#livelaughlove pink

[heavenorely]

celia !　pinterest user　19　music lover　bisexual　colourful jewelry　ryland grace's crewmate　sonny angels　jack abbot's sweetheart　fashionista　lovergirl　big theatre kid　dean winchester's passenger princess　tiger stripes

　　recent　work:　make me wine　(featuring. dean winchester!)

masterlist 　 guidelines 　　　　reqs closed but inbox open for yaps　!!

　　　　　　　 　　　　　　 　 　(๑ᵔ⤙ᵔ๑)　　minors, block the tag "superfreak"

[heavenorely]

　　 ⊹ . ໒꒰ྀི ˵ˊᯅˋ˵ ꒱ა　　make me wine

synopsis: after a hunt well done, dean gets a little too drunk and won't behave when you tell him too. what better way to show him a lesson than a little teasing?

pairing: dean winchester x fem!reader

warnings: 1.6k words, 18+ MDNI, alchohol consumption, established relationship, subby!dean, p with some plot, riding, overstimulation, dual masturbation, p in v obviously, begging, pet names like "baby", orgasm denial/control, i love whimpering men

masterlist!

"How much have you had to drink?"

"Mm…only like…threesh…cups? Bottles?"

You sighed, shaking your head. Dean was laying back on the couch in your small motel room, Sam asleep in one of the two bedrooms. You were sitting over his chest, restraining his wrists above his head so he couldn't get another sip of his whiskey. The cup lay stale on the coffee table, next to the tipped over corked bottle and numerous other glasses.

You'd just completed a week long hunt this afternoon; some werewolves lurking around a small town in Illinois. The Winchester's and you had read about the sightings in a newspaper and decided to check it out, which lead you to a week of tracking and killing the monsters around the neighbouring woods.

You'd been staying in the same motel, making the three of you accustomed to the layout. Which meant you couldn't hide the alchohol from Dean when you came home exhausted earlier today and he wanted to celebrate. Sam had gone straight to bed, and you wanted to as well, but somebody needed to keep an eye on Dean.

You were his girlfriend. You were technically responsible for his bullshit. And you didn't mind anyways; it was funny watching him drunk. He always started talking his mouth off about whatever was on his mind, like some stuck-up shopkeeper you talked to or how "awesome his amazeballs girlfriend was" (you teased him about that one for days.)

You had tried to get him to put down the whiskey at least ten minutes ago, but being the stubborn bastard he was, Dean just turned his back to you and took a few more sips.

You'd looped your arms around his shoulders, pressing his chest to your back; it didn't work.

You'd tried kissing the sides of his neck to get him to loosen up; it didn't work.

So now you were here. Sitting atop his chest and holding his wrists above his head on the soft couch, hair pinned back loosely so it didn't brush into Dean's face. His cheeks had a slight flush, eyes a little dazed, but he was looking up at you with a lazy grin.

"You gonna behave now?" You asked, raising an eyebrow skeptically. You expected him to say some stupid thing like—

"Make me." Yep, there it was. Dean wasn't going to go down without a fight, apparently.

"You leave me no choice." You shifted down his body, dropping your hips over his own. He practically jolted, already feeling buzzy from all the alchohol, more so now feeling your clothed cunt over his jeans.

"Baby, I-I don't think y'should-ah!" Dean practically whimpered when you rocked your hips ever so slightly, sending shivers up his spine. You could feel the bulge in his pants growing by the second. You grinned down at him, feeling a surge of confidence from his little noises. You were used to being the one pinned down, taken sometimes hard and fast, sometimes soft and slow. The complete shift in dynamic made you feel extra in control, especially of him.

"What was that?" You asked, biting your lip as you slowly sped up your movements until it was a consistent grind against his bulge. The rough texture of his jeans sent tingles up your spine, but you didn't want to go any further until you proved a point.

"I…" Dean was out of breath, wrists twisting and turning in your grip to try and take hold of you. "Mmm…feels so good, baby…"

At his words, you halted your motions completely, lifting your cunt from his jeans to keep yourself up on your knees. He let out a loud whine that should've woken Sam up from down the hall, yet you heard nothing. Probably since he was so used to your shenanigans. Dean licked his lips, eyes practically glazed over. "Keep going. Keep going, baby, what stopped you-?"

"You're not behaving." You hummed lowly, leaning down so your face was inches from his. He brought his head up in an attempt to press your lips together, kiss you as desperately as you could see he wanted to in his eyes, yet you pulled away at the last second, denying him that privilege.

"I-I can behave." He practically slurred out, getting more desperate by the second. "Please, please, please baby jusht touch m-me."

"You didn't stop drinking when I told you to." You replied, dipping your hips down to grind hard against his bulge for a split second, one turn for each thing you listed. "You ignored me for twenty minutes. You just tried to kiss me. Not to mention how, for the past week, you've been stupid and reckless."

Dean flushed harder at your condescending words, knowing whole-heartedly he had done all those things. Even still, he was really hard, both from your grinding and from how you were speaking to him. He didn't want to admit that it turned him on, really on, but you could already tell with how big the tent in his jeans was.

You grinned down at him easily. "You want me to touch you? You think you deserve it?"

Dean nodded frantically.

"Prove to me why you should get the pleasure."

Dean's mind raced. You could see the desperate hunger in his eyes, the overwhelming need for you to touch him. Shifting to sit back on his thighs, you kept his wrists pinned with one hand while the other drifted down his stomach slowly. You heard him gasp and felt him jolt when your hand brushed over his bulge and squeezed lightly.

"I-I'll be good. Be so so so good f'ya, baby. Fuck you right." Dean babbled. "Or I could do the domestic shit. Cuddle you up t'night. Make breakfast. Please, just touch me, please ride me, I-whatever y'want, baby, I can do."

"You make a fine argument." You hummed teasingly, slowly unzipping his jeans and pulling them down just enough for his flushed cock to pull free. You gave it a few teasing strokes, relishing the way he whimpered and moaned and bit his lip.

You put on as best a show as you could one handed, slipping off your shorts and tossing them to the coffee table. Your panties came off next, letting your dripping cunt be exposed to the cool motel air. To free yourself, you used your panties to tie Dean's hands together, tightening the knot to hold him in place.

While one hand stroked his cock, the other went to your own pussy, letting him watch as you rubbed circles around your clit and moaned. He shifted again, moving his hips to try and chase your own movement. You pushed him back flat against the couch again, lifting your hips to let the thick swollen tip rub through your folds.

"You're gonna be a good boy, right?" You cooed, pursing your lips, biting back your own noises as you felt the familiar shape of his cock slip slightly into your tight hole.

Dean nodded desperately, hands not even trying to break out of his restraints. "Uh-huh. The best boy. Gonna be so good f'you."

You let yourself sink down until you were fully seated on his hips, thick cock filling you to the brim. You moaned, trying to contain yourself for Sam down the hall, but how could you when your boyfriend felt so damn good? Dean seemed to be in just as much ecstacy as you, eyes fluttering shut at the final reward of his begging.

You rode him like there was no tomorrow, completely letting go after your teasing ended. You were just as desperate as he was now, rocking your hips back and forth and back and forth, hands on his chest to stabilize yourself. You were both letting out noises in unison, and you leaned down to press your lips together.

Dean kissed you back just as harshly, head tilting to a better angle, tongue slipping into your mouth as you felt the familiar tightness in your gut. From the sound of Dean's growing whimpers, you knew he was just as close as you were.

"No. No, you can't cum yet." You breathed out, pulling your mouth away from Dean's just enough to murmur against his lips. "Make me cum first. You can when I say you can."

Dean whimpered louder at your denial, but knew he had no choice to agree. It was doing wonders to him, your pussy clenching around him and your moans filling his ears. He restrained himself just for you, forcing himself not to cum until he felt you sit back on his lap with a loud moan, letting yourself go. He wanted to pinch your clit and hold your hips and slap your ass, but with your panties as his restraints, he couldn't even move his hands.

When he finally came at your command, his warm seed filling you up, you didn't loosen his restraints. You didn't praise him for doing a good job. Instead, you just rocked your hips back and forth again, pussy clenching around his cock practically the same way it did when you two started. Dean knew right away; this wasn't ending quickly.

And it didn't.

Only at the morning rays of sunlight did you finally stop, laying down on the couch next to him, exhausted. Sluggishly, you untied his restraints, yet his arms stayed up there, too spent to move them in any way.

"You just wait until later tonight, baby." Dean muttered, as tired as you were.

You grinned lazily, turning your head to look at him. "Really? What's happening later tonight?"

Dean would've answered, if your hands didn't go to his hair and start brushing through it. He practically melted, barely getting out the words; "y'don't…wanna…know…" in his hazy state.

You just giggled.

a/n: i know they weren't drinking wine but i saw the first image (crush me, stomp me, make me wine) and this immediately came to mind. i think something possessed me because i sat down and wrote this in like an hour and a half 😳😳

written by @heavenorely on tumblr 2026. do not copy, reupload or feed my work to ai.

[heavenorely]

i added soldier boy to my masterlist but i don't have any ideas for him yet...🧐🧐 possibly coming soon possibly coming after i write 100000 other fics in my drafts and notebooks

[heavenorely]

　　 　⊹ . ໒꒰ྀི ˵ˊᯅˋ˵ ꒱ა　　honeybee

synopsis: self-conscious after being hurt so many times, you confess your inner insecurities to Jack late at night. he hates you thinking like that.

pairing: jack abbot x fem!reader

warnings: 0.8k words, reassurance, comfort, pet names like "doll" and "baby", jack trying to be comforting and nice, neck kisses, reader has bad thoughts, soft jack, cuddles in bed, kinda self indulgent, inspired by olivia rodrigo's "honeybee"

masterlist!

It was late at night. Too late, you kept telling yourself, to be having thoughts like this.

Despite being in your loving boyfriend's arms, you couldn't stop yourself from thinking about how his face would like going. Leaving you behind like so many people had already done, tossing you away like a piece of trash that was useful and fun while it lasted. You knew he loved you, but you couldn't stop your mind from running like a hamster on a wheel.

You two were curled up on the bed in his Pittsburgh apartment, his scrubs left in the closet for the following morning. Jack breathed heavily in his sleep, not quite snoring but not quite silent either. His thick arms were looped around your waist, holding your back to his bare chest, feeling his heartbeat soothingly through the layers of skin and clothing.

If only his heartbeat could slow down yours.

One hand under your cheek, the other placed over Jack's, you lay wide awake in the moonlit bedroom. You wish you silence the thoughts in your head; what if he woke up one day and decided he didn't love you anymore? What if he found somebody better? What if you were too ugly, too boring, too simple, too much? What if he found you annoying but hadn't said anything yet? What if—

You couldn't lay still anymore. Carefully prying Jack's arms off your waist, you slid up to a stand beside the bed, tugging on Jack's sweater discarded on the floor. You padded to the balcony, glancing back to Jack still sleeping in bed, making sure he was still unconscious before clicking the glass door shut behind you.

Your bare feet hit the cold concrete as you let out a long breath, the cold night breeze brushing through your hair and causing a shiver to rack through you. You folded your arms over the balcony railing, leaning forward to look out at the houses and windows and lights of the city.

The words "I love you" coming from Jack's lips repeated like a mantra in your head, recounting every time he was affectionate, physically or orally. Every hug, every kiss, every pet name, every date. None of it seemed to silence the negativity.

He doesn't love you, and if he does, he won't keep loving you. You're worthless, stupid, boring, ugly unloveable, useless, naive—

You were so caught up in your head you didn't hear the balcony door open open behind you and Jack's footsteps coming closer until he spoke up. "Doll?" You turned, not meeting his eyes; just acknowleding his presence before looking back over the railing.

"What're you doing up so late?" He rasped, clearly still sleepy but concerned for you.

"Just thinking." You responded quietly. It wasn't a lie, but it was a hell of a simplification.

You could feel Jack staring at you through a solid minute of silence before he stepped foward, even closer, reaching over to tilt your head to his with two fingers under your chin. Not commanding, just soft guidance.

"Don't lie to me, baby. What's going on in that pretty mind of yours?"

"Go back to bed." You mumbled, looking down at his chest instead of his face.

"Not without you, doll. C'mon."

Numbly, you let Jack lead you off the balcony, pulling you around to the bed and gently pushing you down. He crawled on after you, laying face to face on your sides. Without words, he put your hands on his shoulders before brushing one hand over your hair.

"You feeling like shit again?" Jack asked bluntly, even in that quiet tone of his. He was trying his hardest to be soft and nice, like he knew loving partners were supposed to do. Years in the military had hardened him up, to say the least.

You just gave a little nod, not trusting yourself to speak without crying.

"Y'know you're perfect, right?" Jack whispered in that gravely voice of his, low to not disturb the peace, leaning down to press soft lingering kisses to your neck and jawline. "My perfect girl. Love you so much."

"Don't lie to me." You mumbled before you could think through your words. You knew it was a terrible assumption to make, but you were too lost to truly believe him.

"I'm not lying." Jack quickly replied, pressing a firmer kiss to your pulse point. "Why d'you think I'd lie to you?"

"I'm not…I'm not perfect. I'm not the dream girl. I…it's too hard to describe this."

"You don't have to." Jack murmured against your neck, lips and nose brushing the sensitive skin, hot breath almost making you shiver. "Whatever shit you're thinking, it's not true. I love you, not some faceless chick. Only want you in my life."

"Promise?" You whispered tearfully, holding up a pinky. It was childish, you knew, but you needed the reassurance. He took it without question. "Promise."

a/n: if you caught all the lyric drops you're a real one fr...i just love the new album so so so much maybe i'll make more fics based off more songs? i don't know yet but stay tuned!!!

[heavenorely]

been needing this reassurance today, rereading this fic usually helps 🙌

[reidloverr]

BIG BRAINS

pairing: spencer reid x reader (no use of y/n)

summary: it's spencer's first time and his nerves are through the roof. you calm him down and tell him to use his big brain knowledge to make you feel good, and that turns your night into an anatomy lesson

tags & warnings: MDNI, virgin!bf!spencer, dry humping, fingering, spencer explains the anatomy of everything he's doing to you, he cums in his pants w barely any touching, squirting

w/c: 2.7k

a/n: wrote 75% of this on my phone... I actually reached flow state while writing and I didn't reread any of it so I'm just hoping for the best. #my kink is big brains

ty to the beautiful @hotchnerss for being the judge of this plot, mwah <3

“Oh my god,” that was the third time Spencer had repeated those words in your ear while you straddled his lap on his worn leather couch, kissing him senseless. 

Your hands, warm and steady against the cool skin of his neck, slid upward to tangle gently in the soft curls at the nape of his neck. You pulled back just a fraction—enough to break the kiss, though his lips instinctively tried to follow yours, looking entirely dazed and utterly out of his element. 

He was practically vibrating with nerves, his dick already hard against your core, his chest heaving against yours you could swear his heart was on the verge of bursting. 

“Spencer,” you whispered softly, your thumb brushing over his glistening, clenched jaw, feeling the erratic jump of his pulse beneath the delicate skin, “Breathe, Spence,” 

“Right—breathing.” he blurted out, the words tumbling in a breathless rush. 

His hazel eyes darted all over your face, wide and brimming with a mix of raw desire and sheer panic. “I’m breathing. It’s just—my heart rate is well over a hundred beats per minute. I mean given the elevated levels of oxytocin and dopamine in my system right now, it’s a completely normal reaction to—”

You cut off his rapid string of words with a soft, lingering kiss to his cheek, then another to the corner of his mouth. He filled his lungs up in one go, breathing your air into his mouth, hands hovering uncertainly over your hips like he was terrified he’d mess things up if he touched you wrong. 

“You're overthinking again,” you murmured lightheartedly, brushing a stray lock of hair from his forehead. 

“I’m not—well, yes, I am,” he admitted, his voice dropping to a fragile, vulnerable tone, “You know I’ve never done this— any of it— before..” 

“That’s okay, Spence, there’s a first time for everything, and there’s nowhere else I’d rather be right now.” 

He looked down, his lashes casting long shadows against his cheeks, “I just.. I wanna be good at this. I have no experience to rely on, and I really, really don’t wanna disappoint you.” 

You couldn’t help the quiet giggle leaving your lips, reaching down to take his large, long-fingered hands in yours, guiding them to rest firmly on your waist. 

“Spencer, look at me,” you hooked your finger under his chin, “this isn’t a test. I want this to be fun for you. We can take our time and figure out what you like together as we go, okay?” 

“O—okay,” he breathed, the tension in his shoulders slowly starting to melt as his hands molded to the curve of your waist.

You bit the inside of your cheek, contemplating whether or not now was the time to tease him a little. 

“I think out of everyone in the entire world, you probably know the most about working a woman’s body.” you grinned, leaning into his space. 

“What? I mean I do know some things, but I—” he stammered, his eyes widening in confusion. 

“I saw your search history last night.” you blurt out, unable to hold back the confession. For the past 24 hours, you couldn’t think of anything other than Spencer’s search history—entirely about how to make a woman finish, and step-by-step guides on how to properly stimulate a woman. 

You even saw an open tab showing a web page titled ‘how to make love for beginners’. 

It was sweet, really. You knew Spencer wasn’t the most confident when it came to using his assets or developing his skills, but you had no idea that he was putting so much time and effort to be the absolute best he could be for you. 

Spencer looked utterly mortified as embarrassment made his soul momentarily leave his body, a deep beet-red rush spreading all the way up his neck, “You looked at my search history?!” 

“I know, I know, I’m sorry,” you shook your head, only partially sorry for invading his privacy, “it was all in front of me when I opened the computer to check my email. I didn’t really dig for anything.” 

He buried his face into your shoulder, looking like he wanted the floor to open up and swallow him whole, letting out a long groan. 

