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(i do not consent to the use of my work in generative ai training. do not do it under any circumstances or i will eviscerate you.)
pro tip “he freed his erection” is the most useful phrase in any smut writer’s arsenal because it means never having to figure out a dude’s pants situation. how did he do it? were there zippers? buttons? some kind of bizarre lacing situation? maybe he cut off his pants with scissors. maybe it was a wizard. maybe it busted out like the hulk busts out of his shirts. no one knows. no one cares. his dick is out now and that is all that matters. thank you helpful dick wizard.
contents (nsfw): Dunk x fem!Reader, Modern AU friends to lovers rom-com with pregnancy. Humour, fluff, blow jobs, teasing, soft cockwarming, sub!Dunk, dirty talk, breeding kink mentioned, mouth-fucking, praise kink, coming in mouth, slight overstimulation, farse, angst (they fight but resolve!), open-ended with a very clear suggestion as to what happens next.
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MASTERLIST
next chapter -> (31/07)
synopsis: In which Rowan gives birth. (Pregnancy status: 33 weeks, III trimester).
word count: 9,6K
a/n: Banner by me, dividers by @strangergraphics, proofread by @hextoken!
Duncan groans softly.
He swears, you're such a tease sometimes. Cuddle with me, let's watch a film, but your hand keeps performing a harrowing torment at his waistline. His shirt has 'ridden up', though it's actually you who's rucked it to his ribs. Little gentle strokes over cotton first, and then, before Duncan knows it, his belly's exposed, and your fingers twirl the hairs at his navel.
He's trying to keep his eyes fixed on the screen, but they drop, every now and then, to the crown of your head. It's sliding lower, he's noted. It started with resting under the wing of his arm, and now your cheek is below his sternum, mouth breathing hot over his ribs. He's forgotten what's on the telly. Your nails scratch round his belly button, and his whole stomach ripples, shaking strands of hair to fall onto your face.
A small, pleased mm falls from him when your fingers brush just below his waistband. You answer with one of your own, then stretch yourself long across the bed. Your legs straighten. Your free arm reaches overhead until the hand lands in his hair.
It's an excellent way to distract him. Duncan must be wired strangely there, for the slightest pull at the roots enters him far lower than it ought to. His eyes fall shut. Heat gathers behind his navel and sinks, slow and heavy, into his groin. You scratch his scalp once, then close your fingers and tug again. His hips give a small, involuntary shift towards you, and only when the side of him meets the warm press of your cheek does he realise how far you have slid. Your face has settled into the crease of his thigh.
He looks down. In the bottom part of his lenses you acquire an odd shape. Your nose corrugates so that its slope dips and makes the tip look smaller. Your eyes set slightly further apart. There's a hand resting over his stomach and that one has an uncannily thin wrist and fingers like warped spider limbs. Below those, he's getting warmer still. It's not so much the feeling, though Duncan's belly's sensitive to any little devotion, as the sight. There's something deeply sensual about having a mouth right next to his cock, no matter if it suggests something or not. He tries to not get outright hard by simply being breathed on. Tries to calm himself, because you've been having a good, low-symptom day and he wouldn't want to impose. How virgin of him. He's had you bent over, on his face, in his hands, and knows every crease of you, and still he ends up with a chubby.
“That is a very low place to cuddle,” he says, thinner than he would like.
"Hm," you purr. "But I like it here."
Duncan puts a hand to the back of your head, meaning only to keep you where he can see you, but your hair threads through his fingers and your cheek turns into his palm. Then, you kiss his groin through the cotton of his sweatpants. His hand closes round your upper arm. "Ah. Right. C'mere, lassie."
He means upwards. He always means upwards. Give him half a kiss below the neck, and he becomes anxious to return the favour, because he is the caretaker. He's had your tongue on his cock more than once, always with some secret fear of becoming selfish or triggering nausea behind it. He tends to stop you, somewhere halfway through it at the latest, and brings you where he can sort you out. There's so much pleasure in it for him that Duncan does not at all consider himself depraved. Lately, it's all been gentler, too. He keeps his mouth tender on you at all times. Keeps his hands wiser between your legs. When he fucks you, it's slow, and he enjoys it tremendously, because instead of seizing him, his orgasms bloom from leniently paced edging and sometimes he feels you coming on him twice while he's still deep in the buzz of his first rapture.
It has not, ever, crossed his mind, that sucking him off might be the end game you seek. You ignore the pull he gives you and put yourself closer to his crotch. Your hand leaves his hair, which Dunk mislikes so much he frowns. It reaches past him, snags a pillow from under his elbow, and tucks it under the side of your belly. You've somehow made yourself heavier so his grip loosens. He brushes a thumb under the sleeve of your T-shirt, and asks, "What're ye doing, girl?"
"Watching a film," you tell him, hooking your fingers under the ribbed band round his lower belly.
He blinks down at you. "Are ye?"
"Mhm," you hum. "Very invested."
He glances at the telly, stupidly. Two people arguing in a kitchen. He has no idea who they are or which of them is winning. Then, he feels a small tug. His hips go up, because this is an instruction and Duncan obeys those, even if the next thing that happens is him getting helplessly exposed. Both layers start going down. His stomach hollows, and to his attempt at sitting up you throw him a cute little glare.
"No moving me," you say.
"But I can—"
"You watch the film."
He sinks back into the pillows doubting he'll be able to tell you anything about the plot or the characters, because his eyes simply won't come off you.
His cock comes free reluctantly. You ease both the underwear and trousers down, then give yourself over to staring, and Duncan suffers it. He rests, half-hard but pulsing, against the crease of his thigh. Even partially sleepy he's still reaching his belly button. Foreskin cradles his polished head and begins to draw back by the slow industry of blood. One clear drop sits at the slit. The hairs covering his balls and groin gather themselves dark on the navel, then disperse again, making a pillow of his stomach. It's a lovely sight, and a rare one for you to admire unabated. Usually by the time you get him in full nude, he's already wanting so badly all of him is flushed and throbbing. Sometimes, you catch glimpses of him when he's changing or stepping with you into the bathtub. He's gorgeous in both forms, and everything that comes between, but soft, Duncan acquires a different kind of beauty. He's guarded and private. Keeps his arm nearby, ready to cover himself if your eyes stay too long. Still heavy, still wide, still large enough to slap loudly against his thigh, but gentle in a way that asks for delicate handling. Lots of him to hurt. Lots of him to love.
Above you, he stirs. "Don't inspect me like that, girl."
You glance up. His ears are red all over. "I've said nothing."
"I can hear ye thinkin'," he says.
"Can you?" you ask, disbelieving him slightly, because it's still odd to think that Dunk would have this sort of dirt in his mind. You know he's capable, based on everything that falls from his mouth when he forgets himself. You doubt, however, that he can tell you want him measured against your face. That you want him to slap you with it. To have him come all over from your forehead to chin, then spread it with his palm and kiss you. "Is there a point in me showing you then?" you say, pressing your lips to his tender side, still benign.
"Ah, fuck—" Duncan breathes. His palm closes over your nape. "You don't have to, girl. You don't have to—"
"Dunk," you say, brushing skin. You give him your heaviest-lidded leer and a girlish little pout. "What if I really, really want to?" Then, you allow your thinking flesh to take over and pat yourself on the cheek with his tip.
His face does a slow, wonderful thing. Such boyish bewilderment. He fights himself there. You can see all the but let me and c'mere and I want to sort ye out first appearing and passing, until all that's left is please. God, yes, please. Take me, please. Break me, pretty, pretty please and thank you.
"A-aye," Duncan says. "All right, just—just mind yourself, yeah?" He brushes hair off your cheek and bands it in his fist.
You nod. Adjust your belly over the pillow and bring your face closer to his lower stomach. It makes a warm bolster under your cheek. Then, you wrap your fingers round the thickening base and guide his hidden crown into your mouth.
"Ah, shite—" he hisses. His head knocks the headboard; thighs quake.
There, he's pliable still. Supple enough that you can press him to your palate, squeeze a little. You lick over him flatly, then tense your tongue into a tip and let yourself brush under the foreskin to taste whatever he's weeping out for you. Your fingers play at his balls—roll them, compress, then let the whole weight rest in the hollow of your hand. Higher, you start sucking him into hardness.
"Oh, sweet girl," Duncan breathes. It makes your cunt tighten some, because your favourite version of him begins to surface: rendered loud by incapacity to keep himself together. Unmanned, even before the main pleasure arrives. He massages the tendon of your neck with his thumb. Murmurs, "Christ alive, ye feel s'good. Ah God, right there. Right there, oh—"
You release him with a wet smack. Gather the spit from the top and guide it down in slow strokes, pulling on skin to reveal him bit by bit. When you look up, his glasses have slipped a little. There's damp above his upper lip, and his mouth hangs open.
"Do you like it?" you ask.
Duncan nods.
“Talk to me,” you say.
His eyes jump to yours. “About what?”
Your wrist moves up until you close his crown in your palm. You twist there. Watch him suck in a sigh and feel his hips lift towards you. "That," you say.
He laughs weakly. Duncan knows the charm of a lover saying exactly what they want. He adores it on you. Every time he hears fuck me harder, or worse, breed me, put a baby in me, he has to squeeze his eyes shut and invoke all sorts of unsexy things in order to last. He knows you like it on him too, so he tries, despite the way getting so exposed has him burning all the way from chest to scalp.
"Fuck," he grits when your thumb presses on the fold under the head. "Ah, fuck, make me hard girl. Put yer mouth back on me, please—"
So you take him back. Since he's asked so nicely. You flatten your tongue and drag it slowly through the tender join beneath the crown. The right there. His belly jerks so sharply that the hairs on it brush your forehead. And then you just… keep him. Suck on him and warm him up until you can feel the flesh getting hotter and roping with blood that swells his veins. He's breathing audibly through his nose. Below, you cradle his thick root in your hand. Massage it, and scrape your nails through the fuzz. Right where he grows out from his groin you press your fingers down and rub them in circles, making his balls come up tightening in response.
