Frequent NSFW stuff here, so 18+ MDNI
Twilight, 30s, she/her, always diving heart-first into hyperfixations. I love a lot of things but this is primarily a multi-fandom blorbo blog: featuring Viktor [Arcane], Robert Robertson III [Dispatch], Ser Dunk the Tall [AKOTSK], Astarion [BG3], others here and there, and finally memes and things I find generally neat!
These are just some of my interests: ATLA [Zutara], Arcane [Viktor's Cravat Enthusiast], Dispatch [Robert Robertson III], BG3 [Astarion x Resist!Durge my darlings], AKOTSK [Are there no true knights among you??], Twenty One Pilots [I would swim the Paladin Strait without any floatation], Taylor Swift [Long Live all the magic we made, Eras Tour Seattle N1 was ✨️sparkling✨️], TLOU [Endure & Survive], Expedition 33 [For Those Who Come After], Wildbow [have read Worm, Ward, Pale, Pact, planning to read Claw next], Uncharted [Sic Parvis Magna], Outlander [Je Suis Prest], so much more~ ♥
contents (nsfw): Dunk x fem!Reader, Modern AU friends to lovers rom-com with pregnancy. Fluff, humour, smidge of angst (just lots of feels), pregnant sex, edging, praise kink, voice kink, gentle fem-dom, premature ejaculation, overstimulation, multiple orgasms, smidge of come eating. Song used in this chapter.
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MASTERLIST
next chapter -> (19/06)
synopsis: In which they survive the morning after. (Pregnancy status: 16 weeks, II trimester).
word count: 12,8K
a/n: Banner by me, dividers by @strangergraphics, proofread by @hextoken! I have to go to a corporate party today, pray for me.
Sunlight seeps through the curtain slits. Dunk's feeling like he's grown in the night. Broader in the shoulders and softer in the belly, he finds himself swollen and raw elsewhere. There's density to his hips and soreness to the groin that burgeons outward. When he opens his eyes everything's blurry, but by the press on his arm and the smell of biscuits he can tell you're still there and none of the ache is phantom.
He turns his head to the side and down where his bicep has gone half numb under you. “H-hi,” he says.
“Hi yourself,” you say.
He can make out only the blur of your face tipped up at him. The sound of you is morning-rough, gummy at the edges, and his whole body goes at it with something brazenly pleased before his brain gets a vote.
“Um,” you add. “So—”
Dunk palms at you gently because his eyes are useless and he has to solve the room by touch. He is sprawled on his back, you nuzzled to his side, your feet somewhere around his mid-calf and one hand spread small over his ribs. The shirt has ridden up on you in the night. He feels bare thigh against his hip and has to look at the ceiling he cannot see.
“How’re ye feelin’?” he asks.
“Good,” you say. Your fingers twitch. “You?”
“Grand, but,” Duncan says, “blind.”
“Oh, right.” You twist away from him, and he keeps his arm loose enough to let you go. When you come back, he tightens. “Sorry, I took them off you," you say. "Here—”
The glasses get pushed onto his nose and the world snaps itself back together in lines and colours the names of he's no longer certain. “There ye are,” he says.
Seeing you makes him worse. More nervous, because now there are sharp edges. Your mouth looks bitten by sleep, eyes crusted a little from last night’s tears. Your hair has gone all mussed and flattened on one side, and the T-shirt collar hangs too wide on you. His T-shirt. The sight should be ordinary, because shirts are ordinary things, except Dunk has the distinct sense of having been granted back a morning that had been stolen from him once before. The first one. The one where he woke up with a body full of you and no you in the room to prove it.
Now you are here, frowning faintly with worry gathering between your brows, and he feels so lucky it borders on daft.
“You sure you’re good?” he asks.
You nod, then seem to check the answer against yourself. Your hand shifts under the cover, thighs move by a cautious inch, and your face does a small grimace.
Dunk sinks a notch. “Sore?”
“A little.”
He winces. “Ah. Shite. Was I—” Stops, then starts again, worse. “Was I too much?”
Your eyes flick up.
“I mean—” His ears begin to burn. “Too rough. Or too eager. Or—”
“Dunk.”
“—too heavy with my hands. Or just… too much of me.”
You stare at him, then soften in a way that makes him want to hide. “No. You weren’t too rough.”
He studies your face, searching for the lie out of habit. “You’d tell me?”
“Yes.”
“Properly?”
“Yes.” A pause. “I’m sore in a nice way.”
That phrase grabs him low and stays there. His hips seem to hear it first and some lazy pull starts under the ache. He shifts one shoulder against the pillow and hopes the blanket is being merciful. “In a nice way,” Dunk repeats, because he is an idiot.
You look embarrassed now, which helps nobody. “You know what I mean.”
Duncan does. He knows too well. His own body has woken all used and tender, cock sore from work, holding back and coming hard enough that some part of him may still be missing. There is a dragged-open feeling in him, though nothing of his has been entered except by wanting. He understands being glad for the ache. He understands wanting proof that something happened and stayed happened. “Aye,” he says quietly. “I know.”
Silence arrives then, thin and awkward, and lies between you with its eyes open.
“Was I too much?” you ask.
Dunk’s head turns so sharply the pillow drags at his ear. “What?”
“Last night.” You look at his collarbone rather than his face. “I was a bit… I don’t know. Mad.”
He nearly laughs from pure disbelief, except your face is too serious for that. “No.”
“You can say.”
“I am sayin’.” He reaches, then stops before the touch lands at your cheek, as if the rules have changed in the night and nobody has handed him the new sheet. “You were—” His throat tightens around several answers, all of them too large or too plain. Lovely. Wild. Good to me. Mine, some awful part supplies, and he shuts that door hard. “You were grand,” he manages. “More than.”
Your mouth pulls into something small. “Grand.”
“I’m not very articulate in the mornin’.”
You nod thoughtfully. “That explains it.”
A breath of laughter leaves him, and you answer with your own, but the question remains where both of you can see it: What now. It sits on the bed with the clothes on the floor and the cold mugs from last night and the smell of sleep and sex and clementines.
You pull the cover higher over your chest. “We should probably talk.”
“Aye,” Dunk says, though every muscle in him files a complaint.
“Because I don’t want this to get… unclear.”
He gives a small nod. His hand lies open on the mattress beside you. “Right.”
“And I don’t want you thinking you have to.”
That brings his eyes back to yours. “Have to what?”
“This.” You gesture vaguely under the duvet, toward your bodies and the rest of the wreckage. “Me. Us. Whatever this is. Because I’m, you know. Pregnant.”
Duncan takes a second with that. He hears the sense in it, but hates the sound of it. “I don’t feel made to,” he says.
“You did a bit before.”
“With the ring?”
You wince. He hates that too. “Aye,” he says before you can soften it for him. “I know. I made a bollocks of that.”
“I didn’t say—”
“You laughed.”
“Dunk.”
“No, I know why.” He looks down at the blanket. There is a loose thread near his thumb and he worries it instead of your patience. “I think I do, anyway. I was tryin’ to put the house up before we’d even checked if the ground takes a nail.”
You go quiet.
“That sounded better in my head,” he adds.
“No,” you say. “I get it.”
He risks looking at you again. “I want to help. Want to be here. That part’s true.”
“I know.”
“And the other part—” His mouth goes dry. “I liked last night. I want it. I want… you. I’m sayin’ that plain enough, aye?”
Your face changes, then closes slightly, as if plainness has still found a way to hurt. “Aye,” you say. “That’s plain.”
“But I don’t want ye thinkin’ I’m only here for that either.”
“I don’t.”
“And I’d rather it be me than some stranger,” he says, then blushes so hard it nearly makes him dizzy. “Jesus. Sorry. That came out—”
“No.” Your voice has gone quieter. “No, I understand.”
“It’s safer,” he says, grabbing for the practical rope before he drowns in the other thing. “I mean, with the baby and all. If it helps you. If you need it. Or want it. I can—” His face burns worse. “I can be that. For you.”
Your eyes stay on him. “You can be that.”
“If you want.”
"I do," you tell him. “So um… if we’re being practical.” Your jaw works once. “Is kissing allowed?”
Dunk blinks. Looks at your mouth and immediately has no right to answer anything requiring thought. “I’d like it to be.”
“Touching?”
“Aye.” His voice lowers. “If you want me touchin’.”
“I do.”
He swallows.
“What kind?” you ask, then regret shows on you in a hot flash. “Sorry. That sounded like a form.”
“It’s all right.” His hand flexes against the sheet. “The kind where ye tell me if I’ve gone wrong.”
“That’s broad.”
“I’m a broad fella.”
You laugh, and the sound loosens something in him. Then your face shifts again. “Protection?”
“Aye,” he says, too fast. “I was thinkin’—maybe we should. Or could. If ye wanted. For mess.”
Your brows pull in. He sees the mistake arrive before he knows which mistake it is.
“For mess?” you repeat.
“Aye. Just—”
“If you’re planning to keep seeing other people,” you say carefully, already moving yourself away by an inch without seeming to notice, “then yes, obviously. That would be safe. I mean, I’m not saying you can’t. We talked about it, didn’t we? So if you—”
“No.” Dunk nearly sits up. “No, no, that’s not what I meant.” You only gape at him. “Jesus, lass, that’s not what I meant.” His hand reaches this time and lands on your wrist. “I meant the actual mess. Sheets. You. Cleanin’ up after. I thought maybe it’d be easier for you.”
“Oh.”
“I told ye I’m not seein’ anyone.”
“I know.”
“I’m not.”
“Okay.”
“And I don’t want to.”
Your eyes lower to his hand around your wrist. “Okay.”
“Are you?”
“No.” Your answer comes quickly enough to calm some ugly thing in him. Then, quieter: “I’m obviously not seeing anyone either.”
“Good,” he says, then hears himself. “I mean—”
“It is good,” you say.
There is another silence. Different this time. Warmer and more dangerous.
“For what it’s worth,” you add, staring somewhere near his shoulder, “I don’t mind the mess.”
Dunk’s body takes the sentence disgracefully. He feels himself stir under the blanket with enough interest to make his soul sigh and leave him to it. You notice. Of course you notice. Your mouth parts by a fraction.
He shuts his eyes. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be.”
“I’m tryin’ to have a serious conversation.”
“You can be hard during it. Multitasking.”
He laughs, boyish and powerless. You smile properly then, and for one small stretch of morning the thing between you becomes almost simple. Almost.
Because you are still looking at him with that carefulness. Because he is still holding back half the sentence in his mouth. Because both of you are making a shape around the same missing word and pretending the shape itself will do.
“So,” you say. “We keep it… between us?”
“Aye.”
“When I need it.”
“When you want it,” he corrects, then looks startled by his own nerve.
Your face softens. “When I want it,” you say.
“And if you don’t, ye say.”
“Yes.”
“And if I do something wrong—”
“I’ll say.”
“And if I get too—”
“Dunk,” you say, then put your hand on his chest. “You’re allowed to want things too.”
He lies very still under that, because the sentence has teeth. After a moment, he covers your hand with his. “Right,” he says, though it comes out clipped.
You nod, as if that has settled anything. Then you look down at your own body under his shirt, at your knees under the cover, at his hand on yours. “So this is very mature of us.”
“Aye,” he says. “Terribly.”
“Awful.”
“Near bureaucratic.”
It gets you. You press your face into his arm to hide the laugh, and Duncan lets himself turn into it, nose brushing your hair. Biscuits. Sleep. Skin. A trace of him, too, caught in cotton and warmth. His chest goes very full.
“Tea?” he asks after a while, because he has to put the feeling somewhere.
“Tea,” you agree. Then, smaller, before he can move: “And maybe stay here for another minute.”
Dunk closes his eyes. “Aye,” he says. “One minute.”
One minute becomes two, then God knows how many, because Dunk shifts, huffs softly through his nose, and fishes your hand out from under the duvet. He starts cautiously. Thumb over your knuckles. A rub at the side of one nail. The rough pad of his finger traces the crease where yours bends, nervous enough to make the whole thing feel less like idling and more like inquiry. How much of this is he allowed, when it is neither useful nor filthy. How long until one of you names it and ruins the little shelter it has made.
Then he opens his own hand beside yours and rests you against it.
The comparison is so unfair you nearly laugh. Your fingertips only reach the middle knuckles of his, and his palm sits beneath yours with room left over, warm and scored with small lines that look deeper for belonging to someone who does practical things badly and often.
“You’ve such small hands, lass,” he says.
“No I don’t.” Your voice wobbles at the edges, which is horrible of it. “You’ve giant paws.”
He smiles, but only barely, as if too much face might startle the permission away. His thumb slips into the hollow of your palm and tickles there once, then again, slower. You curl a little round it. He watches that happen with a dazed, soft sort of attention that makes you feel discovered in the worst place.
You roll closer. His arm tightens under you, then stills. For a second he goes careful all over. “How d’ye get anything done with such tiny hands, hm?” he murmurs.
Instead of answering, your other hand creeps from under the duvet and lands on his thigh. The muscle under it jumps. “I think you know how much I can get done with such tiny hands,” you say.
Dunk hiccups. Then, to his obvious horror, giggles. He clears his throat so hard it becomes a cough. “You’re a wee menace.”
“Mhm.” You close his hand around yours, then let him have it. “Go make that tea.”
It all works. Sort of. His feet touch the floor, and Duncan realises he's got exactly one T-shirt in here that's currently occupied, and worse, that he's naked and half-hard.
He contemplates options but one where he asks you to hand that shirt over doesn't even make it to the waiting list. He decides that if you could climb into a bath in front of him he can show some courage too.
So. Dunk mans up, or tries to. His feet touch the floor and he pushes himself upright to stand. He keeps his back to you and crosses to where his boxers have been abandoned on the floor. Crouching for them is a mistake in several directions, but he gets them hooked in his fingers, steps in and drags them up minding to sort his dick in there so that it doesn't look like it's screaming I'm needy first thing in the morning.
When he turns back, you have your face aimed very carefully at the window. Your mouth has gone into a put-upon, thoughtful pout, as if the curtains have presented you with some riveting theory. Dunk looks at you for half a second, then smiles. “Aye,” he says. “Very respectful.”
Your eyes flick to him and away again. “I’m looking at the light.”
“Course ye are.”
A grin. “What?”
“Mm.” He pushes the glasses up his nose with one finger, and lets himself enjoy the fact that you have to hide your face under the blanket. “I’ll be right back.”
You only hum to that. Wait for his footsteps to hush once he reaches the kitchen and allow yourself a little squeal into the pillow.
The girlishness he manages to drag out of you by existing near a kettle is ignominious. You are not sure he knows he spent half the night with his face pressed into the bend of your neck, humming and purring sweet little unconscious things like stay and smell nice whenever you shifted too far from the furnace of his chest. Then morning comes and he stands there abashed over a perfectly ordinary tent under the covers, as though your own body would not have betrayed you just as plainly if God had granted women the same crude signage.
All of it lays another brick in the awful construction of Duncan’s sexiness, which is strong and, frankly, a little lethal because he has no earthly notion of it. He is shy until pining gets the better of him. Needy enough that the shyness cannot survive long. Once something is given, he handles it with care. Listens. Anticipates. Looks for the place where your body has begun to ask once your mouth starts failing. It should make him less dangerous, that kindness. Somehow it makes him worse.
When he got up, you had taken to ogling his gorgeous round arse with such immediate appetite you forgot, for half a second, that both of you are here through necessity, accident, and one long chain of poor judgement. The rules are useful. Emotionally fraudulent, maybe, but useful all the same. They let you believe you are protecting the two of you from the version of intimacy that grows thorns later and cuts as resentment. They let you take what mirrors the thing you want while keeping a cloth over the contaminated parts.
Still, Dunk is right. This is better than strangers. If it stays inside this out-of-time pocket pregnancy has made for you, perhaps it is survivable. Perhaps it is even sensible. You remain close. You have somebody to lean on. Dunk misses less, you explain to yourself, staring at the pale scratch of sunlight on the floorboards. The two of you can practise easing into the strange family-shaped arrangement that will be waiting once your body finishes one labour and the rest of your life begins another.
You sit up in the bed and look towards the window. A husk hangs from the sill on a translucent thread, gutted clean by whatever abandoned it. It's split down the back, papery and crumbling, and the thing that has rearranged itself in it has cut its way out and flown off without your eyes on it.
Duncan comes back with two steaming cups and a mean reminder of how broad his chest is. He sits at the foot of the bed and turns the cup in his hand so that you can take it by the ear. "I've put toasts on, too," he says.
You nod with your mouth hidden into the rim. "I'll give you your shirt back in a minute," you say, seeing how he curls into himself. It's a large pity, large enough to rival him, for you'd love to just keep him around like this. "I have uh… spare towels and toothbrushes in the bathroom. If you want to, I mean—"
"I thought," Dunk starts. "It's Saturday. I thought we could still sort out the nursery. If you want."
"Really?" you say. "That'd be great. Yeah, I would love that. The room's ready, we just need to put things in it."
"Grand." His cup finds yours and they clink.
You smile into your tea. Get up. At the wardrobe you open one door and disappear half behind it, bare legs visible below the wood. “We could probably do the same thing at yours,” you say from in there. “Sometime later. When you feel like it. A nursery, I mean, or a corner?”
Dunk nods before he remembers you cannot see him. The thought lands strangely. It reminds him painfully that the arrangement will be divided into two households. That, inevitably, you will come to his flat and set your feet on the floor and, to Duncan, symbolically, it means things getting crossed off. Your voice reaches him. “Dunk?”
He blinks. “A-aye. Yeah. We ought to do that.”
You come out in cotton shorts and a T-shirt still large on you, though much smaller than his, and kneel beside him on the mattress. “Here,” you say, passing him back his one. Then, after a beat, softer: “You can stay over here as much as you want when the baby is born, you know that, right? I just thought it’d be good for you to have things at your place too.”
Dunk takes the shirt from you. “I know,” he says, though his throat has gone a bit narrow with it. He hands you his cup and ducks into the cotton to get sucker-punched by his private version of tangerine dream. The whole thing is warm from you. Smells of sleep and your skin and the sweet rot of whatever lotion has survived the night. It settles over his shoulders as if it has learned him from inside your body and came back altered. He has to sit still for a second with his head only half through the neck-hole, sightless and enormous, before he can finish pulling it down.
When his face reappears, you are looking at him with your mouth tucked in. “What?” he asks.
“Nothing.”
“That’s not a nothin' face.”
“It is.” You reach over and tug the hem straight for him, fingers brushing his stomach through cotton. “You looked very heroic, fighting your own shirt.”
“Mm, a hard battle,” he says, grave as he can manage.
He listens to your laughter with focus meant for the speech of people wiser than him. Finishes his tea and waits for you to finish yours. Then, you show him around the bathroom while Duncan pretends he doesn't know where things are and nods thoughtfully at every stop of the tour. Once it's wrapped, he quells an urge to kiss your forehead and maybe slap your ass lightly. He showers with the soap he's used that one time before, then joins you in the kitchen for breakfast.
First, Dunk snorts at the disparity of plates. Yours holds one sad toast while his overflows with bread, eggs and sausages. When he shots you a questioning look you only shrug and send a don't judge me face in his direction. So Duncan sits. Eats. Tries to not think much about hands that made it for him.
In this mundane moment, Dunk’s memory manages to dim all the girls he has ever smothered into hurting him. Compared to what he feels now, those loves seem skinny. Starved at the ribs. This one is embryonic but ever-growing, blind and hungry and insisting on itself without any shame.
He watches you nibble at the bread’s crust and chase every bite with a sip of tea. One leg perched on the seat of the chair, you do not look at him, only scroll through emails on your phone with your mouth set flatter by the second. He sees how it fleeces the morning bliss off you, bit by bit. Then decides to take the role you keep offering. Someone who has a say in it. Someone who can want things.
“Have ye thought about takin’ leave already?” he asks.
“Hm?” You lift your head. “Oh, yeah, I just…” Your gaze drops back to the phone, then away from it. “I don’t know what I’d be doing with the time, you know?”
Dunk considers that a minute. Wipes his greasy mouth, cringes a little, then rests an arm across the table, ruling halfway through the movement to leave you untouched after all. His fist closes instead.
“We could… I dunno.” He takes a sip of coffee. “We could figure that out. Together, I mean. I’ll have more time soon.”
“Oh?” you say. “Right. School’s ending.”
“Mhm. Few weeks.” Dunk nods. “I’ll still have summer coaching and the activity programme with the kids, but it’s not full-time. We could prepare a bit better. Meet Ray and Red. Maybe you could…”
“What?”
“Come to a game,” he says, quieter. “Meet Egg. If ye want.”
You go still for long enough that Dunk regrets it. Then, you put your phone face down and rest your palm over his fist. It loosens under you. His fingers thread through yours.
“That sounds good,” you tell him. “I probably could use some time off.”
Dunk nods.
You look down at your joined hands, then back at him. “You ready for the nursery?”
Dunk sweeps the room with vacant eyes. “Aye,” he says. “Think so.”
The nursery has been waiting with its door closed. He doesn't know when the painting was done, nor does he ask by whom, because each possible version delivers a small resentment. Had it been you alone, Dunk would scold you for not seeking help. Had it been anyone else, he'd be wounded about not being the first choice. When the door opens, both of you lean on the frame as if bare walls might turn and ask what exactly you think you are doing here. There are boxes stacked by the skirting board, a rolled rug, cot in the exact middle, a changing table flat-packed in a carton with arrows pointing which side is up for some reason. A lamp shaped like a moon. Three soft baskets that smell of new rope and shop dust.
You tell him the changing table should go under the shelf. Dunk measures the wall again though it's been measured twice already, then lifts the table as if it has no weight and puts it exactly where you point. “There?” he asks.
“A little left.”
He shifts it a little left.
“No, your left.”
Dunk's mouth quirks. “That was my left.”
“Your other left, then.”
He gives you a look over his shoulder, wounded by female sense of directions, and you laugh hard enough that he smiles fully. The room eases by one small notch.
After that, the two of you become very serious about things that are very serious only to new parents. Which drawer gets the vests. Whether nappies should live closer to the wipes or closer to the little bin with its impressive system of odour containment. Dunk folds three tiny sleepsuits. You unfold one, refold it worse, and he says nothing, only fixes it when he thinks you are looking elsewhere.
“I saw that,” you say.
“I didn’t do anythin’.”
“You think I can’t fold baby clothes.”
“I think,” Dunk says, eyes on the drawer, “there’s a chance the baby will want its legs in the leg bits.”
You stare at him.
His mouth twitches. “That’s all.”
A muslin hits his head. He catches it without looking, which is so irritatingly impressive you have to turn away and busy yourself with the baskets.
Slowly, the space stops looking like storage and begins to acquire intent. Sheet goes on round the mattress. The little blanket folds over the rail. The lamp finds the corner. Books line up on the low shelf, bright spines and silly animals and one about a tractor Dunk claims is important because children ought to have options. You put the first packet of nappies in place, then stand there with your hand still on it. “Yeah,” you say, to no one.
Dunk looks up from where he is kneeling by a drawer. “What?”
“No, just. Yes. This looks… fine.”
“Aye.” He follows your gaze, then nods too hard. “Yeah. It does. Looks nice.”
There's a hollow, mouth-biting silence after that. Nice is a stupid little word for a room that now contains future. It's too small to express the enormity of the folded clothes that wait for a body neither of you has held yet. Nice is what's said because the real thing is a cutthroat.
Dunk gets up. You both stand in the middle of it with your foreheads set into brave shapes. “This is nice,” you say again, worse this time.
“Aye,” Dunk says. “I like it.”
You glance at him, and his face destroys you. His eyes are red-rimmed behind the lenses, magnified into bareness. Nothing held back on him. Duncan is a pretty crier because nearly none of him frowns. He just sweats tears out of those baby-blues until they adorn his lashes and drop onto cheeks. There's no attempt at hiding, only a fist at the ready to wipe the excess had it blurred his vision.
A complete opposite of you. Mouth slicing itself into a lopsided crescent from the force of trying to keep it inside, then plain ugly sobbing. It erupts from bawling eyes to a painful choke on the back of a mouth. Then snot comes thick and unstoppable, smears the upper lip with salt, and all of you becomes shiny in a way that would cake up any powder.
“Why are you crying?” he asks, voice breaking.
“I’m not crying,” you say, immediately crying. “You’re crying.”
His mouth twitches, then fails. “Am I?”
"Yes, Duncan," you wail. "Visibly."
Duncan steps in as if called by it. The room does a strange thing to a private wound in him. Bursts open the scar tissue that's grown round abandonment. Tends it, cleans it, stitches the evened edges and kisses it better. Small things do that to people. He feels welcome to walk barefoot on the fluffy rug and flick the carousel of geese into a stroll. There's a family for him somewhere in here, and you are a third of it. He doesn't know what kind of wrong has its fingers around your throat, but steps in all the same, because it doesn't really matter.
He gathers you against his chest and the two of you stand there leaking stupidly into each other. “Lass,” he murmurs, palm at the back of your head. “Hey. C’mere.”
“I’m here,” you say into his shirt, which now carries an imprint of your face like it's a fucking Veil of Veronica. “I’m very clearly here.”
“I know.”
“Why’re you crying?” you ask again.
His hand stills, then moves again. "Happy," he lies. “Jus' happy."
You pull back. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Lie badly.”
Dunk's face works. For one flicker you think he might tell you something. Something old. Then he only cups your face in both hands and wipes beneath your eyes with his thumbs. His own are worse. Damn tender and unfair in their size. “And you?” he asks. “Why’re you cryin’?”
You try to answer like a normal woman with control over her organs. The effect is half-strangled, half-mangled through teeth and comes out jittery. “I’m—" you hiccup, "scared I… I won’t be… a good mum.”
He stares at you, genuinely baffled. "Sweetheart," he says, as if it's all dead simple. "You'll be an incredible mam."
Laughter comes abrupt and deranged, hitting the surface of his lenses in wet little spots. Duncan says it like the matter has been already inspected and passed. It makes the idea briefly possible. "You don't know that," you tell him.
“I do.”
“You don’t.”
“I do,” he says again, with the same conviction he's used to persuade you municipal swamp is green. He brings your hand to his mouth and kisses your knuckles. Then knuckles of the other one. Then the hollow of it while your fingers brush his nose. Then your wrist, where the pulse knocks and knocks. "I do know."
“Dunk—”
A kiss on the forehead cuts you off. Long and determined. It makes you gasp and you hope that Dunk will read the gasping as one of the necessary phases for calming down. You clutch the shirt on his stomach, then, with no better plan than needing less fabric between you, you push your palms underneath it. Touch the life of his ribs. His muscles jerk.
“I only trust you,” you say, staring at the damp hollow at the base of his throat, “because you’ll be a great dad.”
He does that thing in the face that heralds the slackening of the whole body. Galvanised within himself to push past the layers of fear, Duncan bends and kisses you deep enough to make the both of you stumble. His hands frame your face, then neck, then shoulders, undecided. "Girl, what are you doin'—" he mutters into it. "What're you doin' to me?"
Loving you, you think, unbidden. You mumble a thing that has a shape of his name but doesn't survive the journey from throat to mouth. Set your fingers on his back and try to pull him closer.
He hums and starts walking. Stops kissing, but stays mouth to mouth. His thumbs and forefingers cuff round your elbows, twitching. There are heavy nasal breaths and working throats and between one swallow and the next Duncan stares at you through those damp, heifer-like lashes as if the answer might be printed somewhere on your face.
"Where's this goin'?" he asks.
"To the—" you stammer. "To bed. If you want."
His whole chest sinks on the exhale. "Thank God," puffs out of him.
Then—arms. A strongman’s foreplay begins with Duncan’s palms finding your arse like it’s signposted. He gets you up with a grunt that nurtures relief where effort should be, and your body remembers the route with alarming ease. It's the third time now. Three times out of three, you have failed to get yourself to bed under your own power where Duncan is concerned. The thought brings another one behind it, bad and quick-footed: perhaps this is simply what he does with women. Perhaps all that size has made a habit of carrying girls through doorways and making them feel singular for the length of one corridor.
You shut that down with both legs round his waist and both hands at his neck, because thinking has done very little for you lately besides invent pain. This belongs to me, you tell yourself, with no court of appeal available. The lift, the hands, the breath punched out of him when you settle against his stomach. Him. All of it yours for as long as he keeps walking.
He kisses you through it. The shape of him between your thighs, already interested, makes a hard bid against you. In the bedroom he lowers you to the mattress with care so anxious it turns clumsy at the last inch. Your back bounces, and he follows you down halfway before catching himself on both arms. There, he hovers, huge, open-mouthed, and trembles for it, and you know damn well it is not from the weight on his shoulders because you tremble too while holding nothing.
Your fingers hook in the hem of his shirt and lift. Dunk straightens enough to help you; yields his arms and head so you can drag it off him. On the other side of cotton he's a mess with his glasses endearingly askew. "There," you say, placing a palm on his cheek.
He huffs, embarassed, scrunches his eyes and smiles with a tongue pushed against the backs of his teeth. Then his hands find your shorts. He searches first, gets your nod, and that is all it takes. The waistband drags down your hips by the work of patient fingers, resists where you're sunken into the bed so you lift, and you could swear he breathes out a little yes.
Around nudity, you tense. Duncan sees it. "There," he says and bends to press his mouth to your stomach.
In current circumstances it is such a strange place to be kissed right before sex that you laugh like an idiot, and ugly too—phlegmy and cracked and wet in a way that you're certain is not attractive. But Duncan looks up with his eyes gone red for entirely different reasons than five minutes ago. "You said kissin's alright," he says.
"I did."
“So—” His palm smooths down your thigh to the knee, broad and calloused like low-grain sandpaper. He gets under the joint and makes it bend, lifts until the leg opens from the hip and leaves you spread in a way that has both of you breathing through the nose. Mouth set judiciously where your belly swells from the pubic bone, he mutters, “—I’m kissin’.”
His body starts moving like communicating vessels: one crawling thing follows another. Crawling palm kickstarts lips. “Still kissin’,” Duncan says, and lies, because now he’s licking. He has his tongue set broad across your navel, travelling upwards until it meets the border of your shirt’s hem.
That invites his other hand to lift it. He bunches the cotton above your tits and continues the kissin’ between your breasts. His hips creep up too, first to your mid-thighs, then level with yours, and the weight of him releases some tension from your loins. He’s wide enough to keep you open by his presence alone, so the hand at the hinge of your knee remains soft. Thumb brushing the side of it. Small. Careful. Damning.
Your palm and finds his hair. Fingers apart, you comb through the roots, then become meaner with the pulling once his stubble brushes your nipple. “Dunk,” you say. “Come here.”
He does, badly. Too much of him for grace, he comes there fast and heavy. Hooks your leg around his hip and presses his clothed, warm cock to your cunt. “Shite,” he hisses when you tug the hairs at his nape. He looks at you, and when you think there will be more kissin’, he stays frozen, just gaping.
“Don’t look like that,” you say.
“Like what?”
“Like I’ve done something to you.”
His eyes drop, then lift. “Haven’t ye?”
He seems a bit shocked by his own answer, so to save him from it you reach for his face and pull him down. Allow yourself the wet and neatless pass of tongue through his mouth. Your leg tightens round him because your body is quick to throw invitation now the brain is ridden with persistent fuck it. Fuck me instead.
Duncan’s hand goes down between you and gets stupid with the practicalities. He could have thought this through better. Could have undressed properly, could have come to bed with some sort of sequence in mind, but details of lovemaking keep leaving him the second your mouth opens under his. He only wants to be close. The rest is laces, waistbands, cloth, mortal hindrance. He shoves at his boxers one-handed, gets them low enough to make use of himself, and winces when the cotton scrapes the head of his cock.
Then, skin meets skin and a sigh falls out of him in one long, shattered piece.
He fits his fist round the base to guide himself. Thumb pressed just under the head, he squeezes until the dew pearls out, slick and clear, then drags it through you. Slow first, because he deludes himself that slow might save him. The crown parts the wet seam of you bluntly, slides up, catches over your clit, and comes back down to nudge at the entrance with no entering done. Your whole body gives a small, greedy twitch to that. His does worse.
“Christ,” he says into your mouth.
Again. A little firmer. His cock learns the route by the fractions: clit, slit, soft clutch of the opening, back up through the mess he has made wetter by being in it. He mixes himself with your sweet sap until the slide acquires sound. The tender parts of you speak through glimmer and greed, while his answer is held in the wrist, in the rippling stomach, and the balls drawn tight enough to feel like someone's holding them.
You bite his lower lip because you cannot think of a sentence worth the effort. He groans, and that makes more of him leak into his own hand. It gets spread back through you on the next pass. There is something near argumentative in it, the way he keeps refusing to give you the thing both of you are braced for. Your hips keep lifting to steal it from him. His knuckles brush your pussy lips each time he works himself down. The heel of his palm grazes the damp hair. He shudders as if the contact keeps running up his spine and knocking something loose behind the eyes.
“Duncan,” you breathe.
“Aye,” he says, uselessly. “Aye, I know.”
He does know. Knows, because your fingers seem dead set on claiming some of his hair for themselves with how viscously you tug. There's a flex to your thigh, hips canting restlessly once the tip of his cock presses where it ought to go but slides away. The tenderest parts of the both of you keep quarrelling, negotiating, resolving, while the faces are busy enduring the wait. Duncan watches yours as if watching a match held to paper.
"Come on," you say, looping both arms round his neck. "Dunk, please."
"But, luv—" he strains, resting his forehead to your mouth. But you're so tight, Dunk wants to say. He laughs, and thank God, you read it as I'm on it. While what Duncan means is I'm sorry for this. Sorry for putting you here. Sorry for liking you so much I forgot to pull out. Sorry for every inch of me and the exact opposite too. "Okay," he says. "Okay."
His hips adjust to stop lying about themselves, and he breaches you slowly. You take him in laborious, exerting shards that make his spine empty of sense. Warmth closes around his length stern as a stubborn mouth and his own puffs out air so suddenly his cheeks swell with it.
He's halfway through when you whine from the bottom of your furious body and cant up for more. "Aye," he says. "Aye, I'm here."
Another inch. The grip is so snug and living the whole of his chest becomes devoted to the passage. His brain too, and his hands, and skin that reddens under your touch and Duncan wonders if scalps can bruise from hair being gripped too ardently. He sinks the last of himself, and when his lower belly meet you, Duncan stops breathing. His body arrives late to the place his heart has been making a fool of itself over for weeks. "There," he says. "There ye are."
You relax around the fullness. Yes, this is right. Your eyes scan him, and find that the lens nearest you is fogged at the edge. And suddenly, you want him bearer, just to see him plain. So you reach for the glasses, and ask, "Can I take those off?"
Dunk huffs a breath. The movement shifts him inside you by some wicked measure and both of you pretend to endure it normally.
"I won't see a thing," he says.
"I know." You slide the glasses off and set them somewhere safe by your pillow. Without them, his face changes. Equally handsome, but transmuted into another kind of comeliness. He's less goofy, more exposed. Somehow more mature and vulnerable. His eyes lose their hard outline, start searching badly and wrinkling where he tries to squint. You cup his jaw and bring him down until his ear is at your mouth. "How about you just listen to me?" you whisper.
The twitch inside you is immediate. "Oh?" you say. Duncan only breathes out a fragmented chuckle. You stroke his cheek with your thumb. "You like that?"
His throat works, excruciatingly thorough, to swallow that gulp down. His hips slip again, then stop, as if there is someone outside of him scolding the misbehaving parts. "Girl," he pleads.
"You do." Your mouth brushes the shell of his ear and his whole back sets until some hard-working vertebrae clicks. "That's good to know."
He pulls back enough to sweep your face and finds, possibly, the shape of your smile. His eyes narrow, poor useless things, and he looks set up by the natural order of things. “You’re very pleased with yourself,” he says.
"A bit."
"Aye, well." He swallows again. His voice has gone thick where he's meant for it to be firm. "Mind yourself then."
You bring him back down. Dunk comes willingly, like he always does when something's been asked of him. His mouth opens against your neck as if that's a grounding thing to do, and he thrusts carefully, deep enough to make your leg flex against his side. The pressure against his ribs is warm, the hand at his nape warmer, and the lips next to his ear border torrid.
"You feel so good," you tell him.
He groans, surrendering the baritone to a higher pitch. "Jesus—"
"So good, Dunk."
"Don't say it like that."
"Like what?"
"As if—" He takes another breath and moves through it. Cock drags slow and proper, particular enough for you to feel the whole thick length of him leaving and coming back. "As if you know."
"I do know."
You might not be an expert on how to execute the part after winning men that makes them brave enough to tell you all the things you yearn to hear (I love you, I love you, I love you), but this—this, you know. You know where they are softhearted. You know how to find this part. Despite what your mother said, it is not wicked. It's listening for key words that quieten their voices, and looking where eyes ought to be set. Dunk seems to be good at this too, because he reads the cues with surprising proficiency. Whether by guess or wisdom, it eludes you, but he manages to be there when you need a hug, a good word, a joke, a shoulder, or now, a fuck. What kind of fuck, he understands quickly too. You don’t yet pass judgement on the intention behind it: if he means to stay for long, or if he has simply recognised the means to an end. The version in which this is just the way he has sex, unperformed and therefore wholly aligned with you, doesn’t even make it to your head.
And Dunk is softhearted in many places. He’s unbearably tender when it comes to tending bodies, as if each part of you deserves kindness. It’s only natural to conclude he’d like that back, in one form or another. He reacts to praise as though it puts ground under his feet. Keeps finding ways to be useful, offering himself in small practical pieces, as if saying notice me, notice me, I am here, without understanding at all that it is impossible to not notice him. If someone in his past failed to see the easiness to love him that he comes with, they were either dumb or cruel in the throat. The only thing in him that halts the loving is the fearful nature of frail hearts. You recognise that like you are both made of similar clay, even if you cannot put a finger on the exact place where it hurts. In cases such as Duncan and yourself, bravery arrives in steps. Valour blooms rather than surges, so you give him a small brick for the lifeblood to keep building. Praise him for the way he is. Just this.
"I do know," you tell him. "You're so patient with me. So careful. I like that."
It costs him some. The hand under your knee pulses, fingers pressing, loosening, pressing again. His stomach jumps against yours, fills with a deep breath, then corrects itself to not flatten you.
"See?" you coo. Pour the sweetness straight into his ear canal so the only thing received by cochlea is that he is being good. "I love how heavy you are. How well you fill me. Fuck, Duncan—" He hits you just right, on the right there. You tighten, and keep muttering, "You're so good to me. So fucking good to me, my good boy."
"Ah—f-fuck—" he snaps, shocked and half-pained.
"Duncan."
He makes the mistake of lifting his head when you say his name. Blind as he is, he still finds your mouth. Kisses you hard, then badly, then breaks to inhale. His hair has fallen over his forehead. Without the glasses he looks dismantled in a more private way, as if you have caught him between skins. "Say it again," he mumbles.
You blink. "What?"
His ears turn crimson. He keeps thrusting. Stays deep, because that's when your body keeps rewarding his with blissful little clenches. Discipline fleets him, and Duncan forgets altogether how to keep himself in reins. It feels too good. Brushes the cords too accurately. "What you said," he rasps.
"That you're good to me?"
He shuts his eyes.
Oh. So that is where it lives.
You pull him closer with the heel of your foot and start speaking into his lips. "You're good to me," you say, slower. "You're good at this. Perfect at this. You make me feel—oh—" You have to stop there, because the next stroke takes the end of the sentence and folds it under your tongue.
Dunk hears enough. Perhaps more than enough. His face comes down beside yours and he starts fucking you with his mouth at your cheek, breathing there, taking the praise like punches he intends to keep as bruises.
"You're beautiful," you whisper. "You know that?"
"N-no." He shakes his head.
"Yes." Your fingers push into his hair. "You are. So handsome. You're so pretty like this."
"Girl," he wheezes. "Girl, I can't—"
"You can." You kiss the corner of his mouth. "You can take it."
You break some working piece in him. He gives one fuller push, then another, and a sound, too open, too surprised, leaves him. His whole body locks above you. "Shite, I—" he gasps. "Shite, wait—"
It takes him too early. You afflict him, his ears and nose and neck with those delicate touches that make the roots of Dunk's hair buzz. With your voice, so fucking loving, it makes his brain melt and threaten to leak. It's all too much. He comes, hideous for trying to withhold it, strong for you being the cause of it, and shivers violently through his every giant muscle. His cock kicks deep with each wrung out spill, face drops to your shoulder, then whole of him follows the drowning to fold around you. The noise he makes there is loud enough to shame him later, if you let it.
You do nothing except hold him. For several seconds Duncan doesn't speak. He focuses on breathing instead and maybe not turning to ash under the blaze of shame. Not one, but a title of few-pumps-chump has finally been handed to him with a shitty confetti and a stale flute of cheap champagne. He stays seated inside you and trembling through the last of it. When he tries to lift himself, his arms disagree.
"I'm sorry," he says, hoarse. “I didn’t mean to—” His pelvis shifts by accident and he winces, oversensitive and still hard enough to make the smallest movement count. “Fuck.”
"Dunk." You press your mouth to his temple. Smooth the hair off his forehead. "Don't be. There's nothing to be sorry for, hm?"
"But you didn't—" he huffs, sounding furious with himself and deeply far away.
A smile, or so he thinks. "I'm okay," you say.
"You didn't finish."
"No," you say. His brows knit. It makes him look so abysmally disappointed that for a beat you consider scraping that and lying.
He lies back down, nuzzling his face to your neck. "Then talk to me," he says.
Your stomach does an unbecoming, joyous little flip. "What?"
“Talk to me,” he says again, quieter. His voice has rawed its own edges, embarrassed and determined both. “Please. I can stay. Jus'—tell me things.”
You smirk. “What things?”
Duncan scowls. “Cruel woman.”
Your hand starts playing with his hair again. Scratching at the scalp, pulling gently. “You want me to praise you back into fucking me?”
Dunk’s eyes close. “Aye,” he says. “If you’re offerin’.”
What moves through you borders unkind. You hook both legs along his sides, cross them on his arse and turn your face to his ear. "So listen," you say.
He's so obedient his entire body slackens as if hearing is achieved through epidermis. For a while, he does just that. Listens with his lashes lowered since sight has become a luxury, and useless to him anyway. He's just touch and sound.
"You're so hot like this," you whisper. His fingers twitch on your shoulder. "You are. All fucked out and sorry for yourself." Against your neck his lips move and draw the shape of Christ. You brush the sweaty curl at his temple. "Your cock feels so good inside me," you say, softer, because it's a less generic truth. "See? You came and I'm still full of you."
Dunk makes a sound rid of consonants. His face turns an inch, mouth opening at your throat because it needs to be put somewhere to not grow loud. You feel him pulse once, tired and sore, and then another thing starts under it. A tiny return. Thickening that makes you rethink your approach on I can take you once again.
“I like it,” you tell him. “The mess you make. I like knowing it’s there.”
“Lass—”
“Makes me feel special.”
That one hurts him. Pleases him too, which may be the hurt of it. He gives the smallest aborted press, an insidious tremor of a body that wants to eat more than it can hold, but it drags through you slickly enough that both of you go quiet. He hisses through his teeth. The overburden of senses has him by the nerves. You can feel it as an argument within the muscles. Pleasure with a hot little blade tucked inside it.
You slide your palm down his back. Sweat has pooled at the dip of his spine and over his shoulders. “I like how big you are,” you say. “How you spread me open just by being there.”
Duncan shudders. His cock gives another slow, disbelieving throb.
“Oh,” you coo. “There he is.”
“Mean,” he mutters, but stays exactly where he is with his ear offered. He wants the cruelty by handful. Wants it ladled warm into the hollow places. Wants to be destroyed by kindness because kindness is the thing he has least defence against.
“You like it?” you ask. He nods once. “Can you tell me with words?”
A pause. His throat works against your skin. “A-aye.”
“Good.”
His whole body rises to that, a rough tightening from shoulders to arse. He moves by mistake, a shallow slip in and out, and the noise bursts from him with such pained sweetness your fingers tense in his hair.
“Careful,” you murmur, though care has begun to look like a strange medicine.
There's a laugh, short and bitten. “Tryin’,” Dunk says.
He always does, which might be a thing that turns you more sombre. “I know you are,” you say and get taken off-guard by how lovesick you sound. You plant a kiss at the place behind his ear. “That’s what I like.”
Duncan goes still again. Listening so hard his body seems to have turned all its chambers towards you. “I like your shoulders,” you say, and let your hand prove it. Sweep over one broad slope, then the other. “I like your sweet face. Especially when you’re inside me.” At that, his breath leaves him in pieces.
There is more. There is a daft, impossible amount more. It crowds up on your tongue in unsayable particulars. I like that your front teeth face inward a little and seem slightly too large for the civil architecture of your mouth. I like the freckle on your left cheek. I like that your left eye crinkles more than the right when you laugh. I like your feet. I like the soft of your stomach. I like your voice in the morning and what you feel like in bed beside me. I like. I like, I like, I like—
You spare him and do not spare him at all. “You’re so pretty, Duncan.”
His hips jerk again. There. No use pretending that one missed. Inside his head the answers to each of your praises start piling up. I like your sweet face too. He bites the thought down and tastes your skin instead. I like your shoulders too. I like your hands. I like them in my hair. I like your laugh when it turns to cackle. I like when you cook and get cross at the pan. I like when you go snotty while crying. I like your tits. I like your arse. I like your thighs. I like the weight of you. I like waking up with one of your hairs stuck to my mouth. I—
“F-fuck,” Duncan hisses through an involuntary back-stabbing twitch.
It's slippery. Lovely. He moves through his own spent and feels the sting prickle from the tip of his cock to the base of his spine like thousands of insects' wings fluttering between layers of skin. His mouth goes so wide the jaw clicks, hand finds your hip, grips, releases, then grips again with a gentleness that comes out more desperate than on purpose.
“Too much?” you ask.
He shakes his head. “N-no.”
In a quick assessment Duncan realises he is fully hard again. Worse than before, somehow. His cock feels harder than it has any right to, bigger too for the swell of deliciously tormented tissue. Blood fills him so utterly he gets light-headed with it and has one fleeting, cowardly thought that maybe men go soft after disgracing themselves for a reason and ought to leave their luck alone. Because this feels stolen. Forbidden in how sweetly it spreads through him. He is bathed in himself and your slick, trembling with it, and still some jurisdiction of the hips returns to him. Enough to roll them into you heavily and whisper, "Keep talkin'. Keep talkin' to me, sweetheart. Please."
It arrives so raw you nearly lose your nerve. Nearly. With the shift inside, your body, faithless and bright, remembers what it was promised. "You're doing so well, Duncan. You're so good. Look at me, darling."
He goes where your palm orders his chin and looks vaguely at where your face should be. It's blurry and he's not certain a case would be different if he had his glasses on. "I want ye to feel good, lassie. I want to be good for you. Oh, fuck—"
Your chest tightens like a hand closing round glass. You smooth your thumb under his eye, where he is hot and damp. “You are,” you tell him. "Kiss me."
He lowers his mouth to yours and lets them meet with too much gratitude, open lips driven by poor coordination. The kiss makes him move into a shallow glide. He is filling out properly, impossible and worried inside you, honed through the overbright ache because praise stomps on every other version of comfort and laughs at it.
