Steve Harrington has spent years learning how to survive monsters, which was never easy, but facing a girl he used to torment in high school somehow turns out to be much harder.
As Hawkins slips toward its final disaster, strange anomalies begin gathering around her: red-violet matter, interdimensional creatures, government officials - you know, the works. While the rest of the group tries to figure out what she is, Steve becomes increasingly concerned with a different issue entirely…he can’t seem to convince her he’s not that guy anymore.
(6.6k words, fem!reader, some body horror, experimentations, religious guilt, yearning from Steve, protective Steve, first kiss, semi-smut, happy ending for everyone!!!)
A/N: I had this romance/sci-fi idea for Steve Harrington, and while this is a concept, it reads like a full story - start to finish. It has dialogue and action. I just wanted to toss it out there!
The story starts after the crawl has gone wrong, with the demogorgon attacking the caravan Hopper is in.
During that sequence, Hopper takes refuge and spots something that doesn't fit the usual Upside Down environment. In a church, The Hawkins Presbyterian Church, there is a specific pew with red-purple matter hovering around it, faint particles gathered over the seat, and in the air above it. It’s nothing like the typical vines and floating spores. Hopper touches it, and it bursts against his fingers and burns him. He jerks back, swears, and remembers the location exactly.
In the real world, at that same time or close to it, the FMC had been sitting in that pew alone, crying, though Hopper and the party do not know that. Her emotion left a residue/pressure in the Upside Down equivalent of the space.
After Hopper gets out, he relays what he saw. At the same time, Eleven and Nancy rush off to her home upon hearing there’s a demogorgon going there. (I forgot who else goes).
So Steve, Robin, and Dustin go to the church that night to check the pew. The church is closed, but they find the FMC there alone. She has glossy eyes that she is trying to blink clear, and Steve notices because he is watching her too closely. It’s clear she does not understand why they are there, because she says the church is closed, they are not parishioners, and even if they were, they cannot be there after hours. Robin tries to sweet talk her and keep the situation from turning too tense. Dustin just slips past and goes toward the general area/pew Hopper described.
Steve remains near the entrance at first, looking at her. When he steps farther in, she backs up.
Dustin reaches the pew and notices the seat is warm, and asks if anyone else was there. She says no, it’s just her. That unsettles Dustin, but it’s not enough proof for anything yet, so he doesn't keep pressing her.
She politely asks them to leave.
After Karen explains what happened with Mr. Whatsit and after they learn Derek is next, Will uses his connection.
He sees the Hive Mind movement, but he also sees demobats circling another house in the Upside Down. He describes it, saying: “White mailbox. Blue flowers painted on it, and a cross on the side. The house number is One-eight-six,” and there is a silver Mercedes parked in the driveway.
At the same time Joyce worries if there are children in that house, Steve recognizes the house and says there are not, or at least, not younger children. He is struck with the guilty memory of him, Tommy H. and Carol driving by, laughing after a senselessly cruel “joke.”
That is the FMC’s house.
Dustin connects it immediately. Hopper saw red-purple matter at the church pew, the pew was warm, the FMC was the only person there, and now Will sees demobats circling her house. He doesn’t know what it means exactly, but he knows something is up.
Steve, Dustin, and Lucas go in the daytime to check on the house. Her mother answers the door, and she is suspicious immediately because three boys are on the porch asking for her daughter.
Lucas panics and says something fast to cover, “Steve’s her boyfriend. He just wants to see her.”
Steve snaps his head toward him while Dustin looks horrified and equally thrilled by how bad that lie is, and the mother stiffens.
The FMC’s father suddenly appears behind her. He knows enough about the Hawkins situation, through old government connections or continued communication or whatever to recognize the boys as dangerous proximity. He may not know every detail, but it’s clear he knows their circle is tied to Eleven, Hopper, the Wheelers, the Byers, and the incidents.
So he tells them to leave.
As the FMC appears somewhere behind him, confused and embarrassed and mortified, Steve sees her but cannot speak to her properly before the door closes.
After the door is shut in their faces, Dustin knows something is off, and says as much, so they look into her father. Through Murray or whatever other route, they learn enough to justify watching the house.
He is a materials physicist with theoretical training. Seemingly has a Department of Energy connection, and had an abrupt move to Hawkins twenty some odd years ago, and apparently has some unexplained money since he has such a nice car and home. Has some redacted project work, and no clean public explanation for what he actually did work-wise.
Steve, Dustin, and Lucas return to her home, hiding in Steve’s car outside the house. They want to wait until she leaves and ask her questions without her father present, hoping she goes to the church again late at night.
Then two black SUVs pull up, and her father lets the men in. Minutes later, she is carried out, limp and in pajamas, slung over a man’s shoulder.
Her parents watch from the doorway, the mother clutching her husband’s arm, but neither of them look particularly sad or heartbroken. Rather, they seem sort of relieved. Steve doesn’t like that.
As Steve starts the car, Dustin is panicking, trying to talk and think at the same time, and Lucas tells them to follow without getting seen.
They trail the convoy.
On a back road leading out of town, demogorgons attack the vehicles, and the vehicle carrying the FMC overturns. As the government men are torn apart, she wakes enough to crawl out, drugged and disoriented.
Steve gets out as one of the demogorgons goes after her, and Dustin screams for him to stay in the car, the Eddie shadow hitting him immediately. Lucas gets out too, to help Steve. Right as the demogorgon pounces on her, Steve sees a burst of red-purple particles, then the creature lands beside her with a scorch mark in its chest, writhing. Steve reaches it and slams his nail bat into its head until it stops moving.
All the while, Lucas grabs the FMC under her arms and tells her to come on. But she is staring back in horror at what happened, so Steve fists the front of her pajama top and drags her when she does not move fast enough.
They get her into the car.
In the car, Dustin starts rapid-firing questions:
“Did you do that?”
“Have you done that before?”
“Why did those guys take you?”
“Are you like El?”
“Does your dad know? Your mom?”
She is drugged, shaking, trapped in a car with three boys she barely knows, one of them being someone who used to be part of a crowd that mocked her, and she is terrified of what came out of her.
Steve swerves and curses as a red-purple pop flares, blinding him momentarily. Dustin exclaims and Lucas tells Dustin to stop talking. Then another pulse happens, and Steve brakes hard and stops slanted in the road. He turns around, pointing as he tries to get everyone under control.
“Everybody shut up.” And when Dustin starts to argue, Steve says, “No. You--stop asking questions.”
Lucas is half out of his seat, looking as if he’s ready to bolt. “You--stop trying to climb out the damn window.”
Then Steve points toward her and says, “And you--just calm down.”
A wisp of red-purple particles pops near his finger and burns him, and he jerks back. She apologizes instantly, twice over, and tries to cover herself, curling up and seemingly pretending what is happening is not real, but Steve senses that her fear and shame make the energy worse.
Steve readjusts and lowers his voice. “Okay. No. Sorry. Don’t--don’t do that. I mean, don’t listen to me. Just breathe.” He almost says she is okay, but stops. “Nobody’s touching you. Nobody will. We’re just taking you somewhere safe.”
Lucas says they need to get off the road, constantly checking out the back window.
They bring her to WSQK, plopping her on the sofa. She’s still in pajamas, wrapped in Steve’s jacket that she didn’t initially want to take, but Steve insisted. She’s exhausted, a little dazed, dirty from the road.
To the group, Dustin explains everything too fast; restating Hopper’s church anomaly, the warm pew where no one else but her was present, Will seeing demobats over her house, the father shutting them out. Then the juicy stuff; the SUVs, the demogorgon attack, and the red-purple burst that maimed a demogorgon.
Then Dustin tells her to show them. She does nothing, so he says it again. Steve tells him to knock it off, and Dustin argues that everyone needs to see it.
Steve says something like, “She just got dragged out of a van and almost eaten. They can wait.”
Hopper suddenly checks the inside of her wrist for a number, but there is none. At the same time, Steve sees the marks on her arm (not SH). As she pulls her sleeve back down, everyone starts suspecting she might be another lab kid, just from a different lab, or maybe a hidden subject Brenner never numbered.
Eleven does not agree. Steve thinks Eleven is trying to reach into her mind while everyone else is talking.
With the FMC already overloaded, red-purple flurries start. She apologizes immediately, trying to stand and leave, but Steve gives her a look, enough to make her sit again.
Everyone is confused about what that was, and what it makes it. Dustin shakes his head because none of their guesses and speculations line up.
After everyone disperses and the Turnbow trap begins forming, Steve goes to check on her. She’s still sitting on the sofa, and he asks if she is okay. She answers curtly. When he sits beside her, she tilts her legs away from him. He starts to ask something else, but she excuses herself to the bathroom and leaves.
Robin overhears and comes to sit beside Steve, telling him to play nice.
Steve says, “She needs to play nice with me. I’ve been playing very nice.”
Robin makes it clear that niceness is not the issue, that this is still a Steve issue, an unresolved one.
Steve grumbles because he knows. He remembers the snide comments about her clothes, Tommy H. pretending to ask her on a date, then Carol humiliating her for trying to take “her man,” and Steve laughing when it happened and the look on her face.
As Steve stands, Robin tells him she (the FMC) is overwhelmed and he should leave her alone, but he ignores her.
He waits by the bathroom, but Jonathan walks out instead, so he searches for the FMC, finding her walking down the radio station driveway.
He jogs to catch up, standing in front of her. “Where are you going?”
She skids to a stop. “I don’t know.” She looks over his shoulder. “…home.”
He shifts his weight from foot to foot. “I get wanting to get away from here. It’s a lot,” he says. “The monsters, the questions, Henderson doing that thing where he talks faster when he’s worked up, which is, honestly, terrible in a crisis. Everybody staring at you.” She rolls her bottom lip between her teeth, and he watches before continuing, “It’s scary. And weird. And it’s new to you, which is probably the worst part, because the rest of us are used to all of this.”
“I don’t know why I did what I did. I don’t know how it happened, or if it will happen again. I don’t know anything. I don’t want to answer any more questions.”
“Then don’t.” He steps closer. “I mean it,” Steve says, rubbing the back of his neck. “Dustin can survive not knowing something for ten minutes. It’ll be hard for him, but he’ll live.” He pauses. “When you do want answers, though, Dustin can explain the monster stuff. Henderson loves explaining monster stuff. El might understand the… whatever happened with…whatever you did.”
“Okay.”
“And me, I guess I’m mostly the guy who used to be an asshole to you and now keeps yelling in cars.” He says with a sad smile. “I know you probably don’t want me being the one checking on you.” She stiffens. “Which is fair,” he says. “Really fair.”
She doesn’t say anything, she just turns back toward the building.
But Steve steps in front of her again, walking backward, saying, “I used to be shitty.” He pauses when she halts. “Very shitty. Especially to you.”
“I don’t need you to--“
“I know.” He nods too fast. “I know you don’t need anything from me. That’s not why I’m saying it.”
“Then why are you?”
“Because you’re standing here in Robin’s sweater, and you’ll look at her, and you’ll look at Nancy, and then I walk up and you look like you’re waiting for me to be shitty again.” She frowns. “And if you tell me it’s fine,” he says, quieter, “I’ll probably let myself believe you.” He gives a small, humorless laugh. “I don’t really want to be that guy anymore.”
She looks toward the building. “Be that guy then. It’s fine.”
“No.” He doesn’t budge when she takes a step. “It’s not.”
“It was high school.”
“Yeah, and that made it easier to be awful. It didn’t make me do it.”
“It really is fine, Steve,” she says again, softer this time, and he hates that some stupid part of him notices how his name sounds in her mouth.
She starts trying to walk, and he lets her, and walks backwards in front of her again.
“I’m not asking you to forgive me. I’m not even asking you to like me. I’m just saying I know being around me probably sucks, and I get why. I would hate being around me too.”
As he bumps his heels into the steps and almost falls, she reaches out.
She walks past him up the stairs and says, under her breath, “It’s even.”
He turns. “What?”
She pauses, one hand on the railing. “You saved me. So it’s even. Let’s leave it there.”
That hurts him.
(She’s gotten a change of clothes from Robin, and has talked to Dustin. Steve knew because he watched from a distance, seeing her face as she took everything in - the Upside Down, the government, the Russians, Vecna/Henry, what’s been happening.)
After the Turnbow trap is established and before the party splits up, Dustin asks if the FMC is going to help. Lucas and Joyce think it is a bad idea, and Steve makes a face. The FMC says no at first.
Eleven scoffs, then makes a comment before she and Hopper leave, something like, “So you can do something, and you won’t?” Mike rubs Eleven’s back, his focus only on her.
Steve picks up that the comment stung her because she sits up straighter and pinches her lips before looking down. He tells her she does not have to go, but she walks away.
Robin shakes her head.
Before they leave, the FMC shows up and says she is going. Steve starts to object, but Nancy tells him to shut up and let her choose. So she goes.
At the Turnbow house, she shadows Robin first, then Nancy while they set things up, carrying what she is told to carry, holding wires, passing supplies, and following instructions.
Steve keeps watching her. Dustin notices and says, “Stop being creepy.”
Steve shoots back, “I’m not being creepy.”
Dustin says something along the lines of, “You’re staring at her like she’s a bomb.”
Steve snorts, “She might be.”
When the demogorgon attack happens, one leaps over the FMC, and she ducks. Steve gets cornered in the upstairs balcony, swinging the nail bat. It lodges in the creature’s flesh, and he can’t pull the bat free.
Red-purple particles wisp over the demogorgon, burning it, before the mist spreads and grows, then bursts, knocking the creature over the second-story railing.
She is stunned by what she did, doing it seemingly on purpose, so Steve lurches forward and grabs both her forearms to keep her from falling, squeezing once.
Then the fight keeps moving. When the demogorgon goes into the gate, Steve, Nancy, Dustin, and Jonathan rush to the car to follow. She gets in too.
He drives into the Upside Down.
At the lab in the Upside Down, the group splits. Nancy and Jonathan go off like normal. Steve, Dustin, and the FMC go another direction.
Dustin and Steve encourage her to search the records because they still think she might be connected to the lab kids somehow, so she goes through files.
All the while. Steve and Dustin have their fight then their heart to heart, as in the show, while she keeps searching.
After Jonathan and Nancy are retried from the melted room, and before the group goes to the roof, Dustin carefully says the FMC should not go any closer.
He explains, holding up Brenner’s journal as he does, that her abilities resemble the ball of exotic matter, that her matter is reacting to it, and if she gets closer, she will set it off fully.
She realizes she caused Nancy and Jonathan to fall, explaining that she found nothing in the records that they suggested she go through, and she just got so upset that the cabinet caught fire. (So instead of Nancy shooting the exotic matter and destabilizing it, the reaction is triggered by the FMC - her being so close, using the matter she’s made of.)
That is what causes Nancy and Jonathan to fall into the melting part of the building. She apologized the moment she realizes, then she says she will go outside and they should continue without her.
Steve follows her.
Outside, she is sitting on a retention wall, holding Brenner’s journal in both hands. Dustin gave it to her because he thought she deserved to see it herself.
She sees him and closes the journal, staring straight ahead as Steve sits beside her. The journal rests between them or in her lap, and after a while he takes it carefully. He skims enough to just barely understand through all the science-y mumbo jumbo that the wormhole was useful only while controllable, that if Brenner’s system ever stopped obeying him, he needed a way to destroy it before anyone else could take it, expose it, or use it without him.
Steve understands that no one like Brenner would ever build a door without also building a lock only he can use.
They tried time and again to contain the exotic matter; a device can hold it for a while, machines can measure it, and chambers can suspend it. But to interact with it at the level needed to collapse the wormhole, it needs a living regulator.
He read that a human body can do what machinery can’t. Adapt second by second, carry a counter-reactive form of exotic matter, respond to shifts in the wormhole field, cross or touch the boundary without immediate failure, and house the failsafe in plain sight.
She was placed in a home to remain stable, hidden, and retrievable. If she had been kept in the lab, she might have destabilized early, died young, been discovered, or been damaged by testing. A normal life keeps her biologically stable and socially invisible until retrieval.
Given to a scientist that would understand her and what she’s made of.
He read that survival is labeled as unlikely, irrelevant, and impossible, and shut the book right after.
They sat in silence for a few minutes, then he tried to comfort her, going about it the wrong way.
“Okay,” he says. “Then we stay away from the chamber and the giant ball up there. Easy.” When she gives him a look, he corrects himself. “Not easy.”
She doesn’t respond, and Steve sits the journal at the other side, where she can't take it. He doesn’t want her reading anymore about her making, at the clinical and methodical and unfeeling way her life is described to be.
He sneaks a glance, watching her chest rise and fall slowly, then says, “Those assholes didn’t have it all figured out.” When she stays silent, he adds, “They didn’t plan for me. Or Dustin, or Nancy, or Robin. Or any of us being stupid enough to make this harder for them.We’ve messed things up for them before. What’s one more?”
She would murmur his name, going to slide off the wall, but he grips her elbow. “I’m sorry.” He’s sorry for everything - what he’s responsible for and what he’s not.
She sits again, furrowing her brows. Steve wants to say something, anything, but doesn’t. Before long, she says, “My mother said I had the worst ‘terrible twos’ she’d ever seen. That I got into everything. That I was always hurting myself.” She pulls the sleeve of Robin’s sweater to the bend of her elbow, showing many tiny burn patches. It looked like his finger after the particles popped. “She never told me what I touched to make these. I always thought I must have pressed myself against heaters, pulled an iron down, or spilled my dad’s tea, or…”
Steve looks from the burns to her face. “And that’s why she was so careful with you?”
She says, “Maybe not for the reasons I originally thought.”
Without thinking, he sits his hand at her lower back, thumb moving over the knit of Robin’s sweater and the line of her spine beneath it. He immediately thinks back to how he and his friends used to torment her for wearing long sleeves and skirts year round. He wants to apologize for that too, but knows it’s not the time.
He would ask, “You never knew? Never randomly made those red and purple cloud things before?”
She looks up at the bright sphere where Nancy, Jonathan, and Dustin were. “No. Sometimes, when I got upset, I’d feel hot, really hot. My mother said I needed to calm my spirit, so she’d make me pray with her. If I couldn’t stop shaking, she told me to hold my breath between the words.” She pauses. “I don’t know why,” she says as Steve stares at her. “It always helped take my mind off what I felt.”
“Yeah,” he says, almost deadpans. “Because you couldn’t breathe.”
Again, another bout of silence ensues, Steve runs his hand up her back, twirling the ends of her hair around his fingers. He is admiring her, looking at her profile - the slope of her runny, sniffling nose, the flutter of her wet lashes, the curve of her bottom lip she kept worrying at.
Wearing his heart on his sleeve, he vows when he shouldn’t, “Whatever that journal says, it doesn’t get to decide what happens next.” And, “That thing up there isn’t your responsibility.”
“I was made to be.”
“Yeah,” he says. “And that’s bullshit.” Then, “They made you. Fine. I hate it, but fine. That doesn’t mean they get the rest.”
“You can’t promise that.”
He says, “No. I can’t. But I can promise I’m gonna be really annoying about trying.”
She lightly shakes her head, but doesn’t speak.
Then he says, “You can hate me for making these promises today. Tomorrow too.” She looks over. He keeps going, “And the day after that. As many days as you want.” Then the heart of it, “You’ll have them.”
Later, when everyone is discussing the ins and outs of what's happening and what will happen to Hawkins and the rest of the world as the Abyss is getting closer, the conversation shifts to the exotic matter and how to destroy it.
The FMC is sitting beside Steve while Dustin explains the chamber within the lab. That it’s somewhere in the sublevels that funnels through the lab’s containment system and upward into the core. The chamber doesn't merely use her “fireworks,” (as Dustin likes to call them) it pulls the counter-tuned exotic matter out of equilibrium inside her body, and her body is what keeps that matter stable. Once the chamber starts draining it, the reaction damages the tissue that contains it.
He mumbles that extracting it would tear the containment system apart and the feedback from the collapsing core would run back through her, and that her nervous system and organs couldn’t survive the full discharge.
Steve rejects it immediately, saying, “Absolutely not.”
She presses against him.
Even though no one has said she is to be used or has to die. He says they will have to find another way, that they could detonate it.
Dustin shakes his head, “A bomb may only rupture part of it, or scatter matter, maybe widen the damage, or create uncontrolled openings. It’s not guaranteed to destroy the wormhole.”
With a shrug, Steve says, “I’m willing to take that risk.”
No one really wants a young girl to sacrifice herself, especially if there’s another way. Even if that other option is murkier and potentially unhelpful in the long run. So, they agree - blow up the exotic matter.
Before the party enters the Upside Down, Steve pulls her into a small conference room, wanting to say his goodbye in private, just in case.
He starts by saying something practical, that she should stay near Max and Vickie, and if anything happens, she should not try to use whatever is in her unless she has to. That he will be back.
She started talking too fast about Vecna, the Mind Flayer, then about everything else Dustin had said to her earlier about the unknowns of the Abyss. How the air might not have enough oxygen, how they could be flattened like pancakes, or how they could freeze instantly. If the pressure was low enough, their blood could do things blood was not supposed to do. Their lungs could pop, or their eyes would. There could be something in the atmosphere that poisoned them before they even found Vecna.
Steve tries to make it lighter, “Henry survived there. That has to count for something, right?”
That doesn’t comfort her like he hopes it would, and she says, “And Dustin said the Mind Flayer is enormous.” She crosses her arms. “Seven hundred feet, maybe. Maybe more. He said it might be connected to everything there. Won’t it know you’re there before you even know where to look for it? And Vecna? What about the demogorgons? And what about--”
Steve tries again. “Hey. I’ve fought these things before.”
That does not help either, and she says, “But not on their own planet.”
And he finally reads it for what it is and looks at her and asks, “Is this about the Abyss, or is this about me not coming back from it?”
She looks away, “Those aren’t separate things.”
Steve steps closer as she presses herself against the boardroom table. “Yeah. Okay. But are you?”
She doesn’t answer directly as the red-purple matter flickers faintly along her knuckles.
He suspects he knows the answer, so he says, “I’m coming back.” When she looks over his shoulder, he adds, “I promised you days, remember?” Then he steps in again, slotting himself between her legs. “I want some of them too.”
He leans in, forehead pressed together. His nose bumps against hers, their breaths mingling. They kiss.
Red-purple exotic matter responds to her desire and fear, sparking and wisping around them, almost holding him closer. He likes it. He likes it a lot. It’s warm against the back of his neck, and tickles over his shoulders and down his arms.
When he breaks away just an inch, lips grazing, he tells her, “When I get back,” His thumb moves along her jaw. “You can have more of those.”
As Hopper yells for Steve, the matter winks out.
She notices what she did, then looks over Steve’s body with worried hands and wide eyes, scared it hurt him.
But it didn’t, and he says as much, “It didn’t hurt.” Even adding, “Kind of the opposite, actually.”
He takes her hands, kissing each palm to calm her when she keeps feeling up and down his arms.
She starts to say something, but Hopper interrupts by throwing open the door.
(Steve would learn all this later)
While everyone is gone, government vehicles arrive at the radio station while the FMC is there with Vickie and Max.
Her father led them back to the Brenner failsafe protocol when he learned news of the attacked convoy, and his missing daughter. So they know what she is, or know enough, and follow through with her design purpose.
They sedate her, way heavier this time, before taking her. Others take Max and Vickie.
The government brings her to the old failsafe chamber in the Upside Down.
It’s a vertical restraint frame, thick glass around it, cables running up into the ceiling with copper coils and magnet rings, and analog gauges.
Hopper and Murray are waiting to hear back from the group before setting off the explosive/timer plan.
Murray is still dealing with the record-player timing, the wiring, the practical ugly mechanics of making the bomb do what it is supposed to do, then something changes. The old conduits begin lighting up, and the core system starts to randomly react.
Murray realizes something else has been activated, and it can only be the chamber, so they find her restrained inside it. Hopper kills the few soldiers and two scientists.
By then, the machine has started pulling from her, and her body is already reacting badly.
Hopper understands enough immediately, and Murray understands more technically, and that makes his silence worse.
The chamber is killing her, and if they let it finish, it may guarantee collapse. But if they stop it, the bomb plan becomes less certain. Hopper has a brief thought of turning around and walking out, but ultimately refuses to leave her there. He and Murray fight to get her out before full terminal discharge.
Since they interrupt the process and the chamber has already taken enough to alter her body, it makes her matter unstable.
Either way, she’s alive.
Meanwhile, Steve is with the group in the Upside Down and then into the Abyss-facing part of the mission.
After Vecna and the Mind Flayer are defeated, Steve helps get the kids out with everyone else. The group loads into the truck and drives through the Upside Down. All the while, Murray and Hopper start the record player, and leave themselves.
They reach the gate and drive through.
They come out into the real world and are met by the government, the sonic speakers, and guns pointed at them.
Steve is trying to locate everyone at once, then he sees Hopper and Murray. And with them, he sees her.
He doesn’t understand what he is looking at, why she’s there. She is supposed to be at the radio station, she’s supposed to be waiting. For him to come back to her like he promised.
Instead, she is barely upright, held between two soldiers, her body changed in ways he can’t see clearly enough.
Steve starts toward her, but he’s held back.
The government men try to regain control all around them, and the FMC is sparking and flickering now, no longer able to fully regulate herself. When a man grabs her to force her upright when she starts to slump, her matter burns him. Another man tries to restrain her and swears when the red-purple particles flare against his sleeve and skin.
One of them throws her down to get her away from them, and she hits the ground hard.
He starts moving toward her, yanking free of whoever is holding him. Dustin and Robin shout after him, and other soldiers reach for Steve and miss.
Then the attention shifts because Eleven is in the collapsing Upside Down.
Mike is screaming, and so are the others.
As the screaming around spikes, Steve glances at the FMC, seeing particles gather around her.
The men closest to her burn first, some catch fire while others stumble back screeching. The sonic speakers spark, rupture, and shriek with feedback before blowing apart. The air breaks open in a red-purple surge.
At the same time, behind Eleven, on the inverted side of the gate-space, Steve sees a red-purple cloud, particulate and bright, almost exactly like what Hopper described seeing in the Upside Down church near the pew. As she cried in the church, the same spot in the Upside Down had reacted, and the same was happening in that moment. Only made worse because of the exotic matter dispersed and soaring in the wormhole.
A red-purple explosion tears open behind El, striking at the worst and best possible second, and the force throws Eleven forward, back toward their world.
She tries to push herself up but can’t, folding inward, as the air around her keeps popping.
Steve runs the rest of the way toward her. The discharge lashes out and burns his hands when he gets too close, but when the popping finally drops low enough, Steve rushes to touch her.
His hands are running all over her back, trying to turn her over, but she’s limp.
Steve manages to get her on her side, her head resting in his lap. Her breath comes shallowly before she starts to sob. He leans over her, smoothing her hair away from her face, away from her damp cheeks while asking if she can hear him, saying he’s right there with her.
One sleeve is partially burnt, but not enough for him to understand what he is looking at when he sees color beneath it. Steve gently rips it open, careful not to pull where the fabric clings. From the shoulder down, her arm is ruined. Burned with dark red-violet light moving underneath in pulses. The muscles jump under the surface, twitching her wrist and curling her fingers in spasms she doesn’t seem able to control.
He picks her up and carries her away.
I don’t know…maybe…Owens survives being chained to a wall in Nevada and helps redirect official attention toward other anomalies and prior experiments, hinting at other subjects and other remnants of Brenner-era work.
(Mike and Eleven get their three waterfalls.)
Steve becomes a high school baseball coach and, to everyone’s endless amusement, teaches sex education too. He’s saving up to buy a home, one he hopes to share with the FMC.
The FMC works at the library in the next town over, then starts taking one class at a time at community college, working slowly toward an associate degree in science.
Steve loves to drive her to her night classes, and loves grading quizzes as she does homework.
Steve is hopelessly enchanted and devoted to the FMC.
The fic ends in Steve’s apartment, though by then it has stopped looking entirely like his.
One of her many sweaters is slung over the back of a kitchen chair, her hairbrush is in the bathroom beside his comb, and one drawer in his dresser is almost empty, pretending he just got rid of some clothes. He didn’t. They’re shoved on a shelf in the top of his closet.
She is sitting at the end of his bed, trying to button her cardigan with one hand.
Steve watches her struggle through two buttons before he crosses the room and kneels in front of her.
“Let me.”
“I can do it,” she says.
“I know.”
He does it anyway. One button, then the next, his knuckles brushing the knit over the swell of her chest. When he finishes, his hand skims down the line of buttons until he reaches her bad arm resting in her lap.
He lifts it carefully. A tremor moves through her hand into his, the nerves damaged. He brings her knuckles to his mouth and kisses them, then the back of her hand, then the skin at her wrist.
“Steve.” He looks up and she adds, “It could hurt you.”
“It’s not.”
“It could.”
“A lot of things could.” He pushes her sleeve up, watching her face while he does it. “This isn’t.”
Steve kisses just above her wrist, then higher and higher, looking at the now translucent scars that reveal her unstable exotic matter coursing wildly within her. They’re all over her body.
The wisps come slowly, red-purple and warm, grazing his cheek, then running along his throat. She stiffens, eyes searching his face for pain. The warmth starts to heat up, becoming almost too hot.
He lifts his other hand to the back of her head and kisses her. Her good hand grabs the front of his shirt, bunching the fabric, and he groans against her mouth as she draws him closer. His knee presses into the mattress beside her hip.
“You were leaving,” he murmurs against her lips.
“I was thinking about it.”
“Terrible idea.”
She makes a sound that was almost a laugh, but Steve kisses it before it could fully become one. The matter moved again, curling around his waist, then lower, making him grip the sheets tightly.
That is new, and is a little wicked. He likes it. A lot.
His hands brace on either side of her head as he pulls back enough to look at her. Her eyes are changed forever, burnt through with red and violet, and he loves them so much it nearly embarrasses him with how often he gets caught staring.
He kisses her cheek, the corner of her mouth, the bridge of her nose. When he draws back, a faint red-purple hue lingers beneath the skin there before dimming. Steve stared at it, then at her.
“What?” she asks, worried again.
“Nothing.”
He kisses the place again, and the color warms under his mouth. A wisp gathers near her jaw, then slips lower before it fades. Steve follows it without thinking, kissing the place where it had been. Another curls at the side of her throat, and he kisses that one too.
The air changes around them. There is a subtle metal taste at the back of his tongue, under the brown sugar of her lotion. By then, he knows her unstable matter does that sometimes, making the room taste a little like a storm cloud trapped indoors.
Steve smiles against her throat, nipping once before he sees a swirl around her collarbone, dipping beneath the neckline of her cardigan.
“Still not hurting me,” he murmurs as the warmth sweeps lower along his waist, popping twice, each burst hot enough to pull a moan out of him before it threads beneath the waistband of his joggers. “Actually,” he says, kissing lower, “it’s being pretty good to me.”
A/N: I wanted to post the outline of part two. It’s filled out, beat by beat. Honestly, it reads like a full story would anyway, just sectioned off and not as polished.
(fem!reader, 8.3k, being watched, obsessive yearning, emotional peak, grief, love love love)
Chapter Eight
1. He’d see her before she see him:
He saw her before she saw him.
He had come back after weeks away, though he had not truly stayed away, only kept himself at a distance. Spring was well along by that point.
He saw her below, hunting again. She killed something, and it upset her as it always did. She knelt with it and cried the way he had seen before.
He watched. He wanted to step in, to spare her, to make himself useful, to answer the part of her pain he still imagined he could answer. He did not.
2. He made a small sound without meaning to:
His boot coming down on a dry stick hidden in grass and snapping it, or his shoulder brushing a cluster of leaves and setting them rustling or a bird startled up from where he didn’t see it, wings breaking the silence.
3. She whirled in a rush and aimed:
He heard her snatch up the bow: the wood of the bow knocking against a stone or root as she snatched it up, the arrow shafts clicking against one another in the quiver as her hand hit for one too fast (she didn’t yank it from her kill), and/or the creak of the bow as she brought it up too fast too.
He went still at once, but he didn’t step out yet.
4. She shot at the tree or boulder hiding him:
She shot at the cover, striking bark or stone near where he stayed hidden.
Then, still breathing hard, she would tell him to come out.
5. He stepped out:
He stepped into her sightline.
She was no longer crying, but her cheeks were still wet. One sleeve was damp where she had wiped at her face, and there was blood on her hands from the animal.
He thought she was angry because he was there. He did not understand yet that some part of it was grief over him.
6. She told him to go away:
She told him to go. Something like: Go away. Run off and hide like you like to do.
7. He stayed where he was too long:
He did not answer right away or move, because there was a tight, sore spot in the center-left of his chest. A clench that squeezed his heart for a few seconds.
Outwardly, he just stood there. To her, it read as the same unbearable refusal she had already suffered from him: not coming when he should, not answering openly, and right then, when he had gone before because she told him to, not going at all.
He saw her anger spike.
8. She came at him:
She stood and came at him quickly. Her tears had started again by then, only a few at first, and she was still breathing heavily. Already wrecked by the animal, then by him.
She shoved him hard in the chest. She wanted him gone, and words had never seemed to do enough.
9. He stepped back with the first shove:
He yielded immediately. He wouldn’t grab her wrists or stop her.
By then she was crying again, blinking through tears, speaking in broken pieces between breaths he could not make out and wanted badly to.
All he could do was keep yielding.
11. She drove him back into a tree:
Eventually, his back would hit the trunk of a tree, and he couldn’t go farther.
12. She kept trying anyway:
She shoved once or twice more, but he could only give as much as the tree let him. He would have given her more if he could.
But there was nowhere left for him to go. The pushing could not drive him into the tree, and it could not make him vanish either.
13. She finally stopped pushing:
Her palms stayed where they were on his chest, flat at first from the shoving, then her fingers gripped the cloak.
He could see the red she had left there from the animal. It marked him. She had marked him.
14. She named one of the hurts:
She would say something like, This is what I didn’t want.
Earlier, she had told him her family could not depend on a stranger. By then it was no longer only meat or winter work. It had become waiting for him, expecting him, being hurt by his absence. Letting him matter without any promise he would stay.
He knew, right then, that was the thing she had feared most.
15. She mentioned Synne first, then her mother:
Synne waiting. Synne asked where he was. Synne was sad when he did not come.
Then her mother. She had never met him, but wanted to. She asked after him often. She had begun to form some idea of what sort of man would do all he had done for a family not his own and ask nothing in return, and she mistrusted that idea too. She wanted to question him, to know what he meant by it.
16. She doesn’t name herself right then:
She talked about what he did to them rather than what it did to her.
She wouldn’t say outright that she had waited too, missed him too, or begun to think he might be theirs for good in some way. That he might, one day, be hers.
But she did tell him she had seen him watching her these last two months. He had not known that. She had kept waiting to see whether he would come to her himself, whether he would stop hiding and make himself known.
Since he never did, it had made her angrier with each day.
17. He would say little or nothing:
He did not defend himself for the watching, and he did not try to soothe her, not knowing what words would do anything there.
18. She got more upset because he still wasn’t giving her what she wanted:
He knew that what she wanted was not an explanation alone. In that moment, she would have taken anything: an answer, a contradiction, a denial, a reason. Just something she could have argued with. Her anger would have answered first to anything he said.
Instead, he only stood there and took it, his eyes dropping from her. When they lifted again, the inner corners of his brows had drawn upward, and his throat stayed dry no matter how many times he swallowed.
19. End of the scene:
She shoved off him, gathered her things, and told him she never wanted to see him again.
Chapter Nine
1. He would be left at the tree:
He stayed where she had left him, his back to the trunk, and slid down the bark.
One hand went to the place where hers had knotted in the cloak at his chest. The blood she had left there smeared into his palm as he rubbed at it, as if he could press the touch of her more deeply into the same place that had ached to hear what his leaving had done to Synne, to the mother, and to her too, though she had not said that part aloud. He would know it anyway.
He did not know the full truth of what his leaving had done to her just yet, only that it had touched her somehow. Her anger showed him that much. He mattered enough to affect her, and he clung to the thought that he lived within her in some way.
For a few minutes, he tried to obey what she wanted. He thought he could let her go, that he could stay away. She had told him to, and he had always been good at listening when she asked something of him.
But he could not. That time, he could not just leave.
2. He rose and went after her:
He could not leave things there, unresolved and unanswered.
He would shrink from speaking of his past, but right then he would have given her anything. If showing her one of the ugliest parts of himself helped her see clearly enough to make her choice, if the honesty of it turned her even a little more toward him than away, he would have done it. Ten times over, if he had to.
And he could not bear not knowing whether she was still crying. He hated when she cried.
3. He would find her at a river:
He noticed the harsh motion of her hands first, the way she scrubbed at the cloth, blood running pink through the current. Her trousers had been spotted through, and she had stripped down to a wet chemise to clean them. She hadn’t gone home.
He understood she had come there for privacy, that she had not wanted her family to see her like that, and he knew just as quickly that she would not have wanted him to see her like that either. He knew she wouldn’t.
4. She sensed him and turned:
He would’ve thought she must have felt him there, or only the fact of being watched, and by then she would have known that feeling too well. She turned fast, and he saw that she was still breathing hard from crying and the cold from the chilly day and water.
As she told him to back off, or go away, or leave, she reached for the quiver, drew an arrow and brought it between them, not on the string/bow.
He looked as the water ran from her where she stood at the shoreline, and as the chemise clung to places he had never seen except in dreams. He felt ashamed that she had been seen by him at all in that moment, under those circumstances. After that, he kept his eyes only on her face.
5. He blurted one of his truths:
Before she could fully drive him off again, he said, “I was made.”
She wouldn’t neatly understand, and/or does not believe him at first.
6. He tried to explain, badly:
Because she does not understand, he would try again. More so in fragments: that he was not born, there was no mother, a man made him, and his body did not do what another body would do. He would make clear that he did not understand it himself. He did not know how it had been possible, or why, only that whatever he was, he was.
He was trying the best he could, but he was explaining the impossible to someone who couldn’t take it in right then. She was too angry, cold, and frightened, which hurt him the most.
So the explanation failed.
7. Silence:
The river kept moving. She was shaking, and he was staring at her.
All he wanted was to be understood, to be believed, to go to her, to close that terrible distance.
But the truth had solved nothing. If anything, he worried it had only worsened things by pushing her further outside anything she had ever known.
He was simply looking at her and wanting her, and wanting to be kept by her, and not knowing how to make any of that real.
8. He asked to show her:
He asked, quietly, to show her. If she could not understand through words, he would give the proof he most hated being reduced to. He would have stripped himself down if it meant she might understand.
She had once touched the seams as if they might give her some answer. He hoped they would then too.
9. He moved to remove his cloak:
At first, she did not seem to understand what he meant. Then she saw his hand go to the cloak and pull it from his shoulders, and she told him to stop.
He did at once, the mantle swinging in his hand.
10. She revealed part of the real wound:
In a breaking, bitter way, she would tell him she did not care what he was.
He had left her confused after the hunters. He had left after letting her see what he was. He would leave after this too. She did not trust him.
None of it mattered if he only came near long enough to wound and disappear.
11. He tried to answer and couldn’t:
His mouth opened, but nothing useful came, so it closed again.
She took that as an answer anyway.
12. She lowered the arrow:
By then she would be too tired to keep holding the line. Her arm came down, but the rest of her stayed rigid.
13. She told him the rest of what hurt her:
She would say, resentfully, that she had been more afraid of losing him than of what she saw his body do. She had thought him dead. Then he lived, and then he left her anyway.
Hearing that, he would feel heat move through his body. Shame mixed with relief, and then more shame for the relief itself. He felt awful for the choice he had made, especially knowing she knew by then that he had never truly left at all. But more than that, he felt his body answer to her care. His heart was beating hard, his palms clammy, and his legs felt restless with wanting to go to her.
He knew then that his leaving had hurt her, and he wanted to promise he would never stray from her side from then on, but he could not promise what he had no right yet to give.
14. She threw the arrow down at his feet:
He would feel that she had said nearly everything by then, and laid it all at his feet. The arrow fell there too, with what remained of her defenses. She had nothing left to hide, and nothing left to hold between them.
15. He stepped over the arrow:
As he stepped over the arrow, he swallowed hard. He took only two steps toward her.
He left the last little distance for her to cross, should she want to. He had to stop himself from asking her to come to him, even in his own head.
16. She wouldn’t step back:
She did not retreat into the water. She looked at him with more in her face than he could know, and he wished he could know it all.
17. He lifted his hand:
He wanted to touch her, though not even he was sure where. Her cheek, to wipe away what the tears had left there. Her waist, to bring her to him and warm her. Just anywhere.
His hand rose anyway, but she looked at it, then back at him. He lowered it to his side.
18. He explained why he left:
He told her he had not wanted stories spreading about her because of him, or her name tied to his. He had not wanted the village tying her to a monster, an unnatural thing.
It was the truest thing he could say, and it was still flawed.
19. She became furious again:
She would be clipped in telling him that he chose for her. Again.
Only then he would start to understand that all his care had run in one direction. He had been careful with her body, with what he touched and what he did not, and careless with the rest. He had still decided what should become of her life, and of his place in it, without asking her.
20. She closed the remaining distance:
She took the last three steps toward him so they were almost chest to chest.
21. She told him she had already chosen:
She said, in substance, that if she had not wanted her name tied to his, she would never have shot at that man. And that she would not have spent all those weeks with him gone wishing she had put the arrow in the man’s leg for what he had done to him.
22. They stared only at each other:
He would have to reckon then with the fact that she had already chosen him in public. She had defended him. She had been angrier for him than he had known.
23. He reached for the hem of her wet chemise:
He gripped a little of the wet fabric a couple of inches above the hem.
24. She caught his wrist:
Immediately, her hand closed around his wrist, but neither let go.
25. He asked the “right” question, finally:
Do I have to go?
He would be aware then that, for all that time, he had not once truly asked what she wanted. He might have asked the same question before, but he would not have kept to the answer in any real way. He would have decided what she felt about him from what she didn't say, and gone back to the shadows.
But after everything she’d said, she clearly did not want him hidden any longer. He did not know whether she wanted him gone from the boreal forest altogether, or only from the fringes of her life.
Only she knew that. He just had to listen.
26. She doesn’t answer:
She turned her head away and looked toward the water, where foam kept catching in the eddies. Or toward the bilberry along the bank where a bee moved through the leaves. He heard the buzzing.
She couldn’t say yes. She couldn’t say no either. She left him in uncertainty for a few seconds.
27. He touched the water on her shoulder:
He reached out and pressed his thumb lightly into the beads of water on her shoulder, where goosebumps had risen. Whether from the cold or from him, he did not know.
28. She turned back and looked up at him:
Her eyes were wide, glassy, and red-rimmed. They went first to his mouth, then followed the seam beside it upward until they reached his eyes.
29. He began to withdraw his hand:
He still did not know what he was allowed, if anything at all. One hand began to draw back from her shoulder, the other loosening from the dripping fabric at her upper thigh.
30. She pulled him into a hug:
She went up on her toes, her arms reaching for his neck until he bent to her. Her hands tangled in his hair as she wrapped her arms around him. She pressed against him, damp cloth soaking into his linen.
31. He went still:
He did not believe it at first. Not after her anger, the accusation, what she had just heard of his making, and his fear of being sent away, which she had not yet answered.
With words, she hadn’t. And he tried not to let himself believe that her holding onto him meant stay.
So he froze.
32. His hands came to her awkwardly:
He placed them at the middle of her back, uncertain, barely pressing down at all.
33. She buried her face in his neck:
Her face pressed into the side of it. He felt the brush of her lashes, the chilly tip of her nose, and the warm air of her breath.
He shivered.
Her hands tightened at his shoulders. She was trying to get closer, and he wanted nothing more than that.
