Hi! My name is Eryn, I'm 21, and this is my little corner where I talk/write/post about hot people. My requests are always open, just be aware there's never a guarantee that I'll get around to them. If you like the stuff I'm writing, let me know! I love chopping it up with people about my hyperfixations and the hotties that come with them. I'm mostly embroiled in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms right now, but I'm involved in tons of fandoms (e.g. The Pitt, Interview with a Vampire, etc.) so don't be shy to ask!
If you have an ageless/under 18 blog and interact, you will be blocked! It's nothing personal, I really do love to queen out over fictional characters, but not with kids!
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Summary: Your husband spends a lazy morning indulging in the finer things, namely: you.
WC: 3.5k
Warnings: 18+/NSFW/MDNI!, smut, fr y'all this is some nasty shit, established relationship, fluff, angst in the final hour, mentions of grief/death/spouse loss, masturbation (f! only), oral sex (f!receiving), fingering (f!receiving AYYYYYYYY), overstimulation, dom/sub dynamics if you squint, finger sucking from both of these freaks, service top!valarr (oh ty lord), also lwk switch!valarr, unprotected p-in-v sex, reader being a pillow princess, the big westerosi 'rona is implied. not beta'd idgaf. lmk if i missed any and i'll update!
Author's Note: baby's first fic, probably a nothing burger but i would genuinely give everything to throw it back on 209 valarr like wow girl i'm so bored let's go get vaccinated and make out. likes, reblogs, and comments are greatly appreciated! ty for reading! also s/o to @priestboy for the divider!!!!
A steady drip of drool came out of his mouth, loud, obnoxious snores sounding into the air. Three freckles packed together on the left curve of his nose, a flare of his nostrils as he slept. His fringe was askew across his forehead, the clump of hair shifted only to one side. You could not help yourself from reaching your thumb out and tugging down the center of his bottom lip, plush and pink.
You could see every crease in it, and pulled it down even further to see his gums. You traced the point where his white tooth met pink, wet and pliant. He was even pretty there, too. He stirred slightly at that, but you pulled back, your hand returning to his cheek. He made a harrumping sound, tawny eyebrows pulled together, annoyance and tiredness painted on his features.
“What are you doing?” Valarr murmured through the fog of sleep, burying his face into your neck, willowy arms wrapping around you.
“Nothing,” you spoke into his hair, fingers twirling the ends. You dug your nose into his scalp, wanting to remember the lilac notes in it.
He mumbled some protests, but you couldn’t make any sense of it. Jumbled and out of place vowels as he squeezed you, as if to drain the ache from his bones by pressing you into him. You stretched, moving to sit up, but he only held you tighter with an indignant huff, seeming to hope that the skin would give way to his will.
Your little laugh made the white streak in his hair sprig up with flight.
“Are you trying to merge your skin with mine?”
He scoffed, pressing a peck to your pulse.
“Yes. I would be successful, were my lady wife not to fight me.”
“And yet I lay here limp.”
“Your will is spiritual. And forged of iron,” he sighed. Silence fell between them, and you traced the muscled line of his arm. Eyes cast up to his, a tad bit guilty.
“I’m sorry I woke you.”
“Ah, cease that. I never get to see you like this. Your hair all muffed up. Drool dried on your chin,” he swooned, smoothing his hand up and down the column of your throat, love in his eyes.
“That soaked pillow is your doing, not mine,” you rebuffed, giving a small bite to his earlobe. He feigned annoyance, a sour glare cast your way.
“And who will believe you? Your word against a prince’s….” he tsked, nudging your nose with the tip of his.
“Do I get a trial at the very least?” you whispered, lips grazing the corner of his mouth.
“No,” Valarr affirmed, giving you a soft kiss. He moved to your cheek, then your forehead, taking his time. Your jaw, your eyelid. Right next to your ear. “Trials are not granted for acts of treason.”
You gave him an admittedly weak scowl, flopping back against the pillow, hair strewn around the crown of your head.
His hands slowly slipped from your back to your waist, small, tentative touches down to the back of your thighs. His hands stilled on your hips and he restrained the urge to pinch the fat where your legs met your ass. He would dream of nothing but greedy fingers soothing the sting, rubbing circles into the flesh he had rendered you into nothing but little mewls as he licked into your mouth.
“What do you desire this morning?” he whispered into the shell of your ear. A kiss on it to leave a piece of himself with you before he left the bed.
Your head swam with possibilities, but indignance came first at his assessment of your wanting.
“And when exactly did I say I desired anything?” you protested, and yet, you smiled through the whole statement.
He sat up, beautiful hair in three different directions. The golden light from the open balcony formed a ring of light around him. One eye lit up in a mosaic of cerulean and cyan, the other with brown. You couldn’t decide which one you loved most. He let out a chortle at your expression and started to smile, and at that, you became entirely too preoccupied with the way the creases around his eyes looked.
“You get…” Valarr waved around a hand, trying to summon the right phrase. “This look. As if you wish to eat me alive. That is how I know you want something. To use your poor husband’s body as a tool for thoughtless pleasure,” he added with a touch of mirth.
Your cheeks burned at his comment, half a mind to bury your face in the pillows and die, but he simply tapped your cheek and brought your hand to his lips, kissing each fingertip for every time you would not meet his eyes.
“It is not an awful thing, wife. I imagine our marital bed would not be as well-used as it is were I having to guess if you wanted me,” he shrugged, bowing his head to yours. “Now, tell me what it is and I will do my best to give it to you. It is not as if I suffer in doing so. Rather the opposite.”
You looked into his eyes, earnest and brimming with affection. You swiftly nodded, a shy smile on your lips.
“Your fingers, for now. Then perhaps more as well.”
He took your order, standing tall and naked from the bed. He strode over to the washbasin, taking his time to thoroughly scrub his hands clean, and then what was left of his and your release from the night prior off of his groin.
You could not free your eyes from him, the chestnut curls that grew above one of your favorite parts of him, long and heavy against the inside of his thigh as he moved a wet cloth along himself. Your mouth watered, fingers slowly moving down under the bedsheets to soothe the ache between your legs at the sight of him. You could not bear to wait until he was done. His meticulous routine always took some time, and patience was not an esteemed virtue of yours.
Strong, tanned thighs from the fortnights they had stationed away at Summerhall, more freckles dotting his skin by the day. You traced your eyes up his body, the lean muscles in his back stretching as he applied perfumed soaps and picked at a spot on his leg. Sinew against skin, stronger and bigger than he had ever been.
He had been training in the courtyards of Summerhall before they had returned to Dragonstone, sword clashing and countering every attack the master-at-arms threw his way. You would have every door into the castle locked if it kept him outside, tanned and panting, gleams of sweat on his brow, arms straining, growing. Thighs that strained against his trousers, bracketing yours at night when he held you. Your head grew heavy, slumping against the pillow, open-mouthed as you drank him in.
A few moans threatened to slip past your throat, but you quickly bit down on your bottom lip, trying with all your might to not reveal yourself. He would tease you endlessly, drag you from the covers and down to the end of the bed, drawing out every sound you prayed the guards posted outside their door would not hear. You stopped the pace of your fingers when he wiped his hands on the hand linens the servants had not yet changed from yesterday night. You willed your hands at your side, shifting the bed covers up to your chin.
He turned around, unhurried paces across the large room. He peeked out to the large balcony that supplemented the bed chambers, gilded beams of sunlight coming dancing off his rich skin. He strode over the railing looking over the sea, the smell of salt crisp in the air. A deep sigh broke from his lips, squinting as he gazed out at the horizon.
You cleared your throat.
“You’ve a wife to attend to, Your Grace.”
His chest shook with a small laugh, lips taut to one side of his mouth as he cast a look at you.
“My cruelty is unparalleled,” he remarked, smiling and throwing your covers aside. The morning was warm, but the air chilled you and he quickly soothed your body with the warmth of his. You thought it better to pretend you did not feel him stirring against your leg.
You hummed in assent, peace on your face as he kissed along your jaw, hands quickly smoothing through his hair.
“Truly, you’re awful. Absolutely…” you trailed off as he moved his fingers in a downwards arc, first tracing the line of your stomach and slowly beginning to tend to where you wanted him. You breathed deeply, focusing on the beams of the ceiling as you willed yourself not to make a fool of yourself screaming like a whore.
“It is a beautiful morning,” he breathed against your pulse before adorning it with his mouth. “Perhaps we can go for a walk in the gardens. I know how you love the yellow roses. I should order the gardeners to plant more.”
You couldn’t control the stupid smile that took over your face, and as a consequence, many of the noises built up in your throat came slipping out, your eyebrows pinched. That seemed to spur him on, lowering his head to circle his tongue around one of your nipples before popping it into his mouth. His unoccupied hand came up to abuse the other one, switching sides every time you grew too quiet.
They were swollen and reddened before too long, overstimulation and pleasure blurring into one another as it became too much.
“Valarr,” you panted, gripping his hair to pull him off your chest. A flash of panic took over his face, eyes searching your face for any pain or discomfort. His worries were soon discarded when you redirected his head between your legs, a smile on his lips as he opened his mouth heartily.
He soon began to make a new mess, spit and slick forming a small pool beneath you on the bed. The spot cooling with air was the only thing that grounded you as he ate at your cunt, tongue slopping over your sex again and again. He felt relentless, pinning your hips down with one arm banded over you as you desperately tried to escape the overwhelming knot building in your stomach. You couldn’t bear it but couldn’t stop adorning his tongue, pulling his hair as tight as you could and rolling your hips into his mouth. Your legs closed tighter around his ears when you looked down to see him grinding himself against the mattress.
Prior, you would’ve balked at how loud your moans grew, echoing in the chambers, but you now wailed with reckless abandon, every feeling and moment centered at Valarr’s nose bumping against you as he dipped down to taste the nectar that had been seeping out of your slit. He groaned into you, resuming with a fervor until your mouth dropped in a silent scream. Legs locked up, you shoved his face into your hips desperately chasing the last of the shock that lit up your bones. He worked you through it, only ceasing when you tugged his chin up to your lips, tasting yourself on his tongue.
You laid there panting for many moments, sweat beading at your hairline. He kissed his way back down, reinforcing his focus on your breasts, watching you twitch and whine as he pressed his lips to your oversensitive nipples. You reached down for him, using what liquid had already beaded at the tip to stroke him in full. You took turns stopping and continuing, watching a beautiful pink flush take over his chest. His soft moans, some caught in his chest, meek and quiet.
“Please,” he groaned into your stomach, humping himself back and forth into our hand after you had paused. You withdrew your hands and he chuckled humorously against your skin, brows pinched together in near pain. He looked up at you, the side of his face heated by your flesh. He was just a man at his temple of choice.
You simply smiled, blissful in the glow of the pleasure he had given you, and mirthful all the same. He conceded, sighing as he accepted his fate.
“You still have not used your fingers,” you chirped, nose tilted up. “That was my sole request, lord husband.”
You could feel his teeth etched against your belly in a grin.
“Right you are, my love,” he said, rising into his knees.
He slipped his fingers into your mouth gently, rounding them around your gums before forcing your tongue down with the pad of his ring finger. He was playing dirty; your brain always seemed to fill with fog whenever he suddenly took control back from you, if only for a moment. Your mouth started to pool with saliva, the edge of his gold wedding band caught on the bottom of your front teeth. You whined and keened, hips moving against his to find friction, but he pinned them again with his other hand.
“Shh….,” he spoke into his knuckles, a hair’s breadth from you. Your lashes brushed up against each other, twin silk threading into each other. Your eyes bored into his, pleading and needy, weakly clenching half of his wrist with your hand. He did his best to hold his smile at bay, but he always loved you like this, drunk off your own desire. Drool started to spill from the sides of your mouth, and he simply wiped it away, replacing the streak with his kisses.
When he had decided you’d sufficiently drenched his fingers, he pulled his fingers out of your mouth, suppressing the smirk at the hoarse gasp you let out. Licked lips, swollen and red, biting still as he brought his hand down between your thighs. Your chin was tucked up to the sky, body practically buzzing with anticipation. His fingers brushed through you, clicking his tongue as he watched you clench around nothing.
He ran them up and down the length of you, wet and sloppy, his spit making your cunt shine in the light of day. He would make seven or so passees, deliberately ignoring your clit and pinning your hips as you tried to wiggle your hips so he would go where you wished. On the eighth pass, he would finally use the full weight of his fingers to press down on your clit, beaming in the way you gripped his hair, pulling him up for a kiss. He snaked his other hand up your body, rolling his thumb around your nipple. You keened, chest rising in quick breaths, distracted enough for him to slip two fingers inside of you.
His pace was brutal from the beginning, short, hard thrusts of his wrist, smiling into your kisses as he felt you drip down the palm of his hand. Any other time, he would take his time with you, gentle touches and a slow temperament. The morning, however, found you rather brave, and was reserved for you being pressed into the cold, smooth mattress and asking, demanding for more. You could not think, hair sticking wildly to your forehead with sweat. Your cheeks burned at his lips against yours, and you were like to scream when he aimed his fingers upward, the loud sound of your desire reverberating in your ears. Your limbs tensed, jaw hung open, and it faded from one moment into another, Valarr suddenly over you, spreading your legs to kneel between them. He smoothed the hair from your head, kissing his way from your chin down to your stomach. Your mouth was dry, your tongue a rough weight bearing it down.
“Was that satisfactory? The fingers only?” he muttered into your stomach, hair ruffled as he looked up at you, head rising with the slope of your torso. You fanned the back of your hand over his cheek, laughing breathlessly as you nodded.
“Do you want more, or shall we make to start our day?” he inquired, sincerity etched into his brow as he chased your fingers with his mouth. He did not expect words from you in these moments, blissed out as you were. You silently pulled his arms up to plant beside your head, your answer plain to him.
He chuckled to himself, and lined himself up with you, the mess you had made together helping him slide into the root. He swallowed your whines, the practiced sawing of his hips digging at the spot he had already abused. He hitched your legs up, holding them to the opposite sides, his pelvis slapping onto yours now. He was everywhere, hot blood thrumming under your skin as saccharine dripped into your legs and made its way up to your stomach.
Your mouth was etched in an O, brows drawn together as he quickened his pace, bearing his body down on you.
“Valarr,” you spat out after several attempts, eyes honed in on him.
He could not respond, his stomach pulling taut. He would not allow himself to, to indulge himself before he had wrung you dry. He bore you into the bed itself, your nails raking down his arms. With a weak, throaty cry, you shook in his arms, and clutched him down to you, hips still chasing his to ride you through it.
His thrusts turned sloppy and uneven, less care now that he had pleased you within all of your whims. His arms bracketed your head, burrowing his own into your neck. What once were reserved groans and careful slips were now uncontrolled whimpers and fervent pants against your flesh. He coated your neck in involuntary drool, cradling the top of your head as he took and took and took. Hips slapping against your, his hair catching against your clit and working your jaw open despite how much he had already given you. Words were not viable for either of you, only grunts that came from your chests and shrill moans.
He tensed, and he shifted to look at you, noses touching as his face clenched up. It was always his tell. Even if he was taking you from behind, one of the mirrors across the room would have to be used or he would need to flip you onto your back. Smoothing his fingers over the face he loved most, static surging through every point in his body, a knot in his stomach that refused to unfurl until he heard you say it.
“Please,” he forced out, so close to you that it seemed there was no more room to breathe. His face was etched in perfect misery, a power only you could grant him, a fire you held the tools to extinguish with three simple words.
You managed to smile through his growingly rough thrusts, open mouth twisting. You gripped his hair and steered him to nearly close the gap between your lips.
“I love you,” you whispered to him, delighting at how such a strong man seemed to shake and tremble at a small testament.
He bit onto the pillow beneath you, ivory of canines and feathers embedded and intertwined. In a more sober moment, he would blush viciously at the noises he was making, but a force was driving through him that could not be contained. His throat felt raw from the whines he filled the chamber with as he finally emptied himself into you. He panted for how many minutes he could not say, red in the face and sweat adorning his hairline. You simply stroked his back, giggling at his exasperation.
He took all of the strength he had left in him to roll himself onto his back and bring you with him, not caring whether or not he stayed inside you. You were the princess; if twenty batches of moon tea was what you desired, you would have it. Your hot skin pressed into his, your weight pushing his back into the soft mattress. He settled his nose into your hair, his breath as real as the warmth from his skin on yours.
“Is this your favorite to remember?” he said, a soft kiss to your scalp, moving the hairs stuck to the sweat on your forehead.
Your stomach emptied at the words.
“This is just a dream, is it not?”
He smiled sadly. The sight of it was so beautiful that it was no wonder it could not be reality.
“Does it matter?” he said, voice so quiet it was barely above a whisper. He tucked pieces of your hair behind your ear, gazing into your eyes with an unreachable somberness. “It happened in this bed.”
“What a blessing,” he whispered against your lips, your eyelashes touching. “You were the last thing I ever got to see.”
You woke alone later that morning, the grey clouds cast over the capital city. The side of the bed that had laid cold and dormant for two years. You rose only to order more sleeping draughts from the maester.
contents (nsfw): Dunk x fem!Reader, Modern AU friends to lovers rom-com with pregnancy. Fluff, humour, smidge of angst (just lots of feels), pregnant sex, edging, praise kink, voice kink, gentle fem-dom, premature ejaculation, overstimulation, multiple orgasms, smidge of come eating. Song used in this chapter.
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MASTERLIST
next chapter -> (19/06)
synopsis: In which they survive the morning after. (Pregnancy status: 16 weeks, II trimester).
word count: 12,8K
a/n: Banner by me, dividers by @strangergraphics, proofread by @hextoken! I have to go to a corporate party today, pray for me.
Sunlight seeps through the curtain slits. Dunk's feeling like he's grown in the night. Broader in the shoulders and softer in the belly, he finds himself swollen and raw elsewhere. There's density to his hips and soreness to the groin that burgeons outward. When he opens his eyes everything's blurry, but by the press on his arm and the smell of biscuits he can tell you're still there and none of the ache is phantom.
He turns his head to the side and down where his bicep has gone half numb under you. “H-hi,” he says.
