contents (sfw): Dunk x fem!Reader, Modern AU friends to lovers rom-com with pregnancy. Humour, angst, sexual and romantic tension, horny thoughts, fluff, jealousy.
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synopsis: The very awkward morning after accidental sleep over. They try to be normal, but get jealous instead. (Pregnancy status: 10-13 weeks, end of the I trimester).
word count: 9K
a/n: Banner by me, dividers by @strangergraphics, proofread by @hextoken! This is probably the last sfw chapter :v
It's incredibly hot. For one confused second you think the fever has climbed into the mattress and swallowed you. Your clothes stick unpleasantly along the back, one sleeve is twisted under your arm, and throat is dry enough to make swallowing feel like work. When you try to roll you can't quite manage it, because something broad and warm is lying across the middle of you.
One slow blink. Then another, and everything starts coming more shaped in the dull blue wash of the mute telly. People on the screen are moving their mouths as if language has been taken from them for the night and they've been left to mime some tiny domestic catastrophe in a room made of aquarium light.
Third blink, and your eyes drop to where you're being stranded to find Duncan's palm on your stomach. He's asleep beside you, though beside is rather generous.
He's arranged like someone has tried to fold a ladder and given up half way. Half on the mattress, half off it, head near the middle of the bed, one leg bunched under him and the other hanging from the knee down. His glasses sit crooked on his face, skewed and pressing a dent into the bridge of his nose. He's on his belly, cheek smashed into the sheet, mouth slack with sleep, and one huge hand is spread over you with such absurd possession that your first emotion about it is peace, which is aggravating.
He's asleep. He's got no idea what he is doing. Makes the tenderness feel illegitimate to enjoy.
In your lack of enjoyment, you stare, despite there being no sensible reason for it. He looks ridiculous. Too large for the bed, too young round the mouth, all poor limbs at weird angles. A lock of hair has dried wrong over his forehead. The glasses make him look like a child who fell asleep mid-homework and lost the fight to drooling onto the page.
On the top of his left cheek there is a darker speckle. You must've seen it before, surely, but something makes it stand out to you only now. A tiny brown mark set there as if someone placed it with a pin. In the dim, with his face turned loose and harmless, it becomes unbearable. Too specific, intimate and private. A place that ought to be kissed or brushed with a thumb. A detail you have no business wanting to touch.
Your hand lifts very slowly, then stops before your fingers reach him. His shifts. Duncan makes a sound low in his chest, and mutters something into the sheet. You catch no words at first, only the rough shape of them. Then, clearer, sleep-thick and almost cross: “Don' go.”
“Dunk,” you whisper. You lie there with the telly painting him blue and white by turns, feeling your body misread the whole scene with dumb eagerness. It takes the weight of his palm and calls it safety. Takes the crooked glasses and cheek mole and long leg hanging off your bed and begins building a future out of rubbish materials. "Dunk," you say again.
He doesn't wake, only frowns a little, as if disturbed by some dream too small to matter. His fingers flex once, then settle again.
You should move him. His neck will be ruined in the morning. He should go home, or at least get properly under the covers, or do anything that does not involve sleeping half-collapsed. Instead, you turn your face into the pillow and shut your eyes. For one minute, you tell yourself.
One minute of letting it be exactly what it looks like. One minute of his breath scraping softly, of your heart making an idiot of itself in the dark. You fall asleep before the minute is done.
Dunk is carrying a chair. A plain kitchen chair, too small for him, one leg shorter than the others. He carries it through a long corridor full of doors. Behind every door he can hear cutlery clinking, voices low until they boom with laugher, someone saying pass the salt. He knows, with a terrible conviction, that he is supposed to bring the chair somewhere, but nobody told him which room. Every time he opens a door, people inside go quiet, eye the chair first, then him, and fall so silent their mild embarrassment is palpable. He thinks he's arrived too early, or perhaps too late, or with the wrong object altogether.
He clutches the thing in his palm and keeps trying rooms. In some, there is already a chair, but child-sized. In others, there is no space at the table unless someone else gives it up. In one, he sees a woman's hand on the back of an empty seat that could be meant for him, or someone else, but he is too afraid to ask. He cannot see her face.
The chair begins changing weight. Sometimes light enough to carry under one arm. Sometimes so heavy he has to drag it behind himself. At one point he sets it down in the corridor and sits on the floor beside it because he is tired. The place keeps lengthening. The noises of dinner being had behind closed doors get louder and go on without him.
Finally, he finds a room with no table. Only a coat hanging on the back of a door and a small lamp left on. The chair fits there, perfectly. He puts it down and realises the short leg has stopped wobbling. Instead of comfort that the arrangement should bring, it fills him with panic. Simply because it fits. Because someone may come and tell him to leave it there. Worse, someone may come and tell him to stay.
He wakes with a shallow breath, his neck wrung in an odd direction, shoulder dead from the joint down, and his mouth tasting like old tea and a shoe-sole. His body informs him, in detail, that he has been sleeping like an eejit.
For a few seconds he cannot place where he is, nor can he move. The room is dim with a silent AM rerun of Great British Bake Off being ridiculous in the background. Dunk blinks at it, baffled, then looks beside him and goes so still the ache in his spine sharpens to a bright point.
His hand is on you, near clutching your shirt, claiming the rights his waking self would never dare claim. Underneath it your belly rises and falls softly, conducting business in secret. You are asleep on your back, face turned towards him. Fever has left you damp around the hairline. Your mouth is open enough to roughen your breathing. One of your hands is curled near your chin like a child's, and the sight of it makes something in Dunk's chest step forward before his brain can call it back.
He feels the end of the dream leaving him. The waking mind accepts this arrangement with a gratitude of an animal allowed indoors. In a rebuttal to hopeless wandering his subconscious has found a place in the dark that makes sense. There's tenderness in it married with anguish, because the loverboy instinct tells him to rub that hand on you. Wake you with a kiss to the warm temple, and a bunch of husband-like questions. He even starts, a little. His thumb moves in a tiny twitch, when Duncan realises your body is there only by interference and he's a big useless bastard caught within it, taking comfort off a sleeping woman because she failed to shove him away.
Horror arrives late but enthusiastic. He lifts the palm by degrees, as if removing a trap. It peels from the warmth of your clothes and hovers in the air. You make a small sound, and Dunk freezes again. Waits. Counts two of your breaths, then three. When your eyes, thank God, remain closed, he begins the delicate works of extracting the rest of himself from the bed.
Doesn't go too great. He's too much man for stealth at best of times, and these are far from best. His dangling leg has gone numb below the knee, and glasses have been bent against his face with one arm of them getting hooked in the bedding. His hip complains when he tries to move it. Somewhere in the chest cavity his heart is making an attempt at escape. “Shite,” he mouths to nobody.
He gets one foot to the floor, then the other. There is a quiet crack of his back that sounds, to him, like gunfire. You stir, making Dunk stand up too fast and nearly black himself out.
"Mm?" you murmur into the pillow.
"Jus' me," he says, which is possible the least useful thing ever said by a human man. He clears his throat because his voice is coming out rough for some reason. "Didn't mean to wake ye."
A long breath. "Time?" you ask with your eyes closed.
He has no idea. "Early," Dunk says. His phone is in his pocket and when he reaches for it he finds that it shares space with the thing he's managed to forget about stealing from your bathroom. He rubs the lace between his fingers once, then decides to not risk it. "Jus'—early. Go back asleep."
You shift under the blanket. "You sleep 'ere?"
The question is reasonable, which doesn't necessarily mean he has any reasonable answer for it. He can feel every bad one lining up in him, each one worse than the last. Aye, beside you, with my hand on your stomach like someone in a painting about fathers. Aye, after committing an offence in your bathroom. Aye, and if you asked me to do it again I’d probably lie down so fast I’d injure myself.
"Err—passed out," he says instead, because a lie about sleeping on a couch, which would be tremendously better than this, arrives a beat too late in his brain. "On the edge there, like an idiot."
Your mouth moves faintly against the pillow. "Mm."
"I'll make coffee," Dunk says. Leaving the room suddenly seems essential to the survival of everyone involved. "Tea for you. If your throat's still at ye."
You make another sound, already sinking back under. He takes it as permission since he needs it to be one, then turns and leaves before some hidden part of himself decides to confess to anything.
In the kitchen, he builds a case for himself. You'd said he could touch. Had taken his hand and set it there before. You were asleep. He had fallen asleep. People did worse things in the world than sleep beside someone they were having a child with, Dunk tells himself. The case is weak but technically alive, given that Dunk's brain has kindly omitted the infamous bathroom wank.
He puts water on, finds coffee, tea. Opens the wrong cupboard twice, because his mind is circling elsewhere. Soon enough the kettle starts to tremble. Dunk presses the heel of his hand onto one eye beneath the glasses and holds it there until colours bloom behind the lid. He needs to go to work later. Teach children how to throw beanbags without turning it into war. Speak to Egg, maybe. Pretend to be someone who knows what they're doing.
His hand slides to the pocket in another mindless tic. The moment his fingers meet the fabric, Dunk's mind manages to revamp booty into keepsake. The theft is now a romantic expression of unspent yearning that he forbids from tipping into concupiscence. He's a boy in it, and you're a girl in it, and in a better world with more storge poured into the cracks he'd write you a poem or a song. Instead, he remains wanting at a permitted distance, keeping useful and himself light enough to not force the frail scaffolding of things to groan under his weight. Desire, if it must exist, can be made considerate by service. So the underwear stays where it is, if only to feed the part of him that is starving decorously at the edge of the table.
He pours the tea and brews the coffee too strong. Prepares a toast he almost burns if it weren't for you appearing in the doorway. Your hair is flattened on one side and there's a blanked dragged over your shoulders. It makes you look annoyed about having a body at all.
“Up, are ye? How’re ye feeling?” he asks.
“A bit better. Less like I’ve been dug up.” Your hand comes up to wipe a glisten from under the nose. “Don’t you have work?” you ask.
He shrugs. “Second period.”
You glance at the clock on the oven. “You’re going to be late if you keep making toast at me.”
“I’m not making toast at ye," Dunk huffs.
“You are. Aggressively.”
He looks down at the plate, then back at you. Frowns a little. “Do you want it or no?”
You take the toast. “Obviously.”
That eases him somewhere he does not care to examine. He watches you nibble at the corner like someone who've hoped to be hungry and found it not being the case, and the want to stay rises in him so plainly it feels boorish. He could ring the school. Say he is sick. Say there is an emergency. But there are children waiting for him, and Egg, and a life he has been living since before your body started carrying a person partly made of him.
“I’ll go in a minute,” he says. “You’ve paracetamol there. Doctor said plenty of fluids. And rest.”
You give him a look over the plate. “Did the doctor say that, or did the app?”
Warmth crawls over his cheeks. “Both.”
A smile. “God help me.”
His shoulders loosen. “Aye, he is trying,” Dunk says.
