Watching You IX
Authors Note:
Update is here! This part is done, starting exactly where we left off last time. Hope you are all doing alright and have some time to read this.
Happy Sunday everyone!! 💕💕
As always like, reblog, comment and share! It’s much appreciated. Also always happy for constructive feedback from you all. 𐙚⋆°｡⋆♡
Tagging: @radio-heartbreak, @cocainaaxlsd, @sourwolf-32, @axlslutt, @being-worthy, @s2ckmylips, @thelittletobsterthatcould, @itzbr1tneybtch, @moez7, @celiseee, @favhiddles, @lilith13130, @lizziebennetsbonnet, @easterbae, @takemyroseaxlrose, @crue-n-roses, @anaheartgnr, @redbandanababy ꨄ︎ꨄ︎ꨄ︎
Pairing: Modern Axl Rose x Housesitter Reader
Summary: So much has been said between you two already and yet not nearly enough. There's so much you need to figure out but are you really ready to face it yet?
Warnings: none
Words: 9 k-ish
The hallway was still buzzing with the low hum of the party when he guided you back inside, the warmth of the house wrapping around you immediately after the sharp cold outside.
He stayed close.
His hand hovered at the small of your back, not quite touching, but present. A quiet assurance. Two of his guests passed you in the narrow hallway, laughing between themselves and his hand settled then, light but steady, guiding you gently to one side to let them through. It lasted only a second before it lifted again, but you felt it long after.
The kitchen was softer than the rest of the house. A few people had gathered near the counter, drinks in hand, conversations drifting in low, comfortable tones. Beta stood among them, her son beside her and she was mid-laugh at something when the two of you stepped in.
She noticed immediately.
Her eyes found you first, then Axl, then the small space, or lack of it, between you. The laugh didn't fade so much as settle into something quieter, something knowing and for just a moment her gaze lingered on the two of you with the kind of stillness that saw everything without needing to be told anything.
A slow smile touched the corner of her lips.
She didn't move toward you. Didn't say a word. She simply turned back to her conversation, that small, private smile still resting on her face like a secret she had been keeping for a while now.
"Hot chocolate?"
You looked up at him.
He was already looking at you, patient, unhurried, like the question had all the time in the world behind it.
You nodded.
That was all it took. He turned to the counter without missing a beat, reaching for a mug, filling it with quiet focus that made it feel like more than just a drink. You watched him from the corner of your eye, the way he reached for the whipped cream without hesitating, piling it generously on top, then dusting the whole thing with a careful pinch of chocolate sprinkles like it was the most natural thing in the world.
It made something small and warm shift in your chest.
He handed it to you with both hands, making sure you had it steady before he let go. There was something in that, something so instinctive and unhurried that caught you a little off guard. No one had ever made you feel quite so looked after in the smallest of ways. Not like this. Not without it feeling like effort.
With him it seemed to cost him nothing. Like taking care of you was simply something he wanted to do.
You were still standing there with that thought, mug warm between your palms when Vanessa stepped into the kitchen.
There was a tightness around her expression still, subtle but unmistakable. The kind that came from a conversation that hadn't ended the way she wanted. She moved into the room with practiced ease, her eyes finding Axl across the space almost immediately..
His name was already forming on her lips.
And then she saw you.
She stopped.
It was brief, barely a second but it was there. Her eyes settled on you with an expression that had gone very still and very careful all at once, the kind of neutral that took effort to hold. Then, smoothly, almost impressively, her features rearranged themselves into something soft and polite. A small smile. Composed. Unbothered.
Axl turned around, his hand finding the small of your back again without seeming to think about it.
Vanessa's eyes dropped to it.
Just for a moment. Just long enough.
Something moved across her face, quick and quiet, like a door closing before she smoothed it away again.
"Everything alright?" Axl asked, his voice easy, giving her the same attention he'd give anyone.
She looked at him for a beat. Then she shook her head lightly, one shoulder lifting in a small shrug.
"Never mind," she said. "It was nothing."
Her voice was pleasant. Unbothered. Perfectly composed.
You brought the mug to your lips.
You had felt her eyes on you the moment she walked in and you felt them still, even now, even as you looked deliberately away. There was something underneath the politeness that she hadn't quite managed to bury, something that sat in the line of her jaw and the careful steadiness of her gaze when it drifted back toward you.
It wasn't subtle. Not really.
Not to you.
You took a slow sip of the hot chocolate instead, warm and sweet, with just enough richness to it and let the taste of it settle on your tongue.
Still, even as you tried to ignore it, will it away, you felt Vanessa's eyes on you.
A quiet stiffening that started at the base of your spine and worked its way up, slow and involuntary, no matter how hard you tried to keep your expression easy. You kept your gaze on the mug in your hands, kept your breathing steady, kept your face arranged into something that you hoped read as calm and unbothered.
You weren't sure it was working.
Axl's hand, still resting at the small of your back, shifted.
His arm moved around your waist instead, unhurried, deliberate, drawing you closer into his side with a gentleness that left no room for misreading. It wasn't a grand gesture. It wasn't loud. It was simply him, pulling you in, his warmth settling around you like a soft blanket.
You exhaled slowly and stared into your hot chocolate.
"Actually," Vanessa said after a moment, her voice lifting pleasantly, "Nicholas has been looking for you."
