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Heartburn | Ch.8.

contents (nsfw): Dunk x fem!Reader, Modern AU friends to lovers rom-com with pregnancy. Humour, angst, banter, sexual and romantic tension, mentions of jealousy, horny thoughts, acts of service, pregnant sex (🗣️🗣️🗣️) consisting of: standing sex, cowgirl, coming inside, lots of feels, aftercare.

<- previous chapter MASTERLIST next chapter -> (12/06)

synopsis: Universe smashes them together. (Pregnancy status: 14-16 weeks, start of the II trimester).

word count: 14K 🤭

a/n: Banner by me, dividers by @strangergraphics, proofread by @hextoken!

It has not even occurred to Dunk that he could date. Last time he tried, he came out of it with his heart all mangled and a new distrust of women who said they liked simple men while meaning simple to keep. Even if he were ready now, to start he would have to meet certain conditions. He would have to talk to women in a way that suggested interest. To do that, he would have to possess some interest in the first place.

When he leaves your flat after an incredibly awkward supper tacked onto what Dunk had thought was an amazing day, he realises he has none. None spare, at least. Whatever ration of interest a man gets issued in life has gone your way entirely and left the cupboard bare. He walks home with the taste of tomato sauce and embarrassment still in his mouth, thinking of how well the baby shopping had gone and how normal it had felt to stand beside you in aisles full of cots and bottles and things neither of you knew how to judge yet. Then dinner, the papers, the maths teacher, and you telling him he could ask her out as if offering him a lift to someplace he did not want to go.

For months after that heart-mangling incident, the one that brought him together with Raymun, Dunk thought falling in love again was a risk he could not afford. Given his generous nature and his inability to keep boundaries where there ought to be some, it seemed only sensible. He had been told he was smothering and that his tendency for enmeshment was fearsome, so staying alone with all those feelings appeared to be the right order of things.

Then Raymun fell in love. With his love came you, and Dunk found himself cured of all his previous resolutions. He took to liking you quickly, and to interest quicker still, because you were the prettiest thing he had ever seen and his eyes, unfortunately, worked well enough with glasses on to make that everybody’s problem. After that came wanting, and there he stayed. For two years he wanted with the low-grade stamina of someone persisting in rain because the bus must come sooner or later. Only every time he gathered enough courage to make a fool of himself, some boyfriend of yours arrived first and had to be withstood. One had a car too loud for the size of his personality. One wore scarves indoors. One called you babe in a tone that made Dunk’s fingers tighten round pint glasses. He endured them all with the pained dignity of livestock at market, and when it finally came to him and you, it went so well he ought to have known the God was setting a trap.

Now, week or so later, he sits on the courtyard bench with a chocolate the maths teacher left in his locker in one hand and a card saying thank you. coffee later? in the other, wondering why on earth he would date someone else when you are out there carrying his child.

A few nights before, he asked Raymun what he thought of it, and Raymun, being Raymun, answered by asking three questions back over the rim of his pint. D’you want to? D’you like her? D’you think she likes you? To the first two Duncan said no, to the third one, I dunno.

Raymun shrugged, offensively simple about it. “Then don’t do it.”

That might have settled the matter if the two of them had not, ten minutes later, gone from one woman to the other as if comparing sacred field notes. Raymun had Rowan’s whole little catalogue ready: how she slept now with one hand under her cheek and the other under her belly though there was barely anything to hold; how she had become adorable over food in a way that made him half mad; how she had discovered the phrase you make it best and used it to turn Raymun into a full-time kitchen servant without ever lifting her voice.

Dunk listened, smiled where he should, laughed where the story asked for it, and felt a small dull sadness open in him at every detail he could not match. He knows your appointments, your nausea, what tea you tolerate, what colour baby clothes you consider criminal. He knows the shape of your feet in black tights and the sound of your voice when illness drags gravel through it. But there are whole ordinary hours of you he has no access to. How you sleep when nobody sees. What you eat at midnight. Whether you talk to the baby yet, or think that daft, or do it only inside your head. Raymun has a life growing round Rowan, messy and domestic and full of crumbs. Dunk has updates, errands, and a longing he keeps trying to dress as good behaviour. Things improve minutely when he's useful, so that is what he focuses on.

“Are you saving that chocolate for later, or can I have it?”

Dunk looks up. Egg stands in front of him with his bag hanging off one shoulder, eyes already fixed on the bar in Dunk’s hand.

“What?”

“The chocolate,” Egg says. “If you’re not eating it.”

“Why? D’you want it?”

Egg’s face opens into a grin so quick and shameless Dunk has to snort. “Well, if it’s upsetting you.”

“Cheeky little—” Dunk mutters, but gives it over anyway.

Egg takes it, drops onto the bench beside him with all the entitlement of a landlord, and starts working at the wrapper. For a moment there is only the crisp little noise of foil and paper. Then he says, with his mouth already full, “So. Are you engaged yet?”

Dunk shuts his eyes. “Jesus Christ.”

“That means no?”

“That means mind your own business.”

Egg chews, unbothered. “You were the one asking me.”

“I did not ask you any such thing.”

“You did. You asked if she ought to be your wife.”

“I asked a general question.”

Egg gives him a flat look.

Dunk huffs and leans back against the bench. “No. We’re not engaged.” Then, too quickly, he adds, “I didn’t ask.”

Egg studies him.

Dunk frowns. “What?”

“You’re lying.”

“I am not.”

“You are.” Egg’s eyes narrow. His bald head tilts a little, and Dunk gets the dreadful sense of a crystal ball being consulted at close range. “Oh,” Egg says. Blinks once, solemn with discovery. “She said no.”

For one full second Dunk thinks he has never been so humiliated in his life, and that includes falling face-first into a mud pit during a staff sports day while children chanted his name like Romans at an execution.

Then Egg adds, “Well, no wonder if you’re flirting with Miss Darry.”

Dunk turns his head very slowly. “I’m doin’ what?”

“Flirting,” Egg says, with a tired patience more fitting for a teacher than a pupil. “With Miss Darry.”

“I am not flirtin’ with Miss Darry.”

“She gave you chocolate.”

“That’s not flirtin’.”

“And a card.”

“That’s gratitude.”

“And she smiles at you with all her teeth.”

Dunk looks down at the card again, then away, as if the thing may sprout more accusations if watched too closely. “She asked me for coffee because I helped mark first-class maths.”

Egg bites off another square of chocolate. “Adults are so bad at knowing when things are happening to them.”

“Listen here, you wee menace—”

“And if you’re having a baby with one lady, you shouldn’t be collecting chocolates from another.”

“I didn’t collect it. It was in my locker.”

“Worse then. She has access.”

Dunk gives him a look. Egg only chews, pleased with himself for about three seconds before his face goes thoughtful again. “Are you going to ask her again?”

Dunk sighs and rubs both hands over his eyes under the glasses. “I don’t know, Egg. Should I, if she said no once? I don’t think so.”

Egg thinks on that. Then his gaze slides past Dunk’s shoulder, towards the black limo nosing up by the school gate. He stuffs the chocolate into his bag with sudden efficiency. “Well,” he says, hopping down from the bench, “you’ve the ring already. You could try asking Miss Darry.”

Dunk grabs him before he can bolt. Egg yelps and laughs as Dunk tucks him under one arm like he weighs no more than a sack of potatoes.

“You little horror,” Dunk says, carrying him across the yard while Egg wriggles without any true commitment to escape. “I ought to leave you in lost property.”

“You can’t. I’m claimed.”

“Aye, unfortunately.”

By the time they reach the car, Egg is still laughing, flushed in the face and indignant in the pleased way children get when an adult has agreed to be ridiculous for them. Dunk opens the back door with his free hand and the laugh goes out of him cleanly.

Maekar Targaryen sits in the back seat, straight-spined in a dark suit, looking at Dunk as if he has been summoned for assessment and found damp. Egg goes quiet too.

He stands there with the boy still half-pinned under his arm. Then he sets him down a little too carefully. Egg smooths his jumper with injured dignity and climbs in.

“Has my boy been misbehaving?” Maekar asks.

Dunk clears his throat. “N-no. No, sir. Jus’—just tomfoolery, is all. Like kids do.”

