โ- Shows/movies- The Pitt, Jjk, Criminal minds, Mha, Demon slayer, Superstore, Abbot Elementary, Scott pilgrim, Alien Stage, Card Captor Sakura, big bang theory, euphoria, smiling friends, Saiki K, others I can't think of rn
โพ- Books- Pjo, Hunger games, any mythology, fanfics ๐, others I also can't think of
โ- Games- Minecraft, Roblox, Mouthwashing, Class of 09, CoD (even if I'm ass), and more
*. เฉโฉโงโหเผบโเผป*เฉโฉโงโห.
Psst! Follow my friends tumblr account and youtube channel- Newerworldorder (they're so cool and funny)
every breath you take
and every move you make
every bond you break
every step you take
โน เฃช หแฏ I'LL BE WATCHING YOU.
[SERIES MASTERLIST] [MAIN MASTERLIST]
SUMMARY : spencer reid has a plan to make you his; a plan that involves copious amount of stalking, sneaky photographs, and money spent on subpar coffee. he'll win you over if it's the last thing he does, and there isn't anything he won't do to ensure his victory.
PAIRING : stalker!spencer x reader | WORD COUNT : 9k
WARNINGS : DDDNE MDNI, stalking, obsessive behaviour, filthy pervert spencer reid, nonconsensual photography, referenced m masturbation, meet cute lowkey, coffee date, spencer literally worships reader, alcohol consumption, mildly concerning drinking habits if you squint, panty stealing!!, and they're used!!, no sex but spencer is bricked up in literally every scene, this is him at his most normal btw
NOTES : hide your panties, guys...he's here.
"Latte withโ"
"Two sugars. Two percent milk. Dusting of cocoa powder."
Lacquered nails drum against the countertop, beats spaced unevenly, but intentionallyโher hand posture, and the unmistakable melody of Bach's Prelude and Fugue in C major, says she's a pianist when she isn't interrupting customers.ย
It would be easy to think she were judging you, but her smile reeks nothing of your typical mean girl archetype. It's genuine; bright and dimpled, like you could be her friend.ย
Your head falls to one side, lips pursed in a sheepish smile. "This feels like a sign to change my order."
"Please." The barista gives a stern shake of her head. Her dog-eared name tag reads MADEILYN in bold, handwritten letters (why her parents opted for that instead of the traditional Madeline is a mystery). "We love our regularsย becauseย of their signature drinks. You know Tony? Probably not; he's usually here at the crack of dawn. Anyway, the staff and I have started making his drink before he even gets to the register. Extra hot americano with a splash of heavy cream. We hand it to him without him needing to order, it's great."
"Until he decides he wants a different drink," you say.
Madeilyn shrugs. "Hasn't happened yet. Tony's an older guy, very stuck in his waysโand kinda cute. Anyway, that'll be four dollars and fifteen cents when you're ready. Cash or card?"
The cash is already in your hand; the exact amount. It has been since you were third in line. Your preparedness is as predictable as your coffee orderโneurotic, almost. It's a ritual of sorts; a mechanism in place to appease a high-functioning anxious mind.ย
The money leaves your hand and lands seamlessly in Madeilyn's, and she slots it into the register without stopping to count, but she'll count the coins of the teenage girl behind youโnot because she's ever underpaid, but because she's new, and trust is earned. Smiles are exchanged between the two of you, and you move aside to wait on your cocoa-dusted beverage.ย
The queue shuffles forward, and your drink is presented before that girl can stumble through her mouthful of an order, rattling off creams and syrups that are sure to mix atrociously together. Madeilyn's smile stiffens, and her brows raise barely a millimetre; customer service front crumbling by the nanosecond. The girl retracts one of her alterations, swaps it for something else, and poor Madeilyn's thoughts practically leak out into the air around her; I don't get paid enough for this. How unfortunate it must be to be stuck with a misspelled name and an unremarkable minimum wage job.
Their interaction drags on, much to the dismay of the accountant standing, arms crossed, behind the girl; she has places to be, even on a Saturday, and she is plain, laughably so, compared to youโeverybody in this place is.
Spencer watches as you pick up your coffee, fingers cradling the mass-produced cup like it's something sacred. It feels as though the cartoon puppy printed on the sleeve is staring right at him, mocking him from under the palm of your delicate hand. If only there were some way to trade places; hell, he'd even become a coffee cup, discarded in the trash by the day's end, if it meant you'd hold him like that for just a moment.
His keen gaze tracks you to your seat; sofa chair, close enough to the window to watch the cars pass, and far enough away to avoid the glare of the sun on your laptop screen. You weave through the populated tables like water, cardigan shrugged from one shoulder, strap of your worn leather bag keeping the other side secured in place.ย
The woollen fabric slips down the length of your arm as soon as you remove your bag, and it catches on your bracelet as you try to readjust it.
One barely withheld sigh and an adorably frustrated nose scrunch later, you've freed yourself. Your cardigan is back in place, still intact after its tussle with the problem bracelet; all is right in the world, but you still glance around the room as you take your seat, like you're expecting to find people staring, or worse, laughing.
Casually, Spencer transitions his focus to his own bag to search for his wallet. He keeps his head bowed, face safely hidden from your pretty eyes, and you pass over him without second glance.
As far as you're concerned, he's no more than another face in the crowd; now second in line, and fast running out of time to prepare his coins before he's called up.
โ
Saturdays are Spencer's favourite day. The weekend has never much appealed to him; too much empty space in his schedule opens doors for bad habitsโoversleeping, skipping meals, thinking too much about everything under the sun until he feels that tightness in his chest; that deep, soul-aching sense of purposelessness. Even as a child, he favoured structure, routine, over free-falling through the days. They're less likely to blend together, that way.
To this day, weekends still don't do it for him, not like they do for his coworkers. Whilst Derek and Penelope are "getting their freak on" in clubs and bars across the city, Spencer is sitting at home with a stack of case files, waiting for Monday to roll back around and bless him with a job to do; unsubsย to catch.
He always felt he had more in common with Gideon, who hangs around the office for hours after the day is done, pouring over paperwork and draining the coffee pot before disappearing to his cabin to "sleep off" everything he's seen that weekโbut his bag will be weighed down with files; consults that he technically isn't supposed to take home with him but always does.ย
But even Gideon has a life outside of work, primarily in his birdwatching hobby. Everyone has their thing. The glue that keeps them from falling apart under the weight of this job. For some, it's friends and family. Others, clubs and birds.ย
Spencer never felt he had a thing of his own; no hobby to keep him afloat outside of the office, no birds to watch. Not until he found you.
You were perfect. The first drops of rain after a twenty-four year dry spell, saturating him with a nectar so sweet it left him dumbfounded, slack-jawed in the line of a coffee shop he'd only entered because he felt dead on his feet, in dire need of a pick-me-upโand what he happened upon instead hit him harder than any amount of caffeine ever had.
Too busy exchanging smile-softened words with the barista, you had picked your coffee up by the plastic lid, failing to notice how it was sitting slightly askew. The cup came apart, hot coffee coating the front of your sweater, and landed back on the counter on its side, spilling its remaining contents out everywhere like the eviscerated corpse Spencer had studied the day before.
Apologies came next, from both you and the barista; two melodies clashing in competition to see who could pile on the most blame, all while coffee dripped steadily onto your shoes. You laughed it off, coughing up a self-deprecating comment with a scotch tape smile; forced, unsteady, yet still utterly captivating.ย
You couldn't have been more marvellous if you tried. Even as your hands trembled removing your sweater, Spencer thought you were fantastic. Elegant in such a true, unapologetically human fashion; something he could watch all day, like Gideon with his birds.
Your drink was remade. Your mess was cleaned up. You moved on, completely unaware of the life changing behind you, reshaping to accommodateโ no, revolve around you.ย
Core collapse and rebirth. A supernova in his chest cavity; the neutron star heart left behind, bound by gravitational need to an oblivious sun. His sine qua non.ย
Spencer had to drag himself out of that coffee shop in a daze, caffeine craving forgotten; replaced by something softer, harsher. Turbulent and lithe all in one. A single butterfly in his stomach, tearing the lining with serrated wings. He felt sick. He felt high.ย
He feltย you.
Your self-conscious laugh, your shaky hands, your ruined sweater; it was all a part of him, somehow. Ingrained into his biology as authentically as his own genetic code.
He had to see you again. Had to know you, intimately. Keep knowing you until the lines blurred and there was no telling where one ended and the other began. He needed a cosmic collision; to tear through outer layers and burrow himself in your chest and become the first proven, perfect Thorne-ลปyktowย object. A star within a star.ย
A fool would have thrown caution to the wind and marched back into that coffee shop. No plan, no thought, just the scattered, spiralling notions of a man who had just survived an explosion, now choking on the dust; the pieces of a cosmic devotion lodged in his throat. A fool would handle you indelicately, and he would scare you away in seconds.
But Spencer is no fool. As hard as it was, he pushed every screaming, irrational instinct down and walked away, each step a struggle against your commanding gravity.ย
He vowed to return, clear-headed, and approach the issue of you, of knowing you,ย as he would anything else; like a profiler's game of chess. In-depth study, fail-proof strategy, and, above all, patience.ย
He'd learn the language of you, and he'd speak it fluently before you even knew who he was. It would take timeโweeks, maybe monthsโbefore he was ready for you to know him, and by then his success would be all but guaranteed; it was the logical approach, one that mitigated any risk, trampled any possibility of failure.
This was the one game he couldn't afford to lose. So he was going to do everything in his power to ensure he won; he'd find a way, no matter what.
โ
"Black americanoโฆwith five packets of sugarโ"
"On the side."
"On the side." Madeilyn looks up at him with a manufactured smile that doesn't quite reach her eyes. It's perfectly cordial. Corporate. Lacking the sincerity she displays with other customers, and quietly simmering with something that seems to teeter close to discomfort.
Spencer would take offence, if she were the only person to treat him this way. But this kind of stiff awkwardnessโuneasy smiles, stilted conversationsโis something he's long since grown used to, especially with women. It doesn't bother him much anymore.
"Anything else?" she asks.ย
"Oh, umโ" He glances back over his shoulder and quickly finds your face in the, line four bodies down. You're studying the pastry display, bottom lip caught between your teeth as you deliberate between the cinnamon bun and the pain au chocolatโyou'll choose the latter. Clearing his throat, Spencer turns back to Madeilyn with a calm, steady smile. "The woman in the brown cardigan, I'd like to pay for her drink."
She stares at him, expression blank, like he's just veered wildly off scriptโand he supposes he has; never in the months he's been a patron here has he asked for anything beyond his regular coffee.ย
But then Madeilyn's face does something he doesn't expect: sheย grins.ย
Laughter taints the edges of her voice as she says your name, confirming she has the right girl. Spencer nods, certain. It's the first time he's heard your name spoken aloud; it's seraphic, almost song-like.
He sees it in flashes: him, calling you by your name in casual conversation; murmuring it in your ear, soft, as he presses a kiss to the shell of your ear; moaning it into your skin between thrusts asโ
"Well," Madeilyn clicks her tongue, still grinning, "if my predictions are correct, that'll be four fifteen on top of your drink. Cash or card?"
Spencer blinks hard, nodding without thought as his mind fights to catch up to her question. "Cash. Umโ here," he hands over the coins, for his drink, and then holds out a crisp ten dollar bill, for yoursโand for the pain au chocolat. "I'll give you ten, just to be safe. You can keep the change."
"That's one way to do it." She takes takes the cash and sorts it into the register, smile still sticking to her face. "Thanks, uhโฆ"
"Spencer," he says.ย
"Spencer, right. Your coffee will be with you in a sec."
"Thank you. Ohโ" He turns back to her last minute, voice lowered to just above a whisper. "Can you not, umโฆtell her? You know, that I'mโฆdoing this?"
Madeilyn narrows her eyes, and Spencer's heart drops.
"I-I justโ" He stammers, already feeling heat rushing to his cheeks. "I, umโ"
"Your secret's safe with me, don't worry," she says simply, offering one last reassuring smile before adding, "Now go, Spenceโ can I call you Spence? It has a nice ring to it. Real cute. Anyway, you're holding up the line. Get out of here."
By the time he's collected his coffee and found a seat, you're already standing at the register, exchanging pleasantries with Madeilyn. He steals an anxious glance as he retrieves his book from his satchel, but all he can see is the back of your head.
Today was supposed to be a regular day. No big moves, no changes in the routine, just regular: he stands behind you in the line, grabs a table a safe distance from yours, pretends to read whilst he watches you work, and you type away on your laptop, oblivious to it all. He thought if he felt particularly daring then he'd pull out his camera, steal a few photographs to add to his collectionโbut that was all.ย
He didn't plan for this to happen today, but you hadn't been there when he arrived. Your spot in the line had been filled by a person that Spencer did not recognise, and with every minute that passed he found himself growing increasingly agitated. Frustrated. With you; with himself; with this stupid, puppy-branded coffee shop that served, at best, subpar beverages that he only bought because of you, and now you weren't even there.ย
So when you walked through those doors a few minutes late, hair dampened with the beginnings of a rain shower, looking like poetry in its purest form, it felt like fate.ย
He understood, then, that today was not intended to be a regular day. The universe had created an opening, provided an opportunity, and he wasn't going to ignore it.
If only he had the confidence to reach for his camera, he'd be able to capture the look on your face as you turn around: brows pinched in a confused, slightly alarmed frown; lips parted, corners upturned to produce an uncertain smile which, on second glance, seems closer to a grimace.ย
Your eyes dart across the room in search for your mysterious benefactor, but you find nothing; no smug smiles, no knowing looks, just the usual crowd of caffeine addicts, likely too busy moaning about the price of their own drinks to even consider paying for yours.
Shaking your head, you turn back to Madeilyn, and Spencer watches, pleased, as you try to refuse his gift; the money's already in your hand, ready to be exchanged, but when you present it to her all your stubbornness earns is a shrug. She waves you away with a smirk, but not before muttering something that makes you scoff.ย
The next time he catches a glimpse of your face, your cheeks are flushed pink, and Spencer's game is officially in motion.
โ
This becomes your new routine. Spencer pays for your coffee, Madeilyn upholds her promise of concealing his identity, and every Saturday you are left increasingly perplexed. Increasingly suspicious. It's addictive.
Each prepaid coffee brings with it an elevated risk of exposure, and Spencer is hooked on the thrill of not knowing when the ball will drop.ย
And when it does, when the pieces click into place and youย seeย him, for the first time, he'll be ready. Armed with his wealth of knowledge and a smile that the staff at his mother's sanitarium say is charming, he'll leave a strong, terminally positiveย first impression. It's inevitable.ย
In the meantime, he continues to watch, taking note of whatever he can, over-analysingย you to the atom and building his ever-growing portfolio of things to discuss with you; TV shows to reference, bands to mention in passing, books to sit and flick through now in the hopes that you might notice as you walk by, so when he brings them up in the future you'll know he's being genuine.ย
If he sits in the right spot, studies your hands for long enough, he can just about piece together what you're typing on your laptop every week. He initially assumed it would be work related. Emails, most likely; you work in administration for a local health clinic, and Spencer would be willing to bet your inbox is always full.
But upon further inspection, he found that your focusโthe slight frown that boarded your face the moment you sat down and stayed, persistent, until you leftโwas not related to your work at all, but something far more interesting: a manuscript.
Your social media profiles never betrayed any desire to become an author. Your social media profiles never betrayed anything, period, aside from your job title and a few photographs from a vacation you took to Italyย two years ago. As far as the internet was concerned, you hardly existed at all, and Spencer had to dig to find evidence of you on the accounts of friends and family, hidden among your mother's posts about her garden, and your friend Scarlet's third trip to the Canary Islands since winter struck DC.ย
You knew how to keep your private life out of the public eye. Smart girl; there's no knowing what kind of creeps would try to stalk you, if given the chance.
This, of course, made it all the more difficult for Spencer to learn about you, but he won't complain too much; really, he's just glad you're keeping yourself safe.ย
For one peaceful hour every Saturday, your writing consumes your entire world. Everything collapses down to you and your laptop, the clack of your keyboard, and Spencer often wonders what it would take to snap you out of your hazeโa fight, maybe? Someย days it seems a bomb could strike the street outside, and you wouldn't bat an eye.ย
So when Spencer reaches for his camera, he isn't worried that you'll catch him.ย
He's worried that someone else will.ย
He operates it with one hand, keeps it under the shadow of his table, angles it blind as his heart hammers against his ribs. Most of the photographs he takes of you (in the coffee shop, and elsewhere), are out of focus, so bad it looks purposeful. He's sure any professional photographer would laugh at his work; hell, even a beginner would.
But sometimes he does it. Captures the perfect image of you, chin resting on your hand as you review a passage, chewing thoughtfully on your lower lip with the sun painting half of your face in its light, looking so perfect it's almost offensive.ย
He cherishes these pictures of you, cosmic deity among common folk, like they're made of solid gold. Idols made to be revered, kept safe in the leather bindings of an old photo book for him to flip through at his leisure, and to worship on those cold nights when the ache he feels surmounts to agony, straining and pulsating with the need to be beside you.ย
This is the only thought on his mind as he leaves the coffee shop a few minutes after you do; printing today's pictures, selecting his favourite, christening it as he wonders what it would be like to touch you. Hold you. Love youโ
You're standing right in front of him as he turns the corner. Wearing a frown that he can't even begin to interpret on account of the fact that you are standing right in front of him.ย
You're real, and you're looking right at him. Seeing him, at last.