34. He really held her then:
One arm closed around her, his fingers digging into her ribs as he bent down further. The other went to the small of her back, pushing her up into him.
On a shaky inhale, a couple strands of her hair slipped into his mouth. A few tears had slipped from his eyes, and he only noticed when one reached his jaw.
35. End of the scene:
She would say, I want you to stay.
Chapter Ten
1. He hunted for them again:
He brought the game to the agreed place as before, the place where he had always left it with no one there. He expected to leave it and go, as he once had.
2. She was already there waiting:
She stood where he was supposed to leave the animal.
Her being there told him the terms had changed again.
3. They did not speak at first, and the cycle repeated:
He would set the animal down, or hold it a moment before placing it where she could take it.
It became a pattern after that. He came again another day, and she was there again. Hardly any speech. Most times, none at all.
Rarely, a nod, or there, or thank you. Most often, nothing.
4. He noticed the ugly work:
Eventually, after one of those meetings, he lingered.
She would begin the skinning, and he would see the knife go in, the hide worked off, the places where it stuck and had to be cut free. Blood on her hands, blood on her legs and shoes. The hide turned and laid open. The scraping and cleaning after, the part that had to be done before anything could be kept.
He would watch her pinch her mouth, and if the animal’s face happened to turn toward her, she would gently turn it away again.
5. He asked to learn:
He would ask, awkwardly, the next time he came. To bear the part that came after, the one just as ugly as the killing.
6. She hesitated, then agreed:
She’d look at him, give some resistance, then she’d let him.
7. He got things wrong:
He would cut in the wrong place, pull too hard, waste something, grip badly, tear the hide where he shouldn’t, and/or not know how little or how much force to use.
She would get frustrated and take charge, and he found that deeply compelling, and attractive in its own way.
There would be a few times when he did something wrong on purpose, if only to have her correct him.
8. She showed him by hand:
She’d take the knife back, reposition his wrist, guide the angle, use her own hands to show how deep or shallow.
Sometimes she would lean close to do it, her chest against his back or shoulder, her mouth near his temple.
9. The teaching repeated over several visits:
He’d return with more game, she would be there, they’d work, he improved slowly, she still got irritated at times, he still liked her irritation more than he should’ve.
The work became more efficient between them, and a bit more charged.
10. Synne started appearing:
Synne began bursting out whenever she knew he was there. She would appear suddenly and loudly, lean on his back while he worked, talk to him while he skinned or cleaned, play with his hair, and ask questions constantly.
11. She softened more and more:
Her corrections grew less prickly. She would let him continue even when he fumbled, without stepping in, even when he really wanted her to. She began speaking more freely while they worked, and sometimes had to swallow what would have been a laugh at whatever outlandish thing Synne said or asked.
12. One night after he helped, and started to leave:
It was that point just before the midnight sun, when the nights no longer went properly dark.
Before he had gone far, or just as he turned, she pulled him into a hug. He was startled, then held her just as tightly.
That was the first nightly proof that leaving meant only leaving for the night, not forever.
13. The hug became apart of their routine:
Every night after helping, before he went, they hugged.
Sometimes Synne was near and pretended not to notice, though he would hear her giggling. Sometimes the hug was quick, sometimes it lasted longer. At the start, she was most often the one to pull him in first. By the end, it was always him, drawing her into his chest before he left.
14. The season moved toward the midnight sun:
The sky finally no longer went completely dark at night, but stayed washed in gold and red instead. Green had covered the ground and softened it underfoot. Flowers popped up everywhere: yellow buttercups, pink saxifrage, purple heather he wanted badly to pick for her.
15. One night, after the hug, he asked her to walk with him:
They were already holding each other when he asked, quietly and almost shyly, if she would like to walk with him.
It was the first thing he had asked for that was only theirs.
16. She agreed:
Just yes, a little too quickly.
17. They walked under the midnight sun:
They walked in the long, warm light.
Everything felt suspended and a little unreal, as though he had wandered into one of Synne’s made-up worlds, where he felt less monstrous than he was, and wanted there all the same.
18. They sat on a green hillside:
They settled on the grass. She swatted midges away, muttering about them. He noticed and tried to help, uselessly waving a hand near her face to drive them off.
19. Silence first:
They sat a while in silence, and for once the silence felt companionable, though still alive with feeling.
20. She began asking about his background:
Weird, sincere ones that he could tell made her head spin. Like how a man could be made, whether priests would call it sin or devilry or be too frightened to call it anything at all, whether he had a soul, if anything in him remembered before. Whether it was something a man ought to have meddled in at all.
She would ask if he would choose being made, if he had the choice.
21. He answered as best he could:
He explained as much as his past and what little he knew would let him. He would be reserved where Victor was concerned, and he might speak of Elizabeth too.
22. She kept looking at his seams:
At some point in the conversation, he noticed she kept looking over him, her gaze tracing the seams where she imagined they led.
She asked if he would let her see, then faltered when his eyes widened, quickly telling him he did not have to, if he did not want to.
23. He opened his linen:
He told her he wanted her to see.
He loosened the neck ties to reveal the seams of his upper chest.
Inside, he wanted to show her everything, every mark on him, and thought that day might come. In the same breath, he hoped she might one day show him the cuts and nicks on her own skin.
24. She sat in front of him:
She moved to sit in front of him, backlit by the strange twilight, close enough that their knees touched.
25. She traced the seams:
Her fingers carefully traced the seams from his jaw, down his neck, to the middle of his chest, and lower, until she met the fabric that concealed the rest of him.
Every so often, she looked up at him to make sure it was all right, and he would nod each time.
Even though he wanted to hide, to cover himself again, to turn her eyes away, he let her continue. For all that he felt hideous, he wanted her to look at him and keep touching him as if there were nothing in him to turn from.
For a moment, he was something to be wondered at.
26. Her hand moved to his heart:
After tracing the seams, she glided the pads of her fingers up and to the left, placing her hand over his heart.
He felt the difference there, from what was made to what was living.
27. His heart sped up:
His heart beat faster.
28. He placed his hand over her own heart:
He looked at her, at the slow way she blinked at what was under her palm. He wondered if she thought of whose heart it had once been, or if she did not care, and all mattered most to her was that it was his, and that it answered to her.
Rather than deciding what her silence meant, he asked, What are you thinking?
Then, quietly, he lifted his hand and placed it over her heart. And there it was, beating just as fast.
29. End of scene:
She’d say, I was thinking I ought to feel worse over them than I do. The men, I mean. But I don’t. You’re here, and that’s all that matters to me.
After a few uneven beats of his heart, he caressed his thumb over her collarbone.
Chapter Eleven
1. The spruce setup:
He was with RC, Synne, and Marit.
He helped RC and Synne climb a spruce. Synne was the harder of the two to help, having no caution and slipping too often. RC was more careful, and needed less of his attention, though she had all of it anyway. Marit stayed below with her arms crossed.
Once RC and Synne were settled on thicker branches, he climbed to a lower one beneath them, where he could catch either if one fell.
2. Synne started her story:
When everyone was ready, Synne launched into The Archer and the (Im)menagerie Tree.
“Eir cared for two baby hares and one really old sea eagle. Eir didn’t have the special mash that could heal all of them from their magical sickness, and, unfortunately, Sassa-drotting was too busy at a market, buying sedge seeds that grew worlds in each pod, then would be off trying to find the draugr that messed with her fairy rings. The sickness made every living creature grow spots all over them, yellow and green. And it made every kingdom look funny, with silvers whorls and black mist that covered all the delightful parts. It’s called Mottled Malady. The hares and the sea eagle all had it, and so did Eir. Eir scavenged for ingredients she remembered Sassa-drotting using, and went out every day to search tree leaves. Every leaf had a recipe written on its veins.
Runi, who found hurt things, of course, found Eir one fateful day, because she was very sick with the Mottled Malady. When Eir first saw Runi, Eir thought he had another sickness because his skin was more like patchwork, not spots. It couldn’t have been the Mottled Malady, and he was very tall, like a tree. Runi wanted to help Eir cure herself and those she cared for, and Eir only agreed because the old sea eagle was awfully terrified of the color green, which meant it needed curing quickly before it died of fright. Eir and Runi teamed up. Runi took over looking for the recipe, because he could see more leaves, and Eir made him emblems that held off the sickness she thought he had. When Runi brought back recipes for Eir to make, they were helping, not as fast as Sassa-drotting’s one would’ve, but the sea eagle grew less scared and the hares could hop higher. Eir would smile more, and Eir had the prettiest smile in all the realms. Sassa-drotting was sure she’d seen a lemming draw her smile once and dart off, because she then saw one just like it amid hundreds of paintings at a market stall that sold out in four minutes. Eir was never good at stories, and the hares and sea eagle always fell asleep when she talked about starflowers. About how they made pretty crowns with their starlight. The hares already knew that. But when Eir talked about Runi, they all loved listening. Except for the moody hare, who stuck up its pink nose. Eir always spoke about how Runi was mystical, he was wonderful and kind. The other, sweeter and shinier, hare knew Eir thought he was handsome too. Eir always brought up his hair, his long locks that would look lovely with a starflower crown. Some mornings the sweet hare heard splashes of water from the bird bath, but Eir always blamed the old sea eagle, even though Eir smelt way better than she normally did. Once, the sweet hare saw Eir kiss an emblem before she put it in her pocket to give him, but when asked about it, Eir said she was checking it for beak marks. Eir even talked about Runi’s hands three separate times, each about how big they were but delicate too. The moody hare rolled its eyes as the sea eagle piped that Eir had been diving for the same fish and hadn’t caught it yet because she kept pulling up at the last moment, and Eir’s cheeks went red at that.
Then there was one random day when Eir stayed out too late, and the hares and sea eagle were worried because trolls and draugr were known to eat Archers and Captains. When Eir finally came back, she hardly spoke and was covered in sticky redness, which meant no Runi stories. The sea eagle asked if a cat got her tongue, and Eir finally sighed that she was okay. But she wasn’t okay, because then she woke too early and went to bed too late. The Moon and Sun frowned every time they saw her when they rose and set. The hares always had their ears down because Eir had to leave for the recipes again, and they knew it meant Runi was gone. The sea eagle refused to look down at its feathers, petrified to ever see green again. The sweet hare asked what happened, and Eir said his sickness got him. The hare couldn’t believe such a thing. None of them could.
Then one day, Eir was crankier than usual, but she went to bed on time, and actually invited the sweet hare to cuddle her. They all were confused. That lasted for weeks.
At one point, The Sun got annoyed that it couldn't bake its honey cookies to feed the songbirds and hear their melodies, so it puffed its cheeks and blew the whorls and mist away. It took a while, but eventually everything started to return to normal again. Even Eir was becoming more like herself. Then one day, one magnificent day, Runi brought more recipes. Silly Runi hadn't paid any attention to anything but Eir, and even then, Runi must’ve been only looking at Eir’s eyes because he hadn’t noticed she hardly had any spots left. It didn’t matter because to the sweet hare or the old sea eagle, they were glad he was back. The moody hare was too, but it was too busy reading some boring book about a hero and princess, which was absurd when Runi and Eir were way better, and way funnier to watch. Eventually, Sassa-drotting came back and spectacularly bound Eir and Runi to where they always had to be together. That they have to see each other every day or else the spell will cause a fissure in their realm and elves would ride on large frogs to come eat them if they don’t.”
When Synne said Eir liked to talk about Runi’s hair, RC’s cheeks flushed and she refused to look at him. When Synne spoke of the moody hare, Marit huffed. When Synne mentioned the sweet hare, Synne sat a little straighter.
3. Synne demanded judgment:
At the end, Synne wanted to know how good the story was, pleased with herself and expecting admiration.
4. RC would answer first:
She would tell Synne, lovingly, that she had added more than the first time she showed it to her.
That would tell him the story had grown over time, and that there had been private tellings before this one. More than that, it would tell him that RC had always given Synne’s strangeness and splendor room, even without meaning to at times.
5. He answered:
He said it was the best story he had ever heard.
Marit grumbled, Of course he would say that.
6. Their mother called from the house:
She yelled, Dinner will be ready in ten minutes.
7. Marit bolted and Synne followed:
Marit took off at once, and Synne, frustrated at being behind, scrambled down after her, intent on beating her home.
He helped Synne on her way down, getting kicked in the abdomen and shins as he lowered her much too slowly for her liking.
8. RC and he were left alone:
He climbed back into the spruce and stood on a lower branch that brought his face level with hers. One hand gripped the bark near her leg, and the other held a branch above them.
9. She asked about her mother:
She asked if he was nervous about meeting her mother.
He answered with, Yes.
10. She reassured him gently:
She put her hands on his shoulders and swung her feet on either side of him. She told him that as long as he did not knock any turf loose from being so tall, he would be all right.
He said he would fix it if he did, and she smiled at that.
11. He was entranced by her smile:
He reached up and his thumb touched the corner of her mouth.
Her feet stopped moving, and her hands tightened on his shoulders.
She told him that if he wanted an out, then was his chance, because if he met her mother and left after that, she would not take him back.
He said he would not want to be anywhere else. Then he brought their foreheads together.
She rubbed his cheek where his seams were, telling him he had to mean it.
He whispered, I mean it.
12. She brought them back to ordinary life:
She cut the moment by saying they had better go eat before her mother sent Marit out to retrieve them.
13. Climbing down:
He got down first, then helped her on the way down, his hands hovering at her hips while she lowered herself branch by branch, ready to catch or steady her.
She jumped the last part herself.
14. The woods glance:
Once down, she looked toward the woods.
He understood what it meant, and didn’t want her eyes there, on the place where she worried he could disappear into if he ever changed his mind. He wouldn’t. He never would.
Then he thought, suddenly, to copy a gesture he had only ever seen from the outside. A kiss on her cheek. Something sweet, enough to turn her back to him.
So he leaned in, and at the same instant, she turned back.
Their noses bumped, their lips grazed. Both of them drew in a breath at the same time. He went still, and she did too.
For a few moments, they only looked at each other’s mouths. He did not dare wet his lips, though he wanted to, because it would mean his tongue might brush her mouth.
He swallowed, hard enough that he heard it himself.
He apologized then. Because he had meant something much more tender than what happened, he leaned in again, slower that time, and placed a very light kiss on her cheek.
He drew back immediately, afraid even that might have been too much.
Then, before the woods could take her attention again, he reached for her hand, and she was the one who laced their fingers together.
15. He met her mother:
At the house, he met her properly for the first time. Her name was Hallkatla. She was a stern but kind woman, and she unsettled him a little.
She asked whether he always meant to loom in doorways like that, then ushered him in. She told him to sit before he took more than two steps, hunching over so he wouldn’t come close to the turf.
16. Dinner and questions:
They sat to eat, and Hallkatla began asking him questions at once: whether he liked this or that, whether he took tea, how he took it, whether he had somewhere dry to sleep. She wanted to know what sort of man kept returning to a house that was not his. She thanked him for helping them through the winter, then followed it by asking what exactly he wanted from her daughter. That made his heart beat faster.
All the while, she kept nudging the large porridge dish back toward him whenever he emptied his bowl.
He often looked to RC for help. Synne liked to jump in and answer for him instead, handing him her flatbread as she did. Marit, he could tell, was somewhere between dry amusement at his being so at a loss and disbelief that covered whatever anger she still felt over his being there at all.
17. The invitation for tomorrow:
Near the end of dinner, Hallkatla told him he was expected at dinner again tomorrow, then added that he should see if he could bring berries, because RC had eaten the rest. Cloudberries were RC’s favorite, she said, in case he did not know. He did.
18. Family berry chatter:
RC said she would pick them, that it was too much trouble to make him do it and he needn’t. He started to say he would anyway, but Marit cut in to mock her, saying she would eat them all before she got back, and RC scoff-laughed at that.
Synne happily told some incriminating berry story about RC once eating too many and getting sick. Marit laughed and went to add that RC had once eaten four with weevils in them before noticing, then spent the rest of the evening hurling.
RC got the last turn by swiftly turning in her chair to face him and telling him to bring an otter instead, since Marit was scared of those.
19. Marit slipped:
After the joking, Marit turned to him and began to say, Runi, don’t--
But she caught herself, realizing what she had called him, and went back to her food, one elbow on the table, knuckles pressed into her cheek, poking at her barley.
20. RC’s leg under the table:
They sat side by side, her thigh pressed into his without looking at him. He felt it from just above his knee to his hip, and was suddenly too warm and too happy.
21. End of the scene:
He pressed back.
Chapter Twelve
1. The game was proposed:
They were all outside together. It was finally summer.
The game was Smart Goats, Dumb Troll, and Synne was the one explaining, because of course she was, and she announced the rules with too much authority and some embellishments.
The rules:
one person was the troll
the others were goats
the troll had to hide three bells in the trees, far from sunlight
each goat must find a bell
once a goat finds theirs, they would have to ring it
after ringing it, they must run for sunlight before the troll could catch them
if the troll is struck by sunlight, they turned to stone and must freeze for a full minute
if a goat was caught by the troll, it was eaten, lost, and sent back
2. Marit declared him the troll:
Marit cut through the last of Synne’s explanation and told him he would be the troll.
3. He went to hide the bells:
He took the rusty bells into the woods and hid them far from sunlight, as the rules required.
He understood how the darker interior of the woods favored the troll, and how the goats had to risk being heard if they meant to win at all. He understood the thrill in both parts: hiding and seeking, ringing and running. And why girls like those, raised with woods and shadows and all the things that could be lost in them, would turn that into play.
4. He returned and counted to thirty:
He came back, turned to the house, and counted aloud while the goats scattered.
5. The game begun:
He turned and began to search. The woods were full of shadow, with rays of light breaking through the canopy.
By then, the terrain was deeply familiar to him. He knew it was to them as well, if not more so, but he felt as though he knew every inch of that ground. He felt how certain and able he was there, and how much of that certainty came from his size. He did not have to watch every footfall. What lay underfoot snapped or crushed, and he kept moving.
6. He spotted Synne first:
He caught sight of Synne moving through the trees, with a few little hops now and then to make sure he had not hidden any of the bells too high for her to find. He had not.
He did not go after her. Instead, he turned away as if he had not seen. The game would’ve been no fun at all if he played it as a true predator, and the last thing he wanted was to frighten any of them, or strip it of its levity.
He thought Synne must have glanced back over her shoulder, because a muffled giggle reached him as she scurried off.
7. He saw Marit next:
He saw Marit a few minutes after, and just as she saw him too, she slipped into a patch of sunlight before he could snatch her and “eat” her, or before she thought he might.
She glared at him from the light. He could tell from her face that some part of her resented how well he suited the role. That she saw in him exactly the sort of large, dark thing the game had asked for, and could not quite trust it not to turn real.
He only walked past.
8. One bell suddenly rang out:
A bell sounded somewhere in the distance.
A goat had announced itself, and the troll could truly begin to hunt.
9. He turned toward the noise:
He went after it.
He moved fast, but not too fast, only by the logic of the game, because he knew how quickly he could close distance, how large he was in motion, and how little effort it took to overtake.
10. He realized it was her:
He caught sight of her with the bell, swinging from her hand by a blue ribbon as she ran for sunlight. When she turned and saw him, after hearing his steps loud behind her and the twigs breaking under him, she began to laugh. Then the laughter broke into squealing as she ran faster.
11. He paused:
Before he sped up, he slowed for a few seconds, listening to her and letting her get ahead.
He had spent so long thinking mercy only meant sparing another creature by deciding for it. Men killed and called it mercy, men made and called it greatness. He had left meat she never asked for. He had stayed away when she had not asked that either. He had kept choosing under the name of care.
But things were done to him, for him, upon him. Victor made him under the name of brilliance. Victor abandoned him under the name of horror. Victor kept deciding the terms of his existence without ever allowing him any meaningful choice.
And then he had done his own version of it to her.
He has repeated, in love, the same structure of power that wounded him in creation.
He would have told the story differently from inside himself: that he fed her, spared her labor, kept away for her sake. But the shape of it was the same. He had chosen for her because he was afraid of what her own choice might ask of him.
She had always been clearer than he wanted to see. He had been too frightened of her real choices to fully accept them.
12. She chose him anyway:
He watched her, knowing she knew what he could do. That she had felt it already, seen it, and still chose to run. That she had let the game happen. Had let her sisters be chased by him too, trusting he would do them no harm.
She had chosen him anyway. Time and again, she had chosen him.
For once, he was not deciding for her at all. He was inside something she had chosen. So he went after her. He chased her.
13. He caught her:
The sunlight was close, very close. She was nearly there, only a few paces from it, when he caught her by the waist and pulled her back against his chest.
14. She turned in his hold:
She turned toward him while still in his arms were still around her, smiling up at him and out of breath and flushed from the run.
He would say, Is this the part where I eat you?
15. The wind moved through the trees:
A breeze moved through the branches and over them both. She leaned back into it for the coolness, and in that movement her neck was exposed to him.
He heard the words come through her smile, It is.
16. The neck kiss:
He bent and kissed her neck as softly as he could.
To him, that was mercy remade.
It was an apology too, for all the times he had not listened, for all the times he had chosen for her.
That he would listen from then on.
17. Her answer:
When his mouth lifted from her neck, she lifted her head. They looked at each other as she tucked his hair behind his ear.
18. End of scene:
He would still be holding her by the waist, the bell hanging against her, the sunlight was just beyond where she nearly reached, the woods were alive around them; squirrels running above, beetles clicking against bark, and warblers singing.
Winter had led the Creature back, again and again, to a hungry house in the valley and to a young woman at the heart of it. She remade not only what he thought he knew of mercy and restraint, but of desire too, and with it what he thought he knew of himself. Since he was made from the dead, what in him was his, if anything at all, and what was theirs, if not everything? If he could not say where those men ended and he began, then what could it mean to belong to her, or to have her belong to him?
(fem!reader, graphic animal death, hunting, blood/injury, body horror, gun violence, being watched, poverty/starvation, moral quandaries, heated daydreams, slow burn, yearning with no end in sight (obsessive slightly), 26k words)
A/N: This was a labor of love, and I'd truly, with every bit of my heart, appreciate any feedback or just...nice words. :P
Northern Norway, 1858 (One year after the events on Horisont)
A damp rustle in a leaf litter drew his head up.
He knew it couldn’t have been the heavier drag of a fox or elk, or the brisk, chopping steps of a man. It was lighter, close to the ground, scratching through the sodden, rotten layer that smelt of mushrooms and rain.
Another sound followed, one he knew at once: the creak of wood bent under the draw.
That one he knew, so his feet turned toward it before he decided he should've.
The slope carried him down between birches with peeling bark and pines that dripped yesterday’s storm from their needles, the same wet clinging to the fur of his hide. A crow flapped out of a tree somewhere behind him, complaining loudly to anyone who cared to listen. He did not.
At the bottom of the dip, the trees opened up. A woman stood in the middle of it, boots slightly sunk in the wet earth, so still it looked as if the clearing had grown you. A thin coat, sap and old berry juice stained into the front, big at the shoulders, cinched at the waist with a strip of fabric to keep it from billowing out.
You lifted the bow, the arrow nocked and waiting. Face turned toward a patch of ground where the leaves looked like they were breathing, eyes dark ringed and sunken.
The hare’s ears showed first, trembling, testing the cold air as it nosed its way out from the bracken.
He leaned his chest against a tree and watched.
You drew the string higher, until it touched the corner of your mouth. Your hands were raw from the weather, knuckles red and little splits at your fingertips darkened with dirt. The bow didn’t look like much. It wasn’t impressive. Old, likely mended once or twice, but it did what you needed of it. He could just barely see a strain working through your arm, the same tiny shake he’d seen in men tugging heavy nets up onto a quay, muscles wanting to give out long before they let go.
Suddenly, the arrow went. A thrum through air, then a squeal twisted for a heartbeat and stopped.
For a moment, there was nothing, then the forest went on again: branches tapping, the trickle of unseen water, wings somewhere overhead.
All while the hare lay tipped on its side, one hind leg tangled under the other.
You didn’t move the way hunters usually did after a kill. The ones he’d watched lowered their bows quickly, shoulders dropping as the tension left their arms. Yours stayed up a few seconds, then the bow sank slowly, and your shoulders stayed bunched tight. It almost seemed possible you might turn and walk away, leave the arrow and the animal there, to pretend to not have been the one who had done it.
Instead, you went to it.
He slid a little closer, gliding across a slick chunk of mud and ducking under a low pine bough.
As your knees hit the ground, you set the bow aside, reaching for the hare with fingers stiff from the chill. You slipped your hands beneath its furry body, lifting its head, keeping its nose out of the wet.
Its legs kicked once, a last, bewildered protest, and you flinched as if struck. Your mouth shook, bottom lip wobbling.
“I’m sorry,” you whispered.
Your head bowed as one tear dropped straight onto the hare’s flank, beading on the fur before soaking in. Another one, then a third landed on your own wrist and clung there, shining.
He had seen men step over bodies on the floor, kicking limbs aside with the toe of their shoe. Victor had rolled him on the table much the same way, hands going over every seam, testing the joins, snipping away what had gone bad and stitching the skin down tighter without so much as a word.
But he'd left bodies behind him too, and he had never knelt like that over any of them.
You stayed like that for a while, crying and shoulders shaking. As wind combed through the canopy, it sent a patter of droplets down onto your back, but you didn’t seem to notice. You watched the hare go still, and waited longer than you had to, until no more air stirred in its chest. Only then did your hands move again. Fingers found the shaft in its chest, close to where he knew the heart sat, easing the arrow out in short, careful pulls so the body didn’t jerk.
Finally, minutes later, you sniffled hard, wiped your face with the back of your wrist, and looked up. Your eyes were rimmed red, lashes damp and spiky. You didn’t look around, didn’t check the woods.
As far as you knew, only nature was watching. He did not count.
“Thank you,” you whispered, and that was stranger still. “I’m sorry, but thank you.”
He watched you draw in one more breath, watched you tuck the hare into the bag at your hip with a care more suited to a swaddled child. It sagged with that new weight, swaying against your left side.
You took up the bow again and pressed the string with your thumb and forefinger, holding it there as if waiting for it to give way. When it didn’t, you let out a sigh and stepped back into the trees, following the spaces between them deeper into the fading year.
The forest offered him other paths: up ridges, down toward the fjord, along streams soon to freeze…away from you and your single rabbit. Away from a scene that should not have mattered to him.
And still, he went after your tracks.
He learned you by the days that followed. That you came out in the mornings when the light was breaking and cold gold, breath always showing in puffs. Sometimes you walked the same way, sometimes you cut across the slope, heading for the same rocks and rowans each time, though no clear path showed on the ground. The bag at your hip swung loose when you passed him and heavier when you came back. Hares, red squirrels, a grouse once, a fox another day with its red coat soiled and its mouth slack.
Every time, the same pattern: the shot, the tears, the apology.
Far off, in the direction you always returned to, smoke lifted above the treetops on certain days. Once he saw the edge of a roof through the branches. He did not go any closer.
He just stayed amid the conifers and watched when you hunted. He watched your bow arm over the days, saw tremor after tremor, and knew early on that the arm itself was not the problem. Watched your coat grow darker at the cuffs from sludge and blood and handling wood.
One day, when frost had shelled over the leaves, the animal you trailed was already hurt.
You’d gone out earlier than usual; the sky still held the last of night's color, a deep blue not yet brightened by dawn. He followed the same way you always took and found you farther out than he’d ever seen you go. You stood at the edge of a narrow strip of bog, frozen over in milky sheets with reeds sticking through the ice.
He saw what you were looking at when it moved. Across the stretch of ice, a reindeer calf limped out of the far tree line with one hind leg dragging instead of stepping. The fur there was clotted above the hoof from some wound he couldn’t see clearly from his distance.
You shifted your weight, heels punching the crust down another inch, then the arrow lifted.
He moved to a shelf of rock with a clearer view and crouched behind it, far enough that he sat outside the corner of your vision. From there, he watched the calf again, and each time it tried the bad leg, its head dropped with the stumble.
You drew the bowstring back, coming up to the corner of your mouth like before, but your arm shook from the start that time, not after holding.
The calf stopped, nose lifted and ears flicking. It didn't know where you were yet, though it would soon. He waited for the string to go.
It didn't.
It stayed pulled, the arrowhead aimed at the space just behind the reindeer’s shoulder. Your jaw clenched, and he could see your throat move as you swallowed. The tremor in your arm spread to your shoulder, into your back. A breath shot out of you in a rush, fogging the air around your face.
You let the bow sink a little, your aim with it.
Both saw as the calf took another step, lurching, but that time one of the front hooves slid on the ice and shot forward. It flailed, hooves skidding, then it found a rough, icy clump of browning grass and righted itself.
You tried again, and the bow came up slower, string pressing into fingertips gone almost purple. When you drew, the arrowhead danced, never settling where it needed to as the calf had turned a fraction, showing more of its ribs, the hollow along its side standing out.
He remembered hearing it once in a hamlet by the river, after a lamb had taken a hard butt from a ram. There was little to see at first. It only stood there breathing shallow and not moving. A child cried and begged the father not to shoot because it was still standing, still alive, but the man did it anyway, then said it was better that way. That it was mercy.
The child’s pleading stayed in his mind while he watched you keep the bow trained there and not let go as the calf limped on, reaching the other side. It paused under a branch, sides heaving, then it pushed into the wood and was gone.
You stood and watched the gap where it had vanished. The arrow was still in your hand, grip tightening until your knuckles went white.
Then you slid it back into the quiver.
There was no apology that time, not a single tear. Nothing had died for you.
He could see what you had done. What it meant, he could only guess at, and even less what in you had made you do it.
Meat was not an idea to him. He knew by that point there was a house past the trees, with a table and mouths waiting on what you brought through the door. The reindeer’s body could have filled that more than any hare or stringy fox; hide, marrow, fat and organs you and the others could boil down to stretch a broth. One arrow and all of that would have been yours.
Something in you had held your hand back and left you to go without, and he could not tell if that sat easier with you than the alternative would have. He had nothing like it. When his hands had closed around a throat or a spine, they had gone through with what they had started. Meat was meat, and death, for others, was death.
He had never stopped to wonder what that made him.
You turned away from the bog, from the hazy pocket of tracks already fading where the calf had crossed. Your face was hollowed out, eyes fixed on the ground as you walked back the way you had come.
He waited until you were a little way ahead before falling in behind, moving through the darker clumps of spruce.
Surprisingly, you did not take the straightest way back.
Almost instantly, you’d veered off, angling toward a plot of shrubs he had seen you pass by on other days. The start of winter had taken most of the color out of them, but a few red berries still clung there; skins wrinkled and some blackened. You dropped to a crouch and stripped them with quick pulls, thumb and forefinger raking the stems, letting whatever came loose fall into your palm. Good, spoiled, it all went into the bag.
He tracked the sound of you moving; the crackle under your steps, a sniff every now and again, the slight pat when a berry missed your hand and hit the ground. You didn’t go looking for better bushes, you went for every sad cluster you could see.
He thought the heaviness in you might’ve been from the cold, or from what you had just walked away from. He couldn’t tell how much belonged to one and how much to the other.
Men, as he had known them, did not step back from such choices. Victor would’ve made it and thought the making reason enough. Others like him took such things into their own hands and called whatever they did mercy, or necessity, or just sense. They did it to beasts, to the sick, to one another, to whatever life fell into their keeping, as if being men were reason enough.
He did the same thing when he killed. So what was he?
The bad leg would make it slow, the weather slower still. The forest would do its work either way. He almost thought of the animal as spared when you let it go, but the word did not sound right. Spared from your bow, yes. Not from the rest of that place.
You had not taken that right into your own hands. Whether that was mercy or weakness or something else, he did not know what to make of it.
Further on you stopped again, that time near a stump where grass and other hardy growth had knotted itself around the base. You set the bow aside and dug in with bare fingers, prying at the frozen top layer until it broke in plates. Under the moss, stringy white roots showed through. You pulled them out one by one, shaking off dirt, revealing harsh smelling onions that hardly filled your palm.
All of a sudden, you flinched with a hiss, hand flying up.
Blood beaded where a nail had torn loose, and for a moment, he thought you might stop, but you only wiped your hand on your coat and went back to the roots.
When you straightened, the bag had sagged only a little more. Not enough to stand in for the weight of a young reindeer. You slung the bow over your shoulder and kept going, cutting from scrub patch to scrub patch whenever you saw so much as a hint of color.
He followed at his distance, knowing the forest still offered other paths, as it always would. And yet, he only followed the one you made.
The first time he went up to your house, he told himself it was only because he’d killed more than he needed. That the fox was extra meat, and leaving it to rot when there was a door not too far off felt worse than leaving it behind.
He waited until the tallow candles inside had gone out and the column of smoke from the chimney weakened and floated away, the fire having burnt itself down with no one awake to tend it. The house stood in a stretch of forest cut back just enough to make room for it, with open ground here and there between the stumps. Snow crusted the ground, catching what little sky glow there was and showing him where to put his feet. All the while, the fox hung from his grip by the forelegs, body long and lank, and fur brushed clean where he’d wiped away most of the mud.
He stepped out of the darkness and it was the closest he had ever been.
The house was shorter than he had imagined from the bit of roof he’d seen; squat and squared off, logs laid one on another, and the gaps between them packed with clay and moss. A small lean-to huddled off one side, stacked with cut wood in uneven lengths. Everything about it looked like it had been built to sit through the weather and not move. He tried to picture the hands that had done it; one person or several, how many seasons it had taken to haul and fit each piece. Whether the one who had swung the axe still slept inside. Brother? Your father?
He paused at the edge of the property and listened. When he heard neither voices nor clatter, he kept going.
Closer in, he saw a line strung between two poles beside the house. A wool skirt, a blue shawl, and two little shirts no broader than both his hands. All frozen stiff. But nothing there that looked meant for a man.
The door was only a few steps away. Plain wood and an iron latch with no light leaking out around it.
He set the fox down on the threshold, careful to lay it straight, legs tucked. Blood had dried along its muzzle and throat in a crimson crust, so he turned that side away from the crack at the bottom of the door. For a heartbeat, he hovered there, hand on its tail, and almost moved it again, some part of him wanting it to look less like a body and more like…a gift? An answer? A mercy?
It was only meat. That was what he told himself. Meat you hadn’t taken when you could have. Meat for the table behind that door, for the small clothes on the line. Nothing more.
He straightened and stepped back until the shadows from the woodpile took him in. He waited long enough to be sure no one had heard him, that no light would flare up to catch him standing there, then he turned and walked back into the trees.
It was meant to be a one time thing. He decided that as he went, repeating it in his head.
Once.
Because you had let the calf go. Because there was no sense in making you do what he could do himself.
Once.
The next time he left something at the door, the candles were out again, and the clothesline held only your sullied coat, with new streaks along the front. He couldn’t tell if you'd tried to wash the fox innards off and it hadn’t come out, or if you’d just hung it there to dry after wearing it through the work.
He set two hares on the threshold that night. Their limp bodies laid side by side, heads turned in opposite directions so the door wouldn’t open straight onto their faces. Once he had arranged them, he backed away until the yard blurred and then he turned and went.
He never came back either of those mornings to see what you and your family did, how you’d react. He did not want to see how your face might ease at the sight of food that had come from nowhere, how much that would tell him about what you all had left inside. He did not want to see fear, either. At the idea of some unseen hand laying dead things at the door. And he did not want to watch shame pass over you, shame for taking it and for being thankful you didn’t have to loose the arrow yourself.
It was enough to know that by the time he passed that way days later, there was no fox, no hares, no scraps left that he could see. The invisible path you used to walk stayed empty too. When he listened for the sound of your bow creaking, he only heard the forest and nothing more.
After a while, the smaller prey began to feel like not enough.
He brought down an elk cow next, thin over the ribs but more meat than everything he had left before put together, and dragged it to the open spot near the door where you would see it at first light. That one, he thought, would last you and your family a week.
Long enough that he could stay away.
He kept to other parts of the forest for a time. Dales whose snow had never known your tracks, ridges where the wind carried none of the firewood and lingonberry scent he had learned as yours. He walked and ate and slept, and none of it felt right.
Nothing in those woods seemed to have any use for him.
The elk should have been enough. He had meant it to be. But there had not been much fat on it…and little marrow either. Once cut up, once boiled, once eaten down to the bone, it might not go as far as he’d reckoned. He told himself you and your family would stretch it. Told himself people always did. Told himself to leave it be. Still the thought kept after him.
He did not stay away.
The next time he came with something in his hands, it was another fox.
As he set it down and knelt, the fox’s jaw fell open, its tongue slipping out between its teeth. He didn’t like the way it looked, it made the death seem clumsy and careless and undignified. He put his hand under the muzzle and stuffed the tongue back in with his thumb, clamping the mouth shut.
Then the door swung inward while he was still bent over it. He did not move.
“Who--” your voice broke on the first word, then came back pitched. “Who are you? What are you doing?”
The door creaked a little more as you shifted, elbow bumping it wider. He could feel you standing over him, the remaining warm air from the room spilling past your legs into the night. He merely kept his eyes on the orangy fur beneath his hands as he felt a deeper breath try to come, but cut it short and kept his chest from rising.
“Who are you?” you tried again, firmer.
He did not answer. His mind had emptied at the worst possible moment, and his tongue sat heavy and inert behind his teeth. He could feel his mouth open and close once, empty, like the fox’s had been. He shut it again.
For a more than a few second, he stayed that way, gaze lowered. Keeping his face from you a second longer felt safer. Once he looked up, there would be no taking it back.
When he finally lifted his head, he did it in pieces. First, your boots on the threshold, planted hard on the boards, one set back a little, as if you had opened the door without giving up the chance to shut it again. That ought to have been enough. He already knew what the rest of you would say, that you did not want him there.
He should have let his eyes drop again. He did not.
They went higher.
To the coat belted tight over your middle against the cold. To the knife strapped at your hip in case the bow could not be shot in time. To the quiver crossing your chest. You had opened the door expecting danger.
Whatever gratitude the meat had earned, it hadn't earned him welcome.
That should have been where he stopped. For his own sake, and yours. Before he had to see what your face would do when you looked at him. Before you had to watch him see it.
Still they climbed.
He met the point of the arrow.
It sat between his eyes, close enough that one small movement would touch skin. The shaft shook, but not enough to make it miss if you let it go.
Past it, he saw your face at last. Your eyes were wide, the dark in them spread so far he didn’t know what the color of them was, and they moved over him without stopping, snagging here and there on the cuts and seams and mismatched colors in his skin. Not one man’s body, but a gathered thing made to resemble one. He knew what you were seeing. He could feel it in the way your gaze searched him, trying to make sense of one part and then the next.
He looked at you just as hard and helplessly, and got no peace from it. Shock was there, certainly. Fear too, or something near enough to it. Beyond that, nothing he could trust. He did not know if you looked at him and saw only a stranger where no stranger ought to be, or something hideous enough to drive that broken sound from you before you could swallow it back.
He stayed where he was, hands still on the fox. There was nowhere useful to put them. He did not want to reach toward you, and he did not want to leave you defenseless either, not even against him.
Behind you, he barely made out a table, a narrow bed with blankets piled where someone small had turned over, and on the other side a longer figure under a wool coverlet. Your mother, he guessed. None of them knew he was there yet. Only you.
“You have been doing this?” The arrow tip didn’t move, but your fingers shifted on the string. “Leaving these?”
He managed a nod, the littlest he could make it. Any larger, his brow would have brushed the arrowhead.
“Why?” your voice rasped. “What do you want from us? Why would you do this?”
Your jaw was set so tight he thought it might ache later. You didn’t lower the bow as you blinked hard, as if willing your features not to give anything more away.
He wished, suddenly, that his hair had not fallen away from his face so much.
“It was never my wish to frighten you,” he said, his voice coming out rougher than he meant. “I did not come here to harm you.”
Your shoulders jerked at the sound, the arrow dipped, then rose, then dipped once more.
“What, then?” you whispered.
He searched for words, but none of them seemed right: that he had watched you longer than he should’ve, that he had seen enough to know you hunted because you had to, not because killing came easy to you. And that beneath all of it lay the thought that shamed him most; that he would sooner bloody his own hands than watch you do it again, because whatever in you recoiled from it was the very thing he could not stop not stop coming back to.
None of it would come into speech, and, perhaps, it was better that way.
“You had need of meat.”
His answer did nothing to soften your features as your gaze dropped from him to the fox, to the blood at his cuffs, then climbed back again. Those few words had only made him stranger to you.
“You’ve been watching us,” you said. It wasn’t a question.
He could not lie about that. He nodded.
For a few long, erratic heartbeats, both of you stayed as you were, the truth of it between you two.
Then you stepped back. It was hardly any distance, but he felt it all the same. He had put it there. Not only the fear for yourself, but for the others behind you, and for all the hours before when you had walked and knelt and thought yourself alone. He had taken that from you. He could not bear the thought of you carrying him into the woods with you from then on, in every silence, in every turn of your head.
What troubled him was that some part of him liked it though, that you would be thinking of him from then on, as he had so long thought of you.
He did not move, and he knew it was a poor offering beside what he had already taken, but it was what he had left to give you: the choice, such as it was, and the little ground you still held. If you released the arrow, the least he could do was give you a still target and not leave you with something uglier to carry afterward. He knew it would not kill him as you thought it would, and you’d be the one left with the pain of it.
Even then, from where he knelt, he could feel you still choosing. He wasn’t sure whether you balked at the act itself, or only at what it would leave behind: his body at the threshold, the others behind you, the knowledge that you had killed when you need not have.
Then he saw the choosing tip one way.
“Up.” When he pushed his weight off his knees, you added, “Slowly. Get up, slowly.”
He made a point of doing just that, slow and plain before you, giving you no movement you had not asked for. By the time he stood, you had to tilt the arrow back to keep the point between his eyes.
“Step back from the door,” you ordered.
He took a step back.
You just stood there, eyes flicking from him to the forest, to the dark around him, then back to his face.
“Further.”
He did as you asked, until the doorway had taken most of you from him, leaving only your face in the twinkling snowlight before that, too, began to soften into the dark.
“You have helped us,” you said, voice tight. “But you must not watch us anymore. Do not follow when I go out. Do not come near the yard.”
You were drawing a line, and he knew he had no right to cross it.
He forced himself to nod.
“Do not leave…” you gestured at what lay between you both. “Do not leave dead things at the door. My family is uneasy enough over what has been left already. I will not have them made afraid, and I will not have them begin to depend on a stranger.”
Uneasy.
His gaze dropped, and for the first time he thought of the hours between finding the meat and eating it: the looking at it with doubt, the question of whether it was safe, whether it ought to go near the table at all. Whether you had put it to your own mouth first before letting the others touch it.
Hidden or not, he brought fear to your door.
“Say you will not,” you insisted. “Say you will stop.”
He hesitated. The thought of going was one thing, but the thought of being sent was another. To stop meant being shut out of the one corner of the world he had come to look for. It meant giving you back to the woods entirely, and going with nothing of you but memory.
Some things might fade in time: the path to the house, the roof through the branches, the sound of you moving in the brush, but not you. It seemed only fitting that what would stay sharpest should be the thing he was made to leave behind.
“I will stop," he said at last. “I will not watch. I will leave nothing.”
Your shoulders eased a bit, and the arrow dipped from his face to his chest.
“Go,” you whispered.
He looked up once more, trying to find your face in the pale wash the ground gave back, but the dark had finally taken it from him completely.
As he turned toward the trees, he left the real you at the door and made another to carry away with him: the bow lowered, your hand in his, your steps beside his into the woods.
He let himself keep that, and no more, as darkness consumed him.
The worst of the winter seemed to arrive all at once.
One week the snow was something he could push through, the next an icy crust had formed over packed snow beneath, cutting at his shins when he broke through and holding his weight only when it pleased.
