as said in Matthew 7:7-8, "ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you..."
my first attempt at writing a threesome about Grace x Reader x Ortiz!Rocky. this is just straight up filth, like almost everything that i publish on this blog. enjoy, my freaky parishioners, specifically the anons who requested this. [MDNI]
I hope you’re ready to become a specimen to be studied because that’s exactly what’s gonna happen once Rocky lays his eyes on you. You're no Eridian; he doesn’t know your biology that well, and Rocky being Rocky… he’ll be curious about everything. He'll ask you about every bodily function you have and how it works; he’ll ask permission to touch you maybe during the first few days, but after that, he’ll decide on his own that you’ve become “comfortable” enough with his inquisitive nature that you’ll just be down to answer any query he might have about your body.
Grace tries to mediate between the two of you. He was sort of sore with jealousy at first when he realized that he might have to share you with Rocky, but he really isn’t the type to not budge when Rocky asks for something — what Rocky wants, Rocky gets — well, he should learn how to share, really; but Grace will teach him about that too. He knows he’s got a bit of an advantage here; you’re both human; you’re more comfortable with Grace, and he knows how to navigate situations that you two find yourselves in. Perhaps not as well as when his head is spinning while you two are making out in the lab after you’ve both bared your feelings to each other… He’s like Rocky in this sense; he’s still trying to wrap his head around the fact that you like him back. He'll come around.
The first batch of questions from Rocky is quite tame: “what this body part for, question?”, “why have protruding muscle in feeding orifice, question?” — but you’ll find out right away that Rocky is touchy even in that earlier stage. You once had to spend at least five minutes explaining why he can’t just tug at your tongue so he can get a better look at it, or that he can’t have you sit on his lap so he can study your scalp and find out how your hair is attached to your skin. So Rocky negotiates, and you end up perched on one of the lab benches as he stands between your thighs, parted just enough so he can be as close as possible to you. Rocky is, by no means, rough: he knows through Grace that you’re equally fragile, so he does his best to be gentle. He'll ask you to lean into his palm as he examines your face, knowing you’ll get tired from holding one pose for an extended period of time.
But even with all of that tenderness, he’s still got that glint in his eyes while he explores you. It's a strange, arousing mix of his curiosity and some kind of hunger, because really, Rocky wants to know how you feel against him; how you’d feel on him, around him, especially in this human form he’s taken. he’s so taken yet still so appalled by how much fluid the human body makes for specific reasons and situations, so that’s the experiment that he wants to conduct next. It'll be easy, he’d think. He has Grace to guide him through you.
The set-up goes like this: you’re laying on the mattress that they’ve set out on the dormitory floor — bare from the waist down — with your back resting against Grace’s chest as he holds you from behind, reassuring you that he’ll tell Rocky what to do, and that there’s nothing to worry about. Rocky, ever the eager individual that he is, has his palms spread atop your thighs, already giving the plump flesh little squeezes; even after all this time, he’s unable to fathom how soft you are; so abundant with curves and openings that he could sink into you every day if he wants. So, so warm, and so, so slippery against his own skin.
Rocky begins with your mouth, as always. The Eridian-Human disconnect regarding the attitudes toward eating has long been a favorite source of humor for the three of you; however, in this case, Rocky cares more about understanding why you’re gushing down south as much as you were producing spit around his fingers as he thrusts them into your mouth. he presses on a particular spot on your tongue, and you moan around his digits. Your eyes flutter shut, lips closing in around him as you suck. Grace runs his hands down your trembling arms, traveling up your sides and catching the curve of your breasts. He tells you to relax, and it doesn’t take much of you to do so, as you’ve associated the sound of his voice with comfort already. you don’t miss how his cock twitched against the skin of your lower back at all, though — you have half a mind to reach behind the two of you to stimulate him, but you put that thought aside for now.
Rocky watches intently as he continues prodding into the wet cavern of your mouth. His other hand steadily creeps down to brush against your folds, and you make that sound again; only louder this time, and this pulls an overjoyed purr of a laugh from Rocky. He withdraws his fingers from your tongue to focus on your pussy. The shame of missing him against your lips washes over you, but that’s replaced by the bolts of pleasure he gives you as he gathers strings of slick that you so generously made for him: glistening nectar from the fruit of his labor. he lays prone on the mattress, all inhibitions and courtesy of asking permission cast aside when Grace verbally tells him it’s okay to lick — he should, actually, because Grace knows you’ll like it. Rocky sings as he gets a taste of you, and you shiver at the feel of his tongue running up from your seam to your clit.
Grace snakes a hand over you and uses his fingers to spread you open, presenting your clit to Rocky. You gasp at the cool air of the dorm hitting your sensitive skin. “This is called a ‘clitoris’,’ he explains. “it would make [name] feel really good if you touched her here, Rocky.”
You brace yourself as the Eridian stares at your sex, mulling over whether he should use his fingers or his mouth. he asks Grace this, and he’s told that either would feel nice. So Rocky tries with his fingers first, and your back arches against Grace as he rubs up and down, and up and down your clit, stimulating the nerve endings like he was setting fire to all of them. He looks up at you from between your legs, elbows supporting his upper body as he smiles at you with so much of that innocent wonder he has about human biology, even if what he was making you feel was anything but innocent. He’s even more delighted when your whimpers come out in jagged succession; he’s switched to drawing slow ovals over your clit now, and you’re sure that you’re about to come in the next few moments. When he brings you there, Rocky is quick to catch your release with his mouth, much to your surprise; he laps up everything and tastes it intently on his tongue. He decides that he likes it.
Grace gets the privilege of penetrating you first. He kisses you as a reward for being such a sport for Rocky’s bit of the “experiment”, and also as a way to get his fill of you. He places you in supine, sliding a pillow beneath your lower back to ease you off the flat surface of the dormitory floor, and positions himself between your legs. He has to demonstrate this part to Rocky first, not wanting him to hurt you on his initial inexperienced trial. Having been fingered and eaten out, you accommodate Grace easily. He bows his head as he slips inside of you, the glide only making him feel closer to the edge. He wills himself to hold that back, and starts to thrust, all while telling Rocky that this is what he’s supposed to do: begin with a slow pace, have patience, and ask if he can do more later on. You’re none-the-wiser to Grace and his diligent teaching methods at this point, because all you can really focus on is how good each drag of his cock feels against your walls. Your hands switch between holding onto his arms, sides, and thighs for support, or anchor to reality; it’s hard to think rationally when your dirtiest fantasy is finally happening to you, with the addition of a very, very excited Eridian who wants to experience you in the same way, too.
