âŽÂ synopsis: he's the winter soldier, and you're just you. but when your skin touches his, he becomes bucky barnes again.
(or: the soulmate fic where touch is everything and bucky barnes will fight his way back to you, one broken memory at a time.)
âŽÂ pairing: ca:tws!bucky x soulmate!reader
âŽÂ disclaimers: fem!reader, soulmates, violence/action sequences, graphic descriptions of torture/memory wiping, PTSD, panic attacks, dissociation, past torture, brainwashing, heavy angst, touch deprivation, references to past violence/assassinations, hurt/comfort, fluff, eventual happy ending, bucky is down horrendously bad
âŽÂ warnings: (18+) MDNI, explicit sexual content, unprotected sex, p in v, oral (f receiving), overstimulation, multiple orgasms, soul bond sex (enhanced sensations), touch-starved bucky, possessive behavior, marking/bruising, praise kink, body worship, emotional sex, crying during sex (in a good way), size kink if you squint, bucky has a dirty filthy mouth
âŽÂ word count: 14.3k
âŽÂ a/n: re-uploading all my fics to this blog so i'm posting a ca:tws-era oldie but goodie (the last 4k of this is straight smut, so if that's not your cup of tea feel free to stop at the **)
bonus drabble 1
bonus drabble 2
series masterlist
The library basement feels like a crypt tonightâall dead air and fluorescent buzz that makes your molars ache.
You've been down here so long your bones have started to match the temperature of the concrete, cold seeping through your jeans where you've been sitting cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by a semi-circle of photocopied articles that all essentially say the same nothing in different ways.
3:17 AM according to your phone, which you check compulsively every twenty minutes like maybe time will take pity and skip forward to your deadline. The security guard made his last round two hours agoâGerald? Gary? Something with a Gâhis whistling fading up the stairwell along with any pretense that you're not completely alone down here.
Your neck cracks when you roll it, vertebrae protesting the last six hours of hunching over sources that shouldn't be this hard to parse. But your advisor had smiled that sharp little smile when assigning this topic, the one that says let's see if you're really cut out for this, and spite is a hell of a motivator.
Even if your eyes are burning. Even if the coffee tastes like battery acid. Even if your soul bond has been aching since midnight with that peculiar emptiness you've learned to ignore.
The lights flickerâbuilding's older than sin, held together by asbestos and prayerâbut the air changes with it. Shifts. Like all the oxygen just remembered it had somewhere else to be.
Your fingers still on the keyboard mid-sentence.
Don't be stupid. It's a basement. In a library. The scariest thing down here is your browser history.
But your body knows things your mind pretends it doesn't. Every hair follicle suddenly awake, skin prickling with the kind of ancient warning that kept humans from being eaten in the dark. Your heartbeat kicks up, stuttering from normal to concerned between one breath and the next.
You turn.
He stands at the edge of the stacks like violence in human form.
Black tactical gear eats the light, makes him look like someone cut a hole in reality and taught it how to hunt. The mask covering the lower half of his face should make him less human, but somehow it's worseâforces you to focus on the eyes that track your movement with the kind of empty precision that makes your hindbrain scream predator predator predator.
"Oh." The sound punches out of you, high and strangled.
He doesn't speak. Doesn't need to. Just moves toward you with the kind of lethal economy that makes you understand, suddenly and completely, why rabbits freeze when hawks circle overhead. No wasted motion. No hesitation. Just purpose distilled into muscle and intent.
Your body triesâGod, it tries. Scrambling backward, papers scattering, laptop sliding off your thighs to crack against the floor in what feels like slow motion. Three months of work fracturing into digital garbage as you crab-walk backward, palms slipping on photocopies, knee catching on your backpack hard enough to send you sprawling.
He crosses the space between you like it's nothing.
Like you're nothing.
His hand finds your throat before you've even processed standing, leather and pressure sending you backward into the wall hard enough to knock the air from your lungs. Old brick catches your hair, pulls it, but that barely registers against the feeling of being pinned like an insect, specimen for examination before disposal.
Both your hands fly to his wrist, fingernails catching on tactical fabric that won't give, won't move, won't budge. He's not crushing your windpipeânot yetâbut the promise is there in the careful placement of his thumb, the calculated pressure that says I could, if I wanted to.
"Pleaseâ" It comes out thin, reedy. Your right hand abandons his wrist to push against his chest, trying to create distance that doesn't exist, will never exist. "I don't know what youâI'm nobody, I'm justâ"
His head tilts. Minute. Considering. The eyes stay empty, stay cold, but something flickers thereâassessment, maybe. Calculation. How long it will take. How quiet you'll be.
Your left hand keeps clawing at his grip while your right slides up his chest, finds the edge of his tactical vest, pushes uselessly at a shoulder that might as well be carved from stone. But the movement makes you stretch, makes your hand slip higher, past the collar of his gear, past the edge of the mask, untilâ
Your fingertips brush his jaw.
Skin against skin.
The world breaks apart.
Heat races from that point of contact like lightning seeking ground, if lightning could rewrite your DNA as it traveled. Every nerve ending lights up at once, not with pain but with recognition so profound it feels like drowning in reverse. Like every cell in your body suddenly remembers how to breathe.
His entire body locks. The hand at your throat spasms, loosens, and you hear him make a soundâsharp, bitten off, like someone just slid a knife between his ribs. Those empty eyes blow wide, pupils expanding until there's barely any gray left, and his chest heaves against your palm like he's just broken the surface after being underwater too long.
He rips the mask off with his free hand. Tears it away like it's burning him, revealing a face that makes your chest cavity feel too small. Sharp jaw, soft mouth, stubble that catches the shit fluorescent lighting and turns it into shadow. Beautiful in the way broken things can be beautiful, in the way that makes you want to cut yourself on the edges.
The leather glove at your throat disappearsâhe tears it off with his teeth, movements gone jerky and desperate where they were smooth before. Then his bare hand is cupping your face, thumb brushing your cheekbone with the kind of reverence reserved for holy things, impossible things, things that might disappear if you breathe wrong.
He pulls you forward, or maybe he falls into youâeither way, your foreheads meet in the space between one heartbeat and the next. His breath fans across your face, ragged and hot, and you can feel him shaking. This man who moved like death incarnate thirty seconds ago is shaking.
"Oh," he breathes, and his voiceâChrist, his voice is nothing like you imagined during those empty nights when the bond ached worst. Rough like he hasn't used it in years. Soft like he's afraid it'll break something. Accent pulling at the vowels in ways that make your chest hurt. "Oh, no. No, notânot like this."
You can't move. Can't think. Can't process anything beyond the electricity still racing through your veins, the place where his thumb traces your cheekbone like he's trying to memorize the architecture of your face through touch alone. Your hands are caught between you, one still fisted in his tactical vest, the other pressed flat against his chest where you can feel his heart hammering out a rhythm that matches yours.
He pulls back just enough to look at you, and the devastation in his eyes makes your throat close for reasons that have nothing to do with violence. Gray like winter mornings, like grief, like the moment before the sky breaks open.
"I'm sorry," he whispers, wrecked. His thumb catches the tear you didn't realize was sliding down your cheek, and the tenderness of it makes you want to scream. "I'm so fucking sorry, I didn'tâI couldn'tâ"
"Who are you?" Your voice comes out destroyed, barely recognizable. The soul bond hums between you like a live wire, like coming home to a place that's on fire, and you don't know whether to run toward it or away.
His jaw works, muscles tightening and releasing like he's fighting something immense. When he speaks again, it's careful. Measured. Like each word costs him something irreplaceable.
"Someone who's going to disappear." His forehead presses against yours again, harder this time, desperate. Both hands frame your face now, holding you like something precious, something he's about to lose. "Someone who needs you to run. Now. Beforeâ"
A sound echoes down the stairwell. Footsteps. Multiple sets.
The change in him is instant and terrible. The softness vanishes like it was never there, replaced by the same lethal efficiency that brought him here, but now there's something else in his eyes. Something that looks like anguish.
"Forgive me," he says, and before you can ask for what, his thumb finds a spot behind your jaw.
The world tilts. Your legs go liquid. But he catches youâof course he catches youâlowers you to the ground like you're made of spun glass while your vision tunnels to nothing.
The last thing you feel is his mouth pressed to your forehead, words whispered against your skin in a language you don't recognize but somehow understand.
I'll find you again.
I promise.
I'm sorry.
When security finds you four hours later, you have bruises on your throat that look like purple-black fingerprints, a concussion that makes the world swim, and no memory the EMTs will accept of how you ended up unconscious in a locked basement.
But you remember.
You remember the way his hands shook when he held your face. You remember the devastation in winter-gray eyes. You remember the electricity of recognition, the soul bond snapping into place only to be severed, leaving you with a phantom ache that feels like dying in slow motion.
There's a leather glove clutched in your fist that no one can pry from your fingers.
You tell them you don't remember where it came from.
You lie.
The world had always been divided into two types of people: those who'd found their match and those still waiting.
You'd grown up watching the found ones move through life with that particular brand of settled confidence, like they'd discovered some fundamental truth the rest of you were still stumbling toward.
Your mother used to tell the story at dinner parties, after her second glass of wine made her sentimental. How she'd been twenty-three, working at a bank in downtown Brooklyn, when a man came in to dispute an overdraft fee. Their hands touched when she passed back his paperwork. The bond snapped into place like a rubber band that had been stretched across decades, just waiting to contract.
She'd knocked over her coffee. He'd forgotten his own name for thirty seconds. They'd been married six months later.
"You just know," she'd say, fingers intertwined with your father's across the table. "It's like every cell in your body suddenly remembers what it was made for."
You'd wanted to believe her. Spent your eighteenth birthday waiting for that recognition to hit, for your body to suddenly make sense in a way it never had before.
But days turned to weeks turned to months, and all you felt was the same low-grade emptiness everyone without a bond carriedâthat constant, quiet ache of incompleteness.
By twenty-one, you'd stopped looking for it in every accidental touch.
By twenty-three, you'd convinced yourself you were one of the statistical anomalies. No bond. No match. Just you and your dissertation and a future that looked exactly like your present, only with better coffee and maybe tenure if you played your cards right.
The bruises have faded to sick yellow-green by the time you make it back to campus. Two weeks of medical leave that you spent staring at your apartment ceiling, trying to make sense of something that refuses to be made sensible. The official report sits in your email, cc'd to your advisor and the department head and probably half the university's legal team: Student found unconscious in library basement. Possible assault. No cameras functioning. Investigation ongoing.
You don't correct them. Don't mention the glove hidden in your nightstand drawer. Don't explain that the bruises on your throat match the exact span of fingers that had held your face like you were something holy, something worth breaking for.
Your body remembers even when your mind tries to forget. The soul bond, severed as quickly as it formed, has left you feeling like someone hollowed out your chest cavity with a melon baller. It's worse than beforeâbefore was just absence. This is active loss. This is knowing exactly what you're missing.
The dreams start the first night home from the hospital.
Not nightmaresâthat would be easier. These are soft things that leave you gasping awake at 3 AM with tears on your face and your hand pressed to your cheek where he'd touched you. Dreams where those gray eyes find yours across impossible distances. Where his hands shake as they frame your face. Where he whispers apologies in languages you don't speak but somehow understand.
Sometimes you dream of snow. Of cold so profound it burns. Of a voice saying his nameânames?âuntil there's nothing left but the mission.
Sometimes you dream of falling. Of a train that screams through mountain passes. Of reaching for somethingâsomeoneâwho's always just beyond your fingertips.
But mostly you dream of that moment. The mask coming off. The devastating gentleness of his forehead against yours. The way he breathed you in like his lungs hadn't recognized oxygen until then, like you were the first real thing he'd touched in decades.
You become an expert in lying about the nightmares. "Trauma response," you tell the university-mandated therapist. "Yes, I'm processing. No, I don't remember details. Yes, I feel safe on campus."
Lies. All lies.
You remember everything. The weight of him. The contrast between violence and tenderness that shouldn't have existed in the same person. The way the soul bond had sung between you for those impossible secondsânot the gentle hum your mother described, but something desperate and raw, like two halves of something broken trying to fuse back together.
The research starts three weeks after the incident. You tell yourself it's academic curiosity. Tell yourself you're not the first person to lose a soulmate before really finding them. There are support groups. Statistics. An entire subset of psychology dedicated to severed bonds and what they do to the human psyche.
Increased rates of depression. Anxiety. Insomnia. Some subjects report physical pain at the site of initial contact. Others experience what researchers call "phantom bond syndrome"âthe persistent sensation of a connection that no longer exists.
You check every box. Feel him in every room you enter, just a second too late. Wake up with your hand pressed to your face, trying to hold onto the ghost of leather and gunpowder and something metallic you couldn't place then but can't stop tasting now.
The databases give you nothing. Facial recognition software turns up empty. You sketch what you remember of his faceâstrong jaw, soft mouth, eyes like winterâbut it feels like trying to draw music, like something essential gets lost in translation.
"Maybe he was military," Katrina suggests over coffee that tastes like disappointment. She's trying to help, your best friend since undergrad, but she looks at you with the kind of careful concern reserved for people about to break. "Special ops or something. That would explain the tactical gear."
You don't tell her about the way he moved. Don't mention that special ops soldiers don't usually have metal armsâyou'd felt it when he caught you, the strange whir of plates adjusting beneath the fabric. Don't explain that whatever he was, military doesn't quite cover it.
December bleeds into January. You submit your dissertation proposal late, blame the incident, receive an extension wrapped in sympathetic looks. The bruises are long gone but you wear scarves anyway, can't stand the feeling of air against your throat where his thumb had pressed.
Your google search history becomes a testament to obsession:
But late at night, when the world sleeps and you're alone with the ache that lives between your ribs, you pull out the glove. Run your fingers over worn leather that's been softened by use and something elseâcare, maybe. The kind of attention that comes from having nothing else to focus on.
It smells like winter. Like violence. Like the ghost of cologne that might have been nice once, before it mixed with gunpowder and fear and whatever else clings to people who move through the world like weapons.
You press it to your face and breathe deep, eyes closed, trying to summon those impossible seconds when he'd looked at you like you were salvation and damnation all at once. When his voice had broken on an apology for something you didn't understand. When he'd promised to find you again in words you shouldn't have been able to translate but did.
The bond throbs. Phantom pain for a phantom connection.
You fold the glove carefully. Place it back in the drawer. Go to bed knowing you'll dream of gray eyes and the kind of gentleness that only comes from people who've forgotten they deserve it.
Tomorrow you'll get up. Go to class. Pretend your chest doesn't feel like someone excavated it with rusty tools. Pretend you don't scan every face on campus, looking for winter eyes and a jaw that could cut glass.
But tonight, you let yourself remember. Let yourself feel the echo of his forehead against yours, the desperate press of his mouth to your skin, the way he'd held you like you were worth breaking the world for.
I'll find you again.
You touch your throat, the memory of leather and promise.
I'm waiting.
The asset doesn't fight anymore.
Hasn't for years. Learned the hard way that resistance only makes it worseâmore voltage, longer sessions, deeper cuts into whatever remains of the person he might have been.
Better to go limp. Better to let them position him like a doll, open his mouth for the rubber guard, wait for the electricity to wash it all away.
The asset craves it sometimes. The blankness. The nothing. Easier than carrying the weight of what his hands have done.
But Bucky Barnes fights.
Screams himself raw before they get the guard between his teeth. Thrashes against the restraints hard enough to bend the metal table, to make the technicians step back with wide eyes because the asset never does this, hasn't done this in fifteen years, not since they perfected the chair's calibration.
"Hold him!" Pierce's voice cuts through the chaos, sharp with irritation. "Get those restraints tightened beforeâ"
Bucky's metal arm tears through the leather strap like tissue paper. Swings wild, catches a handler across the jaw with a crack that sends him spinning into medical equipment. Two more rush forward and he fights them with everything he has, everything he'd forgotten he could be.
Soft hands on his face. Bright eyes wide with recognition. The soul bond singing between them like coming homeâ
"No!" The word tears out of him, accent thick with desperation. Russian, English, something olderâhe doesn't know anymore, doesn't care. "Pleaseâplease, I can'tâ"
A needle finds his neck. Sedative, fast-acting, enough to drop an elephant. His knees buckle but he keeps fighting, keeps reaching forâwhat? The memory's already going slippery, falling through his fingers like water.
Someone. There was someone. Wasn't there?
"Interesting." Pierce circles him as four handlers wrestle him into the chair, voice clinical. "What happened on the mission? You terminated the target, but something affected you. The timeline's off by forty-three minutes."
