“is that cock you’re thinkin’ about baby? thinkin’ about jackie’s cock?” he coos, tilting his neck to demand eye contact.
you’re staring forward, teary-eyed and trembling, shivering under his gooey gaze. you don’t know why you’ve been so needy, don’t know what came over you to weepily walk over to jack at this bar and grip his wrist. maybe it’s because it’s the first time you’re seeing him all day, tummy swirling with warmth and insatiable desire for his attention at all times.
maybe that’s just what it is to be jack abbot’s girl— a push and pull that controls you, not the other way around.
you, ever overly-emotional you, start to cry at his tone. a big, fat tear coursing down your cheek as you pout and nod and he stands straight. “alright baby, let’s go, c’mon.” leading you away from his coworkers, jack nods, your back to his front as you walk. he holds you to him, arm around your tummy & sliding to your hip before you get to his truck.
buckling yourself in, it’s almost pathetic to see how low your head is hung as you wait for the warmth of him on the bench next to you. sliding in a with a pop of his knees & a groan, jack massages his knee for a second before turning to you. “want me to play with you a little before we get home? can your brain handle that now, honey?” “yea” you nod desperately, wide eyed and biting your lip to stop crying again. “yeah? okay baby, thereee we go. all good now, huh?” he slides his hand into your panties, finger tips resting just under your slit; nearly sucking them in as he palms at your clit & starts the engine. “gonna fuck you so good when we get home, baby. promise. okay? daddy promises.” he breathes against your hair, kissing you before pulling away <3
“and where do you think you’re going?” andrew jokes, holding his widespread stance against the kitchen island as his head swivels to follow you. his tight, gray t-shirt clings to his arms that bulge as he watches you flit about the living room. “my nail appointment” you chirp out happily, jingling your car keys as you look for your sunglasses. “baby, have you seen my sunnies?” “here.”
andrew pulls a wad of cash out of his jeans, the stack held together by a pink rubber band. pulling out a few $20s, he puts them in your hand before straightening his stance as he stretches his neck and body. his shirt rides up, exposing the tanned freckled skin of his belly, and your face heats at the fading hickies.
you’re well versed in how to respond to your generous husband. he hates when you refuse money, hates it even more when you look guilty taking it. so you smile, a genuinely happy toothy grin, and lean forward to kiss him. “mmmmmwah! thank you baby! ”
andrew’s ears are tickled pink, his strong, veiny arm coming around your waist to cuddle you to him as you peck his cheek over & over. settling on his lips, he whines, holding you close before smacking your ass as you walk out. shaking your excessive keychain, you squeal happily as you walk out.
before continuing his conversation with his brothers, pope calls out “do you have enough gas?” “um… yeah! it’s like one notch-ish above E!” you continue walking out, oblivious to his anxieties.
if the ac works & the radio & gas & brakes, what else could be wrong? it’s a luxury to be so unbothered, a luxury only andrew can afford his girl to have!
shaking his head with a smile, he sighs, grabbing his keys and following out after you, “go wait by my car princess, ‘m driving you.”
on the way out the door, he has you tucked into his side with his arm thrown lovingly around your neck. tickling you with his whispers as you walk, he tells you “gonna give me a fuckin heart attack one of these days, you know that?” and when you giggle in response to his teasing, he squeezes you tighter to him, “what color are you gonna get? you doin’ your toes too?”
pairing — underground fighter!andrew ‘pope’ cody x fem!reader
summary — pope cody’s got himself a girl he’s sweet on who works on him between rounds, and there’s no part of him that can imagine the thought of leaving you.
warnings — ( 14.5k words ) 18+ MINORS DNI !! explicit sexual content ( p in v, m!receiving oral, pope’s got a size kink, marking, scratching, praise kink, softdom!pope, slightly needy!pope? he’s also rly awkward during sex) slow burn-ish, no physical appearance described of reader (small hands + general size difference noted in relation to pope, no other physical descriptors) obsessive!pope, guns and threat at gunpoint, financial exploitation of reader - she’s paying off a debt by working, brief harassment scene, hurt/comfort and hurt/no comfort, violence, blood + injuries, emotional ending, incarceration, brief mentions of drug use, absent parent, protective!pope, reader’s guarded / slow to trust, unwanted touching (not from pope), pope has a heavy savior complex in this, no use of y/n, pope’s pov, canon-compliant (ish) but it’s pre-season one.
notes — this one got a little away from me and i’m already Sorry it’s a shawn hatosy summer!!! also i’m laughing to myself ab this fic bc the original plot was gonna be so different but this is just the way the cookie crumbled while writing + experimented with a different writing style bc i just think pope’s pov would feel like a lot at once
Craig had made some pretty stupid decisions in his life. He blew his money on blow and bikes most of the time, but once in a blue moon, he made decisions that really cut it, like putting in over three grand into Pope across a single night. Money Craig didn’t even have, money he’d borrowed off a man people didn’t borrow off, because he watched Pope punch a bag by the pool and put a body on the concrete in a parking lot behind a bar and decided his older brother was an investment.
It was, as it turned out. Pope won. Craig got his three grand back and then some, and that was how the basement off Atlantic became a regular thing, because Craig had a taste for it now and Pope had a use for cash that didn’t run through Smurf’s shady fingers first.
The crowd there was the worst he’d stood in front of, and he’d grown up in Smurf’s living room, so that was a measurement that meant something. Men who bet money they needed and meant to take the loss of someone’s skin. The air thick enough to chew, smoke and sweat and the bitterness of a room full of people who’d collectively decided this was the night their luck was going to turn.
Pope wanted to lose just so they’d fuck off.
It was run by a guy named Leo who’d met Craig at a party, late, both of them lit and certain they were about to make each other rich. Leo had the basement, the crowd, the connections that made cops uninterested, and a way of talking that made one-track-minded guys like Craig feel like they were cut in on something even as he was lifting your wallet. Pope didn’t trust him. Pope didn’t trust anybody, but he distrusted Leo with a specificity that felt like respect.
Leo ran the place like a man who’d thought about every cent in a dollar twice. Nothing in that basement was there by accident, which was how Pope knew, eventually, that you weren’t either.
The first night he didn’t put it together. He came up out of the third round with his ears ringing and his knuckles screaming and somebody pressed a wet rag to the back of his neck, and his body did what it always did. He came around with his elbow up and the words already out of his mouth. “Get the fuck off me.”
You went still. You were crouched down close enough that he could see you’d done your eyes earlier in the night and they’d worn through, smudged soft at the corners, and that should have made you look tired and instead made you look like you’d been left out in the weather, gentled by it. There was a smear of someone else’s blood drying brown along your jaw—not yours, you didn’t have a mark on you, you were the only clean thing in a room built for ruining people—and you hadn’t wiped it off because your hands had been busy all night being careful with men who were far from deserving it.
“Okay,” you said, and that was all. You stayed crouched in front of him, an arm’s length back now, holding the rag out where he could take it himself if he wanted it.
He felt like garbage. It all arrived once, the way it did with him, fine one second and then sick with it. You couldn’t have been much more than a bucket and tape to anybody else in that room, just the girl who patched them up, and he’d snapped at you like you were one of the men in the room baying for his blood.
He took the rag off your hands.
And you just went back to it. You pulled his hand into both of yours like nothing had happened, like he hadn’t just shown you the worst of himself in the first ten seconds of knowing you, and started cleaning the wreck of his knuckles with a little furrow between your brows. Devotional, almost. Like his hand had been lent to you and you were supposed to return it in good condition.
It was then he realized Leo had gotten way too lucky with you. He was sure you were used as nothing but a front. You were something soft to put at the edge of all that ugliness so men had a reason to keep their money in the room a little longer. A girl who patched up fighters, sure, but mostly a thing for them to look at, to crowd, to reach for between rounds.
Pope wouldn’t admit it to Craig, or any of his brothers, ever, that the only reason he came back the next time was to see you again. He knew his words and then his sudden muteness probably made you read him as one more man to be careful around. He’d handed you that impression himself, and now he had to live inside it.
The second night, you didn’t tend to him. There was another girl near the bucket—older, harder, a cigarette tucked behind her ear and no softness in her hands at all—and she did his corner between rounds like she was wiping off a dusty counter. Pope sat there and let her and looked for you over her shoulder the whole time, which was how he found you across the room, working the cash, the cigar box against your chest as your lips moved over the count.
Pope hardly believed in coincidences. He was sure he’d snapped and you’d adjusted by putting a body between yourself and the man who’d shown his teeth. It was the smart thing. It was exactly what he’d have told you to do if he were anyone other than the man it was being done to. It sat in his chest all night like a swallowed stone, the understanding that he’d gotten precisely what he deserved and hated every second of it.
He won. He always did; that was the whole problem with him, the thing that made his Craig rich now and him useful to Smurf and left Pope standing in basements full of people who wanted to watch him hurt somebody. The crowd howled, money changed hands, and Pope barely heard whatever Leo was saying because he was watching you seal the night’s take into a zip bag and press the air out of it with the flat of your hand carefully.
He found you after, by the stairs, when the room had thinned to the stragglers and the smell of it had gone stale. He came up slow, hands where you could see them.
“You drew the short straw last week,” he said, the words coming out of him too rehearsed, because that’s what he’d been doing since he noticed you and while getting his guts punched. “Patching me up.”
You looked up at him. Up close, your worn-soft eyes were tired. “I just asked Kate to take your corner tonight.”
So, not a coincidence. He’d already known, yet it did something ugly to him. He already had people who he’d known his entire life scared of him—brothers who were career criminals—and he’d made peace with it, like he had to with everything he couldn’t change. But it landed differently from you, because you didn’t have the years to back the wariness up.
“Right,” he said, because what else was there to say?
You tilted your head, just slightly, and scanned his face like you were checking it for swelling. He knew there was none, not today. He still held still. He realized he’d have held still for anything you wanted to do to his face.
Whatever you were looking for, it seemed like you hadn’t found it. Or maybe you had. Your gaze caught on his mouth, under his jaw, and you clicked your tongue.
“You’re not —” You shook your head faintly. “It’s easier,” you said finally, “to not get in the way of guys like you. That’s all. It’s nothing personal.”
Guys like you. Jesus. He wanted to ask you what that meant, even though he knew. He was guys like him. He’d spent thirty-some years being exactly that. But he wanted, with an intensity that made no sense, to be not that to you.
Any other guy would have let it go. A smarter man, a less stupid one, would’ve said that was a fair enough explanation and left you to your transparent zip bags and never come back to you unless you did to him.
“It is though,” Pope said, voice too rough. “Personal. I wasn’t—right, after the third round.” The words, his voice, everything came out clumsy, and he briefly wondered if his eyes had dropped down his face and his nose had turned upside down. “You don’t have to put Kate—or whoever there. I’m not gonna—” He wasn’t sure how he wanted to end the sentence. “I’d rather it was you.”
He suddenly felt like a complete idiot all over again when he watched your brows furrow slightly and your lips press together as you looked at him almost sadly. Then you let out a disbelieving chuckle as you shook your head as you twisted your neck slightly to look around.
“Is this gonna be a problem?” you said, lowering your voice, glancing off to the side. Checking, he realized, who was still on the stairs, who might be close enough to hear.
That was its own answer to a question he hadn’t been able to ask yet. It told him there were people you didn’t want knowing this, even though there was hardly a ‘this.’
“What?” Pope asked, playing dumb just so he could hear the words from you.
“You.” You brought your eyes back to him, and he felt slightly shaken as you pinned him with a glare that seemed almost gentle. “Saying things like that.” Your voice stayed even, but there was an edge working into it now. “I do my job here. I keep my head down—that’s better for me, okay?”
He didn’t get that. Not really. But he heard the need in it.
“Nobody’s gonna bother you,” he said roughly. It came out flat and certain, it always did when he was truly sure of himself. “Not while I’m here.”
You just looked at him like that again. “Go home, Pope—”
“Andrew,” he said, and he didn’t even know why he did.
He hated that name just as much as Pope. It was just another thing Smurf had handed him that never fit anywhere in his growing life. To the room he was Pope. On the cards he counted, he was Pope. He’d been Pope so long he sometimes forgot there was anything under it. But he didn’t want to be Pope to you. Pope was guys like him. Pope was the thing on the cards coked-up wishful men put their money on. He had no clean self to offer you—God knew he didn’t—but he had the name hardly anybody used often, and so he gave you that, stupidly, like it’d be worth something to you.
His pulse climbed into his throat. He had the sick, racing feeling he got right before things went sideways, the one that had been wrong about as often as it was right and that he'd never once been able to switch off.
“Andrew,” you said, testing it quietly in your mouth, where Pope felt everything landed differently for some reason. And then you looked at him again, and said, “Go home, Andrew.”
Thankfully, by some grace of God, Pope realized he may not have done it all wrong when you came to patch him up after the first round the following week. You dropped down onto the concrete in front of him with the bucket and the brown bottle and a roll of tape gone soft at the edges from your thumb.
You took his hand like nothing had been said, as though the conversation on the stairs had been filed somewhere and this was the conclusion you’d come to on your own time, and Pope felt that he should let that be, instead of pointing it out. He’d learned that much, and tamped down the feeling like his entire week had paid off.
“You lead with right too much,” you said, looking at his hands. “When you’re tired. You drop the left and lead with the right. That’s how they got your eyebrow.”
Pope parted his lips and blinked. “You watch me?”
“I watch the cash.” You pressed the tape down over his knuckle. “Fights are what make them move, but yeah.” You shrugged, and it was stiff. “You drop your left.”
Pope stayed silent for a moment, then asked, dumbly, “You a fighter?”
It was meant to land as dry, a joke, but it never quite did with him.
You let out the smallest of chuckles. “I watch men get hit everyday.”
Pope swallowed, not sure how to respond to that. So he watched the top of your head instead, the part in your hair, the concentration you put into doing a job that probably paid no extra if you did it well. You wrapped him efficiently, all business now, and Pope felt that you’d closed a door he hadn’t realized you’d opened.
It should have frustrated him. Instead, it made him want to earn that inch back slow, the way you’d coax anything that didn’t trust easy. He knew that wanting. He had it about a dog once, a half-feral thing that lived in the corners of the Cody Compound for a summer, that he’d fed in silence for weeks before it let him near. He’d never told anyone about that dog. He thought about it now, crouched-down you and careful tape, and didn’t enjoy what it told him about himself.
“You’re done,” you said, and stood briskly.
“Hey,” he said, the word coming out before he could think it. “Thanks.”
You looked at him a second, and whatever you found in him, it earned him the corner of a smile. You must not have been used to being thanked very often. Pope flexed his wrapped hand, feeling something close to proudness. He wasn’t sure for what, exactly, but it felt good for the moment.
For three weeks, you rationed out small jokes that he was almost sure you didn’t realize were jokes, taped him up, and left Pope driving home with whatever you’d given him that night turning over in his chest.
His fight hadn’t started yet. He leaned up against the support post by the stairs, hood up, trying to do everything he could to make himself look very still and very boring so the crowd would forget to look at him. From there, he had a clean line of the cash table, which meant he had a clean line on you, which was the actual reason he’d stood there.
There was a man at your table. Big, going soft in the middle, a Lakers cap on backward and loose, oozing the sleazy confidence of someone past four beers and good judgement. He’d been talking to you a while, Pope noticed. You were wearing a smile aimed past his shoulder—a small, pleasant, and all around absent thing—and Pope watched you do it with a protective switch under his thumb.
The man reached over and tucked a bill into your bra, slowly, like it was funny. Two fingers folded the bill below your collarbone, and you went rigid, smile staying in place while everything behind it moving.