You laugh weakly and Dunk takes it as leniency, which is dangerous, because he is exactly the sort of man to become worse under leniency. He tidies what there is to tidy since leaving without doing something feels wrong. You watch him from the counter, eyes heavy. When he finally has no excuse left, he picks up his keys.
“Text me if you get worse,” he says.
You wave a hand at him. “I’ll be fine.”
“Text me if you get worse,” he repeats, softer.
A beat. Your face yields the way children's faces yield when they realise there is no convincing him they are tall enough to reach the upper shelf themselves. “Okay,” you say.
He nods. Stands there a moment too long. Then, he makes himself go before a deranged impulse to kiss you goodbye, loving husband-style, takes root.
The kitchen keeps letting him leave after the door shuts. Like on a photograph taken with long exposure, he exists in versions separated by fragments of seconds. Dunk with keys in hand, Dunk in the threshold, Dunk with his shoulder narrowing through the gap, then already outside. Each one lags and seems to leave you time to say something before the next takes him further away. Then, the latch settles, the last of him goes with it, and you are alone with the toast.
Your head feels full of warm wool. Fever does strange things to proportion: makes an overcooked breakfast swell into domestic delusion, a repeated instruction into devotion, a man leaving for work into some small marital abandonment. You bite the burnt edge because he made it, and while scraping charcoal from your tongue you find yourself genuinely, offensively puzzled that the father of your child has left without kissing you goodbye.
By evening, after sleep and water and the fever coming down enough to gift scale back to things, you manage to demote the morning to a failure mode of a sick mind.
The next week and a half breaks itself into pieces. You work. You rest. You promise Dunk you will take it easy and then answer his texts three hours late from Lyonel's office. Every day you keep meaning to find a date for shopping and fail. First because Lyonel needs copy by yesterday. Then because Rowan wants to compare maternity bras and cries in the changing room because one of them makes her feel like an auntie at a funeral. Then because you sleep fourteen hours and wake with a headache from having done so.
He texts without complaint. Practical things, like Did ye eat? Doctor said to ring if fever comes back. Or: Apricot this week. Which seems a bit large to me but there ye are.
It gets stranger, sometimes. A picture of three children from his school standing proudly beside a mud structure that he explains was meant to be a castle and became a bunker. A blurry photo of Egg’s shaved head with the caption: He says it’s aerodynamic. A message late one evening that only says sleep well, lass, and somehow irritates you so much you stare at it for ten minutes before writing back you too, Dunk.
The nausea starts to loosen its grip by degrees, though it remains spiteful about smells. Coffee becomes possible again from across the room, never near your face. Lyonel’s cologne stays an act of workplace violence. Your own shampoo turns traitor for two mornings, then returns to the side of good. Hunger comes back in blunt, unseemly strikes. One afternoon you eat three slices of toast standing up and then feel so moved by cheese you have to sit down.
Your body keeps making announcements before you can bear to acknowledge why. Your breasts are heavier. Your waistbands leave deeper marks. The lower part of your stomach, easy enough to ignore until now, begins to hold itself differently by evening. In the morning you can still argue with it. By night, bloated and tired and mean with the day, you stand in between the hallway mirrors and turn sideways.
Nothing, you think. Then: something. Then, angrily: shut up.
You lift your shirt anyway. One gives you a version. The warped one offers another, stranger and more definite. Between them you stand multiplied, a line of women all pretending they have not noticed the same small change.
It is hardly visible. May be digestion, may be posture, may be the enormous lunch you ate because a person inside you has lately learnt to ask for food with a fist. Still, your hand goes there in a brief press below the navel while you try your best to avoid the poster-ready, motherly hold. Your fingers instead point down and have to curve sooner than memory thinks they should, because the lower belly no longer gives in quite the same way. There is enough of it now to change the route of your hand. Ordinary soft and crease have begun to pull smooth over the low swell of uterus, stretching the skin a little where it used to kink and fold when you bent. Not much. Just enough for the understanding to carve an informative path, leading from palm to brain.
You finally text Dunk on a Tuesday. Friday? Baby shopping if you’re still game.
His reply comes so fast you picture him holding the phone already. Aye! Course. Then, after a minute: Want me to drive?
You look at the message and tell yourself the warmth in your chest is the usual heartburn. Yes please, you write. If you don't mind.
Course I don't. Another bubble appears: I'll pick you up.
It is both plain and warm enough for you to have to fight yourself over not trying to stretch the conversation further. You smile at it so hard Lyonel's brows crawl underneath the curls on his forehead, then a stupid grin joins them.
On Friday afternoon you change many times. First, you discard the jeans that defy you after two buttons. It makes you wonder whether an already rising necessity to hold clothes in place with a hairband means you've foredoomed your future and the size of Dunk's baby will eventually cause your spine to fold. Sweatpants are an option for a second before you tell yourself to not give up just yet. By the end your bed is covered in garments that no longer fit for various reasons. You stand there in your bra, overheated from the work, and choose a dress because it drops from the shoulders and makes no firm claim on the waist. It solves nothing and simply declines to put a line through the part of you that keeps shifting.
Duncan is waiting by the car, one hand on the roof, looking too large and too earnest for the neighbourhood. Glasses on. Hair still damp from a shower. Jacket open over a plain shirt. He turns when the door shuts behind you.
He looks pleased to see you. Then his eyes drop, and he starts looking worse. Barely a moment, but you see the exact instant he notices the altered line of you beneath the fabric. His face goes open in a way that would be comic if it didn't land straight in the softest, most breakable place you have. His mouth parts. Hand tightens on the roof of the car. You could swear his eyes glisten, a little.
“Dunk,” you warn.
He glances back up. The red has started in his cheeks and gone all the way to his ears, and worse, he tries to shrink from it, shoulders coming in, chin dropping, as if he has been caught looking at something prohibited. You dislike it immediately. He should not have to fold himself smaller over this. So you come the rest of the way and put your arms around him.
Duncan takes the hug a second late, then carefully, like the rules of it might change while he has you. When you press in, you feel the heavy drag of his breath through his chest. It catches you in a stupid spot. Low, first, then warmly, even lower. You have missed him, you realise, with vexation that does nothing to make it less true. When you part, you stay close. Take his hand from where it has gone useless by his side and put it on your stomach.
“It’s mostly bloat,” you tell him.
But Duncan is too far gone. He has an urge to kiss you slow and grateful for it, then a thought about it not being any kind of reward for you stops him. And plenty others. “Aye,” he says, far too gently. “Maybe.”
You roll your eyes because there is nothing else to do with the pressure in your throat. He survives it, since there is a whole afternoon with you still ahead of him, and in the state he is in you will surely roll those pretty things more than once.
He smiles and opens the passenger door for you. “C'mon, then. Let’s go buy things in colours you approve of.”
The car smells of his shower gel and the paper bag of school things he has shoved into the back. You find a crumpled worksheet by your foot, half a dinosaur coloured in with what appears to be sincere violence, and decide against asking. Dunk waits until you have the belt on before he pulls away, then starts driving so slow you have a fleeting thought you'd get there on foot sooner, even pregnant.
For three streets the drive is silent. He checks the mirrors. Changes gear. Does the responsible adult act so completely you start to suspect him of enjoying it.
Then he asks, “That green, is it?”
You look down. Then back at him. "Is what green?"
"The dress."
A blink. You look down again, fully baffled. "Dunk," you say, carefully. “It’s… blue?”
He keeps his eyes on the road. The corner of his mouth goes first, dipping like it has been tugged down by a hook. Then the rest of his face starts failing around it, first around the eyes, where the folds deepen behind his glasses in a way that makes looking at him suddenly feel unwise.
The seat takes more of your weight while a smile works under your nose. “You’re fucking with me.”
“No,” he says.
“You are.”
“I only asked.” He gives one small shrug, then an innocent look so badly timed and so sweet that something in you nearly melts. Before it can, his eyes go back to the road. “Can’t blame a man for askin’.”
“You know it's fucking blue!” Both fists thump against your thighs. "No one's that colourblind!"
Dunk loses it then. A snort gets out of him first, delighted and helpless, and the hand he brings to his mouth comes too late to save anybody. His shoulders jump once. It is such a young sound from such a large man that you have to look out the window for a second to get away from it.
“Nice,” you say. “Making fun of a pregnant woman. Very brave.”
“Ah, hush, wee thing,” he says, still smiling. “You’ll have enough fun out of me at the shop.”
“Will I?”
“Aye. Put me near colours and small clothes and I’m finished.”
His ears are still faintly red from before, but now he looks pleased with himself in a way that makes irritation difficult to keep. “Good,” you say. “I hope they have sixteen shades of cream.”
Dunk makes a wounded sound. “Cruel woman.”
“You started it.”
“I asked if your blue dress was green.”
“And lived,” you mutter, fond. “Count your blessings.”
At the shop there is way too much light and a wall of things you have no right needing this early. Bottles with complicated teats, nappies in blunt white bricks, tiny socks clipped together at the cuffs for feet that are still only theoretical. At the entrance, prams stand in a row with their hoods up and straps lying open, upholstered vacancy with price tags.
Dunk goes straight for a trolley. A large one, naturally. The kind people use when they have produced twins or lost control at a Tesco.
“We don’t need a big one,” you tell him.
He looks down into it, then back at the aisles. Dunk knows this. Logic may insist there will be other shops, other Fridays, other chances to do this properly, but logic has never done much for him when something depends on doing well on the first try. “Might.”
“For what?”
A shrug. “Things.”
You look at the empty trolley, then at where he's looking. “Hard to argue with things.”
He accepts the leave and starts pushing beside you. The trolley objects to him almost immediately. One wheel has a limp, and every few steps it makes a slow, determined pull towards the shelves. Dunk keeps bringing it back with both hands and an amount of care no empty trolley deserves, matching your pace.
For the first ten minutes you are principled. You look at muslins and say they can wait. You touch a pack of newborn vests with animals stitched over the heart and put them back because wanting them this much feels premature. Then, there's a small hat with soft ears you stare at long enough for the hat to grow ugly in front of your eyes, and return it to the shelf with your jaw set.
Dunk picks up a packet of plain white sleepsuits and reads the back carefully. “Those have the fold-over hands,” he says.
You pause. “The what?”
He turns the packet round and points with one large finger. “For scratches. Says here. And Raymun said they can get at their faces with the nails.”
A swallow. “Raymun said.”
“Aye. And some books.”
A woman beside you reaches for cotton pads with the serene expression of someone eavesdropping for sport.
“You’ve been reading about scratch mitts?”
“About babies,” Dunk says, faintly injured. “The mitts were included.”
That is how the first thing goes in the trolley. Fold-over sleepsuits, white, with a little yellow sun stitched near the collar. Then muslins, because babies leak from more places than seems fair. Then a pack of tiny socks, because their size makes something in you go foolish and sore. Dunk puts in a cellular blanket after explaining, with more authority than you are ready for, that the holes are the point.