Bucky's jaw works around the guard they're shoving between his teeth. Can't tell them. Won't tell them. But what is he protecting? The feeling's thereâurgent, desperate, worth dying forâbut the shape of it keeps shifting.
A face. Soft mouth parted in shock. The way she'dâ
The electricity hits before he can finish the thought.
White-hot agony races through every nerve ending, bows his back against the restraints they've doubled, tripled. The scream locks in his throat, comes out as a sound that doesn't belong to anything human. But underneath the pain, worse than the pain, is the feeling of something essential being carved out of him.
Don't take her, some part of him begs. Take everything else, but not her, not thisâ
But the machine doesn't care about please. Doesn't care that he's cryingâwhen did he start crying? The asset doesn't cry. The asset doesn't feel. But Bucky Barnes is sobbing, choking on the rubber guard as memories start to fracture and fade.
Her hand against his jaw. The world breaking open. Recognition so profound it rewrote thirty years of programming in secondsâ
Another pulse. Stronger. Pierce has turned the dial past safety parameters, past sanity, past anything they've done before.
"Sir," one of the technicians ventures, nervous. "The readingsâ"
"Continue."
Forehead to forehead. Breathing her in. The apology scraping his throat raw because he'd never wanted to meet her like this, never wanted her to know him as a weapon first and a man secondâ
Gone. It's gone. He reaches for it, desperate, but there's only white noise where her face should be. Only the echo of something precious he'd held for minutesâhours?âseconds?âhe doesn't know anymore.
The machine winds down. Silence except for his ragged breathing, the drip of something (blood? tears?) hitting the concrete floor.
"Asset."
He doesn't respond. Can't. There's something wrong with his chest, like someone reached in and scooped out everything that mattered.
"Asset."
Training kicks in where consciousness fails. His head lifts, eyes focusing with effort on the man in the suit. Pierce. Handler. The one who holds the leash.
"Ready to comply." The words come out broken. Mechanical. But correct.
"Mission report."
"Target eliminated. No witnesses." A pause. Something scratches at the back of his mind, urgent, important. But when he reaches for it there's nothing but static. "Extraction successful."
Pierce studies him, pale eyes narrowed. "And the deviation? You were off-schedule."
The asset blinks. Searches the white noise of his mind for an answer that makes sense. "Unexpected resistance. Handled."
"I see." Pierce doesn't look convinced, but he waves to the technicians. "Run a full cognitive recalibration. I want him stable before the next deployment."
They unstrap him eventually. He doesn't fight. Doesn't do anything but stare at his metal hand, trying to understand why it feels wrong. Why everything feels wrong. There's an ache in his chest that wasn't there beforeâor was it always there? He can't remember. Can't remember anything but the mission, the chair, the readiness to comply.
But that night, locked in cryo-prep, he dreams.
Fragments. Glimpses. A basement that smells like old paper and fear. Someone pressed against a wall, hands pushing at his chest. The feeling of skin against skin and the world exploding into color he didn't know existed.
He wakes with her ghost on his lipsâno name, no face, just the shape of an apology in a language he's not supposed to know.
The asset reports for cryo on schedule. Lies still as they prep the chamber, ice already forming in the tubes that will freeze him until the next time he's needed. But as consciousness fades, as the cold takes him under, one thought persists:
Someone. There was someone. And I've lost them.
The machine hisses. Frost spreads across the glass.
The asset sleeps.
Bucky Barnes screams.
The Starbucks on 42nd doesn't have soul bonds on the menu, but they do have overpriced lattes and witnesses, which is why you're here instead of home, staring at your bedroom ceiling and trying to parse nightmares from memories.
Six months.
Six months of the glove under your pillow losing his scent. Six months of your advisor asking pointed questions about your "lack of focus" and your therapist prescribing sleeping pills that don't work because how do you medicate a severed soul bond?
How do you explain that you're mourning someone you knew for less than five minutes?
You're arguing with yourself about the merits of a fourth shot of espresso when the world explodes.
Glass shatters inward, the windows becoming a thousand diamonds catching afternoon light. Your coffee hits the floorâthere goes eight dollars you don't haveâas your body moves on instinct, dropping behind the counter with five other people who smell like fear and pumpkin spice.
Screaming. So much screaming. Cars screeching outside, the percussion of something that might be gunfire but sounds too wrong, too close, too real for a Tuesday afternoon in Manhattan.
You peek around the espresso machine and your heart forgets how to beat.
He's standing in the middle of the street like death dressed for winter. Same tactical gear, same casual violence, same way of moving that makes everyone else look like they're traveling through molasses. The mask covers the lower half of his face again, but you'd know those eyes anywhere. Have been seeing them every night for six months, after all.
A cop raises his weapon. The soldierâyour soulmate, your ghost, your nightly tormentâdisarms him with an economy of motion that's almost beautiful. The crack of breaking fingers carries even through the shattered windows.
Get up, your brain screams. Run. Move. Do something that isn't standing here like a deer watching headlights come to claim it.
But your body has other plans. Your treacherous, soul-bonded body that recognizes his even across thirty feet of chaos and broken glass. You're moving before conscious thought catches up, stumbling through the destroyed storefront on legs that feel like they belong to someone else.
This is stupid. Monumentally stupid. The kind of stupid that gets psychology PhD candidates killed in broad daylight. But your hand is already reaching, already grasping, because maybeâ
Your fingers close around his wrist.
The barest slip of skin where his sleeve has ridden up, your thumb finding his pulse like it was made for nothing else. The connection slams through youâheat and recognition and yes, finally, yesâ
The gun clatters to the asphalt.
His whole body goes rigid, that same terrible stillness from before. You watch his pupils dilate, watch six months of careful nothing shatter in his eyes as a stranger crashes back into existence.
He moves so fast you don't process it. One second you're standing there, thumb on his pulse, the next you're spinning, back slamming into his chest as his metal arm locks across your body. The gunâwhen did he pick it up?âpresses cold against your temple.
You stop breathing.
Around you, cops and civilians alike freeze. Weapons lower incrementally because now there's a hostage situation, now there's a girl who was stupid enough to touch the Winter Soldier andâ
"Name." His voice in your ear, so quiet you almost miss it under the sirens. That sound that had haunted your dreams, rougher now, desperate. "Your name. Please."
Your lips barely move, sound threading between heartbeats. You tell him, soft as a whisper.
The gun doesn't waver. To everyone watching, he's perfectly still, a predator considering prey. But his metal thumb moves against your bare arm where your shirt has ridden up. Gentle. Deliberate. Tracing letters maybe, or just feeling, and you wonder if he canâif there are sensors in the metal that let himâ
"My name is James Buchanan Barnes." Each word careful, precious, pressed into the space below your ear like a secret. Like a gift. "Bucky. My name is Bucky. I won't remember, so I need you toâyou have to remember for me."
James Buchanan Barnes.
It tickles something in your memory. A history class, maybe. Something about World War II, about Captain America, aboutâ
"What have they done to you?" The words slip out, horrified, because the pieces are trying to fit together but the picture they're making can't be right, can't be possibleâ
"Find me." Urgent now. His realness, his hereness makes your chest ache with completion even as your mind screams danger. "When Iâafter theyâfind me. Please. I can'tâ"
His voice cracks.
The gun leaves your temple.
The crack of the shot makes you flinch, but it's the cop to your left who goes down, clutching his knee, screaming. Bucky shoves youânot hard, but enough to send you stumbling into the crowd as he moves the opposite direction, using the chaos as cover.
You hit the ground hard, knees cracking against asphalt, palms scraped raw. Around you, people scatter like startled birds. Someone's hands on your shoulders, pulling you back, asking if you're hurt, if you need medical attention.
You can't answer. Can't do anything but stare at the place where he'd stood, where he'd held you, where he'd given you his name like it was the only thing he had left to give.
Your arm throbs where his metal thumb had traced patterns. When you look down, you can see the faint red marksânot bruises, just pressure. Just proof.
"Miss? Miss, we need to get you checked outâ"
"I'm fine." You're not. You're the opposite of fine. You're shattering in slow motion, held together by adrenaline and the phantom feeling of his chest against your back. "I'mâhe didn't hurt me."
The EMT looks skeptical. "He held a gun to your head."
"He didn't hurt me," you repeat, and you're not sure who you're trying to convince.
They take you anyway. St. Luke's emergency room, where you spend four hours being poked and prodded and questioned by people who look at you like you might break or explode. The FBI shows up eventually, two agents in bad suits who ask the same questions fifteen different ways.
"Did he say anything to you?"
My name is James Buchanan Barnes.
"No."
"Are you sure? Even something small could help."
Find me.
"He didn't say anything."
They don't believe you. You can see it in the way they exchange glances, the way their pens hover over notepads. But what are you supposed to tell them? That the most wanted man in America is your soulmate? That he gave you his name like a prayer? That even now, hours later, you can still feel the phantom press of metal against your skin?
They release you near midnight with a card and instructions to call if you remember anything. You take a cab home because the subway feels too exposed, too dangerous, like maybe he'll be there in the shadows between stops.
Your apartment is exactly as you left it. Laptop open on the counter, half a cup of cold coffee growing something ambitious by the sink. Normal. Safe.
Empty.
You sink onto your bed, still fully dressed, and pull out your phone. Your search history is already damning, but what's one more nail in the coffin?
James Buchanan Barnes
The results make your stomach drop.
Born 1917. Best friend of Steve Rogers, Captain America. Sergeant in the 107th Infantry Regiment. Fell from a train in the Alps in 1945. Presumed dead.
Except he's not dead. He's not dead because you touched him today, felt his pulse under your thumb, heard him breathing in your ear as he held you like something breakable and precious all at once.
You dig deeper. Past the official records, past the Wikipedia entries, into the conspiracy forums and leaked documents that only half-load on your shitty wifi.
The Winter Soldier.
HYDRA.
Seventy years of ghost stories.
An assassin who appears and disappears like smoke, leaving bodies in his wake.
Your soulmate is a century-old brainwashed assassin. Your soulmate is Bucky Barnes, who died in 1945. Who didn't die. Who was turned into something else, something violent and beautiful and dangerous.
Who fights back to consciousness every time you touch him only to be dragged under again.
What have they done to you?
You close your laptop. Lie back on your bed, fully clothed, and stare at the water stain on your ceiling that looks like a rabbit if you squint. Your arm still throbs where he touched you. Traced letters, maybe, or justâ
You bolt upright.
Grab a pen, try to recreate the pattern from memory on your other arm. It takes three tries before the movements feel right, before the shapes resolve into something recognizable.
Numbers.
He'd traced numbers on your skin. Coordinates.
Find me, he'd said.
Your hands shake as you type them into your phone. A location upstate, middle of nowhere, the kind of place where no one would look twice at an abandoned building or hear the screams from underground.
You should leave it alone. Should forget his name, forget the numbers, forget the feeling of being whole for thirty seconds in the middle of chaos. Should be smart and safe and boring and alive.
Instead, you screenshot the location. Book a rental car for tomorrow. Pack a bag with things that might matterâthe glove, pepper spray that won't do shit against a super soldier but makes you feel better, a first aid kit you probably won't get the chance to use.
Find me.
You're going to. God help you, you're going to find James Buchanan Barnes.
Even if it kills you.
(It probably will.)
(You're going anyway.)
The HYDRA facility squats in the pre-dawn darkness like something that crawled out of the Cold War and forgot to die. You're crammed in the back of a tactical van between enough weaponry to level a city block and Captain America's guilt, which somehow takes up more space.
Forty-eight hours. That's all it took from wine-drunk-email-to-vague-Avengers-PR-listing to thisâbody armor that doesn't fit right, your heart hammering against ceramic plates, and the ghost of coordinates still throbbing on your arm where he'd traced them.
"Two minutes to insertion." Natasha's voice crackles through comms you're not supposed to have. But Steve had insisted, jaw set in that way that apparently nobody argues with. Not even Fury.
Steve Rogers had shown up at your door with Natasha Romanoff and Nick Fury, your roommate had screamed in her towel, and you'd told them everything. About the library. About the way Bucky's entire being had shifted when you touched him, like watching someone break the surface after drowning.
About how he'd held you in that Starbucks, whispered his name against your ear like a secret, like salvation, like the only thing he had left that was his.
Steve had gone very, very still. Then: "We're finding him. We're bringing him home."
Now he's sitting across from you, shield balanced against his knee, and you can see why people follow him into impossible situations. It's not the shoulders or the jaw or the way he fills out tactical gear like he was born to it. It's the way he looks at youânot through you, not around you, but at you. Like you matter. Like your connection to his best friend makes you worth protecting.
"Remember," he says quietly, pitched below the engine noise. "The moment we find him, the moment you make contactâ"
"I know." Your fingers won't stop moving, tracing and retracing the numbers Bucky left on your skin. "Skin contact. Bring him back." Don't let go."
What you don't say: What if it doesn't work this time? What if they've wiped him too many times? What if whatever's left isn't enough toâ
The van stops.
Everything happens too fast after that. Doors flying open, bodies moving with practiced precision, you stumbling to keep up as Steve's hand on your elbow guides you through pre-dawn shadows toward a concrete mouth that looks like it's waiting to swallow you whole.
The facility is worse inside. All industrial fluorescents and that particular kind of silence that sounds like screaming if you listen too hard. Your soul bond, quiet for months, starts to ache with proximityâa deep, bone-level recognition that makes your teeth chatter.
"Southwest clear." Someone else, call sign you didn't catch.
"Movement in the lower levels." Another voice. "Looks like they're mobilizingâ"
A sound cuts through the chatter. Not quite human. Not quite animal. Something between a scream and static that makes your hindbrain light up with warnings to run.
Steve's already moving. "That's him."
You follow because what else can you do? Down stairs that smell like rust and terror, through corridors that branch like diseased arteries. The ache in your chest intensifies with each level down, soul bond pulling taut as piano wire.
Thenâ
The room opens before you like a wound. Medical equipment that belongs in museums next to things that belong in nightmares. And in the center, strapped to a chair that looks more like an electric chair than anything medicalâ
"Bucky." Steve's voice breaks on it.
He's shirtless, sweat-slick and shaking, with enough electricity running through him to light up half of Brooklyn. His hair hangs limp around his face, and even from here you can see the way his muscles lock and release in waves as current pulses through the chair. Fresh burn marks lattice across his chest where the nodes attach, and there's bloodâso much bloodâdripping from where he's fought against the restraints.
There are bodies on the floor. Technicians, by their white coats. The blood is fresh enough to still be spreading.
"Stay back." Natasha has her weapon trained on him, all business. "He's still the Winterâ"
Bucky's head snaps up.
His eyes find yours across twenty feet of blood and machinery.
Time stops.
Those aren't the empty eyes from the library. Aren't the desperate clarity from the coffee shop. These are something else entirelyâferal and frightened and so fucking broken under all that damage. He looks like something that's been torn apart and reassembled wrong, like an animal that's been in a cage so long it's forgotten what sky looks like.
You're moving before conscious thought catches up. Dodging Steve's reaching hand, slipping past Natasha's outstretched arm. Your feet slip in bloodâwhose blood? His? Theirs?âbut you don't stop. Can't stop. The soul bond is screaming, every cell in your body reaching for its other half.
"Don'tâ" Someone shouts. Might be Steve. Might be God himself. Doesn't matter.
Because Bucky's watching you approach with the kind of stillness that precedes violence. His metal armâand this close you can see how it's grafted to flesh, red and raw and infected at the edgesâflexes against the restraints. The leather creaks. His chest heaves with each breath, and there's a wild look in his eyes like he can't decide if you're real or another torture.
You collapse on the arm of the chair. His breathing is ragged, chest heaving, and this close you can see old scars layered on new ones, a roadmap of decades of damage. Seventy years of this. Seventy years of being unmade and remade into something sharp and wrong.
Your hand reaches up, slow as you'd approach a wounded animal.
He flinches.
Actually flinches, this assassin who's probably felt every kind of pain there is. A sound escapes himâsmall, wounded, barely human. But when your fingertips brush his cheekâskin to skin, that electric recognitionâhis whole body convulses.
"Oh," you breathe, and it's inadequate, it's nothing, it's everything. Because the bond slots into place like coming home if home was a person who'd been carved hollow and filled with ghosts.
His eyes clear incrementally. Pupil contraction, focus sharpening, and thenâ
The noise that tears out of him is inhuman. Seventy years of grief and rage and desperate loneliness condensed into a single sound that makes your bones ache. His metal hand shatters the restraint like tissue paper, then the flesh one, and before you can process the movement he's dragging you up, up, into his lap, crushing you against his chest with desperate strength.