“Hi yourself,” you say.
He can make out only the blur of your face tipped up at him. The sound of you is morning-rough, gummy at the edges, and his whole body goes at it with something brazenly pleased before his brain gets a vote.
“Um,” you add. “So—”
Dunk palms at you gently because his eyes are useless and he has to solve the room by touch. He is sprawled on his back, you nuzzled to his side, your feet somewhere around his mid-calf and one hand spread small over his ribs. The shirt has ridden up on you in the night. He feels bare thigh against his hip and has to look at the ceiling he cannot see.
“How’re ye feelin’?” he asks.
“Good,” you say. Your fingers twitch. “You?”
“Grand, but,” Duncan says, “blind.”
“Oh, right.” You twist away from him, and he keeps his arm loose enough to let you go. When you come back, he tightens. “Sorry, I took them off you," you say. "Here—”
The glasses get pushed onto his nose and the world snaps itself back together in lines and colours the names of he's no longer certain. “There ye are,” he says.
Seeing you makes him worse. More nervous, because now there are sharp edges. Your mouth looks bitten by sleep, eyes crusted a little from last night’s tears. Your hair has gone all mussed and flattened on one side, and the T-shirt collar hangs too wide on you. His T-shirt. The sight should be ordinary, because shirts are ordinary things, except Dunk has the distinct sense of having been granted back a morning that had been stolen from him once before. The first one. The one where he woke up with a body full of you and no you in the room to prove it.
Now you are here, frowning faintly with worry gathering between your brows, and he feels so lucky it borders on daft.
“You sure you’re good?” he asks.
You nod, then seem to check the answer against yourself. Your hand shifts under the cover, thighs move by a cautious inch, and your face does a small grimace.
Dunk sinks a notch. “Sore?”
“A little.”
He winces. “Ah. Shite. Was I—” Stops, then starts again, worse. “Was I too much?”
Your eyes flick up.
“I mean—” His ears begin to burn. “Too rough. Or too eager. Or—”
“Dunk.”
“—too heavy with my hands. Or just… too much of me.”
You stare at him, then soften in a way that makes him want to hide. “No. You weren’t too rough.”
He studies your face, searching for the lie out of habit. “You’d tell me?”
“Yes.”
“Properly?”
“Yes.” A pause. “I’m sore in a nice way.”
That phrase grabs him low and stays there. His hips seem to hear it first and some lazy pull starts under the ache. He shifts one shoulder against the pillow and hopes the blanket is being merciful. “In a nice way,” Dunk repeats, because he is an idiot.
You look embarrassed now, which helps nobody. “You know what I mean.”
Duncan does. He knows too well. His own body has woken all used and tender, cock sore from work, holding back and coming hard enough that some part of him may still be missing. There is a dragged-open feeling in him, though nothing of his has been entered except by wanting. He understands being glad for the ache. He understands wanting proof that something happened and stayed happened. “Aye,” he says quietly. “I know.”
Silence arrives then, thin and awkward, and lies between you with its eyes open.
“Was I too much?” you ask.
Dunk’s head turns so sharply the pillow drags at his ear. “What?”
“Last night.” You look at his collarbone rather than his face. “I was a bit… I don’t know. Mad.”
He nearly laughs from pure disbelief, except your face is too serious for that. “No.”
“You can say.”
“I am sayin’.” He reaches, then stops before the touch lands at your cheek, as if the rules have changed in the night and nobody has handed him the new sheet. “You were—” His throat tightens around several answers, all of them too large or too plain. Lovely. Wild. Good to me. Mine, some awful part supplies, and he shuts that door hard. “You were grand,” he manages. “More than.”
Your mouth pulls into something small. “Grand.”
“I’m not very articulate in the mornin’.”
You nod thoughtfully. “That explains it.”
A breath of laughter leaves him, and you answer with your own, but the question remains where both of you can see it: What now. It sits on the bed with the clothes on the floor and the cold mugs from last night and the smell of sleep and sex and clementines.
You pull the cover higher over your chest. “We should probably talk.”
“Aye,” Dunk says, though every muscle in him files a complaint.
“Because I don’t want this to get… unclear.”
He gives a small nod. His hand lies open on the mattress beside you. “Right.”
“And I don’t want you thinking you have to.”
That brings his eyes back to yours. “Have to what?”
“This.” You gesture vaguely under the duvet, toward your bodies and the rest of the wreckage. “Me. Us. Whatever this is. Because I’m, you know. Pregnant.”
Duncan takes a second with that. He hears the sense in it, but hates the sound of it. “I don’t feel made to,” he says.
“You did a bit before.”
“With the ring?”
You wince. He hates that too. “Aye,” he says before you can soften it for him. “I know. I made a bollocks of that.”
“I didn’t say—”
“You laughed.”
“Dunk.”
“No, I know why.” He looks down at the blanket. There is a loose thread near his thumb and he worries it instead of your patience. “I think I do, anyway. I was tryin’ to put the house up before we’d even checked if the ground takes a nail.”
You go quiet.
“That sounded better in my head,” he adds.
“No,” you say. “I get it.”
He risks looking at you again. “I want to help. Want to be here. That part’s true.”
“I know.”
“And the other part—” His mouth goes dry. “I liked last night. I want it. I want… you. I’m sayin’ that plain enough, aye?”
Your face changes, then closes slightly, as if plainness has still found a way to hurt. “Aye,” you say. “That’s plain.”
“But I don’t want ye thinkin’ I’m only here for that either.”
“I don’t.”
“And I’d rather it be me than some stranger,” he says, then blushes so hard it nearly makes him dizzy. “Jesus. Sorry. That came out—”
“No.” Your voice has gone quieter. “No, I understand.”
“It’s safer,” he says, grabbing for the practical rope before he drowns in the other thing. “I mean, with the baby and all. If it helps you. If you need it. Or want it. I can—” His face burns worse. “I can be that. For you.”
Your eyes stay on him. “You can be that.”
“If you want.”
"I do," you tell him. “So um… if we’re being practical.” Your jaw works once. “Is kissing allowed?”
Dunk blinks. Looks at your mouth and immediately has no right to answer anything requiring thought. “I’d like it to be.”
“Touching?”
“Aye.” His voice lowers. “If you want me touchin’.”
“I do.”
He swallows.
“What kind?” you ask, then regret shows on you in a hot flash. “Sorry. That sounded like a form.”
“It’s all right.” His hand flexes against the sheet. “The kind where ye tell me if I’ve gone wrong.”
“That’s broad.”
“I’m a broad fella.”
You laugh, and the sound loosens something in him. Then your face shifts again. “Protection?”
“Aye,” he says, too fast. “I was thinkin’—maybe we should. Or could. If ye wanted. For mess.”
Your brows pull in. He sees the mistake arrive before he knows which mistake it is.
“For mess?” you repeat.
“Aye. Just—”
“If you’re planning to keep seeing other people,” you say carefully, already moving yourself away by an inch without seeming to notice, “then yes, obviously. That would be safe. I mean, I’m not saying you can’t. We talked about it, didn’t we? So if you—”
“No.” Dunk nearly sits up. “No, no, that’s not what I meant.” You only gape at him. “Jesus, lass, that’s not what I meant.” His hand reaches this time and lands on your wrist. “I meant the actual mess. Sheets. You. Cleanin’ up after. I thought maybe it’d be easier for you.”
“Oh.”
“I told ye I’m not seein’ anyone.”
“I know.”
“I’m not.”
“Okay.”
“And I don’t want to.”
Your eyes lower to his hand around your wrist. “Okay.”
“Are you?”
“No.” Your answer comes quickly enough to calm some ugly thing in him. Then, quieter: “I’m obviously not seeing anyone either.”
“Good,” he says, then hears himself. “I mean—”
“It is good,” you say.
There is another silence. Different this time. Warmer and more dangerous.
“For what it’s worth,” you add, staring somewhere near his shoulder, “I don’t mind the mess.”
Dunk’s body takes the sentence disgracefully. He feels himself stir under the blanket with enough interest to make his soul sigh and leave him to it. You notice. Of course you notice. Your mouth parts by a fraction.
He shuts his eyes. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be.”
“I’m tryin’ to have a serious conversation.”
“You can be hard during it. Multitasking.”
He laughs, boyish and powerless. You smile properly then, and for one small stretch of morning the thing between you becomes almost simple. Almost.
Because you are still looking at him with that carefulness. Because he is still holding back half the sentence in his mouth. Because both of you are making a shape around the same missing word and pretending the shape itself will do.
“So,” you say. “We keep it… between us?”
“Aye.”
“When I need it.”
“When you want it,” he corrects, then looks startled by his own nerve.
Your face softens. “When I want it,” you say.
“And if you don’t, ye say.”
“Yes.”
“And if I do something wrong—”
“I’ll say.”
“And if I get too—”
“Dunk,” you say, then put your hand on his chest. “You’re allowed to want things too.”
He lies very still under that, because the sentence has teeth. After a moment, he covers your hand with his. “Right,” he says, though it comes out clipped.
You nod, as if that has settled anything. Then you look down at your own body under his shirt, at your knees under the cover, at his hand on yours. “So this is very mature of us.”
“Aye,” he says. “Terribly.”
“Awful.”
“Near bureaucratic.”
It gets you. You press your face into his arm to hide the laugh, and Duncan lets himself turn into it, nose brushing your hair. Biscuits. Sleep. Skin. A trace of him, too, caught in cotton and warmth. His chest goes very full.
“Tea?” he asks after a while, because he has to put the feeling somewhere.
“Tea,” you agree. Then, smaller, before he can move: “And maybe stay here for another minute.”
Dunk closes his eyes. “Aye,” he says. “One minute.”
One minute becomes two, then God knows how many, because Dunk shifts, huffs softly through his nose, and fishes your hand out from under the duvet. He starts cautiously. Thumb over your knuckles. A rub at the side of one nail. The rough pad of his finger traces the crease where yours bends, nervous enough to make the whole thing feel less like idling and more like inquiry. How much of this is he allowed, when it is neither useful nor filthy. How long until one of you names it and ruins the little shelter it has made.
Then he opens his own hand beside yours and rests you against it.
The comparison is so unfair you nearly laugh. Your fingertips only reach the middle knuckles of his, and his palm sits beneath yours with room left over, warm and scored with small lines that look deeper for belonging to someone who does practical things badly and often.
“You’ve such small hands, lass,” he says.
“No I don’t.” Your voice wobbles at the edges, which is horrible of it. “You’ve giant paws.”
He smiles, but only barely, as if too much face might startle the permission away. His thumb slips into the hollow of your palm and tickles there once, then again, slower. You curl a little round it. He watches that happen with a dazed, soft sort of attention that makes you feel discovered in the worst place.
You roll closer. His arm tightens under you, then stills. For a second he goes careful all over. “How d’ye get anything done with such tiny hands, hm?” he murmurs.
Instead of answering, your other hand creeps from under the duvet and lands on his thigh. The muscle under it jumps. “I think you know how much I can get done with such tiny hands,” you say.
Dunk hiccups. Then, to his obvious horror, giggles. He clears his throat so hard it becomes a cough. “You’re a wee menace.”
“Mhm.” You close his hand around yours, then let him have it. “Go make that tea.”
It all works. Sort of. His feet touch the floor, and Duncan realises he's got exactly one T-shirt in here that's currently occupied, and worse, that he's naked and half-hard.
He contemplates options but one where he asks you to hand that shirt over doesn't even make it to the waiting list. He decides that if you could climb into a bath in front of him he can show some courage too.
So. Dunk mans up, or tries to. His feet touch the floor and he pushes himself upright to stand. He keeps his back to you and crosses to where his boxers have been abandoned on the floor. Crouching for them is a mistake in several directions, but he gets them hooked in his fingers, steps in and drags them up minding to sort his dick in there so that it doesn't look like it's screaming I'm needy first thing in the morning.
When he turns back, you have your face aimed very carefully at the window. Your mouth has gone into a put-upon, thoughtful pout, as if the curtains have presented you with some riveting theory. Dunk looks at you for half a second, then smiles. “Aye,” he says. “Very respectful.”
Your eyes flick to him and away again. “I’m looking at the light.”
“Course ye are.”
A grin. “What?”
“Mm.” He pushes the glasses up his nose with one finger, and lets himself enjoy the fact that you have to hide your face under the blanket. “I’ll be right back.”
You only hum to that. Wait for his footsteps to hush once he reaches the kitchen and allow yourself a little squeal into the pillow.
The girlishness he manages to drag out of you by existing near a kettle is ignominious. You are not sure he knows he spent half the night with his face pressed into the bend of your neck, humming and purring sweet little unconscious things like stay and smell nice whenever you shifted too far from the furnace of his chest. Then morning comes and he stands there abashed over a perfectly ordinary tent under the covers, as though your own body would not have betrayed you just as plainly if God had granted women the same crude signage.
All of it lays another brick in the awful construction of Duncan’s sexiness, which is strong and, frankly, a little lethal because he has no earthly notion of it. He is shy until pining gets the better of him. Needy enough that the shyness cannot survive long. Once something is given, he handles it with care. Listens. Anticipates. Looks for the place where your body has begun to ask once your mouth starts failing. It should make him less dangerous, that kindness. Somehow it makes him worse.
When he got up, you had taken to ogling his gorgeous round arse with such immediate appetite you forgot, for half a second, that both of you are here through necessity, accident, and one long chain of poor judgement. The rules are useful. Emotionally fraudulent, maybe, but useful all the same. They let you believe you are protecting the two of you from the version of intimacy that grows thorns later and cuts as resentment. They let you take what mirrors the thing you want while keeping a cloth over the contaminated parts.
Still, Dunk is right. This is better than strangers. If it stays inside this out-of-time pocket pregnancy has made for you, perhaps it is survivable. Perhaps it is even sensible. You remain close. You have somebody to lean on. Dunk misses less, you explain to yourself, staring at the pale scratch of sunlight on the floorboards. The two of you can practise easing into the strange family-shaped arrangement that will be waiting once your body finishes one labour and the rest of your life begins another.
You sit up in the bed and look towards the window. A husk hangs from the sill on a translucent thread, gutted clean by whatever abandoned it. It's split down the back, papery and crumbling, and the thing that has rearranged itself in it has cut its way out and flown off without your eyes on it.
Duncan comes back with two steaming cups and a mean reminder of how broad his chest is. He sits at the foot of the bed and turns the cup in his hand so that you can take it by the ear. "I've put toasts on, too," he says.
You nod with your mouth hidden into the rim. "I'll give you your shirt back in a minute," you say, seeing how he curls into himself. It's a large pity, large enough to rival him, for you'd love to just keep him around like this. "I have uh… spare towels and toothbrushes in the bathroom. If you want to, I mean—"
"I thought," Dunk starts. "It's Saturday. I thought we could still sort out the nursery. If you want."
"Really?" you say. "That'd be great. Yeah, I would love that. The room's ready, we just need to put things in it."
"Grand." His cup finds yours and they clink.
You smile into your tea. Get up. At the wardrobe you open one door and disappear half behind it, bare legs visible below the wood. “We could probably do the same thing at yours,” you say from in there. “Sometime later. When you feel like it. A nursery, I mean, or a corner?”
Dunk nods before he remembers you cannot see him. The thought lands strangely. It reminds him painfully that the arrangement will be divided into two households. That, inevitably, you will come to his flat and set your feet on the floor and, to Duncan, symbolically, it means things getting crossed off. Your voice reaches him. “Dunk?”
He blinks. “A-aye. Yeah. We ought to do that.”
You come out in cotton shorts and a T-shirt still large on you, though much smaller than his, and kneel beside him on the mattress. “Here,” you say, passing him back his one. Then, after a beat, softer: “You can stay over here as much as you want when the baby is born, you know that, right? I just thought it’d be good for you to have things at your place too.”
Dunk takes the shirt from you. “I know,” he says, though his throat has gone a bit narrow with it. He hands you his cup and ducks into the cotton to get sucker-punched by his private version of tangerine dream. The whole thing is warm from you. Smells of sleep and your skin and the sweet rot of whatever lotion has survived the night. It settles over his shoulders as if it has learned him from inside your body and came back altered. He has to sit still for a second with his head only half through the neck-hole, sightless and enormous, before he can finish pulling it down.
When his face reappears, you are looking at him with your mouth tucked in. “What?” he asks.
“Nothing.”
“That’s not a nothin' face.”
“It is.” You reach over and tug the hem straight for him, fingers brushing his stomach through cotton. “You looked very heroic, fighting your own shirt.”
“Mm, a hard battle,” he says, grave as he can manage.
He listens to your laughter with focus meant for the speech of people wiser than him. Finishes his tea and waits for you to finish yours. Then, you show him around the bathroom while Duncan pretends he doesn't know where things are and nods thoughtfully at every stop of the tour. Once it's wrapped, he quells an urge to kiss your forehead and maybe slap your ass lightly. He showers with the soap he's used that one time before, then joins you in the kitchen for breakfast.
First, Dunk snorts at the disparity of plates. Yours holds one sad toast while his overflows with bread, eggs and sausages. When he shots you a questioning look you only shrug and send a don't judge me face in his direction. So Duncan sits. Eats. Tries to not think much about hands that made it for him.
In this mundane moment, Dunk’s memory manages to dim all the girls he has ever smothered into hurting him. Compared to what he feels now, those loves seem skinny. Starved at the ribs. This one is embryonic but ever-growing, blind and hungry and insisting on itself without any shame.
He watches you nibble at the bread’s crust and chase every bite with a sip of tea. One leg perched on the seat of the chair, you do not look at him, only scroll through emails on your phone with your mouth set flatter by the second. He sees how it fleeces the morning bliss off you, bit by bit. Then decides to take the role you keep offering. Someone who has a say in it. Someone who can want things.
“Have ye thought about takin’ leave already?” he asks.
“Hm?” You lift your head. “Oh, yeah, I just…” Your gaze drops back to the phone, then away from it. “I don’t know what I’d be doing with the time, you know?”
Dunk considers that a minute. Wipes his greasy mouth, cringes a little, then rests an arm across the table, ruling halfway through the movement to leave you untouched after all. His fist closes instead.
