Fracture

Hii!! I’m not sure if your still active here or not and if you do these types of submissions but could you write what you think each of the members ideal types or s/o would be like? Or what they would look for in someone or be attracted/drawn to?

hiii, this is a year late response (LOL, sorry) but pls send through 3 members !

A Simple Cup of Tea [Yandere Scaramouche x Reader]

Title: A Simple Cup of Tea [Yandere Scaramouche x Reader]

Synopsis: You have to be prepared and poised and perfect. But it’s hard to be all those things, even with the looming threat of your husband sitting next to you, when you’ve got a secret hidden underneath your clothes…

Word Count: 1875

Notes: yandere, forced marriage, abuse, bondage, NSFW 

Poised.

You must be poised. Every movement, every gesture, must embody a quiet grace. Your face must be pleasant, without seeming garishly joyous. Your voice must be soft, melodic, clear; yet loud enough to be heard without being required to repeat yourself. 

You must know how to keep a conversation going smoothly, like water in a stream, yet understand when to keep silent. You must know all of these things and so much more, and act on them at all times in the proper degree; all in order to avoid embarrass yourself and more importantly, embarrassing your husband.

In other words, you must be perfect.

And you try–you have to try, because what other choice does Scaramouche leave you?–but it’s difficult. You were never born for this stifled life he’s pushed you into, for a life spent mostly within the walls of his home or at most, behind the high, impenetrable walls of the courtyard.

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hi💕 i would like to request doyoung and jaehyuk as boyfriends

TREASURE - Doyoung & Jaehyuk As Your Boyfriends

Jaehyuk

he’s a chatterbox ong

like you just gotta get him to start going

bc he’s gnna be a little shy at the beginning of your relationship

i think if u act shy he’s gnna act shy

so u gotta sorta take control in the beginning uk

but he’s shy for a good reason

he’s thinking things

like ‘omg they’ve really decided to date me’ typa beat

but once he starts talking

he won’t stop

but i think he’s a chatterbox in moderation?

he’s obvi gnna let you talk as well

he’s gnna need you to talk for him to keep talking

or else he’ll feel bad and think ur uninterested and one sided or he’s talking over u :(

i think he’d be very gentleman like

(not saying none of the boys aren’t but)

like he’ll ALWAYS open doors for you

open car doors for you

let you enter places first

walk on the ‘road’ side of the sidewalk ??? (letting u walk on the inside)

give you his jacket when ur cold

always carry extra tissues or carry another set of gloves

just in case u get cold !!

UWU

little things like that he’ll just do

i think he’ll buy you small gifts

that genuinely remind him of you

like a pretty hair clip or a charm

couple items !!

like a phone charm cute stuff like that

they’re very subtle things

also if y’all choose to have a movie night or if u just invite him to urs

he’s always gnna bring ur fav snacks

and u won’t even have to tell him what it is!!!

mans is observant istg!

like he’ll just see you eating it often and will make a mental note to bring it next time he visits

or if he sees you staring at something when y’all are shopping for a tad bit longerrrrr than usual

he’s gnna buy it

he may not show it that he notices

but he does

7374828/10 best bf

Doyoung

y’all would also be a lowkey couple

but also not so lowkey

y’all would have a couple finsta

with just VVVVV close friends and family

like VVVVV close

immediate friends and family

and y’all would post all your outings and dates on there

some of y’alls friends are DISGUSTED by the cuteness

but some also uwu

u guys would have lots of picnics as dates

gut feeling

just y’all get that quality time 👉👈

also picnics are cute asf

and worthy of the finsta

so yuhhhh

y’all have such a ‘cozy’ fashion sense

like big sweaters n cardigans

baggy pants

HE GIVES YOU HIS SWEATERS I KNOW IT

but he’s lowkey about it

like if he visits urs

he’ll just leave it ‘by accident’

and he’ll just never ever mention it whatsoever

but he’ll be thinking about it 24/7

wondering why he hasn’t seen you wearing it yet!

UNTIL he sees you wearing it

and he’ll be annoying

and tease u

‘u just couldn’t get enough of me’ typa beat

anyways he WOULD CUDDLE

i think he likes to swap

he likes being both big spoon and little spoon

gut feeling uk

he likes to be the small spoon more 🥺

he just feels very safe in your arms ;)

buys u cute gifts

like plushies

and cute ass keychains

YALL WOULD MAKE JEWELLERY TOEGTHER

like beaded bracelets 🥺🥺

UWUWUWUWUWU

yes, some of ur dates consist of pure silence and just the sounds of beads clattering against each other

anyways he’s so babie i cri

1000000/10 ;)

exhibit #2 - shark week

an installment of the freak shit march gallery showcase.

pairing: yandere!cullens x reader (twilight).

length: 1.4k.

warnings: non/con, afab!reader, dehumanization, mentions of kidnapping, mentions of medical malpractice, blood, slight initialization, and generalized twilight.

After moving in with the Cullens, your monthly cycles start to follow a similar routine.

‘Moving in’ meaning, of course, accidentally signing your rights to autonomy away to your doctor while you were so loaded up on sedatives the he hand to cup your hand in his just to make you hold the pen, and ‘period’ referring to, of course, the week or so you spent bleeding out in a house full of half-starved vampires. Carlisle claimed that it was dead blood and held little to no nutritional value for their kind, citing his children’s ability to attend the local community college without gutting an eighth of the students every month as evidence that your menstrual cycle wouldn’t cause an unwanted stir. When you reminded him that humans craved plenty of things that weren’t good for them, like chocolate and liquor and dubiously ethical affairs with their unnaturally cold general practitioners, he only hummed and asked what kind of products you preferred.

Esme usually noticed first. Sometimes, she’d catch it before you did, show up to your bedroom door with a warm compress and a tray of comfort food with only a kind smile by way of explanation, and you’d notice the pin-pricks of red dotting your sheets later on. Carlisle would usually be at work by then, so she’d spend her morning fussing over you, holding her hand to your forehead and forcing home-remedies past your lips until you manage to make her believe that one of her bitter teas had cured you wholesale. There’s a thin line between how she treats you when you’re sick and how she treats you on your period. One was a monthly ordeal, the other a hyper-rare occurrence in their meticulously sterile home, but both rendered you faint and encumbered, more receptive to her mothering. She liked it when you needed her. You guessed the reason why didn’t really matter.

(You used to assume that, if you were ever unfortunate enough to meet her, Esme would hate you. She’d see you as a homewrecker, as competition, or failing that, as a nuisance disrupting her otherwise idyllic domestic bliss. But, she’d never been that hostile, treating you more similarly to one of her adoptive children than her husband’s kidnapped mistress. It probably helped that her relationship with Carlisle was built more on a mutual affinity for make-believe than anything as fragile as love or passion. He was playing doctor, and she was playing dolls. He’d taken an interest in you for the former pastime, before gifting you to his wife for the latter.)

Eventually, you’d insist that you’d gotten enough bedrest and needed fresh air. That was when Alice would find you – waiting just outside of your bedroom door, her smile wide and your outfit for that day slung over her arm. As a rule, you did your best to avoid Mr. and Mrs. Wrong Side of the Mason Dixon Line, but she was one of the more forceful Cullens, prone to stepping on your heels and holding your preferred hideaways hostage until you relented to whatever form of dress-up she planned out for you. Normally, she’d be satisfied with doing your hair, testing out make-up swatches on someone with a skin tone darker than ivory, making you try on outfits that never seemed to repeat. On your period, though, she was a little clingier.

“Edward wrote from Belgium,” she’d say, absentmindedly curling her fingers inside of you. Most rooms in the Cullen house didn’t have a bed, so she would settle for the floor – letting you lean against an antique loveseat, skirt pooled around your waist and three crimson-stained digits buried in your cunt. “He’s so old-fashioned. Bella just calls, but no, he doesn’t want Nessie around too many screens. As if the poor thing won’t be fourteen this fall. Oh, and Jasper’s coming home tomorrow. He's already sick of Portland.”

Jasper wasn’t allowed within two hundred miles of Forks when you were on your period. Not after the tampon incident.

If you were loud enough, and you almost always were loud enough, Rosalie would come to your rescue. That was why she was your favorite.

Your time with her was largely spent outside, where it was a little more difficult to be tempted by the blood coursing through your veins. You’d sit on a riverbed with a book in your lap while she kept a measured distance, breaking the silence only to remind you to eat or drink or stretch your legs – little human inconveniences the others liked to forget about. Emmett, meanwhile, would take a more active approach to babysitting, pestering you to skip rocks or trying to make you laugh. Occasionally, he wouldn’t make it to your little picnics, and inevitably, you’d find a pair of your panties missing from your dresser the next day. Eventually, they’d turn up mixed in Rosalie’s collection – always nearly torn to shreds. You tried not to hold it against him. At least he had the decency to disregard your personhood behind your back.

You liked Emmett, but you liked Rosalie more. She was the only one who’d raised her voice to Carlisle the night he brought you home, the only one to continually acknowledge the issue of expecting a lamb to live among its butchers. It was nice – having someone willing to advocate for you. Or, to be able to believe that someone might, at least.

Once, you’d even asked her if she’d be willing to let you escape. Not even help, really, just leave a set of car keys where you could find them, or tell you where Carlisle’s security cameras were hidden, or refuse to cooperate while the rest of her family hunted you for sport. She’d taken minutes to answer. Time seemed to be an overabundant resource to eternal creatures. They were prone to letting it slip by in quantities that often made you, a being with fewer days to spare, feel sick.

“If I thought your life was in danger.”

Your life, of course, referring to your humanity. You doubted she’d have so much sympathy for you once you’d been reduced to yet another walking statue.

“It might not be something they plan.” And then, pulling your knees into your chest, “I’m really scared, Ro.”

She hadn’t said anything. When your attention turned back to your book, she asked you to read aloud.

Later on, Carlisle would come home. He’d spare a quick greeting for the rest of his coven, find whatever pantry or cupboard you’d attempted to hide yourself away in, and guide you back to your bedroom.

Intimacy wasn’t uncommon with him, but penetration was saved solely for your period. He was always slow, always gentle, but when you were bleeding, it was nearly agonizing – his hips grinding lazily into yours, his hands curled around your oak headboard, his unblinking eyes never breaking away from yours. No mind was paid to the unmarred white of Esme’s sheets. He’d watch lovingly as pink-tinged arousal dripped down your thighs, murmur sweet nothings as you cried and whined and whimpered for him to stop, that it hurt, that it wasn’t safe. If he felt like talking, he might list off the medical benefits of period sex – pain relief, stress reduction, heightened libido – or promise to be more careful next time, to have more patience in the future. Most nights, though, it was just your desperation, his adoration, and the dull sound of marble against flesh.

He didn’t need to sleep, but you weren’t so resilient. No matter how many times you came, he’d only let you go when your eyes grew too heavy to hold open, when your sobbed protests died down into little, sniffling complaints, when you finally went limp underneath his rigid form. He would sigh as he pulled out, not sparing any words of comfort before taking you into his arms. There’d be a bath, always so impossibly lukewarm, and then some humiliatingly frilly nightgown – more fitting for a toddler from his era than and adult from yours. If you were lucky, you’d still have the energy to insist on wearing a pad to sleep. If you didn’t, then Carlisle would get his way, and you’d be drenched in your own blood by the next morning.

Without fail, Esme would be perched on the edge of your bed by the time Carlisle finished. They’d both tuck you in – a pair of children putting their toy away after playtime – and you would fall asleep to the vile sounds of Esme lapping your blood off her husband’s cock.

Actually girlhood is being obsessed with a specific historical tragedy when you were like 9

my body sleeps on your boredom

SUGAR DADDY!PRICE X READER

18+ | sugar daddy/baby relationship. age gap. (implied) mafia au. dom!Price. (slight) dubcon breeding. breeding kink one so insane you can hear Mormons applauding in the distance. contraceptive control. implied financial control. rough sex. infidelity*. dad!John Price. cheating (not between reader and John). Old Money Rich.

What you have with Price is entirely transactional.

His job—the nuances of which he keeps out of the bedroom, the bed—eats up the bulk of his time, and you—pretty little tchotchke that warms his sheets, keeping him cradled between soft thighs, head nestled on the enticing swell of your chest (weary heads and all, you suppose); a homecoming he can sink his stress into—lap up the scraps.

It's an arrangement that works for both of you, really.

Your rent is paid. Closet bursting with clothing. Always tripping over more shoes than you know what to do with. Food in the fridge. Financial worries are swallowed down quickly when they arise (along with a whiskey-tinged glob of spit when he grips your throat and tells you to open wide). He takes care of you. And you—

You take care of him, too.

a simple creature, really: he just wants dinner on the table when he comes over (home), a pretty thing to stare at while he eats, humming around a mouthful as you prattle on about your day (non-negotiable—his appetite is archaic, oppressive: the man grunts around a piece of meat his woman cooked for him as her bare feet slide teasingly up and down his leg, and she fills the stifling silence with inane chatter), and at the end of the obligatory meal, he gets to vent his frustrations out on the wet, warm embrace of your cunt as it squeezes his bare cock (also non-negotiable).