"You," he's saying, over and over, voice wrecked beyond recognition. "You, you, youâreal, you're real, you'reâ"
His hands are everywhere at once. Metal fingers tangling in your hair, flesh hand splayed across your back hard enough to bruise, holding you like you might dissolve if he loosens his grip for even a second. He buries his face in the curve of your neck and the sob that escapes him is pure agony, seventy years of touch starvation hitting him all at once.
You can feel him shakingâno, not shaking, convulsing, like his body doesn't know how to process gentle touch anymore. Doesn't know what to do with softness after decades of nothing but pain.
"I'm here," you whisper against his temple, your own tears falling freely. "I'm real. I found you. I've got you."
His response is to hold you tighter, tight enough that breathing becomes difficult, but you don't care. Can't care when he's falling apart in your arms like this. The metal hand fists in your tactical vest and you hear fabric tear, but he doesn't seem to notice. He's pressing his face harder into your throat, breathing you in like you're air and he's been suffocating for seventy years.
"Thought I dreamed you." The words come out destroyed, muffled against your skin. "They saidâthey said I made you up. That the pain was making me see things. But you smell real. You feelâ" His flesh hand slides up to cup the back of your head, holding you in place. "Please be real. Please, please be real."
"I'm real." You press your lips to his temple, just a brief touch of comfort. "James Buchanan Barnes, you're real and I'm real and I found you."
His breath hitches at his full name, and suddenly he's pulling back just enough to look at you. This close, you can see everythingâthe burst blood vessels in his eyes, the way his pupils can't quite focus, the decades of accumulated scars. He looks ancient. He looks young. He looks absolutely shattered.
"Don't know who that is anymore." Raw honesty, delivered while his thumbs trace your cheekbones with desperate reverence. "Don't know who I am when I'm not killing. When they're notâ" He breaks off, jaw working. "I've been empty for so long. So fucking long. And then you touched me and I remembered what it felt like to be human and they took it awayâ"
"They can't take it away again." You frame his face with your hands, forcing him to meet your eyes. "We're leaving. Right now. Together."
"You don't understand." He's crying openly now, no shame in it, just pure emotional overflow. "Seventy years. Seventy fucking years of this chair, this room, these walls. They put me in the dark and take me out to kill and put me back and I can'tâwhen they say the words, I disappear. Everything disappears."
"Then we don't let them say the words."
"I've killed so many people." He presses his forehead to yours hard enough to hurt, but the contact seems to calm something in him. "Children. Civilians. Good people. Bad people. So many I lost count. The things they made me doâthe things I didâ"
"I don't care."
"You should." His metal hand comes up to wrap around your throat, gentle but present. "This hand has strangled innocent people. These fingers have pulled triggers that ended lives. I'm notâI'm not good. I'm not worthâ"
"Stop." You turn your head to press your lips to his metal palm, and the sound he makes is pure agony. "You're worth everything. You're my soulmate. You'reâ"
He makes a broken noise and crushes you against him again, like he's trying to crawl inside your skin. His whole body trembles with the effort of holding you close enough, like no amount of contact will ever be sufficient after seventy years of nothing.
"They're gonna wipe me again." Matter-of-fact. Resigned. "Soon as they realize what happened here. They always do. And I'll forget you again. Forget this. And next timeâ" His voice breaks. "Next time they'll make sure I can't touch you. They'll find ways to hurt you through me. They'll make meâ"
"No." Your hands tighten on his face. "No, they won't. We're leaving. Steve's here. Natasha. We're getting you out."
"Stevie?" For the first time, his eyes flicker past you, landing on his best friend. The confusion there is heartbreaking. "But you'reâyou're supposed to beâ"
"Hey, Buck." Steve's voice is thick with emotion. "It's me. It's really me. We're taking you home."
But Bucky's already looking back at you, like he can't bear to look away for more than seconds. His flesh hand hasn't stopped movingâtracing your face, your neck, tangling in your hair like he's trying to memorize you through touch alone.
"I don't want to forget again." It comes out small, broken. "Please. I can't do it again. Can't lose you again. It'll kill me. It'llâ"
"You won't forget." You shift in his lap, wrap your arms around his neck, and he makes a sound like you've given him salvation. "I won't let them take you. I won't let them hurt you anymore. I promise."
"We need to move." Natasha's voice, soft but urgent. "Security response in two minutes."
Steve's at your side instantly, but when he reaches for Bucky, the soldier flinches back violently, metal arm coming up in defense. The only thing that keeps him from lashing out is your hand on his chest, your voice in his ear.
"It's okay. It's Steve. He's safe. He's here to help."
"Can you walk?" Steve asks, careful to keep his distance.
Bucky nods against your shoulder, but when you try to move off his lap, his arms lock around you with desperate strength.
"No." Panicked. "No, please. Need toâneed to touchâ"
"I'm not going anywhere." You run your fingers through his hair, and he leans into it like a cat. "We're walking out of here together. But you have to let me stand up."
It takes visible effort for him to loosen his grip. When you stand, he follows immediately, swaying slightly. He towers over you even hunched with exhaustion, and when his hand finds yours, it's with the grip of a drowning man finding driftwood.
You start moving as a unit, but Bucky can't stop touching you. His free hand keeps finding your face, your hair, your shoulder, like he needs constant confirmation you're real. At one point he stops entirely, pulls you back against his chest, and just breathes you in for several seconds while Steve and Natasha stand guard.
"Left," he says suddenly as you reach a junction, pulling you down a side corridor. "Service tunnel. I'veâI've tried before. Three times. No. Four? They alwaysâ" His free hand comes up to his head, pressing against his temple.
"Hey." You squeeze his hand. "Doesn't matter. Which way?"
The service tunnel is narrow and dark. Bucky pulls you through it like muscle memory, but halfway through he stops, pressing you against the wall. His hands frame your face in the darkness.
"What if this isn't real?" Desperate. "What if I'm still in the chair? What if this is just another way they're breaking me?"
You reach up to cradle his face in return, thumbs brushing over his cheekbones. "Does this feel like a dream?"
"No." He breathes the word against your mouth. "No, it feelsâit feels like waking up."
The exit spills you out into pre-dawn forest. The quinjet looms out of the darkness, and for the first time in seventy years, Bucky Barnes runs toward freedom instead of away from it.
But even on the jet, even safe, he can't stop holding you. He pulls you into his lap on the bench seats, ignoring the medical team, ignoring everyone, and just holds on. His face stays buried in your neck during takeoff, his arms locked around you like prison bars in reverseâkeeping the world out instead of keeping him in.
"You're free," you whisper, over and over, like a prayer. "You're free. You're safe. You're mine."
"Yours," he agrees, and finally, finally, his death grip loosens just enough for you to breathe. "Yours. Always yours. Even when I couldn't remember. Even in the dark. Somehow I was always yours."
The sun breaks the horizon as you fly toward home, and for the first time in seventy years, Bucky Barnes believes he might actually make it there.
The first time Bucky Barnes calls you at 3 AM, your body knows it's him before your mind catches up.
The phone vibrates against your nightstand, and your hand's already reaching, heart already racingânot with fear but with recognition. That soul-deep pull that's been your compass for three months now.
"Bucky?" Your voice comes out sleep-rough, concerned.
Just breathing on the other end. Ragged, like he's been running. Or fighting. The sound makes your chest tight.
"Can'tâ" His voice cracks like splintered wood. "Can't remember if the blood on my hands is from yesterday or a decade ago."
You're already moving, sheets tangling around your legs as you hunt for clothes in the dark. "Where are you?"
"Steve's. The Tower. I'mâ" A shaky exhale that you feel in your own lungs. "I'm safe. Everyone's safe. Just neededâ"
"Me." Not a question. The bond thrums with his distress, a phantom ache under your ribs. "I'm coming."
"You don't have toâ"
"I'm coming."
Twenty minutes later, Happy's pulling up to the Tower's private entrance. You're wearing the first things your hands foundâpajama shorts with snowflakes on them that you stole from your roommate, one of Bucky's hoodies that still smells like him (cedar and gunpowder and something indefinably him).
The elevator ride feels eternal. Your skin prickles with proximity, the bond pulling taut as you rise through the floors. By the time JARVIS deposits you on the residential level, your hands are shaking with the need to touch him, to soothe whatever's tearing him apart.
You find him on the couch, knees drawn up to his chest like he's trying to make himself smaller. His metal hand is clenched so tight you can hear the recalibration whirs, flesh hand buried in his hair. Steve hovers nearby, hands opening and closing like he wants to help but doesn't know how.
"Buck," you breathe.
His head snaps up, and ohâhis eyes are winter-wild, pupils blown with panic, caught in some liminal space between then and now. You watch him catalog you in pieces: face, voice, the way you're already moving toward him like gravity's reversed its pull.
You don't speak. Don't need to. Just fold yourself onto the couch beside him, close enough that the line of your body presses against his from shoulder to hip. His flesh hand finds yours immediately, desperate, fingers lacing between yours like maybe if he holds tight enough he won't drift away.
The effect is immediateâa full-body shudder, his breathing starting to sync with yours. The bond hums, warm honey spreading through your veins. Steve makes a soundârelief wrapped in something more complicatedâand quietly retreats.
"Sorry," Bucky murmurs after a moment. His thumb finds your pulse point, traces it like he's counting heartbeats. "Shouldn't have woken you."
"Yes, you should have." No reproach, just fact. "That's what this is."
He turns to look at you then, really look, and you watch him surface by degrees. His metal hand comes up without conscious thought, fingertips ghosting along your jaw with impossible gentleness. The cool metal makes you shiver, but you lean into it, letting him map the reality of you.
"There you are," he whispers.
Something fractures inside you. He pulls you inâcareful, always so careful with youâuntil your foreheads touch. His breathing ghosts across your lips, and you stay suspended in that space, sharing air and warmth and the indescribable thing that ties soul to soul.
It becomes your new normal.
The calls come at all hours. Sometimes Steve's the one calling, voice carefully controlled: "Can you come? He's asking for you." Sometimes it's Natasha, brusque but not unkind: "Barnes needs you." Once, memorably, it's Tony: "Your touch-starved assassin is having a moment. Also, he may have broken my espresso machine."
You always go.
The team adapts to your presence like you're a new piece of furnitureânecessary, functional, occasionally in the way. You learn to read Bucky's tells from across a room: the way his eyes go distant when memory bleeds through, the micro-flinches when sound becomes too much, the careful way he holds himself when he's fragmenting.
But more than that, you learn the language his body speaks when it's seeking yours.
He's always careful at first, tentative as a feral cat learning to accept kindness. A brush of fingers, testing. The barest press of his palm to yours. But once that first contact is made, something in him unravels.
He touches you like he's mapping a new world.
It starts innocuous enoughâfingers tangled together during movie nights, his thumb painting absent patterns on your wrist. His hand finds the small of your back when you walk, not possessive but anchoring, like he needs proof you're real. He pulls you between his knees when he's sitting, arms banding around your waist, chin notching over your shoulder while you chat with Sam about nothing important.
But as weeks become months, the touches grow bolder. Hungrier.
"Does it bother you?" he asks one afternoon.
He's had a brutal therapy sessionâthree hours of guided recall that left him shaking and grey-faced. You'd spent the past hour with his head in your lap, your fingers carding through his hair while he pieced himself back together. His flesh hand has found its way under your shirt, palm spread wide over your ribs, and his metal fingers trace delicate patterns on the inside of your wrist.
"Does what bother me?"
"This." He gestures vaguely at the negative space between you that stopped existing weeks ago. "How much I needâ" He stops. Swallows. Tries again. "How I can't stop touching you."
The question deserves honesty, so you give it consideration. Think about how your life has restructured itself around these points of contact. How you've started wearing layers just so there's always fabric to push aside, skin to find. How your body anticipates his touch now, turns toward him without conscious thought.
"No," you say finally. "It doesn't bother me."
He studies your face with those searching eyes, looking for the polite lie. You let him look, keeping your expression open.
"I've been thinking," you continue, adjusting so you can see him better. His hand immediately shifts, fingers splaying wider across your ribs like he needs more contact to make up for the movement. "About touch. About deprivation."
A muscle in his jaw ticks.
"Seventy years," you say softly. "Seventy years where touch meant pain. Programming. Violence. Where hands on you meantâ"
"Stop." Rough. His hand presses harder against your ribs, feeling your heartbeat.
"âso is it any wonder you're hungry for something else? Something good?"
His exhale shudders out of him. "The doctors say it's codependence."
"The doctors haven't had their souls systematically unmade and remade." You cover his flesh hand with yours, pressing it more firmly against your skin. "You're not codependent, Bucky. You're human. You're healing. And if touch helpsâ"
"It's not just that it helps." The words come out jagged, confessional. "I wantâ" His metal hand comes up, traces the line of your throat with one careful finger. "I want to touch you all the time. Want to know the texture of every inch of your skin. Want to map you like territory, likeâ" He cuts himself off, jaw clenching.
Heat pools low in your stomach, but you keep your voice steady. "Like what?"
"Like you're mine." Barely audible. His eyes won't meet yours. "Like I have any right toâ"
"You do." You turn into him more fully, catch his face between your palms. His eyes flutter closed, and he leans into the touch like a man starved. "You have every right. We're soulmates, Bucky. That means something."
"What if I never get better?" Raw, honest. "What if I always need this? Need you?"
"Then you'll always have me."
His eyes snap open, winter-blue and desperate. "You can't promise that."
"Watch me."
The trial is excruciating. You watch from designated seating as Bucky sits statue-still, hair pulled back severe, wearing a suit that makes him look like someone else entirely. They read names, show photographs, detail missions that exist in his memory like shattered glassâsome pieces clear, others reflecting nothing but blood.
The days he testifies, he comes to you after.
Never speaks about it. Just shows up at your door looking hollowed out, and you let him in without questions. He wraps himself around you like you're the only solid thing in a tilting world, face buried in the curve of your neck, breathing you in like oxygen.
These are the times his hands grow bold.
Not inappropriateânever that. But searching. He maps you like a cartographer charting new territory. Palms skimming your sides, memorizing the curve of waist to hip. Fingers tracing the ladder of your ribs through thin fabric. Metal thumb finding the hollow of your throat where your pulse flutters hummingbird-quick.
"I needâ" he'll say against your skin, words muffled and desperate.
"I know," you always answer. "Take what you need."
So he does. His flesh hand slips under your shirt, finds the warm plane of your stomach, spreads wide like he's trying to absorb your steadiness through osmosis. His metal fingers trace patterns on whatever skin he can findâthe inside of your wrist, the nape of your neck, the sensitive spot behind your ear that makes you shiver.
Sometimes you'll find his hand at your sternum, metal fingers splayed over your heartbeat like he's using it to calibrate his own. Sometimes he'll trace the boundary where clothing meets skin, fingertips ghosting under hems and necklines but never pushing further, just needing to know there's softness underneath, that not everything in the world has sharp edges.
"Is this okay?" he asks every time, even as his touch grows more familiar, more certain.
"Yes," you answer every time, even as your skin heats and your breath catches and you wantâ
You want.
"So are you two fucking yet?"
You choke on your coffee, hot liquid searing your throat. Across the kitchen, Bucky's shoulders go rigid where he's making eggs with the kind of focus usually reserved for defusing explosives.
"Tony," Steve says, warning clear in his voice.
"What? It's a legitimate question. All that touching, the eye-fucking across every room, the way Barnes goes feral if anyone else so much asâ"
"We're not." Your face burns. "That's notâwe haven'tâ"
Tony's eyebrows achieve escape velocity. "You're telling me you've been playing the world's most intense game of grabass for three months and haven'tâ"
"Stark." Bucky's voice is winter-quiet, dangerous in the way that makes smart people reevaluate their life choices.
But Tony's never been accused of survival instincts. "I'm just saying, that level of sexual tension could powerâ"
The plate in Bucky's metal hand shatters.
Silence rings out, broken only by the drip of egg yolk hitting tile.
"I'll just." Tony backs toward the door, hands raised. "Workshop. Important things. Very important things."
He's gone before anyone can blink, leaving you, Bucky, and Steve in a kitchen that suddenly feels airless. Bucky stares at the ceramic shards in his hand like they've personally betrayed him.
"Buckâ" Steve starts.
"I need air."
He's out the door before you can process the movement, leaving you with cooling eggs and Tony's words hanging in the air like smoke.
Steve sighs, the sound of a man who's aged a century in the last minute. "He's an idiot. Tony, I mean. Though Buck's alsoâ" He stops. Runs a hand through his hair. "This is none of my business."
"But?"
