I have seen less and less posts about Palestine each day, and I want to remind people that there is still very much a genocide going on and Palestine has continued to be attacked.
The number of casualties in Gaza has increased to 8,525 with 21,000+ injured
Hospitals in Gaza will run out of power today
Israel has once again cut Gaza’s communications
Israel has striked another refugee camp, killing 50+ and it was reported that children were carrying other injured children to get to safety
ouuh college roommate yuji..hes so sweet and so fucking hot :(( like you just cant help but be a bit of a pervert Because hes so big and sexy..cant help but get off whenever you hear him hook up..
✩꒱ for your ears only, roomie! ft. yuuji itadori .ᐟ
🏁 ꒰ ✩ smut ⋆ mdni ⋆ characters are adults. college roomate!yuuji itadori and fem!reader. college au. no curses. voyeurism, exhibitionism, masturbation, dirty talk, reader is a perv! ꒰ paper thin walls means jerking off to praise not meant for you. it also means your roommate can hear you getting off to him too. ꒱
oh don’t say this to me please don’t. do you think he knows you have a crush on him? like yuuji would notice you checking him out every morning when he comes back from the gym, pecs glistening with sweat, shorts low on his hips and cap backwards on his head. he always looks good in the mornings, brings you coffee and a cake pop too so not only is he hot but he’s extremely sweet to you.
like i think him just being your roommate as a concept is sexy… he cleans up after himself, cooks for you wednesday to thursday nights cause he knows you finish your lectures late on those days, he pays for laundry because the machines downstairs are expensive and he doesn’t mind. i think yuuji is such a good roomie that it turns you on, a man who takes care of himself and others and cares about his education too. also i think he never brings his friends from the football team over, and if he does he tells them to be quiet and makes them introduce themselves politely …
college yuuji isn’t too into casual sex. he’ll have a partner or a fwb and see them exclusively for however long they want him. you know their names, you see them in the kitchen sometimes before a night out or the next day while yuuji fries up enough eggs and bacon to feed the three of you. you’ve asked before if they’re his girlfriends or boyfriends and he always tells you that he’s waiting on something special.
you wonder if you could be that special for him and if you were — you wonder if he’d dirty talk you the way he does his sexual partners.
“there you go, taking this dick like you were made for it.”
you can hear itadori purr through paper thin bedroom walls as you spin webs of slick over your swollen clit — rubbing it mercilessly in tune with the dull thud of his bed against the barrier between you. you match your roommates pace, the switch between gruellingly slow grinds and thoughtful thrusts which you know hit deep. if you close your eyes, you can almost picture him above you, inside you, sinking into walls that welcome him back as though he had never left.
with one hand you spread your folds wide, strings of arousal breaking between them like ruined strands of glue. using the other, your fingers trace lower to press into your quivering hole — you picture yuuji’s stretch, how you’ll struggle to swallow his dick down to the hilt and how proud he’ll be when you do.
“fuck, don’t tell me you’ve had enough. you’re gonna take these inches just like the rest of me. you’re gonna be good, right? that’s what you are… good f’me. good for me.”
you can’t help the way you gush around your fingers at his voice. pulled tight in his throat by lust, gravely against a stranger’s ear to which you feel envious of. yuuji has always been a talker and you could genuinely listen to him for hours, but when he’s fucking someone just one wall away from you — muttering filthy verses into their skin, you know you won’t last very long.
“i can take it. i wanna take it, ‘ji,” you breathe to yourself, under warm breath and teary eyes. the stimulation your fingers provide as they nudge at your wet walls and g-spot — you imagine — hardly compare to the heavy press of yuuji’s cock against them. you know that you’d feel so full, feel his tip climbing up to your ribcage. you know you’ve never wanted someone so bad.
the pace next door quickens, the moans shared grow loud and uncontrolled and for a second — you think that he might be moaning for you. in your mind, you can taste the desperation in the curse words that slip from yuuji’s lips and layer over lewd squelching. the plap of your pussy ravaged by thick cock that throbs every time you clench.
“i want you to cum for me, baby,” he says distantly, fractured voice and slapping skin. “can you do that? cum for me?”
you nod and flex your fingers against every pleasure spot you know your rippling walls possess — imagining the new ones yuuji would discover if he were the one fucking you. “y-yes! i can… ‘m gonna… gonna cum for you ‘ji!” you shriek, muffling the pathetic sound with your shirt between your teeth. “fuck, yuuji!”
it hits when his hits, a tidal wave of lust in liquid form that rushes through your ears like hot blood and streams from your cunt in clear, perfect streams. the high pitched wail that claws its way out of you mimics itadori’s guttural groan while he finishes inside his partner.
“there’s so much cum, so fuckin’ much. wanna put it all inside you.” he chokes. “baby, oh my god.”
you bet it’s warm, viscous as it pools against their entrance. a sleepy thought you barely remember as the strength of your orgasm tugs you to sleep. a slumber where you’ll forget how loud you were when you came and how thin the walls really are.
because in the morning, there is no smell of bacon to rouse you, or hird plate set for breakfast nor is there a sweaty yuuji returning from the gym. its just him and tired eyes and a slanted smirk that makes your gut turn sideways as he carefully pries open your bedroom door — brown eyes dropping to the sticky fingers still buried between your thighs ( of course you’d fallen asleep fucking yourself ).
“i guess we both had fun last night, roomie,” yuuji beams. warm and sugary like molasses melted on a stove. “but what i’d really love to know is … if you were moaning my name to get a rise out of me or to get me to finally fuck you.”
end ! likes are appreciated, but just liking doesn’t do much on tumblr! to support and motivate myself and other writers, reply, reblog and comment if you'd like to see more!! — asks are open to thirsts and thoughts! join my taglist ! love you!
pope tipped his head back toward your apartment window, you reside at the second level of the building. it was almost as if the universe purposefully let him watch the shadow of your figure gyrating on something — without him being spotted by anyone. . . especially you.
pope guessed that you would most definitely hate him if you caught him outside, sitting in his car with the engine and lights turned off, peeking through the translucence of your curtains, like some kind of pervert. maybe he was.
really — it was like you were asking for it. for him. stupid, silly girl. you needed to be more mindful of your safety, or did pope have to do it for you? you depended on him so much, you could not do things on your own.
‘andrew, can you–’
‘andrew, how do you–’
‘andrew–’
you’re an extraordinary woman. everyone likes you, you have a good job, a normal childhood with a loving family, you have friends, and own a nice place in a safe neighbourhood. but truthfully, you could be naive and so so innocent.
or, you only acted like this with pope — big, strong, capable man who’d do absolutely anything for you. ask for anything and you’d get it the next day.
he knew you were still a virgin, you’d admitted it to him that one time he dropped you off after a date, and you were making out in his car. it was obvious with the excessive way you gasped when he maneuvered you to his lap with ease. you were vocal — moans, whimpers, whines — pope wanted to record your noises in secret so he could make himself cum to it anytime he pleased.
you were getting much louder as he touched you in places you’d never been touched intimately before, he’d touched you everywhere — except where you were drenched the most. you snapped out of your lustful haze when he flipped the back of the fabric of your dress up. before things got more heated, you forced yourself to pull away from his delicious mouth.
pope thought you looked positively sinful — the bows in your hair had come loose, your pupils blown wide, your lips were shiny with his saliva instead of your lipgloss, one of the sleeves of your dress had come off, exposing the smooth skin of your shoulder.
“i– i haven’t–” you started. you looked away, you could feel the heat of embarrassment gradually growing from the base of your neck. “i really haven’t done it before.”
jesus. you couldn’t even say ‘sex’ or ‘fuck’.
he reassured you that it’s fine, that you two didn’t have to do anything you weren’t prepared for yet.
he noticed that you’d left a stain on his jeans after he watched you climb up to your apartment. he couldn’t help but give it a little sniff before he dropped it into the washing machine along with his other clothes.
pope guessed that you were humping on something, maybe a pillow? a toy? no, you wouldn’t even walk past a sex store without getting embarrassed. but, he knew you must be thinking about the other night when he had you sitting on the tops of his thighs.
he could tell your movements were sloppy and out of rhythm, your pace was too fast like you’re in a rush to cum. were you really that pent up?
he was getting harder the longer he sat there, he didn’t want to jerk off in his car and make a mess. that’s disgusting.
he cussed himself out for not following through on the plan of breaking into your home and planting a bug. he wanted to hear what you sound like when you pleasure yourself. do you say his name? do you call out for him and beg for him to come and help you? poor thing, you don’t even know what you’re begging for.
however, he decided to wait until you finally invited him into your space. he’s not that sick. he’d let you tease him for now. for now, he would be a good boyfriend for you — yes, a good boyfriend as he stayed rooted to his parking spot and continued palming his bulge.
“would you like to come up? with me?” you asked so quietly anyone could miss it, but pope always paid attention to you.
he raised his eyebrows in mock surprise, you had no idea how long he’d been hoping for this to happen. it’s happening, he’s going to have you — in one way or another.
when you didn’t get a response from him, you rushed to add, “i– i want you t–to spend the night. . .” you were feeling brave. you wanted to feel his touch again, you wanted him closer. most of all, you needed him to ease the ache down there.
“okay.”
you watched as he took in your room — it was painted with pastels, decorated with lace and frills, shelves of trinkets and cute little figurines, bed filled to the brim with stuffed animals and other weird critters — he wondered if you’d ridden them too.
your room smelled sweet as you, like freshly baked pastries and there were notes of caffeine as well. he’s addicted.
you nervously wrung your hands together, craving for his approval. your boyfriend was a stickler for organisation and cleanliness, you hoped you did a good job.
“what do you think?”
pope turned to face you, he bit his bottom lip — you got a small peek of his crooked front tooth, a tiny smile appearing on his face. adorable.
“i like it, sweetheart. it’s very. . . you.”
you exhaled a breath of relief. “oh, thank goodness! i spent hours tidying up.”
“soooo–” you started again. “do you wanna wash up then–”
“then we head to bed.” he interjected, and seemed apologetic. . .enough. “sorry– we had a long night, didn’t we? and you spent the entire day cleaning up the place, right?”
you deflated a little bit, disappointed. you wanted him to continue where he left off that time before you ‘rudely’ interrupted him. but he’s right, you are tired.
you changed into your babydoll nightie and put on some knee-high socks. you walked out of the en suite and stopped in your tracks to find pope in bed, he’s naked waist up, and only in his boxers.
wow. you gulped, the action didn’t help much to soothe the sudden dryness of your throat. he’s so fit. oh my goodness, those thighs. the main subject of your desires for the past few nights.
pope snapped out of zoning out when he felt your presence. he had to mentally command himself from adjusting his dick in front of you. maybe if he didn’t move, you wouldn’t notice the lump that had grown there.
you’re quite the little minx. you had no idea what you’re doing to him. he’s a bad man, because he shouldn’t be finding you so fucking sexy right now. perhaps, when you felt more comfortable being more intimate with him he could ask you to get naked but leave the socks on.
he subtly fixed the comforter of the bed, hiding himself in the process. he patted the empty space beside him, “come to bed, sugar.”
you didn’t know pope didn’t sleep much, if he did he’s a very light sleeper. he deliberately didn’t succumb to it this time, though. he waited for more than half an hour to make you think he’d fallen asleep.
what he didn’t know was that you hadn’t fallen asleep, either. you were just pretending to be, hoping that sleep would take you at some point, instead of thinking about how horny you were at that moment.
but you were too nervous — your attractive, buff boyfriend was right beside you, and you’d soaked through your panties.
he’s lying on his back, and you were on your side, faced away from him. you suddenly felt him move, turning to your side as well. he nestled his body snugly against your back, the warmth of his skin made you feel hot all over. you almost squealed. you felt a solid sensation held against your ass.
then he adjusted his position again, he slotted a strong thigh in between your legs. he pressed the muscle firmly onto your clothed pussy. oh my god – please stop. no! i’m so wet!
you’re so turned on but this was so wrong. he’s unconscious! you made a move to distance yourself away but pope caged you in with his arms, trapping you.
he clenched his quadricep muscle, as if stimulating you. you bit back a whimper, you didn’t want to wake him up. then he did it again, and again and again.
you tried really hard to quell your cries of pleasure, you bit your lip so hard until it hurt. you covered your mouth with the palm of your hand, but it’s too much. he just kept going, you thought he wasn’t aware of what he’s doing — maybe he was just dreaming.
eventually, you lost the battle within you and started to rub your pussy on his thigh with gusto — your mind was clouded with pent up sexual frustration. the real thing was so much better.
you were already climbing toward your peak faster than you expected. you weren’t thinking straight anymore as you missed the part where pope freed you from his arms and gripped your side with a harsh hold, encouraging you.
your hands scrambled across the bed, searching for purchase. you felt something fluffy — one of your stuffed animals (it still smelled faintly of your pussy) — you decided to grab it and use it to cover your face to mask the sounds coming out of your mouth.
you bit the toy after one last roll of your hips. you were breathing hard and heavy, you shut your eyes in an attempt to calm yourself but you were so exhausted you surrendered to sleep.
you didn’t hear the low sigh pope released, you didn’t feel the stickiness of his semen coating your ass cheeks. ♡
tags: sammy bryant x detective fem!reader, non-linear southland seasons, timeline skip, cannon men objectifying women, men in general, tammi is also a warning, 18+ MDNI
notes: so, I started southland and needed to get this out there! so if this flops, I lowkey don't care cause this was for me, "when did you get hot" by sabrina carpenter is 100% sammy bryant coded, if you'd like to join my permanent tag list, please comment here, enjoy!
word count: 3.9k
The bullpen was unusually quiet for a Wednesday afternoon, the kind of lull that settled over the station when everyone was either out chasing leads or buried beneath enough paperwork to make conversation feel like extra work. The overhead lights filled empty spaces while phone calls and distant voices drifting in from another room. You sat at your desk with a half-finished report open and front of you, through your attention had long since wandered elsewhere.
Namely, to Sammy Bryant.
He, like your other fellow detectives, sat across the room hunched forward as he stared at a case file. His tie had been loosened hour ago, sleeves rolled up his thick arms, and there was a deep crease between his brows that hadn’t left all day. You weren’t even sure he’d touched the lunch he’d brought that morning.
It wasn’t necessarily unusual for him to be this way. Lately, nothing about Sammy looked easy, especially when his phone rang and rang and rang and rang and—
The flip phone next to him started buzzing loudly on his desk, and you watched the change happen before he ever reached for it.
A minute earlier, he’d been laser focused on the report in front of him, distracted enough that he’d nearly missed the call altogether. Then his eyes narrowed, almost like he knew exactly who was calling—he did—and whatever small amount of peace he’d managed to find over the course of his afternoon disappeared completely. Tension returned to his shoulders so quickly you almost winced as it settled like a familiar weight. You noticed that he didn’t look annoyed, because you of all people had seen Sammy annoyed way too many times. An annoyed Sammy usually came with a sarcastic comment, a muttered complaint, and a dramatic roll of his eyes that had always been capable of drawing a laugh from your chest.
Annoyed Sammy never looked as exhausted as the one across from you did as he answered the phone. He had the kind of expression people wore when they already knew how a conversation was going to end before it had even begun.
You lowered your gaze back down toward your report, not wanting him to catch you watching, though your ears remained turned toward the other side of the room. Eavesdropping was never intentional; at least that was what you told yourself.
But you were a detective.
Being nosey was part of the job description even if it wasn’t explicitly written in the fine print of your contract. It was simply difficult not to pay attention when Sammy spent so much of his day carrying the weight of everyone around him and so little time allowing anyone to carry any of his.
“Hey, Tammi,” he said after opening his phone, voice gentle like it always was.
You never understood how he managed to do it.
The response that crackled through the speaker wasn’t loud enough for you to make out every word, but it was loud enough that you caught the tone: sharp, frustrated, and accusatory. Whatever was going on, it clearly wasn’t any good.
Sammy listened for nearly thirty seconds before speaking again. “No, I know.” He paused, sighing quietly away from the speaker. “I know.” His eyes squeezed shut tightly, and the fingers of his free hand drummed once against the desk before curling into a fist. “No, that’s not what I said.”
Around him, the station continued moving as if nothing was happening, as if Sammy arguing with Tammi was a normal part of the schedule (which, in a way, it was). Nate looked unphased as he flipped another page of whatever he was looking through. Behind you, the printer whirred to life and spat out a few pages. The normal rhythm of the day continued uninterrupted while Sammy sat perfectly at his desk, absorbing every word coming through that receiver like a man standing in the rain with no intention of finding shelter.
You hated that.
People got upset; Tammi got upset. Relationships, romantic or not, were always known to at least have a few complications down the line.
What you hated was that their conversations never sounded like two people solving a problem together and always sounding like one person apologize for existing.
Sammy huffed. “Tammi, I was working a homicide. I let you know that I’d be late hours earlier to make sure that you were aware.” A pause. “No, I can’t just up and leave in the middle of a case just because you made dinner for once! Why would you even make that when you knew—”
His voice remained calm even if there was a detection of strain beneath it. He had the careful balancing act of a man choosing every word with surgical precision because one wrong phrase would turn an argument into a war. For the next several moments, he didn’t speak at all, simply listening to her go on and on while his expression grew tighter and tighter. When he finally leaned back in his chair, rubbing a hand across his face, you found yourself wondering when the last time had been that you’d seen him look genuinely happy.
The answer disturbed you because you couldn’t remember, and it made things worse when you were sure Sammy probably didn’t remember either.
His gaze drifted briefly across the room, hazel eyes landing on nothing in particular, and for just a second, you caught a glimpse that washed over into defeat. It made your heart hurt.
Sammy Bryant was one of the better guys you knew. He was polite, never throwing around crude remarks about women like the rest of the men of the LAPD seemed to do. He was loyal to a wife that seemed to loathe his existence while your boss was running around with another woman behind his wife that actually loved him. And while he might not have been the dictionary definition of hot with his stomach pudge that spilled over his belt and puffy cheeks that grew when he ate, you found him endearingly handsome, someone you wouldn’t mind taking to meet your parents.
Your lips tugged into a frown at the thought.
He remained frozen in place; eyes fixated on some invisible point on his desk. Slowly, he exhaled through his nose and rolled his chair backwards, hand now rubbing the back of his neck in smooth motions, his skin bunching under his thick fingers. A beat later, he pushed himself to his feet and disappeared toward the break room.
“I don’t know how he deals with her,” Nate muttered after briefly glancing up at you.
Your pen caught between your teeth. “He loves her.”
He snorted in response. “I think love flew out the window a long time ago. He deals with her cause she’s familiar. He needs to go find someone for a night.”
Your eyes rolled far into your head. “Sammy’s not that kind of guy, Nate. He’s loyal unlike the rest of you pigs.”
Across from you, Russell coughed your name loudly. “Tell us how you really feel.”
“Oh we’d be here all day if you let me,” you said with a large smirk.
“Amen, sista,” Lydia called out as she passed.
Nate finally looked at you for more than a second. “So, you’re saying you’d rather have our Sammy boy here miserable for the rest of his life with that woman?”
“That’s not what I said,” you shot back, eyes going back down to your report.
By the time Sammy returned, he was carrying a fresh cup of coffee; you’d lost count if that was his third or fifth. The cup joined his growing collection of bad coping mechanisms as he settled heavily into his chair once more, fingers reaching for a case file despite the fact that he hadn’t even finished the last one.
“You’re gonna give yourself a stomach ulcer,” you called out, eyes still cast downward.
He blinked up at you. “What?”
You pointed your pen toward the coffee. “That.”
“Oh.” A tired laugh bubbled. “Pretty sure I’m already past that point.”
“How’s the missus?” Nate asked, earning him a glare from you.
Sammy shrugged indifferently. “Same old, same old. Feels like lately everything I do pisses her off.” He started listing with his fingers. “I’m working too much, but if I’m home, I’m not helping enough.” Another finger. “If I’m helping, I’m doing it wrong.” Another. “If I miss a call because I’m working, it’s because I’m shaking up with woman; or, if I answer the call while I’m working, she gets mad because I should be more focused.”
You truly wondered if he was going to run out of fingers.
Nate let out a low whistle. “If you’re shaking up while I’m driving, let me know next time, man.”
At least his partner was able to paint a small smile on Sammy’s face, his cheeks pushing up to partly hide his eyes.
“You ever try not trying so hard?” you found yourself asking before you could stop yourself, and even Sammy looked shocked that you had. “Don’t give me that look, Bryant.”
He shook his head. “I’m not giving you a look.”
“You’re definitely giving me a look.” You pushed back slightly from your desk. “Look, if trying so hard gets you in trouble, what will not trying look like? Instead of giving your all to a woman who seems to not appreciate it, why not put that energy into yourself?”
“You always hand out life advice like a shrink, L/n?” Nate asked before you threw him a middle finger.
Sammy stayed quiet, almost as if were mulling over your advice. He clicked his pen a few times before setting it down.
“What if it doesn’t work?” he asked, a bit quieter. “What if it all just stays the same.”
You tilted your head. “Then I guess it’s time for a bigger change until something sticks.”
“Did you ever have to change?”
A loud snort flew from your nose. “How do you think I ended up here in this dump?”
“Hey!”
“Shut it, Moretta,” you snapped. “LA is a dump, and you know it.” A sigh pressed from your lungs. “My last job wasn’t doing too much for me, so I tried a bunch of different things until I found something that worked.”
Sammy looked entirely unimpressed. “Being a homicide detective in Los Angeles was it for you?”
“It was.” You went back to scribbling something on your report before standing from your chair. You lightly tapped him with the stack of papers as you passed. “You’ll find yours soon enough.”
You didn’t know, but Sammy’s eyes tracked you until you disappeared around the corner, his chest blooming with a warmth he hadn’t felt in years. When he looked over to Nate, the man was already wiggling his eyebrows at him.
“Think that’s her signal man. She wants youuuuuu,” he teased, eyes alight with humor.
Sammy scoffed. “She does not. Knock it off.”
Nate held up his hands in surrender. “Whatever floats your boat. Just saying she won’t be available for much longer. Not when she looks like that.”
Before Sammy could really think about it, Nate’s phone buzzed. His partner jumped to his feet and nodded his head toward the door. Sammy scrambled to his feet, hands grabbing at his suit coat on the way out.
But even as they rushed down the freeway, your words were stuck in his head.
_______________________
The call was nothing special, and by the time you arrived on scene, patrol had already secured the area, the initial statements had been collected, and all that remained was the tedious process of sorting through details. You knew this was going to be the kind of case that filled far more paperwork that excitement, and as you climbed out of your car into the hot California sun with your badge clipped to your waist and a clipboard tucked under one arm, you found yourself mentally calculating how long it would take before you could reasonably justify grabbing lunch from the Mexican stand on the way back to the precinct.
Sweat trickled down your back and made your blouse stick slightly to your skin as you approached the cluster of officers gathered near the patrol cars. Most of the officers loitering around were unfamiliar faces since enough transfers and promotions had shuffled people around that it felt like every week brought someone new in during the past several months. You barely glanced at them, wanting nothing more to do than get this case translated into paperwork to do at your desk with decent AC.
But then, your attention snagged on a familiar laugh, and the sound stopped you before your brain caught up. For a second you simply stood there, gaze searching through the gaggle until your eyes landed on the source once before looking away.
Every muscle in your body went tense because there was absolutely no way that the man laughing was Sammy Bryant. You took another look, and then another before you finally let your eyes roam over him.
That was definitely Sammy Bryant, with the same brownish-red hair, the same crooked-toothed smile, the same easy way he carried himself when talking to people. That man was the same man you’d spent years knowing and silently pining after.
Yet, at the same time, somehow, he wasn’t the same man at all either.
You stared at him all dressed in his uniform.
The sight wasn’t that jeering; you knew he’d transferred to patrol almost a year ago. But it was the fact that it fit him differently than his suits ever did. Where his button-up shirts always pushed out across his stomach before disappearing into his pants, the blue fabric ran almost loose and straight down below his utility belt, soft plush around his hips completely gone. His face also looked leaner; jaw more defined every time his neck stretched just slightly. His arms bulged in places that hadn’t before, and instead of fat around his biceps, your eyes traced the distinct muscle lines instead. Even his skin held a darker tint from being outside more, a large comparison to the whiter shade he had while the majority of his time had been spent at a desk.
In simple terms, he looked absolutely delicious.
However, that wasn’t what kept your attention.
Plenty of people lost weight; plenty of people changed how they looked; plenty of people seemed to be happier after a big change.
The thing that nearly knocked the breath out of you was how happy he looked.
Long gone was the crease that you used to trace when it showed between his brows. His shoulders weren’t hunched. His smile actually reached his eyes. Even standing under the hotter-than-hell sun in a patrol uniform dealing with a tedious call, he somehow looked mentally lighter than you’d ever seen him, like somebody had finally removed a weight he’d been carrying for years.
“And then, I told him to drop the gun, and you know what he did? He fell to the ground and then dropped it,” Sammy’s voice boomed through the small group, earning a few chuckles from his fellow officers.
“Hey, Bryant, you gotta bomb ass snack detective staring at you,” one of them said. “Did you get a girlfriend and forget to tell us?”
Sammy’s brow pinched in confusion, and his head snapped over in your direction. Unfortunately, you weren’t fast enough to look away in time and continued to stare right at him. For a split second, you wondered if he’d pretend to not notice and go back to joshing with his friend. But then, his face lit up like a Christmas tree.
He said your name so loudly and genuine that your heart literally fluttered. “Hey!”
He excused himself from the group without hesitation and started toward you; the officers sent out a few cat calls and jumbled garbage, but Sammy looked like a man on a mission. The closer he got, the more your cheeks flushed under his sunglasses-covered eyes.
The patrol uniform should not have been doing whatever it was doing. His sleeves were tight around his biceps. His radio rested against his shoulder and wavered with every step. His hand—left hand you noted was missing a silver band—reached up and tugged the sunglasses off his face and tucked them in a slat between buttons.
Above all, your brain stopped functioning when Sammy stopped in front of you, arms raising like he wanted to bring you in for a hug before dropping back down to his thighs.
“I didn’t know you’d been called,” he said, grin still wide as ever. “Thought this’d be handed off to Gil or Ben.”
When you failed to say anything, still staring up at him with intense eyes that made him want to melt, his smile dropped a bit. “You okay? Did someone say anything to you?” His eyes glanced over toward the group. “Those guys were just joking—”
“Bryant.”
He blinked rapidly. “Yes?”
You raked your eyes over him for good measure. “When did you get so fucking hot?”
As the world slowed down around you, for one second you seriously considered throwing yourself into traffic during busy hour. An officer who had hear chocked on his coffee. When Sammy seemed stunned before he burst out laughing. His head dropped back, and the noise was loud enough to draw attention from half the squad nearby.
“That’s one way to say hello,” he snickered.
You shoved weakly at his shoulder, briefly feeling the tight muscle underneath. “Just wasn’t expecting Sammy Bryant turned Adonis. I’m guessing patrol has been good to you?”
He smiled shyly. “Just doin’ what you told me to. Did a lot of changing before I found something that stuck.”
“I’m glad,” you breathed through a wide smile. “You look good, Sammy.”
He tisked and shook his head. “I think I recall you saying hot specifically?”
“I think you recall incorrectly, officer. Maybe need to get your hearing checked if you want to continue field work.”
From behind you, someone shouted your name, causing you to turn away from Sammy for a split second. Your partner waved you over with a head tilt toward the body on the ground. You held up your pointer before looking back at Sammy.
“Duty calls, I guess,” you muttered. “But it was good to see you.”
You took one step back before Sammy’s hand jutted out and caught your forearm between his large fingers. He had a nervous look on his face, tongue peeking out to wet his lips.
“We both have work, but uh, would you want to argue over what you called me during dinner?”
Your head bobbed before you could stop it. “Hope your phone still has my number. Call me when you’re off shift.”
A blush crept up his neck. “I will.”
“Then I will see you very soon, Officer Bryant.”
Sammy couldn’t help but laugh softly as you sauntered away, hips swaying under your dress pants that—in his opinion—hugged your figure in the best ways. When he turned back toward his buddies, the whole lot hooting and hollering at him, he couldn’t wipe away the smile that spanned his face entirely.
He’d missed you during this season of finding himself, your words always ringing in his ears as he stopped arguing, as he signed the divorce papers, as he chose to leave detective work and join patrol, as he walked over to say hi after not seeing you for close to a year, and finally as you blurted you thought he was hot even if you denied it right after.
Sammy missed out on a lot of things, but this time, he wasn’t going to miss out on you.
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“Fuck, Sammy,” you whined as his lips pressed deeply into your neck.
Dinner had been a wonderful ordeal; almost right out of a dream you’d almost given up on. Sammy had picked you up, brought you flowers, paid for the meal, and offered to walk you back up to your door.
Which, in hindsight, you should have known it wouldn’t take long for you to invite him inside or even longer for him to crowd you into the nearest wall and have his way with you.
Your fingers shook as they unbuttoned his shirt one by one before they tentatively grazed across his now-visible abs. The sound you pulled from his lips—a small whimper—made you crave him even more. While you were busy mapping his body under your palms, Sammy was busy attacking your jaw and neck, tongue lapping to taste your perfume you’d sprayed hours earlier.
“Do you wanna give up and say that you think I’m hot now?” he teased in a hot breath. “Or should I cuff you and get my confession that way? Would you like that? Couldn’t ever do this when I was a detective.” He groaned loudly when your hands squeezed his pecks. “Didn’t imagine I could have you like this.”
The idea of him placing the cold, metal bracelets around your wrists shouldn’t have turned you on as much as it did, but just thinking of Sammy that way had you tightening your legs around his hips.
Drunk on the feeling of him, you couldn’t help the next sentence that flowed from your loose lips as your head thunked against the wall.
“Could have,” you panted. “Wanted you even back then, but you were married, and I’m not a homewrecker. Always thought you were handsome, Sammy.”
He froze against you; his face tucked into your shoulder. You took the moment to lower yourself back down to the floor and place your hands on his face, fingers gently pulling him away so you could look into his confused eyes.
“What?” he asked. “What do you mean you wanted me back then.”
You licked your lips. “Sammy, you were happy, and I—”
“I wasn’t happy,” he interrupted. “Far from it. Only fucking time I was happy was when I got to see you at work, sweetheart.”
Your eyes fell down to your shoes. “Sammy.”
He pressed his forehead against yours. “Thought about you all the time,” he whispered. “You were always there. Been kicking myself for letting you slip through my fingers. I really thought that when I could get in shape and get in a better place, I could have you; I could deserve you.”
That had you looking back up at him with a frown. “No, Sammy, no.” Your hands dragged down his front and settled under the flaps of his shirt against his warm skin. “That’s not—that was never it. I was never going to overstep, but Sammy, please understand it took everything against myself to not jump you in the bullpen.”
In that moment, a wave of humiliation washed through you, but Sammy looked absolutely delighted at your confession. He dipped back down and pressed his lips back against yours. You quickly reciprocated it and opened your lips to let his tongue dive into your mouth. Air was sadly a necessity, causing you to pull back panting.
“So,” you gasped. “You said something about handcuffs.”
Sammy smirked wildly, and in the next moment, you were squealing as he hoisted you over his shoulder, stalking to your bedroom with intent.
Time for naked twister you reasoned. The plot thickens.
content warning: needy!reader, fem!reader, mention of periods/menstrual cycle, dacryphilia, proofread by a very sleepy, crampy girl, daddy kink, use of pet names, sammy’s obsessed with his wife <3
⋆˚✿🍒𐙚⋆˚ minors, do not interact, please ⋆˚✿🍒𐙚⋆˚
sammy x crybaby!wifey who weeps when his cock keeps slipping out of her during sex :(
it’s a been a long week. your body is completely exhausted from your incoming period; shaky and drained, your emotions totally heightened. all you wanted was for sammy to come home and just… lay into you– like really give it to you before you both cuddled up and slept the wednesday away.
dishes were cleaned, leftovers away, the house locked up for the night by the time sammy gets home. it was a flurry of movement throughout your warm, amber lit home. standing from the couch, you curl and uncurl your toes excitedly as the door jingles with sammy’s key.
you can hear the rush of blood in your ears, tongue feeling swollen as the nerve endings on your lobes roar to life. itchy, itchy, itchy. your body is yearning for sammy as you try and cover your pout.
stepping into your shared home, sammy finally sighs in relief at the warm vanilla scent & the sight in front of him. his girl, his sweet baby, standing at the couch waiting for him, cozy sweats & t-shirt making her the picture of comfort.
fuck, he feels too far away already. his green eyes catch on the slight shudder of your body at the sight of him, too.
“hi baby” he tiredly supplies, dropping his keys in the bowl by the door and slipping his shoes off. truthfully, it takes everything in you not to fall to your knees and help him. not to press your cheek against the side of his knee and hug at his calf while he scratches at your scalp. another shudder, his poor baby.
“what’s goin on honey?” sammy coos, voice light and airy as he makes his way over to you. his large palms cradle your cheeks, his own red from being overworked.
you don’t want him to worry, it’s a torment to think that you have caused him more stress just because you’re feeling needy. he doesn’t need more expectations, right?
so you nod and plaster a smile, nuzzling into his hand with a cheery “‘m okay! just really missed you sammy!”
it’s not a lie, you did really miss him. especially when you were wearing his t-shirt and bucking into your fingers unsuccessfully an hour earlier. there was no weight, no hold on top of you that sammy’s thick body always provided.
his thumb runs softly under your eye as he agrees, “okay,” soft and sweet. and the rest of the night goes without a hitch.
dinner, though you are essentially sitting on top of him, is finished pretty quickly.
because sammy sees right through you, always has. it’s no surprise that you, very quickly, find your knees touching your earrings only 15 minutes later.
and it’s filthy. sammy’s tummy warm against the backs of your thighs as pushes in slowly, your toes once again curling and uncurling. his hand stabilizes his lower back a bit, as he wraps the other underneath your knee. “keep ‘em spread. atta girl. good girl, baby.”
it’s all so much, the rocking of your gorgeous wooden bedframe against the wall, the little bead of sweat sliding down sammy’s forehead, the incessant squelching of you & him, the sound of puffy, soft skin slapping. if you weren’t so fucked out, you’d reach out to crush him to your chest in a hug.
his lips are bitten, gel loosening out of his hair as it first happens. “so wet, too fuckin’ wet baby hang on, ah fuck.” he babbles, trying to slip his cock back through your folds as you whine. your chest feels so heavy, the room feeling smaller as you dig your nails into his planted wrist; needing him to feel stable.
he finds his rhythm again, wet plaps & wiggled hips pressing up into your belly. both hands underneath your knees, you’re a total mess, whining and squealing “sammysammysammy” as his speed picks up. puffy cunt sucking him in, binding him to you.
sammy’s own whines pick up “fuck, doin’ so good, so so good mmmm” as he spreads you further. again, the loss of his thick cock causes a loud gasp to escape you.
this time, he wordlessly pumps himself quickly, tapping the tip against your weepy clit before stuffing himself back in as you claw at him.
gritted teeth, you’re almost too loud as you beg “sammy don’t stop, fuckin’ me so good sammy please!” your eyes squeeze shut, so so close as he yanks you forward with two strong hands on your hips. the metal of his silver watch digs into your skin as he moves to lay on top of you, sandwiching your legs between your torsos.
again, the dreaded, agonizing feeling of loss. his cock comes sliding out, and sammy initially chuckles before he looks up at you. it’s the final straw before a long, menstrual cycle.
you’re let out a hysterical cry, hands shaking as you desperately try and stuff him back inside of you. chanting in bratty delirium “no no no!”
he belongs inside, want him inside, need him inside.
“b-baby, hey, hey. whatsa matter princess?” he stops, sitting back up to pull you up with him. that same, comforting coo that makes you feel even emptier right now. you don’t move though, dumb and needy for your man. your man.
“oh god sammy i just fucking need you” you sob, having sammy help sit you up for more air in your lungs.
lightly blowing cold air on your face, he nods along to your sobbing complaints and fights the urge to tuck at his cock. a part of him loves when you cry, and it’s especially doing it for him that you’re crying over a 3 second loss of his cock in your cunt.
frantically you weep, “it’s just been such a long day, and i’m getting my period, and your shift is so long, and i’ve missed you so much, and i’m so tired, and i wanna cum so bad, and i want you to cum in me, and my heart hurts i want it so bad, and i-“
shushing you, sammy’s heart nearly shatters at your need. it’s so basic, so primal, it feels like your chemical make-up could’ve never existed without him filling you every. single. day.
“lotta big feelings, it’s alright, okay i’ll help you. let your sammy help you.” he tuts, laying you back down as your hands stretch to grab him. “too far sammy” “okay, okay, i got you. i have you, ‘s okay.”
sitting back on his haunches, sammy’s cock stands so proudly that you can barely look at it. sniffling and whining, you don’t even recognize yourself as you plead “oh god sammy please” “shhh, ‘m comin, it’s all good”
pulling your hips flush against his, your thighs are thrown over his own as he slides in again. chubby fingers pumping the base until he’s seated so comfortably in you that you’re huffing in relief.
slow fucking, that’s sammy’s favorite. the kind where he can feel the intrinsic chill you get when his tip kisses your cervix. the kind where he can hear your huffs and pouty sobs from how good it feels from the movement and simple knowledge that sammy is as close as he physically can be.
“never gonna slip out again, okay?” he huffs pushing into you in a grind, his hands pressing your arms down into your sides as you tremble.
there’s something so special about your husband seeing your need to let go, and leaving no room for you to do anything but take it. take him. the thought alone has both of you spiraling.
mushy & sweet, like your love for sammy, your cunt swallows him. over and over and over. and sammy finds himself collapsing over top of you. tummy pressed into yours, big biceps wrapping around your head to cradle you as you wail.
“im givin it- i’m givin it to you baby. fuck! milkin’ me dry, ‘s all for you, ‘s all my love” he huffs, his own eyes squeezing shut as he whispers into your ear.
soon the sobs turn to near screams, your hand almost pounding on his back in pleasure. “i love you! sammy, sammy i love you!”
his hips stutter, speeding up his thrusts as his mouth hangs open. breath after breath, his cock keeps coming “i love you baby. never leaving this sweet pussy. never ever, oh my god. full ‘a me forever i promise, always gonna keep you filled up. c’mon baby cum, cum for daddy, that’s it.”
sammy’s gentle voice sends you over the edge, a slobbery open mouth sob leaving your lips as you clutch him closer to you. “that’s it. ‘s good, so good. oh fuck, i’m cumming, so wet.. fuck-fuck!” he shudders, spilling into you and laying his full weight on top of you.
he doesn’t dream of pulling out, just slides over, still connected to you as you snuggle into his chest. sweaty hands moving hair out of your eyes as he smiles, “my good baby, i love you. ‘s that good, you feel better?” but you’re too blissed out to speak. falling asleep in his arms with a smile, finally feeling satiated <3
Summary: Your husband, Sammy Bryant, comes home for his lunch break. The two of you find a way to make time for food and a little extra ;)
Warnings: 21+, established relationship, big dick! husband!Sammy, hypersexual! wife!reader, size kink, fingering f!recieving, oral m!recieving, unprotected piv, dacryphilia, forced orgasm, pet names (including bunny, baby, etc), pussy pronouns, lots of fluff
Word Count: 2.7k
acab btw
⋆⊱༻𖥸༺⊰⋆
"Sammyyyy!!" You cheer as he comes through the front door, you rush over to him with your arms out and he wraps you up instantly.
"Hi, bunny." He signs, relief washing over him the same moment he feels you in his arms. You climb up him until your legs around around his work belt. "Hold on, hold on, let me get this off." He hoists you up higher with one arm while the other unlatched his work belt and sets it on the entry table.
"That's better." You hum, situating yourself on his hips much better now. You pepper his face with kisses as he walks further into your shared home. "I missed you so much, handsome. So happy you came to visit." You coo between kisses, fidgety in his hold as need settles between your legs.
"I missed you too baby." He returns the sentiment, rubbing your back as he walks you over to the couch. "Wanna eat? Only got a few minutes." He suggests and you nod excitedly. You slowly slide out of his hands, pushing him back to sit in the couch before you scurry off to the kitchen.
You fix him a plate of your homemade meal and grab a cold can of cola before returning to the living room. You can't help your grin as you set everything down on the coffee table in front of him.
"Here, handsome." You chirp, skipping around the table and hopping down in the spot next to him. You lean in close to his side, kissing up his neck because you just can't help yourself. He smells so good, like his cologne mixed with a little sweat from the work day. It drives you crazy.
"Thank you, bunny. This looks amazing - Hey, that tickles!" Sammy nudges you away from his neck when you get carried away. You're blushing and grinning at him as he reaches for the plate, taking a big bite and moaning in satisfaction after swallowing it down. "That's delicious, m'so lucky, - you spoil me bunny." He coos, leaning over to peck your lips thankfully, before taking another bite.
Your hands roam over his chest, fingers dancing between his button to feel the warm skin beneath. It makes your thighs clench together, you scoot closer to hip, one of your knees overlapping his thighs as you kiss his face and neck.
"Bunny, I have to eat," Sammy groans, clearly conflicted by your touch. "Fuck-" He hisses when your knees presses into the fat bulge growing in his slacks.
