Leaving hickeys all over Adrians broad back and shoulders uggghhhh
leaving a heart shape made out of hickeys on his back 🫣 he was far too busy playing his switch to even notice what you were doing, he just let you sit on the curve of his back and suck little bruises on him without a word, you took a picture of him once you're were satisfied with your work and made it the lock screen on your phone and now every time adrian sees it his face goes RED
I just know adrian lifts your hips off the bed just to grind into you freely
hes kinda unintentionally brusque and blunt about it too 🫣
not like- on purpose of course, he's just very impulsive! so whenever he does it, maybe when the two of you are making out incredibly nasty on your bed or his (like, breathy and whiny noises filling the room, saliva dripping from your mouths, your hands gripping at his hair, glasses falling askew, his nails digging into the skin of your hips) it just knocks the air right out of you, the way he suddenly lifts your middle upwards and presses it down harshly against his
Adrian just thinks he's being efficient, he just wants to relieve some of the tension that is gathering right below the zipper of his jeans
but his brashness gives you whiplash, you have to scramble to grab on to him or his sweatshirt or literally anything to regain balance or a piece of mind, it makes an incredibly loud squeak of his name escape from your lips
he says "uuunngh here let me-" but he doesn't know the new angle is literally erasing every single thought from your head, that you cant even kiss him properly anymore because all your blood is flowing downwards, you just feel rather than hear the way his moans start to fill your mouth with warm air
he whimpers, says "ohhhh shit!!- this is so much better right? you see how hard my dick is? its literally hurting baby, fuck!- please i just wanna feel you" and you're trying to answer him like "y-yeah, Adrian , b- baby feels good-" but your breath is catching in your throat every time he grinds forward and rubs so directly against you, you might as well be fucking already
summary: Hooking up with Adrian Chase the first time was probably a mistake. Probably. So you definitely won't be doing it again, right?
pairing: adrian chase x f!reader
word count: 6.1k
tags: 18+, smut, coworkers who are maybe friends who also maybe keep hooking up accidentally?, Checkmate reader, subby Adrian, injury, blood, wound care, handjobs, spit, biting, idiots avoiding their feelings, fingers in mouths, questionable medical ethics, arguably stalking, Pavlov, Twilight reference
note: a follow up to bpm. tbh you might be able read this as a standalone if you really want, but I recommend reading bpm first! also, really wanted to give you the fingers in mouth image you all deserve but there is a serious drought of images of men with fingers in their mouths! adrian is an innovator in the field! one more part coming soon! 👀
“Fuck,” you groaned, biting down uselessly on your lip. His fingers pressed firmer into you and your legs wrapped around his waist in a desperate attempt at stability. You were sliding on the bench, a mixture of sweat and bodily fluids.
“Fucking hold still!” Adrian snapped. The tweezers dragged against the edge of the bullet wound like a real-life game of Operation. An electric jolt of pain coursed through you and you wrapped your legs even tighter around Adrian, holding him to you in a vice-like grip.
He tossed the bloodied tweezers onto the tray, along with the last of the bullet fragments. For a moment the only sound between you two was the sound of your blood dripping against the floor of the van percussively.
“You have to stop holding me with your legs like that, it’s making me hard,” he grumbled, pushing up his glasses with the back of his wrist.
“I’m bleeding out in front of you and you’re getting hard?” you asked in disbelief.
Adrian frowned. “You’re not bleeding out. In fact, you’re barely bleeding at all.”
“We’re literally both covered in my blood, but okay, let’s take the time to be pedantic.”
“I don’t think it’s being pedantic if I’m being medically accurate and you’re being a big baby.”
You unlocked your ankles and freed Adrian from the confines of your thighs. Perhaps it wasn’t exactly fair to be ragging on him for getting semi-hard when you knew the space between your thighs was wet. There was simply no time for unpacking that, not when Adrian was –
“Jesus Christ!” you hissed as antiseptic was pressed to the wound with no warning. You punched your other fist against the metal bench, desperate for any distraction from the pain searing in your shoulder. Adrian’s calloused fingers moved away again as he reached for gauze. You tried to focus on breathing, your own fingers prodding at the space between your brows in a half-hearted attempt to ease the tension there.
You let your eyes flutter closed as Adrian dutifully packed and dressed the wound. He was clinically proficient, something you had no choice but to respect about him. When the man was set to focus on something, he could certainly deliver. But good lord if he wasn’t an utter disaster the rest of the time.
“All done!” Adrian cheered and you risked opening your eyes. A dull headache was blooming behind your eyes from the blood loss.
“Thanks Adrian,” you muttered. You pressed your hands against the bench and made to get up, but Adrian was still kneeling between your thighs. You opened your mouth to tell him to piss off but he leaned forward and pressed a kiss over the taped up gauze. When he pulled back, he had your blood on his chin and an expression that seemed as surprised as yours.
So you did the only reasonable thing you could think to do. Pressing your booted foot straight into his abdomen, you pushed him away from you. Adrian fell onto the bench opposite and you scrambled to your feet, vaguely woozy. You grabbed your water bottle from where it’d rolled under the bench and hopped off the end of the truck, ignoring the crackle of pain in your shoulder.
“Where are you going?” Adrian asked, hopping out of the back of the truck after you, a desperate tinge to his tone. You turned on your heel to stare at him.
“I’m just trying to rinse the blood off my hands, Adrian,” you snapped.
“Oh, okay. Good idea!” Adrian nodded emphatically as you screwed the top off your bottle and poured water onto your hands. You put the bottle down on the edge of the van and scrubbed as best you could – the dried blood caked under your fingernails was a later-issue. You rinsed again and then reached out towards Adrian who had just been silently observing you. Water dripped from your fingers to the dirt below.
“What?” he asked, flinching slightly. You supposed you couldn’t really blame him. You sighed and beckoned him with a crook of your fingers, knowing all too well he’d comply. It would take a lot more than a kick to the stomach to keep Adrian Chase down. He stepped closer and you yanked him all the way to you by the wrist. He swallowed a small yelp as you poured water into his waiting, cupped hands.
You waited for him to scrub his own hands together and then dutifully emptied the rest of your water over his significantly less bloody hands. You moved to climb back into the van but Adrian was one step ahead of you, vaulting himself in and reaching down to pull you up.
“I don’t want you to hurt your shoulder,” he remarked, like it was a totally plausible explanation and not an excuse to keep touching you. But you let him pull you up and in and you breezed past him towards John’s bag.
“Um, I think that’s – ” He caught the travel sized hand sanitizer you tossed at him without even blinking. “Oh. Uh. Good idea.”
“Every so often I have one of those,” you joked. Adrian’s face lit up with a smile that you felt low in your stomach. Goddamnit. He tossed the hand sanitizer back to you and you used it before tucking it back in the bag. At least your hands were clean-ish, even if the rest of you was another bloody story.
You slumped back onto the bench and leaned your head against the van wall, pressing your eyes closed, vehemently trying to ward off the headache trying its damnedest to make its presence known, thudding in your temples and somewhere behind your eyes.
Adrian moved about the van in a way that was starting to annoy you. What could he possibly be doing? You refused to open your eyes to find out. There was a slight rattling directly next to you and you were about to ask him to sit still for just a minute when his hand brushed yours and you felt him wrap your fingers around a water bottle. Probably his, since yours had just been emptied over his reverent hands.
“Open,” he said gently, fingers brushing your chin. A shudder rolled down your spine that was definitely because of blood loss and nothing else. You obeyed and felt Adrian press several pills onto your tongue. If his fingers lingered, if they dragged across your lower lip – you ignored it. He guided the water bottle to your mouth and you drank down, swallowing the pills in one fell swoop.
“That better be oxycodone,” you mumbled.
Adrian shifted beside you. “Sorry, it’s just several Tylenol.”
“What, no emergency morphine in the back of the van?” you joked, prying one eye open to look at the man sitting too close beside you on the bench.
“That was all I could scrape up. All the strong stuff is back at headquarters,” Adrian replied with far too much earnestness. One day you’d get him to understand sarcasm.
You let out a small, meaningless huff and gave a testing roll of your shoulders that had you biting back the pain. Well, at least pain meant you were still alive. Adrian winced and reached for your throat before you could protest, fingers pressing firmly for your pulse. Your radial pulse was weak, you reasoned, remembering those words from when you two had – still, goosebumps crept up the back of your neck.
“Are you mad at me?” Adrian asked, very clearly trying not to look like a kicked dog and failing spectacularly.
“No, Adrian, I’m not mad at you. I’m mad at myself. If I had been more focused I wouldn’t have ended up with a bullet in my shoulder,” you replied gruffly, picking at the shreds of your shirt. Maybe you should have been mad at him. It would be easier to have somewhere else to place the blame. But, no, you could only blame yourself. Because the truth was that the reason you’d been distracted was Adrian and there was no world in which you could tell him that.
“Oh. Okay,” he said quietly, sitting back slightly. When you looked over at him he was pouting.
“Are you upset that I’m not mad at you?”
“Last time you were mad at me we had sex,” Adrian stated matter-of-factly. There was simply no time to unpack that statement.
“No,” you corrected. “Last time I was mad at you was literally this past Tuesday. And anyway, we did not have sex that time, we kissed a little, you ate me out and then you came in your pants, Adrian.”
“You were mad at me on Tuesday?” Adrian asked with a gasp, his eyes big and wet. “For what?”
You pressed your eyes closed again and sighed. For the headache. And not because you couldn’t bear to keep looking at him like that. So put out, and bloodstained, and pouty and sweaty and close. “I didn’t like the way you were looking at me.”
“How was I looking at you?” he asked, his brow furrowing. “You better tell me so I definitely don’t do it ever again. Because I don’t want to make you mad. Obviously. It would be totally weird if I like it when you’re mad.”
Had you accidentally Pavloved him into being horny when you were mad at him?
You nearly choked on your water, eyes opening again. “Sorry, do you think we’re going to have sex in this van while we wait for everyone to come back?”
“I dunno, maybe?”
You rolled your eyes and reached down to peel your tattered tank top off. You were fairly sure you had another in your bag anyway, and the destroyed one wasn’t exactly living up to the idea of being a garment at all anymore. It wasn’t like Adrian hadn’t seen you in sports bra before and anyway he –
Adrian’s lips were suddenly on yours, startling you so much you leaned back and smacked your head on the side of the van. Your vision swam.
“Whoah, Adrian, what the fuck?”
Adrian fell back immediately. “Sorry! Shit! Sorry, sorry. I totally misread that, didn’t I? It’s just that I checked your pulse which is kind of our thing? And you like…took your shirt off right after I said I wanted to have sex with you again. That seemed like a green light. I was wrong, clearly. Right?”
“We don’t have a…thing, Adrian! And that was definitely not a green light,” you snapped, even if the very feel of his fingers pressed to your neck had made your mouth dry. Something stupid came over you suddenly. A loss of logic and reason that only Adrian seemed capable of inducing. You leaned towards him. “But this is.”
Fingers hooking into the front of his suit you yanked him towards you, your mouth meeting his. You weren’t altogether sure why you did it. Maybe you were concussed. Maybe it was all some extremely vivid hallucination from blood loss. Maybe you were actually dead and this was hell.
Or, maybe, you hadn’t stopped thinking about kissing him again since that night in the office weeks ago. And it was practically a full time job forcing yourself to not think about him like that. To not drag him into some supply closet at work and put his mouth to good use between your legs again. And your dumb ass had gotten shot because you were busy watching his fingers on the trigger of his gun and thinking about them inside of you instead.
God, you were stupid. Part of you wanted to stick your finger straight into your bullet wound – you deserved the pain. But you were also distracted, leaning against Adrian, his tongue deep in your mouth like he was mapping it for later. You wrapped your hand around the back of his neck and wrangled him somehow closer. Your knee hooked over his and your other leg slipped behind his back, pinning Adrian sideways between your legs. Your hand ran up his thigh and he moaned into your mouth. You tugged at his lip with your teeth as your hand brushed across his lap and he squirmed so violently you pulled back, hands in the air like you were being held at gunpoint.
“What’s wrong?” you asked. Adrian was panting. “I shouldn’t have – ”
“No, no, you definitely shouldn’t have,” he agreed, his eyes squeezed closed. You narrowed your eyes, trying to piece together what was going on in his utterly confusing brain.
“I’m sorry, Adrian. I thought – ” Adrian interrupted you this time, halfway missing your mouth as he kissed you again, wet and desperate and whiny. You could have sworn he was cursing under his breath between every movement of his lips. There was a slight tremble to his hands, less like trepidation and more like barely managed restraint.
“Fuck it, how long until everyone else gets back?” Adrian asked, panting against your open mouth.
“Like five minutes probably?” you replied with a glance towards the open back doors of the van. He was rubbing his face against your neck when you pulled him up by the hair.
He looked at you with wide eyes. “I only need two.”
“Okay,” you sighed. You were about to reach for his zipper but he’d already beaten you to the punch, wriggling his pants and underwear all the way down to his knees. You didn’t waste time snidely commenting on that, if only because Adrian started pumping himself with his own hand, his eyes pressed closed. You sat back slightly, suddenly realizing he had wildly misread your signals again. Part of you kind of wanted to just watch. If he wanted to jerk off in the back of the van while you observed, well, so be it. The way he pulled his lower lip between his teeth was strangely mesmerizing.
Instead, you gave up any hope of better judgment and pulled him closer with your legs. His eyes snapped open just in time to see you join his hand with yours.