"But." Steve fixes you with those earnest eyes that probably ended wars. "He thinks he's protecting you. From himself. From what he's done. He doesn't think he deservesâ" A gesture encompasses you, the kitchen, the entire situation.
"That's not his decision to make."
"No," Steve agrees. "But when has that ever stopped him?"
You find Bucky on the roof because of course that's where he goes. He's sitting on the edge, legs dangling over nothing, and your heart does something complicated in your chest.
"Most people have their existential crises at ground level," you say, settling beside him carefully.
His mouth twitchesânot quite a smile, but close. "Most people haven't fallen off a train."
"Fair point."
The city spreads below like a circuit board, all light and movement and life. Without looking, his hand finds yours, fingers interlacing with the ease of long practice. The bond settles, that constant thrum of rightness that comes with skin meeting skin.
"Tony's not wrong," he says eventually.
You wait, let him find the words in his own time.
"I think about it." His voice is carefully controlled, but you can feel the tremor in his hand. "Touching you. Not justânot just to ground myself. Not for the bond. I think about touching you because I want to. Because you'reâ"
He stops. His throat works, and when he speaks again, his voice is rougher. "Because you're beautiful. And kind. And you laugh at my terrible jokes even when they're not funny. You come when I call at 3 AM. You let me put my hands on you even though these same hands haveâ"
"Buckyâ"
"I dream about it." The confession comes out raw. "Dream about kissing you. About how you'd taste. How you'd feel. Wake up with your name in my mouth and my hands reaching for you, and it's not about the bond, it's aboutâ" He turns to look at you then, eyes dark with something that makes your breath catch. "It's about how much I want you. How much I want things I have no right to want."
"What if," you say, voice steadier than your pulse, "I want those same things?"
His breathing stutters. "You don't. You can't."
"Don't tell me what I want." You turn toward him fully, free hand coming up to his jaw. He leans into it helplessly, eyes falling closed. "I know exactly what I want. Who I want."
"I'm held together with duct tape and trauma," he says, but his resolve is crumbling. You can see it in the way he presses harder into your palm. "I can't take you on normal dates. Can't promise I won't have panic attacks. Can't even sleep through the night withoutâ"
"I don't want normal." Your thumb traces his cheekbone, feels him shudder. "I want you. Every piece, every edge, every nightmare and bad day. I want the man who hums old songs when he thinks no one's listening. Who makes terrible eggs but keeps trying. Who touches me like I'm something precious and looks at me like I'm a miracle."
"You are," he breathes. "You'reâ"
You kiss him.
Or maybe he kisses you.
Maybe you meet in the middle, drawn together by forces older than choice.
The first press of lips is tentative, a question asked and answered in the same breath. His flesh hand comes up to cradle your face, and the tenderness of it makes your chest ache. But then you make a soundâsmall, needyâand something in him breaks.
Or maybe something in him finally fixes itself.
His metal arm bands around your waist, pulls you against him with desperate strength. The kiss deepens, and oh, you understand now why people write symphonies and wage wars. Because Bucky Barnes kisses like he's drowning and you're air, like he's been starving for seventy years and you're sustenance, like maybe the universe knew exactly what it was doing when it tied your souls together.
He kisses you like he's trying to crawl inside your skin.
His tongue traces the seam of your lips and you open for him without thought, and the sound he makesâbroken, gratefulâsends heat racing down your spine. He tastes like coffee and something indefinably him, and you chase that taste deeper, hands fisting in his shirt.
He doesn't surface for air. Doesn't pause. Just tilts his head to find a better angle and kisses you deeper, harder, like he's trying to memorize the shape of your mouth, the texture of your sighs. His metal hand spans your lower back, pulling you impossibly closer, while his flesh hand maps your face, thumb stroking your cheek even as his mouth devastates you.
You're half in his lap now, twisted awkwardly on the ledge, and you don't care. Can't care about anything beyond the heat of his mouth, the way he groans when you nip at his lower lip, the way his hands shake where they hold you.
"Wanted this," he gasps against your mouth, not pulling back enough to actually stop kissing you. "Wanted you. Before I even knew you. So long, so fucking longâ"
You answer by sliding your hands into his hair, nails scraping his scalp, and he shudders against you, kiss going a little sloppy and desperate. He's not cold, not controlled, not careful. He's burning, pressing against you like he wants to fuse at the molecular level, like the soul bond isn't enough and never could be.
When you finally break apartâonly because oxygen is apparently necessaryâyou're both wrecked. His lips are swollen, eyes dark and dazed. You probably look the same. His forehead drops to yours, and you can feel him trembling against you, all that careful control finally, beautifully shattered.
"Okay?" His voice is destroyed, rough like he's been screaming.
"So far past okay," you manage. "Though your timingâwe're on a roof, Barnes."
He laughs, the sound surprised out of him, and presses kisses to your cheeks, your jaw, the corner of your mouth like he can't quite stop now that he's started. "Sorry. I'll plan better next time."
"Next time?" You're going for teasing but it comes out breathless, hopeful.
His eyes find yours, and the intensity there steals any words you might have had. "Every time. Any time. All the time, if you'llâif you wantâ"
You press your mouth to his again, swallowing whatever self-deprecating thing he was about to say. He makes a noise of pure relief and hauls you closer, and you think maybe Tony Stark has exactly one good point in his entire existence.
Not that you'll ever tell him.
**
The science had been clinical, sterile words on a page that you'd skimmed in college while nursing a hangover and trying to make sense of your Behavioral Psych reading.
Academic language that utterly failed to capture thisâBucky's mouth hot and slick and desperate against your throat while his hands relearn territory they've been mapping under cotton and denim for months, each touch sending electricity racing down your spine like lightning seeking ground.
"Fucking finally," he growls against your pulse point, and you feel the words more than hear them, vibrating through skin into bone, into the very marrow of you. His metal hand spans your ribs, each individual plate recalibrating against your skin with tiny whirs and clicks, like even the machinery of him is trying to get closer.
"You know what it's been like? Having you close enough to smell, to taste in the air, but notâChrist, the way you tremble each time I touch you, like you're starving for itâ"
You try to form words but he's already peeling your shirt away with hands that shake despite their practiced efficiency, and the first full press of his bare chest to yoursâscarred skin against soft, furnace heat against cool airâwhites out anything resembling higher thought.
The soul bond doesn't just singâit screams, every nerve ending recognizing its other half and lighting up like a constellation, like a neural map catching fire.
"Oh," you gasp, and it's inadequate, it's nothing, but Bucky goes rigid above you like you've shot electricity straight through his spine.
"Yeah," he agrees, voice absolutely wrecked. His forehead drops to your shoulder, dog tags dragging cold metal across your overheated chest as he pants against your skin, each exhale making you shiver. "Yeah, that'sâfuck, is it always gonna feel like this? Like touching a live wire, justâ"
"More," you manage, arching into him until there's no space left between your bodies, and you feel his control splinter like ice under pressure.
His mouth finds yours again, hungry and graceless, all that careful restraint from months of chaste touches finally, blessedly gone. His tongue slides against yours and you taste coffee and something metallicâblood maybe, from where he's been biting his lip. When you nip at his bottom lip he makes a sound like something wounded, something primal, hips rolling into yours with zero finesse, just pure need, his cock hard and insistent through too many layers of fabric.
"Sensitive," he warns against your mouth, but it comes out more like a plea, like he's begging you to understand. "Everything's dialed up to eleven, I canâI can hear your blood moving in your veins. Can feel every place you're warm and wet andâfuckâ" His whole body shudders when you rake your nails down his back.
Your fingers find the scarred terrain of his back and he actually whimpers, muscles rolling under your touch like water, like something liquid and desperate. That's when the second revelation hits: whatever you're feeling, he's feeling it magnified. Seventy years of sensory deprivation plus enhanced everything plus a soul bond that's been stretched taut for monthsâ
"Gonna lose my mind," he mutters, mouthing at your jaw, your throat, anywhere he can reach, leaving wet trails that cool in the air and make you shiver. His stubble scrapes against sensitive skin and you gasp, hips bucking up involuntarily. "Already lost it. Lost it the second you touched me in that library. Do you know? Do you have any fucking idea what it's like, having someone reach inside your skull and turn all the lights on? Like going from black and white to color, likeâJesusâ"
His flesh hand fumbles with your pants, clumsy with urgency, while his metal hand grips your hip hard enough to leave marksâand god, you hope it does, hope you wear his fingerprints for days. The button pops free and he makes a victorious sound that might be funny if you weren't so desperate, if you weren't already so wet you can feel it soaking through your underwear.
His hand slides lower, fingers slipping beneath elastic, and when he finds you soaked and swollen, the noise that punches out of him is pure animalâa growl that starts in his chest and rumbles through both your bodies where they're pressed together.
"Christ." His fingers slip through wetness, exploratory and reverent, and you can feel the tremor in his hand. "This isâthis is for me? You get like this just fromâ" He circles your clit with his thumb and you cry out, hips jerking. "Fuck, you're dripping. Can feel your pulse in your cunt, baby. So swollen, so readyâ"
"From you," you gasp, grinding down against his hand as he slides two fingers inside without warning. The stretch makes you moan, makes your walls clench around him immediately. "Always from you. Only from you."
Something fractures in his expressionâsomething raw and possessive and desperately vulnerable all at once. He hooks his fingers, finding that spot that makes your vision white out, and watches your face like he's cataloging miracles, like he's mapping the geography of your pleasure. "Say that again."
"Only you." It comes out breathless, edged with desperation as he finds a rhythm that has your thighs shaking, has wet sounds filling the air between you. "Only ever you, Bucky, pleaseâ"
"No." His thumb finds your clit and circles with devastating precision, pressure just the right side of too much. "Not yet. Not when I've been imagining this forâdo you know how many times I've jerked off in the shower thinking about this? About how you'd sound when you're desperate? How you'd taste?" He adds a third finger, stretching you wider, and grins dark and feral when you sob. "Bet you thought about it too. Bet you touched yourself thinking about me, didn't you? Tell me."
"Yes," you admit, face burning, and his pupils blow even wider.
He drops to his knees between your thighs suddenly, metal hand holding you open like something precious, like an offering. The first swipe of his tongue has you jackknifing off the bed, but he just pins you down with his metal arm across your hips and does it again, slower, a long drag from entrance to clit that has you seeing stars.
"Fuckin' knew it," he groans against you, and the vibration of his voice makes you clench around nothing. "Knew you'd taste like heaven. Like mine. Knew you'd shake for me just like this." He spreads you wider with his fingers, looking at you with dark eyes. "So pretty. So perfect." He spits on your cunt, watching it mix with your wetness, and the filthy intimacy of it makes you moan. "Gonna ruin you for anyone else. Gonna make it so you can't come without thinking of my mouth, my fingers, my cock."
His words dissolve into action, mouth working you over with single-minded focus. He eats you out like he's starving, like he's dying, all lips and tongue and just the edge of teeth. The soul bond makes it devastatingâyou don't just feel the physical sensation, you feel his hunger, his satisfaction at finally being allowed to give pleasure instead of pain. His metal fingers dig into your thigh hard enough to bruise and you hope they do, hope you wear his marks for days, hope everyone who sees them knows exactly who put them there.
"Close," you warn, though he probably knowsâcan probably taste it in the way your cunt's clenching, feel it in the bond that's gone molten between you. Your thighs are shaking, muscles pulled so tight they hurt, and there's a sound filling the room that you distantly realize is you, making noises you've never made before.
He pulls back just enough to speak, lips glossy with your wetness, chin soaked, eyes wild. "Yeah? You gonna come on my tongue? Gonna let me taste it?" He slides three fingers in, curling with devastating intent, and your back arches off the bed. "Come on, sweetheart. Give it up. Let me have it, don't be greedy."
You shatter with a sound that might be his name, might be pure noise. The orgasm rolls through you in waves, each crest higher than the last, and he works you through it mercilessly, not letting up even when you try to squirm away from oversensitivity. Through the bond you feel his echoing pleasureânot physical, not yet, but something bone-deep and satisfied and proud.
"Atta girl," he murmurs against your inner thigh, pressing kisses to sweat-slick skin while his fingers still move lazily inside you, drawing out aftershocks. "So fucking beautiful. Look at you, all fucked out and soft and mine. Could do this for hours. Will do this for hours. Keep you here, coming apart on my hands, my mouth, until you're so sensitive you cry, until you forget there was ever a time we weren'tâ"
"Bucky." You tug at his hair, need making your voice rough despite the orgasm still sparking through your nerves. "Get up here. Need you inside me. Needâ"
He's moving before you finish, shucking his pants with graceless efficiency. The first glimpse of his cockâthick and long and leaking steadilyâmakes your mouth water and your cunt clench with fresh want. When you reach for him he catches your wrist, gentle but firm.
"Next time," he promises, reading your intent with unnerving accuracy. His voice is strained, like he's hanging on by a thread. "Let you taste me next time. Let you choke on it, fuck that pretty mouth until you're drooling, untilâ" He cuts himself off with visible effort, chest heaving. "But right now I needâif I don't get inside you in the next ten seconds I'm gonna fucking dieâ"
"So do it." You spread your legs wider, shameless, showing him how wet and open you are, how ready. "Come on, sergeant. Follow through."
His control snaps audibly. He's on you between one breath and the next, pinning you down with his weight, cock nudging at your entrance. The head catches on your rim and you both groan, but he stops there, trembling with effort, forehead pressed to yours.
"Look at me." It's not a requestâit's a command, rough and desperate. You force your eyes open, meet his gazeâwinter blue swallowed by black, raw and vulnerable and fierce. "Need to see you when Iâneed to know you're here, that you're real, that this isâ"
"Real," you confirm, wrapping your legs around his waist, heels digging into his ass to urge him forward. "I'm real. You're real. This isâoh fuckâ"
He pushes inside in one long, devastating slide, and the world reconstitutes itself around this moment. Around the stretch and burn and perfect fullness of him, around the broken sound he makes against your throatâhalf sob, half growlâaround the soul bond lighting up like a supernova, like every nerve ending suddenly discovering what it was made for.
"Fuck." His metal hand grips the headboard hard enough to crack wood, splinters raining down. "Fuck, you'reâtight. So fucking tight. Hot. Perfect. Can feelâGod fucking damn, I can feel everything. Can feel how good it is for you, can feel how your cunt's trying to pull me deeperâ" He shifts his hips and hits something devastating inside you, makes you clench around him involuntarily.
He laughs, breathless. "Yeah, right there. That's it, isn't it, baby? Right fucking there."
He moves experimentally, just a slow roll of hips, and you both moan at the drag of him inside you, at how your bodies fit together like they were made for this, only this. The angle is perfectâhe's reading your body's responses in real-time, adjusting until every thrust has you climbing higher, until you're making noises that would embarrass you if you could think.
"Not gonna last," he warns, rhythm already getting ragged, desperate. Sweat drips from his forehead onto your chest, mixing with the sheen already there. "Not this time. Too much, too long waiting, tooâthe way you feelâ" His flesh hand finds your throat, rests there warm and possessive, thumb pressing just enough to make your pulse flutter. "Like velvet. Like coming home. Like I could fuck you forever and it would never be enoughâ"
"Don't care." You pull his head down, bite at his jaw hard enough to leave marks just to feel him shudder, to watch his control fracture further. "Just want you. Just needâ"
"Tell me." His grip on your throat tightens fractionally, not enough to restrict breathing but enough to make you aware, to make you feel it. "Tell me what you need. Want to give you everything. Want to be so good for you, sweetheart. Want to make up for every night you went to bed empty when you should've beenâ"
"Full of you," you finish, and his hips stutter, lose rhythm entirely for a moment.
"Yeah?" His thumb presses against your pulse, feeling how fast your heart's racing. "That what you need? Need me to fill you up? Keep you full and fucked out and dripping with my come? Make sure everyone knows you're mine, that I'm the only one who gets toâ"
"Yes." You're beyond shame, beyond anything but the building pressure where he's driving into you harder now, each thrust shoving you up the bed. The wet sounds of your bodies meeting fill the room, obscene and perfect. "Yes, Bucky, pleaseâ"
"Say my name again." He's fucking you harder now, chasing his release with single-minded intensity. The bed frame creaks ominously with each thrust. "Want to hear it when you come. Want to feel it when youâfuck, you're clenching around me, baby. You close? You gonna come on my cock? Gonna be good for me?"
You nod frantically, words lost to the slide of him inside you, the relentless pressure against that perfect spot, the way his pubic bone grinds against your clit with each thrust. His metal fingers find your clit, cold against overheated flesh, and the contrast makes you scream.