Maekar’s eyes move from Dunk to Egg, then back again. He gives one small nod, the kind that seems to dismiss and approve in the same motion. “Good day to you, sir,” he says.

“Good day,” Dunk says, and closes the door.

The limo pulls away a moment later, black and polished and awful against the ordinary schoolyard. Dunk watches it go. In the back window Egg lifts a hand without turning round. And Duncan could swear, right before the glass takes Maekar’s face beyond seeing, that the man is smiling.

It brightens him some. Enough that he texts Miss Darry, tells her he’s too busy, and thanks her for the chocolate. Enough that measuring the spare room at your place today, putting everything into the respectable little corner he has arranged with you, feels a fraction lighter.

When he gets there he knocks twice, then a third time, and as he is about to get sweaty all over from the sort of thoughts that bloom out of inertia, he hears your tired voice on the other side of the wood.

“Yes, I’m coming, for fuck’s sake.”

The door opens to reveal you beyond cross, but the minute you see him your face does something utterly strange. It falls back into what Duncan presumes it was before: your mouth frowns with such compulsion the chin dimples under it, your eyes remoisturise, and he knows to add the prefix simply from the already wet redness of them which makes you look like you are battling conjunctivitis.

He steps into the skin of a watchful caretaker as if coming home. “Hey,” he says, reaching for your shoulders. “What’s happenin’, hm?”

“I—” You make that breathless little catch people make when they have been crying for hours. One hand goes to your forehead. “Fuck,” you whine. “It’s today. I’m so sorry. I completely forgot.” Each word comes out damper than the one before, until forgot hitches on the last syllable and a new tear beads on your lashes.

“Oh, sweetheart,” Dunk sighs.

You are always smaller than him, but today exceptionally. He notices the hunch in your neck and the slant of your knees, and is revolted by both because he knows the stance of defeat from muscle memory. He walks you backwards into your own hallway, kicks the door shut behind him, and gathers you in.

“Lassie, c’mon—” he mutters, setting a palm over the back of your head. It is large enough to shield near all of it.

Then you are crying fully. Mumbling I’m sorry and hiccuping into his shirt, clutching at his waist so hard your fingers bite through the cotton. You wipe your face into him, and Dunk aches clean through with it. He rubs your back, rocks you a little, shushes you under his breath, and prays you cannot hear how fast his heart is beating.

When you calm some, he takes your face in both hands and wipes the streaks from under your eyes with his thumbs. “What happened, girl?”

You stare at him. “N-nothing.”

Dunk huffs through a smile.

Your face crumples again, less dramatically this time, more from the nuisance of being known than from fresh misery. “I just… feel like shit,” you say. “Work’s been awful, I’m tired, my back aches, I hate that pregnancy pillow, I don’t want to eat anything I’ve got at home, my hair is greasy, and—”

You stop, swallowing hard.

“And?” he prompts, gentle.

“And I really want to have a bath,” you say, with the malady of a person confessing fraud, “but I’m afraid I won’t be able to get out of it.”

Dunk looks at you for a second. Your eyes are swollen. Your mouth is all dragged down. There is a crease from the pillow still printed faintly on one cheek, and your hair has been tied up and let down and tied again until it has given up all loyalty to shape. “Right,” he says.

You sniff. “Right?”

“Aye.” His thumbs smooth the tear tracks once more, then he lets his hands drop to your shoulders. “We can sort that,” he says. “Why didn’t ye tell me?”

“What,” you croak, “that I’m disgusting?”

“That ye needed help.”

You stare at him, stumped. His eyes are large behind the lenses, soft and kind and warm despite the blue of them, like cold winter light over the ocean. Because you being useful all the time makes everything worse, you think. “I dunno,” you tell him.

Dunk receives that with the grave patience he has for children coming down from a crying fit. “What’s first,” he asks, “food or bath?”

“Bath,” you say, then hesitate. Your eyes move over his face, suddenly unsure. “Would you?”

“Mhm. Course.”

“Won’t that be weird?”

Dunk’s mouth tugs at one corner. “No.” You give him a look. “I’ve seen ye before,” he adds.

“You were drunk.”

“I can get drunk if ye want.”

A laugh, finally. Still damp-faced and wrecked enough for it to catch in the throat. “Sod off.”

“There she is,” Dunk says. “Go change. I’ll run it.”

In the bathroom he has a mild moment of panic. Then, because he is a practical man when panic gives him something to do, he pours far too much of something foamy under the running tap. The bath clouds over quickly. Good. Grand. A civilised barrier between his eyes and certain death. He keeps the water only a few degrees above lukewarm because the app said so, and stands there with one hand under the stream knowing he is going to get clouted for it. He finds he does not mind much.

You step into the bathroom with every nerve in your body alarmed. There is nothing normal about a friend giving you a bath. There is especially nothing normal about this friend. You're being silly, you could just take a shower. When your back gives one dull throb the thought of getting even one ounce of comfort becomes stronger than reason or the entire history of social boundaries. At this point you might agree if Lyonel were the one proposing it, though you’d have to drown yourself after.

Dunk is knelt behind the back of the bath, one sleeve pushed up, arm wet with water and foam. He lifts his head when you come in. His face is already pink, but his voice stays even. “C’mon,” he says. “I won’t look.”

He spreads one arm out for you. It drips on the tile. You come closer, then stop when it comes to taking the robe off. Dunk shuts his eyes with theatrical force.

You huff. “Oh, fuck that. I’d rather have you looking than me breaking my neck over this.”

The robe loosens and peels. Slides down your back. Dunk keeps his lids low, but begrudgingly, he sees.

First your shoulders, tense and rolled a little towards your chest, with the muscle there pulled like a bowstring. Then your back, with a warm bare line carrying the day in every tight place. Lower, where the spine gives way to the small inward dip above your hips, and those two hollows there nearly finish him for reasons he has no language for and too much body for.

He almost manages to skip to your legs and feet. That would have been sensible despite likely to help very little. Yet, his eyes land on your arse and stay there for one harrowing second.

Familiar. Longed-for. Still heavy in his hands if he lets memory have any say in it. He remembers the spill of it into his fingers, the same backs of thighs bracketing his shoulders and the redolence of their apex, kindly facing his nose. The blush deepens on him brutally, laying siege on his neck, face, and, by the feeling of it, scalp too. He thanks the God for not making him bald, and begins to sweat.

What is worse, the angle makes you look unpregnant enough for Dunk to momentarily misplace a reason behind this circumstance. His mind supplies a string of cause and effect: if there are hands, they ought to be held; if there are thighs, they ought to be squeezed; dimples of Venus revered, neck's nape licked, spine unkinked, skin rubbed and felt, buttocks bitten or kissed or outright eaten because they seem delicious to him. Once he gets, barely, past the first involuntary wave of primal depravity, he thinks he might be able to endure it (also barely).

You turn, and he catches enough of the front for the whole experience to morph into lethal. A glimpse of a side-boob, heavy and round, is gorgeous enough for Dunk's heart to recall all the emotions shadowing tenderfoot boy-virgins. Upon leaning, the breasts pour over your ribs and he becomes highly conscious of the reasons for their swelling. His gaze drops to stomach, still mostly yours, still quiet to the eye, but not silent.

He's never put much thought into whether pregnant women are sexy or not, so to see your body and undergo the all-systems seizure is a surprise to him. It seems as if his cock is connected to the heart, that is connected to the head, that is connected to all his limbs that currently tingle. The cock, the heart, and the head agree on one matter: that he's never seen a thing more beautiful in his life and the thought that he's the one who did this to you fills him with smugness and sickening joy.

The belly disappears behind your thigh as you put one foot into the bath, and Duncan comes back to himself enough to lift both arms, hovering, ready in case you need them.

“This is tepid,” you scoff, balancing on his forearm.

Dunk squeezes his eyes shut. “It’s warm,” he says thickly, and knows when you are sat only by the sound of it. Once the water sloshes he deems everything safe enough to see again and cracks his lids open. Kneels behind you, and with some regret, notices that the only visible things now are your head, shoulders and knees.

You lean back and rest your neck on the edge of the bathtub, next to his palm. “Are you temperature-blind too?”

It’s sweet enough that he smiles. Small and murmured so softly he knows, despite complaining, that the service is working. “Ye gonna be mean to me, lass?” he asks.

A pause. “No,” you say. “Sorry.”