You felt your face warm before you could stop it.
Nicholas. You had forgotten about him entirely. The evening had rearranged itself so completely around everything that had happened outside that the memory of him felt like it belonged to a different night altogether.
"He was asking where you'd gone," Vanessa continued, her tone perfectly light. Helpful, almost. "I can go find him if you'd like, he wasn't far."
She was already half turning toward the living room.
"No." The word came out before you'd fully decided to say it. "Please no, don't."
Vanessa paused.
And then, very slowly, she smiled.
It was small. Controlled. But it reached her eyes in a way that the politeness hadn't quite managed to, a flicker of something sharp and satisfied sitting just beneath the surface of it.
"Right." Axl's voice came in smooth and easy, cutting cleanly across the moment. "Actually, I was just about to show her something upstairs." His hand pressed lightly at your waist, already guiding you forward. "We'll leave you to it."
It was seamless. Effortless. The kind of exit that didn't ask for permission or leave room for a response.
You went with him without a word.
The noise of the party softened behind you as he led you further down the hallway, past the familiar rooms and beyond the easy reach of the guests to the upstairs area. The laughter and low music faded by degrees until there was only the quiet of the house.
You glanced up at him once, a small furrow between your brows.
He didn't explain. He just kept walking, his hand warm and steady at your back, guiding you with the same unhurried certainty he seemed to carry in everything he did.
You didn't argue.
You weren't entirely sure where he was taking you, only that the further you got from that kitchen the easier it became to breathe and that alone felt like reason enough to follow.
It occurred to you, quietly, somewhere between one hallway and the next, that he had noticed. That he had seen the way you stiffened, felt the tension move through you before you'd even fully registered it yourself and had simply, without fuss, without drawing attention to it, removed you from the situation entirely.
No one had ever done that for you before.
Not like that. Not so cleanly, so instinctively, like protecting you was just something that came naturally to him. Like it required no thought at all.
Your grip on the mug tightened slightly.
The house settled around you, quieter now and you followed him deeper into it.
The library sat at the end of the hall.
He pushed the door open and stepped aside, and you walked in ahead of him into the soft warm light of it, amber and low, the kind that didn't ask anything of you. The smell reached you first. Old paper and worn leather and something faintly wooden.
Your eyes moved slowly around it.
Bookshelves lined the walls from floor to ceiling, shelves over shelves packed, the kind of collection that hadn't been arranged for show but simply grown over time. Spines of every colour and thickness pressed together in easy rows, some of them clearly read more than once, some tilted slightly from being pulled out and replaced too many times to count.
In the far corner, half tucked away from the rest of the room, sat a large leather armchair, dark and deep and worn soft at the armrests and beside it a small two-seater couch in the same vein, draped with a folded blanket and a few pillows stacked at one end. A low coffee table between them with nothing on it.
Beside the lounging corner a floor-to-ceiling window unfolded over the grounds, and past the darkness, you could just make out the Californian sea, shimmering in the distance. It must be beautiful to sit here and read while the sun set over the horizon you imagined.
"This is my spot," he said, moving past you toward the seating area with an ease that told you he had crossed this room a thousand times. "When the noise gets to be too much." He settled into the armchair with a low exhale, like the room had exhaled with him. "Figured I'd had about enough of out there."
You looked at him.
He didn't look back, just reached over and straightened one of the blankets on the couch with the kind of idle attention that was trying very hard not to be deliberate.
You didn't say anything.
You both knew.
But you let him have it, the small, transparent kindness of pretending it had been his need, his retreat. He knew you well enough by now to anticipate it, that you’d feel the weight of being led away, dwell on it in silence, and eventually shape it into something that made you the inconvenience. He wouldn’t let you.
So you said nothing, and you moved to the small couch, and you sat.
For a moment you just looked at the shelves. Let your eyes trace the spines without reading them, following the long unbroken rows of them from one end of the wall to the other. There was something about it, the sheer accumulation of words, of thought, of every quiet hour that had gone into filling a room like this, that settled something in your chest you hadn't realised was unsettled.
Or maybe it was just the quiet.
It was hard to tell.
You turned the mug slowly in your hands, the warmth of it fading slightly now but still grounding, and for a little while neither of you spoke. The air was comfortable between you.
Then, gradually, it started to shift.
The quiet that had felt like relief began to feel like something else. Heavier. More honest. Out there, with the music and the voices and the movement of the party pulling at the edges of everything, it had been easy to let the enormity of the evening sit at a distance. Easy to be carried along by the warmth of him beside you without having to look too directly at what had just happened between you both.
But in here there was nothing to look at anymore except that.
The conversation outside. The words that had been said, careful and unsteady and true. The way his hands had held your face. Everything that had passed between you in the cold that you hadn't yet found a place to put.
It pressed in now, slow and inevitable, the way things always did when a room got quiet enough to let them.
You stared at the books and said nothing.
There was so much still sitting between you, unresolved and patient, waiting for one of you to be the first to reach for it.
You weren't ready yet.
But you could feel it coming.
He was watching you.
You hadn't looked at him but you felt it, the same quiet attention he had always had, the kind that didn't intrude but simply stayed. Patient and steady, taking in without asking anything.
A moment passed.
Then his hand moved to yours.
