Sometimes violence is the answer to your problems- or in this case, Simon Riley’s problems
It’s not as if there had been a particular moment where Simon Riley had sat down and decided that he was done with having sex.
Rather, it was the accumulation of torture over the years that had left damage- nerves misfiring or simply not firing at all beneath scar tissue that had healed wrong.
Then there were the other injuries layered over it across the years: the fractures, surgeries, concussions, medications, chronic pain and the permanent state of low grade readiness his body seemed incapable of leaving even when he was technically safe.
Simon had spent enough time in hospitals to know the human body was less a machine than people liked pretending it was. Things went wrong. Sometimes they healed. Sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes nobody could tell you why.
His cock, apparently, had decided not to.
He’d noticed it gradually.
Morning erections disappearing first, though he couldn’t have said precisely when- not when his mornings were spent around other people and never actually got the time to wank one out before morning drills or in between dodging gunfire.
Then on the rare occasion he did actually feel enough inclination to do something about himself, it became an exercise in diminishing returns: attraction still existed somewhere in his head, sensation technically existed below the waist, but whatever bridge had once connected the two appeared to have been bombed out.
Simon discovered it through the deeply scientific process of occasionally attempting to masturbate and getting absolutely fuck all for his trouble
He could touch himself and get nowhere. Could want, abstractly, and have his body answer with complete indifference. The first few times Simon tested it, he approached the problem the way he approached most of his failures: with detached irritation, as though persistence alone might force the damaged thing back into service.
Eventually he’d stared down at himself, accepted that nothing was happening, pulled his trousers back up and thought, Right. That’s that, then.
He never mentioned it to anyone, not to a doctor and certainly not to Price, because- contrary to popular belief- there were limits to what Simon Riley was willing to survive and the idea of being waterboarded ranked higher on the list of things he’d want to go through again before having John Price know whether his lieutenant’s cock remained operational or not.
He didn’t make an appointment specifically for it either. Doctors had poked, prodded, scanned, stitched and reconstructed enough of him already, and there was something uniquely intolerable about volunteering this particular failure for examination when he had no real intention of actually doing anything with the equipment even if they did manage to fix it.
Casual sex had never really held enough appeal to justify navigating the humiliation of his body refusing to cooperate halfway through. A relationship sounded worse. Relationships required trust, trust required vulnerability, and Simon had never understood the fascination people had with handing another human being that kind of weakness so openly.
So celibacy became another practical adjustment. Fine. Good, even. One less thing to worry about, one less chemical urge trying to convince him another person was necessary.
Simon’s body already demanded sleep, food, medication, physical therapy and the occasional begrudging acknowledgment that he was not, despite considerable evidence to the contrary, composed entirely of out of spite.
He didn’t particularly mind losing one more demand and eventually he stopped checking whether anything had changed. He stopped noticing attractive strangers beyond the detached recognition that, yes, objectively, they were attractive. He stopped wondering whether there might be some circumstance under which his body would respond differently.
It had been years and whatever part of him had once wanted sex had either been damaged beyond use or buried beneath too much other shit to reach daylight, and Simon had made his peace with that.
Then you arrived and immediately became the most irritating person he had met in recent memory.
Not because you were cruel. Simon could deal with cruel; cruelty was straightforward. You simply possessed a spectacular disregard for the strange force field that usually formed around Ghost.
New recruits tended to give him space. Experienced operators might not fear him, but they understood him well enough not to poke unnecessarily at whatever lived behind the skull mask.
Even Soap, who had elevated testing Simon’s patience into a recreational activity, possessed enough survival instinct to recognize certain lines.
You, however, seemed unaware there were lines at all.
The first time Simon deliberately crowded your space during a disagreement, expecting the usual subtle retreat people made when six-foot-something of masked lieutenant invaded their breathing room, you merely tipped your head back farther and continued arguing. When he leaned down, you leaned forward. When he blocked the doorway afterward because you’d been getting on his nerves for the better part of twenty minutes, you stared at him and asked, “Are you finished?”
“Finished what?” he’d replied, because sometimes Simon could be every bit as juvenile as Soap accused him of being, even if he’s deny it until the day he died.
“This.” You waved vaguely at all of him. “Whatever weird intimidation ritual you’ve got going on. Move.”
He hadn’t and you responded with putting both hands against the center of his chest and shoving him instead. He barely shifted if course, which only seemed to annoy you further.
Your mouth tightened, your boots planted and you shoved again with genuine intent this time while Simon stared down at you in profound disbelief.
Somewhere behind him Soap made the distinctive strangled sound of a man swallowing laughter, and when Simon turned his head just enough all he saw was the sergeant suddenly studying a patch of wall with extraordinary concentration because he valued his continued existence.
By the time Simon looked back, you were already shouldering past the narrow gap you’d created, muttering something about oversized fucking roadblocks.
Deeply irritating. That was Simon’s assessment, and it remained his assessment over the following weeks while you developed an increasingly casual habit of putting your hands on him whenever he was being difficult.
Not affectionately. Never anything he could easily categorize as flirtation.
Rather, you slapped his hand away when he reached for things you were using, nudged his boots aside when he stretched his legs into your path, drove your shoulder into his arm rather than walk around him when he occupied too much corridor.
One afternoon he reached over your head for the exact mug you’d been reaching toward despite three identical ones sitting beside it, and you promptly elbowed him in the ribs.
“Use another one.”
“Wanted this one.”
“You’re a prick.”
“Been told.”
You turned with your mug held against your chest and gave him a look of profound disgust. “Do you wake up every morning and consciously decide to be unbearable, or does it come naturally?”
“Natural talent.”
Something low in his stomach tightened when your eyes narrowed. Simon noticed it only enough to dismiss it. His body produced strange aches, sparks and misfires constantly; one more meant nothing.
The real problem emerged three weeks later over a mission report, largely because Simon had made the decision to edit your wording after you’d already submitted it.
You found him sitting at his desk with the amended copy beside him and launched immediately into an accusation of bureaucratic sabotage.
Simon informed you that he’d corrected inaccuracies. You informed him there had been no inaccuracies. He reminded you that on line of your official report had read, Lieutenant Riley ignored the proposed entry point because apparently God himself whispered a better idea directly into his ear.
“That is an accurate account of events,” you argued.
“Not putting that in an official report.”
“You’re only mad because it makes you sound like an asshole.”
“I am an asshole.”
“Then why are we editing for accuracy?”
You were already moving around the desk while you said it, coming toward him with the particular determined stride Simon had learned meant you were about to invade his personal space as punishment for some perceived crime.
He remained seated though, mostly because standing would have made the whole thing absurd; he was already large enough without looming over you while you complained about paperwork.
You stopped directly between his knees instead, close enough that the fabric over one of your thighs brushed the outside of his. Simon registered it without meaning to and dismissed it.
Then your finger came up and pressed hard into the center of his chest.
“You listen to me, Riley. If you touch my report again without asking, you can take that red pen and shove it so far up your- “
Simon stopped listening.
His body had gone abruptly, impossibly still around one singular point of awareness. There was pressure beneath his pants. Heat. A heavy rush of blood into an organ Simon had, for all practical purposes, considered medically retired.
For several bewildered seconds his brain refused to identify the sensation because it had been absent too long to belong naturally among the catalog of things Simon expected his body to do.
Then his cock gave a distinct pulse against the front of his trousers and every word leaving your mouth vanished beneath one stunned thought.
He was hard.
Not sort of hard, not an ambiguous twitch he could blame on sitting wrong or fabric pressure or some random neurological event.
Simon Riley, who had gone years without getting an erection under considerably more deliberate circumstances, was sitting in his office with a fully functioning cock because you were jabbing him in the chest and telling him to go fuck himself.
You were still speaking, though Simon had no idea what you were saying anymore- although judging by your expression it remained insulting.
He stared at you with such unusual stillness that eventually you stopped on your own, finger still planted against his sternum. “What?”
Simon said nothing.
“What?” you repeated. “Have you gone deaf?”
His gaze dropped to your hand as though it might explain what had just happened. You mistook the look for irritation and removed your finger and Simon waited for the erection to disappear with it. It didn’t.
If anything, the lingering anger in your expression produced another deeply inconvenient pulse.
“No,” he finally said.
“Then say something.”
There were probably several sensible options but Simon chose, “Finished?”
Your whole expression sharpened. “Oh, fuck you.”
You snatched the report from beside him and stormed away, leaving Simon alone in his office with the door swinging behind you and his body apparently celebrating a resurrection.
He sat there for another several seconds before slowly looking down at himself.
The erection remained as undeniable as it was inexplicable. After years of absolutely nothing, his nervous system had apparently located a bypass around the damage because you had yelled at him over paperwork.
Simon stared until disbelief curdled into suspicion, then muttered, “Tha’s fucki’ inconvenient.”
By the following morning, he had explained it away. Bodies were strange. Blood pressure changed. Anger raised adrenaline. Perhaps poking his chest had compressed something in precisely the right way. Perhaps a damaged nerve had fired randomly for the first time in years.
After much deliberation, Simon decided one isolated event proved nothing, and there was absolutely no reason to investigate further.
So it was a completely coincidence, of course, that Simon happened to be standing directly in front of the cutlery drawer the next day, when you needed it.
You’d made tea, reached for the drawer and found approximately two hundred and forty pounds of lieutenant in the way. “Move.”
“Comfy.”
Your hand paused on the mug. “You’re blocking the spoons.”
“Plenty elsewhere.”
“No, there aren’t. They’re in the drawer behind your ass.”
“Sounds inconvenient.”
You stared at him. Simon leaned against the counter with studied indifference, though somewhere beneath that indifference his attention had become embarrassingly focused.
Nothing happened. No stirring. No heat. Simon experienced an emotion dangerously close to disappointment and immediately resented himself for it.
Then you stepped forward, caught a fistful of his shirt at the chest and yanked. “For fuck’s sake, Riley, move.”
His cock went hard so quickly Simon nearly inhaled his own tongue.
There was no ambiguity this time. Your knuckles dragged against his sternum through the fabric, your body crowded directly into his as you tried to haul a man significantly larger than yourself out of the way, and apparently this combination constituted the precise password required to unlock Simon Riley’s long dormant reproductive system.
You succeeded in shifting him half a step, reached around him for the drawer and retrieved your spoon without noticing that Simon had gone rigid for an entirely different reason.
“What’s wrong with you?” you asked when you turned back.
“Nothin’.”
“You look weird.”
“Always look like this.”
“No, you’re acting weird.”
Simon left without making the tea he’d ostensibly entered the kitchen to prepare.
Still, twice could still be coincidence. Simon clung to that argument for roughly forty eight hours before curiosity overwhelmed dignity and the entire situation deteriorated into an experiment he refused to acknowledge he was conducting.
He began noticing variables with the clinical attention he would normally reserve for surveillance. Ordinary proximity produced nothing reliable. Sitting beside you during briefings didn’t do it. Your shoulder bumping his in a crowded transport didn’t do it. You once passed him a weapon and your fingers brushed his glove, and his nervous system remained entirely uninterested.
There was something reassuring about that at first. Perhaps the episodes really were random.
Then he ignored you while you were trying to ask him a question.
“Riley.”
Simon continued inspecting the rifle in his hands.
“Riley.”
Nothing.
“Simon.”
There it was: that warning woven through his name, irritation sharpening the edges. Simon looked up and caught the full force of your glare just as warmth tightened low behind his belt.
“Wot?” he asked.
“I’ve been talking to you.”
“Have you?”
Your eyes narrowed further. His cock stirred harder.
Simon turned back toward the weapons bench before you could notice the slight adjustment in his stance.
Three times constituted a pattern.
After that, his behavior became indefensible.
He discovered that if he deliberately moved one of your things, you would hunt him down to complain. If he blocked your route, you would put your hands on him rather than politely ask twice. If he took the pen nearest your fingers instead of any of the other four available, you would slap the back of his hand. If he walked away while you were talking, you would occasionally grab the back of his vest and yank him to a halt, which produced such an immediate response the first time that Simon had needed to invent an urgent reason to leave the room before you noticed.
He tested other possibilities privately because, despite what his increasingly deranged behavior suggested, Simon was still attempting to establish whether you were actually the variable.
A woman flirted openly with him during leave; nothing. He watched pornography one evening and experienced such profound indifference that halfway through he became distracted wondering whether he’d cleaned the knife he’d used on a security guard earlier. He tried touching himself without any outside stimulus and got little more than the same sluggish response he’d become accustomed to years before.
The following afternoon you stormed into the common room because he’d eaten something with your name written very clearly across the container and jabbed him in the chest, snarling. “I swear to God, Riley, I’m going to kill you.”
His body responded like somebody had thrown a switch, cock harder than diamonds.
Simon stared at you as heat settled heavily between his legs. You stared back, waiting for remorse that was not forthcoming.
“Did you hear me?”
“Yeah.”
“And?”
A profoundly defective impulse surfaced. Simon leaned slightly closer. “Gonna have to try harder than that.”
Your mouth fell open before outrage filled the space. “You absolute fucking bastard.”
You attempted to leap at him, spitting profanities and attempting- Simon assumed- to claw his eyes out but Gaz intercepted and kept you off of him. Still, you managed to shove his shoulder and his cock throbbed in response.
Simon stepped back immediately, which only made you look suspicious. “Stay away from my food,” you snapped, throwing Gaz’s hands off of you, before walking out.
Gaz lowered his hands and looked toward Simon.
Simon turned his head very slowly.
Gaz’s eyebrows rose.
“Wot?”
“Didn’t say anything.”
“Your face did.”
Gaz gave him a deeply searching look- perceptive bastard- before finally settling on. “Not a conversation I’m looking to have, mate.”
Simon went upstairs, shut his bedroom door and sat on the edge of his mattress with both hands dragged over his mask.
It should have been good news. That was the part he could not reconcile. For years he’d assumed the damage was permanent, another small theft committed by men and circumstances that had already taken enough from him.
He had accepted it because Simon understood loss better than he understood recovery; there was peace in declaring something gone and never hoping for it again after all.
Now, against every expectation, his body was proving that some pathway still existed. Something beneath the scar tissue and damaged nerves still knew what to do. Under any reasonable circumstance, that should have felt like getting a piece of himself back.
Instead, Simon was being forced to confront the humiliating possibility that his cock was not broken so much as catastrophically selective.
Apparently lingerie did nothing for it. Flirting did nothing. Attractive strangers did nothing. Pornography had nearly put him to sleep.
But you glaring at him like you were three seconds away from committing an indictable offense? Excellent. You hauling him around by his clothes? Evidently irresistible. You shoving him because he was deliberately standing somewhere inconvenient? His nervous system seemed to consider it practically erotic.
It got worse because Simon genuinely enjoyed irritating you even without the increasingly inconvenient physical reward attached to it. There was something satisfying about the immediacy of your reactions.
Most people behaved differently around Ghost. They measured their words. Watched his hands. Gave the mask more space than it physically occupied. Even people who knew him eventually retained some instinctive awareness that he could become frightening very quickly if circumstances demanded it.
But you treated him like an enormous nuisance.
Simon could stand silently behind hardened soldiers and watch their shoulders stiffen; but all you would do is look over, discover him hovering there, and tell him his breathing was annoying you. People feared monsters but you only responded with irritation at the one who stole your mug.
Simon did not examine why that distinction mattered to him. Instead, he moved your mug again.
The situation finally collapsed when he blocked you in a corridor for no reason beyond the fact that he knew exactly what would happen.
You stopped in front of him with immediate suspicion. “Move.”
Simon remained where he was, arms folded.
“Riley.”
“Hm?”
“You’re doing it again.”
“Doing what?”
“This.” You gestured at the width of him occupying nearly the entire passage. “Standing exactly where I need to go.”
“Small corridor.”
“Exactly and you’re somehow taking up all of it.”
“Skill.”
You stepped left. Simon stepped left. You stopped and stared at him. He could see realization beginning, he dawning certainty that his obstruction was deliberate. You moved right. Simon mirrored you again.
“Are you twelve?”
“Could ask you the same.”
“Oh, my God.” You tried left one more time. He blocked you, and now your patience broke visibly. Your shoulders squared, your jaw tightened and when you spoke again your voice dropped into that particular warning register his body had inexplicably decided it adored. “Move, Riley.”
Heat tightened beneath his belt.
Jesus fucking Christ.
He should have stepped aside then. He had his answer. He had, in fact, accumulated an absurd quantity of answers over the previous week and required absolutely no further data.
Instead, despite being a grown ass adult, Simon leaned one shoulder against the wall and heard himself say, “Make me.”
You went very still.
There was a small part of Simon’s brain, the portion apparently not currently occupied by destroying his own dignity, that recognized he had pushed this into ridiculous territory.
Then you planted both hands against his chest and shoved hard enough to drive his shoulder into the wall.
The response was immediate and vicious. His cock surged against the front of his pants, balls tightening instinctively, breath catching just enough that you noticed. Your hands remained spread over his chest while your expression changed from irritation to confusion.
Simon looked down at them.
You followed his gaze, but this time your attention continued lower.
Silence settled between you.
Simon felt the exact moment you understood.
Your eyes lifted slowly back to his.
“No.”
He said nothing.
Your mouth began to twitch. “No fucking way. Is that why you’ve been fucking with me?”
“No.”
The denial came far too quickly.
Your expression transformed. “Oh my God.”
Simon pushed away from the wall. “Don’t.”
“You have been deliberately pissing me off.”
“Have not.”
“You moved my boots yesterday.”
“Safety hazard.”
“They were under my bed.”
“Could’ve tripped.”
“In my sleep?”
“Dangerous business.”
You stared at him for a long second before laughter broke through. Not polite laughter either. You actually bent slightly with it, one hand still braced against his vest while Simon considered every decision he had made since entering military service and wondered which one had placed him on the path toward this precise humiliation and whether he could go find his enemies and beg for the west release of death.
“You ate my food,” you accused between breaths.
“Was hungry.”
“You stole my pen out of my hand when there were three sitting next to it.”
“Liked yours.”
“You stood in front of the spoon drawer for five fucking minutes.”
Simon’s silence convicted him more effectively than anything he might have said.
“You’ve been fucking with me because it gets you off.”
“Wouldn’t call it that.”
“What would you call it?”
He had nothing.
Your laughter returned, softer now but infinitely more dangerous because amusement was giving way to curiosity. Simon recognized the shift immediately. You looked down again, not long enough to be crude, merely long enough to confirm the evidence remained present, then back up at him. Something in your expression sharpened with wicked understanding.
“You’re a fucking freak, Riley.”
“Watch your mouth.”
“That do it too?”
“No.”
“Liar.”
Simon caught your wrists when you pressed both hands to his chest again, intending only to remove them. The movement changed your expression instantly. Amusement flashed into irritation at being restrained, your weight shifting toward him instead of away.
“Let go.”
His erection throbbed so hard Simon nearly swore.
Your eyes narrowed.
Simon shut his own for half a second because apparently there were indignities even he required time to process. When he opened them, you were staring at him with a new kind of fascination.
“Oh,” you said quietly.
Simon released your wrists.
You didn’t move back.
Neither did he.
The corridor had somehow become smaller around you both, the joking edge thinning into awareness. You watched him for a second, then reached forward with deliberate slowness and hooked one finger beneath the edge of his pants. Simon knew exactly what you were doing now. More importantly, so did you.
“Don’t,” he warned.
“Don’t what?”
“You know what.”
“I don’t think I do.”
“Bullshit.”
You tugged him half an inch closer.
His jaw tightened as his cock reacted instantly.
That awful, delighted grin spread across your face before cupping your palm around the hard, obvious shape of his cock through the fabric and closing your fingers.
Simon’s entire body betrayed him at once.
His head tipped back against the wall with a dull, undignified thunk. His eyes rolled upward so hard he briefly saw the inside of his own skull. A sound escaped him that could generously be described as a groan and less generously as a whine.
He stayed like that for a second- head thrown back, eyes somewhere in the rafters, cock throbbing shamelessly in the warm curve of your hand- while his brain attempted to process the sheer fucking audacity of the situation.
You gave a small, experimental squeeze.
Simon’s hips jerked forward of their own accord- traitors- and he locked every muscle he still had control over, forcing himself still, which only made the next pulse against your palm more obvious.
“Christ,” he muttered at the ceiling, voice strangled.
You didn’t let go. If anything, you adjusted your grip with the calm curiosity of someone who had just discovered a particularly interesting malfunction and intended to poke it until it made more interesting noises. Your thumb stroked once along the ridge of him, and Simon’s breath left him in a short, punched out sound that was deeply unhelpful to whatever remaining dignity he was trying to cling to.
You tilted your head, still cupping him, and watched the way his throat worked under the mask.
“So,” you said, far too conversationally for someone currently holding a lieutenant’s previously non-functional cock in her hand, “this is the bit where you explain yourself, or…?”
Simon dragged his eyes back down to you with visible effort. The mask hid most of his expression, but the set of his shoulders suggested a man who had just realised he had spent the better part of two weeks engineering his own public humiliation and was now living with the consequences.
“Not explainin’ a fuckin’ thing,” he managed, voice rough. “While you’re still holdin’ my cock in your hand. You’re becoming a problem.”
“I’m becoming a problem? You’ve spent the last week acting like a primary school boy pulling someone’s hair because apparently your dick needs interpersonal conflict to function.”
“Tha’s not what’s happening.”
“You got hard because I shoved you into a wall.”
“Coincidence.”
“I can test that.”
“You fuckin’ will not.”
Your grin widened and your palm pressed down and Ghost nearly saw God long enough to ask why after nearly thirty years of suffering, this was apparently the punchline.
Before he could ask, God apparently decided to throw the poor suffering bastard a bone because Soap’s voice sounded from around the corner. “Ghost, ye seen- “
Simon stepped away from you with enough speed that you nearly stumbled forward.
Soap rounded the corner, stopped and took in the scene. You were suspiciously amused. Simon was standing at an equally suspicious angle with his hands planted on his hips and approximately three feet more distance between you than two people naturally needed. Johnny’s gaze moved from you to Ghost, back to you and then very deliberately refused to travel any lower.
“Aye,” Soap said slowly.
Nobody answered.
He nodded to himself. “Actually, never mind.”
Soap turned around.
“MacTavish.”
His pace increased.
“Johnny.”
“Didnae see anything, LT.”
“You didn’t.”
“Exactly.”
He disappeared around the corner before Simon could decide whether murder was worth the paperwork.
You made it perhaps two seconds before laughter burst out of you again, and Simon dragged one hand down the front of his mask while your amusement echoed through the corridor.
This, apparently, was his life now. He had survived torture, burial, gunfire, explosions and enough bodily damage to permanently alter the way his nervous system functioned, only to discover that whatever remained of his sexual response had crawled out of its grave specifically for the most confrontational person he knew.
The pattern had become painfully specific: you close enough to crowd him, your voice edged with irritation, your hands on his chest because Simon had deliberately made himself impossible to tolerate.
His body had surveyed years of opportunity with complete indifference, ignored every conventional invitation offered to it, then watched you square up against a man nearly twice your mass and apparently made an executive decision.
That one. You need to fuck that one.
The thought arrived so clearly Simon actually glanced upward again as though God might be willizng to throw him another bone.
Apparently he’d used up all this good will because the Almighty wasn’t.
There was only you, still laughing as you pushed past him and deliberately knocked your shoulder into his chest on the way.
“Move, Riley.”
His cock twitched again.
Simon closed his eyes and stood perfectly still in the corridor while the universe continued to punish him for crimes he could not presently recall committing and groaned out. “Fuck’s sake.”
Summary: After Gaz's incident everyone has had time to calm down, you finally get to catch Price up on everyone. Even on yourself.
Word count: 3,369
Warnings: medical inaccuracies, female medic reader, reader has long hair (long enough for a claw clip), soft John Price, haven't written in a while so beware.
Since Gaz’s incident you had been practically glued to his hip. The first two weeks were spent with you taking his vitals, changing his bandages and administering fluids and antibiotics. There were also plenty of bathroom trips and it was actually quite endearing when you found out that the soldier was pee shy. You had almost forgotten about the mundane tasks of being a doctor but you found yourself enjoying it- funny enough.
The hours you spent by his bedside had brought you two closer. Soap had come by two days after the accident to check in on him, offering an abundant amount of conversation while Ghost had come in the dead of night almost a week after. You had almost missed him but caught his shadow through the curtain of the individual medical room. Gaz was asleep during his visit but you guessed that's what Ghost intended.
“I heard you were the one who used the gauze to slow the bleeding.” Your voice was soft, trying not to break the calmness that covered the small room. Ghost’s eyes flickered to your form peeking out from the curtains. “It saved his life, I hope you know that.” You didn’t wait for any reaction, you would’ve been there all night if so. You left, careful to not jostle the curtains too much. Ghost felt his shoulders slouch just the tiniest bit from your words.
You had been updating Price on Gaz’s recovery with small notes you’ve been dropping by his desk along with a fresh mug of coffee, timing it for when you knew he'd be out. You had a fear about leaving Gaz in the medical wing, he was a grown man- a soldier- but maybe you were too nervous to run into the captain- alone. Not after the last time you were left alone with him.
During the third week of treatment you had given Gaz a new round of antibiotics due to a few symptoms of an infection taking over Gaz’s wound and unsurprisingly it got Price out of his office and into the medical ward to visit him.
You didn’t want to admit you were avoiding him. Dreams had been plaguing you every night of what could’ve and maybe should’ve happened that night. His hand pulling you in, his lips on yours. You could still feel the ghost of his hands when you laid down at night.
Safe to say after the infection passed Gaz was allowed to leave the med bay and go back to his own room, coming back for a few appointments to check up on him. You had given him a strict six week minimum of leave before he could even start to train to get back out on the field.
It was a gloomy sentence to serve him but Gaz took it with his head held high and a very kind thank you for what you had done for him. “I’d do it again, trust me” you had told him with a soft smile.
Now with him out of the med bay and somewhat safe on his own, you found yourself back to your usual routine. Unfortunately, due to your adventurous save the doctors have seemed to gang up on you somewhat. It wasn’t blatantly obvious, you had spent the first few days trying to convince yourself that you were overthinking it. Hushed whispers that came to a halt as soon as you walked into the med bay, side eyes that seemed to follow you, opinions and directions given with just that certain tone. You knew it wasn’t your imagination when your favorite mug was fully intact on top of the trash bin in the small staff room connected to the med bay. It took a few minutes to hit you, then another few minutes to pick it out, clean it in the sink and bring it back to your room.