Streams froze over, and the sky forgot how to be anything but one unbroken cloud over the trees.
He moved as much to keep his limbs from stiffening as for any other reason. When he stopped too long in one place, the cold climbed him, starting in his fingers and toes and working its way inward. So he kept going, over ground he did not know and past glazed cliff faces, killing what he needed, cracking it open, eating, then moving on.
There was nothing in any of it that asked him to remember.
But when the wind found a way in under his furs, he wondered what such cold must do to your hands, your feet, the skin of your face. He did not always stop it there.
On bad nights, when the frost burned enough to bother even him, he let his thoughts go where he ought not to, if only because they heated him. Sometimes too much. He pictured you finding your way under his cloak with him, inching close. Your feet worked in between his calves for warmth, and your face tucked beneath his jaw, breath tickling his throat. In those scraps of fancy, he always went still at first, then your hand would skim down the front of him for his own as you nestled in, and the thought of that alone was enough to send him sitting upright in the dark, wrenching his cloak loose to let the cold in. It did little to help.
After thoughts like those, he thought the distance between you two was for the best.
He kept his promise and didn’t go back to the valley. When hunger drove him out to hunt, he went deeper instead, further away.
There, among blood and solitude, it was easier to remember what he was.
A reindeer had passed hours before, light enough on its feet that it had barely broken the top layer. He followed the scuffs anyway. He brought it down near a stand of scrub. It tried to break away on the ice, slipped, and that gave him the opening he needed. His arms closed around its neck and he held on until the kicking stopped. When it was still, he let it down and rolled it so the ribs showed.
The knife he’d taken off a dead man months ago went in at the chest, steam rising in clouds that smelled of stomach. He cut what he needed into long pieces he could carry, then slit the belly wide so the rest lay open. Wolves would come, along with foxes and ravens, hopping and screaming around the soaked patch. Leaving what he did not use where the forest could reach it felt, in a tiny way, like something you might respect him for.
He was bent over the animal’s side, hand buried up to the wrist in warmth, when he heard it.
A bow being drawn did not make much sound, but he heard the creak, and a scarcely audible inhale. Every hair along the back of his neck prickled, but he did not turn immediately.
He listened, and the forest said nothing useful. Not a single branch had betrayed a step, and in that pocket where the wind hit less brutally, it brought him no scent at all. Even if it had, the reek of the fresh kill under him would have drowned it.
“Do not move,” you called out, the cold air having dried and abraded your voice.
He took his hand out of the reindeer, slowly, and let it hang at his side.
Snow crunched under your boots as you came closer, then you appeared between two knotty young pines, coat drawn so tight it must’ve pinched your skin. Frost had got into your hair and eyelashes, and stuck there in little white specks. An arrow sat on the string, the head trained on his chest from a few paces off.
He stayed kneeling by the carcass.
“You should not be this far from your house,” he said, eyes on you as you stepped closer again.
“I know,” you glanced back once, as if your home might still be visible to run toward. “But I had to see if I could find you.”
Find him? He quickly wondered if it was to ask him to hunt again, perhaps, if the woods had been giving you little, as they had him on some days. Or for some other work, if you had been hurt and could not manage it yourself. His eyes went over you before he could stop them. You stood sound enough. No limp, no arm held close or bandaged, no blood that he could see. Then his mind betrayed him with the thought of you asking him in and out of the cold. He hated the thought at once. It was not that.
But if you had hunted him all this way, it made a kind of sense that you had come to put an end to him, to whatever he was. To stand in the open with no witnesses at your back and send the arrow where you had once held it.
He did not move.
More than once, lying beneath a rock or under the bole of a tree, he’d thought of you letting the arrow fly. Of the jolt of it going in. Of the mark it would leave. You had sent him away, and the ache of that had stayed in his chest ever since with nowhere to show for itself. An arrow there would have given the pain a place. He could have pointed to it and known what it was for.
“If you have come to kill me, come closer,” he said. “The wind is strong.”
“I am close enough,” you stated as a flake landed on your cheek and melted. “I did not come to kill you.”
His stomach dropped. If not that, then something had happened at the house. For one terrible instant, he saw a spade hacking at frozen ground and getting nowhere, a shrouded body laid beside earth too hard to open. He had seen how men buried their dead, and knew his own hands could force where yours might not.
You sucked in a breath and let it out warily. “I have come to ask for your help.”
His eyes went to your face as he searched it for grief, for some sign that one of the people in your house had been taken from you. He had seen you weep over dying animals, but he could not make himself picture what sorrow would do to you if it were one of your own.
“Tell me,” he said. Whatever it was, he would do what you asked the moment you named it. “What do you need of me?”
Your arms must have been screaming from holding the draw, because you let the string slip back a thumb’s width, then another, until the arrow pointed at the ground near his right leg. Your shoulders sagged.
“My mother is in a bad way,” you started. “She was always… she has never been strong, not since I can remember, and this winter has taken what she had.” Your gaze flicked to his bloody hands, then back to his face. “There is hardly anything left in the house. A few rotten potatoes. Bark. Water with spruce needles in it. She coughs until she cannot breathe, and there is nothing in her bowl that puts anything back into her. We have done what we can with what we had, and now…” Your mouth tightened. “Now I fear she will not see the spring.”
Things at the house must have worsened enough that staying by the bed had begun to feel useless, that watching was no longer enough. You’d come to him because you were trying, in the only way left to you, to keep your mother alive.
“You want me to hunt for your mother.”
“If you are willing,” you stepped closer. “I know I have no right to ask it of you, but I have found almost nothing in the valley. My sisters must eat, and my mother…” you swallowed. “I do not wish to sit and watch her starve.”
He stood, though you had not told him he could. You didn’t lift the bow again or tell him to stay down, but you did flinch ever so slightly.
“I would not see her come to that,” he said. “I would not have that for any of you.”
He tried, for a moment, to measure your fear for your mother against the nearest thing he knew. Victor came to him at once, and with him the old wanting; to be looked at and not seen as an error, to be wanted by the one who had made him. And with that, the pain of how late it had all come.
He had to let the comparison go before it could take him any further.
Your gaze dropped to the reindeer. “You can range farther than I can, bring down larger game, a-and…” Then your eyes flicked quickly over the breadth of him before you looked away. “You are better made for it.”
He had meant to leave the thought there, but then you said ‘better made.’ He wondered how you knew he had been made at all, and why you had said better. As if there were such a thing as a better making, as if chosen parts could add up to a better life, as if Victor’s hand had improved anything by assembling him.
For a second, he felt himself judged as workmanship.
Then he looked at you properly, and you had folded in on yourself and were starting to shake where you stood, waiting for his answer while the cold stung.
You meant his frame, his size, his strength, only that he could bear what was already wearing you down.
“I will help.”
He could not mend your mother’s lungs or put back what winter had taken from her, but he could put meat in the house. He could buy you all time with her, and time was not nothing.
“We have little, but I can skin what you bring, tan the hides, make you something from them. I can sew. Your covering…” Your eyes flicked down the front of him and back up. “It could be patched, or you may keep the furs yourself and I will do the work.”
“You would work for me in return,” he said, not a question.
To hear that you would spend those hours on him made any finer covering seem a poor thing beside it.
More white showed around your eyes. “I did not mean…I would make it for you. Mend it. Not--I would not be working for you.”
“Keep them,” he said. “I do not ask that of you. The cloak serves well enough as it is.”
A crease dug itself between your brows. “What would you ask for, then?”
He did not like the thought of you giving those hours to something that already served well enough, when what he wanted was not the making or mending, but the hours themselves, and that was not something he could name aloud.
He watched you shiver violently since the bow was no longer drawn to keep your muscles tight. You reached into your sack for your mittens, fingers clumsy from the chill, with eyes that never quite left him.
“Only to help,” he said at last. “Nothing more.”
To be of use was what he’d wanted from the beginning, and right then you were offering him the chance to be that much without blighting it. He would still be kept to the edges, he knew that. Still outside. But not, perhaps, as something ominous there.
You stared at him, searching his face as if there had to be more to it than he had said.
“I cannot just…” you broke off, jaw working. “If you bring so much, there must be something you would have. I cannot take from you for nothing.”
He tried to hold onto the simplest meaning of your words, and tried not to think that you might care, even a little, whether he went with nothing. He knew better than to trust such a thing, but knowing better did nothing to make it leave.
“You owe me nothing,” he said, then paused. “Why must it be made even?”
You blinked at him. “I…” Then looked away. “Because otherwise it would feel wrong.”
“It does not feel wrong to me,” he said.
Neither of you said anything more as the blizzard began to stir. As your teeth clicked together, he glanced down at the carcass between you two, a flurry of snow starting to cover it.
“We will begin with this one,” he gestured toward his former meal. He bent, gathered the strips he had cut for himself, and held them out between you both. “I had cut these for myself,” he said. “Take them.”
Your hand lifted, then faltered.
“No,” the word came out squeakier than you seemed to like, so you cleared your throat and tried again. “No, it is yo--”
“I have eaten already,” he stated. “You would not be taking from my mouth.”
Your gaze dropped to his mouth at that, then lifted slowly back to his eyes. “Then…all right,” you said quietly. “Thank you.”
You came to him in cautious steps, and he kept very still, lowering his head a little and holding the strips out, doing what he could to make the bulk of himself feel less. At the last moment, you tugged one mitten off and reached toward his palm, then paused and looked up at him as if to make sure. He nodded once, and only then did you take the pieces one by one, careful not to touch his skin.
“The rest will go to your house,” he said as you stepped away, closing the bag at your hip.
“The rest?” you asked, squinting against the falling flakes. “You cannot mean to bring all that back as well. The gully is bad enough, and the fen…” You nipped at the chapped skin of your lower lip. “You have already given enough.”
“I will manage it," he assured you as he went to the dead animal.
His hands closed around the reindeer’s forelegs, and he leaned his weight back, testing it once. The body lurched across the crust, leaving a streak where the hide scraped the snow.
Your hips tipped a little, the start of a turn back toward the way you came, then squared off again toward him. He wasn’t sure what kept you there when so much waited for you elsewhere.
He only knew his heart had begun to strike harder, and that he could not stop noticing the way you held yourself against the cold. More than once, in the space of a breath, he wanted to strip off his own cloak and put it around you. But he knew better. The smell of it, the sight of him removing and offering it, would likely drive you away instead of warming you.
And what shamed him was how quickly he accepted the thought that you might go on shivering, so long as you went on staying by him.
As he started the drag, you took a step as if to go to the other side, then stopped yourself, hands clenching and spine straightening.
“I suppose I will go ahead,” you said tentatively. “So you know where to go.”
He knew he wouldn’t anyway. The path from there to your home already lay clear in his mind: down through the gully you mentioned, past the snagged fir that leaned over the rock, across the bog where the ice sounded hollow in certain places. Snow could cover prints, wind could shift drifts, a tree could fall and change the look of a turn, and he would still know where your house sat.
Yet, he only nodded.
When he pulled, the dead weight made him slow. Within a dozen steps you were already a little ahead of him, picking the way between shrubs and frosty heather clumps. Every so often you looked back to be sure he was still there.
He met your glance once, the second time, then kept his eyes on the ground after that. It was enough to know you looked back for him at all, though he did not let himself ask how much of that was for him and how much for what he hauled.
Even when he looked down, he still saw you ahead of him at the edge of his vision. He could not help watching the way you moved across the terrain. Once, when a fallen trunk lay across the narrowest part of the path, you did not ask him to stop. You put your shoulder to the lighter end and shoved until it rolled just enough for the reindeer to clear. The movement pulled your coat tight across your back and arms, showing the strain before the fabric loosened again.
He found he liked watching the way you set yourself against whatever stood in your way.
Once the thought came, unbidden, of how that same resolve might look if ever it were turned on him. He did not have to think long to know he would yield to it, to you.
He left the reindeer in the yard the way you’d pointed out to him, near the stacked wood and the trampled path.
After that he kept to the trees again, and from there, he let the carcasses speak for him, and what they said…he did not know.
Twice since then, he had hunted for you and your family. Once a lean reindeer that had strayed downhill and once a boar that had rooted too long in the same patch. He dragged each kill to the line where the coppice gave way to stamped down snow, left it there, and stood back among the trunks until the door opened. Sometimes it was you alone, sometimes a smaller shape or two with you, one of your sisters in a big shawl. You all would come out with hooks and rope and a battered sled, and he watched your breaths fog the air.
He listened for the cough you had spoken of and did not hear it, but that told him nothing. It could have meant your mother slept easier, or that you had bundled her further from the door with new hides and furs. Or it could’ve meant she was too weak to make a sound at all.
More than once, as he stood with his hands empty, the same words climbing up his throat: How is she? Has the meat helped? Have I helped? They seemed simple enough, but each time he pictured your face turning toward him with surprise, fear, or even anger, and the words slid back down again. What place did he have, a thing who came and went with dead animals, to ask after a woman’s chances at another spring?
So he went on as before; he walked, he killed what he needed, and he left what he could spare. The valley sat behind him most days, a pull he ignored by setting his feet in the opposite direction.
Late one evening, when the light had started to ebb, something moved under a dwarf birch. At first, he took it for a lump of packed powder rustled by the wind, then it stirred again, and he saw a white bird hunched there, feathers fluffed as far as they would go. One wing stuck out from its side at the wrong angle, dragging a line when it tried to hop away.
When he stepped closer, it panicked, beating its good wing, the broken one flapping uselessly. It managed two lunges before one foot slipped. It went down on its breast, beak opening and closing. His hand reached out, catching it around the body. The bird fought, claws scrabbling against his palm, heart battering against the callus at the base of his thumb.
He could end it. The meat would not be much for him, barely a mouthful. Or he could set it down and let the night do what the forest would.
But, right then, with the bird in his hands, there was suddenly at least something easier to ask you about than how your mother was.
So he shifted the bird in his hold and tucked it against his chest so the wind would not strip what heat it had left, then he turned his back on the distant ridges and started toward the valley again.
You were already in the yard when he came out of the trees, and for once, he saw you before he saw the door. You stood near a frame leaning against the wall, a hide stretched over it. One hand worked a dull scraper along the flesh side, pushing up curls of frozen scrap that dropped by your feet. Your shoulders hitched with the motion, and each stroke made a wet sound.
He stopped where he always did, at the edge of what belonged to you and your family, then he stepped forward, and your hand stilled. You must've heard the snow under his boots, or perhaps you knew the way he sounded on it.
For a moment, you stayed with your back turned, then you straightened the rest of the way and faced him. The scraper hung from your fingers.
“Why are--” you stopped, looking around. “Is something wrong?”
You had not sent him away. Still, standing there, he could not help but think he had come to you with little more than an excuse; a small broken thing with no use to the table and no certainty it would live.
“I found this,” he said anyway, lifting his arms so you could see what he cradled. “I did not know what should be done with it.”
“Oh,” you frowned, trying to make it out from where you stood, then the bird moved, and you took six steps across the snow. “It’s hurt? What happened?”
He thought you meant him, that you had looked at the bird in his hands and seen only what damage those hands might have done. The thought made him hunch over it more closely instead, shoulders rounding as he lowered it between you two as you approached. Under your gaze, the tips of his fingers prickled where they curved around its body, suddenly aware of how plainly you could see the care he was taking not to injure it more.
“I found it this way,” he said too quickly. “The wing was already broken.” As you crouched a little, he looked down at you, at the crease between your brows as you squinted over the wing without touching it. “I did not know whether to leave it or end it.”
He had taken it up with death already in mind, and still the first thing he saw in it was where it might take him.
Straight back to you.
“It might not come to anything,” you said. “But it is here now. We can at least try.” You wiped your hand down the side of your coat without looking at the smear it left. “Come,” you nodded toward a stump near the wall. “Sit there.”
It wasn’t meant as a seat, but it would do. He went where you gestured and lowered himself until his knees bracketed the wood. The stump hardly reached the middle of his shins.
For a few seconds, you only stood there, looking at the ptarmigan as it squawked in his lap. The pause stretched long enough that he began to wonder whether you were thinking better of it.
Then you moved, first to the woodpile, where you rummaged through the kindling until you found two straight scraps of wood no thicker than a finger. From the wall by the door, you took down a rag hung from a nail, stiff with old grease, and tore a strip free with your teeth before coming back.
“All right,” you murmured, looking down at the bird. “We will see what we can do.”
Your gaze then slid to his legs, to the way his knees rose on either side, and briefly hesitated. Then you stepped in and folded yourself down into a squat a little farther back than was easy, close enough to reach the bird only when you stretched out your arms.
He made himself breathe smaller, with shallow breaths that didn’t push his chest so far over you.
“Hold it here,” you whispered, reaching for the bird. “Wait, no--not on the bone. Let the wing hang free.”
He caught only bits of what you said. His heart was going too fast, the pounding of it filling his ears. Heat gathered under his skin until he wanted to squirm from it, though he held himself rigid where he sat and in his grip.
He did manage to catch your huff before you set the slivers of wood down by his foot, and your hand came over his, pressing at his thumb, then his forefinger, moving them off the break. The ptarmigan wriggled, but he hardly felt it. What he felt was your skin on his; the warmth, the roughness at your fingertips, and the astonishment of finding your hand over his at all.
A shiver went through him before he could stop it.
You froze, then looked up at him for the first time since you’d knelt.
“Sorry,” you said hurriedly. “You were holding it in the wrong place. It would have hurt it more.”
“No,” he said, the word raspier than he meant. “It is all right. Go on.”
He forced his hand to loosen, letting you fully move his fingers where they needed to go. Your touch stayed longer than it had to, and the slight drag of your scabbed cuts against the ridges of his scars seemed to linger after your hand ought to have left him. For one unguarded instant, he found himself wanting to know how that same touch might feel elsewhere; up the length of his arm, over his shoulder, across his back--
He stopped the thought there. Seeing the seams was one thing, feeling them under your hand would be another.
“That’s it,” you murmured as your touch retreated. “Do not let it twist.”
You eased the broken wing out, feather by feather, until the joint showed. He watched your thumbs find where the bone had slipped, watched the careful pressure as she coaxed it back into place. The bird thrashed once, then sagged. Your knuckles brushed his again as you laid the first splint.
“You have done this before.”
“A few times,” you answered without looking up. “A dog we had once, after it broke its leg chasing deer. My sister’s wrist, when she fell out of a tree. My own finger too. I set it poorly the first time and had to do it again.”
You wound the strip of rag around the wing in careful turns, drawing it snug, and the bird let out a shriek. Your nose scrunched before you could hide it.
His head tipped a little. “How did you?”
“Break it?”
“Yes,” he said.
He watched your thumb smooth the feathers back over the splint.
“Cutting wood,” you replied, mouth pulling to one side. “I swung badly and hit the block wrong.”
He tried, then, to picture another pair of hands at the woodpile, larger ones closing over yours on the axe haft to show you where the blow ought to land. But the question of who had taught you did not feel like his to ask, so he let it be.
You bent closer, head cocked, two fingers feeling under the feathers. “Still warm,” you murmured.
He did not know what warmth you meant. He found himself leaning after you, trying to see what your fingers had felt beneath the feathers, what you had learned from that touch alone. In the narrow space between you both, he forgot the size of himself, and his forehead knocked into yours.
He flinched, and his hands clenched on instinct.
Right as you pulled back, one hand flying briefly to your forehead, the ptarmigan lurched in his hold, good wing flailing as it screeched. He opened his mouth to apologize for the knock, but before the words could come, the bird released a hot, foul smelling mess into the fur in his lap.
He drew it away from himself, face tightening as he felt the mess begin to soak in. You grimaced too, though only for a second, the skin around your eyes crinkling before you reached for the bird.
“Here,” you muttered, sliding your hands under the ptarmigan. “I will put it inside by the stove. My sisters can watch it.”
Only when you stood, and the door had shut behind you, did he look down at the filth.
He got to his feet. The stink rose off the fur and into the back of his throat, rank enough that he nearly coughed. He swallowed it down and stood there as the mess began to skid lower. Whatever had been between you two a moment ago was gone now. You'd gone inside with the bird, and he could not see why you would come back out.
He had almost let himself believe he was not frightening you, then the bird panicked in his hands, as if something always must.
He turned toward the forest, back where he belonged. Unseen and easy to forget, where no one had to see what he had made of things, or smell it on him.
The latch lifted abruptly and the door swung inward, then shut just as fast.
“Where are you going?”
Your voice stopped him, and he half turned back. You stood in front of the door without the bird, wiping your palms on a clean rag. Your eyes went to the front of his cloak, then caught on the way he had folded the hem up over itself, covering the soiled patch so it would not drip onto the ground by the door.
“You cannot walk around with that on you,” you said, a little too briskly. “If you take it off, I can clean it.”
He only looked at you for a moment, then let his gaze drop.
“It is my doing,” he muttered. “I should see to it myself.”
The thought of you cleaning it from his cloak shamed him more than the odor. You had already had to correct his hands once, to move them off the break because he was too distracted to mind where he held the bird. Then he had clenched and scared it. If you washed the mess from his cloak, you would be touching the proof of what his hands were like.
Foolish as the thought was, he thought it anyway, that you might look at what his hands had done and know they would never be tender with you.
And if he could not keep his grip gentle on something so small and already hurt, then what business had he imagining those hands on you?
You switched the rag from one hand to the other, teeth biting on your bottom lip. He thought you might argue. Instead, you stepped back, unlatched the door, and dipped inside, hooking your fingers under something hanging on a peg within.
When you stepped out again, you had a folded pelt over your arm, fur showing through the turns. He knew instantly what it was.
“I was going to ask you to try this,” you said, eyes on the bundle instead of his face. “Not…not like this.” You picked at a loose stitch with your nail. “Not with that on you.” You shook the hide out with a snap. Stitches showed along one edge where you had shaped it, coarse seamwork meant to sit on the shoulders. “If you leave your cloak, it will dry better here than it will on your back. You can wear this until you come back for it.”
You looked up then, as if to check he was still there and listening.
“It is from your reindeer anyway,” you added. “I know you said you did not want skins, but it did not seem right to keep all of it. My sisters helped scrape it. We thought you should have something of it that stays with you.”
He could only stare as the words went in one after another. By the end, he felt hot all over. You'd thought of him in his absence. More than that, you had looked at him well enough to shape the hide for his frame, broad across the shoulders. He took a step toward you, drawn by the fact that you stood there shy with it in your arms, offering him something made for him and no one else.
His fingers went to the fastening at his throat, less nimble than he wanted them to be. The clasp fought him, then thankfully gave, and he dragged the cloak off his shoulders in one heavy pull. You stepped in to take it, catching the cleaner corner between your fingers. The stench caught you on inhale, and you let the breath out again a little too fast before smoothing your face.
“I will rinse it in the basin,” you said, nodding toward the rusty tub under the eaves. “The wind will do the rest.”
Before he could say ‘thank you,’ or find any words that seemed enough for what you were giving him, you laid the dirty covering over the stump and held the hide out to him.
He took it in both hands and only held it there a moment before lifting it higher to look at. The fur was darker and shorter than his other one, and the flesh side still held some stiffness from not yet being worn in. His thumb found the seam where you had joined two pieces and traced the puckered line of the stitches.
“Do you not need it?” he asked.
You shook her head lightly. “No, it is for you.”
Warmth clung to the coat from where it had rested over your arm, and he held it a little tighter.
Then the question he had been afraid to ask came out at last.
“Your mother,” he said. “If she is not better, should it not be for her?”
You glanced over your shoulder, as if you could see through the logs to the bed. “She is…a little better,” you admitted. “She sleeps more and is not always coughing. Yesterday she finished her broth and then asked if I would make it thicker, more like stew.”
On your way to the tub, you gathered his old cloak up and pushed it down into the water with both hands. When you spoke again, it was to the wet material and not to his face.
“She knows it is not from my bow,” you said. “She asked, and I couldn’t lie to her. She said I was to tell you that she is thankful.”
You stood and brushed the water from your palms onto your skirt. The wool there was thinned, and the hem uneven where strips had been cut from it and sewn back in elsewhere.
You let out a breath that smoked faintly in the cold. “I am too,” you murmured. Then you turned back to him. “So, no. She does not need it. It is yours now. Whether you keep it is your choice.”
He knew he was doing it when he stepped toward you, knew too that he might be asking meaning from things too tiny to bear it. You did not back away. Your throat moved once in a swallow, but your boots stayed where they were.
“Thank you,” he said, keeping his voice low.
With another step, he was close enough to see how your lips had split in the cold. Your tongue flicked over a cracked spot, and heat flooded him so suddenly he became too aware of his own body, of breath and blood and the space he took up before you. All the tenderness he had already begun to imagine living in your mouth, if ever it were turned wholly to him.
He had to drop his gaze, then busied his hands with the mantle, dragging it up around his shoulders. The inside was cold against his neck at first, and he scratched at the place where it wanted to chafe.
When he looked back up, your eyes were searching his face. Then they dipped to the way it sat on him, and back again. He could tell what you were looking for, whether he liked it, whether it pleased him. He did like it, too much. He liked the idea that you may have drawn the hide over your own shoulders once the work was done, if only from curiosity. It would have gone over you in a sweep, too broad and too long, the dark fur falling heavy and trailing at your heels. It would have swallowed your figure and left him to imagine the shape of you somewhere within, a shape he had learned too well over the passing months.
More troubling was how much he liked the thought that you might have used it. Whether you had slept with it near her, or under you, or wrapped in it through some bitter night. He could not warm you; he did that only in his thoughts. But perhaps the hide had. Something that had come to you through him had lain over you and held back the cold.
The thoughts were bad enough when he was alone with them, but in your presence, they made it hard to meet your eyes.
His gaze slipped toward the dusky woodland. “I should go,” he said. “It is late.”
From inside, he heard a burst of pitched laughter. A girl’s voice, one of your sisters, began to sing, words he did not know, the rhythm of it broken by giggles. He pictured the ptarmigan on the table, their hands smoothing the feathers down along its back.
Suddenly, remembered he had not asked after it since you took it inside.
“The bird…”
The corner of your mouth lifted a little. “My sisters are fussing over it already. We will do what we can for it.”
He had come to you with something he thought would soon be dead and had not thought much past that. But he had not expected you to try. Perhaps you would have helped the calf, if helping it had not meant bringing a sick animal home to hungry stomachs. Perhaps right then, with food in the house, a hurt thing could be met differently.
Or perhaps he still did not understand what had governed either choice. He could not tell.
“I--thank you,” he said again, hoarser than before, and drew the new fur a little closer around himself as he stepped back from the door. “Good night.”
You looked as if you might say something more, but then only nodded. “Good night.”
With a turn he went toward the forest, boots creaking on the sparkling crust. The melody inside faded behind him, but the sound of it, and the feel of the hide, went with him into the dark.
The fire he’d built was small, fixed in a hollow where the wind only came through feebly. Flames chewed at the sticks he fed them while smoke folded up into the branches, losing itself among the lichen and frost. He held his hands over the heat until feeling came back in like needles, the numb places waking up in pieces.
He ate sitting close to the flames, turning each strip on a flat stone set at the edge of the fire before tearing into it. The meat was crispy, leaving grease all over mouth and on his fingers.
There was plenty for him, and more tucked away in a pocket beneath the rock overhang for later. He thought of carrying some down to your house, but he had only just hunted for you and your family two days ago.
He had meant to ask about the bird as well, only the answer had shown itself that morning.
When he dropped the two hares at the place you both agreed on, he saw your younger sisters in the yard, bundled against the cold and chasing each other through the snow. The smallest bent herself forward with the ptarmigan perched on her back, arms spread wide as she ran, making little banking turns as though she were its wings.
And there, by the house, he saw you with your head down and your stiff fingers at the front of your coat, working at one of the buttons that would not go through, then you tried another and another, until you gave up and let your hands fall.
He tore off another piece of meat as he kept thinking of the buttons and how he might have tried them, one by one, to prove to himself that his hands could be gentle.
That he’d bend over and fasten them with care enough not to snap the thread or send a button skittering. The first two would take work, the buttons so tiny beneath fingers too large for them. He would have to pinch each one carefully and find the hole more by feel than sight, leaning back in his crouch for what little light there was. As he’d go higher, your breathing would begin to change. With each breath you let out, the wool would move against his knuckles over the curve of your breast, and he would feel it every time while he tried to keep hold of the button. Once it would slip from him, then again, and when he pressed in too hard, trying not to lose it, your hand would come over his wrist.
He had to stop. He had only meant to fasten the buttons, to do some small thing carefully, and no more. But by the end of it, he could think only of you stopping his hand, and of wanting to flatten his own there, to feel the beat of your heart beneath it, and to look up at you as he did. To find it racing under his palm, to see your eyes wide. He could not let himself imagine it as anything but fear at such a touch from him.
Because he could not have looked up, seen your lips parted as if to say keep going, and gone on calling it fear.
He held one hand above the fire until a flame licked the inside of his wrist. The sting scattered the thoughts. He was glad of it.
Then something moved; a swish of branches being nudged aside, one twig snapping back against another. He went still and tried to make himself part of the boulder at his back until he knew what came.
Soon enough, he knew it was your step. A light tread, picking its way through what lay under it.
When you came into view between two firs, it was your coat he noticed first. The old berry stains had been scrubbed until they spread, the deep spots blurred into wider patches. Near your throat, a few of the buttons were still undone, and he made himself look instead at the scarf at your neck, finer than the one you usually wore, though the ends had begun to fray. Below it, one hand held a lidded tin while the other carried his old cloak.
He pushed his hands down to his knees, suddenly aware of the way he sat, hunched over like some story beast. He made himself straighten and turned a little so he did not face you full on as you stopped at the outer ring of the firelight.
“I thought you might be here,” you said, sniffling and scrubbing at your nose with the back of your mitten. “I smelt smoke.”
He pushed a loose log back into place with the toe of his boot. “I did not mean to bring you this far from your house.”
“You didn’t.” You tightened your grip on the tin. “I needed to check the snares anyway. I…only came a little further than usual.”
He felt your eyes go to his face, lingering first near his ear and then lower, at the line that ran toward the corner of his mouth, before they dropped. He lowered his own gaze, letting his hair fall a little further forward as he looked to where his hands rested on his knees. The fire made the seams there look rawer than they were, picking out the old stitching and the fresher claw mark that had not yet calmed. He slid them off his knees and let them hang at his sides.
“I brought this,” you said, holding the tin out. “Salve. My mother and I made it. Tallow and spruce pitch. It helps when the skin splits. For your…for the places that do.”
He knew what you thought it was for, and suddenly the tin in your hand seemed too dear a thing to have been made with him in mind. You’d spent care on skin that would never close smooth, never fade, never heal as you supposed it might. At best, it might ease the newer cuts.
“These will not close.” His nails dug into the bark. “They are not wounds that heal that way.”
You frowned at that, then tucked his old cloak under your arm and pushed back the other sleeve. A puckered line showed along the inside of your forearm, deeper at one end where the skin had once been opened wider.
“This was worse than it looks now,” you said. “I used the salve on it. It did help.”
His eyes stayed on the mark longer than they should’ve. It looked like the flesh had been torn crudely, and he found himself wanting to ask what had done it, whether tooth or knife or something ordinary, but by then you were already pulling the sleeve back down over it and coming the rest of the way toward him.
He had to tilt his head up to see your face, and with you that close, he felt the selfish pull of wanting to know every other place life had marked you too.
He almost told you to keep the salve. You'd used it before and seen it work, and that alone made it harder to take. And what it was made from came from your house, from what you and your family had saved and rendered and not spared lightly. Your mother, your sisters, even yourself, had more claim to it than he did. To take it for his own felt greedy, almost indecent.
“Try it, at least,” you said.
But the tin stayed between you two, in your outstretched hand, and he could not give it back to you untouched after you had come so far with it.
He told himself he would keep it only until one of your family members or you had need of it. He reached out and let his hand close around the metal.
“Thank you,” he murmured, looking down at the scratched lid.
“You only need a little,” you told him. “At night is best, when it has time to soak in. Or whenever it starts bothering you.”
After that, he said nothing. The thanks had already been given, and he did not know what else to say. He thought his silence might send you back the way you had come, make you see the whole errand as a mistake. But no sound came of you turning away. Perhaps you were only letting your body warm, nothing more. Or perhaps you just had not made yourself go yet.
Even so, he wanted you to stay. His mind went rapidly over what little he had to offer that might give you reason to.
“I have meat, if you have not eaten.” He nodded toward his stash. “I can put a piece on the fire for you.”
You shook your head, giving a small wave of your mittened hand. “I ate. Keep it for yourself.”
His thoughts went loose again after that. He nearly asked after the bird, then almost asked whether the cold had found its way through your coat or boots, and hated himself for how obvious that sounded.
Before he could settle on anything else, you looked down at what you carried and said, as if only then remembering, “And this is yours too.” You lifted his old cloak a little higher. “I washed it as best I could. It should smell better now.”
He took it from you, careful not to brush your exposed wrist with his fingers. “Thank you,” he said.
The fur was damp in places but it no longer reeked, only holding the scent of lye soap and hearth fire. He laid it over his lap, and rested his hands on top of it with the tin cupped between them.
Still, you didn’t move away.
If you left, then the ache would only go on as it always had, familiar enough by that point to endure. But if you stayed, even for a few minutes more, he knew he would let it mean something. Worse, he could feel how badly he wanted to.
“You could sit,” he said. “Warm yourself before you go back.”
Your mouth opened, then closed again, eyes dropping to the snow by his feet.
“Only for a moment,” you said finally.
He shifted at once, dragging himself along the fallen tree until he was more to the side, leaving the place in front of the fire empty for you. Bark scraped under him, snagging on the fabric of his tattered trousers.
You stepped in carefully, then sat down on the log where he had been. He watched as you held your hands out to the heat, fingers spread in the brown fabric, and felt relief rise in him before he could stop it.
For a while, neither of you said anything. The fire did what it always did: a pop, a hiss where sap had been trapped in a knot. Over it, he could hear you. One swallow that clicked in your throat. A breath that snagged in one side of your nose, you clearing it, trying to make it sound like nothing at all.
Your fingers flexed once, then flattened again toward the heat.
“Does it…” you trailed off. “Do they hurt?” Your gaze moved along one of the lines from his temple to his brow. “Did it all happen at once, or over time?”
He knew too well that they hurt, but not in any way he could tell you. He could not sit there and say that sometimes the joins in him burned, or that the nerves sewn together beneath the skin could flare until it felt as though he were being stripped alive from the inside. The pain itself was one thing. The loneliness of it, another. To speak of it would be to speak the truth of how he had been made, and that truth stood between him and too many other things already. Spirit, dignity, inwardness. You got to be full of mystery and history and personhood. And he felt reduced to what could be seen. And then, even in kindness, your eyes had gone first to the seams and stitching.
He looked away, out toward the dull light spreading between the trees. That way he did not have to see what, if anything, had changed in your face.
“Most of it happened at once,” he said. “A while ago.” His fingers went briefly to the line that ran through his neck. “They do not hurt like fresh cuts. They pull, now and then. Sometimes the skin opens again.”
Your mouth pressed in a flat at that.
“That is awful,” you said softly. “For them to keep opening.”
He let out a breath and nodded. When he looked back at you, he found you still watching him. Your eyes slipped away immediately, as if you worried he might not want them there any longer.
His own went over you then, and only after did he realize what was missing.
“You did not bring the bow.”
“No,” you said, still looking toward the fire.
He waited a bit before asking, “Not even for the snares?”
“Well…” One of your boots hooked over the other. “I did not think there would be anything in them.”
“I saw a boar nosing at one once.”
“I was in a hurry,” you tried to reason. “My mind was not quite right.”
“I would rather you carried it,” he said as the wind pressed the scarf at your throat up against your chin, and you caught it with one hand, tucking it back into place. He watched you do it, then added, “When you are out alone.”
Your eyes lifted at that, then slipped away again. “I know how to look after myself,” you said. “Bow or no bow.”
“I know,” he agreed.
And he did. He had seen enough to trust that much. What troubled him was not fox or boar, nor any ordinary thing the woods might set in your path, but the thought of a man with a quicker hand and less care than you had.
“Do you run into other hunters here?”
“Now and again,” you answered. “But mostly further off.” You were quiet for a few seconds, then said, more tentatively, “You mean the bow for them.”
He said nothing. There was no use pretending he had meant anything else.
“I thought that was what you were, at first,” you admitted as you tugged at one mitten, pulling it off. A stray hair had caught between the threads. You plucked it free, then let the hand remain bare. “Another hunter. It was the first time I had ever aimed at a man.”
Him, a man? He had always thought others looked at him and knew at once that he was other.
The men in the woods who shot him, and the ones who drove a scythe into his shoulder and chased him from the farm, had never known his story. To them, he had only been a stranger on their land, too large and too ugly. But a man before anything else.
And you had been no different. Your arrow had come up because he stood at your door in the dark, because there were children asleep behind you, because any man there would have been too much.
It had not been the stitching in his face that first raised the bow, nor some instant knowing.
If they had been afraid of a man all along, and not some other thing, then he did not know what that made him, or what it made them. He had been made in their image. All his flesh had been pulled from men, his face too, though the skin over the middle of it had a bluish cast no other man’s did, and no man he had ever seen had been so marked. But was that enough? Enough to tell them, before he ever spoke, that he was other?
At that moment, he did not think so. If they had been seeing a man where he had only ever felt something made, then where had the mistake begun? In them? In him? In the skin? He could not tell. He knew only that whatever had been lit in him, whatever kept him moving and waking and going on, was not natural. That had not changed. But neither had the flesh changed. Nor the face, nor the fact that fear had risen in others before they knew a single thing about him.
The outside of him had gone among men more closely than he had ever allowed. It was just the rest that would not follow.
He only became aware of his body again when he found himself bent forward, elbows on his knees, his hands hanging loose between them. When he looked to you, you were shifting a little on the log.
“I have taken your place by the fire,” you said. “You can come back, if you wish. I’ll go.”
He shook his head.
“I am warm,” he answered, and it was true enough. “Stay where you are.”
And you did, turning slowly back to the fire, holding your hands out once more, one mittened and one still bare.
It would take so little for you to edge nearer on the log, for your thigh to come against his and stay there as if you had not thought twice about it. He could have your hands between his own, bending over them, breathing warmth across your knuckles the way he did for himself when his fingers had gone stiff.
He looked away abruptly. You had the fire. You did not need him.
He dropped his gaze to the stones by his boots, sunk in the frigid earth, and held it there. If the silence stretched much longer, he would only go back to your hands. To the one still kept in the mitten, and how his fingers would find the cuff, wanting to draw it off.
“You live very far from others,” he rasped. “What keeps you here?”
You did not answer immediately, and he could almost see you weighing what to give him and what to keep.
“The house has been in my father’s family for generations,” you said hesitantly. “My father’s great-grandfather built it first, and the men after him kept adding to it.” You chewed at the inside of your cheek. “By the time I was born, there was nowhere else we belonged.”
The men after him. You had no brothers that he had seen. Even so, his mind set some other man there at once, one not yet come, or somewhere beyond those woods, but meant for the place all the same. A husband. A man who would take up what had fallen to you: the axe, the roof, a broken latch, the runners of the sled when they cracked. One who might add to the house in time, as the others had done before him, and be reckoned part of it.
His teeth came together hard enough to ache. It should have stopped there, but it did not. He had imagined himself there too. As if he had ever been a thing to keep a house. As if those hands could mend what broke and have you glad of them.
As if he might one day bend and kiss you as he had once seen a husband kiss his wife. As if you would ever have him, ever want to kiss him. It would be his mouth, yes, but not his alone. Would it be him you kissed, or the dead man’s mouth he wore?
He had to put the thought away as best he could and turned back to the thing itself; the house, and how such a place kept standing when so many of the hands that had once kept it were gone.
“Who keeps it now?” he asked.
“I do,” you said. “My mother, as she can.”
“Do your sisters help?”
“The youngest is just a child,” you said. “My other sister helps. Or tries to. She wants to learn the rest too.” You let out a breath. “But I would rather she didn’t have to.”
Looking at you, he might almost have thought such a life had not done its worst. There was still too much in you that had not hardened, then he remembered the hare in your hands, the apology, the tears, and knew better.
Fleetingly, he saw you elsewhere; hair pinned up, better clothes. A full table, dry wood, warm rooms, and no smell of blood on you, nor wet wool. But when he tried to imagine what such a life would make of you, his mind balked.
Worse, some part of him did not want to see it. Another life might have been kinder, and he knew that. Yet, he was thankful for the one that had put you in those woods and in his sight.
You cleared your throat. “And you?” you asked, looking at him. “Where is it you go, when you leave here?”
“I stay in the forest,” he admitted. “Under stone, if there is any. Under branches, if there is not. I have no place fixed as my own.”
You looked at him then, brows pinched. “Even during winter?”
“There is nowhere else.” He would not let you answer that, so he hastily said, “Your father--he is not here now.”
You leaned back a little on the log at that, and he knew he should have left it alone.
“He went to sea six years ago,” you murmured after a while. “There is a man from Breivika who takes hands north for the cod season, and my father went with them.” He watched from the corner of his eye, your bare hand pressing into the wood at your side. “The others came back. He did not.”
He looked at you then, but said nothing as snow slipped somewhere, a thud off a branch.
“They say that a boat went down,” you went on. “My mother says he is in God’s hands now.” Your mouth twisted. “No one saw it so no one can tell me where the water took him. He was there, and then he wasn’t. That is all anyone can give me.”
As you paused, his hand drifted to the log between you both, fingers splayed toward you, nails picking at the bark.
“You do not like not knowing.”
You let out a breath through your nose. “He is my father,” you said, as if that ought to have been answer enough. “I would have buried him at home, if I could have. Down by the graves.”
He had never seen the graves. Some part of the valley still lay outside his knowing, and he thought that was likely as it should be.
His fingers moved again, spreading a little closer to yours without quite touching.
“Do you have family?” you asked.
He heard what you meant by it. If there had been anyone to love him, or anyone he might have called his own, he would not have been there. But there was not, and so he had stayed where the smoke from your fire sometimes reached him.
“No,” he admitted. “No one of my own.”
There could not be. Being made had left him with no kin at all.
He had not known his hand had gone so far until his fingertips brushed yours. He was just about to draw away, but your fingers brushed back against his and stayed, the bare tips of them resting lightly over his own.
His heart struck so hard it hurt. His eyes went first to your face, then to your hand, waiting for you to take it back, but you did not.
“I’ve always had my mother and sisters,” you whispered. “I know there will be a day I won’t. Have them, I mean. And I can’t imagine being alone.”
“I would not want you to know it.”
Your ring finger moved against his, the slightest stroke. “I wish you had not had to.”
Every part of him wanted more of it, more of your hand, more of that voice speaking gently to him, and in the same instant, some other part wanted to wrench his hand away before the wanting could grow any fiercer. It felt too near hope, and too near the torture of imagining what he could not have and being made to feel it all the more keenly for having once, however lightly, been given a taste.
His fingers moved against yours before he meant them to. The touch of it startled him more than yours had, and he drew back.
You did not move at first. Your lashes just fluttered once, then again, and for a second, you seemed to lean too much of yourself into the hand you had planted on the log, as if the wood had become the only solid thing under you. Then you sat back, gathered that hand in, and pulled the mitten over it again.
He curled his fingers in against his palm, trying to keep the feel of your touch there.
“I should go,” you said as you rose to your feet suddenly. “The wash will be nearly frozen by now. I’ve left it too long before.”
His body wanted to rise with you. To go as far as the first bend, perhaps further if you had let him. More than that, he wanted your hand again; not only the brush of fingertips, but it slipping into his and staying there, and himself not pulling away from it. But he stayed where he was, fixed to the fallen tree.
He lifted his eyes to you. “You should not leave it then,” he said.
You looked back at him then, and for a few moments neither of you moved. He had the sense that if you stood there any longer, he might have said something he could not take back.
Before you turned away, you whispered, “I hope the salve helps.”
He kept his eyes on the fire as it cracked and sank in on itself while the sound of your steps faded and the snow covered your tracks, until there was only the hiss of the flames and the place where you had been.
Your woodpile had shrunk.
On other days when he’d passed above the house, the split logs had sat in a neat ridge against the wall, higher than your youngest sister’s head. By then, the line barely reached the bottom of the window. Each time smoke went up stronger from the chimney, the stack went down.
He tried not to measure it after that. If he began counting what remained, he would have to reckon with how little it was, and once he did that, he would be down there with the axe in his hands before he had sense enough to stop himself. So he told himself there was still a stack, and while there was wood left, you all had enough.
That lasted four days.
On the fifth, one glance told him how far it had fallen. It sat well below the windowsill. Wood burned fast in a house with four bodies in it; one weak, two still growing, and the last already worn down.
The pile had told him long before that chopping wood was work you put off as long as you could. And by that point, it was low enough that you would be forced to do it soon. He was there, so why should you do it? What cost you strength would cost him little.
So he waited until the smoke from the chimney thickened again the next day, and the wintry light had waned enough that he knew you and your family would be sitting down to a meal, not near the door. Your talk and the scrape of spoons might cover most of the sounds he made.
The axe leaned where it always did, head buried in the block. He reached for the haft, fingers closing where yours must have, and lifted it free. The wood was worn smooth in the grip; you had used it enough for that. He remembered you saying you had broken a finger holding it wrong, and shifted his own grip.
Too high, perhaps. Or not firm enough. He could not know.
You were there then, standing before him at the block. No coat on either of you, only linen. He came up behind you awkwardly at first, leaving too much room between you both, his hands closing over the haft to either side of yours, his arms bracketing you in.
“Closer,” you murmured, as if it ought to have been obvious.
So he stepped in until his chest met your back, and the strain went out of his shoulders. He dipped his head to watch your hands, and it put his mouth near your ear.
“Not so tight,” you said. “You’ll lock your wrist.” Your thumb pressed again, easing one finger loose, settling another in its place. “There. Let the haft sit lower in this hand. And this one--” you nudged his right wrist with the side of your thumb, “--not so far ‘round.”
He let you move him where you pleased.
"That's your grip.” You did not take your hands away. “Shall I show you the rest?”
“Yes,” he rasped.
He heard the faintest hitch in your breathing, and from where his head bent near yours, he glimpsed the slight parting of your lips as his breath warmed the shell of your ear.
When he didn’t move, you turned slowly within the frame of his arms and looked up at him.
“Bend a little,” you said.
He did not. Not until you set both hands high on his chest. Then he followed the pressure of them without thinking, leaning in as you drew him lower. His eyes dropped to your hands. Your nails caught lightly in the fabric as your palms moved lower, dragging the cloth with them, pulling it taut across his chest and then his middle before it gave again in little ripples under your touch. By the time your hands reached his abdomen, one of his hands had fallen from the axe, and the other had dropped with it until the haft hung at his side.
“You are still too straight,” you said. “You’ll never get a proper swing that way.”
Your hands moved lower, to his hips that time. You took hold of them and nudged him square before the block. “Your feet,” you instructed. “Widen them.”
He heard you, but he did not move. The pad of your thumb pressed into his hipbone, and he only stood there under it, unwilling to do anything that might end the moment. He stared down at you, his breathing heavy.
When he still did not obey, you tugged his hips again. It was hardly anything, yet under your hands, he was unsteady enough that his free hand came out and gripped you at the waist.
You looked up then, blinking too fast. “You are not listening.”
“No,” he said. “I am not.”
You drew in a quick breath when he did not let you go. “Then I’ll have to show you again,” you whispered.
His stomach knotted as heat crawled down his spine and around his hips, and he clutched the real haft until the wood bit into his palm. He had made you touch him, made you speak as he liked, when you had never been asked and he had no right to make the answer for you. And he had wanted you to want it, to want him. That was the worst part of it.
It would’ve served him right to hold the haft wrong, to break a finger on it.
He reached for one of the shorter cuts, setting it on its end across the stump until it stopped wobbling. When he brought the axe down, he let too much of himself fall with it; the blade went straight through the birch and deep into the wood beneath. No broken finger though.
His brows pulled in as he worked the iron loose, telling himself the next would be cleaner. Instead he reached for a thicker piece and saw the twist in the wood only when the blade had already sunk a hand’s breadth and stopped hard, the jolt of it running up through his arms until he had to roll his shoulder to shake it out.
He set a new cut on its end and raised the axe again. As he brought it down, the latch lifted and clicked, and more than one voice carried out into the yard. His head turned before his arms could stop, and the iron met only the block with a thud.
“What are you doing?” you called from the doorway.
You had a blanket pulled around your shoulders, one hand still on the latch. Behind you, two smaller figures nudged at your sides, keen to get past you and into the open.
The older of the girls, not little anymore but not grown either, slipped by first, eyes on the chopped lengths and the axe in his hands. She took three steps forward before she looked up the rest of the way and saw his face. Her feet stopped where they were.
The youngest, all furs and mittens, tried to follow, but the older girl’s hand shot out, catching her by the hood and yanking her in against her chest. The smaller girl’s boots skidded on the packed snow as she was pulled back, her head tipping up to stare at him from the shelter of her sister’s arm.
The older girl’s mouth went tight, and she glanced back at you only once.
His fingers loosened on the haft, and instead of driving the head back into the block, he let the axe down onto the ground at his feet, head turned away from you and the girls, handle resting against the stump.
You stepped out, blanket slipping from one shoulder, boots pulled on in such a hurry the laces dragged. As you came up beside them, your fingers brushed the older girl’s elbow.
“Marit, take her inside,” you said.
Marit’s feet stayed where they were; her arm cinched tighter around the small one.
He wanted, suddenly, to shrink. He had frightened your sister, and right then, you had to stand between them.
As you began to walk forward, the little one twisted, turning one way and then the other as if she meant to spin out of her sister’s hold. Then she dipped suddenly at the knees, trying to slide out of her coat and drop to the ground.
“Is that Runi, the Bird-Friend?” she asked, the name lisped a little around the gap in her front teeth.
“No,” Marit snapped under her breath, trying to wrestle the young one into standing.
You stopped just ahead of him and cleared your throat, drawing his eyes down to you.
“I had thought there would be a little more time before you met the girls,” you said, glancing back.
His gaze followed. The youngest bounced up, and the crown of her head caught Marit under the chin with a blunt little knock, making the older girl hiss and snatch her hands back before catching hold of her again.
“I did not mean to put this upon you.” He made his voice low. “If you wish it, I will go.”
“No. Stay.”
Before, he’d been told to go, told not to watch, not to come near, not to leave things at your door, and he had kept all of it. Every word. Wanting the opposite was nothing new. He had been feeding himself on the thought that obeying your wishes and hunting for you and your family was a kind of closeness in itself, that it was enough to know you were better off and never ask for more.
But hearing you tell him to stay showed him how little it had been holding together.
He was quiet for a bit, then his hand came up and caught the blanket where it had slid. You tipped your head a little, giving him room, and his knuckles touched the warm place where your neck met your shoulder before he could stop them. Then the blanket was between you two again, and he dropped his hand.
His eyes fixed on the place he had just touched before he wrenched them down, clasping that hand behind his back and rubbing his thumb once over the knuckles.
“You are cold,” he murmured.
“We all are,” you said. “That’s why the wood is welcome.”
He turned to the hacked top of the stump, to the uneven splits and the stray pieces scattered about.
“I have done it badly,” he said as he stooped to pick up the first of the logs.
“The fire has never complained about the way I split it,” you said. “It all burns the same.”
You drew the blanket closer at your throat, then bent for one before he could take the next. You tucked the chunk against your side under the arm holding the wool shut and turned toward the wall.
He moved hurriedly, reaching for the pieces you had left behind. His hand closed around one, then another, trying to gather more before you could come back for the rest.
“I have it,” you said over your shoulder. “You do not h--”
“Synne, no!” Marit called out, louder than she’d spoken yet.
He straightened at the shout, and by the time his head came up, the little one had slipped free, coat half off one shoulder, boots stomping as she scrambled for him. She tumbled to a stop so close that the toes of her shoes almost met his. For a heartbeat, she only stared, head tipping back and back to find his face, mouth a little open with the effort of looking up that high.
Then her hands flew to her stomach, and she gave a swift, wobbly dip that wanted to be a curtsy.
“Hallo,” she said, still a little out of breath. “I am Synne.” She rocked on her heels, then added, more boldly, “I know who you are. You’re Runi.”
She glanced over her shoulder after she said it, and you were crossing the yard, setting the split birch down. Marit came a step behind, boots thudding harder than they needed to on the packed snow, jaw set.
“You’re in Hvit and the Queen of Moss and Bells,” she said, working her arm back into her coat. “It is a very good story. Do you want to hear it?”
He had never expected to be the kind of thing a child made stories about, much less to hear them. And he wondered briefly which part he played in hers. Whether he was the dark thing in the trees, the one meant to frighten.
“Synne,” Marit’s hand came down on her sister’s shoulder, fingers tightening. “They are only made-up things. He has not done all that.”
Her nose wrinkled at that, shrugging off Marit’s grip without daring to step away.
“You were not there,” she grumbled, not looking at her sister. “So you do not know.”
“Nor were you,” Marit shot back.
Synne's mouth opened, then closed, and her head turned toward you. “You know,” she insisted, a little louder. “You told me about him. You said so.”
You hesitated before your eyes came to his face, then slid away before they fully arrived.
“I did tell you about him,” you said, only looking at your youngest sister. “But once a thing gets into one of your tales, it does not stay quite the same.”
“See, it is true,” she said to Marit under her breath. “I only tell it the right way.”
“That is not what she said,” Marit muttered.
Synne’s chin lifted. “He can find hurt things before anyone else does. He found Hvit.”
Marit snatched her hand back and folded her arms hard across her chest. “You’d hang bells on a stump and call it magic. One day it will get you hurt.”
Synne was already answering. “Then Runi will be abl--”
“Marit,” you cut in, and Synne stopped short. “You would say that of her? She can make kingdoms out of mushrooms or weave tussocks into crowns if she likes, and there’s no harm in it.” You glanced toward him from the corner of your eye. “And he found Hvit, that is true. He’s fed us for most of the winter too. You know Synne did not make that up.”
Part of him thought he ought to turn and walk, and keep walking, until he could no longer have found his way back, even if he tried. Perhaps it would be better for you and your family if his feet did not know the way.
If the truth of him were plain, would you all not all have seen the same thing?
He took a step back, then another.
“That is just it,” Marit burst out, her cheeks flushing darker in the cold. “You let her make stories of him, and now you speak as though they must be true because he found one bird and brought us meat. How does--” She broke off, biting the word back, then swung her glare from Synne to their sister and finally to him. "Who does this for nothing? Who brings that much food and asks for nothing back? People do not do that. What do you want from us?"
He had an answer, but not one he could have given. That he had first done it so you need not kill with your own hands. That until then, that had seemed enough. Only standing there by the stump had he understood that it had spread further than that, to the wood, to the thought of you spared one more task in the cold, and warm for it. The rest of them had come with you in it, as anything near you did. But Marit had asked what he wanted, and the truth of that was not fit for speech. From your mother and sisters, nothing but that they should be fed and well. From you, you. He wanted to live in your mind and body. He wanted you to want him near, and not by chance or necessity. To miss him enough that he might hunt faster to come back to you. He wanted more. He wanted all of it. And he could not have said as much without making his own wants larger than yours, and that would have been uglier than silence.
Marit would not have understood, and he did not think anyone would, so he did not say anything.
“He does not want anything bad,” Synne blurted, as if that settled it. “He is strong. He carried a whole reindeer, and did not eat us.”
Before Marit could gainsay her or drag her back again, she took the last step in and set one mittened hand against his coat, testing. When he did not move, she set a boot on the toe of his and reached for his forearm through the material.
“Synne,” Marit barked. “Do not--”
Too late, she was already climbing. For a fearless child used to trees and fence posts, he was only another tall thing to climb. Hand over hand she went, one boot scraping his shin before she hooked a knee and hauled herself higher. He held himself rigid, afraid that any movement from him would shake her loose.
Marit’s voice cracked as she yelled, “Get down!”
With a few clumsy pulls, she got herself far enough up that he had no choice but to catch her. His arm folded in, elbow bending under her weight so she sat there in the crook of it, short legs dangling against his ribs.
“I knew it,” she panted, pleased with herself. “He is strong and good.”
Synne reached up and pushed the hair back from the side of his face, parting it as she might part grass to see what lived underneath. She traced the line across his forehead, following it where the color of his skin changed.
He went very still.
He wondered if Marit had been right. If her wonder might one day be the thing that harmed her. It had led her here, into the arms of something unnatural, something that had killed men.
“You are very tall, Runi,” she whispered. “Like the trees that do not move in the wind.”
His eyes went to you over the top of Synne’s head and found you standing a little off to the side, head canted. Your gaze moved from Synne, perched in the bend of his arm with her fingers still wandering over his face, to his eyes. You blinked once, slowly, and held his look.
"Runi," he said, his eyes still on you. “Why does she call me that?”
“Because that is who you are in her stories,” you said as you stepped in, placing a hand at the small of Synne’s back. “She has another name for all of us in them. She calls me Eir, the Archer. Mother is Aslaug, the Light-Bearer.”
“And you are Bird-Friend,” Synne added, setting her tiny palm against his cheek, cupping it. “Because of the ptarmigan.”
He dragged his gaze down to her, expecting her to laugh and change it to something else, something more fitting. She only grinned, as if to say yes, that was true, and she was proud of it.
His fingers shifted where they held Synne, tightening the teeniest bit.
“It is near seven,” Marit said. “Hvit will want his mash.”
Synne paused for a second, then wriggled higher against him before anyone could take her down.
“You must hear it. The bird story,” she told him earnestly. “Once there was Runi in the forest, and he found a bird with a wing that went--” she twisted her wrist to show the wrong angle, “--all mangled, and all the woodland critters trotted past, but Runi picked it up and brought it to Eir. And Eir took it to Sassa-drotting, because Sassa-drotting was the only one who knew the secret mix that made broken things mend faster. She fed Hvit every day, and when the wing was almost right again, she held him up when he flapped, and then she took him out into the open worlds and--”
His arm had started to lower while she talked, and he meant to set her down gently, boots back on the compacted snow, but she tightened her grip on his collar, yanking the fabric a little.
“The good part is next,” she protested. “She was teaching him to fly again.”
“Another time, Synne,” you said.
The little one whirled to look at you. “But he has not heard it all.”
“And he will not if he freezes out here first,” you answered, your eyes flicking to his face and then back to your sister. “You can tell it when it is warmer. Or…” you hesitated. “When he comes again.”
He had not yet let himself think of that as something that might happen more than once. Yet, you saying it so simply, as though there would of course be another time, felt like a promise you had not meant to make. Perhaps not to him, perhaps only to soothe Synne. He took it all the same and kept it.
“I will remember it.” He stood straight once more. “You can tell me all of it another day.”
Synne tipped her head back to check his face for any sign he didn’t mean it. When she saw he did, she nodded once. “Good night, Runi. I will see you next time.”
Only then did she let your hand turn her toward the house. As Marit and Synne went back inside, you stayed behind. When the door hadn’t yet swallowed the younger two, you stepped in front of him.
“Hold still,” you murmured, fingers finding the front panels of the cloak and straightening them where they had been pulled askew across his chest. The sides of your hands brushed the top of his abdomen. “Marit is afraid, and she lets it talk for her. It doesn't make her right about you.”
You glanced toward the door, where Synne’s voice was already rising in singsongy bursts, then back up at him. He meant to keep his hands where they were, but his index finger found a loose bit of wool lifting from your blanket and stayed there, twisting it gently between his finger and thumb.
“By tonight, you will be the tallest thing in her stories. Some great, shaggy tree she can climb whenever she likes.”
At that, the corners of his mouth pulled, the skin there stretching tight over old stitching. Muscles he barely knew woke and bunched in his cheeks.
He smiled.
“Whatever good I am in them,” he said, “that came from you.”
He went further than he had any business going for flowers.
The snow had pulled back in places so the forest floor showed through: dead bracken, last year’s papery leaves, and moss just beginning to green. Down toward the fjord, the wind came from a different side, smelling of brine and kelp instead of only resin and rot. Between the rocks, meltwater was already weaving its way through.
He had already killed what he meant to kill, two foxes draped over his shoulder and tugging the fur of his coat sideways with their weight. The red one’s brush showed through the dried mud he had not yet cleaned off it, and the other was pale, white along the belly.
He could’ve turned back long before the valley was almost lost behind him. The path home was long enough with the foxes alone.
Instead, he kept going.
Down the slope, toward where rock showed through in slabs and the trees stood farther apart, where winter had started to let go first. He did not bother telling himself it was for hunting. The foxes were enough, the meat was enough.
He went on for something that had no use beyond being looked at.
At the far side of the drift, in a pocket where meltwater had eaten the snow back, a clutch of shoots poked through. He crouched, dragging one fox around in front of him so it sagged across his knees, and brushed the snow aside with the back of his hand. White bells hung there. Snowdrops, he thought, surprised the name had stayed with him at all. A little further on, in a pocket where the earth had more light, small anemones opened and trembled on slender stalks.
Synne would have liked them. She would have made something of them immediately. Little staffs, perhaps, once Sassa-drotting had them, or some small queen-thing with a use only she would know. Marit would not. She would look at the flowers once and then at him twice, and ask why he had gone so far for something that could not be eaten or worn, what he meant by it, what he wanted in return. He would have brought them to her anyway. Their mother, he was not sure of. She might only see them when someone would set them by her bowl or on the table near the bed. Still, he thought they were pretty to look at, and hoped she might think so too.
You…he only knew he wanted to see what your face would do when the flowers were laid in your hands. Whether you would smile before you meant to. Whether you might tuck one or a few into your hair, or keep them near you a while because they pleased you to look at. He thought, and could not help it, that if you smelled them, you might think of him.
He wanted suddenly to have them in his hand and be on his way back.
He set the foxes down and reached in among the sprouts. The first stem he touched, he pinched the way he would have any other plant, and the head came off in his fingers, the neck of it popping with almost no effort at all. The white bell fell into the snow and lay there on its side.
He frowned and tried again, gentler that time, but his fingers still felt too big. One stem bent under his touch and sprang back when he let it go. Finally, he held a stem closer to the ground and pulled softly until the roots gave.
He gathered only what he could carry without crushing anything, tucking the anemones in among the snowdrops, all their petals cold against his palm. By the time he bound the stems with a scrap of hide to keep them from splaying, his fingertips ached from being too careful.
With the foxes on one shoulder and the flowers cupped in his other hand, he turned back the way he’d come. Above the thawed pocket the snow had crusted over again, brittle at the surface. It held him for a step, then broke under the next, scraping at his boots. He picked his way where scrub and stone broke through.
He had almost reached the trees again when the air cracked.
A ball hit his leg; a blunt, burning punch at the side of his shin, far too small for the wreck it made. It met the bone, cracked it, and his lower leg folded in on itself where it had no joint anymore. He went down hard, foxes and flowers and his own weight coming after him.
His ribs struck rock, and lay facedown, panting, breath steaming the inch of world in front of him.
“Got him?” a man shouted from somewhere above, his voice hoarse with weather and hard drink.
“Aye. Low in the leg,” another answered, younger by the sound of him.
He pushed his palms into the snow and tried to get his good foot under him. The bad one screamed when the ends ground together. His body tried to rise anyway, but he got only halfway before the leg refused. He toppled onto his side hard enough to jar his shoulder, the foxes squashed beneath him.
“Lie still,” the older one called down. “You won’t get far on that leg.”
He rolled just enough to see them. Two figures against the slope, wrapped in dark cloth and leather, rifles in their hands. They came on, dropping from rise to rise. One had a grey beard that blew a little in the wind, and the other’s hair was more brown than not, his jaw was clenched so hard the muscles jumped. Both held their guns ready.
The brown-haired one was already reloading, fingers moving without needing his eyes.
Smoke and sea salt clung to them, and the greasy tang of wool that’d seen too many wet crossings. Men from farther along the fjord, perhaps, or from one of the farther inlets he had never had cause to visit.
“Must be what’s been at the traps,” the bearded one muttered, chin tipping toward what lay crushed beneath him. “Lying right on what he took.”
They stopped just beyond the reach of his arms, barrels trained on his chest. He lay where he had fallen, blood spreading under his calf, the heat of it caught in the soaked fabric.
A throb started in his temples from how hard he was clenching his teeth, at the wrinkle at the corners of their noses, as though the forest were so small it could've yielded no foxes but the ones in their traps. As though there were not hundreds more he might have killed without ever coming near them. They had shattered his leg and still watched him as if they might prefer him dead to wheezing at their feet. Some of that anger turned on himself, for how fast his thoughts went to breaking them, straight to gutting and ripping and skinning.
He pressed his cheek into the snow and held it there.
The flowers lay close to his hand, scattered from where he had dropped them. Some had slid toward him, some had been trodden into the top layer by the hunters. He edged his fingers toward the nearest anemone, only enough that the stem came to rest against his knuckles.
“You move that hand again, I’ll put a hole through it,” the older one barked as he brought the butt of his rifle down on the back of his hand.
An animalistic growl tore out of him, dragged up from the deepest part of his chest.
“Helvete,” the brown-haired one breathed, his eyes going wide as he thrusted the muzzle closer.
The bearded man glanced toward him, but the younger man stayed fixed on him, watching for any sudden movement, his thumb running the curve of the trigger guard. The older hunter ground his molars, then let his gaze travel from the break in his leg to his face, where it stayed.
“Mikkel has children,” the older man said. “Torsten too. Half the men on this side of the fjord do, sending them out to check the lines and fetch water.” He kept his head bent, only his eyes shifting to the younger man. “And your Geir.”
The brown-haired man’s mouth pressed flat, his fingers tightening on the stock.
The bearded one lifted his own rifle, the barrel rising from his chest to his forehead. “I’d not leave a man like this for him to meet,” he said. “So I say we end him here.”
The younger one’s grip slipped on the stock. “He’s lamed,” he muttered. “That ought to be enough.”
“Lamed?” the bearded one spat. “Then he’ll mend with reason to remember you. Your boy too.”
The hollow at the end of the barrel was only a black ring. He knew what it held, and had felt it before, knew what it would do and what it would not.
“What do we do with him then?” the younger man asked.
“Into the trees,” the older man replied. “Get him off the open ground. Let the forest have him. The woods will see to the rest.”
If he killed the hunters, there would be more. Men with families did not go missing without other men coming to find out why. If he sent them home broken instead, they would still carry something back with them, and not the right part. Not the shot in his leg, nor the time he had lain in the snow beneath their guns doing nothing. Only what he had done in return. One way or another, it would lead back to a valley he knew, a door he knew, a woman who had told him to stay.
But if he took the shot and gave those men no more pain to carry home, perhaps nothing there needed to change. There could still be more time, and he could go on. Learn to split the wood better and stack it dry, to set turf right. And learn you too. Not only the woman who held the house together and who your family needed you to be. Not only the archer and butcher, the healer, the sister, the daughter. The rest of you. What you were like when you no longer had to stand in any of those places. How you softened, how you showed anger, and how sadness looked on you when you did not put it away. What in the world you loved when no use had to be made of it. Whether you had meant only to defend Synne before, or something of yourself as well. Whether you had been the one to make the tussock crowns once upon a time.
He stayed where he was and let the muzzle keep its place on him. They could drag him off the slope for dead and leave him among the trees. He would wake later with his skull ringing and firs over him, and pull himself together again a handspan at a time.
The brown-haired man stepped in by his shoulder, gun angled down at his head too. “Herre, tilgi meg,” he muttered, setting his finger to the trigger.
It was wrong, he thought, that the one doing the hurting should ask forgiveness. If he ever asked such a thing, it would be of you. For the night he stood at your door with a fox at your feet and fear in your eyes, and for whatever of that fear still remained in you when you looked at him, because his face was his face.
Metal ticked faintly as the man’s finger tightened.
Lighter steps came then, at a run at first, slowing as they hit the harder snow. The rhythm of them was familiar, the way they picked their way between hidden hollows and exposed rock. He almost wondered if he had imagined it, if his mind had only gone back to those first mornings he followed you, learning the sound of your run between the spruces.
Then he heard your voice.
“Stop!”
It came out a little shaky between breaths.
The younger man jolted, the barrel dipping away from his brow. The bearded one’s gun swung toward the sound, then lowered when he saw you, as if the threat had lessened with a woman attached to it.
He tipped his head up to see you.
You were halfway down already, coat hardly buttoned, trousers rucked up over one boot, scarf dragged half out from where you’d shoved it into your collar. The bow was in your hand, an arrow clutched along the stave, but not yet on the string.
His heart began to pound at the sight of you. You should not have been there. Not with the guns in their hands and his blood in the snow. Not for him.
Go back, he thought, turn around and leave me there.
Your gaze moved fast, first to the muzzle held on him, then to the nearer man’s face, then the older one’s, the scattered flowers, the foxes crushed beneath him. When it reached his leg, it stopped. He saw you take in the way the lower part of it sat, bent where it should not have bent, and the dark blood spread into the ground around it. Her mouth tightened, and for a heartbeat, you looked as though you might be sick.
“What is happening here?” you asked, your voice still unsteady. “Are you all right?” you were looking right at him. “You’re blee--“
“Go back to your house,” the older man said. “Leave this be.”
“He’s hurt,“ you said, eyes narrowing. “Why are your guns on him?”
You took another step down instead. The snow there crusted under your boot, then gave, but you caught yourself before you slid. Your gaze kept pulling back to his leg, then to the sightline still trained on him.
Of all the things he might have done, he wanted most to crawl to you.
“Did you shoot him?”
“He’s been at our traps,” the younger man blurted, as if that answered everything. “Taking from us.”
“Foxes?” you asked, looking at the tail of the red one. “All of this for foxes?”
Your fingers found the notch at the end of the arrow without you looking, and he saw the fletching brush the string as you reached the foot of the slope.
Each step you took toward them drove his heart harder, until he could hear it in his ears.
You should not have been coming closer. You were seeing him laid out and didn’t know he kept still because it was the safest thing left to do. The worst of it was that the same part of you he had seen with the calf, and never understood, was what put you at risk. You had once looked at a hurt thing and would not do more harm to it. And right then, you were looking at him that same way, and he still didn’t know whether that had been mercy then, or was mercy in that moment.
He had to get up. Broken leg or no, riddled with holes or not, he had to get between you and the men.
The tip of his shoe bit into the crust as he tried to heave himself off the ground.
“Foxes are reason enough,” the older man said.
Before he could rise any farther, a boot caught the back of his head and drove his face down. Ice and grit raked along his cheek as his jaw slammed against a jutting rock beneath. Something in the hinge shifted with a sick crack. Pain shot up into his ear and flooded the side of his skull. His teeth knocked together so hard one felt odd in his mouth, higher than the rest, and the next breath filled with iron as blood ran under his tongue.
Above him, a sound broke out of you and cut off at once. It had started as a word and come apart halfway through.
"Let’s see you rise now,” the bearded man hissed, boot still on him. "Go on then.”
When his vision righted, you were closer than before. The bow was up in your hands, string to your cheek, arrow trained on the older man’s chest.
“Don’t touch him again.”
The younger man’s chin dipped as the bearded one’s fingers clenched on his stock. He looked you up and down, and in his face was the plain thought that you would not loose.
“You take up for a thief?” the bearded man sneered. “Against men who work for what’s theirs?”
The men waited for you to say something, but you didn’t.
You only came on, one slow step and then another, and stopped when you had come far too close. From where he lay, he could see the arrow trembling on the string.
Deep in the ruined leg, bones began to set themselves back into place, hot pulses running through vessels that were already closing again. It was working; he could feel it, but not fast enough. All he managed was a jerk of his heel that only sent pain up his spine and left him no closer to getting between you and their guns.
“Step back from him,” you said.
The younger man’s eyes cut sideways to his companion, waiting to see whether you would be heeded at all. The bearded man did not move.
“You’re quick to defend him,” the younger one said.
You only said it again. “Back.”
Then something changed in the bearded man’s face. “So he’s yours, then. Bringing you pretty pelts, was he? To throw over his face when he takes you--”
You loosed.
The snap of the string cracked past his ear as the arrow hissed across the space and struck just before the older man’s boots. It buried itself in the crust and struck stone; splinters of ice and chips of grit leapt up and stung his shins. He jumped back with a curse, his heel slipping.
“Have you gone mad?” he snarled, jerking his rifle up.
The muzzle swung and found you.
His body moved, palms driving into the snow as he shoved himself up on the good leg as far as it would take him.
He tried to say no, but the moment he opened his mouth, the hinge of his jaw shifted and more pain shot into his ear.
Then the bad leg came under him, and when it did, the break buckled under the weight. He nearly went with it, then hauled himself higher on the good leg, dragging the rest of himself after it. Snow slid under his boot, and the world framed in red at the edges. He made it upright anyway, swaying once.
Below him, the brown-haired man went white and swore. “Faen.”
Only then did he look down into the dark mouth of the barrel.
The gun went off.
The flash burned the world white and wiped the men, the trees, and you from his sight. The ball struck his brow just above the bridge of his nose. There was no searing push like the leg, only a single, dull blow that drove straight in and seemed to knock everything loose behind his eyes.
After the light went out, so did he, for a breath or two.
Sound came back first, the only thing left to tell him what was happening. A crackle that might have been the shot still breaking against the trees, then boots grinding in the snow, closer than before. Someone swore under his breath. The younger one, by the pitch of it. Spittle landed near his neck with a wet smack. The older one must have spat. His voice came after, saying something about hell. He could not keep the words together, they slipped around the hole in his head.
He tried to open his eyes, but nothing happened. Tried to lift a hand and could not feel where his arm ended.
Then you.
Your voice burst through the roaring in his head, higher than he had ever heard it. The words did not stay with him, only the sound.
Something thudded close by as you must've dropped to your knees. Then came the scrabble of your bow along the ice as you crawled to him. Your hands came to his face a second later, quick and searching at first along his jaw, then softening when they found his mouth slack and his head limp in your grip. Wet warmth fell on his cheek and slid toward his ear.
The men spoke again. One said he’d be mad to touch him. Another said one should take the shoulders and the other the feet.
“Get away from him!”
That he heard clearly. The anger in your voice cut straight through the fog. After that, he could make out the others too.
One of the hunters kept moving in, metal chinking as he came.
“Go,” you gasped. “Did you hear me? Go! Take your foxes and--”
The rest broke on a sob as something jolted under his ribs as you yanked. The crushed bodies dragged against his coat, flesh sticking before it let go with a squelchy pull. In two hard tugs, you tore the bodies free from under him, then came the slap of meat and fur on packed snow, one, then another, thrown back at their feet.
“Leave.”
A boot scuffed close to his hand, and he heard the crush of a stem under it. One of the flowers.
“The fjord’s safer now,” the older man said. “I’ll sleep better tonight for it.”
Leather rubbed as he bent and gathered up the pelts. He heard the pair dragged over the ground, fur whispering and bumping over stone. The younger man muttered something low that he could not make out. Their steps moved away, growing weaker as they hauled the foxes back up the slope and out of earshot.
Then there was only you.
You kept crying until your breath hitched so hard he thought you might choke on it. At some point, you drew his head into your lap, one hand cupping the side of his face, your thumb moving back and forth while the other kept brushing the heel of your wrist under your nose.
He wanted to lean into your palm, to drag his cheek along it so you would know he was there. His tongue had felt dropped into the back of his mouth, too far toward his throat to do any speaking with yet. If he could have moved anything at all, he would have lifted a hand to your face, thumb to the corner of your mouth where he knew the tears gathered, only to draw you back to him through it.
Instead, he had to lie there and listen to you come apart over him.
He had no sense of how long you both stayed like that. He couldn’t name it in minutes, only in what his body was doing to itself; pressure gathering behind his brow then relenting, an oozing heat along the edges of the wound as bone and meat crept toward each other, the hinge of his jaw ticking and grinding back into place.
Then he felt the pressure at his neck change. You’d eased his head down off your knees, one hand cupping beneath it, and set it back on the ground as if afraid it might crack further if you were careless.
He lay there and thought you meant to leave him where he was and go back to your house.
But then he felt himself move. You had hooked your hands under his shoulders and heaved. At first, nothing happened; you slid, the snow squealed under your soles, and then he lurched only an inch, then another. His skull bumped over crust and stone in short, jarring jerks. Once you lost your footing and dropped hard onto one knee beside him with a hiss, then pushed up again and dragged. Twice you had to stop, breath coming hard above him, before you set yourself once more and hauled him on.
At last, the back of his head met something solid, maybe a log, and you eased him up against it bit by bit.
Wool swiped across his face once you had him set so he wouldn’t slump over. It must have been the scarf from your own throat; he knew it by the weave and by the warmth still clinging to it. You wiped slush and blood from his eye sockets, his mouth, his jaw.
“I’m sorry,” you whispered. “I should have stopped them. I should have come sooner, I--"
Minutes later, you sat down beside him, and the sobbing seemed to lessen. He felt you lean in, the tremor still running through you when your shoulder touched his. He knew you were still crying, but the sound had gone out of it.
You had nothing to be sorry for, and still you had said it, when all of it had begun with him.
From the first time he saw you in the forest and did not stay away. From every lie after, each one cut down to look like less than it was. That he only wanted to understand. That he only wanted to look. That he only wanted you fed. That it was enough to leave meat and go. It had never been enough, and he’d always known that too. He kept going after more, and because he hadn’t stopped, those men would go back to their village with you in their mouths as well as him. Not only the thief they thought he was, but the woman who stood up for him. The woman who put an arrow in the snow at his feet and did not deny that he was hers. They would tell it until it dirtied you. The thief’s lover. The one who would shoot for such a hideous thing. And all of it had come to you because he had wanted and kept wanting and had never once done the decent thing and let you be.
As if it were not enough that he had given those men a story to carry back about you, he was about to put one more horror on you. You would have to watch the holes close and the flesh pull itself back together. To think him dead and then see, with no way to make sense of it, that he had not died at all.
Because behind his brow something in his sight began to crawl together. Light seeped in where there had only been black, first as a glare, then as smears of white and grey with the faintest wash of color where you sat beside him. His first instinct was to blink the blur clear, but the movement only dragged it across itself. The surface of his eyes hadn’t righted yet, so the world doubled, two lines of trees and two shapes of you, all sliding over one another. He kept blinking until the doubles shivered and pulled into a single version of each thing. Only then did he see how dim the light truly was, and know that it was night.
At last, he could see you.
You sat at his side, turned toward the churned slope where the hunters' tracks stamped uphill, both arms wrapped tight around yourself. Your face was blotched from crying, lashes clumped and spiky, and your hands were stained red.
He let his head roll back until his gaze found the branches above. Carefully, he tried his damaged leg, the tiniest pull to see if it would answer him. It did by shooting pain up from his shin to his upper thigh, and his breath whirred out of him before he could hold it in.
Your head turned at once.
"What--" you choked, eyes wide and glassy. "No, no, no--"
You lurched forward on your knees, hands going straight to him. Your fingers dug first into the fur at his shoulders, then moved to his face, as if you had to be sure he was truly there. Your palms found his cheeks, thumbs skidding over the ridges of old seams and the crusted blood there.
"I thought--" you started. "He shot you right…"
Your trembling fingers pushed his hair back from his forehead. The place where the ball had struck throbbed under your touch, and the skin there felt tight and strange with the work of closing. He could feel the torn flesh, the bruise already rising around it, the singed hair where the powder had scorched.
"There was blood," you said, breath hitching. "So much. All over your face. You just…"
Your thumbs swiped at the dried streaks caked along his temple. The heel of one hand grazed a tender place and pain shot through his head again. He grunted, and you flinched back an inch, then came right back in. You hardly seemed to know what your hands were doing. You kept sliding them over his cheek, along his jaw, down the side of his neck, back up into his hair.
“You went down,” you whispered, still sounding as though you did not believe it. “You just…you didn’t move.”
He watched you as you looked down, your hands moving over the top of his chest. He could tell you were feeling for the beat of his heart.
“I should have shot him,” you said. “He shot you because I didn’t.”
You had cried over hares that kept you from starving, so he knew that would’ve gone deeper and stayed longer, and might never have left you.
He would take the shot again before letting you live with such a thing.
Instead, he dragged his good hand through the snow until his knuckles touched your knee, the back of his index finger rubbing over the fabric. It was the only answer he could give, the only way left to tell you that even without the shot, he was still there.
Your gaze dipped to watch his hand, and he could tell by the quick blinking that you were holding back more tears. Then your hands clutched tight in his furs and stayed there, and he could just make out you squeezing your eyes shut, waiting for whatever had come over you to pass.
He did not know how long it took, but he would have let you hold onto him for as long as you needed.
When your eyes came back to his face, they passed over his mouth before returning to between his brows. Your gaze held there, fixed on the inner brow, and only then did he become aware of the faint itch in the skin, a fine prickling under the new flesh.
Your head tipped a little as your hand rose to smooth his hair back again.
His finger stilled against your knee as you narrowed your eyes.
“No, that was open,” you said.
You sat back on your heels, hands slipping from his face.
He watched the distance open between you two, barely the span of his forearm, and still it felt too far.
He did the only thing he could think to do then. He rested his hand on his thigh, palm up. His fingers splayed a little, then stilled again, leaving room for yours.
“How…” you whispered.
Though his jaw had mended enough for speech, he did not try to respond. He did not know what to say or where such an answer could begin. To tell you how would mean starting with his making, and that would only breed more hows after it. There had been science in it, he was sure, but he understood it no more than you might have. And even if he had, what answer could have made that moment less terrifying for you?
When he gave you no answer, your gaze dropped first to his shin, taking in the leg, the cloth stiff with dried blood. Then your eyes moved toward the hand at his side, but before you could get a full look at it, he drew it in against his thigh. From where you sat, the mantle hid the rest.
For a while, you did nothing, and he stayed as he was, while the wind flicked snowflakes against the side of your neck.
“Are you still with me?” you asked gently.
He was, and the wanting in him to be with you went farther than that moment, farther than the log and the dark and what had happened. It went to always. It went where it should not. He should not take any more of your days. Not if your days might be turned to that for him again, and surely they would've been. He had to stop. He had to go and leave you to a life that did not hurt for having him in it. He would go on thinking of you anyway. Always. Of what you were doing, and with whom, if you were happy. Of Synne’s tales changing as she got older, whether Marit learned the things you had wanted to keep from her, and of your mother, whether she ever got her strength back, or went into God’s hands with her husband.
Perhaps that was the closest he could come to mercy. Gone, he could do you no more harm.
He gave the smallest dip of his chin.
“I saw inside y--I saw…” Your face pinched, and you looked briefly sick at the memory. “And now I do not.” You let out a breath. “How?” you asked again, quieter. “How can you be alive and sitting in front of me, and still say nothing?”
Still, he did not answer.
“Then why,” you continued. “Why are you not frightened? Did you know this would happen?”
And when he met you with silence again, you wiped at your cheeks with a hasty swipe of your sleeve, as if angry at the tears themselves. He wondered if you thought you had wasted them on something that didn’t deserve them. What use was crying over a death that would not last?
You were still watching him, waiting, when a shiver went through you, and you shoved your bare hands under your arms, crossing them.
“You are freezing,” he said at last, voice coming out scratchy. “We should not stay here.”
You opened your mouth to speak, then swallowed it down and nodded.
So he set his other hand on the log and tried to stand, but the leg still protested. The bone had not yet set firm. He got halfway up before the world tilted and he had to catch himself on the trunk again.
“Wait,” you breathed, and were up almost at the same time he was, catching at his arm.
Your shoulder came only to his ribs, but you wedged yourself under him anyway, taking what weight you could.
“I can walk,” he said.
He pushed again, slower that time, and got himself higher, his bad leg stinging.
He swayed.
Your hands shot up, one to his side, the other to the fur at his shoulder. You pressed in and simply held on. He could feel your heart beating through the layers between you two.
“I can’t catch you if you fall,” you said.
One of his hands found your back, fingers spreading over the thin wool of your coat to keep you both upright. The last thing he wanted was to pull you off your feet with him. Better he hit the ground first than have you trapped under his weight.
“I only need a moment,” he managed.
He bowed his head to ease the throb behind his eyes, and the crown of yours met his chin. He let it rest there, as lightly as he could.
Neither of you spoke for a few minutes. At one point, when he felt your fingers slip under his cloak, over the linen, and onto the warmth of his chest, he nearly pulled you against him just to stop that searching touch from moving seam to seam. You didn't ask what he was, but he felt the question in it, as though the stitching might tell you what he would not.
“Please,” you whispered.
His hand closed tighter on the fabric at your back. He knew what you wanted, and still he could not give it to you.
He cleared his throat. “I am ready,” he said. “If you are.”
You paused before saying, “I am.”
He took his hand from your back and lifted his chin, letting the cold come between you two again. He managed one step, then two.
The forest leaned in around you both as you went. More than once, he caught the round shine of owls’ eyes in the branches, and moonlight in the knotted burls along the trunks, till it seemed there were eyes on him from every side.
He kept his gaze down, picking every place his bad leg would have to land.
You both walked for miles in silence, and it was only when the trees began to thin and the first glimpse of your valley showed below that you spoke again.
“I can make more salve, if it would help any.”
He still had the first salve you had made him, unused in his cloak. He would not be there to need the next one either. Better you make it and have it, he thought, for one of your family members or you when any of you had need of it than have it go with him while the other sat untouched in his keeping.
You want to test your 60s-inspired makeup before a Halloween party. S7!Spencer says yes to being your guinea pig but adds a condition that he’s far too smug about. He thinks he can handle it, which is so, so foolish on his part. Because he absolutely can’t, not even a little.
(fem!reader, cockwarming, p in v, fem!riding sex,(soft)dominant!Spencer, light dirty talk/praise)
“Come on, Spencer. Let me try it, please. Just once?” You fussed, hanging over the sofa’s backrest with your arms dropped to either side of him. “I swear, you’ll look gorgeous.”
You asked again, voice gone syrupy sweet to get your way, and mouth close enough that your breath stirred the hair at his temple. Spencer could only glance sideways, catching flashes of your glossy lips moving. His own parted, a half second behind your meaning as you whined please please please.
He tipped his head back against the cushion, mouth skewed playfully. “Ask me again,” He said, his tone warm but merciless. “But I still might say no. Probably will.”
You let out a frustrated sound and pressed your forehead to his shoulder, sulking just for show. He knew you hated the word no, especially from him, when yes was usually so easy to get.
Then you rounded the sofa and stood between his knees.
“I keep messing it up,” You complained, lip caught between your teeth. “The whole mod look just turns into a muddy blob when I try it on myself. If I practice on you, maybe I’ll finally get the shapes right.” Twisting at the hem of your baggy blue t-shirt, you added, “I really, really don’t want to show up to the party looking ridiculous in front of everyone.”
Spencer’s eyes flitted downward, catching on the doughy curve of your thighs, and the flash of yellow cotton beneath, a tiny sun printed just above where the fabric dipped between your legs. Heat prickled up his neck and down his stomach.
A splintered laugh rumbled in his chest. “They’re not going to notice your eye makeup. I promise.”
Your eyes widened and you huffed, indignant. “Penelope always notices. If she doesn’t say anything, that’s how I’ll know it’s bad.”