Not urgently. Just a slow, careful reach across the small space between you two, his fingers finding yours and resting there, light enough that you could have pulled away without any fuss if you'd wanted to. A question more than anything else. A gentle knock at your door.
You looked up.
His eyes were already on you, soft and unhurried, and there was nothing in them that made you feel like you were failing at something. No expectation. No impatience. Just him, watching you with the kind of steadiness that made the noise in your own head feel slightly less loud.
"Hey." His voice was low. Warm. The same tone he'd used outside in the cold, like he was being careful with something. "Look at me."
You did.
"Don't overthink it." A small pressure from his hand on yours. "We'll figure it out. All of it. Just not tonight."
It was simple. Unhurried. He meant every word of it.
"Tonight's not the time," he continued, his thumb moving once, slowly, across your knuckles. "Too much noise. Too many people. This—" he paused, just briefly, like he was choosing carefully "—this deserves better than that."
The tightness in your chest that had been quietly building loosened, almost without your permission.
You looked at him for a moment longer. At the calm certainty sitting in his expression, the complete absence of pressure in it. Like there was no wrong answer you could give him right now. Like he had already decided to be patient with you before you'd even asked him to.
The corner of your mouth lifted.
Small. Quiet. But honest.
You nodded.
And something in him seemed to settle too, at that, a barely perceptible easing around his eyes, like your smile had answered something he hadn't quite let himself ask out loud.
He didn't let go of your hand.
You let out a small breath and straightened.
"We should probably head back," you said, smoothing your palms down the front of your dress, feeling the soft fabric of it settle back into place. "Before your guests start wondering where the host disappeared to."
He looked at you with a quiet amusement, his hand falling back to his lap when you smoothed out your dress.
"Can't have that," he agreed, pushing himself up from the armchair with an ease that still somehow managed to feel unhurried.
He crossed to the door ahead of you.
You hadn't asked him to. He simply did it, stepping in front, pulling it open and holding it with one hand, his other gesturing you through with a small, unhurried inclination of his head. There was a hint of a smile on his face. Playful, just slightly. Like he was enjoying it.
You shook your head faintly as you passed him, the warmth of the room trailing after you into the hall.
"You know," he said, pulling the door closed behind him, "whenever it gets to be too much down there, the room's yours. Whenever you need it."
You glanced back at him.
He said it simply, without ceremony, like it was the most obvious thing in the world to offer. Like the library, his quiet corner of the house was simply a thing he wanted you to have access to.
"Thank you," you said softly.
He just nodded, and fell into step beside you
The stairs turned down toward the sounds of the party rising up to meet you again, voices and laughter and the low drift of music spilling from the rooms below. His hand found yours again somewhere between the top and the middle of the staircase, fingers folding around yours naturally, steadying without drawing attention to it.
You were nearly at the bottom when something small collided firmly with Axl's legs.
A little girl, no older than six, dark curls bouncing, cheeks flushed pink from running, stumbled back a step and looked up. Her wide eyes moved from Axl's face down to his hand, and then to yours, and then back up again.
She went very still.
Then she giggled. A small, delighted, barely containable giggle that she pressed her fingers against her mouth to muffle, her eyes bright and impossibly serious at the same time.
"You can't hold her hand," she whispered, with the grave authority only a six year old could manage.
Axl looked down at her. "Is that so."
She nodded urgently. "Because she's Mrs. Santa." Another giggle escaped through her fingers. "She's Santa's girlfriend."
You felt the laugh rise before you could stop it, soft and genuine, and you pressed your lips together in a valiant and largely unsuccessful attempt to hold it in.
Axl, to his credit, received this information with complete seriousness.
He crouched down to her level, which seemed to delight and terrify her in equal measure, and lowered his voice conspiratorially.
"You know what," he said, "you might be right. But Santa asked me very specifically to look after her tonight while he finished up with the reindeers." He gave a small, solemn nod. "Very important job."
The little girl considered this with furrowed brows, clearly weighing the logic of it.
"He did?"
"He did. So I'm just helping out." He tilted his head slightly. "You understand."
Another pause. Then she nodded, apparently satisfied, the seriousness dissolving back into giggles as she turned and disappeared into the party at a run, already forgetting about them in the way only children could.
You looked at him as he straightened back up.
He caught your expression and raised an eyebrow, the corner of his mouth pulling upward.
"What?"
"Nothing," you said, still smiling. "Santa's very lucky to have you."
He huffed a quiet laugh, low and genuine, and his hand found yours again as you stepped off the last stair together.
He leaned in slightly as you walked, his voice dropping low enough that it was only ever going to reach you.
"Santa's a lucky bastard," he murmured, something warm and unhurried in it. "Breathtakingly stunning girlfriend like that."
The heat rose to your cheeks before you could do anything about it.
You looked ahead and said nothing, which seemed to satisfy him entirely.
The party reclaimed you gradually as you moved back into the heart of it, the warmth and noise of it pressing in from all sides, voices overlapping, glasses catching the light. It didn't take long before someone spotted him.
A hand raised across the room. A name called over the noise with the easy entitlement of someone who had known him a long time.
Axl's hand tightened slightly around yours, an instinct more than a decision, and he glanced at you with the clear and unspoken intention of pulling you along with him.
You slipped your hand gently from his.
"Go," you said quietly. "I'll find Beta."
He looked at you for a moment. Not hurt, just reading you, the way he always did, patient and unhurried.