His hand slides to your shoulder. Swipes the hair off it. “Besides,” Duncan says, “it’s safer for the baby. The a—”

“The app said so, is it?”

“Point taken.” He blushes fiercer for it. Lets his fingers idle on the apple of the joint, then slip beneath the sheet of water. “I know ladies like to scald themselves in showers and whatnot, but it can’t be this bad, hm?”

“It’s not,” you say.

The dance is very gentle. Dunk hasn’t planned this far, so he doesn’t know how much he’s allowed or what he’s expected to do. One large worry is you saying thank you, I got this, and making him wait outside. One ardent wish is to wash your hair. He lingers on the precipice, stirring the water next to your arm, hoping his hand will decide for him once the opportunity arises.

You seem to not mind. Only ask him, “And how do you suddenly know what ladies like to do in the showers and whatnot?”

“Well believe it or not," Dunk says, "I’ve met some ladies in my life before you.”

You hum at that, then turn your head a little against the rim. “Speaking of,” you start. “How’s your maths lady?”

Dunk frowns. His hand stills. “She’s not my maths lady.”

Another beat. Then: “You know what I mean.”

He thinks about saying that he has no interest in your stupid idea of him dating, and less interest still in hearing you encourage it from the wrong side of a tub while he is trying very hard to keep himself decent. The whole thought comes up too blunt and hot for speech, so he only huffs and draws his hand from the water. “She’s still a colleague,” he says.

Internally, you go: thank fuck. Thank fuck, because despite the whole thing being engineered by your fear-ridden brain, you still wanted to win this one, and you have. For the most part, at least, because Dunk is not dating the maths teacher. Lovely. A smaller part of it belongs to your body’s new flavour of cruelty, which has led you to some humiliating places.

Hinge is not a pond where pregnant women can swim safely. Your logical mind has told you so, basic human hubris has told you so, and Rowan has told you so, then proceeded to help you construct an alluring profile anyway. If anything has announced your transition from the first to the second trimester, it is the mild hots unravelling into full-blown randiness. It has left you leering perversely at anything that has fallen victim to Lyonel’s oral fixation, rolling your hips against the moon-shaped pillow you always secretly imagine to be Duncan, and cannibalising your own lips at any of his texts that could qualify as mildly romantic. Big part of the shame is that even a simple how you? has been filed under that category as of late.

An even bigger part of the shame is the maths teacher. The unexplainable jealousy of her, and the last two weeks spent wondering less how you are going to survive it if it happens than how to prevent it. Showing up at school under petty pretext, wearing one of the belly-revealing tops did not happen only because the summer is technically still spring, and a fool’s one.

Enough became enough when your hand joined the rutting hips and the mouth left agape against plush like you were a teenage girl practising kissing on a mirror. You tried to be normal and available and modern. The app gave you freaks, cowards, lactation enthusiasts, and one man who opened with respectfully, how pregnant? The thought of each sickened you before it excited anything, while thoughts of Dunk remained persistently intrusive. Yes, of that one night, but more, too. Of his hands on you. On your feet, on your belly. Of the way his head dips so his lips can reach your shoulder every time he hugs you. Of the way he blushes at wrong moments and never backtracks from a promised thing. Of his back bared from bowing over the crib. Of his smile. His freckles. His hair in tufts, his slim nails, his shoes being enormous next to yours in the hallway, and the way he says lass like you are someone special to him.

You slide down until your head dunks under the water, just enough to wet your hair. The bath muffles the room for one blessed second, then you come back up blinking and wiping droplets from your eyes with the heel of your hand. When you reach for the shampoo, it’s not there.

The next thing you hear is a wet cough of liquid being squeezed from the bottle. “Is it all right if I do it for ye?” Dunk asks.

You try very hard not to sound giddy. “You want to wash my hair?”

“Well,” he says, practical as a hammer. “You want your hair clean, don’t ye?”

“Y-yeah.” You sit up a little, drawing your knees in until you can fold around yourself. “Sure. If you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind, girl.” Then, Dunk lathers the shampoo between his palms and slides his fingers into your hair.

The sound you make is small. Small, but it lands in him so badly. Breathy and sweet and gone before you can catch it back. Your head eases into his hands with the whole damp weight of it, and Duncan loves it so immediately he has to look down at your crown to gather himself. Your hair clings to his fingers, slick and heavy with water, softer once the shampoo works through. It parts for him in darkening ropes. Catches between his knuckles. Holds the heat of your skin.

With strands drawn out of the way he can see the knobs of your spine and the line of bathwater teasing the tits that are flattened against your thighs. Technically, he sees nothing. Unfortunately, his imagination works like a warehouse with every shelf badly labelled and all the doors left open.

So he keeps to the work. Slow, circular movements. Fingers at your temples, careful over the sore-feeling places. Behind your ears. Back to the crown. Then, at the nape of your neck, he grows bolder. His whole palm frames it and squeezes. Not hard, only enough to feel the tension ease and give the muscle somewhere to go.

You gasp. “Oh, yes—”

Duncan smiles like an idiot. “Good?”

“Yeah. Yeah, um—” You swallow, throat clicking softly. “Sorry. Sorry for the state of me.”

“Stop that.” His hands still for a second. “There’s nothin’ wrong with your state. It’s blessed, so it is, and I don’t want to hear any more snarks about it.”

Under the correction you go quiet. Worse, you obey it. Your shoulders sink, first from exhaustion and then from something more treacherous, until your body begins accepting the hands on it as if without them it gets wounded with deficiency. The touch works down past the scalp and takes liberties elsewhere: slackens your jaw, unhooks something under the breastbone, sends a warm pulse through your hips that has no regard for context. The last person who touched you with this sort of care was also Duncan, but then it came with drink, darkness, and several hours missing from the timeline. This is worse for being clear. You know where his fingers are. You know where yours are gripping your own knees. You know the water has gone nearly still around you and your body, faithless little beast, is starting to hope he never stops.

When you’re about to lose it and start begging him, touch me, touch me, keep touching me, he stops. “Pass me the shower head, will ye?” Dunk says.

You do, blindly, while scowling at the very bottom of your soul and mourning your losses. He starts the water, tests it against his wrist first, then shields your forehead with his cupped palm and begins rinsing. Warmth floods you. Warmer than the bath, finally, as if the man has discovered mercy after all.

You tip your head back, throat bared long and vulnerable, and it does something murderous to Duncan’s blood pressure.

He takes the gift of your closed eyes to gape. At your teeth showing between parted lips, at your lashes clumping darker with damp, at the small working of your neck when you swallow. He keeps the water from your face with the seriousness of a surgical task, which means he simply has to keep touching you. His palm smooths over your temple, cheek, the slick line of hair. Then, he guides the spray lower and rinses the last of the soap from your back. Sadly, the moment when your hair gets clean arrives.

Dunk turns the shower head off. “There,” he says, voice only a little ruined. “Now for the dreaded part, hm?”

“Yeah,” you say, then swallow. “Just—please don’t laugh.”

Duncan, offended by the very thought, says, “I won’t.” He stands, and because he is occasionally capable of saintliness when directly supervised, fixes his eyes with great discipline on the far wall, the towel rail, the corner of the ceiling, anywhere that is neither tit nor arse. Then his palms slide under your armpits. “Up,” he says.

You make one small noise of protest, but he lifts, and your body goes with him as if someone has pulled a string through the top of you. For one second you are dangling more than rising, knees straightening, feet finding the bath’s floor, water sliding off you in streams. The minute you’re upright your arms cross over yourself, even though your back is to him.

You hear fabric shift. Then the bathrobe lands over your shoulders, heavy and soft, and Dunk’s hands come next, drawing it round you without fuss. A towel follows, catching the wet ends of your hair before they can drip down your spine. He pats rather than rubs, which should be funny and somehow only makes your throat feel narrow.

“Here ye are,” he says. “All in one piece.”

You clutch the robe closed at your chest. “Thank you. Maybe just help me get out?”

He nods. “Course.”

You are prepared for an arm. A forearm, specifically. Something to balance on while you step over the high side of the tub with as much grace as a pregnant woman can manage. Dunk, however, has other ideas.

He comes round to the side, bends, and starts gathering you up. You jerk a little in surprise. “What're you doing?”

