Daughters With Soft Underbellies; Masterlist

Anyway

Simon Riley who is finally back from deployment after 8 months out in God only knows where. Fresh blood still under his nails when he arrived at the shitty flat he called home. It was made incredibly worse when he realized there wasn’t any food in his fridge and his pantry laid bare. The two cans of beans did not count. So he dragged himself to the closest grocery store and picked out necessities, half dazed as people gave him second glances. Finally headed toward the exit and passing by the coffee shop inside the store, he was stopped by a rowdy laugh.

Simon couldn’t remember the last time he heard a laugh like that.

Upon turning he saw you.

It took every bit of his willpower to remember how to even speak when he trudged up to the counter, grocery bags heavy in his hands. He didn’t register the soft greeting you gave him. What he did notice was the way you looked him up and down. Disgust or interest, it didn’t matter. You were his now, and he would do anything to hear that laugh again.

To me, Simon has the dumbest hair 90% of the time because he just buzzes it himself (I cannot believe that man pays money to one, do something he could theoretically do himself, and two, spend time with a stranger). The other 10% it's good -- when he first cuts it, an eighth of an inch of pale fuzz left behind, and when it just starts growing out, that's fine. But a lot of the time, especially when he's at home, he just lets it go.

And you, his next door neighbor, will never not give him shit about it.

"You look so goofy," you tell him when you see him in the hallway, one arm holding your groceries and the other fiddling with your keys. "Just cut it, Jesus Christ."

He rolls his eyes or tells you to fuck off, because you've known each other long enough for that kind of thing. He's lived in the building for years, never having seen a reason to leave, and you've been there for a few yourself. You're friends in the way that you may not call or text or schedule time to hang out, but you can scarcely think of anyone you see more often.

"Seriously," you go on, unlocking your door and speaking louder so he can hear you when you go inside. "It's just like two inches sticking straight off your head, why are you walking around like that?"

"Doesn't bother me," Simon answers, moving to lean against your doorframe and watch you as you put up your things. "Seems to bother you an awful lot though."

Your back is to him while you move around your kitchen, but you can tell he's smirking, and you scoff.

"Yeah, it bothers me. You get a face like that and you go and screw it up with the dumbest excuse for a haircut I've ever seen."

It's not the first time you've flirted with him, or even the most direct time, but it still gives him pause. He doesn't wear his mask when he's not working, most of the time anyway, because he thinks it draws too much attention and he'd prefer to just slip into the shadows wherever he goes. But you seeing him, and you letting him know that you like what you see, it does something to him, every time.

"You cut it then," he says.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. You're the one so torn up about it, you fix it."

You snort, finally turning back to him, saying, "I'm not a barber, stupid."

"No, you sure seem like a coward though."

A few minutes later, you're both in Simon's bathroom. He's got his shirt off, straddling the toilet so you can reach his head, and you're behind him with clippers in your hand, looking down at him. You've never seen this much of him, never even seen the place where his tattoos stop on his arm, and it's a lot to take in.

You want to take your time, commit every scar, every freckle to memory, but he turns his head, smirking again.

"Told you you were a coward."

Without a word, you turn on the clippers and get to work.

It's not hard, it's just a buzzcut. The hard part is in touching his ears, gently pushing the lobes down to trim around them. It's in sneaking glances over his shoulder to watch his chest as it rises and falls while you work. In trying not to notice the tiniest little hitch in his breath when you lean in closer and rest your hand on his back while you get the hairs on the back of his neck.

The worst part though, is the beauty mark that sits perfectly in the place where his neck meets his shoulder. Specifically, the worst part is the strong, almost uncontrollable urge to bite it.

When you're done, you turn off the clippers and set them on his bathroom counter, then dust off his shoulders for him. Just before he stands, you can't deny yourself any longer -- you won't be able to reach it when he's not sitting so perfectly like this -- and give a quick, soft kiss to the mark.

During all the time you've known Simon, he's barely responded to your flirting. To you, he doesn't seem interested, and to him, you don't seem serious. But a kiss, faint as it may have been, is different, and before you can register it, he's on his feet, turned and standing over you.

"Hair looks better," you say softly.

He grunts in response, and before you know it, his mouth is covering yours, hot and insistent. It's a heady feeling, having him so close, and before you can get used to it, his hands are on you, first on your waist, then on your hips, then on the backs of your thighs as he lifts you up and holds you against him.

He maneuvers you both out of the bathroom and towards his bedroom, where he unceremoniously tosses you on his bed. You look up at him, letting your eyes trail freely over his body now, going down when you see him place his hands on his belt.

"Not so mouthy now, are you?"

AHH YES

Thinking about Alpha!John Price x Beta!Reader today.

John, who leans always a little too close, presses himself into you ever so slightly, murmurs “Johnathan for you, love” and noses at your neck, coaxing out the faint soft smell of yours. Perfect darling for him, blushing so deliciously, hissing when he allows himself too much. Keeping him in line.

John Price whose hands are somehow always on you, thick fingers hooking in the loops of your jeans and dragging your hips to his, broad chest of his pressing into your back when he whispers “got you, sweetheart”.

He kisses you behind the ear, always lingering just a little to savour the taste of yours that he manages to swallow being this close to your scent gland. Licking air and not yet your skin, because you keep pushing him away, keep glaring at him like he is a dumb beast too keen on the idea of eating a local bookshop owner instead of looking for royal offspring. As he should have.

Dumb beast who is not realising that he shouldn’t rub his scent into you, that lingering pinewood and cigars kill all your chances to get a proper date with someone.

John, who hums when you protest and gently bites your neck, just holding you between his teeth, your pulse pounding into his lips.

Why’d you need dates with some boys, love? Don’t you have him? Isn’t he the best there is to get?