A small guilt opens under the fondness. He knows about blanket holes while you have done no reading worth mentioning. The first trimester has flung itself past in work, nausea, sleep, and a loneliness you keep stepping over because there are emails to send and copy to fix and a body to haul through the day. The rest of your attention has gone to trying to throttle the lingering horniness by looking at the calendar with your due date on it, as if staring might make the months move faster out of embarrassment.
“You’re unsettlingly prepared,” you say.
“'m not,” he says.
You lean against the shelf and look down at your feet. “You know about blanket holes.”
He looks pleased in a manner he tries to make practical by checking the price. “I know one thing about blanket holes.”
“That’s one more thing than I knew,” you say, and it comes out sad enough that Dunk stops looking at the tag.
He doesn’t know the right words. What he wants to tell you is too large and would come out wrong anyway. That you are doing enough by standing there. By letting him put a blanket with holes into the trolley. By keeping his baby and letting him near enough to have a family around the edges of it. Instead, he comes a little closer and brings the blanket to your cheek. “This one’s soft.”
Your eyes close. A smile finds its way through. “It’s beige.”
“Is it?” he murmurs. “Thought it was red.”
“Dunk.”
It comes out half-whined, laughter pulled unwillingly through the sad place, and relief goes through him so cleanly he nearly grins. He keeps it small.
“How about you put in anything you like,” he says, “and I’ll tell ye what it’s for if I know.”
After that it becomes easier to let wanting have a shape. A changing mat with pears on it goes in because you keep touching the corner and then pretending you haven’t. A packet of bibs follows, then a thermometer, then a soft hooded towel with little ears sewn into the corner. Dunk lifts it, runs his thumb over the edge, and looks at you as if asking whether towels can matter. All he sees is that you love it, so he puts it in.
The bath support takes longer. It is pale and rubbery and shaped in a way neither of you can make sense of until you read the picture on the box. Dunk looks from the baby in the illustration to the object in his hand, then down at your stomach. The movement is so careful your cheeks start feeling warm.
“For washing them?” he asks.
“For keeping them from sliding, I think.”
“Aye,” he says quietly, and adds it to the trolley as if it has become necessary now that he understands it.
He finds nail scissors next. Tiny ones with rounded ends. The hinge makes a useless little click when he tests it, and he almost drops the whole thing for the size of his fingers. His brows draw together. “They’re awful small.”
“So will the hands be.”
He thinks about this. Hands smaller than his thumb, fingers with nails already growing, a whole person arriving with edges that might hurt themselves. He puts the scissors in without another word.
By the end of the second aisle the large trolley has become reasonable. It holds cotton, towelling, small devices, pale things, soft things, proof that wanting can be sorted by category and carried on wheels. You walk beside it feeling a little less foolish each time something else goes in.
Near the clothes, you find two rompers in the same unfortunate family of colours shops invent to distress men. One is pale sage. The other is grey, which feels like cheating even to you. You hold them up against each other.
“Right,” you say. “Test.”
Dunk stops pushing. The trolley wheel makes one last crooked attempt at freedom and knocks his shoe. “Ah, here.”
“No fear. Just tell me what colours these are.”
He looks at the rompers. Then at you. Adjusts his glasses. Then back at the rompers with a focused dread, like he's been asked to defuse something in public. “That one’s grey,” he says.
You cock your head to the side. “Which one?”
His hand hovers, then retreats. “The left.”
“My left or your left?”
He catches his lower lip between his teeth, fighting a smile so broad it puts a dimple in his cheek. “See, that’s dirty work.”
Through the heat fighting its way up your body, you tell him, “Answer the question.”
He squints. Actually squints. A flush begins blooming on his neck with great sincerity. “The one with the buttons.”
“They both have buttons.”
Dunk makes a pained little sound and opens his hands at the rompers, genuinely wronged. “Why would they do that?”
You grin fully. “Because they hate you.”
He breathes out through his nose and takes a step back, stretching the rompers farther from his face, trying for solemn resourcefulness to outdistance his own eyes. “That one is green.”
You look at the romper in your right hand. “This one?”
“Aye.”
“It’s grey.”
His eyes close briefly. “Then the other one’s green.”
“The other one is also sort of grey.”
“That’s cheating, that is.”
A snort gets out of you. The sound of it softens him visibly, though he tries to hide it by taking one romper from you and studying the label. “Sage,” he reads, offended. “Sage is a herb.”
“It is also a colour.”
“It should pick a trade.”
“Do you want the herb-coloured one?”
He looks between them again, then gives up with an honesty you find more damaging than success. “I like the one ye smiled at.”
There is very little to do with that, so you put both in the trolley and move on.
Then, an aisle you find to be a promised land once your eyes rest on the pregnancy pillows arranged in a soft heap. Great curled things, moons and commas and pale sleeping beasts. You press a hand into one and your whole body produces a quiet report in favour. Your hips, back, stomach, and some miserable hinge inside the pelvis all vote yes before you have opened your mouth. “God,” you say. “I need this.”
“Put it in,” Dunk says immediately.
“It’s enormous.”
“So is the trolley.”
You shake your head. “You were waiting to be proved right.”
His lips press together. “A bit.”
You lift a crescent-moon one. It is heavier than expected and shaped to humiliate. Dunk takes it before the second struggle can begin, fitting it into the trolley. It clearly makes you happy but, privately, he hates the pillow with unreasonable bitterness. He feels replaced by stuffed cotton before he has ever been given the job. It is a wicked thought that arrives fully formed anyway: you would not need that great curled bastard if he were allowed to lie where he fit best. The notion burns him so badly he nearly steers into a stack of baby baths.
“You alright?” you ask.
“Aye,” he says. “Wheel’s gone funny.”
“The wheel has been funny since we came in.”
“Aye. Getting worse.”
“Mm.”
The cots are at the back, in a quieter section of the shop with softer light and shelves arranged as if noise would be wrong here. The air smells of new wood and packaging. Little beds stand made up with tiny mattresses and fitted sheets, each one offering a shape to a future that still refuses to hold one for long.
Dunk slows before you do.
There are white ones, natural wood ones, one painted a soft green he wisely does not comment on. Some have drawers underneath. Some turn into toddler beds, according to the cards clipped to the rails. Mobiles hang above them in felt clouds and bees and moons, waiting for somebody sentimental enough to set them moving.
Dunk is that somebody. He reaches up and flicks one with the back of his knuckle. Three small geese begin a lazy circle over an empty mattress.
You watch him watching it. His face has gone quiet in a new way. Earlier he had been pleased, embarrassed, bullied by colours, proud over his research. Now something has pulled him inward. He walks between the cots with the trolley forgotten behind him, barely touching but looking at everything. At one cot, he crouches. His elbows fold over the rail and he peers down into it as if something might already be there if he looks gently enough.
The size of him beside it makes them look like they are meant for dolls, not children. His knees are too high, shoulders too broad, hands folded together like they are too clumsy to be trusted here. Still, the picture settles somewhere tender and inconvenient. This man, bent over a small empty bed, trying to imagine the weight of a person who has so far existed mostly as symptoms, measurements, fruit comparisons, and trouble.
In Dunk’s mind, small beds have chipped rails. Metal corners. Blankets that belong to many children before they belong to more children. He remembers rows of them more than he remembers a single one that was his. Some were too short before he had the language to complain. Some had screws that worked loose. One mattress dipped so badly in the middle that every baby placed there seemed to be sliding towards the same tired hollow. He has no clean memory of being put down in a cot chosen for him before he arrived. He cannot say whether there was one big enough by the time he needed it. There were beds. There were places to sleep. That is a thinner thing.
This one could be picked. Paid for and built before the child came. Waiting with its screws tightened by his hand, its mattress level, and sheet clean.
Your palm appears on his shoulder. “Do you want to buy one today?” you ask.
Dunk looks up. His glasses have slipped a little. “Is it not too early?”
“We’re three months in,” you say. “So technically it isn’t.”
He takes that in like you have granted legal permission for a feeling. His hand stays on the rail. “Could I buy it?” he asks.
“The cot?”
“Aye.” His thumb moves along the wood, then stops, because even touching it too much embarrasses him. “Any one you like. I’d like to buy it. And build it, if that’s alright.”
For a second you have no answer. He looks too ardent asking. Too exposed in the shop light, crouched there amongst rabbits and laminated warnings about safe sleep. The request has come out of him plain, but whatever sits underneath it is large enough to make speech seem like the wrong tool. “Yeah,” you say, softer than intended. “Sure.”
His eyes stay on your face.
“You can pick,” you add. “They’re all pretty to me.”
Dunk looks back into the cot. The geese above the next one have slowed almost to stillness. He nods once, serious as anything, and wraps his fingers round the ribs of the rail. They barely fit there. "D'you like geese?" he asks.
"I love geese," you tell him.
So it's the one with geese. He pays for it separately, then packs everything into the car with the pregnancy pillow wedged behind your seat so poorly it keeps nosing the side of your head all the way home.
Back at your place, Dunk gives you the lightest bags with such poor subtlety that you almost object, then don't. He takes the rest himself, most of it coming in bags that cut into his fingers. When you unlock the door, he is pink in the face and pretending this has cost him no effort at all.
The cot pieces spread across your floor in pale wooden lengths. Screws go into a little bowl. Instructions flatten under Dunk’s palm. He takes his glasses off once to wipe them, puts them back on, and lowers himself to the carpet. You leave him to it and go to the kitchen to make supper out of what can be warmed, cut, or forgiven.
Both things take a long time—supper because a great part of the ingredients makes you feel nauseous upon being cut open, the crib because it is, after all, a rather small object in Duncan's hands. He lays its organs out grouped by the order of assembling, swears a little at the bits and bobs and makes it sound charming enough to worsen the nausea.
You manage pasta, a pan of jarred sauce, and a salad so basic it almost resents being called one. The cucumber is fine until the knife opens it and releases that wet green smell directly into the back of your throat. Onion is impossible. Tomatoes look slimy inside. You stand there breathing shallowly through your mouth, stirring with one hand, watching Dunk through the counter gap while he hunches over the cot and tries to make two pale pieces agree with each other.
It provides you with some inward facing bother, having him there on your floor building furniture for your child. Your body floods itself with hormones and your brain, given one inch of fabricated domestic bliss, takes the whole mile at a run. Him shirtless over the same pieces, sweat caught down his back. Those stupid glasses fogging for reasons caused by different kind of effort. His hands made rougher by wood and screws, touching you after. His face close to yours and his breath smelling of the exact day he has had, and you being able to tell because one can about a person who is theirs.
The pan spits. You look back too late and catch the heel of your palm close enough to heat that pain flashes up before the burn can settle. “Shite,” you hiss, yanking your hand back.
Dunk looks over immediately. “Alright?”
“Fine,” you say. “Just… stupid.”