Slowly, he begins to fill your cheeks. It feels safe to be there. Special too, because despite Duncan always nodding to your you are allowed to want things, he's still learning. It's almost as if he's used to taking second-hand pleasure from whatever service he's providing. So, you don't tell him this is for you as well. That there is a whim underneath it to check if you are able to wring your man clean without opening your legs.
His thigh firms beneath your cheek. “Slow,” he breathes. “Aye, like that. Christ, look at ye.” A thumb passes over your temple.
Your eyes take him in. Belly bare and quivering. One knee knocked wide to give you room, foot planted as if he needs to brace against the bed. His face has gone helplessly honest. Every stroke of your hand travels visibly through him. “Do ye like it?” he asks.
You let him slide from your mouth, wet and darkened. “Very much.” Then, you kiss the vein on his underside. One small peck. Another, bolder, until your lips part and tongue comes out to make out with his cock. He moans, loud, and squeezes your neck. "Too much?" you ask.
“N-no." He shakes his head. "That’s lovely. Do it again.”
"Mm," you hum, guiding your nose lower. It lands in the webbing of his sack and hauls air greedily. There's a whine, so pretty-sounding you have to rub your thighs together. You lick him all the hard way between the two seams: balls to slit. There, you stop and tell him, "You keep talking."
"Jesus," he whispers. "What're ye doing to me, girl? Put your tongue on me again."
His fingers thread through your hair. His fist closes. There's a small tug you feel at your roots. It makes you moan against him, and Duncan throws his head back.
Yes, this, you think. Show me, tell me. Bear your throat to me. He's not the one to manhandle you, despite having all the necessary equipment. Even when he hauls you, lifts you, holds you, it's all done so considerately sometimes you want to outright tell him that bodies don't break so easily. That it is sometimes nice to nurse a bruise a lover has left you. The hand in your hair is a first. There's an itch within it, a small wicked urge to guide you down. Maybe choke you on him, a little. You pretend he's pushed harder than he did, and swallow as much of him as you can.
“Oh, fuck me,” he whispers. "Oh, my good girl. My best girl, oh fuck—" His pelvis rolls into your mouth. You look up again, waiting. "Yer so—" he manages. "So soft. And warm. I like it when—ah—when ye use your tongue like that. Round the head. Aye, just—" His eyes go shut when your tongue circles his crown. Fingers twitch. "There," he pants. "Oh God, there. God, ye know."
Oh, you do know. You know exactly where his skin pulls tight, where the vein underneath makes him shudder, how far you can take him without your jaw beginning to ache. You know the sound he makes when you play with him like that. You know he will hold his breath until you touch his thigh and remind him to let it out, and still, hearing all that you know already makes it so much sexier. Makes him, in some profound way, even more yours than he was to begin with, and for a moment you forget there is a pregnant belly between you. It's just you, pleasuring your darling in the evening of some nameless day, because you both forsake calendars on the weekends.
Duncan's getting lost in it. It's difficult for him to remain this useless, and near impossible to comprehend that someone would pay his cock so much attention. It makes him want terrible things. He yearns to see your hand jerk him off until he's all sloppy with his own body's drool, preferably while you bite on his lip and have your palm round his neck. When he closes his eyes, an entirely scummy image forces itself into his mind: his cock, sliding in and out of your mouth. Just a little. Shallow, but enough to see your cheeks filling and hollowing. He rubs his fingers on your scalp. “Can ye look at me?” he asks.
You lift your eyes.
His brows draw up. “Oh, girl.”
He's meaning to ask you. His thumb strays to the corner of your lip, right where it shines with spit. He wipes it and spreads it towards your temple. With that tiny pressure your jaw slacks. Tongue lolls out. You lower yourself onto his belly and keep looking up. He gives one, shy roll of his hips. Your mouth pulls in a soft smile. "Is that all right?" he asks.
There's a nod. A hum, too. Your hand stays banded round his base, so when he moves, he's sliding through both things at once. He keeps staring at you, searching for anything that would tell him no, and finds yes everywhere. "Sweet girl," he murmurs. "You've such wicked mouth. That's so fucking lovely." All of it whispered, though there is no one to overhear him.
"Ye always make me feel so good," he says. Cradles the back of your head again. "And yer so pretty. Keep lookin' at me." A swallow.
There is one more thing Duncan wants, but it will give him away horrendously. He starts touching you. Rubbing your back. Brushing through your hair, like he's trying to coax it out of you by begging with his body. You only hum some more and stroke between his root and balls. It's all very maddening. Finally, he brings himself to mumble, "Will ye—would ye roll your eyes for me? Like ye do when you're cross, or when… when you come—oh, please—"
He watches it happen like it's a car crash he's about to be in. Your eyes widen first. Then, recognition settles in them, horrifying and gorgeous, and then oh—your lids flutter and irises travel from one side to the other, and Duncan gasps out your name. "Fuck," he grits. "It's my favourite sight in the whole world. God, I'm close. I'm so close—"
He keeps fucking himself through your fist to your mouth, and reaches the breaking point. His back leaves the pillows. "Fuck, keep going," he breathes, bowing over you. "That’s it. That’s my girl.”
There's a familiar marrow-wring, just this time Duncan is mildly guilty for arriving at it. Stomach ceases to feel like it belongs to him and for a split second he is weightless and stuck in a moment right before the warmth spilling. It's so good already he keeps gasping and moaning, until he ceases to move altogether and just watches the pulsing tip of himself, entirely sure the sight of him filling your mouth is going to destroy him.
Cock stiffens against your tongue. You feel the pull in his sack against your hand, and then the first spurt lands hot and salty; another follows. He groans through various things: your name, countless instances of shredded yes, sweet endearments, all that while you swallow, stroke, and his length throb between your fingers. His belly quakes, and the wave of it moves the whole of his torso. Below the shirt, his chest shudders too. You fix your eyes there and see his heart beating frantically below the breastbone.
Some of the spent slips out of your mouth onto his skin. It milks over the hairs covering his body. You're so enamoured by each of sights that you notice his hands on your shoulders only when he whimpers.
"Too much," he says. "Too much, girl, oh God—"
So you release him. He smacks against his stomach heavily. The shine of him spills around and you can't help yourself—you lick the softened head once and he jerks so violently the bed complains.
“Mercy,” Duncan wheezes. "Sweetheart, please—"
Whether the mercy comes or not, Duncan is certain he could take it. He will never again refuse you if you so much as breathe next to his cock. He knows exactly what he's getting out of going down on you. It's a thing that makes him feel most man of all, to have you clawing at his scalp and suffocating him with your thighs. To hear his name wrapped into moans is his favourite way of being called. That is his purpose in it. Now, he's dazed and confused and beyond blissed, and he's staring at you, staring at his softening cock.
"You're so fucking pretty," you tell him, all serious. "You have the prettiest cock I've seen."
It's so absurd, he giggles. Then laughs out loud, until you frown. Both of his hands get under your arms, and this time you let him lift you. He brings you up with great care and no grace, deposits you across his chest, then catches your jaw and kisses you. The inside of your mouth tastes of him. It's hot. The whole scene excites him so much, Duncan near loses his wits.
"I—" he starts. Hesitates. Dips a thumb in a bit of cum drying on your cheek. "Ye make me so bloody happy, lassie."
You sniff. Smile, then study him with a long glance coming from under heavy lids.
He's looking unbearably dear. Sweaty and pink all over his cheeks. His freckles stand out against the canvas of skin with blood flowing underneath it. You could bust him right there. Tell him you've just learned an extra soft spot on body that's already full of softness. But you decide to keep that one and instead make a mental note to roll your eyes at him in some near future.
Your finger taps his lips. "You know how pretty you are, right? And handsome too."
"Lass." It is at all possible for Duncan to go a deeper shade of pink, it seems. "Don't ye tease me now. I'm already finished."
"'m not," you say. Again, serious. You shift so that your belly fits next to his side. Your hands come to take his glasses off and cradle his face. "I find you incredibly attractive."
It comes out stupidly official, but somehow feels very important to get across. Your thumbs press below his eyes, where the skin is warm and damp. He keeps looking at you, though you suspect he hasn't hidden behind a wince yet only because without the glasses he cannot properly see. Maybe that helps. Maybe it can land cleaner if he does not have to read the whole look on your face.
“You are so handsome, Dunk,” you say. “And just… kind, and—”
The words begin to feel unsafe in your mouth. He's gone awfully still under your touch, shy and pained, as if praise is something that has to be suffered first and enjoyed later in private, when nobody can catch him needing it. This is your way of telling him. A smaller road to the same place. Something that might make him more secure without asking him to repeat it back.
These last few days have been better. Sleepy, sluggish, heavy in some obvious aspects, yet better all the same. The contractions are rare, nausea has left you near entirely, and life has settled into something gentler. You have managed to talk to Rowan a lot. She has been merciful enough to curb her own panic for your sake and lean instead toward being giddy about meeting her girl soon. Duncan has gone out with Raymun twice, and each time he came back with a one-pint flush on his cheeks and an overwhelming urge to kiss you, as if him and Ray had sat on bar stools talking about you and Rowan until missing became physical. Since then, both of you have been waiting for the sign from Ray that labour has started.
Besides that, some old grudges have been vanquished. Your complaints about Duncan coming and going have lost their place. Now he simply comes back, every time. He texts home in 10 when he is on the way, and you know it is only a figure of speech, yet it makes you excited all the same that he has started calling your flat home.
So now you try to tell him. Try to convey, somehow, that he means the world to you in flesh and soul, and all the other worlds you are not sure exist, though the science says they might. He has been doing and saying all the right things, except one. It is almost as if he is too stubborn to say it and his body decided to bleed it out through his pores instead. You know he asked for more time. That is all right. Still, the question of what exactly frightens him gnaws at you. If it is you, you reckon you can make yourself as innocuous as possible.
“Your mouth is lovely,” you say, trembling.