John, who keeps coming back just to chat you up, always with excuse to touch you, worming his way into your life until you don’t even notice that his thumb has been stroking your wrist for the last 10 minutes of your conversation.

He comes back after every deployment and rubs himself on you, smiling when you hiss and wiggle out of his grip. Feisty first thing after so long apart. He knows, sweetheart, he missed you too.

John who comes back once and has to swallow back a low growl, sound starting in his chest, his teeth itching because you don’t smell like him and you don’t smell like you.

He circles you around before pressing himself into your back, bracketing you against the counter, his nose diving into the neck of yours, beast in his head snarling when he finds someone else’s hickey there.

Kept yourself busy, didn’t you, love?

He’s been gone for too long, his scent got too weak.

John admits, he should have come back sooner, should have pulled you under a long time ago.

But he liked your little game of push and pull, he enjoyed the tag so much that he forgot he isn’t the only one playing.

An oversight, not a good thing for a captain.

John who is still hazy with the blood from last deployment, urge to tear another throat out simmering right under the surface when he presses his hips to your ass, slotting against you like perfect puzzle.

If he knew you’d get impatient, he would have taken proper care of you, sweetheart.

But he won’t make the same mistake again.

John Price, who takes leave of absence so he can stop taking suppressants for the first time in years.

Rut of his pounding in the back of his head, spreading through him like an infection, dripping under his skin like poisonous honey.

Sticky sweet, molten with yearning, hungry for blood.

Hungry for you.

John Price who clicks his tongue at you to stay behind your counter, as he locks the doors behind him and lowers himself down. On his knees, nudging your stance to widen.

So he can pull your jeans down, tongue sliding between your thighs, big hands holding you open for him.

No need to thrash, love. He isn’t letting go now. He isn’t backing away either, not anymore.

His rut makes you hazy, his rut clouds your head and makes you slip, bracing your forearms on the wooden counter, his ‘good job, sweetheart’ dripping slick between your thighs.

John eats you out until his knees ache, until your hips roll into his mouth, until the sweet faint scent of yours blends in with his.

Your whole bloody shop is going to smell like you have a man, love. Like you have John.

There is a low dangerous rumble in his chest when you try to pull away, to stop him from eating you out into overstimulation. Because where do you think you are going, sweetheart? You need to be nice and slick to take all of him.

You need to be soft and pliant for John to feed the thick length of his cock to your greedy hole.

“Goin’ to fuck attitude out of ya, lovie.”, John breathes out, biting your ass until you whimper trying to get him off and until the indent of his teeth is a red mark on you. First out of many. “Any bloke in this bloody country would be able to tell you are taken. Anyone who takes a step inside will know I was here.”, he growls, grinding on the plush of your buttock.

Not going anywhere now, love. Never again.

John Price who clicks his tongue when you whimper about condoms, because that’s just silly, sweetheart, you won’t need any of it with him. How are you supposed to feel his knot if you won’t let it in?

That just won’t do.

John Price who bounces you in his lap, thick calloused fingers holding onto the meat of your hips, slamming you down and pulling you up, until the knot of his pops inside of your hole, plugging you in, binding you to him for the next half an hour.

John Price who holds you in full Nelson, arms under your knees, teeth grazing your ear when he bounces you on his knot, pulling just enough so you’d feel the stretch, so you’d start whimpering for him, so you’d scent become sweeter for him.

Naughty fucking thing, you like him being mean to you?

John who lets the rut take reigns, so he can press you into the counter, biting all over your shoulders, snarling “mine, always mine, only mine” when you can’t help but arch. Whether to pull away or to press into him, he’s not sure.

John who licks the scent gland of yours, teeth itching to sink in, dumb beast in his head pulling him to rut into you. And Lord, you are slick and warm and perfect, squeezing him like you never want to let go, milking him for all he’s worth.

Perfect mate.

He humps into you like a feral dog, heavy thick hips of his pressing into yours, not letting you close your legs. Not when he’s folding you into the mating press and sinking his teeth in the crook of your neck, popping the untouched and unmated gland there. Binding you together, blending himself into you, drinking you in so your sweetness is always in his scent from now on.

Won’t be anyone else, love. Not for him. Nor for you.

John Price who presses your face into his neck, rasps out “bite, sweetheart”, his knot popping back inside of your hole — your legs twitching above his shoulders. Sweet thing, he’s too much for you without much of a preparation. But it’s okay, he will be better next time.

He will take you somewhere soft and warm, he will feed you meat and fruit, letting you lick juices off his fingers, he will suck on your tender sensitive parts until you are crying.

You just gotta bite, lovie, just sink your teeth in his gland, will ya?

John Price who licks his lips when you nuzzle in the crook of his neck, your teeth grazing his gland, your jaw trembling. Rode you ragged, didn’t he, love?

It’s okay, John will help, just open wide, aye?

John murmurs, voice half a growl when he presses your head into his neck, when he closes your jaws down on his gland, shiver running down his spine, everything clicking in place.

This is right. This is how it’s supposed to be.

John who kisses your face pulling you out the crook of his neck — your eyes gone, pupils blown wide and jaw slack when he ruts into you again.

Just one more orgasm, sweetheart, just one more. He knows you can do it, you can be good for him.

You can give him his reward for being so patient, you can thank him for not tracking down your now irrelevant suitor and not presenting you bloke’s fingers as a courting gift.

You can thank him proper and you will, won’t ya, lovie?

Come on, one more time, he rasps in your ear, fingers prying your mouth open and stuffing it until you are drooling messily all over him. Pretty thing, see how easy it is? Just had to come to your Johnathan and he would have taken care of this greedy hole.

He would have made it better. And from now on he always will.

Till death do us part, sweetheart. If he has to say anything about it.

