stepdad!soldier boy is the kinda guy to make you blow him when you’re home alone together, his hands gripped tightly in your hair, his cock halfway down your throat, only to tell you “you’re swallowing your siblings” when he inevitably cums in your mouth, filling you up with not only his pearly white load, but also a deep sense of shame just ‘cause he thinks it’s funny.
Robert Robertsonxfem!reader explicit (sex-worker/dispatcher!Reader, glory hole, blowjobs (obviously), strangers (?) to lovers, dirty talk, banter, masturbation, flirting, drunk sex, power play, satirical language, happens on December 30-31)
word count: 10,8K
author’s note: Hi :v I was late for X-mas fics but I made it for NYE. This was inspired by Strangers in a Strange Place by DogsInMyMind, then brainstormed up to the wazoo with @doggrowth, thank you! And well, Happy New Year!
Dispatch Masterlist
AO3
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It was necessity, at first. Necessity, and whatever seed of hedonism pushes you to do things 'for the plot'. Some of them turn into entire chapters of your life, instead of an odd holiday special. Being broke has led you places you’d never tell anyone about—secrets stacked and locked, building a second identity you don’t let the outside world see.
Back then, you didn't need much: a Craigslist ad posted at 2 a.m. written in lowercase with too many exclamation marks. Ones written too politely, a poor attempt at sanitizing whatever seedy business was expected to be done.
Bar-back for private parties where the living room turns into a kennel of shoes and cologne; ‘event staff’ that really means stand in a hallway and keep strangers from wandering into the wrong bedroom; overnight cleaning for a massage place that swore it was just massage; posing as someone’s plus-one for a corporate dinner, paid cash to laugh at jokes and look touched by the speeches; testing products for a hosiery webshop, legs only, face out of frame, ‘must be comfortable with close-ups’ (need to get details on those garters, honey, pity though, you have such a pretty… face); selling your hands for ring photos, then your feet for sandal listings, then your silence for everything else; reading tarot at a student bar, telling drunk men what they paid to hear; doing ‘mystery shopping’ at clubs that put their bouncers in suits; pet-sitting animals that felt like they belonged in a lab; taking phone calls for a hotline that was supposedly about loneliness, until it wasn’t.
With this one, it’s a shitty hand-written flyer with tear-off strips bearing the phone number. Hung from a single pin on the video rental’s What’s New board. Details scarce. Mysterious enough to hook you anyway: mouth to feed? it says.
I’ve got one of those. You take the number. Call. Nod through it, get the ‘job.’
For a while, it’s enough. Until it becomes clear that mouths tighter than yours still won’t get full (pun intended) off sucking dick in the back of a video store. So you take the upgrade.
The SDN listing comes with initial polish: paid time off, salary regularly paid, the whole fantasy of stability. It’s easy enough to get in. All they want is someone smart enough to play a daily game of managing resources—calls, crises, timers, triage—and at that you’ve always been good. Again: you got the job. Now you have two.
You keep both because lust and greed are your favourite deadly sins, and because life behind a desk turns out tame compared to life on your knees. Hero-manager by day, whore by night, just to keep some live-wire plot in your story.
Because nothing you do at SDN ever feels as pure as that moment in the stall: faceless cock shoved through a hole, stripped of biography, stripped of consequence, reduced to three to seven inches of tender skin and corpora cavernosa full of pulsing blood. Yours to play with, yours to decide the pace, until they’re trembling on the edge of themselves, grunt ugly and earnest as men do when they forget they’re supposed to be men and they swell at the tip into their flavoured condoms begging for a name you won’t give.
And when it’s over they leave with their dignity in their pocket like loose change, while you zip up, rinse your mouth, and go back to being employed. Truth be told, it’s fucking thrilling.
Obviously, they come in all shapes and sizes, but the way you work, each one comes with a flavour and a temperament, too.
Strawberry is punctual. Strawberry shows up early, like the stall is an appointment and you’re the specialist. Thick at the base with a small crown, always clean, always shaved (pity), trying to make a good impression on a person he’ll never see. He likes a quiet Monday or Tuesday, hates an audience, hates waiting, hates the idea that you might be bored. When he’s done, he leaves the place tidy in the way people get tidy when they’re ashamed of wanting something.
Fresh Mint is a control freak. He does it in near-dead silence since sound would make it real. No chatter. No jokes. No begging. Just breath counted through the nose, a tight little hiss that starts arrested and ends feral, kettle-on-the-boil. Then he exhales like he’s been holding his whole life in his lungs. Fresh Mint always tips. Fresh Mint slides the money through like he’s paying a fine. Fresh Mint comes back anyway.
Piña Colada has a dick the size of a child’s arm and is disgustingly proud of it. Piña Colada picks the loudest wrapper because he wants you to laugh, wants you to picture him grinning, wants the whole thing to feel like a story he gets to tell later. He’s showy with it—too much cologne, too much swagger, too much meat to be shoved down your throat like this. He gives you work. Your jaw tells the truth the next day. Piña Colada leaves satisfied, thinking he’s impressed a god.
There are others, of course. Cola and Grape and Cinnamon; Bubblegum Sweethearts and Sour Little Bastards; the ones who come in like they’re buying milk and the ones who come in like they’re committing a felony. Some flavours vanish after one night. Some become regulars. You catalogue them the only way you can—by what they offer through the slot, what they ask for, what they can’t stop giving away. You don’t shrink them on principle. You shrink them because the booth gives you no faces to attach the cock to, so you do what you’ve always done when you’re safe enough to be curious: suck what information you can get, and get it the hard way.
Then there’s your favourite, and the joke’s on you: it’s Vanilla. He’s pretty, at least the inches you get to see. Pinkish tip, lovely soft slit that makes you wish there was no scented rubber between you, veins that can’t decide whether they’re blue or green, but more importantly, they swell deliciously under your tongue and make him fun to suck. He plays with his balls a lot and does not shut up for a second. Makes you laugh, cringe, reconsider, then finger yourself while you’re at it because his voice would probably convince you to do anything.
With Vanilla, you have a thing going on. He’s a monogamist. A romantic. He’s brought you a single carnation for your tenth ‘date’ anniversary (since that’s the only flower he thought wouldn’t get ruined while pushed through the hole) and let you edge him until only words left in his vocabulary were fuck and baby and please. He was shy at first, slightly pissed and you know that type too: can’t believe that a guy like me came to a place like this. They are good, those ones. They beat themselves up until they realise there is nothing wrong about being a human with a need that has no eyes to it.
The stall creaks. Door opens, shuts, he closes the latch and sighs long and deep. Vanilla comes in quieter than the others. Not furtive—comfortable. Like he’s carried the outside cold on his shoulders and left it by the door with his coat. His voice is deep and raspy, sounds like it’s been used all day for being competent and kept, and now gets to be used for something else. It has a drag to it, nicotine-adjacent even when it isn’t, a throat that’s been scraped clean by fluorescent air.
“Hey,” he says, soft. “You there?”
“Always,” you tell him.
You’ve got your rituals too—your hands washed, hair up, posture set like you’re clocking in. “How’re you doing?” you ask, letting him have the illusion of normal conversation.
There’s a brief pause and then an abashed chuckle, just breath and embarrassment that make his voice this much rougher. “Horny,” he admits, and immediately sounds like a younger version of himself.
“Good,” you say. “That’s my favourite.”
He laughs, one sharp, charmed sound. You shift closer to the slot, curiosity wearing its best dress. It’s the only moment you get to see his hands, and they’re pretty too: knuckles periodically reddened have you wondering if he’s hit something or someone—hot either way. Fingers that look like they’d fit well between your legs, or around your throat, were you feeling adventurous. He undoes the belt buckle, leather slides through the loop. Pants open, sag on his thighs, and he takes himself out into a palm slickened with spit.
It’s the sluttiest frame there exists, yet he still manages to make it worse. Moves back a step so you can see the pale stomach with a dark line of hair, thickening towards the base. You watch him go from delicate to intent in real time, firming under the attention until he’s hard and ready to get dressed for you.
“Are you… peeking?” he asks, too gentle to be accusing, too pleased to be innocent.