He keeps looking for another second, then a screw betrays him by rolling under the cot frame. He crouches to retrieve it, one palm braced on the floor, and his shirt rides up at the back.
A narrow strip of lumbar area shows above his jeans. The spine dips cleanly in the middle, framed by the strong cut of obliques at either side, the whole place looking made for hands in a way that feels medically unjust. For holding. For squeezing until your fingers leave shape behind. Suddenly you think of tongues on skin, nails dragging red, his body, specifically, bowing forward under pressure. Your neck feels hot.
The tap goes on. Both hands go under the cold water, including the one that has no reason to be there. You press wet fingers to your throat after, then lean over the counter between the kitchen and the living room, letting the edge hold some of your weight while you try to make your voice even. “How’s it going?”
“Near done,” he says, and steps back with the screwdriver still in his hand.
There is a cot. Around it, the floor is all torn cardboard, folded instructions, plastic sleeves, and one runaway screw. But in the middle of your living room there is a baby bed now, pale and square, looking absurdly small with Duncan standing beside it. He gives one rail a testing nudge.
“Just needs the mattress in,” he says. “Then that’s it, I think.”
To make a point, he reaches up and flicks the mobile. The geese begin their slow circle over the empty space.
You swallow. Smile. “It’s lovely,” you tell him. “You hungry?”
“Aye,” he says, immediate. “Always.” Then his face does a delicate guilty rearrangement. “I’ve a bit for work to do, if I’m stayin’ a while. After I eat. If that’s alright.”
You shrug first, because doing anything else would reveal too much, and pass him a plate. The two of you end up on the couch with the food balanced where it can be balanced. Dunk eats fast, then catches himself and tries to eat slower, which only makes the whole performance worse. He hums through the first few bites. Terribly. Full-throated enough that you nearly ask whether the pasta has inspired him spiritually.
Instead, your body chooses to focus on something more harrowing. He likes it. He likes the food you made in a kitchen with your wet fingerprints still on the counter. This should be ordinary. It lands somewhere below ordinary and starts making trouble.
You get through half your plate before the smell and the day and the stupid little geese overpower you. “Do you want the rest?” you ask, offering it over.
Dunk looks at the plate with plain interest, then at you with stronger principles. “You might want it later.”
“I won’t.”
“You might.”
“Dunk.”
“I’m not scrounging off a pregnant lady, lassie.”
For a second, there is only your stare on him and his enormous moral firmness over three forkfuls of pasta. Then you sigh, defeated, and set the plate back in your lap.
It is fucking weird. So domestic it becomes weird. The ability to sort him properly slips when he is on your couch like that, in your flat like that, eating like that. Part of you cannot understand why the natural progression is running late, one where after supper he is under you, naked and bitten in places not-so-private, so others can see he's spoken for. The cold thought you have been harbouring all this time makes its attempt and struggles to squeeze through.
He is doing it for the baby. He is here for that.
Before you can say anything a normal human might, Dunk leans over the side of the couch for the paper bag and pulls out a clipped stack of worksheets. “Mind if I do this?”
“What is it?”
“Maths assignments.” He shrugs. “From first class,” he adds, as if that explains anything.
You frown at the pages. “Why is a P.E. teacher checking maths assignments?”
“I, uh—maths teacher’s sick. She asked me,” Dunk says. You keep staring at him as if he has just claimed a secondary profession in dentistry, so he smiles and adds, “I’m not that thick, luv. I can manage some first-grader mathematics.”
“Oh… y-yeah, I know.” You shake it off, or try to.
Your brain swells unpleasantly in the quiet that follows. You may not have the best nose for men; that has been proven in several educational instalments. Most of them turned out to be relationship dilettantes with nice-smelling smoke screens. Once the fog came down, you were either dumped or forced to do the dumping for the sake of your sanity. This tactic, though, you know. Damsel in distress. Works exceptionally well on men like Duncan. A nasty little element of your upbringing crawls out then: your mother’s voice, sweet and sour, telling you to always assume the worst of women when precious male specimens are near.
Instead of throttling it, you blurt, “Is she pretty?”
Dunk sucks in some air. “W-what?” You stare at him. He looks genuinely thrown, which somehow makes it worse. “I—I dunno,” he says, blinking. “I guess so? I don’t know, she’s just… a teacher. My colleague.”
Troubleshooting, now. Now, your heart screams. You could say sorry and blame it on being partially brain-dead from nausea. You could apologise and take the hot little shame that comes with blurting something ugly out of nowhere. It is only that the thought of someone else batting her lashes at him does no favours to your stomach or anywhere lower.
You wonder if uterine envy could be a thing, then make yourself worse by staring at the mark on his cheek. It rises when he squints at you. Others must notice it too. Others must notice him, period, because how could they not? They must gape, ogle, crane their necks, lay their palms on his forearm, giggle and lick their lips, willing his eyes to settle there. You wonder if Dunk looks at other women’s lips. If he blushes around them. If he goes warm and clumsy and pleased because someone with normal hormones and a flat stomach asked him for help with sums.
It makes you sick clean through, and before you turn green enough even he would be able to name the colour, you say, “You should ask her out.” Hate yourself in the same instant.
Something in you, meaner and more managerial than the rest, decides to treat the wound as excavation. Dig yourself out by handfuls. If the crush cannot be starved, maybe it can be given walls. Maybe this is simply better. His kindness has become too hard to stand near without misreading it, and every new interval between you feels less like space and more like a test you keep failing in private. If Duncan had someone else in his life, there would be a line thick enough for even your stupid heart to see. A woman from work. A nice one. One who asks him for help with maths and gets his baffled smile over worksheets and no complicated biology grafted to it.
It tastes vile. Hurts so cleanly you almost respect it. Still, you push through, because the alternative is sitting here pregnant and jealous over a woman whose face you have never seen.
Dunk stares at you as if the sentence has reached him in another language. The worksheet in his hand bends slightly under his thumb.
“I mean it,” you say, though your mouth has gone dry. “You don’t owe me celibacy, Dunk.”
His head pulls back a fraction. “I never said I did.”
“No, I know. I’m saying you don’t. We’re still human, aren’t we? We shouldn’t put our lives on a hook because something unplanned happened.”
He says nothing.
You hate this. Hate yourself for sounding sane. “And I’ve been thinking about it too, so maybe it’s a good moment to talk about it.”
That lands. Colour rushes up him so fast it could be fever. Neck first, then ears, then the blunt handsome planes of his face. His fingers crumple the edge of the paper.
“You’ve been—” He stops. Starts again, rougher. “H-how d’you even imagine it?”
You blink, genuinely thrown. “What do you mean?”
Dunk panics, a little. First, because he wants no maths teacher. He has no vacancy anywhere for a maths teacher, pretty or otherwise, no matter how kindly she asks him to take home sums. Secondly, because the thought of anyone coming near you, especially now, makes all the hairs on his body lift in a way he doesn’t like. His chest gets hot. His stomach makes a brave attempt at returning pasta to sender. Some filthy old part of his brain stands up with a club and says: who, exactly, in their right mind, would come close to a woman carrying his child?
The thought arrives first. Primitive, ugly in the teeth. His before he can make it decent. Then air gets in. He drags enough of it through his nose for the mind to take over from the animal. Reluctantly, miserably, he can see the reason in what you are saying. You owe each other honesty and the baby care and some version of friendship that can survive the strain. You do not owe each other the shape of a marriage neither of you agreed to. He counts his blessings, sourly, that the matter has come up now and not seven weeks earlier, when he would have had no claim to even the raw little fury currently making a fool of him.
He looks down at the worksheet. The child has written seven plus five equals eleven. Dunk feels an unreasonable sympathy for the error. “I mean,” he says slowly, “I don’t know how I’d imagine it. That’s what I’m askin’.”
And there it is: the feeling that you have stepped wrong. Put your foot through some tender, rotten board in the floor and now the whole room has heard the crack. You sit up a little, though your body protests it, and gather a blanket around your middle as if that might put things back where they were.
“I haven’t planned anything,” you say quickly. “I only mean… naturally. If it happens. I’ve less chance than you now, obviously, but if something—or someone—happens to be interesting, I’m saying you can.” Your mouth has started running and there is no catching it by the coat. “I’m just saying you can date. That I wouldn’t mind," you lie through your fucking teeth.
Dunk only looks at the papers in his lap. If you stop talking now you are going to cry, and crying over this would make it true in some way you cannot afford.
“I don’t know,” you say, worse now, softer. “I suppose I’m saying you can if you want to. Not that you need my permission, Christ, that’s not what I mean. Just in case you were wondering. Unless you weren’t, then just—ugh.” You press the heel of your hand briefly to one eye. “Forget I said anything. I’m sorry, I’m just—”
“I get it, lass,” he says. Quiet.
You lower your hand.
He smiles at you, and it is so sad your whole jaw goes tight enough to click. “It’s fine,” he says. “I will… keep you posted.”
There is a little hum in your ears. You make yourself smile back. Wide. Awful. Pulled so hard it feels as if someone has hooked thumbs into the corners of your mouth and stretched.
“Yeah,” you say. “Me too. All right. Great. That’s all I’m saying.”
Dunk nods. Looks back at the worksheet. Picks up his pen again.
The telly murmurs low. His pen scratches red ink over paper, and the relief of both of you having behaved so reasonably is horrendous.
contents (nsfw): Dunk x fem!Reader, Modern AU friends to lovers rom-com with pregnancy. Humour, angst, misunderstandings, Reader is having a hard time, Rowan is a good friend, lots of yearning, underwear theft, scent kink, masturbation.
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synopsis: Aftermath of the failed proposal with life kicking Reader's ass a bit. Thankfully she has Dunk to help her, but who will help Dunk? (We are something like 8-10 weeks in with the pregnancy).
word count: 9,7K
a/n: Banner by me, dividers by @strangergraphics, proofread by @hextoken! Happy birthday to the Birthday Anon, I hope you like panty sniffing done by sad boys :3
In Duncan’s mouth Will you marry me? is actually Should we marry? said with the conviction of someone asking directions. And that, perhaps, is what does it in the end.
Because you have felt everything these last two weeks with such abhorrent intensity already. Tired enough to resent objects. Always hungry and then disgusted mid-way through the meal. Sick in sly little turns that don’t reach vomiting and therefore cannot even be dramatised properly. Your tits ache. Your stomach goes queer at smells that used to be your own kitchen. On top of all that, you have heard the heartbeat for the first time and nearly climbed into Duncan’s ribs from the force of it, and then scowled a little for how naturally it came.
He took you home. He sat on your floor and worked your feet in those big careful palms until your bones melted. Neither of you said a thing about it, because a gesture like that only stays innocent in the hands of very unawkward people, and you are not those people.
When he draws an actual ring, and one that looks insultingly as though he has thought of you in the choosing of it, you feel too much to sort cleanly.