You went somewhere way back behind your own eyes the way Pope had watched you go a dozen times, and the man laughed at his own joke and left his hand there a beat too long.
The trouble with Pope was that most of the time, he never decided. One second he was against the post and the next he had the man’s wrist in his hand and he was bending it back off you, almost politely.
“Wrong,” Pope drawled, plucking the bill out of your collar with his free hand and pressed it to the man’s palm. He closed the man’s fingers over them. “Cash goes in the box.”
“The hell’re you —” The man turned to get a real look at him, and got the whole of him. The hood and the wrapped hands and Pope’s uncanny stillness, and Pope watched the recognition arrive, and the bluster went out of him like the air on your sealed bags. “Pope—hey, man. No harm. No harm.”
“Sure.” Pope let go of the wrist and the guy immediately melted back into the crowd. The whole thing had taken maybe nine seconds and Pope’s pulse hadn’t even climbed, which it should’ve, but some animal thing under him had considered this easy.
“Why would you do that?” you said, voice quieting.
“He had his hands on you.” His voice came out defensive, which he hated, because it made him understand that he’d done something wrong before he could even process it. “I’m not standing here watching some creep—”
“That was Reyes,” you said, like it meant something. It didn’t, not to Pope, and your face did something between fury and despair as he realized this. “He runs paper for Leo. You just—” You pressed your lips together and looked around quickly, the same way you’d done on the stairs except this time he could see real fear attached in it. “I don’t—I don’t need people thinking a Cody’s got a thing for me,” you finished, quieter. “You don’t.”
“What if I—”
“You don’t, okay?” It came out sharper than you’d intended, and he saw how you caught it. “It’s fine. It’s no big deal.” You were already looking away, gathering the cash box against your chest, busying yourself. “I really am better when people don’t worry about me, Andrew.”
You tucked a piece of hair back, gave him a quick, tired ghost of a smile that didn't reach anything, and stepped back into the crowd with your box like the last nine seconds could be put away with everything else you put away.
There was that horrible feeling tightening in his stomach again. He knew he’d done the right thing, but there was a frustration in him of being right about the wrong thing. The thing he’d done to help you had immediately become another thing for you to be frightened of, clean up, another man’s decision landing on your plate.
You’d probably spent your entire life cleaning up after other people’s choices and he’d just handed you one more.
He fought ugly and won ugly, which was somehow worse than losing altogether. The crowd got what it paid for and then some, and Pope walked out with a rib that clicked when he breathed and a cut over the eye he’d earned by leading with the right all night like the idiot you’d warned him not to be.
He collected off Leo without a word. Pope wasn’t even sure why the guy even bothered to grin and laugh and talk to him while he counted the money; Pope had said around two words to him and won him more than two grand.
He didn’t bother hearing the compliments—the fake, complimenting bit to make sure he came back—and took his roll of cash and shoved it inside his pocket and left out the back.
He went up the concrete steps, into the lot behind the building where the air was at least air instead of four hundred people breathing the same lungful.
He leaned against the cinderblock wall in the dark, in the orange wash of one working lot light, and pressed the heel of his hand under the bad rib and breathed shallow and concentrated on not being anywhere, on going behind his own eyes the way he'd watched you do it, somewhere the night couldn't reach him.
The door opened and shut carefully, and the latter action made him not need to look to know.
“You walked out without letting anybody look at that,” you said.
“I’m fine.”
“No, I can tell,” you said drily, almost amused. Your footsteps came across the lot and stopped a few feet off, not crowding him—you never crowded him—and giving him the room he hadn’t asked for and needed anyway. “I basically heard your ribs.”
He huffed something close to a laugh. It pulled at the rib and he stopped.
Your hands hovered around his body, like you were asking for permission to take a look without saying the words.
“Are you okay?” he asked, forcing the words out roughly. Because he needed to, it’d been gnawing at him for too long. “Is he hurting you?”
Your hands when still where they hovered. You took the rag instead, wet it from the bottle, and reached up to the cut over his eye as though he’d never asked the question.
“Hold still,” you said.
“That’s not—” He caught your wrist, palm loose around it, but he caught it. “I asked you something.”
In the orange light, Pope could see the smudge of your makeup, dark and worn through around your eyes, and the rings on your fingers catching the light each time your hand moved. You let him hold your wrist without pulling away, your eyes dropping to his chest like you’d decided against looking at his face.
He could feel your pulse under his thumb, thrumming. He let go of your wrist with a sigh, and you stepped back into the work, dabbing at the cut, close enough he could feel the warmth coming off you.
You said, after a moment, evenly, “Don’t try to help me.”
“Don’t try to help me.”
“I didn’t say—”
“It’s written all over your face.”
You pressed the rag a little harder than the cut needed and let you, kept his face still, watching yours. You narrowed your eyes at him when he didn’t react to the pressure, as though his stillness annoyed you. Pope didn’t know how you hadn’t realized he’d let you do anything. He’d let you press the rag as hard as you wanted and he’d sit there and take it. He’d stopped having a choice about it a while ago.
That, and the fact that your hands, so small compared to the enormity of him, were the furthest things from the worst he’d taken.
“Are you trying to hurt me?” he asked, amused despite it all.
“If I were, you’d know.” But the corner of your mouth tugged, just barely, before you caught it and put it away. You eased up on the rag. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be.”
For a second, it felt easier between you two again. Then, you remembered yourself, and he watched as your lips pursed.
“I mean it, though,” you said. “Don’t. Whatever you’re sitting there cooking up.”
“You don’t know what I’m cooking up.”
“Andrew,” you said his name flatly, and he felt like a dog at how quickly it got his neck to tilt up to meet your eyes. You hadn’t even spoke and he was looking at you like you’d asked him a question he wanted to get correct.
“You’re not the first one to try this,” you said softly. “It always goes the same way.”
“Yeah?” A muscle ticked in his jaw. “Tell me, then.”
“Either he gets in over his head and screws up.” You wiped the last streak of blood from his brow, your hand coming to rest light against his face to hold him still. He leaned into your palm, the warmth of your hand and him moving into it like it was the most natural thing he’d ever done.
One of your rings sat cool against his cheekbone and he felt that, too, the small contrast of it, cool metal and warm palm, and he was very aware you were still talking and he was having trouble with that.
“ —or he sticks around for long enough to figure out it’s too much trouble, gets bored, and quits. He leaves, and either way I’m standing here worse than before,” you said, conversationally, and he did believe it was a tale as old as time for you.
“I won’t get bored,” he managed to say. “I’m good at what I do.”
“They all say that, too.” You smiled that sad, soft smile again.
You took your hand back off his face and he felt the loss of it like air. He was already thinking about how to get you to put it back, which was probably the most pathetic thought he’d ever had, and he’d had some bad ones.
“When do you fight next? You shouldn’t, for a while. For your ribs.”
He let you change the topic. He noticed you did that often.
“Next week, probably,” he said. “My brother’s already running his mouth about it.”
“Tell your brother your ribs are hurt.” You crouched to gather the bottle, the rag, the soft-edged tape, packing them back into the bucket.
“Where do you go? After this,” he asked.
He watched the careful machinery turn—watched you weigh whether it was a real question or a way in—and then something in you must've been too tired to keep the door shut, because you let it swing.
“Home. My mom’s,” you said. “She’s around, just—not a lot.” You gathered the bucket against your hip. “So it’s me and my brother mostly. He’s eleven.”
The whole shape of you tilted and resettled in the space of the word. Why you watched every dollar like it held something up. You weren't just keeping your own head down. You had a kid behind you, in the blind spot, where the room couldn't reach him.
“He know you’re here?” Pope asked.
“He thinks I wait tables.” The corner of your mouth went up, rueful. “Thinks I’m terrible at it. The tips are all over the place, so.” You shrugged.
Pope cleared his throat. “Are they?”
“This week, yeah,” you said.
“Do you want to?” Pope found himself asking, “Wait tables.”
You looked at him for a long moment that he almost thought you wouldn’t answer. “It’d be nice, I guess. To have steady cashflow and all that.”
“Leo pays you enough?”
You shifted the bucket against your hips. “He doesn’t really—” You stopped yourself, then started again. “The tips are what they are.”
Pope hummed. “That cover everything?”
You looked at him sideways, catching what he was doing. “Most weeks,” you said hesitantly.
“This week?”
You looked off past him, and he watched you decide whether to say it. “My brother’s shoes split,” you said finally, and it’d come out in a small voice. “Bottom’s gone right through it, so.” You shrugged, making a small face as you pinched your eyes shut, like you hated saying it.
Pope took the roll out of the jacket, thumbed off a fold of it without counting and held it out.
You looked at it, then at him. “No.”
“For the kid.”
“Andrew.”
“Take it.” He kept his hand out. “It’s shoes.”
“That’s not—” You stopped. Your jaw worked. He could see all of it going on behind your face, the pride and the rule and the thing you'd spent the last few minutes telling him. “That’s just what I told you not to do.”
“You said not to help you.” He pushed his hand further toward you. “This is shoes for a kid I never met.”
He watched your eyes rise to look at the sky and you shook your head. “You’re making this really hard.”
He tipped his chin down. “Just take it. I don’t need it.”
You took it slow, your fingers closing over his for a second before they took the bills, and you didn't say thank you—he was glad, thanking him would’ve made it a transaction—you just held on to his hand a beat longer than you needed to, and breathed out, shaky, and let it go.
“Please don’t make this a thing,” you said, voice thick. “I can’t—I can’t say no to the money. I wish I could.” You looked at the bills in your hand. “I don’t wanna take things from you.”
He felt himself shrug, eyeing the top of your head as you looked down. “I’d let you.”
He’d meant to keep that to himself. Or he hadn’t. He didn’t really care, though. The money itself was nothing; what he’d just handed you was a rounding error, less than what his brothers dropped in a single night without blinking. It was the kind of number that moved in the Cody household without anyone thinking to count it; money they’d find between the cushions from five years ago.
He had more coming in than he knew what to do with and nowhere clean to put it. You had a kid to help out with and yourself to take care of, and the situation was so simple it almost made him angry.
It became a thing without either of you calling it one. It was a thing, in Pope’s mind, obviously, but he was sure that telling you would’ve spooked you and he wasn’t ready for that.
You’d started taping him differently. Early on you’d wrapped him all brisk and businesslike, done before he’d thought of anything to say. He had to watch his words in general, but he had to try even harder with you, for he never wanted to say the wrong thing. Somewhere in those weeks, you slowed. You took longer than the wrap needed—smoothing the tape down twice when once would’ve held just fine, turning his hand over in both of yours to check the knuckles you’d already checked—and Pope started to pretend he didn’t notice.
He’d sit on the folding chair with his hand lent out to you and watch the top of your head and feel his pulse come down out of his throat, slow, the dog talked off the thing. One night, he let his thumb find the inside of your wrist while you worked, resting there against the thrum of you.
He started taking on more fights and ending them earlier. He told himself it was because of his ribs, the cash, any of the reasons a man might want a thing over with. All of it when the reason was that when the basement emptied after, it was just the two of you, and Pope had started living for the after the same way men lived for the fight.
You started watching the fights now—not the cash, him—and he knew because one night he had a bad one, a hook he missed that snapped his head around. He looked for your face before he looked for anything else, and found you already wincing.
Your hand had come up halfway to your mouth. You caught yourself and dropped it. But he’d seen it and carried it home for a week, a proof of what, he didn’t know.
Pope really, really hated asking Craig anything. He knew that he’d make him pay the toll one way or another. Sometimes by talking for forty minutes about something nobody asked about, or remembering the question to bring it up at the worst possible time. So Pope sat on it for a week; he iced the rib, didn’t fight, and drove past the ring twice without going in. He knew it was fucking pathetic.
Pope found Craig by the pool, sunburnt and shirtless and rolling something on a paper plate.
“You know the girl,” Pope started, “at the ring, the one who does the cash?”
He found that he wanted to keep your name to himself, in case Craig hadn’t already caught onto it.
“Which one?” Craig asked without looking up.
“The one that does the cash, man.”
“There’s like three girls.” He licked the paper and twisted the end. “You gotta be more specific. There’s the older chick, the mean—”
“Younger. Quiet.” Pope forced his voice to stay even. “Patches people up.”
Craig looked up at him then, a slow grin spreading. “Ohhhh.”
“Don’t.”
“No. No.” Craig held his hands up, waving them slightly, delighted. “Can’t believe you’re asking me about a girl, man.”
“Forget it.” Pope turned to go.
“Hey—hey,” Craig said, standing from the lounger. “I’m messin’ with you. C’mon. What do you wanna know about her?”
“Why’s she there?”
Craig shrugged. “Pretty sure she owes Leo.”
“She owes Leo?” Pope asked, letting the surprise show in his voice. “For what?”
“Pretty sure she’s collateral.” Craig lit the thing, talking around it. “Some guy that was around. Dad. Stepdad. Who knows?” He waved the smoke out of his face. “Pretty sure she’s just workin’ the square until it pays itself off.”
“How much?” Pope asked immediately.
Craig rolled his eyes, shaking his head. “Don’t be stupid, man.”
“Just say it.”
“I’m not his accountant,” Craig said. “And she’s not worth it. It won’t work, and I’m pretty sure she’s been working there longer than she hasn’t.”
Pope ignored that. “It’s not even hers,” he said, quietly, almost to himself. “She’s down there holding it for a guy who took off. Kid at home, no money, and she’s—”
He stopped talking once he noticed the amused and incredulous expression on Craig’s face.
Craig’s hand moved to the side, waving vaguely in confusion. “She’s got a kid?”
“It’s her brother.”
“Jesus—how much have you talked to this chick?” Craig dragged a hand down his face. “Real talk. You go pay the guy off—say you even can, say he gives you a number and it’s a real one, which it won’t be—you know what happens? He realizes Pope Cody just dropped twenty grand on a girl who pours drinks and puts bandages on people.” He spread his hands. “Best case. Best case, man. We don’t know what else the guy’s got her doing. She’s been there a long time. Girls don’t stay in places like that just counting cash.”
Pope felt his teeth grind. “She counts cash and she patches people up,” he said, tipping his chin down slightly to pin Craig with a glare. “That’s what she does.”
Craig looked at him for a moment and shrugged. “Alright, man.”
“And even if she—she doesn’t just do that. It doesn’t—”
Pope’s jaw worked, and he had to look away from Craig. He had no words for it. It didn’t matter what you did in the basement, what Leo had you doing or what Craig was implying. You were still you, and Pope knew that.
If the situation was larger, then Pope saw it as more of a reason to get you out, not less. That was the thing Craig wouldn’t understand.
“It doesn’t change anything. For me,” Pope said flatly. “She shouldn’t be there, that’s all.”
Craig’s lips opened like he wanted to say something, then caught the look on Pope’s face, and said, “Yeah, man. She probably shouldn’t.”
He’d hoped that Craig would never have to meet you, at least not in the way he did.
It happened on a night Craig hadn’t wanted him there at all. Craig had come for the first few of Pope’s fight, and realized he actually didn’t have to see his older brother take down a man twice to know the money was good. He could simply hand over the bet and go do anything else with his night. So most weeks, he dropped his cash with people and disappeared upstairs and reappeared only to collect.
This week, he hung around the edge of the ring, three beers in, restless, and that was how he was standing right there when Pope took a cut over the cheekbone bad enough you came down to the corner with your supplies before the round was properly called.
Craig noticed it. The dumb piece of shit. One second Pope had your hands on his face, turned away from the crowd so nobody would notice your closeness, and the next he could feel the exact attention of his brother sharpening as he moved down to catch the interaction.