Unwilling to waste the language, you answer with a sound: a low, indulgent hum that tastes like saliva gathering, like a mouth making up its mind. A noise that means yes without ever handing over the dignity of saying it.
His inhale stutters. “Fuck,” he breathes, affectionate and doomed. “You’re trouble.”
“Hmm, no,” you say. “Just enjoying my job.”
He smiles, you think, pulls the condom on, moves closer. You wait, wet your lips, count your teeth and then he’s through, proud as much as a cock can be, twitching to have you take him. A kiss on the tip, and he sighs already. “Fuck, I missed you,” he says and you grin all goofy, close your eyes and think what you won’t speak: Missed you too.
There’s a signature style you’ve mastered, but everyone gets their own special deviation. With him it’s mouth dragged to the side, tongue small and shy at first, then flat and broad when you lick into that little well of pulled skin, right where his groin turns into root. It’s for the both of you: he gets the first pass of tenderness, a slow start to the shaking and breaking; you get a warm-up with your jaw loose and your nose pressed into the coarse hairs at his pubic bone. A greeting of sorts, made special and intimate despite the wooden border.
Your hand does the sensible work so your mouth can be indulgent. Fingers circle the base, snug, thumb settling into soft groove just under the head. You keep him there, held and pointed, while your tongue does a test tour—under the ridge, along the seam, back to the slit. When you finally seal your lips around him and draw down, it’s a careful pull, no rush, like you’re tasting a new thing you’ve already decided you’re going to eat whole.
He reacts in a way that’s becoming familiar: knuckles thud against the partition, a helpless little applause of bone on board. His hips give first stutter of argument—don’t, do, don’t—and then agree to your pace. Breath goes from normal to managed; he starts measuring it out in counted sips, drags it in through his nose, lets it leak out around bitten-back sounds.
You work him in increments. Take a little more, then back off, tongue cushioning the underside on the retreat. The hand at his base twists when your mouth rises, steadies when you sink again, so the whole length gets equal attention. Every time you nose into his hair he twitches, a pleased little jolt that skips the vertebrae like thrown stones, and comes back down his cock into your grip.
He starts to mutter; lovely nonsense all of them give you, but he makes it sound true in a way that slicks your own thighs. You let yourself check—hand reaching to cup your cunt and roll your hips, entirely unsecretive. He likes knowing you’re busy down there—it’s been tested enough.
“F–fuck, you are so… insanely good at this—ah—” The sentence kinks when you let your throat open around him. Take him that fraction deeper, tongue dropping, and his cock pulls a damp, vacuous click out of your mouth as the seal tightens. A hitch of breath, shoes scuffing on tile. “Ohfuck, just like that,” he slurs, voice gone rough-grain. “God—I know that’s not the house rules, but you have no idea what I would give to have your ass on my face.”
You answer by sticking your tongue out along the underside and sliding forward until the base of him kisses your lips—“I’d eat you out so good, I promise—” until the condom ring touches your nose—“get my tongue inside you and everything—f-fuck—” and your gag reflex barks a wet complaint around him. A crack through his monologue, punched clean and mean.
You pull back, slow; his tip drags against your lower lip as you speak. “What is it, love?” you ask, breath cooling the wet. “Too much?”
“N-no,” he says, and it sounds yanked out of him by the root. “I love your fucking mouth so much.” A shivery inhale, the stall wall creaks as he lets himself lean on it. “Just… slow down. Just a little.”
A lazy stroke, just enough friction to keep him true. “So sensitive today, hm?” you murmur.
“No, it’s just…” The silence stretches while he gathers bravado. “You’re getting better every time.”
You snort, kiss the underside of his tip like you’re scolding it. “Flattery won’t get you far, honey. Behave.”
“It’s true,” he insists, and you can hear him shift, shoulder hitting plywood. “Also, I behave all day. And then I come here to you.”
You reward the honesty with a longer pull of fist, wrist turning, tongue flicking the slit as if you’re dotting an i. “Do you think about me at work?” you ask, casual, but secretly humming with please say you do.
“All the time,” he says.
“Tell me about it,” you mutter, take him back, lips sliding down until your mouth closes over your fingers and pushes them out of the way.
“Jesus, where do I even start—” The sentence lurches when you swallow, throat flexing. “I think about—hah—” A hum, low and permissive, sound that says go on and also does wicked things to his self-control. “—do you want me to be nice?” he manages, like the question might save him.
You let him slip free just far enough to talk, hand taking up the work again. Saliva shines on the condom when you stroke. “Mm, I want you to be honest.”
He exhales hard, like you’ve opened a valve. “I think about spreading your legs, keeping them open,” he says, words already shredding. Your grip tightens on the next downstroke and he follows with a ragged, “Spitting on your pussy and watching my dick breach you.”
You reward the picture with another slow sink of mouth, hollowed cheeks, busy tongue. He groans, deeper this time. “God, that first thrust is always so incredible,” he says to the ceiling, or to you, or to the dark. “And I know it sometimes hurts a little because you’re not stretched yet but fuck, it’s so tight, and hot, and hah—”
Agreement comes out as a sound, trembling in your throat around his trapped cock.
“Fuck, make that sound again, please—”
You oblige, obedient and vicious, humming low like you’re tasting him.
“Fuck, yes, that one, that one,” he babbles, fingers thumping the wood in tiny, helpless taps. “God, you’re gonna make me come before I tell you everything.”
You ease off, swap lips for palm, keep him right at that shimmering edge without tipping. “Oh, we wouldn’t want that, would we?” you say, all injured innocence.
“Menace,” he sighs, thick with affection. “Absolute menace. Enjoying yourself?”
“Immensely. I’m all ears,” you tell him, impish smile wasted on the wall but your thumb isn’t; it circles the damp, tender notch under his head. “What else do you think about?”
“Coming on your face,” he grits. “Smearing my cum on it with my cock.”
You close your eyes like you’re already there for him. He starts to fuck into your hand, short, eager pushes. “And I want you to be happy about it,” he goes on, chuckles all deranged. “Laughing while I do it because you fucking love it, don’t you? Tell me.”
“You know we can arrange that, right?” you ask, thumb giving him one slow, approving drag.
“Fuck, don’t tease me, baby,” he mutters. “Please don’t play with me like that.”
“Mm. Tell me a bit more and we’ll see.”
“Fuck. Alright.” He swallows, audibly, braces on a breath that sounds like it’s propping him up. “Do you like it up the ass?”
“I love it up the ass,” you nearly sing. (You’ve never had it up the ass, but with him loving it feels possible—good angles, a crown that looks generous first and manageable second. You would.)
“I’d go so slow with you, swear,” he says.
Your hand keeps on while the other sneaks behind, finds yourself slick, gathers it and presses a fingertip to that tighter ring. He doesn’t know yet; you want to hear it first.
“I’d kiss you all over before I even tried,” he says, words pouring now. “Get my tongue on you, in you, fuck you with it—” You circle that muscle, let the fantasy and his voice do half the work. “God, I bet you taste amazing,” he says. “I’d slide my thumb in first, just a little, until you ask for more.” Lost in it you do that one more press and pretend it’s him. “I’d keep checking you’re okay, because I don’t want to hurt you, baby, I want you to enjoy it. I’d, ah—” He chokes as your fist clenches around the base at the same time your finger seats fully inside you.
“Fuck, keep talking,” you breathe, all shaky and shameless.
“You like that? Are you touching yourself?”
“Yeah.” Your hips give a traitorous roll. “Guess where.”
“F-fuck,” he whines, sweet delirium. “Fuck, I’m gonna come so hard. I’d have you bent over, keep your cheeks spread—” His hand hits the wall again, harder. “Enter you so… slowly. Rub your pussy while I do it. Oh, baby, tell me how wet you are, please—”
“Dripping,” you say, as your palm strokes him, finger moves inside you and you are briefly a closed circuit of filth and imagination. “Are you close?”