The thing itself is dear. You would wear it. You might have loved being given such a thing under a different sky. But the frame round it spoils the first astonishment. It comes to you freighted with duty, with fright, with his giant impossible goodness, and you hate yourself for the sharp bright flicker in you that wanted, for one deranged second, to say yes simply because he looked so earnest asking.
You cannot tell him any of that in the moment. If you open your mouth you may cry, or accept, or ask something humiliating like whether he means now or only because of the baby. Some mean little girlish organ inside you had wanted to be chosen and now cannot tell whether this counts—it must be what all this searching has been about. Your body, traitor that it is, chooses for you.
It sends the whole knot of feeling out the wrong door. A laugh comes on you so hard it near doubles you. By the time you clap a hand over your mouth it is too late; another peal gets out, then another, and your eyes are stinging with water. And it doesn’t just come because the whole thing is ridiculous, though God, from one angle it is. You are laughing because it is unbearable and because if you do not laugh you may do something much worse, like take the ring and break your own heart with it.
He sits there on his heels and stares at you like he’s ashamed of existing, so you troubleshoot instead of being honest with anyone in the room. Wipe those tears and ask him if he’s lost his mind. Not because you think so, just to check if the child is going to have two lunatic parents or just one.
You’ve a hunch neither of you is fully sincere or fully at your wits, because how can one be when things are happening this fast and with no pause in sight. He asks if you’re angry, and you tell him no despite being, a little. It is an odd thing to be proposed to and feel as if what’s being offered is the mind’s emergency measure rather than the heart’s own movement; comfort a person produces because they cannot reach the wound itself and so place something useful nearby and hope it helps. Maybe not angry exactly, then, but faintly soured by it. Your mother would laugh herself sick at the whole arrangement, so both the proposal and the baby go straight into the enormous drawer of things you will never tell her.
You answer a half-measure with one of your own and tell him the ring is pretty. Then, because cruelty is sometimes only honesty in shoes, you add that he ought to keep it for an actual wife. At that Duncan looks so gravely stricken you almost take it back, but then you put it on the day being too full of feeling for either of you to know what to do with it, never mind all of it together.
When you linger on the fact that you’ve just been proposed to by a man you know hardly anything about and who knows hardly anything about you beyond what friends of friends know about each other, he says possibly the first true and sensible thing all evening. He asks if you can hang out. And for a great many reasons you are glad.
It is a good idea not to live estranged. It will be good for the baby, when it finally arrives, to find parents who know something of each other beyond preferred lager and whose turn it is to get the next round. And despite part of you shrinking from the performance of it and all the little consequences that follow—shop girls smiling at the poor doomed pair, strangers deciding what you are to each other, the whole world eager to drape a shape over you before you have made one yourselves—some tiny romantic crumb in you howls at it all the same.
Because there is devotion in Duncan. It lives in his eyes and hands and shoulders, in the slight lop of his mouth when he looks at you now. Even if it is only for the baby, you decide you can live inside it for a while. Better, perhaps, to rent a shabby house than remain homeless.
Silence, for a while. He sits next to you, making the sofa dip so your hips slant with it. The box turns in his fingers. Finally he snaps it shut and pockets the ring. He sighs from somewhere low in himself, tips his head back and says, “I should probably go. Will ye be all right?”
“Mm,” you say. “It’s like living in a perpetual hangover. I’ll be fine.”
He nods to that, then gathers himself off the couch and points vaguely at the door as if he has to persuade himself towards it. There is absolutely no reason for him to stay. You are fully capable of boiling your own kettle and feeling odd in your own flat. He gets as far as the door before you stop him. “Hey, Dunk—”
His head lifts. “Aye?”
“How did you know about pregnancy weeks?”
“Oh.” He shifts a little. “I told—” He swallows, suddenly looking as if this may have been a tactical error. “I told Raymun. Hope that’s all right?”
“I told Rowan,” you say. “I guess we’re even. So?”
That brightens him a little. “Raymun showed me an app.” He is already pulling his phone out. “Look.”
You drift closer while he opens it. He shows you a pastel little diagram with the baby floating in a black oval like a bean in space. “Sweet pea now,” he says, with such fondness it nearly short-circuits you. His thumb taps ahead. “And that’s next week. Then that one.”
You look at the screen, then at him while he doesn’t notice. He is completely engrossed. He starts telling you what vitamins the app says you should take and what it recommends for nausea, and by then you have to snort.
“Okay,” you say. “I’ve seen enough. You can go now.”
He sinks a little at that. “D’ye mind it?”
“No.” You shake your head. “It just feels strange that you’ve been out there with Raymun nailing logistics while I’ve been talking to Rowan about everything except the logistics and trying to figure out how to sell Lyonel’s booze. Not exactly pregnant behaviour.”
Dunk goes solemn with that, the way he does when he thinks he has been handed a job. “I can do the logistics,” he says. “If ye want.”
You stare at him for a beat. It does offer to take something off your back. Then, just as quickly, the other side of it rises: handing him the weight of it all, letting him get practical and useful and necessary, and knowing the arrangement has an end point. Something in that feels wrong. Unfair to him. Unhealthy for you.
So you smile, a bit tight. “I’ll get the app too.”
He studies your face as if checking whether that is a real answer. “Right.”
“But I don’t mind that you’re interested,” you add. “It’s nice.”
That softens him. He nods, pockets the phone, hesitates a moment, then bends and kisses your forehead. “Sleep well, lass.”
You close the door behind him and groan into the empty flat at the whole ridicule of it. At the proposal. At the app. At the forehead kiss. At the fact that you are now painfully aware of how tender he was with your feet, and wonder why in God’s name your brain insists on filing that under some deranged version of an erotic encounter.
With the next appointment scheduled for two weeks from now, you half-ass the promise of hanging out by merely keeping Dunk in the loop. It is mostly texts and short calls. Between work and Rowan, who has fully surrendered to the role of pregnant wife-to-be, it is all you can manage.
You meet her twice for breakfast, partly to compare symptoms and partly for girl talk, though those two things keep bleeding into each other. Pregnancy, you learn, comes in all flavours and tempers, because Rowan is your mirrored opposite in nearly everything. She is fidgeting, restless, forever adjusting in her chair, forever talking, forever midway through choosing flowers or dresses or napkins or whatever fresh circle of hell weddings contain. She has colour in her cheeks and too much life in her limbs. You, meanwhile, are so tired you could put your head down in the jam and sleep there.
“I’m serious,” you tell her over tea and toast on the day of the second appointment. “It’s like my body has decided this body no longer matters. We are now focusing on making a new body, so all my energy goes into this.”
Rowan laughs so hard she nearly snorts tea. “I did read that, actually,” she says. “That it can hit you like that. Rotten luck that it picked you, though.”
“Cheers,” you mumble through the sore in your throat from all the other things you don’t talk about.
“How are you even managing work?”
You sigh and drag your fork through egg you no longer want. “Well. I suppose Lyonel thinks I’m burning out, because I fell asleep on my hand the other day and he actually looked concerned about something for the first time in his life.”
Rowan blinks. “Hang on—you didn’t tell him?”
Your face wrinkles. “That I’m pregnant and will most likely go on maternity leave in a few months and suffer the consequences of it? Not yet.”
She gives you a fond, patronising look over the rim of her cup. “You do know you’ll have to stop work at some point, right?”
“Part of me knows it, yes. For now I can’t. And you should be glad, because your future wife status depends on it.”
Rowan scoffs. “One of these days Lyonel’s cologne is going to make you puke on his expensive shoes and he’ll send you away before you get any say in it.”
You grimace. “Duncan says it passes. That the first few weeks are hard and then it gets a little better.”
She goes still and just blinks at you. “I’m glad you have another pregnant hen to seek advice from.”
“Fuck off,” you mutter. “He’s just… engaged.” As soon as it leaves your mouth you can hear the irony of it. “As in dedicated,” you correct, a beat too late.
“What was that?”
“Nothing.”
“No, no.” Rowan points at you with a bit of sausage. “That there. What was that?”
You go quiet, shoulders tightening, and pray uselessly into your tea, god no, god no, god no.
She sees it land. Her eyes narrow. “Did Duncan—?”
Playing dumb proves to come with more effort than grace. Still, you try: “Did Duncan what?”
“What did he do?”
There’s no way of saying it without getting berated, so you mutter it into your tea first and have to say it again. “He proposed.”
Rowan freezes, then grabs both your hands off the table and turns them over, inspecting them as if evidence may yet materialise there. “I see no ring here, though,” she says, a little panicked.
“Well,” you say, pulling a face, “I said no.”
That gets you a full scowl. “Why the fuck would you say no? I thought you liked him.” Under her nose, she adds, “You liked him enough to fuck him.”
You scoff and yank one hand back. “I don’t fucking know him. He’s just been… there for two years, and I know nothing beyond what team he cheers for and that he’s friends with Raymun because they met down the fucking pub. That’s it, Rowan.”
Her face softens then, annoyance giving way to something careful. “Hun. I know it’s backwards. I know it’s not ideal. But have you thought this through? Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. He’s a good lad, and he likes you, and—”
“I cannot think of a worse thing than baby-trapping a guy who’ll look back and resent me years on,” you cut in. “Call me a thick-o, but I don’t want to be proposed to because I got accidentally knocked up. I know it’s noble. I know it.” You stare down at your plate. “It’s just… not what I want. Ugh, it’s insane, right?”
Rowan goes solemn at that. For a second she looks as though she is about to tell you she knows a thousand worse fates than this, and you are sure she does. Then, she reins herself in. “It’s not insane,” she says. “And I get it. I’m proud of you, actually.”
You look up.
She shrugs, picking at the handle of her cup. “You’re right. We don’t have to do a thing just because there’s a path worn into the ground for it. It’s only—” Her mouth goes a bit crooked. “I’ve spent half my life being dead set against this sort of carry-on, and now that I’ve gone and done the properly transgressive thing of following the path, it feels disgustingly right. So I forget, sometimes, that not everyone’s built like me.”
“Thanks,” you say, and mean it. Inside, of course, the truth is more embarrassing. You do want it. You just want it with a hundred conditions attached, a whole chain of stupid ‘buts’ clamped round the ankle of it.
Rowan lets the silence sit only a moment before she tilts her head. “Are you all right otherwise? Apart from the obvious.”
You cringe and cover half your face, as if anyone in the café might read your mouth. Then you lean in and whisper, “I’m… weirdly horny.”
She gapes at you. “Don’t piss me off.”
“What?”
“Well, that, for one, I envy.” She sits back with a huff. “I’ve been feeling all sorts of gross about it, and whenever Raymun gets ideas I swat his poor arse off.”
You shrug, self-conscious enough to stare into your tea. “We should maybe swap then.”
“Well, have you thought about Duncan?” Rowan asks. “You’ve already done it once, so—”
“Christ, Rowan.” You drop your hand and stare at her. “How do you imagine this going? Hey, I won’t marry you, but we can fuck, how about that?”