The Captain - Simon Riley x Sniper!Reader, Wife!Reader

summary: Ghost’s sniper wife (reader) joins Task Force 141 on an op, against his wishes call sign: Freyja warning: mentions of violence and death (ofc), blood Next >>

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Just thinking about breeding programs between alphas and omegas in which people basically sell their uterus or sperm to have the most attractive/strong/smart kid possible.

And I’m thinking about the person you choose being John Price. You’d seen him one time in the hospital you worked at and immediately went “that’s the father of my child”.

Except he insisted on getting you pregnant the old fashioned way and would only take half the amount you offered him for his services. And as he laid you down in one of those sterile and neutral rooms they used for this sort of thing, his scent hit you full force.

John Price was your mate. And you had picked him out of a damn crowd of people, no scent needed.

The employees had to usher you both out as the planned breeding became a full-blown rut and heat, the alpha insisting on mating you at that very moment.

John Price is older and John Price has spent his entire life serving and giving. It’s only fair he finally take something. Something that was his from the very moment he came into the world.

I made a new sticker collection of these cute little Pridesaurs!!

They are currently available on my esty page, we got the whole gang!

ACE-kylosaurus (Ankylosaurus)

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BI-rachisaurus (Brachiosaurus)

Me-GAY-losaurus (Megalosaurus)

LESB-beosaurus (Lambeosaurus)

THEY-rizinosaurus (Therizinosaurus)

PAN-oplosaurus (Panoplosaurus...yeah its juts literally its name...)

QUEER-mesaurus (Quilmesaurus)

TRANS-ceratops (Triceratops)

If you are interested in owning one of these pretty pretty dinos, please consider supporting my silly art and visit my shop through the following link

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Shop ShatterHeadShop by ShatterHeadShop. Smooth shipping! Has a history of shipping on time with tracking. Speedy replies! Has a history of

Link to the stickers:

peristalsis - v

selkie!soap x reader. depression. strangers to "lovers." shower sex. cunnilingus. smut. manipulative soap. oysters as an aphrodisiac. unstable narrator. . Running away from life to the Scottish Hebrides, you meet a man who won't leave you alone. . Masterlist. Ao3.

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You watch him over an open book.

It’s an old romance, something from the eighties. Classic bodice ripper, billowing sleeves, tight corsets, mullets and heaving bosoms and all. Naturally, it’s set on a pirate ship, the heroine as the unlucky spoils of a merchant ship raid and the hero a lusty captain able to pierce her virgin’s desire for sexual depravity.

It could only have been more pointed at you if it had been set in the North Atlantic—it isn’t—but you glare at Soap’s back anyway.

He must be able to feel it, because he stands straight at the wheel, shoulders thrown back, occasionally flexing.

The freak.

You’d realized the joke he’d been making, once your heartbeat had slowed. Hiding the pelt somewhere obvious enough for you to see it. You live in the age of the internet—you know what it’s supposed to mean.

And you kind of hate him for it. Now, post-coitus, you can’t shove it away into a box—he is the most attractive man you’ve ever encountered. Rugged and handsome, competent at everything you’ve seen him do, seemingly at home wherever he finds himself. Everything makes him smile. Nothing seems to disconcert him.

And a nice big cock he actually knows how to use. Certainly the best lay you’ve ever had.

What every woman traveling solo, you think, longs to encounter on a solo trip across the world, but will never acknowledge looking for. An answer to an unaddressed desire; proof that satisfaction is out there to find, if it’s searched for.

A lover with no conditions. Someone willing to strip your inhibitions away, knowing your protests are only token.

You had not been searching. You’d given up searching.

And now he mocks you—with every satisfied glance he throws over his shoulder.

“Good book?” he asks, all casual and pleased. “S’ one a’my favorites. Tell me when you get to the naval battle.”

You frown. “You haven’t read this.”

He gives a little huff of amusement. “Read all of ‘em, bonnie.”

No, this is where you draw the line. A good cook, a good fuck, and a romance reader? No. No, you absolutely will not take this.

“Sure you have, Johnny,” you grouse, “you read every single stupid book on that shelf. Sure. Hell, you’ve read books that aren’t on that shelf. You’ve read every new release from the last six months, even. Why not.”

He looks at you again over his shoulder, mouth curled. “Aye. Needed ideas, once a’knew you were comin.’”

He says it matter-of-factly, with only a little bit of pride. As if it was a natural step in the process of getting ready for your arrival—renovate the croft. Stock the fridge and pantry. Plan some island excursions.

Study the erotic mind of the average woman to divine how best to seduce her.

Your frown deepens, and you lift the book higher, making it a barrier between you and him. Loser. Couldn’t he just go to the mainland for a few days if he wanted pussy? Not like it would be hard to find, for him.

You resolve to ignore him for the rest of the trip. A petty endeavor, maybe, but it’s the only one you can make.

But six hours is six hours, and you can’t read the whole time. Periodically you have to get up to stretch your legs, and the windows wrapping around the bridge draw your attention to the sea outside.

Johnny drives the trawler at a remove along the coastline, keeping close enough to the islands for easy viewing. The denizens of the Hebrides are out en masse, enjoying the clear weather, joyfully populating the land- and seascape in the absence of human interlopers.

Porpoises, so much smaller than you might have expected, periodically catch the wake of the boat, swimming alongside, playful and curious. Gulls loop in the air above the dunes, fronds of grass fluttering in the breeze. Gannets, stark white, arrow down into the waves, wings folded back pin-straight as they spear their quarry—silvery fish that boil the surface of the water in their frenzy.

Some removed part of you enjoys their pleasure secondhand. The normally-grey ocean is vibrant in the sunlight, crystalline and sparkling and as blue as Johnny’s eyes.