"There you are," you say. "Oh fuck, there you are. Right there—"
"Yeah?" Dunk says. Starts pulling back farther, enough to make you protest the loss. When he slides in again both of you feel the second life of him. He brushes the rawest depths. The mess you claim to like so much gets pumped back in with a sound so wet and filthy the burn in Duncan's ears begins to feel cold.
"Yes—" you moan. Clench around him as if welcoming the insult. "God, you're so good—"
He whimpers. Quiet and punched out. Buries his face into your shoulder immediately after as if a noise so vulnerable doesn't have the right to exist in his body.
The sound spills across your chest and bleeds into your fingers. “Oh, Dunk.”
“Don’t make a thing of it.”
“I’m making several things of it.”
“Lass.”
“You sound beautiful,” you tell him, with a face so soft it could kill him.
His whole body flinches. “Jesus, woman.”
“You do.” You pull at his hair until his face comes back where you want it. “You sound beautiful when you want me.”
Duncan stares in your general direction, eyes narrowed and wet, lips parted around breaths he has forgotten to ration. Then his hips move again, and again, each stroke careful out of necessity, each one less careful because you keep rewarding him for it.
I like when you want me too, he thinks, frantic with it. I like when you need me. I love—
He squeezes his lids shut. Whole cliff edge waits under one syllable.
You kiss him before he can fall off it and murmur, “Good boy,” against his mouth.
The last of the strategy leaks off with the sweat at Dunk's temple. He thrusts deeper, shakes harder with the cost of it, and your back arches clean off the bed. Pleasure opens low and hot, fed by the weight of him, the broken sounds, the knowledge that you have put your mouth to some hidden hinge in him and made it swing wide.
“Again,” he says, barely there.
You smile against his lips. “My good boy.”
His cock jumps inside you so hard you gasp. He hears that too. Even without sight, he is learning you by damage and reward. He finds the rhythm by your sounds and keeps his face so close your words have nowhere to go except to him.
“Perfect,” you whisper. “I'm so close, Dunk. Keep fucking me like this. God, you're lovely—” A groan, then another careful stroke. Your thumbs brush under his lower lashes in a sweet little I'm here, I'm here with you. It's not really fair to be able to see his face opened so cleanly while he can't see yours, but the partial anonymity pours some courage down your throat. "I don't know who taught you to be ashamed of wanting," you say, "but they were wrong."
Duncan whines out your name. Torn and bruised by his teeth. The sound of it said like that tips you. You cradle his head to your neck and come with your mouth full of his hair. It seizes you crude and complete, legs and arms locking so hard he has nothing left to do but stay buried and take what your body milks out of him. “My good boy,” you whisper through it. “Duncan, my good boy—”
Good boy. Good boy is what Dunk has always wanted to be, and has tried to be, and still nobody has told him so. Good boy said with conviction by both your mouth and body is what lures him into following you into his second orgasm. He comes again, and worse for it. Loud this time, and costly. His whole body fights itself over where to put the force of it, lower stomach clenching, calf near mangled from the effort of keeping his weight off you. His voice breaks somewhere above his own size. “Ah—Christ, girl—ah, fuck—” Then he spends another load inside you, bathing his cock hot, while your cunt keeps pulling at him in ruthless aftershocks as if it has claimed him now and wants payment.
You keep him trapped by every limb you have. Keep him there while he shudders, while his hips give their last helpless stammers into yours, while his breath falls apart against your throat. It feels brutal for how close it is. For how much of yourselves you have both put into the other without saying the sensible things first.
When it passes, Duncan stays braced over you, trembling. His mouth works near your skin. “Y-you—you—” he stammers. “You make such a mess of me.” He blinks, then palms the mattress for his glasses. Finds them and manages to slide them on one-handed, though not entirely well for they sit on his nose crooked. But at least he can see you again. And Jesus fucking Christ—
The love is no longer embryonic. It has managed to gestate into some sort of Leviathan in the span of one fuck. He looks at what he's done to you and cannot believe his eyes. All of you looks warm. Face melted of every wrinkle it could produce, you lay below him blissed and gorgeous and Dunk feels as if he's going to need to step out from his own skin if he doesn't thank you. For this. For listening. For seeing him and guiding him when he's blind.
"God, girl, what was that?" he says. "What've you done to me?"
You regain the ability to frown. Your brows knit, worried, and you perch yourself higher on one elbow. "Are you not well?" you ask, brushing his cheek. "Have I—"
"No." Then, Duncan laughs. Not because he's happy, though he is, and not because anything is being particularly funny. His body chooses laughter for him. He puts his palm to your jaw and touches your lower lip. Presses on it, stretches it, and it's so glossy it slips away. "Yer not real," he says. "Yer an impossible girl."
A smile splits you, weird and uncanny. It lacks the eyes. Confused, you whisper, "Duncan?"
He answers the sound of his name with his mouth. Poorly at first. A little startled, a little overbrave, a kiss dragged from some place in him still smoking. He catches your lower lip, lets it go, comes back for the corner, then the whole of you, and the further he gets from the post-nut clarity, the more careful he becomes. His hand settles at your neck with a tenderness that feels borrowed from later life.
You let him. Let the kiss calm into something with breathing in it. When he pulls back, his forehead stays close to yours. “How d’you know me so well?” he asks, almost accusing.
Your eyes soften. “I could ask you the same,” you say.
If you did, you'd hear that I love ye, and it cannot be right of you. Duncan goes still above you. “Aye,” he says, though it barely counts as speech.
You brush your thumb over the corner of his mouth. “What?”
“I’ve never had it like that in my life,” he says, blushing fiercely. “I don’t know what it means, or if it has to mean anythin’, but I just—shite, I’m sorry, I jus'—”
“Me too,” you say. He blinks. You nod, because he looks like he needs the second strike of it. “Me too. I wasn’t lying about anything.”
“Thank you,” Dunk says. It is the first thing he can find that is small enough to fit his mouth. Then he shifts, and the small thing gets ruined. “Ah—shite.”
He tries to pull out carefully. Careful does not save either of you. The slip of him leaving is uncomfortable and cold. He hisses. You hiss too, then both sounds turn into sheepish laughter. Dunk sits back on his heels with hands hovering over you as if there is still a correct place to put them and he has not found it yet. "S-sorry," he says.
“Stop apologising for having a dick, okay?”
That makes him look at you in scandalised silence, which is worth the ache. He groans, and looks down since your face is a bit too much. His hands find your knees. He closes your legs gently and rocks them once as if settling something very important and badly made.
You sigh, loose and thready, and your whole lower body goes into a tired little tremor.
“There,” he says. His gaze catches lower. Sticks. “Shite,” he says. “I’ve, uh—”
“What?”
Instead of answering, Duncan leans in and, with the same care, straightens your legs leaving them slightly parted. The air finds you. You make a protesting noise, but he is already lowering himself between your thighs, ungainly and tender about it, until his cheek settles in the crook of one leg and one huge hand smooths over your navel.
“Don’t get any ideas,” you warn him. “I’m still very much untouchable.”
“I—I know.” His voice grows rougher, muffled near your skin. “Me too. I jus’—”
He moves his mouth close and kisses you. There. Low, over skin, without asking anything more from your nerves. His cum is seeping out. Your slit is filled white and wet enough that his spent drips lower, down the swell of buttock and onto the sheet. The sight ought to shame him, probably. Instead, it quiets something in his bones and wakes something worse.
“Relax,” he murmurs. “Just a kiss, lass.”
You try, though relaxation has become a complicated act. His breath warms where everything is swollen and used. He only rests his mouth in small presses, nose close enough to take in the scents bleeding over each other. The newness of it makes him oddly proud. Animal-proud. Kind of proud that probably only another beast would understand.
Duncan ought to leave it there. He knows this from the very recent, first-hand education in what happens when a body is pushed past what it can politely take, and he has no wish to be cruel with you. Still, curiosity implores him. He lets his tongue out only a little and touches you near the entrance, where the trickle has thinned enough to seem less like a dare. Just the tip of it. Just once.
The concoction meets him badly alloyed, both of you discoverable in it. He is salt and water, almost insipid were he to perform alone. You are richer. Sharper. Creamy in the way he remembers from the drunken night that got the two of you here, with that same wild edge underneath. Together it is stranger than either of you apart. Overwhelming, but with a door in it.
He licks again. Small and careful. More reverential than useful, though he would sooner bite off his own tongue than call it that. If romance is a place, Duncan thinks, it is here. Then, he stops thinking much at all. Your fingers find his hair after a moment. You comb once through it and leave your hand there, too tired to do anything finer. When your thigh starts twitching from the weight of his head, he lifts it and looks up at you. “Go shower?” he offers, hoarse. “I’ll change the sheets.”
You stare at him, a little stricken, than let him embrace the weirdness with dignity. Nod. His hands are there to help you when you try to rise and get off the bed. He pulls his T-shirt over you, though only the head, forgetting to put arms into their respectable holes.
"The sheets are—" You start pointing and it's only a finger vaguely poking under cotton.
"I know," Dunk says. "Go, go."
While you're gone, he does things automatically and with his head elsewhere. A man who is a friend and a co-parent and a willing, but ultimately rejected fiance, can only extend his stay this long. Even though for a moment Duncan has felt like an actual lover, there is no argument in him that would sound appropriate aloud. He looks at the dirty sheet in his palms and here he can no longer tell which part of the stain belongs to him, and which to you.
He's stood with a pillowcase half-fixed when you return. Sleepy-looking and warm from the shower, you come closer. Help him with one decisive shake and throw the pillow onto the bed. Then, you crane your head up, and tell him, "Stay? If you want."
Duncan sighs. Bends to kiss your forehead, and says, "Aye." You breathe out too, and the air dilutes int something more chewable. "I'll be right back," he says.
It feels natural to the point of danger. Cuddling in the morning, breakfast together. Setting up a room. Having a mild breakdown over it, which reforges itself into emotions too messy to be talked over so they lead to sex instead. The sex is mind-blowing and leaves Duncan both full and hollow. You take shower first, he goes second. He knows where the sheets are and where the towels are. He knows to wipe his feet before stepping onto the tiles, otherwise you huff so loudly he can hear you across the flat. You gave him a toothbrush. His cock feels a bit scraped, balls empty, but both things are pleasant and sit agreeably on the hips. He walks down the corridor to the bedroom and hears the telly muttering. He can tell exactly which episode of Sapphire & Steel is playing, because he's seen it many times. He cannot remember the plot of it properly, but it's the one with people disappearing into the photographs. In the bedroom you've passed out on your side of the bed, curled, with one arm invading beyond the middle, and the other wedged under your chin. He has his side of the bed. He sits, puts your hand on his thigh, watches the episode and remembers one afternoon when he watched it with Rafe. When the show ends, he turns the telly down and lowers himself so his face is level with your belly.
He's nervous. There's a human inside the size of an avocado, and when Duncan thinks of an avocado in his palm it all seems improbable to him. He's got no idea if the baby can hear him, but feels it is seemly to introduce oneself. "Hello in there," he whispers, quiet to not wake you. "I am your da. We'll meet in uh—" He takes out his hand and counts the remaining time. "In five months," Dunk says.
It all feels very silly but very necessary. He pulls air in through his nose and continues, softer, as if low volume is the thing that might make it less strange. “I, uh… I’ve read babies like when ye sing to them. So I’m gonna—jus' quiet. We won’t wake your mam. She’s asleep.”
There is no answer from above. Only your thick breathing and the small shift of your knee. Dunk takes that as permission. He adjusts himself with one arm folded under his head and legs hanging off the mattress from the knees down. His eyes rest on a place where the child is doing its secret dark work. Then, he clears his throat, feels foolish, and starts with a hum so low it near stays in his chest entirely.
"I wish I was on yonder hill," Duncan croons, half-swallowed for shyness. “‘Tis there I’d sit and cry my fill, until every tear would turn a mill.” He shuts his lids. It's not really a lullaby, but it's the first thing that comes to his mind. The old language feels borrowed and worn smooth enough by other mouths for him to express something Dunk doesn't understand yet.
“Is go dté tú, mo mhuirnín slán… Siúil, siúil, siúil a rúin… Siúil go socair agus siúil go ciúin…"
And may you go, my darling safely. Walk, walk, walk on, oh love. Walk steadily and walk softly.
His voice deepens where it warms. It starts coming quieter, and somehow fuller, and your eyes open somewhere inside the dark of sleep. Unmoving. The room has gone that thin afternoon hush where a body can pretend it is still dreaming if it keeps still enough. Dunk does not know you are listening. That makes it worse. Better. One of those.
There's a hand resting near you, shy of touching until he forgets himself and lets two fingers settle on the cotton. The pressure is almost nothing, but you feel it.
“Siúil go doras agus éalaigh liom,” he sings. The line makes a door appear in your head. An escape. Come away with me. Elope with me, without him having to say anything modern enough to frighten either of you.
When he sings that part he misremembers Gaeilge briefly and lets the thing be just sound, for the true matter and its recipient are, for now, only wishful thinking.
The last blessing comes. “Is go dté tú, mo mhuirnín slán.”
You keep your eyes half shut. Watch him through the blur of your lashes.
“I’ll sell my rock, I’ll sell my reel,” he goes on. “I’ll sell my only spinning wheel to buy my love a sword of steel.” His thumb moves against your shirt. You doubt he notices, or that he understands what his own voice is doing. Making vows out of other people’s grief, putting shape round something he has no courage to hold up in daylight yet. Love, maybe, dressed as a folk song so it can walk past both of you unsearched.
Your throat tightens. Stupidly, completely.
“Is go dté tú, mo mhuirnín slán.”
He hums the chorus this time more than sings it. The Irish turns soft in his mouth, almost sleepy.
“Siúil, siúil, siúil a rúin…”
You let your eyes close before he can catch them open. Let him have the kindness of being unseen. Let yourself have the worse kindness of hearing him.
“Siúil go socair agus siúil go ciúin…”
His fingers spread a little wider over your shirt.
“Siúil go doras agus éalaigh liom…”
By the last line, his voice has thinned to nothing much. A murmur. A breath laid carefully where his hand is.
“Is go dté tú, mo mhuirnín slán.”
For a while after, he only hums. Then even that fades. His hand grows heavy on you, and you know he's fallen asleep. You let out the long-trapped gasp, and with it, a tear falls down your cheek.
Now, you know I always have a hard time limiting myself on what to quote because it's all so lovely and poetic and so many things jump out to me, but this really tugged at my heartstrings:
"You might not be an expert on how to execute the part after winning men that makes them brave enough to tell you all the things you yearn to hear (I love you, I love you, I love you), but this—this, you know. You know where they are softhearted. You know how to find this part. Despite what your mother said, it is not wicked. It's listening for key words that quieten their voices, and looking where eyes ought to be set. Dunk seems to be good at this too, because he reads the cues with surprising proficiency. Whether by guess or wisdom, it eludes you, but he manages to be there when you need a hug, a good word, a joke, a shoulder, or now, a fuck. What kind of fuck, he understands quickly too. You don’t yet pass judgement on the intention behind it: if he means to stay for long, or if he has simply recognised the means to an end. The version in which this is just the way he has sex, unperformed and therefore wholly aligned with you, doesn’t even make it to your head.
And Dunk is softhearted in many places. He’s unbearably tender when it comes to tending bodies, as if each part of you deserves kindness. It’s only natural to conclude he’d like that back, in one form or another. He reacts to praise as though it puts ground under his feet. Keeps finding ways to be useful, offering himself in small practical pieces, as if saying notice me, notice me, I am here, without understanding at all that it is impossible to not notice him. If someone in his past failed to see the easiness to love him that he comes with, they were either dumb or cruel in the throat. The only thing in him that halts the loving is the fearful nature of frail hearts. You recognise that like you are both made of similar clay, even if you cannot put a finger on the exact place where it hurts. In cases such as Duncan and yourself, bravery arrives in steps. Valour blooms rather than surges, so you give him a small brick for the lifeblood to keep building. Praise him for the way he is. Just this."
Just completely stunning and heartfelt!! Reader recognizing a kindred spirit even if it might come from different places, and just how earnest Dunk is, just ahhhhldkahjsflkh this man deserves all of the praise and tenderness!! Men want this too! 🥺
contents (nsfw): Dunk x fem!Reader, Modern AU friends to lovers rom-com with pregnancy. Humour, angst, banter, sexual and romantic tension, mentions of jealousy, horny thoughts, acts of service, pregnant sex (🗣️🗣️🗣️) consisting of: standing sex, cowgirl, coming inside, lots of feels, aftercare.
<- previous chapter
MASTERLIST
next chapter -> (12/06)
synopsis: Universe smashes them together. (Pregnancy status: 14-16 weeks, start of the II trimester).
word count: 14K 🤭
a/n: Banner by me, dividers by @strangergraphics, proofread by @hextoken!
It has not even occurred to Dunk that he could date. Last time he tried, he came out of it with his heart all mangled and a new distrust of women who said they liked simple men while meaning simple to keep. Even if he were ready now, to start he would have to meet certain conditions. He would have to talk to women in a way that suggested interest. To do that, he would have to possess some interest in the first place.
When he leaves your flat after an incredibly awkward supper tacked onto what Dunk had thought was an amazing day, he realises he has none. None spare, at least. Whatever ration of interest a man gets issued in life has gone your way entirely and left the cupboard bare. He walks home with the taste of tomato sauce and embarrassment still in his mouth, thinking of how well the baby shopping had gone and how normal it had felt to stand beside you in aisles full of cots and bottles and things neither of you knew how to judge yet. Then dinner, the papers, the maths teacher, and you telling him he could ask her out as if offering him a lift to someplace he did not want to go.
For months after that heart-mangling incident, the one that brought him together with Raymun, Dunk thought falling in love again was a risk he could not afford. Given his generous nature and his inability to keep boundaries where there ought to be some, it seemed only sensible. He had been told he was smothering and that his tendency for enmeshment was fearsome, so staying alone with all those feelings appeared to be the right order of things.
Then Raymun fell in love. With his love came you, and Dunk found himself cured of all his previous resolutions. He took to liking you quickly, and to interest quicker still, because you were the prettiest thing he had ever seen and his eyes, unfortunately, worked well enough with glasses on to make that everybody’s problem. After that came wanting, and there he stayed. For two years he wanted with the low-grade stamina of someone persisting in rain because the bus must come sooner or later. Only every time he gathered enough courage to make a fool of himself, some boyfriend of yours arrived first and had to be withstood. One had a car too loud for the size of his personality. One wore scarves indoors. One called you babe in a tone that made Dunk’s fingers tighten round pint glasses. He endured them all with the pained dignity of livestock at market, and when it finally came to him and you, it went so well he ought to have known the God was setting a trap.
Now, week or so later, he sits on the courtyard bench with a chocolate the maths teacher left in his locker in one hand and a card saying thank you. coffee later? in the other, wondering why on earth he would date someone else when you are out there carrying his child.
A few nights before, he asked Raymun what he thought of it, and Raymun, being Raymun, answered by asking three questions back over the rim of his pint. D’you want to? D’you like her? D’you think she likes you? To the first two Duncan said no, to the third one, I dunno.
Raymun shrugged, offensively simple about it. “Then don’t do it.”
That might have settled the matter if the two of them had not, ten minutes later, gone from one woman to the other as if comparing sacred field notes. Raymun had Rowan’s whole little catalogue ready: how she slept now with one hand under her cheek and the other under her belly though there was barely anything to hold; how she had become adorable over food in a way that made him half mad; how she had discovered the phrase you make it best and used it to turn Raymun into a full-time kitchen servant without ever lifting her voice.
Dunk listened, smiled where he should, laughed where the story asked for it, and felt a small dull sadness open in him at every detail he could not match. He knows your appointments, your nausea, what tea you tolerate, what colour baby clothes you consider criminal. He knows the shape of your feet in black tights and the sound of your voice when illness drags gravel through it. But there are whole ordinary hours of you he has no access to. How you sleep when nobody sees. What you eat at midnight. Whether you talk to the baby yet, or think that daft, or do it only inside your head. Raymun has a life growing round Rowan, messy and domestic and full of crumbs. Dunk has updates, errands, and a longing he keeps trying to dress as good behaviour. Things improve minutely when he's useful, so that is what he focuses on.
“Are you saving that chocolate for later, or can I have it?”
Dunk looks up. Egg stands in front of him with his bag hanging off one shoulder, eyes already fixed on the bar in Dunk’s hand.
“What?”
“The chocolate,” Egg says. “If you’re not eating it.”
“Why? D’you want it?”
Egg’s face opens into a grin so quick and shameless Dunk has to snort. “Well, if it’s upsetting you.”
“Cheeky little—” Dunk mutters, but gives it over anyway.
Egg takes it, drops onto the bench beside him with all the entitlement of a landlord, and starts working at the wrapper. For a moment there is only the crisp little noise of foil and paper. Then he says, with his mouth already full, “So. Are you engaged yet?”
Dunk shuts his eyes. “Jesus Christ.”
“That means no?”
“That means mind your own business.”
Egg chews, unbothered. “You were the one asking me.”
“I did not ask you any such thing.”
“You did. You asked if she ought to be your wife.”
“I asked a general question.”
Egg gives him a flat look.
Dunk huffs and leans back against the bench. “No. We’re not engaged.” Then, too quickly, he adds, “I didn’t ask.”
Egg studies him.
Dunk frowns. “What?”
“You’re lying.”
“I am not.”
“You are.” Egg’s eyes narrow. His bald head tilts a little, and Dunk gets the dreadful sense of a crystal ball being consulted at close range. “Oh,” Egg says. Blinks once, solemn with discovery. “She said no.”
For one full second Dunk thinks he has never been so humiliated in his life, and that includes falling face-first into a mud pit during a staff sports day while children chanted his name like Romans at an execution.
Then Egg adds, “Well, no wonder if you’re flirting with Miss Darry.”
Dunk turns his head very slowly. “I’m doin’ what?”
“Flirting,” Egg says, with a tired patience more fitting for a teacher than a pupil. “With Miss Darry.”
“I am not flirtin’ with Miss Darry.”
“She gave you chocolate.”
“That’s not flirtin’.”
“And a card.”
“That’s gratitude.”
“And she smiles at you with all her teeth.”
Dunk looks down at the card again, then away, as if the thing may sprout more accusations if watched too closely. “She asked me for coffee because I helped mark first-class maths.”
Egg bites off another square of chocolate. “Adults are so bad at knowing when things are happening to them.”
“Listen here, you wee menace—”
“And if you’re having a baby with one lady, you shouldn’t be collecting chocolates from another.”
“I didn’t collect it. It was in my locker.”
“Worse then. She has access.”
Dunk gives him a look. Egg only chews, pleased with himself for about three seconds before his face goes thoughtful again. “Are you going to ask her again?”
Dunk sighs and rubs both hands over his eyes under the glasses. “I don’t know, Egg. Should I, if she said no once? I don’t think so.”
Egg thinks on that. Then his gaze slides past Dunk’s shoulder, towards the black limo nosing up by the school gate. He stuffs the chocolate into his bag with sudden efficiency. “Well,” he says, hopping down from the bench, “you’ve the ring already. You could try asking Miss Darry.”
Dunk grabs him before he can bolt. Egg yelps and laughs as Dunk tucks him under one arm like he weighs no more than a sack of potatoes.
“You little horror,” Dunk says, carrying him across the yard while Egg wriggles without any true commitment to escape. “I ought to leave you in lost property.”
“You can’t. I’m claimed.”
“Aye, unfortunately.”
By the time they reach the car, Egg is still laughing, flushed in the face and indignant in the pleased way children get when an adult has agreed to be ridiculous for them. Dunk opens the back door with his free hand and the laugh goes out of him cleanly.
Maekar Targaryen sits in the back seat, straight-spined in a dark suit, looking at Dunk as if he has been summoned for assessment and found damp. Egg goes quiet too.
He stands there with the boy still half-pinned under his arm. Then he sets him down a little too carefully. Egg smooths his jumper with injured dignity and climbs in.
“Has my boy been misbehaving?” Maekar asks.
Dunk clears his throat. “N-no. No, sir. Jus’—just tomfoolery, is all. Like kids do.”
Maekar’s eyes move from Dunk to Egg, then back again. He gives one small nod, the kind that seems to dismiss and approve in the same motion. “Good day to you, sir,” he says.
“Good day,” Dunk says, and closes the door.
The limo pulls away a moment later, black and polished and awful against the ordinary schoolyard. Dunk watches it go. In the back window Egg lifts a hand without turning round. And Duncan could swear, right before the glass takes Maekar’s face beyond seeing, that the man is smiling.
It brightens him some. Enough that he texts Miss Darry, tells her he’s too busy, and thanks her for the chocolate. Enough that measuring the spare room at your place today, putting everything into the respectable little corner he has arranged with you, feels a fraction lighter.
When he gets there he knocks twice, then a third time, and as he is about to get sweaty all over from the sort of thoughts that bloom out of inertia, he hears your tired voice on the other side of the wood.
“Yes, I’m coming, for fuck’s sake.”
The door opens to reveal you beyond cross, but the minute you see him your face does something utterly strange. It falls back into what Duncan presumes it was before: your mouth frowns with such compulsion the chin dimples under it, your eyes remoisturise, and he knows to add the prefix simply from the already wet redness of them which makes you look like you are battling conjunctivitis.
He steps into the skin of a watchful caretaker as if coming home. “Hey,” he says, reaching for your shoulders. “What’s happenin’, hm?”
“I—” You make that breathless little catch people make when they have been crying for hours. One hand goes to your forehead. “Fuck,” you whine. “It’s today. I’m so sorry. I completely forgot.” Each word comes out damper than the one before, until forgot hitches on the last syllable and a new tear beads on your lashes.
“Oh, sweetheart,” Dunk sighs.
You are always smaller than him, but today exceptionally. He notices the hunch in your neck and the slant of your knees, and is revolted by both because he knows the stance of defeat from muscle memory. He walks you backwards into your own hallway, kicks the door shut behind him, and gathers you in.
“Lassie, c’mon—” he mutters, setting a palm over the back of your head. It is large enough to shield near all of it.
Then you are crying fully. Mumbling I’m sorry and hiccuping into his shirt, clutching at his waist so hard your fingers bite through the cotton. You wipe your face into him, and Dunk aches clean through with it. He rubs your back, rocks you a little, shushes you under his breath, and prays you cannot hear how fast his heart is beating.
When you calm some, he takes your face in both hands and wipes the streaks from under your eyes with his thumbs. “What happened, girl?”
You stare at him. “N-nothing.”
Dunk huffs through a smile.
Your face crumples again, less dramatically this time, more from the nuisance of being known than from fresh misery. “I just… feel like shit,” you say. “Work’s been awful, I’m tired, my back aches, I hate that pregnancy pillow, I don’t want to eat anything I’ve got at home, my hair is greasy, and—”
You stop, swallowing hard.
“And?” he prompts, gentle.
“And I really want to have a bath,” you say, with the malady of a person confessing fraud, “but I’m afraid I won’t be able to get out of it.”
Dunk looks at you for a second. Your eyes are swollen. Your mouth is all dragged down. There is a crease from the pillow still printed faintly on one cheek, and your hair has been tied up and let down and tied again until it has given up all loyalty to shape. “Right,” he says.
You sniff. “Right?”
“Aye.” His thumbs smooth the tear tracks once more, then he lets his hands drop to your shoulders. “We can sort that,” he says. “Why didn’t ye tell me?”
“What,” you croak, “that I’m disgusting?”
“That ye needed help.”
You stare at him, stumped. His eyes are large behind the lenses, soft and kind and warm despite the blue of them, like cold winter light over the ocean. Because you being useful all the time makes everything worse, you think. “I dunno,” you tell him.
Dunk receives that with the grave patience he has for children coming down from a crying fit. “What’s first,” he asks, “food or bath?”
“Bath,” you say, then hesitate. Your eyes move over his face, suddenly unsure. “Would you?”
“Mhm. Course.”
“Won’t that be weird?”
Dunk’s mouth tugs at one corner. “No.” You give him a look. “I’ve seen ye before,” he adds.
“You were drunk.”
“I can get drunk if ye want.”
A laugh, finally. Still damp-faced and wrecked enough for it to catch in the throat. “Sod off.”
“There she is,” Dunk says. “Go change. I’ll run it.”
In the bathroom he has a mild moment of panic. Then, because he is a practical man when panic gives him something to do, he pours far too much of something foamy under the running tap. The bath clouds over quickly. Good. Grand. A civilised barrier between his eyes and certain death. He keeps the water only a few degrees above lukewarm because the app said so, and stands there with one hand under the stream knowing he is going to get clouted for it. He finds he does not mind much.
You step into the bathroom with every nerve in your body alarmed. There is nothing normal about a friend giving you a bath. There is especially nothing normal about this friend. You're being silly, you could just take a shower. When your back gives one dull throb the thought of getting even one ounce of comfort becomes stronger than reason or the entire history of social boundaries. At this point you might agree if Lyonel were the one proposing it, though you’d have to drown yourself after.
Dunk is knelt behind the back of the bath, one sleeve pushed up, arm wet with water and foam. He lifts his head when you come in. His face is already pink, but his voice stays even. “C’mon,” he says. “I won’t look.”
He spreads one arm out for you. It drips on the tile. You come closer, then stop when it comes to taking the robe off. Dunk shuts his eyes with theatrical force.
You huff. “Oh, fuck that. I’d rather have you looking than me breaking my neck over this.”
The robe loosens and peels. Slides down your back. Dunk keeps his lids low, but begrudgingly, he sees.
First your shoulders, tense and rolled a little towards your chest, with the muscle there pulled like a bowstring. Then your back, with a warm bare line carrying the day in every tight place. Lower, where the spine gives way to the small inward dip above your hips, and those two hollows there nearly finish him for reasons he has no language for and too much body for.
He almost manages to skip to your legs and feet. That would have been sensible despite likely to help very little. Yet, his eyes land on your arse and stay there for one harrowing second.
Familiar. Longed-for. Still heavy in his hands if he lets memory have any say in it. He remembers the spill of it into his fingers, the same backs of thighs bracketing his shoulders and the redolence of their apex, kindly facing his nose. The blush deepens on him brutally, laying siege on his neck, face, and, by the feeling of it, scalp too. He thanks the God for not making him bald, and begins to sweat.
What is worse, the angle makes you look unpregnant enough for Dunk to momentarily misplace a reason behind this circumstance. His mind supplies a string of cause and effect: if there are hands, they ought to be held; if there are thighs, they ought to be squeezed; dimples of Venus revered, neck's nape licked, spine unkinked, skin rubbed and felt, buttocks bitten or kissed or outright eaten because they seem delicious to him. Once he gets, barely, past the first involuntary wave of primal depravity, he thinks he might be able to endure it (also barely).
You turn, and he catches enough of the front for the whole experience to morph into lethal. A glimpse of a side-boob, heavy and round, is gorgeous enough for Dunk's heart to recall all the emotions shadowing tenderfoot boy-virgins. Upon leaning, the breasts pour over your ribs and he becomes highly conscious of the reasons for their swelling. His gaze drops to stomach, still mostly yours, still quiet to the eye, but not silent.
He's never put much thought into whether pregnant women are sexy or not, so to see your body and undergo the all-systems seizure is a surprise to him. It seems as if his cock is connected to the heart, that is connected to the head, that is connected to all his limbs that currently tingle. The cock, the heart, and the head agree on one matter: that he's never seen a thing more beautiful in his life and the thought that he's the one who did this to you fills him with smugness and sickening joy.
The belly disappears behind your thigh as you put one foot into the bath, and Duncan comes back to himself enough to lift both arms, hovering, ready in case you need them.
“This is tepid,” you scoff, balancing on his forearm.
Dunk squeezes his eyes shut. “It’s warm,” he says thickly, and knows when you are sat only by the sound of it. Once the water sloshes he deems everything safe enough to see again and cracks his lids open. Kneels behind you, and with some regret, notices that the only visible things now are your head, shoulders and knees.
You lean back and rest your neck on the edge of the bathtub, next to his palm. “Are you temperature-blind too?”
It’s sweet enough that he smiles. Small and murmured so softly he knows, despite complaining, that the service is working. “Ye gonna be mean to me, lass?” he asks.
A pause. “No,” you say. “Sorry.”
His hand slides to your shoulder. Swipes the hair off it. “Besides,” Duncan says, “it’s safer for the baby. The a—”
“The app said so, is it?”
“Point taken.” He blushes fiercer for it. Lets his fingers idle on the apple of the joint, then slip beneath the sheet of water. “I know ladies like to scald themselves in showers and whatnot, but it can’t be this bad, hm?”
“It’s not,” you say.
The dance is very gentle. Dunk hasn’t planned this far, so he doesn’t know how much he’s allowed or what he’s expected to do. One large worry is you saying thank you, I got this, and making him wait outside. One ardent wish is to wash your hair. He lingers on the precipice, stirring the water next to your arm, hoping his hand will decide for him once the opportunity arises.
You seem to not mind. Only ask him, “And how do you suddenly know what ladies like to do in the showers and whatnot?”
“Well believe it or not," Dunk says, "I’ve met some ladies in my life before you.”
You hum at that, then turn your head a little against the rim. “Speaking of,” you start. “How’s your maths lady?”
Dunk frowns. His hand stills. “She’s not my maths lady.”
Another beat. Then: “You know what I mean.”
He thinks about saying that he has no interest in your stupid idea of him dating, and less interest still in hearing you encourage it from the wrong side of a tub while he is trying very hard to keep himself decent. The whole thought comes up too blunt and hot for speech, so he only huffs and draws his hand from the water. “She’s still a colleague,” he says.
Internally, you go: thank fuck. Thank fuck, because despite the whole thing being engineered by your fear-ridden brain, you still wanted to win this one, and you have. For the most part, at least, because Dunk is not dating the maths teacher. Lovely. A smaller part of it belongs to your body’s new flavour of cruelty, which has led you to some humiliating places.
Hinge is not a pond where pregnant women can swim safely. Your logical mind has told you so, basic human hubris has told you so, and Rowan has told you so, then proceeded to help you construct an alluring profile anyway. If anything has announced your transition from the first to the second trimester, it is the mild hots unravelling into full-blown randiness. It has left you leering perversely at anything that has fallen victim to Lyonel’s oral fixation, rolling your hips against the moon-shaped pillow you always secretly imagine to be Duncan, and cannibalising your own lips at any of his texts that could qualify as mildly romantic. Big part of the shame is that even a simple how you? has been filed under that category as of late.
An even bigger part of the shame is the maths teacher. The unexplainable jealousy of her, and the last two weeks spent wondering less how you are going to survive it if it happens than how to prevent it. Showing up at school under petty pretext, wearing one of the belly-revealing tops did not happen only because the summer is technically still spring, and a fool’s one.
Enough became enough when your hand joined the rutting hips and the mouth left agape against plush like you were a teenage girl practising kissing on a mirror. You tried to be normal and available and modern. The app gave you freaks, cowards, lactation enthusiasts, and one man who opened with respectfully, how pregnant? The thought of each sickened you before it excited anything, while thoughts of Dunk remained persistently intrusive. Yes, of that one night, but more, too. Of his hands on you. On your feet, on your belly. Of the way his head dips so his lips can reach your shoulder every time he hugs you. Of the way he blushes at wrong moments and never backtracks from a promised thing. Of his back bared from bowing over the crib. Of his smile. His freckles. His hair in tufts, his slim nails, his shoes being enormous next to yours in the hallway, and the way he says lass like you are someone special to him.
You slide down until your head dunks under the water, just enough to wet your hair. The bath muffles the room for one blessed second, then you come back up blinking and wiping droplets from your eyes with the heel of your hand. When you reach for the shampoo, it’s not there.
The next thing you hear is a wet cough of liquid being squeezed from the bottle. “Is it all right if I do it for ye?” Dunk asks.
You try very hard not to sound giddy. “You want to wash my hair?”
“Well,” he says, practical as a hammer. “You want your hair clean, don’t ye?”
“Y-yeah.” You sit up a little, drawing your knees in until you can fold around yourself. “Sure. If you don’t mind.”
“I don’t mind, girl.” Then, Dunk lathers the shampoo between his palms and slides his fingers into your hair.
The sound you make is small. Small, but it lands in him so badly. Breathy and sweet and gone before you can catch it back. Your head eases into his hands with the whole damp weight of it, and Duncan loves it so immediately he has to look down at your crown to gather himself. Your hair clings to his fingers, slick and heavy with water, softer once the shampoo works through. It parts for him in darkening ropes. Catches between his knuckles. Holds the heat of your skin.
With strands drawn out of the way he can see the knobs of your spine and the line of bathwater teasing the tits that are flattened against your thighs. Technically, he sees nothing. Unfortunately, his imagination works like a warehouse with every shelf badly labelled and all the doors left open.
So he keeps to the work. Slow, circular movements. Fingers at your temples, careful over the sore-feeling places. Behind your ears. Back to the crown. Then, at the nape of your neck, he grows bolder. His whole palm frames it and squeezes. Not hard, only enough to feel the tension ease and give the muscle somewhere to go.
You gasp. “Oh, yes—”
Duncan smiles like an idiot. “Good?”
“Yeah. Yeah, um—” You swallow, throat clicking softly. “Sorry. Sorry for the state of me.”
“Stop that.” His hands still for a second. “There’s nothin’ wrong with your state. It’s blessed, so it is, and I don’t want to hear any more snarks about it.”
Under the correction you go quiet. Worse, you obey it. Your shoulders sink, first from exhaustion and then from something more treacherous, until your body begins accepting the hands on it as if without them it gets wounded with deficiency. The touch works down past the scalp and takes liberties elsewhere: slackens your jaw, unhooks something under the breastbone, sends a warm pulse through your hips that has no regard for context. The last person who touched you with this sort of care was also Duncan, but then it came with drink, darkness, and several hours missing from the timeline. This is worse for being clear. You know where his fingers are. You know where yours are gripping your own knees. You know the water has gone nearly still around you and your body, faithless little beast, is starting to hope he never stops.
When you’re about to lose it and start begging him, touch me, touch me, keep touching me, he stops. “Pass me the shower head, will ye?” Dunk says.
You do, blindly, while scowling at the very bottom of your soul and mourning your losses. He starts the water, tests it against his wrist first, then shields your forehead with his cupped palm and begins rinsing. Warmth floods you. Warmer than the bath, finally, as if the man has discovered mercy after all.
You tip your head back, throat bared long and vulnerable, and it does something murderous to Duncan’s blood pressure.
He takes the gift of your closed eyes to gape. At your teeth showing between parted lips, at your lashes clumping darker with damp, at the small working of your neck when you swallow. He keeps the water from your face with the seriousness of a surgical task, which means he simply has to keep touching you. His palm smooths over your temple, cheek, the slick line of hair. Then, he guides the spray lower and rinses the last of the soap from your back. Sadly, the moment when your hair gets clean arrives.
Dunk turns the shower head off. “There,” he says, voice only a little ruined. “Now for the dreaded part, hm?”
“Yeah,” you say, then swallow. “Just—please don’t laugh.”
Duncan, offended by the very thought, says, “I won’t.” He stands, and because he is occasionally capable of saintliness when directly supervised, fixes his eyes with great discipline on the far wall, the towel rail, the corner of the ceiling, anywhere that is neither tit nor arse. Then his palms slide under your armpits. “Up,” he says.
You make one small noise of protest, but he lifts, and your body goes with him as if someone has pulled a string through the top of you. For one second you are dangling more than rising, knees straightening, feet finding the bath’s floor, water sliding off you in streams. The minute you’re upright your arms cross over yourself, even though your back is to him.
You hear fabric shift. Then the bathrobe lands over your shoulders, heavy and soft, and Dunk’s hands come next, drawing it round you without fuss. A towel follows, catching the wet ends of your hair before they can drip down your spine. He pats rather than rubs, which should be funny and somehow only makes your throat feel narrow.
“Here ye are,” he says. “All in one piece.”
You clutch the robe closed at your chest. “Thank you. Maybe just help me get out?”
He nods. “Course.”
You are prepared for an arm. A forearm, specifically. Something to balance on while you step over the high side of the tub with as much grace as a pregnant woman can manage. Dunk, however, has other ideas.
He comes round to the side, bends, and starts gathering you up. You jerk a little in surprise. “What're you doing?”
He pauses, genuinely baffled, one arm already behind your back and the other slipping under your knees. “Helping?”
“Duncan.”
“C’mon,” he says. “Don’t be a wuss now.”
You put up a final symbolic fight in the form of a suffering look, and Dunk only waits it out.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” you mutter, and let him have you.
He lifts before your body has fully agreed to be lifted. Arms go from hovering to holding, and then the bathroom drops by a few inches. Your stomach dips with it. Your hands fly to his shoulders and clutch there, and you wish for him to read it as some small fear because it's a closer neighbour to dignity than the truth.
He has the weight of you settle against him with such immediate rightness that Dunk has to set his jaw against it. The way he perceives it, you weigh almost nothing and also the entire room, which is troublesome and confusing both. It is simple enough for muscle, so Dunk could carry you to the end of the street and back without thinking much of the effort. Complicated when it gains density. There is your forehead right next to his chin and he tries to be mindful of not scratching it. Where your hair presses his chest the cotton soaks, warms, and darkens. Water slides down your calf, gathers at the heel, and drops onto the floorboards with hollow taps. He walks carefully, as if the flat has become uneven on purpose.
Once he gets to the bedroom, he asks, “Where am I puttin’ ye?”
You turn your face into his shoulder. “The floor is fine.”
So he lowers you as if the floor is miles away until you come back to standing. You look up. He looks down.
The room goes oddly close around the two of you. Your hair drips because he hasn't done a very good job drying it. One cold bead runs from the end of it and lands on the back of his hand. Dunk watches it break there.
“Right,” he says, though nothing has been made right by saying it.
You still have both hands on his shoulders. Your fingers have gone slack, but persist. “Right,” you echo, softer.
He could step back. There is space behind him. There is a whole bed to put between you, a whole hallway to traverse and make you a cup of tea, a whole street to walk to his own place, whole country to run and a whole world to travel, and none of those would make Dunk feel any better.
“D’you need anything else?” he asks. Your eyes flick over his face, and for one mad second he thinks you might say yes.
Yes.
Robbed of touch, you want it back. His fingers in your hair again, nails on scalp, chest to your side, no, to your chest, and sliding and heavy on you until breathing is something you get to indulge in only if you do your maths correctly and gulp once the weight eases. Touch me, hold me, crush me, anything-me, so you don't have to spend another night on a half-arsed tryst with a pillow masquerading as him.
“Hold me,” you say, because the little in- dividing sanity from its opposite has begun to look less like a prefix and more like a plank over a ravine. You could've just said no. It has two letters as well, which should make it sturdier. But the numbers let the no acquire certain overfamiliarity with the in- which would send you back under the covers to scrape his smell from the bathrobe with your teeth and pretend his mouth is at your neck instead of back at his own flat. Anything braver than hold would kick the plank clean out from under you and make the word into a whole insanity with no seam left to hide in. So you choose the hyphen. The smallest scrap. A thing with enough necessity in it to be genuine and enough restraint in it to still let you lie about what you mean.
Dunk is there before you finish thinking. Arms, whole miles of them, come round you, wrap you, then keep wrapping as if the first pass failed to convince him you are caught. It is less a hug than a gathering. He takes you in by increments and still seems to think there is more of you to collect. His body bows around the shape yours takes until his face finds the junction of your shoulder and neck. The bridge of his glasses nudges you there, cold for a second. His mouth stays open against the robe, breath soaking through.
You have to rise onto your toes from the force of it. Your heels lift. Your whole weight goes strange and borrowed, balanced between his arms and the floor, and because he is Duncan he notices and shifts one foot forward so you can lean properly. His hand spreads between your shoulder blades, then drags down your back through the bathrobe. “Ye feel good,” Dunk mutters into you. He keeps rubbing. Finds your spine and makes it look innocent, and the fact of it having to be made to look so speaks for itself. "Smell nice," he says, breathier.
“Dunk,” you say.
He answers with a sound from the chest. A hum, an almost-purr, thickened by the place his face is pressed. “Mm.”
Then he starts rocking you. Barely. Back and forth in a motion so small it could pass for soothing if your body had less imagination. His hand keeps working at you through cotton. Shoulder to waist, waist to shoulder. Makes your toes curl against the floorboards.
Insanity acquires new shape. It becomes an empty bed and sheets cold on one side and morning that holds only one person. It is having a man who knocked you up kept at an arm's length while his nose is wedged into your neck. And maybe loneliness has you both by throats, but for a second you let yourself believe he might want it too and rule that it would be saner to just… ask him.
“Would you—fuck,” you stammer. “Would you consider, uh—” Dunk moves then. Lifts his head off you and looks, making the whole art of producing speech this much harder. Under the scrutiny you manage only: “Can you stay?”
He frowns, puzzled. "Aye, course. Of course I can."
"No. I mean—" You shake your head. "Can you stay with me. Can you—oh God." Your forehead knocks his chest.
Duncan stills, then says, "Girl." He frowns some more and studies the parting of your hair. "Girl, what d’ye need?" he asks. "What d'ye need, just tell me."
"I need—I need—" you start, but fail there. Wonder if there are some other ways of speaking that Dunk would understand, because it turns out asking outright gains so much ridicule on its way out it withdraws itself from the options. Your hand finds his wrist. You put it on your hip first, which is cowardice. Swallow, and proceed: lower, until your arse fills his palm.
He goes rigid. Lets himself be put in place and nothing more. When you look up his eyes are locked somewhere between you. There's an attempt at a kiss; a poor one. You're out of toes to tip onto and out of mouth to purse so it lands off, on his jaw, and becomes something far sweeter and purer than you've had in mind.
"Ah," he says. Gives himself a moment to kickstart the grey matter of his brain and recognize the bit between the cause and effect. It's still very much improbable, but Dunk risks it. "Yer saying—" he whispers. "Ye—you want me?"
A small nod.
“Now?" he asks. His thumb wedges under your chin. "As in: right now? Ye want to—w-with m-me?”
“Yeah?” You cringe. He's stunned for way too long for this to go smoothly. “Shit, I’m sorry—”
“No,” Dunk says. He finds the side of your neck. “No, no, no, don’t be. Don’t be, please—” A gulp. “I w-would. I—yes—I—yes. God, aye, I want to.” Teeth worry his lower lip. “But uh—is it… safe?”
“Yes,” you laugh, for lack of better reactions. “Yes it is, I checked.” With that Dunk's face muddles back into bewilderment he hides very poorly. The hand on your arse tenses. “What?” you mouth.
“Ye checked?” he asks, pouting. “Why did ye check?”
A cold little fright nips through you. “Cause I’m—” you stammer, then let it out in one breath. “God. Going a bit mad here and I considered checking out Hinge but Rowan said I’d attract only creeps right about now so I read a little before I did anything.”
Duncan blinks. Behind the lenses, his lashes move in two enormous dark fans. “H-hinge? You considered Hinge?”
“Y-yes?" you say. He keeps staring. "Duncan, what is it?”