“We could… I dunno.” He takes a sip of coffee. “We could figure that out. Together, I mean. I’ll have more time soon.”
“Oh?” you say. “Right. School’s ending.”
“Mhm. Few weeks.” Dunk nods. “I’ll still have summer coaching and the activity programme with the kids, but it’s not full-time. We could prepare a bit better. Meet Ray and Red. Maybe you could…”
“What?”
“Come to a game,” he says, quieter. “Meet Egg. If ye want.”
You go still for long enough that Dunk regrets it. Then, you put your phone face down and rest your palm over his fist. It loosens under you. His fingers thread through yours.
“That sounds good,” you tell him. “I probably could use some time off.”
Dunk nods.
You look down at your joined hands, then back at him. “You ready for the nursery?”
Dunk sweeps the room with vacant eyes. “Aye,” he says. “Think so.”
The nursery has been waiting with its door closed. He doesn't know when the painting was done, nor does he ask by whom, because each possible version delivers a small resentment. Had it been you alone, Dunk would scold you for not seeking help. Had it been anyone else, he'd be wounded about not being the first choice. When the door opens, both of you lean on the frame as if bare walls might turn and ask what exactly you think you are doing here. There are boxes stacked by the skirting board, a rolled rug, cot in the exact middle, a changing table flat-packed in a carton with arrows pointing which side is up for some reason. A lamp shaped like a moon. Three soft baskets that smell of new rope and shop dust.
You tell him the changing table should go under the shelf. Dunk measures the wall again though it's been measured twice already, then lifts the table as if it has no weight and puts it exactly where you point. “There?” he asks.
“A little left.”
He shifts it a little left.
“No, your left.”
Dunk's mouth quirks. “That was my left.”
“Your other left, then.”
He gives you a look over his shoulder, wounded by female sense of directions, and you laugh hard enough that he smiles fully. The room eases by one small notch.
After that, the two of you become very serious about things that are very serious only to new parents. Which drawer gets the vests. Whether nappies should live closer to the wipes or closer to the little bin with its impressive system of odour containment. Dunk folds three tiny sleepsuits. You unfold one, refold it worse, and he says nothing, only fixes it when he thinks you are looking elsewhere.
“I saw that,” you say.
“I didn’t do anythin’.”
“You think I can’t fold baby clothes.”
“I think,” Dunk says, eyes on the drawer, “there’s a chance the baby will want its legs in the leg bits.”
You stare at him.
His mouth twitches. “That’s all.”
A muslin hits his head. He catches it without looking, which is so irritatingly impressive you have to turn away and busy yourself with the baskets.
Slowly, the space stops looking like storage and begins to acquire intent. Sheet goes on round the mattress. The little blanket folds over the rail. The lamp finds the corner. Books line up on the low shelf, bright spines and silly animals and one about a tractor Dunk claims is important because children ought to have options. You put the first packet of nappies in place, then stand there with your hand still on it. “Yeah,” you say, to no one.
Dunk looks up from where he is kneeling by a drawer. “What?”
“No, just. Yes. This looks… fine.”
“Aye.” He follows your gaze, then nods too hard. “Yeah. It does. Looks nice.”
There's a hollow, mouth-biting silence after that. Nice is a stupid little word for a room that now contains future. It's too small to express the enormity of the folded clothes that wait for a body neither of you has held yet. Nice is what's said because the real thing is a cutthroat.
Dunk gets up. You both stand in the middle of it with your foreheads set into brave shapes. “This is nice,” you say again, worse this time.
“Aye,” Dunk says. “I like it.”
You glance at him, and his face destroys you. His eyes are red-rimmed behind the lenses, magnified into bareness. Nothing held back on him. Duncan is a pretty crier because nearly none of him frowns. He just sweats tears out of those baby-blues until they adorn his lashes and drop onto cheeks. There's no attempt at hiding, only a fist at the ready to wipe the excess had it blurred his vision.
A complete opposite of you. Mouth slicing itself into a lopsided crescent from the force of trying to keep it inside, then plain ugly sobbing. It erupts from bawling eyes to a painful choke on the back of a mouth. Then snot comes thick and unstoppable, smears the upper lip with salt, and all of you becomes shiny in a way that would cake up any powder.
“Why are you crying?” he asks, voice breaking.
“I’m not crying,” you say, immediately crying. “You’re crying.”
His mouth twitches, then fails. “Am I?”
"Yes, Duncan," you wail. "Visibly."
Duncan steps in as if called by it. The room does a strange thing to a private wound in him. Bursts open the scar tissue that's grown round abandonment. Tends it, cleans it, stitches the evened edges and kisses it better. Small things do that to people. He feels welcome to walk barefoot on the fluffy rug and flick the carousel of geese into a stroll. There's a family for him somewhere in here, and you are a third of it. He doesn't know what kind of wrong has its fingers around your throat, but steps in all the same, because it doesn't really matter.
He gathers you against his chest and the two of you stand there leaking stupidly into each other. “Lass,” he murmurs, palm at the back of your head. “Hey. C’mere.”
“I’m here,” you say into his shirt, which now carries an imprint of your face like it's a fucking Veil of Veronica. “I’m very clearly here.”
“I know.”
“Why’re you crying?” you ask again.
His hand stills, then moves again. "Happy," he lies. “Jus' happy."
You pull back. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Lie badly.”
Dunk's face works. For one flicker you think he might tell you something. Something old. Then he only cups your face in both hands and wipes beneath your eyes with his thumbs. His own are worse. Damn tender and unfair in their size. “And you?” he asks. “Why’re you cryin’?”
You try to answer like a normal woman with control over her organs. The effect is half-strangled, half-mangled through teeth and comes out jittery. “I’m—" you hiccup, "scared I… I won’t be… a good mum.”
He stares at you, genuinely baffled. "Sweetheart," he says, as if it's all dead simple. "You'll be an incredible mam."
Laughter comes abrupt and deranged, hitting the surface of his lenses in wet little spots. Duncan says it like the matter has been already inspected and passed. It makes the idea briefly possible. "You don't know that," you tell him.
“I do.”
“You don’t.”
“I do,” he says again, with the same conviction he's used to persuade you municipal swamp is green. He brings your hand to his mouth and kisses your knuckles. Then knuckles of the other one. Then the hollow of it while your fingers brush his nose. Then your wrist, where the pulse knocks and knocks. "I do know."
“Dunk—”
A kiss on the forehead cuts you off. Long and determined. It makes you gasp and you hope that Dunk will read the gasping as one of the necessary phases for calming down. You clutch the shirt on his stomach, then, with no better plan than needing less fabric between you, you push your palms underneath it. Touch the life of his ribs. His muscles jerk.
“I only trust you,” you say, staring at the damp hollow at the base of his throat, “because you’ll be a great dad.”
He does that thing in the face that heralds the slackening of the whole body. Galvanised within himself to push past the layers of fear, Duncan bends and kisses you deep enough to make the both of you stumble. His hands frame your face, then neck, then shoulders, undecided. "Girl, what are you doin'—" he mutters into it. "What're you doin' to me?"
Loving you, you think, unbidden. You mumble a thing that has a shape of his name but doesn't survive the journey from throat to mouth. Set your fingers on his back and try to pull him closer.
He hums and starts walking. Stops kissing, but stays mouth to mouth. His thumbs and forefingers cuff round your elbows, twitching. There are heavy nasal breaths and working throats and between one swallow and the next Duncan stares at you through those damp, heifer-like lashes as if the answer might be printed somewhere on your face.
"Where's this goin'?" he asks.
"To the—" you stammer. "To bed. If you want."
His whole chest sinks on the exhale. "Thank God," puffs out of him.
Then—arms. A strongman’s foreplay begins with Duncan’s palms finding your arse like it’s signposted. He gets you up with a grunt that nurtures relief where effort should be, and your body remembers the route with alarming ease. It's the third time now. Three times out of three, you have failed to get yourself to bed under your own power where Duncan is concerned. The thought brings another one behind it, bad and quick-footed: perhaps this is simply what he does with women. Perhaps all that size has made a habit of carrying girls through doorways and making them feel singular for the length of one corridor.
You shut that down with both legs round his waist and both hands at his neck, because thinking has done very little for you lately besides invent pain. This belongs to me, you tell yourself, with no court of appeal available. The lift, the hands, the breath punched out of him when you settle against his stomach. Him. All of it yours for as long as he keeps walking.
He kisses you through it. The shape of him between your thighs, already interested, makes a hard bid against you. In the bedroom he lowers you to the mattress with care so anxious it turns clumsy at the last inch. Your back bounces, and he follows you down halfway before catching himself on both arms. There, he hovers, huge, open-mouthed, and trembles for it, and you know damn well it is not from the weight on his shoulders because you tremble too while holding nothing.
Your fingers hook in the hem of his shirt and lift. Dunk straightens enough to help you; yields his arms and head so you can drag it off him. On the other side of cotton he's a mess with his glasses endearingly askew. "There," you say, placing a palm on his cheek.
He huffs, embarassed, scrunches his eyes and smiles with a tongue pushed against the backs of his teeth. Then his hands find your shorts. He searches first, gets your nod, and that is all it takes. The waistband drags down your hips by the work of patient fingers, resists where you're sunken into the bed so you lift, and you could swear he breathes out a little yes.
Around nudity, you tense. Duncan sees it. "There," he says and bends to press his mouth to your stomach.
In current circumstances it is such a strange place to be kissed right before sex that you laugh like an idiot, and ugly too—phlegmy and cracked and wet in a way that you're certain is not attractive. But Duncan looks up with his eyes gone red for entirely different reasons than five minutes ago. "You said kissin's alright," he says.
"I did."
“So—” His palm smooths down your thigh to the knee, broad and calloused like low-grain sandpaper. He gets under the joint and makes it bend, lifts until the leg opens from the hip and leaves you spread in a way that has both of you breathing through the nose. Mouth set judiciously where your belly swells from the pubic bone, he mutters, “—I’m kissin’.”
His body starts moving like communicating vessels: one crawling thing follows another. Crawling palm kickstarts lips. “Still kissin’,” Duncan says, and lies, because now he’s licking. He has his tongue set broad across your navel, travelling upwards until it meets the border of your shirt’s hem.
That invites his other hand to lift it. He bunches the cotton above your tits and continues the kissin’ between your breasts. His hips creep up too, first to your mid-thighs, then level with yours, and the weight of him releases some tension from your loins. He’s wide enough to keep you open by his presence alone, so the hand at the hinge of your knee remains soft. Thumb brushing the side of it. Small. Careful. Damning.
Your palm and finds his hair. Fingers apart, you comb through the roots, then become meaner with the pulling once his stubble brushes your nipple. “Dunk,” you say. “Come here.”
He does, badly. Too much of him for grace, he comes there fast and heavy. Hooks your leg around his hip and presses his clothed, warm cock to your cunt. “Shite,” he hisses when you tug the hairs at his nape. He looks at you, and when you think there will be more kissin’, he stays frozen, just gaping.
“Don’t look like that,” you say.
“Like what?”
“Like I’ve done something to you.”
His eyes drop, then lift. “Haven’t ye?”
He seems a bit shocked by his own answer, so to save him from it you reach for his face and pull him down. Allow yourself the wet and neatless pass of tongue through his mouth. Your leg tightens round him because your body is quick to throw invitation now the brain is ridden with persistent fuck it. Fuck me instead.
Duncan’s hand goes down between you and gets stupid with the practicalities. He could have thought this through better. Could have undressed properly, could have come to bed with some sort of sequence in mind, but details of lovemaking keep leaving him the second your mouth opens under his. He only wants to be close. The rest is laces, waistbands, cloth, mortal hindrance. He shoves at his boxers one-handed, gets them low enough to make use of himself, and winces when the cotton scrapes the head of his cock.
Then, skin meets skin and a sigh falls out of him in one long, shattered piece.
He fits his fist round the base to guide himself. Thumb pressed just under the head, he squeezes until the dew pearls out, slick and clear, then drags it through you. Slow first, because he deludes himself that slow might save him. The crown parts the wet seam of you bluntly, slides up, catches over your clit, and comes back down to nudge at the entrance with no entering done. Your whole body gives a small, greedy twitch to that. His does worse.
“Christ,” he says into your mouth.
Again. A little firmer. His cock learns the route by the fractions: clit, slit, soft clutch of the opening, back up through the mess he has made wetter by being in it. He mixes himself with your sweet sap until the slide acquires sound. The tender parts of you speak through glimmer and greed, while his answer is held in the wrist, in the rippling stomach, and the balls drawn tight enough to feel like someone's holding them.
You bite his lower lip because you cannot think of a sentence worth the effort. He groans, and that makes more of him leak into his own hand. It gets spread back through you on the next pass. There is something near argumentative in it, the way he keeps refusing to give you the thing both of you are braced for. Your hips keep lifting to steal it from him. His knuckles brush your pussy lips each time he works himself down. The heel of his palm grazes the damp hair. He shudders as if the contact keeps running up his spine and knocking something loose behind the eyes.
“Duncan,” you breathe.
“Aye,” he says, uselessly. “Aye, I know.”
He does know. Knows, because your fingers seem dead set on claiming some of his hair for themselves with how viscously you tug. There's a flex to your thigh, hips canting restlessly once the tip of his cock presses where it ought to go but slides away. The tenderest parts of the both of you keep quarrelling, negotiating, resolving, while the faces are busy enduring the wait. Duncan watches yours as if watching a match held to paper.
"Come on," you say, looping both arms round his neck. "Dunk, please."
"But, luv—" he strains, resting his forehead to your mouth. But you're so tight, Dunk wants to say. He laughs, and thank God, you read it as I'm on it. While what Duncan means is I'm sorry for this. Sorry for putting you here. Sorry for liking you so much I forgot to pull out. Sorry for every inch of me and the exact opposite too. "Okay," he says. "Okay."
His hips adjust to stop lying about themselves, and he breaches you slowly. You take him in laborious, exerting shards that make his spine empty of sense. Warmth closes around his length stern as a stubborn mouth and his own puffs out air so suddenly his cheeks swell with it.
He's halfway through when you whine from the bottom of your furious body and cant up for more. "Aye," he says. "Aye, I'm here."
Another inch. The grip is so snug and living the whole of his chest becomes devoted to the passage. His brain too, and his hands, and skin that reddens under your touch and Duncan wonders if scalps can bruise from hair being gripped too ardently. He sinks the last of himself, and when his lower belly meet you, Duncan stops breathing. His body arrives late to the place his heart has been making a fool of itself over for weeks. "There," he says. "There ye are."
You relax around the fullness. Yes, this is right. Your eyes scan him, and find that the lens nearest you is fogged at the edge. And suddenly, you want him bearer, just to see him plain. So you reach for the glasses, and ask, "Can I take those off?"
Dunk huffs a breath. The movement shifts him inside you by some wicked measure and both of you pretend to endure it normally.
"I won't see a thing," he says.
"I know." You slide the glasses off and set them somewhere safe by your pillow. Without them, his face changes. Equally handsome, but transmuted into another kind of comeliness. He's less goofy, more exposed. Somehow more mature and vulnerable. His eyes lose their hard outline, start searching badly and wrinkling where he tries to squint. You cup his jaw and bring him down until his ear is at your mouth. "How about you just listen to me?" you whisper.
The twitch inside you is immediate. "Oh?" you say. Duncan only breathes out a fragmented chuckle. You stroke his cheek with your thumb. "You like that?"
His throat works, excruciatingly thorough, to swallow that gulp down. His hips slip again, then stop, as if there is someone outside of him scolding the misbehaving parts. "Girl," he pleads.
"You do." Your mouth brushes the shell of his ear and his whole back sets until some hard-working vertebrae clicks. "That's good to know."
He pulls back enough to sweep your face and finds, possibly, the shape of your smile. His eyes narrow, poor useless things, and he looks set up by the natural order of things. “You’re very pleased with yourself,” he says.
"A bit."
"Aye, well." He swallows again. His voice has gone thick where he's meant for it to be firm. "Mind yourself then."
You bring him back down. Dunk comes willingly, like he always does when something's been asked of him. His mouth opens against your neck as if that's a grounding thing to do, and he thrusts carefully, deep enough to make your leg flex against his side. The pressure against his ribs is warm, the hand at his nape warmer, and the lips next to his ear border torrid.
"You feel so good," you tell him.
He groans, surrendering the baritone to a higher pitch. "Jesus—"
"So good, Dunk."
"Don't say it like that."
"Like what?"
"As if—" He takes another breath and moves through it. Cock drags slow and proper, particular enough for you to feel the whole thick length of him leaving and coming back. "As if you know."
"I do know."
You might not be an expert on how to execute the part after winning men that makes them brave enough to tell you all the things you yearn to hear (I love you, I love you, I love you), but this—this, you know. You know where they are softhearted. You know how to find this part. Despite what your mother said, it is not wicked. It's listening for key words that quieten their voices, and looking where eyes ought to be set. Dunk seems to be good at this too, because he reads the cues with surprising proficiency. Whether by guess or wisdom, it eludes you, but he manages to be there when you need a hug, a good word, a joke, a shoulder, or now, a fuck. What kind of fuck, he understands quickly too. You don’t yet pass judgement on the intention behind it: if he means to stay for long, or if he has simply recognised the means to an end. The version in which this is just the way he has sex, unperformed and therefore wholly aligned with you, doesn’t even make it to your head.
And Dunk is softhearted in many places. He’s unbearably tender when it comes to tending bodies, as if each part of you deserves kindness. It’s only natural to conclude he’d like that back, in one form or another. He reacts to praise as though it puts ground under his feet. Keeps finding ways to be useful, offering himself in small practical pieces, as if saying notice me, notice me, I am here, without understanding at all that it is impossible to not notice him. If someone in his past failed to see the easiness to love him that he comes with, they were either dumb or cruel in the throat. The only thing in him that halts the loving is the fearful nature of frail hearts. You recognise that like you are both made of similar clay, even if you cannot put a finger on the exact place where it hurts. In cases such as Duncan and yourself, bravery arrives in steps. Valour blooms rather than surges, so you give him a small brick for the lifeblood to keep building. Praise him for the way he is. Just this.