You took it with your head held high, but it was slowly dragging you down. It took a little longer for you to fall asleep at night, it made your thoughts run a little too fast, it was like a rock was sitting on your chest every time you walked in there. Then came the extra workload, paperwork was going missing as soon as you handed it in, meaning you had to redo it all over again. Equipment you were told was in one place was in a completely different place. You were tired of it.
The exhaustion was setting in from the work and the conflict, your shoulders sagging as you got your stuff together to head towards Price’s office. He wanted to discuss how everyone was doing, especially Gaz after everyone had some time to calm down since the mission. The walk to his office is quiet, everyone either in the rec room or off base doing God knows what.
You knock softly against his door and hear a quiet “come in”. The door is awfully squeaky but you close it behind you, “Take a seat, love. I just need to finish this up quick.” You give him a nod and take a seat on the small couch he has situated along the wall, manilla folders on the coffee table, you practically melt into the cushions. After a sigh, you reach for your hair, taking out the claw clip you put it in that morning and running your finigers through your hair, kneading you scalp where you can feel a headache coming on.
Price has been behind on paperwork since he got back from the mission, between Gaz’s injury, checking in on the guys and his all consuming thoughts of you, he has been busy. But even with that he can’t help but watch you now, all but forgetting what he was writing a few seconds ago. He has never seen you with your hair down, it makes you look softer.
You’re exhausted. Price can see it in your shoulders, you’re basically staring at the wall paper with eyes fluttering shut when your fingers hit a tense spot on your temple. He fiddled with the pen in his hand for a few seconds, fuck it. The paperwork can wait.
The sound of his pen hitting his desk and the rustle of paper is what brings you out of your daze. Your eyes find his, with his hands interlocked, elbows resting on the desk. He’s the most underdressed you’ve seen so far. No tactical vest that shows off his tiny waist, just jeans and a shirt, but you still catch his drop leg holster from where you’re sitting.
“You alright, love?” You give him a small nod. As soon as this meeting is over you’re going to absolutely knock out in your room, a nice warm shower, a soft blanket waiting for you and a new candle ready to be lit. Let’s just get through this quickly.
Price doesn’t fully trust the nod you give him, you’ve never been this quiet, this small, but he tucks it into the back of his head and blames it on the tiredness you must be feeling. You already grabbed the manilla folders, opening up to who is going to take up most of the conversation. Gaz.
“I discharged Gaz from the med bay. He’s going to stop by once a week for check ups, his infection is mostly gone but he still has to finish up the antibiotics I’ve been giving him and he should be good. Once we hit six weeks I can see about getting him back to training before he goes out again.” John hasn’t taken his eyes off your figure during your entire spiel. Your eyes have been locked with him since your first words, you lick your lips and look down to the folder in your lap. “Due to his previous anemia and the blood loss from the injury I will be a little stricter with his iron supplement… I also might see if I can get some steak for you guys.” Your voice trails off towards the end. When you finally look back up at Price he has a small smile on his lips.
“This part of the deluxe package you were talking about?” He chuckles. You have to fight the heat that is creeping up your chest and neck. “It’ll be a free trial, so you can cancel it when the steaks turn out to be shit.” It’s your turn to let out a chuckle but you feel yourself not as troubled as before. You both haven’t talked about the last time you two were alone but something tells you he didn’t think of it as a bad thing. You clear your throat and move on to Soap.
“Soap is okay for now, his hearing test says he is only a point below normal so it’s nothing we need to worry about yet but I did force him to move to headphones instead of earbuds for daily use. Umm, he also requested some medicinal hair growth because apparently his beard hasn’t grown back since he last burnt it off. I am a little iffy on giving it to him, feel like it’s kind of deserved if you ask me.” This was supposed to be quick but shit if you didn’t like making the captain laugh. It’s well needed, for both of you.
Price laughs, hard, “Don’t give it to him, it’s probably not in the budget and he can go without a full beard for a bit.” You choke back the giggle while you take your pen from your scrub top and scribble down in the folder. “ Maybe he’s just jealous of your facial hair, Cap.”
“Mine?” He runs his hand against his mutton chops. Fuck me, I wonder what they feel like. You sit up a little straighter at the dirty thought, girl get your shit together. “I don’t think there’s anything to be jealous about a couple white hairs.”
“Nothing wrong with a little salt and pepper.” Why the fuck would you say that.
“Salt and pepper?” His eyes have you frozen in your seat.
“Yeah… like white hairs? Salt and pepper… that's what people call it sometimes, it’s cute.”
“My white hairs are cute?” Oh my God, how the fuck did we even get here.
“No… just you.” I’m too tired for this, what the actual fuck am I doing.
“Ain’t ever been called cute.”
“Handsom, then.” Fuck it, we ball.
It took a lot to make Captain John Price speechless but you, with your hair down, with warm cheeks in his office was enough to get him there. He coughs to try and hide the way he knows his cheeks are reddening. We need to move on, for both our sakes. You take the cue and move onto Simon.
“Simon is also doing great, his sleep has gotten better but since Gaz he has slipped back a little. Nothing a little bit of time won’t solve.” You wish you had more to say, it would help your previous word disappear but you know they won’t. Price remembers everything.
“And what about you Cap? Have you been sleeping a little better?” Ever since you started this job, Price has only ever complained about one thing. His sleep, which was usually due to a bad back or neck which you helped out with once and then never again. He was supposed to come back and see you up until the last mission. “I’m alright for now. I’ll let you know if that changes, love.” He stands up from his desk and moves over to the cabinet on the other side of the room where he opens up a bottle of whiskey and pours it into a cup. “And what about you?”
You’re surprised by the question, I probably look like shit and that's why he’s asking. “I’m alright, just tired… exhausted actually.” You give a soft chuckle at the end, hoping it lessens the weight of what your words truly mean and how you feel finally saying it out loud.
John turns to look at you with the glass in his hand, his other now in his front pocket. His eyes bore down on you. “Are the guys bugging you?”
“No! God, no. They’re sweethearts.” You close the folders and put them back on the coffee table in front of you, rubbing your hands on your thighs. “Is someone on base causing you any trouble?” Price doesn’t seem to be letting up, you’ve been here for months, taking everything in stride so it had to be someone or something making you extra tired then normal.
“It’s nothing.” You try to give him a small smile, thinking about that hot shower that is still waiting for you after this. “It’s something, love.” God, he had to stop with the nickname, it was making you feel light headed. “I will be alright, John. Promise.” He takes a second to rake his eyes up and down your form before moving to take a seat on the other side of the couch.
“Listen, I know the guys and I can be a little tough to work with, intimidating some would say. So, thank you, for everything. Especially with Gaz, I know you went out of your way- more than you usually do.” He’s staring at the glass in his hand instead of at you.
You know this means a lot to him, thanking you. “You’re welcome.” You whisper.
“I really like working with you guys, and you’re a good Captain.” You added, he looked tense and what you said wasn’t a lie. If he wouldn’t come to you for any medical reason you could at least help him with words of kindness. Price turns his head just the tiniest bit to smile at you.
You stifled a yawn, covering your mouth with your hand, “Sorry… I should head out before I fall asleep here.” You move to grab your stuff before Price’s hand comes out to cover your hand. “I understand if you don’t want to talk about it , but if there is anything, you can come to me.”
You glide your eyes from his hand on top of yours to his face where he seems to be trying to speak through his eyes. Anything or anyone.
You use your free hand to trap his, rubbing your thumb across his knuckles. “I know I can, John.” I need to get the fuck out of here. You finish getting your stuff together before heading to the door, throwing out a small Goodnight before closing it behind you.
The walk back to your room is slower, and even quieter somehow. Is he like that with everyone? So caring? Charming? Fucking handsome? And why the fuck did I say that? I called him handsome. I called the captain of my team, handsome. Fucking shit.
You round the corner, head swarming when you collide with someone. The force makes you take a step back to see the doctor who tore you a new one about using that extra epi on Gaz. You have to fight the urge to roll your eyes. “What the fuck are you doing here?” He all but spits out.
“My job, actually.” You clutch the folders to your chest, praying that this will be short and you can finally get to your room.
“Surprising, I thought you just did whatever you wanted, actually.” He crosses his arms and looks you up and down. “By the way, your report got lost again. Need you to rewrite it and hand it in by 8am tomorrow.”
“I have rewritten that report twice already, if you guys keep losing it that seems like a you problem more than a me problem.” You’re fed up. He’s got it out for you and quite frankly you’re too tired to care about how you’re coming off.
He takes a step closer, making sure he’s too close for comfort by normal standards. “Listen here, I don’t care who you sucked off to get this job or who you’re fucking to be able to keep it but when you’re in my medical ward you do what I say. Rewrite the report and get it in by tomorrow.”
You can feel his breath hitting your face and your neck is starting to hurt from careening it away.
“Is there a problem here?” Fuck.
You step away and turn to see Price, it looks like he just came around the corner but the look on his eyes and his tense shoulders tell you he heard the speech this asshole just gave you.
“No problem, just doctor stuff.” The man tries to move around you, purposefully ramming his shoulder into yours before Price takes another step towards him. He freezes for a second before side stepping around the Captain. You watch as he walks back around the corner leaving the two of you alone. Your eyes come back to Price but find he’s already looking at you. “Thank you… for that.” The folders are still clutched to your chest, all the giddiness you had before drained from your body and that familiar feeling of exhaustion seeping back into your bones.
Price looks like he wants to say something but doesn’t know how, he opens his mouth but closes it back up and holds his hand out to give you. Your clawclip. “You left this in my office, I came to give it back.” You breathe a sigh of relief from finally having his eyes off of you even if it were for only a second. “Oh… thank you, I tend to lose them all the time. Pretty sure this is one of my last ones. So, thank you, seriously.” I need to shut up. You reach out and take it out of his hand, your fingers lightly brushing his, they’re calloused but so warm.
“Is that what you were talking about when you said it was nothing?” He’s got his hands in his front pockets and slightly swinging the way he usually does when he’s waiting for something. You swallow, trying to find the words. Should you tell him about the medical ward? The extra hours of work they’ve been making you do? How much shit they’ve been giving you?
“That's the same doctor as before wasn’t it?” His voice is getting rougher, his accent deeper, it finally makes you meet his eyes and give him a slight nod. Those eyes don’t let up, he needs you to speak, needs to know what has been going on, how he can help.
“They’re mad about a protocol I broke to give Gaz that extra shot of epi to help bring him back from cardiac arrest. It worked so I don’t understand why they’re like this but apparently it matters enough to warrant him to act like an asshole.” You take a deep breath, feeling your heartbeat spike with all the tiredness and slight anger you feel flooding your veins. “Things I turn in have gone missing so I end up having to redo them, they lie about where something is so it takes me longer to find it. That was the first time they actually said anything insulting.”
You hear him sigh and his hand comes up to land on your shoulder, his thumb starting slow circles on your collar bones. “I’ll talk to them.” It’s short, curt, final. You catch his hand as he goes to turn, “Wait… just don’t do anything outrageous. I don’t want to lose my job or anything.” Your voice is almost a whisper at this point, Price has to dip his head to be able to fully hear you but he does and his hand in your grasp turns to hold you.
“You’re not leaving. You’re my medic, not theirs.”
That gets you to smile, you like the sound of being his. Even if it is just as a medic.
“And you’ve still gotta get those steaks for us, love.”
He walks you back to your room, his hand at your lower back and a quiet goodnight before closing the door. That hot shower and warm blanket was exactly what you needed. But there is something in your chest, you need something else… him.
Authors Note: Hey guys... long time no see. I got married! Oh and I got my masters with a big girl job and everything. I actually missed writing. I won't be at it like before but I thought wow I hate when there is a story I like and then the author just stops posting, and then I was like holy shit, I do that! So enjoy the updated after almost 3 years!
something something you call for your husband as you make tea in the kitchen and another man's voice answers. slowly you make your way to the living room, where a strange man is wearing your husband's clothes, reading your husband's book, sat in your husband's chair.
"somethin' wrong?" the stranger asks, peering over your husband's reading glasses. he has powder blue eyes, a dark, shaggy beard with flecks of silver glinting in the lamp light, and shoulders so broad they stretch the thin cotton of his everton fc shirt- and even sitting down, you can see that his joggers stop well above his ankles.
you don't think you've ever seen this man before in your life- but something about him is awfully familiar.
"where is my husband?" you ask quietly, voice shaking in obvious fear. the man's mild curiosity flips to deep concern as he puts the book down, not even bothering to mark his place.
"what are you- i'm right here." his brows furrow. "sweetheart? are you all right?"
"you're not my husband." on shaking legs you slowly back away towards the kitchen door. "you're not my david."
"of course i am, who else would i be?" he asks, sounding concerned- but not in the way david would be. david would be irritated, angry, annoyed with you for being 'hysterical'. this man isn't doing that- and what's more, he seems genuinely worried.
"i don't know you. get out of my house." it comes out barely above a whisper, terrified tears springing to your lashes. you can barely comprehend what's happening right now, but the way you see it, your options are one of two things:
one- there is a stranger in your home, pretending to be your (missing) husband and doing a rather poor job of it. your david is not near as gentle or sweet as this- if he was really your husband, he'dve told you to shut up by now. twice, probably.
two- you have suddenly undergone some sort of traumatic brain... thing... that you don't remember, and now your husband appears to you to be kinder, taller, wearing a different face, and speaking in a different voice. your brain is no longer to be trusted, and you're going to have to depend on david as reality's grip on you continues to loosen.
so you've either lost your mind, or you're in serious danger from an intruder. either way, your instinct is to get far away from the man whose presence is causing you so much confusion and distress.
"are you hurt, darling? did you hit your head? did you fall? do you remember?" he asks, brows creased in concern, arms out like he's trying to calm a nervous horse. he's fucking with you, he's got to be. david would've called you names by now- hurtful ones, cruel ones meant to belittle and break the spirit.
the worry in this stranger's voice and written on his face brings your tears spilling over your lashes and onto your cheek. fear and humiliation have you turning on your heel to run, but the stranger is on you faster than you'd expected, arms locking around your waist and reeling you in.
"it's all right. it's okay. just a bump to your head, sweetheart, we'll take you to see someone, get you fixed up. it's all right." he spins you in his arms, pulling you into a tight hug, one hand holding the back of your head as the other rubs up and down your spine. light kisses are peppered against your temple, and it brings another wave of tears to your eyes.
he's an imposter, you're certain of it- and it breaks your heart to realize that a stranger, someone who maybe even wishes to do you harm, is treating you with a gentleness and compassion that you actual husband hadn't shown you in years.
"what do you want?" you ask, voice croaking with emotion. the stranger coos sympathetically at you, petting at your back as he continues to nuzzle against the side of your face.
"i want my best girl t'be well. we'll get you well, love, don't worry. we'll see a doctor, and then maybe i'll take you up to scotland for a few days. i've heard of a place we can rent- out of the way, far from people, a quick walk to the sea. should do your nerves some good, i think." he murmurs softly, determination audible.
it's hard to think like this. you know he's lying, that you're not hallucinating, but parsing out what it is he's actually after seems to be nigh impossible without directly confronting him, and you're not sure that's the best idea. what if he drops the doting, attentive, and concerned charade that you can't help but relish in? on one hand, it would mean that he could decide to hurt you to get what he's after. on the other, well. with your cheek pressed against his shoulder and his broad, warm palm still rubbing comforting circles on your shoulders, it fills a need that your husband left unfulfilled for years.
the realization wrings a pained sob from you, and the man murmurs quiet assurances, sweet words to calm a hysterical woman, all with the patience and warmth you've been so severely lacking.
and you cry all the harder for it.
"i st-still don- don't know what you wa-want from me-hee-hee." the words rattle and shake their way from your mouth, uncertain and afraid- but they're met with more tenderness and gentle reassurance, which makes it all the worse. this is the most danger you've ever been in, and you've never felt more treasured in your life.
"i don't want you afraid, darling- especially not of me." he murmurs between gentle shushes, and god help you, but you really do believe him. you pull back a bit to look at him, and the soft way he looks at you is heartbreaking. when was the last time david looked at you like that? it's been years. you stare up at the stranger's face, still feeling that faint spark of recognition as you gaze up at his face. you remember those eyes and that little mole on the side of his nose- but not where you'd seen them before. it's infuriating, making you feel even crazier than his assertion that he's david.
"please don't hurt me." you plead, looking deep into those beautiful blue eyes. his visible shock almost makes you flinch, but his expression settles into a determined one as he gently cups your face in his hands, thumbs wiping away your tears.
"listen t'me: whatever else you might believe about me, know that i will not hurt you." he tells you, solemn as a funeral, eyes locked onto yours. he tilts his chin to his chest. "i think we'd better get that fresh scottish air in your lungs sooner rather than later. lets pack your bag, darling. come on."
he leads you towards the bedroom, but as you pass the window you notice something- despite the fact that they won't be picked up for another three days, the bins are out, and judging by the way the lid is tilted, stuffed full to the brim.
'david' watches you like a hawk as the two of you pack your bags, telling you to bring as much as you like, that he'll figure out arrangements with your work until this 'mental health crisis' is over- and you wonder if he means to kill you.
"you don't have to be here. you don't have to do this." you plead with him, throwing every clean pair of underwear you have into the bag petulantly. "you can just leave me. just go. live your life, leave me here, it'll be okay. you don't need me."
"yes, i do." the stranger murmurs, pulling you in for another hug and kissing your temple. "i've needed you since i first saw you. it's why i'm here, why i have this ring, isn't it?"
david's ring sits on the man's finger, and in your heart, you know you should grieve- but there's a blockage inside of you preventing it. it could be that fear and confusion have overridden it, it could be that david's callous and cruel behavior eroded away any possibility of it, or it could be that you've actually, factually, broken your brain during the course of this mindfuck of an evening.
the stranger presses a gentle kiss to your lips- and while still fairly chaste, you can feel something in it, a passion that's barely being held back.
"i'm gonna take care of you. we're gonna take care of each other. in sickness and health," he kisses your forehead, "-til death do us part, yeah?"
"yeah." you reply, without knowing why. the way you see it, he's huge, in your space, and either crazy or dangerous or both. fighting isn't an option, and you're not fast or wiley enough to run. freezing didn't work, so fawn it is, you suppose.
"my good girl. lets finish packing and get on our way." he presses another kiss to your mouth, and reaches back to full-handed grope your ass, winking as he lets go to finish looting your husband's closet. it doesn't escape your notice that none of the blue everton shirts get packed into his bag, nor any of the trousers that you suspect also cut off above his ankles.
soon he's got you buckled into the passenger seat, your luggage packed in the boot, and the backseat crammed with a few days worth of food, toilet paper, and general supplies. he reaches over and squeezes your thigh, fingers flexing on the inseam of your trousers, and it sparks a memory.
merseyside derby, a few years ago. david got drunk and started shouting at some liverpool fan who'd done nothing more grievous than breathe the same air as him. he'd ignored your husband entirely, giving you a once-over with powder-blue eyes, smirking slightly when he'd remarked that he thought you'd look even prettier in red.
it had been so long ago, but now here you are, receiving that same look in the front seat of your husband's car, and the memory leaves you breathless.
"we're really doing this?" you ask warily, voice shaking with nerves. how long was he waiting? watching? planning?
"we're really doing this." the stranger confirms warmly, unaware of your recognition and subsequent mental spinout, putting the key in the ignition. the engine turns over, and it feels like a death knell.
"who are you, really?" you ask, voice barely audible over the radio that's just come to life, volume last set by david to mask any 'chatter' you might engage in. the man clicks it off entirely.
"i'm your david, sweetheart. remember?" he asks, but there's a tone to it. a mild warning, and therefore, an acknowledgement of the farce. your blood runs even colder, and your posture stiffens. he pulls the car out, driving you both through the neighborhood in the dead of night, making your way north towards god-knows-what.
pls i’m begging PLEASSSEEEEEE more butcher simon x mother reader
Continuation to this little thing with Butcher!Simon and Single mom!Reader
Thinking about Butcher Simon slowly encroaching in your life, chipping away at the wall piece by piece, till he can fit his big hat through the whole and take a good look around.
Simon likes how careful you are, how you don't let go of your boy no matter what, how even around someone as, now, familiar as Simon you are mindful to keep an eye on your lad. Can't be too careful in a big city when you've got no one to look out for you, no one to soften the blow if it comes to knock the wind out of you.
You mention in passing that the father is not in the picture, only he gets a feeling that the dad was left in the other frame that you squeezed yourself out of the first chance you got, running. Took your boy with you, took his things and his stuffed toy and his favourite book.
Took only a backpack of your own things. Simon saw them, when he got into your apartment while you two were out. A couple sweaters, jeans, one good pair of boots and a coat.
He toys with the idea of rummaging through your underwear drawer, but it wouldn't be fair. You don't have much right now, you are in no position to splurge for more than necessary for your kid. Not even for yourself.
You are a good mom, he thinks, stomach tightening hot and slow, when he lies on your bed for a couple minutes, nose in your pillow. Swallowing your scent, sleep-soft and a little salty with the hint of your sweat.
You must taste delicious, Simon noses at your pillow, hand snaking down to unbuckle his belt. He's been popping up here and there all over the narrow road of your life to offer some extra meat, a helping hand or a kind word. He knows the importance of making himself a safe unchanging fixture in your life.
You don't need no surprises, you need someone dependable. Someone you can rely on and someone who's not going to strain you any further.
Someone you can trust, Simon thinks, scarred palm wrapping around his cock when he presses his face into your pillow. It's hard to breath like that, air hot and cotton stuffing his mouth when he pants into it, stroking himself, calloused finger rubbing the underside of his head, till his hips twitch.
Till he's even hungrier, rocking his hips in the hand, cool air of your bedroom nipping at the hot sensitive skin of his. Your pillow smells like you and Ghost burrows his face in it, so he doesn't breath much, so his head goes light and empty - your careful glances up at his face imprinted on the inside of his eyelids.
You are so good, he murmurs, slurred and wet, drool filling his mouth, gums itching for him to sink his teeth in. Such a good mum, gonna be good to him too, yeah? Gonna let him take care of you in turn, won't you?
Orgasm shudders through him, spills into the tight fist of his hand so it doesn't marr your duvet covers. He didn't bring you anything proper this time, can't go getting too greedy now.
Simon heaves into your pillow, wet spot of his drool forming and fucking hell, he'll need to do something about it before leaving.
You don't have to know that he was there, not yet. Not until he got an actual invitation in your home, marking another goalpost reached.
He tilts his head at you next time you walk into his shop, bundled up in your coat, eyes shiny with glee at the first snow and something in his chest warms up, like a faulty heater that finally got a proper kick to start working.
Maybe it was worth getting sent to early retirement and work right back where he started 15 years ago.
You smile at Simon for the first time since he met you, shoulders no longer as tight and the corners of his lips twitch. Pretty.
Wonder if you are gonna smile at him too when he's got his mouth on your-
"What can I get you today, luv?" He cuts his train of thought before it can reach the station, because the counter is high enough but there is no need to pop a boner out in the open. Can't afford to spook you before the teeth of the steel trap called 'Ghost' close above your head.
"The usual, please." You respond, no longer that scared exhausted thing from the first day in his shop, nowadays you have more and more smalltalk with your favourite butcher. "The weather's chilly today, but God, the snow's absolutely lovely."
He's got to be your favourite, Simon thinks, weighing the meat and like always throws in a little something in addition, no way you are going to any shop other than his. Not like any other dimwit can feed you as good as he does.
"That it is." He just hums in response and glances at your son staring him up. "You take care of yer mum, lad?" Simon asks, eyes flickering to the way your smile widen's when your 3-year old nods immediately.
"He does." You respond instead of your son and the affection in your voice is so thick that Ghost in him tugs the air in, aching to stretch out in your direction and curl around like a big beast that he was. "Don't know what I'd do without him."
Your boy always sticks close to you, watching strangers with curious eyes, his hair disheveled when in the warmth of the shop you take his knitted hat off, tucking it under your arm so he doesn't sweat too much while you two wait.
"Think the feeling's mutual." Simon says, without planning too, but you giggle, short happy sound and something in his brain sparks to life. So that's how you sound when you laugh.
"I sure hope so." You grin at him, eyes crinkling and Simon doesn't know what to do with the traitorous heat in his face when he passes you the meat, grazing your fingers as you take the bag.
How stupid is that?
Simon would like to hear you laugh at things he says for the rest of his empty life.
He watches you leave, eyes following you and your boy walking down the street - his hand in yours as he starts chatting your ear off about something immediately. A chatterbox when he's around his mum, huh?
You are warm in the best way possible, when you look at him and hold the elevator when you spot him in the entrance to your apartment building, eyes crinkling again. Like he's a friend.
Ghost in him itches to crack your locks and sink into the space behind your bedroom door so he can watch you sleep, so he can stay there in close proximity to the light that you emanate, to the family that you have with that little boy, to the prospect of belonging someplace warm and soft.
Could maybe give you another baby, he thinks idly in the evenings, staring at the orange light of his oven. There is beef inside, slowly baking until he knows its gonna be soft and tender enough for you to swallow without chewing. Something else to sustain you, to fill out the hollowed out edges and bring some shine to your eyes.
Being mum is hard, Simon reasons, palms clasped together in his lap. His kitchen is small and dark, only light of his oven softening the shadows around him. And you ain't taking any of his money, even if he offered, he knows that you won't. But you'll take food.
Can't say no to a good bite and if there's something that Simon knows it's meat.
He didn't cook much since he joined military, but nowadays he's got a lot more free time and space in his head that needs to get stuffed with something other than an occasional urge to sharped the knives again and get out in the dark to split someone's skin under his knuckles.
More of a habit, really, his bones aren't used to not getting strained and cracked every once in a while. It's been a minute since he's got an adrenaline crash and he'd like to say that he hates it.
He did.
And then you walked in, nervous and tired, your boy on your hip - head tucked against your shoulder.
Being retired wasn't that bad after it, eh, mate? Ghost hums in the still quiet of his flat, deft fingers wrapping the cooked meal in tinfoil and packing it up for tomorrow.
Maybe he could talk you into eating with him if you go all shy on him all of a sudden, his mind continues the chain of thought, weaving a picture for him to press his face into. The almost of it stratching over his skin like saran wrap, tight around the misaligned bridge of his nose, pressing insistently over his cheekbones.
You probably ain't letting him handfeed you, but a bloke can dream, right?
For now he could settle for just watching you eat something he made. Cutting into bite-sized pieces for your boy if he'll be with you tomorrow.
Good thing Simon so used to being painfully patient, swallowing down every urge and every want, choking down the impulse to rush in and make a mess of a perfectly good timeline of this relationship.
Hell, was he even ten years younger, he would have probably already squeezed himself in your doors, inviting himself over to your dinner.
Would have taken all of the space and then some, would have molded his whole body against every corner of your life, smothering even the flicker of resistance.
Ghost would have moved in with you while you were sleeping, knowing that you aren't going to outright tell him to leave.
Ghost would have bitten off the entire hand if you gave him a single finger and then he would go for the throat, sinking his teeth in to rip at the carotid.
But Simon isn't Ghost anymore.
And Simon doesn't want to smother your flame. He'd like to warm himself up on it and for that you need to let him closer. For that, he'd need to be patient for you.
He sucks his teeth, inspecting the packed dish. Makes sure nothing's going to leak.
Gotta make a good first impression with this small offering, right? So when he comes back with more you wouldn't have the itch to pretend you've got to run.
He sighs heavily, eyeing the clock the next day, restless urge within him growing when you don't come at your usual 4 o'clock. Should've been here by now, he knows how long it takes you to get from your job to daycare to him and then home.
Simon walked the route a couple times, following you and your son, just to time it for himself. A little self assurance, can't be too prepared in matters of war and love.
When the bell above his entrance door sways, alerting him, Ghost in him is scratching slow and annoyed to go see what's wrong and what caused the deviation in usual routine when usually there isn't any.
"The usual, luv?" He calls out, walking out of the backroom, wipes his hands off on the towel before he turns to you (knows better than to come in with his hands bloody and shoulders tense). "You'r a bit later today." Simon points out, glancing at the spot you usually occupy by his cash register.
You aren't smiling at him, is the first thing that pops into his head before he assesses the situation and wordlessly opens the latch to herd you behind the counter.
Sits you down on a stool, murmuring 'come on, luv' so you'd let him help you out of the coat. Maybe the roast will come in handy after all.
Just not the way he hoped for.
You are quiet and glassy-eyed, your eyelids swollen and hands trembling when you let Simon tuck you behind the counter and silently accept the fork that he passes you.
"This is delicious, Simon." You say after another few minutes of chewing, fat tears welling in your eyes when you look at him and it's not his roast, Ghost thinks. He ain't that good at cooking to make you actually shed a tear because of it.
"Somethin' happened?" He just asks, looking you in the eyes and you look back down at the plastic tupperware he brought out for you. The meat is in fact good.
Really really good.
Your first meal of the day, you remember distantly and sniffle, taking another bite.
It isn't right to burden Simon with your problems, not when he has already been good to you since you walked into his shop. But you just...you just want to tell someone before you might have to run again.
You don't look at him when you do, words spilling about the man you have left behind, about the way money was never enough, about the yelling and the smashed dishes.
About him throwing the dish at you.
You've dodged it, you joke, fingers tight around the fork and Simon sits there, quiet, his eyes a physical weight on your nose.
But your boy was crying and then you noticed that he's got glass in his hair, you share after a moment, throat tight. You had to spend an evening just picking out all the shards to make sure he's not going to cut himself on it.
"Had to go after that." You murmur, swallowing another wave of tear and Simon nods. "We left before he came back and I just...small country, I suppose. He wants to meet up and says that its his son too, that I can't keep him from his child and-" You suck the breath in, lightheaded and ice cold with terror, voice cracking in half.
Simon makes a quiet affirming sound, his wide palm landing on your back and you blink through the tears, trying not to sob again when he slowly pulls you a little closer, giving you a hug.
It will be embarassing later how you just sob into his sweater, chest gurgling with tears and panic, arms wrapped around the big butcher who has been so nice to you and it's not fair, it's so unfair that you have to leave everything again.
"D'you want to see the bloke again?" Simon asks, tone calm as he hunches his shoulders to let you cry into him as much as you need to. "And do you want your boy to see 'im again, luv?" He adds, palm stroking your shivering back.
When you shake your head, hiccuping, Ghost nods and presses a small kiss to your hair, not tightening his hold on you because this is not what you need right now.
What you need is for the problem to go away.
"Where'd you leave the lad, luv?" Ghost murmurs, voice coarse and low when you finally look up at him and explain that you left your son with a friend from work because she lives nearby. That you didn't want to take any chances if you run into your ex outside.
If he maybe waits for you back at your flat.
"I feel so fuckin' daft." You mumble, suddenly angry at yourself and Ghost huffs out air, kisses your cheek then, eyes calm and dark.
"You'r not daft, luv. Go to your friend, okay? I finish in 'bout an hour. I'll walk you two home. Check for any...surprises." He doesn't offer, but state, wrapping up the rest of the roast for you.
Ghost kisses your other cheek as goodbye, knowing that you are too out of it to process everything right now. And that's okay.
You've got Simon, don't you?
And Simon's got a couple mates that still go all dark behind the eyes at the offer of doing some work in their spare time. Something a bit off the books for their lieutenant.
The phone gets picked up on the second ring, cheery voice on the other end familiar like his own right hand.
"Didn't pack yer bags yet, did you, Johnny?" Ghost in him humms, phone pressed between the shoulder and his ear. "Got a bit of a rush job for you 'nd Garrick."
Soap on the other end laughs like the mean bastard he is, promising to wake up Kyle and be there in ten, all too happy that their trip to Manchester isn't going to be boring after all.
"We goin' for a ride, l.t.?" Johnny asks like he knows the answer and Simon thinks for a moment.
"No rides." Ghost says, dragging his apron off. "Got an hour to get it done. I've got dinner plans."
Simon doesn't know much about how good families work, doesn't always know what's the right thing to say, but Ghost in knows what to do when there is someone breathing his sweetheart's air and dimming her shine.
"Tell Garrick he's on clean up tonight." He says and sergeant grumbles in the back of the phone call, audibly sleepy.
After all, Kyle did tell him a couple years back that he always wanted to see if anyone other than Ghost could get out after getting buried alive.
20K words, Simon’s hair has grown out, reader wears glasses, Simon doesn’t know how to dance, smut, the fluffiest fluff, angst, size kink, Simon is huge, pee mentioned, Simon is filthy but we all knew that. Tell me if I missed any tags.
He was four years old when he stole your crayons.
Not all of them. Just the good ones. The red one. The yellow one. The bright, sunflower-gold one that you'd been saving to colour the sun in the corner of your drawing, the way all four-year-olds drew the sun — a circle in the corner, rays shooting out like a child's idea of joy.
You looked at him across the low art table in that bright little preschool room that smelled of poster paint and digestive biscuits.
He was stocky even then.
Chubby-cheeked and heavy-set. A thick, sturdy little boy who sat with his legs wide and his fat fists curled around your crayons like he'd earned them.
He wasn't even looking at you.
He was colouring something — a car, maybe, or a blob that might have been a dog — and the yellow crayon moved in big, purposeful strokes across his paper.
You did not cry.
You considered it.
Then you leaned across the table and took them back.
He looked up.
Brown eyes. Even at four, they were startling — dark and serious and far too watchful for a boy his age.
He stared at you.
You stared back.
Then he slid the gold crayon back across the table to you, said nothing, and went back to his drawing.
His name was Simon.
You would not learn that until the register was called the following morning. But you remembered his eyes before you remembered his name.
— ✦ —
He broke your glasses in Year Two.
Not on purpose — or so you believed, for most of your life, until you were old enough to accept that
Simon Riley did very few things without purpose.
He knocked into you in the corridor outside the dining hall, your plastic NHS frames hitting the linoleum floor, one arm snapping clean off at the hinge.
You stood there, the world going soft and blurry at the edges the way it always did without them, and you felt the particular, humiliating sting of being unable to see properly — the vulnerability of it, the indignity.
Simon picked up the frames. Looked at them. Looked at you.
He didn't say sorry straight away. He examined the break with the seriousness of a boy who was already, at seven, very careful about what he said and when he said it. Then, "I'll carry your bag till they're fixed."
"You broke my glasses," you told him like he didn’t know.
"I know." He nodded.
"That's not the same as fixing them."
"No," he agreed. "But it's what I've got."
He carried your bag for three days. And when your mum brought the repaired frames in on the fourth morning, he handed the bag back without ceremony, turned, and went to join his mates by the football cage. No further apology. No acknowledgement that anything had occurred between you at all.
That afternoon, you kicked over his sandcastle in the playground.
He watched you do it. Didn't say a word.
You felt better.
And somehow, after that, you were friends.
— ✦ —
He couldn't read very well. You figured this out in Year Three, during the round-robin reading in class — when the teacher went along the rows and each child read a sentence aloud.
You noticed the way Simon's jaw set and his hands went flat on the desk the closer it got to his turn. The way his eyes moved across the page, laboured and slow, tracking words like they were things to be wrestled rather than known.
He got through his sentence. Barely. His face was blank when he sat back, the particular blankness he'd already learned to wear — that carefully constructed nothing that meant everything was fine when everything was not fine at all.
You didn't say anything about it. Not then. You were eight years old, not stupid.
What you did was start reading with him at break time. You presented it as something you needed — you told him you were practising for a reading competition and needed an audience.
Simon was not fooled. He was never fooled, not really.
But he sat down with you on the bench by the library door and listened while you read, and then slowly, carefully, you handed the book to him and asked what he thought happened next, and he had to read ahead to find out.
It took most of the school year. But by the summer he was reading chapter books. He never thanked you. He did start saving you a seat on the library bench every break time, and that was the same thing.
— ✦ —
He played football and rugby.
You read on the grass bank above the field.
It became a kind of institution — the ritual of your shared proximity without shared activity. Simon on the pitch, broad and determined and already bigger than the other boys by Year Five, already moving with that particular physicality that seemed less like playing and more like declaration.
And you on the bank above, your book open, your reading glasses (a better pair now, tortoiseshell) perched on your nose, half-reading and half watching without ever quite admitting to the watching.
He always knew you were there. He didn't do anything about it. But sometimes, when he scored, he'd look up at the bank first before he looked anywhere else.
You told yourself you were only there because the grass was nice and the light was good.
You were not a good liar, even then.
— ✦ —
The boy's name was Daniel Holt and he pushed you over in the playground in Year Five because you'd refused to give him the answers to the maths homework.
You'd said no three times and the third time he pushed you and you went down hard on your palms and your knees, the concrete was unforgiving.
You were crying before you'd fully registered what had happened. Not dramatically — small, shocked, indignant tears, the kind that arrive before the pain does.
Simon was there before a teacher was. You didn't even see where he came from. One moment the playground was its ordinary mid-morning noise, and the next Daniel Holt had a split lip and Simon Riley was standing over him with blood on his knuckles and a look on his face that was completely, utterly calm.
The calm was the frightening part. Even at ten.
He got three days at home for it. He spent the first afternoon sitting on your front step, eating crisps, because he knew you'd be furious with him and wanted to face it head-on.
You were furious. You told him he was an idiot. He told you Daniel Holt had it coming. You told him violence wasn't the answer. He told you Daniel Holt wasn't going to touch you again.
He was right. Daniel Holt never came near you again.
You didn't thank him either. You went inside and made him a sandwich, and that was the same thing.
— ✦ —
Secondary school arrived like a change in weather — everything slightly larger, slightly louder, the corridors longer and noisier, the stakes somehow higher and more ambiguous all at once. You arrived with a bag so heavy your shoulder ached within the first hour: your textbooks, yes, but also the extracurricular books you carried everywhere, the extra notepad you used for non-school thoughts, the six different highlighters you colour-coded by subject.
Simon took the bag from you on the third day without asking.
"I can carry it," you told him.
"I know," he said.
He slung it over his shoulder like it weighed nothing, which for him it probably didn't. He'd grown over the summer — not just taller, though he was that, but broader, thicker through the shoulders in a way that made him look like a man playing a boy, trying the shape of it on. He wore it well, even at eleven. He wore everything like he'd already decided what he was and was simply waiting for the world to catch up.
He carried your bag when it was heavy, and it was frequently heavy. He did it without comment and without making you feel small for needing it. That was the thing about Simon — he never made you feel small. He made other people feel small, sometimes, when they deserved it. But not you. Never you.
— ✦ —
The bruises were never from rugby.
You knew by the second year of secondary.
You were not naive — you had read enough, observed enough, understood enough about the world to recognise the shape of what was happening in Simon Riley's house even though he never said a word about it.
The bruises were in the wrong places for rugby. They appeared in the wrong season. They were around his ribs and his arms and once, memorably, along his jaw, and he came to school the Monday after the jaw bruise with that face — that blank, carefully constructed nothing face — and you sat next to him at lunch and said nothing at all.
You said nothing because there was nothing you could do. You were twelve. You were a girl with a book bag and highlighter pens and absolutely no power over the man who was hurting your best friend, and knowing that — the impotence of it, the helpless, hollow ache of caring about someone you could not protect — was the first truly adult pain you ever felt.
What you could do was this: you could make sure he had somewhere to go.
Your mother, who was perceptive in the quiet way that some mothers are, never asked questions when Simon turned up at the back door on a Sunday evening or a Wednesday after school.
She just set another plate.
Your house became a refuge without anyone naming it as such. Simon did his homework at your kitchen table, ate your mother's cooking, watched telly with your family, and slept on your sofa sometimes when the option was presented naturally enough that it didn't feel like charity.
— ✦ —
You got your period for the first time on a Tuesday in November, in Year Nine. In the school toilets, third period, when you were thirteen years old and the day had been entirely ordinary right up until it wasn't.
The particular cocktail of shock and pain and embarrassment and the specific existential bewilderment of being a person whose body was doing something enormous without prior adequate notice left you sitting on the closed toilet lid crying in a way you hadn't cried in years.
You got out your Nokia. That familiar brick of a phone, the keypad worn smooth at the number five. You typed Simon's number and pressed call before you'd properly decided to.
He picked up on the second ring. "Yeah."
"Simon." Your voice came out wrong. Too thin.
A beat. When he spoke again his voice had changed — quieter, more careful. "Where are you?"
"Girls' toilets. Near the science block."
"Right," he said. "Stay there."
He appeared outside the girls' toilets seven minutes later — you could hear him through the door, his voice low and flat, telling a Year Eight girl to go use the other ones — and then he was there, right there on the other side of the door, talking to you through it in that steady, even way he had when he wanted to be calm on your behalf.
"You're alright," he said. “Do you need me to go to the office?"
"No," you managed. "I need — I don't know what I need."
"I'll get you something from the vending machine," he said, that Manchester accent of his low and unhurried. "And I'll text your mum."
When you came out of the toilets twenty minutes later, looking wrung-out and clutching what the school nurse had provided, Simon was leaning against the wall. He looked at you for a moment — took you in, the way he always did, that comprehensive, assessing look — and then he stepped forward and kissed your cheek. Quick. Certain. His mouth warm and deliberate against your cheekbone.
"You're alright," he said again. He said it like a fact. Like he was making it true by saying it.
You cried a bit more, for different reasons, and he pretended not to notice.
— ✦ —
He was captain of the rugby team by Year Ten. It suited him — the leadership, the sense of purpose, the structure of it.
You went to his matches sometimes, wrapped in a scarf on the touchline, and watched him move across the pitch with that same quality you'd noticed on the primary school field: less like playing, more like declaration.
He was ferocious and focused and occasionally frightening, and the other boys deferred to him not just because he was bigger than them but because he had the kind of authority that doesn't need to be announced.
Afterwards he'd find you on the touchline, still carrying that quality — coiled, alert — and it would take him a few minutes to come back to himself. To come back to you.
"Good game," you'd say.
"Yeah," he'd say.
And then slowly, the set of his shoulders would ease, and he'd become Simon again. Your Simon. The one who stole your crayons and carried your bag and ate your mother's shepherd's pie like it was sacred.
— ✦ —
He could make you laugh. This was not a small thing.
Simon Riley was not, by general consensus, a funny person. He was serious and quiet and his face in repose looked like a man carrying a private weather system. But he had a dry, deadpan wit that he deployed rarely and precisely, and it landed, every time, like a key in a lock made specifically for it.
He knew how to make you laugh because he'd spent years learning you. The specific frequency of your humour. The things that made you dissolve into giggles rather than just smile. He deployed his wit with the same precision he deployed everything else, and the result was that when Simon Riley made you laugh — really laugh, the helpless, breathless kind — it felt like being given something he didn't give to anyone else.
Which, you would eventually understand, was accurate.
— ✦ —
His name was Ryan Marsh and he was your first kiss, in the park on a Friday evening in Year Ten, and it was fine. It was nice, even. Ryan was sweet and nervous and smelled of his older brother's aftershave and the kiss lasted approximately forty seconds.
Ryan Marsh had a broken nose the following Monday.
Simon maintained, with total conviction, that Ryan had walked into a door. Ryan, to his credit, corroborated this story completely.
You did not push the matter, partly because you had no concrete evidence and partly because some part of you — the part that read on the grass bank and watched the pitch and noticed when Simon looked up at the bank before he looked anywhere else — felt something that was not entirely uncomplicated about it.
You and Ryan Marsh did not have a second kiss. You told yourself it was because the chemistry hadn't been right.
You were getting a bit better at lying to yourself, by fourteen. But only a bit.
— ✦ —
GCSEs arrived the way all important things arrived — with more weight than you'd expected and less warning than you'd have liked.
Year Ten and Eleven were the years you restructured Simon's entire approach to studying, methodically and patiently, the same way you'd helped him learn to read, finding the approach that worked for how his mind moved.
Simon was not unintelligent.
He was, in fact, formidably sharp in ways that didn't translate easily to an exam paper: quick to read people, quick to understand systems, possessed of a spatial and strategic intelligence that you recognised and admired even as you taught him how to write it down in ways that the mark scheme would accept.
He sat with you at your kitchen table night after night — your mother quietly replenishing the tea,— and you explained things in the language that made sense to his brain rather than the language of the textbook.
He sat with you at lunch during school hours and glared at anyone who called you a nerd. The glaring was extremely effective. Simon Riley's face, by fifteen, was a significant deterrent.
His GCSE results, when they arrived, were good. Better than anyone who knew his circumstances might have expected from a boy who'd had so much working against him.
He rang you on the house phone when he opened the results envelope. He didn't say much. His voice, when he spoke, was different — something in it unguarded, the Manchester in it softer somehow, without the armour it usually carried.
"Couldn't have done it without you," he said.
"You did it," you told him firmly. "I just held the torch."
"Still needed the torch."
You smiled so hard your face ached. "Go celebrate, Simon."
"Yeah," he said. And then, quieter, "Thanks, sunshine."
— ✦ —
He was an apprentice at the butcher's on Renshaw Street after school — learning the trade with the same focused, physical competence he brought to everything else, solid and unhurried, his big hands learning new kinds of precision. You had a job at the bookshop two streets over.
On his lunch breaks you would walk over with a sandwich and a packet of crisps, and you'd sit on the low wall around the side of the shop while he ate and you talked about nothing in particular and everything in general.
He had sawdust on his boots and you'd have ink on your fingers from pricing stickers, and you'd sit in the thin afternoon light talking about books and people and where things might go from here, and it was the most ordinary, irreplaceable thing in the world.
You didn't know, then, that you were storing it up. You didn't know you were in the middle of something finite.
You were seventeen and you thought you had time.
— ✦ —
It was the eleventh of September, 2001.
You were at work when it happened — the bookshop had a small television in the back room, and you watched the footage with your hand pressed over your mouth and the world rearranging itself into a new shape around you.
Simon came to you that evening. He didn't knock — he had a spare key, had done for years — and you heard him come in and go into the kitchen and fill the kettle, the sound of him so familiar and domestic and real that something in your chest loosened a fraction.
He brought you tea. He sat on the sofa beside you and you watched the news together in silence, and at some point your head found his shoulder without either of you deciding it had.
"I'm going to join up," he said. Not asking. Telling.
You lifted your head from his shoulder. Frowned at him. "Join up what?"
"The military."
The word landed in the room and stayed there. You looked at his face — that flat, certain expression he wore when he'd already decided something — and you felt the ground shift slightly under you.
"Simon. You're seventeen."
"You can join at sixteen with parental consent," he said. Straightforward, as though he'd already looked into it. Which of course he had. "Seventeen without."
"That's—" You stopped. Started again. "You've thought about this before today."
"Yeah."
Of course he had. You could see it now, the shape of it — this was not a reaction to the footage on the television, not a hot, impulsive thing. This was something Simon had been building toward without telling you. The structure of it. The purpose. The particular kind of belonging that came from being part of something larger than yourself. You'd always known he'd go toward something like this. You'd just hoped, without ever quite admitting to the hoping, that it might be further away.
"You're not going to try to talk me out of it." Not a question.
"Would it work?"
He held your gaze. "No."
"Then no," you said. Your voice was very steady. You were proud of it. "I'm not."
He was quiet for a long moment. The television continued its awful repetition. Then his arm came around your shoulders, heavy and warm, and he pulled you in closer against his side.
You stayed like that until the tea went cold.
— ✦ —
The train station was grey and noisy with other leavings, other arrivals, other people in the middle of things.
Simon stood in front of you on the platform with his kit bag and his big, careful hands and the face he'd spent seventeen years learning to keep blank, and it occurred to you, not for the first time and not for the last, that you loved him.
That you had loved him in different quantities and different registers for most of your life. That you did not know how to say it and were not sure it would do either of you any good if you did.
So you didn't say it.
You went up on your toes and you hugged him — truly hugged him, arms around his neck, your face pressed against his jaw — and he held you back with both arms, the kit bag dropping to the platform, and he was so solid and warm and real that you memorised it.
"Don't be an idiot," you told him, muffled.
He made a sound that was almost a laugh. Almost. "Best I can do is try." The Manchester in his voice, low and warm and his.
"Simon."
"I know," he said quietly, against your temple. "I know, sunshine."
You stepped back. You held it together. He picked up his bag and he walked toward the platform and at the door of the train he turned, and looked at you standing there with your glasses and your coat and your hands pressed together in front of you, and for a second you saw something in his face that wasn't blank at all.
Then he was gone.
You cried on the way home. Proper, ugly crying, in the front seat of your mother's car, while she drove and said nothing and passed you a tissue.
You cried because you thought you might never see him again. Because the world had cracked open on a Tuesday in September and people were going toward the fracture and Simon Riley was one of them.
You cried because you never told him.
— ✦ —
He sent a birthday card every year.
They arrived with no return address and postmarks from places you'd never heard of, and sometimes they were late and sometimes they were so early you suspected he'd sent them weeks in advance in case he couldn't later.
They were always plain — Simon Riley was not a man who browsed the sentimental section — white or cream envelopes, the kind of card that was almost generic, and inside: his handwriting, which had improved vastly from the boy who'd struggled across the page in Year Three, and always the same thing. Your name at the top. Happy Birthday, sunshine. And then: S.
Just S.
Like he was still close enough that you'd know exactly who that meant. Like the initial was sufficient.
It was.
You sent his birthday gifts to a P.O. box he'd given you, wrapped carefully, the tag always: From your best friend. You didn't know if he received them all. You sent them anyway. It felt important to keep sending them — to maintain the thread, even when you couldn't see both ends of it.
— ✦ —
Thirty-four years old now.
You have no husband. You had come close, once — a man named Patrick who had been perfectly acceptable in every measurable way and who had wanted to marry you and had probably deserved someone who could give him more of herself than you could manage.
You had not been fair to Patrick. You knew that. You had been in love with someone else for most of your adult life, and even with the someone else absent and silent and possibly dead, there wasn't room for anyone else.
You have no children, though you wanted them. The timeline on that was becoming its own quiet ache, the kind you didn't prod too often.
You have a job that pays the bills and not much else — admin in an office building that smells of carpet cleaner and recycled air, the kind of work that requires enough of your brain to stop it from wandering but not enough to satisfy it.
You have an apartment that is functional and yours and that you have tried to make cozy, with books on every surface and plants that are mostly surviving and a kitchen you actually cook in.
It is not the house. It is not the house you told Simon about when you were sixteen and lying in his back garden on a summer evening, staring up at the sky.
No birthday card for five years now.
Five years of the particular, specific silence that was different from all the silences before, because the silences before had been interrupted. Annually, reliably, he had broken them.
Five years of nothing had the texture of conclusion. Of a chapter closing. And you had reached the point — slowly, painfully, with the kind of acceptance that doesn't feel like acceptance but feels like exhaustion — where you were fairly certain Simon Riley was dead.
Your heart ached for your best friend in the low, constant way of grief that has become so familiar it's almost structural.
You carried it the way you carried other things, quietly, with your spine straight.
Which is why you are sitting across from a man named — it didn't matter, it really didn't matter what his name was — on what your colleague Debbie had described as 'a perfectly nice date with a perfectly nice man' and trying to remember what it felt like to be interested in your own life.
The man sitting across from you was the complete opposite of Simon Riley.
He was trim and well-dressed and had the kind of face that was handsome in a way that required no effort to appreciate and inspired no particular feeling from you.
He had been talking for, by your reckoning, forty-seven minutes. In that time he had covered: his career (impressive, in his telling), his car (expensive, in his telling), his last holiday (exotic, in his telling), and his general philosophy on modern dating (nuanced, in his telling).
He had not asked about your job. He had not asked about your books or the one peeking out of your handbag; the one he'd glanced at and not commented on. He had not asked if your pasta was nice, which it was, actually, genuinely nice, and you'd have told him so if he'd asked. He had not asked you almost anything, come to think of it.
Simon Riley, who spoke perhaps a tenth as many words as this man, had always asked.
Simon Riley had always wanted to know. Not because it was polite. Because he actually, genuinely, in the particular way of people who care about very few things very deeply — wanted to know.
You excused yourself to use the bathroom and stood at the sink running cold water over your wrists and looking at your own reflection, and you thought: this is fine.
This is a perfectly nice evening with a perfectly nice man. This is what moving forward looks like. This is what being a person in the world, a person with a life and a future and reasonable expectations of company, looks like.
You dried your hands. You went back to the table. He had ordered himself another drink without asking if you wanted anything.
You finished your pasta and smiled at appropriate intervals and thought about Simon Riley and felt, as you so often felt, quietly furious at him for being gone.
— ✦ —
The birthday card arrived on a Thursday morning.
You almost missed it entirely — it was tucked between a pizza delivery leaflet and something from your energy supplier, the cream envelope almost camouflaged by the mundane. You shuffled through the post on autopilot and then stopped.
Your name, in handwriting you would have recognised anywhere, would have recognised in your sleep, had recognised in your bones for thirty years.
You sat down on the bottom stair. Your legs suddenly uneasy.
Your hands were not steady.
The envelope opened. The card was white. Plain. Almost generic.
Inside:
Happy Birthday, sunshine.
I'm sorry it's been so long.
I'll explain everything.
Come, if you want to.
If you can stand the sight of me.
Below that, an address. Three towns over. A postcode you didn't recognise.
And then, at the bottom, the way it had always been at the bottom: S.
You sat on the bottom stair for a very long time.
Then you got up, went to your room, and started thinking about what to wear.
— ✦ —
You plucked up the nerve to go on a Saturday.
The drive took forty minutes and you spent most of it trying to manage yourself — talking yourself through reasonable expectations (he is alive, that is enough, start there), warning yourself against things you could not control (the five years, the silence, the way your hands were doing that unsteady thing again), cataloguing everything practical (the address, the map).
The street was quiet. Semi-rural, the kind of neighbourhood that sits between things — between town and country, between the ordinary and the aspirational. The houses were spread out, set back from the road, each with its own front garden and its own character.
You parked. You looked at the address. You looked up.
And you stopped breathing.
It was a beautiful house.
Large, substantial and solid, the kind of house that had been built to last. White painted render, clean and bright in the afternoon light. A white picket fence surrounding the front garden, which was full of flowers. Roses climbing the gatepost. Lavender edging the path. Foxgloves and dahlias and great loose clusters of something purple you couldn't name from here. The kind of garden that had been planted with intention, tended with care, left to be a little wild in the best way.
A porch. And a porch swing, painted white, with a yellow cushion on it.
And flying from the corner of the roof, bright against the blue afternoon sky: the Union flag.
You sat very still in the driver's seat.
You were sixteen years old. It was a summer evening and you were lying in Simon's back garden on an old sleeping bag, looking up at the sky. He was beside you in the way he was always beside you — solid, quiet, taking up exactly the right amount of space. You'd been talking about the future the way teenagers do, in great floating hypotheticals that feel more like weather than plans.
"What kind of house?" he'd asked. He asked follow-up questions always, quietly, wanting the specifics. It was one of the things about him you loved.
And you'd described it. A big house, not ostentatious but real — space for books and for people and for a garden that did what it wanted within reason. A white fence, because you'd always liked them. A porch with somewhere to sit. A flag, because you were — despite everything — proud of where you were from.
Simon had been quiet for a long moment.
"Okay," he'd said. Just: okay.
You had thought he was humouring you.
You had not thought — you had not let yourself think — what it might mean, that he was going to do anything about it.
You got out of the car. Your legs were not entirely reliable. You held the gate and walked up the path — lavender brushing your hand where it grew close, the scent of it too perfect, almost staged — and you stopped at the foot of the porch steps.
The door opened.
He had to duck.
That was the first thing you noticed. The physical fact of him, the sheer size of him, his shoulders nearly touching the doorframe on both sides simultaneously, the automatic dip of his head as he stepped through onto the porch.
He straightened.
The afternoon light landed on him and you had to spend a moment recalibrating, because the last time you'd seen Simon Riley he had been seventeen years old with sawdust on his boots and a train ticket in his hand, and this man —
This man.
The white button-down shirt was simple, the sleeves rolled to the elbow, and from his left wrist to well past the roll of the sleeve his forearm was dark with ink — a sleeve of tattoos, intricate and considered. A whole geography of imagery that you couldn't read from here but would, you thought, take time to learn.
His right wrist carried a watch. His black slacks were fitted close enough that you could see the muscle of his thighs pulling the fabric with every shift of his weight, and his shoes — loafers, black with gold buckles, completely unexpected and somehow exactly right — were precise.
His hair. A dark sandy blonde, longer than military specification presumably allowed and slicked back from his face, which meant you could see all of it, his whole face; the angles that had sharpened from boy to man, the jaw, the set of his brow, and those eyes. Those brown eyes that had been watching you since you were four years old and had never, not once, looked at you with anything less than complete attention.
He was raking those eyes over you now. Slowly. With the same quality he'd always had — that comprehensive, unhurried assessment that somehow never felt like being measured — and his hands were in his pockets and he was standing there like that, on the porch he'd built or bought or arranged specifically around a description you'd given him at sixteen.
He looked like something out of a magazine and like Simon all at once.
You were going to murder him.
"Hi, sunshine."
His voice. Lower than you remembered, rougher, carrying all the years he'd lived since you last heard it. That Manchester accent — still there, unmistakably, that warm northern flatness underneath everything, the vowels shaped by a city, by a street, by a particular kind of upbringing that no amount of training had entirely smoothed out.
That nickname, in that voice, in that low, deliberate way he'd always said it: like you were his.
Like it was a prayer.
You opened your mouth. And you closed it. And you looked at him — this enormous, tattooed, stupidly handsome man who had stood on your mother's doorstep at twelve years old with bruises he didn't mention, who had kissed your cheek at thirteen and broken Ryan Marsh's nose at fourteen and waved goodbye from a train platform at seventeen and then sent you birthday cards from the edges of the world for a decade and then stopped for five years —
"Five years," you said. Your voice was very quiet.
Something moved in his face.
"I-,"
"I thought you were dead." You snapped cutting him off.
"I figured you would’ve."
"Simon."
"I know, sunshine." He said it the same way he'd always said things he couldn't argue with — not deflecting, not dismissing, just absorbing. The Manchester vowels in his voice like a hand on your shoulder. "I'll explain everything. I promise. All of it. Whatever you want to know."
You looked at him.
He looked at you.
The afternoon settled around the house, around the garden that was your garden in your own sixteen-year-old description, around the flag and the porch swing and the lavender and all of it, and the distance between you on the path and him on the porch steps was perhaps four feet and thirty years and five years of silence and a whole life of choosing not to say the one true thing.
"You built me the house?" you asked, whispering it. Like you were afraid to say it.
He was quiet for a moment. Then, "Bought it. Had the garden done the way you said."
"Simon." Your heart ached.
"You said lavender at the edges," he said. His voice was completely level. "You said a porch with somewhere to sit. You said you wanted to see the flag from the garden."
You pressed your hand to your mouth.
The rage was still there — it was not going anywhere quickly. The five years of it, the grief of it — but underneath it, something else. Something that had been there since you were four years old at a preschool art table, larger and quieter and more permanent than anything else you'd ever felt.
"You were sixteen," he said. As though this explained it. "You told me what you wanted. I just..." He stopped. Started again. "I wanted to be enough first. I wanted to have what you needed."
There was a long silence. A bee moved through the lavender. Somewhere a few streets away, a lawnmower hummed.
"Come inside," Simon said. "I'll make you tea. And I'll tell you everything."
You looked at him on the porch of the house he'd built you from a word, and you thought: you absolute idiot. You wonderful, impossible, infuriating man. You thought I'd stopped. You thought thirty years of this was something you could be enough for eventually, like it was a bar to clear, like there was a version of you I was waiting on instead of just —
Instead of just you. Always just you.
The lavender brushed your hand again. You walked up the steps and he looked down at you with those brown eyes that had never once left you.
"Hi, Simon," you said.
Something happened in his face. Something opened.
"Hi, sunshine," he said, his hand coming to the small of your back to guide you inside.
He made the tea.
You stood in the kitchen of a house that smelled of fresh paint and cedar and something faintly floral from the garden drifting through the open window over the sink, and you watched Simon Riley move around it like he'd always lived here — filling the kettle, finding the mugs without opening the wrong cupboard, knowing where the teabags were — and you thought: how long. How long has he been here, in this house he bought for you, learning where everything lives, waiting.
You sat at the kitchen table. It was a good table, heavy oak, the kind built to last and you ran your thumb along the grain of it and tried to arrange your feelings into some kind of order and failed.
Simon set the mug in front of you. Milk in last, the way you'd always taken it, which he knew because he'd made you approximately four thousand cups of tea over the course of your lives. He sat down across from you, his own mug between his big hands, and looked at you.
You looked back.
The kitchen light was warm and it caught the angles of his face. The jaw, the brow, the slight crook in his nose that was new, or newer, the result of something you didn't know about and weren't sure you wanted to.
He was watching you with that particular quality of attention he'd always had. Complete. Patient. Like you were the only thing in the room worth looking at.
"You're not wearing your glasses," he said.
You blinked. Of all the things. "No."
"Contacts?"
"For about ten years now, yes."
He was quiet for a moment, studying your face with that same unhurried attention, "I missed them."
"You missed my glasses?" You say with the deadpan tone you'd perfected over the years.
"Tortoiseshell ones," he said. "Used to push them up your nose when you were concentrating." He took a gulp of his tea, Adam's apple bobbing when he swallowed.
You stared at him. Eighteen years. Eighteen years of distance and war and God knows what else, and he missed your glasses. "Simon."
"Just saying."
"You are unbelievable." You scoff.
"The contacts suit you," he said, and the corner of his mouth moved — barely, almost nothing, but you'd spent your whole life reading that face and you caught it. "Everything suits you. But I liked the glasses."
"Stop it." You snap.
"Stop what?"
"Whatever that is," you said, and you pointed at his face, at the not-there-almost-smile, at the quality of his voice when he said everything suits you, at all of it. "You don't get to do that. You've been — Simon, you've been gone. You've been gone for eighteen years and for five of them, I thought you were dead." Your voice stayed steady, which surprised you. You'd expected it to crack on that. "So you don't get to walk out onto your porch looking like — like that — and tell me you missed my glasses and flirt at me like no time has passed."
He listened without interrupting. He always had — it was one of the things about him, the way he gave you the whole space of what you were saying before he entered it.
"You're right," he nodded.
"I know I'm right." Your spine straightened.
"I owe you an explanation."
"You owe me considerably more than that, Simon Riley, but yes. An explanation would be a start."
He wrapped both hands around his mug again and looked at you across the table and there was something in his face that was not the blank-nothing face, was not the armour he'd worn since he was twelve years old but something that was quieter and more exposed and a great deal more frightening because of it.
"Not here," he said.
You frowned. "What?"
"I don't want to do it like this. Sat in a kitchen." He glanced around the room briefly, as though orienting himself. "Come to dinner with me tomorrow night."
"What I—"
"The Grill on Merton Street."
You went very still.
The Grill on Merton Street. You hadn't been in years — not since you'd moved away from the area, not since things had shifted and the rituals of your old life had quietly been replaced by other things.
But you knew it. You knew every table in it. The way the light came through the front windows on a Sunday, the smell of it — roasted meat and old wood and the particular warmth of a place that had been feeding families for decades.
Your mother had loved it. Your father used to order the same thing every time and be pleased about it every time, and you and Simon had sat across from each other in the corner booth with the sticky laminated menus and kicked each other under the table and laughed.
"That's still open?" you managed.
"Had a look earlier this week," he said. "Still there. New owners but the same building. Same corner booth."
You looked at him. He looked at you. Outside, through the open window, a late bird was making itself known in the lavender.
"Fine," you said. "Dinner. Tomorrow. And you're going to tell me everything." you struck at him with a serious face.
"Everything," he agreed.
"I mean it, Simon. All of it."
"I know you do."
You drank your tea. It was exactly right. The temperature, the strength, the milk ratio and you hated him a little bit for that. For the fact that he still knew, that across seventeen years and God knows how many miles he still knew exactly how you took your tea, and he'd made it correctly on the first attempt without asking, and you were absolutely not going to cry about that.
You were not.
— ✦ —
You dressed carefully.
Not because you were trying to impress him.
You told yourself this firmly, standing in front of your wardrobe in the room you'd taken in the local B&B — you'd booked a night, not knowing how long this might take, not knowing what state you'd be in for the drive home afterwards — and you told yourself that you were simply dressing appropriately for a dinner at a decent restaurant.
That was all.
That was the entirety of it.
The dress was deep green. Fitted through the waist, falling to just below the knee, with a neckline that was elegant rather than dramatic.
You'd bought it for a work event two years ago and it had lived in your wardrobe since, waiting for an occasion that felt worth it. You put your hair up — not elaborately, just neatly, the kind of arrangement that looked effortless and had taken twenty minutes — and you wore the small gold earrings that had been your grandmother's. Low heels. The good handbag. A slick of red on your mouth that you almost wiped off twice before deciding to leave it.
You were not trying to impress him.
You were absolutely trying to impress him.
He was waiting outside The Grill when your taxi pulled up, standing on the pavement with his hands in his pockets. The air around him relaxed and easy. An anchored stillness, like a man who'd learned to wait and had made peace with it. He has the same dark slacks as yesterday, same loafers with the gold buckles, but the shirt tonight was black.
A deep, clean black that made his shoulders look approximately the width of a doorway, which was in fact an accurate assessment — and he'd left the top button undone. His hair was the same: pushed back, dark sandy blonde curling at the nape of his neck and catching the amber of the streetlights.
He saw you get out of the taxi.
He went very still. Completely, suddenly, entirely present in a way that landed on you like a hand against your sternum. Under your heartbeat.
You crossed the pavement toward him and his eyes moved over you — slowly, comprehensively, that same rake of attention he'd given you yesterday on the porch steps, only this time there was nothing restrained about what it did to your pulse.
He eyed you the same way he used to look at the extra cuts of slow roasted beef your mother added to his plate every time he joined you for a Sunday roast after church.
"Hi," you said.
"Hi, sunshine." His voice was low. The rough Manchester sending tingles down your spine.
He opened the door for you.
The Grill smelled exactly the same.
Roasted meat and warmed bread and old wood and something faintly of candle wax. It hit you the moment you stepped through the door and you had to stand still for just a second, just one second, to absorb the weight of it.
Your father's coat on the hook by the door. Your mother's reading glasses going into her bag as the menus arrived. Simon across from you, fourteen and fifteen and sixteen, his big hands wrapped around a Coke glass, his eyes on you under that careful brow.
The layout had shifted slightly — new owners, as Simon had said — but the bones of it were the same. The dark wood panelling. The low warm lighting. The tables set with proper linen and actual candles in glass holders. And in the back left corner was the booth.
Simon's hand was at the small of your back as the host led you through. A light touch, barely there, the kind of thing that could be merely courteous and was absolutely not merely courteous.
You said nothing about it.
You were almost at the booth when a voice said, "Well. I don't believe it."
You turned.
Margaret and Gerald Howarth.
Margaret had been your mother's friend since before you were born — a small, bright-eyed woman who had somehow barely aged in two decades. Her silver hair cut the same way it had always been, her husband a large, genial man beside her with a napkin already tucked into his collar. They'd been eating here since before you were born too, you suspected. Some people were simply woven into the furniture of a place.
"Margaret," you said, and you felt a genuine, warm rush of it. Of being seen by someone who had known you as a child, who had watched you grow up, who carried that particular knowledge of you that only people of a certain generation can hold. She was already rising halfway from her seat, her hand extended, and you took it and she covered it with her other one, the way she always had.
"We heard you were back in the area," she said — which was interesting, since you'd only arrived yesterday, but news apparently still moved at its old speed around here. Her bright eyes moved to Simon, and something in them softened with recognition and surprise in equal measure. "And Simon Riley. My goodness."
"Mrs Howarth." Simon's voice was respectful, quieter than usual, and you noticed — because you noticed everything about him — that he straightened fractionally. Not stiffly. Just the particular adjustment of a man in the presence of someone he'd known when he was young and unguarded.
"Look at the size of you," Gerald said, not unkindly, staring up at Simon with the frank appreciation of one large man for another. "What are they feeding you?"
"Gerald," Margaret scolded mildly.
"It's a compliment." He shrugged.
Simon almost smiled. "Good to see you, Mr Howarth."
Margaret was looking between the two of you with the expression of a woman who had been quietly observing people her entire life and drawing accurate conclusions from very little evidence. "Are you together?" she asked, with the particular directness that came with age and with having known you since you were in a pushchair.
"We're having dinner," you said carefully.
Margaret's expression said, quite clearly, that she had heard this and had also heard everything it was not saying. "Well," she said, patting your hand once more before releasing it, "it's lovely to see you both. You always did belong together, the pair of you. I said that to your mother once, do you know. I said those two—"
"It was lovely seeing you, Margaret," you said, with great warmth and only mild desperation.
She laughed, a bright, pleased sound and settled back into her seat.
As you turned to follow the host the rest of the way to the booth, you were almost certain you heard Gerald say, to his wife, "told you" in a tone of quiet marital satisfaction.
Simon was very carefully not reacting to any of this. You were very carefully not looking at him.
You saw two others you knew before you reached the booth.
Kim Ashworth, who had been in your form in Year Ten and who looked essentially the same as she had in school except that she had a baby on her hip and a husband trailing behind her with a changing bag.
She stopped mid-step when she saw you, did a small, delighted double take, said oh my God twice, and then looked at Simon in a way that was extremely uncomplicated in its appreciation before remembering the husband with the changing bag. There were promises exchanged to catch up properly, phone numbers that would probably not be used, genuine warmth on both sides.
And then at the bar, perched on a stool with a whisky, Dave Pearce — who had played alongside Simon on the secondary school rugby team and who greeted him with the particular vocabulary of men who knew each other at fifteen and have not changed as much as they think.
There was a brief, loud exchange that involved at least one shoulder-clap that could have knocked a smaller man sideways, and then Dave shook your hand too and told Simon he was punching. Which Simon received without expression and you tried your hardest not to laugh, biting your lip.
Finally the corner booth. You slid in. Simon folded himself into the seat across from you, the table scaled to ordinary human beings and therefore slightly absurd against the size of him, his knees bracketing it, his shoulders blocking the view of the room behind him entirely.
The menus came.
They were not laminated anymore — proper printed card, changed seasonally, the kind that meant the new owners had ambitions. But the roast was still on. The proper Sunday roast, the one your father used to order when you could afford to.
"Same corner," Simon said quietly.
"Same corner," you agreed.
He was looking at you across the table the way he used to look at you across this table, except that now his face was older and larger and had been to places that had clearly asked things of it. The look was different in its texture. Deeper, maybe. Older in the same way he was older. Like it had more weight behind it from all the years of being carried.
"You said everything," you reminded him. "All of it."
"I know."
"So." You gestured for him to start.
He set his menu down. Looked at you. And then he started talking.
He told it the way he told everything — without embellishment, without drama, in the flat, precise language of a man who had learned to communicate facts and trusted the facts to carry the weight without decoration.
He'd gone in at seventeen and he'd been good at it. Not surprising. He was built for the structure of it, for the clarity of having a purpose and a unit and a chain of things that made sense.
He'd moved up fast — faster than he let on in the cards he'd sent you, which had been careful, he explained, deliberately careful, because the more you knew the more you might worry. Which, you pointed out, had not been his decision to make. He didn't argue with that.
Task Force 141 came later. Years later, after deployments that he summarised in a sentence each and you understood enough from his face to know that each sentence was doing the work of much longer things.
He was a lieutenant now. He said it the way he said most things about himself, flatly, without vanity, presented as information. He had certain freedoms now that he hadn't had before, certain ability to make choices about where he went and when and what he did with the things the years had given him.
You both ordered your food.
"And the five years?" you asked, sipping your cocktail the waitress had brought over.
He was quiet for a moment, he stared at his San Miguel pint, the condensation sliding down the glass. Your food had arrived at some point during the waiting, while Simon collected his thoughts.
He picked up his fork and then set it down again.
"There was a man," Simon said.
Something about the way he said it made you put your fork down too.
"He ran drugs. Major operation, international — I won't go into all of it." He said this without flinching, looking at you steadily, not softening it. You'd always appreciated that about him — the way he treated your intelligence as a given. "After I escaped him, he decided to make it personal. He went after the people I—" He stopped. Chose the word carefully. "The people I was connected to."
The candle in the glass holder between you threw warm, unsteady light across his face.
"He killed them," Simon said. "My brother. Tommy's family." A pause that cost him something; you could see it cost him. "My Mother."
The restaurant continued around you — the murmur of other tables, the clink of cutlery, someone laughing softly near the bar — and you sat very still.
"Oh Simon," you whispered, you could feel the way your face formed the sympathy.
"I'm alright." He said it the way he'd always said it, the Manchester flat and absolute. The way that meant; don't make it bigger than I can hold right now. You knew that voice. You honoured it.
"He knew about you," Simon said and you froze. "That was the other thing. He'd done his research." His jaw shifted slightly. "As long as he was alive, you weren't safe. If I'd contacted you, properly contacted you, kept the thread going the way I wanted to, it would have given him a cleaner line. A more reliable way to reach me."
You understood the logic of it. You understood it clearly and immediately in the part of your brain that processed information. The other part — the part that had sat on the bottom stair with a birthday card after five years of silence, the part that had thought past tense — that part was going to take considerably longer.
"So you cut me off," you said. Not as an accusation. As a fact, laid down. You were starting to understand the shape of it.
"To keep you safe. Yes."
"Without telling me why." You sighed but you knew you were being unreasonable, but you hoped he would let you for a little longer.
"If I'd told you why, you'd have known there was a threat. And you'd have—" He stopped. The corner of his mouth moved, something that was not quite a smile and not quite not one. "You'd have done something about it. Gone looking. Made noise."
"I would not have—" You stopped, because you would have. You absolutely would have. You'd spent thirty years being completely unable to sit on the sidelines where Simon Riley was concerned, and the knowledge that someone was threatening him would have made you entirely unreasonable. "That's—" you huffed.
"Yeah," he said.
"You could have found a way—"
"There wasn't one. Not one that was safe." His voice was very level. "I went through every option, love. I promise you. Every one."
The word arrived quietly, without ceremony.
Love.
He'd never called you that — not in thirty years, not in all the time and all the familiarity of what you were to each other. He said it the way he said everything that mattered: without preamble, without dressing it up, laid down like the fact it was.
"And now?" you asked. Your voice was quite steady. Steadier than you felt.
"He's dead." No elaboration. None needed. The flat Manchester vowels carrying the weight of it cleanly, without mess. "And you're safe. And I—" He looked at you across the table, across the candle and the white linen. "I bought the house," he said. "I've spent a while making it what it is. Making if perfect. I saved up for years. The 141 pays well when you get to a certain level and I wasn't spending it on anything else."
"For years," you repeated, feeling a shiver rack up your spine and your toes go numb.
"Since I was about twenty." He said this without apparent embarrassment, as though it were the most natural thing in the world to spend fifteen years saving money to buy a woman a house from a description she'd given you at sixteen years old. "Took a while to find the right one that wasn’t too far from your parents. The lavender took three growing seasons to look like it did when you pulled up."
Three growing seasons.
He had planted the lavender three years ago. He had stood in a garden three towns from where you lived and planted lavender along a path because a sixteen-year-old girl had mentioned it lying on her back in his garden thirty years ago, and he had tended it for three years, and he had waited.
"Simon Riley," you said.
"It's got room for your books Sunshine, built the shelves myself." His lips quirked up at the corners at your flabbergasted expression.
"You are the most—" You stopped. Started again. "Do you have any idea what the past five years have felt like? Do you have any idea what I—" Your voice did the thing you'd been preventing it from doing, cracked at the edge of the sentence like a plate under too much weight. You stopped. Pressed your lips together. "I grieved you. I sat in my flat and I genuinely, actually grieved you and decided you were dead. I had — Simon, I had a plan for getting through it. I was managing it."
"I know."
"Don't say I know." you snapped sounding more like a bratty child than angry.
"I'm sorry." And this was different. This was not the automatic I know, the absorbing of your anger. This was something he said the way he said very few things — carefully, with full weight behind it. His eyes on yours across the table. "I'm sorry for the five years. I'm sorry I couldn't find another way. I'm sorry you were on your own with it." A pause. "I'm sorry it took me this long to have something worth coming back with."
"The house is not—" You stopped. "You didn't need to buy me a house, Simon. I didn't need—"
"I needed to," he said. Simply. "I needed to know I was coming back with something real. Something that wasn't just me turning up with nothing after all that time, asking you to — to accept—" He moved his hand across the table, and his fingers stopped just short of yours. Not touching. Close. "Asking you to take me as I was. I needed it to be enough. I needed there to be something I could give you that was—"
"Simon." Your voice was very quiet.
"I know it's not—"
"Simon." You turned your hand over on the table. Just that. The small, deliberate movement of turning your palm up.
He looked at it. Then he looked at you. Then, slowly, he put his hand in yours — his enormous, careful, tattooed hand. Not quite the one that had carried your bag through every corridor of secondary school and pulled you up off the pavement after Daniel Holt and held you on the platform at the train station, but this one now and his fingers closed around yours and he held on.
"I only ever wanted you," you said softly.
"Sunshine-"
"You were always worth it," you cut him off. And then, because it was time — because it had been time for approximately thirty years and you were done waiting for the right moment when the right moment had repeatedly failed to arrive — "You were always enough. You were always the thing I was — Simon, you have always been the only one I wanted. Exactly as you are."
He was very still.
"I didn't tell you on the platform," you said. "I should have. I've thought about it every day since."
"So have I," he said.
The candle between you flickered in some movement of air from the kitchen, and in the warm unsteady light his face was open in a way you had waited thirty years to see. His hand was warm and sure around yours, and from the other side of the restaurant you were almost certain you heard Margaret Howarth say something to Gerald in a satisfied undertone.
"You planted the lavender," you grinned.
"Three years ago." He finally smiles back at you, it was crooked and uneven and you loved it.
"You are," you said carefully, "the most ridiculous man I have ever known." You shook your head still grinning.
"Missed you too, sunshine," he smirked.
Dinner ended the way the best dinners end — not with a definitive conclusion but with a gradual, reluctant unwinding, the kind where both people keep finding one more thing to say, one more thread to pull, because the alternative is standing up and the evening becoming past tense.
You ordered dessert.
Neither of you particularly wanted it but you both ordered it, and you both knew why, and neither of you said so. The chocolate brownie was very good. Simon ate his methodically, the way he ate everything, and at one point looked up and caught you watching him and said nothing.
The candle between you had burned down to a stub by the time the bill came.
He paid. You protested on principle. He gave you a look that had not changed at all since he was fourteen years old — flat, certain, faintly amused — and handed the card to the waiter without further discussion.
"That's not—" you started.
"Next time," he said.
Next time. You let it sit there between you, warm and presumptuous and everything you wanted.
Outside, the evening had cooled.
The last of the summer still holding in the air, the kind of September evening that felt like a concession, like the year wasn't ready to be done.
The street was quiet for a Saturday, just a few couples moving between the restaurants and a group of lads outside the pub further down having a smoke. The amber of the streetlights made everything look like something worth remembering.
Simon stood beside you on the pavement, close enough that his arm brushed yours when he turned to look down the street, and you were very aware of the warmth of him and the black shirt and the lavender you couldn't smell from here but could somehow still feel in your hands.
"Walk with me a bit," he said. Not a question, not quite. He'd always done that — phrased invitations as though the outcome were already agreed, as though he simply assumed you'd say yes because you almost always did.
"Alright."
He fell into step beside you, and for a little while you just walked — past the wine bar with its fairy lights, past the old library that had become a gin distillery at some point in the last decade, past the post office that had been there since before either of you were born. You talked about small things. Easy things. The kind of conversation that runs alongside the real one underneath.
Then he stopped.
You stopped too.
Simon looked down at you. His hands were in his pockets. That brown gaze of his moved over your face in the way it had been moving over your face all evening — like he was cataloguing it, like he was making up for lost time in the looking.
"Dance with me," he said.
You blinked. "What?"
He tilted his head, "Come dancing with me."
You stared at him.
Simon Riley, who had sat against the wall at every school disco you'd ever attended, arms folded, watching everyone else with the expression of a man conducting a private risk assessment.
Simon Riley, who you had never, in thirty years of knowing him, seen voluntarily approach a dance floor.
"You don't dance," you said.
"No," he agreed. "But you do."
The simplicity of it landed somewhere very central.
You do.
As though that were reason enough. As though your enjoyment of a thing were sufficient justification for him to walk into it without hesitation.
Which, you supposed, when it came to Simon, it always had been.
"Alright," you said, for the second time in ten minutes.
His hand found the small of your back again, that same light, deliberate touch from inside the restaurant and he guided you down the street.
Simon said you weren't far, when you heard it.
The particular sound of a Domino's box. The slight crinkle of a carrier bag. And then your mother's voice, carrying across the quiet street in the way it always had — warm and clear and entirely without volume control.
"Oh honey! We thought - oh!"
"Oh fuck," you cursed.
You said it very quietly. Not quietly enough. Simon chuckled under his breath.
Your parents were coming along the pavement from the direction of the only car park around here — your father in his weekend coat, your mother in the blue one she'd had for fifteen years. A Domino's pizza box balanced in her arms and a carrier bag hanging from your father's hand.
Movie night. Of course. They still did it every other Saturday, had done since you were small, and of course they would do it tonight of all the Saturday nights in the entire calendar.
Your mother's face when she saw you was pure, unguarded delight — the face she always made when she encountered you unexpectedly, as though each time were still a pleasant surprise. Then her gaze moved, naturally and automatically, to the man standing beside you with his hand at the small of your back.
The delight didn't disappear. It did something more complicated.
"Oh honey," she said again, but differently this time. Softer. Her voice going somewhere else entirely. "Simon?"
The Domino's box dipped. Your father caught it with the reflexes of a man who had been catching things your mother nearly dropped for forty years.
Simon had gone still beside you. Not that controlled, present stillness he had, the one that wasn't tension but something adjacent to it. He was looking at your mother with an expression you couldn't fully read from the side, but you could see the line of his jaw, and it was careful.
"Mrs—" he started.
"Don't you Mrs me," your mother said. Her voice was not angry. That was the thing — you'd prepared yourself, in the split second between seeing them and now, for anger, or for the brisk, self-protective coolness she used sometimes when she'd been frightened. But it wasn't that. It was something that had tears in it, which was considerably worse to witness.
She handed the pizza box to your father without looking at him — he took it with the silent competence of long practice — and she crossed the pavement in four short steps and she put her arms around Simon Riley.
He was so much larger than her. He had always been larger than her, even at fifteen when he'd eaten her shepherd's pie at the kitchen table and been careful to seem like it was casual and not like he was starving. Even when she gave him seconds and he looked like he would beg for thirds.
But now it was almost absurd, the smallness of her against the width of him, and he stood there for just a fraction of a second — that fraction where you could see him recalibrating, receiving something he hadn't prepared for — and then his arms came around her and he held on.
Your mother was crying. Small, quiet sounds, the kind she made when she was trying not to. Her face was pressed against his chest and her hands gripped the back of his black shirt and she said, muffled and with great feeling, "You absolute boy."
Simon said nothing. His eyes, over the top of your mother's head, found yours.
You had to look away. The street was very interesting. The lamppost in particular.
You bit into your lip.
Your father appeared at your shoulder.
He was a quiet man, always had been. The kind of steady, observant presence that took things in without making a production of the taking in. He stood beside you with the pizza box over one arm and the carrier bag in the other hand and watched his wife hold the boy who had eaten at their table for a decade, and he said, very quietly, to you,
"Well. He's not dead then."
"No Dad," you managed. "He's not dead."
"Good," your father said.
As though this settled it. As though the entirety of the past five years of your grief and his, because he had grieved Simon too in his quiet way, in the way of a man who doesn't say things aloud but feels them thoroughly. He looked at Simon over the top of your mother's head and gave him a single, deliberate nod. The kind that meant; we'll talk. The kind that meant; I have things to say to you. The kind that also, underneath both of those, meant; I'm so glad son.
Simon received the nod with equal gravity, which was exactly right.
Your mother finally pulled back. She held Simon by the arms — or tried to, her hands not quite making it around the circumference of them — and looked up at him with red eyes and the particular expression of a woman who has a great deal to say and is choosing, for now, not to say most of it.
"You'll come for dinner," she said. Not a question. The same tone she'd used on him at fifteen and apparently intended to continue using indefinitely. "Sunday. Proper dinner. Not a restaurant. Mine."
"Yes," Simon said. Immediately. Without hesitation.
"Good." She released his arms and reached up and patted his cheek once, firmly, the way you might with someone who had done something frustrating and beloved in equal measure.
Then she turned to you, and her expression did something complicated and warm and knowing, and she didn't say any of the things she was clearly thinking, which you appreciated deeply.
What she said instead was: "Don't stay out too late. You're thirty-five, not seventeen."
"Mum." You scolded.
"I'm just saying." She shrugged.
"We're going dancing," you told her, with the energy of someone redirecting a conversation through sheer momentum.
Your mother looked at Simon. Simon looked at your mother. Something passed between them that was private and thirty years old and not yours to have.
"Of course you are," she said.
Your father passed the Domino's box back to your mother, and said, "Right then. We'll leave you to it." He looked at Simon one more time. "Sunday," he confirmed.
"Sunday," Simon said.
Your parents moved off down the pavement.
Your mother looked back once — just once — and her face when she did was the face you'd seen her wear at your primary school nativity and at your GCSE results and on the morning you'd gone to university; the particular face of a woman watching her child be happy and feeling the full, complicated, loving weight of it.
Then she turned back to your father and said something you couldn't hear, and his hand found her shoulder as they walked, and they rounded the corner and were gone.
You stood on the pavement in the September evening and breathed.
Beside you, Simon was also very carefully just standing there.
"She cried on me," he said, after a moment.
"Yes."
"Didn't expect that."
You turned to look at him. He was looking at the corner your parents had turned, and his face had the quality it sometimes had when something had reached him — not visibly, not dramatically, just in that particular stillness that meant something had got through.
"She cried about you," you told him. "When you stopped writing. Three years ago — there were several times, actually, but three years ago was the worst. She held me in her kitchen and we both—" You stopped. Managed the next part carefully. "She loves you too, Simon. She always did. You were at our table every other night for years."
He was quiet for a moment. Something moved in his jaw. "I know," he said. And this time the I know was different from all the other times he'd said it tonight — heavier, and private.
"You agreed to Sunday dinner," you giggled.
"Of course I agreed to Sunday dinner," he said knowing full well he would have been stupid not to and gotten an earful from your mother.
Simon offered you his hand.
Not at the small of your back this time. His hand, palm up, in the space between you. Old-fashioned and deliberate.
You put yours in it.
"Come on then," he said. "Let's go dancing."
There was, as it turned out, only one place to go dancing in this town on a Saturday night if you meant actual dancing — the kind with a proper floor and music with a real structure to it.
It was not a club.
It was not a bar with a cleared space near the speaker.
It was the old church hall on Callow Street, which had been hosting the Saturday Evening Social Dance since before either of you were born, and which Simon seemed to know about with the specificity of a man who had done his research.
"A dance hall," you said, standing outside it. Through the tall, thin windows the warm light was visible, and the sound — strings, a proper band, something with a waltz rhythm that made the windows hum faintly. "You're taking me to a dance hall."
"Only place with a floor."
"Simon, this is a — there will be pensioners in there." you said quietly.
"There'll be a dance floor," he looked down at you. "And you said yes." he shrugged but looked smug.
He pushed the door open and held it, and because you had in fact said yes, and because the music through the door sounded genuinely lovely, and because you were still holding his hand from the pavement, you went in.
The church hall smelled of floor polish and tea. Fairy lights were strung along the rafters — someone's addition, not the original fixtures, and they made the whole space amber and soft.
Round tables lined the edges, most of them occupied by couples in their sixties and seventies and eighties, a few younger faces dotted among them, everyone dressed with the particular care of people who still believed an evening out was worth dressing for.
On the small stage at the far end, a four-piece band was working through something in three-four time with the ease of musicians who had played together for years.
And at the edge of the floor, clipboard in hand, wearing the same expression of organised authority she'd worn every PE lesson for fifteen years was Mrs Valerie Croft.
She was smaller than you remembered. Or perhaps you were simply larger.
She'd retired at some point — the hair was fully silver now rather than streaked — but the posture was identical: spine straight, chin up, the bearing of a woman who had spent decades telling teenagers to stand properly and had eventually simply become the embodiment of the instruction.
She looked up from her clipboard as you approached and her eyes moved from you to Simon, and to her credit, she didn't miss a step.
"Well," she tilted her chin up to meet his eyes, "Riley."
"Miss," Simon said. Which was technically incorrect given that she had a ring on her finger and had for as long as you'd known her, but you suspected it was because he'd called her Miss in secondary school the way you had. "Mrs Croft. Sorry. We were passing and— " He paused, which was unlike him. "Is there any chance we could crash it?"
Mrs Croft looked at him. She looked at you. She looked at your joined hands with the expression of a woman who had supervised enough teenagers to recognise a development when she saw one.
"Can you behave yourselves?" she asked.
"Yes," you said nodding.
Simon said nothing.
Mrs Croft made a sound that was not quite a laugh but was adjacent to one. "Floor's open," she said. "Don't knock anyone over." And she turned back to her clipboard.
The first dance was not elegant.
Simon was, as he had always been and had openly admitted, not a dancer.
He was a man built for other kinds of movement — purposeful, directed, the kind that had somewhere to go. Dancing required a different relationship with your body, a willingness to be present in it without agenda, and that was not naturally his.
But he was trying. And Simon Riley trying at something he wasn't good at with complete, unhesitating commitment was one of your favourite things in the world.
He held you correctly — one hand at your waist, the other holding yours at the right height — because he had clearly looked this up at some point, which you were choosing not to think about too hard. His footwork was careful. Deliberate. Slightly behind the beat in the way of someone counting silently.
"You're counting," you told him trying your hardest not to laugh.
"Shut up."
"Simon, I can see your lips moving." you snorted.
"I said shut up."
You were laughing now. Properly, helplessly, the kind that came up from somewhere real — and he looked down at you with that face, that flat, long-suffering, completely fond face, and something in his eyes that was warm in a way that had nothing to do with patience and everything to do with the fact that your laugh had always been, apparently, one of his favourite sounds.
"You're doing fine," you told him, once you'd recovered.
"I'm doing terribly," he answered. "Keep going."
By the second dance, he was better.
By the third, he had found something. Some adjustment in the way he held you, the way his hand settled more fully at your waist, drawing you closer so the movement between you became less about individual steps and more about one shared thing. He was a quick study. He always had been, once he'd decided something was worth doing.
You became aware, gradually, of the room watching.
Not intrusively. Not all at once. But in the soft, peripheral way of a room full of people who have been in love for decades and recognise the particular weather of it when it walks through the door.
An older couple near the stage — she in pale blue, he in a suit that had been good once and was still cared for — had stopped talking to watch you.
A woman at one of the corner tables had her chin in her hand.
Mrs Croft, by the door, was very deliberately looking at her clipboard and failing to look only at her clipboard.
You didn't mind. You were too busy watching Simon watch you.
The band changed tempo at half past nine.
The waltz gave way to something with a different shape entirely — something that moved from the hips rather than the feet, a rhythm that was slower in its pulse and considerably less innocent in its intention.
A rumba.
You looked up at Simon.
He looked down at you.
"I don't know this one," he said.
"I'll show you." you breathed.
You took his hand and placed it lower at your waist, right above the curve of your ass. Deliberately watching his face when you did it, watching the shift in his expression, the way something in his eyes went very still and very focused. "Hip to hip," you told him. "Slower than you think. Let the music pull you."
He followed your lead with an attention that was frankly overwhelming in its completeness.
Simon Riley giving you his full, undivided, physical focus was not a small thing. He was so large and so present and he moved with you rather than against you, adjusting with every shift of your weight, and somewhere in the second minute of the song the counting stopped and something else replaced it.
He drew you closer. His hand at your hip pulled you in until there was no space left between you, until you could feel the warmth of him through the green of your dress and you were very aware of every point of contact, of the music and of the room full of people who had gone very quiet.
Then he turned you.
It was not technically correct. It was not what the dance required. But he turned you in a single, smooth movement that his body had decided on and yours simply followed, because that was what it did with him.
And then he dipped you.
The room tilted. His arm was across your back, solid and immovable, and you were suspended in the amber light with the music around you and your hand at his shoulder.
He lowered you — slowly, with complete control, no hesitation in the hold and then his face was close, very close, and his nose grazed the line of your throat making your breath hitch.
A slow, deliberate graze. The warmth of his breath against your pulse point. You felt it in places that had nothing to do with dancing, between your legs throbbing.
His hand — the one at your hip — slid down, just slightly, just enough, finding the outside of your thigh where the fabric of your dress lay, and he hooked your leg, slowly, around his hip. His fingers at the back of your thigh. Holding you there. His nose still at your throat.
The music resolved. Somewhere behind you, someone started clapping.
He brought you upright. Smoothly, slowly, until you were standing again and his hand was still at the back of your thigh. Your leg still around his hip and your faces were very close. Your heart was conducting itself in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with exertion.
You were panting. Slightly. Just slightly.
He was not panting. He was looking down at you with the almost-smile, the one that had always been rarer than gold and twice as valuable — and his eyes were warm and very dark and entirely, completely satisfied with themselves.
"You looked that up as well," you managed.
"No," he said.
"Simon—"
"That one," he said, "I just wanted to do."
From the table by the stage, the woman in pale blue was applauding with great enthusiasm. Her husband had two fingers in his mouth and was whistling.
Mrs Croft had given up entirely on the clipboard.
The taxi back was not a long ride.
It felt longer than it was, and shorter than you wanted.
You sat beside him in the back seat with his thigh against yours and the city moving past the windows and neither of you speaking. The silence had a texture to it that was thick and warm and anticipatory in a way that made the air feel heavy in your lungs.
His hand was on your knee. Just resting there, heavy and warm, the way he did everything — with complete, unapologetic certainty.
You did not move it.
The house appeared at the end of the lane with its white fence and its dark windows and the lavender silver in the moonlight.
You were out of the taxi before it had fully stopped and you were aware how eager this appeared and you didn't care.
Simon paid the driver and caught up with you in three strides because his legs were considerably longer than yours and always had been.
He got to the door first. Key in hand.
The door opened.
And you did not wait for him to step through it.
You took him by the front of his shirt, that black shirt, warm from his body, the fabric bunching in your fists and you lips were suddenly on his.
You walked him backwards through the doorway and you felt the moment his back met the wall just inside and you were already kissing him before he'd fully registered the sequence of events.
Your mouth on his. Your hands in the front of his shirt. Thirty years of it finding its way out all at once, without ceremony, without preamble, without any of the careful management you had been applying to yourself since you were four years old at a preschool art table.
He kissed you back.
He kissed you back the way he did everything — thoroughly, completely, with his full attention and no apparent interest in doing anything else ever again.
His hands came to your face, big and careful, tilting your jaw, and for a moment you were simply inside the realness of him and the warmth of him and the fact that he was here and alive and kissing you in the hallway of the house he'd bought for you.
He pulled back.
"Easy, sunshine," he said against your lips. Low. A little breathless, which you would be privately triumphant about later. The corner of his mouth pulled up in that crooked smile.
You became aware, in the slightly dazed way of someone returning from somewhere, that your hands were still in his shirt and his hands were still on your face and you were standing approximately two inches apart in his hallway.
You also became aware, in the refocusing of your vision, of his mouth.
Of the scar on his upper lip.
You didn't know how you hadn't noticed it before — through dinner, through the dancing, through all of it.
Perhaps you had simply not been this close before. Or perhaps you had been looking at so many things that you hadn't been looking at everything.
It was small, a thin pale line bisecting the left side of his upper lip, old enough to have faded to silver, the kind of scar that had been there for years and had been lived with so thoroughly that the face had absorbed it.
You lifted your thumb and touched it, gently. "How'd you get this?"
He went very still, alert and present and reading you.
You kissed it. Softly. Just that.
Something moved in his throat.
His hands shifted from your face to your waist, warm and settled, and he began to move you gently — backwards, one steady step at a time — turning you both away from the wall and deeper into the hallway. His foot found the door behind him and pushed it closed with a quiet, final click.
"If I tell you about that one," he said, his voice low and even above your head as he guided you past the entrance and toward the stairs, "I'll have to tell you about the rest."
He looked down at you as he said it, that look, the one that said you were the most interesting thing he had ever encountered. The one that made you feel simultaneously seen and slightly undone — and his expression had in it something that was fond and amused and entirely, devastatingly warm.
You kicked your heels off at the bottom of the stairs. They went somewhere behind you. You didn't look.
Your bag went next, dropped against the banister.
"The rest?" you repeated. Your voice came out slightly smaller than you intended. Your eyes, entirely without your permission, moved down the front of him — the black shirt, the breadth of his shoulders, his torso, his thick thighs, all of him — and back up again. Slowly.
He watched you do it. He said nothing.
You swallowed. "Tell me then."
His hand at your waist steered you up the first step, and then the second, and the stairs curved slightly toward the landing above, and at the top of the stairs he pushed open the door to a bedroom.
The room was large and furnished.
A bed, properly large, the kind that accommodated a man his size without complaint. Low lamps on either side casting the same amber warmth as the hall below. Dark wood floors, a window looking out toward the garden, the curtain shifting slightly in a crack of night air.
He kissed you, just inside the door you kissed him back and his hands were at your hips.
Then he pulled back with a groan. Both of you breathing slightly harder than was strictly accounted for by climbing one flight of stairs.
"I want to, sunshine," he said. His voice was very low. Restrained. His hands still on your body, holding you there, his thumbs moving in a small slow motion against the fabric of your dress that was doing nothing to help you think clearly. "I do. But I need to hear it from you first. Your permission. Clear words. I don't want to misunderstand you."
You opened your mouth.
And then your eyes moved, over his shoulder, to the dresser.
A skull mask looked back at you.
You closed your mouth. You looked at it. The mask, white and stark and precise but somehow both alien and completely, recognisably his. The balaclava beside it, folded neatly. And tactical gloves — enormous, black, reinforced, approximately the size of your head.
"That yours?" you asked.
Simon turned his head, following your gaze. He looked at the dresser, then back at you. "Yeah."
"What is it?"
"What I wear on missions."
"Oh," you said.
And then your brain did something entirely beyond your authority. It constructed, with great speed and considerable detail, an image: Simon, broad and enormous, in black tactical gear. Gloved hands. That mask. Hovering over you.
You swallowed.
The image did not leave. It simply settled in, warm and vivid and decidedly unhelpful.
"Sunshine."
His hand came to your face — his big, warm, ungloved hand, his actual hand, the one you knew — his thumb sweeping gently under your eye, bringing you back into the room and the amber lamplight and the present moment.
"Hmm?" you managed meeting his gaze.
His eyes moved over your face with the same comprehensive attention he always gave you.
"Your permission, love," he said. Quiet. Certain.
"Oh." You blinked. "Yes. Yes, you have it. Always."
The almost-smile. "Not for everything I want to do to you." His thumb was still moving, very gently, under your eye. "I'll ask. Multiple times."
You stared at him. "Multiple—"
"Times," he confirmed. His voice was entirely level. His eyes were not.
You pushed his shoulder and your cheeks burned.
He caught your hand as you pushed it and laughed, a low, real, full sound, the kind that you had spent most of your life engineering because it was so rare and so completely, unreasonably good.
You laughed too, properly, the helpless kind, and his forehead came down to rest against yours and you were both laughing in the amber light of his bedroom with the skull mask on the dresser and the lavender outside the window and thirty years behind you and everything in front.
The laughing settled.
Not all at once — it unwound gradually, the way laughter does when it's the real kind, leaving something warm and loose in its place.
His forehead was still against yours. His hands had moved from your face to your waist, both of them now, holding you the way he'd held you on the dance floor — with that complete, unhurried certainty, like you were something he'd been waiting to hold properly for a very long time and intended to do it right.
The amber light of the lamps lay across everything. Through the gap in the curtain, you could see the edge of the garden — the pale shapes of flowers, the dark of the lawn.
"Tell me about the rest," you said quietly.
He pulled back just enough to look at you. "The scars?"
"You said if you told me about the one on your lip you'd have to tell me about the rest." You reached up and touched the scar again — that thin, silver line — with the pad of your thumb. "So tell me about the rest."
He looked at you for a long moment. Then he reached up and began, without ceremony, to unbutton his shirt.
You were very still.
He did it the way he did everything — without drama, without performance, button by button from the collar down, and when he shrugged it from his shoulders and set it aside you understood, in a way you hadn't before, what eighteen years of that life had written on him.
He was enormous.
You'd known that in the abstract — had known it from the doorframe and the dance floor and the way rooms seemed to reorganise themselves around him — but this was different.
This was the specific, undeniable reality of his shoulders, the breadth of his chest, the muscle of his arms that carried the tattoo sleeve on the left, the ink wrapping from wrist to shoulder in dark, intricate patterns that in this light you still couldn't fully read but wanted to.
And the scars.
There were more than you'd expected.
Each one a different shape and age and story, written into the topography of him in pale and silver lines. A long one along his left ribs. Something older, fainter, across the top of his right shoulder. A circular scar below his collarbone on the left side that your medical knowledge was sufficient to identify and that made your chest constrict briefly and completely before you put that particular knowledge away for now.
He was watching your face as you looked. Careful. Giving you the time of it.
You stepped forward. You placed your hand flat against his sternum — his heart under your palm, steady and real — and you felt him exhale.
"The lip," you said.
"Kandahar. 2004. Caught the stock of a rifle." He said it the same way he'd told you everything tonight — flat, factual, trusting the fact to carry the weight. "Bit through my lip. Wasn't pretty for a while."
You moved your hand from his sternum to his ribs. Found the long scar there, traced it gently with your fingertips.
"That one."
"Knife. 2009. I moved the wrong way and the other man moved the right way." The shadow of something in his face that was not quite humour and not quite not. "Lesson learned."
Your hand moved to his shoulder. The older, fainter scar.
"Before the military," he said, before you asked. His voice changed, just fractionally. Flatter. Doing more work to stay level. "Not a mission."
You understood. You didn't ask further. You pressed your lips to it instead — gently, just that, your mouth against the old pale mark — and you felt the breath go out of him in a way that was different from all the others. Slower. Deeper.
"Sunshine," he said. Very quietly.
"The one below your collarbone," you said.
A pause. "That one's not a story for tonight."
You tilted your head back to look up at him. "Is it a story for eventually?"
His eyes on yours. Something in them that was considering, assessing, "Yeah," he said. "Eventually."
"Alright," you said. You meant it. You had waited thirty years; you could wait for the story of one scar.
His hand moved to your face. That same gesture from the hallway — his thumb at your cheek, slow and deliberate and he tilted your chin up and kissed you. Not urgently this time. Slowly. Deeply.
His hands found the zip at the side of your dress — careful, unhurried — and he looked at you, a clear question in it, and you nodded, and his hands were very steady and very gentle. Your dress went the way of your heels and your bag, somewhere behind you, unmissed.
He looked at you the way he had looked at you on the porch yesterday, and outside The Grill tonight, and across the restaurant table, and on the dance floor — with that complete, comprehensive attention.
Only now there was nothing restrained about what was in it. It was simply there, open and certain, and it was thirty years of something finally being allowed to be exactly what it was.
"Hi," you said. Which was absurd. Which made him laugh again, low and real.
"Hi, sunshine," he said. His hands at your waist. His forehead dropping to yours.
“Si I need to-“ you breathed in deep, “I um,” he pulled his head away from yours, looking into your eyes with those brilliant brown ones of his.
“What is it Sunshine?” He asked, his finger under your chin tilting your head up.
“I’m, I’ve never-“ you sigh, “I’ve told you so many things, I can’t believe I can’t even say this to you.”
“Do we need to slow down?” He asked, his voice softening.
“No. It’s not that. I mean I’m not a virgin if that’s what you’re thinking I just, no guy has ever-“ you sigh again, your eyes dropping from his.
Simon is quiet. He waits, the way he always waits — giving you the whole space of it, not rushing you toward the end of the sentence.
“Made it good,” you finally say, to his chest. “For me. It’s always just, fine. Maybe sometimes I get close but then it’s over. Not that there’s been loads of guys, maybe three.”
A beat.
You make yourself look up at him.
Something changes in his face.
You see the flare of it.
Anger.
Not toward you — you feel that immediately, the anger isn't at you, it moves through him and settles somewhere else entirely. His jaw shifts. His eyes, for just a moment, go somewhere dark and quiet.
"Every one of them," he says. Low. More to himself than to you.
"Simon—"
"Had you," he says. "And didn't—" He stops. The jaw again. His eyes squeeze shut. "Didn't pay attention."
"It's not—"
"It is." His eyes open. He looks at you, his hands moving to your hips, both of them, settling there with a weight that feels like anchoring, like he needs the contact as much as you do. The darkness has settled now, controlled, underneath everything else.
"And I wasn't here." Something moves through his expression — not guilt exactly, but something adjacent to it, something private and old. "Should've been your first, sunshine. Should've been there to—"
He stops himself. His forehead drops to yours.
"I've waited years for this," he says quietly. "I'm not rushing it. And I'm going to pay attention."
“Pay attention?” You ask breathless.
“To every sigh,” he kissed your cheek, “whimper and moan.” His lips moved down to your jaw. “To the way your hips move, the way your back arches, the way you’ll writhe under me, how I’ve imaged it every time I’ve gotten off for the last two decades.” He whispered the last bit into your ear, teeth tugging on your earlobe.
You gasp, “Simon.” Your cheeks burn.
“Oh don’t tell me you never thought about it.” He grins pulling back to look down at you.
You look at the floor sheepishly cause of course you have. Of course you’ve cum the hardest you ever have in your life only when thinking about Simon fucking you.
"Oh you have." He smirked titling his head.
“Shut up.” You push his shoulder and he laughs.
His hands leave your hips and then you're moving, his arms around you, and the edge of the bed meets the back of your knees.
Then his massive paws are in your hair and his lips are on your neck as your back meets the sheets. His weight heavy and solid on you. You could tell he was holding himself up so he didn’t squish you.
He leaned back on his heels, kneeling between your legs. You sighed in satisfaction when his fingers ran over your bare skin. His blunt nails scratching softly where your pelvic bone sits.
"So beautiful Sunshine," He grabs your hips and squeezes, "Fill my hands with you finally." Simon groans. A noise you've been picturing in your head. This and everything else that happens this evening, you truly believe, will be one of those times when reality is better than anything you have imagined.
Simon's brown eyes have always been intense, but right now the way he's looking down at you it's like he is someone else entirely. His eyes almost black with how much they have darkened.
"Simon." You tangle your fingers with his.
"Can I?" He asks. His hand, the one not in yours, trailing down your thigh and stopping on your mound. You clench around nothing when he pushes down, just a little bit of pressure that you feel in your clit and makes your hips buck.
You don't miss the way his lips do the almost smile thing. You nod furiously but he shakes his head.
"Need your words love." He raises a brow.
"Yes, yes Simon touch me." You breathe out, your chest feeling tight when he nods, moving his hand down to cup your cunt over your underwear.
And maybe its because you haven't had sex in three years, maybe its because you are touch starved or maybe its simply because its Simon, but your back arches and your moan is down right pornographic with a simple touch over your underwear.
"So responsive." He mumbles, his thumb rubbing circles over your clit through the fabric. "Get your tits out for me Sunshine, wanna see em." he grunts feeling your underwear getting wet.
Shakily you reach behind your back and unclip your bra. "Been thinking about them for years. What they look like, how they'll bounce when I fuck you." He groans as you pull the straps down your arms and fling the bra on the floor.
His eyes are on your chest, he doesn't blink. Then as if his system has rebooted, he blows air out of his cheeks and whistles low. "Fuck lovie, so pretty. You're a dream." Simon leans forward and wraps his lips around your breast, his tongue swirling around the nipple as his thumb continues circling your clit.
You moan, fingers tugging at his hair.
He comes off your breast with a pop making you whine and push at his shoulder. He grins pressing his thumb firmer against you, while sliding his other hand over your leg, index finger tracing over the small scar on you leg from when you fell off your bike after Simon broke your training wheels.
There was something comforting about this. Simon wasn't someone you had to explain yourself to, he already knew every version of you, he was simply adding this one to his list. This version, open and honest and begging the man you'd known for thirty years to make you cum on his fingers.
This didn't feel like a hook up, not like other guys have, but it felt like two people who have been each other's home for years and they're finally admitting it.
"Kiss me Simon." You're not even sure if what you said made sense with how much you were panting. But he leaned down to graze his lips along yours. Teasing and soft, despite the fast past he'd started to set with his thumb.
"Stop teasing." You huffed.
"Its my favourite pastime." He grinned hooking his fingers in your underwear, pulling them down and moving with them to settle between your legs.
You gasp, when his tongue slides from your asshole to your clit. "Simon!" His dark eyes are locked on yours as he swirls the tip of his his tongue around your entrance. Your toes curl, your head falling back onto the soft bed sheets.
A few occasions, you could count on one hand, had a guy you were with eaten you out and it was good but fuck, it didn't feel like this.
You felt like you were burning all over with each swipe of his tongue, each dip inside your entrance, each pattern he begins to circle over your clit.
He was learning you.
Simon groans against you, his breath hot, it made you dizzy. You feel everything, its too much to quick and your hips start to buck against his mouth.
Simon clearly had no intention of slowing down or stopping as he slides his arms around your thighs and splays his hands over the tops of them locking you in place.
It feels like fire, like molten lava pooling low in your abdomen the harder his tongue presses against you.
You don’t even recognise the sounds coming out of you, it’s as if every movement pulls a new one from you.
His thumb replaces his tongue and he rubs the bump in small circles until you can barely breathe. “Sound so pretty,” he murmurs just as your back arches and you moan loudly into the night air.
He is still speaking but you can’t hear anything he is saying, it’s all blurring together the way your vision is blurring. His thumb slides from your clit down until it’s pushing its way inside you. Your hips jerk away but his other hand is quick to hold you in place.
“No running.” Simon growls.
You cry out when his tongue comes back to torture you, lapping at you like he’s never had a drink and you're fresh water. Soon enough the rhythm he’s built has your hips rolling forward seeking more of whatever he has to give you.
Your hand reaches for his arm and squeezes hard the exact moment your vision turns white and your body shakes, dissolving into pleasure. It's like lightning pulsing through you. He works your through your orgasm, wringing every last wave of pleasure from you before he moves to your lips, kissing you.
“Did so good Sunshine. I’ve got you.” His arms wrap around you, your nipples grazing against the hair on his chest, that alone has you whimpering.
"Need more, want you inside me Simon. Please." You look into his eyes, your shyness gone with your orgasm.
"Okay Sunshine." Simon chuckles, the sound vibrating against you.
He pulls back and gets off the bed before he starts to unbuckle his belt. He pushes his black slacks down along with his underwear, his large, and he was so fucking big, cock already hard.
"Always wondered what you'd be like in bed," He tilts his head with a smirk, "If you'd like being in control. Or if you'd prefer me to lead," He knelt on the bed again, and oh my god Simon Riley, your best friend of thirty years and the love of your life was crawling up the bed towards you until his cock was flush with your entrance. "If you'd be needy and beg. Or if you'd bark orders at me." He slapped the head of his cock against your clit. "If you'd be loud or quiet."
"If you'd let me do whatever I wanted to you," his head titled back, eyes shut, "Fuck Sunshine, the things I've imagined doing to you," He looks down at you with the most intense gaze, pining you there on the bed, "Would you let me lovie? Do whatever I want to you?" He asks, pearly whites peaking out to sink into his bottom lip.
"Like what?" Your breath is so unsteady, so hitched and uneven you feel your cheeks heat even more than they have done at his words.
He grins, "Like what?" He chuckles pushing the head of his cock against your entrance, not in, but resting against it, "Wanna fuck you so hard you can't walk. Make love to you slow and so deep you'll feel me everywhere. Bend you over every surface in this house and make you cry on my cock-"
"Simon!" You gasp.
"Can I Sunshine?" He groans pushing in a little more and your eyes sting with tears at the stretch.
"Yes! Please yes!" He pushes in slowly. One of his hands coming next to you on the bed and the other gripping your hip. He keeps sliding in further, so slowly until its sheathed inside you.
Simon does not move. You can see the restraint within the way his teeth are gritted, his brows furrowed, sweat forming on his forehead.
“Fuck you feel amazing wrapped around me, so tight.” He groans.
You don’t have any words and even if you did, you doubt you would be able to say them. You have never felt so…full. So filled to the brim and unable to get a reprieve from it.
“M’gonna move, gotta move Sunshine,” Simon growls and the fullness disappears for a second before he’s pushing himself back in.
“Fuck you feel so good Si.” You shudder and stars appear in your vision when he moves forward and takes your legs with him folding you in half.
Simon Riley has you in fucking mating press and didn't even break the slow rhythm he's building. He continues this push and pull movement until it begins to flow, each movement begins where the other ends. The pattern making you sob, “Don’t stop!”
You can't function and its only now that you understand the phrase 'being fucked dumb', rocking your hips, trying desperately to keep up with each thrust, back arched so beautifully.
Simon lets his hand slip and curve around your jaw without thinking about it, "Taking me so well Sunshine." The feral look in his eyes sends a shiver up your spine.
"Too big." You sobbed, your hands grabbing at his large biceps as he thrusts harder. He could feel every ridge and curve of your sopping cunt.
"You can take it." He encouraged you, biting at your neck leaving marks in his wake and looking so damn happy whilst doing it.
You continued to moan and whimper, tears of pleasure falling down your face while Simon's huge body hovered over you. Protecting you from the outside world, in here, it was just you and him.
"Si..oh!" you cried out feeling him hit that rough spot inside your weeping, swollen cunt.
"There it is." He didn't mean to grin like a obsessed man in such an intimate moment but he couldn't help himself. He never can with you. Each thrust hits the one place no man ever seems to be able to find but Simon seemingly found with ease. A spot that makes a tightening begin like a coil, being wound with every drive of his hips.
Your sinful noises morph into higher pitched breathy little screams.
"I know lovie, I know." He cooed, holding you closer. His sweat glazed skin meeting yours as his large veiny hand slips under your head, his other arm curling around your waist.
You move your hips and he groans vulgar into the air, his hand gripping your hair and pulling your head back, a little to the side before he attacks your neck all messy. Smearing his lips across your throat, you don’t even recognise the sound that leaves your mouth.
He pulls away, his dark eyes flit to your squelching pussy, the noise attracting his attention pupils dilating, honing in on the way your cunt sucks his cock back in. He couldn’t pull away even if he wanted to and fuck he doesn’t, he wants nothing more than to stay in your pretty pussy forever.
“Simonfuckyespleaserighttheredontstop!” All the words and moans blend together until your mumbling nonsense trying your hardest to keep conscious, it’s difficult with the way he’s fucking into you so deliciously it’s making you delirious in the best way.
His big body towering over yours, big hands gripping you almost bruisingly. His thick muscular hairy thighs press against your skin compellingly, the sight before you, it's irresistible. All you have to do is look down to see his massive cock sliding in and out of you, a ring of white collecting at the base.
It's too much seeing him like this, feeling the sweet pleasure burn through you and yet Simon moves one of his hands off your head and presses a thumb to your swollen, aching clit.
You're done for.
You sob, so fucking loud you swear everyone in the world can hear it, hot tears flow down your cheeks staining them.
"That's it." The words wash over you with your orgasm, it swirls around you, clings to you, and pushes you down down down the rabbit hole of pleasure. Oversensitivity sets in making you whine at his touch, but you can't stop yourself from wanting more.
Your hips buck into his touch eliciting a dirty chuckle from him.
As Simon picks up his thrusts, he comes to the conclusion that he loves you like this, wants to see it everyday. You're so drunk, so delirious and he loves it. Loves the far away look in your eyes right before they roll back into your skull.
He shoves his face into your neck groaning, "Gonna cum Sunshine, need to. Where?" his thrusts pick up again, as if that were even possible.
"Cum inside me Simon, fill me up." You cry out.
Simon must have been right there as he cums the second you finish your sentence. Hot thick robes of cum pushing deep inside you. He rubs your clit faster and another smaller orgasm zips through you leaving you whimpering.
He stays in you, holding you until he goes soft. He moves your legs so they don't cramp. "Did so well for me Sunshine. I love you so much." He looks into your eyes as more tears spill down your cheeks.
"I love you Simon." you bring your fingers into his hair, pulling him closer to kiss you. The contrast between the way he just destroyed your guts and is now kissing you so softly, is astounding.
He is careful when he picks you up and walks into the ensuite bathroom to the right, flicking the light on and placing you on the toilet. "Gotta pee sunshine, don't want you getting you a uti." He says and you're so tired you don't even have the energy to be embarrassed.
Your eyes as still closed as you pee. Your hand moves to find the toilet paper but a warm flannel is being pressed against you, Simon's other hand on your knee to keep them open. You whine and push his hand away, "Simon that's icky." You frown at him opening your eyes to see him looking at you with a frown of his own.
"Nothing about you is icky Sunshine. I'm clearing up my mess, now move your hand." You do as told and it occurs to you, through your tired haze, while Simon gently wipes you clean that he must be used to clearing up mess with the job he does.
"All done. Want a shower or straight to sleep?" He asks.
"Sleep." You yawn making him smile at you.
He carries you back to the bed, lifting the duvet and settling you both underneath it.
The particular quality of afterwards settles in the room.
The warmth of it, the specific silence, the way the world outside the window continues to exist and you become aware of it again in layers. The sound of the garden. The distant sound of a car somewhere. The sound of him breathing.
You were lying with your head on his chest. His arm around you, heavy and warm. His heartbeat under your ear, steady and unhurried, the same heart that had been beating beside you in one form or another for thirty years.
His hand moved. Slowly, idly, up and down your back.
You watched the lamplight glow on the beside table. You thought about the lavender. You thought about the train station in 2001, and the birthday cards, and the bottom stair with the cream envelope, and Margaret Howarth saying you always did belong together with the satisfied certainty of someone who had known it before either of you did.
"Simon," you said.
"Yeah."
"You planted lavender for three years."
"You mentioned that already."
"I'm still processing it."
A low sound in his chest that was the rumble of a laugh contained. "Take your time Sunshine."
You propped yourself up and looked at him. His face in the lamplight — older, marked, those brown eyes that had been watching you since you were four years old, now watching you from a pillow in the house he'd bought you.
His expression was open in the way it had been open on the porch and at the restaurant table and in the dance hall, the way it had been open perhaps three times in thirty years before tonight and was now, apparently, simply his face when he looked at you.
You loved him so much.
You had loved him in different quantities and different registers for most of your life and now you loved him in this one too, this new one, and it was the same love and completely different and you thought you would be discovering its dimensions for a considerable amount of time.
"You should have told me," you said. "Years ago. Before the train."
"Yeah," he said. No argument.
"I would have said it back then too."
Something moved in his face. "I know," he said. And then, quieter, "I wasn't ready then. Wasn't enough yet."
"Simon—"
"I know what you're going to say."
"You were always—"
"I know," he said. "I believe you. Now." His hand came up to your face, tucking a strand of hair back, his thumb at your cheekbone. "Took me a while to get there. But I'm here."
"You're here," you agreed smiling.
"And you're here." his hand tangled itself in your hair.
"I'm here." you giggled.
He looked at you for a long moment. Then, "Stay with me."
Not a question, not quite — more like a hope said aloud. The rarest thing from him. He had carried so much silently for so long, and this one small thing cost him something, and you could see it, and you loved him for it.
"It's my house," you said cheeky and bright.
He blinked. Then that laugh again — the real one, the rare one — and your heart did what it always did when you earned it, that particular, irreplaceable lurch.
"Yeah Sunshine," he said. "It is."
You lay back down against his chest. His arm came around you. His heartbeat under your ear.
Outside, the lavender moved. The Union flag was still on the roof. The porch swing sat in the dark with its yellow cushion, waiting for morning.
"Sunshine," he said. Into your hair.
"Hmm."
"I love you."
You pressed your lips to his chest, above his heart.
"I love you too," you said. "I've loved you since you were that chubby four-year-old who stole my crayons."
A long pause.
"Chubby," he repeated.
"Stocky," you amended, grinning into his chest. "You were very stocky."
"I was four."
"You were a very solid four year old."
His arm tightened around you — not painfully, just firmly, the way of a man making a point through the medium of holding — and you laughed again, helplessly, into the warmth of him.
He made that sound, that low rumbling laugh that lived in his chest, and the lamp burned warm and low and outside the lavender moved in the dark.
Simon Riley.
Who stole your crayons at four and broke your glasses at seven and learned to read because of you and carried your bag through every corridor of secondary school and punched a boy for pushing you over and kissed your cheek in a toilet corridor and sat beside you through every lunch and glared at anyone who called you a nerd and came round to your kitchen table for years and went to war at seventeen and sent you cards from the edges of the world and planted lavender for three years and bought you the house you described at sixteen and came home.
simon "ghost" riley x fem!reader | western!au | oneshot | a light AU to daughters with soft underbellies
After countless years of traveling, Simon Riley wanders into a small-town saloon owned by an old man who's quick to anger. His poor daughter seems to take the brunt of his berating for simple mistakes. As a favor to himself, Simon decides to buy the girl off of him as a wife.
cw: old west alternate universe, wayward outlaw! ghost, smut, dub-con, alcohol and intoxication, improper (or maybe too proper) use of spurs, blood and injury, historically typical views of women and purity, simon is a jerk but hey at least he's better than your dad
An old, fat dog lounges in the corner of the saloon with his eyes closed and belly facing up towards the smoke stained ceiling.
Simon’s been watching him for the last hour while he sips on his whiskey and chews on the butt of his cigarette, filter dissolving on the tip of his tongue. It’s as if he’s looking in a mirror. A washed up mutt with hardened skin finally reclining after too many years of work. Tapping his finger on the table, he keeps count of each respiration and breathes in time with the creature. He twitches in his sleep—tail wagging, cheeks puffing up with emphatic growls that hardly roll past his canines.
There’s nothing else of value to watch in the saloon besides the mangy creature. The poker game taking place three tables down is smothered with ancient men sporting white hair and liver spots who hardly let anything out of their lips except wet coughs, and the bartender has been muttering curses to himself for half the evening that Simon doubts he would make good conversation. Besides, he's a wayward man. Constantly on the move, traveling from place to place, refusing to linger for too long lest trouble finds him.
For now, he’s perfectly content on leaning back in his chair and enjoying his solitude—
—until you stumble in.
Pale pink fingerprints stain the cotton of your apron that you either didn’t bother to remove or forgot to hang up in the kitchen before bursting into the saloon with wild eyes and a heaving chest. As he takes a drag of his cigarette, Simon half expects some inebriated bastard to stagger in after you, caught in a drunken stupor trying to chase after some girl who he doesn't have even half the skill to catch in his maw. You are a sight for sore eyes. Certainly better than the half dead mutt keeping him company. Clad in a sky blue dress that seems all too common for women settling in the west and a gaze that can’t help but be magnetically attracted to the floor as you walk to the bar on lubberly legs, he nearly chuckles when you hold your hands behind your back.
“You’re late,” the barkeep berates.
“Sorry Daddy, I was finishing up chores, and the geese were pitching a fit again—” You’re tripping over your words worse than you do your feet. They spew between your teeth like water from a well pump that has too much pressure behind it.
“I don’t give a damn what held you up, girl. I tell you to be here no later than seven, and I expect that you listen to that,” the man—your father—snaps. Your apology comes so quiet that Simon can’t make out what you say, but he can tell by the curling of your shoulders that it exists. All you get in response is raised brows and a clenching jaw. “Well? Go on. I didn’t ask you to be here just to stand around.”
You slink away from the bar without another word before your gaze is cast out at the swathes of unoccupied tables around you. Simon flicks the ash from his cigarette onto the floor as he studies the way you mentally drink up the tasks laid out for you before you're springing to work. One by one you ignite the oil lamps that hang from the ceiling with precariously rusty chains. A curse hisses between your pursed lips when you burn your fingers on one of the matches, and you shove the raw pad against your tongue to numb the pain.
Simon doesn't bother to hide the way he watches you. His gaze is heavy beneath the brim of his hat, darker than the coal mines that line this pathetic excuse for a town and ten times more suffocating. You make the mistake of not carrying a canary with you as you approach his table—there is no sudden silence of a bird's song to warn you of the danger you're in—a meek smile graces your face as you light another match and reach up to ignite his lamp.
"Good evening, sir," you greet.
His fingers freeze against the table. Simon's lost his interest in keeping count of an old dog's breathing. "Evenin."
Your scent washes over him just as the oil begins to burn. Sweet like fresh strawberries, yet smothered by crude, unadulterated earth. Wet soil, the muck of animals. Simon studies the curve of your face as the flames illuminate your skin. Delectable flesh, pliable and soft—softer than him—yet the blemish on the apple of your cheek screams at him.
"Look at me, sweetheart." The pet name is kind, but his voice isn't. Jumping, the match burns down to your fingers again forcing you to yelp, but even through the pain you listen to him.
He's traded one dog for another.
When you question if something is wrong, Simon gives you no answer except for the beckoning of his fingers. Complying, you lean forward as he snatches your jaw in one hand and sticks his thumb into his mouth before smearing his spit across your cheek. It's wet like a kiss, and your skin drinks up his touch like starved earth yearning for any bit of rain the skies will bless it with. The dried mud flakes off with ease, and he wipes the remainder off on his stained jeans.
"O-Oh." When he relinquishes you, your hand flies up to your face where you begin to rub at your skin as if you can feel the mark he's left on you. "Thank you, sir."
Simon only hums in response before tapping the side of his glass. It rings like church bells on a bleak Sunday. "I'm dry."
Gruff. Short. Seemingly having no time for pleasantries. You awkwardly snatch his glass up before bringing it to your father where he berates you for not asking what was in it before you took it away. Luckily the saloon isn't too busy, and when you return his drink back to him Simon's happy to find that it's exactly what he ordered even though half of it is beaded on the outside of the cup from your blatant mishandling.
His night has become much more interesting now that he can watch you through the haze of his whiskey. Bent over on your hands and knees, sweat beading on your brow, you scrub the floor in the unoccupied areas of the saloon with a bristle brush. The view is nice. The curve of your ass presses through your dress like rising sourdough while you work, and when you're facing him your bodice cuts so low your cleavage glistens in the marmalade lighting.
John Price has always told him views like this were worth the money. His business partner has always been fond of the little thing he keeps locked up at home fat with his kids and sticky with the food he buys. Always got a fresh meal on the table for dinner and a sweet cunt to sink into for dessert. It's not half bad, Riley.
But he knows that type of life isn't for him. Always on the road, gloves tainted with blood turned russet from weeks of baking in the sun before he even bothers to rinse it off. The money in his billfold is far from honest, but men like Simon Riley don't leave the comfort of England to come to the American West for pure business. Face muddled with scars, thighs sore from years of riding, and back ruined from sleeping on the cold earth—he'll be dead long before he ever sincerely dreams of settling down with a wife and kid.
Still, the thought is tempting.
His daydreams shatter the moment you bucket spills, sending water and suds all along the floor, flooding the wood until puddles reflect both the oil lamps and your shame back into your face. Cursing, your father marches over to where you stare at your mess with watery eyes. You jump when he kicks the bucket, sending it flying across the room. Even the near-dead dog in the corner can't sleep through the ruckus.
"Useless daughter of mine! What are you good for besides making a damn mess of my work?" His disparaging cuts so deep Simon can see the quiver in your bottom lip as you stare up at your father, hands neatly folded on your lap despite the way the water soaks your apron. "Don't just sit there! Go fetch some rags and dry this shit up!"
When you stand to your feet, Simon is reminded of the fawn he slaughtered last spring. Wobbly legs, unsure feet, trotting out the door as if you're a fresh babe again. He only killed the small creature out of pity, not malice. Having shot its mother, it was left alone with without a teat to suckle on or any maternal guidance to raise it into adulthood. It didn't even flinch at the flash of his knife or the cut of the blade, it only stared up at him with soft brown eyes that reflected the whole world back at him.
The meat wasn't half bad, neither.
Sucking down the dregs of his drink, Simon saunters up to your father with his empty glass in hand while you work on fixing the mess you've made of the floor. He towers over the bar so much that when he goes to lean on it he has to curve his spine forward, shoulders hunching as if he's some inhuman creature preying on the animals below him. Your father looks at him without so much as a second glance before swiping his empty glass away from him.
"Another?" he asks. He's already grabbing the bottle of whiskey before Simon even nods.
While his cup is poured, Simon glances back down at you. Head bowed, you're wringing out your rag back into your bucket in an attempt to fill it up, but at the rate your tears are streaming down your face, he knows you'll have another flood to worry about before you're even halfway through.
"That your daughter?" Simon inquires with half-hearted interest.
Your father doesn't even bother to look at you before scoffing. "You mean that useless animal? Yeah, she's mine."
"What's she good for?"
Your father sets Simon's drink in front of him, prompting him to return the favor with a few coins on the scarred counter. The whiskey slides over his tongue like rough sandpaper, but the burn in the back of his throat and the cotton being shoved between his ears is worth it.
"Not a damn thing," he huffs before crossing his arms. Your father glares at you from across the room, and you must feel his gaze on you because it isn't long before you're finally raising your head. Sorrow is strewn all over your face, a hefty guilt you can't rid yourself of. "She's a klutz, hardly speaks loud enough for anyone to hear her, always hurting herself like she's still some child."
"Haven't married her off yet? That'd get 'er off your hands." Simon means it as a sour joke, but your father grumbles before he returns to his chores.
"No man's stupid enough to marry her."
The harsh reality of it is no worse than Simon's used to, but he finds himself mulling the idea over anyway. Certainly you're good for something. Glazed eye candy for men to gawk at—men who like their women soft around the edges. Tiny little puppy teeth that can hardly break skin and gets a chuckle when it starts to tickle.
Besides, Simon's learned well enough not to trust the words that comes spewing out of an angry father's mouth. Rancid with the decay clogging their arteries, his own father wasn't much different. A right bastard who knew just how to wiggle his way beneath everyone's skin, slicing through tendon and pure bone just to get a reaction, anything that would justify his hand upon a cheek.
Simon won't pretend to be a good man, but he's certainly better, and if it wasn't for the fact this man has provided him the means to get drunk, his blood would be joining the soapy water in an instant.
"I'd buy 'er off ya."
It takes your father several moments to formulate a response; long enough for Simon to down the rest of his whiskey in a single swig. For the first time since he's walked through those doors he finally notes a smile on the man. It's ugly, twisted at the corners in the way only malevolent things can, but it's sincere.
"Quit pulling on my leg, son," he dismisses.
"I'm not pullin' on anythin," Simon grunts.
A large hand snakes through Simon's vest as he presses his fingers into his breast pocket to retrieve his billfold. It's old. Probably ancient. A dilapidating piece of leather he snatched off of a body just outside Lead two years back when he realized it was much better than the coin purse he had. Perusing through the folded up notes, he yanks out a fifty dollar bill and places it face up on the counter.
Your father's smile vanishes once he sees the money, but the twinkle in his eye only strengthens. "What are you playing at?"
"I'm playin' at buyin' myself a wife and giving you a migraine free end of your life," Simon says bluntly. Brows raising, he spots a bottle behind the man and nods towards it. "Better throw in that bottle of Kentucky bourbon, too."
"Now why would I do that?" your father scoffs.
Simon shrugs. "A wedding gift."
It doesn't take your father very long at all to think over this offer before he snatches the money off the counter and hands Simon the key to his spoils.
"You have my blessing."
You put up a teary-eyed fuss as your new future is laid out before you in the form of a tall stranger who smells like whiskey and iron. Despite the pitiful protests that bleed from your lips, your father has trained you all too well—a sharp snap, a show of teeth, and you're falling quiet like the dead of night in winter. Your father doesn't tell you that he's giving you away for a crisp fifty dollar bill. Not out loud, anyway. He certainly doesn't try to hide it when he shoves it into his pocket.