“I—nothing. I mean—nothing.” His eyes drop and grip loosens. The crossness arrives in him by parts, which is how you know it for real: first the stilling of his mouth, then the colour high on his ears, then a hard gulp moving his throat. You have seen him awkward, embarrassed, worried, wounded. This is rarer, and heavier for being held down. “I jus'—”
He sees it with ugly clarity: men with stupid names and blank faces sending you their little texts, all vapid smiles and dead-eyed compliments, asking questions they have no right to ask. Worse, he sees hands attached to them. Mouths. Their shrivelled, hopeful pricks trying to talk their way near the place some ancient, thick part of him has already marked in chalk and blood as his. It horrifies him, the thought itself and how quickly it stands up in him, ready to bite.
“Why do you look unbelievably cross about it, then?” You put your hands on his chest and beneath them his heart is racketing like a drum. It is scary to see him angry. It reminds you how much force lives in him unspent, how much of him is usually lowered on purpose. “Look, I know it’s your baby," you say carefully. "I wouldn't do anything to harm it, alright? I’m just… weird." A sigh. "I fucking hate it here sometimes.”
“W-where?” Dunk asks, hoping you don’t mean his arms.
“In this… body,” you say and Duncan almost blurts out Why? Why, I love this body. I dream of it and think about it often. I want this body to myself.
“It’s strange, and a bit gross, and I sweat a lot and if I’m not sleepy I’m just horny all the time, and I—” you hiccup. “God, I’m sorry, this must be so weird to you. I’m so sorry, please forget I said anything?”
“No,” Dunk says. “No, don’t do that. Don’t do that, I want to—” He catches you back from where you have gone loose in his hold. “I said I’d help you with anything. And I would like that.” He brings his face closer and sets his fingers to your temple. Either the pulse is in you or in him, or both of you have become terrible at keeping quiet under the skin. “What I don’t like is that you considered Hinge before coming to me. And that you say bad things about yourself,” Dunk whispers.
He thinks of courage, then. How it keeps changing shape. He has permission and still there are things lodged in him he cannot ask without sounding small. Do you want me or just anyone? Am I easier than Hinge, or harder, and you are making the effort anyway? Do you remember anything? You come tighter around him, cinching his waist. Your mouths touch and Dunk closes his eyes.
“I like this body,” he says.
His hand slides from your temple to your neck and lower, cautious until cautiousness begins to pain him. He slips his fingers between your skin and the robe near the collar. The other hand finds the knot at your belt and waits. He waits for anything. A twitch, a flinch, a word, some sign that he has gone too far and should be put down for it.
You nod. So Dunk pulls. The belt gives, and the robe loosens round you.
“It’s… hot,” he says, simpleton that he is.
The trouble is, this body has always been hot to him. He has never known how to give it a clean name. Pretty is too innocent for the places his thoughts go after the first look at you. Maddening comes nearer. Now, with you changing in front of him and the change tied back to his own curse of being a man words fail even worse. His hand sneaks beneath the fabric and finds your belly. The backs of his knuckles graze the skin there.
“It’s making a baby for us—” he says, sombre-eyed. “Yer bloody pretty, lass,” Duncan says, because despite wanting to tell you hot, sexy, toothsome, edible, challenging, ripe, built for my grip, spreadable, kissable, gorgeous, dangerous, disastrous, full, an answer to why lads lose their hands and heads, he knows damn well girls always like to be called pretty.
It works wonders. You let him wedge his hands deeper until the collar of the robe slips wide, falls off both shoulders, and by the time it lands round your feet Duncan is so hard he learns a new truth about trousers. None of them are made for him—old jeans, good jeans, jeans chosen by Raymun—all of them turn traitor under enough pressure. He grips your arms without thinking, partly for himself, partly to stop the quick frightened movement you make to cover yourself.
"Dunk—" you whine.
The unfairness of it is clear. "Aye," he says, gone strange. "Aye, sorry. Hold on."
He grabs his T-shirt by the neck and drags it over his head as boys do, glasses nearly going with it. Once his chest is bare your eyes go over him in famished little sweep and Dunk has to lick his own mouth for bracing against it. His hand goes to his belt. What should be simple, since he's undone belts for the larger part of his life without audience, becomes difficult because of the audience precisely. His thumbs are slipping, he's muttering shite twice, and finally gets it open with a jerk too harsh for the poor leather. He shoves everything down so jeans, pants and shame, the whole construction of it, go to mid-thigh before he remembers his feet and has to kick one foot free, then the other, in a small hopping mess that ought to be funny. He cannot spare enough brain to check.
In his trying to match you for nudity so the embarrassment settles in its good bones, Dunk fucks himself over. He's got no idea if he's doing it for you the same way you're doing it for him, but such is a disadvantage of being a man whose dick tells on him: plainness. It would show plain how much he wants you even without it, if only by the heaving of his chest and redness on him. Even without a raging hard-on, which tries to stand proudly but is unable for the weight of it, Duncan's sure you'd recognise the want on him. He can only hope the little kicks of muscle and dew coming from the tip count as honesty rather than greed.
"I'm trying—" he says, quiet, then reaches for you again. "I'm trying to make it even."
Your memory gets jogged instantly, and you seethe at your mind for banking such sight somewhere distant. The pieces you have of him from before arrive anew, with merits of sobriety, of your bedroom's lighting, of him being nervous as sin, somehow managing to make it look as if you are the one doing him a kindness. In the blink between standing freely and being gathered, you catch the hollows under his arms when his biceps flex, the quiver of them kept in their cage of skin, the billow of his stomach with each hard breath and the way his cock gives a small answering throb below it. His body keeps contradicting itself, undecided between muscle and softness, all of it forced into one large being. His knees point a little outward, hips cut into chewable dips, thighs are broad and furred with something too fine for the rest of him. Almost tender-looking, which is mean considering the size of them.
And God above—above. Iliac furrows bracketing his lower belly, lethal enough, sunk deep enough to make him so irrefutably man you gain understanding of why anyone ever got vulgar about those gutters and called them sex lines.
They invite it. They invite thighs to bracket them, tongues to lick down them, mouths to kiss them, fingers to fit inside the grooves, faces to rest there, arses to press back against them until his balls are flattened to buttocks. Before the gathering ends, one demented conclusion gets its claws in you: Duncan is so solid he would remain rideable under any amount of you. He'd last you until the end of this, and then some.
You go where his arms take you. Up, higher, and higher, for in this over-fervour neither of you seems interested in the limit to climbing another person. His neck gets yoked by your grip, hands find your ass, and he uses the pardon lifting grants him to clutch it until the flesh goes hard. Karma for this indulgence is instant: the weep from between your legs drags his cock, makes him groan loud and torn, and since there’s no pity in your face he knows disguising it as effort has failed.
Locked in this full-body shackle, Duncan feels sexy. Holding a woman he’s put a baby into while remaining helpless makes him feel accomplished. You’re carriable, though to say light is to rob you of the resplendent human burden he believes himself created to keep. Belly still small enough to not get crushed, you cling to him, and every press of you on his torso makes Duncan beg the powers that be to not render him a one-pump chump.
“I don’t think we’re ever even,” you say. You seem to trust his muscles despite their tremble, for one of your hands comes to caress his face. He brings himself closer to it.
His beautiful face, lips of which he bites constantly, nose of which rubs next to yours, eyes of which drill into you with their perfect hopeful blue, and you're certain it eludes Duncan what you mean, and instills some idea about you being clever.
None of you are. We're never even because you're behind with your wanting, both of you think at each other violently.
"Aye," he says. Reckons you're telling him he's the fool here, and agrees. "I've got ye though," Duncan says, voice a little ruined because he very much does not got himself. He seeks your mouth anyway. "Can I kiss ye?"
Show, don't tell, your lips go. They flatten to his first. Wet, firm, already enough to make some working part of Duncan’s brain step off the ledge. Then you open and hum into him, and he goes near stupid with it. His breathing turns loud through his nose. The hands under your ass squeeze, then knead, because that is the only remedy for the overwhelming urge to grab your face and take more of your mouth than he’s been given.
Thankfully, you grant it. Deepen the kiss yourself, wedge your tongue inside and bring one hand to his throat to hold him there. The squeeze is light, but brands him anyway. His head swells with all the yearning things, all the I want you, yes, you are wanted like this, yes, your body is safe with me, yes, I can hold it, yes, kiss me, kiss me, kiss me, because he loves it when you kiss him. He loves your hands on him. God, Dunk is so fucked already that his mouth breaks from yours only enough to say, “I meant it.”
You just hum back, busy licking at his teeth.
“I do like this body,” he says. “Wasn’t sayin’ it to keep ye sweet. I like it fierce.” Then, he starts rocking you against him. Small at first, and less so when your grip tightens round his neck. His hands spread you, part you at the cheeks until his fingers brush the slick edges of your pussy. You keep kissing him. Keep taking his mouth as if the hand between your thighs is only another thing you have decided to allow.
You’re wet. He goes so mad with it his grip adjusts. The head of his cock finds the slick and slips through it, messy and blunt and enough to make him drag his mouth open under yours. “I want to fuck ye so badly,” he says, leaving himself there for you to take what you need from him. “Want you to fuck me back, girl,” Duncan says, and in the same second, he breaches.
You take. Seize and clench and grab so hard your jaw sets itself, and from the back of your throat crawls a dry click that bounces off Duncan’s uneven enamel. Then “F-fuck,” comes out of you and disintegrates into a grunt once more of him gets inside you. It’s rupturous, rapturous, poetic and honest. Fucking great, is what it is, to have your whining and moping and complaining answered with the ardent keenness of a man who acts like he owes you his life for keeping a baby you want anyway. A private crumb of you finds it in itself to admit that you want it because it’s his.
"You're so—" you say, mouth dry. "Strong."
He smiles, so sweetly. Like you've done him some kindness. You could say pretty. Handsome, lovely, good, but the way he holds you brings strong to your mind first.
"Ye good then?" he asks, grinning. Sinking. There's more of him, and more, and you keep waiting for your buttocks to meet his hips but the meeting is getting postponed by endless inches.
"Yeah," you tell him.
Good is a mild descriptor. The spread burns deliciously. Melts into a deep ache with warmth at its rim your body recognises as something it's owed, and by rights. Feet cold from the strain of thighs cinching his waist, you get struck by the contrast of temperatures. His hips, hot to the bone, twitch once, as if begging for more sense than he has given them, and you encourage that craving with a brush of thumb on his throat. "Keep going," you say. "Just… don't drop me."
Never. He'd rather take a cramp to the calf, a bowie to the ribs, a bat to the kneecap, a deconstruction to the troth, a nail to the head and hail to the thief than rid himself of the holy parsimony raging in his muscles from not driving into you outright. He gets you on the whole of himself slowly, gently, and once he's all safe and sound within your splendid womb, Duncan whispers, "I'd never."
In his head lives a fantasy that converts him from being a last resort into a yearner who's finally wanted after weeks of expressing bravery through adept courtship. He's taken you to a date during which you've let him get the chair for you and call the waiter. Then your hand has brushed his on the menu and the foolhardy Duncan has closed his palm around your fingers, and you let him do that too. You've smiled at him with lips smeared glossy, set his arm round your shoulders on the way home and climbed onto your toes so he could kiss you.
He's kissed you plenty. You've been teasing, flirting and taunting him beyond what's legal. The pinnacle of it happens in your bedroom where, with its lights dimmed, Duncan acquires a skill to his fingers, otherwise absent. He undoes the button of your trousers, wedges flat palms under the fabric and slides all your layers down by the power of thumbs cleverly hooked over the waistbands. Comes back up, groping your thighs and arse, and finds the clasp of your bra that's for once his ally. His hands don't shake. The lace peels off your tits. There are dents in the skin where it has held you against gravity and he learns that when breasts become honest about their weight and lower onto ribcage is one of his favourite sights.
He lifts you to show you how strong he is, how reliable. To see if you'd let him, too. You wrap yourself around him, cinch his belly and neck with your limbs. With his cock exposed to elements he keeps kissing you and rocking you against his hips until the first contact is made. The tip parts your lips and you gasp. Nerve endings hone themselves to receive pleasure only. He quells the resistance, burrows himself fully, and his brain loses capacity of telling fantasy from reality. He's stuck in the former, where he is confident and worthy.
You moan, full-mouthed. Duncan smiles, and coos, "Biiiig stretch." Then, he realises he has said it out loud, and the whole brave idiot in his head drops dead.
"I—" he stammers. Doesn't get to finish because there's a small snort against his lips, then laughter, and your whole irriguous insides start quaking with it, making him clench his jaw. "Luv," he grits, squeezing your arse.
"Since when are you so smug?" you ask. Kiss him for it like he's done something right. "I like it," you tell him. "C'mon Dunk. I can take it."
You like it on him too much. The borrowed shape of nerve and whole posture stolen from a man with better practice sits on Duncan as if it has been waiting for him to grow into it. It straightens something in him and squares him. Gives his mouth a sharper line and makes his arms look less accidental, less apologetic, more like boons he has finally decided to use.
For you. On you. Because you asked.
That thought bubbles foul and honeyed in your head. Your need, somehow, has overthrown his usual inadequacy. It has dragged him upright by the scruff and put him where you have privately wanted him for longer than is reasonable to admit: proud, useful, pleased with himself for pleasing you. A small, dangerous idea puts down a root somewhere tender. That maybe, if the whole thing had not come at you backwards and sideways, you might have made each other better on purpose.
You jerk on him with your hips, impatient and clumsy. Duncan huffs a laugh against your mouth, startled into himself again. “Aye,” he says, abashed. “Aye, I’ve got ye.”
Then, he moves. The first lift makes your thighs seize round him. The first descent makes the breath go blunt in your chest. He does it slowly because he is trying to be good, and because you are wrapped round him in a way that leaves no margin for errors. Hands under your buttocks with fingers sunk deep and heels of them taking the weight where your body spills. He works you on him with the plain problem-solving force of moving something heavy and dear and alive, and every inch down feels discovered twice: once by the body and once by the greedy mind that knows whose body this is.
A body that gets filled. Emptied. Filled again.
His cock muscles in with its girth so ample you can tell which veins of him pulse hardest. It leaves you hollow for a beat, then comes back so surely your belly coils, coaxing tight wheezes of air out of you. Each time he lowers you, your clit slaps against the hair below his navel. The scratch blooms as little bright injury you start anticipating. You know the rhythm by the third time. By the fourth, your hips are trying to meet it and the whole diaphragm of pelvis flexes to keep him. By the fifth, your nails have found his neck.
It is complicated only if you let thought get involved. You are held up by his strength, dependent on it, opened and moved because he can do that to you and because you told him to. Your feet cannot find purchase, your balance belongs to him, and still the power of it sits in your own throat. You could stop him with a word. You could break him with praise. You could make him harder by saying his name the right way, and there is an equality in it you've never managed to find by standing level with anyone. A strange fairness made out of mismatched sizes and opposite hungers.
On another level it is dead simple. Duncan is strong enough to lift you and kind enough to listen. You are wet enough to take him and mean enough, now, to enjoy what it does to his face.
Your hand tightens enough for your thumb to press the bob of his throat when the pleasure finds its proper shape. Between your legs first, then higher, into your chest, under the tongue, behind the eyes. “There,” you tell him. “Right there. Oh, fuck, Duncan—”
His whole expression changes, but he keeps it at there. Holds the found angle with severe compliance, lifting and lowering you through the same strip of bliss until the repetition makes you go doll-like. Fucked so well you’re certain your face drains of every hint that intelligence lives anywhere within it, so you hide it in his. You press your nose into his cheek so hard you can feel the solid outline of his teeth through skin. His glasses prod your forehead. Both mouths just hang open since kissing has become too skilled an activity for either of you. Instead, you breathe loud, ugly breaths into him, like you’re the one doing the lifting.
Duncan watches you from too close. His eyes go blurry behind the lenses. “Good?” he mumbles, raspy.
Silly man, you think. Yes, good, yes, keep going, yes, until rather than speaking your body just shows him how good. Your calves lock themselves at the small of his back so fiercely he has nowhere to go but deeper. The first cramp takes you there, then the next, each one making your cunt grip him in greedy shocks until your breath turns useless against his face.
It is liquid succour poured over bone and bruise, if the bruise were months of being devastatingly unfucked while Duncan keeps being his best self in your orbit. In the tightness your body shapes you can feel him throbbing, worse and better for being held there. His arms close round your waist and keep you, while the orgasm spends its havoc through you. Eyes roll back in your skull. Your head fills with cotton, warm and sodden, and the room dims as if set a few feet underwater. In it, you register him moving.
Duncan’s thighs are on fire. He has no idea how he hasn’t spilled yet (given that he's just witnessed your eyes doing the thing, and at last in the right context), and he worries briefly that something in him has gone broken. He takes three stumbling steps backwards until his calves strike the edge of the bed. So he sits. You quiver on him, and he stays there stunned, holding you through the last of it. When it’s over he falls onto his back with you clutched to his chest, still hard inside you.
For a moment he thinks perhaps that was it. That the body can be fooled by mercy if the wanting is severe enough. Everything in him has pulled tight, gone blind, endured the full sweet punishment of you coming around him, and surely after such a thing a man ought to be empty and softened. Released from service. None of that, though. His occupation is to lie there with his cock still buried and aching, too hard for comfort, lit by some phantom ending that never arrived. When you shift on him the smallest amount, the sting runs from root to tip, raw in its brightness, making his stomach ripple.
“It’s good,” you tell him, voice loose. “God, you’re good.”
Dunk shuts his eyes.
There is praise, and then there is whatever that does to him. It gets deep into bloodstream and starts moving in his veins. Then you start moving too, and Duncan knows for sure he has not come yet.
You push off his chest. Bestraddled, he watches the ascent diligently: your tits hang heavier when you’re bowed and settle once your back straightens. There, they shift slightly outward. The weight of them travels until skin draws fine and taut from sternum to collarbone. The upper slopes lift with your breath, but the undersides lower and stay there. Flesh touches flesh with a softness so plain and human Duncan’s mouth fills with spit.
His hand goes because it must. It reaches and fits under one breast with the strange exactness of a thing made to house him without asking. He wedges the span from thumb to forefinger into the crease. Your tit settles over his knuckles, warm and fuller than memory, and beneath the heel of his palm your heart beats hard enough to rival his.
Light catches you so that he can tell the change. His fingers find your stomach with their backs, just grazing, and the skin there is soft in a way that puts daft images in his head, small impossible creatures made of satin and warm milk and whatever else men with sex-drunk brains invent when faced with a woman.
Then, his whole hand covers your belly, and that is much worse. Worse in the sense of too much lack landing in his grip. He spans an area so vast all sensible parts of his mind get blown out. Under that touch, your hips roll. Duncan sucks in a stinging breath, then grits, "What're ye doing, girl?"
You cover his palm with yours, and bring the other back to his throat. Curled fingers, clever fingers, hold him where pulse does its best to tightrope between excitement and peril. Then, you clench, slow and mean enough for his heart to stop completely for one whole second. “Making you come,” you say, though for Duncan it's more like making you die. “I want to see your face when you do and remember it this time.”
He chokes a little, tries to cover it with a groan and it all comes out mixed and mangled into some shape of your name Dunk's never said out loud. His hips rise because he becomes an overeager boy who loses the battle to greed. "Christ, f-fu—" he says, then bends his knees under you to help you solve a problem that is his cock begging for friction. It gives you something better to use, and God help him, you use it. Rock down, grind forward, take the part of him he has been trying so hard to keep courteous and turn it into a tool for his wreckage.
The deconstruction of Duncan begins at the points of him that carry profound sense for the predicament he's in: the head of his cock, raging with heat; the ridge under it, rubbed raw with your slick; the tight forlorn pull in his balls every time your hips drag back and make his body expect relief, then deny it with a new descent. Duncan crumbles by fractions. First a sound, then a twitch. Then the last of his good posture. His hands fumble, find your waist, lose it, and finally pull.
You fall forward over him and catch yourself with one palm beside his head, saving his throat from the full weight of you, though the loss grieves him instantly. He would have taken it, happily, dumbly, with his windpipe dented and gratitude leaking out his ears. Instead he grips your arse and the broad of your hips where God, in a rare moment of sense, has granted you handles Duncan can delude himself into thinking are there for his enjoyment.
“What do you need?” you ask, breathy and gorgeous above him, cheeks shining, forehead damp, mouth all used-looking from him and still asking.
Dunk looks up at you and has to search himself for speech. Most of him is gone already. What remains has no pride worth naming. “Use me,” he murmurs, and pours all the devotion he has for you into the miserable little shape of it. His fingers dig in. “Use me, girl.” Under your sharpening eyes, he grasps at the fortitude built badly enough it cannot hold one form for long, and adds, smaller, "And kiss me."
You blink. Lower yourself and take his upper lip between yours, suck it softly, then give him a sweet, taunting nibble that has his hips punching up. The flesh pulls, stretches, slips free redder, and you smile against it in a way that makes him want to confess to crimes he has not yet committed.
Your arms wind round his neck. It opens him up under you, throat bared, and you go there with filthy acumen. Lick a long wet path over the pulse and tendon, up where his skin goes tender under the jaw, then to the shell of his ear. Your breath arrives first. Hot, broken, full of effort. “Talk to me,” you whisper. “Tell me how you feel.”
For an answer, Dunk moans. He means to do better, he does. But you are panting now, rutting down on him fast enough that the bedframe remembers the both of you, fingers threaded in his hair, hips working him with that half-desperate rhythm he ought to be ashamed of loving. Your cunt keeps taking him and taking him, and there is no clean thought left in him. Only this. Only breath.
When you lift your head, something in his face changes. "Dunk?" He only blinks too many times. “Do you want to stop?” you ask.
His head shakes. “N-no,” he says, near bitten. Swallows, tries again, hand sliding to your thigh to keep you from reading him wrong. “No, lass. Just—slow. I wanna—” His eyes squeeze shut with some useless heat behind them before he finds something at least adjacent to what should be said. “I wanna feel ye proper," he murmurs. "You’re… you’re so kind on me.”
It quakes you some. He's trying to prolong it, the sweetheart, you think. So your body quiets for him first, then alters. You exchange the speed for depth and give him fat, thorough rolls. Let the planes of his hips take the whole weight of your arse, just as you've wanted. His balls flatten under your buttocks on every downstroke, cock throbs madly in your womb.
“Oh—” he breathes, and sounds scattered enough to make your stomach tighten. “Oh, that’s—aye. Aye, there. Fuck, right here. Like that.”
You bend close and kiss him again, softer, with the same hunger spread over it like a tearing sheet. He kisses back badly. Too open, too wet, too much air-gulping getting in the way. When you sweep his face, Duncan’s lids are glistening, lashes clumped in little dark points behind the crooked glasses, so undone he looks like a weeping saint with a bad eye.
His stomach swells into yours with fast, shallow gasps. One palm leaves your hip and comes to the back of your neck. He holds you there, foreheads touching, mouth close enough that every word is partly yours before it is finished.
“Feels—” He stops, teeth flashing over his lip. “God, ye feel amazin’. So warm. So—ah—so good round me. I can feel ye everywhere. In my back. In my bloody teeth," he says, then catches your cheeks dimpling. "Don’t laugh.”
You do laugh, very softly, and kiss the corner of his mouth for it.
Dunk groans. “Cruel woman.” His hand tightens on your nape, thumb rubbing without rhythm. “No, no, keep—please, keep doin’ that. You’re gonna have me. You’re—ah, Christ—you’re pullin’ it out of me.”
You slow further, vicious with pity, and he near sobs.
“That’s it,” you whisper. “Let me see.”
His eyes open to yours. Blue, glassy, embarrassed beyond measure and unable to hide any of it. He tries to speak again, because you asked him to, because he would try to move a mountain if you took his face in your hands and said please, for me?
“I’m close,” he says. Then shakes his head, helpless with the size of the understatement. “No, I’m—luv, I’m right there. Don’t stop. Don’t—” His mouth opens under yours, breath breaking up. “Please. Please, I’m gonna c-come.”
Heat spreads like conflagration through Duncan’s bones, and all of his muscles go ablaze with it too. He feels the rupture of the tightening coil and breaks into an out-of-tune chant of yes, yes, yes, while you milk him and let his hips stammer.
It starts low, in the drag of his balls drawing up so hard it borders pain, then strikes the root of his cock with a shock that makes his whole frame buck under you. “Ah—fuck, fuck, lass—” he chokes, then loses even that much sense when the first spill leaves him.
His hands clamp down on you. There's no pulling anymore, only holding on while his body empties itself in heavy, helpless pulses. Each one makes him flinch. Each one makes his cock throb so hard inside you he can feel it answer against the grip of your cunt, the seed pushed out and held there, nowhere to go, nowhere he wants it to go. His hips keep trying, little rhythmless, aborted jerks, and he finds only a crude animal wish to stay buried until the last of him is wrung out.
“Good girl,” he hears himself say, or thinks he does. Dug out and cracked, roughening on the way from between his ribs. “Oh, God—my best girl. Take it. Please, take it. I’m—ah—I’m sorry, I—”
He has no idea what he is apologising for. For coming. For wanting. His eyes squeeze shut, then open again because you asked to see him and some part of him remembers even while the rest of him is being dismantled.
The next pulse makes his chest cave around a breath that sounds ugly and comes with its edges wet. He comes again, or keeps coming, he cannot tell. The pleasure has stopped behaving like pleasure and started acting like something with teeth, something that bites deep enough to find the softest parts of him and shake them.
His soul goes with it. That is the stupidest possible way to understand it, and still the only one Duncan has. It leaves him in shudders, in spend, in the long broken noise he makes when you stay there and take all of him without flinching. For one blown-out second he feels loved so plainly his eyes sting, and he cannot tell whether the tears threatening him are from release or from mourning the fleeting fallacy of his malleable boy-heart.
You see it. The exact place where his strength gives up its post. His face goes open underneath you. The blush is everywhere now, ears to throat to the broad rise of his chest. His glasses sit crooked with their lenses misted, and behind them his eyes shine stunned. His mouth, the beautiful foolish thing, keeps parting as if speech might come back if he only makes room for it, but all that gets out is breath and your name in pieces.
Last time you missed this. Or lost it to drink, to darkness, to the mind’s rotten habit of keeping the wrong souvenirs. Stupid, you think, with an ache so sudden it has no time to dress itself up. Stupid, stupid girl. Because Duncan in rapture is worth remembering with pious accuracy. The cut of his jaw slackened by pleasure. The hard male brutality of his size made defenceless by what your body has done to him. The little crease between his brows. The way his face looks too large for innocence and somehow full of it anyway.
And God, the way he comes. Thick, hot throbs, intimate enough to make you tighten again in little aftershocks. His cock kicks and spends, kicks and spends, with deep-gathering warmth that spreads in a slow, private heaviness. You hold still over him and let it happen. Let him put himself there, in you, with the same earnest violence he brings to everything he cannot say properly.
Dunk makes another sound when he feels you clench. Almost a whimper, though he would hate the word if he had enough brain left to object. His hand slides from your neck to the back of your head, looking for a place to rest. His fingers tangle clumsily in your damp hair.
“Lass,” he says, wrecked. Then softer, because the fierce part of it has passed away and left him with only the unbearably tender aftermath. “Jesus. Lass.”
"Duncan," you say, framing his cheeks. They are warm. "Sweetheart, you alright?" You brush the locks darkened with sweat off his forehead and feel a staggering urge to cradle him.
Duncan's very much not alright. He's shattered into a million pieces, but there is a sober part of him that knows he shouldn't cling. He should tell you, or better yet, carry you to the bathroom and let you tend to your business there, because the app said so. "A-aye," he breathes. "You ought to—" A thick swallow. "I'll help you to the—"
“No,” you say. “Stay a moment. C’mere. Sweet boy, come here, let me hold you.”
“But—”
“Nothing will happen if we stay here for two minutes. I’ll go, just—”
You settle over him, careful where the small swell of your stomach rests against his. Duncan lets you because resistance, in that moment, would require bones in places where he has none. He's not crying, maybe, or not enough to call it that, but his eyes look sore. You swipe beneath one with your thumb. Then the other. He looks away.
“Oh, don’t,” you murmur.
His jaw shifts under your palm. The shame of being scrutinised after the body has made a holy spectacle of itself is sitting plain on him, right there in the colour blotching his neck. You coax his face back anyway, gentle under the chin, and make him meet you. “Thank you,” you say.
Duncan blinks. “For what?”
“For that.” Your thumb makes a small pass over his cheek. “For listening.”
He cannot answer. Something in him tries and only finds the raw place where all the words have been burned out. You spare him the effort by lowering your face to his. Cheek to cheek first, then brow against temple, your mouth near enough his ear that your breathing goes into him. Slow. Deep. A little unsteady. He feels the ribs move around it. It wakes him up some.
His hand remembers it's alive and slides down your back. Over the borrowed heat of skin, down the knobs and shallow dips he now knows in one kind of dark and one kind of light. “You feelin’ better?” he asks.
You nod. Then make a small pleased sound, too close to a purr for Duncan’s remaining sanity. “Mm. Much.” His palm stops low and stays there. “Can you stay tonight?” you ask.
How about forever, Duncan thinks, with such dreadful ease his heart will need some proper scolding later. Aye, forever, if you asked it plain and did not laugh after. What he says is, “Aye.”
“Okay.”
Then you lift yourself off him with a small groan, and Duncan begins to loose you. The loss is horrible in its own right. His cock slips free, tired and overused and sad about leaving you, and he feels what follows: too much of himself spilling warm across his lower belly, dragging over skin and hair. He blushes so hard it ought to count as a second fever. He lies there softening, wet and creamed over, betrayed by what has been done and how much of it there is.
You look down only a second before your eyes flick back to his face. Duncan opens his mouth. “Don’t,” you say, faintly amused and too kind about it. “Don’t even start.”
You climb off the bed on unsteady legs. He means to sit up. Means to help. Means to stop lying there like an offering left out by mistake. But then you bend, gather his T-shirt from the floor and pull it over your head, and Duncan dulls.
It drops over you wrong and right. Too broad in the shoulders, too long on the thigh, collar slipping enough to show one side of your neck. His shirt. On you. With your hair messy and your legs bare and his come still leaking between them, no doubt, though he does not let his eyes go there because he has suffered enough for one evening and also possibly has not.
You disappear toward the bathroom. He remains in post-little-death rigor mortis with one hand frozen over his stomach because he has no idea whether touching anything makes the situation better or worse. The ceiling receives the full force of his stare.
When you come back you have a towel, wet wipes, and a glass of water. You kneel beside him, and the mattress wobbles under the new weight. Duncan grunts.
“Hey,” you say. “It’s all right.”
“It’s—” He swallows. “I can do that.”
“You gave me a whole bath. Least I can do.”
“That’s different.”
“How?”
He has no answer that doesn’t sound foolish, filthy, or too soft in the middle. You open the packet and pull out a wipe. The first touch is cold below his navel and makes his stomach suck itself in.
“Sorry,” you murmur.
“S’all right.”
You wipe his lower belly first. Your other hand steadies him at the hip, thumb resting in the hollow there as if it has any business knowing him. Duncan watches your face because watching your hand will kill him.
Then your fingers close round his cock to move him aside, and his breathing goes funny.
You pause. “All right?”
“A-aye,” he says.
You give him a look, then continue. Lift him with a care so simple it becomes unbearable, wipe along the softened length, the tender head, and the mess gathered at the base. His cock gives one poor twitch in your hand, more memory than ambition, and Duncan shuts his eyes because surely God has limits and he has found them.
“Dunk,” you say.
“I’m not doin’ anythin’.”
“No, I can see that.”
Your hand moves lower. Wipes his balls. Clinical, it should be clinical. It has the shape of nursing and the heat of being claimed in a way he has no defence against. He lies there, fists balled by his sides, while you clean him up as if his body is allowed to be inconvenient in your presence. As if the mess of him deserves tending.
“What’re ye doing?” he asks, helplessly.
You glance up. “Cleaning you.”
“Aye, I know that.”
“Then why ask?”
Because I don’t know what to do with being looked after, he thinks. Because if you keep touching me after, I’ll begin thinking after belongs to me too.
He says nothing. You spare him again.
Once the wipes are set aside, you pat him dry with the towel. Softer than necessary. He feels the careful press along his belly, the inside of one thigh, the last damp place near his groin. Then you toss the towel away, pass him the glass of water, and wait until he drinks.
“Yer so bossy,” he mutters into the rim.
“Correct.”
That gets a small laugh out of him, almost soundless. He drinks, hands the glass back, and you put it on the floor before lying down beside him. “Hi,” you say.
Dunk turns his head on the pillow. “Hi.”
Your mouth twitches. You look exhausted now that the urgency has left you. Washed-out and pleased and sick still, all mixed together unfairly. The T-shirt has rucked up at your hip. He fixes his eyes on your face.
“I can see you thinking,” you say.
“Aye,” Dunk says. “I’m thinkin’.”
He is thinking so much it has become a crowd. Whether this changes things. Whether you wanted him or only relief with a familiar face. Whether he is allowed to be happy. Whether you will regret it by morning. Whether he should apologise for some part of it and which part first. Whether asking to kiss your stomach now would ruin his life quicker than staying quiet. Whether you know his shirt on you has done damage no compensation can mend.
Before any of it reaches his tongue, you shuffle closer and nuzzle into him. Your nose presses under his jaw. One arm comes over his chest. “We can talk in the morning, hm?”
Duncan looks at the ceiling again. Breathes in. Breathes out. Lets his hand come up and settle over your back, where it has apparently always wanted to live.
contents (sfw): Ser Duncan The Tall x fem!mer!reader, inspired by HCA's The Little Mermaid, switching POVs (indicated with dividers), medieval rom-com, love at first sight, witchcraft, body horror, transformation, romantic and sexual tension, mutual pining, yearning, caretaking, non-sexual nudity, there was only one bed(roll), sword of chastity, protective!Dunk, virgin!Dunk, soft!Dunk.
part two ->
synopsis: A mermaid falls in love with a knight praying on her riverbank. A witch gives her legs and three days to make him love her back.
word count: 13K
a/n: Banner is by me, dividers by @strangergraphics and @honeyluvsw! Thank you lovely humans for giving it a read before publishing (@lateknightbites and @siliceousooze). My last-minute mermay offering :') There will be two parts of this story!
The feeling of driving his sword through someone’s chest is entirely wretched. Duncan remembers the cause and what it carries, but every time he takes a life his jaw locks tight and his breath stops in a naïve surge of compassion.
The man pierced with Dunk’s iron says his mother’s name. It comes out thin and astonished, as though he had expected to die louder. Duncan hears it over the din. He watches the man’s eyes go queer in his face—film creeping over them, the pupils dulling, the whole wet look turning flat, the way dead fish do when they rise in poisoned water and the sun gets at their bellies.
An apology pushes up hard against Duncan’s teeth. He keeps it there. There is something mean in begging pardon of a man you have already run through. It makes him answer for your sorrow besides his own death. When the body sags and quits at last, Duncan braces a hand to the fellow’s shoulder, eases him off the blade, and lowers him onto his back with what care he can manage in a field full of screaming men. Then he pulls his sword free and breathes.
The stream is only a little way off. Sun has had all morning to work on his armour. The plates burn through his surcoat. The mail at his throat rubs raw and holds the heat there. Under it, the blood trapped in the quilted cloth has already begun to turn.
He knows he ought to go back. He knows the work is not done. His knees strike the bank before the thought is finished. He drags off one glove and then the other, drops them in the grass, and thrusts both hands into the current so fast the cold hurts. Water ropes round his fingers and under his nails and takes the blood by threads at first, then by clouds, until the stream runs pink, then weak as watered wine, then clear again as though the thing had never happened anywhere but inside his own skull.
He bows his head over it. His breath goes in rough through the nose and leaves slower. For a moment he can do nothing but look at his hands—broad things, nicked over the knuckles. Then he cups water to his face. The shock of it lifts the worst of the heat. He does it again. Lets it run from his brow and nose and mouth. Somewhere behind him men are still shouting. Steel still rings out, thin with distance now.
Duncan shuts his eyes. He has never been much for prayer, nor for finding the right words for it, but there are not many disbelievers in a foxhole. He opens his mouth.
“Mother, take him. He called your name. Forgive me for it. Mind his mother, too.” Breath shudders out of him. “Warrior, make me brave enough. Keep my hand true.”
Beyond the bank where the water deepens and the weeds grow long as hair, something has gone perfectly still to watch him.
When you see him kill your heart flutters strangely. Clean slice, straight for the heart. Merciful and cold in the same breath.
You know violence as the sharp white turn of a fish’s belly before your teeth close round it. The panic-kick of things that fit in your hands and things that do not, the times your own blood has gone stringing loose in the water because something bigger thought to make a meal of you first. Death below the surface is ugly, but it serves. Something eats. Something lives another day. Here, men spill one another open for reasons that do not end in hunger. The body falls in the grass and feeds no one. The waste of it catches at your mind.
Yet the great one uses his strength well. Joyless, he puts the blade where it must go and gets it done. Warrior, your thoughts supply at once, though he is younger than the word makes him sound.
Then, he stays. Only for a breath long enough to ease the dead man down from his sword and keep him from crumpling into the dirt like a sack split at the seams, but it is enough to draw you closer under the current. Almost as if he cannot bear for the man to go wholly alone. Almost as if being the hand that kills makes him answerable for that last small stretch between breath and none.
You slip nearer the bank, slow as weed-drift, and brace your fingers between the stones. The stream is clear here. It lets you see him drop to his knees. Lets you see him strip off his gloves with hands gone clumsy from heat. Blood clouds into the water when he thrusts his fingers in. He bends and sluices his face.
Your tail gives a hard, involuntary twitch. Until now he has been iron and leather and bright mail and the broad set of shoulders that belong to grown creatures who know their force. Then the water takes the blood and the grime from him and what rises from beneath it stills your breath clean out of you.
A boy. A beautiful boy. Young in the face despite the size of him. Wet lashes spiked dark. Mouth parted. Water running from brow to cheek to jaw, then slipping under the collar at his throat and down his neck. Your nails bite into the stones. Your gills flare wide and fast. You drag in more water through them without meaning to, as if the stream has suddenly thinned and left you short.
He opens his mouth and your eyes shut. The shouting from the field dulls. Stream keeps on at your shoulders. Wind moves somewhere high in the crowns of the trees. All of it goes faint around the shape of his voice. It reaches you blurred by distance, scant and earnest, with none of the grand sound men use when they want the world to think them holy. He asks for the dead man first. For the mother of the dead man. Forgiveness for what his own hand has done. Then he asks for bravery enough to return and do more of other men’s bidding before the sun goes down.
Nothing for himself. No glory. No protection. No rich spoil. Not even life.
Your grip slips and tightens again. Something deep in you, old as tide-pull, gives way. You have seen handsome things before. Fast things. Dangerous things. You have wanted and hunted and fed.
This is worse. This is a hurt that blooms sweet through the middle of you. By the time he lowers his head and the last of his prayer leaves his mouth and goes nowhere you can see, you love him so completely it feels less like being struck and more like sinking.
He rises and leaves, and the place he was at is empty as if it were bitten. The bank looks wrong without him on it. The water goes on over the stones as though nothing has happened. Your heart has no such manners. It follows him at once, crude and greedy, as though wanting were a hand with fingers on it. You part your lips with half a mind to call after him. Men can be called. Men can be coaxed to the water with the right note laid soft over the surface. You know how to turn the voice sweet enough to draw a neck forward, a foot wrong, a whole body into your keeping. The sound gathers under your tongue and dies there. To put a spell on him feels foul. It seems to you that a creature like that ought to come of his own will, or not at all.
You do not know by what rules men choose their maidens. You know only the old shapes from song and tale, the women with hair to their waists and wreaths at their throats, the ones led from halls by the hand, kissed before witnesses, warmed by fires built on dry land. Even the plainest of them has what you have not.
Legs.
By the time the sun tilts lower you are stern in the mind and weak in the heart, which is a poor way to go to a witch and the only way you have.
You gather what seems dear. Round pebbles from the streambed, the ones worn smooth as eggs. A white one with a milk-pale seam through the middle. A twist of yarrow and sage stolen from the bank where the roots drink deep. A handful of hazelnuts, though you have never eaten one and do not know if witches do. Three rowan berries bright as pinpricks of blood. One swan feather gone loose among the rushes.
Childish things, perhaps. Bride-things from the mind of a fool. You keep them all the same, tucked close in the fold of weed and river-grass you knot for carrying. Then you force yourself into one of the narrow runs that leaves the stream and threads the dark places inland. Mud slicks your sides. Roots comb your hair. The water grows warm and still and brown. It narrows to veins and then opens without warning into the bog pool, black at the middle, with a hut crouched on the shore as if it had grown there meanly from the peat.
You wait a long while with only your eyes above the weed. Nothing stirs but a gnat-cloud and the slow shake of sedge in the wind. At last you take one of the little stones from your hoard and throw it. It clicks against the wooden door. The sound is small; it still seems to carry everywhere. You sink lower, heart drumming hard, and hide among the pondweed with the offerings clutched to your breast, as if the right gifts and a brave face might yet make you into something a beautiful boy could love.
The door opens. The woman who steps out is bent nowhere and old everywhere. Her hair hangs in ropes the colour of drowned straw. Her shift is the grey of mushroom flesh. She peers toward the water as if she has smelt you already.
“Well,” she says. “What pretty thing noses at my threshold?”
You rise through the skin of water and push the bundle of gifts towards her. “I brought—”
“Did you.” She stoops and takes it between two fingers, as if it is something small and dead. “Then speak. A wish is no good to me till it has a mouth.”
You blink at her. Try to find the words for something prettier than a blunt girly whim, but they come out as they are. “I want legs.”
The witch looks at you for a moment. Then, she laughs. “That is not what you want.”
Mud stirs under your tail with the force of your annoyance. You dig the tip of it down into the black silt.
“Ah,” she coos, seeing it. “There is no shame in wanting, child. Only folly in pretending. You want a lad to love you.” You remain silent long enough for her eyes narrow with delight. “No. Not a lad.” She leans closer over the bank, and her smile turns terrible with it. “A knight.”
The scales along the back of your tail prickle. “Can you help me?”
“Likely.” She reaches down without warning, crooks one finger beneath your chin, and turns your face first one way, then the other. “You are fair enough for mortal work. Fairer than many that walk on two feet and think well of themselves besides. Why not sing to him? Why not call him into the water? Earth has given you gifts enough. Why do you not use them?”
You pull away from her hand. “I do not wish to lure him.”
Her mouth rounds. “Oh.” The sound is soft, but curdles your stomach all the same. “It is true love, then,” she says. “Pure as springwater. You would not stain your dear knight with a spell.” Her voice thins to a hiss. “What do you think you are doing here, if not spell-work?”
“The spell is not for him,” you say, and hear the weakness in it. “It is for me. I only need legs.”
“A spell is a spell all the same.”
She turns your bundle and lets the things fall. The pebbles, the berries, the herbs, the feather—all of it drops into the bog with a series of small, insulting plops. One hazelnut floats a moment before the water takes it.
“You may keep your trinkets,” she says. “I am not a hedge-wife to be bought with rowan and sage.”
Heat rises through you against the coldness of the bog. “Then why hear me?”
“Because I am curious.” She smiles again. “And because I can give you what you want. Under a condition,” she says.
Of course. Again, you keep still and say nothing. She seems to like that better than if you had begged.
“I will give you legs, and all that comes with them. You will wake with feet to stand on and knees to bend. You will go where he goes if you can keep pace. You will have three nights to win what you came for.”
The reeds whisper in the wind. Somewhere behind her hut a bird cries once and stops.
“If by the third night the knight loves you, the bargain is spent. If not, a soul is owed me.”
Your fingers tighten on the mud-bank. “Mine?”
“If you are dull enough.” The witch reaches into the fold of her garment and brings out a dagger. It is old and grisly, with a hilt of dark wood worn smooth by long handling. The blade is dark as well, but moonlight catches on it in a thin wet line. It looks hungry. “Or his.”
You stare at it.
“He may be given in your stead,” she says mildly. “A thrust under the rib. Upward, if you are weak in the arm. Bring him to me warm and I shall count us square.”
“Why would I do that?”
She lifts one shoulder. “Because hearts turn vicious when they do not get their fill. Because death is easier than longing for some creatures. Because on the third night you may find you love yourself a little more than him. I make room for all outcomes.”
The dagger gleams in her hand. You cannot stop looking at it. At last you whisper, “How shall I know if he loves me?”
The witch’s brows rise. “Were you not certain of it a moment ago?”
A pout blooms on your face unbidden.
She crouches at the bank then, bringing her face close to yours. Her breath smells of peat and old roots.
“When mortal men love their maidens,” she says, almost kindly, “they do not keep their hands to themselves. They part those fine legs you hunger after. They open the flesh between and put themselves there.”
A cold shiver runs the length of you.
Her smile returns, pleased and wicked. “There. That is plain enough even for a love-addled little fish.” She straightens. “Well? Do you accept?”
The word catches in your mouth. You sweep the dagger, the dark bog, the hut with your eyes. Then, her face, which has no mercy in it and no patience either. Because you have already loved him enough to come here, you say, “Yes.”
“Of course you do.” She puts the dagger down on the bank within your reach, then slips her hand somewhere inside her sleeve, deeper than the cloth ought to allow. When she draws it out again there is an egg in her palm, black-speckled and oddly warm.
You frown at it.
“Eat.”
“What is it?”
“An egg,” she says. “Do not go witless on me now.”
You take it from her. The shell is warm indeed, almost hot. “And then?”
“Then you sleep. Then you wake altered. It need not trouble you beyond that.”
It turns in your hand. “Raw?”
The witch gives you a look of withering contempt. “No, child. Put it in a silver cup and take it with honey.” She bares her teeth. “Yes, raw.”
Your eyes lower, ashamed of the question. The shell cracks easily. The inside slides thick and strange over your tongue. You swallow twice to get it down. The witch watches every motion.
When it is done, you wipe your mouth with the back of your hand and say, “How shall I find him?”
At that, something shifts in her face. Too rotten to be kindness, but it is the brief look of someone hearing a tune they know well.
“His blood is in the water,” she says.
Then she steps back, pulls the door open, and goes inside. It shuts between one blink and the next, leaving you in the bog with the dagger on the bank and the taste of the egg still clinging at the back of your throat.
You swim the way you came slowly. Moonlight makes the water mean and every root below look like a hand with the shape of something waiting. Above, the moon itself has thinned to a sickle near fine enough to seem a cut laid across the sky. It tells you that on the night of your judgement it will be gone altogether. You will hear it in the dark. His blood is in the water, the witch had said, and the current takes you at her word, carrying you through the narrow runs and back toward the broader stream where you first saw him kneel.
By the time you reach it, the bank is empty. You keep to the deeper part and let yourself drift there, belly turned uneasy by the egg, heart sore with a want that has already learned absence.
Sleep comes badly. Even so, it comes. The river rocks you. In the first fold of dreaming he leans over the bank again, all shadow and wet lashes, and this time when he opens his mouth it is not prayer that leaves it but your name. He reaches for you with a careful hand and thumb wedging under your chin. He bends and kisses you as though he has been thinking on nothing else.