"I know, Sammy, just wanna make you feel good." You whisper, kissing his jaw and replacing your knee with your hand. You stroke him over his slacks, enjoying how much of him there is to touch and lean against.
Your husband is a stout man and it does something to you. You love every inch of him, from his chubby belly to his chubby cock. You shiver at just the memory of how full he makes you, it makes you whine with need. You've already soaked through your silk shorts just by rubbing your thighs together.
Sammy notices how worked up you're getting, he can always tell when you need him. He quickly shovels a few more bites in while the food is hot before setting the plate back in the coffee table. When he leans back he pulls you into his lap, big hands on your hips as your straddle him.
"C'mere, baby." He coos, finding your lips at the same time he grinds himself between your legs. He groans from the friction and you cry out. The small sensation feels like such a relief, Sammy works you up so much sometimes you wonder if you're spelled, you just need him all the time.
It's not always sexual, you married the man for gods sake. But you can't deny that his special touch in the bedroom drives you just as crazy as his crooked smile and round cheeks. He's your Sammy, and you want to feel him fill you up.
You reach between your bodies, frantically ripping Sammy's slacks open. He kisses your jaw and caresses your body all over, giving you goosebumps despite how warm he is against you. When you finally free his length your hand is instantly wrapped around his wide shaft.
"God, Sammy, I love you so much - need it, need it!" You whine, wiggling in his lap as you're overcome with need. You guide his tip to your clothed entrance, using his mushroom head to slid your shorts aside.
"Woah, woah baby, not yet. You know that. Have you stretched yourself yet today?" Sammy grabs your wrist to slow you down, his other hand cupping your cheek as you pout at him.
"No..." You huff, wanting to skip the prep part and just have him split you open. At this point you're not sure you care. But you know Sammy does, he's always so dedicated to making sure you're ready to take all of him. Sometimes it takes all his fingers and an orgasm before he can pound you the way he likes without bringing you to tears - and he never minds. "But I don't care, we can just grab the lube and..."
"No, baby, you know better than that." Sammy shakes his head and it makes you pout further. You're just so desperate for him, it's getting more and more unbearable by the second. "Take your bottoms off and I'll get you ready, hurry." He encourages, guiding you off his lap.
You stand up, giggling with excitement. Sammy grabs a few more bites of his food as you undress from the waist down. You swirl your own fingers over your clit as soon as you're exposed, biting your lip to stifle your noises as the relief sets in. It's not enough but it'll keep you from crying for now.
"Bunnyyy - c'mere," He huffs, losing his breath at the sight of your slim fingers swirling around in your wet, messy, pussy.
"Finish your food, I'll start." You encourage, trying to stand up straight in front of him. Sammy picks up his plate with haste and it makes you blush. You place your non working hand on his shoulder for balance as you sink a finger into your dripping cunt. The twinge of relief makes you whiny which makes it nearly impossible for Sammy to control himself.
"Do another bunny, I know you can take it, I hear how wet you are." Sammy begs of you. When you listen however it has him at his wits end. He's right though, your second finger glides in along with your first with no resistance. "Good girl, such a pretty pussy." He whines, reaching for you but you redirect him to his plate. He coughs on his food when you start fucking yourself with real force and speed.
"Hurry up and eat, need your fingers instead." You tell him when you become impatient. He scarfs down the remnants on his plate before tossing it on the table. He shoves his slacks down around his hips, grabbing your arms and dragging you all the way back to him. You slide between his legs instead of crawling into his lap and his shivers.
"Baby, you don't gotta do that." He pets your hair and tilts his head.
"I want to." You assure him, grabbing his length with both of your hands before wrapping your mouth around his tip. He bucks up accidentally, forcing himself to the top of your mouth as distorted sounds escape him.
"M'so sorry, baby - didn't mean that, fuck, keep going - please!" He grunts out, petting your head as his lays back on the couch.
You swirl your tongue around him, bobbing up and down a few times at a comfortable depth. Sammy whines and writhes under your touch, you can see him resisting the urge to take over and fuck your mouth. He knows he'd have you gagging and choking and you'd love it but he just doesn't have time to indulge that far.
So, he lets you sputter for a few moments, enjoying the show you put on for him while you have your fun. When he can't take it anymore he grabs your arms and drags you back to his lap. You straddle his thick thighs as he guides you to slide your slick pussy along his shaft.
He slides a hand between your legs, his blunt finger tips teasing your entrance. You whimper and shift down against him, begging for more.
"You're so wet, bunny. She needs me, doesn't she?" Sammy asks earnestly, kissing your lips and teasing you with his tongue as he sinks a finger into you. You whine and nod your head to agree with him.
"Your pretty little pussy is dripping for my chubby cock all the time, huh? She wants to be stretched wide, hm?" He continues, fucking you faster so you're practically incoherent just off one finger.
"Could take my bunny's pussy anytime I want 'cause she's always ready for me?" Sammy sinks a seconds finger into you, dripping down his own shaft at the sounds you make.
"Oh, god, Sammy! I love your words but please - please stop teasing me, gimme your cock!" You beg and plead, wiggling your hips around and digging your fingers into his shoulders.
"Think you can take me already? Without being properly prepped?" He looks up at you with curious eyes.
"Yes! Sammy, give it to me, please!" You go on with your whining and he finds it so endearing. He loves that his wife can't get enough of him, that she's so eager even knowing that it'll be too much. He's the same way with you, risking returning late just to get a good orgasm out of you.
"C'mon, baby," He instructs, slipping his fingers out of you and grabbing your hips to pull you closer. You go eagerly, holding his shoulders for balance as you hover over him. He guides his tip to your soaking entrance and you whimper, instantly shifting for more. "Hey, hey, go slow!" Sammy urges, sounding so worried about you.
You don't head his warning, forcing his tip and a little more inside your cunt. Sammy shudders and digs his fingers into your hips, clearly struggling to hold back. You're a whiny mess, the burn of the stretch egging you on. It hurts so good.
"Oh god, yes Sammy!" You cry out, writhing uncontrollably. Every thrust you manage to stuff a little bit more of him inside of you, so desperate and determined to take all of him.
The stretch has tears stinging in your eyes, stealing the air from your lungs, leaving you an absolute mess on top of him. Sammy holds your flushed face in his hands, his own pleasure all over his face as he watches you struggle to get all of him in.
"So, so beautiful bunny! Please be careful - don't hurt yourself, - ah! Fuck!" He tries to slow you down but your fight back, slamming yourself down with all your might.
You're too impatient to wait for your pussy to stretch gradually, instead you grind your swollen clit against the sparse happy trail on Sammy's lower belly, where his shirt rode up, to help. He's a sputtering mess, trying to get you to calm down and breathe for a moment.
It doesn't work, you move too quickly and with too much determination, he can't tame you. He holds you close and tight, kissing you anywhere he can reach, hands groping your ass for comfort.
"Mm, love you so much, bunny. Love the way you bounce on me, so so pretty." Sammy praises, petting your hair and face, nails down your back as he kisses the whimpers out of you.
"Fuck me back, Sammy, please!" You beg, kissing his lips to seal your request.
"I can't baby, it'll hurt," He argues gently but you just won't hear it.
"I don't care! It's not enough, I need all of you - please, fuck me back!" You continue on, practically hysterical by this point.
"I got you, baby." He huffs, wrapping his arms under yours and bringing you to on his chest. "I'll give you what you need, don't worry." Sammy uses his leverage to bounce you off of him as he starts thrusting up into you.
"That's why you married me isn't it?" Sammy groans into your neck. "Cause I know how to take care of you, I know what my bunny needs." His lips trace down your neck, hands rough and demanding on your hips.
"You take such good care of me, baby." You whine back to him, your voice cracking with tears.
His pace is relentless, just like what you begged for. The pain echos through you, along with the the tingles of pleasure that follow. You start to wonder if you've become a masochist for your husband's cock.
He fucks you until you're a blubbering mess, sniffling through the moans bellowing out if you. Sammy and you work together to keep a steady pace, he kisses the tears from your cheeks and holds you close.
"Let it out, baby, I know, I know." He coos at you, caressing your legs and your back to soothe you. "I can feel you getting close, bunny." He whispers, nudging your face with his nose. You whimper back, intimidated by the pressure building in your belly.
"S'too much, Sammy. You come!" You insist, making Sammy scoff at you.
"You must be fucked silly on my big fat cock, huh? Thinking I'm gonna come before you, ridiculous." He shakes his head, holding your jaw to lift you away from his chest where you lay.
He holds you up right, his free hand reaching for your swollen clit. You try to bag his nimble fingers away but he's too strong, circling your nerves so expertly you start shaking.
"What makes you think I'm going to let you not come? - you become such a dumb bunny when I give every inch of me." His fingers and fat cock work you to the edge quicker than you can register.
"Sammy," You whisper, your body going limp in his hold as your orgasm bursts through you. Your eyes roll back in your head, your husband's strong hands hold you up as he pounds you through it.
"That's it, baby, - fuck! You grip me so good, - gonna make me come too." He grunts out, his hips stuttering as you start to come down. You might as well be a ragdoll as Sammy fucks himself through his orgasm. He's so deep it makes you hiccup every few thrusts from the depth, you can feel him in your belly and he loves it. He spends a few extra thrusts making sure his come stays deep inside you.
When he's finished making a mess of you and slowly eases his half hard cock out of you, kissing you the whole time as a distraction. He scoops your limp body up in his hands and lays you down on the couch, kissing your face and lips as you return to earth.
He guides your panties back up your legs and over your plump ass, tapping a cheek for encouragement once you're covered.
"Love you so much, Sammy. - You felt so good." You mumble, almost incoherent but he can understand you. His gentle hands are on your face, making sure now hair is out of place.
"Love you too, bunny." He whispers, covering you up with a blanket and kissing your forehead. "Don't clean up, okay? I still wanna be inside you when I get home." He requests, nuzzling your nose.
"Wouldn't think of it, Sammy." You hum, cuddling his large hand.
"Gotta get back to work now, baby. - Thank you for lunch." He kisses you again, hesitating to pull his arm away from you.
"Anyyytime." You sing, winking at him even though your eyes burn.
"Get some rest for me. I'll see you so soon." He coos, pecking you gently as you start to get drowsy. You hear him say other sweet things, how he loves you and can't wait to come back home to you.
You doze off, the adrenaline gone now so you're exhausted. The feeling of being so full of your husband even as he returns to work follows you into your dreams.
☼︎ 1.5 k celebration fic for... sammy bryant ☼︎ based on these asks ☼︎
summary ☼︎ after getting cheated on and treated as if he was terrible in bed, your boyfriend sammy has no idea just how good he always makes you feel. how do you remedy that? by having him tell you how good he is while you ride him of course!
cw ☼︎ afab!reader, talks of insecurities/infidelity, established relationship, reassurance af! dry humping for like a second, kissing :3, reverse cowgirl, unprotected p in v, creampie heals all
wc ☼︎ 1.2 k
the first time you and sammy had sex, you thought him asking you "that feel good?" or "is this okay?" repeatedly was just him learning your body. but at three months into the relationship and he's still acting surprised you even want to be intimate with him, you know it's more than that.
it was the same cycle of little things here and there that had you realize sammy was unaware of how good to you he was. it ranged from sending him a dirty text or picture while he was gone only to be met with a response like "you know you sent that to me right?", to trying to get him undressed and in your pants the second he got home just for him to scrunch his face up and say "you don't have to do that for me."
some nights, you even thought you were the problem. because every time you tried to tell him you felt needy for him, he always double and triple checked if you actually wanted to. your confusion came to a head after dinner on his couch one night.
you'd wanted him inside you since the second he got home, but as always, he looked at you like you had four heads when you tried to make a move. so you waited until after dinner and halfway through the movie he let you pick out. you lean over to start kissing his neck and you hear his breath hitch when you sling a leg over his waist to straddle him. "missed you today sammy.." you hum as you reach his lips while trailing your fingers down his soft belly to his pants zipper.
"are you sure you want to?" is what he murmurs when you tug at the metal tab. you huff, pulling back to look at him. "do you.. not want me or something sammy?" his hazel eyes look cartoonish the way they bulge outwards. "w-what? of course i do."
you play with the buttons on his shirt as you whisper, "then why are you always acting surprised when i want to be with you?" his pudgy cheeks redden instantly, a hand carding through his curls as he looks anywhere but you. "cause it is surprising for me. i guess." when your face scrunches in confusion he rubs the back of his neck as he continues. "my ex she uh, she cheated on me. and i- i think its because of y'know.. her not being satisfied with my… abilities."
the frown takes over your face instantly, heart sinking at the fact that his insecurities come from a woman who wasn't even faithful to him. you think for a second, the last few months becoming clearer in your mind. "sammy… you know that i think you're really good at sex right?"
"baby, you don't have'ta lie-" "i'm not lying! i swear, sammy. you're the only guy who's ever made me finish." he blinks up at you, hands tightening on your hips as you rock once on top of him. "i- i am?" you nod sweetly, not being able to help grinding down on him as you feel him fully harden beneath you. a small groan slips out of both of you at the movement.
"mhm.. you make me feel so good sammy. only you" his lips part at your admission before he cradles your face in his chubby hands to pull you down to kiss him. by the time your tongue slips into his mouth you're desperate, rocking back and forth and whining on top of him.
a surge of confidence rushes though your boyfriend as he whispers against your lips, "w-want me to make you feel good right now?" you don't try to fight of your soft moan of anticipation, which causes sammy to buck his hips up involuntarily as you nod.
you both quickly stand up and all clothes are discarded in between needy kisses before settling back onto the couch. you stop him before he can roll you into missionary, his go to position, and you pray that you've reassured him enough that he'll let you try something new.
you scoot around until you're hovering upright on his lap as you face away from him. you glance over your shoulder and bite your lip when you see his eyes glued to your ass. "this okay sammy?" his enthusiastic nod has you giggle, which is quickly cut off by a moan as he guides you to sink down onto his cock.
"jesus- fuck- you feel so good like this baby." sammy babbles already as you start to ride him in reverse cowgirl for the first time. you're crying out his name as he stretches you until you feel him in your throat.
even though you're not face to face, the new position lets you lean back against his soft chest and easily turn your head to kiss him. it's a sloppy kiss that has your hips faltering when he starts grinding upwards to meet each of your bounces. "oh god- so big sammy ooohh god-!" you yelp when he reaches around to rub your clit just how you taught him to, which you reward with a "just like that- mhm-! so good sammy."
sammy starts to whine into your mouth when you clench around him. "tell me that you're making me feel good. say it sammy." he hesitates for a second before you bend down and gently cup his balls that sit just below where he's touching your clit. he chokes out a groan before nodding in agreement. "im makin' you feel good baby- makin' you f-feel so good."
you're tugging on his bottom lip with your teeth as you whimper, "so good sammy- best anyone's ever made me feel." he speeds up his thrusts, his thick tip hitting the sensitive spot inside you relentlessly. he breaks your kiss to stick two of the chubby fingers from his free hand in your mouth, humming in satisfaction at you when you suck fervently and look back at him with glossy eyes.
he releases them with a *pop* and brings them to pinch one of your nipples and your orgasm approaches you like the inevitable drop off at a cliff. you feel him puff out his chest a bit against your back. and when he grunts, "yea.. yea- i'm the best you've ever had- hnng - f-fucking this tight pussy better than anyone else has, r-right?", you're a goner. you spasm around him, reaching forward to grab at his knees when your eyes squeeze shut in pleasure and you free fall with a shaky moan.
and sammy's right behind you, muttering a few "so good baby, fuck- best ive ever felt." and "gonna fill you up jus how you like it- gonna be so full a'me. only me." the next second your insides are flooded with warmth as he whimpers your name. you shiver at his come filling you to the brim, sending lovely aftershock waves through your body.
you sag back against his chest with a sigh, sammy wraps his strong arms around you, kissing your neck softly. you nuzzle your cheek to the top of his head where is curls lay a little sweaty now. you hold his hand in yours as you smile. "told you you were good at that."
SUMMARY ⋮ ⌗ ┆When your grumpy skate coach has a bone to pick with your every move, it’s only natural he helps his golden girl get back on track. . .right?
PAIRING ⋮ ⌗ ┆coach!jack abbot x figure skater!reader
CONTENT WARNINGS ⋮ ⌗ ┆18+ SMUT AHEAD. MDNI. age gap (r! is in her 20s, jack is in his 40s). established backstory. power imbalance. lots of banter. mean!jack ゛ ˎˊ˗ dom!jack. sub!reader. afab!reader. unprotected piv sex. use of pet names in and out of smut (sweetheart, honey, sugar, baby, and doll were all used). fingering (r!receiving). squirting. nipple play. breast sucking (r!receiving). condescending praise. degrading. a little medplay. jack steals your panties. jack also calls himself an old man one too many times. . .hair pulling. creampie. breeding kink if you squint. overstimulation. one use of sir. choking. size kink. multiple orgasms.
WORD COUNT ⋮ ⌗ ┆6.3k
ּ֯ . ❥ ּ֯ ┆꒰ MY OLD MAN IS .ᐟ ꒱
A TOUGH MAN, BUT. . .
“YOU’RE LATE,” said Jack before you’d even put your bag down. For fuck’s sake, you’d barely set foot into the damn rink.
“I’m sorry. There was—“
“Let me guess. Traffic?” Jack finished for you.
You sighed and put your bag down on the bleachers, pulling your skates from it with a deserved attitude. You’d only been late by a few minutes, and Jack had no business being so brash about it.
“I’m here now,” you said. “And ready to skate.”
“Hardly,” Jack scoffed. “You’re not even in skates yet. I don’t mind this from my newcomers, but I expect better from my best skater.”
“Coach Abbot,” you huffed. “I’m sorry. Okay? Can’t you cut a girl a little slack?”
“I have been. For weeks, actually,” Jack said. He crossed his arms. “But it’s opening night this weekend, and unless you want to make a fool of yourself, then I suggest you start acting like you really want this.”
You bit your tongue, because whatever words that could’ve possibly tumbled out of your mouth in response would have been wildly impulsive, and probably inappropriate.
You were one of five skaters your coach, Jack Abbot managed, but you were his best. His golden girl. Or so he said. The way he spoke to you at times made you feel like the term’s polar opposite.
You’d been working with Jack for the last three years. In that time, he’d made an absolute star out of you. You’d assisted in a few shows on ice and competed in sporadic competitions before becoming so adored by the public that people wanted to see you perform at your own shows. That upcoming tour was the very thing that had your coach’s panties in a twist.
Jack had always been a little gruff, but he’d been different lately. You couldn’t really blame him. The stress of the tour had you behaving a little out of character, and your die hard figure skating coach was likely interpreting it as indifference. In reality, you were just nervous, and you wanted to exceed the expectations of everyone who was coming to opening night.
While you understood his perspective, would it kill him to sugarcoat anything? You honestly think you’d prefer he lie to you than be so blatantly rude. At least you had somewhere good to put the reassurance, even if it was fabricated. The petty comments only made you feel worse.
“I do want this,” you grumbled, pulling your skates on. “I’m here now, right? So, come on, let’s go.”
Jack looked like he wanted to protest, but he gave in and sighed. “Fine. Let’s.”
He held the door to the chilly ice rink open for you. You stepped out onto the ice and breathed the frosty air in, hoping it’d ease your nerves. With your luck, however, it instantly had the opposite effect.
“Two laps around the rink. I’ll wait here.”
“Okay,” you said. You’d failed to mention the part where you hadn’t stretched before this like usual, and hoped he wasn’t soon to figure that out.
You felt Jack’s eyes boring into you as you made your first lap around the rink. It felt like he’d been scrutinizing your every move lately, even when you were off the ice, and it was futile for your confidence.
“Pointers?” you shed through clenched teeth after your first lap. Jack only grumbled in return.
“No. One more. Backwards.”
You sighed and did as told, turning around to perform the backwards lap. Aside from a slight trip, you remained on your feet until you circled all the way back to him.
“Two foot slalows. Around the rink.”
You nodded and got right to work, moving your body from side to side as you made your way around again. You were starting to feel a little warm despite having not stretched, so you at least had that going for you.
Jack had you do a few more familiar warm ups before you were off the hook. He eyed you with that same look of scrutiny when you returned, putting his hands together. “Good. Let’s see you practice some jumps.”
You nodded and got to work. Tried to, anyway. The first three jumps went by like a breeze, but the fourth had you taking a slight stumble on the ice. Jack was skating near you now and helped you up, less because he wanted to and more because he felt obligated.
“Up. Try again,” Jack said.
He skated with you while you prepared for a fifth jump, this one landing with ease. You breathed a sigh of relief at the small victory, but this practice was still far from over.
“Better,” said Jack plainly. Why were his insults always more decorated than his compliments?
“Thanks,” you returned just as flatly. “S’that enough?”
“For now. You feeling warm?” he asked. You nodded.
“Good. Let’s see your choreo.”
“Just like that? But we haven’t—“
Jack held up a hand. “I want to see what you remember. Surely you should know the routine you’ll have to execute in less than a week before, I don’t know, thousands of people? Right, sweetheart?”
Sweetheart. The nickname was typically sugary, but coming from Jack’s lips, it was more bitter than ever. In the time that you’d known him, he hardly uttered it with affection.
“Right, Coach,” you bit annoyedly. “I should.”
“Then, show me.”
“Can I play the music for it?”
“If that’ll improve your performance, sure.”
With an eye roll you hoped Jack didn’t catch, you made your way off the rink and to the soundbooth outside it, using your phone to queue up the music that’d play as you skated on opening night. The choreography required you start off the ice to make an entrance, so the second you started the playlist, you flew out on your skates.
The routine started well. You did two dramatic laps around the rink, swaying your arms and settling back into the rhythm you’d been trying to return to for weeks. You did a few twists here and there to show off, letting the music sweep you into an elegant dance on the ice.
It was elegant, at least, until your first complicated move, a double axel jump into a smooth landing, followed by a traveling camel spin—seriously, what the fuck was Jack thinking?—snuck up on you at the height of the song’s chorus. You braced yourself for the move and took a deep breath before attempting it, silently praying to whatever god there was that you did this right.
Unfortunately for you, if there was one, they were not on your side as you flew into the air and promptly landed on your ass.
“Fuck,” you muttered as Jack skated over to you. He helped you to your feet, but he didn’t look happy to do so.
“Again.”
You went back to the soundbooth to restart the playlist, emerging onto the ice with your same dramatic flare from earlier. Whatever they said about faking it until you made it really needed to prove true for you right now.
You conquered the same move you’d just failed like the universe was purposely playing tricks on you. At least the small win eased your nerves the slightest bit.
It was mostly short lived, however, as you prepared for the following one.
You steeled yourself to go into a toe-loop jump, one of the many moves that’d had people enamored with you from day one. Two large glides and some mental motivation had you pulling the move off with flawlessness.
You could see Jack’s slight nod from the corner of your eye. While it wasn’t much, it was more than he’d given you all morning, and you had to hold onto that.
Subsequently, after another dramatic lap, you had another complicated jump in the finality of the song. The Salchow jump was no easy feat for any skater, but if you wanted eyes on you, it was definitely the way to go.
As the bridge of the song began to play, you readied yourself for the final complicated move of this part of the show. You felt Jack’s eyes burning into you from somewhere in the room, ready to witness your coordination. You sure hoped you could muster that in time for the final move.
You glided once, twice, willing your feet to act like they were attached to a halfway decent skater, and leaped into the air to make your final move. You executed it with confidence, completing it with a decent landing, but you lost your footing towards the end of it, ultimately throwing the elegance of the move off.
“Christ,” Jack said to you when you skated back over to him, the first song having now ended. “I’ve seen far better from you. And I expect it in the next song.”
“Yes, Coach,” you said with a sigh. You were starting to think that the reason Jack’s exasperation irritated you to pieces was because it was mostly justified.
You skated off the rink once again and queued up your second song, this one a little more upbeat than the last. You took your place on the ice to start the routine, but this time, Jack skated over, positioning himself behind you.
You turned to cock an eyebrow at him, your eyes twisted into what was practically a glare.
Jack waved his hand. “Pretend I’m not even here.”
“Easier said than done,” you muttered under your breath.
You started skating again, keeping a quickened pace that matched the faster tempo of the song. The beginning had a few simpler moves than the first, which gave you enough time to hopefully. . . .hopefully. . .find your groove again.
Except you were utterly grooveless as you lost your footing for the umpteenth time, far before your first complicated move. Hell, before the song had really started.
You didn’t even notice that Jack had skated off the rink until the song stopped abruptly, making you pause in your tracks. You skated over to the soundbooth, stepping inside the bleachers area.
“Alright, I can’t watch this anymore,” Jack huffed. “Skates off.”
“What? But, Coach, I—“
“Off. I don’t want to hear it.”
You furrowed your eyebrows but obliged—you owed him that after what was arguably your worst performance of all time—and sat down on the bleachers to take your skates off. You slipped your regular shoes back on and spent far longer than necessary lacing them to avoid Jack’s piercing glare.
“You trying to make a fool of yourself or me?” Jack barked.
“What?” you said.
“If your heart’s not in it, sweetheart, and clearly, it’s elsewhere right now, now’s the time to tell me. My career doesn’t need to go down with yours.”
You scoffed, standing up. “You didn’t even help me out there. Your criticism only made it worse,” you snapped.
“At least it was constructive. Why should I have to hold your hand through this? You know far better than to put on a show like that.”
“I wouldn’t be putting on a show like that if my coach acted like he gave a shit!”
Jack crossed his arms. “I do give a shit. Too many, apparently. You want the big leagues, honey? Those coaches would have ended your contract like that for even half the performance I just saw.”
You crossed your own arms to mirror him, huffing.
Jack took a step closer to you. His face went the slightest bit softer despite his earlier fury. “Look. I’m not saying this to be a hardass. And I’m sorry if it’s coming off that way. Skating’s your passion, and I know you want this,” he said. “But if you can’t act like you want to be here, then I can’t help you. Nod if you understand me.”
Your head seemed to nod of its own accord.
“Great. Now, you going to tell me what’s the matter?”
You looked up at the taller man, taking your bottom lip between your teeth. “I don’t know, Coach. I’m stressed, I guess. Stressed I’m going to royally destroy the opening show this weekend. And I suppose I. . .I’m also scared to disappoint you.”
“You might do both things if you can’t get your head in the game,” Jack deadpanned.
“Coach,” you whined.
“It’s true,” he said. His tone went quieter then as he looked you in the eye. “But you probably won’t do either if you put your heart in it, too.”
You held eye contact for a minute without speaking or moving. As much as you hated to admit it, Jack did have a point. As a matter of fact, you’d hardly known him to ever be wrong since the day you’d fucking met him.
Jack broke the silence. “So, what do you need? More practice? Pointers? Need to stretch again?”
“Well. . .” you said. “About that.”
“What?”
“I didn’t actually stretch before this? Was already late, and—“
“Hold on. You got on the rink without stretching?”
“Yes? No? Which answer will take the look you’ve got on your face right now away?”
“Jesus Christ,” Jack said, pinching the bridge of his nose. “You want to get hurt now, too? Fuck, what am I going to do with you?”
“I’m sorry! Again,” you said. “Let’s stretch.”
“You need more than dynamics. Let’s take a walk.”
You cocked an eyebrow as Jack started to split down the hallway that led outside the arena. “More than dynamics?”
“Yeah. I need you back on your A-game, and we need to release any tension in your muscles before you start again,” Jack said. “You coming or what?”
“Yes, Coach,” you said, ever the dutiful skater, following behind him.
You trailed beside him until you reached a room you’d never been in outside the rink. It was mostly empty save for one of those doctoral beds in the corner, as well as a counter with a few random items atop it.
“Never been back here before,” you said. “What is this?”
“There used to be masseuses here for the figure skaters and hockey players that come through. Few other rooms just like this one down the way,” Jack said.
“So you get to play masseuse now. Exciting.”
“Hilarious. Come on, honey. Vest off.”
You took off the puffy vest you’d had on and set it on a chair in the room. You also took your shoes off at Jack’s command.
“Did you want, um. . .should I keep my shirt on? I have a tank top under. And shorts,” you said awkwardly.
“It’d make it easier,” Jack said plainly.
You then made quick work of your longsleeve, revealing a thin tank top underneath, followed by your thermal leggings. The exposure made your cheeks heat up slightly, but Jack thankfully didn’t seem phased.
“Lay down. You can start on your back.”
You got onto the bed with Jack’s help—and tried not to think too hard about his hand lingering on your waist—and laid down flat. Jack’s warm hands met the flesh of your leg, and you turned away timidly as he started to lift it.
“Let’s loosen those hamstrings, yeah?” Jack said. He lightly thumbed your skin while your leg was positioned above you, working into the knots you hadn’t even known accumulated there. The feeling might have been foreign, but that didn’t mean it felt bad.
“No wonder you can’t skate. You’re tense.”
“Would it kill you to say anything nicely?”
Jack chuckled. “Maybe it would.”
He put your left leg down and moved onto your right, repeating the same routine.
“Just breathe. Relax. You’ll feel better.”
You tried your best to internalize that, but you couldn’t relax with the feel of Jack’s hands on you if you tried.
He lowered your leg and pushed your knees into your chest, holding them there. You completely averted eye contact with him, letting the silence speak for you. Jack hummed like he was amused.
“What?” you said.
“All that fire on the rink but you can’t even look me in the eye in here. It’s funny.”
“Shut up. It’s just awkward.”
“Still funny,” Jack said. “Both legs up. Hold it.”
You lifted both your legs. The stretch did at least feel good in your glutes, and the ones prior had you feeling good in general, so you had to give him credit for that.
“Legs down. Put your foot over your other leg, then switch.”
“You’d make a good doctor,” you teased as you used both arms to hold your leg over the other.
Jack rolled his eyes. “All this shit is Google-able. So as I said earlier, it’s like you want to get hurt.”
“Jesus. Old man can’t take a joke now?”
“Sure I can. Switch legs.”
You followed his instruction, but you weren’t done pushing him yet. “I’m just saying. Doctor Jack Abbot. . .mhm, could totally see it.”
“You’d probably give me a hard time as a patient, too,” Jack said.
“I don’t give you a hard time now,” you hummed. “You just take everything so personally.”
“You trying to piss me off?”
“See? My point is proven.”
“Turn over. On your stomach.”
You did as told and laid on your front now, feeling even more vulnerable like this. Jack rubbed your inner thighs with the pads of his fingertips. You let out a shaky sigh in return.
“Feel good?”
“Mhm. It’s. . .nice.”
“Good,” he said. He lifted your leg again, pushing it towards you until you felt a stretch in your quad. “Hold it.”
After doing the same to your other leg, putting you in child’s pose, and lastly, into a cobra position, Jack finally let up. You sat up and faced him, your legs hanging off the edge of the bed.
“How was that?” Jack asked.
“Way better than dynamics. I feel great.”
“Of course you do. The longer you neglect your muscles, the better it feels when you finally release the tension in them.”
You rolled your eyes. “And here I was, about to tell you how good of a masseuse you are.”
“You’re full of jokes today, aren’t you?” Jack said with a small chuckle. But he tried, no surprise to you, to hide his amusement beneath his usual stoicism. “I’m still not too happy with you.”
You let out an exaggerated groan. “Come on, Coach. I already said I was sorry! What else do you want from me?”
“What do I want?” Jack said, taking a step closer to you. You parted your legs without thinking so he could stand between them, all before you could really process what you were doing. What he was doing.
“I want my golden girl back.”
You swallowed nervously as you looked up at him. Apart from celebratory hugs and pats on the back, you didn’t think you’d ever stood so close to him; close enough to make out every gorgeous feature on the older man’s face, every gray in his stubble. Every rise and fall of breath, the freckles that started at his neck and slowly descended beneath his shirt. . .
Your breath hitched at the proximity, leaving you stupidly tongue tied, until you managed a small, “I can be her. I promise.”
Jack rested a hand beside you on the bed. “Yeah, honey? You promise?”
“Yes, Coach.”
Like two magnets with an impenetrable force, you both found yourselves leaning into what was more than a kiss, but a whole new side of your relationship you hadn’t known existed until now. You weren’t exactly sure who sealed the deal, only that Jack cupped your cheek with a tenderness contrasted deeply by his previous gruffness, and started to work his lips against yours similarly.
The kiss was soft and sweet, tentative, like Jack was trying to figure out what you liked. Luckily for him, you had no problem disclosing just that. You pushed your tongue past his lips and wrapped your legs around his waist, pulling him closer.
Jack grunted against your mouth, possibly the hottest sound you’d ever heard, and slipped his fingers into your hair. His hold wasn’t to control you but more to possess, and the thought had you soaked.
You weren’t the only one worked up, however, because there was a bulge in Jack’s pants that was already hard and insistent against you.
The kiss became frantic as the sounds of both your noises filled the room. You desperately guided his hand down to your shorts, right above your clothed core. Jack chuckled against your mouth.
“My God, honey. You’re so fucking needy,” he said, but he didn’t pull his hand away. He laid his palm flat over your center, and though fabric prevented him from fully doing so, you still rutted your hips against his hand.
“You expected me to stay sane after I had your hands all over me, Coach?” you rasped.
Jack shook his head. He looked you in the eyes while he kept his palm against your core, letting you take your pleasure. “Skip the formalities, sweetheart. You can call me Jack.”
“Okay,” you said with a swallow.
“Say it to me.”
“Jack.”
“Again.”
“Jack.”
“That’s it. Get used to it. S’exactly what you’re gonna say when I fuck you stupid on my cock,” Jack said with so much nonchalance, you could barely register the implication. “Hips up. I want your shorts off.”
“So bossy,” you teased, but you did as told. You lifted your hips so Jack could slide your shorts off your body, revealing your pitifully soaked underwear.
“Should have expected that from you of all people,” you said.
Jack helped you take them off, discarding them on the chair you’d put your vest on. “Girls like you need it. Always acting up until someone puts you in your place,” he tutted.
Jack audibly groaned at the prominent wet spot on your panties. He rubbed his thumb over your clit through the cloth, finding the spot easily, a breathy chuckle leaving his lips.
“Fuck, look at you. S’this why you were fucking up out there, honey? Too wet to think straight?” he cooed.
Unable to argue with that, you bit your lip. “Can you b- blame me? You can be really hot when you’re mad.”
“Which, according to you, I’m always mad.”
“Then you’re always hot.”
“Have you always thought that, honey?” Jack said, his pace against your clit quickening.
“It’s kind of hard not to notice,” you admitted unabashedly. “Especially when you—fuck—talk to me like that. Makes me think all kinds of dirty things about you.”
“Oh, yeah? And just what kind of things d’you want this dirty old man doing to you, doll?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know,” you teased. You pulled him in by his curls, twisting them in your fingers and pulling him in for a heated kiss. “Let’s start with your fingers inside me.”
“Demanding girl, aren’t you?” Jack scoffed, but he still obliged. He instructed you to lift your hips and slipped your panties off your legs, shamelessly putting them in his pocket.
“Perv.”
“You like it,” Jack said. He wasn’t wrong.
Jack slipped two fingers between your folds to find you wet and pliant for him, your hole practically crying to be filled. He used his free hand to drag you to the edge of the bed, keeping his arm around your waist and his eyes on yours while he teased your slit. Your breath picked up speed at the teasing gesture while your body begged for more.
“Come on, Jack,” you breathed, tasting his name on your lips. You found its flavor as sultry as the scene before you. “Don’t make me beg.”
“I don’t know, honey. After your little tantrum today? I think you deserve it.”
“Jack.”
“What?” Jack said nonchalantly, still teasing you between your folds. You thought you might implode if he didn’t fuck you already. “I told you what I want. So come on, doll. Ask me nicely.”
“Please, Jack. Please, fuck me.”
“Good girl,” Jack said, and with that, he slipped two fingers inside you, thrusting them in deep. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
“Fuck, n- no,” you squeaked as he began to thrust in and out of your tight walls, your own wetness the only thing allowing him to breach it at all. “Jesus, Jack,” you whined, scratching your nails into his bicep.
“Fuck, love when you say my name, baby,” Jack grunted. He pulled you impossibly closer, gripping your waist with a possessiveness that was making you feel dizzy. “Can you take a third?”
“Already? Shit, you’re insatiable.”
“Guilty,” Jack smirked.
“For you, I can.”
“Aren’t you a sweetheart,” Jack cooed to make it sound sugary, but you knew it was anything but. He slipped a third finger inside you, groaning as you clenched around the digits. He began to pump them in and out of you with vigor, eyes never leaving yours.
“Mmm, so good,” you whimpered. Fuck, if you were this stupid on his fingers, you had no idea how you’d handle his cock.
“You’re cute when you can’t think,” Jack said. He flicked his thumb against your clit, implementing the same circular motion he had previously. “No bratting, no back-talk. S’like my version of heaven.”
“You’re so. . .mean. . .”
“Oh, but you like it, huh? Look how hard you’re clenching around me,” Jack tutted. “Now I know the trick. Give this pussy a bit of attention and you’re a stupid little slut for me.”
“Fuckfuckfuck,” you whined as he spoke. “Don’t stop, Jack, please, m’gonna cum.”
“Don’t stop what? This?” Jack said with a particularly sharp thrust into your cunt. “Or did you mean treating you like a whore, honey? Yeah, that’s it. You need a filthy old man putting you in your place.”
“God, y- yes,” you nodded your agreement. “Need you to fuck me so dumb, Jack.”
“Gonna give you everything you want, sugar. Just need to be good f’me. . .you are capable of that, aren’t you?” Jack cooed, taking your face in his free hand. He pinched your cheeks between his fingers, making you look at him.
“Yes, sir. So, so good.”
“There’s my precious slut. Cum for me, baby. Cum all over your old man’s hand.”
That did you in. A wave of pleasure crashed over you as you came with a shudder, holding onto Jack’s arm while he fucked you through your release. His fingers didn’t leave until you were basking in the aftershocks, and only then did he pull them out, sucking his fingers clean.
You pulled Jack in for another kiss, moaning when your tongue met his. He kept a hand on your waist, the other on your neck, gently squeezing down. You moaned into the rough touch in approval.
Jack pulled away to help you get your shirt off, then unclasped your bra with scary ease. He groaned at the sight of your hardened peaks, taking both breasts into his hands.
“Shit. Your tits are perfect,” Jack said as he squeezed them both, circling your nipples with his thumbs.
“Fuck,” you whined. You watched him trail kisses from your neck to your collarbone until his tongue swiped over your chest. He sucked one of your breasts into his mouth, swirling the length of it over your nipple, while one of his hands continued to knead your other tit.
“Beautiful girl,” Jack hummed more to himself than to you, all while his mouth continued working. His filthy words and flick of his tongue against your chest, paired with the incessant hard-on pressing against you from below, was about to make you fucking explode.
“This is some. . .stress relief,” you whined, still trying to joke despite your vulnerable position. “You really would be a good doctor.”
“Back to that, are we?” Jack hummed against your nipple. “What are you trying to say?
You laced your fingers through Jack’s hair again, playing with it as you spoke. “Just. . .saying. This feels like a check-up, that’s all.”
“What’s that make you, then?” Jack hummed. “My pretty little patient?”
Caught off guard by his words, you let out an involuntary whimper. “I suppose it does.”
“Well, don’t worry, doll,” Jack said. He squeezed your nipple even harder, pinching it between his fingers. “Doctor Abbot’s gonna get you all fixed up.”
With that, he latched his mouth onto your nipple again, swirling the bud with his tongue. It was evident what kind of man he was as he took a liking to your pretty tits, hardly coming up for air and grunting like he was the one being pleasured.
“That feel good, baby?” Jack hummed after switching to your other nipple, giving it as much attention as the other.
“So good. Doctor,” you teased without thinking. “But I want more.”
“Oh, s’that right? You’re gonna have to use your words, sugar.”
“I want your cock, doctor. Think that’d really fix me.”
Jack chuckled and stood upright. You didn’t have to tell him twice. “Lay back.”
You did as told and laid down on the bed he’d been stretching you on previously. Well, you supposed this still counted as. . .stretching. . .right?
As Jack started to remove his pants, you realized you’d been completely naked while he was fully clothed. He almost stopped at his bottoms and climbed atop you, until you shook your head.
“Shirt, too, Doctor.”
“Bossy,” Jack said, but he didn’t deprive you. He removed his shirt and discarded it on the growing pile of clothes across the room. The sight of his bare chest had you impossibly wetter, even more so as he settled between your legs on the bed.
“Fuck, you’re so hot,” you said as he hovered over you.
“Look at that. You do know how to be nice,” he returned.
“You should be the last person talking.”
“I’m as nice as they come,” Jack hummed like he actually believed it. He started to free his cock from his boxers, and the girth of him surprised you. You sat up on your elbows to get a better look, swallowing at the size.
Jack’s face went a little softer. “You okay, baby? Sure you can take it?”
You nodded quickly. In fact, you might have been a little too excited to take him, not so much the converse. “S’this gonna help me, Doctor? Relieve my stress?”
Jack smirked at you. “Sure is, doll.”
“Then, yeah, I can take it.”
“That’s a good girl. See? You can be smart,” he said.
“Oh, fuck you,” you retorted.
“Gladly,” Jack said. He slotted his already leaking tip between your folds, putting a hand beside your head to keep himself steady. “Ready?”