"I do know," you tell him. "You're so patient with me. So careful. I like that."
It costs him some. The hand under your knee pulses, fingers pressing, loosening, pressing again. His stomach jumps against yours, fills with a deep breath, then corrects itself to not flatten you.
"See?" you coo. Pour the sweetness straight into his ear canal so the only thing received by cochlea is that he is being good. "I love how heavy you are. How well you fill me. Fuck, Duncan—" He hits you just right, on the right there. You tighten, and keep muttering, "You're so good to me. So fucking good to me, my good boy."
"Ah—f-fuck—" he snaps, shocked and half-pained.
"Duncan."
He makes the mistake of lifting his head when you say his name. Blind as he is, he still finds your mouth. Kisses you hard, then badly, then breaks to inhale. His hair has fallen over his forehead. Without the glasses he looks dismantled in a more private way, as if you have caught him between skins. "Say it again," he mumbles.
You blink. "What?"
His ears turn crimson. He keeps thrusting. Stays deep, because that's when your body keeps rewarding his with blissful little clenches. Discipline fleets him, and Duncan forgets altogether how to keep himself in reins. It feels too good. Brushes the cords too accurately. "What you said," he rasps.
"That you're good to me?"
He shuts his eyes.
Oh. So that is where it lives.
You pull him closer with the heel of your foot and start speaking into his lips. "You're good to me," you say, slower. "You're good at this. Perfect at this. You make me feel—oh—" You have to stop there, because the next stroke takes the end of the sentence and folds it under your tongue.
Dunk hears enough. Perhaps more than enough. His face comes down beside yours and he starts fucking you with his mouth at your cheek, breathing there, taking the praise like punches he intends to keep as bruises.
"You're beautiful," you whisper. "You know that?"
"N-no." He shakes his head.
"Yes." Your fingers push into his hair. "You are. So handsome. You're so pretty like this."
"Girl," he wheezes. "Girl, I can't—"
"You can." You kiss the corner of his mouth. "You can take it."
You break some working piece in him. He gives one fuller push, then another, and a sound, too open, too surprised, leaves him. His whole body locks above you. "Shite, I—" he gasps. "Shite, wait—"
It takes him too early. You afflict him, his ears and nose and neck with those delicate touches that make the roots of Dunk's hair buzz. With your voice, so fucking loving, it makes his brain melt and threaten to leak. It's all too much. He comes, hideous for trying to withhold it, strong for you being the cause of it, and shivers violently through his every giant muscle. His cock kicks deep with each wrung out spill, face drops to your shoulder, then whole of him follows the drowning to fold around you. The noise he makes there is loud enough to shame him later, if you let it.
You do nothing except hold him. For several seconds Duncan doesn't speak. He focuses on breathing instead and maybe not turning to ash under the blaze of shame. Not one, but a title of few-pumps-chump has finally been handed to him with a shitty confetti and a stale flute of cheap champagne. He stays seated inside you and trembling through the last of it. When he tries to lift himself, his arms disagree.
"I'm sorry," he says, hoarse. “I didn’t mean to—” His pelvis shifts by accident and he winces, oversensitive and still hard enough to make the smallest movement count. “Fuck.”
"Dunk." You press your mouth to his temple. Smooth the hair off his forehead. "Don't be. There's nothing to be sorry for, hm?"
"But you didn't—" he huffs, sounding furious with himself and deeply far away.
A smile, or so he thinks. "I'm okay," you say.
"You didn't finish."
"No," you say. His brows knit. It makes him look so abysmally disappointed that for a beat you consider scraping that and lying.
He lies back down, nuzzling his face to your neck. "Then talk to me," he says.
Your stomach does an unbecoming, joyous little flip. "What?"
“Talk to me,” he says again, quieter. His voice has rawed its own edges, embarrassed and determined both. “Please. I can stay. Jus'—tell me things.”
You smirk. “What things?”
Duncan scowls. “Cruel woman.”
Your hand starts playing with his hair again. Scratching at the scalp, pulling gently. “You want me to praise you back into fucking me?”
Dunk’s eyes close. “Aye,” he says. “If you’re offerin’.”
What moves through you borders unkind. You hook both legs along his sides, cross them on his arse and turn your face to his ear. "So listen," you say.
He's so obedient his entire body slackens as if hearing is achieved through epidermis. For a while, he does just that. Listens with his lashes lowered since sight has become a luxury, and useless to him anyway. He's just touch and sound.
"You're so hot like this," you whisper. His fingers twitch on your shoulder. "You are. All fucked out and sorry for yourself." Against your neck his lips move and draw the shape of Christ. You brush the sweaty curl at his temple. "Your cock feels so good inside me," you say, softer, because it's a less generic truth. "See? You came and I'm still full of you."
Dunk makes a sound rid of consonants. His face turns an inch, mouth opening at your throat because it needs to be put somewhere to not grow loud. You feel him pulse once, tired and sore, and then another thing starts under it. A tiny return. Thickening that makes you rethink your approach on I can take you once again.
“I like it,” you tell him. “The mess you make. I like knowing it’s there.”
“Lass—”
“Makes me feel special.”
That one hurts him. Pleases him too, which may be the hurt of it. He gives the smallest aborted press, an insidious tremor of a body that wants to eat more than it can hold, but it drags through you slickly enough that both of you go quiet. He hisses through his teeth. The overburden of senses has him by the nerves. You can feel it as an argument within the muscles. Pleasure with a hot little blade tucked inside it.
You slide your palm down his back. Sweat has pooled at the dip of his spine and over his shoulders. “I like how big you are,” you say. “How you spread me open just by being there.”
Duncan shudders. His cock gives another slow, disbelieving throb.
“Oh,” you coo. “There he is.”
“Mean,” he mutters, but stays exactly where he is with his ear offered. He wants the cruelty by handful. Wants it ladled warm into the hollow places. Wants to be destroyed by kindness because kindness is the thing he has least defence against.
“You like it?” you ask. He nods once. “Can you tell me with words?”
A pause. His throat works against your skin. “A-aye.”
“Good.”
His whole body rises to that, a rough tightening from shoulders to arse. He moves by mistake, a shallow slip in and out, and the noise bursts from him with such pained sweetness your fingers tense in his hair.
“Careful,” you murmur, though care has begun to look like a strange medicine.
There's a laugh, short and bitten. “Tryin’,” Dunk says.
He always does, which might be a thing that turns you more sombre. “I know you are,” you say and get taken off-guard by how lovesick you sound. You plant a kiss at the place behind his ear. “That’s what I like.”
Duncan goes still again. Listening so hard his body seems to have turned all its chambers towards you. “I like your shoulders,” you say, and let your hand prove it. Sweep over one broad slope, then the other. “I like your sweet face. Especially when you’re inside me.” At that, his breath leaves him in pieces.
There is more. There is a daft, impossible amount more. It crowds up on your tongue in unsayable particulars. I like that your front teeth face inward a little and seem slightly too large for the civil architecture of your mouth. I like the freckle on your left cheek. I like that your left eye crinkles more than the right when you laugh. I like your feet. I like the soft of your stomach. I like your voice in the morning and what you feel like in bed beside me. I like. I like, I like, I like—
You spare him and do not spare him at all. “You’re so pretty, Duncan.”
His hips jerk again. There. No use pretending that one missed. Inside his head the answers to each of your praises start piling up. I like your sweet face too. He bites the thought down and tastes your skin instead. I like your shoulders too. I like your hands. I like them in my hair. I like your laugh when it turns to cackle. I like when you cook and get cross at the pan. I like when you go snotty while crying. I like your tits. I like your arse. I like your thighs. I like the weight of you. I like waking up with one of your hairs stuck to my mouth. I—
“F-fuck,” Duncan hisses through an involuntary back-stabbing twitch.
It's slippery. Lovely. He moves through his own spent and feels the sting prickle from the tip of his cock to the base of his spine like thousands of insects' wings fluttering between layers of skin. His mouth goes so wide the jaw clicks, hand finds your hip, grips, releases, then grips again with a gentleness that comes out more desperate than on purpose.
“Too much?” you ask.
He shakes his head. “N-no.”
In a quick assessment Duncan realises he is fully hard again. Worse than before, somehow. His cock feels harder than it has any right to, bigger too for the swell of deliciously tormented tissue. Blood fills him so utterly he gets light-headed with it and has one fleeting, cowardly thought that maybe men go soft after disgracing themselves for a reason and ought to leave their luck alone. Because this feels stolen. Forbidden in how sweetly it spreads through him. He is bathed in himself and your slick, trembling with it, and still some jurisdiction of the hips returns to him. Enough to roll them into you heavily and whisper, "Keep talkin'. Keep talkin' to me, sweetheart. Please."
It arrives so raw you nearly lose your nerve. Nearly. With the shift inside, your body, faithless and bright, remembers what it was promised. "You're doing so well, Duncan. You're so good. Look at me, darling."
He goes where your palm orders his chin and looks vaguely at where your face should be. It's blurry and he's not certain a case would be different if he had his glasses on. "I want ye to feel good, lassie. I want to be good for you. Oh, fuck—"
Your chest tightens like a hand closing round glass. You smooth your thumb under his eye, where he is hot and damp. “You are,” you tell him. "Kiss me."
He lowers his mouth to yours and lets them meet with too much gratitude, open lips driven by poor coordination. The kiss makes him move into a shallow glide. He is filling out properly, impossible and worried inside you, honed through the overbright ache because praise stomps on every other version of comfort and laughs at it.
"There you are," you say. "Oh fuck, there you are. Right there—"
"Yeah?" Dunk says. Starts pulling back farther, enough to make you protest the loss. When he slides in again both of you feel the second life of him. He brushes the rawest depths. The mess you claim to like so much gets pumped back in with a sound so wet and filthy the burn in Duncan's ears begins to feel cold.
"Yes—" you moan. Clench around him as if welcoming the insult. "God, you're so good—"
He whimpers. Quiet and punched out. Buries his face into your shoulder immediately after as if a noise so vulnerable doesn't have the right to exist in his body.
The sound spills across your chest and bleeds into your fingers. “Oh, Dunk.”
“Don’t make a thing of it.”
“I’m making several things of it.”
“Lass.”
“You sound beautiful,” you tell him, with a face so soft it could kill him.
His whole body flinches. “Jesus, woman.”
“You do.” You pull at his hair until his face comes back where you want it. “You sound beautiful when you want me.”
Duncan stares in your general direction, eyes narrowed and wet, lips parted around breaths he has forgotten to ration. Then his hips move again, and again, each stroke careful out of necessity, each one less careful because you keep rewarding him for it.
I like when you want me too, he thinks, frantic with it. I like when you need me. I love—
He squeezes his lids shut. Whole cliff edge waits under one syllable.
You kiss him before he can fall off it and murmur, “Good boy,” against his mouth.
The last of the strategy leaks off with the sweat at Dunk's temple. He thrusts deeper, shakes harder with the cost of it, and your back arches clean off the bed. Pleasure opens low and hot, fed by the weight of him, the broken sounds, the knowledge that you have put your mouth to some hidden hinge in him and made it swing wide.
“Again,” he says, barely there.
You smile against his lips. “My good boy.”
His cock jumps inside you so hard you gasp. He hears that too. Even without sight, he is learning you by damage and reward. He finds the rhythm by your sounds and keeps his face so close your words have nowhere to go except to him.
“Perfect,” you whisper. “I'm so close, Dunk. Keep fucking me like this. God, you're lovely—” A groan, then another careful stroke. Your thumbs brush under his lower lashes in a sweet little I'm here, I'm here with you. It's not really fair to be able to see his face opened so cleanly while he can't see yours, but the partial anonymity pours some courage down your throat. "I don't know who taught you to be ashamed of wanting," you say, "but they were wrong."
Duncan whines out your name. Torn and bruised by his teeth. The sound of it said like that tips you. You cradle his head to your neck and come with your mouth full of his hair. It seizes you crude and complete, legs and arms locking so hard he has nothing left to do but stay buried and take what your body milks out of him. “My good boy,” you whisper through it. “Duncan, my good boy—”
Good boy. Good boy is what Dunk has always wanted to be, and has tried to be, and still nobody has told him so. Good boy said with conviction by both your mouth and body is what lures him into following you into his second orgasm. He comes again, and worse for it. Loud this time, and costly. His whole body fights itself over where to put the force of it, lower stomach clenching, calf near mangled from the effort of keeping his weight off you. His voice breaks somewhere above his own size. “Ah—Christ, girl—ah, fuck—” Then he spends another load inside you, bathing his cock hot, while your cunt keeps pulling at him in ruthless aftershocks as if it has claimed him now and wants payment.
You keep him trapped by every limb you have. Keep him there while he shudders, while his hips give their last helpless stammers into yours, while his breath falls apart against your throat. It feels brutal for how close it is. For how much of yourselves you have both put into the other without saying the sensible things first.
When it passes, Duncan stays braced over you, trembling. His mouth works near your skin. “Y-you—you—” he stammers. “You make such a mess of me.” He blinks, then palms the mattress for his glasses. Finds them and manages to slide them on one-handed, though not entirely well for they sit on his nose crooked. But at least he can see you again. And Jesus fucking Christ—
The love is no longer embryonic. It has managed to gestate into some sort of Leviathan in the span of one fuck. He looks at what he's done to you and cannot believe his eyes. All of you looks warm. Face melted of every wrinkle it could produce, you lay below him blissed and gorgeous and Dunk feels as if he's going to need to step out from his own skin if he doesn't thank you. For this. For listening. For seeing him and guiding him when he's blind.
"God, girl, what was that?" he says. "What've you done to me?"
You regain the ability to frown. Your brows knit, worried, and you perch yourself higher on one elbow. "Are you not well?" you ask, brushing his cheek. "Have I—"
"No." Then, Duncan laughs. Not because he's happy, though he is, and not because anything is being particularly funny. His body chooses laughter for him. He puts his palm to your jaw and touches your lower lip. Presses on it, stretches it, and it's so glossy it slips away. "Yer not real," he says. "Yer an impossible girl."
A smile splits you, weird and uncanny. It lacks the eyes. Confused, you whisper, "Duncan?"
He answers the sound of his name with his mouth. Poorly at first. A little startled, a little overbrave, a kiss dragged from some place in him still smoking. He catches your lower lip, lets it go, comes back for the corner, then the whole of you, and the further he gets from the post-nut clarity, the more careful he becomes. His hand settles at your neck with a tenderness that feels borrowed from later life.
You let him. Let the kiss calm into something with breathing in it. When he pulls back, his forehead stays close to yours. “How d’you know me so well?” he asks, almost accusing.
Your eyes soften. “I could ask you the same,” you say.
If you did, you'd hear that I love ye, and it cannot be right of you. Duncan goes still above you. “Aye,” he says, though it barely counts as speech.
You brush your thumb over the corner of his mouth. “What?”
“I’ve never had it like that in my life,” he says, blushing fiercely. “I don’t know what it means, or if it has to mean anythin’, but I just—shite, I’m sorry, I jus'—”
“Me too,” you say. He blinks. You nod, because he looks like he needs the second strike of it. “Me too. I wasn’t lying about anything.”
“Thank you,” Dunk says. It is the first thing he can find that is small enough to fit his mouth. Then he shifts, and the small thing gets ruined. “Ah—shite.”
He tries to pull out carefully. Careful does not save either of you. The slip of him leaving is uncomfortable and cold. He hisses. You hiss too, then both sounds turn into sheepish laughter. Dunk sits back on his heels with hands hovering over you as if there is still a correct place to put them and he has not found it yet. "S-sorry," he says.
“Stop apologising for having a dick, okay?”
That makes him look at you in scandalised silence, which is worth the ache. He groans, and looks down since your face is a bit too much. His hands find your knees. He closes your legs gently and rocks them once as if settling something very important and badly made.
You sigh, loose and thready, and your whole lower body goes into a tired little tremor.
“There,” he says. His gaze catches lower. Sticks. “Shite,” he says. “I’ve, uh—”
“What?”
Instead of answering, Duncan leans in and, with the same care, straightens your legs leaving them slightly parted. The air finds you. You make a protesting noise, but he is already lowering himself between your thighs, ungainly and tender about it, until his cheek settles in the crook of one leg and one huge hand smooths over your navel.
“Don’t get any ideas,” you warn him. “I’m still very much untouchable.”
“I—I know.” His voice grows rougher, muffled near your skin. “Me too. I jus’—”
He moves his mouth close and kisses you. There. Low, over skin, without asking anything more from your nerves. His cum is seeping out. Your slit is filled white and wet enough that his spent drips lower, down the swell of buttock and onto the sheet. The sight ought to shame him, probably. Instead, it quiets something in his bones and wakes something worse.
“Relax,” he murmurs. “Just a kiss, lass.”
You try, though relaxation has become a complicated act. His breath warms where everything is swollen and used. He only rests his mouth in small presses, nose close enough to take in the scents bleeding over each other. The newness of it makes him oddly proud. Animal-proud. Kind of proud that probably only another beast would understand.
Duncan ought to leave it there. He knows this from the very recent, first-hand education in what happens when a body is pushed past what it can politely take, and he has no wish to be cruel with you. Still, curiosity implores him. He lets his tongue out only a little and touches you near the entrance, where the trickle has thinned enough to seem less like a dare. Just the tip of it. Just once.
The concoction meets him badly alloyed, both of you discoverable in it. He is salt and water, almost insipid were he to perform alone. You are richer. Sharper. Creamy in the way he remembers from the drunken night that got the two of you here, with that same wild edge underneath. Together it is stranger than either of you apart. Overwhelming, but with a door in it.
He licks again. Small and careful. More reverential than useful, though he would sooner bite off his own tongue than call it that. If romance is a place, Duncan thinks, it is here. Then, he stops thinking much at all. Your fingers find his hair after a moment. You comb once through it and leave your hand there, too tired to do anything finer. When your thigh starts twitching from the weight of his head, he lifts it and looks up at you. “Go shower?” he offers, hoarse. “I’ll change the sheets.”