He pauses, genuinely baffled, one arm already behind your back and the other slipping under your knees. “Helping?”

“Duncan.”

“C’mon,” he says. “Don’t be a wuss now.”

You put up a final symbolic fight in the form of a suffering look, and Dunk only waits it out.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” you mutter, and let him have you.

He lifts before your body has fully agreed to be lifted. Arms go from hovering to holding, and then the bathroom drops by a few inches. Your stomach dips with it. Your hands fly to his shoulders and clutch there, and you wish for him to read it as some small fear because it's a closer neighbour to dignity than the truth.

He has the weight of you settle against him with such immediate rightness that Dunk has to set his jaw against it. The way he perceives it, you weigh almost nothing and also the entire room, which is troublesome and confusing both. It is simple enough for muscle, so Dunk could carry you to the end of the street and back without thinking much of the effort. Complicated when it gains density. There is your forehead right next to his chin and he tries to be mindful of not scratching it. Where your hair presses his chest the cotton soaks, warms, and darkens. Water slides down your calf, gathers at the heel, and drops onto the floorboards with hollow taps. He walks carefully, as if the flat has become uneven on purpose.

Once he gets to the bedroom, he asks, “Where am I puttin’ ye?”

You turn your face into his shoulder. “The floor is fine.”

So he lowers you as if the floor is miles away until you come back to standing. You look up. He looks down.

The room goes oddly close around the two of you. Your hair drips because he hasn't done a very good job drying it. One cold bead runs from the end of it and lands on the back of his hand. Dunk watches it break there.

“Right,” he says, though nothing has been made right by saying it.

You still have both hands on his shoulders. Your fingers have gone slack, but persist. “Right,” you echo, softer.

He could step back. There is space behind him. There is a whole bed to put between you, a whole hallway to traverse and make you a cup of tea, a whole street to walk to his own place, whole country to run and a whole world to travel, and none of those would make Dunk feel any better.

“D’you need anything else?” he asks. Your eyes flick over his face, and for one mad second he thinks you might say yes.

Yes.

Robbed of touch, you want it back. His fingers in your hair again, nails on scalp, chest to your side, no, to your chest, and sliding and heavy on you until breathing is something you get to indulge in only if you do your maths correctly and gulp once the weight eases. Touch me, hold me, crush me, anything-me, so you don't have to spend another night on a half-arsed tryst with a pillow masquerading as him.

“Hold me,” you say, because the little in- dividing sanity from its opposite has begun to look less like a prefix and more like a plank over a ravine. You could've just said no. It has two letters as well, which should make it sturdier. But the numbers let the no acquire certain overfamiliarity with the in- which would send you back under the covers to scrape his smell from the bathrobe with your teeth and pretend his mouth is at your neck instead of back at his own flat. Anything braver than hold would kick the plank clean out from under you and make the word into a whole insanity with no seam left to hide in. So you choose the hyphen. The smallest scrap. A thing with enough necessity in it to be genuine and enough restraint in it to still let you lie about what you mean.

Dunk is there before you finish thinking. Arms, whole miles of them, come round you, wrap you, then keep wrapping as if the first pass failed to convince him you are caught. It is less a hug than a gathering. He takes you in by increments and still seems to think there is more of you to collect. His body bows around the shape yours takes until his face finds the junction of your shoulder and neck. The bridge of his glasses nudges you there, cold for a second. His mouth stays open against the robe, breath soaking through.

You have to rise onto your toes from the force of it. Your heels lift. Your whole weight goes strange and borrowed, balanced between his arms and the floor, and because he is Duncan he notices and shifts one foot forward so you can lean properly. His hand spreads between your shoulder blades, then drags down your back through the bathrobe. “Ye feel good,” Dunk mutters into you. He keeps rubbing. Finds your spine and makes it look innocent, and the fact of it having to be made to look so speaks for itself. "Smell nice," he says, breathier.

“Dunk,” you say.

He answers with a sound from the chest. A hum, an almost-purr, thickened by the place his face is pressed. “Mm.”

Then he starts rocking you. Barely. Back and forth in a motion so small it could pass for soothing if your body had less imagination. His hand keeps working at you through cotton. Shoulder to waist, waist to shoulder. Makes your toes curl against the floorboards.

Insanity acquires new shape. It becomes an empty bed and sheets cold on one side and morning that holds only one person. It is having a man who knocked you up kept at an arm's length while his nose is wedged into your neck. And maybe loneliness has you both by throats, but for a second you let yourself believe he might want it too and rule that it would be saner to just… ask him.

“Would you—fuck,” you stammer. “Would you consider, uh—” Dunk moves then. Lifts his head off you and looks, making the whole art of producing speech this much harder. Under the scrutiny you manage only: “Can you stay?”

He frowns, puzzled. "Aye, course. Of course I can."

"No. I mean—" You shake your head. "Can you stay with me. Can you—oh God." Your forehead knocks his chest.

Duncan stills, then says, "Girl." He frowns some more and studies the parting of your hair. "Girl, what d’ye need?" he asks. "What d'ye need, just tell me."

"I need—I need—" you start, but fail there. Wonder if there are some other ways of speaking that Dunk would understand, because it turns out asking outright gains so much ridicule on its way out it withdraws itself from the options. Your hand finds his wrist. You put it on your hip first, which is cowardice. Swallow, and proceed: lower, until your arse fills his palm.

He goes rigid. Lets himself be put in place and nothing more. When you look up his eyes are locked somewhere between you. There's an attempt at a kiss; a poor one. You're out of toes to tip onto and out of mouth to purse so it lands off, on his jaw, and becomes something far sweeter and purer than you've had in mind.

"Ah," he says. Gives himself a moment to kickstart the grey matter of his brain and recognize the bit between the cause and effect. It's still very much improbable, but Dunk risks it. "Yer saying—" he whispers. "Ye—you want me?"

A small nod.

“Now?" he asks. His thumb wedges under your chin. "As in: right now? Ye want to—w-with m-me?”

“Yeah?” You cringe. He's stunned for way too long for this to go smoothly. “Shit, I’m sorry—”

“No,” Dunk says. He finds the side of your neck. “No, no, no, don’t be. Don’t be, please—” A gulp. “I w-would. I—yes—I—yes. God, aye, I want to.” Teeth worry his lower lip. “But uh—is it… safe?”

“Yes,” you laugh, for lack of better reactions. “Yes it is, I checked.” With that Dunk's face muddles back into bewilderment he hides very poorly. The hand on your arse tenses. “What?” you mouth.

“Ye checked?” he asks, pouting. “Why did ye check?”

A cold little fright nips through you. “Cause I’m—” you stammer, then let it out in one breath. “God. Going a bit mad here and I considered checking out Hinge but Rowan said I’d attract only creeps right about now so I read a little before I did anything.”

Duncan blinks. Behind the lenses, his lashes move in two enormous dark fans. “H-hinge? You considered Hinge?”

“Y-yes?" you say. He keeps staring. "Duncan, what is it?”

“I—nothing. I mean—nothing.” His eyes drop and grip loosens. The crossness arrives in him by parts, which is how you know it for real: first the stilling of his mouth, then the colour high on his ears, then a hard gulp moving his throat. You have seen him awkward, embarrassed, worried, wounded. This is rarer, and heavier for being held down. “I jus'—”

He sees it with ugly clarity: men with stupid names and blank faces sending you their little texts, all vapid smiles and dead-eyed compliments, asking questions they have no right to ask. Worse, he sees hands attached to them. Mouths. Their shrivelled, hopeful pricks trying to talk their way near the place some ancient, thick part of him has already marked in chalk and blood as his. It horrifies him, the thought itself and how quickly it stands up in him, ready to bite.

“Why do you look unbelievably cross about it, then?” You put your hands on his chest and beneath them his heart is racketing like a drum. It is scary to see him angry. It reminds you how much force lives in him unspent, how much of him is usually lowered on purpose. “Look, I know it’s your baby," you say carefully. "I wouldn't do anything to harm it, alright? I’m just… weird." A sigh. "I fucking hate it here sometimes.”

“W-where?” Dunk asks, hoping you don’t mean his arms.

“In this… body,” you say and Duncan almost blurts out Why? Why, I love this body. I dream of it and think about it often. I want this body to myself.