You nodded.
“Words, sugar.”
“Yes, Coach.”
Caught off guard by your words, Jack sunk into you shakily, the name in a moment like this working him right up. “Fuck. You’re trouble.”
You gasped at the utter stretch of him inside you, and felt even more shocked when you looked down and realized that was only half of him. Jesus. You were already sweating and he hadn’t even fully breached your hole yet.
“Oh, s’that too much, love?” Jack cooed at your little whimpers. He pressed a kiss to your lips to silence you, humming as his mouth swallowed your noises. “Shhh, shhh, you can take it. Big stretch, sweetheart.”
With that, he pushed even further into you, watching your face for your reaction. His equally cocky and attentive demeanor was making your head spin with complete and utter lust.
When he was all the way inside, he started to thrust into your pussy, picking up speed the faster your moans got. Your body was gradually accommodating his size, but the longer he fucked you, the better it felt.
“Jack, f- fuck, you’re so big,” you moaned as he rocked his hips against you. Jack was so deep that his heavy balls were slapping against you with every thrust, adding to the erotic nature of the moment.
“You like that, sugar? How much I fill you?”
“So, so much. Please, don’t stop,” you whined.
“Wasn’t planning on it,” Jack grunted into your ear, his thrusts already getting sloppier. For how uptight he was on the ice, it was jarring in all the right ways to see him lose a bit of control.
“My good girl. My golden girl. Taking her coach’s cock so well,” Jack cooed.
“Wanna be your good girl, Coach. Only yours.”
“That’s what I like to hear, sugar,” Jack grunted.
He picked up the pace and fucked you into the bed quicker now. Your back arched off the surface, the man so deep it was like you could feel him in your throat, as you took every punishing thrust of his hips into your gummy walls.
Jack withdrew momentarily, the loss pulling a whimper from your lips. “Lift your legs, doll.”
You didn’t question him and raised your legs the same way you’d been earlier when you were stretching. Jack took them over his shoulders and lined his head up with your hole again, before thrusting back into you.
“You’re so pretty when you listen to me,” Jack hummed as he started rutting into you again.
You let out a breathy laugh, though it proved hard with the feeling of being so full. “I’m not all brat, as you’d put it.”
“I like when you behave. Should try it more often.”
“I’ll think about it,” you said, thought you both knew full well you wouldn’t.
Not if it ended in sex like this.
Jack pulled out of you, and for a second, you thought he was going to make you beg for his cock again. That is, until he was slamming back into you, getting lost in the feel of your pussy wrapped around his dick.
“Fuck, baby. You’re squeezing me so tight.”
“Jack,” you whimpered in return, your body ready to give into another orgasm. “I’m close again.”
“Yeah? Want me to—“
“No,” you said instantly. Paired with him subtly shifting his hips back, you knew where this was going. And, quite frankly, the thought of him pulling out wasn’t a good one. “Cum inside me. Please? I want you to.”
Jack chuckled, thrusting back into you. “Jesus, sugar. Who knew you were such a dirty girl?” he said. He pushed in impossibly deeper, the tip of his dick hitting that sweet spot inside you. “You want this old man filling your pretty little pussy, huh? Fuck the consequences?”
“Fuck the consequences,” you repeated. “I want it.”
Jack didn’t deny you. He fucked into you like an animal, gripping your legs tightly as he slammed into your cunt. A familiar pleasure started to build in your lower belly, and you knew it wouldn’t be long now.
“Jack, fuck, faster!” you moaned. “Gonna cum for you, gonna cum, holyshit.”
“I’m right there with you, baby. I gotcha,” Jack groaned. You clenched around him hard at the reassurance, and before you knew it, you couldn’t hold back.
You came with a loud cry after a particularly harsh thrust into your pussy, soaking Jack’s dick with your juices. He wasn’t far behind you, cumming deep inside you only seconds later with what could only be described as a feral grunt.
“There’s my girl,” he cooed as he fucked you through it. “Take it like a good little slut.”
When you finally caught your breath—or enough to get a few words out, anyway—you looked up at Jack with a fucked-out expression. Sweat was sticking his gray curls to his forehead, and he looked just as dizzy as you.
“That was—“ you started, but you didn’t get to finish before Jack was suddenly flipping you over, pulling a surprised “Oh!” from your mouth. Without further warning, he bent you over with your ass up, running his hands over the flesh of your bottom.
“Jesus, Coach,” you said at the sudden action. “This another one of your stretches?”
“Always a fucking minx, aren’t you?” Jack tutted. He pushed your face down into the bed and pressed up behind you, his cock prodding and insistent between your cheeks.
“I’m not a—holyshit,” you moaned. You didn’t finish that sentence either, not before Jack was thrusting back into your oversensitive hole, setting a lethal pace.
Jack chuckled. “Yeah, not loud-mouthing now, are you, sugar?”
“T- Too s- soon!” you managed through a whimper, the overstimulation making you dizzy. You had said you liked him meaner, but you hadn’t expected this.
“Poor baby. Just a little more now, love, almost done,” Jack cooed like his fingers weren’t now gripping your hair, and the room wasn’t filled with the wet squelch made from him pounding into your poor pussy.
“Jack,” you whined, the sound muffled by the pillow he had your face in. “Feels. . .feels like. . .”
“Use your words, doll,” Jack commanded. “Feels like what?”
“L- Like I’m gonna pee,” you admitted embarrassingly.
Jack chuckled and didn’t let up, already knowing where this one was going. “Ain’t anything to be embarrassed about, sweetheart. S’gonna feel so good, promise.”
“What’s. . .what’s gonna. . .mmph!” you said with a final moan before you felt exactly what Jack was being so smug about.
The second Jack withdrew from your pussy, a stream of fluid involuntarily escaped you, promptly soaking the already ruined bed below you as well as Jack himself. He patted your bottom condescendingly as he watched you do it, muttering a satisfied, “There it is, doll. Let it out.”
“You’re so evil,” you muttered when all was said and done. You turned around to find a smiling Jack, who pulled you to rest flush against his front, his arms wrapped around your waist from behind.
You tried to ignore the feeling of his still-hard cock behind you as he returned, “Still got my golden girl back, didn’t I?”
You giggled and conceded, nodding in agreement. “Told you I could be her. Or whatever you want me to be,” you said. You laced your fingers through his curls, pulling him in for a sensual kiss.
Jack returned it eagerly, the gesture a sweet contrast to his rough treatment from before. “Yeah? ‘Cause after this sugar, you might have to be mine.”
You smiled at him. “I think I could live with that.”
summary — the worst-cared-for girl in the county keeps washing up in jack’s er, and he can’t help but start paying attention.
warnings — 19.2k. large age gap (jack’s fifty/reader’s in twenties), doctor/patient dynamic initially, power imbalance (attending/nursing student, age, life experience), yearning!jack, protective!jack, jealous!jack, and literally every single word in the book, mutual pining, slow burn, he falls first, hurt/comfort, reader shows signs of adhd but it isn’t explicit, alcohol use (recurrent drunkenness, mention of alcohol poisoning, ER, and repeated intoxication played somewhat lightly), loneliness/self isolation, low self-worth, it’s very difficult for her to accept care, lack of family support/implied estrangement, financial stress and overworking, she’s also spending an unrealistic amt of time hanging out in the ed but it’s fanfic so it’s ok, jokes about financial stress, injuries (sprains, split lip, bruising, gravel burns), medical setting, blood, referenced patient death (patient dies, off-page, Jack grieves), making out/heavy kissing, suggestiveeee content (thumb-in-mouth beat, grinding) but nothing explicit.
notes — oops sorry this fic is so so self-indulgent 🫶 i literally loved writing them tho i was thinking about them for days on end. tried to take a swing at this based on this idea i had + thank you @ker0senebunny for inspriring the shoe scene!!!! inspired by this post + my er visits where i was literally the worst patient ever
Friday and Saturday after midnight, the board filled up with the same predictable words; alcohol poisonings, bar-fight lacerations, the kids who’d taken things they couldn’t name and showed up convinced they were dying when they were mostly just twenty and having a large thought. Jack triaged it on autopilot, and he’d stopped finding any of it interesting somewhere around year seven.
Sure, sometimes there were some cases that got a mild laugh out of him or turned his head. There was a kid who’d superglued his halloween mask on his own face for a dare. The guy who’d lost a bet and swallowed something he wouldn’t name in front of his mother, who was present and furious. The occasional genuinely strange thing the human body did that still, after all these years, made Jack think huh, that’s interesting, the small grim curiosity that was about the only part of the job the years hadn’t fully sanded down. He kept those and told them to new nurses over shitty coffee at four a.m. because he supposed that was a better story than what he could say about the Middle East.
The first time you came in, he’d handed you over to Shen. You were a sprained wrist and a BAC that explained the wrist, sixteen other things were louder, and Shen was free then.
He’d clocked you for half a second on his way to a GI bleed in bay nine: girl on the gurney, one heel too high on, and one somewhere in the greater metropolitan area, some little pink lace-trimmed thing sliding off one shoulder, telling Shen with enormous seriousness that she was so sorry, she didn’t usually do this, she’d had a singular margarita. Only.
Singular. He’d categorized it under the thousand other single margaritas he’d sworn to in this department and forgotten you before he’d reached the bleed.
The second time, he didn’t take you either, but he noticed the wrist.
Same wrist. Different night — a Saturday, three weeks in, the sort of shift where the waiting room sounded like a kennel — and he caught it sideways while he reviewed another chart. It was the same left wrist, taped this time, the nails on that one hand done in some soft pinky color gone chipped at the tips as though the week itself outlasted the manicure, somebody walking you through the discharge paperwork you clearly were ignoring. Something thought for him instead of him thinking much for it, some pattern-recognition thing buried under twenty-some years of reading bodies fast, the same instinct that made him glance twice at something almost normal. A wrist that kept coming back, he supposed. A thread snagging on a nail, there and gone.
The third time, it was Shen, breezing past the station with his Dunkin, saying over his shoulder, “Frequent flyer’s back.”
He shrugged, not yet placing that you were the frequent flyer, and went to bed four.
And that — somewhere between the third time and a number he stopped keeping an honest count of — was where it stopped being a chart and became some sort of thing. A bit, he’d say. The nights the bars let out and the board lit up, he’d find himself reading the incoming names a half-second longer than triage required, and feeling something wrong in his chest when yours wasn’t in them.
Pittsburgh was notoriously interesting, Jack learned through you, in that it apparently contained an infinite supply of ways a girl could get herself in trouble. He was convinced he could’ve drawn a map of the city by your injuries. There was the ankle, of course, a recurring grievance, always the shoes, never your fault. There was one time you’d burned your hand on a curling iron getting ready tipsy and come in more upset about the makeup you’d had to redo (because of crying it off) than the blister. The night you’d gone over in a parking lot because you refused to look at the ground while walking — looking at the ground, while drunk, you informed him, was how you trip — and the time you sliced your finger open trying to shotgun a White Claw with a key because someone had bet you couldn’t. You were really proud of the last one, you’d won the bet.
You were never the same disaster twice, he had to give you that. A little too keen on busting yourself up here and there, sure, but at least it was the wrist once, then a knee that met a curb, then a memorable evening involving a fence you’d been certain you could clear. You came in apologizing — always apologizing, to him, to the nurses, once, memorably, to the wall — and you came in sweet, which was the part that got under him, because drunk people in this ER were a lot of things and sweet was rarely one of them.
“Mmm,” you hummed the fourth or fifth time, the second your eyes found him through the gap in the curtain, going boneless with relief like Jack was the cavalry and not the man who was meant to flash light into your eyes for thirty seconds. “The pretty one.”
Jack let out a huff. “Thanks, doll.”
“Doll,” you repeated, the word going gummy in your mouth. “He calls me doll.”
“Eyes open. Follow the light.”
“You call everyone that, Dr. Abbot?” you said, his name coming out in a cluster like you were losing thread of it, the Abbot dissolving into something closer to a hum.
“Sure do,” he lied. “Track the light.”
You looked at his mouth, then his hands, then back up, a slow uncoordinated sweep because your eyes had stopped reporting to anything in particular, much less what they had to. Pupils blown wide and lazy. He thumbed your eyelid up a fraction to get the light where he needed it; your lashes were clumped and starry with whatever mascara had survived the night.
He held the penlight steady and waited you out. He had nowhere to be. That was the thing about the dead hours after bars closed; the bleed had been signed up to the floor, the chest pain turned out to be a panic attack and a large energy drink, and there was just you, and the saline ticking into your arm one slow drop at a time.
“What’d you get up to tonight?” he murmured, thumb finding the pulse at your wrist, counting without meaning to.
“S’fast ‘cause you’re here,” you said, sounding very pleased with yourself.
“Sure it is. Where’d you hurt yourself tonight?”
“... stairs,” you said after a moment, like your brain had to run a few laps to get to the word.
“Oh, yeah?” He hummed. You lifted your free hand a little off the mattress, lost track of it, and dropped it back down. “How many?”
“Mm. Four?” You squinted at the ceiling. “Maybe three. I dunno. Not the Great Wall or somethin’. Promise.”
“I believe you.” He nodded, then turned your forearm to the light, finding the scrape you’d come in with. It was gravel-burn, raw, the heel of your hand and a stripe up your wrist. Nothing that needed more than cleaning. You watched him do it with your head tipped against the pillow, gone quiet so the talking had run out for a second, which never lasted.
“Should I get a better first aid kit?” you asked, then clenched your jaw for a second like you felt something was wrong with it. “S’I don’t have to bother you all the time?”
“Might be a good idea to invest,” he said. He pulled the swab through the gravel-burn slowly, and you hissed and tried to pull back the hand on reflex. “Easy.” He kept it, his grip light yet unmoving around your fingers. “Almost done. Don’t fight me.”
You hummed, like you wanted a different answer.
Jack wet his lips, shaking his head slightly. He worked the grit out of the scrape, a fleck of it catching raw skin, and he tilted your arm to the light, getting it on the second pass, and wiped it on the gauze. Your hands twitched in his, and he pressed your fingers flat to the mattress with his thumb, and they stayed.
“You’d have to do it yourself, though,” he said. “Bathroom sink at three in the morning with one hand.” He reached for fresh gauze. “You’d make a mess of it.”
You frowned at the ceiling, nodding. “Sounds a little bad.”
“It’s a lot bad.” He laid the gauze over the scrape, thumbed the tape down at the edge of your wrist slowly, smoothing it flat where it wanted to lift. His knuckle dragged once over the thin skin there, and he felt your pulse jump under it. “You’d scar, probably.” His thumb passed the chipped polish, the chunky gold ring you’d kept on, even for this. “You’ve got nice hands. Shame to wreck ‘em over the sink.”
It took you a second. “You think so?”
“Don’t wreck ‘em.”
“You like when I come in,” you said, delighted.
“What I’d like,” he said, flat, lifting his eyes to yours, “is you off the stairs and down to the one drink.” His thumb settled over the back of your hand again. “But if you’re set on flinging yourself down, then you come here. Deal?”
Your fingers had curled around two of his somewhere in there loosely, without you noticing. He felt them settle, and he held very still so as to not spook you. He chose to not acknowledge it or look at it.
“Deal,” you mumbled, somewhere far off, probably forgetting the front half of the terms.
He let it go at that, taping down the last edge and turning over your wrist once more to be sure of it. Then he set your hand back on the mattress, yours still loosely hooked through his, going nowhere.
“Anyone out there to get you home?” he asked.
“Dunno.” Your nose scrunched. “Was gonna Uber.”
He sighed through his nose. “Where’s that girl — the one you came in with last time? Why don’t you call her?”
“That’s annoying, Dr. Abbot,” you said, almost in a whine.
“Yeah?” He kept looking at the wall behind you. “What’s annoying about a ride home?”
“Calling people. Making it a thing.” Your free hand flopped vaguely. “Then they gotta come get you, and they’re all — have to be nice about it, but you can tell.” Your nose scrunched. “It’s a whole production.”
He pressed his thumb flat back over your hand where your fingers were still caught in his.
“Oh? Nothing annoying about it, sweetheart. You call, she comes. Simple as that.” He turned to face you. “But if you insist on it, I’m not signing you off until you’re good enough to go home alone. So you call your girl, or you sit right here and keep my department company till you’ve cleared enough that I’ll sign off on it.”
Your eyes narrowed as you looked at him as though he’d spoken a different language. “Second one?”
“Obviously you pick that one,” he said.
He pulled the stool over and sat. For a few minutes, he had nowhere to be, and now, apparently, neither did you.
It wasn’t that you simply didn’t let people help you, either. Jack had never seen anyone so committed to being simply fine. Jack had met the stoic kind before; construction guys who walked in with rebar through a forearm acting like it was a small inconvenience; old ladies who’d been having a heart attack since last Tuesday and didn’t want to be a bother. But Jack had always believed those people to be suppressing, and you were just convinced, somewhere down in the foundation, that needing anything was an imposition.
That was also why the shoes confused him so much.
“This is the same damn ankle,” Jack said, turning your foot in his hands, watching the swelling outside of it.
“You don’t have to remind me. Most men buy me a drink before they get this familiar with my ankles,” you said, then groaned as you looked at his eyes going over the swelling.
“No drink.” He pressed along the bone. “Not my fault you keep handing your ankle to me.”
You tipped your head back against the pillow, groaning again. “Dr. Abbot, they look so bad. I feel like I’m pregnant.”
“I can do a quick blood draw and we can rule it out.” His palm flattened on the mattress beside your feet, leaning over to meet your eyes again. “But I think it’s those heels of yours, doll.”
Your eyes snapped to him. “Don’t be a dick, Dr. Abbot.”
He tilted his head, then pointed at the laminated paper stuck to the wall. “Aggressive behavior of any kind toward healthcare workers is a felony.”
“Then arrest me, doctor. I’ll die on this hill — and they’re not heels.” Your lips pursed, and the corner of your mouth kicked up. “Cuffs may be a little forward for a date, but I won’t stop you.”
“Aren’t you just so sweet,” he muttered. “What are they, then?”
“Bottega Lido Mules.”
The words meant absolutely nothing to him — could’ve been a pasta dish, a town in Italy, a wine — but they clearly did to you, so he remembered them.
“That’s nice, doll. They’ll be the reason I see you again.”
“Maybe, ‘cause I’ll never stop wearing them.”
You said the words your whole face, hands coming off the mattress to make the point with a drunk theatrical conviction as you argued something that genuinely mattered to you. Jack thought, not for the first time since he’d met you, that you’d have been magnetic stone-sober at a dinner party, the kind of girl that made a table lean in. It was just that he only ever got the 3am version.
At least you had a hill you’d die on and didn’t apologize for, Jack supposed.
“You married, Doctor?” you asked as he started icing your ankle.
“No,” he said, holding your eyes for a second. “Why — you got a boyfriend I should know about, then?”
He almost wished you did have one. He wished that there were somebody whose name you’d have said just now who’d be in the waiting room with his jaw tight because you’d gone and hurt yourself again. Somebody who’d take care of the ankle when you walked out of here in crutches, who took the keys when you had too many. He wished there was a person in the world whose job you were.
And you weren’t his first patient who he’d understood to not have someone taking care of them. He knew that if he carried them all, he’d drown inside a month if he tried to be the person nobody else had been. He’d never once had it turn into a wish, standing here with an ice pack in his hand going slack in his hand because he was too busy resenting someone who didn’t exist for not being in the waiting room.
He wondered when down the line you’d stopped letting the people in your life around you be the ones you could call, became a girl who said sorry for bleeding and had nobody, nobody, and looked at him like he was the warmest place she’d been in all week.
You laughed. “If I had a boyfriend, would I be laying it on so thick?”
He let out a breath through his nose, despite himself. “Stop wearing the heels, doll. Not nice to not have a foot.”
The next time you came in, it was a Thursday. With some pileup of bad luck, you came in somewhere past one with a split lip and a story about a dance floor he only half got the shape of. Jack hadn’t even been assigned to you yet, he’d just seen your name on the board, and reassigned himself quietly enough that dared anyone on shift to comment. Nobody did.
“Lip’s not bad,” he said, tilting your chin up under the light, thumb at your jaw. The split was already going fat and shining at the center of your lower lip, and he found his eyes stayed on your mouth a second past the part that was his job, on the soft unhurt swell of it under the hurt. He moved his thumb. “Doesn’t need anything. You bit it when you fell down. That’s all.”
“S’throbbing, Doctor,” you mumbled, the word coming around muffled around the split.
“It’ll throb. You’ve got a swollen lip.” He let go of your jaw and reached for the penlight. “Eyes on me.”
“I was so cute before this,” you said through a groan.
The huff that came out of him was almost a laugh, dragged out against his own will, and he shared a fleeting look with Bennet — a fairly new nurse — who had tilted his head briefly and was too afraid to meet your eyes.
“Alright. Still the prettiest girl I’ve treated tonight,” Jack said when your brows had furrowed together.
“You treat other girls?”
“It’s a hospital,” he said. “Few hundred a week.”
Your face looked wounded. “Few hundred.”
He leaned in slightly, faking a whisper. “You’re my top three.”
You were further gone than usual tonight. He’d noticed it the second he came around the curtain, the way your head was having a hard time holding itself up, the loose unmoored swim of your eyes that took longer than it should to find his finger. A piece of hair had come loose and stuck to the gloss at the corner of your mouth and you hadn’t the coordination to deal with it, and he had the unprofessional impulse to, and didn’t.
Bennet kept working the blood pressure cuff up your arm, half an eye on you, half on his own work.
“Track the light,” Jack murmured. “Slowly.”
“Too bright.”
“Tough.” The corner of his mouth moved up slightly. “You can bat your lashes at me when we’re done. Right now, I need ‘em open.”
You batted them anyway, slowly and theatrically, just to be a problem about it. They were long, and the theater of it was so ridiculous, and Jack had to bite down the inside of his cheek to keep his face flat to wait you out, until you gave up and tracked the finger. Your pupils were reactive, equal, and lagging half-a-beat behind. He clicked the light off.
“Too bright,” you said again.
“It’s off,” he drawled, chuckling.
Bennett thread a line into the back of your free hand, and you watched him sink it with a drowsy focus.
“Why’s it go in the back of the hand?” you mumbled. “More nerves there. Hurts more. Why not the — inside. By the elbow.” You tilted your head slightly to let your eyes wander to the crook of your arm. “Bigger vein. The antec—antecubital,” you said carefully, sounding out each syllable, afraid of messing it up. You wet your lips and turned to face him, then Bennet. “Why’s nobody use the good one?”
Jack pursed his lips and looked at you for a moment.
“Saves the good one,” he said, catching up, eyes going back to your chart. “AC vein blows easily when somebody’s moving around, and you —” He tipped his head at you, raising a brow, the squirming drunk of you. “ — Are gonna move around. Back of the hand’ll hold. I’d rather you be sore than re-stuck twice ‘cause you couldn’t sit pretty for thirty seconds.” He paused as he saw your eyes glaze over. He sighed. “Ask me how I know that about you.”
You’d gone busy, lips moving slightly like you were repeating it back to yourself so it’d stick, and Jack felt something in his chest shift a degree as he watched you do it.
He sighed, dragging a palm over the lower half of his face. “Where’d you learn that, then?”
“School,” you said to the ceiling, a small hint of pride taking over your voice. “M’gonna become a nurse. Gonna be good at it.”
Bennet snorted, finishing the tape. “Gonna be patching up drunk girls just like you then, huh,” he said. “Full circle.”
Jack watched the pride go out of your face slowly, like a house losing its power. Your chin dropped and your eyes slid from Bennet to the curtain as your hand fisted in your lap.
“Yeah,” you said, almost curiously. “Guess so.”
Jack’s jaw clenched involuntarily. It wasn’t the guy’s fault, not really. It was a nothing joke, the sort the whole department tossed off a hundred times a shift, the gallows shorthand that kept you sane at two in the morning. Jack had made worse about patients who’d never know, about drunks who wouldn’t remember, about exactly this, exactly girls like you. He’d just never had one of them go quiet before, watched the bright thing fold itself up and get tucked away.
“Bennet, you done?”
“Yeah, line’s good — ”
“Then go take vitals on six. I’ve got her.”
Bennet went, and it was just the two of you again.
Jack pulled the stool over with his foot and sat — lower than he had to, level with you, taking himself out of the column of people standing over you tonight and telling you what you were — and waited until your eyes came up off the curtain and found him.
“There she is,” he said when your eyes found him. He turned your taped hand over under the light like there was still something to do with it. There wasn’t, he just wanted his hands on something of yours while he undid what the room had done. “Look at me. Nothing good on the curtain.”
“How’s school treating you then, doll?” he asked, aiming for offhand and not steering you off whatever Bennet had knocked loose.
“Hard,” you said, but a small smile had crawled up your lips. “But I like it.” Your shoulders came up loosely.
“Yeah?” He kept his thumb moving over the back of your hand slowly, like he could press the bright thing back up to the surface where it belonged. “I think you’ll be good at it.”
It was such a strange feeling, Jack distantly noticed, to feel this utter conviction. He was rarely sure of anything good anymore. Sure of plenty else; sure within ten seconds of a bad rhythm which way the night was going to break, sure of which of the kids wheeled in at 2 am he’d see again and which he wouldn’t, a grim accumulated certainty that had nothing in it he’d ever wanted to be right about.
The job had made him an expert on the downslope of things. He could read the exact moment a body wanted to quit better than he could read most of what people said to his face. And here you were, and he was so sure of the other direction, and he felt the same weight of it behind his sternum, except it had swung and pointed at something good for once. You were going to be excellent at this.
It bothered him a little, how much he wanted to be there to see it, whoever you were going to be once you stopped washing up on his floor on the worst nights of your week. He’d known you, what, a handful of shifts as a frequent flyer, a bit, a name his eyes unconsciously caught on. He had no business feeling certain of anything about you, and he was, and he’d let himself feel it.
Your eyes found him properly again. “Liar.”
He huffed out a short laugh. “Tell you what. You finish that program, you get through all that mess where they try to drown you.” His thumb smoothed over the tape. “Then you come find me here and we’ll see if we can get you here with me on nights. Clearly you’re at your finest then.”
It was maybe something silly to say, and Gloria may have his head for it. He had no actual standing to say anything like it, even though you’d never remember it. He knew better; hope was a controlled substance in his field and he was stingy with it on purpose, because he’d seen the withdrawal.
But God, he’d love to see the part of you he could only catch glimpses of through the wreck like a light under the door. He’d love to be the one who taught you which arrogance to keep and which to let the job take away. He’d love, plainly and without anywhere to put it, to watch you become who you’d just told him you were going to be.
It was a lot of loving for a girl who’d been in his department and wouldn’t recall his face or a word of this by tomorrow morning. He was getting sentimental, or old, or both; the years stacked up behind his eyes until he started mistaking everything for a second chance at something.
Your lips moved. “So I can patch girls up like myself?”
“Nah.” He kept looking at your hand. “You can patch up old bastards like me, too.” Then, he pointed his index finger of his free hand at you, mock-stern. “Gotta make sure you’re not at point three BAC, though. Will have to do that work to get you working with me.”
“Mm.” Your eyes flickered up to the ceiling, weighing it with the enormous gravity of the very drunk as though he’d posed a very real proposition to you. “Okay. For you, I’d stop.”
“For me?” he repeated, mostly to buy himself a second.
“Mm-hm.” You turned your face to him and said it with such ease, no glance away to leave yourself an exit. “You’re worth not drinkin’ over.”
Your words went in clean, the way the best and worst things do, under the ribs where he kept nothing armored because nobody ever aimed there. Jack felt the back of his neck go warm and was abruptly, intensely grateful for the light that wouldn’t display it.
Jack huffed, having to look away at the floor then. “That’s the nicest thing anyone’s said to me all year, and you’re not gonna remember it. Hell of a thing.”
When he made himself look back up, you’d tipped your face into the pillow, watching him from the side with your eyes gone soft and heavy, the smile arriving unguarded across your mouth. The split tugged one corner of it, that small wince folded right into the sweetness, and you seemed to not feel it.
He had the sudden, idiotic wish to have met you on a night you’d remember. To have perhaps caught you when you fell at the bar, to have been the stranger whose arm happened to be there, not the doctor it eventually routed you to. Perhaps he could’ve been a man in your night instead of a stop in it.
He shook his head. “You’re trouble, you know that, right? Saying all these nice things. What’s a man supposed to do with that?”
He’d have liked to have been remembered, was the bottom of it. By you specifically. He’d spent decades being the man people were grateful to and glad to forget.
“What’s your name, Doctor Abbot?” you asked, drowsy.
He looked down at his badge, then back up at you. “Take a wild guess?” Then, he added, “You never looked at my badge?”
“Sorry. Didn’t read.”
“Don’t apologize to me. It’s Jack.”
Jack was doing his usual rounds this Friday, on a rush from a chest pain in two that turned out to be a panic attack and a kid in five who’d put a kitchen knife through the meat of his own palm trying to halve a frozen bagel when Ellis caught him by the elbow at the board.
“Heads up, Abbot,” she said, grinning. She nodded toward triage, toward the doors. “Bed three. Your, uh—” The grin tipped over, delighted with itself. “Girlfriend’s got a boyfriend.”
It was a running thing now. Somewhere around the fourth or fifth time you’d washed up on his shift the staff had started on it — your frequent flyer, your stray, your girl’s back — and Jack had stopped bothering to deny it because that’d only feed it, and he’d learned not denying it had a way of starving the joke faster.
He looked, and was immediately able to notice what you weren’t doing more than what you were; you weren’t grinning at the ceiling, weren’t doing that boneless sweet-relief thing. You were sitting up too straight on the bed, hands folded in your lap, and there was a guy fitted to the chair beside you with one arm slung along the back of yours and a hand resting on your knee like he’d put it there to mark the spot. He was saying something low to the side of your face, and you were nodding at it, and not looking at anybody.
Jack felt a muscle tick in his jaw, immediately not feeling anything nice about the situation. “I got it — you mind taking six for me? I’ll come in a couple minutes.”
By the time he’d made it to you, he’d settled his face into something unbothered. You could read it, he’d realized at some point during your frequent visits, and that only meant he had to be on his better behavior around you.
“Evening.” He pulled the curtain half-round behind him, glanced at the chart clipped to the foot of the bed, then at you. “What’d we do tonight?”
“She caught an elbow,” the guy answered. “Some asshole on the dance floor. It’s nothing — she’s fine. She’s just a lightweight, aren’t you — ” A little squeeze on your knee. “ — didn’t even really need to come in, but y’know. Better safe.”
You weren’t a lightweight, he immediately wanted to correct. He’d seen you put away enough over the months to know your tolerance better than this guy apparently did; he knew the difference between the nights you were genuinely wrecked and the nights you came in clearer than you let on, and looking at you, tonight, you weren’t anywhere near the state implied.
“You,” he said, tipping his chin in your direction. “Not him. Where’d it get you?”
You lifted your hand up from your lap and touched your cheekbone, movement slow, and Jack stepped in and tipped your head up toward the light with two fingers under your chin, thumb resting just shy of the scrape. The skin had gone dark along the bone, tender, an elbow’s worth of it. Nothing that needed more than an ice and a night, but you were still holding still under his hand and not meeting his eyes, and that he didn’t like at all.
“It’s okay,” you said. “Really. S’not even — ”
“Let me be the judge of that, sweetheart. Gettin’ paid for this.” His eyes flicked down to yours and caught, holding it there a second with a small question in the rise of a brow, before he went back to the bone, thumb tracing the edge of the bruise so light you barely felt it. A small frown pulled at the corners of his mouth at the sight. “Follow my finger. Eyes only.”
You followed, pupils fine and equal. No concussion in it.
“She’s fine, I told you,” the guy said from the chair, a little laugh under it like he was inviting Jack in on something. “Hardly. She bounces back.”
Jack clicked the penlight off and turned to the side. “Gonna need the room.”
“I’ll stay.” The hand went back to your knee. “I’m all good here.”
“Can’t clear a head strike with people in the room. You get it.” Jack tilted his head to the side, raising a shoulder. “Liability. Coffee machine’s down the hall. Give me two minutes with my patient.”
The easy smile on the guy’s lips went thin around the edges, looking for a thing to push against and not finding it. He stood up slow, making a show of it, squeezing your knee and letting you know he’ll be back in a minute, babe, a hand trailing your shoulder on the way past, all of it aimed less at you and more at Jack holding the curtain. Jack pressed his lips in a thin line as he met the guy’s eyes.
The second the curtain closed behind him, a breath left you, tiny and involuntary, and your shoulders came down in the empty room.
“Sorry, Dr. Abbot,” you murmured. “I keep being a mess at this place.” You took in a short, almost shaky breath. “Sorry.”
“None of that,” he almost grumbled, penning your chart. “Your folks down here, sweetheart?”
“No,” you said to your lap, picking the edge of the blanket. “Back home. A few states over.” You let out a laugh. “Just me out here. S’nice.”
Jack forced a small smile, having to look at the ceiling while you looked down at your lap, shaking his head, more of an action for himself than for you. He pulled the stool over with his foot and sat, getting level with you.
“What’s goin’ on with you, huh?” he asked quietly, making sure there was nothing sharp in his tone at all. “Honest. I like seeing you but not like this bruised up with a guy who talks for you.” His thumb found your wrist. “So talk to me. What’s going on?”
“He’s fine,” you said. “Just likes being around.”
Jack tilted his head, dipping his head to meet your eyes that were still facing down. “Not the important part of the question, and you know it.”
You sighed. “Sorry, Jack.”
“Quit it. The only thing I want from you tonight is some honesty, alright?”
A corner of your lip kicked up, even though the dimness in your eyes held. “Your eyes look really pretty tonight.”
“Heard that one before,” he drawled. “Had ‘em fifty years. Try a new one.”
“Your neck’s going red,” you mumbled, fingers reaching up to press flat to the warm of his skin, right there below the jaw, like you just had to feel whether it was true.
Jack stilled. Your fingers were cold on his neck. He distantly registered his pulse was probably going under your fingertips, and you’d feel it if you held there a second longer. And then you caught yourself, hand snapping back to the blanket.
“Sorry. Sorry — I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t have done that — ” you said, the words coming out in a taut string.
“Easy,” he said, voice coming out rough. He swallowed. “Got me all flustered and now you’re gettin’ all shy?”
You huffed a small laugh, your hand still fisted in the blanket where you’d snatched it back. “I’m not allowed to do that. I don’t think.”
“Had no idea you knew how to behave,” he leaned a little back from the stool, crossing his arms. “Should I be worried about that guy out there?”
“Jealous, Doctor?”
He rolled his eyes slightly, not responding.
You sighed when you realized he wasn’t taking the bait. “He’s fine. He just likes being around.”
He stood off the stool and reached for the discharge clipboard at the foot of the bed.
“Whatcha doing there?”
“My job.” He clicked the pen. “Clearing you. You’ve got no concussion. You’re not dying tonight.” He scrawled on the paper. “And I’m writing you a script for the bruise and a code for an Uber — ”
“No, no,” you said immediately. “Please don’t do that.”
He raised his hand with the pen, palm open. “You never let me Uber you back when you’re alone. At least have this.” Your face scrunched up, and he could practically feel the guilt building in you. “Don’t need to use it now. Or ever. You can keep it for whenever.” He set the slip on your lap before you could push it back at him, the matter completely closed on his end. “Goes in your phone case. You can forget it exists until you need it.”
“You can’t keep handing me stuff — ”
“Department’s got a whole stack. You’re not special.” He capped the pen, though the corner of his mouth made it slightly visible that his words were false. “Don’t flatter yourself, doll.”
You looked down at the slip, your thumb worrying the edges of it. “I don’t like taking things.”
“I noticed. A few hundred times now.” He tucked the pen back in his scrub pocket, and his voice came down a notch. “If it really makes you feel so bad, though, then maybe we can start taking care of ourselves so you don’t have to keep ending up here?”
Jack was in the middle of hand-off, Robby doing his thing before Robby left and did whatever the hell he did. They were at the board, Robby running down the floor. It was six-fifteen in the ugly hour, the in-between where the day shift was dragging itself toward the door and the night hadn’t started biting yet, the light through the ambulance doors gone gold and slanted and almost decent for once.
And then the doors slid, and you came through them. Jack’s attention peeled to you the second your shape entered the room, except this was wrong, he distantly registered. It was daylight and six in the evening and you were on your own two feet, upright and, assumedly, sober and walking in through the front like a person as opposed to a patient. You were wearing a jacket that swallowed you, and he assumed underneath it was shorts of some sort. He could see a stripe of navy cotton peeking from under the collar of your jacket as you adjusted a tote bag on your shoulder.
You looked, frankly, like a completely different species from the one he scraped off bed four on weekends. The jacket was too big — his first thought was that it was a man’s, and his second thought, which he didn’t care for, was about whose — sleeves shoved up to your forearms, a stripe of soft navy cotton on the collar, and below it bare legs and shorts and sneakers that had likely never seen the inside of a club. Your hair was up and a little damp at the temple and your face was scrubbed clean.
You looked like somebody’s whole good day, he thought. You looked around around the waiting room with slightly widened eyes, a lost expression coating your features like you’d built up a lot of nerve to walk in here and had no idea what to do with it.
“ — and the tox screen is still pending, so don’t let them,” Robby was saying.
“Mhm,” Jack said, attention already halved.
And Bennet, breezing past the triage desk with cheerful obliviousness, caught your figure and said, out loud, “Don’t tell me you’ve started day drinking. It’s barely past six, you gotta pace yourself — ” He let out a small laugh at his own joke, and kept walking, and didn’t see the way it landed.
Your body stiffened, and you looked like a deer in headlights. Your mouth opened, some sort of flustered apology forming, he was sure.
Jack let out a short groan, shaking his head. He set the tablet on the counter, already moving to cross the floor toward you. “Finish the hand-off with Shen. I gotta go deal with something.”
Robby said something at his back — deal with what? — but Jack was already gone, crossing the floor slowly but somehow still eating the distance fast, and he watched you spot him coming and watched the relief crash over your face. Except you were sober now, in the daylight, and your whole face was going soft and grateful and just slightly wrecked at the sight of him.
He stopped a couple feet short of you, closer than a doctor, further than he stood to you at night. He wasn’t sure what to do with his hands — there was no chart to hold (he should’ve brought the tablet) or wrist to take or a penlight to shine — so he clasped them behind his back, and tilted his head to get a better look at you.
“Hi,” you breathed.
“Hey,” he said, eyes doing a quick once-over to make sure you really didn’t have any new injuries.
You shifted the tote under his gaze and clutched whatever was in the bag a little tighter.
“Jack —” you started, stopped, like the name had come out wrong. “ — Dr. Abbot.” You winced, pinching your eyes shut for a second. “Jack?” you tried to say again, smaller, your eyes flicking up to check his face to check if you’d overstepped. “Sorry, I don’t know which — ”
“Jack’s great.” His mouth tugged up, despite himself. “You’ve called me a lot worse. Jack’s a step-up.”
You let out a startled little laugh, your mouth coming over your mouth like you could catch it, as your body eased a degree.
“I’m sorry — I don’t — God, this is so embarrassing. I’m sorry.”
“You know how many times you’ve apologized to me? Quit it.” He rubbed a finger over his lips. “What’s got you here today, then?”
“Um, I came to see you.” He raised a brow, and you let out a short breath, then continued, “I might not remember a lot of it, but I remember you took really good care of me. And my friends who came in with me sometimes said you took really good care of me.” The words came out softer now, flowing, more earnest. “Even though I was a mess. Especially when. So I just wanted to —” You shrugged, smiling slightly. “ — come say thanks.”
Jack felt the complete warmth of you land somewhere he kept no armor. “It’s the job,” he said quickly, before he could stop himself. “You didn’t have to come down here for that. That’s — it’s what we do. Anybody on shift would’ve done the same.”
Your expression faltered for a moment, and your eyes dropped to the tote at your side as your shoulders came in. You shook your head, a small motion, then smiled again.
“Right. No — yeah, of course.” You chuckled. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to make it a — I know it’s your job.” You shifted the bag, then shifted your weight from one foot to another. “Still, though. You did, so I wanted to.”
Jack already wanted to take his words back, but he couldn’t, so he just shook his head. “Hey, you’re my problem, though. So thank you. For the thanks. We’re even.”
Your shoulders eased and you nodded. “Well, I also have something for you.” You hauled a container out of your tote and held it out to him with both hands before you could chicken out. “It definitely doesn’t make up for all of the times you helped me.” You looked down at the container. “And I don’t know if you’re lactose intolerant, or have a peanut allergy or anything. I’m sorry if you do — I can — ”
“I’ve got a cast-iron everything. The cookies won’t kill me.” When you pushed the container further to him, he took it off your hands, eyes quickly scanning the round chocolate chip cookies, forcing a smile down. He swallowed whatever had lodged in his throat.
“These are homemade?” He weighed the container in both hands, absurdly. You nodded. He swallowed whatever on earth had lodged in his throat at that.“Didn’t have to do all that for me.”
“I wanted to,” you said quickly. “I wasn’t sure how the food here is, so thought it might be a nice change.”
“Worse than you’re imagining,” he said, then tipped his head to the side as the memory crawled into his brain, uncalled for. “You’ve actually thrown a sandwich across the room.”