You were too deep in the work to notice Craig, lips pressed flat, that furrow between your brows, going fast because the round was coming. “This one’s gonna scar if you keep splitting it open,” you murmured, tipping his head toward the light. “You’re doing it on purpose at this point. You’re gonna ruin this face.”
“What do you think about this face?” Pope said before he could think the words through.
You rolled your eyes, lifting a hand off his face just to smack his shoulder lightly before it went right back to the cut.
“You talk too much when you’re losing blood,” you lied, but the corner of your mouth had gone soft. “Hold still.”
“You didn’t answer.”
“You’re fishing.” You pressed the butterfly closed over his cheekbone, your thumb lingering there a half-second past the job, warm against his face, and you dropped your voice even though there was nobody close enough to hear. “Ask me again when you’re not bleeding on me and I’ll think about it.”
He felt his mouth want to move closer to yours then, and he tamped down the urge. But he must’ve let something through because when his eyes flicked up over your shoulder, there was Craig, beer halfway to his mouth, forgotten.
You followed his eyes, found Craig, and Craig found you. Your hand came off his face and your spine went straight. “You know him?” you asked, quietly, gathering your bottle and tape as you stepped back to a safe distance.
Pope caught your wrist. “My brother. He’s nobody. He’s dumb.”
Your eyes went over the crowd that was distracted. “You tell him anything?”
“There somethin’ to say?” he asked, raising a brow that made him wince.
You gave him a flat look, unimpressed by the deflection. “Don’t try to be cute.”
Pope generally blamed his anger on a rage that had been planted in him from a tender age. Smurf had put it there the way you put a seed in dirt—patient, deliberate, knowing exactly what it’d grow into—and then spent thirty years acting surprised at the sheer size of it. He never thought about it. Thinking about it wouldn’t beat it away. It was just there—low and perpetual—like a pilot light he’d learned to turn down because the alternative was what happened in the ring when he forgot to.
He forgot to that night. It had nothing to do with the guy across from him. The guy was a nobody—some gym rat Leo had matched him with, all shoulders and bad footwork—and Pope would, on any other day, put him down clean in two rounds because there was no reason to make it ugly. But Pope had spent a week with a number he didn’t own and a plan he couldn’t run with yours and Craig’s voice saying ‘don’t.’ The whole impossibility of you had stacked up in his sternum with nowhere to go, and when the guy clipped him, caught him good across the mouth first, something in Pope just opened the valve.
He didn’t remember most of it after, and that was how he knew it was bad. The parts that came back later were wrong-angled and too bright (the kid’s head snapping, the wet sound, the way the crowd’s noise changed, going from hungry to something quieter, pulled back). Crowds like this roared throughout all of it unless they were watching a man go somewhere they wanted to stay back from.
Somebody got between them. There were hands on his chest and a referee he had no idea even existed shouting something and the guy on the concrete not getting up the way he was supposed to. Pope was standing over it with his chest heaving and knuckles split open through the wrap and no memory of the ninety seconds at all.
The crowd parted for him when he started walking and that should’ve told him something, the way grown men stepped out of his way. He'd looked for you on the way through.
He'd looked for you the way he always did, automatically, and he'd found you at the edge of the cash table with the box held up against your chest, and you'd been looking right back at him.
Pope was distantly and too closely—both at the same time, two things too large for him—able to register you hadn’t looked at him the way you usually did.
You'd looked at him the way the crowd had. You’d gone still and careful, your eyes wide and fixed on him like he was the thing in the room, the dangerous thing, and you'd held that box to your chest like it could go between you and him. Just for a second. Just one. Then you'd caught yourself and your face had closed over it, gone professional.
He went upstairs, and into the gap behind the stairs where there was a cot and a mop sink. It smelled like bleach. He put his head against the cinderblock and slid down it to the floor and tried to get his breathing under whatever was happening in his chest.
Pope let himself sit on the floor with his hands ruined, the pilot light still guttering too high, and he let the worst story about himself tell itself all the way through. You’d finally seen the actual thing. You’d patched him up and made jokes and told him things about yourself, and then you had to watch him nearly kill somebody over nothing, and now you knew. Now you looked at him the way everybody did, just the way his mother had intended.
He heard the door open, and he had to shake his head even though he wasn’t sure you could see it.
“Don’t,” he said, and his voice came out wrecked. “You don’t have to help me or anything. Go help the guy.”
“Andrew—”
“I mean it.” His hands hung between his knees, split and shaking, and he kept his eyes on them. “Go check on him. I don’t—I don’t need it.”
He heard the door shut behind you, and then your footsteps came across the little room. “He’s up,” you said. “He’s fine. He’s got people. Concussed, probably, but he’ll be fine.” You paused, then added, “I came back here for you.”
That made his chest pull tighter. “Shouldn’t have.”
You set the bucket down by his feet, and then you were crouching in front of him, and he could see the toes of those wrong gray shoes in the edge of his vision and still couldn't make himself look higher. “Can I have your hands?”
“No.”
“They’re split to the bone. Andrew, give ‘em here.”
He didn’t. The muscle in his jaw ticked as he sat there, and before he could stop himself, he asked, “Are you scared of me?”
You stayed silent for a second, and he felt his chest seize. Then, he felt your hand—cold to the touch—against his face, turning it gently so he’d look at you. He kept his eyes trained to the ground.
“Look at me,” you said quietly. When he refused again, your thumb slid against his cheekbone. “I’m not.”
When he said nothing, you continued, “You scared me a little out there. But look at you, you’re hiding behind the stairs. C’mon. Scariest man alive.”
He huffed and let his eyes come up anyway, finally, and you were just looking at him. “You mean that?”
Your bottom lip pushed the top, and you looked at him as you tilted your head. “Yeah. I mean it.”
The plainness of the words got him. You said that as though it cost you nothing to mean it when it was the most expensive thing anyone had handed him in years. You had no idea the things he’d done so many times they stopped feeling like anything at all. You’d seen one bad night. And he wanted to tell you that maybe you should have been scared.
He kept his mouth shut. He looked at you looking at him and decided, quietly and completely, that he was going to spend whatever time he had making sure you never had a reason to find out you were wrong.
You were close. You’d been close the entire time, crouched between his knees with your hand cold on his face, and he’d been waiting for you to flinch that he hadn’t realized how close you were.
He felt it now. Like always, he didn’t decide. The same broken wiring in him was pointing somewhere new, because one second he was looking at your mouth and the next his hand had come up, ruined knuckles and all, and curved around the back of your neck.
He stopped a breath short to give you an inch, some last careful piece left in him left it up to you, hung there close enough that he could feel your breath go uneven, waiting to see if you’d close it.
You did, soft, slower than he’d expected. He’d always been waiting for quickness and hardness, things that got over with, and instead your mouth settled against his and stayed. Your hand came up light along his jaw, and the split in his lip stung but he didn’t move away from it. He was sure he couldn’t have this without paying for it.
His hand was still at the back of your neck, knuckles wrecked, and he held you there carefully, just keeping you close. His thumb moved once behind your ear. You made a small sound against his mouth and he felt it more than heard it, felt it go down through his chest.
Your fingers curling at the collar of his shirt, your breath warm and uneven against his cheek between kisses.
His rib ached when he leaned into you. He leaned in anyway. He could feel the warmth of you all down his front, your weight tipped against his knees, your other hand finding his ruined one where it sat between you and holding it.
It felt like such a stark difference to how you usually held his hand, to clean it, Pope distantly thought.
You broke off to breathe, but neither of you went far. Your forehead hovered over his, and your breath stayed uneven against his mouth. He let his hands hesitantly drift down to your waist, letting his palms run over the shape of you.
You let them, your waist, the dip of it, the warmth coming up through your shirt, and you watched him do it with your bottom lip caught between your teeth.
“Do you like this?” Pope asked, hesitance creeping into his voice despite how hard he tried to push it out. He hated how it came out, like he had no trust in himself. But he had to know—had to hear it—because he’d just spent too long thinking you’d seen the worst of him, and now you were warm in his hands and he couldn’t quite square the two.
Your mouth curved, soft, and you tipped your forehead down against his.
“Yeah, Andrew,” you said, like it was obvious. “I like it.”
Your thumb moved along his cheekbone, and he let his lashes flutter slightly at the feel of your skin against so many parts of him all at once.
“Been liking you a while,” you added, lower, a little dry, a little shy. “If you wanna know.”
Pope’s hand tightened at your waist. “How long?”
“Not saying,” you said, smiling when you kissed him again, and he felt it against his mouth, and that was better than the answer would've been anyway.
He kissed you slow at first and then not slow, his hand sliding up your spine to press you closer, the other still spread wide and certain at your hip.
You shifted down into him and he broke off with a rough breath, forehead dropping to your shoulder, his grip going tight to hold you still.
“Hang on,” he managed to say, low against your collarbone. All the wanting you stacked up behind his ribs with nowhere left to go, and you were so warm and so real on his lap, and he was trying not to be what he always was, too much, too fast.
“We don’t have to—” you started.
“I know,” he said, voice rough. He lifted his head to look at you. “I wanna. I just—” He pushed his lips around, trying to find the right words. “I don’t want you doing anything back here. In this building.” His thumb moved at your hip. “You’re better than this place.”
Your hands pressed against his chest, and he registered the smallness of them against his broad frame, and you pulled yourself back slightly and let out a staggered breath. For a second, you looked at him. Stunned, almost, like the words hadn’t landed anywhere familiar, like nobody’d ever told you that before. He watched it cross your face quickly.
One of your hands left his chest and slid up, slid back, fingers pushing slow into the short hair at the nape of his neck, your nails digging light against his scalp. Your fingers worked through his hair and curled at the base of it, and the newness of the touch—the pure uselessness of it, a touch that wasn’t for anything—went through him like a current.
It got a low and rough sound out of him and his eyes slid shut. His face went hot at the helplessness of it, a man his size coming apart under fingers in his hair, but he couldn't stop it and he didn't pull away. He pressed back into your hand instead, into the slow drag of your nails, chasing it.
“So are you,” you said quietly after a moment.
He fluttered his eyes open halfway.
“Better than this place,” you clarified.
Pope’s mouth twitched, wanting to tell you he wasn’t. He wanted to tell you every single bad thing he’d ever done. He wanted to lay all of it down between you so you'd see he didn't belong anywhere clean, least of all up against you, you who had never chosen to work in this shithole, you who’d probably never hurt a goddamn fly.
The words stayed sealed, because he had a feeling you’d hand them all back if he tried.
“Come on,” he said instead. He shifted under you, wanting to ease into the position while having to force himself to move. “Get your stuff and clock out. I’ll drive you.”
You blinked. “Where?”
He let out a short-lived laugh. “Wherever you want to go.”
You looked at him like he’d just done a trick. “I have to be home,” you said slowly. “My brother waits up.”
“Alright.” Pope eased you off his lap, and got a hand against the cinderblock. “So I’ll take you home.”
“You don’t have to—” You were saying from the ground.
“C’mon.”
He held a hand out to you, then you took it and let him pull you up.
Pope was uncomfortable about everything. His entire life, he’d been uncomfortable, whether it was in his own skin, in his house, in rooms full of people. So it came as no surprise when he had no fucking clue what to do with you. He hadn’t thought this far; he’d wanted to get you the hell out, not get you. And now you were here—or as here as you could’ve been—and he didn’t have the next part. Nobody had ever handed him a good thing and let him keep it. He kept waiting for the catch, turning his pockets out for the cost of it, and the cost wasn’t coming. And that was uncomfortable, waiting for a hit that never landed.
So he did the only thing he thought he could’ve done, which was keep it quiet and keep it close.
The cab of his truck. The back room after the basement emptied. Your mouth on his, his hands learning you slow, because he wanted to—Pope wanted to learn you the way other men wanted to win. It was the only ambition he’d ever had that belonged all to him. He wanted the map of you. He wanted to remember the exact spot in your ear that made your breath catch, that he’d found once on accident and gone back to like a man returning to the one warm room in a house that was freezing. The way you said his name, the real one—Andrew—that fit in nobody else’s mouth but yours.
Pope had to be clear with himself about the fact that it was nothing like a life, even in his own head, because hoping for more than the thing in front of him was how you got hurt.
When the basement ran late and your house was a long quiet drive, sometimes you’d let him take you back to his place instead, and you’d sleep there. You would actually sleep, hard and deep, in a way you’d once told him you couldn’t at your own home.
He watched you sleep. He knew it was a strange thing to do but he did it anyway; propped on an elbow in the gray lights off the blinds, because it was the only time your face went all soft. Awake, even with him, you kept some of it back, the watching, the careful, the part of you that—like him—was always waiting for the next bad thing.
Asleep, you let it all go. You looked younger, and Pope thought this was how you would’ve looked all the time had the world dealt you a different house.
He must’ve shifted, or his breathing must’ve changed, because your eyes cracked open. You found him in the dark, found him watching you, and your mouth curved, slow and sleep-heavy.
“Creep,” you mumbled into the pillow.
“Yeah,” Pope said in a whisper.
You shifted toward him, unhurried, still half in sleep, and your hand came up to his jaw as your fingers traced the line of it.
“You don’t sleep,” you murmured. You’d noticed it weeks ago.
“No.”
“C’mere, then,” you said, rough, tugging lightly at his jaw, and he came.
He kissed you slow.
He always started slow—it was the only speed he trusted himself at—and you let him have it slow for a minute, warm and half-asleep against his mouth. Then you weren’t half-asleep anymore, he felt the change in you as your hand slid back into his hair and curled and pulled. The sound that the pull had dragged out of him was embarrassing.
“Quiet,” you breathed against his mouth, throwing his own word back at him—I can be quiet, he’d said once—and he huffed a rough laugh into the crook of your neck and got a hand spread wide and certain against the small of your back to pull you flush against him.
Your leg hooked over his and your breath went uneven against his ear, and Pope allowed himself to stop thinking.
He dragged his mouth down your throat, slow, to the soft place that made your breath catch, the spot he'd mapped weeks ago and gone back to since like the one warm room in a freezing house. Got there. He felt you go boneless and then not boneless, your fingers tightening in his hair, your hips shifting against his, and he made a low sound into your skin and pressed you down into the mattress with the careful weight of him.
“Andrew,” you said, rough against his collarbone.
“Yes?” He lifted his head to look at you, and found you already looking at him.
Your hair was loose around your face and your lips were swollen and your eyes were dark. Pope felt a sort of satisfaction he’d never felt before knowing he’d done that, that you’d come to his bed neat and composed and he’d taken you apart this much already.
Your hand still in his hair tugged him down to your ear. “Take my shirt off.”
He went still for a second, eyes closing at the words, then he regained himself and pulled back enough to look at you.
You lifted your arms. He got it over your head and dropped it somewhere and then he just stopped, brain short-circuiting as his body immediately reacted, shifting underneath you. His hand came up and hovered over your bare waist, not quite touching, just close. Deciding where to start.
His hand settled finally, warm and certain against your ribs, thumb brushing the underside of your breasts. He let out a shaky breath. “You’re so pretty,” he murmured.
You let out a soft breath, and he let his thumb move, again, slow, up and he rubbed over the swell of your breasts through the bra, watching your face with his whole attention.
He pushed himself up onto one elbow to get a better look at you and you let him, lying there with your hair spread out and your eyes on his face. He took his time, and he could tell it made you want to squirm, and his free hand settled on your hip, holding you still.
“Come here,” you said softly, reaching for him.
“In a minute.” His thumb traced the underwire of your bra, following the curve of it. His eyes followed his own hand and his jaw was tight the way it got when he was concentrating.
