing at yours,” you say from in there. “Sometime later. When you feel like it. A nursery, I mean, or a corner?”

Dunk nods before he remembers you cannot see him. The thought lands strangely. It reminds him painfully that the arrangement will be divided into two households. That, inevitably, you will come to his flat and set your feet on the floor and, to Duncan, symbolically, it means things getting crossed off. Your voice reaches him. “Dunk?”

He blinks. “A-aye. Yeah. We ought to do that.”

You come out in cotton shorts and a T-shirt still large on you, though much smaller than his, and kneel beside him on the mattress. “Here,” you say, passing him back his one. Then, after a beat, softer: “You can stay over here as much as you want when the baby is born, you know that, right? I just thought it’d be good for you to have things at your place too.”

Dunk takes the shirt from you. “I know,” he says, though his throat has gone a bit narrow with it. He hands you his cup and ducks into the cotton to get sucker-punched by his private version of tangerine dream. The whole thing is warm from you. Smells of sleep and your skin and the sweet rot of whatever lotion has survived the night. It settles over his shoulders as if it has learned him from inside your body and came back altered. He has to sit still for a second with his head only half through the neck-hole, sightless and enormous, before he can finish pulling it down.

When his face reappears, you are looking at him with your mouth tucked in. “What?” he asks.

“Nothing.”

“That’s not a nothin' face.”

“It is.” You reach over and tug the hem straight for him, fingers brushing his stomach through cotton. “You looked very heroic, fighting your own shirt.”

“Mm, a hard battle,” he says, grave as he can manage.

He listens to your laughter with focus meant for the speech of people wiser than him. Finishes his tea and waits for you to finish yours. Then, you show him around the bathroom while Duncan pretends he doesn't know where things are and nods thoughtfully at every stop of the tour. Once it's wrapped, he quells an urge to kiss your forehead and maybe slap your ass lightly. He showers with the soap he's used that one time before, then joins you in the kitchen for breakfast.

First, Dunk snorts at the disparity of plates. Yours holds one sad toast while his overflows with bread, eggs and sausages. When he shots you a questioning look you only shrug and send a don't judge me face in his direction. So Duncan sits. Eats. Tries to not think much about hands that made it for him.

In this mundane moment, Dunk’s memory manages to dim all the girls he has ever smothered into hurting him. Compared to what he feels now, those loves seem skinny. Starved at the ribs. This one is embryonic but ever-growing, blind and hungry and insisting on itself without any shame.

He watches you nibble at the bread’s crust and chase every bite with a sip of tea. One leg perched on the seat of the chair, you do not look at him, only scroll through emails on your phone with your mouth set flatter by the second. He sees how it fleeces the morning bliss off you, bit by bit. Then decides to take the role you keep offering. Someone who has a say in it. Someone who can want things.

“Have ye thought about takin’ leave already?” he asks.

“Hm?” You lift your head. “Oh, yeah, I just…” Your gaze drops back to the phone, then away from it. “I don’t know what I’d be doing with the time, you know?”

Dunk considers that a minute. Wipes his greasy mouth, cringes a little, then rests an arm across the table, ruling halfway through the movement to leave you untouched after all. His fist closes instead.

“We could… I dunno.” He takes a sip of coffee. “We could figure that out. Together, I mean. I’ll have more time soon.”

“Oh?” you say. “Right. School’s ending.”

“Mhm. Few weeks.” Dunk nods. “I’ll still have summer coaching and the activity programme with the kids, but it’s not full-time. We could prepare a bit better. Meet Ray and Red. Maybe you could…”

“What?”

“Come to a game,” he says, quieter. “Meet Egg. If ye want.”

You go still for long enough that Dunk regrets it. Then, you put your phone face down and rest your palm over his fist. It loosens under you. His fingers thread through yours.

“That sounds good,” you tell him. “I probably could use some time off.”

Dunk nods.

You look down at your joined hands, then back at him. “You ready for the nursery?”

Dunk sweeps the room with vacant eyes. “Aye,” he says. “Think so.”

The nursery has been waiting with its door closed. He doesn't know when the painting was done, nor does he ask by whom, because each possible version delivers a small resentment. Had it been you alone, Dunk would scold you for not seeking help. Had it been anyone else, he'd be wounded about not being the first choice. When the door opens, both of you lean on the frame as if bare walls might turn and ask what exactly you think you are doing here. There are boxes stacked by the skirting board, a rolled rug, cot in the exact middle, a changing table flat-packed in a carton with arrows pointing which side is up for some reason. A lamp shaped like a moon. Three soft baskets that smell of new rope and shop dust.

You tell him the changing table should go under the shelf. Dunk measures the wall again though it's been measured twice already, then lifts the table as if it has no weight and puts it exactly where you point. “There?” he asks.

“A little left.”

He shifts it a little left.

“No, your left.”

Dunk's mouth quirks. “That was my left.”

“Your other left, then.”

He gives you a look over his shoulder, wounded by female sense of directions, and you laugh hard enough that he smiles fully. The room eases by one small notch.

After that, the two of you become very serious about things that are very serious only to new parents. Which drawer gets the vests. Whether nappies should live closer to the wipes or closer to the little bin with its impressive system of odour containment. Dunk folds three tiny sleepsuits. You unfold one, refold it worse, and he says nothing, only fixes it when he thinks you are looking elsewhere.

“I saw that,” you say.

“I didn’t do anythin’.”

“You think I can’t fold baby clothes.”

“I think,” Dunk says, eyes on the drawer, “there’s a chance the baby will want its legs in the leg bits.”

You stare at him.

His mouth twitches. “That’s all.”

A muslin hits his head. He catches it without looking, which is so irritatingly impressive you have to turn away and busy yourself with the baskets.

Slowly, the space stops looking like storage and begins to acquire intent. Sheet goes on round the mattress. The little blanket folds over the rail. The lamp finds the corner. Books line up on the low shelf, bright spines and silly animals and one about a tractor Dunk claims is important because children ought to have options. You put the first packet of nappies in place, then stand there with your hand still on it. “Yeah,” you say, to no one.

Dunk looks up from where he is kneeling by a drawer. “What?”

“No, just. Yes. This looks… fine.”

“Aye.” He follows your gaze, then nods too hard. “Yeah. It does. Looks nice.”

There's a hollow, mouth-biting silence after that. Nice is a stupid little word for a room that now contains future. It's too small to express the enormity of the folded clothes that wait for a body neither of you has held yet. Nice is what's said because the real thing is a cutthroat.

Dunk gets up. You both stand in the middle of it with your foreheads set into brave shapes. “This is nice,” you say again, worse this time.

“Aye,” Dunk says. “I like it.”

You glance at him, and his face destroys you. His eyes are red-rimmed behind the lenses, magnified into bareness. Nothing held back on him. Duncan is a pretty crier because nearly none of him frowns. He just sweats tears out of those baby-blues until they adorn his lashes and drop onto cheeks. There's no attempt at hiding, only a fist at the ready to wipe the excess had it blurred his vision.

A complete opposite of you. Mouth slicing itself into a lopsided crescent from the force of trying to keep it inside, then plain ugly sobbing. It erupts from bawling eyes to a painful choke on the back of a mouth. Then snot comes thick and unstoppable, smears the upper lip with salt, and all of you becomes shiny in a way that would cake up any powder.

“Why are you crying?” he asks, voice breaking.

“I’m not crying,” you say, immediately crying. “You’re crying.”

His mouth twitches, then fails. “Am I?”

"Yes, Duncan," you wail. "Visibly."

Duncan steps in as if called by it. The room does a strange thing to a private wound in him. Bursts open the scar tissue that's grown round abandonment. Tends it, cleans it, stitches the evened edges and kisses it better. Small things do that to people. He feels welcome to walk barefoot on the fluffy rug and flick the carousel of geese into a stroll. There's a family for him somewhere in here, and you are a third of it. He doesn't know what kind of wrong has its fingers around your throat, but steps in all the same, because it doesn't really matter.

He gathers you against his chest and the two of you stand there leaking stupidly into each other. “Lass,” he murmurs, palm at the back of your head. “Hey. C’mere.”

“I’m here,” you say into his shirt, which now carries an imprint of your face like it's a fucking Veil of Veronica. “I’m very clearly here.”

“I know.”

“Why’re you crying?” you ask again.

His hand stills, then moves again. "Happy," he lies. “Jus' happy."

You pull back. “Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Lie badly.”

Dunk's face works. For one flicker you think he might tell you something. Something old. Then he only cups your face in both hands and wipes beneath your eyes with his thumbs. His own are worse. Damn tender and unfair in their size. “And you?” he asks. “Why’re you cryin’?”

You try to answer like a normal woman with control over her organs. The effect is half-strangled, half-mangled through teeth and comes out jittery. “I’m—" you hiccup, "scared I… I won’t be… a good mum.”

He stares at you, genuinely baffled. "Sweetheart," he says, as if it's all dead simple. "You'll be an incredible mam."

Laughter comes abrupt and deranged, hitting the surface of his lenses in wet little spots. Duncan says it like the matter has been already inspected and passed. It makes the idea briefly possible. "You don't know that," you tell him.

“I do.”

“You don’t.”

“I do,” he says again, with the same conviction he's used to persuade you municipal swamp is green. He brings your hand to his mouth and kisses your knuckles. Then knuckles of the other one. Then the hollow of it while your fingers brush his nose. Then your wrist, where the pulse knocks and knocks. "I do know."

“Dunk—”

A kiss on the forehead cuts you off. Long and determined. It makes you gasp and you hope that Dunk will read the gasping as one of the necessary phases for calming down. You clutch the shirt on his stomach, then, with no better plan than needing less fabric between you, you push your palms underneath it. Touch the life of his ribs. His muscles jerk.

“I only trust you,” you say, staring at the damp hollow at the base of his throat, “because you’ll be a great dad.”

He does that thing in the face that heralds the slackening of the whole body. Galvanised within himself to push past the layers of fear, Duncan bends and kisses you deep enough to make the both of you stumble. His hands frame your face, then neck, then shoulders, undecided. "Girl, what are you doin'—" he mutters into it. "What're you doin' to me?"

Loving you, you think, unbidden. You mumble a thing that has a shape of his name but doesn't survive the journey from throat to mouth. Set your fingers on his back and try to pull him closer.

He hums and starts walking. Stops kissing, but stays mouth to mouth. His thumbs and forefingers cuff round your elbows, twitching. There are heavy nasal breaths and working throats and between one swallow and the next Duncan stares at you through those damp, heifer-like lashes as if the answer might be printed somewhere on your face.

"Where's this goin'?" he asks.

"To the—" you stammer. "To bed. If you want."

His whole chest sinks on the exhale. "Thank God," puffs out of him.

Then—arms. A strongman’s foreplay begins with Duncan’s palms finding your arse like it’s signposted. He gets you up with a grunt that nurtures relief where effort should be, and your body remembers the route with alarming ease. It's the third time now. Three times out of three, you have failed to get yourself to bed under your own power where Duncan is concerned. The thought brings another one behind it, bad and quick-footed: perhaps this is simply what he does with women. Perhaps all that size has made a habit of carrying girls through doorways and making them feel singular for the length of one corridor.

You shut that down with both legs round his waist and both hands at his neck, because thinking has done very little for you lately besides invent pain. This belongs to me, you tell yourself, with no court of appeal available. The lift, the hands, the breath punched out of him when you settle against his stomach. Him. All of it yours for as long as he keeps walking.

He kisses you through it. The shape of him between your thighs, already interested, makes a hard bid against you. In the bedroom he lowers you to the mattress with care so anxious it turns clumsy at the last inch. Your back bounces, and he follows you down halfway before catching himself on both arms. There, he hovers, huge, open-mouthed, and trembles for it, and you know damn well it is not from the weight on his shoulders because you tremble too while holding nothing.

Your fingers hook in the hem of his shirt and lift. Dunk straightens enough to help you; yields his arms and head so you can drag it off him. On the other side of cotton he's a mess with his glasses endearingly askew. "There," you say, placing a palm on his cheek.

He huffs, embarassed, scrunches his eyes and smiles with a tongue pushed against the backs of his teeth. Then his hands find your shorts. He searches first, gets your nod, and that is all it takes. The waistband drags down your hips by the work of patient fingers, resists where you're sunken into the bed so you lift, and you could swear he breathes out a little yes.

Around nudity, you tense. Duncan sees it. "There," he says and bends to press his mouth to your stomach.

In current circumstances it is such a strange place to be kissed right before sex that you laugh like an idiot, and ugly too—phlegmy and cracked and wet in a way that you're certain is not attractive. But Duncan looks up with his eyes gone red for entirely different reasons than five minutes ago. "You said kissin's alright," he says.

"I did."

“So—” His palm smooths down your thigh to the knee, broad and calloused like low-grain sandpaper. He gets under the joint and makes it bend, lifts until the leg opens from the hip and leaves you spread in a way that has both of you breathing through the nose. Mouth set judiciously where your belly swells from the pubic bone, he mutters, “—I’m kissin’.”

His body starts moving like communicating vessels: one crawling thing follows another. Crawling palm kickstarts lips. “Still kissin’,” Duncan says, and lies, because now he’s licking. He has his tongue set broad across your navel, travelling upwards until it meets the border of your shirt’s hem.

That invites his other hand to lift it. He bunches the cotton above your tits and continues the kissin’ between your breasts. His hips creep up too, first to your mid-thighs, then level with yours, and the weight of him releases some tension from your loins. He’s wide enough to keep you open by his presence alone, so the hand at the hinge of your knee remains soft. Thumb brushing the side of it. Small. Careful. Damning.

Your palm and finds his hair. Fingers apart, you comb through the roots, then become meaner with the pulling once his stubble brushes your nipple. “Dunk,” you say. “Come here.”

He does, badly. Too much of him for grace, he comes there fast and heavy. Hooks your leg around his hip and presses his clothed, warm cock to your cunt. “Shite,” he hisses when you tug the hairs at his nape. He looks at you, and when you think there will be more kissin’, he stays frozen, just gaping.

“Don’t look like that,” you say.

“Like what?”

“Like I’ve done something to you.”

His eyes drop, then lift. “Haven’t ye?”

He seems a bit shocked by his own answer, so to save him from it you reach for his face and pull him down. Allow yourself the wet and neatless pass of tongue through his mouth. Your leg tightens round him because your body is quick to throw invitation now the brain is ridden with persistent fuck it. Fuck me instead.

Duncan’s hand goes down between you and gets stupid with the practicalities. He could have thought this through better. Could have undressed properly, could have come to bed with some sort of sequence in mind, but details of lovemaking keep leaving him the second your mouth opens under his. He only wants to be close. The rest is laces, waistbands, cloth, mortal hindrance. He shoves at his boxers one-handed, gets them low enough to make use of himself, and winces when the cotton scrapes the head of his cock.

Then, skin meets skin and a sigh falls out of him in one long, shattered piece.

He fits his fist round the base to guide himself. Thumb pressed just under the head, he squeezes until the dew pearls out, slick and clear, then drags it through you. Slow first, because he deludes himself that slow might save him. The crown parts the wet seam of you bluntly, slides up, catches over your clit, and comes back down to nudge at the entrance with no entering done. Your whole body gives a small, greedy twitch to that. His does worse.

“Christ,” he says into your mouth.

Again. A little firmer. His cock learns the route by the fractions: clit, slit, soft clutch of the opening, back up through the mess he has made wetter by being in it. He mixes himself with your sweet sap until the slide acquires sound. The tender parts of you speak through glimmer and greed, while his answer is held in the wrist, in the rippling stomach, and the balls drawn tight enough to feel like someone's holding them.

You bite his lower lip because you cannot think of a sentence worth the effort. He groans, and that makes more of him leak into his own hand. It gets spread back through you on the next pass. There is something near argumentative in it, the way he keeps refusing to give you the thing both of you are braced for. Your hips keep lifting to steal it from him. His knuckles brush your pussy lips each time he works himself down. The heel of his palm grazes the damp hair. He shudders as if the contact keeps running up his spine and knocking something loose behind the eyes.

“Duncan,” you breathe.

“Aye,” he says, uselessly. “Aye, I know.”

He does know. Knows, because your fingers seem dead set on claiming some of his hair for themselves with how viscously you tug. There's a flex to your thigh, hips canting restlessly once the tip of his cock presses where it ought to go but slides away. The tenderest parts of the both of you keep quarrelling, negotiating, resolving, while the faces are busy enduring the wait. Duncan watches yours as if watching a match held to paper.

"Come on," you say, looping both arms round his neck. "Dunk, please."

"But, luv—" he strains, resting his forehead to your mouth. But you're so tight, Dunk wants to say. He laughs, and thank God, you read it as I'm on it. While what Duncan means is I'm sorry for this. Sorry for putting you here. Sorry for liking you so much I forgot to pull out. Sorry for every inch of me and the exact opposite too. "Okay," he says. "Okay."

His hips adjust to stop lying about themselves, and he breaches you slowly. You take him in laborious, exerting shards that make his spine empty of sense. Warmth closes around his length stern as a stubborn mouth and his own puffs out air so suddenly his cheeks swell with it.

He's halfway through when you whine from the bottom of your furious body and cant up for more. "Aye," he says. "Aye, I'm here."

Another inch. The grip is so snug and living the whole of his chest becomes devoted to the passage. His brain too, and his hands, and skin that reddens under your touch and Duncan wonders if scalps can bruise from hair being gripped too ardently. He sinks the last of himself, and when his lower belly meet you, Duncan stops breathing. His body arrives late to the place his heart has been making a fool of itself over for weeks. "There," he says. "There ye are."

You relax around the fullness. Yes, this is right. Your eyes scan him, and find that the lens nearest you is fogged at the edge. And suddenly, you want him bearer, just to see him plain. So you reach for the glasses, and ask, "Can I take those off?"

Dunk huffs a breath. The movement shifts him inside you by some wicked measure and both of you pretend to endure it normally.

"I won't see a thing," he says.

"I know." You slide the glasses off and set them somewhere safe by your pillow. Without them, his face changes. Equally handsome, but transmuted into another kind of comeliness. He's less goofy, more exposed. Somehow more mature and vulnerable. His eyes lose their hard outline, start searching badly and wrinkling where he tries to squint. You cup his jaw and bring him down until his ear is at your mouth. "How about you just listen to me?" you whisper.

The twitch inside you is immediate. "Oh?" you say. Duncan only breathes out a fragmented chuckle. You stroke his cheek with your thumb. "You like that?"

His throat works, excruciatingly thorough, to swallow that gulp down. His hips slip again, then stop, as if there is someone outside of him scolding the misbehaving parts. "Girl," he pleads.

"You do." Your mouth brushes the shell of his ear and his whole back sets until some hard-working vertebrae clicks. "That's good to know."

He pulls back enough to sweep your face and finds, possibly, the shape of your smile. His eyes narrow, poor useless things, and he looks set up by the natural order of things. “You’re very pleased with yourself,” he says.

"A bit."

"Aye, well." He swallows again. His voice has gone thick where he's meant for it to be firm. "Mind yourself then."

You bring him back down. Dunk comes willingly, like he always does when something's been asked of him. His mouth opens against your neck as if that's a grounding thing to do, and he thrusts carefully, deep enough to make your leg flex against his side. The pressure against his ribs is warm, the hand at his nape warmer, and the lips next to his ear border torrid.

"You feel so good," you tell him.

He groans, surrendering the baritone to a higher pitch. "Jesus—"

"So good, Dunk."

"Don't say it like that."

"Like what?"

"As if—" He takes another breath and moves through it. Cock drags slow and proper, particular enough for you to feel the whole thick length of him leaving and coming back. "As if you know."

"I do know."

You might not be an expert on how to execute the part after winning men that makes them brave enough to tell you all the things you yearn to hear (I love you, I love you, I love you), but this—this, you know. You know where they are softhearted. You know how to find this part. Despite what your mother said, it is not wicked. It's listening for key words that quieten their voices, and looking where eyes ought to be set. Dunk seems to be good at this too, because he reads the cues with surprising proficiency. Whether by guess or wisdom, it eludes you, but he manages to be there when you need a hug, a good word, a joke, a shoulder, or now, a fuck. What kind of fuck, he understands quickly too. You don’t yet pass judgement on the intention behind it: if he means to stay for long, or if he has simply recognised the means to an end. The version in which this is just the way he has sex, unperformed and therefore wholly aligned with you, doesn’t even make it to your head.

And Dunk is softhearted in many places. He’s unbearably tender when it comes to tending bodies, as if each part of you deserves kindness. It’s only natural to conclude he’d like that back, in one form or another. He reacts to praise as though it puts ground under his feet. Keeps finding ways to be useful, offering himself in small practical pieces, as if saying notice me, notice me, I am here, without understanding at all that it is impossible to not notice him. If someone in his past failed to see the easiness to love him that he comes with, they were either dumb or cruel in the throat. The only thing in him that halts the loving is the fearful nature of frail hearts. You recognise that like you are both made of similar clay, even if you cannot put a finger on the exact place where it hurts. In cases such as Duncan and yourself, bravery arrives in steps. Valour blooms rather than surges, so you give him a small brick for the lifeblood to keep building. Praise him for the way he is. Just this.

"I do know," you tell him. "You're so patient with me. So careful. I like that."

It costs him some. The hand under your knee pulses, fingers pressing, loosening, pressing again. His stomach jumps against yours, fills with a deep breath, then corrects itself to not flatten you.