Your palm came up to your mouth, and you let out a muffled, “I’m so sorry.”
Jack snorted, shaking his head. Then, after a moment, he cleared his throat before it could get away from him. He looked back toward the board, then at you, knowing time was slipping and he’d have to go back to work and you’d have to go somewhere else, most likely.
“You got finals or anything coming up soon?” he asked.
Your lips curved down, and you nodded. “Yeah, in a couple weeks.”
“Am I gonna be seeing you getting wheeled in wasted?”
“I want to say no,” you said, smiling a little crooked. “I’m working on it. But I’ve said that before and ended up here. So.” You shrugged, lips jutting out like you were also unimpressed with yourself. “Ask me again in a couple weeks, I guess. I’d like it if you didn’t, though.”
“Then quit doing the hard nights alone,” he said, leaning in just slightly. “You keep yourself off the stairs, and you can come bother us instead here with a textbook.” He raised a brow as he held your eyes. “We’ve got a family room that’s almost always empty at night.”
“I couldn’t — ”
“Won’t be a bother. Trust me. You’d be silly not to use people’s help when they’ve clawed through the same exams to get the badge. You get stuck, somebody’ll know it cold.” He shrugged. “Half of ‘em are bored out of their minds some nights. You’d be doing us a favor.”
You let out a breath, brows pinching together. “That’s — yeah.” You let out a short laugh, looking away for a second. “I’d like that. A lot. Thank you, really. As long as you don’t mind.”
“This is a teaching hospital, doll. I don’t mind, so long as you don’t mind the company. Might be nice for me, too.”
You smiled and for a moment, neither of you moved to end it. Then you shifted the tote back up your shoulder, and Jack felt the pull to keep you here one more second before he could stop himself.
“Go home,” he said gruffly. “And I’ll be looking for you. So actually turn up, don’t make me look for nothing.”
The whole sun of you came up at that, stunned, like you hadn’t expected to be looked for by anyone. Jack felt the ground go quietly out from under him, the vertigo of having reached for a person’s happiness on purpose and connected, of being, for once, the cause of a face doing that. He’d gotten so used to delivering news that took the light out that he’d forgotten it ran the other way, too.
“I’ll turn up. I promise.”
He nodded, clearing his throat and turning for the board, bidding you a throaty goodbye.
“She’s the girl that everyone on night talks about?” Robby asked immediately, falling into step beside him.
Jack looked at him sideways, shaking his head. “You got something to say, too?”
“No,” Robby said, rubbing his palm at his chin like he was holding something in. “You like her or something?”
Jack halted for a second, pointing his index at Robby as he lowered his chin. “You shut up. She’s gonna be a nurse.”
“Oh, yeah,” Robby laughed. “Looks like she’s gonna be your nurse, old man. You’ll need it soon enough.”
Thank god you did turn up. Jack had the sense that maybe he’d scared you off altogether by his offer, and the line he’d toed had two very alternate spectrums: you’d find a new hospital altogether to go to in the metropolitan area after your falls or poisonings, or you’d be here a lot more often, which he still wasn’t sure would’ve been often enough.
The first time you came in, it was well past midnight and Jack had unfortunately not been able to catch you off the bat because he was in an emergency surgery. He’d walked out of it with his blood-stained surgical gown still on to be met with the sight of you by the nurse’s station, writing something down on the back of a discharge form for Lena, with another Tupperware laying on the table. He made the guess that you’d brought the whole floor something and were three minutes from having Lena eating out of your hand.
You’d found a corner of his department and made yourself a small soft home in it inside of ten minutes, and you were leaning in, and Jack stood there for a moment with the bad night still ringing in his ears and felt something unclench in his chest by a fraction.
“ — no, but you gotta,” you were saying to Lena in earnest as Jack approached closer. “If you put the brown sugar in while the butter’s still hot, it’s just — it’s a different cookie.”
“You taking the recipe, Lena?” Jack asked then, fully submerging into the knot you’d made with his charge nurse.
You turned to face him, a smile forming on your lips almost immediately, and then your eyes dropped over him, to the gown, the rust-brown stain dried dark across the front of it, the set of his shoulders.
“I am,” Lena replied. “Gonna make these for the kids.” She punctuated her sentence by holding up one of the cookies.
“Gonna make some for us, too, then?” Jack asked, raising a brow, and settled his elbows over the table. He turned his neck to face you properly, putting on his best smile.
Lena laughed shortly. “I don’t like you enough.” She pushed off the counter with some forms in hand. “Her, maybe. You can have whatever she leaves behind.” She shot you a look that was almost warm before she went and disappeared down the hall.
“Could be you someday,” Jack said, tilting his head in the direction of Lena’s chair.
You shook your head, then pushed the container in his hands. “I’ve got to graduate first. And pass pharm, which is currently — ” You patted your tote bag, textbooks heavy. “ — trying to kill me.”
Jack nodded toward the family room, placing the container on the table for a second beside him. “C’mon, then, doll. Let’s see what the pharm’s doing to you.”
“You don’t have to — ” Your eyes flicked down the gown again. “You just came out of surgery. You don’t have to help me study.”
“Actin’ like I’m the one who got the surgery,” Jack muttered, chuckling slightly. He was already peeling off the gown one-handed, balling it up to toss. He started walking, and you followed behind him. “C’mon. It’s pretty empty right now.”
It’d been pleasant that night and the few after to have five to ten minute increments of sitting with you helping you study in between doing his actual job. He’d duck in between things — a lull after discharge, the dread stretch while he waited for a CT scan, the ten minutes a trauma took to roll in once the call came — and you’d be there in the family room with your stack of cards on the couch. He’d drop on the chair across you or the couch beside you and pick up wherever you’d left off like he hadn’t left at all. Then his pager would buzz and he’d be gone, and you’d still be there an hour later when he came back, and he’d sit back down, and both of you’d pretend this was a completely normal way to study.
It’d annoyed him the first night how badly the flashcards were failing you; he’d seen you stare at the words and your eyes would glaze and slide right off it like they were greased. You’d memorized or retained nothing. And then he’d said, half to himself, a story for the why to click, and he’d watched it lock in you.
So he’d stopped quizzing you primarily off the cards and started telling you stories instead and you’d talk it back to him, reasoning out loud, getting there in the saying of it the way you never got there on the page.
The nights stacked up. The first week, you’d sat at a table across from him. By the second, you’d migrated to the chair beside him. Your coffee, the one by the far end of the table, was right by his elbow. Lena started leaving a second cup at the station when she saw you come in, his and yours, and never commented.
You’d stopped apologizing for taking up his time somewhere in there. He noticed when you’d started saving him the worst looking cookie on purpose because he’d once told you he liked the ugly ones. He’d noticed when you learned the rhythm of his pages; you’d go quiet and just hand him the next card when his eyes drifted to the board through the window of the door, would have it ready when he came back, like you’d kept his place for him while he was off keeping someone alive.
He noticed that he more than looked forward to it. Somewhere in the dead middle of a bad shift, his feet would take him toward the family room before his brain could catch up on the why of it all. An empty table on a night you didn’t come in sat wrong with him, a tiny disappointment he didn’t have anything in him to figure out why.
Sometimes, like now, you’d get distracted. Jack had learned. He’d walked into the family room to see you and Ellis folded into opposite ends of the couch, the flashcards abandoned in a fanned mess on the cushion between you, both of you mid-argument and enjoying yourselves too much.
“Poaching my study hall, Ellis?” he said, finally moving in.
Ellis pointed one stern finger in your direction as she pulled herself off the couch. “Do the crossword, not the sudoku.”
“She’s gonna make you a worse student,” Jack said to Ellis’s back.
“She’s making me a worse doctor,” Ellis said cheerfully, already at the door. “I’ve been here twenty minutes. I have patients.” She turned to you one final time. “Crossword. You’ll thank me later.”
She gave Jack a knowing look on her way out, one he didn’t want to read too much into, and she was gone, the door swinging shut behind her in one slow plunge.
You watched the door settle, and the entire wattage of your attention turned to him. He hadn’t gotten used to that, and he didn’t think he ever would. “Looks like I’ll never be a nurse.”
“Don’t say things like that.” He came around and lowered himself onto the couch beside you. “What’re you stuck on? Hit me.”
Your palm met his upper arm, a small smack.
He narrowed his eyes at you. “Hit me all you want. You’re not getting out of this.”
“But Jaaaack,” you drawled, tipping your head back on the couch. “Not here to study today.”
His eyes flickered over to your form briefly as he gathered the cards and squared them. “Oh, no? What’re you here for then?”
“Dunno.” You pulled your knees up to the couch. “Didn’t wanna be at mine. And work was a lot and boring.” You turned to face him then, a small smile growing on your lips. “Thought I’d bother yours instead.”
He set the squared deck on his knee. “Lucky me.”
He’d caught it, though, how you’d folded the sad thing in the middle of the sentence where it’d draw the least attention and moved on before it could sit. He let it move on, but he kept it. The image of you on a Tuesday, work behind you, and the choice you’d made was to drive to a hospital rather than go home to your own quiet. He was getting a picture of what that quiet looked like and learned that he didn’t like it very much.
“Work was boring, huh,” he said, though he couldn’t imagine what a fun day looked like as a waitress. “You working more?”
“Mm. Saturday girl quit, so now I’m on Saturdays, too.” You picked at your sock. “S’okay. Tips are good. I learned that old guys tip better when you call them ‘sir.’”
He huffed. “Do they?”
“Huge. It’s a cheat code.” You tilted your head at him, smiling shyly. “You’d tip well, I think. You’d overcompensate.”
“I’m not gonna sit here and get profiled by you in the only few minutes where I can catch my breath.” He held the card up, front to himself. “And I tip twenty-five percent like every functioning adult, thank you.”
You groaned. “Where can I get tipped more than that?”
“You don’t want me to answer that.”
“I do. I do. I’m a broke student. Point me to the money — where should I apply?” You shifted on the couch, fully facing him now, the cards apparently abandoned for the moment. “C’mon. You’ve lived a hundred years. You’ve gotta know where I can make some quick cash.”
“You’re sweet to me, doll,” he muttered, rolling his eyes. He set the cards down and looked at you, genuinely considering it now. He tried to ignore the fact that you likely had money troubles and tried to think about how he could actually help. “Define quick.”
“Like — by next Thursday.”
“Legally?”
“No.”
“Legally, you can sell plasma. Twice a week, they pay you, you sit there with a juice box.”
Your nose scrunched. “I don’t love needles in me sober.”
“You’re gonna be a nurse.”
“In other people. That’s totally different.” You waved it off. “Next. What else?”
“Sleep studies pay you to sleep. Egg donation pays a whole lot but it’s a whole process, not a Thursday deal.” He was ticking them off on his fingers, now fully committed. “Medical research’ll pay you to test things. Phase-one trials. You take an experimental drug and they watch you for side effects.”
“That’s the one.” You sat up. “How much?”
“No,” he said immediately, shaking his head. “Absolutely not. I bring you in here to keep you from blacking out. I’m not gonna have you volunteering to get poisoned for a quick four hundred bucks.” He pointed at you. “Maybe start laying on the ‘sir’ a little too thick from now on.”
“Sir.” You tested on him directly, dropping your voice, leaning in an inch, lashes going slow. “Could you help me out, sir? Tips have been so slow, sir.”
He turned his face away from you, now making himself look out the window. “I’m not entertaining this.”
“Oh, but sir.” You’d fully abandoned the cards now, scooting closer, a hand under your chin, the picture of innocence. “I’m just a girl. A poor, hardworking girl trying to be a nurse. Don’t you want to help me out, sir?”
“I am trying.” He pulled up the flashcards. “If it’ll help, I’ll bring my SWAT buddies into your place and they can run up a tab.” He waved a card in front of your face, trying to get your attention back to it. “You do this, I’ll have eight cops eating mozzarella sticks in your section by Friday, overtipping ‘cause I saved their lives. Won’t even have to call ‘em sir.”
“Right. No, that’s — ” You let out a little laugh too quickly, eyes widening at his words, and you took the card out of his hand mostly to have something to do with yours. “You don’t have to do that. Obviously. I was kidding — ” You batted the whole thing away with a shake of your head. “God. No. I’m okay, I promise. I was kidding.”
“I’m half-kidding,” he said, raising a brow. “I do know those guys. It’s no skin off me. But it’s okay.”
He let the offer sit like that, and he saw you pinch your eyes shut. He watched the whole thing happen on your face, the small involuntary recoil you always had when anyone offered you real kindness. You were bad at it. For a girl who lied so charmingly about how much she drank and how her night went, you had absolutely no poker face for being cared about. You had not the first idea how to hide it.
He found it unbearably endearing.
You opened your eyes and looked a little caught, a little sheepish as your thumb worried the corner of the card.
“You’re a strange girl,” he mumbled, fond, before he could stop it. “You know that?”
“Shit — Jack,” you said through a small laugh, shaking your head. “I don’t — I’m — ” You pressed your lips together and your shoulders came up almost to your ears in a stiff shrug. “Is there anything I can do for you? I can’t just accept — all your help.”
He snorted. “What help? I give you a study room and review flash cards.”
“Let me do something. I’m a good cleaner — ”
His head went back slightly, shaking his head. “You’re really not.”
“Okay,” you continued, rallying. “A dog? Guys like you always have dogs they don’t walk ‘cause of their hours. I can walk dogs.”
“No dog.” He raised his hand when he saw your mouth move again, stopping you. “You pay me back by passing your boards. You can pay me back plenty if you end up working here, doing good at the job.”
You went quiet for a second. “That’s just me doing my own thing. That’s not real.”
“That’s real to me.” He shrugged, like he hadn’t just made your whole future the price of his kindness. “I get a good nurse out of it someday.” He pulled himself off the couch. “And now I gotta go. Floor’s not gonna run itself.”
“Boo,” you said, pulling the entire deck on your lap now. “You’re the worst study partner. You leave constantly.”
Tonight, Jack had come into the family room after leaving you for a longer stretch of time than usual — a multi-vehicle situation that had eaten two hours and most of his patience — and found the studying had long since lost.
You’d migrated to the couch at some point. The textbook was open face-down on the cushion beside you like a small tented roof, your flashcards fanned across the middle seat, and you were folded in the corner with your knees pulled up and cheek mashed into the worn armrest, fighting your eyes and losing completely. You’d dimmed the overhead lights, lighting the lamp in the corner, the one nobody used, throwing everything low and gold.
He paused in the doorway. “You awake?”
“Mhm. Need a cat nap, though,” you murmured.
Jack snorted, shutting the door behind him as he walked closer to you. “How far’d you get?”
“Far enough.” Then, you added, “Cat nap.”
“Sayin’ it like I’m gonna not let you have one.”
Your eye cracked open a sliver, tracked him, then fell shut again. “Feel like you’re gonna make me do more cards.”
He toed the leg of the coffee table aside, reached down, and started clearing your mess off the cushions. He lifted the textbook and shut it around the receipt you’d jammed as a bookmark; gathered the flashcards and squared them in his palm; capped the highlighter and pocketed it. You watched the cleanup through one half-open eye, not lifting a single finger, your cheek staying flat to the armrest.
“There. No more cards. You’re done for tonight, doll.”
“Hooray,” you mumbled.
He nudged your socked foot where it had crept up across the cushion. “C’mon. Budge up a second. Don’t want you wrecking your neck sleeping like that.”
You made a small sound of protest but you went, peeling your cheek off the armrest with reluctance. There was a crease pressed into your skin where the fabric seam had been and your hair was flat on one side and mushed on the other. You blinked up at him, swaying where you sat, eyes glassy and unfocused in the gold lamplight.
He sank into the space he’d cleared, the cushion dipping, tipping the two of you a fraction into each other. That was all the invitation your body apparently needed, because you folded into him without a beat of thought — too tired to second-guess it, he supposed — your temple finding the warm of his shoulder, your whole side melting against his. You drew your knees up and tucked them against his thigh. Your hand came to rest on his chest, palm flat, fingers spreading once before they went still. You exhaled after a moment, long and slowly, and burrowed your nose into his neck.
Jack stilled.
“Ten minutes,” you murmured, the words barely coming out as words.
He took his arm off the back of the couch and settled it around your back, broad hand spanning between your shoulder blades and drawing you that last fraction deeper into him. You went boneless with it, a small contended hum slipping out of you.
Because he couldn’t help himself, he tipped his head down a fraction to say into your hair, “Been doin’ really well, y’know that, sweetheart?”
You hummed, the sound of it vibrating against his throat, your fingers curling the faintest bit in his scrubs. “Thanks, Jack.”
“Gonna be a good nurse,” he murmured, thumb moving once along your shoulder.
“Gonna work with you,” you mumbled, three-quarters gone. “You said.”
“Mhm.”
“Holdin’ you to it.”
“Yeah, I know you are.” The corner of his mouth flicked up where you couldn’t see it. “Go to sleep. You can hold me to it in ten minutes.”
When you didn’t answer for a second, Jack realized you were already gone. You were warm and trusting at his side, your hand slack over his heart, your breath sinking deep and even into his neck.
Jack let his head tip back against the couch, pinching his eyes shut at the feeling of you, at the feeling you caused. His hand spread slowly across your back, feeling the breath go through you — the proof of you — and he let his thumb find the curve of your shoulder and rest there, keeping his eyes shut. He sat with the enormous fact of you, the girl he’d not seen anyone circle back for, gone soft and so pliant in his arms like she’d always belonged there, and he stopped pretending he wasn’t already lost.
The ten minutes came and went. He let them. He’d have given you the whole night, the whole shift, the whole of whatever this was turning into. There wasn’t one place on the earth worth standing up for, and he’d known it for weeks, and only now, with your breath slow against his throat, did he let himself sit all the way inside of the knowing.
Jack came out of the OR and signed — albeit distantly, mind running a meter a minute about nothing good — what needed signing and said the things he was meant to, feeling the familiar piece of his own damn soul rotting away in the place those things went to rot. He knew the spot by now. It’d been decades of depositing them into the same place, and the place didn’t fill, exactly, but it never emptied, either. It just sat there, getting heavier, like things usually do when you keep adding to it and never take anything out.
This one would sit a while. Jack had started to sense it around the first year in this job; the ones that stayed had a weight, and you knew on the table whether you were getting one of those or whether it’d wash off by morning. This one wouldn’t.
He stripped his gloves, and somebody said something he answered without hearing, and then his feet simply walked past the board, carrying him down the hall toward the one door on the whole floor that wouldn’t have somebody else’s catastrophe behind it.
His hand was flat on the door. He was still wearing the gown, and he looked down and registered it too late. He should’ve changed it, left the thing in the dirty bin with the rest of what the shift had taken, the way he always did before he came to you, kept the two halves of the floor separate on purpose.
He opened the door. You were on the couch, one leg tucked under you and the other foot on the floor and a half-empty cup of coffee on the table going cold. You’d been doing something on your phone, or nothing, when the door opened, and you looked up with the easy expectant expression on your face you always had before it dropped. He watched it melt.
“Hey,” you said, making your voice soft.
“Hey.” His voice came out rough, and he almost winced as he heard it himself.
You set your phone face-down on the cushion and unfolded yourself from the couch and stood, crossing the room to close the gap between you. You stopped in front of him and looked up, your brow doing a small worried thing, and he let himself be looked at.
“Sit down,” you said. “You look like you’re gonna fall through the floor.”
He distantly registered you walking him to the chair — your hand finding his forearm, a light touch — and he let you. He folded into the chair like the strings of his own body had been cut, his elbows finding his knees and head dropping.
He heard you move, small domestic sounds of you filling a cup, the tap somewhere down the hall turning on then shutting off. Then your socks were back in his eyeline, toes pointed to him.
“Here.” You crouched, came into his lowered field of vision, and pressed a cup into his hands — water, cold — and folded his fingers around it when they were slow to close. “Drink it all.”
He drank because that was the path of least resistance. The water caught something he hadn’t registered was bone-dry. You took the empty cup out of his hands when he was done, setting it on the table behind you, and then he felt your hands find his shoulders.
He flinched just slightly, the smallest involuntary thing, for nobody touched him like that. Nobody put their hands on him that weren’t shaking one of his or needing something from him. You settled your thumbs into the iron base of his neck and pressed slowly, working the knots the night, the days, the weeks, and probably the year had wound there.
Your thumbs were unsure of themselves — you weren’t good at it, you weren’t trying to be, you were simply trying — and that was somehow worse because it got further to him than skill would have; there was the unpracticed earnestness to it, like you’d simply decided his shoulders had been holding too much and you wanted to put your hands there to take some of it down.
He felt his head drop lower, coming forward on its own, the tension bleeding out of his neck by degrees under your hands. Your thumbs found a place at the top of his spine that had been clenched so long that it had stopped registering as pain, and you pressed there, and a fraction let go. He felt his shoulders drop the inch they’d been holding up all night, and an uneven breath went out of him.
You kept your hands moving, your thumbs working the meat of his shoulders through the cotton, occasionally finding a knot and leaning your weight into it until it gave.
His head tipped a little forward after a stretch of time — chasing, or simply falling — and it found the soft of your stomach. His forehead rested against the front of you, where you stood close in the gap between his knees. He hadn’t intended for it, or maybe he had, somewhere under where the intention happened, his body had chosen to stop holding its own weight and give it to the nearest thing that felt like it’d take it. His eyes were already shut, and he stayed there, hands coming up on their own to rest at the sides of your waist. His fingers anchored into the fabric of your shirt.
“Shitty job sometimes,” he mumbled after a moment.
“Yeah,” you said softly above him. “I bet it is.”
Your fingers had found his hair, threading through the curls. Then, you added quietly, “But you’re really good at it.”
His fingers tightened a fraction at the fabric on your waist as he let out a short huff.
“Didn’t help him,” he said finally, the words coming out muffled behind his own mouth. “Whatever I’m good at didn’t help him.”
“Maybe not.” Your fingers scraped carefully at his scalp. “I think you were the best shot he had.”
He breathed you in, choosing to let the words rest in his skull for a while instead of fighting them.
“I’m — ” He heard you take in a breath and felt it go through your whole body. “I’m really grateful I met you, Jack.”
For some reason, he waited for you to take it back. There was a primally fast thing in him that told him that you’d take the words back, and he’d have understood.
“You don’t have to say anything,” you added. “I just wanted you to know. While you’re here being all — ” Your thumb moved at the back of his neck, tender and so gentle. “ — Figured it was a decent time to tell you I’m glad you exist.”
He took in a shaky breath against you, fingers tightening again.
“Thank you, sweet girl,” he said, and it sounded like it’d been punched out of him. “Likewise. More than you know,” he finished, his arms wrapping around the rest of your waist now, pulling you in like he could just fold himself smaller if he held hard enough.
Your fingers kept moving slowly in his hair, your other hand coming around the back of his head to hold him there. He couldn’t think of the last time he’d let anybody do this; as far as he could remember, he’d decided in some wordless permanent way that he’d carry his own weight from then on, that it was cheaper, that needing somebody was a bill that came due eventually and he’d rather not run the tab.
“You should sit,” he said after god knows how long without letting go. “Selfish, keepin’ you standing here.”
“It’s okay.”
He hummed, thumb moving once at your waist. “Two more minutes then.”
“Whatever you need, Jack,” you said, voice quiet. “I’m not going.”
Jack’s phone lit up on the arm of the couch at 10:52, face-down, buzzing itself a quarter-inch off the leather before he caught it.
He’d been working his way, with grim completionist patience, through an iceberg video you’d sent him three days ago with the message ‘THIS rabbit hole i need you to fall down.’ You’d followed it up by telling him, ‘do Not skip tiers!!’ He hadn’t skipped tiers. He was, in fact, ninety minutes deep and only about two-thirds down the pyramid, somewhere in the tier where a young man with a serious voice was explaining internet folklore he couldn’t believe was real.
He was fairly sure it’d been invented by some teenager, but Jack only shrugged, distantly wondering why on earth anyone would spend the labor — the diagrams, alone — hoaxing a thing this elaborate for an audience of complete strangers. He also wondered why on earth you were so interested in this. As quickly as the thought arrived, he realized that he was working down the iceberg himself.
Working down a thing you’d handed him felt adjacent to sitting next to you, and his apartment had become the sort of quiet that made adjacent worth ninety minutes of contemporary folklore. He’d sooner have chewed glass than admitted it out loud.
It was a good apartment and an unwitnessed one. He’d realized somewhere in the past year it was untouched by any hand but his. Every object was exactly where he’d last set it down, for there was no second person to nudge the remote three inches or leave a hair tie on the counter or ask why there was a mug in the sink and no bowl. His leg was off for the night, propped against the arm of the couch, the whole standing weight from his night shift to SWAT calls finally set down somewhere it was allowed to stay.
So, the phone going off, went off loud in the silence that had become almost-permanent. Your name lit across the screen, and the picture with it (one you’d set yourself, commandeering his phone to do it). It was already strange that it was a call. You never called; you texted in floods, six messages deep before he’d gotten to the first, but the ringing meant the thing had gotten past the point where typing it out would hold.
He looked at your laughing face buzzing on his phone for a second too long, the cold little instinct, and thumbed it green.
“Hey,” he said. “You know it’s almost eleven on my night-off. This better be good.”
You stayed silent for a second, and he could hear your breath and the hollow of a call connected in a car, the cooling engine’s tick and automotive acoustics.
“Hey,” you said finally, and Jack felt it wrongly. The back half of the word had gone soft and unsteady at the end.
Jack was already sitting up. “Hey, yourself,” he said. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing.” He heard you swallow quickly. “Sorry. God, this is so dumb. You — were you asleep?”
“I was almost through with your iceberg, if you want the truth.”
You made a sound that tried to be a laugh but didn’t clear the runway, breaking apart halfway. “You watched it?”
“Almost.” His fingers were drumming against his prosthetic leaning by the couch now. “Are you out?”
“I’m —” You paused, then hummed like you were debating. “I’m kind of near your place, actually?” Your voice rose toward the end, like you were embarrassed or questioning it all yourself. “I know. It’s creepy. But I think I need to — talk to you.”
“Yeah?” He tried to keep his voice light, though he could already feel something in his body start racing, panicking. “You break something?”
“No. No. Promise. It’s nothing like that.”
For some reason, that put a deeper hook in him. If it wasn’t a wrist, an ankle, or your body doing something it shouldn’t, then it was the other kind, and he had no idea how to hold something like that. He wasn’t sure what he could do with a sprain he couldn’t ice.
“Okay — ”
“Wait,” you interrupted, voice pitching higher, and he could see you were psyching yourself out. “I could just say it now, honestly. It’d probably be easier over the phone.”
Jack’s eyes widened a fraction at that. His stomach suddenly felt cold.
“No,” he said, voice rougher than he’d intended. “I won’t make it hard. Whatever you want to say, I promise. Just — not like this, okay? Come here.”
He listened to you breathe as you weighed it and knew, with bone-deep certainty, that he wouldn’t like what you were going to say. “Okay,” you breathed. “I’ll be there in fifteen.”
Jack opened the door after the first knock, unembarrassed of waiting. You’d come as you were, a coat thrown open over sleep clothes, good wool hanging loose over a thin cami with lace at the collar and soft shorts and bare legs down to the sneakers you hadn’t laced properly. The second fact that registered to Jack was that you’d been crying; there was a soft ruin around your eyes, the mascara long gone, wiped with a sleeve somewhere back in the evening. Your hair was up and losing, a claw clip hanging looser than he believed it was meant to.
“Hi,” you said, eyes raising to meet his. “Thanks for letting me come by.”
Jack felt his shoulders rise to his ears just slightly at the formality. He felt like a bucket of ice had been dropped upon him because somewhere in the past few weeks, you’d stopped apologizing to him as much, which had felt like a small victory he never told you he was counting. And here it was again, your stiff little courtesy, the door swung back shut on a thing that had been open. Jack didn’t like it. He didn’t like it at all.
“You don’t thank me for coming by,” he said gruffly, opening the door wider.
You came in, but only just. Before he could steer you to the warmth of his apartment, you were already reaching into the bag on your shoulder — hands shaking, he realized, with a fine tremor — and pulling out a folded piece of paper, creased hard down the middle and then again like you’d tried to bundle it up into a fist.
He unfolded it and smoothed out the edges, eyes looking for yours briefly, but you’d already looked away. Your bottom lip was between your teeth and you were looking at the ground. He forced himself to look down.
It was your pharmacology exam. Your cramped looping handwriting scattered the margins, a star drawn to one question because you starred everything. There was red pen all down the side and a number circled on the top. The number, Jack saw immediately, was not catastrophic, not a failure even. It was a low pass, the sort of grade that would’ve stung for Jack in his school days and evaporated by the next exam. He’d expected worse from the way you’d been shaking holding it.
He looked back at you, confused more than anything. “Congratulations, you passed.”
Your jaw tightened, and he could see your eyes go bright and wounded. “It’s a seventy-one.”
“That’s a pass.”
“Barely. Barely.” You took the paper out of his hands, folding it away like you couldn’t stand looking at it anymore. “And you helped me with this so much and I still couldn’t. I’m so tired of — ” You stopped, looking up at the ceiling as you pressed your lips flat. “It’s not about the test.”
“Okay.” He leaned back against the counter, giving you the whole floor of the room. “Talk, then.”
You looked at him, and he watched you gather it all up, deciding, as it settled into your face, your mouth, whatever you’d come here to say.
“I don’t wanna waste your time anymore,” you said, tugging your bottom lip between your teeth as your eyes landed on the wall behind him. “I can’t — it’s not fair.”
Jack felt the whole floor shift under him and felt his brows go up an inch as he tried to keep his face seem collected.
“You’re you,” you continued. “You’ve got a whole life, a hard one, and I’ve been just — dumping mine on you. Making you sit there and hold my hand through studying and I’m — ” You shook your head, face going grim as you said the words. “It’s not fair to you. You’ve been carrying me for so long, and it’s not fair. None of this is yours to carry. I’m not yours to carry.”
His nose scrunched just slightly, something like burning blooming at the center of his face. Something in his chest had cracked along the seam he had no idea was there, because he’d never had to look at it once straight on. It was easy to carry your own weight when there was no one asking to take some. It was easy to call solitude a principle when nobody had ever made the alternative real. And you had. You’d made it real for months, and here you were proposing — no, telling — to take it back, to hand him his loneliness again because of some measurement of fairness.
The horror of how much Jack didn’t want it — how badly, how completely he didn’t want to go back to how it was before you — was the first honest look he’d taken at himself in longer than he could stand to count.
“That so?” was all he could say, voice roughening as his brows narrowed at you.
“Yes.” You mistook the roughness for agreement, or maybe you just needed to do so, because you kept going. “You don’t have to help me. The only thing I can think is you’re — you are a good person and I was there. And you help people, it’s what you do.” Your hand waved in the general direction of him as your voice cracked. “So help someone who’d actually make it worth it. Who won’t barely pass and keep getting too drunk and — ” You laughed slightly, and it was all wet and terrible, the sound. “I’m a bad use of you. You’re this — you are so much, Jack, and I’m a bad place to put it. So put it somewhere better.”
Jack had to force a swallow when you ended your words with a sharp intake of breath, the pool behind your eyes slipping free slowly down your cheeks. You’d run out of anything that’d make you wipe it away now, and that undid him worse than the crying itself, that you were standing there and letting it fall, done hiding, wrung all the way out.
“I’m sorry — ” he started.
“It’s okay,” you said immediately, shaking your head.
“For making you think that’s what it was,” he said, lowering his voice. “That’s on me, that you talked yourself into thinking this has been some sort of charity.” He cocked his head to the side then, wishing you’d look up at him. “But you’re gonna quit shaking your head for one minute, and hear the rest, ‘cause you got it wrong. All of it, backwards and upside down.”
He came off the counter and closed the space himself, until you had to lift your chin to keep his eyes.
“I’m not a man who spends his nights on a stray out of the goodness of his heart. Ask anyone I work with what I’m like. I don’t have that lying around spare.” His jaw tightened. “So take the halo off. That’s not what this was.”
“Then why — ”
“You,” he said plainly, for he learned it cost him nothing to do so, and a lot if he didn’t. “I wouldn’t do this for just anyone. There’s nowhere else I want to put it.”
He watched everything in your face tighten at his words, the disbelief and reflex to argue all curdling underneath.
“If you don’t want this.” Me. Me, he wanted to say. “Say it. I’ll leave you alone. You don’t owe me anything.”
“That’s not — ”
“But don’t act like it’s some favor for me.” He was closer now than he’d been. “Don’t tell me you’re leaving for my sake. That’s a lie.”
“It’s not — ”
“It’s a lie,” he said, voice going flat and so final, as he slowly nodded his head. He looked at you a second, lips coming between his teeth, then looked away as he felt something physical seize over his entire body.
Jack himself had to process the words as he said them, because he was only just realizing how much truth they held.
“You make it good.”
He forced himself to look back at you, and you had tilted your head now to look up at him, caught and still as stone, the arguing gone completely off your face now and replaced with something more frightened.
“Don’t — ” One of Jack’s shoulders came up in a half-hearted shrug. “You’re the one part of my day that doesn’t take anything out of me. Just — get that straight, sweetheart.”
You were just looking up at him with your whole face undone, the tears gone still on it, as though his words had knocked your own clean out of you.
“I don’t know what to do with that,” you said quietly. “People don’t — that’s not a thing that happens to me, Jack. Being — ” Your sentence broke apart and your hand had come up and fisted loosely in front of his shirt without either of you deciding it should, holding on, holding him there. “I don’t know what to do with it.”
“Nothing.” His hand came up slowly and covered yours where it fisted in his shirt, holding it flat there against his chest. “It’s just true.”
You made a small, pained sound and dropped your forehead against his sternum, right where his hand held yours, and he felt the whole strung-tight weight of you gave at once and settled into him. He felt you breathe against his shirt at the same time he felt his own pulse going too fast on your knuckles; he wasn’t bothered enough to try and slow it, because there was no point now. You’d already found out.
“Very grateful for you,” he murmured, his other hand pulled up to rest over the back of your skull. “Told you so earlier. Meant it more than you let yourself hear.”
You huffed against his shirt — half a sob, half a laugh, maybe the ruined cousin of both — and he felt it go through the cotton and land warm against his skin, felt your fingers uncurl a fraction from the fist they’d made then re-fist, like even now some part of you was checking he was still there to hold onto.
Jack held still for it, same as you had in the family room for him. He was good at holding still, it was half the job, but this was a different kind — he supposed — where there was a plain animal willingness to be a wall for as long as you needed one and not move a muscle that might spook you out of it.
He rested his chin at the top of your head, murmuring, “I don’t have to tutor you anymore, if that’ll help.” He swallowed, closing his eyes as he breathed in your faint perfume. “We can scrap the whole thing, if that’s what’s making you feel so bad.”
You stilled for a second, then made a small sound against him.
Despite himself, despite it all, he let out a short chuckle. “S’okay. I’m the reason you got a seventy-one. You’re allowed to switch.”
“You’re the reason it’s a seventy-one and not a thirty,” you said, and it came out muffled and immediate. You almost sounded cross, like you didn’t want the slander against him to stand even now.
After a moment against him, you added, “I don’t want to be just someone you help, I think. I don’t want to be somebody — I guess — that you’re just good to.”
When Jack hummed, you continued, “I don’t know what I wanna be instead. Just — a friend — or, I don’t know. Something that goes both ways.”
Jack’s chest swelled at the words. He felt that he’d have been anything you asked of him, simply because it had just become how it was. It was almost outrageous how, if you’d asked, he’d have handed it over, the whole rest of it, whatever you wanted the name to be, whatever box you needed him in.
A man his age was supposed to be past this. He was supposed to have calcified somewhere in the second decade of the job into something that didn’t reorganize himself around what someone he’d known properly only for the better part of the year had asked him.
“Consider it done,” he murmured, letting the word settle. Friend.
You breathed against him, and Jack felt himself want to remain exactly here and knew that he shouldn’t. He knew that the kind thing now was to give you somewhere to put your face that wasn’t his chest, some ordinary ground for you to set your feet back down on.
“C’mon.” He got a hand on your shoulder and eased you off him gently, a slow, slow reclaiming of the eight inches of air between your body and his. He dipped his head to catch your eyes, which were pink-rimmed and swollen and doing their utter best to avoid his now that the worst was out of you. “Do you want me to order food?”
Your neck rolled back slightly as you met his eyes, caught slightly off-guard at the shift of tone. You blinked. “That was a lot, and now you’re asking about food?”
“It was a lot,” he agreed. He reached up and thumbed a smudge of leftover mascara from under your eye briskly, and you let him. “And now it’s done. So, food, and we can watch the stupid video you sent me before you head home.”
It had been six days since you showed up at his apartment, and Jack had embarrassingly counted every single one of them. You’d left his apartment somewhere past two with your eyes finally dry and a paper bag of his leftover Thai you’d protested and taken anyway, and he’d walked you down to your car and stood in the lot like some idiot in a movie until your taillights turned off his street, and then he’d gone back up to a quiet that felt, for the first time in years, like something had been in it.
Since then it had gone like it always had and nothing like it; you still turned up with flashcards and left a graveyard of half-drunk coffees on every surface. But he’d noticed how you started letting him sit closer now, let a compliment land without flinching off, and once, mid-story, had reached over and fixed his scrub top where it had folded under, casual as breathing.
Friend was the word you’d settled on. Jack was thinking about that when Shen dropped into step beside Jack with a cup of fresh Dunkin sweating in his hand.
“You know it’s not standard to let your girlfriend occupy the family room for three hours of your shift, right?”
“She’s not my girlfriend,” Jack immediately clarified. It seemed more important to do now than it was earlier, when people only knew you when you came in as an emergency. Still, it felt wrong, like a key going in the wrong hole. “And you got a problem with it?”
Shen lifted the coffee in surrender, unbothered. “You know we’ve grown to her. She and I do the Wordle every midnight.” Then, he spread one hand. “Administratively, she’s not staff. She’s not a patient. She’s not family of a patient. Which leaves the category I’d have to call —” He tilted his head, faux thoughtfulness. “ — Abbot’s girlfriend, and I don’t think that’s in the handbook.”
“Try again,” Jack drawled, thumbing a form he wasn’t reading that didn’t need to be read. “She’s a nursing student getting hours of free tutoring off a board-certified attending. Put that in the handbook. Teaching hospital. I’m teaching.”
Shen shook his head, letting out a small laugh. “Alright. Alright. She’s not your girlfriend. Mind if I ask her out, then?”
Jack snorted. “If you could only be so lucky.”
“Clearly she has a type for attendings,” he pressed, grinning. “Or is it just the ones with gray hair?”
Jack looked at him sideways. “This is getting a bit weird, even for you.”
“I’m happy for you, man. Even if you’re gonna make us all watch you not do anything about it for the next six months.”
“Mind your own damn business.”
“Sure,” he turned, lifting a hand over his shoulder as he went. “Close the blinds anyway. There’s a window on that door. Everyone can see her making you dumb.”
Jack looked down the hall and set the form down before going there to close the blinds — telling himself it was for the window, for Shen’s real talk — and knowing, somewhere under that, that he was really just going to you.
He could see you through the window in the door before he reached it, which was, he supposed, exactly Shen’s point. You had a textbook open in your lap and you were chewing the end of your highlighter, brow pulled in, mouthing something to yourself, working a card over your head. You’d pulled the sleeves of one of his old sweatshirts down to your hands, the one you’d swiped from his locker two weeks ago and never given back and that he’d never once asked for, because he’d found he didn’t want it back, found he liked seeing it swallow you.
You gave him a smile when he walked in. He reached up and tipped the blinds shut on the window with two fingers, the floor outside tipping away.
“Why’d you close them?” you asked, slightly bored.
“Apparently the whole department’s been getting a show.”
You furrowed your brows then. “A show of what? Me failing?”
“Somethin’ like that.” He let it go at that, coming around and lowering himself onto the couch beside you, the cushion dipping and tipping you toward him a degree, what it always did that neither of you ever corrected. “How’s it going? Honest.”
“Honestly?” You blew out a breath, closing the highlighter. “I’d kill for a drink.”
“Oh?” Jack settled back against the couch, his arm coming up along the top of it behind you. “Telling that to the one man who’s seen what you look like at the bottom of the bottle.”
“Jaaaack,” you said, almost in a whine. “Let’s go to a bar.”
He snorted, dragging a hand down his face. “Now I’m wondering what’s pushing you toward the edge.”
He picked the flashcard you had set on the textbook, the one you’d been studying. He read the front of it without much intention — your handwriting was cramped and looping, a star drawn next to it — and turned over and checked the back. He did the same thing he always did, the story, the image; he’d done it a hundred times by now. He could do it half-asleep, and most nights he half was.
You thought about it for a second, your bottom lip tugged between your teeth, then walked yourself to the answer.
“Mhm. See. Good,” he murmured. He flipped the card to the back to check you, and you’d had it. Of course you’d had it, you’d had more of this than you ever gave yourself credit for. “Tell you what. Get the next three right, and I’ll get us a drink once your exams are done.”
Your brows narrowed. “Bribe?”
“It’s an incentive.” He held up the next card, eyes on you. “Don’t think. Just answer me.”