He seems to be in a good mood, too, although that could just be because you let him fuck you. You feel his eyes on you even as you refuse to look at him, dancing along the curves of your body the same way his fingertips might.

At one point—“Bonnie, I know you’re sulking an’ all, but c’mere.”

He gestures you over to the cockpit, and—embarrassed at being called out—you join him. He brings a hand to the small of your back, stepping behind you and pointing over your shoulder.

A gray wall of passing cliffs, and crags of rock jutting up from the churn at their base. You see ten or twelve grey-and-white seals lounging across every available flat surface, some cuddled in groups of three or four, apparently unbothered by the periodic spray of breaking waves.

“No’ where I’d choose to have a kip, personally,” Johnny says, sounding amused.

You turn your head to look at him, hard. His eyes soften when they meet yours, and he tilts his head to kiss you, undeterred even when you flinch away from it.

His hand tightens across your back, fingers digging in. He sucks your bottom lip between his and caresses it with his tongue, as he edges beneath the hem of your shirt to spread his hand across the warming skin of your back.

“I’m mad for ya,” he murmurs when he pulls away, blush high on his cheeks.

“It’s been two days,” you deadpan.

He presses up behind you, open hand sliding around to press into the low part of your belly, right at the sensitive crest of your mons; you can’t help your gasp when, at the same time, his erection nestles into the cleft of your ass.

“No’ to this,” he purrs in your ear. “Feels like it’s been forever, for this.”

When his fingers start making their way beneath the waistband of your pants, you grab his hand and wrench it away, scoffing.

“You’re just a fucking horndog,” you sneer, betrayed by the heat spilling through your core.

“Aw, you break my heart, bonnie,” Johnny simpers, but there’s a mocking edge to it. As if he knows exactly what you’re hiding.

You step away from him, folding your arms across your chest and staring out at the basking seals instead. Then—

“There’s one in the water,” you say.

A few meters away from the rocks, a round head pokes up from the surface, bobbing with the rise and fall of the waves. Its eyes are slitted closed, nostrils dilating.

“Aw, he’s bottling,” Johnny says affectionately, when he comes over to look. “Look at his wee face.”

You remember suddenly your encounter of the previous day—another lone seal, resting apart from its fellows.

“I saw one on the beach,” you say, “yesterday, after you dropped me off. A big one. You didn’t say they might show up.”

“Male?” he asks, and you nod. “Peripheral male, then. I’m no’ surprised.”

You sigh. “And that is…”

As if magnetized, his hands find you again, this time settling on your waist. It seems that Johnny’s touch is something impossible to escape, in his vicinity. He drags them down over your hips and back up almost idly, as if he’s not even thinking about doing it.

“There’s dominant males, and then there’s the rest of ‘em. Only the dominant ones get to breed at the rookeries, see? And the rest of ‘em have to wait around for the females to leave to have their chance.”

He leans into you from behind, nose in your hair, and you hear him inhale as his hands tighten.

“Once a peripheral male finds a female alone, separated from the colony, ready to go back out to sea—well, that’s his chance to pounce.”

You frown, mostly to yourself. “No matter how the female feels about it.”

“We’ve been over this,” he chides.

He brings his lips to the curve of one ear, then the soft spot behind it. His nose finds the juncture of your neck and shoulder, where the capillaries that he broke with his teeth still throb whenever you press your fingers to them. He inhales again, deeply.

“Why do you do that?” you grouse, unwilling to give him the win.

“Like how you smell,” he says, doing it again.

His tongue caresses the bruise before he closes his mouth over it—but he goes no further than to kiss your neck twice more before returning to the wheel. It leaves you reeling, half-dizzy with arousal, and when you stomp back to your seat with a frustrated growl, he only glances over at you, smirking, and laughs.

He finds a berth in the early evening to park the trawler, and at that point you’re thankful for any kind of solid ground to set your feet on, as well as enough open air to disperse whatever pheromones have saturated the enclosed space of the bridge.

You’ve been half-tempted the whole time to make him drop anchor and drag him belowdeck toward the nearest flat surface big enough for the two of you to share; as it is, you’ve simply stewed in your own juices instead, hot with angry arousal and ignoring the slick pooling in the gusset of your underwear.

Johnny steps out into the cooling air in his usual kilt and sweater, and you once again huddle in his jacket, aromatic with his musk, as he leads you onward. This time, unlike the last excursion, he insists upon holding your hand the whole way, callused fingers worming their way between yours, the captured air hot and humid between your palms.

Callanish turns out to be a henge of standing stones.

Meters-tall megaliths, squarish and narrow like broken teeth, surrounding a burial site and extending in two directions as if lining a road. Inevitably evocative of its cousin Stonehenge, with the notable exception that you are allowed to go up and touch the stones with your bare hands.

“They used ‘em for that TV show,” Johnny informs you as the two of you circuit the main ring. “Well, no’ these, they probably had styrofoam for that, but they got the idea from these.”

You lay your free hand on the nearest stone; it’s cold, and rough to the touch, a day’s worth of sunlight evidently not sufficient to warm it. Tiny spots of moss and lichen cling to the old stone, green and eggshell white.

“Why are we allowed to touch them?” you say. You think of bronze statues, rubbed to a golden gleam by millions of tourist hands.

“That’s Lewisian gneiss, bonnie,” says Johnny, laying his hand, much larger, next to yours. His thumb teases the side of your pinky. “Doubt you could make much of a mark on it. This rock here? Three billion years old.”

You look at him, seeing his profile. The expression on his face is soft—not unlike the way he looked at you earlier, on the way here. He spreads his fingers over the stone, tendons furrowing down the back of his sun-weathered hand.