You kiss him once. He lets you. Sits there stunned beneath it, lips soft and parted, breath caught somewhere in the middle of him. You clutch his shirt and kiss him again. Then his cheek, then the place below his eye. “And your teeth,” you whisper. “I love your teeth. And your eyes. Especially when you can’t see a bloody thing.”
“Lassie—”
“You look so sweet without the glasses.”
Your breathing starts to go wrong: shuddery, uneven, too full for the size of your ribs. That animates him. His arm comes round your back, hand firming over your shoulder, and then he plucks you off him just enough to look at you.
“Stop, girl,” he says, frightened. “Yer makin’ yourself cry. What are ye cryin’ for?”
You blink at him. Feel the wetness only then, hot at the corners of your eyes and slipping down. Stupid. You want to tell him properly. Want it so badly your whole body feels too crowded with it, yet the fear of his face changing makes the words retreat. You do not want to corner him or make him feel he has to answer. “Because I need you to know,” you say instead. Your fingers stay twisted in his shirt. “Do you know how dear you are?”
Duncan blinks. His eyes are hazy without the lenses, looking into yours, then away, then back again as if the room keeps moving. He pulls you into him and tucks his face into your neck.
“I don’t,” he says there, muffled. “Not properly. Feels strange hearin’ it.” His mouth presses warm under your jaw. “But I like ye tellin’ me. Even if I look scared while ye do.”
Your hand comes to the nape of his neck.
That is when his phone buzzes on the nightstand. Once, then again. Three more pings come close behind. Duncan keeps holding you while he reaches for it, squinting painfully at the bright screen. “Shite,” he mutters. “I can’t see a thing.” He turns the phone towards your face. “Is it Ray?”
You read the texts with his arm still round you. “Yeah.” Your heart lifts and drops together. “God, it started. They’re at the hospital. He says to come in the morning.”
Duncan goes still for a second. Then he kisses your temple. “Will ye be fit to come? Are ye feelin’ all right?”
You nod and settle against his chest. He puts the phone down blindly and rubs your back, quiet now.
“Dunk?”
“Mm?”
“Will you let me do that more often?”
His hand pauses. “What?”
Your cheeks go hot. “Make you feel good.”
Something changes in the way he breathes. He reaches for his glasses then, gets them on, and looks at you for a long moment. “Sweetheart,” he says, rough and soft together, “how can ye even ask me that?” His thumb comes to your cheek. “I’d beg ye for it if ye didn’t offer." Then, quieter: "Will ye… let me?"
"Yes," you say.
You're not sure if this has settled anything or not. But is assuages enough. Afterwards you let him fuss, despite him being the one with his cock out and cum dried all over it. He showers quickly. Walks around the flat killing all the lights in his very dad-like fashion. Sets the alarms for tomorrow, then comes back to bed and gathers your back to his chest. His hands are wise: one rests on the belly over Aodhán's little kicks, the other covers the crown of your head. He's got his nose wedged into your shoulder and breathes there. The last thing you hear from him is a very sleepy, "You smell so nice, lassie."
Sleep comes easy. Waking not so much. Your bladder practically screams, so the alarm is merely a courtesy that saves you from bursting. You wring yourself out from Duncan's embrace, and by the time you're back he's sitting on the bed and staring at his phone with a hand over his mouth.
"Look," he says. "Fucking Christ, she did it."
You sit beside him and he tilts the screen towards you. There's a picture of Rowan, her red hair looking like some large bird's nest, cheeks and neck flushed, dark circles under her eyes. She's passed out. In her arms there's a baby, also asleep. Long eyelashes and incredibly bushy eyebrows for something so small. Below, caption says: Meet Róisín. Raymun sent it at 4 a.m.
"She looks like Rowan," you say, taking the phone from Duncan's hand to study the picture up close. "She looks exactly like her." It hits you, boulder-heavy, that in approximately four weeks you too will hold a small copy of Duncan and yourself.
Dunk blinks at you. "Ye alright, sweetheart?"
“I’m all right,” you say, and find that it is true enough to count. The feeling is large, yes. Unfriendly in scale. But there is no room for a meltdown when Rowan has just become someone’s mother. “Just strange. Seeing her.”
Duncan watches your face for another second. “Aye.” Then he takes the phone back and looks at the picture again.
It has touched him more than he expected. First, Raymun Fossoway, his best friend in the whole crooked world, has become a father sometime around four in the morning while Duncan was sleeping with his nose against your shoulder. That alone is enough to make the day feel split open. Raymun, who forgets where he puts his wallet twice a week and once tried to dry trainers in an oven, now has a daughter with furious eyebrows and a name. Second, there is the smaller matter of Duncan being next in line.
Soon. Soon enough that the word has begun to lose its general shape and sit on his chest.
You get up to pee again, then wash your face, then start talking from the bathroom about whether Rowan would want food brought in, or if flowers are stupid, or if flowers are allowed, and Duncan sits there a moment longer with the phone cooling in his palm. Last night returns by quieter routes. Your thumbs under his eyes. Your voice saying dear as if the word had been chosen with care. He heard it. He hears it still. He only wishes his body had not been so full of everything else that he sat there useless and never managed to say, You are dear to me too.
The words look simple now. Criminally simple.
“Dunk?” you call.
“Aye.” He rubs a hand over his face and moves. “I’m comin’.”
He dresses in the clothes nearest the chair, then changes the jumper because it has a stain on the cuff, then changes it back because the clean one has a neckline he hates. You pass the bedroom door with your hair half-pinned and one shoe on, and he feels the old fondness strike him in the side. After that he finds the car keys under yesterday’s newspaper, locks up, and follows you out.
In the car he hums under his breath. It takes him three streets to notice he is doing it. You notice sooner and look out the window with your mouth trying not to smile. He stops at a small shop near the hospital and comes back with flowers that are yellow and a little daft-looking.
“No lilies,” he says, getting back behind the wheel. “Thought they’d smell too much.”
You look at the bouquet. “That’s oddly thoughtful.”
“Oddly?”
“Deeply. Terribly. Very thoughtful.”
He gives you a glance and pulls back into traffic.
In the hospital there are white walls, blue signs and floor polish. It's too warm near the lifts and too cold in the corridors. Duncan takes your hand in the car park and keeps it. Across the road. Through the sliding doors. Past reception, where you both speak more quietly for no reason except that everyone else does. In the lift your fingers tighten round his when another family squeezes in with balloons and a foil packet of something that says IT’S A BOY. He rubs his thumb once over your knuckles.
By the maternity ward your palm has gone warm in his. Raymun appears before either of you finds the room number, looking as if somebody has shaken him violently and filled him with light.
“You came,” he says, then laughs at himself. His hair is flattened on one side. His shirt is buttoned wrong. There is a tiny white cloth over one shoulder like a military rank.
Duncan lets go of your hand to hug him.
It happens for a reason. There is a hug, then the flowers to pass over, then Raymun’s nervous pointing towards sanitiser, then the door handle under Duncan’s palm. Still, when he looks back, your hand is empty at your side. The fingers close slowly round the strap of your bag. Your face remains pleasant.
“All right?” he asks.
“Mm.”
Raymun, mercifully too dazed to notice weather in other people, opens the door.
Rowan is sitting propped up in bed like she has survived a duel and intends to give inaccurate statements about it later. Her hair has doubled in size since the photograph and now sits round her head in red disorder. Her lips are dry. One shoulder of her hospital gown has slipped. There is a water bottle on the table large enough to hydrate livestock, a half-peeled banana beside it, and the unmistakable square outline of a pad under the blanket. She looks ruined and victorious.
“Oh my God,” you say, and go to her.
“Careful,” Rowan says, already reaching. “I’m barely held together, hun.”
You bend awkwardly around your own belly and hug her anyway. Rowan shuts her eyes when your cheek touches hers.
“You did it,” you whisper.
“Apparently.” Her voice comes out hoarse and pleased with itself. “I kept asking if I could resign. They said no, can you imagine?”
Raymun makes a helpless sound from near the sink. “She told the midwife she was reporting her to management.”
“I was in pain.”
“You told her birth was a pyramid scheme.”
“It is.”
Duncan laughs, and Rowan’s eyes find him over your shoulder.
“Dunk,” she says, softening all through the exhaustion. “Come here, you massive thing.”
He comes carefully, though he has no idea what danger his largeness presents to the furniture, the baby, Rowan, or the air itself. The room has gained a new centre. He feels it before he properly sees it: a small bundled shape in the clear bassinet beside the bed. Róisín sleeps with one fist by her mouth, scowling hard in her dreams. One ear is folded at the top. Her eyebrows are Raymun’s, ridiculous and dark on a face still deciding what face means.
“Look at her,” Raymun says, and his voice breaks on nothing.
Duncan looks. The baby makes a thin squeak, not quite a cry. More hinge than voice. His heart gives such a stupid jump he nearly steps back.
“She does that,” Rowan says. “It’s normal. Everything terrifying is normal, they tell us.”
“She’s beautiful,” Duncan says.
Rowan sniffs. “She looks like a furious old man.”
“She does,” you say, laughing wetly. “She really does.”
“She’s so beautiful,” Duncan says again, stubborn about it.
Raymun’s face changes. He goes to the bassinet and spends far too long arranging his hands before he lifts her. Already he has the strange care of someone trained for this. Supporting the head. Checking the blanket. Moving with slow cautiousness and panic held between the teeth. He brings her to Duncan.
“Want to hold her?”
Duncan’s mouth opens. “I—”
“Ye don’t have to,” Rowan says.
“No, I want.” He clears his throat. “I want to. If that’s all right.”
Raymun places Róisín into him.
She nearly vanishes against Duncan’s chest. His arms make a fortress round a parcel. For a moment he looks horrified by the difference in scale. Then she settles. Her scowl deepens, as if she has found his heartbeat objectionable, and one tiny pink foot shifts under the blanket.
“Oh,” Duncan says. That is all.
You are standing beside Rowan’s bed with one hand over your mouth. Duncan sees you from the corner of his eye and looks down quickly, because something in your expression makes the room tilt. Love, maybe. Fear too. A look from the shore at incoming storm. His son moves in your belly under the dress, or perhaps Duncan only imagines it because he has another child in his arms and the future suddenly has weight and cheeks and tempers.