“It’s strange, and a bit gross, and I sweat a lot and if I’m not sleepy I’m just horny all the time, and I—” you hiccup. “God, I’m sorry, this must be so weird to you. I’m so sorry, please forget I said anything?”

“No,” Dunk says. “No, don’t do that. Don’t do that, I want to—” He catches you back from where you have gone loose in his hold. “I said I’d help you with anything. And I would like that.” He brings his face closer and sets his fingers to your temple. Either the pulse is in you or in him, or both of you have become terrible at keeping quiet under the skin. “What I don’t like is that you considered Hinge before coming to me. And that you say bad things about yourself,” Dunk whispers.

He thinks of courage, then. How it keeps changing shape. He has permission and still there are things lodged in him he cannot ask without sounding small. Do you want me or just anyone? Am I easier than Hinge, or harder, and you are making the effort anyway? Do you remember anything? You come tighter around him, cinching his waist. Your mouths touch and Dunk closes his eyes.

“I like this body,” he says.

His hand slides from your temple to your neck and lower, cautious until cautiousness begins to pain him. He slips his fingers between your skin and the robe near the collar. The other hand finds the knot at your belt and waits. He waits for anything. A twitch, a flinch, a word, some sign that he has gone too far and should be put down for it.

You nod. So Dunk pulls. The belt gives, and the robe loosens round you.

“It’s… hot,” he says, simpleton that he is.

The trouble is, this body has always been hot to him. He has never known how to give it a clean name. Pretty is too innocent for the places his thoughts go after the first look at you. Maddening comes nearer. Now, with you changing in front of him and the change tied back to his own curse of being a man words fail even worse. His hand sneaks beneath the fabric and finds your belly. The backs of his knuckles graze the skin there.

“It’s making a baby for us—” he says, sombre-eyed. “Yer bloody pretty, lass,” Duncan says, because despite wanting to tell you hot, sexy, toothsome, edible, challenging, ripe, built for my grip, spreadable, kissable, gorgeous, dangerous, disastrous, full, an answer to why lads lose their hands and heads, he knows damn well girls always like to be called pretty.

It works wonders. You let him wedge his hands deeper until the collar of the robe slips wide, falls off both shoulders, and by the time it lands round your feet Duncan is so hard he learns a new truth about trousers. None of them are made for him—old jeans, good jeans, jeans chosen by Raymun—all of them turn traitor under enough pressure. He grips your arms without thinking, partly for himself, partly to stop the quick frightened movement you make to cover yourself.

"Dunk—" you whine.

The unfairness of it is clear. "Aye," he says, gone strange. "Aye, sorry. Hold on."

He grabs his T-shirt by the neck and drags it over his head as boys do, glasses nearly going with it. Once his chest is bare your eyes go over him in famished little sweep and Dunk has to lick his own mouth for bracing against it. His hand goes to his belt. What should be simple, since he's undone belts for the larger part of his life without audience, becomes difficult because of the audience precisely. His thumbs are slipping, he's muttering shite twice, and finally gets it open with a jerk too harsh for the poor leather. He shoves everything down so jeans, pants and shame, the whole construction of it, go to mid-thigh before he remembers his feet and has to kick one foot free, then the other, in a small hopping mess that ought to be funny. He cannot spare enough brain to check.

In his trying to match you for nudity so the embarrassment settles in its good bones, Dunk fucks himself over. He's got no idea if he's doing it for you the same way you're doing it for him, but such is a disadvantage of being a man whose dick tells on him: plainness. It would show plain how much he wants you even without it, if only by the heaving of his chest and redness on him. Even without a raging hard-on, which tries to stand proudly but is unable for the weight of it, Duncan's sure you'd recognise the want on him. He can only hope the little kicks of muscle and dew coming from the tip count as honesty rather than greed.

"I'm trying—" he says, quiet, then reaches for you again. "I'm trying to make it even."

Your memory gets jogged instantly, and you seethe at your mind for banking such sight somewhere distant. The pieces you have of him from before arrive anew, with merits of sobriety, of your bedroom's lighting, of him being nervous as sin, somehow managing to make it look as if you are the one doing him a kindness. In the blink between standing freely and being gathered, you catch the hollows under his arms when his biceps flex, the quiver of them kept in their cage of skin, the billow of his stomach with each hard breath and the way his cock gives a small answering throb below it. His body keeps contradicting itself, undecided between muscle and softness, all of it forced into one large being. His knees point a little outward, hips cut into chewable dips, thighs are broad and furred with something too fine for the rest of him. Almost tender-looking, which is mean considering the size of them.

And God above—above. Iliac furrows bracketing his lower belly, lethal enough, sunk deep enough to make him so irrefutably man you gain understanding of why anyone ever got vulgar about those gutters and called them sex lines.

They invite it. They invite thighs to bracket them, tongues to lick down them, mouths to kiss them, fingers to fit inside the grooves, faces to rest there, arses to press back against them until his balls are flattened to buttocks. Before the gathering ends, one demented conclusion gets its claws in you: Duncan is so solid he would remain rideable under any amount of you. He'd last you until the end of this, and then some.

You go where his arms take you. Up, higher, and higher, for in this over-fervour neither of you seems interested in the limit to climbing another person. His neck gets yoked by your grip, hands find your ass, and he uses the pardon lifting grants him to clutch it until the flesh goes hard. Karma for this indulgence is instant: the weep from between your legs drags his cock, makes him groan loud and torn, and since there’s no pity in your face he knows disguising it as effort has failed.

Locked in this full-body shackle, Duncan feels sexy. Holding a woman he’s put a baby into while remaining helpless makes him feel accomplished. You’re carriable, though to say light is to rob you of the resplendent human burden he believes himself created to keep. Belly still small enough to not get crushed, you cling to him, and every press of you on his torso makes Duncan beg the powers that be to not render him a one-pump chump.

“I don’t think we’re ever even,” you say. You seem to trust his muscles despite their tremble, for one of your hands comes to caress his face. He brings himself closer to it.

His beautiful face, lips of which he bites constantly, nose of which rubs next to yours, eyes of which drill into you with their perfect hopeful blue, and you're certain it eludes Duncan what you mean, and instills some idea about you being clever.

None of you are. We're never even because you're behind with your wanting, both of you think at each other violently.

"Aye," he says. Reckons you're telling him he's the fool here, and agrees. "I've got ye though," Duncan says, voice a little ruined because he very much does not got himself. He seeks your mouth anyway. "Can I kiss ye?"

Show, don't tell, your lips go. They flatten to his first. Wet, firm, already enough to make some working part of Duncan’s brain step off the ledge. Then you open and hum into him, and he goes near stupid with it. His breathing turns loud through his nose. The hands under your ass squeeze, then knead, because that is the only remedy for the overwhelming urge to grab your face and take more of your mouth than he’s been given.

Thankfully, you grant it. Deepen the kiss yourself, wedge your tongue inside and bring one hand to his throat to hold him there. The squeeze is light, but brands him anyway. His head swells with all the yearning things, all the I want you, yes, you are wanted like this, yes, your body is safe with me, yes, I can hold it, yes, kiss me, kiss me, kiss me, because he loves it when you kiss him. He loves your hands on him. God, Dunk is so fucked already that his mouth breaks from yours only enough to say, “I meant it.”

You just hum back, busy licking at his teeth.

“I do like this body,” he says. “Wasn’t sayin’ it to keep ye sweet. I like it fierce.” Then, he starts rocking you against him. Small at first, and less so when your grip tightens round his neck. His hands spread you, part you at the cheeks until his fingers brush the slick edges of your pussy. You keep kissing him. Keep taking his mouth as if the hand between your thighs is only another thing you have decided to allow.

You’re wet. He goes so mad with it his grip adjusts. The head of his cock finds the slick and slips through it, messy and blunt and enough to make him drag his mouth open under yours. “I want to fuck ye so badly,” he says, leaving himself there for you to take what you need from him. “Want you to fuck me back, girl,” Duncan says, and in the same second, he breaches.

You take. Seize and clench and grab so hard your jaw sets itself, and from the back of your throat crawls a dry click that bounces off Duncan’s uneven enamel. Then “F-fuck,” comes out of you and disintegrates into a grunt once more of him gets inside you. It’s rupturous, rapturous, poetic and honest. Fucking great, is what it is, to have your whining and moping and complaining answered with the ardent keenness of a man who acts like he owes you his life for keeping a baby you want anyway. A private crumb of you finds it in itself to admit that you want it because it’s his.