Then the dream turns. Above you, something vast opens. The eye of god, grey and pale and lidless, hanging in the dark where the moon had been. Its patience is so complete the age of it exceeds the feeling of pity. Below, a pair of shears glints, iron-black and long as oars. The water thickens around you into a fat-like jelly, holds you fiercely, as the blades close with a sound no louder than a crab-shell snapping, and fire races you clean through.
Scale after scale dulls and loosens. Webbing parts. Bone groans as if gripped and wrung by unseen hands. Your tail splits where no living thing ought to split and your flesh draws apart. New joints wrench themselves into being with a wet internal crack that never seems to finish. You open your mouth to scream and swallow black water instead. Heat tears through you from spine to hip to the new-made lengths of you, all the way to ten small, useless ends where your body has never ended before. Hair roots burn. Teeth ache. Even your fingertips feel changed, as though the whole of you has been dragged through too narrow an opening and forced to come out other.
You wake choking while dawn creeps into the sky. Half on the bank, half in the wash of the stream, naked to the chill, with the dagger clutched to your breast. Air rasps into you thinly through mouth and nose, making panic strike at once. You paw at your ribs and find only smooth skin where your gills ought to flare. Sealed. Gone. You drag another breath and another, each one scant enough to frighten. The water at your side offers no help. It laps your hip stupidly, as if it does not know you.
When you look down, you see them. Legs.
Two of them, long and bare and wrong as peeled roots. Knees knuckled sharp. Feet splayed in the mud with their blunt little toes. They belong to you no more than the moon belongs to the bog. The sight turns your stomach. You put a hand to one thigh. The skin there is soft and strange, without scale or sheen or the strength of a tail built to drive through current. When you try to draw the limb in, the knee folds with a hideous ease and the whole thing jerks sideways. It feels loose. Breakable. Made badly.
Still, you have asked for them. You plant both palms in the earth and try to rise and pain bites through your middle. Your legs buckle, each seeming to choose a different direction. One foot slides out from under you. The other catches on nothing and twists. You go down hard on your hands, palms full of mud. For a while you can do nothing but crouch there trembling, hair hanging round your face, breath coming sharp and ugly through a body that no longer knows its own shape.
Morning hones itself as you kneel in it. The scent of his blood has thinned almost to nothing. In its place comes the rest: men everywhere, dead and living both. Sweat gone sour in gambesons. Split guts, horse piss, iron and smoke. The field beyond the trees breathes out ruin by the lungful.
You have three days. Three days to find the knight, make him love you, and keep your soul out of a witch’s hand. You cannot even stand. Water clouds your vision and you laugh bitterly at how it won’t let you go entirely.
On the morrow, Dunk sweeps through the edges of the battlefield after the worst of it, checking for men still breathing whose bodies might be saved or those who need a merciful hand to help them pass. His side aches badly where someone slashed him, one ear hears less than it did before the fight, and one of his sockets throbs with excess blood, but at least he’s not the one gasping his last. He keeps his eyes peeled for movement, yet when he notices a particular creature trembling at the very shore where his inept prayers were heard, he stills.
A girl. Mud-caked, naked, and—Gods—crying.
He hauls the reins on Sweetfoot at once, dulling an instinct to charge forward and holding her in a rushed trot instead. “M’lady!” he calls from horseback. “M’lady, be not afraid!”
Your eyes lift, but the rest of you dwindles immediately. Arms come to cover your head and Duncan notices you’re stricken with grime wrists to elbows as if you were trying to make your way uphill on all fours. He dismounts with a small grunt and hunches on instinct. His arms spread wide and gentle, and before he knows it he’s murmuring as he would to a skittish thing. “Easy now,” he whispers. “Easy. I vow this to you—I am no threat. My name is… Ser D-Duncan The Tall. I won't hurt you.”
The title sits oddly in his mouth when he’s half-shrunken and on bent legs. As he comes closer, his cheeks begin hoarding warmth despite him, for the shape of you is visible and evident even at this angle. Breasts plastered to your thighs billow with each frightened breath. Your belly creases in the middle and clay tears and crumbles off your knees when you shudder. He sees nothing else, but in his chest an unbearable instinct to cradle you almost overcomes him.
His head turns to the side, so he watches you only with his eye’s corner. When he’s close enough, he undoes his cape, spreads it gently over your back and lets it fall over you. He has a fleeting thought on what kind of smell it must carry and whether that matters.
Only then does he see the dagger. It is clutched in your fist, half-hidden by mud and the hunch of your body, but iron is iron. His hand stills on the edge of the wool. For a breath he says nothing. A crying maid with a blade is still a maid with a blade, and fear can make a body quicker than training.
“Easy,” he says again, lower. “You needn’t use that on me.”
You stop trembling enough to lift your face. The blade drops. Then all at once you are on him, hands closing round his waist with such force Dunk rocks back on his heels. Something reaches him through wool and shaking breath. Unintelligible mutter. Then—found me. And again, softer, urgent with respite. Knew you would. Knew you’d find me.
For a moment he does nothing but stand there with his own arms half-raised, startled clean through. Then they come round you, shy and boyish. One hand settles between your shoulders. He rubs once, then again, broad and slow, as though you are a frightened colt and his hand might smooth you into sense. “There now,” he says, because it is what comes. “There now.”
Beneath the mud and the cold reek of the stream there is a smell to you he cannot place. Something green. Something sweet. It cuts strangely through blood and horse and churned earth.
He lets you cling till your breathing eases enough to stop catching. When it eases, he gives your shoulders one careful squeeze and tries to look at your face without looking full at your face.
“M’lady,” he says. “Have you been hurt?” You shake your head against him. He swallows. “And your clothes—were you robbed?” There is a pause to that. Then you nod.
“Ah.” Dunk shuts his mouth on all the things that might follow that and does not ask them. “Well. I’ll take you to the village,” he says. “We’ll find something to put on your back, and someone to look you over.”
You do not let go, and he finds he does not much mind that. By now he is holding most of your weight besides. He means to set you back a little then, only enough to walk you to Sweetfoot, but the moment he loosens his hold your legs betray you. They fold queerly with the loose, witless give of limbs that do not know their own business. Dunk catches you fast under the arms before your knees can strike earth.
Some hurt in the low back, he thinks. Or the spine knocked wrong. He has seen men go slack in the limbs from less.
“Easy,” he says again, lower now. “I’ve you.”
Your head comes up. There is mud on your cheek, tears dried in bright tracks through it. Up close the sight of you lands worse on him than it did before. Such beauty in such a place. Such beauty at all. If someone asked him later, he would have no better answer than that.
“May I carry you?” he asks.
You nod.
He gathers the cape tight first, fingers making poor work of it. Then he crouches so you may put your arms round his neck. When you do, your face comes so near he feels the warmth of your breath on his mouth. His own has gone dry. “I will lift you now,” he says, for want of anything wiser.
One arm behind your back, the other under your knees. He brings you up. The pull in his side is vicious enough to whiten his sight for a blink, but he only grunts and holds you the tighter for it. You are light to him. Light should not be so difficult.
Sweetfoot turns her head and blows at the sight of you in Dunk’s arms. “Mind yourself,” Dunk mutters, and means the horse, and himself, and perhaps the day entire.
Getting you into the saddle proves ugly work. There is no good way to manage a naked maid wrapped in a cloak when one hand is wanted for decency, the other for balance, and his side seems set on parting company with him. He stands a moment with his jaw shut hard, then does it the only way such things ever get done—awkwardly.
“M’lady,” he says, hot-faced, “I must set you before me.” You only look at him with those wide, strange eyes and make no complaint.
He gets one boot to stirrup, hauls himself up enough to raise you after, and nearly fumbles you when the cloak slips and his forearm feels the bare warmth of your back through the wool. Heat runs through him so fast it feels wrong. He gets you right the second time by sheer stubbornness, settles you before the saddle-bow, then adjusts behind with a grunt he prays sounds like effort.
It does not improve matters.
There is no room worth speaking of. You sit before him with your hair damp and knees thrown to one side, and Dunk must put an arm round your middle the moment Sweetfoot moves or see you slide clean off. He has no notion what one does with a girl in such a fix. Horses, boys, wounds, armour, hard roads, those he understands. A maiden fair as vision and shaky in the limbs, is another matter. He finds himself hoping there is some widow in the village with a stern face and capable hands who might take one look at you and know everything he does not. Then he may ride on to Riverrun with peace in his mind.
The thought sits well enough till you lean back. A little more weight at each step, whether from weariness or trust he cannot tell. Soon your back is to his chest and your hair keeps straying under his chin. He has to look somewhere, so he looks at your hands on Sweetfoot’s neck.
Mud is dried in the lines of your palms and packed black beneath your nails. The nails themselves are pale in a way he mislikes. A drowned sort of blandness, as though the blood had only lately remembered to leave them. His hand closes harder on the reins.
What befell you? Robbed, you had said—no, nodded. Robbed of clothes and the strength in your legs. Robbed near of your wits, to be found bare and weeping on the skirts of slaughter. His mind offers up answers and every one of them is ugly.
“You are safe enough for now,” he says, because the words come and because he wants them said. “We’ll have you among decent folk directly.”
You say nothing. Perhaps doze. Perhaps you only listen. When Sweetfoot steps through a rut, your head tips back against him for an instant, and Dunk’s arm goes firmer round your waist.
Riverrun can wait an hour. Even a day, if it must. First the village. Clothes. Food. A woman to tend you. Then he will know what ought be done.
He keeps his eyes ahead and rides. When the road begins to thicken with huts and kitchen smoke he turns Sweetfoot toward the first cottage with a swept patch of yard and washing strung on a line. A hen darts from underhoof squawking. Dunk reins in, slides down, and reaches up for you.
The door opens before he can knock. A broad woman with red wrists and a face like a hatchet stands in the threshold, takes in Dunk, the horse, the cloak-wrapped girl in his arms, and narrows her eyes. “I can explain,” Dunk says, which is a poor beginning and sounds like one besides.
“Can you?” she says.
Heat climbs his neck. “I found her by the stream yonder. She’s been robbed, I think. She’s got no clothes, and her legs are none too steady. I thought—” He falters, then tries again. “I thought a woman might better see to her.”
The woman looks past him to your face. Something in hers shifts, not softer exactly, but less sharp. “Well, I am a woman,” she says. “Bring her in, then, you great oaf, and stand there bleeding on my threshold no longer.”
Dunk ducks his head and does as he’s bid. The cottage is low-ceilinged and close with the smell of onions and wool. He sets you down where the woman tells him, though not without trouble, for your legs go queer under you again and your hand catches in his sleeve with sudden force. “You are safe,” he says under his breath.
Your fingers tighten. “Please,” you whisper. “Do not leave.”
That near aches him more than the clinging had. “I’ll be just outside,” he says, for the woman is already flapping a hand at him to get out and because there is no fitting place for him in a room where a maid must be dressed. “Only outside. I vow it.”
A beat. Then, you let go. The door shuts on him. Dunk stands in the yard with a hand pressed to his side. Through the wall come the dim sounds of women’s voices, yours low and strange, the older one brisk and practical. Once there is a clatter. Once a silence long enough to make him straighten from the fence-post he had leaned on. He is thinking whether it would be madness to knock when the woman steps out at last, wiping her hands on her apron.
“Well?” Dunk asks.
“Well, nothing’s broke,” she says. “No fever that I can feel, no wound worth speaking of. She’s frightened half witless and weak in the legs, that’s all. Hungry, too, I’d say. May be she took some knock to the head. May be she was born a little moon-touched. Hard to say.”
Dunk blinks at her. “She knows her own name?” he asks.
The woman gives him a look. “She knows enough.”
That does not answer much, but before he can find a better question the door opens and you come out.
The clothes hang on you as they would on a child dressed from a dead woman’s chest: a coarse shift, a faded gown, sleeves a touch too short, hem uncertain, boots big enough to host toes twice as long as yours. Your hair has been pushed back from your face with damp hands. Your legs still look unsure of themselves. Dunk moves before thinking and takes you by the elbows when you waver on the step. “There now,” he murmurs. “Steady.”
You look up at him with such plain relief that his grip gentles.
The woman snorts softly behind you. “Take her home, then.”
Dunk clears his throat. “Aye. That is—” He looks down at you. “Where is your home, m’lady?”
Your hand comes up and closes over his forearm. “There is nothing for me there,” you say. Your fingers tighten. “Please.”
He opens his mouth, then shuts it. “I am bound for Riverrun,” he says at last. “I’ve business there. I cannot—”
“That is where I am going,” you say quickly. “The last place where I have anything. Please. Take me with you.”
Dunk stares. It may be nonsense. It may be the plain truth. It may be only the talk of a girl too frightened to be left among strangers. He cannot tell. What he can tell is the feel of your hand on his arm, the look of you trying not to sway where you stand, and the knowledge that if he leaves you here, he will think on it all the road to Riverrun and probably every road after.
The woman folds her arms and watches him make a misery of the choice. “Well?” she says.
Dunk lets out a breath. “I can take you as far as Riverrun,” he says, still looking at you. “No farther promised than that.”
Your smile is answer enough. Later, when doubt gets into him, it will be one of the things he reaches back for.
Soon after the village, Duncan finds himself about a number of tasks he had not meant to take on. He accepts the pity bundle of more garments from the woman, all of them light. He lifts you to the saddle, then goes back for Chestnut and Thunder. He loses the mark of his back, gathers his scant belongings, counts them, and thinks of the trouble of one bedroll. Riverrun lies four nights off, and his purse is too light for inns along the way. He shifts the saddle on Chestnut till it will hold you steady enough, then goes through the poor store of cloth he owns to see whether there is anything fit to spare you. At last he finds a blanket little better than rough army issue and ties it round your shoulders with a length of string.
When he is done, he steps back to look at you and nearly laughs for the misery of it. A strange girl with no place to go, less worldly goods than he has, a queer way of speaking, and legs that seem only half-convinced by land—and here he is, setting his road to her pace as though this were a sensible thing. Duncan knows well enough what sort of fool he is. Dunk the Lunk, thick as a castle wall, slow as an aurochs. Still, his mouth pulls into a shy half-smile.
“Ready?” he asks.
The world of men continues to bewilder. They kill each other relentlessly and let the bodies rot out in the fields until crows find them. They speak oddly. They wear clothes. Rough things that scratch the skin round armpits and knees, and make their beasts wear clothes too. They walk on two imbalanced legs that have less sense to them than you would ever think they have, which end with feeble little things that need the most woeful instrument imaginable to stay protected—shoes.
The pain comes on you late. At first everything is so strange that the cuts in your feet barely matter. Then, just as you get the first grasp on how to walk on those fleshy stilts, an old woman gives you a shift, a skirt that wedges itself between your thighs, stockings that roll beneath your knees, and a pair of disgusting animal-skin things that make the wound across your sole press and bleed, press and bleed. You could fit another set of those ugly little toes into them and still they’d knock your ankles raw. Duncan seems to think your wits were rumbled sideways by whatever befell you, and sighs through his nose each time you try a few wobbling steps before giving up and tossing you from one place to another. From doorstep to horseback. From horseback to ground. From ground back to horseback again. Then, the horse takes over the carrying.
None of this matters greatly. None of it rubs you wrong in any way, because your knight has found you and agreed to take you to Riverrun, of which you know only that it is overrun with rivers and mean spirits, and you want nothing to do with either. You want everything to do with him, though, so you let the beast called Chestnut carry you toward it and knock your newly acquired arse against the hard leather of her saddle.
You glance at him often, only to make certain you were right to choose him, but Duncan proves worth every bruise on your buttocks. He is prettier close by. Washed of blood, his face goes almost holy at moments—too open and clean in the look of it—then a shift of shade will catch under the brow and jaw and make a man of him again so suddenly it gives you pause. His arms are strong enough to carry a girl like you. His heart, plainly, is soft enough to help one and trust one within the space of a single hesitant breath.
That softness lives in him in sly places. Not only in the face, though the face does its share. In the stammer that catches him when he is too aware of himself. In the way he asks leave before he touches you, as though a thing may be both necessary and solemn. In how he handles even his own size like it might alarm somebody if set down too hard. You begin to see that the boyishness in him is not only a matter of smooth cheeks and dark lashes and that honest mouth. It lives deeper. Some tender piece of him has made it to his great age uncrushed.
You have no notion what he knows of love. His lips look unkissed, which strikes you at once as improbable and agreeable. Kissable all the same. So are his cheeks, if it comes to that, and the hollows under his eyes look made for the brushing of thumbs in acts of pity or fondness or whatever human girls do when they mean to soothe a man. You think, in the stupid way of girls, that it may be just as well if he knows nothing. You know very little yourself. The males of your kind are greedy, quarrelsome creatures who would bite the shine off a scale if they thought it theirs by right. The tenderest kiss you have ever given in all your life was to a trout, and that was mostly because it was dying.
Still, you know enough to know this: there is something dear in a creature so large keeping such a breakable heart inside him. Duncan feels safe to you in the way deep water once did. Not because he could not drown you if he wished, but because every part of him seems arranged against wishing it.
The road, of course, is another matter. It goes on and on, pale and hard beneath the horses, made by men for reasons men must have found clever. When there is no canopy the sun comes down bare and mean, scorching your face, your scalp, the tender tops of your hands. Dust lifts and settles in your throat. The saddle knocks under you with a steady, sour persistence, and after a while even wonder thins into boredom. You cannot understand why anyone would choose such a path. Roads have no give. They hold the day’s heat. They are full of stones and wheel-ruts and the old droppings of beasts. Water, at least, takes your shape when it carries you.
But then, toward evening, the land alters. Light begins to bleed richer colours over everything. It gathers in the grasses and tips the hedges. It slicks itself along the backs of flies until the air is full of brief, burning specks. The trunks of trees grow black on one side and warm on the other, and the far fields seem to have been brushed by something molten and low. From the height of Chestnut’s back, you see land from its own heart for the first time: furrow, ditch, thorn, moss, little stones shining in the road, the long back of the world lifting itself toward dark.
The dying sun finds Duncan too. It catches in his hair until the auburn of it wakes with red-gold hidden under it, banked fire stirred by a stick. All of him brightens: cheek, ear, the blunt line of his nose, the great slope of shoulder under travel-stained cloth. When the sun begins to go, his colours come alive. It seems unfair that a thing may grow more beautiful just when the light is going, as if it was never meant to be kept.
“M’lady?” His voice pulls you from the sky. You turn your head and find him watching you from Sweetfoot’s back. “Are you tired?”
You consider this. “Tired of what?”
He blinks.
“Sitting on a beast?” you ask.
A sound leaves him then, low and huffed through his nose. “Aye. Riding can weary a body. We should make camp soon. It will be dark before long.”
You look him over for signs of weariness, but he shows none that you can read. He sits tall enough, broad enough, with the reins easy in one hand and the dust on him as if it has been there all his life. “The road is hard,” you allow. “The beast is delightful.”
At that you lean forward and wrap both arms around Chestnut’s neck. Chestnut blows out a pleased breath and dips her head as if she agrees with you entirely.
Duncan stares for a moment. Then his mouth presses itself into a line and he looks back to the road.
“Do people always choose paths this hard?” you ask.
“This?” he says. “This is no hard road. It’s straight, and flat enough, and there’s no great wind to cut at us. There are harder paths than this.”
You frown. “Why would anyone take a harder path?”
“Sometimes they must.”
You consider that gravely. Men do seem fond of arranging misery into rules and then obeying them.
After another little while, Duncan says, “Keep your eyes peeled for a place to camp, if there is one you like.”
Your hand lifts before he has finished speaking. “There.”
He follows the line of your finger. There is only a thick tangle of trees and bramble ahead, with sun lying through the branches. “There?” he says.
“By the water.”
He looks again, slower this time, as if water may show itself out of courtesy. “There ain’t water there, m’lady.”
“There is.”
His gaze comes back to you. It is a look you dislike before you understand it. Careful. Mild. The look given to a creature who has said something foolish and might be frightened if the foolishness is named aloud. Pity sits in it, thinly covered.
Heat pinches under your ribs. “Beyond those trees,” you say. “Where the sun takes aim. There is water.”
Duncan shifts in the saddle. For a moment it seems he means to answer. Instead he only draws a breath and turns Sweetfoot’s head. “All right, then.”
The gentleness of it makes the pinch in you flare hotter. The males of your own kind speak so when they wish to make you small. Little thing, pretty thing, witless thing. They forget how quickly a little thing can open a throat when she has teeth and a mind to use them. How a male may reach for you in the weeds, grinning, and only know himself dead when his fingers will no longer close because all the blood has run out of them.
You say nothing. Chestnut follows Sweetfoot off the road and into the green press, Thunder trots close behind with all of the belongings clinking at his sides.
Branches drag over your shoulders. Leaves brush your face and catch in your hair. The ground grows softer almost immediately, darkening underhoof. You hear it before he does, of course: the low, glassy talk of water over stone, hidden under bird-call and the rasp of insects. A moment later Duncan hears it too. His head lifts. Sweetfoot’s ears prick forward. He urges her on a little faster without looking back.
The trees thin, and beyond them lies a small bed of grass pressed close to a clear stream running lazy under evening light. A willow grows at the bank with its long hair fallen into the water, making a green chamber beneath it. The surface holds the last of the sun in broken pieces and lets them go again.
Duncan reins in. At first, he only looks. “Well,” he says at last, quiet and baffled. “Gods be good.” You sit straighter on Chestnut’s back when he turns to you. “How did you know?”
Your chin lifts, because even though he has no right to know, you are a proud creature. “I am not so witless as you think me, knight.”
At that his face changes. The bafflement stays, but something troubled comes into it too. “I never thought you witless,” he says.
Instead of dignifying that with a response, you begin getting off Chestnut. It seems simple enough. One leg must go somewhere, then the other after it, and the ground waits below with its usual bad intentions. You slide halfway down the saddle and there the business collapses. Your skirt catches, one foot finds nothing. Your hands clutch at leather and mane, and you are left hanging from the side of the beast in a deeply humiliating fashion, breathing hard through your nose.
Duncan is there before you make a fool of yourself entire. His hands span your waist through the shift, large and warm and terribly sure. He lifts you down as if the effort costs him nothing, though you have seen the way his side catches sometimes when he thinks you are looking elsewhere.
“I only meant,” he says, setting you on the grass with more care than the world deserves, “you keep surprising me.”
You say nothing to that. Only look at him from close by, and shamelessly so. He is shy for a lad this big. It pleases and worries you in equal measure. It makes you wonder, briefly and without comfort, whether he will know what to do with you at all. Whether he knows how men put themselves between the legs of women who want them so dearly. Whether, third night from this one, the witch will have the soul she grinned for.
Before you can ask, Duncan looks away. “You may bathe, if you like,” he says. “Under the willow there. I’ll start a fire. See to some food. Water the horses after.” Then he turns from you with the haste of a sailor escaping a sinking ship.
The first thing you lose is the shoes. You wrench them off and drop them in the grass with hatred. The cut across your sole still presses when your foot meets earth, but at least it is no longer trapped against leather, forced to bleed and bleed in its own little prison. The stockings go next, or try to. They roll and cling beneath your knees like pale eels. Then, the blanket. You tug at the ties and laces and strings, cross with their stubbornness, then only angrier. Human clothes are full of tricks and no kindness. At last, with a tired grunt, you pull the shift up over your head.
Behind you, wood clatters. You look round.
Duncan stands a few feet away with firewood scattered at his boots. His mouth has parted. For one suspended moment he simply gapes. Then flush climbs fiercely round his ears, up his neck, into his face, and he drops into a crouch to gather the sticks as if they have become suddenly precious.
“M-m’lady,” he says, strangled. “You oughtn’t—Seven save me—you oughtn’t undress before a man you scarce know.”
You stare at him.
“I thought you meant to go beneath the willow,” he goes on, still looking hard at the twigs. “Out of sight. I thought—what are you doing? Have you never been on the road? Or near men? Or near folk at all?”
An instinct pinches you, strange and unwelcome, to cover your chest. You do, though slowly, and with no clear idea why. He looks as if you have done him some harm. “It is only flesh,” you say. “You have flesh too. What is so wicked about mine that you cannot look?”
He makes a small, suffering sound and bends lower over the firewood. “My flesh is—” He stops. Swallows. Tries again. “It is different.”
You glance down at yourself, then at him. “How?”
His hand closes on a stick so tightly the bark cracks. “M’lady, I beg you.”
“For what?”
“For pity,” he says, so miserably that your brows lift. “It is improper, is all. A maid shouldn’t—And I don’t mean to have you think I’m that sort of man. I am trying to do good by you.”
He sounds so nervous your annoyance falters. Only for a moment.
You pick up the shift and hold it to your chest, then begin toward the bank. Walking still feels like being made to argue with the earth. Each step must be planned, lowered, endured. Too much pressure and the pain flares white-hot. Too little and your knee goes soft. Your feet seem stupidly far away from the rest of you, little traitors sent ahead to ruin your dignity.
You stop beside him. Duncan bows his head even lower, as though your bare ankle might strike him blind.
“Do you dislike women’s bodies?” you ask.
The sound he makes then is very nearly a whine. “Please, m’lady. Spare me. I am only a hedge knight. I am trying—please.”
You huff at him. “Forgive me for tormenting you with some skin.” Then you limp on beneath the willow’s hanging hair.
There, hidden by the long green fall of it, you strip with more temper than grace and lower yourself toward the stream. This is going poorly. Your knight does not seem at all like the men you have watched from the shallows, those shore-men who seize their lovers round the waist and press them down laughing in the dark, bodies gleaming, mouths so sinful your tail once twitched hard enough to stir silt. Duncan behaves as though the sight of you is a trial set by cruel gods.
At least there is water.
The stream receives you kindly, though changed skin and sealed ribs make even kindness strange. You lie back over its cool sheet and drift where it is deep enough to hold you, looking up through the willow leaves as they sieve the last gold from the sky. The current slips beneath your new body, uncertain around the parts it no longer knows, and you let it carry what little of you it still can.
Duncan remains crouched over the scattered firewood long after you limp beneath the tree, ears burning as though someone has boxed them both. The stream talks quietly behind him. The horses crop at the grass.
He has no answer for what has just happened. None he likes, anyway.
You are strange. Stranger than any girl he has known, though known is too large a word for the few girls that ever had cause to look twice at him. Your face is strange too, in how open it is. He has not seen one so plain and easy to read since he was a boy looking down into still puddles and finding his own there. He can tell when you are baffled. When you are tired. When you are pleased. When you are angry.
Now you are angry. Likely under the willow still wearing that fierce little frown, cross with him because he turned his eyes away. That is the oddest part. Most maids, he thinks, would be angry with a man for gaping. You seem wounded that he did not gape longer.
He did gape. Only a heartbeat, maybe, before sense struck him like a thrown stone, but a heartbeat can be a mean long while when a girl stands bare in afternoon light. He saw the lift of your breasts before your arms came up, full where the borrowed shift had hidden them, and prickling with river-cool air. He saw the narrow give of your belly, the line where ribs fell into waist, the dark crease of shadow beneath. Enough. More than enough. Too much for a man meant to be gathering sticks and doing honourable things with his hands.
You asked how your flesh was different from his. The terrible thing is he would only need to stand up to show you.
That thought near makes him groan aloud. He jams another stick into the small pit he has scraped clear with his boot and starts arranging kindling with far more care than kindling deserves. Fire. Food. Horses. Bedroll. Those are proper troubles. Those can be solved with hands and a bit of sense.
The bedroll is the worst of them. Four nights to Riverrun. A purse too light for inns unless he means to arrive there hungry and horseless. He pokes at the kindling and gives himself over to a hard, practical anguish.
When the fire catches, he goes to see to the horses. Sweetfoot accepts his hand with her usual calm. Chestnut, traitor that she is, blows warm air straight into his face and tosses her head toward the willow.
“Oh, have you a new favourite?” Duncan mutters. Chestnut chews at nothing, looking pleased with herself. “Aye. Good. All of you against me, then.”
He returns to the fire with what food he has: one mangy rabbit still fit for roasting, a clutch of withered potatoes that have begun trying to become more potatoes, and bread gone hard enough to argue with a knife. He has had worse meals. Many worse. Still, he finds himself worrying whether it will be enough for a tender-mouthed creature like you, whether you are used to finer things, softer things, things served by hands that have never been black with battlefield mud.
The whole day sits oddly in his skull. Morning had found him still full of war. Blood from the day before. The sour stink of men opened for no good reason. Boys felled in the grass with their eyes gone milky and their mothers’ names drying on their tongues. He had been angry then, in a slow thick way, at killing and lords and banners and all the great heavy wheels that roll over little bodies until no one can tell what shape they had.
Then he found you by the stream, naked, half-wild with fear, concussed or close enough, begging him without quite begging to take you with him. Now you are angry because he would not stand there and leer at your tits.
Duncan understands horses better than people. Dogs too. Even mules, ugly-hearted beasts though they can be. A horse gives warning before it kicks. A dog shows teeth before it bites. People smile, weep, lie, ask strange questions, go hurt in places a man cannot see. You escape even the small customs he has managed to learn.
He lifts his eyes from the rabbit just as the wind moves the willow’s hanging hair aside. Through the green gaps, he sees you.
You are floating on your back where the stream broadens under the tree, arms spread loose on either side, legs moving slowly beneath the skin of the water. The last light scatters over you in pieces. A knee and a hip. The small rise of your belly. Water darkens and brightens as it crosses you, breaking your shape and making it whole again. Your hair fans out around your head. Your eyes are closed, mouth parted, and the stream slips between your lips as though you have invited it.
Duncan ought to look away, but the boy he is, he doesn't.
There is enough of you on display to shame a septa dead in her robes. Breasts, thighs, the place between them blurred and shown by water in turns. Yet your face holds him worst. The peace of it, the ease of it. Stripped of cloth and terror and all the hard rules that seem to trouble you, you look newly made and older than the earth together. Not human, he thinks. Then he feels wicked for it, because you are a girl, and hurt, and under his protection.
Still, you look like one of those goddesses men carved in old stones before the Seven came, the kind Duncan knows nothing about except that a wiser man would kneel or run. You look pleased to have the world off your skin. No wonder you shed clothing like a snare.
The willow falls back into place. Green covers you again. Duncan looks down at the rabbit, jaw tight, and turns it over the flame before it can make it to coal. He scolds himself too, keeps muttering Ser Arlan's little knightly preachings to tear his mind away from what boys think about, and back to what sworn swords should think about.
The stream sloshes and plops with the sound of a body being dragged out of it. There, Dunk wonders what exactly to do, because he knows well enough you are no good at walking yet, but finds himself in the grip of a strange preference. He would rather let the stumble happen and rush to help than prevent it outright, if prevention means enduring another comparison of flesh.
Soon enough, he catches you limping from the corner of his eye to the heart of his vision. You come to sit beside him much too close for his peace. The cold of the river comes off you plainly, running against the heat of his shoulder where yours nearly touches. Damp has darkened your hair and set loose drops along your neck. Before he can shift away without making it an insult, you arrange yourself with great importance and announce, “There. Modest.”
Dunk looks. Stupidly, but he does. He has never known cloth to be a thing worthy of praise. Cloth is only cloth. A courtesy. A barrier. A way for decent folk to go about the world without setting fire to one another’s ears. Yet in his want to tell you that you have done well, he stabs his own foot clean through.
The linen has clung to you everywhere it ought to have had the manners to hang loose. Breast, belly, the small inward draw of your waist—all made plainer by water and the thinness of the shift. The blanket lies in a heap too near the fire, abandoned as though wool has somehow offended you.
He holds the lump in his throat from becoming a sound. Then he reaches for the blanket, shakes the worst of the grass from it, and puts it over your shoulders with as much solemn care as if he were robing a queen. He draws it close beneath your throat and tucks one edge over the other.
“You’ve not dried yourself off,” he says. “Cold, aren’t ye?”
You look at him for a moment. Then, there's a nod, and, thank the Seven, your hands take over the keeping of the blanket at your breastbone. The lump in Dunk's throat loosens.
He busies himself with the food. The rabbit has given what it can to the pot, which is less than a rabbit ought to give and more than nothing. The potatoes have softened. The bread will have to be chewed with conviction. He ladles the thin pottage into one of his wooden bowls and passes it to you.
You take it in both hands and eye it with open suspicion. “What is this?”
“Supper,” he says.
You smell it.
“It ain’t much,” Dunk goes on, because the look on your face begins to trouble him. “Only rabbit and some potatoes, and the bread’s gone hard. Still, you ought to eat. There’s a day on the road ahead, and you’ve had naught in you since—” He stops, because he does not know since when. “A while, I’d wager.”
He expects disappointment, perhaps. Revulsion, if you are some lord’s daughter after all, though what lord’s daughter finds herself naked and half-drowned by a stream is beyond him.
Instead, you look bewildered. “You made this?”
Dunk blinks. “A-aye, m’lady.”
You dip your fingers in before he can offer a spoon. The first bite goes into your mouth carefully, as though supper may have sharp bits within it. Then your face changes.
It is a small thing, merely a lifting of brows and mouth pausing round the taste. Then you take another bit, and another, hotter than is wise, huffing through it and laughing once under your breath as though the whole notion of cooked rabbit has played some clever trick on you. Grease shines at the corner of your mouth. You lick it away with no shame at all.
“This is good,” you say, and sound surprised by your own gladness. “This is very good.”
Dunk is bewildered. It is one kind of cruelty to tease him and huff at him for trying his best at decency and failing, another to make a jest out of him and his hedge-ridden status. He looks down into his own bowl.
“Must you mock me?”
You stop chewing at once. The mouthful is too large to swallow cleanly, but you do it anyway and wince as it goes down. “Mock you?” you ask. “Why would I?”
“It’s only rabbit,” he mutters. “And mangled potatoes. You needn’t make a show of it.”
The hurt that comes into your face lands in him badly.
“I did not mean to hurt you,” you say. “Forgive me. I only meant—I would not be able to make this.” A pause. “Or start a fire, for that matter.”
Dunk lifts his head. “You do not know how to start a fire?”
You look at him a moment too long, then back into the bowl. “I’ve never needed it.”
That answer is another strange stone set on the growing pile of you. He gives a low hum and scrapes at his own supper with the spoon. “Well,” he says after a moment, rough with regret. “I beg your pardon, then. If you truly enjoy it, I am glad.”
Your eyes lift. “I do. Truly.”
Knowing it is true does something worse than the praise did. It catches him off guard and warms him under the breastbone, soft and dangerous. He leans back on one hand, taking you in. Half-smile, bare feet peeking from beneath the blanket, bowl clutched as though it contains some small wonder.
“So,” he says, because his mouth is safer when it is trying to crack an unresolvable riddle, “you’re a lady who cannot cook, cannot start a fire, and despises garments and shoes, but has some queer prescience when it comes to finding a body of water. Hm?”
Silence only, then a wide-eyed glance.
“Peculiar,” Dunk says.
“I do not understand why men wear so much cloth anyway,” you say, picking at the blanket where it sits under your chin. “What is peculiar is to have skin so feeble—”
There, your voice dies. Dunk has gone very still with his spoon halfway to his mouth. “Men?” he says.
You blink.
“You are people too,” he says, after a beat.
The words are gentle enough, but they come with a puzzled furrow between his brows, as though he is trying to set you in the proper place and cannot find the shelf. He takes another mouthful and chews it slowly. “Have you worn lighter cloth before, then? Before… all this?”
Before the stream, he means. Before the mud. Before the village woman and the borrowed gown. Before whatever thing he has decided happened to you.
Your fingers tighten round the bowl. “Lighter, yes.”
“How light?”
You give him a careful look.
Dunk seems to understand his mistake before you answer. Red returns to his ears with comic speed. “Never mind. You needn’t— That was no question to ask a maid.”
You consider him. “Do you not often see women naked?”
He chokes. It is only a little choke, but enough to make him turn his face and thump one fist against his chest. “Gods,” he says when he has breath again. “M’lady.”
“I am only asking.”
“Aye, well. Some questions ought to be asked with more care.”
“Why?”
“Because they—” He looks at you, then away, then helplessly down to his lap. “Because they put thoughts in a man’s head.”
“What thoughts?”
His mouth opens. Shuts. You lean closer, interested so plainly Dunk near suffocates on air that suddenly feels chewable in his mouth. “Do women’s bodies trouble all men so badly, or only hedge knights?” you ask.
He makes the suffering sound again. Quieter this time, but telling all the same. “I've seen women,” he says, with the grave misery of a fool walking barefoot over hot coals. “Some. A few. In bathhouses, once or twice by mistake. On the road, folk are not always private as they ought be. And, uh—” He clears his throat so hard it sounds painful. “And in places where women are paid to be looked at.”
You stare. “Paid?”
“Aye.”
“To be looked at?”
“Among other things.”
“What other things?”
Dunk puts his bowl down. You wait. He looks into the fire as if the flames might take pity on him and leap high enough to swallow his face. “Things between men and women.”
“What things?”
“Married things,” he says, too quickly.
“Only married people do them?”
His eyes close briefly. “No.”
“Then why call them married things?”
“Because I am trying to keep this talk decent,” Dunk huffs.
You frown into your supper. “Have you done them?” you ask.
It is such a rude and forthright question it strikes bone in him, though somehow it does not quite offend. His face pulls tight. The flush burns hotter, but something under it draws inward, shy and sore and young.
“N-no,” Duncan says, small.
You lean closer, as if trying to match him in secrecy lest his horses suddenly recognise human tongue. “Never?”
“No.”
“Why?”
He gives a small, helpless shrug. “I’ve had no wife.”
“But you said folk do these things without wives.”
“Aye, some do.” He groans then, low and exasperated, dragging one hand over his mouth. “Gods.”
“But you do not.”
“No.”
“Why?”
His thumb moves over the rim of his bowl. There is dirt under the nail, a split at the knuckle, the hand of a man who knows fire and reins and sword-hilts and very little of where to put himself when a girl asks him plain questions in the dusk.
“Seemed wrong, most times,” he says. “Or costly. Or I was too young. Or too big and stupid and slow to know what was wanted till the chance had gone.”
He goes quiet after that, hoping it is enough of a confession to satisfy you. Another part of him wonders what business he has entertaining the whim at all. A puzzle of a girl you are, that is for certain. Strange in your questions, in your frowns, in the careless tilt of your head when you hear a thing you cannot place.
Then a thought comes on him, tender and stupid enough to shame him: is this another chance he cannot recognise while it is being given? He lifts his face to check yours for some sign of what he imagines a lustful glance might be, though he has no real notion what he expects to find there. Heat? Mischief? Some womanly knowledge he would know when he saw it? Before he can make any proper fool’s study of you, you ask another question.
“Do you like kissing?”
You might as well have picked up a knife by the blade. “I—” His throat works. “I suppose I might.”
“You suppose?”
He breathes heavy. His skin surely can’t get any hotter, so he answers, “I have kissed.”
Your eyes brighten at that, keen enough to make him regret the disclosure at once. “How many times?”
Duncan laughs then, though there is little mirth in it. Nerves, mayhaps. Or the pure severity of you sitting there with rabbit grease on your mouth, asking after his kisses as if counting apples in a basket. He has admitted to being green and now sounds greener still. “Seven save me,” he whines.
“How many?”
“Enough to know a man should not count in front of a lady.”
“Was it good?”
The fire pops. Somewhere behind the pair of you one of the horses tears grass with its teeth. Dunk sits in deepening blushing silence.
You eat another bite. Hum, as if the flavours have managed to marry into something more delicious during the interrogation. “At the shore,” you say then, “men kiss women as if they are hungry.”
Dunk’s gaze snaps to you.
“I have seen it,” you add. “They hold them by the waist and put them down in the grass. Sometimes the women laugh. Sometimes they make sounds as if they are being bitten, but they keep their hands in the men’s hair, so I think they must like it.”
Duncan feels himself go past blushing into something worse. Stricken, feverish, and too aware of the place where his belly has kicked tight under your words. He cannot have you thinking him that sort of knight. Cannot sit here in the dark with you speaking of women pressed into grass and let his mind go where it has already begun to go.
“M’lady,” he says, and hears the plea in it himself. “I think we ought to try and get some sleep.”
“It is barely dark,” you say.
“It will be darker soon.”
“That happens whether we sleep or not.”
“Aye,” he says faintly. “So it does.”
You lick a bit of grease from your thumb. His eyes move there and away so fast he prays you miss it. “Do you want more supper?” he asks.
You smile into your bowl. “You are changing the subject.”
He smiles back, weakly. Hopes there is enough begging in it, though judging by your curiosity about every cursed thing under the moon, falling to his knees would only give you more to ask about. “I am… trying to save my soul.”
Your laugh comes out small and surprised, and it spills warm through his chest in a way that has no business being so pleasant.
“Eat,” he says. “Then sleep. There will be more road on the morrow, and you already hate the road.”
“I hate the shoes more,” you tell him.
“Aye. I had gathered.”
“And the stockings.”
“A terrible foe,” Dunk says, standing up.
“And the laces.”
“Cruel little beasts.”
You glance at him, something sharp and pleased on you. It is very difficult to keep thoughts from his head, foul thoughts, when you look like this. His heart softens a notch while the other parts of him harden, and before he is forced back to sitting, Dunk turns and tells you, “I’ll water the horses and prepare the bedroll for us.”
He does so. You follow him soon after, quiet-footed for once, and stop to eye the splay of oilcloth and old wool on the ground as if it is another human custom laid out for judgment.
Dunk clears his throat. “You should lie down. You’ve had a long day.”
That much, at least, you obey. You lower yourself carefully, one knee bending wrong at first, then righting with a frown that makes him look away before fondness can show too plainly on his face. He waits until you are settled, then pulls the blanket up over you and tucks it in at your shoulder. Only a little. Only enough to keep the night air off. His hand stills there for half a heartbeat before he draws it back.
Then he turns, draws his sword, and lays it down between the two sides of the bedroll.
It makes a good enough line. Honest steel. Cold steel. A better man than he is, perhaps, lying straight-backed where honour ought to be.
You watch him do it, and Dunk pretends not to notice.
Getting himself down beside you is less graceful than he would like. He lowers carefully, trying to favour the slash in his side, but the wound pulls anyway and a wince catches him regardless. He settles on his back at last with a breath through his teeth, one arm tucked behind his head, his body held a proper distance from the blade.
For a while there is only the fire. The horses. The soft working of water under the willow. But, of course, you must ask. “What is the sword for?”
Dunk shuts his eyes and opens them again. “For sleeping.”
You turn your face toward him. He can feel it without looking. “Are you afraid of me?”
“No,” he says quickly. “No, m’lady. It is only—” He searches for the words and finds only poor ones. “It is a boundary, like. For your honour.”
“My honour?”
“Aye.”
“Does it need steel?”
Dunk rubs a hand over his brow. “Mayhaps mine does.”
That comes out wrong enough to make him go still. He tries again before you can catch hold of it.
“I mean, it is proper. A man and a maid should not lie close without vows between them. Or kinship. Or—” He thinks of hedge knights, camp followers, drunk squires, road wives, all the world as it is rather than as septons pretend it to be. “Or some understanding.”
You hum. It is only a small sound, but it slips soft through the dark and goes straight into his groin. Pretty. Gods help him, even that is pretty. Your voice has no need of song to work on a man.
Dunk fixes his eyes on the sky. “I do not wish you to think ill of me,” he says, lower. “That is all.”
Another stretch of quiet. The fire clicks and collapses inward on itself.
“Do husbands and wives sleep like this too?”
Dunk's lids squeeze shut so hard they hurt.
He ought to answer. He knows he ought. It is a simple question, mayhaps, though no question of yours has proved simple yet. But he has no answer fit to give without inviting ten more behind it, each worse than the last. His side aches. His head aches. His body is a foe beside a sword that suddenly seems no wider than a blade of grass.
So Dunk lies very still and does his worst pretending to be asleep. After a moment, you hum again, as if you know perfectly well he is awake and have decided to let him keep the lie.
This entire story is LITERAL gold, but I wanted to highlight this passage where Reader admires Dunk while they're on horseback as the first day wears on. Nat, the way you describe how he's beautiful both outside and in, walks such a fine line between boy and man, and then the entire world and Dunk especially gets even MORE beautiful as Golden Hour sets in?? My heart and brain have both MELTED this was so gorgeously written:
"You glance at him often, only to make certain you were right to choose him, but Duncan proves worth every bruise on your buttocks. He is prettier close by. Washed of blood, his face goes almost holy at moments—too open and clean in the look of it—then a shift of shade will catch under the brow and jaw and make a man of him again so suddenly it gives you pause. His arms are strong enough to carry a girl like you. His heart, plainly, is soft enough to help one and trust one within the space of a single hesitant breath.
That softness lives in him in sly places. Not only in the face, though the face does its share. In the stammer that catches him when he is too aware of himself. In the way he asks leave before he touches you, as though a thing may be both necessary and solemn. In how he handles even his own size like it might alarm somebody if set down too hard. You begin to see that the boyishness in him is not only a matter of smooth cheeks and dark lashes and that honest mouth. It lives deeper. Some tender piece of him has made it to his great age uncrushed.
[...]
Still, you know enough to know this: there is something dear in a creature so large keeping such a breakable heart inside him. Duncan feels safe to you in the way deep water once did. Not because he could not drown you if he wished, but because every part of him seems arranged against wishing it.
[...]
But then, toward evening, the land alters. Light begins to bleed richer colours over everything. It gathers in the grasses and tips the hedges. It slicks itself along the backs of flies until the air is full of brief, burning specks. The trunks of trees grow black on one side and warm on the other, and the far fields seem to have been brushed by something molten and low. From the height of Chestnut’s back, you see land from its own heart for the first time: furrow, ditch, thorn, moss, little stones shining in the road, the long back of the world lifting itself toward dark.
The dying sun finds Duncan too. It catches in his hair until the auburn of it wakes with red-gold hidden under it, banked fire stirred by a stick. All of him brightens: cheek, ear, the blunt line of his nose, the great slope of shoulder under travel-stained cloth. When the sun begins to go, his colours come alive. It seems unfair that a thing may grow more beautiful just when the light is going, as if it was never meant to be kept."
I also have a prediction on how the title might be used or referenced later :') GAHHHH NAT I ADORE YOUUUU, YOU ABSOLUTE GEM!!! Your mind is the most wonderful playground, thank you for these invitations to see what you come up with! <33
Ok so…dunk letting her take out her pent up hormonal horniness on his thigh.. as his good deed as father of her child! completely platonic ser
Hi Anon, sorry this took a bit longer, I had to take a shower :') I know you guys are not there yet and it doesn't make much sense, but on the Heartburn timeline this can be placed somewhere in limbo between future chapter nine and ten. Enjoy a smutty stream of consciousness drabble (cw: thigh-riding, servicing, coming in pants).
So yes, he will absolutely be there, with the mindset of I'm in no matter what Reader asks of him. Despite Duncan's heart swelling weirdly every time you give him the look, he tells himself this is platonic, and that it is duty, because, well, his dick caused the misery, so letting you use him is the least he can do.
At first it's innocent enough. A mid-conversation, mid-joke, small, exasperated, point-making sit. You just sit. Awkward too, because it's in the middle of his thigh, and Dunk realises his legs are spread for no good reason but Jesus, good fucking riddance. There is a stretch of that thick silence he's used to hate but tries to unlearn the hating with you. With you, what follows the thick silence are other thick things, and those he enjoys. Your thick ass. The way your tongue feels thick in his mouth. The way he feels thick inside you.