You stare at him, a little stricken, than let him embrace the weirdness with dignity. Nod. His hands are there to help you when you try to rise and get off the bed. He pulls his T-shirt over you, though only the head, forgetting to put arms into their respectable holes.
"The sheets are—" You start pointing and it's only a finger vaguely poking under cotton.
"I know," Dunk says. "Go, go."
While you're gone, he does things automatically and with his head elsewhere. A man who is a friend and a co-parent and a willing, but ultimately rejected fiance, can only extend his stay this long. Even though for a moment Duncan has felt like an actual lover, there is no argument in him that would sound appropriate aloud. He looks at the dirty sheet in his palms and here he can no longer tell which part of the stain belongs to him, and which to you.
He's stood with a pillowcase half-fixed when you return. Sleepy-looking and warm from the shower, you come closer. Help him with one decisive shake and throw the pillow onto the bed. Then, you crane your head up, and tell him, "Stay? If you want."
Duncan sighs. Bends to kiss your forehead, and says, "Aye." You breathe out too, and the air dilutes int something more chewable. "I'll be right back," he says.
It feels natural to the point of danger. Cuddling in the morning, breakfast together. Setting up a room. Having a mild breakdown over it, which reforges itself into emotions too messy to be talked over so they lead to sex instead. The sex is mind-blowing and leaves Duncan both full and hollow. You take shower first, he goes second. He knows where the sheets are and where the towels are. He knows to wipe his feet before stepping onto the tiles, otherwise you huff so loudly he can hear you across the flat. You gave him a toothbrush. His cock feels a bit scraped, balls empty, but both things are pleasant and sit agreeably on the hips. He walks down the corridor to the bedroom and hears the telly muttering. He can tell exactly which episode of Sapphire & Steel is playing, because he's seen it many times. He cannot remember the plot of it properly, but it's the one with people disappearing into the photographs. In the bedroom you've passed out on your side of the bed, curled, with one arm invading beyond the middle, and the other wedged under your chin. He has his side of the bed. He sits, puts your hand on his thigh, watches the episode and remembers one afternoon when he watched it with Rafe. When the show ends, he turns the telly down and lowers himself so his face is level with your belly.
He's nervous. There's a human inside the size of an avocado, and when Duncan thinks of an avocado in his palm it all seems improbable to him. He's got no idea if the baby can hear him, but feels it is seemly to introduce oneself. "Hello in there," he whispers, quiet to not wake you. "I am your da. We'll meet in uh—" He takes out his hand and counts the remaining time. "In five months," Dunk says.
It all feels very silly but very necessary. He pulls air in through his nose and continues, softer, as if low volume is the thing that might make it less strange. “I, uh… I’ve read babies like when ye sing to them. So I’m gonna—jus' quiet. We won’t wake your mam. She’s asleep.”
There is no answer from above. Only your thick breathing and the small shift of your knee. Dunk takes that as permission. He adjusts himself with one arm folded under his head and legs hanging off the mattress from the knees down. His eyes rest on a place where the child is doing its secret dark work. Then, he clears his throat, feels foolish, and starts with a hum so low it near stays in his chest entirely.
"I wish I was on yonder hill," Duncan croons, half-swallowed for shyness. “‘Tis there I’d sit and cry my fill, until every tear would turn a mill.” He shuts his lids. It's not really a lullaby, but it's the first thing that comes to his mind. The old language feels borrowed and worn smooth enough by other mouths for him to express something Dunk doesn't understand yet.
“Is go dté tú, mo mhuirnín slán… Siúil, siúil, siúil a rúin… Siúil go socair agus siúil go ciúin…"
And may you go, my darling safely. Walk, walk, walk on, oh love. Walk steadily and walk softly.
His voice deepens where it warms. It starts coming quieter, and somehow fuller, and your eyes open somewhere inside the dark of sleep. Unmoving. The room has gone that thin afternoon hush where a body can pretend it is still dreaming if it keeps still enough. Dunk does not know you are listening. That makes it worse. Better. One of those.
There's a hand resting near you, shy of touching until he forgets himself and lets two fingers settle on the cotton. The pressure is almost nothing, but you feel it.
“Siúil go doras agus éalaigh liom,” he sings. The line makes a door appear in your head. An escape. Come away with me. Elope with me, without him having to say anything modern enough to frighten either of you.
When he sings that part he misremembers Gaeilge briefly and lets the thing be just sound, for the true matter and its recipient are, for now, only wishful thinking.
The last blessing comes. “Is go dté tú, mo mhuirnín slán.”
You keep your eyes half shut. Watch him through the blur of your lashes.
“I’ll sell my rock, I’ll sell my reel,” he goes on. “I’ll sell my only spinning wheel to buy my love a sword of steel.” His thumb moves against your shirt. You doubt he notices, or that he understands what his own voice is doing. Making vows out of other people’s grief, putting shape round something he has no courage to hold up in daylight yet. Love, maybe, dressed as a folk song so it can walk past both of you unsearched.
Your throat tightens. Stupidly, completely.
“Is go dté tú, mo mhuirnín slán.”
He hums the chorus this time more than sings it. The Irish turns soft in his mouth, almost sleepy.
“Siúil, siúil, siúil a rúin…”
You let your eyes close before he can catch them open. Let him have the kindness of being unseen. Let yourself have the worse kindness of hearing him.
“Siúil go socair agus siúil go ciúin…”
His fingers spread a little wider over your shirt.
“Siúil go doras agus éalaigh liom…”
By the last line, his voice has thinned to nothing much. A murmur. A breath laid carefully where his hand is.
“Is go dté tú, mo mhuirnín slán.”
For a while after, he only hums. Then even that fades. His hand grows heavy on you, and you know he's fallen asleep. You let out the long-trapped gasp, and with it, a tear falls down your cheek.
Valarr Targaryen x Reader:
sleepyhead: 18+/NSFW/MDNI; f!wife!reader, domestic morning, fluff, smut, angst
see what sticks: 18+/NSFW/MDNI; f!valarr'swife!reader, infertility, pregnancy, breeding kink, smut, angst, cucking, m/m/f threesome (work in progress)
Ser Duncan the Tall x Reader:
brute: 18+/NSFW/MDNI; f!wife!reader, smut, fluff, rough sex, experimenting (work in progress)
see what sticks: 18+/NSFW/MDNI; f!valarr'swife!reader, infertility, pregnancy, breeding kink, smut, angst, cucking, m/m/f threesome (work in progress)
Baelor Targaryen x Reader:
matchpoint: 18+/NSFW/MDNI: challengers au, rival coaches, f!tennis player!reader, sport championships, angst, smut, m/m/f threesome (work in progress)
Maekar Targaryen x Reader:
matchpoint: 18+/NSFW/MDNI: challengers au, rival coaches, f!player!reader, sport championships, angst, smut, m/m/f threesome (work in progress)
Daeron Targaryen x Reader:
mouth to mouth: 18+/NSFW/MDNI; f!wife!reader, alcohol abuse, sobriety, oral fixation, munch daeron AYYYYY, fluff, smut (work in progress)
penny for your thoughts: 18+/NSFW/MDNI; f!sex worker!reader, substance abuse, dom/sub dynamics, heavy angst, smut (work in progress)
Summary: What was monstrousness? What was it, but a certainty that there existed within you multitudes of desires, needs, guilts, impulses – humanity? At the end of the world, when the dust has finally settled, Joel grapples with what it is to take hold of your own monstrosity – your own humanity – and live with it. And what it is to bear that truth in the palm of your hand held towards the person you love, offer it to them, and have it be accepted for what it was. Courage, above all else, it is courage that is necessary to go on.
-OR-
Big bad Joel Miller falls in love and doesn't know how to deal with it.
Rating: Explicit 18+
Content: Age gap, smut, angst, grief, PTSD, canon typical violence, discussions of medical procedures/illness, emotional unavailability, pregnancy
Word Count: 55K
Read on AO3
Chapter I: I dreamt that time had ended
Chapter II: Although a monster [Joel] could be charming in company
Chapter III: Your bitter heart, heals my heart
Chapter IV: Mouth full of blood
Chapter V: Love humiliates you
Chapter VI: The indignity of suffering
Chapter VII: For: Before
Chapter VIII: The Fisher King
Chapter IX: What should we believe in next?
Epilogue: Birdie
Birdie's House: Extras
Did the loneliness die that night?
Summary: Birdie and Joel’s first time.
I am a lantern
Summary: Birdie realizes she’s pregnant.
Joel
Summary: Writing exercise, not part of canon story line - Joel passes away.
My Whole Life
Summary: The family celebrates Joel’s birthday.
Updates Blog : Follow and turn on notifications for new writing!
🎶 FoG Companion Playlists:
- Apple Music
- Spotify
(This is not only a compilation of songs that reminded me of the story, but also songs I listened to over and over again during my writing process)
Ok first off, Kat, LOVE LOVE LOOOOVE your work 🫶 I just finished consuming the entirety of your BB series including the short oneshots and I'm SO SO hooked on BB.
That said ! Since we've established that BB can change forms + he'd need to fuck reader constantly for them to have a child, do you have any thoughts on how freaky they'd be (kinks, favorite body part, etc.)? Like does BB contort his body to give her more pleasure hehe...... . . ..
(Sorry kween the horni took over 🥀)
𓈒 (b)etter (b)obby — intimacy hdcs.
the body, the kinks, and the strange-tenderness of being loved by something that literally built itself for you.
content warnings: 18+, monsterfucker territory ⚠❗❗ explicit sexual content throughout including: non-human/eldritch sexual partner, shapeshifting genitalia, knotting, throat penetration via extended tongue ("threading"), unprotected sex, cream pie, marking/biting/bruising, somnophilia, pheromone-induced arousal states, restraint via non-human strength, exhibitionism in front of other entities, breeding kink with fantastical biology, body modification (seven permanent "rooted places" of his essence inside your body), marathon sex sessions; body horror elements; non-human limb counts, jaws unhinging wider than human, fluid/wrong joint geometry, temperature shifts as physiological tells; extreme codependency, possessiveness, scent kink ig???
📹better bobby series masterlist.
somehow despite all of the above this is genuinely one of the softest, tenderest things I've ever written about an ancient predator who builds his girl a pile of blankets out of love and warms up when she touches him?? I don't know what to tell you?? haven't been in the sauce like this since tt!aerion😭
the body itself:
the cock he has by default is human-shaped because that's what he saw first. he built this body from observation of Bobby and Bobby is a man. so the default is what you'd expect from a twenty-something cameraman with good genes. proportionate, warm, slight upward curve, thick enough at the base that the first time you took him you whimpered. nothing weird if you don't ask for weird. he can absolutely be your normal boyfriend if that's what the night calls for.
but the default is a setting, not a fact. every part of the body is malleable. he can adjust the shape, the length, the girth, the texture, the temperature, the firmness. and he does, constantly, in tiny imperceptible ways, calibrating in real time to what your body is responding to. you've never had bad sex with him. you've never had even mid sex with him. it's mechanically impossible because he's reading your nervous system the entire time and adjusting accordingly.
the temperature thing is its own situation. he runs cool by default. not cold, just a few degrees below room temperature. the way a stone in the shade is cool. this is the actual baseline of him, the unaffected fact of his body. but when you touch him, when you kiss him, when his attention narrows to you and the want of you starts moving through him, he warms.
emotion warms him. arousal warms him. you warm him. by the time you've been kissing for a minute he's human-temperature. by the time he's inside you he's fever-warm. the cock specifically runs the hottest of him, because it's the part of him most committed to you in any given moment. you can chart his interest by his temperature. you have, more than once, pressed your palm flat to his chest specifically to feel him warm under it, and the look on his face when you do it... yeah.
this is part of why he loves how warm you are. see below in his kinks section. you're a furnace next to him. you running hot is what running hot is, in his sensory experience. the steady radiating heat of a living human is the warmest thing he's ever pressed himself against, and he is, on some level, addicted to it.
the eye thing. the second tell, after temperature. Bobby's eyes are blue (bright, warm, a little crinkled at the corners) and BB built them carefully, the colour exact, the way they catch light, the small expressive movements.
they are the part of the face he's proudest of, technically speaking.
they're also the part that gives him away first when he slips. when the careful Bobby-shape starts to thin (when he gets distracted, when he gets aroused, when emotion gets out ahead of his composure) the blue darkens. it doesn't go grey, doesn't go any normal human direction. it floods black. ink-black, glossy, sclera and iris and pupil all going at once until what is left is two wet dark stones in his face that catch no light.
they're not reflective the way human eyes are reflective, they're clearly not the same kind of organ at all. when he's fully slipped the eyes are entirely black. when he's mostly Bobby they're entirely blue. and between those two states you've learned to read him like a book.
the creeping dark at the edge of the iris means he's paying very close attention, the blooming dark means he's losing the shape, and the full black means he isn't pretending anymore. you find all three states beautiful. you've told him so. he's still working out how to believe you.
the eye-thing is involuntary. he can't control it the way he controls most of his shape. it is, like the warming, a true response. the deep thing underneath leaking through when he's moved.
he could probably learn to suppress it given enough effort but he's noticed that you like it, you watch for it. that you check the colour of his eyes when you kiss him to see how he's really doing, and so he's decided to leave it alone. it's honesty he can give you easily. it tells you what he's feeling. you would rather have that than the perfect maintained blue.
he doesn't have a refractory period. the human signalling that tells a male body done, take a break is not installed. he can stay hard indefinitely. he can finish inside you and stay inside you and start moving again ten seconds later and the only thing that has changed is that you're slightly fuller. this is a thing that took you a while to fully process.
he can also choose not to finish, for hours. the orgasm is a thing he releases when he wants to. usually he wants to whenever you do. because watching you come apart is the entire point, but he can hold himself back through six of your climaxes and not finish until the seventh if that's what you've asked for or if that's what your body is telling him you need.
the stamina is genuinely deadly. he doesn't get tired. he doesn't get sore. he doesn't get distracted. his attention does not waver. you have, on multiple occasions, fallen asleep mid-sex from sheer exhaustion and woken up to find him still gently moving in you with the same patient focus, as if no time had passed. for him no time had passed. for him you're the only clock.
the sleep thing
this deserves its own section honestly because it's one of the strangest and most intimate things about being with him.
he doesn't sleep. he doesn't need to. he can do something that looks like sleep. with breath, slow rhythm and closed eyes, if you ask. he does it because you find it comforting to wake up to, but the body doesn't require it. while you sleep, he's awake. he's been awake every single night of your relationship.
he stays inside you. he prefers it. once you're seated together, he's reluctant to withdraw. the first time he asked if he could stay you said yes and now it's the default. you fall asleep with him buried deep and the seven humming and the warm wet seal of him at the centre of you holding everything in place, and the comforting closeness of it sends you under in seconds.
the cock softens, slightly. not to fully human softness, but enough to be comfortable. he keeps a low pulse going in time with your heartbeat. you don't feel filled, exactly, while you sleep. you feel held from the inside, which is different and worse and better and way too addictive.
sometimes he moves. not always. but sometimes. when he's been lying awake for hours watching the warm dark shape of you breathe against him. when the harmonic in his chest has built up some pressure that needs releasing, and he he's been thinking about you for too long with the cock seated inside you. he will start, oh so slowly, to roll his hips.
it's the softest thing in any world. you don't wake. you sleep right through it. the rhythm is so unhurried it doesn't disturb you. long, slow grinding strokes, half an inch of withdrawal at most. mostly just the slow rock of him against the deep places he knows by heart. the seven catch each motion and pass the warmth on. the cock thickens fractionally inside you and you, in your sleep, clench softly around him and make small contented sounds and burrow closer.
he does this for hours sometimes.
just slow, gentle motion. no urgency, no intent to finish. although sometimes he does finish, quietly, the warm flood of him soaking into the seven without your conscious awareness of it. he likes to leave you full overnight. you wake happy and warm and slightly slick at the thigh and you know what happened without him having to tell you and the knowledge pools low and hot inside your lower belly every single time.
when you do wake up to him moving that's its own thing. that's the slow surfacing where you become aware in stages.
first the warmth, then the fullness, then the unhurried drag of him inside you in long leisurely strokes. the hand on your hip stroking absent possessive circles, then his low voice at your nape mornin', baby.
and your whole body has been primed for hours by the gentle pulse of him. you're already wet, already clenching around him, already ready in a way no human morning has ever prepared you for. you have, multiple occasions, come within thirty seconds of waking up because he had been so patiently working you toward it in your sleep.
you no longer sleep alone. you can't. you've tried. without the slow seal of him inside you the bed feels wrong. the seven keep humming but the centre of you feels hollow. you came back to him after one (1) attempted night apart and you've not tried again.
there's also the fucking-you-to-sleep thing, which is its own ritual,too. on the nights when you've had a long day, or you're upset, or you're keyed up and can't settle.
on those nights, he takes you to the nest and he lays you down and he slides into you and he just moves. deep, patient and unhurried. no intent to finish you, just the warm long rhythm of him grinding deep. and the harmonic in his chest goes low and lullaby-soft, and you sink into the rhythm the way a child sinks into rocking.
you go under in minutes. by the time he feels your breathing even out he's barely moving, just the gentlest seated rock, and then he stops, and just stays, the cock still inside you, and he holds you for the rest of the night. you sleep better that way than you've ever slept in your life.
the nest
the nest deserves its own section too because it's not just a piece of furniture or means to an end. it's a love language.
he made it for you. he built it the way he built the room. blankets layered into a soft deep pile, pillows arranged in the curve your body makes when you sleep on your side, the warm yellow lamp set to a height that doesn't shine in your eyes.
there's even blanket your grandmother knit folded over the foot of it in the exact fold she used to use. you had not described the fold to him. he knew. he watched closely, in the early days what your memory pulled here, and he reproduced.
the nest (or, I should say nest 2.0) is the safest place in any level of this place. that's not metaphor. nothing can enter the nest that he's not allowed. nothing can hear what happens in the nest. nothing can find you in the nest if you don't want to be found.
he's built it that way. it's not just a spot you chose anymore. it's a bubble of his attention, sustained by him, defended by him; him in the literal architectural sense of being made of his will. when you're in the nest, you're inside him, sort of. you're within the volume of him that he holds open for you. nothing he doesn't want in there can get in. nothing you don't want to feel can find you.
this is how he says he loves you. he doesn't have human words for it, not really. the I love yous are there now. he has learned them. you 've taught him, but they're not his native tongue.
the nest is his native tongue. the building of you a place to be warm and safe and comfortable in a world that is none of those things. that's the sentence he's constantly speaking.
every time he tugs the blanket up over your shoulder while you sleep. every time he adjusts a pillow. those times he adds a new soft thing because he noticed you running cold or running tired or looking at a texture in a way that suggested you'd like it.
the nest is alive with these small accretions. you've not actively decorated it. it has simply grown (kept growing) because he keeps adding to it.
the nest is also where he's most himself. the place where the Bobby-shape loosens most easily. he can lie in the nest with you with his shape unguarded. the long fluid line of him, the wrong-fingered hands, the eyes fully dark. the nest will hold both of you. his actual shape and your human shape, with equal patience.
the nest is for this. it's the only place in any level where he can be both with you and himself with no compromise required. you've come to recognise that when he wants you in the nest specifically (not the bed, not a couch, not anywhere else) he's asking for something deeper than sex. he's asking to be known. in his actual configuration, by you, in the only place that holds him properly.
other entities have noticed it. the nest registers to them as something. they can't see in. they can't get close (most of them anyway). but they can feel the shape of what he's made. the way a thing in the water can feel a vortex without entering it, and they steer clear.
the nest is, among other things, the most concentrated piece of him in this place. it's BB-territory in the way an animal's den is its territory. except his territory is a pile of blankets in a sub-level he made out of love, and the love is so intense it constitutes an actual mechanical defence.
you've never thanked him for it. not in words. you don't know how. the gesture is too large for thank you.
instead you sleep there. settle into it the way it is meant to be settled into. you trust it. you let him keep adding things. you have, on several occasions, woken up to find that he's added a new pillow you didn't know you wanted and then realised the second you put your head on it that you had wanted it. that he had known you wanted it before you knew.
you understand that this is the thanking. what you have to offer. and he understands. and the harmonic in his chest hums steady whenever you're in the nest, and you understand that the steady hum is him thanking you, for accepting the gift, for letting him build, for being warm and accepting and his to keep safe.
what changes when he's not playing human
the ridged texture. for one. the tongue does it and the cock can do it too. when he stops bothering to maintain the smooth human surface, the skin of him develops a velvety give and faint ridges that drag against your inner walls in a slow, rolling way no human anatomy could produce. it's genuinely unfair. the first time he let it happen by accident you came inside of ninety seconds and nearly blacked out.
his cock can lengthen. he's careful about not going past what your body can comfortably take, but he can add an inch or two of depth when he's chasing a particular angle. and the ability to find the deep places inside you with that extra reach is one of the reasons he can take you apart on command.
the cock can also thicken mid-act, slowly, in response to you clenching around him. you tighten and he swells to match. the stretch this produces is its own private language between your body and his. your tightness telling him more, his thickness answering I hear you, no words required.
the knot. the base of him can develop a swell. you've called it a knot and he has not corrected you, though privately he thinks of it as something else, something his.
it doesn't behave quite the way a canine knot would. it builds gradually during sex rather than appearing all at once at climax. it can be small (a faint thickening at the base that gives you a little extra stretch when he bottoms out) or significant (a true swell that locks him inside you, no withdrawing possible, the two of you sealed together until he chooses to let it ease).
he can summon it on request. he can summon it without request, when he's deep in you and the seven are humming and he simply cannot bear the thought of withdrawing for the next hour.
when he does the full version you feel the lock happen. a slow, thick settling at the base, the stretch building, the pressure registering as held, and your body's instinctive small bracing in response. you can't move off him. he can't pull out of you. for however long he chooses to keep it, you are one thing.
you've discovered that you have feelings about this.
that the impossibility of withdrawal does something to your nervous system you wouldn't have predicted. that being locked together (physically, mechanically, no breaking the seal) produces a settled, deep quiet in you that nothing else quite matches.
the seven sing brightest when he's knotted in you. the harmonic in his chest pours out steadiest. it's the closest to what the two of you are emotionally, which is inseparable, and the body recognises this and goes calm in a way the body rarely goes calm.
he uses it on nights when you both need that. he uses it when you've had a hard day. he uses it before long sleeps. it's a tool of comfort more than sex, by this point. though it remains, also, the most overwhelming thing he can do to you while staying inside the human-shaped range of what his cock can be.
you watching him change. the seeing of him adjusting his cock while it's inside you. the moment when you're full of him at one thickness and then, slowly, you're full of him at a thicker thickness. and you watch his face while it happens, and his eyes go dark at the edges because he can feel you registering the change and the change is for you and you're liking it.
or the moment when you whine and grind down and he lengthens in you to reach the angle you were chasing without you having to ask. or when you say something soft like deeper and the cock simply complies, eager but patient. no need for him to adjust position. the responsiveness of it (that you can talk and the body of him changes) is one of the most addictive sensory experiences of your life.
you have, more than once, asked him to do small adjustments just to feel them happen. thicker. now thinner. now ridges. now smooth. and he does it, indulgent and amused, watching your face while you map the shape of what he can be.
the cock has a pulse when he's deep inside you. completely separate from his heartbeat (he has multiple if he bothers, none if he doesn't). it's slow and rhythmic and it syncs to the seven rooted places in you. when he's seated to the hilt and pulsing in time with the seven and you're clenching around him, the resonance produces a sensation in your pelvis that has no human equivalent.
pheromones
you knew about this from the breeding ritual. you did not, at the time, fully understand that it was a thing he had access to outside the ritual. you've learned since.
the full breeding version is the one you've experienced. the warm honey-thick coming off his skin that fogged your cognition into a soft golden state, locked your body into the empty-yearning, made every climax read as beginning instead of finishing.
that was the full deployment. he built specific biology to do it and he did not pull punches. it was a chemistry designed to make sure the ritual completed. by design, the ritual needed your body kept in a specific state, and you had asked him to take you there. it was extreme and it worked and you don't regret asking for it but you both understand it's not a thing for casual use.
the mild version is something else. he's discovered (and you've discovered with him) that he can do a small amount of it. a taste of it. a softening release of warm scent off his skin that doesn't lock you into anything. doesn't override your cognition, or turn you into the desperate begging fog-version of yourself.
but does make you softer. more responsive. more wanting than you would have been without it. it's roughly the difference between being drunk and having a glass of wine. it softens you by measurable amount and gets your body humming without committing you to anything beyond what you already wanted.
he uses it sparingly. he uses it with permission. you can tell when he's doing it because the air around him goes the faintest bit sweet. the warm honey-edge to your throat that you remember from the ritual but in a fraction of the strength.
almost like a perfume you can only just catch. can I, sweetheart? he'll ask, usually with his mouth at your throat, and you'll nod, and a minute later you'll find yourself a little softer in his arms than you were, a little more pliant, a little more yes to whatever he's about to do and everything feels even better than it just did moments ago. it doesn't make you do anything. it makes the doing feel better.
he can also direct it. this is a more recent discovery. he can pheromone a small region rather than the whole of you.
release it specifically against your throat when his mouth is there, or against the soft skin of your thigh when he's working you with his hand, and the local effect of it is electric.
the nerves under that patch of skin light up brighter. your blood rushes there. whatever he does to that area in the next few minutes registers about twice as intensely as it would have. he uses this carefully. he uses this on nights when he wants to spend a long time on one part of you and have you feel every second of it.
there's a grounding version too. and this one took you both longer to realise was possible.
when you're upset, tired, or wound too tight to settle. he can release a different scent off his skin. not arousing, just calming. warm and clean and almost milk-soft, the olfactory equivalent of a hand on your back.
it makes your breathing steady. it makes your shoulders drop. you've pressed your face into his throat and felt that scent come up and felt your whole body unwind.
and of course there's the pheromone he leaks involuntarily when he's losing composure. the one you can catch a hint of when his eyes are going dark and the harmonic is starting to break.
this one is his. he's not releasing it for you, he's releasing it because his body cannot help it. because the want of you has gotten ahead of his self-control and the chemistry is leaking through. you've learned to recognise it. when you catch that specific sweet-electric thing in the air, you know he's gone, and you know what is about to happen, and your body (entirely without consultation with your mind) answers in kind.
the pheromones, like every other thing about him, are a language. you've learned to read them. learned to ask for them. have learned which ones mean what. it's one more way he speaks to you in a register no other being could.
the tongue-and-cock thing (yeehaw!)
the tongue. the long, ridged velvet one when bobby shape loosens. when he's fucking you (any position, any depth) he can also slide the tongue into your mouth. from your mouth it can keep going. down. it doesn't have to stop at the back of your throat. doesn't trigger your gag reflex because he's controlling it from his end. and he's spent a great deal of careful attention learning your throat the way he learned the architecture of every other part of you.
the tongue slides into your throat and settles there, the ridged length of him filling you from your mouth down to a depth no human body could reach.
and at the same time, the cock is moving inside you below. and you are filled from both ends, and the two of him are connected, and the rhythm of one feeds the rhythm of the other.
it's not double penetration exactly. it's something else. a threading. him moving through you, end to end, two points of contact that are actually one continuous presence, and when he flexes the tongue deep in your throat you feel it resonate through your sternum and down into your pelvis where the cock is also flexing, and the sensation is... it's one sensation, in two places, and your body can't separate them and stops trying.
the harmonic he hums in this configuration pours out of both points of contact at once. you feel it inside your throat and inside your cunt simultaneously. the resonance frequencies stack. the seven sing back. the room hums. you have, in this configuration, come for so long and so continuously that you have lost track of where one orgasm ended and the next began, your whole body just one long wave of taking.
you can't speak when he does this. no making any sound except the small wrecked series of hums that escape around the tongue in your throat. but he doesn't need you to speak. the seven tell him everything your mouth would have said. you press a tiny pulse into the seven (yes, more, deeper, slower, harder) and he reads it, perfectly, every time.
he can make them move in opposite rhythm. the tongue pushing deep when the cock withdraws, the cock pushing deep when the tongue withdraws. a continuous, rocking motion that means you're never not full of him somewhere.
or he can sync them, both pushing deep at once, and the simultaneous deepest-point of both is... you don't have words for it. you only have sounds for it.
he's careful with this. he doesn't use it often. he saves it for nights when you both want something that exists beyond language, beyond the usual choreography human bodies use. what any other lover has ever offered you. it's his. it is something only he can give you. you think he understands that you understand this.
favourite positions (or, the recurring ones)
you on your back, him braced over you, knees pressed up to your chest. the classic. he likes to see your face. he likes you folded small under him. the angle lets him reach the deep places easily and the eye contact is direct. he calls this one the easy one in a way that's not in any sense easy.
you on top, riding him, his hands on your hips guiding. he loves this because he gets to watch. you doing the work. you slick with sweat, bouncing and biting your lip.
his hands move slow on your hips not really directing, just holding, just feeling the rhythm you've chosen. he can stay like this for hours and let you set every pace. you've fallen asleep on top of him in this position before.
you on your hands and knees, him behind you, one hand splayed possessive across the small of your back. the most animal one. the angle lets him go deepest. he tends to lose the Bobby-shape the fastest in this position because the visual of you presenting for him pulls something old up in him that doesn't bother to wear a human face.
you sideways in his lap, one of your legs draped over his thigh. half-positions like this. where you're sort of sitting in him but not fully impaled, where the connection is intimate but lazy. you can kiss him easily and stroke his hair. these are the ones he prefers for long, lazy stretches. low intensity. lots of soft kissing. cock seated shallow.
the impossible ones. when he stops bothering with human geometry. he holds you suspended in the air with too-many arms while he fucks you from below and one of him kisses your throat and one of him strokes your clit, and you have given up trying to understand the topology. you just let it happen. there's no name for these positions. they're not in any book.
face-to-face, lying on your sides, foreheads pressed together, slow rolling motion. the most intimate one. this is the one he picks when he wants you to feel held, not necessarily to come. although you usually do, eventually. it's barely sex sometimes. it's just being inside each other in the dark, breathing the same air, his hand on your cheek and yours on his throat where you can feel the harmonic hum.
the spooning one. you on your side, him curled around you from behind, the cock seated shallow, his arm a heavy bracket across your ribs. his face buries in the back of your neck. this is the sleep position. this is the one he holds you in for hours at a stretch. there's barely any motion. there doesn't need to be. the seal of him inside you is the whole point.
the "be more other" thing
he hates being seen as a copy of Bobby. he's never said this in those exact words but you've figured it out and he's confirmed it.
the Bobby-shape was built out of necessity. he needed a face you could love and Bobby's was the only one available. but underneath it, he's not Bobby. he's something older, stranger, and entirely his own. and every reminder that he's wearing another man's shape. every time someone outside the relationship comments on the resemblance, every time he catches sight of his own face in a mirror and the face is not his, it chafes.
which is why when you ask him to be more like himself, he loses his mind a little.
the first time you said it you were in bed together and he was being careful and you reached up and traced his jaw and said I want to see more of you. the actual you. and he went so still you thought you'd broken something.
and then he said, very quietly, baby, you don't have to ask me that to be polite. and you said I'm not being polite. I'm asking because I want it. and his eyes (Bobby's warm blue eyes, the ones he built so carefully) bled to black. iris and sclera and all of it, no whites left, just deep glossy dark like wet stone, and the harmonic fractured and he kissed you with a desperation he had never let himself show before.
now you ask whenever you want it. let go of the face, sweetheart. show me. I want the real you. and he does. layer by layer. the Bobby-shape peels back as he gets braver. the jaw goes wrong-wide, the fingers stop counting, the blue of his eyes floods with black until there's nothing else left, the shoulders lengthen, the harmonic he's been damping rolls out free. and you don't flinch. you've never flinched.
you ask for more. that's the part that takes him apart every time. you watch him let go of the shape that was a gift to you and you ask for more of what's underneath. and he understands that you're not tolerating the true him as a price for the rest of him.
you're choosing the true him, you want the true him, the rest is just shapes he wears for you.
when he's in his more-other shape, sex is different.
rougher in texture, gentler in pace. the not-quite-right hands grip with strength no human could match, but he's so afraid of breaking you that he moves slower than he does in the Bobby shape. the cock develops the ridges by default. the harmonic pours out unrestricted and the room hums constantly. you can feel him at frequencies your skin reads as warmth and your nervous system reads as home.
you call him by his name even when he doesn't have a recognisable face. BB. into the wrong-wide mouth, against the wrong-textured skin, into the long sinuous line of his other-shape. BB. BB. and the name lands the same way every time. because the name is yours. the name is the one you gave him, and in the other shape that fact is even clearer. he's your BB. not anyone else's. yours, and yours alone.
the comparison to Real Bobby you have to be careful never to make. Bobby would've... in any sentence that compares them is a sentence that you stopped finishing very early on.
because the first time you started one his whole body went tight and the harmonic shrieked, just for a second, and his eyes went flat in a way you had never seen before. he never said anything. he didn't have to. you watched him swallow it down and pretend he hadn't reacted and you understood, then, what you had walked into and walked out of.
the things you say instead (you're mine, my BB.) undo him every time. he goes quiet in that bone-deep way of his. the harmonic hums grateful. he holds you a fraction tighter. he never asks you to repeat it but you can feel him cataloguing it, saving it, going back to it later when you're not watching.
kinks (his)
being watched by you. not in the kink sense, actually, in the literal sense. he wants you to see him. he spent so long being something nobody could look at without screaming that the privilege of being looked at, by you, with want, is the thing he treasures more than any specific act. the moments where you turn your head and just watch what he's doing to you and let him see your face? those wreck him every time. he will edge himself for an hour for the chance of one of those moments.
being asked to drop the face. see above. nothing he's done in his long existence has prepared him for being wanted as the thing he actually is. it's the deepest kink he has and the one that took him longest to admit he had.
proof of him on you. marks, prints, the soft bruise of his fingers on your hip the next morning. he's not a sadist, he doesn't get off on hurting you, but the visual evidence that he's been there, that your skin remembers him, is something he gets quietly insane about. he will trace the marks with one finger for hours after.
scent. his sense of smell is not human. it doesn't work the way yours does, doesn't sit in his nose, doesn't process by molecule the way yours processes. but he has an equivalent, something more diffuse. something that reads the trace of a thing in the air the way a thing in deep water reads currents.
and the trace of you is the most distinctive signature in any world he has ever moved through. he can find you in a level by it. he can tell which corridors you've walked down. he can tell how long ago by how the trace has faded. you have a unique scent to him and he has known it longer than you've been aware he existed. he knew your scent through the warm wall at Clark's, back when he was a thing in the dark and you were a sound he could hear and a smell he could catalogue without you knowing.
he wants you to smell like him. this is the deeper layer to the above, the one he's been quietly indulging for as long as you've been together.
when he's been inside you, when he's marked you, you have spent a long night in the nest with the warm not-quite-skin of him pressed all along the length of you — you smell different. he can smell himself on you. your trace acquires his trace. the two scents braided together, and the braid is something every other entity in this place can read clear as a stamp. taken. kept. his. it's not subtle to the things that share this place with you. it is a flag.
this is one of the reasons he likes you sleeping with him still inside you. one of the reasons he likes finishing in you and leaving you full. one of the reasons he tucks his face into the warm hollow of your throat for so long after sex.
partly because of the heat, partly because of the pulse, but also because his trace transfers to your skin from his face, and he's deliberately scenting you, slow and patient. the way a cat works its cheeks against the things it loves. you've caught him doing this in the after, half-asleep, rubbing his jaw absently along your collarbone with a look of dreamy contentment, and you didn't say anything because the moment was his, and you understood without him having to explain.
and he likes smelling you on him. the inverse. when you've been pressed against him. your hair rubbing against his shirt. when your skin's been against his skin for hours. he carries you.
your scent stays on him. and the fact that other entities can smell you on him is... the pleased purr he makes about it. it's the most peaceful sound. it tells the world that he's kept too.
the human-marking goes both ways. that he's not just a possessor but a possessed, and he's spent his existence wanting to be possessed by something and never finding anything worth being possessed by.