You have to hold onto the sheets when Grace snaps his hips into you; a result of your own doing, since he asked you if he can go faster. He leans forward, closer to you so he could kiss you, and your legs wrap around his waist to draw him nearer. Rocky whines from the compulsion to be in contact with you again; he’s been stroking himself for the past couple of minutes, so when you briefly snap out of the haze that you and Grace were sharing, you beckon him towards you. He rushes to your side, and lets you wrap your hand around his cock to touch him yourself. His body curves forward; his fingers grip your wrist, steering you so you could stroke him the way he wants you to. Grace finishes at the sight of both of you — his hips pummel into you erratically as he fills you up, sighing as he empties himself within your addicting heat.
Rocky practically positions you according to his preference like a doll once Grace tells him that it’s his turn. You hold onto Grace as he sits up against the adjacent wall; your body’s bent over while Rocky is on his knees behind you. Rocky is a little bigger than Grace, you find; he’s stretching you more as he slots himself into your cunt, and remnants of Grace’s release drip out from where you’re both connected. Rocky wants to do that too; to give you his own release, to feel it wrap around him and paint you inside with it; and he wants to do it without Grace’s help next time. He’s a fast learner, and he aims to do good. It’ll be his first practical test, and he only needs you to tell him how well he’d do.
You don’t even get to savor the struggle of keeping your jaw from hanging slack at the feeling of being so full of Rocky, because he’s decided on his own that you’re ready to take him in such a brutal rhythm. He dips down to wrap his arms around you as he resumes that same tempo.
“[Name] feel so good; good, good, good,” he trills into your ear. He licks the shell of it, and chuckles brokenly. “Can [name] promise [name] will do it with Rocky only later? Want to get you alone, want you all to myself…”
Grace kisses you, swallowing your noises as Rocky plunges into you over and over again, catching you as your arms begin to give out. He croons, telling you that you’re doing so well while he’s pumping his own cock at the same speed as Rocky who’s fucking you in wild abandon.
You announce not long after that you’re going to come again, and Rocky is more than happy to be the one to bring you to another exquisite peak.
“Yes, yes, [name], come for Rocky one more time,” he coos into the damp skin of your nape, “wanna hear you sing again, please, please, please…”
You cry out his name as your second release rips through you, shaking in his embrace as you fuck back into his cock in faltering pulses. Rocky takes it all, and sighs as he does the same, spilling every drop within you like he always wanted. He presses his cheek against your shoulder, panting from exhaustion and satisfaction. You’ve got yours on Grace’s, and he’s dotting your forehead with gentle pecks. You tiredly lift your head, meeting his lips in a sloppy kiss.
Rocky is just about to figure out that he likes being sheathed inside you like this. Maybe he could get away with that before he fucks you again in a few hours.
Hi guys! I thought I should just share my whole mini little library of Project Hail Mary-related things so they're all in one place:
It includes:
My transcript of the movie (more on that here)
Audio recordings of the movie
A PDF of the book
The full audiobook
A copy of Andy Weir's doc on Eridians
The audiobook and audio recordings all have their properties programmed so they (should) work just like songs with a track number, album cover, artist, and so on if you download them.
There are two audios of the movie, one is the entire film untouched and one is that same audio cut up and broken down into separate scenes for convenience.
Additionally, there are two versions of the transcript, one with time stamps that match the audio and one without. The time stamps (+ their titles from the audio) are outlined in that version, so if you double-click on that tab or click "show outline," they'll all show up and you can pick a specific scene.
As always, if anything's not working right, you notice any mistakes in the transcript, or any of the audios are cut wrong, please let me know and I'll fix it as soon as I can!
jack abbot x f!reader | slow burn, age gap, hurt/comfort, veteran!jack, reader is a paramedic turned ER charge nurse, chronic pain themes, emotional avoidance, pittsburgh winter
The first thing you learn about Jack Abbot is that he lies about his pain levels.
Not dramatically. Not in the way patients lie, theatrical minimizing, hoping you won't notice the sweat on their upper lip or the way they're breathing through their back teeth. He lies the way someone lies when they've been doing it long enough that the lie has become the first language and the truth is the translation. Automatic. Fluent.
You know this because you spent six years as a paramedic before you became a nurse, and paramedics learn to read bodies the way other people read faces. By the time you get to a scene, the body has already been telling the story for minutes, sometimes hours. You learn to listen to it instead of the words.
Jack Abbot's body, on a bad day, says something completely different from what his mouth says.
His mouth says fine, it's manageable, don't worry about it.
His body says the socket fit is wrong today, or the weather changed overnight and the phantom pain is running hot, or he's been on his feet for six hours past the point where he should have sat down. The particular set of his jaw and the almost-imperceptible shift of his weight to his right side are the story, if you know how to read it.
You know how to read it.
You don't say anything about it for the first two months.
You came to PTMC in January, which is, in retrospect, the worst possible time to move to Pittsburgh. The city in January is gray in a way that feels personal, a low flat gray that sits on everything and muffles sound and makes the days feel like they're happening inside a cotton ball. You grew up in North Carolina. You were not prepared.
What you were prepared for was the job, because the job is the one thing that has always been straightforward. You are good at this. You have always been good at this, from your first day on an ambulance at twenty-two to the charge nurse position you'd held at Durham Regional for four years before the particular series of events that led you to Pittsburgh. You don't think about those directly if you can help it. You've filed them under necessary change in the organizational system of your own history.
PTMC's night shift ER is a different animal from what you knew. Bigger, faster, with the specific energy of a teaching hospital, residents everywhere, the constant low-level hum of people learning under pressure. You'd worked in teaching hospitals before. You understood the rhythm.
What you didn't anticipate was the attending.
Your first shift, you're given the standard orientation rundown by the outgoing charge nurse, a woman named Delphine who has clearly been doing this long enough to have developed a personal shorthand for everything, delivered at speed. She covers the board system, the trauma bay protocol, the supply room situation, the attendings. When she gets to Jack Abbot, she pauses in a way that isn't quite a pause, more like a breath, like she's selecting the right words.
"Night shift lead," she says. "Ex-military, Army. Left leg prosthetic, below knee. He'll never mention it, don't mention it either unless he brings it up or it becomes a clinical concern. He runs a tight floor. He's fair. He doesn't raise his voice." She looks at you over the top of her reading glasses. "When he gets quiet is when you should pay attention."
"What does quiet mean?" you ask.
"You'll know," she says, which is not an answer, and turns out to be completely accurate.
You meet him properly at the start of that first shift, in the handoff briefing. He's already at the board when you come in, reviewing overnight census with the precision of someone who has been doing this long enough to read a board the way other people read a sentence. Whole, not word by word.
He's, you notice him the way you'd notice a weather system. Something that occupies space differently from the things around it.
Late forties, maybe early fifties. Dark hair with gray through it, more at the temples. The kind of face that would be called handsome in a way that's about structure rather than prettiness, strong jaw, lines around his eyes and mouth from years of squinting into the sun or the middle distance. He's in scrubs and a white coat and he wears both with the unconscious uprightness of someone whose posture was trained into them young and stayed.