A hopelessly smitten smile overtook your face as his hair pressed messily into the crook of your neck, his pure embarrassment and obvious need to satisfy you warming your heart and turning you on. 

“If you want a lab rat to test out your theories… I’m completely offering myself up for science.” you captured his bottom lip between yours, licking the soft lines of the plush flesh before sucking on it and drawing a broken moan from the back of Spencer’s throat. 

You tilted your hips, angling them to grind harder against his dick, feeling him twitch beneath you and squeeze your waist before his thumbs rubbed against the skin to soothe it. 

The combination of the friction between your clothed core and his growing erection and your mouth sucking his own was all too much for Spencer. But he knew he had to hold back. 

He couldn’t possibly be pathetic enough to unravel in under 5 minutes of dry humping. 

Although when you first started dating, Spencer would finish in under 3 minutes when you two made out and your hands would wander across his lean back. 

He’d shiver under your touch, and his spine would arch into you, pressing your ribs firmly against his, feeling his entire frame pound in arousal and anxiety every single time. 

“Show me what you know, Doctor Reid,” 

“Um.. could you sit on the cushions so I can see you better?” 

“Absolutely,” you eagerly nodded, shifting your weight off of his lap and onto the couch. 

Spencer reached over,  adjusting the small fluffy pillow behind your back, “is this okay? You comfy?” 

You’ve never experienced Spencer taking charge of your body. 

Not that you two have ever gone past making out and dry humping, but even when you simply kiss him, his body goes weak against yours, giving you the upper hand to control his every move. 

Sometimes he’d get so hungry and turn the kiss into a sloppy mess of clacking teeth and messy spit, and you loved to see that side of him, even if he chooses to suppress it to not overwhelm you with his desperation sometimes.  

“Mhm,” you hummed, parting your legs as he knelt down to sit on the carpeted floor before you. 

He flattened his palms on his thighs, overthinking where to start first. 

“Listen, Spence,” you reached down, cupping his cheeks in both hands, “let’s approach this differently.” 

You pecked the button tip of his nose before standing up and stepping beside him, “There’s no such thing as messing up. If it helps you get out of your own head, just treat me like an open textbook--touch whatever you want and tell me all about it.” 

You stripped out of your clothes, leaving nothing on your body. 

Maybe the sight was too quick for Spencer, because the bulge between his legs strained harder through the stuff fabric of his sweatpants, and he tried to hide how hard he got when nothing even happened yet. 

“Okay.. yeah, that sounds doable,” he whispered, his fingers flexing nervously against his knees as you returned to your position on the couch. 

“God, you’re so beautiful,” he mumbled, leaning closer to the level of your thighs as his trembling hands carefully positioned themselves between your open knees, “I don’t think anything I’ve ever seen before gave this view justice,” 

He stroked his thumbs along the plush skin of your legs, taking in the sensation before dipping his head to trail warm kisses from your knees to your inner thighs.

The heat of his mouth sent a shiver straight up your spine, pulling a breathy gasp from your lips as you sunk back into the couch. 

He looked up at you, “Are my hands too cold?” 

You shook your head, reaching down, your fingers carding through his soft curls, “No, they’re perfect. I’ll tell you if anything feels uncomfortable, don’t worry about me,” you reassured, your fingers softly scratching the stubble on his chin before he returned his focus from your face to your core. 

His long, slender fingers traced your folds, coating his fingertips in your natural slickness as his other hand gently gripped your thighs, his touch overly careful it almost felt clinical. 

A dark crimson rush crept up to his ears as he felt how warm and wet you already were, “The.. the bartholin’s glands,” he blurted out, his voice hitching as he stroked along your labia minora, “they produce fluid during arousal and.. It’s working. You’re so wet,” 

He carefully pressed his thumb to your clitoris while his other fingers feathered lightly over your folds, staying close to your opening. 

“The clitoris has an average of ten thousand-two-hundred and eighty nerve endings.. So this—” He began a firm, rhythmic circle with his thumb, “—should feel good,” 

And you confirmed it instantly, a breathless, needy hum escaping you. 

Hearing your moan sent a wave of heat straight to his lap, his cock straining heavily against his sweatpants that he had to shift his knees to ease the friction and not come undone 

“That feels so good, Spence,” you breathed out, lolling your head back as his index finger applied gentle, shallow pressure against your tight hole. 

Every pretty sound you made was met with a whimper from Spencer’s lips, making it sound like he was the one being touched. 

“Simultaneous stimulation of the external clitoris and the anterior vaginal tissue can trigger stronger orgasms,” he panted, his thumb keeping that steady rhythm over your clit while his middle finger finally slid smoothly into your slick entrance, “I’m— is it okay if I—” 

“God, yes, Spencer, it's okay. You can do anything you want.” you cut him off with a quiet gasp, tilting your hips upward to encourage him to sink his finger deeper into you. 

He carefully brought his index finger alongside his middle finger, sliding them into your sensitive clenching inner walls, his mouth widening as he watched you swallow his fingers to the knuckles, a shaky, desperate moan leaving his lips, “You’re taking me so easily.. God, you feel incredible,” 

He pumped his fingers into you, going deeper when your hips rolled against his hand, “The vaginal walls temporarily expand during arousal.. they’re accommodating to me. It’s so fascinating to experience in real-time,” his breath tickled the hypersensitive skin of your inner thighs. 

He choked on his own breath when your walls pulsed harder around him, his thumb pressing harder against your clit, “I— god, you’re perfect.. you’re so unbelievably perfect,” 

A soft, needy sigh traveled past your lips as you looked down at his flushed, beautiful face. “You’re doing so well, Spencer, you’re a natural,”  you panted, your pussy squeezing around his fingers again. 

His eyes blew wide at your compliment, his fingers working extra hard now. 

“Your g-spot should be around one to two inches up,” he thrusted his fingers and curled them upwards, his other hand pressed firmly on your lower stomach, fingers splaying out as if he’s trying to reach your insides and feel every change that happens as his fingers explore you. 

It took him two tries of angling his fingers and hooking them with precise force before he hit your sweet spot, drawing a whiney moan out of you, “there it is,” he whispered breathlessly with pride and pure amusement. 

As your hips bucked against his hand, seeking more friction and begging for a faster pace, Spencer let out a stifled groan as he shifted his rock-hard, aching cock against his leg. 

“I—I don’t know if I’m hallucinating or not, but I— I think I feel you swelling around me, it’s getting to my head—” he panted, his lips pressing absentmindedly pressing against your thigh, the wet warmth of his mouth cooling your feverish skin as all his focus was on nothing but your pussy. 

“My god, Spencer, are you gonna come before me and you’re not even being touched?” your lips twitched into a smirk, your own loud moan cutting you off when Spencer’s fingers increased their pace. 

“I know it’s weird, I’m sorry,” he shook his head, trying so hard to gather any bits of his lost composure. 

“Don’t be. It’s really fucking hot,” you breathily whispered, your voice barely audible as you struggled against the knot that was tightening by the second in the pit of your stomach. 

He didn’t know what to say to your praise, but all he knows is that every word you uttered went straight to his dick and he silently took it, putting his frustration into curling into you in a fast, punishing motion. 

“Y’know the skene glands are what produce ejaculate. They—um, they sit along the front of the vagina on the lower end of the urethra. They overlap with your g-spot so I—I think I can try to target them.” he bit his bottom lip with intense concentration, almost breaking the delicate skin and drawing blood, “Did you know that the surrounding erectile tissue swells with blood when you’re this aroused?” a small breathless laugh left his lips, because he seemed much more confident and secure when he could translate his passion into science.

You were incredibly grateful that you suggested this method of approaching intimacy with Spencer—his words were making the coil in your gut pull impossibly tighter. 

“Spencer..” you kept repeating his name all because it was the only possible word your brain could come up with when you were drowning in the sensory overload of his touch. 

You didn’t finish right away, giving Spencer time to slightly adjust the angle of his relentless fingers, testing different paces and pressures, admiring your expressions and noises until he was a whiny mess at your feet. 

“Come on, Spence, I’m so close. Don’t hold back, baby, come on,” you moaned out, your fingers tangling in his hair, slightly tugging on it. 

Spencer pumped his fingers inside you frantically, losing his rhythm, but trying to match the desperate bucking of your hips. 

The knot in your gut finally snapped, a blinding wave of heat splashing through your entire lower half, making you cry out, your legs shaking on either side of Spencer’s head as you gushed all over his hand, soaking his fingers and palm and spraying across his cheeks and mouth. 

Your walls clamped down around his hand as he tried to keep up with your contractions 

The fluid dripping from his skin was the final straw that pushed him over the edge and made him drop his forehead between your legs, losing all control and brain power, “oh my god, ohmygod,” he sobbed with tightly shut eyes. 

Spencer was so far gone by this point, completely grinding against his own calf that was folded awkwardly beneath him as he spilled his entire load in his pants, the stickiness filling his boxers as the dampness bled through the fabric. 

You laid back as he reluctantly withdrew his fingers, instinctively bringing them to his wet lips as he licked them clean, examining them to collect every last drop of your juices. 

He stared up at you with puppy-dog eyes while heaving, unable to get any words past his glistening pink lips.

You grunted as you straightened your sore back, leaning down to him and cupping his face, “That was incredible, Spencer. I’m so, so proud of you.” you kissed him hungrily, the sight of him soaked in your fluid igniting something primal in your chest. 

“Th—thank you for that,” the words were muffled by your sloppy kiss, but he couldn’t wait to get the words out of his chest. 

As you pulled back from the kiss, Spencer’s eyes fluttered, following your gaze as you looked down at the dark stain on his grey sweatpants, “God, I’m so sorry— I didn’t mean to come so fast,”

Your thumbs caressed his burning cheeks as you peppered open-mouthed kisses along the damp skin, “You came from making me feel good, do you have any idea how hot that is? You have nothing to apologize for, Spencer,” 

A shaky exhale escaped his chest as he slightly twitched at the wet trail you were leaving as you tasted yourself on his face. 

“Come on, let’s get you cleaned up,” you pressed a firm kiss at the crown of his head.

[heavenorely]

YES YES YES YES YES 100 TIMES YES THIS FIC IS GORGEOUS BEAUTIFUL CHEFS KISSSS i love spencer so much bro and this was sooooo well written!!!!!

[heavenorely]

yall not ready for the freakquencies i'm sending your way 😏😏

[heavenorely]

teaching your boyfriend jack abbot how to take good pictures of you!!! just a drabble 　 masterlist!

warnings: fashionista!reader, dresses and cleavage, literally only like 350 words, jack being a smug little shit in the end, pet names notes: too lazy to write a whole fic and i was thinking about this on my forest walk the other day so here it is written down <3

"A little lower, Jack."

You instructed your doting boyfriend with one hand, the other resting by your hip. You had dressed up so cute, putting on your favourite little dress and stockings, holding a simple necklace between your collarbones down the curve of your breasts. You had brought Jack out to the park so you could go for a nice walk, but when you found a giant bush of your favourite flowers, how could you not want to take pictures?

Of course, you knew how to pose and how to angle yourself and all that social media stuff. Jack, on the other hand, not so much.

He had struggled to even hold the phone when you first gave it to him, and the first few pictures he took were at an awkward angle and his thumb was in the way. Now he was on one knee, holding the device with the excellence that you just grilled into him minutes prior, snapping as many shots of you as he could while you turned and posed.

You finally held up a hand to finish the photoshoot.

He handed the phone to you with shaking hands.

You inspected the photos, one by one, and Jack could see the dissection in your eyes. He curled his arms around your waist, dropping his chin to your shoulder, and you felt his stubble press against the side of your neck.

"You like them, doll?" He murmured, almost timid in his question. Truth be told, he'd take a hundred more pictures if you wanted them; you deserved to see yourself the way he saw you, absolutely beautiful every second.

After a long moment, you gave a curt nod, tucking your phone away in your pocket. He'd actually surprised you with how well he'd gotten after just a few minutes of your instruction, but you didn't want to let it get to his head.

Jack just grinned smugly, able to read your mind like an open book. He pressed a kiss to the underside of your jaw, then your cheek, then your lips.

"I'll take that as a yes, pretty girl."

[mariasont]

THERE'S NOTHIN' MORE WE COULD GET OUT OF HERE, BABY DRIVE ✮⋆˙

a doctor walks into a strip club not expecting to find his most timid patient

MASTERLIST | RULES | INBOX

PAIRING michael robinavitch x stripper!reader

WARNINGS 18+ MDNI fem!reader, shy!reader (on occasion), strip-club setting, private/lap dance, er!barbie mention if u squint, depression themes, burnout, reader wears skirts, partial nudity, social anxiety, sexual shame and insecurity, fear of emotional intimacy, i make robby wear his glasses all da time… sue me, doctor/patient meet cute, minor head injury, needles/sutures, objectification and male-gaze framing, jack is a lil sleazy in this for narrative purposes, reader calls robby michael!, sex-worker/client power dynamics, references to marital infidelity (not between mcs), alcohol and smoking, clothed grinding, authority/instruction kink, praise kink, lots of pet names, light condescension/dumbification, dom!robby, hair pulling, clothed clitoral stimulation, fingering, multiple orgasms / overstimulation, age gap, car sex, brief mention of oral sex (f receiving), non-graphic mention of maternal suicide

WC 14k

Today has been a shit day to be Michael Robinavitch.

And yes, Robby understands — hard not to, with the department he runs thrumming behind him like a hive full of grief — that he is hardly the sorriest soul within earshot. Blood hits the floor. Heartbeats quit. Lives learn, fast and loud, that the Almighty can be blunt as a brick to the face. 

In this place, Robby has witnessed enough human catastrophe to know that his own shit day should rank somewhere below minor inconvenience.

Knowing it, unfortunately, doesn’t ease the drag.

Because there’s this fucking tiredness that lives in him now by strata, each year pressed flat beneath the next, until whatever came before has been fossilized beyond recognition.

He remembers only fragments of that earlier man, someone who laughed without effort, someone who did not hear his name and immediately feel another small portion of himself being requisitioned. 

They ask, and he gives. They ask again, and he gives again. That is the work. That is who he is. The two have grown around each other so completely that separating them would require cutting into bone.

But usually, the work of the emergency department can still pull him above the fatigue. Adrenaline is useful that way. 

Today has offered no such mercy.

Hence, shit.

Just a steady procession of petty failures. Interruptions. Demands. Death by thumbtacks. Laughable, except there is barely enough of him left to puncture. 

At six, a pipe bursts over radiology and turns half the department into a damp, swearing migraine, ceiling tiles sagging with dirty water while everyone responsible for maintaining the building becomes mysteriously unreachable. 

At seven, a confused patient pulls the fire alarm because nobody will let him smoke beside the oxygen tanks which, if nothing else, demonstrates a level of commitment to a terrible idea that Robby almost respects.

Almost. 

At eight, he discovers that the overnight attending (cough, Jack, cough) has left him a waiting room packed to capacity, two unsigned charts, and one impressively hostile email from the hospital’s administrative assistant whose pink signature and tiny heart-shaped bullet points do nothing to soften the phrase “ongoing efficiency deficits.” 

And by ten, his coffee has been knocked out of his hand, his lunch has been stolen from the refrigerator, and Whitaker has called out sick. 

That leaves Robby down a physician and picking up whatever cases he can cram into the narrow spaces between one thing and the next.

Curtain Seven holds an uncomplicated eyebrow lac.

Practically a gift. A tiny, finite problem for a man whose entire life currently feels composed of open tabs and unfinished sentences. 

Five minutes to assess, ten to irrigate and close, two more to recite the standard warnings about dizziness, vomiting, confusion, unequal pupils, and the many creative ways a minor head injury can become his problem again by midnight.

In and out. Straightforward. Painless, at least for him.

Then back to the several other problems already elbowing for space inside his overtaxed brain. 

But the moment Robby pulls back the curtain, straightforward goes comprehensively to hell. 

Medically speaking, it is exactly as the chart advertised. A small cut above your eyebrow. Manageable. Routine. Boring, even. 

You are none of those things.

You sit perched on the edge of the gurney as though you have been placed there for safekeeping and warned not to touch anything. Spine stick-straight, hands gathered neatly in your lap.

Your cardigan is a soft color he doesn’t have a name for, but he thinks it’s pretty, buttoned almost primly to your collarbones, tiny pearl buttons marching down the front.

Your skirt spills modestly over your crossed knees, sheer tights covering the rest of your legs, and a pair of neat ballet flats dangle just above the floor.

One toe traces a nervous little semicircle through the air before you catch yourself and hold still. 

At the sound of the curtain, you turn, and your eyes find him immediately, enormous and worried and so wholly fastened to his face that doe-eyed no longer feels like a figurative term.

Robby nearly takes a step back. 

He has not eaten. That must explain the dizziness. 

He clears his throat and looks down at the chart, seeking temporary asylum among the intake notes. His eyes catch on your name. Pretty name. Naturally. Pretty woman, pretty name, the universe apparently committed to the theme. 

He says it aloud and glances up to confirm the pronunciation. You nod quickly, almost eagerly. 

“I’m Dr. Robinavitch,” he tells you, then relents before you can attempt the full four syllables. “Dr. Robby, if you like.” 

That earns him another look — good grief.

It’s a look that should be reserved for lifeboats at three a.m., that trembling instant when you realize the sea might still let you live. You shouldn’t waste that on a man built mostly of leaks and patch jobs.

“Hi, Dr. Robinavitch,” you say softly. “It’s lovely to meet you — well, I suppose it isn’t, really. Lovely, I mean. I’d rather not be in the emergency room.” Your mouth sours at your own words. “Sorry, that was rude. I don’t mean I’d rather not meet you. Just not like this. With this —” A limp hand flutters at your face. “— whole facial fiasco.”