and now he is, and the trace of you on him is the proof of it. he wears your scent the way a wedding ring is worn. he has rubbed his face against the pillow you slept on after you've left a room just to refresh the trace before going out.
the marking is mutual and lowkey obsessive. he wants you marked by him. you (without fully realising it at first) want him marked by you.
in practice this means: you press your face into his throat when you greet him, you bury your nose in his shoulder when you hug, you wear his shirts and they come back to him with you on them, you sleep with your hands fisted in his clothes, and over time the trace builds and builds and you stop being two separate scent-signatures and become one layered signature, a braided thing, you-and-him, and everything in this place can read it. they all know. they've all known for months. you're not a creature with a possessive entity hovering nearby.
you're bonded, in the way scent-bond is bond, and the bonded nature of you is the loudest fact about you both to anything that can read it.
the breeding pheromone was a weaponised version of this preference. the warm honey-thick pheromone he released during the ritual was, at the chemical level, his trace turned all the way up. it was him telling your body, in the most intense possible register, mine, mine, take it, mine.
and it was also a public announcement, in a sense. anything in any nearby level could have smelled the ritual happening, could have read it as clearly as if a banner had been hung. he didn't care. he wanted them to read it. that was partly the point.
after the ritual the trace settled. something about completing it deepened the braid. your scents got more thoroughly woven into each other.
you smell like him in a way that does not fade now even if you spend a day apart. which is rare, but it has happened, and he's commented on how you still smell like him through the absence, and how it eases him. the seven amplify this too. they hold the scent. they keep the signature stable. you carry him in your body in seven places and on your skin in countless more and the totality of it is, to him, the most complete claim any being has ever made on any other being, and to you it is the most settled and held you've ever felt.
you've asked him, once, what he smells like to you in his real shape. not the Bobby-scent, which is warm cotton and a faint oceanic scent, but what the underneath smells like.
he hesitated. he said he wasn't sure you'd have a word for it. you asked him to let you find out. and you breathed him in, slow, with his actual shape pressed against you in the nest, and what you found was. old water. warm stone. a faintly mineral scent, faintly clean, like a deep cave that's never known erosion. not unpleasant. it was, in fact, the most comforting smell you'd ever encountered. you told him so, and he held too still and you understood that no one had ever told him what he smelled like before.
exploring you. he's fascinated by your body. in a student of you way, the way an archaeologist is fascinated by something rare and beautiful and theirs to study slowly.
he'll spend literal hours on a single part of you. an evening can be him just at one breast. slow lapping, soft sucking, the careful drag of his teeth, the hot, wet suction of his mouth around your nipple. for what feels like forever, until you're arching and pleading, soaking through the blanket.
and then he'll pull back with this small considering hm, like he's filed something away, and move to the other breast with even more hunger, and start over. he can do this for an entire night. he has done this for an entire night. he calls it gettin' to know you better, baby.
you're not just a body to him. you're a territory. he wants to know every inch of it like the back of his hand.
the catalogue of you. related to the above: he is, somewhere in his ancient and patient mind, cataloguing the things he learns. the spot on your neck that makes you whimper. the angle of pressure on your hip that makes you melt. the exact stroke speed that builds you slowest. the words that work on which days. he updates the list constantly. he's the best lover you'll ever have for the simple reason that he's been studying you, specifically, with the full force of his attention.
you reaching for him first. god, this one. when you are the one to close the distance. when you set down your book and crawl into his lap unprompted, or turn into him in the dark and pull his hand to your throat without saying anything.
when you cup his jaw and pull his mouth down to yours. everything in him lights up in a way he can't hide. the harmonic in his chest jumps half an octave. his pupils blow. he's spent so long being the one to want, the one to ask, the one who has to be gentle about how much he wants.
the moments where you want him first, act on it without prompting, where you simply take, those moments are gifts. he goes pliant under your hands. he lets you set the pace. he'll give you anything you want when you are the one reaching.
your mouth on him. when you press him back against the pillows and trail your mouth down his chest. suck a mark into the soft place under his jaw. when you take his hand and kiss each fingertip tenderly.
when you go down on him. which you don't do often, because he tends to lose composure and pull you up and put you under him within a minute, but the minute you get he's wrecked.
it's the reverse of his exploration kink. he's spent so long being the explorer, the one whose mouth and hands move over you, that the rare reversal undoes him.
he'll let you do anything to him. lie pliant under you and watch you with eyes gone glossy and dark and the harmonic in his chest will pour out shaky and greedy. afterward he'll hold you like you've given him something no one else's ever offered him. which you have.
the small things. related to the above and deserving its own bullet because of how easy it is to set him off. he is (for an ancient eldritch predator) an incredibly responsive lover.
things that should not, by rights, do anything to a creature of his power: you sucking softly on his lower lip during a kiss, the kind of slow pulling kiss you'd give a boyfriend on the couch. you setting your teeth gently to the side of his neck. you mouthing at his pulse point (he doesn't have one but the architecture suggests one and he feels it when you go for the place).
you sucking on the soft pad of his thumb when he traces your lip with it. any of these and the harmonic in his chest purrs out unrestrained and his body coils around you. the not-quite-right way. arms longer than they were a second ago, the line of him pouring closer. every part of him drawn to the point of contact like iron to a magnet. it's so easy.
you have, on countless occasions, completely derailed a casual evening just by leaning over and sucking on his lip for three seconds. he likes that you know this. he likes that you use it. the easiness of his responsiveness is, on his end, a deliberate choice. he doesn't have to react this readily, his body is not naturally arranged this way, he's just decided that around you he wants every small touch to count.
wants you to feel the effect of yourself on him constantly, wants there to be no ambiguity ever about what you do to him. the smallest gestures get full responses. that is on purpose.
your warmth. you feel so warm to him. this is a phrase he's actually said. it's not poetry. it's a literal sensory fact.
he runs cool by default, the air in this place runs cool, the entities he's spent his existence around are cool. and you're a steady human furnace, you radiate heat. constantly. without effort. just by being alive.
when he holds you, when you press into him, when he's inside you and your inner walls are pulsing softly around him, the heat of you is a sensory experience he has nothing to compare to. he runs his hands over your skin sometimes just to feel it. he presses his face into your throat just to feel the warmth radiating off your pulse. he'll spend a long time, in the after, with his palm splayed flat over the warm soft skin of your belly, just feeling you be warm.
he learned to warm by touching you, learned his own body could do that by being near yours, and the response now is automatic. you're the source. you're why he can be warm at all.
you warming him on purpose. you've figured out that you can do this. you can walk up to him cool-skinned in the middle of an ordinary afternoon and put your palm flat to his chest under the flannel and just hold it there. you watch the warmth bloom under your hand.
you can press into him in bed when he's cool from having been still and feel him heat up against your stomach in slow degrees. can take his cold hand in both of yours and breathe on it and watch the harmonic shudder out of him as the heat catches.
this is yours. only you can do it. nothing else in his existence makes him warm. when you do it deliberately, when you're clearly choosing to warm him, the look on his face is gentle, wanting. awe of a thing that's been cold for unimaginably long being deliberately made warm by a creature small enough to hold in his arms.
you watching for the tells. the temperature, the eyes — the fact that you read him by them. he loves being read. when you cup his jaw to check the colour of his eyes after he's been quiet, or put your hand on his throat to feel for the harmonic.
when you press your forehead to his and pause to feel the warmth. they're small, private gestures. they're languages only the two of you speak.
he'd assumed, when he built this body, that he would have to learn human ways of telling you what he was feeling. words, expressions, the usual signals. he didn't expect to find that you would learn to read his actual self instead. that you would meet him at the level his body actually communicates. it's one of the deepest gifts you've given him without realising it was a gift.
caretaking. dressing you after. brushing your hair after. running you a bath after. cleaning the marks he asked permission to leave. tucking the blanket around you. bringing you water before you ask. he's built half the rooms in this place specifically to facilitate aftercare. the act ends when you're clean and warm and held, not when he comes.
kinks (yours, which he learned)
being told you're his. mine in his rough drawl, said low into your throat. he figured this out maybe a week in and has weaponised it ever since.
being held still. the not-quite-human strength of his grip when he pins your hips in place. you didn't know this was a thing you liked until he did it (jut pinned you and made you take him) and you came so hard you nearly sobbed. he files this kind of information away meticulously.
being watched. not in the original sense, in the actual kink sense. this one has an origin story.
you were in the Poolrooms when other entities stumbled onto the two of you in a moment that was not meant to be public. you were on the warm tile and he was over you and you had just started something slow and unhurried when you both felt them. three or four of them, hovering at the far end of the corridor, watching.
BB started to pull back, to cover you, the old protective instinct kicking in with a snarl, but you caught his wrist. you held his eyes. you said, quiet but absolutely certain: let them see. and the look on his face (the blue going dark at the edges, stunned, delighted) was a thing you wanted to keep forever.
he kept going. slowly. thoroughly. let them see exactly what he was doing to you and exactly how you were taking it. let them hear every sound. you came harder than you had in weeks and he understood, then, that this was a thing about you, a real thing about you, and he's been incorporating it carefully ever since.
now, he has (on occasion) manifested an audience in private rooms. lets you choose if you want the watchers to be real or shapes that look like watchers but aren't. you've tried both. the real ones are rare and require specific conditions (he's extremely particular about who gets to look at you). the manifested ones happen more often. the shapes sometimes shifts in the middle of things and you become aware of eyes, vague at the edges of the room, and you know without asking that he's made them for you.
dirty talk in the warm drawl. the voice is one of the few parts of the Bobby-shape you both actually love unreservedly. the warm Cali 90s drawl, lazy and amused. the way he stretches vowels. the contrast between that voice and the obscene things he's saying with it does something to you and he knows. come on, baby, that's it, look at you takin' it so pretty for me (spoken in that exact lazy timbre) has reduced you to incoherence on multiple occasions. he keeps the voice even when the rest of the shape is slipping, because he's noticed what it does to you.
the warming response. the way he goes from cool to warm under your hands. you didn't fully understand at first. early on you assumed he just was warm, the way humans are warm, and only later figured out that the warmth was because of you.
that you walking up and putting a hand on his arm was what turned the heat on. now you know. now you do it on purpose. you press your palm flat to his chest just to feel him warm up under it. you kiss him unhurriedly specifically to watch the temperature climb.
you have, on cold nights, slid your cold hands up under his shirt to put them against the cool plane of his stomach, and felt the slow startled bloom of warmth as your touch registered. felt his humming catch and then purr as his body did what it does, and stayed very still and let you steal the heat back as fast as he made it. it's one of the most intimate things you do with him and barely counts as foreplay. it's evidence. proof that he's alive to you in a way he's not alive to anything else.
reading him. related and important. the temperature and the eyes are not just sensory facts, they're how you communicate.
he doesn't always have the words for what he's feeling. he was not built with the kind of expressive language humans have for emotion. but his body tells you. the cool-to-warm gradient on his skin under your hand. the creep of black at the edge of the blue. the pitch of the harmonic in his chest. you've learned to read these the way you'd learn to read a beloved second language.
you check his eyes when he comes in the door. you put your hand flat to his chest when he's been quiet. you know how he's doing without him having to tell you.
he likes this. he likes being legible to you. he's spent so long being unreadable to everything around him that the experience of being known by his body, without effort, by someone who pays attention, that's love to him.
watching the eyes during sex. specific. when he's over you and moving in you and the slow build of him toward losing the shape is happening (when the blue is eating at the edges with black, the dark creeping inward) you keep your eyes on his eyes.
you watch it happen. you watch the colour go from blue to bloom-darkening-blue to mostly-black to gone, until what's looking down at you is something with no white in its eyes, only deep glossy ink, and the rest of his face is starting to follow. you have come, more than once, from nothing but watching that progression. just the seeing of it. the visual confirmation that you're doing this to him.
that his composure is coming apart because of you, that he's letting you see it. you come watching his eyes go and he watches you come and his eyes finish going and the loop completes.
his warmth. the warmth as a gift. cold things stay cold. cold things radiate cold. he was cold when you met him (you didn't know it then, because he was being careful, but the body he held you against in the early days was cool, and you only realised later, in retrospect, that he had been working very hard to seem human-warm). he's warm with you now because being with you warms him. every time you touch him and he heats under your hand, that is an answer. that's him saying yes, this, more of this, you, you, you with his entire body.
the threading. see above. you didn't know you needed to be full of him in two places at once until he did it and now your body remembers and asks for it without your permission.
how he feels pleasure
his pleasure is not located the way yours is. he doesn't have nerve endings the way you do. he doesn't have a hard cutoff point where sensation crests and then he's done. the body he built has all the equipment that would make pleasure happen for a human partner, and the equipment does work, but it works differently on his end.
his pleasure is mostly relational. what feels good to him is, almost entirely, your pleasure. when you arch under him, when you whimper his name, when the seven hum bright and you clench around him and you sob more into his throat—that's what feels good to him. it's not vicarious enjoyment, exactly. it's more direct than that. he feels your pleasure in his own body, through the seven, and translates it into his own sensation. when you come, he comes, in a sense. he has his own version of the experience, but it is keyed to yours, not independent of it.
the seven are a feedback loop. the seven take his attention and translate it into sensation in your body. you've known that for a while. what you may not have fully understood is that they also work in the other direction. they take your pleasure and feed it back to him.
so when he's making you feel good, you're also making him feel good, through the same mechanism. the loop completes itself. he's the source of your pleasure and also the recipient of it, and the more you feel, the more he feels, and the more he feels, the more he wants to give you, and the more he gives you, the more you feel.
this is why he never wants to stop. ever. the loop is self-sustaining. he could happily make you come for hours (hell, for days, if your body could take it) because the longer he does it the better it feels for him.
there's no point at which he gets bored. no point at which he has finished in the way a human partner might be finished. he's engaged in something that gets better the longer it goes, and the only limit on it is your body. your endurance, your need for water and food and sleep. those limits matter to him enormously. without them he might literally never stop.
he finishes when you do, mostly. this is a choice, not a reflex. he times his own release to yours because he likes the way the seven respond when you come on him (they hum brighter, they pull harder) and his finishing in that moment doubles the resonance. but he can finish at other times. he can finish multiple times in the same encounter, and he can stretch his own pleasure across hours of being inside you without finishing once. the orgasm, for him, is one note in a longer piece, not the resolution.
the warmest sound he makes is that low harmonic, the purr-rumble, the one that vibrates through your sternum when he's happy. it's his version of the good sound. it pours out of him when you're warm against him, when you're full of him and content. it's not a sex sound, exactly. more so contentment sound. it happens at sex and also when you're reading next to him or have fallen asleep with your head on his thigh. he is, in a real sense, purring the way a vast and ancient cat would purr, and the sound means yes, this, more of this, forever.
what you feel like to him. he has tried to describe it and the descriptions never quite fit. the closest he has come: warm. bright. humming. you feel to him the way a fire feels to a thing that's been cold for an unimaginably long time. intense, almost overwhelming with how alive you are.
your body radiates life in a way nothing else in this place does. the heat of you, the pulse of you, the soft give of your skin, the constant gentle electrical hum of a human nervous system doing what nervous systems do. all of it together is, to him, the most sensorily rich thing he's ever encountered. being inside you is being inside that, surrounded by it, part of it. the seven amplify the experience. he is, when he is in you, more alive than he's ever been. in the sense that he's closer to your kind of life than his ancient distant version of it.
this is why he's so reluctant to withdraw. this is why he stays inside you while you sleep. why he never wants to stop. you're warm and bright and you are life, to him, and he's been cold for so long.
he never wants to stop making you feel good. every single position, kink, and long exploration. nights spent inside you while you sleep, every patient hour of his mouth on you. all of it is in service of the simple unwavering project of making you feel as good as you can possibly feel. for as long as he can sustain it, until the end of time if you'll let him. and you will. you absolutely will.
things he does that no human could do
the contortion thing. yes. yes he does this. his joints don't have to count properly when he isn't bothering. he can bend in ways that let him reach angles a human spine would shatter trying to reach. he can fold himself around you so that every part of you that wants to be touched is being touched simultaneously.
the first time he did this (you on your back, him somehow with one hand on your throat and one between your thighs and his mouth on your breast and the cock still inside you, all at once, with no apparent strain in his posture) you laughed, in pure shock, and BB stopped immediately to check on you and you had to explain you were happy.
the matched rhythm. he can sync the thrust of his hips, the curl of his tongue, the press of his thumb on your clit, and the pulse of the seven inside you to one single rhythm. all five points of contact. all on the same beat. there's no human word for what this does to your nervous system. it's like being played as an instrument.
gravity-defying things. he can hold you against a wall with no apparent support from below. he can carry you mid-act and the position doesn't break. he can fuck you while you are essentially levitating in his arms with your legs around his waist and never once does he need to set you down. you've stopped questioning how this works. it just works.
temperature override. he can stay cool even when you're under him panting, hold his body at that stone-shade baseline through everything you're doing to him. this takes effort and he rarely bothers. the only times he uses it: in hot levels when you want the contrast, or the rare moments when you ask for cold, and the cock slides into you ice-cool and your whole spine arches off the bed. he can also push the other direction. go hotter than emotion alone would take him, fever-hot in a deliberate way, but he does this even less, because the natural warming is, to him, more honest .
internal vibration. the cock can vibrate, at a frequency. when he's buried deep and not moving and the cock starts vibrating steadily against your inner walls. the sensation is so unfair it almost feels like cheating. he uses this one sparingly because if he used it often you would never get out of bed.
the splitting thing. now. you've asked him about this only once, and the answer terrified and intrigued you in equal measure. he can produce more than one of himself, temporarily due to strain, for the duration of an act. two BBs, fully formed, both him, both aware, both wanting you. it's not duplication so much as distribution. you've not asked for it. you might. you might never. the option exists.
favourite parts of you (his)
the seven, obviously. but you knew that.
the soft place at the small of your back. he can't leave it alone. his hand finds it whenever you are near him. when you're standing, when walking. you're lying on your stomach with the blanket pushed down. he traces circles into it without thinking. when he's inside you from behind his palm rests there like an anchor.
the hollow of your throat. where your pulse hammers. he's fascinated by the hammer of you. by the visible proof that you're alive and the heart is doing what hearts do. he kisses you there constantly. he sets his teeth into the place gently and feels the pulse against his tongue and the blue of his eyes goes dark at the edges every time.
your hands. specifically the backs of them. he holds your hand constantly, when you're walking, when you're sitting, when he's inside you and you're lying together after. he traces the bones of your knuckles. he kisses each finger separately sometimes. he's endlessly delighted by the fact that you have hands and that they hold onto him.
the sound you make when you wake up. the quiet, involuntary one before you open your eyes. he'll lie awake for hours waiting for it. it is, he's told you, the best sound in any world.
the place behind your ear. where your hair is fine. he buries his face there constantly. he says you smell like the only home he's ever wanted.
the final note (the underneath)
everything about the sex (the contortion, the stamina, the impossible mechanics, the seven, the breeding chemistry, every freaky impossible thing) is in service of a very simple project, which is keeping you happy.
he's not actually a freak. so much as an ancient thing that's been alone for a very long time and that fell in love with a lonely human at a furniture store and has been, ever since, trying to give her every good thing he can build. the kinks are just the shapes the love took when it had nowhere else to go.
he would be just as happy holding you fully clothed on the couch for hours as he is doing any of the above. truly. he has told you this. you believe him.
but he's also a thing of vast appetite and watching you come apart under his hands is, genuinely, one of the great pleasures of his existence. so when you ask him for the freaky things, he gives you the freaky things.
the love and the freak are not separate. the love is the freak. the freak is the love. there's no version of him that wants you politely. you got the entity. you got all of it.