It's an effortless synchronicity.

When you need money, you send a picture of yourself in lingerie he bought above a coy pretty please, daddy to soften the grump up, and after a few exchanges of him lamenting the unnecessary purchase (a part of you, wishful, idealistic, clings to the idea that maybe he just wants an excuse to talk to you, to let you lap at more of his time than think he can afford to give), he relents. The money is sent to your account. You walk out of the department store with an ache in your belly that no amount of expensive wine or truffle could ever hope of filling and bags dangling on the crook of your finger, and he gets to thicken in his trousers over the idea of spending his money on a pretty little thing he can bury his cock inside of whenever the mood strikes. A patriarchal sort of preening. Masculine ego stroke. The role of a dutiful provider all wrapped up nice under the hum of ownership, sex.

(Then he really gets his money's worth when he bends you over the settee. Bought and paid for.)

And you're fine with it. It works. It makes sense because this is the only way that the two of you, together, do.

He's older than you are (salt peppers his hairline; wisps of smoke slither out of the tips of wry, umbre curls. No laugh lines, but his eyes crinkle when he smiles). He has a career. A good one. The second bottle of Violet Sapphire he bought on a whim for you after you whined about running out of the first (a gift—sales lady said you'd like it, sweetheart) isn't cheap. Neither are the handbags. The Tuscan leather shoes. The teardrop pearls. A good man, too. Upstanding citizen, and all that—

(the thin line of pale, creamy skin against ripened peach: a married man. a crayon shoved in the pocket of his trousers: a father.

blood under his nails. ghosts in his eyes. the smell of gunfire and madness clinging to his skin: a monster, too.)

—and you barely finished community college. Scraped by with a degree you're almost entirely certain he paid for, too. But you get to float around a meaningless job doing empty, vapid things to fill your days when he isn't around. 

(An ornament doesn't serve a purpose if it isn't being gawked at.)

An imbalance, you suppose. Or a ballad: the timeless tale of a stupid, greedy girl sinking her teeth into a grown man's wallet like a dog with a bone. In his hand, the leash. A tug. Be good.

And you are.

You let him slide inside of you as many times as he wants, and pretend the burnished seaglass staring down at you isn't filled with longing. Kneel on your satin cushion at his feet as he stretches out on his throne, and guides your pretty, empty head to his cock. Good girl.

Always.

Even when you shouldn't be. Even when he's gone for long periods of time. don't wait up, peppering the air as he goes. Nothing but an empty bed. Rumpled sheets. The scent of sex and tobacco. Leather and motor oil. Smoke. Sage and stale sweat on your pillowcase. An ache between your thighs. The tattoo of his teeth seared into your skin. An envelope full of cash (just in case). The card he left behind (anythin' you want).

Little tchotchke put back on the shelf. Tucked away so the reason for that pale strip of skin and the broken crayon in his pocket won't ever see you. A dirty secret. Another skeleton in an overstuffed closet.

Predictable, really.

You know your place in his world even if he doesn't say it.

(until he does—)

Just not in so many words—a paradox considering how much he loves to boss you around, growling commands under his breath (on your knees, open up, suck my cock, pretty girl, want me bad, mm, missed my cock inside your cunt, didn't you? show me how much)—in fact, they don't even come from him.

It comes from the pharmacist when you duck inside to pick up your prescription for birth control, and instead of handing it over, he just shakes his head.

"You don't have any refills for this month."

He's gone for two months.

MayoClinic warns that this is the estimated window needed for the hormones to dissolve from your system. The risk of a pregnancy after this, it reads, is likely.

You ponder that in a penthouse suite, sitting pretty amongst shredded wrapping paper. A Dior Turtleneck Sweater wrapped around your throat instead of his hands. An apology—according to the embroidered card, the tight, messy pen strokes mention something about an unexpected business trip.

The return address on the box is in Liverpool.

It's listed for sale on Zillow. The asking price is just over a million dollars. A family home on a vast plot, it reads. Six bedrooms—five in the main home and an additional inside a detached coach house. A gated driveway. A secluded courtyard with a suntrap. Something called a self-contained annex seems to be the main focal point of the sale. It has five reception rooms and a sprawling garden.

Perfect for a family, it adds.

You thumb the alpaca wool on your knit sweater, and wonder if this is the leash being cut—

Or pulled tighter.

He doesn't bring it up.

And so, neither do you.

It sits like an oafish, gaudy elephant in the background as he walks into the apartment, fingers digging into his tie. Ignored. Dismissed. He grunts when the knot loosens. Shoulders falling lax. Calmed without the clench of something around his neck.

You place his plate on the table when he wanders closer, offering one of those simpering 50s era housewife smiles when his big, bearish hand swallows up your waist. The scent of char and gunsmoke clings to his collar when he leans in, pressing a kiss to your temple. Acrid. Metallic. Beneath it, you catch stale sweat. Animalic. Unwashed man, leather.

And nothing else.

There's old, greasy sweat on his nose. His hair is slicker than usual. Darker. Blood under his nails. Smoke between his teeth when he hums, offering a low, rasping missed you, sweetheart that scratches along your skin.

He didn't shower before he came to see you.

You hide the notion of it behind your teeth, letting it grace your smile with something that feels less plastic, rigid. More real. Artless. Clumsy. Like the dress he sent ahead of himself and the matching pair of designer heels that still sit inside their box. You'd never wear shoes in the house, but John Price isn't a man who does things in halves.

(a purse sits on the settee: a complete set.)

His eyes are dark—pelagic: the ocean at night; all dark, no stars, moonless—and when he looks at you (in the clothes he bought, in the penthouse he owns, cooking the dinner he wanted), something ripples across the surface. A frisson. Underwater quake. Deep and dark, and darkly possessive. Hungry. 

You like the look on him right now. Maybe even more than anything else he'd ever bought for you, done to you, because Price is, above all else, fundamentally human.

He has rules. Expectations. It's rare he's ever driven by instinct beyond anger—that thrilling thing you'd only ever glimpsed when he peeled back the curtain, tearing the skin he wore with you kneeling at his feet and growled into the phone at whoever stroke his ire. He's controlled chaos. Gruff and uncompromisable.

But the look on his face right now splits that staunch control down the middle until it falls, shattering into pieces at his feet.

He growls m’hungry, sweetheart, and you barely have a second to push the risotto aside before he lifts you onto the table, barely sparing a minute to swipe his hand across the surface, sending dishware and untouched food tumbling to the ground with that same little growl he gave to the man on the phone who disturbed him from the comfort of keeping his cock warmed on your tongue all day long. 

You're laid over the jacket he'd thrown down—rich with gunsmoke, tobacco, and something sharp and metallic—legs squeezed together, ankles tossed over his right shoulder.

It's messy. Artless. All animal despite the cocoon of finery bracketed around you.

Plates shake from the jarring force of his thrusts. Cups tip, spilling your glass of Roumier across the table. Something shatters when it hits the ground. But he doesn't stop. Doesn't even notice the chaos happening around him—as if the world ceases to exist beyond the sight of you taking his cock like a good girl. Spread out for his leisure. His pleasure.

He certainly looks like a hellish king as he stands above you. Towering. Terrifying. One hand wrapped around your throat, keeping you still as he slides his gaze from the tilt of your thighs to the tears puddling in the corner of your eyes as he stretches you open with the thick of him. The other looped under your knees, holding firm. Fingers digging into your flesh. Tight. Rutting like a beast.

There's sweat on his brow. His chest heaves. The hand around your throat slides down your collarbones in a damp spill of heat that makes your toes curl above his shoulder. Rough. Sticky with sweat. With you from when he pried your cunt open on three thick, scarred fingers, grunting at the sloppy mess he found between your thighs. Always so fuckin' wet for him.

It wasn't enough, but you think he likes that. Indulges in something archaic, sinister, when he catches the wince on your face as his too-big cock notches against your too-tight hole. Forcing himself inside with a grunt that sometimes sounds like a laugh when you whimper. When you cry and claw at the sheets and beg for mercy—just a minute to adjust, a second to get used to the burning stretch. The poignant ache when he slides down to the root—so deep, you sometimes think you can taste him in your throat.

He gives no quarter then, and he doesn't now.

Price likes fucking you rough. Edging on painful, bordering on too much. It's the juxtaposition, you think, from the way he treats you like a spoiled little princess who has daddy wrapped around her finger to the dressed up little whore he lays out on a table, bends over a settee, and brands your throat with the clench of his paw as he pounds into you like a beast. A little mean, a little cruel—just enough to balance out the rasp in his voice when he hands you his credit card and says buy whatever you want, sweetheart.

(and miss you, sweetheart—when he's tired and alone and already four glasses of whiskey deep; voice ground down to ash from the cigars he burned through. As soft as a man like him could ever get. Can't stop thinkin' about you, sweetheart. Need to see you, sweetheart. Need your pussy. Your cunt. Your mouth. That tight little ass. Want to fuck your throat until you can't speak for days, sweetheart.

(Want to push m'self so deep inside of you that you forget yourself, love. Forget who you are without my cock inside of you. Can't—can't live without me—)

Ash and soot. The next morning, another ten grand sits in your account. A knife slides cleanly, neatly, into your guts when the accompanying text says for listenin' to the nonsense of a drunk old man. don't take it to heart.)

Balance, maybe.

the thin strip of skin on his finger. the broken crayon in his pocket.

Maybe tonight was supposed to be the end. A clean break.

It makes you wonder if she found out about the tchotchke he keeps in his closet. The pretty little thing he begs to stay when he's drunk and alone, and then rips into pieces the next morning when money is promptly deposited into your account. A cruel-edged don't forget yourself, sweetheart.

But he's snarling as he peaks, grunting above you as sweat drips down his brow, heaving. Panting. Lips twisted up into a snarl. Eyes furious. Mad. His hand is a brand over your mound, possessive as he holds you in his palm, feels the way his cock splits you apart. Owned.

Bought and paid for.

Another grunt, and his thumb dips down to rub at your clit, barking at you to come—come on my cock, sweetheart, need to feel it—until you howl, clenching up so tight around him that it rips a molten, liquid purr from his chest. A throaty moan that breaks you into pieces. Tears the veneer of flesh and bone from your consciousness until your body liquifies, spilling out over the table, mingling with the Chambolle Musigny Amoureuses soaking into your back. Wrapped tight around him, as he batters into you without any finesse. Clumsy ruts. Sloppy. Animal. And then—

His cock swells. Throbs.

Over the roar in your ears, you hear him groan low in his throat, deep and brutal; the rumbling of a well-fed bear burying its dinner in the dirt. It sounds like mine now. Like ain't you, mm, sweetheart? gonna keep you nice and full. got all those rooms to fill, don't we—

wishful thinking.

But he comes inside of you. Bare. Raw. Your hands untangle from around his wrist, palm still wrapped around your throat, and drop down to your belly.

Price sees it and groans—

"that's it, sweetheart—"

(ain't gonna be empty for long.)

He's always had this little fantasy of knocking you up.

Used to growl in your ear about how badly he wanted to see you swell with his babies. Little broodmare he'd keep chained to his bed like a queen. Giving him five sons and five daughters because he could never seem to make up his mind on what he wanted—only that it was a lot.

(An improbable thing, really—he might yank on the leash, but you easily talked him down to four; two boys and two girls.)

He comes back (home) some days with fire in his eyes and sets on you like a man possessed, starved. Smothering you into the mattress with the thick of his body, grunting into your ear about knocking you up. Getting you fat and needy with his babies until you forget what it felt like not to be nursing, to be pregnant.

A terrifying concept. Something that made you rush a little faster to pick up your contraceptives, comparing the pill in your palm to pictures online just to make sure they were the same. And maybe at some point, it just became a game.

He'd press you into sheets and fuck you all day long, making you keep count. Each time he came inside of you was another baby to this empty house. A crazy thing, really. Midlife crisis, perhaps.

But you indulged.

Let him press his hairy, thick chest against yours as he folded your knees up to your ears and pounded inside of your aching, messy cunt, gasping out a tally into his sweat-slicked jaw. Laughed as he kept your legs bent and your hips tilted up, eyes riveted to the split of your sore, aching cunt. Growling an awful amalgamation of primal, masculine satisfaction at the sight of him spilling out of you and in anger at the fuckin' waste.

("gonna plug you up next time," he seethed, two fingers buried inside your bruised hole to stem the flood. "Wastin' it all, sweetheart.")

But that was before.