You did. One, then the next, then the one after. You were quicker now that there was something on the end of it, your lip caught between your teeth as you walked yourself there each time. He noticed you worked when there was something to earn. After all three, he hummed. “See. Good girl, there you go.”
He felt you go still beside him, and his eyes flickered up to you to see your eyes dropping to your textbook. He stayed silent a second, eyes raking over you, your thumb running the worn edge of a card back and forth.
Jack knew better than to point out how you being flustered was almost silly when he’d said the same words many times while taping you up or shining a penlight in your eyes. He let his arm stay where it was along the couch, hand not quite touching your shoulder, and watched the side of your face.
“You wanna do some more?” he said finally, voice coming out rougher. “Or are we done for the night?”
You held up a finger, as if telling him to wait.
“Okay, then,” he mumbled, leaning back further against the couch. “Take your time.”
After a second, he turned to say something dry to break the silence. You’d turned your head, too, and were closer than he initially realized, your eyes coming up off the card and finding his, near enough that whatever he had bubbling in his throat died there immediately.
Jack hummed involuntarily. You closed the sound by pressing your mouth to his, the feeling of the plushness so very featherlight, there and barely there, the softest press.
He went still as stone, every system in him locking at once. His hand was still along the back of the couch and his mouth hadn’t answered yours, not because he didn’t want to — God, he did — but because the entirety of him had gone still with the disbelief of it, with the you, here, choosing this — him — and the half-second of nothing stretched into a second, too damn long.
He’d seized on you, the fact you’d nearly walked, had stood in his kitchen finding the kindest way to disappear, and here you were, closing the last of the distance yourself.
You pulled back like you’d touched a stove, a gasp leaving your mouth, replacing where his own had been.
“Oh god.” Your hand flew up to your mouth, your eyes going wide before pinching shut completely. “I’m sorry — I’m so sorry, Jack. I read that so, so wrong. You’ve been so nice and I — fuck, I’m sorry.”
Jack made a pained sound that was lost somewhere in your ramble, at the sight of you snatching it back. Nothing had gone wrong. Jack knew you’d read nothing wrong, and that the only thing that had happened was that he’d been too slow, too stunned, too thirty-years-rusty to catch what had been handed to him in good reflex.
His hand came off the back of the couch and he caught your jaw, thumb on your chin as he pushed slightly against your skin. He was distantly aware that he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so afraid about leaning in to kiss a woman, and went in to try and give you back the second he lost, mouth finding yours the exact way every bone in his body knew he should’ve the first time.
You made a startled sound against him before the entirety of you melted. His mouth worked against yours, thoroughly, making sure not to fumble it twice. His thumb stayed on your chin, tilting your face the half-degree he wanted it, and when your lips parted on half a breath, his entire upper body leaned in to follow it, deepening it.
It was you who moved first. Of course, it was you, always you. You followed it, the kiss pulling you up and forward, your knee coming over his thigh, and then you were settling over him. Jack let out the throatiest of a chuckle, still intent on keeping your mouth, as your hands slid from the front of his scrubs to his jaw.
Jack’s hands caught yours on instinct — one at your waist, one at your hip — steadying you down to him, your hips still slightly in the air like you weren’t sure you could close the last of the distance, your weight held in the suspended air in the ache of almost, thighs braced on either side of his.
Jack pulled back just enough to look at you, letting his head fall back against the back of the couch, dragging his eyes up the length of you poised over him. He blew out a short breath, the corners of his lips kicking up as his palm glided up and down on the side of your waist, catching onto your tank top on accident to show a sliver of skin at your lip — warm, soft, the band of your shorts sitting low — and he watched his own hand do it before he dragged his eyes back to your face.
“Nothing halfway with you, huh?” he said, the words practically coming out from his chest. His thumb rested against that bared sliver of you. “Climbing me at my work.”
You lowered your head, and your nose grazed against his. “You started it.”
“I did?”
“You closed the blinds.”
He let out a surprised laugh. “I can promise you I didn’t expect this when I did that.”
Your lips ghosted over his for a second, and his chest swelled at the sight of you trying to tamp down the sweetest smile. “Problem?”
“No.” The words came out immediately, because apparently somewhere in him, there was still something insatiable and teenage that had lurched up at the sight of you. “No. No problem.”
His hand spread flat and warm against the small of your back, fingers slipping under the hem of the top to your warm skin there, and he drew you down, finally, that last suspended inch collapsing as he settled your weight flush over him.
He had to pinch his eyes shut a second, then open them again to take in the whole sight of you. His hand came up to your jaw. The light caught the loose hair at your temple, the bare line of your shoulder where the strap had slipped. Your mouth was full and flushed from his, parted slightly, your breath coming. The skin under his hand at your back was hot to the touch, and he spread his fingers wider against it just to feel more of it.
You were trying not to smile. Your lip caught between your teeth, the corners pulling anyway.
His finger perched against your jaw moved to your lips, dragging slowly across the lower one, parting it under the pad of his thumb. He watched it give, your breath warm against his skin.
Your eyes flicked up to his as your lip closed around the first knuckle, your tongue hesitantly pressing flat against the pad, the wet heat of it catching him so completely off guard that the air went out of him in a rough exhale. His other hand fisted at the small of your back, turning over to gather the hem of your tank in his grip.
“Oh.” His eyes had dropped to your mouth and fixed there, his jaw slack as his head cocked to the side. “Pretty.”
His gaze was locked on the sight of his thumb disappearing past your lips, no hesitation in it, that same no-halfway boldness turned filthy and sweet all at once. The tired man in him went down all at once.
His thumb dragged free, catching on your bottom lip and tugging it down before it slipped loose. His chest heaved harder now under the warm weight of you.
“Where’d that come from?” he muttered gruffly, almost to himself, thumb pressing the slick of your own lip back against you. His palm moved to cradle your face, tapping your cheek softly once. “Can’t be doing things like that here, doll. I’m on call.”
“Then don’t make it so easy.” Your lips brushed his thumb, then you moved down to press your mouth to the line of his jaw, the stubble catching your lips, then lower to the warm of his throat.
“You callin’ me easy?” he said through a chuckle, letting his head tip back. You scraped your teeth over the cord of his neck and felt the whole of him go tight underneath you, his fingers flexing hard into the bare skin of your back.
“Alright.” His voice had dropped to stone. “You’ve had your fun.. No more of that,” he said, though made no move to stop you.
You peppered a line of pecks down his throat down to where his collar had started, your lips dragging over the jut of his collarbone through the thin cotton. He swallowed. One of your hands slid up to the back of your neck, fingers pushing into the soft gray at his nape, scratching light, and the other flattened over his chest, over the steady-then-not rhythm, fisting slow in the fabric just to feel him breathe wrong because of you.
You sat back an inch to look at him. His head was still tipped back against the couch, his throat bared where you’d left it momentarily pink and glossy, his eyes half-lidded. His hands had gone heavy and possessive at your hips, giving up pretending he wanted them anywhere else, you anywhere else.
You dragged your thumb over his bottom lip, watched it give, the same way he did to you.
“Can I ask you something?” you asked, quietly, your hips settling more firmly into his lap.
“Mm.” His hands spread wide, settling you down harder against him. “My social security number is — ”
You laughed.
“Two-two-six — ”
“Jack — ” You swatted at his chest, the seriousness dissolving into something giddier. “I’m being serious. Stop.”
“Okay, okay.” The corners of his mouth lifted up, and his hands squeezed slightly at your hips. He pulled his head up off the couch to meet your eyes properly. “Shoot. Doubt I could stop you.”
“Are you seeing anyone?”
He let the question sit, humming. His thumbs moved idly at your hips, head tilting against the couch like the question required any real thought. “There’s a few women,” he said, lowering his voice as he looked at you, like he was letting you in on a secret. “There’s a nice lady who brings me fruit baskets.”
Your hand, on the flat of his chest, slid up slow to his throat and he kept talking like he didn’t notice.
“ — there’s this nurse on days who keeps leaving me her number at the station — ”
You leaned in and closed your teeth slightly on his earlobe. He let out a short laugh, one that was dragged out of him, his head tipped to give more of it to you without permission.
“Alright. Okay,” he said as your nose dragged the line of his jaw. “Stop doin’ that. I don’t wanna explain teeth marks to the whole floor.”
Your hips set firmer into his lap. “Jack,” you warned. “I can’t do this if you’re seeing fifty other women.”
He sobered a degree, his thumb going still at your waist, his eyes coming up to actually hold yours. The joke drained out of his face as he realised the edge of seriousness you tried to tamp down, and he momentarily short-circuited at how it was even possible for you to wonder.
“Hey.” His hand came up off your hip, pushed the hair back from your face and stayed there, cradling. “Until five minutes ago, there were zero women. Forget fifty.”
Your only response to that was a smile and your cheek leaning further against his palm. He let his thumb move once across his cheekbone, watching the way your cheek turned into his hand. Your eyes drifted half-shut. There was a speck of dried highlighter ink on the side of your finger where it curled against his throat. The strap of your top had slid off your shoulder again; he looked at all of you and stopped bothering to pretend, even to himself, that he was looking at anything other than the only thing in the room he wanted.
“What about you? You seein’ anyone?” His thumb stayed where it was, but his voice had gone quieter. “‘Cause I’ve seen people bring you in. And I never liked one of ‘em.”
You huffed a small laugh, your nose grazing his. “Jealous, Doctor?”
“Yeah.” He watched the laugh stall on your face at how easy he gave it up. “If there is, he should be worried. I’d like to take you on a nice date to change that.”
“Ohhhh,” you drawled through a laugh. “There’s no one, but I won’t say no to the date.”
“Then you’ve got yourself one, doll.” He kissed you on it — short, sure, his hand still cradling your face — sealing the thing as the corner of his mouth caught yours before he pulled back. He let his forehead rest against yours for a second and breathed you in.
Then, with a short groan, he tipped his head back off of yours.
“I gotta get back out there.” His thumb was still moving at your jaw, clearly working against the very thing he was saying. “My work ethic’s going wrong and my residents might actually report me.”
Then, his hands found your waist and he lifted you off, setting you off his lap and onto the cushion beside him where the entire thing had started. You landed with a small affronted sound, your hand fisting in his collar a beat longer before he had to let it go.
You flopped back into the cushion where he’d deposited you, one hand pressed flat to your chest, the picture of wounded. “I guess it’s true what they say about old men. They use you. Wham, bam, thank you ma’am.”
He stood up and scrubbed his palm down his face like he could wipe the last ten minutes off it before he had to walk out and be a doctor again. He could still feel the heat sitting at the back of his neck and even though he’d tried to scrub your gloss off, he was sure there was a remnant somewhere the worst possible person would notice.
“Yup, got exactly what I wanted. Thank you, ma’am.” His hand came down to rest at the top of your head and gave it a slow, condescending pat, ruffling the wreck of your hair worse than it already was. “I’m a terrible man. You’re welcome to stay here while I go be one somewhere else.”
He made himself step back and snagged his pen off the table, the badge, the small armor of the job clipping back into place piece-by-piece. The whole time his eyes kept catching on you, sprawled and rumpled where he’d set you down, looking up at him like the night had gone exactly where it was supposed to. He’d seen this room a thousand nights. He’d never once not wanted to leave it.
“Mm. Gotta go home. S’almost three,” you mumbled. “And you get off at seven.”
“I do.”
“So.” You pushed yourself off the cushion, slow, gathering your hair back off your face and pushing up your strap, putting yourself back together piece by piece the same way he was, the night closing in on both ends. “I’ll go and let you be a doctor. You’ve been very neglectful.”
“Don’t I know it,” he muttered. He watched you reach for your textbook, your highlighter, the flashcards, and sweep it all back into your bag, feeling the small stupid pull of not wanting the room to empty out.
He stepped in before you finished, catching your jaw, tilting your face up to kiss you once more. You went still under it, the bag forgotten halfway zipped, your hand coming up to rest light on his chest. He pulled back an inch to look at you.
“Text me when you get home,” he said, thumb dragging along your jaw.
You chuckled, brows pulling in. “It’s a ten minute drive.”
“Text me. Humor an old man, since I’m so terrible to you already.”
summary — Jack has already decided what he can survive losing. You didn’t realize you weren’t on the list until you weren’t.
content warnings — 8k words. hurt/no comfort, breakups, talk of pregnancies & the decision to have children, partner who doesn’t want children, age gap (reader’s 30, jack’s 50s), power imbalances; reader’s a nurse, jack’s her attending, workplace settings; working with ex, anticipatory grief, mourning a future, references to patient death, five-year-old patient (no serious injuries), pediatric medical case (forehead laceration, suturing, child is okay), blood in medical context, obliquely referenced that jack’s a widower, this is just sad tbh, mentions of eating habits (reader mentions not being able to eat and eating habits)
author’s note — i kind of realllllyy don’t know how i feel about this so i’m sorry if it’s bad 🫤🫤 thank you for so much love though
It was childish, you knew that, to have yourself temporarily placed only on day shifts. The correct protocol would have demanded you go through your attendings, but given that one out of the two attendings was the man you didn’t believe you could’ve stood in the same room as without completely breaking while the other half was his best friend, you took it straight to Dana.
You’d written it on the back of a discharge instruction sheet because a Post-It felt too informal. You’d written ‘days?’ and crossed it out. You’d written ‘can I be moved to’ and crossed that out too. You’d settled, finally, on ‘days only, for now?’
That was acceptable, for the time being, considering you’d framed it as temporary. If it did end up having to be permanent, for you were sure night shifts would have to be pried away from Jack’s cold, dead hands, then you’d deal with it then.
Dana had not asked. She’d taken the slip of paper you’d written it on—you hadn't been able to say it out loud, you'd written it down at the workstation and handed it to her, like a child passing a note in class—and she had read it and folded it in half and put it into her breastpocket. She clicked her pen twice then set it down then picked it back up.
“Okay, honey. I’ll see what I can do,” she’d said, and turned back to the assignment board.
You had loved her in that moment with a small, almost dumb, religious gratitude. You had loved her for not asking, You had loved her for the way she had not, in the eleven days since, looked at you any differently than she had looked at you in the years she had been your charge nurse. Except for one morning the previous week where she had passed you in the hall and put her hand on your forearm, briefly, in passing, and squeezed once, and kept walking. You had cried for thirty seconds in the supply closet about it. It was the only crying you had done that week.
You checked the schedule every morning. You did it on your phone, from the wrong bed, in the wrong apartment, the second after the alarm went off and before you’d even sat up. You checked it again on the subway. You checked it again at the workstation by the supply closet when you got in, the monitor you'd come to think of as yours because the rolling chair in front of it had a busted wheel that everybody else avoided. You knew it was pathological, yet you continued to do it.
The next chart you did was a woman in her seventies with back pain. The next chart was a teenager with a probably-broken thumb. The next chart was a man in his forties who had cut his hand on a can of black beans and was apologetic about being there. You worked. Your hands worked. Your hands had been very good, the last eleven days, at working. You had begun to suspect that your hands had decided to take this one for the team.
At 11:14 a peds laceration came in. You heard it before you saw it. The The father saying that it was okay, over and over, the way fathers said it in waiting rooms, less to the kid than to themselves.
Dana looked at you from across the central desk and you looked at her. You did not know, in that moment, what she was asking. You found out about three seconds later, when she did not, after looking at you, hand the chart to anybody else.
She handed it to you.
You did not check the schedule again, which was the first thing your hand wanted to do. You opened the chart. Female, five, forehead lac from a playground fall. Vitals stable. Father in the room. Mother on her way from work. Tetanus current. No known allergies. Five-year-old's name was Lily.
You walked to the room.
The dad stood up when you came in, which you wished he wouldn’t, because people standing up when nurses or doctors came in always made you want to apologize. You told him it’s okay if he sat, so he did. He had the kind of fleece on that meant he had left the house in a hurry—half-zipped, the inner liner showing—and his phone was face-up on his thigh and the screen was lit and he was not looking at it. The father was almost always in fleece; you couldn’t pinpoint what it was about emergencies that made men reach for fleece, but in the four years, you’d seen it hold.
Lily herself was on the bed with a gauze pad to her forehead by her own small hand, and her tears were slowing down a little, all cried out. Her cheeks were the high red of a child who had been outside in the cold. She was wearing a pink hoodie with a unicorn on the front and the unicorn had a small smear of blood on its horn, and the detail of the smear on the horn was going to live in your chest for a long time. Your first thought, before you could stop it, was that’d need cold water to clean it. Your mother had said to you so many times that it had become, somewhere in your twenties, the only thing you knew how to think when you saw blood on cotton.
The second thing you noticed was that Lily had a barrette in her hair shaped like a strawberry, hanging on by one clip, and that somebody had put that barrette in this morning, and the somebody was probably the woman currently crying in the hallway, and you were going to have to not think about that for the next forty minutes.
“Hi, Lily,” you said. “I’m your nurse,” and you said your name. You said it the way you said it to children, with your voice pitched a little higher than it sat. It had taken you a year to get it right. You were quietly, stupidly proud of it. It was the kind of thing you'd never told Jack about, because it was the kind of thing that sounded like nothing when you said it out loud, and you understood now that this was probably the category of thing your whole inner life lived in.
Lily’s tears continued to roll down her cheeks but she looked at you, which was a start.
“I’m going to do a couple of things really fast,” you said, “and the doctor’s going to come look at your cut, okay?”
She nodded. The gauze on her forehead moved when she nodded, and the dad reached forward to hold it for her, but Lily re-pressed the gauze with the exact wrong amount of pressure and your own hand twitched to fix it and you did not fix it, because the holding of one's own gauze was a thing a five-year-old could do for herself and was, in fact, the first task she had been given in the long career of being a patient, and you wanted her to have it.
You took her vitals. You did them the way you did them. Temperature, BP—pediatric cuff, the small one with the cartoon giraffes—pulse ox, the clip on her index finger that she watched with something like interest because the red light fascinated her. Her vitals were good. Her vitals were the vitals of a five-year-old who had fallen off something and was scared but was not, medically, in any trouble. You wrote them down.
You asked the dad the questions. Tetanus current — yes, he checked his phone for the date of her last well visit and read it off. Allergies — none. What she had been doing: monkey bars. Where she had fallen from: the third bar, he said, and looked stricken, and you said, "That's not high," in the voice that meant please put your face back together, and he did, sort of.
How long ago: twenty minutes maybe. Whether she had hit anything else on the way down: he didn't think so. Whether she had been unconscious: no, she had cried immediately, which he said with the specific relief of a father who had read the same internet article every father had read about head injuries. You wrote it all down. Lily watched you write.
“Okay, kiddo. The doctor’s going to be here any second to come look at it. They’ll probably want to fix it up so it heals nice. Can you keep holding that for me?”
She nodded, and her tears had slowed.
Dana was at the central desk when you stepped out. “I’ll page,” she said, without looking up as though she could sense your presence.
“Page who?”
“Whoever can cover peds lac in the next five minutes.”
“Okay.”
“Go restock the suture cart.”
You went to restock the suture cart. The suture cart lived in the equipment alcove off the main hallway. You stood in front of it and you opened the drawers and you did the inventory. You counted nylon. You counted prolene. You counted the gauge of the needles. The act of counting was good. The act of counting was the kind of thing your hands could do without your brain. You let your hands count. Your brain did the thing it had been doing intermittently all morning, which was nothing, which was a kind of low gray hum.
You did not check the schedule. You wanted to. You did not. You had decided, sometime around the fourth drawer, that checking the schedule again would be the act of a person who was not okay, and you were going to be okay, you were going to be okay through this shift, you were going to be okay until you got home, you were going to be okay until you could close a door behind yourself and not be okay in private. The not-checking was an act of discipline. The not-checking was the only thing you had control over.
You restocked. You closed the drawers. You walked back to Lily's room with the cart.
You knocked once and pushed the door open with your hip.
He was in the room.
Jack had taken a chair with his weight foot forward, his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped loose between them, looking up at Lily on the bed. He had positioned himself so his eyes were a little below the level of hers, a thing he’d clearly done on purpose, because the chair was lower than the bed and he’d wheeled it closer. He made himself, in the structure of the room, small.
You had not realized, in the moment, that you thought the word ‘father’ until you heard it land somewhere behind your sternum.
He turned his head when the door moved and saw you. His face went neutral, a deliberate-neutral that he had to will it to be.
“Hey,” he greeted softly, the way an attending greeted a nurse who walked in with a cart in tow. He said it in the voice he used at work, the voice that had nothing to do with you, the voice that was for any nurse who had walked through that door in the last fifteen years. The voice was a mercy. The voice was also a small specific cruelty, the way mercies sometimes were.
“Doctor Abbot,” you said.
You realized, cruelly, that you’d never used his last name since the fifth date. You said it now, flat and professional, the way you’d practiced it in case you ever were in this situation. You were proud of yourself for one second, then you immediately regretted it because Lily was looking at both of you with an alertness only a child can have and make it obvious.
Jack turned back to Lily. “Alright, kiddo. This is who I was telling you about. She’s gonna help me.” When Lily tilted her head to the side with a small smile, Jack added, “She’s the best we’ve got around here. You’re lucky.”
You wheeled the cart in, parked it, set the tray up. Your hands set the tray up. Your hands knew what tray Jack liked, for they had been setting up trays for Jack for years, since before the dates, since back when he’d been an attending you’d worked with and gone home and thought about more than was appropriate. You set it up the way Jack liked it, with the needle driver on his left because he was right-handed (he liked to grab things cross-body), the forceps angled toward him, the suture spread out so he could see the gauges without rotating the pack. Your hands did all of this arranging and you did not, you realized, have any conscious memory of telling them to do it.
Jack didn’t look at the tray. He had, you suspected, watched it all go together in his peripheral vision in the same way a violinist heard another one tuning. He’d likely registered that the tray was just how he liked it and decided to stay silent about it.
“All right,” he said to Lily. “We’re gonna take a look. You’ve been doing such an amazing job with the gauze. Can you let your dad hold it for a second so I can see?”
Lily looked at her dad who nodded and took the gauze. Jack braced his right hand on the arm of the chair and stood—a motion he had developed, the half-second pause as he settled his weight before he moved—and stepped to the bedside and bent at the waist over Lily to look at the cut.
“Yeah,” he said. “You were having a good time, huh.”
“I fell.”
“I heard. The third bar, right?”
She nodded.
“I would’ve fallen on the first one,” he said, pressing his lips into a straight line before shaking his head self-depricatingly. “Monkey bars were not my game. I had no upper body strength. I had—what’s the word—noodle arms.”
Lily, despite herself, made a small sound that was almost a laugh.
“Yeah, that’s funny,” Jack said, nodding as his lips spread wide. “I had noodle arms. Your dad probably also had noodle arms.”
“Hey,” the dad said, with a softness of a man who had just been given permission to be in on a joke.
“Sorry,” Jack said, faux-shrugging.
Lily did a snotty, half-cry, which was a laugh. You stood at the cart with a packet of lidocaine in your hand as you watched a five-year-old laugh at a joke Jack had made. You realized he had built this whole calibration for kids, probably years ago. He’d been carrying it all the time you’d been with him, and you had never once seen it deployed so thoroughly in front of you. Perhaps it came down to the fact that there weren’t many peds cases in the middle of the night, and as luck had it, today, the universe decided to play a cruel joke on you by putting you on one with him.
You handed him the lidocaine with steady hands. You were so proud of your hands. Your hands were carrying you.
“Okay,” he said to Lily. “I’m going to put a tiny bit of stuff in the edges of the cut. It’s gonna pinch; I’m not gonna lie to you about that, ‘cause I think you can handle the truth. Can you handle the truth?”
She nodded solemnly.
“Good. So it’s gonna pinch. It’s like a bee sting but smaller. You ever been stung by a bee?”
“No.”
“Okay, so this’ll be your first bee. Congratulations. Some people would be good money for a bee this small.”
The dad made a small huff that was almost a laugh.
“Once it pinches, it’s gonna feel cold. And then in about two minutes, you’re forehead’s gonna feel super weird. Like—” He looked up, and you were almost certain he was pretending to think. “—Has your foot ever fallen asleep?”
“Yes.”
“Like that. But on your face. It’s a weird feeling. Some people don’t like it. I want you to tell me if you don’t like it, okay? So we know you’re being honest with us.”
“Okay.”
“And then once the numbing stuff is working, I’m going to clean the cut, and then I’m going to put some stitches in. The stitches are going to feel like pushing, and they’re not gonna feel like pain. If they feel like pain, you tell me right away, and I’ll stop, and we’ll fix it. Deal?”
“Deal.”
Jack blew out a breath, tilting his head to the side. “You are an excellent patient, you know that?” he said. “I had a forty-year-old in here last week who cried more than you, and he was getting a much smaller thing.”
You couldn’t look at Jack, so you looked at the tray. You looked at the suture pack and the lidocaine vial sitting next to the sharps box. You looked anywhere but at his face, because his face, right now, was doing something you couldn’t afford to look at.
Jack’s face was being kind and patient. His face was being good at being this; his face was one of a man who would have been an extraordinary father, and the face was standing six-feet from you in a fluorescent-lit ED room with a kid’s blood on the sleeve of his coat. You had to hand him forceps in approximately ninety seconds, and you couldn’t look at that face.
When he gave the lidocaine, Lily flinched and gasped but there were no tears. Jack said, “There it is, that’s the bee. You did so good. You did so good.”
He capped the needle and handed it back to you. Your fingers brushed when you took it. The brush was less than a second, and neither of you reacted, except for his thumb, which was curled in, briefly, against his palm.
Lily was hiccuping, and her had had his hand on her ankle.
Jack stepped back from the bed to let the lidocaine work. He did not sit back down in the chair. He stood at the foot of the bed, one hand resting on the rail, weight on his left, which was his good side, the side he stood on when he had to stand for a while.
His eyes didn’t find yours while the lidocaine worked. He looked at Lily, asked her about her hoodie. She told him about the unicorn. He asked the unicorn’s name. She said it was Strawberry. He said Strawberry was a great name for a unicorn. He said he had a stuffed animal when he was a kid named Bear, which he admitted was a low-effort name. Lily told him he should’ve named it something better.
The dad had relaxed by degrees watching this, like he realized their kid was going to be okay and he was allowed to stop bracing. He was watching Jack with something that was close to a love born out of appreciation. Parents fell in love with their kid’s doctors in moments like this; it was a small and clean version of love. It came out of realizing their child was being held by someone who could be trusted to hold them.
You filed it down with the smear of blood on the unicorn’s horn, the muscle in his jaw, and the word ‘father.’
“Okay,” Jack said. “I think we're ready. Let's see if you can feel this.” He took the forceps from your hand — your fingers brushed again, the second time, less than a second, again no reaction. And he touched the closed end of the forceps very lightly to the skin a centimeter from the cut. “Feel that?”
“No,” Lily answered, voice bemused.
“Cool. Cool cool cool. That’s what we want. I’m gonna clean it up and then do the stitches. You can close your eyes if you want; some kids like to close their eyes, some like to watch.”
“Can I watch?”
“Absolutely. I have to warn you, it’s a little gross.”
“I want to watch.”
“Okay, brave girl,” he said, chuckling slightly as he exhaled through his nose. “Girl who’s also potentially a future surgeon, what do I know?”
You handed him saline. You handed him gauze. He blotted. He worked. He talked to Lily the whole time. He told her about the saline. He told her what the irrigation was for. He told her that the cut was going to need four stitches, probably, maybe five, depending on how it sat once he got the first two in. He told her that the stitches would dissolve, eventually, but for now they would look like little blue threads, like tiny pieces of embroidery floss. He told her she could tell people at school she had embroidery in her forehead. He told her, when she asked, that embroidery was a kind of needlework, where you made pictures out of thread on fabric.
You watched his hands. You watched his hands because watching his hands was your job, because watching his hands was the thing a scrub nurse did, because you had to be ready to hand him the next thing he needed, because watching his hands meant you did not have to watch his face. His hands were the hands you knew. His hands were the hands that had held your hips in the kitchen during one of the worst three weeks of your life. His hands were the hands that had built you a stew thirteen days ago. His hands were the hands you had watched, for three years, do small competent things in your apartment like open jars, fix things, hold a coffee cup, work a buttonhole. His hands were doing small competent things now, on a five-year-old's face, the same hands, the same exact hands, and you watched them work the suture through the skin and you understood that hands were the cruelest organ a person had, because hands kept doing what hands did, regardless. Hands didn't grieve or pause for the convenience of the people watching them. Hands were just hands.
He did four stitches. He did them well. He did them in the time it would have taken a worse doctor to do two. He talked to Lily through every one of them. He told her when the next push was coming. He told her she was doing great. He told her, at one point, that her dad had been very brave to bring her in so fast, which was the kind of gift a doctor sometimes gave a parent in a room and which the dad in the corner accepted by closing his eyes for a second and exhaling.
He cut the last suture and stepped back. “You’re officially repaired. How do you feel?”
“Weird,” Lily said, dragging the word out.
“Yeah, the numbing stuff is weird. That’ll wear off in sometime. Your forehead’s gonna feel normal again by dinner.”
“What’s for dinner?” the dad asked Lily with a wobbly smile at being handed his kid back.
“Don’t know,” Lily said. “Pasta?”
“Pasta sounds good,” Jack said nodding. “Try to keep her from running around for the rest of the day. She can run around tomorrow,” he said to the dad.
Jack went through the rest of the discharge, and the dad asked one or two questions. Jack was excellent at this. You knew that. You’d known that since the first time you’d met him as a nervous nurse, but this, this he was especially good at.
You started cleaning up the tray. Your hands did the cleanup. You bagged the sharps. You wiped down the surface. You stacked the unused supplies. You did not look at Jack and Jack did not look at you. You moved around each other in the small room without contact, the way you would have moved around any colleague, the way you had moved around him in this hospital for years before you had ever moved around him in a kitchen, in a bedroom, in the small space between his side of the bed and the wall where you'd had to turn sideways to get past.
“Can I come back?” Lily asked Jack.
“We see you again, it means something bad’s happened. You can bring a drawing or anything you want, though. We put them on the wall.” He pointed to the wall by one of the desks where kids’ drawings were taped up in a gradually growing collage that nobody had ever taken down. “If you want to draw a picture, I’ll put it up.”
“Okay. I’ll draw Strawberry.”
“Send it in!” Jack said, smiling.
As the dad helped Lily down, the dad turned to you and said, “Thank you,” and said your name.
“You’re welcome, take care.”
Lily hugged you around the waist, briefly and fiercely, the way kids hugged near-strangers when they had decided in the last twenty minutes that the person was safe. You put your hand on the back of her head. You let her hug you. From the other side of the room, you heard Jack inhale, just once, audibly, like something had landed wrong in him.
She let go. She took her dad's hand. They left.
You and Jack were alone in the room. You went back to cleaning the tray. There was almost nothing left to clean. You cleaned it anyway. You picked up the empty lidocaine vial and you put it in the sharps box. You picked up the suture wrappers and you put them in the trash. You folded the sterile drape and you put it in the linens bin. Your hands were moving very fast and very precisely. Your hands were doing a week's worth of cleaning in the next forty seconds because if your hands stopped, you didn't know what would happen.
Jack said your name, and your hands paused for a minute.
You gathered yourself in a millisecond and picked up the cart’s handle to wheel it around. You moved past him to the door.
“Hey—” he said, voice so terribly soft. “Can I—”
You heard Jack stop himself, as he realized it was a question he didn’t have the right to ask. You knew that he realized asking was the cruelest thing he could have done in a room where he had just performed forty minutes of being the father he was choosing not to be, and you heard him try to take it back by going quiet.
You opened the door with your hip and you wheeled the cart out into the hallway and you let the door swing shut behind you and you walked.
You did not run. You walked. You walked at the pace of a nurse who had somewhere to be. You wheeled the cart back to the equipment alcove and you parked it and you did not, this time, restock it. You left it. You walked past the central desk and Dana looked up and Dana looked at you and Dana did not say anything, and you turned the corner past the central desk and you walked down the back hallway to the staff bathroom and you went in and you locked the door behind you.
You stood with your back against the door.
You walked into the far stall and closed the door. You sat down on the lid of the toilet with your scrubs on you and you put your hands flat on your knees and you bent forward at the waist and you put your forehead almost on your knees. It was what they taught you to do in school to do if you thought you were going to faint, the way you had done exactly once before, on your first day, after you’d witnessed your first death.
The sound that came out of you was close to a sob; it was small, it was wet, it was almost a laugh. It came out of you and you put your hand over your mouth and you pressed hard. Then the sob came, and then another.
You cried for the dad in the chair with his phone face-up and the look he had given Jack. You cried for the way Jack had stood at the foot of the bed on his left leg, managing the load. You cried for the muscle in his jaw when Lily said your name. You cried because his hands had been the same hands. You cried because he had said your name behind you, in the empty room, and you had not turned around, and the not-turning-around was the kindest thing you had ever done for him and also the cruelest, and you didn't know yet which one it was going to turn out to be.
You texted Jack before you opened the door to the apartment. The apartment, not yours. Just a thing your sister’s friend had graciously offered while she was out of town.
You wrote, hey - i need to come by for my passport. You sent the message before you could think twice about it and stood very still before your door as you watched the three dots appear, disappear, then reappear again. You did need your passport, but you also had to have this conversation with Jack. You wished you could live in this limbo state forever, the one where you can still be a tad unsure about what the two of you are, before you get a clean break and there’s no question that it was, truly and completely, over.
You were going to have to see him on Mondays, or Wednesdays, or whatever other days you were put in the same rotation as him because that was out of your control unless night shift had found a new nurse that was available every night, every day of the week.
His reply came in eleven seconds. Eleven seconds was, by your count, exactly Jack-fast. It was the speed of a man who had been waiting for the phone to do something and had decided, the moment it did, that he was not going to make you wait the social interval of pretending he hadn't been.
Of course. When works?
You wrote back, 2 PM today?
His response was quicker, the lag almost imperceptible. Yeah. I’ll be home. It seemed he had decided the same thing as you, and that was he was going to stop trying to make it small, because making it small was a thing the two of you had spent three years doing to bigger things, and he was—apparently—done.
You put your phone down on the kitchen counter that didn’t belong to you. The counter was a butcher block, scarred where your sister’s friend had cut tomatoes directly on it for years. You’d been resenting the butcher’s block since Tuesday. The marble in your apartment with Jack had been wrong in its own ways, but at least it hadn’t been absorbent. You wiped a smear of something off the butcher block with your sleeve, because there was nothing else to do with your hand. You had not eaten since the day before. You had not eaten breakfast or lunch or the kind of in-between snack that would have made not eating breakfast or lunch a manageable thing, and you understood, looking at the butcher block, that the not-eating was going to become a thing you had to address before it became a thing somebody else had to address, but you were not going to address it today.
Jack was in the entryway. He’d been waiting in the entryway near the closet, and his hand was on the closet door, and he had—you understood, taking in the staging—positioned himself so he was doing something when you walked in. You guessed that he landed on which was the same flavor of stagecraft as him being at the sink eleven days ago when he had imagined, that time, you coming in. He had needed a thing to be doing. The closet was the version of the dishcloth.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.”
“You can—come in,” he said. The pause before come in was the size of him deciding whether to say come in or come home or come here. He had said come in. It was the most correct of the three available options and it was also, you understood, a thing he had picked from a menu.
You came in and closed the door behind you. You hadn’t let yourself lock it, because that would’ve meant something different.
“I kept your passport on the counter,” Jack said, and you almost paused in your footsteps as you stepped through the entryway. Like he’d noticed, he added, “Not to—you know. Just, if you prefer not to—”
He looked down at his hands, which were still on the closet door, and he took the hands off the closet door and let them fall, and the falling was the thing that told you he had given up on the staging. He had nothing to do with his hands and he had decided, in the half-second of looking down, that he was going to let them be empty.
You walked. You walked past him into the apartment because the walking was easier than the answering, because the answering would have required you to pick which of his unfinished sentences you were responding to, and you could not, in this entryway, pick. You walked. You felt him behind you not following.
You set your bag down on the bench. You set it down without thinking and it was only after the bag had left your hand that you registered the bench, that you understood your body had walked you to there because that was where bags went in this apartment, and three years of muscle memory had walked you to the bench and your brain had not been consulted.
The bag was on the bench. Your bag. Where his bag had always gone when he came home and put his hands on your hips. You looked at your bag on the bench and you understood, with a small clinical clarity, that this was the last time anything of yours was going to be on this bench, and that the bench was going to keep existing after today, and that he was going to walk past it every morning for some number of years, and that the bench was not going to know.
You took your hand off the bag slowly. You took it off the way you took your hand off a patient's wrist after a pulse check, the careful release of a thing you were not going to be holding anymore.
You’d never let yourself imagine it all too deeply, but the imagining had happened anyway, in the soft margins of your brain where you didn’t keep accounts. Standing in this entryway you were aware of it the way you became aware of a bruise four days after it settled. You had imagined, you understood now, a girl. You had imagined a girl with his hairline and your hands and you imagined her on the bench by the door putting on shoes. You had imagined Jack sitting on one knee to do the laces, because you knew he would crouch even though it hurt him. He was a man who made himself smaller to help at the child’s height; he’d done it for Lily and you knew the small grunt his left knee would make and the way he would brace one hand on her shoulder to stand.
You had imagined a second one, too, smaller, a boy or girl you hadn’t decided about, somewhere. You had imagined a kitchen—not this kitchen, a different one, somewhere with more light and up the river, a kitchen Jack had said yes to, with a backdoor that opened to something green. You’d imagined him older in that kitchen standing at a counter in that kitchen explaining something patient and slightly too complicated to a kid who was half-listening, and you had imagined yourself watching him do it from a doorway. The watching had been the feeling, and you had thought—when you let yourself think it, which had been rare, late at night, in a warm muzzy place between his arm and pillow—that you would be lucky.
You had built a future in the warm muzzy place that you had never once dragged out into the kitchen and put on the counter and asked him to look at it. And you had now understood that he, in the same three years, had built a different one, and neither of you had shown the other the blueprint, and the blueprints had been incompatible the whole time, and the incompatibility had been sitting between you on every couch and in every bed and at every table for three years like a third person nobody was introducing.
You weren’t sure when you’d grabbed the passport, but it was in your hand.
“My sister’s going to come down to help me move the stuff next week, if that’s okay?”
Because it was decided—you’d decided—that you’d be the one to move out.
“Yeah.” He cleared his throat. “Whatever works for her.”
It came out lower than he’d meant to. You could tell because he heard it come out, and his jaw moved once, a small adjustment, the kind of micro-correction he did when a sentence didn't come out the size he had wanted it to. He cleared his throat again.
“I can be gone, if you—she wants. The whole day. I’ll take a shift, I’ll—yeah. I can not be here.” Then, he added, “Or I can help. If it’s heavy stuff. Some of the boxes from the closet are—”
“I’ll let you know.”
He was nodding too much. He had been holding the nodding to the metered pace of the rest of the conversation and the pace had broken, somewhere in the last three sentences, and the nodding was running ahead of him. He noticed. He stopped. His hand came up to the back of his neck and stayed there.
“Sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
Don’t do this, you were thinking to yourself. Don’t make this any harder than it already is.
“And I’m sorry about the case—Lily. I wasn’t going to take it because you were on it, and it was peds, but Robby was busy—”
You were shaking your head because your eyes had started burning now, at the memory of it. “It’s fine, Jack.”
“I should’ve found someone else. I shouldn’t have walked in there. I knew you were on it and I walked in anyway and I—I am sorry.”
“It’s fine.”
You said it louder the second time than you’d meant to. The loudness almost echoed in the apartment as his lips pressed together to keep himself from saying more, and you stood there with your eyes threatening to spill over and you understood he was apologizing for a case because a case was the only thing he would apologize for. That was the only way he could apologize for any of it, and that letting him do that was a kindness you did not have inside you to give.
You couldn’t let him use a five-year-old with a forehead lac as the vehicle for the thing he actually wanted to say because the thing he actually wanted to say was too large and the vehicle was too small and the gap between them was going to break you if you stood in it any longer.
He kept his hand on the back of his neck.
“You were good with her,” you said, voice softening an inch. You hadn’t meant to say it. “You were really good with her. That’s not—I’m not saying that because. I’m just saying.”
You weren’t sure if you’d said any words that resembled anything close to a sentence.
“Thank you,” he said, and closed his eyes for a second and held them that way. “I’m sorry I can’t be—that. For us.”
You closed your eyes, too at that, and the pressure caused a small, single stream to ripple down your cheek. Looking at him with his eyes closed without sleeping was a thing you were unequipped for, closing your eyes was the only available form of leaving the room without leaving the room. You stood with your eyes closed and the passport warm in your hand and you let yourself, for two seconds, not be in the entryway.
When you opened them he had opened his.
“Don’t—that’s not—you don’t have to be sorry for that. It’s a thing that—it’s just a thing. Don’t apologize for it.”
He pulled the corners of his cheeks between his lips as he nodded.
“But you should have told me. A long time ago.” Because I don’t know where I’m going now, without you.
“I’m sorry. I’m—I am sorry,” he said, and his hand had come off his neck and he was fidgeting with the belt loops of his jeans, tugging on them harshly as though that was the place he was redirecting his words to.
“I should go,” you said.
“Yeah.”