"You're so—" you say, mouth dry. "Strong."

He smiles, so sweetly. Like you've done him some kindness. You could say pretty. Handsome, lovely, good, but the way he holds you brings strong to your mind first.

"Ye good then?" he asks, grinning. Sinking. There's more of him, and more, and you keep waiting for your buttocks to meet his hips but the meeting is getting postponed by endless inches.

"Yeah," you tell him.

Good is a mild descriptor. The spread burns deliciously. Melts into a deep ache with warmth at its rim your body recognises as something it's owed, and by rights. Feet cold from the strain of thighs cinching his waist, you get struck by the contrast of temperatures. His hips, hot to the bone, twitch once, as if begging for more sense than he has given them, and you encourage that craving with a brush of thumb on his throat. "Keep going," you say. "Just… don't drop me."

Never. He'd rather take a cramp to the calf, a bowie to the ribs, a bat to the kneecap, a deconstruction to the troth, a nail to the head and hail to the thief than rid himself of the holy parsimony raging in his muscles from not driving into you outright. He gets you on the whole of himself slowly, gently, and once he's all safe and sound within your splendid womb, Duncan whispers, "I'd never."

In his head lives a fantasy that converts him from being a last resort into a yearner who's finally wanted after weeks of expressing bravery through adept courtship. He's taken you to a date during which you've let him get the chair for you and call the waiter. Then your hand has brushed his on the menu and the foolhardy Duncan has closed his palm around your fingers, and you let him do that too. You've smiled at him with lips smeared glossy, set his arm round your shoulders on the way home and climbed onto your toes so he could kiss you.

He's kissed you plenty. You've been teasing, flirting and taunting him beyond what's legal. The pinnacle of it happens in your bedroom where, with its lights dimmed, Duncan acquires a skill to his fingers, otherwise absent. He undoes the button of your trousers, wedges flat palms under the fabric and slides all your layers down by the power of thumbs cleverly hooked over the waistbands. Comes back up, groping your thighs and arse, and finds the clasp of your bra that's for once his ally. His hands don't shake. The lace peels off your tits. There are dents in the skin where it has held you against gravity and he learns that when breasts become honest about their weight and lower onto ribcage is one of his favourite sights.

He lifts you to show you how strong he is, how reliable. To see if you'd let him, too. You wrap yourself around him, cinch his belly and neck with your limbs. With his cock exposed to elements he keeps kissing you and rocking you against his hips until the first contact is made. The tip parts your lips and you gasp. Nerve endings hone themselves to receive pleasure only. He quells the resistance, burrows himself fully, and his brain loses capacity of telling fantasy from reality. He's stuck in the former, where he is confident and worthy.

You moan, full-mouthed. Duncan smiles, and coos, "Biiiig stretch." Then, he realises he has said it out loud, and the whole brave idiot in his head drops dead.

"I—" he stammers. Doesn't get to finish because there's a small snort against his lips, then laughter, and your whole irriguous insides start quaking with it, making him clench his jaw. "Luv," he grits, squeezing your arse.

"Since when are you so smug?" you ask. Kiss him for it like he's done something right. "I like it," you tell him. "C'mon Dunk. I can take it."

You like it on him too much. The borrowed shape of nerve and whole posture stolen from a man with better practice sits on Duncan as if it has been waiting for him to grow into it. It straightens something in him and squares him. Gives his mouth a sharper line and makes his arms look less accidental, less apologetic, more like boons he has finally decided to use.

For you. On you. Because you asked.

That thought bubbles foul and honeyed in your head. Your need, somehow, has overthrown his usual inadequacy. It has dragged him upright by the scruff and put him where you have privately wanted him for longer than is reasonable to admit: proud, useful, pleased with himself for pleasing you. A small, dangerous idea puts down a root somewhere tender. That maybe, if the whole thing had not come at you backwards and sideways, you might have made each other better on purpose.

You jerk on him with your hips, impatient and clumsy. Duncan huffs a laugh against your mouth, startled into himself again. “Aye,” he says, abashed. “Aye, I’ve got ye.”

Then, he moves. The first lift makes your thighs seize round him. The first descent makes the breath go blunt in your chest. He does it slowly because he is trying to be good, and because you are wrapped round him in a way that leaves no margin for errors. Hands under your buttocks with fingers sunk deep and heels of them taking the weight where your body spills. He works you on him with the plain problem-solving force of moving something heavy and dear and alive, and every inch down feels discovered twice: once by the body and once by the greedy mind that knows whose body this is.

A body that gets filled. Emptied. Filled again.

His cock muscles in with its girth so ample you can tell which veins of him pulse hardest. It leaves you hollow for a beat, then comes back so surely your belly coils, coaxing tight wheezes of air out of you. Each time he lowers you, your clit slaps against the hair below his navel. The scratch blooms as little bright injury you start anticipating. You know the rhythm by the third time. By the fourth, your hips are trying to meet it and the whole diaphragm of pelvis flexes to keep him. By the fifth, your nails have found his neck.

It is complicated only if you let thought get involved. You are held up by his strength, dependent on it, opened and moved because he can do that to you and because you told him to. Your feet cannot find purchase, your balance belongs to him, and still the power of it sits in your own throat. You could stop him with a word. You could break him with praise. You could make him harder by saying his name the right way, and there is an equality in it you've never managed to find by standing level with anyone. A strange fairness made out of mismatched sizes and opposite hungers.

On another level it is dead simple. Duncan is strong enough to lift you and kind enough to listen. You are wet enough to take him and mean enough, now, to enjoy what it does to his face.

Your hand tightens enough for your thumb to press the bob of his throat when the pleasure finds its proper shape. Between your legs first, then higher, into your chest, under the tongue, behind the eyes. “There,” you tell him. “Right there. Oh, fuck, Duncan—”

His whole expression changes, but he keeps it at there. Holds the found angle with severe compliance, lifting and lowering you through the same strip of bliss until the repetition makes you go doll-like. Fucked so well you’re certain your face drains of every hint that intelligence lives anywhere within it, so you hide it in his. You press your nose into his cheek so hard you can feel the solid outline of his teeth through skin. His glasses prod your forehead. Both mouths just hang open since kissing has become too skilled an activity for either of you. Instead, you breathe loud, ugly breaths into him, like you’re the one doing the lifting.

Duncan watches you from too close. His eyes go blurry behind the lenses. “Good?” he mumbles, raspy.

Silly man, you think. Yes, good, yes, keep going, yes, until rather than speaking your body just shows him how good. Your calves lock themselves at the small of his back so fiercely he has nowhere to go but deeper. The first cramp takes you there, then the next, each one making your cunt grip him in greedy shocks until your breath turns useless against his face.

It is liquid succour poured over bone and bruise, if the bruise were months of being devastatingly unfucked while Duncan keeps being his best self in your orbit. In the tightness your body shapes you can feel him throbbing, worse and better for being held there. His arms close round your waist and keep you, while the orgasm spends its havoc through you. Eyes roll back in your skull. Your head fills with cotton, warm and sodden, and the room dims as if set a few feet underwater. In it, you register him moving.

Duncan’s thighs are on fire. He has no idea how he hasn’t spilled yet (given that he's just witnessed your eyes doing the thing, and at last in the right context), and he worries briefly that something in him has gone broken. He takes three stumbling steps backwards until his calves strike the edge of the bed. So he sits. You quiver on him, and he stays there stunned, holding you through the last of it. When it’s over he falls onto his back with you clutched to his chest, still hard inside you.

For a moment he thinks perhaps that was it. That the body can be fooled by mercy if the wanting is severe enough. Everything in him has pulled tight, gone blind, endured the full sweet punishment of you coming around him, and surely after such a thing a man ought to be empty and softened. Released from service. None of that, though. His occupation is to lie there with his cock still buried and aching, too hard for comfort, lit by some phantom ending that never arrived. When you shift on him the smallest amount, the sting runs from root to tip, raw in its brightness, making his stomach ripple.

“It’s good,” you tell him, voice loose. “God, you’re good.”

Dunk shuts his eyes.