He just stares at you and waits for the telling smile and a lip bite and maybe the slow fan of lashes, and when all the boxes are ticked, it's on. Sweetly, he asks you, D'you need somethin'? His hands are already at work, because oh, it's actually Duncan who needs and what he needs is you closer. He's holding you by the hip dips and sliding you down his leg and perching his knee a little so the slope becomes gravity's natural order and not only his doing. You land with your pussy pressing against where his thigh creases, buttocks spilling on either side of muscle and he's keeping them safe for you, because he's helping. He's helping and not at all getting anything from it. He's helping, and it only happens so that your tits press under his throat and your arms come round his neck, and your mouth murmurs into his forehead yes, just like that.
His glasses skew a little with you rocking against him, enough for his vision to blur. So he closes his eyes and lets himself experience your weight only through the remaining senses. You smell lovely. You chest tastes of sweat where his mouth hangs open against it. Your butt fills his palms completely and Duncan thinks great many things about how the world is build, and concludes that this particular piece of ass has been made for him specifically. There's wet at his trousers now, and your leg knocks his crotch gently every time you roll your hips and he fights the urge in himself to lie back on the bed and just let you ride him with your hands on his throat.
He helps as best as he can. Sets his palms under the heavy parts and takes the work over and hitches his thigh higher and pretends the sound he makes is effort. He's muttering, there, right there, use me lass, use me, that's it, and it all goes into your tits and Dunk has some faint idea that his soul will be spared if he means for it to go to your heart. His face is bullied into position of worship and suffocation which he has no quarrel with because it would be a good death to lose breath in your cleavage.
Then his brain tricks him into believing he's actually getting fucked and his cock takes the bait so eagerly Duncan near shames himself. That's beautiful, he says, and means both the pressure in his groin and you on him. Christ, yer beautiful when ye need somethin', girl. He's too owned already to tell being used from being claimed. He's all of those things, and you are making sounds and breathing hard into him, and it all arrives in his body through denim and bone, wet and hot, and oh God, he's helping, he's helping, it is a good deed, it is his job to keep you happy, it is platonic, service rendered through clenched teeth, and he's squeezing your arse and bearing you down on himself so hard it's actually him dictating the movement and he rasps, fuck yes, take it, take it, my girl, just like that, fuck, fuck—
You come with a little wounded squeal, with a shudder, with a small yes and Dunk and please, fuck, and him practically folded into you, and he's so attuned to you already he believes, firmly, it is possible that he feels it, the inward draw of you cunt through denim, phantom sensation of muscle clenching round him, and the full-body stupidity just steals him away from trying to be altruistic. There's more wet, too much of it to be caused only by your grinding, and when he opens his eyes again you're smiling all dazed and with glistening at the mouth, and his pants go dark, darker, then fully soaked with his own cum.
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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MASTERLIST
next chapter -> (05/06)
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.
mad scientist!machine herald viktor x gn!reader, medplay, kidnapping, knife (scalpel?) play, blood play, bondage, wound fucking (fingering), dubious consent
18+, minors dni
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"Poor little thing," Viktor coos. He isn't even trying to sound concerned. "You will be good for me, yes?" His voice lowers. Smooth, dead-serious. "Or will I need to catch you once more?"
Your breathing comes in quick, sharp pants, like that of a panicked animal. Beneath the squished press of your cheek, the operating table you're sprawled over is ice cold. Viktor's body, metal, impossibly heavy, keeps you pinned in place. His chest is pressing against your back, where you can feel his artificial warmth, his mechanics, rhythmically thrumming. The gears of his heart, the pistons of his lungs. Vibrations reverberating to a methodical, unsettling tune. He has your wrists pinned to the table, held down with both of his hands, and his third arm, the Hexclaw, is pushing with moderate force at the back of your skull.
Still, you shake your head as best you can manage.
Viktor goes silent, considering. Then, he guides your hands up, pulling them above your head. With great care and precision, he presses your wrists together, securing them with a leather binding, and fastening them to a curved metal hook that juts out at the end of the table.
He hums to himself, and when it seems evident that he's restrained you properly, that you won't — or can't — move, he pats your shoulder, approving.
"I can forgive you, as you do not understand what is truly necessary, nor can you grasp the entire extent of your contributions to progress." Viktor's metal hand snakes under you to grasp your chin. He squeezes your jaw, more firm than affectionate, he lifts your head and holds it at a near awkward angle. "You are my research subject, the most glorious lab mouse to have ever graced me, in fact. You are cherished. Even if you do not believe it."
In front of you, a large steel canister acts as a makeshift mirror. Wires lace from its edges to its open core. It drones idly, murmuring electricity. In it, you can see a curved picture: the dirty walls of Viktor's lab, hollow machine-bodies littering the floor, and a nearby side table, strewn with syringes and tools. Something twists tightly in your chest. Is he- is this what he plans to use on you, this time?
You can barely make out Viktor's shape, all metal armor, inhuman and daunting. He seems even larger when you're underneath him. His eyes, burning pools of amber light, fixed to his mask, meet yours in the reflection.
"I will only say this once more." Viktor leans in close. "You know that I am stronger than you, I am more knowledgeable, more perceptive. Do not run from me. There is no reality where I will not find you. Do you understand?"
You nod feverishly. (Your imperfect heart is thumping, you're stumbling over your feet like a helpless fawn; a laser, precise and burning hot, slices a line in front and behind you, cutting off all escape paths. Maybe you only ran from the Machine Herald because you knew you'd be caught. And subsequently praised, or even punished. You'd be pleased with both.)
You've never felt so pathetic.
The Machine Herald laughs, victorious. "Good pet. Hold still. I would hate to have to restrain you any more than this, after you have shown such sublime obedience."
He reaches for the small table. Overhead, the lights flicker, dull, sizzling. Your heart batters your ribs. Your eyes must be wide, pupils blown into fearful dark moons. Viktor adjusts his hand, he cradles your cheek, tilting your head to the side.
A needle kisses your neck. Thick, crimson liquid fills a silver syringe, held deftly between patient metal fingers. Small particles swirl inside, like dotted stars, like shards of sharp glass.
"Breathe in for me. Excellent. Breathe out, now." Viktor brushes his thumb over your cheek. You could almost mistake it for tenderness. "The lack of anesthesia should serve as an adequate form of punishment."
You close your eyes tight, until you can't see anything at all — just vague colors, pulsating like veins.
"Ah, you are shaking… there is no need to be afraid." Viktor's velvet voice, the curl of his accent is electric; you can't help but go limp. Relaxed, and waiting. "I will be with you. I will always be right here."
He injects you.
A gasp breaks on your lungs; you twitch, you writhe for a moment. All at once, a strange feeling comes over you, heat blooming at the base of your neck. Vines gush down your skin, causing shivers to patter along your spine. You feel… insistent. Viktor's third arm grasps the base of your neck, to hold you still.
"Hm." Viktor examines you, verbally taking notes. "Accelerated breathing. Heightened body heat. Arrhythmia, synonymous with an irregular heartbeat."
He taps your cheek. "Open wide."
Metal fingers slide inside your open mouth. They taste bitter and metallic, segmented with intricate joints, exposed bolts. You resist the urge to lap at them, or to close your mouth and suck. Viktor rubs his fingers in a small circle onto the flat of your tongue, in a rather practical motion. He is careful to not push them back too far, but you begin to gag anyway.
"And an excess of saliva. How peculiar." Viktor wipes his hand off on your nape, cooling your skin with your own slick drool. "I assumed this mixture would incite a conflicting response. I designed it with the average human body in mind, but evidently, that was not good enough. There are many inconsistent factors at play… the potency of the drug… your precise level of endorphins, or perhaps it is the oxytocin… Ah, no matter. I suppose I cannot declare it a complete failure, quite yet."
While he's been busy monologing, your breathing has grown heavy. "V- Vik…"
Viktor's voice gets a touch softer. "Are you alright?"
"I think… I- I don't know…"
"That is just fine, sweet thing. Perhaps you would like an antidote."
(There is none, but you, poor, precious, unevolved and unaugmented you, certainly can go without knowing that.)
"Yes- please?"
"Then listen to me carefully." The Machine Herald settles his weight atop yours, pressing closer. A flicker of steam, his breath, exhales from beneath his mask to brush your face. "I am sure my little rabbit can accomplish this much."
You nod. Dumbly.
The lights are fizzling again. "Now, could you tell me the answer to eleven plus four?"
"Fifteen…" Your head is spinning — no, the whole room is spinning… "Ah-"
"Good. Very good job. And what colors are you currently able to see? Simple observations such as red, or blue, will do just fine."
"Grey." (Almost the entirety of his lab is the color of steel, of cold fog rolling through Zaun, of smoke brimming from busy machinery.) "Purple." (Beakers, bubbling with shimmer.) "Blue." (Formaldehyde. The liquid he typically uses to embalm hearts and livers, brains and small organisms, suspended in jars, in translucent receptacles.) "And… orange, maybe?"
"I see. Your cognitive functions are decent. That is good, at least."
A stab at your head. Your headache is trying to escape the confines of your bones. "Did I mess something up?"
"Oh no, no, of course not," Viktor purrs; he leans into your cheek, like a cat's headbutt. "You have been nothing but sweet to me, and I simply cannot express how proud I am of you. I will not give you anything more for now, but… I believe I should perform more testing before I administer this particular solution again. Perhaps on your blood, as well as your skin."
He sits up, and he touches your nape, where the needle mark is quickly bruising. You wince, to his satisfaction. (Hopefully, you will wear this mark for a long, long while.)
"And in order to accomplish that, I will need a piece of your flesh."
"Okay… okay…" You say, only slightly over-eager. "You can do whatever you want, Doctor Viktor…"
"Ahaha, there you go. I am incredibly pleased to hear that." His Hexclaw ruffles your hair, before it releases you. A small mercy. "I will be gentle. So please, do not worry."
Viktor makes certain everything is in order first. On the table, he's organized some bandages, some cotton pads to soak up the bleeding. Forceps, he may need those. Scissors, meat saw, bone chisel, no, that won't be necessary. Not yet. Not tonight.
He grabs his scalpel very carefully, inspecting the shiny, sterile blade. (The shape is nothing short of delightful, a perfect grip, measured approximately to his hand, and a lightly curved edge, like a delicate half-moon. Admittedly, Viktor has always cared little for simplistic inventions such as these — they are mere tools to accomplish a task, drops in the ocean, the bits and pieces that help to form the basis of techmaturgy.
And yet, he finds himself longing to indulge more and more these days. Is this the sort of madness that you inspire?)
He acquired this scalpel in particular just for this, just for you, after all. Light catches on its surface as he tilts it. Fish scales. Or polished ironwork, he thinks, yes, that is more appropriate. How divine.
A feeling the Machine Herald had long since forgotten, a sense of excitement boils deep in the forge of his heartbeat.
"Left or right?" He twirls the scalpel. "Choose quickly."
"Right."
Viktor hikes up your shirt. He brings the tip of the scalpel to your right side, beneath your ribs, but above your hip. It only takes him a moment to settle on the exact position. His free palm presses to the small of your back — to hold you still.
"Do you trust me?" Viktor asks. It's hardly a question at all, because there's only one way you can answer.
Once again, you nod, but Viktor seems unsatisfied.
"Say it."
"I do, I trust you…"
A breath, in unison. These conditions are hardly appropriate to perform a proper biopsy, but he shouldn't pay that any mind.
As long as you have placed your faith in him, your trust, in his vision, as long as he has you; more accurately, he owns you. You are his responsibility. And so —
Viktor begins with a small, loving incision, barely a centimeter in length. You tense, expectedly, but you do not cry. Not to start with, but you will. The blade cleaves your flesh like silk. Nothing compares to the sight of it. He cuts as far into the tissue as the scalpel will allow.
"It must be painful… poor sweetheart." Viktor removes the scalpel, if only to prolong the process. He leans a bit closer, wiping tear droplets from your cheeks with a warm metal thumb. "But you can be strong for me. I know it is possible. You may not see what I see, but I promise you, this is wonderful. You still possess such potent emotions. Pain, fear, adoration, and to be able to witness them on display… Oh. Your pulse is spiking. Look at you… you are exquisite."
You plead, stuck on the V of his name, for a moment: "Viktor… V-Viktor…"
"Yes, my dear? Ah, fuck me, I should not have answered. It is so much more enjoyable to hear the way you beg for me."
It's no use. Spiked and quick, pain lances out from your side. Your shoulder blades go tense, pretty wings grinding together; you grit your teeth, and for him, you bear it.
"Oh, you cannot answer? That is okay… yes, if you feel the need to bite your tongue, that is more than okay."
Viktor returns to cutting. He is experienced enough to do this blind, and so he does, he focuses on you. On your weak body trembling beneath his metal-mass, a toy for his examinations, your chest heaving, your bottom lip shaking so pitifully.
And to think, you were once one of his colleagues, worthy of his respect in your own right — but you will never need to use that lovely head of yours ever again, unless he asks you to, unless he plans to cut it open.
Blood, love-red plasma, drips down your skin and pools onto the table, vivid with oxygen — and Viktor is enamored, beside himself with ecstasy. He shudders, though his working hand remains steady.
"You have no idea how much it satisfies me to be inside you." Viktor huffs, and the air in front of him clouds with the release of pressurized steam. You resist the need to cough. "I think you are beautiful, you have always been entirely perfect. In truth, my infatuation is… unyielding."
But oh, you'd be just as beautiful with a few metal augmentations. Viktor rambles, "My little love. If you would allow me to open your pretty body, I could provide you with more efficient, self-sustaining organs- it would be such a sight to behold. Ah, or perhaps I could give you a set of metal joints, they would function very well for you- of that, I am certain. No other scientist nor mechanic is able to grant you such an upgrade. Their minds are too feeble, too enclosed to understand true potential. I am the only one capable, and I would give you anything, everything you desire."
He laments, briefly, that you are still fully clothed. He would have loved the opportunity to examine you even closer, to open up your ribcage, or perhaps he could thoroughly inspect the wet warmth between your legs —
Dizzy with affection, Viktor glides his gloved hand up your back, he presses firmly enough to feel the ladder of bones beneath.
"A design signed with my name, proof that you have given yourself to me, to the newly realized future of humanity… haha, or maybe… I think you might prefer a metal collar for you to wear, one you are unable to remove without my assistance. Perhaps we could start there. You would not get lost again, yes?"
"Viktor, please…" You sob, you are begging without knowing what for — for him, for Viktor to adore you in every way possible: the tangible, the surgical, the cannibalistic.
Viktor can no longer help himself. His free hand prods his neck. A puff of stream unfurls to greet him. Here, he finds a familiar coupling of thick, exposed wires, kinked and curling from his nape to his throat. He teases them with the end of one finger, then begins rubbing and pulling with two. The stimulation is acute, instant. It feels good. So good. Arousal melts along his body, gnawing at his inner systems; a closed circuit, lapping at itself.
When you arch your back, metal jingling as your wrists pull at their restraints, your ass presses into him; Viktor grabs your waist to keep you steady.
"Dear…" He clicks his tongue: "Tch, I have not dressed your wound yet." Shaky, exhilarated, he gently cups your side. Brushes his palm to his work, the perfectly circular cut, the sticky still-oozing of blood, and his head goes heavy, just at the sight of it. "What am I to do with you?"
A constant ringing persists in your eardrums.
Two metal digits begin to probe your open wound, toying with it, or perhaps attempting to dig out the circle of flesh. Your blood slicks the steel. The perpetual brain-noise swallows you whole.
You scream so sweetly for him. The Machine Herald doesn't doubt that your cries can be heard from halfway down Emberflit Alley.
"Shhh. Such trouble you are making for me once again." Viktor's Hexclaw, with the clumsiness of an untrained machine, gives your head a few stiff pats. "Quiet, now. I am the only one who needs to hear you. Yes, well done. The pain is merely a temporary hindrance. Eventually, you will learn to control its impulses."
He then glides his gloved hand up, beneath your shirt. It presses to your soft bare skin, where he feels the thump, thumping of your heart. So adorable, so precious. So needy.
Malfunctions are running rampant within his brain. Fractals fraying from emotion blocking chips, prefrontal enhancement devices instead choosing to bend to Viktor's ardent desires. In the simplest of terms: he wants to claim this heart, wants to feel you even closer than this, a beating thing in the curve of his palm.
You will be pliant for him, will you not?
"It's alright. Once we are done, I will take good care of you." A gross, wet sound echoes through the Machine Herald's lab. His mechanics are beginning to purr, inner gear belts grinding, cooling fans whirring to unreliable speeds.
"Rest assured that I am intimately familiar with how this must feel for you. The rippling pain. The pervasive sense of dizziness, the way it threatens to conquer what remains of your composure. But do you not understand, now? I am making you into something far better. You are loved so dearly. That is why I must do this."
"Mhmm…" You sigh, glassy-eyed. The air has turned humid, almost stifling. I am loved, I am loved, I am loved.
"Precisely." Were you speaking aloud? Viktor hums, pleased, as he admires the newfound lump of flesh in his palm: "What a good little test subject you are. You have impressed me, but we are not yet done. Let us continue with something more… gratifying, shall we?"
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.
<- previous chapter
MASTERLIST
next chapter -> (29/05)
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.
content: nsfw, Viktorxfem!reader, exes, angst, jealousy, oral sex
summary: That time you bumped into Viktor at a party.
word count: 5.1k
an: another flash back :) Y’all are gonna have to wait till chapter 7 for them to resolve the pub conversation, sorry not sorry <3 Listened to 2000s house party music while writing this and imagined I was a fly on the wall watching it all unfold. I drew a map of the layout of this house party in order to block the scene lol, I'll post it soon. This fic on AO3.
I don't know how long it's gonna take me to write literally anything atm, I'm so busy, but I pinky promise I won't be going on another year long hiatus <3
Chapter list
divider by @saradika-graphics.
The past few months had been a lesson in whims, as in how to follow them. Tired of being good, of not knowing what catharsis feels like, of holding onto everything so tightly for fear of dropping the ball, you decided it was time to let your hair down. Where you used to bite your tongue, now you were inclined to shout. Where you previously couldn’t be baited, now you bit down hard enough to draw blood. It felt good to drink as often as you now did. It felt good to smoke the cigarette you swore you’d never touch. It felt good to wake up in the bed of a stranger, to get a taste of the person you thought you’d never be as you slowly became a stranger to yourself.
When you wake in the morning, room still spinning, organs both begging and daring you to move, insecurity seeps in. Call it good old hangxiety, but it feels silly to treat the mere act of your going out as revolutionary. It’s not as if sleeping with someone you now cannot remember the name of is some grand rebellion. You practice your reasoning each time you hunt for your clothes strewn across whoever’s room it is this time. You are not trying to be rebellious, per se. You are trying to be human. You are trying to dismount the horse you’ve been sat on, stood atop a hill looking down on the rest of your peers, whether intentional or not. You are trying to allow yourself to be greedy, to indulge in your desires and for once, not feel bad about it.
You don’t want to think. You want to turn off your brain and try feeling instead. Whether you are succeeding or not is debatable.
You’ve chosen a new subject for tonight. The house party of a friend of a friend always provided the perfect pool of candidates; a decent enough peer review and enough distance not to cause too much drama. He gave you his name ten minutes ago, but seeing as he won’t be getting your number you haven’t catalogued that bit of information. He’s broad, tattooed, a classic tall-dark-handsome. You’d hoped to find some brooding there too, but so far he’s all sunshine and rainbows. You are putting him through all the usual tests; leaned against a wall, shoulders back, face tilted up, lashes low. The flush in your cheeks in only on account of the alcohol and you keep your lips persistently upturned as he speaks. He is responsive; blushes easy, laughs awkward but endearing, scratches at the back of his neck when you compliment him. He’s accidentally charming, talks a lot, eager, and yet he doesn’t encroach on your personal space no matter how much you invite him to. Polite. Too polite. You can tell it’s not because he doesn’t want to. He’s nervous, you make him nervous, but it’s more of a boost to the ego than it is enticing.
You could get him to come home with you, you had a feeling he’d go willingly as long as you lead the way. It’s easy to imagine how he’d feel under you, whispering into his ear how sweet and easy he is and all the things you’d like him to do to you. He’d stutter and blush no doubt. You’d have to convince him you weren’t made of glass though and likely field a thousand ‘are you sure?’s with increasingly impatient yeses. It would require thinking, not an insignificant amount. It’s not that you mind being the one to call the shots, but tonight you wanted someone to put all the right words in all the right places. Crudely into your ear, or perhaps in the crease of your groin, you wanted someone to make you blush all over, someone to render you speechless because they found a spot that made your eyes roll back, someone to tell you how sweet and easy and good you were, and all the things they’d like to do to you.
So as lovely as Tall Dark and Handsome is, you will nod idly and be polite and half-listen to his tipsy ramblings on invasive but edible alliums while you scan the crowd for your next candidate.
The fibres of your shirt catch on the matte paint of the pillar behind you, a gentle scratching sensation as you press your back against it. It’s steadfast in the sea of moving bodies. While everyone else finds satisfaction flitting between here and there, you find comfort in staying exactly where you are. You let your candidates come to you when they give into the luring feeling of someone’s eyes on them. And if you want an out, you have Jayce and Mel in your sights too, just one excuse away. The pillar has a perfect view of the door, no new faces could walk in without you noticing. And, oh, how you notice when the next late-comer arrives.
Lucky, lucky you.
Viktor is fashionably late. Being that he is not a candidate, that should be all you notice. He looks good though, unfairly so, and he looks tired. Not the kind of tired you get from late nights at the library, but the kind of tired that you yourself have been carrying all semester; last night’s booze still kicking about in the liver, purple bags under the eyes, wincing at the music till you adjust and tonight’s booze hits you. Even without having visited your old library haunt in months, you know he’s been avoiding it too.
If he was coming here with someone, they should have walked through the door by now. If he’d been dragged along by Jayce and Mel, he would already have been here when you arrived. If he didn’t intend to do more than just drop by, he wouldn’t have put in more effort than just changing his clothes. The only other reason for his being here alone, then, is that he wanted to be. Tall Dark and Handsome’s voice has disappeared into the background as you make your observations.
Then your stomach drops, because Viktor’s gaze has locked onto you too.
Tunnel vision is one of Viktor’s strengths, though he’d rather not admit it. He would like to think, sometimes, that he is good at seeing the bigger picture, that he is as good at compartmentalising as you seem to be, and that he does not apply the scientific method to dating. He has tried other people. He has fucked other people, he has even dared to date them. But you are his control group. He looks for you in the gaps between teeth, beneath layers of cotton and polyester, in the crook of an armpit. He looks for you in locks of hair, a crown tucked under his chin, as if you are a piece of fuzz he could groom from the head of another, as if his looking is enough to make your existence come true. Hell, he has even tried to find you in the touch of a man, imagining the lips wrapped around him as yours and expecting to hear some muffled quip about how much he’s enjoying this. The man had said something along those lines and Viktor had laughed — actually laughed — when he couldn’t match the cadence to yours and realised his own ridiculousness. Unfortunately, the man didn’t share your fondness for laughing during sex. So Viktor had finished himself off in the bathroom, looked for you, as he most often did, in the palm of his hand. He hasn’t decided whether he wants to replicate results or find evidence against the theory that men never get over their first love. Either way, his findings are not promising.
For a second — and it is quite unfortunate that it’s within the first minute of his arrival — tunnel vision kicks in and the room narrows to you.
What he had failed to account for in his collecting of evidence is that he might see you. And that you might not be alone. You might, for instance, be leaned against a pillar in the middle of the room where everyone could see you, and you might be flirting with an objectively attractive man, showing him off like a shiny trophy. Look what I can do, he imagines you’re thinking. It is even worse that you’ve chosen to look back at him, forcing him to keep whatever curses he wants to mutter to himself until you finally decide he’s not worth looking at anymore.
Black cotton and tour dates stare back at Viktor as he tries to bore a hole through the man with his eyes, if only to get a proper look at you. You're showing off, it seems, and he'd like to get a look at how you're taking your victory.
He hears his name called out from across the room, warm and bright, accompanied by Jayce's enthusiastic wave beckoning him over. His inquiry will have to wait.
“Hey, Vik! Thought you might bail on us after last night,” Jayce greets with a firm clap to his shoulder.
Viktor pretends that Jayce's hand landed too heavy and mocks an unsteady sway. “I am no weakling, Jayce. I can handle a few nights out in a row.”
He watches Mel trace his eye line, throwing a glance over her shoulder in your direction. She seems unsurprised by your current situation.
So, this wasn't new for you then.
"It's good to see you," Mel says with her la bise. "We could've given you a heads up."
"It's fine," Viktor replies too quickly.
It should be fine. It should provide him with some closure. You were both moving on, as you both should. Mel eyes him with a level of scepticism possessed only by someone who knows too much, but does not push.
"Jayce was just telling me that you've moved up from teaching assistant to associate lecturer. Congrats, you deserve it," she continues.
Viktor smiles awkwardly, accepting the pat on the back with a small nod. He is about to say something about how the increase in workload is necessary evil of this development when Jayce swoops in and saves him from downplaying his achievements. Or really having to make any conversation at all.
Which is good, because conversation is proving nearly impossible.
Because Viktor cannot stop looking at you. He cannot stop watching you, he cannot help himself but to study the way you try and coax this other man out of his shell. He cannot help but notice how you hide your frustration at the man's inaction behind an unmoving smile. There is part of Viktor that feels bad for the guy, because he is either a fucking idiot who can't read your fuck-me eyes, or he just can't handle being on the receiving end of them. Neither option will end in you having a good time. The other part of Viktor wants to show the man how it's done. If it was him over there, he'd have you a blushing mess in seconds. In fact, Viktor's positive he'd have dragged you away from that pillar you're clinging to and bent you over the bathroom sink. He'd fuck you from behind, make you look at yourself in the mirror while he tells you to be quiet, and how pretty you are, and you good you are, and how you plague him, and how he cannot stop thinking about you and how he almost hates you for it.
A head's up would have been nice, actually. That way he might not be stood here, staring at you half-hard, while Jayce blathers on about- Viktor realises he has no clue what Jayce is talking about because he hasn't been listening. And he cannot listen because you are driving him insane from all the way across the room without having so much as looked at him in the last five far-too-long minutes. There must be something, something divine, something supernatural, anything that explains why he cannot help but be drawn to you whether he should be or not. He is convinced you must be putting out some kind of siren call designed specifically to torment him and him alone.
Your eyes seem too trained on the man, as if you are trying not to look back at Viktor. He knows if he looks for too long you will give in and return eye contact, and he's not sure that's what he wants but he doesn't get a choice when he proves himself right.
You look. He stiffens, grip tightening on his cane, holding his breath.
Your stare is blank. And in spite of himself, he thinks you are beautiful.
“And so then- what are you looking at?” Jayce furrows his brow and looks over his shoulder. “Oh,” he pauses, and Jayce's looking causes you to look away. “You should go talk to her.”
“Jayce,” Mel warns gently, a hand on his back.
Viktor finally comes back to conversation. “No it’s okay, she’s busy.”
“Hah, busy is one word for it,” Jayce jokes, good-natured yet poorly placed.
“Jayce” Mel warns again with a quelling look.
Viktor's eyes flick to Jayce and his brow twitches slightly. “My point is proven, then.” When he looks back at you, your eyes are fixed on the floor and you fiddle with your necklace.
"She's going through a phase," Mel offers as some flimsy explanation for Jayce's joke.
Phase. Right. Viktor couldn't say he didn't know what you were doing. It was obvious, for one. He'd heard talk that you had broken out of your usual goody-two-shoes routine. This was merely confirmation. And it was written all over your face when you saw him. Guilty, yes, but for once you didn't look like you were going to throw up about it. It almost suited you.
Viktor clears his throat. "I got that."
Jayce and Mel give him sheepish, apologetic looks that Viktor decides he can't bear. "I need a drink," he tells them before slipping past them.
The drinks are in the kitchen. To get to the kitchen, he has to walk past you. He could give you a wide berth and slip right by you, but where would be the fun in that? No, you have been setting him adrift since he got here and it was unfair that he be the only one affected.
Viktor calculates his trajectory. A bump to your shoulder, not hard enough to hurt, but enough to hopefully dislodge you from that goddamn pillar you clung to like a barnacle.
Your poker face has never been one of your strengths, but you muster up everything you have to give away as little as possible as you stare back at Viktor. You wish sometimes that you didn't say as much with your face as you did. It had gotten you in trouble on more than one occasion, catching you out in a lie or revealing your amusement in what is supposed to be a serious situation. God forbid Viktor saw you were affected at all by his being here. Getting over someone in theory is one thing, but seeing them in person tends to feel like picking at a scabbed over wound. You had done a decently good job of avoiding him; between the last time and now, all you'd seen of him was a glimpse in university hallways and cafes. Other than that, your self-experimentation went on without disruption. You just hadn't found what you were looking for yet, whatever that was.
Viktor should have no choice but to believe that you feel fine about him being here. You were both free to do whatever you liked. It wasn't that you felt bad for flirting with someone else in front of him, you thought, but that it was simply awkward to see you ex like this. Yes, that was it, that was the queasiness that had come over you. That or the mixing liquors in your stomach.
The self-experimentation was about you, and you could take constructive criticism. 'You think too much and talk even more'. Viktor hadn't been wrong. There was no harm in trying something different, something out of your comfort zone, something to push you.
You put your blinders on as you decide that ignoring Viktor is the best course of action for tonight. But Viktor's stare is piercing and unbearable, and you'd like to use it to your advantage and put on a show for him he'd hate. Tall Dark and Handsome will do for now, because even though he might be more effort than you're usually willing to put in, he comes with the added benefit of pissing Viktor off. You play the part of interested, bare your teeth in your smiles, get touchier, make it look like you're going to do more than get this man to walk you to a taxi rank so you're seen leaving together.
The only reason you look back over at Viktor is to check whether it's working. Though he is still staring back unwaveringly, there's very little you can see in the way of a reaction. Maybe you should give it up. Maybe this is more effort than it's worth. When Jayce joins in with the looking it's your cue to put the blinders back on. This time you actually try to listen to what the man before you is saying.
And then it happens, the glorious catharsis of being right, of winning. Viktor's shoulder collides with you, sending you a stumbling step to the left. Never in your life have you been so delighted to be pissed off.
The triumph is short-lived, lasting as long as the dull ghost of him at your shoulder. It is replaced by a phantom on the back of your hand. Barely there, so faint it might not have been real. You could've sworn you felt the graze of his knuckles. And if you did, it must've been accidental, he wouldn't have done that on purpose-
Tall Dark and Handsome puts out a hand to steady you and says your name as he waits for you to answer him.
"Sorry, zoned out there for a minute," you reply, trying to shake Viktor off and attach yourself back to the pillar. He was just bumping you in retaliation, what else could it have been?
"Oh, you alright? Need some water?" Tall Dark and Handsome checks, bless his heart.
"Yeah, I'm okay." When you look up, he is watching Viktor go, and it's not with the mild annoyance you expect, but intrigue. The poor boy obviously thinks it was an accident.
You put your smile back to steal his attention back to you. "What were you saying?"
You don't get to find out what it is Tall Dark and Handsome was saying, not for lack of trying, but he may as well be talking gibberish because that's all you can hear. He talks enough that your hums and nods and yeahs sound like active listening as you finally relinquish the idea of sleeping with him.
He must finally have realised he'll get nothing from you, because at some point he'd left. You don't remember when, but you notice that he hasn't come back. Some sweet girl that must've seen the whole thing comes to check on on you, pressing a glass of water into your hand, making small talk, attempting to pull you out of the shell you've retreated back into.
You have been set adrift, the pillar doing little to anchor you now. The sensation of Viktor's knuckles against yours haunts you. You're still not convinced it was real, and still not convinced it was on purpose. Because what reason would he have for doing it on purpose? It's not like he wanted anything from you. He probably just wanted a reaction. That is, if it was on purpose, he probably just wanted you to feel bad for flirting in front of him. And, if that was the case, he really shouldn't have come to a party. People flirt at parties, he'd have to get over it since he was the one who didn't have time for you. Yes, a reaction, that's what he wanted. Because if he didn't want a reaction, if he wanted something else, that was a whole other kettle of fish. Maybe he wanted to shake that guy off you, but then he shouldn't have bumped you. He might've wanted you to follow him, but follow him for what?
The girl checking on you is saying something about how guys suck while you're thinking yourself into an early grave. Viktor's laugh puts the final nail in the coffin.
Viktor is standing in front of none other than Tall Dark and Handsome, who is leaning against the wall while Viktor twirls his cane idly. Viktor has him blushing deeper than you ever managed for the forty-five minutes you had him, and he looks more at ease somehow despite how heavy you know Viktor's gaze is. Maybe the he finds the weight of it comforting. You always did. Viktor had this uncanny ability to make a person feel seen just by looking at them. It was less like being looked at and more like being disassembled to see how you work, then put back together.
You realise you have not won. No, Viktor's reaction was a consolation prize, a distraction so that he could do this. Confusion spoils, turns ugly and boils over.
"Sorry, I think I see someone I know," you tell the girl who is still trying to reassure you.
You're moving before you can even think about it.
Bas, as Viktor had learned the man's name was, was far too sweet to be used as bait in this game of who-will-break-first. Admittedly, Viktor had first approached him to find out what you'd seen in him. He'd been right to think that Bas couldn't handle your fuck-me eyes, evident now that he was positively melting under Viktor's. It was cute, really, Viktor felt a little bad that Bas had been lured in and caught up in all this nonsense between you. Viktor could hardly blame him, you were not easy to resist by his account. None of this had been Bas's fault, and it had turned out a bit too much hassle for Viktor too. Perhaps it would be welcome if Viktor made it worth both their whiles.
There is a hand on Viktor's shoulder. And then you are looking up at him with a saccharine smile. Bas is giving you an awkward but polite nod in lieu of acknowledging he ditched you. And Viktor cannot think of what you'd possibly want now other than payback for displacing you earlier.
"Can I steal him from you for a minute?" you ask Bas, but Viktor knows it is not really a question.
A stuttered 'sure' is hardly out of Bas's mouth before Viktor is being dragged away. He doesn't have time to protest the matter. You have pulled him away from the party, into the darkened hallway reserved for chatting while you wait for the bathroom or making out.
His back hits the wall with a thud, but there are no needy lips on his. Instead, you are pointing a finger at him and demanding answers from him like he's committed a crime.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“Am I not allowed to talk to people?”
“You’re stepping on my toes, you’re doing it on purpose.” Ah, so you have decided what he is doing for him.
“You weren't exactly having the best time with him,” he points out.
You snarl. “Oh, I see, you’re jealous.”
Viktor has to admit, he is amused at all the hoops you are jumping through to blame this entirely on him. “Yes, I’m the one that’s jealous,” he mocks.
It sets you off. The words come spilling out of your mouth, hot and venomous and bitter and mean. Viktor should be upset at the interruption, worried about causing a scene, shocked and angry that you'd say anything as nasty as what you're spewing. He is impressed by the sheer volume of it, and none of it lands close to hurting him. He is too focussed on the way your lips curl around every jab, the way your teeth gnash at the air and pierce vowels. Consonants cutting, scarlet creeping up your neck, and a line between your brows he wants to lick flat. Viktor has never seen you like this, not with anyone. He knew it was there, simmering underneath your skin, waiting to be seen. So many times he had asked you to show it to him, tried to provoke it. So many times all he had wanted was to see you free from the vice grip your strange morality had on you, and have you show him how you felt instead of packaging the feelings all pretty with an apology note attached.
A glob of saliva flies from your mouth in your rage and lands on his shirt. Right now, you are so angry, and you are so free. And somehow, it makes you more beautiful than you already were.
"You think you’re so clever, you think you know me so well, don’t you? Well guess what? I’m different now, you don’t know anything about me-”
Viktor kisses you. It's not a smart decision by any measure. He gets the angle wrong, lips meeting your teeth instead, resulting in a blooming, bruising pain. He half expects you to bite down and draw blood, push him off you and call him an asshole and tell him to stay away from you.
You correct the course. Shift into him, use his shirt to press him further into the wall as you lean your weight forward. Viktor opens his mouth to accept your barbed tongue, sucks on it gently and swallows all that venom down for you and relishes the bitterness. He grabs at your hips, pulling you against him by the belt loops.
The hands fisted into his shirt drag him towards a bedroom, and Viktor goes without resistance. He would follow you anywhere, and if it meant he could continue receiving your wrath he'd let you trawl him along the ocean floor. If he had known this is what your ire looked like, he might have tried harder to provoke it. He offers up his lip for you to gnaw on as he backs you up to the bed, cane abandoned by the door, and falls down with you.
Viktor kisses down your front, pulling your jeans down with him. He buries his nose against the dampened cotton of your underwear and takes a deep inhale there, breathing in the sweet musk that heaven must smell like. He could die happy here between your thighs, nose pressed to your clothed cunt, your hand loosely in his hair. He would live here if you let him. He licks you through the fabric, his taste buds catching on cotton. He knows the most you’ll feel is the heat of his flat tongue, that you’ll think he’s taking his sweet time just to drive you crazy. But it’s not for you, it’s for him. He needs literally anything to pace himself right now, to not come in his pants like a teenager from just the taste of you. You’d find it hot, no doubt, might even let him fuck you because of it.
“Vik, your leg-” you protest. The nickname is not new by any means but he files it away for later regardless, along with your brief moment of concern.
“Is fine,” he assures, but his knee argues. “Throw me a pillow.”
He peels your panties off so they joins your jeans at your ankles. Finally, he can kiss lips that do not claim to hate him. Viktor is measured at first, gentle as he licks from opening to clit. He slides a hand under your shirt to brace both you and himself as he settles back into the feeling of you.
The little gasp you let out spurs Viktor on. He is pleased you are not angry with him anymore, unfiltered fury bleeding out of you as you soften, tense, pull his head further into your crotch. He licks it up, fucks you with his tongue first and his hips rut into the bed frame.
When you whine, he knows you want more. He gives you his fingers, because he would give you anything, pumping them inside you as he flicks his tongue over your clit steadily. Your thighs tighten around his head and make it harder to breathe, though this is less of a problem than how it muffles the sound of your voice. Every whimper, every moan of his name, every plea is kept from him by the very flesh he reveres.
He listens to your body instead; the scrape of your nails against his scalp, the way you pry his hand off your stomach and interlace your fingers there and squeeze. Your hips cant into his face. He hums into you to answer the question your body is asking him. Then you are coming around his fingers, and he is lapping at you to savour every moment he has of you like this.
Viktor catches his breath against your thigh. He presses a kiss there tentatively, and you are either too boneless to brush him off, or — if he lets himself hope — you like it as much as he does. He chances at another, then another at your hip, another at your navel, then your sternum through your shirt, collar bone, neck-
His nose traces the shell of your ear, he can smell your perfume emanating from where you tucked it under your jaw.
"Lásko…" he breathes.
The next kiss he places lands on thin air.
Viktor opens his eyes to find yours averted, your whole face turned away from him. The hope he had just barely nurtured withers. Somehow, somewhere, he has made a mistake, and you are angry again. This time it is the kind that you bite back and swallow down for fear of anyone seeing it. He wants to rest his forehead to yours, make you look at him. He would take it if you started shouting at him again, but you are already squirming out from under him.
He lets you go because he doesn't know how to stop you without making this worse. He doesn't even really know what he did wrong. The door slams behind you and Viktor collapses into the hollow you left in the sheets. He wants them to smell of your sweat but they only smells of whosever room this is.
an: Also, completely unrelated, but in the last chapter I wrote that lil bit about Reader hiding like a rabbit and I didn’t wanna lean too much more into the prey thing than that so I left it there bc I didn’t want it to be creepy. I kid you not, like two days later, a someone on a dating app where they described themselves as a horrible person, told me I had the ‘eyes of a prey animal’… hello???? wtf??? It’s been haunting me. If on the off chance anyone I actually know reads this and now knows it’s me bc of that tid-bit, no u don’t.
synopsis: when Dunk returns to camp bruised and bloodied, you tend to his wounds (and then some)
word count: 4.3k
content [NSFW!]: Dunk x fem! traveling companion reader, yearning, explicit consent, smut, outdoor sex, submissive dunk, m!receiving, hand job, praise, calling him pretty, talking him through it, slight (soft!) femdom, mild blood cw (dunk is slightly wounded), pain play if you squint? but not really. (i repeat, he has minor injuries). mention of masturbation, size difference bc dunk is talllll, mutual pining, no visual descriptors for reader, no use of y/n, (so close to hurt/comfort but i don't think it could be considered as such lol)
a/n: this is what happens when I set out to write a little drabble and then trip and fall into a 4k wc... my b.
**Fic revised 5/10/26** thank you to @goat-limbs and @ladyoftheelm for beta reads and edits <3
* * *
"Be still, Ser Duncan," you chided. "I cannot help you if you do not let me look."
"Enough of that. I told you 'm fine."
Dunk was decidedly not fine; his head was propped up on the trunk of his chosen elm, face bruised and bloodied in places, with more blood yet still staining the stony blue fabric of his tunic. You'd spotted the largest of the stains as soon as he had dismounted Sweetfoot, and you were determined to figure out whether or not that blood was his.
He'd reclined in his usual spot, groaning as he collapsed onto his bedroll that was still unfurled in the grass from that morning. You had set out to the task of boiling water and gathering rags to drop into the pot you'd propped over the fire that had been going since before he'd returned to your camp.
Perched at his side now, knees pressed into the edge of his bedroll just a breath away from his hip, you steadied the cooling pot of water onto the grass. Though he lay beaten boneless beneath you, you had to marvel at his size; his shoulders spanning wider than any one person's rightly should. The length of his body stretching long even with knees knocking east and west to fit the bend of his legs.
You watched him stiffen beneath you, straying knees drawing close as pain sharpened his breathing.
"There's no need, truly," he assured you, tone softening. "I'm more bruised than anything."
"You're bleeding," your hands trembled as you reached for the hem of his tunic, and suddenly you were aware of adrenaline that had been racing through you since you saw the stain—a dark ugly bloom disgracing his abdomen.
He caught your hands in his, then. Steadying. "It's not mine."
You closed your mouth around a sigh, exhaling sharp through your nose. "Please, Ser. Just let me check."
Dunk relented, releasing your hands from his. Wasting no time, you gently pulled at the fabric, easing it taut to break the tunic off from where it stuck to skin. The garment peeled back and exposed his belly.
Catching the faintest glare from you then, he added "Well, not most of it, anyway."
Pale skin gave way to saturated dappling as the new bruises begun to set in, and while there were a few cuts into the plush of his abdomen, none of them required more than simple cleaning and bandaging. The large stain that scared you witless revealed itself to be just that: a stain. Dark and sticky, the blood coated nearly half of his stomach, coloring the hair that swirled toward his navel and trailed down below his trousers.
Relief washed over you then, soothing and sobering, loosening the tension in your body with a single exhale. "Right, let's get you cleaned up." You ghosted a finger over his skin, tracing beside the deepest looking gash. "This one will need bandaging."
Dunk squirmed under your examining gaze, "You needn't trouble yourself, truly."
Hushing him, you reached into the pot to grab a strip of cloth, squeezing out the excess water to drip into the grass below. "You aren't trouble," you said, sliding the fabric along his skin now, attempting to clear away the largest splotch of blood. "Well, you certainly were trouble to the poor bastard who bled all over you. But not to me."
Dunk shuddered, and you halted your scrubbing.
"Sorry, did I hurt you?" Your hand lifted from him.
He was quick to shake his head, "N-no. Sorry."
You nodded, then returned to your work. Attentive and careful with another drag of the cloth, you watched as the pillow of his flesh gave way under the weight of your fingers. The hair of his navel went damp, then kept catching in the weave of the fabric to follow the direction of each careful stroke. Your breath grew heavy in your chest, lungs holding onto each intake of air for just a bit too long.
Now that your panic had lessened, the reality of your proximity to Dunk took its place, giving your pounding heart no reprieve. You'd never touched him for so long at once, and certainly never anywhere so intimate. Your eyes glazed over as they followed the trail of hair that pointed down from his navel before disappearing into his trousers. You wanted to look where it led, to study where the hair grew thickest.
"R-really, I can clean myself up later, just wanted to rest a while before—"
"I will not hear another word of it." You interrupt, mildly startled by him breaking the daze that had fallen over you. What had gotten into you, anyway? Lusting over a man as he lay bleeding beneath you.
"Yes, m'lady." His eyes flicked back and forth between your face and hands before resigning to stare behind you at the fire. His boyish features walked the line of a solemn expression, sending a flash of guilt to your gut.
"Be at ease, Ser. I know I'm certainly no Maester. Or a healer for that matter. And fortunately you're not like to need one. Even so, this shouldn't take me too long." You coaxed, resting your spare hand on his thigh in reassurance. It seemed to do the opposite of soothing, because you felt him jolt under your touch. You dragged a thumb along him in apology before setting back to your task.
You'd finally done away with the worst of the blood left on him, discarding the dirty cloth at your side before grabbing a clean one from the pot of water to tend to the deepest cut.
Dunk sucked in a breath before it caught in his throat. He grunted near imperceptibly at the sting as you worked at the sliced skin low near the waist of his trousers. Your face was hovering so very close as you sought precision in your task. Leaning over the span of his hips, you run the fabric along him, careful not to press into the gash itself, and worked to clear away any further blood or debris from the site.
"I'm almost done with this part," you soothed. "You're doing so well for me. Just a moment longer."
Above you, Dunk's breathing—along with his expression—became anguished.
* * *
Dunk was hoping to the Gods that you'd assume his unsteady breathing was from pain.
He was hurting, sure, but the pain was overshadowed by another ache; brought on by your attentive focus on his body, your concentrated expression and gentle fingers.
Enraptured with your hands on his skin, feeling as you stroked across the expanse of his belly, Dunk wasn't sure of the last time he'd been touched so kindly—if ever—and it set his heart ablaze, but Seven above if he wasn't feeling indecent. Exposed beneath you, at the mercy of your care and command. There was only so much he could do to remain composed with your hands on his stomach, moving lower to his hip, curling a finger under the waist of his trousers to swipe the wet cloth underneath, catching every trace of blood left on him.
What a depraved sod; a man who would grow hard while his wounds were being tended to, he thought to himself. And your kind and soothing words only added fuel to the fire burning hot in him now. Praising, reassuring that this would almost be over.
Gods know he needed this to end. But, help him, he didn't want it to.
There would be more wounds to tend, so long as he didn't scare you off now. He found himself desperately needing to get his eyes off of you and his mind onto something, onto anything, else he would be pitching an awful tent in his trousers.
Dunk knew this would happen, too. Knew he was doomed as soon as you'd seen the state of him and began gathering bandages. In the time you'd been traveling together, he learned he needed to tread carefully. Every stolen touch, casual and innocent as they were, struck him through to the marrow of his bones.
Early in the mornings when the sunlight caught your hair just right, he wondered what you would smell like in the heat of it. If he pressed his nose against the crown of your head where the suns rays spent the most time, or at the base of your skull where your sweat would gather at the nape. How would it differ at dusk, after a long day of hard riding? In the evening, after you'd rinsed the day off in a cool creek, your skin primed to soak in the water, then the wood smoke as you sat across from him? Could he begin edging closer to sit beside you, could he blame it on the way the wind blew the smoke in his face, or was that a trite excuse?