“Andrew.”
“Give me a minute.” His mouth came down on your sternum and pressed there, warm, just breathing for a second, his hand still moving over your ribs, your waist, the dip of it. His lips moved to the curve of your breast, the soft skin at the edge of the fabric, and you felt his breath go unsteady against you.
“Can I—” he started.
“Yes.”
He reached around you, unclipped it with one hand—slightly clumsy, which was so unlike him—and drew it off you slowly, and then he just stopped again, forgetting how to move when he looked at you.
His mouth found you properly then, warm and slow, and you let your head tip back and your hand tighten in his hair and he made a low sound against you.
He worked his way back up to your throat, your jaw, found your mouth again, and kissed you slow until your hands were pulling at him and your hips were shifting and you’d stopped being patient entirely.
You pressed at his chest. He went, rolling onto his back and taking you with him, and you sat up over him in the gray light and watched his face as you settled your weight down against him, and his hands went to your thighs and gripped and his eyes went briefly shut.
You leaned down and kissed him once, soft. Then his jaw, his throat, the way he'd done to you, finding the places that changed his breathing.
His hands moved up your back, down again, restless, unable to settle. You felt him swallow when your mouth reached his collarbone.
You moved lower. His stomach tightened under your mouth and his hand came up to your hair, resting there, heavy and warm, the way he did everything when he was trying to hold himself back. You looked up at him from where you were and found him already looking down at you, jaw tight, throat working.
“Are you—”
“Mhm.”
You got his briefs off and he lifted his hips to help you without being asked, which made you press your lips together against a smile. You settled between his thighs and took him inside your hand first, and he let out a shaky, breathless sound as your fingers tightened around his length, small fingers tugging slightly.
You shifted down, and pressed your lips to the inside of his thigh first, just to feel him react, Pope understood. His whole leg went rigid under your lips. You stayed there a moment, and his fingers curled in your hair out of impatience he wasn’t proud of at all.
“C’mon, hey—”
You did it again, the other side, taking your time, and heard him exhale hard through his nose.
Then, you started from the bottom, tongue gliding over him, base to tip, and Pope’s jaw dropped open and stopped pretending he wanted any sort of control in this situation.
His hands fisted in your hair. Not pushing—he wasn’t going to do that—but holding on, because he really, really needed something to hold onto and you were it, you were all of it, had been all of it for months, and now you had your mouth on him and your small hand wrapped around the base of him while looking through your lashes at him like you knew exactly what you were doing to him—you absolutely did—and he wanted to do nothing about it except lie there and take it.
You took him into your mouth properly and his hips came off the mattress before he caught them, hand pressing down against his own stomach, jaw locked.
“Christ—” It came out mangled, just sound.
You set a pace that was sure to kill him, so deliberate with everything and focused attention on him entirely, and he had the distant thought that he’d never been on the receiving end of attention like this. His thighs tensed around you and his free hand found the sheets.
You pulled off just enough to say ‘don’t’ when his forearm moved toward his face, and he dropped it back, exposed, staring at the ceiling, throat working. Your hand worked what your mouth couldn’t, and he felt his vision go slightly sideways, hand in your hair tightening involuntarily, fingers curling against your scalp.
“Let me—” He stopped when he noticed how wrecked he sounded, barely his own voice. His grip tugged you up. “Can you—Can I—”
He stumbled over the words, but you still moved up.
You settled over him, knees either sides of his hips, and he got his hands on your waist immediately. His chest was heaving and he was sure he looked completely undone.
“Can I—” he tried again. His thumb moved against your hip, pleadingly. “I need to—” He tried again. “Will you—”
You looked down at him. “Are you asking me something?”
“Yeah.” His jaw tightened. “Trying to.”
“So ask.”
He took in a sharp breath, fingers digging into the flesh of your ass. “Can I be inside you?”
You held his eyes a second. “Yeah,” you said. “Yeah.”
The sound he let out at that was quiet and involuntary and you felt it in your sternum. His eyes closed for just a second, like he needed that, you saying it had done something to him before anything had even happened yet.
You reached between you and his breath caught audibly, hands tightening on your hips, feeling it happen, needing to feel it happen somewhere in his palms.
You sank down onto him slow and his head went back and his throat worked and his hands on your hips pulled you down the last inch with a low, helpless sound that he clearly hadn't planned on making.
He’d never felt this way before, so all-encompassed. You were so warm and close in way the months of wanting had never prepared him for, your hands braced on his chest, your weight settled on his lap, and he could feel your pulse where you were joined and his own pulse and everywhere else.
He stayed there a second, both hands spread wide on your hips, breathing.
“You okay?” you asked, quiet.
“One second.”
You gave him the second. He sat up after that, and his arm banded around your waist and pulled you flush against him and that made you gasp, hands grabbing at his shoulders, his neck.
He was so much bigger than you like this, your knees hardly finding the mattress either side of him, and he held you there, mouth finding your throat.
“Do you like this?” he asked into your skin.
“Yes—yeah,” you said, slightly breathless.
He bit down lightly at your pulse point, just enough, and your nails raked down his back in response, and the sound that got out of him was dark and satisfied, his hips rolling up into you slow and deliberate.
His hips set a pace after that, one hand spread flat against your lower back holding you exactly where he wanted you, the other gripping your hip, guiding you down to meet each roll of his hips. You could feel everything. He made sure of it, and he knew by the way your walls clamped down on him.
“Andrew—”
“Feels so good,” he said through a groan, mouth set on your throat. “You feel so good.”
Your nails found his back again and he groaned into your neck and his hips stuttered, losing the rhythm for just a second before he found it again, deeper this time, and you made a sound against his shoulder that you felt him collect, felt him file away, his arm tightening around you in response.
“That good?” he murmured.
“It’s—” you started, breath catching.
“Yeah?” His hand moved from your hip to the small of your back, adjusting the angle, pressing you down onto him, and whatever you'd been trying to say dissolved entirely into something that wasn't words at all. “There?”
“Jesus, Andrew—” you said, a punch in your words as he pushed you down onto him. “Where’d you learn this?”
He pulled back to look at your face, and the look on his was almost amused, almost, underneath all the want. “Just wanna make you feel good,” he said, “with me.”
Your hands coming up to his face without deciding to, cupping his jaw, and he turned into it immediately, that same helpless lean he always did when you put your hands on his face, like he couldn't help it, like you'd found the one soft spot in him nobody else had ever found.
You kissed him then, different from the others — slower, more deliberate, saying something you didn't have words for yet, and he kissed you back the same way, his pace going slow and deep and unhurried, like the night had gotten longer suddenly, like neither of you were going anywhere.
His forehead dropped to yours when you broke off, both of you breathing uneven, his hand moving up your spine, vertebra by vertebra, just feeling you.
“You with me?” he murmured.
“Yeah,” you said. “I am.”
His hand pressed you further into him, like there was any space. “Promise me.”
It came out rougher than he meant, needier than he'd have liked, and he felt it land between you in the dark and couldn't take it back and didn't try.
You looked up at him. Whatever you found in his face made yours go soft. “Promise,” you said.
He exhaled against your mouth and his hips rolled forward and you made a small sound and your hands slid up into his hair, pulling, and whatever had gone tender between you tipped back into heat, his pace picking up, deeper now, one hand gripping the headboard above you and the other finding your hip, holding you where he wanted you.
Pope had come to the basement earlier, before his fight. He had no good reason for it—the fight was in an hour, the place was half-empty, the crowd still trickling in—but he’d gotten restless at the apartment and figured he’d find you early, steal a few minutes before the room filled up.
He came down the concrete stairs and heard Leo’s voice before he saw anything, and the sound of it stopped Pope three steps from the bottom. Pope had never once in his life heard the guy yell, lose control, and the voice coming up was low and almost patient, like you’d talk to a child or a dog.
“ —count it again,” Leo was saying. “‘Cause I counted it, and I’m coming up short. That’s a problem, you know that, right?”
“I counted it three times,” you said, your voice flat and so, so careful it gnawed at him. “It’s all here. I swear, it’s all—”
“Don’t swear to me, sweetheart. Count.”
Pope came down the last steps quiet. You were at the cash table with the box open in front of you and your hands unsteady on the bills. Leo was standing close to you, like that was the point—looming, using the size of himself—as he crowded you back against the table. He was making you do the math all out in a flat, dead voice, your shoulders up around your ears, and Pope watched you flinch when Leo shifted his weight even though the guy hadn’t done anything.
“You’re light,” Leo said, soft. “You’re light and you’re trying to swear. You know what happens to my count when one of my girls gets light.” He let his words hang, tilting his head. “It comes out of the square. Adds to it. You’re going backwards, sweetheart, after all this time. Going the wrong direction.”
Leo reached and took your jaw in his hand—almost gently, tipping your face up out of the count—and your body went still, and that was the second you saw Pope behind Leo’s shoulder.
“Don’t touch her,” Pope said, without thinking about it.
Leo turned, unhurried, his hand still loose at your jaw before he let it drop, on his own time. He was making a point of it, Pope realized. “It’s off.” He spread the hand, easy, showing him. “See? We’re just talking. Business.”
Then, he turned to look at you, chin tipping down. “You really messing around with this guy? I thought it was just people making shit up.”
“People talk—” you started to say.
“You were just waitin’ around for some rich guy to come along?” He looked at you, shaking his head. “That it?” Then, he turned to Pope. “She could’ve gotten out a lot earlier—you know that right?” He shook his head, like he was disappointed. “Could’ve taken the back room, cut the number down to nothing in a couple months. Easy. Plenty of guys asking. But no, she just wanted to do it the long way.” He tipped his chin at Pope, lazy. “—And then go and give it away to you. For free.”
Pope’s pulse should’ve been climbing. It had gone flat and slow and cold. “Watch your mouth.”
“Or what?” He asked, almost fond. “You gonna—”
The gun was out before he decided to pull it. His hand went to the small of his back and came around and then the thing was there, level, steady, muzzle a few inches off Leo’s forehead.
The guy stopped smiling. He didn’t flinch—Pope gave him that—but he went very slow, very careful, his hands drifting up off his sides. His palms were loose and open.
“Okay,” Leo said, quiet now. “Okay. Easy.”
“Are you kidding me?” Pope muttered, shaking his head. “You don’t have a damn gun on you?”
“I don’t need a gun in my own place,” he said through gritted teeth. His eyes flicked to the stairs, then back to the muzzle. “You wanna put that down before you get stupid over nothing?”
He’d half-hoped that Leo would’ve been carrying, show any sign that he felt afraid. “Her number. Say it.”
“That’s not—” He huffed, almost a laugh, disbelieving. “That’s not how—there’s a process to this, there’s people I gotta answer to.”
Pope’s lips flattened, eyes flicking to the ceiling, annoyed. “You know I’ll do it, man. I don’t care enough not to.”
Leo’s smile dropped then. “Half the room’s had their hands on her, you know that? She’s not somebody’s girlfriend, man. The second she doesn’t need either of us, she’s not looking back at you any more than she’s looking back at me.”
Pope let out a short chuckle. “Now you’re getting whatever I’ve got in my pocket or I’m shooting. Your call.”
“You’re making a mistake,” the guy said, his last call, Pope realized. “You can’t pull a gun on me and —”
“That’s tomorrow’s problem.” Pope’s hand stayed still. “Right now, you take the money, she’s square, she walks.” His head tipped, slight. “Say yes, man. You’re a smart guy. Say yes.” Pope nudged the gun slightly further into his head. He leaned his head closer to the guy’s ear, voice dropping into a register that would’ve been too low for you to hear. “I’ve put people down for less than this. You know that.”
Leo took a beat. “Fine.” The word came out flat, bitten-off. “Fine. The money. She’s square. Get it out slow, I don’t want your fucking hand movin’ fast near me.”
Pope reached into his jacket with his off hand—the gun never leaving Leo's face—and pulled the roll, the whole fight roll, thick and rubber-banded, and tossed it onto the table by the box. It landed heavy. Leo didn't look at it. He kept his eyes on Pope, and his hands stayed up, and the deal sat there in the dead air between them, made.
Leo looked at it, and a long moment passed. He let out a short, disbelieving breath through his nose. “That’s it?”
“You should’ve said yes the first time. You knew I was good for it,” Pope said. “Say it,” he added. “She’s good. Tell her so she hears it.”
“You’re square,” he said to you, the words ugly. “You don’t owe me shit. Don’t come back.” A muscle jumped in his cheek. “Either of you.”
Pope held the gun where it was a beat longer than he had to—long enough to make it clear the leaving was his idea, not Leo's permission—and then he lowered it, slow, and stepped back, and reached out without looking and found your wrist.
“Let’s go,” Pope said roughly to you.
You didn’t move at first. He had to tug your forearm once, and then you came, stumbling off the spot you’d been rooted to, and he put himself between you and Leo and walked you up the concrete stairs and out the side door into the lot, into the air that was finally air, with the gun cooling against his back and your pulse hammering under his fingers where he still had your wrist.
Pope let out a shaky breath as he tipped his neck back to look at the sky. He’d assumed that one day, he would’ve figured it out, how to help you—it would have been cleaner, probably, and wouldn’t have happened right in front of you—and he hadn’t thought it’d be fucking today.
He still had your wrist. He made himself let it go, and turned to look at you. You were looking at nothing, at the chain-link past the lot, your arms coming to wrap around yourself, holding your elbows.
“Get in the car,” he said to you.
You stayed still.
Pope shook his head once, pressing his lips together. He nodded at the truck. “C’mon. Just get in the truck.”
You stayed rooted there in the orange light, arms folded over yourself, shaking your head faintly—not at him, not a no exactly, just somewhere else, somewhere he couldn't reach you. He felt the impatience climb in him, the adrenaline still draining, the gun still warm against his back and the tomorrow-problem already stacking up behind his ribs, and it came out rougher than he meant.
“Just—get in the damn car.” He dragged his palm down his face and exhaled.
You went around to the passenger side and shut the door. He got in beside you, and for a second, neither of you said anything. He pulled out the lot and drove the way he always did with you, to his apartment. You sat against the window with your knees pulled up and your arms still around yourself, and he kept glancing over, waiting for it, the thing he could feel build up.
“You mad at me?” he asked, the words coming out choked, almost like he was forcing them out.
You took in a breath and looked out the window. “Are you gonna be fine?”
He snorted. “Yeah. Don’t worry ‘bout me. I’m safe.”
You nodded, even though he could tell you didn’t believe it. He wanted to tell you that he was probably the most safe guy in Oceanside, part of a family that would make sure nothing happened to anyone in it, even if they all may hate each other deep down.
“I didn’t want it to happen like this,” you said a moment later. “I wanted to do it myself.”
Pope knew what you meant, but he wanted you to talk more, just so he could justify it. “Yeah?”
“I was gonna work it down to nothing,” you continued. “And one day it’d just be done, and I’d—walk out. And it’d be cause I did it. Me. The one thing that was gonna be mine.”
“You weren’t getting out.” When you snapped your head to look at him, eyebrows furrowed, he forced to keep himself looking at the road. “I’m sorry, but you were never getting out. Don’t be dumb. I know you wanted to.”
“Don’t call me dumb.”
“Then don’t be.” He shook his head. “You’re paying off a debt that’s not even yours when you could be—what? Working anywhere that gives you an actual paycheck. He wasn’t gonna let you have that. There’s no fucking contract making sure he lets you out.”
You looked back at the window, jaw tight. “I didn’t want you buying me,” you said quietly. “That’s exactly the thing I didn’t want. Now I’m—I don’t want to owe you, Andrew. I like you.”
“You don’t owe me,” he said, voice rough, trying to ignore what the words did to his chest.