When he turns to acknowledge the incoming shift, his eyes do the thing Delphine warned you about. A quick systematic read of the room, everyone clocked and filed in seconds. When they land on you, they pause one beat longer. New face. Catalogued.
"Charge nurse?" he says.
"Yes," you say. "First shift."
"Durham Regional before this?"
"Six years before that as a paramedic."
Something registers in his expression. Not warmth exactly, more like the slight adjustment of a person recalibrating an estimate. "Good," he says, and turns back to the board.
That's the whole introduction.
Later you'll understand that good from Jack Abbot in the first thirty seconds of meeting you is the equivalent of a lengthy written endorsement from anyone else.
The first month is learning. Not the job, you know the job, but the floor, the people, the particular language of this specific place.
You learn: Lena at the main desk has worked this floor for nineteen years and knows where everything is, has ever been, and probably will be. Consult her before the supply room. Resident Santos is sharp and combative and improves dramatically when you treat her like the intelligent adult she is rather than a medical student who needs managing. Resident Whitaker is careful and slow and will get there, he just needs more runway than the others. Dr. Parker Ellis is the senior resident who has, apparently, been trying to get Jack to take a vacation for three consecutive years.
You learn Jack in layers, the way you'd learn a complicated patient history. Not all at once, but accumulating, building toward a picture.
He takes his coffee black and too hot, and he has opinions about the ER coffee machine that he has apparently been voicing to facilities since before you arrived. He reviews charts standing up, always, unless it's the end of a long shift and he thinks no one is watching, at which point he will occasionally, briefly, sit. He has a particular way of delivering bad news to families. Not scripted, not the sterile clinical distance some doctors put on like protective gear, but present. Actually in the room with them. You've watched him do it three times in your first month and each time it's the same: he finds a chair, he sits at their level, he doesn't rush the silence.
He is, in ways that are professionally inconvenient, exactly the kind of person you find most difficult to be indifferent to.
You do your level best anyway.
The pain thing comes to a head on a Thursday in February.
The weather has been bad for a week. Pittsburgh winter, which turns out to be a different category of winter than North Carolina winter, with a wet cold that gets into everything and a wind off the rivers that has a personal quality to it, like it knows where you're going. You've been told by multiple people that you'll acclimate. You're skeptical.
The floor has been brutal. A multi-car pileup on 376 sent four traumas in under an hour, and the residual administrative chaos of that is still reverberating five hours later. You've been moving without stopping since the shift started, and you're aware, in the background-noise way you're aware of your own physical state during hard shifts, that your feet crossed the threshold from tired into genuinely unhappy about two hours ago.
You're at the medication cart at hour seven when you notice Jack at the far end of the hall, reviewing a chart. The weight distribution is wrong. He's putting almost nothing on his left side, and the line of his back is carrying a tension that wasn't there at the start of shift. He's been on his feet for the same seven hours, plus whatever time he was here before handoff, and the socket that connects his prosthetic to his residual limb has a tolerance for hours-of-use that you know from six years of working with amputee veterans is finite and individual and frequently ignored by the person most affected.
You finish with the medication cart. You think about it for another minute. Then you go to the supply room.
When you come back, you find him at the hub.
You set a heat pack on the counter next to him, the kind you crack and shake, runs for about forty minutes. You don't say anything. You go back to your charting.
A long pause.
"What's this for," he says. Not a question. The sentence has the quality of someone who knows exactly what it's for and is deciding how to handle it.
"Residual limb pain responds well to heat when it's cold-triggered," you say, eyes on your screen. "Particularly after extended weight-bearing. I've got four amputee veterans in my contacts from my paramedic years and two of them told me that independently."
Silence.
"Your weight's been on your right side for two hours," you say. "I noticed."
More silence. You type something. You can feel him looking at the side of your face.
"I didn't ask for—" he starts.
"You didn't," you agree. "I didn't offer it as a commentary on your ability to do your job. I offered it as a heat pack." You look at him then, briefly, level. "You don't have to use it."
You go back to the screen.
Another pause. Then, in your peripheral vision, he picks it up.
He doesn't say thank you. He goes back to his chart.
You don't expect him to. You weren't doing it for the thank you.
About twenty minutes later, a cup appears next to your keyboard. Coffee, from the good machine at the other end of the floor, not the hub machine. Hot.
You look at it.
You look toward the board, where he's standing.
He's talking to Ellis about a consult. He doesn't look over.
You drink the coffee.
This becomes, without either of you naming it, a language.
Not every night. Not predictably. But the small offerings accumulate, the coffee, the heat pack on the bad days, a granola bar left near your station during a brutal stretch when you haven't eaten since before shift, a specific piece of information relayed in a way that makes your job marginally easier, the quiet appearing at your shoulder on the nights that earn the particular designation of hard rather than just busy.
You do the same back. It comes naturally. Six years of paramedic work teaches you that care is often most useful when it's practical and doesn't require the other person to acknowledge receiving it.
The first conversation that isn't about the floor happens in the break room, five weeks in.
You're eating dinner at eleven PM, or what passes for dinner, which is the depressing collection of vending machine items that constitute nutrition during a long night shift, when he comes in for coffee. He does the microwave thing. He leans against the counter while it runs.
You eat your crackers.
"Durham," he says. "What made you leave?"
He's not looking at you, looking at the microwave, thirty-eight seconds remaining on the display.
"Needed a change," you say.
"From the job specifically?"
"From a version of myself I'd gotten stuck in."
The microwave beeps. He gets the cup. He turns around and leans against the counter facing you now, and the expression is attentive in the particular Jack Abbot way, not performing interest, just actually interested.
"What version," he says.
You consider how much of this you want to hand over to someone you've known for five weeks. Then you consider that you're in Pittsburgh in February eating crackers at eleven PM and your options for honest conversation are limited.
"The version that had gotten very good at the job," you say, "by removing herself from it. Technically excellent. Clinically appropriate. Completely sealed. You do the thing for long enough without adequate processing and it just," you tap the side of your head, "goes somewhere it shouldn't. Calcifies."
He's quiet.
"Paramedic work specifically does something to you," you say. "You're first in. By the time a patient reaches an ER, there's a team, there's protocol, there's structure. On a scene it's you and your partner and whatever you find when you get there. No buffer. You absorb a lot." You pause. "I absorbed a lot."
"And you stopped processing it."
"I stopped having the bandwidth. And then I stopped noticing I'd stopped. And then one day a woman in the waiting room asked me if I was okay and I realized I genuinely didn't know how to answer."
He makes a sound that isn't quite a word.
"You know that version of the problem," you say. It's not a question.
A beat. "I know a version of it," he says. "Different origin. Same architecture."
"Military."
"Yeah."
"When."
"Three deployments. Third one ended the career." He glances down at his leg without looking like he's glancing down at his leg, a micro-movement you'd miss if you weren't watching carefully. "By which point I'd been not-processing for about eight years."