With his bourbon in one hand and the small of your back in the other, Simon leads you out of the saloon. Neither he nor your father give you any opportunity to gather your things back home—you have nothing to your name but the clothes on your back. Dusk brushes over the sky with a plain pallet of deep reds and bruising purples only to be blotched out by migrating geese that honk in the distance. Long shadows tickle your footprints in the dirt until you reach the hardened rocks and earth that surround your hometown. Not a single word is exchanged between the two of you as your travels begin to wane. There is only the jingle of the spurs on Simon's boots and your intermittent sniffling as you attempt to keep your tears at bay.
Simon's camp is nestled in the valley of a ravine where the soil is cool and the walls are high—a protective den for a wild animal to hide in with his back covered and eyes focused on any throat that gets within sniffing distance. He sets you at the yawning mouth of his tent, a simple lean-to with stained white canvas and hardly enough space for the brute of a man himself, let alone you too.
You try to keep your shivering at bay while Simon crouches in front of a stone fire pit. By the looks of it, he's been here for a few days at least. A moderate stockpile of wood rests next to where his horse is hitched and his feet mar the earth so viciously you fear she may be scarred until the next thunderstorm rolls overhead to smother out all traces of human life.
Fire blooms to life with waifish flames licking up towards Simon's face, demanding more. He feeds kindling and small blocks of wood into it until it's purring content near the tips of his toes, illuminating all the gnarly features that comprise his body. Deep scars cut without care around his cheeks and lips, some spanning even as far as his hairline, distorting the growth with keloids and angry skin. His nose is curved worse than a sickle, and is more crooked than a pianist's index finger.
Despite his flaws, he is not an ugly man. Only slightly painful to look at in the way beasts are—striking fear through your heart as if wielding a dagger. His broad shoulders would be something your friends would squeal over, and his height would send any mentally stable person running for the hills if they were ever unfortunate enough to cross paths with him. Still, you're not sure what to make of him or the way he looks at you. Dark eyes pinning you into the dirt, dry lips parting just enough for him to huff as he stands.
"You hungry?"
All you can do is stare at him. Simon Riley; this man who is to now suddenly be your husband, who bought you off of your father for a single scrap of paper. Some untamed piece of you wants to snap at him, snarl with your teeth bared—how dare he pretend to care for you as if he sees you as anything more than a piece of meat.
"Yeah, starvin' aren't ya? Scroungy thing you are." Before you have the time to argue with him, Simon begins to sort through an old leather satchel held together with a spotty stitching job and a half-hearted prayer. From it, he produces a fair amount of jerky and holds out a stringy piece for you to take. "Here."
You swallow down the smoke wafting from the campfire. "I'm not hungry."
Simon doesn't waver in the face of the stern attitude you attempt to wear; instead, he presses the jerky closer to your face. "Mad at your daddy so you're mad at the world, yeah? That shit doesn't fly with me, sweetheart. Eat your dinner 'fore I give ya somethin' else to keep that pretty mouth occupied."
He doesn't give you an opportunity to argue further before he's pressing the food against your lips, pressing past them and jamming into your teeth. To prevent him from shattering your enamel, you take it from him with a fawn-like glare. It's salty. Harder than the rocks at your feet. Still, you gnaw on it, jaw clenching as your molars grind it as best as you can. As you swallow, you pretend it's Simon's throat.
Your husband-to-be doesn't bother to sit while he eats. The speed in which he devours his food like some gluttonous beast leaves your brain spinning—crooked teeth, sharp canines, and a bad habit of licking his lips afterwards like he yearns for something more than just simple brine on his tongue. Neither of you speak. You're glad for it. Conversation has never been your strong suit, and your father has always treated every sound that's ever left your throat like a chore.
Sparks fly into the night sky to dance with the stars as Simon tosses another chopped log on top of the fire, but you don't get the chance to revel in the beauty of the flames before he's obscuring your view. He removes his hat to reveal short cropped hair before he tosses it onto the bedding behind you where it lands with a dull thunk. You stare up at him. Already a large man, he looks baronial when you're settled on your haunches, attempting to make yourself unnoticeable by his burning gaze.
"You know what comes next, don't ya sweetheart?" he questions.
It's as if the fire doesn't exist at all. You can't stop shivering. Simon's belt buckle flashes in the umbra as he sticks his thumb into the waist of his jeans. You can smell him now—or, at least your brain can make sense of the scent. Long soaked tobacco and the whiskey he drank at your father's saloon, along with something heavier. Like ichor. Like lead.
"I haven't the slightest idea what you're talking about." Your faux courage doesn't get you very far—there's a waver in your voice that trills on the end of your words, and Simon finds it cute enough to chuckle.
"Didn't realize I bought myself a dumb fawn."
A fat palm rests on the nape of your neck with lightning speed and precision, and before you know it your torso is twisted until you're face first into blankets that smell like musk and gun powder. Your yelp is lost into the sparse padding against your cheek. A wounded animal, bleeding out and waiting to be gutted.
You jump as his other hand lands on your rump, not in a spank but in an arcing motion that smooths over your thighs. Even through the skirt of your dress he can feel the way you quiver as you struggle against the palm on your neck. A feisty barn cat, scruffed when it doesn't want to be.
"That's alright, I don't mind spellin' it out for ya if ya need it," Simon muses.
"Wait, wait, please!"
He silences your pleas as his hand wanders down the back of your thigh. Breath catching in your throat, fingers curling into rough blankets that choke you with lingering tar—you squeal when he pulls up the skirt of your dress, exposing your backside to the fire. Warmth licks up your legs both from rigid shame and the flames dancing behind you, but nothing compares to the way he rips through your pantalets as if they're as thin as paper.
"This is how this is gonna work sweetheart." His hands are wandering further, fingertips brushing where they shouldn't, dipping into the warmest part of you with enough friction to make you yelp. "You're gonna lay right there nice, pretty, and quiet for me while I christen this new union of ours, yeah? Gonna get the best bang for my buck, that's for fuckin' sure."
Squeezing your eyes shut, you nod. One of the working women in town once told you what sex was like. Your father has always held purity in high regard, but she talked about it as if it was nothing of importance, a flippant union that she did for work nearly every night.
Ain't nothin' but a slight burn and pleasure so underwhelming you'd wish you had your own fingers down there instead.
Finally, you nod. "Yes sir."
Chuckling, the pressure on the back of your neck vanishes as Simon stands to his feet, spurs jingling on his boots and kicking dirt up into the air as he positions himself behind you. He whistles low as if looking at a painting. Always hung up high in the gallery at the library, brushstrokes vivid as they swirl in prismatic colors—a work of art, just for him. He makes a few adjustments as he tears further through your pantalets with a knife. The iron runs across your skin. A gentle kiss with teeth hardly held at bay. You shiver as the night air rushes to meet your sex.
"Spread those legs, sweetheart," Simon orders. His words are tough, but slurred. Whiskey heavy on his tongue, alcohol burning through his blood like wildfire devouring a mountainside.
Obeying, your weight wiggles side to side as you move your knees further apart and it feels like cutting into yourself. A doe with a knife gralloching herself so that the hunter's work is less laborious.
Simon only chuckles. "C'mon, you can do better than that."
When you try again and he still isn't satisfied with the way you're contorting yourself, his feet thud into the ground behind you just before something bites the inside of your thighs. They're cruel. Like thickets gnawing into your skin as you attempt to fetch the enticing berries just before you, but you get no sweet treat in the end. Just ichor running down your legs as you lurch away from the source of pain, quivering legs spreading until your hips can't take it anymore.
"Yeah, tha's good," your husband-to-be purrs.
Shoulders curling, you attempt to look between your legs only for your dress to block your vision. "Did you- did you cut me?"
"Just used my spurs for some extra motivation," Simon shrugs. The said item jingles as he falls to his knees again, but it's smothered by the sound of his fly coming undone. "If it's not cruel 'nuff for my horse, then it's not cruel 'nuff for you."
"T-That hurt," you snap. You're glad he can't see your face right now and the way pathetic tears plunge down your cheeks with each flutter of your eyelashes.
"I'll kiss it better later if it means that damn much."
His promise tastes stale in the air as his jeans rustle down his hips and the sound prompts you to freeze as something presses against your backside. It's too warm to be a hand. Blistering hot like the surface of the sun jumping out to snatch you up on a warm summer's day. It's too smooth to be his hands; those palms of his are calloused beyond recognition.
You don't realize that it's his cock until it's butting up against you, pushing your labia apart until you're choking him. The stretch burns. Like a paper cut being pried too far apart, flesh splitting, blood oozing from the pathetic laceration. An ache blooms in your jaw as your teeth clench together, and you have to fight the urge to chew on the bedding against the side of your face. Simon grunts as he moves closer, attempting to push further into you, but your body refuses to give. Skin dimples, organs flutter, and you're left wincing at the small intrusion.
"Fuckin' hell. Never been fucked properly before, have ya?"
As Simon curses, he pulls away from you and the pressure dissipates throughout your body. Relief comes next. Bitter and cutting, it tingles between your thighs as the muscles in your back liquefy. Perhaps he's finished with you.
You don't realize how terribly wrong you are until his hand yanks back on your shoulder, forcing your torso off of the ground until your spine is bending like the branches of a willow tree. Sour fingers dart into your mouth, pushing past your lips and knocking around your teeth until gunpowder and stale tobacco presses against your tongue. You gag as the fingers move to the back of your throat, nails digging through your soft pallet, slicing up your throat until you're pulling on his forearm for any bit of reprieve he'll allow you to earn.
"Dryer than a goddamn desert," he mutters against the back of your skull. "Can hardly get you to take even an inch."
He leaves you coughing and sputtering as he retracts his fingers from your mouth and pushes you back down on the blankets. Spit coats your chin, but it isn't long before it's coating your sex too. Haphazardly wiping his fingers along your labia, Simon pushes two fingers into you, plunging too far too fast. Your feet kick at the intrusion, but Simon only laughs.
"That hurts!" you squeal, hips moving side to side as if you could buck him off like a rodeo horse.
"Relax, sweetheart. I'll get ya singin' real pretty f'me in no time," he discards.
There is no time to think or breathe before he's replacing his fingers with his cock. You split apart easier this time. Faster. Body giving into his, flesh decoupling where it's never bled before. All you can do is hold your breath as he fills you with slow, even pressure. When you're so full of him that you can't take anymore, he continues to try despite it. Breaking the laws of physics, bending your will to his own, all while growling like a guarded wolf refusing to share a meal with the rest of the pack.
"Yeah, that's it," Simon praises between gritted teeth. "Just like this, sweetheart."
When Simon picks up his pace—pumping in an out of you faster than your brain will allow you to comprehend—you realize that prostitute you spoke with all those years ago is a liar. This is more than a simple numbness swallowing you, wishing that you'd take matters into your own hands. You feel every ridge and angle of him. The way he pushes your walls out of the way, organs displacing to make room for his demanding cock, everything sliding against one another as if to start a fire within you. Friction too great. Nerves melting off at each junction.
His fingers curl into your hips as if to mark you. White hot branding iron against your skin, shaping you into the swirls of his finger prints—your husband-to-be. You've never heard of men claiming their wives with anything other than a ring on their fingers, but you suppose this man—Simon Riley—might not be much of a human at all.
"Sweet little thing, you are," he grunts. His pace continues at the same speed he's kept since he began, relentless and fast, desperately chasing for something he hasn't gotten in such a long time that it's left him half brain-dead. "Dunno why your daddy treats you the way he does. I've always liked dumb fawns."
Though his words sting, the pain is nothing compared to the way he moves inside of you. His words seem kind and sincere but the verbiage is cutting and wrong—a backhanded compliment meant to leave you floundering. Keeping your lips tight, you refuse to respond to him. You're not sure what you would even say to such a comment anyway. This man, who bought you off your father as a wife, now staking his claim before the matrimony has even taken place.
Seemingly displeased with your silence, Simon's pace falters as one of his hands snakes around your front and down between your thighs. His weight presses on your back. Soft stomach rolling against your rump, hair rubbing against the tender skin—he steals your breath away as his firm fingers swipe against the rawest part of you. The part where your skin hardens, puffy and stiff, blood rushing between your legs until you're brimming full with electricity like lightning.
Simon hisses as your body tenses, back arching as you lift your head up from the bedding, arms aching from keeping yourself from toppling over. He sounds like a snake. An angry rattler slithering through a garden he doesn't belong in. He chokes it off with a chuckle when you begin to gasp and choke on your own breath.
"Yeah, there she is," he chuckles as his pace begins to pick up once more. "Just need a little extra coaxing."
It feels like a betrayal to yourself to admit that it feels good—but it does. It numbs the burn inside of you as Simon continues to take what's now rightfully his. Adding water to the fire until it's no longer roaring, but sizzling, smouldering remains snuffing out with each swirl even as you clench so tightly around him that you nearly trap him inside of you.
His nose rests against your back, crooked tip nestling into the bend of your spine. You feel each exhale. Hot breath soaking into your skin. It makes you shiver.
"That feels—oh—I don't… I can't…" It's the first sentence you've attempted to string together since he began, and it comes out disjointed. Half formed stutters on a tongue that's too limp underneath his fingers.
"I feel it, sweetheart," Simon pants. "Squeezin' me as tight as you are, not sure I could stop myself even if I wanted to."
And he doesn't. He goes faster. Hips snapping against you, thighs rubbing against the new cuts on your skin, blood smearing along him until his legs are bright pink, fingers raking over your sex, digging deep until he's twisting the nerves to his liking, rewiring you until all you can do is hold your breath with clenched fingers. Then, there's the swell. The change in pressure that tenses in your core and skull. Brain throbbing, eyelids fluttering until everything becomes so tight—
—that you finally shatter.
A million pieces of you scatter all over Simon's tent as you come. Thighs quivering, cunt fluttering around him despite his relentless pace; it's sweeter than the strawberry pastries you spent all afternoon baking but the acid that follows bites worse than a wasp. A wretched give and take that leaves you gasping in the stilly night air.
Simon plunges in not too far after you. Both hands returning to your hips, he yanks you towards him and keeps you locked against his body while his cock begins to pulse inside of you, jumping rhythmically as if to a tune you can't hear. Your brain can't make sense of it until he's pulling out of you with a grunt and something warm runs down the inside of your legs—he's truly consummated this marriage-to-be with a gift only man can bestow upon a woman.
He allows you to collapse, but not without another mocking chuckle. On your side, you curl your legs up as close to your chest as you can get while Simon shuffles through items out of your view. Ruined pantalets at your ankles, dress wrinkled beyond recognition; you're soiled. Claimed down to your very marrow by this stranger who blew into town and suddenly decided to take you for himself out of the kindness of his heart.
A kindness soaked in acrimony. Both your tongue and eyes water at the mere stench of it.
When Simon yanks the skirt of your dress over your exposed rump, you can't help but jump. Hands pushing into the earth, you look over your shoulder at him and you're nearly blinded by the fire that dwindles into coals waving with remnants of heat. He holds something out for you to take—a large bottle with a skinny neck and fat bottom. Amber liquid sloshes around inside as he settles down next to you, head skimming against the lean-to tent canvas.
"Go on, then," Simon prompts.
You take the bottle into your hand and realize it's the fresh Kentucky bourbon your father sells at the saloon. The cap has already been popped off, and fresh liquid stains the rim with the remnants of Simon's lips.
"I'm not thirsty," you say, ready to discard the bottle back into his grasp.
"I told you to drink, sweetheart," he corrects you, tone severe.
Brows heavy with a scowl, you ignore the pang between your legs as you sit up and press the bottle to your mouth. Tiny sips allow the alcohol to seep between your lips and though the flavor is smooth, the sting is violent. Needles on your tongue, coals down your throat. When your mouse-like sips aren't enough to satisfy Simon, he tips the bottom of the bottle up, flooding your sinuses with the drink until you're choking it down and coughing at the sting.
"Atta girl," he chuckles before swiping it away and swallowing more gulps than he should.
The earth moves but you stay still. Frozen in time as everything moves around you, time and space warping with you at the epicenter of the destruction of your life. When your husband-to-be settles for bed, he pulls you close to his side but doesn't seem intent on offering any sort of comfort to you besides heavy snoring from his crooked nose.
Your eyes glaze over as you stare at the dying fire. It no longer cracks and spits sparks into the air, it only dances with trembling embers that remind you of waves on a lake. As a coyote howls in the night, you think of how easy it would be to wander back home. To slip from Simon's faint grasp and vanish into the night. You do not scrounge up the courage to leave.
Like your father has taught you—love is nothing if it is not painful.
When dawn breaks you are alone in the tent, but Simon is not far. Breathing life back into the campfire, he crouches next to it with hunched shoulders while boiling water for a canister of dry tea that rests next to his boots. Eyes like soot quickly find you as you peek your face out from the blankets, body stunned into silence as you watch him.
"Mornin' sweetheart," he greets.
Breakfast is just as dull as your pathetic dinner was. Hardtack with not enough salt, and tea that tastes like raw juniper without sugar—you do your best to keep your discontent to a minimum. Your hot cakes are better. Smothered with freshly churned butter and doused with maple syrup from up north. You think about telling him as much, but decide to keep quiet when he stands to his feet and begins to dismantle his tent.
You turn your attention to the dwindling fire as he works. It is a difficult task to focus on the way flames sputter and cry when you can still feel the way Simon ruined you last night. Your sex is swollen, puffy between your thighs, chaffing in areas you never thought were possible. His stench smothers you. Hard work and musk, salty cum between your legs, scabbed cuts screaming at the mixture as it spills out of you, soaking into your tattered pantalets.
Reality hits you without any qualms the moment you place your hand on your stomach. Even that much movement alone hurts.
There are womanly duties that are expected of a bride—of a wife. Of anyone unfortunate enough to be born into the life you are. The seed has been planted, and you're worried about the growth that will overcome your body if it decides to germinate.
"Here."
Simon's voice lulls you back to your senses. His hand is extended for you, and in his palm lies several five dollar bills, all crisp with a neat fold in the center to be stowed away somewhere safe. There's a fat wad of them—nearly 100$ total if you had to guess. Brows creasing, you look up at him.
"What's this? An allowance?" you ask with shaky snark.
He shakes the bills with a tilt of his head. "A parting gift."
Dry lips part in shock. A half-formed demand balances on the tip of your tongue, but you cut it in half with your teeth as you stare up at Simon. "A parting gift?"
"Should be plenty to get you on your way. I'll take ya to the next town over, then what you do from there is up to whatever your sweet little heart desires," he says, voice heavy laden with sarcasm.
Legs contracting, you attempt to stand to your feet only for your knees to give out underneath you, leaving you struggling like a poor-shot doe waiting to be put out of her misery. "But you-! You bought me! Told Daddy you were gonna make me your wife! And last night you took me Simon Riley!"
Tired of holding out money that you don't seem to care about taking, Simon drops the bills to the dirt at your knees. "I'll be real honest with you, sweetheart. I don't have a need for a wife. You're nothin' but just another mouth to feed. Baggage I don't need. Just needed a good night's rest, and that little cunt of yours got the job done just fine."
His haphazard disregard of you leaves thick shame bubbling in your chest like molasses being brought to a boil. No man will take you like this. A whore who has already given herself to someone who has no intention of marrying her, virtue stolen away and devoured as a midnight snack.
"You can't do this to me." Despite your anger, your words only escape your mouth as a hissing whisper.
"Trust me, sweetheart. It's better this way."
"No!" Just as he begins to turn away, your fingers curl into the front of Simon's jeans. A thick layer of dirt and grime wiggles beneath your finger nails, but you ignore the discomfort as you stare daggers up at him with wet eyes and an iron jaw. "You bought me off my daddy, you fucked me last night here in the middle of nowhere—I'm coming with you. Please Simon, you can't just… just leave me. I'll die out there."
As Simon looks down at you with your wet eyes and desperate hands, he realizes he's found himself another fawn. Dumb, looking up at him with a gaze so glassy he can see the whole world reflected within it, lost without guidance. Begging for something to be done. A knife to their throat—anything.
He has long known that he's had no use for a wife. Some woman to calf out children and stay home like a singing bird locked in a cage. But you? This fawn begging for him, desperately in search for someone to trail behind, ready to listen to his every whim? Perhaps he can get used to that.
"Okay sweetheart." He softens right before your eyes. Warm palm against your cheek, thumbing away at the tears on your skin before pressing them into your mouth, all but stunning you into silence. "I'll take care of ya if that's what ya really want. Don't mind havin' a pet."
Simon's sudden change of heart leaves you dizzy, and the thumb on your tongue doesn't help to stabilize you. You promise to be quiet as he finishes packing up the rest of camp, storing away all his items on his horse who lazily watches you while chomping away at the sparse greenery at its feet. When he's finished, he stands in front of you with the rim of his hat sitting low on his face and his thumbs hooked behind his belt buckle.
"Stay right 'ere, sweet fawn. Gonna go get your things from your daddy, yeah?"
It takes all of twenty minutes to convince yourself that Simon's abandoned you. The only thing that can convince you otherwise is that his horse is still here. Just as obnoxiously tall as he is with the same dull, dark eyes staring at you as if he doesn't know what to do with you. Either that or he's gone off to buy a horse from someone else to abandon you without hearing your pathetic shrill cries. He's certainly got enough money for it.
Yet, about an hour later, you hear him huffing and puffing as he settles back down into the ravine. Clenched in one of his hands lies your old carpet bag, something you haven't used since you stopped visiting your friends for sleepovers when you were a child. Even from a distance you can tell it's full to the brim, old fabric bulging beneath the weight of your items as they clank around.
He doesn't bother to greet you upon his return. Too busy tying your carpet bag to his saddle back, thick fingers working along frayed rope as he gives his horse yet one more thing to lug around. Rocks and sand crunch beneath your shoes as you approach him. Even at a distance you can smell the sweat on him. Thick perspiration and musk seeping from his skin, getting his pallid flesh to glow in the sunlight as morning draws dangerously close to noon.
Fingers lacing together, you rock back onto your heels just as Simon turns to face you. "Is everything alright?"
Nodding, Simon digs his thumbs behind his belt buckle once more. "Yeah."
"Good." It's impossible not to notice the stench of blood that follows him. Fresh ichor, iron thick on his skin. When you look at his hands, you see the splitting of epidermis—knuckles busted open like overripe peaches. "Did my daddy say anything?"
"Yeah. Said he was sorry."
You blink. "Sorry?"
Huffing, Simon begins to stalk forward, boots heavy on the ground, spurs ringing with each step, until your cheek is cupped in his hand. It feels wet. Freshly cooled in a nearby stream.
"Said he was sorry 'bout everythin' he ever said 'bout you, 'n that it won't happen again," he explains. The cogs in your mind begin to twist, cleaning the rust off of the gears until every web and speckle of dust is gone. Before you can stop it, you're smiling as you admire this strange man before you. Broad shoulders, crooked face, and fresh blood on the collar of his shirt. "C'mon, sweetheart, let's get outta 'ere."
You situate yourself on the back of his horse as best as you can—legs swung over to the side, arms wrapped around his torso as he kicks the beast into action. It's far from comfortable. Each bump reminds you of the way Simon's cock took you the night before, rabid like a beast and chuckling like a hyena in the night.
Still, as the horse begins to climb out of the ravine, you can't help but smile against Simon's back when you realize you'll never have to be at the butt of your father's scathing abuse ever again.
in honor of mando and grogu coming out soon: what are your favorite din djarin fics??
hiiii nonnie friend!! 👋🏼 thank you for this ask, I’m soooo in love with our fave beskar clad space dad and his green little baby!! there are so many good fics about din around and I’m always in awe of the talented writers who share their work with us. here’s a random selection of some of my faves:
🌌 Stars fading by the talented @bergamote-catsandbooks
🌌 Touchstone by the talented @sawymredfox
🌌 It’s getting tight by the talented @queenofslowburn
🌌 The Long Way Round by the talented @din-cognito
🌌 locked out of heaven by the talented @quinnnfabrgay
🌌 Sight Unseen by the talented @reedispunk
🌌 Brown Eyes by the talented @thedivinereverie
🌌 long gone and found (two parts of the same story) and Meet the Teacher by the talented @burntheedges
🌌 Surgar, Spice and, Starlight by the talented @lamentationsofalonelypotato (link to first part of the series)
🌌 Best Kept Secret by the talented @lincolndjarin (link to first part of the series)
this list is by no means exhaustive and please feel free to drop your fic recs in the comments too!! 💫
I won’t say it isn’t a little embarrassing…. But it really pushed my buttons. Like if you’re the kinda person this is aimed at, you’ll know, because it’ll core you like a fucking apple.
simon "ghost" riley x fem!reader | mafia!au | masterlist
Chapter Thirty-Five: francesca
It is winter, and Simon is cold.
His feet are heavy. Laced with lead, an iron ball chained to his ankle. They refuse to hinge upwards as he trudges through the snow, leaving behind long, wandering lines that mark his uncertain path like groveling worms tearing through the earth. Glistening flakes reach all the way up to his knees. He is smaller, now. A child. His hair is lighter, eyes brighter, but his nose is just as crooked—deeply scarred with the brutal love of his father, tissue puffing out as if to escape his body for somewhere warmer.
Despite the stark landscape around him, he recognizes this hill and the valley it carves into the earth. It welcomes him like the yawning mouth of a fox, eager teeth ready to clamp down and claim him as food, as trophy, as warrior.
In the algid belly of the land, there is a single patch of grass. Warm and flourishing, wildflowers grow in its wake, dotting the spindly leaves with vibrant splashes of color. There is an ugly blemish in the midst of it—a steel cage. A man-made prison. A deceiving burrow meant to take even the sweetest creatures off guard, luring them where their screams are muffled and escape is nothing but a childish dream.
Someone sits inside, resting on their haunches. Frosty fingers curl around the bars, knuckles hardly able to fit through the empty space. Their eyes are wet like river stone. Beautiful things he wishes to pluck into the palm of his hands.
It's you—why is it always you?
"Simon?" Your teeth are chattering, syllables short and staccato. Each tear that streams along your cheek freezes in place; drops perfectly preserved until they dribble off your chin and shatter on the floor of the cage. "I'm cold."
He stops just as he reaches the ring of grass. Snow plows onto the patch of spring only to instantly melt, glistening like fresh dew in the morning.
All he can do is stare at you, this strange creature, cowering in the gullet of an iron beast he knows he can't bend to his will. Not when he's like this, with child hands and fingers easily shattered beneath the flesh.
"Please, I don't wanna die," you beg.
Simon thinks he should save you—he wants to—but he doesn't think he can. Child body, child heart; still too afraid of water to dive beneath the surface. A big coward in a little body, still waiting to grow up so that he can swallow it and forget all about it.
Still, he thinks he'd at least like to try; undaunted in the face of something he's never witnessed before. The bitter cruelty of humans.