Trying, and failing, to hide a smile, Spencer leaned in, elbows rested on his knees, looking up at you with blown pupils. He knew you were always worried about how his friends saw you, never wanting to put a foot wrong around his team, even after all this time. It was heartbreakingly endearing; the way you tried so hard, even though you already had them all wrapped around your finger.
He could’ve given in right then, hearing how much it meant to you…but he was a scheming mastermind instead.
He tilted his head, feigning earnestness. “Isn’t that considerate though? Penelope sparing your feelings?” His eyes sparkled, baiting you.
Spencer knew he had you on the hook the second you begrudgingly agreed, “Well, yes, it’s kind…but I…I--” Only to trip over your own logic, stammering for a convincing and real reason why it would still feel awful.
Spencer caught one of your hands and brought it to his mouth, pressing a trail of scattered kisses across the back of it, wrist to knuckle.
Between each kiss, he murmured, “How badly do you want to practice on me?”
You bounced a little on your toes. “More than anything. I’ll do anything; wipe down baseboards, I’ll finally deal with the icky garbage disposal, or--or I’ll dust your books without moving a single one out of place. Please, Sp--”
Before you could finish his name, Spencer interrupted. “Alright, on one condition.”
“Yes, yes. Anything, name your price.”
He didn’t break eye contact as he said, “You can do whatever you want with my face if you keep me inside you the whole time.”
There was confusion at first, a little line between your brows. “Inside…” You echoed, voice trailing off.
The second your understanding caught up, Spencer found your pulse with his thumb, smiling as it leapt beneath his touch.
You gave in with a bashful smile. “Yeah, okay. I can do that.” Your nail traced along his bottom lip. With a teeny poke, and he opened just enough to nip at you, playful but hungry. “Come on.”
He squeezed your hand before letting go, watching you nearly prance your way back into the bedroom. He heard the happy clang of compacts and brushes as you shuffled through your makeup.
Spencer followed a second later, footsteps padded down the hardwood hallway. When he reached the doorway, you were already hunched over the vanity, eyeshadow palettes fanned open in front of you, an eyeliner pen held between your teeth as you rifled through a drawer for something else, whatever it was.
His chest tightened and the world seemed to spin, a dizzy prickle running through his body, leaving him hard. Already.
It never took much. Sometimes just watching you mop the floor, scrub grout, or kneel in the garden pulling weeds had him ready to jump your bones, wanting you in every plain, ordinary corner of your life together.
For year after year, as long as you’d let him stay.
He hooked his thumbs into the waistband of his joggers, pushing them but leaving his underwear on, letting the fabric strain against him. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught you sneaking glances, pretending to be busy with your brushes, but your interest was obvious. The way your breath hitched, how the eyeliner pen shifted between your teeth with a creak as you bit down a little too hard.
He crossed the room, coming up behind you, and placed his hand on the small of your back. The warmth of his palm lingered as he lowered himself into the chair, crowding in behind you.
“Don’t spare my feelings. Tell me if it looks ugly.” He said, the lightness in his tone meant to loosen the tension winding through your legs.
You met his eyes in the mirror as you smiled. “I’ll be extra careful. Not that you could ever look bad anyway.”
“Take all the time you need,” He said and you shook your head, eyes dropping as you rummaged through the clutter, fingers closing around a tube Spencer was fairly certain he’d never seen before. “What is that?”
“Primer.”
He glanced down at colorful sprawl; palettes open and gleaming, brushes fanned out in tidy rows, every bristle clean and ready. His gaze landed on a small glass pot tucked among the colors, and he nodded toward it. “What about that one?”
He’d laid in bed and watched you do your makeup so many mornings that he almost knew the names of everything by heart, but you were always like a magician, producing little jars and tubes from the drawers that seemed to appear out of nowhere.
“Hmm?” You answered, then noticed what he meant. “Oh, that’s gel liner.”
Spencer frowned lightly, scratching his jaw. “You already have liner. That pen is a liner, right?”
You giggled and stood up straighter, his hand slipping from your back. “There’s more than one kind,” You pointed out, holding up both the pot and the pen for emphasis, then dug through the drawer again and produced a pencil liner with a flourish. “See? Endless possibilities.”
Spencer grunted, a wry smile tugging at his mouth as he mumbled, “It’s excessive,” but there was no real heat behind it.
Without missing a beat, you waved away his complaint, too busy scanning your collection to care. In the glass, Spencer watched as you silently mouthed each name, making sure everything was in its right place before you began.
You gave a satisfied nod, then looked over your shoulder at him.
“All set,” You said, turning to face him with a twinkle of excitement in your eyes.
As you moved to straddle his lap, Spencer caught your hip with one hand, shaking his head.
“Not so fast,” He said, a teasing lilt in his voice. “You forgot something,” His fingers slid beneath the hem of your shirt, finding the elastic of your panties and giving them a tug. “These,” He murmured, then let them snap against your skin, “Need to come off first.”
You steadied yourself against his shoulder, starting to strip off your panties, but Spencer’s hand closed around your wrist, stopping you. He took over with cheeky care, drawing the fabric down your legs, his knuckles brushing your goosebumped skin as he went.
When his eyes landed on the gusset, spotted with a damp patch, he couldn’t help the husky, rough sound that tore from his throat, heat flaring in his gaze as he looked back at you as you straddled him.
He loved how easy it was; how your desire always showed itself so honestly, never bothering to hide, as if your body trusted him enough to give away every secret.
Even when shyness overtook you, and you crawled into his lap to hide your face in the crook of his neck, your body kept telling the truth for you. He could feel you, hot and wet through his boxers, his cock jumping at your slick outline.
Your body never bothered with modesty the way your mind did.
He pressed a kiss to your shoulder, voice gone hoarse. “Up, sweetheart. Just for a second.”
As you rose, he freed himself from his boxers, guiding the head along your slit before nudging at your entrance. As you sank down, his moan was nearly guttural, his body straining not to thrust up as your heat squeezed around him, taking him deeper with every inch.
Once he was fully sheathed inside you, you instinctively started to rise, to ride him, but his hand shot to your hip, holding you down, the hint of a smile playing at his mouth.
He tutted as he held you in place. “You really can’t help yourself, can you? Just keep me warm while you work your magic.”
You sat up straighter, trying to look stern. Like watching a bunny try to stamp its foot. “If you don’t behave, I’m going full glitter. Middle school dance glitter. That I know how to do just fine.”
You weren't bluffing, he’d seen the eighth-grade winter formal photos. All sparkle shadow and bold fuchsia lipstick, a riot of tulle, and a corsage twice the size of your wrist. He’d never admit how many times he’d looked…or how fond he was of the braces.
You’d always been luminous to him. Even then, but especially now.
With a wicked glint in his eyes, he gripped your hips and guided you in a slow, deep grind against him. “Threaten me all you want,” He said quietly, “You know I like it.”
Liked it because your threats landed so meekly, never more than a feather’s touch, so different from the darkness and pain he was used to carrying home. Never any malice, never any unkindness.
You took a moment to tuck his hair behind his ears, brushing away a few stubborn strands that clung to his lashes.
“Okay, okay,” You plucked the shiny purple tube of primer, twisting it open while clearly trying not to get distracted by the way Spencer filled and teased you. “Now close your eyes and be a good canvas. Please.”
He closed his eyes just like you asked, but after a second, one eye peeked open, peering at you with a lopsided grin. “Or what?”
“I’ll tell Penelope you did your own makeup,” You warned, nose scrunching.
Spencer had seen finches look fiercer, all fluffed feathers and no bite.
He laughed, the sound bubbling up from his chest, he felt it low in his belly, the vibration traveling everywhere you both touched, especially where he was buried in you. The ripple of it made him squeeze your hip, downright powerless to do anything but smile.
His mind was still reeling from the way it felt, which, unfortunately, made him stupid enough to almost say: ‘She wouldn’t believe you without proof,’ but caught himself just in the nick of time. Knowing you, you’d be halfway to the kitchen for your phone before he could stop you.
He raised a brow instead and said, “If she buys that, I’ll know you’ve finally learned to lie without giving yourself away. No fiddling with your hair, no tapping your fingers on your leg, no scrunching your nose.” He kissed the tip of it, then added, “That’d worry me.”
“One of these days I’ll surprise you,” You whispered, with what he thought was misplaced purposefulness, as you curled your arms around his neck, nudging your forehead into the space beneath his jaw.
Spencer hummed, hand rising to cup the back of your head, gently tipping your face away. You let him, eyes flicking up shyly.
“That day’ll never come,” He said confidently, lovingly. “Every day I just learn you better.”
He cradled the back of your head as he pressed lush, reverential kisses to the column of your throat.
“Spencer, you’re gonna have me stay bad at this forever if you keep at this.”
Your gasp turned to a mousy, breathless laugh as he nipped at the spot he knew too well. You managed to push him back just enough to focus, squirting a dollop of primer, a bright white bead, no bigger than a pea, onto the pad of your middle finger.
“What, this is distracting?” He drawled, voice mellow but full of trouble.
You made a point of ignoring his taunt by smoothing the primer over his other eyelid, then gently patted it along the delicate skin beneath both eyes.
Spencer found it impossible not to squint, lashes fluttering with the urge to blink the odd, slippery feeling away. It left a faint, tacky sheen, almost like a weird second skin, and he wondered how you stood it every day.
As you shushed his twitching, he groused, “Is it supposed to feel like this?”
Dusting a fluffy brush in pressed powder, you tapped off the excess before sweeping it gingerly over his lids.
“I think you’re just not used to it. Most people barely feel it.” You set the compact aside and leaned forward, scanning the open palettes. “Hmm…” You mused, wiggling your fingers indecisively over classic blue and metallic silver.
Then you leaned even further, reaching for a pinky palette at the back, and the movement pressed down just right, and Spencer exhaled a startled, choked-off noise he couldn’t hold back, the movement sending a sweet jolt through him.
You didn’t seem to notice, still caught up in your color choices. “Which do you think suits you better? Retro or disco ball? Or frosted pink?”
He’d told himself he could handle this. Cocky, apparently, for no good reason, since the slightest movement proved him wrong instantly. He should’ve known better, that good-for-nothing brain of his should’ve, given how quickly he always came whenever you were on top. Nine times out of ten, he didn’t stand a chance. One roll of your hips, or even a clumsy slip of your hand across his chest that made your hips stutter…that was all it took, and he was done for.
He wouldn’t have it any other way.
Somewhere in the blur of his thoughts, your voice trickled back in mid-ramble.
“--and my tights are plum, so I thought pink might tie it together better? But blue’s such a nice contrast. But I just really want something that complements your skin tone too, you know?”
Spencer blinked, trying to catch up. You were still bowed over your palettes, swatching shades across the back of your hand with furrowed brows.
He couldn’t stop the fond tug of his smile, and didn’t even try to. Of course you were trying that hard, of course you were thinking about him, even now.
You glanced up, nodding thoughtfully, locking eyes with him as if he’d said something brilliant.
“Yeah, you’re right. Silver’s out,” You decided, like he’d said it first
He didn’t correct you. Couldn’t, really. His voice was lost somewhere in his throat, stuck behind the way your inner thighs gripped his hips unthinkingly and derailed at how it felt like his opinion already lived in your head.
His hands found the hem of your t-shirt; the tattered aquarium one he’d brought back for you during a Baltimore case. You’d worn it thin, mindlessly worrying the stitches over time, pulling tiny threads loose.
Spencer rubbed one of them between his fingers, absently looping it around his fingertip. Same as you always did.
He swallowed, loudly. There was too much in his chest again; too much intimacy, too much push and pull between being good or being selfish. You were sincerely trying to get it right; sampling for the best color, still worrying about Penelope’s approval that you already had in spades, and blissfully set on marking him up with hues and tints.
He just wasn’t sure how much longer he could pretend he cared about makeup.
What he wanted was to lay you back and kiss the corners of your mouth before you could pout. Kiss the top of your sternum, where your pulse always fluttered when his hand dipped between your legs. Kiss the crease where your thigh met your pelvis, just so you could both moan at the same time as he inched inward.
Or take you right there on the wooden chair, not caring if the knurled decorative spindles scraped his back.
Sadly, though it shouldn’t have been, you looked so earnest, so dreamy with your things branched out, that he couldn’t even bring himself to interrupt as you cocked your head to the side, holding up two palettes on either side of your face.
“Which one?” You asked, angling the pink slightly higher.
“Pink,” He gravelly managed. His thumb and forefinger kept twisting at that loose thread, and as he ground out, “Definitely pink,” The seam finally gave, splitting a little.
You sighed, visibly relieved, and set the other one down. “Good. That’s a good pick. I think it’ll look really nice on you.” Then, almost as an afterthought, “And it’ll give me a better idea of how it’ll look with my costume.”
You dipped the brush into the pink pigment, tapping it lightly again, the bristles fluffing with shimmer as you leaned in closer….and clenched.
It was so slight. Done so damnably subconsciously, he was sure of it.
You could’ve tried all of this again tomorrow or the next day, or the next. Could blend and swatch and practice every shade in the drawer until your heart’s content. The party wasn’t for another week.
Right now all he wanted was you.
He wanted you to break the spell yourself before he did so with far less delicacy.
To desperately rut against him and like you’d forgotten where you were, what you were doing. Ride him until you’d made a mess of yourself, or beg him to press your stomach into the downy mattress and sink into you from behind until the whole world and its expectations dissolved.
Maybe he shouldn’t have suggested this position.
Spencer’s hand shot under your shirt, splaying wide over your bare hip, fingers digging in roughly around the plush of your backside.
“Okay, uh, close your eyes,” You forced the words out, pitifully trying to keep your tone neutral even as your hips gave a tiny, involuntary roll.
He floundered, jaw slack. One part of him screamed to take what he needed, especially at the feel of your arousal, soaking through his boxers where you were your bodies met. It almost drove him wild.
The other just sighed, adoring and tender and torturously bewitched, and did as he was told.
He never stopped wanting you, there wasn’t a day that’d gone by when he didn’t. Some mornings it was worse than others. Some nights he had to hold himself still while you slept on his chest, the weight enough to make him throb long past midnight.
He told himself it was better that way, that it was the right thing, but sometimes it still burned.
Right then, it was a raging fire, licking up his spine and through his veins the second you tipped forward, noses almost touching for the perfect angle, breaths mingling and catching, each inhale and exhale drawn straight from the other. The brush swept lightly across his lid, but all he could focus on was the shift of your hips, how you whimpered as your clit pressed down against the cotton of his boxers.
He nearly lost it at how you nearly lost it.
Spencer wanted to tell you not to stop. To beg you to just give in, to let yourself move the way you wanted, to fall apart together.
He didn’t bite it back that time as he murmured, “You’re already using me for your makeup, sweetheart. Go ahead, use me for this too.”
He rocked your hips gently against himself, making sure your sensitive bud of nerves dragged along the fabric each time. You let your eyes flutter closed, mouth parting, and for a moment, he felt a giddy, short-lived victory, like you might really give in and let go right there in his lap.
But then you shook your head, blinking the trance away.
“Spencer, I--I can’t…I can’t do both at the s-”
“You can,” He promised, nuzzling his nose against yours. “I know you can. Just move your hips, nice and slow for me. I’ll help.”
He guided you in unhurried, sensual rolls against him, making sure your clit caught just right with every pass. Your free hand found his shoulder, clutching for balance, knuckles whitening as you tried to keep dusting pink across his lids with your other.
“You’re insatiable,” You muttered, voice barely more than a shaky sigh. “And devious.”
The brush wobbled, your breath stuttering as you swiped another streak of pink; less precise and a bit skittery. Spencer couldn’t care less if you smeared it all over, if it trailed across his cheek, his forehead, his chin. Anywhere and everywhere, no place was off limits, no place he minded. He’d happily wear that look for you.
All that mattered was how you moved for him and moved with him, showing him, without a word, that you wanted it just as much as he did.
“And you’re doing perfect,” He encouraged, then needled, unable to resist winding you up a little more. “I bet it looks great already. You always do good work.”
He couldn’t see himself; your body blocked the mirror, but he was keenly aware of the little rays of pink wandering out of bounds. He could feel the tickle of bristles in his eyebrow and along the inner corner of his eye.
Proud in a playfully haughty, deeply committed way, he rocked your hips a little firmer.
He heard your suppressed huff as your hand shot to his opposite shoulder, brush still clutched tight, tickling his collarbones.
He couldn’t help himself, grin curling at his mouth, he goaded, “Don’t let me distract you too much,” His hands slid lower, palms cupping under your ass, angling you just right as he sank lower in the seat and thrust up to meet you. “You wanted to get it right, so show me how you do it.”
With every upward drive of his hips, you bounced in his lap, your grip tightening, and then he heard it: a tiny clatter, the brush slipping from your fingers and tumbling to the floor, forgotten and unwanted.
All attempts at composure dwindled as your hands fisted in his shirt instead.
“Faster, please,” You breathed, desperate.
Finally, he thought. Finally, you wanted him to take over, to let him give you what you needed, what only he could. There was nothing he wished for more than wringing pleasure from you, making you break for him, marking you with something no one else could ever touch.
It was a gift, one he guarded fiercely and selfishly, hoping he’d always be the only man to have you like this.
Heat spiked in his chest as he said, “After all those sweet words, now you’d rather just ride me? Can’t say I’m surprised.”
Even as he teased, he was already giving you what you wanted; his pace picking up, chasing the high right along with you.
Your hands slid from his shoulders into his hair, fingers tangling and tugging.
“Shut up,” You said so willfully, so suddenly that it made him groan.
He went silent instantly, heart pounding. Nothing thrilled him more than watching you take what you wanted, letting him know, without a doubt, who was really in charge. Anyone looking in might think he ran things, but really, it was always you, and he loved it that way.
You started rocking your hips quicker, breath hitching into heavier pants as each movement made you crest higher and higher. He felt you clench down around him, hot and wet and velvet, your body dragging him with you every time you moved.
He couldn’t say another word, not when you’d told him so plainly not to, so he kissed you instead. Open-mouthed and hungry as he poured every promise and pestering comment he couldn’t say into the way his lips found yours, letting his hands help you move just the way you needed.
He felt it building in you; the feverish and urgent way your hips ground down, the shiver that wracked your body, the way your walls fluttered intensely around him. You pressed harder into his kiss, swallowing every grunt he made.
There was something deeply arrogant, and deeply loving, in the way he watched you chase your high from him, needing him and clinging to him. Sometimes, in the height of it, it almost seemed like you’d crawl right under his skin if you could, just to get nearer, just to feel him soul to soul, bone to bone.
Spencer wanted that too; wanted to give you everything so you'd never be left unsatisfied, to be the place you could disappear into, completely.
His hand slid from the soft swell of your backside up to the middle of your back, pressing you even closer to his chest, pinning you against him. He gave you exactly what you sought out; no distance and no letting go.
He felt you reach your peak, gasping into his mouth as he licked and sucked at your bottom lip, as if he could drink down every ounce of your pleasure from there too.
As you trembled in his arms, Spencer let one hand slip up to cradle the back of your head, leading you to tuck into the curve of his neck. He held you, sheltered and comfortable, through every aftershock, even as he gritted his teeth, so unbelievably worked up that the hardness of his cock was a kind of euphoric agony.
Then you had to go ahead and arch your back, still rolling your hips in that way you both knew drove him mad. It was instinct, devotion, and maybe muscle memory with how you moved for him, giving him the exact angle he craved.
His sweet, giving girl. So thoughtful, even after you were spent and sensitive, still eager to make him feel as good as you did.
It was that, your carnal generosity, the way you let him seek his rapture even in your own haze, that finished him. He spilled with a ragged, broken sound, gratitude and desire tumbling together as you both shuddered through the last waves.
Both of you stayed like that for a bit, chests heaving in tandem. Spencer let his fingers lightly scratch at your scalp, soothing you, while you dotted a few tender kisses along his neck and jaw.
Neither of you were in a rush to let go.
After a minute, his voice drummed quietly against your hair. “Can I talk now?”
You pushed yourself up, trussing your hands against his lower stomach, fighting a smile as you looked at him.
“I’m honestly shocked you actually listened,” You quipped, but then your eyes went wide, gaze zipping across his face.
Spencer couldn’t help but grin at your expression, knowing exactly what you were seeing: the haphazard splotches of icy pink.
“Well? Am I gorgeous?”
You let out a self-effacing laugh, covering your face with both hands, cheeks burning with embarrassment and affection.
“Oh, that’s horrible,” You lamented behind your fingers. He gently pulled your hands away, pressing a kiss to your knuckles. “Not your face,” You hurried to add, face heated and beaming. “Just the application. I can do better, I swear. Let me wipe that off you and we’ll start over.”
Spencer clicked his tongue, shaking his head. “I distinctly remember agreeing to one makeover, not two.” But then he leaned in, lips caressing your ear as he added, a little bolder, “But…if you shower with me, I might be persuaded.”
You scoffed as you deftly climbed off his lap. He couldn’t hold back a groan at the loss of you, his eyes glued to the sight of your combined release slipping down your inner thigh. A vision that was deliciously seared into his memory.
“And let me clean you too,” He included, voice darker.
“Do you promise to behave?” You asked as you held your hand out for him.
He laced his fingers with yours. “I can’t promise that.”
Post-prison!Spencer can never get enough of your laughter, following you from a haunted house to a fortune-teller’s tent, carnival lights to a confectioner’s stand. At the end of every night, you both know exactly where he wants to be: home, on his knees, promising you everything…starting with his mouth.
The toy chest gave a delighted rattle, scattering tinsel and pieces of fake frosting into the fog. Then came the rats; animatronic, overfed, and still dressed for the doll’s birthday they’d just devoured.
Spencer felt you shudder before he even turned.
You yelped, squealed, and immediately laughed, grabbing his arm as the rats skittered forward on a track. “I hate it. I love it.”
Their sides shed confetti and sprinkles, one wearing a crumpled party hat over its glowing red eye while another gnawed on a plastic doll foot. Streamers trailed behind like entrails. It would’ve been horrifying…if it hadn’t been so ridiculous.
It was unsettling, yes, but only because everything was so earnestly, bizarrely put together that it almost worked.
His hand found your back, palm splaying over the fabric of your costume.
He glanced down at you, wry amusement flickering behind his eyes. “You’re having way too much fun being terrified.”
“Exactly. That’s the whole point, isn’t it?”
Just then, the rats jerked back into motion, clicking in reverse toward their wooden nest, gears whining as the set reset for the next unlucky group.
One twitched wildly on its track, limbs spasming mid-cycle with a high-pitched squeak stuttering over and over again. You tilted your head at it, like you almost felt sorry for the janky little thing, then took an almost subconscious step closer to him.
“Somebody should oil its gears. It’s suffering.”
“Poetic justice, if anything.” He chided dryly.
Spencer didn’t pretend to keep watching the rat after that, he was too busy gazing at you.
A loose ribbon trailed from the neckline of your dress, swaying with every breath you took, teasing the space that separated you. Spencer reached out and pressed it gently against your collarbone, the fabric soft and rich beneath his rough fingertips.
Behind you two, the distant rattle of the curtain rod and a burst of laughter signaled a new group entering.
Spencer’s fingers brushed once more over the scarlet velvet before falling away.
“Come on, my muse.” His voice was low and private, meant only for you.
You passed through the curtain, dress swaying a little too much to be innocent. He let himself smirk as he went after you, more captivated by you than by anything the haunted house could conjure.
“Don’t fall behind, Dorian.”
The hallway tapered, plywood walls stripped bare of illusion, only faint fog machine haze wisping along the floor.
Spencer caught up easily in a few strides, a stutter of strobe light fractured across his features as he drew level with you. He bent his arm, offering his elbow like you were about to promenade through a ballroom instead of painted flats and staged horrors.
You took his arm, your lace glove catching on the fabric of his sleeve as you tipped up to press a kiss to his cheek without breaking step. He felt the waxiness of your crimson lipstick as you pulled away, leaving proof of your affection for anyone who cared to look.
A smile wanted to take over his whole face, and he tried to pare it down to something modest, but it kept breaking through at the edges, emboldened by that little stamp, by the time the next scene unfolded around you two.
The set funneled into a narrow corridor lined with mirrors, light fractured and doubling them endlessly. The floor creaked underfoot, thin boards flexing just enough to sound like they might give, every step answered by dozens of Spencers and dozens of you.
At the far end, the red glow of an EXIT sign hovered, fractured into a hundred copies across the glass.
For a moment, there was nothing but reflections. He caught one; your gaze sliding over your own dress, fingertips smoothing the ruffled cream satin at your hip, and his chest tightened, pleased at how effortlessly you fit the era he’d dressed you for. How confidently you carried the dress, as though you’d worn it all your life.
He leaned in slightly, voice colored with that bone-dry wit of his, “I should’ve known you’d outshine the illusions.”
“You’re just saying that because--”
Then one reflection faltered, its movements half a second behind. The mirror yawned open like a door, and a figure lunged into the corridor, chainsaw roaring as a rubber wolfman mask wobbled rabidly with each step.
A startled cry tumbled out of you and broke into giggles, the sound bright and reckless, as you bolted first, boots striking sharply against the hollow floor, and his shoes thundered after. Your hand reached back, his fingers lacing with yours before you even glanced over your shoulder.
You hit the crash bar first, and the door banged outward. The roar of the chainsaw cut off behind you, swallowed by the cool bite of autumn air that swept across his face, crisp and clean after the stifling dark.
Carnival music already pressed in again as colored bulbs twinkled behind you, making your dress flicker in jewel tones and catching in your hair like stars snagged in strands. He didn’t think he’d ever seen you look more alive.
You were still laughing, and the sound carried differently out there, lighter under the open sky.
“You’re faster than you look.” He said, chest still rising with each breath.
That made him feel better, somehow. Knowing that you could outrun danger if he couldn’t get to you in time.
He hated the thought, but loved the proof of you; alive, laughing, eyes bright.
“Adrenaline,” You panted, voice rocky with leftover tension. “But I’m super surprised those long legs didn’t beat me.”
He hadn’t meant to hang back, but he did, a step behind you, between you and the actor…just in case. He knew it was all part of the harmless scare, just a bladeless prop and a script, but his instincts didn’t really care. Or maybe they were just too fried to trust the difference anymore.
“I was busy making sure you didn’t get chainsawed in half.”
“I would say ‘my hero,’ but I was enchanted, actually enchanted,” You lamented, still clinging to his hand. “The walls came alive in that bloody garden room, Spencer, and you ruined it by pointing out invisible paint.”
“If you were really enchanted, you wouldn’t have noticed me ruining it.”
You hauled him to you, his arm yielding like a rope drawn slack, and he followed the pull without hesitation. Your hand slid up his sleeve, over his shoulder, finding the edge of his high-collared shirt where it had gone crooked. You smoothed it flat with exaggerated care, grinning up at him, satisfied you’d claimed two triumphs in one gesture.
You patted his collar once, as if to seal the adjustment. “So you admit you ruined it.”
“Then I guess I’ll deserve whatever punishment you come up with.” His hand slid to your waist, holding you there.
His eyes lingered on the deep crimson painted across your lips, a temptation waiting at the smallest distance. He leaned in, the faintest drag of his tongue across his own mouth betraying how much he wanted the color smudged onto more than just his cheek.
But you sighed dramatically, turning your head so his mouth found your cheek instead.
“Punishments,” You corrected, emphasizing the plural, while mischief glinted in your eyes. “Starting now.”
Spencer’s fingers pinched lightly at your waist as you pulled away, enough to startle you into a quick gasp.
“Don’t test me, Spencer. I’ll keep all the funnel cake or whatever to myself.”
Every stall around you both could vanish for all he cared; there was only one sweetness worth chasing, and it wasn’t wrapped in paper or spun with sugar.
He could still feel it from last night, the lingering soreness in his jaw from keeping you spread across the comforter while your hands clawed at the sheets and pulled hard at his hair, until you came apart three times beneath his mouth and he still couldn’t bring himself to stop.
But that ache was nothing compared to the one in his chest now. How willing you were, how undone. Your moans still lived in his throat, your hands still ghosted through his scalp. For all the ways life had withheld sweetness from him, you’d given him that night, and the hundreds before it, each one a moment stitched from you and need and trust.
It was something extraordinary he’d never stop snapping at the heels of.
Without a word, Spencer intertwined his fingers with yours and pulled you close again, keeping you beside him as the scent of kettle corn and the strange sweet-smog of ride engines saturated the spaces between barker calls and carousel melodies.
As pennants fluttered and rides buzzed, belts slipping and starting again, he leaned in and pressed a kiss to your temple.
“Where to next?” He asked gently, tugging absently at his already loosened cravat.
“There’s so much I want to do,” You murmured, eyes darting from the spinning tilt-a-whirl to the candy-striped booths. “But right now I’m stuck between the photobooth…or the fortune teller.”
“We could save the ten dollars and I’ll tell you your lucky number is seven, your aura’s excellent, and you’re destined to be spoiled senseless by someone neurotic, generous, and very good in your kitchen.”
“Wow,” You said, scooting sideways as a cluster of tiny cowboys and a fairy princess tottered by, glitter and churro crumbs clinging to everything. One of them waved at you with sticky fingers and a lopsided smile, and you returned it without missing a beat.
Spencer tucked the image away, and he just looked at you like you were made of everything good that ever happened to him.
“I’ve clearly hit the jackpot then.” You added after they passed.
He wondered if there was a psychological term for it, for the intense, stinging warmth that came with loving someone so completely. If there wasn’t, he’d name it after you.
He leaned in and whispered against the shell of your ear, “Let’s go get our picture taken. You look like a dream tonight.”
“Nope, let’s see if the fortune teller backs up your claims first, one way or another.”
You started lugging him the opposite way, toward the far end of the row where the midway dimmed and the crowd thinned.
The fortune teller’s tent slouched to one side in the corner, pitched beneath a web of string lights. Gauzy purple drapes fluttered at the entrance, heavy with the scent of charred spice and old metal, maybe rust or tarnish. A hand-painted sign leaned against a hay bale out front: Baba Nox: Readings by Candle and Clove.
Spencer raised an eyebrow, but let you keep pulling him forward, as if you were taking him into some worldly fairytale. It was so like you, playing to his skepticism with a grin, and maybe it was so like him too…secretly loving every second of it.
“Don’t hold my hand in there,” You murmured, pausing at the drapes. “It'll fudge the forecast.”
He gave your hand a light squeeze, thumb brushing once across your knuckles, before letting go.
Inside, it was all witchlight gloom and slow-burning votives nestled in colored glass, the air perfumed with clove and smoke, and something else that tickled his nose.
Spencer followed close behind, so close he clipped the back of your heel and caught himself with a quick hand to your shoulder, steadying both of you.
“Right. Sorry,” He muttered, stepping back. “Wouldn’t want to skew the magic or anything.”
On the low side table tucked beneath a stretch of damask, he spotted a laminated palmistry guide. He resisted the urge to point it out. He’d already been scolded once for messing with the mystique, and the look on your face wasn’t worth risking again.
Just then, the silence cracked like a cue.
“Welcome,” Came a voice from the shadows; smooth, theatrical, and absolutely timed for effect.
You and Spencer both jerked toward it in tandem, heads swiveling like synchronized spooked cats.
The fortune teller was middle-aged, maybe in her early fifties, wrapped in layers of brocade and beads like a community theater actress who never left the role.
She, Baba Nox apparently, motioned to the cushions with a flourish.
“Cross the veil and take a seat,” She intoned, then, after a second, said, “And if you have cash, that’s even better than incense.”
Spencer looked over just in time to catch the corners of your mouth twitching, lips pressed tight to hide a smile. You didn’t say anything, just padded toward the cushions and sat.
He followed, fishing a few bills from his wallet as he walked.
The money left his fingers without ceremony. When he sat, he didn’t look directly at the woman, didn’t need or really want to. Not while he could feel her gaze skimming over him; eyes tracing him like chalk outlines, already knowing where to poke and pull from.
“Who shall I be reading tonight?” She asked, already sounding like she knew the answer.
You didn’t even hesitate. “Him.”
Spencer blinked as he turned to you, dumbfounded and duped. “Wait, what?”
“Well, I already got my fortune. Remember? Seems only fair you get yours too.”
He opened his mouth, then closed it.
Brat, he thought. You’d absolutely set him up. He knew it, you knew it, and somehow, he still didn’t mind. Especially not when you looked that pleased with yourself.
“Of course it’s you,” The fortune teller said, sounding beyond scripted. “They always bring the skeptics in last.”
Baba Nox turned, reaching for a narrow shelf behind her, cluttered with jars of dried petals and a folded pair of reading glasses. The tarot deck sat there, stashed between a bottle of glitter and a leather-bound ledger.
She took it down like a well-loved recipe book, thumbed through it once, and began to shuffle.
Spencer leaned back slightly, eyeing the shelf. He was already noticing all the inconsistencies, and, against his better judgment, the charm.
Baba Nox didn’t ask what he wanted to know. She simply began to lay the cards like she’d done it a thousand times before.
“The fates are chatty tonight,” She said, almost to herself. “Let’s see who’s been whispering about you.”
She drew the first card with a casual flair, flipping it to face you both.
The Hermit…naturally.
Baba Nox gave a hum that bordered on a chuckle. “Well, of course,” She said, tapping a ringed finger to the card. “This one’s easy. The Hermit doesn’t necessarily mean lonely, it means self-reliant, observant, doesn’t waste words.” She looks him over. “You wear it well, darling.”
A safe bet, he’d give her that much. You could stick that label on any quiet cynic dragged into a tent by someone more dazzling than him. On anyone who didn’t talk much, where mystery could fill in the blanks.
‘Lonely’ was a risky guess. It wasn’t something she could say with certainty, not with him sitting that close beside you. She’d have to be a little more perceptive than that.
Still, he couldn’t help but wonder what she’d draw next, and how she’d twist it, not in his favor, but in hers. To keep her credibility and glamour.
She laid the second card with a knowing tilt of her wrist.
Temperance. Hmph.
“A balance,” She said mildly, as if she were explaining something already obvious. “Two forces meeting in the middle. You temper each other; her fire, your calm. You keep her from burning too hot.”
He didn’t bristle outright, but something in the way she said it sat wrong. Tilted the picture off-center.
She thought it was flattering, like taming something wild. As if that would ever be a compliment. That you were something to be cooled, a flame needing a steadying hand. As if his presence existed to keep you from spilling over, instead of honoring what burned within you.
He loved you because you were vivid and wild enough to love fear on purpose. Wild enough to choose someone like him; overthinking everything, always a few steps behind everyone else, too careful by half.
Spencer didn’t want to be the one who dampened that. He couldn’t imagine trying to.
“That’s a common misreading of the card.” He folded his hands in his lap, thoughtful. “Temperance isn’t about restraint. It’s about harmony. Mutual transformation.”
He meant it in ways he couldn’t even begin to explain, and wouldn’t out loud, but felt all the same. It wasn't about keeping things in check, it was about how two people could meet in the middle and change without losing themselves.
That’s exactly what you’d done for him.
You’d made space where he didn’t think there was any left, never made him feel like too much or not enough, and without even trying, you rewrote everything he thought he knew about closeness, about wanting, about being wanted in return.
He’d spent years believing he was safest alone, until you, and he didn’t know how to go back to not needing you.
He’d always need you, the same way he’d always want you.
Baba Nox blinked, caught off guard, but it didn’t show in her voice, but something in the room slipped sideways with her.
“Mhm,” She muttered, nodding slowly. “Maybe the cards say one thing and the man holding the calm says another.”
Then she flipped the next card with a touch more care.
Her voice droned gently onward, but Spencer didn’t pay attention anymore after that. He just watched the worn corners instead, the way the cards fanned across the table; faded ink, foxed edges, and their symbolism dulled from too many retellings.
All he could feel was the weight of your hand inside his. He’d reached for it with full awareness, his thumb grazing over your knuckles, then catching gently on the tips of your nails, like he couldn’t stop touching where you ended.
He didn’t care that it broke your earlier request.
It didn’t matter now. He’d already chosen what he wanted to know, and wasn’t interested in what the cards had to say, or in the performance someone built around them. Not when he could feel you, so warm and real beside him, truer than any omen and more certain than fate.
Baba Nox turned over another card, then another, but he didn’t look up until she finished.
He held your hand all the way out, and neither of you spoke as you stepped back into the noise and color of the festivities. Laughter was all around; some deep and braying, others high and fluttery, with the shrill delight of children trailing behind like streamers.
“Maybe I should’ve guessed your future instead.”
He dropped his head with a short exhale, but it caught in his throat like a laugh. His hair curtained his face, and he didn’t bother pushing it back.
“Yeah, I’d take that version,” He said, “Any day.”
“Consider that your second punishment then.”
He tugged you gently toward him, hand splayed at your lower back. “You’re being cruel,” He leaned down, lips barely brushing your cheek. “You’ll have make it up to me later,” He rasped, voice thick and uneven. “By letting me stay inside you for as long as I want. Just you…and me staying exactly where we belong.”
You pecked his lips and lingered just long enough to make a point.
Then you murmured against his mouth fondly, “You have absolutely no shame.”
You weren't wrong.
He had absolutely no shame when it came to you. He knew he should’ve, even a little bit was better than nothing. He knew better than to let himself slip like that, to forget where he was, who might see…but he didn’t care. Couldn’t be bothered to try and care.
If it were up to him, he’d stay pressed against your side until the world stopped turning. Be shrunk down and carried in your pocket, or better yet, disappear into you entirely - just merge, somehow, soul-first.
He’d asked for a second chance at life and meant it, but only if you were in it. Only if you were his.
“Thank you for noticing,” He deadpanned, then smiled as you scoffed.
You grasped the charcoal waistcoat at his ribs, hard enough to crease the fabric. Your gaze lifted to meet his, and your head tilted ever so slightly.
He knew that look.
Knew exactly what it meant, how it always started with your mouth parting and your eyelids going a little heavier than before. He knew you were imagining it, what he’d said. You beneath him, limbs tangled, all breathless and loved. That gasp you only ever gave him when he filled you. The way you always opened up so beautifully, like you were made for him.
Desire tucked behind your lashes just as his cock twitched, straining already, every filthy pulse dragging heat up from the base of his spine.
He swallowed, jaw tight. Maybe he really should’ve had some shame.
Spencer was seconds from losing his grip, his poor restraint hanging by a thread, when you cleared your throat and took a sharp little breath.
“We should, um - go…to the photo booth? Before it runs out of film, or ink, or…whatever it uses. What do they use?” You asked with a self-effacing laugh.
It was almost too easy, getting under your skin like that. Swaddling all that sunshine until it flushed pink just for him. He’d never get over it; how someone so spunky, so luminous, could turn bashful at a few low spoken words.
It made you less terrifying, somehow. Less golden and gleaming and out of reach. He loved both, the fire and the stumbles, but the latter made you feel even more like his. Like he could touch the parts of you that nobody else saw - those that were just for him, because you let them be.
“You got it,” He said, leaning in like it was some grand secret. “Thermal paper and dye-sublimation ink, technically, but…’whatever it uses’ works too.”
Then he led you back into the kaleidoscope of chatter and movement.
He could feel people looking. Maybe not plumb staring, but seeing…him, specifically. Eyes snagged on his face for no more than a few seconds, then trailed off like smoke. It felt like it was obvious they knew he didn’t quite match the tone of the scene.
With you, the world looked at you like it already knew you. Like every light was hung for you and every echo muted to let you pass.
Or maybe he was just that lovestruck. Maybe he’d spent so long watching you with wonder that now he saw it reflected back, imagined it in every passing glance. Because in his world, there was no way anyone could look at you with anything less.
He was definitely gone. For you, for good - call it love or call it madness.
The photo booth up ahead was dressed for the season; a curtain flanked by plastic tombstones and stringy webs someone had clearly gotten carried away with, and cute paper bats hung from the frame.
You stopped short, hand tightening slightly in his.
“Wait--” You said faintly, tugging him back. “Let them go first.”
He followed your gaze and saw them: a couple well into their seventies, dressed to the nines like background characters in an old soap opera; pearls, shoulder pads, and a silk ascot. They looked absurd and regal at once, arm in arm, smiling at each other.
With a hand to her elbow and the other parting the curtain, he helped her inside.
It was ridiculous, probably, how quickly his brain leapt ahead. How fast he saw himself thirty years from now, devotedly helping you into places like that; booths and bakeries, pharmacies and flower shops. He’d carry your groceries and smooth your cardigans and kiss the smile lines by your eyes so often you’d forget they ever made you self-conscious.
Time couldn’t take that from him. It couldn’t if he kept proving it, and not if he showed you, day by day, wrinkle by wrinkle, that you’d only ever become more of what he loved.
Because what else could be more profound than being loved, wholly and daily, by your favorite person for the rest of your life?
Standing with time, not against it. Letting it happen together.
A warbly laugh, the woman’s, he guessed, slipped out from behind the cloth, buoyed by the rustle of wind and the snap of photo strips.
“They’re adorable,” You cooed quietly, eyes still on the booth. “I love her laugh.”
His chest ached in that piercing, resplendent way, like every single heartstring knew how lucky he was.
You, with your open heart and all your little adorations.
Him, finally brave enough to offer his own. To be the one who got to look at you like that, talk about you like that, tell you just how easy it was to love you.
Once upon a time, he used to keep those things to himself, but no more. Now he handed them over, one by one, hoping you’d never get tired of hearing them. Even the ones he wrapped in sarcasm just to survive saying them out loud.
You always heard them anyway.
“They are,” He said honestly. “You know, you're the sweetest person in the world to strangers and a menace to me. It’s a little backwards.”
“I treat you how you like it.”
He almost chuckled, or moaned, or said please. It was hard to tell, with how fast you could rattle him with just one line, with no buildup or warning. It just went straight to his bloodstream. The worst part was how unbothered you were when you said things like that, how you knew exactly what you did to him and had no plans to stop.
Sometimes there was no mercy in your mouth, and he treasured you for it.
His hand found the edge of your once-puffy sleeve where it had collapsed a little, fluffing it back into shape. It was nothing, just a small thing, but it gave him an excuse to touch you right then.
He bit down on his lower lip and looked away before his face gave him up. God forbid you saw the way his eyes clung to yours after a moment like that. He didn’t think he could take much more without combusting; tragically, stupidly, somewhere south of dignity.
Your eyes roved, taking in everything; from the glowing game stalls to the toddler in a too-big Cookie Monster hoodie. But you kept drifting back, again and again, to the stand lined in caramel and lacquered sugar, where apples gleamed on sticks like little glass hearts, their candy shells traced with sugar flames that glowed like jack-o’-lanterns.
He knew you were going to ask, so he beat you to it.
“We’ll get one after,” He said, before you could bat your lashes and pretend it wasn’t obvious. “I think they’re almost done.”
The curtain rustled ahead, and Spencer caught sight of the man’s cane tipping out first, the rubber cap nudging along the pavement as he searched for steady footing.
They stepped out like they'd forgotten their age entirely; giggling with the woman fixing her hair while the man held up the photo strip like it was solid gold.
They disappeared into the crowd, kind of like a dream you hope you’d have again. Spencer didn’t know them, but he felt connected all the same, as if their ease belonged to him too, or would, if he was fortunate enough.
Someday, with you.
“Come on,” You said, already halfway to the photobooth. “Don’t dally, Dorian.”
Spencer took a few long strides to catch up, then passed you by just enough to reach the booth first. Without a word, he caught the curtain and held it open, his other hand extended slightly toward you in a gentlemanly offer.
“After you, my lady.”
He let you climb in first, which was a given. There’d never be another order to things.
Spencer shimmed in after you, pulling the covering closed. The booth was tight, warm, oddly peaceful.