"See?" you coo. Pour the sweetness straight into his ear canal so the only thing received by cochlea is that he is being good. "I love how heavy you are. How well you fill me. Fuck, Duncan—" He hits you just right, on the right there. You tighten, and keep muttering, "You're so good to me. So fucking good to me, my good boy."

"Ah—f-fuck—" he snaps, shocked and half-pained.

"Duncan."

He makes the mistake of lifting his head when you say his name. Blind as he is, he still finds your mouth. Kisses you hard, then badly, then breaks to inhale. His hair has fallen over his forehead. Without the glasses he looks dismantled in a more private way, as if you have caught him between skins. "Say it again," he mumbles.

You blink. "What?"

His ears turn crimson. He keeps thrusting. Stays deep, because that's when your body keeps rewarding his with blissful little clenches. Discipline fleets him, and Duncan forgets altogether how to keep himself in reins. It feels too good. Brushes the cords too accurately. "What you said," he rasps.

"That you're good to me?"

He shuts his eyes.

Oh. So that is where it lives.

You pull him closer with the heel of your foot and start speaking into his lips. "You're good to me," you say, slower. "You're good at this. Perfect at this. You make me feel—oh—" You have to stop there, because the next stroke takes the end of the sentence and folds it under your tongue.

Dunk hears enough. Perhaps more than enough. His face comes down beside yours and he starts fucking you with his mouth at your cheek, breathing there, taking the praise like punches he intends to keep as bruises.

"You're beautiful," you whisper. "You know that?"

"N-no." He shakes his head.

"Yes." Your fingers push into his hair. "You are. So handsome. You're so pretty like this."

"Girl," he wheezes. "Girl, I can't—"

"You can." You kiss the corner of his mouth. "You can take it."

You break some working piece in him. He gives one fuller push, then another, and a sound, too open, too surprised, leaves him. His whole body locks above you. "Shite, I—" he gasps. "Shite, wait—"

It takes him too early. You afflict him, his ears and nose and neck with those delicate touches that make the roots of Dunk's hair buzz. With your voice, so fucking loving, it makes his brain melt and threaten to leak. It's all too much. He comes, hideous for trying to withhold it, strong for you being the cause of it, and shivers violently through his every giant muscle. His cock kicks deep with each wrung out spill, face drops to your shoulder, then whole of him follows the drowning to fold around you. The noise he makes there is loud enough to shame him later, if you let it.

You do nothing except hold him. For several seconds Duncan doesn't speak. He focuses on breathing instead and maybe not turning to ash under the blaze of shame. Not one, but a title of few-pumps-chump has finally been handed to him with a shitty confetti and a stale flute of cheap champagne. He stays seated inside you and trembling through the last of it. When he tries to lift himself, his arms disagree.

"I'm sorry," he says, hoarse. “I didn’t mean to—” His pelvis shifts by accident and he winces, oversensitive and still hard enough to make the smallest movement count. “Fuck.”

"Dunk." You press your mouth to his temple. Smooth the hair off his forehead. "Don't be. There's nothing to be sorry for, hm?"

"But you didn't—" he huffs, sounding furious with himself and deeply far away.

A smile, or so he thinks. "I'm okay," you say.

"You didn't finish."

"No," you say. His brows knit. It makes him look so abysmally disappointed that for a beat you consider scraping that and lying.

He lies back down, nuzzling his face to your neck. "Then talk to me," he says.

Your stomach does an unbecoming, joyous little flip. "What?"

“Talk to me,” he says again, quieter. His voice has rawed its own edges, embarrassed and determined both. “Please. I can stay. Jus'—tell me things.”

You smirk. “What things?”

Duncan scowls. “Cruel woman.”

Your hand starts playing with his hair again. Scratching at the scalp, pulling gently. “You want me to praise you back into fucking me?”

Dunk’s eyes close. “Aye,” he says. “If you’re offerin’.”

What moves through you borders unkind. You hook both legs along his sides, cross them on his arse and turn your face to his ear. "So listen," you say.

He's so obedient his entire body slackens as if hearing is achieved through epidermis. For a while, he does just that. Listens with his lashes lowered since sight has become a luxury, and useless to him anyway. He's just touch and sound.

"You're so hot like this," you whisper. His fingers twitch on your shoulder. "You are. All fucked out and sorry for yourself." Against your neck his lips move and draw the shape of Christ. You brush the sweaty curl at his temple. "Your cock feels so good inside me," you say, softer, because it's a less generic truth. "See? You came and I'm still full of you."

Dunk makes a sound rid of consonants. His face turns an inch, mouth opening at your throat because it needs to be put somewhere to not grow loud. You feel him pulse once, tired and sore, and then another thing starts under it. A tiny return. Thickening that makes you rethink your approach on I can take you once again.

“I like it,” you tell him. “The mess you make. I like knowing it’s there.”

“Lass—”

“Makes me feel special.”

That one hurts him. Pleases him too, which may be the hurt of it. He gives the smallest aborted press, an insidious tremor of a body that wants to eat more than it can hold, but it drags through you slickly enough that both of you go quiet. He hisses through his teeth. The overburden of senses has him by the nerves. You can feel it as an argument within the muscles. Pleasure with a hot little blade tucked inside it.

You slide your palm down his back. Sweat has pooled at the dip of his spine and over his shoulders. “I like how big you are,” you say. “How you spread me open just by being there.”

Duncan shudders. His cock gives another slow, disbelieving throb.

“Oh,” you coo. “There he is.”

“Mean,” he mutters, but stays exactly where he is with his ear offered. He wants the cruelty by handful. Wants it ladled warm into the hollow places. Wants to be destroyed by kindness because kindness is the thing he has least defence against.

“You like it?” you ask. He nods once. “Can you tell me with words?”

A pause. His throat works against your skin. “A-aye.”

“Good.”

His whole body rises to that, a rough tightening from shoulders to arse. He moves by mistake, a shallow slip in and out, and the noise bursts from him with such pained sweetness your fingers tense in his hair.

“Careful,” you murmur, though care has begun to look like a strange medicine.

There's a laugh, short and bitten. “Tryin’,” Dunk says.

He always does, which might be a thing that turns you more sombre. “I know you are,” you say and get taken off-guard by how lovesick you sound. You plant a kiss at the place behind his ear. “That’s what I like.”

Duncan goes still again. Listening so hard his body seems to have turned all its chambers towards you. “I like your shoulders,” you say, and let your hand prove it. Sweep over one broad slope, then the other. “I like your sweet face. Especially when you’re inside me.” At that, his breath leaves him in pieces.

There is more. There is a daft, impossible amount more. It crowds up on your tongue in unsayable particulars. I like that your front teeth face inward a little and seem slightly too large for the civil architecture of your mouth. I like the freckle on your left cheek. I like that your left eye crinkles more than the right when you laugh. I like your feet. I like the soft of your stomach. I like your voice in the morning and what you feel like in bed beside me. I like. I like, I like, I like—

You spare him and do not spare him at all. “You’re so pretty, Duncan.”

His hips jerk again. There. No use pretending that one missed. Inside his head the answers to each of your praises start piling up. I like your sweet face too. He bites the thought down and tastes your skin instead. I like your shoulders too. I like your hands. I like them in my hair. I like your laugh when it turns to cackle. I like when you cook and get cross at the pan. I like when you go snotty while crying. I like your tits. I like your arse. I like your thighs. I like the weight of you. I like waking up with one of your hairs stuck to my mouth. I—

“F-fuck,” Duncan hisses through an involuntary back-stabbing twitch.

It's slippery. Lovely. He moves through his own spent and feels the sting prickle from the tip of his cock to the base of his spine like thousands of insects' wings fluttering between layers of skin. His mouth goes so wide the jaw clicks, hand finds your hip, grips, releases, then grips again with a gentleness that comes out more desperate than on purpose.

“Too much?” you ask.

He shakes his head. “N-no.”

In a quick assessment Duncan realises he is fully hard again. Worse than before, somehow. His cock feels harder than it has any right to, bigger too for the swell of deliciously tormented tissue. Blood fills him so utterly he gets light-headed with it and has one fleeting, cowardly thought that maybe men go soft after disgracing themselves for a reason and ought to leave their luck alone. Because this feels stolen. Forbidden in how sweetly it spreads through him. He is bathed in himself and your slick, trembling with it, and still some jurisdiction of the hips returns to him. Enough to roll them into you heavily and whisper, "Keep talkin'. Keep talkin' to me, sweetheart. Please."

It arrives so raw you nearly lose your nerve. Nearly. With the shift inside, your body, faithless and bright, remembers what it was promised. "You're doing so well, Duncan. You're so good. Look at me, darling."

He goes where your palm orders his chin and looks vaguely at where your face should be. It's blurry and he's not certain a case would be different if he had his glasses on. "I want ye to feel good, lassie. I want to be good for you. Oh, fuck—"

Your chest tightens like a hand closing round glass. You smooth your thumb under his eye, where he is hot and damp. “You are,” you tell him. "Kiss me."

He lowers his mouth to yours and lets them meet with too much gratitude, open lips driven by poor coordination. The kiss makes him move into a shallow glide. He is filling out properly, impossible and worried inside you, honed through the overbright ache because praise stomps on every other version of comfort and laughs at it.

"There you are," you say. "Oh fuck, there you are. Right there—"

"Yeah?" Dunk says. Starts pulling back farther, enough to make you protest the loss. When he slides in again both of you feel the second life of him. He brushes the rawest depths. The mess you claim to like so much gets pumped back in with a sound so wet and filthy the burn in Duncan's ears begins to feel cold.

"Yes—" you moan. Clench around him as if welcoming the insult. "God, you're so good—"

He whimpers. Quiet and punched out. Buries his face into your shoulder immediately after as if a noise so vulnerable doesn't have the right to exist in his body.

The sound spills across your chest and bleeds into your fingers. “Oh, Dunk.”

“Don’t make a thing of it.”

“I’m making several things of it.”

“Lass.”

“You sound beautiful,” you tell him, with a face so soft it could kill him.

His whole body flinches. “Jesus, woman.”

“You do.” You pull at his hair until his face comes back where you want it. “You sound beautiful when you want me.”

Duncan stares in your general direction, eyes narrowed and wet, lips parted around breaths he has forgotten to ration. Then his hips move again, and again, each stroke careful out of necessity, each one less careful because you keep rewarding him for it.

I like when you want me too, he thinks, frantic with it. I like when you need me. I love—

He squeezes his lids shut. Whole cliff edge waits under one syllable.

You kiss him before he can fall off it and murmur, “Good boy,” against his mouth.

The last of the strategy leaks off with the sweat at Dunk's temple. He thrusts deeper, shakes harder with the cost of it, and your back arches clean off the bed. Pleasure opens low and hot, fed by the weight of him, the broken sounds, the knowledge that you have put your mouth to some hidden hinge in him and made it swing wide.

“Again,” he says, barely there.

You smile against his lips. “My good boy.”

His cock jumps inside you so hard you gasp. He hears that too. Even without sight, he is learning you by damage and reward. He finds the rhythm by your sounds and keeps his face so close your words have nowhere to go except to him.

“Perfect,” you whisper. “I'm so close, Dunk. Keep fucking me like this. God, you're lovely—” A groan, then another careful stroke. Your thumbs brush under his lower lashes in a sweet little I'm here, I'm here with you. It's not really fair to be able to see his face opened so cleanly while he can't see yours, but the partial anonymity pours some courage down your throat. "I don't know who taught you to be ashamed of wanting," you say, "but they were wrong."

Duncan whines out your name. Torn and bruised by his teeth. The sound of it said like that tips you. You cradle his head to your neck and come with your mouth full of his hair. It seizes you crude and complete, legs and arms locking so hard he has nothing left to do but stay buried and take what your body milks out of him. “My good boy,” you whisper through it. “Duncan, my good boy—”

Good boy. Good boy is what Dunk has always wanted to be, and has tried to be, and still nobody has told him so. Good boy said with conviction by both your mouth and body is what lures him into following you into his second orgasm. He comes again, and worse for it. Loud this time, and costly. His whole body fights itself over where to put the force of it, lower stomach clenching, calf near mangled from the effort of keeping his weight off you. His voice breaks somewhere above his own size. “Ah—Christ, girl—ah, fuck—” Then he spends another load inside you, bathing his cock hot, while your cunt keeps pulling at him in ruthless aftershocks as if it has claimed him now and wants payment.

You keep him trapped by every limb you have. Keep him there while he shudders, while his hips give their last helpless stammers into yours, while his breath falls apart against your throat. It feels brutal for how close it is. For how much of yourselves you have both put into the other without saying the sensible things first.

When it passes, Duncan stays braced over you, trembling. His mouth works near your skin. “Y-you—you—” he stammers. “You make such a mess of me.” He blinks, then palms the mattress for his glasses. Finds them and manages to slide them on one-handed, though not entirely well for they sit on his nose crooked. But at least he can see you again. And Jesus fucking Christ—

The love is no longer embryonic. It has managed to gestate into some sort of Leviathan in the span of one fuck. He looks at what he's done to you and cannot believe his eyes. All of you looks warm. Face melted of every wrinkle it could produce, you lay below him blissed and gorgeous and Dunk feels as if he's going to need to step out from his own skin if he doesn't thank you. For this. For listening. For seeing him and guiding him when he's blind.

"God, girl, what was that?" he says. "What've you done to me?"

You regain the ability to frown. Your brows knit, worried, and you perch yourself higher on one elbow. "Are you not well?" you ask, brushing his cheek. "Have I—"

"No." Then, Duncan laughs. Not because he's happy, though he is, and not because anything is being particularly funny. His body chooses laughter for him. He puts his palm to your jaw and touches your lower lip. Presses on it, stretches it, and it's so glossy it slips away. "Yer not real," he says. "Yer an impossible girl."

A smile splits you, weird and uncanny. It lacks the eyes. Confused, you whisper, "Duncan?"

He answers the sound of his name with his mouth. Poorly at first. A little startled, a little overbrave, a kiss dragged from some place in him still smoking. He catches your lower lip, lets it go, comes back for the corner, then the whole of you, and the further he gets from the post-nut clarity, the more careful he becomes. His hand settles at your neck with a tenderness that feels borrowed from later life.

You let him. Let the kiss calm into something with breathing in it. When he pulls back, his forehead stays close to yours. “How d’you know me so well?” he asks, almost accusing.

Your eyes soften. “I could ask you the same,” you say.

If you did, you'd hear that I love ye, and it cannot be right of you. Duncan goes still above you. “Aye,” he says, though it barely counts as speech.

You brush your thumb over the corner of his mouth. “What?”

“I’ve never had it like that in my life,” he says, blushing fiercely. “I don’t know what it means, or if it has to mean anythin’, but I just—shite, I’m sorry, I jus'—”

“Me too,” you say. He blinks. You nod, because he looks like he needs the second strike of it. “Me too. I wasn’t lying about anything.”

“Thank you,” Dunk says. It is the first thing he can find that is small enough to fit his mouth. Then he shifts, and the small thing gets ruined. “Ah—shite.”

He tries to pull out carefully. Careful does not save either of you. The slip of him leaving is uncomfortable and cold. He hisses. You hiss too, then both sounds turn into sheepish laughter. Dunk sits back on his heels with hands hovering over you as if there is still a correct place to put them and he has not found it yet. "S-sorry," he says.

“Stop apologising for having a dick, okay?”

That makes him look at you in scandalised silence, which is worth the ache. He groans, and looks down since your face is a bit too much. His hands find your knees. He closes your legs gently and rocks them once as if settling something very important and badly made.

You sigh, loose and thready, and your whole lower body goes into a tired little tremor.

“There,” he says. His gaze catches lower. Sticks. “Shite,” he says. “I’ve, uh—”

“What?”

Instead of answering, Duncan leans in and, with the same care, straightens your legs leaving them slightly parted. The air finds you. You make a protesting noise, but he is already lowering himself between your thighs, ungainly and tender about it, until his cheek settles in the crook of one leg and one huge hand smooths over your navel.

“Don’t get any ideas,” you warn him. “I’m still very much untouchable.”

“I—I know.” His voice grows rougher, muffled near your skin. “Me too. I jus’—”

He moves his mouth close and kisses you. There. Low, over skin, without asking anything more from your nerves. His cum is seeping out. Your slit is filled white and wet enough that his spent drips lower, down the swell of buttock and onto the sheet. The sight ought to shame him, probably. Instead, it quiets something in his bones and wakes something worse.

“Relax,” he murmurs. “Just a kiss, lass.”

You try, though relaxation has become a complicated act. His breath warms where everything is swollen and used. He only rests his mouth in small presses, nose close enough to take in the scents bleeding over each other. The newness of it makes him oddly proud. Animal-proud. Kind of proud that probably only another beast would understand.

Duncan ought to leave it there. He knows this from the very recent, first-hand education in what happens when a body is pushed past what it can politely take, and he has no wish to be cruel with you. Still, curiosity implores him. He lets his tongue out only a little and touches you near the entrance, where the trickle has thinned enough to seem less like a dare. Just the tip of it. Just once.

The concoction meets him badly alloyed, both of you discoverable in it. He is salt and water, almost insipid were he to perform alone. You are richer. Sharper. Creamy in the way he remembers from the drunken night that got the two of you here, with that same wild edge underneath. Together it is stranger than either of you apart. Overwhelming, but with a door in it.

He licks again. Small and careful. More reverential than useful, though he would sooner bite off his own tongue than call it that. If romance is a place, Duncan thinks, it is here. Then, he stops thinking much at all. Your fingers find his hair after a moment. You comb once through it and leave your hand there, too tired to do anything finer. When your thigh starts twitching from the weight of his head, he lifts it and looks up at you. “Go shower?” he offers, hoarse. “I’ll change the sheets.”

You stare at him, a little stricken, than let him embrace the weirdness with dignity. Nod. His hands are there to help you when you try to rise and get off the bed. He pulls his T-shirt over you, though only the head, forgetting to put arms into their respectable holes.

"The sheets are—" You start pointing and it's only a finger vaguely poking under cotton.

"I know," Dunk says. "Go, go."

While you're gone, he does things automatically and with his head elsewhere. A man who is a friend and a co-parent and a willing, but ultimately rejected fiance, can only extend his stay this long. Even though for a moment Duncan has felt like an actual lover, there is no argument in him that would sound appropriate aloud. He looks at the dirty sheet in his palms and here he can no longer tell which part of the stain belongs to him, and which to you.

He's stood with a pillowcase half-fixed when you return. Sleepy-looking and warm from the shower, you come closer. Help him with one decisive shake and throw the pillow onto the bed. Then, you crane your head up, and tell him, "Stay? If you want."

Duncan sighs. Bends to kiss your forehead, and says, "Aye." You breathe out too, and the air dilutes int something more chewable. "I'll be right back," he says.

It feels natural to the point of danger. Cuddling in the morning, breakfast together. Setting up a room. Having a mild breakdown over it, which reforges itself into emotions too messy to be talked over so they lead to sex instead. The sex is mind-blowing and leaves Duncan both full and hollow. You take shower first, he goes second. He knows where the sheets are and where the towels are. He knows to wipe his feet before stepping onto the tiles, otherwise you huff so loudly he can hear you across the flat. You gave him a toothbrush. His cock feels a bit scraped, balls empty, but both things are pleasant and sit agreeably on the hips. He walks down the corridor to the bedroom and hears the telly muttering. He can tell exactly which episode of Sapphire & Steel is playing, because he's seen it many times. He cannot remember the plot of it properly, but it's the one with people disappearing into the photographs. In the bedroom you've passed out on your side of the bed, curled, with one arm invading beyond the middle, and the other wedged under your chin. He has his side of the bed. He sits, puts your hand on his thigh, watches the episode and remembers one afternoon when he watched it with Rafe. When the show ends, he turns the telly down and lowers himself so his face is level with your belly.

He's nervous. There's a human inside the size of an avocado, and when Duncan thinks of an avocado in his palm it all seems improbable to him. He's got no idea if the baby can hear him, but feels it is seemly to introduce oneself. "Hello in there," he whispers, quiet to not wake you. "I am your da. We'll meet in uh—" He takes out his hand and counts the remaining time. "In five months," Dunk says.

It all feels very silly but very necessary. He pulls air in through his nose and continues, softer, as if low volume is the thing that might make it less strange. “I, uh… I’ve read babies like when ye sing to them. So I’m gonna—jus' quiet. We won’t wake your mam. She’s asleep.”

There is no answer from above. Only your thick breathing and the small shift of your knee. Dunk takes that as permission. He adjusts himself with one arm folded under his head and legs hanging off the mattress from the knees down. His eyes rest on a place where the child is doing its secret dark work. Then, he clears his throat, feels foolish, and starts with a hum so low it near stays in his chest entirely.

"I wish I was on yonder hill," Duncan croons, half-swallowed for shyness. “‘Tis there I’d sit and cry my fill, until every tear would turn a mill.” He shuts his lids. It's not really a lullaby, but it's the first thing that comes to his mind. The old language feels borrowed and worn smooth enough by other mouths for him to express something Dunk doesn't understand yet.

“Is go dté tú, mo mhuirnín slán… Siúil, siúil, siúil a rúin… Siúil go socair agus siúil go ciúin…"

And may you go, my darling safely. Walk, walk, walk on, oh love. Walk steadily and walk softly.