“Oh! Wait, no! You don’t have to do that!” Adrian almost squealed, wriggling out of your grasp. You frowned at him. “You’re injured and it’s going to be so annoying if you undo all the first aid I did because you were jerking me off! No handjob related injuries on my watch!”
“Adrian, I have two hands…” you reminded him. You lifted your injured arm and gave a wave of your fingers, in case he needed the visual aid.
“Are you sure?”
You rolled your eyes. “Are you going to come faster if I do it?”
He swallowed hard, his throat visibly constricting under the skin. You wrestled down the urge to bite him. “Uh, almost definitely.”
“Great,” you said simply and wrapped your hand around him again. He let his hand fall back onto his upper thigh, fingertips pressing into the pale flesh.
“Um, sorry,” he choked out.
“Why are you sorry?” you asked, studying his expression. Suddenly he looked pained, the tips of his ears bright red. You sat back slightly and eased your hand away. Adrian whimpered at the loss of touch, confusing you further.
“It’s just…um, and I want to say that you’re perfect and you couldn’t do anything wrong ever, it’s just…” he trailed off and looked around as if there would be someone else to explain for him. You just waited patiently, starting to think there was no way this man was getting off before the rest of the team came back. You were about to suggest he tuck himself back into his pants when he leaned close to you. “It’s just kind of dry.”
“Oh,” you replied simply. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
You smiled wanly at him. What you were sure was a glint in your eye seemed to only draw him closer, almost conspiratorially.
“Spit on it,” you instructed. Adrian seemed surprised for a moment, but did not need to be told twice. Without breaking eye contact he leaned over, gathering saliva on his tongue. Then he let the string of spit land with the kind of practiced aim only a marksman possessed on his dick.
He wrapped his fingers around yours, continuing to slide up and down the length of him. He pressed his forehead to yours as he tried to catch his breath. “Can I…can I show you how I like to touch myself when I think about you?”
“You think about me while you touch yourself?” you asked. Even though you were certain it was probably better not to know. His fingers flexed slightly and tightened your grip.
“Are you kidding?” he asked, a break in the low husk of his voice. “I think about you every time I touch myself. I mean, I was thinking about you even before last time. Although, just to be clear, I don’t really even masturbate that much, but when I do I think of you. I don’t want you to think I’m some sort of sex-crazed pervert who’s jerking it to you everyday because I am not. It’s a totally normal biological thing to wake up hard sometimes and then it’s like, okay, well I have to take care of this before I get on with the rest of my day so I might as well picture the badass I work with if it’s going to get it over quicker. You’re the badass in question. To be clear. Although I do think about Chris sometimes, too. And one time Harcourt sorta by accident but you cannot tell her I said that.”
“Before last time?” you choked out. You were actively ignoring the rest of that rambling diatribe because you well and truly were not in a clear enough headspace to begin to unpack that.
He must have misunderstood what you were asking because he narrowed his gaze, his brow furrowing, even as his breath hitched in his throat. “Yes? When I went down on you? I feel like you probably remember that, especially because you got shot in the shoulder not in the fucking head.”
You rolled your eyes. “Yes, Adrian, I remember. Are you going to show me or not?”
“Oh, cool, sweet, yeah, um, so just like…” he trailed off, tucking his tongue between his teeth as he repositioned your hand slightly and tightened your grip significantly.
“That’s not too tight?” you asked, vaguely concerned.
“No, too gentle and it kinda gives me the heebie jeebies,” he replied, a rolling shiver running through his shoulders. You moved your hand under his new direction and his hips immediately bucked up off the bench into your fist. “Y-yeah exactly like that.”
You moved slow and firm, encouraged by little mumbled assurances and hitches in his breath. As your thumb rolled over the tip, he groaned and ducked his head slightly, his forehead pressing against your shoulder as his breathing quickened.
“Fuckfuckfuck,” he mumbled. Your gaze drew up the length of his neck to his face and you immediately averted your eyes, redirecting towards his hair. Sure, that was a safe thing to look at! His eyes were closed, his lower lip tucked between his teeth, his cheeks flushed. But his hair…well, his hair was a ragged, sweaty mess, curls that had been pressed into submission beneath his helmet. Hair that you wanted to knot your fingers into.
Okay, so maybe his hair wasn’t a safe place to divert your attention either. Luckily, Adrian was mumbling something.
“I’m gonna - I’m gonna – ” You expected him to say come. Adrian, it seemed, had other plans. “I’m gonna fucking die.”
“What?” It slipped from your lips, your grip faltering. You couldn’t help it.
“I’m gonna die, you’re gonna kill me,” he said again. You weren’t sure what to make of that, and your brain didn’t have any time to think about it either because Adrian surged forward and pressed his lips to yours haphazardly, teeth knocking against yours, panting into your open mouth. Then he came all over your hand.
“Why’s it kinda smell like sex in here?” Adebayo asked, sliding onto the bench beside you.
Harcourt assessed the bloody mess you and Adrian’d left behind. “Also, whose blood is this?”
Adrian laughed a little too loud. Here we go, you thought to yourself. This is how I die – the first known case of death by mortification.
“Oh yeah, Ads, because we were definitely fucking in here while waiting for everyone to come back,” Adrian said, using his patented ‘sarcasm voice’. “That’s so crazy that you would even suggest such a thing!”
“I didn’t suggest anything, I was just making an observation…” Adebayo said slowly. You were painfully aware of several gazes pinned to you. Unfortunately for them, you got into black ops specifically for the lying.
You shrugged nonchalantly. “As much as Adrian probably wishes, we were not having sex in here. I was a little busy bleeding all over the place.”
Technically not a lie.
“You’re so crazy! I don’t wish that! Because I only have sex with people who are my best friends, and you are definitely not one of my best friends. You’re like…a frenemy…”
Adebayo was looking at you sideways as you bit the inside of your own cheek to keep from frowning. Was that really how Adrian thought of you? “Okay, I don’t know what’s going on here but it’s deeply weird and now I don’t wanna know.”
“I had to cut her shirt off because of the bullet, Ads!” Adrian yelped suddenly.
“Why are you yelling about it?” Harcourt asked.
“I’m! Not yelling!” Adrian managed to get out, not really disproving the yelling accusations. “I just wanted to address the horse in the room!”
“Do you mean elephant?” Economos asked as he climbed into the front seat.
“No?” Adrian rolled his eyes.
“The expression is ‘elephant in the room’,” Harcourt sighed like she couldn’t believe she was getting roped into the discussion even as it was happening.
“I thought the animal was like…proportional to the size of the thing in question? Like…she’s not wearing a shirt but that’s not an elephant-scale thing to be addressed. More like horse,” Adrian explained.
“Oh my god…” Adebayo laughed. “Adrian…just…no.”
“Hey Adrian?” you said gently. His head whipped towards you. You smiled sharply at him, full of teeth. “Shut the fuck up?”
Chris landed in the back of the truck with a tremble of metal and a clatter of guns being tossed aside. He pulled the van doors closed, mercifully casting the back of the van in shadow. Hopefully it would be enough to hide the heat in your cheeks. He took one look at you, then Adrian, then with a raised brow dug into his bag and produced an oversized Poison shirt which he promptly tossed at you.
“Thanks,” you managed.
Adrian leaned forward and whispered loudly, “I think Economos has been jerking it in here while we’re out in the field!”
“I can hear you, asshole!” John snapped from the driver’s seat.
“Well, you didn’t deny it!” Adrian said with a purse of his lips and a shrug of his shoulders.
Adrian was being…strange.
Which was saying something for a man whose default setting was strange.
It was to the point where everyone was starting to notice.
“What did you do to him?” Rip asked, rolling his chair up beside yours at your desk. You nearly gave yourself whiplash turning to give him a look.
“Who?”
You knew exactly who.
Rip rolled his eyes. “Adrian.”
“I…” you trailed off, eyes finding Adrian across the office where he was…what was he doing? He was walking, heel to toe, around the cubicles, pausing every so often to jot something down on a sticky note and then resuming. You had to drag your gaze by force back to Rip. “I didn’t do anything. Adrian’s always weird. He gets into moods sometimes, you know that.”
“Uh huh,” Rip intoned, looking you up and down.
“Dude, I swear,” you insisted.
“Well, if you haven’t done something to him then maybe you should,” he countered with a tilt of his head. “Because I don’t think I’ve ever seen a man who needs to fuck it out of his system so bad. Like…it’s embarrassing.”
You laughed, but even you could tell it lacked any authenticity. You really weren’t doing a very good job selling your emotional distance from the unfolding situation. Probably because there was none.
“Well, if you’re so concerned maybe you should fuck him.”
“Adrian’s not my type. Besides, I don’t think anyone else stands a chance based on the way he looks at you.”
You froze. “What way?”
Rip grinned but Adebayo called his name and he only gave you a shrug before leaving you alone. Your fingers dug into the arms of your chair.
“Rip! What way?” you called after him. You slumped in your chair. “Fuck.”
Your eyes tracked Adrian, pacing back and forth amidst the cubicles. The second you rose to your feet you could feel the distinct prickle of his gaze on you. You met his eyes and smiled at him. He looked over his shoulder, as if there was a possibility your smile was intended for someone else. Your heart clenched involuntarily. You couldn’t exactly blame him, you’d been keeping a bit of a distance since the van incident. But surely that wasn’t why he’d been so squirrely…right?
“Adrian, I’m going to make some coffee. Wanna take a break and give me a hand?” you asked casually. Take a break from what? He certainly wasn’t working. Or…at least not in any way that was comprehensible to anyone outside of Adrian.
“Oh, well, I’m actually trying to cut back on caffeine intake because – ”
“Adrian,” you interjected. “Whatever. Come grab a snack, then. Walk with me, V.”
Adrian finally seemed to get the memo that it wasn’t a request. He launched himself down the hall towards the kitchen and all you could do was sigh and avoid eye contact with Economos.
Adrian was perched on the countertop by the time you arrived, his legs slung casually wide in a way that made your face hot. And yet, he was swinging his feet back and forth in a way which made you feel conflicted about feeling anything toward him at all. He was so impossible.
“So,” he said. His hips shifted slightly as he braced his hands behind him and leaned back. “I was thinking you could stand between my legs and – ”
“Chase, we are not about to hook up in the work kitchen in the middle of the day.”
Adrian let out a huff and flung himself back onto the counter. “Ohthankgod. Listen, I would have done it for you, I’d do anything for you, but I was a little concerned. No way we wouldn’t have gotten caught! I am not very good at being quiet. Well, why am I telling you that? You’ve had my dick in your – ”
“Ooookay!” you spoke over him, throwing a surreptitious glance over your shoulder. You crossed to the coffee pot and started pouring a cup just for the sake of something to do with your hands that didn’t involve strangling Adrian Chase to death. You turned back to him as you swirled a spoon in your mug.
“You need to chill the fuck out, Adrian,” you began. His head turned towards you but he didn’t get up. He opened his mouth but you shook your head. “You’ve been acting weird. Weirder than usual. And everyone’s starting to notice. So, what’s the deal?”
Adrian’s lips pursed. “Nothing. Nothing’s the deal. I’m being so normal.”
“You’re laying on the kitchen counter in our office’s communal kitchen. That’s not normal.”
“This isn’t normal?” he asked, gesturing to his still reclined body.
“No.”
He was off the counter and had you pinned between him and the coffee machine in the blink of an eye. “What about now?”
“Adrian…”
“You know, you say my name a lot. You’ve said it like five times since you asked me to come in here.”
“What’s your point?”
He backed off slightly, shoving his hands into the pockets of his jeans, his shoulders lifting up in a shrug. If you said you didn’t miss the closeness of him, the way he’d cornered you even for just a moment – you’d be lying. A thrill of possibility had coursed through you. A thrill you would not be indulging. Fucking Chase…well, actually fucking Chase would just complicate things. You’d already done enough.
“You know you probably shouldn’t drink that,” he sniffed.
You rolled your eyes. “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah, your blood pressure has been really high lately, which is unusual for you and excessive caffeine consumption is definitely not helping.”
Your eyes widened as you stared at him. “How would you even know that?”
He blinked back at you like you were stupid. You were starting to get deja vu, the kind that ended with Adrian Chase’s mouth between your legs. His brow scrunched together as he laughed. “Because, I keep an eye on your vital signs?”
“Why would you do that? How would you even do that?”
“Because you’re my partner? And I need to know if you’re not performing at peak capacity. Like, for example, when you first went back into the field after getting shot in the shoulder, I knew that your heart rate was elevating faster than normal because you’d been on desk duty for so long and your body was reacclimating. That’s also how I knew that your aim was off – ”
“Fucking excuse me?”
“You didn’t let me finish! I was about to say, off by a negligible amount, because your aim was so good before you got hurt. So technically your accuracy flagged, but your efficiency has not.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” you scoffed, indignant. You narrowed your eyes at him. “You didn’t answer the second part of that question.”
“Oh, well, pulse is easy enough to check, you know that. Also, when your pulse elevates your carotid like…throbs?” His tongue darted out and wetted his lips. His eyes traced the column of your neck and for the briefest moment you wondered if he might sink his teeth right in. What did it mean if you wanted him to? “Basically as soon as you pass 100 beats per minute or so. So I just look for that.”
“And?”
“Aaaaand I may have convinced the medical intern to tell me your blood pressure readings after every check-in. But only because I was worried about you!”
“Adrian, that is such an invasion of privacy,” you reprimanded even if your tone perhaps lacked some of the bite it should have had in the situation. He was worried about you?
“So I probably shouldn’t mention that your periods have been all over the place?”