It’s strangely funny, hearing his full name from your mouth. Most people seize the abbreviation when offered. But you cradle Robinavitch like fine china, intent on returning it intact.

“Right. That,” he says, taking a few measured steps closer. “Can you walk me through what happened?” 

Robby can practically see the debate flicker across your features. Truth in one corner, lie in the other, both taping up their knuckles. The lie comes out swinging first, something vague and graceful rising in your eyes, but your conscience cheap-shots it before the bell.

“I, um, ran into a door.” 

“And how did that happen?”

He has the answer assembled before you can give it to him, because there are only so many roads that lead a grown woman directly into a stationary object.

Too much wine, perhaps. A phone held three inches from your nose. Some spectacularly avoidable mishap born from distraction, intoxication, or the particularly lethal combination of both. People do not generally collide with doors while demonstrating excellent judgment. 

You duck your head, and your thumb drifts to one of the pearl buttons on your cardigan, nudging it back and forth in its buttonhole, rubbing over the thread until the tidy cross-stitch has gone soft and fuzzy at the edges. 

Not a new habit, Robby thinks. The button has been loved nearly to death.

“Do I have to tell you the exact details?” you ask, already shrinking from the question. “Because I would really prefer not to.”

That does not help your case. Something irresponsible, then.

“I would prefer it if you did,” he prods. “I need to know if anything threw off your balance before impact. Vertigo, alcohol, low blood sugar, a sudden loss of consciousness. Anything like that.” 

He keeps the rest to himself, the way his own interest is tunneling deeper, a quiet animal gnawing through wood to find the soft center. 

“No, um, nothing like that,” you insist. “I was reading while I walked and I just… didn’t look up soon enough.”

Robby blinks. “You were reading.”

It’s not a question, really, only a small correction entered into the file he had already begun assembling in his head.

So he was wrong.

Entirely, which perhaps he should’ve anticipated. He was just trying not to judge a book by its cover. But your cover is proving remarkably faithful to the contents. 

Without meaning to, Robby begins sketching the rest of you around it. You work somewhere quiet, he decides. A library, maybe, or some obscure university office tucked behind a corridor nobody visits without an appointment, surrounded by tidy shelves and coworkers who instinctively soften their voices around you. 

You pack your lunch the night before in a regiment of matching containers. Drink tea, not coffee, probably something floral and faintly medicinal. Buy pens only after testing how smoothly they move across paper. Say sorry when other people bump into you. 

Probably apologized to the door afterward, too. 

A laugh falls out of him before he can decide whether it’s appropriate, soft at first, then edged with genuine amusement. “Must’ve been a hell of a book.” 

“You know, I don’t think doctors are supposed to derive entertainment from their patients’ poor spatial awareness,” you mutter, lashes lowering the instant the words escape, as if the joke were a spark you need to smother before anyone sees the smoke. 

A small, stubborn curve clings to the edge of his mouth as he cants his head in concession. “Fair point. You’re right, and I apologize.”

The words are properly contrite. The twinkle in his eyes says he’s enjoying every second anyway.

Then he moves closer, and the witty spark in your eyes gutters out on cue. He catches the exact sputter of your breath — one skipped beat, a sharp sip of air — as he settles between your knees and towers over where you sit, broad shoulders eclipsing your view of anything but him. 

“Let’s take a look,” he murmurs. 

As soon as his thumb brushes the corner of the bandage, you begin talking. 

“It probably looks worse than it is. I mean, I haven’t actually looked, because I thought that might make me feel faint, which is ridiculous because I’m not squeamish, usually, except with my own blood, apparently, and I did clean it, I promise, I just wasn’t sure if hydrogen peroxide was still considered good or if everyone decided it was bad while I wasn’t paying attention —”

“Hydrogen peroxide is still considered good,” he cuts in, trying to drape calm over your runaway syntax.

Robby eases the tape away slowly, one inch at a time.

The wound beneath is nothing: a shallow scrape, the faintest puff of swelling. Still, annoyance sparks anyway, a quick, irrational flare. Ridiculous. A red skid mark above your eye — insignificant, yes, but on that face it feels like graffiti on marble.

The reaction inside him is almost comically paternal, a stern memo from some inner guardian demanding the universe exercise better stewardship over its delicate masterpieces. 

Robby cradles your cheek with latex-clad fingertips, pressing gently around the scrape to check for deeper swelling. You flinch, shoulders stiffening, mouth pursing around a startled hiss. 

“Tender there?” Robby asks, the lines of his eyes tightening with concern. 

Your lip disappears beneath your teeth, eyes darting up through thick lashes. “A little. Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize.” His thumb drifts along the unbruised ridge of your cheekbone, touch light as breath. 

Honestly, with the number of apologies flying between you, he ought to be wearing a mason jar on a string around his neck — your coins on one side, his on the other, rattling like wind chimes every time either of you says the word. 

“I just don’t want to make your job harder by… y’know being uncooperative.”

He stifles another laugh.

The idea is so backwards it’s almost endearing.

Patients usually fight him like toddlers at bath time. If you were any more compliant, you’d offer to suture yourself up while reciting after-care instructions. 

“You’re a dream compared to the gentleman who tried to bite me for even suggesting stitches.”

Also, a dream in other respects, but he’ll keep that to himself.

“Stitches?” you echo, pupils flaring wide as if you’ve spotted the needle already.

Robby raises both gloved hands in the universal easy there gesture. “Yes, stitches. Two, maybe three. We’ll numb the area, you won’t feel a thing. Promise.”

Your gaze flicks from his gloves to his face, searching for any hairline crack in the reassurance he’s offered.

Robby feels suddenly exposed, half-convinced you’re also reading the shallow crow’s-feet and the faint gray at his temples, those watermarks that say used but serviceable even on his best days. 

However, whatever you see must satisfy you; the tension in your jaw eases, and you exhale through your nose, giving him a small, firm nod. 

“M’kay. Should be fine,” you murmur, offering a tentative half-smile that wobbles at the edges. 

“Will be,” he corrects, voice dipping to the same rhythm as the cotton pad he draws along the cut. Outward strokes, clearing dried blood. 

The antiseptic smell billows up, but it falters against the subtler warmth of you. Clean skin, faint lavender shampoo, sun-warmed wool, the sweet trace of whatever lip balm you worried away earlier. 

He sets the cotton aside, swaps it for the syringe of lidocaine, and pitches his voice to the same hush one might use coaxing a skittish foal.

“Tiny pinch coming — deep breath with me.” 

You obey promptly. The needle slips under the skin. He feels the faint give, watches your lashes flutter but not fall.

“Good,” he praises. “Halfway done with the worst part.”

While the numbing spreads, he cups your jaw with his free hand, thumb tracing an idle circle well clear of the scrape. He doesn’t know why he does it. Can’t stop either. An anchoring touch, perhaps. Nothing more.

Your pulse beats quick beneath the glove, bird-wing frantic, yet you keep still, eyes trained on his like you’ve decided they’re the safest coordinates in the room. 

Thread, needle, forceps. He moves through the motions with ritual care, narrating each step.

“Little poke,” he says as the curved needle dips. “Pulling through, just a tug.” 

You tense, then relax when the promised pain never arrives. He snips the tail, smooths a fresh swab over the line of the suture, and starts the next pass. Two stitches.

Then, for safety, a third, fine as spider silk, barely visible against your skin. 

“All right, last one. Another deep breath.”

Your inhale is shaky but obedient. He mirrors it, slow and exaggerated, so you can match pace. In those three shared seconds the world shrinks to the hush of fabric, the faint click of instruments, the muted roar of blood in his ears. 

The final knot seats neatly. He studies the trio, a tiny constellation guarding the fragile universe of your eye, and feels a swell of pride, as though he’s fitted diamonds into marble rather than nylon into flesh. A dab of antibiotic, a butterfly dressing laid with careful hands. 

“Gorgeous work,” he jokes, meaning the repair but, embarrassingly, meaning you as well. “You’ll hardly know it’s there in a week.” 

Your shoulders sag in a relief so tangible he could cup it in his palms. He steps back only after giving your cheek one last feather-light pat.

“Bravest patient of the night,” he declares, peeling off his gloves with a snap and dropping them into the bin.

A slow exhale pours out of you, followed by a smile so earnest it could power streetlamps. 

“I barely felt a thing,” you say, eyes tracking him as though he’s some rare object and you’re afraid to blink it away. “Thank you, Dr. Robinavitch.”

“You did great.” He feels the need to add that one. He’s not sure why. Surely not because you instantly perk up at the praise. “Don’t get it wet tonight. And, um, starting tomorrow, cleanse only daily with diluted baby shampoo, blot dry, tiny dab of ointment. This will all be in the instructions you’ll be given. These stitches come out in about six days. Any signs of streaking redness, increasing tenderness, yellow drainage, or sudden headache, you come back in. Deal?”

“Deal,” you say, quick nods punctuating every syllable.

He reaches for the handle, then pauses. “Oh, and the book stays closed anytime your feet are moving, yeah?” 

You clutch the strap of your bag and give him a tiny, chastened nod. “Right. Yes. Books and walking are officially divorced.”

Robby hasn't been able to stop thinking about you.

He isn’t entirely sure why, and in the interest of preserving what remains of his peace, he has elected not to investigate. Ignorance is bliss, after all, and bliss is already more than a man with his age, schedule, and accumulated wreckage ought to expect.

Romance is not something he can sustain. He has made peace with that, mostly. Fleeting companionship is different. 

A drink, a laugh, the uncomplicated relief of a warm body beside his for seven weeks or so. He is good at beginnings. Endings even more so, particularly when he can arrange them before a woman begins leaving things in his bathroom or asks him to describe the future as though he has ever possessed one.

Love and similar things demand room he does not have. Time he cannot promise. Parts of himself he suspects have already been spent elsewhere.

And you seem like you deserve more than a man who’s only confident in the temporary.

Which is all theoretical anyway. Seventeen minutes is not enough time to determine whether a woman is interested in you. You gave him no indication you wanted him. And he has no intention of making a fool of himself by looking for one retroactively. 

More importantly, life is not generally so obliging as to place the same stranger in his path twice. 

It has been four days already, and his memory has begun eroding in all the wrong places. 

You are still there, technically, but less in full and more in fragments. Your face keeps blurring at the margins no matter how often he finds himself, coincidentally, trying to call it back. 

He remembers your nails. Neat, he thinks. Maybe rounded. Something careful about them, as though you spent time making sure even your hands caused no offense. The cardigan was pale, soft enough that he remembers wanting to touch the sleeve, although now it is cream, now pink, now some color he suspects you never wore at all. 

Your mouth resists him most.

Presented as a still, it flat-lines. He only revives it by remembering kinesiology rather than anatomy, the subtle concavity when you spoke, and then, abruptly, the entire feature reanimates, pulsing with life he can’t keep. 

The thought of you persists, even here, in a room thick with stale cigar smoke that rasps over his tongue like powdered charcoal.

Robby presses his thumb into the bridge of his nose until color sparks behind his eyelids. Creams and pinks.

He refocuses on Jack, who has sprawled comfortably into a low leather chair. A cigar glows between his fingers, the ember brightening each time he makes a point to Mateo and Parker, orange-red, then dull, then orange-red again.

How he allowed himself to be dragged here, of all places, remains unclear. Jack’s talent for weaponized rationality probably played a role.

It began innocently — one drink, Robby, come on — then snowballed into you’ve been a hermit for half a year, and ended with Jack beside Robby’s car holding his keys hostage until he agreed to accompany them.

At no point had anyone mentioned that the “quiet place Mateo knows” employed women in six-inch heels. And by the time he clocked the neon, tacky signage, the silhouette of a woman wrapped around a pole, he was already wedged in the back seat between Parker and a cooler.

Jack catches him staring and lifts his brows. “Try to look less like you’re waiting for the health department to arrive.” 

Robby exhales through his nose. “Give me two more whiffs of this carpet and I’m calling them myself.” 

“You’ve been here twelve minutes, pal.” Jack taps ash neatly into the tray beside him. “Loosen up. Have a drink. Let a pretty woman remind you that the human body occasionally does things other than crash and burn.”

“I’m well acquainted with its full range of functions, thanks,” Robby says, finally lifting the glass he’s ignored all night. The ice has surrendered to a sad film of water, flavor leached out before he even tasted it. 

Parker tears her attention from the stage, lashes still raining glitter, and pins him with a look that borders on pity. “With all due respect, Robby, I think you may have forgotten a few of the more recreational applications.” 

Robby tracks the path her eyes abandoned, just in time to glimpse a quicksilver blur twining up the pole before the lights swallow it whole. 

He hasn’t forgotten. He has simply not mistaken remembering them for needing them, or so he has been telling himself since his last fling ended four weeks ago. There was sex, plenty of it, an indisputably recreational application that, for forty-five minutes at a time, returned his body to something other than a piece of shiftwork machinery.

Then it was over, the loan period expired, and the instrument went back on the surgical tray.

Jack salutes Parker with his glass in agreement.

Robby swings his gaze between them, unimpressed. “I’m old enough to remember when that kind of commentary would’ve at least been whispered behind my back.” 

“Night crew’s a different animal, man. After midnight, we’re all equals.” Mateo lifts one shoulder, entirely unrepentant.

Robby snorts. “No, we aren’t.”

“And that attitude right there —” Mateo lifts a finger and aims it straight at him “— is exactly why Jack dragged your ass out tonight.”

Robby inhales to fire back, but the song ends on a hard cut, swallowing his comeback in a wave of cheers. Silver lights bleed instantly into velvet red, and an anticipatory murmur travels across the room with remarkable speed. Glasses thunk onto tables. Spines straighten as though tugged by the same invisible string.

A man near the front actually elbows his friend into silence, eyes fixed on the curtain.

A familiar woman steps out.

Or, more accurately, Robby’s eyes insist she is familiar, and his mind arrives several seconds later, scrambling for an explanation. 

Robby has seen that happen often enough. A limb arranged at an angle the body was never designed to hold. Blood arcing with such absurd force it looks less like injury than special effects. The first look rejects it. The second begins the unpleasant work of believing. 

He trusts the second look because panic is an unreliable witness, because fatigue smears what’s real, because a person under strain will borrow a stranger’s face and fasten it onto any recognizable outline if recognition feels safer than confusion. 

So that is what this must be. A trick of light. A bad angle. His weary mind reaching backwards four days and dressing an unfamiliar woman in the remnants of you.

But the second look is the same as the first. 

The woman remains you. A vision rendered in arterial red, lace curling over your body in ornate filigree, satin bands drawing the eye down the sleek length of your legs to crimson stilettos that land against the stage with sharp, ceremonial clicks.

Light pools in the soft hollow of your waist, slides over the swell of your hips, catches on the bounce of cleavage held in scalloped cups.

He could still call it resemblance, perhaps, if not for the small interruption above your eyebrow. The cut. The one he irrigated, aligned, closed. His handiwork sits there like a signature on a painting, ruining every alternative.

A bolt of percussion fires through his veins. One huge, discordant thud that reverberates all the way up into his skull. 

“Jesus,” Parker whistles, lounging into her elbows. “Alright, I see why she’s got regulars.”

Robby does too, though agreement seems a flimsy response to what’s happening.

You’re… wrong word, wrong word, wrong word.

Pretty is flowers in glass jars and daylight and picnic tables. Sexy is no better, insufficient and boyish, a word that is used in locker rooms and bad dating apps.

What you are now is something closer to magnetic, maybe. 

You draw the room toward you molecule by molecule, the way the moon hauls entire oceans across the earth without asking permission. Even Robby, professional skeptic, finds his spine tilting, happy to pretend the leash isn’t there while secretly begging you not to drop it. 

A flush climbs his neck, prickling beneath the starched edge of his shirt, so he sneaks a finger inside for air.

Jack notices, turning just enough to smirk around the rim of his glass as if to say told you so. But he doesn’t know the real reason Robby feels suddenly suffocated.

Robby shrugs deeper into the leather, posture telegraphing cool indifference like a man impervious to heat.

He isn’t. And he’s even less impervious to the whiplash of matching this siren to the shy patient who sat in his ER.

The woman in the ER had nearly apologized herself into a corner over the possibility that saying hello wrong might make her rude. This woman keeps a hundred people waiting on one slow turn of her hip and does not apologize to any of them. Four days ago, you could barely hold his gaze without softening it with a timid smile. Now you meet the eyes of strangers one by one, choosing them, releasing them, granting each man the brief narcotic thrill of being singled out before moving on fast enough that none of them can confuse attention with ownership.

It should feel like performance. A costume, a trick of lighting, confidence painted on as carefully as whatever dark color shines across your mouth. Except nothing about it reads false. 

You are not pretending to command the room any more than you had been pretending to be nervous with him. Both things are true, somehow, two states held inside the same body without either invalidating the other.

Schrödinger’s woman, collapsing into whatever form the environment demands.

The possibility unnerves him more than a lie would: that he never really sees all of anyone, that patients arrive in pieces and leave with the rest of themselves still undisclosed. That the same could be said for him. 

At work he’s precision incarnate, voice pitched to steady the hands of interns and family members alike. Off the clock, the same voice can’t convince him to answer texts or fold laundry that’s been clean for a week. He’s the doctor who tells grieving spouses to hydrate, then forgets to eat until his vision tunnels. Two truths, both real, both incomplete. 

On the next pass your eyes collide with his, momentum juddering so fiercely the rest of you almost follows.

Almost.

You decant the shock into a languid pause while your hand trails over the valley of your waist. The crowd drinks it in as pure seduction, none the wiser. Robby is. He witnesses the recognition bloom hard behind your pupils before you bury it. For a second he was seeing Curtain-Seven-You blinking up through the polish, startled to discover her doctor reclined with a sweating glass and a stare he can’t pretend away.