When he'd shower before he came to see you. Sometimes waiting days after he landed before he was back in your bed, grunting around the idea of another trip you wanted him to take you on, pretending to think about it despite the tickets to Egypt already booked. When he'd play house with you. I Love Lucy on the television, dinner in the oven. His hand curled over your nape as you bobbed your head up and down his cock. A dutiful wife taking care of her overworked husband.

Making babies in the dead of night. When he'd grunt say it, sweetheart into your ear, and you'd beg him to give you another one. Tears in your eyes, lachrymal, as you tried to convince your husband that the baby you put to bed in the empty room needs a sibling.

His hand on the leash, but your voice in his ear—paper soft—pleading don't make our child grow up as an only child, John.

(two weeks in Portofino booked. First class. Luxury resort. A Wolf & Badger swimsuit laying on your bed, one with a gold zipper on the front that he wears out by the sixth day and has to run to town to buy you a new one.)

But that was before. When it was just a rich, dangerous man's fantasy. When you had birth control to keep the unrepentant baby fever he had just a dream. Never a possibility. Never a reality.

MayoClinic says the possibility of conception is high.

The period tracker you glimpse on his phone one evening warns that you have two days before it comes.

When you swallow around the idea of it, half dizzy, half sick (six bedrooms), he rests his hand over your nape, tugging on the leash. His eyes are dark again. Midnight blue, almost black. Hadal.

He keeps them fixed on you. A ravenous black hole. Calmly closing the app as if nothing was wrong, as if he didn’t have your cycle locked into his phone. Rough, calloused thumb brushing over the soft patch of skin beneath your ear. Steady and soothing. Like calming a skittish mare. 

Unflinching. Unbothered. Entirely unconcerned when he kicks his foot over the line of what's expected, what you want, and fucks you again that night, bare. Raw. Groaning when he comes. Huffing into your ear about how he'll take such good care of you—both of you.

And when he tucks a pillow under your hips, you drag your hand down to your wet, swollen cunt in a clumsy, enticing attempt to keep him inside of you until he fills the empty space with the thick split of his scarred knuckles.

A performance, you think, when he groans like you gutted him. Bought and paid for. 

That's all this is.

But he doesn’t book a trip for this performance.

And he's gone when you wake (business, he says, in a messily scrawled note left on the end table), but there's a gift bag on the dining room table, sitting next to the stain you left when he pulled out of you. Dried come. Slick. Tinged slightly pink because he was rough with you last night. Hurried. 

The black box inside is an apology for hurting you even though you know he likes it when his come is a little pink as it leaks out of you. When you wince when you sit, and have to press a icepack against your sore, swollen cunt.

(it doesn't surprise you to find a pack already left out for you. coffee in a pot. breakfast warm on the stove.)

But the next thing he left is the real gift.

Divorce papers—already signed by him, the gold band he never let you see on top—sits on a stamped envelope, awaiting another signature. It just has to be mailed out. When you sift through them, the cause for the divorce is irreconcilable differences.

Balm to the shame is the little fact that he hasn't lived with his wife for the last year. The date of separation coincides neatly with that drunken phone call when he told you he wanted to bury himself so deep inside of you that you couldn't breathe without him saying you could. 

Domineering. Grossly possessive. 

He has you already, but that's not enough. 

It'll never be enough.

("wanna—mm, wanna give you everything, sweetheart. and I want everything, too. every part of you. wanna change your fuckin' name to mine—")

You tap your nail against the page labeled custody agreement, not even a little surprised that this docket has everything outlined, itemised. The table of contents says you'll find the prenup on page fifty-six and the proposed split of assets on page sixty-seven. It's thorough and every bit as intimidating and uncompromising as the man is wont to be. 

He's serious.

And John wants his kid. Non-negotiable.

That, too, doesn't really surprise you. Even when you were playing house, he'd always been a rather doting father—

("I don't want them to just have a sibling," he'd growl, firm and immutable, adding (intractable as always): "I want them to have a fuckin' team.”)

The address he gives for his primary residence, however, does give you pause. Liverpool. Chestnut Avenue, Moor Park. Six bedrooms. A guesthouse. 

The envelope is filled out, too. All it needs is to be tucked inside and mailed out. 

Already separated, his lawyer says, neat and tidy, like everything else in the pages. This was the most inevitable course of action, and my client, John Price, is ready to move on with his new life. 

Ready to move on. You scrape your tongue against your teeth, hand settling over your belly as you think about that. It's just—

He's always been a rather obstinate man. Stubborn. Once he gets his head around an idea, very little can change his mind. You'd seen it countless times before, but never this cold. Callous. 

Dismissive. 

Not to you, anyway. Not that you can remember. It's always been silk sheets, gifts from stores that would deny you entrance based on your credit score alone. A new wardrobe. A new place to stay. And that's—

That's kind of odd, you think. Maybe. 

He cut your lease the day after you dragged him home from the bar, back when he was just a bad choice after a terrible night out. Had the locks changed. A new lease in your hands—in his name—and a key under the mat beside a housewarming gift. An expensive espresso machine that would be a little too bourgeois in Starbucks. A penthouse that overlooks the ocean. Members only. 

There's a valet. A gym. A swimming pool. He joked one night that you'd feel right at home with the sauna it housed. Jus’ like a lodge, mm. 

You're not sure how he knew. It's one of those things that he just does. Like your name. The real one you grew up hearing before you moved to the city and changed it to fit in. How many siblings you have. Your parents. Their birthdays. A gift always sent out in your name, arriving just on time. 

All of your old things were donated. You didn't need them anymore—not when he ordered a whole new wardrobe from Loro Piana for you. Handed you his card and told you to fill the house up with whatever would make you happy. 

(Fitting, you suppose, since you barely have to think about anything except how to make him happy.)

He turned in your resignation less than three hours after you fell asleep on your lumpy mattress, worn out after a night of drinking. A night of him. More animal than man. Too tired to kick him out before you passed out under the weight of him still burying you into the mattress, hips flexing as he fucked you again for the third time. 

(the fourth, fifth while you were still sleeping. waking up to the sixth: him inside of you, a slow grind as he rocks in and out; he's bigger than you. too big. with your thighs wrapped snug around his hips, the top of your head barely clips the ledge of his shoulder. he wrapped an arm around your upper back, the other reaching out, gripping the pillows above you. panting into the thick bed of curls covering his chest as he threads his hand over your crown and presses you tighter against him. groaning into your ear. ducking his head down to rasp out how badly he wants to feel your messy little pussy squeeze him tight—

before he leaves, he hooks two thick fingers inside, and fucks his come into you. makes you come on his cum-soaked fingers before he wanders off with a small smile, the scent of tobacco and sex pungent in the air.)

And the ring—

You thought he never wore it because of some misguided sense of propriety. Decorum. The Madonna—a thin strip of pale skin, waterlilies and cashmere, a crayon in his pocket; tabloids dressing her up as a modern day Diana; a divot between his brow that grows and grows and—

and the Whore—

A penthouse. Dior sunglasses. Cucinelli heels. Colombo jackets. Loro Piana outfits that cost more than your parents make in a year. His credit cards left on your bedside table. Trips in a snap of a finger. Luxury a phone call away. 

(his voice pitched low. a smoldering rasp. stay, sweetheart, don't go. don't leave—)

—the divot melting into a brooding, heated stare. Desire drenched across his brow; want so thick, so palpable, you can feel his need throbbing between your legs. Dissolving into ash after, when he loops an arm under your body, cradling you close to his sweat-slicked chest as he leans against the headboard, smoking a cigar. Basking in the scent of sex. Satiety. Your finger curling around a thick whorl of damp, coarse hair. Content. 

It’s selfishness. Teeth digging into the man, refusing to let go. But beyond that, you know you’re good for him. 

Better for him, you think, and jog the papers on the table, right above that ugly little stain, to neaten up the pile. 

It takes five minutes to slip them inside the sleeve, peel the adhesive off of the sticky tab, and walk them down to the mailbox just outside of the lobby. Five minutes to initiate a divorce. 

If you had any qualms about falling into bed with a married man—not that he really gave you much room to think about it since he never showed up with his ring, just the mark of her around his neck like a noose; a constant guessing game—it’s put to rest when the metal flap snaps shut. 

Shame feels like an elephant. Something in the background. Ignorable. 

And besides—

(you place your hand over your belly and hum)

—you have other things to think about, to worry over, than a crumbling marriage.

He must have gotten the notice that you mailed the documents because a text comes later that night. Simple. Succinct. 

Good girl. 

The elephant slinks away into the moonless night as you pull open the catalogue of engagement rings he left on his bedside table, and circle a few that catch your eye. 

All of them sapphire. The same blue as the broken crayon in his pocket.

(The period tracker on his phone chimes a few weeks later.

You don't even bother peeking over his shoulder to know you're late.

You have more things to worry about, after all. Like moving to Liverpool next week when his divorce is finalised, and planning a wedding for the spring.)

Title: Ferine.

Pairing: Yandere!Toji x Reader (JJK).

Word Count: 4.1k.

TW: Hybrid AU, Non/Con, Fem!Reader, Slight Manipulation, Rough Sex, Oral Sex, Knotting, Mentions of Blood + Violence, Slight Breeding, and Biting.

Toji was, by far, the largest hybrid you’d ever taken care of.

Which, technically speaking, wasn’t that big of an accomplishment. This was barely your third month at the research facility, and you could count the number of hybrids you’d encountered before being hired here on a single hand. Still, even compared to the other wolves you currently looked after, Toji was beyond impressive. His long, pointed ears and stocky build set him well above six-foot, and even if he’d lacked height, he would’ve been able to make up for it with the planes of sculpted muscle circled around his biceps and thighs, laid over his chest and back. Top it all off with a set of claws each longer than your pointer finger and sharp enough to pierce reinforced steel, and he was practically fit for exhibit. Not that Toji could ever actually be a show dog, no – he’d tear the judges apart before they’d so much as heard his name. He was sweet, but he had a temper. You had to be careful not to set him off.

His fangs were impressive, too – perfectly in-tact despite years of less-than-adequate care, only a touch duller than a real wolf’s. You were careful not to let your hand stray from where it cupped his cheek as you looked for signs of damage or rot only to, of course, come up empty. The longer you spent with him, the more convinced you were that nothing could actually hurt Toji, even if the faded scar stitched into the corner of his mouth suggested otherwise.

“All done,” you started, letting go of his cheek. Immediately, Toji’s jaw snapped shut with enough strength to take off a finger, had you given him the chance. “Perfect as always, Toji. I think you might be my best patient.”

A cocky smile found its way to his lips, and you could hear his tail beating lazily against the dirt floor of his enclosure. The facility was committed to replicating the natural environments of their more exotic hybrids as closely as possible, even if Toji claimed he’d trade it all for a punching bag, or better yet, something ‘real’ to dig his teeth into, whatever that meant. “Do I get a treat, doc?”

It was asked playfully, but still, you hummed by way of confirmation, pulling your duffle bag into your lap and fishing Toji’s well-earned rewards – a generic chocolate bar and a can of some painfully acidic, sickeningly sweet brand of soda your hybrid patients couldn’t seem to get enough of. It was a meager prize, but it was as much as you were able to spare considering how strict his caretakers were when it came to his diet. You’d probably save yourself a few dirty looks if you didn’t give him anything at all, but it didn’t feel right to leave him empty-handed.

He accepted your humble offering greedily. While the chocolate bar was stowed away for later consumption, the can was pierced with a clawed thumb and emptied in one long, unpleasantly audible swig. You’d only started to push yourself to your feet when Tojj finished, letting the now empty can fall to the ground before turning his attention back to you. “It hurts my feelings, knowing you’re just gonna run off and put your hands on another animal.” His ear pressed flat against his scalp, as if he was trying (and failing) to feign disappointment. “If I didn’t know better, I’d start to think you didn’t really care about all the time we’ve spent together.”

“You’re not exactly in desperate need of medical attention,” you chided, throwing your bag over your shoulder. “And I’m on a schedule. Not all of us can sit around, grooming ourselves all day.”

That earned a breathy laugh, a coy lilt to his smile. “Well, if you wanted to take a shot at it, I wouldn’t—”

“Save it. I get enough of that with the cats.” Just thinking about it made you grimace. It was one thing to think that Toji might bite you. Knowing Satoru and Suguru – the bonded leopard and panther pair who shared a check-up date with Toji – would insist on licking any exposed skin raw before letting you do your job was a much more tangible reality. “I’ll see you in a couple of days. You’ll be good until then, right?”

“I’m gonna gut those fucking strays.” His answer was blunt, immediate, but he cracked as soon you shot him a purse-lipped frown. “Kidding, kidding. I’ll just rough ‘em up a little – make ‘em regret putting their paws on you, y’know?”

You couldn’t help but soften. Toji was rough around the edges, but he wasn’t a bad dog. He just had a protective streak and that, paired with his brash personality and tendency to bite before he barked, was enough for most people to write him off.