“I’m going to kill you. I’m actually going to kill you, Chase,” you muttered. “What, you bribed the intern for that info too?”
“Ew, no, that would be fucked up,” he protested, his whole face twisting into disgust. “The only time I’ve even considered bribing someone was when Peacemaker was in jail but Ads said – ”
“Adrian.”
“Right.” He refocused himself and then shrugged. “That one’s easy. I just know you.”
You’d be the first to admit that your perception of friendship and love and romance was completely and utterly warped. Just a side effect of your chosen field that you’d accepted with ease years ago. What is it they say? To be loved is to be known? Yeah right.
“Yeah? You care that much about your ‘frenemies’?” you taunted.
His expression shifted into something almost like amusement. “Oh. Is that what this is all about?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve been avoiding me. And I thought it was maybe because you regretted what happened in the van, but was it because I called you my frenemy?” he sounded weirdly elated. “Because I didn’t actually mean that. I sort of…panicked. Because when I think about you it’s like…you’re not my best friend, and you’re not my enemy…you’re like a secret third thing. What do you call someone who you think about all the time, who you tell stupid jokes to in the office but also that you kill people with in the field, and who you want to know all their thoughts and everything they want, and you think about kissing a lot and who you have kind of hooked up with? Someone you know the taste of but you don’t know how they feel?”
You didn’t have an answer.
Attempting to wash that thought and any accompanying unwise words straight down you lifted your cup to your mouth at the exact same time that Adrian grabbed for it.
“Ow, fuck, Adrian!” you hissed as hot coffee sloshed over the edge of the cup and across your fingers. You slammed the cup down on the counter but before you could move to rinse the spilled coffee off your hand Adrian grabbed your wrist and pulled you towards him.
“Let me clean it up,” he said quietly, gaze fixed on you. As he dragged your hand closer to his mouth it became abundantly clear what he was about to do and you…did nothing to stop him. No, you let him push your fingers past his lips.
Mercifully his eyelids fluttered closed so you didn’t have to deal with those big, green, pathetic eyes of his. You naturally drifted closer to him as his warm mouth contended with the intrusion of your fingers. His grip on your wrist was firm and his tongue was hot.
Something heated and unwelcome uncoiled low in your stomach. Part of you felt like a predator with your prey exactly where you wanted him when you looked at Adrian’s sweet face. There was something that could almost be perceived as innocent about him when you couldn’t see the manic gleam in his eye. Well, as innocent as one could look while doing something so obscene.
A brief, albeit fleeting, moment of clarity had you realizing just how much you were playing with fire. This is bad, this is stupid, this is dangerous! your brain all but screamed. But then his other hand fisted in your shirt as he moaned and then nipped playfully at your fingertips before he pushed them all the way back in.
“What are you two freaks up to in he – oh.”
Adrian’s teeth clamped down on your knuckles as you both jumped at the sound of Fleury’s voice. Heads whipped in his direction before you finally managed to free your fingers from the trap of his mouth. Adrian whimpered somewhere at the back of his throat; small, graciously quiet and hungry.
“I wasn’t expecting actual freak shit,” Fleury said in his trademark flat tone that made it impossible for you to parse out what he was actually thinking.
“I was choking!” Adrian yelped at the exact same time you said, “I burned myself!”
“What?” you both said in unison, looking at each other.
“Riiiiight,” Fleury drawled out. He pointed at you. “You got burned so Adrian had to put your fingers in his mouth?”
You swallowed hard and nodded your head. “Yup.”
Adrian looked at you and then nodded emphatically, eager to commit to the bit. “Yes! Yeah! I was wondering if my healing factor extended to my spit. You know, Edward Cullen style.”
Fleury frowned. “Edward Cullen didn’t have healing spit. His spit was venom.”
You both stared at him blankly.
He put his hands on his hips. “Stephenie Meyer’s vampires don’t have pointy teeth and they have venom, a major point of contention among vampire aficionados. Aren’t you both from the Twilight generation? Shouldn’t you know this?”
“Sorry?” you offered. Fleury shook his head and sighed.
“Now I don’t even remember why I came in here,” he mumbled and then turned around and promptly left the kitchen.
“I cannot believe that worked,” you breathed. You wiped your fingers on his shirt and a part of you thrilled at the feel of his abdomen tightening beneath your brief touch.
Adrian made a strangled sound of agreement and when you looked back at him his entire neck was red, his ears ruddy. His eyes were locked on your neck where you could feel your pulse hammering, his hand half raised between the two of you. He shifted slightly and then, without sparing another glance in your direction, managed: “I gotta go do something!”
He took off and left you alone in the kitchen before you could manage a response.
Looking down at the cup on the counter sitting in a ring of spilled coffee, you sighed. You dumped it out in the sink.
synopsis: In the field, you've come to expect Vigilante not to follow orders. After another reckless maneuver and at your wits' end you find yourself alone in the office with Adrian and discover maybe he's not so bad at listening after all.
gif by @/chaseadrian
pairing: adrian chase x reader
tags: 18+, welcome to smut city, coworkers to maybe more?, but definitely coworkers to coworkers who fuck, very loose sub adrian vibes, adrian is different in and out of the suit, vigilante is fucking menace, fingers in mouths, oral (f receiving), premature ejaculation, office/desk sex, pw(arguably too much)p, tiny bit of medical terminology and injury, parts of this are very silly sorry i can't help myself when it comes to humor!
word count: 6.1k
note: brought to you by this ask! with a special shoutout to @genuinelygemini for the "subby adrian" suggestion! i don't know exactly how subby this is in the end, but it was fun to write! i don't usually write explicit smut, but I had a grand old time. 🙂↕️
The sound of your helmet colliding with the wall was what finally prompted Adrian to speak up.
“I feel like you’re mad,” he said simply, his brow furrowed as he watched you pace back and forth. The sound of his voice stopped you dead. You clapped your hands together slowly as you looked at him through narrowed eyes.
“Oh, really astute, Adrian. Good job.”
He smiled that stupid dimpled smile of his. “Thank you.”
“Ohmygod,” you groaned under your breath, raking your fingers through your hair.
“Do you need water or something? I feel like you’re breathing really hard and,” he paused to look down at his watch, “usually your heart rate has returned to normal by now.”
“What I need, Adrian, is for you to fucking listen to me in the field!” you exclaimed, kicking the wastebasket that was suddenly in your way. Adrian’s eyes tracked it as it skidded across the floor and into the filing cabinets. “Do you have some kind of fucking complex or something? It’s like you’re physically incapable of hearing anything I say when we’re out there. We’re supposed to be a team but every mission becomes The Adrian Show. Like, we get it. You’re a man.”
“Well, I’m sorry that I can’t help my genetic makeup. Frankly, I think being a woman would be awesome. I mean, aside from all the misogyny and systemic oppression. But I’ve kind of always wanted to know what it would be like to be a mother,” he rambled.
You stared at him in disbelief. “Can you please, please shut the fuck up?”
A small part of you felt bad for saying it. You didn’t usually mind when Adrian went off on one of his rants. He was like a cute black hole, and you knew all too well what it was like to be sucked in. Adrian Chase - the man you sat next to at work, who always brought you a cup of coffee without being prompted; who could talk ad nauseum but listened when you had something to say; the coworker whom you always found yourself tucking in the tag at his collar was not the issue.
The issue was who he became in the fucking suit. Vigilante put blinders on him - and not just because of his stupidly limited field of vision in the mask.
You started undoing the clasps of your body armor and tossed your chest plate onto the nearest chair which you promptly threw yourself into. You hunched over and mentally prepared yourself to start unlacing your boots - you’d gotten kicked hard as shit in the ribs out there. They were sore, not broken. Probably. But before you could manage the task, Adrian rolled his chair in front of yours, brushing your knees with his. He reached down and started untying one boot, gently knocking your tired fingers out of the way in the process.
You sat up, stunned, and merely watched as his head dipped between your knees and he unlaced both boots, then slowly took them off and gently set them aside. He sat back up and pushed his wireframes up the bridge of his nose and just looked at you. It was unnerving to have him so silent.
“Where the hell is this in the field?” you asked quietly. He cocked his head slightly, almost like he didn’t understand the question.
“I don’t have to worry about you in the field,” he said simply. “Except when you get kicked so hard I think you’re going to start coughing up blood.”
“Of course you don’t have to worry about me in the field, I can hold my goddamn own. But you put that fucking suit on and it’s like I don’t know who I’m dealing with anymore.”
His brow furrowed slightly. “I don’t understand, I feel like we work really well together.”
“You don’t listen to me. It’s like you’ve got a one track mind and it’s your way or the highway. We work because I’m always having to adapt to you.”
He seemed to consider this. “But that’s because I know what I’m doing?”
You barked out a laugh that hurt. “Oh and I don’t?”
“I’m pretty sure I just said I don’t have to worry about you? I’m confused.”
His green eyes were wide and bewildered. You took a sharp breath through your nose and pushed your chair slightly back. You needed space - a thing Adrian did not know how to give. You unzipped your compression jacket, hoping it would alleviate the hot prickle of anger at the back of your neck, but instead all it did was cause Adrian’s gaze to drag across your chest like a jolt of electricity.
“What did you say about my heart rate earlier?” you asked, your mouth feeling suddenly dry.
“Huh?” he asked, gaze raking up the column of your throat before he seemed to remember you had a face.
“Not listening once again, I see,” you taunted, this time with a sly smile. Adrian pouted slightly.
“Okay, this was different. I’m not thinking about your tits when we’re in the field,” he said, as if that was some sort of sound argument and not a confession.
“Good to know my feminine wiles aren’t causing your fucking problem,” you drawled sarcastically.
“Oh, no, they definitely are. But like, a different sort of problem,” he said, voice low in the same sort of way it got when he was drunk. Then, he seemed to regain an ounce of focus. “Hey! I don’t have a fucking problem. You just don’t like taking orders from me.”
That wasn’t entirely untrue. Though calling them orders was perhaps a bit generous. More like improvising based on Vigilante’s unhinged decision making. “You seem to like giving them.”
“When I’m Vigilante, sure! You’re acting like I don’t take orders aaaaall the time when we’re not in the field,” he complained. “I like it when you tell me what to do.”
You paused. “You like it?”
“Is that not what I just said?”
You turned all the new information over in your mind. “What’s my heart rate, Adrian?”
“How should I know?” he retorted. “Your resting heart rate is normally 56 beats per minute. Cool as a fucking cucumber. I’ve actually been trying to train mine to be somewhere like 45 beats per minute because I read somewhere that really good athletes can have a bpm as low as 40bpm. And, I mean, we basically are athletes and I want to be at the top of my game. Actually, the Guinness World Record for slowest resting heart rate is 27bpm and I feel like if I worked really hard I could probably beat that.”
You laughed again and then winced. “Adrian Chase, you will only have a resting heart rate lower than 27bpm when you’re fucking dead.”
You weren’t sure you wanted to know how he knew your resting heart rate, but your brain supplied the image of his fingers gently pressed to your throat so easily. He must have checked it while you were sleeping - whether that was on one of his “sweeps” of your apartment in the middle of the night, or while you were napping on the bedraggled office couch, or the time you two had had to share a bed on a mission, well…he’d had plenty of opportunities to collect data you supposed.
“Adrian,” you repeated again, your hand moving slowly towards his. “Take my pulse.”
“Oh!” he said, sitting up slightly straighter, something attentive in his posture. Then he nodded. He grabbed your wrist and pulled it towards him. He looked down at your hand in his lap and seemed to short circuit.
“Might help if you take your gloves off,” you suggested.
“Right,” he replied, nodding vigorously. He ripped a glove off with his teeth and then pressed his warm, slightly sweaty fingertips to the pulse point in your wrist.
“Your radial pulse isn’t very strong,” he commented, his brow furrowed in concentration.
“Try here,” you said, bringing his hand to your throat. You rolled your chair just slightly forward so that his knees were trapped between yours.
But he met your gaze evenly and those wide, shining eyes of his took you in as he counted silently, his pink lips moving around the shape of each number. You could practically see two pastel hearts pasted where his eyes should be. You were probably, almost definitely going to regret this all later. But the pure curiosity of it overtook all common sense.
“75,” Adrian said, voice a hoarse whisper.
“What?” you asked, too busy lost in the swirling green pools in front of you. You really were doomed, weren’t you?
“Beats,” he clarified. “Per minute. Actually, that’s an average over the course of two minutes. You didn’t stop me and I thought I might as well be thorough.”
You nodded as if that made perfect sense but you couldn’t stop thinking about how you’d both let two minutes pass uninterrupted while you stared into each others’ eyes with his warm fingers pressed at your throat. You leaned slightly further forward.
“Your turn,” you said gently and touched your fingers to the side of Adrian’s neck. “But you have to be nice and quiet for me so I can focus. Can you manage that?”
Adrian made a small noise somewhere in the back of his throat. “Fuck - uh, yes?”
Again, he wordlessly locked onto you in a way that made something terrible and wonderful brew inside you. The corner of his lips twitched like he wanted to speak but he managed to wrangle it in. You weren’t wearing a watch, so you pulled Adrian’s hand into your lap and started counting meticulously. You dragged your gaze from his watch to his face for just a moment and enjoyed the spike in his pulse. He frowned at you and then whispered: “Shouldn’t you be focusing?”
“I’m very focused, Adrian,” you replied, voice low. Adrian shifted his hips in his chair. You winked, causing him to curse under his breath. Satisfied with the taste of excitement in him, you looked back at his watch.