Summary: Your husband spends a lazy morning indulging in the finer things, namely: you.
WC: 3.5k
Warnings: 18+/NSFW/MDNI!, smut, fr y'all this is some nasty shit, established relationship, fluff, angst in the final hour, mentions of grief/death/spouse loss, masturbation (f! only), oral sex (f!receiving), fingering (f!receiving AYYYYYYYY), overstimulation, dom/sub dynamics if you squint, finger sucking from both of these freaks, service top!valarr (oh ty lord), also lwk switch!valarr, unprotected p-in-v sex, reader being a pillow princess, the big westerosi 'rona is implied. not beta'd idgaf. lmk if i missed any and i'll update!
Author's Note: baby's first fic, probably a nothing burger but i would genuinely give everything to throw it back on 209 valarr like wow girl i'm so bored let's go get vaccinated and make out. likes, reblogs, and comments are greatly appreciated! ty for reading! also s/o to @priestboy for the divider!!!!
A steady drip of drool came out of his mouth, loud, obnoxious snores sounding into the air. Three freckles packed together on the left curve of his nose, a flare of his nostrils as he slept. His fringe was askew across his forehead, the clump of hair shifted only to one side. You could not help yourself from reaching your thumb out and tugging down the center of his bottom lip, plush and pink.
You could see every crease in it, and pulled it down even further to see his gums. You traced the point where his white tooth met pink, wet and pliant. He was even pretty there, too. He stirred slightly at that, but you pulled back, your hand returning to his cheek. He made a harrumping sound, tawny eyebrows pulled together, annoyance and tiredness painted on his features.
“What are you doing?” Valarr murmured through the fog of sleep, burying his face into your neck, willowy arms wrapping around you.
“Nothing,” you spoke into his hair, fingers twirling the ends. You dug your nose into his scalp, wanting to remember the lilac notes in it.
He mumbled some protests, but you couldn’t make any sense of it. Jumbled and out of place vowels as he squeezed you, as if to drain the ache from his bones by pressing you into him. You stretched, moving to sit up, but he only held you tighter with an indignant huff, seeming to hope that the skin would give way to his will.
Your little laugh made the white streak in his hair sprig up with flight.
“Are you trying to merge your skin with mine?”
He scoffed, pressing a peck to your pulse.
“Yes. I would be successful, were my lady wife not to fight me.”
“And yet I lay here limp.”
“Your will is spiritual. And forged of iron,” he sighed. Silence fell between them, and you traced the muscled line of his arm. Eyes cast up to his, a tad bit guilty.
“I’m sorry I woke you.”
“Ah, cease that. I never get to see you like this. Your hair all muffed up. Drool dried on your chin,” he swooned, smoothing his hand up and down the column of your throat, love in his eyes.
“That soaked pillow is your doing, not mine,” you rebuffed, giving a small bite to his earlobe. He feigned annoyance, a sour glare cast your way.
“And who will believe you? Your word against a prince’s….” he tsked, nudging your nose with the tip of his.
“Do I get a trial at the very least?” you whispered, lips grazing the corner of his mouth.
“No,” Valarr affirmed, giving you a soft kiss. He moved to your cheek, then your forehead, taking his time. Your jaw, your eyelid. Right next to your ear. “Trials are not granted for acts of treason.”
You gave him an admittedly weak scowl, flopping back against the pillow, hair strewn around the crown of your head.
His hands slowly slipped from your back to your waist, small, tentative touches down to the back of your thighs. His hands stilled on your hips and he restrained the urge to pinch the fat where your legs met your ass. He would dream of nothing but greedy fingers soothing the sting, rubbing circles into the flesh he had rendered you into nothing but little mewls as he licked into your mouth.
“What do you desire this morning?” he whispered into the shell of your ear. A kiss on it to leave a piece of himself with you before he left the bed.
Your head swam with possibilities, but indignance came first at his assessment of your wanting.
“And when exactly did I say I desired anything?” you protested, and yet, you smiled through the whole statement.
He sat up, beautiful hair in three different directions. The golden light from the open balcony formed a ring of light around him. One eye lit up in a mosaic of cerulean and cyan, the other with brown. You couldn’t decide which one you loved most. He let out a chortle at your expression and started to smile, and at that, you became entirely too preoccupied with the way the creases around his eyes looked.
“You get…” Valarr waved around a hand, trying to summon the right phrase. “This look. As if you wish to eat me alive. That is how I know you want something. To use your poor husband’s body as a tool for thoughtless pleasure,” he added with a touch of mirth.
Your cheeks burned at his comment, half a mind to bury your face in the pillows and die, but he simply tapped your cheek and brought your hand to his lips, kissing each fingertip for every time you would not meet his eyes.
“It is not an awful thing, wife. I imagine our marital bed would not be as well-used as it is were I having to guess if you wanted me,” he shrugged, bowing his head to yours. “Now, tell me what it is and I will do my best to give it to you. It is not as if I suffer in doing so. Rather the opposite.”
You looked into his eyes, earnest and brimming with affection. You swiftly nodded, a shy smile on your lips.
“Your fingers, for now. Then perhaps more as well.”
He took your order, standing tall and naked from the bed. He strode over to the washbasin, taking his time to thoroughly scrub his hands clean, and then what was left of his and your release from the night prior off of his groin.
You could not free your eyes from him, the chestnut curls that grew above one of your favorite parts of him, long and heavy against the inside of his thigh as he moved a wet cloth along himself. Your mouth watered, fingers slowly moving down under the bedsheets to soothe the ache between your legs at the sight of him. You could not bear to wait until he was done. His meticulous routine always took some time, and patience was not an esteemed virtue of yours.
Strong, tanned thighs from the fortnights they had stationed away at Summerhall, more freckles dotting his skin by the day. You traced your eyes up his body, the lean muscles in his back stretching as he applied perfumed soaps and picked at a spot on his leg. Sinew against skin, stronger and bigger than he had ever been.
He had been training in the courtyards of Summerhall before they had returned to Dragonstone, sword clashing and countering every attack the master-at-arms threw his way. You would have every door into the castle locked if it kept him outside, tanned and panting, gleams of sweat on his brow, arms straining, growing. Thighs that strained against his trousers, bracketing yours at night when he held you. Your head grew heavy, slumping against the pillow, open-mouthed as you drank him in.
A few moans threatened to slip past your throat, but you quickly bit down on your bottom lip, trying with all your might to not reveal yourself. He would tease you endlessly, drag you from the covers and down to the end of the bed, drawing out every sound you prayed the guards posted outside their door would not hear. You stopped the pace of your fingers when he wiped his hands on the hand linens the servants had not yet changed from yesterday night. You willed your hands at your side, shifting the bed covers up to your chin.
He turned around, unhurried paces across the large room. He peeked out to the large balcony that supplemented the bed chambers, gilded beams of sunlight coming dancing off his rich skin. He strode over the railing looking over the sea, the smell of salt crisp in the air. A deep sigh broke from his lips, squinting as he gazed out at the horizon.
You cleared your throat.
“You’ve a wife to attend to, Your Grace.”
His chest shook with a small laugh, lips taut to one side of his mouth as he cast a look at you.
“My cruelty is unparalleled,” he remarked, smiling and throwing your covers aside. The morning was warm, but the air chilled you and he quickly soothed your body with the warmth of his. You thought it better to pretend you did not feel him stirring against your leg.
You hummed in assent, peace on your face as he kissed along your jaw, hands quickly smoothing through his hair.
“Truly, you’re awful. Absolutely…” you trailed off as he moved his fingers in a downwards arc, first tracing the line of your stomach and slowly beginning to tend to where you wanted him. You breathed deeply, focusing on the beams of the ceiling as you willed yourself not to make a fool of yourself screaming like a whore.
“It is a beautiful morning,” he breathed against your pulse before adorning it with his mouth. “Perhaps we can go for a walk in the gardens. I know how you love the yellow roses. I should order the gardeners to plant more.”
You couldn’t control the stupid smile that took over your face, and as a consequence, many of the noises built up in your throat came slipping out, your eyebrows pinched. That seemed to spur him on, lowering his head to circle his tongue around one of your nipples before popping it into his mouth. His unoccupied hand came up to abuse the other one, switching sides every time you grew too quiet.
They were swollen and reddened before too long, overstimulation and pleasure blurring into one another as it became too much.
“Valarr,” you panted, gripping his hair to pull him off your chest. A flash of panic took over his face, eyes searching your face for any pain or discomfort. His worries were soon discarded when you redirected his head between your legs, a smile on his lips as he opened his mouth heartily.
He soon began to make a new mess, spit and slick forming a small pool beneath you on the bed. The spot cooling with air was the only thing that grounded you as he ate at your cunt, tongue slopping over your sex again and again. He felt relentless, pinning your hips down with one arm banded over you as you desperately tried to escape the overwhelming knot building in your stomach. You couldn’t bear it but couldn’t stop adorning his tongue, pulling his hair as tight as you could and rolling your hips into his mouth. Your legs closed tighter around his ears when you looked down to see him grinding himself against the mattress.
Prior, you would’ve balked at how loud your moans grew, echoing in the chambers, but you now wailed with reckless abandon, every feeling and moment centered at Valarr’s nose bumping against you as he dipped down to taste the nectar that had been seeping out of your slit. He groaned into you, resuming with a fervor until your mouth dropped in a silent scream. Legs locked up, you shoved his face into your hips desperately chasing the last of the shock that lit up your bones. He worked you through it, only ceasing when you tugged his chin up to your lips, tasting yourself on his tongue.
You laid there panting for many moments, sweat beading at your hairline. He kissed his way back down, reinforcing his focus on your breasts, watching you twitch and whine as he pressed his lips to your oversensitive nipples. You reached down for him, using what liquid had already beaded at the tip to stroke him in full. You took turns stopping and continuing, watching a beautiful pink flush take over his chest. His soft moans, some caught in his chest, meek and quiet.
“Please,” he groaned into your stomach, humping himself back and forth into our hand after you had paused. You withdrew your hands and he chuckled humorously against your skin, brows pinched together in near pain. He looked up at you, the side of his face heated by your flesh. He was just a man at his temple of choice.
You simply smiled, blissful in the glow of the pleasure he had given you, and mirthful all the same. He conceded, sighing as he accepted his fate.
“You still have not used your fingers,” you chirped, nose tilted up. “That was my sole request, lord husband.”
You could feel his teeth etched against your belly in a grin.
“Right you are, my love,” he said, rising into his knees.
He slipped his fingers into your mouth gently, rounding them around your gums before forcing your tongue down with the pad of his ring finger. He was playing dirty; your brain always seemed to fill with fog whenever he suddenly took control back from you, if only for a moment. Your mouth started to pool with saliva, the edge of his gold wedding band caught on the bottom of your front teeth. You whined and keened, hips moving against his to find friction, but he pinned them again with his other hand.
“Shh….,” he spoke into his knuckles, a hair’s breadth from you. Your lashes brushed up against each other, twin silk threading into each other. Your eyes bored into his, pleading and needy, weakly clenching half of his wrist with your hand. He did his best to hold his smile at bay, but he always loved you like this, drunk off your own desire. Drool started to spill from the sides of your mouth, and he simply wiped it away, replacing the streak with his kisses.
When he had decided you’d sufficiently drenched his fingers, he pulled his fingers out of your mouth, suppressing the smirk at the hoarse gasp you let out. Licked lips, swollen and red, biting still as he brought his hand down between your thighs. Your chin was tucked up to the sky, body practically buzzing with anticipation. His fingers brushed through you, clicking his tongue as he watched you clench around nothing.
He ran them up and down the length of you, wet and sloppy, his spit making your cunt shine in the light of day. He would make seven or so passees, deliberately ignoring your clit and pinning your hips as you tried to wiggle your hips so he would go where you wished. On the eighth pass, he would finally use the full weight of his fingers to press down on your clit, beaming in the way you gripped his hair, pulling him up for a kiss. He snaked his other hand up your body, rolling his thumb around your nipple. You keened, chest rising in quick breaths, distracted enough for him to slip two fingers inside of you.
His pace was brutal from the beginning, short, hard thrusts of his wrist, smiling into your kisses as he felt you drip down the palm of his hand. Any other time, he would take his time with you, gentle touches and a slow temperament. The morning, however, found you rather brave, and was reserved for you being pressed into the cold, smooth mattress and asking, demanding for more. You could not think, hair sticking wildly to your forehead with sweat. Your cheeks burned at his lips against yours, and you were like to scream when he aimed his fingers upward, the loud sound of your desire reverberating in your ears. Your limbs tensed, jaw hung open, and it faded from one moment into another, Valarr suddenly over you, spreading your legs to kneel between them. He smoothed the hair from your head, kissing his way from your chin down to your stomach. Your mouth was dry, your tongue a rough weight bearing it down.
“Was that satisfactory? The fingers only?” he muttered into your stomach, hair ruffled as he looked up at you, head rising with the slope of your torso. You fanned the back of your hand over his cheek, laughing breathlessly as you nodded.
“Do you want more, or shall we make to start our day?” he inquired, sincerity etched into his brow as he chased your fingers with his mouth. He did not expect words from you in these moments, blissed out as you were. You silently pulled his arms up to plant beside your head, your answer plain to him.
He chuckled to himself, and lined himself up with you, the mess you had made together helping him slide into the root. He swallowed your whines, the practiced sawing of his hips digging at the spot he had already abused. He hitched your legs up, holding them to the opposite sides, his pelvis slapping onto yours now. He was everywhere, hot blood thrumming under your skin as saccharine dripped into your legs and made its way up to your stomach.
Your mouth was etched in an O, brows drawn together as he quickened his pace, bearing his body down on you.
“Valarr,” you spat out after several attempts, eyes honed in on him.
He could not respond, his stomach pulling taut. He would not allow himself to, to indulge himself before he had wrung you dry. He bore you into the bed itself, your nails raking down his arms. With a weak, throaty cry, you shook in his arms, and clutched him down to you, hips still chasing his to ride you through it.
His thrusts turned sloppy and uneven, less care now that he had pleased you within all of your whims. His arms bracketed your head, burrowing his own into your neck. What once were reserved groans and careful slips were now uncontrolled whimpers and fervent pants against your flesh. He coated your neck in involuntary drool, cradling the top of your head as he took and took and took. Hips slapping against your, his hair catching against your clit and working your jaw open despite how much he had already given you. Words were not viable for either of you, only grunts that came from your chests and shrill moans.
He tensed, and he shifted to look at you, noses touching as his face clenched up. It was always his tell. Even if he was taking you from behind, one of the mirrors across the room would have to be used or he would need to flip you onto your back. Smoothing his fingers over the face he loved most, static surging through every point in his body, a knot in his stomach that refused to unfurl until he heard you say it.
“Please,” he forced out, so close to you that it seemed there was no more room to breathe. His face was etched in perfect misery, a power only you could grant him, a fire you held the tools to extinguish with three simple words.
You managed to smile through his growingly rough thrusts, open mouth twisting. You gripped his hair and steered him to nearly close the gap between your lips.
“I love you,” you whispered to him, delighting at how such a strong man seemed to shake and tremble at a small testament.
He bit onto the pillow beneath you, ivory of canines and feathers embedded and intertwined. In a more sober moment, he would blush viciously at the noises he was making, but a force was driving through him that could not be contained. His throat felt raw from the whines he filled the chamber with as he finally emptied himself into you. He panted for how many minutes he could not say, red in the face and sweat adorning his hairline. You simply stroked his back, giggling at his exasperation.
He took all of the strength he had left in him to roll himself onto his back and bring you with him, not caring whether or not he stayed inside you. You were the princess; if twenty batches of moon tea was what you desired, you would have it. Your hot skin pressed into his, your weight pushing his back into the soft mattress. He settled his nose into your hair, his breath as real as the warmth from his skin on yours.
“Is this your favorite to remember?” he said, a soft kiss to your scalp, moving the hairs stuck to the sweat on your forehead.
Your stomach emptied at the words.
“This is just a dream, is it not?”
He smiled sadly. The sight of it was so beautiful that it was no wonder it could not be reality.
“Does it matter?” he said, voice so quiet it was barely above a whisper. He tucked pieces of your hair behind your ear, gazing into your eyes with an unreachable somberness. “It happened in this bed.”
“What a blessing,” he whispered against your lips, your eyelashes touching. “You were the last thing I ever got to see.”
You woke alone later that morning, the grey clouds cast over the capital city. The side of the bed that had laid cold and dormant for two years. You rose only to order more sleeping draughts from the maester.