You didn't explain further and you didn't need to. It wasn't embarrassment, and some part of you hoped he understood that. It was simply too much, too soon, too public, and there was still so much sitting between you both that hadn't yet found its shape. Being seen together like that, folded into each other in front of a room full of people, felt like getting ahead of something that deserved more care than that.
And Nicholas was with those people too.
You had clocked him from across the space without meaning to, and that alone was reason enough to find somewhere else to be.
Axl‘s eyes moved briefly, almost imperceptibly, out across the room, scanning before he found where Beta was currently at. He nodded, once, and let you go.
Beta wasn't hard to find.
She was standing near the edge of the room, a glass held loosely in one hand, half turned from the nearest conversation in the comfortable way of someone who had hosted enough gatherings to know when they could step briefly outside of one. She saw you coming before you reached her.
The smile that met you was soft and unhurried and full of something that it didn't put into words.
She didn't ask. That was the thing about her, she simply opened the space and let you walk into it, the way mothers did. Or the ones worth having, anyway.
You settled beside her and let out a slow breath.
She said something easy first. Something about the party, the food, the way the house looked with all the lights. Drawing you in gently, giving you a moment to land.
And then, without preamble or pressure, almost as a passing thought:
"Take your time, you know." Her voice was warm and quiet beneath the noise of the room. "Both of you. There's no rush for any of it."
You looked at her.
She wasn't looking back at you. Just watching the room with that same calm, settled expression, like she was simply making an observation about the weather.
"These things have a way of working out," she continued, unhurried, "when people stop trying to force them into a shape too quickly."
You didn't answer straight away.
You stood there beside her and let the words settle, feeling the quiet steadiness of her beside you, something almost maternal in the way she took up space, calm and certain, not asking anything from you in return.
"Okay," you said eventually. Softly.
She smiled again, and took a sip of her drink, and said nothing more about it.
Across the room, you could see Axl with the guests who had called for him, laughing at something, one hand in his pocket, completely at ease. But even from that distance, even mid conversation, his eyes found you once.
Just briefly.
Just long enough.
Then he looked away, and you looked away, and you stood beside Beta and let the party carry on around you.
As the evening went on and a couple minutes passed your eyes found their way back to the host over and over again.
It was difficult not to watch him.
He moved through the room with an ease that seemed entirely unconscious, one hand gesturing as he talked, laughing at something someone said with his whole face, unguarded and unperformed. It was rare to see him this open and unguarded and for a moment you wondered if it was because of how your conversation had gone outside earlier. There was a lightness to him like this that caught you off guard every time you saw it. Something almost boyish in the way it broke across his features, that particular spark that didn't belong to the decades or the weight of everything that had come between then and now.
You had seen it in old footage once. Grainy concert videos, interviews from when he was young and loud and burning at both ends. That same brightness, underneath all the fire.
It was still there.
Quieter now. More settled. But there.
You looked away before he could catch you staring and reached for something from the nearest tray, letting yourself drift back into the gentle current of the evening, Beta's easy conversation, a couple of the other guests still lingering nearby, the warm unhurried atmosphere that came with a party winding down from its peak into something softer.
At some point, small fingers found the hem of your dress.
You looked down.
Mateus blinked up at you with the heavy, contented expression of a four year old who had thoroughly exhausted himself and was now simply seeking somewhere familiar to anchor. He didn't say anything. Just stood there, one fist curled loosely in the fabric of your skirt, swaying very slightly.
You brushed your fingers gently through his hair.
He leaned into it without ceremony, and you let your hand rest there, and the conversation carried on around you.
The evening thinned slowly, the way good ones always did.
The children went first: coats and sleepy protests and whispered reminders about Santa, small faces turned up for goodbye hugs before being ushered out into the cold night air with their caretakers. Mateus went with considerable reluctance, pausing at the door to look back at you with an expression of profound betrayal before being gently redirected toward the stairs.
After that the rest followed in ones and twos, the room growing quieter by degrees, the music lowered without anyone quite deciding to lower it.
By the time the last few guests were pulling on their coats in the hallway, the house had settled into something that felt almost like itself again, Beta and her children the only ones remaining, the three of them staying the night, their voices low and familiar somewhere behind you.
You stood in the living room with your phone in your hand.
It was time. You knew it without needing to think about it, the practical shape of the evening reasserting itself, the long ride home, the hour, all of it arranging itself into a quiet reminder that the night had to end somewhere.
You opened the app and started scrolling through available drivers, checking the estimated pickup times, calculating.
You didn't hear him come back in.
"What are you looking at?"
His voice came from just behind you, low and relaxed and you glanced up briefly before looking back at your screen.
"Just checking for an uber," you said simply. "Seeing when the nearest one could pick me up."
Silence.
You were already looking back at the app when you registered it, the heavy silence like something didn‘t sit right with him about you taking an uber.
You looked up.
He had gone very still.
Not tense, not alarmed, just still, like his thoughts had stopped moving and were now sitting somewhere, unmoving, behind his eyes. A small frown had pulled itself together between his brows, quiet and unforced.
Your thumb hovered over the screen.
"Something wrong?" you asked.
His eyes moved from the phone in your hand up to your face and for a moment he didn't answer.
"Stay."
It came out quietly. No preamble, no buildup just the word, low and even, his eyes moving from the phone in your hand up to your face.
You looked at him.
He held your gaze with a deliberate steadiness, you could tell. There was a stillness about him that wasn't quite ease, something underneath it that was working slightly harder than he was letting on. A man who had faced crowds of thousands without flinching, standing in his own living room looking at you like the answer genuinely mattered to him.
"The guest rooms are all taken," he said, before you'd found anything to say. His voice was measured, careful, like he'd thought about how to phrase this before he'd opened his mouth. "Beta and the others, they've got them for the night." A brief pause. "But my room's big enough. Easily." His eyes stayed on yours, unhurried, making sure you were hearing him correctly. "I'd take the couch. If you'd rather. I just.. " he stopped. Reconsidered. "It's late. And it's a long ride."
He said it plainly. No weight on it that didn't belong there, no suggestion curling underneath the words. Just the simple, quiet note of not wanting you to leave.
You stood there for a moment, the app still open in your hand, the little car icons blinking patiently on the screen.
You hadn't considered it. The thought simply hadn't presented itself to you and now that it had, you turned it over carefully, waiting to find the edge of it that felt wrong.
You didn't find one.
"You don't have to take the couch," you said.
Something in him shifted. Barely visible, a fraction of tension releasing somewhere around his shoulders, his expression opening slightly, like a window being pushed further than it had been before.
"Yeah?" The word came out a little quieter than the rest.
"It's your bed," you said simply. "It'd be strange for you to sleep on the couch in your own house."
He looked at you for a moment longer, something warm and unhurried moving through his expression that he didn't seem particularly interested in hiding.
Then, almost as an afterthought, almost careful about it, he nodded.
"Okay," he said. Soft. Like he didn't want to put too much weight on it and disturb it.
You glanced down at yourself. At the red dress, the thin fabric of it, the complete absence of anything practical for sleeping.
"I'll need something to borrow though," you said, looking back up at him. "To sleep in."
The smile that crossed his face was immediate and unguarded, broader than he probably meant it to be, reaching his eyes before he'd quite decided to let it and for just a second he looked almost young with it.
"Yeah," he said. "I think I can manage that."
"Head up already," he said, nodding toward the stairs. "I'll be up in a bit, just want to help sort things out down here first."
You followed his glance toward the kitchen, where Beta and Fernando had already begun the quiet, practiced work of clearing things away, Vanessa somewhere at the edges of it.
"Okay," you said.
You didn't argue. You were, if you were being honest with yourself, quietly relieved to have a reason to move in the opposite direction from Vanessa without it needing to be a thing. The evening had been long and the ground between you and her felt uncertain in a way you hadn't fully made sense of yet. You knew now that she and Axl weren't together, he had been clear about that, and you believed him without question. But the why of her coldness toward you sat unresolved somewhere in the back of your mind, small and persistent. You'd think about it later. Not tonight.
You slipped away from the noise of the remaining tidying and made your way upstairs.
You had been in here before.
Not often, and never for long. The house-sitting duties had brought you to the door a handful of times, the plant beside the far window needed watering every few days, a quiet and practical reason to step inside. You had always done it quickly. Filled the small watering can, crossed the room, tended to it, left.
It had always felt like standing in someone's private thoughts. The kind of room that held the shape of a person even when they weren't in it, and you'd never felt entirely comfortable taking your time in there. Axl Rose was already an idea that loomed large enough from a distance. His bedroom felt like somewhere you didn't have the right to linger.
So you hadn't.
But now you stepped inside properly for the first time and let the room take you in.
It was large and quiet and simpler than you might have expected. A bed that took up its space, dark linen, well made and uncluttered. The headboard was solid and dark, chosen for how it felt rather than how it looked. A book left open face down on the nightstand beside a lamp. The floor to ceiling windows ran the length of one wall. Beyond them the ocean stretched out dark and vast beneath the night sky, the same view you had tended the small plant beside without ever quite letting yourself stand still long enough to appreciate it.
You stood in front of the glass for a moment.
Then something cold pressed against your ankle.
Mr. Blue blinked up at you, all flat face and enormous eyes and the particular seriousness of a small dog who considered himself very important and then wagged his entire back half in greeting, his whole body getting involved in a way that his size made slightly comedic.
The smile came before you could think about it.
You crouched down and he was immediately at your hands, snuffling and warm, demanding attention, and something in your chest that had been sitting slightly too tight since you'd walked up the stairs began quietly to loosen.
The cats appeared shortly after. Dijon first, picking his way across the rug slowly, Whiskey behind him, considerably less restrained, already pressing the top of his head insistently into your palm before you'd quite reached out for him.
You ended up on the rug.
It happened without you deciding it, sitting cross legged with Mr. Blue warm and settled against your leg, Dijon arranged beside you with careful dignity, Whiskey pushing his face repeatedly into your hand with a persistence that made you smile every time. Your fingers moved between the three of them slowly, scratching and stroking and the animals asked nothing of you except to stay exactly where you were.
It helped.
More than you wanted to admit. Because underneath the warmth of it, underneath the quiet pleasure of three creatures who were simply glad you were there, your mind had already begun doing what it always did when left unattended for too long. Turning things over. Noting the details. The room around you. The bed. The fact that in a little while he would be in here too and it would be the two of you and the door would be closed and there was something about the specificity of that which your thoughts kept circling back to despite your best efforts to redirect them.