“95 and climbing,” you said when the minute had passed. “What’s got your heart in such a patter?”
“My pulse is usually, like, way lower, I swear,” Adrian said quietly. “But you’re making me nervous.”
“Nervous?” you asked, pulling back slightly, worried you were misreading the whole thing. Adrian’s fingers caught your wrist in a flash.
“Not nervous. I’m fucking horny. Fuck! I mean, uh, I’m fucking happy. That you want to touch me.”
“Oh?” You couldn’t help the giggle that bubbled out of you. “So you’re not horny, or?”
He groaned and pressed his forehead into your palm instead of his own.
He dragged your hand down his face, over the front of his throat and then slid it up towards his jaw. You let your fingers explore, catching against the slightest stubble. Suddenly, Adrian opened his mouth and looked up at you with big, pleading eyes.
You narrowed your gaze, uncertain what he wanted, until he moved his head so that your fingers were just inside his lips, resting against his tongue. Oh. You slid your fingers into his wanting mouth, gliding over the velvet expanse of his tongue. He closed his lips around your index and middle finger, and you pushed them further in, testing, before you slowly withdrew, feeling how he hummed around them.
“I’ve always wondered what that would feel like,” he admitted once your fingers had slipped free. A small thread of spit connected you still. He turned his head again and pressed a kiss to the inside of your wrist innocently like he hadn’t just begged for your fingers in his mouth. You wanted to say fuck it, to lean forward and capture his mouth with yours, to strip him out of that stupid costume and ride him until you both came hard, but more than that you wanted him to work for it. To beg a little. Adrian owed you nothing, but Vigilante on the other hand…
“Apical pulse,” Adrian said suddenly.
“What?” you asked, snapped straight out of the delightful idea of his face between your legs.
“Apical pulse is the most accurate,” he said matter-of-factly.
“And where is that?”
He reached forward and brushed his fingers against the front of your shirt, slowly dragging until they rested just beneath your breast. His fingers hooked into the fabric idly.
“Can I try again?” Adrian asked breathlessly. “Please? For science.”
Your lips split into a grin. “Well, if it’s for science how can I say no?”
Adrian released his hold on your shirt and sunk to the floor between your knees, causing your breath to hitch in your throat. He dragged his fingers down to the hem of your shirt and dipped his trembling fingers beneath the fabric. His breath was hot against your throat as he leaned even closer, his other hand coming to your waist. You weren’t sure if it was to ground himself or hold you down. Either way it made something hot and wanting unravel in the pit of your stomach.
The callused pads of his fingers were deliciously warm against your skin as they slid up and cupped your breast over your bra. He gave it a tentative squeeze before he dipped his index and middle finger beneath the underwire. His fingers dragged along the underside of your breast until he found the right spot. You were sure he’d find your heart rate had increased again, despite your attempts to the contrary. The last thing you wanted was Adrian to know he rattled you, though, you suspected you may have blown it entirely on that front.
You ran your fingers up Adrian’s neck into his curls and gripped tightly. Adrian hissed and then looked up at you with glassy eyes, pupils blown wide. “I - I lost count.”
You laughed, then yanked Adrian up to your mouth by the hair. Your lips had barely touched when he moaned into your open mouth. He kissed with the exact kind of frenzy you expected: wet, tongue-forward, frankly sloppy. It was a kind of eagerness that stirred a fondness in your chest. His hand slipped, conveniently, up your breast, pushing your bra up and out of his way.
Adrian leaned closer still, following your mouth like he was afraid you were going to take it away from him for good at any moment. You gripped his hair tighter still and Adrian seemed to be speaking into your mouth, but you couldn’t make heads or tails of what he could possibly be saying. He slipped his hand out of your shirt, fingers dragging gently across your skin and sending a shiver down your spine. He grabbed your tank top and ripped it straight down the middle.
“Adrian!” you gasped, pulling back to punch him in the shoulder.
“I’m sorry!” he exclaimed and then immediately began peppering your face with kisses. “Sorry I just couldn’t stop picturing what your tits look like and I needed to see them immediately.”
You snorted a laugh and unhooked your bra and tossed it aside. “Happy?”
“I think I’m the happiest I’ve ever been in my entire life. Like, I could die right now and I would be content. Thank you. Thank you for sharing these with me. I’m the luckiest man in the whole wide – ”
“Adrian, shut the hell up,” you ordered.
“Yes ma’am,” he agreed with a salute before grabbing ahold of your hips and sliding you closer to the edge of your chair. He danced his fingers lightly over the ugly bruise forming across your ribs before he kissed the top of each of your breasts. Then, he paused, staring at your chest with a look of pure consternation. “How am I supposed to pick just one?”
“Oh my god, Adrian,” you started to groan but then Adrian took one of your nipples into his warm mouth and the disparagement left your brain entirely. His teeth grazed your skin slightly and then he looked up at you through his lashes, his glasses slipping down the bridge of his nose again. You gently repositioned them for him and were rewarded with a blinding smile.
“Is this okay?” he asked, his breath hot against your sensitive skin.
“It’s fine,” you replied, trying to assure him. But he seemed to take that as an assessment of quality instead. He sat back on his heels and pouted.
“How can I do better? Tell me what to do and I’ll do it. I’ll do anything,” he pleaded.
You pressed your thighs together slightly, desperate for some sort of relief. You were both a goddamn mess. Desperate for distraction from the sight of him begging, you twisted your fingers into his curls and pulled his mouth to yours again, leading him into a slower, more languid kiss. Somewhere in the back of your brain you reprimanded yourself for kissing him so much - letting him think this was something other than what it was was dangerous. But the idiot was a good goddamn kisser.
You guided him to his feet, pulling him closer still until suddenly he was straddling your lap, ass perched firmly on your knees. Your fingers traipsed over him, undoing buckles and zippers and snaps as you went. You knew Adrian’s armor intimately from your agile study of his form, his fighting style, and from looking for weak points. He wasn’t open to your notes, but it helped you know how best to cover his ass at a moment’s notice in the field.
Your fingers finally found smooth skin as you helped him out of his last layer, leaving him and his tightly muscled form in just a tank top. Part of you wanted to rip it off with your teeth, another part of you wanted to sit back and watch him slowly strip the rest away. All thoughts left your head as Adrian’s mouth moved to your neck. His tongue laved at the skin, teeth pinching flesh just slightly, when he suddenly drew back, as if rousing from some kind of haze.
“Aren’t you supposed to be on my lap?” he asked quietly, his gaze fixed on your lips. His chest was heaving and barely anything had happened. You worried suddenly that if you let him put his dick in you he’d drop dead.
“Way to give into gender stereotypes, Adrian,” you taunted. His eyes snapped up to meet yours. “I’m teasing. Mostly. I think it’s kind of hot that you’re on my lap.”
“You do?” he asked. You nodded. “Okay, good. Because I like it, too. A lot.”
“I have an idea,” you said suddenly, tilting Adrian’s chin with your index and middle finger. “How about a little lesson in taking orders?”
Adrian nodded furiously, at a loss for words. He looked so happy - kind of like the way he did when you complimented him on a kill. And now you were imbued with a kind of power you hadn’t really been anticipating. But you were certainly going to make it worth both your whiles.
You sat back slightly and dragged your gaze over him. “Shirt off, please.”
Adrian wasted no time at all. When he untangled himself from the fabric eagerly he looked back at you. “You don’t have to ask nicely. I’ll do anything you say even if you ask not-nicely. Actually don’t even ask. Just tell me.”
You blinked back at him. “I just want to make sure I have this straight - you really want me to tell you what to do?”
“I’ve been told I do really well with clear instruction,” he said, grinning.
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” you retorted with a roll of your eyes.
Adrian sighed. “You’re still mad about earlier? God, maybe Peacemaker was right - you really do need to get laid.”
You could feel the frustrated heat crawling up the back of your neck. Of course fucking Peacemaker was - “I’m sorry, why exactly were you and Chris talking about my sex life?”
“I just said I thought you’d been a little tense lately and I wondered if I could do anything to help and he said that you ‘probably just needed a good fuck’.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“If it makes you feel any better he said I ‘definitely wasn’t man enough for the job’,” Adrian said with a shrug. You weren’t really sure how that was supposed to make you feel better or instill any confidence in you.
“Look, I know he’s your friend, but that’s fucked up all around. And I’ll kick his fucking ass for you…if you want?” you offered with a wince. Might as well have stapled your bleeding heart straight to your arm for everyone to see.
“I’d like to see it,” Adrian said with a thoughtful expression. Then he leaned down and kissed the corner of your mouth almost daintily. “Just promise not to hurt him too bad?”
“I will make no such promises.”
Adrian gasped like he was scandalized. “God, you’re so fucking hot.”
You preened a little under his praise. “Anyway, are you going to do something about proving Peacemaker wrong or are you just going to sit there on my lap looking pretty all night?”
“Definitely not!” Adrian replied, kissing you again, this time his open mouth on yours, hot breath mingling. He reeled back, your head held in his hands. “Wait, fuck, I mean definitely not going to sit here looking pretty all night. Definitely going to fuck you.”
His mouth returned to its sloppy conquest of your neck and he slipped his hand into the waist of your pants, wasting no time in dragging his fingers between your legs, pushing your underwear aside. Your hips lifted into his touch and you pulled his hair harder than you intended.
“If you keep pulling my hair like that I’m gonna come in my pants,” he said, half complaint and half desperate need. He bit down on your collarbone. “You’re so fucking wet. Sick.”
You couldn’t help but laugh. Adrian pouted again but you reassured him with your tongue in his mouth and your fingers grasping at him through the fabric of his pants. He let out a hiss and gave up all other priorities to fumble with his pants. You pressed a hand against his smooth, warm chest.
“Are we really about to fuck on a wheelie office chair?” you asked, interrupting the flow of the moment.
“Uh, yeah? It’s kinda cool. I can like…slide us around to different places.”
“Why would you need to do that?”
“I don’t know, don’t you like options?” he argued, seeming utterly confused that you didn’t see the merit in transportation-based fucking. You rolled your eyes.
“You’re a fucking idiot.”
His hips rolled against you slightly. Of course he liked that.
“Fine, we can fuck somewhere else. Maybe the couch? Nah, Peacemaker and Harcourt have definitely fucked on that couch and I don’t want to encroach on the sanctity of that…”
“What?”
He plowed ahead, eyes scanning the room. “Oh! We could fuck on your desk. Wait, no, let’s fuck on my desk! There’s a real risk that every time I look at it after this I will get hard, but that’s a risk I’m willing to take.”
“I hate you.”
“Maybe,” he retorted with a grin. “Now can I please go down on you? It’s actually all I can think about. I’ve been told my pussy eating could make anyone love me, so let’s see if you still hate me after.”
“Adrian, no one has ever told you that,” you accused. He grinned, something crooked and impish.
“Okay, so maybe no one has said it to me, but I think it was implied. All I’m saying is satisfaction guaranteed for services rendered!”
The blatant honesty took you by surprise but not any more than suddenly finding yourself on your back on the desk with Adrian’s hips between your legs. He yanked you closer to the edge of the desk and then made quick work of undoing your pants, taking them and your underwear in one go in a way that almost made you dizzy.
Whatever you were about to say died on your lips when Adrian dropped to his knees again with a decisive thud and threw your legs over his shoulders. His warm hands pressed into the tops of your thighs, grip tight but not painful. He kneaded at your skin for a moment before he looked up at you through those pretty, stupid eyelashes of his.
“May I?” he asked, voice a low whisper.
You pressed your lips into a firm line to keep from laughing. If you were being honest, Adrian asking for permission was really doing something for you. You propped yourself up on one elbow so you could reach down and run your fingers through his curls adoringly. He had the same intense energy at the prospect of eating you out as if you’d given him a present to unwrap. He was vibrating with excitement. He dragged his cheek along the inside of your thigh and kissed your knee as he waited, patient and postulant.
“You may.”
The speed with which Adrian plunged forward to lick between your folds needed to be studied by science. He approached the act like he was well and truly starved. Your thighs tightened around his head, an involuntary clench of your muscles, but Adrian seemed to love that too. He hummed his approval against you, the sound of his tongue on you and in you positively obscene.
“You’re so wet,” Adrian managed, catching his breath for a moment.
“Please remember to breathe down there, Adrian,” you replied, deeply aware of the way it was harder to even out your own breathing. You twisted a curl around your finger and then another and his eyes fluttered shut. You hated how pretty he was. How was it possible that the beautiful, hapless, devotee between your legs was also the same man you wanted to choke to death with your bare hands in the field?
You gave his hair another little tug.
“I like when you pull my hair,” he groaned. You smiled wickedly and pulled a little harder.
“Like that?” you asked, watching him carefully, calculating. He was so much easier to read out of the Vigilante suit.
“Yeah, just like that,” he confirmed. He reached down, adjusting himself within his tactical pants. You really needed to do something about getting him out of those, didn’t you? You dragged your gaze up his torso to find him staring at you, wide-eyed and grinning. “You make me feel like a sexy Ratatouille.”
“Please tell me you did not just reference a Disney movie while you’re giving me head, Adrian!”
“It’s a Pixar movie, first of all,” he argued with an expression that seemed to convey that he thought you were an idiot. “And second of all, you told me to breathe. So I’m breathing! If you want me to not talk about how you make me feel like a sexy Pixar character you have to explicitly say that. Did you not want me to say that?”
“Not really!” you complained, slapping a hand over your eyes. You couldn’t bear to look at him, because even though he was yapping about goddamn Ratatouille of all things, he still looked painfully hot. “By the way, his fucking name is Linguini. Ratatouille is the name of the movie!”
“I thought Ratatouille was the name of the rat?”
“His name is Remy!” you exclaimed, sitting fully upright on Adrian’s desk. Fuck. You knew this was a bad idea and then you went ahead anyway and indulged Adrian’s weird shit. “I can’t believe this.”
“Wait, wait!” Adrian’s fingers pressed desperately into your hips. “Let me make it up to you. I’ll bravely drown between your legs if it means you’ll forget everything I just said.”
“Adrian…”
“Please, please, give me one more chance. I wanna make you feel good. I know I can make you feel good,” he begged. Those stupid green eyes were so hard to say no to. Who were you to deny him – and more importantly, yourself – a long overdue orgasm on Adrian Chase’s tongue?
“Fine.” Adrian smiled wide. “Now make me come, Adrian Chase.”
He kissed at the inside of each of your thighs this time, not rushing into it like before. He nosed at your clit and then kissed it softly before taking it into his mouth, sucking gently. His tongue slid through the warmth between your legs with an eager conviction, even if he was taking his time in his hard-won second approach. He was noisy as hell - moaning and muttering sweet-nothings as if you had your own hand around him. Your back arched off the table as he slipped a finger in you, and then another, pressing deeply inside.
“Harder,” you urged, and he took that directive with fervor. For a few moments, he kissed the crease of your thigh, the crest of your pubic bone, nuzzled his face against the soft hair between your thighs as his fingers adjusted their pace and their depth and their pressure. You weren’t sure how it was possible, but Adrian was a fucking scholar in pussy.
“Fuck,” you whispered, before managing to clamp down on your lower lip. Adrian smiled against your skin at the way your body – and you – responded.
You were hesitant to wind your fingers in his hair again, but you didn’t know where to put your hands. Your palms, sweaty, slid across the surface of the desk. You pawed at your own breasts to no avail, it wasn’t as good as his mouth and his calloused, warm fingers. Speaking of fingers – Adrian crooked his inside you and, at last, both your hands tugged at his sweaty curls. You pressed him slightly closer, and ground your hips against his face. In response, he cursed against you and removed his fingers so he could firmly grab your hips in both hands and press you flush against his face.
For a brief moment you genuinely did worry about him suffocating between your thighs. All thought leeched out of your brain the second Adrian merely pressed his thumb over your clit with a practiced pressure and you came hard. You were aware of the moan that dragged from your lips, dredged from somewhere deep in your core by Adrian Chase of all people. You were also faintly aware of the sound of Adrian hissing a whine through his clenched teeth.
If you hadn’t experienced alternate universes yourself you might have thought you were in one.
Adrian’s ministrations between your legs didn’t stop. His tongue laved slowly at you, dragging between your folds like he wasn’t quite done cherishing his last meal on death row.
“Adrian,” you vaguely moaned, or at least, you hoped his name had come out of your mouth coherently. You really couldn’t be sure.
“C’mon, one more. I owe you for saving my life,” he murmured. You looked down at him, his chin wet, his lips swollen, his glasses slightly askew, his hair a hopeless mess. Somehow, he still looked good. If this was what he looked like making you come on his tongue, then what the hell would he look like when he was coming inside you?
You inhaled sharply as his index finger dragged between your folds and slipped toyingly into you for just a moment before withdrawing. You bit back an embarrassingly wanting groan. “What are you talking about? When did I save you?”
Adrian frowned, like he was almost offended that you didn’t remember. “You save me every day.”
Then he looked up at you through his lashes as he ran his tongue up your thigh, his other hand drawing his nails across your chest, and made you come around his mouth and his fingers one more time.
When he was finally satisfied he dragged himself up to standing between your legs and kissed you deeply, brain still too fuzzy to properly taste yourself on his tongue. The rough fabric of his tactical pants dragged almost painfully against your core. You felt his index and middle fingers press flat against the inside of your thigh while he kissed you lazily. Finally, he pulled back and looked at you with big, glassy eyes.
You skated your hand along his jaw, dragging your thumb across his lower lip tauntingly before pressing it between his lips. You pressed down, sliding your thumb across the surface of his tongue and then let him close his mouth around you. You would have squeezed your thighs together at the sight, had he not been in between them. He mumbled something and you withdrew, grazing against his teeth, smearing spit across his chin. His chin dipped forward slightly, like he might try to trap you again. He was so hungry.
“What’d you say?”
“Femoral,” he said, as way of explanation. “110.”
Your brow furrowed further in confusion. “What?”
“Your heart rate,” he said simply, with a little shrug of his shoulders. “I can do better than that, too. Promise.”
To you, that was a goddamn invitation for more. You wanted him to prove it to you. You wanted him to bend you over his desk and fuck you hard, treating your heart rate like a personal best score every time. You ran your hands down his torso and reached for the zipper of his pants but he pushed your hands away.
“I’m good,” he said sheepishly. You frowned, studying his flushed expression. Then your eyes widened and you nodded in understanding.
“Hey, that’s okay,” you replied softly. You dragged your hips slightly against the rough fabric with intention this time. You couldn’t help that the idea of him coming in his pants made the whole thing strangely hotter.
“I really do want to fuck you, you know,” he said, tilting his head slightly, his gaze dragging down your body. “I dream about it.”
“You do?”
He laughed in disbelief. “Are you kidding me? Of course I do. I’ve been dreaming about it for like…as long as I’ve known you.”
“You’re so confusing, Adrian Chase,” you said, holding his face in both hands. “You’re like two different people. When you’re in the suit you don’t listen to a fucking thing I say, but when you’re just you, I think maybe you’d lick the ground if I told you to.”
“Do you want me to?” he asked, beautifully pathetic.
“Listen?” you asked.
He shook his head. “Lick the ground.”
“I don’t know what I want from you. To kill you or to fuck you.”
Adrian laughed. “You couldn’t kill me if you tried.”
“Is that a fucking challenge?” you asked lowly, wrapping your legs around his annoying narrow waist. The distinct sound of Peacemaker’s voice outside the building startled you two back to reality and Adrian tossed clothes at you faster than you could put them on. You hadn’t been expecting the team back so soon - usually cleaning up Vigilante-related messes took a little longer.
In the conference room, Adrian sat beside you for the debrief, the stillest you’d ever seen him, a dopey grin on his face the entire time. While everyone was distracted reviewing footage of Vigilante plunging into a spray of gunfire without you to cover him, you studied his profile. Soft, sweet, devoted Adrian had given you more than you could have asked for. But, you couldn’t help but wonder…
You leaned yourself against the arm of his chair and gestured vaguely at the screen.
“Maybe next time you wear the suit.”
Back in the field, you were calling out orders - Harcourt gave a nod and peeled off, taking Peacemaker with her. But Vigilante turned back over his shoulder and you could tell even through the mask he was fucking grinning.
“Vij, don’t you fucking dare!”
Your eyes widened as he pulled the pin from the grenade you hadn’t even known he’d had and tossed it into the warehouse. There was no time to process as he was too busy tackling you to the ground, draping his body over yours. Heat roared over the two of you and Vigilante wrapped his arms around you tightly, his mask tucked into the crook of your neck. Somewhere not far away you heard Harcourt cursing him out.
Vigilante panted, breath hot against your face even through the mask. His grip slid to your waist as his hips adjusted slightly against yours.
Can you do a fic where reader has epilepsy whether or not she’s involved with the 11th street kids is up to you but she is at the very least keeping it from Adrian maybe also the crew if she’s involved as to not raise concern but maybe she can feel a seizure coming on and either has to warn him because she’s with him or has to call him because she’s all alone.
A/N: I really really struggled with this and just from a personal standpoint; growing up and a few times as an adult I’ve had a type of silent seizures called stress induced short term memory loss so I just based this off my own personal experience and what I needed. This might be too specific to me to really encompass what you were wanting and if that’s the case I’m really sorry. I just don’t feel comfortable writing too much into something I haven’t lived while this I have and had lived through. Thank you @vigilantexreader for the beta and edits!!
Summary: Reader starts experiencing stress induced short term memory loss, Adrian seems to be the only one to notice the sharp decline in her mental health.
Masterlist
__
The first time Adrian noticed it he didn’t say anything.
He honestly didn’t even realize anything bad was happening. Which was probably really shitty considering something was clearly happening to his girlfriend. Something he didn’t understand, but he kept his eye on her.
Just watched the way her expression seemed to glaze over, her hand kept moving, but not writing anything new on her page. Even from across from her he could tell nothing was changing on her page.
Just the same sentence over and over again.
He was prone to writing bad notes and losing focus during meetings, and when no one else seemed to point it out and she snapped out of it a few minutes after the meeting with some slow blinks he just figured it was normal.
It was a few weeks later that he found her crying in the training room. Her face was panicked and scared as he rushed towards her, flinching when he slid onto his knees and grabbed her. She was completely alone in the room, no one else watching as Adrian ran through his mind what on earth could be wrong with her.
“Hey, you’re okay. Where are you hurt?” he asked, eyes wide behind his glasses as his hands skimmed across her body, trying to not make her uncomfortable but needing to reassure himself that she was okay. She didn’t flinch from any pressure in particular and there was no visible blood on any part of her.
“What?” she cried, voice shaky. Adrian had seen her keep her cool a thousand times over in the field. This reaction made no sense to him at all. Which of course, freaked him out even more.
“Are you hurt anywhere? Why are you crying?” he repeated, voice more tense than he’d like. He hated to see her like this, completely unraveled and freaked out when there was nothing that made sense to him. He couldn’t figure out the why. It felt wrong to see, especially at work. “Baby, what’s wrong?”
“Who are you? What are you talking about?” she said, crying harder and Adrian’s brain stopped dead in its tracks.
“I’m…I’m Adrian. We…we’re dating and we work together. We’re at work right now,” he said as gently as he could, his mind screaming that something terrible had happened to her. Hell, it could be butterflies for all he knew even though they all thought they were dead. He watched as she shut her eyes tight as if Adrian’s words were physically hurting her.
“I’m not…I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, voice tense and untrusting. Something Adrian had never heard directed towards him.
“Can I take you to my car? I think we should go to the hospital together,” he said, trying to sound as calm as possible as his nails dug crescents into his palms. He begged himself to stay calm, worried that she could have a concussion or something else wrong that his panic could make worse.
“Is it safe?” she said, voice quiet and Adrian quickly nodded.
“Very safe! Extremely safe, just the safest possible place ever, I promise,” he said. “I’d never let anything ever happen to you, and I just think we should go to the hospital to be safe.” Adrian waited, his eyes wide, searching her face until she finally nodded and took his hand.
It took some gentle coaxing and deep breaths from both of them as he ushered her out of the office towards his car, waving Chris’ concern glance away. He could fill everyone in on it later - if she wanted them to know at all what was happening. But for now, his concern was on her, speaking in low sentences, guiding her as much as possible without hurting her or freaking her out any worse.
It was hours later, and Adrian sat next to her through all the tests as she calmed down, coming back to herself but with no memory of the training room, or even her and Adrian’s trip to the emergency room. He tried to keep his panic off his face, but he couldn’t help as he kept chewing his fingernails down to a nub as he watched her heart monitor and oxygen pulse with hawk eyes. The EEG freaking him out the most as he watched them glue the electrodes on her head, he frowned when she grimaced at the texture of the glue. It wasn’t the first time Adrian wanted to beg the universe to switch their places and it certainly wasn’t going to be the last time.
He started playing with his phone so he wouldn’t look as desperate with concern for her.
“You didn’t need to come with me,” she whispered. Adrian’s eyes snapped off his phone and to her. He fought the urge to laugh and make fun of her, as if his girlfriend being in the hospital was something he would just…ignore.
“Do you want me to leave?” he asked, watching her fidget with her hands. As much as it pained him, if she asked him he would leave her be.
“No,” she said softly, almost sounding defeated.
It was then finally the doctor came in gently, sitting in a chair as she rolled over to her. Adrian leaned forward to listen.
“I think what you’ve been having is called ‘stress induced short term memory loss,’ it can happen from too much and too little stress-”
“You’re joking,” she said, deadpanned and Adrian couldn’t help the slight twitch of his lips at her sass, anything to go back to her normal sense.
“I’m not,” the doctor said, chuckling. “I’ll give you some recommendations for some stress therapy, and I’m glad your partner brought you in today. Since these can cause lapses in memories, it’s possible you’ve had more than just the one today and simply forgotten about it.”
“Is this…bad for her brain?” Adrian asked.
“Staying in high stress like this in survival mode isn’t great for your health, but a lot of the effects are reversible and manageable,” she said gently. “With proper therapy and having people keep a close eye on you and bring you back down in those moments will be really helpful. This is hard, but livable.”
Adrian watched with careful eyes as she nodded and closed her eyes, clearly digesting this information. Adrian couldn’t help but feel relieved that at the very least it was manageable and hopefully something they could make sure doesn’t happen again. He tried to steady himself imagining something like this in the field…she was going to hate that he was going to have an even closer eye on her now.
He watched the doctor squeeze her hand before standing up.
“I’ll get your discharge papers prepped. I recommend resting today and tomorrow before going back to work,” the doctor said, leaving the two in the room. Adrian rolled his chair closer to her, grabbing her hand that was firmly against her thigh.
“You okay?” he whispered.
“I just want to go home,” she said, voice wavering as Adrian nodded.
“Soon, baby. I promise,” he whispered, wishing he felt half as competent as he sounded.