“Yeah, so close,” he gasps. “Fuck, I’m so close. I’m so close, ah—”
That’s your cue. You take him back into your mouth and latch on, hand at his base so he doesn’t bolt. His response is immediate—manliness stripped down to boyish weakness he’s one of the most eager to show. “Keep—keep sucking me,” he stammers, losing the thread. “Christ, you’re so—so amazing, fuck, fuck, fuck—”
You feel it on your palate, the twitch, then the torsion in the balls under your fingers, the way they escape your grip and ride higher and higher when the head hits the back of your throat.
The perk of the hole in all its glory is that you don’t need to look pretty and that they want you to sound ugly. With your mouth spread wide and tongue rolled out you let him gag you, choke you, tickle the uvula until he’s blabbering yes, fuck, yes, fuck, yes, fuck and then he just grunts and moans and bumps his head on the wood between you.
As promised, you roll the condom off, press the vanilla-lubricated cock to your face and have him ride the whole plane of it, from chin to forehead. Your head cants back, his balls fall into your mouth. You suck them, chuckle and hum, a devil and a woman sewn into one, and he’s helpless, spilling warmth all over, dragging it onto your eyebrows, down to cheeks and nose. It dribbles slowly, cools when it reaches under your ear with its thin, lazy slide.
“What—” he pants, emptying of last drops. “What did you do?”
Something stupid, you think. “Gave you a belated Christmas present,” you say. “Did you like it?”
“I loved it,” he whispers. “Thank you.”
You smile, audibly, a chuckle in the throat. Let yourself stay there a minute before the cum starts to dry out and pull on your skin like a face-mask left too long. Then it’s just pragmatism: wet wipes on both sides, wash hands, condom to the bin. He gets dressed back into normalcy.
The lock clicks, but he stalls, you can hear it: a sigh and a squeak of a shoe on the floor. “Hey,” he says. Sticks his hand through the hole. “C’mere. Let me touch you. Please.”
You stare at it, a little stunned. And then your body does the thinking. Tilts, presses in, fits itself into him like the palm was moulded for caressing hookers. He cups you carefully, fingers spread to catch temple and jaw, thumb angled toward your mouth. He smells of soap and gentleness.
The thumb moves first: drags along your lip slowly, making it give, denting where your teeth live. He chases a stubborn tacky streak the wipes missed, makes a small quizzical sound when your mouth parts against him on habit. His fingers climb, three of them fanned across your forehead, smoothing the tension out of it.
Blind man’s epistemology: every square inch mapped by touch alone. Bridge of your nose, the notch where it meets the brow, then a brush of knuckles on eyelids as if he’s closing them. He moves to the curve of cheekbone and down to the hinge of your jaw.
“God,” he murmurs, so quietly you hear it with your skin. “You have no idea how you make me feel.”
You huff a tiny laugh against his thumb and it moves as if he could catch the exhale. His hand shifts, heel of it fitting under your chin, fingers crawling towards your hairline. “You’re… ridiculous,” he says and means an entirely different thing. “Best part of my week. Every time.”
In barely two minutes, Vanilla’s managed to crush the thrill of giving strangers the best oral of their life and changed it into an overwhelming need of getting a kiss. You could claw through that plywood to hang from his belt and beg him to take you home with him now. Kindness is, by far, the sexiest thing you’ve seen on a man.
You get a hold of yourself in an act of iron will that ought to be written up in a journal somewhere. “You should go,” you tell him, unhook his hand from your face and kiss his knuckles once, quick. “Come back, though. You’re my favourite.”
Usually they come and they go. Some polite, some awful, none allowed to stick. You stitch yourself back into the version that’s responsible in daylight and a little reckless after dark; you remember tomorrow’s New Year’s Eve SDN shift, handed to rookies like a punishment with a paper hat and patched over with promises of a ‘small gathering with food and drinks’ afterwards. You remind yourself that either job description does not include falling for vanilla-flavoured regulars, even for two minutes.
He stands there a second too long with his hand still half out, fingers pinched on phantom cheek. Reels the limb back in like he’s just realised it belongs to him again. Unlocks the door and shuts it behind him quietly.
The corridor opens on the same bored standee of a forgotten action hero staring him down from the wall. He brushes the plaster with his knuckles on the way out in the last dumb display of tenderness towards his darling girl. Tiles bathed in red neon slide past under his boots as he crumples the receipt into one pocket and tucks the condom wrapper neatly into the other. No one looks twice at him when he leaves the store having rented exactly no DVDs.
Robert walks home. It’s not far. Ten minutes if he cuts through the alley that smells like fryer oil and hot asphalt, fifteen if he lets himself dawdle and pretend he’s just out for air. Tonight he takes the long way: jacket zipped up to his throat, cock tucked back into public neutrality but still a little tender, brain doing its usual post-stall recursion.
He walks with his body a little wrong on him, more than usual. Lighter in places that should be light already—the back of his throat, the hinge of his jaw, especially his wallet. Heavier in others that by rights shouldn’t carry weight after a faceless blowjob, but somehow do. His chest, mostly. Favourite sits there with its legs spread, particularly insistent.
You are his favourite too (not that he’s tried any others). Begrudgingly so, because the first time was pure rage and spite parcelled up and aimed at a stranger he didn’t have to look in the eye. A by-product of loneliness and something Absolutely Terrible that happened that day and that he can’t even name now—just remembers the shape of it: sharp, breathless, nowhere for his hands to go.
He’d gone to the video store to do the usual damage control. Comfort movie, brain on rails, watch the same explosions in the same order until his pulse stopped climbing things. Instead, the half-dead XXX neon in the corner window blinked at him one time too many. The guy behind the counter had the paperback-and-bad-decisions look of someone who would actually offer what that sign promised. He clicked his tongue once, looked Robert up and down, then crooked a finger. Robert knew it would be seedy and awful and he was going to say yes anyway because how much worse could it get, really.
“Need a breather?” the guy had asked.
Robert had stared past his head. Unblinking. Mind elsewhere, frustration very much here. “Whatever,” he’d said, leaning in on his elbows like he was ordering coffee.
He got the talk first: house rules, no names, no repeat bookings, cash only, you leave everything in the stall, including your conscience. Then the box came out: cardboard, battered, filled with flavoured condoms in a cheerful shuffle, like ice-cream samples gone wrong. Strawberry, mint, cola, grape, pretend-tropical nonsense with cartoon fonts.
“Pick one,” the guy said.
He’d stared longer than any sane man needed to stare at latex. In the end he took vanilla because it felt like a joke that didn’t hurt anyone. Of course you did, he tells his younger self now. The flavour you choose when you’re tired of having opinions. A small, neutral dot in a life where everything else is either life-or-death, or pretending very hard not to be.
He stuck with it and it stuck to him. Someone—probably you, he’s decided—started writing VANILLA in the rota margin when they pencilled booth times, and the whole thing slid from one-time lapse into ritual. Vanilla on the sheet three, four times a month. Vanilla in the stall. Vanilla’s dick in your ridiculous mouth while your laugh, when you let it slip, knocked his knees a little looser every visit.
The first time went about as gracefully as a car crash in slow motion. He’d been all fight-or-flight on legs, jaw locked, shoulders up around his ears, hating everything—himself most of all—right up until the moment your mouth fit over him. You moaned into his skin like vanilla was your favourite flavour on earth, like he wasn’t the default option but the point, and somehow that rewired his brain enough that he believed, for a naïve second, that the exact shape of his cock did something for you.
He came faster than any grown man with a mortgage should, a hot, embarrassing snap that had him seeing static behind his eyes, and you—evil, wonderful creature that you are—wiped your lips and said, “You know you’ve got time for a second round? If you’re up for it.”
So he let you nurse him back to hardness with hands and voice and that smug, careful little tongue, and thanked every god going for the condom when the second load turned out pathetic: a few brave drops and a whole-body shudder that left his thighs trembling and his pride in pieces.
And now he looks forward to it. Keeps wrappers as souvenirs of your encounters, stores them in an inconspicuous tin on his kitchen counter. That’s how he knows when it rounds up to the tenth time.