After supper, when you'd share a glance that lingered too long, or let out one of your breathy full-chested laughs, he was left at half mast. He'd excuse himself for his own bath in the creek then, stroking himself at the thought of you, even through the shame of it all. Making half excuses, sometimes his mind would wander farther. To the way your skin would feel under his hands, the way you'd sound if he brought you pleasure, to the way your lips would taste. Or, how the rest of you would taste, if he were ever so bold as to run his mouth along every part of your body.
"Dunk."
He startled, returning his eyes to you then, seeing you with a bandage at the ready, long and gathered between each of your hands.
"Lift a moment for me."
Oh, he won't make it out alive. He knew this now, beyond any shadow of a doubt.
Nodding, Dunk obeyed. Lifted his hips up off his bedroll for you to snake your hands underneath him. You passed the end of the bandage between your hands to wrap it around his torso. The fabric held between your forefinger and middle, the index sliding against his back along the way, dipping to the curve of his spine before grabbing hold of the bandage again with the other hand. Pulling it taut while his hips eased back down to the earth.
Tying the bandage tight, fingers brushing along his skin as you secured each knot. Dunk's heart was pounding in his throat at the sight of himself, now visibly straining against the fabric of his trousers.
* * *
You leaned back to check your work, and Dunk was quick to roll onto his side, facing away from you. But not before you saw the unmistakable swell at the crux of him.
"Dunk," you said, placing your hand on his hip and pulling him gently back down, "lie back before you ruin my hard work."
As you fussed with the bandage, ensuring that it remained securely tied on, Dunk watched in disbelief.
"Is this why you were fighting me so? Why you didn't want my help?" You asked. Your hands stilled.
Dunk's knees drew up, his hands moved to his face to hide from you. "Fuck I'm sorry—Seven save me—I'm so so sorry."
"Hey—hush, now. It's alright." Leaning forward, you caught his wide forearm in your hand, seeking to reveal him again. "Dunk."
His eyes, full of panic, found yours. They held a truth which his mouth refused to express, lips parting only for a peek of his tongue. His heavy lower lip shone wet, and you wanted to pull it between your teeth and test the plush of it. To soften and trace your lips against his in apology. You paused for an agonizing moment, nakedly staring.
Then: "Can I kiss you?"
"What?" The question knocked the wind out of him. He managed to hold your gaze, searching for a reasonable explanation in your face and finding none.
"Can I kiss you?" You asked again.
"I-I don't—I couldn't, that would be… improper. I wouldn't want to be—" Lashes fluttering as he fought himself, Dunk could hardly manage to keep looking at you.
"That is not what I asked, Dunk. Do you want to kiss me?" Your face was a breath from his now.
Sputtering out a ragged sigh, he looked back down at the state of himself. "Gods, yes, of course, but I c—"
At his desperate 'yes', you moved forward, hand laying over his cheek, thumb finding the corner of his mouth, eyes tracing the same path. You paused for the faintest second, silently asking one last time before you placed your lips to his in a single, long kiss; chaste, closed mouths melding together.
Asking permission again without a word, you broke away an inch, foreheads pressed to each other. Dunk's eyes, wide and blue, were even larger this close. Flicking between eyes and lips before his chased yours again.
Falling into an ill-timed, desperate pace with noses knocking and teeth scraping against flesh, you slid your hand down from where it rested against his cheek. Steadying his jaw in your palm to overthrow his pace for your own, you worked your lips against his slowly, open, wet, wanting. He moaned, hedonistic and low, right into your mouth.
Dunk managed to follow your rhythm as the palm on his jaw slid lower, flat over the velvet of his throat on the way to his collar, nails scraping over the hair that peeked from the dip of his tunic.
"This okay?" You whispered against his lips.
He kept nodding until he could conjure a response; soft, uttered in a breath. "Yes."
You kissed a trail from the corner of his mouth to his jaw, murmuring into his ear as you palm found the swell of his chest. "I've been wanting this for so long." Lashes brushing against his cheek, you tilted your head to nuzzle into him, speaking each word onto his skin. "Kiss you. Touch you. Tell you how pretty you are. Fuck, since my first night at your fire."
Dunk's only reply was an agonized sigh, his head lolling away from you as his face tinted pink. Neck exposed, flush extending there too, you took the chance to kiss it as well. Your lips pressed against where a tendon jumped beneath his skin.
You could swear you felt his pulse, thumping and quick as a hare against your palm and mouth, "you want this too?"
"Gods, yes, I just—I shouldn't." Voice tight, wanting.
"According to?" You pulled back a moment then, seeking eye contact. He turned his head back to you but struggled to meet your gaze until you spoke again. "Mine is the only permission you must seek. No God's, no Lord's. Mine. So long as you want this, too."
Your words took hold in him, finding a home next to his heart, nestling beside where his knights oath resided. "Yours." He breathes.
"So, I'll ask again—"
"Yes," he interrupted, breathlessly. "I want this. Want you." The hand closest to you worried at his side, long fingers curling and unfurling before finally laying over your knee, fingertips scarcely sliding in tentative strokes.
You dragged your own hand further down, along his stomach again. "Like this?" And the pads of his fingers squeezed into you, long digits wrapping around your leg.
Dunk nodded, mouth slightly parted, brows pulling close. Taking your time, your hand slid across the same skin as moments before, now unbidden by propriety. Tracing your fingers along the hair at his navel, you dipped your head down to swallow every sigh from his lips. Pace slow, soft, present, but not quite enough to satiate. Your hand ventured lower, fingertips slipping just under the waist of Dunk's trousers to play with the curls that start there.
Whispering onto his mouth, "Can I untie these?"
"Please." More so feeling his reply than hearing it, you covered his mouth again. His hands slid up now, broad, resting over your legs, holding your hips, touching anywhere he could reach. You pressed your mouth against his in earnest, tongue sliding to part his lips beneath yours, licking into him. Your fingers passed over laces, coming down to caress where he pressed against his trousers, then traced up the length of him. He twitched under your light touch.
"Be kind to me." He sounded wrecked as he broke off your mouth, breath hot against your face.
Gods, Dunk was so deliciously sensitive. There was a real temptation to draw this out, to make it torture, but you swung a leg over his hip, straddling his thighs to work at his laces and relieve some pressure. You begun untying the knot at the top, hooking your fingers in the lace before pulling it loose. "You will tell me to stop if you need. At any time." A direction, not a question. He nodded in response, and you halted the fingers at his laces, watching him patiently.
"I will." He agreed, and you pull another set of laces loose.
"Very good." And Seven above, if you didn't relish in the shudder that trembled through his frame at your praise. A ruddy flush followed, creeping along his skin as you finally freed him from where he'd been pressing against the rough spun fabric of his trousers. You found him achingly hard, the tip of him blushing pink and already weeping with need. He winced as you parted the garment to make room for him, your knuckles brushing against his most sensitive skin, featherlight, only adding to his agony.
Wincing turned to a low groan, ragged and dragged from deep in his chest as your palm finally petted along the bare length of him. You pressed him against his own belly as you stroke up, fingertips nudging slightly against the ridge near the peak, then gathered him in your hand on the way down. Dunk busied himself white-knuckling his bedroll, thighs twitching under yours as you explored the heft of him in your hand. Placing the other on the crest of his hip, you leaned your weight upon his frame as you pumped his cock, still soft and slow and slight, scarcely catching the tip of him in the circle of your fingers at every pass.
Dunk sounded wounded, yet he looked up at you like you were made of starlight. Like he needed to commit every angle of you to memory, every dip and curl and plane of your body, of your face. His lids fluttered to a close, head tipped back against the tree as you reached the crown of him, wrist flicking ever so slightly as you twisted to caress him. "F-fuck."
"S'that feel good?" You eased, spare hand now running along his stomach, careful to avoid the places his skin had been scraped or slashed. You traced a finger along the bandage you'd tied, along his darkening bruises, stroking his cock all the while. He watched you, whether in awe or horror you couldn't quite gauge, though the lewd groan that tore through him now hinted at the former. The sound went right between your legs, where you were growing wetter by the moment. "It's dreadful, I know. But Seven save me, Dunk. I wanted to touch you like this—just like this—as soon as I knew you were alright. As soon as I had your skin under my hands. While you were still bleeding beneath me."
"Ohhh fucking hells, love. I, I—" He threw his forearm over the bridge of his nose, "yes, fuck."
His thighs jolted below you, near unseating you as your own legs tightened around him. He was sighing, groaning, letting out so many sounds made just for you. "Thought you'd sound pretty, Dunk, but not like this. Gods, so pretty."
"You'll do me in, you keep talking like that—" He whined out as your thumb slipped over the slit of him, "w-wont last another minute."
"You needn't, love. Just relax." His cock was dripping, length becoming slicker with each downward stroke of your hand. You could hear his feet twitching behind you as they scrambled for purchase on the bedroll, on the grass. The muscles of his legs flexed beneath your thighs with every jerk.
"B-but, Seven fucking hells, I—" His argument fell away, surrendering to the ruined moans that left his mouth in its stead. Grabbing the cleaner corner of the hem of his tunic, you ruck the garment up his body, the heel of your palm brushing along him before you lift the fabric to his mouth.
"Can you bite onto this, for me?" His eyes held a silent plea, but Dunk followed through, shuddering again as you watched him pull the hem between his teeth, the pad of your fingers pressing to his lip before they fell to his now exposed nipple. "This alright?"
He nods with fervor, brows pulling tightly together, whining heartily through the fabric between his teeth. You imagined the only times he'd been asked to bite down on something were followed by painful stitches or cauterized wounds, a depraved part of you enjoying providing their equal opposite. "Ease, it's alright. I have you." You cooed as you pinched softly, increasing pressure while you twisted his flesh between your fingers, your other hand continuing its rhythm on his cock.
The tunic between his teeth did little to muffle his loud whine, the muscles in his pecs and abdomen jumping under the plush of his flesh at your attentions, so sensitive beneath you. Salivating as you played with him, your heartbeat pounded between your legs at every noise he made. Eyes screwing shut now, he nearly jumped out of his skin as your hand left his nipple to catch the very tip of his cock, palm ever so slightly touching before wrapping around it. Working at him with two hands, one thumb pressing in to ride the length along the underside of his cock, the other twisting around him as you increased your pace.
His fight to wrench his eyes open was futile, blown out pupils rolling to the back of his head at the lightening that surged up his spine, white-hot and unforgiving. They squeezed tightly shut again, head rolling side to side against the tree in avoidance. It was too much; he couldn't look at you, he couldn't listen to you, your hands on him, the wet noises they made. Couldn't think about your weight on him, the heat of your thighs around his hips. You set a ruthless pace, squeezing and pulling and twisting and—
"Oh, fuuuuck—" He keened out, tunic sticking, then falling from his lips as he came, twitching while you wrung every drop from his cock, catching his spend in your hand so he wouldn't make a mess of his bandage. His hips strained against you, rocking up as he fucked into your hands through his release. Once he slowed, you stroked both hands down the length of him again, softening and oversensitive now. But his wrecked face, the sounds he made, along with the obscenely wet noise of his cock in your hands, were too irresistible. You continued stroking him until he was nearly kneeing you off his lap, legs spasming from overstimulation. "Ah, love—please. S'too much."
You responded mercifully, easing the pressure of your ministrations before ceasing them entirely. Dunk was a ruined mess beneath you, his eyes sopping wet with admiration as they met yours. You leaned down, humming as you kissed him slowly, messily, completely enamored with him.
"So good t'me, love," he murmured between kisses, petting his palm down your arm, the other resting against the nape of your neck. So chaste; meanwhile your own palms were coated in his release.
You broke from him after a beat, his hands falling down to rest against your knees. You paused, a faint smile playing at your lips as you looked down at him before moving to grab the forgotten pot of water still resting in the grass to Dunk's side. You rinsed off your hands, grabbed the last strip of cloth, wrung it out and cleaned Dunk off for the final time. Tucking and tying him back into his trousers, you wiped up any of the spend that had slipped from your fingers and onto him before easing his tunic back down to cover him. He watched all the while, eyes glossy and chest heaving with the effort to catch his breath.
You gathered each cloth, dropping them back in the pot before covering his frame with yours, hugging your arms under his, head resting against his collar bone. He restrained a pained groan at your weight against his fresh cuts and bruises, but made no complaint as you took a deep inhale. He smelled of sweat, sunshine, creek water, and the leather of his gear, and you couldn't get enough of it. Your nose pressed into the crook where his neck met his shoulder, and you stayed there a moment while his hands skated up and down your back.
Finally, you sat up. Placing a kiss to his forehead, you pushed yourself off of him, gathered the pot, and moved toward the creek to clean up. "Rest here a while. You've had a long day, I'll go get supper started for us… But, you're cooking tomorrow." Dunk looked at you, perplexed, about to argue. As a knight, you knew he was going to hold tight to the ideal of fairness.
As he rightly should.
"But-" his words halted in his throat with just a look from you, then a grin cracked his expression, "alright, love." Your thighs clenched together at his voice, still breathless even minutes later. He looked giddy, sated, yet still a bit of a mess—especially in that damn bloodied tunic.
You grabbed a clean one for him, fed the fire, then made for the creek to clean up. And, for some privacy.
Reposting this updated fic after some re-working! I had a blast with @goat-limbs over on elipsus, so a very massive thank you to Nat for revisions and suggestions on this one, I had way too much fun <3
contents (sfw): Dunk x fem!Reader, Modern AU friends to lovers rom-com with pregnancy. Smidge of angst, humour, banter, Raymun being a good friend, Egg cameo, lots of feels and yearning, one 🤏 foot massage :3
*Mo chailín daor -> My dear girl.
<- previous chapter
MASTERLIST
next chapter -> (22/05)
synopsis: Aftermath of the telling, Dunk's reaction to it and their first doctor's visit! From this point forward I will be marking how pregnant Reader is so this time we are 7 weeks in :)
word count: 8K
a/n: Banner by me, dividers by @strangergraphics, proofread by @hextoken! I promise this will make sense. And just a reminder, taglist is ofc open.
Four hours is a long time when your own mind has turned mutinous. In that span you change it three times. First you think you will tell him and get it over with before fear can grow roots. Then you decide you absolutely will not, because there is no reason to drag him into a thing you have not even managed to hold properly in your own two hands yet. Then you circle back again, because this is not a leaky tap or some other private disaster to be handled with paper towels and a grim face. By the end of it you have drafted six versions of nevermind and deleted all six, because none of them land. They all sound like lies written by a woman already half inside a larger one.
On Rowan’s advice you buy two more tests from different brands, as if science might be bullied into contradiction by variety. (It is not.) Both come up positive. Each time the waiting strips you raw, and each time you realise with a small shock that you are hoping for the same answer. Tea appears in your hands by the mugful. You drink so much of it that the taste goes flat. You call the clinic and make an appointment in a voice that sounds, to your own ear, entirely like somebody else’s.
Half an hour before he is due, you stand in the hallway between the two mirrors and practise expressions. Smiles, mostly. Calm ones. Reassuring ones. Ones that might survive a first glance. There is nowhere else to hang the mirrors, so one faces the other and sends your reflection running off in crooked ranks behind you. One gives you the plain lie. The other, older and faintly warped, gives it back with a twist: the smile goes distorted at the edges and even though there is nothing human-looking about it, this reflection feels more accurate than the first one. Your mother got rid of nearly every mirror in the house when you were a girl, so you keep these two out of something that feels, on bad days, a little like spite.
By the time he knocks, you are still caught between, watching an infinite number of your own hands rise and fall a fraction too late in that dim iridescent tunnel. Once the door opens, your nerves are humming so hard you barely register that he is nervous too. What you notice is the dampness at his temples, the way he has clearly come on foot through weather that cannot decide what season it belongs to, and his eyes—enormous behind the lenses, fixed on you with such helpless attention that avoiding them is impossible.
In the kitchen he looks like he’s bracing for catastrophe and trying to be decent about it. When his mind starts lurching toward the most embarrassing possibilities, something in you gives up on finesse and reaches for blunt force instead.
The word pregnant leaves your mouth, and Dunk’s face goes blank.
It empties, as if every expression has left. You tell him you think you would like to keep it, and still he gives you nothing. He stands there petrified while your own pulse goes at you like a fist on a locked door while something monstrous is chasing the fist’s owner. You are squeezing your cup so hard a cramp catches in the little muscle of your palm and makes your smallest finger twitch. The pain finally forces sound back into you.
“Dunk?” you say, because the silence has turned mean. “Are you with me?”
That brings him back. A visible moment of him stepping behind his own eyes again. He looks at you and then something softens so completely it startles you. He takes the cup from your hands, puts it aside, and then he is all shoulders and arms and chest, gathering you in with such force and certainty that your own body gives up and makes more tears. He smells of damp air and anxious sweat and the cold he has carried in from outside. Some bit of weather still clings to him. He keeps thanking you, and it takes you a second to understand why.
He is happy.
It goes through you strangely and ungently. He says he is happy and hugs you tighter, and your eyes sting all over again because of course this is how he would do it, with gratitude so plain it makes your ribs feel poky. You could say I’m glad it’s with you. The truth stands there ready enough. Yet what comes out is softer and more defended, something about there being worse fates than this. He does not seem to mind. Or perhaps he minds and forgives it instantly. When he says you will make it work, he says it with such simple conviction that your brain, treacherous thing, takes him for safety and holds onto him.
“So, um—” you begin after a while, your mouth half lost against his sweatshirt. “Do you want to talk stuff?”
“Mm, stuff?” Dunk hums above you. “As in: rules?”
You shrug as best you can inside his arms. “Yeah. Like… do you want to come to appointments and all that.”
He draws back a little. “Course I do. When’s the first one, then?”
“In two weeks,” you say. “A proper check.”
“I’ll come,” he says with negative amounts of hesitation. Below zero. It should maybe worry you, how quickly he slots himself into the sentence. Instead it eases something jagged.
He studies your face a moment longer. “You scared?”
You let out a breath. “Shitless. My mam was… difficult.” The word seems thin and insufficient. Dunk takes it as if it weighed much more.
“But you’re a great woman,” he says, and the seriousness does a great many things to your stomach. “And I’m not too bad with kids. Ah, worst case, we raise a criminal.”
A laugh does get out then, surprised and wet. “You’re so silly.”
He smiles in the smallest way, as if he is pleased to have earned it and trying not to crowd the moment by showing too many teeth.
You talk a little longer after that, though nothing in it feels as large as what has already happened. Bits and pieces. Practical things. He asks whether you have eaten. You lie and say enough. He does not call you on it, but his face says he knows better. The room slowly returns to itself around you and all of it looks absurdly normal.
When he finally gets up to leave, he does it with the air of a man pulling his own hands off something he does not want to let go of yet. There is no argument in him about going, only reluctance. All his heartstrings look yanked tight under the skin. He passes the mirrored gate and you watch endless versions of him stepping through, each one smaller and less true to the original. At the door he stands still a moment, looks like he’s about to say something, then his fingers drift to your face where strands of hair have caught in your brows and between eyelashes. He touches your forehead and swipes them to the side. You feel the tiny drag as he frees them, a ticklish sting across your eyelid, delicate enough to make your eyes threaten water for reasons that have nothing to do with pain. Then, he smooths the rest behind your ear and says, quiet and certain, “We’ll be all right.”
You smile at him. His hand ends up at your neck. It’s warm and a little damp. The urge to kiss you arrives whole. The same bad, blinding urge he had that first night at the pub quiz, when wanting had first stopped feeling abstract and started feeling like a thing with weight and momentum. It comes to him now with a sentiment that it would fix something, ease something, set the whole world a little straighter.
He stops himself before the thought can get any further than that. “Sleep well, lass,” he says. Only lets his thumb brush once beneath your ear, and after that makes himself go.
Dunk does some walking before he realises he’s headed not home at all. He’s torn between running while screaming and going somewhere to get blind drunk. The news sits in him, so huge, his chest feels swollen with it. Before he chooses either option, phone materialises in his hand and he’s texting Raymun: you up? Need to ask ye somethin.
He gets back fast. Aye. Usual place in 10?
Dunk is already turning before he finishes reading. Halfway down the next street he sees Raymun coming from the other end, coat half-buttoned, hair in the state of someone who’s been stuck on the couch doom-scrolling. For one mad second Dunk nearly shouts it across the pavement, but stops himself out of worry for his kneecaps.
“Oi!” Raymun calls. “I’ve only got an hour or so. Rowan’s asleep, but if she wakes and I’m not there she’ll be raging.”
Dunk hugs him. “Aye, won’t take ye long,” he says. They head for the door and Dunk asks, “She up your arse this much?”
“Nah, she’s just scared a bit,” Raymun says. They go to the bar and order. Once they have the pints, Raymun carries on, abashed in a small happy way. He scratches the back of his neck. “I am too, honestly. Scared, I mean. Everythin’s goin’ well, but why would I have everythin’ goin’ well for once, I dunno.”
Dunk nods thoughtfully. He’s scared too, but for many more reasons than Raymun. “And Lyonel?”
“He’s a bastard, but a good one.” Raymun lights up a little and laughs. “Came to see the orchard. Met my grandfather. Got so drunk he nearly had to crawl out. Apparently they love each other now.”
Dunk laughs at that and drinks his beer. Raymun looks at him and frowns. “Dunk,” he says. “I love seein’ ye, mate, y’know I do.” He sets a palm on Dunk’s shoulder. “But did ye make me risk me life to ask about Rowan and the cider business?”
“Aye, no, I didn’t,” Dunk says. He says your name first, just to have it hanging there in case he decides to coward out and tell Raymun only half of the truth. But Raymun looks at him with such friendly, tolerant eyes it all spills out of him. Dunk takes a big breath and looks somewhere past Raymun’s head, to a vintage poster saying Guinness is a whole meal. “After that night at the Storm,” he starts, “we slept together. Spoke of it little after. She gave me a free pass.”
Raymun’s face shifts the more he hears. “Free pass?” he asks, trying hard to balance eagerness with outrage. Dunk nods. Raymun lowers his voice a bit. “So nothin’ came of it?”
“Ah, somethin’ came of it,” Dunk says. He winces, then makes himself look at Raymun. “She’s pregnant now. Just told me.”
For a moment Dunk hears how it sounds once it’s said to somebody else. Deranged. Frightening. Faintly impossible. More than any of that, right. Once he says it, it belongs in the world and fits there, and despite all the crooked bits of it, Dunk likes the sounding of it.
Raymun’s face lags. He is clearly searching for something to say, but his mouth cannot seem to keep pace with the options. What he lands on is, “So that’s why Rowan was so strange when she came back.” He looks at Dunk long and hopeful. “Are you—?”
“Happy?” Dunk says, and makes him suffer a second longer by taking another sip of his beer. “Aye, mate. Nearly cried right there.”
“And you guys—?”
“No, just—” Dunk shakes his head. “We keep it where it is. Just parenting together.”
Raymun frowns. “Duncan.”
“What?”
“You absolute gobshite.” Dunk cuts him a look over the rim of his pint. Raymun leans closer, drops his voice. “You ought to tell her.” He makes a helpless sort of face, pleading and disbelieving all at once.
“There’s naught to tell, Ray,” Dunk says. “We slept together, she remembers nearly none of it. She asked could we still be friends. I ought to keep that more than anythin’ else.” He can see exactly how little Raymun approves of this. There’s a pause, and Dunk sighs, sinking a little on the stool. “But I’ve just told her we’re gonna be all right, and then it hit me I know piss-all about children that aren’t grown enough to get in a mud fight at lunch.”
Raymun barks a laugh. “Well I don’t know much about that either.”
“How far in is Rowan, then?”
“Ten weeks? Eleven?” he says. “Somethin’ like that.”
Dunk leans in as if they are discussing something unthinkable rather than pregnant women. “Well,” he says, “what’s she like?”
“Oh, fussy.” Raymun huffs, all fond. “Mean to me one minute, then she wants her neck rubbed. Sweet enough in the evenings, cranky in the mornings. Eats a lot, but I think it’s more because she reckons she ought to than because she actually wants to. The kid’s a Brussels sprout, but her back aches sometimes like it’s an elephant.”
“Brussels sprout?” Dunk mutters.
“Aye, look—” Raymun whips out his phone and opens an app all done in pink and peach colours. “I’ve got it all here. Gonna be a plum soon.”
Dunk stares at the screen with the grave attention he usually gives lesson plans and suspicious rashes on children. “That’s a stupid system.”
Raymun snorts. “Why?”
“Because plums vary, don’t they? Brussels sprouts too. One sprout’s small, another’s near a tennis ball if you’ve bought badly.”
Raymun laughs into his pint. “Aye, all right, fair point.”
“And why food at all?” Dunk asks. “Why’s it not somethin’ useful?”
“Because women would kill whoever made the app if it said your baby is now the size of loose change,” Raymun says. “How far in is she?”
Dunk frowns. “Three weeks?”
Raymun blinks at him. “Three weeks since what?”
“Since it happened.”
“That ain’t how it works.”
Dunk looks genuinely affronted. “How else would it work?”
“It counts from the last period.”
Dunk stares. “That’s stupid too.”
“Aye, maybe, but that’s what they do. So if it was three weeks ago…” Raymun squints at the screen, thumb moving. “She’s what, four? Five weeks, maybe.”
“How d’you know that?”
“The doctor told us,” Raymun says. “And I read.”
Dunk gives him a look over the rim of his glass. “You?”
“Fuck off,” Raymun says mildly. “Here. Four weeks.” He turns the screen. “See? Poppy seed. Rice grain. One o’ them.”
Dunk peers at it, then lifts his hand and tries to pinch the air at the size of it. His fingers wobble before they even get close enough. “That can’t be right.”
“It is right.”
“That’s not even a size. That’s debris.”
Raymun laughs so loudly the barman glances over. Dunk keeps staring at the app as if the grain might enlarge under pressure. A whole child. At present, apparently, smaller than a thing stuck to the side of a pot.
“What d’you do,” he asks after a moment, “when a woman’s fussy?”
Raymun rocks his pint a bit. “Hit and miss.”
“That helpful, is it?”
“I’m serious. You’ve got to offer options. Tea. Toast. A lie-down. A walk. Neck rub. Blanket. Open a window. Close a window. Then she picks one and tells you the other six were stupid.”
Dunk absorbs this with a solemn nod. “Right.”
“And sometimes,” Raymun adds, “she’ll say nothin’s wrong, and somethin’s clearly wrong, and you’ve just got to stand there and keep bein’ useful till she decides what it is herself.”
“Sounds grim.”
“It’s grand,” Raymun says at once. “Just grim sometimes.”
Dunk drinks. Thinks. Looks again at the little grain on the screen.
Raymun lets him sit with it for a minute, then says, “You’re really not gonna pursue this, then?”
Dunk’s mouth shifts. “Pursue what?”
“The girl.”
Dunk rubs at the label on his bottle. “Ray, look at it from where I’m stood. I’ve got more than I thought I would already.”
Raymun goes still at that.
Dunk shrugs, uncomfortable under his own honesty now it is out. “She’s keepin’ it. She wants me there. I’m there. That’s—” He stops, because even saying it plain makes something hot move up in his gut. “That’s grand enough to knock me sideways. I’m not gonna start askin’ for more and ruin the lot.”
Raymun looks at him for a long moment with something that understands too well. “Aye,” he says in the end. “I get you.”
Dunk huffs once, humourless. “Do ye?”
“I do, actually.” Raymun tips his glass against the bar top. “But still. You’ve a bad habit of folding yourself up to fit whatever room you’re in.”
Dunk glances at him.
Raymun does not push further. He just nudges the phone back between them and says, lighter now, “Anyway. Your one’s currently a grain of rice, give or take. So maybe start there and work your way up.”
Dunk looks at the tiny white shape on the screen again and feels, all at once, terrified and absurdly proud. “A grain of rice,” he repeats.
“Aye.”
He nods to himself. “Right.” Then, after a beat: “I’ll need that app.”
So Raymun helps Dunk install the app. He recommends Dunk books to read and websites to check out. Apparently there is an Instagram profile run by a dad for other dads and Raymun makes Dunk follow that account. They sit until Raymun gets a text from Rowan that consists of five question marks and that’s a sign enough that Raymun has pushed his luck tonight. They hug tight goodbye, and Raymun gives Dunk one solemn look, and says, “Mate. I didn’t say congratulations. So—congratulations. Yer gonna be a dad, ain’t that somethin’?”
“Aye, that’s somethin’,” Dunk says. He clasps Raymun’s shoulders once more and then they go their designated directions, Raymun much faster than Dunk. At home, Duncan falls asleep lulled by lager and a strange certainty that all will be well and tells himself that for now things are solid, because grains of rice are at least roughly all the same size.
He eases into the rest of the week slowly. Texts you sometimes to test the waters, and you always reply, even if only to tell him work is hectic. Once, he goes as far as to send you a goodnight message, and to that you send back sleep well, old man, which makes him slightly warm in the ears.
With less than a week before the first appointment, he gets a bit antsy. Checks the app often as if the babe’s not gonna transform from a grain of rice to a sweet pea unless he monitors it. Egg finds him, curious as ever, sat on the courtyard bench with a nose wedged into his phone and as kids do, just plops beside him and looks over his shoulder.
“What’s that?” Egg asks, peering at the screen.
“Nothin’ that concerns you,” Dunk says, angling the phone away. “Don’t you have class?”
“I’ve a free period.” Egg tips his head. “Don’t you?”
Dunk only sighs at that, which is answer enough. Then he notices the plaster on the side of Egg’s head. Small thing, flesh-coloured, just above the ear. “What happened there?”
Egg reaches up and touches it as if he had forgotten. “Daerion was drunk shaving my head and got me a little.”
Dunk goes very still. “He what?”
Egg glances at him. “A little,” he repeats. “It’s fine.”
Dunk looks at the bandage a second longer than he ought to. “You all right?”
“Yes. All men cut themselves shaving at least once,” Egg says with maddening calm. “And I’d still sooner have him do it than anyone else. Aerion would take off more than a slice.”
Dunk’s hand curls into a fist on his knee. He makes himself loosen it. “If you want to talk more about it,” he says carefully, “or want me to do anythin’, I would.”
Egg shakes his head at once. “No.” Just that. No.
Then, his eyes drop to the phone again. He squints at the pastel nonsense on the screen, the little fruit icon, the week count. When he speaks next it is with grave interest. “So you’re going to have a baby?”
Dunk lets out a slow breath. “Jesus.”
“With whom?”
“What business is it of yours?”
“None,” Egg says. “But it’s happy news, no?”
Dunk cannot help the way his mouth shifts at that. “Aye. It is.”
Egg absorbs this. “I didn’t know you had a wife.”
“I don’t have a wife.”
Egg turns his whole face up to him. “Then who are you having a baby with?”
“A girl,” Dunk says, already annoyed with himself. “A woman, I mean.”
“Well why isn’t she your wife, then?”
There is a pause in which Dunk comes up with three possible answers and believes none of them. “Because things are…” He trails off. “They’re as they are.”
Egg watches him with open disbelief.
Dunk rubs a hand down his jaw. “What?”
“Well.” Egg shrugs, but only with one shoulder, a gesture he has plainly stolen from some older brother. “Is she going to be your wife, then?”
Dunk hangs there for a moment. Then, against all dignity, he hears himself ask, “Should she be?”
Egg’s brows pull together. “Are you asking a seven-year-old that?”
Dunk snorts despite himself.
“Are you even an adult?” Egg goes on.
“Mind your business,” Dunk tells him. “And don’t test me.”
“I’m not testing you,” Egg says, affronted. “I just think if a woman is making a baby for you, you ought to make her a wife. That’s what my father says.”
It lands quite hard, despite Dunk not wanting to admit it. He looks back at the phone. A sweet pea appears where the grain of rice had been two seconds ago. Then at the yard in front of them where a football lies abandoned in a patch of weak sun. “You really think so?” he asks.
Egg nods at once. “Yes.”
Dunk studies him. “And what would you know about it?”
Egg sits up a bit straighter. “Plenty.”
“You’re seven.”
“And you’re ancient,” Egg says. “That doesn’t seem to be helpin’.”
Dunk laughs under his breath and shakes his head.
Egg, encouraged, presses on. “Besides, you strike me as husband material.”
Dunk turns and stares at him. “How d’you know phrases like that?”
Egg gives him a look that is nearly pity. “I’ve told you already. Girls like me.”
“Oh, have you.”
“Yes. One of them said it.”
Dunk huffs. “One of the girls in your class called you husband material.”
“Not in my class.” Egg looks faintly smug now. “An older girl.”
“Jesus wept.”
“She said I was serious and had nice eyelashes.”
At that Dunk gives up and laughs outright. Egg allows him a second of it before returning, with brutal efficiency, to the matter at hand. “So,” he says. “Are you going to marry her?”
Dunk looks down at the app again, though he is no longer reading a word on it. The question is much too large for a child to have asked. Too simple too. “I don’t know,” he says.
Egg accepts this more easily than any grown person would. “Well. You should figure it out before somebody else does.”
Dunk blinks. “What’s that mean?”
Egg shrugs. “Women hate waiting.”
Then the bell goes sharp through the yard. Egg hops down from the bench.
“You’re late,” Dunk says.
“I know.” Egg starts off, then glances back. “Congratulations, anyway.”
Dunk is still sitting there like he has been hit lightly over the head. “Aye,” he says after him. “Thanks.”
Egg nods once and heads inside. Dunk stays on the bench a minute longer. Husband material, says the seven-year-old oracle with the cut by his ear and a father rich enough to make rules for schools. Dunk rubs at his mouth, thinking of you and your frightened face in the kitchen and your voice saying I think I’d like to keep it.
By lunch he has not stopped thinking of it. By the end of the day the thought has rooted. By evening it has become a plan stupid enough to feel, in certain lights, almost noble. The next day he guts his savings account a little and goes to buy a ring, hoping one of the clerks will have hands like yours so he can judge the size properly, all while telling himself he probably will not do it anyway.
The woman who comes to help him has hands near enough in size to serve, though Dunk rules them inferior for reasons he cannot explain without sounding unwell. The fingers are the right sort and the knuckles show a little, same as yours, but yours are prettier. He spends one full stupid second wondering whether prominent joints are a thing men are meant to find attractive, then gives it up. He likes them. That is enough. There is no committee to answer to.
He picks something modest, but good. Gold band, blue stone. Not too grand, and not mean either, just a ring a woman could wear every day without fearing it. When the clerk tells him it is a lovely choice because it matches his eyes, he nearly puts it back from sheer discomfort. Then, because the whole exercise has already cost him his dignity, he asks if she would mind trying it on so he can see the size on an actual hand. She giggles at that and goes pink all over in a way that confuses him until it is too late and she says, “She’s one lucky lady.”
Dunk chokes on his own breath a little. Lucky does not strike him as the word for any of this, though he considers himself to be.
For the days after, he keeps the box on his bedside table like a thing under observation. As if its mere presence might declare itself either a brilliant idea or proof of damage to the head. It says nothing, of course. It only sits there, square and shut, while he glances at it every morning and every night and feels his pulse do odd things.
On the day of the appointment he wakes sweaty, nervous and giddy all over. Before he can think better of it, he sends you a gif of a wriggling cat.
You text back: I know. Glad one of us is excited, I’m NAUSEOUS and I have to go and do bloodwork in half an hour.
Dunk smiles at the screen and writes: If you puke you get a free pass on it.
You react with a laughing face, then send the clinic pin and the hour, neither of which he needs because he has both memorised already.
What feels odd to him, and then odder the longer he sits with it, is not seeing you for two weeks. A few messages, a few careful little exchanges, and that is all. He knows Rowan and Raymun are by now attached at the hip. He knows every arrangement is different and that this one is barely an arrangement yet. Still, some part of him resents missing the small things. He does not even know what small things there are to miss. Only that there must be some, and that they are happening without him.
At the clinic’s main hall he spots you before you spot him, though that might only be because he has been scanning every face that comes through the glass like a dog waiting at a gate. You walk in with your coat unbuttoned, bag slipping off one shoulder, tiredness written plain across you. Frazzled too, a little. Hair not entirely obeying. Mouth set as if the day has been giving you tasks since dawn. Lovely all the same, so much so it makes something in him go weak and witless.
You are halfway through saying hi when he decides to just hug you. A small sound leaves you when he tightens, and Dunk jerks back half an inch. “Shite. Sorry,” he says, sheepish. “Too tight?”
You swat him once in the chest, light. “If I puke, it’s on you now.”
That gets a grin out of him. “Fair enough.”
You are smiling too, faintly, and there is enough of the old ease in it to settle him some. Only some.
Inside, the waiting room smells the way fluorescent lights look. You sit shoulder to shoulder in plastic chairs with a poster about folic acid looking down at you from the wall. Dunk keeps his knees wide because otherwise there is nowhere for them to go. You keep fiddling with the strap of your bag. When the nurse calls your name, your hand finds his before either of you says anything about it. Your grip stays, and tightens once they get you both into the office.
The doctor is kind in the brisk, practised way of a man who has seen every human feeling come through his room and does not make a spectacle of any of them. He asks a run of questions, checks your details, glances over the bloodwork from earlier, and then starts building the shape of it all aloud. Last period. Cycle. Symptoms. Nausea. Tiredness. Any bleeding. Any pain.
You answer well enough at first. Then he says, “So that would put you at around seven weeks,” and your whole face turns to him.
“Seven?” you ask. “How is it seven? We—” You stop only long enough to look annoyed at having to say it in front of a stranger. “We conceived about five weeks ago.”
Dunk, still holding your hand, says, “It doesn’t count from that.”
Your head turns to him so fast he nearly feels the movement in his own neck. “How do you know that?”
The doctor laughs under his breath, a touch sardonic. “He’s right. We date it from the first day of your last menstrual period, not from the day you had sex.”
You stare between them as if there is nothing worse in this world than being mansplained pregnancy.
Then the doctor says something about your husband being well informed, and both of you answer at the same time.
“He’s not my husband.”
“I’m not a husband.”
The doctor looks up over the file. There is half a smile at one corner of his mouth. “Okay,” he says, drawing the word out only a bit, and leaves it there.
He explains the next part carefully. At this stage, he says, there may be cardiac activity visible, but he cannot promise it. Sometimes it is there. Sometimes it is simply too early, even when dates look good on paper. Either way, there would need to be another scan later to confirm development properly. He says parents often like to look if there is a chance. He says it gently, as if offering rather than insisting.
You nod. Dunk nods too, though his throat has gone tight again.
The doctor gives you time to get settled. There is a screen pulled, instructions spoken in the same calm voice, a sheet draped over your lower half. It feels intimate in the clinical sense, the way hospitals are intimate: by necessity, routine, and asking a body to become information. When you are ready, Dunk is brought back near your shoulder, where he can see your face and the monitor and not much else. He is grateful for that. It keeps his attention where it ought to be.
The colour has drained from your face a little, so he takes your hand again.
The room goes quieter than it needs to for a moment while the doctor works. There is the soft scrape of equipment, a few words of warning from him before anything uncomfortable, your small breath through the nose. Dunk looks at your face, then at the ceiling, then at the monitor because he does not know where else to put the force of his attention.
At first the screen means nothing to either of you. Grey and black shapes. Grainy weather. The doctor angles things, measures, adjusts. Then, he points.
“There,” he says.
You squint. “Where?”
He shows you. A small dark sac. A tinier thing within it. Not a baby in any storybook sense yet. More the idea of one. A start. A shape. Dunk leans in without meaning to with your fingers gone hard around his.
The doctor measures quietly, clicks a few things, studies the image. Then he stills. “And yes,” he says, softer. “There’s cardiac activity.”
For one beat neither of you reacts, perhaps because the sentence is too technical to mean what it means. Then, he turns on the sound.
It’s fast. Thin and rapid and busy. More like a trapped flutter than anything grand. Still it fills the room and packs your ears with it. Dunk feels your hand convulse in his.
Something passes over your face that he doesn’t have vocabulary for because there are too many pieces in it. Fear, wonder, bewilderment, some old grief maybe, something opening and other things closing. His own chest seems to go hollow and full at the same time. That frantic little sound keeps going, absurdly quick, belonging to nothing he can see with ordinary sense, and yet there it is. A baby. A grain of rice with a heart already hard at work.
The doctor, wise enough not to crowd the moment, talks you through the practical bits while you both struggle to rejoin the earth. Measurements look appropriate, he says. Dates are rough but seven weeks is reasonable. Bloods are fine from what he can see so far. He tells you what to watch for, what matters, what does not, when to come back. He prints a picture that barely resembles anything and hands it over with absolute seriousness.
Dunk looks at the printout, then at you, then back at the picture. “That’s—” he starts, and fails.
You laugh once through your nose, shaky as all hell. “Yeah.”
You leave quietly. Remain quiet throughout the waiting room walk, as if you were both shown the truth about the universe and it turned out to be Lovecraftian. Only when you reach the corridor does Dunk finally manage, low and thick with it, “That were fast.”
You make a helpless little face at him, still clutching the printout. “Christ, I near shat myself.”
Dunk blinks. “Thank Christ for that near because on that you wouldn’t get a free pass.”
You break so suddenly into laughter that for a second Dunk only stands there, startled and relieved by it. Then the sound tips strange. Too sharp and wet. Your face folds as quick as paper in water and before he can make sense of it you are crying outright.
He panics a little. His hands come up uselessly, hovering. “Ah, shite—lass—”
You spare him the choice by stepping straight into him. The impact is soft but wholehearted. Your face goes into his chest, and a second later his jumper is taking the brunt of it. Dunk folds his arms round you. He has seen this kind of overwhelm a hundred times on children—how a thing grows too large inside them and has to come out the eyes or the nose or the whole body. So he does not ask what is wrong, only steadies you and says, quiet as he can, “You’re bate, aren’t ye? Want me to take ye home?”
You nod against him and make a miserable little sound. “Yes.”
So he does.
In the cab you sit in the back with your head on his shoulder and the printout held between you. Neither of you says much; you just look at it. Then at each other’s hands around it. Then at it again. Dunk likes the silence of it. It feels full rather than empty.
At your building he gets out with you by instinct and only then realises he should likely have booked the taxi with a stop for him after. But at the door you turn, wrung out and tired and all softened by the crying, and ask, “Do you want tea?”
He nods. Follows.
The minute you get inside it is as if the last of your strength runs out through the soles of your feet. You make it to the couch, then drop there in your coat and shoes and everything, one arm flung over yourself, the other still holding the printout. “I’m sorry,” you mutter without moving. “I know it’s rude but you have to make the tea.”
Dunk laughs under his breath. “Aye, grand.”
He puts the kettle on, finds mugs by guesswork and memory, and when he comes back you are sprawled across the couch exactly as he left you, still staring at the picture, one hand now over your belly.
Dunk passes you a cup, then sits on the floor by where your feet are on the sofa. “How does it feel?”
“Strange,” you say. “Like—nothing’s happening yet and you can’t tell. But it feels different. It’s hard to work with this in my head.”
“D’you need to keep working?” Dunk asks.
“Aye, I’d rather, for a while longer. Lyonel is a complete cunt sometimes though, and he keeps smoking that fucking candy vape of his and it’s foul.” You take a sip and grimace faintly. “Everything in that office smells of melted sweets and cologne. I swear to God if I’m sick on one of his mood boards I’ll call it performance art.”
That makes Dunk laugh, but the laugh fades quick because his eyes have drifted to your belly again, and you catch him at it. “You can touch it if you want.”
He looks up. You set your tea aside, reach for his hand, and place it low on your stomach. There is something in the gesture that snags briefly in your head, some half-memory of him there before, as if his touch is known to that part of you already. “Here,” you say, blinking through it.
Dunk goes thoughtful and very gentle. His hand barely weighs anything there at first. Only when you press it in a little more does he let it settle proper. There is no chance of feeling anything from the baby yet. Still the whole thing seems suddenly enormous to him.
“How big’s it going to get?” he asks through a thick swallow.
“Like—” You lift your free hand and sketch the shape in the air over yourself, the round of some future you. “This big? Maybe bigger, given it’s you.” A beat passes. Then you say, “I like how you didn’t question the parenthood issue at all.”
Dunk frowns. “Why would I?”
“I don’t know. Any other man I know would.”
“Well, did ye sleep with anyone else?”
“No, you prick,” you scoff.
He grins at that. “And are ye still happy-adjacent?”
“Yeah.” You nod, small with it. “Closer and closer to just happy.”
He sets his tea on the floor and turns a little more toward you. His hand stays where it is. Only his thumb moves, once, absently. “I didn’t know ye wanted a baby.”
“I didn’t,” you say. “It just… happened.” Another beat. Then, under your breath: “I didn’t know we’d been that reckless.”
An ugly thought passes through Dunk so fast he hates himself for it even as it comes. “Did ye think about—?”
“For about ten seconds,” you admit. “Then I thought about keeping it and that won.”
“Would ye tell me then?”
“No,” you say.
Dunk thinks on that and cannot sort his feelings cleanly enough to name them. “Why not?” he asks.
You weigh the answer before you give it. “It would hurt you,” you tell him. His face does absolutely nothing with that, which is frightening enough for you to shift. Trying to catch his eyes, you say, “Hey, Dunk.” Your chin wrinkles a little with it. “You cross with me for that?”
“No, no.” He forces himself to keep looking at you. “Just… odd, thinkin’ all this might’ve passed me by.”
“Well, it didn’t.”
He smiles then, faint. Breathes out through his nose. “You’re sure I’m the father, right?”
“Oh, sod off.” You roll your eyes and this time Dunk has to look away for plain reasons of being a man with functioning blood.
He settles his head against the couch near your calves and asks, “Anythin’ else botherin’ ye, lass?”
You think on it for a moment. “My feet ache. That’s it. End of complaints.”
He hears you loud and clear. Turns some more until he is sat cross-legged on the floor opposite you and reaches for your foot, and you are so stunned by the smallness of the gesture that you do not even protest. He plucks a shoe off you and side-eyes it briefly, sees it is a bit mangled, and remembers it is him who had mangled it in his fist. Underneath there is pantyhose, black and sheer, and your toes in it look slightly drained of colour and squished by the flat’s tip.
He takes your heel into the hollow of one hand, and the other he wraps round those poor toes and presses them towards the dorsum as the joints go naturally. They creak and pop and all of that makes you hiss and try to steal the foot away from him, but Duncan holds your ankle and mutters, “Sorry. Sorry, lass, I’ll be more careful.”
To prove it he stretches his fingers higher, towards your shin, wedges them under the trouser leg and squeezes a little. The muscle under gives. Your foot grows heavier in his grip and he gets back to work.
This time slower. Thumb pressed into the ball of your foot through the nylon first, then the arch, then the tender seam where the heel meets the rest of you. He is sage about it, and patient. He uses both hands as if this is some practical thing deserving his whole attention, and maybe to him it is. Your breathing starts changing before either of you remarks on it. Little sounds leave you, barely even sighs at first. Just the body giving up its complaints one by one.