He felt lucky that his ‘soon’ ended up to be truthful and they were discharged and in his car within the next two hours. She was silent the whole time, letting Adrian handle everything. Not that he minded, but it did increase his worry and panic for her.
“Thanks for driving me,” she said gently, leaning her head against the passenger window. Adrian did a double take, making sure he actually heard her and he hadn’t made it up in his head.
“Of course,” he said softly. “Are you hungry? Do you want to grab something to eat before I take you home? We can stop anywhere or I could even try cooking-”
“No, I’m okay,” she said, and he hummed. “Are you hungry? I can watch you eat or make you something-”
“You don’t need to make me anything, you just spent six hours in the hospital,” he said, trying to balance sounding firm and gentle and he seemed to fail when she flinched ever so slightly.
“I just want to feel normal,” she whispered, and he sighed.
“You will,” he promised.
“Adrian…”
“I mean! You probably won’t ever feel the same again but that’s okay because life is hard and weird and strange and I don’t know about you but I never knew this could even happen and when I found you-”
“Adrian,” she said, looking over at him. Out of the corner of his eye he saw her lips twitch slightly up.
“The point is; you will feel normal eventually. Just…let today be weird and then we’ll take it one step at a time,” he finished and she reached over and squeezed his hand.
“Thank you,” she whispered as he pulled into her lot.
adrian chase has no respect for anything apart from you and peacemaker, let alone churches and religion.
reader-insert (no y/n,) female reader, blasphemy, cunnilingus, spelling name, called goddess/deity/religion/holy/church by adrian, improper use of alters, pews and confessionals. degrading, praise, multiple rounds, biting, marking, hickeys, riding, begging, overstimulation, unprotected sex, creampie, do not read if you are religious, this will be offensive.
18+ only — minors dni
adrian's tongue drags slow and filthy between your spread thighs where you're perched on the edge of the altar, hands locked around your hips to keep you open for him. "fuck, this is the only holy thing that matters," he mutters right against your dripping pussy, the words buzzing straight into your clit. "you're my religion. my whole church. my only god. i'd torch every bible just to stay down here licking this perfect cunt."
he works his tongue in long, obscene strokes, sucking your clit between his lips before shoving it inside you with a low groan. then he starts spelling, tracing each letter deliberately into your soaked folds. a… d… r… i… a… n. every stroke of his name carved into your cunt like a prayer, tongue flicking and pressing deep with each curve and line until you're shaking. "deity. goddess. mine. taste so fucking good, holy or whatever. i'd kneel here till the world ends if it means drowning in you."
he doesn't stop until your thighs clamp around his head and you're coming hard against his mouth, his name still wet on your skin.
adrian doesn't let you catch your breath after he spells his name across your soaked cunt on the altar. he pulls back with a wild grin, lips shiny, and drags you off the cold stone. "pew time, goddess," he mutters, voice low and rough like he's still praying between your legs. he spins you around once you're both in the aisle, yanking his cock free so it's already hard and leaking against your thigh. he drops onto the nearest pew and pulls you down with him, your back flush to his chest, legs spread wide over his.
his hands lock around your waist like iron, fingers digging in hard enough to bruise. he lines up and slams you down onto his cock in one brutal thrust, burying himself to the hilt inside your dripping pussy. "fuck yes, ride your fucking religion," he growls against your ear, teeth sinking into the side of your neck right under your jaw. the bite is sharp and claiming, followed by soft, wet kisses along your shoulder as he starts lifting and dropping you on his length.
he uses you like a toy built for his cock, bouncing you up and down with punishing rhythm, your ass slapping against his thighs every time he slams you down. his grip on your waist never eases, thumbs pressing into your skin while he bites your neck again, sucking a dark mark there before soothing it with his tongue. "you're my church, my whole fucking god, and i'm gonna fuck this holy cunt till it breaks," he pants, voice muffled against your shoulder. every thrust punches the air out of you, his cock stretching you open again and again while he holds you still enough to grind deep on the downstroke.
he keeps you there for what feels like forever, biting and kissing, using your body to get himself off like you're nothing but a divine fleshlight made for him. your pussy clenches around him every time his teeth graze your neck, and he groans like he's worshipping at the altar of your cunt.
when he finally pulls out, he doesn't give you time to rest. adrian drags you toward the confessional booth at the side of the sanctuary, shoving the door open and pulling you inside. he sits on the narrow bench, cock still rock hard and glistening, and tugs you onto his lap so you're straddling him again. this time he doesn't thrust. he just sinks deep and stays buried, hands gripping your ass to keep you perfectly still with his length throbbing inside you.
"beg your god for what you want off me," he teases, voice low and filthy right against your ear. "say it loud enough for the big guy upstairs to hear. tell him exactly how you want this cock, goddess. beg nice and pretty while i sit here splitting you open." his fingers squeeze your ass, keeping you impaled and twitching around him, refusing to move until you give him what he wants.
once your voice trembles out the desperate pleas, he snaps. adrian starts fucking up into you hard and fast, pounding your pussy through the thin wall of the confessional like he's trying to break it. the whole booth shakes with every brutal thrust, his teeth finding your neck again while he uses you like his personal deity, groaning filthy praise against your skin. "that's it, take your fucking religion, take every inch like the goddess you are." he doesn't stop until you're shaking and clenching around him, the sound of skin slapping echoing through the empty church.
fbi!dex who’d never been in a proper relationship before you. he struggled with comforting u, and wasn’t really good with emotions as a whole and often felt awkward whenever he caught that u were upset. usually giving u “i’m sorry, that must be really hard.” and letting you cling onto him.
before u two began dating he had a habit of stalking ur socials, and later on that still stuck. he caught wind of u reposting a few things related to getting fucked to soothe ur feelings. so it clicked to dex that was how he could comfort u from now on!
it began after someone had been an asshole too u at work and u just wanted help — surprised when dex began to slide ur shorts down slowly with mumbled comforts and slipping his fingers into u clumsily.
from then on: rough day? he’ll bend u over the nearest surface. upset over a small problem? he’ll eat you out.
u and dex had gotten into a small disagreement— dex unable to handle you ignoring him so he practically stormed over to you and shoved ur leggings down with shaky hands, bending you over ur bed as he dealt with his own clothes before shakily spreading ur legs and sliding into u with perfect precision. "you’re okay— it’s okay. i’m sorry. don’t leave me. y— you’re okay, right?" as u were now, crying from pleasure.
when they think we’re mutilating ourselves to the point that they pose as SRS doctors and literally mutilate us for their agenda. cis ppl don’t forget this
topsurgery.net is a site with lots of before + after pics categorised by surgeon. I encourage everyone with other resources on srs surgeons and their results to share them here, for mtf/mtx surgeries too please
Let me know in my inbox if there are any other flags you would like to see me draw :]
Edit: I’m gonna turn off my asks temporarily while I go through my requests bc if I get any more I fear I may explode 😭😭 (I’ll turn my asks back on after I finish all of them though!)
synopsis: One of their targets is in sight, and when Adrian, Chris, and Ads discover crucial information about the pack's enemies, Adrian is more than ready to start taking down the people who are responsible for nearly getting you killed.
tags/warnings: 18+ MDNI, omegaverse dynamics, alpha!Adrian, omega!reader, fluff, talk about heats/ruts/marking, Checkmate mission stuff, Adrian and Chris being bros
word count: 6.5k
notes: I am back from vacay and I had a wonderful time! Back on the writing grind starting today <3 Thank you as always @embeanwrites and @snowyathena for the beta read.
Masterlist | part one | part two | part three | part four | part five | part six | part seven | part eight | part nine
That morning, Ads crafts a careful text to Dev Mason from the drug dealer’s phone. Adrian tries desperately to be patient as she does. Subterfuge like this is not his strong suit, but he understands the need to make sure this text is perfect if they want to get Mason to do what they want.
“We have to go back through their message history first,” Ads says, on the phone with John. “Figure out what their code words might mean. They’re not stupid enough to just talk about cocaine dealing outright. Dev might get suspicious if something sounds off.”
“No full sentences,” John notes. “Lots of straight up dates, times, meeting locations without any other context. Occasionally a follow-up to explain. Like this one—got the good stuff in yesterday.”
“What should we say?” Ads asks, staring at the blinking cursor in the message thread. Her thumbs hover, ready to type.
“We can lure him in with the promise of a job?” Chris suggests. “Say Eli knows a guy who has work for him?”
“Eli?” Adrian asks.
“The drug dealer you killed last night,” Chris deadpans. “He had a name.”
“Oh, right.”
“That’s risky,” you point out, and Adrian straightens at the sound of your voice. He hasn’t realized you were on the other end of the line with John.
“Morning, baby,” he says, unable to help his smile.
“Hi Ade,” you say, and he can hear the smile in your voice. “What if Eli didn’t know Dev is a mercenary? We can’t assume that. Whatever message you send, it has to be drug related.”
“Good point,” John muses.
“Well, Adrian just saw him buy drugs last night,” Chris says. “He’s probably not gonna need more for a little while, at least. So what’s the move here?”
“I worked in the drug trafficking unit of the DEA for a while,” Emilia says. Adrian’s smile falters a bit when he realizes she’s there too. He wonders how close you’re standing to her, then kicks himself for even having the thought. He grits his teeth and clears his throat to stop the growl that threatens to escape. Chris gives him a weird look.
“You need some water, Vig?”
“I’m good,” Adrian says, looking away, clenching his fists.
“One time we lured a guy by fabricating a supply chain issue,” Emilia continues. “Made it out like the dealer was running low and might not be able to restock for a while due to local gang activity. If he thinks his source is drying up, Dev might buy some extra.”
“Still not a guarantee that he would show, but I think that’s a better option,” you agree.
“Even if he doesn’t show—now that I have his number, I’ve coded a program to scan and trace calls coming from his phone. It just might take a little longer,” John says.
“Either way, we’re on to him. We know he’s in the city, we got the bar right that he frequents. We’re in a good spot,” Ads says. “I say we go for it. What should I say?”
“Pick a location where they’ve met before, if you can find one in the message history,” Emilia says. “Give him an address and a time. No frills. Then send a follow up. Running low. Supplier problem. Meet here if you want an emergency restock.”
“Misspell a couple words,” Adrian notes, reading the thread over Ads’s shoulder as she searches for an address. “This guy is fucking illiterate and apparently doesn’t use autocorrect.”
Your laugh rings out over the phone speaker, and it makes Adrian feel a little lighter.
“Keep us in the loop,” Emilia says.
“Be careful,” you add. “I don’t want to hear about any bullet wounds or broken bones.”
“I’ll keep him in line,” Chris says, and Adrian only half-resents the implication that he’s like an animal in need of leash training.
“Love you,” he says, ignoring the dig.
“I’m not saying I love you too, that’s fucking weird,” John says.
“He wasn’t talking to you, you fucking moron,” Emilia groans.
“Love you too, Ade,” you call back with a giggle, over the sound of Emilia smacking John upside the head.
“You ready, Vig?” Chris asks. “I can see Mason coming this way.”
“I’m ready, all right,” Adrian says, a slight growl to his voice.
“Please remember that you cannot kill him right away,” Ads says, exasperated.
Ads is set up in the van a block away from the established meeting spot, while Chris keeps a careful eye on it from a rooftop across the street. Luckily, Dev Mason took the bait, and Adrian has been waiting for him to show for the last twenty minutes, hands shoved deep in the pockets of another jacket borrowed from Chris, because apparently his own clothes aren’t cool enough and Dev will be suspicious if he sees a dork in a dad outfit.
You’d giggled when Adrian had called you to complain about it. Really, he’d just wanted to talk to you one last time before meeting up with Dev tonight. It was late now, nearly 2 a.m., and he wouldn’t get to talk to you again until tomorrow.
“They’ve got a point,” you said sympathetically. “Maybe we need to get you some undercover outfits. Your Vigilante suit is intimidating. The rest of your wardrobe, not so much.”
“I thought you liked my wardrobe!”
“I do love your wardrobe, because you are the one wearing it. But you have to admit that you don’t dress like the average black ops agent.”
“Fine,” Adrian grumbled.
“Hey. I love you, baby, ” you remind him. “Be careful tonight.”
“I will,” he said softly. “I love you too.”
Adrian thinks about that conversation now, eyes closing briefly as he remembers the sound of your voice, reminding him that you love him, calling him baby. Even still, his nose wrinkles with irritation. The memory isn’t enough to erase Chris’s strong Alpha scent that’s leached into the fabric of the jacket.
Normally, Chris’s scent doesn’t bother him, but it’s one thing to be crammed into the van with him. It’s another thing entirely to be wearing his clothes. It’s putting him on edge, even more than he has been the rest of this week. It’s making his stomach hurt, it’s making his head hurt, it’s just plain pissing him off. He wants to rip all his clothes off and wrap himself in the picnic blanket, the one still barely holding on to traces of your scent after five days away from you.
“Dev rounding the corner in thirty seconds,” Chris reports, his voice ringing in the mic in Adrian’s ear. Adrian refocuses. He’s got a job to do.
“Remember,” Chris says. “No small talk. You’re bad at it. But you are probably stronger than him. He’s only a Beta, and he’s pretty wiry. Just grab him and drag him into the alley. I’m already on my way down to meet you so you have backup.”
Not ten seconds later, Dev Mason rounds the corner and nods at Adrian.
“You Eli’s guy?”
Adrian grits his teeth and forces down the wave of rage he feels just at the sight of this asshole, so casually nodding at him, like they’re fucking buddies. Like he’s not on Adrian’s shit list, right in the top ten. Adrian can’t even bring himself to speak, he just schools his expression and nods, waiting for Dev to walk closer, intending to pass off some money in return for drugs and make a deal.