There is praise, and then there is whatever that does to him. It gets deep into bloodstream and starts moving in his veins. Then you start moving too, and Duncan knows for sure he has not come yet.

You push off his chest. Bestraddled, he watches the ascent diligently: your tits hang heavier when you’re bowed and settle once your back straightens. There, they shift slightly outward. The weight of them travels until skin draws fine and taut from sternum to collarbone. The upper slopes lift with your breath, but the undersides lower and stay there. Flesh touches flesh with a softness so plain and human Duncan’s mouth fills with spit.

His hand goes because it must. It reaches and fits under one breast with the strange exactness of a thing made to house him without asking. He wedges the span from thumb to forefinger into the crease. Your tit settles over his knuckles, warm and fuller than memory, and beneath the heel of his palm your heart beats hard enough to rival his.

Light catches you so that he can tell the change. His fingers find your stomach with their backs, just grazing, and the skin there is soft in a way that puts daft images in his head, small impossible creatures made of satin and warm milk and whatever else men with sex-drunk brains invent when faced with a woman.

Then, his whole hand covers your belly, and that is much worse. Worse in the sense of too much lack landing in his grip. He spans an area so vast all sensible parts of his mind get blown out. Under that touch, your hips roll. Duncan sucks in a stinging breath, then grits, "What're ye doing, girl?"

You cover his palm with yours, and bring the other back to his throat. Curled fingers, clever fingers, hold him where pulse does its best to tightrope between excitement and peril. Then, you clench, slow and mean enough for his heart to stop completely for one whole second. “Making you come,” you say, though for Duncan it's more like making you die. “I want to see your face when you do and remember it this time.”

He chokes a little, tries to cover it with a groan and it all comes out mixed and mangled into some shape of your name Dunk's never said out loud. His hips rise because he becomes an overeager boy who loses the battle to greed. "Christ, f-fu—" he says, then bends his knees under you to help you solve a problem that is his cock begging for friction. It gives you something better to use, and God help him, you use it. Rock down, grind forward, take the part of him he has been trying so hard to keep courteous and turn it into a tool for his wreckage.

The deconstruction of Duncan begins at the points of him that carry profound sense for the predicament he's in: the head of his cock, raging with heat; the ridge under it, rubbed raw with your slick; the tight forlorn pull in his balls every time your hips drag back and make his body expect relief, then deny it with a new descent. Duncan crumbles by fractions. First a sound, then a twitch. Then the last of his good posture. His hands fumble, find your waist, lose it, and finally pull.

You fall forward over him and catch yourself with one palm beside his head, saving his throat from the full weight of you, though the loss grieves him instantly. He would have taken it, happily, dumbly, with his windpipe dented and gratitude leaking out his ears. Instead he grips your arse and the broad of your hips where God, in a rare moment of sense, has granted you handles Duncan can delude himself into thinking are there for his enjoyment.

“What do you need?” you ask, breathy and gorgeous above him, cheeks shining, forehead damp, mouth all used-looking from him and still asking.

Dunk looks up at you and has to search himself for speech. Most of him is gone already. What remains has no pride worth naming. “Use me,” he murmurs, and pours all the devotion he has for you into the miserable little shape of it. His fingers dig in. “Use me, girl.” Under your sharpening eyes, he grasps at the fortitude built badly enough it cannot hold one form for long, and adds, smaller, "And kiss me."

You blink. Lower yourself and take his upper lip between yours, suck it softly, then give him a sweet, taunting nibble that has his hips punching up. The flesh pulls, stretches, slips free redder, and you smile against it in a way that makes him want to confess to crimes he has not yet committed.

Your arms wind round his neck. It opens him up under you, throat bared, and you go there with filthy acumen. Lick a long wet path over the pulse and tendon, up where his skin goes tender under the jaw, then to the shell of his ear. Your breath arrives first. Hot, broken, full of effort. “Talk to me,” you whisper. “Tell me how you feel.”

For an answer, Dunk moans. He means to do better, he does. But you are panting now, rutting down on him fast enough that the bedframe remembers the both of you, fingers threaded in his hair, hips working him with that half-desperate rhythm he ought to be ashamed of loving. Your cunt keeps taking him and taking him, and there is no clean thought left in him. Only this. Only breath.

When you lift your head, something in his face changes. "Dunk?" He only blinks too many times. “Do you want to stop?” you ask.

His head shakes. “N-no,” he says, near bitten. Swallows, tries again, hand sliding to your thigh to keep you from reading him wrong. “No, lass. Just—slow. I wanna—” His eyes squeeze shut with some useless heat behind them before he finds something at least adjacent to what should be said. “I wanna feel ye proper," he murmurs. "You’re… you’re so kind on me.”

It quakes you some. He's trying to prolong it, the sweetheart, you think. So your body quiets for him first, then alters. You exchange the speed for depth and give him fat, thorough rolls. Let the planes of his hips take the whole weight of your arse, just as you've wanted. His balls flatten under your buttocks on every downstroke, cock throbs madly in your womb.

“Oh—” he breathes, and sounds scattered enough to make your stomach tighten. “Oh, that’s—aye. Aye, there. Fuck, right here. Like that.”

You bend close and kiss him again, softer, with the same hunger spread over it like a tearing sheet. He kisses back badly. Too open, too wet, too much air-gulping getting in the way. When you sweep his face, Duncan’s lids are glistening, lashes clumped in little dark points behind the crooked glasses, so undone he looks like a weeping saint with a bad eye.

His stomach swells into yours with fast, shallow gasps. One palm leaves your hip and comes to the back of your neck. He holds you there, foreheads touching, mouth close enough that every word is partly yours before it is finished.

“Feels—” He stops, teeth flashing over his lip. “God, ye feel amazin’. So warm. So—ah—so good round me. I can feel ye everywhere. In my back. In my bloody teeth," he says, then catches your cheeks dimpling. "Don’t laugh.”

You do laugh, very softly, and kiss the corner of his mouth for it.

Dunk groans. “Cruel woman.” His hand tightens on your nape, thumb rubbing without rhythm. “No, no, keep—please, keep doin’ that. You’re gonna have me. You’re—ah, Christ—you’re pullin’ it out of me.”

You slow further, vicious with pity, and he near sobs.

“That’s it,” you whisper. “Let me see.”

His eyes open to yours. Blue, glassy, embarrassed beyond measure and unable to hide any of it. He tries to speak again, because you asked him to, because he would try to move a mountain if you took his face in your hands and said please, for me?

“I’m close,” he says. Then shakes his head, helpless with the size of the understatement. “No, I’m—luv, I’m right there. Don’t stop. Don’t—” His mouth opens under yours, breath breaking up. “Please. Please, I’m gonna c-come.”

Heat spreads like conflagration through Duncan’s bones, and all of his muscles go ablaze with it too. He feels the rupture of the tightening coil and breaks into an out-of-tune chant of yes, yes, yes, while you milk him and let his hips stammer.

It starts low, in the drag of his balls drawing up so hard it borders pain, then strikes the root of his cock with a shock that makes his whole frame buck under you. “Ah—fuck, fuck, lass—” he chokes, then loses even that much sense when the first spill leaves him.

His hands clamp down on you. There's no pulling anymore, only holding on while his body empties itself in heavy, helpless pulses. Each one makes him flinch. Each one makes his cock throb so hard inside you he can feel it answer against the grip of your cunt, the seed pushed out and held there, nowhere to go, nowhere he wants it to go. His hips keep trying, little rhythmless, aborted jerks, and he finds only a crude animal wish to stay buried until the last of him is wrung out.

“Good girl,” he hears himself say, or thinks he does. Dug out and cracked, roughening on the way from between his ribs. “Oh, God—my best girl. Take it. Please, take it. I’m—ah—I’m sorry, I—”

He has no idea what he is apologising for. For coming. For wanting. His eyes squeeze shut, then open again because you asked to see him and some part of him remembers even while the rest of him is being dismantled.

The next pulse makes his chest cave around a breath that sounds ugly and comes with its edges wet. He comes again, or keeps coming, he cannot tell. The pleasure has stopped behaving like pleasure and started acting like something with teeth, something that bites deep enough to find the softest parts of him and shake them.