Dunk keeps his head bent. Watches what his hands are doing. Feels the fine drag of the tights under his thumbs and the shape of your foot inside them and the warmth building where he holds you. It should be ordinary enough. A foot is only a foot. Except yours is not. Yours has an ankle made for his fingers to near meet round it, and an arch that jumps sometimes under his palm, and toes painted in some colour he cannot name in this light. He is trying very hard to be decent about all this and feels, with increasing inconvenience, that decency and his body are once again after wanting different things.
He kneads the sole more firmly and your head tips back against the couch. Eyes shut. Mouth goes soft. You have simply stopped guarding yourself and left him alone with the effect he is having, which is very dangerous to Dunk’s head.
He thinks of what Egg told him and what Raymun told him and cannot say whether either of them are right about anything, but the ring box in his pocket keeps prodding his hip through the fabric and he is painfully aware of having bought it. He’s so aware of it he could scream.
The more he touches you the more he wants to. Your calf. The back of your knee. Both your legs over his shoulders. That is the plain truth of it in a moment that ought to be tender only and Duncan wonders if he could keep it this way if, by some odd twist of fate, he’d get lucky.
When he deems the first foot done, he sets it back on the couch and takes the other one up. Does the same job there, a little quicker only because his nerves start misbehaving. By the time he is finished you are near dozing, and with that his chance seems to be slipping too. So he shuffles across the floor, closer to your face, reaches for his pocket and, very softly, says your name.
“Mm?” you stir. Your eyes creak open.
He fumbles, swallows, runs a hand through his hair. Then finally opens his fist in front of you and says, “I thought maybe—for this, I mean. Should we marry? I bought ye a ring. To do it proper.”
You go so perfectly still save for your eyes, which widen and shrink and then widen again. Your chest expands around a breath and Dunk thinks his shirt has gotten soaked clean through under the jumper from how nerve-racking this is. When the moment stretches he contemplates if he has offended you with such a piss-poor proposal and realises he could have done it more proper and he would have liked to do it more proper.
Instead of saying yes or no, your cheeks swell and the skin pulls tight over your temples as you try and try but nothing comes of it, and then you blow air through your pursed mouth, clearly aiming at not laughing and failing spectacularly. You choke a little. Giggle and then cackle and then wheeze with a hand over your eyes. Finally, you sit up and set your hands on his shoulders.
“Dunk,” you say, still breathy. “Have you lost your mind?”
Not yet, but he might. Of all the things Duncan could say like no, or why, or maybe? or don’t you like the ring?—what comes out is, “Are ye cross with me now?” because that is the part that matters most.
Your face softens at once and you shake your head. “No,” you say. “Not cross. Just… baffled. We don’t have to do this, you know. It’s not fucking regency era.”
“Aye,” Dunk says, because he supposes it isn’t. He mutters an apology, lets out a sigh heavy enough to bend him with it, then scrambles up off the floor and sits beside you on the couch. You take the ring from his hand and trade him the scan picture for it, turning the little thing between your fingers while he holds his breath, just a bit.
“It’s very pretty,” you say at last. “You should keep it for someone you actually want to marry, you know?”
But I want to marry you, Dunk thinks, with the plain helpless certainty of a child thinking a thing. Or maybe wants is too quick a word for something that has come over him this hard and sudden. He does not know. In that moment it feels true enough to hurt. Maybe he is too done in by the day, and by the last two weeks, and by everything everyone has told him—from a seven-year-old to a thirty-something man. He wonders whether men ever wise up at all, or only get stupider with age.
“Aye,” he says. Then he goes quiet a moment. Then: “D’ye think we could meet more often, though? For appointments and—I dunno.”
You nod and put the ring back into his hand, and he bloody does not want it back.
“We can hang out,” you tell him, nodding. “Go baby shopping together, and stuff. Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Dunk says, forcing a smile into place. “That’d be grand.”
contents (sfw): Dunk x fem!Reader, Modern AU friends to lovers rom-com with pregnancy in the future chapters. Smidge of angst, humour, Rowan being a great friend, pregnancy reveal.
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MASTERLIST
next chapter -> (15/05)
synopsis: We are telling Dunk.
word count: 5,6K
a/n: Banner by me, dividers by @strangergraphics, proofread by @hextoken! Shorter chapter today, but tbf, the events from chapters one to four were supposed to happen only over the course of two so... :') Shit's set up and I will try to publish the next one sooner than in a week but writing sex pollen derailed me slightly, so I need to finish chapter 7 first :D
For long minutes you are just frozen on your toilet seat. Oddly, there is something unreal in a piece of plastic that has just redefined the future for you, and you keep staring at it as if it’s about to morph in your hands into something else.
Pragmatic thoughts merge with the shame of it. So he didn’t pull out—good to know. Given that both of you seem to remember only the basic bones of that night, you give him the benefit of the doubt and decide this would come as the same shock to him as it does for you. The solution to the issue is loud and clear, and the clinic is only a couple of blocks away. The cold, calculating part of your brain whispers that you shouldn’t tell him, if only for the reasons the overwrought part of your brain keeps supplying. That he would be ashamed. Or devastated. Or frightened. Or incredibly awkward and undecided on the matter. Or that he would support you fully and offer to come with you to get the thing done. None of those you can deal with without some part of you dying, so, on the spot, you decide it is a you problem and it’s you that should deal with it alone.
When a weak breath finally gets through the seizure in your throat, your mind seems to leap at the fresh batch of oxygen. It wanders. You see your mother, pouring gin into her coffee. You see her brushing your hair in front of her adult-sized vanity with an ivory brush she kept from her grandmother as both keepsake and souvenir of a life that skipped her generation. You hear her saying vile things in a sweet voice. You are so much prettier than I was at your age, she’d say. But I was pretty too. Pretty girls like us don’t attract good men into their lives. Wait till you become a mother. Pray that you have a son. Daughters steal your beauty.
She’d pull at the hair where it was matted and scold you for not taking good care of what you’d taken away from her. Once, she said, I wonder if I’d have stayed pretty if I’d gotten rid of you.
You realise your eyes are pouring only when the tears overspill and one of them drops onto your wrist. It is absolutely unwise. Fully deranged, because the life you’ve built holds no space for surprises like this. And yet all you can think is: At least I’d have someone who loves me. At least I’d have someone I could love. And I’d love them better than my mother loved me.
The decision blooms in you not from a place of comfort, but utter fear. Of never having another chance. Of being thirty-two with no prospect of a steady relationship, or a man who would leap at such news and maybe cry a little, if you’re being fully delusional. Of staying alone while Rowan and Raymun build their new life together, Lyonel works his way through the waiting list to his bedroom, and Duncan, sooner or later, finds a nice girl and settles down with her too.
There’s someone you need to say it aloud to, if only to hear how it sounds and judge whether hearing it turns your stomach or brings some measure of calm. So you call the one person you know to be a stranger to judgement and well acquainted with the dread of this sort of choice. Rowan.
She picks up on the first signal. “Hey, um… are you free?” You clamp down on your throat hard enough to make your jaw hurt, but a sniffle slips through anyway.
“Are you crying?” Rowan nearly shouts. “What happened? Do you need me to come over?”
Yes, God bless her. You pause to get some of the voice out, but what comes is breathless and weak. “Yeah, that… that would be great.”
“I’m on my way.” You hear movement at once, drawers or cupboards, something being opened with force. Then Rowan, away from the phone: “Raymun! I’m going out. And if that sink is still full when I get back, I’ll have your guts for garters.” A muffled, long-suffering male voice answers, “Aye, my love.” Rowan comes back to you. “Ten minutes. Put water on or don’t... Just open the door when I knock, alright?”
It takes her less than that. You spend the wait curled on the couch, arms wrapped round your middle as if you can hold the whole mess together by pressure. When the second knock comes you open the door and the minute Rowan sees your face hers drains of colour.
“Darling, Christ—” she says, and gathers you straight into her arms.
It does what it’s meant to do. You break open against her shoulder. Rowan rocks you where you stand, one hand between your shoulder blades, the other rubbing up and down your back. “What the fuck happened? You’re freaking me out.”
You pull away enough to look at her, though she keeps both arms banded round you as if you might otherwise crumple to the floor. Wipe under your nose with the heel of your wrist, search wildly for some demure arrangement of words, find none, and after waiting a beat for your throat to permit it, whine, “I’m fucking pregnant,” and promptly start crying harder.
Her face does something strange. “Oh my God, me too!” Rowan squeals. Then, her grip tightens on your arms. “Wait—hold on. You’re seeing someone and you didn’t tell me? Or was I so far up my own arse I missed an entire man?”
You blink at her. “You’re pregnant? Rowan, that’s—” You are still sobbing, trying to force the words through it. A smile pulls at your mouth, crooked and weird, and the tears track down into the dry split of your lips and sting. “That’s so amazing, oh God—I’m so, so happy for you.”
“I’d believe you more if you weren’t crying like a widow at sea,” Rowan mutters, rubbing both your shoulders, and that only makes a fresh wail tear out of you. “Hey. Hey, it’s alright. We can be happy about mine later.” She steers you further inside with both hands and sits you down on the couch before folding in beside you. “So… how? How did this happen? Do you need help with—?”
“I want to keep it,” you say, very fast.
It lands in the room and stays there. You hear it properly for the first time and something in your chest settles around it. When you look up, Rowan is staring at you with her mouth slightly open, confusion all over her face.
“I know, I know. I know how that sounds. I’m not crying because I’m devastated. Okay, I am, a little.” The thoughts are coming too quickly, some meant for Rowan, some only trying to get out of your own head. “And that was my first thought too, but then—” You drag in air. “Then I thought… I don’t know what I thought. I just thought about keeping it and it felt better.”
You look down at your hands and keep going, because once the thing is spoken it wants more speech built around it. You talk about the clinic being close. About how obvious the answer seemed for one minute and then stopped seeming obvious at all. About fear, and the lack of guarantees, and the sick certainty that if you let this go you might spend years listening for the shape of it in the dark. None of it sounds wrong when it leaves your mouth. Reality, apparently, has already made its decision and dragged you after it. The reality now is that you are going to have a baby.
There is a small silence after. Rowan rubs your back, then tugs gently until you give in and let her guide you down, your head pillowed in her lap. Her fingers smooth your hair with long, patient strokes.
“It’s alright, hun,” she says, in the voice one uses on the truly panicked. “You’ve still got a bit of time to decide—”
You turn onto your back to look up at her. “Red, I don’t want to get rid of it,” you say.
You hold her eyes and see the worry in them fighting with that other thing women know how to give each other without instruction: understanding before agreement, tenderness before sense.
Rowan puts a hand to your cheek and wipes away some of the wet. “You sure? Because they’re not so easy to toss once they arrive. I mean, possible, I suppose, but extremely rude.” Your brows climb and she cuts herself off with a small grimace. “Right. Fine. Listen. I’m here, fully. Look at us—pregnant together, lovely, terrifying, very efficient of us. But…” She frowns down at you. “Who? Unless you don’t know, which is also fine. Less administratively tidy, but fine.”
There is a pause then, because of course this is the next gate. Your hands go cold. Your breathing seems to suspend itself on some internal hook. You gulp, loud in the quiet, and say, “It’s… Duncan.”
“WHAT?!”
Her whole body gives a jolt and then goes still with it. You try to cling to your belief that Rowan remains, under all conditions, a stranger to judgement. She starts again, very carefully.
“I thought—I thought you didn’t—I thought you two weren’t—” She makes a face like language has failed her on a structural level. “Ugh. Duncan? How?”
You sit up and catch both her hands in yours. “Are you cross with me?”
“No. No, not at all.” Rowan squeezes back on reflex, still staring. “Just a little bit fucking shocked, to be honest. I never thought you’d actually go through with it.”
“Go through with what?” You let one of her hands go. Your head has started filling with that pale, cottony feeling that comes after a proper crying fit.
Rowan blinks at you. “I mean—the goo-goo eyes. Obviously. Every now and then. From both of you.” Her face sharpens. “Wait. Is that why it was so fucking stiff at the pub the other night? Oh, you pair of absolute—”
“Aye,” you say, wincing. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry, I can’t even remember the better part of it. It was the night at the Storm, we just—we got so fucking wasted, Red.” It all comes out easier now that you are already ruined. “It was just once, and I don’t think he remembers much either. Or he doesn’t want to. We’re good, I promise. We talked a bit and it’s fine, it’s just—” You drag in breath. “I should tell him, right?”
“Oh, hun.” Rowan’s expression does a complicated thing then—pity, disbelief, fond exasperation, all elbowing for space. “I know you think that man’s a bit simple, but there’s no hiding an entire pregnant belly from him.”
“Hey, I don’t think he’s simple,” you say. “We’re just not a good fit, is all.”
“Mhm.” Rowan gives you a look so noncommittal it practically has bangles on. “You absolutely have to tell him. Like urgently. I’m sure he’ll be decent about it.”
“I know he will be.” That part comes too fast to deny. “I just don’t want to—I don’t know—baby-trap him.”
“What?” Rowan says, and it comes out odd. Like she has had to stop herself very quickly from saying something else.
You catch it anyway. “What is that face?”
“Nothing. Nothing, I promise.” She rubs at her mouth with her thumb, thinking. “I can’t say much, because it isn’t my place. But trust me on this one: Duncan will be decent, and he’ll most likely…” She pauses, chooses. “He’ll most likely take it better than you’re imagining. Just give him a minute if he goes quiet. He’s not great with shock.”
You let that sit. Look at her. Feel, against all expectation, a little calmer for having brought the thing into air where someone else can hold a corner of it.
Then you lean in, wrap an arm round her shoulders, and kiss her temple. “So we’re pregnant together, huh? Is that why you were in such a rush to get married?”
Rowan punches you lightly in the ribs. “Fuck off, you cunt,” she says, and laughs. “You’d have known sooner if you weren’t so busy causing trouble. I was drinking pissy non-alcohol lager that Thursday and every one of you was so busy yapping nobody noticed.”
You bark a damp little laugh. “That’s dreadful. I’m sorry. Congratulations on your celebratory cup of piss.”
“Oh, fuck you,” she says affectionately, settling into your side. “It wasn’t that bad.”
“It sounds horrific.”
“It was citrus.”
“That is worse.”
Rowan laughs again, proper this time, and relaxes further. After a moment she murmurs, “Why do you always have to parrot everything I do?”
You smile into her hair. “Because you’re my role model.”
“God help you, then.”
She takes one of your hands and starts idly playing with your fingers, turning your rings, flattening your palm, folding it shut again. Then, in the thoughtful tone of somebody asking a legitimate administrative question, she says, “If our kids get together, would that be incest?”
You snort so hard it knocks a laugh clean out of you. “You’re insane.”
“I’m serious!”
“You are absolutely not.”
“I’m just thinking ahead.”
“Well stop. They’re embryos, not Regency cousins.”
Rowan hums. “Still. Best to have policy in place.”
“You need help.”
“And yet here I am, your chosen first call.”
“That was clearly a lapse in judgement.”
“Mm. Keep lipping off and I’ll tell your child about this exact hairstyle you’re wearing now.”
You gasp weakly. “That is vile. I’m vulnerable.”
“You’re hideous,” Rowan says fondly, and squeezes your hand. Then the humour softens out of her a little. “We’ll sort it. One thing at a time, alright?”
A nod. “One thing at a time,” you echo.
When Rowan leaves you feel judged only in the areas that solidify friendships, and supported where things were about to crumble. Riding that high of momentary tranquility, you text Duncan. Could we meet? I’d like to talk to you. Then you try, with all your might, to not just stare at the screen until he replies.
His phone buzzes against his thigh halfway round the park and Dunk nearly ignores it on principle. He only ever checks mid-run if it might be Raymun, or one of the teachers from school saying some child has broken an arm in a creative new fashion. He slows, fishes the thing out one-handed, glances down—
Could we meet? I’d like to talk to you.
And promptly catches the edge of a raised paving stone with the toe of his trainer.
He lurches hard, windmills once, nearly goes down in full view of a woman walking a terrier in a little yellow coat, recovers with all the grace available to a man his size, which is none. The dog startles. The woman startles. Duncan keeps moving two steps out of momentum alone, then stops dead and stares at the screen as if the words might rearrange into something less capable of stopping his heart.
He types fast. sometjing happenwd? Sees it, swears, retypes, and sends a proofread version straight after: Something happened? Then, before you can answer that either: Yes of course. And then, because apparently he has decided to just lean fully into panic:
When d’you want to meet?
Where are you?
Are you all right?
It is as if the two weeks of withheld contact living in Duncan’s fingers have grown fully fed up with their prison and decided on a jailbreak. Every other evening he’s found himself stuck scrolling through nonsense, drifting into your thread, typing how you? and then deleting it. At some point he stopped deleting and simply kept adding question marks. Three days ago he forced himself to man up and backspaced it so hard his phone froze, and that seemed to settle it. Things would get back to normal sooner or later, because they had to. He stayed at school longer than he ought to, then pestered Raymun into working out with him. Raymun came out once, nearly passed out at the outdoor park gym, and Dunk felt bad for it.
Dunk apologised, but Raymun waved it off and said no worries, he was only knackered. Rowan had been having insane cravings in the middle of the night and Raymun, wanting to do right by her, kept dragging himself out to buy whatever strange thing she’d latched onto this time—ice cream, pickles, Marmite, though Rowan had never liked Marmite in her life and apparently did now. That was how Dunk learned she was pregnant. Joy flooded him fiercely at the news, followed close by some odd little pang of dread, a sense of being left behind. Before he could give it voice, Raymun went white, swore under his breath, made Dunk vow he would not tell Rowan he knew, then laughed loud, clasped both hands to Dunk’s shoulders, and told him the kid was blessed already, because they were going to have the best godfather in the world.
And this is something Dunk’s great at, being a parent figure that’s not a parent exactly, so he doesn’t know why he’s felt partly full and partly empty hearing the news. All in all he’s happy for Raymun and has once again stopped himself from saying something that would ruin the moment. This time, it would be asking if that’s why the engagement went from an idea to a mission so fast. They didn’t drink that night, but they hugged about it tightly and Raymun’s eyes got red from it.
His heart is racing because he’s just run and nearly split his head on the pavement, and for no other reason at all, when finally you text back. I’m ok, just don’t want to talk over the phone or text. My place? 7?
When Dunk checks the time it is only three in the afternoon, and he wonders how he is meant to survive the next four hours in this state of near-cardiac event. The heartburn is back in full. But if there is one thing he knows for certain about you—and in fairness, the inventory of things he knows is not large, some of it plainly filled in by hope—it is that you do not like being pushed. So he sends a thumbs-up and walks home instead of running, because he does not want to die before learning what it is you mean to tell him.
At home he tries, first, to behave as though the evening is not bearing down on him with its hands out. He showers. Puts water on for tea. Forgets about it until the kettle has long since clicked off and the kitchen has gone quiet around it. He opens the fridge and stares in with the grave concentration of someone hoping cold air might contain counsel. There is a yogurt two days from turning. Half a jar of pesto. Eggs. A lonely pepper going soft at the shoulder. He shuts the door again.
He sits. Gets back up. Turns the telly on low and keeps finding, a minute later, that he has not taken in a single word of whatever is playing. His phone stays in his hand too much. At one point he realises he has opened your message thread without knowing he has done it, just staring at My place? 7? as if more might appear beneath it if he waits reverently enough.
Then comes the matter of what to wear, which makes him feel simple in a way that is almost rude. He changes his shirt, then changes it again. Looks at himself in the mirror and sees a man apparently dressing for a firing squad or good news, and since no one in the history of speech has ever said we need to talk to deliver a pleasant surprise, he tells himself to stop acting the gom. For one miserable stretch of thought he becomes convinced you are about to tell him he has given you something. An STI, maybe. He stands there trying to reason through it. He has not slept with anyone in the past year. Logically, if anything has been passed between you, the odds tilt the other way. Dunk refuses, on instinct, to believe such a thing of you. The refusal comes so fast and whole it irritates him. He has no problem imagining himself as the source of badness. You remain, in his head, curiously exempt.
By half six he cannot bear the flat another minute. He leaves too early and knows it. Tries to correct for it by taking the longer route, which is not really a route at all but him wandering the paths around the park near your place, adding distance in pathetic little loops. Children are still out, shrieking over a ball. A dog drags a woman through the grass with its nose down and full conviction. Somebody is eating chips on a bench. Dunk walks past all of it with the feeling that his skin has been pulled half an inch too tight over his frame.
On the second lap round the pond he wonders whether he should have brought something. Flowers feel insane. Drink, worse. Food assumes too much. He pictures himself turning up on your doorstep with a bag of oranges or a packet of biscuits and nearly wants to lie down in the mud. By ten to seven he has run out of places to waste time without looking suspicious even to himself.
So he goes to your building, climbs the stairs with his pulse all wrong, and, at ten to seven exactly, lifts his hand and knocks.
You open after a little while, and the sight of you unmans him some.
Dunk knows the look of somebody who has cried for hours and come out the other side of it. He sees versions of it at school often enough—children convulsed by some grief enormous to them, a lost favourite object, a cruel word, the wrong partner in a game, and then, once the crying has spent itself, the face goes soft and warm with exhaustion, the tragedy reduced to a size that can be survived and sometimes even laughed at. On you it sits badly in him. Because if he is reading the room right, the reason for all that crying and the reason he has been summoned here share too much ground.
“Hey,” you say, and smile at him weakly. “You’re early.”
“Am I?” he says, making a show of looking uncertain. “Should I—?” His thumb points vaguely back down the hall, as though he has even a shred of intention to leave and return in ten minutes.
Then, something unfortunate happens. You roll your eyes at him, and the quick flash of white sends him straight back into bed with you—buried in heat and sweat and the memory of your face breaking apart around pleasure, though the look now has nothing to do with that one. Even so, his body does not care for distinctions this fine. He feels the blood rise hot in his cheeks and hopes, with some urgency, that his ears are not joining in.
“No, come on,” you say. “It’s fine. Tea?”
“Aye,” he says, aching for an ordinary thing. “Tea’d be grand.”
He steps inside with the care of entering somewhere familiar under entirely unfamiliar terms. You move ahead of him towards the kitchen and he follows, too aware of his own size, of his shoes, of where his hands are hanging, of the fact that he has brought none of the things a decent person might bring to a difficult conversation and is now arriving empty-handed and broad as a wardrobe.
The living room tells on the day a little. Tissues on the couch. A blanket half dragged to the floor. In the kitchen there are cups in the sink, abandoned at different stages of usefulness. The kettle appears to have been at work for hours. You do not even need to switch it on, only reach for fresh mugs and teabags with the dull speed of body moving ahead of your mind.
You pour milk into the cups and the bottle knocks lightly against one rim. A little spills over and runs under the bottoms, leaving white rings on the counter.
“Shite,” you mutter, and he realises you are nervous.
Something in Dunk drops and braces at the same time. Up till now some small, stubborn corner of him has been making up harmless reasons for this meeting. They all die when he sees the spill and the way you stare at it for a second too long, like the milk has presented you with a problem of impossible complexity.
He moves before thinking too hard about it. Reaches past you for the dishcloth by the sink, slow enough not to startle, and wipes the counter clean in two broad swipes. “It’s only milk,” he says quietly.
His voice comes out gentle. He sets the cloth down. Looks at your hands, then at your face. “You don’t have to do the tea if y’don’t want,” he says. “I’m not here for the tea.”
“I know,” you say, and point at the cups. “Well, it’s ready. Just a bit messy. C’mon, I think I need you to sit.”
Dunk braces a hand on the counter. “Freakin’ me out a bit there, lass,” he says. “What is it?”
You stare at him for a second, then look down. “I just…” you mutter, small. “I just gotta tell you something, is all.”
He takes a step forward and, with everything in him, does not reach for your shoulders. “Well, then?”
You scratch at your hairline and huff a breath. “Uh, Christ, this is harder than I expected.” Your arms fold round yourself and you wince. “Gimme a second, okay?”
“Somethin’ bad happen?”
“No,” you say, fast. “I mean yes, something happened, but if it’s good or bad, you can decide.” You sigh. Shake both hands in the air like that might loosen the words. Then you turn, hold your sides, and look up at the ceiling. “Okay, fuck—”
Anxiety makes the blood go loud in his ears. He tries to breathe through his nose and fails. To cover the sound of it, he asks, “Did I… hurt ye? Did I—”
“No, God no—”
“Y’gonna tell me I’ve got somethin’ on me now, then?” he asks and regrets it instantly.
“What?” you snap. “No, Jesus, Dunk—”
“Then what is it, luv?”
You stop fidgeting. Just pull in one thin, startled breath and look at him.
“I’m… I’m pregnant, and—”
One word and the rest of you goes muffled, as if you are talking to him through wool. Duncan’s heart seems to stop. His breathing too. There are tears in your eyes again.
“And it’s yours for sure, and I wanted to tell you before anything—and, and I t-thought about it and I just—”
In that moment Duncan’s biggest dream or nightmare might as well come true. He blinks through the potential calcifying into fact. It is a long blink. He may become the figure he has mourned quietly his entire life. Somewhere in the back of his mind lingers the knowledge he has passively absorbed from reels about mental health and substitution and trying to patch one absence with another. He knows well enough that this would not do that. But because the missing bits are missing all the same, his heart is a simple creature and leaps at the possibility. Another part of him sinks a little, because one version of this has you telling him only because such things must be told, and then taking the seed of that joy away. I’m going to be a dad rings louder in him than I’ve fucked up. He waits to see if his head is wedged under the guillotine when the blade falls.
“I think I’d like to keep it,” you say, and let him keep his head after all.
Dunk wonders whether this sort of thing is meant to happen to men who are thirty or thirty-two. His papers say thirty-two, but the papers came after, and after is where people start guessing. The story of him turning up at the orphanage lived in a dozen mouths, but he believes Uncle Arlan’s version because Arlan never saw the use in lies when the truth caused enough bother on its own.
He told Dunk he’d been left there with no documents and already big enough that they took one look at him and put him down older than he likely was. For a while some of them thought there was something wrong with him for other reasons too—that he was slow where he should not be, wrong in the head, late to things other boys managed easy. Then the years went on and bits started evening out, except for the size, which only kept making fools of everybody’s estimates. So thirty-two may be true. Thirty-one might be truer. Thirty, even. Dunk has never known for certain. Standing there with your words still warm in the air, he decides he must be younger after all, because this feels too large and round to happen to a man on a crooked number.
“Dunk?” you say. “Are you with me?”
You look scared. Your hand is wrapped around the cup you are not drinking from. Shoulders drawn up, brows pulled together, you seem to be waiting for him to blink or breathe or do anything at all. But the joy that floods him now is even fiercer than what he felt when Raymun told him Rowan was pregnant, and he is too astounded to speak. So instead of speaking, Dunk closes the distance, plucks the cup from your hands, sets it on the counter, and gathers you in tight. Only then can he breathe.
“Thank you,” he says into your hair. “Jesus, thank you.” His voice comes rough with it. “Thank you for tellin’ me. Thank you for—” He swallows and starts over, because there are too many things at the same time and none of them fit through cleanly. “I’m here, aye? I’m here.”
At first you stand like a log and just let him hold you, giving nothing back. Then, slowly, your hands climb until they rest on his back, and there is the lightest brush of your fingers there. “You’re happy?”
“Happy? God—” He breathes you in. You smell the same. “Aye, I’m happy,” he says. “I am. I’m so happy I think I might be a bit thick with it. You?”
“Mostly terrified,” you mumble. “But… yeah. Something happy-adjacent.”
Dunk pulls back enough to look at you. He smiles. “Happy-adjacent?”
“Don’t take the piss.”
“I’m not. I like it.”
You sigh, and your eyes water a bit. “Ideally, this would be happening with someone I’m actually with, but I suppose there are worse fates than having a baby with a friend who’s a good person.”
“Mm.” He only hums to that, and you look at him again, waiting. “Sorry,” he says. “I’m just still—”
“Dunk.” You run your hands on his arms. “Look, I don’t need you to… I don’t know, bend over backwards or do anything that would change your life a lot. But if you want to be present, you know…” You swallow. “I’d love that. If you don’t that’s alright too, but I’m guessing you do based on—”
“Hush, girl. Hush now,” he says, cutting in, and pulls you back into him. “I’ll be present. I want to.”
Silence for a while. He just rocks you, then rests his chin on the top of your head.
“We can make it work, right?” you ask.
Yes. Dunk will die if he does not make it work.
You said this is not ideal, and under any other circumstance he might have had enough blood in his brain to let that land where offence is kept. But this is too large and too bright for offence. Where you are only happy-adjacent, Dunk has somehow stumbled into family-adjacent, and that is enough to make him the happiest he has ever been in his life.
He is going to have a baby with his beautiful friend. He is going to be somebody’s father, with you.
If he came from normal people, maybe there would be some higher standard stored in him somewhere. Some polished version of how these things ought to begin. Flowers. Planning. A house already chosen. The proper order of it all, learned by watching it happen around him. But Dunk has never lived by examples like that. He counts family differently. Whoever wedges themselves into his life and stays, he keeps. Whoever loves him long enough to become a fixture, he builds around.
So yes, this begins in chaos. Yes, the pair of you are standing here because of a one-night stand and a spectacular lapse in judgement. He knows that. Knows it fully. Still, all he feels is warmth.
☆ Tags: Modern au(?), hurt/comfort, inter-dimensional travel, mentions of past lifes, my first time ever trying to write angst, probably went bad since I hate angst, I’m too sensible for that unhappy sht🥀 either way, please enjoy.
English is not my first language, I'm doing my best with the little bit of knowledge that I have, so, please excuse my grammar mistakes, also, if you would like to leave a correction or any recommendations, I'm willing to hear it, without wasting more of your time, please enjoy.
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Ever since I was a kid I have had this strange dreams of a man I loved more than anything in the world. When I wake up I can't remember his face nor his name, but the feeling that I've lost something precious and dear hunts my days to no end. This dreams had only worsened over the years to the point it turned into an obsession and had to start seeing a therapist. She told me to try writing my dreams on piece of paper and burn it afterwards so maybe that way I could let them finally go.
So, here it goes;
"Seeing him used to be just like a fresh breeze in the middle of summer. His golden all consuming eyes drowned all my worries, my thoughts and dreams equally. I breathed him in, his perfume hitting harder than any cigarette, nullifying my senses until all that I could see, think and feel was him. I caressed his face with the tenderness an artist caress his muse. I still remember the feeling and if I try hard enough, I can even feel it tingling on the tip of my fingers, soft as porcelain, cold and pale, distant. Sharp at the edges in the way only years of suffering and scarcity could achieve.
I gave him the kind of love you only read about in novels. I gave him devotion, softness, care and protection. And in exchange, he gave me access. To his world, to his mind and eventually, to his heart.
We didn't shared our whole lives together. I met him when the world had already taken its toll on him, always after, never on time. The first time, in the hallways of a prestigious academy which name I can't remember. He was an otherworldly creature that looked totally out of place, a patch of roughness, ink stains and fidgety hands roaming through my, until then, perfect and monotonous domain. I admired him from afar, studied him and eventually, stole him for my self. Or at least I thought I did. That was until the universe, fate, god, his sickness and the greedy people of my world took him away.
The second time I saw him, he went by a different name. I heard it by chance amidst the chaos of that filthy bar and immediately knew It was him. The same face, the same voice, the same fidgety hands that used to be always over mines. His name changed, but everything else was the same. I approached him only to discover once again every mole, every quirk, his brilliance and resistance. Nothing changed but his name, included his fate.
I watched him wither once again, his own body killing him, stealing my lover day by day. It didn't mattered how hard I tried, how many bridges I burned trying to extend his life, it was all in vain.
The third time was different, when I remembered him I started looking out, that time I knew that he was be out there waiting for me to come back. I went years without a single trace, driven only by hope and love. Only to discover that fate had found him first and all that was left for me were some dried flowers and a cold, lonely and forgotten tombstone.
The fourth time I gave him a home, two beautiful daughters that he loved more than anything. I don't even remember how I found him, the memories so distant that at this point they may even be just a blur or maybe my desperation making up things to help me cope with reality. Either way, he was there, he was mine and again, it was just temporary.
Time after time the cicle repeats himself. I wake up, I find him, I love him again and again just like the first time and at the end, he slips from my grasp leaving me alone and broken. Now I can't even remember how many times have been, how many cycles, how many chances, how many versions of my lover I had lost over the centuries."
...
At this point I don't even know if I'm crazy, I've lost the ability to differentiate reality from delusions long ago and honestly, as I stare at the burning piece of paper, the only thing that comes to my mind aside from the memories, is the fact that I don't care anymore.
Maybe fate doesn't want us together, maybe those pasts versions of me should've respected that long ago, maybe that way he could had live happy and longer, but this time I will. Dreams are just that, dreams, creations of my mind specifically designed to torture me.
Either way, it doesn't matter anymore, after all, I met the most handsome and sweet guy ever last month on my therapist office. He has this cute moles on his face that make me want to kiss them, messy brown hair, he's smart and has this beautiful voice.
The first time I met him was thanks to the doctor, she told me about another patient she had that was experiencing the same problem as me and arranged a meeting for us so we could share our experiences out loud and cope together.
The first thing he told me that day was that I looked like someone he met once in a different life and I kinda felt like I've knew him my whole life too.
Maybe we are meant to be, maybe we are all that the other one needs to forget those dreams or maybe I'm just clinging to him because he feels oddly familiar. Either way we are having our first date today, I don't use to go out with people I just met but ever since I saw Viktor for the first time he made me feel safe, as if his golden all consuming eyes drowned all my worries, my thoughts and dreams equally.
contents (nsfw): Ser Duncan The Tall x travelling companion fem!reader, sex pollen (but it's actually mushrooms), yearning, mutual pining, idiots in love, synesthesia, explicit consent, scent kink (act surprised), praise kink, body worship, coming untouched, size difference, outdoor sex, unprotected sex, prone bone, and to be super judicious also chem-sex (because well, they are high).
synopsis: They get lost in the woods and eat some mushrooms :')
word count: 13,1K *sigh*
a/n: Banner is by me, dividers by @strangergraphics! Thank you lovely humans for giving it a read before publishing (@hextoken, @lateknightbites and @ladyoftheelm).
Duncan is hungry. Beyond upset with himself, though he cannot show it. His boots grind after your footsteps in the moss, quite literally mangling the prints you leave behind with his large feet, eyes down because he cannot even force himself to look at you.
You had been right, of course. Right when you said to buy more long-lasting supplies. Right when you said there might be no inn for miles and miles, and the last bed and fair meal in your bellies were already fading from memory. Right when you said to walk around the woods instead of cutting through, because no one could see the stars under crowns grown so thick, and this particular forest had looked queer even from the road.
It had unsettled him too, if he is honest. The trees stood too close together. The path under them seemed less like a path than an invitation made by something with poor intentions. But Duncan had wanted, badly, to be the sort of man who knew the way.
He had said the coin purse was too light for the inn. He had said north was north. He had said the road through was straight enough, and if you kept going you would come out three days sooner than if you went around. He had said Ser Arlan taught him to read land and wind and moss on bark.
You had only looked at the forest and said, “Moss grows where it pleases in a place like that.”
And now moss grows everywhere. On stones, on roots, on the wrong sides of trees. It slicks the ground under his boots and makes a fool of every scrap of road-wisdom he dragged out to defend himself. The sky has been gone for two days. The trees keep swallowing the light. Little ways open ahead of you and close behind you without sound.
Worst of all, you have stopped telling him you were right. That is how Duncan knows you are truly angry, and it is the last thing he wants. Everything he does is to show you how dear you are to him. When you are only cross, you sharpen yourself on him. When there is still play in it, you peck and prod and make sport of his solemn face until he either laughs or thinks hard about putting his head through a tree. Now you walk ahead in silence with your cloak hem dark from mud, one hand pressed to your empty stomach when you think he cannot see. But he sees.
With the ache in his legs he can't decide whether it is a new punishment from the Gods, or merely a top up of his ongoing one. Being doomed to spend all his time around creature who smells of woodsmoke and crushed green things, whose laugh comes out meaner for hunger yet makes something in him lift like a hound hearing its name, whose hands can bind a cut with such brisk mercy he feels forgiven before the knot is tied, then cuff him round the arm a breath later for moving too soon.
Those hands trouble him. The gentleness of them troubles him worse. The little sharp swats you give him when he says something thick-headed trouble him worst of all, because Duncan is a boy beneath the height and mail and borrowed vows, and boys think where they are forbidden; boys wonder how the same hand might fall in privacy, in play, in anger sweetened by permission.
He cannot have you. That is the root and rot of it. So he keeps you where a hedge knight may keep what is precious and impossible: in his head, in his heart, and, when he strays furthest from the knightly path, in those low, shameful devotions that take him half-awake before dawn, hand gone traitor under the blanket while you sleep near enough to unman him, face softened by the pale morning, mouth parted and begrudgingly unkissed.
A rock hits the tree bark, and a grunt follows. The same crow that has yelled at the pair of you twice already flies off with a menacing cackle, and Duncan sees you standing there with your shoulders drawn and anger practically fuming off your neck.
“If we kill it, we can eat it,” you announce grimly.
“You cannot eat a crow,” he tells you. “It’s a bad omen.”
It is much too quiet. Much too calm, and matches your mood not at all, for you are beyond livid and looking for something to punch outright.
“Oh?” you quip. “Worse than dying of hunger in the middle of the meanest fucking forest I’ve ever been to?” There, you stomp your foot hard enough to feel the impact travel thighwards and spread a vile ache. Your boot sinks into the moss.
Duncan gapes at you, clearly frightened. “We’ll find something soon enough,” he says, taking a few steps forward. His hands fist the belt of the satchel nervously. When you give him nothing but a death stare, he bows his head and mumbles, “Forgive me, I—”
It makes you explode. “Stop this! We’ve found nothing for two days except for disgusting birds!” you yell at him. Or rather, your stomach yells at him, and there is a lot of space within it to draw air from. “We’ve passed the same split ash twice, and there’s no sky in here. Where is your north now, hm?” You move in, throwing your hands around. When he says nothing, you press on: “I told you we should’ve stayed at the inn. I told you we should’ve walked round, but you never listen. Ser Arlan this, Ser Arlan that, I’m sick of listening to the wisdom of that old fart! And quit standing there looking like I should pity you, it’s infuriating!”
His eyes jerk around, but his head doesn’t. “A-aye,” he stammers. Walks right past you. “As you wish.”
“Duncan, I’m—”
“Keep moving.” He cuts you off. Hurt. “Start marking the trees, and perhaps we will stop walking in circles.”
You know damn well you’ve hurt him, regret it dearly, and get only more cross about it. Stupid boys with their stupid I-can-do-this attitudes. Stupid Duncan with his stupid we-can-make-it every time you offer an easier solution. You are well aware of how light your shared purse is, but there are ways around things. You could’ve charmed the innkeeper. Could’ve haggled with the grain seller. Could’ve hunted small game on your way around the woods, and at least there would be some stars above your heads. At least the air would be fresh and not rotten-smelling and damp all the way. Stupid Duncan with his stupid frowned mouth that wouldn’t even show you his endearing teeth or the way his eyes wrinkle when he laughs.
There are moments when you let yourself be deluded into thinking he has a kinder eye on you than merely a companion’s. He looks longingly whenever a larger patch of your body shows, and blushes furiously when he gets caught looking. Always makes you eat your ration first and pretends he’s well fed while his stomach could obviously host yours and his, and he’d still be hungry. He helps you into and out of the tall places, walks first through suspicious lands, and hides you with his broadness whenever someone ill-looking crosses your path. Often you find him staring at you in the mornings. He misliked the idea of you flirting your way into a warm bed so much the door rattled behind him when he stormed out of the inn. Went ahead guilty-looking and pulled at his brows as if it was some sort of personal betrayal.
You were very close to telling him that if you shared a bed you might be able to afford it, but something in you told you no. The same voice that acts as a constant apologist for all the deceptions of a girlish heart. It yearns for his lashes to tickle your cheeks when he kisses you and for his hands to smooth down your thighs, while the mind, still steadfast, screeches at you that he is a knight. A man honourable enough to apply all those gestures selflessly, out of duty and his soul’s purity. So you keep those little fits of unbearable pining to yourself, and only let them boil over from frustration in situations like this one. When the threat of closeness becomes so grand, you end up in the middle of nowhere instead, with no provisions, wineskin empty and body so hungry it feels as if it has started feasting on itself.
Watching him try to be competent while exhausted makes you furious in an oddly specific way. So much so that it takes an additional ounce of effort to look away from what it attempts to disguise. You insisted because food and shelter are sensible, yes, but underneath that: you are tired of him deciding what hardships both of you will nobly endure. You are tired of him being far away all the time. You are tired of him being able to admit a mistake exactly never, because he has some ridiculous fear of failing you.
So you drag yourself behind him, silent, functionally hostile, letting him mark the trees while your eyes remain fixed on the forest’s groundcover. For a long time there is nothing but moss and decomposing bark. Then, a little pale congregation shows itself under the lip of a fallen trunk.
You stop so quickly your knees almost forget the arrangement. Mushrooms. A whole clutch of them, bunched close in the wet dark, caps the colour of old cream and bruised grey at the edges, stems thin and stubborn where they push up through the rot. They look indecently alive in a forest that has offered no berries, no nuts, no rabbit flashing white under a bush, no squirrel rude enough to be killed, no clean water except what one might wring from the moss like from an old rag. You crouch and pick one. The stem gives with a soft little snap. It smells damp, earthy, faintly sweet in a way that makes your stomach fold in on itself with need.
You turn it over. Gills. Fine ones, packed tight underneath, pale as milk. You try to summon every scrap of sense you own about things growing wild and free: what colour means death, what smell means bellyache, what little skirts and bulbs and stains should send a person praying. The knowledge arrives in tatters. Old women muttering by cookfires. A girl you once knew who swore the brown ones were safest, until another girl swore the same about the white. You split the cap with your thumb and watch it bruise darker where you have hurt it.
The forest holds its breath. That is what Duncan notices first. The lack of you behind him. Muttered complaints, boots dragging and hungry little curses aimed at roots, birds, Gods, or him, cease entirely. He turns and finds you knelt in the moss bed, hunched over your own lap as if you have discovered treasure or a corpse.
“What is it?” he asks.
“Mushrooms,” you tell him, eyes fixed on whatever's before you.
He goes still. “Put them down.”
“They seem good enough.”
“Put them down,” he says again, and this time it lands as command. “You do not know what they are.”
Your mouth sets. Oh, there it is. The last rotten twig laid on the pile. You are hungry enough to feel hollowed with a spoon. Cross enough to bite the next thing that comes near your mouth. Cross with him for the inn, for the road, for the woods, for treating you as if you are some soft lady to be carried through hardship rather than the companion sharing it. Cross with him for touching you only when duty gives him permission. Cross with him for staring with those huge blue eyes full of thoughts he never once has the courage to drag into words. Cross with him for standing over you now as if he gets to decide this too.
You gather two fistfuls from the moss and sit back on your heels.
“Don’t,” Duncan says.
So you stuff the first handful into your mouth.
It is a dreadful decision immediately. They are wet and cold and spongy between your teeth, tasting of soil, pepper, old leaves, and something almost buttery enough to coil nerves. You chew with the wild-eyed conviction of a person proving a point no sensible man asked you to prove.
Duncan runs. For a man so large, he hits the ground beside you with shocking speed. “Stop that! Spit them out!” His hand catches your chin, thumb at one side, fingers at the other, trying to turn your face up. True fear has made him clumsy. “Spit them out, I said. Seven hells, are you mad?”
You clamp your jaw shut.
“Open your mouth.”
You shake your head with such force his grip slips. He catches you again, gentler and worse for it, because all that concern is going straight through your skin where his fingers hold you. He is stronger, of course he is, but strength has poor purchase against a mouth sealed by spite. You make a muffled, triumphant sound through the chewed mess of shroom flesh, and Duncan looks one breath away from prying your lips open with both hands.
“D'you want to die?” he snaps. “Is that it? You want to make a corpse of yourself because I told you no?”
It is enough to tip your anger over. You surge up into him with the second fistful crushed in your palm. He jerks back too late. Your hand smears over his mouth, damp caps and broken stems mashed against his lips, and for one glorious, idiotic heartbeat you have him pinned in sheer surprise, your other hand shoved hard against his jaw to keep him from throwing you off.
Then, he does throw you off. You land in the moss with a graceless thump while Duncan spits, coughs, spits again, one hand braced on the ground and the other scraping at his mouth as if he has kissed plague. “Fuck,” he chokes, which would be deeply satisfying under finer circumstances. “Fuck—”
You lie there with your chest heaving, ground cold under your back, and watch him retch up a sorry fleck of pale cap. “You ain’t dead yet,” you tell him.
Laughter bubbles out of you. Thin, cracked, half-starved, ugly with deranged little triumph. It keeps going because his face is appalled, because he has mushroom pulp on his chin, because the whole thing is so childish and awful that laughter is the only shape your body can make around the shame of it.
Then, you see his eyes and the humour dies.
Duncan wipes his mouth with the back of his wrist. Spits once more into the moss. When he looks at you, he is furious, yes, but beneath it something scared sits bare and wounded. “That was foolish,” he says, low and rough. “Cruel foolish.”
You push up on one elbow. “Duncan—”
“No.” He stands too quickly, sways, and pretends he has not. “Enough of this childish nonsense. Get up. Keep walking before we drop dead in this place and the ground eats what is left of us.”
You get up because staying on the ground would mean staying beside the shape of your own idiocy. There is no victory in your belly. The mushrooms sit there damp and useless, offering neither meal nor death nor apology. Your stomach remains hollowed. Your tongue finds some last shred of cap stuck against a tooth and you swallow it down because spitting now would feel too much like agreeing with him.
So you follow Duncan who walks ahead with his shoulders drawn hard, nicking the trees with more force than the trees deserve. Each cut shows pale through the bark. A poor little wound, then another, then another. You keep your eyes on them because looking at the back of his neck seems unwise. Because there is shame in you now, a hot coal of it under the hunger, and because the whole matter will surely sort itself out once there is road underfoot again. Road, sky, a stream, some village woman with a pot over the fire and enough mercy to sell you both porridge on credit.
The more you walk in dead silence, the more odd everything grows. First, the green deepens. Moss goes dark and bruises emerald where your boots press it flat, then almost black around the roots. The rot in fallen trunks shows itself in bands: brown, rust, yellowed cream, a wet red near the heartwood that makes you look twice. Beads of damp shine on bark like threaded glass. The world has somehow grown a skin and every part of it is tender.
Your eyes roll themselves to look ahead, to check whether up matches the down, and something unfeasible happens: Duncan's hair catches auburn where there is no sun to put it there. You blink hard, but it is still in place. Burning copper, warm at the roots, as if late summer has claimed him and crowned him its ruler.
He is ten paces ahead, fully clothed, filthy at the hem, angry with you in every line of him, and still something in the sight of his back opens a door you have spent months pretending was only a crack in the wall. His shoulders shift under the cloth. His rope-belt rides where his stride pulls it. One hand hangs near his thigh, broad and scraped at the knuckles, fingers flexing now and then as if he is still trying to close them around his temper.
And you can smell him. From there. From too far. Wool and old sweat. Iron, leather, green bark crushed fresh under his boots. The sour-sweet human warmth gathered at his throat after two days beneath the same clothes. It comes into you with the air and sits in your mouth, intimate as a thumb pressed on the tongue.