“That’s not how—”
“It’s how it works with me,” he said flatly. “I didn’t buy you. Don’t say shit like that. I bought you out.” His hands tightened on the wheel. “There’s nothing you owe me.”
“I wanted it to be clean,” you said, and Pope almost wanted to shut you up. “Us. I wanted to get out and just be—someone you liked. Not somebody you had to save or something like that.”
“Well, that’s too bad, then,” he rasped. “You can come with me. You can go wherever you want. You’re out, you can choose.” He killed the engine as the car reached his apartment. “You are someone I like already. I never liked who you had to be, but I like you—this, whatever it is. Alright?”
A part of Pope knew he shouldn’t have taken the job. Robberies were always a mess, but Baz had a fondness for them. And Baz had a kid and a whole life balanced on not going inside, and Pope had a girl who he wasn’t even sure was his girl, and no good reason in the world to be holding the bag when it went wrong.
So now there was a phone bolted to a cinderblock wall and a line of men behind him and a number he’d memorized. Thank God he’d memorized.
It rang twice.
“Hello?”
The sound of your voice did something itchy to his sternum. He’d last heard it three weeks ago, before the job, when you’d been half-asleep against his shoulder in the truck outside your place. You’d told him to call you when he got home.
“Andrew?” you asked immediately, like just an exhalation of his breath, you could recognize. “You’re in jail?”
He forced out a dry chuckle, because the opposite would’ve gotten him kicked. “Folsom County.”
“Jesus—why?”
“Robbery. It was a—a family thing—” He kept it short. The line was recorded; half of what he wanted to say, he couldn’t, and the other half, he wouldn’t. Especially not to you, not like this, with a guard at his back and a clock ticking somewhere.
“Can I visit you?” you asked immediately. The hope in your words tightened something in his chest so hard he had to close his eyes to loosen it even a fraction. “How long are you in there for?”
“No—don’t. Hey, listen,” he said, voice shaking and he hated it. “You—you gotta be safe, okay? If anything happens, I need you to look for—”
“What are you talking about?”
“I can’t take care of you from here,” he said through gritted teeth. “I need to make sure you’ll be okay.”
“How long are you in for?” you asked, weary, like you’d read somewhere between the lines and realized that you were going to hate the answer.
“Six years,” he said, letting out another sigh. Then, because he couldn’t help himself when he heard you go silent on the other end, he said, “I’m sorry.” He pressed the phone harder against his ear, as if that did anything.
“Fuck—fuck, Andrew. Six years—?” you said, voice so sharp he could feel it cut through him. He heard you breath, trying to collect yourself. “Okay. Okay—I can come there, to you. Visit you and stuff, alright?”
“You’re not living the next six years meeting me behind a glass, alright?”
“I don’t care about that.”
“I do.” It came out rougher than he’d intended. He pressed his forehead to the cold block, eyes shut as his free hand came up to tug at his hair. The line of men and the guards and the whole gray space fell away from him for a second, and it was just your voice in his ear and him trying, failing, to do one right thing for you. “You just got out—I’m not putting you back in. You got out, and you—you can do whatever you want.”
“I don’t want it without you,” you said, voice breaking clean down the middle, and it about took him out at the knees, standing there in his county blues with a telephone crushed to his ear.
“You’re not thinking right,” he said, trying to get the words out slowly, like saying it that way would make you believe them. “You’re not waiting for me for six years. You know how long that is?”
Pope was at a loss in this; he’d never had to push someone away before. Every person he’d needed gone, before he even knew he did, he’d made himself ugly enough to push it out. He didn’t have the ugly to use on you; he’d used up every bad thing in front of you already and you’d stayed anyway, and now he had nothing left to drive you away with except the truth, which was that Pope loved you too much to let you do this to yourself.
He couldn’t say that either because maybe then you’d really never leave.
You only breathed on the other end, and he could hear the hitch of your voice when you started to try saying something, then stopped.
“I won’t like it,” he said, quieter now, “if you wait for me.”
It was a lie and you both heard it. He didn’t try to sell it harder and let it sit there, all wrong, and moved on before you could call him out from it, because he had something he needed you to have more than he needed to win the argument.
“Listen,” he said, forcing his voice to steady. “You got something to write with? Or open something on your phone to get it.”
“Andrew—”
“Please.”
Something in his voice must’ve reached you, because he heard you shift.
“Okay,” you said, voice thick. “Okay.”
He recited the number, slow and twice, so you’d have it right. “That’s Baz. Alright? Barry Blackwell—write that down, too. My brother.” His teeth gritted. “You don’t ever have to call it, but you keep it. And if anything ever—” His jaw worked, and he pinched his eyes shut at the horrible thoughts. “If money gets tight or if people come sniffing around even though they shouldn’t. If you get caught up in anything—somebody gives you trouble, or anything, the car dies, whatever it is. You call him. You say you’re mine, say Pope said to call. He’ll help.”
“I don’t want your brother to—”
He didn’t want his brother to, either. Baz had a bad track record with people Pope considered his, people Pope loved. He pressed his molars together at the thought of Baz with you, of all people. Despite how much love he held for his brother, he didn’t like the thought. Six years was a long, long time.
Six years was long enough to forget a voice, long enough for the thing you’d been holding in your hands to shift without noticing, long enough for a warm and present man to become more real than a memory behind a glass. Baz wouldn’t. But he can’t imagine Baz ever meeting you and not seeing what Pope loved about you, what everyone could love about you.
“It’s the only way I can do anything for you,” he said quickly, making sure you’d understand. “It’ll make me happy.”
He heard you choke slightly on the other end. “Can you call me, then? If I can’t visit you.”
He wanted to say yes. It would've cost him nothing in the moment and it would've ruined you slow, six years of you living from phone call to phone call, your whole life arranged around fifteen minutes of a recorded line, waiting on a man in a cage. And he knew he’d rightfully deserved to be caged. He’d seen what waiting did to you. He’d pulled a gun to get you out from under exactly that.
“No,” he said. “You stay out. You got out. Stay out of all of it, including me.”
And a part of him believed he was doing you a favor, despite it all. He’d never quite gotten you all the way like he’d wanted—merged your life into his and his yours—and maybe that was for the better. As long as you were wrapped up with him, you would’ve been wrapped up with his family, the jobs, the heists, the next county lockup waiting for him somewhere down the line.
Your little brother deserved a sister who could come home clean, someone who didn’t have a Cody-shaped problem following her through the door. He’d been told he was the worst of them; he was built up for a purpose and it wasn’t the kind of thing you brought home. Pope cared about you enough to know that; it was hard not to realize it, standing in prison.
He heard you say a jumble of words in one breath, and he couldn’t quite catch any over the ringing in his own ears. The guard said he had sixty seconds left.
“I’d do it again, I swear,” he said, fast, before your voice cut off. “I’m sorry I couldn’t—it was short.”
Your breath stopped for a second, then you asked, forcing an even voice, “How will I know you’re okay?”
“I’ll be fine. I got people watching my back, I swear.”
“Please, just—”
“Bye,” he said, forcing his voice gentle. “Take care of yourself, okay? And the kid.”
The sound you made—wet and broken, landing like a wound he’d probably carry for six years—was the last of you he let himself take. He set the receiver down slow, like slow made it kinder, before you could say his name again. Because he never would've managed it if you'd said his name again.
tags: soft sevika, protective sevika, drunk reader, sevika washes you, sevika is a service butch basically, butchfemme, femme reader
summary: sevika takes care of you when you're drunk
w/c: 1.2k
⚬──────────✧──────────⚬──────────✧──────────⚬
“What do you mean I’m cut off? Come on, I’m only tipsy,” you groan, propping your body against the bar and fixing your posture in an attempt to convince the man.
The bartender stares back at you and shakes his head. “You’ve had three shots in the last thirty minutes. I’m not serving you anymore.”
“Please,” you beg, holding out the word for a few beats. A stupid smile splits open your face, and you push your last shot glass towards the man. “Just one more, then I swear I won’t ask again.”
“I said no,” the man replies, turning away from you and speaking to another customer.
You persist, following the man down the bar. Finally, he gets tired of your begging and turns to face you.
“Sevika, come get your girl,” he calls into the crowd.
Frowning, you stand up a bit straighter.
“Whatever, you’re no fun” you mumble, slurring your words as you stumble away.
You’ve almost made it across the bar when you feel a heavy, calloused hand land on your shoulder.
“Going somewhere, dollface?”
“Just waiting for you,” you reply, turning around to find Sevika standing behind you.
“Oh yeah? And why’s that?”
“Are you done with your cards?”
“Yeah, I’m done,” Sevika responds, pulling you closer to her. “Didn’t answer my question, though.”
“Let’s just go home, they won’t give me anything else,” you say after a moment, letting Sevika support your body.
Sevika chuckles in response, her flesh hand falling around your waist. “Alright,” she replies, her voice a bit mocking. “Let’s get you home.”
You roll your eyes, but you let Sevika pull you towards the exit. “Don’t say it like that,” you mumble, meaning to sound as sober as possible.
It doesn’t work, obviously.
“Yes ma’am,” Sevika says, still making fun of you slightly. Nevertheless, she guides you out of the crowded bar, gently pushing you out into the cool night air.
The walk home is quick, and before you know it, you’re watching Sevika unlock the door to your shared apartment. You follow her inside, dropping your purse on the couch.
Your body follows, curling up in the pile of pillows and blankets from last night’s movie. Sevika laughs again, sitting down by your legs.
“Sleepy?”
“No,” you groan, pushing up into a half-sitting position. “I’m so awake.”
“Sure, you are,” she replies, her voice barely above a whisper. You watch her flesh hand move closer to your face, and she softly tucks a stray hair behind your ear. “Let’s go take a shower, baby.”
You think of refusing for a moment, but you don’t. A nice, warm shower sounds pretty appealing.
Nodding, you stand up. Before you can move, though, you stumble slightly, grabbing onto Sevika for support.
She watches as you drunkenly giggle, and you can almost see the thoughts forming in her brain. Just as you realize what she’s going to do, Sevika scoops you up into her arms with ease.
You giggle at the sudden weightlessness, placing your arms around Sevika’s neck. She carries you to the bathroom and gently places you down on the edge of the tub, turning on the water.
“I can take a shower, Vika,” you mumble.
“You couldn’t even walk to the bathroom, doll” Sevika says, her voice soft. “I don’t mind doing this.”
Going quiet, you listen to the water fill the tub. Sevika helps you stand up, being overly cautious.
“Vika, I can undress myself,” you say, but your words are in vain. Sevika expertly turns you around, unzipping your dress and letting it fall to the ground.
You step out of the dress, watching as Sevika picks it up and folds it. She sets it on the bathroom counter before kneeling down on the ground in front of you.
“Sit down,” she says quietly. You obey, taking a seat on the edge of the tub again.
In front of you, Sevika takes your shoes off of your feet, setting them down to the side. “I don’t know how you walk in these every night,” she chuckles, poking at the heel.
“Practice,” you smile, staring down at her. “You look cute down there,” you add quietly, smirking slightly as you run your fingers through Sevika’s hair.
Sevika catches the shift in your tone, and she raises her eyebrow slightly. “No, you’re drunk.”
You sigh, pulling your hand back. “Whatever.”
She doesn’t respond, instead picking you up and setting you down into the warm water. Then, Sevika grabs the soap and starts lathering it over your body.
“I can wash myself,” you say, but again, Sevika doesn’t pay your words any mind.
You finally just lean back, letting the other woman wash you.
She does this every time you’re drunk or injured in some way. The truth was, Sevika just really enjoys taking care of you, even when you could technically do it yourself.
“Makes me feel stronger,” she’d told you when you’d asked her why a couple of years ago. “Like I can protect you.”
So, you let her do it.
You let her carry you around, wash your body, then tuck you into bed next to her. It was the least you could do for her, anyways.
Tonight, she finishes washing you and pulls you out of the tub. She dries your body with a soft towel, paying soft attention to the most delicate parts of you.
Then, she takes you to bed, setting you down on the edge while she pulls back the covers for you.
You’re quickly tucked in, and Sevika steps back, admiring her work.
“Can I get you anything before I shower? I’ll make it quick, of course.”
You shake your head, waving her off. “You’ve already done plenty, Vika,” you reply.
Nodding, Sevika turns and pads down the hallway back into the bathroom. You hear the water turn on, then the sound of Sevika quietly singing to herself.
It makes you smile, hearing her, but you never tell her. She’d stop doing it out of embarrassment if she thought you could hear her.
True to her promise, Sevika is in and out of the shower in a record three minutes. She returns to the bedroom wrapped in a towel as she rifles through her drawers.
Once she picks something to wear, she changes, letting the towel fall to the ground.
Sevika walks over to the bed, sitting down.
You roll towards her as she pulls the covers over her body, waiting for her to get comfortable. Once she does, she wraps her flesh arm around your shoulders, pulling you flush against her body.
Sighing, you relax into her, closing your eyes.
“You’re going to be so hungover tomorrow,” Sevika whispers into your ear.
“No, I’m not,” you shoot back, but your words don’t have any bite to them.
“Oh yeah? And you aren’t even tired, are you?”
Before you can even muster a response, your eyes start to droop. You settle for a quiet groan, and it gets your message across all the same.
Sevika chuckles, and you can feel the vibrations under your head.
summary: In an attempt to seduce a past hookup, you accidentally send your attending, Jack Abbot, a lewd photo.
tags/warnings: MDNI 18+, smut, oral (f receiving), piv sex, pussy eating, fingering, pussy slapping, jack abbot certified bush lover, overstimulation, implied age gap (reader is a resident), medical inaccuracies (peritoneal lavages are rarely used nowadays, but who cares), no use of y/n, trauma scene based on an episode of ER teehee.
wc: 9.5k
a/n: okay this is fully like two weeks late to the trend but it was inspired by that “you shaved your bush” tiktok trend lol. I genuinely do not know how this got so long, It was supposed to be a cute little fic but i got carried away, oopsies! I hope you enjoy <3
credits: gif credits to @ho-ii !!
It was Friday afternoon and you were desperately, achingly horny.
You’d tried your old faithful vibrator, which was doing the job fine, but you were desperate for some human connection. Your mind drifted through the mental rolodex of who you could call up for some casual fun. It was a short list, your demanding schedule not lending itself to a particularly vibrant social life. You’d only been on a handful of dates in the past year, most of which ended in disaster.
Alex was out of the running because of his unfortunate odor problem.
Sam was out due to a creepy doll collection he failed to disclose until you made your way to his apartment.
And Daniel was out because, frankly, he was terrible at sex, which is kind of a sticking point for you right now.
That left James, a guy you met on one of the apps and who was decent enough with his mouth that you’d seen him a handful of times. You didn’t hook up with him often, mostly because he was particular about your pubic hair. He preferred for it to be cleanly shaven, or at least heavily trimmed before he would consider going down on you.
So despite the fact that he wasn’t much good at fucking, you tended to go back to him when you needed a release. Yes, your standards were abysmally low, but the truth of the matter was that residency didn’t really give you any time to get out and meet new, better hook-ups. So James it was.
It had been a couple months since you’d hooked up, mostly due to this preference of his. Unfortunately, taking the time to take an ‘everything shower’ just to get your pussy eaten was a luxury that you were not often afforded due your residency schedule.
But today you’d had the time, energy, and desire to get devoured, so you hopped in the shower to take care of everything. By the time you emerged your hair was double cleansed, you’d applied a hair mask, exfoliated, shaved your legs, applied moisturizer and body oil, and–most importantly–your pussy was cleanly shaven.