"It's you, isn't it?" you ask, voice carefully calm. Perfect. "You've been buying my coffees."
A beat.
Another one; longer.
Fuck, Spencer. Speak.
"โฆhuh?" Wrong; that's a noise.ย
"What?" Okay, we're getting somewhere.
"Huh?"ย Never mind.
Your brows raise with each sound he chokes out. He wasn't prepared for this. He thought he was, but he wasn't.ย
The camera, buried deep in the bottom of his bag, now feels impossibly heavy. Guilt stuffed into metal casing. You can smell it, he's sure.
Heย can smellย you.ย Cardamom, cinnamon, sandalwood; all the warmth he's come to associate with you, only ever experienced from a distance, now flooding his nose, hijacking his brain. He feels nauseous. He feelsโ
"I'm not mad," you say, cautiously trying to ease his distress with a soft smile. Spencer adjusts his bag to cover his crotch. "Madeilyn and Iโฆwe had this agreement where if I guessed who was buying my drinks, she'd give me a free pin, andโฆ"
You gesture to your chest (God help him), pointing at a small puppy dog broochโthe coffee shop's stupid mascot.
"โฆI got it right."
You look almost proud, self-consciously suppressing a smile that would be sure to make his head explode if you let it blossom. It's enough to make him forget Madeilyn's betrayal, forget everything, completely. If you were to ask his name right now, he's pretty sure he'd end up saying yours.
"I'm sorry," he manages, face ablaze with a suffocating heat despite the winter breeze. Under his tweed jacket, his shirt sticks to his back, soaked through with sweat.ย
Someone kill him.ย
"I was, umโ I thought it would beโฆI don't know. It wasn't my intention to make you uncomfortable, or anything. It's just that you seemedโฆnice, andโ and I wanted to, um, do something good? I-It's like what Anne Herbert wrote; 'practice random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty', and I personally really, um, identify with that philosophy, andโฆand I don't know. I'm sorry."
Youย stay quiet as he speaks, silently watching him spiral before saying, at last, "I was gonna thank you, butโฆokay."
"What?"
He's staring at you like you've just sprouted another head, caught somewhere between disbelief and amazement.
"I mean, with how expensive a coffee is these daysโฆ" You shrug. Casual, like you're not in the middle of delivering a divine blessing. "You've been saving me a decent chunk of cash."
You hold out your hand. He watches it, wide-eyed, like he's never seen a hand before in his life; like this is some kind of prank, and you might hurt him.
But then he gathers his courage. He wipes his sweaty palm on his pants, and he takes your hand, grip firm.
"Thank you, uhโฆSpencer, right?"
You know his name.ย
His pants are so tight he's beginning to fear he might pop a stitch.ย
"Yes," he breathes. "Andโ and it's no big deal, really. I'm happy to, uhโฆhelp."
Tooย happy to help; he's so hard it hurts, and the rush of blood to his crotch deprives the areas that need it mostโhis brain, for instance. He forgets to move his arm as you shake his hand, and he forgets to let go when you stop; he just stands there, dumbstruck, holding onto you like you're the only thing keeping him upright.
"Of course," you slide your hand out from his seamlessly, "I can't not pay you back. And I know that kind of defeats the point of a random act of kindless, but I'm sure Anne Herbert won't mindโ"
This isn't happening. This isn't real; there's no way.
Your words glide through one ear and out the other. Focusing on what you're saying is an impossible task when you're here,ย be it real or imagined, and looking like that ("that" being utterly mundane; utterly beautiful). There isn't anything provocative about your outfit; there can't be, given the season. You're wearing loose-fitting slacks and a blouse under a cardigan and coat; you aren't showing anything, and you're leaving everything to the imagination.
And that's the problem, because Spencer Reid's imagination is a force to be reckoned with.ย
It's enough to bring him to his knees, almost; the thought of what you're hiding under your clothes. The thought of him peeling away the layers slowly, methodically, so he can study you. Every curve, mapped. Every freckle, memorised. He could study you for the rest of his lifeโhe has been for months already, and you've been fully clothed, out of reach, the entire time.
"So, how about coffee? Next week, on me."
He tunes back in then, just in time to catch your offer, and he almost drops right there, in the street, to kiss the pointed toes of your pumps and thank you profusely for doing this for him, but he refrains.ย
Pursing his lips, he swallows any mortifying response bound to come spilling out if he tries to speak, and he settles instead on a nod. Quick and simple, and safe.
Coffee. Next week. On you.
โ
He never should have said agreed to this.
Watching is easy. It's passive; there's no thought required when watching someone, no social game to play. You can't do something wrong if you're hardly doing anything to begin with.ย
But this? This is different. He isn't equipped to handle this. Couldn't be. No amount of watching, no amount of preparation, could prepare him for the hurricane that is you.
Sitting across from you in this coffee shop, Madeilyn's amused gaze burning into his side profile when she isn't speaking to customers, Spencer is convincedโwholly, utterly convincedโthat he is dying. There is no other explanation for what is happening inside of him other than death, slow and painful, and ecstatic.ย
"Soโฆ" You shift in your seat, crossing your legs as you observe him with unconcealed curiosity. "What do you do for work to afford so much coffee?"
"Iโ" Spencer swallows hardโwhy is he hesitating? "I work in the FBI's, um, Behavioural Analysis Unit."
"The BAU?"
It isn't a question asked out of confusion. You aren't asking for clarification (which, admittedly, he was just about to give); you know what the BAU is, and you're impressed.ย
"Yes," he confirms.ย
Which is about as terrifying as it is giddying, because that means you know what he does. What he can do.ย
"So you're Agent Spencer, then?"
He expects you to ask about profiling; how much he can learn about someone just from watching them, for example. Or about serial killers, like most other people do. People's morbid curiosity tend to flare up when they're discussing his job, but you stick with surface-level questions.
"It's Doctor, actually," he says. "Doctor Spencer Reid."
You raise an eyebrow. "Doctor?"
"I have three PhDs." He feels like a child showing off his good grades. "Mathematics, Chemistry, and Engineering."
"You've been busy." You narrow your eyes, studying his features a little more closely. Immediately, he feels his cheeks flush. "And you areโฆ"
"Twenty-four." He finds that if he speaks fast enough he's less likely to stutter. In exchange, though, he sounds absolutely terrified.
"So there's no Benjamin Button business going on?"
"No ma'am."
Maybe he should just stop talking entirely. You'll ask him yes or no questions, and he'll just shake his head up and down, and left to right; that seems to be the only way to save himself from complete humiliation.
Because "no ma'am"? You're younger than him, for Christ's sake. Even if you weren't, he has no business calling you "ma'am"; it's weird, if not downright inappropriate.ย
But it feels good, too good, to have those words flow from his lipsโwhich is exactly why it's inappropriate. It's perverse; he just hopes you fail to take notice of the way he has to shift in his seat to counteract the growing tightness in his pants.
"You know," you reach for your coffee, but you don't take a sip. The warmth against your palms is a comfort measure, something to keep you grounded when your nerves pick upโwhen you first sat down, it took you seven minutes and forty-two seconds to relinquish that cup. "My friends actually tried to talk me out of this. Meeting with you."
Spencer frowns. That isn't what he wants to hear. "May I ask why?"
"They figured you were, umโฆI don't wanna say a creep, butโฆyeah. That's their word, though, not mine. Hell, they even tried to convince me to move to a different coffee shop when you started paying for my drinks, but that'sโ" You cut yourself off mid-sentence, and Spencer watches as you run calculations in your mind, deciding what you can and cannot say. In the end, you just smile. "They can be protective."
Why?
It's a question he doesn't ask, but one that sits too heavy on his tongue to just swallow. Sure, to you, it isn't any of his business, but it is to him; understanding your relationships and your pastโboth of which he has struggled to get a grasp on thus farโis important. If your friends are protective, if they have a reason to be, then he needs to knowย why.
But he can't push or pry, not now. So he just sits with it, and he takes a sip of his coffee before changing the subject.
"Did you know that some predators have been known to stalk their prey for days on end?" he asks. "Crocodilians, for example, can lie completely still at the water's edge, justโฆumโ they blend in, opting to wait for their prey to come to them rather than engaging in an active pursuit."
You blink at him, confused, but also intrigued. "And this is relevantโฆhow, exactly?"
He turns his coffee cup so the grating little dog is facing you. "This place uses a havanese in their marketing, likely because they're percieved as cute, orโ or innocent. They're what's known as a, um, 'velcro dog', meaning they're prone to intense separation anxiety, and their size and shape, their fluffy coatsโฆit all lends itself to an adorable, almost helpless look."
Your gaze flicks between Spencer and the dog as you cross your arms. You've no idea why he's saying any of this, that much is clear, but you're listening, trying to understand, and that's what's important to him; if this relationship is going to play out like it does in his fantasies, you ought to get used to listening to his various tangents.
"But dogs are, wellโฆdogs,"ย he continues, turning the cup back to himself. "Natural predators. They've been domesticated for centuries, but you'd be surprised to learn just how little it can take for primal instinct to override their designer genetics. Under the right circumstancesโฆeven a havanese can be a wolf."
He watches with keen eyes as you nod thoughtfully. You take a sip of your coffee and examine, briefly, the havanese printed on your own cup.
"Soโฆwhat are you, then? A wolf, or a crocodile?"
Spencer almost chokes on his own saliva, blood running cold as your words reachย his ears and scorch their way into his brain.ย
To you, it's an innocent question; to him, it's everything. Eros and a landmine.
You're quick. Perceptive. And that about terrifies him just as much as it turns him on.
He could tell you he's a crocodile; entertain your curiosity and watch the true meaning of his words skim over the top of your head.ย
"โฆI, uhโย What?ย I-I wasn't, umโ"
โฆbut that would require a working brain, and a confidence that has just dropped, alongside his pounding heart, right out of his ass.
"โฆthe weather's finally starting to clear up, have you noticed?"
โ
The bar is loud. 2005'sย Greatest Hitsย interrupted by Christmas songs; Mariahย Carey's voice blending into the chorus of people, all a little bitย tooย drunk for a Wednesday night.ย
You're yelling at the bartenderโnot because you're upset, but because it's the only way he can hear youโwith a face alight with an angel's smile, asking for a refill, and for another round of shots. The cash is already in your hand, and you drop a few coins as you make the exchange.ย
Spencer feels like a fish out of water.
This isn't the first time he's followed you here, this has been part of his routine for a good while now, but it's the first time he's had the courage to step inside; partly because he was afraid you may recognise him, mostly because he hates bars.ย
But tonight, he was willing to sacrifice his comfort for you. Loud environments aren't so bad if he has something to focus on, and you've checked that box a thousand times over.
Low rise jeans and a black camisole are all you're wearing, despite the chill outside, and as you lean over the bar to watch your drinks being made, Spencer feels himself growing lightheaded. The arch of your back, sculpted by the hands of a lustful God, is one thing, but the deep red lace peeking out from your jeans is something else entirely. If the world were to end tonight, he'd certainly die happy. And hard. Fatally hard. Words cannot describe how grateful he is for this place's dim lighting.
He came up with today's plan on the fly, which is something he rarely does, but the thought of you weighed so heavy on his mind, drowning out all other stimuli, that he simply had to act; else he'd turn up to work tomorrow with rocks for brains, as he had done every other day this week.ย
It isn't good. He can usually force himself to forget you when he's working, he'd get no work done otherwise, but ever since he met you (officially) he's found it impossible to do so.ย
You've breached containment, and the team have noticed.ย
They've noticed his lack of focus, his spacing out during meetings, the decline in his work speed. Soon enough, they'll start asking about it, and Spencer will have no choice but to confess that he's interested in someoneโand he really doesn't want to do that; the team will never leave him alone again if he does that.
Seeing you again was the only way he could quell his restlessness, fill the you-shaped hole in his soul, that way he could make it through the rest of the week. Focus on cases. Save lives.ย
But merely seeing you isn't enough anymore, not after knowing the bliss of speaking to you.
So he makes his move.
He weaves through the crowd with about as much grace as a blind dog; stepping on toes, bumping shoulders, tripping over his own feet because he's too busy watching you. You're thanking the bartender, carefully picking up the tray of drinks, turning around, andโ
"Woahโ"
โฆalmost walkingย straightย into him.
Each shot glass loses about half of its contents. Liquid sloshes over the sides and pools on the tray. A few dribbles of your vodka cranberry (your third one of the night) land on your chest, trickles down between your breasts.
Oh, God help him.
"โฆSpencer?"
His gaze snaps back to your face. "I'm so sorry, I-I wasn'tโ are you okay?"
"I'm fine. It's fine." Your smile is lopsided. Relaxed. Almostย fond.ย "I really need to start, um, watching where I'm going, don't I? Gosh, the girls are gonna be so mad I wasted half of their shots."
There's no concern in your voice, just amusement. Pure, almost childish amusement.
You'reย drunk.
"Here." Spencer eases the tray from your hands. "Where are you sitting?"
The far left corner, byโ
"By the, uhโฆ" You gesture vaguely to your left before reaching for the tray. "The pool table, that's it. But you don't have toโ"
"I think you should just watch where you're going," he says.
You scoff and shake your head, but you're grinning. "And I thinkโฆ" You let your arms fall to your sides. "That you're completely right. Come on."
Spencer trails behind as you lead the way, keeping a steady grip on your tray of drinks like he's carrying the crown jewels and staring, quite shamelessly, at your ass. The sway of your hips is almost hypnotic, and he has to tear his gaze away before your friends see him.
They're standing around a cocktail table, deep in a conversation that cuts off when they see you approaching. All three of them greet you with bright smiles that, like a flash of lightning, start to fade once they catch sight of Spencer behind you; not upset, butโฆapprehensive, and understandably so. He's a stranger.
"This is Spencer." You're still beaming; a star in the night sky. "The guy from the coffee shop."
Recognition washes over each of their faces, and they relax slightlyโthough they're still watching him closely, eyes narrowed ย like predators.ย
"Sorry, can I justโฆ" Spencer squeezes past you to set the tray on the table, and he flashes them a painfully self-conscious smile. "Hi."
"And these are Cassandra, Scarlet, and Abby. My friends," you say, gesturing to each girl. "Friends, Spencer; Spencer, friends."
Three lionesses and their baby deer, that's what Spencer sees when he looks at the four of you.ย
Cassandra looks more like a Scarlet than the actual Scarlet does; her hair is dyed a dark shade of red, and she's making no attempt to appear warm or welcoming. She shifts closer to you, just slightly, like she's preparing to pull you away from him at a moment's notice.
The real Scarlet is flaunting her winter tan lines in a tube top. She's smiling at him, but her eyes are sharp. Hungry, almost.ย
Abby is the only one whoย doesn'tย look as though she's about to bite his head off.ย
"This is who's been funding your caffeine addiction?" she asks.
Nodding, you reach for a not-quite-full shot glass. "Yup," you say, popping the "p" before knocking your head back. The glass, now empty, gets set back on the table, and you reach for your vodka cranberry in its stead. "He's an FBI agent."
"He's cute." Scarlet leans over the table, eyeing him up like a piece of meat. And then, to his horror, her gaze drops to his hips. "Do you carry,ย agent?"
Please don't see his erection please don't see his erection please don'tโ
"Hey."ย You give her a playful shove before turning to Spencer with an apologetic smile. "Ignore her. She's drunk. We're all,ย umโฆdrunk." Laughter rises in your throat, tainting your words as you shake your head. Your attention flicks back to Scarlet. "And it'sย Doctor."
"Doctor?" she and Abby echo in unison.
"Three PhDs in, uhโฆvery impressive subjects that I am totally not forgettingโฆ"
You nudge him with your elbow, and Spencer damn near jumps out of his skin.
"What? Oh. UmโฆMathematics, Chemistry, and Engineering," he says with a smile, so stiff around the edges he thinks his skin might split open. He's never particularly enjoyed being the centre of attention, but this is so much worse than delivering a presentation, or a profile; you've thrown him into the lion's den, naked and afraid.
But you're cheering him on; talking him up to your friends like he's something important. Something to show off. Smiling and laughing and touching him, however briefly. Looking lighter than air, carefree and beautiful in all the ways he dreamed you'd be.
He tells himself it's the alcohol; the final wall of realism put up against a bewitched, senseless heart. You can't like him as much as you appear to, it doesn't make sense. You don'tย knowย him.
But youย feelย him, maybe as strongly as he does you. Maybe the gravity is mutual; cosmic collision already in motion.ย
What if this isn't a chase, but a dance? Souls entwined from first glance, no words needed. No touch.ย
Maybe you're already his.ย
Further interrogation yields surprisingly positive results; the lionesses are impressed by his job title and "heroic" lifestyle (Abby's words, not his), but what interests them even more is his extensive knowledge of different alcoholic beverages and the effects they have on the brain. He mentions the term "aphrodisiac" once when discussing red wine, and everybody, even Cassandra, leaned in to listen.ย
He wasn't expecting to make such a good first impression on your friends. Hell, he wasn't expecting to make an impression at all; his half-baked plan only involved saying hi, maybe buying you a drink, and then parting waysโa quick hit of you, your scent, your smile, was all he needed.ย
And now he's commanding a table of women he was so sure were going to maul him, handling the social pressures with ease even though he hasn't had a drop of alcohol; he doesn't need it, not when he has you.