"That's it," he growls, working your clit in tight circles while maintaining that punishing rhythm. "Come for me. Come on my cock like a good girl. Let me feel it, let meâfuck, there it is, I can feel it starting, you're getting so tightâ"
You come with his name on your lips, back arching off the bed so hard you think you might snap in half. The orgasm slams through you like a freight train, like dying and being reborn, every muscle locking up as pleasure whites out your vision. The bond makes it circularâyour pleasure slamming into him and reflecting back, amplified, until you're both shaking with it, until you can't tell where you end and he begins.
"Oh fuckâ" His rhythm breaks entirely, becomes something desperate and animal. "Fuck, I'm gonnaâgonna fill you up, gonnaâ"
"Inside." You dig your nails into his shoulders hard enough to draw blood, hold him deep even as oversensitivity makes you want to squirm away. "Want to feel it. Want all of it."
He comes with a sound that's half your name, half prayer, half roar, hips grinding deep as he spills inside you. You feel it allânot just the physical sensation of his cock pulsing, filling you with warmth, but the emotional avalanche through the bond. Relief and want and mine mine mine and something that feels dangerously close to devotion, to worship, to complete and utter belonging.
He fucks you through it, shallow little thrusts like he can't help himself, like his body won't stop even though he's already given you everything. Each movement makes more come leak out around his cock, makes wet sounds that have you hiding your face in his shoulder, embarrassed and aroused in equal measure.
The aftershocks last forever, little sparks of shared pleasure that have you both gasping, twitching, clutching at each other like lifelines. When he finally stills, he doesn't pull out, just shifts enough that his weight isn't crushing you, keeping you plugged full of him.
"Stay," he mumbles into your neck, words slurred like he's drunk. "Justâstay exactly like this. Please. Need toâneed to keep you full. Need to know you're here, that this is real, that I get toâ"
"Not going anywhere." You card your fingers through his sweat-damp hair, feel him shiver at the gentle touch after all that intensity. "Never going anywhere. You're stuck with me, Barnes."
His arms tighten around you, and you can feel his smile against your skin, feel the way his cock twitches inside you with renewed interest. "Good. Because now that I know what this feels like, what you feel likeâ" He rocks his hips experimentally, and you both groan as you feel his come shift inside you, feel how wet and open you are. "We're not leaving this bed for a week. Gonna fuck you in every position I've imagined. Gonna map every inch of your body with my mouth. Gonna find out exactly how many times I can make you come before you beg me to stopâ"
"What aboutâ"
He kisses you quiet, slow and thorough and filthy, tongue fucking into your mouth in a pale imitation of what his cock just did. When he pulls back, his eyes are dark with promise and his cock is fully hard inside you again, enhanced recovery time making itself known.
"Nothing else matters," he says simply, starting to move again, slow and deep and devastating. You're so sensitive it borders on too much, but the soul bond floods you with his pleasure, his desperate need, and suddenly you're right there with him again. "Just this. Just us. Just how many times I can make you come before sunrise. How full I can keep you. How loud I can make you scream."
You clench around him involuntarily and his eyes flutter closed, hips stuttering.
"Gonna kill me," he mutters, picking up speed, the wet sounds even more obscene now with his come easing the way. "Seventy years of nothing and nowâ" A particularly deep thrust has you seeing stars. "Now I've got a soulmate who looks at me like I'm worth something, who touches me like I'm not a weapon, who lets me use her however I needâ"
"Who loves you," you interrupt, watching his face crumble and rebuild itself, watching him fight back what looks suspiciously like tears.
"Yeah?" Barely a whisper, so vulnerable it makes your chest ache.
"Yeah." You pull him down for another kiss, pouring everything you can't say into the contact, letting him feel it through the bond. "So much. So long. Even before I knew you, I think I loved you. Think I was waiting for you."
He makes a broken sound and starts fucking you in earnest, like a man possessed, like he's trying to climb inside you and never leave. "Say it again."
"I love you."
"Again." Harder now, each thrust shoving you up the bed.
"I love you, Bucky Barnes."
He fucks you like a promise, like a prayer, like maybe if he does it right the universe will let him keep this. You come apart under him again and again, until time becomes meaningless, until the only reality is where you're joined, where the soul bond burns brightest, where his come leaks out of you with each thrust only to be fucked back in, marking you inside and out as his.
When exhaustion finally claims you both, he's still inside you, still hard, wrapped around you like armor and apology all at once. You're going to be sore tomorrowâhell, you're sore nowâbut you wouldn't move for anything.
The last thing you feel before sleep takes you is his lips against your temple, his voice rough with wonder and satisfaction:
"Love you too, sweetheart. More than I've got words for. More than I probably should. Gonna spend the rest of my life showing you, if you'll let me. Gonna take such good care of you. My girl. My soulmate. Mine."
"Yours," you mumble, already drifting, clenching around him one last time just to feel him shudder.
His arms tighten, and you feel his smile against your skin, feel the way his cock twitches inside you with interest despite everything.
"Forever," he promises.
"Forever."
Outside, Brooklyn wakes to another morning, unaware that two souls have finally, fully, found their way home.
Ok so I finally got to watch it and here's a maybe obvious take: Hermes definitely knows. And I think it maybe lends credence to the "Orpheus knows" theory.
I guess we've always been aware because it's how Hermes opens the show with Road To Hell. But Road to Hell frames Hermes as a narrator breaking the third wall for the audience. Like sometimes he's "narrator" Hermes who's recalling the story to us, and sometimes he's "in-story" Hermes who's playing it out as it happened.
But at the end of the show, after Eurydice sinks and Orpheus collapses at the edge of the hole, Kurt Elling's Hermes turns his back to the audience and starts to sing Road to Hell Reprise directly! to! Orpheus!
Don't ask why, brother, don't ask how
He could have come so close
The song was written long ago
And that is how it goes
He's telling Orpheus that there was nothing he could have done, it was always going to play out this way. Because it already had before.
I've only seen clips from prev broadway productions and in one clip (I think previews) they staged it with Hermes standing centre downstage to sing the reprise to the audience because he was just narrating again. In later broadway clips, it starts with Hermes on the left of the hole and Orpheus on the right so they can be positioned opposite each other, but Hermes is still angled to the audience when he/she sings and is still framed as a narrator.
This version puts Orpheus closer to stage center behind the hole, so that it makes it clear that Hermes is actually talking to Orpheus and not us, because he has to turn his back mostly to the audience to face Orpheus.
It's a sad song
It's a sad tale
It's a tragedy
He speaks the last line like a parent teaching their child a life lesson. Kurt Elling's Hermes isn't an indifferent narrator sitting outside of the story. He's the same Hermes who's been helping and caring for Orpheus this whole time. He has a tissue in his hand and openly wipes his tears during the above lines (he holds it in the hand that's closer to the audience so he's not trying to hide it). (A tiktoker I follow said she's seen several casts in multiple countries and has never seen a Hermes cry).
The whole show he's been a father-figure to Orpheus, squeezing his shoulders in encouragement whenever Orpheus gets nervous. And the whole show, he's known that this tragedy was going to play out and he just has to let it happen. (I think the parental aspect is true of all of the productions, though some Hermes may be warmer than others -- I will mention that during Epic III, Kurt's Hermes looks like a nervous parent hovering to the side of their kid's recital and it's very endearing).
And then Hermes does eventually turn around to address the audience:
'Cause hereâs the thing
To know how it ends
And still begin to sing it again
As if it might turn out this time
And then he turns back to face Orpheus one more time and gestures to him:
I learned that from a friend of mine
and Orpheus looks him in the eye and then gets up and goes back to his starting position from the beginning of the show.
or joelsflannel presents: a frankie morales christmas
masterlist
pairing: frankie morales x wife!reader
rating: absolute tooth-rotting fluff
warnings/tags: husband!frankie, dad!frankie, frankie is a girl dad and I stand by that, very fluffy, morales family christmas, kaleigh uses lots of words to say not that many things, blink and you'll miss it barely a reference to TF canon events, not one but TWO sets of big, brown, baby cow eyes, no mentions of religion or anything outside of presents and santa. reader has no specified appearance, pictures are included for aesthetic purposes only.
word count: 351 (she's just a baby, your honor)
summary: mom and dad get woken up for presents ofc.
A/N: merry pedromas @frenchiereading!! surprise, I'm your pedrostories secret santa and I hope you enjoy your moodboard as much as I enjoyed making it. I couldn't help myself at the thought of christmas girl dad!frankie so I had to write a little blurb. It's a little cheesy but hey, 'tis the season â¤ď¸đ
dividers by the amazing @saradika
Peaceful. The morning starts out peaceful, the comforting weight of Frankieâs arm holding you impossibly close as the light begins to shine through the curtains. The soft sounds of snores and a smell so warm, inviting, and uniquely Frankie fills your senses and provide a soothing soundtrack for the start of the day. Turning in his grip, you canât help but admire the sleeping face of your husband. Tracing a gentle finger over the scruff of his jaw with an almost reverent gaze. The way his mouth parts slightly and the ever-present worry lines between his eyebrows fade with the warm embrace of sleep. The peace doesnât last long, replaced by the sound of small feet pattering down the hall and sweet giggles growing closer before the door swings open.Â
âMama! Daddy! He came, he came!â The excitement in your daughterâs voice is enough to stir Frankieâs sleeping form, his arms tightening around you one last time before sitting up. His sleepy eyes sparkle in a way that melts your heart into a puddle. The perfect father, the way he grabs hold of his little girl and litters her small face with kisses, matching brown eyes caught in a battle of who can out puppy dog eye who. After a few minutes of laughter and your daughter deciding that you make a great tickle target (read: your daughter begging to go downstairs to unwrap her presents from Santa), you finally make your way downstairs. Spoiler alert: her puppy dog eyes win every time.Â
Itâs been a long year, one made exponentially better by the warmth brought by your little family. The little giggles, the sound of wrapping paper being torn open to reveal months of hard work met with bright eyes, the feeling of Frankieâs arms wrapping around you as the two of you curl up on the couch and watch your daughter play with her new toys. Sheâs completely entranced by them, only tearing her attention away to look up every now and then with a âMama, Daddy, look!!â that warms your heart in a way that no fire could hold a candle to.Â
âMerry Christmas, Santa.â you turn your head to look up at Frankie, those strong arms tightening as your eyes meet his. He shakes his head with a laugh before pressing a soft kiss to your forehead, âMerry Christmas, cariĂąo.â
I adore this lil' family with all my heart and reading this made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, I'll always be so smitten with girl dad frankie!!! đĽšâ¤ď¸đđ
thereâs a fic that i canât stop thinking about because i want to reread it but i cannot for the life of me find it.
the plot i remember: it was joel x reader and reader was from ig our reality and somehow ended up in tlou universe and has to go through all of the s1/tlou1 events while knowing what happens and they fall in looove
please if anyone knows, iâll be forever indebted to you
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・đŚšÂ°â§âľ PAIR: Joel Miller x babysitter!fem!reader
・đŚšÂ°â§âľ WC: 11k
・đŚšÂ°â§âľ CONTAINS: 18+ SMUT MDNI, no outbreak au, pov switching, trailer park joel awooga wooga, tommy miller appearance because daddy i love him, joel is kinda sleazy and pervy, large girthy age gap (53/early 20s), and itâs very much brought up, finding joelâs porn drawer because heâs vintage, reader is called jailbait like once, reader is also a little creep lmao, just two freaks coming together praise, masturbation, fingering, brief allusions of fisting, the BAREST hint of ass play, p in v, rough sex, riding, pussy pronouns, spanking, finger sucking (told you i canât stop), erectile dysfunction? yeah we donât know what that means in this house because that old man can fuck like heâs twenty, porn with too much fucking plot, no use of y/n.
・đŚšÂ°â§âľ NATâS NOTE: i blame tommy gunn for thisâŚand my period for rearing its ugly head and making me act like an animal. i donât know i guess my brain is just fully rotted, but yâallâs are too so hereâs a nice little gift from me to you, iâm lovingly placing this on your dash xoxo. this isnât really based on manchild sorry for the false advertising babies, i just thought the lyric was super cute and itâs been stuck in my head so yeah here we are lmao. hope yâall love it, mwah!
dividers by @cafekitsune & @saradika-graphics! plus the delicious icon from @iamasaddie!
joel miller needs a babysitter, youâre back in townâŚ
Gruene hasn't changed much. Not really.
You're not sure how much different it'd be after only a couple years away, but still. Something in you had expected it to feel even smallerâlike the way old t-shirts shrink in the wash when youâre not paying attention.
The air felt the same when you first stepped out of your beat up Chevy, heavy and humid like a wet mouth. The pavement in front of your house still burned the bottom of your shoes, and the cicadas were buzzing in the dry grass like they never stopped.
You left for college thinking youâd never come back. And yet, here you are. Spending summer back in your hometown, a little more than half a degree under your belt, flat broke, and bored to death.
Your roomâs the same, maybe just a little smaller now that youâve lived other places, slept in other beds. All the posters are still up, faded from the sun and curling at the corners. Your mom left your old tennis trophies on your dresser, like maybe she thought youâd want to see them. You donât, not really. You appreciate the effort anyway, at least she didnât turn it into a yoga room or a place to keep extra boxes and Christmas decorations.
You try not to spend too much time at home, even though you technically donât have anywhere else to go. You kill time with long drives down the streets you memorized years ago, past beat up gas stations with sun bleached lotto signs and eighteen wheelers parked in the back.
You try your hand at some half-hearted job hunting at a few different places that promise to call but never do. And you sit in the back booth of an old diner where you and your friends used to sneak fries from abandoned tables and smoke paper wrapped joints in the alley out back.
Every place you go feels like a ghost town version of what you remember. Familiar, but all hollowed out.
âYou know who might be looking for help?â Your mom says one morning, standing at the stove fussing over a pan of bacon. âJoel Miller, you remember him donât you?â
You pause, your fork stuck hovering just above the plate. âSarahâs dad?â
âMhm. I ran into him at the market a couple weeks ago and we got to catching up. Heâs needing to pick up some extra work, and itâs just him, you know. Sarahâs starting high school in the fall but heâs still not wanting to leave her on her own. He looked stressed, poor thing.â
You hum warily, pushing your eggs around your plate to distract from the way your stomach flutters.
Joel Miller.
You havenât heard that name in years. Not since you stopped babysitting Sarah, not since you left. It has something low and guilty stirring somewhere deep inside you.
You shouldnât be surprised that itâs floating back into your life like cigarette smokeâall pungent and sour and impossible to ignore. In a town of less than two thousand people, you were bound to circle around some old memories sooner or later. And Joel Miller was a big one.
Mr. Miller was a few years older than your mom, a single dad that lived with his daughter in the trailer park a few miles past the city limit. You met him when you were seventeen and trying to save as much as you could for college, when your puny part time job flipping burgers and serving ice cream cones wasnât cutting it.Â
He needed someone to pick up Sarah from school and watch her until he got home from work, you needed the extra money. It seemed like a perfect fit.
But Joel was alwaysâŚdifferent. He scooped you up off the gravel and carried you into his living room to bandage up your knee when you took a bad fall outside his trailer. He never ratted you out when he caught you smoking one of his Marlboros in his backyard after you put Sarah to bed one night. He drove you home when you got too drunk at a field party and couldnât stomach the thought of calling your mom.Â
You can still remember the way his truck smelledâgasoline, sunbaked leather, sawdust.Â
He didnât say much, just kept his gaze trained on the road as you watched him through glassy eyes while Johnny Cash floated through the cab. He looked back once, slow and quiet, like he was really thinking something over.Â
Itâs been a long time since you thought about that night, but the reminder of it resurfaces sharp and sudden, like a thumb pressed into a bruise.
Now, your momâs pouring more coffee into your cup and saying his name like itâs no big deal, like she didnât just drop a live wire into your lap. Like he didnât take up way too much room in your seventeen year old imagination.
âYou should go down there and talk to him sometime,â she says, casual. âIt might be a good way to make some money while you look around for something else.â
You bite back a grimace, conflicted. âIsnât Sarah old enough to stay home alone by now?â
Your mom shrugs like it doesnât matter. âMaybe, but like I said Joelâs always been a littleâŚanxious about leaving her on her own too many nights. Sheâs at that age, you knowâboys, phones, lord knows what else.â
You frown, stabbing at your eggs. You only remember Sarah as the sweet little girl whoâd beg to stay up and watch Disney with you, who was more interested in her Barbie dolls than any screen. You used to braid her hair while she did her times tables, let her wear some of your lip gloss when she begged.