He buys the flower partly because that’s the kind of guy he is, partly out of a special brand of cowardice that forbids him from looking straight at the darker corners of his nature. The part that insists he’s a different beast than the others he passes on his way in. Disambiguation doesn’t really live here though—no matter how many extra reasons he can invent, at the end of the day he comes under the same banner as all of them: chasing a strip of bliss with no duties attached. Not even the duty of showing someone his face.
By the time he hits his building he’s yawning, the deep, bone-level kind. Stall nights do that. They don’t fix anything, not really; they take the volume knob on his brain and turn it down from screaming to tolerable. He can sleep after. He can get three, sometimes four hours where the calls get filed away into dream-noise instead of stabbing him awake.
Tomorrow, he can even afford it. Rota’s got him on the weird New Year’s Eve half-shift—late start, later finish, SDN’s idea of a consolation prize for newcomers: ‘reduced staffing with post-shift refreshments,’ which translates to lukewarm prosecco, supermarket canapés and the privilege of answering phones while everyone else is kissing someone. No 05:30 alarm. No pre-dawn commute. A little slack in the rope.
Inside, he manages shoes-one-place, keys-other-place, jacket-mostly-near-the-hook, then gives up and falls sideways onto the bed. Beef lifts his head, sniffs the third-hand porn-shop smell, decides it isn’t a threat and oozes over until too-many-kilos of dog for a chihuahua are draped across Robert’s ribs.
The last organised thought he has is of your cheek in his hand, the way it fit there. After that, he drops under fast, like someone cut the power.
As if it’s a funny joke, he wakes exactly at 5:37 a.m., abandoned by his dog in favour of the living room couch—out of Robert’s snoring radius, he presumes.
Outside the window Torrance is colour-graded in hungover sodium: streetlamps still insisting on orange, sky already paling at the edges like milk has been poured into it. The air has that winter-coast quality, not actually cold, just damp and offended. A palm across the way shivers in no wind anyone can see. Somewhere, a truck coughs itself awake.
He turns over, drags the duvet with him. Hips feel laden, heavy as if someone’s left a paperweight sitting on his groin. Morning wood plus last night’s reruns, the whole area aware of itself in a way that makes lying still feel like a test of character. He exhales at the ceiling, then lets his eyes shut again, because technically he doesn’t have to get up yet. Technically, he could sleep in.
His mind declines the offer. Goes straight back to you like there’s been no intervening hours, only a jump cut. The ass he couldn’t shut up about in the booth slides obligingly into focus: weight of it on his chest, the two perfect handholds of your thighs bracketing his ears, the give of you when he pulls you open and gets his mouth where it’s been threatening to be yesterday. He imagines slow work, not the clumsy, frantic tongue of his twenties but careful circles, kisses pressed into skin that never sees daylight—the under-curve, the crease of thigh, the long tendon at the back of your knee.
And then, because his subconscious has absolutely no survival instincts, it adds a face that could be yours. First one the sleepy brain supplies: the pretty girl from two floors up, one that smiles at him in the lift, one that he presses the button for after she gives him a polite hi. If he focuses enough, the hi sounds almost like the one you give him. So you wear her face, hang above him in ugly morning light, hair a mess, eyes creased from sleep, his hands on your hips and his mouth coming up, up, to meet yours like that’s allowed. Like the most unhinged thing he could want from his favourite after-hours girl is the simple, dangerous act of kissing her hello.
He tries to be good. To just lie there and let the fantasy bruise itself out on its own.
That lasts about thirty seconds.
His hand finds the ridge of his cock under the duvet. Thumb drags the waistband down enough to get skin on skin; he hisses through his teeth, half at the temperature, half at how tuned the whole area still is to the memory of your mouth. It all ghosts: the way your tongue flattened, the particular suction when you sank and held. His fist is annoyingly blunt compared to that. Functional. Nobody’s favourite.
He works himself anyway, because what else is he going to do with this good morning. Short strokes at first, then the impatient kind; the ones that have nothing to do with pleasure and everything to do with getting it over with. He spits in his palm, swears quietly, squeezes just shy of too hard like he can wring last night back out of himself.
It comes on him fast and badly. No build, no orchestra, just a tight pull in his gut, a few stiff jerks and then he’s spilling into his own hand with a stifled grunt that sounds more annoyed than relieved. The orgasm is thin, a copy of a copy. His toes don’t even bother to curl.
He wipes off on the inside of the duvet cover in a way Future Robert is going to resent, flops back and stares at the ceiling again. The clock on his phone reads 5:49. Brilliant.
He closes his eyes, because principle. Snooze by sheer force of will. His body votes against. Blood’s already retreating but his brain’s picked up speed, throwing little slide-show frames at him: laugh through plywood, hand on cheek. The more he tells his head to shut up, the more awake he feels. By the time the alarm actually goes off, he’s exhausted from trying to rest.
The hours before his shift get spent in fragments. Shower hot enough to sting the slapped parts of his own conscience. Coffee drunk too quickly over the sink, scrolling through news headlines he doesn’t absorb. He runs a cloth over surfaces that don’t need it, stacks dishes that were already stacked, waters the one plant that keeps forgiving him. If he had any sense he’d jerk off again just to knock himself down another peg, but the idea tastes faintly of defeat, so he pulls on pants instead and checks the time for the seventh time in ten minutes.
Since SDN’s ‘we’re a family here’ policy means New Year’s Eve shifts go to newbies (especially the ones too polite to fight back, and Robert has managed to be both), he gets to see the building in its all half-heartedly festive’d glory by night—tinsel strangling the banisters, a listing plastic tree sukling in one corner. Up on his floor, the call centre looks like it’s been dressed for a school disco: paper banners sagging between fluorescent strips, a playlist on safe hits fighting with the usual background hum on ringing phones and distant printer tantrums.
Everyone anointed looks about as thrilled as he feels. The real veterans have taken leave or swapped onto days; what’s left is a patchwork of rookies, stopgaps, and the chronically unlucky. They drift between desks doing all the pointless rituals that feel like preparation: re-winding headset cords, straightening stacks of incident forms, fiddling with the angle of screens. Between calls they trade eye-rolls and horror stories, the pre-gamed and the pre-panicking filtering through the lines—people trying to find parties, lose exes, squeeze one last errand into the year as if time will forgive them for putting it off.
By seven, the catering company starts wheeling in trestle tables. Foil trays sweat under their own heat lamps: beige finger food, sad salad, something that might once have been a vol-au-vent. Bottles of generic fizz clink in ice buckets that never quite catch up. Second-hand management orbits, doing their best ‘this will be fun’ faces, herding people towards sign-up sheets for party games no one wants to play.
When the Z Team invites him to common trashing oneselves in Sardine, he pulls his best face and politely declines. Today, every cell in him screams no. Another, smaller set whispers go. Go home. Go downtown. Walk right past this entire farce and back to the video store to see if the XXX sign is lit and if Vanilla gets a New Year’s kiss through a wooden wall.
He scratches that thought so hard it bleeds. Dumbest idea on earth: show up to stalk a hole in the wall. Congratulations, you’ve levelled up from sad to pathetic.
He takes a plastic flute instead. Fills it with whatever cheap bubbly’s closest, knocks back half in one go. It’s sweet and flat and vaguely chemical, sending a thin fizz up behind his eyes. He tops it off again, leans his hip against the table, and lets the alcohol do what the stall usually does: take the edge off, blur the corners, make it just that much easier to stand here and pretend this is enough.
People from other floors slowly dribble in. Some faces he knows, some he sees for the first time, but one in particular both gets his attention and has his ears burning hellish flame at the thought of what he did with it this morning. The elevator girl. The hi girl. The girl he has that special let me push the button for you and never say a word because I’m too awkward around normal people relationship with.
You work somewhere in the bowels of the building, he knows this much. A dispatcher too, for a G Team or a T Team, he can’t fucking remember now. Something far less succesful than A Team and far more organised than Z Team. Less charming though, Robert’s sure of it.
For you, it’s all fuzzy. What you spot first is the table with peach-adjacent alcohol spread on it. The table happens to have the elevator guy propped against it.