You really did have a long, long list of other appointments you had to get to before the end of the day, but against your better judgement, you paused as you passed him, reaching down to rake your fingers through sleek black hair. He was stoic, especially for a hybrid, but even his cool, dark eyes and wry smile couldn’t hide the way his tail moved just a little faster at the feeling of your nails raking over his scalp, his ears immediately perking up. It only took a second for him to bat your hand away, but you only laughed as you started towards the staff exit, waving to Toji over your shoulder.

Maybe, for his next check-up, you’d see if you could sneak in something special.

~

“Your mutt’s been unruly, lately.”

You glanced up from your clipboard, turning your full attention to Nanami and quickly finding that he hadn’t paid you the same courtesy. He was one of the senior researchers and, so far, the only one you could stand to be around for any longer than a few minutes. Since the higher-ups expected you to fill out your reports with one hand while you took a four-hundred-pound tiger’s temperature with the other, you tended to camp out in Nanami’s office when you had paperwork to file. “Toji?” Nanami nodded, and you rolled your eyes. “I’m just the vet, Kento. If his handlers aren’t doing their—”

“The problem isn’t his handlers, it’s him.”

His voice was flat, his tone icy. You laid your clipboard over your lap, crossing your arms over your chest. “He’s an animal. It’d be more out of character if he didn’t lash out occasionally.”

Nanami opened his mouth, but closed it just as quickly. After a lengthy pause, he leaned back in his seat, bringing a hand to his temples and massaging absentmindedly. “Do you know why he hasn’t been released back into the wild, yet?”

Obviously. Working with hybrids – let alone exotic hybrids – was dangerous, and your debriefing had drilled the face, name, and background of every animal in the facility into your memory. “He was born in captivity. He’s too acclimated to human society to adjust to the wilderness.”

Nanami pressed his lips into a thin line – an expression you’d learned to read as ‘you’re right, but I’m not going to say that’. Still, a degree of satisfaction accompanied his silent confirmation. “He was found in a dog fighting ring – or, what was left of one, at least. It took three rounds of sedation and two broken muzzles before our recovery team was able to get him under control.”

A knot formed at the base of your throat. Fuck chocolate, Toji deserved a blanket and as many hugs as he would let you give him. “That’s terrible, Kento. Were the organizers arrested?”

“The organizers—” Nanami straightened. “—were found mauled and stuffed into a kennel. Their bodies were so thoroughly mutilated, we had to rely on blood samples to identify them.”

“Wolves aren’t known for attacking unprovoked. It could’ve been another—”

“One of his handlers is currently hospitalized,” Nanami went on, as if you hadn’t cut in. “And two have already turned in their resignations – a resounding fear for their welfare in the workplace, supposedly.”

Your eyes fell to the floor, and that knot in your throat tightened until only the barest whisper could find its way out. “He’s not a bad dog,” you muttered, nearly under your breath. “He just— He loses his temper, sometimes. He doesn’t mean to hurt anymore.”

“He’s never tried to hurt you?”

You didn’t have to think before shaking your head. “Never.”

That, of all things, seemed to catch Nanami’s attention. For the first time, his eyes flickered briefly to you before falling back to his desk, his paperwork. “Good,” he said, marking down something on a piece of scrap paper in front of him. If he felt the need to elaborate, he clearly didn’t deem it worth the effort.

Later that day, you were informed that you were being transferred to the reptile wing indefinitely. If you’d been there for a few more months, if you’d had a little more experience to throw around, if you’d had a little more authority, you might’ve protested, but it was all you could do to nod and set to memorizing your new schedule.

~

It took exactly three weeks for you to see Toji again.

One of his handlers – a woman in her early twenties sporting a pressed scowl and a gauze-padded bandage on her cheek – met you at the facility’s gates and flatly told you that Toji was injured. You’d never been in the facilities (much less with a hybrid) after sundown, and in the simulated wilderness of his enclosure, it was easy to forget that you were never more than twenty feet away from a security camera, that there was only one apex predator you had to be afraid of. After checking your usual meeting spot (clear spot near the center of his enclosure – neutral territory, safe territory) and finding it vacant, you reluctantly stumbled your way to his den, dragging your feet despite the urgency of the situation. Toji wouldn’t deliberately attack you, but any animal could react if provoked. You didn’t want to set him off. More importantly, you didn’t want to prove Nanami right.

You’d never ventured far enough to see his den, but you knew what to expect. A square shell of cement occupied the deepest corner of Toji’s enclosure, bracketed off by a metal door tucked inside of a deep entryway meant to give the illusion of privacy. You approached it slowly, stepping underneath the shadowed overhang with no small amount of caution, but you didn’t get the chance to knock before a hand manifested on your shoulder and shoved you against the cold steel.

Claws bit into to the dip of your shoulder, then your wrist, too, as he caught your hand and shoved it into the small of your back. You felt hot air on the nape of your neck, heard heavy panting laced with the barest trace of a throaty growl, and it took everything you had not to panic, not to struggle, not to give him a reason to dig his teeth into your neck and tear. Toji wasn’t a bad dog, but he was still a dog. He’d still bite, if given an excuse.

“Toji,” you started, slowly, taking care to soften each harsh syllable of his name. “I’m here to help you.”

He didn’t respond, his hold only tightening. His check pressed into your back, and there was a short, airy noise – sniffing, as little as you wanted to put a name to it. “Toji,” you repeated, with more urgency. “I heard you were hurt. Will you let me help you?”

A second passed in silence, then another. Finally, he pulled away from you, releasing your wrist first, then your shoulder. He remained where he was – a little too close, a little too looming – as you shuffled to face him, forcing yourself not to consciously acknowledge that you were in a very big cage with a very poorly behaved animal. His handlers hadn’t mentioned why they’d needed you, but you didn’t have to wonder for very long. Even in the pitch dark, you could see the dark blood covering his jaw, washed over his throat and chest. It was on his hands, too, coating the white bone of his claws, and matted into his dark hair. Your waning self-control faltered then shattered altogether, your hands shooting to his head, his face, searching for bruising or swelling or broken bones, but surprisingly, all your worry earned was an airy laugh. “It’s not mine, doc.” He laid a hand over yours. “I’m doin’ just fine. Even better, now that you’re here.”

But he wasn’t. Twin sets of puncture marks were littered across his throat, his face, his arms. Something had taken a chunk out of his left bicep, and five matching scratch marks had been etched deep into the skin of his chest. The wounds looked feline, but you couldn’t bring yourself to linger on the implications. “You’re hurt,” you muttered, more to yourself than to him. Your hands fell to his shoulders, pushing him downward gently. “I— I’ve got bandages, and sutures—” You let your bag fall from your shoulder to your elbow, already reaching for the zipper. “Find somewhere to sit. We should get you cleaned up before something worse sets in.”

Panic was quickly overshadowing your better judgement, but Toji didn’t move, didn’t look away from you. He was still wearing that coy, sardonic grin – almost teasing, given your anxiety. “I already told you, I’m just fine.” His smile widened, until his pointed fangs caught in the dim light. “I didn’t think you’d actually come. They said I could ask for whatever I wanted, but—” He paused, sucked in a sharp breath. “I didn’t think you’d actually come.”

“Toji, you’re not making any sense. You need help.” Again, you pushed gently on his shoulders, and again, he didn’t seem to notice. This time, though, he shifted, leaned toward you, burying his face in the crook of your neck. You scowled, shoving a little less gently on his chest, but Toji didn’t move. “Toji, please, just let me help—”

“You’re gonna be the death of me, princess.” You felt his hands on your waist, then your ass. His chest was slotted against yours, and his tongue ran unabashedly over the curve of your neck once, then twice before he went on. “Keep sayin’ my name like that, and I won’t be able to control myself.”

Something pressed into your thigh – hot and hard and, like the rest of Toji, fucking huge. Your heart fell into your stomach, the air flooding out of your lungs and leaving you dazed, breathless.

Fuck. Fuck.

You should’ve stuck with the fucking reptiles.

Toji was panting audibly, again; his tongue lapping over your neck, your cheek. You were still cursing yourself for ever applying for this shitty job in the first place when Toji fell to his knees, forcing your thighs onto his shoulders as his claws caught on the fabric of your pants, decimating the thin material in an instant. His teeth tore away your panties just as quickly, leaving you exposed, splayed out on a silver platter in front of him. You reacted reflectively – knotting your fingers in his hair and doing your best to pry him away from you, but your strength was nothing compared to his and in the end, all you earned was a throaty groan, a tight squeeze to your ass before he buried his face in your cunt. His teeth grazed against the tender insides of your thighs, his claws biting into your now-unprotected skin, but the feeling of his tongue laving over the length of your slit replaced every other sensation with pure heat.

Predictably, he was near animalistic – his thick tongue fucking into you as the bridge of his nose ground shamelessly into your clit. From a distance, it would’ve been hard to tell if he was trying to eat you out or eat you alive; every noise he made feral and wet, punctuated with rough growls and little, uncharacteristic whines. It would’ve been impossible not to feel anything, but still, you couldn’t help but hate yourself when it started to feel good. His tongue was thick and textured, long enough to fill your pussy and flexible enough to curl inside of you, abusing the walls of your cunt without mercy. It was difficult to tell how much of the gloss staining his chin and the inside of your thighs was his drool and how much of it was your arousal, but even if your mind was disgusted by every slick noise and sharp flick of his tongue, there was nothing your body could do to block out the sudden pang of heat in your core, to fight the way your legs ached to clench around his head and pull the source of your revulsion that much closer.

“To—Toji, no, st—” you tried to say, like you were scolding a normal dog, like any part of you still thought he was listening. A cracked moan cut you off prematurely, and even if it hadn’t, Toji’s only response was a bruising squeeze to your ass, a low moan just loud enough to reverberate against your sensitive clit. Blinding white flashed across your vision, and before you could stop, before you could bring yourself back from that edge, you were coming undone on his tongue, your hips bucking against his face as he nursed you through your mind-numbing climax. Rather than pull away, he forced his tongue that much deeper into your pussy – taking advantage of your hypersensitivity to drag another unwilling orgasm out of you, then another, until the dried blood smeared across his lips was tacky and dripping onto your skin. He only pulled away when your little, pained sounds began to die into half-choked pleas and your limited strength failed, leaning you limp and boneless on top of him, and even then, he took the time to drag his tongue over your slit, to lap up what would’ve been wasted slick. You would’ve given anything for him to just leave you like that – messy and covered in your own arousal, but unfortunately, Toji had never been a bad dog.

His gaze flitted up to meet yours. “Sorry, princess,” he muttered, when he saw the misery knitted into your expression. The broad grin he wore was anything but apologetic, though. “Might’ve gotten carried away after all. Can’t help it – you always come to me, smellin’ like other men, and nobody ever lets me do anything about it.” He nuzzled into the inside of your thigh, nipping at the tender flesh with just enough force to break the skin. There was a tight pinch, of bright spark of pain, but Toji tended to the minimal wound lovingly, running his tongue over the thin stream of blood. “Gonna have you nice n’ scented by the end of the night.” A sharp whimper slipped past your grit teeth as the points of his fangs grazed over your skin, and Toji sighed. “Gonna have you nice n’ bred, too, if you keep making those sounds.”

Bred. Bred. Bred. You turned the offensive word over in your mind, unable to grasp what it possibly could’ve meant, as Toji carefully lowered you onto the ground – never so much as toying with the idea of fucking you into anything other than the cold, raw earth. It wasn’t until his clawed hand fell to the hard, pulsing cock standing stiffly between his legs that you were able to fully process what he’d said, what he was threatening to do to you. Your thoughts went blank, your years of veterinary school and countless hours of animal-handling training and common sense all dissolving into total nonexistence in an instant. It didn’t matter that he was taller than you, stronger than you – you were already throwing your full weight against him, scratching at his chest with your blunt nails, doing everything in your so incredibly limited power just to get away from him. Your latest wave of resistance wasn’t enough to overwhelm him, but it earned a frustrated rumble at the base of his throat, a downward quirk to his cocky smile. Your nails caught one of the puncture marks on his cheek and, reflexively, he straightened his back, brought his hand to his face, left just enough space between your body and his for you to roll onto your chest and scramble desperately towards freedom. You’d barely gotten your knees underneath you when his hand lashed out, catching you by the collar and forcing your cheek into the soil. His chest pressed into your back, his legs caging yours in on either side, and worst of all, his cock throbbed against your ass – somehow, impossibly, harder than it’d been a few seconds ago. You might’ve jotted it down as an impressive display of canine resilience, if you hadn’t felt so desolated.

“Shoulda figured you wouldn’t make this easy on yourself.” His voice was rougher than it had been, but no less self-satisfied. That made sense. Wolves were endurance predators. He would’ve come into this expecting there to be a struggle. “I thought you’d be more of a mate than a bitch, but—” He paused, his mouth settling against the nape of your neck. “—either’s fine by me.”

You clenched your eyes shut. “Please, Toji, don’t do—”

But, it was already too late. He rutted your ass once, then twice, before his tip caught on the entrance to your abused pussy and he was inside of you, fully sheathed without a trace of resistance.

Toji was big, even for a hybrid. He was a hunter, tried and true, all muscle and agility and pure, unfaltering strength. Even with his generous (albeit, unwelcomed) prep, it was all you could do to convince yourself that his cock wouldn’t tear you apart. He was thick enough to press against every soft and sensitive spot inside of you, long enough to leave a tight knot of pressure sitting in the pit of your stomach, and when he started to move, pulling out slowly before slamming back in, the force alone was enough to scatter little black spots in the corner of your vision and leave you hazy, light-headed. The way he was fucking into you didn’t help anything, either. Keening whines slipped out of some deep, feral pocket of his chest as he took advantage of your vulnerable cunt, alternating between grinding into you with a desperate sort of clinginess and trying to bully his way that much deeper with bruising, brutal thrusts. One arm wrapped around your midriff, dragging you even close to him, while a groping hand found the delicate buttons of your top and tore, ridding you of what was left of your protection against him. He kneaded half-consciously at your chest as he fucked into you; his own pleasure suddenly his only priority.

His selfishness should’ve been a welcome change, but you were too far gone, your body too eager to find a silver lining to his rough affection. Your hands clawed mindlessly at the ground as he pumped into you, the heat of his body against yours clouding your senses and making the feeling of cock stretching you open, his dull head pounding against your cervix all the more unbearable. You doubted he’d be able to talk, even if he’d had anything left to say, but he was still vocal enough. Raspy groans and harsh grunts rung distantly in your ears, his calloused hands groping mercilessly at your chest, your stomach, your waist. Finally, his thumb found its way to your neglected clit, and with less than a full second of stimulation, you were buckling into yourself, clamping down around his cock with a fractured whimper. As humiliated as you were, Toji wasn’t far behind. With something between a moan and a howl, he was cumming inside of you – predictably making no attempt to pull out. Something hot and vile flooded into you, but it was hard to focus on that when you could feel something hard and bloated and wrong press into your entrance. Toji’s breath hitched as he forced his knot into your tight cunt, and whatever hope you had for coming out of this unscathed curled up and died inside of you.

You could feel him slacken on top of you. You almost thought he would collapse like that, leave you locked to him and trapped under his weight, but instead, he nuzzled against the crook of your neck, his fangs ghosting over your throat before sinking into the soft flesh just underneath your jugular. He stayed like that, his knot splitting open your pussy and his teeth buried in your neck, until you lost any hope of him ever pulling away.

Exhausted, you shut your eyes, sinking into yourself. You’d been right, in a way. Toji wasn’t a bad dog.

He was just a terrible terrible man.

Treasure Box Reactions, Headcanons and Scenarios

Anyone looking for YG Trainees reactions, headcanons and scenarios, please send in some requests!

BIRD DOG | Simon 'Ghost' Riley x Reader

MOODBOARD · AO3

A few times a year, Simon goes home to an empty apartment in a shithole city and counts down the days until he can leave. This time, there's someone waiting for him when he comes home.

Convenient. He was already planning on ordering takeaway.

Or: the live-in masseuse au

tags: Size Difference, Size Kink, Explicit Sexual Content, AFAB reader - Freeform, Masseuse Reader, Forced Cohabitation, Strangers to Roommates to Lovers, Porn with Feelings

The mangled hand of fate lets him go but seldomly. 

He does, though, get a few weeks off a year. Bids farewell to his captain (the barest hint of a nod after leaving each other on the runway, chopper blades spinning faster and faster, the other man headed back out, his duties never finished; the world can never let them both rest at the same time) and then he’s gone, bags long packed and truck loaded the night before last. He drives a long, circuitous route after leaving the military base, the mask only shed when the paranoid prickle in his head finally abates. 

It never quite goes away though.

And then comes the drive back, the road long and the drudgery endless. One hand on the wheel, the other hanging out of the side of the truck, a cigarette pinched between two knuckles. Occasionally, he takes a drag. 

This is the part he always hates. The drive back. Roads winding through quiet towns and over hills, blue disappearing into black, streetlights piercing the darkness and demarcating the beginning and end of civilization. Manchester is a long drive north. He stops once for a piss by the side of the road and then carries on. 

It’s a wonder they let him go at all. He is violence forthright; setting him free does no one any good. It’s hardly even a reward for him, more of just a pretense of normalcy. A week to stretch his legs, so to speak. If he were anything other than human, maybe they’d force him to stay on base indefinitely, secured and contained behind barbed wire fences and reinforced concrete walls.

But a few times a year, they play this game and send him off into the world.

There’s an apartment in Manchester that he’s rented for as long as he can remember. A shithole flat in a shithole borough, and though Simon’s squirreled away enough money to buy a place of his own, the thought of owning anything makes his skin crawl. It’s not in his blood, he thinks. He’d sooner live in a shack in the woods, no fixed address or way to find him. Even his flat in Manchester is rented under a different name, and he pays his landlord in cash for the year. 

It’s dark when he reaches the city, the sky soot black and patchy with clouds. Moon nowhere in sight. Nothing beautiful ever visits Manchester. 

But there’s a light on in the window when he pulls up in front of his place.

Odd.

Would’ve remembered if he left the light on the last time he was in town months ago; filament would’ve blown out in at least that time as well. Still, there’s a light on in the living room window and a new curtain pulled across to keep anyone from looking in.

Simon stares at the light while he leans outside against the truck and finishes his cigarette. Stubs it out under his boot when it’s down to the filter and locks the car door behind him. Violence already itches under his skin, knuckles tingling like they know what’s coming if he opens that door and finds some junkie living in his flat. It’ll be worse if he finds out that his scumbag landlord moved someone else in after picking up on him being gone nearly half the year.

His key still works though. Fancy that. 

He finds you like that, sitting up from a nap on his couch, sweater slouched down a shoulder and groggily blinking open big doe eyes that widen when you notice him in the doorway, fear making you freeze up. 

You’re a pretty little thing; a pleasant surprise to find something like you sitting on his couch. It quells the violence simmering in his belly because it awakens another appetite instead. Like a meal delivered right to his door. He was already planning on ordering takeaway. 

He drops the duffel bag by his feet, propping the door open with it. “You lost, bird?”

Terror leaves you mute. He can only imagine; he must seem like something straight from a horror movie—defenceless girl waking up to the dead-eyed stare of a giant dressed in all black watching her sleep and blocking her only way out. That’s not completely true; there’s a backdoor through the kitchen that leads into a laneway behind the house, but the door sticks in the winter, not easy to open in a hurry. 

He has as much right to ask as you do to run at the sight of him though, considering it is his fuckin’ flat. 

You can’t seem to choke out a single word. Scared stiff, likely, heart slamming against your chest while the worst scenarios possible play out in your mind. Simon nearly rolls his eyes. 

“Fuckin’ ‘ell,” he grumbles, finally kicking his bag out of the way so the door can shut behind him. “Cat got your tongue or somethin’?”

The sound of the door slamming shut must finally snap you out of it because you scramble off the couch, nearly tripping over the arm when you run for the back. Screaming too, just to piss him off extra. His back already aches something fierce from the long drive—he wasn’t expecting a headache on top of everything else. 

“Heeeeeeeeelp! Heeeeelp!” 

Your screams are borderline deafening, almost more aggravating than finding someone living in his flat in the first place. 

You scramble down the hall, so terrified that you go for the first open door, slamming it shut behind you. His eyes follow the shape of your bare legs and the way the muscles in your ass move as you run. 

“I’m c-calling the police!” you yell from behind the bathroom door. 

When Simon looks back down the hall, he notices your phone on the floor, bright side up. Must have dropped out of your pocket when you bolted like a scared cat.

“No, you’re not,” he says blandly, staring at the door. There’s a pause on the other side like you just noticed your missing phone, then a bleat of panic. “Don’t try going out the window either—thing’s been sealed shut since the nineties.”

On the other side of the door, the window rattles in its frame for a good few seconds before you give up on trying to escape that way. There’s a pause while you consider your options. Simon waits patiently on the other side of the door, his temper slowly but surely getting the better of him the longer he goes without a shower and a beer, locked out of his own bathroom. 

What a bloody headache. 

He pounds a fist against the door, bracing his feet in case you try to open it and scurry out around him before he’s had a chance to have a chat. “Gonna come out now?”

“Get out of my house!” you shriek instead of being polite. 

Figures. He should’ve known his landlord would pull some shit like this. “How long’ve you been living here, bird?” 

“I have a knife!”

Pretty thing that likes to lie. There’s not a shot you have anything better than a hair dryer or nail clippers in there. 

“Better get away from the door ‘cause I’m kickin’ it in,” he announces, taking a step back to give himself some distance and waiting a few seconds for you to realize that he’s dead serious before you start screaming at the top of your lungs again. 

Got quite a set on you. That doesn’t matter much to him though. The door caves in after only a few good kicks, the frame splitting right up through the lock when it finally gives, and the two halves—the door itself nearly snapped in half—banging against the wall when it ricochets open. 

You’re trembling between the toilet and the wall when Simon walks in, knees practically knocking together. The crotch of your shorts are wet and there’s a small puddle under you; must’ve pissed yourself in fear, and he’d almost pity you if you weren’t squatting in his flat. 

The closer he gets to you, the harder you wail. Full on bawling now, snot and drool dribbling down your face, and Christ, he sure picked a bad time to grow a heart. He’s not immune to a pretty girl in distress, much as he wishes he could be. 

He kneels in front of you, purposefully blocking your only way out, before knocking his knuckles under your chin, huffing out a breath when you flinch. “Ain’t gonna hurt you, bird. You’re just in my flat, is all.”

“Your flat?” you repeat in disbelief. “This is my flat. I pay rent!”

“Got a lease then?” he asks, and though your eyes are still bloodshot and your nose is still leaking, you nod. 

“Yes.”

“Show me then,” he orders. 

And you do when he steps back to give you some space, scampering shamefully to your—his—bedroom to rifle through the dresser until you pull out a handful of papers that look suspiciously like a lease. He skims it with a growing tick in his eye. It looks like one because it is one.

“See?” you mumble. He ignores the attitude in favour of reading until the end, where he finds his landlord’s name, the blotchy signature underneath it unmistakable. 

“Bullshit,” he grunts through his teeth.

“It’s not. You can call him and ask! Where’s yours?” 

His copy of the lease is tucked away in a drawer in the kitchen, buried under loose rubber bands, old batteries, and takeout menus from restaurants that went under years ago. When he returns with it and holds it up to your nose, you frown.

“Oh. I guess that explains some things.”

“Explains some things, huh? The clothes didn’t tip you off?” Simon asks, referring to the sweatpants and shirts still lining the dresser shelves. Your lips tighten. 

“I thought the previous tenant skipped town and left his clothes. I was gonna throw them out eventually.”

“Good thing you didn’t.” His voice is thick with sardonicism. 

It’s an interesting standoff to say the least. You, standing there in your soiled sleep shorts with tear-streaked cheeks, and him still decked out in his military gear and boots tracking dirt across the flat. You sway on your feet, the adrenaline crash likely intense. He catches you when you sway too close to him and you flinch when his hand clamps down over your shoulder, a new wave of adrenaline coursing through you. 

“I’m fine,” you snap, taking a step away.

For fuck’s sake. His mood darkens at the continued hostility. It’s not like you’re the one who came home to a strange man squatting in your flat—if anyone has a right to be hostile, it’s him. 

Skittering back into the bedroom, you shut the door behind you, likely to change into another pair of shorts. Simon’s mood festers the longer he waits for you to come out. The last string of his patience nearly snaps when you finally creep back out into the living room, the sour expression on your face pissing him off even more.

“I’m gonna call Tom,” you mutter, picking your phone off the coffee table.

“Go ahead.” He doesn’t bring up that it won’t change a thing. Not his problem if you’re so green behind the ears that you think your landlord will drop everything to answer a call, especially after dinner. 

No one answers when you ring, just as he thought. He plops down on the couch and rests a foot on the coffee table, ignoring the way you pace back and forth waiting for your landlord to pick up.

“No answer?” Simon asks rhetorically. 

“Aren’t you gonna try?” you ask.

“Yeah. Tomorrow. When ‘e’ll actually pick up.”

“Well, what are we supposed to do then? I’m not getting a hotel room for the night.”

“Me neither, birdie.”

He meets your stare with one of his own. It doesn’t take long for you to give in. 

There’s a pullout bed in the couch that you offer to take and he lets you because he is, at the end of the day, a selfish prick who won’t give up a week of decent sleep for anybody. Not when his back and neck have been acting up for the past month and keeping him from getting more than three hours at a time. 

The ache behind his eyebrow throbs as Simon sits on the edge of the bed. A slow exhale. 

Tomorrow can’t come quick enough.

In the morning, Simon rings his landlord and listens silently as the fuckhead blubbers on the other end of the phone about late payments and eviction notices.

“This ain’t a charity, y’know,” the other man sniffs. “I gotta pay my bills too.”

He lets the man make excuse after excuse and accuse him of this and that until he finally goes silent when he notices Simon hasn’t said a word in minutes. At which point, Simon icily reminds him of what he does for a living and the fact that he paid him for the year in full just a few months back. 

Not much to be done after that. There’s silence on the other end before his landlord tries to hem and haw his way out of it. He offers Simon one of his other properties currently sitting vacant on the other side of town, but that’s not the answer that Simon is looking for. 

“If anyone’s moving out, it ain’t me,” Simon growls into the phone. 

The wounded look that you shoot at him rubs him the wrong way.

His landlord’s still rambling on about moving costs and lawyer fees when Simon hangs up, no longer in the mood to try and talk things out. 

He doesn’t really understand the legalities here, but he knows he can’t just toss you out on your ass when you’ve also got a lease, same as him.  

“I have every right to be here,” you start up the second he hangs up the phone, not letting him get a word in edgewise, shoulders rolled back like you’re trying to be assertive. “I’ll take it to court if I have to.”

“Jesus fuckin’ Christ.” Simon scrubs a hand down his face. 

“I’m serious. Rent is expensive and this is the only place close enough to where I work that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg—and I don’t have the money to hire a lawyer to get my money back—”

“I’m not gonna kick you out,” he finally snaps, fed up with your caterwauling. 

You pause, hope warring with disbelief. “You’re not?”

He gives a curt shake of his head. “Too much of a headache. I’m only…in town for a week anyway.”

“Oh. ‘Til when?”

“‘Til whenever I’m back.” Purposefully cryptic. He gives you a flat look when you open your mouth to pry some more. 

You reconsider, chewing your bottom lip until a better question occurs to you. “Are you in town a lot? Because I’m not sure how else we could make this work. I could sleep at my cousin’s until you leave?”

“Your cousin live around here?”

You hesitate. “No.”

“Then that ain’t gonna work, is it?”

“At least I’m trying,” you hiss, and Simon has to tamp down the amusement that swirls in his chest at the sight of your shoulders puffing up. “I’m not ripping up my lease and if you’re not either, then we have to figure out something unless you feel like taking this to court.”

While Simon wouldn’t usually take kindly to being threatened, his annoyance never quite develops into anything more substantial. 

“Just keep outta my way and I’ll keep outta yours,” he says. 

“Fine.”

The agreement you come to is that when he’s in town—seldom and erratic—he’ll take the bedroom and you’ll sleep on the couch, a fair compromise since you have the flat to yourself the rest of the year. 

He doesn’t explain himself, of course. Doesn’t explain why he’s allowing this instead of dragging you to court kicking and screaming. It’s no one’s business but his why he chooses not to go down that road.

He tells himself that it’s easier this way; that it’s easier just to run your lease out and spare himself the legal mess. It’s not like he’ll even be around most of the time anyway. 

What he carefully side steps, even in his own mind, is the sharp displeasure that accompanies the thought of forcing you out of his flat and onto the streets.   

Cohabitation is—

Easy wouldn’t be the right word. He certainly doesn’t make it easy on you, leaving his dirty dishes in the sink and his half-empty beer cans in the shower caddy, his cum drying on the wall over the tub spout. You try to do the same by leaving your dirty laundry on the communal furniture, but it doesn’t have the same effect. 

It’s interesting, at least. It’s not as though he’s never lived with anyone before—his memories of his early years in the service are littered with bunkmates packed into every corner of the room, and learning to sleep everywhere from moving caravans to while standing in formation, always surrounded by other people—but he’s paid his dues. Barring deployment, he thought he’d earned the luxury of his privacy. 

But it’s not all bad; it’s been years since he had fun like this. 

You try your best to annoy him in return, but you don’t realize that you’re playing chicken with a man who’s been buried alive. There isn’t much someone like you could do to break him. 

Living with another person doesn’t soften him up one bit. There’s a time for change and it’s not off the back of a four-month covert operation, his nerves still razor sharp and ability to sleep practically nonexistent. He gets precious few weeks to himself and he isn’t going to waste them trying to get in the habit of smoking on the porch instead of in his own living room. 

“I’m a masseuse.”

“Oh yeah?” Simon grunts, barely listening. There’s a match on the telly and a beer in his other hand—a perfect afternoon, if only you’d just stop yapping in his ear for five fuckin’ minutes. 

“Yes, and I can’t show up to work reeking like a chimney,” you explain, scooching closer to him on the couch while being careful to leave some distance between the two of you. For all your posturing, you’re still timid around him, like a kitten hissing and spitting around a much bigger cat. 

“What’s that got to do with me?” he asks rhetorically, not in the slightest interested in how it pertains to him. He takes another drag from the cigarette dangling between his index and middle finger, ashing it over the side of the couch. 

“It means I’d prefer if you didn’t smoke in the flat,” you say, hissing the last few words. 

He takes another drag, turning to look at you before exhaling right in your face. “That’s a shame.”

You cough and squawk, and he fights down a grin. 

For the most part, he leaves you to your own devices, intent only on enjoying his time off. He fixes the bathroom door at least, which you begrudgingly thank him for. 

A week and a bit, Simon reminds himself when you come in through the front door chirping into your phone, your voice effectively drowning out the TV on in the background. When you spot him staring at you from the couch, you go quiet as a mouse and slink off to the bathroom, locking the (newly installed) door behind you. He supposes it’s the only place where you feel any semblance of privacy since his bedroom is off limits until he leaves. It does leave him without a bathroom though. 

Pissing in the alleyway behind the flat half an hour later, he scowls into the darkness and reminds himself that he has no one to blame but himself for this mess.  

When his leave comes to an end, Simon doesn’t bother to give you a heads up. You’ll realize it in a couple of days when you notice his absence around the flat, the siege finally lifted. He supposes you’ll be grateful for his departure and grateful not to make you feign politeness.  

Duffel bag packed away in the car, he leaves with the bed still unmade. Knows that’ll ruffle your feathers later on when you come home, but it’s his parting gift. His reminder to you to enjoy the couple months reprieve his job allows you. 

And then the road slips away under him and he’s gone. 

The months away are just complex rearrangements of the same thing. Each time it drives his soul deeper into the gully, buffeted by katabatic winds. 

His daily life on base is split into brackets of time. Wake up, go to the gym, work, clock out, see the captain for a drink. Wash, rinse, repeat. Each day blending into the next. Back where he belongs, under the thumb of a system that he’s long sold his body and freedom to, and sent out God knows where to do God knows what. 

Then, again the rooster crows at first light and he lifts himself out of bed.

When he’s deployed, everything changes while everything stays the same. He doesn’t have the same freedom of movement as he does on base, but in truth very little changes from one deployment to the next if you zoom out enough. Limited time to sleep on the chopper before it touches down, body tensed for what’s to come, and then he’s off, his objectives clear. 

Driving a knife into a neck to the hilt and pulling it out one inch at a time. It’s the one he knows how to do, and he does it well. He doesn’t have to like what he does; he doesn’t even have to think about it so long as it gets done. 

Ghost exhales and slips the mask back on.

In [redacted city] in [redacted country], he sets his scope up in the window of a building across from one where his target is slated to be in twelve hours and then he waits. Flexes his fingers when they go numb and ignores the thirst clawing up his throat. Four hours later, his elbows ache something fierce from digging into the ground for hours on end, a sharp pain shooting up his arms, but Ghost pays it no mind. Mind over matter. 

Amidst the hours of laying there and waiting for his target to come into frame, his mind doesn’t wander. That’s a luxury for a different time—when the job is done and his target is executed. 

At the very edges of his consciousness though, something flickers. The skin around his eyes pinches as he pushes the half-formed thought away. 

Then his target walks into the room and everything else disappears.

You’re still there when he returns months later on another government ordered leave. Same petulant frown and wobbly lower lip when he walks in through the front door, dripping wet from the rain outside. When he tosses his duffel bag onto the couch, you scowl, nudging the bag onto the floor with your foot. 

“You could’ve rang,” you mumble, pulling the throw from the back of the couch over your lap to hide your bare legs. Pity to be deprived of a nice view, but Simon doesn’t take it to heart. 

“Didn’t think you’d still be ‘ere,” he grunts instead, shrugging out of his jacket and shaking it dry, suppressing a smirk when you start squawking about getting water all over the floor. 

That’s partly a lie, though not one he’ll ever admit to. Simon figured there might be a chance you’d be gone, but in the time since he last saw you, he’s done enough digging around online to know that you weren’t kidding about the lack of affordable flats in the area. There’s hardly a unit nearby that isn’t going for double what he pays, some even more. 

“Well, guess I’m sleeping out here tonight,” you grumble. You’re on your tiptoes in the doorway to the living room now, the throw wrapped around you like a security blanket. 

He doesn’t answer that. No point getting your hopes up when he has no intention of giving up the bed. 

In another life, he might be enough of a gentleman to let you sleep in the bedroom while he takes the couch, but in this one, his back is ravaged by sciatica and his dominant hand and wrist twinge with the beginning of carpal tunnel syndrome. Most nights, it’s a miracle if he can get five uninterrupted hours. 

So no, he won’t be giving up the bed.

But Simon toys with the thought of dragging you in with him. It’s been awhile since he had a woman, so long that the memory is fuzzy when he dredges it up, and though his hand does the job when the itch grows severe, he’s no monk. He could pull you in with little effort, sweet talk you until your knickers are around your ankles and your legs are in the air, hot cunt steaming when your legs part and he sinks his cock in deep. Wouldn’t take more than a half dozen thrusts before he busted, pretty pussy painted with his cum.

In the doorway, you eye him dubiously, scrunched nose expressing your discontent. 

It’s an idea, at least.

He still leaves his dishes in the sink and wakes to you pounding on the bedroom door, whining about having to scrub his plates with a pot scraper, but time and distance have mellowed any hostility in you. You treat him less like a stranger intruding on your space and more like a roommate you’ve grown to tolerate despite his many faults. 

The oddest thing is opening the fridge up to more than just a six-pack, a stick of butter, and three half-empty bottles of mustard. Fresh produce and meat spill from the shelves now, leftovers packed in tupperware and neatly labelled. He eats like a king now, takeout relegated to the days when you don’t feel like cooking. On those days, Simon heads down to the chippie a few streets away and gets enough for the both of you before heading back to eat on the couch with you. 

He still gets a kick out of leaving his cigarette butts in cups strewn around the flat for you to find. 

“So what do you do anyway?” you ask out of the blue.

“What’s it matter?” Simon grunts from beside you. He has to slow his usual gait to keep pace with you—which is irritating as all fuck—but you didn’t leave him much choice when you insisted on going to the store well after dark.

“I’m just making conversation. You always get so squirrely when I ask—what are you, some kind of secret agent?” 

He’d roll his eyes if he had any less self-control.

“No way. No way. You are?” you gasp, suddenly glued to his side, hands scrambling for purchase on his bicep and shoulder. 

Simon stares down at your hands clutching his arm, unconsciously tucking his bicep between your tits. “Best to not ask questions, bird.”

You pout. He ignores the impulse to lean down and sink his canines into that plump bottom lip.

His nose itches because the world is changing. 

He used to catalogue his time off base in much the same way. Wake up, workout, tinker with the junk pilfered from estate sales and scrap yards he’s frequented over the years, then head to the pub for a drink. Wash, rinse, repeat. 

That’s changed since you came into his life. Aside from when you’re out working, you unbalance his schedule. Upset his routines. The structure propping up his entire existence gets taken down in an instant when you open your mouth and ask him to the market with you, giving him no choice but to slam the door shut behind him and drive you there.

Each day comes with its new flavour, a new bite to it. 

“You’re not eating takeout again?” you ask him, aghast when you come home from work to find takeout containers all over the coffee table

“Always a fuckin’ lecture with you, huh?” Simon grumbles into his curry. Shovels another forkful into his mouth. 

Just as he expected though, you don’t let it go. He was a fool to think you would. It’s not so bad at first when all you do is cook for him—with the life he’s lived, he’s never been one to turn down a home cooked meal, so he accepts the proffered food happily—but it’s another thing entirely when you rope him into it.

He’s already pissed off when you wrangle him into the kitchen under the guise of needing his help—absurd after your subterfuge from the day before, his expectation being that you were happy to do all the cooking yourself, not force him to debase himself by chopping up all the vegetables and meat while being ordered around like a line cook. 

What really ticks him off though is that—

he grumbles to himself as he chops the mushrooms into thin slices

—you keep getting away with it.

The worst is when you catch the tremor in his hand at the breakfast table, quick eyes picking up on the subtle quiver instantly.

“Something wrong with your wrist?” you ask. Always prying into his business. 

Simon closes his hand into a fist. “It’s nothing.”

You frown. “Doesn’t look like ‘nothing’.”

“Well, it is.”

“Can you relax your grip? I just want to see that again.”

How he lets you talk him into massaging his wrist is beyond him. Then you press your thumbs into the meat of his palm and rub in smooth, circular motions, and his brain goes offline for half a second. The relief hits him like a cudgel to the head; knocks him upside. 

“Jesus fuck, bird,” Simon groans. His knee bangs against the leg of the table. 

“Feels a bit better, huh?” you ask, the corner of your mouth quirking up in a crooked, teasing smile.

And fuck if it doesn’t feel a thousand times better by the time you’re done. He snaps when your thumbs dig in too deep at his wrist and pain radiates up his arm, but all you do is laugh it off, smiling to yourself when you press down on a tender point on his wrist and his jaw goes slack.

Sometimes, he wishes he could study you like a bug. Pin your arms and legs down to get a closer look. Kneel over you and pin your shins down with his to keep you from squirming away, then tuck his fingers into the inside of your cheeks to pull them open. 

But he keeps his hands to himself. Just barely. 

He doesn’t stay long this time, called back from his katabasis before the week’s even up, Price’s voice urgent over the phone. His duffel bag is packed before the call is even over, boots laced up and mask folded neatly in his pocket for when he leaves the city limits. 

“You’re leaving?” you ask when you notice, and if Simon were less of a realist, he might think you sounded upset. 

“Need me to take out the trash?” he asks, his answer implicit. Yes, he’s leaving. Even if it weren’t for his job, he’s not the staying type; those kinds of decisions are out of his hands anyway, and even if it were up to him, he’d be long gone by now. Adrift; across the pond or somewhere down in the Balkans, far enough away that you couldn’t find him even if you wanted to. 

That’s what he tells himself. Whether he believes it anymore is another question.

You’re quiet for a second. “Sure. Thank you.”

Simon nods. Nothing more to say. The ache in his gut could be anything else. 

He lifts a hand on his way out, ruffles your hair once before he’s gone.

Rain soaks him down to his britches but still he stands in it without complaint, watching some of the privates unload a delivery truck parked outside of the commissary. Even the mundane parts of his job are his to attend to and he does so with little complaint.

When they finish around eighteen-hundred hours, he signs out for the day and heads to Price’s office for a drink. It’s so routine it’s practically part of his DNA. 

Price already has both glasses poured when Ghost arrives, two fingers each, and it goes down smooth when he rolls the mask up over his nose to take a sip. 

“Got out the pricey stuff just for me?” Ghost asks. He can tell by the taste and from the bottle sitting on the shelf behind Price, label facing outward. 

“What else am I saving it for?” Price asks rhetorically. “I’m not letting the good stuff go to waste.”

Ghost hums. It’s still raining buckets outside. He watches as it hits the windowpane behind Price’s desk, almost transfixed.

“Got time for a drink before you’re out on Friday?” 

He shakes his head. “No time. Gotta be out by six.”

“Six?” Price repeats, a mite surprised. “Why? Something waiting for you back home?”

Ghost doesn’t answer. 

Price lifts an eyebrow. “Well, spit it out.”

He shrugs. “Nothing to tell.”

“So there’s no one back in Manchester?”

“Didn’t say that.”

Price’s lips twitch into a grin under his mustache, eyes faintly amused. “Heard.”

Truth be told, he has started to think of you as someone waiting back home. Maybe not for him, but waiting all the same. Why else would you be back in his flat in Manchester in his bed if not to wait for him to come back?

It almost makes him itchy to leave. He can tamp down the urge when the situation calls for it, but it sits right under his skin most days. If he thinks about it for too long, his focus goes razor sharp and the edges of his vision go blurry. 

In the present moment, he brings the glass to his lips and tips his head back, letting it pour down his throat. 

He has some nascent idea of where this is going.

As always, you’re curled up on the couch watching TV when he walks through the front door, on the verge of sleep. When your eyes land on him, you blink away the sleep and smile so brightly that his chest aches. “Simon!”

In nearly forty years, no one has ever said his name like that. Brimming with brightness and warmth. Like for once someone has longed for him in his absence. 

All he can do is stare at you for a time. It should make his skin crawl, and it does, to an extent. He should be out the door already—lease broken, all his shit in the back of his truck, ties cut, and so many kilometers between you and him that he has no choice but to forget your face. 

Instead, he kicks the door shut behind him and ruffles your hair when he passes on his way to the bathroom to piss and scrub a towel over his face. 

It must be a form of self-punishment. That’s the only explanation for why he comes back every single time when he has more than enough money to fuck off down south for a week instead—he could be spending his leave in Costa Brava or sipping rakija in Kotor, but he chooses to come back to this hovel with its bleak weather and seedy underbelly every single time. What other urge would drive him to abuse himself like this other than masochism? 

Any attempt to answer that is swiftly dismissed. 

One day. One day is all he manages after promising to keep himself in check this time around. He manages to get through that first day largely because of the physical distance he puts between the two of you, playing chess with a couple old men in the park, rock doves pecking at the birdseed scattered under the wrought iron tables and benches. 

His restraint breaks when he catches you dozing off in front of the television, socked feet tucked under your thighs and head balanced precariously on your fist, elbow resting on the arm of the couch. 

He sits down beside you and his lip twitches when your head bobs, slumber briefly breached when the cushion under you dips with his weight. 

“C’mere, girl,” Simon grunts, pulling you onto his lap. 

You go somewhat willingly, only putting up a little bit of a fuss. Grumbling to keep up appearances. But that melts away the second he tucks your head into the crook of his neck, body going lax and fingers burrowing into the fabric of his shirt at his belly, gathering it together in your fist. 

Christ, Simon thinks, dropping his head back on the couch. What am I doing?

Even he doesn’t know these days, but his chest aches in a way it never has before. He makes a mental note to see a doctor when he’s back on base. 

His back aches too, but you pick up on that rather quickly, hounding him when you recognize the stiffness in his back for what it is. It takes you days to wear him down enough to agree to a massage, but eventually you do. He regrets it the second the words leave his mouth, leery at the thought of putting himself in such a vulnerable position.  

You lock him out of the bedroom while you set up your table and do all the little things that you need to do in order to set the mood. His nose wrinkles when the smell of incense hits him. 

“You can strip down to your comfort level,” you explain after letting him back into the room, patting the bed as if he doesn’t know where to lie down. “Then get under the blanket and let me know when you’re ready.”

He cocks a brow. “You trying to get me naked, bird?”

“Simon,” you sigh, a touch exasperated, hands on your hips to emphasize your weariness. 

His belt clinks as he unlatches it. “Don’t worry, birdie, just gimme a second to get these off.”

A frustrated growl and then the door slams shut behind you when you bolt out of the room. 

He spares you the indignity of having to repeat yourself, sliding under the towel and barking at you to come back in when he’s stripped bare and covered. You slip back in quietly and flit over to the dresser to press play on your music.

The first touch of your hands against his bare back almost makes him flinch. All his regret comes rushing back and he very nearly calls it off, and then you press the heels of your palms into the meat of his shoulders and the bottom falls out from under him. Then you drag them down the length of his back and he very nearly bites his tongue clean off. 

Simon doesn’t bother muffling his noises when you dig your hands into his back to work out the plethora of knots, huffing and groaning like he’s balls deep. When you get to his shoulders though, he has to fight to stay put, 

“Oh, your back is really messed up,” you note, a bit breathlessly. 

He doesn’t acknowledge your words, too intent on not vocalizing his pain. Not even a grunt passes his lips. 

You work years of hard labour and soreness out of his muscles, leaving behind a new man. The oil coating your palms makes your hands glide across his back. 

He must fall asleep at some point because he wakes to the sound of television in the other room. Groggy at first, cotton mouthed and sleep drunk, and when Simon stumbles into the living room, you’re sitting on the couch with your knees drawn into your chest. 

“Oh hi,” you say when you notice him standing there. “Sleep well?” 

Speech still beyond him, all he can do is nod and plant himself on the couch beside you. Shirtless still. Simon only notices it himself when he tips his head to look over at you and finds that you won’t meet his eyes, gaze steadfast on the TV. 

“Shoulda ‘ad you do that when you moved in,” he says. 

“I could give you another one before you leave,” you reply, still not looking over at him. He bets that if he brushed his knuckles over your cheeks, they’d be hot to the touch. “Just tell me when.”

Maybe he will. What use is there in depriving himself of life’s little pleasures when his soul bears all of life’s bruises? 

He reaches over to pinch your cheek, grinning when you yowl. Just as warm as he thought.

One thing Simon doesn’t take for granted anymore are his scarce moments of privacy. No stranger to a little exhibitionism (barracks walls and tent flaps hardly muffle sound, and he’s learned over the years that men will tolerate anything if it means they can rub one out in peace), he still appreciates the time he gets to himself to take care of things. 

He’s only just finished tugging one out, his jeans buttoned back up and his hand still wet with his spend, when you walk in the front door.

You start up the second the door slams shut behind you, steam practically billowing out of your ears. “Well, thanks a lot—one of my regulars just gave me shit because she said I smelt like an ashtray and she couldn’t ‘properly relax’ for the whole hour—” 

Afterglow proper scotched, Simon sits there and lets you cuss him out until the pounding behind his eyebrow becomes unbearable. 

You go quiet when he rises to his feet, unused to him actually reacting to your whinging. Sometimes you don’t realize how accustomed to him you’ve become—how ingrained he’s become in your everyday life. What continues to elude you for no good reason is that you live with a stranger, and a strange man at that. It would piss him off if it were anyone other than him. 

Practically chest to chest now, you nearly go cross eyed staring up at him. Jaw unhinged and mouth dangling loose, just the slightest gap between your lips like you forgot to close them. He lets you size him up for a second before lifting his hand to your mouth and slowly but firmly shoving his cum-covered fingers into your mouth.

Dumbstruck, all you can do is stare up at him with his cum-slicked fingers in your mouth, holding them there for a few more seconds and whimpering when he drags them out and then feeds them slowly back in. You even go a little glassy-eyed.

When he finally pulls his fingers out and lets his arm drop to his side, you sway on your feet a little, at a loss for words. There’s a creamy sheen on your bottom lip that disappears when you suck it into your mouth on instinct, eyes going wide when you recognize the taste on your tongue. 

“Thanks for cleaning that up, birdie.” And then he reaches down to zip his fly up, smug when your eyes flit down to his crotch. 

The stakes are different now than what they were all those months ago. It can’t be a carefree cohabitation when he’s playing for keeps. Whatever that means. 

But his time is cut short again, the world catching up to him and yanking him back. And when Simon goes this time, he can’t help but drag his feet on his way out.

You’re looking good. A comment made in passing, Price’s face barely twitching through it, but Ghost catches it and he lets it sit for a moment before responding.

“Yeah?” he grunts, looking away. The recruits round the part of the track closest to where they stand, panting through their seventh lap. 

“Put on a bit of weight since you left,” Price notes. 

“Calling me fat, sir?”

He rolls his eyes, huffing out an exasperated breath. “Give it a rest, you fuckin’ muppet. I said you look good.”

Price isn’t wrong though. He both looks and feels different. With increasing regularity, he watches the clock and counts the days down until he’s released from his duties again. His want has him circling like a bird of prey. 

All his life, he’s had to live in the moment, concerned only with the immediate, tangible present because that’s all that life let him have. And though it’s been decades since he’s needed to be in survival mode, those instincts have never quite left him. 

The shock to his system has left him forward-thinking for once. A girl in his house and food in his fridge; his body feeling better than it has in years—he’s still lucky if he gets more than five uninterrupted hours of sleep, but his expectations are different when he’s not at home. Even the concept of home is foreign, like a language he’s just starting to learn. 

The future isn’t some nebulous concept out of his reach but a real place that he gets to walk into. 

Desire tips him like a scale. There may not be any coming back from this.

Love shows him no mercy, so he doesn’t show you any either. 

Months pass before Simon’s leave comes around again, and when it finally does, he’s already packed and signed out before his last day on base is even up. He says his goodbyes to Price on his way out and the other man visibly suppresses a smile, eyeing the bag clutched tight in his hand. 

“Give her my best,” is all he says before getting back to the paperwork in front of him. Simon leaves without another word. 

Then the long drive back. A skein of birds in flight follow him for part of the journey. A train running parallel to the throughway follows him for the rest. Tree boughs bend under the weight of the last snowfall.

Then he blinks and when his eyes open, he’s home.