"How'd you get out of it?"
He makes a quiet sound that has some irony in it. "Badly, at first. Then therapy. Then time. Then finding something worth being present for."
"Medicine."
"Among other things."
The break room is quiet. The vending machine hums. From outside the door, the distant sounds of the floor.
"Pittsburgh was supposed to be temporary," you say. "I was going to do a year, get my head right, figure out the next thing."
"And?"
You look at your crackers. "Still figuring."
"How long have you been here?"
"Seven weeks."
"Give it till April," he says. "The city looks different when the gray lifts."
"That sounds like the beginning of civic propaganda."
"It sounds like someone who came here for temporary reasons and then stayed," he says, and picks up his coffee and goes back to the floor, and you sit in the break room for another few minutes thinking about the specific weight of that sentence.
March is when the floor gets to know you.
Lena starts leaving notes for you at the start of shift, small intelligence briefings on the state of the floor, the status of the supply situation, which residents are having good nights and which need watching. Santos, after an incident involving a difficult patient and your intervention on her behalf, starts bringing you coffee exactly once a week in what you understand is her version of a significant gesture. Whitaker asks you questions in the tentative way of someone who has been burned before by asking the wrong person, and you answer them straight, and he relaxes.
Parker Ellis tells you, on a Tuesday in March, that you're good for the floor.
"How so," you say.
"You stabilize things," she says. "Some charge nurses manage the floor. You hold it. There's a difference."
You think about this later. You think about the version of yourself in Durham who was excellent at managing and terrible at holding, and whether Pittsburgh is teaching you something or whether you arrived already changed and the city is just the location of the change.
You think about a lot of things lately that you'd stopped thinking about for a couple of years.
Jack is not incidental to this. You'd be dishonest with yourself if you tried to argue that he was. There's something about the quality of his attention, the specific way he notices without making the noticing a performance, that has begun to unlock things. Things you sealed up and labeled later and then ignored.
You don't know what to do about this, exactly.
You file it under pending.
The night it shifts is a Wednesday in late March.
A warehouse fire on the South Side sends three critical patients in under forty minutes. It's the kind of night that strips everything down to function, no room for anything except the work, the sequence, the next right thing. You've been in these nights before. You know how to move through them.
What you haven't navigated before is moving through one of these nights and simultaneously being aware, in some registered but unaddressed corner of your attention, that Jack Abbot is running on something that isn't all right.
It starts small. The tells are minor. He's been on his feet longer than he should, the cold has been bad this week, the socket issue you've been watching for two months has been a recurring problem and he's mentioned the new fitting exactly once in the dismissive tone of someone who made an appointment and then cancelled it. On a normal night you'd leave a heat pack and a coffee and consider the conversation managed.
This isn't a normal night. This is eight hours of controlled emergency, and by hour six you can see, if you're watching, if you've been watching for three months, that the pain is running high enough to be a factor.
He doesn't show it in the work. That's the thing that makes it worse, in a way. The work is impeccable. The decisions are right, the communication is clear, the patients are managed with the same steady competence that they always are. Whatever he's dealing with, he has put it somewhere else with a proficiency that speaks to long practice.
But you've been a paramedic. You've seen people push through pain until their body stops accepting the instruction, and you know what that looks like in the seconds before it happens.
At hour seven, during a lull between the second and third trauma, you find him at the hub. You don't ask how he's doing. That's not the language.
"I need you to do something for me," you say.
He looks at you.
"Sit down for twenty minutes. I'll cover."
"I don't need—"
"I know you don't need to. I'm asking you to do it for the floor." You hold his gaze. "You're eight hours into a shift that's had three traumas and you've been compensating your gait for the last two hours, which means the socket is causing problems, and if you end up off your feet involuntarily in hour nine because you didn't sit down in hour seven, that's a floor problem. So I'm asking you, as charge nurse, to sit down."
A long pause.
"That was very tactical," he says.
"I spent six years on ambulances. I learned to frame requests so people would take them."
Something almost moves in his expression. "Twenty minutes."
"Twenty minutes."
He goes to the break room. You cover the floor. Twenty-three minutes later he's back, and the gait is better, and the tension in his jaw has reduced to something closer to baseline, and he doesn't say anything about it and neither do you.
But at the end of shift, when the floor is winding down and you're both at the hub finishing charting, he says, without looking up from his screen: "How did you know it was the socket and not the phantom pain."
"Phantom pain doesn't change your gait," you say. "Socket fit does."
He's quiet.
"You cancelled the fitting appointment," you say. Not a question.
"How do you—"
"You mentioned it in February. You haven't mentioned it since, and the problem's gotten worse, not better." You save your chart. "I'm not asking you to explain yourself. I'm observing that the appointment would probably help."
A pause. Then: "You're very annoying."
"I know."
"In a," he stops. Starts differently. "It's useful. The annoying."
"High praise."
The almost-sound, the one that isn't quite a laugh. You've been hearing it for three months and you've started to understand that it's the version of warmth he allows himself in professional settings, the suggestion of it, the controlled release. You've started to notice when you prompt it.
You're aware this is information with implications you haven't fully processed.
April arrives and the gray does lift, like he said.
It happens incrementally, a morning here, an afternoon there, the river catching light in a way that Pittsburgh in January made you doubt was possible. The city reveals itself differently in April. Older neighborhoods with the particular architecture of a place built by people who intended to stay. Bridges everywhere, connecting things.
You take a different route to work and find a diner and start stopping there before night shifts, and the routine of it, the specific booth, the same server who brings coffee without being asked after the third visit, grounds something that has been unmoored since January.
You're better, you realize, in April.
Not fixed. Not resolved. But better, in the specific sense of being present in your life rather than passing through it at a remove.
You tell Jack this, one night in the break room, because the break room has become the place where you say the things that don't fit on the floor.
"You were right about April," you say.
He's at the table with a chart, paper, one of the few remaining paper charts, a particular older patient who prefers them and for whom Jack has apparently been maintaining the practice without comment for two years. "Was I."
"The city looks different. You were right."
"Mmm." He makes a note. "How's the diner?"
You look at him. "I haven't mentioned a diner."
"You come in before some shifts with powdered sugar on your jacket," he says. "There's a diner on Penn Avenue that does beignets until four AM. It's the only place within walking distance of the parking structure."
You look at your jacket. There is, in fact, a trace of powdered sugar on the lapel.
"That's," you start.
"Observational," he says. "Same thing you do."
You sit down across from him. He turns a page in the chart. The break room is quiet.
"How long did it take you?" you ask. "After you moved here. To feel like Pittsburgh was where you actually lived and not just where you were."
He thinks about it. "Two years, maybe. Closer to three before it felt like home."
"What made it feel like home eventually?"
He's quiet for a moment. Then: "People. The floor. Having something that mattered."
"Not the city itself."
"The city's just the container," he says. "What you put in it is the part that matters."