He looks at Róisín again. He sees naught of the furious old man Rowan speaks of. Only a child, precious and small enough to fit comfortably in his palms alone. To Duncan, she’s beautiful in some profound way. He holds her for a mere minute and already feels how hard it will be to give her back to Raymun. Then a horrific thought strikes him: how little love must there have been in the person who made him, if they looked at him and did not feel even a poor cousin of this. Or else what an ugly specimen of child he must have been. Red, strange, wrong in the face somehow. A thing easy to set down and leave. His eyes begin to sting.
“You look good with one,” Rowan says.
Duncan coughs and pretends he's red because of embarrassment.
Raymun sits on the edge of the chair beside the bed, then immediately stands again to fetch Rowan’s water. Rowan reaches for it too late. He is already there, cap unscrewed, straw angled towards her mouth. She drinks like she's been rescued from the desert.
“See?” she says after swallowing. “This is what they don’t tell you. You get a baby and also a valet.”
“I was always a valet,” Raymun says.
You laugh. Duncan looks at you over Róisín’s head. Your face has gone soft in a way that makes him want to walk across the room and press his mouth to your forehead for being so loving. He stays where he is. The baby’s folded ear is nearly touching his thumb. He would rather cut the hand off than jostle her.
Rowan follows his gaze. Then she follows yours back to him. Her eyes narrow with a new, exhausted brightness. “Christ,” she says, stretching and sighing. “I’m glad you two finally got on with it.”
Raymun freezes with the water bottle in hand.
You blink. “Red.”
“What?” Rowan says, flushed with the righteousness of operating on no sleep and several hormones at full volume. “I am. The circling was exhausting. I can say shite about Ray all day, and I will, but at least he was blunt with it. He saw me and went, right, you, and now look—” She gestures too widely towards Róisín. Raymun lunges for the water before it tips into the blanket.
“Easy,” he says. “Jesus, Red.”
“I’m only saying.” Rowan’s eyes have gone shiny. “People waste so much time pretending they don’t know what they know. It’s stupid. Look at them. They’re lovely.”
Duncan’s throat closes. The baby gives another little creak in his arms. He looks down at her, then at you, then at Rowan. Heat climbs his neck so fast it feels medical. “Ah,” he says, and tries for a laugh. It comes out wrong. “No, we haven’t—”
Raymun shuts his eyes.
Rowan stops smiling.
You do too.
Duncan burns under it. Three women looking at him, one of them fresh from labour and no less lethal for it, another tiny and wrinkled in his arms, and you with your face gone still in the way that means something has landed and will have to be found later.
“I mean—” he tries. Nothing useful follows. Róisín coos once. A wet, birdlike sound. Then her face folds on itself and she begins to cry. Duncan starts breathing heavily. “Oh, I’m—” He looks down in alarm. “I’m sorry.”
Raymun is there in a second. “It’s all right, mate.” His hands come out. “She’s just hungry. Wasn’t you.”
“A-aye,” Duncan stammers, and gives her back.
Raymun passes Róisín to her mother. The baby roots blindly into the blanket. “Ray, sweetie,” Rowan says, eyes still on Róisín. “Will you bring me a Twirl from the machine?”
“Aye. Course.”
“And take Dunk with you, hm?”
Duncan nods too quickly. Truth be told, he is ready to leave the room for a minute or forever. He cannot quite look at you. His gaze drops to your shoes. “Do ye want anything?”
“Just water is fine.”
“Aye.”
Raymun clasps his shoulder on the way out and steers him through the door.
For a moment the room is held together only by Róisín’s hungry little noises and Rowan arranging herself with a wince. Then Rowan looks up at you. Her face crumples at the corners. “I’m so sorry, hun,” she says. “I’ve said some awful things in the last twenty-four hours, but I had no idea. I saw you two and I thought—”
“It’s fine.” You sit on the chair near her bed and let your hand come to Róisín’s head. Her hair is unbelievably soft, damp in places, warm as something kept under a wing. “I think he’s just… overwhelmed.”
“I caused you grief, haven’t I?”
You do not want the room to turn towards you. Rowan is pale under the flush, and her hand keeps twitching near the baby’s back, counting, checking, learning. You take that hand instead and squeeze it.
“It’s all right,” you say. “It is what it is.” Then, quieter, “Now. Be honest with me. How was the labour?”
“It was fine,” Rowan says flatly.
“Do not lie to me.”
She sighs through her nose and looks at the ceiling. “It was horrible. But not as horrible as I thought it would be. All those stupid exercises they told us to do? They make sense. I hate admitting that. The breathing and the positions and the pelvic floor nonsense. It really helped.” Her eyes come back to you. “You’ll do good.”
You go quiet.
Rowan studies your face. “Are you scared?”
“A little.” Your palm settles over your belly. Beneath it, Aodhán shifts slowly. “I got so used to this.”
“The next thing is better,” Rowan says.
You look at her.
“It is,” she insists, hoarse and certain. “I promise you. I’ve never loved Ray more than I do now.”
That makes you smile. Rowan reaches out and touches your cheek with the backs of her fingers.
“He loves you,” she says. “I can see it.”
The door opens. Raymun comes in first with the Twirl and a bottle of water. Duncan follows behind him, looking so frightened that your chest hurts. Then he sees your face. The smile still there. The absence of disaster. He relaxes by one careful inch.
A thing happens then. For the first time, Duncan has a full conversation with you without either of you opening your mouths.
You give him a look that says act normal, calm down.
He blinks. Are ye cross?
Your eyes drop. Inconclusive. Then you look up again, and Duncan understands: later.
He can do later. He can do this much.
You stay another thirty minutes. Rowan eats half the Twirl and complains that nobody warned her newborns made such aggressive faces in their sleep. Raymun says he did warn her, actually, because he had googled it at six in the morning. Rowan tells him to not act so smart. Duncan stands near the foot of the bed with his hands in his pockets until you pat the chair beside you, and then he sits.
Róisín falls asleep in Rowan’s arms, mouth open, brows still drawn as if dreaming of some adult business. Not long after, Rowan’s head tips back into the pillow. Her eyelids lower mid-sentence.
You rise first. “We’ll go.”
Rowan opens one eye. “Come again.”
“Try and stop me.” You kiss her forehead. She catches your wrist for half a second and squeezes.
Raymun walks you both to the corridor. He hugs you hard and careful round the belly, cheek pressed to your hair. “Missed ye,” he says. “Love ye. You’ve got this.”
Your arms tighten round him. “You too. I love you too.”
Then he turns to Duncan. They clasp forearms first, formal for one second, and then Raymun breaks rank and leans into his chest. Duncan grunts under the contact, then pats his back. “Good man,” Duncan says, rough.
Raymun nods against him. “Yeah.”
When you walk down the corridor outside, Duncan’s chest feels awful. In the courtyard he wants to take your hand again. Instead, he twirls the car keys in his fingers and asks, “How are ye?”
“I… don’t know,” you say, hollow. Your steps slow. “Is there anything I should know about?”
He gulps down a thick glob of spit. “As in—?”
You stop completely. Then you look down at your feet. “How do you—Have you, um. Changed your mind?”
Duncan watches your hands. They keep fidgeting with your rings. “Or not,” you say, “and I just don’t know what’s been on it?”
He is taken aback slightly. It is not that Duncan does not know what he wants. He knows exactly. He just did not want it dissected publicly. “Nothing’s changed,” he says. “I’ve had my mind made a long time now.”
“I don’t understand what that means.”
“Lass,” he sighs. “I’m bein’ as plain with you as I can.” It comes out pained, and Dunk regrets it in an instant.
You huff. Nearly stamp your foot on the pavement, though the movement stops halfway and turns into something smaller and sharper. “You’re not.”
Duncan looks at you, surprised.
“You’re not,” you repeat, more annoyed now. “You say things round the actual thing. You do everything round the actual thing. Then someone says it out loud and you look horrified and start stammering about how we haven’t.”
His mouth opens, then closes again.
“You said you needed time. And I understand that, I really do. But I’m a month away from giving birth and would like to at least have an option to prepare for what comes next,” you tell him. “And being earnest doesn’t equal plain or honest.”
Something odd goes through him. Cornered, maybe. Frustrated, surely, though more with himself than with you. If he had only fallen to his knees and said I love ye madly, perhaps the whole thing would have settled itself. Instead he stands there with the keys biting into his palm and his heart making hard work of the obvious. “I ain’t lyin’,” he says, desperate.
You scoff and kick a small stone across the pavement. “You are not telling me the truth either. You’re not telling me much outside of when we sleep together.”
Something in Duncan boils over. “How else do you want it said, girl?” he asks, and hears his own raised voice too late. “I’ve been there all those months. I proposed. For God’s sake, I sleep with ye every other day and bathe ye and I am there all the damned time, and gladly.”
His voice breaks at the edge. Breath runs short. You only stare at him. “I’d be a real piece of shite if there was nothing coming afterwards,” he says.
There is no response. Duncan wishes, badly, that he could hold your hands now. His voice is very thin when he speaks again. “Ye really think that of me? Ye think I’d… I’d touch ye like that? That I’d braid your hair and sleep next to ye if I was preparin’ to go back to bein’ pub mates?”
“Dunk, I—” You hiccup. Your eyes begin to burn. “I don’t know. It happened to me before, so—” Your hands open uselessly between you, then drop back to your sides. “And you proposed right after I got pregnant. With, if I remember correctly, should we, not I would like to.”
His face tightens all over. “Since when does it matter how it’s done?”
You know where the thing is. It is right there for you to reach. A fistful of mud, a buried little pebble that will hurt him terribly if you throw it just right. So you reach. And you throw.
“Since you fucking tell me you love me while you’re still inside me and while your baby is inside me too and then you take it right back!”
Duncan chokes on something invisible. His chest heaves. His mouth moves once, then again, with no sound coming from it. Then his face cracks. “Because it was badly done!” he yells. “It was cowardly done.”