You take a sip of coffee, the burn of it trickles down from your throat to settle somewhere deep in your chest. âYou really think heâd hire me again?âÂ
Your mom shrugs again, plating the bacon. âI donât see why not. Sarah always loved you, Joel too. Heâs asked about you once or twice, said you were a real good girl. Very responsible and all that.â
You try not to laugh at that.Â
Good girl. Responsible. Right.
You nod vaguely, standing to clear your plate into the trash even though itâs still half full. âMaybe,â you mutter. âIâll think about it.â
Later that night, alone in your room, you find yourself scrolling through Facebook like an angsty teenager.Â
You kicked your sheets off a while ago, cracked your window open to let in the cool breeze swirling outside. Crickets sing quietly in the background, only drowned out every once in a while by the sound of cars passing your street.
Joelâs profile is still public, but itâs sparsely updated. A new truck photo here, a blurry picture of Sarahâs eighth grade promotion there. She looks the same, maybe a little older. Her hairâs longer, but still curly as ever.
Thereâs no recent pictures of Joel anywhere. Not posted by him or any of his friends. You canât tell if the feeling that blooms inside of you is disappointment or something else entirely.
Youâre about to exit the app when finally, a tagged post catches your eye.
A post by an account with the name Henry B. attached to it. Itâs just a grainy photo of someoneâs backyard littered with wood pallets and stray tools, Joel standing in the middle of it all with a few other people you donât recognize.
His account is tagged in the caption underneath. Big thanks to my buddy Joel Miller for the extra set of hands tonight. Saved our ass! Itâs dated June 13, 2023.
You pause, your thumb hovering over the screen. So heâs still handy, you think distantly, chewing on your bottom lip.
You remember that much. There were always new projects cluttering the yard in front of his trailer. A crib for the expecting couple a few doors down, a rocking chair with ornate vines and flowers carved into the armrests, a soccer goal for Sarah to practice with when she started getting serious about it in the fifth grade.
You zoom in on the picture, just a little.
The angleâs weird and itâs overexposed as shit. Joelâs face is half shadowed by an old Longhorns baseball cap, but even stillâthereâs that jaw. That mouth. That same broad width of his shoulders you used to trace with your eyes when heâd lean on the doorframe after he got home from work.Â
Itâs still an older picture, and you canât help but wonder how much heâs changed since.
You breathe through your nose, one long uninterrupted breath before you close the app and toss your phone face down on the mattress.
Joel Miller was handsome when you were in high school and stupid and still biting your nails.Â
He was a late forty-something, tired around the eyes. Always in pair of ratty, stained jeans and those soft, worn down flannels with the sleeves rolled up. Sarahâs dad. The hot one, according to the girls at school. The divorced one, according to the snooty moms at the PTA. He was tall and strong, thick arms with dark hair dusted along veiny muscle. Big hands that were calloused and rough to the touch when he slipped you a couple folded twenties at the end of every night.Â
You havenât seen him since the summer after you graduated, but sometimes you still think about the way he used to look at you.
Like he shouldnât.
Like he knew he shouldnât, and did it anyway.Â
You can still feel it. That heat, that weight. The way his eyes always lingered a little too long when you bent down to grab your homework off the coffee table. The way his voice got low and syrupy when he asked what you were doing that weekend.
You were young then, but now?
Now youâre not sure who you are, not entirelyâbut you know youâre not that same girl. Youâve lived. Youâve done things he couldnât even guess at.
Youâve grown up. And you wonder if Joel would notice too.
You donât plan on going. Not really.
The next day, your mom leaves a note taped to the fridge that says sheâs out running errands and wonât be back until later. You stare at it for a while, then glance at the clock.
Itâs barely noon.
You have nothing to do. No plans. No job. So you get into your boiling hot car, roll the windows down, and drive.
Youâre not sure what makes you do it.Â
Maybe itâs the antsy feeling thatâs been worming around under your skin since you got here. Maybe itâs the way Joelâs name has been bouncing off all the corners of your mind like a moth against glass ever since your mom said it.
Either way, you find yourself veering onto a familiar exit off the highway, tires crunching under gravel until it turns to dirt when you pull into the same trailer park on the edge of town. The same one you spent most nights back in high school.
You sit in your car for a little longer than necessary, keys still in the ignition, engine ticking quietly as it cools.
The place hasnât changed much either. Same sloped roof, same white paneling, same wind chimes clinking together on the porch. Thereâs a pair of muddy work boots by the steps, and your stomach knots.
You didnât bother calling ahead. You donât even know if he has the same number. Youâre regretting that now.
You should leave. You really should. But youâre already pulling the car door open and stepping into the dry afternoon heat. The airâs thick again, the sun sitting high and mean in the sky. Your shirt sticks to the sweaty skin along your spine as you walk through the gate and up the short gravel path.
You hesitate at the foot of the stairs, clenching and unclenching your fists a couple times like thatâll magically relive all your nerves. You wonder, and almost hope, if Sarah will be the one to open the door. If sheâll even remember you.
Then, the screen door cracks open before you can knock.
Joelâs standing there. He looks the same as the last time you saw him.
âWell Iâll be damned,â he mutters, opening the door wider. Heâs in jeans, barefoot, nothing but a tank top clinging to his chest, a dark patch blooming at the collar where itâs damp with sweat. âLook at you.âÂ
No, not the same.
Older. Broader, somehow. More worn in, like a favorite jacket thatâs been well loved. His hairâs longer than you remember, messier. His beard is thicker too, dusted with more gray, and thereâs a little more weight around his middle. But his eyes are just the sameâdark, steady, and sharp in a way that makes you feel instantly, achingly seventeen again.
He looks you over once. Not quick. Real slow. Real deliberate. A single drag of his eyes from your flip flops to the shorts you maybe shouldnât have worn. His gaze sticks when it reaches your chest, lingers there a beat too long before flicking back up to your mouth. And then, finally, your eyes.
You shift your weight, offering a small smile. âHey, Mr. Miller.â
His eyes narrow, and thereâs the ghost of a smirk pulling at his mouth. âDonât start with that âMr. Millerâ bullshit. Youâre grown now.â
Your stomach tightens.
âI, uh...my mom said you might be looking for help,â you say, fighting the urge to squirm where you stand. âWith Sarah, I mean.â
He leans against the doorframe, one hand gripping the wood above his head. The movement lifts his shirt just enough to show a strip of his stomach, a trail of dark hair disappearing under the waistband of his sweats. âShe did, huh?â
You nod, still frozen in place at the bottom of the steps.
Joel lets the silence hang in the air, heavy and charged. Then he huffs a quiet breath through his noseâhalf amusement, half something elseâand steps aside. âYou cominâ in or what?â he asks, jerking his head impatiently, giving you another long, lazy once over. âAinât polite to keep an old man waitinâ, kid.â
Your heart beats wildly against your ribcage, and with one last quick, steadying breath you hope Joel doesnât notice, you climb the stairs.
Joel hadnât expected to see you again. At the very least like this, showing up at his place in the middle of the dayâstanding at the bottom of his porch like a mirage in the heat, older and more grown in all the places a man like him shouldnât be noticing.Â
And sure as hell not in those shorts.
He watches you walk past him into the living room, slow and uncertain, that little sway in your hips you maybe donât even mean to have. Or maybe you do.
Either way, itâs a goddamn sight.
Joel closes the door with a soft click, dragging a hand over his mouth like thatâll help wipe the look off his face. It doesnât. The look of youâbare legged and smiling, sun kissed and back in his house after all this timeâsticks to the inside of his skull like syrup.Â
You look around the room with a small smile, eyes scanning the familiar furniture. Some of itâs new, some of itâs the same. Joelâs never been much for decorating. You pause in front of the bookshelf he built a few years back, Sarahâs old school pictures still sit in a few mismatched frames next to a couple of paperbacks.
He clears his throat, scratching at his beard so he has something to do with his hands as he walks to the kitchen. âYou want somethinâ to drink? Water, iced tea? I think I got Coke in the fridge somewhere.â
âIâm good, thanks.â You follow slowly, looking younger somehow in the kitchen light. You rest your hip against the doorway, eyes watching him as he walks to the fridge. âI wonât stay long. I just figured Iâd stop by real quick and see if you still needed some help.â
Joel pulls the fridge open anyway, grabbing a beer from the half empty six pack. He cracks the tab with a soft hiss and leans back against the counter. âSarahâs mostly independent now. She donât need a sitter like she used to, but I still get caught up workinâ late. Donât like the idea of her beinâ here by herself too often. 'Specially not with some of the boys sniffinâ around lately.â
You laugh, soft and bright. âWell, Iâve got time,â you say, toying with a loose thread on your cutoffs. âI donât know how much help you actually need, but my scheduleâs pretty much open. I can do evenings, weekends, whatever you want.â
Joel has to bite back a grin. Whatever he wants.Â
If you only knew the half of what he really wants.
Joel shifts his weight against the counter. âIt wouldnât be every night,â he says, shaking his head. âJust the evenings I pick up extra hours, or if I get called out for a job.â
You nod. âI can help. You donât have to worry about paying me a whole lot. Iâll just be happy to keep busy.â
His mouth pulls into something that might be a smile. âIâll pay you,â he says, almost gruff. âYouâre doinâ me a favor.â
The silence that follows feels familiar. Not awkwardâjust full. A little tight around the edges.Â
Heâs always known how to talk to you, but now thereâs something different to it. Youâre not seventeen anymore. Not biting your lip and looking away when he catches your eye. Youâre standing there calm as you please, looking straight at him, like you already know heâs thinking things he shouldnât.
Joel watches you from across the kitchen, beer can sweating against his palm. The ceiling fan spins lazily overhead, stirring warm air that doesnât help much with the heat climbing under his skin. Youâre standing there across the way from him like nothingâs changed, like you never left. Like no time has passed at all.
Except that it has. And it shows.
âYou still in school?â he asks, voice rougher than he means it to be.
You blink, head tilting to the left. âYeah. Iâm up in Chicago now, Northwestern.â
âBig shot,â Joel whistles low, nodding appreciatively. âThatâs a ways away from here.â
You shake your head, smile small and bashful. âIt is. Itâs expensive as hell too, my scholarshipâs the only reason Iâm there.â
He makes a soft sound in his throat, impressed. âSmart girl.â
âI try.â You shrug, but thereâs pride under it. âIâve got one year left, usually I stay for the summer to try and make as much as I can in the city. IâI just needed a breather, I guess. Some time to figure shit out, you know?â
Thereâs something soft in your tone when you say it, an openness he didnât expect, and maybe shouldnât pry into. But part of him wants to. Always has.
âYou donât seem like the type that needs figurinâ out,â Joel says, voice a little quieter now. âAlways thought you had your head on straight.â
Your smile flickers into something crooked, something secret. âThatâs because you didnât really know me.â
He chuckles, deep and rough. âNo, sweetheart. I think I knew you just fine.â
Your eyes lock for a second too long after that, thick enough with heat and history to make the air feel heavier than it already is.
You look away first, your eyes flicking to the living room. âI, uhâsorry, do you mind if I use the bathroom?â
Joel gestures vaguely with his free hand. âGo ahead, you remember where it is.â
You push off the doorway with one last grateful smile and duck down the hallway, footsteps silent against the linoleum. Joel watches until you disappear around the corner, his gaze dipping low without shame.
He waits until he hears the click of the bathroom door shutting behind you to exhale a slow breath, setting his beer down on the counter harder than he has to.
Jesus Christ.
Sheâs not a girl anymore, he thinks to himself. And youâre not, youâre far fucking from it.
But that feeling, that ugly one churning deep down in Joelâs gut, itâs still there. It feels just as dangerous as it used to, maybe even worse now. All because of you.Â
The look of your glossy lips forming around the words whatever he wants. The shape of your thighs, those damn shorts clinging to you like a second skin. The way you were looking at him, eyes all wide and shiny under his shitty kitchen light.Â
Joel canât help himself, he thinks back to a few years ago. You, curled up on his couch every night when he got home from a long build, looking so soft in the hazy glow of the TV. Barefoot and sleepy, blinking up at him in those skimpy little after school clothes youâd always throw on.
It was a vision, something to settle his aching bones.
He thinks about how he started looking forward to it, coming home to you. It was sick, he knew that much, the fucked up little game of house he played, projected onto you. An old man like him leering at you, thinking of you long after youâd left, waving sweetly from the window of your moms car.
Joel shouldâve known better. Shouldâve done better. But that never stopped him before, not when it came to you.
A knock at the door pulls him from his thoughts. Two quick raps, followed by a heavy creak.
âJoel?â Tommyâs voice fills the trailer before he can even move, loud in the quiet. âYou home?â
Joel sighs, brows pinching together as he pushes off the counter. He didnât even hear the damn truck pull up.
Tommy rounds the corner, sweaty and covered in dirt. Heâs got a ratty bandanna hanging from his jean pocket, sleeves pulled up around his shoulders and a pair of aviators covering his eyes.
âYou ever heard of callinâ before you just barge in on someone?â Joel doesnât try to hide the annoyance in his tone, brow arched as he stares at his brother.
âHello to you too, jackass.â Tommy just walks past him like he owns the place, opening up one of the cabinets above the sink. âYou gettinâ memory loss already, old man? You said Saturday.â
âYeah, well now ainât a good time, Tommy.â Joel cuts his eyes to the hall, to the light bleeding out from under the bathroom door.
Tommy just snorts, still rifling through the cabinet. âYeah right, you got a woman over or somethinâ?â
Joel doesnât answer, eyes still fixed on that thin sliver of light glowing under the bathroom door like it might give him away.
Tommy catches on, turns slow with a shit-eating grin already stretching across his face. âYou do have someone here.â
Joel gives him a hard look, one that should tell him to shut the hell upâbut Tommy only laughs, knowing.
âCâmon,â he drawls. âDidnât know you were even seeinâ anybody. You been holdinâ out on me?â
âIt ainât like that,â Joel mutters, too fast, too defensive.
Tommy tilts his head, chewing on that like a dog with a bone. âHuh. So sheâs not yours then?â
Joel doesnât get the chance to answer. Before he can shoot back with something mean enough to shut him up. From down the hall, the bathroom door opens with a quiet click, and thenâ
Then you're back, smoothing your hands down your thighs as you reappear around the corner, voice drifting back into the space.
âJesus, that sink is still running freezing cold water? I nearly put my-ohâŚâ Youâre clearly caught off guard, your eyes catching on where Tommy stands in front of the sink. âTommy?â
Joel watches it click in real timeâyour eyes lighting up with recognition, mouth parting into a surprised smile like youâve just stumbled on an old friend. Which, in a way, you have. Tommy was around a lot back then. Backyard beers, watching football on the TV, leaning against Joelâs truck while you wrangled Sarah inside for dinner.
âWell shit,â Tommy says, slow and low, pulling his sunglasses down. âThat isnât the little babysitter, is it?â
You smile, sheepish and sweet, and Joel feels something sour twist in his gut. âItâs been a while.â
âYeah.â Joel watches Tommy take a good long look at you just like the one he did, eyes wide as his gaze rakes from your head down to the bare skin of your legs and back up all over again. âNo kiddinâ.â
It makes the space behind Joelâs ribs burn with something hot and ugly, Tommyâs eyes on you. Shameless and obvious as all hell. He might just be the biggest hypocrite in the country for it, but he canât find it in himself to care.
âI didnât know you were back in town,â Tommy goes on, leaning in like he canât help himself. âYou home for the summer?â
âYeah, just for the summer,â you say brightly. âI thought Iâd see if Joel needed help with Sarah again.â
âOh, I bet he does,â Tommy says, and Joelâs had about enough of this.
âWe were just finishing up,â Joel cuts in, his voice sharp enough to slice through the air. âShe was about to head out.â
You donât seem to notice the tension, if you do, you ignore it with grace that makes it worse somehow.
Your eyes flick to him, and for a second, Joel thinks maybe you notice somethingâs off. But your smile is still easy. âYeah, I should probably get going.â
Joel gives a short nod and steps toward you before Tommy can open his mouth again. âIâll walk you out, honey.â
You look between the two brothers for a second longer, then nod and head back into the living room, Joel right behind you. The sound of Tommyâs boots are hot on his heels, following.
You bend down to swipe your keys off the coffee table, not by much, just enough for your shirt to ride up and your shorts to dip low. Joel nearly swallows his tongue at the sight of lace. Bright pink, thin. A pathetic little scrap of fabric clinging to either side of your hips.
Joelâs throat goes dry, heat rolling under his skin like a slow burn, thick and unrelenting. You straighten back up, smooth the hem of your shirt down, but the damage is done. He feels that familiar ache stirring low in his belly, his cock twitching with interest in his sweats.