You look at the table. "I haven't put very much in it yet."
"You've been here four months."
"I know. In Durham I had ten years of putting things in. People, places, a version of myself that knew how to be there. Starting over is," you look for the word.
"Expensive," he says.
You look at him.
"It costs something," he says. "Starting over. People underestimate that. They think fresh start means free, but it's actually the opposite. You pay for the fresh start with everything you built before it."
"Was yours worth it?" you ask. "The cost."
A long pause. He closes the chart. He looks at you with the expression that isn't quite neutral, the one you've seen a handful of times, the careful one, the one that's managing something.
"Most days," he says. "Yes."
The night in April that you file under the night things changed is less dramatic than you'd expect.
It's not a bad shift, particularly. Moderately busy. No catastrophes. The kind of night where you move steadily and finish on time and feel, at the end of it, tired in the clean way rather than the hollowed-out way.
What happens is this: at two in the morning, during a quiet stretch, you're in the hallway outside the storage room and your phone rings with a call you've been half-expecting and fully dreading.
It's your sister in Raleigh. Your mother's been asking about you. It's been three months since you visited. When are you coming home.
You stand in the hallway and have a version of the conversation you've been having for a year, the one where you explain, without explaining, that home is a complicated word right now and that you're figuring things out and that yes, you'll visit, you just need a little more time. Your sister is kind about it. She's always kind about it. The kindness makes it worse, somehow.
You hang up and stand in the hallway for a moment with your hand flat against the wall.
"Bad news?"
You turn. Jack is at the other end of the hall, heading toward you.
"No," you say. "Just family. It's fine."
He slows as he reaches you, reading the hallway the way he reads everything. He doesn't keep walking. He stops, a few feet away.
"You don't have to," he starts.
"I know." You lower your hand from the wall. "My mom wants me to come home for a visit. My sister was relaying the message. Nothing bad happened. I just,"
you stop. You're not sure how to finish the sentence.
"Don't know what home means right now," he says.
You look at him.
"You said in March, starting over costs what you had before. I think one of the things it costs is the easy answer to that question."
Your chest does something complicated. "Yeah."
"That gets easier," he says. "Not because you answer it definitively. Just because you get better at living in the ambiguity."
"That sounds terrible."
"It's better than it sounds."
You lean back against the wall. He stays where he is, which means he's about three feet from you, and the hallway is empty and quiet and it's two in the morning in Pittsburgh and you've known this man for four months.
"Jack," you say.
"Yeah."
"Can I ask you something personal?"
A pause. "Probably."
"After you came back from the last deployment, the one where you lost the leg, who took care of you?"
The question sits in the hallway. He's very still.
"Why are you asking that," he says. Carefully. Not defensively.
"Because you're very good at it," you say. "Taking care of people. Not in the managing way. In the actual way. And I've been trying to work out if that's just who you are, or if someone taught you by doing it for you."
A long pause.
"My platoon medic," he says. "Before I became one myself. Man named Curtis. He had a way of treating the person that had nothing to do with treating the injury. Used to drive the MOs insane. He'd spend ten minutes just talking to someone. Being there. And they'd come through things they statistically shouldn't have come through." He pauses. "I asked him once why he did it that way. He said the body takes cues from being witnessed. That knowing someone is there changes the physiology."
"He was right," you say. "That's documented."
"I know that now." He looks at the floor for a second, then back up. "After I came home the last time, after the leg, no one took care of me, specifically. I didn't allow it. I had a version of that problem you described. Sealed up. Handled." He says handled with the specific irony of someone who has been in enough therapy to know what they were actually doing. "I took care of myself because the alternative meant admitting I needed it."
"How'd you crack that open?"
"A therapist with considerably more patience than I deserved," he says. "And time. And losing enough by refusing to let anyone in that eventually the cost of refusing was higher than the cost of letting."
"What did you lose?"
He's quiet for a moment. "That's the longer story."
"Okay," you say. You don't push.
He looks at you. The careful expression, the managed one, and then, for just a second, something shifts in it. Like a held breath, released.
"My wife died," he says. "Seven years ago. And I'd been so shut down, for so long, that I almost missed the last year of her life because I was performing fine for everyone including her. Including myself." A pause. "I don't, I'm not putting that on the table as a bid for sympathy. I'm answering your question about who taught me by doing it for me. She did. Once I finally let her."
The hallway is very quiet.
"I'm sorry," you say.
"Thank you." Said simply. Not deflecting it, not managing it. Just receiving it.
You stand in the hallway for another moment.
"That's not a shorter story," you say, finally.
The almost-sound. The not-quite-laugh. Warmer than usual. "No," he says. "It's not."
"Thank you for telling me."
"You asked an honest question," he says. "You get an honest answer."
He pushes off from where he's been standing and moves back toward the floor. At the hallway junction, he pauses.
"You should go visit," he says. "Your mom. It doesn't have to mean anything about home. It can just mean going."
You look at him.
"Pittsburgh will still be here when you get back," he says, and turns the corner.
You stand in the hallway for another thirty seconds.
Then you go back to the floor and do your job and don't think about it. Or try not to.
You fail, mostly.
May.
You go to Raleigh for four days, which is the longest you've been away from the floor since January, and which reveals something you hadn't fully understood: you miss Pittsburgh when you're not there.
Not the winter. Not the gray. But the diner and the particular quality of the morning light over the river and the floor and the people on it. Lena and her comprehensive institutional knowledge. Santos and her weekly coffee tribute. Whitaker finding his footing. Parker Ellis's running commentary on everything.
And Jack. You miss Jack, which you acknowledge privately and then immediately file under to be examined later while you eat your mother's cooking and sit on your sister's porch and allow yourself, for four days, to be someone's child and someone's sister and not a charge nurse running a trauma floor.
When you come back, you are, measurably, better. Something that was wound has loosened. Something that was held at distance has been permitted to be close.
You walk into your first shift back and Lena says "welcome back, honey" and Santos gives you a nod that is the Santos equivalent of a standing ovation, and Whitaker tells you about a case he managed well while you were gone with the barely-suppressed pride of a kid showing a parent a test score.
Jack is at the board when you come in. He doesn't turn immediately. You do the handoff briefing, get caught up on the floor status, settle into the shift.
An hour in, he ends up beside you at the hub.
"How was Raleigh," he says. Not looking at you. Looking at the board.
"Good," you say. "It was good."
"Your mom."
"Good. She kept feeding me."
"Sounds right."
"How was the floor," you say.
"Functional. Ellis covered competently. Whitaker had a good week."
"I heard."
A pause. He marks something on the board.
"You look better," he says. Still looking at the board.
"I feel better."
"Good." He caps the marker. And then, still not looking at you: "Pittsburgh felt different with you gone."
You go very still.
He puts the marker in the tray. He still doesn't look at you. The floor noise continues around you, the steady background hum of a functioning ER, monitors, voices, the distant sound of the ambulance bay.