He turns away, rubs hard at the back of his head, then turns back again. “And I thought I’d been sayin’ it plain all the bloody time.” His hand lifts, pointing at you, though the accusation seems to fail halfway through the gesture. “Fucking shite—”
Then, he turns once more. Starts walking back and forth, one hand at his neck, breathing too hard through his nose. When he speaks, it sounds almost addressed to the pavement. “I thought—I thought you’d be with me after that first damned night, for Christ’s sake.”
“H-how?” you whine, patience snapping clean through. “If I don’t even remember what happened?”
Duncan stops. Scoffs, sharp and disbelieving. “You enjoyed it.”
“What?”
“You enjoyed it,” he says. “You enjoyed it so much you got pregnant with me. You came on my face first. Then I carried you to the bed. Then you said to carry on even though I had no rubber on me. And ye fucked me and told me we were goin' to be all right. Then you left and said you remembered naught of it.”
The words keep coming once they start. Too fast and entirely bare. Duncan looks almost sick with them, and unable to stop.
“Because I—” You gasp. “Because I don’t. Most of it, I don’t. You remember it? Dunk, how could you—”
The hurt comes up hot. Fury too. If only he had been brave then. If only you had been brave and asked outright. Months and months of both of you walking round the same buried thing, each with a different map. God, your head is spinning.
“What?” Duncan says, clipped. “Not tell ye? After that text you sent me, how could I not tell ye, is that it?”
“Well, yes?” He shakes his head. You reach for his arm and he slips away, too wound up to be held. “You don’t believe me,” you say. “Duncan, I was drunk—”
“You weren’t that drunk. You weren’t that drunk, lass.” His voice wobbles, then thickens. “You told me you wanted me. For a long time. And then you didn’t want me, and then you come back and we’re having a baby together and ye ask me if I wanna be around as if I would ever—” He wedges a hand beneath his glasses. His next words come wet. “Don’t do this to me.”
You go still.
“Don’t tell me ye were too drunk to be yourself when you said all that to me,” he says. “Don’t tell me I fucked one girl and got a different one pregnant. I’m bein’ plain. I’m bein’ honest, I’m just—” His breath hitches. “I just. I don’t know the right words.”
You stand there, stunned. Heartbroken, and oddly close to understanding. No matter how ridiculous all of this is, you both seem to be saying the same thing, just badly.
“I’m being plain too. I’m being honest too. So why are we here?” you ask. “Why did you never tell me?”
“Ye’ve always had someone,” Duncan mutters.
“Not when I got pregnant.”
“Cause I—I didn’t want to lose this. I want a… a family. Whatever shape it’s goin’ to have.”
Air puffs through your nose, unbidden.
“What? Don’t ye scoff at me, girl.” His eyes flash, hurt and cross. “Think on it a second before you tell me I’m thick. Look at the men yer with and look at me. Look at how ye acted when I finally got you into my bed—”
You step into his space and put both hands on his chest despite the size of him there, the heat coming off him, and the fact that he looks almost frightening with all that fear turned outward.
“Duncan,” you say, trying to find out if bravery still counts when it comes late. “Three years ago I wanted you to kiss me so badly. And then you didn’t, and avoided me like plague, and grew all judgemental on me—”
Your belly seizes. “Ah, shite—” You fold over the pain.
Duncan catches your shoulder immediately. “What’s wrong?” His tone changes entirely.
“It—it hurts,” you say, cringing. “Fuck, I need to sit—”
“Shite, sweetheart. Luv, c’mere.” He guides you to the nearest bench, one hand at your back and the other under your elbow. “C’mere. Fuck, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” He sits with you. His palm comes to your stomach. “Where does it hurt?”
You close your eyes. “Here, it’s just—just a cramp.” You breathe through your mouth. “It’s just a cramp, but it hurts badly.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“It’s not your fault, it’s a contraction,” you tell him. “Fuck—”
“Take my hand.” He grabs your palm and squeezes. You squeeze back, hard. “Breathe with me, aye?” You nod, though your chest has started to shake. “Girl, I said breathe, not cry.” His face bends in distress. “Why are ye cryin’?”
“I’m sorry, but—” You wipe clumsily at your eyes. “I’ve been—I’ve been eating at myself over whether I’m baby-trapping you all this time.”
“What?”
“You’re so fucking obliging you’d stay if I asked you. Don’t look at me like that, you know you would—”
Duncan stares at you as though you have just told him the shite-coloured onesie he bought was green all along and everyone has been lying to him for sport.
“And I do not remember shite because I’m fucking smaller than you and I don’t eat well, okay?” you grit. “Doesn’t mean anything I said wasn’t true. If I said I wanted you, it means I do.”
You keep squeezing his palm. His free hand rubs your back. Eventually the cramp loosens its teeth and goes. You draw a deeper breath, then look him in the eye.
“Duncan, I…” Your voice breaks, then holds. “I love you so damned much. I mean every word I say to you. But I want you to stay because you want to. Not because it’s proper or honourable.”
For a second Duncan hears nothing. His ears ring. His mouth goes dry. Deep inside him, it feels as though someone has put a blanket over his heart.
He is loved. So damned much.
All the anger and inadequacy lose their shape. What comes in their place is tranquility. Clean enough to frighten him less than it ought. Duncan breathes out, and the next breath comes easier. He cups your jaw, thumb resting near the wet corner of your mouth. “I want to,” he says.
You search his eyes. Then you nod. “Good.”
He nods back. His hand moves down to your stomach. “How’s yer belly?” he asks. “Ye want me to take ye home?”
“Please,” you breathe.
He helps you up slowly. “C’mon, sweetheart.”
For a while there is only the sound of walking. Your hand rests on his arm. His keys sit trapped in his fist. Three steps away from the car, you say, “Rowan’s so insane.”
“Aye,” Duncan says, and smiles. “I know.”
He helps you in, gets your seatbelt settled below the belly, then shuts the door. On the drive back, you doze with your cheek against the glass and one hand tucked under the curve of yourself. Duncan keeps the radio low. Every few minutes his eyes flick from the road to you, then back again.
At home, he carries you from the car. When you make a sleepy objection by the door and try to get down, his hold firms.
“Leave it,” he murmurs. “I’ve got ye.”
Somehow he manages the keys with you still in his arms. Gets the door open, kicks it shut behind him, and walks you straight to the bedroom. There, he sets you on the mattress and pulls the blanket over your legs.
“Sleep, my girl,” he says. “Rest some.”
You blink at him, bleary-eyed. A small sound of surrender leaves you, and then you turn into the pillow.
It is early afternoon, though October has already lowered the light. Duncan stands by the bed until your breathing evens. Then he goes quietly through the flat. Dishes first. Cups, plates, a fork with dried egg on it. He puts the washing on, checks the bin, folds the towels from the radiator. Small works. His hands know this part.
When there is nothing left requiring him, he changes into running clothes. At the door he pauses, listening back towards the bedroom. You do not stir.
Duncan takes one long breath, then steps out.
He knows the right words, after all. He has known them all along. His hands have carried them for weeks, passing them from task to task, hiding them in water, buttons, towels, food, the steady place beneath your belly. Now his mouth knows too.
reader LIKED the fic? reader left thoughtful comment because they thought there was something worth analyzing? oh! oh! love for reader! love for reader for one thousand years!
I want to highly recommend two tools for helping you with this very sad situation, which you must use before it happens.
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With the combination of these two, I can look in my bookmarks, see what was deleted, and easily find it in my downloads. It's such a relief to have my own fic library is all my favs!
reading a historical romance novel and reflecting on the way these stories often present woke nobility for the contemporary reader. a big thing is servants. you can’t not have servants in those times but many modern readers think “but I would never have servants. it would be so weird to have servants” and in order to make the protagonists of the story more relatable they are actually friends with the servants. but flip your perspective and think of it from the side of the servants. wouldn’t it be so awful if your boss was always trying to be friends with you. a really common thing you’ll see is the woke baronet having tea in the kitchen with the servants bc he’s not like other baronets. but what if your boss wanted to hang out and talk during your lunch break every day. not so charming when you think about it that way
#okay but now what is the optimal way to be a good boss in this situation i genuinely wanna know#its easy to guess what makes a bad boss or a mid boss. but what is a good boss#specifically in such a highly structured hierarchal situation (via @rainbowroach)
HELLO you are asking questions that literature and poetry THROUGHOUT the middle ages has asked, and it is from this questioning that we derive things like the Codes of Chivalry (which is not "how to treat a noble lady really nice" but is actually "how to be an ethical person when you're rich and you own a horse" and includes such things as "don't run people over with your horse")
In fact I daresay you already know instinctively just from cultural osmosis what a good boss -- a good liege lord -- is and does based on the tropes that have survived to the current day and the kinds of things that get Hugely Praised in things like legends of King Arthur.
A good boss (liege lord) is:
Merciful. He is not having his peasants killed for things like poaching rabbits during a famine. In fact, he is working to mitigate famine. During times of individual hardship, he might negotiate with a peasant for a payment plan on their annual rent.
Patient. He is not impulsive, he does not lose his temper.
Prudent. He makes choices that are thoughtful, considered, conservative (in the sense of not needlessly risky--he's not investing his entire fortune in having everyone plant an unproven crop). He is making sure local infrastructure like roads and public buildings are maintained and kept in good nick.
Gentle. He doesn't haul off and slap a servant or a tenant for breaking a dish or making a mistake. He doesn't abuse animals, his wife or children, or his employees. He doesn't rape the servants.
Generous (both in money and in spirit). He is not extorting the peasants for an amount of rent that is beyond their means, he is not raising taxes every year to cover his own lavish lifestyle. He is paying his servants a living wage (or, if wages are low, he's giving them room/board/clothing to make up the difference). If someone in a tenant's family dies, the lord is sending a gift of condolence, or helping to pay for the funeral, or possibly even ATTENDING the funeral and speaking a few kind words about the deceased, ESPECIALLY if they were a really upstanding and important member of the community. If one of his tenants is gravely sick, the lord is sending a basket of food or paying for a doctor. He is giving charitably (generally this will be, like, a bequest to the church so that they can run a hospital or an orphanage or a school for the local village children).