You’re still sitting on that blasted couch when Simon opens the front door, pretty as a peach in August, and his name rings like a bell off your tongue when you say it, summoning him to you. It’s not his fault that his urges prevail, that he has no choice but to throw his bag down onto the carpeted floor and stomp over to you, lifting you up by the collar of your housecoat and dragging you into a scorching hot kiss. 

“Mmf,” you squeak against his lips, eyes flying open. 

It’s messy and frenzied, spit dripping down your chin and his tongue halfway down your throat. No finesse or skill to speak of, only an incessant buzzing at the back of his head that only quiets when you give a helpless little moan, an instant balm to his suffering. 

Simon pulls back for a moment to let you breathe. “That’s my welcome ‘ome?” he murmurs. His lips brush against yours when he speaks. 

“W-welcome home?” you repeat, flustered, your lip catching against his. He sucks it between his when it does, cock throbbing in his pants when you gasp, hot breath billowing into his mouth and making his head spin. 

This is nothing like being high on pain meds or three sheets to the win. It pulses through him and makes his cock chub up, forcing him to shove a hand down between his legs to readjust himself. That gets you good when you notice. 

He kisses hungry and mean, ever greedy for your mouth, fitting his hand over the back of your head and angling you how he likes. Holding the delicate cradle of your skull in his palm and knowing that he could crack it if he squeezed his fingers hard enough. The thought sends a rush right through him, his violent underbelly scratched in just the right way. 

“W-where’s this coming from?” you gasp when Simon pulls back. You look thoroughly flustered, but he ignores you to hook a finger in your mouth and wrench it open. 

“Open,” he grunts, giving your inner cheek a sharp tug. 

You go cross-eyed when he spits in your mouth, the glob of spit landing right on your tongue, and your affronted little gasp hits him like an arrow shot straight through his heart. He’s considerate enough to seal it in with a kiss, making sure not to let you waste a drop. Tongue pushing in right after to lick it up, growling at you to suck it when you only nervously kiss back.

His patience isn’t infinite though and kissing barely wets his appetite. It’s not enough to plumb the depths of his hunger when there’s something uglier down there waiting with its jaws wide open.

He twists you around and bends you over the back of the couch, rucking your housecoat up to your waist. Your knickers get ripped clean off, tearing at the seams, and your ensuing shriek nourishes the hunger simmering low in his belly. Appetite never satiated, belly never full. 

He likes that you didn’t expect him back so soon. Fuzzy, unshaved legs and holey socks; pimple patches on your face and nothing under your robe. The lazy domesticity appeals to him in a way he never would’ve expected. 

Then his fingers split the seam of your pussy and the runoff of his appreciation cascades down the slopes of his shoulders and his back. Slick drips from your winking hole, gathering together into a tight bulb before a single drop drips onto the couch beneath you. 

“Fuck—now there’s somethin’ to come ‘ome to,” Simon grunts, and then drags his tongue between your dew-slicked lips.

His enjoyment was a foregone conclusion when he imagined this back in his quarters in the barracks, cock in hand, but the reality of having his mouth on your pussy exceeds his expectations a thousandfold. It’s all soft, pillowy skin and sweet nectar. He gorges himself on it, an almost pathological need to be tongue-deep in your cunt.  

“Wet little gash just sucks ‘em right in…” he murmurs, plunging two fingers into your hole slowly. The soft flesh of your hole bulges around his fingers when they sink in all the way to the knuckle. 

“Fuck—don’t call it that,” you bleat, so pathetic that he’s smitten. 

“Shouldn’ta wagged it at me if ya didn’t want me to touch it,” Simon teases, then crooks his fingers just so and your leg spasms. 

He keeps you stuffed full until your legs shake, on the verge of coming, and then he rips them out. 

You practically scream in frustration, twisting to look at him from over your shoulder. “What’s wrong with you?” 

“Somethin’ wrong, birdie?” He smirks when you arch your back, pushing your ass back in his face. 

“I want to come, Simon,” you whine, wagging your ass in his face again. Just his luck that a little slut like you dropped into his life.

“Alright,” he sighs, mock aggrieved. “Lemme see if I can ‘elp with that.”

Ungrateful little thing, he thinks when he turns you over onto your back and heaves you up into the air. 

“Simon—”  you keen his name when he has you pinned up against the wall, his arms scooped under your thighs to hold you in place. 

He plunges into that warm little honeypot between your legs in slow, measured strokes at first, savouring each punctured whimper and hiccup that drops from your lips. Each flex of his hips brings him that much closer to heaven and that much closer to hell.

“Didn’t think you could just barge in without consequences, did ya?” Simon asks rhetorically, voice gone brassy and tiger-stripped, thick in his chest. “Been sleeping in my bed for nearly a year, ‘aven’t ya? Ain’t I owed this?”

He means it too. 

“You’re—so full of it,” you retort, hiccuping through your words.  

Your arms hang limp around his neck, fingers twined at his nape and nails scratching at his hairline. The low ache in his back is barely a deterrent—he’d hold you up all night if it took that long to make you come. A distant voice at the back of his head reminds him that he’ll suffer for it in the morning, but he shakes that thought away. 

He chases the beads of sweat snaking down your chest and tits with his tongue, straightening back up only when that nearly makes you lose your grip around his neck and topple out of his arms. 

“Hey,” you pout when Simon chuckles, digging your nails into his back in retribution for laughing at you. It has the opposite effect though, the pain stoking his pleasure and sending a shiver down his back, his next thrust so rough that you bounce in his arms.

Your skin smells like sweat and musk this close, so heady that his head spins. It registers dimly at the back of his mind that he’s still dressed while you’re fully nude, housecoat and knickers in a pile on the floor in front of the couch, but he can’t pull away now, not with the need to come pressing into him on all sides, dick hard enough to split diamonds. 

He stares down between your legs where his cock splits you again and again, a ring of white cream at the base. He could paint that little snatch white with his cum or stuff it deep inside, both options appealing to his baser instincts. It’ll be a coin flip in the end.

When the ache in his back grows too significant to ignore, he lifts you up off the wall and drops you down on his cock, burying himself to the hilt before carrying you to the open door to the bedroom. 

“Sorry, pet,” Simon murmurs when he feels you clench around the thickest part of his cock, whispering a little oh fuck to yourself under your breath. He kicks the door shut behind him with his heel. “Back’s shit. Mind taking over for me?” 

The mattress squeaks under his weight when he sits down on the end. You blink up at him. “You want me on top?” 

He nods and hums his assent, digging his fingers into the muscle and flesh of your ass and kneading. “Yeah, bird. Still wanna see all the pretty bits though.”

The pretty bits being the globes of your ass facing him while you ride his dick, his hands pulling apart your cheeks to watch you take it inch by inch, thighs quivering with the strain.  

Your thighs are stretched out on either side of him, pretty calves resting perpendicular to his chest and toes curled into the mattress. He eyes those with some interest before your pussy distracts him again. There’s no angle that isn’t nice to look at, but this has got to be his favourite so far, tight bud between your cheeks clenching every time you drop down onto his dick. It’s easy to ignore the ache in his shoulder with a view this nice. 

“Fuck, birdie,” Simon murmurs, dragging his hand over your ass and then swatting it, grunting when that makes you clench up around him, inner walls squeezing his length and nearly milking him dry. “Coulda been doing this the whole time.”

You laugh a bit breathlessly. “No—you were way too annoying.”

Smack. You yelp when he backhands your ass and your shoulders go stiff, spine a taut line with your impending orgasm. Simon can feel it like a knot in his throat, pussy so hot that it nearly burns him alive. 

“Shit,” you gasp, hands on his legs the only thing keeping you upright. You nearly rip out the hair on his thighs when you curl them into fists.

His hands glide up and down your sides, touching wherever he wants. It’s his God given right after housing you for so long, and though Simon clings belligerently to that belief, like the foundation of his existence is built on quid pro quo, on doing nothing for others unless there’s something in it for him, there’s something else that burrows underneath that maxim. Something far truer and more terrifying, and if he were to look it dead on, it would bring him to his knees. 

Simon grunts, lungs pummelled when you squeeze around his length, tight as a vice.

Good thing you’ve got him on his back instead.

In the end, it’s not up to him whether he comes in you or not. When his cockhead bumps against your cervix and he feels teardrops land on his thighs, your shoulders shaking with the force of your sobs, the spigot loosens and his stomach aches with how hard he comes. His heels dig into the mattress, hips lifting up, trying to cram more and more of his cock into your cunt, tendons straining against his neck. 

“Take it, bird,” Simon snarls, teeth grinding together, his voice sounding wrecked even to him. “Take it nice ‘n deep, fuck—wanna see it leak from your hole when I pull ya off—”

Your nails sink into his thighs, cutting him off. 

He does too, when you flop down beside him onto the bed and he tucks you under his arm, spreading your legs so he can push his cum back into your cunt, fingers pearly white with your mixed juices. 

“Oh God,” you whisper, squeezing your thighs together around his hand until he’s forced to wrench them open again, hovering over you this time, the cudgel dangling between his legs already thickening up again. 

And that’s how he spends his week, in a suspended state of euphoria, no sense of time passing. It doesn’t matter where it goes as long as you crawl into bed with him at the end of the day, eyes sparkling with delight. 

The leaving is tougher than it’s ever been, claws scoring right through his chest when Simon tips your chin up and leans down to slot his lips over yours. He’s not made for this sentimental bullshit, but it finds him either way. 

His chest burns on the drive back to base, acid reflux a bitch as always. 

The next time his landlord calls, he comes bearing good news.

“I’ll cut you a deal on the first month to make up for the…mix up,” he starts begrudgingly. “But don’t worry—the girl’ll be out of your hair by the end of the month. Gonna tell her today that I can’t renew her lease.”

Simon hangs up without saying a word, swathed in anger. Nearly crushes the phone in his grip when his landlord calls back a second later. He ignores that call too.

If he were a different man, if this was a different world—

No one ever knows when their world is about to change until it does. 

But even if his walls have grown barbed wires in the years that he’s been alone, there’s always a way to dig out from under. 

The return home is different this time around, the wind under his sails all but lifting him into the air. 

A year to the date almost. Another month and time will wrap back around on itself, the seasons changing the same way they have for all thirty-seven years of his life. When fate lets him go this time, Simon heads over to Price’s office before taking off for the week, carving out time for one last drink before he hits the road. Over a whiskey and kretek, he tells Price his plan and only just keeps from rolling his eyes when Price barks a laugh, clapping his hands together.

“Never thought I’d see the day,” he chuckles, shaking his head. 

“Shut up.”

“It’s a big step, Simon. I’m proud of you.”

Simon rolls his eyes, pleased despite himself. “Stuff it, old man.”

And then he’s gone again, following the same winding road back, with one stop along the way this time. He stays overnight at a local inn after signing the paperwork, too exhausted to keep driving. Too much on his mind anyway. 

It means nothing to him that people do this sort of thing all the time. He has survived the locust years of his life and come out the other side. That should be enough to give himself some grace when he tosses and turns all night, back pain flaring up and immobilizing him for an hour. Only when the first rays of dawn pierce through the threadbare curtains does it finally abate, and he heads out after his morning piss, ignoring the cramp in his belly on the drive over.

You greet him at the door when you hear his car pull up, standing under the door frame while he gets out and rounds the car, bare toes curling at the cold air. And any effort to tamp it down now is in vain, his chest filling with something unspeakable and unsaid. 

“Put your shoes on,” Simon instructs, coming over just to pull you in for a kiss before nudging you back into the flat, shutting the door behind him. 

“Why?” you ask, lifting a brow. “Wanna go for coffee or something like that?”

“Something like that. Why aren’t you putting your shoes on?” 

Herded into the truck after getting dressed, you badger him with question after question the whole drive over while Simon keeps his mouth shut, focusing on the road in front of him. It’s not a long drive at least, but your incessant questions make it last an eternity. 

Until he pulls up in front of a house with a short gravel walkway and a garden in desperate need of attention, milkvetch growing near the front step. The outdoor sconces are new though, and though Simon already has a few things in mind to fix up around the house, it’s got good bones. Leagues nicer than the place you just left.

“Are we picking someone up?” you ask when he puts the car in park, confused. You stare at the door as if waiting for it to open. 

Simon doesn’t respond.

You look over at him and he takes one of your hands, holding it palm-side up and covering it with his own ugly mitt. You feel something cold drop from his hand into yours and he curls your fingers into a fist to hold it.

“No.” 

When his hand moves away, you uncurl your fingers to find a key. It means so little and so much all at once. If he could say it with words, it wouldn’t be the same so there’s no point in trying. 

“It’s ours?” you ask.

“Yeah.”

There’s a watery sheen over your eyes when you look up, and your lip wobbles. And in a way different than ever before, his chest grows tight, the ache in his heart a fresh and welcome pain.

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