You reached forward and jabbed the button, the screen flickering to life in front of you. A chime counted down from three.
Already you were shifting in your seat, wiggling your hips to get a better angle, tucking a strand of hair behind your ear, tilting your chin to catch the light. It was the same little dance you did before any photo. He bit back a smile, watching you pretend not to care while clearly caring just enough.
He was just about to tell you how pretty you looked, to shush whatever insignificant and nagging voices that still tried to argue with the camera.
Before the words made it out, the booth flashed, catching the moment: you smiling sweetly at the screen, and him, caught mid-thought and looking only at you like you hung the moon and all the stars.
“Spencer,” You admonished in a rush. “Look forward. I want your handsome face in at least one of these.”
He beamed at that, so full and mischievous, and a little breath caught in the back of his throat.
“Sure,” He murmured, reaching out. “But only if I get this first.”
Then he turned your chin, and kissed you right as the second flash popped; the shutter catching the curve of his smile against your mouth.
You started giggling, eyes crinkling, your nose brushing his.
“Don’t make me force you to stop looking at me.”
Spencer only leaned in closer, resting his forehead against yours.
“Try me,” He quipped devilishly, right as the third flash went off.
You’d clambered into his lap by the last flash, both hands on his cheeks, trying to hold his face still and forward while giggling uncontrollably by that point. He looked stunned and smitten, lips parted in a start of a laugh, as if you’d just tackled him with love, which, in a way, you had.
The last flash went off, catching the chaos of you both in a blur of light. Spots danced in his vision as the booth fell quiet again and Spencer felt your weight still on his lap, your breath warming his cheek, the softness of your hands cradling his face.
Sometimes it was too much…how much he wanted you, in every direction at once.
He had to get out of the booth. Before he said something that would tip the mood too far and too fast. Before he ruined the levity with the weight of just how much he meant it.
Gently, he slid his hands up to yours and peeled them from his cheeks, kissing one palm and then the other. Then he gave your knee a light tap and ducked out with a breath that didn’t quite calm him, heading for the slot where the photo strip would appear.
He hovered by the machine, heart still thudding, when you popped up behind him, arms sliding around his waist and body tucked snugly against his side.
“Might as well take ‘em since you looked at me in all of them anyway.”
He would’ve kept them anyway. If you’d asked for them, he might’ve refused, just a teensy-weensy bit, but only to make you ask twice.
Finally, the strip slid out, all shiny and warm. He took it carefully, worried it might’ve smudged or torn under too much awe.
The colors were too bright, a little garish. You know, the kind that made cheap booths feel magical in one way or another. The real saturation was in the way the moments had been caught. The first one was sweetness. The second, longing. The third, laughter. The fourth…that was devotion, plain and simple.
Each photo was bursting, somehow, with that dizzy, amazed affection he never quite managed to believe he deserved.
He knew too well the parts of himself that had once made people leave, and still did to that very day; the silences mistaken for disinterest and the spirals he couldn’t always control. Affection like that, undemanding and daily and playful, didn’t seem made for someone who'd gotten so used to living on the smallest possible version of what he needed.
He still didn’t understand how someone like you wanted someone like him.
He could spend forever trying to make sense of it, or he could just live his happily ever after…with you.
He glanced down at the strip once more, then carefully folded it, slipping it safely behind the inner panel of his waistcoat, where the lining pressed smoothly against his chest.
“Let’s go get you that candied apple.” He said with a kiss to your crown, a low hum in your hair.
He walked with you, tuned to every sway of your shoulder against his.
The confectioner behind the stall was busy arranging trays; marshmallows dusted in violet sugar, rock candy that glittered like geodes under the lamps, and cherries on stems dunked halfway in dark chocolate and dotted like little eyeballs.
You leaned in, grinning. Spencer felt the heat from a copper kettle, but even more from you.
With a little bow and a tip of his paper cap, the vendor said, “Take your pick, madame. Sweet, sweeter, or dangerously sweet?”
The man looked older, in his sixties, with a plush belly beneath his apron and laugh lines carved deep into his cheeks. Someone’s grandpa, probably. The kind who snuck you goodies when your parents weren’t looking.
“Whatever category the candied apples fall into,” You said merrily, “I’d like one of those, please.”
“Dangerously sweet it is then,” He said, lifting the glossiest one from the tray. “A treat worthy of the loveliest guest.”
As he wrapped the stick in parchment, Spencer was already reaching for his wallet, flipping it open with one hand and thumbing through the bills. He’d already noted the price and calculated tax, of course, and selected the exact amount, crisp and ready.
But the candymaker gave a tut and waved a sugar-dusted hand.
“On the house,” He said cheerfully, handing you the ruby-covered gift. “Too much joy in a smile like that. Wouldn’t feel right charging for it.”
“That’s kind of you. Thank you so much.”
Spencer’s hand hovered mid-offer, fingers still pinched around the bills. Before he could argue, the man winked at you and turned back to his goods.
He frowned ever so slightly and glanced over the spread again. The candied apples sat off to the side, their glaze catching glimmers and sparkles but drawing no attention. No takers. Maybe the man just wanted them gone? That he was better off giving one to someone who’d enjoy it, even if it meant giving it away for free.
Why didn’t he give Spencer one then?
You both drifted past clusters of people crammed around fold-out tables, banter bouncing between bites. A pair of teens split a root beer float with two straws while a man juggled hot dogs for a toddler’s applause.
Eventually, you found an empty bench near the edge of the food court chaos, and Spencer sat beside you like he hadn’t just been mentally tallying all the reasons he felt oddly territorial about a five dollar apple.
You took the first bite, teeth sinking in, and Spencer found himself watching, too intently. Practically entranced.
The glossy shell cracked beneath your lips, the red layer giving way to the pale flesh beneath, and the mark of your mouth left behind in a perfect crescent. Your lipstick, rich and crimson, clung to the bite like blood from a piercing kiss.
He stared and stared, struck dumb by the small violence of it.
As if it weren’t already too much, your tongue passed over your front teeth in a thoughtless sweep, catching a bead of syrup before it could escape. His mind went feral for a second, picturing himself leaning in to catch it for you, tasting the sweetness and the tart green bite of the apple right from your mouth.
With perfect nonchalance, you angled it his way and asked, “Want a bite?”
His first impulse was to shake his head no. He wasn’t hungry at all, but something about the way you held it out so casually, so certain he’d want it - even though you knew better, hollowed him out in an annoyingly perfect way, like you’d aimed and hit the one part of him that was always hungry.
He didn’t want the treat, he wanted what you left behind on it. That’s what he was starving for.
Spencer took it without a word, his eyes locked on the mark you left. He smirked faintly, then bit into the exact same spot, lipstick and all.
“It’s yummy, huh?”
He passed it back with a nod, still chewing, the sugar gluey between his teeth.
“Yeah,” He said. “Dangerously sweet.”
He glanced absently back toward the stand. The confectioner was chatting with a young woman and her friend, gesturing animatedly at his selection.
Spencer’s eyes narrowed just a little while his jaw flexed before your laugh pulled him back.
“You liar,” You teased. “I only offered because you were looking at it like it was the best thing you’d ever seen. I know you don’t like stuff like this.”
He didn’t answer right away. Instead, he gave you a small, sly smile and lifted his hand, used the pad of his thumb to wipe a bit of lacquer from the edge of your mouth, then popped it into his without breaking eye contact.
“Wasn’t the apple I wanted.” He said, low and heady.
"Yeah? Too bad I’m not the one on the stick then."
Spencer huffed a quiet laugh, then let his hand fall to your thigh, squeezing once. “Doesn’t mean I won’t get a taste later tonight.”
You gave him a sidelong look, lips quirking before you bit down again, leaving him to sit with the promise he’d just made.
He couldn’t stop thinking about it…your taste on his tongue, the way you always gave in when he lingered, when he made you wait for it. He loved that, loved keeping you open and wet under his mouth, tongue working you slowly until you were grinding against his face, slick running down his chin, until he decided when you had enough.
Just one tonight, he thought, but he’d stretch it out, make it last until you were begging for it, dragging it out until you were trembling and desperate. He’d keep you waiting until you were crying for release, and only then would he let you have it. Only then would he let himself have you, every inch, every need, until neither of you could breathe for it.
Heat clawed through him until he had to shift in his seat, trying to think about anything else.
He tried to think about the midway instead; the odds of winning a ring toss, the statistical probability of pulling a weighted duck from a tank. Anything, anything at all.
But it just didn’t work. All he could picture was you melting around him, his tongue.
“Thanks for coming with me,” You said, bumping his shoulder lightly. “I know this isn’t exactly your kind of thing, but I really hope you had some fun too.”
He glanced at you, utterly caught off guard. She thinks I’m twitchy because of the crowd, he realized, because of the noise and the people, and not because I can’t stop imagining how I’m going to have her later.
It felt almost like a mercy, the way you gave him an out. A lifeline to grab if he needed it. He almost laughed pitifully, because if only you knew: he wasn’t drowning in the chaos, he was drowning in you.
"With you? Always."
“So I can put us down for caroling then?” You teased.
He leaned in, pressing his nose to your cheek as he kissed it, a chuckle slipping out.
“Absolutely not.”
The night blurred after that, bunting and games and stalls fading into shadows as the crowds dwindled and the carnival wound down around you. When you made it back to the car, his waistcoat sagged where you’d yanked at it during rides, and the hem of your dress was smudged with dust and stained green from the grass. The backseat was full of stuffed animals he’d insisted on winning for you, and one small one you’d won for him, though you wouldn’t let him carry it himself the rest of the night.
Everything after seemed to move on its own; seatbelts, headlights on dark streets, the lull of exhaustion as the thrill of the night faded to memory. By the time you both reached your front door, all the laughter and calliope music already felt like it belonged to another world.
You adjusted the armful of plushies with a dramatic lift of your chin, balancing them precariously as he fitted the key into the door.
“You might at least relieve me of a rabbit,” You said loftily. “What sort of gentleman leaves his muse in such disarray?”
The lock clicked, and Spencer brushed his shoulder against yours as he leaned closer. “The sort who knows she looks loveliest right before she drops everything.”
You huffed and went to sweep past him into the house, but he stopped you with a quick hand. One by one, he plucked them from your arms: the tufted bear, the rabbit in its orange bowtie, the penguin, and finally the neon-green frog. He gathered them against his chest with an ease that said more than words, because he knew you’d hate it if even one of them touched the dirty porch.
“Gallantry delayed is gallantry denied,” You remarked, slipping past him, “But I suppose I shall forgive you this once.”
His laugh came out in a snort as he trailed you in, depositing the toys in a heap on the sofa. By the time you bent to your boots, he was already kneeling before you, steadying your calf with one hand while pulling at the knot with the other.
“Now you’re being too merciful,” He said, easing one boot free with a careful tug. “Any other muse would have dismissed me outright. I’ll prove myself properly this time.”
“Any other muse? Dorian, you’ll make me tear through your sketchbooks.”
He covered his grin with a kiss that lingered just a shade too long, lips hot against your inner knee, betraying the hunger he meant to keep hidden until later.
“You won’t find another face in them,” He promised, removing the other shoe. “Only yours, again and again, until I get it right.”
You fluffed the folds of your dress with unnecessary vigor.
“Muses aren’t meant to take their creators at their word. They demand proof.”
Spencer’s hands ran along your lower legs. “Then maybe I’ll start proving it right here. Right now.”
Dorian dissolved between one heartbeat and the next. Only Spencer remained, as the most enamored man alive, all love and wanting, and fervently unarmed at your feet.
He let the second boot drop, fingertips gliding along your calf, following the path he knew by heart. He dipped his head, breath ghosting heat along the inside of your knee, lips barely brushing over silk and skin before he pressed a firmer kiss there, then another, higher and higher.
Nothing else mattered but the space beneath your dress as he eased the hem up, baring your legs bit by bit.
Spencer’s hands were confident and loving, lingering as if time itself had slowed. He wanted to rush and to take, but made himself savor every inch…because why race toward pleasure, when most of the sweetness was in the tension between?
His palms smoothed up to your thigh, then stilled at the garter. There, his thumbs drew lazy circles at the band as he looked up, finding his answer in the shudder of your breath.
His finger hooked under the band of your stocking, drawing it down so slowly the soft slide of silk sounded loud in his ears. He watched, absolutely mesmerized, as the fabric slipped over your knee, your calf, your ankle, then finally came to rest at your heel before he slid it off entirely.
Every inch was an unveiling, one he watched with the rapt attention of someone unwrapping something precious, something wholly his.
Without breaking eye contact, he pressed his lips to the bare skin above your knee, then higher, letting the stubble of his jaw scrape gently along your thigh as he climbed. He let his teeth graze the tender flesh, tongue following in a soothing sweep. His hands bracketed your legs, holding you open as his mouth traveled upward.
When he finally reached the top of your thigh, just shy of where you needed him most, and where he ached to be, he hovered; breath way too hot, lips nearly trembling with the effort not to give in, his mouth grazing your skin in a slow, desperate drag.
He wanted you trembling before he ever gave in, but the torment went both ways, sad in its own way, but good too, because it meant he was just as lost to you as you were to him. For every moment he denied you, the ache inside him grew fiercer, crueler.
Spencer’s breath fanned hot against your center as his hands held you, but he didn’t move closer. He just looked up at you, a sly flicker in his eyes, waiting for you to break first.
Well, he prayed you’d break before he would.
“You want more,” He confirmed quietly. “You want my mouth for more than words, don’t you? That’s the proof you’re after.”
He let his nose graze the thin fabric of your violet panties, the warmth of his breath seeping through, making the lace cling tighter against your core, where he could see your arousal seep through. His mouth heartlessly trailed sideways, skimming the delicate crease where thigh met hip, and then he nipped at the edge of the material.
Nothing still. Alright, fine. If you wouldn’t give in, he’d just have to try harder.
At first, he dragged his tongue along the inside of your thigh, mouthing at the doughy parts until you were quivering under his hands. Then he pressed his mouth lower, more inward, tongue flicking over the damp spot, determined to drag you past the edge by sheer force of will.
He hummed as your breath grew ragged, and lips parted to speak.
“Well?” He whispered, almost gentle, almost not. Mostly not.
He let his teeth catch on your panties, tugging lightly until the fabric stretched away from your skin, then letting it snap back. A tease, a harmless sting that he knew sent heat straight through you as he looked up with pupils blown with fiery mischief.
“You know, you could help a little,” He said, lips quirked. “How am I supposed to know if I’m proving myself if you won’t tell me what you require?”
He already knew, but to hear you, someone so bold and so sure, asking him, choosing him to make you feel good…that was a different kind of pleasure.
No words, not a sound or peep. Just the press of your hips against his palms while your eyes found his, alight with defiance and wildness, and your lips curled up at one side, knowing exactly how much it was costing him.
It was devilish really, and appropriate with the festive clings grinning from the glass behind you. He couldn’t help but think it fit perfectly, how you’d be the devil he’d gladly give his soul to that night.
Spencer’s pulse kicked harder at the challenge in your eyes; he felt it in the tension of your thighs, in the way you wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.
He saw it then, in every inch you refused to give. While he teased with words and hands, loud in his longing, you answered with silence, your restraint its own sort of provocation, keeping him just as needy as he kept you.
Maybe he should’ve been frustrated, but all it did was stoke the ache inside him.
“So, that’s how it’s going to be?” He smiled, wicked and warm. “Keep playing, but we both know how this ends.”
He lingered, eyes on yours, waiting for some sign: a gasp or a word or maybe a shiver, but you gave him nothing. Only the smallest, most infuriating tilt of your head as you looked down your nose at him, queenly and simply unbothered.
Alright, new tactic, he thought as he shifted his weight, fingers brushing the delicate edge of your panties. They were one of his favorites, swirling in intricate, almost floral patterns finished with a tiny bow just a shade lighter. He hooked his thumbs beneath the waistband, right beside that lilac bow, dragging the lace down in a torturously slow arc, his knuckles gliding over your thighs, the fabric catching for a heartbeat at your knees before slipping free.
He watched your eyes the whole time, looking for any crack in your composure; the tiniest flutter of your lashes or a quiver in your lips. Anything, a spark of want you couldn’t quite hide.
He’d never wanted anything more than to see you fall apart for him right then, but seeing you hold together was its own kind of ruin. He loved you for every second you made him wait, for every second you kept your secrets, for the power you gave him only when you chose to let go.
He let the material fall to the floor, then ran his hands greedily back up your legs.
“The house feels empty when you’re not talking back.” He rasped as he kneaded gentle circles into your calves, working out the strain from all the miles you’d walked together at the carnival.
Rather than let him hear you surrender, you slipped one foot up along his bent knee, then his thigh. A crooked smile played on your lips, squeezing his heart and sending blood rushing low.
Spencer’s hand shot to your ankle, fingers flexing as he gripped it.
“You’re such a brat,” He muttered roughly, nails digging lightly into your skin, leaving tiny crescents behind. “You make it impossible for me to be good.”
You only lifted your chin in reply, pushing your heel just a bit firmer into his thigh, as if to remind him exactly who he was kneeling for.
As if he’d ever forget.
At that point, he still thought he wanted to win…until you reached out, and suddenly he had to wonder why he ever thought giving in to you would feel like losing. One hand settled on his shoulder for balance as your leg slid up, draping over his shoulder.
Spencer stilled, the sight of you spread so boldly and unashamed before him, knocking every last clean thought out of his head.
“You’re not playing fair,” He groaned as his lips brushed the middle of your inner thigh, just above where your leg rested on his shoulder.
“And you have been?” You whispered gravely, barely audible.
His gaze snapped up, wrecked and desperate, suddenly and fully aware he has always been at your mercy. Not the other way around.
With an unapologetic hand, you gathered the hem of your dress and drew it up to your stomach, baring yourself entirely. There was no trace of shyness, not after all that time. Not with him. You knew, and he knew, you’d never have to second-guess his wanting you, not for a moment.
That was it, he thought; the proof. Even if you’d never call it that, whether you realized it or not.
Spencer’s breathing seized up at the sight; the delicate arc of your thighs led to that shadowed heat, glistening with need in the moonlight.
He pressed his forehead to the hollow above your hip.
For a moment, he closed his eyes, but it didn’t help settle his frantic heart. The image stayed; of you so completely bare and so breathtakingly willing, it made something inside him snap in half. Whatever resolve, whatever careful control he had…gone. Left in two pieces, both useless.
Was there even a prize for winning? Or was it the same as losing? It didn’t matter anymore.
“You win,” He said, the words riding on a shaky breath. “I just need you. Right now.”
Then his hungry mouth found you, purposefully unhurried. So many kisses dotted the silken skin just beyond your core, a starburst of tender presses, before his tongue ventured further and lapped gently at your slit, tasting the heart of you with kinetic obsession. His hands gathered you in; strong at your thighs, drawing you closer, steadying you when your knee threatened to give.
He held you there, determined that you’d feel every bit of adoration in him.
His mouth was relentless, but he never gave you everything all at once. The moment when he felt you start to shake, sated too easily by a few languid licks, and felt you tense with a sharp inhale, he drew back, just a fraction.
He needed you unsatisfied, keen for more, because needing him was the only thing that matched the way he burned for you.
Whatever it made him; selfish, starved, a fool for you. He’d bear it gladly and proudly.
The look he gave was wordless and unyielding. It read: not yet, not until he allowed it. He drank in the anticipation, holding the moment deliciously taut between you two.
His tongue worked in slow strokes against your most sensitive part again, each flick a pulse of heat that jolted your body, while his fingers toyed at your entrance, amplifying every sensation that his mouth wrung out of you.
Once again, he brought you to the edge, pulling back just as you were about to fall apart.
And again…
His fingers slid deep, stretching you with slow pressure; your walls fluttered and gripped, every squeeze sending a tremor through his hand. He twisted his wrist, crooking his fingers to press at just the right spot, feeling you tighten even more around him. The heat of his palm cradled your bucking hip, holding you still.
Cruelly, his lips sealed over your clit, tongue circling and flicking before flattening to draw a long pull. He felt the scrape of his own stubble against the supple skin of your thigh, the way you jolted under him, hips jerking for more. The wet suction echoed through his mouth, his breath spilling hot across your skin, and internally smirked at the cool drift of air over the mess he’d made.
He worked you with patient, ruthless intent: fingers curling and tongue tracing intoxicating patterns. Your body bowed, hands fisting in his hair, trying to hold on to something solid.
Until he stopped.
Your eyes flashed downward as you caught your breath.
“If you’re waiting for me to beg, you’ll be here all night.” You tried to sound smug, but you were too breathless.
He liked the sound of that.
“Good,” He murmured, “I could spend all night here.”
He meant it wholeheartedly. The press of wood into his knees, the pain already building in his back and neck, none of it mattered. He’d kneel there for eternity if you let him, happy to wear himself raw and stiff just for the chance to stay between your legs.
There was nowhere else he wanted to be.
“No, you can’t,” You said as you raised your gloved hand, letting him see the delicate lace, then offered it to him. He caught the tip of the glove between his teeth, tugging until your hand was bare. Only then did you skim your thumb along his slick cheek. “You’re the one suffering, Spencer. You think I can’t see how hard this is for you?”
Your thumb paused at his lips, and he let you press it inside, tongue swirling possessively over every groove and whorl.
Every tick of his jaw betrayed how badly he wanted more.
He didn’t break eye contact. If anything, his gaze grew darker, even more worshipful as he sucked you clean, letting you feel just how much he craved every bit you’d give.
For a beat, everything stopped; time, the teasing, the game you’d been playing all night. There was just the two of you, saying nothing but feeling everything.
Spencer suddenly felt painfully aware of the slow burn of the evening, how it left him strung tight. His cock ached with a throbbing torment.
He huffed a broken laugh the second his mouth was empty. “So help me out and tell me where to go, what to do.”
For a moment, there was only the furrow of your brows, the rolling of your shoulders as if trying to burn off the frenzied current buzzing beneath your skin. He watched, transfixed, as your breath slowed, chest rising and falling once before you spoke.
“Closer,” You whispered, letting your hand slide into his hair. “I want you closer.”
With a rush of breath, he rose, taking you with him. His hands guided your other leg to the floor, and then he pressed you against the cool wood of the door; the edge of one panel bit into your back. He noticed and nearly apologized, but you didn’t seem to care. You only arched closer, every thought pinned on him.
His face hovered inches from yours, noses bumping.
“Tell me where. Here?” His voice dropped lower as he fitted his body to yours so you could feel his erection. “The bedroom? The dining room table?” He swallowed, eyes searching. “Go on, tell me. I know you’re not shy.”
He could feel the question shimmering in the silence, every nerve on edge for what you’d say.
“Anywhere,” You rasped, eyes glassy. “The couch, maybe. I don’t care, I just want to feel you. All of you.”
Then he was moving, walking you backward, one arm curled around your waist, his feet bracketing yours on the hardwood, leading you until your tailbone met the armrest.
As soon as you thumped against it, he grabbed you for a deep kiss, tongue sweeping in to chase the fading sugar of that candied apple on your lips, determined to claim it for himself. But you met him, tongue to tongue, fighting him for every last hint of sweetness, refusing to let him take it all.
He groaned into your mouth, unable to help himself as you matched him, bested him.
You nipped at his lower lip as you pulled back. “Is that all you’re going to do, Spencer? Just kiss me?”
The taunt wasn’t even cold in the air before he turned you with less than delicate hands, stealing a final kiss to the curve of your shoulder before folding you forward over the armrest. Your face sank into the heap of plushies from the carnival; the minky fur, the black stitched smiles, the memory of laughter and winning and all the ways he’d tried to give you happiness.
He wanted to give you everything, always and forever. Your joy would everlastingly come before his own…but as he gathered the fabric of your dress in his hands, bunching it up over the curve of your backside, something good inside him slipped too fast to grab ahold of.
The sight of you bent over and spread for him chased away every selfless thought.
Spencer’s hands shook as he reached for his own clothes; he tore at buttons, fabric slipped from his shoulders in frantic waves. The costume, every piece of Dorian, hit the floor and he didn’t care, stepping right on the vintage ensemble, heedless of the aged cloth beneath his heel.
He wanted nothing between you, not even a name. He wanted to be himself, just himself, when he entered you.
His hand traced the curve of your back, following the dip of your spine until goosebumps arose under his fingertips. He let himself savor the moment, wanting you to feel it, to know it was your Spencer, your lover, there with you and nowhere else.
When he finally pressed himself against you, the heat of his body against yours was enough to send a tremor through both of you. He lined himself up, hands at your hips. The crown of him slid up and down your center, his arousal mingling with yours in a heady, intimate medley.
Then, slowly, Spencer pushed inside. The first inch was everything; tight, wet, and unbearably good. Both of you hitched your breath at the same time, a twin gasp that seemed to echo in the silent room.
His hands clung to you, kneading at every bit of give, as if the only way to keep from slipping under was to keep himself tethered to your body, letting every squeeze and stroke remind him that what he wanted most was you, not just release.
It was too soon, way too soon. He only just started.
But it was working less and less, the urge to come cresting higher with every intentionally languid thrust, until he angled forward, chest flush to your back, lips dragging across the nape of your neck.
He could barely see, vision blurring at the edges, but he heard the sound of your nails bit into the knitted couch beneath you.
He definitely felt the tilt of your hips as you rolled back into him, chasing for more and more.
He wanted to say something, anything. About how perfect it was, how much he loved that hunger in you, but the words tangled in his throat, drowned by the heat unspooling inside him.
All that escaped was a husky whisper. “You want it so much.”
He almost added, “More than me,” but in that very moment, it hardly mattered who wanted more. Only that you both needed it, desperately.
If he had been keeping score, which he most definitely wasn’t, he’d always want you more.
Maybe it was that truth, or maybe it was the way your breathless whimpers grew louder, the sound working under his skin, making it impossible not to move faster and faster. His pace instantly quickened, each thrust deeper and needier while one hand slid up, bracing himself against the cushion beside your head as he chased that spiraling, bright breaking point for you both.
When he looked down, he saw the way your dress was already clinging to your skin. All ruined, damp with sweat and more, the fabric crumpled and wrinkled, rucked up to your ribs by the force of his hips. He smoothed his palms over the mess he’d made, calloused fingers catching on seams, pressing into damp cotton and sticky silk.
He remembered buying the dress. How he’d found it on a crowded rack in the back of an antique shop, running the material between his fingers, picturing how it would look in every possible light. He’d known, just by the cut of it, that it would fit you flawlessly, and it had. For four perfect hours, it was yours. He doubted it had ever looked more beautiful than it did in those four hours, even now…especially now, hugging you as if it never belonged to anyone else. And never would again.
Spencer slid his hand into your hair, twisting gently at the roots until your face turned sideways, cheek squashed into the bear as your lips parted around a whine.
He was utterly entranced by you, flushed and open, pleasure vivid in every line on your face. He felt some feral, boyish pride that it was him, only him, who could make you look like that.
He watched the way you writhed for him, felt your core tightening around him, and it just about broke him. Spencer was losing himself in you, in the beauty and the need.
He was almost too far gone to hold back, but he fought for it anyway. “You have to finish first. I need you to finish for me, want you to come first. Let go for me--”
His hand slipped from your hair, gliding down the length of your spine, winding under your hip until he found his mark, middle and ring finger circling your clit in slippery, coaxing swirls.
His touch moved in time with his hips, pulling you closer, always toeing the line between too much and just enough. You pressed back against him, every nerve alive and heightened, his name trapped between your teeth as you bucked and gasped.
He loved it. Of course he did.
The heat and mess of your bodies, the ruined dress gathered under your chest, the plushies muffling your cries, none of it mattered to Spencer except for the way you came around him, your voice breaking on his name as ecstasy rippled through you. That was all he could feel, you clenching and quivering around him.
Spencer moaned, holding you through every single wave until you fell limp.
He barely gave you time to breathe before he started to praise you, voice thick with awe and fuzzy feelings.
“You’re the best thing that ever happened to me, and I’ll spend forever making you happy--” The words spilled out between ragged pants, his hips stuttering. “So pretty…so good…mine, always mine. I love you, I love you, I love y--”
Heat coiled, every thrust and word pushing him closer, until the next word snared in his throat, a gasp swallowed by the bliss that started to run through him. Your purposeful squeeze made his climax all the stronger, your hold tightening around him, each pulse a deep, shaky burst.
When he finished, Spencer just held you there, collapsed over you. His chest flush to your back once again, his arms coming around to hold you, bodies still joined. His breath moved against your neck as the drum of his heart pressed to your ribs.
Neither of you spoke. He just counted the seconds in the sound of your breathing, twelve breaths a minute, each drawn first through your nose, then through parted lips when you exhaled, the rhythm skipping every time he shifted against you.
After a while, when the aftershocks faded, you wiggled a little beneath him, just enough to make your intent clear.
“You’re going to smother me, and after all that proof too.”
He let out a low, lazy groan, wishing he could keep you pinned there forever, him inside you, but then he softened, kissing your back, carefully easing himself up, slipping from you at last.
The separation was tender with a final shiver from you both.
Then he helped you upright, unsteady and still a little dazed from what you’d just done together. The dress bunched awkwardly around your waist, so twisted and sticky it wouldn’t fall back into place. You fumbled with the fabric, trying to peel it from your skin.
Spencer watched you for a second, smiling to himself, before his hands found the zipper at your back.
“Here,” He murmured, his voice husky and fond as ever.
He worked the zipper down slowly, his palms skimming your sides, pulling the dress down your hips, over your thighs, until it finally fell in a heap at your feet. He helped you step out.
When you turned to face him, he was already stepping close.
“Remember how cruel you were earlier?” He said, voice pitched low as he brushed his lips against your jaw.
You tipped your head, feigning innocence, letting a teasing smirk play at your mouth.
“Hmm, no. That’s not ringing any bells.”
He laughed, but it broke into a rough groan as he pressed closer, hands sliding down to grip your backside.
“You remember,” He rasped, kneading your flesh possessively. “You know exactly what I’m talking about.” He squeezed you tighter, hips nudging you back a step, mouth incessant against your jaw. “I told you, I’m going to stay in you all night. Just like I promised. You’re not getting away from me for a second.”
Post-prison!Spencer remembers you perfectly from your BAU internship over a decade ago. The timid way you carried yourself, the way he wanted to be noticed by you and never was. It stung. Now you’re different; once reserved, now freer and more open. He tries to play it off like it doesn’t matter, but his distance hides the truth: he’s grown colder, convinced that who he is, exactly as he is, isn’t worth knowing now.
(fem!reader, FBI-adjacent!reader, p in v, car sex, naughty daydreams, yearning, slow burn, dominant!Spencer, I wrote too much)
Spencer didn’t like the archive room. It smelled too much like dry rot and old toner, and it reminded him too much of solitary and forgotten things.
Unfortunately, and a bit ridiculously, Penelope had flagged a metadata discrepancy, something about a sealed file from ‘97 that had been partially digitized and corrupted mid-upload. She’d said, “You’ve got the longest arms, and I already bribed Morgan to do something else. Don’t make me go down my list. Go grab the hard copy from Records while I ping the contractor.”
Off he went without fuss. His very useful, very important long arms swayed the whole way there.
The fluorescent lights sputtered awake as Spencer blinked at the sudden glare before his vision settled. The room looked the same as always; uncomfortably narrow with dusty surfaces, but something had already disrupted the order.
A single file waited on the counter near the back by the microfilm readers, the tab aligned just so, like whoever left it had been particular, but in a hurry. One of the pages had slipped slightly out of its clip.
The way it was just barely off bugged him, but he didn’t reach for it.
He just went to the third filing cabinet, the one with the peeling label. The drawer groaned when he pulled it open. Folders leaned sideways in a tilt, tabbed in dates and brittle colors. His fingers stopped just short of the one he’d come for.
Maybe he should straighten that page.
His molars met with a faint clack, tension creeping down his neck as he moved toward the counter.
He reached for the page, meaning only to slide it back into place, but before his fingers even made contact, he saw it.
A slant in the margin. A loop on a capital F, too slim, and the cross of a t that cut high through the stem. You used to write like that. Upside-down in the corners of briefing packets, reading them from across the table like it didn’t matter that the text was backwards. Spencer used to tilt his head trying to catch the words, and you’d smile softly and never stop writing.
You were there…in Quantico, at the BAU?
He hadn’t seen you, and that couldn’t have been right. He would’ve noticed, of course he would’ve. He noticed everything.
The handwriting, fine. It was distinctive, but not entirely unique. The looped F could’ve been anyone’s, and plenty of people cross their t’s high. Even writing in the margins upside-down, that wasn’t unheard of. Odd, sure, but not impossible. Around 2% of the population exhibited nonstandard spatial habits.
It didn’t mean anything, it didn’t have to be you. Even if he wanted it to be.
…Unless Penelope had meant something by what she said earlier and just last week. An offhand comment about the new contractor handling the sealed juvenile cleanup. Spencer hadn’t asked her to clarify. He’d just nodded. It hadn’t mattered then.
That didn’t mean anything either. He was spiraling, and for no good reason.
Penelope talked constantly. Half of what she said was nonsense or nicknames, the other half borderline illegal, so he’d long ago learned not to take every word to heart. ‘Contractor,’ ‘juvenile cleanup,’it could’ve meant anything. Anyone.
He doubted she even remembered you. Too much time had passed, and you hadn’t opened up to just anyone. Only with people who gave you the time to. Penelope had started to, back then. He remembered she had made you laugh once and it was a real, belly laugh, the kind that made your whole posture change and face light up.
Spencer had wanted to be the one to do that.
He’d almost managed it, until you vanished like most interns eventually did.
He was being ridiculous. Making ghosts out of ink and paper. It wasn’t your handwriting. It couldn’t be. Even if it was, so what?
He wasn’t that fawning boy anymore.
The one who tried to look busy when you walked in, but kept glancing up anyway. Who spoke too quickly when you addressed him, then spent the rest of the day thinking about it. The one who lingered by the coffee machine longer than necessary, just in case you passed by.
He stopped trying to be seen after realizing no one really looked. Not unless he was bleeding or brilliant.
Now, he kept his distance. Made eye contact when necessary, stayed quiet when it wasn’t. No more reaching. No more hoping someone might reach back.
He plucked Penelope’s file from the cabinet like it didn’t matter, like he hadn’t just wasted ten minutes thinking about the past. His grip left a bend in the tab.
No hesitation and absolutely no second glance at the page you might’ve touched. Just right out the door, like it hadn’t rattled something tender in his chest. That stupid mushy place that never hardened right.
He walked out faster than he needed to; his footsteps sounded too loud in the near silent hallway. He adjusted his pace and straightened his shoulders.
Then stopped.
You were coming down the hall, not even ten paces ahead, backlit by the fluorescents, and the sight hit him hard enough to hurt. He rubbed the heel of his palm on his chest as he blinked rapidly. Walking toward him, not actually to him, of course, with something tucked under your arm and your gaze low, reading as you moved. With that exact same walk, the same tilt in your step.
His pulse spiked so suddenly it made him dizzy. What were the odds? No, he thought, don’t calculate them. Don’t give the moment logic.
You looked up just before passing him, probably sensing the shape of something wrong in your path.
For a moment your face didn’t know him, and that stung more than it should have. Then your eyes moved, flicked across his cheeks, his hair, his mouth, and recognition lit across your features like dawn.
“Spencer?” You said it like you didn’t mean to say it out loud just yet, like it slipped out before you could think better of it.
He blinked, mouth parting, and then hoarsely managed, “Hi.”
You didn’t smile, something in his voice must’ve caught you off guard. He didn’t blame you. It sounded different even to him these days.
“Hi,” You said back evenly, and there was something unreadable in it. “It’s been a long time.”
“It has,” He said, and didn’t say how long.
What would be the point? You’d either counted too, or you hadn’t thought of him at all.
You nodded slowly as if you were going to leave it at that. Let the weight of his words settle and drift past, because Spencer wasn’t exactly making conversation easy and he knew it.
Then you paused and frowned slightly as you canted your head.
“Can I ask how you’ve been?” You said carefully, almost reluctant.
He looked at you, then away.
“I’ve had better decades.”
His eyes found the framed print across the hall, abstract with harsh lines and grayscale geometry. Nothing worth looking at, which made it perfect. He focused on the soulless details, not on your pouting mouth or the faint creases near your eyes he didn’t remember.
You nodded again, picking up on a signal he hadn’t meant to send. He wasn’t trying to push you away. It just came out that way. If you said it was good to see him, he might actually flinch. He didn’t want a lie, even a kind one. Even if he was the one making himself hard to read.
You moved like you were about to leave with a goodbye on your lips, and he should’ve let you, but the words slipped past his walls anyways,
“How have you been?”
You blinked like you hadn’t expected him to care or ask, or maybe you just hadn’t prepared for what you’d say.
“I…I’ve been--” You paused, eyes flicking to his face again. “Good. Busy as a beaver, but that’s good too, I guess.”
Still with the idioms. He remembered the morning you told Morgan not to cry over “spoiled milk,” and he’d corrected you with a laugh. You’d said it right the next day. Spencer had smiled at his desk like a lunatic. You probably forgot, but he certainly didn’t.
The memory warmed something he didn’t want warmed. His mouth twitched, then tightened, and he focused on his breath, on the file label still clutched in his hand, on not feeling it.
The tension in his hand must’ve snagged your attention, your eyes tracked the worn tab between his fingers.
“Wait, is that one of the botched sealed cases? Penelope just told me about a few that hadn’t finished uploading.” You exhaled, like you’d been on that trail too long. “I’ve been trying to match the physicals.”
He shrugged, handing it over without ceremony, but his traitorous fingers didn’t let go right away. They skimmed yours, and it lit his nerves like a flare and instant heat rocketed down his spine.
He didn’t look at you when he let go. Just flatly said, “Penelope didn’t say it was…you.” When your eyebrow raised, he signed as he added, “She should’ve.”
“And why’s that?”
Words filled with unfiltered and simple curiosity, they disarmed him so thoroughly he couldn’t look anywhere else. His eyes dropped to your mouth and stuck there. He didn’t want to stare, but he just…couldn’t stop. Waiting to see what else might come out.
The moment you wet your lips, he croaked out, “It would’ve made this easier.”
“Easier how?” You mused.
“Forget it. Doesn’t matter.” He dismissed, just as someone rounded the far corner.
A junior agent with a takeaway cup and a distracted look, clearly trying to slip past without getting involved. You shifted half a step to make room, and so did Spencer, instinctively. His shoulder brushed yours as he moved in front of you. The agent barely glanced up as he passed, gone in seconds, but Spencer didn’t step back.
He just stared…at you, finally.
Your face, that devastatingly sweet face. He used to steal glances, convinced you never noticed. Once, in a dream, you'd let him trace every feature with his fingertips, like a precaution against some future where his sight might fail him.
His hand moved purposefully from your cheekbone first, then chin, then the softness beneath your mouth. You didn’t stop him, just looked at him like you already knew and you’d been waiting.
Your lips parted. He slid his thumb inside, your tongue pressed lightly to the pad of his finger.
He swallowed hard, but the damage was done. His abdomen tightened, a reflex he couldn’t outthink, and he loosed a ragged breath. Shame rushed in behind the thought like floodwater. His jaw clenched as he stepped back.
You traded your weight from the left foot to the right, clearing your throat.
“I used to be easier to talk to, huh?”
Spencer forced his eyes up, only to catch your first smile at him, and, of course, it was lopsided and a little sad. It looked the same and yet completely different. It had grown up without him.
“No,” He said honestly. “I think I got harder to talk to.”
He didn’t think he could’ve smiled anyway, but if he had, it would’ve been sadder than yours.
His, he understood. Yours, he didn’t.
You both hadn’t talked much back then. Well, not often and not deeply. A few scattered conversations over lunch breaks or case files, mostly you asking questions and him rambling through the answers until he’d catch himself and apologize.
Once, you’d asked him if he thought criminals were ever actually remorseful, and he’d talked for eleven straight minutes while you ate pretzels out of a vending machine bag. When he stopped to breathe, you’d just said, “Thank you for taking the time to explain all that for me. I mean it,” like he hadn’t just dominated the whole conversation and overloaded you. He’d gone home warm for days.
So it just made sense you both wouldn’t really talk now, after all this time.
For all his degrees, he’d never quite figured you out the first time, so he doubted he'd do any better this time around.
“I don’t know,” You clasped your hands behind your back, then offered, “I’m still talking to you, aren’t I?”
The fact that it wasn’t flirty made Spencer's mouth dry out.
Flirting, he could’ve ducked or dodged or disbelieved...but sincerity had no handles. Nowhere to hold it and no way to deflect, so it just landed, and it landed violently.
“You are,” He almost left it there. “You’re…different. Not in a bad way.”
Spencer immediately wished he could rewind. He should’ve known better than to try sincerity with a mouth like his. ‘Different’ wasn’t the wrong word. Just empty without the rest of what he meant and hadn’t managed to say.
“You seem different too,” You said, voice mild and sure. “And not in a bad way.”
You shifted slightly, and the fabric of your skirt moved with you, brushing up just enough to expose the cap of one knee.
Spencer saw it and wished he hadn’t.
Years ago, you used to rub your palms there when you were nervous. He remembered it vividly: the way your hands would sweep over the smooth arc of your knees during briefings. Back then, it made him want to comfort you or perhaps just catch your eye and offer a smile, if he was brave enough that day.
Now, he wanted to watch that same hand lift the hem of your skirt slowly. He wanted to see the fabric pushed higher, inch by inch, and not stop until you were open under his stare.
Don’t go there, he thought. Don’t think about your thighs. Don’t think about his hands on them, or worse, his head between them, your fingers in his hair. Don’t think about the way you might whine if he--
He wiped a hand down his face roughly, like he could scrub the thought out.
“Well, that’s generous of you to say.”
He knew what arousal did to the brain: the flood of dopamine, the narrowed focus, the reckless firing of neurons, but science couldn’t explain why it was you. Spencer himself couldn’t explain it. You hadn’t looked at him like that before, you hadn’t really looked at him at all. Somehow it was all different now. He wanted more than a simple glance, meek smile, or the chance at a seat beside you in the briefing room.
He wanted to be wanted by you, by the once-timid girl now with a stronger voice and a straighter spine. The craving made his chest feel tight.
He tore through his chances without sympathy, which implied, foolishly, that there had been any.
You offered a small, closed-lipped smile and stepped aside. “I left a file in the archive room,” You said, gesturing toward the space he’d left only minutes ago. “I should go get it. It…it was nice seeing you again, Spencer.” The moment his brows drew together, you quickly added, “I mean it.”
He didn’t flinch like he thought he would've, but it was hard to imagine you meant it. With how distant he’d been, he wouldn’t have believed himself either.
It felt like you couldn’t wait to get away from him. He couldn’t blame you, but a new crack formed along his heart.
“Yeah, you too. Take care,” He muttered, but hoped you heard more in it than he meant to give away.
As you stepped past, your hand lifted, just lightly, to his wrist. A parting gesture to show you meant what you said.
His pulse jumped, but he kept his eyes forward.
He didn’t watch you go, but he heard the sound of your steps down the hall, as if you hadn’t stopped to break his ribs in the middle of it.
He adjusted the collar of his shirt as he stepped inside, fingers grazing the fabric like it might still be wrong. It was the third one he’d tried…wait, no, the fourth, and he’d ended up back at the first. A pale blue button-down, too nice for a place with sticky menus, but it was the one he didn’t hate the most.
The bar was dimly lit, only softened by amber sconces and laughter. Some kind of music blew through the space, a low-volume mix of late-90s indie rock, if he wasn’t mistaken. It was loud enough to make people lean in to be heard.
Someone jostled past with a drink and a lit cigarette, and Spencer’s body pulled in on itself just slightly.