Pious. This classically means "goes to church, submits with humility to God" but to me this quality is subtextually standing in for "maintaining an ongoing sense of Perspective that HE'S not god, that there are higher powers he is Accountable to, that he too can be Judged, etc, so that he doesn't end up going on a weird fucked up power trip"
Humble. One of the most admiring things you hear about a lord doing in literature and epic poetry is, "He ate off of wooden plates while his followers ate off of gold and silver." Humility isn't about being meek, it's just about not thinking so much of yourself that you turn your nose up and sneer at what "lesser" people do. In other words: Don't be a fucking diva. If your carriage gets stuck in the mud, climb out and help everybody else push, you're not gonna die from getting mud on your shoes.
Condescending. This word has changed wildly in meaning/tone over the last couple centuries -- it's now a rude thing to do (because we've done away with legal social hierarchies, so someone acting like they're lowering themselves to your level IS insulting), but in older times, a high-ranking person "condescending" to a servant was worthy of praise and admiration: it means they were setting aside rank and privilege to speak to them with the easygoing, friendly respect and compassion they'd give a peer. This is things like... Treats those beneath him with courtesy and respect (ie: listens soberly and attentively when one of his servants or tenants comes to complain about a problem). Having a sense of humor and kindness about it when the lord and a servant both come around a corner at the same time and run into each other and the servant gets knocked to the ground and starts babbling apologies--the condescending (positive) lord helps them to their feet with his own hands and cracks a joke to show them that it's ok (as opposed to just walking off without a word or insulting/scolding them). This is also things like trusting a farmer, woodcutter, or artisan to speak with expertise about their own livelihood and taking their advice into consideration if they tell the lord that one of his ideas won't work.
Good boundaries. The ethical liege lord knows that it's normal for the staff to probably be softly bitching about him in private (even with a really good boss, we all grumble from time to time). He's not eavesdropping on them, he's not going into the staff areas where they should reasonably expect to have a degree of privacy, etc.
Righteous and protective of "the weak". The "weak" here doesn't necessarily mean physically weak, this is often used in the sense of someone politically or socially weak, aka The Marginalized -- the poor, the disabled, women, children, the elderly, etc. If a lord sees someone like this being mistreated or abused, he's supposed to step in and put a stop to that.
Committed to reciprocity. In a highly hierarchical system like feudalism, every person (from the lowest peasant all the way up to the crown prince) legally OWES their liege lord certain things (taxes, labor, service, loyalty, etc). A good liege remembers and takes very seriously the idea that this should be a balanced and reciprocal relationship -- in other words, he owes something BACK. Feudalism is modeled very strongly on the family system: If children owe their parents obedience and service, then parents owe their children care and protection. This still applies when the "child" is a farmer and the "parent" is a local baron. Or when the "child" is a duke and the "parent" is the king.
Basically, we get so caught up in the aesthetics of nobility that we forget that it literally is a managerial position that comes with responsibilities that were... very similar back in the day to the same ones we have now. Humans have not changed all that much. At the end of the day, a really good boss in the 1400s versus in one from the 2020s displays most of the same qualities of personality, even if the details of execution are different.
The next question is, of course, "well, but this theoretical liege lord is HIGHLY idealized -- how often did that actually HAPPEN? Wasn't it more likely that everyone was exploited all the time?" and to that I say: Well, maybe. But again, I don't think humans have changed all that much. Just like the bosses of today, there's a SPECTRUM: A really really good boss is rare and precious and one that you tell stories about for years after you've left that job, but a truly, genuinely, homicidally nightmarish boss is also pretty rare. Most bosses are sort of meh -- they have their good moments, they have their shitty moments, but they're tolerable and you can get along with them well enough to do your job, and then you roll your eyes at them behind their back. Generally, humans don't take outright exploitation lying down. Being a bad boss in the historical period is how you get peasant uprisings and revolts, and you know that to be true because your parents raised you with that knowledge, so unless you are very stupid or inbred or an egomaniac, there is literal personal incentive to at minimum be a Tolerable liege lord. And that means hitting at least SOME of the above bullet points.
TL;DR: In the words of Honore de Balzac, "Everything I have just told you can be summarized by an old word: noblesse oblige!"
(for more discussions of the ethics of fealty and what it means to be a good boss when you are an exquisitely beautiful twink of a prince with a hot beefy bodyguard.... [fingerguns] read A Taste of Gold and Iron)
i hate it when i cant even write a poem about something because its too obvious. like in the airbnb i was at i guess it used to be a kids room cause you could see the imprint of one little glow in the dark star that had been missed and painted over in landlord white. like that's a poem already what's the point
If you're writing anything involving cons, scams, heists, or morally questionable characters who are very good at lying, here are some free resources I've been using for research. Saving you the "why is this in my search history" anxiety.
1. The FBI's Famous Cases & Criminals archive (fbi.gov/history/famous-cases) has detailed breakdowns of real fraud cases, Ponzi schemes, and confidence operations. The language they use is clinical and precise, which is perfect for getting the procedural details right.
2. The FTC Consumer Sentinel Network publishes annual reports on the most common fraud tactics in the US. Great for understanding how modern scams actually work and what makes people fall for them.
3. The Smithsonian's American Art Museum has a free digital collection of forgery case studies. If your character forges documents or art, this is gold.
4. Court Listener (courtlistener.com) is a free legal database where you can read actual court transcripts from fraud trials. Want to know how a real con artist talks under oath? This is where you find out.
5. The Internet Archive's collection of old newspaper crime sections. Search for "confidence man" or "swindle" in papers from the 1920s through 1960s and you'll find incredible real stories that would feel too dramatic for fiction.
Bonus: The Psychology of Fraud section on the Association for Psychological Science website has accessible articles about why people trust, how deception works cognitively, and what makes someone a convincing liar. Essential reading if you want your con artist characters to feel psychologically real.
Reblog to save for later. Your WIP will thank you.
A non-writer asked me "but where do you get your ideas" and i genuinely did not know how to explain that it's not a place. it's not a website. it's not a folder. it's that i was on the bus and a woman was holding a paper bag very carefully and something about the way she held it made me need to know what was inside and then i needed to know why she was sad about it and then there was a whole person and then there was a whole story and the bus had already stopped and i missed my stop. that's where.
okay but there is something disquieting about this urge to cast fan writers as altruists. they give us all this for free!! well, no.
they’re sharing
it’s a key difference in perception. fic isn’t given. it’s shared. it’s part of a fandom community— in which readers are also an integral part.
it’s probably inevitable mission creep from the increasingly transactional nature of the internet and fandom-as-consumerism, which was always gonna happen after corps worked out how much bank there is to make from those weirdo fan people
but like. fandom is sharing. i think we’ve lost that somewhere.
contents (nsfw): Dunk x fem!Reader, Modern AU friends to lovers rom-com with pregnancy. Humour, fluff (this is a breather chapter, they just enjoy each other for a bit), acts of service, mild foot fetish (just devotion, devotion, devotion), hand jobs, sub!Dunk, coming outside, lactation kink, dirty talk, breeding kink mentioned, fingering, good boy, coming in pants.
<- previous chapter
MASTERLIST
next chapter -> (24/07)
synopsis: In which it momentarily settles. (Pregnancy status: 30 - 32 weeks, III trimester).
word count: 11,3K
a/n: Banner by me, dividers by @strangergraphics, proofread by @hextoken!
Duncan's sat on the floor by the legs of the bed with his head bowed and a small desk lamp pointing its beam directly onto his lap. There rests your foot. His thumb is warm in your arch, fingers cradling your toe knuckles. He's bowed so that you only see the tense line of his shoulders, though from the overall stressed stance you can tell he's squinting.
"I told you I can try doing it myself," you say.
"Hush, girl," he huffs. "You've such tiny toes, is all. I don't want to hurt ye."
"I still maintain it's you who has huge paws," you murmur. Duncan lifts his head. Hair has sneaked under his glasses and falls into his eyes. He's frowning in what you mark as an attempt at looking stern. "You won't glare me out of a fact, darling."
He sets the nail clipper down. Slides his hand down to your Achilles tendon and raises your foot so that it levels with his chest. There, he sets his free palm flat to your sole. The tips of his fingers reach slightly beyond your toes. "See?" he says. "A wee little foot. With wee little toes."
"Proves nothing," you say. "Only that you are a giant."
Air puffs out through his nose. He hangs his head down, and for a second you're ready to celebrate your victory. But then you notice him bowing lower and lower while your foot is being raised higher and higher, both by near imperceptible increments. Before you know to wrench out, his teeth sink in the ligament of your arch. Lightly. Sweetly.
"Dunk!" you squeal. Jerk your knee, but his grip is too strong.
His jaw unclamps, but lips stay where they are. He kisses over the bite. Higher, on the joint of your biggest toe. Then, he sucks the toe itself into his mouth and hums. His eyes close. Yours stay wide open as you watch him.
It's been plenty of this recently—small acts, little gestures of devotion Duncan keeps doing to attach action to his declaration of not going anywhere. It feels nice. He's able to turn the most wicked things into something hallowed. The sucking continues until he's satisfied with your silence. He releases your toe with a soft pop, and sets your foot back down onto his lap.
"That's better," he says. Then—click. A strip of your toenail falls onto a towel he has spread on the floor.
You've been needing someone as your loving lackey more and more as of late. The belly has become an unfamiliar ballast and an obstruction impossible to compare to anything from the past, no matter how violently your weight has been fluctuating between late teens and late twenties. It makes some elements of necessary daily maintenance, and an unnecessary (but missed) portion of grooming, unachievable alone.
Which is how you end up under Dunk's compromised, but still watchful eye. It's been two weeks since he brought his bag and announced he would stay here for a bit, which in reality meant simply moving in.