But then Whiskey headbutted your chin with considerable force and you laughed, quiet and genuine and Mr. Blue's stubby tail started going again at the sound of it.
You looked down at the three of them and felt your shoulders drop.
Later, you told yourself. You could overthink it all later.
You didn't hear the door.
Only felt the shift, something in the room changing.
You looked up and Axl stood in the doorway.
He hadn't moved past it. Wasn't reaching for anything or crossing toward the wardrobe or doing any of the practical things that might have explained the pause. He was simply there, one hand resting lightly against the doorframe, looking at you on the floor with his three animals settled around you like you'd always belonged there.
Something in his face was very soft.
He didn't say anything for a moment. Didn't seem to feel any particular need to.
"Hey," you said quietly.
"Hey," he said back.
His eyes moved across the three of them, Mr. Blue, Dijon, Whiskey and then back to you, and whatever was sitting in his expression didn't quite have a name but it was warm and unguarded and entirely unhurried.
Like a man who had just found something he hadn't known he was missing.
He crossed the room slowly, looking down at the three of them with an expression of profound betrayal.
Mr. Blue didn't even look up.
Axl stared at him for a moment, then at Dijon, then at Whiskey, who had resettled himself across your knee with boneless contentment.
He crossed his arms over his chest.
The muscle in his jaw moved once, fighting something.
You looked up at him and caught it, the absolute losing battle happening at the corner of his mouth, the smirk he was working very hard to suppress and failing at entirely. His eyes flicked to yours and he looked away again immediately, as if eye contact would make it worse.
"Traitors," he said. Flatly. To the animals.
Mr. Blue's tail wagged and you pressed your lips together.
He exhaled through his nose and shook his head with the slow resignation of a man deeply wronged, and the laugh you'd been holding came out quiet and genuine before you could stop it. He glanced at you sideways and the smirk finally broke through properly, just for a second, before he turned away toward the wardrobe.
The tension you hadn't quite been able to set down, the low hum of it that had started up again the moment the door had opened and the room had suddenly become real and specific around you, loosened without ceremony. It was difficult to sustain a quiet anxiety about being alone with someone who was currently pretending to be emotionally wounded by his own french bulldog.
He didn't say anything about the evening. Didn't reach for any of it. Just moved to the wardrobe and pulled one side open with the easy familiarity of routine, scanning the shelves for a moment before pulling something out.
He turned and held them up.
A shirt, large, well worn, soft looking and a pair of pyjama pants, dangling from his other hand by the waistband.
"Would these work?"
You untangled yourself from the animals, which took a moment and required some negotiation with Whiskey specifically and pushed yourself up from the rug. You crossed toward him and reached out, taking the fabric from his hands. It was soft between your fingers. Worn in the way of something washed many times.
You nodded.
He tilted his head toward the door at the far side of the room. "Ensuite's through there. Fresh towels are in the cupboard." He shifted his weight slightly, unhurried. "New toothbrushes in the mirror cabinet. And whatever else you need in there, just help yourself."
"Thank you," you said quietly.
He nodded once, easy, like it cost him nothing, and you slipped past him toward the bathroom door.
The bathroom was large and warm and smelled faintly clean. You moved through it slowly, finding things without rushing, a toothbrush still in its packaging in the cabinet, a soft towel from the cupboard, products lined up on the shelf that you helped yourself to without overthinking it.
You washed your face carefully, working through the layers of the evening, the makeup and the cold air and the hours of it all coming away under warm water until your skin felt like yours again. You brushed your teeth. Combed through your hair with a comb you found on the shelf until it sat smooth and loose around your shoulders.
Then you reached back and unzipped your dress.
The red fabric pooled at your feet and you stepped out of it, rolling the stockings down and folding everything into a small, neat pile. Your bra unclasped and joined them, and then you reached for his shirt.
It slipped over you with the easy weight of something too large in all the right ways, the hem falling to mid thigh, the sleeves hanging low on your upper arm, the collar wide and soft. You could smell him on the fabric and a small smile appeared on your lips. The pyjama pants sat low on your waist and pooled slightly at your feet but not ungainly. Baggy in a way that felt comfortable rather than shapeless.
You looked at yourself for a moment in the mirror.
Then you gathered up your things, dress folded over your arm, stockings tucked inside, bra underneath, and pushed the bathroom door back open.
Axl was already in bed.
He was lying on top of the covers on the left side, one arm behind his head, wearing a loose shirt and pyjama pants, the lamp on his nightstand on and the book nearby where he'd clearly left it sometime before. His head turned when you came out.
Something moved across his expression.
It was brief, a shift, quiet and unannounced, like something had just arrived in the room that hadn't quite been real until now. He didn't say anything for a moment. Just looked at you standing there in his shirt with your dress folded over your arm and his pyjama pants bunched soft above your feet, your hair loose, your face clean.
Like he had somehow only just understood, fully, that you were going to be here. That this was happening. That you were real and present and standing in his bedroom and staying.
He had shared a bed before. You understood that without needing to be told, a man his age, his life. This was not a first in any measurable sense.
And yet something in the way he looked at you suggested that this felt like nothing he had a reference for.
He cleared his throat, almost imperceptibly.
"Pick whichever side you want," he said.