He could’ve stayed home, should’ve stayed home, but you were there. He didn’t know what he expected from it, if anything, just that he wanted to be near you.
He spotted Penelope first, her hair was unmistakable even in a crowd, and JJ beside her, mid-laugh. They hadn't seen him yet.
You hadn’t noticed him yet.
And for a second, it felt like nothing had changed. As if time had folded in on itself and left him right where he started: unseen.
Then your whole face lit up with a kind of smile he didn’t remember you ever wearing.
It lit some damp, dark chamber in him. It wasn’t just how you looked, but how it felt, like being caught in a warm patch of sun.
Yet, it wasn’t for him.
Whatever Penelope had said, it made JJ laugh behind her hand and shake her head.
He wasn’t sure if he was ready to go over yet, but standing there like a lost coat rack felt worse. It made him feel obvious, like people could tell he didn’t know where to stand or who to be, or that he didn’t belong.
So he moved, cautious and crooked, shoulders too square and jaw too loose.
You were still smiling when he reached the edge of the table, hands tucked into his pockets, eyes drifting across the lineup of half-finished drinks. JJ had something golden with a salt rim, Penelope’s was pink and fizzy with too many garnishes, and yours was just water, a wedge of lemon sliding down the side. For some reason, that made his chest ease a little.
Penelope beamed as she said, “There he is! We were starting to worry you bailed.”
We, he thought. You? Did you worry he wasn’t going to show up?
“What do you want to drink?” Penelope asked, already flagging the server. “They have mocktails, and like, this really weird cucumber soda thing I think you’d secretly love. Or water, obviously. Or--”
He barely heard her after that because there was only one empty seat...right next to you. Statistically, it wasn’t that improbable. Emotionally, it felt like a cosmic dare.
He sat before he could think better of it.
“Sorry I’m late,” He muttered. “Water’s fine.”
The server came over with a polite nod, pen already poised.
“One water for the gentleman,” Penelope said brightly, like she was ordering champagne on his behalf.
Spencer gave the faintest incline of his head, a thanks he couldn’t quite get into words. His hands stayed on his thighs, resisting the urge to tug at his shirt hem, or to glance at you.
That was when he realized JJ was watching him.
He felt the weight of it like a pin between his shoulder blades. He pressed his tongue to the back of his teeth before he turned, meeting her eyes at last.
Her expression didn’t switch, not much, but her eyebrows raised the faintest degree. The smallest acknowledgement. She knew, and he knew she knew. He just wouldn’t say it, not even to himself.
He swallowed, unease crowded behind his sternum, and forced his gaze back down to the condensation already slipping down the side of his glass that had just been dropped off.
Penelope swirled the straw in her drink like it might jog her memory as she tried to push past the tension he knew was his fault. “Oh! You were saying something about how you ended up in records, right? Before Mr. Tall-and-Troubled walked in.” She said, eyes landing back on you.
“Actually, you didn’t really let her explain before you jumped in asking about hotties.” JJ's voice was mellow, faintly amused.
Penelope said with a wave, not looking the least bit sorry, “Okay, fine, I got curious, geez. But I was going to circle back.”
Spencer took a drink, though it didn’t help the heat crawling up his neck. He didn’t want to picture your job, your building, the people who saw you every day. He didn’t want to think about the way they might look at you, or worse, what they might imagine: your voice caught in your throat, your back arching if someone’s mouth touched the skin just above your waistband.
He had no right to that thought either, but it was his regardless, and it made him feel sick to think someone else might be chasing the same one.
His gaze lifted before he could stop it, scanning the bar in pieces. No men were looking, not at you and not at JJ or Penelope, but he kept checking anyway.
“In my defense,” You said graciously, glancing between them, “It’s hard to compete with that level of curiosity.” You adjusted the straw in your drink, then added, “I think I was saying that I did some state records work? Nothing glamorous. Then my mentor moved over to a DOJ preservation project and brought me in. Mostly forensic crosswalks, retention anomalies, that kind of thing.”
Penelope perked up almost instantly.
“Wait, so do you ever find, like, weird gaps? Stuff that got buried?” Her eyes widened. “Tell me someone’s hidden a whole second identity somewhere. I live for that.”
Spencer spoke before you could, “That kind of thing doesn’t really happen in federal records. Not in sealed holdings, at least. Everything’s cross-indexed.”
He turned slightly, spotting your small nod, then your eyes. There was a twinkle there, like you were in on something with him.
“But,” You added, voice easy and light, “I did flag a series of legacy files once that turned out to be tied to a contractor with two aliases. Nothing criminal, just sloppy merging, but I still think it’s sorta weird.”
Penelope gasped. “See? I knew you found buried treasure.”
JJ tilted her head, “I don’t know how you keep your focus with all that data. I’d go cross-eyed in a week.”
You gave a small scoff, shaking your head. “Says the profiler. You can track the inside of someone’s mind with nothing but a few interviews and case notes. That takes more focus than I’ll ever have.”
JJ reached over and gave your hand a squeeze, smiling in a way that was open and sincere. You returned it without hesitation, your mouth curving gently as your fingers curled back around hers.
A faint warmth sparked under his ribs, tangled with an ache he didn’t want to name, tightening before he could press it down.
Penelope lifted her glass, eyes darting around the table. “Okay, but where’s my compliment? ‘Cause I feel like my computer sorcery is going wickedly unappreciated here.”
Your smile went straight to Penelope, “Honestly, I don’t know anyone who makes the impossible look easier.”
A small part of him braced for you to turn next, to let that sweetness land on him. The thought itself made him flush with shame, and when it didn’t come, he swallowed hard, pretending he hadn’t expected it.
He turned toward the noise of the bar. Everywhere he looked, people leaned close, brushed lips, shared something private in the middle of the crowd. A cruel reminder of what belonged so easily to others, and never to him.
Out of the corner of Spencer’s vision, he saw Penelope’s eyes narrow playfully.
“You’ve hardly said two words since you sat down. Talk to us, long arms.”
He shifted in his seat, not quite looking at anyone. “I like listening to you guys talk.”
“Aw, see? He does love us. I knew it.” Penelope leaned toward JJ, grinning like she’d won something.
JJ gave a quiet laugh, tilting her head just slightly. “Of course he does.”
That was all it took for the two of them to slip into an easy back-and-forth, laced with years of shorthand. Spencer picked up pieces here and there until he noticed your attention settle on him instead.
He wondered if his collar looked wrong again, if his hair was sticking up at the back, if he was sitting too stiff, since he couldn’t relax into the chair at all.
You didn’t look away. “I picked up The Left Hand of Darkness a while back. It reminded me of you, probably because I remember you with Dune once.”
His head tipped in your direction after a beat, slower than it should’ve been. You, meanwhile, had already turned fully toward him, shoulders angled his way, showing that you were ready to listen to only him.
Running from you, at least inside himself, was getting harder to manage, less convincing every time he tried.
“What’d you think of it?”
You leaned into your palm, chewing at your lip, deciding how to put it.
He stared longer than he should’ve at your mouth, tongue dragging over his own lips before he even realized. He imagined lemon still fresh on your tongue from the wedge in your water, cut through with the wax-sweet of cherry, maybe strawberry, from the tint on your lips. The thought burned through him before he could shove it away.
He wanted to taste it for himself, he wanted to kiss you so, so badly.
As you spoke, he didn’t tear his eyes away from your mouth, “I thought it was going to be more…I don’t know, sci-fi? Spaceships, laser guns, but it was just these two people trying to understand each other.” You gave a sheepish smile. “I didn’t expect it to feel so slow. Or so sad.”
“Le Guin wasn’t interested in technology as much as she was in people.” He paused. “A lot of people miss that the science is just a container and not the point.”
You nodded earnestly, tapping your nails lightly against your jaw like you were thinking something through.
“Yeah,” You said, “I thought it was leading somewhere else. Like there was going to be some big reveal or twist or…something.” You laughed under your breath. “When it ended, I just sat there thinking, ‘Great, so I read the whole thing wrong.’”
The corner of his mouth pulled up just a bit, and he didn’t fight it that time.
“Have you ever read The Dispossessed?” He asked as he rearranged himself in his seat, pulling his legs from under the table so he could face more toward you.
To be casual and comfortable, he told himself. Just so he wasn’t twisted anymore. In the process, his knee knocked into yours, and the contact drew his attention away from what he was about to say next. He looked down for a second, cleared his throat as heat rushed up his neck.
“Sorry,” He muttered. “It’s still Le Guin, but a, uh - different tone. You might like it more.”
As you opened your mouth, the song changed and Penelope rejoiced across the table.
“Oh, my god! This song,” She said, waving toward the speakers like she couldn’t believe it had taken this long to hear something decent. “Spencer, this is the one that used to be on that awful diner jukebox in New Mexico, remember? The one with the green tile and the chairs that everything stuck to?”
One Headlight by The Wallflowers. He blinked and for a second, he could smell the place; the burnt coffee, fryer oil, the lemon cleaner they used on the booths.
She leaned across JJ, eyes bright. “You made us stop there three times in one week. All for that sad little peach pie.”
He blinked again, pulled back into the sound of her voice before he could register the loss of yours.
“It was good,” He said, then his gaze flicked to you, then back down to the damp napkin on the table. “The crust was actually laminated. You don’t see that in diners.”
Whatever you were about to say, it was gone.
“I remember you asking if they made it from scratch.” JJ said, smiling. “And didn’t the waitress say something sarcastic like, ‘We churn our own butter too’?”
The music just barely hid your laugh, and something in him eased at the sound of it. Enough to make him recline back in his chair. His arm shifted with him, draping along the back of yours without much thought.
A moment later, you leaned into the backrest. He saw the change but missed everything beneath it; how your hands clasped tightly in your lap and the breath you didn’t quite let out all at once.
Penelope gripped the edge of the table with a theatrical sigh. “Okay, well now I want pie, or fries, or something. I’m starving.” She looked around the table. “Is it weird to order food this late? I need something fried and shameful. Anyone else?”
JJ nodded without hesitation. “Fries. Always fries.”
You reached for your water for a sip, then set it down again. “Oh, no. Nothing for me.” Then, with an easy motion, you stood. “I’m actually gonna run to the bathroom. I’ll be back in a jiffy.”
Spencer didn’t even move, his arm stayed where it was; resting behind an empty chair.
He could still feel the slight warmth in the wood under his hand. His fingers moved without meaning to, drifting over the grain like he didn’t want to lose what little was left.
Penelope and JJ were debating between fries and nachos. He heard the word "sriracha" and the clatter of a menu being folded, but none of it landed.
Nothing was wrong, he told himself that over and over again. You’d said you’d be right back, but something about the way you’d left, so quickly after the ease between you two.
It burst a seam in whatever calm he'd managed to hold together.
His brain kept replaying it, like there was a cue he’d missed and couldn’t quite rewind to find. Or maybe there wasn’t anything to find, and that was the problem. He didn’t know what had happened, if anything.
Penelope asked the passing server if they had truffle oil, just to “put it out into the universe,” she said, and JJ laughed. Spencer sat there, trying to school his face into something neutral, something not inward and broken.
That familiar, ridiculous feeling of trying so hard not to mess something up and somehow doing so anyway.
“Spence,” JJ said, cutting clean through the commotion.
Her stare didn’t waver, not even when a stool scraped across the floor behind her and a drink tray wobbled past at her back. The look wasn’t particularly harsh, but it didn’t leave him anywhere to hide either.
He shifted, and met her eyes almost reluctantly.
“You gonna tell me what that was?” JJ nodded toward the empty seat. “Because it wasn’t nothing, so don’t try to say otherwise.”
His arm recoiled before he could think about it, as if the chair had gone hot under his skin.
“It was nothing,” He said quickly, fast enough to make it obvious it wasn’t.
“Then why do you look like someone drop-kicked your favorite first edition?” Penelope asked, almost cooed with a sympathetic frown. “I mean that lovingly.”
He didn’t respond, he only shook his head rashly and exhaled quietly through his nose.
Spencer let his eyes drift across the room; past the tables, past the bar, past every patron. He didn’t mean to look toward the hallway where you’d gone, but his fixation went there anyway.
It felt like he was trying to summon you with nothing but focus. To draw you back to him. He wasn’t even sure if he wanted you to save him from the conversation, or if he just wanted to see your face again.
Not until JJ tapped her knuckles against the table, grabbing his attention once more.
“You like her.” JJ said it like a fact he couldn’t deny. “Does she know that?”
He truly didn’t want to say anything. Mostly because he didn’t know what he’d say, or if saying it would make it worse, or make things somehow real.
But would that be so bad? Making it real? It wasn’t like he hadn’t already made a fool of himself tonight, one way or another. It wasn’t a crime to like someone, or to want something. Even if he didn’t know what, exactly, he wanted.
He couldn’t even tack on “if anything” anymore. He did want something.
“No,” He said finally, and it came out quieter than he meant it to, under all the noise.
He hoped, almost desperately, they didn’t hear him.
Unfortunately, they did hear, and JJ didn’t smile, but she nodded, understanding more than he wanted her to.
“You don’t have to say anything you’re not ready to. Not to us, at least. Just don’t pretend there’s nothing you want to say to her.” JJ said.
The thought of saying something, anything, to you made his heart falter. What would he even say? That he remembered how kind you’d been, even back then. That your voice still sounded the same, a little deeper now, more certain, but still warm. That you’d always given people time to talk, even when they didn’t deserve it. He surely didn’t.
That your full laugh had split him in two. That it hurt a little, in the best way, of course.
That you looked different, but not really. Your hair had changed. Your mouth hadn’t. Your lips still pressed together the same way when you were thinking. You even had smile lines now, and they were small but permanent, like you’d finally felt free enough to smile more often.
And your body--
He pressed his palm into his thigh, felt the muscle displace under the pressure.
He thought about your body more than he wanted to admit. The shape of it, the weight of it, the imagined heat of your skin beneath his unruly hands. The ridiculous, aching need to kiss along the curve of your hip, your stomach, the soft skin just behind your ear. Every inch he wanted to touch, out of reverence, out of some dumb, dizzy hope to be allowed that close to someone who made him feel so alive…so completely.
It embarrassed him, the sheer detail of his own memory. How vividly he “remembered” things he hadn’t even experienced. Places he hadn’t touched, but still longed to anyway. He had to be insane. Had to be, without a doubt.
“Well, when you do figure it out,” Penelope said, leaning in a little. “Can you make it at least a little swoony? Some girls like to swoon. I think she might. She seems like the type.”
He didn’t even know how to talk to you, let alone how to make you swoon.
“I don’t know,” JJ said, her laugh mellower now. “She doesn’t seem like the swooning type. Maybe when we first knew her, but not now.”
“What? Yes she is,” Penelope replied immediately, mock-offended. “You’re telling me she wouldn’t melt if he did something heartfelt? Please.”
They kept going, blurring into the background. He couldn’t focus on their back and forth while he was having his own internal debate, rewinding every moment he’d had with you over the last few hours, even that brief exchange by the archive room. Trying to pin it all against the version of you he used to know. The quiet intern with too many notebooks and the long silences.
Would you want something swoony? Would that feel too forced? Too obvious? Did you even want anything at all?
He hadn’t a clue what you expected from him. Worse, he wasn’t sure what part of him you were even seeing. He’d been trying to offer the least shattered version of himself, hoping that would be enough, but fearing it only made him seem lifeless.
The questions kept relentlessly circling, tripping over each other and making even more of a mess. He couldn’t sit with them any longer.
Before he could talk himself out of it, he pushed back from the table and stood.
“I’ll be right back.”
He wove through the crowd, dodging half-full beers and the aimless stumbles of men who’d been drinking since before the sun went down. The hallway near the bathrooms was narrow and dim, tiled in that way-too-clean fake marble.
He stood stupidly in line for the men’s room, pretending he was waiting his turn as he eyed the door across the way. A minute later, an older woman stepped out, purse clutched tight.
Not you.
His eyes lingered on the door even after it shut. You weren't there, which meant - what? That you’d slipped past him, the entire group? He watched you walk in this direction. He turned slightly, scanning the narrow hallway. There was a service door at the end, half-shadowed and unlabeled. Would you sneak out without saying goodbye? That didn’t track. Or did something bad happen?
His eyes lingered on the exit, more shadow than shape the longer he looked. Something bad, something bad, something bad. The thought rooted before he could pull it up.
He tried to reason with it, to flatten the rising noise in his head, but the cases started flashing through anyway; reports of women disappearing between the bar and the parking lot, assaults in back hallways, just out of view. He’d read them, had studied them, and interviewed families after the fact.
He tried to tell himself it was nothing. That you were fine, that he was being irrational, but that’s what the wrong people always said after the fact, and Spencer wasn’t built for after the fact.
He hated how easily he could picture it. Hated that he couldn’t tell if the panic rising in him was rational, or just his own selfish fear.
His feet moved before his thoughts could catch up. A push through the emergency bar on the service door, the hollow metal clattered behind him, and suddenly the night was impossibly louder than inside, too wide and obscure.
He scanned the alley: random bricks, overflowing garbage bins, grease-stained cardboard. Absolutely nothing important, nothing he cared about.
Maybe behind the dumpster at the other end? He walked over, eyes adjusting to the flickering light. Just fleeting shadows and roaches. No shoes, no figure, no you.
Then his head turned toward the employee cars, all lined like teeth in the back lot, and his chest tightened. He checked between the bumpers, looking for a shape too still, a coat crumpled, just anything.
Then he rounded the corner of the building, heart already pitching sideways, toward the front lot…
…and stopped.
You, finally. Thankfully.
There were a few people loitering near their cars, laughing way too loudly, the glow of cigarettes painting little arcs in the dark. Spencer eyed them wearily as he approached you.
You were off to the side, leaned against the brick wall of the building like you’d been there a while. Arms crossed, head bowed slightly, eyes fixed on a pebble.
An invisible pressure released in his chest, enough to let him breathe, but it was immediately replaced by something else. Something heavier and murky, because if nothing bad had happened…then why were you out there, alone?
He shoved his hands in his front pockets as he stepped off the lot, onto the narrow concrete stretch by the wall.
The scuff of his shoes nabbed your attention.
You looked up, and gasped, hand flying to your chest like your heart had leapt all the way up to your throat.
Then, seeing it was him, your shoulders dropped.
It shouldn’t have meant anything to him, but it did. He’d been so sure you wouldn’t want him to be the one who found you out here.
“I just needed some air and some quiet. I was about to come back in - I was, I just--” You trailed off, gave a helpless sort of gesture, then smiled; small, sheepish, and a little guilty.
“I thought you left.” The words came out flat, a bit too honest. He shook his head, frustrated with himself. “Sorry. That’s not fair. I just...didn’t know where you were.”
His voice caught on the last word, and he looked away, embarrassed and ashamed.
You blinked so quickly a lash landed on your cheek as you said, “I wouldn’t leave without saying goodbye. I just needed a minute. That’s all.” You looked down, then back up at him, more serious now. “I’m sorry I worried you guys - you, I’m sorry if I worried you.”
He gnawed at the inside of his cheek as he stood across from you. Both of you watched the other wholly, like a single glance held too long could give something vital away. Breath shallow, eyes way too full.
He wanted to say something. Anything. A confession, a question, just enough to close the distance, even if the answers stung.
But it wasn’t him who spoke first.
“Spencer,” You said gently, “Have I done something to make you uncomfortable? You’re kind of all over the place with me, and I just - I don’t want to make you feel weird.”
He closed his eyes for a second. It touched the nerve he’d been avoiding: the fear that he was hurting you without meaning to, and the worst part, he couldn’t say for sure that he wasn’t. And how maddening it was, because he liked you, he wanted you close, but wanting someone and knowing how to handle that want were two entirely different things.
Right then, he only knew one thing for certain: he wanted you, and he couldn’t deny it anymore.
Entirely. Terribly. Sincerely. He craved you.
“No, never,” He said, his voice suddenly hoarse. “I haven’t been handling things that great lately.”
For a very long time actually, he thought, but you threw another wrench in the works.
He could tell you were trying to make sense of his pitiful explanation by how your brows pinched briefly, but couldn’t, so you only gave a defeated nod. It made him feel even farther from you than before, that he’d just created another unspoken mess neither of you knew how to unspool.
With the smallest, kindest smile, enough to soften the space between you, you whispered, “I hope things get better, or just easier.”
Spencer lowered his eyes, the movement almost ceremonial, as if to bow before your words rather than risk breaking them with his own. His head bent toward you with mute appreciation.
The spell cracked when the lot roared alive again. A group of men burst out. All sweat and swagger, laughing over some indecipherable joke no one would remember in the morning.
“Not much difference between inside and out the bar, huh?” You said wistfully as you pushed off from the wall. “I guess we should head back in.”
He didn’t move, not an inch, as you lingered there in the low light, waiting for him. He felt it, the expectation that he’d fall in step, that he’d make the choice simple. He just couldn’t, not yet, at least. He wanted to move with you, every instinct pulling him forward, but his body refused.
Because stepping back inside meant breaking that precious bubble, that fragile pocket where it was only the two of you.
He only wanted more of this, more of you to himself, though he knew it was selfish with Penelope and JJ waiting inside.
“We don’t have to go back in yet. We could sit in my car for a few minutes, if you want.”
You went silent, eyes on the pavement, your hands moving like they didn’t know where to go; fussing at your cuticles, then twisting the fabric of your dress, then behind your back in a restless clasp. It wasn’t a no, but it wasn’t an easy yes either.
Spencer stood there, still not moving, suddenly afraid that his offer had cornered you somehow, that it put pressure where there wasn’t meant to be any.
Maybe he should take it back, he thought. Say he hadn’t meant anything by it.
Before he could, you took one step to him and said, “Yeah, okay. Just for a bit.”
You said it so simply he almost didn’t process it. His thoughts kept running, kept planning how to backtrack, how to unmake the stilted moment, but now there was nowhere to put them. The words were already out there. You’d stepped past him and off the curb.
So he did too.
Both of you fell into step without speaking. Not perfectly, not all at once, he took a few strides too slow at first, then picked up half a beat, just as you adjusted to match him.
He scanned the lot along the way, reading everything around him. The parked cars with fogged windows, taillights that were still warm, snippets of sloshed conversations carried on the breeze. One man leaned against his hood, talking to someone out of sight. Another man, standing near his car, looked up as you passed and didn’t look away fast enough.
Spencer’s hand rose, light against your lower back as he guided you.
His car waited a few paces from the far end of the lot, tucked in a patch of dimness where the last streetlight had long since burned out. The sedan was older but clean, silver dulled slightly by time.
Spencer pulled his keys from his pocket, and unlocked the car with a chirp. He stepped forward, not saying anything, and opened the passenger door like it was instinct.
You murmured a quiet “thank you” as you ducked inside, and though he didn’t speak, he lingered there for a second before making his way around to the driver’s side.
The door shut with a muted thud that made the car tremble just slightly, and then the silence spread between you, so sudden and almost ironically overwhelming. There was no longer any music, no voices and no street noise leaking in. Just the hush of the cabin and the faint sound of your breathing that he could tell you were failing to steady.
He was too, especially as you moved, smoothing the bottom of your dress as you scooted back against the seat. The burnt umber linen flowed over your legs.
Spencer kept his eyes forward. Well, he really tried to.
But he could see the way it settled mid-thigh. Shorter than anything he’d ever seen you wear. The hem inched higher when you folded one knee over the other, baring the plush slope of your upper leg, and Spencer’s breath hitched before he could stop it.
He hadn’t meant to look, and definitely hadn’t meant to keep looking.
But it didn’t even matter when he forced his view out the windshield, he couldn’t unsee that image. Couldn’t unfeel the pull of it, the foolhardy thought of sliding down into the narrow space at your feet, pressing himself between your legs until you had no choice but to touch him finally, to tell him everything he’d never been brave enough to ask before.
He wanted to know what you’d thought of him all those years ago, when you were mousy and reserved, tucking yourself behind casefiles and ill-fitting clothes, and he was the one fumbling over coffee lids, speaking too fast, trying too hard. Back when his hair was too long, his ties too wide, and his eagerness came out sideways until it embarrassed even him.
He wanted to hear you say what you’d meant back by the archive room: You seem different too, and not in a bad way.
He wanted to know what you saw in him now, after everything.
The thought knotted all ugly in his chest, tight enough he had to clear his throat, and his legs shifted, knees spreading as he tugged at the fabric of his trousers. Such a clumsy attempt at looking casual when every nerve in him was anything but.
Maybe you saw the jitter in his hand, or maybe he’d already fractured the peace so badly you let it go when you said, “I like your shirt. Light blue is one of my favorite colors.”
He didn’t turn toward you. He kept his vision pinned to the dark glass of the window, his fingers tugging at the cuffs, working the button loose and fastening it again, needing the distraction.
“I remember that,” He murmured after a beat. “That light blue was your favorite.”
“You did?”
“Yeah,” He said, I remember the cornflower blue mug you kept at your desk. In some of the socks you wore, just peeking out above your shoes. Just little flashes of it everywhere.
“I remember your collars used to be slightly crooked sometimes,” You said, voice loaded with fondness. “I always wanted to fix them, but I couldn’t muster up the courage to even tell you.” With your pause, he slowly turned his head toward you again, and there it was, a wry smile tugging endearingly at your mouth. “It’s doing it again, it’s crinkled on the left.”
It had been fine when he left the house, he remembered checking. Twice. Then again, he’d fussed with his reflection the whole drive over. From his collar, to his hair, his cuffs, back to his hair. As if it really mattered, like any of it might make a difference.
Instinctively, he reached up to smooth it, fingertips grazing the edge, but then he stopped, his hand stalling mid-air as you spoke…
“Would it be okay if I…?” You asked, already starting to lift your hand, but slow enough that he could stop you. “You know, just…eleven years late.”
At first, he just looked at you, and you looked right back.
It was as if time itself had circled in on that moment, tightening the loop until it touched down in the middle of the car, until it found the first glance you’d ever shared, long ago across a cluttered bullpen, and layered it over this one.
Neither of you dared move yet, not even a breath too loud, only the look, and the thousand things it carried: over a decade of almosts, of silent moments, of what ifs folded neatly into what now.
He didn’t trust his voice not to splinter, so he only angled his head toward you. Not a full turn, but enough to expose the fold on the left, enough to say yes without saying anything at all.
You leaned in with such care that it made his stomach twist as your fingers found the ruffle and pressed the fabric back into shape. He could feel your breath, humid and uneven and gentle, stroking the cords of his neck, and he couldn’t help it, the way his pulse surged hard behind his ribs.
If he turned now, just a little, his lips would find your cheek. If you looked up, if you tilted your chin, he could kiss you.
He thought he’d know what your lips felt like after all this time wondering.
“Done,” You murmured, but didn’t move away as your hand slowed against his collar until it rested completely.
Please please please don’t pull away, he thought, the words between plea and panic. Every blink of your lashes felt like a warning, like the flutter of something waking up and realizing where it was, what it had done. Like the twitch of a fawn’s ear right before the brush moved.
He wanted, no - needed - to keep you close, even if he was the monster in the overwood.
Before he could second-guess himself; gently, his fingers closed around yours as he guided them to his cheek, and held them there with a light press. The warmth was immediate, sinking in so deep and too fast. He hadn’t meant to want it so much, especially hadn’t meant to show it so impulsively, but it was there and utterly undeniable. It embarrassed him how little resistance he’d managed.
“Tell me what you’re thinking.” He said above a whisper.
“I don’t even think I can put it into words.” You said, and your thumb swept gently along his jaw as if that might explain it better.
It didn’t.
“Try,” He held your hand tighter.
“I…what about you?” You asked instead, voice almost inaudible. “What are you thinking, Spencer?”
His head dipped, fingers slackening around yours, just shy of letting go.
His voice barely surfaced, “I was thinking about kissing you,” He said. “I’ve been thinking about it for a long time.”
Long enough that saying it out loud would’ve made him sound like a man who’d built some ridiculous fantasy, all starry-eyed and grasping at things that never really belonged to him.
He’d never really been inside your world. He wasn’t then and wasn’t now. Just a background figure, a name in passing, maybe a fleeting glance here and there, and yet, he wanted you with a force that didn’t quite make sense.
How do you say that out loud? How do you admit that you’ve spent years aching over someone you barely got to know, someone who left, lived a life without you, and then reappeared like a ghost you never stopped seeing?
It was outrageous, gravely unfair, and somehow all-consuming at the same time.
“And I’ve wanted you to kiss me for a long time.”
His mind scrambled to calculate what your “long time” meant. Years? Months? Since tonight? But his body didn’t wait for an answer.
He leaned in too fast, too desperate, and his lips caught the corner of your mouth instead. You gasped, before your hands rose to either side of his face and kept him level and steady, right where you wanted him.
Right where he wanted to be.
The second kiss found your mouth perfectly, guided into place, and it was nothing and somehow everything like he’d imagined. It was slower, so much sadder, and infinitely sweeter.
He hadn’t expected your lips to be that soft. Well, maybe he had. He certainly imagined them as tender and unreal and devastating, but the truth was worse, because now he actually knew. Now he knew how they felt, how you tasted - raspberry, not strawberry or cherry. How you kissed him like you wouldn’t ever have another chance to.
He’d never, ever be able to forget it.
Because all that wanting terrified him, with how sharp it was and how full. Perhaps the night would end and you’d forget it all, or that your mouth had been some trick of the light and your fingers on his collar had never really happened.
He deepened the kiss with a cautious, devotional press of his tongue, like he thought maybe if he kissed you thoroughly enough, the years wouldn’t matter. That maybe your soul would meet him halfway.
A guttural, helpless sound slipped from him the moment your tongue met his.
His hand rose to cradle the back of your head. He needed you to stay exactly where you were, no floating away.
The whimper that left you pulled him under, then your fingers curled into the longer strands at the back of his head and gave a slight tug.
Your lips barely parted from his. The space between you wasn’t even a breath wide. Foreheads pressed together and noses bumped as you panted, visibly wrecked, like the air couldn’t find your lungs fast enough.
He should’ve been satisfied. That one kiss should’ve been enough to last him another decade, but it wouldn’t.
“Please,” He sighed, lips grazing yours. “That wasn’t enough, just one more.”
You gave him a simple peck, lips barely touched his for more than a few seconds. A kiss too brief, too petal-soft, too careful. It unjustly tormented him with how small it was compared to everything he felt.
He leaned in before he could help it - not that he would’ve - seizing your mouth again with more intensity, spates upon spates of crushing desire.
He couldn’t see the smile so much as feel it; a gentle tilt of your mouth into his, like you’d just unlocked some long-buried myth of Spencer Reid. That you finally saw it: how badly he wanted you, how ruinously close he was to falling apart.
‘One more’ would never be enough.
You fisted the fabric at his chest, drawing him closer until the console pressed hard against his ribs and you couldn’t pull anymore. He bent anyway, content to let the plastic edge dig into him. As if it was proof you wanted him close enough for it to hurt.
His free hand closed around your wrist where it gripped his shirt, thumb resting over your pulse, as his mouth changed. Wetter, sloppier, with no real shape to it anymore. Just breath and tongue and the throaty sound it pulled out of him as he dragged you closer too.
You hit the console with a jolt, belly first, and it only made him grab harder after hearing you whine.
“Spencer, Spen--” You stammered between his incessant kisses.
You squirmed, trying to ease the angle, hip twisting against the console as you murmured something under your breath. Probably ow, or maybe hold on because he was being way too bold and ambitious, borderline unforgiving.
He didn’t let you go. Not an inch or a millimeter if that comfort wasn’t closer, and it wasn’t.
“No, come here,” He rasped, voice frayed.
He pulled you straight into his lap, your knees bracketing his, arms draped loosely around his neck. Your dress gathered high at your thighs, the hem bunched where his palms curved underneath, holding the backs of your legs.
Like he needed to feel every inch of your weight to believe you were real, not just in one of his daydreams, where nothing had mass and he could never quite quantify a single thing. Where he could never get the shape of your body absolutely right, never accurately remember how your voice sounded, never once imagine the exact way you’d taste.
He buried his face in the crook of your neck, needing one more proof point; scent.
Something floral and sugary, likely jasmine and pear, the kind of perfume that clung to sweaters and pillowcases. Underneath it, the real you bled through; warm skin, faint shampoo, a trace of salt. Something he’d never be able to replicate in his memory.
Your head turned slightly, shoulder shifting beneath his cheek. He felt the swivel before you spoke.
“Spencer,” You crooned, eyes flicking toward the glass on each side. “Someone could see us.”
He didn’t pull back, didn’t lift his face. Just let his fingers press into the plush curve of your thighs.
“Next time,” He murmured, “We’ll be somewhere no one can see.” His voice cracked as he added, “And I’ll take my time then.”
The second the words left him, his whole body tensed. Wanting was one thing, but wanting again, the suggestion of after, that was too much. That was greedy. That was a boy’s hope, and he didn’t get to be that anymore.
You pressed both hands to his chest, trying to lean back far enough to see him. Your spine hit the steering wheel with a dull thunk, but you didn’t flinch or reposition yourself again, but his hands loosened instinctively, senselessly.
He tried not to look right at you as he turned his face toward your shoulder, toward the heat he already missed, but you found his chin and lifted. He didn’t even resist, he just blinked up at you with shallow breaths and repentant eyes.
“You want a next time?” You asked, like it hurt to say.
He didn’t understand why your voice broke like that, why asking him that question sounded like a wound ripped open.
Unless you didn’t believe he meant it. Unless you thought he’d take what he wanted and vanish. That the whole thing had been a fluke, some lapse in his otherwise sound judgment. Maybe you thought he only wanted you right there, not after, not anywhere else.
He searched for a better reason, anything other than that, and found nothing but guilt.
He saw it, clear as day. How every moment up until now had written a different story, one where he was closed off, unreadable, at arms-length. Always just out of reach.
In the hallway, at the bar, and on the sidewalk outside.
He hadn’t offered you comfort when you reached for it. Hadn’t met you emotionally, even when you’d tried to crack him open. He’d watched you smile so freely now and hadn’t even smiled back, watched you hesitate and hadn’t soothed it. And now he’d kissed you like he couldn’t function without it, and expected you to believe that meant something.
That was so very cruel, and he hadn’t meant to be cruel.
The burn behind his eyes hit hard, but he didn’t blink it away. He wouldn’t let himself look away either. He held your stare.
“I want a lot of things when it comes to you.”
You shook your head, eyes suddenly fixed on the line of buttons at his chest as your fingers toyed with one.
“You want a lot of things when it comes to me…” You said slowly, testing the shape of the words, then your lips twisted before you added, “Show me one of them then?”
It was mercy you weren’t pulling away, that you weren’t done with him.
He should’ve said something better and way sooner. He should’ve done a lot of things.
Should’ve asked you questions in the hallway, real and sincere ones, instead of pretending he wasn’t desperate to know what had changed. Should’ve joined in at the bar instead of sitting off to the side like a shadow, listening without adding a single thing.
Yet, you were still there, asking him to show you what he hadn’t been brave enough to say, and that time, he wouldn’t fail you.
“Anything for you. Anything,”
He smoothed his hand along the side of your face first, taking in the warmth of your skin again, the curve of your cheekbone, the texture of the tiny hairs near your ear. Down your neck, where he paused, his thumb brushing once over your pulse. To your shoulder, then your arm. Where goosebumps lingered from the very first second he’d touched you. He smoothed them down, wanting to calm the reaction the same way he wished he could calm the ache in your eyes. With nothing but care.
His other hand drifted lower, skimming the back of your thigh again with his fingertips, then the front, noticing the jump of your muscles there. The skin there was softer, thinner somehow, like the sun hadn’t touched that part of you in months. A few loose threads clung there too, static-welded. He brushed them off gently, careful not to press too hard, worried even that could leave a mark.
He needed to remember every detail, and he would. If his memory ever gave out, he’d relearn you with his hands. Again and again, until he got it right.
Your legs shifted wider without thought, a reflex you didn’t seem to notice or correct, like your body had decided for you. So, he followed wordlessly, his touch traveling inward, across the delicate skin of your inner thigh, then just beneath the hem of your dress.
He wanted to go higher, but he held himself where he was, letting the want stretch deliriously long between his fingertips and the place he hadn’t yet touched.
His hands ached with the want of more, but he gave it to his mouth instead as he leaned in a little too quickly, lips finding the side of your throat to place a tender open-mouthed kiss. Then another, lower, and then one just beneath your jaw, longer and hungrier.
He needed to leave a trace somewhere you couldn’t brush off.
He kissed the other side of your throat, then nipped at the skin just beneath your ear, a flick of tongue and the faintest pressure from his teeth.
“I want to show you another one,” He drawled, each word slower than the last. “Of the things I want.” He kissed your jaw once more. “Let me make you feel it.”
The turn of your head nudged his jaw, a pivot that pulled him away before he meant to stop, and he felt your gaze flick outward again.
“Tell me if you want to stop,” He said quietly. “Just say it and I will. I promise.”
He’d have done anything you asked him to right then. Anything. Said it, proved it, dropped it.
He didn’t care that you both were in a parking lot, didn’t care about the hour or the press of the world beyond the windows. All of it faded, unimportant and colorless, so long as no one took this from him, so long as you stayed.
But he cared if you cared.
Silk-light fingers trailed down his arm to his wrist until they reached his hand still resting at your thigh. You guided him higher and higher, like you knew exactly what he wanted but wanted it more.
“I don’t care about anything else right now.” You murmured, needy and sure. “I just want you.”
The sound of it, the certainty and urgency, punched square through him. His breath caught, his hips jerked up before he could stop them. A low groan tore from him as your gaze dropped, landing on the thick press of him straining through his pants.
His hand didn’t need to be led anymore; his thumb traced along the center of your underwear, where the fabric clung to you with heat and dampness. Even through it, he felt the plush seam of you underneath…so soaked, so sensitive, and parted just enough that the pad of his thumb skimmed every curve and dip of your core.
That told him everything - how much you wanted this and wanted him, and it shattered the last of his restraint.
He gripped your thighs tight, dragging you forward in his lap, mouth snatching yours in a kiss that was all tongue and shameless longing. He rutted up into you tentatively at first, then his breath hitched as he swore he could feel the slick drag of your panties through his pants. He thrust up again, harder that time, needing more and more.
Your hands clutched at his shoulders, nails digging through the blue linen as you rocked against him, gasping into his mouth like you couldn’t get close enough either.
Want, when it came from you, wasn’t just arousing; it was unbearable because he wanted to devour it, to coax every tremble out of you and feel it in his own bones, to lose himself in what you’d let him give you.
He brought both hands to your face, cupping it fully, palms warm against your cheeks with your hair trapped flat beneath them.
The kiss stopped so he could whisper a confession, “I don’t want to want you like this,” Forehead to forehead. “So much it scares me, so much I don’t think I’ll know how to stop.”
“How do you want me?” Your voice was mild and curious as you cupped his face like he was cupping yours. “We don’t have to stop.” You pressed a kiss to the corner of his mouth, one under his eye, his temple, then to the crease between his brows. “I don’t want to.”
The corner of his mouth twitched and he worried he might break. Then, reverently and deeply, he kissed you so he wouldn’t. It felt like you’d just offered him something he’d spent his whole life pretending not to need.
“I want you here,” He admitted, nudging your nose with his. “And after this…I-I’ll never stop wondering how I ever got this lucky. I’ll give you everything I have, if you’ll let me.”
Your hips slowly rolled down over his, forcing a broken sound from deep in his throat.
Spencer’s hands slipped from your face to your waist, only to grip hard, holding you in place. His erection pressed firm against your center, the contact nearly too much.
His voice broke close to your ear, “If you do that again, I’ll take you right here like I said I wanted to. I don’t care who sees.”
You didn’t answer with words. Instead, you leaned in and snatched his bottom lip between your teeth, a sweet little bite that made him groan, before grinding down on him the best you could under his hold.
Once again, his mouth was on yours, capturing you in a kiss so bruising, so desperate, it made your head tip back. One hand flew to the back of your head, fingers threading into your hair, pressing you deeper into it like he needed to feel your mouth from the inside out.
Something inside him gave out, his sanity or his control. Maybe both.
His other hand bunched the skirt of your dress up high on your hips, fisting and wrinkling the material in a rush to get to you. When his fingers found the edge of your panties, he didn’t hesitate; he tugged them aside with a rough breath, then dragged his fingers through your arousal, smearing it across your folds.
With a whimper, you pressed yourself into his touch. Hips bucked without thought, chasing his hand, trying to shift him, guide him, anything to make his thumb land exactly where you needed it.
Then he felt your hands fumbling for his belt, clumsy and frantic, fingers trembling as they worked open the buckle, then the zipper, like you couldn’t get to him fast enough. He felt it too, that same desperation, that it wasn’t fast enough. So he helped with the rest, shoving the waistband of his boxers down just far enough to free himself, thick and flushed and aching only for you.
You looked down, breath catching at the sight of him, then glanced back up with a look he couldn’t place. He tilted his head, trying to name it: passion, maybe awe, or something that was too sentimental to name…until your thumb swept over the head of his cock, gathering the slick there and spreading it, just like he did for you moments ago.
Every thought faded into oblivion.
Your hand was soft. Too soft for what he’d done to you. He knew it, he’d gripped, ground, groaned into you like a man possessed. While you touched him like he deserved care, when he really didn’t. For one disorienting second, he felt bad. Then you rolled your hips, slick and needy, and it knocked every ounce of softness right out of him.
He helped you find him, helped you angle just right, and then froze, because the moment your body started to take him, he stopped breathing. You were so warm, so tight around him already, and he knew…he just knew there’d never be anything - anyone - else after that.
Your eyes stayed locked on his the whole way down. He held them as long as he could until it became too much and he tipped his head back, jaw clenched, fighting not to come already.
“Talk to me,” He begged, casting shame to the wayside. “Tell me what this means to you, tell me I’m not just some fuck to forget.”
He’d already said it twice, that he wanted a future, wanted to try for one. Either time, you hadn’t answered, and now, with your body wrapped around him and his heart wide open, he needed something, anything.
Because you were unforgettable, and he didn’t think he could survive not being the same to you.
Your voice wobbled, meek against his cheek. “What if the real me isn’t what you’re hoping for?”
A beat passed, somehow too short and too long, before your body sank down fully onto his cock, burying him to the hilt.
Spencer’s head jerked up, eyes fixed on yours as he rolled up into you, letting his body meet every inch of where yours had taken him. Where he felt the flutter of your muscles, inside and out.
“I know this,” He said, hips shifting deeper. “I know how you feel around me. How I feel with you. Let me learn the rest.”
“Spencer--”
He heard the worry in your voice, the tremor beneath his name.
“Then let me find out,” He said, voice cracking. “Whatever’s real, whatever’s you, I want it. Even if I don’t know you yet, I...I want to.”
You reached for the buttons of his shirt, undoing the top few to press a kiss to his chest, right over his heart.
“No, you’re not someone I’ll forget,” You promised, peppering kisses over his collarbone. “You never were.”
He just kissed you, his tongue worshiping yours; wet, rhythmic, and endless, with everything he couldn’t say. A hand slid down from your waist, trailing over your stomach until his fingers found the place just above where your bodies met. He circled his fingertips over your clit, gentle and completely attuned.
Then he moved inside you again fully.
The windows fogged, breath and body heat curling against the glass, just as tightly as you curled and clenched around him.
He was losing himself, fast. Every sound you made, he tasted. Every shift of your hips to meet his, pushed him closer to the edge. He tried to slow down, tried to savor it, to make it last, but each time he did, you whimpered in protest, and his resolve crumbled.
He couldn’t deny you. Not in that moment and not ever. If you wanted more, he’d give you everything and then some.