You stepped into him before you could decide to. Your body did it, the way his body had done the half-step at the closet, and you were halfway across the foot of air between you before your brain caught up and registered that you were doing it, and by then it was already done, your forehead was against his collarbone and your hand had found the front of his shirt and the passport was somewhere, you didn't know where, you had stopped holding it.
He stood still for half-a-second. He stood with his arms at his sides and you understood he was not going to assume he was allowed, that even now, even with you in his chest, he was waiting for the permission to be explicit, and so you pressed your forehead harder into his collarbone and that was the permission, and his arms came up.
He held you so carefully, the way you held a thing you had been told you couldn't have but had been given anyway, briefly, for a reason that wasn't going to last. One of his hands found the back of your head. The other one was at your shoulder blade, flat, and you could feel his thumb against you not moving, holding very still, the discipline of a man not allowing the thumb to stroke because stroking would have been taking.
His body shook. It was small. It was one tremor that moved through him from somewhere low in his ribs up through his shoulders, and you felt it because you were against him, and you would not have felt it from a foot away, and you understood that the thing about being held by him right now was that you were the only person in the world who could feel what his body was doing, and that you were never going to feel what his body was doing again after today.
“This is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.”
He whispered it into your hair very quietly. He said it at the same decibel of when he said things in the dark when he thought you were asleep, the small unguarded register he had thought, in those moments, was private, and that you had heard every time, and that you had never told him you had heard.
There was no answer that was the size of what he had just said and so you stayed against him and you let him have the silence.
He held you for a few more seconds.
He pulled back first and gently, with the carefulness of a man undoing a knot he had tied himself, and his hands moved down your back and around to your sides and stopped there, briefly, before one of them—his right— came up to your face, his own twisting slightly as he warred with himself over whether or not he was allowed to touch you this way. He put his palm against your cheek and cupped it. His thumb went under your eye where the tear had been earlier and was now dry, and he brushed the dryness with a shaky thumb, and it stayed there for a second longer than it needed to.
“I know you’ll find the right person.”
His voice had come back to almost level. He had spent the moment on the shake and the whisper and now he was using the last of the discipline he had to deliver this line, and you watched him deliver it, and you understood that he had been saving it. He had decided some time in the twelve days that this was the line he was going to give you on the way out, and he had practiced the steadiness of it, and the steadiness was working, and the steadiness was the gift.
You couldn't imagine loving anyone but him.
You were going to be thirty-one in three months and you were going to live in apartments that were not this apartment and you were going to walk past men on the street and on the train and at work and none of them were going to be him, and the not-being-him was going to be the central fact about every man you met for some long time you could not yet measure. You knew this with a clinical clarity that you kept to yourself. Voicing it would do nothing.
“You too, Jack.”
He smiled softly, like he knew you were offering him a kindness you couldn’t promise, a kindness he himself believed not to be true. His jaw set, the half-second readjustment that told you he had heard the lie and was not going to correct it. He was going to receive the lie the same way he was receiving the hug, carefully, gratefully, knowing he was not supposed to have it.
“Okay.”
His hand came down from your face and you stepped away, because being there any longer, in his arms, you knew, was not right for you. You grabbed your bag and cleared your throat before you said, “I’ll text you about the move.”
“Okay.”
“Probably Tuesday.”
You had walked into the apartment in your shoes and you were going to walk out in them and the not-taking-off-of-shoes was, you understood, a thing the version of you who had come through this door at 2 PM had decided about, the small protective instinct of a woman who had known she was not going to be staying.
You put your hand on the doorknob.
You turned around.
He was where you had left him. He had not moved. His hands were at his sides again, the kitchen-position, the position they had remembered. He was looking at you with his face mostly held but not entirely held.
You let yourself look at him for a half-second longer than you had meant to, because the half-second was the last one you were going to have with him being someone you could love before he became your attending and just that; you wanted to know what he looked like at the end of it so you would remember the right face later.
Jack had decided that he wanted to let you leave clean, not prolong it any further. He’d given himself that opportunity for three years, and he’d let you leave cleanly now, with the small consistent excellence of a man who had decided what the standard was and was going to meet it.
You were going to spend the rest of the afternoon, and the evening, and the night, and possibly the rest of your life, hating him for being good at it even now.
“Bye, Jack,” you said as you opened the door.
You couldn’t bear to turn around, but you heard a hitch in his breath as he said, “Bye.”
Jack had been the love of your twenties. He was never going to be able to tell you you were the last love he would have.
Description: You and your new boyfriend haven't had sex yet. Though, getting drunk for the first time — and seeing your gorgeous boyfriend take care of you — awakens that dormant part. Or, you being a drunk mess trying to get him to fuck you, and him fighting his self-control.
Tags/warnings: Established rlsp, Drinking, r is drunk, lots of flirting, highly suggesting themes, lots of mentions of sex, huge age-gap (reader in 20's, abbott is 50), size difference, horniness lol, slight allusions to dom!jack, use of pet names: sweetheart, baby, honey (would u guys like "kid" lol?) (sorry, i have issues. i think.)
Note: This is my first fic, and i wrote it in one go. While I tried to make the reader very neutral in terms of characteristics — the fic is highly self-indulgent (i, too, am horny for abbott), and you may see some mentions of reading having hair, reader being in heels.
Part 2 now up!
“I kind of want to get shitfaced.”
Jack did not turn to look at you. He just huffed into his cup of black coffee, held closely to his lips. The kind of black coffee that made you wrinkle your nose. You proudly liked yours with a bit of milk in it. Okay, a lot of milk. To the point, Jack called it a milkshake.
His eyes remained fixated at the screen of his phone, straining even with his reading glasses, to read the daily news on a bulletin app you downloaded on his phone.
“What about your policy against having fun, and letting yourself go for more than two minutes in a row?” Jack asks in his low voice, scratchy from the coffee. His eyes finally find yours, as he takes a slow sip from his cup. His eyebrows raise at you questioningly, holding your gaze.
Damn him and his gaze. Even after 6 weeks of dating — and pining for a lot longer than that — he sure could still make you feel like a puddle.
You're only able to speak once he turns to his phone again. “Uh, excuse you, I'm a very fun person, thank you very much. Yesterday, I put a fake ‘your computer is down’ screen on Shen's laptop,” you tell proudly.
“Dear god. He did not go into a cardiac arrest from your…prank?” Jack's voice caught on the word “prank” as if it deeply amused him.
You narrowed your eyes at your boyfriend (still hard to say that), shifting close enough to him on his couch that your knee knocked against his thigh. Your entire body faced him, while his faced the front — a tiny whine left your lips.
Jack turned his attention back to you as you spoke again. “You know it's the loss of control I hate. Don't you think I also feel like getting all loose-lipped and dancing on top of tables and flirting with strangers?”
His eyes softened a fraction when he saw the small frown on your lips. He sets his phone face-down on the arm of the couch, before shifting so his upper half faced you too. “Okay, what brings this on? You know I just like teasing, I don't think there's anything wrong with being an alcohol virgin.”
You rolled your eyes at his choice of words. “I want to know what it's like. It makes everyone so…” your hands do a weird dance in front of your chest, trying to find a proper word. Your attending swiftly moves his cup a bit to the left, so your hands wouldn't knock it all over yourself.
“Joyful,” you finished.
“Okay, but let's not dance on table tops and flirt with strangers,” he takes off his reading glasses and perches them next to his phone. When his eyes find you again, they're equal parts amused, and that softness that only seems to show up when you're in the room.
“I would never, I'd feel bad for giving you stress at your age.”
He lightly smacks your hip that's not smushed against the couch, “Brat.”
You grin widely, “You'll be there, right?”
“With a camera and a mic. My beautiful, sensible, nurse, looking like an absolute fool,” he tugged at a loose strand of your hair, his eyes shining with endearment.
Your little baby blue sling looks absolutely ridiculous hung over his shoulder. “What did I tell you before leaving?” His voice strains with the effort of all the workout he got in today. He's struggling with unlocking the door, because your purse keeps slipping down his arms.
You were a disaster. While your favourite doctor made sure you only stuck to fruity drinks that gave you a pleasant buzz and not regrets — you still managed to outdo yourself in terms of being a mess.
You challenged a man twice your size in an arm wrestle. You advised 3 different women to break up with their boyfriends, “Mine's handsome and kind. You guys stay safe, though.” And, finally, broke the heel of your left boot making you even more unbalanced than you already were.
“That Dr. Robby is a little shit with no self-preservation inst-”
“The other one, honey.”
You went silent for a moment, searching your hazy brain as the door opened in front of you. Jack gently guided you in, before locking the door with a sharp click. His rough hands sneak up your arms, tugging the jacket at your shoulders, and shrug it off you to safely hang it on his coat rack.
“That I shouldn't carry my bag if I couldn't keep it safe?” you say, looking down at him, as he sets his knee on the floor. His hands that cut and heal skin with such precision, are deftly working the zipper of your boots. He gently helps your feet out of the pair, patting your calf, before rising to his full height again with a groan.
Without your size boosters, your head was once again leveled with his chest. Jack nodded, leaning his head down so you didn't have to crane your neck as much.
“But I had my ID and pepper spray in there,” you justified, your lower lip jutting out in a pout.
Jack's hand pats the right-side pocket of his hands, “ID,” his voice rumbling as if coming straight from his chest. “And you don't need pepper spray. You have me.”
But you're not registering a word he says, not when he looks like this. His salt and pepper curls are all ruffled from your bar visit. His simple black tee is pulled taut across his biceps, making them look just as delicious as they do in his SWAT uniform.
His fingers snap in front of you, “Eyes up here, sweetheart.” You look in his honeyed eyes again. God, why haven't you guys had sex already? You seriously can't remember why.
“Why haven't we fucked?” You blurt out. Oh, the alcohol doesn’t make you Joyful. It makes you blunt.
Your boyfriend freezes for a second, before letting out a deep, throaty laugh. His hands settle on your shoulders. With a slight bend of his knees, he manages to stare completely and directly into your eyes. “Wow, thought we went to the bar, not to a seminar for clear communication.”
You capture both his hands and slide them down, so they're firmly on your hips. After humming in satisfaction, you take a step closer to him, your chest brushing his. “Answer me.”
As if suddenly realizing you both are still standing in the entryway, Jack starts walking you backwards, swiftly maneuvering you so you don't hit the kitchen counter. “I'm your attending, honey, I don't answer to you,”
You furrow your brows, staring up at him with irritation. You press yourself even closer to him, your palms settling on his hard stomach. “Like hell you don't. I want to know why me and my gorgeous boyfriend haven't made good use of every room in this too-big-for-you house.”
Jack sighs deeply, his fingers unconsciously tightening around your hips. He takes a seat on one of the low kitchen counter stools, so he doesn't have to keep looking down at you. His arms completely wrap around your waist, pulling you in until you're standing between the hard muscle of his thighs.
“Because we work at a hospital, we're either busy or tired. And…it's hard to find a footing with sex. You tense up whenever my hand slips under your shirt, you've talked about how insecure you get. And me…well, I'm not what I used to be.”
Your eyes soften, “But do you want me?” Your lips graze his jaw, your hands palming the hard plane of his chest.
Jack shifts in his seat and takes a deep breath, “What do you think, baby?” his right hand moves an inch lower with exaggerated slowness, settling on the top curve of your ass, his thumb stroking the curve.
You let out an entirely pathetic whimper at his breathy voice, his lips brushing your temple. You move back your face, so you can watch him again. His eyes look darker than they actually are.
“I see this as a good opportunity that we should seize, doctor.” His throat catches at the ‘doctor’. Oh, you are not a fair player.
“Well, I don't like my medical staff being inhibited. Perhaps, sometimes when you're horny and sober, we can continue the procedure.” His breaths are coming in shallow, his hard thighs squeezing around you to completely lock you in. His hands have not stopped moving, the one on your waist has moved north to tangle in your hair at the nape of your neck.
A petulant whine leaves your lips as you bury your mouth in the crook of his neck. “But-”
“No buts. I have no intention of being between your legs in a state you won't even remember anything in.” The rasp in his voice so close to your ear directly travels to the your belly, already coiling tight with tension.
The imagery makes you groan: His mouth working between your legs, his jaw shining under the dim lights, stopping for a moment to say, “Louder, baby. Your doctor can't hear you.”
Your lips slip from his neck, replaced by your forehead. His lips brush against your hair, the gentleness so different from what his body is suggesting.
“Kids and their hormones,” he teasingly says. That makes you pull yourself back. Because that's rich coming from a man whose pants are getting visibly tighter.
“Is that so, grandpa?” Your eyes are entirely fixated on his lips. Your own bottom lip has caught between your teeth.
His thumb comes up to free your lip so you don't hurt it, “Careful, brat.” His hand stays on your face, and you lean heavily into his palm, blinking at him. The strap of your top has conveniently fallen off from its place, and Jack is staring like a man who's just discovered shoulders, tracking the soft curve of it, following the slope of your neck, where your pulse thrums rapidly.
Leave it to him to have a gaze that weights at least a 300 pounds.
Your palms drop from his chest to his waist, brushing your fingers against the waistband of his pants. A soft “uh-uh” leaves his mouth as he slowly shakes his head, though he makes no move with his hands to push you away.
“You're palming at me like you're a little girl, and I'm your favorite barbie doll.”
“You are my favorite barbie doll, Dr. Abbott,” it leaves your mouth in a soft, needy, whine.
His shoulder shake slightly from laughter, the comforting rumble filling the room, subsequently reaching every tensed part of your body, and taking its place there too, perfectly fitting every crook and corner.
“I am a 50-year old man with a military background, who spends his nights managing an entire floor of medical staff. My day hobbies include being a buddy to SWAT and getting shot at.”
You look at him, as if to say “so?” and hearing the adoration — despite the choice of words — in your voice completely decentres him. “Glad to be your favourite barbie doll, honey.”
He finally freezes when your wandering palm brushes against the hard ridge in his pants, practically begging to be freed. You let out a little gasp as you feel his size, even with a barrier of rough fabric.
A low groan leaves him, his hand sharply capturing your bold wrist against his own chest, heaving up and down. For someone just talking about being 50, the man's heart is sure beating with a fast thump-thump-thump, like a teenage boy catching his crush in a 2-feet vicinity. Your name leaves his mouth, dirty and like a prayer at the same time.
“Let me help you, doctor. Please” you say sweetly, voice coated in silk and need and whatever poison this man mixed in your drinks.
A pause.
He gets off the stool in a sudden motion, his hands grip your forearms, and starts walking you backwards in the general direction of the bathroom.
“You are a pain in my ass. And, frankly, a horny mess.”
“Speaking of horny and my ass-”
He doesn't let you complete the sentence before turning you around, his broad chest hovering over your form from the back. “Nope. You have lost the privilege of looking at me before you've taken a cold shower.”
You tilt your head back to look at him, excitement glinting in your eyes, “together?”
“No, you pervert.” Your boyfriend opens the door to the bathroom and lets you both in. Before you can even complain, his rough palms are gripping the back of your thighs, swiftly lifting you up on the counter. You let out a little squeal, squeezing your thighs at the display of his strength.
Show-off.
So fucking hot, though. It's like he was made by Lana Del Rey's mind.
Jack doesn’t stop, though. He finds his way behind the glass that separates the shower from the rest of the bathroom. His practiced hands mess with the settings until he's satisfied, and comes back.
He stands in front of you again, crossing his arms over his chest. His muscles strain at the motion, trying to escape their way from the tight shirt. You pout at his slut-ishness. A walking, talking, thirst trap. If he was an actor, he would surely have his fare share of editors.
“How am I supposed to not get wet when you manhandle me?”
“Jesus,” he mumbles, pressing the heel of his palms into his eyes to lull some of his composure back into him. He silently thanks his military discipline, or you would currently be spread on the soft sheets of his bed, waking up his neighbours.
He takes a deep breath, eyes scanning you again. His fingers come up to pinch your chin in a soft embrace, “Shower. Clean. Mind and body both. And then, we will sleep. Got it?”
Heat pools low in your belly at his authoritative voice. God, how did you land this man?
“Sir, yes, sir.” You watch his gaze get heavy at the word. He leaves his hold on your chin, pats your hip, and exits the bathroom.
Guess you know what you'll be calling him, when he finally lets you do what your body is begging you to do.
You find him on his bed, wearing only a pair of low hung worn-out sweatpants. His back is slumped against the pillows, fingers locked behind his head as he stares at the ceiling.
He finally looks at you, crawling on his king-sized bed, trying to make your way over to him. It seems the shower un-possessed you. You look soft, sleepy, tired, and utterly his.
He holds out his arm and you immediately curl up into him, your icy-cold nose finding the hollow of his neck. “Hold me,” you murmur.
“One second, honey.” Before he can properly embrace you, he pulls up the thick duvet and arranges it to cover both of you. His left arm is trapped under your body, fingers pressing against the small of your back to pull you closer. His other hand brushes the hair back from your face, watching your heavy eyelids.
“There you are,” he softly rumbles before pressing the softest, most lingering kiss on your temple. A low sigh of satisfaction leaves you. You're still inhibited, but the tiredness has caught up.
“You didn't like the freaky me?” You ask, your jaw cracking with a yawn right after.
“I like every-you, unfortunately. It's a weakness in the ED.” His fingers are still moving in your hair, scratching your scalp in a way that turns your brain to mush. You push your face even deeper in his neck. Hell, you would live inside his ribcage if he ever allowed it.
You let out a soft giggle, hiking your thigh over his hip so no part of you is separate from him. “Can we have a proper conversation about sex tomorrow?”
Your boyfriend murmurs a “yes, baby,” against your forehead.
“Okay, goodnight. Gonna have some good wet dreams.”
“Shut up, and go to sleep, sweetheart.”
If anybody even reads this, and ends up liking it - pls feel free to glaze me in comments, asks, or dms. likes and reblogs appreciated as well <3 also, do yall think im funny?
Description: Alexa, play ‘manchild’ by Sabrina. Or, 3 times Jack notices the incompetency of your new boyfriend and gets annoyed, and 1 time he does something about it.
Tags/warnings: big age gap (r is in 20's and abbot is 50), "ive got tattoos older than you" gets said, yes he has tats bcos i said so, size diff, mentions of concussion, medical inaccuracies (idk shit), (1) allusion to reader having a choking kink (💀), r has a used to have a massive crush on him, made ellis a lesbian bcos ofc, abbot life's goal is to make fun of r's bf, flirting (so much), bit of yearner!jack & dom!jack vibes, gets dialogue heavy at the end, angsty fights & confessions, suggestive themes, mentions of sex, sexual innuendos, i use loads of em dashes (dont even compare me to chatgpt bcos im better), pet names: kid, kiddo, sweetheart
Note: tysm for the love on my first ff, it means the world to me. Writing something longer made me lose all objectivity, and I genuinely cannot tell if it's good or great or whatever. Please give me feedback (PERSONALLY). Again, I tried to keep r neutral but you might see mentions of r having hair.
Enjoy. This is for the ones with a competency kink. And for the ones who def wanted him to call you “kid.” and the ones who love silver foxes (get checked) (ur girl incl)
1
“I told him not to take me here,” you mutter to Jack, who's checking for tenderness in your neck, his thick fingers pressing against the side, while you try not to think of his hands on your neck in a very different context.
“Let him. Something the boy can do right, hm?”
After checking for initial symptoms — making you walk in a straight line, and balancing yourself on a single foot, you're subjugated to the very hands-on physical examination. You're suddenly wondering how other patients remain composed when Dr. Abbot touches them like this.
Well, usually, attending physicians don't do a history check or a physical exam, but this one does. For you. Probably because you're his staff.
Focus.
You clock into the reality, realizing the dig he made at your “boy.”
“Yeah, she didn't wanna come, I kinda dragged her here. I was like, ‘babe, it may just be a light concussion but you're a nurse, not a doctor’ so, like, thanks, doc. We needed the big guns,” proudly speaks Noah standing against the wall, checking time on his phone for the 5th time since you've been in this room.
Jack's jaw tightens and he shoots him a look so dirty, Noah actually takes a step back.
“Watch it, kid, if it wasn't for nurses, American healthcare would be even fuckin’ worse.”
Abbot looks back at you, and raises an eyebrow as if to say “really? him?”
You should speak up in your boyfriend's defense, something — anything — to wipe that perceptive look on Jack's face, the smugness he isn't trying hard enough to hide. You might as well be in your birthday suit right now, for how bare you feel. How bare you always feel in his presence.
God knows how much you'd actually like to be — no, you have a boyfriend. A perfectly handsome, competent, and a caring one.
Handsome. Not rugged.
Competent. Doubtful.
Caring. Well, caring enough.
“Doctor Abbot…” you begin, voice stripped raw, breath coming uneasy, when his index brushes right over your thrumming pulse.
“Focus on the examination. Tsk, thought we taught you better here. Well, I at least did. Don't you agree, nurse?”
The air leaves your mouth in a little puff, leaving your throat dry, your lips soon following. You need a glass of —
“Need some water? You've been here a while,” Jack asks, tone becoming gravelly and intimate, eyebrows drawing closer seeing how pale you look.
He immediately turns to Noah — hands leaving your neck — without waiting for a response from you. His voice takes on its normal cadence. “Hey, son, grab her a bottle, would you? Vending machine is at the end of the corridor. Thanks.”
His ‘Thanks’ comes out in a slow drawl that makes you squirm in your seat.
Your attending has not even fully turned back to you yet, when your partner speaks up, “Uh, bottle of what?”
“A Pinot Noir, perhaps. Which one do you prefer?” His eyes find yours again, brows raising in deep amusement. Is he getting a kick out of humiliating your boyfriend — and by extension, you?
“Uh…” noah looks utterly confused. You feel almost bad for him. Almost.
“Water, son. Get your girl a bottle.” Noah makes a move to leave, complying immediately to the doctor. Has he ever even listened to you so quickly? God, men are such dicksuckers for each-other.
“A chapstick while you're at it, maybe,” Jack mutters, trying to keep the humour out of his voice. Noah stops in his tracks again, clearly deaf to the sarcasm.
Jack huffs. “Just go.”
You honestly don't understand why he dislikes Noah so much. You've only been dating him for 3 weeks.
Well.
Noah did try to make a “romantic” gesture by coming to pick you up from your shift. Except, he arrived an hour early as a “surprise” and cribbed because you couldn't leave early. And he did just undervalue your job as a nurse. And…of course, an hour ago, he accidentally hit you your head with a football while he was showing attempting a trick.
As Noah leaves, Jack lets out a long-suffering sigh. “Don't worry, I'll get you a chapstick,” he says, staring shamelessly at your trembling bottom-lip before making a slow way up again.
“Penlight. Incoming.”
You've barely had time to react when a sudden light shone in your eyes. Your face instinctively tries to move back, only to be stopped by a feather-light touch on your jaw. Jack's finger retracts as soon as it comes, leaving you starved for more. More than just the pad of his index.
You hold still for him, letting him sway the torch alternatively between your eyes. When the light is kept back with a soft clink, there are no more distractions as he stands up straight again.
The creases in his scrubs only increase when he folds his arms over his chest.
“So.” You mutter, your gaze trying to find something interesting on the floor.
“Nick seems like a good guy.”
“Noah.”
“Right. We should thank Nick for bringing you here right on time. Wouldn't wanna lose one of our best nurses.”
You scoff at his words. Your feet are moving in a slow back and forth rhythm, your eyes fixated on them.
“Let's not say things we don't mean for good staff satisfaction scores.”
“If you're trying to insult me by implying I care about that shit, good job. I'm slightly more offended than the time you implied I am too old for karaoke." He's slightly rocking himself back and forth on the balls of his feet.
“Didn't imply, actually. I think I was pretty direct.”
A huff of laughter leaves his lips. You don't want huffs or sarcastic laughs. You want his full belly-laugh. His happy laugh that you've only seen Robby drag out of him.
“I don't care about staff satisfaction scores,” he lightly shakes his head for a moment.
“Yes, you just sai —”
“Only care about yours.”
That makes you look up at him again with widened eyes and parted lips. Little shit, off-handedly throwing around words that gives you butterflies.
Dead butterflies, of course, just like your affections on him. Former crush. Yes.
You quickly regain your senses to retort.
“Satisfaction with your services? If so, thank you for checking me for a concussion.” The formality in your words completely betray the flush creeping up your cheeks.
“Of course, what else?” You hate the way he says your last name. The way it rolls off his tongue. The way it reeks of intent, and not casualty.
The sharp noise of metal rings dragging across a rod brings you out of your trance. Nic — Noah emerges from behind the privacy curtain, a bottle of water clutched in his right hand, and a simmering cup of black coffee in left. “Got you choices, babe.”
You smile thankfully at him, perhaps more grateful for the distraction. You extend your hand, your pointer gesturing at the water. You don't feel the same electricity when Noah's fingers brush against yours in the hand-off.
Jack takes a step back. He nods at you. “Rest. Hydrate. You know it.”
"Mhm, no big brain activity, limited screen time, don't avoid if symptoms worsen."
"Impressive. How does a civvie like you know the drill?" he asks, eyes widening in mock-surprise.
"Oh, I'm very smart. Could've easily been a nurse at your hospital," you can't help but smile.
"Shame. I'm sure you would've been terrific."
He nods at your boyfriend next, “Nick.”
“Uh, it's actually Noa —” but Jack's right hand has already caught the edge of the curtain, swiftly pulling it out of his way, and disappearing shortly after.
“She prefers lattes, by the way.”
2
Bzzzzzzz
“Doctor Ellis, I didn't know you allowed your staff to bring phones in a trauma bay. I would've brought mine to play some music while we inserted a chest tube inside this man.”
Ellis only grunts, too focused on work at hand.
Your cheeks heat at Doctor Garcia's comment, feeling the loud buzz against your thigh for the nth time today.
“I'm sorry — ” you had only just begun when Dr. Abbot's voice cut in, deadpan and dry.
“Yolanda, you listen to music?”
“Doesn't everyone?”
“Yeah, well, normal people do. Why?”
Garcia's sharp glare to the attending does nothing to his demeanor. His hands — controlled, precise, and so fucking practiced — don't stop for even a fraction of a second.
“Not everyone can have eccentric hobbies like nude yoga, Dr. Rabbit.”
Nude yoga? Nude? You force your mind to not conjure up an image of that. Especially not with your attending — who you have used to have a schoolgirl crush on — as the main character. Or, you'll be the one on the operation table instead of observing, breaking out in hives.
“I'm sorry, Dr. Garcia,” you complete.
“Apologise to the man on the table; It's not my life on line. No matter how much I wish whenever I work with you boy scouts.” You always cringe at the bluntness in her tone, but it's worse when directly aimed at you.
“Easy, Garcia,” Jack commanded, tone instantly gaining its authority, pausing a moment to shoot her a look. Yolanda doesn't deter, and two of your most-respected, highly-competent seniors seem to engage in a silent eye-conversation. It ends with a twitch of Garcia's lips as she glances at you, and your attending muttering, “shut it.”
Huh, Strange.
***
The biohazard bin shuts with a snap, and you rub your clammy hands, trying to get the feel of rubber gloves off them. Trauma bays are always stress-inducing, no matter —
Bzzzzzzzzz.
You're about to kill someone tonight. It's gonna be your boyfriend. And you're gonna enjoy it. And you're gonna go online, talk about it, and watch a number of supportive women tell you, “I support your rights, but also your wrongs. You go, bitch.”
The constant vibration against your thigh, the baby crying in pedes, and looking like a fool in a trauma bay…you heave a sigh. Has the ED always been so bright? It's like the lights are directly in your eyes.
You hate loud. So much.
You un-pocket your phone, letting it unlock before you start typing furiously, your mouth instinctively murmuring everything you're typing. Your feet carry you forward, muscle memory taking you to a quiet corner, where you can peacefully argue. And bang your head against the wall, if you're lucky. But you're not sure if there's a staff discount at The Pitt. And frankly, you're already struggling with rent and groceries.
Look at you being fiscally responsible.
“Fuck, sorry,” leaves your mouth as soon as you accidentally collide with someone. A single calloused palm settles on your hip, steadying you.
Your lips part to say something, but no words come out. It seems the entirety of blood in your body has rushed towards your hip to greet Dr. Abbot's hand, before it retracts.
“Been apologising a lot today. Forgot your training or have you rejoined pre-school?” His body moves to your front, effectively blocking the view of rapid-paced staff, and people in wheelchairs and gurneys.
“Just…one rookie mistake after another.” Your body sags sideways, taking support of the wall. As if on instinct, his posture mirrors yours, his entire side leaning against the wall as well. You deposit your phone back in your pocket.
“For what it's worth, you started out not too long ago. You are, technically, still a rookie,” he speaks.
In this slow corner, the lights seem dimmer and noise quieter. Your shoulders drop just a bit. You're not sure if it's the location or him. Your bet is on location.
You wonder how you must look to the others, a junior nurse and the person with the most seniority on this floor, tucked away in a hushed hallway. What would they think of you? Certainly not co-workers.
Your lips curl in a tired, soft smile. “Trying to make me feel better again, sir?”
“Trying to tell you trauma surgeons have a permanent stick up their ass. Shen and I have bets on whether she lives in an ice castle or a secluded cave.”
Your smile grows bigger, and his eyes crinkle. “It's not just her. In fact, I admire women with a mean mouth.”
“Only women?”
“Men already are. I can't think of any situations where they'd need to be more mean.”
“I can think of a few,” his voice dips even lower, rocks coated in honey. Your eyes find the fluttering pulse on his throat, and travel up his face, to find his gaze fixated on your lips. He looks up again. Slowly. Not in a rush.
In this low-lit corner and his head tilted down to adjust to your height, his curls — salt and pepper and presumably soft — brushed his forehead, creating shadows across his face.
You clear your throat, trying to erase some of the tension. “It's Noah. You met him the other day, if you haven't forgotten."
“Oh, I tried.”
You click your jaw, “He's a nice guy, sir.”
“Uh-huh. Is he blowing up your phone? What's wrong?” His brows furrow in concern, and you find his worry comforting. You're about to open your mouth to explain —
“Did he forget his Roblox password?”
You slightly shake your head, looking down at his shoes. “You…Dr. Abbot,” you trail off, looking up at him again to see the corner of his mouth twitching, eyes wide as if he's seriously expecting an answer.
“How do you even know what that is? And no, that's not it. He…sprained his ankle, hewasdoingaparkourjump,” you mumble the last part as quickly as you can, cheeks heating and eyes wandering.
Jack pauses, expression caught somewhere between humour and exasperation, “Wow, didn't know your boy was still in middle school. Tell me, were you trying to find a boyfriend or a son?”
You throw your head back, a light groan escaping your mouth. While you rub your eyes, you feel your attending move. After a second, he has a bottle of water in his hand.
You give him a look of gratitude and hold your fingers out. But before passing it to you, he twists off the cap with ease. For a moment, you let yourself enjoy the sight of his biceps straining against his scrub top.
You empty almost half the bottle, throat working the liquid down, flushed under the heavy gaze of the man standing in front of you who is currently shamelessly oggling your neck. He's quick to take the bottle off your hands once you're done.
You mutter a quiet “Thanks.” He holds out his free hand forward. You shoot him a confused look, your fingers come up, hovering centimeters away from his palm.
Does he want you to hold…?
“Your phone, nurse.”
Your eyes blink, realisation creeping with a smudge of cringe, “Oh, that makes more sense. Yeah.” But the embarrassment is quick to vanish when you think about what he said.
“What? No. I feel naked without my phone on me.”
His eyes drop to your chest the moment the word “naked” leaves your mouth. You're not sure you've stopped blushing in the last 2 minutes.
“You're not a teenager.”
“Well, I love my phone like one,” you defensively say, standing up straighter. Your right hand moves towards your pocket to protect your mobile.
Abbot rumbles your last name like a warning, his husky voice settling low in your belly, and your traitorous hand is fishing the phone out without a conscious thought.
Before you can even hand it to him, he slightly bends, prying it out of your fingers.
“Now, I feel like a teenager,” you pout.
He uses her corner of your phone to tap against your nose, “Then don't make me go all authoritative on you again, kid.”
With that, he pockets your phone and walks away. You watch him twist the cap off the bottle again and drink directly from the mouth of it. The mouth you just had your own lips wrapped around.
Kid.
You need a chair.
3
“Okay, instead of using this job as an excuse for a sad dating life, how about you guys just admit…y'all got no game,” Mateo knocks back the last sip of his drink, making this very, very bold claim.
“First of all, nobody was talking about dating life. We were talking about sex. Forget dates, when was the last time any of you got laid?” Ellis asks, using her glass to gesture vaguely around the table, a few droplets falling on the wood.
Your shift was hell. Well, everyone's was. Really, every shift is hell, so this one was no different. The only thing was that today, everyone decided to grab a drink. Not in the nearest park, no. Instead, they're all here, the nearest bar that's open at a time when a person should be doing a morning walk, not shots.
You're tucked between Mateo on your left and Jack on your right, in a worn-out brown leather booth, with Shen and Ellis across the table.
“I don't feel comfortable talking about the personal details of my married life with my colleagues,” replied Shen, sadly nodding his head.
Jack's voice, raspy from his whiskey, cuts in, “Oh, shut it, Shen.”
“I'd say 6 weeks since we slept together,” Shen gave up quickly. A series of sympathetic groans and nods went around the table.
Mateo juts his chin towards Ellis, raising his brows. “Hooked up with someone last week. Left before she woke up,” replied the woman.
“Didn't know you were a player, doc,” laughs your fellow nurse, before his head turns to you. “And you? Come on, we're the youngest and hottest, we gotta rub it in their faces. Besides, you have, uh, what's his name...”
You laugh nervously, tracing the rim of your glass with your index. While everyone’s lazy and heavy-lidded all around, you feel Abbot's fervent gaze burning a hole into the side of your head.
“Noah. And hate to disappoint, but it's been some while,” you admit. Not being able to hold back any longer, you finally turn your head to the right. Not taking his eyes off you, your attending takes a long sip of his whiskey.
“How much is a while?”
This is inappropriate. Your attending physician shouldn't be asking you this, you're sure of it. But nobody but you looks alarmed.
“I would say…none of your business, doc,” you softly murmur, the liquid courage making your tongue sharper.
“And what about you Dr. Abbot?” Mateo jumps in again.
It's your turn to look at Jack with the same intense gaze. He doesn't take his eyes off you, “been a while for me too,” he mutters so low, like he's only referring to you.
You lose. You lose the staring contest and let your eyes fall back to your glass. Thank god, you have some of your drink still left.
“Why, is it…old man stuff?” Mateo asks, and your eyes widen at his question. You bite the inside of your cheek to hold back your laugh. Ellis's rich chuckle fills the quiet bar. You finally bring your cup to your lips.
“I'm an attending, Mateo. We're always at the very top of our performance. Here to serve well. In or out of trauma bays.”
Your drink goes down the wrong pipe, and you break out into a violent cough. Why would he say it like that? You're pretty sure you look like a tomato.
You feel a strong hand on your back, beginning to rub small circles through the thin fabric of your shirt. “Easy,” Jack whispers into your right ear.
Is nobody watching this?
You look around to see Shen, Ellis, and Mateo have deeply engrossed themselves in a completely different conversation. You wonder for a second if it's intentional.
His heavy hand stops rubbing, instead patting the small of your back softly and rhythmically. Your coughs start dying down, and you wipe the underside of your watery eyes with your knuckle.
“Have trouble swallowing, kiddo?” His voice is right next to your ear, every breath rustling a tiny bit of your hair.
Oh. Oh. OH.
“Think I need some air, sir,” you mutter, voice dried. You feel floaty, and it has nothing to do with alcohol.
Jack rises from his seat with a low grunt, “Think we're gonna step outside for a moment,” he announces.
You quickly follow suit and walk out after him before you can see anyone's expressions. You're pretty sure you hear Shen's giggle.
***
You welcome the morning chill that greets your face as soon as you step out, double doors falling shut behind you. You close your eyes, tilting your head upwards, and take a deep breath, easing the night's tension out of your body.
“Hot date yesterday?” You're quickly brought back to reality, turning sideways. Abbot has his hands in pocket and hair ruffled from the wind.
“Oh, uh, yes. How'd you guess?”
“You clocked in yesterday wearing something…different.” His eyes drop to your chest, before lingering on your lips, and then meeting your eyes again.
Your cheeks burn. You didn't realise he saw you in your fancy clothes. It was bad enough that you were running late, and worse that you didn't get to change before clocking in with your date outfit still on.
“Yeah. Noah took me to dinner. I just signed a new lease. I'm moving out of my current dumphole to another dumphole, but it's nearer to work. So.”
“Congratulations, glad to have you close.”
“Thanks, sir.”
A comfortable silence falls over for a minute before he speaks again, “was the place nice and quiet?”
“Hm?”
“Where he took you. Nick.”
“Ah. No. It's kinda trendy right now, so, super loud…” you trail off with a sigh. Jack keeps looking at you, as if wanting you to say more, as if finally expecting you to spill the truth out: Noah doesn't know you.
“Hm. Didn't peg you for a gold person, either.”
“What?”
He gestures with his chin towards your neck, where a sliver of chain is peeking out from under your shirt. A new one, gold colored, gifted by your boyfriend yesterday.
“I'm an anything person, really.”
Jack doesn't say anything, only waits. And this time, it works.
“Well, silver, if I had to pick. I like silver,” you speak, your voice bordering on a whisper.
Jack finally stops looking at you, and with that, you finally breathe. He casts his gaze towards the sky.
“I know.”
He says your name.
Your first name that he rarely says. Your heart stutters. Every bit of fresh air you inhaled seems to leave your lungs all at once. Instead, a family of butterflies — so fucking alive — have swarmed in there, rendering you speechless.
Please say my name again.
“I know, kid.”
“I'm not a kid, Jack.” For a second, you watch his eyes get darker. He takes a step closer to you. Then another.
You crane your neck to look up at him. Suddenly, he turns his back to you. One of his hands peeks from his side, and tugs at the lower back of his shirt, pushing it down by an inch or two.
You stand confused, until you notice faint black ink — now visible — just below his neck. You suck in a sharp breath.
By the time Jack turns towards you again, you're barely holding yourself up. He leans forward, his nose only inches away from yours.
“I've got tattoos older than you,” he breathes, “kiddo.”
Your knees turn to jelly. A sharp heat travels straight into your belly, increasing the buzz between your legs. Your lips part, teeth sinking into your plush lower lip.
You can only numbly turn your body towards the door as he holds it open for you. There's not a hint of teasing or smugness in his expression. There is something else, though.
Desperation.
You walk in through the gate, mind already trying to think of a reason to break up with Noah. Unfortunately, or fortunately, it finds plenty.
+1
“Oh, honey, just take this right now. The doctor has told your mom the rest. You're gonna be just fine!” You give your brightest smile to the 6 year-old girl, looking all sad and tiny on the gurney.
You stand up straight again, your back protesting. For someone still “young”, you definitely have an old-person back.
The mom gives you a thankful smile that still doesn't hide her tiredness, “Thank you so much.”
“She's gonna be alright, mom.” You flash one last smile and turn to pull the privacy curtain. When you step out, you see Lena, your charge nurse, and Jack in a conversation at the charge nurse station.
Lena calls out to you, “All done in there, hun?” You nod and give a thumbs-up. You expect your attending to say something, a joke, or even glance at you, but he doesn't.
Your heart sinks. After the morning at the bar, you went home and planned how to break-up with your boyfriend. On the other hand, Jack apparently went home and came up with, “10 ways on how I will ignore my co-worker who I occasionally flirt with on purpose.”
For the past week, there have been no lingering looks, no cornering you to check in, and no making fun of you.
No point in dwelling. You start going on about your usual business, entering through another curtain, all while the back of your mind still calculates how to leave Noah.
You had prepared your speech and your reasons. But then, Noah lost his job the same day you were planning to have the talk. And 2 days later, he was leaving to visit his parents in California. Shouldn't you just wait until after the trip? It will be so much easier.
Yes, you're definitely delaying it because it makes sense, and not because you're scared that Noah will absolutely take it the wrong way. He's been miserable lately as is, and while you were trying to be sympathetic, you couldn't find it in yourself.
Noah had always been unobservant and insensitive to your needs, not doing anything till he's told. All while, he expected it all from you — emotional support, moral support, and now, financial support. You saw nothing wrong with being “needy” but didn't you deserve the same treatment from him?
As you leave another exam room, still conflicted, you see Lena waving you over, the telephone receiver pressed against her ear. You quickly walk over.
Lena brings down the handset, palming the mouthpiece so the other person can't hear. “Sweets, it's your boyfriend, he's all panicking over something. Do you wanna take this, or should I make an excuse?”
The color from your face drains. This is humiliating, Noah calling at your work because he can't take care of himself. You quickly un-pocket your phone, tapping the screen awake.
9 missed calls from Noah.
“Uh, I'll take it. Thank you, Lena. Sorry too.” She gives you a sympathetic smile and hands you the handset.
“Noah, you can't be calling me at work.” You whisper into the mouthpiece.
“Babe, did you think I wanted to? I called your phone like 3 times, but you didn't pick it up. It feels like you're ignoring me.”
“It's because I am ignoring you. I am at a fucking hospital, working the emergency department,” your voice is straining with the effort to keep it low.