“No’ just older than us,” he continues. “Older than what we used to be, a’fore we were us. Was there when we first made fire. Was there when we came down th’ trees. Was there all the way back when we left the ocean for the first time—”

He looks at you, then. The setting sun catches in the dips of his irises, setting jewel blue aflame.

“An’ it’ll be there, bonnie, when we go back.”

The wind curls around the stones with the chill of the oncoming night. Even despite the jacket, despite the walk up to the site—you feel it penetrate beneath your skin, deep into your bones.

You choose derision, to reject the shiver.

“And you have this all memorized,” you say.

Johnny doesn’t respond. He continues to stare at you, mouth in a relaxed, but inscrutable line.

You suddenly remember that you do not know this man; though he’s told you enough about himself to fill out his background—you don’t know him. You don’t know how he feels about most things, what’s important to him, why he may find one thing or another meaningful. Not the way you’d have to, in order to understand why the gaze he fixes on you feels so significant.

Whatever you’re supposed to understand in the way he looks at you now, you don’t have the ability to discern. The only thing that occurs to you is that, perhaps, you’ve finally managed to offend him.

It does not satisfy you as much as you might have imagined—

In fact, the thought drops through your belly like a rock.

Again. You did it again.

In the one place you thought you’d never have to face this—you did it again. Here is someone who seems to like even the worst of you, and you somehow found an even uglier side of yourself to show him, a squirming thing that cannot help but sling itself around with no heed for the damage it can cause.

But when you open your mouth to say something reparatory, something that certainly won’t fix what you’ve broken no matter what he might say, his expression softens into something thoughtful.

“Visited when I first came here,” he says. Completely unbothered. “After the discharge an’ all.”

You blink. Sharp heat and the numbness of cold, warring across your face.

“Why?” you ask.

“Dunno.” He shrugs, and lifts his hand from the stone, smiling ruefully. “I was a bastard back then. Didnae wan’ anything’ to do with anyone anymore. Mad at the world, a’was.”

Shucked like an oyster; scaled like a fish. Heat wins out, even in the growing chill. Tender skin scalding itself.

“And what,” you say, reflexively nasty, panic whirring up behind your breastbone, “you thought—you’d get some sort of, magical insight here?”

Johnny laughs. “Naw, a’was just pissing my money away, bonnie. Thought I’d come up here an’ try t’ knock one over.”

Tight chest. Can’t breathe. You step away from him, far away, hide it like you’re looking at another of the standing stones, but a stabbing pain spears upward through your diaphragm.

In—count—hold—out—

“Could you?” you ask, wringing something like a normal tone out of your voice.

“Nope. Paid for it later, though.”

He says it casually. He hasn’t noticed. You reach out to the new stone, drag your fingers overtop of the rough surface, imagine every little bump flipping the friction ridges of each print like pages of a book. Cold—the rock is cold. The wind is cold, and sharp with the smell of rain. The jacket is heavy on your shoulders.

The jacket smells like Johnny.

“I’m sure the park wardens weren’t happy,” you say, feeling your heart slow in your chest.

“No,” he says, and—with the silence of a lightning strike—“I drowned, afterwords, first time I went to sea.”

You look back at him. The wind picks up, ruffling the ends of his mohawk; on the horizon, a rind of darkness splits the clouds from the earth.

“You drowned?” you repeat.

The hem of his kilt flutters and dances. His gaze is intense—the angle of his brow unreadable.

“Aye, bonnie. I did.”

Your ears begin ringing—as you stare at him, you get the sense of dreaming. There’s a distinction to Johnny that contrasts the landscape framing him, a sharpness so focused that everything else lenses around him.

“Why—why are you here?” you find yourself asking, though you’re not entirely sure why. The question leaves you as if surfacing on its own power.

The corners of his mouth quirk—although for once, he doesn’t smirk at you, the way he always does.

“You tell me,” he murmurs.

He holds you in the tilt of his head; in the depths of his eyes, currents pulling you downward. You inhale, and expect, for some reason, water to pour into your lungs.

Then a gust of wind buffets the two of you. Johnny turns, surveying the sky. Breaking the spell, he says, “Come on, let’s get back. I don’ like the look a’that storm.”

Halfway back down the path, the front overtakes you; rain begins sheeting down, ice cold, needle-precise into your hair and down your collar. Johnny grabs your hand again even as you start worrying about slipping, and though the torrent veils the way, the both of you make it back to the trawler in one piece.

Back on the bridge, a red light blinks on the panel by the wheel. While Johnny attends to it, flipping a switch and bringing a microphone on a curly wire to his mouth, you squeeze your hair out over the sink nearby.

“This is Soap on the vessel Sea Ghost,” he says, and waits for a response.

“Soap. Drop anchor somewhere. Looks like a storm’s coming in,” a gruff voice comes in.

“Yeah, Cap, we noticed,” Johnny says with a laugh, turning and smiling at you. “We’re moored, dinna fash.”

“Good. Looks like it’s just for the night. Clear enough in the morning.”

“Barry. You got everything? Shops’ closed tomorrow.”

“Never will understand why. But yes.”

“It’s a holy day, Captain,” Johnny says pleasantly.

Price grumbles something about damn Catholics and their damn rules, which just makes Johnny laugh.

Then, “Gaz is here. Made it in after you left.”

Johnny’s posture shifts. Similar to a dog hearing the turning of a doorknob; amorphous attention coalescing, finding a target to point at. Anticipatory. Tail twitching, winding up to wag.

It’s a new reaction, to you—you’ve never seen it before.

Johnny lifts the transmitter to his mouth. He holds it there for a silent moment, before saying, “And Simon?”

No response from the other end of the line, pulled taut, as if snagged. Then Price responds “Haven’t heard yet.”

Something passes over Johnny’s face. Some flex of the muscle in his jaw. An expression held in check.

That’s—

That’s familiar.