His soul goes with it. That is the stupidest possible way to understand it, and still the only one Duncan has. It leaves him in shudders, in spend, in the long broken noise he makes when you stay there and take all of him without flinching. For one blown-out second he feels loved so plainly his eyes sting, and he cannot tell whether the tears threatening him are from release or from mourning the fleeting fallacy of his malleable boy-heart.

You see it. The exact place where his strength gives up its post. His face goes open underneath you. The blush is everywhere now, ears to throat to the broad rise of his chest. His glasses sit crooked with their lenses misted, and behind them his eyes shine stunned. His mouth, the beautiful foolish thing, keeps parting as if speech might come back if he only makes room for it, but all that gets out is breath and your name in pieces.

Last time you missed this. Or lost it to drink, to darkness, to the mind’s rotten habit of keeping the wrong souvenirs. Stupid, you think, with an ache so sudden it has no time to dress itself up. Stupid, stupid girl. Because Duncan in rapture is worth remembering with pious accuracy. The cut of his jaw slackened by pleasure. The hard male brutality of his size made defenceless by what your body has done to him. The little crease between his brows. The way his face looks too large for innocence and somehow full of it anyway.

And God, the way he comes. Thick, hot throbs, intimate enough to make you tighten again in little aftershocks. His cock kicks and spends, kicks and spends, with deep-gathering warmth that spreads in a slow, private heaviness. You hold still over him and let it happen. Let him put himself there, in you, with the same earnest violence he brings to everything he cannot say properly.

Dunk makes another sound when he feels you clench. Almost a whimper, though he would hate the word if he had enough brain left to object. His hand slides from your neck to the back of your head, looking for a place to rest. His fingers tangle clumsily in your damp hair.

“Lass,” he says, wrecked. Then softer, because the fierce part of it has passed away and left him with only the unbearably tender aftermath. “Jesus. Lass.”

"Duncan," you say, framing his cheeks. They are warm. "Sweetheart, you alright?" You brush the locks darkened with sweat off his forehead and feel a staggering urge to cradle him.

Duncan's very much not alright. He's shattered into a million pieces, but there is a sober part of him that knows he shouldn't cling. He should tell you, or better yet, carry you to the bathroom and let you tend to your business there, because the app said so. "A-aye," he breathes. "You ought to—" A thick swallow. "I'll help you to the—"

“No,” you say. “Stay a moment. C’mere. Sweet boy, come here, let me hold you.”

“But—”

“Nothing will happen if we stay here for two minutes. I’ll go, just—”

You settle over him, careful where the small swell of your stomach rests against his. Duncan lets you because resistance, in that moment, would require bones in places where he has none. He's not crying, maybe, or not enough to call it that, but his eyes look sore. You swipe beneath one with your thumb. Then the other. He looks away.

“Oh, don’t,” you murmur.

His jaw shifts under your palm. The shame of being scrutinised after the body has made a holy spectacle of itself is sitting plain on him, right there in the colour blotching his neck. You coax his face back anyway, gentle under the chin, and make him meet you. “Thank you,” you say.

Duncan blinks. “For what?”

“For that.” Your thumb makes a small pass over his cheek. “For listening.”

He cannot answer. Something in him tries and only finds the raw place where all the words have been burned out. You spare him the effort by lowering your face to his. Cheek to cheek first, then brow against temple, your mouth near enough his ear that your breathing goes into him. Slow. Deep. A little unsteady. He feels the ribs move around it. It wakes him up some.

His hand remembers it's alive and slides down your back. Over the borrowed heat of skin, down the knobs and shallow dips he now knows in one kind of dark and one kind of light. “You feelin’ better?” he asks.

You nod. Then make a small pleased sound, too close to a purr for Duncan’s remaining sanity. “Mm. Much.” His palm stops low and stays there. “Can you stay tonight?” you ask.

How about forever, Duncan thinks, with such dreadful ease his heart will need some proper scolding later. Aye, forever, if you asked it plain and did not laugh after. What he says is, “Aye.”

“Okay.”

Then you lift yourself off him with a small groan, and Duncan begins to loose you. The loss is horrible in its own right. His cock slips free, tired and overused and sad about leaving you, and he feels what follows: too much of himself spilling warm across his lower belly, dragging over skin and hair. He blushes so hard it ought to count as a second fever. He lies there softening, wet and creamed over, betrayed by what has been done and how much of it there is.

You look down only a second before your eyes flick back to his face. Duncan opens his mouth. “Don’t,” you say, faintly amused and too kind about it. “Don’t even start.”

You climb off the bed on unsteady legs. He means to sit up. Means to help. Means to stop lying there like an offering left out by mistake. But then you bend, gather his T-shirt from the floor and pull it over your head, and Duncan dulls.

It drops over you wrong and right. Too broad in the shoulders, too long on the thigh, collar slipping enough to show one side of your neck. His shirt. On you. With your hair messy and your legs bare and his come still leaking between them, no doubt, though he does not let his eyes go there because he has suffered enough for one evening and also possibly has not.

You disappear toward the bathroom. He remains in post-little-death rigor mortis with one hand frozen over his stomach because he has no idea whether touching anything makes the situation better or worse. The ceiling receives the full force of his stare.

When you come back you have a towel, wet wipes, and a glass of water. You kneel beside him, and the mattress wobbles under the new weight. Duncan grunts.

“Hey,” you say. “It’s all right.”

“It’s—” He swallows. “I can do that.”

“You gave me a whole bath. Least I can do.”

“That’s different.”

“How?”

He has no answer that doesn’t sound foolish, filthy, or too soft in the middle. You open the packet and pull out a wipe. The first touch is cold below his navel and makes his stomach suck itself in.

“Sorry,” you murmur.

“S’all right.”

You wipe his lower belly first. Your other hand steadies him at the hip, thumb resting in the hollow there as if it has any business knowing him. Duncan watches your face because watching your hand will kill him.

Then your fingers close round his cock to move him aside, and his breathing goes funny.

You pause. “All right?”

“A-aye,” he says.

You give him a look, then continue. Lift him with a care so simple it becomes unbearable, wipe along the softened length, the tender head, and the mess gathered at the base. His cock gives one poor twitch in your hand, more memory than ambition, and Duncan shuts his eyes because surely God has limits and he has found them.

“Dunk,” you say.

“I’m not doin’ anythin’.”

“No, I can see that.”

Your hand moves lower. Wipes his balls. Clinical, it should be clinical. It has the shape of nursing and the heat of being claimed in a way he has no defence against. He lies there, fists balled by his sides, while you clean him up as if his body is allowed to be inconvenient in your presence. As if the mess of him deserves tending.

“What’re ye doing?” he asks, helplessly.

You glance up. “Cleaning you.”

“Aye, I know that.”

“Then why ask?”

Because I don’t know what to do with being looked after, he thinks. Because if you keep touching me after, I’ll begin thinking after belongs to me too.

He says nothing. You spare him again.

Once the wipes are set aside, you pat him dry with the towel. Softer than necessary. He feels the careful press along his belly, the inside of one thigh, the last damp place near his groin. Then you toss the towel away, pass him the glass of water, and wait until he drinks.

“Yer so bossy,” he mutters into the rim.

“Correct.”

That gets a small laugh out of him, almost soundless. He drinks, hands the glass back, and you put it on the floor before lying down beside him. “Hi,” you say.

Dunk turns his head on the pillow. “Hi.”

Your mouth twitches. You look exhausted now that the urgency has left you. Washed-out and pleased and sick still, all mixed together unfairly. The T-shirt has rucked up at your hip. He fixes his eyes on your face.

“I can see you thinking,” you say.

“Aye,” Dunk says. “I’m thinkin’.”

He is thinking so much it has become a crowd. Whether this changes things. Whether you wanted him or only relief with a familiar face. Whether he is allowed to be happy. Whether you will regret it by morning. Whether he should apologise for some part of it and which part first. Whether asking to kiss your stomach now would ruin his life quicker than staying quiet. Whether you know his shirt on you has done damage no compensation can mend.

Before any of it reaches his tongue, you shuffle closer and nuzzle into him. Your nose presses under his jaw. One arm comes over his chest. “We can talk in the morning, hm?”

Duncan looks at the ceiling again. Breathes in. Breathes out. Lets his hand come up and settle over your back, where it has apparently always wanted to live.

“Aye,” he says. “Morning.”

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