CAN I SPILL TODAY'S TEA? 🐳🐳
reader giving husband dottore a back massage 🩷
You guys enable me so bad. 😋🙏
Zandik all but collapsed through the front door, the wood hitting the wall behind it with a soft thud. His coat hung half off his shoulders, slowly sliding down his arms until it pooled at his feet. He didn’t bother to pick it up.
He braced a hand against the frame and arched his spine, a groan leaving him. It was the kind of sound he would never willingly make in front of a colleague.
You heard it from the kitchen and came to find him, still caught mid-stretch, his hair mussed, one glove halfway removed, eyes unfocused behind their usual sharpness. Exhaustion clung to him like dust.
By the time you spoke, he’d sunk bonelessly into the armchair, legs sprawled, head tipped back as though gravity was punishing him personally.
“How was your day, dear?”
A hum. Barely a syllable. The verbal equivalent of swatting at a fly.
You leaned against the doorway, arms loosely crossed, amusement tugging at your mouth.
One eye cracked open. Not quite annoyance — more like he was weighing the energy cost of responding. Then he muttered, voice low and gravelly from disuse:
You couldn’t help but scoff, though the sound carried more fondness than irritation. Arms crossing, you gave him a look that dared him to push back.
“Then take your medicine… or come to bed so I can work out those knots.”
He chose the second option.
You helped him shrug out of his shirt, the fabric sliding off his shoulders like silk. The lamplight caught on him — the gleam of old scars, the faint stretch of time-softened muscle, and the slight curve of his stomach. He was still undeniably strong, but not so razor-edged. Not the blade he once was. Something warmer. Lived-in. The look of a married man.
Those soft tufts of pale blue hair that dusted his torso always made something inside you go tender. Every time. They were human, real, and a little sexy.
You stared a second too long and he noticed — of course he noticed — and immediately dismissed it with a quiet, annoyed huff, as if affection were some experimental variable he hadn’t accounted for and refused to examine.
Wordlessly, he climbed onto the bed and lay face-down, arms folded beneath his chin, hair falling in a soft, uneven curtain.
He trusted you enough to expose his back.
That, too, meant something.
Your hands moved slowly at first — thumbs circling at the tension knotted beneath his shoulder blades — and you saw it: the first soft exhale, the way his spine loosened slightly, shoulders no longer held in that perpetual, analytical precision.
It was a small surrender. But with him, every surrender mattered.
Marriage had changed him in ways no experiment ever could. Bit by bit, he had begun delegating more of his work to his segments — not because he trusted them, but because he trusted you more. Trusted that whatever he missed in the lab, he gained tenfold in the life you built together.
He ate two real meals a day now, sometimes three. He pulled fewer all-nighters, fewer death-willed research marathons that blurred into dawn. Some mornings, you even found him asleep before you were.
And it didn’t stop there — couldn’t stop there — because he had started leaving Zapolyarny Palace behind more often, choosing instead to come home to this quiet place nestled far from the grinding machinery of Tsaritsa’s demands.
A home that wasn’t just his.
Your palms slid lower, working into the long lines of his back, and he let out another breath — this one unguarded, nearly a sigh, almost content.
He was asleep in twenty minutes. Your largest concern now was how you were going to move this man to his side of the bed after he’d sprawled himself out to yours.
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