Your eyes moved to the left side. The book on the nightstand, the lamp, the faint impression of habit in the way the covers had been pulled back.
You moved to the right without comment.
You set your folded things on the chair by the window, pulled the covers back on your side and sat on the edge of the bed. Behind you, after a moment, you heard him get up and move past you toward the bathroom.
The lamp on his side was still on.
The ocean sat quiet beyond the glass.
You pulled your legs up and settled back against the pillow and looked at the ceiling, and tried very hard not to think too loudly.
You pulled the covers up and settled into them, the fabric soft and warm, carrying that same faint familiar scent the room had when you'd first walked in. You lay back against the pillow and looked up at the ceiling for a moment before your gaze drifted sideways toward the window.
You couldn't see the ocean. Only the room reflected back at you, the lamp, the shapes of the furniture, and yourself, lying in his bed, covers pulled to your chest, hair loose on the pillow. A version of you suspended in the dark glass like something from someone else's life.
You stared at it for a moment.
It didn't feel real. Not in a bad way, just in the way of something that hadn't yet caught up with itself. The evening sat behind you like a series of rooms you had walked through one after another, each one further from where you had started, and now you were here. In this one. And the girl in the window looked perfectly still, like she was waiting to find out what happened next.
The bathroom door opened.
You looked away from the glass.
Axl crossed the room in the low light, unhurried, and pulled the covers back on his side, settling in beside you. The mattress shifted with his weight and then stilled, and for a moment neither of you said anything.
You were both leaning against the headboard. There was a distance between you, not vast, not pointed, but deliberate in the way that things are when neither person is ready to be the one to close them. A space that held its breath.
Your eyes drifted back to the window.
The lamp went out.
The reflection disappeared, the room, the furniture, yourself, all of it erased in an instant, and in its place the ocean opened up beyond the glass. Dark and wide and quietly moving, the moon lying across its surface in a long, broken shimmer, shifting with the water beneath it.
The breath came out of you before you'd decided to let it.
It was involuntary and small, barely a sound, just the body's honest response to something unexpectedly beautiful after a long evening of other things.
In the darkness beside you, you felt more than heard it, the quiet shift of him, the faint warmth of his attention moving to your face.
You didn't look.
He didn't say anything. But you could feel the smile in it.
It was the kind of thing he had long stopped seeing. Something that had become furniture, the ocean at night, the moon on the water, the simple and extravagant fact of it sitting just beyond the glass. His life had accumulated so many extraordinary things that the genuinely beautiful ones had grown quiet somewhere along the way, easy to move past.
And then there was you. Catching your breath at a window like it was the first time anyone had ever thought to put the moon above the sea.
He looked at you.
He wasn't thinking about it, not consciously, not with any particular intention. His thoughts had simply drifted somewhere slow and private, somewhere that had to do with how young you were and how little that actually meant, how it sometimes seemed like you had arrived in the world already knowing the things it had taken him decades of damage to learn. The small things. The real ones. That it wasn't the money or the stages or the name that any of it had ever been about. That it was this, a window, a moon, a room that was warm while the dark sat outside it.
He had needed fifty years and more suffering than he cared to catalogue to get to that understanding.
You seemed to have simply brought it with you.
He wondered sometimes, in the unhurried way of a thought that didn't need to go anywhere, what it would have looked like. If the years had been different. If you had existed in his life earlier, in some other version of things, some rearranged world where the timing hadn't been what it was. If a younger version of him, loud and burning and completely certain he already knew everything, might have been reached by someone like you. Quieted, maybe. Redirected toward what actually mattered before he'd had to learn it the hard way.
He was so far inside the thought that he didn't notice he was still looking at you.
You were trying to ignore it. You could feel his gaze on the side of your face with the particular clarity of something that had been there long enough to become undeniable, and you kept your eyes forward and your expression neutral and told yourself that if you simply didn't acknowledge it, it would pass.
It didn't pass.
The longer it went on the warmer your face became, heat rising slow and involuntary, and finally, because there was nothing else to do with it, you turned your head and looked at him.
"Do I have something on my face?"
He blinked.
The thought dropped away all at once and he was back in the room, in the bed, caught entirely, and the expression that crossed his face in the half second before he recovered was almost worth the embarrassment of having to ask.
He cleared his throat and shifted against the headboard, his body turning slightly toward her, and the spell broke cleanly.
You laughed, soft and quiet, more air than sound, and lifted your hand to your face automatically, fingertips brushing at your brows, your cheekbone, trying to locate whatever had held his attention for that long.
His hand came up and caught yours.
He shook his head once. Nothing there.
You lowered your hand slowly, the warmth of his fingers still registering on your wrist even after he'd let go, and raised an eyebrow at him in the dark.
He turned back toward the window.
"The view," he said simply. "It's beautiful, isn't it."
You followed his gaze. The ocean sat beyond the glass, the moon still moving softly across its surface, endlessly patient.
"It is," you said.
A beat passed.
"Honestly." His voice was quieter now, unhurried, like he was thinking it through as he said it. "When you see something every day for long enough, decades, you stop seeing it. It's just there." A small pause. "Stops meaning anything."
You didn't say anything.
"Your reaction reminded me." He said it simply, without ceremony. "That it does."
You turned your head to look at him.
He was closer than you'd registered.