“Alright. Back tomorrow then.”

“See you.”

He replaces the mic on its hook.

Thunder claps somewhere over the distant, open ocean. The trawler creaks and groans as the wind swirls around it. Yellow lamps illuminate the warm, wooden space, but are unable to penetrate the lowering blackness outside.

Tension—you can feel it drawing tight, see his shoulder blades shifting closer together. It aches in the muscles of your own back. He faces away from you, like you’re not there—

He turns to look at you. He’s smiling, but it doesn’t look quite real. As if he’s forcing the expression on his face.

“Poor bonnie,” he croons, looking you up and down. The tenor of his voice is saccharin-sweet and thick. “How’s a hot shower sound to warm up, hmm?”

Your belly pinches. “Sure.”

He leads you down a steep flight of stairs into the stomach of the boat, showing you into a single bedroom. The space is cramped, wedge-shaped—barely enough room for the double bed shoved into the middle of it, sheets and blankets gathered in rumples across the top. The unique musk of its occupant wars with the smell of lacquer; the walls are lined with orangey planks, evoking the sailing ships of old.

Directly to the left of the entrance, an open door leads into a small bathroom, into which Johnny guides you, hands on your hips.

“Go’ plenty a’ drinking water stored upstairs so take all the time you like,” he says. “Here, lemme show you how the taps work.”

You half-expect him, after the instruction, to stand there and watch, waiting until you undress. And he does hesitate for a moment, hovering in the threshold, before giving you a practiced grin, telling you to enjoy yourself, a closing the door behind him.

You stand in the middle of the tiny room for an uncertain heartbeat. Assumptions lurching. Almost—hoping.

His heavy footsteps climb back up the stairs.

So, you peel off your damp clothes and drop them into a pile on the floor, stepping naked into the shower. It’s far less mildewed than you might have worried of a single man living alone. Hot water chases cold out of your hair, streaming with pressure far superior to the cottage’s installment.

You realize your toiletries are still above deck, in your bag, beneath the two paperbacks Johnny packed that you haven’t gotten to just yet. You could step out after him—

You don’t do that anymore. You promised yourself.

The floor sways as the shifting sea rocks the trawler in its berth. You reach for the bar on the wall to steady yourself.

One version of yourself is sometimes able to fool the other. The truth is, you could have told him to stop at any time. Put your foot down, hard. Just because he owns the house you’re staying in doesn’t mean he gets to decide what your entire vacation is going to look like.

You scoff at yourself, without any humor. Vacation. Like you’d ever believed this was anything more than self-imposed exile.

The truth is, water takes the shape of the container it fills.

There’s a chill still present in your hair follicles. Impossible for you to identify until now; live with an ache long enough and it stops registering, until it’s balmed with a moment of relief. This is where the addicts begin; experiencing, for the first time, a complete absence of pain, as if it had never been there in the first place, and, once that pain is restored, the ruthless pursuit of its elimination.

Cold rain outside, warm rain within. You stand in the flow, listless. Steam rapidly clouds the empty spaces around you, gathering in droplets on the wall, drizzling down again.

That’s where the mistake is. Pain is never defeated—only deferred. Its panacea provides only diminishing returns, until it’s useless. Until you might as well be swallowing sugar pills or drinking seawater to assuage your thirst.

But you keep doing it. You remember too well how it felt. You chase it down because now you know how it feels.

At some point you have to understand that it always ends poorly.

The bathroom door opens again, and then the shower door, spilling yellow light into the shadowed recess—

Johnny.

The expression on his face is inscrutable; mysterious, as his gaze moves down your body, following the streaming water. Your arms curl around your chest in a perfunctory attempt to conceal yourself, even despite the futility of the effort.

He’s naked, and half-hard, a refrain on the previous night. One hand holds the travel-size soaps and gels that he must have dug out from your bag. He steps in behind you—enclosing the two of you in together.

“Sorry, bonnie,” he murmurs soothingly in your ear. “Had t’make sure we were tied up for the storm.”

The space is not even suggestive of being big enough for two people. You hear the squeak of the shower wall against his shifting back, hot skin slipping against yours as his hands draw you back against him by the hips.

“Dinnae want you t’slip an’ hit your head,” he murmurs, massaging the fat of your pelvis, as if there’s any reason to make excuses for what he’s doing.

Half-raised hackles petted down too easily. You relax into his touch, even as you disdain it. Your heart tremors in your chest.

“What’s going on tomorrow?” you finally ask. “Who’s Simon?”

Pathetic. A jealous lover, after less than forty-eight hours.

“Old task force,” he answers, kissing the back of your head. “Little reunion, food an’ beer, mostly.”

You half-expect him to go immediately for your breasts, or maybe your pussy. His cock is stiffening against the small of your back. But instead, he opens one of your bottles, squirts some pearly body wash into the palm of his hand. Rubbing a little to lather it, he puts his hands back on your hips, and begins massaging it into your skin.

Inward, up your stomach. Pressing into the soft parts of it, with the water slicking his way. His mouth touches the back of your neck—softly. Tenderly. With all of the languor you rejected the previous night, and not enough space for you to slap it away again.

His lips press inward, looking for the bite he left, which he lays his tongue on as if in contrition, licking it like a dog with a wound. The comfortable warmth of the shower swelters with his added body heat; the steam pulses in time with the heavy beats of your heart.

One hand slides up your body, fording your thoracic arch, the wedge of his hand ascending the length of your breastbone. He cups your jaw, bubbles between his fingers, one of your breasts nestling between his bicep and forearm.

He tilts your head to the side as he cranes his head further into your neck, lipping at the space behind your ear, kissing delicate, sensitive skin, as his other hand drags soap around your ribs, beneath and over both breasts, up into your pits and back down again.