“Oh, I knew you'd throw your job in my face because I'm unemployed. You're a nurse, not a doctor, babe. See, I remember things.”
You take a deep breath.
“What do you want?”
“I locked myself out of my house. The locksmith will come by in the morning. Can you swing by and drop your keys? You know, I lost my license recently, and my ankle is still not good enough to take the subway.”
“No.”
“Jesus, I'm stranded, just be a good girlfriend for once.”
That sends you over the edge. You put the telephone down with more than necessary force, cringing when a few people turn to look at you.
“Fuck,” you mutter under your breath, tears of frustration welling up in your eyes.
“You okay, kid?” Lena asks sweetly, coming to stand closer to you. You're only able to nod at her. If you open your mouth, your voice will break. When your charge nurse finally steps away, you clear your throat, and blink back your tears.
When you look up with clear eyes, there's Dr. Abbot standing about 20 feet away from you, in a conversation with a nurse that he's not listening to. Because he's looking directly at you.
You quickly move your head, “Lena, mind if I take 5?”
“Take 10, hun.” You flash her a grateful smile and start walking towards the supply closet.
You twist the doorknob and walk into what must be a 6×6 feet room, and close the door behind you. Your phone is still in your hand, clutched tightly enough to be used as a weapon. You open Noah's chat.
This isn't working out. When the locksmith figures out your door, pack my things in a box and leave them outside my door. Have fun folding your own bedsheets. I'm changing my Netflix password!
Your thumb hovers over the send button. Is the message too unkind? Too cruel for you? You drop the phone in your pocket, with the text still sitting there.
You force yourself to take deep breaths, pressing the heel of your hands against your eyes, turning around to face the organized racks.
“Fuck, fuck, fuc —”
The door slams open, and then shuts behind you, making you jump around, your hands falling to your chest.
“Jesus, Jack.”
“Did you forget your manners?” His voice comes out stern, low enough to drop the temperature of the room.
Your hands fall to your side. You're not in the mood for this. You don't want him in here, no matter how quickly your body is gaining color in his presence.
“What do you want, sir?” your question comes out breathless.
“You know, we pay you to work, not to hide in supply closets when you have fights with your childish boyfriend.”
“I asked Lena first, and I should be out in 5.”
“A patient can need you in 1,” he deadpans.
“Good thing there's Mateo and a bunch of fucking nurses already out there! I'm not the only one, sir,” you frantically wave your hands around, voice rising in pitch.
“Yeah, you're the only one yelling at your attending,” he leans back against the door, looking like he's enjoying a goddamn show. His calm pisses you off even more.
In your frazzled state, the true words spill out before you can filter them.
“Yes, my attending who has spent the last couple of days icing me out, keeping his distance, like I broke into his house and stole his leg.”
He's eyeing your motioning hands cutting through the air. You must look like the crazy one, while he stands there all frickin’ composed, his lips twitching.
“That's dark. And I'm your attending, nurse, as you mentioned. I'm not your boyfriend,” he shakes his head slowly like he's talking to a dog.
“I know that. Do you?”
“Oh, I know I'm not Nick,” he snickers.
“FOR THE LAST —” your voice booms throughout the small room before you stop yourself. You pinch your nose, chest heaving up and down.
Deep breaths. In and out. You're not the only two people in the hospital, no matter how much it feels like that.
Nurse, there's people that are dying.
“For the last time, his name is Noah,” you calmly say, voice shaking with the effort of controlling your pitch.
“Right, sorry. I just forgot because he forgot to fill his name out on your discharge papers when he brought you in. It's okay, children make mistakes like that all the time. Even when the forms are very easy to navigate, and the font size is very large,” Jack mocks, laughing sardonically.
“Why do you care so much?”
“Don't flatter yourself, sweetheart. I care about all my staff.”
Sweetheart.
“You're killing me.”
“Trauma bay 1 is empty,” he deadpans, shrugging his shoulders.
A humorless laugh escapes you. Oh, he thinks he's so funny.
“Staff. Is that what I am? Then why do you look at me differently than you look at others? Why do you catch me in the hallways? Why are you always seeking me out? Why have you not walked out of this —”
You flinch at the sudden motion, hand moving towards your temple where something just knocked against it. You look down, where a box maybe twice the size of your hand, lies on the ground.
The rack behind you is still vibrating from when your right arm collided with it 2 seconds ago. You shouldn't have been waving your arms around so much.
“Ow,” you mutter, the heel of your impacted hand rubbing your temple, and eyes downcasted at the box, looking at it like it personally wronged you. Which it did.
Jack quickly moves towards you, his left hand shooting up to take hold of your fingers that are kneading your head — same fingers that smashed against the rack — and brings your conjoined hands down.
“Careful. Are you hurt?” With only inches between you, he bends his head down to examine where you took the hit. His free palm brushes your hair back gently, and you shiver at the touch of his warm skin.
Trapped between your torsos, your hands are still joined, his thumb stroking against your knuckles to soothe any pain you felt on the impact.
“I asked you something, kid.”
You've lost your voice. You look from your connected fingers to his eyes.
And, oh.
His eyes have softened, looking at you with concern. This man sees lacerations, head traumas, hematomas, and fractures every single day. You've never seen him look this worried, and all for a pathetic clash that didn't even leave a bruise behind.
He switches positions with you, and suddenly, his back faces the shaky rack, his form protectively towering over yours. All of your body protests when he moves back, his hands dropping to his own sides.
“You can continue yelling at me now.”
In and out. Deep breath.
“Why have you not walked out of this room yet? And why have you kept me at an arm's distance?” you say but your voice is anything but loud, it's small and quiet, breaking at the end.
“As I said —”
“Stop, stop, stop. Stop, Dr. Abbot, and don't lie to me.” You instinctively take a step forward, closing all the distance again.
A pause.
“I really thought you were gonna break up with him. That morning, I thought you finally regained your senses, and were gonna cut off the dead weight,” he admits, running a hand through his hair.
“Jac —”
“Shut up and let me speak. I thought you were gonna end it with him, and you would come to the next shift looking happy and bright again. Just like you used to before you let that boy date you. You.”
His eyes are boring into yours, and he looks breathless and affected, so opposite to how he was just a minute ago.
“Me? What about me?”
He laughs humourlessly, “let's not fish for compliments. You know what you are. And if you don't, it makes me wonder what kind of limpdicks you have been with.”
You suck in a sharp breath, at a loss of words. Your cheeks burn, and your heart does a backflip.
He thinks that?
Jack turns around, so his back is facing you. Both his hands brush his hair back, and you can see the expansion and contraction of his back as he takes deep breaths.
“What if I had broken up? Nothing would've changed. It's not like you would've done anything. You would've continued to eye-fuck me across gurneys, and flash a smile once a day,” you speak up, voice rising in pitch again.
He turns back sharply, walking even closer to you, his chest colliding with yours.
“Oh, you know it's more complicated than that,” he retorts, eyes narrowing.
“What? You're my senior, you're older —”
He says your name. Low. Authoritative. You feel a traitorous sensation between your thighs.
“I'm not just older, I am old. Period. And I know just how old I am, because I feel it everyday when I strap my leg, and wake up with a new pain every day."
You don't know how to respond. Your gaze falls to his lips, and before you know what you're doing, you're withdrawing your phone from your pocket.
You take a tiny step back to make space, and tap your screen awake. It directly opens to Noah's chat, your message still sitting there in the type box.
You turn your screen towards Jack. His eyes move back and forth, reading your draft. When his eyes meet you again, they're intense, frantic, and what do you know…excited.
“Why haven't you sent it?”
“Because he's already going through a lot. He doesn't have a job, or a car, or…okay, I get it.”
Jack's fingers come up to grab your chin, holding it up. He looks like he's just had a shot of espresso and topped it off with another 3.
“Do it. Do it right now, in front of me, or you'll chicken out. He lost his job, his car, the next thing he loses is you. The one that's worth the most.”
With his breathless voice, taking the edge of desperation as every second ticks, you know you've lost. You bite your bottom lip.
His thumb moves from your chin, to your lower lip, freeing it from your teeth, “don't worry yourself over him.”
Deep breath. In and out.
You slowly look down at your screen, your thumb hovering over the little arrow.
Send.
You put the mobile back in your pocket and look up at Jack with hope, like a kid waiting for approval. Jack flashes you the biggest smile you've ever seen on him.
You did that. You.
“You did so good, sweetheart,” his thumb strokes your cheekbone, and you can't help but lean into his palm. You're high watching him smile, a similar one takes form on your lips.
He's so beautiful. He's the most beautiful man you've ever seen. He should be on TV, winning Emmy's for his grin.
But then you falter, “My…my minutes are up.”
“You can take another 5,” his face leans closer, and the tip of your nose kisses his.
“Patient might need me in 1,” you helplessly whisper, your breaths mingling.
“Well, consider me a patient, then. Your patient.”
You gulp. Your knees are growing weaker by the second and you can't stop staring at his soft lips. You let out a little pathetic whimper before lifting your chin, brushing your lips against his softly.
Fuck.
Your heart tries to escape your ribcage, palm operating with a brain of its own and landing right over his heart. His fluttering, excited, nervous heartbeat greets you, and your lips curve upwards.
Just as you try to move your lips against his —
“Not like this,” he murmurs against your mouth.
You let out an entirely pathetic whine, forehead crashing against his neck with a soft thunk. Your affectionate graze on his sternum turns into a punch — also, pathetic — and it makes him chuckle.
“How, then?” your mutter into his neck.
His arm comes around your waist, holding you up for him so you can let your weight go. His arm tightens as soon as he feels you melt.
“When I'll get you all the silver jewelry in the world,” he breathily replies in your ear.
“That's a lot.”
“What can I say? I like paying for things.”
His free fingers travel to the back of your neck, deftly working the hook of your golden chain with a single hand. You catch as the necklace falls down your chest, reluctantly taking your face out from his neck.
Note to self: Ask him what perfume he uses later.
“One hand, wow.”
“A lot of things I can unhook with one hand.”
He captures your wrist that you've held against his chest — index hatefully scratching, trying to harm him for not kissing you — and brings it to his lips.
He doesn't break eye-contact when he kisses the inside of your wrist. Then the middle of your palms, and finally the tips of your fingers.
You're grateful for his arm around your middle, otherwise you'd be on the floor, shrieking and screaming.
“Don't want to see that on you again,” he points with his chin towards your fist with the necklace inside it.
“Yes, doctor.”
He nods, heat swimming in his gaze. He finally extracts his arm from around your midriff, using it to pull out your phone from your pants and swiftly slipping it in his.
“No more worrying, hm? In return…” He empties his other pocket, taking out a set of keys. He brings your palm down from his face and puts them in it.
“Sit in my car at the end of the shift. You know which one. Turn the heating on, and wait for me,” he raises his eyebrows, awaiting confirmation.
“Yes, okay,” you gulp, closing your other fist as well. One holds your past, another, your future. Or, so you hope.
“Yes, what?” he asks, already side-stepping you and moving towards the door.
“Yes, doctor”
“Good girl,” he shoots you a wink, the door falling shut behind him.
Look at that, your 10 minutes are up.
I enjoyed writing this sm, and i hope you lovely people do too. again, feel free to glaze me in asks, comments, and dms. likes and reblogs appreciated much <3 i also need to know if yall blushed reading this, if yes, WHEN
pairing — underground fighter!andrew ‘pope’ cody x fem!reader
summary — pope cody’s got himself a girl he’s sweet on who works on him between rounds, and there’s no part of him that can imagine the thought of leaving you.
warnings — ( 14.5k words ) 18+ MINORS DNI !! explicit sexual content ( p in v, m!receiving oral, pope’s got a size kink, marking, scratching, praise kink, softdom!pope, slightly needy!pope? he’s also rly awkward during sex) slow burn-ish, no physical appearance described of reader (small hands + general size difference noted in relation to pope, no other physical descriptors) obsessive!pope, guns and threat at gunpoint, financial exploitation of reader - she’s paying off a debt by working, brief harassment scene, hurt/comfort and hurt/no comfort, violence, blood + injuries, emotional ending, incarceration, brief mentions of drug use, absent parent, protective!pope, reader’s guarded / slow to trust, unwanted touching (not from pope), pope has a heavy savior complex in this, no use of y/n, pope’s pov, canon-compliant (ish) but it’s pre-season one.
notes — this one got a little away from me and i’m already Sorry it’s a shawn hatosy summer!!! also i’m laughing to myself ab this fic bc the original plot was gonna be so different but this is just the way the cookie crumbled while writing + experimented with a different writing style bc i just think pope’s pov would feel like a lot at once
Craig had made some pretty stupid decisions in his life. He blew his money on blow and bikes most of the time, but once in a blue moon, he made decisions that really cut it, like putting in over three grand into Pope across a single night. Money Craig didn’t even have, money he’d borrowed off a man people didn’t borrow off, because he watched Pope punch a bag by the pool and put a body on the concrete in a parking lot behind a bar and decided his older brother was an investment.
It was, as it turned out. Pope won. Craig got his three grand back and then some, and that was how the basement off Atlantic became a regular thing, because Craig had a taste for it now and Pope had a use for cash that didn’t run through Smurf’s shady fingers first.
The crowd there was the worst he’d stood in front of, and he’d grown up in Smurf’s living room, so that was a measurement that meant something. Men who bet money they needed and meant to take the loss of someone’s skin. The air thick enough to chew, smoke and sweat and the bitterness of a room full of people who’d collectively decided this was the night their luck was going to turn.
Pope wanted to lose just so they’d fuck off.
It was run by a guy named Leo who’d met Craig at a party, late, both of them lit and certain they were about to make each other rich. Leo had the basement, the crowd, the connections that made cops uninterested, and a way of talking that made one-track-minded guys like Craig feel like they were cut in on something even as he was lifting your wallet. Pope didn’t trust him. Pope didn’t trust anybody, but he distrusted Leo with a specificity that felt like respect.
Leo ran the place like a man who’d thought about every cent in a dollar twice. Nothing in that basement was there by accident, which was how Pope knew, eventually, that you weren’t either.
The first night he didn’t put it together. He came up out of the third round with his ears ringing and his knuckles screaming and somebody pressed a wet rag to the back of his neck, and his body did what it always did. He came around with his elbow up and the words already out of his mouth. “Get the fuck off me.”
You went still. You were crouched down close enough that he could see you’d done your eyes earlier in the night and they’d worn through, smudged soft at the corners, and that should have made you look tired and instead made you look like you’d been left out in the weather, gentled by it. There was a smear of someone else’s blood drying brown along your jaw—not yours, you didn’t have a mark on you, you were the only clean thing in a room built for ruining people—and you hadn’t wiped it off because your hands had been busy all night being careful with men who were far from deserving it.
“Okay,” you said, and that was all. You stayed crouched in front of him, an arm’s length back now, holding the rag out where he could take it himself if he wanted it.
He felt like garbage. It all arrived once, the way it did with him, fine one second and then sick with it. You couldn’t have been much more than a bucket and tape to anybody else in that room, just the girl who patched them up, and he’d snapped at you like you were one of the men in the room baying for his blood.
He took the rag off your hands.
And you just went back to it. You pulled his hand into both of yours like nothing had happened, like he hadn’t just shown you the worst of himself in the first ten seconds of knowing you, and started cleaning the wreck of his knuckles with a little furrow between your brows. Devotional, almost. Like his hand had been lent to you and you were supposed to return it in good condition.
It was then he realized Leo had gotten way too lucky with you. He was sure you were used as nothing but a front. You were something soft to put at the edge of all that ugliness so men had a reason to keep their money in the room a little longer. A girl who patched up fighters, sure, but mostly a thing for them to look at, to crowd, to reach for between rounds.
Pope wouldn’t admit it to Craig, or any of his brothers, ever, that the only reason he came back the next time was to see you again. He knew his words and then his sudden muteness probably made you read him as one more man to be careful around. He’d handed you that impression himself, and now he had to live inside it.
The second night, you didn’t tend to him. There was another girl near the bucket—older, harder, a cigarette tucked behind her ear and no softness in her hands at all—and she did his corner between rounds like she was wiping off a dusty counter. Pope sat there and let her and looked for you over her shoulder the whole time, which was how he found you across the room, working the cash, the cigar box against your chest as your lips moved over the count.
Pope hardly believed in coincidences. He was sure he’d snapped and you’d adjusted by putting a body between yourself and the man who’d shown his teeth. It was the smart thing. It was exactly what he’d have told you to do if he were anyone other than the man it was being done to. It sat in his chest all night like a swallowed stone, the understanding that he’d gotten precisely what he deserved and hated every second of it.
He won. He always did; that was the whole problem with him, the thing that made his Craig rich now and him useful to Smurf and left Pope standing in basements full of people who wanted to watch him hurt somebody. The crowd howled, money changed hands, and Pope barely heard whatever Leo was saying because he was watching you seal the night’s take into a zip bag and press the air out of it with the flat of your hand carefully.
He found you after, by the stairs, when the room had thinned to the stragglers and the smell of it had gone stale. He came up slow, hands where you could see them.
“You drew the short straw last week,” he said, the words coming out of him too rehearsed, because that’s what he’d been doing since he noticed you and while getting his guts punched. “Patching me up.”
You looked up at him. Up close, your worn-soft eyes were tired. “I just asked Kate to take your corner tonight.”
So, not a coincidence. He’d already known, yet it did something ugly to him. He already had people who he’d known his entire life scared of him—brothers who were career criminals—and he’d made peace with it, like he had to with everything he couldn’t change. But it landed differently from you, because you didn’t have the years to back the wariness up.
“Right,” he said, because what else was there to say?
You tilted your head, just slightly, and scanned his face like you were checking it for swelling. He knew there was none, not today. He still held still. He realized he’d have held still for anything you wanted to do to his face.
Whatever you were looking for, it seemed like you hadn’t found it. Or maybe you had. Your gaze caught on his mouth, under his jaw, and you clicked your tongue.
“You’re not —” You shook your head faintly. “It’s easier,” you said finally, “to not get in the way of guys like you. That’s all. It’s nothing personal.”
Guys like you. Jesus. He wanted to ask you what that meant, even though he knew. He was guys like him. He’d spent thirty-some years being exactly that. But he wanted, with an intensity that made no sense, to be not that to you.
Any other guy would have let it go. A smarter man, a less stupid one, would’ve said that was a fair enough explanation and left you to your transparent zip bags and never come back to you unless you did to him.
“It is though,” Pope said, voice too rough. “Personal. I wasn’t—right, after the third round.” The words, his voice, everything came out clumsy, and he briefly wondered if his eyes had dropped down his face and his nose had turned upside down. “You don’t have to put Kate—or whoever there. I’m not gonna—” He wasn’t sure how he wanted to end the sentence. “I’d rather it was you.”
He suddenly felt like a complete idiot all over again when he watched your brows furrow slightly and your lips press together as you looked at him almost sadly. Then you let out a disbelieving chuckle as you shook your head as you twisted your neck slightly to look around.
“Is this gonna be a problem?” you said, lowering your voice, glancing off to the side. Checking, he realized, who was still on the stairs, who might be close enough to hear.
That was its own answer to a question he hadn’t been able to ask yet. It told him there were people you didn’t want knowing this, even though there was hardly a ‘this.’
“What?” Pope asked, playing dumb just so he could hear the words from you.
“You.” You brought your eyes back to him, and he felt slightly shaken as you pinned him with a glare that seemed almost gentle. “Saying things like that.” Your voice stayed even, but there was an edge working into it now. “I do my job here. I keep my head down—that’s better for me, okay?”
He didn’t get that. Not really. But he heard the need in it.
“Nobody’s gonna bother you,” he said roughly. It came out flat and certain, it always did when he was truly sure of himself. “Not while I’m here.”
You just looked at him like that again. “Go home, Pope—”
“Andrew,” he said, and he didn’t even know why he did.
He hated that name just as much as Pope. It was just another thing Smurf had handed him that never fit anywhere in his growing life. To the room he was Pope. On the cards he counted, he was Pope. He’d been Pope so long he sometimes forgot there was anything under it. But he didn’t want to be Pope to you. Pope was guys like him. Pope was the thing on the cards coked-up wishful men put their money on. He had no clean self to offer you—God knew he didn’t—but he had the name hardly anybody used often, and so he gave you that, stupidly, like it’d be worth something to you.
His pulse climbed into his throat. He had the sick, racing feeling he got right before things went sideways, the one that had been wrong about as often as it was right and that he'd never once been able to switch off.
“Andrew,” you said, testing it quietly in your mouth, where Pope felt everything landed differently for some reason. And then you looked at him again, and said, “Go home, Andrew.”
Thankfully, by some grace of God, Pope realized he may not have done it all wrong when you came to patch him up after the first round the following week. You dropped down onto the concrete in front of him with the bucket and the brown bottle and a roll of tape gone soft at the edges from your thumb.
You took his hand like nothing had been said, as though the conversation on the stairs had been filed somewhere and this was the conclusion you’d come to on your own time, and Pope felt that he should let that be, instead of pointing it out. He’d learned that much, and tamped down the feeling like his entire week had paid off.
“You lead with right too much,” you said, looking at his hands. “When you’re tired. You drop the left and lead with the right. That’s how they got your eyebrow.”
Pope parted his lips and blinked. “You watch me?”
“I watch the cash.” You pressed the tape down over his knuckle. “Fights are what make them move, but yeah.” You shrugged, and it was stiff. “You drop your left.”
Pope stayed silent for a moment, then asked, dumbly, “You a fighter?”
It was meant to land as dry, a joke, but it never quite did with him.
You let out the smallest of chuckles. “I watch men get hit everyday.”
Pope swallowed, not sure how to respond to that. So he watched the top of your head instead, the part in your hair, the concentration you put into doing a job that probably paid no extra if you did it well. You wrapped him efficiently, all business now, and Pope felt that you’d closed a door he hadn’t realized you’d opened.
It should have frustrated him. Instead, it made him want to earn that inch back slow, the way you’d coax anything that didn’t trust easy. He knew that wanting. He had it about a dog once, a half-feral thing that lived in the corners of the Cody Compound for a summer, that he’d fed in silence for weeks before it let him near. He’d never told anyone about that dog. He thought about it now, crouched-down you and careful tape, and didn’t enjoy what it told him about himself.
“You’re done,” you said, and stood briskly.
“Hey,” he said, the word coming out before he could think it. “Thanks.”
You looked at him a second, and whatever you found in him, it earned him the corner of a smile. You must not have been used to being thanked very often. Pope flexed his wrapped hand, feeling something close to proudness. He wasn’t sure for what, exactly, but it felt good for the moment.
For three weeks, you rationed out small jokes that he was almost sure you didn’t realize were jokes, taped him up, and left Pope driving home with whatever you’d given him that night turning over in his chest.
His fight hadn’t started yet. He leaned up against the support post by the stairs, hood up, trying to do everything he could to make himself look very still and very boring so the crowd would forget to look at him. From there, he had a clean line of the cash table, which meant he had a clean line on you, which was the actual reason he’d stood there.
There was a man at your table. Big, going soft in the middle, a Lakers cap on backward and loose, oozing the sleazy confidence of someone past four beers and good judgement. He’d been talking to you a while, Pope noticed. You were wearing a smile aimed past his shoulder—a small, pleasant, and all around absent thing—and Pope watched you do it with a protective switch under his thumb.
The man reached over and tucked a bill into your bra, slowly, like it was funny. Two fingers folded the bill below your collarbone, and you went rigid, smile staying in place while everything behind it moving.
You went somewhere way back behind your own eyes the way Pope had watched you go a dozen times, and the man laughed at his own joke and left his hand there a beat too long.
The trouble with Pope was that most of the time, he never decided. One second he was against the post and the next he had the man’s wrist in his hand and he was bending it back off you, almost politely.
“Wrong,” Pope drawled, plucking the bill out of your collar with his free hand and pressed it to the man’s palm. He closed the man’s fingers over them. “Cash goes in the box.”
“The hell’re you —” The man turned to get a real look at him, and got the whole of him. The hood and the wrapped hands and Pope’s uncanny stillness, and Pope watched the recognition arrive, and the bluster went out of him like the air on your sealed bags. “Pope—hey, man. No harm. No harm.”
“Sure.” Pope let go of the wrist and the guy immediately melted back into the crowd. The whole thing had taken maybe nine seconds and Pope’s pulse hadn’t even climbed, which it should’ve, but some animal thing under him had considered this easy.
“Why would you do that?” you said, voice quieting.
“He had his hands on you.” His voice came out defensive, which he hated, because it made him understand that he’d done something wrong before he could even process it. “I’m not standing here watching some creep—”
“That was Reyes,” you said, like it meant something. It didn’t, not to Pope, and your face did something between fury and despair as he realized this. “He runs paper for Leo. You just—” You pressed your lips together and looked around quickly, the same way you’d done on the stairs except this time he could see real fear attached in it. “I don’t—I don’t need people thinking a Cody’s got a thing for me,” you finished, quieter. “You don’t.”
“What if I—”
“You don’t, okay?” It came out sharper than you’d intended, and he saw how you caught it. “It’s fine. It’s no big deal.” You were already looking away, gathering the cash box against your chest, busying yourself. “I really am better when people don’t worry about me, Andrew.”
You tucked a piece of hair back, gave him a quick, tired ghost of a smile that didn't reach anything, and stepped back into the crowd with your box like the last nine seconds could be put away with everything else you put away.
There was that horrible feeling tightening in his stomach again. He knew he’d done the right thing, but there was a frustration in him of being right about the wrong thing. The thing he’d done to help you had immediately become another thing for you to be frightened of, clean up, another man’s decision landing on your plate.
You’d probably spent your entire life cleaning up after other people’s choices and he’d just handed you one more.
He fought ugly and won ugly, which was somehow worse than losing altogether. The crowd got what it paid for and then some, and Pope walked out with a rib that clicked when he breathed and a cut over the eye he’d earned by leading with the right all night like the idiot you’d warned him not to be.
He collected off Leo without a word. Pope wasn’t even sure why the guy even bothered to grin and laugh and talk to him while he counted the money; Pope had said around two words to him and won him more than two grand.
He didn’t bother hearing the compliments—the fake, complimenting bit to make sure he came back—and took his roll of cash and shoved it inside his pocket and left out the back.
He went up the concrete steps, into the lot behind the building where the air was at least air instead of four hundred people breathing the same lungful.
He leaned against the cinderblock wall in the dark, in the orange wash of one working lot light, and pressed the heel of his hand under the bad rib and breathed shallow and concentrated on not being anywhere, on going behind his own eyes the way he'd watched you do it, somewhere the night couldn't reach him.
The door opened and shut carefully, and the latter action made him not need to look to know.
“You walked out without letting anybody look at that,” you said.
“I’m fine.”
“No, I can tell,” you said drily, almost amused. Your footsteps came across the lot and stopped a few feet off, not crowding him—you never crowded him—and giving him the room he hadn’t asked for and needed anyway. “I basically heard your ribs.”
He huffed something close to a laugh. It pulled at the rib and he stopped.
Your hands hovered around his body, like you were asking for permission to take a look without saying the words.
“Are you okay?” he asked, forcing the words out roughly. Because he needed to, it’d been gnawing at him for too long. “Is he hurting you?”
Your hands when still where they hovered. You took the rag instead, wet it from the bottle, and reached up to the cut over his eye as though he’d never asked the question.
“Hold still,” you said.
“That’s not—” He caught your wrist, palm loose around it, but he caught it. “I asked you something.”
In the orange light, Pope could see the smudge of your makeup, dark and worn through around your eyes, and the rings on your fingers catching the light each time your hand moved. You let him hold your wrist without pulling away, your eyes dropping to his chest like you’d decided against looking at his face.
He could feel your pulse under his thumb, thrumming. He let go of your wrist with a sigh, and you stepped back into the work, dabbing at the cut, close enough he could feel the warmth coming off you.
You said, after a moment, evenly, “Don’t try to help me.”
“Don’t try to help me.”
“I didn’t say—”
“It’s written all over your face.”
You pressed the rag a little harder than the cut needed and let you, kept his face still, watching yours. You narrowed your eyes at him when he didn’t react to the pressure, as though his stillness annoyed you. Pope didn’t know how you hadn’t realized he’d let you do anything. He’d let you press the rag as hard as you wanted and he’d sit there and take it. He’d stopped having a choice about it a while ago.
That, and the fact that your hands, so small compared to the enormity of him, were the furthest things from the worst he’d taken.
“Are you trying to hurt me?” he asked, amused despite it all.
“If I were, you’d know.” But the corner of your mouth tugged, just barely, before you caught it and put it away. You eased up on the rag. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be.”
For a second, it felt easier between you two again. Then, you remembered yourself, and he watched as your lips pursed.
“I mean it, though,” you said. “Don’t. Whatever you’re sitting there cooking up.”
“You don’t know what I’m cooking up.”
“Andrew,” you said his name flatly, and he felt like a dog at how quickly it got his neck to tilt up to meet your eyes. You hadn’t even spoke and he was looking at you like you’d asked him a question he wanted to get correct.
“You’re not the first one to try this,” you said softly. “It always goes the same way.”
“Yeah?” A muscle ticked in his jaw. “Tell me, then.”
“Either he gets in over his head and screws up.” You wiped the last streak of blood from his brow, your hand coming to rest light against his face to hold him still. He leaned into your palm, the warmth of your hand and him moving into it like it was the most natural thing he’d ever done.
One of your rings sat cool against his cheekbone and he felt that, too, the small contrast of it, cool metal and warm palm, and he was very aware you were still talking and he was having trouble with that.
“ —or he sticks around for long enough to figure out it’s too much trouble, gets bored, and quits. He leaves, and either way I’m standing here worse than before,” you said, conversationally, and he did believe it was a tale as old as time for you.
“I won’t get bored,” he managed to say. “I’m good at what I do.”
“They all say that, too.” You smiled that sad, soft smile again.
You took your hand back off his face and he felt the loss of it like air. He was already thinking about how to get you to put it back, which was probably the most pathetic thought he’d ever had, and he’d had some bad ones.
“When do you fight next? You shouldn’t, for a while. For your ribs.”
He let you change the topic. He noticed you did that often.
“Next week, probably,” he said. “My brother’s already running his mouth about it.”
“Tell your brother your ribs are hurt.” You crouched to gather the bottle, the rag, the soft-edged tape, packing them back into the bucket.
“Where do you go? After this,” he asked.
He watched the careful machinery turn—watched you weigh whether it was a real question or a way in—and then something in you must've been too tired to keep the door shut, because you let it swing.
“Home. My mom’s,” you said. “She’s around, just—not a lot.” You gathered the bucket against your hip. “So it’s me and my brother mostly. He’s eleven.”
The whole shape of you tilted and resettled in the space of the word. Why you watched every dollar like it held something up. You weren't just keeping your own head down. You had a kid behind you, in the blind spot, where the room couldn't reach him.
“He know you’re here?” Pope asked.
“He thinks I wait tables.” The corner of your mouth went up, rueful. “Thinks I’m terrible at it. The tips are all over the place, so.” You shrugged.
Pope cleared his throat. “Are they?”
“This week, yeah,” you said.
“Do you want to?” Pope found himself asking, “Wait tables.”
You looked at him for a long moment that he almost thought you wouldn’t answer. “It’d be nice, I guess. To have steady cashflow and all that.”
“Leo pays you enough?”
You shifted the bucket against your hips. “He doesn’t really—” You stopped yourself, then started again. “The tips are what they are.”
Pope hummed. “That cover everything?”
You looked at him sideways, catching what he was doing. “Most weeks,” you said hesitantly.
“This week?”
You looked off past him, and he watched you decide whether to say it. “My brother’s shoes split,” you said finally, and it’d come out in a small voice. “Bottom’s gone right through it, so.” You shrugged, making a small face as you pinched your eyes shut, like you hated saying it.
Pope took the roll out of the jacket, thumbed off a fold of it without counting and held it out.
You looked at it, then at him. “No.”
“For the kid.”
“Andrew.”
“Take it.” He kept his hand out. “It’s shoes.”
“That’s not—” You stopped. Your jaw worked. He could see all of it going on behind your face, the pride and the rule and the thing you'd spent the last few minutes telling him. “That’s just what I told you not to do.”
“You said not to help you.” He pushed his hand further toward you. “This is shoes for a kid I never met.”
He watched your eyes rise to look at the sky and you shook your head. “You’re making this really hard.”
He tipped his chin down. “Just take it. I don’t need it.”
You took it slow, your fingers closing over his for a second before they took the bills, and you didn't say thank you—he was glad, thanking him would’ve made it a transaction—you just held on to his hand a beat longer than you needed to, and breathed out, shaky, and let it go.
“Please don’t make this a thing,” you said, voice thick. “I can’t—I can’t say no to the money. I wish I could.” You looked at the bills in your hand. “I don’t wanna take things from you.”
He felt himself shrug, eyeing the top of your head as you looked down. “I’d let you.”
He’d meant to keep that to himself. Or he hadn’t. He didn’t really care, though. The money itself was nothing; what he’d just handed you was a rounding error, less than what his brothers dropped in a single night without blinking. It was the kind of number that moved in the Cody household without anyone thinking to count it; money they’d find between the cushions from five years ago.
He had more coming in than he knew what to do with and nowhere clean to put it. You had a kid to help out with and yourself to take care of, and the situation was so simple it almost made him angry.
It became a thing without either of you calling it one. It was a thing, in Pope’s mind, obviously, but he was sure that telling you would’ve spooked you and he wasn’t ready for that.
You’d started taping him differently. Early on you’d wrapped him all brisk and businesslike, done before he’d thought of anything to say. He had to watch his words in general, but he had to try even harder with you, for he never wanted to say the wrong thing. Somewhere in those weeks, you slowed. You took longer than the wrap needed—smoothing the tape down twice when once would’ve held just fine, turning his hand over in both of yours to check the knuckles you’d already checked—and Pope started to pretend he didn’t notice.
He’d sit on the folding chair with his hand lent out to you and watch the top of your head and feel his pulse come down out of his throat, slow, the dog talked off the thing. One night, he let his thumb find the inside of your wrist while you worked, resting there against the thrum of you.
He started taking on more fights and ending them earlier. He told himself it was because of his ribs, the cash, any of the reasons a man might want a thing over with. All of it when the reason was that when the basement emptied after, it was just the two of you, and Pope had started living for the after the same way men lived for the fight.
You started watching the fights now—not the cash, him—and he knew because one night he had a bad one, a hook he missed that snapped his head around. He looked for your face before he looked for anything else, and found you already wincing.
Your hand had come up halfway to your mouth. You caught yourself and dropped it. But he’d seen it and carried it home for a week, a proof of what, he didn’t know.
Pope really, really hated asking Craig anything. He knew that he’d make him pay the toll one way or another. Sometimes by talking for forty minutes about something nobody asked about, or remembering the question to bring it up at the worst possible time. So Pope sat on it for a week; he iced the rib, didn’t fight, and drove past the ring twice without going in. He knew it was fucking pathetic.
Pope found Craig by the pool, sunburnt and shirtless and rolling something on a paper plate.
“You know the girl,” Pope started, “at the ring, the one who does the cash?”
He found that he wanted to keep your name to himself, in case Craig hadn’t already caught onto it.
“Which one?” Craig asked without looking up.
“The one that does the cash, man.”
“There’s like three girls.” He licked the paper and twisted the end. “You gotta be more specific. There’s the older chick, the mean—”
“Younger. Quiet.” Pope forced his voice to stay even. “Patches people up.”
Craig looked up at him then, a slow grin spreading. “Ohhhh.”
“Don’t.”
“No. No.” Craig held his hands up, waving them slightly, delighted. “Can’t believe you’re asking me about a girl, man.”
“Forget it.” Pope turned to go.
“Hey—hey,” Craig said, standing from the lounger. “I’m messin’ with you. C’mon. What do you wanna know about her?”
“Why’s she there?”
Craig shrugged. “Pretty sure she owes Leo.”
“She owes Leo?” Pope asked, letting the surprise show in his voice. “For what?”
“Pretty sure she’s collateral.” Craig lit the thing, talking around it. “Some guy that was around. Dad. Stepdad. Who knows?” He waved the smoke out of his face. “Pretty sure she’s just workin’ the square until it pays itself off.”
“How much?” Pope asked immediately.
Craig rolled his eyes, shaking his head. “Don’t be stupid, man.”
“Just say it.”
“I’m not his accountant,” Craig said. “And she’s not worth it. It won’t work, and I’m pretty sure she’s been working there longer than she hasn’t.”
Pope ignored that. “It’s not even hers,” he said, quietly, almost to himself. “She’s down there holding it for a guy who took off. Kid at home, no money, and she’s—”
He stopped talking once he noticed the amused and incredulous expression on Craig’s face.
Craig’s hand moved to the side, waving vaguely in confusion. “She’s got a kid?”
“It’s her brother.”
“Jesus—how much have you talked to this chick?” Craig dragged a hand down his face. “Real talk. You go pay the guy off—say you even can, say he gives you a number and it’s a real one, which it won’t be—you know what happens? He realizes Pope Cody just dropped twenty grand on a girl who pours drinks and puts bandages on people.” He spread his hands. “Best case. Best case, man. We don’t know what else the guy’s got her doing. She’s been there a long time. Girls don’t stay in places like that just counting cash.”
Pope felt his teeth grind. “She counts cash and she patches people up,” he said, tipping his chin down slightly to pin Craig with a glare. “That’s what she does.”
Craig looked at him for a moment and shrugged. “Alright, man.”
“And even if she—she doesn’t just do that. It doesn’t—”
Pope’s jaw worked, and he had to look away from Craig. He had no words for it. It didn’t matter what you did in the basement, what Leo had you doing or what Craig was implying. You were still you, and Pope knew that.
If the situation was larger, then Pope saw it as more of a reason to get you out, not less. That was the thing Craig wouldn’t understand.
“It doesn’t change anything. For me,” Pope said flatly. “She shouldn’t be there, that’s all.”
Craig’s lips opened like he wanted to say something, then caught the look on Pope’s face, and said, “Yeah, man. She probably shouldn’t.”
He’d hoped that Craig would never have to meet you, at least not in the way he did.
It happened on a night Craig hadn’t wanted him there at all. Craig had come for the first few of Pope’s fight, and realized he actually didn’t have to see his older brother take down a man twice to know the money was good. He could simply hand over the bet and go do anything else with his night. So most weeks, he dropped his cash with people and disappeared upstairs and reappeared only to collect.
This week, he hung around the edge of the ring, three beers in, restless, and that was how he was standing right there when Pope took a cut over the cheekbone bad enough you came down to the corner with your supplies before the round was properly called.
Craig noticed it. The dumb piece of shit. One second Pope had your hands on his face, turned away from the crowd so nobody would notice your closeness, and the next he could feel the exact attention of his brother sharpening as he moved down to catch the interaction.
You were too deep in the work to notice Craig, lips pressed flat, that furrow between your brows, going fast because the round was coming. “This one’s gonna scar if you keep splitting it open,” you murmured, tipping his head toward the light. “You’re doing it on purpose at this point. You’re gonna ruin this face.”
“What do you think about this face?” Pope said before he could think the words through.
You rolled your eyes, lifting a hand off his face just to smack his shoulder lightly before it went right back to the cut.
“You talk too much when you’re losing blood,” you lied, but the corner of your mouth had gone soft. “Hold still.”
“You didn’t answer.”
“You’re fishing.” You pressed the butterfly closed over his cheekbone, your thumb lingering there a half-second past the job, warm against his face, and you dropped your voice even though there was nobody close enough to hear. “Ask me again when you’re not bleeding on me and I’ll think about it.”
He felt his mouth want to move closer to yours then, and he tamped down the urge. But he must’ve let something through because when his eyes flicked up over your shoulder, there was Craig, beer halfway to his mouth, forgotten.
You followed his eyes, found Craig, and Craig found you. Your hand came off his face and your spine went straight. “You know him?” you asked, quietly, gathering your bottle and tape as you stepped back to a safe distance.
Pope caught your wrist. “My brother. He’s nobody. He’s dumb.”
Your eyes went over the crowd that was distracted. “You tell him anything?”
“There somethin’ to say?” he asked, raising a brow that made him wince.
You gave him a flat look, unimpressed by the deflection. “Don’t try to be cute.”
Pope generally blamed his anger on a rage that had been planted in him from a tender age. Smurf had put it there the way you put a seed in dirt—patient, deliberate, knowing exactly what it’d grow into—and then spent thirty years acting surprised at the sheer size of it. He never thought about it. Thinking about it wouldn’t beat it away. It was just there—low and perpetual—like a pilot light he’d learned to turn down because the alternative was what happened in the ring when he forgot to.
He forgot to that night. It had nothing to do with the guy across from him. The guy was a nobody—some gym rat Leo had matched him with, all shoulders and bad footwork—and Pope would, on any other day, put him down clean in two rounds because there was no reason to make it ugly. But Pope had spent a week with a number he didn’t own and a plan he couldn’t run with yours and Craig’s voice saying ‘don’t.’ The whole impossibility of you had stacked up in his sternum with nowhere to go, and when the guy clipped him, caught him good across the mouth first, something in Pope just opened the valve.