He doesnât look at Tommy, he doesnât need to. The quiet crunch of a beer can bending under a tight grip is all he needs to know that he isnât the only one taking that lace peeking out from under those damn shorts as a neon sign flashing all the wrong kinds of welcome.
Joel barely has enough wherewithal to drag his eyes up to your face when you turn back aroundâthat sweet, oblivious smile still pulling at your lips.
âOkay.â Your fingers toy with your keys, the metal soft and jangling in your palm. âReady.â
Joel gives you a short nod, jaw tight. He doesnât trust himself to speak.
Tommy, of course, steps in the silence, voice syrupy. âHey, donât be a stranger, alright? Good seeinâ you again, sweetheart.â
You glance over your shoulder, lips parting into a lazy little grin. âYou too, Tommy.â
Joel holds the door open for you, watching the way the light hits your shoulders, the back of your thighs, the little shadow that dips right at the curve of your spine.
The cicadas are buzzing, your car parked half crooked along the curb. You walk slow, gravel crunching under your sandals. Joel stays beside you, hands shoved deep in his pockets. The sunâs lower now, soft gold spilling across the lawn.
You open the car door, pausing with your hand on it. âThat wasâŚfun.â
Joel nods, biting back a frown. âYeah, sorry about him. Tommy hasnât got much of a filter.â
You laugh, shaking your head. âItâs okay, I missed you guys.â
Joelâs heart kicks hard in his chest. Heâs not sure what to do with that.Â
âYou know where to find us,â he says finally.
You nod, climbing into the car. The engine kicks up and the window rolls down.
âThanks for the talk,â you say. âAnd the job, Iâll call you?â
Joel leans down a little, arms resting on the open window frame. Youâre so close like this. Too close. He can smell the sweet perfume mixing with the bright tang of sweat on your skin.
âOf course,â he says, eyes flicking down to your lips. âIâll be waiting.â
You smile. âIt was nice seeing you, Joel.â
Joel watches you drive off, his reflection shrinking in your side mirror until heâs nothing but a speck in the dust your tires kick up.
He lets out another long breath, turning to walk up to steps. When he comes back inside, Tommyâs on the couch now, feet kicked up on Joelâs coffee table.
Joel shuts the door a little too hard behind him.
He lets out a low whistle. âDamn.â
âI told you,â Joel says, low and firm. âNow ainât the time.â
Tommyâs grinning. âNo shit it ainât the time. Jesus, Joel. Sheâs whatâtwenty? Twenty one?â
âSomethinâ like that.â Joel says, arms crossed tightly over his chest.
âOh, well never mind then, that makes it fine,â Tommy says, laughing. He cracks open the beer in his hand, taking a slow sip. âYouâre outta your fuckinâ mind, you know that?â
Joel clenches his jaw, not bothering with an answer. His heavy silence speaks louder than any words could.
Tommy watches Joel closely, taking his silence for what it is and grinning wide enough to show off the sharp point of his canines. âShe filled out real nice though, didnât she?â
Joel shoots him a warning look, brows pinched together. âDonât.â
Tommy holds his free hand up in surrender, but heâs still smirking. âAll Iâm sayinâ isâI remember when she was this pretty little thing runninâ around here. Nowââ He makes a vague gesture at his own chest. ââjailbaitâs a whole lotta grown.â
Joel takes a step forward, hands clenched into fists at his side. âWatch your goddamn mouth.â
Tommy raises a brow, and the air goes real still between them for a beat. Joel knows his little brotherâknows heâs testing the waters, seeing just how deep the river runs.
Joel shakes his eyes off him, walks to the kitchen and snatches his forgotten beer off the counter.
He hears Tommy chuckle again, more to himself than anything, his voice is louder so Joel can hear him. âYou better watch yourself, man. That one? Sheâs trouble.â
Joel downs the rest of his beer in one long, bitter swallow, eyes peering out the windowâlocked on the road your car disappeared down. His voice, when it comes, is low and final.
âYou got no idea.â
Itâs almost too easy, falling back into the routine of it.
A few nights a week, just like before. Joel calls. You come over. The knock on the door doesnât even feel necessary anymore, since Sarah already knows itâs you when she yanks it open and launches into talking before youâve even stepped inside.Â
You know where the snacks are. The remote. You know how to work the tricky thermostat and still have all the emergency contacts scrawled on a paper tacked to the fridge memorized.
It all comes back like muscle memoryâlike no time has passed at all.Â
Sarahâs older now, a little more sarcastic. Witty and bolder in a way that surprises you sometimes, just enough edge in the way she talks to you that reminds you how much time has passed since you used to sit on the same couch and color. Sheâs brimming with the kind of secrets sheâs aching to spill to someone she knows wonât tell her dad.
Youâre still not quite a âgrown-upâ in her eyes, but youâre not a kid anymore either. Youâre in that sweet spotâa cool older girl with her own car who lets her say things like shit and dickweed when Joelâs not around.
Youâre not supposed to let her stay up this late, but you both pretend not to notice the clock. Sheâs curled up next to you on the couch, draped over the armrest only half watching the reruns you turned on with her chin propped on her palm. Â
"Can I ask you something?â Sarah says suddenly, grinning.Â
You narrow your eyes at her, mock suspicious. âYou can, but Iâm not promising Iâll answer.â
She laughs, kicking you gently with a socked foot. âDid you ever, like, sneak around when you were my age? Steal beer? Hook up with anyone?â
âJesus, Sarah.â You raise your eyebrows, but sheâs too amused to be embarrassed. You toss a throw pillow her way lazily. âYou know your dad would kill me for answering that, right? Heâd think Iâm giving you ideas or something.â
âThatâs not a no,â she sings, smirking.
âNo comment.â You shake your head, smiling in spite of yourself. âI donât need to give you any blackmail material to use on me later if I piss you off.â
âPlease,â she huffs with a dramatic roll of her eyes. âIâd never narc on you like that. Besides, Dad still thinks Iâm eight, I donât even think he knows that I know what âhooking upâ means.â
You laugh, shaking your head as you turn your attention back to the TV. âYouâre his baby.â You shrug as a new episode of Daria starts. âIt makes sense that heâs treating you like one.â
âGross,â Sarah huffs again, letting her head fall back against the cushion to stare up at the ceiling. âHeâs just so overprotective sometimes. I mean, I guess I get it but, come on? Iâm basically in high school now, Iâm not really a baby anymore.â
You glance over at her, and she isnât. Not really. Not the gap toothed little girl who used to fall asleep on your shoulder watching Finding Nemo. Sheâs growing up in the kind of terrifying, beautiful way that makes your chest ache a littleâalready too smart for her own good.
She cracks her eyes open a bit, peering across the way at you. âBet you noticed that when you were my age, right? When guys started looking at you differently.â
You blink. Itâs not the words that shake youâitâs the timing. The way they hit, low and close to the bone.Â
Because yeah, you did notice. You still do. Especially now. Especially here.
Before you can say anything, the alarm you set on your phone blares loudly, cutting through the quiet.
âAlright!â You push her feet off your lap and stand, happy for the distraction as you clap your hands together. âThatâs curfew.â
Sarah groans, but she rolls off the couch with no argument and starts down the hall.Â
You busy yourself with tidying up the living room as she brushes her teeth, pointedly ignoring the growing pit in your stomach. Her words ring in your ears like church bells, her voice tolling a little too close to something youâve pointedly ignored since you got back. Something half buried and dangerous.
Bet you noticed that when you were my age, right? When guys started looking at you differentlyâŚ
You breathe out slowly, shutting off the TV and dropping the remote onto the couch a little harder than necessary. You shouldnât read into it. She didnât mean anything by it. Just a kid mouthing off, reaching for connection, for understanding.Â
But it rattles you more than you want to admit, especially hereâespecially in his house.
You swallow hard, clearing the dirty dishes off the coffee table and walking into the kitchen. You just wonât think about it anymore, itâs that easy.
You're just being ridiculous. Paranoid. That's all.
A little while later, youâre still tidying up.
The dishes are all done, washed and drying in the rack next to the sink. The living room looks better than when you got here. Itâs damn near pristine.Â
Sarah went to bed almost half an hour ago. You crane your head down the hallway as you fold an old blanket, her door is cracked open enough that you can see the light from her alarm clock shining in the dark. The soft sounds of waves drone quietly from her noise machine.
You smile, a warm fondness blooming in your chest.
That fuzzy feeling doesnât last long, not when your eyes drift almost on their own, landing on Joelâs door.Â
Joelâs room.
Itâs cracked open too, just like Sarahâs, but thereâs no light shining from inside. You keep folding the blanket, distracted. Itâs not like you havenât been in Joelâs room before, you have. Passing through it with clean loads of laundry or sneaking his phone charger from the plug near his nightstand when your phone died.
But youâd never gone in alone, and youâd never stayed long. Sarah was always hot on your heels, catching your wrist in her tiny hand to drag you back outâfollowing you around like an overexcited puppy. Not to mention it was always in the light of day, never at a time like this. When the moon is shining high in the sky and the stars are scattered across vast velvety darkness like spilled sugar.
You drape the folded blanket along the arm of the couch, eyes still glued to the door. The cogs in your mind turn and turn, spitting out an idea that has your stomach clenching with something you canât quite put your finger on.
You gnaw on your bottom lip anxiously, eyes cutting to the clock above the door.
11:53
Joel told heâd be a while tonight, before he left. He said theyâd be short a man, that the job would drag on because of it.
Thatâs not an excuse, you know that.
You shouldnât. You really shouldnât.
Your feet are moving before your brain can catch up to how bad of an idea this really is.
Your steps are silent on the linoleum, barefeet not making a sound. The wood of his door is dark and shiny, cool against your hand when you lay your palm over it. You give Sarahâs room another sideways glance, you can see the shape of her beneath the covers. Sound asleep.
The door creaks when you push it open, just barely. The sound isnât enough to scare you off, and you step inside. The carpet is plush under you, it silences your steps even more as you walk to the nightstand and flick the light on.
Your heart pounds against your ribs as you take it in. The messy, unmade state of Joelâs bed. The covers are thrown back, thereâs a dip in the pillow where his head rests. The nightstand has a paperback open and laying face down, a pair of wiry reading glasses resting next to it.
The room smells like him.Â
That scent that used to cling to you by accident when you were youngerâclean cotton and cedar, a little motor oil and sweat, and whatever body wash heâs been using for years. It hits you all at once.
It has something stirring in your core, the familiarity of it. You look around some more, greedy eyes taking in every tiny detail you can. Thereâs a few paintings and framed pictures littering the walls. Pictures of Sarah, of Tommy, all kinds of different Texas landscapes.Â
An old guitar rests on the wall across from you, you can see that itâs a little beat up even from where youâre standing. The glossy wood chipped and well loved.
Then your eyes land on the dresser.
Itâs old, stained a light brown. You wonder distantly if he built it himself.
Your gaze catches on the top drawer, the pull handle worn with use.
Again, you know itâs wrong. That youâve already crossed every line imaginable by just being in here, but you seem full to bursting with bad ideas tonight.Â
Youâre across the room with your fingers resting gently on the handle before you can even blink. Slowly, like somethingâs pulling you on a leash, you slide it open.
Socks. Boxers. Old, ratty belts. Itâs nothing special, but heat climbs up the back of your neck all the same.
The next drawer has shirts, old band tees and fancier button downs that really should be hung up. You press your hand against one of them, feeling the starchy fabric beneath your skin.
The third drawer sticks a little, enough that you need to yank on it harder than the last two. It slides open with a dull thud. You wince, your eyes flicking to the door like Joel could be standing there, catching you rifling through his underwear like a sick little perv.Â
The darkness of the hallway is all that greets you. Quiet, empty.
You take a steadying breath, but your hands donât stop trembling as you tug it the rest of the way open.
Youâre not sure exactly what youâre looking for, but then, you see it.
There, tucked toward the back under a couple old flannels, a small stack of magazines.Â
Playboys. A couple Hustlers. From the look of them, they're mostly 90s, maybe early 2000s. Itâs so vintage, so Joel. The covers are glossy, edges curled and worn.Â
Your breath hitches. The heat between your legs is instant, sharp and impossible to ignore.
You pull one out, heart hammering, and flip it open carefully. Your eyes skim over picture after picture, some of the pages sticking together as you thumb through them. The scent of paper and dust and something faintly musky drifts up, and the centerfold you finally land on is obsceneâposed, yes, but raw in a way that makes your thighs press together.Â
Legs spread wide on a bearskin rug, pink mouth parted, full bush and glossy nipples.
Sheâs brunette, hair poofy and curled up to Jesus like they used those big old school rollers. Her eyes are the same color as yours, half lidded and covered in a sparkly blue shadow.
You glance down at the caption under her photo.Â
âTurn-ons: Older men. The kind that know how to use their hands.â
A shiver rolls down your spine.
You should be laughing. Maybe grossed out. But insteadâ
Instead you imagine Joel, sitting in this room, flipping through these pages alone. Hand between his legs. That rough, big, calloused hand. Not fast, not frantic. No, you imagine him slow.
Measured.
Probably gritting his teeth, because he seems like the type who doesnât let himself sound desperate even when he is. Grunting softly. Breathing hard. Coming into a tissue or his palm or maybe just letting it land on his stomach. Because thereâs no one here to see. No one to touch him. Just him and the sound of paper turning.
You shut the magazine too fast. Slide it back in place, heart pounding.
Before you can push the drawer closed, your eyes catch on one of the flannels that covered Joelâs little secret.
Itâs an old oneâsoft looking, broken in, a faded green and black. You should put it back, lay it down exactly where you found it so thereâs nothing even hinting at you digging around in places you shouldnât.
Instead, your hand closes around it, and without letting yourself think too long, you hold it up to your nose.
God. It smells like him. Like his detergent, like summer sweat and wood and something faintly smokey. Warm and safe and so damn inappropriate in every possible way.
Itâs too much, itâs not enough. Itâs obscene.
You canât help yourself, you push the rest of the flannels back over the magazines, but the one in your hand gets tucked under your arm.
You donât even try to justify it. You donât even look back.
You donât touch yourself right away.
You wait. You ride the buzz all the way home. Eat a popsicle standing barefoot in your kitchen, flannel in a heap on the counter like a loaded gun. You pretend to forget about it. You go about your night like normal. Shower. Brush your teeth.
Then youâre in bed and itâs just there. Laying on your mattress.
You unfold it. Run your fingers over the soft, worn fabric. You should feel guilty. You do, but that doesnât stop you from pressing it to your nose and inhaling a deep lungful. You crawl into bed, tearing your shirt off and kicking your shorts down your legs all at once.
You lay back against your sheets, flannel still clutched in your hands. You rub it along your chest, over your peaked nipples, down your stomach. Rubbing Joelâs scent into your skin like itâs your own personal brand.
Your free hand slides down your body, down the lacy fabric of your panties. Youâre already wet. Youâve been wet since the minute you opened that drawer.
You close your eyes, fingertips teasing along the wet expanse of your pussy as you let your mind go thereâ
To the thought of Joel finding you like this.
His flannel draped over your face. Your hand between your thighs.
Would he be mad? Would he punish you for it?
Would he take it back? Rip it out of your hands?
Or would he make you put it onâjust so he could see you wear it while he ruined you?
You want to come like this. Wrapped up in something of his. Want to ruin yourself in it. You dip your fingers into your underwear and finallyâfinallyâbrush them over your clit.
The gasp you let out is sharp.
Itâs not just his cologne. Itâs his scent. That hot-skin smell that clings to the inside of his hats and his truck and his work boots. Itâs Joel, soaked into the fabric like heâs holding you down.
You rub slow circles over your clit, hips twitching. You canât stop picturing him. Not just his face, but the sounds heâd make. The weight of his body over yours. The way his voice would rasp against your ear if he caught you doing this.
âDirty fuckinâ girl, so desperate youâre gettinâ off with my dirty laundry?â
You slide two fingers inside yourself and gasp, mouth falling open. You imagine his hands instead. Rough, thick, calloused. Bigger than yours. Slower. Crueler.
âOh fuck, Joelââ you whisper without thinking, the name catching on your teeth like a sin.
You come hard, pressing the flannel to your face, thighs trembling, biting down on soft cotton as you ride it out. It rolls through you in hot waves. Shame, lust, guilt, needâall tangled up.
When itâs over, you lie there panting, the room silent except for your heartbeat in your ears. You relax your jaw, the flannel falling from between your lips, fabric soaked with your spit.