A doll in his hands, bent along the shape of his will. He shifts his hips, frotting his erection against you.

“Johnny,” you breathe. “Johnny, this isn’t anything. This doesn’t mean anything.”

“Aye, bonnie,” he hums. “Whatever you say.”

He licks a hollow in your throat.

His other hand dips lower, sweeping down into the crease of one thigh to round the lower swell of your hip; then back up again, fingers spreading.

The stall compresses your arms close against you; the only space you have available to lay your useless hands is on his arms. The dark hair you find with your fingertips is coarse, wiry, plastered to hot skin with water. The spray seeps between the both of you, streams in the runnels of flesh pressed together.

Between your legs, your clitoris heats, awakening even though untouched. You give a small whine, and Johnny huffs a little chuckle in your ear, suckling your neck as his fingers make the descent back, rinsed in the falling water, teasing your pubic hair before nudging your folds apart.

He finds you slick and aching. He only dips lower briefly to wet his fingers, and then, as he settles a light touch over where you’re most desperate for it, relief razes through your nerves in a sudden wash.

You search for the back of his head, slotting your fingers into the ends of his mohawk at the nape of his neck. He hums against you, hand dropping down from your jaw to cup one breast in his palm, weighing it, thumb flicking around the pert nipple in the same tight circle he draws around your clitoris.

Orgasm, usually so obvious on approach, sneaks up on you, quick and quiet, but when it takes you it floods you, rather than knocking you down. You tremble all over, the follicles on your scalp standing on end, the nerves down your back and sides bending like dune grass to a wind.

Your long, breathy cry reverberates against the shower walls, and you lean heavily back against Johnny’s body, grip tightening where you have your hands on him.

He twitches against your back, but he makes no move to chase his own climax. He only turns you carefully, when you recover, and lays his hot, open mouth on yours, tugging your hips close enough to trap his cock against your belly. This time, the wall is cool at your back, the crown of your head moving against it as Johnny angles himself deeper, sliding his tongue between your lips.

“C’mon,” he says, when he finally pulls away. His pupils are huge, black dilation swallowing the blue. The spray fills the empty spaces between the strands of his mohawk, fluffing the hair a little as it courses down the shaved sides of his scalp. “Need to get my mouth on you again, bonnie.”

This time, when he eats you out, he does it at his leisure. Licking honey off a spoon. So lightly that you whine at him, find the energy to bitch at him to do it like he means it, but tonight he does not indulge you.

No—he mouths at you, eyes closed, curly lashes against his cheek as you lay belly-up on the rumpled sheets of his bed. The heat of his tongue in your cleft is the only source of warmth you have as the rain lashes at the outside of the trawler, but the hot shower still lingers in your skin—

Humid. Sticky. Sweat gathering beneath Johnny’s palms where he holds your thighs to his ears, as if mimicking the way your sex will clutch around him when he enters you. Slick and tight and viscous.

When he crawls up your body—nosing at your belly, your breasts, inhaling as if your musk is something he’s trying to get drunk on—he fucks you slow and deep. You stop being able to tell if it’s the storm rocking the boat, or the weight of his hips rolling against yours, one of his hands on the headboard for leverage and the other on your mons, pressing down with the heel of his hand to feel the head of his cock moving in you.

Tacky skin catching on the grind; heart speeding up as he grins at you from above, thumb tapping your clitoris. Enough to wind you up. You reach for his hips with your clawed hands, digging your nails into the meat of his ass—firm, muscle tensed, twitching every time he bottoms out.

“Johnny,” you finally beg, on the edge of a sob, “please, Johnny, please—”

Breath leaves him like a steam valve turned, pressure carrying an uninhibited moan. He ignores your plea, hips rolling slow, forcing you to feel every inch of him in and out of you, every ridge—every vein pulsing on the surface of his cock.

His eyes are closed still; when the widest part of him catches the rim of you around him again, his mouth drops open, lips pink and bitten.

Lost—he’s lost in pleasure, in the feeling of you around him, pulling him in. You watch his chest as it heaves, the flex of his stomach as it tightens—the twitch in the muscles of his arms as the impact of each thrust ripples up his body.

Look at me, you want to say. Look at me. I’m right here. Look at me.

“Again,” he groans, choked, restrained, hands gripping your hips. “Say it again, bonnie—”

“Please—” you whine, on the edge of a sob, “please, please, please—”

Thumb metronoming at a quick tempo where you need it—you seize, back arching, tightening around him so narrowly you could force him out—

He snarls, sharp and hard, thrusting into the resistance, hands falling to fist in the mattress. Breath coming rough and fast, sweat dripping from his forehead into the cups of your collarbones and down between your breasts. Hard and fast now, pushing in as far as your body will let him, and a final, long moan tears from his parted lips, liquid heat flooding you as Johnny goes rigid with a climax following only moments after your own.

Pelvis flush with your thighs. He doesn’t let a drop escape, pushing against you, lifting your hips from the bed.

“Tha’s right,” he slurs, eyes hazy when they open. “Tha’s right, that’s where it belongs.”

He collapses on top of you, almost crushing you with his weight, as he seeks your mouth out with his. He moves his hips against yours with shallow thrusts, whining in his throat.

“Didn’t you—” you pull your lips away, too hot, too cold, buzzing and exhausted, “didn’t you just finish?”

He tongues at your cheek instead, and then down your neck. “Doesnae matter, is no’ enough. C’mon, bonnie, wrap your legs aroun’ me, please…”

After he is finally spent—long after you’ve had enough energy to do more than lay beneath him and let him use you as he pleases—Johnny diverts briefly to the galley, bringing back with him a plate of oysters and a pry knife. It’s his bed, so you don’t complain about shell fragments, but you resolve to make him change the sheets anyway, shifting uncomfortably to find a spot that isn’t soaked.