You had a renewed pep in your step as you made your way over to your bed, ready to entice James. You maneuvered onto the bed and experimented with a few poses before landing on one that showed off your assets the best. You propped up your phone–timer set for 10 seconds–and you scrambled into position, perching back on your haunches and settling back on your feet, back arched a little uncomfortably.
You heard the shutter of the camera going off and quickly extricated yourself from the uncomfortable position. Looking over the image, you were very impressed.
The photo pictured your nude body from the chest down, beginning with the barest hint of the underside of your breasts showing, then the expanse of your stomach and curve of your hips. Lower, your fingers were on your pussy, parting your lips just enough to tease. It was a damn good nude, if you did say so yourself. James was lucky to receive it.
It had been so long since you texted him that instead of scrolling through endless scam messages and bill reminders, you just typed in the first few letters of his name to pull up his contact. As soon as you typed ‘ja’ it popped up, and you quickly began composing your message.
Gnawing at your thumbnail, you went back and forth on a few messages, trying to sound sexy, but playful. After five minutes of deliberation, you decided to just go with what you had. Honestly, it’s not like James was going to give it more than a second thought–if he wanted to fuck he wasn’t going to care about how sultry (or not) the message you sent him was.
You settled on:
you: shaved just for you. want something sweet to eat? ;)
You looked it over for a minute, nodding to yourself and hitting send before you could psych yourself out.
What a mistake.
Jack sat at the work station, mouth open and slackjawed, still staring at his phone screen.
Not at the photo anymore–no, that had been quickly swiped away–but the image was still burned into his retinas, the after image projecting onto the back of his eyelids when he closed them.
Why?
Because three minutes ago he received a text message from one of the day shift residents. He was concerned, initially, because there was little reason for day shift residents to contact him as opposed to Robby. Which is why Jack opened the message as soon as he saw it come in, thinking it might be an emergency, especially because it was you.
Instead, he was greeted with a sight he thought he’d never have the pleasure of seeing.
You, stretched back on your heels, breasts barely visible, pussy on full display for him. Your fingers held you open, your folds glistening in the late summer light that was streaming in, your pretty little clit in the center, just begging to be sucked. It was, quite possibly, the prettiest pussy he’d ever seen.
He couldn’t take his eyes off of the photo for a good 30 seconds, before the logical side of his brain kicked in and he remembered oh yeah, I’m at work and can’t be caught looking at my resident’s cunt.
He wasn’t unfamiliar with you, even though you’d only worked a handful of shifts together. But he saw you every morning at handoff, and you two shared warm smiles and easy jokes, your sardonic wit matching his bar for bar. He knew you were smart, able to hold your own in a trauma, and compassionate and empathetic underneath it all. And he couldn’t ignore the fact that you were gorgeous either.
And he would be lying if he said he hadn’t thought of you in this sort of light before, either. Jack Abbot was not a proud man–he could admit that on more than one occasion, he’d stood in his shower fisting his cock to the image of you on your knees for him.
It was especially bad when you did something impressive at work. Like the time you went toe-to-toe with a surgeon about whether a patient really needed surgery when you insisted that all they needed was a pericardiocentesis, and to prove your theory, you stuck the needle into the pericardium and extracted the fluid despite surgery’s objections. A ballsy move, one that would have been deeply problematic if you were wrong, but paid off. He’d had to rub one out in the bathroom that day. He apparently has a thing for competency.
“You’re gonna catch flies, Abbot,” Ellis said, walking out of an exam room, IPad tucked under her arm and smirk wide on her face. Jack shook himself out of his reverie, trying desperately not to think of your photo (but failing miserably).
He cleared his throat, “Sorry, what’ve you got for me?” he asked, still a bit dazed. Ellis looked at him skeptically–there wasn’t much that threw Dr. Jack Abbot–but proceeded to present her case anyway.
Once he approved her plan of treatment, Jack returned to his phone. He sat there for a long moment, contemplating what to do. You hadn’t said anything else, no frantic “I’m so sorry, that obviously wasn’t meant for you,” texts that explained the situation. Jack was positive it wasn’t intended for him, and he didn’t want to embarrass you more than you were sure to be.
His thumbs hovered over the keyboard, dancing nervously as he typed out his reply.
You started getting ready after sending the text, anticipating that James would want to meet up tonight. You did your hair, applied a bit of light make up, and threw on a cute little sundress.
It was about an hour later when you went to check your phone again, fully expecting to see a cheeky message from James inviting you over for some fun.
What you saw made your stomach drop instead. You felt dizzy, nausea washing over you in roiling waves. The text thread you were looking at was addressed to Jack Abbot, not James. And staring back at you was your nude body, followed by a response from Dr. Abbot.
Jack Abbot: I don’t think I’m the intended recipient for that photo.
Jack Abbot: But for what it's worth, a real man would eat it even if you didn’t shave. Would prefer it, actually.
Jack Abbot: Sorry, that was inappropriate. I’ve deleted this text thread, along with the photo. We can pretend this never happened.
There’s no fucking way. Absolutely not. There is no possible way that you accidentally sent a nude photo of yourself to your fucking attending. Not just any attending either, but the one you'd had a big fat stupid crush on for the better part of a year. The one you’d spent endless nights fantasizing about with your fingers plunged deep into your cunt, whose visage you’d pictured hovering over you, fucking you hard and deep; the name you accidentally moaned when James was eating you out the last time you hooked up.
Your mind refused to accept that this was reality, hoping against hope that this was some twisted fucking nightmare.
Shame welled up inside you, your cheeks hot from embarrassment and tears pricking at the corner of your eyes, mortification settling in earnest now. In addition to being humiliating, you also felt like a fucking creep. From his perspective, you just sent him a completely unsolicited nude photo.
Even more so, you hated that this probably killed any chance you had with him, even if that chance had been slim to none to begin with.
You paced your bedroom, thumbnail chewed raw as you tried to do damage control. What does one even say after they accidentally send a nude to their boss? After far too much deliberation, you decided to keep it simple, apologize, and crawl into your bed for the remainder of your two days off.
You: Dr. Abbot, I am so sorry about that!! I obviously didn’t mean to send that to you.
You: I meant to send it to a James and must not have looked closely enough before I sent it.
You: Thank you for deleting the photo, and I’m so sorry once again that you were subjected to seeing that.
You threw your phone as far away from you as possible, recklessly disregarding its safety despite the fact that you most certainly could not afford to repair said phone if it was damaged, and flopped onto the bed, screaming into a pillow. Your throat was raw by the time you surfaced for air, your body limp and exhausted, mind shuffling through worst case scenarios.
In the midst of your spiral, your brain drifted to the other part of his message: a real man would eat it even if you didn’t shave. That was, admittedly, inappropriate, but no more so than sending a nude to your superior, so you figured you were even. He probably just meant it to be supportive; to try and diffuse the awkward situation.
But another part of you wondered if he meant something else. If he was signalling to you that he would eat it, bush or not. The thought was indulgent, if not utterly preposterous. He was an attending; you were a resident. There was no way he’d meant anything by it. But you couldn’t help thinking…
Did he like the photo? Was he picturing you with a bush? Did he think about tasting you, about swirling his tongue around your clit or plunging it deep into you?
A notification dinged, shaking you out of your daydream, and you contemplated whether or not you actually wanted to see what he said, if anything at all. Curiosity eventually won out, hands grappling for your phone and swiping open the notification.
Jack Abbot: No worries. 👍
It was a completely normal response, which almost made it worse. Part of you wished he would lash out, call you disgusting or a whore, at least you’d know what to do with that. Shame or disgust were easier to digest than nonchalance.
You didn’t bother to send the photo to the correct person, your lust dampened, the fire doused with cold water, remnants pulverized to ash. Groaning, you burrowed into your bed with no intention of leaving for the next two days.
You had no idea how you were going to face him Monday.
You woke up two days later and ran through your options.
Flee the country and never return to Pittsburgh ever again (unrealistic, you’d devoted too much time to becoming a doctor, you weren’t giving up because of some catastrophically stupid mistake)
Arrive to work 20 minutes late, hopefully avoiding Jack Abbot by all costs (unlikely, the man worked more overtime than anyone except Robby. He was sure to still be there, and all you’d get was attendance point for your trouble)
Be a mature adult, apologize, and forget this ever happened, like he suggested (undoubtedly the best choice, but could you really ever forget that your attending has seen your pussy? And, a far sicker thought, did you want him to forget?)
Indecision weighed on you as you got ready, ultimately deciding on lucky number option 3. Your only saving grace was the fact that you were on day shift, and Abbot rarely worked days. The only interaction would be at handoff, and maybe if you could busied yourself enough getting a jump on patients, you could avoid him for as long as possible.
That was your plan of action as you walked into chairs, head down as you scanned into the ED and approached the nurses station. You didn’t hear his voice, which was a good sign; typically, you could hear it as soon as you entered, steady barking out orders over the hum of the department. You took a deep breath, steeling yourself and thinking for the first time since you sent that photo that things might be okay.
You spot Ellis at a work station, and beeline to her to get the handover started.
“Hey Ellis, how’d the night go? Any weird and wild cases?” you ask,
“Oh, you know, the usual,” she said, “foreign body extractions, a couple MIs, an insomniac who overdosed on benadryl and swore that the hat man was after him for money,” she laughed, shaking her head.
“To be fair, the hat man could be after him for money,” you said solemnly, face straight for a second before you burst out laughing.
Handover continued smoothly, Ellis updating you on which patients needed labs or imaging and which needed to be discharged. You almost made it through unscathed, your body turning to make your way to North 5 when you heard his voice calling to Ellis.
Your shoulders tensed–body betraying you by freezing in place–and he was next to you before you could scuttle away. Resting his forearms on the counter next to you, he continued talking to Ellis–about what, you couldn’t say, static filling your ears as you remembered what you’d done.
“Morning, Doc,” he said, startling you out of your daze.
“G-good morning, Dr. Abbot,” you stuttered, eyes glancing briefly at him before settling on his chin, unable to meet his eyes for more than a second.
He looked annoyingly normal, showing no sign that anything unseemly had occurred between you. You chanced another look at his eyes, the hazel orbs showing no hint of amusement or belittlement. But there was a look of acknowledgement, a steady one that should have reassured you that everything was okay, that you weren’t a laughingstock. The same look he’d give you in a trauma when things went sideways through no fault of your own.
And In any other situation, it would be reassuring. But right now, all it did was remind you that he’d seen your most sensitive parts, that he’d commented on the state of your pubic hair (or lack thereof). Heat bloomed in your cheeks, and your breath caught in your throat, eyes unable to breakaway from his gaze.
When you did manage to look away, it was, traitorously, to look down at his lips. They looked so soft, and for a split second you imagined yourself leaning in, capturing his lips with yours and kissing him into oblivion. You snapped back to reality half a second too late, seeing the edge of Abbot’s mouth turn up in the barest hint of a smile.
Clearing your throat, you quickly excused yourself to see a patient, all but running to the exam room. You managed to slow your breathing and compose yourself before you entered the room, squaring your shoulders and getting back to work.
This was going to be a lot harder than you anticipated.
Jack was being honest when he told you he deleted the text thread with that photo in it, a fact he was coming to regret as he laid in bed post-shift, body tired but too wired to relax and fall asleep. He’d committed the photo to memory, though, losing himself in it as he dragged his hand up and down his cock, thinking about how soft you’d be, how sweet you’d taste, the sounds he’d pull from you as he fucked you with his tongue. He’d fallen into this routine an embarrassing amount of times since he received that photo, feeling like a pervy, dirty old man all the while, but doing nothing to stop himself either.
His hand glided over his shaft once more, imagining that it was your warm, wet walls wrapped around him instead, and he was coming hard, painting his stomach with streaks of warm, wet goo. He sat there, breathing heavy, as a twitch of shame rolled over him. He shouldn’t be jerking it to the remembered image of a resident’s pussy, a woman at least 15 years younger than him, if not more.
But it was harder than he’d thought it would be to put that photo behind him. It was all he could think about as soon as he saw you that first morning, the image looping in an endless projection in his mind. It was completely unprofessional, and frankly dishonest. He’d told you that you could both pretend it had never happened, but he wasn’t so sure that was possible anymore.
And it was clear you hadn’t forgotten either. You were jumpy around him, the easy quips you used swap in the morning abandoned for stuttered greetings and awkward silences. He’d also caught you looking at his lips on more than one occasion and stealing glances at him when you thought he wasn’t paying attention. He wasn’t sure if it was true attraction, or just some morbid curiosity that was sparked by the unusual situation you two found yourselves in, but Jack wasn’t about to get his hopes up for the former.
As difficult as it was to keep his head on straight after seeing that photo, the more troubling part was that he’d lost the 10 to 15 minutes he spent every morning talking to you, a small ritual he looked forward to every shift. He hadn’t realized how much those moments meant to him until they were gone. Even the worst nights were magically better when he was able to make you laugh at handoff, your smile making his chest swell with pride and head fuzzy with feelings he had no business feeling.
Jack knew he had to do something to ease the tension, to get things back to normal. Or maybe a new normal, if he had anything to do with it.
The days passed in a similar fashion to that first day. Jack would greet you politely and attempt your typical banter, and you would awkwardly stutter out an adequate reply before making your escape as quickly as possible. You weren’t sure why you weren’t able to be a fucking adult and put it behind you, but you just couldn’t. Every time you thought you had the courage to revert back to your typical routine with Abbot, you chickened out almost immediately, bumbling your wall through some moronic excuse.
To make matters worse, you couldn’t stop thinking about him. It was worse than it ever had been before; what used to be an errant thought that would arise only in the throes of pleasure were now occurring during the most mundane tasks. You thought about what his full, silver curls would look like buried between your thighs while you were doing laundry; what his mouth would feel like on your breasts, teeth pulling at the pebbled skin of your nipples while you cooked dinner; how he would fuck you–would it be soft and slow, or hard and punishing?–while you cleaned the bathroom.
Your luck ran out about a month after the incident, as you were calling it. For the most part, you were able to keep your interactions with Abbot brief, albeit awkward. But today he was scheduled on day shift, covering for Al-Hashimi while she was home sick with her son. You’d only found out when you walked in, seeing his name on the board despite the fact that he was off last night.
You felt a wave of nausea wash over you; how were you supposed to go a whole day avoiding him? You managed pretty well for the first half of your shift, presenting exclusively to Robby, which wasn’t all that different from your normal routine. You avoided the traumas Abbot was running, hiding in exam rooms under the guise of checking vitals or reviewing scans. It was working fairly well until midday, when you were unfortunately in the vicinity of the ambulance bay when paramedics burst through.
“Santos, Mohan,” Abbot paused, eyes flitting over to where you stood before calling your name as well, “with me!” he said, already moving into the trauma room and gowning up. You reluctantly followed, slipping on your own trauma gown. He was behind you before you could secure your gown, fingers brushing against the nape of your neck as he tied the strings for you. It shouldn’t have sent a thrill down your spine, but it did. You stuttered out a thank you as you moved to assess the patient.
The paramedic was halfway through the bullet when you arrived at the bedside, hands moving to transfer them from the stretcher to the bed. “– multiple lacerations, bruises to the face, chest, and abdomen. Possible tib-fib and facial fracture.” You looked down at the patient, a teenage boy who couldn’t have been older than 15.
“BP’s low, 70 palp; pulse ox is 85,” Princess called out.
You slid the chestpiece of your stethoscope over the patient's chest, listening to the lungs. Unfortunately, your brain went blank when Abbot sidled up next to you, arm pressed tight against yours in the cramped trauma room.
“What do you think, Doc?” he asked, listening with his own stethoscope now.
You blinked, brain lagging as you tried to compose yourself; to try and save this boy’s life.
“Uh-um good breath sounds?” you said, a question more than an answer, though you were certain about the breath sounds. “Airway is patent, no tracheal deviation, no blood in the canal,” you finished, regaining a bit of confidence as you averted your gaze from his.
“Good,” he said, hand grasping your elbow and moving you down to the end of the bed. “What do we need to order?”
Santos, blessedly, answered before you could embarrass yourself further, “C-spine, chest and head CT.”
“BP is down to 60!”
“Alright people! What are we dealing with?” Abbot called out, eyebrow quirked at you.
Every differential evaporated from your mind. “He’s bleeding from somewhere,” was all you could come up with, though that was obvious. Instead of dwelling on that, you turned your attention to the boy, your eyes examining his body, searching for the source of bleeding. With Samira’s help you flipped the boy over, desperate to find a stab wound or gash, but coming up empty.
“Must be the belly,” Santos said.
“Alright, lavage kit please!” Abbot said, turning to you, “you ever done one of these?”
You shook your head.
“Well, today’s your lucky day, then,” he said, handing you an 11-blade.
Despite your best efforts, your hand shook as you pressed the blade against the skin.
“I-I can’t,” you whispered, low enough that only he could hear.
“You can,” he said, stepping behind you to steady your hand, guiding as you made the incision. He handed you the tubing next. “Make sure you’re into the peritoneum,” he whispered, lips right next to your ear. His hand was still on top of yours as you slid the tubing in, “I’m in, hook up the saline and extension tubing,” you said, breathing a sigh of relief.
Your relief was short-lived. The results of the lavage came back–negative. “Shit, nothing. It’s not the belly,” you said, eyebrows furrowed in confusion.
“What the fuck? Where the hell is this kid bleeding from?” Abbot cursed, pacing around the bed to see if anything was forgotten. “You check his back?” he asked.
“Yes, nothing there. Maybe it’s a faulty blood pressure cuff?” you said, grasping at straws, but moving to flip the boy over and recheck his back again anyway.
Abbot was next to you, eyes raking over systematically to find the source when suddenly Mohan pointed out a tiny mark on the boy’s lower right side, “What is that?” she asked.
“That is a very small puncture wound. Probably an ice pick, if I had to guess,” Abbot answered.
Fuck. You should have caught that. You were standing right there, staring at the lower quadrant of the boy's back. You’d even seen the small mark, but dismissed it as a mole. You felt sick to your stomach, fear and shame welling up in you. You had never had a reaction like this in a trauma, not even on your first day as a med student.
Garcia burst through the door just as Abbot was getting the patient ready to head up to the O.R. “Puncture wound, probably hit the kidney or renal artery,” he said, passing off the patient. She nodded, taking over from there.
“Good pickup,” you congratulated Mohan weakly as you walked out of the trauma bay, hoping you could make it to the bathroom and wallow in self-pity for a few moments.
You heard him call your name shortly after you exited the trauma bay. Heart sinking, you turned to face him. “Yes, Dr. Abbot?” you asked, fidgeting with the hem of your scrub top. You weren’t sure you could handle being yelled at by him today. You’d never been one for tears at being reprimanded, but you could already feel the tell-tale prickling behind your eyes, and you were almost positive that the dam would burst at a harsh word from Abbot.
“A word, please?” he asked, gesturing you to the stairwell, the only place with a semblance of privacy in the ED. You sullenly followed after him, bracing yourself for impact.
You leaned back against the wall, fully expecting him to start yelling as soon as you were situated under the staircase, hidden well enough from passersby, but all you felt was a warm, heavy weight on your shoulder.
“You have to settle down, okay?” he said, one hand planted firmly on your shoulder and the other grasping your chin between his fingers to direct your gaze to his. “Look, I know what you sent me was embarrassing, and we probably should’ve talked about it, but you can’t get this worked up over it when I’m on shift as your attending. It can’t affect your work, you're too good of a doctor to let something like this throw you,” he said earnestly, eyes sincere when you looked into them.
You stood there, mouth opening and closing like a goldfish. Your mind still hadn’t fully caught up. “I… you didn’t bring me out here to yell at me?” you asked, voice coming out weaker than you intended it to.
He shook his head, confused, “What? No, of course not. I barely noticed that puncture wound myself,” he said, alleviating your anxiety somewhat.
“What I’m concerned about is how wound tight you are around me. I’m not saying you have to like me or anything, but you have to be comfortable working with me. You didn’t make an error in this trauma, but you could have. And I know it would eat you up if something like that happened,” he said, thumb gently sweeping over your chin.
“I can’t let you jeopardize your education because you’re embarrassed about mistakenly sending me a revealing photo. It would kill me if you didn’t reach your full potential because of something like that, if I had any part of it,” he shook his head, a pained look on his face.
Oh. You couldn’t breathe, your cheeks surely inflamed at this point. You were suddenly very aware of how close he’d gotten–and of his hand on your face. His fingers were warm against your face, skin rough, providing delicious friction as his hand repositioned, thumb stroking along your jaw as he subtly tilted your head back. He smelled like clean laundry and coffee, with a slight tang of antiseptic.
Your lips parted, ragged breaths falling from your lips.
“Dr. Abbot–”
“Jack. Call me Jack,” he murmured, so close that you could feel the heat radiating from his body. If you tipped your head up just a fraction, it would close the distance between you; would bring your lips flush together. Your eyes fluttered shut at the thought.
“Jack, I don’t know why I can’t stop thinking about that picture,” you admitted quietly.
“Can I tell you a secret?” he asked, tongue darting out to wet his lips, “I can’t stop thinking about it, either.”
“Really?” you looked up at him from under your eyelashes.
He nodded, moving impossibly closer, lips ghosting against yours. He hesitated briefly, a look of doubt flashing across his face before his gaze steadied–a decision made; a line ready to be crossed. His grip tightened against your jaw, “I can’t stop thinking about you spreading that pretty little pussy open, or about the prick who wanted you to shave before he’d think about going down on you,” he said, shaking his head in disgust.
“You know how many times I fucked my fist to the memory of that photo? How much I’ve thought about how you taste, what sounds you’d make when you cum?” he asked.
A strangled moan escaped your lips at his words. You’d never seen this side of Jack Abbot before, and it was intoxicating. “I-i think about you when I touch myself too,” you whimpered, your admission seeming tame compared to his vulgar words, but you wanted him to know you were also going crazy over him; that this wasn’t one-sided.
“Yeah, pretty girl? You think about me when you stuff that little cunt with your fingers? Wish it was my cock instead?” he asked, his other hand snaking down to your hip, fingers inching their way under your scrub top to caress the skin there.
You nodded, the proximity and dirty talk stealing your breath and leaving you unable to form an intelligible sentence.
“Did he eat your pussy, sugar? You got all dolled up for him, did he at least treat you right?” he asked, breath fanning over your lips, stubble just barely grazing your sensitive skin.
You shook your head, dazed. “I didn’t send it to him,” you said, a little bashful, “was too embarrassed after I sent it to you.”
He groaned, forehead falling against yours, “poor baby, put in all that effort and didn’t even get to cum, did you?” he asked, just the slightest bit condescending.
You let out a pathetic whine, shaking your head ‘no’ at his question. Heat pooled deep in your belly and you felt your panties quickly dampening.
He tsked, “we’ll have to rectify that,” he said, “You shave again? Or you let her grow back natural?” he asked.
You bit your lip, still a bit shy despite all the filthy words that he’d spoken in the last 5 minutes. “I’m au naturelle,” you whispered, a slight smirk tugging at your lips.
“Good fucking girl,” he growled before his mouth was on yours. His lips moved against yours with a ferocity you’d never experienced before. There was nothing uncertain about the kiss, his lips firm as he devoured you, tongue licking into your mouth and sliding against yours deliciously. One of your hands slid up the side of his neck to play with the curls at his nape while the other fisted in the fabric of his scrub top.
His spit tasted like the stale breakroom coffee and the spearmint of his gum, and you couldn’t get enough. You suckled at his tongue, trying to keep up with his relentless pace, but eventually let him take the reins and kiss you silly.
You were both panting when you pulled away, a string of spit drawn taut between your lips before snapping. Jack held your head between his hands, thumbs brushing softly over the apples of your cheeks.
“Talk with me. Tonight. Come have dinner or a drink with me, and we can talk about it all,” he said, a borderline pleading look on his face.
You nodded, still a little dumb from the kiss. “Yeah, yeah, sure. Okay,” you said, slowly extricating your hand from his scrub top.
He let you go with a final squeeze to your jaw, moving to re-enter the ED before you.
You stood there a moment longer, wiping your lips to get rid of your combined saliva and to lessen the kiss bitten look you were sure you were sporting before getting back to work.
The rest of the shift was painfully slow, the hours passing by like molasses. You couldn’t stop thinking about the kiss, the way his lips molded against yours like it was their rightful place. You did make a concentrated effort not to let it impact your work, though. Jack was right about that; nothing could come between you and finishing your residency.
It was just after 7:30 when you exited the hospital, and you immediately spotted Jack leaning against his truck waiting for you. You smiled as you approached him, nervous butterflies erupting in your stomach. Despite that breathtaking kiss, you still didn’t know where you stood. Was he just satisfying a sexual curiosity? Or was it possible that he also had feelings for you?
He cleared his throat, “So I was thinking we could order something to my place and talk there. Unless you want to go somewhere else, to a restaurant or your place,” he rambled, nerves undercutting his typically confident energy.
“Your place sounds good,” you nod, still a bit shy.
His hand was warm on the small of your back as he guided you to the passenger side, opening the door for you and helping you step up into the cab. The ride to his house was quiet, but not uncomfortably so. Some 90s alternative rock playlist hummed quietly in the background while you ordered pizza for the two of you–on his phone, with his card, he insisted. His hand rested lightly on your knee, the heat of his palm burning through the fabric of your scrubs.
You arrived at a beautifully manicured house in a suburb far enough from the city to be peacefully quiet. It’s different from what you pictured, you realize as you walk in. You assumed that a man who worked as much as he did wouldn’t have the time or energy to put into making a house a home; you pictured a sterile kitchen and minimalist fixtures, white walls with abstract art.
But it was homey. The walls were painted, photos scattered across them. The couch looked comfy, something picked out with intention, not the first option plucked from a furniture catalog. There were plants, beautiful, well taken care of ferns and pothos littered about. Warm light filtered through the kitchen, the island topped with butcher block and bracketed by two upholstered stools.
“Do you want anything to drink? Water, wine, beer?” he asked, opening the fridge and grabbing a beer for himself.
You focused your attention back on him, abandoning your pseudo-psychoanalysis of his house and drifting over to perch on a stool. “Wine would be nice,” you said, grateful for something to occupy your hands. He nods, pours you a modest glass of red–something French that probably costs ten times the amount of your shitty grocery store wine.
The pizza arrives soon thereafter, and you sit down at the island to eat. Conversation is easy, and you feel more at ease with him now than you ever had before, a drastic 180 from this morning. You talk about your day, life, post-residency plans; he lets loose a few embarrassing stories from his own residency days, one featuring a very unfortunate Robby being pantsed by a 6 year old in the middle of the ED. Eventually, though, plates are cleared and glasses are downed, a natural lull falling over the conversation.
“So,” he starts, head resting against his palm, arm propped up on the counter, “that photo…” He’s got that sly smirk on his face now, comfortable now to tease you about it.
You groan, burying your head in your arms. He laughed, “you don’t have to explain yourself, but I am curious what series of events led to me receiving that photo,” he said… “a series of events for which I am very thankful for, by the way.”
You turned, resting your head sideways on your arms, and started explaining all about James and his preferences, how he was your only real option for some skin-to-skin contact. Jack, for his part, listened quietly, offering little commentary until you finished your great tale.
“So you’re telling me that this kid can’t even fuck you right, yet he demands you shave before he’ll go down on you?” he asks, a horrified look on his face.
“Welcome to the joys of modern dating,” you joke, shooting him a halfhearted smile.
He shook his head, “unacceptable,” he said before hooking his leg around your stool and pulling you closer. You gasp, steadying yourself with a hand on his thigh as you fight not to topple onto him completely. He was close now, one hand coming up to rest on the hollow of your neck while the other slid up your top, thumb strumming over your ribs.
Jack didn’t hesitate this time. This kiss was different–no less searing, but a little more leisurely–like he wasn’t worried about scarcity anymore, confident that he had the time to take you apart and put you back together again before the night was over. His mouth was molten against yours, tongue delving deep in your mouth and swallowing up the steady stream of desperate whines escaping you.
The hand on your neck coasted upward, tangling in your hair and angling your head back to deepen the kiss. Your hands slid under his shirt, groaning as they came to rest on his tummy. He was warm, the muscle firm under your hands as you lightly scraped your nails over his flesh. His chest rumbled under your touch, the hand in your hair tightening, the twinge of pain a welcome contrast to the overwhelming pleasure of his lips against yours.
He barely broke the kiss to whisper into your mouth, “let me show you what its like to have a real man fuck you. Please, sugar,” he pulled away finally, resting his forehead against yours.
“Please fuck me, Jack,” you said, eyes hooded with lust. A moment later you were being scooped up from the stool and carried toward his bedroom. While Jack focused on not running into anything, you trailed open-mouthed kisses along the length of his neck, sucking the skin between your teeth before soothing it over with your tongue. You nipped gently at his adam’s apple, smiling when he yelped at the contact.
“You’re trouble, you know that?” he chuckled before dropping you down onto his bed, your body bouncing slightly before settling. He stood between your legs, face cradled between his meaty hands. “I want you to listen to me, okay?” he asked, waiting for you to nod before continuing, “I want to do so many filthy, obscene things to you tonight; want to fuck you into oblivion as many times as you’ll let me, but I want you to know that if you want to stop, at any point, you just say the word and we’re done. No questions asked. Understand?”
You nodded once more, but that was insufficient for Jack. “need you to use your big girl words, okay, pretty? Tell me you understand,” he said.
“I understand, Jack. If I want to stop, I’ll tell you,” you replied seriously, even though you knew there was no chance you’d want to stop.
“Good. Now, I want you to take off your scrubs, scoot up to the headboard, and get comfortable while I take care of my leg, okay?”
You did as he bade you, left only in a pair of pink cotton panties and bra. You hadn’t planned on being in this situation, but you were glad they were a matching set at the very least. Settling against his pillows, you watched as he shucked his pants off, the sleek metal of his prosthesis glinting in the low lamplight.
He sat down at the edge of the bed, fingers undoing the mechanism with practiced motions, twisting the appendage off and setting it to the side. The skin looked a little chapped, but not raw, which was a good sign.
“Is there anything I could do to make things more comfortable for you?” you asked. You wanted to make sure he knew you weren’t put off by his leg, wanted to make sure he didn’t feel like he had to overcompensate because of it.
“No, thank you, sugar. You’re doin’ plenty already,” he assured, turning around to face you. His eyes darkened as he took you in, his gaze hungrily raking over your newly exposed skin. He moved to hover over you, forearms braced next to your head as kisses you again, this time a sweet press of his lips against yours before he began trailing his mouth along your jaw and down your neck, laving hot kisses all across your neck and collarbone.
A gasp punches out of you when he sucks harshly at the spot just below the ear, the spot that turns your insides to putty. He grins against you, focusing his attention there until you’re a writhing, moaning mess under him. A hand reaches behind you to make quick work of your bra clasp, the flimsy material soon thrown across the room, forgotten immediately. His hands are on you in a flash, thumbs teasing along the underside of your tits.