One blink later the mask reseats itself. The woman he sutured melts back beneath the gloss-hard shell of the woman steering the room by its collective bloodstream.

You prowl towards the pole.

The knot of men ringing the stage is already rowdy, but your proximity behaves like accelerant. One slaps the rail, another looses a lewd invitation, all of them bending forward to peak at the whisper-thin scrap stretched over your ass.

Robby’s molars meet with a crack at the wet, barking laughter of appreciation that follows. 

You appear unbothered, palm sliding up chrome, spine unwinding as you lift onto the lethal points of your heels, a slow ascension that leaves the pack panting.

You draw one leg behind you and tip forward, lace disappearing between parted thighs as you roll downward.

His hand lifts to his mouth, knuckles pressing against his teeth, and then he bites down because Christ, because fucking hell, because apparently the human body still does plenty other than crash and burn. 

His, for one, springs to attention violent enough that he has to shift in his chair and pass the movement off as a casual adjustment, pretending the sudden pressure behind his zipper is nothing more than a quest for better lumbar support. 

Rising inch by inch, you draw yourself back up.

A gentle press of your wrist sets you spinning once unhurried around the pole. Your gaze rides the rotation, finding one patron, then another, gifting each a fraction of electric eye contact that has wallets loosening like reflex. 

When the orbit swings you toward Robby, you turn your chin a breath away, letting your hair curtain the sight of him, withholding the current he suddenly realizes he wants more than air. 

“Well?” Jack suddenly murmurs, nudging him with the side of his arm. “She doing anything for you?”

“She appears to be doing something for everyone,” Robby replies, dryly, lifting his glass as though the room’s collective reaction has nothing whatsoever to do with his own. 

“Maybe you should find out what she does one-on-one,” Jack says mildly, like he’s suggesting another round. “Private dances are a thing here, I’m told.” 

“I think I’ve seen enough,” Robby replies, aiming for bored and landing somewhere closer to strained. 

He has not seen enough, not even enough to satisfy the first sharp edge of curiosity. A dozen questions are now cracked open where one used to be. Enough is nowhere in sight.

You never look at him again. 

The song winds down. The room stands for you. Applause swells while you gather the scattered bills with calm hands, then slip behind the curtain without so much as a backward glance.

Good, Robby tells himself. Better this way.

The lie rides home with him in the passenger seat.

The first vintage car Robby bought had already been abandoned once. He found it beneath a collapsing canvas cover behind a house outside Pittsburgh, all four tires sunk into the earth.

He traced the rain-carved rivulets of rust down its fenders as the homeowner, beer resting on a potbelly, bragged about a future overhaul spoken in the casual, uninterested tone of a man who’d rather let weather finish the job. 

Robby bought it before he had anywhere sensible to keep it. And for two long years Robby spent his evenings and weekends nursing seized pistons free, lathing corrosion off gears, feeding the straight-six new gaskets and hope until it almost sounded like itself again. 

He called it a hobby, later upgraded the label to cheaper than therapy, but never once spoke the truest thing — that some stubborn, eight-year-old corner of his heart was trying to prove that abandoned didn’t automatically make a thing unworthy of rescue. 

“Hi, Dr. Robinavitch.”

Robby straightens, throat clearing more than once. “Hi. It’s… nice to seeing you again.”

A poor choice of words.

He knows it from the way the sentence seems to remain in the room after he has finished speaking.

Nice to seeing you again here, he means. In the emergency department, fully clothed in a yellow sundress, purse clasped between polite hands. Not nice seeing you again since the strip club, where he’d gone home afterward and wrapped his fist around his cock like some middle-aged sleazeball with no better use for his imagination. 

Surely you will assume he means the emergency room. Any reasonable person would. 

“Um, I followed all your instructions. For the aftercare, I mean.” Your hand rises halfway toward your eyebrow before seeming to think better of it. “It looks all right, doesn’t it?”

The upward tilt at the end gives you away. Robby recognizes the bid for praise, though he is less prepared for how instinctively he wants to satisfy it. 

It is profoundly disorienting to see you like this, returned to his most timed, sweet patient.

“It looks great,” he promises, lips tipping into a smile he can’t stop. “Seems you did everything right.” 

Relief melts your shoulders, an overlarge reaction to a modest bit of validation. Robby feels an equally outsized glow at having caused it.

Drawn in, he shortens the distance between you, leaning over the gurney to parse the neat ladder of scabbed flesh.

“Any redness, swelling — any drainage? Fever? Swelling?”

“No.”

“Kept it dry?”

“Mostly.”

“Mostly?”

You blink up at him. “I showered.”

“Everyone showers,” he points out.

The answer comes out drier than intended, though not unkindly. You seem to consider this, lips parting and then closing again, as though reviewing the entire history of human bathing for a more defensible response.

Robby waits and dislikes how charming he finds the hesitation.

“Right, well, yes,” you concede at last, cheeks warming. “But some people are better at keeping their faces out of the water than others.”

He nearly lets the grin escape. “And which category would you place yourself in?”

Then he makes the mistake of letting the sentence form an image. Water coursing over cheekbones, pooling in clavicles, dress adhering to the soft body beneath.

He does not need to imagine much. His memory has become inconveniently exact where your body is concerned.

The swell of your breasts, full and heavy. He has seen the smooth plane of your stomach, the dip at your navel, the round flare of your hips, the way that scrap of satin vanished between the fat curve of your ass when you bent over and held the room there with you.

The sundress feels suddenly fraudulent, a modest little curtain drawn over a body his mind has no trouble stripping bare.

“Uh… the less-graceful division.” A nervous little smile flickers and dies. 

“Well, fortunately, shower water isn’t acid,” he teases, sliding a latexed thumb beneath the healing seam. “Once the wound has had a day or two to seal, brief contact is generally harmless. Prolonged soaking, scrubbing, contaminated water — those would concern me. Your inability to lean backward does not.”

There is really no reason for him to be here today. The department is fully staffed, plenty of nurses, plenty of docs. Suture-snipping is a five-minute chore, and anyone with gloves and passable vision could handle it. 

Langdon even volunteered — “I’ll take the stitch removal” — surely looking for something easy to do in between back to back GSWs. But Robby’s eyes caught your name on the board, and before the words could stop themselves, he’d stepped in. 

“I’ve got it.”

He didn’t think it was rude. More curt, maybe. Decisive. Perhaps carrying the implication that Langdon should fuck off and find a different patient. He recovered by invoking continuity of care. He knows how the wound looked initially. He can assess healing against the baseline.

All true points.

And plus, Robby likes to finish what he starts. That’s what he told himself about the car, too, during that second frost-bitten winter, when the engine still wouldn’t turn over and more pragmatic voices egged him toward the scrapyard. 

It justifies the way he looks at you now. He intends to finish with you as well. Finish what, though? A repair? A detour? He can’t name it yet, only feels the torque of wanting to see the job through.

“Does removing them hurt?”

“Not usually.” Robby adjusts the goose-neck lamp above you. “There’s some pulling. Maybe a sting if the skin has started growing around one of the knots. Compared to the laceration itself and the anesthetic injections, this should be the easy part.”

You nod and brace yourself, chin tipped up, lips pressed into a thin determined line. Your fingers close around the edges of your handbag, knuckles tightening. Robby is not sure why you haven’t set it aside. Perhaps you expect to flee halfway through. 

Robby angles the forceps and offers a calm, “Try not to tense.”

A terrible instruction, really. You go rigid beneath his hand. 

He places one gloved hand along your temple, thumb resting just above your cheekbone, and brings the scissors to the first knot.

The surgical scissors dip, catch, snap. He eases the filament clear.

Your nose wrinkles.

“You okay?”

“Yeah. Just… felt weird.”

“That’s the official technical term.” He huffs a laugh, swiping a finger at the injury. “Look at that — one down, two to go.”

He snips the second knot, giving his hands more concentration that the task requires. You study a blank patch of wall beyond his shoulder. Robby trains his eyes on the shears, the tray, anywhere but the soft sweep of your lashes. 

Each time your lines of sight drift close, you both twitch a millimeter off course. An awkward pas de deux so perfectly in sync it reeks of rehearsal.

“So, um.” You exhale like you’re stepping off a ledge. “Is the plan to keep acting like you didn’t see me?”

For a breath the tiny blades hover, silver comma in the sentence. Robby’s hand moves again before the moment can form into trouble. 

“I assumed that was what you preferred.”

Snip. The last blue thread lifts away. Robby drops it into the tray and peels his gloves. 

“Well — yes. Usually,” you admit, eyes tracing anything but his. “It’s just awkward now, and I’m sure it’s awkward for you, too, and I feel like I put you in a strange position by being here.” 

Robby inspects the thin pink line left behind, then cleans away the faint crusting with a square of saline-dampened gauze.

The edges have knitted neatly enough that he decides against Steri-Strips, though he smooths a small bandage over it for protection anyway. 

“You came here for medical care,” he says, pressing the adhesive down with his thumb. “You didn’t put me in any position. You had stitches that needed removed, and I’m a doctor.”

“I know, but you didn’t know what I did before, and then you saw me doing it, and now you have to do this while we both pretend you haven’t seen significantly more of me than is appropriate. That feels like a strange position.”  

He stares at you.

“To be fair, I’m the one who came into your, um, place of work and saw you like that. You didn’t bring any of it in here.” He gives a stiff chuckle, then rushes, “Not that I make a habit of visiting those kinds of places.” 

You face falls, though only by degrees, nothing he could accuse himself of causing if he wanted the escape, only a tiny collapse around the eyes before they drop to your lap.

Shit.

“Right,” you murmur. “I understand.” 

He does not think you do. You understand what his tongue accidentally suggested: that he considers himself separate from men who go to strip clubs and, by extension, considers you separate from women deserving uncomplicated respect. 

“I only mean it wasn’t planned,” he corrects quickly. “On my part. Not that there’s anything wrong with where you work.” 

You push yourself off the gurney too quickly, knees nearly catching its metal frame. 

“You don’t have to explain, Dr. Robinavitch.” The title returns with enough formality to put several safe feet between you. “Really. I understand.” You smooth the skirt of your dress, though there is nothing wrong with it, eyes darting toward the curtain. “I should go, anyway. I have another appointment.” A pause. “Am I all right to leave?” 

A firm no hovers on his tongue.

He could claim the adhesive hasn’t fully bonded, that follow-up education on UVA vs UVB protection is suddenly urgent. Hell, he could ask about nausea, tinnitus, sleep patterns — whatever buys an additional thirty seconds so he can reel his arrogance back in rather than watching you walk away with it.

“Yes, you can go.” Robby steps back, creating a polite corridor of air even while every muscle in him strains to close it again. “The wound is closed. No signs of infection.”

You nod, murmur another thank-you, and leave with the brisk determination of someone escaping a small fire. 

He tosses the gloves, scans the room to be sure nothing’s missing, and steps into the hall. 

By Friday, you have almost convinced yourself that Dr. Robinavitch’s opinion does not matter. 

Because it doesn’t, really. Why would it? You don’t know the man. You don’t even know his first name. You only know how he looks in navy scrubs and how he looks in a dark green hoodie with the sleeves shoved to his forearms and you know how he blinks behind askew glasses when the universe throws a curveball. 

None of that grants him jurisdiction over your self-worth, you remind yourself — for the sixth, seventh, eighth time in the last hours (which is absolutely a rational number of times for something that totally, unequivocally does not bother you)

You have no idea what his favorite color is, what he does on his days off, whether he reads before bed or falls asleep with the television on, whether he has friends who tease him or children who call him when they need something fixed. He could be boring. He could be unbearable. 

He is functionally a stranger, and the opinions of strangers should pass over you without leaving a mark.

Except there had been a moment during that first visit when he had not felt like a stranger at all.

Some tiny aperture had opened in your mind, no more substantial than a daydream caught between blinks, and through it had been an entire future built from nothing. He would maybe ask for your number. You'd manage polite astonishment, of course, pretending the last ten minutes hadn't been an obsessive loop of ask me, ask me, ask me.

Then coffee. Maybe dinner. Conversation that would wander past the pleasantries and into the real questions. Everything happening in the normal order, the one other people seemed to enter without needing a script.

A man likes a woman. He asks her out. She says yes.

There would be no transaction or discussion of time or disclaimers about boundaries or fees. Just interest migrating, cell by cell, toward intimacy.

That little fantasy had been naive. Nothing in your life had ever been handed over with both palms open. You had fought for every apartment, every paid bill, every small square of stability you could defend as yours, and even stripping had begun less like a choice than as the only unlocked door in a hallway full of deadbolts.

It was never meant to be forever.

Forever had looked a little quieter when you pictured it, something involving the degree you had worked for, maybe kitten heel shoes that wouldn't destroy your arches, perhaps a desk with a small green plant you would remember to water because in this imagined life you were also the kind of woman who remembered such things. 

Instead, your diploma yellowed discreetly on the wall while your student loans siphoned off money earned in rhinestones and six-inch heels, the sort of circular joke capitalism might have written after three drinks: you had gone into debt to become qualified for work that could not support you, then used supposedly disreputable work to pay for the qualification. 

But the work does keep you housed. 

It keeps the electricity on and the refrigerator stocked and (miracle of miracles) lets the rent clear without taking the rest of your life with it. As survival strategies go, it beats overdraft fees and lukewarm Ramen by a mile.

And plus, you are good at it. 

A song lasts three minutes, sometimes four, and for that small illuminated span your life became beautifully finite.

Eight counts, a mark beneath your stilettos, the angle of your chin timed to the bass. Nothing accidental, nothing capable of catching you unprepared. Under the lights you swell to mystic size, pure glitter and gravity, and the house confuses being watched with being known.

You give them a body, a smile, the suggestion of closeness. Not one thing more.

“Someone’s askin’ for you.” Candy — six feet of sunset-red hair, glitter-lidded eyes, and a cigarette behind her ear — materializes at your elbow.

She worries a cocktail straw between teeth painted Revlon Fire & Ice, shifts weight onto one stiletto and fixes you with a look. 

Candy had been at the club long enough to remember three owners, two renovations, and at least a dozen girls who had arrived with stage names chosen in the parking lot and disappeared before anyone learned their real ones. 

She was not material, she would have corrected anyone who suggested it, largely because she considered children loud and motherhood an elaborate pyramid scheme.

Still, she had taken one look at you on your first night and decided you were hers to keep alive. Somebody had to.

You glance toward the hallway. “Who?”

“Didn’t ask. Tall. Glasses, maybe.” She stabs her straw toward the lobby, cherry lipstick parting in a half-smirk. “Or not. Lighting’s shit out there.”

“Well, that narrows it down,” you say with a laugh, tightening the cap on your mascara. 

Through the mirror Candy tips her chin, curls spilling forward like spent matchsticks. “Trust me, honey, you won’t miss him. Sticks out like a sore thumb in there. Real stuck-up face. Could be handsome under all the disapproval.” 

“Reassuring,” you murmur, sliding the tube into your makeup bag. “All right. I’ll go talk to him.”

You step away from the mirror’s glare, padding down the corridor that smells of hairspray and stale Mojitos.

Being requested has long since stopped surprising you.

The frequency still does, perhaps, because it happens more to you than to most the girls and you cannot quite identify the mechanism, what small thing you do that makes men single you out from an entire room of beautiful women.

You suspect it might be the distance, the impression that some essential part of you remains elsewhere. Men enjoy a locked door when they believe money might furnish the key.

So a summons from the floor means little, a private-room request, which you're sure is to follow, even less.

The steeper the fee, the holier they feel. And your fees are steep. 

You have learned the taxonomy by now: the overexcited ones who can barely sit still, the grabby ones who pretend they misunderstood, the married ones who turn their rings inward, the unmarried ones who act as though that makes them virtuous.

Odds are Tall-Maybe-Glasses will slot into one category or another. They always do.

What you find is not remotely what you expect.

Even under the club’s shit lighting you recognize him instantly, despite the bodies cutting between you, despite every reasonable part of your brain insisting there must be hundreds of men in Pittsburgh with broad shoulders and glasses, hundreds who own dark green long sleeve shirts and jeans, hundreds capable of sitting stiffly around a drink they must regret ordering.

But only one of them blinks at disaster the way he does.

Only one is Dr. Robinavitch, and he is already looking directly at you.

You consider turning around and pretending Candy found the wrong girl. Too late. You feel her surfacing already, that other side he seems uniquely equipped to excavate. The fumbling girl who never knows where to put her hands and whom you have worked very hard to keep out of this room.

By the time you reach him, whatever elegant greeting your usual persona here might have offered has abandoned you completely.

“Dr. Robinavitch,” you say, stopping before him with your arms held awkwardly at your sides. “What are you doing here?” 

“You can call me Michael,” he says, holding your gaze. It looks like he almost regrets saying that, but he continues on. “We’re not at the hospital.”

It is a nice name. Simple, strong, well-suited to him. It belongs in kitchens lit gold before sunrise, in slow Sundays and coffee cooling on the counter, in a voice calling up the stairs that breakfast is ready. It belongs to people who know him well enough to shorten it when they are teasing and draw out every syllable when they are cross.

“Michael, then,” you say, testing the shape of it while pretending it does not make him seem suddenly, inconveniently more human, then repeat, “What are you doing here?”

Michael lifts the glass to his lips, the ice chiming. “Having a drink.”

“Thought you didn’t frequent places like this.”

It’s cheap. Petty, even. You know it the second you say it, but that sentence has been bruising beneath your skin all week, tender every time you press at it.

Michael looks down into his drink. “I deserved that.”

Your posture slips by a degree, less certain of itself. 

“I wasn’t trying to make you feel bad,” you say automatically, then wince because that is plainly untrue. “Well, I was. A little.” Your finger finds the edge of the bar, worrying at it. “But only because you made me feel bad first, which is childish, I know, and not that it even matters because you don’t owe me anything, I just…” Stop. Breathe. Locate the point. You make yourself meet his eyes again. “Could you answer the original question honestly, please? Because the drinks here are terrible.”

You have never been particularly good at cruelty, not sustained cruelty, anyway.

When you were eight, you once cried harder than your cousin after shoving him off a swing because he had called you stupid, then spent the rest of the afternoon bringing him popsicles and checking his scraped knee as though guilt itself might cauterize the wound.

Even now, one flicker of remorse in someone's face and your anger begins eating its own tail.

“I wanted to see you. To apologize.” His mouth pulls taut, irritation aimed inward. “I didn’t know where else to find you.”

“Oh.” A rogue strand of hair is tucked away, buying you a second to breathe. “Well, that’s… nice. Unnecessary, but nice.” You give him a shrug. “It’s okay. I know you didn’t mean it the way it sounded. I’m just a little sensitive sometimes, apparently.”

“No. You’re not too sensitive. I was insensitive.” He pauses, as though deciding whether to risk the rest. “And I’d like the chance to —”

A hand lands lightly at your elbow.

“There you are.” A voice interrupts. “You free for a private?”

The club rushes back in all at once. Damp skin. Sugared alcohol. A bartender shouting over the room as ice spills hard into a metal sink.

You turn and find one of your regulars smiling down at you. Married category. Grabby-hands category. Frequent overlap.

He is broad through the middle, expensive watch flashing at his wrist, his face polished into the benign affability of someone who says my wife doesn’t understand me like he has personally discovered marital dissatisfaction.

Once, after three bourbons, he had shown you a photograph of said wife and two daughters without the faintest sense of irony. Beautiful family. Matching white shirts on a beach somewhere, everyone squinting happily into the sun.

Then he had tucked the phone away and laid both hands on your thighs despite having been told twice not to.

You had removed them one finger at a time.

He had called you feisty.

Those are the moments that blur the professional laminate of the job, makes you wonder whether a woman who participates in other people's dishonesty are still allowed to want honest things for herself.

Your mouth opens, closes. “I — uh.” The word sticks, unfinished promise in Michael’s gaze tugs at you, but the house cut doesn’t wait. A practiced smile slips into place. “Absolutely. Room three’s free. Go grab a seat, I’ll be right behind you.”

Before the man can move, Michael’s voice cuts in.

“I’ll take that room instead — at double your usual rate.”

You lashes jump. “Sorry, what?”

“I need a private moment with you,” he clarifies. “Whatever it costs, I’ll double it and add another hundred.”

The regular bristles, shoulders squaring. “Pal, you can’t just buy my slot.”

“That’s exactly what I’m offering.” Michael swings his gaze to you. “Triple.”

You start to shake your head. “Micheal, that’s not procedure. I have to —”

“Take care of customers, I know. So let me be the customer.” He trails off on customer, like he's only now realizing that buying your time might require more than throwing numbers into the air.

“Rich boys and their wallets.” The man scoffs, the sound thick with bottom-shelf whiskey and wounded vanity.

But he does unclamp his fingers from your forearm, wiping the phantom scorch across faded denim as if your skin left a welt.

The grumble from Mr. Grabby fades behind you, leaving you alone with Michael again.

Michael and that unreadable face, solemn eyes and a tightly ironed flat mouth, giving away nothing. Refusing to hint at what he expects to happen when you breathe in a smaller room together.

You sift his features one last time, hoping for a spark, for motive, or leak of feeling, but the shelves are bare tonight, so you assemble a customer-service smile, flash the bouncer your wristband, and angle your chin toward the corridor.

“Um — this way, please.”

He ducks in behind you, almost too big for the narrow hall, one shoulder skims peeling latex paint, the other nearly takes out a exit-sign wire. His fists stay buried in his pockets.

Neon leaks through the frosted door ahead, flooding everything in pink-blue prisms. When you step inside and catch your reflection in the mirror, you look like a broken candy heart flashing on and off in a vending-machine light show.

“Clock starts when the door shuts,” you say, palming the latch. 

“Then shut it.” 

Baritone honey pours over you and a tide of goosebumps rise in its wake. You're grateful for the anonymity the lighting provides, hiding the way your mouth parts like you've never heard a command before.

Snick.

The door seals and silence rushes in, puffing outward until it fills every corner of the room.

He lowers himself into the narrow armchair, long legs arranged with care, spine straight, hands folded together over his lap. No ring on his left. Still no ring, because yes, you checked again, and yes, you had checked the first time you met him too. You tell yourself it's not a weird thing to notice. People notice hands.

“Okay, there’s a couple rules before we start.” Your voice nearly snags as you move in front of him, every shift of your sequined costume scattering red flecks over his face. “First, no touching unless I initiate. If I do, you let me lead.” You lift another finger. “Second, stay seated unless I tell you to move. And third… anything said or done here disappears when the timer goes off.”

He nods. 

Normally, this part requires almost no thought. Muscle memory takes over and your mind slips away into its little palace of useless thoughts. What you will eat after work. Whether Candy ever returned your lip liner. How many payments are left on your student loans. 

You think about anything but the man in the chair.

But tonight, when you tap the music to life, the little door in your head refuses to open. It remains here, aware of him, aware of yourself through his gaze, awareness folding over awareness until the whole thing feels less like performance than standing between two mirrors and watching the image multiply.

Still, your body knows where to go.

You skim two fingers along the wall, static skittering beneath their pads, and then you turn.

Your left knee softens, weight melting into the floor through the arch of your foot as your shoulders roll into the first down beat. Three slow steps carry you neatly between his knees.

One hand plants on the chair-back above his head, the other glides down your own thigh, tracing its curve until only a sliver of air remains between your skin and his, rule one perserved by the narrowest margin.

Michael’s shoulders iron themselves to the seatback, eyes flicking up to yours, down, immediately back up, panicked by the prospect of settling anywhere too long. His thumbs sneak under the armrests, improvised restraints for hands that clearly no longer trust themselves.

You let one painted nail trace the shallow notch of his collar and feel the shiver it pulls it loose.

Then you turn again, hips sweeping slowly over his lips before planting your hands on his knees and folding forward until his exhale punches hot against the back of your thighs.

“Listen —” He stalls, throat clicking around the word like it’s too wide to pass, “I never meant to belittle you. Before. In the ER.” 

A soft, warning little “mm-mm” escapes your lips as you lift one hand before he can continue, pivoting back toward him as you sink into the space between his parted knees, palms gliding slowly up the hard planes of his thighs.

“You're wasting very expensive minutes, Dr. Robinavitch.”

“Michael,” he corrects automatically, then drags in a breath. “But you need to know...” He blows the sentence out through flared nostrils, gathers the rest like loose change and dumps it at your feet. “I never thought less of you. If anything” — he swallows, pride shrinking a size — “I’m far too invested in what you think of me. So I’d really prefer it if I didn’t leave here with you convinced I’m some condescending asshole.” 

Your fingers tighten just enough to gather a pinch of his trousers. “Why?”

His brows crash together. “Why what?”

“Why are you so invested in what I think of you?” The words tumble out softer than you intend, but there’s no stuffing them back inside now. 

“I don’t know,” he admits. “I just… do.”

You answer by rising onto your toes, sliding forward until your knees plant on either side of his thighs and gravity pulls you down, snug, perfectly aligned. You can feel how hard he’s trying not to rock up into you; the tension turning his thighs into steel beneath your calves. 

You cup the back of the chair with one hand, the other drifting to the nape of his neck, fingertips teasing the short hair there while your hips settle, testing his restraint like a match teasing gasoline. 

“Did you really come here just to apologize?”

“Yes.” It lands flat and Michael's gaze flinches sideways. You can practically hear the second half of that lie thrashing in his throat, begging for a more believable host.

“I don’t know that I believe you.” Your hips tip forward in a languid circle, coaxing a muted groan that reveals far more than his answer did.

His mouth parts around the sound and an impulse sparks — close the distance, lean in and test whether his kisses are as buttoned-up as every other part of him. But kissing would not be part of the dance. A kiss would be yours, not the performer's, and you've already bared more of yourself with him than intended.

“Do you think I have ulterior motives?” His eyes flick down to your lips then snap back up as though caught.

Your nails trace the neat seam of his shirt, an excuse to keep touching him while you marshal courage. “I think a man who shells out triple the rate has some motive. Whether that's ulterior or not is still up in the air.”

One corner of his mouth tugs upward, a brittle almost-smile. “Touché.” 

A sharp beep-beep-beep interrupts the charge in your chest.

“Time.”

You don't move right away, hands now resting on the broad shelf of his shoulders as if checking for something you forgot. A heartbeat passes before you ease back, letting air slip in.

“If that’s… all you needed, apology accepted. Promise.” Your voice skips like a stone. “I’ll just— grab the door.” 

Before you can slide from his lap, his hands move to your waist.

The touch is tentative for all of half a second, waiting, perhaps, for you to remind him of rule one. 

When you don’t, his hands forming a firmer pressure into your sides. “That’s not all I needed.” 

Heat sparks under his thumbs, soldering whatever resolve you had to stand up.

“What does that mean?”

“It means —” A muscle jumps in his cheek. “I did come here to apologize. I just didn’t anticipate wanting... considerably more than your forgiveness.”

Your inhale stalls mid-rib. “Such as?”

“First,” he murmurs, leaning in until his breath ribbons across your mouth. His lips graze, barely, a static spark you could almost pretend you imagined.  “I want to kiss you. Will you let me do that?”

Your body tilts toward him on instinct, gravity picking sides, but you slam the brakes a centimeter from his mouth. 

Heat still flares across your cheeks as you remind both of you, “I don’t kiss customers.” 

His hands ease from your waist. “Okay.”

“That’s it?” you blurt, half-expecting the bargaining to start.

He blinks, brow pleating. “Did you expect a fight?”

He almost looks hurt by the idea.

But that's almost exactly what you were primed for. Just like that the negotiation table collapses, all your rehearsed rebuttals clattering to the floor while he simply pockets his desire and honors the line. No counteroffer, no charm as defense, nothing.

He’s the first customer who’s ever heard no and decided the period at the end was permanent, and the respect tastes oddly like defeat.

“You could ask me again when I’m not working.”

“Could I?”

Your pulse jumps at the invitation you just opened and you curse your mouth for racing ahead of your fear, yet the idea of him wanting you outside this neon fishbowl sends a ridiculous bloom of warmth through your body. 

“If you still want to,” you say, pretending cool confidence while your mind is screeching please say yes, please say yes. 

“I will.”

“You can’t know that.”

“No,” he concedes. “So tell me when you’re not working and give me the opportunity to find out.”

“And if you change your mind?”

“I won’t,” he says, voice trimmed of hesitation. His stare pins you in place. “But if it makes you feel better, I’ll wait until then to say I told you so.”

Three Thursdays later, Michael Robinavitch still hasn't cashed in his told-you-so, even though he earned the right to say it several times over (turns out he's far too charitable for that), but you've learned two things about him all the same.

The first is that his kisses are anything but buttoned-up.

You learned this after your first date, which began at a little restaurant with linen napkins and candles guttering inside cloudy glass jars and ended with the servers stacking chairs around you.

Michael asked you questions with the same concentration he gave everything else, chin tipped into one hand, eyes fixed on your face as though every silly tangent might eventually prove significant.

And there were tangents.

The glow-in-the-dark stars you stuck to your childhood ceiling in accurate constellations, the library card you considered your first real possession, the disastrous apartment with the radiator that screamed at three every morning and a kitchen drawer that came completely free of the cabinet if you pulled too hard.

In return, he told you about the cat who bullied him awake before sunrise, the grandmother who still called to ensure he was eating properly, the years he’d spent letting work devour every other part of his life. 

By dessert, he was no longer merely the doctor from the ER or the man who had paid you to dance for him.

He was Michael. You were you.

Somewhere between stealing bites of his chocolate cake and defending tiramisu as a perfectly respectable morning food, the invisible Plexiglas box marked Stranger slid right off its hinges and vanished.

And then after he drove you home, he stood outside your apartment door, beneath the jaundiced porch light and asked, “Will you let me kiss you now?”

A gentleman right until you said yes. 

Then both hands framed your face, broad palms swallowing your cheeks, and his mouth came down with startling hunger.

Michael did not kiss so much as take possession of every breath you tried to draw, lips parting yours, tongue sweeping in with an appetite that turned your knees watery and your fingers useless.

The take-home box slipped from your hand and landed upside down between your shoes.

Neither of you noticed.

The second thing you learn is that the restored car taking up half his garage is less an object than a private history he has kept alive by hand.

He has loved it patiently, replaced what failed without resenting the failure, returned to it year after year with a consistency few people have managed to draw from him — or so you've been told, courtesy of Candy, who knows a girl whose brother is dating someone with a cousin who works in the same hospital.

You try not to think about that part too much. About the consistency. About how few people have managed to keep him, or be kept by him, and what that might eventually mean for you.

Because for all the ordinary sweetness of this undefined thing, dinners and garage tours and his hand finding the small of your back without thinking, there is still a clock somewhere.

The car proves Michael is good at returning to the things he choose. You have no proof you are one of them.

So you enjoy each moment as it comes and refuse to count how many might be left, which is another way of admitting you already believe they are finite.

For now, though, there is this one: Michael bent beneath the raised hood of said car, bare forearms streaked with grease.

His glasses keep slipping down the bridge of his nose while he works, and every few minutes he nudges them back into place with the cleanest part of his wrist, unaware that this only leaves another dark smudge near his temple.

“This is still the original carburetor,” Michael explains, tapping some hidden component with the wrench. “I rebuilt it twice before I got the idle where I wanted it. Replacing it would’ve been easier, but then you lose part of what makes the car —”

“Mm-hm.”

“— worth preserving.”

“Absolutely.” 

Your gaze crawls from knuckle to wrist to the ropey lines of his arms, lingering on a bead of sweat the slips toward the cuff he he's shoved past his elbow. Above that: a slash of collarbone and the thin vee of skin beneath his open button.

He eases to his full height, one hand braced against the frame. “What am I pointing at?”

The question yanks your attention toward the car so quickly your neck nearly protests.

“The… engine?”

Michael’s brow arches. Wrong answer, apparently. You follow the line of the wrench and find not one tidy solution but a chaotic constellation of bolts and hoses, none generous enough to wear a nametag.

“That specific part of the engine,” you amend.

“Technically correct.”

Heat rushes into your cheeks. “It’s just — there are so many pieces.”

“There are.”

“And you were talking very quickly.”

His mouth twitches, but he mercifully turns back beneath the hood. “I’ll slow down.”

“To be fair, I learn better by doing,” you tell him, nudging a stray nut with the toe of your sandal. “Maybe you should let me drive it.”

His head emerges from the engine bay again, eyeing from your painted toes up to your face. “You know how to drive a manual?”

“I know how to drive in the broad, point-A-to-point-B sense,” you offer.

“That was not my question.”

“You could teach me.” 

His gaze maps your face, skepticism eroding under a tide of fond exasperation. “You’d have to do listen very carefully and do exactly what I tell you.”

An unexpected knot draws your stomach in on itself.

“I could do that.”

He lets the silence stretch, eyes fixed to yours, until the faintest sliver of a grin breaks through.

“We’ll see.”

Twenty minutes later, you confirm, beyond reasonable doubt, that you cannot operate a stick shift.

The poor car bucked, stalled, lurched forward with all the dignity of a go-cart missing one wheel, and by the time you finally limped back into the driveway, Michael looked as though the lesson has carved twenty years off his remaining lifespan.

“It really wasn’t that bad.”

His hip now rests against the fender, knuckles drumming against it. A few new worry lines have set up camp across his forehead and you're fairly certain each of them bears your initials.

“You’re a terrible liar, you know.” You reach up, smoothing a grease-free patch on his sleeve. “But thank you for trying.”

“I said it wasn't that bad. I didn't say the car enjoyed itself.” His gaze drops to your hand on his sleeve, a slow warmth softening the lines fatigue carved earlier. “You listened. Mostly. We can work with mostly.”

You smooth the same spot on his sleeve again, mostly to keep touching him. “Would you call me a promising student?”

“Promising implies measurable improvement,” he says. Only when your mouth falls open in offense does his expression finally give with a crooked little smile. “You're very promising. In more ways than one.”

You drop your head, squinting at a phantom smear on the glossy hood because looking at him feels reckless.

“I — um — thank you.” The smile you manage is small, shaky, painfully earnest, before retreating to the safety of your shoes. It takes a full second for your tongue to unstick. “Guess I'll try to keep the... improvement curve steep.”

He reaches over, thumb hooking a wild curl and tucking it back, then lingers, knuckles grazing the angle beneath your jaw.

“You don't have to prove anything to me,” he murmurs, coaxing your gaze upward with the barest pressure. “You’re allowed to be learning. I happen to like teaching you.”

Up close, you notice the daylight trapped in his irises. Minute gold dust swirling through dark syrup, copper shavings glinting every time he blinks. The color is so glossy, so mirror-deep, you catch your own startled face rippling back at you.

“Even if I put your beloved car through the garage wall?”

Michael leans closer, his hand sliding from beneath your chin to rest lightly at the side of your neck. “If you put my car through the wall, I’ll be very upset.”

You swallow, and the motion bumps against the pad of his thumb; he follows the leap of your pulse like he’s tracking wildlife.

“You wouldn’t forgive me?” you tease, letting the words skim the edge of a pout. “I’d hate to disappoint you.”

“I'd forgive you,” he murmurs, mouth tipping farther into a smile. “But you'd have to prove you learned your lesson.”

You narrow your eyes at him, though the smile tugging at your mouth ruins the effect. “That’s interesting. I distinctly remember you saying I didn’t have to prove anything to you.”

“You don’t have to prove anything right now,” he corrects, leaning close enough that his breath warms your mouth. “But after putting my car through a wall? I’d keep you up all night making sure the lesson stuck.”

Excitement unwinds through you, fed by every almost Michael has left smoldering between you. His hand beneath your skirt but never under your panties. Your bra loosened beneath his fingers, only for him to kiss the exposed slope of your shoulder and fasten it again before leaving.

The night you climbed into his lap and ground against him until both of you were breathing like you had run somewhere, only for Michael to murmur that you should slow down while his own hips revealed his truth once, rutting beneath yours.

You have been circling this for weeks, close enough to feel the warmth of it without ever stepping fully inside. Now the circle seems to have opened.

You glance at him from beneath half-mast lashes. “All night?”

“Would that be so terrible?” he asks quietly. “Spending the night showing me you can follow directions?”

You nuzzle lightly against his palm.

“I can follow directions,” you say at once, the words nearly tripping over each other in their hurry to reach him.

“Let's see it.” His thumb traces your lower lip. “Turn around, press your palms to the hood, and wait there until I join you.”

A thrill fizzes through your limbs as you turn. Each step towards the hood feels electric. You place your palms flat against the glossy surface, worrying the inside of your cheek, adjusting yourself by small, nervous degrees until you think you resemble what he asked for.

Boots scuff behind you.

Michael's palm settles at your lower back while the toe of his shoe nudges one ankle, widening your stance by inches.

His hand slides to the nape of your neck and presses until your breasts mold to the hood and your breath fogs the paint.

“Good,” he murmurs near your ear. “Stay just like that.”

He fits his palms atop your smaller ones, trapping them to the metal, the heat of his skin bleeding straight through.

His legs slot behind yours, hips pressing in until the hard length of him is an unmissable line against your ass.

You're keenly aware of how little space he's left you — and how much you like it.

One hand releases yours, patience pooling in every inch of its downward glide down your waist. The soft hiss of fabric follows until his fingertips catch the skimpy hem of the skirt you wore on purpose, pinching it like he's checking its integrity.

Lately you've treated riskier hemlines as negotiating tools. Flash a little more leg, tip the scale from almost to yes. From the way his grip tightens, the strategy seems to be paying handsome dividends.

“Tell me if this is too fast,” he says, but the desperation lacing the words makes it very clear he hopes the answer is no.

“It's not.” You arch the smallest amount into his hand, offering proof that you have no desire to slow him.

“Let me hear it — tell me I can finally do everything I’ve wanted since you looked up at me in that prim little blouse with those pretty doe eyes.”

“Whatever you want, Michael,” you manage, voice catching on a soft gasp. “I’m yours — just tell me how to please you.”

A dark chuckle rumbles out of him.

“You have no idea how much you’re pleasing me.” His lips skim the fine hairs at your nape. “So relax and let me take care of you, honey. That’s all I want.”

His free hand skims under your skirt, knuckles dragging upward until he finds the thin cotton he intends to ruin.

He cups you through the barrier, pressure light, exploratory.

“All this for me, baby?” There's genuine surprise hidden beneath a teasing tone, fingers prodding at the damp material, zeroing in until they find your clit.

You brace on the slick metal, nails scraping for purchase that isn't there as a sharp breath escapes you.

You grind back into his hand and he rewards you by gathering a fistful of your hair, guiding your head back so you're forced to listen.

“I asked you a question,” he rasps, fingers still stroking where you need them. “Answer me, honey — who’s all this for?”

“You,” you gasp, pushing harder into his touch.

“Thought so.”

His fingers keep circling, not faster or harder, refusing the impatient escalation every man before him seemed to mistake for skill. There had only been two, technically three if you counter the college boyfriend whose idea of foreplay lasted approximately the length of a commercial break, but enough to teach you that pleasure usually required instruction, negotiation, the subtle repositioning of a wrist followed by exaggerated encouragement so nobody's ego bruised.

Michael needs none of it.

He reads the staccato hitch in your breath like sheet music, easing pressure when your thighs tense, adding the tiniest grind of his palm each time your exhale fractures.

“Can you come like this, baby? Just from having your clit rubbed?” His fingers press a fraction more firmly, listening when your breath splinters. “Is this how you touch yourself at home?”

Your thighs tense around his hand, not from the pressure this time but from the sudden, ridiculous urge to hide. He has you bent over his car with your skirt around your hips, yet apparently being asked about your masturbation habits is where modesty finally draws the line.

“Yes,” you mumble, cheek burning against the paint.

“Nothing to be shy about.” His lips brush the back of your shoulder, almost sweet enough to distract from his hand. “Perfectly normal. Besides, I’m very interested in learning exactly how you make yourself come.”

“Usually I — I have to concentrate harder than this.”

Usually there is work required. A whole tedious committee meeting between brain and body, several false starts, the refusal to think about laundry or tomorrow or whether you locked the door.

With Michael's hands on you and his weight suffocating against your back, the entire process collapses into something almost simple. It feels good, then better, then suddenly far too good, the pressure rising so quickly you cannot locate the moment it became inevitable.

“Yeah?” he murmurs against your ear, the smile audible in his voice. “Poor thing. All that cleverness, and a few touches have you going empty on me.”

Whatever remained of your mind gutters out. Pleasure crowds every available space, swelling in your organs, beneath your stomach, down the backs of your shaking thighs.

“S’too good,” you breathe, barely forming the consonants. “Michael, I can’t… ’m gonna come.”

Your voice sounds distant even to you, drowned beneath the blood rushing in your ears.

“Already?” Michael murmurs, pleased surprise warming the word. “Didn’t stand a chance, did you?” His palm presses more firmly against you. “Go ahead. Show me how pretty you are when you come.”

Your climax detonates like a string of firecrackers, first a bright spark at the center of you, then rapid-fire pops that ricochet up your spine and down your thighs.

Your vision goes pointillist, tiny pinpricks of white dancing at the edge of sight, while your hips jerk once, twice, a third time under his palm. Every new burst feels sharper than the last, until the sparks fade to a soft glow that leaves you boneless against the hood.

With careful hands, Michael tucks your hair away, mouth brushing the place where neck becomes shoulder. Then he urges your chin toward him, and captures your lips in a slow kiss you answer weakly, all pliant mouth and lingering shivers.

The kiss keeps your soft and unsuspecting while his fingers hook beneath the edge of your panties and draws them aside.

Cool air reaches you for half a second before the pad of his finger finds your bare clit, slick and swollen from the orgasm he has barely finished coaxing out of you.

You jerk instantly, a startled cry catching between your joined mouths as your knees threaten to fold. His free arm bands around your waist, hauling you tighter against his chest when you squirm at the overstimulation.

“I know, honey. I know it’s sensitive,” Michael murmurs, tightening his arm when another helpless squirm runs through you. “You can come for me again, can’t you, sweetheart? Hmm?”

“You’ll help me?” you ask, voice small and fractured, as though he is not already doing exactly that.

“Course I will.” His fingers dip through your folds. “Gonna do all the work. You just be my pretty girl, yeah?”

He gathers the wetness there, coating one finger before easing it into you. Your walls flutter around the intrusion. Michael pauses at the first tense pull of your body, lips brushing your shoulder while he waits for you to soften around him, then advances another careful inch.

He crooks the finger slightly as he begins to work it in and out, testing the angle until your knees weaken and a garbled moan tumbles from your mouth.

You try his name once and lose it halfway through.

After a minute, Michael stills with his finger buried deep.

“Think you can take one more?”

You manage something between a nod and a whimper. Apparently it is answer enough. A second finger joins the first, spreading you slowly while his arm tightens around your waist to hold you steady through the stretch.

“That’s it,” he praises, easing in until both knuckles press flush. “Good girl. Open up for me.”

“More,” you plead, words pouring out without supervision. “I can take more than your fingers. I want you, Michael, please.”

“Not bent over my car.” He pumps both fingers into you slowly, as though proving denial does not mean deprivation. “When I finally fuck you, I intend to take my time. Properly.”

“Please,” you babble, clenching desperately around him. “I’ll be good. I’ll do whatever you tell me.”

A rough sound leaves him. His fingers plunge into you harder, once, twice, forcing your mouth open around a broken moan.

“You think I don’t want to?” he rasps. “I’m trying to do this right. So don’t tempt me into giving you less than I intend to.”

You try to tell him you do not want less, that having him here would feel like everything, but his fingers drive back inside before you can shape the sentence.

They curl, withdraw, return harder, each stroke pulling pleasure tighter beneath your stomach until your hips begin meeting his hand of their own accord.

The argument dissolves somewhere between one breath and the next. You still want him, God, you want him enough to feel hollow without him, but the approaching orgasm seizes control of every available muscle and leaves your tongue useful only for begging him not to stop.

“There you go — knew you’d listen.” His voice is a rough purr against your ear. “You’re close, aren’t you? Give it to me, baby, right on my hand.”

You obey.

And this time it isn't an explosion, but a long, rolling pull that drags pleasure through every muscle. And gone before you can process the full weight of it, leaving your lungs empty and your legs shaking so hard his arm has to catch all of you.

He keeps you upright while he withdraws, then spins you gently to face him. A quick kiss lands on your forehead before he parts his lips and sucks the taste of you from his knuckles.

The sound he makes is all satisfaction. “Sweetest thing I’ve had in this garage.”

Your cheeks burn, words tangling on your tongue. Michael must sense it, moving to smooth your skirt as one plam stays at your lower back.

“Easy, honey,” he murmurs, thumb brushing your cheek. “How’re you feeling?”

“Good,” you breathe, then reconsider because the word is painfully inadequate. “Better than good. I just can’t really think yet.” You press your burning face into his chest, hiding there with a small, mortified laugh. “Don’t make me talk until my brain comes back.”

“That could take a while,” he says, laughter rumbling beneath your cheek. Before you can protest, his arms tighten around you. “Lucky for you, I’ve cleared my evening.”

Seven weeks is usually when Robby begins looking for an exit.

It isn't a conscious thing. He does not circle the date on a calendar or wake on the forty-ninth morning possessed by some biological imperative to sabotage his own happiness.

It happens by accumulation. Small expectations begin collecting around his ankles, almost weightless individually, until he notices he is standing in something deep enough to drown in.

And Robby — who has spent most of his adult life being needed by more people than he can satisfy — feels the familiar urge to escape before he disappoints one more.

Seven weeks just happens to be enough. Enough to enjoy a woman. Enough to leave before enjoyment turns into dependence, or dependence turns into something he cannot provide without cutting into himself for spare parts.

Tonight, however, Robby is parked behind the club at nearly six in the morning, waiting for you in the restored car while dawn begins thinning the darkness around him.

His phone sits facedown on the passenger seat, though he does not need to look at it to remember what is waiting inside: dinner reservations for next Friday, a reminder to teach you how to change a tire the week after that.

Plans stacked neatly beyond the seven-week mark, each one entered by his own hand, each one quietly assuming there will still be a you and him when the date arrives.

If he has anything to do with it, there will be.

The contradiction does not escape him. It has, in fact, been sitting in the passenger seat all night.

The engine idles beneath his hands, every vibration familiar.

He has already checked the clock four times, although your shift ended seven minutes ago and he knows closing rarely means leaving. There are tips to count, makeup to remove, men to steer toward the exit after alcohol has convinced them money can interrupt the rotation of the Earth.

The metal door finally swings open and you emerge in pieces he once would have considered incompatible.

Above the collarbone you are still dusk-lit velvet with eyes rimmed noir, lashes casting soft shadows against your cheeks, a comet's tail of glitter charting the dip of your throat. But flats have replaced your heels, a swollen paperback bulges from your tote, and the cardigan you've buttoned askew is pale pink.

Mystery solved.

You spot the car and stop so abruptly the red-haired woman behind you mutters a curse, forced to sidestep you.

Through the windshield Robby watches your mouth shape a tiny, startled no, as if the word could turn the headlights off by itself.

By the time he climbs out, you are approaching with the wary steps of someone encountering an unattended explosive.

“You brought that here?” you ask, eyeing the vehicle.

Robby glances back at it, though he hardly needs to.

It's got new imperfections now. The little hooks your nails carved into the paint the first night in his garage, when he had you trembling against the hood. The smudged scrape across the rear panel from the night he fucked you over it. The faint scratches along the passenger side, left by your shoes while he knelt on the concrete and ate you out until your thighs shook around his ears.

None of it is damage he has been able to treat as damage.

When he waxed the car last Sunday, he polished around the marks from your nails with ridiculous care, preserving them as neatly as initials cut into wet cement.

“I said I'd pick you up,” he says, lifting one shoulder.

“But in this car?”

You look past him again at it, visibly appalled on his behalf. You know how he feels about the car, which means you also know downtown is a minefield of shopping carts, careless doors, drunk pedestrians, and parallel parkers who believe bumpers are instructional.

You know that he loves the car. He's told you so, himself.

He might love you more.

Unfortunately, that sentence is considerably harder to say than it is to diagnose, so he'll keep it tucked away for a little while longer.

Instead he fishes the keys from his pocket and holds them toward you.

Your eyes fall to them, then rise slowly to his face. “What are those for?”

“The car.”

“I know what keys do, Michael.”

He is still not entirely used to that.

Michael.

Nearly everyone has called him Robby for so long that his first name feels less like an identity than a fact printed on hospital credentials. He had not used it socially since around the time his mother took her own life, a softer version of him then sealed somewhere on the wrong side of that loss.

Robby is what remained. Robby became a doctor, became useful, became someone too busy tending other people’s emergencies to examine his own.

But that night he offered Michael to you anyway.

Now he likes hearing it in your voice, likes the strange sensation of watching you resurrect a name without resurrecting the grief attached to it.

“Good. We’re already ahead of where we were with the carburetor.”

Your eyes narrow, but your hand remains firmly at your side, apparently unwilling to implicate itself in whatever terrible idea he has conceived.

Robby reaches for it anyway, turns your palm upward, and deposits the keys there before you can refuse them on principle.

“You need practice,” he explains.

Your fingers curl around the metal with great reluctance. “Do you not remember what happened last time?”

“I remember there wasn’t enough road,” he replies. “And now there’s more road.”

You look past him toward the empty street, then back again. “You keep saying things you think are reassuring, and they are not.”

It makes him smile, though he conceals most of it while opening the driver’s door for you.

You settle behind the wheel and begin arranging everything with a process he thinks might be better suited to launching an aircraft. Seat forward. Mirror down. Mirror up again. Hair tucked behind one ear, then untucked when you decide the ponytail is pulling too tightly. Your bag lands between you, paperback still protruding from the top as though prepared to flee independently if the lesson turns ugly.

Robby waits through the entire ceremony, then calmly reminds you where the clutch is after you press the brake instead.

Your first attempt kills the engine anyway.

“Vehicular manslaughter,” you whisper.

He can feel the laugh pressing against the back of his teeth, but keeps his voice level. “Start it again.”

The second attempt gets you three feet. The third carries you out of the parking space and onto the service road, the engine smoothing beneath your hands. Your shoulders slowly descend from around your ears, one hand loosening its death grip on the wheel.

Robby has always been better at beginnings and endings. For once, he does not think about either.

“Where am I going?” you ask.

Robby looks toward the empty road ahead. “Doesn’t matter. Just drive.”

So you do.

MARIA NOTE fourteen thousand words. FOURTEEN. all because i thought it would be hot for robby to unexpectedly see shy reader’s tits at a strip club. hubris is real and she has punished me severely. unfortunately, i regret nothing. thank you for reading this absolute beast <3

YOU CAN FIND MY MICHAEL ROBINAVITCH MASTERLIST HERE ⭑.ᐟ

[heavenorely]

THIS WHOLE FIC?? PERFECTIONNN usually i don't read robby (i'm more of a jack girl hehe) but this was so beautifully written and so detailed i think this actually got me into reading more robby fics (esp from you maria ❤️❤️)

[heavenorely]

when i made this account i didn't think it'd be a fanfiction account, so this is a side blog and side blogs can't leave asks and stuff which is so sad 😭😭

plus i've already made so much stuff here i don't really want to move to the main blog without losing everything here! trust guys i'd be doing so much more if i wasn't stupid enough to make this a side blog 💔💔💔

[heavenorely]

obsessed w the theme 💖🌸🌷

thanks my love!!!!!!! 😘😘

[heavenorely]

your new theme is so teaaaa

thank you so much my love!!!!!

[heavenorely]

#livelaughlovepink

#livelaughlovepink 🙏🙏🙏

[heavenorely]

HOLY SHIT THE PINK THEME 💕🎀🌸💗

YESS SO GLAD YOU LIKEY LIKEY MY LOVE!!!!!

[daughterbubs]

꒰ ⟡ 𝟣𝟪+ blurb — ❤︎ 𝐉𝐀𝐂𝐊 𝐀𝐁𝐁𝐎𝐓 & 𝐇𝐈𝐒 𝐎𝐕𝐄𝐑𝐆𝐑𝐎𝐖𝐍 𝐒𝐂𝐑𝐔𝐅𝐅 . . It’s longer, a gleaming silver, gilding over his chin and jaw, while you’re forced to feel it. That thickened, rough, unshaven texture alongside every thick, wet lap he makes at your little puffed-up pussy. His tongue, licking and slipping through sticky folds, soft and sweet in contrast to the sharp texture of his facial hair, which is unintentionally marking up your thighs. It has just grown so much, prickly and nearly white, rubbing against your tender, pulsing hole while his tongue licks up in languid glides. His chin firms itself on your perineum to feel your pulsing little slit rubbing against the coarseness; to feel his baby grinding up on his own face. Jack just wants you shuddering, helpless and humping his silvered, rough-fuzzed jaw. His lips part to slick you up with saliva, allowing a thick, wet string to connect his face to your needy, swelling pussy. The wetness pools up in the seam of your clit, and he spreads his tongue onto you, flat and demanding, stiffening it for a moment on your needy bud, before licking and kissing into where your clit hood is exposed — pulled back, alit, and inflamed, all from his face between your thighs.

 "Gonna lick you 'til you're raw." Jack admits hoarsely into your little cunt. "Just need to have my mouth on you, honey."

He wraps himself on the thickened flesh of your bulbed-up clit, suckling wildly and coating his chin in you during his latch. His thicker scruff frictions right against the skin of your chubby and delicate pussy lips, before his tongue swirls hard, just once more, and retracts away from where you're spread. His fat, aged and freckled hands keep your soft thighs speared wide open, just to observe your desperate, aching hole. You’re beard-burned and sensitive, a soppy little cunt rubbed raw from his face; chafed up, creamy, and fluttering wetly around nothing. Jack's jaw is steeped in you, wet on the growth that shrouds the curve of his face and neck. He takes a long, rough breath, an open-mouthed aspiration to taste your sweetness through the air, swallowing the scent as his head lilts in working condescension. Silver curls, dampened with his own sweat, swath over his lined forehead with the tilt. 

“Aww, pumpkin… does she like it? Little pussy likes my scruff? I think she does…" Jack coos, his voice enough to make your legs quiver under his pinion. He inhales, puckers his lips, and effuses a jet of his hot breath, runneled right to your needy hole. His lips upturn, thumbs pinching deeper into your thighs.

"Look at her. She’s already clamping up – just ‘cause Daddy had his mouth on you…” 

A finger glides through the mess, thick and seeping down irritated, velveted flesh, clinging to the sheets below your puckered hole. Jack can't halt his hand, which lifts to press his thumb pad to the cleft of your ass, like he's surveilling the vicious throb of you through your puddle of arousal. 

“Is it all stingy, baby? Should Daddy shave so he doesn't hurt your little pussy anymore?” 

Your head shakes violently, writhing on the sheets, whimpering as you gush out more between your forcedly spread thighs.

“No? You like it? I can tell. My baby’s already too close…” Jack sighs with a sated grin, and his digits ascend back up to your throbby little hole.

“Should we let her, hm? Let your little cunt just cum – all messy on Daddy’s beard?” It’s rhetorical, plainly mean, and Jack completely rescinds a response from you when his jaw presses right up against where you're pulsing. He fucks his tongue inside, driving it in deep, without warning or clemency. 

Jack adheres his face and stubbly bristles to your soft, sloppy folds, prompting you to leak, fresh and hot, all over him. The strong muscle licks inside at inner walls, his fingers rubbing at your quivering clit to feel you grip onto him in tighter, cinching pulses. He pulls away just enough to watch your tiny hole cling to his tongue, his scratchy fuzz slick and sticking to your slit, and then he's lapping at you, from entrance to bud once more. He curves his lips onto your swelled clit, suckling and licking into the fleshy rift. Your whines crack open to sharp-pitched moans when your orgasm torments every nerve ending, muscle, and cell. Your belly swoops, warming in your release, riveting the heat through to your trembling thighs. Your eyes shimmer with tears through the cascades of pleasure and the prickle of his chin, which Jack rubs over your poor pussy well into the aftershocks. And he still doesn’t stop – his silver hair is lambent and streaked with your cum, and he strokes his mouth down you to elicit a shiver, patting your hip in coax. “That’s it – My good little girl. Daddy’s just gonna get you real clean now.”

◞ daughterbubs ⭐︎ 2026 ༝

[heavenorely]

THIS BLURB OMG???? IT'S SO DESCRIPTIVE AND AMAZING AND BEAUTIFUL LITERALLY GAVE ME FULL BODY SHIVERS

[heavenlybarnesss]

MDNI, 18+

✦ . 　⁺ 　 . ✦ . 　⁺ 　 . ✦ ✦ . 　⁺ 　 . ✦ . 　⁺ 　 . ✦

Singing karaoke with Trinity and Mel, except it’s “Don’t Cha?” by The Pussycat Dolls and you’ve all somehow convinced a bunch of others from the E.R. to come have a drink, including Jack and Robby (I can’t quite see Robby at a karaoke bar, but I also can’t imagine Jack going somewhere like that without making Robby tag along, so here we are. 😂) And when it’s your turn to sing, you do a kind of burlesque type thing where you have fun with it and teasingly strip your jacket off and spin it around in the air. You toss it jokingly to Dennis offstage and wink. Jack and Robby are at the bar, and Jack is just drinking you the fuck innn. Beer? Whiskey? Fuck the alcohol. Who needs it when he has you, in front of him, swaying your hips and shaking your ass like there isn’t an entire bar of people with eyes on you? He just wants that sweet ass in those jeans on a platter in front of him, and he’ll die a happy man. There is, however; too many eyes for Jack’s liking.

Don’t get him wrong, he wants to watch you. He could watch you do this alllll night long. You’re so carefree and effortlessly sexy in the way you move, and sing, and laugh. It’s just that he wants to be the only one watching you. He wants you to dance like this for him naked, and at his place. Did it make him feel like a little bit of a gross, old man? Sure. But if he’s got you - in nothing but his old college T-shirt to wake up to every god given morning - people can think whatever bullshit they want. Fuck ‘em. Yeah, maybe he can be a little gross. He’s daydreamed a time or two about you meanly shoving your panties in his mouth as you bounce up and down on his cock. And yeah, he’s older than you. But that just means he knows how to fuck you better than any guy your age ever could.

You girls aren’t at all quiet when drinking, and Jack overheard you earlier telling the group how nobody’s ever given you an orgasm. And it is a fucking tragedy if Jack ever heard one. He’s embarrassed for the men in your age bracket that don’t know how to please and worship a woman like you. You’re a ray of fucking sunshine that deserves the world, and Jack just wants to show you this - by fucking you with his tongue while you clamp your thighs around his head, crying for him to stop because it’s so deliciously too much. It’s okay, he’ll build your tolerance. You’re not even used to one orgasm from a man let alone two or three a night - every night - rain or shine, period or no period. Don’t worry baby, old Jack’s gonna get you there.

[heavenorely]

FUCK YES I CAN PICTURE THIS VIVIDLY IN MY HEAD OMG

[ceriseangels]

⋆ ˚｡⋆౨ৎ˚ JACK ABBOT who... cannot wrap his brain around the fact that you're insecure.

CONTAINS: 18+ MDNI, 3.1k words, unprotected p in v sex, insecure!reader, curvy/plus size!reader, discussions of insecurity and food intake, ass man!jack abbot supremacy, spanking, brief mentions of jack's prosthetic/crutches, not proofread! divider from the beautiful @robinavitchslut⋆ ˚｡⋆౨ৎ˚

It starts after a rich, full dinner. You're stumbling across his threshold together, slightly tipsy off of what seemed like bottomless wine. Jack's lips are on yours in an instant, a large, rugged hand cupping your cheek, pulling your face to meet his.

You melt into him, like you always do, though flashes of the night keep echoing through your brain. The bloat in your tummy, the waitress who's eyes lingered on Jack for too long.

Suddenly, your dress feels too tight, Jack's roaming hands like little taunts over your plush skin. Not thin enough, not pretty enough, not good enough.

You're not an idiot, you see the way women look at Jack, the confused looks that always follow when you tell them that no, you are not his daughter. The logical part of your mind assumes the confusion is born of your age gap.

The rest of yourself is not so kind.

Wiggling out of his grasp, your heart clutches at his little pout. You pinch his cheek, stomach lurching at his hungry eyes.

"I just have to use the bathroom, I'll be right back, okay?" You whisper, desperate to hide any emotion in your voice.

"Okay," he mumbles as you walk past. "Don't take too long, I'll miss ya."

You roll your eyes, affection for the sweet man momentarily drowning out your painful insecurities. Once you're behind the bathroom door, though, the dam breaks.

All your worst thoughts flood through, sweat pricking at your brow. The shape-wear you shoved yourself into just hours ago is too tight, suffocating as you peel your dress above your head, wiggling the pinched fabric down your hips.

Once your skin is free of its confines, you can breathe a little easier. It's stolen from your lungs once again, though, when you slip your dress back over your head.

The satin clings to your tummy in a way that makes you cringe, a low wince slipping through your teeth. You pinch at the loose skin, sucking in and turning every which way in a sad attempt to flatten your stomach.

Why did you have that second helping of pasta? Why did you agree to dessert? Why would Jack ever be attracted to someone like you?

Tears slip past your ducts, and you hold your head parallel to the ground in an attempt to preserve your makeup. You catch your arms in your periphery, the extra jiggle in them as your shoulders shake, a gasp escaping your throat.

Do detox teas work in 30 minutes?

You don't have time to Google your absurd question, as a knock comes from outside.

"You okay, baby? Heard some heavy breathing in there, you're not sick are you?" Jack's sweet voice rings out, and your heart aches.

Sick in the head, maybe.

"No, I'm good," your voice comes out shaky, and utterly unconvincing.

Jack picks up on it, because of course he does, with a sassy huff.

"You sure? Can I be of service in any way, doll?" He pushes, and for some reason, that name snaps something deep within you.

"Don't call me that," you hiss, and he's silent for a moment.

Guilt and regret flood you in equal parts, burning deep in your belly like poison.

"I'm sorry," he responds, and you just cry a little harder. "I'm going to come in though, okay? It's very obvious you're crying, and I can't have that. This is your warning, alright?"

He waits a second before turning the knob, sliding across the threshold, brows furrowing when he sees you in such a state.

"Honey, what is it? What's wrong? Anything hurt?" He jumps into doctor mode, if only for a moment, while he gets underneath you to scan your face.

"Hm, pretty as ever," he muses, pinching your wet cheek.

You sniffle, arms coming up to cover your stomach. He knows this move, has picked up on all your little signs in the short time you've been dating, a small coo escaping his lips at the action.

"Oh, honey, you're overthinking that meal, aren't ya?" He asks, and it's so matter of fact that it makes you cry even harder.

"Oh, shh, shh, shh," he whispers, stroking your hair and peppering kisses to your scalp. "You're okay, I got you, you're so beautiful."

"Stop lying to me, Jack," you babble, throat scratchy and voice hurt. "I saw the way our waitress was looking at you, y'know?"

He takes a step back at this, clearly surprised. You keep going.

"In fact, I see the way all girls look at you when we go out, the way they look at me," you mumble, avoiding eye contact.

"Yeah?" He prods. "And how's that?"

"Like they can't believe you'd be with someone like me," you answer, punctuating with a pitiful laugh. "Hell, I can't believe it most days."

"What are you saying to me right now, baby?" He asks, and you roll your eyes. "Don't give me that. What are you trying to tell me?" He demands, and it's embarrassing how easily you fold.

"I'm saying that you could be with anyone in the entire world!" You throw your hands up, gesturing to your curvy frame. "But you chose me? Why? I just don't understand what you see in me, is all."

You trail off at that last bit, crossing your arms over your body once more. He's not having any of it, hands immediately coming down to remove them.

"What?" Is all he manages, a sad whisper reluctant to leave his lips. "You don't understand what I see?" He laughs, though nothing about his tone is humorous. "Baby, you're half my age!" He exclaims, and you roll your eyes.

"No, I'm serious, do you know how scared I was to ask you out on a date? Robby had to talk me off the roof, I'm serious," he insists, and you swat at his arm, remembering the day.

A new EMT at PTMC had flirted with you, and as Jack described him, he was younger, fitter, and more…age appropriate. He'd come rushing to you, had told you that the thought of you with someone like that scared the living shit out of him; you'd told him you weren't interesting in that. Only him.

So why is it so hard for you to understand that this is a two way street?

"Can I help you understand?" He asks, taking your hand. "Please?"

You nod, letting him take you from the bathroom to his bedroom, where he takes a seat at the edge of the bed. You stand in the doorway, watch for a minute as he undoes the mechanisms of his prosthetic, carefully sliding it off and resting it on the side of the bed.

He uses his palms to scoot himself back, not too far, but enough to open a spot for you between his knees. You take it, slotting in like a perfect puzzle piece. His hands start low, fiddling with the hem of your pink dress.

"'s this okay?" He murmurs, and you whisper a breathy, 'yes'.

He doesn't lift it up, rather continues to work his hands up the fabric, pinching your thighs and massaging your ass. Resting his head against your tummy, he peppers kisses there, and your face heats.

"Jack, you don't-" you try to move his head out of the way, discomfort an ever present third in this relationship. "You don't have to do this just because I was sad, I'm a big girl, I'll get over it."

He chuckles, it's sardonic, almost a little mean as he continues to kiss your plush skin.

"I know you are," he mumbles into you. "That's not what this is about. This is about me taking what I want. Y'gonna let me do that? Or are you going to keep doing this lil' shy girl thing?"

Your stomach burns at his words, jaw dropping in surprise.

"Jack-" you exclaim, a gasp wrestling from your chest as he pulls you further into him. "Oh!" You moan, throwing your head back and finally letting yourself lean into his touch.

"There she is, thaaaat's my girl," he coos, finally pulling your dress up over your head.

Your tits bounce as they're freed from the fabric, your tummy spilling over the waistband of your panties, just a little.

His eyes glaze over at the sight, and you cup his cheeks in your hands. He can't take his eyes off your body, and you have to fight the instinct to run away, to hide.

"So fucking beautiful," he grumbles, pushing his face deep into your tits.

You gasp as his hands follow suit, grabbing at your skin, kneading them, enclosing his own head between them. You can't help but giggle, trying to separate yourself from him.

"Jack! You're gonna suffocate!" You chuckle, but he just holds you closer.

"Perfect way to go, stop interrupting me," he quips, latching onto your nipple now.

A sweet 'oh!' leaves your lips, fingers coming up to scruff and tug on his hair. He groans at that, the vibrations around your peak sending shockwaves straight to the apex of your thighs.

"Prettiest fucking body I've ever seen, you don't even know," he breathes out, switching his attention to your other breast now.

Spending some time there, he moves his lips lower now, lifting you with ease so he can better access the swell of your tummy. His hands and lips are all over, kneading and massaging what you've always imagined to be your worst feature.

You tell him so, and he just shakes his head, a sardonic chuckle leaving his lips.

"'s fucking insane, baby. Thought you were my smart girl, hm?" He asks, looking up at you.

You nod, tears filling your eyes. He smiles at the sight, his thumb coming up to brush them away.

"Not a very smart thing to think, that you're anything other than a fucking goddess," he whispers. "Not smart at all."

He scoots back some more, holding his hand out for you to straddle him. He pulls you to him by your hips, his hands sliding lower until they reach your ass. You're thankful you at the very least had some foresight to put on a cute pair of panties.

They're not entirely a thong, but a pretty, seamless pair that slides between your cheeks anyways. He groans, bites down on your shoulder at the sight of them.

"God, you have all this back there and have the nerve to be insecure?" He asks, finding purchase on the real estate of your skin.

He grabs at it, kneads like dough, even leaving a few slaps there. You whine at that, and he groans, the way your skin jiggles rolling his eyes back.

"Jesus fucking Christ, want you over my lap. Now," he orders, and you scramble.

Your tummy and tits press up against his soft duvet, your hips settling on his lap. Heat blooms warm in your belly as he rubs a hand over your skin, a soft, "good girl," falling from his lips.

You whimper, arching your back into his touch. He chuckles, and it's almost mean as his hand cracks down on your skin.

"Jack!" You squeal, lurching forward. He just grips your waist, strong hands holding you in place.

"Ah, ah, ah," he tsks, giving you another slap in punishment. "Stay still, yeah?"

You nod, and he smacks you again.

"Yeah?" He repeats, firmer, stronger.

"Yeah," you blubber, wiggling into his harsh touch.

"Good girl, that's my sweet girl," he mutters, dropping another slap onto your cheek.

You squeeze your eyes shut, wetness dripping down your thighs. You can feel his hard length beneath you, and you don't feel so embarrassed, knowing he's turned on, too.

Wiggling your hips into his crotch, he chuckles, coos a bit before cracking his hand down once, twice, three more times. You whine, though you arch into his touch all the same.

"Okay, okay, we can be done," he secedes, and you huff out a breath. "C'mon, up, thatsagirl," he purrs, settling you upright on his lap once more.

He massages your raw skin as you get comfy, leaving one last little smack before pulling his cock out.

You swallow thickly, helping him lift his shirt over his head, as well. He's so pretty, his buff, rugged frame threatening to swallow you whole. Darting your tongue out, you wet your lips before leaning back into him.

He kisses you with a fervor you have no chance of resisting, shoving his hand between you. His coarse fingers collect your wetness, bringing it up to your clit with slow circles.

It feels incredible, your tummy already tightening at the pressure. Your lips form a cute 'o', a small moan escaping them. He splays a hand across your lower back, pulling you further into him.

"I know, feels good, doesn't it, pretty girl?" He asks, and you whine. "D'ya think you can take me like this? Think you're wet enough? Or d'ya need my fingers to split you open, first?"

As delightful as his fingers sound, you think you'll die if you go another 10 seconds without his cock.

"I'm wet enough, I am- oh God, please!" You whine, thrashing your hips for more friction.

He cuts your writhing off with another sharp slap to your ass, and you throw your head back in a whine.

"Y'gonna stop being a brat so I can fuck you properly?" He asks, lining his tip up with your entrance.

You nod, tears pricking your eyes at the pure desperation.

"Good," he mumbles, poking his tip into you.

Your jaw goes slack, ever the stretch, no matter the lubricant.

"Yeah, yeahh," he draws out, pulling you down even further onto him. "That's it, 's a lot, isn't it? Big dick for my sweet girl, hm?" He asks, getting you seated fully.

You rest your hands on his shoulders, squeezing your eyes shut as you adjust to his size. When you try to move, though, he stops you, his big hands once again controlling your actions.

Your head whips up, eyes glassy, lips pouty. He cocks his head to the side, faux-pity lining his features. You rake your nails across his skin, reveling in the goosebumps that erupt on his skin.

"Jeeeesus," he groans out, taking a deep breath to maintain his composure. "What did I say about bein' a brat? Get comfortable, y'gonna hurt yourself if you try to move so quickly."

Your heart flutters at his casual dominance, the way he takes over your decision making. It makes your head go fuzzy, your hips wiggling in his grasp.

"God, you're fuckin' pushin' it, aren't ya?" He asks, swatting your backside once more.

"'m sorryyyy," you whine out, sounding nearly drunk of him already. "Just feels too good, need more, please."

He relents at that, relief flooding through you when he says, "Fine, but go slow, and be careful."

You listen, because of course you do, rocking your hips every so slightly.

"Good, gooood job, baby, s'nice, huh?" He coos, and your tummy turns at his words. "Nice and full of me, hm?"

You nod, desperate and shaky as you lift yourself up, just slightly, to drop back down.

"That's my girl, body looks so fucking beautiful riding me like this," he mutters, and you bury your face in his neck.

"Nuh-uh," he tsks, pulling your hair to get you to look at him.

You whine, and he pouts at you.

"Ooh, that hurt?" He asks, and you nod. "Mmm, sorry, angel," he replies, not sounding sorry in the slightest.

His hands grip your ass once more, helping you move up and down on him like an expert. You babble around him, utter nonsense flowing from your lips at the intense pleasure.

"Jack-Jackie-ooh! Oh, it's so good!" You whine, breath hitching as he hits your sweet spot.

"Yeah, that's the spot isn't it? Makes you feel so nice every time I hit it," he inhales sharply. "And I do hit it every time, don't I?" He calls for reassurance, and you wonder how much of it is for him and not you.

"Every time, Jackie, fuck me so perfect every time," you whine, pushing him back onto the bed to gain more purchase above him.

He flops back in surprise, eyes going wide as you press two delicate hands on his chest. You resume your bouncing, this time with much more fervor. Your skin prickles as you feel your orgasm build, the warmth in your tummy has been brewing for too long, you're starting to grow desperate.

"God, this fuckin' view," he groans, hands gripping your love handles. He squeezes the extra skin there, thumbs running over the chub. "So perfect, baby, gonna dream about this for years."

You giggle, picking up your speed, just a little.

"Y'know, you can always just ask me to fuck you, don't have to dream about it," you tease, earning you another spank.

"I guess I can, can't I?" He muses, arms coming up to rest behind his head.

"Mmhm," you coo, circling your hips to get friction onto your clit. "Comfy?"

"Incredibly," he replies, and your eyes shine with love. "Gonna cum for me?" He asks, and you're reminded of the task at hand.

Your teeth sink into your bottom lip, the burning sensation in your stomach hard to ignore, growing more impossible each second. You nod, brows furrowing in desperation.

His lips collect in a whistle as he drags his thumb between your legs. He rubs, and it's nearly immediate, how your orgasm takes over. Arching your back, lightning shooting through you as the first wave washes over.

Your orgasm comes in a million little explosions, fireworks popping through your veins, tightening your pussy around Jack. This spurs his own release, as he releases inside you, a raspy "good girl," falling from his lips.

Trails of fire litter through you as you both come down, the throbbing of his now softening cock like a reward for your hard work.

"That's it, thaaat's it, good job, honey," he mumbles as you pulse around him, limp body flopping into his chest.

His large hands creep up your back, rubbing soothing circles on your sweaty skin. Chests heaving together, he slowly lifts you up and off of him, where you both groan at the sudden emptiness.

"Baby, will you grab me my crutch so I can go to the restroom 'n clean you up?" He asks, a bit of red tinting his cheeks at the request.

"Honey, of course," you say, leaning over to the opposite side of the room. "But I can always go myself, you know?"

"Ah, ah, ah," he cuts you off with a wave of his finger. "Don't want hear that, you know that, hm? What did I say about being a brat?" He asks, hoisting himself up.

"Hmmm," you pretend to think, resuming your spot on the bed. "Not sure, you're going to have to remind me later."

He growls, gripping your chin between his thumb and forefinger, pressing one last sloppy kiss to your lips.

"Be careful what you wish for."

[heavenorely]

this made me feel so seen and loved omfg ❤️‍🩹

[heavenorely]

　 　 ⊹ . ໒꒰ྀི ˵ˊᯅˋ˵ ꒱ა　　expectations

synopsis: time after time again, spencer unknowingly meets your desired dating standards, evolving from quiet acts to something more intimate.

pairing: spencer reid x fem!reader

warnings: 2.8k words, 18+ MDNI, porn WITH plot, eventual sex, protected p in v, soft smut, nerdy sweet gentle spencer, office setting to plane setting to bar setting, reader wants that cookie bad, based on olivia rodrigo's "expectations"

masterlist!

Location: The BAU headquarters. Time: 9:46am.

You had first day jitters. How could you not? You had just graduated with a major in psychology, you had done well in interviews, everything was fine. But you had close to zero field experience, while everybody else in the building had. How could you compete with that?

You held your keycard in shaky hands, swiping it once to get through the front door. When it didn't work, you swiped again, and again, until finally it worked. Must've just been a glitch, right? Or was it something else, and you weren't supposed to be there, or maybe this was all a dream and it was still exam season—

You blinked the thoughts away, stepping through the door and glancing around. Desks cluttered everywhere, you saw employees typing away or talking into microphones. Nervous to disturb any ongoing mission or case, you tiptoed around carefully, trying not to interrupt anything. This meant you weren't looking up and collided with a firm chest, stumbling back and managing to catch yourself on a nearby potted plant.

"Sorry. Sorry, I should've looked." You mumbled out, then cleared your throat, forcing yourself to speak again and not sound like a weak mouse. "My apologies."

"No worries. You're, uh, new here, right? First day?"

You looked up. The man in front of you was tall, almost lanky, with his tie and dress shirt peeking out his sweater collar. His sleeves were rolled up to his elbows, veiny arms on display, and he was looking at you with a tiny smile.

"It's normal." He continued without waiting for you to reply. "Reported that at least 50% of new hires in any workplace get mishaps on the first day. That can be fixed with a tour guide. I can help you around."

You blinked. You weren't used to a man offering to help you before you even said anything; especially not with your dating history of douchebags and idiots.

"That…would be great. Thanks." You attempted a smile, holding out a hand for a shake. The man just ignored it with a little wave instead, saying; "I'm Spencer."

Disregarding the lack of contact, you followed behind him as he showed you around the office. He showed you meeting rooms, facilities like printers or bathrooms, and finally, your own desk. It was conviently just a few rows down from his own. The space was empty, and he gestured to it with one hand.

"I'm sure you'll decorate it as pretty as you look."

You hardly had time to process the compliment before he smiled awkwardly and backed away, turning around to head down a hallway.

Well. This would be more interesting than you thought.

Location: The BAU printing room. Time: 2:12pm.

While you waited for papers to print, you got time to think.

It was simple, really. All the things others called bare minimum were legendary in your world; you were lucky for a boyfriend to even touch you at night, let alone get flowers or plan dates or notice little details without words. You had settled for guys doing drugs at parties, guys with fake jobs, guys that weren't smart or funny. None had ended well, and while you (and your closest friends) could have deducted that at your first meeting, you had stuck to him with a I-can-fix-him attitude.

Yeah. You could admit you were a bit too hopeful sometimes.

You needed standards. Expectations that your boyfriend will do the same things your friend's boyfriends did. Expectations that he won't be an asshole that'll just leave you in the dirt as soon as a prettier girl slided up next to him at a bar.

What you had started doing, though, after five months as part of the BAU team, was to keep a list. Not of cases or to-dos, but of every time Spencer did something like that. No, you weren't dating, nor would you let yourself think you had a crush on him. But he was doing more sweet things as a coworker-friend than some six month long relationships had.

As of now, you counted four things. The time you didn't want to interrupt at a group meeting, so he let you whisper your idea in his ear and he spoke it out, crediting you afterwards. The time he left a bouquet of flowers on your desk with a note that read as a new decoration. The time he read his science book to you when you couldn't sleep on a plane ride home, enunciating softly so you could hear each word in that nerdy voice of his. The time he brought coffee for you, exactly the way you liked it despite you having never told him explicitly what you liked.

In between the more memorable services, he found ways to slip more kindness in every day interactions. He never spoke much after he did these acts for you, just giving you the same smile you'd grown so fond of or a little finger brush that made you shiver each time.

The printer dinged. It had finished. As you collected your papers, you heard a voice behind you that you instantly recognized;

"What'cha working on?" Spencer asked, going past you to get to the coffee machine in the corner. He placed his mug down, going for a refill as he kept his gaze on you. You loved that about him; when he talked to you, he talked to you directly, like he wanted to hear your response.

"Some papers for Hotch." You replied easily. You found it easy to talk to him — and the rest of the team — now that you had been at the BAU for a few months now. Other than long cases, you were used to the hustle every day; and you woke up every morning excited to see Spencer again. He really had an effect on you.

Spencer nodded, taking a sip of his now finished coffee. "What are they about?"

Through his questions and curious gaze, you ended up talking to him for at least fifteen minutes, the two of you slowly inching closer and closer like magnets until you were standing side by side in the printing room. Spencer had read over your papers with his usual quick speed, and while you started talking about work, you ended up talking more about your own lives.

He had told you about a few of his published research papers, and you were excited to get home and read them. You had told him about all your extracurriculars in college, and he seemed interested about what you were interested in. You talked about what you thought your lives would look like in ten years, and you had to bite back the urge to say something about how you hoped Spencer was still in yours.

There was a loud knock on the door, and you could tell it was Hotch wanting the papers. You laughed quietly, just for Spencer, collecting all the sheets and heading out the door.

With your back turned, you didn't see how he kept looking at you while you left.

Location: The BAU business jet. Time: 11:54pm.

Everybody on the plane was asleep except for two people; you, and Spencer.

You were sitting side by side, as you now usually did. Penelope had noticed it first, how close you two had gotten over the year you had been at the BAU, and then everybody else caught on. You weren't a hundred percent sure if that was because of how you acted or because of Penelope's love for gossip, but now it wasn't a secret how close Spencer and you were.

Spencer was reading a book, flipping pages so quickly you could barely read a full paragraph before it was onto the next.

"Slow down." You murmured softly, your elbow propped up on the armrest between your seats, leaning over to look down at the book. You laughed quietly to not wake up the rest of the team asleep in their spots. "It's almost scary how fast you read."

"You think I'm scary?" Spencer whispered back, and you turned your head to look at him. Underestimating the closeness, your lips nearly brushed his as you met his eyes. Neither of you moved.

"I think you're lovely." You replied whole-heartedly, which got you a small smile.

You turned your head back to his book when you knew he wouldn't actually reply. He never really did after you tried to compliment him, and it wasn't annoying; no, it was just another trait you loved about him.

Liked. You liked about him. Where did that come from?

The problem was that it was late, almost midnight, and you still had a few hours until you landed back in Quantico. After a long day and a bumpy start to the ride, you were feeling tired. You dropped your head on Spencer's shoulder, barely noticing his freezing as your eyes drifted close.

You felt one of his hands come up to the side of your head, gentle fingers brushing through your hair, and you let out a sleepy hum of contentment.

You weren't sure if it was Spencer's lips or a slight breeze that grazed your forehead, but you knew what you were wishing it was.

Location: Brenna's Bar, downtown Virginia. Time: 10:32pm.

You hadn't meant to get drunk. You really hadn't. And if you thought about it hard enough, you weren't that wasted; enough to stumble a little as you moved on the dancefloor, but not enough to not register what Penelope or Derek were saying.

Despite it being a work celebration after a long case, you had dressed up cute, pinning your hair up and slipping into a short dress and heels, and you felt pretty. While applying your makeup before leaving, maybe you had thought once or twice about Spencer's reaction to seeing you.

To your disappointment, he just gave you the same smile and sat down a few seats away. No jaw drop, no heart eyes, and you knew it was childish to feel that way, but you couldn't stop it. Not after spending so long with kind and gentle touches and acts and feelings, not after everything Spencer had done for you under a friendship label. Friends didn't do what you two did.

At least, that's what you said to get yourself to sleep at night.

You were dancing now, the pink and purple lights reflecting off the disco ball and your shimmery dress. You were up with JJ and Penelope while the guys sipped their drinks on their stools or talked about whatever guy things they talked about. You were too tipsy to care, too tipsy to notice Spencer's subtle glances to you, too tipsy to see Morgan punch his shoulder with a teasing grin.

You wanted to show off. It was a Friday night, and you hadn't been with anybody in ages, not since before you joined the BAU. You were desperate to get Spencer off your mind, which was why you were moving so energetically next to JJ and Penelope's bodies, not really paying attention to anything other than the pounding of your heart.

You felt a pair of hands slip over your hips and waist, and craning your head over your shoulder, you saw the guy that stood behind you, swaying along. His body was tall and chiseled, his lips curved into a smirk with light stubble growing on his chin. He was hot enough, and his hands were warm and confident, nothing like Spencer's soft and tentative touches. He whispered something in your ear. You didn't hear it.

If you squinted enough, you saw Spencer in his features.

And then you actually did see Spencer, as he had gotten up from his stool and stormed over, pulling the man's hands off your waist. You hardly had time to gasp before he reached for your wrist, pulling you away to the back exit.

When you felt the cold night air hit your face, you exploded.

"What the fuck, Spencer?! I spent months trying to be confident and flirty and get you to want me, but you never do. I never stop thinking about you, as much as I fucking hate it. As soon as I think I can get some sort of distraction and be with somebody who wants me, even for just a night, you storm in and act like I'm a cheating whore!"

"I never said that." Spencer cut in, running a hand through his hair.

"I never said you did!" You pushed his chest, too drunk to filter the words coming out of your mouth. "But you sure are making me feel like one! Did any little thing you ever did mean shit to you, or am I just losing my fucking mind?"

"What do you want me to say? That I'm in love with you? Because I am, and that doesn't change anything!"

It took a minute to process his last words. Because I am. He was in love with you. You weren't crazy, you weren't making things up to satisfy your own desires.

You deflated. "You…you are?"

Spencer let out a long sigh, turning his head away, down the allyway to the street. "…yes. And seeing you with some random person just…I don't know."

Wow. Spencer never didn't know things. He was the smart one, the nerdy one, the one who never shut up about science or math or miscellaneous facts. You had never heard the words "I don't know" come out of his mouth, ever.

"Can you do something about it?" You asked quietly over the cool wind breezing through the alley.

"I think I should now, huh?"

Location: Spencer's apartment. Time: 11:06pm.

It didn't take too much time to get to his place.

You had gotten a taxi, and the two of you barely sat restrained in the back, the only connection being your hands laced together. You kept glancing over at Spencer, your head starting to clear ever so slightly from the lack of new drinks, though you knew you were still a bit tipsy.

The second the door closed behind you, he was kissing you.

It was all consuming now; the way he pressed you to the door, the way you could feel his body heat through layers of clothes, the way his lips moved so desperately against yours like he had wanted to act on his feelings for months, just like you had. Your hands came up to thread through his hair while his own hands laid hesitantly on your waist, careful not to touch skin.

You broke your lips apart just enough to murmur out a; "Touch me, Spencer."

You could feel him swallow harshly, gently prying you off the door and taking you further into the living room. He laid you down on the couch softly, as if all the desperate pent-up desire he had back in the allyway fizzled out now that he actually had you under him. You could still see the want in his eyes, the hunger, but you could also see the sweet man you had fallen in love with so many months ago.

Love. That was a big word, yet no word felt so right.

"We can't. We shouldn't." Spencer whispered. You were laying down on the couch, and he hovered over you, legs bracketing your hips and propping himself on his elbows beside your head so he didn't crush you under him.

"Why not?" You asked, tilting your head up, chasing his lips.

He sat up fully, delicately pushing your shoulders down to the soft cushions. "You're drunk. Or tipsy. I don't know how many drinks you had, and that's what makes me nervous. You aren't in your right mind as of now."

You huffed. You really thought this was going somewhere. "What does that mean? Are you kicking me out?" "No, god no." Spencer reached one hand down to brush over your hair. "Just…wait until the morning. See if you still feel the same way, then we can do everything you want to."

Location: Spencer's apartment. Time: 8:48am.

Sunlight poured in from the windows.

The breeze of the air conditioning wafted through the house.

You were being pushed into the mattress.

Spencer never stopped being gentle with you; when you woke up, he had tucked your hair behind your ear. When you said you wanted to do the same thing you wanted last night, he had just nodded and kissed you deeply.

Now, the same hands that barely grazed yours months ago was holding your waist down to the mattress as he thrusted in and out of you with gentle purpose, eyes locked on your face to watch your expression for any twitch of discomfort or — god forbid — pain. He wanted to make you feel good, as good as you could feel with a hangover, and while you pulled at the nape of his neck and moaned out his name, all he did was smile and kiss you again.

"Love you." He whispered against your lips. You knew he did, you knew he fit all your expectations, from the day you met and he showed you around the headquarters to just last night at the bar.

It wasn't possible to say anything else. "I love you too."

a/n: got a bit carried away haha!!!! sorta lost the plot near the end but i really really love how it turned out though and i'm proud to call this my first spencer reid fic! hope you guys enjoyed ❤️❤️

[heavenorely]

THERE IT IS MY BEST SPENCER REID FIC