His voice deepens where it warms. It starts coming quieter, and somehow fuller, and your eyes open somewhere inside the dark of sleep. Unmoving. The room has gone that thin afternoon hush where a body can pretend it is still dreaming if it keeps still enough. Dunk does not know you are listening. That makes it worse. Better. One of those.

There's a hand resting near you, shy of touching until he forgets himself and lets two fingers settle on the cotton. The pressure is almost nothing, but you feel it.

“Siúil go doras agus éalaigh liom,” he sings. The line makes a door appear in your head. An escape. Come away with me. Elope with me, without him having to say anything modern enough to frighten either of you.

When he sings that part he misremembers Gaeilge briefly and lets the thing be just sound, for the true matter and its recipient are, for now, only wishful thinking.

The last blessing comes. “Is go dté tú, mo mhuirnín slán.”

You keep your eyes half shut. Watch him through the blur of your lashes.

“I’ll sell my rock, I’ll sell my reel,” he goes on. “I’ll sell my only spinning wheel to buy my love a sword of steel.” His thumb moves against your shirt. You doubt he notices, or that he understands what his own voice is doing. Making vows out of other people’s grief, putting shape round something he has no courage to hold up in daylight yet. Love, maybe, dressed as a folk song so it can walk past both of you unsearched.

Your throat tightens. Stupidly, completely.

“Is go dté tú, mo mhuirnín slán.”

He hums the chorus this time more than sings it. The Irish turns soft in his mouth, almost sleepy.

“Siúil, siúil, siúil a rúin…”

You let your eyes close before he can catch them open. Let him have the kindness of being unseen. Let yourself have the worse kindness of hearing him.

“Siúil go socair agus siúil go ciúin…”

His fingers spread a little wider over your shirt.

“Siúil go doras agus éalaigh liom…”

By the last line, his voice has thinned to nothing much. A murmur. A breath laid carefully where his hand is.

“Is go dté tú, mo mhuirnín slán.”

For a while after, he only hums. Then even that fades. His hand grows heavy on you, and you know he's fallen asleep. You let out the long-trapped gasp, and with it, a tear falls down your cheek.

One slow blink. Then another, and everything starts coming more shaped in the dull blue wash of the mute telly. People on the screen are moving their mouths as if language has been taken from them for the night and they've been left to mime some tiny domestic catastrophe in a room made of aquarium light.

Third blink, and your eyes drop to where you're being stranded to find Duncan's palm on your stomach. He's asleep beside you, though beside is rather generous.

He's arranged like someone has tried to fold a ladder and given up half way. Half on the mattress, half off it, head near the middle of the bed, one leg bunched under him and the other hanging from the knee down. His glasses sit crooked on his face, skewed and pressing a dent into the bridge of his nose. He's on his belly, cheek smashed into the sheet, mouth slack with sleep, and one huge hand is spread over you with such absurd possession that your first emotion about it is peace, which is aggravating.

He's asleep. He's got no idea what he is doing. Makes the tenderness feel illegitimate to enjoy.

In your lack of enjoyment, you stare, despite there being no sensible reason for it. He looks ridiculous. Too large for the bed, too young round the mouth, all poor limbs at weird angles. A lock of hair has dried wrong over his forehead. The glasses make him look like a child who fell asleep mid-homework and lost the fight to drooling onto the page.

On the top of his left cheek there is a darker speckle. You must've seen it before, surely, but something makes it stand out to you only now. A tiny brown mark set there as if someone placed it with a pin. In the dim, with his face turned loose and harmless, it becomes unbearable. Too specific, intimate and private. A place that ought to be kissed or brushed with a thumb. A detail you have no business wanting to touch.

Your hand lifts very slowly, then stops before your fingers reach him. His shifts. Duncan makes a sound low in his chest, and mutters something into the sheet. You catch no words at first, only the rough shape of them. Then, clearer, sleep-thick and almost cross: “Don' go.”

“Dunk,” you whisper. You lie there with the telly painting him blue and white by turns, feeling your body misread the whole scene with dumb eagerness. It takes the weight of his palm and calls it safety. Takes the crooked glasses and cheek mole and long leg hanging off your bed and begins building a future out of rubbish materials. "Dunk," you say again.

He doesn't wake, only frowns a little, as if disturbed by some dream too small to matter. His fingers flex once, then settle again.

You should move him. His neck will be ruined in the morning. He should go home, or at least get properly under the covers, or do anything that does not involve sleeping half-collapsed. Instead, you turn your face into the pillow and shut your eyes. For one minute, you tell yourself.

One minute of letting it be exactly what it looks like. One minute of his breath scraping softly, of your heart making an idiot of itself in the dark. You fall asleep before the minute is done.

Dunk is carrying a chair. A plain kitchen chair, too small for him, one leg shorter than the others. He carries it through a long corridor full of doors. Behind every door he can hear cutlery clinking, voices low until they boom with laugher, someone saying pass the salt. He knows, with a terrible conviction, that he is supposed to bring the chair somewhere, but nobody told him which room. Every time he opens a door, people inside go quiet, eye the chair first, then him, and fall so silent their mild embarrassment is palpable. He thinks he's arrived too early, or perhaps too late, or with the wrong object altogether.

He clutches the thing in his palm and keeps trying rooms. In some, there is already a chair, but child-sized. In others, there is no space at the table unless someone else gives it up. In one, he sees a woman's hand on the back of an empty seat that could be meant for him, or someone else, but he is too afraid to ask. He cannot see her face.

The chair begins changing weight. Sometimes light enough to carry under one arm. Sometimes so heavy he has to drag it behind himself. At one point he sets it down in the corridor and sits on the floor beside it because he is tired. The place keeps lengthening. The noises of dinner being had behind closed doors get louder and go on without him.

Finally, he finds a room with no table. Only a coat hanging on the back of a door and a small lamp left on. The chair fits there, perfectly. He puts it down and realises the short leg has stopped wobbling. Instead of comfort that the arrangement should bring, it fills him with panic. Simply because it fits. Because someone may come and tell him to leave it there. Worse, someone may come and tell him to stay.

He wakes with a shallow breath, his neck wrung in an odd direction, shoulder dead from the joint down, and his mouth tasting like old tea and a shoe-sole. His body informs him, in detail, that he has been sleeping like an eejit.

For a few seconds he cannot place where he is, nor can he move. The room is dim with a silent AM rerun of Great British Bake Off being ridiculous in the background. Dunk blinks at it, baffled, then looks beside him and goes so still the ache in his spine sharpens to a bright point.

His hand is on you, near clutching your shirt, claiming the rights his waking self would never dare claim. Underneath it your belly rises and falls softly, conducting business in secret. You are asleep on your back, face turned towards him. Fever has left you damp around the hairline. Your mouth is open enough to roughen your breathing. One of your hands is curled near your chin like a child's, and the sight of it makes something in Dunk's chest step forward before his brain can call it back.

He feels the end of the dream leaving him. The waking mind accepts this arrangement with a gratitude of an animal allowed indoors. In a rebuttal to hopeless wandering his subconscious has found a place in the dark that makes sense. There's tenderness in it married with anguish, because the loverboy instinct tells him to rub that hand on you. Wake you with a kiss to the warm temple, and a bunch of husband-like questions. He even starts, a little. His thumb moves in a tiny twitch, when Duncan realises your body is there only by interference and he's a big useless bastard caught within it, taking comfort off a sleeping woman because she failed to shove him away.

Horror arrives late but enthusiastic. He lifts the palm by degrees, as if removing a trap. It peels from the warmth of your clothes and hovers in the air. You make a small sound, and Dunk freezes again. Waits. Counts two of your breaths, then three. When your eyes, thank God, remain closed, he begins the delicate works of extracting the rest of himself from the bed.

Doesn't go too great. He's too much man for stealth at best of times, and these are far from best. His dangling leg has gone numb below the knee, and glasses have been bent against his face with one arm of them getting hooked in the bedding. His hip complains when he tries to move it. Somewhere in the chest cavity his heart is making an attempt at escape. “Shite,” he mouths to nobody.

He gets one foot to the floor, then the other. There is a quiet crack of his back that sounds, to him, like gunfire. You stir, making Dunk stand up too fast and nearly black himself out.

"Mm?" you murmur into the pillow.

"Jus' me," he says, which is possible the least useful thing ever said by a human man. He clears his throat because his voice is coming out rough for some reason. "Didn't mean to wake ye."

A long breath. "Time?" you ask with your eyes closed.

He has no idea. "Early," Dunk says. His phone is in his pocket and when he reaches for it he finds that it shares space with the thing he's managed to forget about stealing from your bathroom. He rubs the lace between his fingers once, then decides to not risk it. "Jus'—early. Go back asleep."

You shift under the blanket. "You sleep 'ere?"

The question is reasonable, which doesn't necessarily mean he has any reasonable answer for it. He can feel every bad one lining up in him, each one worse than the last. Aye, beside you, with my hand on your stomach like someone in a painting about fathers. Aye, after committing an offence in your bathroom. Aye, and if you asked me to do it again I’d probably lie down so fast I’d injure myself.

"Err—passed out," he says instead, because a lie about sleeping on a couch, which would be tremendously better than this, arrives a beat too late in his brain. "On the edge there, like an idiot."

Your mouth moves faintly against the pillow. "Mm."

"I'll make coffee," Dunk says. Leaving the room suddenly seems essential to the survival of everyone involved. "Tea for you. If your throat's still at ye."

You make another sound, already sinking back under. He takes it as permission since he needs it to be one, then turns and leaves before some hidden part of himself decides to confess to anything.

In the kitchen, he builds a case for himself. You'd said he could touch. Had taken his hand and set it there before. You were asleep. He had fallen asleep. People did worse things in the world than sleep beside someone they were having a child with, Dunk tells himself. The case is weak but technically alive, given that Dunk's brain has kindly omitted the infamous bathroom wank.

He puts water on, finds coffee, tea. Opens the wrong cupboard twice, because his mind is circling elsewhere. Soon enough the kettle starts to tremble. Dunk presses the heel of his hand onto one eye beneath the glasses and holds it there until colours bloom behind the lid. He needs to go to work later. Teach children how to throw beanbags without turning it into war. Speak to Egg, maybe. Pretend to be someone who knows what they're doing.

His hand slides to the pocket in another mindless tic. The moment his fingers meet the fabric, Dunk's mind manages to revamp booty into keepsake. The theft is now a romantic expression of unspent yearning that he forbids from tipping into concupiscence. He's a boy in it, and you're a girl in it, and in a better world with more storge poured into the cracks he'd write you a poem or a song. Instead, he remains wanting at a permitted distance, keeping useful and himself light enough to not force the frail scaffolding of things to groan under his weight. Desire, if it must exist, can be made considerate by service. So the underwear stays where it is, if only to feed the part of him that is starving decorously at the edge of the table.