The second he’s within reach, Adrian wrenches Dev’s arm behind his back, kicks him in the groin, and punches him right in the neck. A sickly satisfied smile crosses Adrian’s face. He delights in the way that the man’s eyes go wide with surprise, the wind knocked out of him, mouth gaping as he tries to speak, to yell for help, anything, all for naught.
Adrian drags him off the street and out of sight. The Checkmate team had gone through Dev and Eli’s previous meeting spots and carefully selected the location for this specifically—the dark, filthy alley with the giant dumpsters. Adrian shoves Dev behind one of them, right into the wall, his head making a cracking noise as it hits the stone wall of the building.
Dev finally manages to take a deep breath, but right before he’s about to shout, Adrian’s hands close around his throat to hold him in place.
Chris enters the alley behind them just a few seconds later. Dev hears his footsteps and starts struggling, thinking someone might have come to save him.
“Help,” Dev manages to squeak out, his voice hoarse and tight, Adrian’s grip cutting off his air supply just enough to keep him under control, but not enough to kill him.
“He’s not here to help you,” Adrian hisses. “He’s here to help me, you fucking dickbag.”
He sees the moment when Dev catches a real glimpse of Chris and a flash of terrified recognition crosses his face.
“Peacemaker,” he rasps. His struggle intensifies as he looks back at Adrian. “And you—you’re Vigilante?”
One hand grips desperately at Adrian’s around his throat, trying to pry his fingers away. He looks left and right for an exit route that is nowhere to be found.
“Okay,” he says, panicked. “Okay, okay! Tell me what you want! I’ll—I’ll give you whatever you want. Money? Information?”
Chris shakes his head and scoffs with disgust at how easily he’s surrendered.
“No shit, we want information,” he says. “We know what you’re doing. You and Leon and the others.” He walks closer and pulls a gun, cocking it at Dev’s head. “Members of my pack got hurt because of you.”
“Not because of me!” Dev insists desperately. “I’m not—I’m not the decisions guy! I just do the tech work! I worked in the same department as John Economos at ARGUS, we just—we just do the computer shit!”
“Computer shit,” Chris says. “What kind of computer shit?”
“I book the jobs! Manage the finances, manage everyone’s schedules! That’s it! I don’t—I don’t do field work! I’ve never killed anybody!”
“Pussy,” Adrian mutters.
“If he manages the schedules,” Ads says over the comms, “then he should know where they all are right now. Ask him.”
“You know where they are?” Chris says. “The rest of your team?”
“Y-yes, I do!!” Dev sputters. “I’ve got—I’ve got it all on my laptop, on a spreadsheet. It’s at my apartment! I can take you there!”
Chris cocks his head as he considers. The guy seems about five seconds away from pissing himself. He lowers his gun.
“Put him down, Vig.”
“What?” Adrian cries, outraged.
“Look at him. His knees are fucking shaking. He’s about to piss himself. He’s not a threat.”
Adrian gives Chris a hard look. His hands clench tighter around Dev’s throat as he hisses a breath through his teeth. Chris is on your side, he reminds himself. Chris is your best friend. You promised you wouldn’t have any problems taking orders from him in the field.
Adrian lets go of Dev with a shove, pushing all his anger into the piece of shit in front of him even as his heart is screaming at him to grab on again. To squeeze tighter around Dev’s neck until his face is turning red, until he can’t breathe, until he’s fucking dead, just like he deserves for everything that he and his team have done to his pack. To you.
Dev swallows and looks between Chris and Adrian nervously. “I—”
“What?” Chris demands.
“I’ll take one of you,” he says, seemingly working up a scrap of courage when he realizes Chris might be willing to show him a bit of mercy. “I’ll take Peacemaker.”
“I think fucking not,” Adrian says at the same time that Chris says, “Okay. Deal.”
“Are you fucking insane, Chris?” Adrian says.
“He’s right, Chris. You’re not going anywhere with this guy by yourself. It might be a trap,” Ads says.
“And what, you think I can’t handle myself?” Chris snaps. “Might I remind you, I am the pack Alpha. I am more than capable of making a call like this, especially with this wimpy asshole—”
He cuts off at the sound of thundering footsteps. He and Adrian turn in the direction of the sound to see Dev’s retreating form, bolting as fast as he can out of the alley and down the street.
“Fuck!” Chris says.
“This is why I didn’t want to let go of him, dude!” Adrian shouts, taking off to chase after him.
Dev looks back with wide, panicked eyes when he realizes the two Alphas have stopped arguing and started pursuing him. He fumbles a bit, yanking his shirt out of his pants as he runs and nearly tripping over a sidewalk curb as he reaches into his waistband behind him to pull a gun.
“He’s got a gun!” Adrian yells, just as Dev manages to fire a shot. It flies wide. So fucking wide it’s laughable. And Adrian, in fact, starts cracking up.
“Holy shit,” he says as he pulls his own gun from the deep pocket of Chris’s jacket. “You’re fucking kidding. Your aim is shit! How do you work black ops, Mason? Jesus Christ.”
“Maybe stop criticizing the aim of the guy trying to kill you, Adrian!” Ads cries over comms.
Dev keeps firing erratically, and Adrian cries out when one of them manages to hit him. It doesn’t stick—it’s only a graze—but it hurts like a bitch because he’s not wearing his Vigilante suit. He doesn’t have any armor on.
“Fuck!” he hisses. “You fucking dickhead!”
Adrian lifts his gun and shoots. And his aim is anything but laughable. The bullet hits dead center at the back of Dev’s head, and he hits the ground instantly. Adrian keeps running until he gets to the body, kicks the gun out of his hand, but when he looks down, he sees it wasn’t necessary.
“He’s dead,” Adrian reports, holding his ear.
“Fuck, Adrian,” Chris says. “He could have still been useful!”
“Fuck you! He shot me! Was I supposed to not shoot him back?”
“You’re hit?” Ads says urgently. “Fuck. I’m coming around with the van. Put pressure on it. Try not to bleed everywhere and leave evidence, please?”
Adrian does as she asks, putting his gun away and covering the wound on his shoulder with his hand. He frowns and huffs.
“Fuck. I told her I wouldn’t get shot,” Adrian grumbles. “She’s gonna kill me.”
Chris and Adrian tense at the sound of a vehicle pulling around the corner, but relax when they realize it’s just Ads. She pulls up right beside them and rolls down the window, taking in the scene with an unamused sigh.
“Alright,” she says. “Let’s get this cleaned up.”
“Do we take the body?” Adrian muses, ready to reach down and pick it up.
“No,” Chris says. “We take all his shit, like we did to Eli. The cops will think they’ve got a mugger on the loose who keeps killing people.”
“No,” Ads says. “Even if we take all his shit—we have to break into his apartment, too. That’s where he said his laptop was, isn’t it? With all the information we need? We won’t be able to do that if the cops are swarming the place, investigating his murder. Adrian’s right. We take the body.”
Adrian tries not to feel too smug that Ads is taking his side, for once.
“Okay,” Chris says. “We take the body. Break into his apartment and grab the laptop. Bring it home to John to dig through all the files. And dump him somewhere random on the way back home?”
Adrian and Ads nod.
“Alright,” Chris sighs. “Let’s do this. I wanna go to fucking sleep.”
Adrian doesn’t wake up until nearly 2 p.m. the next day.
He panics when he checks his phone and sees a dozen message notifications. Did he miss something important from you? Did your heat start? Does he need to go home?
But ten of the messages are just from Chris and Ads, saying they’ll regroup for dinner, taking it easy after the chaotic events of the previous night.
Ads: What time are we meeting today?
Peacemaker: It’s too fucking early. I’m going back to sleep.
Ads: It’s noon, Chris.
Peacemaker: I don’t give a shit. I spent two hours last night scrubbing blood off the sidewalk. I do not want to deal with the body in the van yet.
Apparently Adrian is not the only one feeling tired today. He, especially, needed the extra sleep, his body healing from the bullet wound on his arm. He unravels the bandages Ads had wrapped last night to find smooth skin.
Still, he’d broken a promise to you and gotten hurt. He was impulsive last night, chasing after Dev like that. He wasn’t even wearing his suit, no plates of armor to protect him. If that bullet had hit a foot to the right, it could have done some serious damage. Damage that his body might not have been able to repair. And then you would have been left alone. His stomach clenches with guilt.
He has to tell you. He knows he does. He just really, really, doesn’t want to do that right now. He clenches his jaw and turns back to the group chat.
Ads: Alright, fine. Go back to sleep, Sleeping Beauty. I’ll update the team back in Evergreen.
Ads: Don’t worry Adrian. I won’t tell her you got shot. I’ll let you have that conversation 😬
Ads: I’ll pick up pizza for dinner. Let me know what you want.
Peacemaker: You know me Ads. Meat lovers all the way.
Ads: Meat lover, huh? Maybe you really are an ally, Chris
Peacemaker: It’s not gay to like pepperoni Ads!!!!!!
Adrian rolls his eyes and types out a quick response.
Sorry guys. Just woke up. Pizza sounds great. Meet in an hour? Can’t really do anything until it’s dark anyway.
Just moments later, Ads likes his message. Then he closes out the chat and opens his message thread with you.
Omega 🩵: Morning, baby. I know you had a late night, considering I didn’t get a goodnight text until 5 a.m. I assume you’re still sleeping. I miss you! Call me later.
For the first time ever, he hesitates about pressing the call button next to your name. He doesn’t want to worry you. Not when you’re already in a sensitive state, not when you’re already wanting him and worrying about him. He can tell you about the injury later. It’s already healed up anyway.
“I don’t have to tell her right now,” he says to himself with finality, and he calls you.
It only rings once.
“I would say a regular hello, but something tells me I should be saying good morning,” you tease with no preamble. He smiles.
“I did, in fact, just wake up. I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have anything to apologize for, baby,” you say softly. “I want you to be well-rested. Especially out in the field. You’re less likely to get hurt.”
Adrian winces and changes the subject. “How are things back at the office? Ads says she updated you?”
“She did,” you say. “Dev is dead?”
“Yeah,” Adrian says. “One down. Five to go.”
“Good,” you say firmly, a sharp note in your voice. “I’m glad you killed him.”
“And he spilled a lot of information before I did,” Adrian adds. “Hopefully we’ll find even more at his apartment tonight. But first, Chris and I have to dump the body. It’s just…sitting in the van right now.”
“Dismember and burn?”
“Yeah. We’ll have to drive out of the city for that. Not sure where yet.”
“I can help with that,” you say. “I’m sitting at my computer right now. Let me bring up a map—”
“You don’t have to—”
“Let me fucking help, please,” you interrupt. “I’ve been feeling absolutely useless the last couple days. Just sitting around waiting for you to come back.”
“You’re not useless,” Adrian immediately argues. “You’re—you’re—everything. You’re my reason.” He pauses and swallows. “I think about you all day. And then I get back to this shitty motel and I think about you all night. And the only thing that’s keeping me from running home right now is the fact that everything I’m doing here is to—keep you safe.”
“I want to keep you safe,” you remind him, your voice thick with emotion. “I told you before you left. Before you even went on this mission. I can help too. I am more than capable. And I am trying really hard to be mad at you right now for being all overprotective. I don’t want to have this conversation again. But you’re such a sap and you just—say all the right things sometimes. You’re gonna make me cry.”
“Don’t cry,” he says hoarsely. “I never want you to cry. Not ever. I want you to be happy and safe and—mine.”
“I am.”
That evening, Ads rents a car to keep watch outside Dev’s apartment while Adrian and Chris go dump his body in a river thirty minutes outside the city.
“Just in case,” she says. “If he has a roommate or something, we need to be prepared.”
“Good point,” Chris says. “But be careful, Ads. We’ll be half an hour out if you need anything.”
“I’m not worried about me,” Ads says. She looks pointedly between Chris and Adrian. “I’m worried about you two and your bickering. Don’t kill each other.”
“We won’t,” Adrian says.
In fact, you had told him the exact same thing. Ads had told you that he and Chris were terse with each other this week.
“He’s your best friend,” you had reminded him. “Think before you snap. I know it’s not easy.”
It turns out, though, that everything is fine. Chris and Adrian have dumped dozens, maybe hundreds of dead bodies together. They fall into the old rhythm of it quietly, carrying Dev’s dead weight out into the middle of the woods, finding a good spot where the river water rushes by. It’s quick and efficient and—well, not quite fun. Chris grumbles a bit about the fact that they’re even out there dumping a body at all, and Adrian feels a little guilty for jumping the gun and killing the guy so quickly when they might have been able to get more information out of him. But there’s almost something nostalgic about it that brings him back to the days before Chris even knew his secret identity.
It’s the time in the car on the way back when things start to feel a little more…tense. Adrian starts to get almost carsick as he sits in the passenger seat and every breath he inhales feels hot and thick with Chris’s scent from the seat right beside him. He cracks the window open.
They’ve been sitting in silence for ten minutes when Adrian can’t take it anymore.
“I’m sorry,” he says, just barely audible over the sound of the radio that Chris has cranked up, playing his usual hair metal songs.
Chris pauses and glances over. “What the fuck are you sorry for?”
“Being annoying,” Adrian says. “All week. I know I’ve been on edge, and it’s making you on edge. And I’ve been more impulsive than usual.”
“I would be the same,” Chris admits, “if I was in your shoes.”
“What do you mean?”