Whining, you claw at his shirt, desperately wanting to feel his bare chest against your nipples, and he obliges, one-handedly throwing the thing off. The fine silver hair on his chest scrapes against you, your nails digging into his back as you pull him flush to you. Jack groans, hips involuntarily rutting against you, his hard cock a delicious pressure against your aching cunt. Your hips cant up, chasing the friction and grinding yourself against him.
“Careful, you keep doin’ that and this’ll be over before it even starts,” Jack warns, nipping at your bottom lip before continuing his maddening descent, mouth exploring your breasts–conveniently ignoring your painfully hard nipples. “Jaaaack,” you whine, thrusting your chest upward. He takes the hint, lips suctioning against a nipple and using his tongue to flick the pebbled flesh. Your hand fists in his curls, holding him there as his hand moves to tug at your other nipple. When he decides he’s given enough attention to one nipple, he switches sides, giving the other the same treatment. By the time he moves on, your tits are sure to be sore and red tomorrow, but you could not care less about that right now.
He kissed down your stomach, lips lingering at your navel before pulling back, eyes travelling down between your legs. “Fuck sweetheart, is all this just from me playin’ with your pretty tits?” he asked, eyes fixated on the wet spot on your panties. You whimper in response, mind too fuzzy to form words. His fingers skate over your waistband, your tummy contracting in anticipation. Ever so slowly, he drags your panties down your legs, discarding them over his shoulder as he settles between your legs.
His pupils were blown wide, utterly entranced by your pussy. The attention made you want to shrink in on yourself, your legs subconsciously moving to close, but his wide shoulders and firm grip on your thighs stopped you. “Fuck, sugar, this is what she looks like with some curls on ‘er? And you let some boy convince you she needed to be bald?” He shook his head, a genuinely pained look on his face.
He moved to spread you open for him, thumbs stroking up and down your lips as he took you in. Without warning, he surged forward, pressing a chase kiss against your clit before sitting back and continuing to admire your pussy. You squealed, hips twitching forward in search of more friction, the brief contact making you dizzy with need. It was slightly embarrassing, being watched like this, but you were growing impossibly wetter anyway.
Jack’s hands moved back to your thighs as you squirmed, grip tightening, fingers sinking into your soft flesh just enough to ache, and spread you further open. “Don’t hide from me, pretty girl,” he said, pressing hot kisses from your knee to your inner thigh, stopping right at the crease between your pussy and thigh, breath fanning over your puffy folds. Your clit was throbbing, your hips subtly shifting against nothing.
“‘m gonna show you just how pretty this pussy is, not gonna stop until you feel it,” he said, looking directly into your eyes, “you okay with that?”
No sooner had you nodded than he was on you. He didn’t waste any time, swiping the flat of his tongue through your folds from entrance to clit in one long stroke. His tongue was hot against your cunt, the muscle firm as it lapped hungrily at your folds, exploring every inch of you. He groaned, nuzzling his face deeper into your pussy. “Fuck, you taste better than I could have ever imagined,” he moaned, tongue dipping into your hole to collect the slick gathering there.
He didn’t surface for air, mouth working against you relentlessly; like he’d been deprived of something vital that had been restored to him, and he wasn’t about to let it go again. It was primal, almost animalistic the way he licked, sucked, and nipped at your cunt. Your back arched almost painfully off the bed, hands fisted in the sheets and moans slipping from your lips unbidden.
He alternated between circling your clit in tight little circles with the tip of his tongue, and suckling on it, lips wrapped snug around the bundle of nerves. Your body was hot, your legs trembling as the coil in your core wound tighter. One hand moved to grip his curls, the hair soft between your fingers as you tugged at it. He moaned into your pussy, the vibrations bringing you right to the edge.
“Fuck, right there, Jack,” you gasped, “I’m so close, so–”
“Cum for me, sugar, let me taste you,” he said quickly, head bowing back down to suck your clit harshly, teeth grazing it just the littlest bit.
And you did, white hot pleasure coursing through you, body contorting, legs squeezing his head between your thighs as you rode out your orgasm. You felt like a live wire, your nerves firing on all cylinders while Jack kept gentle pressure on your clit, drawing out your release as long as possible. Jack lapped up all your spend, not letting a drop go to waste. Boneless, you weakly pushed his head away, the overstimulation too much.
He sat back a fraction, face dripping with your juices and his saliva. There was a gleam in his eye as his thumb replaced his mouth, rubbing soft circles against your clit. A high-pitched whine escaped you, your sensitive nub begging for reprieve.
“You can give me another one, can’t you pretty girl?” he asked, voice brooking no argument.
“I d-don’t–fuck–I don’t know,” you blabbered, the painful overstimulation quickly giving way to pleasure, your hips canting forward against his thumb.
“I think you can,” he murmured, swiping a thick finger through your folds before sinking it in and curling lazily against that sweet spot on your front wall. “Fuck, Jack, feels so good,” you moaned, moving you hips in time with his finger. Before you knew it he was adding another finger, a slight sting accompanying the stretch. All you could do was whimper, his fingers switching between slow and deep, and fast and hard strokes.
Your second orgasm hit you without warning, pleasure reverberating through your body from the top of your head to the soles of your feet, your toes curling as you came harder than you ever had in your life. Jack’s fingers kept moving, wringing every last after shock from your body. You were panting now, trying to catch your breath but failing miserably.
And yet, Jack’s fingers were still moving, scissoring you open now. It was too much, the sensations bordered more on pain than pleasure. “I can’t–can’t do a-another one like this,” you stuttered out.
Jack looked at you, a wicked grin spreading across his face. “Tell me you have the prettiest pussy,” he said, fingers slowing a fraction as he waited for you to answer, gaze leveled directly at you.
You whined, face heating at the order, “J-Jack, please, just wanna cum on your cock,” you said, hoping it would break his resolve.
“I’ll fuck you as soon as you say it, sugar. Say you have the prettiest pussy.”
You squirmed, cheeks hot as you whimpered, “I can’t–I’m not–” was all you managed to get out before a sharp slap landed on your pussy. You gasped, the pain shocking but not unwelcome.
“If you want to cum on my cock, you have to be a good girl,” he said, face severe as he continued curling his fingers against your sweet spot. “and good girls do what they’re told. So, I want you to say, ‘Jack, I have the prettiest, sweetest pussy’ okay? Can you do that for me, pretty girl?” he asked, thumb circling your clit.
You huffed, trying to catch your breath. “Ja-aack, fuck, I-I have, hng, I have the p-prettiest, sweet–ah–sweetest pussy,” you stammered out.
“Knew you could do it for me,” he praised, fingers leaving your cunt to pull off his boxers. His cock sprang out, curving slightly and resting against his abdomen. It stole the breath from your lungs–It was obnoxiously thick and decently lengthy, tip flushed red and leaking precum steadily. Your hand reached out to feel him, maybe jerk him off a little before he fucked you, but Jack stopped you, pinning your wrist down on the bed. You whined, lip jutting out in a not-so-faux pout.
“I’m trying not to cum in 5 seconds like a teenager, sugar, and if you put your soft hands on me right now I’m not gonna be able to last,” he said, reaching over to his bedside table to grab a condom. He stroked his cock a few times before rolling the condom on and lining himself up with your entrance, neither one of you interested in teasing anymore.
He eased the tip in, your walls fluttering around him to accommodate his girth. Your legs spread open wider for him as he settled between your hips, pushing the rest of his length in slowly until he was flush against your hips, his pelvic bone rubbing your clit just right. The stretch was intense, your walls fluttering and clenching harshly at the intrusion. Your hips wiggled slightly, trying to get used to the twinge of pain from the sheer size of him.
Jack hovered over you, one arm resting next to your head while the other gripped your hip tight. His face was twisted, almost painful looking. “You gotta relax for me, sugar, you’re gripping me like a fuckin’ vise,” he grit out, head falling into the crook of your neck, placing chaste kisses there, trying to loosen you up. You tried, willing your muscles to relax around him.
A few moments passed before Jack was able to move, pulling out to the tip before thrusting back in harshly, setting a brutal pace. You moaned, Jack’s hips snapping hard against you, cock dragging through your walls exquisitely. You tried to keep up with his pace, your hips meeting each thrust, cunt greedily sucking him back in each time.
Your back was arched, hair splayed out across the pillow as you took what Jack gave you.
“So pretty for me, sweetheart,” he said, sitting back on his haunches, “my perfect little pussy.” He grabbed at your thighs, pushing them up toward your chest, knees nearly at your ears. The new angle forced him deeper than before, his thrusts fucking you into the mattress. You were entranced by the view of him fucking you, curls dripping and chest glistening with sweat as he pounded into your pussy.
The room sounded obscene between the slapping skin, your combined moans, and your squelching cunt. Moans were falling from your lips at a near constant rate, and Jack was louder than you’d expected, throaty groans and grunts reverberating like music to your ears.
You’re honestly not sure you’ve ever come more than twice in a night, but it didn’t take as long as you thought for your third orgasm to build, the waves cresting fast. The only thing you could think about was Jack’s cock hammering into your pussy.
“I think I’m gonna, gonna cum again,” you breathed, “don’t stop, Jack, pleasepleasepleasepleeeeeeease,” you keened.
Jack’s hand found your jaw, tilting your face up to kiss him sloppily, “cum for me, baby, let me feel you milk my cock,” he said, thrusts growing more uncoordinated as he neared his orgasm.
It only took a few more deep, punishing trusts before you were coming undone around his cock. You held eye contact with Jack as your orgasm washed over you, your mouth parted wide, tears gathering at the corners of your eyes at the overwhelming sensations. You felt so full, your walls pulsing mercilessly around him.
Jack gripped your hips in both hands, his trusts faster and harder than before as he chased his release. “wanna feel you cum in me Jack,” you croaked, throat raw, hands reaching out to paw at any skin you could.
Jack groaned, hips stuttering a few more times before thrusting deep into you once last time and cumming. He ground his hips into yours, milking every last drop from his cock. You felt the warmth of his cum through the condom, your cunt clenching again at the feeling, your mind already flashing forward to imagine him fucking you raw–you let about another garbled moan at the thought.
Spent, Jack collapsed into you, cock softening inside your still pulsing cunt. His weight on top of you was comforting, grounding you back to earth. You were content to lay there, coming down and catching your breath.
Eventually Jack rolled off of you, disposing of the condom and grabbing a few wet wipes from his nightstand to clean you both up.
He pulled you against his side, big hand petting your hair, “You okay, sugar? Was that too much?” he asked, voice hoarse.
“no, was so good, Jackie,” you mumbled, feeling floaty and sated.
“Good,” he whispered, pressing soft kisses onto your hairline.
You sat in comfortable silence for a while, head resting on his bare chest, his heartbeat a comforting thrum in your ear. One large hand ran up and down the smooth expanse of your back while the other held your hand against his chest, fingers intertwined together.
“I hope you know this isn’t just a one time thing,” he said suddenly, his arm tightening its hold around you.
“No?” you asked, trying to keep the hopeful edge out of your voice.
“Uh-uh, you’re mine,” he says possessively, hand snaking down to cup your sensitive mound, “this is my pussy now.”
You want to be offended, want to point out that you’re more than your cunt. But you know Jack knows that, and more than anything your head grows warm and fuzzy at the thought of being someone’s. Of being Jack’s.
“Yeah, ‘s all yours, Jackie,” you mumble, falling asleep against the gentle rise and fall of his chest, happier than you’ve been in a long time.
a/n: whew that was a lot!! thank you if you made it all the way through!!
ohhhh i've just started writing virgin!reader: the remix and not to toot my own horn but i'm obsessed with them. obsessed with soft!simon. obsessed obsessed obsessed.
he’s sitting on the couch watching television when you walk into the room after getting back from work.
when you finally reach the couch, you immediately snuggle into him and all he says is, “is that all i get?”
you turn your head to look at him.
“what do you mean?” you ask softly.
“i haven’t seen you all day, don’t you wanna give your daddy a kiss?”
you quirk your eyebrows at him before laughing.
“you’re so gross,” you say as you shove him gently but his gaze stays locked on yours.
you know that look, that stupid smirk that doesn’t leave his face, he’s going to get what he wants because at the end of the day you're still weak for him.
you roll your eyes and kiss him softly, and that’s when he knows he’s in.
he starts sneaking it into casual conversations after that, always referring to himself as your “daddy” and you laugh, brushing him off as just teasing you.
but it gets worse when he starts using it in the bedroom.
you start acting out?
“come on, love. don’t you wanna be good for daddy, hm?” he says in that soft voice and it has you melting.
he knows just how to break you. he knows you love when you talks to you in that gentle voice of his. he also doesn't forget the way you subconsciously lean your cheek into his hand when he strokes it softly.
always so sweet for him.
he also is incredibly patient.
it doesn’t matter how much his pants tighten when he watches you squirm in front of him because you’re too embarrassed to ask him to fuck you. he’s going to wait, however long it takes.
john makes you use your words. if you don’t say anything, you won’t get anything.
"you gonna tell daddy what you want?"
he looks at you expectantly with a smug look on his face as he feeds off your embarrassment.
when you finally give into him, a pitiful "please touch me, daddy" leaving your lips, he smiles cockily before he leans down to kiss you roughly and his hand wraps around your throat holding you in place.
Kyle Gaz Garrick is the perfect man to be around when you’re on your period. He’s not squeamish about it, thank fuck; he’s very sympathetic, sweet and he absolutely spoils you rotten. And if you’re like me, ie ridiculously affectionate and ridiculously in pain, he’d absolutely carry you about when the thigh cramps set in and all you want to do is cuddle.
like he knows it soothes you before bed & gets you extra comfy, so he does it every night(or whenever you’re having anxiety) without a second thought!
and he doesn’t just scratch the same place over & over until it’s raw— no, that’s lazy, and jack abbot is never half-assed when it comes to you.
lightly scratching your back, your arms & thighs, giving you little kisses while he cuddles you closer under his left arm as you lay on your tummy. whispering “you’re gonna be so cozy, gonna sleep so good tonight baby. mmm, is that nice? you all snuggly?”
Jack would never be the kind of boyfriend who waits outside of the store on some bench, collectively staring at his phone with a bunch of other bored guys who are waiting for their girlfriends to finish up shopping.
He's carrying your bags and purse for you so you'll have two free hands while browsing. And he actually looks out for clothes you'd like too, he's not even carrying his phone with him. He just needs his card and one of your scrunchies on his wrist because he knows you're likely to sweat inside of the changing room later.
He's silently collecting the clothes you're picking on his arm, occasionally dropping some of his choices on there too.
There's also a smol water bottle tucked into his back pocket which shouldn't even fit but somehow does and makes you stare at his ass way too often. He can't have his baby girl get thirsty and have no refreshment close.
He loves how you gasp when spotting a pretty summer dress or cute heels! You get so giddy and walk away from him fast, but he never loses sight of you, not once.
Jack's favorite thing to shop for is underwear or bikinis.
Because for that, you always need his opinion and he slips behind the curtain of the changing room, backing you up against the big mirror while dropping the bags and taking a reaaally good look at you.
"Jesus, baby...you're so fucking beautiful." while his hands roam over your waist, his thumb slipping just past your cute flimsy bottoms.
"Don't you think it's too short?" Aw, you're blushing. Jack is so fucking hard.
"Too short for what? Our private pool at the air bnb with no one except us there? No, baby, it's alright." He kisses your forehead, his hand caressing your underboob that peeks out from the bra top. "You'll gonna look fucking hot, I can barely contain myself now, do you know what you'll do to me once we're on vacation?"