He pours the tea and brews the coffee too strong. Prepares a toast he almost burns if it weren't for you appearing in the doorway. Your hair is flattened on one side and there's a blanked dragged over your shoulders. It makes you look annoyed about having a body at all.

“Up, are ye? How’re ye feeling?” he asks.

“A bit better. Less like I’ve been dug up.” Your hand comes up to wipe a glisten from under the nose. “Don’t you have work?” you ask.

He shrugs. “Second period.”

You glance at the clock on the oven. “You’re going to be late if you keep making toast at me.”

“I’m not making toast at ye," Dunk huffs.

“You are. Aggressively.”

He looks down at the plate, then back at you. Frowns a little. “Do you want it or no?”

You take the toast. “Obviously.”

That eases him somewhere he does not care to examine. He watches you nibble at the corner like someone who've hoped to be hungry and found it not being the case, and the want to stay rises in him so plainly it feels boorish. He could ring the school. Say he is sick. Say there is an emergency. But there are children waiting for him, and Egg, and a life he has been living since before your body started carrying a person partly made of him.

“I’ll go in a minute,” he says. “You’ve paracetamol there. Doctor said plenty of fluids. And rest.”

You give him a look over the plate. “Did the doctor say that, or did the app?”

Warmth crawls over his cheeks. “Both.”

A smile. “God help me.”

His shoulders loosen. “Aye, he is trying,” Dunk says.

You laugh weakly and Dunk takes it as leniency, which is dangerous, because he is exactly the sort of man to become worse under leniency. He tidies what there is to tidy since leaving without doing something feels wrong. You watch him from the counter, eyes heavy. When he finally has no excuse left, he picks up his keys.

“Text me if you get worse,” he says.

You wave a hand at him. “I’ll be fine.”

“Text me if you get worse,” he repeats, softer.

A beat. Your face yields the way children's faces yield when they realise there is no convincing him they are tall enough to reach the upper shelf themselves. “Okay,” you say.

He nods. Stands there a moment too long. Then, he makes himself go before a deranged impulse to kiss you goodbye, loving husband-style, takes root.

The kitchen keeps letting him leave after the door shuts. Like on a photograph taken with long exposure, he exists in versions separated by fragments of seconds. Dunk with keys in hand, Dunk in the threshold, Dunk with his shoulder narrowing through the gap, then already outside. Each one lags and seems to leave you time to say something before the next takes him further away. Then, the latch settles, the last of him goes with it, and you are alone with the toast.

Your head feels full of warm wool. Fever does strange things to proportion: makes an overcooked breakfast swell into domestic delusion, a repeated instruction into devotion, a man leaving for work into some small marital abandonment. You bite the burnt edge because he made it, and while scraping charcoal from your tongue you find yourself genuinely, offensively puzzled that the father of your child has left without kissing you goodbye.

By evening, after sleep and water and the fever coming down enough to gift scale back to things, you manage to demote the morning to a failure mode of a sick mind.

The next week and a half breaks itself into pieces. You work. You rest. You promise Dunk you will take it easy and then answer his texts three hours late from Lyonel's office. Every day you keep meaning to find a date for shopping and fail. First because Lyonel needs copy by yesterday. Then because Rowan wants to compare maternity bras and cries in the changing room because one of them makes her feel like an auntie at a funeral. Then because you sleep fourteen hours and wake with a headache from having done so.

He texts without complaint. Practical things, like Did ye eat? Doctor said to ring if fever comes back. Or: Apricot this week. Which seems a bit large to me but there ye are.

It gets stranger, sometimes. A picture of three children from his school standing proudly beside a mud structure that he explains was meant to be a castle and became a bunker. A blurry photo of Egg’s shaved head with the caption: He says it’s aerodynamic. A message late one evening that only says sleep well, lass, and somehow irritates you so much you stare at it for ten minutes before writing back you too, Dunk.

The nausea starts to loosen its grip by degrees, though it remains spiteful about smells. Coffee becomes possible again from across the room, never near your face. Lyonel’s cologne stays an act of workplace violence. Your own shampoo turns traitor for two mornings, then returns to the side of good. Hunger comes back in blunt, unseemly strikes. One afternoon you eat three slices of toast standing up and then feel so moved by cheese you have to sit down.

Your body keeps making announcements before you can bear to acknowledge why. Your breasts are heavier. Your waistbands leave deeper marks. The lower part of your stomach, easy enough to ignore until now, begins to hold itself differently by evening. In the morning you can still argue with it. By night, bloated and tired and mean with the day, you stand in between the hallway mirrors and turn sideways.

Nothing, you think. Then: something. Then, angrily: shut up.

You lift your shirt anyway. One gives you a version. The warped one offers another, stranger and more definite. Between them you stand multiplied, a line of women all pretending they have not noticed the same small change.

It is hardly visible. May be digestion, may be posture, may be the enormous lunch you ate because a person inside you has lately learnt to ask for food with a fist. Still, your hand goes there in a brief press below the navel while you try your best to avoid the poster-ready, motherly hold. Your fingers instead point down and have to curve sooner than memory thinks they should, because the lower belly no longer gives in quite the same way. There is enough of it now to change the route of your hand. Ordinary soft and crease have begun to pull smooth over the low swell of uterus, stretching the skin a little where it used to kink and fold when you bent. Not much. Just enough for the understanding to carve an informative path, leading from palm to brain.

You finally text Dunk on a Tuesday. Friday? Baby shopping if you’re still game.

His reply comes so fast you picture him holding the phone already. Aye! Course. Then, after a minute: Want me to drive?

You look at the message and tell yourself the warmth in your chest is the usual heartburn. Yes please, you write. If you don't mind.

Course I don't. Another bubble appears: I'll pick you up.

It is both plain and warm enough for you to have to fight yourself over not trying to stretch the conversation further. You smile at it so hard Lyonel's brows crawl underneath the curls on his forehead, then a stupid grin joins them.

On Friday afternoon you change many times. First, you discard the jeans that defy you after two buttons. It makes you wonder whether an already rising necessity to hold clothes in place with a hairband means you've foredoomed your future and the size of Dunk's baby will eventually cause your spine to fold. Sweatpants are an option for a second before you tell yourself to not give up just yet. By the end your bed is covered in garments that no longer fit for various reasons. You stand there in your bra, overheated from the work, and choose a dress because it drops from the shoulders and makes no firm claim on the waist. It solves nothing and simply declines to put a line through the part of you that keeps shifting.

Duncan is waiting by the car, one hand on the roof, looking too large and too earnest for the neighbourhood. Glasses on. Hair still damp from a shower. Jacket open over a plain shirt. He turns when the door shuts behind you.

He looks pleased to see you. Then his eyes drop, and he starts looking worse. Barely a moment, but you see the exact instant he notices the altered line of you beneath the fabric. His face goes open in a way that would be comic if it didn't land straight in the softest, most breakable place you have. His mouth parts. Hand tightens on the roof of the car. You could swear his eyes glisten, a little.

“Dunk,” you warn.

He glances back up. The red has started in his cheeks and gone all the way to his ears, and worse, he tries to shrink from it, shoulders coming in, chin dropping, as if he has been caught looking at something prohibited. You dislike it immediately. He should not have to fold himself smaller over this. So you come the rest of the way and put your arms around him.

Duncan takes the hug a second late, then carefully, like the rules of it might change while he has you. When you press in, you feel the heavy drag of his breath through his chest. It catches you in a stupid spot. Low, first, then warmly, even lower. You have missed him, you realise, with vexation that does nothing to make it less true. When you part, you stay close. Take his hand from where it has gone useless by his side and put it on your stomach.

“It’s mostly bloat,” you tell him.

But Duncan is too far gone. He has an urge to kiss you slow and grateful for it, then a thought about it not being any kind of reward for you stops him. And plenty others. “Aye,” he says, far too gently. “Maybe.”

You roll your eyes because there is nothing else to do with the pressure in your throat. He survives it, since there is a whole afternoon with you still ahead of him, and in the state he is in you will surely roll those pretty things more than once.

He smiles and opens the passenger door for you. “C'mon, then. Let’s go buy things in colours you approve of.”

The car smells of his shower gel and the paper bag of school things he has shoved into the back. You find a crumpled worksheet by your foot, half a dinosaur coloured in with what appears to be sincere violence, and decide against asking. Dunk waits until you have the belt on before he pulls away, then starts driving so slow you have a fleeting thought you'd get there on foot sooner, even pregnant.

For three streets the drive is silent. He checks the mirrors. Changes gear. Does the responsible adult act so completely you start to suspect him of enjoying it.

Then he asks, “That green, is it?”

You look down. Then back at him. "Is what green?"

"The dress."

A blink. You look down again, fully baffled. "Dunk," you say, carefully. “It’s… blue?”

He keeps his eyes on the road. The corner of his mouth goes first, dipping like it has been tugged down by a hook. Then the rest of his face starts failing around it, first around the eyes, where the folds deepen behind his glasses in a way that makes looking at him suddenly feel unwise.

The seat takes more of your weight while a smile works under your nose. “You’re fucking with me.”

“No,” he says.

“You are.”

“I only asked.” He gives one small shrug, then an innocent look so badly timed and so sweet that something in you nearly melts. Before it can, his eyes go back to the road. “Can’t blame a man for askin’.”

“You know it's fucking blue!” Both fists thump against your thighs. "No one's that colourblind!"

Dunk loses it then. A snort gets out of him first, delighted and helpless, and the hand he brings to his mouth comes too late to save anybody. His shoulders jump once. It is such a young sound from such a large man that you have to look out the window for a second to get away from it.

“Nice,” you say. “Making fun of a pregnant woman. Very brave.”

“Ah, hush, wee thing,” he says, still smiling. “You’ll have enough fun out of me at the shop.”

“Will I?”

“Aye. Put me near colours and small clothes and I’m finished.”

His ears are still faintly red from before, but now he looks pleased with himself in a way that makes irritation difficult to keep. “Good,” you say. “I hope they have sixteen shades of cream.”

Dunk makes a wounded sound. “Cruel woman.”

“You started it.”

“I asked if your blue dress was green.”

“And lived,” you mutter, fond. “Count your blessings.”

At the shop there is way too much light and a wall of things you have no right needing this early. Bottles with complicated teats, nappies in blunt white bricks, tiny socks clipped together at the cuffs for feet that are still only theoretical. At the entrance, prams stand in a row with their hoods up and straps lying open, upholstered vacancy with price tags.

Dunk goes straight for a trolley. A large one, naturally. The kind people use when they have produced twins or lost control at a Tesco.

“We don’t need a big one,” you tell him.

He looks down into it, then back at the aisles. Dunk knows this. Logic may insist there will be other shops, other Fridays, other chances to do this properly, but logic has never done much for him when something depends on doing well on the first try. “Might.”

“For what?”

A shrug. “Things.”

You look at the empty trolley, then at where he's looking. “Hard to argue with things.”

He accepts the leave and starts pushing beside you. The trolley objects to him almost immediately. One wheel has a limp, and every few steps it makes a slow, determined pull towards the shelves. Dunk keeps bringing it back with both hands and an amount of care no empty trolley deserves, matching your pace.

For the first ten minutes you are principled. You look at muslins and say they can wait. You touch a pack of newborn vests with animals stitched over the heart and put them back because wanting them this much feels premature. Then, there's a small hat with soft ears you stare at long enough for the hat to grow ugly in front of your eyes, and return it to the shelf with your jaw set.

Dunk picks up a packet of plain white sleepsuits and reads the back carefully. “Those have the fold-over hands,” he says.

You pause. “The what?”

He turns the packet round and points with one large finger. “For scratches. Says here. And Raymun said they can get at their faces with the nails.”

A swallow. “Raymun said.”

“Aye. And some books.”

A woman beside you reaches for cotton pads with the serene expression of someone eavesdropping for sport.

“You’ve been reading about scratch mitts?”

“About babies,” Dunk says, faintly injured. “The mitts were included.”

That is how the first thing goes in the trolley. Fold-over sleepsuits, white, with a little yellow sun stitched near the collar. Then muslins, because babies leak from more places than seems fair. Then a pack of tiny socks, because their size makes something in you go foolish and sore. Dunk puts in a cellular blanket after explaining, with more authority than you are ready for, that the holes are the point.

A small guilt opens under the fondness. He knows about blanket holes while you have done no reading worth mentioning. The first trimester has flung itself past in work, nausea, sleep, and a loneliness you keep stepping over because there are emails to send and copy to fix and a body to haul through the day. The rest of your attention has gone to trying to throttle the lingering horniness by looking at the calendar with your due date on it, as if staring might make the months move faster out of embarrassment.

“You’re unsettlingly prepared,” you say.

“'m not,” he says.

You lean against the shelf and look down at your feet. “You know about blanket holes.”

He looks pleased in a manner he tries to make practical by checking the price. “I know one thing about blanket holes.”

“That’s one more thing than I knew,” you say, and it comes out sad enough that Dunk stops looking at the tag.

He doesn’t know the right words. What he wants to tell you is too large and would come out wrong anyway. That you are doing enough by standing there. By letting him put a blanket with holes into the trolley. By keeping his baby and letting him near enough to have a family around the edges of it. Instead, he comes a little closer and brings the blanket to your cheek. “This one’s soft.”

Your eyes close. A smile finds its way through. “It’s beige.”

“Is it?” he murmurs. “Thought it was red.”

“Dunk.”

It comes out half-whined, laughter pulled unwillingly through the sad place, and relief goes through him so cleanly he nearly grins. He keeps it small.

“How about you put in anything you like,” he says, “and I’ll tell ye what it’s for if I know.”

After that it becomes easier to let wanting have a shape. A changing mat with pears on it goes in because you keep touching the corner and then pretending you haven’t. A packet of bibs follows, then a thermometer, then a soft hooded towel with little ears sewn into the corner. Dunk lifts it, runs his thumb over the edge, and looks at you as if asking whether towels can matter. All he sees is that you love it, so he puts it in.

The bath support takes longer. It is pale and rubbery and shaped in a way neither of you can make sense of until you read the picture on the box. Dunk looks from the baby in the illustration to the object in his hand, then down at your stomach. The movement is so careful your cheeks start feeling warm.

“For washing them?” he asks.

“For keeping them from sliding, I think.”

“Aye,” he says quietly, and adds it to the trolley as if it has become necessary now that he understands it.

He finds nail scissors next. Tiny ones with rounded ends. The hinge makes a useless little click when he tests it, and he almost drops the whole thing for the size of his fingers. His brows draw together. “They’re awful small.”

“So will the hands be.”

He thinks about this. Hands smaller than his thumb, fingers with nails already growing, a whole person arriving with edges that might hurt themselves. He puts the scissors in without another word.

By the end of the second aisle the large trolley has become reasonable. It holds cotton, towelling, small devices, pale things, soft things, proof that wanting can be sorted by category and carried on wheels. You walk beside it feeling a little less foolish each time something else goes in.

Near the clothes, you find two rompers in the same unfortunate family of colours shops invent to distress men. One is pale sage. The other is grey, which feels like cheating even to you. You hold them up against each other.

“Right,” you say. “Test.”

Dunk stops pushing. The trolley wheel makes one last crooked attempt at freedom and knocks his shoe. “Ah, here.”

“No fear. Just tell me what colours these are.”

He looks at the rompers. Then at you. Adjusts his glasses. Then back at the rompers with a focused dread, like he's been asked to defuse something in public. “That one’s grey,” he says.

You cock your head to the side. “Which one?”

His hand hovers, then retreats. “The left.”

“My left or your left?”

He catches his lower lip between his teeth, fighting a smile so broad it puts a dimple in his cheek. “See, that’s dirty work.”

Through the heat fighting its way up your body, you tell him, “Answer the question.”

He squints. Actually squints. A flush begins blooming on his neck with great sincerity. “The one with the buttons.”

“They both have buttons.”

Dunk makes a pained little sound and opens his hands at the rompers, genuinely wronged. “Why would they do that?”

You grin fully. “Because they hate you.”

He breathes out through his nose and takes a step back, stretching the rompers farther from his face, trying for solemn resourcefulness to outdistance his own eyes. “That one is green.”

You look at the romper in your right hand. “This one?”

“Aye.”

“It’s grey.”

His eyes close briefly. “Then the other one’s green.”

“The other one is also sort of grey.”

“That’s cheating, that is.”

A snort gets out of you. The sound of it softens him visibly, though he tries to hide it by taking one romper from you and studying the label. “Sage,” he reads, offended. “Sage is a herb.”

“It is also a colour.”

“It should pick a trade.”

“Do you want the herb-coloured one?”

He looks between them again, then gives up with an honesty you find more damaging than success. “I like the one ye smiled at.”

There is very little to do with that, so you put both in the trolley and move on.

Then, an aisle you find to be a promised land once your eyes rest on the pregnancy pillows arranged in a soft heap. Great curled things, moons and commas and pale sleeping beasts. You press a hand into one and your whole body produces a quiet report in favour. Your hips, back, stomach, and some miserable hinge inside the pelvis all vote yes before you have opened your mouth. “God,” you say. “I need this.”

“Put it in,” Dunk says immediately.

“It’s enormous.”

“So is the trolley.”

You shake your head. “You were waiting to be proved right.”

His lips press together. “A bit.”

You lift a crescent-moon one. It is heavier than expected and shaped to humiliate. Dunk takes it before the second struggle can begin, fitting it into the trolley. It clearly makes you happy but, privately, he hates the pillow with unreasonable bitterness. He feels replaced by stuffed cotton before he has ever been given the job. It is a wicked thought that arrives fully formed anyway: you would not need that great curled bastard if he were allowed to lie where he fit best. The notion burns him so badly he nearly steers into a stack of baby baths.

“You alright?” you ask.

“Aye,” he says. “Wheel’s gone funny.”

“The wheel has been funny since we came in.”

“Aye. Getting worse.”

“Mm.”

The cots are at the back, in a quieter section of the shop with softer light and shelves arranged as if noise would be wrong here. The air smells of new wood and packaging. Little beds stand made up with tiny mattresses and fitted sheets, each one offering a shape to a future that still refuses to hold one for long.

Dunk slows before you do.

There are white ones, natural wood ones, one painted a soft green he wisely does not comment on. Some have drawers underneath. Some turn into toddler beds, according to the cards clipped to the rails. Mobiles hang above them in felt clouds and bees and moons, waiting for somebody sentimental enough to set them moving.

Dunk is that somebody. He reaches up and flicks one with the back of his knuckle. Three small geese begin a lazy circle over an empty mattress.

You watch him watching it. His face has gone quiet in a new way. Earlier he had been pleased, embarrassed, bullied by colours, proud over his research. Now something has pulled him inward. He walks between the cots with the trolley forgotten behind him, barely touching but looking at everything. At one cot, he crouches. His elbows fold over the rail and he peers down into it as if something might already be there if he looks gently enough.

The size of him beside it makes them look like they are meant for dolls, not children. His knees are too high, shoulders too broad, hands folded together like they are too clumsy to be trusted here. Still, the picture settles somewhere tender and inconvenient. This man, bent over a small empty bed, trying to imagine the weight of a person who has so far existed mostly as symptoms, measurements, fruit comparisons, and trouble.

In Dunk’s mind, small beds have chipped rails. Metal corners. Blankets that belong to many children before they belong to more children. He remembers rows of them more than he remembers a single one that was his. Some were too short before he had the language to complain. Some had screws that worked loose. One mattress dipped so badly in the middle that every baby placed there seemed to be sliding towards the same tired hollow. He has no clean memory of being put down in a cot chosen for him before he arrived. He cannot say whether there was one big enough by the time he needed it. There were beds. There were places to sleep. That is a thinner thing.

This one could be picked. Paid for and built before the child came. Waiting with its screws tightened by his hand, its mattress level, and sheet clean.

Your palm appears on his shoulder. “Do you want to buy one today?” you ask.

Dunk looks up. His glasses have slipped a little. “Is it not too early?”

“We’re three months in,” you say. “So technically it isn’t.”

He takes that in like you have granted legal permission for a feeling. His hand stays on the rail. “Could I buy it?” he asks.

“The cot?”

“Aye.” His thumb moves along the wood, then stops, because even touching it too much embarrasses him. “Any one you like. I’d like to buy it. And build it, if that’s alright.”

For a second you have no answer. He looks too ardent asking. Too exposed in the shop light, crouched there amongst rabbits and laminated warnings about safe sleep. The request has come out of him plain, but whatever sits underneath it is large enough to make speech seem like the wrong tool. “Yeah,” you say, softer than intended. “Sure.”

His eyes stay on your face.

“You can pick,” you add. “They’re all pretty to me.”

Dunk looks back into the cot. The geese above the next one have slowed almost to stillness. He nods once, serious as anything, and wraps his fingers round the ribs of the rail. They barely fit there. "D'you like geese?" he asks.

"I love geese," you tell him.

So it's the one with geese. He pays for it separately, then packs everything into the car with the pregnancy pillow wedged behind your seat so poorly it keeps nosing the side of your head all the way home.

Back at your place, Dunk gives you the lightest bags with such poor subtlety that you almost object, then don't. He takes the rest himself, most of it coming in bags that cut into his fingers. When you unlock the door, he is pink in the face and pretending this has cost him no effort at all.

The cot pieces spread across your floor in pale wooden lengths. Screws go into a little bowl. Instructions flatten under Dunk’s palm. He takes his glasses off once to wipe them, puts them back on, and lowers himself to the carpet. You leave him to it and go to the kitchen to make supper out of what can be warmed, cut, or forgiven.

Both things take a long time—supper because a great part of the ingredients makes you feel nauseous upon being cut open, the crib because it is, after all, a rather small object in Duncan's hands. He lays its organs out grouped by the order of assembling, swears a little at the bits and bobs and makes it sound charming enough to worsen the nausea.

You manage pasta, a pan of jarred sauce, and a salad so basic it almost resents being called one. The cucumber is fine until the knife opens it and releases that wet green smell directly into the back of your throat. Onion is impossible. Tomatoes look slimy inside. You stand there breathing shallowly through your mouth, stirring with one hand, watching Dunk through the counter gap while he hunches over the cot and tries to make two pale pieces agree with each other.

It provides you with some inward facing bother, having him there on your floor building furniture for your child. Your body floods itself with hormones and your brain, given one inch of fabricated domestic bliss, takes the whole mile at a run. Him shirtless over the same pieces, sweat caught down his back. Those stupid glasses fogging for reasons caused by different kind of effort. His hands made rougher by wood and screws, touching you after. His face close to yours and his breath smelling of the exact day he has had, and you being able to tell because one can about a person who is theirs.

The pan spits. You look back too late and catch the heel of your palm close enough to heat that pain flashes up before the burn can settle. “Shite,” you hiss, yanking your hand back.

Dunk looks over immediately. “Alright?”

“Fine,” you say. “Just… stupid.”

He keeps looking for another second, then a screw betrays him by rolling under the cot frame. He crouches to retrieve it, one palm braced on the floor, and his shirt rides up at the back.

A narrow strip of lumbar area shows above his jeans. The spine dips cleanly in the middle, framed by the strong cut of obliques at either side, the whole place looking made for hands in a way that feels medically unjust. For holding. For squeezing until your fingers leave shape behind. Suddenly you think of tongues on skin, nails dragging red, his body, specifically, bowing forward under pressure. Your neck feels hot.

The tap goes on. Both hands go under the cold water, including the one that has no reason to be there. You press wet fingers to your throat after, then lean over the counter between the kitchen and the living room, letting the edge hold some of your weight while you try to make your voice even. “How’s it going?”

“Near done,” he says, and steps back with the screwdriver still in his hand.

There is a cot. Around it, the floor is all torn cardboard, folded instructions, plastic sleeves, and one runaway screw. But in the middle of your living room there is a baby bed now, pale and square, looking absurdly small with Duncan standing beside it. He gives one rail a testing nudge.

“Just needs the mattress in,” he says. “Then that’s it, I think.”

To make a point, he reaches up and flicks the mobile. The geese begin their slow circle over the empty space.

You swallow. Smile. “It’s lovely,” you tell him. “You hungry?”

“Aye,” he says, immediate. “Always.” Then his face does a delicate guilty rearrangement. “I’ve a bit for work to do, if I’m stayin’ a while. After I eat. If that’s alright.”

You shrug first, because doing anything else would reveal too much, and pass him a plate. The two of you end up on the couch with the food balanced where it can be balanced. Dunk eats fast, then catches himself and tries to eat slower, which only makes the whole performance worse. He hums through the first few bites. Terribly. Full-throated enough that you nearly ask whether the pasta has inspired him spiritually.

Instead, your body chooses to focus on something more harrowing. He likes it. He likes the food you made in a kitchen with your wet fingerprints still on the counter. This should be ordinary. It lands somewhere below ordinary and starts making trouble.

You get through half your plate before the smell and the day and the stupid little geese overpower you. “Do you want the rest?” you ask, offering it over.

Dunk looks at the plate with plain interest, then at you with stronger principles. “You might want it later.”

“I won’t.”

“You might.”

“Dunk.”

“I’m not scrounging off a pregnant lady, lassie.”

For a second, there is only your stare on him and his enormous moral firmness over three forkfuls of pasta. Then you sigh, defeated, and set the plate back in your lap.

It is fucking weird. So domestic it becomes weird. The ability to sort him properly slips when he is on your couch like that, in your flat like that, eating like that. Part of you cannot understand why the natural progression is running late, one where after supper he is under you, naked and bitten in places not-so-private, so others can see he's spoken for. The cold thought you have been harbouring all this time makes its attempt and struggles to squeeze through.

He is doing it for the baby. He is here for that.

Before you can say anything a normal human might, Dunk leans over the side of the couch for the paper bag and pulls out a clipped stack of worksheets. “Mind if I do this?”

“What is it?”

“Maths assignments.” He shrugs. “From first class,” he adds, as if that explains anything.

You frown at the pages. “Why is a P.E. teacher checking maths assignments?”

“I, uh—maths teacher’s sick. She asked me,” Dunk says. You keep staring at him as if he has just claimed a secondary profession in dentistry, so he smiles and adds, “I’m not that thick, luv. I can manage some first-grader mathematics.”

“Oh… y-yeah, I know.” You shake it off, or try to.

Your brain swells unpleasantly in the quiet that follows. You may not have the best nose for men; that has been proven in several educational instalments. Most of them turned out to be relationship dilettantes with nice-smelling smoke screens. Once the fog came down, you were either dumped or forced to do the dumping for the sake of your sanity. This tactic, though, you know. Damsel in distress. Works exceptionally well on men like Duncan. A nasty little element of your upbringing crawls out then: your mother’s voice, sweet and sour, telling you to always assume the worst of women when precious male specimens are near.

Instead of throttling it, you blurt, “Is she pretty?”

Dunk sucks in some air. “W-what?” You stare at him. He looks genuinely thrown, which somehow makes it worse. “I—I dunno,” he says, blinking. “I guess so? I don’t know, she’s just… a teacher. My colleague.”

Troubleshooting, now. Now, your heart screams. You could say sorry and blame it on being partially brain-dead from nausea. You could apologise and take the hot little shame that comes with blurting something ugly out of nowhere. It is only that the thought of someone else batting her lashes at him does no favours to your stomach or anywhere lower.

You wonder if uterine envy could be a thing, then make yourself worse by staring at the mark on his cheek. It rises when he squints at you. Others must notice it too. Others must notice him, period, because how could they not? They must gape, ogle, crane their necks, lay their palms on his forearm, giggle and lick their lips, willing his eyes to settle there. You wonder if Dunk looks at other women’s lips. If he blushes around them. If he goes warm and clumsy and pleased because someone with normal hormones and a flat stomach asked him for help with sums.

It makes you sick clean through, and before you turn green enough even he would be able to name the colour, you say, “You should ask her out.” Hate yourself in the same instant.

Something in you, meaner and more managerial than the rest, decides to treat the wound as excavation. Dig yourself out by handfuls. If the crush cannot be starved, maybe it can be given walls. Maybe this is simply better. His kindness has become too hard to stand near without misreading it, and every new interval between you feels less like space and more like a test you keep failing in private. If Duncan had someone else in his life, there would be a line thick enough for even your stupid heart to see. A woman from work. A nice one. One who asks him for help with maths and gets his baffled smile over worksheets and no complicated biology grafted to it.

It tastes vile. Hurts so cleanly you almost respect it. Still, you push through, because the alternative is sitting here pregnant and jealous over a woman whose face you have never seen.

Dunk stares at you as if the sentence has reached him in another language. The worksheet in his hand bends slightly under his thumb.

“I mean it,” you say, though your mouth has gone dry. “You don’t owe me celibacy, Dunk.”

His head pulls back a fraction. “I never said I did.”

“No, I know. I’m saying you don’t. We’re still human, aren’t we? We shouldn’t put our lives on a hook because something unplanned happened.”

He says nothing.

You hate this. Hate yourself for sounding sane. “And I’ve been thinking about it too, so maybe it’s a good moment to talk about it.”

That lands. Colour rushes up him so fast it could be fever. Neck first, then ears, then the blunt handsome planes of his face. His fingers crumple the edge of the paper.

“You’ve been—” He stops. Starts again, rougher. “H-how d’you even imagine it?”

You blink, genuinely thrown. “What do you mean?”

Dunk panics, a little. First, because he wants no maths teacher. He has no vacancy anywhere for a maths teacher, pretty or otherwise, no matter how kindly she asks him to take home sums. Secondly, because the thought of anyone coming near you, especially now, makes all the hairs on his body lift in a way he doesn’t like. His chest gets hot. His stomach makes a brave attempt at returning pasta to sender. Some filthy old part of his brain stands up with a club and says: who, exactly, in their right mind, would come close to a woman carrying his child?

The thought arrives first. Primitive, ugly in the teeth. His before he can make it decent. Then air gets in. He drags enough of it through his nose for the mind to take over from the animal. Reluctantly, miserably, he can see the reason in what you are saying. You owe each other honesty and the baby care and some version of friendship that can survive the strain. You do not owe each other the shape of a marriage neither of you agreed to. He counts his blessings, sourly, that the matter has come up now and not seven weeks earlier, when he would have had no claim to even the raw little fury currently making a fool of him.

He looks down at the worksheet. The child has written seven plus five equals eleven. Dunk feels an unreasonable sympathy for the error. “I mean,” he says slowly, “I don’t know how I’d imagine it. That’s what I’m askin’.”

And there it is: the feeling that you have stepped wrong. Put your foot through some tender, rotten board in the floor and now the whole room has heard the crack. You sit up a little, though your body protests it, and gather a blanket around your middle as if that might put things back where they were.

“I haven’t planned anything,” you say quickly. “I only mean… naturally. If it happens. I’ve less chance than you now, obviously, but if something—or someone—happens to be interesting, I’m saying you can.” Your mouth has started running and there is no catching it by the coat. “I’m just saying you can date. That I wouldn’t mind," you lie through your fucking teeth.

Dunk only looks at the papers in his lap. If you stop talking now you are going to cry, and crying over this would make it true in some way you cannot afford.

“I don’t know,” you say, worse now, softer. “I suppose I’m saying you can if you want to. Not that you need my permission, Christ, that’s not what I mean. Just in case you were wondering. Unless you weren’t, then just—ugh.” You press the heel of your hand briefly to one eye. “Forget I said anything. I’m sorry, I’m just—”

“I get it, lass,” he says. Quiet.

You lower your hand.

He smiles at you, and it is so sad your whole jaw goes tight enough to click. “It’s fine,” he says. “I will… keep you posted.”

There is a little hum in your ears. You make yourself smile back. Wide. Awful. Pulled so hard it feels as if someone has hooked thumbs into the corners of your mouth and stretched.

“Yeah,” you say. “Me too. All right. Great. That’s all I’m saying.”

Dunk nods. Looks back at the worksheet. Picks up his pen again.

The telly murmurs low. His pen scratches red ink over paper, and the relief of both of you having behaved so reasonably is horrendous.