Truth be told, you’ve pregamed long before stepping foot on SDN grounds today, because yesterday has done something unforgivable to your brain: made you fucking daydream about a client. Or rather, nightdream. Long, sweaty and senseless, picturing everything he’s offered everywhere he’s offered.
It wouldn’t let go of you in the morning, wouldn’t fuck off by afternoon and still holds like a nasty neep in the hair, so your goal is to kill it with alcohol poisoning.
You drift towards the table like it’s magnetic, go straight for the bottle like an amateur. Don’t even pretend to be browsing—just reach, fingers closing around the neck as if the label said antidote instead of whatever supermarket brand this is.
“Hi,” he says, somewhere to your left. Up close his voice is even nicer, fuller. “Uh… tough shift?” He tilts his head to glance at your badge, squints, and tacks your name onto the end like a question mark.
You pause mid-pour, shoulders doing a tiny oh God hitch. Then you laugh, because that’s what you do when your brain is soup. “Something like that? Mostly just a terribly useless one. You?”
Robert stares at you a second too long. The laugh lands wrong in the right way—hits some weird overlap in him, like remembering a dream he’s not sure he had. It’s the same bright crackle he heard yesterday in a completely different context, except that’s insane, so he files it under you’re drunk, Robert, calm down. He shakes his head, huffs a little chuckle before you can clock him as a freak.
“Terribly useless here too,” he says. “Feels on-brand.”
You let your gaze travel. Elevator guy holds up even under scrutiny: nice shoulders, tired eyes, a mouth that looks like it apologises a lot and could probably do better things. His timbre is familiar in a way that does something low in your stomach.
You lean in, lower your voice. “I’m a bit drunk,” you confess, conspiratorial. “I promise I’m more eloquent sober.”
He laughs at that, boyish and quick, tongue flicking out to wet his lower lip like he’s trying to catch the taste of the joke. He mirrors your lean without meaning to, the space between you tightening a notch. “Cool,” he says, equally under-the-table. “Me too.”
“Hey, you wanna get out for a smoke?” you ask, because that’s what people in films say when they want to be somewhere else with someone specific.
“I don’t… I don’t really smoke,” he says, a little apologetic wince in the middle.
“Me neither, but it’s a party.” You fish in your pocket, produce a skinny, suspicious cylinder and hold it up between two fingers. “I only have one anyway. I got it from that bat guy on his way out.”
“Oh, shit,” Robert says, plucking the ‘cigarette’ from your hand like lit dynamite and tucking it straight into his breast pocket. “You really shouldn’t smoke or ingest anything you get from him.”
You grin, dumb and bright, delighted by how seriously he takes it. “Alright, stickler. Can I have another alcohol?”
“Yes,” Robert says, and snorts. “You can have another alcohol.”
You salute that with your cup, top it up obscenely close to the brim. Only when the crisis of refuelling is handled do you notice his lanyard is missing. Your eyes skim back up to his face.
“What’s your name, anyways?” you ask. “I’ve never asked and now I feel horrible about it.”
“Ah, it’s Robert,” he says. There’s a little hitch before he commits to the rest. He offers his hand like he’s not sure if that’s still done at office parties. “Robert Robertson.”
“That’s…” You start without thinking, watch something in his shoulders brace for impact—waiting for the joke he’s heard all his life. You slide your hand into his, let it sit there warm and sure. “—incredible.”
He blinks. “Literally no one has ever said that to me.”
From there, time goes odd around the edges. You stand with your plastic cup and your horrid SDN lanyard digging into the back of your neck and somehow the space shrinks until it’s mostly just you and him and the beige buffet orbiting in your peripheral vision. You discover he’s funnier than his face suggests, dry little lines dropped under his breath that you have to lean in to catch; you give as good as you get, trading dispatch gallows humour like baseball cards. Twice your fingers brush when you both reach for the same bottle; on the second pass nobody moves away fast. Heat from his hand stows itself in the lines of your palm and refuses to leave. You blame it on the prosecco and the fact that New Year’s Eve is a magnifying glass for whatever hunger you already walked in with.
Robert keeps waiting for the moment it all curdles into awkward, and it just keeps not happening. Conversation slides with the same easy wrongness as that laugh in the stall—too familiar for a stranger, like the first time he answers a caller on instinct before they finish the sentence. He watches your mouth move around jokes and sips and the occasional bitten-back yawn, sees the little micro-expressions that would make sense if he’d known you for years.
The party recedes to a low blur: someone massacres Mariah on the bluetooth speaker, someone else squeals by the window about premature fireworks, but his body has re-tuned to a different frequency. It clocks the near-misses when your arm brushes his sleeve, the way your hip angles in when you shift your weight, the fact that you’re standing a fraction closer than workplace health-and-safety would suggest.
By the time he’s on his third ‘another alcohol’ and you’re pretending you’ve lost count, you’ve both silently agreed that this is not, in fact, the worst social gathering SDN has ever strong-armed anyone into. Your hearts, starved dry by months of handling other people’s emergencies, keep misreading the situation as one of your own. You feel it when his gaze sticks a beat too long on your mouth; he feels it when your laugh drops an octave and your eyelids start doing that slow, hunting blink you only deploy on purpose. Praying mantis courtship, you step into it without thinking—lip a little wet from the last drink, head tilted, eyes soft and siren-mast like you’re already taking him apart in your head. It lands in him with horrible precision, right on the nerve labelled exactly my type: sharp girl, sharp teeth, the kind who coaxes him out of rooms he doesn’t know how to leave on his own.
Equipped with a flirty tilt of head and a strand of hair tucked behind your ear, you ask, “Hey, do you…want to get out of here?”
“Yeah. Totally,” he says, surprising himself with how fast it comes. His fingers find yours on the tablecloth and close, sudden-brave. “Let’s run.”
You giggle, a sound so girlish and sweet it hits him sideways after all the sharp. Whiplash again, the good kind.
“Not entirely sure I could run right now,” you confess, curls of humour in it, “but we can walk. I don’t live far.” You have no idea what you’re doing. You know exactly what you’re doing. It’s just the other you holding the reins—the night one, the reckless one that feeds on making men feel good on your own terms.
Outside, the air bites differently; the building door snicks shut behind you and you’re halfway down the steps when he brakes. The tug on your hand reels you back so that you rock into his chest, shoulder first. Before you can ask, his mouth is on yours—off-centre, a little too eager, hot with cheap fizz and nerves. A breathless, inept kiss, all heart and no technique. He breaks it quickly, pulling back far enough that you can see the panic spark.
“Sorry,” he blurts. “I just… really wanted to do that. We don’t have to, if you don’t—”
You press your palm to his mouth, feel the words bump against your skin. “Shut up and come before I change my mind.”
There’s a yes ma’am right behind his teeth; he swallows it like something dangerous and lets you lead. Three blocks of damp pavement and blurry streetlights later, you tug him to a halt in front of a scuffed door with a peeling number. “This is me,” you announce, punching the entry code in with a hand that trembles more from anticipation than alcohol.
The stairwell smells like dust and someone else’s dinner. Inside your flat you pause just past the threshold, keys still in your fist. “Do you want a tour, or—?”
He shakes his head once. Step, step, and your back meets the hallway wall. His palms plant either side of your head, caging you without touching. He leans in close enough that you can count the freckles across his nose. “Later,” he says, and somehow makes one word sound like an IOU and a promise.
Familiar, your brain insists. You, unhelpfully drunk, tell it to shut up and stack the thought for tomorrow. Right now there’s the way his mouth finds yours again, slower, like he’s reading you instead of crashing into you. Your hand climbs to his shoulder, hooks in the collar of his jacket and yanks; he doesn’t resist, shrugging out of it in an awkward, endearing tangle of sleeves.
His fingers are already on your buttons, careful but quick, knuckles brushing the warm skin revealed inch by inch. You answer by walking him backwards a step, then another, drowning both of you in the corridor’s narrowness until the only logical direction is towards the bedroom and further in.
There’s more kissing on the way. Snorting, giggling through impatient hands on belts and flies. Mouth bitten and already swollen, you abandon him at the foot of the bed to turn the night lights on. When you return, the first real fireworks start to rumble outside of your window.
“Shit,” Robert says. He’s completely forgotten. “It’s midnight.”
You walk up to him slowly, losing your pants and shirt on the way. His face in your palms, fingers sliding into his hair, you whisper, “Happy New Year,” and give him the most candied kiss you have on yourself.
He wishes you the same, only with his tongue. Slides it inside and hums when you open your mouth wider, undoes your bra on the way and does a little yes in his mind when it gives on second try.
You hum back and Robert nearly stops; he could swear. But it can’t be.
Before he gets to linger, you push him back until his knees catch the mattress and he drops, ass first, onto the edge. You follow the line of him down, mouth still on his for as long as physics allows, then spill lower—hands on his chest, his ribs, his waistband—until he feels your weight pour off his lap and onto the floor between his knees. Any chance he had to start questioning things gets knocked clean out of him by the sight of you going down.
Night-Robert and day-Robert blur into one animal. It’s not that he’s that responsible, it’s more of a subliminal conditioning where his brain, hand and cock form a closed circuit of action: fish the condom out of the pocket, pass it to you, wait to be ruined in the best possible way. An immediate Pavlov’s response to a girl doing that for him.
You’re busy yanking his pants and underwear down to his ankles. When you look up, you see it: a yellow wrapper perched between his two fingers with bright Vanilla written on it.
Everything inside you screams. You take it carefully, swallow, then look at the final proof.
You’d recognise this cock anywhere and in any state. Now: half-hard, resting snug in the groove of his thigh. You’ve counted the freckles on it at least fifteen times. When you’re alone with one hand between your legs and fingers pushing between your lips, it’s exactly this cock you picture.
Your favourite. Your vanilla romantic sweetheart with the deep voice and the dick that tastes like he’d make you come if you ever got so lucky as to have him somewhere extra than your mouth. And then he’d kiss your forehead after.
Revelation takes so long his brows scrunch. “Sorry,” he says with a slight hiccup. “I know it’s lame, but it’s the only one I have. It’s a long story—”
“It’s my favourite,” you tell him, letting the evil slip in. You snatch the packet from his hand and catch a glimpse of panic, identical to the one you felt second ago. Unlike yours, it doesn’t seem to bloom into shared enlightenment. It stays there, locked in the oubliette of can’t be. He needs another push, you decide.
So you push, and you do it your special, Vanilla-only way. Condom rolled on. A kiss to the tip. Mouth canted to the side, then a brief devotion paid to that small well of skin at the base.
He watches you with his eyes blown wide, focus sharpening, sobering by the second. When he still doesn’t call it, you tease further. Slide his cock out until the tip rests on your chin, then drag it over like it’s lipstick. “Do you want to talk to me a bit? Tell me, say…” You bite your lip, tickle his balls with your fingertips, smile when he twitches. “How you’d like to spread my legs? Keep them—” A beat. “—open?”
Robert stares, jaw unhinged, frozen like someone’s run a live wire from his cock to his brain and left him in an open-eyed coma. Then his hands remember themselves: they come up to cup your face, both palms on your cheeks. He pulls until you rise off your knees and end up propped on his thighs. Close, closer; he studies your mouth, thumbs rubbing over your lips. Red stretches and bends; he tugs your lower one down, bares your teeth like he’s checking a pedigree in the show ring.
“Holy shit,” he whispers, a staccato of half-blinks while he’s making sure he doesn’t lose sight of you. “Am I this drunk, or is it really you?”
You grin, wide and honest and so fucky pretty he actually sighs. “Hi, Vanilla,” you murmur. “Happy New Year.”
He hauls you into his lap properly, hands catching wherever they land—hip, waist, the warm underside of your thigh. Every grip feels like it might bruise if he forgets himself. He has to make a conscious effort not to shake you, as if you might flicker out if jostled. “What—how—” he keeps asking, useless little fragments, and you just laugh against his mouth, bright and excited, making him feel mad and sane in the same breath.
He’s been right all along. It’s too much to unpack on a drunk New Year’s mattress.
He’s just met his dirtiest secret in person and you’re pretty and quick and perched over his lap with your cunt snug against his cock already, and Robert suddenly believes—down in the idiot superstitious part of him—that every awful thing that’s crawled across his path was just set-dressing for this exact moment.
Modern-day Cinderella, decanted through a grimy filter of red neon signs and back-alley video stores; instead of a glass slipper he got a stack of vanilla wrappers and a mouth he’d have recognised in the dark.
His brain trips the alarm: this is wrong, you must be terrified, he should get dressed, apologise, go home, quit his job, move out of state and start answering phones under a different name. Fright sprints ahead of him, already packing his bag.
Your hands catch it. One smooths the angry notch between his brows, thumbs the glabella flat; the other slides up into his hair and tugs, gentle as a leash. “Shh,” you coo. “Relax. Relax, it’s all good. I’m glad.”
His lungs blow everything out at once. “Thank fuck,” he breathes, forehead falling into the curve of your neck. The exhale shakes. His arms cinch around your waist. “Though glad hardly covers it for me.”
“We can talk tomorrow,” you tell him, wriggling in his lap in a way that makes his eyes roll shut and his teeth find your shoulder on reflex. “You promised me many things, and I want to cash them in now.”
Robert decides, for once, to just believe his luck. No autopsy, no cross-examination. Just roll with it.
He grabs you, tips you backwards, a careful heave; you hit the mattress with a small bounce and a silly giggle that he wants to bottle. He kicks his pants and underwear the rest of the way off his ankles, then hooks fingers in your knickers and drags them down, slow enough to stare. For a long, indulgent minute he just looks at you, bare and spread in front of him, trying to remember the exact inventory of filth he poured through that hole yesterday with his brain shrunk down to fit inside the head of his cock.
It’s muscle memory alone that makes his hand slide down and smooth along your inner thighs, thumbs digging into the hinges of your knees. “Tell me if anything’s wrong, yeah?” he says, leaning over your cunt like he’s two seconds from just smothering himself in it and calling that a good life.
“Don’t even think about it,” you say, propping up on your elbows. “I mean, I would love to, tomorrow and all the days after that, but today I really need you to fuck me.”
“Fuck, baby,” he whines, cock jerking exactly when you smile.
He spits on your pussy, just like he promised. The spit hits hot; his palm follows, broad and clumsy, spreading it where it needs to go. Then he comes up to you, hips pressing to yours, arms wrapping around your shoulders. You rub against him, slick heat sliding along the line of his cock. Not in yet. Asking. He doesn’t give it to you immediately; he’s busy with your ear, lips closing around the shell of it, teeth catching the lobe.
“I have a question though,” he says there, mouth curving. “Where should I fuck you?”
“Robert—” you warn.
“I’m kidding,” he breathes, laughs easy like this is your tenth time, not the first. “Let’s stick to the programme.”
One hand goes searching. He reaches down, fits himself where your body is open, pushes in and leaves his fingers there, for later. Your mouth unlatches on the same noise his does, the wordless oh of two people getting exactly what they wished for. “Fuck yes, just like that,” he groans, forehead dropping to yours for a second. “Does it sting?”
“A little,” you admit, and he closes his eyes because of what that does to him—how the tiny flinch of pain tightens around his cock like a fist that trusts him not to be stupid.
“Fuck, you feel good,” you manage, arms coming up around his back, nails just grazing. “Keep going.”
He takes the hint in the oldest language there is: lower back doing the thinking. Hips move in short, drilled shoves, backing off only far enough for you to get that brief, cool absence before he plugs it again. You tighten your stomach on purpose, a mean little crunch to cant your pelvis, to line him up right where you want him—spot that makes your face pull like you’ve just been pleasantly offended. The noise you give him when he lands there is wet, startled, delighted; his knees threaten mutiny.
“Fuck yes, I knew you were good,” you groan, throat shown off, neck tendons standing like roadmap veins. Your hands slide back, get two greedy fists of his ass and steer, fingers digging in where the muscle jumps under skin. You test the hold with a sharp smack, palm cracking loud off him. “Fuck me harder.”
“So bossy,” he answers, nothing in it but devotion. One extra thrust for good behaviour, then his palms shift—off the mattress, onto the hard brackets of your hips—as he rocks back to his knees. He drags you with him by bone and meat until your buttocks settle on his thighs, ankles hooked behind him, your whole trusting heft gathered warm in his lap.
You moan at the new geometry, spine bowing, chest tipping up like you’re laying yourself out for inspection. The angle buries him deep and keeps him there, base snug, pubic bone pressed exactly where your body has been begging for friction.
“Good?” he asks, already reading the answer in the way your fingers find your tits, thumbs circling your nipples like you’re ticking yes, yes.
You nod, quick, mouth gone loose at the corners. “Please,” you say, and the small word unwraps something fuzzy in his chest, a scene his future will chew on when the rest of life is beige.
He moves again. Starts working his hips in tighter rhythm, making you ride the shelf of his thighs with each drive. The stretch of him consolidates into a proper ache, a thick, relentless push that travels from the backs of your knees to the soft place just under your navel.
He watches through sweat in his lashes—flinches of eyelid, the new shapes your mouth takes when he grinds in a hair deeper. Then, the looking turns greedy, drops between bodies to that glorious fucking drip that oozes from you, the way it slickens the condom. He has his ears open for that sound that could be a smack of lips but it’s just him, slapping the hang of your ass with his balls.
One thumb strays from the clamp on your hips, sneaks forward, knuckle skimming over the small, slick swell where you’re wrapped around him. He sets the pad there and draws a slow, vicious circle.
Your whole body jolts like he’s pressed the right button. A broken sound rips out of your throat, a curse he’s heard from people dying or dying just a little, and your nails bite his forearms, drag. He tightens his grip and does it again, thumb worrying frantic little knot while your cunt grips him in stuttering pulses that make his vision go grainy.
This is better than just your mouth, he decides. In so many petty, greedy ways—from finally having something softer than plywood under his hands, to the sight of your boobs bouncing and your belly tightening each time he hits home.
“Jesus fuck, you’re so gorgeous,” he gets out, and feels it sink into you like a thumb pressed in deep.
“I’m—close,” you mumble, fingers clawing at his arms. “Come with me, I want to hear you, ah—”
“Fuck, baby,” he grunts, hips stuttering, “I’m too stupid to be this lucky, Christ—”
You clamp around him, hard, harder, until the strongest clutch locks on and holds, hauling him straight into your finish. Your back bows, legs shaking out long; the grip on his cock goes from rhythm to strangle and drags his own orgasm out by the root.
“Fuck, I—” The rest breaks against your mouth when he folds forward, sweat-slick chest plastered to yours, groaning right into your kiss. Awash in it, devoted idiot with more luck than sense, he wraps himself tight around you and pumps into the condom, mind tossing up one fresh wish: someday his only flavour on you will be skin.
Breath goes hoarse on both sides. Stomachs rise and fall out of sync, then start to match. You hold him, or he holds you, or the whole mess just holds itself together for a minute.
“Shit. You are—” he starts, brain still full of static and cheap bubbles, the part that handles language short-circuiting.
“You fucked me into the next year,” you blurt, and immediately wince at yourself.
Robert lifts his head, eyes bright, grin breaking slow. “And she’s got dad jokes too,” he says. “We should just marry.”
You bark a full, mad cackle, then smooth a hand over his cheek, thumb rubbing the flushed patch your body helped paint there. “I can’t believe you’re Vanilla.”
“Not entirely,” he says, cheeky.
“You have a whole fresh new year to prove it then,” you tell him and kiss the smug off his face.
Cleanup is the bare-minimum kind: condom knotted and pitched into the bin, a half-hearted swipe of tissue where gravity’s had its way. The bed’s already picking up a new year’s patina—sweat, spit, the faint plasticky ghost of flavouring—but neither of you seems inclined to file a complaint. He lets you shove him over to your side and climbs in after, long limbs folding around you like he’s been assigned this particular tangle. Muscles go slack by degrees: jaw first, then shoulders, then the stubborn coil in his gut that’s been there since whatever-happened-before-the-stall.
You end up facedown on his bicep, his other arm draped heavy across your ribs, hand parked just under your breast like he’s weighing proof that you exist. Outside, fireworks keep auditioning for apocalypse and failing. Inside, the loudest thing is breath.
You used to think of your mouth as something to keep busy, an extra shift’s worth of work for rent and debt and boredom. Tonight it feels occupied in a different way. No dick in it, just a name you roll around once—Robert—until it melts sweet on the back of your tongue and settles there.
He sleeps like a man who’s had every dial in his body turned down to humane. Somewhere in the muddle between waking and dreaming he registers one last daft thought: mouths to feed, sure. He’s finally found the one he wants to keep fed—with kisses, with dad jokes, with the kind of soft, ordinary ‘hi’ that comes with a face.
Morning can do what it likes. For now, the year starts here: two dispatchers off-duty, one bed slightly disgusting, and one shared secret cooling on the pillow between them, ready to be named when the sun’s up.
✧.* blurb: gee, that photoshoot was so long, wasn't it? yeah, he thinks so too. posing and pouting in your little outfits, bending for the camera, it's only natural he'd get a little pent up over it, right? you are his, anyway - he can do what he wants. ✧.* warnings: pre countess, era typical misogyny and sexism, mean vought rising ben, reader is presented as "dumb", natural self hatred (on reader's part), underlying prostitution, mention of selling bodies/people, degradation but he kinda means it, dubcon, mentions of assault/forced oral. ✧.* an: trying to get back into my groove. not proofread at all. @cujja your wonderful arranged marriage ficlet gave me juice for this, so thank you honey !! wrote this to.
part 2
You were a press wife. A PR puppet, practically sold to Vought by your money-hungry daddy so that you could be known by the masses, pictures - both the filthy and pristinely prudish - could be passed around by filthy men on deployment, printed in the magazines until you became some lewd, watered down, semi-erotic image, a borderline pornographic figure. Vought lived for it, and so did the masses - after all, it peddled what they were going for.
So, that was it. You were Payback's very own whorish, leotard suited girl, and there wasn't much to the image... not until Soldier Boy became the new thing, and all of a sudden, it wasn't patriotic to be a slut anymore. The right kind of woman pandered to her husband's needs, and yet the image you had to peddle was still one that was so overdone. So, then, a Playboy-mag housewife, was what they wanted you to be. They shot you up with a variant of V. They knew what it did this time - helpful, mind you. Regenerative abilities. Regenerative abilities and nothing else. No super-strength, no super-speed.
You never had much of a choice in the matter. Your business contract never touched your hands, in fact, passing from a Vought exec's palm to your daddy's, then to Ben's, then back again, until a thin, inked up piece of paper which suspended your body and free will into a contract. It was your fresh, drugged up body going to the highest bidder.
Vought, the high-paying brothel.
When you first met Ben, he was arrogant. Gave an all-time, State famous sleazy grin, clicking his tongue and nodding in this odd, enthused manner. He was, admittedly, loving of his own country, patriotic without a fault - at least they got that bit right. The gentlemanly part? Not so much. At least, though, he had the decency not to eye you up like some filthy freak and grope your ass up while you made him a stiff drink... but hey, that was just him, right? Just being appreciative, appraising the stock, right?
The whole bad-girl-gone-good notion amused him greatly; the very notion of you was an impartial one. This was a convenience at least, a creature comfort at most, for you to be no different to the fifteen female bodies, pertly busted and tight, hair done, the epitome of artificial femininity.
It started with the very first press event. A couples coming out, if you will, where amongst the mulch of filthy, common humans, sub-level supes and washed-up starlets, were the miners - journalists, they otherwise were, but miners; hacking away at your frivolous image and his sharper one until they struck gold.
If they wanted gold, though, they could have as much as they want. The lights were coruscant, abrasive to the naked, untrained eye, and there was so much to hear from all of them:
Over here, over here! Give us a smile!
Ben smiled at the cameras. Smiled his same, sleazy grin. Wrapped his arm around your waist, pawed at your hip, groped at your ass, and leaned down to press his lips to your ear.
"What, honey, y'don't wanna give them a spin?" he asked, his voice vague.
"Ben," a correction. "They've seen enough, c'mon, can we go in?"
A laugh, as if you've said something amusing, and he looks to all of the journalists, pimps and whores. "Then what the hell are y'getting paid for, girl?" he comments, shoving you away from him, grinning as if to say what a shy girl and turning you. "Yeahh, look at that! Don't they love it?"
Eventually, it was over. You got inside the building half by being kindly poked and prodded in your lower back, jabbing until you walked along, practically tripping over your feet. The inside crowd was considerably full-bodied, but less prying. No-one cared, not really. They didn't care
No-one cared when Ben cornered you on the stairs, right hand holding your face painfully tight, a glass of whiskey in his left, a louche expression plastered on his face.
"Y'know," he said, shaking his head like he really had something to think about, shaking your head too, emphasising. "I'm not sure why they got a dumb bitch like you in. What're you good for? What can you do?"
Nothing, you think. Jackshit... though, it was never about what you could do. It was about the image - that's all it was ever about, to Vought: a reasonably attractive woman who was willing enough to have her body used and sold, whether it was really her will or not. Shame, really, because it was tough to find someone like you with all of this new female liberation, and whatnot.
"I'm not-" you frown, cheeks still squished in his palm. You realise, in this moment, that he might kill you. Maybe he'll take you out back and knock your head clean off. Maybe he'll break your neck right here, and he could have as much fun as he want... your body would still be warm, right? And if you heal, it's not really that filthy, right? "I don't know."
"'Course y'don't. How could you?" He murmurs, chuckling lightly. His breath reeks of alcohol and the collar of his suit stinks of weed. "They don't pay you to be smart. If they were, they wouldn't be paying you much, would they?"
You shake your head of your own volition, now. His offensive grip makes you a little slackjawed, and the gum you'd been chewing earlier has slid to the back of your tongue. This whole thing, though expected, is so fucking infuriating that there's a little stubborn part of your head that wants to scream at him, and cry, and whine, and bitch.
Then, as if he can read your mind. "Don't go runnin' that whore mouth, hm? We're all friends here."
Ben lets your face go with a tight, slightly threatening smile still plastered on his, and takes a sip of his drink, before shooing you off with his hand. "Go have fun. Play, or whatever the fuck you do."
You do go have fun. Playing, by his offensive description, as if what you did was any less than what he did... which was quite true, really, the only difference being that he mattered. There was one of him, and four hundred of you, the other four hundred and ninety nine on a beach boardwalk, or L.A, or still in college, young and arguably more attractive. Fresher, dumber, more innocent. Real innocence, is what that exec had said they were looking for.
Daddy had looked at you, nodded. "She's real innocent." So, you went and played. Ordered one of those pink, fruit flavoured drinks from the bar, the one with gin and a cherry with a coquettish French name, and leaned against the wall in the corner of the room, looking out of the window, the maraschino cherrystem between your teeth.
The so called innocence that they had you selling off the stick was bullshit.
"Welcome to the cathouse," the exec had said on your first day in. He'd said it again, considerably more excited after your contract with Ben had been signed.
You knew it was over the day you were eased into the brand-new, barely used boardroom by a brunette woman in a pencil skirt. Tek Night sat there. Waited. Gave you one of those soothing smiles. He had wagged his finger at you. "You're very nervous for someone with one of the best jobs in the world."
One of the best jobs in the world, then, was being a whore: gagging on Tek Nights cock after he tutted at you, sat you down, and began to explain your contract to you in a tone - the kind you use for kids who don't understand things. He had dragged you off him by your hair - the ends. You'd left the room with tears in your eyes and a bootprint on your face.
There is something very humiliating about this job. What wouldn't be? The media fame, you now think, looking out of the window onto the rest of the city - small, dumb, Payback worshipping city - sipping your disgusting, strawberry flavoured drink.
When you got back to the compound, it was silent. There was less of a fuss made over you, Ben, and the others, unlike the way it had been before, and you felt that at least now, you didn't have to perform for them, too.
You made yourself another drink. It was strong, and sure, they say don't mix your spirits, but you were exhausted, hardly sloshed, with a jaw-ache and an ego you felt you had to nurse, because like it or not, you'd been fucking humiliated. Paraded around in a stupid pink exiguous outfit, your tits spilling out, Ben twirling you around in some offensive manner, laughing. You'd been humiliated when, in front of half of the worth-something supes, he'd grabbed at your face and nodded your head for you, shook it.
"Feelin' generous?" Ben asks, sauntering into the kitchen, leaning against the island with his hip. He reeks, now, even more of marijuana, and it makes you wrinkle your nose delicately.
You laugh under your breath, shaking your head for yourself, this time. "Am I ever?"
Ben tuts. "From what I've heard, yeah, sweetheart. You're pretty fuckin' generous."
Your face burns with shame. Shame, and something else, because it's him saying it, and he matters... for what are you if not the fame-hungry whore you were signed over to be?
"Yeah." you mumble, sliding over another glass filled with dark liquor.
"How so? I mean, all the others say you're just a doll, but I'm not so sure." he clicks his tongue, frowning at you in that small, condescending way. "Y'don't seem to like me much."
You bite back a curse, swirling your drink. It smells rich, clogging up your senses - you weren't even a drinker before all of this, but now you feel it's the only way you can really get away from this. That contract reminded you vaguely of when an intruder sticks his flag on native land, land that isn't his, and the natives are chased out violently.
"You're not particularly nice."
Ben can see all of your discomfort. It grates on his nerves, but he seemingly remains sanguine, sipping the drink you'd slid over to him. "Not nice? Honey, I've been nothin' but nice." He answers, his body slightly stiff.
He's gone from falsely friendly to not friendly at all, and you're wondering if you should have even spoken to him; maybe it'd have been better if you'd have just passed over the glass of liquor and left the kitchen. Maybe smiled at him.
You're far too comfortable with underperformance, clearly, dumb thing.
"You're right, sorry. Very welcoming." You mutter, ducking your head vaguely.
Ben laughs, the sound slightly coarse, his manner uncomfortably unctuous, and he leans back against the island, putting his drink down on the counter. "Sweetheart, welcoming doesn't even cover it," he says, smiling wanly. "What, y'ain't grateful to me? Think you're some big shot here, is that it?"
"No!" you protest.
He clicks his tongue at your hasty response, nodding, considering your words. Ben cocks his head to the side like an eager, curious German Shephard. "How grateful are you, then?"
"Grateful enough."
"Must be real fuckin' glad to do this job, then, doin' your duty to this country and all." Ben says, smiling, sickening smarm plastered all over his face. He's closer to you than you thought he was, and you look down at the floor.
"Yeah." You agree, nodding vaguely.
"Not doin' a great job of showing it." he comments. "C'mon, sweetheart, can't you be a little patriotic for once?"
watching 90s-2000s tv is crazy because it’s like wow. there used to be good writing and acting and more than 10 episodes per season and a new season every year. we really had it all.
i like writing about mean evil men. nice men are great too. where are the evil mean men. @.johnprice @.simonriley @.soldierboy @.bunny(fakestraight)corcoran @.henrywinter Pull the fuck up
perverted soldier boy thoughts. thinking about literally any jackles character fucking you in a headlock... a full nelson even... mmm especially soldier boy. he'd be number one getting you in a full nelson or a head lock even just fucking you in positions where its clear hes just using you for his own pleasure. he doesn't care that your neck hurts when he pulls your hair or that hanging off the bed is making you lightheaded. he doesn't care that you're overstimulated from how many times hes rubbed your clit numb. he doesn't care that the amount of cum hes pumped into you is making you gross and sticky. hes shoving your face into the pillow slapping your ass every time you move when he told you not to. you're gasping for air while he knocks the wind out of you from how deep and fat his cock is. he'll call you a sick fuck for calling him dad but your just so fucked out you cant even get the whole thing out. while you're bent over getting split open on his cock he'll spit in that valley of your ass pressing a thumb to your hole as he pounds into you calling you a greed whore.
ellievsbear
tangentwithtanner
snowghoul