He is, however, very thankful when Cassandra takes back the reins.
"I'm gonna go order another drink," she says, smiling at everyone but Spencer. He doesn't take it personally. "Who's coming?"
Abby and Scarlet are already moving, quietly scheming to split the cost of a bottle of red wine. You hold out your empty glass to Cassandra, grinning.
"Water?" she asks.
"Oh, boo." You pull the glass back as she tries to take it. "Come on, Cass. You can't cut me off; I'm having fun."
"And the last time you had fun, we had to carry you home because you were too sick to get in the cab, remember?"
"That wasโ"
"I'm getting you that water, 'kay?"
She walks away before you can protest further.ย
Reaching for your purse, you huff as you begin rummaging around for cash, but then you feel Spencer's gaze on you. You pause, fist full of coins, and sigh before setting everything back down.
Turning, you flash him a strained smile. It doesn't quite reach your eyes. "Like I said, protective," you sigh, leaning back against the table. You're quiet for a moment, but the silence proves too much to deal with so you jab your finger into his bicep. "Hey, well done though."
Spencer blinks at you. "โฆfor what?"
"For disproving their wholeย โcreep' theory," you say. "They're, umโ they like to assume the worst, especially when it comes toโฆ" You gesture vaguely to Spencer and shrug. "I keep telling them to lighten up, but I'm not reallyโ โฆthey justโ they have their reasons, you know? Sorry, I should stop talking. I'm drunk, and Iโ"
"It's okay," he says quietly.ย
You look up at him then, all soft-eyed, like you're seeking reassurance. The world goes quiet as Spencer offers you an equally gentle smile.
You take it, hold it, and you move on.
"What's an FBI agent doing in a bar on a Wednesday night, anyway? Don't you have work tomorrow?"
Spencer's smile hardens like wax. Split-second panic attacks his neck, goes for the throat, but he fights it off in time to say, "Don't you have work tomorrow?"
"I work a desk job, I'll be fine," you say. "Not sure you can afford to be hungover whilst chasing serial killers, though."
"Oh, I'm not drinking."
It just kind of comes out.ย
In all fairness, it was either thisโtelling the truthโor making himself out to be an irresponsible agent.ย
"Thenโฆ" You frown. Uncertainty is starting to creep into your expression. Apprehension, the same kind he'd witnessed in your friends. "Whyย are you here?"
"I, umโฆ"
Come on, Spencer. Use your brain.ย
"I take pictures." Oh, Jesus Christ. "I-I'm a photographer. Amateur."
Curiosity replaces suspicion, and you raise an eyebrow. "A photographer?"
"Yes," he says quickly. "Candids, mostly. I like, um, capturing peopleโtheir essenceโin the moment. So I go to bars andโฆother places to take photographs. I-I might indulge myself in a drink orโ or two, but only on weekends. I have my, umโ" He gestures to his satchel. "I have my camera with me."
The moment he sees your face light up, the regret hits him like a fucking truck.
"Oh, cool! Can I see?"
No. No, you can't see. You absolutely, definitely cannot see.
"I-I actually don'tโ woah."
In his panic, he doesn't notice the way you're swaying until you're stumbling, heading straight for the floor. He moves quickly, grabbing you by your arms and holding you steady as you try to blink away the dizziness.
"Are you okay?"
"Mhm. Yeah, I justโฆ" You rub your eyes. Spencer's still holding onto you. His grip loosens to something gentle, but he remains unwilling to let you go. "Fuck, I'm drunk."
You say it like it's a realisation; like you haven't been told it, and said it yourself, already.ย
"Oh, God," you groan, shaking your head. "This is so not cool. I'm sorry, I don't usually do this. I don'tโ I swear Iโฆ"
"Hey, it's okay." Spencer gives your arms a light squeeze, hoping to reassure you. "Do you want to get some air?"
You cough up a laugh so bitter he can almost taste it, laced with a regret that he can't place; an insecurity that runs impossibly deep. "Yeah," you mutter. "You know, I should probably justโ I think I should go home. I have work tomorrow, likeโ like you said."
"Should I call a cab?"
"No, it's okay. I can walk."
Spencer frowns. "On your own? I'm not sure that'sโ"
"Everything okay?"
Cassandra has reappeared, bottle of water in hand. Her gaze flicks between you and Spencer, his hands on your arms, and she purses her lips.
"We're going home," you announce, easing yourself out of his grasp.ย
"We?"
Spencer and Cassandra's voices overlap, disbelief harmonising.
He's misinterpreted your words, surely, because there's no possible way you mean what he thinks you mean.ย
He stands as a statue of himself, frozen in wait for the pinch that'll wake him up. But it never comes.
"I'll call you when I'm home," you say, gathering your belongings, "and you have my location. It'll be fine. You guys should stay and enjoy yourselves."
Cassandra's jaw works as you speak, teeth grinding the same way Hotch's do when he doesn't like the sound of something, but there's a grim kind of acceptance about her expression, like she knows there's no point in arguing with you.ย
"Call me." Is all she says.
You flash her a small smile as you put on your coat. "I will."
Without waiting for Spencer, you turn towards the exit. He rushes to catch up to you, but Cassandra grasps him, gently, by his sleeve before he can get away.
He expects a lecture, a threat, a warning, but all she does is press the water bottle into his hand and mutter, "Keep an eye on her, will you?"
Spencer nods, a silent, earnest promise, and she lets him go.
โ
The two of you walk in near silence, which should feel like a blessing after the oppressive noise of the bar, but it doesn't; it feels suffocating, overwhelmingly dense and yet exceedingly empty.
He hands you the water bottle. You don't notice how he turns every corner before you do. Don't question how or why he knows where he's going; you're too busy looking at the cloudless sky. At the stars that you can barely make out for the city's light pollution. One day, he'll take you to the observatory.ย
"Have you heard of aย Thorne-ลปyktowย object?" he eventually asks.
You crane your neck to look up at him, and your unsteady feet lead you into him. Your shoulder bumps his arm; proof of the gravity thrumming between you. "A what-what object?"
"It's a conjectured type of hybrid star," he explains, keeping his words soft and slowโas slow as his overzealous mouth will allow. "Kip Thorne and Anna ลปyktowย hypothesised that it would be formed if a neutron star were to collide with another star. They spiral inwardโ it's almost like a dance. The forces between the neutron star and the core of its companion are so strong that, once they collide, there's no undoing, and eventually they merge. If their combined mass exceeds the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit, then the two will collapse into a black hole."
"And if it doesn't?"
"They coalesce into a single star," he says. "A red supergiant with a neutron star at it's core. Technically theย entireย star would be considered a neutron star but, observationally, it continues to resemble a red supergiant."
Your gaze drops from the stars to the sidewalk, and Spencer watches as you chew on your bottom lip.ย
"Sorry," he says.
"For what?"
"I have a habit of, um, rambling." He's sweating. It's below freezing out here, and he's sweating. "I-I just thought that talking, giving you something to focus on, mightโฆhelp."
"Don't apologise," you say. "I think it's sweet."
Spencer has to watch his feet to make sure he doesn't start floating in the wake of your words.
"The star thing, I mean. Who doesn't want to merge with someone and spend the rest of timeโฆfloating through space together?"
Oh. Okay. That's okay; at least you're getting his pointโ
"You trying to cheer me up is sweet, too."
Oh.ย
Okay.
โ
He has to help you up the stairs to your apartment.ย
Genuine tears formed in his eyes when you asked him to walk you up to that first floor, east-facing set of rooms he's spent the last few months dreaming about, walking past, mapping it out in his mind using your building's floor plan. He wasn't expecting to get past the door, but that was okay; simply seeing the door, and the glimpse into your living space it would provide, would have been enough.
But you let him in, and you give him a mission: pyjamas. Third drawer of the dresser in your bedroomโcould he grab a pair for you whilst you use the bathroom? Anything will do.
Spencer can't breathe in here. He thought the living room was bad enough, but the bedroom? The place where you sleep? Relax? Do all the beautiful things he can't let himself picture because it will have damning consequences for him and his pants? It's too much.
Everything smells like you. Your scent sticks to his skin like a divine perfume, seeps into his bloodstream like a narcotic. He tries to narrow his world down to that dresser, to that drawer, and stop himself from letting his gaze, his mind, his hands, wander anywhere they aren't supposed to go.
But it's a losing battle, and there's a laundry basket in the corner of your room. Wicker. Stuffed full of you; practically begging to be opened.ย
He tends to the pyjama problem first; grabs a pink pair that look like they'll keep you warm through the night, tucks them under his arm, and moves on to his trueย target.
It's half-full. An abyss of clothes; some that he recognises, some that he doesn't.ย
He picks a pair of panties from the second layerโpale blue cotton with scalloped hems and a pretty little bowโand stuffs them into his pocket just as he hears the click of the bathroom door unlocking.
After steadying his racing heart, Spencer meets you in the living room and presents your pyjamas with a humble smile. You seem steadier now, more like yourself; the fresh air did you some good.ย
But you're still drunk, more so than he thinks you want to let on. Your cheeks are flushed and, no matter how hard you try, or how purposefully you move, you can't shake that looseness. Every movement is fluid, mesmerising, even the way you hug your pyjamas to your chest as you look up at him.
"Thank you," you say. The ghost of that happy, drunken grin haunts your face, threatens to resurrect.ย
Spencer shrugs. It's the best he can do to appear casual, like his heart isn't a ticking time bomb in his chest. "Don't worry about it. Justโฆremember to drink plenty of fluids, okay?"
You tilt your head. "Doctor's orders?"
"Iโ" Oh God. "Yesโ yes, Doctor's orders."
There it is. That smile. It moves quick, conquering every feature until you're glowing. Radiance exuding from every line, every dimple. You're a cosmic anomaly; perfection incarnate. Spencer couldn't tear himself away from such a sight even if he wanted to.
Your gaze wavers. Falls to his lips. Reverts to his eyes. Wanders down again.ย
Please.
It wouldn't take much to bridge the gap; you know that. One small step. The tilt of a head.ย
Pleasepleaseplease.
You jerk back, lowering your head in one quick, abrupt motion. Severing the tie. Resisting the pull. It hurts; a bruise stamped behind his ribs, pulsating to the beat of what could have been. You feel it, too. You must.
"I should, umโ" You clear your throat. You're still smiling, but it has melted. Reshaped into something bashful. "I should go to bed, I think."
Spencer forces himself to nod. He even manages to flash a smile. "You need to be well rested for work."
"Yeahโฆ" You mime his actions, unable to hold his gaze for more than a few seconds at a time. "You too. I'm sorry for keeping youโ"
"It's okay," he says.
"โฆokay." A sigh escapes your lips, soft and breathyโwistful, almost. "Thank you, again, for walking me home. Now get out of here."
"Yes, ma'am."
He doesn't curse himself for saying it, this time. The shame is long gone, replaced by something light; the butterfly in his stomach, wings newly softened; the delicate blue fabric in his pocket.
As he steps out of the warmth of your apartment, you call out to him.
"I'll see you on Saturday?"
Spencer nods, smiling. "You'll see me on Saturday."
But he'll be seeingย youย a lot sooner than that.
psst...if you're interested at all in supporting me further, i have a ko-fi <3
20K words, Simonโs hair has grown out, reader wears glasses, Simon doesnโt know how to dance, smut, the fluffiest fluff, angst, size kink, Simon is huge, pee mentioned, Simon is filthy but we all knew that. Tell me if I missed any tags.
He was four years old when he stole your crayons.
Not all of them. Just the good ones. The red one. The yellow one. The bright, sunflower-gold one that you'd been saving to colour the sun in the corner of your drawing, the way all four-year-olds drew the sun โ a circle in the corner, rays shooting out like a child's idea of joy.
You looked at him across the low art table in that bright little preschool room that smelled of poster paint and digestive biscuits.
He was stocky even then.
Chubby-cheeked and heavy-set. A thick, sturdy little boy who sat with his legs wide and his fat fists curled around your crayons like he'd earned them.
He wasn't even looking at you.
He was colouring something โ a car, maybe, or a blob that might have been a dog โ and the yellow crayon moved in big, purposeful strokes across his paper.
You did not cry.
You considered it.
Then you leaned across the table and took them back.
He looked up.
Brown eyes. Even at four, they were startling โ dark and serious and far too watchful for a boy his age.
He stared at you.
You stared back.
Then he slid the gold crayon back across the table to you, said nothing, and went back to his drawing.
His name was Simon.
You would not learn that until the register was called the following morning. But you remembered his eyes before you remembered his name.
โ โฆ โ
He broke your glasses in Year Two.
Not on purpose โ or so you believed, for most of your life, until you were old enough to accept that
Simon Riley did very few things without purpose.
He knocked into you in the corridor outside the dining hall, your plastic NHS frames hitting the linoleum floor, one arm snapping clean off at the hinge.
You stood there, the world going soft and blurry at the edges the way it always did without them, and you felt the particular, humiliating sting of being unable to see properly โ the vulnerability of it, the indignity.
Simon picked up the frames. Looked at them. Looked at you.
He didn't say sorry straight away. He examined the break with the seriousness of a boy who was already, at seven, very careful about what he said and when he said it. Then, "I'll carry your bag till they're fixed."
"You broke my glasses," you told him like he didnโt know.
"I know." He nodded.
"That's not the same as fixing them."
"No," he agreed. "But it's what I've got."
He carried your bag for three days. And when your mum brought the repaired frames in on the fourth morning, he handed the bag back without ceremony, turned, and went to join his mates by the football cage. No further apology. No acknowledgement that anything had occurred between you at all.
That afternoon, you kicked over his sandcastle in the playground.
He watched you do it. Didn't say a word.
You felt better.
And somehow, after that, you were friends.
โ โฆ โ
He couldn't read very well. You figured this out in Year Three, during the round-robin reading in class โ when the teacher went along the rows and each child read a sentence aloud.
You noticed the way Simon's jaw set and his hands went flat on the desk the closer it got to his turn. The way his eyes moved across the page, laboured and slow, tracking words like they were things to be wrestled rather than known.
He got through his sentence. Barely. His face was blank when he sat back, the particular blankness he'd already learned to wear โ that carefully constructed nothing that meant everything was fine when everything was not fine at all.
You didn't say anything about it. Not then. You were eight years old, not stupid.
What you did was start reading with him at break time. You presented it as something you needed โ you told him you were practising for a reading competition and needed an audience.
Simon was not fooled. He was never fooled, not really.
But he sat down with you on the bench by the library door and listened while you read, and then slowly, carefully, you handed the book to him and asked what he thought happened next, and he had to read ahead to find out.
It took most of the school year. But by the summer he was reading chapter books. He never thanked you. He did start saving you a seat on the library bench every break time, and that was the same thing.
โ โฆ โ
He played football and rugby.
You read on the grass bank above the field.
It became a kind of institution โ the ritual of your shared proximity without shared activity. Simon on the pitch, broad and determined and already bigger than the other boys by Year Five, already moving with that particular physicality that seemed less like playing and more like declaration.
And you on the bank above, your book open, your reading glasses (a better pair now, tortoiseshell) perched on your nose, half-reading and half watching without ever quite admitting to the watching.
He always knew you were there. He didn't do anything about it. But sometimes, when he scored, he'd look up at the bank first before he looked anywhere else.
You told yourself you were only there because the grass was nice and the light was good.
You were not a good liar, even then.
โ โฆ โ
The boy's name was Daniel Holt and he pushed you over in the playground in Year Five because you'd refused to give him the answers to the maths homework.
You'd said no three times and the third time he pushed you and you went down hard on your palms and your knees, the concrete was unforgiving.
You were crying before you'd fully registered what had happened. Not dramatically โ small, shocked, indignant tears, the kind that arrive before the pain does.
Simon was there before a teacher was. You didn't even see where he came from. One moment the playground was its ordinary mid-morning noise, and the next Daniel Holt had a split lip and Simon Riley was standing over him with blood on his knuckles and a look on his face that was completely, utterly calm.
The calm was the frightening part. Even at ten.
He got three days at home for it. He spent the first afternoon sitting on your front step, eating crisps, because he knew you'd be furious with him and wanted to face it head-on.
You were furious. You told him he was an idiot. He told you Daniel Holt had it coming. You told him violence wasn't the answer. He told you Daniel Holt wasn't going to touch you again.
He was right. Daniel Holt never came near you again.
You didn't thank him either. You went inside and made him a sandwich, and that was the same thing.
โ โฆ โ
Secondary school arrived like a change in weather โ everything slightly larger, slightly louder, the corridors longer and noisier, the stakes somehow higher and more ambiguous all at once. You arrived with a bag so heavy your shoulder ached within the first hour: your textbooks, yes, but also the extracurricular books you carried everywhere, the extra notepad you used for non-school thoughts, the six different highlighters you colour-coded by subject.
Simon took the bag from you on the third day without asking.
"I can carry it," you told him.
"I know," he said.
He slung it over his shoulder like it weighed nothing, which for him it probably didn't. He'd grown over the summer โ not just taller, though he was that, but broader, thicker through the shoulders in a way that made him look like a man playing a boy, trying the shape of it on. He wore it well, even at eleven. He wore everything like he'd already decided what he was and was simply waiting for the world to catch up.
He carried your bag when it was heavy, and it was frequently heavy. He did it without comment and without making you feel small for needing it. That was the thing about Simon โ he never made you feel small. He made other people feel small, sometimes, when they deserved it. But not you. Never you.
โ โฆ โ
The bruises were never from rugby.
You knew by the second year of secondary.
You were not naive โ you had read enough, observed enough, understood enough about the world to recognise the shape of what was happening in Simon Riley's house even though he never said a word about it.
The bruises were in the wrong places for rugby. They appeared in the wrong season. They were around his ribs and his arms and once, memorably, along his jaw, and he came to school the Monday after the jaw bruise with that face โ that blank, carefully constructed nothing face โ and you sat next to him at lunch and said nothing at all.
You said nothing because there was nothing you could do. You were twelve. You were a girl with a book bag and highlighter pens and absolutely no power over the man who was hurting your best friend, and knowing that โ the impotence of it, the helpless, hollow ache of caring about someone you could not protect โ was the first truly adult pain you ever felt.
What you could do was this: you could make sure he had somewhere to go.
Your mother, who was perceptive in the quiet way that some mothers are, never asked questions when Simon turned up at the back door on a Sunday evening or a Wednesday after school.
She just set another plate.
Your house became a refuge without anyone naming it as such. Simon did his homework at your kitchen table, ate your mother's cooking, watched telly with your family, and slept on your sofa sometimes when the option was presented naturally enough that it didn't feel like charity.
โ โฆ โ
You got your period for the first time on a Tuesday in November, in Year Nine. In the school toilets, third period, when you were thirteen years old and the day had been entirely ordinary right up until it wasn't.
The particular cocktail of shock and pain and embarrassment and the specific existential bewilderment of being a person whose body was doing something enormous without prior adequate notice left you sitting on the closed toilet lid crying in a way you hadn't cried in years.
You got out your Nokia. That familiar brick of a phone, the keypad worn smooth at the number five. You typed Simon's number and pressed call before you'd properly decided to.
He picked up on the second ring. "Yeah."
"Simon." Your voice came out wrong. Too thin.
A beat. When he spoke again his voice had changed โ quieter, more careful. "Where are you?"
"Girls' toilets. Near the science block."
"Right," he said. "Stay there."
He appeared outside the girls' toilets seven minutes later โ you could hear him through the door, his voice low and flat, telling a Year Eight girl to go use the other ones โ and then he was there, right there on the other side of the door, talking to you through it in that steady, even way he had when he wanted to be calm on your behalf.
"You're alright," he said. โDo you need me to go to the office?"
"No," you managed. "I need โ I don't know what I need."
"I'll get you something from the vending machine," he said, that Manchester accent of his low and unhurried. "And I'll text your mum."
When you came out of the toilets twenty minutes later, looking wrung-out and clutching what the school nurse had provided, Simon was leaning against the wall. He looked at you for a moment โ took you in, the way he always did, that comprehensive, assessing look โ and then he stepped forward and kissed your cheek. Quick. Certain. His mouth warm and deliberate against your cheekbone.
"You're alright," he said again. He said it like a fact. Like he was making it true by saying it.
You cried a bit more, for different reasons, and he pretended not to notice.
โ โฆ โ
He was captain of the rugby team by Year Ten. It suited him โ the leadership, the sense of purpose, the structure of it.
You went to his matches sometimes, wrapped in a scarf on the touchline, and watched him move across the pitch with that same quality you'd noticed on the primary school field: less like playing, more like declaration.
He was ferocious and focused and occasionally frightening, and the other boys deferred to him not just because he was bigger than them but because he had the kind of authority that doesn't need to be announced.
Afterwards he'd find you on the touchline, still carrying that quality โ coiled, alert โ and it would take him a few minutes to come back to himself. To come back to you.
"Good game," you'd say.
"Yeah," he'd say.
And then slowly, the set of his shoulders would ease, and he'd become Simon again. Your Simon. The one who stole your crayons and carried your bag and ate your mother's shepherd's pie like it was sacred.
โ โฆ โ
He could make you laugh. This was not a small thing.
Simon Riley was not, by general consensus, a funny person. He was serious and quiet and his face in repose looked like a man carrying a private weather system. But he had a dry, deadpan wit that he deployed rarely and precisely, and it landed, every time, like a key in a lock made specifically for it.
He knew how to make you laugh because he'd spent years learning you. The specific frequency of your humour. The things that made you dissolve into giggles rather than just smile. He deployed his wit with the same precision he deployed everything else, and the result was that when Simon Riley made you laugh โ really laugh, the helpless, breathless kind โ it felt like being given something he didn't give to anyone else.
Which, you would eventually understand, was accurate.
โ โฆ โ
His name was Ryan Marsh and he was your first kiss, in the park on a Friday evening in Year Ten, and it was fine. It was nice, even. Ryan was sweet and nervous and smelled of his older brother's aftershave and the kiss lasted approximately forty seconds.
Ryan Marsh had a broken nose the following Monday.
Simon maintained, with total conviction, that Ryan had walked into a door. Ryan, to his credit, corroborated this story completely.
You did not push the matter, partly because you had no concrete evidence and partly because some part of you โ the part that read on the grass bank and watched the pitch and noticed when Simon looked up at the bank before he looked anywhere else โ felt something that was not entirely uncomplicated about it.
You and Ryan Marsh did not have a second kiss. You told yourself it was because the chemistry hadn't been right.
You were getting a bit better at lying to yourself, by fourteen. But only a bit.
โ โฆ โ
GCSEs arrived the way all important things arrived โ with more weight than you'd expected and less warning than you'd have liked.
Year Ten and Eleven were the years you restructured Simon's entire approach to studying, methodically and patiently, the same way you'd helped him learn to read, finding the approach that worked for how his mind moved.
Simon was not unintelligent.
He was, in fact, formidably sharp in ways that didn't translate easily to an exam paper: quick to read people, quick to understand systems, possessed of a spatial and strategic intelligence that you recognised and admired even as you taught him how to write it down in ways that the mark scheme would accept.
He sat with you at your kitchen table night after night โ your mother quietly replenishing the tea,โ and you explained things in the language that made sense to his brain rather than the language of the textbook.
He sat with you at lunch during school hours and glared at anyone who called you a nerd. The glaring was extremely effective. Simon Riley's face, by fifteen, was a significant deterrent.
His GCSE results, when they arrived, were good. Better than anyone who knew his circumstances might have expected from a boy who'd had so much working against him.
He rang you on the house phone when he opened the results envelope. He didn't say much. His voice, when he spoke, was different โ something in it unguarded, the Manchester in it softer somehow, without the armour it usually carried.
"Couldn't have done it without you," he said.
"You did it," you told him firmly. "I just held the torch."
"Still needed the torch."
You smiled so hard your face ached. "Go celebrate, Simon."
"Yeah," he said. And then, quieter, "Thanks, sunshine."
โ โฆ โ
He was an apprentice at the butcher's on Renshaw Street after school โ learning the trade with the same focused, physical competence he brought to everything else, solid and unhurried, his big hands learning new kinds of precision. You had a job at the bookshop two streets over.
On his lunch breaks you would walk over with a sandwich and a packet of crisps, and you'd sit on the low wall around the side of the shop while he ate and you talked about nothing in particular and everything in general.
He had sawdust on his boots and you'd have ink on your fingers from pricing stickers, and you'd sit in the thin afternoon light talking about books and people and where things might go from here, and it was the most ordinary, irreplaceable thing in the world.
You didn't know, then, that you were storing it up. You didn't know you were in the middle of something finite.
You were seventeen and you thought you had time.
โ โฆ โ
It was the eleventh of September, 2001.
You were at work when it happened โ the bookshop had a small television in the back room, and you watched the footage with your hand pressed over your mouth and the world rearranging itself into a new shape around you.
Simon came to you that evening. He didn't knock โ he had a spare key, had done for years โ and you heard him come in and go into the kitchen and fill the kettle, the sound of him so familiar and domestic and real that something in your chest loosened a fraction.
He brought you tea. He sat on the sofa beside you and you watched the news together in silence, and at some point your head found his shoulder without either of you deciding it had.
"I'm going to join up," he said. Not asking. Telling.
You lifted your head from his shoulder. Frowned at him. "Join up what?"
"The military."
The word landed in the room and stayed there. You looked at his face โ that flat, certain expression he wore when he'd already decided something โ and you felt the ground shift slightly under you.
"Simon. You're seventeen."
"You can join at sixteen with parental consent," he said. Straightforward, as though he'd already looked into it. Which of course he had. "Seventeen without."
"That'sโ" You stopped. Started again. "You've thought about this before today."
"Yeah."
Of course he had. You could see it now, the shape of it โ this was not a reaction to the footage on the television, not a hot, impulsive thing. This was something Simon had been building toward without telling you. The structure of it. The purpose. The particular kind of belonging that came from being part of something larger than yourself. You'd always known he'd go toward something like this. You'd just hoped, without ever quite admitting to the hoping, that it might be further away.
"You're not going to try to talk me out of it." Not a question.
"Would it work?"
He held your gaze. "No."
"Then no," you said. Your voice was very steady. You were proud of it. "I'm not."
He was quiet for a long moment. The television continued its awful repetition. Then his arm came around your shoulders, heavy and warm, and he pulled you in closer against his side.
You stayed like that until the tea went cold.
โ โฆ โ
The train station was grey and noisy with other leavings, other arrivals, other people in the middle of things.
Simon stood in front of you on the platform with his kit bag and his big, careful hands and the face he'd spent seventeen years learning to keep blank, and it occurred to you, not for the first time and not for the last, that you loved him.
That you had loved him in different quantities and different registers for most of your life. That you did not know how to say it and were not sure it would do either of you any good if you did.
So you didn't say it.
You went up on your toes and you hugged him โ truly hugged him, arms around his neck, your face pressed against his jaw โ and he held you back with both arms, the kit bag dropping to the platform, and he was so solid and warm and real that you memorised it.
"Don't be an idiot," you told him, muffled.
He made a sound that was almost a laugh. Almost. "Best I can do is try." The Manchester in his voice, low and warm and his.
"Simon."
"I know," he said quietly, against your temple. "I know, sunshine."
You stepped back. You held it together. He picked up his bag and he walked toward the platform and at the door of the train he turned, and looked at you standing there with your glasses and your coat and your hands pressed together in front of you, and for a second you saw something in his face that wasn't blank at all.
Then he was gone.
You cried on the way home. Proper, ugly crying, in the front seat of your mother's car, while she drove and said nothing and passed you a tissue.
You cried because you thought you might never see him again. Because the world had cracked open on a Tuesday in September and people were going toward the fracture and Simon Riley was one of them.
You cried because you never told him.
โ โฆ โ
He sent a birthday card every year.
They arrived with no return address and postmarks from places you'd never heard of, and sometimes they were late and sometimes they were so early you suspected he'd sent them weeks in advance in case he couldn't later.
They were always plain โ Simon Riley was not a man who browsed the sentimental section โ white or cream envelopes, the kind of card that was almost generic, and inside: his handwriting, which had improved vastly from the boy who'd struggled across the page in Year Three, and always the same thing. Your name at the top. Happy Birthday, sunshine. And then: S.
Just S.
Like he was still close enough that you'd know exactly who that meant. Like the initial was sufficient.
It was.
You sent his birthday gifts to a P.O. box he'd given you, wrapped carefully, the tag always: From your best friend. You didn't know if he received them all. You sent them anyway. It felt important to keep sending them โ to maintain the thread, even when you couldn't see both ends of it.
โ โฆ โ
Thirty-four years old now.
You have no husband. You had come close, once โ a man named Patrick who had been perfectly acceptable in every measurable way and who had wanted to marry you and had probably deserved someone who could give him more of herself than you could manage.
You had not been fair to Patrick. You knew that. You had been in love with someone else for most of your adult life, and even with the someone else absent and silent and possibly dead, there wasn't room for anyone else.
You have no children, though you wanted them. The timeline on that was becoming its own quiet ache, the kind you didn't prod too often.
You have a job that pays the bills and not much else โ admin in an office building that smells of carpet cleaner and recycled air, the kind of work that requires enough of your brain to stop it from wandering but not enough to satisfy it.
You have an apartment that is functional and yours and that you have tried to make cozy, with books on every surface and plants that are mostly surviving and a kitchen you actually cook in.
It is not the house. It is not the house you told Simon about when you were sixteen and lying in his back garden on a summer evening, staring up at the sky.
No birthday card for five years now.
Five years of the particular, specific silence that was different from all the silences before, because the silences before had been interrupted. Annually, reliably, he had broken them.
Five years of nothing had the texture of conclusion. Of a chapter closing. And you had reached the point โ slowly, painfully, with the kind of acceptance that doesn't feel like acceptance but feels like exhaustion โ where you were fairly certain Simon Riley was dead.
Your heart ached for your best friend in the low, constant way of grief that has become so familiar it's almost structural.
You carried it the way you carried other things, quietly, with your spine straight.
Which is why you are sitting across from a man named โ it didn't matter, it really didn't matter what his name was โ on what your colleague Debbie had described as 'a perfectly nice date with a perfectly nice man' and trying to remember what it felt like to be interested in your own life.
The man sitting across from you was the complete opposite of Simon Riley.
He was trim and well-dressed and had the kind of face that was handsome in a way that required no effort to appreciate and inspired no particular feeling from you.
He had been talking for, by your reckoning, forty-seven minutes. In that time he had covered: his career (impressive, in his telling), his car (expensive, in his telling), his last holiday (exotic, in his telling), and his general philosophy on modern dating (nuanced, in his telling).
He had not asked about your job. He had not asked about your books or the one peeking out of your handbag; the one he'd glanced at and not commented on. He had not asked if your pasta was nice, which it was, actually, genuinely nice, and you'd have told him so if he'd asked. He had not asked you almost anything, come to think of it.
Simon Riley, who spoke perhaps a tenth as many words as this man, had always asked.
Simon Riley had always wanted to know. Not because it was polite. Because he actually, genuinely, in the particular way of people who care about very few things very deeply โ wanted to know.
You excused yourself to use the bathroom and stood at the sink running cold water over your wrists and looking at your own reflection, and you thought: this is fine.
This is a perfectly nice evening with a perfectly nice man. This is what moving forward looks like. This is what being a person in the world, a person with a life and a future and reasonable expectations of company, looks like.
You dried your hands. You went back to the table. He had ordered himself another drink without asking if you wanted anything.
You finished your pasta and smiled at appropriate intervals and thought about Simon Riley and felt, as you so often felt, quietly furious at him for being gone.
โ โฆ โ
The birthday card arrived on a Thursday morning.
You almost missed it entirely โ it was tucked between a pizza delivery leaflet and something from your energy supplier, the cream envelope almost camouflaged by the mundane. You shuffled through the post on autopilot and then stopped.
Your name, in handwriting you would have recognised anywhere, would have recognised in your sleep, had recognised in your bones for thirty years.
You sat down on the bottom stair. Your legs suddenly uneasy.
Your hands were not steady.
The envelope opened. The card was white. Plain. Almost generic.
Inside:
Happy Birthday, sunshine.
I'm sorry it's been so long.
I'll explain everything.
Come, if you want to.
If you can stand the sight of me.
Below that, an address. Three towns over. A postcode you didn't recognise.
And then, at the bottom, the way it had always been at the bottom: S.
You sat on the bottom stair for a very long time.
Then you got up, went to your room, and started thinking about what to wear.
โ โฆ โ
You plucked up the nerve to go on a Saturday.
The drive took forty minutes and you spent most of it trying to manage yourself โ talking yourself through reasonable expectations (he is alive, that is enough, start there), warning yourself against things you could not control (the five years, the silence, the way your hands were doing that unsteady thing again), cataloguing everything practical (the address, the map).
The street was quiet. Semi-rural, the kind of neighbourhood that sits between things โ between town and country, between the ordinary and the aspirational. The houses were spread out, set back from the road, each with its own front garden and its own character.
You parked. You looked at the address. You looked up.
And you stopped breathing.
It was a beautiful house.
Large, substantial and solid, the kind of house that had been built to last. White painted render, clean and bright in the afternoon light. A white picket fence surrounding the front garden, which was full of flowers. Roses climbing the gatepost. Lavender edging the path. Foxgloves and dahlias and great loose clusters of something purple you couldn't name from here. The kind of garden that had been planted with intention, tended with care, left to be a little wild in the best way.
A porch. And a porch swing, painted white, with a yellow cushion on it.
And flying from the corner of the roof, bright against the blue afternoon sky: the Union flag.
You sat very still in the driver's seat.
You were sixteen years old. It was a summer evening and you were lying in Simon's back garden on an old sleeping bag, looking up at the sky. He was beside you in the way he was always beside you โ solid, quiet, taking up exactly the right amount of space. You'd been talking about the future the way teenagers do, in great floating hypotheticals that feel more like weather than plans.
"What kind of house?" he'd asked. He asked follow-up questions always, quietly, wanting the specifics. It was one of the things about him you loved.
And you'd described it. A big house, not ostentatious but real โ space for books and for people and for a garden that did what it wanted within reason. A white fence, because you'd always liked them. A porch with somewhere to sit. A flag, because you were โ despite everything โ proud of where you were from.
Simon had been quiet for a long moment.
"Okay," he'd said. Just: okay.
You had thought he was humouring you.
You had not thought โ you had not let yourself think โ what it might mean, that he was going to do anything about it.
You got out of the car. Your legs were not entirely reliable. You held the gate and walked up the path โ lavender brushing your hand where it grew close, the scent of it too perfect, almost staged โ and you stopped at the foot of the porch steps.
The door opened.
He had to duck.
That was the first thing you noticed. The physical fact of him, the sheer size of him, his shoulders nearly touching the doorframe on both sides simultaneously, the automatic dip of his head as he stepped through onto the porch.
He straightened.
The afternoon light landed on him and you had to spend a moment recalibrating, because the last time you'd seen Simon Riley he had been seventeen years old with sawdust on his boots and a train ticket in his hand, and this man โ
This man.
The white button-down shirt was simple, the sleeves rolled to the elbow, and from his left wrist to well past the roll of the sleeve his forearm was dark with ink โ a sleeve of tattoos, intricate and considered. A whole geography of imagery that you couldn't read from here but would, you thought, take time to learn.
His right wrist carried a watch. His black slacks were fitted close enough that you could see the muscle of his thighs pulling the fabric with every shift of his weight, and his shoes โ loafers, black with gold buckles, completely unexpected and somehow exactly right โ were precise.
His hair. A dark sandy blonde, longer than military specification presumably allowed and slicked back from his face, which meant you could see all of it, his whole face; the angles that had sharpened from boy to man, the jaw, the set of his brow, and those eyes. Those brown eyes that had been watching you since you were four years old and had never, not once, looked at you with anything less than complete attention.
He was raking those eyes over you now. Slowly. With the same quality he'd always had โ that comprehensive, unhurried assessment that somehow never felt like being measured โ and his hands were in his pockets and he was standing there like that, on the porch he'd built or bought or arranged specifically around a description you'd given him at sixteen.
He looked like something out of a magazine and like Simon all at once.
You were going to murder him.
"Hi, sunshine."
His voice. Lower than you remembered, rougher, carrying all the years he'd lived since you last heard it. That Manchester accent โ still there, unmistakably, that warm northern flatness underneath everything, the vowels shaped by a city, by a street, by a particular kind of upbringing that no amount of training had entirely smoothed out.
That nickname, in that voice, in that low, deliberate way he'd always said it: like you were his.
Like it was a prayer.
You opened your mouth. And you closed it. And you looked at him โ this enormous, tattooed, stupidly handsome man who had stood on your mother's doorstep at twelve years old with bruises he didn't mention, who had kissed your cheek at thirteen and broken Ryan Marsh's nose at fourteen and waved goodbye from a train platform at seventeen and then sent you birthday cards from the edges of the world for a decade and then stopped for five years โ
"Five years," you said. Your voice was very quiet.
Something moved in his face.
"I-,"
"I thought you were dead." You snapped cutting him off.
"I figured you wouldโve."
"Simon."
"I know, sunshine." He said it the same way he'd always said things he couldn't argue with โ not deflecting, not dismissing, just absorbing. The Manchester vowels in his voice like a hand on your shoulder. "I'll explain everything. I promise. All of it. Whatever you want to know."
You looked at him.
He looked at you.
The afternoon settled around the house, around the garden that was your garden in your own sixteen-year-old description, around the flag and the porch swing and the lavender and all of it, and the distance between you on the path and him on the porch steps was perhaps four feet and thirty years and five years of silence and a whole life of choosing not to say the one true thing.
"You built me the house?" you asked, whispering it. Like you were afraid to say it.
He was quiet for a moment. Then, "Bought it. Had the garden done the way you said."
"Simon." Your heart ached.
"You said lavender at the edges," he said. His voice was completely level. "You said a porch with somewhere to sit. You said you wanted to see the flag from the garden."
You pressed your hand to your mouth.
The rage was still there โ it was not going anywhere quickly. The five years of it, the grief of it โ but underneath it, something else. Something that had been there since you were four years old at a preschool art table, larger and quieter and more permanent than anything else you'd ever felt.
"You were sixteen," he said. As though this explained it. "You told me what you wanted. I just..." He stopped. Started again. "I wanted to be enough first. I wanted to have what you needed."
There was a long silence. A bee moved through the lavender. Somewhere a few streets away, a lawnmower hummed.
"Come inside," Simon said. "I'll make you tea. And I'll tell you everything."
You looked at him on the porch of the house he'd built you from a word, and you thought: you absolute idiot. You wonderful, impossible, infuriating man. You thought I'd stopped. You thought thirty years of this was something you could be enough for eventually, like it was a bar to clear, like there was a version of you I was waiting on instead of just โ
Instead of just you. Always just you.
The lavender brushed your hand again. You walked up the steps and he looked down at you with those brown eyes that had never once left you.
"Hi, Simon," you said.
Something happened in his face. Something opened.
"Hi, sunshine," he said, his hand coming to the small of your back to guide you inside.
He made the tea.
You stood in the kitchen of a house that smelled of fresh paint and cedar and something faintly floral from the garden drifting through the open window over the sink, and you watched Simon Riley move around it like he'd always lived here โ filling the kettle, finding the mugs without opening the wrong cupboard, knowing where the teabags were โ and you thought: how long. How long has he been here, in this house he bought for you, learning where everything lives, waiting.
You sat at the kitchen table. It was a good table, heavy oak, the kind built to last and you ran your thumb along the grain of it and tried to arrange your feelings into some kind of order and failed.
Simon set the mug in front of you. Milk in last, the way you'd always taken it, which he knew because he'd made you approximately four thousand cups of tea over the course of your lives. He sat down across from you, his own mug between his big hands, and looked at you.
You looked back.
The kitchen light was warm and it caught the angles of his face. The jaw, the brow, the slight crook in his nose that was new, or newer, the result of something you didn't know about and weren't sure you wanted to.
He was watching you with that particular quality of attention he'd always had. Complete. Patient. Like you were the only thing in the room worth looking at.
"You're not wearing your glasses," he said.
You blinked. Of all the things. "No."
"Contacts?"
"For about ten years now, yes."
He was quiet for a moment, studying your face with that same unhurried attention, "I missed them."
"You missed my glasses?" You say with the deadpan tone you'd perfected over the years.
"Tortoiseshell ones," he said. "Used to push them up your nose when you were concentrating." He took a gulp of his tea, Adam's apple bobbing when he swallowed.
You stared at him. Eighteen years. Eighteen years of distance and war and God knows what else, and he missed your glasses. "Simon."
"Just saying."
"You are unbelievable." You scoff.
"The contacts suit you," he said, and the corner of his mouth moved โ barely, almost nothing, but you'd spent your whole life reading that face and you caught it. "Everything suits you. But I liked the glasses."
"Stop it." You snap.
"Stop what?"
"Whatever that is," you said, and you pointed at his face, at the not-there-almost-smile, at the quality of his voice when he said everything suits you, at all of it. "You don't get to do that. You've been โ Simon, you've been gone. You've been gone for eighteen years and for five of them, I thought you were dead." Your voice stayed steady, which surprised you. You'd expected it to crack on that. "So you don't get to walk out onto your porch looking like โ like that โ and tell me you missed my glasses and flirt at me like no time has passed."
He listened without interrupting. He always had โ it was one of the things about him, the way he gave you the whole space of what you were saying before he entered it.
"You're right," he nodded.
"I know I'm right." Your spine straightened.
"I owe you an explanation."
"You owe me considerably more than that, Simon Riley, but yes. An explanation would be a start."
He wrapped both hands around his mug again and looked at you across the table and there was something in his face that was not the blank-nothing face, was not the armour he'd worn since he was twelve years old but something that was quieter and more exposed and a great deal more frightening because of it.
"Not here," he said.
You frowned. "What?"
"I don't want to do it like this. Sat in a kitchen." He glanced around the room briefly, as though orienting himself. "Come to dinner with me tomorrow night."
"What Iโ"
"The Grill on Merton Street."
You went very still.
The Grill on Merton Street. You hadn't been in years โ not since you'd moved away from the area, not since things had shifted and the rituals of your old life had quietly been replaced by other things.
But you knew it. You knew every table in it. The way the light came through the front windows on a Sunday, the smell of it โ roasted meat and old wood and the particular warmth of a place that had been feeding families for decades.
Your mother had loved it. Your father used to order the same thing every time and be pleased about it every time, and you and Simon had sat across from each other in the corner booth with the sticky laminated menus and kicked each other under the table and laughed.
"That's still open?" you managed.
"Had a look earlier this week," he said. "Still there. New owners but the same building. Same corner booth."
You looked at him. He looked at you. Outside, through the open window, a late bird was making itself known in the lavender.
"Fine," you said. "Dinner. Tomorrow. And you're going to tell me everything." you struck at him with a serious face.
"Everything," he agreed.
"I mean it, Simon. All of it."
"I know you do."
You drank your tea. It was exactly right. The temperature, the strength, the milk ratio and you hated him a little bit for that. For the fact that he still knew, that across seventeen years and God knows how many miles he still knew exactly how you took your tea, and he'd made it correctly on the first attempt without asking, and you were absolutely not going to cry about that.
You were not.
โ โฆ โ
You dressed carefully.
Not because you were trying to impress him.
You told yourself this firmly, standing in front of your wardrobe in the room you'd taken in the local B&B โ you'd booked a night, not knowing how long this might take, not knowing what state you'd be in for the drive home afterwards โ and you told yourself that you were simply dressing appropriately for a dinner at a decent restaurant.
That was all.
That was the entirety of it.
The dress was deep green. Fitted through the waist, falling to just below the knee, with a neckline that was elegant rather than dramatic.
You'd bought it for a work event two years ago and it had lived in your wardrobe since, waiting for an occasion that felt worth it. You put your hair up โ not elaborately, just neatly, the kind of arrangement that looked effortless and had taken twenty minutes โ and you wore the small gold earrings that had been your grandmother's. Low heels. The good handbag. A slick of red on your mouth that you almost wiped off twice before deciding to leave it.
You were not trying to impress him.
You were absolutely trying to impress him.
He was waiting outside The Grill when your taxi pulled up, standing on the pavement with his hands in his pockets. The air around him relaxed and easy. An anchored stillness, like a man who'd learned to wait and had made peace with it. He has the same dark slacks as yesterday, same loafers with the gold buckles, but the shirt tonight was black.
A deep, clean black that made his shoulders look approximately the width of a doorway, which was in fact an accurate assessment โ and he'd left the top button undone. His hair was the same: pushed back, dark sandy blonde curling at the nape of his neck and catching the amber of the streetlights.
He saw you get out of the taxi.
He went very still. Completely, suddenly, entirely present in a way that landed on you like a hand against your sternum. Under your heartbeat.
You crossed the pavement toward him and his eyes moved over you โ slowly, comprehensively, that same rake of attention he'd given you yesterday on the porch steps, only this time there was nothing restrained about what it did to your pulse.
He eyed you the same way he used to look at the extra cuts of slow roasted beef your mother added to his plate every time he joined you for a Sunday roast after church.
"Hi," you said.
"Hi, sunshine." His voice was low. The rough Manchester sending tingles down your spine.
He opened the door for you.
The Grill smelled exactly the same.
Roasted meat and warmed bread and old wood and something faintly of candle wax. It hit you the moment you stepped through the door and you had to stand still for just a second, just one second, to absorb the weight of it.
Your father's coat on the hook by the door. Your mother's reading glasses going into her bag as the menus arrived. Simon across from you, fourteen and fifteen and sixteen, his big hands wrapped around a Coke glass, his eyes on you under that careful brow.
The layout had shifted slightly โ new owners, as Simon had said โ but the bones of it were the same. The dark wood panelling. The low warm lighting. The tables set with proper linen and actual candles in glass holders. And in the back left corner was the booth.
Simon's hand was at the small of your back as the host led you through. A light touch, barely there, the kind of thing that could be merely courteous and was absolutely not merely courteous.
You said nothing about it.
You were almost at the booth when a voice said, "Well. I don't believe it."
You turned.
Margaret and Gerald Howarth.
Margaret had been your mother's friend since before you were born โ a small, bright-eyed woman who had somehow barely aged in two decades. Her silver hair cut the same way it had always been, her husband a large, genial man beside her with a napkin already tucked into his collar. They'd been eating here since before you were born too, you suspected. Some people were simply woven into the furniture of a place.
"Margaret," you said, and you felt a genuine, warm rush of it. Of being seen by someone who had known you as a child, who had watched you grow up, who carried that particular knowledge of you that only people of a certain generation can hold. She was already rising halfway from her seat, her hand extended, and you took it and she covered it with her other one, the way she always had.
"We heard you were back in the area," she said โ which was interesting, since you'd only arrived yesterday, but news apparently still moved at its old speed around here. Her bright eyes moved to Simon, and something in them softened with recognition and surprise in equal measure. "And Simon Riley. My goodness."
"Mrs Howarth." Simon's voice was respectful, quieter than usual, and you noticed โ because you noticed everything about him โ that he straightened fractionally. Not stiffly. Just the particular adjustment of a man in the presence of someone he'd known when he was young and unguarded.
"Look at the size of you," Gerald said, not unkindly, staring up at Simon with the frank appreciation of one large man for another. "What are they feeding you?"
"Gerald," Margaret scolded mildly.
"It's a compliment." He shrugged.
Simon almost smiled. "Good to see you, Mr Howarth."
Margaret was looking between the two of you with the expression of a woman who had been quietly observing people her entire life and drawing accurate conclusions from very little evidence. "Are you together?" she asked, with the particular directness that came with age and with having known you since you were in a pushchair.
"We're having dinner," you said carefully.
Margaret's expression said, quite clearly, that she had heard this and had also heard everything it was not saying. "Well," she said, patting your hand once more before releasing it, "it's lovely to see you both. You always did belong together, the pair of you. I said that to your mother once, do you know. I said those twoโ"
"It was lovely seeing you, Margaret," you said, with great warmth and only mild desperation.
She laughed, a bright, pleased sound and settled back into her seat.
As you turned to follow the host the rest of the way to the booth, you were almost certain you heard Gerald say, to his wife, "told you" in a tone of quiet marital satisfaction.
Simon was very carefully not reacting to any of this. You were very carefully not looking at him.
You saw two others you knew before you reached the booth.
Kim Ashworth, who had been in your form in Year Ten and who looked essentially the same as she had in school except that she had a baby on her hip and a husband trailing behind her with a changing bag.
She stopped mid-step when she saw you, did a small, delighted double take, said oh my God twice, and then looked at Simon in a way that was extremely uncomplicated in its appreciation before remembering the husband with the changing bag. There were promises exchanged to catch up properly, phone numbers that would probably not be used, genuine warmth on both sides.
And then at the bar, perched on a stool with a whisky, Dave Pearce โ who had played alongside Simon on the secondary school rugby team and who greeted him with the particular vocabulary of men who knew each other at fifteen and have not changed as much as they think.
There was a brief, loud exchange that involved at least one shoulder-clap that could have knocked a smaller man sideways, and then Dave shook your hand too and told Simon he was punching. Which Simon received without expression and you tried your hardest not to laugh, biting your lip.
Finally the corner booth. You slid in. Simon folded himself into the seat across from you, the table scaled to ordinary human beings and therefore slightly absurd against the size of him, his knees bracketing it, his shoulders blocking the view of the room behind him entirely.
The menus came.
They were not laminated anymore โ proper printed card, changed seasonally, the kind that meant the new owners had ambitions. But the roast was still on. The proper Sunday roast, the one your father used to order when you could afford to.
"Same corner," Simon said quietly.
"Same corner," you agreed.
He was looking at you across the table the way he used to look at you across this table, except that now his face was older and larger and had been to places that had clearly asked things of it. The look was different in its texture. Deeper, maybe. Older in the same way he was older. Like it had more weight behind it from all the years of being carried.
"You said everything," you reminded him. "All of it."
"I know."
"So." You gestured for him to start.
He set his menu down. Looked at you. And then he started talking.
He told it the way he told everything โ without embellishment, without drama, in the flat, precise language of a man who had learned to communicate facts and trusted the facts to carry the weight without decoration.
He'd gone in at seventeen and he'd been good at it. Not surprising. He was built for the structure of it, for the clarity of having a purpose and a unit and a chain of things that made sense.
He'd moved up fast โ faster than he let on in the cards he'd sent you, which had been careful, he explained, deliberately careful, because the more you knew the more you might worry. Which, you pointed out, had not been his decision to make. He didn't argue with that.
Task Force 141 came later. Years later, after deployments that he summarised in a sentence each and you understood enough from his face to know that each sentence was doing the work of much longer things.
He was a lieutenant now. He said it the way he said most things about himself, flatly, without vanity, presented as information. He had certain freedoms now that he hadn't had before, certain ability to make choices about where he went and when and what he did with the things the years had given him.
You both ordered your food.
"And the five years?" you asked, sipping your cocktail the waitress had brought over.
He was quiet for a moment, he stared at his San Miguel pint, the condensation sliding down the glass. Your food had arrived at some point during the waiting, while Simon collected his thoughts.
He picked up his fork and then set it down again.
"There was a man," Simon said.
Something about the way he said it made you put your fork down too.
"He ran drugs. Major operation, international โ I won't go into all of it." He said this without flinching, looking at you steadily, not softening it. You'd always appreciated that about him โ the way he treated your intelligence as a given. "After I escaped him, he decided to make it personal. He went after the people Iโ" He stopped. Chose the word carefully. "The people I was connected to."
The candle in the glass holder between you threw warm, unsteady light across his face.
"He killed them," Simon said. "My brother. Tommy's family." A pause that cost him something; you could see it cost him. "My Mother."
The restaurant continued around you โ the murmur of other tables, the clink of cutlery, someone laughing softly near the bar โ and you sat very still.
"Oh Simon," you whispered, you could feel the way your face formed the sympathy.
"I'm alright." He said it the way he'd always said it, the Manchester flat and absolute. The way that meant; don't make it bigger than I can hold right now. You knew that voice. You honoured it.
"He knew about you," Simon said and you froze. "That was the other thing. He'd done his research." His jaw shifted slightly. "As long as he was alive, you weren't safe. If I'd contacted you, properly contacted you, kept the thread going the way I wanted to, it would have given him a cleaner line. A more reliable way to reach me."
You understood the logic of it. You understood it clearly and immediately in the part of your brain that processed information. The other part โ the part that had sat on the bottom stair with a birthday card after five years of silence, the part that had thought past tense โ that part was going to take considerably longer.
"So you cut me off," you said. Not as an accusation. As a fact, laid down. You were starting to understand the shape of it.
"To keep you safe. Yes."
"Without telling me why." You sighed but you knew you were being unreasonable, but you hoped he would let you for a little longer.
"If I'd told you why, you'd have known there was a threat. And you'd haveโ" He stopped. The corner of his mouth moved, something that was not quite a smile and not quite not one. "You'd have done something about it. Gone looking. Made noise."
"I would not haveโ" You stopped, because you would have. You absolutely would have. You'd spent thirty years being completely unable to sit on the sidelines where Simon Riley was concerned, and the knowledge that someone was threatening him would have made you entirely unreasonable. "That'sโ" you huffed.
"Yeah," he said.
"You could have found a wayโ"
"There wasn't one. Not one that was safe." His voice was very level. "I went through every option, love. I promise you. Every one."
The word arrived quietly, without ceremony.
Love.
He'd never called you that โ not in thirty years, not in all the time and all the familiarity of what you were to each other. He said it the way he said everything that mattered: without preamble, without dressing it up, laid down like the fact it was.
"And now?" you asked. Your voice was quite steady. Steadier than you felt.
"He's dead." No elaboration. None needed. The flat Manchester vowels carrying the weight of it cleanly, without mess. "And you're safe. And Iโ" He looked at you across the table, across the candle and the white linen. "I bought the house," he said. "I've spent a while making it what it is. Making if perfect. I saved up for years. The 141 pays well when you get to a certain level and I wasn't spending it on anything else."
"For years," you repeated, feeling a shiver rack up your spine and your toes go numb.
"Since I was about twenty." He said this without apparent embarrassment, as though it were the most natural thing in the world to spend fifteen years saving money to buy a woman a house from a description she'd given you at sixteen years old. "Took a while to find the right one that wasnโt too far from your parents. The lavender took three growing seasons to look like it did when you pulled up."
Three growing seasons.
He had planted the lavender three years ago. He had stood in a garden three towns from where you lived and planted lavender along a path because a sixteen-year-old girl had mentioned it lying on her back in his garden thirty years ago, and he had tended it for three years, and he had waited.
"Simon Riley," you said.
"It's got room for your books Sunshine, built the shelves myself." His lips quirked up at the corners at your flabbergasted expression.
"You are the mostโ" You stopped. Started again. "Do you have any idea what the past five years have felt like? Do you have any idea what Iโ" Your voice did the thing you'd been preventing it from doing, cracked at the edge of the sentence like a plate under too much weight. You stopped. Pressed your lips together. "I grieved you. I sat in my flat and I genuinely, actually grieved you and decided you were dead. I had โ Simon, I had a plan for getting through it. I was managing it."
"I know."
"Don't say I know." you snapped sounding more like a bratty child than angry.
"I'm sorry." And this was different. This was not the automatic I know, the absorbing of your anger. This was something he said the way he said very few things โ carefully, with full weight behind it. His eyes on yours across the table. "I'm sorry for the five years. I'm sorry I couldn't find another way. I'm sorry you were on your own with it." A pause. "I'm sorry it took me this long to have something worth coming back with."
"The house is notโ" You stopped. "You didn't need to buy me a house, Simon. I didn't needโ"
"I needed to," he said. Simply. "I needed to know I was coming back with something real. Something that wasn't just me turning up with nothing after all that time, asking you to โ to acceptโ" He moved his hand across the table, and his fingers stopped just short of yours. Not touching. Close. "Asking you to take me as I was. I needed it to be enough. I needed there to be something I could give you that wasโ"
"Simon." Your voice was very quiet.
"I know it's notโ"
"Simon." You turned your hand over on the table. Just that. The small, deliberate movement of turning your palm up.
He looked at it. Then he looked at you. Then, slowly, he put his hand in yours โ his enormous, careful, tattooed hand. Not quite the one that had carried your bag through every corridor of secondary school and pulled you up off the pavement after Daniel Holt and held you on the platform at the train station, but this one now and his fingers closed around yours and he held on.
"I only ever wanted you," you said softly.
"Sunshine-"
"You were always worth it," you cut him off. And then, because it was time โ because it had been time for approximately thirty years and you were done waiting for the right moment when the right moment had repeatedly failed to arrive โ "You were always enough. You were always the thing I was โ Simon, you have always been the only one I wanted. Exactly as you are."
He was very still.
"I didn't tell you on the platform," you said. "I should have. I've thought about it every day since."
"So have I," he said.
The candle between you flickered in some movement of air from the kitchen, and in the warm unsteady light his face was open in a way you had waited thirty years to see. His hand was warm and sure around yours, and from the other side of the restaurant you were almost certain you heard Margaret Howarth say something to Gerald in a satisfied undertone.
"You planted the lavender," you grinned.
"Three years ago." He finally smiles back at you, it was crooked and uneven and you loved it.
"You are," you said carefully, "the most ridiculous man I have ever known." You shook your head still grinning.
"Missed you too, sunshine," he smirked.
Dinner ended the way the best dinners end โ not with a definitive conclusion but with a gradual, reluctant unwinding, the kind where both people keep finding one more thing to say, one more thread to pull, because the alternative is standing up and the evening becoming past tense.
You ordered dessert.
Neither of you particularly wanted it but you both ordered it, and you both knew why, and neither of you said so. The chocolate brownie was very good. Simon ate his methodically, the way he ate everything, and at one point looked up and caught you watching him and said nothing.
The candle between you had burned down to a stub by the time the bill came.
He paid. You protested on principle. He gave you a look that had not changed at all since he was fourteen years old โ flat, certain, faintly amused โ and handed the card to the waiter without further discussion.
"That's notโ" you started.
"Next time," he said.
Next time. You let it sit there between you, warm and presumptuous and everything you wanted.
Outside, the evening had cooled.
The last of the summer still holding in the air, the kind of September evening that felt like a concession, like the year wasn't ready to be done.
The street was quiet for a Saturday, just a few couples moving between the restaurants and a group of lads outside the pub further down having a smoke. The amber of the streetlights made everything look like something worth remembering.
Simon stood beside you on the pavement, close enough that his arm brushed yours when he turned to look down the street, and you were very aware of the warmth of him and the black shirt and the lavender you couldn't smell from here but could somehow still feel in your hands.
"Walk with me a bit," he said. Not a question, not quite. He'd always done that โ phrased invitations as though the outcome were already agreed, as though he simply assumed you'd say yes because you almost always did.
"Alright."
He fell into step beside you, and for a little while you just walked โ past the wine bar with its fairy lights, past the old library that had become a gin distillery at some point in the last decade, past the post office that had been there since before either of you were born. You talked about small things. Easy things. The kind of conversation that runs alongside the real one underneath.
Then he stopped.
You stopped too.
Simon looked down at you. His hands were in his pockets. That brown gaze of his moved over your face in the way it had been moving over your face all evening โ like he was cataloguing it, like he was making up for lost time in the looking.
"Dance with me," he said.
You blinked. "What?"
He tilted his head, "Come dancing with me."
You stared at him.
Simon Riley, who had sat against the wall at every school disco you'd ever attended, arms folded, watching everyone else with the expression of a man conducting a private risk assessment.
Simon Riley, who you had never, in thirty years of knowing him, seen voluntarily approach a dance floor.
"You don't dance," you said.
"No," he agreed. "But you do."
The simplicity of it landed somewhere very central.
You do.
As though that were reason enough. As though your enjoyment of a thing were sufficient justification for him to walk into it without hesitation.
Which, you supposed, when it came to Simon, it always had been.
"Alright," you said, for the second time in ten minutes.
His hand found the small of your back again, that same light, deliberate touch from inside the restaurant and he guided you down the street.
Simon said you weren't far, when you heard it.
The particular sound of a Domino's box. The slight crinkle of a carrier bag. And then your mother's voice, carrying across the quiet street in the way it always had โ warm and clear and entirely without volume control.
"Oh honey! We thought - oh!"
"Oh fuck," you cursed.
You said it very quietly. Not quietly enough. Simon chuckled under his breath.
Your parents were coming along the pavement from the direction of the only car park around here โ your father in his weekend coat, your mother in the blue one she'd had for fifteen years. A Domino's pizza box balanced in her arms and a carrier bag hanging from your father's hand.
Movie night. Of course. They still did it every other Saturday, had done since you were small, and of course they would do it tonight of all the Saturday nights in the entire calendar.
Your mother's face when she saw you was pure, unguarded delight โ the face she always made when she encountered you unexpectedly, as though each time were still a pleasant surprise. Then her gaze moved, naturally and automatically, to the man standing beside you with his hand at the small of your back.
The delight didn't disappear. It did something more complicated.
"Oh honey," she said again, but differently this time. Softer. Her voice going somewhere else entirely. "Simon?"
The Domino's box dipped. Your father caught it with the reflexes of a man who had been catching things your mother nearly dropped for forty years.
Simon had gone still beside you. Not that controlled, present stillness he had, the one that wasn't tension but something adjacent to it. He was looking at your mother with an expression you couldn't fully read from the side, but you could see the line of his jaw, and it was careful.
"Mrsโ" he started.
"Don't you Mrs me," your mother said. Her voice was not angry. That was the thing โ you'd prepared yourself, in the split second between seeing them and now, for anger, or for the brisk, self-protective coolness she used sometimes when she'd been frightened. But it wasn't that. It was something that had tears in it, which was considerably worse to witness.
She handed the pizza box to your father without looking at him โ he took it with the silent competence of long practice โ and she crossed the pavement in four short steps and she put her arms around Simon Riley.
He was so much larger than her. He had always been larger than her, even at fifteen when he'd eaten her shepherd's pie at the kitchen table and been careful to seem like it was casual and not like he was starving. Even when she gave him seconds and he looked like he would beg for thirds.
But now it was almost absurd, the smallness of her against the width of him, and he stood there for just a fraction of a second โ that fraction where you could see him recalibrating, receiving something he hadn't prepared for โ and then his arms came around her and he held on.
Your mother was crying. Small, quiet sounds, the kind she made when she was trying not to. Her face was pressed against his chest and her hands gripped the back of his black shirt and she said, muffled and with great feeling, "You absolute boy."
Simon said nothing. His eyes, over the top of your mother's head, found yours.
You had to look away. The street was very interesting. The lamppost in particular.
You bit into your lip.
Your father appeared at your shoulder.
He was a quiet man, always had been. The kind of steady, observant presence that took things in without making a production of the taking in. He stood beside you with the pizza box over one arm and the carrier bag in the other hand and watched his wife hold the boy who had eaten at their table for a decade, and he said, very quietly, to you,
"Well. He's not dead then."
"No Dad," you managed. "He's not dead."
"Good," your father said.
As though this settled it. As though the entirety of the past five years of your grief and his, because he had grieved Simon too in his quiet way, in the way of a man who doesn't say things aloud but feels them thoroughly. He looked at Simon over the top of your mother's head and gave him a single, deliberate nod. The kind that meant; we'll talk. The kind that meant; I have things to say to you. The kind that also, underneath both of those, meant; I'm so glad son.
Simon received the nod with equal gravity, which was exactly right.
Your mother finally pulled back. She held Simon by the arms โ or tried to, her hands not quite making it around the circumference of them โ and looked up at him with red eyes and the particular expression of a woman who has a great deal to say and is choosing, for now, not to say most of it.
"You'll come for dinner," she said. Not a question. The same tone she'd used on him at fifteen and apparently intended to continue using indefinitely. "Sunday. Proper dinner. Not a restaurant. Mine."
"Yes," Simon said. Immediately. Without hesitation.
"Good." She released his arms and reached up and patted his cheek once, firmly, the way you might with someone who had done something frustrating and beloved in equal measure.
Then she turned to you, and her expression did something complicated and warm and knowing, and she didn't say any of the things she was clearly thinking, which you appreciated deeply.
What she said instead was: "Don't stay out too late. You're thirty-five, not seventeen."
"Mum." You scolded.
"I'm just saying." She shrugged.
"We're going dancing," you told her, with the energy of someone redirecting a conversation through sheer momentum.
Your mother looked at Simon. Simon looked at your mother. Something passed between them that was private and thirty years old and not yours to have.
"Of course you are," she said.
Your father passed the Domino's box back to your mother, and said, "Right then. We'll leave you to it." He looked at Simon one more time. "Sunday," he confirmed.
"Sunday," Simon said.
Your parents moved off down the pavement.
Your mother looked back once โ just once โ and her face when she did was the face you'd seen her wear at your primary school nativity and at your GCSE results and on the morning you'd gone to university; the particular face of a woman watching her child be happy and feeling the full, complicated, loving weight of it.
Then she turned back to your father and said something you couldn't hear, and his hand found her shoulder as they walked, and they rounded the corner and were gone.
You stood on the pavement in the September evening and breathed.
Beside you, Simon was also very carefully just standing there.
"She cried on me," he said, after a moment.
"Yes."
"Didn't expect that."
You turned to look at him. He was looking at the corner your parents had turned, and his face had the quality it sometimes had when something had reached him โ not visibly, not dramatically, just in that particular stillness that meant something had got through.
"She cried about you," you told him. "When you stopped writing. Three years ago โ there were several times, actually, but three years ago was the worst. She held me in her kitchen and we bothโ" You stopped. Managed the next part carefully. "She loves you too, Simon. She always did. You were at our table every other night for years."
He was quiet for a moment. Something moved in his jaw. "I know," he said. And this time the I know was different from all the other times he'd said it tonight โ heavier, and private.
"You agreed to Sunday dinner," you giggled.
"Of course I agreed to Sunday dinner," he said knowing full well he would have been stupid not to and gotten an earful from your mother.
Simon offered you his hand.
Not at the small of your back this time. His hand, palm up, in the space between you. Old-fashioned and deliberate.
You put yours in it.
"Come on then," he said. "Let's go dancing."
There was, as it turned out, only one place to go dancing in this town on a Saturday night if you meant actual dancing โ the kind with a proper floor and music with a real structure to it.
It was not a club.
It was not a bar with a cleared space near the speaker.
It was the old church hall on Callow Street, which had been hosting the Saturday Evening Social Dance since before either of you were born, and which Simon seemed to know about with the specificity of a man who had done his research.
"A dance hall," you said, standing outside it. Through the tall, thin windows the warm light was visible, and the sound โ strings, a proper band, something with a waltz rhythm that made the windows hum faintly. "You're taking me to a dance hall."
"Only place with a floor."
"Simon, this is a โ there will be pensioners in there." you said quietly.
"There'll be a dance floor," he looked down at you. "And you said yes." he shrugged but looked smug.
He pushed the door open and held it, and because you had in fact said yes, and because the music through the door sounded genuinely lovely, and because you were still holding his hand from the pavement, you went in.
The church hall smelled of floor polish and tea. Fairy lights were strung along the rafters โ someone's addition, not the original fixtures, and they made the whole space amber and soft.
Round tables lined the edges, most of them occupied by couples in their sixties and seventies and eighties, a few younger faces dotted among them, everyone dressed with the particular care of people who still believed an evening out was worth dressing for.
On the small stage at the far end, a four-piece band was working through something in three-four time with the ease of musicians who had played together for years.
And at the edge of the floor, clipboard in hand, wearing the same expression of organised authority she'd worn every PE lesson for fifteen years was Mrs Valerie Croft.
She was smaller than you remembered. Or perhaps you were simply larger.
She'd retired at some point โ the hair was fully silver now rather than streaked โ but the posture was identical: spine straight, chin up, the bearing of a woman who had spent decades telling teenagers to stand properly and had eventually simply become the embodiment of the instruction.
She looked up from her clipboard as you approached and her eyes moved from you to Simon, and to her credit, she didn't miss a step.
"Well," she tilted her chin up to meet his eyes, "Riley."
"Miss," Simon said. Which was technically incorrect given that she had a ring on her finger and had for as long as you'd known her, but you suspected it was because he'd called her Miss in secondary school the way you had. "Mrs Croft. Sorry. We were passing andโ " He paused, which was unlike him. "Is there any chance we could crash it?"
Mrs Croft looked at him. She looked at you. She looked at your joined hands with the expression of a woman who had supervised enough teenagers to recognise a development when she saw one.
"Can you behave yourselves?" she asked.
"Yes," you said nodding.
Simon said nothing.
Mrs Croft made a sound that was not quite a laugh but was adjacent to one. "Floor's open," she said. "Don't knock anyone over." And she turned back to her clipboard.
The first dance was not elegant.
Simon was, as he had always been and had openly admitted, not a dancer.
He was a man built for other kinds of movement โ purposeful, directed, the kind that had somewhere to go. Dancing required a different relationship with your body, a willingness to be present in it without agenda, and that was not naturally his.
But he was trying. And Simon Riley trying at something he wasn't good at with complete, unhesitating commitment was one of your favourite things in the world.
He held you correctly โ one hand at your waist, the other holding yours at the right height โ because he had clearly looked this up at some point, which you were choosing not to think about too hard. His footwork was careful. Deliberate. Slightly behind the beat in the way of someone counting silently.
"You're counting," you told him trying your hardest not to laugh.
"Shut up."
"Simon, I can see your lips moving." you snorted.
"I said shut up."
You were laughing now. Properly, helplessly, the kind that came up from somewhere real โ and he looked down at you with that face, that flat, long-suffering, completely fond face, and something in his eyes that was warm in a way that had nothing to do with patience and everything to do with the fact that your laugh had always been, apparently, one of his favourite sounds.
"You're doing fine," you told him, once you'd recovered.
"I'm doing terribly," he answered. "Keep going."
By the second dance, he was better.
By the third, he had found something. Some adjustment in the way he held you, the way his hand settled more fully at your waist, drawing you closer so the movement between you became less about individual steps and more about one shared thing. He was a quick study. He always had been, once he'd decided something was worth doing.
You became aware, gradually, of the room watching.
Not intrusively. Not all at once. But in the soft, peripheral way of a room full of people who have been in love for decades and recognise the particular weather of it when it walks through the door.
An older couple near the stage โ she in pale blue, he in a suit that had been good once and was still cared for โ had stopped talking to watch you.
A woman at one of the corner tables had her chin in her hand.
Mrs Croft, by the door, was very deliberately looking at her clipboard and failing to look only at her clipboard.
You didn't mind. You were too busy watching Simon watch you.
The band changed tempo at half past nine.
The waltz gave way to something with a different shape entirely โ something that moved from the hips rather than the feet, a rhythm that was slower in its pulse and considerably less innocent in its intention.
A rumba.
You looked up at Simon.
He looked down at you.
"I don't know this one," he said.
"I'll show you." you breathed.
You took his hand and placed it lower at your waist, right above the curve of your ass. Deliberately watching his face when you did it, watching the shift in his expression, the way something in his eyes went very still and very focused. "Hip to hip," you told him. "Slower than you think. Let the music pull you."
He followed your lead with an attention that was frankly overwhelming in its completeness.
Simon Riley giving you his full, undivided, physical focus was not a small thing. He was so large and so present and he moved with you rather than against you, adjusting with every shift of your weight, and somewhere in the second minute of the song the counting stopped and something else replaced it.
He drew you closer. His hand at your hip pulled you in until there was no space left between you, until you could feel the warmth of him through the green of your dress and you were very aware of every point of contact, of the music and of the room full of people who had gone very quiet.
Then he turned you.
It was not technically correct. It was not what the dance required. But he turned you in a single, smooth movement that his body had decided on and yours simply followed, because that was what it did with him.
And then he dipped you.
The room tilted. His arm was across your back, solid and immovable, and you were suspended in the amber light with the music around you and your hand at his shoulder.
He lowered you โ slowly, with complete control, no hesitation in the hold and then his face was close, very close, and his nose grazed the line of your throat making your breath hitch.
A slow, deliberate graze. The warmth of his breath against your pulse point. You felt it in places that had nothing to do with dancing, between your legs throbbing.
His hand โ the one at your hip โ slid down, just slightly, just enough, finding the outside of your thigh where the fabric of your dress lay, and he hooked your leg, slowly, around his hip. His fingers at the back of your thigh. Holding you there. His nose still at your throat.
The music resolved. Somewhere behind you, someone started clapping.
He brought you upright. Smoothly, slowly, until you were standing again and his hand was still at the back of your thigh. Your leg still around his hip and your faces were very close. Your heart was conducting itself in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with exertion.
You were panting. Slightly. Just slightly.
He was not panting. He was looking down at you with the almost-smile, the one that had always been rarer than gold and twice as valuable โ and his eyes were warm and very dark and entirely, completely satisfied with themselves.
"You looked that up as well," you managed.
"No," he said.
"Simonโ"
"That one," he said, "I just wanted to do."
From the table by the stage, the woman in pale blue was applauding with great enthusiasm. Her husband had two fingers in his mouth and was whistling.
Mrs Croft had given up entirely on the clipboard.
The taxi back was not a long ride.
It felt longer than it was, and shorter than you wanted.
You sat beside him in the back seat with his thigh against yours and the city moving past the windows and neither of you speaking. The silence had a texture to it that was thick and warm and anticipatory in a way that made the air feel heavy in your lungs.
His hand was on your knee. Just resting there, heavy and warm, the way he did everything โ with complete, unapologetic certainty.
You did not move it.
The house appeared at the end of the lane with its white fence and its dark windows and the lavender silver in the moonlight.
You were out of the taxi before it had fully stopped and you were aware how eager this appeared and you didn't care.
Simon paid the driver and caught up with you in three strides because his legs were considerably longer than yours and always had been.
He got to the door first. Key in hand.
The door opened.
And you did not wait for him to step through it.
You took him by the front of his shirt, that black shirt, warm from his body, the fabric bunching in your fists and you lips were suddenly on his.
You walked him backwards through the doorway and you felt the moment his back met the wall just inside and you were already kissing him before he'd fully registered the sequence of events.
Your mouth on his. Your hands in the front of his shirt. Thirty years of it finding its way out all at once, without ceremony, without preamble, without any of the careful management you had been applying to yourself since you were four years old at a preschool art table.
He kissed you back.
He kissed you back the way he did everything โ thoroughly, completely, with his full attention and no apparent interest in doing anything else ever again.
His hands came to your face, big and careful, tilting your jaw, and for a moment you were simply inside the realness of him and the warmth of him and the fact that he was here and alive and kissing you in the hallway of the house he'd bought for you.
He pulled back.
"Easy, sunshine," he said against your lips. Low. A little breathless, which you would be privately triumphant about later. The corner of his mouth pulled up in that crooked smile.
You became aware, in the slightly dazed way of someone returning from somewhere, that your hands were still in his shirt and his hands were still on your face and you were standing approximately two inches apart in his hallway.
You also became aware, in the refocusing of your vision, of his mouth.
Of the scar on his upper lip.
You didn't know how you hadn't noticed it before โ through dinner, through the dancing, through all of it.
Perhaps you had simply not been this close before. Or perhaps you had been looking at so many things that you hadn't been looking at everything.
It was small, a thin pale line bisecting the left side of his upper lip, old enough to have faded to silver, the kind of scar that had been there for years and had been lived with so thoroughly that the face had absorbed it.
You lifted your thumb and touched it, gently. "How'd you get this?"
He went very still, alert and present and reading you.
You kissed it. Softly. Just that.
Something moved in his throat.
His hands shifted from your face to your waist, warm and settled, and he began to move you gently โ backwards, one steady step at a time โ turning you both away from the wall and deeper into the hallway. His foot found the door behind him and pushed it closed with a quiet, final click.
"If I tell you about that one," he said, his voice low and even above your head as he guided you past the entrance and toward the stairs, "I'll have to tell you about the rest."
He looked down at you as he said it, that look, the one that said you were the most interesting thing he had ever encountered. The one that made you feel simultaneously seen and slightly undone โ and his expression had in it something that was fond and amused and entirely, devastatingly warm.
You kicked your heels off at the bottom of the stairs. They went somewhere behind you. You didn't look.
Your bag went next, dropped against the banister.
"The rest?" you repeated. Your voice came out slightly smaller than you intended. Your eyes, entirely without your permission, moved down the front of him โ the black shirt, the breadth of his shoulders, his torso, his thick thighs, all of him โ and back up again. Slowly.
He watched you do it. He said nothing.
You swallowed. "Tell me then."
His hand at your waist steered you up the first step, and then the second, and the stairs curved slightly toward the landing above, and at the top of the stairs he pushed open the door to a bedroom.
The room was large and furnished.
A bed, properly large, the kind that accommodated a man his size without complaint. Low lamps on either side casting the same amber warmth as the hall below. Dark wood floors, a window looking out toward the garden, the curtain shifting slightly in a crack of night air.
He kissed you, just inside the door you kissed him back and his hands were at your hips.
Then he pulled back with a groan. Both of you breathing slightly harder than was strictly accounted for by climbing one flight of stairs.
"I want to, sunshine," he said. His voice was very low. Restrained. His hands still on your body, holding you there, his thumbs moving in a small slow motion against the fabric of your dress that was doing nothing to help you think clearly. "I do. But I need to hear it from you first. Your permission. Clear words. I don't want to misunderstand you."
You opened your mouth.
And then your eyes moved, over his shoulder, to the dresser.
A skull mask looked back at you.
You closed your mouth. You looked at it. The mask, white and stark and precise but somehow both alien and completely, recognisably his. The balaclava beside it, folded neatly. And tactical gloves โ enormous, black, reinforced, approximately the size of your head.
"That yours?" you asked.
Simon turned his head, following your gaze. He looked at the dresser, then back at you. "Yeah."
"What is it?"
"What I wear on missions."
"Oh," you said.
And then your brain did something entirely beyond your authority. It constructed, with great speed and considerable detail, an image: Simon, broad and enormous, in black tactical gear. Gloved hands. That mask. Hovering over you.
You swallowed.
The image did not leave. It simply settled in, warm and vivid and decidedly unhelpful.
"Sunshine."
His hand came to your face โ his big, warm, ungloved hand, his actual hand, the one you knew โ his thumb sweeping gently under your eye, bringing you back into the room and the amber lamplight and the present moment.
"Hmm?" you managed meeting his gaze.
His eyes moved over your face with the same comprehensive attention he always gave you.
"Your permission, love," he said. Quiet. Certain.
"Oh." You blinked. "Yes. Yes, you have it. Always."
The almost-smile. "Not for everything I want to do to you." His thumb was still moving, very gently, under your eye. "I'll ask. Multiple times."
You stared at him. "Multipleโ"
"Times," he confirmed. His voice was entirely level. His eyes were not.
You pushed his shoulder and your cheeks burned.
He caught your hand as you pushed it and laughed, a low, real, full sound, the kind that you had spent most of your life engineering because it was so rare and so completely, unreasonably good.
You laughed too, properly, the helpless kind, and his forehead came down to rest against yours and you were both laughing in the amber light of his bedroom with the skull mask on the dresser and the lavender outside the window and thirty years behind you and everything in front.
The laughing settled.
Not all at once โ it unwound gradually, the way laughter does when it's the real kind, leaving something warm and loose in its place.
His forehead was still against yours. His hands had moved from your face to your waist, both of them now, holding you the way he'd held you on the dance floor โ with that complete, unhurried certainty, like you were something he'd been waiting to hold properly for a very long time and intended to do it right.
The amber light of the lamps lay across everything. Through the gap in the curtain, you could see the edge of the garden โ the pale shapes of flowers, the dark of the lawn.
"Tell me about the rest," you said quietly.
He pulled back just enough to look at you. "The scars?"
"You said if you told me about the one on your lip you'd have to tell me about the rest." You reached up and touched the scar again โ that thin, silver line โ with the pad of your thumb. "So tell me about the rest."
He looked at you for a long moment. Then he reached up and began, without ceremony, to unbutton his shirt.
You were very still.
He did it the way he did everything โ without drama, without performance, button by button from the collar down, and when he shrugged it from his shoulders and set it aside you understood, in a way you hadn't before, what eighteen years of that life had written on him.
He was enormous.
You'd known that in the abstract โ had known it from the doorframe and the dance floor and the way rooms seemed to reorganise themselves around him โ but this was different.
This was the specific, undeniable reality of his shoulders, the breadth of his chest, the muscle of his arms that carried the tattoo sleeve on the left, the ink wrapping from wrist to shoulder in dark, intricate patterns that in this light you still couldn't fully read but wanted to.
And the scars.
There were more than you'd expected.
Each one a different shape and age and story, written into the topography of him in pale and silver lines. A long one along his left ribs. Something older, fainter, across the top of his right shoulder. A circular scar below his collarbone on the left side that your medical knowledge was sufficient to identify and that made your chest constrict briefly and completely before you put that particular knowledge away for now.
He was watching your face as you looked. Careful. Giving you the time of it.
You stepped forward. You placed your hand flat against his sternum โ his heart under your palm, steady and real โ and you felt him exhale.
"The lip," you said.
"Kandahar. 2004. Caught the stock of a rifle." He said it the same way he'd told you everything tonight โ flat, factual, trusting the fact to carry the weight. "Bit through my lip. Wasn't pretty for a while."
You moved your hand from his sternum to his ribs. Found the long scar there, traced it gently with your fingertips.
"That one."
"Knife. 2009. I moved the wrong way and the other man moved the right way." The shadow of something in his face that was not quite humour and not quite not. "Lesson learned."
Your hand moved to his shoulder. The older, fainter scar.
"Before the military," he said, before you asked. His voice changed, just fractionally. Flatter. Doing more work to stay level. "Not a mission."
You understood. You didn't ask further. You pressed your lips to it instead โ gently, just that, your mouth against the old pale mark โ and you felt the breath go out of him in a way that was different from all the others. Slower. Deeper.
"Sunshine," he said. Very quietly.
"The one below your collarbone," you said.
A pause. "That one's not a story for tonight."
You tilted your head back to look up at him. "Is it a story for eventually?"
His eyes on yours. Something in them that was considering, assessing, "Yeah," he said. "Eventually."
"Alright," you said. You meant it. You had waited thirty years; you could wait for the story of one scar.
His hand moved to your face. That same gesture from the hallway โ his thumb at your cheek, slow and deliberate and he tilted your chin up and kissed you. Not urgently this time. Slowly. Deeply.
His hands found the zip at the side of your dress โ careful, unhurried โ and he looked at you, a clear question in it, and you nodded, and his hands were very steady and very gentle. Your dress went the way of your heels and your bag, somewhere behind you, unmissed.
He looked at you the way he had looked at you on the porch yesterday, and outside The Grill tonight, and across the restaurant table, and on the dance floor โ with that complete, comprehensive attention.
Only now there was nothing restrained about what was in it. It was simply there, open and certain, and it was thirty years of something finally being allowed to be exactly what it was.
"Hi," you said. Which was absurd. Which made him laugh again, low and real.
"Hi, sunshine," he said. His hands at your waist. His forehead dropping to yours.
โSi I need to-โ you breathed in deep, โI um,โ he pulled his head away from yours, looking into your eyes with those brilliant brown ones of his.
โWhat is it Sunshine?โ He asked, his finger under your chin tilting your head up.
โIโm, Iโve never-โ you sigh, โIโve told you so many things, I canโt believe I canโt even say this to you.โ
โDo we need to slow down?โ He asked, his voice softening.
โNo. Itโs not that. I mean Iโm not a virgin if thatโs what youโre thinking I just, no guy has ever-โ you sigh again, your eyes dropping from his.
Simon is quiet. He waits, the way he always waits โ giving you the whole space of it, not rushing you toward the end of the sentence.
โMade it good,โ you finally say, to his chest. โFor me. Itโs always just, fine. Maybe sometimes I get close but then itโs over. Not that thereโs been loads of guys, maybe three.โ
A beat.
You make yourself look up at him.
Something changes in his face.
You see the flare of it.
Anger.
Not toward you โ you feel that immediately, the anger isn't at you, it moves through him and settles somewhere else entirely. His jaw shifts. His eyes, for just a moment, go somewhere dark and quiet.
"Every one of them," he says. Low. More to himself than to you.
"Simonโ"
"Had you," he says. "And didn'tโ" He stops. The jaw again. His eyes squeeze shut. "Didn't pay attention."
"It's notโ"
"It is." His eyes open. He looks at you, his hands moving to your hips, both of them, settling there with a weight that feels like anchoring, like he needs the contact as much as you do. The darkness has settled now, controlled, underneath everything else.
"And I wasn't here." Something moves through his expression โ not guilt exactly, but something adjacent to it, something private and old. "Should've been your first, sunshine. Should've been there toโ"
He stops himself. His forehead drops to yours.
"I've waited years for this," he says quietly. "I'm not rushing it. And I'm going to pay attention."
โPay attention?โ You ask breathless.
โTo every sigh,โ he kissed your cheek, โwhimper and moan.โ His lips moved down to your jaw. โTo the way your hips move, the way your back arches, the way youโll writhe under me, how Iโve imaged it every time Iโve gotten off for the last two decades.โ He whispered the last bit into your ear, teeth tugging on your earlobe.
You gasp, โSimon.โ Your cheeks burn.
โOh donโt tell me you never thought about it.โ He grins pulling back to look down at you.
You look at the floor sheepishly cause of course you have. Of course youโve cum the hardest you ever have in your life only when thinking about Simon fucking you.
"Oh you have." He smirked titling his head.
โShut up.โ You push his shoulder and he laughs.
His hands leave your hips and then you're moving, his arms around you, and the edge of the bed meets the back of your knees.
Then his massive paws are in your hair and his lips are on your neck as your back meets the sheets. His weight heavy and solid on you. You could tell he was holding himself up so he didnโt squish you.
He leaned back on his heels, kneeling between your legs. You sighed in satisfaction when his fingers ran over your bare skin. His blunt nails scratching softly where your pelvic bone sits.
"So beautiful Sunshine," He grabs your hips and squeezes, "Fill my hands with you finally." Simon groans. A noise you've been picturing in your head. This and everything else that happens this evening, you truly believe, will be one of those times when reality is better than anything you have imagined.
Simon's brown eyes have always been intense, but right now the way he's looking down at you it's like he is someone else entirely. His eyes almost black with how much they have darkened.
"Simon." You tangle your fingers with his.
"Can I?" He asks. His hand, the one not in yours, trailing down your thigh and stopping on your mound. You clench around nothing when he pushes down, just a little bit of pressure that you feel in your clit and makes your hips buck.
You don't miss the way his lips do the almost smile thing. You nod furiously but he shakes his head.
"Need your words love." He raises a brow.
"Yes, yes Simon touch me." You breathe out, your chest feeling tight when he nods, moving his hand down to cup your cunt over your underwear.
And maybe its because you haven't had sex in three years, maybe its because you are touch starved or maybe its simply because its Simon, but your back arches and your moan is down right pornographic with a simple touch over your underwear.
"So responsive." He mumbles, his thumb rubbing circles over your clit through the fabric. "Get your tits out for me Sunshine, wanna see em." he grunts feeling your underwear getting wet.
Shakily you reach behind your back and unclip your bra. "Been thinking about them for years. What they look like, how they'll bounce when I fuck you." He groans as you pull the straps down your arms and fling the bra on the floor.
His eyes are on your chest, he doesn't blink. Then as if his system has rebooted, he blows air out of his cheeks and whistles low. "Fuck lovie, so pretty. You're a dream." Simon leans forward and wraps his lips around your breast, his tongue swirling around the nipple as his thumb continues circling your clit.
You moan, fingers tugging at his hair.
He comes off your breast with a pop making you whine and push at his shoulder. He grins pressing his thumb firmer against you, while sliding his other hand over your leg, index finger tracing over the small scar on you leg from when you fell off your bike after Simon broke your training wheels.
There was something comforting about this. Simon wasn't someone you had to explain yourself to, he already knew every version of you, he was simply adding this one to his list. This version, open and honest and begging the man you'd known for thirty years to make you cum on his fingers.
This didn't feel like a hook up, not like other guys have, but it felt like two people who have been each other's home for years and they're finally admitting it.
"Kiss me Simon." You're not even sure if what you said made sense with how much you were panting. But he leaned down to graze his lips along yours. Teasing and soft, despite the fast past he'd started to set with his thumb.
"Stop teasing." You huffed.
"Its my favourite pastime." He grinned hooking his fingers in your underwear, pulling them down and moving with them to settle between your legs.
You gasp, when his tongue slides from your asshole to your clit. "Simon!" His dark eyes are locked on yours as he swirls the tip of his his tongue around your entrance.ย Your toes curl, your head falling back onto the soft bed sheets.
A few occasions, you could count on one hand, had a guy you were with eaten you out and it was good but fuck, it didn't feel like this.
You felt like you were burning all over with each swipe of his tongue, each dip inside your entrance, each pattern he begins to circle over your clit.
He was learning you.
Simon groans against you, his breath hot, it made you dizzy. You feel everything, its too much to quick and your hips start to buck against his mouth.
Simon clearly had no intention of slowing down or stopping as he slides his arms around your thighs and splays his hands over the tops of them locking you in place.
It feels like fire, like molten lava pooling low in your abdomen the harder his tongue presses against you.
You donโt even recognise the sounds coming out of you, itโs as if every movement pulls a new one from you.ย
His thumb replaces his tongue and he rubs the bump in small circles until you can barely breathe. โSound so pretty,โ he murmurs just as your back arches and you moan loudly into the night air.ย
He is still speaking but you canโt hear anything he is saying, itโs all blurring together the way your vision is blurring. His thumb slides from your clit down until itโs pushing its way inside you. Your hips jerk away but his other hand is quick to hold you in place.
โNo running.โ Simon growls.
You cry out when his tongue comes back to torture you, lapping at you like heโs never had a drink and you're fresh water. Soon enough the rhythm heโs built has your hips rolling forward seeking more of whatever he has to give you.
Your hand reaches for his arm and squeezes hard the exact moment your vision turns white and your body shakes, dissolving into pleasure. It's like lightning pulsing through you.ย He works your through your orgasm, wringing every last wave of pleasure from you before he moves to your lips, kissing you.
โDid so good Sunshine. Iโve got you.โ His arms wrap around you, your nipples grazing against the hair on his chest, that alone has you whimpering.ย
"Need more, want you inside me Simon. Please." You look into his eyes, your shyness gone with your orgasm.
"Okay Sunshine." Simon chuckles, the sound vibrating against you.
He pulls back and gets off the bed before he starts to unbuckle his belt. He pushes his black slacks down along with his underwear, his large, and he was so fucking big, cock already hard.
"Always wondered what you'd be like in bed," He tilts his head with a smirk, "If you'd like being in control. Or if you'd prefer me to lead," He knelt on the bed again, and oh my god Simon Riley, your best friend of thirty years and the love of your life was crawling up the bed towards you until his cock was flush with your entrance. "If you'd be needy and beg. Or if you'd bark orders at me." He slapped the head of his cock against your clit. "If you'd be loud or quiet."
"If you'd let me do whatever I wanted to you," his head titled back, eyes shut, "Fuck Sunshine, the things I've imagined doing to you," He looks down at you with the most intense gaze, pining you there on the bed, "Would you let me lovie? Do whatever I want to you?" He asks, pearly whites peaking out to sink into his bottom lip.
"Like what?" Your breath is so unsteady, so hitched and uneven you feel your cheeks heat even more than they have done at his words.
He grins, "Like what?" He chuckles pushing the head of his cock against your entrance, not in, but resting against it, "Wanna fuck you so hard you can't walk. Make love to you slow and so deep you'll feel me everywhere. Bend you over every surface in this house and make you cry on my cock-"
"Simon!" You gasp.
"Can I Sunshine?" He groans pushing in a little more and your eyes sting with tears at the stretch.
"Yes! Please yes!" He pushes in slowly. One of his hands coming next to you on the bed and the other gripping your hip. He keeps sliding in further, so slowly until its sheathed inside you.
Simon does not move. You can see the restraint within the way his teeth are gritted, his brows furrowed, sweat forming on his forehead.ย
โFuck you feel amazing wrapped around me, so tight.โ He groans.ย
You donโt have any words and even if you did, you doubt you would be able to say them. You have never felt soโฆfull.ย So filled to the brim and unable to get a reprieve from it.
โMโgonna move, gotta move Sunshine,โ Simon growls and the fullness disappears for a second before heโs pushing himself back in.ย
โFuck you feel so good Si.โ You shudder and stars appear in your vision when he moves forward and takes your legs with him folding you in half.
Simon Riley has you in fucking mating press and didn't even break the slow rhythm he's building. He continues this push and pull movement until it begins to flow, each movement begins where the other ends. The pattern making you sob, โDonโt stop!โ
You can't function and its only now that you understand the phrase 'being fucked dumb', rocking your hips, trying desperately to keep up with each thrust, back arched so beautifully.
Simon lets his hand slip and curve around your jaw without thinking about it, "Taking me so well Sunshine." The feral look in his eyes sends a shiver up your spine.
"Too big." You sobbed, your hands grabbing at his large biceps as he thrusts harder. He could feel every ridge and curve of your sopping cunt.
"You can take it." He encouraged you, biting at your neck leaving marks in his wake and looking so damn happy whilst doing it.
You continued to moan and whimper, tears of pleasure falling down your face while Simon's huge body hovered over you. Protecting you from the outside world, in here, it was just you and him.
"Si..oh!" you cried out feeling him hit that rough spot inside your weeping, swollen cunt.
"There it is." He didn't mean to grin like a obsessed man in such an intimate moment but he couldn't help himself. He never can with you. Each thrust hits the one place no man ever seems to be able to find but Simon seemingly found with ease. A spot that makes a tightening begin like a coil, being wound with every drive of his hips.
Your sinful noises morph into higher pitched breathy little screams.
"I know lovie, I know." He cooed, holding you closer. His sweat glazed skin meeting yours as his large veiny hand slips under your head, his other arm curling around your waist.
You move your hips and he groans vulgar into the air, his hand gripping your hair and pulling your head back, a little to the side before he attacks your neck all messy. Smearing his lips across your throat, you donโt even recognise the sound that leaves your mouth.
He pulls away, his dark eyes flit to your squelching pussy, the noise attracting his attention pupils dilating, honing in on the way your cunt sucks his cock back in. He couldnโt pull away even if he wanted to and fuck he doesnโt, he wants nothing more than to stay in your pretty pussy forever.
โSimonfuckyespleaserighttheredontstop!โ All the words and moans blend together until your mumbling nonsense trying your hardest to keep conscious, itโs difficult with the way heโs fucking into you so deliciously itโs making you delirious in the best way.
His big body towering over yours, big hands gripping you almost bruisingly. His thick muscular hairy thighs press against your skin compellingly, the sight before you, it's irresistible. All you have to do is look down to see his massive cock sliding in and out of you, a ring of white collecting at the base.
It's too much seeing him like this, feeling the sweet pleasure burn through you and yet Simon moves one of his hands off your head and presses a thumb to your swollen, aching clit.
You're done for.
You sob, so fucking loud you swear everyone in the world can hear it, hot tears flow down your cheeks staining them.
"That's it." The words wash over you with your orgasm, it swirls around you, clings to you, and pushes you down down down the rabbit hole of pleasure. Oversensitivity sets in making you whine at his touch, but you can't stop yourself from wanting more.
Your hips buck into his touch eliciting a dirty chuckle from him.
As Simon picks up his thrusts, he comes to the conclusion that he loves you like this, wants to see it everyday. You're so drunk, so delirious and he loves it. Loves the far away look in your eyes right before they roll back into your skull.
He shoves his face into your neck groaning, "Gonna cum Sunshine, need to. Where?" his thrusts pick up again, as if that were even possible.
"Cum inside me Simon, fill me up." You cry out.
Simon must have been right there as he cums the second you finish your sentence. Hot thick robes of cum pushing deep inside you. He rubs your clit faster and another smaller orgasm zips through you leaving you whimpering.
He stays in you, holding you until he goes soft. He moves your legs so they don't cramp. "Did so well for me Sunshine. I love you so much." He looks into your eyes as more tears spill down your cheeks.
"I love you Simon." you bring your fingers into his hair, pulling him closer to kiss you. The contrast between the way he just destroyed your guts and is now kissing you so softly, is astounding.
He is careful when he picks you up and walks into the ensuite bathroom to the right, flicking the light on and placing you on the toilet. "Gotta pee sunshine, don't want you getting you a uti." He says and you're so tired you don't even have the energy to be embarrassed.
Your eyes as still closed as you pee. Your hand moves to find the toilet paper but a warm flannel is being pressed against you, Simon's other hand on your knee to keep them open. You whine and push his hand away, "Simon that's icky." You frown at him opening your eyes to see him looking at you with a frown of his own.
"Nothing about you is icky Sunshine. I'm clearing up my mess, now move your hand." You do as told and it occurs to you, through your tired haze, while Simon gently wipes you clean that he must be used to clearing up mess with the job he does.
"All done. Want a shower or straight to sleep?" He asks.
"Sleep." You yawn making him smile at you.
He carries you back to the bed, lifting the duvet and settling you both underneath it.
The particular quality of afterwards settles in the room.
The warmth of it, the specific silence, the way the world outside the window continues to exist and you become aware of it again in layers. The sound of the garden. The distant sound of a car somewhere. The sound of him breathing.
You were lying with your head on his chest. His arm around you, heavy and warm. His heartbeat under your ear, steady and unhurried, the same heart that had been beating beside you in one form or another for thirty years.
His hand moved. Slowly, idly, up and down your back.
You watched the lamplight glow on the beside table. You thought about the lavender. You thought about the train station in 2001, and the birthday cards, and the bottom stair with the cream envelope, and Margaret Howarth saying you always did belong together with the satisfied certainty of someone who had known it before either of you did.
"Simon," you said.
"Yeah."
"You planted lavender for three years."
"You mentioned that already."
"I'm still processing it."
A low sound in his chest that was the rumble of a laugh contained. "Take your time Sunshine."
You propped yourself up and looked at him. His face in the lamplight โ older, marked, those brown eyes that had been watching you since you were four years old, now watching you from a pillow in the house he'd bought you.
His expression was open in the way it had been open on the porch and at the restaurant table and in the dance hall, the way it had been open perhaps three times in thirty years before tonight and was now, apparently, simply his face when he looked at you.
You loved him so much.
You had loved him in different quantities and different registers for most of your life and now you loved him in this one too, this new one, and it was the same love and completely different and you thought you would be discovering its dimensions for a considerable amount of time.
"You should have told me," you said. "Years ago. Before the train."
"Yeah," he said. No argument.
"I would have said it back then too."
Something moved in his face. "I know," he said. And then, quieter, "I wasn't ready then. Wasn't enough yet."
"Simonโ"
"I know what you're going to say."
"You were alwaysโ"
"I know," he said. "I believe you. Now." His hand came up to your face, tucking a strand of hair back, his thumb at your cheekbone. "Took me a while to get there. But I'm here."
"You're here," you agreed smiling.
"And you're here." his hand tangled itself in your hair.
"I'm here." you giggled.
He looked at you for a long moment. Then, "Stay with me."
Not a question, not quite โ more like a hope said aloud. The rarest thing from him. He had carried so much silently for so long, and this one small thing cost him something, and you could see it, and you loved him for it.
"It's my house," you said cheeky and bright.
He blinked. Then that laugh again โ the real one, the rare one โ and your heart did what it always did when you earned it, that particular, irreplaceable lurch.
"Yeah Sunshine," he said. "It is."
You lay back down against his chest. His arm came around you. His heartbeat under your ear.
Outside, the lavender moved. The Union flag was still on the roof. The porch swing sat in the dark with its yellow cushion, waiting for morning.
"Sunshine," he said. Into your hair.
"Hmm."
"I love you."
You pressed your lips to his chest, above his heart.
"I love you too," you said. "I've loved you since you were that chubby four-year-old who stole my crayons."
A long pause.
"Chubby," he repeated.
"Stocky," you amended, grinning into his chest. "You were very stocky."
"I was four."
"You were a very solid four year old."
His arm tightened around you โ not painfully, just firmly, the way of a man making a point through the medium of holding โ and you laughed again, helplessly, into the warmth of him.
He made that sound, that low rumbling laugh that lived in his chest, and the lamp burned warm and low and outside the lavender moved in the dark.
Simon Riley.
Who stole your crayons at four and broke your glasses at seven and learned to read because of you and carried your bag through every corridor of secondary school and punched a boy for pushing you over and kissed your cheek in a toilet corridor and sat beside you through every lunch and glared at anyone who called you a nerd and came round to your kitchen table for years and went to war at seventeen and sent you cards from the edges of the world and planted lavender for three years and bought you the house you described at sixteen and came home.
"You're dating her? She must have low standards." Percy tried to hide his frown from the child camper. Percy and you had taken the job as being camp counselors for a few extra bucks in the summer.
Every kid was 5-10 and seemingly easy to care for. You were sitting at the lunch table helping a camper tie her bracelet around her wrist.
Percy was sitting at his own table with a different patch of campers. Spaghetti rolled over his fork as he glared down at the little boy camper. It was an innocent conversation at first.
The little camper asking questions about Percy's life. Like Percy's favorite color, if he has siblings, and how old he was. Then the boy asked if Percy had a romantic partner.
Percy being ever the bragger had proudly pointed to you and admitted that yes, you were his person he kissed at night and lived with. The camper wasn't very fond of the idea.
Actually he couldn't really believe it. At first the little camper thought it was a prank until you noticed Percy pointing and blew him an innocent kiss.
Percy was the camper who tripped over his own feet, dropped all the firewood, crashed the tennis-cart, and forgot to wipe his minty toothpaste off his lips making him look like he was foaming at the mouth.
Then there was you. Radiant and perfect. Remembering every campers name, always carrying a first aid-kit, has every essential in her purse, and carried bug spray on her like a glock. Not to mention reading a book to every cabin before bed.
So yes to this little camper it was a shock, and after that day it spread like wildfire. Every little camper was talking about it and how shocking it was. Some little girls even telling you how oh so sorry they felt about your relationship.
It wasn't until a few weeks later they understood why.
A fire had broken out in the cafeteria because of a loose fuse unseen by a camp director. You had been in the back trying to find the fire extinguisher that wasn't in the spot you remember it being at.
Kids huddled outside the cafeteria peering in at you as if you were about to die. The fire wasn't big and it could be put out with the fire extinguisher easy. Yet the campers outside were hugging each other while sobbing hoping their favorite camp counselor didn't die.
That's when Percy came running in with a fire extinguisher on hand and quickly put the fire out in less than five minutes. After that the campers saw him differently. They saw him as a hero who saved their angel counselor.
"Maybe he isn't that bad."
"Yeah he just saved our favorite counselor!"
"And he took out a fire!"
"He's our hero!"
"We all love Counselor Percy!"
Yeah, now every year you two come back to camp, the story of your hero boyfriend Percy saving you from a vicious fire travels with you. And every year, a handful of parents call the camp confused by a little campers very dramatic retelling of the story.