"I'm not sure what to do with that," you say, very carefully.
"You don't have to do anything with it," he says. "I'm just saying it. For accuracy."
You look at the side of his face. The line of his jaw. The gray at his temple.
"Jack," you say.
He turns, finally, and looks at you.
"I need you to be clearer than that," you say. "Because I have been working very hard for five months to be professional about something and if you are saying what I think you might be saying I need you to actually say it."
A pause. Something in his expression moves through several registers, the careful controlled neutral, the managed version, and then the version underneath it, the one you've seen a handful of times. The unguarded one.
"I think about you," he says. "Outside of work. I think about whether you're sleeping enough, whether the diner is open when you need it to be, whether whatever you're still carrying from Durham is getting lighter." He looks at you steadily. "I'm aware of the position. I'm not asking you for anything. I just, you said you needed me to be clear."
You breathe.
"I think about you outside of work too," you say.
The hallway with your sister calling. The four days in Raleigh and the shape of what was missing. The floor at two AM and the particular way he told you the longer story because you asked an honest question.
"I think about how you are the first person in a long time who has not asked me to perform anything," you say. "Who takes me as I am and doesn't need me to be more okay than I am, or less damaged than I am. You make it easier to be actually here. And I don't know what to do with that either, but I'm done pretending I don't know what it is."
He's very still.
"I don't know what this looks like," you say. "Practically. Given,"
"The floor."
"The floor."
"You're charge nurse," he says. "I'm the attending lead. There's no direct supervisory,"
"I know."
"It would require,"
"I know."
A pause.
"I'm not impulsive," he says. "I need you to know that. I don't do things halfway. If this is something, it's something. I can't do the version where it's ambiguous. I'm not built for that anymore."
"Okay," you say.
"Okay?"
"I don't want ambiguous either." You look at him. "I moved to Pittsburgh because I needed to stop being a recording of myself and start being actually present. And whatever this is," you gesture slightly, the small inadequate gesture for the thing you've been building for five months in a language of heat packs and coffee and two AM honesty, "it's the most present I've felt in two years. I'm not interested in backing away from that."
The floor continues around you. Someone calls for a consult at the other end of the hall. A monitor beeps its reassuring rhythm.
Jack Abbot looks at you with the expression that has no performance in it.
"There's a restaurant," he says. "On the North Side. It's good. I've been meaning to," he stops. Tries again. "Would you have dinner with me."
"Not a shift," you say.
"Not a shift."
"When."
"Saturday. You're off Saturday."
"How do you know my-"
"I know the schedule."
You look at him. He looks back. The door, which has been ajar for five months, is open.
"Yes," you say.
He nods. The expression does the thing, the almost-laugh, warmer than you've ever heard it, and then, briefly, the real one. Quiet and genuine and entirely devastating.
"Back to the floor," he says.
"Back to the floor," you agree.
You go in opposite directions. You don't smile until you're around the corner.
Saturday is April in Pittsburgh, which means cool and bright, the city wearing its best version of itself. The restaurant is on the North Side, small and warm, with the kind of menu that takes itself seriously without making you feel like you've walked into a performance.
He's there when you arrive. He's early, you realize. Of course he's early. He's been running tight logistics his entire adult life.
He stands when he sees you, and the simplicity of the gesture does something unexpected to your chest.
"Hi," you say.
"Hi," he says.
You sit down. The server comes. You order wine. He orders water and then looks at the wine and changes his order, and you file this as the first new thing you're learning about him outside of the hospital context. There will be many more of these. The prospect of them is something you haven't felt in a while.
The dinner is easy. Which is not what you expected, exactly. You'd anticipated a version of the careful managed conversation of the floor, the professional language, the deliberate navigation.
But off the floor he is still Jack, still precise, still honest, still the person who answers real questions with real answers, but something has been set down. Some part of the management. He talks about his sister in Columbus who calls him too often and who he would not trade for anything. He talks about what it was like to go to medical school in his mid-thirties, post-military, post-amputation, in a class full of people a decade younger, and what he learned from that and what it cost. He asks about your paramedic years with the genuine curiosity of someone who wants to understand the timeline of a person, not just the resume.
You tell him about the car accident that started your paramedic career. The one you were first on scene for at twenty-two, the one where you didn't know what you were doing and did it anyway and everyone survived and you sat in the ambulance bay afterward for forty minutes understanding that this was what you were supposed to do. He listens to the whole thing.
"That's how you know," he says, when you finish. "When you can't explain the why and you don't need to."
"Is that how it was for you? Medicine?"
"After the leg," he says. "I needed something to fix things with. I'd been breaking things, one way and another, for long enough. I wanted to be on the other side of it."
"And?"
He looks at his glass. "And it worked. Mostly."
"Mostly?"
He looks at you. "There are still nights."
"I know," you say. "I've seen some of them."
"You have," he agrees. "You see things very clearly. I found it uncomfortable at first."
"And now?"
The expression. The real one. "Now I find it," he considers the word carefully, "restful."
You look at him across the table in the warm light of this restaurant on a Saturday in April and you think about five months of a specific language built of small gestures in a hospital at two in the morning, and how the thing you came to Pittsburgh to find, the presence, the being actually here, has arrived from a direction you weren't expecting.
"Can I tell you something," you say.
"Yes."
"I came here to stop being a recording of myself and I'm not sure when exactly it stopped being a risk, but I think it was early. Earlier than I wanted to admit."
He waits.
"I think it was around the time I started leaving pens near your chart station," you say.
The almost-laugh. The real one. Warm and quiet and brief, and you're close enough now, across a restaurant table on a Saturday night, that it's not at a professional distance anymore.
"Around the same time," he says.
"The heat pack?" you say.
"Before that, actually."
"When?"
"Third shift," he says. "You were in bay seven with a patient who was frightened and escalating and you were completely still. Not frozen. Still. Like someone who has been in frightening rooms before and knows that the stillness is what the other person needs, and who can provide it without it costing them anything in the moment. I'd seen nurses do that before. Not like that."
You don't say anything for a moment.
"And then I walked away and told myself it was a professional observation," he says, dry, "and I was extremely convincing. To myself. For about two weeks."
"Then what?"
"Then you left a heat pack on the counter without making it an event," he says. "And that was harder to file away."
You look at him.
He looks at you.
"Jack," you say.
"Yeah."
"I'm not very good at this part. The saying the thing part. I spent a lot of years being good at everything else."
"I know," he says. "I'm not either. I've been told I communicate like a situation report."
"You don't, actually."
"Only with you," he says. Simply. "Only recently."
The restaurant is warm and the wine is good and Pittsburgh is outside the window doing its April thing, and you reach across the table and put your hand over his.
He turns his hand over.
His thumb moves across your palm, once, and you feel it in your sternum.
"We're figuring it out," you say.
"We're figuring it out," he agrees.