Somewhere in the last few moments the distance between you had narrowed without announcement, and now he was near enough that the details of his face were soft in the darkness, the moonlight from the window catching the line of his jaw, the curve of his shoulder. Near enough that his scent reached you properly, warm and clean and distinctly him, stronger now than the shirt you were wearing or the sheets around you, more immediate, more real.
His eyes moved across your face slowly.
Not searching for anything. Just looking, the way he sometimes did, with that unhurried quality that made you feel simultaneously seen and completely undone.
"I think it's lovely," he said quietly. "That you notice things like that."
Your heartbeat had shifted without asking you. Picked up slightly, steady but present, and you sat very still.
His hand came up.
Slowly. Giving you every opportunity to see it coming, to make a decision about it. His palm curved against the side of your face, warm and broad and careful, his thumb moving once across your cheekbone in a slow, unhurried stroke.
You stopped breathing for a moment.
His eyes dropped to your lips.
Just briefly. Just long enough to be honest about it, before they came back up to yours, and when they did there was something in them that was very quiet and very certain and also, underneath all of it, asking.
"May I kiss you?"
His voice was low. Rich and soft in the darkness, the kind of voice that didn't need volume to reach somewhere deep.
You stared back at him.
You weren't sure you could have moved if you'd wanted to. The room had narrowed down to the specific warmth of his hand against your face and the particular way he was looking at you like you were something worth being careful with and the question was still sitting in the air between you, patient and soft, not pushing.
It registered slowly.
And then all at once.
Your heart was loud in your own ears when you nodded.
Small. Barely a movement. But certain.
He didn't rush it.
He leaned in the same way he did everything, unhurried, deliberate, giving you all the time in the world and when his lips finally met yours the kiss was soft and warm and impossibly gentle, his thumb still moving slow against your cheek like he was trying to make sure you were still there.
Like he wanted to make sure you knew he was.
His lips were warm.
That was the first thing, the simple, grounding fact of it, warmth spreading from the point of contact outward, slow and certain. You felt your eyes close without deciding to close them.
You kissed him back.
And when you did his other hand found the back of your head, fingers threading gently into your hair, guiding you closer with a careful pressure that deepened the kiss by degrees rather than all at once. Like he had decided how this was going to go and had no intention of being rushed out of it.
Your heart was loud. Steady but loud, filling up the quiet of the room in a way you were fairly certain he could feel.
You had kissed him before tonight. Twice, technically. But the first had been sudden, unexpected and bright and over almost before you'd registered it was happening, the mistletoe and the noise of the party and the shock of it all tangled together into something too quick to fully feel. And the second had come after an evening that had already wrung you out completely, your emotions so thoroughly rearranged by everything that had led to that moment that the kiss itself had arrived inside a storm.
This was neither of those things.
This was quiet. Controlled. No shock, no preceding crisis, no convenient excuse to fold it into. Just him, and you, and the dark room, and the deliberate warmth of his mouth moving against yours with the gentle confidence of someone who knew exactly what he was doing and had chosen, carefully, how much of it to give you.
It wasn't heated. It didn't push toward anything. And yet it was, consuming, somehow, in the way of something that didn't need to be loud to take up all the space. His lips moved with a patience and a precision that made it very difficult to think clearly, and you understood in some dim and distant part of your mind that he was holding back. That this was the restrained version. That he had made a decision about that and was keeping to it, firmly and without apparent difficulty.
That alone was slightly dizzying.
He slowed it gradually. Drew back by degrees the same way he'd deepened it, unhurried to the last, and when he finally stopped he kept his hand where it was, your face still angled toward his, his thumb resuming its slow movement across your cheek.
"We should sleep now."
His voice was low and quiet and entirely composed, which felt slightly unreasonable given the current state of your own thoughts.
His hand fell away gently. He turned and settled back against the pillow, easy and comfortable, like a man with a clear conscience.
You sat there for a half second longer than was strictly dignified.
Then you lay down.
You stared up at the ceiling and focused on breathing normally, which required more concentration than it should have. Beside you the mattress shifted as he settled, and the room was quiet, and the ocean sat beyond the glass, and you were just beginning to locate some version of equilibrium when his hand found your waist.
He didn't ask. Didn't announce it. Just reached across, palm warm and certain against your side, and pulled you into him with a low, easy sound, a grunt, quiet and unhurried, tucking you against his side like it was simply where you were meant to be and he'd been patient about it long enough.
Your cheek came to rest against his chest.
You felt the steady rise and fall of him beneath you. The warmth of his arm settling around you, heavy and secure. The way the room seemed to rearrange itself around the fact of it, quieter now than it had been a moment ago.
Outside, the moon moved slowly across the water.
Neither of you said anything.
There wasn't anything that needed saying and just like that you both drifted off into sleep.
A/N: so guys I'm excited to hear your thoughts and impressions. I wanna know EVERYTHING you hjave thought or felt, imagined or wondered about while reading this. How would Axl act in this situation? Because I see him as this strong and grounded man that is secretly dying for the chance to be the the solid rock for his girl. a steady and strong pillar that she can hold onto and rely on if needed. It took him a while to get there but now that chance presents itself to him and he'd be damned if he didn't give everything he has. I also wonder which side do y'all believe he prefers to sleep on? And does he allow his pets in bed as well? (i think he does 🥰) Also you guys can look forward to waking up with axl next chapter.
prev part.〢