At first, the arrangement rubbed somewhat ill-fitting. The punishment you both had invented on the bed stretched itself into smaller punishments and kept finding Duncan in odd places. In the kitchen, the hall, beside the washing machine with one of your bras held between two fingers and a resigned expression of someone wronged by situations needing an instructions unclear label. You became quippy with him without meaning to. Sometimes sharp, sometimes, embarrassingly, cruel without a point to it over the angle of a pillow or the way he asked if you wanted tea. It rarely came from any great store of resentment towards him. More often it sprouted from the grand insult of needing witness. Your body had become a public inconvenience, and Duncan, by caring about you enough to stay, had also become the nearest official representative of the court.
He took it bravely. Came home straight from school, hair upset by weather or children or both, and answered every ridiculous text as if responding to a distress flare. I feel like death. I’m so tired and I have a headache. I think I’m hungry but I can’t eat. My back is broken. The baby is punching my ribs. Never mind, I just ate a banana. To all of it there would come the little typing dots, then: Do ye want me home? Or: Have water, please. Or: Left side, lassie. Try left side. Sometimes just: I’m sorry. I’ll be there soon.
He made an effort with the rest of it too. His clothes went into the drawers and shelves you had freed for him, instead of breeding bachelor-style over the chair and floor. The toothbrush settled in the cup beside yours. His gym bag stopped waiting by the door making it look like he's going to go eventually. Every few days he would ask, awkwardly, if something was in the way, if he’d put it wrong, if you wanted him to move it, and every time you had to suffer the fact that he meant himself as much as his socks.
It grew uglier, more intimate, less dignified. The test turned out to be an ordinary pressure only. Indigestion tablets on the bedside table. Damp towels. Your temper. His patience. Your snoring, which he called breathing with courage and got a pillow thrown at him for it. His terrible habit of standing in the middle of a room until he remembered why he had entered it. The repaired thing between you had seams, and every day found some new way to lean its weight on them, but it kept enduring.
Then, last week, Duncan’s carefulness seemed to leave the room. For one whole evening, it had almost felt easy again. He came home from school, dropped his bag by the door, and kissed you in the hall with his coat still on and one hand cold from the outside. “Good to be back,” he said, quiet into your cheek, then went pink as if the sentence had shown too much leg.
Dinner was only reheated leftovers, though Duncan watched you stir the pot with his chin propped in his hand. “What?” you asked.
“Nothin’.”
“You’re staring.”
“Aye.”
“That’s generally something.”
“I like looking at ye,” he said, and no apology followed. That was new too. Small, but new.
Afterwards, you sat together on the couch without the telly swallowing the room. Talked, even. Real talk. Little talk. You asked about Egg, and Duncan told you things seemed good, or good enough, though Egg had never been one to let much slip unless the feeling came wrapped in a complaint. There was some school nonsense after that. A child who had tried to dry a wet sock over a radiator and nearly started a fire. You laughed more than the story deserved and Duncan looked pleased with himself for the next ten minutes.
Then the talking thinned. Duncan took to staring again. This time he did something with it. His hand came to your jaw, and he kissed you without the shy little request that usually came first. Unprompted. Unasked. Welcomed so quickly your body seemed to have been waiting ahead of you. It was lovely for a while. Lovely in the plainest sense. His mouth warm, his fingers careful, the couch creaking under the work of his knees as he turned towards you. It felt present instead of like a substitute for something, pure attraction and I want to kiss and touch my girl moment.
You got lost in it, and properly too. One hand in his hair, the other fisted in his shirt, legs opening for him because what else were legs meant to do in a situation like this one. Then his fingers found your waistband.
You caught both his hands. Then: “No.”
Duncan pulled back immediately. All the colour left his face in a clean drop. “I’m s-sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
“Oh God, Dunk—”
“I just. It’s fine if ye don’t want—”
“No, wait.” You kept his hands between yours, though now neither of you knew what to do with them. “That's not what I mean.”
He stared at you with that wounded obedience that made everything worse.
“It’s just that I kind of...” You swallowed. Heat rose into your face, neck, and ears. “I can’t reach certain territories anymore.”
Duncan blinked. “Territories,” he repeated.
“Don’t make me say regions.”
“’m not.”
“You are looking very region-curious.”
Duncan's brows pulled. “I’m trying to understand what’s happened to the territories.”
You shut your eyes. “I haven’t shaved my legs since the last time. And they were already a bit unshaved then.”
For a second, he just breathed. Then he breathed out so long it almost became a laugh.
Your eyes snapped open. “What’s so funny?”
“Nothing.”
“It can be silly to you, but—”
“It’s not silly.” He shook his head quickly, hair falling into his glasses. “It's not. I’m relieved, is all. I thought ye were cross with me.”
You stared at him.
“I mean, ye may be cross with me as well,” he added. “Wouldn’t blame ye. But I thought I’d pushed too far.” Then, he looked down at your joined palms. “Would ye like to? Otherwise?”
There was a small nod. His thumb moved over your knuckles. “Right,” he said. “Then if that’s the issue, we can sort it.”
He led you to the bathroom, and by hand, as if something either huge, or very small was about to happen. There, he sat you on a stool and turned the taps. You watched the whole scene—him squinting at labels before deciding what to pour into the tub, checking the temperature, preparing a towel, finding the razor with a little ha!—like he was about to perform some shamanic ritual. He noticed your staring and came down in front of you.
"What?" you asked.
His hands went to the soft place where your thighs and arse met the wooden rim of the stool, and rubbed there. Then, he looked up at you. "Can I shave your legs for ye, sweetheart?"
And well—grace decided to abandon you whatsoever. "I—oh—" you stammered, then just remained with your mouth open and full around words that would be useful and were, in that instant, impossible to produce.
"Are ye all right?" he asked.
"Y-yes? Yes, I—I am," you said, wondering at the same time when you’d become such a terrible liar. Your chest felt shallow where it ought to let you breathe deeply, and you realised you were fucking flustered. Just shy of giggling, and so unbecoming when he was gaping at you like that, with the sheer sincerity of his face bowing towards you.
The corners of his mouth did something uncertain. "Yer breathing funny."
"I'm… I'm fine, really," you said, putting your hands on his wrists. Your lips pressed together, futilely so. For it was beyond erotic to imagine him performing an act of service so ordinary and useless, driven purely by a whim. An indulgence. He would be doing it for no reason except that you had wished to feel smooth under his hand, and, to undignify you further, he was already kneeling for it. Your laugh came out strangled.
He narrowed his eyes, concerned. "What is it?"
You shook your head.
Then Duncan frowned even more, until something terrible bloomed on his face. Recognition. Either you had been so obvious that one needed no bottle-bottom lenses to spot it, or he just knew you this well by now. "Are ye—" He paused, visibly seeking the gentlest route through the thought. "Are ye excited?"
Your hand came to cover the treacherous mouth. The other squeezed his knuckles through the altering of his eyes. At first wonder, swiftly followed by an intimate softness that brought salt under your lids. "Yes," you whispered, nodding.
"Oh, girl." He rose on his knees and came close. His nose brushed yours, and then cheek. He pressed his face into you and let out a deep breath, all worn down and fond. "My sweet girl," he murmured. "If I knew some razor work would make ye this happy, you'd never shave your legs on your own."
That's when you cackled, fully. Duncan kissed your scrunched cheek, then stood and offered both hands. You let him pull you up. He undressed you briskly enough to have passed for confidence if his ears had not gone red-hot in spirit. By the time the fabric came away, his face had gone quiet.
He took you by the waist and elbow and led you into the tub. "Step in," he said. "I've got ye."
The water was warm if you were being generous, but such were the constrictions of pregnancy. You held onto his shoulders and let him guide you down, ungainly both with belly and need. When you were all settled and partially covered by foam, he exhaled through his nose and gave your jaw one small stroke with his thumb.
Then, Duncan straightened and turned away to tug his jumper and T-shirt over his head. After that, his trousers, worked down with one hand braced on the sink because he nearly stepped on the hem and took himself out with them.
You watched him slit-eyed. He noticed halfway through folding the trousers over the toilet lid. “What?”
“Are you getting in with me?”
Duncan snorted. “I think ye’d need something more pool-like to fit us both, lassie.” He pushed his glasses up, glanced at the bath, then at the floor, calculating. “I’m only gonna—” His foot stepped into the water, then the other, and he lowered himself to sit on the edge with a careful grunt. "—sit 'ere. Jus' so I can reach ye proper."
"O-okay," you said, feeling your cheeks blazing. He paddled under the surface searching for your ankle, grasped it gently and set your foot on his calf. "Oh—"
"Is that alright?" he asked.
"Yep," you mumbled, leaning back so the belly had more space to exist.
"Mm." Duncan nodded. He reached behind himself for his shaving cream, which in itself was another sexy part of the whole scene, and loosened the cap with a thumb. A blue gel line painted on your shin began to puff up into a white foam. He set the bottle on the edge of the tub and put his hands to you. Started to spread it gently until the whole of your leg was evenly covered, up to slightly above the knee. Your muscle flexed under his touch. "Nervous?" Duncan asked. "I won't hurt ye," he said. "I'm good at this."
"Are you now?"
"Aye," he said. "Arlan taught me. Have ye ever seen me with a razor burn?" You shook your head. “Well, then.” He turned the razor once between his fingers, absurdly confident for a man sitting half-dressed on the side of your bath. “Ready?”
Your hand went to his thigh, warm and damp. “Yes.”
Duncan gave you a last searching look, then set the razor to your shin. Slow, immaculate stroke. Foam parted under the blade and gathered at the sides of its head, leaving a clean strip of skin behind, glossy and newly bare. You watched the pass of metal with strange attention. His thumb kept holding the flesh steady, making a narrow road appear through the white. What should have been ordinary, and had been ordinary all your life when done in a rush with one leg propped badly on a sink or a bath edge, had gained new weight in his hands. He bent over with his head slightly tipped, and kept looking through the lower part of his lenses. Sometimes his tongue touched his upper lip. Sometimes his teeth caught it. All that size brought down to a single strip of your shin.
“There,” he murmured, rinsing the razor in the bathwater. “Grand.”