Your face goes hot. “Duncan,” you say before you mean to.
He stops, and turns only half-way. “What?”
Nothing. Everything. You have no answer fit for speech, only the sudden, humiliating perception of him through distance, moving among the trees like the forest made room grudgingly and only because it had to.
“I—” You swallow. The hollow in your stomach twists, and lowers into a stranger ache. “Nothing.”
He looks over his shoulder then. Only for a moment. His eyes are still angry. Still hurt. Something else beneath. The blue of them near takes the knees out from under you.
The white of your shift under the cloak flashes blinding to him. For a vile moment he knows the body beneath the cloth with alarming accuracy. The curve and press of it. The warm hidden places where fabric clings. The space between your thighs where his fingers would fit if his hand twitched one inch further into sin. He blinks, and once his lids lower he can feel the forest pulsing around him. Trees throb from root to crown, or so he thinks. Leaves shiver high above, though there is no wind he can hear. Only you.
Your breath comes from behind him, fine and close, though he knows you are several paces back. The small draw of it, the break and the swallow after. If he stays inside the sound too long, his head fills with images that shame him: blood moving thick and slow through veins, mouths parting in the dark, the slick red place behind your teeth. It comes again, and this time he hears the scrape of teeth over your lower lip. Hears your tongue shift when you swallow. Hears the wet click of it like a secret told directly into his ear.
He turns away hard and starts walking before his face can betray him. The ground gives strangely under his boots. Too soft to carry him, or too willing. Moss takes his weight and keeps the shape of it. Roots, slick and glossy, groan like sleeping limbs. Behind him your steps begin to sound coloured. Brown-black when you tread on earth. Pale when you crush dry leaves. Red when you stumble and curse at the tree that caught your sleeve.
Duncan scratches at his wrist. The itch has started there, under the cuff, a mean little needling. Then the other wrist. Then the side of his neck, just beneath the hair. His skin feels wrong on him, pulled too tight over bone, and the collar of his tunic rasps his throat with each breath. He hooks one finger under it and drags, angry with the cloth, the nature and his own flesh for having the gall in a time like this.
He stops at the next tree and lifts the knife. The mark comes crooked. His hand is less steady than he thought. Bark peels under the blade, wan tissue showing beneath, and when he braces his palm against the trunk the taste of it goes through his skin. Warm resin and bitter green. Something cloying and golden underneath, thick enough to coat the tongue.
For one dreadful breath, he wants to put his mouth to it. Then, he snatches his hand back.
You catch up while he stands there, staring at the tree as though it has whispered something incredulous to him. Your shoulder comes near his arm. Near enough that your warmth finds him through sleeve and cloak and all his ruined good intentions. He employs every nerve in an effort of not looking down. Looking down would show him your mouth, and he already hears too much of it.
Duncan sucks in a breath and regrets it at once, because it tastes like your laughter. "D'you feel—"
"N-no," you snap, visibly clawing at your sleeve.
The itching has gone worse now that you are close to him. You try to look everywhere but at his face and still it pushes itself into vision. More gorgeous than ever, which is a terrible thing to discover about a man who has just called you cruel foolish and looked as though you had stuck a knife between his ribs. His mouth sits soft even in anger, upper lip fine and nearly secretive, lower lip fuller, tenderly made, the whole of it held in that slight crookedness that makes him look as if a smile has once lived there and left its shape behind. Kissable enough to seem wet with sweetness. Near dripping, like split fruit. You can almost tell what it would taste of: salt, hunger, the warm copper of his bitten cheek, some grave and boyish mercy he keeps trying to spend on everyone but himself.
Beneath it, when his lips part around another breath, you catch the heart-wrenching disorder of his teeth. Crooked and ivory, youthful enough to undo the rest of his solemn, knightly face. His canines show for one bare second and something in you folds toward them with such obedient stupidity you want to laugh again, or bite your own hand. You would let them hurt you. You would lick over the uneven enamel just to learn the shape of him there too. His cheeks are freckled under the dirt, and the little mark high on the left one sits like a sign left by some indecently helpful god: here. Peck him here. His eyes are so blue they have no right to be warm, and yet they are, even scared, even angry, even with the pupils blown strange in the forest’s dim. His lashes would shame half the women in Westeros. His throat shows above his collar, working hard, begging for hands to circle it lovingly and feel the swallow pass under the thumbs.
It is the whole complex architecture of him that shreds you. The way his face moves before he can command it. Wrinkles with laughter. Saddens openly, no matter how quickly he ducks his head. Sets in anger he throttles inside himself until his jaw looks pained with it. He is a book flung open so wide the spine must be creaking, and still he behaves as if no one can read him. You want that face in your hands. At your neck. Bowed over you in the dark. You want that mouth at your breast, licking sweat from skin, lower too, in places the hunger in you has grown too proud to give it a name. He is a young man made, in this instant, to be loved down to the bone and back again, and you cannot understand why he will not simply let you.
“I feel… something,” you say after a moment, small and ashamed, and Dunk’s head snaps to the side to glare at you properly.
“I told you.” His voice comes out sharp, and he scrapes a hand over his mouth as if he can wipe the tremor from it. “I told you not to eat them.”
He looks worse now, which is a cruel way of saying better. Sweated through at the temples. Lips parted. The anger in him has gone twitchy, pulled tight, and every part of him seems brighter for it, as if fever has decided to make a feast of him first.
You ignore the fit because looking at him too long makes the ground loosen under your feet. “Do you feel it too?”
“I feel…” He stops.
The words plainly fail him. His jaw shifts. His hands open and close at his sides, large and helpless, missing something they have no right to know the shape of yet. There are knightly words for pain, for hunger, for wounds taken cleanly, for fear swallowed and carried forward. There are no words decent enough for this kind of yearning. No chivalric term for a cock so hard it makes thought limp and useless. No sweet, courtly account of his tongue feeling parched as old leather, as if only the salt of your skin could wet it. His whole body has turned want into a task. His hands want your flesh, specifically, under them. His mouth wants sweat. His chest wants weight. Even his bones seem to ache in your direction.
“Sick,” he says at last.
That throws you off enough to cool your face by one degree. “Sick how?”
His eyes shut briefly. “Wicked-sick.”
“Duncan.”
“Below the gut,” he grits out. “Aching.”
You move without thinking. One step, then another, drawn by the sound of him admitting anything at all. Your hand lifts near his chest, not touching yet, though the heat of him rises through the little space between you. “Well then—”
“No.” He backs away so quickly his spine hits the marked tree. Bark shudders behind him. For one absurd moment you think the forest gives a pleased little pulse. “No,” he says again, weaker. “I will not. I cannot throw all we have away for one witchcraft misery.”
A frown pulls at your mouth. You swallow, and Duncan feels it as if the working of your throat has passed through his own. His eyes drop there and jerk back up, pained.
“But we’ve got nothing but each other,” you say.
It comes out bewildered. Worse than that, wet at the edges. The tears mortify you the instant they gather, because you are hungry and furious and lit up from the inside by some vile little mushroom, and still the part of you that hurts most is the old part. The standing outside him part. The watching him lock himself away with all his goodness like a miser with coin.
“Duncan,” you mumble, and step in again.
He makes a sound under his breath. Almost your name, but more a plea with its back broken.
Then both his hands come down on your shoulders. Firm, but not harsh. Even now, with his face ruined and his arms trembling from the work of resisting it, he holds you as if you are something flammable he must keep from the fire. His fingers bite only as much as they need to. He keeps you at arm’s length, and the distance feels tormentuous, heartending and warm all the same.
“Sit,” he says.
You stare at him.
“Please,” he adds, and that does worse things to you than any command could.
With absolute pain written into every muscle, Duncan guides you back from him and down onto a mossy rise between two roots. He waits until you are seated, then pulls his hands away as if touch itself is thorned. He goes several paces off, too damn far, and lowers himself heavily to the ground with his back to another tree.
“We wait,” he says, breathing hard through his nose. “That is all. We wait it through.”
You hate the idea, but keep sitting where he put you because your head confuses the command for beguilement. The first few hauls of air almost convince you it might work. Your hands are folded badly in your lap, nails pressed into meat below the thumbs. He stays with his knees drawn up, head bowed and eyes closed. Looks as if he means to endure his own body by refusing to believe in it.
The distance should help; it does the opposite. It makes you want to scream. Whatever lives in your blood follows him across the ground and brings him back whole. His smell grows stronger with space, more exact, meaner for being denied. Salt has gathered at his hairline, and the place beneath his jaw where a mouth could fit grows warmer. You shift on the moss and the moss answers too softly, sinking under your hips with a sympathy you resent.
Across from you, Duncan’s hand closes around a fistful of earth and your own palm burns with it. His fingers dig in. Soil packs under his nails. A root bends against the heel of his hand, and your skin reports the pressure as if the soil has confused you for him.
He hears something. His head turns a fraction when you breathe through your mouth. Sweat slides down the side of your neck, slow as an insect. His lashes lift. His eyes go there with such naked soreness that your throat tightens around nothing.
“Stop listening to me,” you say.
His mouth twitches into a strained smile. “I am tryin'.”
“You look like you are praying.”
“I am tryin' that too.”
A stupid, tender ache opens in your chest and gets swallowed by the lower one. You drag your sleeve over your neck; it makes the itching worse. Cloth rasps over skin and the sound of it seems to pass through Duncan’s teeth; he winces and shifts, hard, then stills with both hands flat on the moss.
There is no hiding it. The line of him under his breeches is plain enough even in the dim. Angry, trapped, dragging each breath out of him by force. You look before you can tell yourself not to. Then you cannot look away quickly enough to make it innocent, and, begrudgingly, Duncan notices.
His face goes the most painful red. One hand flies down to cover himself, and the pressure makes him give a low, broken sound through his teeth. He jerks his hand away again, humiliated nearly past bearing, and turns his face aside. “Do not,” he says.
You should feel triumphant. Some sour little part of you tries, but it dies quickly. He looks wretched with it, sweating and rigid, punished by the very thing you have been imagining for months with all your private, girlish cruelty. Your own body answers him with a deep pull that leaves your thighs weak. Nothing shows on you so simply. That feels unfair too. You are suffering just as stupidly, only your suffering has the manners to hide under skirts.
“Dunk,” you say, softer.
His shoulders climb.
“We could help each other—”
“No,” he grits.
“You did not even let me finish.”
“I heard enough.”
“You heard what you wanted.”
“I heard what I feared.” He swallows, and the sound arrives in you wet and close. “And I said no.”
He feels your stare on him. His hands go into fists again, punishing the green because the green will not bruise like the body would. He is picturing it now, Gods help him. How wet you must be under all that cloth. He does not know much, but he has learned enough to know girls do that when they start looking like you look now: flushed and wounded and angry with wanting. He thinks of putting his hand there and near loses the thread of his own breathing. Thinks of the heat of you opening under his fingers. Thinks of being allowed the taste of it, then the taste of your mouth after, and in the state he is in now he cannot help wondering whether that too would have colour, or sound, or smell. Whether kissing you would ring gold in his teeth. Whether your breath would taste the way your laughter does. The sweetness of permission feels so distant it turns appalling, and Dunk sits there starved with the effort of keeping those pictures caged.
“It would be wrong,” he says.
“Why?”
“Because we are half mad.”
“We were half mad before.”
“This is different.”
“You mean easier.”
His eyes cut to you. The look makes heat climb under your ribs. There he is, the part of him that can be stern when forced to it, that can stand between you and ill-looking men on the road with all that height suddenly gathered into threat. It should warn you away, but instead it scrapes through the need and brightens it.
“I would not have you come back to yourself and curse me for it,” he says.
The words land too near the old fear. That miserable little thought that perhaps his whole pain is honour fighting witchcraft, while yours is only the truth made louder. You breathe through a phlegmy laugh. “Curse you.”
His brow knots.
You are about to leave it be. To sit through it, wait through it, whatever is a brilliant solution that Duncan has thought of. Your hips shift on the ground, and make you mutter, inadvertently, “I wanted you before I ate the bloody things.”
Duncan stares. Truly stares. The blue of his eyes has gone strange again, wide and dark at the centre, his face emptied of everything save for shock. “W-wha—what?”
You lick your lips. His gaze drops there and returns with visible effort. “Y-yeah,” you say, now that it is out and steaming on the groundcover. “That.”
He blinks. Your courage begins to thin immediately, because why wouldn't it. It was never courage, only fever with a mouth on it. You pull your knees closer, as if there is still some arrangement of limbs that could restore dignity.
“I mean—” Your voice catches. You hate it. “Never mind. I know you are trying to do right by me. I know. We can wait it through. Forget I said anything.”
Duncan’s chest rises, and the forest seems to rise with it. He breathes out your name, barely shaped. His hands have opened, the dirt clings to them. He looks frightened still, painfully so, but the fear has changed its direction. Some part of him has stepped to the edge and found ground there after all.
“Say it again,” he says.
Your heart gives a foolish, violent knock. “What?”
His throat moves. “What you just said."
You stare at him. “Duncan—”
“Please.”
It takes more from you than the mushroom, that one word. You sit there with your skin singing and your mouth swollen around the truth, while he waits as if you have a blade to his neck and every intention of mercy.
“I wanted you before,” you say.
His eyes close, and his face changes direction so fast you nearly miss it. It seems to not be able to settle between hurt and then hurt getting alleviated, then the rest of locked places opening at different speeds. A bewildered, boyish joy gets smothered so quickly by hunger that your hands twitch in your lap.
“I thought—” he chokes. “I thought it was only me.”
A smile, toothy and horrible, pulls your mouth and it suddenly makes sense what one old woman has said to you about smiles: that they are deceitful, that creatures bare their teeth in fear and pain mostly. “Idiot,” you say, laughing, because the shake it gives to your shoulders at least loosens something up.
“Aye,” Duncan says. For the first time in days his mouth tips upward. "I might be."
You nearly cry then. Properly. From fury, from tenderness, from the unfairness of him sitting there all this time with the same wound as yours hidden better than yours. Your lips part to tell him that waiting is fine, that you can both be noble and miserable and half-dead until the mushrooms spend themselves, that he need not come closer, that you are sorry for making it worse, when he lifts his head and rasps, "C'mere. C'mere, girl."
He manages to stand, but only just. Poor thing limps for the ballast between his legs, face drawn tight with the effort of making his body obey him. You find no such strength in yourself, so you crawl on all fours, getting fistfuls of moss between your fingers, knees drowning, cloak slipping off one shoulder as you go to him with whatever dignity hunger and witchcraft have left you.
When he gets close enough, he falls to his knees and into you. His arms come round you, pulling you in, the both of you stumbling with it. He sinks your back into the ground and his mouth onto yours. Groans loudly for it. The sound goes through you before the kiss does, and then the kiss is there too, wet and hard and poorly aimed for the first starving second while his mouth is learning yours by error.
Duncan feels like a hundred fists that have been holding each joint of his spine let go in the same instant. Suddenly he can bow deeper, go at it harder. Get more of himself over you, around you, as if he means to wrap you into himself. Your body tastes like absolution through his palms and covers him in its odd soot. It gets into the lines of his hands, beneath the nails, under the skin, and he does not know whether to pray over it or lick it off.
His cock presses to your thigh, and it is worse and better somehow than it has ever been. Worse because there is cloth between you and still the pressure nearly blinds him. Better because it is you, actually you, warm and shifting, making a place for him with your legs and your hands and your open, foolish mouth.
Into his mouth, you are laughing. He is kissing you and you are laughing, giggling so saccharine you might be made of sweet things. The laughter itself has a taste in Duncan’s ears, the sound of it melts on his tongue, enters the bloodstream through all the grooves in it, and when he pictures licking your neck, he wonders: would your skin giggle too?
His hands find your collar because the thought has nowhere else to go. He pulls at the laces with none of the skill he has for knots, fingers too large, too eager, too angry with cloth for existing. The shift gives under them, opening enough for air to touch the skin below your throat, and he lets his lips slide from yours.
It goes badly for him. Your jaw is slick from his own mouth. Lower, it goes open and wet and panting, tongue rolling out as if he has forgotten any courtly use for it. He licks down the side of your throat to the collarbone to find out whether laughter lives there, and learns it gives him praise instead. All of you tenses beneath him. Your legs jerk. Your nails go hard into his back through tunic, and the pain comes through bright enough to make his hips grind down.
“Duncan—”
“Yes—” he mumbles into your skin, uselessly. Then, because he's gone foolish: “You taste—Gods—like being let in. Like rain after I thought there’d be none. I don't know—”
He tries again with his tongue since words make a poor account of the matter. His weight settles over you, heavy and shaking, and you answer by wrapping your legs round his hips. The cradle of it, the permission of it, make his head dizzy. His cock settles where it most wants to be, when you take his face in both hands.
Duncan stills, or tries to. Your palms press his cheeks, thumbs push under his upper lip with such strange, fond boldness that his breath stops. You bare his teeth yourself, exposing the crooked row of them while he looks down at you, broken and burning, too far gone to be ashamed quickly enough.
Then you crane up and lick across them, and a slide of flesh on enamel rings in his bones like a bell. A sound leaves him that has no knightly ancestor.
“You’re so pretty I could kill you,” you say.
He makes another sound, worse than the first, and you press your face to his before he can hide from it. Rub your cheek against his, nose dragging clumsily along the dirt and wet of him as if looking is suddenly insufficient, as if you must take the shape of his face by touch too.
“Undress me,” you breathe against him. Your hands clutch at his collar next, less patient than his. “And you. Take it off. I want to see you. Undress us.”
"A-all of it?" he asks dimly. The only thing he gets is a nod. A glint in the eyes that have gone so dark Dunk has to squint to recognise the ring of remaining colour in them. His mind is still considering it, while the body has taken to obeying briskly: he undoes the rope and tosses it into moss, gets his hand under the hem of the tunic, drags everything over his head and for a moment blinds himself in linen.
When he comes free his hair is rucked up and the sight of him near bends you with affection. He looks younger like this. Exposed by acquiescence before he is exposed by skin.
“Boots,” you tell him, because he has gone still under your looking.
“Aye. Boots.”
He nearly tangles himself in the work of them, kicking one free, then the other, cursing when the heel catches in wet. His breeches follow with even less dignity, shoved down and worked off in an ugly struggle of knees and hips and breath held through his teeth. He is too large for haste. Too flustered for grace. Beautiful in the middle of both.
Then, his hands come back to you and change. Shaking terribly and clumsy as ever, but tender in a way that seizes your throat. He unlaces you as if he's wronged the ties and has to make amends. His knuckles drag against your breastbone, and he looks at your face like he still expects rebuke.
"Duncan," you say. "You can touch me."
"I—I know," he says. "I'm tryin' to be gentle."
“You can be quick and gentle.”
He blinks to that. Grows as heedless as you wished him to be all this time and you watch the permission taking shape in a mind trained to deny itself. He pulls the laces loose, opens the front of your bodice, works fabric from shoulders and arms with an urgency that keeps catching on worship. When cloth sticks at your elbow, you both swear at it. When your skirt snags beneath your hip, he makes a noise close to despair and you have to lift yourself enough for him to drag it free.
Once you're denuded properly, framed by green and dark, he sits back on his heels and his face breaks open around the sight so quickly he has no time to hide it. Want, yes, awful and plain. But wonder too, and fear of the wonder, and that same helpless grace he wears when given food he did not ask for and badly needed. His hands hover near your sides without touching, fingers flexed, palms dirty, as though he has come upon something hallowed and has no idea what Gods do to fools who reach too fast.
“Do not look like that,” you say, though you want him to look exactly like that until the trees fall down.
His throat works once. “Like what?”
“Like it's a trickery,” you tell him. "I'm here."
To prove it, you push yourself up on your elbows and reach. Crawling. Climbing. You're climbing, climbing, climbing and there is no end to him. Duncan The Tall, Duncan The Broad, Duncan the man you've wanted so badly all this time and suddenly cannot contain it. Whatever it is that is happening now has not so much set you to be doing this, but has stripped the already precarious layers of we shouldn't, I couldn't, he wouldn't and made your mind and heart and hands and legs go need you, want you, death to me if I can't have you, please, please, please—
Your arms make it to his neck, hips slot into his lap, and there he is, angry and throbbing and so needy for you that the heat of him seems to have found its own heart. His hands catch your waist, grip harder when your skin gives under them. The first press of you against him turns his face ruinous. His mouth opens. His lashes jump. For one breath he looks as if he might beg pardon of your bones for wanting them so badly.
Then, you push him, barely. Pressure on the chest, a lean of your weight, and still he goes, pliant, as if all the strength has been taken out from under him. His back sinks into the moss, arms fling to the sides for he'd let you crucify him. You land with your palms on either of his shoulders, knees wedged into the dirt and thighs crowding his ribs. Between your legs his stomach rises softly, and the hairs on it tickle the skin most sensitive.
“There,” you breathe.
Duncan is stricken. Drained of volition as if volition were blood, and that one is occupied to gather elsewhere. He bends his knees slightly to ease some of the terrible sensation of air cooling the weep of his cock, and thinks he's never been so close to bursting just from being. He has his eyes closed to achieve anything—regroup, withstand, persist this unbearable wave of tenderness that thrashes in him—when your fingers get to the tendons of his neck and caress him, and it's all he needs to tip his head back and bare his throat to you.
There, your looking turns worse. You gape at the long working line of it until Duncan’s breath snags. The notch above his breastbone. Sinew drawn tight under the skin. The pulse batting there as if trying to get out. Your fingers follow first, light enough to make him suffer, then firmer when his head lolls to the side and his mouth opens on a sound he seems to bite in half.
“Don’t do that,” he says, palms flexing in the dirt.
You pause. “Do what?”
Dunk's lids crack open and he finds you above him with your hair all wild, staring as if you've found a chunk of gold in the mud. “Look at me so,” he says. "As if I'm—"
He fails there, since there are no words for it. As if I'm worth looking at. As if you're seeing something comely. Too much feeling is brought to a narrow door and made to wait outside because no word is plain and large enough to carry it in.
"You are," you tell him. Set both palms lower, where his chest is warm, alive and broad enough that your fingers look foolishly small against it. Through the sparse hair, over the hard-won muscle and the softer give laid over it, and that one you give a greedy squeeze. His nipple tightens under the heel of your hand and he jerks, shocked enough to look double-crossed by his own body, so you do it again.
“Gods,” he says, strangled.
“Good?”
His answer comes late, dragged through the teeth. “Aye," he says, though the mind still lingers in the country of mortification. Arms begin their raise, some old reflex reaching to cover himself, to help you or stop you, or simply manage the unbearable position of being wanted.
You swat them away, go back to cradling his jaw, and tell him softly, "Don't." He freezes, then melts under your thumbs on his cheekbones. "Don't be scared of me," you whisper.
“I ain't scared of you.”
“You are.”
His face twists, proud even now. “I’m scared of what I’ll do.”
“What will you do?”
"Shame myself," he says. "Fail you, I—"
"You won't," you tell him. "Is it shameful if we are both ruined? I just want to—" A swallow. "I just want to look." You bend over him, and the shift of your hips brings proof to your side of things. Your cunt grinds his stomach, leaves him all slicked and warm, and Duncan learns it helps little to nothing that you are equally fervent. Only makes him worse for it. He lies under you, enormous and nearly unmanned, and hears you whisper an absent, "Let me," a second before your mouth finds his chest.
He goes silent in that alarming way men do when noise has become too small for the body. Every part of him tightens. You kiss him, once, then again, then open your mouth and press your tongue to skin which tastes like freedom you have with him on the road, human and dear, and when your teeth graze him he gasps, and your own skin goes hot at the power of it. “You’re beautiful,” you say into him.
He shakes his head hard. “N-no.”
“Yes.”
“No, girl, don’t—”
“Yes,” you say again, and put your mouth lower to make the word enter him another way.
With it, your frame slides down his. His muscles pull tighter for it, cock strains against your stomach, hard and furious with denial, and the sight of him suffering through praise makes something in you go soft and feral both. Your hands glide from his ribs to hips, thumbs follow the inward cut there, then squeeze the warm, soft belt of flesh low on his belly. It's so generous and male and so violently lovely it makes your teeth set. Some songs ought to be rewritten for men like him. Some maiden's graces ought to be stolen back and hung on his foolish body where they belong. The supple flesh at his middle should be praised the way poets praise hips and breasts and long necks. His breadth should be Venusian, size should be called lush. His stubborn, hungry, frightened beauty should have men lighting candles under it and women lying awake from thinking too long.
It feels as if he sets of the beauty in you when he's all across your lips, gentle, coarse, freckled with the body that bears marks of every touch. It blooms easily where your fingers rake him, where your teeth nick him, where you suck and lick and kiss. He blemishes red against milk, and then the milk whole blushes into pink from all the blood that's alive within him, and for you.
“You're so gorgeous,” you murmur, face lost in skin. “It makes me angry that you do not see it.”
"You oughtn't eat those mushrooms," he says, trying for light, coming out pitiful. "They fool your eyes."
Your mouth splits into a smile. "I'm telling the truth," you tell his belly. "Only now I've the courage for it."
"Aye, well." Duncan swallows, and his spine bends towards you with it. "It's doing me harm, girl," he says anyway.
"Hm, good," you hum. Keep going lower, lower still until your nose finds his navel and rests there. The hair thickens beneath your mouth, darkening downwards, and you press your face into it because you can, because he lets you, because the smell of him there goes straight through your skull. You wedge your nose into the small dip of his belly and breathe him in.
It makes him feel like he's dying. Lust has him hard and fevered, yes, but your adoration takes his joints apart. He has imagined your mouth for months in shameful pieces: the shape it takes when you sleep, the wet inside of it when you laugh, the feel of it in a bedroll dream that left him waking guilty and sticky and half-mad with it. Now those same lips chose him, return to him, find new places to be fond over. He has no defence built for being cherished.
“Please,” he says, though he's unsure what he begs for. His hips jump, hand joins the begging in your hair, and you just stay, drunk, half-conscious, with every breathing device body offers devoted to the densest parts of him.
There's no friction to explain it. It's only his mind draining and draining of thought so his blood can fill him elsewhere. He feels himself sweating, muscles in his sacrum thumping, sack going hard as rocks, before he even realises he's going to come simply from this. “My girl—" he tries, voice cracking around it. "Wait. I'm—oh—”
You do hear him, but understand too late. He goes rigid beneath you, helpless and huge, and his lower back lifts off the ground, breath breaks into loud, choked moans, and then he spills so hot against your body it shocks you. A wicked part of you goes yes. Give me. The gentler one holds him through it, sighs all delighted and lets him rut into a poor cradle made of your bodies pressed together.
"I'm sorry," he whispers, shaking. "I'm sorry. Forgive me."
Your head lifts, sluggish, and you catch him turning his face aside, red to the ears. "Forgive you?" you ask.
“I didn’t mean—” He swallows hard. “I should’ve held. I should’ve—”
“Stop,” you say. Come back up to have your eyes level and drag some of the wet with you. "I could kiss you bloody for that.”
You brush the hair off his forehead. It shines satin. Makes him this much more beautiful. He looks at you, dumbfounded and startled, then lets his lids lower when you put your mouth back on him. To his cheek. Then, the high freckle on it you have wanted since before the forest went strange. “Pretty,” you tell him. “Gorgeous. Sweet stupid man.”
“Do not call me sweet after that.”
“I’ll call you what I like.”
He tries to look stern. Fails because your mouth is on his again. Fails worse because he has barely softened at all, still hard, still wanting, already gathering toward the next hunger while shame loosens its fingers from his throat.
His hands come to you, and arrive with less fear. Still careful, but firmer now, dirt-palmed and shaking, learning the shapes that've been bludgeoning him in his sleep. His mouth opens wider, touch slides up, then down, then around, and when you gasp he hears it bright as struck metal and groans as if the sound is next to his ear.
“Tell me,” he says against your lips.
“What?”
“If I do wrong.”
“You won’t.”
“Tell me.”
You look at him then, this great man under you, stubborn and proud and delicate where he has hidden it worst, heart bigger than his body and twice as easy to wound. “I’ll tell you,” you say. “And I’ll tell you when it’s right.”
His eyes close briefly. “Aye,” he breathes. “Do that.”
"And you tell me," you say, "what do you want."
“Your neck,” he says, gathering you closer. Rising to sit, and pulling you with him. You let yourself be lifted and sat back onto his lap. "The nape." His voice roughens. "I want—Seven forgive me, I want to smell you there."
The wish should be strange. It is strange. It feels like a hand closing under your ribs. “Then do it,” you tell him.
He finds your hips and turns you, guiding rather than hauling, mouth already searching for the place before he has settled you. You feel him shift, chest coming to your back, breath over your shoulder, and when his nose presses where it ought to, he makes a sound so low it seems to enter the ground before it enters you.
“Gods,” he says.
You brace yourself on both hands. “What?”
There's no proper answer. Just mouth opening over skin, wet and hot and shaking. He breathes you in there, kisses, breathes again, each pass less composed than the one before. His groan reaches your spine as heat before sound.
One permission opens the next in him. More private. You let him smell you without recoiling or calling him a creep, and worse—seem to enjoy it, because the sweet scent of your cunt joins all the other ones. The locked, starved part of Duncan takes the gift and grows bold from enduring it. Your body softens forward, the shape of yes becomes flesh under him. It loosens something old and badly tied. If he may put his mouth here, then he may want the slope of your back. If he may want that, then perhaps the weight of himself over you is no crime. Perhaps wanting to cover you is only wanting, and no beast’s law until he makes it one.
He presses you down and you go willingly, sinking onto the moss, cheek turned to the side, hips lifting because Gods, I want you here, I want you right here. The earth gives as if it has been waiting to receive the shape of you both and smells loud.
Then, his frame comes over you. One arm wedges itself across your shoulders, the other braces on the ground. His weight lowers in pieces: chest to back, belly to pelvis, cock—slick and warm—to ass, calves to your feet, and it thrills you that there is so much of him still going on when you yourself end.
“I want you like this,” he says, mouth to your ear.
Your arms weaken. “Dunk.”
Your voice makes gold flare behind his eyes. He sees it, absurdly, as his name leaves your mouth: gold struck thin, gold swallowed, gold caught in the hollow under his tongue. His arm tightens, asking with the pressure before his mouth can manage the question. “Can I? Have you like this?”
“Yes,” you near cry. “Yes. Take me.”
Duncan closes his eyes. Settles a bit heavier. “Too much?” he asks, wrecked.
“No.” You push back against him, furious with tenderness. “I swear to the Seven, I’ll bite you. More, Duncan. Give me more.”
Your restlessness does something terrible to him. So he gives you more, in small increments, though he wants to give you all of it at once. Shields you with himself until the forest air can hardly get between you. You feel his heart hammering through his chest, buzzing like it's bees sealed under bark, and him rolling his hips into the plush of your buttocks. The promise of him is tremendous—slick, large, rigid, veined perfectly, with a thick blunt head that barely squeezes itself through the crease, and heavy, potent balls, ready to fill you up to the brim.
“I want you,” he murmurs at your ear, words broken by the drag of his pelvis. “I want you so much. Wanted you—Gods, I wanted—”
“Then have me,” you whine and almost impale yourself on him. Duncan huffs a laboured breath, trembles when his hand leaves the dirt to guide himself inside you and you welcome the sweet weight pressing your shape into the ground. He's all over you. His scent has bled over to your tissues. His thighs flex over yours, and then, oh—
"Fuck—" he grits, and it's deeply satisfying. The crown breaches you. The whole wood pulses dark green, copper, red at the roots. The girth splits you. Only then do you remember how unbearable the need has been, because the answer to it comes shaped like Duncan and hurts accordingly. Your body takes him by inches, each one too much until the next one proves it survivable. He pushes in so slowly you can make out the build of him in your mind, impossibly present, taking his place through clench and that bright pain that flashes behind your eyes whenever your body tries to change its mind.
“Easy,” he pants, though there is nothing easy in him. “Easy, girl.”
He grips your hip, shaking so much the fingers jump on you. Holds himself there, barely inside enough to destroy you, nowhere near enough to save you. The restraint of it turns wicked. You feel the carefulness in him like another ache, another place he refuses to fill. “Duncan,” you whisper, pleading.
“I know,” he says. “I know.”
“You don’t.”
He tries to breathe. You feel it against your back, great lungs straining, arm tight across you. He gives you another inch and your vision darkens. Your thighs start quivering under his, badly enough that he stops. “Sweetheart,” he says. “You were to tell me.”
“I am telling you.”
“You’re shaking.”
“Yes." You swallow. Find his forearm and squeeze it meanly until your nails leave dents there. "Because you stopped.”
He hides in the back of your neck. For a second Dunk seems to lose the whole battle against himself there, hips twitching, cock dragging deeper by a cruel little accident that makes you choke on his name. He goes still immediately, horrified by his own body, and you could howl from the piety of it.
“Keep going,” you say.
“I’ll hurt you.”
“N-no—it hurts wherever you aren’t,” you say, and he groans. “Please,” you say, needy, crazed, with your truth made fanatic. “Duncan, please. I need you. I need you, I need you—”
"Gods damn it, girl," he says. "Gods damn it, I need you too."
He pushes in farther. Rougher, all of him, setting you aflame from the inside. Your body empties of room for hunger or air or shame, because he's taken up all of the space within it. He rolls his hips and finds another impossible depth, making the burn open into something lovely enough to frighten you.
“There,” you sob. "Right there."
He is all over you. In you. Around you. Heavy enough to press your breath into the earth, careful enough that you can feel forbearance shivering through him. His groan comes against your spine before your ears receive it, and when his mouth opens by your neck, all you can do is push back and take the shape he has made of you.
Then, Duncan's hips lift. He feels himself dragging all the way back, and your cunt grips him on the exit like it disagrees with the hollowing. "Fuck, you're so—" he says. Sinks back in, faster, hungrier, worse, better, more, and finds that however little space the angle grants you, you use it wisely. Push your sweet ass out for him until your bodies meet with a wet slap and only then does he understand how wet you've made yourself for him. How ready you are. How willing.
He slots flush to you and finishes his thought: "—tight."
"Gods, fuck me more," you say. "Dunk—"
His name turns gold behind his eyes again. Brighter this time, struck hard enough to spark. He works his muscles and feels the colour burst through his skull, down his spine, into the hand he has braced across you.
“Like this?” he asks, already doing it again.
“Yes," you breathe. "Jus' like that. Oh, fuck—”
So he gives it to you. Just like that.
The boy in him, the one who blushes and stammers and hides his wants under duty until duty starts to resemble cowardice, gets shouldered aside by something broader. Some man’s part of him with dirt under its nails and your heat round its cock and no room left for pretty suffering. He still holds you with care; that remains. But his hips are done pretending they do not know what they want.
He fucks you harder, and the moss takes the force of it. Your fingers claw into green and black and flesh of his forearm. His palm slips in the dirt and catches again. The earth smells damp and opened. Leaves taste bitter on the air, and beneath all of it is you: hot, slick, clenching down each time he draws back as if your body would rather keep him entire.
“Duncan,” you gasp.
He buries his face against the back of your neck. “Say it again.”
“Duncan.”
Gold, again. He groans, broken loose enough that his mouth starts working without permission. “You’re beautiful,” he says. "So beautiful."
You laugh, though it comes out ragged. “Now?”
“Aye, now.” His hips grind deep on the word. “Especially now.”
“Liar.”
“No.” He lifts enough to look down the line of you, the turn of your cheek, the sweat on your neck, the place where your malleable body strains under his and endures more, asks for more than he would ever suspect. “You are. Gods, you are. I can scarce stand it.”
You shudder around him. That does him harm, too.
He drops his mouth to your ear. “If the sun never came up, I’d not care. If this wood kept us here and there was only this, only you under me, I’d—” His voice catches. He drives into you again, short and rough. “I’d be a worse man than I thought.”
“You’d be honest,” you say, smiling. Exhilarated. Turn your face enough that your cheek drags in the moss. “Tell me more.”
That should shame him. It does, but the shame is toothless. The mushrooms have made a ruin of his monastery for silence, and his body has found the ruin agreeable. “I hate when men look at you,” he says.
Your breathing trips. “What?”
“I hate it.” His hand tightens on your ribs, then loosens quickly, remembering. “In inns. On roads. When you smile to get us bread cheaper. When some man thinks you soft because you’ve a soft mouth, or thinks you easy because you are kind, or thinks—” He thrusts harder, angry now, the memory of every look finding your body through his. “I know what they think.”
You push back into him, mean with pleasure. “How do you know?”
He goes still for half a breath. Then his mouth finds the shell of your ear, and his voice drops so low it seems dragged from the ground.
“I am a man.”
There. There it is. The confession under all confessions. He has looked too. He has thought. He has watched the curve of your smile over a cup, the bend of your back by the fire, the softness of your mouth in sleep, and made himself suffer for it as if suffering could make him clean. He has wanted with the rest of them and hated them for wanting less carefully.
You clench around him so hard his forehead knocks between your shoulder blades.
“Seven hells,” he chokes.
“Were you thinking too?” you ask, cruel because you need him to say it.
“Aye.”
“What?”
His hips start again, less measured, sloppier and greater for it. The more they do, the more you drip for him and Duncan no longer knows anything. He just feels.
“Your mouth," he says. "Your hands. How you’d sound if I—” He loses the sentence inside you and has to drag it back by force. “How you’d look under me. Over me. Anywhere. I thought of you so much I near made myself sick with it.”
“Good,” you pant.
“Good?”
“Yes. I wanted you sick.”
He gets punched to the gut by sheer force of words. Drives into you harder, close and blunt and heavy, his arm drawing you up enough that your back bows under him. His chest drags over your skin and hums through you, hair falls forward, tickling your cheek. His mouth returns to your neck as if that place has become a home he means to worry open.
“My girl,” he mutters.
“Yes,” you breathe.
“My girl?”
“Yes, Duncan, yours, just—fuck—”
More, more, more is what you want, so he gives it. Gives you more because you asked and because he has wanted to be asked for so long the wanting has grown limbs. He gives you the weight, and the girth of him until the tip touches the spot that makes you go there. There, right there, fuck me there, more, you keep saying. He smiles through it, nods through it, and despite his balls going laden enough to feel heavier than whole of him, he still manages to tease you.
“There?” Duncan asks.
“There," you say. "There, don’t stop.”
Your legs tense. Feet curl against his calves, and your toes find them for purchase. He wonders if he is deep enough to dent the earth beneath your belly when he fills you. If you will be sore from him. If you will let him soothe you with his mouth after.
“I wouldn’t,” he says, and then feels the change in you. The hardening of your buttocks under him. The faint tremor starting low, travelling outward through muscle, your body drawing itself tight around the place where he is buried. His hips falter, then go meaner because you push back for it. “Close?”
“Oh, fuck, Dunk.” Your face has gone into the dirt. Your cheek, your mouth, all that cleverness pressed to moss and leaf-mould while you pant under him like the ground has stolen the rest of your words. “Fuck, my darling, I—”
His whole body stumbles at that. “Say that again.”
“Yes—” you breathe instead, uselessly, beautifully. Your thighs shake beneath his. “Darling, Oh Gods, yes—”
You tighten on him. Duncan chokes. His arm bands across you with a blind little jerk, keeping you under him, keeping himself in you, his other hand clawing at the earth by your shoulder. “Girl—”
Then it has you. Breaks hot and huge through your nerves, too large for the body it has been given. Your hands seize in the ground. Hips kick back into him and then can do nothing but bear it, taking the thick drag of him through each bright pulse while the world opens its wet mouth around you. Soil at your cheek. Leaves green on the tongue of the air. His chest heavy over your back, a low-humming cage. His breath at your neck, ragged and stunned. His cock inside you, absolute.
Pleasure rolls through so fiercely it feels delivered, brought down to you by the only body that could have carried it. Your Venusian boy. Your tall knight. Your man with the freckled face and the foolish, breakable heart. You had wanted him before the mushrooms. You want him through them. You will want him when the forest has spat you both out into ordinary daylight and made cowards of all this green magic.
“Duncan,” you sob into the dirt.
He tries to hold. For one more breath, he tries. There is some last thread in him that thinks of weight, of gentleness, of the promise he made you with his mouth and his shaking hands. Then you clench again, deep and helpless, sucking him in as if your body means to wring the marrow out of him, and the thread snaps clean.
He slots himself tight to you. All the way in, hips pressed hard to your ass, whole of him poured over you, size finally surrendered to yours with no cleverness left in it. His mouth goes into your hair.
“Fuck,” he bites out. “Fuck, fuck—Seven—”
He comes worse than the first time. Brutal enough that he thinks, distantly, he might go blind from it. His body drives deep and stays there, sack flattened against you, him spilling hard into the tight, shuddering hold while the whole woods dissolve from his vision. His groan tears out loud, then breaks into something rawer. Teeth catch in your hair. For a moment he forgets how much of him there is, forgets all the roads he failed to find, forgets everything. Remembers his girl only.
“My girl,” he cries into your hair, ruined with it. “Gods—my girl.”
Several heartbeats continue the spending in him as aftershock, profound and almost soundless. It leaves him hollowed in a way hunger never managed, emptied clean through and simple with awe: he has put himself in you. Some living of him has gone where his hands and mouth and morning thoughts have been circling for months, and no witchcraft can explain the feeling spreading through his ribs now. That is his own. The fierce gladness of being allowed to give you something his body made, before sense arrives and worries it with teeth.
“Oh—” you say.
It is the first small sound either of you has made that belongs to the after. Thin, dazed, almost curious. Duncan hears it and comes back to himself by ugly degrees: ground under his knees, sweat cooling along his spine, the fist of his hand in your hair, the full weight of him poured over you as if you are something the earth gave him to smother.
“Seven hells,” he whispers. Gathers himself off you with a haste that makes both of you wince, then gets an arm beneath your ribs and rolls you with him onto your sides. The movement is clumsy, tender, terrible. You end up tucked against him, his chest to your back for another breath, his mouth at the crown of your head, both of you still joined in the softening.
“Did I hurt you?” he asks.
You laugh. It comes out loose and pleased and completely unhelpful.
Duncan lifts himself enough to look at your face. “That is no answer.”
“I know.” You turn your head with difficulty, cheek streaked with dirt, eyes gone drowsy in a way that makes him ache all over again. “Ask me again when my bones remember their duties.”
His brow pulls, worried despite everything. “How do you feel?”
“Like I’ve been taken apart and put back wrong.” Your smile curls, lazy and wicked at the edge. “Happy.”
Satisfied enough, he eases himself from you, jaw tight with the sensation, and then goes still. For a second he only stares, caught by the sight of his seed slipping warm down your thigh, white as milk, taking grains of dirt with it. Wonder hits first. Possession after. Then sense comes in like cold water poured down his neck. “Oh, Gods,” he breathes.
You turn into him before he can get any farther into horror, nuzzling your face against his chest as if you mean to burrow under the skin there and quiet the heart hammering beneath it. “Don’t worry,” you murmur. “I know how to make moon tea. Hush. Just—hush a moment.”
His hand hovers above your back, then settles, broad and shaking. “You are sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“And the itching?” he asks. “Is it still on you?”
You tip your face up enough to look at him. The forest has begun to dull around the edges. Green is green again, mostly. His hair is only light brown where damp has darkened it, though a warm thread still catches in it when he moves. The air no longer tastes quite so loudly of leaves. “No,” you say. “All my itches have been scratched.”
Duncan nods, solemn as a septon receiving grave news, and draws you closer. You let him have that for three breaths. Then, you add: “Doesn’t mean I won’t itch again.”
His face changes so quickly it makes you laugh: worry struck through, then comprehension, then that wide boyish smile he has been hoarding from you like a miser. He laughs too, and the sound rolls through his chest into your cheek.
“I’ve got you all covered in dirt,” he says, as if this is suddenly the great shame of the hour.
His palms move over you, brushing at your shoulder, your arm, the smear along your hip, making a worse mess of it because his hands are filthy too. The gentleness of the attempt makes your throat pinch.
“Yeah, you brute,” you say. “Manhandling me like that. So unknightly—”
He cuts you off with his mouth. Better for it, like he's taken the lesson and learnt carefully. Long, deep, with no hunger's panic or teeth knocking, and no witchcraft dragging him by the blood. Loving too, with his hand at your jaw, thumb near the mouth's corner. You soften into him. Breath leaves him through his nose. He tastes only of ruined man.
When he lets you go, his forehead stays against yours. “Will you listen to me next time?” he asks.
You look down and trail your fingers through the hair on his chest, damp and curling under your touch. “No.”
His eyes open. “No?”
“I would go hungry another week if this is where it gets us.”
“Girl,” he says, despairing and fond in equal measure. He wraps you in before you can make it worse, chin settling on the top of your head. You feel the shape of his smile there, hidden in your hair. Beyond him, the trees stand dense and black and wet, all their malice used up or merely bored of you at last.
Then Duncan goes still. “Hey,” he says quietly.
You shift against him. “What?”
His hand smooths once over your back, then points past your shoulder. You twist to look, and between the close trunks, farther ahead than any path had shown itself before, light pours through in a clean, ordinary sheet.
“Look,” he says.
"Gods be good," you say. "See? You ought to trust me more."
"As if that is your doing," Duncan huffs, all exasperated but still endeared.
"Hush, knight," you tell him. "Or I will eat you."
Duncan mutters something about never eating anything you hand him again, then takes your hand before you can answer. It rather spoils the threat.
Highlighting this part here because I teared up and my soul left my body when I read it:
"[…] You kiss him, once, then again, then open your mouth and press your tongue to skin which tastes like freedom you have with him on the road, human and dear, and when your teeth graze him he gasps, and your own skin goes hot at the power of it. “You’re beautiful,” you say into him.
He shakes his head hard. “N-no.”
“Yes.”
“No, girl, don’t—”
“Yes,” you say again, and put your mouth lower to make the word enter him another way.
With it, your frame slides down his. His muscles pull tighter for it, cock strains against your stomach, hard and furious with denial, and the sight of him suffering through praise makes something in you go soft and feral both. Your hands glide from his ribs to hips, thumbs follow the inward cut there, then squeeze the warm, soft belt of flesh low on his belly. It's so generous and male and so violently lovely it makes your teeth set. Some songs ought to be rewritten for men like him. Some maiden's graces ought to be stolen back and hung on his foolish body where they belong. The supple flesh at his middle should be praised the way poets praise hips and breasts and long necks. His breadth should be Venusian, size should be called lush. His stubborn, hungry, frightened beauty should have men lighting candles under it and women lying awake from thinking too long.
It feels as if he sets of the beauty in you when he's all across your lips, gentle, coarse, freckled with the body that bears marks of every touch. It blooms easily where your fingers rake him, where your teeth nick him, where you suck and lick and kiss. He blemishes red against milk, and then the milk whole blushes into pink from all the blood that's alive within him, and for you."
Like?? Yes, YES, all of this, just LOOK at this man he deserves every bit of this and then some, from that gorgeous copper hair all the way down to his toes! ;_;
This entire story is the most gorgeous, heart-achingly stunning ode to Dunk's beauty, and combining that with such a fun take on sex pollen is truly a gift to Blorbo and us, what a privilege to get to enjoy reading <3
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