“I know what it’s like. I keep thinking about what I act like when Emilia is in pre-rut. How agitated I get about protecting her. She threatens to kick my ass when her rut comes around twice a year and yells at me that she doesn’t need my protection,” Chris huffs a laugh. “She’s right. She doesn’t. It’s one of the reasons Alphas don’t mate with Alphas, a lot of the time. They butt heads too much. Like we’ve been doing this week.”
“Oh,” Adrian says. He’s never even noticed.
“I give you props for even being able to come on a mission at all,” Chris continues. “Leaving her behind can’t have been easy. But we needed you, and you’re doing great. Even if you’re a little more…high-strung than usual. You just gotta learn to channel that energy and anxiety into the work, instead of bottling it up, you know?”
“I guess that makes sense.”
“Okay. I think we’ve had enough sappy conversations in the last several weeks to last a lifetime,” Chris mutters. “Let’s cut that shit out.”
“It’s healthy to be in touch with your emotions,” Adrian says. “Being able to be vulnerable with me is an important outlet, especially since you don’t see a therapist or anything—”
“Shut the fuck up, Adrian.”
“Right. Sorry.”
“You don’t see a therapist either.”
“I am already in touch with my emotions, I don’t need therapy.”
Chris looks at him sideways. “You need therapy more than any other person I’ve ever known.”
Adrian put on his Vigilante suit tonight before breaking into Dev’s apartment, the address listed on his ID. Chris and Ads had tried to talk him out of it, saying he’d draw more attention and look suspicious, but he’d insisted.
He’s still feeling guilty for getting shot last night. For breaking his promise to you. It’s put him on edge, made him nervous about tonight. He doesn’t want to risk getting hurt again, not because he’s afraid of the pain. Yeah, pain sucks, but he’s been literally tortured before. He knows he can take it.
He just doesn’t want to hurt you. And he knows that you’ll take on his hurt like your own. So he dons the suit, even though it’s a hot, steamy summer night, and his visor fogs up every time he exhales. And he waits until dark, when no one will see him sneaking up the building’s fire escape.
It’s a shitty part of town, anyway, nothing but moonlight guiding his way because all the street lamps are shitty and broken. The window itself is shitty, too. The lock on the frame breaks away under his gloved hands with ease, and he clambers into the dark, messy apartment. He makes a face.
“This place is a fucking mess,” he mutters into his comm. He broke a sweat scaling up the building, and he goes to wipe off his face before remembering he’s got the suit on, and does nothing more than hit himself in the face. “Fuck. It’s hot in here. Does he not have any air conditioning? Jesus.”
“Just make sure it’s clear, and then come open the door for us,” Ads says. “I don’t care if he’s got literal garbage piling up. Somewhere in there, he’s got something we need.”
Adrian makes his way through every room of the tiny apartment—the bedroom, where he came in through the window, a tiny living room and kitchen, a bathroom. That’s it. No office, no second bedroom. It’s so small Adrian almost feels claustrophobic, especially when he’s stepping around piles of dirty laundry and old takeout containers.
“It’s clear,” he confirms.
Two minutes later, he opens the front door for Chris and Ads, who wrinkle their noses when they step inside.
“You weren’t kidding,” Ads says. “This is just as bad as Chris’s trailer when he first got out of prison.”
“Hey! That was not my fault. The fucking cops raided my shit.”
“That was totally not cool of them,” Adrian agrees.
“Forget it!” Ads says. “We’re looking for his laptop. Any technology, really. Stuff we can bring back to John to look for.”
“There’s no office. This place is just as tiny as it is messy,” Adrian says, gaze swinging around the room. “God. I’m sweating like crazy right now.”
“It’s not that bad,” Ads says, confused.
But Adrian exhales again, red visor steaming up with his breath, and he starts to feel like he’s choking on it. Chris notices the way he’s tensed up, maybe even smells the change in his scent, the way he gets a little panicky.
“Take the mask off, Adrian,” he says. “There’s no one here.”
Adrian does what he says with trembling hands, inhaling sharply.
“Are you feeling okay?” Ads asks, concerned. “You’re really flushed right now.”
“Just—hot,” Adrian says, strained. He looks down at himself. He wants to take the entire fucking suit off, actually. It suddenly feels too tight, too scratchy, too much. He swallows it down.
“Drink some water,” Chris says, digging through Dev’s kitchen cupboards for a glass. “You really don’t look good, man.” He fills up the cup from the sink tap, and Adrian scowls.
“I’m not drinking his nasty sink water,” he says. “I’d rather die of dehydration. What if he—puts cocaine in it?”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Drug addicts do weird things! Addiction is a mental illness!”
“Are you sick?” Ads asks him. “How was your wound when you woke up this morning? Did I not clean it out well enough? Is it infected? Do you have a fever?”
“No, his healing factor would have taken care of that too,” Chris says, shaking his head. “It’s been a long week. It’s probably just stress. He’s been away from his Omega for almost a week, and her heat—”
“I’m okay,” Adrian insists, through his shallow breathing and shaking hands. He clutches at his mask to hide it. “Just—let’s find this fucking laptop and get the hell out of here. I want to go home.”
And that is what he wants, he realizes, more than anything right now. He wants to feel your gentle hands on his hot forehead, he wants to curl up in your lap, he wants to be laying in the cool grass with you outside in the Checkmate courtyard. No. Not in the courtyard—in bed. In the nest you’ve been fidgeting with all week. He wants to slot himself inside it like the missing piece he is, and feel you next to him and all around him, and go home.
Because for the first time ever, home doesn’t mean back to his mom’s house, or an empty safe house. It means your apartment. It means you.
“Right. Adrian and I will start out here in the living room, Ads, you can tackle the bedroom.”
It takes less than ten minutes for Ads to turn something up. She comes out of the bedroom holding a high-end laptop in her hand, maybe the newest and most expensive thing in the entire apartment.
“Found this under the bed,” she says. “Next to some unspeakable things that I do not want to talk about.”
“A man has needs, Ads,” Chris says, and she rolls her eyes.
“There was more stuff under there too,” she says. “But I thought we should try to crack this first.”
“I’ll keep looking in there,” Chris says. “You and Vig are better with computers than me.”
Ads cracks open the laptop and goes to turn it on, but Adrian stops her.
“Cover the camera,” he says. “He might have some spyware installed, or some shit.”
“Good point,” she says.
Ads powers on the computer expecting it to bring up a password screen, but it just—opens. To all of the files sitting on the desktop, just as messy and disorganized as the apartment they’re sitting in.
“You’re kidding,” Ads says. “He doesn’t even have a fucking password on his shit.”
“This guy is the shittiest black ops agent in the history of the universe,” Adrian comments.
Ads clicks around on some files. Everything appears to be names with a series of random numbers and letters, maybe a code that means something to Dev, but nothing that means anything to them. And while the computer isn’t password protected, it appears that a lot of the documents are.
“We’ll have to bring it to John,” Ads says. “Damn. I was hoping we wouldn’t have to, in case there’s some tracking bug on here or something.”
“Hold that thought,” Chris says, exiting the bedroom with a black notebook held in the air. “Password book.”
“You’re kidding,” Ads says. Adrian reaches for the book and cracks it open.
“It’s all right here,” he says, disbelieving. “File A75FBT2. Password: b00b5.” He and Chris cackle.
“Real mature,” Ads deadpans, but she types in the password, and—it works. They all stare at the screen for a moment, waiting for the gotcha moment. For the computer to crash, for the laptop to lock up. But nothing happens.
“Holy shit, I can’t believe that worked,” Chris says. “This is their tech guy? And he used to work for ARGUS?”
“I’m sure John will have stories,” Ads says. She takes a hard drive out of her pocket. “I’ll copy all the files over onto the drive. We’ll take the notebook.”
“Guys,” Adrian says, because while they’ve been chatting, he’s been reading the file that they just unlocked with wide eyes. “Take a look at this.”
It’s a schedule. A breakdown for the entire team. Job assignments, what the job whether it’s stealing or killing or protection, how much they’re being paid. But most importantly—names. Dates. Times. Locations.
“Holy shit,” Chris says. “This is it. This is—”
“Exactly what we came for,” Adrian finishes.
Adrian is itching to go right now. To burst in, guns blazing, and just fucking take them all out. They’ve got all the information they need. Names, times, and locations of their mission assignments. They could go down the list one by one. Starting with that dick Leon Sullivan.
Only some of the information is encrypted—who hired them. And they could easily work without that. Anyone hiring a mercenary to kill someone is gonna be bad news; no matter what, they’d need to be on guard.
The sooner these assholes are dead, the sooner the entire pack is safe. The sooner you are safe. And selfishly, he thinks, if he can take care of this before the rest of the group has to even get involved, he doesn’t have to worry about you putting yourself at risk, in the line of fire. Not for a while, anyway.
And he’s not the only one thinking about it. Taking immediate action. He can tell Chris is thinking it too. In the van on the way back to the motel, the air in the vehicle is heavy with tension.
“We could go.” Adrian says the quiet part out loud. “We could go now. And kill them. Take care of it.”
Chris hesitates, exchanging a loaded glance with his friend. “I know.”
Chris is stressed, Adrian knows. Maybe even more stressed than he is. Adrian is worried about you. It’s his job to keep you safe. But Chris—he’s the pack Alpha. He’s got everyone’s safety in mind. He’s got the final call.
Ads, in the backseat, finally speaks up. “We should go home. Regroup.” She says it firmly. “This isn’t something we should rush into. Remember what happened last time. When we thought we were prepared. We got ambushed. We should give the hard drive to John. Let him unlock the encrypted shit. So we’re not caught off guard. No surprises.”
Adrian goes tense immediately. Chris meets Adebayo’s eyes in the rearview mirror and nods.
“You’re right,” he says quietly. “We go home. We’ll regroup.”
Before, Adrian might have fought him on it. Part of him wants to, even now. But he’s got a new perspective. There’s a new level of shared life experience that he and Chris have, now, and it helps him understand, a little bit more, the weight that his best friend carries. The lengths that he’s willing to go to in order to protect his pack. If that means being patient—Adrian can do the same. He is determinedly on the same page as his friend: whatever it takes, the pack stays safe, which means you stay safe, and that’s the only thing that matters.
Chris looks over at him, and Adrian realizes he’s waiting for his agreement. That his opinion matters, here. It’s a new feeling. A good one. He swallows and nods.
“We go home,” he echoes, with a little bit of relief. Because he really does just—want you, after days apart.
You’re going to need him soon, anyway, he thinks, and you are more important than anything else.
By the time they pull into the Checkmate parking lot, Adrian is the one driving the van.
He was thrilled when Chris tossed him the keys. He never gets to drive. But Chris and Ads seemed exhausted, and Adrian was wired with nerves and excitement about going home to you, so he happily took over while his teammates napped in the back seat.
“Home!” he says cheerfully, and Adebayo winces awake, rubbing her neck. Chris continues snoring in the passenger seat until Adrian kicks his foot.
“What?” he grumbles.
“We’re back!” Adrian says. He doesn’t wait any longer for the other two to get their shit together. He glances at the clock. 3 p.m. Everyone is still at the office. You’re right inside. His smile grows.
He should probably stop and bring some bags inside. There’s all kinds of shit they need to unpack. Med kits, weapons, his own duffle bags with clothes and personal items. But he doesn’t give a shit.
Adrian just tosses the keys at Chris, still half-awake. They hit him in the face, but Adrian is already outside, the van door slamming shut behind him as he runs inside.
Fleury is the first person he sees. He nearly runs into him, actually, in his rush to get inside.
“What the fuck!” Fleury exclaims. “When did you—”
“Literally right now,” Adrian interrupts. “Chris and Ads are in the van still. Where is she?”
Fleury’s eyebrows furrow. “She didn’t—”
“She’s not here,” says John, and Adrian jerks his head to look at his friend as he exits the break room. “She went home early. She said she wasn’t feeling well.”
“She’s sick?” Adrian says worriedly.
Emilia steps out from behind John. She gives Adrian a pointed look, and his eyes widen.
“Oh,” he says. “Oh, I need to—I need to go—”
He immediately reaches for his phone to call you, hands trembling, ready to fret over you. He realizes then that you’d texted him two hours into the drive.
Hey. I am NOT in heat yet. But I’m reaching the point where I’m cramping a lot and I just want to go home and nest, so I’m leaving early. Don’t rush. I’m only telling you because I don’t want you to worry when you get back to the office and I’m not there. Love you.
“Yeah, no kidding, you have to go,” Emilia says. “I can fucking smell it on you.”
“What—what do you mean?” Adrian says, caught off guard. “Smell what? That she’s in heat?”
He tries really, really hard not to get all pissy about the fact that another Alpha can scent it, the same way that he can. He grits his teeth in an effort not to growl.
Emilia looks at him like he’s a fucking moron.
“Not her. You,” she says, like it’s obvious. She looks at Chris and Ads, who have finally followed him in the front door, carrying in some of their travel bags. “Chris, you’ve been with him for a week straight. It’s a miracle you haven’t killed one another.”
“What?” Chris says, just as confused. “I mean. Yeah, it fucking is, he’s been unbearable all week, but—”
“No shit!” Emilia says. “He’s in fucking pre-rut!”
actually getting pregnant? no. bad. awful. I do NOT want that!!
having them grunt in your ear how they're going to knock you the fuck up like the worthless breeding bitch you are while they pound you into the mattress before cumming deep inside of you? YES. YESYESYESYESYESYES. LITERALLY NOTHING BETTER. YESSSSS. THE BEST. YES PLEASE!!!