Here is what you know, by the time the summer comes.
The diner on Penn Avenue knows your order. The server, whose name is Gloria, asks after Jack on the mornings you come in alone, because you came in together twice and once is a coincidence and twice is a data point and Gloria has been reading data points for thirty years.
The floor is still the floor. The work doesn't change, the long nights don't change, the particular weight of the hard ones doesn't change. But there is a shift in the architecture of the hard ones. The knowing that at the end of them there is a person who will not require you to perform recovery, who will simply be there while the shift processes through you like weather.
You go back to Raleigh in June and this time you don't feel the pull of the departure the way you did in May. You feel it on the return, the Pittsburgh-shaped gravity that has been building since January, that you understand now is not the city itself but what you've put in it.
You call your mother from the airport and she asks how things are going, really, in the tone of a woman who reads her children accurately from two states away.
"Good," you say. "Really."
A pause. "There's someone," she says. Not a question.
"There's someone," you confirm.
You can hear her smiling. "Does he deserve you?"
You think about a man who answers honest questions with honest answers. Who said restful and meant it as the highest thing.
"I think we deserve each other," you say. "Which is different."
"That's better," she says. "That's the right answer."
Jack is on a Saturday morning in July, in your apartment, drinking coffee that is actually hot because you got a machine that does it correctly, reading something, when you come in from your run.
You are, in the clinical vocabulary, a lot. Red-faced, sweaty, approximately nine miles of July heat in your joints.
He looks up. He looks at you. The expression, the open one, the unguarded one, the one that stopped being rare sometime around April, sits on his face with the ease of something that lives there now.
"There's water," he says.
"I see it."
"You look like you ran somewhere unreasonable."
"Nine miles."
He shakes his head. Returns to his book. "Statistically inadvisable."
You get the water. You sit on the other end of the couch, legs folded under you, drink half of it and look at him.
"Jack."
"Hmm."
"I rescheduled the fitting appointment."
He looks up from the book.
"The socket's been giving me problems," he says.
"I know."
"I cancelled twice."
"I know that too."
A pause. He looks at you. The expression is the one that means he's deciding how much to say.
"Thank you," he says. Quietly. "For staying on it."
"You stayed on mine," you say. "The processing thing. The being-present thing. You stayed on it without making it a project."
"That's different."
"It's not."
He holds your gaze for a moment. Then the almost-sound, warm and real.
"Annoying," he says.
"You keep saying that."
"It keeps being true."
You lean over and take the book out of his hands and put it on the coffee table, and he watches you do this with the mild expression of someone who is not going to object.
"We have four hours before you have to be at the hospital," you say.
"I'm aware of the schedule."
"Then stop reading and pay attention to me."
The actual laugh, brief and quiet and entirely devastating, the same as the first time you heard it and every time since.
"You're the most presumptuous person I've ever met," he says, and puts his arm around you when you lean into his side, and outside the window Pittsburgh is doing its summer thing, green and warm, the rivers catching the light.
You're learning that this is what it's supposed to feel like.
You're learning it's worth the cost of getting here.
Author's Note:
jack abbot has been living in my head rent free for longer than i'd like to admit, and at some point i had to do something about it. so here we are.
this one is slow and quiet and a little bit about learning to let people see you. if that's your thing, i hope you like it.
for everyone who's been fine. you know the kind.
— with love and an embarrassing amount of feelings about a fictional man
summary - nightshift!reader is eager to catch a bit of rest before she has to clock in for her double. thing is, jack’s in her way. but he’s just where he wants to be.
warnings - nsfw. mdni. large unspecified age gap. hr violations. fingering. dirty talk. pet names. kid used. baby used. sort of exhibitionism if you squint.
notes - not proof read i just wanna fuck this old man
⋆ ｡ ˚ ౨ৎ ‧ ₊ ˚ .
“you still breathing?”
his arm fell from his face. the harsh white hospital lights made her look like an angel in his bleary vision. jack grumbled and pulled his arms over his head, stretching himself taunt. “oh good i thought you finally croaked,” she quipped.
as he lifted his arms his black tee drew up his stomach. his stomach was defined, but not to an unnatural extent. she wanted to sink her teeth into that bit of pudge around his hips. she caught a glimpse of the silver hair dusted along his abdomen, trailing up his navel and disappearing beneath the black cotton of his shirt. he was impossibly thick. he nearly filled the space of the hospital bed.
“you’d miss me too much,” he groaned. her eyes flew back up to his face. an undeniable heat slowly seeped down her spine and settled in her tummy. he crossed his large arms against his chest. she would happily spend hours kissing every one of the freckles there.
“it’s my nap time, old man,” she smiled, fidgeting with her fingers. the physician scowled, “i’m pulling a double.”
“yeah i know because so am i,” she pulled the railing down on the side of the cot. it snapped with a shrill squeak. he flinched sleepily at the noise.
jack sat up. her knees brushed the edge of the limp mattress. “you’re not getting my bed,” he insisted, pink knuckle roughly rubbing at his eye.
it was childish. but it worked like a charm. she puffed out her cheeks and pouted, “do you hate me?”
“what?” jack laughed. the crows feet at the edge of his eyes deepened. that smile. prodding against his cheeks like her personal vice. he shook his head, running a broad hand through his hair. he suddenly looked much more awake.
she shrugged helplessly, “you want me to go sleep in my freezing car in the snow,” she whined. jack stared at for a moment, just grinning. it was like she put him on pause and the gears in his head were working double time to keep him from doing something. what that something was, she wasn’t sure.
he huffed, “okay. c’mon.” he sat up a bit in an attempt to make space for her but his thighs nearly filled the entirety of the seat of the bed. her heart pattered a bit in her throat. an invitation to be as close as professionally possible. or maybe they were breaking a few rules. she grinned and leaned in, “you wanna cuddle?”
jack scoffed, “go sleep in your car.” she shook her head, “scoot over, asshole,” she giggled.
he listened. he pressed himself against the opposite rail, but there still wasn’t much room for her. she sat down and pulled her legs to her chest, reaching down and pulling up the rail. he was turned on his side, arms still crossed, legs crowding her own.
“you look real comfortable,” he muttered. when she looked to him his eyes were flitting about her face. he was so close. he had been this close before - leaning over her shoulder or whispering a dirty joke in her ear - but he had never looked at her like that. she teased, “oh so you do wanna cuddle?” her voice came out an octave too high. she bit her lip.
jack gently tapped her folded leg. “relax,” he whispered, tone husky and low, “i don’t bite.” her stomach was flipping with nerves. he had that catlike smirk on his lips and for once she couldn’t read his mind. he was so warm. so close. it made her brain fuzzy.
she sighed shakily. he licked his lips. she sunk into the bed, shifting awkwardly to ease the aching of her overworked joints. she turned her back towards him and her legs mirrored the curl of his own. she placed an arm under her head. she could feel the material of his scrub bottoms brushing against her ass. if she just backed up-
“you smell good,” he muttered. she looked over her shoulder to him with a knotted brow. it was like he was trying to kill her.
jack frowned, “what? go to sleep.”