He didn’t remember most of it after, and that was how he knew it was bad. The parts that came back later were wrong-angled and too bright (the kid’s head snapping, the wet sound, the way the crowd’s noise changed, going from hungry to something quieter, pulled back). Crowds like this roared throughout all of it unless they were watching a man go somewhere they wanted to stay back from.
Somebody got between them. There were hands on his chest and a referee he had no idea even existed shouting something and the guy on the concrete not getting up the way he was supposed to. Pope was standing over it with his chest heaving and knuckles split open through the wrap and no memory of the ninety seconds at all.
The crowd parted for him when he started walking and that should’ve told him something, the way grown men stepped out of his way. He'd looked for you on the way through.
He'd looked for you the way he always did, automatically, and he'd found you at the edge of the cash table with the box held up against your chest, and you'd been looking right back at him.
Pope was distantly and too closely—both at the same time, two things too large for him—able to register you hadn’t looked at him the way you usually did.
You'd looked at him the way the crowd had. You’d gone still and careful, your eyes wide and fixed on him like he was the thing in the room, the dangerous thing, and you'd held that box to your chest like it could go between you and him. Just for a second. Just one. Then you'd caught yourself and your face had closed over it, gone professional.
He went upstairs, and into the gap behind the stairs where there was a cot and a mop sink. It smelled like bleach. He put his head against the cinderblock and slid down it to the floor and tried to get his breathing under whatever was happening in his chest.
Pope let himself sit on the floor with his hands ruined, the pilot light still guttering too high, and he let the worst story about himself tell itself all the way through. You’d finally seen the actual thing. You’d patched him up and made jokes and told him things about yourself, and then you had to watch him nearly kill somebody over nothing, and now you knew. Now you looked at him the way everybody did, just the way his mother had intended.
He heard the door open, and he had to shake his head even though he wasn’t sure you could see it.
“Don’t,” he said, and his voice came out wrecked. “You don’t have to help me or anything. Go help the guy.”
“Andrew—”
“I mean it.” His hands hung between his knees, split and shaking, and he kept his eyes on them. “Go check on him. I don’t—I don’t need it.”
He heard the door shut behind you, and then your footsteps came across the little room. “He’s up,” you said. “He’s fine. He’s got people. Concussed, probably, but he’ll be fine.” You paused, then added, “I came back here for you.”
That made his chest pull tighter. “Shouldn’t have.”
You set the bucket down by his feet, and then you were crouching in front of him, and he could see the toes of those wrong gray shoes in the edge of his vision and still couldn't make himself look higher. “Can I have your hands?”
“No.”
“They’re split to the bone. Andrew, give ‘em here.”
He didn’t. The muscle in his jaw ticked as he sat there, and before he could stop himself, he asked, “Are you scared of me?”
You stayed silent for a second, and he felt his chest seize. Then, he felt your hand—cold to the touch—against his face, turning it gently so he’d look at you. He kept his eyes trained to the ground.
“Look at me,” you said quietly. When he refused again, your thumb slid against his cheekbone. “I’m not.”
When he said nothing, you continued, “You scared me a little out there. But look at you, you’re hiding behind the stairs. C’mon. Scariest man alive.”
He huffed and let his eyes come up anyway, finally, and you were just looking at him. “You mean that?”
Your bottom lip pushed the top, and you looked at him as you tilted your head. “Yeah. I mean it.”
The plainness of the words got him. You said that as though it cost you nothing to mean it when it was the most expensive thing anyone had handed him in years. You had no idea the things he’d done so many times they stopped feeling like anything at all. You’d seen one bad night. And he wanted to tell you that maybe you should have been scared.
He kept his mouth shut. He looked at you looking at him and decided, quietly and completely, that he was going to spend whatever time he had making sure you never had a reason to find out you were wrong.
You were close. You’d been close the entire time, crouched between his knees with your hand cold on his face, and he’d been waiting for you to flinch that he hadn’t realized how close you were.
He felt it now. Like always, he didn’t decide. The same broken wiring in him was pointing somewhere new, because one second he was looking at your mouth and the next his hand had come up, ruined knuckles and all, and curved around the back of your neck.
He stopped a breath short to give you an inch, some last careful piece left in him left it up to you, hung there close enough that he could feel your breath go uneven, waiting to see if you’d close it.
You did, soft, slower than he’d expected. He’d always been waiting for quickness and hardness, things that got over with, and instead your mouth settled against his and stayed. Your hand came up light along his jaw, and the split in his lip stung but he didn’t move away from it. He was sure he couldn’t have this without paying for it.
His hand was still at the back of your neck, knuckles wrecked, and he held you there carefully, just keeping you close. His thumb moved once behind your ear. You made a small sound against his mouth and he felt it more than heard it, felt it go down through his chest.
Your fingers curling at the collar of his shirt, your breath warm and uneven against his cheek between kisses.
His rib ached when he leaned into you. He leaned in anyway. He could feel the warmth of you all down his front, your weight tipped against his knees, your other hand finding his ruined one where it sat between you and holding it.
It felt like such a stark difference to how you usually held his hand, to clean it, Pope distantly thought.
You broke off to breathe, but neither of you went far. Your forehead hovered over his, and your breath stayed uneven against his mouth. He let his hands hesitantly drift down to your waist, letting his palms run over the shape of you.
You let them, your waist, the dip of it, the warmth coming up through your shirt, and you watched him do it with your bottom lip caught between your teeth.
“Do you like this?” Pope asked, hesitance creeping into his voice despite how hard he tried to push it out. He hated how it came out, like he had no trust in himself. But he had to know—had to hear it—because he’d just spent too long thinking you’d seen the worst of him, and now you were warm in his hands and he couldn’t quite square the two.
Your mouth curved, soft, and you tipped your forehead down against his.
“Yeah, Andrew,” you said, like it was obvious. “I like it.”
Your thumb moved along his cheekbone, and he let his lashes flutter slightly at the feel of your skin against so many parts of him all at once.
“Been liking you a while,” you added, lower, a little dry, a little shy. “If you wanna know.”
Pope’s hand tightened at your waist. “How long?”
“Not saying,” you said, smiling when you kissed him again, and he felt it against his mouth, and that was better than the answer would've been anyway.
He kissed you slow at first and then not slow, his hand sliding up your spine to press you closer, the other still spread wide and certain at your hip.
You shifted down into him and he broke off with a rough breath, forehead dropping to your shoulder, his grip going tight to hold you still.
“Hang on,” he managed to say, low against your collarbone. All the wanting you stacked up behind his ribs with nowhere left to go, and you were so warm and so real on his lap, and he was trying not to be what he always was, too much, too fast.
“We don’t have to—” you started.
“I know,” he said, voice rough. He lifted his head to look at you. “I wanna. I just—” He pushed his lips around, trying to find the right words. “I don’t want you doing anything back here. In this building.” His thumb moved at your hip. “You’re better than this place.”
Your hands pressed against his chest, and he registered the smallness of them against his broad frame, and you pulled yourself back slightly and let out a staggered breath. For a second, you looked at him. Stunned, almost, like the words hadn’t landed anywhere familiar, like nobody’d ever told you that before. He watched it cross your face quickly.
One of your hands left his chest and slid up, slid back, fingers pushing slow into the short hair at the nape of his neck, your nails digging light against his scalp. Your fingers worked through his hair and curled at the base of it, and the newness of the touch—the pure uselessness of it, a touch that wasn’t for anything—went through him like a current.
It got a low and rough sound out of him and his eyes slid shut. His face went hot at the helplessness of it, a man his size coming apart under fingers in his hair, but he couldn't stop it and he didn't pull away. He pressed back into your hand instead, into the slow drag of your nails, chasing it.
“So are you,” you said quietly after a moment.
He fluttered his eyes open halfway.
“Better than this place,” you clarified.
Pope’s mouth twitched, wanting to tell you he wasn’t. He wanted to tell you every single bad thing he’d ever done. He wanted to lay all of it down between you so you'd see he didn't belong anywhere clean, least of all up against you, you who had never chosen to work in this shithole, you who’d probably never hurt a goddamn fly.
The words stayed sealed, because he had a feeling you’d hand them all back if he tried.
“Come on,” he said instead. He shifted under you, wanting to ease into the position while having to force himself to move. “Get your stuff and clock out. I’ll drive you.”
You blinked. “Where?”
He let out a short-lived laugh. “Wherever you want to go.”
You looked at him like he’d just done a trick. “I have to be home,” you said slowly. “My brother waits up.”
“Alright.” Pope eased you off his lap, and got a hand against the cinderblock. “So I’ll take you home.”
“You don’t have to—” You were saying from the ground.
“C’mon.”
He held a hand out to you, then you took it and let him pull you up.
Pope was uncomfortable about everything. His entire life, he’d been uncomfortable, whether it was in his own skin, in his house, in rooms full of people. So it came as no surprise when he had no fucking clue what to do with you. He hadn’t thought this far; he’d wanted to get you the hell out, not get you. And now you were here—or as here as you could’ve been—and he didn’t have the next part. Nobody had ever handed him a good thing and let him keep it. He kept waiting for the catch, turning his pockets out for the cost of it, and the cost wasn’t coming. And that was uncomfortable, waiting for a hit that never landed.
So he did the only thing he thought he could’ve done, which was keep it quiet and keep it close.
The cab of his truck. The back room after the basement emptied. Your mouth on his, his hands learning you slow, because he wanted to—Pope wanted to learn you the way other men wanted to win. It was the only ambition he’d ever had that belonged all to him. He wanted the map of you. He wanted to remember the exact spot in your ear that made your breath catch, that he’d found once on accident and gone back to like a man returning to the one warm room in a house that was freezing. The way you said his name, the real one—Andrew—that fit in nobody else’s mouth but yours.
Pope had to be clear with himself about the fact that it was nothing like a life, even in his own head, because hoping for more than the thing in front of him was how you got hurt.
When the basement ran late and your house was a long quiet drive, sometimes you’d let him take you back to his place instead, and you’d sleep there. You would actually sleep, hard and deep, in a way you’d once told him you couldn’t at your own home.
He watched you sleep. He knew it was a strange thing to do but he did it anyway; propped on an elbow in the gray lights off the blinds, because it was the only time your face went all soft. Awake, even with him, you kept some of it back, the watching, the careful, the part of you that—like him—was always waiting for the next bad thing.
Asleep, you let it all go. You looked younger, and Pope thought this was how you would’ve looked all the time had the world dealt you a different house.
He must’ve shifted, or his breathing must’ve changed, because your eyes cracked open. You found him in the dark, found him watching you, and your mouth curved, slow and sleep-heavy.
“Creep,” you mumbled into the pillow.
“Yeah,” Pope said in a whisper.
You shifted toward him, unhurried, still half in sleep, and your hand came up to his jaw as your fingers traced the line of it.
“You don’t sleep,” you murmured. You’d noticed it weeks ago.
“No.”
“C’mere, then,” you said, rough, tugging lightly at his jaw, and he came.
He kissed you slow.
He always started slow—it was the only speed he trusted himself at—and you let him have it slow for a minute, warm and half-asleep against his mouth. Then you weren’t half-asleep anymore, he felt the change in you as your hand slid back into his hair and curled and pulled. The sound that the pull had dragged out of him was embarrassing.
“Quiet,” you breathed against his mouth, throwing his own word back at him—I can be quiet, he’d said once—and he huffed a rough laugh into the crook of your neck and got a hand spread wide and certain against the small of your back to pull you flush against him.
Your leg hooked over his and your breath went uneven against his ear, and Pope allowed himself to stop thinking.
He dragged his mouth down your throat, slow, to the soft place that made your breath catch, the spot he'd mapped weeks ago and gone back to since like the one warm room in a freezing house. Got there. He felt you go boneless and then not boneless, your fingers tightening in his hair, your hips shifting against his, and he made a low sound into your skin and pressed you down into the mattress with the careful weight of him.
“Andrew,” you said, rough against his collarbone.
“Yes?” He lifted his head to look at you, and found you already looking at him.
Your hair was loose around your face and your lips were swollen and your eyes were dark. Pope felt a sort of satisfaction he’d never felt before knowing he’d done that, that you’d come to his bed neat and composed and he’d taken you apart this much already.
Your hand still in his hair tugged him down to your ear. “Take my shirt off.”
He went still for a second, eyes closing at the words, then he regained himself and pulled back enough to look at you.
You lifted your arms. He got it over your head and dropped it somewhere and then he just stopped, brain short-circuiting as his body immediately reacted, shifting underneath you. His hand came up and hovered over your bare waist, not quite touching, just close. Deciding where to start.
His hand settled finally, warm and certain against your ribs, thumb brushing the underside of your breasts. He let out a shaky breath. “You’re so pretty,” he murmured.
You let out a soft breath, and he let his thumb move, again, slow, up and he rubbed over the swell of your breasts through the bra, watching your face with his whole attention.
He pushed himself up onto one elbow to get a better look at you and you let him, lying there with your hair spread out and your eyes on his face. He took his time, and he could tell it made you want to squirm, and his free hand settled on your hip, holding you still.
“Come here,” you said softly, reaching for him.
“In a minute.” His thumb traced the underwire of your bra, following the curve of it. His eyes followed his own hand and his jaw was tight the way it got when he was concentrating.
“Andrew.”
“Give me a minute.” His mouth came down on your sternum and pressed there, warm, just breathing for a second, his hand still moving over your ribs, your waist, the dip of it. His lips moved to the curve of your breast, the soft skin at the edge of the fabric, and you felt his breath go unsteady against you.
“Can I—” he started.
“Yes.”
He reached around you, unclipped it with one hand—slightly clumsy, which was so unlike him—and drew it off you slowly, and then he just stopped again, forgetting how to move when he looked at you.
His mouth found you properly then, warm and slow, and you let your head tip back and your hand tighten in his hair and he made a low sound against you.
He worked his way back up to your throat, your jaw, found your mouth again, and kissed you slow until your hands were pulling at him and your hips were shifting and you’d stopped being patient entirely.
You pressed at his chest. He went, rolling onto his back and taking you with him, and you sat up over him in the gray light and watched his face as you settled your weight down against him, and his hands went to your thighs and gripped and his eyes went briefly shut.
You leaned down and kissed him once, soft. Then his jaw, his throat, the way he'd done to you, finding the places that changed his breathing.
His hands moved up your back, down again, restless, unable to settle. You felt him swallow when your mouth reached his collarbone.
You moved lower. His stomach tightened under your mouth and his hand came up to your hair, resting there, heavy and warm, the way he did everything when he was trying to hold himself back. You looked up at him from where you were and found him already looking down at you, jaw tight, throat working.
“Are you—”
“Mhm.”
You got his briefs off and he lifted his hips to help you without being asked, which made you press your lips together against a smile. You settled between his thighs and took him inside your hand first, and he let out a shaky, breathless sound as your fingers tightened around his length, small fingers tugging slightly.
You shifted down, and pressed your lips to the inside of his thigh first, just to feel him react, Pope understood. His whole leg went rigid under your lips. You stayed there a moment, and his fingers curled in your hair out of impatience he wasn’t proud of at all.
“C’mon, hey—”
You did it again, the other side, taking your time, and heard him exhale hard through his nose.
Then, you started from the bottom, tongue gliding over him, base to tip, and Pope’s jaw dropped open and stopped pretending he wanted any sort of control in this situation.
His hands fisted in your hair. Not pushing—he wasn’t going to do that—but holding on, because he really, really needed something to hold onto and you were it, you were all of it, had been all of it for months, and now you had your mouth on him and your small hand wrapped around the base of him while looking through your lashes at him like you knew exactly what you were doing to him—you absolutely did—and he wanted to do nothing about it except lie there and take it.
You took him into your mouth properly and his hips came off the mattress before he caught them, hand pressing down against his own stomach, jaw locked.
“Christ—” It came out mangled, just sound.
You set a pace that was sure to kill him, so deliberate with everything and focused attention on him entirely, and he had the distant thought that he’d never been on the receiving end of attention like this. His thighs tensed around you and his free hand found the sheets.
You pulled off just enough to say ‘don’t’ when his forearm moved toward his face, and he dropped it back, exposed, staring at the ceiling, throat working. Your hand worked what your mouth couldn’t, and he felt his vision go slightly sideways, hand in your hair tightening involuntarily, fingers curling against your scalp.
“Let me—” He stopped when he noticed how wrecked he sounded, barely his own voice. His grip tugged you up. “Can you—Can I—”
He stumbled over the words, but you still moved up.
You settled over him, knees either sides of his hips, and he got his hands on your waist immediately. His chest was heaving and he was sure he looked completely undone.
“Can I—” he tried again. His thumb moved against your hip, pleadingly. “I need to—” He tried again. “Will you—”
You looked down at him. “Are you asking me something?”
“Yeah.” His jaw tightened. “Trying to.”
“So ask.”
He took in a sharp breath, fingers digging into the flesh of your ass. “Can I be inside you?”
You held his eyes a second. “Yeah,” you said. “Yeah.”
The sound he let out at that was quiet and involuntary and you felt it in your sternum. His eyes closed for just a second, like he needed that, you saying it had done something to him before anything had even happened yet.
You reached between you and his breath caught audibly, hands tightening on your hips, feeling it happen, needing to feel it happen somewhere in his palms.
You sank down onto him slow and his head went back and his throat worked and his hands on your hips pulled you down the last inch with a low, helpless sound that he clearly hadn't planned on making.
He’d never felt this way before, so all-encompassed. You were so warm and close in way the months of wanting had never prepared him for, your hands braced on his chest, your weight settled on his lap, and he could feel your pulse where you were joined and his own pulse and everywhere else.
He stayed there a second, both hands spread wide on your hips, breathing.
“You okay?” you asked, quiet.
“One second.”
You gave him the second. He sat up after that, and his arm banded around your waist and pulled you flush against him and that made you gasp, hands grabbing at his shoulders, his neck.
He was so much bigger than you like this, your knees hardly finding the mattress either side of him, and he held you there, mouth finding your throat.
“Do you like this?” he asked into your skin.
“Yes—yeah,” you said, slightly breathless.
He bit down lightly at your pulse point, just enough, and your nails raked down his back in response, and the sound that got out of him was dark and satisfied, his hips rolling up into you slow and deliberate.
His hips set a pace after that, one hand spread flat against your lower back holding you exactly where he wanted you, the other gripping your hip, guiding you down to meet each roll of his hips. You could feel everything. He made sure of it, and he knew by the way your walls clamped down on him.
“Andrew—”
“Feels so good,” he said through a groan, mouth set on your throat. “You feel so good.”
Your nails found his back again and he groaned into your neck and his hips stuttered, losing the rhythm for just a second before he found it again, deeper this time, and you made a sound against his shoulder that you felt him collect, felt him file away, his arm tightening around you in response.
“That good?” he murmured.
“It’s—” you started, breath catching.
“Yeah?” His hand moved from your hip to the small of your back, adjusting the angle, pressing you down onto him, and whatever you'd been trying to say dissolved entirely into something that wasn't words at all. “There?”
“Jesus, Andrew—” you said, a punch in your words as he pushed you down onto him. “Where’d you learn this?”
He pulled back to look at your face, and the look on his was almost amused, almost, underneath all the want. “Just wanna make you feel good,” he said, “with me.”
Your hands coming up to his face without deciding to, cupping his jaw, and he turned into it immediately, that same helpless lean he always did when you put your hands on his face, like he couldn't help it, like you'd found the one soft spot in him nobody else had ever found.
You kissed him then, different from the others — slower, more deliberate, saying something you didn't have words for yet, and he kissed you back the same way, his pace going slow and deep and unhurried, like the night had gotten longer suddenly, like neither of you were going anywhere.
His forehead dropped to yours when you broke off, both of you breathing uneven, his hand moving up your spine, vertebra by vertebra, just feeling you.
“You with me?” he murmured.
“Yeah,” you said. “I am.”
His hand pressed you further into him, like there was any space. “Promise me.”
It came out rougher than he meant, needier than he'd have liked, and he felt it land between you in the dark and couldn't take it back and didn't try.
You looked up at him. Whatever you found in his face made yours go soft. “Promise,” you said.
He exhaled against your mouth and his hips rolled forward and you made a small sound and your hands slid up into his hair, pulling, and whatever had gone tender between you tipped back into heat, his pace picking up, deeper now, one hand gripping the headboard above you and the other finding your hip, holding you where he wanted you.
Pope had come to the basement earlier, before his fight. He had no good reason for it—the fight was in an hour, the place was half-empty, the crowd still trickling in—but he’d gotten restless at the apartment and figured he’d find you early, steal a few minutes before the room filled up.
He came down the concrete stairs and heard Leo’s voice before he saw anything, and the sound of it stopped Pope three steps from the bottom. Pope had never once in his life heard the guy yell, lose control, and the voice coming up was low and almost patient, like you’d talk to a child or a dog.
“ —count it again,” Leo was saying. “‘Cause I counted it, and I’m coming up short. That’s a problem, you know that, right?”
“I counted it three times,” you said, your voice flat and so, so careful it gnawed at him. “It’s all here. I swear, it’s all—”
“Don’t swear to me, sweetheart. Count.”
Pope came down the last steps quiet. You were at the cash table with the box open in front of you and your hands unsteady on the bills. Leo was standing close to you, like that was the point—looming, using the size of himself—as he crowded you back against the table. He was making you do the math all out in a flat, dead voice, your shoulders up around your ears, and Pope watched you flinch when Leo shifted his weight even though the guy hadn’t done anything.
“You’re light,” Leo said, soft. “You’re light and you’re trying to swear. You know what happens to my count when one of my girls gets light.” He let his words hang, tilting his head. “It comes out of the square. Adds to it. You’re going backwards, sweetheart, after all this time. Going the wrong direction.”
Leo reached and took your jaw in his hand—almost gently, tipping your face up out of the count—and your body went still, and that was the second you saw Pope behind Leo’s shoulder.
“Don’t touch her,” Pope said, without thinking about it.
Leo turned, unhurried, his hand still loose at your jaw before he let it drop, on his own time. He was making a point of it, Pope realized. “It’s off.” He spread the hand, easy, showing him. “See? We’re just talking. Business.”
Then, he turned to look at you, chin tipping down. “You really messing around with this guy? I thought it was just people making shit up.”
“People talk—” you started to say.
“You were just waitin’ around for some rich guy to come along?” He looked at you, shaking his head. “That it?” Then, he turned to Pope. “She could’ve gotten out a lot earlier—you know that right?” He shook his head, like he was disappointed. “Could’ve taken the back room, cut the number down to nothing in a couple months. Easy. Plenty of guys asking. But no, she just wanted to do it the long way.” He tipped his chin at Pope, lazy. “—And then go and give it away to you. For free.”
Pope’s pulse should’ve been climbing. It had gone flat and slow and cold. “Watch your mouth.”
“Or what?” He asked, almost fond. “You gonna—”
The gun was out before he decided to pull it. His hand went to the small of his back and came around and then the thing was there, level, steady, muzzle a few inches off Leo’s forehead.
The guy stopped smiling. He didn’t flinch—Pope gave him that—but he went very slow, very careful, his hands drifting up off his sides. His palms were loose and open.
“Okay,” Leo said, quiet now. “Okay. Easy.”
“Are you kidding me?” Pope muttered, shaking his head. “You don’t have a damn gun on you?”
“I don’t need a gun in my own place,” he said through gritted teeth. His eyes flicked to the stairs, then back to the muzzle. “You wanna put that down before you get stupid over nothing?”
He’d half-hoped that Leo would’ve been carrying, show any sign that he felt afraid. “Her number. Say it.”
“That’s not—” He huffed, almost a laugh, disbelieving. “That’s not how—there’s a process to this, there’s people I gotta answer to.”
Pope’s lips flattened, eyes flicking to the ceiling, annoyed. “You know I’ll do it, man. I don’t care enough not to.”
Leo’s smile dropped then. “Half the room’s had their hands on her, you know that? She’s not somebody’s girlfriend, man. The second she doesn’t need either of us, she’s not looking back at you any more than she’s looking back at me.”
Pope let out a short chuckle. “Now you’re getting whatever I’ve got in my pocket or I’m shooting. Your call.”
“You’re making a mistake,” the guy said, his last call, Pope realized. “You can’t pull a gun on me and —”
“That’s tomorrow’s problem.” Pope’s hand stayed still. “Right now, you take the money, she’s square, she walks.” His head tipped, slight. “Say yes, man. You’re a smart guy. Say yes.” Pope nudged the gun slightly further into his head. He leaned his head closer to the guy’s ear, voice dropping into a register that would’ve been too low for you to hear. “I’ve put people down for less than this. You know that.”
Leo took a beat. “Fine.” The word came out flat, bitten-off. “Fine. The money. She’s square. Get it out slow, I don’t want your fucking hand movin’ fast near me.”
Pope reached into his jacket with his off hand—the gun never leaving Leo's face—and pulled the roll, the whole fight roll, thick and rubber-banded, and tossed it onto the table by the box. It landed heavy. Leo didn't look at it. He kept his eyes on Pope, and his hands stayed up, and the deal sat there in the dead air between them, made.
Leo looked at it, and a long moment passed. He let out a short, disbelieving breath through his nose. “That’s it?”
“You should’ve said yes the first time. You knew I was good for it,” Pope said. “Say it,” he added. “She’s good. Tell her so she hears it.”
“You’re square,” he said to you, the words ugly. “You don’t owe me shit. Don’t come back.” A muscle jumped in his cheek. “Either of you.”
Pope held the gun where it was a beat longer than he had to—long enough to make it clear the leaving was his idea, not Leo's permission—and then he lowered it, slow, and stepped back, and reached out without looking and found your wrist.
“Let’s go,” Pope said roughly to you.
You didn’t move at first. He had to tug your forearm once, and then you came, stumbling off the spot you’d been rooted to, and he put himself between you and Leo and walked you up the concrete stairs and out the side door into the lot, into the air that was finally air, with the gun cooling against his back and your pulse hammering under his fingers where he still had your wrist.
Pope let out a shaky breath as he tipped his neck back to look at the sky. He’d assumed that one day, he would’ve figured it out, how to help you—it would have been cleaner, probably, and wouldn’t have happened right in front of you—and he hadn’t thought it’d be fucking today.
He still had your wrist. He made himself let it go, and turned to look at you. You were looking at nothing, at the chain-link past the lot, your arms coming to wrap around yourself, holding your elbows.
“Get in the car,” he said to you.
You stayed still.
Pope shook his head once, pressing his lips together. He nodded at the truck. “C’mon. Just get in the truck.”
You stayed rooted there in the orange light, arms folded over yourself, shaking your head faintly—not at him, not a no exactly, just somewhere else, somewhere he couldn't reach you. He felt the impatience climb in him, the adrenaline still draining, the gun still warm against his back and the tomorrow-problem already stacking up behind his ribs, and it came out rougher than he meant.
“Just—get in the damn car.” He dragged his palm down his face and exhaled.
You went around to the passenger side and shut the door. He got in beside you, and for a second, neither of you said anything. He pulled out the lot and drove the way he always did with you, to his apartment. You sat against the window with your knees pulled up and your arms still around yourself, and he kept glancing over, waiting for it, the thing he could feel build up.
“You mad at me?” he asked, the words coming out choked, almost like he was forcing them out.
You took in a breath and looked out the window. “Are you gonna be fine?”
He snorted. “Yeah. Don’t worry ‘bout me. I’m safe.”
You nodded, even though he could tell you didn’t believe it. He wanted to tell you that he was probably the most safe guy in Oceanside, part of a family that would make sure nothing happened to anyone in it, even if they all may hate each other deep down.
“I didn’t want it to happen like this,” you said a moment later. “I wanted to do it myself.”
Pope knew what you meant, but he wanted you to talk more, just so he could justify it. “Yeah?”
“I was gonna work it down to nothing,” you continued. “And one day it’d just be done, and I’d—walk out. And it’d be cause I did it. Me. The one thing that was gonna be mine.”
“You weren’t getting out.” When you snapped your head to look at him, eyebrows furrowed, he forced to keep himself looking at the road. “I’m sorry, but you were never getting out. Don’t be dumb. I know you wanted to.”
“Don’t call me dumb.”
“Then don’t be.” He shook his head. “You’re paying off a debt that’s not even yours when you could be—what? Working anywhere that gives you an actual paycheck. He wasn’t gonna let you have that. There’s no fucking contract making sure he lets you out.”
You looked back at the window, jaw tight. “I didn’t want you buying me,” you said quietly. “That’s exactly the thing I didn’t want. Now I’m—I don’t want to owe you, Andrew. I like you.”
“You don’t owe me,” he said, voice rough, trying to ignore what the words did to his chest.
“That’s not how—”
“It’s how it works with me,” he said flatly. “I didn’t buy you. Don’t say shit like that. I bought you out.” His hands tightened on the wheel. “There’s nothing you owe me.”
“I wanted it to be clean,” you said, and Pope almost wanted to shut you up. “Us. I wanted to get out and just be—someone you liked. Not somebody you had to save or something like that.”
“Well, that’s too bad, then,” he rasped. “You can come with me. You can go wherever you want. You’re out, you can choose.” He killed the engine as the car reached his apartment. “You are someone I like already. I never liked who you had to be, but I like you—this, whatever it is. Alright?”
A part of Pope knew he shouldn’t have taken the job. Robberies were always a mess, but Baz had a fondness for them. And Baz had a kid and a whole life balanced on not going inside, and Pope had a girl who he wasn’t even sure was his girl, and no good reason in the world to be holding the bag when it went wrong.
So now there was a phone bolted to a cinderblock wall and a line of men behind him and a number he’d memorized. Thank God he’d memorized.
It rang twice.
“Hello?”
The sound of your voice did something itchy to his sternum. He’d last heard it three weeks ago, before the job, when you’d been half-asleep against his shoulder in the truck outside your place. You’d told him to call you when he got home.
“Andrew?” you asked immediately, like just an exhalation of his breath, you could recognize. “You’re in jail?”
He forced out a dry chuckle, because the opposite would’ve gotten him kicked. “Folsom County.”
“Jesus—why?”
“Robbery. It was a—a family thing—” He kept it short. The line was recorded; half of what he wanted to say, he couldn’t, and the other half, he wouldn’t. Especially not to you, not like this, with a guard at his back and a clock ticking somewhere.
“Can I visit you?” you asked immediately. The hope in your words tightened something in his chest so hard he had to close his eyes to loosen it even a fraction. “How long are you in there for?”
“No—don’t. Hey, listen,” he said, voice shaking and he hated it. “You—you gotta be safe, okay? If anything happens, I need you to look for—”
“What are you talking about?”
“I can’t take care of you from here,” he said through gritted teeth. “I need to make sure you’ll be okay.”
“How long are you in for?” you asked, weary, like you’d read somewhere between the lines and realized that you were going to hate the answer.
“Six years,” he said, letting out another sigh. Then, because he couldn’t help himself when he heard you go silent on the other end, he said, “I’m sorry.” He pressed the phone harder against his ear, as if that did anything.
“Fuck—fuck, Andrew. Six years—?” you said, voice so sharp he could feel it cut through him. He heard you breath, trying to collect yourself. “Okay. Okay—I can come there, to you. Visit you and stuff, alright?”
“You’re not living the next six years meeting me behind a glass, alright?”
“I don’t care about that.”
“I do.” It came out rougher than he’d intended. He pressed his forehead to the cold block, eyes shut as his free hand came up to tug at his hair. The line of men and the guards and the whole gray space fell away from him for a second, and it was just your voice in his ear and him trying, failing, to do one right thing for you. “You just got out—I’m not putting you back in. You got out, and you—you can do whatever you want.”
“I don’t want it without you,” you said, voice breaking clean down the middle, and it about took him out at the knees, standing there in his county blues with a telephone crushed to his ear.
“You’re not thinking right,” he said, trying to get the words out slowly, like saying it that way would make you believe them. “You’re not waiting for me for six years. You know how long that is?”
Pope was at a loss in this; he’d never had to push someone away before. Every person he’d needed gone, before he even knew he did, he’d made himself ugly enough to push it out. He didn’t have the ugly to use on you; he’d used up every bad thing in front of you already and you’d stayed anyway, and now he had nothing left to drive you away with except the truth, which was that Pope loved you too much to let you do this to yourself.
He couldn’t say that either because maybe then you’d really never leave.
You only breathed on the other end, and he could hear the hitch of your voice when you started to try saying something, then stopped.
“I won’t like it,” he said, quieter now, “if you wait for me.”
It was a lie and you both heard it. He didn’t try to sell it harder and let it sit there, all wrong, and moved on before you could call him out from it, because he had something he needed you to have more than he needed to win the argument.
“Listen,” he said, forcing his voice to steady. “You got something to write with? Or open something on your phone to get it.”
“Andrew—”
“Please.”
Something in his voice must’ve reached you, because he heard you shift.
“Okay,” you said, voice thick. “Okay.”
He recited the number, slow and twice, so you’d have it right. “That’s Baz. Alright? Barry Blackwell—write that down, too. My brother.” His teeth gritted. “You don’t ever have to call it, but you keep it. And if anything ever—” His jaw worked, and he pinched his eyes shut at the horrible thoughts. “If money gets tight or if people come sniffing around even though they shouldn’t. If you get caught up in anything—somebody gives you trouble, or anything, the car dies, whatever it is. You call him. You say you’re mine, say Pope said to call. He’ll help.”
“I don’t want your brother to—”
He didn’t want his brother to, either. Baz had a bad track record with people Pope considered his, people Pope loved. He pressed his molars together at the thought of Baz with you, of all people. Despite how much love he held for his brother, he didn’t like the thought. Six years was a long, long time.
Six years was long enough to forget a voice, long enough for the thing you’d been holding in your hands to shift without noticing, long enough for a warm and present man to become more real than a memory behind a glass. Baz wouldn’t. But he can’t imagine Baz ever meeting you and not seeing what Pope loved about you, what everyone could love about you.
“It’s the only way I can do anything for you,” he said quickly, making sure you’d understand. “It’ll make me happy.”
He heard you choke slightly on the other end. “Can you call me, then? If I can’t visit you.”
He wanted to say yes. It would've cost him nothing in the moment and it would've ruined you slow, six years of you living from phone call to phone call, your whole life arranged around fifteen minutes of a recorded line, waiting on a man in a cage. And he knew he’d rightfully deserved to be caged. He’d seen what waiting did to you. He’d pulled a gun to get you out from under exactly that.
“No,” he said. “You stay out. You got out. Stay out of all of it, including me.”
And a part of him believed he was doing you a favor, despite it all. He’d never quite gotten you all the way like he’d wanted—merged your life into his and his yours—and maybe that was for the better. As long as you were wrapped up with him, you would’ve been wrapped up with his family, the jobs, the heists, the next county lockup waiting for him somewhere down the line.
Your little brother deserved a sister who could come home clean, someone who didn’t have a Cody-shaped problem following her through the door. He’d been told he was the worst of them; he was built up for a purpose and it wasn’t the kind of thing you brought home. Pope cared about you enough to know that; it was hard not to realize it, standing in prison.
He heard you say a jumble of words in one breath, and he couldn’t quite catch any over the ringing in his own ears. The guard said he had sixty seconds left.
“I’d do it again, I swear,” he said, fast, before your voice cut off. “I’m sorry I couldn’t—it was short.”
Your breath stopped for a second, then you asked, forcing an even voice, “How will I know you’re okay?”
“I’ll be fine. I got people watching my back, I swear.”
“Please, just—”
“Bye,” he said, forcing his voice gentle. “Take care of yourself, okay? And the kid.”
The sound you made—wet and broken, landing like a wound he’d probably carry for six years—was the last of you he let himself take. He set the receiver down slow, like slow made it kinder, before you could say his name again. Because he never would've managed it if you'd said his name again.
he is a freak for prone maybe even putting you in a headlock while lost in your pussy too 😩
everybody loves the yuuji headlock headcanon i am a big fan for this will agree every time … i think it’s the ability to have you underneath him unable to escape just taking his cock even if he’s got to bully it into you, thrusting so deep like he’s trying to touch your soul. wraps his big arms around your neck to keep you still, in a position where he can lick the sweat from the side of your head or kiss away your tears. also I think he forces a hand under your hips to rub your clit raw … grunting “take it, take it. oh my god ‘m gonna bust, fill you up s-so nice.” into your ear and he switches from thrusts to circular grinds. he’s not even trying to choke you or anything, just be there and ground you when you squirm and gasp because it’s all too much :(
Romantic tiger shark yuuji courting with tiny little treasures from the deepest depths of the sea just to present to you on his big clawed hands, smiling so cute with the prettiest blush on his cheeks and his eyes sparkling with adoration and a nervous look of pure love AGHHHHGGGGHGGHHH😭
✩꒱ pearlescent ft. yuuji itadori .ᐟ
🏁 ꒰ ✩ fluff ⋆ mdni ⋆ tiger shark merman!yuuji itadori and marine biologist & fem!reader. strangers to lovers, friends to lovers, crushes, yuuji is 17ft, monster…loving, monster x human, implied language barrier ꒰ you swap gifts with your merman friend who lives in the sea, but his carries a more romantic meaning. ꒱
tiger shark yuuji waits for you to come and visit him by the pier every single day at sunset it’s how you get to talk to him without putting him in any danger and at risk.
when he surfaces there’s a brilliant splash of water that carefully rains down on your skin as if the ocean has taken to greeting you with small kisses. yuuji leans over the edge of the wooden pier with bright, boba eyes intrigued by your small human hands that tremble with excitement whenever you see him. you often do a ‘cultural exchange’ … you bring him something from the human world and he brings you something from the sea. each time more intricate and more thoughtful because he really has grown fond of his little land creature with two pretty legs.
“yuuji,” you say, smile bleeding into your cheeks like the water sunset does into the sky. your fingers hold up something that wobbles in the wind but looks like a moment of time stilled. “this is a picture! i took it with this,” you gesture to the camera hanging from your neck. “it captures memories, so we can keep them forever.”
his head tilts, pink hair dripping with water that lands cool on your thighs as the merman leans over you. “pic-chure?” he blinks up at you to check if he’s said it right.
“yes, picture!” a giggle bubbles through you, warm like the sand between your toes — drifting into the salty sea breeze. “they’re um… printed onto paper… but i laminated it so it doesn’t get wet. i’ll explain lamination to you later… it’s kind of bad for the environment but sooo useful—!”
“—who are they?” yuuji asks abruptly. not to be rude, but to be curious. his clawed pointer finger signals to the pic-chure once again.
the ink has carefully crafted faces of people you love most — who’s everlasting support for your dreams landed you a position here, who’s hearts you miss every single day and think of when night crawls over land.
“my friends from back home,” you say wistful, longing. it’s painted on the face blurred by the blush of the pinky-orange sky. he knows that feeling very well, it beats through his chest when he looks at you. “i won’t get to see them for a while.”
“just … human friends or human lovers?”
you squeak, nearly tipping forward into the waves. yuuji’s large hands are gentle on your hips — steadying you in your seat on the edge of the pier. “just friends! i’ve never… i’m not so lucky with love.”
the merman lets his voice fall into the quiet depths of silence as he ponders. only for a second, enough to let his heart decided what comes next with the turn of the tides. “i’ll be back.” he says in a tone not stern but one that keeps you rooted to your spot — and with a swish of his striped tiger shark tail, he disappears into aquamarine and frothy peaks.
just for a second. leaving you with the gulls and the rush of waves for company. you wonder why your pulse races and why your skin feels warm to the touch for reasons other than the sun.
“back.” when yuuji returns, another magnificent splash — you nearly jump into the water once again. his damp hands settle you but your heart does not still, mimicking that of stormy weather that disturbs peaceful waters. his brown eyes melt in the evening sunlight, they unravel you just a bit because they are all too kind. soft in comparison to the hard line of his torso that must taste like salt and sea. your gaze follows droplets that run down his chest and merge where his v-line disappears to the sea.
“for you.” your eyes snap back up to where yuuji holds out a hand to you — the queen conch shell dwarfed in the palm of his hand. reminding you of how magnificent of a creature he is. your fingertips brush his claws as he passes it to you, two hearts stutter. “inside.”
acting on his guidance, you shake the shell and into your hand rolls a pink pearl. in the hands of the sun’s rays, an undulating pattern is revealed — resembling that of flames. the silky pattern of the milky pink pearl glistens for you under evening light.
you look up again, mystified to find yuuji watching you eagerly. you know what it is, how rare it is. a one in fifteen thousand chance of finding such a beautiful and natural pearl — and the merman has gifted it to you as though its rarity weighs nothing on his mind.
yuuji has bought you gifts before. shark teeth and whale bones, sea shells and and even sea jellies but nothing as grand a this.
“for me?” you whisper, surprise and gratitude cracking open in the fragile cage of your chest.
yuuji nods once, timid almost. “in our culture we gift pearls to people we care about,” he explains, his timbre voice a harmony with the sea’s ambience. “not to friends, to lovers.”
his words sink into your bones like stone in water, his current would drag you under if given the chance. lovers, not friends. there’s a million things you want to say to the merman, a million feelings you want to convey before your time together is up for today. for now, you clutch the pearl to your chest — the glitter of appreciation to your eyes almost pearlescent itself as you smile.
he mirrors you, tail swishing in relief.
“let’s take a picture together,” you breathe. “as lovers, not friends.”
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