Two more steps and he's able to reach for the cage. Winter follows him, a wave of foreboding mist that swallows up the remnants of spring that wilt and die beneath his feet. Each petal on the wildflowers flake off, drying on powdery snow like drops of blood that refuse to properly wash clean. In the distance, he can almost hear the girls in his school playing that game again.
He loves me. He loves me not.
"Don't leave me here, Si." Your voice is small. Squeaky. A rodent burrowing too far from grasp.
He places his hand on the bar—what else is he supposed to do with you trapped in a cage?—and he winces at the frost. It sticks to his skin, peeling off the superficial layer until his fingertips are raw and aching, bright red blush.
"Leave it." It's Tommy. His hand rests on Simon's shoulder like a fresh autumn leaf.
"But she's scared," Simon retorts.
Algid fingers wrap around his and the freeze settles deep into his bones. Simon watches as you shrink, body curling in on itself, collapsing on your side like a long forgotten corpse.
"Grandpa will take care of it later," Tommy assures. "Come on, we're gonna be late for dinner."
Simon doesn't know why he chooses now to listen when he knows he shouldn't, but he does. Legs extending, he stands up straight where you watch him leave from your crumpled position. Eyes glossing over, the rime overtakes your enclosure. Your prison. Your new home.
When he turns his back to you, your pules sound dead in the air as the snow begins to melt around him. Spring blooms where it hadn't before. Lush trees and chirping birds. In the distance, he can smell his mother's cooking. The cottage door welcomes him with open arms. In the dining room, there is a long table with his family. They all smile at him with too-white teeth.
"It's okay, Simon," his mother says. "We know you didn't mean for it to end this way."
He blinks. "What?"
"Come on, grab a seat. Dinner's gonna get cold."
In his seat, there is nothing but a bloodied Polaroid camera and a fox who licks her lips like she can taste the sins wetting his body.
Simon wakes with a breath.
It crackles deep in his chest and burns warm like fire. There are embers in his lungs. Bright wood that pierces through soft tissue and chars everything in its path. He is all wound. All pig meat waiting for the knife with tender eyelids fluttering open to be greeted with a pallid ceiling.
There is blood in the air. Thick. He's drowning in it.
While he makes sense of the stabbing pain in his throat, Simon attempts to recall his last living memory. All he knows is that tub. Rusty spout that tastes like ichor biting into his nose. Smoke curling around his fingers. The searing ache of split knuckles.
There is a fuzziness that separates him from his pain. A thin veil that diffuses the technicolor bulbs of the television droning on. With it attached to the wall, he doesn't need to crane his neck to make out the movie playing, though his blurred vision provides challenge. The music and dialogue are equally as quiet, as if he were shoved under water again, angry fingers curling into his shirt, loveless father pressing on his throat.
Panic rises in his chest only to be pushed down when he sees a figure on the other side of the room. She's curled forward, legs tucked close to her body, eyes blankly staring at the screen while her hands dance in front of her. Fingers curl then straighten, wrists moving fluidly as if being dragged along by an unseen current. A tiny ballerina. A dancer leaping between fingertips.
He only realizes that it's you when he recognizes the string weaving between your fingers.
Patterns. Intricate designs suspended between your hands. Simon swears he can see color between the yarn. Stained glass windows in your palms—an explosion of color brought to life by your will alone.
Beautiful.
Your name catches in his throat, phlegm thick on his tongue, expelling in a cough that aches along every muscle in his body. He clutches his chest and it's only then that he sees the tubes. A needle in his hand, fluids flowing into his veins. His skin feels wrong. Tight, like plastic wrap meant to keep meat fresh after butchering. There's less flesh on his bones. A wasting skeleton with an aching back and tired eyes.
"Simon?" You speak his name and his eyes are on you. It's as if you're looking at a ghost. Someone who's crawled out of their grave in an attempt to return to the land of the living. Limp in your curled fingers lies the red string you always hide away—a prized possession now mere trash when compared to him. "Are you…?"
You don't know what to say. Neither does Simon. All he can muster is another weak cough and a tilt of his chin. "You never did teach me how to play that."
Of all the things you do—you laugh. Breathless and faint, a harsh exhale into the air as you collapse into the chair next to his hospital bed. You're crying now. String discarded on the edge of the mattress, you take his hand into yours, wet cheeks rubbing along his knuckles all while you laugh as if it's your first time discovering the emotion.
Things come back in pieces. Little patch work blanket crudely stitched together. The knife in his chest. The gaping hole left in Marco's throat. All the blood that spilled over his body; his shoes; his mouth. Any worries he has about your safety melts away the moment you start speaking, voice cracking on each syllable.
"I missed you so much." Your body shudders with a choked sob, tears now wetting down his forearm as you continue to rub your face against him.
"How long have I been gone?"
Gone. That's a good way to describe it, you think. Here with his body, unmoving in bed as if he had been stuffed inside of a cellophane coffin. A perfectly packaged doll, like the ones you got for your birthday that you were never allowed to play with.
"About two months," you share, voice quivering. "They just took the tube out of your mouth last night. I was here for it, I promise, but you were so loopy that I don't think you remember it. Maybe it's for the best. You had one in your chest for a little while, too, but they took that out when the swelling or fluid or whatever wasn't so bad."
Simon nods his head as best as he can against the stiff hospital pillow. He swallows. It's sticky in his throat—aches like pins and needles. "Is that why everythin' hurts so fuckin' bad?"
It's meant to be humorous, but your eyes grow wide. "Do you need something? The nurse said they could give you more meds, or maybe even water now since they got that tube out of your stomach, too…"
"Could use a cigarette."
"No."
Even in his current state of near-heavy sedation and confusion, Simon raises a brow at the force behind your denial. Quiet bashfulness overtakes your face as your eyes fall down to his hand. Your fingers interlace with his. They're sore. He's gone too long without holding you.
"Your smoking made everything worse," you admit. "When your lung collapsed, they couldn't get your oxygen levels up. It's why you were out for so long."
For a while, the two of you playfully banter back and forth about his tobacco use. Vaping (despite the fact he abhors it), chewing, herbal cigarettes—you deny them all. Really, Simon doesn't care about it. He just likes hearing you talk.
The only thing that interrupts your tirade is someone entering the room who introduces himself as Simon's respiratory therapist. An older gentleman in pale scrubs, he seems to know everything about him. How he's been doing the last few weeks, his progression; the idea makes him more than uncomfortable. This vulnerability that Marco plunged him into is a rotten wound that he can't expunge fast enough.
There is good news, despite the discomfort. After weeks of fighting on that bed, he's finally stable. Hopefully enough to be moved out of the ICU by the end of the week, the therapist shares. It's enough to make you smile, and Simon's grateful for that much at least.
"Do you have any questions for me, Mrs. Riley?"
For a moment, Simon looks around for his mother. Eyes squinting, he's confused on how he hadn't noticed her, yet he doesn't find her. Not perched on the couch, or hidden in some corner. It isn't until you respond that he realizes the therapist is talking to you.
Pride swells in his heart. It pushes against the walls and arteries until his pulse is audible in his ear drums, beating away on the membrane until he can't make out anything else but the sweet lull of your voice. Soft sunlight surrounds the crown of your head, diffusing into the features of your face, how you nod as your questions are answered. He feels weaker—body broken and decaying—but you look stronger. More sure of yourself.
That strength melts into sheepishness when the therapist exits the room and you realize the intensity in which Simon looks at you with. Your shoulders curl as you lean over the bed.
"You okay?" you ask.
"Mrs. Riley," Simon repeats tenderly.
"Oh, yeah, you—erm…" A breathless laugh escapes you as your eyes fall to your hands. "The first time they tried to remove the tube from your mouth, you mentioned something about a wife. I guess you were pretty sedated. But, well Kyle's been helping to sneak me in to see you despite the fact they weren't allowing you to have visitors, and one of the other nurses caught me but instead of telling me to leave, she asked if I was your wife and… well, I said yes. I know it wasn't right but… well, I couldn't leave you here."
Simon is silent for so long you're not sure if he's still with you. He's motionless on that bed—everything still except for his eyes. They traverse your face, soaking in every detail, pupils expanding the further he gets.
"You're so beautiful." Butterflies swarm in your stomach as he raises his hand. He's shaking, muscles failing him yet he still pushes through until his palm is cupping your cheek. Closing your eyes, you lean into his touch. "C'mere. Give us a kiss."
You hesitate. "But you could get sick."
"Don't care," he wheezes. "Need to feel you."
You give in easily. Body folding forward, torso curling with care to make sure you don't lean on his chest, you hover over him until he pulls you down. Your lips are tense. Anxious. Sour memories roll over your tongue as you recall a bloody kiss and wheezing breath. It dissipates when Simon hums into your mouth. You nearly cry. This kiss tastes like him—it's him. Warm and salty.
Your Simon Riley.
Days later, Simon graduates from the ICU and is moved to the main floor of the hospital. A spark of hope lives inside of you that thinks this means he'll be able to come home soon, but his first day of in-patient physical therapy proves otherwise. It's brutal. Near degrading. He can't even stand on his own. This man, who used to be the zenith of strength, nearly collapses on the floor, saved only by the physical therapist and the equipment strapped to his torso keeping him from colliding with the earth. The weight and muscle mass he's lost is substantial.
Though it's well hidden, you see the frustration that brews in him. He has to be assisted with nearly everything for the first few weeks. A wheelchair becomes his new legs. Each joint aches and pops with any minuscule movement he makes. Some days, even raising cutlery to his mouth to eat exhausts him.
There is grace hidden in the folds of this despair, though. Now that he is awake, he can receive more visitors than just you. His family makes a grand weekend trip out of visiting, all traveling in Tommy's car stuffed full of get well gifts and things to distract him during his prolonged stay. Joseph leaves behind his favorite toy airplane to sit beside Simon's bed where it brightens the room with its mere presence.
Eventually, once the motor skills in his hands have returned, you teach Simon to play cat's cradle. You've almost forgotten how to play when there's another set of hands in the equation. You tried to teach Aelin once after she spent the evening begging you to teach her, but she was too drunk to do it properly—the last person you ever truly played with was your dad. Simon's good at it. More than good. His physical therapist praises both of you for his progress. Your silly game finally has a purpose.
For weeks, you stay by his side day and night. You've made your own bed on the couch in his room where you curl up at night like an animal in hibernation. Sometimes you fall asleep in the chair next to his bed, head on his lap, waking up complaining about neck pain in the middle of the night before he can convince you to move somewhere more comfortable. Really, he wishes there was enough room to pull you up onto bed with him; to feel your warmth against him.
The first and only time you leave his room for an extended period of time is to visit Aelin and John after the birth of their daughter—Amelia Róisín Price.
She's beautiful. Tinier than you expected. When you first meet her, she's curled up on John's bare chest while Aelin eats the largest hamburger you think you've ever witnessed in your entire life. John's hand swallows her back, dwarfing her until she looks like a doll. Eyes closed, she sleeps until Aelin suggests that you hold her.
"She's got to meet her Auntie Chip," she reasons.
Amelia feels about as light as Pumpkin; your poor stuffed fox. When she wakes, she looks up at you with cloudy grey eyes that don't seem to note your features all too well—still, a pink tongue darts out as she yawns and you can't help but giggle at her cooing. You try to recall the last time you ever held a baby, but nothing comes to mind. She fits so well in your arms it's as if it were meant to be.
When the nurse comes in, you help change her diaper and coddle her when she begins to cry at the wipes on her skin. She is the one bit of peace you've been able to find, little Amelia. A beautiful life born in the midst of chaos. A short moment to take a step back and breathe.
August arrives with heatwaves, rain, and the green light for Simon to go home.
It doesn't feel real loading up next to him in the back of John's car, but in the few months since he's woken up he's already made immense progress. Still, he is far from where he was before this all happened. Muscle mass and fat stores evaporated, cheeks gaunt but beginning to fill—he's sent home with instructions. Physical therapy three times a week. No skipping meals if he can help it. Plenty of rest.
You're pleasantly surprised to open the door to Simon's house to find everything clean. Bleach lingers in the bathroom and the kitchen floor smells of cleaner. All the blinds are open, something unfamiliar in the house as Simon usually keeps things quiet and dark. On the counter, you find a bottle of Kentucky bourbon and a note from Kyle and Johnny, the ones responsible for the washed dishes and freshly laundered sheets.
Despite the daylight, Simon drags you into bed, hardly bothering to dive under the covers as he strips his sweat soaked shirt from his torso. His scars are angry. Freshly grown skin puffs along the stab wound, tall and red. It's deep, curling between his ribs like a bad memory. The one from his feeding tube is smaller; less noticeable. Still, it's all you can seem to stare at as you shimmy out of your jeans.
"Whats'a matter, sweetheart?" he asks.
Your eyes have weight to them, and they only grow heavier at his question as you sink into the mattress and scoot up next to him. "Nothing. I just…"
You stare at his chest. The scars. A part of you wonders if this all would have been better if you had just given in to Marco's temptation all those years ago. Sewn your mouth shut and done his bidding. Better yet, if you had just kept quiet during the blood payment, none of this would have ever happened to him. Ribs prominent enough for you to count, stomach sinking towards his spine as he lays on his back, putting the iliac crests of his hips on display through his joggers—your throat tightens. You think you might be sick with the knowledge that you've destroyed the person you love.
"Fuck, Simon, I'm so sorry," you spew, bottom lip trembling.
It's the first time you've apologized for what you've done to him. What you dragged him into. Before you know it, the tears start spilling and Simon's dragging you toward him with the same gentle restraint he's always shown to you. You don't let him pull you all the way. You've spent so long running on the high of him being alive, of trying to stay positive as he healed, that it was a nice break from the morbid reality of your situation.
But now you're faced with your sins. Everything you've done to him. All the harm you caused. Ruining everything—just like you always do.
"Got nothin' to apologize for," he murmurs. His palm is on your cheek, warm and burning into your flesh, holding you close, attempting to lure you into him.
"You almost died." Snot is building up in the back of your throat, and you're sniffling like a madman to keep it at bay. "Every day I was so scared I'd wake up and they'd tell me you're gone. That I've lost you just like I've lost everyone else. Even now you're… Look at what I did to you."
Simon shakes his head. "Baby, this is nothin."
"How can you say that? This is everything! You're everything. This is all my fault, you never would've ended up like this if I had just- I could've lied or- or something. Anything to save you."
"I'd do it all again."
Shocked, you can only blink. Stinging tears dribble off your chin and onto Simon's bare chest as you work through your shock. "What?"
"I'd do it again," he repeats. "All 'o it. Don't care how painful it is, I'd do anythin' for you, sweetheart. I don't have any regrets 'bout lovin' you."
You're stunned into silence. Wide-eyed and wet. All brine and no breath. Your face contorts as you break. It isn't clean or pretty. Splinters scatter in your throat as Simon pulls you into him and you finally lose the strength to fight back. He lays you on his chest, ear pressed against his ribs, nose wetting his pallid skin as he drowns your pules in love.
Bringing your fingers up to his mouth, he kisses each one as he mutters. Love you more than life itself. Do anythin' to get back home to you. Nothin' bad happens to my baby.
When he's finished, Simon places your palm flat on his sternum. His heart beats just how you remember it. Resonant, it echoes throughout his chest, a war drum finally learning a love song, and as it rages, your own heart swells with the knowledge that each strike sounds just for you.
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cw: mdni, it’s just fluff lol, chef!ghost, waiter!reader, it’s a little long.
Waiter!reader who’s overworking themselves.
And it’s not like you meant to, just- you needed this to be perfect. You needed this opportunity that Chef!Ghost gave you, to work out. So the past two weeks you’ve done nothing but focus on that.
You go to culinary school, a bus to the restaurant, work till about ten, get home by 11 and pour your heart into perfecting your 3 recipes till about 5 am. And do it all over again the next day. And the next and the next. It feels like your constantly burning daylight. There are little to no breaks, no room for mistakes, just perfection.
But when you strive for perfection, there comes irritation, anger, disappointment— you’re tired. But you want this—no— this has to work out for you.
You’ve already gone down a route your parents weren’t so proud of, you’ve made your own way by yourself, and then you lost your last job, you got lucky snagging this one. And then with how close you’ve gotten with Simon, the other waiters are questioning you, “Just because you fucked the boss doesn’t mean you can be late,” one snorts. And you have to remind yourself, that this is okay. It’s just for the time being. That you can prove them all wrong. You can prove Simon right, that you are good and it’s good enough to be on his menu.
And maybe this ache in you would make you a good chef, break you down enough just like the other professors wants— enough that makes your soul break juuuust enough for you to be impeccable. That’s the way to show your love of you job, right? That’s the way you want this, right?
So there’s no time to stop. There’s a red bull or a coffee in between the day— you don’t remember—, your professors are complimenting you— maybe you missed the bus to work and almost cried when the second one showed up late. Ran into your shift and threw on an apron, fake smiles and working your way through customers and not dropping that large tray with their food on it, sleeping on the bus on the way home just to get your cupcakes down.
And then there’s Chef!Ghost who hasn’t been able to see you. Not even to check up on you, and at first he let it go, you’re nervous, you don’t want to disappoint. But he doesn’t see you at family meal, your running right out the door as soon as the restaurant closes, and when he does see you, in those small glimpses between the dishes of food, the other waiters and line cooks, you’re just barley holding up, bags under your eyes, jittery, eyes flicking from the linecook to the ticket to the plate, not even talking unless you have to.
You’re on autopilot.
He wants to stop you, tell you that’s it’s all okay. And he shouldn’t have pushed you like this. You can try again later, when you’re mentally ready for it. It makes his heart ache from not even hearing your voice in the kitchen, or smiling at him, whispering in his ear during service how you’d like steak for dinner instead of the special. And he gets to be the one to whip it up for you.
Fucking hell, he misses you.
Before he gets the chance, you’ve come to his office. You’ve got a white chefs coat on, one you must wear in school that has your last name embroidered into it in black, your hair tied up with a cute brown claw clip, your hands behind your back, glasses pushed all the way up your nose and biting the inside of your lip.
Simon could eat you— but he chooses not to. Not this time.
“Could you come with me Chef?” As if you’d have to ask, Simon’s already on his feet towering over you. He rolls up his sleeves, as he follows you from the back to the prep area.
“How are you? I haven’t talked to you in a while.”
You hesitate, and he looks down at your hands— , they’re trembling, “Good. I-I’m good.” You’ve managed to convince yourself.
He wants to take your hand in his like he’s done before, tell you it’s okay. But you’ve pushed yourself deep into a corner, he knows it. The only thing that will lure you out is if he gives you reaction you want or he pulls you by the nape like a kitten— in other words— the truth.
You stop at the metal table, three well decorated cupcakes a top of them, along with the peach cobbler one he asked for, a cinnamon sugar compote dripping atop the perfectly whipped frosting. The middle a classic vanilla with a large star piping, and finally a red velvet, a bit of crumbles bits on top with hand made chocolate hearts.
Simon pauses for a moment, looks from you to the cupcakes, “They’re…”
“Perfect. I know, my professors say I’m the top of my class if I keep going the way I am.”
And it doesn’t make him crack a smile like you thought it would, his lips are in a thin line, he’s uncomfortable. He can’t go over there and yell at them for you. And part of him gets it, culinary school is to make a chef that can work around anything, learn how to make anything, but they’re pushing it too far. His jaw clenches and you notice, shifting on your feet.
He sighs, trying to ignore the irritation, pulling out another random fork from his apron, “Let’s try it, yeah?”
It’s the peach cobbler first, he cuts into it, and feeds you first. Then himself. It’s splendid to say the least, not overly sweet but the peach compote bangs it out the water. Something they’d serve in heaven. Simon uncontrollably groans in satisfaction, “You’re amazin dovie. It’s fuckin lovely.”
A little part of the stress you’ve been holding melts away, hear rising from under you cheeks, playing with your fingers. “You think?”
“I know.” He nods, large calloused hand finding the bavk of your neck, rubbing your nape in comfort. You could feel yourself radiating.
The red velvet is a breeze, Simon isn’t the biggest fan of red velvet but he likes it. It’d be a flavor to switch out on the menu, and you can put another if you’d like. The last one should be easy right, it’s fucking vanilla for gods sake, there should be no issue.
But he bits into it first. Quickly chewing and swallowing, and then he snorts. A grin forming on his lightly scared face.
The fuck is funny at a time like this?
“I-is something wrong Chef?” You stutter out, heart beating faster, big brown eyes searching his. It’s not good for his heart the way you look at him. God, you’re so adorable, so damn pretty.
He hums in amusement, pushing the fork into the cupcake so it leans on its side. And then you see it. A horror show.
The little black specs of burnt cupcake at the bottom.
“I- oh. Uh.“
You’re at a complete loss of words, how could this happen? You’d made vanilla cupcakes before, you could make them with your eyes closed, but you fucked it up this one time? When it actually matters?
Your eyes glaze over with tears, you let out a shaky breath, “I’m sorry. I— this isn’t- I don’t usually burn anything. I didn’t mean—“ maybe it’s been waiting to come out this whole time, and maybe Chef’s Ghosts laughter didn’t ease your tension like he thought it would, but the lump in your throat bursts like a dam.
Simon curses underneath his breath, pulling your further into the prep station so no one sees. “It’s nothin wrong with it swee’art, just a little mistake, it’s still good.” He cups yoru face in his hands, thumbing your falling tears away.
“But it wasn’t perfect! It’s the one thing I shouldn’t’ve fucked up and I did! The one time I- I was supposed to make you proud and I can’t do that right!” You babble on and his heart swells.
Shit, you adorable thing, loveable girl.
“And you have done [+]. Look here baby,” and he lifts your chin up to look at him, taking his hands in yours.
“Told you, I’m no perfectionist. Don’t know where that idea came from. Shit? The one thing I’d critique your cupcakes on is how perfect they are. I like things a little- messy, yeah? Life is messy, and it shows in my work. It shows how authentic my food is, that it’s from the heart. And I know you ran laps in that brain ‘f yours about this but that burnt cupcakes, exactly the kind’ve work ‘m lookin for.”
You pout, biting the inside of your lips. You wants to refute it, but he gives your hand a gentle squeeze.
He lightly chuckles, “Can’t exactly serve something burnt but it’s a mistake. Mistakes can easily be fixed, come out with somethin even better. And I know that’s in you.”
His thumbs rub over your knuckles soothing you. Your heart finally calming down.
“So, does that mean you don’t want them?” Your hesitate. Eyes peeking at him, you still want the job, more than ever do you want to show off to your family for once.
Simon sighs, he couldn’t say no to you, not even if the cupcakes were actually shit. “Course I want them, the jobs always been yours, just— you have to take it easy baby. No stressing yourself out on me, okay? I’m right here for you.”
You throw yourself into his arms, squeezing him tight, overjoyed that Chef— Simon still trusted you with this and relief can finally wash over you. A ramble of ‘thankyouthankyouthankyou’ falls from your lips and you feel the vibration of the amused grunt. Your heart leaping out of your ass. But you don’t let go, just another moment. And Simon, doesn’t let you go either.
“I’m sorry.” You sniffled. Wiping your nose with your sleeve.
“What for? Havent done anythin wrong.”
“I just- I forgot.” Your murmured.
Forgot that he’s right there, and he’s always been right there and waiting to hear you out. Looking out for you, taking care of you.
It’s things he doesn’t mind doing, only for you. Just to see that perfect smile, know that your heart is content and safe. Even for just a moment.
He’ll Listen to you when you have something in your mind. And you’ve done the same for him. Heard him out about the troubles he has. There’s an unknown line you two hop back and forth between, personal and impersonal, proof that close just isn’t close enough. The past three or so months have been a whirlwind of emotions but Chef Ghost— Simon, Simon is constant.
Simon is caring, kind, and understanding and willing.
The exact type of person you’d craved to be with your whole life.
And it’s everything properly falling into place, his eyes lost in yours, some type of magnet pulling you into his space against the counter— his lips meeting yours for the first time. It’s sickeningly sweet, the taste of buttercream and cake on his lips, one that still has your breath hitching, heart pounding.
But Simons gentle, “easy birdie,” he mumbles against your full lips. He lets go of his hand find your waist, tucking you closer to him.
There’s no need to rush, this is the perfect recipe. Slow, steady, soft, mixing two things together takes time. He pulls away after who knows how long, steadying you by your hip. Pecking your lips for good measure once more.
He give you a small smirk, “Let’s get to work then.”
a/n: I know this took a while, sorry. Also I don’t like peaches, and I hate warm fruit. Inspo obviously broken clocks by SZA. This was kinda shite but whatever.
went apple picking and the spot we went to had raspberries and you know I was up in those brambles eating the best raspberries I have ever had.
naturally it got me thinking about bear shifter!price who retired from the service to a quiet little cabin in the woods. the kind of place where you could walk out your front door and not see another soul for miles and miles.
price knew there were hiking trails through the woods, knew they used to be frequented by the locals and others, but rumors of bear sightings had scared off most people. a few carefully planed sightings of price in his bear form and suddenly he had half the mountainside to himself.
you had heard the rumors, old men huddled around the bartop where you worked whispering about about a big black bear, biggest bear anyone had ever seen taking up residence in the woods that you had grown up exploring. you weren't going to let some bear stop you from rediscovering the woods you grew up in.
you follow the familiar paths through woods that feel more like coming home then the house you had grown up in had when you came back to town after years of being away.
you packed a lunch, had plenty of water, but when you found the brambles thick with raspberries, plump and juicy, hanging heavy from the vines. it would have been a shame to let them go to waste.
thats where price finds you. laid out on the ground by the brambles, brambles he had been waiting to ripen, fingers stained with the juice from the berries, face sticky, eyes closed as you rest, the high summer sun sapping your energy until you had no chance but to take a nap, head rested against your pack.
you wake to the feeling of something wet and warm dragging against your face. your mind slow to catch up in, body fully melted into that warm summer nap. when your eyes do peel open you feel like your caught in a dream. theres no other explanation for it because the alternative is that a massive bear is standing over you, giant paw next to your head, mouth open, tongue lolled out to lick stripes up your neck and cheeks.
price feels it when you wake, knows the moment you realize the danger you are in, body tensing, breath stuttering in your chest. you're scared enough that he wouldn't have to worry about you returning to his woods, stealing his berries, bothering his peace.
but the smell of you is thick in the air, the taste of your sweat mixed with the sweet juice of berries coats his tongue. the gasp that escapes your lips when he drops his head down on your chest has his blood boiling, its hard not to imagine what other sounds he could coax out of you.
maybe he didn't need to be so alone up here, maybe there was a benefit to having someone to share his berries with.