“you’re cruel,” she huffed as she shimmied her shoulders to reposition her head. he laughed suddenly, “what did i do? i’m sharing my bed with you -“ his lips brushed her ear as he whispered, “you should be grateful.”
she turned her head a bit. the warmth of his breath tickled her cheek. his eyes had a bit of brown in them. “see. you’re mean,” but she was smiling because there was a wetness flooding the space between her thighs.
jack’s head reared back a bit. his brows ticked and eyes narrowed. he was offended by her disobedience. “c’mon, say thank you, doctor abbot.”
her heart dropped. she chuckled dryly, “shut up,” and turned her gaze back toward the wall.
jack grabbed her by the jaw, fingers digging in to her plump cheeks and forcing her lips to pucker. her eyes widened and heat flooded over her body. he made her look at him. half his body weight rested on her side. blazing like a sun. something snapped in her. it wasn’t a joke.
he looked scorned or maybe aroused. she couldn’t tell what lived behind his cheshire grin. “be a good girl. say thank you, jack, for being so kind to me.”
her cunt was throbbing now. “th - thank you, jack,” she managed to choke out. his grip tightened. jack shook his head lightly, “no, no. i know you’re a good listener. that’s not what i said.”
“thank you for being so - so kind to me, jack,” she mumbled. he smiled once more, nodding, “good girl. so smart.” his hand fell from her jaw to her throat. his calloused fingers slowly ghosted over the column of her neck before trailing down between her breasts, then over her stomach, and sliding beneath the waistband of her scrubs. his hand froze there. hot and oddly heavy against her abdomen.
“you want this?” he whispered. she nearly laughed. like she hadn’t shown him just how much she wanted him the past few months of their working relationship. she nodded enthusiastically, lip caught between her teeth.
the older man straightened up a bit. he slinked his other arm around her shoulders and she followed his lead - scooting up the bed flat on her back to make her body more accessible to him.
head resting against his bicep, she looked at him through her eyelashes. though his eyes were on her’s his gaze was heady and his mouth was just slightly agape in focus. the flat of his palm slid down her abdomen and cupped her mound. she whimpered, “jack.”
she was practically dripping. his fingers prodded at the patch of slick seeping through her panties. “fuck. you’re so wet,” he groaned. jack pressed his forehead against her temple, lashes fluttering against her skin as he closed them in ecstasy. he pressed one big, fat finger between her clothed folds. his fingertip began to ever so slightly dip in and out of her wet cunt.
she was whining, rolling her hips against his big hand. he pressed a chaste peck into the apple of her cheek. “d’you know how long i’ve wanted to get my hands on you? hm?” she screwed her eyes shut, holding back a squeal.
the calloused pads of his fingers dragged along her skin as he pushed her panties to the side. the heel of his palm pressed into her clit. two fingers swirled around her entrance then up and down her sensitive folds, collecting her arousal and using it as lubricant to play with her sex. “little pussy’s so wet and puffy,” he was all gravelly. “feel like velvet, pretty girl. s’this pussy just as pretty as you?”
she hummed. her mind was static. stuffed full of jack. jack’s musky cologne. jack’s breath against her. jack’s big bicep curling against her side. the outline of jack’s big hand completely, impossibly covering her lap through her bottoms. the freckles on his skin. the weight of his body against her.
“i could play with your cunt forever. but that would be mean, huh?” his voice dripped with faux sympathy. his touch stalled against her slick hole. she held her breath. “‘m not that mean. no,” he cooed. she could feel a bit of spittle on his lips. he was drooling. “‘ll fuck you with my fingers. how about that, kid?”
he was gross and perverted and decades her senior and she moaned like a whore, hips jutting instinctually. jack hummed against her hair. he pressed a wet kiss against her head and whispered a yeah before he slipped his finger in.
the digit curled against her gummy walls over and over. just one but it made her cunt ache. she was whimpering, panting, and he was shushing her.
“sh, sh, sh, babygirl. someone’ll hear.”
she opened her mouth to argue but euphoria scrambled her brains, “but i - feels g - s’good, jack. good, jack.” her words were airy. it made him laugh. he pressed his cheek against her and watched his hand as he slipped in another finger. she gasped at the stretch.
“i know, baby,” he cooed. lust was knotting a tight band in her tummy. the meaty heel of his palm was grazing her clit in tandem with the rhythmic thrusts of his wrist and curls of his knuckles. she was edging on release in such little time and jack knew. and he was losing his mind.
jack’s fat bulge was pressed against her hip. he ached with need. all that blood in his cock made him lightheaded.
she turned her head to him, watery eyes meeting his glassy ones. “jack m’gonna cum if - if -“ she cut herself off with a small moan. he was moving faster, brushing against that perfect spot in her pussy with his perfect fingers.
“want you to cum. make a mess on my hand, baby. i’ll clean it up, c’mon. jack’ll clean it up for you, baby.” his perverse encouragement had her on the edge.
then he pressed his lips to hers and everything felt hot. his tongue swiped against her own lazily. her hips stuttered and a sweet rhapsody of release trickled through her body. they moaned into each other’s mouths, jack lightly humping her leg, soiling the layers between them with ropes of sticky cum.
she rode his hand through her high. their lips finally parted with a wet tch. for a moment they passed back and forth the same hot breath. jack finally pulled out of her ruined pants.
he brought his fingers to his mouth and sucked on the two digits. his eyes fluttered shut. he moaned like a teenage boy. she lightly giggled, still trying to catch her breath. jack pulled them out and pressed them to her smiling lips. she opened to taste the mix of his spit and her cum on his fingertips.
his hand fell to her chest and his head into the crook of her neck.“think we’ve still got time for a nap?”
summary: coercing lord bridgerton into pretending to court you to avoid the affections of a baron is very simple. that is, of course, until it isn't.
featuring fake dating/courtship, minor rivals to lovers, idiots in love, mutual pining that they think is unrequited, slowish burn, hurt/comfort, a signature bridgerton happily ever after, and my blood sweat and tears!
total wc: 44,497
overall warning(s): historical inaccuracies, period typical misogyny, implied/referenced sexual harassment -- individual, more specific warnings on each chapter. reader is referred to with the last name worthing for convenience
part 1
↳ 10k words | miss worthing makes an awful sort of proposal to the viscount bridgerton.
part 2
↳ 7.1k words | miss worthing despises and enjoys the viscount bridgerton's company in equivalence.
part 3
↳ 9.7k words | miss worthing has a terrible realization.
part 4
↳ 7.6k words | the viscount has a revelation and miss worthing decides against her heart.
part 5
↳ 9k words | miss worthing and the viscount find themselves at a crossroads.