“Was on this boat,” Johnny says, as if picking up the thread of a conversation only recently dropped. He picks up one of the oysters and shucks it open. “When I drowned.”

The way he says it, you’d think it was a casual thing, something he barely thought about anymore, but the line of his brow is low and serious.

He hands you one half; you bring the shell to your lips and tip it upward. Brine slides across your tongue, flesh smooth and buttery. Johnny watches you with soft eyes before having his own.

“Price was with me. I told him to fuck off, but he said he wasnae gonna let me take it out alone the first time ever. I was a bastard back then, I told ya. We went out in a storm, like this one, even though any eedjit could take a look outside and know it’d kill him.”

You flick at the edge of the shell with your fingernail, looking down at your hands. “Why’d you do it?”

“Dunno. Had somethin’ to prove, I guess.”

“That you could still do stuff like that?”

He doesn’t respond, so you look back up at him. He angles his gaze toward the mess of your hair—the new hickies he’s left on your neck—the bead of your nipples in the cold. The hard angles of his face soften.

“All my life,” he says, measuredly, “all I wanted to be was a soldier. An’ I couldnae anymore. Even though I was better. Hell, I was better than better. But I couldnae go back. That was it. It all wen’ on withou’ me.”

He breaks open more oysters as he talks, hands steady and deft around shells and knife. When he finishes, he slides the plate into your lap, and reclines to face you on his side, propping his head up with his hand.

“We wen’ out when the waves were as tall as a man, an’ us hangin’ onto the railing for dear fuckin’ life,” he continues. There’s a faraway quality to the tone of his voice. “Only life wasnae so fuckin’ dear, was it? I could’ve held on tighter, I think. I fell off.”

“And Price pulled you out?”

That feeling again, meeting his gaze; caught in the arms of a whirlpool, being dragged down. A vial in a centrifuge, constituent parts separating.

“No,” he says, “he didnae.”

“Then…”

“Eat, bonnie.”

There’s a stillness to him that feels unnatural. Johnny is a man who should be constantly in motion, gesturing with his hands, bouncing on the balls of his feet, tapping any available surface with rolling fingertips. Instead, here in front of you, he’s still as a statue. Chest softly rising and falling, but otherwise completely placid.

He gazes steadily at you, down at the plate, and then back up. You sigh, and pick up another shell.

“I don’t remember exactly what happened. I remember getting pushed down deep, real deep, then getting forced up again, on a current or something. Not far enough to get any air, mind. I thought, I’m gonna die out here, an’ I didnae want to.”

He shifts then, a little forward toward you.

“That seemed important, you know? I didnae want to die. Dinna think the sea would’ve given me up f’ I did. It knows. Sometimes it doesnae care. But I guess that time, it did, ‘cause after I blacked out, next thing I know I’m wakin’ up on the shore.”

Something hard shifts in your belly.

“Cap found me a bit later, bringin’ the boat in. Gave him a real scare. Think it turned some of his hair gray overnight. After that…a’was no’ the same. How could y’be, after that?”

You—you don’t want to know any of this. You don’t care. You didn’t ask. His story drops expectation on your shoulders, heavy, custom-tailored, laden with understanding that sands your abraded nerves.

All of this is too much. The damp sheets beneath you, the food, the sex. The fact that you picked the last place in the world thought you could ever meet anyone, let alone someone who—

“And now you have a seal fetish,” you sneer.

Who understands.

Indulgent. This is indulgent, reckless, idiotic in the extreme.

Soap reaches out, and wraps a large, sun-brown hand around your wrist, the one still holding the oyster. Pulling it towards him, he opens his mouth and then tips the flesh from the shell. He slurps it down, noisily, mimicking the sound of his mouth and tongue on your pussy.

“Something like that,” he says, with a sharp, cocky grin.

He changes the sheets. Dims the lights. Plasters himself around you as the storm blows itself out, arm heavy over your waist, thigh and knee nested inside yours.

He’s warm at your back, musky with the mingling aroma of dried sex and sweat.

Sturdy. More real than anything that’s ever put its hands on you.

Johnny, who the sea loved so much it spat him back out. So treasured by the world that a bullet to the brain couldn’t even take him away from it.

Who, by the sound of it, means so much to the people in his life that they would follow him to the middle of nowhere just to keep an eye on him.

Bile churns in your stomach.

next chapter early access

a/n: two chapters left!

Captain John Price in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 20/??

I keep reading balaclava as baklava 💔

it’s hard for simon to focus on anything other than the way water glides down the expanse of your softened hips, your curves swaying with each move you make.

the man is literally drooling when you bend over to place your bar of soap back where it belongs, breasts bouncing, glistening in the lights of the bathroom when you straighten. residual soap drifts down your arms, legs, the top of your chest, down the planes of your round tummy.

and it’s when you turn that simon realizes you’ll be the death of him.

he knew this from the beginning of course, honeyed eyes watching the curl of your lips when you first graced him with your smile, the sun peaking out from behind the darkest of clouds.

but it’s now, you standing here swollen with his child, that he feels those rain clouds disperse. the final puzzle piece sliding into place.

you turned, eyebrows raised in question as simon looks down at you, his eyes mimicking that of a man starved.

“si? is everything alright?”

he was sure he looked like an idiot, smirking down at you in such a boyish way while he placed his hands at the dip of your hips, one hand snaking down to squeeze the plump of your ass. he was met with a squeak and a playful smack to his arm as you leaned into him, breasts flattening against his chest.

he didn’t mean for his voice to sound so full of hunger, but it was hard when you looked up at him under those fluttering lashes of yours.

“s’nothin’, mama. just thinkin’ ‘bout what i want for dinner tonight.”