A grin twitches at her mouth. “I can’t imagine him saying no, to be honest.”
“That is not the point.”
“No, but it matters.” She points her fork at you. “You already know you don’t hate sleeping with him. He very clearly didn’t hate sleeping with you. The pair of you have been carrying on like two Victorian widows over one drunken shag, and meanwhile here you are whispering across your breakfast that you’re horny.”
You groan and rub at your forehead. “You make everything sound revolting.”
“I make everything sound exactly as it is.” Rowan chews, swallows, then says, “You don’t have to make it tragic just because it’s awkward.”
“It would be tragic,” you mutter. “He proposed. I said no. That tends to put a dampener on things.”
“Did you say no because you don’t want him?”
You go quiet.
Rowan arches her brows. “Well?”
“No,” you admit. “I said no because I don’t want that version of it.”
“There you are, then.”
“There I am nowhere,” you snap, feeling warm in the neck. “What am I meant to do? Ring him up and ask if he fancies helping me through some sort of hormonal collapse?”
She snorts. “Put like that, maybe not.”
You give her a flat look.
Rowan softens again. “I’m only saying he’s not some random man off the street. And you’re already tied to each other now, whether you marry or not. It’s not wicked to want a bit of comfort from the father of your child.”
You stare at the dregs in your cup. “You say that as if it’s sensible.”
“I say that as if you’re both making this harder than it has to be.”
There is enough truth in that to irritate you properly. You sigh, push your plate away, and mutter, “Maybe I should just reinstall Hinge.”
Rowan laughs from the throat. “Aye, brilliant plan. All the amazing options that start knockin’ once you announce you’re pregnant. Lovely, hope you like oddballs.”
You sigh.
“Wait till you start lactating,” she adds. “That’s when the real ones come out.”
“Oh, shut up,” you groan.
She is still laughing when you glance at your phone and swear. “Bollocks. I’ve got to go back.”
You shove your chair back, gather your bag in a hurry, nearly knock your spoon onto the floor, fix it, then make for the door before doubling back because leaving Rowan with only a wave feels wrong somehow. She is still sat there, one hand over the almost non-existent curve of her stomach in that absent new way of hers, when you bend and wrap your arms round her.
“Thank you for being pregnant at the same time,” you murmur into her hair. “I think I’d go mad without you.”
Rowan squeezes you hard round the ribs. “You’re still mad,” she says, getting a laugh out of you. She tips her head back to catch your eyes. “Go on, then. Before Lyonel sends a search party.”
You kiss her temple. “Love you.”
“Yeah, yeah. Off you fuck.”
You leave smiling, then rush the whole way back to work with your bag slipping off your shoulder and your stomach sloshing tea in protest.
At the office it feels as if Lyonel has taken a bath in musk while you were gone. He gives you a long look the minute you step in, eyes skimming you head to toe with all the tact God forgot to put in him.
“You look a bit sickly,” he says. “Maybe I shouldn’t let you out for lunches.”
You show him your tongue for lack of a better response and drop into the chair opposite his desk.
He only grins and shuffles the mock-ups closer. The cider campaign has spread across the whole surface in glossy disorder: bottle shots, orchard photos, two possible taglines circled in red, one moodboard full of damp gold light and apples split open with their insides showing. Lyonel taps one of the layouts with a ringed finger.
“This one looks like we’re selling grief,” he says. “Which, granted, we often are, but I’d prefer it if the customer only realised that after the second bottle.”
You snort and pull the page nearer. He is happy enough after ten minutes of rearranging copy, swapping a photograph, and vetoing one slogan with the explanation that it sounds ‘like a priest trying to flirt.’ By the time you get him to approve a version, you are almost enjoying yourself.
Then he reaches for the vape. Your tongue clicks against your palate.. He pauses with it halfway to his mouth and looks at you over the top of it. “What?”
“Could you maybe… not smoke that inside?”
His brows lift. “Smoke?”
“You know what I mean.”
He studies you another second, then sets it down. “Touchy.”
“And just reminding you,” you mutter, looking back to your notes, “I need to leave earlier today.”
That earns you another look, sharper this time. Suspicious, interested and irritatingly awake. “Doctor’s visit again?”
You do not look up. “Yeah.”
“Should I be concerned about you?”
“No,” you say. “Why?”
“Well.” He leans back in his chair a little. “You are either being diagnosed with cancer or pregnant, and both options are terrifying.”
Your head comes up so fast your neck nearly cramps. You say nothing. Only stare.
Lyonel’s mouth shifts. Absurdly, horrifyingly knowing. “You think I’m entirely self-absorbed,” he says. “Fair enough. But I do see things.” His voice drops a little. “Are you all right? Honestly.”
You blink at him. “Lyonel.”
“Am I right, then?” He reaches over and lays his hand over yours where it rests on the notes. The gesture is so uncharacteristically gentle it alarms you more than the question. “Am I such a terrible boss,” he asks, “that you’re keeping important things from me?”
You swallow. “These are private things, though.”
“Well, we’re friends too, I’d hope.”
You hesitate, then say, small, “Option B.”
Lyonel goes still. For one second his face is unreadable. He turns it over in his head, all of it, faster than should be possible. Then, his grin breaks wide and sharp.
“Is it with the giant?” he asks. “You are going to have a terrible time pushing that out of you.”
You choke so hard your eyes water. Between denial and laughter, what comes out is, “How the fuck did you know that?”
“Please.” He flicks his fingers. “Let’s say I could smell how wet between the legs he was for you.”
“You are disgusting.”
“And yet correct.”
“I’m reporting you to HR.”
“We have no HR.”
“To the unions, then.”
Lyonel laughs outright at that, all pleased with himself. “Go on. Tell them your decadent employer guessed you got knocked up.”
You cover your face with one hand. “I hate you.”
“No, you don’t.” He tilts his head. “So. Duncan.”
You groan.
“The teacher. The very large one. Earnest eyes. Built like a provincial war memorial.”
“Oh my God.”
“He does have the look of a man who’d apologise to furniture after walking into it.”
“He is a nice person,” you defend, not knowing exactly why.
Lyonel catches that and his grin turns sly. “Ah. There she is.”
You glare at him. “Don’t.”
“Have you told him?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“And nothing. He knows.”
“Stunning. Riveting. You ought to write fiction.”
You drag in a breath through your nose and let it out slowly. “He’s been decent.”
Lyonel’s face softens by a hair. “That matters.”
You nod.
He toys with the vape without lifting it. “So tell me. Is this good news or bad news?”
You look down at the papers, then at his hand still near yours, then away. “It’s just news,” you say. After a beat, quieter: “And I’m keeping it, so I guess we can tip that toward good.”
Lyonel laces his fingers together and exhales through his nose. “Can’t believe you’ve made me an uncle. I think I’m too young for that.” His hand reaches for the vape again by instinct. You give him a look. “Right,” he says, abandoning it. “Sorry.”
That surprises you almost as much as the earlier concern did.
He folds his arms over his chest and watches you for a moment. “If you need anything, you come to me.”
You huff a laugh, slightly phlegmy. “I’ll remember that when it’s time to change a nappy.”
“I don’t think the daddy would like me doing that, pet.”
Briefly and with some fatigue, you think about correcting both the pet and the easy assumption that there is now some shared domestic future between you and Duncan that other people can see from the roadside. In the end you only say, dryly, “I suppose not.”
He lets you off the hook, at least for now. The work gets finished early as promised, and by the end of it you feel—and likely look—wrung out enough for Lyonel to mutter only, “Good luck,” on your way out, then give you a smile you decide is almost disturbingly sincere.
It is early enough still for the sun to play hide and seek between the clouds. Every time it slips out it goes suddenly warm; every time it vanishes it turns bitch-cold again. You cannot tell whether spring is truly this changeable or if your body has simply gone mad. Your back feels damp under your clothes, in turns hot and clammy, and you hurry to the clinic while trying very hard not to examine the faint butterfly feeling in your stomach at the thought of seeing Duncan.
He is already there when you arrive, and for one idiotic second all you can do is look at him. He is in full P.E. teacher attire: shorts meant to hit a normal man at the knee and which on him land somewhere between above-knee and mid-thigh, a big sweatshirt with some washed-out print across the front, and, as usual, a piece of vision aid that should by all laws of God and man do nothing for you and somehow does. He turns when he spots you and his whole face alters around it.
“Hey,” he says at once. “You all right?”
“Why does everyone keep asking me that?” you mutter.
His mouth twitches. “Well. You look a bit…”
“A bit what?”
He eyes you with care. “Tired.”
You give him a look. “I fucking am. I’m making a child while working and remaining part of society.”
He chuckles, low and warm. You stop then, look him over once more, and narrow your eyes. “Why do you look like you’ve run from school?”
“I did run from school.”
You bark a laugh, and the day improves by a small but measurable margin.
The doctor is the same as last time, only mildly less tense, as if you have all now agreed this is really happening and may as well proceed like adults. He asks a lot of questions, looks through your results, and does another scan. The heart is still there. Still beating far too fast for something the size of a whatever-it-is-now to be allowed such force. This time Duncan is less struck dumb by it. He puts an arm round your shoulders and keeps his mouth pressed to your temple through half of it, like this is normal friends behaviour. You let him.
“Nine, maybe ten weeks,” the doctor says after a while.
Duncan, without missing a beat, goes, “That’s a kumquat, I think.”
You turn your head just enough to stare at him. “A what?”
“A kumquat. Or near enough.”
The doctor laughs. “Your—” he pauses, obviously thinking better of whatever word he was about to use, “—the father has been doing his reading.”
“Clearly,” you mutter.
The doctor talks you through what to expect over the next weeks, confirms the nausea is normal, then stops and looks at you more closely. “Have you a cold?” he asks.
“What?”
“You look a little feverish.”
“Great,” you say. “Another thing to add to all the other things.”
He takes your temperature, peers at your throat, asks a few more questions, then rules that yes, on top of being pregnant, you are also simply ill. You lie there thinking that if the female body is such a miracle of design then the designer ought to be taken out and shot.
You get slightly berated for trying to carry on as normal. Duncan gets visibly worried beside you, which is more annoying than it should be because it lands warm all the same. The doctor prints another picture. This one Duncan takes before you even fully register it exists.
“You can keep that one,” you tell him as you sit up properly again. “We’ll swap. One for one.”
He looks at the printout like it might dissolve from sheer luck. “Aye?”
“Aye.”
That seems to please him so much he goes quiet.
By the end of it all the doctor is writing things down, updating dates, reminding you to rest, and then, with the authority of a man who has decided enough is enough, tells Duncan to take you home. You lift your head. “She’s in the room still.”
The doctor only waves a hand as if this changes nothing.
Duncan nods. “Aye. I’ll take ye. Came by car.”
You turn to him. “Why are you by car?”
“I’ve shopping in the car,” he says.