Your mouth parted from his, but didn’t go far, lips still brushing his disjointedly. The kiss wasn’t a kiss anymore, just a blur of open mouths and needy sounds as your pleasure started to build.
Spencer’s eyes fluttered open, dazed. He couldn’t help it, he had to see you, and what he found set him spiraling even further: your eyes shut tight and brow creased like you were being pulled apart in the best possible way.
He felt like the luckiest man alive to be the one undoing you, and to have you undoing him.
His own climax crept up his spine like a fuse catching flame, spreading outward through his body until he could feel it in his fingertips, in the trembling of the hand still lovingly between your legs.
But he refused to let go before you, not when you were that close. Definitely not when your body thrummed around him like you were already halfway there.
He leaned in, mouth dragging down your jaw to your throat. His kisses turned hungrier as he searched, desperate to find that spot that would tip you over.
Spencer found it in no time; the bend where your neck met your shoulder. He knew, without a doubt, that was the place. That was where your pulse thudded too hard, too fast, where your hips shook. He began to nip and soothe, tonguing that spot with dreamy loops.
“Right here?” He whispered into it, his voice hoarse. “You’ll come for me if I stay right here?”
You only turned your head, offering more of your throat in silence, but silence wasn’t enough.
“Don’t do that,” He encouraged as he blew air over your sweet spot. “Don’t go quiet on me, I need to hear it.”
“Yes, please. Please,”
Spencer let out a ragged groan at the sound of your voice, at that breathless please.
He pressed a kiss to your throat again, open-mouthed and shaking, before bringing his tongue back to that spot with renewed devotion. Slow and sultry circles, just like before. Exactly how you needed it.
You clung to him, quivering as your hips stuttered against his, every breath snagged on his name as he worked you closer and closer.
“Spencer, Spencer, Spencer--”
He didn’t stop, he didn’t dare. He felt it, that tension building inside you, tightening around him in waves. His hand remained between your legs - as if it had anywhere else better to be - tempting you, syncing with the movement of his tongue as your body began to quake.
Then you broke, unbound and set free.
Your walls fluttered tight around him, spasming with your release, and the sound you made…it was high and wrecked and sensual. Something he’d never forget, something he’d seek again and again, as many times as you’d let him. He could live off the sound of it.
You slumped forward into him, boneless, your face tucked into his neck as if your body couldn’t hold itself up any longer. He fretted that it really couldn’t.
So, Spencer caught you instantly; arms winding tight around your back, one hand sliding up to cradle the back of your head. His hips slowed and softened, the rhythm gentling. Less urgent and more devotional.
“It’s okay, I’ve got you,” He said as his lips brushed your hairline, then your temple.
He didn’t stop moving inside you, not entirely. He just rocked with you now, more comfort than craving, trying to soothe you from the inside out.
He couldn’t remember the last time he felt that full. Like he was right where he was meant to be, with someone who trusted him enough to fall into him, not away, and let him stay, like he’d always wanted to.
And somehow, that was what finished him; the weight of you folded into him, your heartbeat ticking in front of his own. The sound of his name still echoing in his ears, and the unbearable gift of knowing you let him have this, have you.
It rippled through him before he could brace for it. That biting, all-consuming pleasure that had him coming with a broken gasp, still buried deep and holding you tight enough to shake.
Neither of you moved.
There was only the rise and fall of heavy breath, tangled together in the thick air between you. His chest rose beneath yours, yours stuttered above his.
Everything else fell away: the fogged windows, the cooled sweat, the ache in his thighs. All of it dulled beneath the warm press of your body.
He didn’t want to let go, but the moment the haze cleared, guilt settled in. There was absolutely no guilt for touching you, for wanting you and needing you like that, but for where it happened. For how fast and how exposed he let you be.
That wasn’t how he wanted your first time to be, not crushed between his body and the steering wheel as the seatbelt buckle dug into your kneecap.
You deserved a bed, a real one. Sheets pulled back, time unspooling slowly, every inch of your body seen and praised the way you deserved.
“You should’ve had more than this,” He said remorsefully against the crown of your head. “I don’t regret you, not for a second, but I hate that this is the memory I gave you.”
You straightened with soft insistence, and cupped his face in both hands. Your thumbs brushed the stubble at his jaw.
“You could say the same about yourself,” You said thoughtfully. “You deserved more than this too, Spencer. You deserved time and comfort and adoration.” His throat worked around some thick, unspeakable lump. “But I wanted you. So badly I couldn’t stop, and nothing you say will make me regret that or wish I had more.” Your thumbs pressed firmer, urging him to believe you.“This wasn’t a mistake. It was us, and I’ll remember that, not the car.”
Spencer’s eyes darted away, lashes low. Your words had touched something he wasn’t ready to face head on just yet. You’d answered his deepest fear so plainly, so willingly, that it frightened him with how easily you saw through him and how unflinchingly you chose him anyway.
So he busied himself with what his hands could do.
Without a word, he reached down and carefully pulled your panties over your center with respectful hands, then gently smoothed your dress back over your thighs. He tugged the hem into place, as if reassembling you meant keeping you safe and respected.
Then he reached for the seatbelt buckle that had pressed into your knee, shoving it aside, and caressing his knuckles over the mark it left.
He still didn’t meet your gaze.
As he reached to tuck himself back into his underwear and trousers with his free hand, his movements slowed by the weight of everything unsaid and you gently nudged his hand aside.
“I got it,” You mumbled.
Spencer froze, letting you take over.
You handled him with the same care he’d given you as you guided the fabric back into place, then zipped up his fly. Next, your fingers found his belt, buckling it with ease, and when you saw the rumpled edges of his shirt, you didn’t hesitate to smooth it down and tucked it back into his pants. One hand pressed lightly to his stomach as you made sure everything was neat again.
Then you reached for the buttons you’d undone earlier. You fastened each one with calm fingers, as if sealing something in, or keeping something precious from slipping away. He didn’t know.
Only once you were done did you look up at him again, eyes kind.
His mouth opened like he wanted to say something heavier, something big and permanent, but what came out instead was:
“Did you drive yourself tonight?”
It sounded awkward even to him, but the need beneath it was plain. After everything, he wanted to be useful in some way, somehow.
You shook your head no, pressing your lips together to keep a smile at bay.
“Would you let me drive you home?” His shoulders relaxed, but his voice was still tentative.
He wanted to make sure you were okay, to stay near you for as long as he was allowed.
“If Penelope will let you,” You said, a glint of humor in your eyes. “She might not forgive you for ditching her and JJ.” Then you swiftly added, “Well, us. I ditched too.”
Spencer let out a soft, almost breathless laugh. “She’ll survive.”
“Will she?” You teased. “I’m not so sure.”
Your playfulness hung in the air, and it melted any remnants of his armor. The way you looked at him, like that moment was the beginning of forever. A glimpse of the woman he already yearned to understand fully, even if it took the rest of his life.
His heart swelled, his affections poured over.
Before he could talk himself out of it, Spencer leaned in and kissed you. So sweetly, with so much gratitude and wonder that it felt like he was trying to thank you without saying a word just yet.
His hand held your jaw, thumb brushing beneath your ear, and when he pulled back, his forehead rested against yours.
“Thank you,” He murmured, barely audible.
It didn't feel like enough, not nearly, but it was all he had without collapsing in on himself again.
You smiled so full and bright, so wide it reached your eyes and crinkled the corners. You looked happy. Truly and proudly happy.
And Spencer…he smiled back. Slow at first, like his face had forgotten how, then it grew into a small, crooked thing, but it was real.
“You know,” You said, still close enough that your noses almost brushed, “We should probably head back in…before they come looking for us. If they haven’t already and seen the windows.” You nodded toward the fogged glass and grinned.
His smile twitched wider, sheepish and a little bashful, the tips of his ears pinking.
You reached for his hand and lifted it to your lips, placing a kiss to the back of it.
It floored him, how romantic you were without even trying. It turned his spine to smoke. If that was how you expressed want, that openly and sweetly, then God help him, he’d spend all of eternity trying to deserve it and return it twice over.
“Come on,” You whispered against his skin, then released him and opened the car door with a click.
Cool night air spilled in, breaking the heat between you, but Spencer still felt warm all over. Warmer, maybe. Warmer in a way that wouldn’t fade.
He exhaled, then followed, determined to reach the bar door before you, if only to reclaim a scrap of chivalry after having sex in a car and the humbling kiss to the back of his hand.
Post-prison!Spencer doesn’t know how to say he’s scared you don’t want him anymore, so he shows up at your apartment with a foreign film. He thinks you’re pulling away, that you found someone else.
(fem!reader, art conservator!reader, hand kink adjacent, jealousy, fingering, p in v)
Pages snapped in his hands like brittle wings, the newspaper tired from being folded and worried over, over and over again.
Spencer had read the same line three times, but the words wouldn’t stick. His eyes skimmed graphs and numbers, parsing them automatically. He could recite them back if asked, of course, but the words were insignificant.
As if printed on another world that you weren’t a part of.
The sidewalk was alive and loud with movement; the scuff of rubber soles, the clipped percussion of boots, the uneven stagger of someone too rushed or too distracted.
Each time, his head snapped up, searching, stupidly hopeful, and each time, it wasn’t you.
He knew the rhythm of your steps the way he knew cadences in speech or patterns in music: heel to toe, the careful tap and shuffle as you navigated debris, the pop of your work-worn flats randomly lifting off your heel, and the brief pause as you pressed back in before continuing.
He waited for those sounds, hyper-attuned to every footfall, though his eyes pretended to follow the printed page.
The corner of the DVD case, the one he’d unceremoniously brought for you, pressed into his thigh as he spun the top edge between his fingers. The hard plastic bit into his skin on purpose, some pain to counter the mental litany he’d been running for hours.
When footsteps neared again, he went ramrod straight; listening, measuring weight, distance, the angle of approach. His chest tightened at the possibility it was you.
He looked up so fast it hurt, already picturing the way you’d round the corner.
Still not you.
It was a middle-aged woman, a grocery bag cutting into her wrist, a food stain darkening her shirt. Likely a mother. She looked at him just long enough to offer the practiced, perfunctory smile of the city, gone in less than a heartbeat.
Spencer managed a tight-lipped smile in return, his eyes distant. When his gaze fell back to the paper, the numbers dissolved into static.
She doesn’t wa-- He drove the corner in harder, shaking his head until strands fell loose across his forehead, anything to cut the thought off. She wants som-- He pressed again and again and again.
He thought of your smile instead. How it always pulled crooked before it opened wide and beautiful, an asymmetry that made it positively unforgettable.
He hadn’t seen it in almost a week.
Stress had chased it away, and he’d heard the proof again earlier on the phone when you called to cancel plans, explaining you had to stay late; a damaged varnish layer needed stabilizing before it set wrong. Spencer heard it immediately: how every syllable was pulled a little too tight, your usual warmth pressed flat beneath the pressure.
Even the new job showed in your posture, shoulders caved as if carrying weight you couldn’t put down, fingers antsy at your sides as though still reaching for a brush or scalpel, or the fine lines of concentration etched deeper around your mouth than they’d been months ago.
The paper rustled as he folded it again, a meaningless task for hands that wanted something softer to touch. He wished for yours instantly, so nimble and infallible, constantly paint-covered. Imagining pressing his lips to your pulse points at the wrist, where your artisan’s hands begin. How your fingertips might feel, dragging lightly over his chest, through his hair.
Instead, all he could do was wait.
The light shifted as he waited, sunlight peeling back from his shoes, inch by inch across the pavement. He followed its retreat the way others might follow the ticking of a watch.
Another minute had passed, tracked by the shadow’s march over the curb. Then, sound preceded sight: the faint pattern he knew better than his own heartbeat - heel to toe, heel to toe. Distinct, lighter than the others.
You.
Science made it uncanny that footsteps could be reduced to data, patterns, predictable repetition, but love made it terrifying. That a sound alone could obliterate his concentration, could tell him it was you without his eyes.
He rose, spine uncoiling as he slid the paper under his arm, the DVD case balanced in his hand. His chest was too tight, but he drew himself tall anyway. An easily shatterable kind of dignity, as if posture alone could keep longing from showing in his face.
And then you appeared, rounding the corner, and suddenly, you were everything in view.
The first thing he noticed was the shirt. A short-sleeved button-up, the fabric puffing at the shoulders. Then the pants: black dress slacks, a size too big, cinched awkwardly at the waist.
Even so, he liked you best this way, with your clothes having been a little off. Mind had been elsewhere, wrapped entirely in your work.
Imperfect, and somehow more beautiful because of it.
Guilty relief washed over him, because the exhaustion in your face was proof. Work had claimed you, not anyone else. You were alone, and you were coming home.
Your brows were knit, thoughts turned inward where he couldn’t follow. The white cord rose from your pocket in a line to your ears, carrying the buzz music he couldn't make out, but imagined suited you perfectly. It wasn’t fast enough for rock, not rigid enough for electronic. Maybe something more mellow, mild enough to match the way you stepped around cigarette butts on the pavement.
You never lifted your eyes, your mouth pressed flat, museful and far away.
Spencer’s lips curved slightly. He knew this version of you. The one who never looked up, who’d stumbled into doorframes and signposts more times than you cared to confess. Absorbed and careful, but careless. All at once, impossibly.
At the moment you drew near, he subtly and calculatedly adjusted his stance, placing himself squarely in your way.
Your shoulder clipped his chest, the slight impact making you jolt.
Your hands caught his forearms before you could think, fingers curling tight. The warmth of your palms burned through his shirt. He let himself have it, just for a moment, the closeness of your face, the drag of your breath, the shock in your eyes as they met his.
It was selfish, technically, to crave your attention so completely, to want you pulled out of thought and sound and tethered only to him.
“Spencer,” You gasped, “Hi, hi.”
The press of your lips to his was rushed and a little frazzled, and the spark of it climbed through his chest. His heart stuttered, then leapt, and he was already leaning forward again, chasing you for another kiss, unwilling to let the first vanish so quickly.
A hum escaped him as your hands fisted the front of his shirt, the sound vibrating against his ribs. When he drew back, his eyes flicked over your face, hungry to read every line of it.
The street, the windows, the world around you both barely registered. All he saw was you.
Your lips glistened faintly from the kiss, a swift lick catching the last trace of it before you looked up. Your head tilted in that familiar way, just slightly, the same degree every time.
“What’re you doing here?” You asked with amusement tinged with weariness, words weaving awkwardly through the spill of music in your ears. He lifted a hand, ready to slip the earbuds free himself, but you got there first, tugging them out with a sheepish motion. “Sorry.”
The stifled guitar and hushed vocals lingered, the sound fitting neatly with the evidence your steps had already offered. Indie folk, probably Iron & Wine.
Spencer smiled, holding up the DVD so the light caught the embossed foreign letters.
“I thought you might like to watch this,” He said calmly, though his pulse betrayed him. “I brought it for you.”
He’d bought it two weeks ago, holding onto it like a special secret. Waiting for the night you’d finally have time to curl into him on the couch at his place, when he could press play and surprise you.
Now it’d became something else. An excuse to stand there.
He didn’t expect you to ask him to stay, but he stepped a little closer anyway, hoping your body might answer before your mouth could decide.
You reached out and took the DVD from his hand, flipping it once, twice, like you didn’t quite know what to say. Your eyes scanned the cover, then lifted to his with a surprised little puff.
“La…Atalante?” You tried, mangling the French halfway through. Your lips twisted with a self-conscious smile. “I butchered that.”
“L’Atalanté,” He murmured gently, the pronunciation exact and affectionate.
With a huff of embarrassment, you said, “Yes, that. Thank you, Spencer.” Quiter, “Thank you.”
You shifted slightly, weight rocking from foot to foot, lashes blinking too fast to be nothing. Your gaze pinged between him and the case in your hands, like you were waiting for the words to rise of their own accord.
Spencer didn’t press, didn’t even speak, just watched the DVD turn delicately in your hands. Your fingers slid across the case in small, infinity-shaped movements, and he felt every one like a touch. It was as if your fingertip had brushed the back of his neck, at that strip of skin just below his hairline, and he exhaled without meaning to.
Like you were kissing him right then, and your fingernails had wandered there, dragging slowly, just sharp enough to leave a trail of goosebumps down his back.
Spencer’s chest tightened in that familiar, delicious ache.
“Would you want to stay and watch it with me? It’s okay if not.” Your gaze dropped. “I know I sort of ruined the plans we had, but I…I’d like to end the day with you.”
The pause stretched between you two, delicate as blown glass. He felt it in his limbs, that greedy warmth that came from being wanted, from being invited into your space. It wasn’t the art exhibit you both planned for the evening, all muted lighting and plinths standing politely apart, but it was yours to offer.
Spencer let a flicker of confidence expand in his chest. He wasn’t a hopeful man. Not by nature and not by training. For you, though, he’d made an exception, and he’d been right to wait. Right to hope.
“Yes,” He said unwaveringly, the answer had been waiting on his tongue all evening.
The hint of relief softened your features, a light exhale slipping past your lips. Even from a few steps away, Spencer saw the way your shoulders dropped. Not all the way, but enough. Like his yes had peeled back just one layer of the day’s weight.
He took your hand in his, thumb brushing over the waxy residue still clinging to your skin that you hadn’t had time to scrub away fully.
At the apartment’s vestibule door, Spencer paused, arm arcing to hold it open. You passed beneath it, a glide beneath the crook of his elbow. Hands still linked, a binding neither of you wanted to release. The hinge responded with a shudder, registering along his tricep.
“Did that consult wrap up okay today?” You’d asked it lowly, voice just above a whisper as you both passed the lobby mailboxes.
It wasn’t out of fear someone might hear, no one would’ve cared, rather out of some instinctive gentleness. An act that settled silkily against him, like a drop of mercy spilled across the floor of Cannae.
He lifted his free hand, reaching to press the elevator button.
He didn’t look at you when he said, “We got through it,” Then he added, “That’s as close to ‘resolved’ as I expect these days.”
Your hand squeezed his.
It was the kind of consult where everyone lied just enough to sound like they were telling the truth. Spencer didn’t bother chasing sincerity anymore, not at work.
With you, he didn’t have to chase it. You never made him.
He squeezed your hand back.
The elevator arrived. As you and Spencer stepped in, two men already occupied the space; young, tanned, arms thick from labor, the scent of fresh soil faint on their clothes.
Spencer shifted casually, body angling between the men and you as you stepped in, creating a narrow buffer.
Still holding your hand, he kept his posture relaxed and casual, but protective. A shield of flesh and bone against the harmless threat of comparison. Ridiculous, yes, but there all the same. They didn’t even know how lucky they were to stand beside you.
Spencer knew for them.
The ride wasn’t silent, not with the shudder of the elevator’s ascent, the metallic squeaks of cables pulling upward, or the discussion of powered augers, soil depth, and dogwoods.
The two men stepped off at level two, and as the elevator resumed its climb, Spencer’s sight locked to the numbers above the door, watching them blink by so slowly. His thumb rubbed loops into the back of your hand.
Another floor, then another.
The scent hit him first. Amber resin and labdanum, with a trace of vetiver beneath it all. Dry, green, a little wild. It hovered at his side, drew him in without trying. He inhaled without thought, the aroma seeping into his bloodstream, altering him molecule by molecule.
You nudged him lightly with your elbow, a little prod against his ribs.
“Did Penelope, um… ever mention anything about that blueprint?” Your voice was quiet, almost like you didn’t want to sound too eager. “The one with the studio add-ons? For my building?”
He cleared his throat before answering, though a sudden rasp surprised him.
“She’s still checking,” Then added knowing how much this meant to you. The northern light, the ventilation, and the double doors wide enough for stretcher frames felt just out of reach. “But I looked into the city registry last night. There’s something about a fire code variance, but I couldn’t access the old permit logs.” A crease formed between his brows. “Penelope’s better at wrangling locked databases than I am.”
A cough broke loose from him, trying to rid the rasp that still lingered. He brought a hand to his mouth, eyes darting away, the flush of vulnerability flared before he could stop it.
“Are you alright?” You asked earnestly.
“Yes,” He hesitated, brushing his fingers across his lips and down the line of his jaw. “Just-- my throat. Dry air, maybe.” His eyes tipped to yours. “She’ll figure it out.”
One more level.
You nodded, accepting the answer, and turned to face forward again.
Spencer didn’t.
His gaze lingered on your profile; the curve of your lips, the dip of your nose, the slow rise and fall of your chest.
His mind flickered out of reality for a fraction of a second, to the thought of your back against the wall, his mouth at the slope of your neck, just above your collarbone. He’d trace it with his tongue.
To hear you whine, I need you, Spencer. Just you. I don’t want anyone else, I swear. Please.
He swallowed hard, blinked it away.
But it came back so swiftly, a bittersweet disobedience.
Your hand slipping past the hem of his button-down, brushing down the fine hairs on his stomach, slower than it needed to be, thumbs teasing just beneath the band of his trousers. You pressed your lips just beneath his jaw--
Ding.
You didn’t say anything, just gave his hand the smallest tug, already halfway into the hallway.
He followed instantly, like you’d summoned him. Like his desire had been infused into the marrow of his bones, moving him toward you with every step.
Every step was another test of control. He counted them.
Seven. Eight. Nine.
You reached into your bag, and he knew the pattern - the way your fingers always missed the key the first time, then swept past wrappers and receipts as you fished the brass out.
Ten. Eleven.
The key slid into the lock.
Twelve.
The bolt clicked.
You stepped into the darkness like someone returning to a dream, and for one silent, gut-deep second, Spencer feared it was his dream you’d returned to.
Your hand slipped from his, and you felt fatally distant. Kind of angelic ghost that haunted him behind bars, the one kindness he allowed himself to survive the viciousness. Something he reached for when his fear grew teeth and talons, something he let himself believe in, just long enough to fall asleep.
He still couldn’t believe that something followed him home.
Spencer stepped inside, then froze, the door latching behind him with a deafening thud.
Then light tore sharply across the room, and Spencer blinked once, then twice, before his vision adjusted, finding you in pieces at first. The outline of your shoulders, the movement of your hand, the thump of your purse as you dropped it on the spindled stool you’d painted ivory, snapdragons curling along the legs.
Your kitchen counter was an extension of your exhaustion: torn envelopes strewn between tubes of paint, the bills snared in place by used bottles turned to paperweights.
He watched you move through the kitchen like you hadn’t forgotten he was there, but you didn’t look back either. A cabinet opened, hinges squeaked. The clink of glass against the granite countertop. The trickle of water.
Spencer stood unabatingly still, just past the threshold of your home, feeling every inch of himself suddenly. The weight of his body, the architecture of his frame, the damp heat still gathered at his collar.
You didn’t ask if he wanted water. You just brought it to him, holding the glass out.
Whatever passed across his face, you met it evenly.
“For your throat,” You said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
“Thank you.” He said as his fingers wrapped around the glass, the water mercifully cold.
Your eyes tracked over him absentmindedly…maybe, or maybe not. A sweep that paused somewhere near his stomach, where his shirt was still tucked too neatly into his slacks. There was a stutter in your fingers, like they’d considered reaching for something and changed their mind.
He felt it like heat behind his sternum, desperate to cool himself down with a chug of water that was no longer mercifully cold.
“I’m gonna go change,” You said tentatively, turning toward the bedroom. “You can too, if you want?”
He tensely nodded.
“Sure,” He croaked, the word clung thickly to his tongue. “Okay.”
You disappeared into the bedroom, but he didn’t follow just yet. First, he had to order his limbs to obey him. When he finally moved, each step was purposeful and heavy.
He reached the bedroom door, and the lamp was already on, all fuzzy and golden, spilling out across the hallway floor.
You were facing away. One foot bare, the other clad in a yellow sock, and already changed into a baggy t-shirt and loose pajama shorts.
He stopped. An unbidden, selfish disappointment pounded against his skull. He’d missed it. Missed the moment where fabric peeled from your skin, missed the wisp of cloth slipping over curves he wanted to touch, if only with his eyes.
Spencer’s hands clasped behind his back. His fingers found the flesh at the inside of his wrist and pinched. A sharp little reprimand. She’s tired. She’s kind, always so kind, and you’re lucky to be here at all.
“Here,” You said, holding out a folded bundle of clothes. “I’ll start the movie. Do you want something to eat? I have a Cadbury bar. No more apples, they went mushy. Hmm…I still have some trail mix or sunflower seeds?”
“No, it’s okay.” He said reflexively, but the way you offered, so naturally, it made him want to give something back. “Actually, the chocolate sounds good. If we share it.”
“Okay,” You said with the beginnings of a smile rising, but it faded before it reached your cheeks. “I’ll go grab it.”
He watched you turn and leave the room, the door frame swallowing you. Like it was the most ordinary thing, like people did this all the time; shared chocolate and changed clothes without glamour and left the man who loved them just standing there, barely breathing.
You’d shifted his entire internal tide, leaving him to absorb the aftershock in silence as he undressed in your absence.
Spencer stepped into the main room that wasn’t quite a living room, not quite a kitchen, just a single box-shaped space with its boundaries marked by thrifted furniture and stray canvases. His fingers fussed with the hem of the shirt. Rolled from too many trips through the wash, the cotton twisting where it met his skin.
You were already curled up in the cushions, knees drawn to your chest, the glow of the screen waiting patiently.
He crossed the room, meek steps over wooden floors, and sat beside you. Your shoulder bumped his, a tiny nudge, as you passed him the chocolate, fingers brushing his for a second longer than necessary.
Then, with a flick of the remote, the film began.
L’Atalanté opened with fog bleeding over a canal, the black hull of a barge splitting the water. Spencer’s brain stored the images, filed them in some distant drawer.
He’d caught you, out of the corner of his eye, letting the chocolate melt on your tongue slowly…intimately.
Spencer placed a square piece in his mouth, intently focused on the texture: processed cocoa fat and soy lecithin. It made his tongue sit too heavy with its cloying taste, and a sharp crack echoed in his jaw as he bit down roughly.
Too sweet, it was too much.
He couldn't finish it. He set the rest of his half on the coffee table, eyes fixed on the screen but vision completely unfocused.
He’d gone without your mouth for a little over a week, and maybe that was punishment enough.
But the thought that someone else might’ve known and learned its sweetness, maybe those seemingly normal and strong men in the elevator, made his throat dry out all over again.
“This came out before the New Wave, right? Godard and all that?”
He didn’t even try to suppress his grin. He couldn’t. You were coaxing him back to you, away from himself, and not subtly.
He said with no tiny amount of confidence, “Twenty-five years before. Vigo was practically inventing poetic realism, using symbolism instead of structure. Most people didn’t appreciate it until decades later.”
You hummed, pleased as punch, and said, “Knew you’d know.”
Both of you watched in silence for a while.
Or rather, you watched, and Spencer drifted. In and out of the visuals - the screen washed in smoke-gray and river-green, of curtains fluttering in pale silhouettes.
Mostly, he noticed you. The way your hand flexed in your lap, rubbing slowly at the muscles between your thumb and forefinger.
He knew it meant your hands were sore. Fatigue that lived deep in the flexor tendons, and, thankfully, he knew how to ease it. Where to press, how long to hold, how not to overwork the tissue. He’d researched it once, after the first time he’d seen you massage your hand like that.
He shifted slightly, angling toward you before you could downplay it again. He turned his palm up and laid it on his thigh. His fingers twitched once, then stopped.
“Let me do it,” His voice low with something like redshift, that stretch in the light when what you love moves just a little too far away.
There was tension in the way his shadow wavered over you, cast by the flickering television light, like he was already reaching for you without moving, like not touching you might ruin him.
You offered your hand so simply, like it was the most natural thing, and he cupped it as if it were breakable. The pads of his fingers found each strained place, thumb brushing the tenderest part with affection and slight pressure. You didn’t look at him, but he knew you were letting him care for you, allowing him to be gentle.
It meant more than he could ever say aloud.
Spencer didn’t pretend to keep watching the movie anymore. Your hand, resting in his, was its own kind of cinema.
His thumb moved in slow spheres, skimming the base of your thumb, brushing the calloused ridge near the joint.
He’d dreamed of these fingers. Not just wrapped around him, though he had…more times than he’d ever admit, but doing what they were meant for. Making torn things whole, coaxing beauty from near extinction, restoring what time tried to take.
He couldn’t imagine what it felt like, to be trusted by history that way.
Hands like that didn’t belong touching men like him, and yet, there they were; willingly cradled in his.
Spencer couldn’t help himself, he brought your hand to his mouth reverently. Kissed kissed kissed so softly, so slowly. Absolutely starving.
His lips dragged along each knuckle, mouth parting just enough to warm the skin beneath. He could feel everything: the faint abrasion of dried solvents near your nails, the invisible histories your hands carried in their creases.
He pressed your fingertips to his lips one by one, as if your prints might burn into his mouth and brand him yours.
He kissed your ring finger last, longer than the rest.
Once he started, he couldn’t stop.
His mouth wouldn’t leave your ring finger. No longer just kissing it, he nuzzled it. The bridge of his nose brushing against your knuckle. Lips parted as he nipped too gently to call it a bite, but with his desperation, there was nothing else to call it.
Then he heard it, that stifled, pitched sound. It shot straight through him, arresting everything. He pulled back instantly, panic pushing out pleasure. Struck with the sudden fear he’d hurt you.
“Spencer,” You whined.
He worried he’d read it wrong. Afraid of hurting someone who trusted him.
He didn’t move; he just pressed your hand to his cheek as he whispered, “Did I hurt you?”
“No, no,” You admitted, thumb stroking his cheek. “Not at all, I promise. I just--” Your voice dipped, the rest of the words washed down with a nervous gulp.
He finally looked at you then.
His gaze moved over your face, searching for what you meant to say.
As he leaned in slightly, you hid in his neck, suddenly bashful, and dotted a kiss so sweet it nearly wrung his heart out. His blood surged all at once, trying to get closer, gather under your lips, trying to belong to you.
“I’m sorry,” You whispered with another kiss. “I just missed you a lot. In a lot of ways.”
Spencer kissed the side of your head. “You don’t have to be sorry,” He said, voice scarcely more than a tremble. “Just tell me what you need.”
You tried to speak but faltered, so you pressed your mouth to his neck again.
“I need you,” You confessed, the words muffled, but he heard them, or maybe just felt them.
His breath hitched. It lit every nerve in him.
He guided you into his lap, never breaking contact, his hand steady at your back. The other cupped your face, thumb brushing your cheek like he was afraid you might vanish if he blinked.
“Tell me,” He murmured, eyes searching yours. “Tell me what you need, from me.”
He couldn’t just guess with you, because if he assumed, if he rushed, and that wasn’t what you meant or wanted, then the voice that haunted him most would be his own. It wouldn’t just be a mistake; it would be a desecration of your trust and of everything he loved in you enough to fear deserving.
Your gaze dropped, lashes low, the way they always were when you were feeling more than you could say. He felt it before your head even tilted. His hands shifted instinctively, thumbs brushing higher to catch the motion before it finished. He tilted your face back up, and you met it.
Your eyes stayed on his then, pupils dilated and indisputably clear with longing. “I want you to…” You leaned your forehead into his, a heavenly bridge between thoughts, like you were trying to share all the things you couldn’t quite say. “To touch me, please.”
“Where?”
“Everywhere.”
He kissed you like he remembered it from another life, like he'd searched lifetimes for the shape of your mouth against his. His lips moved with yours in slow, aching glides. It was tender, then deeper, then tender again. He didn’t know if he should be worshiping you or begging.
Every press of his mouth said more more more.
Each kiss turned breathier, wetter, more desperate from how severely he missed you. His breath caught between kisses, panting through the closeness like the air couldn’t reach his lungs unless it passed through your mouth first.
“I missed you,” He whispered into the corner of your lips, grazing. “I missed you so much.” One hand stayed at your jaw, the other found the back of your head. His fingers tightened just enough to press you into him, hoping the closeness could make up for lost time. “Thought maybe you didn’t want me anymore. I told myself not to take it personal, but I did. A little.”
Your expression faltered. It downright crumpled, and he could sense that something inside you caught and tore. Mouth parted, but no words came out. Your eyes scanned his face instead, wide and pained and full of unshed apology.
You drew back only slightly, far enough to see him clearly. Spencer didn’t chase the space between you that time. He didn’t even try to mask the sadness pooling in his eyes. It was all there, honest and splintered. The months of wondering if maybe you’d grown tired of needing him, the week he fretted he wasn’t worthy to smile at.
So you kissed him. Once at his temple, in the hollow of his cheek, then once at the spot just beneath his eye where the worry had collected in his dark circles, intensifying them.
“I missed you while restoring that manuscript, the one with the tiny constellations. I kept hearing your voice saying them in Latin.” You murmured against his skin. Another kiss. “I missed you every time the tea water boiled and you weren’t there to remind me I left it on.” Another. “And I kept wearing your shirt to bed." Your lips brushed his jaw. "But I couldn’t sleep in it. Every time, I’d end up pulling it off…it made me miss you too much, made me want your hands on me instead.”
Spencer didn’t speak. There were no words, not a single one, that could support what he felt.
He only looked at you, stunned and devoted, as his thoughts melted away.
Before you could place the next kiss, he angled your mouth to his. There was a twinkle in your eyes, a smile that was quickly cut off as you leaned in. The first kiss was sweet, tender, and careful. His mouth was trying to say thank you in the only way it could, without breaking the moment.
He kissed you harder, his tongue sliding against the seam of your lips, pleading to be let in.
Your tongue met his, and at the same time, you sank forward - hips to hips, heat to heat. The motion dragged a chasmic groan from him. His hand locked at your waist like muscle memory, like your body had always belonged in his arms.
No one else’s. Just his.
His teeth caught your bottom lip, just enough to make you sigh in the shape of his name. Then he let it go, breathing against your mouth.
“I need to know,” He said hoarsely, his voice shaking with restraint. “That you want me. Only me.”
There was flagrant jealousy in his words, the kind that came from loving someone so wholly, it terrified him to imagine being anyone less to you. The need to belong to you and be belonged to even pressed just beneath his fingernails, like he might scratch the world away if it meant getting closer to your heart.
Your bottom lip caught between your teeth, pressure-seeking. To replace what his mouth had taken from you a moment before.
Your voice was quiet, rhythmically broken, “Just you. Only you, forever and always.”
He exhaled sharply, and the next one came through his nose.
“Say it again,” He said, voice thistledown.
“You’re mine, Spencer. I’m yours.”
His hips bucked helplessly, involuntarily. The thick line of his arousal pressing into the heat between your inner thigh and center, right where your legs parted just slightly above him. Not quite where he needed to be, but close enough to make his blood rush wildly.
His spine curved like you’d pulled a string inside him, drawing him forward into your space, into your claim. One hand gripped your waist tight while the other slipped up your back, fingers curling into the fabric of your shirt.
You shifted in his lap, the friction drawing another low sound from him. His forehead dropped to your shoulder.
His hips rocked once more, slowly that time, testing permission.
Your fingers fisted the front of his shirt as an unintentional gasp was ripped from you. It came the moment your hips lifted just enough to meet him, and the head of his cock brushed right over your clit through the thin barrier of your cotton shorts.
Spencer felt the sound it tore from you. The subtle tremble in your legs, the way your nails flexed against his chest like you'd been electrocuted by pleasure.
He knew how sensitive you were. His body was just as starved, just as close to breaking.
A needy sound rose in his throat, full of both arousal and adoration like his soul had tripped over itself on the way to worship.
He pressed his mouth to your neck, just below your jaw, right against your pulse. His hand moved slowly, so achingly slow, fingers brushing down the outside of your thigh until he found the hem of your pajama shorts.
He slipped under the fabric so gently it was almost maddening.
The backs of his fingers skimmed first, petal-soft against your skin, knuckles barely grazing the crease where your leg met your center. He didn’t touch you there yet, even though every part of him begged to press harder, to give in.
His fingertips spread over your upper thigh, soft and doughy and perfect beneath his palm. He squeezed, then his thumb moved in careful circles, so close to your core.
“You’re--” He couldn’t finish the thought, so he tried another, “You’re so--I don’t deserve you.”
His lips pressed between your brows, to the bridge of your nose, the curve of your upper lip.
He hadn’t meant to change the pattern, but as his thumb drifted inward, the shape evolved on its own. The spiral he traced was instinctive at first, then he recognized it. The Fibonacci curve. Nature’s most efficient expression of beauty. Flowers, waves, galaxies, and then you.
Spencer’s chest barely rose as he pulled back just enough to see.
His hand stayed beneath the soft fabric of your shorts, thumb circling so close to your core, and his eyes dropped. He needed to watch you fall apart because a man in love needs to witness what no one else gets to, the unraveling meant only for him.
With a high, breathy keen, your hand shot down to grip his wrist. His whole body stilled.
His thumb froze in place, fingers curling instinctively as if bracing himself to let go, but you didn’t move him. Didn’t tug or push or flinch. You just held him there, your palm tight over the bones of his wrist.
He looked up at you.
When your wide and glassy eyes met his, pleading without shame, his hesitation dissolved.
“You can,” You whispered, barely audible. “Please.”
As he nodded, he eased your hand from his wrist, kissed your knuckles gently, and then kept moving.
His touch drifted inward, and where your panties curved with your leg, he nudged the fabric aside.
He couldn’t make out every detail, not with the TV’s pale glow flattening color into shadows, but he could still see the parting of you, the slick shimmer catching just enough light to make him moan. A desperate sound, shorn from the walls of his lungs.
His hand shook from the strain of trying to give you everything; time, space, reverence, a choice. Even if every part of him screamed to touch every part of you.
But your body was so tight with need that he could feel it in the way your hips twitched forward, in the scrunch and release of your calves, the quiver running up your torso.
So, when his fingers finally brushed your bare heat, you whimpered, stripped of sweetness or control.
“I know,” Spencer crooned, his thumb never stopped stroking with tender insistence over your clit. “I know.”
The bundle of nerves swelled slightly as he moved over it - turgid, hypersensitive, reacting to even the lightest pressure. He adjusted his touch, easing from featherlight to a deeper press, then softening again until your nails bit into his skin.
Eventually, you shook your head, and not because you meant to say no.
It was too much, and Spencer could see that. The way your climax crept up on you, unfairly fast and overwhelming, like a wave cresting up your spine. He saw it in the way your feet dug into the cushion. The way your hand found his wrist again with an ironclad grip, fingers squeezing with something like desperation.
You were trying to slow it down, to hold back, but your body didn’t want to listen.
Maybe Spencer wasn’t listening either because his hand kept moving, his fingers soaked, sliding through the heat of you with such care.
You timorously said, “More. I want more.”
He truly thought he understood, so he pressed a single finger inside, letting his palm rock against your clit with each movement.
You yelped so suddenly, gasping against his neck. Your mouth found him there, lips and teeth sinking into the side of his throat in shock.
Your other hand moved, sliding down to wrap above the one already clutching his wrist. Both your hands were stacked there, holding him, your body shaking.
Spencer stopped immediately.
“Are you okay? Did I--?”
Before he could finish, your mouth kissed his.
“I’m okay,” You said reassuringly against his lips. “I want your…I- I just need more than your fingers.”
Realization hit like a thunderclap. His finger stilled inside you, but his eyes never left yours.
You shifted in his lap, more instinct than thought, hips bracing like you meant to rise, legs gathering beneath you.
Spencer didn’t let you go. His fingers spread against the nape of your neck, forearm rested on your shoulder, wordless in his plea.
He wanted you right there. Not in the bedroom. Not later.
It had been months since he’d felt you like that, so warm and eager, all your softness angled toward him instead of away. He knew the way distance could sneak in, how silence could calcify, how long it could take to find each other again when the days pulled too hard and for too long.
There had been moments, too many, when you were the only calm in his overcrowded and overloaded world. You'd been there when his hours bled together, when the inside of his head was louder than anything outside it.
He hadn’t forgotten that. He never could.
He’d always find you, the way particles stay entangled across impossible distances, the way two halves remember each other no matter how many universes lie between. There was no version of the world where you weren’t his.
He knew you’d always find him too.
Spencer didn’t speak, but he didn’t have to. Not when his eyes were hooded and star-dusted had said everything he wasn’t able to: Stay. I want to give you myself right here.
You paused, then relaxed. Practically melted as you nestled your body back down into his. Your hands slid up to his shoulders, the press of your fingers sending sparks through the tendons of his neck. Your hips lifted slightly as an invitation.
He felt it like a yes.
His nose nudged yours sweetly. His fingers lingered a heartbeat longer before slipping from your center, then his hand slid between your bodies, and he freed himself. The weight of his cock strained between you, hard and slick with anticipation, pressing up against your heat.
“I missed touching you,” He whispered, his voice uneven as his hand found the edge of your shorts again. “I missed every inch of you.” His fingers hooked into the fabric and pushed it aside again, baring you to him once more.
His hands steadily curled beneath your thighs, and he lifted you a little higher, so you could come down onto him at your own pace.
He lined himself up, the thick head of him brushing over you, and his voice was nothing but air:
“You’re sure?” He whispered, eyes only on you. “You’re not doing this just for me?”
You smiled with the smallest, truest curve of your lips, like something had soothed inside you. A knot finally unspooling. He felt the smile before he fully saw it, sensed it in your pulse, in the way your breath licked warmth against his cheek.
“I want this just as much as you do.” You promised, cheeks rounding even more. “If not more.”
Spencer hadn’t known when he’d see that smile again, and that uncertainty alone had scorched some cavernous place within him, some soft place he rarely let anything touch.
There you were, beaming at him, and it felt like light spilt across bare skin. Awakening goosebumps as it passed.
His hands gripped your hips, holding you as you slowly lowered yourself onto him until the thick heat of him finally pushed past your entrance, stretching you in the most intimate silence he’d ever known.
His mouth fell open as he just watched your face. Watched for any sign of pain, discomfort, anything that might make him stop.
There was none.
Only the way your lashes fluttered, and the way your hand held onto the back of his neck, and the way that smile, that absurdly precious, soul-deep smile, stayed.
You were moving above him, rhythm steady as your body wrapped around him so perfectly it made him dizzy. His eyes were heavy-lidded as his gaze shot downward, transfixed where your bodies met like it was the only thing tethering him to earth.
His jaw went slack.
Every time you sank down, he had to remind himself not to fall apart. But he was close, already.
He tried to focus on the stretch of your neck, the curve of your shoulder, the sounds you made, anything but the delicious drag of your body around him, but he knew you knew. That you saw it written all over him; the way his eyes fluttered, the jitter of his knee, bouncing once before going taut, the subtle flex of his fingers as his climax tried to rise without permission.
The moment you reached between your legs, Spencer’s breath staggered, chest lurching.
Your fingers, those wickedly perfect fingers, slipped between your folds, and started to circle your clit.
“W-wait--” His voice cracked, hoarse with panic and pleasure, “Don’t--if you--if you keep touching yourself like that I--”
It was too late.
You moaned softly, hips still rocking, and the sight of your fingers bringing yourself to the edge while he was inside you, feeling your muscles contract, destroyed him, in the best and worst way.
The best: His orgasm hit like a shudder through his entire spine. A long, low moan pressed into the crook of your neck as he emptied into you, holding you so tightly he worried he might never let go.
The worst: Guilt.
He wanted you to finish before him. How he’d been so close, so reverent, and still, your pleasure hadn’t come first.
“I’m sorry,” He hurried, kissing the edge of your mouth. “I didn’t mean to-- I didn’t want to finish before you.”
You just kissed him back, held him like he wasn’t broken or made of missteps and mistakes.
He needed to give you more. He had to. So, Spencer kissed you again, and eased you back onto the sofa, his hands so gentle on your hips, your waist, your quivering thighs.
“Let me make it right.” He whispered-pleaded, already sliding between your legs.
His mouth lowered, his arms hooked under your upper legs, and he settled between them like it was home.