You drift off with it clutched to your chest. Still wet between your legs. Still aching. Still imagining what heâd do if he ever found out.
And you sleep better than you have in weeks.
You donât think anything of it when you see Joelâs truck parked in front of the trailer. Itâs not out of the ordinary, heâs almost always there to make sure you get in safe before he leaves.
You climb the creaky steps and knock like usual. Three little raps, your knuckles against the thin aluminum of Joelâs door, already shifting your weight to the side as you wait for Sarah to yank it open and start catching you up on all the latest gossip from her last summer soccer practice.
Onlyâit doesn't swing open. Not right away.
You frown, Sarahâs usually opened the door before you can even raise your fist to knock again. Itâs only then that you notice how quiet it is.Â
No music thumping out from her window, no light flicked on in her room. No hum of the TV playing. No voice yelling âJust a second!â from down the hall. Just the light hanging above your head buzzing faintly and the dull thud of your knuckles against the door.
You knock for a fourth time, less sure.
A few more seconds go by. One, two, three, four.Â
You count all the way to ten before the door creaks open, the screen with it. Joel fills the frame, one shoulder leaning against it. The light floods out from behind him, a warm yellow glow spilling into the dark and haloing around his broad shoulders.Â
Heâs not dressed in work clothes, just an old grey short sleeve and a pair of jeans that ride dangerously low on his hipsâa beer bottle held loosely in his left hand. He doesnât even have shoes on.
Youâre hit with a violent wash of dĂŠjĂ vu, your traitorous mind thinking back to the first day you saw him again.Â
âHey,â you say as casually as you can, shifting on your feet. You peer around him into the living room. Empty. âWhereâs Sarah?â
Joel doesnât move, head tilting as he watches you. âSheâs stayinâ over at a friends.â
You blink. âOh.â
âYeah. Oh.â The corner of Joelâs mouth raises slightly, itâs not quite a smirk, but itâs close. âI texted. You didnât check your phone?â
You shake your head slowly, but you canât help the way your brows furrow. You had checked it, right before you left your house, like you awake do. No calls. No texts.
âI mustâve missed it.â
Joel gives you a lazy once over, eyes dragging down your front like a slow lick. âHuh,â he says, but itâs far away. âGuess you might as well come in anyway, wouldnât want you to waste your time cominâ out here for nothinâ.âÂ
He steps aside, holding the door open expectantly.Â
âItâs fine, really.â You laugh, but itâs awkward. âI can just goââ
âCome inside.â
He says it low. Not a suggestion.
You hesitate for half a second, nerves suddenly scraping just beneath your skin. But you step in anyway, brushing past him into the cool dimness of the trailer, the familiar scent of cedar, beer, and Joel hitting your nose all at once.Â
The door shuts behind you with a heavy click.
Joel walks past you, sets his beer down on the coffee table before his eyes find yours again. You can see his face better in the light of the living room, his eyes are hard. Dark in a way you havenât seen in a long time. It has your stomach clenching tightly, the sour edge of alarm churning with arousal inside you.
âItâs good youâre here. We oughta talk.â
You open your mouth, then shut it. His tone is strangeâoffâbut not angry. Amused, almost. You wring your hands behind your back anxiously. âEverything okay?â
âYeah,â he says, voice low, rough, âI been meaninâ to ask you somethinâ. Just been waitinâ for the right time.â
You frown. âAsk me what?â
Joel drags the silence out. He watches you try not to squirm, mouth tilted in another half smirk.Â
"You go through my shit, baby?"
Your heart trips three times over in your chest, stomach dropping down to your feet. âIâwhat?â
Joel huffs hard out his nose, that smug smirk spreads. Itâs all teeth now, feral and amused. âDid I stutter?â
Youâre shaking now, hands trembling in time with the frantic beat of your pulse. âI just thoughtâI didnât think youââ
Joel clicks his tongue, cutting you off. âYeah thatâs the problem, ainât it? You didnât think.â He takes one slow step toward you, eyes locked on yours, heavy and dark and hot enough to burn.
âItâs real funny,â he says offhandedly, too casualâlike youâre talking about this weekâs forecast. âThereâs only a few people whoâve been in and outta here lately. And I know Tommy ainât the one riflinâ through my drawers, takinâ shit that doesn't belong to him. I ainât dumb, baby.â
Your mouth opens and closes desperately, mind racing to say anything. To lie, to defend yourself, to beg for forgiveness. Nothing comes out. Your throat works around nothing, and your hands are clenched so tightly behind your back theyâre going numb.
Joel just hums. A low, throaty sound that vibrates down your spine. His fingers curl under the hem of your shirt, lifting it slightly, just enough to show the little strip of skin above your shorts. âYou touch yourself in it?â
The question punches the air from your lungs. You donât need to ask him what it is.
âIâJoelââ
âDonât try lyinâ to me.â
Your face burns. You canât bring yourself to nod, let alone speak. You donât have to.Â
Joel laughsâdark and low, like he already knows the answer. He trails his hand along the skin of your stomach, his touch featherlight. You canât hide the shiver that wracks through you, goosebumps pebbling along your skin.
His hand falls away, only so he can drop down onto the couch behind him. Legs wide, thighs spread, jeans tugging tight across them as he leans back like heâs settling in for a show. His voice is pure gravel. âGo on, then. Show me what you did.â
You just stand there. Eyes wide. âWhat?âÂ
Your voice shakes, quiet and small in the tension.Â
Joel shakes his head, sighing like heâs dealing with a stubborn child. He hooks one finger in the waistband of your shorts, tugging. You move without thinking, stepping into the space between his spread thighs.
âSee, I donât wanna have to ask you again, baby. So, are you gonna show me?â he says slowly, his touch dipping low enough to brush over the lacy edge of your panties. âOr am I gonna have to make you?â
Your breath catches in your throat, heat flooding your body in less than a second. âJoelââ
He cocks a brow. âWhatâs wrong, sweet thing? You were bold enough to sneak into my room, go through my drawers, take what donât belong to you. Donât get shy now.â
You feel it thenâthat impossible to ignore, deep, slick throb between your legs. Shame and heat twisting up your insides. Your whole being pulses with heat, phantom flames lapping over your skin.
You donât know if youâre more humiliated or turned onâyour body doesnât seem to care either way. Joel hasnât taken his eyes off you.
Thereâs no way out of this. And youâre not even sure if you want one.
You bite your lip, cheeks burning as your fingers trail down your belly, under your shorts and down between your thighs. Already wet. Slick with the shame of it, slick with how bad you want him watching you.
Joel swats your hip, not hard enough to sting. Just enough to make you feel it. âNo maâam, none of that shit. Shorts off.â
You freeze, your hand still buried under the waistband, your pulse thudding in your ears like a war drum. Apparently, you donât move fast enough, not for him, and Joelâs already leaning forward, hands on your hips as he yanks them down himselfâyour shorts and panties in one brutal tug.
âFuckinâ brat,â he mutters, almost to himself, dragging the fabric down your thighs and letting it pool at your ankles.
Your breath hitches as he sits back again, arms draped lazily over the back of the couch, dark eyes fixed on the wet heat between your thighs like heâs starving.
You step out of your clothes, naked from the waist down, cheeks burning, heart beating so hard itâs making you lightheaded.
Joel tips his chin toward the floor. âGo on.â
Your stomach flips. Youâre sure he can see it, the way your chest heaves, nipples pressing hard into the thin fabric of your top. Your hand drifts between your legs again, slow and shaky. Joelâs eyes follow every motion. Every tremble.
Your middle finger dips down and slides through your folds, slow. You let out a shaky breath. You brush over your clit, and twitch, hips jerking without meaning to.
âThatâs it.â Joel nods, his hands clenched into fists. âSee how easy it was, sugar? Feelâs good, doesn't it?â
âYes,â you whisper, your voice threadbare. Youâre rubbing yourself faster now, pressure building fast. âIt feels so good, Joel.â
Joel groans at his name falling from your lips. âI bet it does. Bet you fucked your fingers into that tight little cunt while smellinâ me on the collar of that damn shirt. You nasty little thing.â
You nod, barely, lips parted as you circle your clit again, breath hitching on contact.
âI should spank your ass red for that,â he growls. âShould bend you over my lap like a fuckinâ child. You need discipline, donât you?â
Your knees nearly give. âJoel. Pleaseââ
He cuts you off again, gesturing lazily to where your hand disappears between your thighs. âOpen her up. Let me see.â
You press two fingers between your folds, spreading them apart so he can see your glistening pussy, sticky and swollen from just a few strokes.
âGoddamn,â Joel groans, reaching down to adjust the thick shape of his cock hard under his jeans. âSheâs fuckinâ drippinâ. That for me, baby?â
You nod, lips slack as your thighs tremble.
âYeah,â he drawls, stretching the word like out taffy between his teeth. âThatâs real pretty.â
You moan at that. Loud and desperate. Your touch dip that much lower to push one finger inside. Then another, like you just canât help yourself. Youâre so wet thereâs no resistance, your pussy welcoming them in like itâs done this a hundred times thinking of him. Slick drips down your thighs, shining under the light of the lamp.
Joel licks his lips slowly, deliberately. âLook at that.â He leans forward, pupils wide and dark as an oil spill. âJust a little rub like that, a little stretch and youâre already makinâ a mess.â
You whimper, hips rocking against your hand. âJoel, Iââ
âGive yourself another finger. Show me how you take itâ
You grind down onto your own fingers, mouth slack with soft moans that breathe to life before you can muffle them. You press in a third finger. The stretch burns, but you donât stop. Youâre panting now, skin dewy, hips jerking forward to meet your hand. Joel watches like a man starved.
He grins, smug and handsome and infuriating. âYeah, three feels nice donât it, honey?â He reaches out, his hand sliding up your thigh in one slow motion, lazy and unhurried through the slick. âBet you could take my whole fuckinâ fist if you wanted it real bad.â
A pathetic little whine fills the air, more of a mewl than anything. It takes you a second to realize youâre the one making the noise, so desperate and gone from the tiniest amount of touch. It makes your walls clamp down harder around your fingers.
Joel sees. Joel knows.
And itâs all he needs to finally break.
âCome here,â he growls suddenly, jerking his head impatiently.
You scramble over, straddling him, bare thighs spread over his denim clad ones. Joel undoes his belt with one hand, the clink of the metal making your pulse trip. He pulls himself out of his soaked boxers, hard and straining, the rosy head drooling precome onto his shirt when it slaps up to rest against his stomach.
Your mouth falls open at the sight of it, flushed and big. Bigger than youâve ever seen, outside of guilty late night porn searches.Â
Joel chuckles darkly, taking himself in his hand. He strokes himself slowly, twisting his wrist over the head. âYou think you can take all this?â he taunts meanly, dragging the tip through your folds, wetting himself with your slick. âYouâre just a baby, sweetheart. You think you can handle this dick?â
You moan as he rubs himself over your sensitive clit, warm and wet. Your hips twitch down, desperate for more. Your pussy clenches around nothing, overwhelmingly empty.
He slaps your ass, hard. He kneads the tender skin in his rough hand after, dragging out the sting. âHow old am I? Tell me, honey. Say it.â
You gasp, eyes screwing shut in embarrassment. âFiftyâah! Fifty three,â you breathe, not looking Joel in the eye as you say it.
You canât, not with the humiliation coursing through your veins like pure kerosine. Itâs white hot, burning so bright, but itâs still not enough to stop your pussy from dripping sticky all over his cock like a broken faucet.
âDamn right,â he growls. âOld enough to be your fuckinâ daddy.â
Joel thrusts into you in one brutal push.
You scream. Your nails dig into his shoulders hard enough that you feel the thin material of his shirt straining under it. The stretch feels like itâs tearing you in two, like your fingers didnât do anything to prepare you for his cock carving a place for itself inside you.
Joel kisses you, sucks the noise right off your tongue. He tastes like beer, like sweat and salt and something thatâs only him. You moan into his mouth, your fingers threading into the soft hair curling at the nape of his neck.
He pulls back, a string of spit connecting your lips until it bends and breaks under the weight of gravity. âCome on, darlinâ.â He slaps your ass againâonce, twiceâand you squeal, the burn sharp and perfect. âYou wanted to fuck me so bad you couldnât keep those thievinâ hands to yourself, huh? Well nowâs your chance. Fuck me, give it to me good.â
You donât ease into it, too worked to even think about starting slow.
You bounce on his lap like youâre possessed, thighs slapping, slick drenching his jeans. Joel groans with every roll of your hips, low and drawn out. He lets his head fall back against the couch, the tan column of his throat on display.
âBeen waitinâ for this,â he pants. âSince the day you showed back up. Actinâ all grown. Look at you now. Cryinâ on my cock.â
Youâre drooling. Dizzy. Brain turned to static as you ride him, his hands gripping your hips so tight you know youâll bruise.
âYouâre so fuckinâ tight,â he growls, raising his head to watch you. âThis pussy wasnât made for boys your age. Needs a man to stretch it out. To ruin it.â
You whine, your pussy tightening around the throbbing length of his cock. Joel notices, of course he does.
His hands grip your ass, urging your hips up and down faster. âYou like that, sweet thing? You like lettinâ an old man fuck you raw like this?â
âYes,â you whine, tears burning at your water line. âI love it, want you to come inside me so bad Joel, fuck-â
âI know, baby.â Joel kisses your cheek, softly. Too soft, too tender. âYou ainât ever gonna want some college boy after this. Youâre gonna be thinkinâ about how Mr. Miller fucked you open better than they could.â
Your moan is muffled by his fingers pushing between your slack lips, filling your mouth. You whine at the taste of yourself coating his skin, sucking obediently as he presses them down on your tongue.
âGonna make you mine,â he pants. âMine. No more sneakinâ around, no more stealinâ my shitâyou want something, you ask for it like a big girl, and Iâll fuckinâ give it to you.â
You shake your head, babbling around his fingers. âYesâyes, only you. Iâm yoursââ
You can feel your orgasm building deep in your belly, the coil of pleasure tightening and tightening until it threatens to snap.
Joel rips his fingers from your mouth with a dark growl, reaching back down to grip your ass again. He spreads you open, the cool air making you gasp. One finger, wet with your own spit, rubs over your rim.Â
He doesnât push inâjust teases, circling, pressing, tuggingâenough to make you clench and cry out as he starts pounding up into you. His hips lifting off the couch and filling the room with the loud noise of skin on skin as his balls slap against your ass with every thrust. Your pussy squelching around him with dirty, wet noises would make your ears burn if you werenât so far gone already.
âYou gonna let me play with this too?â he murmurs, lips brushing against your. âYou lettinâ me train this hole next?â
Thatâs it. Itâs all you can take.
You shatter with a scream, pussy squeezing so tight it makes Joel snarl and buck wildly up into you. He grabs your ass, choking out a strained string of âfuck, fuck, fuckââ
He curses, pulls you down hard onto his cock one last time as he spills inside you, so deep you swear you feel it behind your ribs. His head drops to your shoulder, breath ragged as he comes and comes.Â
It feels endless, spurt after spurt of hot spend flooding your walls until itâs forced to leak back out along the fever hot skin of his cock, slipping down his balls to drip onto the couch.
Itâs filthy.
Itâs obscene.
Itâs exactly what you wanted.
You both lean into each other, breathless and spent as you come down. Sweat drips down your back, rolling down your spine as your hands stay buried in his hair.
Joel strokes your thigh lazily, still inside you, watching the mess drip down where youâre spread open around him.
âYouâre stayinâ the night,â he says simply.
You canât fight the tiny, secret smile you press against the sweaty skin of his throat as you nod wordlessly, thighs still shaking violently around his hips.
Youâd never make it to the door anyway.
MINI NAT'S NOTE: what's so funny to me about this is that i didn't realize how much i actually missed writing for joel until i took a little mini break to work on my other frankie and harry fics like itâs so dramatic truly, but baby weâre so back! back and hopefully pissing off the joel age gap haters!
shoutouts to baby rylea for giving me the flannel idea cause this fic might have been lost without it. it was rescued from being just another abandoned wip and instead turned into a literal monster which was never supposed to happen but uh that's chill i guessâŚtwo fics over 10k words in one month? thatâs literally unheard of over here. ALSO my first venture into ass play to spite @ebodebo and @yuenity sooo thatâs fun. i love them both really LMAO
once again it's four a.m because i just can't function like a normal person. thank you to femme bot by charli xcx, pink red bull, and ofc my geeky bar for letting me power through and finish this mess. okay i'm done now sorry for talking so much, i just love yapping to you guys :(( thank you so much for reading, love you!
do you love him? @joelsflannel - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag