Down With Sickness Over @dante-mightdie ‘s Blue Collar!simon And His Fixation With Having A Good Meal

old drawings of ghost

fig. 2. teeth in crooked neck | Kyle 'Gaz' Garrick x Reader

MASTERLIST · AO3

Ten years is a long time to wait for the love of his life. So when you come to him to ask for his help with your heat, what can Gaz do but accept?

or: the forced mating omegaverse au

tags: Size Difference, Size Kink, Omegaverse, Explicit Sexual Content, AFAB Reader, Dubious Consent, Forced Bonding/Mating, Heats & Ruts

His fortune turns when your name flashes across the screen of his phone for the first time in weeks. 

“Hey love,” Gaz says, answering on the first ring. “Haven’t heard your voice in awhile.”

“Hi Kyle,” you sigh, and it’s like life rushes back into him all in one word. 

It’s been a few weeks since you last spoke, the last time being a few days after Gaz returned from a work trip overseas. Since then though, he’s been in the city consistently, making your absence come as a gaping hole in the middle of his life. 

The first thing you do is apologize for the weeks of silence. “Sorry I haven’t reached out. Work was crazy for a bit, and then—…ah, it doesn’t matter. Sorry though.”

“That’s fine, love. Bit calmer now?”

“Uh…yes and no,” you answer cryptically. “That’s, um…that’s why I wanted to call you actually.”

“Yeah?” he prods, curiosity piqued. It’s second nature to always wonder what you’re up to. If it was possible to live in someone’s head, he’d make yours a second home.

“Are you free for lunch tomorrow?”

He puts you on speaker phone so he can check his calendar at the same time. “I can move some things around. Can’t tell me whatever it is you wanna talk about right now?”

You’re quiet for a moment before you speak again, voice a little tinny through the speaker “I just…it’d be better if we could talk face to face.”

Words like those never bode well, but Gaz shakes it off, giving you the benefit of the doubt. It might just be embarrassing or sensitive news that isn’t easily disclosed over the phone. He’s never begrudged you your privacy before; it certainly isn’t going to start now. 

Besides, whatever it is won’t be private for long. 

“Sure, love. We can have lunch. What time?”

There are things he associates with time—seasons, death, taxes. Faces too, when they change with each time he sees them, months separating his visits and meaning that each time he comes home, there are new lines and new wrinkles in familiar faces. Piercings that weren’t there before. Tattoos and pregnancies and blemishes and drooping cheeks. 

Your face, however, is a constant. Not just in that it never seems to change, but that it never leaves his mind long enough to be forgotten. 

After all, how could it leave for even a second with what you are to him? 

He’s gotten that question before. What do you think you’ll do when you find your mate? When you come across an omega that smells just right, so delicious and ripe that you have no choice but to sink your teeth in and hold? 

Gaz doesn’t have to imagine. He’s known longer than most. It’s been more than ten years since he first met you—ten years since his keen teenage nose caught the tail end of your scent and followed it down the hallway and around the corner until he could put a face to the smell. 

His memories after that moment come in snapshots. A passing teacher dragging him into an empty classroom after recognizing the look in his eye, pupils dilated and mouth agape, his whole body thrumming with desire. Sitting in the principal’s office with his hands in his lap, fists clenching and unclenching while waiting for his mother to join them, the other adults in the room watching him with blatant distrust, as if he weren’t a child too; as if this wasn’t new and overwhelming and terrifying. His mother doing her best to console him in the car on the drive home, Gaz both too old and too young for the torrent of emotion washing over him. 

He blocks that week from his memory lest those same emotions surge up and paralyze him in his tracks. It gives him nothing but grief to remember that day. If the agony of an unconsummated mate bond weren’t enough, the sheer indignity of being treated like something to worry about even to this day comes as a crushing blow. 

It’s taken a lot to move beyond those years. 

It isn’t something Gaz would wish on anyone else. His life has been shaped by a very specific kind of longing. Agony in the shape of a neck. His burden since youth has been to stave off the hunger pangs, but that hasn’t always come easy, and it’s come at a cost. 

In the months following that day, he formed a kind of tentative friendship with you, trying not to let the devastation overwhelm him when you never seemed to recognize his scent as your mate’s. To just be in your orbit was better than nothing at all. 

He lasted all of a year at the same university as you before dropping out and enlisting, his instincts steadily becoming too powerful to ignore. The military was where he learned to manage the hunger—long, sleepless nights and rigid protocol hardening him, reinforcing his weak points. Learning to live with a certain kind of absurdity, and sucking up the urge to argue when given asinine tasks like mopping up rain water in a thunderstorm or being put on pencil sharpening duty. 

Since then, time and distance have helped him soothe the ache and leash his instincts. If he couldn’t be your mate, he could be your friend at least, and he’s taken to that role with zeal. 

Hunger still clings to the inside of his rib cage though. Cramped hunger crouched beneath his lungs. All breath, all pneuma. Tight clustered and tumorous. 

These days he’s just better at managing it. 

A day after your call, you meet on neutral territory, a coffee shop around the back of a busy street in Shoreditch, a neighbourhood he’s only visited a few times in years past when you felt inclined to drag him to the Sunday market. It’s not terribly busy for mid-morning on a Saturday, but the steam wand keeps hissing in the background and the music is cranked up a few decibels higher than Gaz would usually like. The whole place smells of hazelnut and toffee. 

You though—you smell like something indescribably delicious. Floral and fragrant, so succulent that his mouth waters when he inhales a lungful of your scent. Sweet like dandelion wine. 

Time has made it easier for his heart to cope with not having you, but not his hunger. 

You make pleasant conversation for a few minutes before addressing the elephant in the room, avoiding it at first in favour of talking about old friends and family—you ask him how his sister’s PhD defence went and light up like a thousand watt bulb when he tells you that it was successful—anything to avoid the real reason for inviting him to lunch. But there comes a point when you have no choice but to suck in a deep breath and finally get to it.

“I need to ask you for a favour.”

“Okay.”

“It’s a big one,” you warn him.

“Okay,” Gaz repeats, smiling. His acceptance comes easy because there’s nothing he wouldn’t do for you.

“I wouldn’t—God, this is so awkward,” you start, a heavy sigh steaming up from the back of your throat, head collapsing into your waiting hands to hide your face. Anything to avoid looking at him. 

Gaz sits and waits patiently for your courage to return. Unlike you, he doesn’t fidget or cross and uncross his legs. His urges are strictly regimented, impulses beaten out of him after years of exposure therapy, so to speak. 

You pick your head back up and his heart thumps in his chest. Mostly beaten out of him. 

“Please don’t feel like I’m pressuring you into this.” His lips twitch with a suppressed grin. “I’m only asking because you were the first person I thought of, but I can always figure something else out, or go to, um…—go to a heat centre.” 

He straightens at those words. “Heat centre?” 

“Yes. My, um—” You go quiet again, the words not coming easily to you, but his mind is already racing, mouth dry when he considers the implications of what little information you’ve already offered up. “I’ve been on suppressants for a really long time. Ever since high school. I was supposed to get my prescription renewed with my doctor this week, but I’ve only been seeing her for a few months, so when she realized how long I’ve been on suppressants for, she…—it’s apparently not healthy to be on them for that long.”

“Not healthy,” Gaz repeats, his rational mind somewhere else. 

You shake your head in confirmation. “No. She said long term suppressant use can lead to different cancers and other health complications, and that I should’ve been spacing it out rather than just…suppressing my heats altogether.”

The shrill whistle of blood through his ears muffles all but your words. 

It barrels into him at full tilt. Drives the breath from his lungs and the thoughts from his head. 

“Your heat is coming up,” he finishes for you, lasering in on the microexpressions flitting across your face. Blinders on. Nothing else in the world matters as much as your next words. 

You swallow. Look away. “Yep,” you chirp, voice catching in your throat and breaking. 

A chair scrapes loudly against the floor when someone nearby scoots back. 

“You aren’t going to a heat centre?” 

“…No.”

His heart beats so hard against his ribs that his chest nearly hurts. 

“You want me to help you through your heat.” He doesn’t have to ask; your trepidation says as much, and he’s always had an eye for details. 

“I know this is awkward, and I wouldn’t ask you if it wasn’t an emergency.”

Gaz reaches across the table instinctively to take your hand. “No, love, it’s fine. You know you can tell me anything. I’m glad you came to me first.”

Glad hardly touches the depth of the emotion coursing through him. Honoured comes closer. It’s not like he’s never thought about you in heat before, but he’d been away so often and for such long stretches of time, that he assumed you’d gone the heat centre route. He would’ve known if you’d gotten an alpha to help you through it—would’ve smelt their stench on you whenever he was back in the city. 

But as grateful as he is that you entrusted him with this knowledge, it also nearly takes his breath away. 

“You’ve never had a heat before?”

It almost seems unfathomable. He’s had plenty of ruts before—a couple of times with a partner, usually another alpha or a beta—and never once assumed that you’d gone your whole life without experiencing a heat. 

You shake your head. “No. I got on suppressants as soon as I presented and it was just easier to live life without having to, you know…deal with heats and all of that. Just seemed like a hassle.”

His head is spinning. He grips the edge of the table to keep himself upright, but it’s almost not enough. At any moment, he might tip right over.

He won’t ask if you’ve ever slept with someone before. It’s none of his business. Even if it were, he wouldn’t want to know. 

Besides, even if you have, they haven’t had you in a way that mattered. There’s no mark on your neck or ring on your finger, and you’ve never spent a heat with someone else. 

Never until now, that is.

The answer is right on his lips when you cut him off at the pass. “Don’t answer now. I wanted to ask you in person, but I don’t want you to feel on the spot.”

“Love, you aren’t putting me on the spot.” Not when the choice is so obvious. 

But you don’t let him finish, holding up a hand to get him to stop talking. There’s a tremor in your hand, your fingers quivering slightly, and noticing that makes him pause. 

“Please just—just think about it,” you insist. 

“…Fine, I’ll give it a think,” Gaz rasps, acting like his whole entire world hasn’t changed in a blink. 

“Thanks, Kyle.” 

Your relief is palpable, so undisguised that he’d be insulted if he wasn’t viscerally aware of how much the conversation has taken out of you.  

You hug him on the way out—a gesture so natural to your friendship that you don’t notice the way he pulls you closer than normal, every inch of your body plastered to his—and he stays for a bit longer, finishing his lunch alone. He needs the time to think after what you just told him, time to digest that news without the blood ringing in his ears.

When he leaves, the sky is different. Silver sheafs of light paint the streets on the walk home, the noise of the traffic and clatter of conversation louder than ever before, the cacophony of a whole world happening around him. But it’s distant somehow, like the trickle of a brook off somewhere deep in a forest. 

He’s on the threshold of a new world, one foot dangling over the edge. For now, he keeps his balance. It remains to be seen in the days to come. 

A late, gold sun bathes the street with ribbons of light and warmth in the early hours of the evening. There’s a bistro across from the building where Simon works the evening shift in the underground parking lot, and they meet there once a week for food and a cig before Simon has to clock in. 

Gaz savours this hour and a half more than most. There’s never a guarantee that Simon will show up; his friendship is a deliberate and intentional act, not easily given but easily taken away. It’s not something that Gaz takes for granted. There may come a day when the other man never shows up again and Gaz eats at a table across from an empty chair. 

He has faith though. Their relationship isn’t so tenuous that every day he expects the worst. More than once, they’ve travelled together—one of Gaz’s fondest memories is sitting with Simon in a piazza in Florence and conversing over espressos and lemon tarallucci. For a time after leaving the military—close to around six weeks, give or take a few days—Simon even slept on Gaz’s couch until finding his own place. 

Suffice it to say, they’re closer than most people would guess. Close enough that Simon doesn’t need to be told that something’s up when Gaz is more brusque with the waiter than usual.  

“Are you ever gonna spit it out or what?” Simon finally asks, a touch annoyed with having to be the one to broach the subject of Gaz’s mood. 

The bigger man sits across the table from him with a mullish look on his face. Cantankerous as always, likely in a mood from a combination of bad sleep and old aches flaring up. He’s always touchier between the seasons, the sudden shifts making his skin go painfully dry and old injuries act up. 

Gaz’s smile is slightly sheepish when it creeps onto his face. “You could tell?”

“‘Course I can. You’ve got stupid look on your face,” Simon grunts, taking a messy bite of his sandwich. Pepperoncini slices and mayonnaise drip from the other end onto the plate. 

The one downside to eating with Simon is having to mask his reaction to Simon’s complete lack of table manners. It's a skill that's come with plenty of practice.

“My—” he pauses, choosing his next word carefully. “A friend of mine asked me to help her through her heat.”

It’s not a topic they’ve ever broached before. His raunchier conversations are usually relegated to Johnny, Soap usually the initiator. Simon keeps his exploits private, cards close to his chest; it doesn’t seem impossible that he has a girl squirreled away somewhere, but Gaz would never know if he did. 

“Ever fucked ‘er before?” Simon asks, blunt as usual. 

Gaz laughs, shaking his head. “No. It’s not like that.”

“But you’re gonna fuck ‘er now?”

“Yes. Maybe. It’s complicated.”

“What’s complicated about fucking an omega through a heat?” He talks with his mouth full for a second before pausing to finish chewing and swallowing. Then he takes another bite, talking through that one too. “Knot ‘er a couple times, wear a mouthguard if you ‘aven’t got enough control, then go home. Simple.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“Why the fuck not?” 

He mulls over the best way to say it before deciding to just mirror Simon’s usual blunt approach. “She’s my mate.”

Simon’s indifference sloughs off all in one go. “When the hell did you bag someone, Garrick?”

His laughter this time borders on derisive. “Haven’t yet, actually.”

Simon stills, staring at him from over his sandwich. More ingredients spill from the bottom and onto the plate but he pays them no mind. The silence stretches on for a while, long enough for Gaz to catch on to the fact that Simon has no intention of responding, either too baffled or appalled to muster up a response or simply waiting for Gaz to justify himself. Likely the latter. 

“We were both too young when we met,” he explains. “Must’ve just presented when I first scented her and everyone told me to wait until she made the first move. Then time passed and…obviously she didn’t, and I didn’t want to pressure her.”

“How young?” 

“Uh…” He doesn’t have to think, but he knows how Simon will respond and that makes him hesitate. “Eighteen?”

“Jesus fuck, Gaz,” Simon groans, letting go of his sandwich in disgust.

“Look—”

“You’ve waited ten bloody years to bite her?”

Simon looks at Gaz like what he’s saying is anathema, like even the thought of not mating his omega doesn’t compute. For him, it probably doesn’t. It’s not the way things usually go. Gaz knows he’s been more patient than most. 

“I didn’t want to force her into a mate bond.” He shrugs. His own sandwich grows cold on the plate, barely a third of it gone compared to the scraps Simon still has left to eat. 

Gaz knows the excuse doesn’t hold water, but for as close as he is with Simon, he doesn’t have it in him to get to the real heart of the matter, the truth that his heart is still bruised. That there’s still a part of him that doesn’t believe this won’t all get ripped away from him in the end. That his own doubts might be the reason it all falls apart. 

“Fuck that,” he scoffs, pointing at Gaz with a mayo and buffalo sauce covered finger. “Have you told ‘er yes then yet? Never mind, ‘course you ‘aven’t, bloody fuckin’ moron. You’re gonna call ‘er after this and tell ‘er yes. Then, on the day of, you fuck her and bite her.”

Gaz rolls his eyes. “I can’t make that decision for her.”

“Someone’s gonna eventually. Has to happen. If it ain’t you, it’ll be some other bloke who gets to fuck and pup ‘er while you sit around with your dick in your hand. That how you want this to play out? Cucked by some bellend who won’t treat ‘er right?”

He nearly gnashes his teeth at Simon’s words, but he’s more civilized than that. He goes stone-faced instead, nostrils flaring.

“What was I supposed to do? Bite her the next time I saw her in the hallway?” Gaz rolls his eyes. “Yeah, that would’ve played out really well for me. Not like I wasn’t on thin fuckin’ ice the whole time with everyone.”

“Been a few years since then.” Simon picks his sandwich back up and takes such a big bite that he squeezes most of the ingredients out, tearing off a chunk of bread and meat.

“Yeah, I’m aware.” His tone is abrasive, but Simon shrugs it off, unbothered by a little vitriol. “Seeing as how I’m the one who’s been suffering through those years. Nobly, might I add.”

“There’s nothing fuckin’ noble about suffering,” he scoffs, upper lip curled. “You do the hard shit and then you get out. No sense in letting it drag on.”

He very nearly argues that point. Has to bite his tongue at the last second to keep from being crueler than warranted. As if suffering weren’t Simon’s main export; his main claim to fame.

He’s better than that though. And, if he were being honest with himself, there might be some truth there. 

When Simon leaves for his shift, Gaz sits there until his coffee goes cold and the manager comes by to gently inform him that they’ll be closing shortly, offering to pack up the rest of his food for home. Gaz nods absently, still miles away in his head.

He drives home in that headspace, mulling Simon’s words over. 

Justice is a core tenet of his. Fairness another. He’s lived his life up to this point guided by a strict set of principles, hardly breaking his rules of conduct unless forced to do so, unless given no other recourse. 

But he’s given so much of himself to the world and asked for so little in return. Is it not fair that he receive this? 

And besides, the beast in his chest rumbles, licking its chops, did you not ask for his help? 

He clicks the button on his sun visor to let himself into his condo’s garage. In the elevator on the way up, he stares at his reflection in the door and chews the inside of his cheek. 

Ten years now he’s sat on his hands and waited for a sign, rejecting the urge to simply take what his beast sees as his. The patience of a monk. Now there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. A white flag waved to signal the end. And rather than take that white flag for what it is and head into the sunlight, he insists on staying put and ignoring the way fate beckons him forward. 

There’s no glory in torturing oneself, no prize to be won for self-abnegation. 

And though his answer was always yes, Gaz allows himself a moment to consider what it would take for him to say no and send you off into the arms of another man. 

He hasn’t got that kind of strength in him. He’s dangled out of helicopters with his head mere inches from the ground, jumped out of a chopper hit by an RPG, fallen through the floor of a building on fire, and been under heavy fire more times than he can count, but that would be the thing that killed him. Seeing you with someone else. Knowing that the opportunity to make you his was truly lost, beyond recovery. 

And he’s tired of the way things are, his sacrificial nature bleeding into every facet of his life. 

There has to be a time for change. 

The next morning, as soon as it’s socially acceptable, he calls you, holding the phone so tight that he accidentally lowers the volume all the way down before fixing it. 

“Thought about it enough. I’ll do it.”

Two weeks until the day.

He circles it in red on the calendar in his office and it colours his peripheral vision every time he turns his head. 

And every night leading up to that day, Gaz puts his head down on his pillow to rest and he dreams. 

Fragmented dream; images of soft thighs and sweat matted hair, lips and tongues pressed together, glutes and buttock squeezing with each thrust, panted breaths getting louder and louder, the air humid and electrified. 

Always, waking at some undetermined hour, jaw clenched, the flameform of a woman left burning in his throat. 

Anticipation whets his appetite. His stomach growls like the beast in his chest and it paces restlessly as the days stretch out endlessly, only stopping when the sun finally dips below the horizon, that time coming each day later and later like some sadistic torture levied on his soul. 

In the weeks leading up to the event, Gaz comes with you to pick up supplies even though you swear that you’ve got it all under control. A lot goes into preparing for a heat. You have to stock your fridge, make your nest, lock away your valuables in case you break anything in the throes of your heat. At the end of your Costco run, the trunk of his car is stuffed to the brim with water bottles, groceries, blankets, wet wipes, chafing cream, sports drinks, and moisturizer. 

At the door to your apartment, he moves to come inside with the bags and only stops when you protest, insisting that your nest isn’t ready yet. His lips twitch into a grin. 

“You don’t want me to help carry everything in?” Gaz asks.

“No, it’s fine. I’d rather—well, just bring everything to the door and I can do the rest.”

He humours you this time because things will be different soon. When your heat is over and he’s no longer just a friend that you can keep at a distance but a red blooded man who tended to your weeping cunt and kissed every inch of your body, things will be different.

Until then though, he can give you this. 

Sometimes he finds himself hypnotized by the tantalizing glimpse of skin that he gets when your neckline pulls and the mating gland sitting in the divot between your neck and shoulder is exposed. 

Every moment in your presence is excruciating now that he knows that the waiting has come to an end. The two week interim period feels almost flimsy, false; the veil has dropped though, and he knows what’s on the other side of it now.

Though his rut is months off, the resonance of your scent must rouse his dormant instincts and throw his hormones into whack because he puts on a couple kilograms with ease, his body preparing for your heat. He overstays his allotted time at the gym by half an hour every session, so lost in his own head that he runs ten kilometres without even realizing it. Sweat runs off him in rivulets, the front of his shirt stained a darker shade of its original colour. 

In the locker room, Gaz sets his towel down on the countertop and stares at his reflection in the mirror. The sudden uptick in mass that he’s put on in the last week is noticeable even to him, his thighs and arms bulkier, and his abs a little less defined with the added weight around his midsection. His skin is smooth and buttery from moisturizing religiously before bed every night, a nice sheen to it. 

He rolls his shoulders back and flexes, preening for the imaginary viewer in his head that looks remarkably like you. 

Johnny would taunt him mercilessly if he could see him now. As if Johnny weren’t twice as vain and pompous as Gaz on a good day. 

He looks good though. Strong. Virile. Capable of seeing his mate through her first heat. If that self-assurance makes him seem cocksure or arrogant, so be it. 

There are plenty of worse things to be. 

“Did you put in for time off?” you ask, still sweaty from a brisk walk through the park to meet him. 

“Yeah. Did it the same day I called you. Took the whole week off.”

Even for as early as it is, the park is busy. Mothers pushing prams jog by in front of the bench the two of you are sitting on, all dressed in the same leggings and puffy vests, headbands holding their hair back. The city has barely woken up from winter’s tight hold, the air brisk and the ponds gelid; small mounds of ice-encrusted snow spread throughout the park like an inverse archipelago. 

In a few more weeks, there might be buds on the trees.

The pretext for spending so much time together in the lead up to your heat is so you can integrate his scent into your system. Gaz barely suppresses a laugh when you give him that excuse. As if you haven’t had a lifetime of acclimation. As if his scent hasn’t immixed with yours by now, and yours with his. 

“I took an extra couple days off after. You know, just in case.” You shrug like it’s no big deal. 

Gaz knows better though. Your ambivalence doesn’t read as wholly true. He can see the way your throat bobs when you swallow and your fingers tighten around your coffee cup. You haven’t made eye contact with him yet despite ten minutes having passed since you sat down beside him. Despite the mild weather, your coat is zipped up to the top, the metal nearly biting into your throat.

You’re doing a bang up job of acting like this isn’t some long preamble before jumping into bed together. He can’t fault you for the fact that it’s all he can think about. It runs through his mind twenty-four-seven, running an endless track that only seems to get easier the more laps he does. 

It’s strange being with you now. Humbling. There’s almost something fascinating in knowing that though you now insist on keeping a polite distance, in a week’s time, he’ll have you flat on your back and whimpering. There’s no harm in allowing you this final bit of grace, so Gaz doesn’t protest, even though—

In a week, you’ll be his.

“Are you nervous?” Gaz asks.

You stiffen, either offended or shy. He settles on the latter when you hesitantly reply, “No. I think we got everything I needed. Um. Not much more to do now other than wait.”

“That’s good.”

“Plus…I trust you.”

His heart clenches at that, stunned into silence for once. 

“You’ve always smelled good too,” you admit. “From what I can tell. I’ve always had a pretty poor sense of smell—really, it’s shit—but you smell better than most people. And I know you’d never hurt me.”

“I wouldn’t,” he stresses. 

You smile and finally meet his eyes. If only he could tell you it with his eyes alone. Nothing could be further from his intentions. If he has his way, you’ll be better off by the end of your heat.

“It’s going to be rough though,” Gaz says apropos of nothing when you go to take a sip, nearly making you spit out your coffee. 

“Huh?” you ask, looking over at him. You wipe your mouth off on your sleeve. 

“First heats always are.” A gust of wind makes you shiver. “You'll probably be worse too, since you put it off for so long—” He chuckles under his breath when your eyes widen. “Sorry, love, I’m not having a go—I’m just being honest is all. Have to know what you’re getting into before it happens; that way you don’t freak out when it’s too late.”

“Too late?” you repeat.

He nods. “Yeah, love. Once your heat hits and my…my alpha takes over, I’m not going to be able to, uh…control myself. I’m going to want to knot you as many times as I can. It’ll be the only thing I’ll want to do.”

All you can do is stare at him, beyond words. Mouth open, teeth separated. One day he’ll have you on your knees like that, tongue out as well to run up the underside of his cock. 

“But I’ll be good to you. I promise.”

He pats your knee before standing up, and you stare up at him with your mouth slightly agape, eyes round. 

“You’re leaving?” you croak, dry throat making your voice crack. 

Gaz smiles. “Gotta head out, love. Got some errands to run. Remember to do your stretches and call me if you need anything before Saturday, alright? And thanks for the coffee.”

He tosses his cup into the bin on his way out of the park, every instinct in him screaming to turn around and go back. It isn’t time though. 

It’s coming, he reassures himself on the walk home. It won’t be long now. 

How does it happen that an alpha can have his omega within biting distance for years and still keep their hands to themselves? He asks himself this question every day, but the answer remains out of reach.  

It takes a strength of will not easily called up. A sense of honour and duty that few can touch, never mind possess. He has it in spades though, chock full of the stuff, and it’s moulded him into the kind of man capable of taking care of you. 

The only thing left unanswered is whether that strength has served its purpose. Whether now is the time to let it go.

He runs his tongue over the point of his canines. 

It’s too soon to tell.

He wakes more alert than any time in nearly thirty years of life, daylight engraved into the side of his face.

Close enough to touch. Gaz’s skin itches when he brushes his teeth and packs his weekend bag with his last few things. An hour—two tops—and you’ll be under him, soft thighs parted and slick hole stuffed full of his cock. Then days more ahead of him to do the same thing over and over and over. 

He drives to your place with a sense of caution that borders on neurotic, coming to a full stop at every stop sign and yield, on the lookout for any reckless drivers lest today be the day that he gets into an accident. There’s no margin for error today. 

The roads are clear this early in the morning though, so he breathes out when he pulls into the parking lot of your building. It’s overcast now, the sun receding behind the clouds. Everywhere around him, life keeps on happening like the world isn’t about to irrevocably change. 

Gaz lets himself in using the spare key fob you gave him a week prior. Even the halls are quiet, the day not yet started enough for people to be on their way out. It’s a Saturday after all. 

His legs seem to move without conscious thought, like he’s being pulled towards your flat, a magnet of opposite polarity. There’s a prickling awareness of another consciousness at the back of his mind. He’s been aware of it all his life, but it’s as real now as it’s ever gotten, the prospect of its omega in heat at the end of a hallway and beyond something as trivial as a door giving it more cognisance, more influence. 

Even from the other side of the door, your scent sets his teeth on edge. 

You answer the door bleary-eyed and sweaty, housecoat cinched tight around your waist and fuzzy slippers making it look like you just woke up. Visibly teetering on the edge of your heat. It’s so obvious and the smell of it so fragrant that Gaz’s instincts kick in and he pushes you back into the apartment, slamming the door shut behind him. His bag drops to the floor beside him. 

“How are you feeling?” he asks, already palming your cheeks and tilting your head this way and that. He tugs down your lower eyelid gently, checking your sclera for anything abnormal.

“A bit hot,” you admit. 

“What’s your temperature?”

“Just a little over ninety-nine degrees. What’s the matter with you? Did you go to med school without telling me or something?” 

A slight temperature is entirely normal for a heat, the body working overtime to support the increased production of estrogen.

“It’s your first heat. I’m taking it seriously.”

You roll your eyes. “It’s not a baby. I don’t think you need to ask me every five minutes if I’m dilated enough.”

He ignores the baby joke because there’ll be danger if he doesn’t. The situation is already tense enough without thinking about you swollen with his pup. That’s a dream for a different day. Instead, he helps you take off the housecoat (which must have been adding five degrees to your internal temperature) and herds you into the kitchen for a cold glass of water.

It helps but barely.

Your first wave of your heat doesn’t crest until mid-morning, and by then Gaz is practically breathing smoke, the scope of his attention shrinking until you’re the only thing he can focus on. When you twitch, his head snaps in your direction, eyes vacant apart from a slight glimmer of awareness. 

It’s getting harder to think through the fog. It’d be worse if his rut overlapped with your heat, but even just being in proximity to an omega in heat—his mate, no less—forces him into an equivalent headspace. Ears peeled for any noises in the hallway outside your apartment. Wary of another alpha intruding on you in this state.

“C’mon, baby, we’re gonna get one last snack in you before it hits,” Gaz murmurs soothingly, urging you up off the couch and into the kitchen. You stumble slightly on your way there and his heart skips a beat.

You squirm in your chair while trembling fingers bring slices of manchego and chorizo up to your lips. His gaze is intense and unwavering. Any desire to glance down at the spot between your legs evaporates when your eyelashes flutter shut and your cheeks bulge as you chew. 

You’re so sweet like this. A tender thing for him to open up and ply with victuals.

“Just a couple more, okay?” he urges, pushing the plate closer to you and shushing you when you whine. 

You turn your head away when he brings a slice of cheese to your lips. “M’full,” you complain. 

“I know, baby, but it’s gonna be a long time before you’ll wanna eat again.”

“You smell weird,” you grumble instead, turning your head into his armpit and taking a deep inhale. 

“What do you mean ‘weird’?” he asks, slightly perplexed.

“Dunno. Different.” You drag another deep breath in. “Did you put cologne on or something? Smells…uh…really good.”

His dick throbs. “No, baby. Didn’t even shower before I came over.”

“Mmm. Good.”

His arm drops to the table, the force of it making the plate rattle. Fuck but how that nearly gets him. He’s not infallible. Eventually something is going to tip him over the edge from sanity into delirium. 

If this is any indication of the days to come, there’s a chance neither of you will come out entirely unscathed. 

It happens gradually, your sentences slowly degenerating and fragmenting, and your eyes glazing over. Even the smell of your skin gets richer. 

The effect that your heat is having on him is staggering. No one told him it’d be like this. No one told him it’d be like unzipping himself and letting you inside. Like sitting still as a fire blazes around him, the flames licking closer and closer to his skin.

Then your fever spikes and all bets are off. 

“Up,” Gaz growls. He doesn’t wait for you to listen, lifting you up from the chair from under your arm and hunching slightly to scoop you up into his arms. 

You moan, clinging to him. “It’s, uh—Kyle, I…I’m really hot.”

His legs are heavy beneath him, lead weights that he has to drag across the apartment, each step tougher than the last. 

Your nest is a soft, sumptuous garden of blankets and pillows and assorted clothes dragged out of the closet and spread across the floor and bed. You must have pulled the mattress off the bed frame at some point in the last two weeks because it’s pressed into the corner of the room, draped in every single sheet and blanket you own. The bed frame sits quite awkwardly on the other side of the room, pushed out of the way so as to not get in the way, and there are foam panels plastered all over to soundproof the walls. 

Clever girl, thinking of that. 

Everything’s been rearranged. He’d caught that you’d dragged a bookshelf into the living room when he came into your apartment, but even your dresser and nightstand are tucked away in the corner of your room. It’s like you took inventory of everything you own and moved everything apart from the barest essentials needed for your heat. 

He comes down onto one knee on the edge of the mattress before setting you down. You come up onto your elbows almost immediately. There’s a look in your eyes that he’s never seen before except in his dreams. Besotted, devotional. In his wildest dreams, he couldn’t have imagined that you’d ever look at him like this. 

You sit up when he comes down onto the mattress, constantly orbiting and orienting towards him. 

“Gonna take this a little at a time, okay, love?” Gaz rumbles. 

“Yeah, yeah,” you rasp, climbing into his lap when he softly urges you up. An arm braced behind him keeps him from collapsing when you sag into him. 

Pseudo-rut makes him a bit dumb, a bit clumsy. He palms the back of your neck a bit too roughly, murmuring an apology against your lips when you whimper before drawing you into a deep, toe-curling kiss. 

His stomach seizes up when he realizes that he’s kissing you for the first time. Ten years of anguish and heartache and delirious need finally culminating in your lips parting against his, the soft melt of your tongue against his when you let his tongue slide into your mouth, his blunt fingers tilting your head higher up. 

Gorgeous, perfect mouth. Kissing it feels like coming home after years away. 

God, he’s wanted it for so long. And God, your mouth tastes good, and when your tongue touches his, his head goes cloudy and his cheeks go hot. 

Clothes fall to the wayside, slowly added to the nest one by one—his pants are shoved into the crease between the mattress and the wall, your shirt tucked under a pillow. He has to reach down to readjust himself through his boxers and your eyes follow the path his hand takes, going half-lidded and hot.

He smirks, only a little bashful. “See something you like?” 

“Uh-huh,” you mumble, barely taking in his words. 

His chest puffs involuntarily, the beast in him preening. 

Touching your bare skin for the first time, Gaz realizes that he’s never felt so moored and ready. This is where he’s meant to be. Every agonizing moment of the last ten years has prepared him for this moment; not even the bite of his pseudo-rut could make him flounder. 

He traces a nipple with his thumb, following the path with his tongue when he lifts his thumb away, round and round the areola until you’re practically sobbing his name. Not enough. It’s still not enough. 

“Baby, I need to get you ready,” he murmurs when you pull at the waistband of his boxers. 

“M’ready now,” you half-snarl, tugging more forcefully, trying to rip his underwear right off. 

Gaz laughs. “No, you’re not.”

You don’t have a choice but to indulge him though. It’s his way or the highway. He’d told you that back at the beginning, after ringing you to tell you that he’d help you through your heat—it had to be under his terms or not at all. 

Your knickers get shoved under the pillow as well. Something for him to toy with later, when you’re tuckered out and not raring to go just yet. It’ll tide him over when you’re too sensitive for him to play with your pussy. 

He barely grazes a knuckle over your clit and you come, hiccupping through your first orgasm. You’re quick to come, like everything up to this point has just been foreplay. 

“Oh lovie,” he coos, pressing his lips to your temple. “It’s alright—I’ve got you.”

You jolt when he thumbs your clit again. Too sensitive. He pulls it away just long enough for you to catch your breath and for the twitches to subside, but when you start to pant again, your smelling ripening in that telltale way, he strums his thumb across it again, tucking a finger into your hole and groaning when he finds it scorching hot.

He dreamt of fingering you all the time back in high school. Thought of sitting beside you in the auditorium during assemblies and sliding his hand up your skirt until you spread your thighs and let him push your panties out of the way; cornering you in the bathroom between classes and pressing his fingers into you from behind, muffling your cries with his mouth; jiggling your pretty clit in the backseat of the bus, draping his jacket across your lap so no one else would see your wet pussy. 

The reality is so much better than he ever could’ve imagined. 

Three fingers and still you beg for more. You’re clamped so tight around his fingers that he can barely move them, not without exerting a bit more force than he’d like. You must like it though because you squeeze around his neck almost intolerably tight when he forces his fingers in.

“Good girl,” he grunts, shoving them back in. “You can take it.” 

“A-alpha?” you stutter. 

Gaz pulls you close, tucking your face into his neck. “Come here, I’ve got you. Just hold onto me, love, okay? Can you do that?”

“Y-yeah,” you breathe. 

His whole body jerks when you bite his neck. Your teeth don’t break the skin, but still he shudders, squeezing his eyes shut. Just barely keeps from telling you to bite down harder.

You have to take another break after you come, limp and satiated. Gaz uses that time to fluff the nest a bit, getting it nice and comfortable. He even leaves to fetch you a glass of water, bringing you into his chest for a nice cuddle while you recharge.

When you start staring too much again, he knows it’s almost time. 

Nervousness has no hold on him though. You came to him because you trusted him to take care of you through your first heat. 

That assurance settles him. Grounds him. There’s no one more equipped to do what he’s about to do because he’s waited his whole life for this. Whether consciously or not, his whole life has been in preparation for this moment, every choice, every heartache, every sleepless night. It’s all been in anticipation of this. 

It nearly undoes him though, despite everything. Despite the weeks spent mentally preparing, despite the strength in his body and the muscle he’s tacked on, despite his own fervor even. 

Because when he climbs on top of you and your thighs part, your hole is wet and waiting, ready for him to use it and leave a little mess behind. Just looking at it makes his balls throb. It almost doesn’t seem right that he’s about to spoil something as pretty as your pussy with his dick. Leave it stretched out and full of come. A little puffy from being knotted so many times. He should’ve gotten you a plug for after, something to keep his come inside of you. 

If his cock wasn’t so heavy, Gaz would be tempted to lean down and kiss it a bit too. It feels wrong to push inside without at least a little send-off kiss, something soft to set your mind at ease before he fucks you six ways from Sunday. 

He doesn’t have the luxury of taking his time though; your temperature is rising again, skin hot to the touch. 

Your patience is thinning too. “Kyle, I can’t wait—I can’t. I need you—” 

“I know, baby, I know.”

He strips off the last of his clothes quickly, boxers getting tossed behind him somewhere, before crawling over you again. The head of his cock looks brutish against your slick opening when he lines it up, but it stretches so prettily when he starts to sink in, gravity doing the work for him. 

Your legs girdle his waist, pillowy thighs catching him when he sinks to the hilt, breasts moulding to his chest. You’re scorching hot inside, a sweltering, blistering wetness that squeezes his cock like a vice. 

“Baby…” 

He sounds broken, eviscerated. Gutted like a gralloched animal. 

Gaz is barely able to move, barely able to pull his hips back and hump forward, the mattress shifting under him. He could probably knot you just like that. It wouldn’t take much to push him over the edge. 

“Ohohohohoh—” you squeak when he grunts low and deep, bearing down on top of you.

Two strokes into the softest, wettest cunt of his life and his resolve fractures into a thousand parts. Shards too splintered to ever piece back together again. 

At the back of his mind, he thought he might be strong enough to resist temptation. Thought he wouldn’t need anything as barbaric as a mouthguard or a collar around your throat to keep him from giving in to his baser urges. 

Strength isn’t what kept his urges fenced in though. Fear is what’s haunted him for the last ten years—the fear that he wouldn’t be enough for you, that he wasn’t allowed to have you for some reason, doubt crawling into his ear like an insect and whispering to him that he had so much more to do in order to prove himself worthy of you, that you needed to be the one to invite him in. 

But you have, haven’t you? 

Two strokes into the love of his life’s pussy and Gaz relinquishes himself to instinct, dropping his head, teeth sinking into the mating gland sitting pretty at the crook of your neck. It gives almost too easily under his teeth. Soft and tender skin, and then the secretions fill his mouth, blood and ambrosia all at once. Sweet dandelion wine and honeyed nectar. 

You tense up around him instantly, a garbled, watery gasp jumping from your lips, and sharp fingernails bite into his shoulders.

“Oh fuck,” Gaz gasps into the side of your neck when he relaxes his bite, head spinning as it all snaps into place, every strand finally tightening into place, draped in fate like samite, ermine, and brocade. “Oh God, baby, I’m so sorry. Oh God, baby, fuuuuuuck…”

“Alpha?” you wheeze. 

“Yeah, baby, I’m here,” he sighs, laving his tongue over the hurt. Your pulse thrums under his tongue, nervous and fast. “You just felt—hng, fuck—felt so good. Couldn’t help m’self.”

“A-alpha, you—you bit me—”

“Sorry, love, I didn’t mean to. Just couldn’t help it.”

“It hurts,” you whimper. You sound like you’re on the verge of tears.

“I know, baby, I know—I’m sorry. M’gonna make it all better, okay?”

“You’re gonna make it better?” you ask, almost pathetically, the tears beading in the corners of your eyes. 

His goddamn heart nearly breaks at the sight of your tears. “Of course I will, baby. Not gonna let anything bad happen to you—not my omega. My mate.”

There’s blood on his lip but not an ounce of regret in his being. Gaz sits up on his haunches, hands digging into your waist when he repositions you. He rolls you over onto your side and lifts a leg over his shoulder, swollen lips splitting open with the stretch, and fuck if you aren’t dripping wet. His head lolls forward as he stares, tempted to put you right back down and drink straight from the source, hook both legs over his shoulders and just go to town. 

But he has a job to do and his knot is already fattening up at the base of his cock, desperate to be wedged in a soft, warm hole. 

One hand palms your belly while the other holds your leg in place as he shuffles forward, turgid cock still slick with your juices. He pulls his hand away from your stomach briefly to readjust his cock, lining it up with your hole against before sinking in, letting the weight of his body carry him forward. 

Your eyes roll back in your head, the whites so white that his teeth ache. Not a hint of iris or pupil. 

He bottoms out this time on the first stroke, the curly hairs at the base of his cock damp with your slick. Warm, wet walls squeeze around his cock, sucking him in deeper, and Gaz curses softly under his breath. 

“With me, love?” Gaz asks.

When you don’t respond right away, he gives your cheek a light tap. “M’okay…”

The first few thrusts are mindful, slow enough to gauge your reaction and ensure you aren’t overwhelmed. His instincts dig like a spike into the back of his head, but Gaz grits his teeth, forcing back the impulse to rut between your thighs like a mindless beast. There’ll be a time for that in the coming days. 

Then he bucks forward a bit rougher, his shoulders tightening, tendons in his neck straining when his jaw clenches. 

Your breath comes short and sharp. “Oh god, oh my god…”

“There we go,” Gaz purrs. “That better, baby?”

“H-huh…?” Disoriented, your eyes roll around in their sockets until they land on him. Recognition comes slow, if at all. Poor thing, so horny that you can’t even think straight. 

“That feel good? That feel better, baby? I’ll take care of everything in the morning—get all the paperwork sorted, tell your parents and friends, everything. Not gonna let you stress about anything. Just have to lie there and take it nice and deep.”

The thought alone nearly makes him come. He’ll do everything by the book in the morning. It appeals to him on a base level, the idea of taking care of everything for you, so entrenched in your life that you don’t even have to think with him around. 

No more holding back, his beast rumbles in his chest.

We’ve always been worthy of this.

The thing under his skin has gone hungry for far too many years. It has known where to go to satisfy itself, but waited instead for the meal to come to it. 

And it has. You have. Wobbly-lipped and desperate for him to bite and hold. 

His pace is frantic now, mind turned off and glutes flexing with every thrust, thighs burning with the effort to keep the rhythm. All that matters is burying himself in you as deep as physically possible. 

Sweat drips into his eyes. Blinking doesn’t help. The air compresses around him, squeezing him to the point of bursting. 

Your pretty tits bounce with every thrust and he has to touch them. Grab them. Mould his hand over them until his palm always remembers what your nipple feels like. He loves the sounds you make when he pinches them and slides them between his fingers. 

“Wanted to touch these for years,” Gaz growls. He cups his hand under your breast, plumping it up all nicely. “Every summer you’d wear these, uh, these low cut tops…and I’d be so fucking hard, thinking about how much I wanted to pull your shirt down and suck on them.” 

“You never—oh, oh, oh—” you start, interrupted when you come again, walls contracting around his length. Gaz has to grit his teeth to keep from coming as well, not ready to come just yet. 

This one leaves you near breathless, too spent to finish your sentence. Your channel milks his cock. 

He wants to hear it though. “What’s that, baby?” 

“You…you never…said anything.”

“Wasn’t sure you wanted me back.” His vulnerability is ripped from him without warning, so used to giving you everything that he doesn’t even stop to think about what it’ll do to him.

You scrunch up your face, pouting up at him and it’s bad for his heart, it’s so bad for his heart how smitten he is with you. “‘Course I did. I just thought—I thought you didn’t—I’m, ah…”

So close to coming again, you lose track of your words, but Gaz understands, and the implication leaves him short of breath. 

So much lost time. So much to make up for. 

He leans down, bracing himself over you again. Your skin tastes salty when he runs his tongue over the shell of your ear. “You gonna take my knot, baby?” 

“Yesyesyesyes—”

“Gonna let me come inside too?”

“Yesssss—” you hiss through your teeth, tears spilling over your waterlines.

“‘Course you are, perfect girl. Gonna let me come inside and knot you because you’re mine. You’re my girl—my omega—my mate—”

It’s right there, barely a klick away. His balls are drawn up tight, thighs tensed and burning, every inch of him poised on the edge, desperate to come. 

When you reach down to grab a handful of his arse, trying to pull him in closer, Gaz chokes on his breath, tipped right over the edge. His groin pulses when he comes, that first spurt so good that his vision goes spotty. 

It’s so good—

God.

It’s hard to think. Hard to breathe. 

The breath is punched out of him, the sudden swell of his knot winding him. It locks his hips in place, the swollen flesh snug in the wet embrace of your cunt. Under him, you gasp for breath, wide eyes staring up at him.

“It’s alright, it’s alright,” Gaz coos, cupping your cheek in his hand. “I’ve got you, love.”

His hips grind forward in absence of any movement. Your walls flutter around his knot, too stretched out to squeeze any tighter. The energy is sucked from his body with his come, each pulse making him shudder and gasp. You must be full to the brim with how much he comes.

When there’s nothing left in him to give, Gaz slumps forward, only his elbows catching his weight, hips pinning yours down to the bed until he rolls over tentatively, making sure to keep you pressed tight to his chest. 

There’s nothing he could say that would be better than just this—draped over you, forehead to forehead, soothing his omega. Rubbing the bridge of his nose against yours. Massaging your thigh when you shift, a little cramp in your hip. 

It comes like second nature to him. It’s always been his favourite part after all—the afterglow. Pillow talk and cuddling; sweet, slow kisses with swollen lips. The fact that it’s with you only makes him enjoy it more.

When his knot softens enough to dislodge, he pulls out of you and strokes your cheek when you whine in discomfort. The sight of your poor, battered cunt makes him wince. 

He wets a hand towel in the bathroom and comes back to find you in the same place as when he left you, dazed eyes watching him curiously. Kneeling at the edge of the bed, he parts your legs to either side and crawls in closer, starting with the mess along your inner thighs and the fold of your butt. 

“Stay still,” he growls when you squirm. You go still at the subtle command in his voice, alert even under the fog of heat.

Your legs still twitch when he swipes the cloth between your legs, wiping off his leaking spend and the slick still wet on your inner thighs, but you hold yourself as still as possible, nearly biting your lip off in the process. 

“T-thank you, alpha,” you whisper, chewing on your fingertip. 

He feels his cock twitch at that, still wet with your juices. Doesn’t take much for you to work him up. 

It isn’t long before your heat crests again and you’re crawling over Gaz, hands pinning his shoulders down to the mattress. He laughs. The sound dies in his throat when you line his shaft up with your hole and sink down in one smooth motion, shutting him up oh so effectively.

Cheeky little thing. 

A few days go missing, only recalled in chunks when he’s a bit more clear-headed. Feeding you fresh fruit and slices of cheese from his fingers as you whined on his knot. Licking his own spend out of you while holding your trembling thighs open, digging his fingers into your plush inner thighs. Sucking your beaded nipples into his mouth while gliding his fingers over your clit, your cunt a bit too sore to take his knot again; not so soon anyway. Carrying you into the bathroom for a quick soak before emptying the tub and bringing you back to the bed. 

All the while, feeling your presence like a phantom limb. Like an extension of himself. Every inch of your pleasure rippling across his skin, amplifying his own. 

If Gaz had known it would be like this—

he’d have moved heaven and hell to have it. 

It’s his now though. You’re his. Mated and bound to him. So intrinsically and indelibly tied to him that no earthly force could pull you apart. 

It’s why now he can feel your mounting anxiety like a prickle at the back of his head. It’s what wakes him up so suddenly, creamy golden light spilling across the sheets and furniture when he opens his eyes to the door to your bedroom ajar. 

You’re in the bathroom when Gaz walks in, touching the mostly healed mating mark on your neck. It’s barely a puckered scar, so subtle that he might have missed it.

“Did you mean to do it?” you ask. It’s not the question he expected, but then again, Gaz isn’t sure what he expected from you. 

He nods though. No sense in lying to you. “Yeah.”

It’s clear now that this was always going to be the natural end, that any tryst between the two of you would always end here, with his mark on your neck. 

He wraps his arms around you and pulls you into him, moulding you to his chest. In the mirror, you look exceptionally fragile, still shaky and brittle from your heat, and it makes his heart ache. 

“I didn’t think I would, but I wanted to. I never would’ve if I had any doubt.”

One day he’ll tell you everything. He’ll tell you why he waited so long, what held him back all these years when he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that nothing else would come close to this. 

“You didn’t used to smell like this,” you murmur, cold nose pressed into his collar bone. You seal your words with a deep inhale, drawing all of your breath into your lungs and holding it there for a moment before expelling it. 

“What do you mean?” Gaz asks. His lips twitch when you press your nose harder against his skin. 

“It’s different. It changed.”

“I swear it hasn’t,” he laughs. “I’ve always smelled like this.” 

He can feel the way you wrinkle your nose against his skin. “Liar. You used to smell… I don’t know. Maybe like this, but subtler. Fainter.” You exhale again, more contemplative this time. “It must’ve been my heat. Everything smells so much stronger now. It’s like breathing after being sick or something. Like my nose is clear or something.”

Gaz stares at your reflection from over your head while it washes over him. Of course his life would be ruled by a comedy of errors. What might’ve happened had you not gotten on suppressants all those years ago? Maybe nothing. Maybe the past is what it’s always been and there’s no sense in looking back and asking what if things had been better. Maybe regrets are like false idols in that way—there’s nothing holy in worshipping at the altar of them. 

He makes a mental note to keep this from Johnny. Gaz will never hear the end of it if he finds out. 

“What are we gonna do now?” you whisper. 

He lowers his head, pressing his lips to your crown for a moment before resting his chin on top of your head. “Don’t worry, love. I’ll take care of everything.”

ch13 something borrowed something blue (mafia!price x simon's sister!reader)

tw: allusions to torture. reader has some ptsd. SMUT.

also i did not edit this srry

masterlist | next

“Again.”

Johnny sighs to his right, but Simon ignores it, too concerned with the man in the chair in front of him. “Say it again.” The man in the chair (Richard, 34, nephew of a Price uncle, twice-removed or some bullshit) spits out a glob of blood on the floor before clearing his throat. “The night the weapons were stolen I was at home with my wife. We watched a new episode of one of those trashy American shows, The Bachelor, that dropped that night. I was off-shift. Came in at 6am because of the Mrs. Price emergency.” Simon’s eyebrow twitches under his mask. Three days after getting his sister back and this is what sniffs out the rat? An American show Johnny loves to pirate? He wants to laugh at the absurdity of it all.

Johnny catches his eye and he can’t fault the man for the grin on his face. When Simon turns back to Richard, red in the face, he’s pretty sure the man’s figured it out. “The Bachelor drops Mondays.”

Richard sputters, twitching. “We were catchin’ up from the week before.” Simon shakes his head, glancing at the papers on the table to his left. “You had off every other night that week and only got to it by Sunday? Tellin’ me the wife keeps up with the drop schedule but waited six days?” He walks closer to Richard, gloved hands gripping the man’s jaw tightly. He presses his fingers into the bruise near his mouth, pressing hard until he breaks.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m in debt, man, 50,000 Euros. No one knows so when I lost to the guy at that shithole of a bar and he offered me a job, I couldn’t say no! He said it was just a few documents, wouldn’t hurt anyone…” Stupid, stupid, stupid. Before Simon can grab a tool from the wall, Johnny clears his throat. “Let me, sir. Gaz called. You’re needed at base.” That could only mean one thing. Simon nods, swallowing thickly as he leaves the room to the sound of screams. 

It’s a half hour drive back to the Castle, but it feels like eons. Simon changes his gloves and mask with the limo partition up, even swapping his sweatshirt out for your benefit. The smell of blood fades when the fabric is removed, bundled into a trash bag he leaves in the car. When Simon double checks his phone, his hands are shaking. Another oddity of the week, too miniscule to dwell on.

It’s been three days since he last saw you, cuddled up in Price’s arms like an injured stray. For all Simon has tried to protect you from, the insults of childhood and your shared shitty father, it worries him to think you got hurt despite his greatest efforts. There’s no doubt that you’re a strong woman, but he’s not sure what Shepherd did to you and no matter what, there’s only so much a person can take. The guilt that’s been following him since the marriage is heavy like a chain, weighing down his every motion. Did he marry you off too early? Was Price the wrong pick? Thoughts swirl like a snowstorm in his head, only stopping when the car pulls up to the Castle.

It’s the perfect home he would have picked for you, given the chance. Sophisticated wealth, nothing flashy or too pretentious. Gaz mentioned that you redecorated, and he can see parts of you in the artwork, in the new chairs meant for casual conversation instead of just functionality. You’ve turned the base into a home and the guilt creeps up again thinking of how you might have never returned to it.

“Mr. Riley.” The door guards nod at Simon as he walks through. He feels out of place in his hoodie, used to his lax uniform in Manchester. Price styles himself more as a businessman than Simon ever has. He hides the scars with gloves and a mask but he doesn’t delude himself into thinking of himself as a professional. He’s more like the head of a wolf pack, barking and snarling at anyone who gets too close. Nothing like Price and he’s glad for it. You deserve someone who can give you a semblance of a normal life, pretending like he’s going to work at an office instead of meeting illicit weapons dealers on the edge of town.

Gaz is waiting for him in the foyer, immaculate in a deep blue button-up. It’s the first time he’s seen the man shaved, a testament to the bonds that you forged with Price men that were tested in the past week. “Ghost.” Gaz nods, leading him through the Castle. “How is she?” Gaz walks slower than usual, seeming to need more time before bringing Simon upstairs. “She’s…recovering. Been talking with a trauma therapist the Captain trusts.” Simon nods. He can’t imagine what they put you through, why John ordered him to find a new set of clothes when they found you. Everything he learns is a strike against Phil, whenever Simon finds him. John promised him retribution.

“How is she physically? They hurt her?” Gaz stops in front of the stairs, scratching the back of his head awkwardly. “She’s skittish. Can’t approach ‘er from behind, got t’ give ‘er plenty of warnin’. I only saw her last night when she came down for some food, ‘s the first time she’s been out of the room. The Captain’s given me a temporary title while he’s taking care of ‘er.” It’s not temporary. Simon can sense it, leadership senses setting off alarms. Loyalty, initiative, intelligence - Gaz has it all. A fine replacement if he’s ever seen one. Too bad Johnny hates him. 

Simon nods, ready to see his sister. Before he can step up the stairs, Gaz clears his throat. “If you can, sir, convince her to drink some water? Last night, all she could do was look at the glass.” Christ. What did they do to you?

When Simon climbs up the stairs, you’re lounging in the sitting room, swathed in clothes too big for you. The couch you’re on is out of place, tugged from its original spot so the back is now against the wall. Tactical. He ensures his steps are loud so you sit up with a smile instead of a shudder. “Si!” You grin and his heart stops at the fact you still have the ability to. They didn’t take everything. “Hey, love. Can I hug ya?” You nod, setting your book down with your arms reaching up. “I missed you.” You murmur as he hugs you. The angle is awkward as he towers over you but he doesn’t particularly care, sitting down next to you while keeping you in his arms.

“How ya doin’, kid?” He asks when you release him. Simon slips off his medical mask into his pocket. On closer look, you’re wearing John’s clothes, the name of some obscure London footie team emboldened on the chest. He can hear the man’s voice come from behind the closed bedroom door, likely on a phone call. “I’m okay. John got me a therapist and she’s really helping. She specializes in kidnapping victims and immediate solutions and…yeah. Isn’t that a bit weird, saying I’ve been kidnapped?” On second look, you don’t look your best. There’s circles on your eyes and faded bruises on your jaw, like someone grabbed it and forced it open. Instead of answering, Simon brushes the soft skin of your neck until he can find your pulse. You don’t jolt like he expected you to, instead curling into the feeling of his familiar touch. 

“I knew somethin’ was wrong ‘fore Gaz called. Had this dream of you screamin’ my name, askin’ for my help from somewhere far. When I woke, I just knew. Ready to tear the world apart f’ you, kiddo. You’re still my little sister to protect.” A tear escapes your eye. He brushes it away, then squeezes your cheek like a grandmother would before pulling back. “I’m still lookin’ f’r others who were involved. They’ll get what’s coming for ‘em.” You nod, catching his hand before he pulls back completely. “Thank you for that, Si, but also, I just- just need you here, you know? I think your presence here will do a lot more for me than being an avenging angel.” He gets it, he does, but he didn’t get to kill Shepherd. He was John’s but Phil is Simon’s and no matter what, he will be found. “Think there’s a way f’r us to split it?” It. His time. Your wants, his needs. 

You squeeze his hand and nod. “I think so.” You croak out. Simon can sense the need for levity, so he starts telling you about how Johnny almost got himself blown up a few weeks ago when dealing with a Chinese chemical supplier. Simon’s not usually the joker between you two but he channels the infectious energy of his husband, in pursuit of making you laugh. You finally giggle when he mimics the windblown look on Johnny’s face, even putting in the effort to mimic his mohawk with his hands. It’s goofy and reminiscent of your childhood, the ghost of Tommy making a rare appearance in the corner of the room. Your kidnapping has sent Simon off the edge and out of character, desperate to do anything to repair what has been broken.

The bedroom door creaks open and John’s heavy footsteps follow. “Hi, sweetheart.” John approaches the couch head on, kissing your forehead before nodding at Simon. “Simon.” He nods back, not feeling the need to put his mask back on. “John.” “What is this?” Your eyes flick between the two of them, brows furrowed. Simon looks at John, who shrugs. “What’re ya talkin about?” You frown at Simon’s words, crossing your arms in front of your chest. “Since when is there a bromance? What did I miss?” John sighs, dragging a hand down his face. Simon reaches out to ruffle your hairdo, smiling when you screech and bat his hand away. “‘S called mutual respect, sweetheart. Not sure what a bromance is.” You mock John’s sigh, rolling your eyes. “You’ll be wearing friendship bracelets by the end of this year if you keep going on this trajectory.” The men lock eyes with twin glances of horror.

“On that note, you good if I pop in downstairs, sweetheart? Gaz needed help on something.” A look of understanding passes between you two, a look Simon has felt time and time again with his husband. It’s like a punch to the gut in the softest way possible. “All good, I’ll be here with Simon.” John nods, kissing your forehead before taking a few steps back towards the staircase. Before he can leave, Simon clears his throat. “John, you have any condos or safehouses in the area you aren’t usin’?” John’s eyes flicker with a different kind of understanding. “Enough space for two, I gather?” Simon nods, ignoring how you’re kicking his shin. “For a month or two, at least.” You kick him harder and he shoves your foot away in a playful push. “I’ll see what I can do.” John responds, nodding before heading down the stairs. 

“You’re stayin’?” When he turns to look at you, your lip is quivering. He sighs in faux exhaustion before tugging your legs on top of his. “‘Course I’m stayin’. Can’t let my baby sister fight alone.” You shyly wipe your eyes before meeting his own. “What about the business in Manchester?” He shrugs, acting like he didn’t spend hours on the phone with his best men last night. “It’s what I’ve got men for. Plus, you can show me ‘round.” Instead of squealing or jumping him, you give him a small smile. It feels older and mellow, something he hates. “Thanks, Si.” He squeezes your foot. He wants to bring up the water drinking, but you seem a little fragile right now. He’s got time now, something he won’t miscount. “‘S what I’m here for. Now tell me the rest ‘f y’r redecoratin’ plans. That entryway could use some work.” You grin and he’s reminded of the toothy five-year old, playing hide and seek in the Riley house of horrors. A survivor, through and through.

-

Every day passes faster than the last. You find out your therapist, Marie, is actually Dr. Marie Laswell, Kate’s wife. She promises you that despite their marriage, everything you share is confidential and stays between you. It’s hard work, recounting everything that happened in your daily meetings. John is there, kissing your forehead and cuddling you after nightmares, like the perfect gentleman. As the adrenaline drains and you find yourself living again, you crave more than that.

You want to go back to your last fight. You know it could be self-sabotage, but in the confines of the Castle, it’s like nothing can harm you. John only has guards you know working. Terrance stops by once or twice, telling you he got promoted. Simon visits whenever he can. Your reunion with Johnny is heartfelt and strong. Gaz feels like a son now, protective and firm about your security. All of these facts coalesce into a suit of armor, knowing that as long as you don’t leave the building, you are safe.

Marie tells you it’s not the healthiest mindset. You remind her progress is progress. She sighs in a way that reminds you of her wife.

The one-month anniversary of your kidnapping creeps up on you, haunting the corners of your mind. There’s an ache deep in your heart to return to normal, no matter what he said about finding a new one. You want so badly to change without looking over your shoulder. On rainy days, there’s a phantom ache in the side of your arm that Phil sunk a syringe into. He’s still in the wind, a fact that agitates Simon more and more. Small wins happen too. There are days you don’t need John at home, content with phone calls throughout the day and a long dinner at night. You’ve gone on two (2!) walks by yourself, passing through the park across from the Castle as guards trail behind you and at the corners of the park. You’ve progressed to Gatorade and flavored carbonated water but still jump at unknown touches. Except, of course, John’s.

Every night runs like clockwork. You shower, John standing outside the door like a protective hound. Then you slip on a robe and let him in, brushing your teeth and finishing your routine together. He leaves to ‘check something’ and always returns with a new non-water liquid he wants you to try, like a new Gatorade or flavor of tea. In the time he’s gone, you change. You’ve graduated from speed-changing to taking your time, rubbing lotion on your body before slipping on pajamas. When John comes back, you cuddle and talk, and then lights out.

The same damn routine. Every. Night. You feel like a nun.

The anniversary passes without little fanfare. John takes the day off, unusual but part of the new normal. Gaz is left in charge again, a fact he’s getting more used to. When you wake in the morning, something else new happens.

Morning light warms your eyelids. John’s arm is a comfortable weight around your waist, his forearm hair rubbing the patch of your stomach exposed by your raised shirt. Something pulses low in your belly. When he turns to pull you closer into him, your stomach flutters. His face tucked into your neck, the weight of him searing as his body is half-slung over yours. It’s a welcome change from how you usually find yourself on top of him, like he’s pinning you to reality. A body scan reveals wetness between your thighs and a keenness between your lips.

When you cant your hips slightly, chasing that fluttering feeling, his cock twitches in his sweats where it’s against the outside of your thigh. You tilt them higher, fighting against the weight of him, and smile when his cock twitches again. “Go t’sleep.” He groans, rough and sleepy into your ear. Instead of listening, you push your thigh outwards to the heavy weight of him.

“Watch what y’r doin’, pet.” Pet is new. Unlocking a new nickname sends a thrill down your spine. You ignore the connotations behind it. “John…” You whisper, injecting an extra breath of air into your speech. He pulls his head up, hair mussed and eyes blurry. He’s beautiful.

He props himself up on his forearm, giving your own arm freedom to move. You do so, sliding it from his neck to his torso, snaking down to follow his happy trail. “What d’ya think y’r doin’?” You run your fingers through his trimmed body hair, only dipping slightly into the elastic of his boxers. “I want to feel you.” You blink at him with wide eyes. He pulls his core backwards, letting your hand drop on the mattress. “Y’r not ready.” You frown, scooting back into your pillows so you can properly meet his eyes. “I think I get to decide that, John.” He closes his eyes, sighing. “I was readin’ an article and-” You huff, pulling back further until you’re sitting on the opposite side of the bed. 

“This is the problem we have, John. You trust external sources more than me.” If he was a weaker man, he’d look whiplashed. Unfortunately, you got a husband prepared for anything, a man who can argue at the drop of a hat. “I’m jus’ sayin’, sweetheart, maybe we wait. I don’t want t’ hurt ya.” You scoff, pulling your knees to your chest. “Can you trust when I say you won’t hurt me? That I can handle myself and know my limits?” He’s silent for a second too long.

You launch yourself out of the bed, heading for the bathroom. He’s faster than you, weak from weeks of lethargy, beating you to the punch to stand in front of the door instead of tugging you back into him. “Stop.” You place a hand on his chest, intent to push him away, but all he does is cover it with his own. “Can you jus’ wait for a second?” That’s when you take a second look at your husband. How he’s panting like he’s out of breath, even if you know he goes for runs every day. His pupils are blown and feral, a predator in the wild. You stand for a bit, letting your palm track how his breaths go in and out of his chest.

“Deep breaths for me, baby.” How nostalgic it feels, the roles reversed as this time it’s you talking him off a ledge. His breathing calms after a minute, eyes going tame as he squeezes the life out of your hand. When he’s calmed, he speaks. “The last time you ran from me after an argument, you were taken from me.” Your heart breaks a little at the weakness he lets you see. Your hand slides up into his beard, brushing over the rough strands as you look in his eyes. “I wasn’t running, John. I just needed some space.” He shakes his head in disagreement. “Ya don’t know what it felt like, seein’ you step into tha’ car an’ gettin’ a call hours later that you were gone.” You nod, biting your lip.

“You’re right, John. I don’t know. And you don’t know how my brain works. You don’t know how harsh grips trigger me but yours never have.” Understanding brews in his eyes, cloudy like a cup of coffee. He pulls you in closer by the waist, lining you up until your pelvises meet. “I get it, sweetheart. I trust you.” You exhale a breath at his words.

“I didn’t take ya on tha’ trip months ago because I was meetin’ a new supplier an’ I didn’t trust him. You know firsthand now how dangerous my world is. I know you’ve lived this life, but London is more cutthroat than Manchester could ever be. ‘M not sorry f’r smotherin’ ya, because at least y’r safe. ‘S my number one concern in this world.” It’s terrible, how you don’t care that he’s admitted that he smothers you. How all you care about is how he knew what you were referencing, even if it was from months ago.

“How do I know you want me for me?” Another concern of yours from your fight before the kidnapping. He shrugs, giving you a wry smile. “Guess you’ll have to trust me.”

You drag him into the bathroom, jumping onto the counter and pulling him between your legs. You practically maul his face, kissing him with unrestrained want. His admission flipped a switch in you, a longing that’s been asleep for a while. It wakes up when he pulls you closer to his pelvis, your clothed cunt rubbing against the outline of his cock. You’re still wet from earlier, your folds sticking to airy fabric. 

“Didn’t want it like this.” He breathes behind your ear. John sucks a soft patch of skin there, licking at the sweat from your sleep before trailing down your neck. “Wanted t’ eat ya out f’r an hour ‘fore even pullin’ my cock out.” You run a hand down his rigid back muscles, pulling at the fabric until he lets you tug it off. John laves his tongue at your neck, alternating between sucking and nipping at your sensitive skin. His hands grip your hard, thumbs inching closer and closer to your core. You’re wearing shorts without underwear, a perfect combination that he soon discovers. “What else?” You moan, leaning your head back until it hits the mirror behind you. It’s perfect, knowing there’s nothing but a wall behind your back. It calms the worried part of your brain, letting you fully focus on the moment.

“Then I’d let ya suck my cock, get it nice an’ warm in tha’ mouth of yours. Let you rub y’r cunt against me.” You whine at the image, nails digging into his back as he continues making out with your neck. Finally, he tugs your sleep shirt off, trailing downwards to suck at your tits. He squeezes one while sucking the other, pulling hard enough to make it hurt. There’s no part of him you can reach, the angle of it awkward and wrong. The solution is to trail your free hand up your thigh, passing his hands to push the fabric of your shorts aside and thumb at your clit. “Wha’s this, hm?” He murmurs, switching to your other tit. “Wanna be ready f’ you, John.” The wetness seeping from your cunt makes it easy to slip a finger in, stretching yourself in preparation for your husband. He’s letting you set the rhythm in a way he usually doesn’t, and you love him for it, something you don’t think too hard about.

“Let me?” He asks and you nod immediately. He replaces your hand with his own, sliding two thick fingers into your hole. You clench immediately at the intrusion, more out of tension than fear. John stops, glancing up at you from where he’s leaning down. “Need me to stop?” You shake your head, moving your hips forward so his fingers slide in deeper. “It’s just been a while.” John is still stopped, searching your face for something. “I trust you, John. I need you to say it back or this won’t work.” His eyes don’t leave your face, nodding slowly. “I trust you with my life, baby. An’ I trust ya with yours. You gonna let me stretch you out?” Instead of answering, you start to grind slowly, fucking yourself on his fingers. His gaze drops down, watching your cunt squeeze him tight. 

“How’d I get so lucky, hm? Perfect wife, dropped right into my lap.” John makes you work for it, angling his thumb so your clit hits it with every grind. It’s the most work your body has done in months and you love it, love the burn in your muscles as you command them to work. “This is goin’ t’ be a lot shorter than I wanted it t’ be, pet. Can’t focus when y’r mewlin’ f’r my cock like this.” You whine at his words. John pulls his fingers out, a string of slick trailing after them. He rubs them against your chest, pointed nipples scraping against your own wetness. The friction makes you delirious and needy in his arms. “John, I need you.” He hums, that same hand pushing down his sweats to reveal his cock, thick and heavy in his hand. He gives it a pump and you watch him spread your slick around it, mixing with his precum to make it even smoother.

“Last chance, baby.” John lines his cock up with your cunt. He rubs it up and down, catching on your clit every other time. “Shut the fuck up and fuck me, John.” His name on your lips is punctuated with a gasp as he pushes into you. You let out a string of curses at the intrusion. No matter how many times John has given you his fingers, the blunt width of his cock is so much more. It’s been over a year since you’ve fucked someone, and it’s never been like this. It’s never been dark blue eyes filled with trust and care, flicking down every so often to watch his cock go in and out. It’s never been dangling over the precipice of an orgasm so fast, the speed of it hitting you like a lightning strike. He fucks you through it, his hand on the back of your neck, forcing you to look down at where you’re joined. You watch your tits and stomach bounce at his movements and you watch as he hungers for it.

John’s a talker. This you’ve known, but it’s never been like this. 

“Look at you, taking my cock so well. Fuckin’ made f’r it.”

“Y’r cunny’s so tight, baby. This all for me?”“So desperate for it, pet.”

“Such a good girl for daddy. C’mon, say it.”

It makes you clench and mewl and claw at his back. He tries to kiss you but all you can do is let your mouth fall open and pant against him. Your first orgasm left you weak-willed, eager to follow his instructions. You nod your assent to every word, sweat dripping into your eyes. The second orgasm builds slow in your core. It burns with every thrust, every brush of your clit that John’s thumb makes. You lean your head back so it hits the mirror, suddenly realizing that your actions echo each other in the mirror behind John.

Your mouth is open. Sweat makes your skin glisten. You settle your weight on your hands and arch your back, a glimpse of your tits visible in the glass. It means you look almost whorish but it doesn’t matter because it’s for your husband, whose muscled back ripples with every thrust. That’s the image that sends you over the edge, whining John’s name as you fall off the edge. 

“Where, baby?” John meets your eyes with a burning question. You look down at the creamy ring around his cock, the slight of it sending another hazy spark to your core. “Inside.” This time John’s the one cursing, dropping his forehead to your collarbone as he watches himself come inside his wife. Finally, with his soft cock still inside you, John slows to a stuttering stop.

“Oh fuck.” John looks up at your panicked words with a matching expression. “Somethin’ hurt?” Your mouth opens, then closes. “What? No. I just remembered I stopped taking my birth control because of what happened. I haven’t been on it in over a month. And Plan-B’s really mess up my cycle.” John laughs. Your husband laughs, with his forehead on your collarbone and his cock inside you, pushing his cum in further. “This is not funny, John!” He shakes his head before meeting your eyes. “I got a vasectomy.” You blink. “What do you mean, you got a vasectomy?” He drags a hand down his face. Instead of answering, John eases out of the tight hold of your cunt. He fishes for a washcloth somewhere near, running warm water over it before swiping at your inner thighs. “When we had tha’ conversation about Gaz. Didn’t want it to happen after tha’ an’ not be prepared.” You squint in confusion. “I timed it with your period.” You bark out a laugh of disbelief.

“You’re fucking crazy.” He looks up at you with worry etched into his face, like he’s done something wrong. All you do is smile and pull him in, kissing his nose like he’s adorable. “I hate you.” You say, laughing. “You love me.” He murmurs against your skin. You don’t refute it, shutting him up with a kiss.

-

Phil watches and waits.

Her husband keeps leaving her alone. Phil’s camera screens flicker, shots of her through windows and from the park. The brother is closing in but it doesn’t matter, not when he’s so close to completing his mission. He must watch and wait.

-

one. chapter. left.

i barely edited this so if you see any mistakes no you didn't

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deep end

price x transmasc!reader | 7.9k | AO3

cw: dubcon (power imbalance, price steamrolling reader), hints of daddy issues/mild daddy issues for those who want to see them, abrupt ending, age gap, alcohol, masturbation, praise kink, hand feeding, fingering, oral, anal sex a/n: clit, cock, and cunt are used to describe genitalia of reader's body. reader has top surgery scars.

There’s something to be said for the kind of work that doesn’t pretend to be anything it’s not. 

It’s not glamorous, but it’s yours—a modest business with your name on the side of a sun-faded van, stocked with gear, and enough regulars to keep the bills paid. That’s more than a lot of people can claim. It keeps the lights on. Affords you food and pride, both. Proof you’re getting by.

This little operation, humble as it is, at least gets you outside. And on days like this, that’s a gift. The cirrostratus looks like pulled strands of candy floss overhead, and the breeze takes the edge off.

You tip your head for a moment to admire the clouds, then tug the brim of your sunhat. It’s too big, like everything else you’re wearing. The clothes came out of the same catalog you order your gear from. A stiff, white button-up with your logo on the pocket and shapeless red shorts that skim your knees. Cheap. Chafes in all the wrong places, but expensable.

You scratch absentmindedly near your navel and guide the vacuum along the pool floor in methodic passes. The water is clear, the motion soothing. Slips you into a quiet headspace. 

It’s satisfying. Calming. The zen and predictability of a repetitive task cannot be understated. Lulls you into a lovely state of not-quite-daydreaming. 

So, you don’t hear Mr. Price the first time.

“You with me, lad?”

The vacuum handle nearly slips as you twist around too fast, your foot catching the edge of the pool. You wobble, free arm flailing for balance. Mr. Price steps forward instinctively—poised to surge across the yard. You manage to steady yourself, weight rocking back in time.

Both of you exhale at once.

He scrubs a hand over his face, dragging it across his beard.

“Sorry, sir. I didn’t hear you.”

“I gathered.”

You switch off the vacuum, the underwater hum fading. “Was there, uh, something you needed, sir?”

His sunglasses are too dark to tell, but you feel him sizing you up, same as he did when you arrived. He hadn’t said much then either, just opened the door, looked you over from head to toe, then gestured toward the side gate with a grunt.

You don’t know what to make of him. In truth, you rarely give your clients much thought beyond big house and lucky bastards. If you see them at all, it’s through the windows.

This is your first time at his place, and you’re still formulating an assessment. 

You don’t know if Mr. Price has a family, but his house is big enough to accommodate one. There’s a sporty car parked outside his garage. A sprawling garden, lined with hedges, mature trees, and a wrought-iron fence. No immediate neighbors butting the property line.

And, obviously, a pool.

What sets him apart is that you met him, and not a housekeeper or assistant. Clients typically let others handle the scheduling and small talk. It caught you off guard, putting a face to the voice, and matching the face to the owner’s name.

Still, your gut says to treat him the same as the others. Another man accustomed to obedience. So, you straighten and lift your chin.

Your change in posture seems to amuse. The corner of his mouth lifts.

“I asked if you needed water.”

Your eyes flick to your bag and your beat-up thermos, plain as day. He had to have seen it. Which means this isn’t really about concern. You’ve done this dance before. A casual, innocuous question preceding a snide comment or suspicion. Are you slacking off? Cutting corners?

Knew it, you think bitterly.

“No thank you, sir.”

His mouth twitches again, this time downward, then flattens. 

“Suit yourself.”

He retreats indoors, and the rest of the visit passes without incident. No more words exchanged. The clouds lift, sharing a rare, naked sky.

You pack your tools and log the time. As you pull out of the drive, you check the rearview.

Mr. Price stands at the back gate with a phone pressed to his ear.

You can’t read his face from this distance—but you feel the weight long after the house disappears from view.

You must’ve made an impression, because Price starts booking weekly. On your docket every Friday afternoon.

It mystifies. His pool is never particularly dirty. Maybe a thin film of grime at the most, a handful of leaves blown in from the hedges and bird cherry trees. No signs of children or pool toys. No evidence of parties. It’s clear he lives alone, and doesn’t host.

Far be it for you to question easy money.

It makes for a pleasant, if not boring, routine. Knock on the door. Head around back. With booking and billing handled online, there’s no need to see or speak to him at all.

For a couple weeks, it’s simple. Another lucky bastard with a big house who leaves blank five-star reviews. The best you could hope for.

Then he starts appearing poolside.

At first, you assume it’s a fluke. That he’s forgotten you’re scheduled. 

He’s the picture of leisure. Drink in one hand, cigar in the other, stretched out on the cushions. If he’s startled or annoyed by your presence, he doesn’t show it. He gives you a polite nod, then buries his nose in a magazine.

But then it happens again. And again. 

Like clockwork. The new fucking routine.

You unlatch the gate, and there he is, waiting. He makes himself comfortable—well, more comfortable, given it is his house—and watches. Or seems to. It’s hard to tell with the sunglasses.

He never interrupts, just smokes and reads. The magazines he cradles are dog-eared, covers curled over. Sometimes you catch glimpses of the topics: cars, golf, current events. None of it hints at what he does for money. If he’s retired or working from home. If he’s ever worked a day in his life.

It changes things.

The calm dissolves. You grow more aware of every little thing. The way your shirt sticks between your shoulder blades. The trickle of sweat down your spine. Every time you bend at the waist or kneel by the pool’s edge. 

You try to ignore it, but you feel his eyes brushing over the nape of your neck or small of your back. Yet every time you peek, he’s not looking. You can’t shake it anyway—the sense of being observed, possibly admired.

That’s when the shame creeps in.

What are you doing? What do you think this is, a slow-burn porno? Are you that vain?

This is just a job.

You scold yourself, cheeks burning hotter than the sun overhead. It’s mortifying. To even imagine that a man like him—older, composed, probably has a different watch and woman for each day of the week—would be watching you. You. You’re not special. You’re a line item on an invoice. Background noise.

The thought that you’ve spun some dumb fantasy makes your stomach knot.

You work faster. Keep your eyes down. Try not to think about it too hard.

But when the breeze shifts and carries his smoke toward you, heavy and spiced, and it curls around your ribs like a hook.

Your first real conversation, you’re in trouble.

“You’re late.”

“I know. I’m sorry, sir.”

Mr. Price’s fists sit on his hips, a cigar at the corner of his mouth held in place by a frown. Sunglasses hiding a glare.

“What kept you?”

You’re sweating from the mad rush, juggling the hose and skimmer, and running on fumes. A dull throb pulses in your skull, the tail end of a headache from your last client’s shrill tirade. His threats to leave bad reviews over a handful of rowan petals in his pool and a perceived lack of hustle.

A nutcase, you want to spit. You want to tell Price about how you skipped lunch and nearly got sideswiped on the drive. Complain about how your life depends on the goodwill of people who don’t remember your name and settle for obscenities or diminutives.

Instead, you drop your armful on the grass and lie. “Traffic.”

He cocks a brow. “Traffic got you worked up?”

“Yes,” you bristle, and slam the gate to storm back to collect the rest of your supplies.

When you return, he’s still at the gate, and this time, one long arm swings past. He slows the metal before it slams, guiding it shut with a quiet click. Suddenly, he’s too close, and you’re boxed in. A meld of tobacco, sweat, and body heat seeps into the space between. It’s toothsome. Heady on the tongue.

You form an apology—you can’t afford to lose business—but he doesn’t raise his voice.

“Whatever’s actually put you in a mood, you won’t be takin’ it out on my property.” He ducks his head to chase your eyes and you’re forced to stare at your reflection in the dark lenses. “We clear?”

The steel of his jaw, his arm flexing, the authority crackling in his tone like fire splitting wood—it shouldn’t make your stomach flip, but it does.

“Yes, sir.”

He smiles then. Not kindly. Smug, maybe. “Good lad.” 

The words hit a nerve you didn’t know you had. They sink in somewhere soft and sensitive. The same place that makes a dog’s hackles rise and puts butterflies in bellies.

“And you better not slack just because you’re behind.”

“I won’t, sir.”

He lets you pass, and follows when you do. It’s a struggle to not trip over your own feet.

This time, he makes no secret of watching. His cigar burns out untouched. The magazine flutters in the wind. He sits with his fingers laced over his middle, legs crossed at the ankles. 

Bent on all fours over the system compartment, a prickle at the back of your neck grows impossible to ignore. You glance over your shoulder. 

He appears asleep—utterly still—until the corner of his mouth lifts. A slow, knowing smirk.

You snap back to the task at hand. 

A chuckle follows, low and indulgent. It drapes over you like velvet and settles somewhere deep, where it can hum and hiss like a wasp caught under a jar.

On a night off, you go dancing. Three glasses of cheap vodka in your bloodstream, the taste coating your tongue. You considered ordering whiskey, but lost your nerve. 

Leaning against a wall outside with your friends, getting air between songs, someone asks if you’ve met anyone lately. 

Or are you all work, no play?

You answer without hesitation. Without thinking.

(It’s not until the next morning, hungover and rueing the sun itself, that you understand they meant someone from an app. A date. A one-night stand, maybe.)

But you’d already blabbed. Confessed.

Mr. Price. 

John.

Your mouth runs wild with the liquor in your blood.

He’s a bit odd, you admit. Hard to read. Just the other day, you’d walked in as he finished swimming laps, and he climbed out the moment he spotted you. You swear it happened in slow motion—water rolling off the hard lines of his chest, the softer spread of his belly, the pelt of hair. The treasure trail and fading farmer’s tan. You nearly keeled over at the sight. And it’s hard to guess his age. He’s fit, and the silver threads in his beard do something to you.

It isn’t until the laughter shifts into something sly, that you realize how long you’ve been going on. The teasing comes fast, merciless but fond. There’s no walking it back.

And when they ask—flat-out—if you’d fuck him, you can’t lie.

That gets them going.

“Do you think he’s—?”

You cut them off. “No. No way.”

Denial is easier than the fantasy of hope.

With an excuse, you peel yourself off the wall and flee back into the fray to shake the heat crawling up your neck.

You attempt to bury it all in the mouth of a stranger. Older, taller, dark hair curling damply at his temples. Broad enough shoulders. A cheap cologne that stings your nose. You let him kiss and paw at you against the sticky wall by the toilets, but it’s no good. He tastes like rum. Too sweet, no substance. Nothing like what you want. 

The night ends early, frustration simmering. Alone in your room, sprawled in the dark, you add one item to the shopping list on your phone:

Whiskey.

The weather turns fast one afternoon.

It starts with the trill of Mr. Price’s phone and a curse. He abandons his post, gritting out a clipped Yeah? before striding toward the house. The glass doors shut behind him, and though they muffle the sound, his voice climbs in volume as he disappears from view.

Almost in answer, the sky darkens. In minutes, clouds quicken and roll in, dragging the light with them and smothering it in a drab, gray sheet. The breeze kicks up and then your sunhat is gone, plucked clean off your head and hurled skyward.

You watch it spiral away helplessly.

Leaving your equipment where it sits, you duck beneath the umbrella between the chairs. It offers little protection. The raindrops fatten, splattering against the stone, and without giving it much thought, you scoop up his magazine and half-finished drink.

Clutching the snifter to your chest, the scent of whiskey rises. You’re more of a wine fan, really, but the smell settles you. Warms you, even as goosebumps sprout along your arms and shoulders. Reminds you of your dad.

You shift foot to foot, back turned to the wind and rain. The uniform clings in cold patches as it soaks through.

Then, from across the lawn—“Inside!”

Mr. Price stands in the doorway, motioning you in.

You hesitate. You have a policy: stay outdoors. Liability. Safety. If rain hits, you wait it out or move on. You know this.

Then a sheet of rainwater sluices off the umbrella as it topples sideways in the wind, sloshing down your back. Shuddering, you shove the magazine under your shirt to shield it and bolt.

The rain lashes your skin. Grass squishes beneath your feet. His drink sloshes over the rim with every step, drenching your fingers in liquor.

You slip through the doors, soaked, clothes plastered on. You produce the rumpled magazine and offer it to Mr. Price with his half-drained glass.

“I, uh, tried to—”

“You’re dripping,” he says flatly, his gaze dropping to the puddle forming at your feet.

You glance down at the water pooling at your feet and almost stumble back outside, stammering apologies, but he cuts you off.

“I’ll get you a towel. Shoes off.” He empties your hands, pivoting toward the kitchen to deposit them on the island. As he rounds a corner, he points at the floor. “Stay put.”

Outside, the rain picks up, and you gingerly remove your shoes and socks, not wanting to make more of a mess. Shivering, teeth clacking from the chill, you rub your arms and gawk. You’ve never been inside a client’s home before.

A polished, heavy table anchors the immediate area. Old wood floors stretch beneath it, the tile under your feet a practical addition. Meant for footprints. Framed photos are scattered throughout, on the walls and sideboard, family portraits old and new you assume.

A grand painting behind the grand table seizes your attention: a small fishing boat, crimson and white, nearly lost in a violent storm. The sea churns around it in deep greens and blacks, lightning tearing across a sickly sky. 

You admire the scene until you hear footfalls.

Mr. Price bears a towel and clothes. You accept the towel, pretending not to notice the second offering. When you peek out from beneath the cotton, he’s holding a shirt out.

Does he seriously think—

“Go on. You’ll catch your death if you stay in that.”

A laugh putters out. You shake your head. “You can’t—I can’t take that, sir.”

His chin dips. “You’re not taking anything. You’re borrowing. C’mon. Shirt off, son.”

An ember catching kindling. You struggle to tamp it down.

“Can’t I change in the–”

He scoffs dismissively. “I’m not moppin’ up a trail. Nothing I haven’t seen before. Transparent, anyway.”

Nothing I haven’t seen before. You doubt that. Your scars have faded into blurs, but they’re recognizable. Obvious in their purpose. 

He is right. Your shirt clings better than cellophane, sheer in all the worst places. You tug at the hem, flustered, burning up under his scrutiny.

Another look at his face says arguing only delays the inevitable. It’s fucked—whatever this is, however he keeps pushing and playing with you. Batting you around like a bored tomcat would a mouse. Worse is how easily you’re letting it happen. Part of you, perversely curious, wants to see where it’ll lead, if he’ll eat you whole or what. Another can’t stop replaying the memory of what he looks like, soaked and shirtless.

One-handed, you work the shirt free, and new goosebumps bloom across your skin. Your nipples stiffen. It shouldn’t be a big deal—but Mr. Price is staring.

Maybe your scars haven’t faded as much as you think. You take the shirt, refusing to shrink, and square your shoulders. Posture makes all the difference amongst men, you learned.

The borrowed shirt slips overhead, and you juggle the towel to thread both arms through. It’s loose in the shoulders, hitting the midpoint of your butt. Plain black, clean-smelling cotton.

Price clears his throat. “Better. Bottoms, now.”

If your cheeks weren’t already warm, they’re scorching now.

“Sir.”

He clicks his tongue and swings the spare shorts. “C’mon, these’ll do if you tie the string.”

“There’s no need!”

“You’d rather make more of a mess on my floor?”

You hold your ground, waiting for an indication he’ll back off, but he doesn’t. An unevenly matched game of chicken and you’re losing one concession at a time. You last all of ten seconds.

With a huff, you wrap the towel around your waist. Wiggling your hips, you coax the shorts down without revealing more than you already have. It takes a long, awkward minute. And when you think you’ve made it through with some shred of dignity intact, he kneels, and closing a hand around your ankle.

“Steady.”

You freeze as he lifts one foot, then the other, helping you step out. 

You snatch the shorts out of his hand and hurriedly shove them on, nearly combusting when the towel comes away in his hand seconds after you pull them over your bottom.

And then he’s up, moving, your wet clothes slung over his arm like nothing happened. Like he wasn’t—like he didn’t just—

“Back in a jiff.”

This is where your curiosity’s led you.

Barefoot, in his clothes, heart fluttering ridiculously. Breaths in short bursts, stifled little things, afraid to be too loud. Dumbstruck.

How ridiculous you must look.

Do you think he’s—?

Well.

You dry off as best you can and sidestep the puddle. Your boxers are likely see-through as well now, but you vow to not mention them. You wouldn’t survive Mr. Price insisting on a fresh pair with your ass on display.

You rinse the whiskey off in a haze and find the kitchen as orderly as the dining room. Together, they’re larger than your entire flat. Modernized, no-frills. 

Through the archway, the hum of a tumble dryer kicks up, and Price reappears.

“Some rain. Didn’t expect it, did you?”

You almost ask which part—the rain, or the forced striptease?

Instead, you mutter, “No, Mr. Price.”

“Think you can call me John now.”

Within minutes, he talks you into tea and a sandwich. While you nibble, he fills the silence with small talk. He doesn’t cook much himself—so if you don’t like it, s’not his fault—and arranges for a chef to deliver meals every Sunday. Nothing elaborate, enough for the week, with extras in case of company.

You work up the nerve to ask what he does for a living.

He’s unfazed. Says his parents passed, left him the house. He’s retired military, lives comfortably off a pension. Mentions he does some consulting now and then—vague, detached, the kind of answer meant to end the conversation, not invite it forward.

“But enough about me. Want to know more about you.”

You wash a bite down with a sip, uncertain that he’s serious. He’s being polite, you reason. A man like him—he doesn’t really want to know. You’re a half-drowned dog he brought in from a storm. A good deed.

“I’m not that interesting.”

“Says the kid with his own company.”

Fair play.

You relent. Share little things. Where you’re from how you started, and that most of your work is seasonal. You help out at a school in the off months, and teach swimming at the community pool when they’re short-staffed. He listens intently, attention never wavering. Probably finds it novel, working more than one job.

“Sounds like you have your hands full.”

You nod, swallowing the last sip of tea. “I keep busy.”

He hums. “You do alright on your own?”

The question is light, but it lands heavy. It’s simple, benign—but it isn’t neutral and it needles. He ducks his head when you look away, searching. Like he’s casting a line, hoping you’ll give something up.

Heat flares under your collar. Your throat constricts, shame blooming sharp and sudden.

You shrug, keeping it light. “I manage.”

When the rain finally stops, you’re overdue, and itching to escape Mr. Price—John’s—attention. There are only so many ways to dodge questions.

He meets you at the van once it’s packed.

“Be seeing you, kid.”

“Yeah,” you nod once. “Thanks again, John.”

You offer a cordial hand, business-like, and his palm is hot around yours. You bet it’d feel like a brand elsewhere.

At a light on the way home, you tug the collar of his shirt up over your nose and inhale. For a brief, blistering second, you imagine his hands around your ankles again. Pushing them up and up and up.

You don’t remember the rest of the drive home.

It’s only after you’ve kicked off your shoes and settled into the couch with a sip of your new whiskey, that it hits you—your uniform’s still in John’s laundry.

Shit.

You go back for it after the weekend, off schedule. Have to. 

Having rung ahead, he’s expecting you. He meets you at the door, phone tucked between his shoulder and cheek. You hand off the spare clothes; he passes yours back. He mouths sorry and squeezes your shoulder, before disappearing back inside like it never happened.

You’re already behind, so you change in the van before your first job. The moment you slide the shorts on, your eyebrows hit the ceiling. They sit higher now, snug around your thighs, hitting well above the knee. You assume they must’ve shrunk in the wash—until you pull on the shirt. It’s been hemmed. Clean, subtle stitching. Tighter at the sleeves, better at the waist.

You consider going back, but your schedule’s packed, and the day runs away from you.

When you see him next, he beats you to it.

“Fits better, doesn’t it?” John claps your shoulder, pinching and tugging the shoulder seam.

“Yes, but did you—?”

“Eyeball the size?” He grins. “Not bad, eh? I’ve got a good tailor.”

It’s not like you can undo it and you’re not about to shell out for a replacement. So you thank him, and receive a pleased, grumbled good lad in return, and a swat to the small of your back, a hair north of improper. 

A wordless dismissal. Back to work.

With every window flung wide, you wage a hopeless war against the stagnant heat. Your sheets are drenched in sweat. Restless doesn’t cover it—you’re strung tight and buzzing, sticky and half-mad with frustration.

Sleep’s not happening, not like this.

You groan and kick your boxers down your legs, then roll to your stomach, pushing up onto your knees. The air’s balmy, sticking in your lungs.

You’re not surprised to find yourself wet. Some of it’s sweat, sure, but the rest—that’s your own fault. The consequence of a wandering mind and no one around to check it.

You let your imagination take the reins.

Face mashed into the mattress, you imagine his foot on your back. Weight bearing down on you, pinning you in place. His cock rutting over your ass, one big hand grabbing himself at the base, slapping it against your hole, and the other digging into a fleshy cheek to spread it.

Your cock pulses between your rubbing fingers and a moan spills out. Your teeth scrape the sheets, eyes welding shut. It’s obscene and loud in your quiet room when you steal slick from your cunt to rub over your asshole.

He would work you open, push one finger in at a time. Get you to cry on two, render you incoherent on three. Your own aren’t enough to bring tears to your eyes, but thinking of what he’d say is.

He’d ask if you wanted it. Needed it. Deserved it. All in that frustratingly even timbre of his.

His voice comes out of nowhere, clear as a klaxon in your head.

Good boy.

You come hard and fast, bucking your cock into your palm, fingertips prodding at your rim. Didn’t even get far enough to slip them inside.

You lie there for ages, gasping, limp. Your muscles are too heavy, and you’re too far gone to care about the mess.

Sleep takes you like that—sticky and spent.

The next morning, you peel yourself out of bed and strip the sheets in silence, tossing everything into the wash, shame eating you alive.

You can’t look at John that week without that memory pumping blood south. Imagining him bending you over a chaise or pushing you into the clover until your uniform turns green.

It’s divine punishment when he decides you need feeding. Like he somehow knows what played out in the privacy of your bedroom, or caught the stench of desperation that only comes with a misplaced crush, and you need your nose rubbed in it.

John presents fruit under a mesh cloche and demands you take a break. Not like there’s much to do, anyway. The pool goes unused most of the time, the maintenance minimal at best. You put up little resistance, beckoned toward him by a crooked finger.

He moves his legs for you to sit as if there aren’t three other loungers ringing the pool. Gesturing for you to scooch closer when he uncovers the fruit, stabbing a cocktail fork into a pink cube dusted with tajin. He offers it handle first.

A drop of juice drips onto his shin, and you think, lick it. You could. You would, if he told you to.

The impulse grips you so intensely, it’s absurd. This whole thing is absurd. Here you are, with a client. Not a date, not a boyfriend. A man with at least ten years on you, casually bullying his way past all personal and professional boundaries, and you’re waving him through as if they don’t matter.

You know he expects you to take the fork from him, but that curious twitch stirs, and instead, your mouth falls open.

His eyes narrow, and he turns the fork, tucking the fruit into your mouth. Your lips close around the bite, tugging it off the tines with your teeth.

“Cheeky.” he murmurs.

A good little pet sitting at their master’s feet.

Your head spins.

You’re convinced now. There’s a tear in reality, one that opens every time you turn onto that private lane. You pass through it like Alice through the looking glass, crossing into another plane thrumming with heat and heavy air, a whole world that revolves around Mr. Price and his whims. 

A gravity all its own.

A special request from John arrives mid-week, close to the hottest day of the year.

Full-service. Deep clean, filter flush, system check—the kind of job that’ll eat your afternoon and keep you working well past quitting time. Two other clients will have to be bumped, but he offers triple your usual rate. Says he understands it’s last minute.

Says he’ll make it worth your while.

For the hundredth time, you’re unable to turn him down.

You tell yourself it’s the money, but that’s only half true. The other half keeps your hands tight on the wheel the whole drive over when Friday rolls around.

Nothing helps your nerves. You can’t stop thinking about eating from John’s hand. The weight of his stare. His attention. About that man at the bar—the cheap imitation whose tongue you sucked in a vain attempt to quiet what’s only gotten louder.

It’s all climbing to a fever-pitch, and you want it to break.

John greets you at the gate.

“Glad to see you.”

He lays a hand across the back of your neck, and you fall into step.

“Hosting a mate’s retirement party. Suspect his kids’ll want to swim.” He continues on about the details, but you’re stuck on how he directs your attention via squeeze.

You expect a mess, or evidence of a gathering on the horizon, but everything’s the same. Practically pristine. Swept and hosed down. You glance sidelong toward John when he sits, buzzing with something you don’t want to name. 

There’s no real reason you should be here.

No real work to do.

But he’s bought your time, so you give it, and it crawls. You move equally slow, checking the seals for wear, inspecting the heater, running tests. All of it busy work and theater.

You’re kneeling on a folded towel, bent over the open housing for the pool’s pump system. Focused until his shadow spills across the ground.

“Don’t mean to sneak up on you,” John says.

You twist to peer over your shoulder and almost swallow your tongue at the sight of his trunks at eye-level, and rise to your feet. “Everything alright?” You swipe your forehead with your wrist, willing yourself to relax.

His knuckles brush your cheek, featherlight. He frowns. “You look warm,” he taps one to your chin. “Come on. Enjoy the fruits of your labor with me, yeah?”

You barely put up a fuss when he cajoles you into a dip. Stripped to your boxers, you wade in, relief singing up your legs. Curling around your waist. You nearly groan from how good it feels.

At the other end, John dives in. He slices through the water, sleek and galeoid, surfacing within reach. Veins of water cut down his chest and stomach, disappearing at the elastic at his hips.

“Better?”

“Loads,” you say, hoarse.

He gives a faint smirk, then turns, launching into lazy laps. Says something about needing to stay limber, working out a knot in his back. You hopeless to watch. He puts those shoulders to use, pulling with long, fluid strokes.

You swallow hard, trailing him shamelessly: the sweep of his back, the bulk and muscles under freckled and scarred skin. You’re greedy. You want him. On you. Around you. Inside you. You want to bite down on that smirk and hear him swear your name.

You sit on the steps, draw your knees in, and press your thighs closed to hold yourself together. Your hands flex on the vinyl. They want to reach. Grab.

He pushes off the wall for another loop, and you stay right where you are, trying to think about anything that isn’t the throbbing pulse between your legs.

John doesn’t bother asking if you’re hungry, or if you’ll stay for dinner.

Haphazardly dressed, shirt half-buttoned and untucked, you stow the last of your gear. You’re in a daze, holding fast to denial. The spell will break, your van will revert into a pumpkin, and you’ll head home to scrub the day from your skin. Send the invoice, knock off a percentage, and you’ll do it all over again next week.

Then smoke hits the air.

John’s at the grill laying down strips of pork, the meat hissing on the grate. He halves peaches with a paring knife that’s tiny in his grip and sets them cut-side down beside the meat. The air turns lush with salt and charred sugars, rosemary and garlic.

You slink to his side, salivating, meaning to say goodbye and thank you. Polite and decisive.

Then he jerks his head to the door and tells you to fetch plates and cutlery, and you bound off. Retrieving them dutifully. Inwardly, a part of you raises the fact you didn’t agree to stay, that you shouldn’t stay—but that flicker of good sense snags on the barb of hunger and all your aching.

By the time the food’s ready, you’re ravenous. You never eat this well. Burnished pork glazed in its own fat and blistered peaches. You stop short of licking the plate.

After washing up, you peek at your phone.

“Stop that,” he scolds. “I know exactly how long I’ve got you for.”

And he does—he keeps you through golden hour.

Abendrot, painted in red and gold and soft indigo, bleeds over the sky. You’re boneless in the lounge chair. Content. Melting around the edges, the line between help and guest completely dissolved. Rendered.

John sprawls the next seat over, holding a lowball glass that catches the last of the light.

You lie on your side, head pillowed on your arm, watching the bob of his throat as he swallows.

“Can I have some?” you ask.

“Don’t think you’d like it. Picture you as more of the daiquiri type.”

“Not true,” you sit up. “I’ve got a bottle of that at home.”

That makes him glance your way. Then, he shifts, patting the cushion beside him.

He walks you through it, clearly doubting your tastes and experience: breathe in first, don’t take too much, let it roll. Savor it.

It burns, but it’s smooth. Honey folded in smoke. Leagues better than what you picked up on sale.

“Good?” he asks.

You wheeze, nodding. Emboldened, you try again twice more under his amused supervision. After a shallow fourth, you push the glass to his chest with a breathless laugh.

John chuckles, shoulders shaking. When the sound dies, you notice how close you’ve drifted.

“Well,” you murmur, easing upright. “This has been–well, I should...”

“That it?” he asks. “Off the clock now, aren’t you?”

“Yes, but, I should go, since–”

“Yeah?” he smooths a hand up your thigh. “Aren’t you the boss?”

Your brain stutters. Your mouth moves before your thoughts can catch up. “Aren’t you?”

It comes out soft. Sultry. Unfurls like a red flag in front of a bull.

His face blanks. Then, very quietly, “Careful.”

Panic punches through you. Words spilling fast. “I am so sorry, sir. That was—that was over the line. I didn’t mean—”

Storm clouds darken his blues and you brace for it—for the correction, the ending you walked yourself into.

But he moves.

The glass hits the table with a muted clink, forgotten. His hand shoots out, closing around your wrist, and the next thing you know, you’re hauled straight into his lap.

He’s kissing you.

“John–” you gasp against his mouth.

Devouring you.

His mouth slants hard over yours, tongue parting your lips, taking what he wants with a low sound—part growl, part groan.

You try to breathe through it, to think, but it’s useless. He tastes like smoke and whiskey and stone fruit. He grabs your waist and drags you closer, until you’re straddling him, knees framing his hips.

The lounger creaks.

“Christ,” he mutters against your jaw. His teeth scrape there, making you arch. “You’ve no idea how long I’ve been waiting for you to make that face again.”

“What face? A-again?” you moan, dizzy.

“That one,” he murmurs, mouth trailing lower, grazing your throat. “Like you’d let me wreck you right here, out in the open. You make it all the time.”

You shudder. He feels it—laughs under his breath.

His hand slips to your nape. His forehead presses to yours, thumb brushing your cheek.

“You want this, hm?” he asks.

You nod.

“Words, sweetheart.”

“Yes.”

“Good,” he says, and kisses you again. Rougher this time. Meaner. The decision’s final.

You belong here. On his lap. On his tongue.

“There’s a good boy, fuckin’ good boy.”

A head rush in two ways. The pulse of John’s cock on your tongue rewires your brain, resets it completely when he presses your nose into the steel wool of his hair. Dizzying, both the lack of air and the sheer size of his hand cradling your skull.

Right here, out in the open. Kneeling on a bunched-up shirt.

He had let you take charge to a point. Half-heartedly muttered about there being no need. Though as soon as you slid your tongue along the underside of his cock and hollowed your cheeks, he swore and took the reins.

He fucks your throat in slow, deep thrusts, and tells you what he thinks of your talent. What a nice surprise it is. He coos when tears well and spill, mistaking them, maybe, for strain. But it’s not that. It’s the way he looks at you. He means every word. That’s what’s undoing.

He catches your tears with a thumb, and drags them across his tongue to taste the salt. You could come like this, giving head to a man who calls you kid. When you slip a hand over your crotch he doesn’t stop you. In fact—

“Go on, do it. Show me how desperate you are.”

There’s not a shred of embarrassment when you cup yourself through your clothes, rubbing along the seam, chasing friction. You can’t do much of anything except rile yourself up. It works for John—a line of filthy encouragement streaming from him uninhibited. He grinds his hips up into the heat of your mouth, picking up speed.

John doesn’t give much warning before he comes. A stifled grunt gives it away—then his grip tightens, the pressure turning forceful, insistent, urging you to take more, to take all of him. You gag, sparks bursting in your vision when he spills in your throat. 

He gives another couple thrusts before allowing your retreat. You sputter and cough, lips slick with drool. You curl inward slightly, heels digging into your backside.

While you scrub at your eyes with the heels of your hands, still sniffing, he leans. Drags your lower lip down and hooks a thumb in your mouth to steal a look inside.

“Perfect.”

His bed could eat yours for breakfast.

That’s your first thought when John eases you into it.

Then his mouth finds yours, slower now, pacing himself. He’s got all the time in the world. You’re not going anywhere.

His kiss deepens as he crowds in close, tongue sliding against yours. You can feel every inch of him, chest to chest, the hard line of his thigh slotted between yours. His weight is a delicious trap, anchoring you down.

He shoves your shirt open, one rough palm skimming your waist, the other dragging its thumb across a scar. His mouth works a line down your neck, maw open and hungry.

“You’ve been driving me fucking mad,” he murmurs, gravel-thick. His teeth catch the shell of your ear as he toys with a nipple. “Teasin’ me for weeks.”

You twist your fingers in his hair and pull. He groans, grinding between your thighs.

“I wasn’t trying to,” you gasp. “You—you made me—during the storm—”

“Never made you do a damn thing,” he grunts, tugging at your waistband. “Did I? Didn’t make you wear my clothes. Didn’t force you to eat my food.”

He yanks your shorts and boxers to your ankles, and there’s no hiding it. He finds you wet—slick and ready. His whole body stills to collect himself. Then he exhales slow, grinning.

“Christ,” he kisses your jaw, your cheekbone, your temple. “Don’t need to force a thing.”

John’s touch is as demanding as the rest of him. He learns you fast, using two fingers and his thumb to stroke your cock. His other hand slides under your back, kneading a globe to coax you into another filthy kiss.

He breaks to swipe through your cunt, and you moan into his neck, clinging to him. He groans at the way you flutter when he circles your hole, hips shifting so you feel the hard heat of him against your thigh.

“This alright?”

You nod, helpless.

“Speak.”

“Yes,” you gasp. “Yes, John.”

He slicks his fingers and returns to your twitching cock, stirring you up into a fit of noise, hips mindlessly canting into his touch.

You’re right there—right on the edge—when he pulls away. A desperate sound tears from your lips as he stands, leaving you aching on the bed. You turn, watching him through bleary eyes as he looms.

“John,” you whimper, tilting up.

He doesn’t answer. Just reaches down, huffing through his nose, and rolls you onto your front. You scramble to get your knees set.

“Please, please—”

“Know what you need,” He grits, hauling you by the hips to the edge of the bed, swearing when you’re completely exposed. “Fuck, look at that. Could sink my teeth in right here and eat,” he swipes over your flesh, chuckling at your whimpering. “Another time, baby. Don’t worry.”

You hiss as he massages your rim using the mess from your cunt. Firm circles to ease you open. When he finally breaches, sinking to the first knuckle, you lose a little time, and come back to feel the prodding of a second digit. It’s a touch too soon, but you don’t stop him.

Don’t think you could. Not sure if you’d want to.

Soon enough, you’re tearing at the sheets. Tears roll over the bridge of your nose and slopes of your face, staining the cotton. You’re trembling, hiccuping, overwhelmed—barely able to keep up with him working you over on three of his spit-coated fingers.

Just a job, you told yourself, and now you’re crying into his bed. Listening to him purr your name. You sob once—high and cracked—and he hushes you, holding you still at the base of your spine.

“That’s it, sweet boy. Let it out.”

You cling harder to the sheets, the salt of your tears burning where they admix with sweat. You’re not sure what you’re crying for anymore—relief, need, shame. The staggering, unbearable pleasure of being wanted.

Again, he stops short of letting you come.

You’re too far gone to complain, every nerve lit up and raw. The last of your common sense, a final coherent thought raising the issue of a condom, is seared out of your mind when his cocks glides through your folds. When it slaps over the cleft of your ass. Once. Twice.

Then he’s pressing in.

It’s almost unceremonious—the weeks of simmering tension finally and suddenly boiling over—white-hot and unbearable. It ruptures, spills molten in your veins, and splits you wide open.

John’s belly brushes your lower back, then presses, cushioning when he curls over to push until he’s flush.

“Oh–oh fuck, John,” you choke out, grappling the pillow half-tucked under you.

“You’re alright.”

He keeps you close, anticipating the kick of your legs, the instinct to wriggle away. One hand smooths over your flank, gentle as breaking in a wild thing, until the worst of your shaking settles.

Then he hooks an arm snug across your chest and the other under your stomach. He finds your leaking dick, thumbing it with a hum while his own stretches you out.

“Kept this waiting, didn’t I? Sweet boy, such a mess.”

He saws in and out slowly, luxuriating in it. The rough scrape of his stubble drags over your shoulder and neck, the humid gust of his breath puffs in your ear. His fingers dip and trace your seam, circling your neglected hole. 

“Please,” you try to buck against him, but it’s impossible to move.

“Greedy,” He grunts derisively, though the eagerness with which he burrows a finger in your cunt, betrays him.

He stalls his thrusts to a grind as feeds your cunt his fingers until you cry and shake anew. They probe deep, the rub of his palm to your aching cock almost too much. You snake a hand under to push his wrist away, but his teeth find your shoulder.

“You begged for this,” he growls. “So you’re gonna let me.”

It’s not so much permission as surrender—inevitable, all-consuming. You don’t allow it so much as you yield, helpless but to drown.

The squelch of your cunt around his fingers is damning. Thicker than yours with a longer reach, he finds what makes you clench around him tight, earning a clipped curse. His wrist must be sore with the angle, but he doesn’t let it stop him. He picks up his pace again, keeping your cunt stuffed and smothered, hurtling you toward your release at last.

“John, I-I’m gonna…” you pant, breath choppy. Drool sticking to the corners of your lips.

“That’s it,” he growls. “Give it.”

Eyelids slipping shut, lightning splits the black and shoots through your nerves and muscles. You seize up with a shout then jerk, orgasm rolling through you in waves.

The rest blurs—distant. Muffled.

A guttural sound, John’s fingers retracting. Clenching around nothing and everything. Two sweat and cum-damp palms flitting over your hips and tugging, guiding you back to meet the erratic snap of his hips. 

Clarity returns with the first spurts of his cum. Mouth falling slack all over again around a feeble, surprised moan as it floods you. You can’t see him, but imagine it. Head thrown, a coat of sweat over his front and back, glutes flexing. Rooted in this deep, all-encompassing.

It’s a while before he pulls out. Seconds, minutes. Doesn’t matter. 

It beads out of you like a pearl, smeared under a thumb, then wiped by a towel.

You don’t fight him when he tucks you into his side. It’s far too hot to be this entangled in each other’s arms, but the musk of sex and sweat soothes. Easy to overlook discomforts when you’re so sated.

He sighs sweet dreams into your ear, but you’re already gone. Pulled under.

In the morning, you wake to a scorching quilt over your back. 

His chest fitted to your spine, cockhead nudging at your sore hole. He contorts you some when you rouse enough to sleepily relax for him, hooking a thick arm beneath both knees and drawing them up. They press toward your chest, folding you like a bug. Tight and close to him until there’s no room, until you’re just a precious thing for him to fuck awake.

Dozing anew in bed, you draw circles through the hair on his stomach, lazy and absent, while his fingers trace soft, idle patterns between your shoulder blades. You yawn, stretching a little into him.

“Shouldn’t you be decorating or something?”

He grunts, the movement of his fingers pausing to scratch his stubbled jaw. “Hm? Wha’s that now?”

“The party,” you murmur, eyes half-lidded.

John exhales, then folds you tighter against him, dragging the duvet higher.

“What party?”

Highlife

Price finds you high after a tough mission and makes it his own personal duty to make sure you’re okay

Cw: smut, this ended up being a lot softer than I planned, short mention of blood at the beginning, marijuana and nicotine use

-

The mission had been a shit show, really, it had been. Gaz had gotten shot and you’d had a panic attack the moment you all escaped into the helicopter. It had taken Price’s hands on your shoulders and his piercing eyes glued to yours, demanding you breathe with him to calm down. The image of his blood over your hands was why you’d opened up the box and rolled the blunt. He was fine now, simply patched up and staying in the med bay for the night.

You were a few heavy hits in when the knock at your door sounded. Cursing under your breath and snuffing out the blunt, you coughed harshly as you threw together the box and shoved it under your bed as quietly as you could.

Just as you thought whoever it was decided to leave, another knock came again, harsher this time. You had no choice but to open the door, your brain not fully comprehending the dangers of doing so. Drugs were prohibited on base and in the dorms. It was Gaz who had snuck you this bit late one night.

As you opened the door horror filled your entire body with a creeping anxiety as you came face to face with your captain. His eyes met yours, then went above and past you as he sniffed at the air. Coming back to look at you, he quirked a brow and pushed past you.

“Captain, I can explain-”

“Sergeant.” he cut you off, noticing the hastily pushed over covers to your bed.

Leaning down with a soft grunt that had your addled head keening at the noise, he pulled out the box.

“Captain please-”

“That’s enough now, love.”

It shuts you up for good that time, watching with a solidified dread as he sets the box down on your desk and opens it, snorting as the contents are revealed.

“You know I came to see how you were doing,” he smiles wryly, taking out the grinder and one of the papers, “Didn’t expect you to be one to use drugs to get rid of the day. You’re a little young for that.”

“I’m only a few years younger than you.” you retorted, taking a few steps closer. Bad idea.

Price used your proximity to look you up and down, eyes resting a little too long on your breasts, which were only clothed with a standard black tank top. You had thrown on loose sweats as well that hung a bit at your hips, stolen from Soap a few weeks before.

His hands were deft as they eventually rolled the blunt, his calluses helping him. It was a big one, larger than you’d ever roll for yourself.

“Captain what are you doing?” you finally found the courage to ask, heart stuttering as he dug around in his pants for a light. It forced the outline of his cock to grow more defined, drawing your attention before your right self had the sense to look away.

“Making sure you’re okay. If this is how you do it then I won’t let my presence stop you.” he said gruffly, the light flickering as he held it up to the unfiltered end and lit it.

Coming closer to you, he softly grabbed your chin between his forefinger and thumb and tilted your head up. Your eyes managed to focus on his, met with the deep blue that spoke volumes of experience and pain. But in that moment they were dark, filled with a focus and purpose you usually only saw out on the field. Now they were trained on you as he brought the blunt up to you lips.

You take it, letting him hold it as you breathe in deep. It burns and soothes at the same time, filling every crevice of your chest as you hold it in your lungs.

“Exhale, love.”

The smoke goes right into his face, which he inhaled deeply before taking a hit of his own. Inching his finger up, he gently rested the pad on your lower lip and tugged. You obliged easy, like butter to a knife, mouth falling open for him to exhale into. The closeness was deafening. Your eyes never left his as you took the smoke in, a hint of his own scent and flavor on it.

“That better?” he asked, finger coming to rest on your tongue and pressing down. You couldn’t even answer his question if you wanted to.

You instead nodded dumbly, tongue wrapping around his finger slightly as you did. He watched carefully, throat bobbing as he swallowed heavily.

“I don’t think you’re better yet, hun. Think you’ve been needing something else for a while now.” he nearly whispered, sinking his finger deeper into your mouth.

It wasn’t a lie. The way his hands gripped yours during training to adjust you always sent fire licking up your spine, the mere sound of your name on his lips sending you into a frenzy… you were nearly crazed for your own captain. You knew it was wrong, knew you shouldn’t. Yet as he looked into your eyes with his finger in your mouth, knuckles pinched by your canines, there was no discerning good ideas from bad one. Not as the marijuana flooded your senses and thoughts, finally slowing them.

“Answer me.” he said softly, forcing your head up more as he took another hit and breathed it into your face.

The sound that left your mouth was nothing short of a whimper, a plea for him to relieve you. It seemed to work; he slowly dragged his thumb from your mouth, licking the pad of it as you fought the urge to reach out.

“I am.”

“You’re what?” he pried, bringing the blunt to your lips and allowing you to take more. He always did that. Let you take as much as you pleased, even if you could tell he craved the power of taking it away.

“Needing.” you answered, practically heaving with the effort it took to keep yourself off of him.

He seemed a little surprised at that, surprised at your acquiescence to what he was asking without asking. Price leaned back, putting the blunt out on your ashtray where the other one from earlier rested.

“I don’t do casual, love.” he admitted, voice strained as he opened up to you. No longer the confident captain you knew, now brutally honest and bare before you. It was so shocking that you found no other response than the truth in return.

“I never said I needed casual.”

His hands and lips were on you in an instant, soft and yet urgent, needy yet managing to stay patient. He was warm against you, lips soft against your own as his hands gripped at your hips like a lifeline.

You moaned into the kiss, hands reaching up to caress his face and tangle in his beard. He groaned softly at the touch, his own hands moving up to your back and stroking soothing lines down your ribs.

He had you breathless in moments, tongue gently sweeping across your lips in a desperate request. You let him in, letting your tongue grace his own as the two of you engaged in a slow dance. He pushed and you pulled, sucking at him as his hips involuntarily bucked in response. It dragged a groan out of you, which only seemed to spur him on.

Hands wrapping around your lower thighs, he quickly pulled you up and against him. You wrapped your legs around his torso, pussy grinding against his abs as your arms found their place at his neck.

Price pushed you both against the door, hand bracing on the wood next to your head as he kissed from your jaw to your neck. He bit at your collarbone, drawing a whine out of you as his cock dragged at your ass from where it was stiff in his pants.

“Please,” you managed to whisper as your fingers tangled in his hair. He licked a long strip up your neck before responding, panting in your ear.

“I got you, love.”

Taking you swiftly from the door to the bed, he set you down with a care you didn’t expect from the gruff man you had grown to rely on and respect so much.

He only released you to pull his standard shirt off, revealing the beauty that was his chest. Thickly muscled with a small yet healthy layer of fat that accumulated a bit at his belly and absolutely covered in dark curls. His shoulders were broad yet tapered down to a lean waist where a particularly thick matting of hair trailed from his belly button down into his pants.

You were immediately stripping, tank top abandoned as he unzipped and pulled down his pants. He was stark and massive against his boxers, more thick than he was long.

Just as you reached for your own sweats his hands reached for your wrists, stopping you with a gentle strength.

“Let me.” he breathed, climbing onto the bed with you.

Price truly was a massive man, just as impressive and intimidating nearly naked as he was clothed. And yet he was careful as he slipped your sweats down your hips, revealing your lack of underwear and aching core. Finally pulling them all the way off, he laid a kiss to your upper ankle before setting your legs down on either side of you.

He was on you again instantly, body caging you in as your tongues and teeth clashed with a desperation that spoke volumes of the years that you both had worked together. Years you had been untouched by another because you couldn’t bring yourself to crave the feel of any other but him.

You moaned once again into him as his cock dragged against your clit, hands coming up to fist at his chest. Your hips moved up in response to the stimulation as you grinded up against him. That got a sharp gasp out of Price, startling him enough that he buried his face in your neck once more and drove his cock against you.

“Price please.” you begged once again as you dug your fingers into his nape, pushing his face down toward your tits.

His mouth found one of your nipples and sucked soft then hard, tongue swirling around it gently as his teeth nipped. You whined in response, arching into his attentions as his hand dragged down the length of your body, fingers dipping down into the sopping wetness of your cunt before coming back up to rub circles into your clit. Your body seemed to shatter and melt at once, every sense of the outside world fading to the feeling of his mouth and hand on you.

Price took a moment to pull back and observe you as he worked your clit, clinging to him so tight you feared your fingers might break his skin.

“You’re beautiful,” he cooed as he pressed down simultaneously, forcing a jagged moan out of you.

“That’s it.”

It was only when the first finger dipped inside you that you really began to lose your mind. The stretch was made comfortable from just how wet you were, which Price quickly noticed and decided was enough to push two more in.

The air punched out of you in an instant, a cry escaping your throat as your hips braced against his hand. It only made it worse. His palm against your clit, he rubbed you softly as his fingers began to curl. He chose that time to suck at your other tit, breath hot against your sticky skin.

It was too much too fast.

You came right then and there as he bit particularly roughly at your nipple, cunt squeezing the life out of his fingers as he focused on your clit with the heel of his palm. Panting and whining with each breath, you were already exhausted from what he has dragged from your body.

In the aftermath of your orgasm he looked in your eyes once again, a savage hunger there that would have scared you if you didn’t know better. His lips claimed your own as his fingers pulled gently from your cunt, aware that the sudden loss of fullness would have shocked you.

“You’re fuckin’ perfect.” he moaned against your lips, cock dragging against your already overstimulated cunt. His boxers must have been soaked at that point, ruined with the amount of slick that had pooled from you when you came.

“I need you,” you gasped, dragging him by his hair to pull back and look at you, “Need you inside me. Fuck me, John.”

His eyes went nearly black.

Shimmying out of his boxers, the pure girth of him had your mouth dry and open in shock. Neatly kept dark curls surrounded it, heavily balls hanging low. His tip was huge as well, the entirety of him causing it to droop slightly as he repositioned himself above you.

Noticing your slight anxiety at his size, he leaned down to kiss you once more, soft like the first time. It was passionate, his hand finding your cheek and cupping your face in his palm like it was all he needed. Like you were all he needed. It soothed you, body relaxing as he slowly dragged his cock through your slick. When he found your clit with it you whined, loud and impatient at him. He chuckled softly at that, eyes never leaving yours as he lined up with your cunt and pushed.

All you could do was gasp and moan as his tip sunk into you, stretching you so wide your vision blacked.

“Hey.”

His hand found your jaw, turning your head back to him from where it had been buried in the pillow.

“Breathe, love. Breathe.”

You followed him on instinct, big breaths filling your lungs as your cunt released him enough for him to keep pushing inside. It was too much and not enough, barely able to think around the way he split you open yet so desperate for his balls to sit against your ass that you forced yourself back onto him.

He groaned at the movement, eyes rolling as his head hung slightly, hips jerking a bit as he sunk in to the base. His hair tickled your clit, causing you to squirm under him.

“Oh God.” he muttered from where his head rested between your breasts, chest heaving as he tested you with a tentative thrust of his hips.

It had you seeing stars and moaning from low in your throat, enough to cause him to move. He was slow, hips rolling into you as he lowered himself onto his forearms, forehead resting against your own. It was so intimate that in that moment you knew he had been serious. This wasn’t casual. He was making love to you, worshipping your body in a way that only a man that was wholeheartedly devoted to you would.

“You feel so good.” you whispered to him as he continued to thrust into you, pulling your legs up over his hips.

“Heaven, love. Fuckin’ heaven between these legs.”

Eyes, blue, stark against the moonlight that managed to sneak through your window. Handsome, strong, loyal.

You ran your hands over every inch of him, feeling his biceps strain as they held him up, back taunt as his hips grinded into you and chased not his pleasure but yours. Each moan he drew from you only made him faster, more devoted to the gradual tightening of your cunt.

He increased in pace, grabbing one of your legs by the meat of your thigh and pushing it up and over his shoulder. The angle had you half screaming as he reached your cervix, his moans of pleasure half drowning out your own.

You were close, building up to your orgasm like a tsunami cresting the horizon. Each thrust drew you up tighter, coaxing your body to work just how he liked and how you craved.

It hit you harder than the first time.

You only had time to wrap your arms around his neck and draw him close as you shattered once again, causing him to go hoarse as he fucked you through the orgasm. Price didn’t stop, didn’t let your pleasure end until every drop had been wrung from your body.

When he came, it was with a cataclysmic groan that resonated over every inch of your body. His hips stuttered a few more times before he drove himself so deep inside of you that breathing felt hard. You locked your legs tight around his hips as he emptied himself inside you, shuttering and gasping into your lips as you soothed him and held him close.

He stayed like that for a while after collapsing his weight partially on you, dick buried to your womb and nose cradled to your ear as you both came down from the dual highs you were experiencing.

After a bit he pulled out, leaving you empty and dripping with cum and slick as he found your bathroom and brought a rag back. He laid kisses to your knees as he cleaned you up, gentle and aware of the fact you were still sensitive to every touch from him.

It was only when he got some water in you that he crawled back into the bed and pull you up onto his chest. He ran his hands through your hair and kissed your brow, the silence enough for the both of you. You were eventually brave enough to speak.

“Not casual, right?” you asked, not prepared for the waver in your voice.

“No love. You’re mine now.”

-

Note: Now edited! Thank you for reading and to those who ignored the typos! Might write a part two if I’m feeling it.



peristalsis - vii

selkie!soap x reader. depression. strangers to “lovers.” suicidal resolve. major character death. violent drowning. a reckoning. . Running away from life to the Scottish Hebrides, you meet a man who won't leave you alone. . Masterlist. Ao3.

previous

When you’re sure that Johnny’s friends have left, you return to the beach. The wind has died down in the late afternoon; the clouds sit heavy and motionless in the sky.

Night is coming, and it promises to be cold. It hangs in the wary stillness of the air, in the waiting quiet. The seabirds’ calling is absent; the dune crickets’ singing has ended.

He’s there on the sand. Somehow, you knew he would be. Felt it, even before he came into view. He stands by the kayak, almost as if he’s been waiting there for you.

You hold the folded pelt with both hands against your stomach as you approach. The fur is so soft against your palms, your fingers. Cool from having spent a night in the ground.

He looks at it with sharp eyes. Then, up to you, expectantly.

His eyes on you in the cottage bedroom, moonlight shifting in them. Teeth in your neck. The taste of brine in your mouth.

Pearls in your memory. Parting gifts to enjoy, as you come to the close.

“Missed you at the end there, bonnie,” he says, even and purposefully steady. “The boys were glad to meet you.”

He’s known—the whole time. He always has. You don’t know how you know this, but you do.

“I’ve had a nice time with you, Johnny,” you say, when you’re only a few paces away from him. “But I think it’s time for me to go.”

Three days. That’s all it’s been. Nothing much, objectively, to say goodbye to. A good way to end things, truthfully, with the aftertaste of good food still on your tongue, the heat and girth of him still lingering inside you. The etchings of his calluses still fresh on your skin.

A kind ending. A gentle one. Better than you and he deserve.

You hold out the pelt.

He looks at it. Mouth a tight line. Brows low and flat. Then his gaze moves to you.

“Where will you go?” he asks, still steady.

“I’m not sure,” you say. “Maybe—Amsterdam. Does it matter? I don’t know.”

“Just like that,” he says flatly. “After everything.”

You frown. “I was always going to leave, Johnny. Remember? I only booked the place for a month. This is just…earlier.”

Something frenetic buzzes in his posture. The slight lean forward in the way he stands. The angles of his face seem harsher, more pronounced. Eyes dark as wet stone.

“Johnny, just—” you shake the pelt at him, still holding it out. “Just take it, okay?”

He looks at the pelt again, and then back at you.

At it, then you.

It—you—

Johnny lunges.

In one swift surge forward he snaps the pelt from your hands and flings it aside. As it flutters to the ground his hands whip at you, seizing fistfuls of your shirt a half-thought before you realize it, wrenching you forward.

“What the fuck?!” you cry, but then you’re off your feet, falling toward him, arms flailing as you lose your center of balance. You topple into him, and he hooks you beneath the shoulders with the iron bands of his arms, stepping away from the kayak, and only for a moment do you think that maybe he’s going to bring you back to the cottage before he starts dragging you in the opposite direction—

“Johnny, no,” you breathe, as you hear a wave break on the sand,“Johnny, no!”

You start to kick and thrash. You throw yourself against his grasp, dig your heels into the sand, try to find the meat of his forearm with your teeth, but he is resolute. Unstoppable.

You start to scream.

The waves eddy around your feet, rise up to engulf your ankles, your calves, as Johnny roils the water with wide, unfaltering steps, deeper in—

The water closes around your thighs. Your waist.

This is happening. This is really happening—

“Had a month to get to this, bonnie,” says Johnny, over your screaming, rough and harsh and completely unrecognizable. He slings you around to face him, jaw set hard, the muscles in his temples flexing as he clenches his teeth. “But I guess we’re doin’ it now.”

“Johnny,” you plead, “please don’t, Johnny, please—Johnny, no, no, no, no—!”

He clamps his hands on your shoulders and shoves you downward. You claw at him, push against the seabed, but your lover is too strong, immune to your fighting, and you are barely able to inhale before he forces your head below the water.

Frigid cold—it rushes into your ears, through your hair, knife-sharp and paralyzing. Salt flooding the open canals of your nose—

You close your throat. The surface swirls above you, distorting him, rippling and folding in on itself as a wave recedes. Hope waits for the retreating water to expose you, but he has dragged you out too deep, far enough that even the lowest point of the backwash still submerges you.

Seawater, eroding cilia, ramming against the rolled stone of your epiglottis. Burning the film of your corneas.

You reach up, swinging your hands at his face, but the distance of his straightened arms, muscles flexing to hold you down, is too great; you beat at empty air, or collide with the rock-hardness of his shoulders.

Another wave comes in, deepening the surf around you. You kick out, knee upward, wrench against him—you just need him to loosen his grip once, for just one moment, and then you can get away. You try to pry his fingers up, but they may as well have rooted in you.

Lungs pulsing. Throat already fighting to open. Chest heaving, diaphragm beating upward to pull in air. Pain lancing up your chest, unimaginably sharp, head so heavy it might burst—

You throw yourself to one side, kicking against the sand, and physiology subsumes your control. The cost of fighting is breathing. The floodways open—the ocean rushes into your throat—

Salt abrades the walls of your esophagus, claw-slashing downward. Acid bypasses the filters of your alveoli, honeycomb structures collapsing to the pressure, to the spasming of your lungs desperate to send oxygen to the rest of your body. Your diaphragm contracts—your chest convulses to cough, to force water out, only to welcome more of the sea in.

You beat at Johnny’s arms again. All you manage is to throw water against him. He is a sea stack above you. A pillar. Unmovable.

Holding your body against his in the bedroom, frighteningly strong, moving against you like the ocean itself—

The water churns above you with your struggle. You cannot see his face. All you see is the unstable shape of his silhouette, wavering lines distorting the edges as the corners of your vision darken.

More seawater, expanding your chest. Heart stuttering between your lungs, yanking in the last of your oxygenated blood, with nothing to send back out. The weight of your body swells, arms too heavy to hold up. They crash into the water before you force them back up again, searching and unwieldy.

Perception narrows. Him, and you. That’s all.

Sunlight through the window the next morning, rimming him in gold. The heat of his shoulder pressed to yours.

The seawater steals the tears from your eyes, throat convulsing on a sob you cannot make.

Grinning as you shared oysters.

You slap your hands against his arms, clapping your palms to whatever they can find, begging, praying—

Him moving inside you, his warmth, his smell, the weight of his tongue in your mouth. The tug of his hand on your arm.

His smile, his voice, his hand in yours—

Fists like weights holding you down. Fire in your chest. Too full.

Upward—something in you tugging upward.

You want to live. You want to live. You want to live—

It’s done.

Johnny lifts your body from the surf and carries it back to the beach. You fit in his arms as if they were the mold you were cast from.

He knew you would the moment he saw you in the airport. Perfect. You were perfect for him. He saw it in the angles of your body, the way you stood, the emotions moving behind the mask of your face.

He tried to explain it to Price once—the seeing. The knowing.

How he could look straight at his old captain, for instance, and know, without ever hearing the man say a word, that he felt responsible. For everything. For the gunshot. For the months afterword. Even though he hadn’t chosen to discharge Johnny himself, Price saw the mold of his hands in the shape his sergeant’s life had taken.

It’s how he knows Gaz couldn’t see the change in him, because he saw what he wanted to see—his best mate whole and healthy, thriving in a new stage of his life.

It’s how he knows Ghost doesn’t even recognize him anymore. Not really.

And it’s how he knows you’re just like him.

He lays you down on the sand, cradling the back of your head so it settles lightly down. Stretches your legs to rest straight out. He aligns your limp arms with the length of your torso, turning your hands upward so the sand will not cling to your palms.

Beautiful. Even with your face slack. Eyes half-open, unseeing. Mouth parted; seawater dripping from the corners.

Your feet touched the island the same way his did, years ago. Running away. Looking for the end, without really trying to find it. It was in the set of your brows, the tight pull of your mouth against your teeth.

Life had gone in every direction opposite of your intention. And it had left you alone.

Johnny smooths a few stray hairs away from your forehead, and kisses the place between your brows. The little line that has sat between them this whole time is gone, smoothed away. He kisses the bridge of your nose, and then your mouth, and then stands.

It took him a while, back then, to make the decision. It was hours before he woke to find Price watching him, sitting despondent on the sand, tears tracking salty down the older man’s face.

He goes to the place he threw his pelt away and retrieves it, shaking it out. Holding it in his hands assuages the anxiety that has wriggled in the back of his mind since the day he shoved it into the lintel of the croft. He’d known where it was, but survival instinct prevails over logic—for the rest of his life, he will always fear its loss.

It’s a consequence, but not one he’d been unfamiliar with.

And, in the end, preferable to the alternative.

He lowers himself to the sand a little ways away from you, propping his knees up and spreading the pelt across them.

When he had done this—he’d done it alone. It had been close. He almost hadn’t made it.

If he takes up this vigil—if he stays, the whole time, watching you—you’ll make it. It’s not a matter of hope or belief. It’s a matter of knowing.

He knows every time he looks into your eyes. Every time he’s been inside you. Every time your body has risen to meet his touch.

You want to live.

So he sits back. He keeps his eyes on you.

And he waits.

The sky claps you between its palms and hurls you back down the gravity well—

You vomit up the ocean.

Panting, with burning lungs. Closer—everything is much, much closer, loud and bright, and suddenly, individually distinct.

Channels of sound and aroma dance on the wind—sea salt, the smoke of someone’s grill from the village, burning meat, the rolling crash of the incoming tide, birdcall and the gust of beating wings and—and—

And you can sense them all.

A gap in the clouds lets the sunlight touch the earth.

You move on the sand. Turn onto your belly, chest heaving, empty and light. The cove—you’re still in the cove. There’s the path back up to the cottage. There’s the kayak. There’s—

Johnny, riotous, waiting in the crashing waves.

He calls to you: loud, long, triumphant, teeth bared in jubilation.

You cry out. Wordless. If you’d had any words to say, your lips could not shape them.

You’re alive.

It crashes into you. Alive.

You lift your head into the wind coming off the ocean. It caresses your face softly, tenderly, like a mother’s kiss on your cheek.

Johnny suddenly turns from you and darts into the water.

You wail with surprise. A wave rushes up to where you lay, water licking up the fibers of your body. You’re not ready. It’s too soon. Why did he leave you? What’s happening? Why isn’t the water cold?

You clutch at the sand. You can’t find your legs—you can’t stand up. All you can do is crawl, shuffle your ungainly body forward with the clumsiness of a newborn child. You cry out again, trying to convince him to return, to come help you, but if he hears it, he does not come to your aid.

Another wave surges forward; salt water crashes across your face. You flinch away from it, but something nictates over your eyes, shielding them from the burn.

Once you reach the surf, the water cradles your body, buoyancy easing your way. You submerge, finding something to kick with—

And then you’re gliding.

Murky, and blue. Sand clouding in the tide. But comfortable—cool, without being cold. You remember frigidity cutting into your skin only hours earlier, rending you at the seams, unmaking you.

Now, it receives you like an old friend.

Ahead of you, Johnny moves further out. You can feel him, far out in the distance, tiny eddies of water rippling against your cheeks.

He’s not the only thing you can feel. The radius of your awareness vibrates with blips of movement, darting, swaying, dancing, below and above and all around. It shocks you to realize, and you go still, hovering in place, momentarily stunned by how much there is living around you.

Johnny pauses too, ahead of you. Waiting. A lone distinct figure, patient for you to follow.

You shiver with startled wonder, and resume your way toward him.

The coastal shelf slopes downward, falling away. The water gradually clears as overhead, past the surface, the sun sinks in the sky. Warm golden light dyes the sea around you. He leads you on, further and further, until a forest of kelp grows up around you.

In the turquoise, ribbons of twisting green undulate and twirl, feathery and dancing in the windy current. Silvery bubbles trail toward the sunlight, intermingling with tiny schools of glimmering fish that dart and jump between the fronds. Down below you, red and green algae fur valleys of rock, swaying lazily like prairie grass.

It’s beautiful.

Johnny drifts to a stop in the middle of it all, wheeling around to face you. You approach him, coming in close—and it’s almost like approaching the sun, so much that he radiates across your senses.

His dark eyes hold yours the same way they had that day on the beach, and the pendulum swings balanced now between you.

He brushes the side of his face along yours, and with his touch he leads you downward, following the stipes of kelp toward the stone to which their holdfasts grip. The heat of his huge body warms the water that flows in the narrow spaces between your bodies, even as the coolness intensifies the further you dive.

The two of you draw up along the forest floor—and find the myriad little denizens of the sea. You’d known they were there, at the very edge of your senses, and now they bloom into fullness in your attention.

Shrimp perambulate beneath rocky ledges. Crabs walks along the ridge of a huge boulder, like climbing a mountain. And there, further down, snails in their spiral shells, pulling themselves across the sandy grain. Starfish, in shades of red and blue and orange. Anemones, translucent hair streaming.

Tiny lives—insignificant to you, before. Hardly worth your notice. Now, you marvel at them, reeling. You want to cup them all in your palms and bring them up to clutch against your chest.

Something brushes against you.

You look up—Johnny, sliding along your side, curving back in toward you, then looping underneath. He nudges at you, then darts away; you gaze at him, confused, so he comes back in, shunting you with his body, and once again retreats.

Behind him, you catch a turtle fluttering in between the green leaves. Atlantic salmon chasing capelin. An eel peeking out from its cave. Undisturbed by Johnny’s—and your—antics.

He nudges you again, then backs off, looking at you expectantly. Realizing his intentions, you follow—he makes a low clicking sound in his throat, pleased, and jets into the flowing leaves, buffeting you with the wave he leaves in his wake.

You’re shocked only for a moment before the kelp parts for you in your pursuit. Johnny quickly disappears ahead of you, dipping down below the canopy. You feel him rapidly shrink in your awareness, and you propel forward, scanning for telltale splashes of gray and white, arms of green caressing you as you pass.

You close in on him, but suddenly he evades. You follow again, only to find he’s nowhere in view. Then the chase is on: he stays in one place only long enough for you to catch sight of him before he bolts, or wheels around and backtracks to confuse you every time you approach. Teasing, taunting, flaunting the dexterity he has underwater which you have yet to acquire.

Golden shafts of dancing sunlight begin to dim and shorten as he leads you on. Frustration rapidly builds in your chest, buoyed as your lungs press against your ribcage. You need to breathe, even as Johnny becomes no more than a dot of movement in your senses, confounding you at every turn.

Why is he doing this? Why won’t he stay with you? If you surface, you’ll lose him, but the sudden memory of saltwater flooding your chest has you kicking toward the fading daylight. Self-preservation taking its place at the head of your priorities, and you follow it with no longer any second thought.

Above you shifts a mirror of silk.

You rise. Faster as the weight of the sea lessens, your reflection blooming as you approach, closer and closer to the wedge-shaped face, the large, dark eyes—

You swim into yourself and breach the air. Your nostrils open, and you inhale the wind.

You see the twilight bleeding into the day. Clouds moving quickly off as the sun sinks into the horizon.

Where is Johnny?

You can’t sense him anymore—as you knew would happen—and your chest contracts with fear and longing, suddenly believing you’ve seen him for the last time—that he’s left you all alone, to figure out what to do next, with no idea how to live in the skin of this new self you’ve become.

You give a mournful howl. You don’t want to do this alone, you can’t, you thought you wouldn’t have to—

But in the distance, back the long way you came, you hear an answer.

You whirl around, facing the shore, and almost too far away to see, a dark shape rests on the sand.

Your throat convulses with a clumsy breath, and then you dive. The water parts for your body, sliding around you, streaming through your hair. Faster than you expect, the slope of the shelf draws close, and you jet upward, belly meeting the sand, and when the water recedes and you drag yourself back onto the beach, your own weight settling heavy on your bones, you cry out again.

You shake the water from your head, wailing at the top of your lungs, desolate and blind as you blink the salt away, and then there’s a warm body up against yours, weight melding against you, heat reaching out to drive away a coldness you hadn’t felt until you’d surfaced.

You continue crying as Johnny closes his teeth around a hank of your neck and drags himself on top of you, pressing you down into the sand. You shift to let him settle over you, and all of his weight compresses your body—sandwiching you between himself and the earth, pinning you down in one place.

Something in you still wants to fight. To shake him off—to escape. But all you can do is cry. He enters you with no resistance, and you cry more, harder, until your lungs deflate, and then you take a deep breath and start wailing again.

Saltwater streaming down your face, dripping into your own mouth. Your voice hits the cliff walls, rebounds off the stone until the air fills with your weeping. Johnny shifts on top of you, pressing your head down to the sand.

The vessel you have contained yourself within overturns. You cry.

You cry for yourself. You cry for him. You cry for what you’ve done, what you haven’t, and for what you can never undo. Your lament fills your own ears and spills out again, all across the beach, catching in the wind to fly off into the ether, raised to the birds, to the passing clouds overhead.

You cry with despair of never going back. You cry with the terror of Johnny finally rolling off of you, to dart back into the waves, to leave you here alone again. You cry until your throat hurts, stinging and raw—

And Johnny’s hands, strong and warm, edge beneath your pelt and pull you out, still bawling with every drop of shame you’ve carried in your body since the day you realized you hated yourself.

“Shh, shh,” he murmurs, drawing you up into his chest, arms steady and strong around you. “It’s alright now, bonnie, it’s alright. I’m here.”

You cannot respond to him. Your mouth hangs open only to wail your grief. Your body wracks against him, convulsing, involuntary, as you scream with despair and relief and horror and resolve, too much to contain, too overwhelming now to ever split yourself away from.

You find his arms with your shaking hands and grip on tight. He slips the pads of his thumbs beneath your eyes every so often to clear away your tears, and you feel his mouth press against your forehead. You wait for him to drop you. Wait for him to see the mess you’re making and wash his hands of it.

He doesn’t. Every time another sob wracks you, he grips you tighter.

Eventually—when you begin to wonder if it ever could, if this is all you are now, a squalling bundle of fragile skin pebbling in the cold—it passes.

The next time you pause to draw breath, you find nothing more inside you to disgorge. You begin to shake in Johnny’s arms, trembling with exhaustion, whimpering with clenched eyes.

He breathes slowly against you. Calm and even. He strokes your face with gentle fingers, even and patient, as if there’s nothing more in the world he’d rather do.

You find the courage to meet his gaze when your heartbeat steadies, finding the rhythm in Johnny’s chest to match. You see again what you saw that first day, that next night; you know now what you’ve always known, somewhere inside you. Your face is familiar in the reflections of it in his eyes.

His mouth curls gently as he gazes down at you. His eyes dance in yours, corners creasing as he traces the curve of your cheek. Light catches in his pupils.

You see him clearly, as the sun gives way to the evening, and the moon rises over a cloudless night of stars.

epilogue early access

a/n: shoutout to @/gildui for suggesting screenshots for that one section of text. Thank you to @/bi-writes for trying to figure out how i could keep the formatting with tumblr's coding. Please let me know if alt text is necessary. God forbid a text-based website allow for formatting said text.

Raspberry Girl Previous + masterlist + AO3 Simon Riley/female reader CW: 18+ daddy kink

You’re trying. 

Your body language betrays you. The effort and the turbulence beneath, your eyes flicking rapidly through the parking lot, the ramrod straight line of your spine, your quadricep tensing and relaxing under his palm as he works his fingers from your knee up, back and forth. 

“What’s wrong?” You sigh. Slump. Turn to face him with an anxious pout. 

“I just… I don’t love the restaurant store.” He gives you a chance, and then prompts, pushes just slightly.

“What’s the rule?” 

“Tell you when I’m scared, or anxious. Or overwhelmed.” He squeezes approval, and you continue. “It’s chaos, especially on a Sunday, and… it’s like a warehouse so the sound bounces…  all of it is really loud.” You latch onto his forearm, hard intake of breath sharp before softening, your fingers applying firm pressure. He doesn’t mind. You’re anchoring yourself to him, with him. It’s all he could ask for. 

“It’s okay baby, we’ll get it done and then go home. I’ll be with you.” Your head bobs repeatedly with a nod, but you make no effort to unbuckle your seatbelt or get out of the car. You need a little comfort, a little encouragement, things that are his job to provide, so he’s out of the truck on his side to open the passenger door, reaching over to unbuckle your seatbelt. “Close your eyes and open your mouth.” He works his thumb behind your teeth and rests it on your tongue, a pleased flush rushing through him when you immediately pull and suck on him. “Good girl.” You calm almost immediately, strained muscles and back turning plush, tight corners of your eyes smoothing away. When you lean in, looking for more contact, he decides to test the limits. Your limits. “Breathe through your nose,” he murmurs encouragingly as he presses deeper into your mouth, “there we go.” You try, but when his knuckles meet your lips and his thumb brushes your throat, the back of your tongue, you seize up, trying to swallow, trying to find air, and jerk away, gagging. He follows the movement, width of his hand against your neck with a finger against your pulse, keeping you steady and still through the swift rise and then decline of panic. It crashes like a wave, receding just as quick and leaving something in its place.

You blink rapidly, gears turning, so obviously trying to reconcile something you’re feeling, something he can so easily read. Worry. Shame. Spiral.

“Stop.” He brushes a kiss across your forehead. “Don’t go there. When it’s time, I’ll take care of you. Do you understand?” Your chest loosens. 

“Yes daddy.” Music to his ears.

“Does your throat hurt?” 

“It’s okay.” He cups the back of your head, guides you into his arms, and place your ear over his heart. You’ve started to tap your fingers with the rhythm, against your skin or his, self soothing, and it makes him whole. It’s not just a sexual dynamic with you, it’s everything, an entire soul under his shelter, a whole human using his heartbeat to ground themselves, and nothing is more fulfilling. “Ready to go?” You tug on him instinctively, hopping from the truck, keeping your grip locked in his. 

“Yeah.” He smiles at your resolve, the confidence. 

“Brave girl. C’mon.” 

It doesn’t bother him that you lock up again, the store is a madhouse. It’s overcrowded, and loud, the metal roof of the warehouse doing nothing to dull the senses, bright lights and too many boxes, bags, things being tossed around. 

You’re wide eyed, rooted to the floor, still clutching his arm in a stranglehold and he herds you towards a corner. 

“Tell me.” You don’t start immediately, scrounging around for words, and he encourages with a gentle reminder. “Remember your rules baby.” It doesn’t take anymore coaxing after that. 

“I’m overwhelmed.” You blurt, wincing, but just as he predicted, hoped, you visibly relax, and he takes your face in his hands. Holds his whole world. 

“Proud of you sweetheart.” Tears shine in your eyes, dew drops in the corners, and when one falls he wipes it away. “Do you need me to finish your list?” 

“Please, if it’s…” He doesn’t waste time, just moves you to the cart, stations you at the helm so you can steer and he can manage the rest. 

“You’ll push the cart, and stay in the middle of the aisles. I’ll get the things you need.” You blow out a breath. 

“Okay.” 

“When?” 

“Dunno. Sometime next week, I think. Wasn’t real clear.” Simon groans, rubs his nose into his palm and then pauses, listening for footfalls in the hall or the adjacent bedroom.

“Well, if they’re goin’ we are too. I’ll see what’s going on, let you know later.” Gaz grunts an affirmative and hangs up. He’s been restless, itchy, just like the others, but Simon’s in no rush. 

Not now. 

Not when he has you, here in house, with your things in his bedroom, his bathroom, with your toothbrush next to the sink. The slow migration of your stuff has begun and is in full swing, two fuzzy blankets, your switch, your kindle, even that weird pillow you have that you call Pusheen. It’s a stuffed cat of some kind, he thinks, and you use it as a pillow half the time, which means it’s little eyes are sometimes staring at him in bed. 

But you love it, and you don’t know yet, but he loves you. 

Every sweet piece, even the weird stuffed cat. 

Which is why he’s dreading the next mission, the next time he loads onto an airplane and drops into an undisclosed location, the next time he has to turn his mind dark, shutter his heart, forget about anything that could interfere with completing an objective. 

For the first time in his life, he doesn’t want it. 

And he doesn’t want to dwell on it right now either, so he shoves back from the desk and closes his laptop, opting to find you instead. 

You’re in the kitchen. There’s a beater in your hands, something else that’s new to him, and the rich scent of chocolate in the air. 

“What’s this?” He tugs you close, holds you against him with your back to his chest, kisses your ear. 

“Whipped cream.” You shiver, goosebumps raising the hair on your arms. “It’s for…. I made hot chocolate?” 

“Is that a question?” He nips your skin. it’s getting harder to control the instinct, the urge to mark you in every way possible. 

“N-no it’s… I made it. You can make whipped cream! I don’t know why anyone buys whipped cream in a can. I mean, I know. It’s because they don’t realize how easy it is. It’s really so simple and so much better. Obviously, people don’t have time to make it by hand, I know that, I’m not trying to make anyone feel bad, but…” 

“But?” He squeezes your hip. 

“But… it’s so good this way.” The stainless steel bowl glints under the kitchen’s pendant light. “Do you want some?” 

“Of course.” You bounce a bit on your toes, the smile he dreams about lighting up your face. “I don’t think I’ve ever had hot chocolate.” You give him a shocked look.

“Wha… what?” He shakes his head and sips. It’s silky and smooth, but not something that would rot your teeth. There’s a hint of decadent bitterness to it, well balanced, a roasted coffee taste of some kind.

“Didn’t get a lot of sweet stuff, ’til you.” Whipped cream dots your upper lip and he tries to tamp down the rushing blood in his veins. 

“That’s um… that’s…” He puts the mug down, already half empty. 

“It’s what, sweetheart?” 

“It’s nice.” You whisper, drifting closer, and he slides his hands up under your hoodie. 

“Hmm,” You’re so soft, everything about you, head to toe, and you tremble under his touch, the circles he scrawls into your skin as you try to regulate your breathing. He can’t help himself. “You were such a good girl for me today, weren’t you?” 

“Yes daddy, I tried.”

“You were. So good, and so sweet,” he taps your phone and sighs at the glowing numbers on the screen. Tomorrow. “It’s late, and you should be asleep already, go on.” He urges you away from the kitchen with a pat on your ass, even as you try to protest. “Bed, little berry girl.” 

“I can clean up-” 

“Bed,” he pauses, cocks his head and reaches for the bowl of whipped cream. “Will this still be good in the morning?”  Maybe he’ll wake you up with his mouth on your nipples, tongue working circles through cream as he drags his teeth across them, pinching them so he can hear your surprised little squeak. He’d paint you with his own if you were ready, decorate your body with his cum, drag it down to your pussy and then smear it over your clit, working back and forth until you were making your own mess on his hand. 

“Um… yes? If it’s left in the fridge.”

Maybe… 

“Perfect.” 

animal, sick as they come

summary: Ghost has been starving his whole life. Never enough food to fill his stomach, never enough blood to cover his hands, always leaving him hungry and ready to snap. You’re the supposed solution to his problem, willing or not. (or: the kidnapped home chef au)

wc: 14.2k

cw: GRAPHIC NONCONSENSUAL SEX, kidnapping but you’re lowkey chill about it, rough sex, pain play, dirty talk & light degradation, non-consensual spanking, rough/painful anal sex, gratuitous description of cooking/food written by someone who once lit a pot of boiling water on fire and is really just trying her best

read on ao3 - see the pinterest board

You may have never been kidnapped before, but you can’t imagine this is how it’s supposed to go.

The masked man looms in the doorway to the kitchen, shoulders so wide that he can’t stand in the opening properly because he wouldn’t even fit, the very top of his head hidden by the worn frame. He’s a beast of a man, hulking in every sense of the word, and you can’t help but wonder how he managed to sneak up on you in the first place. Surely you’re not that unaware of your surroundings? He’s easily 6’4, probably no less than three hundred pounds.

Not much time had passed since you’d woken in a dark room with a thudding pain between your temples, mouth dry and throat swollen. You were sure you’d been blindfolded at first, eyes dry and heavy, until ice-cold water splashed onto your face and your eyes flew open on instinct.

He’d just… been there. One minute you were walking home, trying to avoid large puddles and squinting through pouring rain, and the next you were shivering and scared, your captor towering over your crumpled and bound form.

You’d lost control of your bladder the moment the sight of him registered. He’d looked down, snorted, and lumbered away to find a hose. 

You’d been inconsolable when he told you to strip, shaking with your sobs and keeping your arms wrapped tight around your chest. Even when he’d grunted ‘m not gonna fuck you when you reek of fuckin’ piss, you hadn’t been able to calm enough to follow his demands. It was only when he’d reached up to run a hand over his face and his shirt lifted just enough for you to get a glimpse of the piece on his hip that you’d been snapped away from your panic.

You can see the shape of it now, tucked in its holster. You’re fucking terrified that at any moment he could pull it out and end your life, like that. It would take hardly any effort at all. Just a twitch of the finger and bam, you go from captive to corpse.

“How long’ll it be?” The man grunts, massive arms crossed over his chest, breaking you out of your fearful stupor. 

You blink at him, wide-eyed and silent. He’d given you clothes – clothes that fit, to your comfort and horror – so you’ve been spared the further indignity of forced nudity, but the extra layer doesn’t make you feel much safer. 

He dips his chin when you don’t answer, dark eyes boring into yours. That only makes you clam up more, joints stiff.

He huffs. “Dinner. When’re you gonna fuckin’ feed me, bird?”

You stare at him, baffled. “What?” It’s the first word you’ve said to him without sobbing, and your voice trembles, shrill and weak.

He steps forward, angling his shoulders to fit into the room, fuck, and you skitter back, pressing yourself to the wooden cabinets. They’re tall, taller than the countertops in any house you’ve ever lived in, and the lip presses into the middle of your back.

“There’s food in the fridge,” he grunts. “Get to work.”

You’re not sure you could move even if you wanted to, your fight-or-flight instinct having settled firmly on freeze. 

He rumbles low in his chest and plants one hand on the island in the center of the kitchen, leaning over it. He’s so tall that his head nearly reaches the other side of the counter, hardly a foot away from yours. The counters are the perfect height for him. 

“What’s not clicking, girl?”

You pinch yourself, a quick twist of skin to make sure that this is all real and you’re not just trapped in the world’s most confusing nightmare.

“I-I don’t… you want me t-to cook? For you?” You manage, voice strangled.

He looks spectacularly unimpressed with your lack of understanding, and a distant part of you recognizes that you should probably be worried about making your captor displeased so quickly. However, the far larger part of you hasn’t had a rational thought since he hosed you down with freezing water and is still almost entirely useless.

He turns to the side to open his fridge, hand dwarfing the handle, and drops a chunk of frozen meat on the counter. It’s wrapped in brown parchment paper, a little string holding it closed. The fridge rattles with how harshly he closes the door and you can’t help but flinch. 

If he weren’t closer to the exit than he is to you, you’d have bolted away the second he turned his back. But he’s close enough that he could reach out and grab you with one hand if you got to the doorway, and you can’t even bring yourself to think about what he might do if you were caught. 

“Cook it.” He nods at the meat, voice bored like this is simple. Like it’s obvious, and your lack of understanding is an inconvenience that he’s rapidly losing patience with.

You listen, because it is obvious. He’s the captor, you’re the captive. At any moment, at the slightest whim, he could shoot you, strangle you, beat you, or a dozen worse things you can’t imagine for fear of ruining his dinner with your bile. 

He has every advantage and you don’t have anything but the shapeless hoodie and sweatpants he gave you. Here, you are nothing and he is everything.

So with shaking hands and tears streaming down your face nearly the entire time, you listen. 

You find a pan – he doesn’t help you and it’s incredibly awkward to try and dig around in unfamiliar cabinets without turning your back to him, but you manage it – and get the burner turned on. He steps out of the doorway again, still watching you from the hallway, and that gives you just enough bravery to inch towards the fridge, snatching the butter from it like he might lurch forward at any minute. 

It’s a good cut of meat. A ribeye, think and with not much fat on it. You’ve worked in the resturaunt business for a long time and it’s obvious to you that this is cut by a local butcher, not some packing plant. This is fresh. 

You have to stand with your back to the counter beside the stove to keep him in your eyeline. He doesn’t seem to mind, though the black balaclava covering him from scalp to neckline keeps almost all of his expressions a mystery to you. 

“How do you want it?” You manage to ask, after what must be five minutes of psyching yourself up internally and darting your eyes between him and the meat. 

“Rare,” he says, and you find that you’re not exactly surprised by his answer.

Basting the meat is the hardest part, but you manage. You’ve watched your father do this since you were born, spent countless nights in the corner of your parent’s restaurant watching line cooks and chefs and dishwashers and paying them all far more attention than you ever did your homework, nodding off in class the next day because the restaurant was open until eleven and your parents never once left early.

You could cook this meat in your sleep. Even with his minimal ingredients (he just shakes his head when you ask where the garlic is, and you quickly realize the only seasonings you have to work with are salt and pepper), you’re confident that the meat has come out tender and juicy, if flavorless. 

There are no sides. No drinks. No dessert. If you’d made this meal for either one of your parents, they’d lecture you for so long that the steak would go stone cold. 

You don’t have a plate to serve it on. When you ask tentatively about the dishes, voice hardly audible to even you, the man doesn’t answer. 

He instead begins to stride towards you, sending you careening around the island to try and keep as far from him as possible, hips crashing into the sharp edges of the counter and socks slipping across the tile. He ignores you completely as he leans over the over, sniffing loudly. 

You’ve thrown yourself, completely unintentionally, to the side of the counter with a large and well-stocked knife block. Before you even really think about it, you’re gripping a carving knife with both hands and holding it straight out in front of you, like you’re hoping he runs into you and impales himself. It’s probably your best bet, considering your knees are nearly knocking and barely holding you up.

He is entirely unconcerned by you. He grabs an oven mitt that was either always black or has been scorched so badly that it’s been darkened, the back of it split with its thin lining peeking out, and grabs the cast-iron by its handle, turning back to the rest of the kitchen. 

He snorts when he sees you, the sound distinctly amused and unafraid. “You think you could hurt me? With that thing?”

You may be shaking in fear, the knife quivering in front of you even with your knuckles clenched so tight they nearly spasm, but you still manage to find yourself almost offended.

“I’ll stab you,” you threaten, voice quiet but the steadiest it’s been since you woke up in that damp basement. “I’ll do it.”

The cheeks of the balaclava pull up, the imprint of his lips clear throught the fabric as he smiles, an indent where his teeth must be. “Don’t think you’ll like what happens if you try, pet.”

He steps around the island again, striding for the door and completely dismissing you. At least, that’s what you think until he calls, “Follow,” over his shoulder, like you’re an animal being called to heel.

The dining room is visible from the kitchen, a section of one wall carved out so you can see into each room from the other. You only lose sight of him for a second before he reappears on the other side of the wall, heading to sit at the table. 

The room has a horrible dark red carpet, the walls the same old-fashioned panneling as the hallway he’d dragged you down hardly an hour earlier. He seats himself at the head of a small rectangular table. It’s the only chair in the room despite the fact that five more could easily fit at the table, one leg shorter than the other. There’s nothing on the walls, no decor anywhere, just one table and one chair for one man.

You linger in the doorway, shifty and nervous, halfway to rushing back to the kitchen if only for some deluded sense of familiarity you’ve already built. 

“Don’t make me chase you,” he warns, eyes narrowing into a brief glare before he drops the pan in front of himself, silverware already set at his place, cast iron still smoking. “Neither of us’ll like it if you ruin my meal, bird.”

Then, he digs in. 

You’ve seen a lot of people eat. More people than you can count, in fact. You’ve seen them eat good food, bad food, life-changingly good and life-changingly bad food. As a child you’d been fascinated by the expressions on customers’ faces when they tried something new for the first time.

A woman with her eyes squeezed shut and eyebrows raised high as she bites into a new chocolate cake recipe your mother spent weeks making you taste test, moaning so loudly her husband had blushed. A man nearly collapsing over his bowl of soup on a cold winter day, just barely keeping his tie from falling into it as he desperately shoveled another bite into his mouth. You’ve seen people cry over your father’s wagyu, pepper your mother’s face with kisses after tasting her dacquoise.

This man eats like none you’ve ever seen before.

He’s like an animal. It takes him just a second to push his mask up to his nose, revealing pale skin decorated with atrophic and keloid scars both, then he’s pulling the pan as close to his chest as he can and hunching over it like a predator guarding its kill. 

He seems entirely unworried about burning his wrists on the edges of the pan, instead focused on tearing his steak into barely bite sized pieces with his fork and messily rubbing it in the extra butter still pooling in the bottom of the pan. 

He doesn’t even pick the first piece up with his fork. He pinches it between two fingers and pushes it between thin, scarred lips, ignoring what must be a burn on his fingertips. He chews twice, then swallows. His digits shine under the low light of his dining room, juice from the meat dripping down his fingers to cover his hand, nails choppy and with a little piece of fat stuck under one until he digs it out with his tooth.

You gape as he does it again and again, pushing two, then three pieces into his mouth at once as he works through the meat. 

It was a massive steak. It took more than half an hour to cook, if the clock on his stove is right. It’s gone in less than five minutes.

He moans as he eats, nearly pornographic in a way that makes you shift in discomfort. The steak is rare enough that the juice dripping from it is pink, the meat itself a brighter color than the man’s thin lips. Juice sluices down his chin as he chews with his mouth open, bits of the meat caught between crooked teeth. 

When he gets to the last piece of the cut, half of it submerged in butter, he holds it in front of himself for just a moment. Then, he turns to you for the first time since he left the kitchen.

His lips are flat, expressionless, as he holds the piece of steak up in front of himself. His elbow is planted firmly on the table to keep his hand in his eyeline, and he looks at you expectantly, silent. 

Your stomach growls, loud enough for him to hear. His lips twitch up in a smirk before he smothers it. You glare. You have no idea how long the drugs knocked you out for, how many days it’s been since your breakfast omlette. Standing over the oven, smelling the steak as it cooked, has made you hungry. 

The two of you are silent as you inch forward, hardly daring to lift your feet from the carpet. It doesn’t take you very long to reach the table, not when the room is as small as it is.

You shift the knife to just your dominant hand, your now free hand reaching forward slowly as you keep your eyes trained on his. The steak is still so hot that steam is still curling from the pink center of it, right between his eyes. He’s still as a statue.

Then, the second your fingertips brush the meat, he snatches it back, slipping it between his lips. 

You flinch back as your mouth drops open, offended and startled by his sudden movement. Your fist tightens around the knife, no longer so limp at your side. 

He chews with his mouth open, smiling meanly at you. His teeth are stained pink from the juices, and you think for a moment that it almost looks like his gums are melting. 

“Forget your manners, pet?’ He asks, only swallowing once he’s finished talking.

You wince at the lack of manners, your p’s and q’s brow beaten into you with a stiff wooden spoon to the back of your hand when you were young, shocked to see someone ignore what you’ve always seen as instinctual and then ask you about manners. “What?”

He leans forward in his seat, greasy hand set on his jean-clad knee. “You didn’t say please.”

You blink at him, caught in some sort of trance that you have no idea how to pull yourself out from. “Oh.”

He sits, still and silent, for several long moments, belly rising and falling beneath his folded fingers, before speaking again. “You’ll call me Ghost while you’re here.”

Your brows furrow a bit but you nod, fingers trembling where they rest limp against your thighs, knife almost entirely forgotten in this almost-hypnosis he’s dragged you into. You can’t quite make your lips move enough to give him a verbal answer, but he seems to accept the nod. 

He snorts, eyes narrowed as he looks at you. He doesn’t even have to tilt his head up even though he’s the one sitting. The realization makes you sweat, something hot igniting low in your belly. 

Before you even register that Ghost is moving, he’s snatched the knife from your now-slackened grip. He drops it into the pan immediately, the handle and blade both becoming drenched in the butter. 

You’d nearly forgotten you even had the knife but the lack of it now drags the fear back up your throat, makes your heartbeat louder and your fingertips colder. 

“Don’t need that,” he grunts, leaning back and folding his hands over his belly, fingers sliding against the fabric and already staining. This close, you can see that it hangs over the hem of his pants just enough to cover the button. You swallow thickly. 

“‘S good,” Ghost says, looking you up and down. Just like in the kitchen, the chair and table here are taller than what you used to, like they were tailor made for your captor instead of bought from a store. You’re only barely taller than him even as he sits, but he somehow still manages to make you feel like he’s looking down on you. 

There’s something in you that keeps you from backing away, even though being hardly a foot away from him makes the backs of your eyes sting with tears. It’s like your feet have sunk through the floor, like you’re up to your knees in shag carpeting and you can’t even try to get yourself out until the behemoth before you looks away.

“Congratulations, girl,” he rumbles, lips quirked up into a mean smile. “You just bought yourself a life, right here with me.”

You can’t stop the tears from falling, shaking hands clapped to your mouth in a fruitless attempt to muffle your sob. 

Ghost leans forward, smile growing when you stumble back until the small of your back meets the half-wall. “What’re you cryin’ about, doll?” He lowers his voice, like he’s sharing a joke with you. “Think I won’t treat my new pet well?”

Your heart feels like it’s going to beat so hard it gives out, its galloping thump felt even in your teeth, gums numbing. Your tears blur your vision, but you can see enough to know when he stands from his set, the chair creaking as he scuffs towards you.

He comes into focus when he crouches in front of you, his knees hovering just above your naked feet, toes curling into the carpet in a futile attempt to get as far from him as you can. 

“I won’t,” he says lowly, hot breath gusting over your face and lighting your nerves on fire. “Not until you earn it. Y’hear me?”

Whimpers eek through your fingers at his words. There’s something in his eyes that still looks hungry, little drops of grease dripping from Ghost’s fingers to your toes, and it makes you feel like prey just inches away from the predator’s jaw. 

His hand darts out, smacking your clothed thigh and making you yelp. 

“Don’t fuckin’ ignore me,” he snarls, sharp and sudden anger upon him like a wave, your thigh stinging from his hit. 

You nod as soon as the chain of words connects in your brain to mean something, head bobbing up and down quickly in desperation to avoid any more physical contact.

His eyes narrow, unimpressed. “Repeat it, then.”

“I have to–” you cut yourself off, breath suddering out of you almost painfully. “I have to earn it.”

“Earn what?”

Exasperation mixes with terror, eyelids straining to stay widened, unwilling to miss another twitch from him.

Think I won’t treat my new pet well? He’d said. You have to earn it.

You can’t think of a way to distill that down into a singular answer, not quick enough for him, at least. 

“I don’t– I don’t know,” you sob.

His movement is slow this time, but it’s no more possible for you to avoid his touch than it was when you hadn’t seen anything coming. His hand drags into your hair, nails catching on scalp, and he tugs your head back, slamming it into the wall. 

“Everything,” he hisses, the fabric covering his nose brushing against yours, snot sliding down your fingers. “You earn everything here. You work for it all. Get it?”

You can hardly nod this time, his fingers tightening around the strands of your hair and pulling at your scalp, but thankfully it’s enough for him.

“Good,” he spits, leaning back and standing, dragging you with him. 

Once you’re standing, half crouched to try your best to ease the pain rippling from your head but pushed up on your toes so his hand isn’t practically lifting you, Ghost grabs you by the elbow instead and drags you out of the room before you can even fully realize what’s happening.

He grabs you in the exact spot he had when he’d dragged you to the kitchen in the first place, each finger laid precisely where there were already bruises emerging. His grip so tight you can’t even think of trying to rip away – you imagine your arm would come off your body before Ghost’s hand came off of you. 

He drags you from the dining room and down a small hallway. From what you’ve seen of the house, and what you can remember that isn’t clouded over by a haze of panic, the floor-plan is closed off, more claustrophobic than anything else. 

Every room seems connected by a new hallway and they're each thin enough that you couldn’t walk by the man’s side – the two of you might not even be able to walk chest to chest without somehow getting wedged between the wood-panneling, considering the bulk of him. 

Your toes drag, catching on the warped wood floor as he pulls you behind him. Your hands are wrapped around his wrist in a wasted but desperate attempt to keep everything below his grip from going numb, leaving your choking whines and sobs and pleas to rush out of you, voice bouncing off the panneled walls. 

Ghost ignores you entirely, doesn’t even seem to notice when you dig your nails into his skin and you try your best to yank. 

You start to grasp at the walls, trying to slow his stride in whatever way you can. You have no idea where he’s taking you, no idea what you’d do even if you did somehow manage to break free from him, but you try nonetheless. 

He doesn’t react, no matter how much you scream and hiss, no matter how much you claw and kick and make your body dead weight, nearly breaking your wrist from the way you yank and twist. 

It’s only when your fingers catch on the edge of something thin that you’re given a tangible thing to wrap your hope around.

You only realize it’s a picture frame once you’ve already yanked it from the wall, the photo itself a complete mystery to you.

It’s the adrenaline that makes you pull back and slam the frame glass-first into the side of his head, reaching up as high as you can to make contact. There’s a horrible crack when glass meets fabric, a screech when you drag it down the side of his face, glass catching on mask and skin and more glass.

Ghost doesn’t let you go but he does stumble into the wall, grunting like a bull and batting your opportune weapon like it’s hardly more than an annoying mosquito, sending it crashing to the ground despite your death grip. 

He falls back into the wall, tugs you with him with enough force to nearly knock you off your feet, your head a mix of fear and victory and adrenaline and pain and more fear, coherent thoughts a far-off dream.

“Little fuckin’ cunt,” you hear him spit, heavy boot smashing fallen glass into further pieces as he turns to press you against the wall with his body, heavy and hot against you.

His eyes are raging, scarred lips curled to bare his teeth and little pieces of glass sticking from his skin and balaclava. 

You only have about four drops of blood to speak of for your desperate attack, and with your kidnapper furious and holding you down all you can manage to think is why the fuck did I do that? What was I thinking? 

There’s no room for anything but shame when you’re staring down the barrel of God only knows what he’ll deicde to do to you. 

“Off to a bad fuckin’ start,” he hisses, spittle landing across your cheeks. “Thought I’d be nice to you. Send you off to sleep with hardly a damn scratch.”

Ghost snarls, shakes his head like a beast shaking off fleas. Glass goes flying around his head. You can hardly breathe.

“Tha’s not good enough for you, is it?” He says, hand coming up to lock around your throat. You’d cry out if he left you enough air, but he’s squeezing so tight you can barely get enough breath to stay conscious. 

“You need a heavy hand, ‘s that it, pet? Need someone to show you what happens when you fuckin’ misbehave?” He pulls your head a few inches away from the wall on the last word, slamming you back enough to rattle your brain in your skull, eyes unfocused and hardly seeing and unable to groan with his hand squeezing your airway shut. 

You try to shake your head, can’t manage to do anything more than shift with the grip on your throat. You think, briefly, about how he could snap your neck with one hand. His palm rests over your vocal chords, fingertips pressing against the nape of your neck. A flick of his wrist and you’d be dead. You think your heart may give out, overwhelmed and unable to keep up with everything Ghost is drawing from you, spitting at you.

Capture myopathy, a friend told you once, sitting beside you in a required biology class only one of you was interested in. When a rabbit is so scared that their heart gives out on them and they die. Just like that. Snap. Easy dinner for a fox. Isn’t that sick?

Sick. She’d said. This, you think, is sicker than anything a fox could do to a rabbit. 

“You’re lucky your meat was good,” he says, tone calming into something less rageful and more frustrated, hand loosening enough to let you breathe more easily but still keeping you from speaking. “Don’t mind trainin’ you up knowin’ you’ll be an investment. Just need some work, huh?”

You try your best to nod, eager to pick training over certain death any day. 

He hums, thumb stroking the crease of your skin between neck and shoulder and you can’t stop your shiver.

“Don’t worry, bird.” His teeth gleam when he flashes them, finally leaving your space. He practically throws you in front of him with the hand on your neck, letting it shift to wrap around your nape so he can guide you forward. “I’ve had pets before. All those tears tell me you’ll at least be easier to break in than the boy was.”

You only have a brief moment to wonder who the fuck the boy is, if he’s in this house, and what that could possible mean for you, before Ghost is nudging open a rickety door and nudging you down the stairs. 

He lets you go once you’re firmly on the narrow staircase and taking slow, tentative steps out of fear you’ll miss one in the dark. Ghost takes his hand from you, looming as you make your leaden-footed way down.

You can’t stop your sniffles or your tears, terrified of the nightmares that must be waiting at the bottom of the staircase and back in the basement you’d woken up in. You know some of what waits for you, what the room will look like and what will be in it – Ghost had been with you since he dragged you to the kitchen, there would’ve been no time for him to change anything – but you’ve got no idea what training means or what Ghost will do to you when your feet hit concrete. 

You don’t move any further into the room when you reach the bottom, Ghost easily stepping around you and choosing to ignore you in favor of looking for whatever he’s decided he needs. The sight of a small carabiner with keys latched to one of his belt loops makes your idea of running back up to the door leave as quick as it comes.

“Over here,” Ghost calls, back turned to you as he crouches down and fiddles with something at the wall.

You don’t move, feet anchored to the floor.

He huffs when he doesn’t hear you following him, shifting one knee to rest on the ground so he can turn over his shoulder and level you with an unimpressed look.

“You really want to make me come get you?” He rumbles, and the threat is enough to get you rushing forward then pulling to just as sudden as stop just out of his arm’s reach. 

It doesn’t matter much, you can’t really do anything to stop him when Ghost’s arm darts back to grab you by the knee, his torso leaning back to get a hand on you and tugging you forward. 

You can’t keep yourself from falling to your knees right at his side, nothing around for you to grab onto other than him and even looking at a face-full of concrete you know not to make any unnecessary contact with Ghost, not if you can help it. 

The weight around your neck is sudden and unexpected, his quick movements around your head even moreso. You don’t even have enough time to decide if it would be worth it to try and fight him off before there’s a resolute click, and he’s pulling back with something thick wrapped around his knuckles.

It’s a chain. Silver, hardly a hint of rust on it, thick and well-kept, and leading right back up to your neck.

You don’t put it together until shaky hands come up to press around the- the collar. Thick leather, two or three inches wide, just tight enough that you can feel it on every exhale. 

A collar. A collar with a chain leash, heavy enough that you can feel the hint of pressure pulling you towards Ghost, the length of the chain that’s not tight in his fist resting in loops by his boot. 

You can’t do anything but stare up at him, wide eyed and trembling, can’t begin to think of what to do before he’s standing and tugging you with him.

“Here now,” he grunts, not bothering to give you any time to get to your feet. You sort of stumble after him, knee scraping the ground as your head is jerked along. You can’t let yourself lag at all, not unless you want to get dragged along by your neck.

You feel like you’re moving through quicksand, every move only making things worse for you. Every forced step forward is another step closer to him, every jerk of your head pulls at the hair stuck in the back of the collar that he hadn’t bothered to move before locking it onto you, every panicked breath only serves to keep your breathing short and hitched.

Ghost drops himself onto the small cot pressed against the wall, it’s metal legs creaking under his weight. You can’t straighten fully with how short he keeps the chain, which leves you in a terribly vulnerable hunched position, eye-level with his stomach and bent at the waist, knee throbbing.

“Over my knee,” he rumbles, voice quiet. “Get this over with.”

You stare up at him with wide eyes, panting open-mouthed, drooling. A panicked animal with its leg caught in a trap, unable to do anything but stare up at the jaws closing around its body.

“Please,” you beg, voice hardly a whisper. “Don’t hurt me.”

His eyes are hard behind the mask, mouth a firm line as he looks down at you. You can feel your heartbeat in your throat beneath the thick leather. 

Ghost doesn’t give you another chance to obey. One quick jerk of his hand and you’re toppeling forward, choking on spit and holding your hands out to catch yourself. 

He manhandles you quickly – one hand on the chain yanking it further down, head forced lower than his knee while his other hand grabs you by the hips and hefts you on top of him, elbow jamming itself between your thighs while blood rushes to your head. 

You yelp, legs kicking out as you push at the bed with one hand, the rough ground with the other, throwing your head back and forth as much as you can with the leash giving you almost no room to move.

“Settle,” Ghost hisses. You don’t listen, can’t listen with the way panic alone rules your mind, and in response he lands a harsh smack on the center of your ass, enough to push you forward a few inches.

Your pleas come to a sudden stop, breath stuck in your throat as you absorb the pain, a noticeable sting even through the sweatpants.

“You’re gettin’ fifty,” he grunts when you’ve gone silent, tucking two fingers in the back of your pants and tugging them down, lifting up one knee to lift your torso so he can yank them to your waist. “Take ‘em, then we’re done.”

“No, no, please, God,” you choke, one hand flying to your mouth and pressing against it. Tears stream down your face, cheeks blazing with heat, a horrible mix of terrified and humiliated that leaves you all but limp over his legs.

Ghost snorts above you and you jump when you feel his cold hand make a pass over the fat of your ass. “Won’t be thinkin’ that much longer.”

You only have a brief moment to think hysterically is he making a joke right now? before there’s a horrible pain on your ass, the smack loud in the otherwise silent room.

It takes a second for the pain to hit you, but when it does you yowl. You push up on his thigh with both hands as another smack rains down, pulling as hard as you can against the chain.

“Stop, stop, stop it!” You screech, toes sliding uselessly against the cement as you writhe, all of your struggles doing absolutely nothing to stop his hand from falling again, this time right on the center of both cheeks. 

“Y-You can’t- you can’t d-do this!” You wail, throat filled with tears and snot as you realize you can’t even get close to standing, not with his grip on the chain as immovable as it is. “Stop!”

His next smack is his hardest, his grip around the chain loosening at just the right time to allow you to be sent sprawling over his lap, sobbing at the pain that lights up your backside. It hurts, and now your forehead is nearly pressed to the floor, leaving you completely off balance.

Ghost grunts as he shifts one of his legs, tucking your flailing limbs between his thighs and forcing you to be bent over just the one thigh, knees hovering inches off the ground.

“Stop your fuckin’ wailin’, Christ,” he hisses, peppering you with more spanks, each of them as hard as the last and forcing all the air out of your lungs. “Damn lucky this is all you’re gettin’. I should make you count ‘em, start over every time you get one wrong.”

You cry out at that, wriggling desperately and only serving to push your ass further into the air, trapped on both ends.

“We’d be here all damn night,” Ghost mutters to himself, hardly audible over your fit. “One picture ain’t worth bruisin’ my hand over.”

Your feet just barely brush against his thighs when you manage to kick up, but you’re embarrassed to find that you don’t have the strength to do much more than hang limply in his hold, one hand reluctantly wrapped around his calf to keep yourself from falling to the floor. 

Your tears and sobs don’t stop as he continues his assault on your ass, but there’s a part of you that almost… settles. Not into the pain, not when he’s smacking you hard enough to jolt your body forward and make you wail at every new touch, but into the steadiness of his smacks.

He doesn’t wait more than a second between hits, each spank no heavier or lighter than the last. It hurts, hurts worse than anytime you’ve burned or cut yourself in the kitchen, but after the first minute or so your body comes to expect what’s coming.

That doesn’t make it any easier to handle. You couldn’t stop your crying if you tried, like his hand is resting on your tearducts instead of your ass, squeezing every bit of moisture out of your eyes. 

He stops at some point, hand resting on your cheeks. He squeezes, nails digging in deep, and pulls your cheeks apart. You sniffle at the indignity, free hand covering your eyes as your face crumples.

“Half way through now,” Ghost says, ignoring the way you cry out. You can’t imagine taking one more hit, let alone twenty five. 

He shifts back on the cot and for a moment you have absolutely no idea what’s happening. It’s not until he not-so-gently readjusts your legs, his own laid out flat in front of him with his feet hanging off the cot, your body readjusted so you’re lying properly over his thighs.

It’s more comfortable, certainly, but you’re not sure you want comfortable right now. It feels impossible to imagine the brute above you as thinking of your comfort, completely analogous to his actions and leaving you a confused and weak mess. 

Ghost shifts his hand along with the rest of him, dropping the chain entirely in favor of resting a heavy palm on the back of your neck, equally as effective at keeping you still. He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t comment on your heaving breaths or shaking thighs, just lets you breathe with your hands curled beneath your chest and your forehead pressed to the thin sheet covering the cot.

The next spank catches you completely off guard, your body having gone limp and leaving you unprepared for the sudden pain. It reignites your sobbing, your throat on fire from all the screaming you’ve done. You can hear your voice crack as you absorb the pain, shoulder shaking.

“Christ,” Ghost sighs, hand briefly leaving your ass. 

He’s lifting you by your hair a moment later, thick fingers laced through the tresses as he pulls your head back and stuffs something in your mouth. You whimer at the feeling, tongue working at the frankly disgusting taste, brows furrowed.

“Keep that there,” he orders, and you just barely get a glance of the side of his head before he’s shoving you back down, face-first. You realize, blinking slowly, that he’s shoved his mask in your mouth. “Can’t be bothered to teach you to shut the hell up, gonna hafta work on that once you learn how to behave.”

He spanks you again and this time your sob is muffled as you bite down on the fabric and grind it between your teeth. 

His pace is slower now, hand more thudding than stinging. It feels like he’s putting his weight behind every smack, each one delivered with what you’re sure is bruising force. Though truly you can’t tell much of a difference, not with your whole ass already feeling like it’s on fire. 

It gets harder and harder to differentiate between new and old pain as he lays brutal spanks over spots that are already hot and throbbing, varying the strength of each smack this time. You sink into the pain, limp and unable to do anything but take it.

“Better,” Ghost says, the rough pads of his fingers rubbing your scalp when you jerk at the sound of his voice. His next hit lands on the crease between your thigh and your ass, but your whine is almost silent. “Can hear myself think now, for one.”

Another smack, and your body doesn’t even jerk this time. You’re not even fully present in yourself, mind floating. You don’t quite feel like an outside observer, more like you’re just a few inches removed from the situation. All your sensations feel dulled, and you bear the pain as best you can. 

“Can enjoy the sight too,” you hear him say, and suddenly there are pauses between each smack, a little break Ghost takes to rub your glowing ass and thighs as much as he wants before laying another handprint across your soft skin. 

“‘S too bad I don’t fuck where I eat,” he muses, and you groan into the mask at a particularly rough hit. “You don’t take much fightin’. I like that in a girl. Go down real easy with a firm hand, don’t you?”

You shake your head as best as you can, which really isn’t much at all. He snorts at your effort, tightens his fingers to keep your head still.

You’re sapped of all energy, unable to move even as his punishing spanks linger lower on your ass, and even when he bullies a hand between your thighs and spreads your legs.

“Look at that,” he says, voice low. You can feel it through his stomach, goosebumps racing from your ribs to the rest of you. “Dirty girl, are you?”

You’ve got enough wherewithal to try and squeeze your legs shut when his fingers prod at your center, yanked back into your body at the sharp turn from painful to… something else.

He strokes two fingers over your slit, and you groan at just how much slick you can feel him spreading. You have no idea when it happened, have no idea why it happened, but you’re drenched between your thighs. Your cunt feels as hot as your ass, and the realization yanks a horrible little whine from you.

“Guess that wasn’t much of a punishment,” Ghost muses, spreading your lips and letting cool air ghost over you. You feel him blow a breath across you and struggle more than you have since he’d laid you flat across him, knees coming to tuck up under yourself.

“No,” he says simply, landing a horrible, smarting slap to your pussy. It sends you flat to your tummy again, squirming against him and wailing through the pain. It hurts. “Down, girl. No strugglin’ now.”

He only continues to stroke you, now pushing the steadily dripping wetness from your clit to your asshole, making you tense and writhe where you’re pinned, his order ignored.

“Think I’ll do the last few here,” he says, landing another harsh smack to your center, this time focused on your clit. “Make sure you remember your lesson.”

He doesn’t wait any longer, just begins to lay quick, harsh slaps all across your cunt – your spread lips, your hole itself, your clit. Once, even, on your bottom hole, digging his nails into your stinging cheeks to spread you wide for him.

It hurts more than any of the smacks to your ass did, undeniably, but you’re sapped of all energy and find yourself hardly able to cry, let alone struggle. You’re too busy being swept away in a maelstrom of pain-pleasure you’ve never experienced before to even try defending yourself.

Your only option is to lie still and wait for him to finish with you. So that’s all you do.

It feels like it’s been an eternity when he finally stops. 

The hand near your ass gropes you firmly, pinching what you can already feel are tiny little raised spots from where his palm landed the hardest. 

You don’t have the energy to even think of struggling when he finally moves you off him, letting you flop uselessly to the cot as he moves out from under you. There’s the sound of metal clinking, the tension from the collar finally eased as he lets it go completely.

He doesn’t bother to pull your pants up, but he does nudge your legs closed. It’s a bit of decency you didn’t expect from him. 

You can’t do much more than blink wearily at him as Ghost reaches to tug his mask from your mouth, lip curling in disgust at the drops of saliva that fall from it. Good, you think. That’s just the start of what you deserve, bastard.

He crouches in front of you a moment later, bringing his face into full focus in front of you.

He’s… not traditionally attractive, that’s for sure. Even your defeated and exhausted mind can recognize that you would’ve avoided this man had you seen him on the street. Probably would’ve even risked being seen as rude and crossed to another sidewalk before he walked past you. Seeing as this is where you’ve ended up, your instincts wouldn’t have been wrong about him.

He’s got a square head and blond hair buzzed close to the scalp. The scars you’d seen across his cheeks and jaw extend further up his face, something textured across his temple that you can’t guess the cause of, eyebrows patchy and only half-grown in from burns, little bumps decorating his scalp.

But there’s something captivating about him. In his eyes, maybe, such a dark blue that you can only tell they’re not brown because he’s hardly a foot from you. There’s something about him that says look at me. Don’t forget where I am.

Though maybe, you think deliriously, you’re only thinking that because he’s the captor who just spanked your ass raw and dragged his fingers through your cunt.

“Rule one,” Ghost rumbles quietly, breath gusting over your lips. “You hurt me, I hurt you. Heard?”

It takes all the energy you have left to nod, eyes falling shut even as the little prey voice in the back of your head screams at the danger so near, never mind that you haven’t been able to do anything to keep him from you. You’re too loud to listen to the voice anyways, only a very distant part of you acknowledging it as you slip into a sort of half-sleep.

You don’t hear him leave.

From there you settle, bizarrely, into a routine. 

Every day begins with you waking up in the basement. Always before Ghost comes to get you, some primal instinct buried deep knowing that you need enough time every morning to brace yourself for seeing him.

He locks the chain, the leash, to a hook on the wall a couple feet above your cot every night, the key to the padlock always left on him. The chain is long enough to give you plenty of room to roll and shift in bed at night but it’s too short for you to reach the small bathroom across the basement. There’s no clock for you to keep track of time with but you spend what must be half an hour every morning just sitting on the cot, waiting for Ghost to come get you.

He’s always nearly stumbling when he comes down the basement stairs to fetch you, sleep keeping his bones heavy. It’s only in the mornings when you see him with his shoulders hunched, movements weighted down, any other time he’s perfectly alert. 

You think, at first, that your best shot at trying to hurt him would be in those early mornings when he’s groggy and slow moving, but Ghost never lets you off the chain when he’s like that. It’s always after he’s stiffened up, shoulders rolling back and permanent-scowl firmly back in place.

He’ll unhook the chain from the wall first, rarely saying a word as he half-drags-half-leads you over to the bathroom, doesn’t let you close the door while you do your business and shower.

(There’s a way he looks at you in the morning, when he’s at his rawest. Something animal and hungry in a way you don’t see even when you serve him his meals, pupils blown and lingering on your curves, unabashedly staring at your ass when you glance over your shoulder at him.

It had been terrible, at first, to get naked in front of him. He’d just stare, and most days you could see his hardness tenting his pants. Hell, some days he came down the stairs with his cock making itself plenty known, not a speck of shame in him.

You’d once listened to him jack himself off while you were in the shower. You’d had to step over the puddle of cum on the tile when he’d tugged you out of the room, nearly slipped into it when he’d pulled you just a little more harshly than usual.)

The chain stays in the basement, always unlatched from your throat along with the collar before he shepherds you up the creaky stairs, never much more than a foot or two away from you. 

Then, breakfast. 

It had taken a while for you to really believe him after he’d said you were only there to cook. What kind of person kidnaps a woman just to keep her as a private chef? But days went by where he never once touched you any more than necessary to get the collar on and off, his only reaction to your body a seemingly unintentional erection and usually ignored when you were naked. 

Days, weeks pass where all you do is cook. Three meals a day, snacks when he’s hungry (which seems to be always). 

Ghost’s cabinets were bare the first week of your captivity. He had enough meat in his freezer to last him months, but little else. There was a loaf of bread on the counter, a few condiments in the fridge with crusted lids and misshaped bottles, and some cans of soup in the pantry. Nothing else. He’d drop a cut of meat on the counter and expect you to work with it and seemed plenty content when you served him the blandest roast chicken of your life.

It took you three days until you worked up the nerve to ask him to go grocery shopping. It was the first thing you said to him that wasn’t a plea for your freedom. 

You’d been terrified that you’d end up face down ass up over his thighs again, your ass still bruised from his first punishment and his subsequent much quicker corrections. But he’d hardly reacted, had just given you a piece of paper and a short pencil with bite-marks on the eraser, told you to write what you thought you needed.

He locked you in the basement for hours (you tracked the sun through the sole window as best you could, left behind fear and anger for boredom around what you guessed was the three hour mark) when he left. Briefly, you’d regretted asking in the first place. If the bastard wanted to eat nothing but protein and die of a nutrient deficiency, who were you to stop him? It would serve him right.

But you have nightmares, sometimes, of being stuck in the basement. Your captor dead in his bed, fallen to the bathroom floor with his head cracked open, bleeding out in the forest one of the times he goes off hunting. And you, stuck here, chained to a wall. No key, no way out, no one to find you.

A part of you had breathed a sigh of relief when he came home, letting you up to the kitchen and supervising while you dug through the plastic bags and put everything where you wanted it.

He doesn’t… do much during the days, is the thing.

He goes hunting, sometimes. You find that that seems to be his most consistent outing. He’ll spend hours out there at a time, sometimes coming back with nothing and other times coming back with a twelve-point buck you watch him drain through the kitchen window. He also has to keep his weapons – his many, many weapons – in shape, and you find that it’s not rare to spend an afternoon watching him clean guns or sharpen knives.

You enjoy his hunting moods most. He’ll disappear for hours on end to even find his kill, then spend days skinning and preparing the meat, then doing whatever it is he does in his shed with the bits of the body he doesn’t bring you to cook. Those days spent in the forest or the shed for him guarantee you hours of time alone, which isn’t nearly so miserable when he doesn’t keep you in the basement. 

Sometimes he goes out after dinner. You’ll hear the front door slam shut after he locks you up in the basement, his truck’s old engine loud enough to be obvious when he revs it. You’re never sure where he goes, who he might even go with since he never takes calls, but you also have little interest in asking.

But most nights he watches TV. Almost exclusively old VHS recordings of The Price is Right, Wheel of Fortune, Password, and shows so out-of-date you’re sure you could count the pixels on the screen. He’ll roll himself a blunt and relax into an old recliner with cracked leather, eyes half-lidded and hazy.

(You watched him rest a hand in his pants, once. He hadn’t even been focusing on the TV, eyes far away and breathing heavy as he stroked himself slowly beneath his jeans. You don’t even think he finished, he was just… relaxing. You’d decided to just be glad he wasn’t coming after you for that job.)

Sometimes he’ll watch the same Manchester United games every night for a week straight, grunt approvingly or shout at the TV at the same points no matter how many times you’ve seen him watch it. By the end of your first month in his captivity, you could guess who scored every goal in the team’s 2012 championship game. You have absolutely no idea why he doesn’t just turn on the newest games.

You learn quickly that Ghost mounted a hook to nearly every wall in the house, and that he’s not shy about chaining you in the same place for hours at a time and leaving you to your own non-existent devices while he lumbers off. You spend the most time in the kitchen, undoubtedly, but you find that the horrible plush carpet in his living room isn’t too uncomfortable to sit on either.

It doesn’t take many days for your fear to turn to boredom, is the thing. Absolute, complete, mind-numbing boredom. There’s simply nothing to do but watch Ghost, and for a kidnapper he’s turned out to be spectacularly uninteresting. 

He’d laid out the rules in the first few days. You hurt him, he hurts you. Listen to his orders, don’t make him repeat himself. Don’t try to escape, you won’t find anyone to help anyway and he doesn’t want to chase you down. Don’t try to fuck with the food you make him, he expects good meals consistently.

It had been the third you’d struggled most with, though you could hardly blame yourself. You’d thought he was going to make you bleed when he caught you trying to throw yourself out of a recently-broken window.

He’d taken you over his lap a few more times for smaller infractions too. To make sure the lessons stick, he’d said. They did. Ghost hits hard, and even after just his first punishment you’d been plenty cowed. You don’t give him many reasons to punish you again.

The bright spots in your life are, as they have always seemed to be, food orientated.

There’s a part of you that hates how much time you think of ways to quite literally serve him, but you have nothing else to do. He may enjoy his shows, but after about two weeks you think you may go insane if you have to focus on much more Tom Kennedy in an other-wise silent house. 

You spend long hours staring out his windows at the foggy forest surrounding the cabin, running through the recipes you’d wanted to try before you’d been taken, notes for your parents’ dishes that were never listened to, plans on what you could make for Ghost himself with what he would provide.

And he does. Provide, that is. He provides plenty.

The fifth day of your captivity, he drops a chicken carcass on the wood island. Whole, unplucked, the blood from its neck still drying.

“I can’t…” You start, hesitating at the doorway to the kitchen as he moves further in. “I’m not a butcher. I can’t cook it like that.”

Ghost looks over at you, mask covering his expression. You find that it’s a fifty-fifty chance he doesn’t pull it on in the morning, dependent on some factor you’re not allowed to know.

“I’ll cut it up,” he grunts, turning his back to you and tugging a drawer open, digging around noisily. “Don’t need you to do anythin’ but cook it.”

You shift from foot to foot as he turns back to the bird, empty trash bag at his side and carving knife in his hand. 

For a man who you’ve always assumed to be inept in the kitchen, he handles the bird like a professional. He has it plucked in less than a minute, his mess minimal.

His butchering is less impressive, though no less effective. He’s a bit of a slob with his cuts, reckless with his knife in a way that has you craning your neck to see just how much breast is left on the bone. 

Ghost is slow-moving, careful in a way you’ve never seen him when he pops the thigh from the leg joint. It must’ve been a well-fed bird during its life, there’s plenty of meat for his thumb to dig into as he carefully rotates and pulls, not too much strength but not too little. A balance he seems to struggle to find before the thigh finally pops away from the body easily, and he moves on.

It’s… intimate is the wrong word, but it’s not far off. His hands – damp from being washed, something you’d been glad to see him do without you needing to draw his attention back to you – are shiny with the bird’s juices covering them, his thick fingers brutalizing the delicate, pale meat. The job is done quickly and cleanly enough to leave you plenty of meat.

He doesn’t butcher it completely for you. He leaves the wing connected to the breast, the breast and the tenderloin one large piece of meat when he lays his carving knife on the counter. His most precise cuts are around the oysters, each of them dug out and set to the side quickly. 

It’s not a quiet process, his knife cutting through bone and joint. But it feels particularly loud with the only other sound the soft humming of the fridge, the call of a bird outside the window. 

You feel squirmy for reasons you can’t quite place when he’s finished, bird butchered and glistening under the dim kitchen light. The look he gives you, heavy and stifling, doesn’t help. 

You make him get mason jars next time he goes to the store, mourning all the stock that goes to waste because you’ve got no way to store it. He praises the tenderloins you make for dinner that night, voice rough in a way that makes your cheeks heat.

Most of the food he buys for you to work with is store-bought, but the meat continues to be fresh. He enjoys the food most when he kills it himself – he moans when he bites into a piece of duck in a way that you feel no shame in calling pornographic – but you learn that he’ll settle for anything fresh.

There’s a calendar on the inside of the pantry. 

It’s an old military one, each of the pictures a dramatic shot of a soldier, covered in filth more often than not and staring across some sort of beautiful landscape. It’s from 2014, each of the pages worn and ripped where fingers have pinched and flipped. Each of the days is already marked off with an X in the box, some of them even with little notes written in different colors from over the years.

G birthday in Lancaster

S appointment - needs ride

L retirement on base

You know when he flips it to read June that you’ve been with him a month. You’re not happy, far from it, but you don’t spend everyday shaking in fear. 

You know what to expect from Ghost, he knows what he expects from you, and you’ve settled into an almost-peaceful cohabitation. 

He takes to ordering you prettier clothes about halfway through your second week. Sweatpants get traded in for sundresses and uncomfortably tiny shorts, sweatshirts exchanged for cardigans and low-back tank-tops. 

Some days, watching him feed the chickens through the window in your daisy-print sundress and flour-covered apron, you feel almost like a homesteader’s wife.

If not for the chains hanging from the walls, of course. 

You’re wearing one of those dresses when Ghost comes to visit you in the kitchen, nearly six weeks after he’d taken you.

He’d been letting you wander the house off-leash more and more, in small doses. Whether confident in his ability to catch you or your inability to get far from the cabin, you’re not sure, but you’re thankful nonetheless. You’re still a little sore from your last escape attempt, ass smarting from his belt, and haven’t quite gotten into your head to try again yet.

You’re leaning over the counter, tasting a fresh brownie from the middle of the pan while he smokes with his Wheel of Fortune on, having sent you off with a pat on the ass and a I want somethin’ sweet, doll. 

You’ve never been nearly as good at baking as you have cooking, and you’re not sure you’ve perfected your brownie recipe yet. But you’ve always had a bit of a sweet tooth, and Ghost keeps his house cold. Biting into a still-steaming gooey brownie, the top just enough of a crust to give the bite texture, the chocolate melting into your tongue, is one of the best things you’ve done since you first woke up in that basement. 

You don’t realize you’ve made a noise until there’s an echo behind you, Ghost’s groan so quiet it’s nearly drowned out by the TV in the other room.

You jerk back from the counter, hands braced on the rounded corner as you look over your shoulder, sure that there’s a pipe groaning in the wall.

Instead you see your kidnapper, already hardly a step away and boxing you into the counter, hulking body smothering you with ease.

Your spine goes ramrod straight, brownie abandoned in its pan as he presses himself into you, hard chest pushing against your softer back. You’re silent, stiff, too surprised and scared to do more than wait. 

“‘S got you moanin’ in here?” Ghost rumbles, heavy against you. “Thought I said I wanted a treat.”

“I–” You gasp, arching when he presses his hips into you. His sweatpants don’t do anything to disguise his length and you can feel every inch of him against your back. “I–I made brownies.”

“Hm…” One hand comes to rest on your hip, his head lowering enough that you can see his profile in your peripheral. “Let’s have it then.”

You don’t move at first, fingertips tingling and lips pressed tightly together.

He huffs, smacks your ass once. He pushes the fabric of your dress up just enough to clip your skin, simple granny panties doing little to soften the blow. You gasp and jerk forward, soft stomach pressing into the counter.

“Give me one,” he says, hand rubbing where he’d just spanked, fingertips just dipping under the edge of your underwear. “C’mon, bird, I want a bite.”

Your fingers quiver as you lift the brownie in your hand to his lips, holding it just over his shoulder as he feels you up with both hands, roughly kneading the cheeks of your ass as you try to stay as still as possible.

Ghost gives you more of his weight and bites the brownie, the sharp edges of his teeth scraping your knuckles. You jump at the feeling, unwittingly grinding yourself against him. 

“Fuck, pet,” he moans, face dropping to rest his forehead against your temple. You can do nothing but stare at the cabinet. “That’s fuckin’ delicious. I need another bite.”

You’re reaching towards the pan to cut him another piece when you realize he’s shifting to his knees behind you.

“Ghost,” you whine when he takes your hips in his hands, hefting you up so you’re fully resting on the island with your toes unable to even skim the tile. Your eyes are wide as you stare at the backsplash, unable to quite believe what’s happening.

“Hush,” he scolds, and you get a smack to the thigh for your trouble. “I want my sweet thing.”

Ghost eats your cunt the same way he eats your food: voraciously, messily, and shamelessly.

He gives you no warm up, no time to prepare for something he’s only hinted at wanting to do before. There’s one broad swipe of his tongue across your sex, then his lips wrapping around your clit and your eyes rolling back into your skull.

You’re not sure that he cares about your pleasure, but he’s certainly giving you plenty. He licks from cunt to clit again and again, tongue quick and stiff against where you’re sensitive and drawing breathy moans from you, nails scratching uslessly at the counter.

He focuses mostly on your hole, licking up your slick like it’s the best thing his tongue has ever touched and leaving you pushing back for more unconsciously, wanting more than just the tip of his tongue inside you. 

“Greedy,” he huffs when you nearly slip off the counter. He slips two fingers into your leaking hole and you squeal at the stretch, noticeable even with his mouth working you over. “This is for me, not you, pet. Settle down and let me eat.”

You cry out when he laps at your clit, quick, broad licks over the bud and just enough pressure to make your mouth hang open. He gives you almost too much suction, your brain rattling around between your ears when he crooks his fingers and tugs.

He uses just one hand on your thigh and two fingers in your cunt to shove you up the counter, giving him more space to have you practically sitting on his face. He laps around his own fingers, fucking with you just enough to coax more slick for him to drink, your knees knocking against the cabinet.

Eventually, what feels like it must be hours later, you come. The combination of Ghost’s fingers pressing at just the right spot, the suction on your clit and the sound of his mouth against you making you feel insane and finally pushing you over the edge.

It’s heaven, to have him lick and suck you through your orgasm. Your limbs feel tingly, bright white starbusts flying behind your eyes as you go limp across the counter, head pressing against the backsplash.

It isn’t until he doesn’t pull out his fingers, doesn’t pull his tongue away, that you start to feel truly gone, a puppet dancing to his tune, a piece of fruit squeezing whatever juice he wants into his mouth for as long as he wants.

“Not done with you yet,” you hear him murmur, the rumble of his voice against your cunt making you moan from overstimulation. “Gonna drain you dry, pretty thing. Shouldn’t have made yourself so sweet if you didn’t want me taking it all.”

You want to growl that you can’t make yourself taste like anything, but he slips a third finger into your hold, curls his fingers and rubs his knuckles against your g-spot, and you’re coming too hard to even attempt a protest.

By the time he pulls your dress back down and pets your ass, taking a brownie from the pan without even bothering to use the knife to cut himself a piece, there’s nearly as much drool dripping from your mouth as there is your cunt.

From there, your life centers around two things: food and sex. Both of them exist only because of and with Ghost, him your constant companion as you unwillingly grow more and more comfortable in his house. 

You cook him a stew made from cow leg he’d dropped on your counter that morning. Small russet potatoes float in the broth, popped into his mouth whole and swallowed almost as completely, pieces of carrots he chews to mush and celery he avoids, wine soaked meat leaving grease stains down his shirt. 

Ghost puts you on your knees beneath the table, feeds you his cock while he feeds himself your food. You suck him as well as you can, trace your tongue over the thick vein up the side of his cock, ignore the throbbing in your jaw and try to push his foreskin back to suckle on his head.  He wraps his fingers around the base of his cock, doesn’t let himself come until he’s finished with his meal. You can’t tell if his groaning is for your work on the stew or your work beneath the table.

Fuckin’ heaven, that mouth. Want me to send you off with a full belly, huh? Bet you like your meal as much as I like mine.

Half a dozen eggs, scrambled, served with enough bacon to make you feel sick from the smell alone and half-soaked in maple syrup. 

You, needy and desperate, grinding your cunt across his thigh. You lean back as far as you can with your hands carefully resting on the table at your back, desperate to avoid his syrup-sticky fingers, and end up with a view of his cock lancing you. He scoops your slick up with his clean fingers, picks up another piece of bacon and rips it in half, offers you the bit he doesn’t take.

Please, please, Ghost, I need it so bad, it hurts and it’s supposed to, love, I said I wanted a show with my breakfast, didn’t I?

A rack of lamb, sliding off the bone, bites of it shared between Ghost and you as three of his fingers work slowly in and out of your ass, leisurely and for his viewing pleasure more than your own orgasm. Red juices smeared across your lips and face, dripping down his chin and staining his fingers. A thumb on your clit, meat shoved between your teeth as you come. 

Gonna fuck you here too. Gonna make it hurt, listen to you cry a little when I eat. Oh, hush, you’ll be fine, don’t get yourself worked up. Not yet, at least. My cock’ll spread you out at least twice this much, save your tears for when you’ll need ‘em, pet.

Sticky fruit laid across your stomach, cantaloupe and watermelon and kiwi and banana. His fingers picking them off you piece by piece, savoring them as he fucks you hard. You laid flat to the table, legs spread why and throat sore from your cries, the stark difference between the way he relishes the food and the way he fucks you like an animal making you feel wanted in a way that threatens to drown you.

You need it bad, don’t you? Slut. Pretty, tasty, perfect little slut. Fuckin’ squeezin’ my dick off, goddamm, honey. Gonna fuck you full, gonna fill you up and feed you plenty. 

Stir fry you make with hog maw, a recipe you’d never tried before given to you by a girl in cooking school who was set to inherit her parent’s restaurant. His face moving between your cunt and his meal, your whines about a UTI and cross-contamination go ignored, and he holds his bowl beneath your cunt while he strokes your g-spot with two calloused fingers. 

Tightest fuckin’ cunt in the world. Pretty little thing and her pretty little meals, just made for me, huh? ‘S that right, pet? You’re made just for me and my mouth and my cock, hm? Gonna give me a nice little dressing for my food?

A night spent in his bed, after you make him angel-food cake from scratch. Waking up to a cock pressed against your ass, chain leash and collar heavy around your throat and locked around the headboard but the sheets soft under your skin, pillows thick and his own body warm in a way the basement never gets. 

Ghost isn’t awake yet. He’s snoring like a freight train, completely unaware of the way you stare at him in the blue-dark of the early dawn hours. 

The chain is heavy in your hand, cold against your soft palms. You feel almost like you’re in a trance, the world still hazy around its edges as you shift to kneel over him. 

You don’t know how much strength it takes to strangle a person, but evidentially you don’t use enough. 

You wrap the chain tight around either knuckle, press your hands hard into the mattress on either side of his head, and hold your own breath. His snores quiet, his breathing shudders. He coughs once, twice, you feel his hips and legs begin to shift beneath you and you really put your body weight behind your hold. He goes still.

Then, his eyes fly open. 

There’s hardly time for you to think fuck before he’s flipping you onto your stomach, harsh hand shoving you into the mattress while another rips the chain from your hands and pulls.

You wail a breath as your head is pulled back, scalp nearly touching your spine as Ghost forces your back into a steep arch, ass pushed into the air.

“Fuckin’ hell,” he hisses. You can’t tell if the heat in his words is rage or hunger or some sick mix of both, have even less of an idea which one you should be hoping it is. “You tryin’ to fuckin’ kill me?”

You can barely breathe through the anticipation, the fear that’s been gone for so many days suddenly wrapped around you as tight as the collar, but you find enough breath to shout when he lands a horribly heavy hit across your ass. 

“Ghost!” You shout when he only follows it with several more, eyes squeezed shut as he overwhelms you in pain and discomfort.

“What?” He snarls, fingers clipping your cunt and making your squeal. “What, now you don’t like pain? I watched you cream my cock without a single finger in your cunt last night, girl, but this?” Another spank, harder than you’ve ever taken and burning. “This too much for you?”

You huff, squirming as much as you can in your strained position. 

“You wake me up with a goddamn chain around my neck and bitch when I beat your ass for it?” His voice is nearing a shout now, thick with what you’re sure is anger. “You’re gonna try and kill me in my own fuckin’ bed and pitch a fit when I make you sorry?”

You can’t find it in you to do anything but cry, chest tight and eyes squeezed tighter while he doles out punishment, bruising slaps landing anywhere from your cheeks to your cunt to your thighs to your hole, his hand spreading you wide for him.

“Spread,” he grunts eventually, a harsh hand shoving your knees wide. “Need to get to that hole.”

You don’t get to listen, he makes you do what he wants without giving you a chance to, and then lays a dozen terrible, painful smacks to your asshole.

You’re nearly screaming through them all, feet slamming into the bed as the pain rushes through you. He yanks the chain hard when you try to pull forward and bury your face in the pillow, forcing you to keep the tortuous pose he’s holding you to.

You feel the bed rocking with the force of his hits, spit and tears dripping down your face as you can do nothing but lay there and take it. 

“Naughty, naughty fuckin’ thing,” he spits, two rough fingers pushing into your cunt with little care for your cry. “My own little chef tryin’ to strangle me, I can’t fuckin’ believe it. I bring you here to feed me, give you a load in your stomach anytime you need it, and you wrap your leash ‘round my throat?”

“I’m– I’m sorry!” You wail, inconsolable as he roughly rubs a palm over your clit, your cunt quickly getting slick. You’re still damp from the way he’d bent you over earlier, a mix of his and your cum wet between your thighs.

“Not good enough,” Ghost hisses. He quickly fucks his fingers back inside you, once twice, then pulls them out again.

You go taut as a board when those slick fingers move up, towards your far, far tighter hole.

“No,” you gasp, struggling even pinned as you are, a sense of panic shrouding your mind. “No, no, nonono, you can’t, oh God, please, Ghost, don’t–”

Ghost drops the chain in favor of grabbing you by the throat, tearing you back so violently that you’re staring at his sneer upside down. 

“Shut the fuck up.” His spit is tacky when it lands on your cheek, mixing with your tears, and his smile looks evil as he glares down at you. “Gonna make sure you don’t even think of that shit again. Gotta make it hurt if you’re gonna learn a lesson.”

You sob as he lets you go, head finally falling limp to the bed as you turn your face to the side so you can still breathe. You watch as he reaches for a half-full bottle of lube on his bedside table, the label peeling and stained. 

“Gonna cry for me some more?” He coos, laughing when you jump at the cold feel of the lube on your ass, thighs tense with nerves. “You know I like it when you make yourself look silly, pet. Go on, cry all you want. Still gonna fuck you.”

One finger pushes the lube into your ass, then two, then three. He gives you no time to adjust, only one thrust from each digit before he forces you to stretch further, lands slaps across your ass seemingly whenever he feels like it.

“Ghost, pl-ease,” you cry when you feel the hot head of him press against you, sure that it’ll be excruciating. 

He threads a hand into your hair, pulls you up enough that he can bend to speak into your ear.

“You’ll call me Simon while I fuck your ass,” he says, voice low. “I wanna hear you scream it when I hurt you, pet.”

You listen to him against your will, the scream he wanted tearing from you and echoing the sheer pain of being fucked by someone as massive as Ghost with such little prep.

Your hole feels like it’s on fire, the pain racing through the rest of your body and leaving you limp and panting, only able to close your eyes and endure as he mercilessly pushes forward, uncaring of your pained hiccups and cries.

“Simon,” you whine when he bottoms out, warm balls settling against your neglected cunt. “Hurts…”

His laugh is mean, nasty in your ear. “Good, fuck, say it again, girl. Tell me how much it hurts.”

“So bad…” is all you manage, even just those words warbling off into nothing as he pulls out, fucking himself back in with a harsh thrust that nearly chokes you. 

“Can’t believe you tried it,” he huffs, bracing himself over you as he sets a ruthless pace, no consideration for your comfort. You can see the chain in his right hand, feel the way it just barely tugs at your neck with how viciously you’re moving along the bed. “Been waitin’ for you to give me a chance to do this to you, to fuck you up.”

Your fists clench in the sheets as you do your best to breathe through the pain, the slide of the lube only making his thrusts marginally easier to endure.

“Been waitin’ to get my cock in this hole. Wanted to watch you cry and make you put your tears in the food, gape your little hole and make you ride me while I smoke, shit. Tightest ass I’ve ever felt, love, goddamn. ‘S that feel good?” A slap to the side of your face, rousing you. “You feel good with my cock drilling your little ass?”

“No,” you moan, miserable.

“Good,” he hisses, thrusts quickly becoming uncoordinated as he stares down at your ruined face, his eyes gleaming. “You’re so much sweeter when you’re hurtin’, girl. Wanna keep you like this all the time.”

You sob at the idea, already unable to imagine how excruciating it’ll be to sit tomorrow with your ass covered in welts.

“C’mon, c’mon,” Ghost pants, staring at you ravenously. “Cry a little more for me, attagirl…”

You feel his cum shoot deep inside you before his thrusts slow, the heat spreading as he fucked you through his orgasm, face twisted in pleasure. Your tears haven’t slowed, even as the pain lessened and lessened throughout your fucking.

“Fuck, fuck, that feels good,” he breathes, grinding himself against you as he empties the last of himself inside you.

You feel nearly catatonic as he pulls out, only able to whine when he slips free from your hole and then again when he rearranges you on the bed, limbs sore and neck stiff as he continues to hold you by the leash.

“Took it well,” he grunts, shifting to lay on his back again and tossing the lube to the table beside him. “You gonna pull that shit again?”

You sniffle shaking your head no, only verbally answering when he cocks an eyebrow. “No, Simon.”

He smirks. “I’d love if you did,” he whispers, like it’s a secret. “Would love if you gave me another chance to ruin you. Just go ahead, love. I’ll tear into you whenever you want.” He tilts his head, considering for a moment. “Whenever I want too. ‘Cause you’re mine to do whatever I want with, aren’t you?”

You nod, hands tucked beneath your chin as he tugs you closer by the hip, fingers pressing into rapidly developing bruises and making you whimper.

“Yeah, gonna fuck you ‘til you cry as often as I want. And you’ll gimme those tears every time, won’t you?”

All you can do is nod, a part of you calmed and feeling safer as you watch the predator’s teeth pull away from the prey’s neck when he nods.

The plate you balance is larger than your face and still nearly overflowing with food.

It’s filled to the edges with steak, mashed potatoes, glazed carrots, and rolls. You have a bottle of wine tucked under one arm, a corkscrew held between your lips and one glass in your hand as you saunter towards Simon.

“Smells good,” he grunts. You’ve learned that his compliments are concise but rare, and you greedily take in the praise from him. “Enough for us both?”

You snort. There’s enough food on your plate to feed five people, easily. But Ghost’s stomach is never-ending, and you’d made sure that there would be no way he’d go to bed hungry.

He spreads his thighs as you approach, pats one of them like you’re not already lowering yourself to him. He takes the glasses while you lay the plate, setting his silverware to the side as he opens the bottle and fills the glass nearly to the brim.

You hum as you take in a breath of the food, that familiar sense of pride from a meal well-made settling in your chest.

Ghost cuts the food while you lean back on his chest, watching his thick fingers work. 

He lifts one of the little pieces of steak to your mouth once he’s cut it, swiping it through the potatoes and guiding you to look at him with a finger on your jaw.

He presses the tender, rare meat between your lips and you take it greedily, letting your eyes slip shut as you savor the taste. He kisses you almost immediately after, passes his tongue over the food before you can even swallow, but lets you keep it.

You giggle when he pulls back, swiping a thumb over the potato on your lip. He picks himself up another bite, pinches a bit of carrot with his steak and swallows without chewing, a moan slipping from his lips. You feel yourself dampening against his thigh, breath hitching.

“Happy Valentine’s day,” you say, voice quiet and held just between the two of you.

He snorts, ever unromantic. “Eat up, doll. Wanna have you for dessert after a meal this good.”

You smile softly at him, opening your mouth willingly when he lifts a bite of food to your lips.

Thinking very hard about Kyle and period sex too. Kyle with his long fingers, kneading your thighs until cramping goes away, bringing you warmed up heating pad and murmuring “know it hurts, doll. It’s okay, just breathe, you doing good”.

Kyle who notices when you breathing changes, when you get restless with need you can’t sate, not on your own — his lips trailing down to your knees, cheek rubbing on your thigh when he asks “can I, baby?”.

You grumble, cheeks heating up because you are going to be messy and you are bloody and it will ruin the bed and he will be messy too and—

Kyle hums, nodding along and drags your shorts off, tapping your hip so you’d raise them for him to spread the towel under you. He kisses your thighs, teeth grazing meat of them, pressing harder the closer he gets to your pussy.

Aching, sensitive and slick. Poor you, got so needy and thought it to be an inconvenience?

Kyle, whose long beautiful fingers spread you open so he can drag his tongue up, taking a long lick, so he’d greet your clit already warm and slick. Lips of his pressing into you gently as he holds you open. Just like that, baby, be good for him, be still, okay?

He will take care of everything.

Kyle who is leaving kisses all over your pussy, sucking the folds of yours in his mouth, giving love to every soft tender bit of yours. Can’t have his favourite girl getting cold, can’t he?

And Kyle can keep you warm alright.

He sucks on your clit, tongue trailing up and down until you are whining “Kyle-Kyle-Kyle”, like it’s all that you know, like it’s all you can remember. Your hand pushing his head lower, forgetting about the blood and the mess and any embarrassment.

Because Kyle groans in you pussy, sucking it clean and laving it with attention, his hips moving when you whimper “Kyle” again, his hips grinding into the mattress so he can get some relief too.

Because Kyle is so hard it’s enough to make him dizzy, drunk on you, his head so empty he feels it ringing and cracking like a white noise of faulty telly.

Because Kyle looks up at you, bloodied, eyes half lidded and fingers holding you open when he presses another kiss to your clit.

He licks another stripe up your pussy, breathes out “wanna cum, baby?”, like you weren’t rocking your hips in his face a moment ago. Cheeky bugger.

Kyle’s thumb finds your clit, rubbing it in slow perfect circles, making you whimper, blood and slick dribbling down on the towel when he taps it, toying.

“Say please, doll.”, he murmurs, kissing your inner thigh again, his pupils blown wide, his other hand tugging his sweatpants down so he can hump the bed in peace. “Say ‘please, Kyle’.”, he sucks a mark in your thigh and taps your clit again. Impatient. Hungry. Greedy for your attention.

Kyle is the best there is and it’s not up for a debate. Kyle wants to know you think so too. Kyle wants you to plead for him because one needy whimper from you and his cock leaks so much it’s embarrassing.

“Please, Kyle, wanna cum”, you choke out, hips twitching to roll into his touch, his thumb feather light on you. Infuriatingly so. Giving you just enough to keep going and not nearly enough to push you over the edge.

“Need me so bad, baby? Need your Kyle so fucking bad, don’t you?”, he breathes out, diving back between your thighs, grinding into bed, sucking on your clit until you are trembling and gripping his hair, trying to pull him closer. So hungry for him, so needy, he groans, his own hips twitching, heat dripping to the base of his spine, pooling in his abdomen.

Until he is blind with want, until he is drooling all over your pussy, eating you out like there is no tomorrow.

Kyle, who pushes you over the brink and laps up every drop of pleasure, drunk on you, hazy with want, his thighs trembling, stomach sticky with his own release. Can’t help it, doll. Not when you squeeze his head and moan his name and cum on his tongue.

Not when you are being so good to him, chanting his name, letting him eat his fill — spoiling him really with all that, baby. Being so sweet, that he’d gladly spend the rest of his life between your legs.

If you promise that he is going to be your Kyle through it all, baby. Deal?

Version 1 of barry sloane picking up girls to kiss them 💙

version 2 here