That is so obviously not the whole truth that you narrow your eyes at him, but he only holds the scan picture carefully by one corner and avoids looking guilty by sheer force of size.
He manages to get you into the car without much trouble, stops by the pharmacy to get paracetamol because by now he knows it is the only relief pregnant women are allowed, and ignores all your whines and huffs about how you are going to be fine and he should not fuss. And it is not that Duncan is cross with you. It is only that, in the two weeks between the last appointment and this one, you have managed to see him exactly zero times, push Raymun’s cider business so far ahead it is nearly on the shelves, and get yourself ill enough that Dunk knew something was up the minute he laid eyes on you.
His own two weeks have not exactly been light either. Half of them he’s spent wondering how much of his presence would count as help and from what point on it would just become foisting himself on you because he likes the idea of being near. The other half has gone on Raymun, who is near frantic over Rowan not wanting much done to her except the rubbing of her back and the fetching of impossible things, and on Egg who says things in that level little voice of his that sit in Dunk’s head for hours after. That Daeron fell asleep in a chair with a cigarette still going. That Aerion told him if he is so clever he can start paying rent, then emptied Egg’s schoolbag out on the floor to see whether there was anything worth selling. That Aemon stopped calling. That their father is due back and everyone in the house is acting like weather before a storm. Egg says all of it with a shrug that is far too old on him, as if he is only reporting on the state of the bins. Duncan keeps having to stand there and answer like a teacher and not like a man who wants, quite badly, to go round and start dragging grown males out by the hair.
So Dunk has been carrying that as well, turning it over with no good answer to show for it. Because if he pushes too hard, Egg will only shut up and look at him with that old little-man face of his. And if he lets it lie, he feels like a coward. It leaves him in a state he knows well by now: worried in three directions, sleeping badly, and making plans for other people because it is easier than admitting he cannot sort the ones already in his hands.
By the time he pulls up outside your place, he has worked himself into a quiet state about it. As pure rage is alien to him, it lingers in the area of a thick, stubborn worry that sits in his throat and will not shift. He goes round to the back, reaches into the boot, and gathers the bags before following you to the door so naturally it is clear he has decided this part without consulting you.
You glance back over your shoulder while digging for your keys. “I take it you’re coming inside?”
“Aye,” he says. “And you’re going to bed.”
You frown at him. “It’s four in the afternoon.”
“Which gives you plenty of time to rest.”
Your shoulders go stiff. You fold your arms across yourself. “Do not order me around.”
“I’m askin’ nicely,” Dunk says. Then he adds, “But you know damn well I could pick you up and put you there myself.”
That stalls you for a second. Just enough of one that he almost smiles. Then you unlock the door and let the both of you in.
Inside, he sets the bags down by the kitchen counter. You turn on him with your arms still folded, but there is less heat in it now. “Are you angry with me?”
“No.” He shakes his head. “But I don’t like bein’ away for two weeks and findin’ you like this.”
Your face does something small and crumpled. Your eyes begin their glimmer, and panic goes through him so quick it near makes him breathless. “Ah, shite—no, lass, I didn’t mean—” He comes to you, hands half-lifted. “Sorry. Sorry. Don’t do that.”
You huff a weak laugh that sounds one bad inch from tears. “I’m not doing anything.”
“Aye, well. Stop it anyway.”
Another little breath goes out of you. You rub under one eye and lean your shoulder briefly against the wall. “It’s fine,” you murmur. “Maybe I really am tired.”
Dunk softens straight through. “What d’you need?”
You think on it, then sigh. “I guess bed isn’t the worst idea.”
“There we are. D’you want to eat something first?”
“No,” you say, with the grim conviction of the truly afflicted. “Everything’s disgusting.” A beat. “You could make me tea, though. And for yourself. If you want to stay a bit.”
He nods. “Aye.”
You point vaguely down the hall. “I’ll see you in the bedroom, then.” Then you stop. Turn back, and squint at the bags by the counter. “Dunk?”
“Mm?”
“What’s in those?”
He goes sheepish, and because there is so much of him, it shows everywhere. “Bought some food I read’s good for you,” he says. “And tea. And some…” He glances at the bags. “Baby things. Since you were busy.”
You stare at him. Actually choke a bit on the start of a reply. “That’s… uh—”
His stomach drops. “Too much?”
“No, no.” You shake your head fast. “I just—never mind. What did you get?”
It steadies him some. He crouches by the bags and starts pulling things out with dour practicality. Crackers. Ginger tea. Clementines. Yoghurts with that miserable healthy look food for pregnant women always seems to have. Then the baby things. A packet of little socks. A soft blanket. Three tiny vests. And, with all the certainty of a man unveiling a sound decision, a few bits of clothing in what is, to him, plainly green.
“It’s because we don’t know what it’s goin’ to be yet,” he explains. “Neutral, see. And I like green.”
You take the little romper from his hand and just stare at it. Your face pulls tight in a way he recognises on the spot. He is about to be roasted. Oddly, he finds he does not mind that at all. In fact he waits for it with a kind of interest.
Instead, you look up and say, “Can I see your glasses for a second?”
Dunk frowns. “Why?”
“Just gimme them.”
He bends down enough for you to pluck them off his face. The room blurs. You put them on and mutter, “Jesus.”
Then, you hold up the romper with theatrical concentration and inspect it. Dunk has to lean back and squint uselessly to see anything at all. You look strange in his glasses. Endearing too, though he wishes very much he could see you properly. The frames are too broad for you and the lenses blow your eyes up enormous. Worse still, you are wearing something of his, however briefly, and that does something ill-advised to the inside of him.
You smack your lips. Sigh. “Nope. It’s not the glasses. Still poo-coloured.”
Dunk blinks at the blur of you. “What?”
“This is not green, you goof. This is shite-coloured.” You hold the thing up between two fingers. “Who makes baby clothes in this shade? Duncan—are you colourblind?”
“It is green.”
“It is absolutely not green.”
“It is.”
You grin so wide he can hear it in your voice. Then you laugh, loud and helpless, and because of course he does, he starts laughing too, though he still feels entirely right. “It’s green,” he insists.
“It’s baby diarrhoea.”
“That’s still under the umbrella of green.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Give us those back,” he says, reaching for you at last because this has gone on long enough.
You dodge half a step, still laughing. “Clearly they don’t help you at all—”
But he gets an arm round your middle anyway and pulls you in. Just enough. Enough that your laugh shortens against him. Enough that his face lands close to yours, too close for his peace and too blurred for his comfort. He can barely make out the shape of you now. Only the warmth of your body, your breath, and the faint line of your mouth.
Then, your hand comes up and settles on the back of his neck. “I love your enthusiasm,” you say, softer now. “But can we go shopping together? I promise I’ll make the time.”
Dunk closes his eyes at that. Just for a second. Lets the touch be there and himself experience the warmth seeping from your skin to his throat. His thumbs move once over your waist as if they have thoughts of their own.
“Mm,” he says after swallowing. “Can I get my glasses back now? I’ll snap my neck without them.”
You huff a laugh and slide them back onto his nose. He feels the familiar weight settle. When he opens his eyes again you are still there. Close enough to punch his nose with the smell of butter and clementine zest.
“Will you be good and go to bed now,” he asks, “or do I’ve to make you?”
You step out of the embrace, roll your fucking eyes, and at this point Dunk hates the way Pavlovian responses work in his own body. Then, you turn, march off toward the bedroom, and despite Duncan knowing this whole evening is going to be quite literally hard for him, the pinch he’s been carrying at the back of his neck loosens one notch.
So he makes the tea. Thinks a great many things about how to survive this without making a complete idiot of himself, and then remembers this is what he wanted. He steps through your flat with the odd sense that your corridor accommodates him better than his own, then finds the bedroom door wide open, the telly on so low it is nearly only light. And you—on your back in bed, over the duvet, lousily half-covered by a throw and still in your clothes, with one shoe on as if you lost the will halfway through the job.
He sets the mugs down on the bedside table and stands there looking at you for a second longer than is useful. Your hair is all over the place. One arm’s flung out. You look less like a person who has gone to bed than one who has been dropped there by invisible force.
Dunk crouches and reaches for the shoe. Your foot twitches in his hand. You stir, make a small sound, and he says, low so as not to startle you, “Look at ye. Didn’t want to go to bed and now you’re near droolin’ into the pillow, hm?”
Your eyes stay shut. “I don’t drool,” you mutter.
The words come out rough with rasp. You hear it too. Your eyes blink open a slit. “Oh my God,” you croak. “Maybe I am sick.”
It is another misfortune to Duncan. He keeps his face straight with effort, thumb still hooked at your heel while his brain trips over the sound of you all husky and wrecked with sleep. “Aye,” he says, a bit too quickly. Then, gentler: “Think maybe ye are, lass.” He gets the shoe off and sets it aside. Sits on the edge of the bed. “D’you want to change?”
You give a tiny, miserable shake of the head. “No. Please don’t make me move.”
A smile pulls at him. “What if I move ye?”
You make a thin, put-upon noise, but let him shift you all the same. Duncan slips an arm behind your back and another under your knees and lifts just enough to get you where you ought to be, then works the blanket and covers around you properly. You are warm through your clothes. Too warm. By the time he has you tucked in, the tea is set by your bed and you are sunk deeper into the pillow with the loose, dazed look of someone whose body has decided the argument is over.
“You’re a saint,” you tell him.
God save him. He wishes he were. Instead he sits there hearing your voice make that shape for him and wonders what other praise would sound like in it. What it would sound like if he had earned it with his fingers. Or his mouth. What it would sound like repeated around a yes because you could not do much else. He sits there wishing for his body to seize all blood circulation, or better yet, for a fucking aneurysm—anything to stop the attention gathering between his hips.
A swallow he manages to force through comes out loud. He tucks the blanket once more near your shoulder though it needs no tucking. “You gonna sleep?” he asks. “Mind if I take a shower?”
You blink up at him. “Course not.” Your voice catches again and comes out worse. “You don’t even have to stay if you don’t want.”
Dunk clears his throat. “I want to.” You look at him a second, tired enough not to make much of it. He adds, because he has to add something, “Just—been at school all day. Clinic after. Feel a bit grubby, is all.”
“Mm,” you rasp, already halfway gone again. “Help yourself.”
He nods though you have shut your eyes by then. Stands. Looks at you once, then makes himself turn for the bathroom before he does something catastrophically foolish, like climb in beside you just to see if you would let him.
When he closes the door it dawns on him that he’s somehow found his way to the promised land. In this bathroom lives the answer to why on earth would a human girl smell like the inside of a biscuit packet and Duncan’s gonna find it as if his life depends on it.
So he starts with whatever bottles and jars are lined along the sink and stacked on the shelf. Uncorks the perfume and wedges his nose into the caps because spraying them outright would be difficult to explain to someone who’s got a newly acquired hound dog sense of smell. One of the creams carries a faint scent of biscuit, another of clementine peel and one of the flacons has something soft in it that must live somewhere at the base of your throat and wrists. Bits of you are in all of it, but none of them are exactly right. That makes Dunk think you are the secret ingredient to all of this and do something the products cannot manage on their own.
Resigned, he puts everything back where he found it. Then, he bends to one of the lower cabinets for a clean towel and gets confronted with your laundry basket. He gasps softly.
Some wicked ounce of boyhood, still alive in him despite the years and the schooljob and his giant responsible body, lifts its head and tells him to have no respect for himself. It makes him double-check if he’s closed the door properly. What happens next he will later attempt to class as an accident of momentum and circumstance and weak moral judgement. In one unconscious fit of getting afflicted with dick-for-brains and heart-for-dick, he sends his rational mind on mandatory leave from decision-making and lets himself be tempted by the crumpled knot of lace at the top of the heap. Watches his own hand reach for it like he’s watching someone commit a crime from three feet away, and presses it to his face.
His mouth hangs open. The minute he’s muzzled, all the blood in him remembers. His body gets thrown straight back to that moment when he had his nose buried in it and your pussy was underneath the cloth, and he was drunk and you were too, and there was a heft of your ass between his fingers and your thighs on his shoulders.
He finds it there. Gone darker, closer, headier, with tang at the edges. Slightly overripe, like fruit tipped past perfect and threatening to spoil if nobody is bold enough to get at it in time. It is a note more maddening than what you carry at the throat and Dunk wonders if there is more to a scent than creams and oils and perfume and sweat. He wonders if it’s something truer than heat at the loins and if it’s possible that you’ve made yourself into a complex thing he may spend his life trying to disassemble and inevitably, fail.
Events fold down on him. One second he’s back to the first night so completely he fears the hard-on rising in his pants has all to do with the memory of fucking you. Then, his chest suffers a full-on assault of the smaller things: your hand squeezing his at the clinic, the same hand at his neck, you laughing, you crying, you in his glasses, your forehead glowing with the mild fever and your feet going soft under his fingers and your voice gravelled in a throat that’s sore and from there his name is being croaked out so intimately his body gives a small helpless hitch.
“Christ,” Dunk whispers. He blinks and finds himself breathing you in like a sinner with his cheek nearly brushing the cabinet door and his palm deep beneath the waistband, fingers wrapped round his balls like he’s trying to make the boner go back where it came from. “Fuck—”
Some bastard reasoning in him is winning the argument. The point, supposedly, is to get his body out of the way so he can go back into your room and be decent amongst all the little things you do that are slowly becoming insufferable.
At some point all the merged parts of him begin to work against him and feed him conjured images. When he moves his hand to the base of his cock, in his dick-for-brains it is your hand. He slides the fist down to the tip and near hears you saying you’re doing so well. Humming. Cooing at him in that hoarse voice. Speaking his name, his full name, saying Duncan, calling him yours, giving him a place to belong to, telling him he’ll be a great father and all of that straight to his ear, so close your mouth brushes his earlobe.
He’s got no idea why any of that would happen, because Dunk has never thought of himself as neither heartthrob nor cuntthrob. He’s simply a throb for girls with nice necks and tits that go heavy when the bra falls off and hips that spill over surfaces they are pressed to, and when he thinks of all of this he’s becoming wetter and wetter between the legs. So wet that the shameful act of jerking off with a mouth full of your underwear acquires a sound, and he gags himself tighter.
The effect is him becoming quieter and even more turned on, because between his mouth and palm your knickers warm from his breath and strengthen their hold on his sinuses. Make his toes curl in his socks. He goes faster and faster, and prays for you to let him, at least once, to make love to you again, for you to plow your nails through the meat of muscle on his back when he’s eating you out, to let him wipe under your eyes with his thumbs and play with your hair and grant him the image of your cum face, and then Dunk is fully gone.
He gives in to what his body has wanted all along and what his brain has never let him entertain cleanly. The made-up you at his ear gets bolder, filthier, meaner in all the sweetest ways. He hears you tell him put a baby in me and it is so hot to him his wish for an aneurysm near materialises, only in his cock.
“Jesus—” he chokes into the lace.
He fumbles himself out of his shorts, hissing when the rough fabric catches on the tender head, then sprawls over the cold porcelain of your sink like he’s trying to survive a wound. One hand works him in short frantic strokes while his mouth keeps filling with your knickers and your scent and all the stupid rotten things he has made of both.
Your name spills out first. Then lass. Then please, said to nobody who is there to hear it. Then, Duncan loses the last of whatever little dignity had kept him upright through this. He mutters to you in scraps. Please. Let me. Ah, Christ. Good girl. Little torn-off bits of talk, pathetic enough to shame him if shame were not already queueing up outside the door.
He comes with his face turned into his own forearm, teeth sunk hard into it to stop the cry. The force of it goes through him so sharp his knees near give and he has to catch himself on the sink. For one blind second he can hear nothing but blood and breath and the wet drag of his own hand finishing the job while his cock pulses itself empty under his fist.
When he can see again, the first thing he does is look at your knickers. They are damp with his spit. He stares at them in full mute horror, then jerks his eyes round the room in a panic to check whether he has sprayed anything impossible to clean. Sink, mirror, tiles, floor. He finds spots and deals with them in a rush, yanking toilet roll loose with one hand while the other still shakes with the last of it. Shame keeps punching him like a heavy boulder.
He starts the shower, strips, and thinks only that at least his dick is down now. Under the water he just stands and lets it run hotter than is sensible, hoping the last of the tension will leave him and go down the drain. He uses only the plain bar soap to clean himself because reaching for any of your fancy bottles would be begging to get trapped in here for another round of disgrace if any one of them smells even faintly of you.
When he steps out, he sees the knickers where he left them. That is when he permits himself one more second of possession. He palms them, pushes them deep into his pocket, and spends the whole walk from the bathroom to your bedroom convincing himself he did not do it.
There, he finds you asleep. One arm under the pillow, mouth parted, the blanket kicked low again since your body has elected fever on top of everything else. Dunk smiles to himself. Goes to the free side of the bed and sits, careful not to jostle you. Then, because his own back is one long complaint from the day, he stretches both arms over his head and lets out a slow breath through his nose.
From behind him comes a hoarse little hum. “Biiiiig stretch.”
He chuckles, caught, and turns to look at you. Your eyes are open only a slit. Glassy. Cheeks and forehead shining. But your face has gone calm in sleep, none of the strain from earlier left in it.
“You all right?” he asks.
“Mm,” you say. “You?”
That throws him for half a beat. “Aye. Why wouldn’t I be?”
You blink slowly. “You’ve been brooding since the doctor’s.”
He stares at you in silence, surprised enough that he forgets to hide it.
“I’ve eyes,” you mutter.
Dunk huffs once through his nose. “Do ye.”
“Mm.” You shift a little deeper into the pillow. “You wanna talk about it?”
For one dangerous second he thinks of all the things he could say that have you in the middle of them. The biggest of them is there like a bad tooth: that all of this has him half split open with gratitude and dread, and that a fair bit of the dread comes from the fact that he has never had a family without the word broken nailed to it.
He could tell you that. He could tell you he does not know how to speak of being left without making it sound like a plea for pity, and that the thought of pity from you makes his skin crawl even though it would be yours. He could tell you the whole thing feels so enormous to him because nobody has ever stayed by right, only by accident or habit, and now there is a child in the middle of the future asking to be counted before it has even got limbs to speak of. All of that crowds up and stops at the back of his teeth. Then his mind swerves, thankfully, into ground more fit for human use. “There’s this…” He scrubs a hand over his mouth. “This kid in my school.”
You nod a little to show you’re listening.
“He’s a good lad,” Dunk says. “Bright. Bit odd, but in the right ways. Small fella. Carries himself like he’s forty.” He glances at you and finds your eyes on him despite how tired you look. “Home’s not… simple for him.”
He picks at a loose thread on the blanket. “He says things. About his brothers. His house. Just drops them in like nothin’. One of them smashed up his schoolbag. One of them shaved his head drunk and nicked him. Their da’s due back and the whole place sounds fit to burst when he talks of it.” He pauses. “But he says it all like he’s listing what’s in the fridge. Then looks at me as if I’m meant to know what to do with it.”
Your hand moves under the blanket and finds his where it rests on the bedspread. He goes quiet.
Then: “I don’t—” Dunk says after a moment. “Know what to do, I mean. Not really. If I push, he shuts up. If I don’t, I feel like I’m lettin’ him down. And he’s only a child.”
You rub his knuckles once with your thumb. “He talks to you,” you say.
“Aye.”
“That’s not nothing.”
He glances down at your hand on his. Small against big. His fingers still a bit rough from gym equipment and steering wheel and all the other ordinary uses of them. “I know,” he says. “Still doesn’t tell me what I’m meant to do.”
“No.” Your voice catches and roughens worse. You clear it with a tiny wince. “Sorry, no, that’s not useful.” You shift a little under the covers. “Can you ask him? Not what happened, I mean—whether he wants you to do anything. Whether he wants you to step in at all.” You pause. “And if you can’t ask him, maybe you measure it by feel? There’s probably a moment where it stops being his business to manage and becomes too much for a kid. Do you feel like it’s there yet?”
A laugh almost gets out of him at that, though not from mockery. More from the shock of finding something solid in what he had thought would be only kindness. “Christ,” he says softly. “Maybe.”
“I know absolutely fuck-all about children,” you add, and his mouth does twitch now. “But I know a bit about people trying to act as if things don’t hurt when they do.”
Dunk turns his head. You are half gone with tiredness, eyes barely open, throat a gravel, and still there is that effort in you, the reaching. More than just to soothe him. To actually think it through on his behalf.
“And maybe talk to the father, if he’s not the source of the problem,” you murmur. “Or someone else in the house. But ask the boy first if you can. Let him have that much.” You blink slow, fight your way back up for one more second. “I don’t know if any of that’s useful.”
He sits with it. “It is,” he says. “Thank you. That does help.”
You nod a little into the pillow. “Dunk, you can tell me things. We’re stuck together, and I keep whining to you about every little thing that happens to me. I don’t want it to be one-sided. Wouldn’t be right.” For a second after that you drift, and he thinks you are gone. Then: “Hm, what’s his name?”
“Aegon.”
One eye opens a bit more. “That’s awful.”
Dunk laughs properly, quiet enough not to shake the bed. “Aye.”
“Poor child.”
“He likes Egg better.”
“I like Egg better too.”
You shut your eyes again. Your hand stays where it is on his for another few breaths before going loose with sleep. Dunk lets it lie there till the weight of it changes. Only then does he ease his own hand free and sit beside you in the low hum of the telly, listening to you breathe and feeling, for the first time that day, a little less trapped inside his own head. He doesn’t even know when it happens so that his body folds on the mattress and cheek touches the pillow.
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