Another stroke. Then another. He kept them even and light, working up the leg in patient lines. Around the ankle he slowed. Around the knee he changed to short little passes and smoothed the place after with his thumb, checking the skin by touch. His hands had nothing vulgar about them, but they were not purely medicinal either. There was no sting, nor a scratch, just as he'd boasted, too.
A person could say I love you and then panic. A person could need more time and mean it. A person could kneel anyway, could take up a razor and your foolish wish and make a vow out of tending to it. The minding of nothing. The willingness toward anything. You looked at him leaning over your leg. The hair on his chest was damp and curled, cheeks pink. Between his legs he was slightly tumescent, making the cotton at his crotch stretch over the bulge. You felt some part of you go quiet with receiving.
“For the record,” Duncan said, still concentrating, “I like all versions. Hair or naught.” His thumb went over your knee again. “But this is nice.”
“Nice, hm?”
He glanced up. Your fingers slipped beneath the hem of his boxers and found the hotter skin there, high on his thigh.
“Mm.” Duncan’s mouth pressed itself into a line. “Is it nice for ye, girl?”
You nodded.
His eyes held yours a second longer, then they went back down as he finished the last pass over your calf. When the first leg was done, smooth and slick, he rinsed the razor again.
You gave him the second one yourself. Set your heel against his calf, then shifted until your foot rested closer to his groin. Pressed there, lightly. Duncan looked down at it. At you. A small smile came and went, older than his panic used to be. More fluent. “Yer trouble,” he said.
His fingers wrapped round your ankle and squeezed. He took the shaving cream and drew a new line along your shin. This time, when he spread it, his palms travelled higher. Over knee, over thigh, inward by a careful inch. Your fingers answered by slipping deeper under the cotton.
“Lassie,” he said, low. “You shouldn’t distract me, ye know.”
“I’m not doing anything.”
“Mm. Right.”
His hands were less steady on the second leg. Only a little. Enough for you to feel his restraint labouring through the task. He shaved you with the same care all the same, but his breath kept growing heavier through his nose. At the knee he slowed until it almost tormented you. Short stroke, thumb, rinse. He did not nick you once.
When he finished, he set the razor on the far edge of the tub beside the bottle, out of reach of both your feet. Then, he swept you whole with his eyes, and asked, "Are ye feeling better?"—all while he was visibly throbbing, the sweetheart.
You shifted in the bath. Skidded a bit closer and rested both palms on either of his thighs. Your thumbs brushed the creases where leg became underbelly and one of them, inadvertently, grazed over the base of his cock. Just the side of it, and only a little, but the little was enough for him to jerk.
"Yes," you told him, and smiled when he propped himself on the edge of the tub and lolled his head back. "You?"
Yes, this, you thought. This was correct and, in some sweet, safe way, unremarkable. With him, it was the pressure and the fissure that gave off the feeling of wrongness. So maybe, for once, you could exist in the oblique a while and give him time to voice what his body had been screaming for months upon months. Because no one, ever, had got this hard this quickly around you, not to mention purely from performing a mundane action of grooming.
"Like this?" you asked, parting the fly of his boxers and pulling him out. You ran a finger on the broad, top side of his length all the way to the seeping slit. It was odd to think that this was your new default. Duncan wasn't the type to aim at ruining you for other men, though he did precisely that, stronger for being innocently unaware of his own virility. His cock deserved no other word than magnificent and met every promise his body made. Size, yes, staggering in girth and proportion, but also delicacy where it mattered. Softness of skin over the hard-working flesh beneath. Full of blood, full of life, coursing through veins that roped it, some slight, some fuller and blue. The root sat wide in a thatch of dark hair you loved running your nails through until his breath came in torn out shards. Toward the head the foreskin lay soft and pale, flushing darker where your fingers drew it back; the tip itself looked tender enough to scold you for touching badly, silken under finger and tongue, quick to shine, quick to suffer.
Another maddening thing was that he had always been clean. In an ordinary way of soap, laundry and warm body, even after a long day. Rarely, the need to get to you exceeded his quickness to wash the training off, and he came to you with sweat dried in the hair at his temples and under his shirt. Even then the afternoon was not enough for the salt of him to turn. There was a span in which Duncan smelled private and living, and the first time you had asked him to leave it on himself, to come without showering, he had looked at you first with bewilderment, and then as if he saw a creature of incarnate kinship.
There was a twitch in cotton. You glanced down to where the rest of him was held by the boxers. His balls hung blurred in the fabric, heavy and kept from you for the time being by the same cloth your fingers had already invaded. Exposed him more, somehow, that contraption, and made him into a man partly presented and partly caught. You ran your thumb under the crown and watched his stomach tighten.
“Lass,” he said, voice gone careful in the wrong direction.
You looked up from him. “What?”
His hand had clamped round the tub's edge. The other hovered near your shoulder and never landed. You lowered your gaze again.
There was a note you made then, solemn as any law proclaimed in a bathroom could be: if the two of you came out the other side with something steady, if the days stopped behaving like bridges with missing boards, you would make up for the months in which your stomach rebelled at anything surpassing the tip of your tongue. Get him into your mouth more, for he was fuckable, yes, monstrously and sweetly, but he was also made for being sucked. For the lip of your mouth under the head of him, for spit and patience and feeling that caution give out to hips that want and thighs that shake.
You drew a circle over the place beneath the head with your index finger. Small, slow, almost scholarly, though there was no learning left to be done there. The frenulum gave under the lightest pressure, and Duncan’s thigh jumped against your palm. One clear bead had gathered at the slit; when you swiped it away, another followed immediately, already formed, glossy and round. Poor thing. As if dryness offended him. As if he could not bear to be anything except wet and soppy in your hand.
To make him even easier you made your mouth water. Not that the task was difficult—the eyes saw a gorgeous thing and gossiped to the tongue in no time at all—so gathered the spit, eager and charmed. You bent your head enough to let it fall. It landed on your knuckles first, warm from you, then slid between them and onto him. You spread it with two fingers, over the crown, under it, down the thick ridge of him until he shone.
“Oh, fuck, yes,” Duncan blurted.
Your hand closed round him. He got worse immediately. Hips gave a rough little shove, stomach drew tight, hand blanched on the bath edge. His cock filled your grip with a heat that felt almost separate from the rest of him, some blunt animal portion of the heart dragged through the soma and placed where you could answer it. You gave one slow stroke, only one, and felt him pulse all the way through your fist.
“Lass,” he whined.
You looked up. Saw his open mouth and glasses slipping down his nose. His knees kept drawing further apart until the seam at the crotch creaked. “What?” you asked.
Duncan swallowed. His eyes went to your palm, then back to your face. “Will ye—” He stopped, breathed hard through his nose, and tried again. “Will ye take me in hand, sweetheart? Proper.”
Your fingers tightened. "Like that?" you asked softly.
That hurt him beautifully. His head tipped back a little, throat working. “Please,” he said. “Please, girl.”
"Baby," you cooed. "Of course. How is this?" You gave him a thorough stroke. Your fist slid easily through the mess of spit and him. Already he was panting, stomach drawn into tight ridges and the softer flesh over them trembling with every pass.
“Yes,” he muttered. “Yes, yes—” Choked and strained, as though the word had to be dragged out of the same place pleasure was lodged.
You paid special attention to the head, where he was tenderest. Shielded him whole there, held him, squeezed until he gave up more of his soot, then returned it to the length where the veins girdling it pulsed hotly. “Tell me, Dunk,” you whispered.
He bit his lip and chewed on it for a second. One hand came to you and spanned your neck. Only resting. Thumb below your jaw, fingers warm over the side of your throat, his palm was absurdly large and careful. Through a loosened jaw, he said, "Good." A breath. "It's bloody fucking amazin'." Another wheeze of air through his nose, then, slurry: "Ye can do whatever ye want with me, woman." He gave you a stare near lidless and irisless, pupils dilated as if you were the drug and this was sensation entering bloodstream.
An impish thing seized your throat. “Can I do this?” you asked, and cupped the whole of his sack through the wet cotton.
Duncan folded in the spine. “Oh fu-huuck, girl—” His hips rolled forward until he almost slipped off the edge and into the bath. His feet kicked water against your hip; the grip on your neck tightened by instinct, then steadied there, still aware despite the rest of him going to pieces. “Yeah. Like that. Oh fuck, please—please keep touchin’ me, mo ghrá, I’m—oh—oh—”
So you did. Massaged him through the fabric while your other hand kept him in a slow steady rhythm. Your thumb teased the crevices and the hole of his crown whenever you reached the top. Added spit when he needed it, and he did need it, poor thing, kept using it up on you as fast as you gave it. You had all sorts of unuseful thoughts. How perverse it was that his cum had proved itself so potently dangerous it got you knocked up after the first time. What a waste it would be to have it vanish into bathwater. How you might at least get it somewhere it would look pretty. Somewhere he'd appreciate and blush over it sweetly for you.
Duncan shook under your hands. Sweat gathered on his stomach and began to run down his thighs, searching for ways through the fine hair there. His chest lifted in broken pulls. The hand on your throat slipped higher, thumb brushing the hinge of your jaw, and all the while he looked at you as if looking had become another kind of fucking.
He began to grow harder, everywhere too. You felt his balls riding up and straining in their supple flesh, cock kicking against your palm and all the tendons roping under skin. “I’m gonna—” he said, though naught needed to be announced. By then you knew him backwards and sideways, and when he was looking like that, breathing like that and rasping as if this was honest labour instead of pleasure, you would soon be granted that lovely split on the face, the rounding of mouth, the pulling of brows, and him whispering, yes, yes, yes, all slut-like and grateful.
The nail in the coffin was your Good boy. Offered last minute and so wickedly that Duncan groaned out a loud fuck, bucked up into the cradle of your fingers, and you only had a second to point him where you wanted him. You shifted closer in the water and pressed your chest out for him. Duncan saw. His eyes dropped, mouth still open from the shock of his own rapture, and then the first spill of him came over your tits in a hot white stripe.
“Oh God,” he choked. “What did ye—”
Another wave took him. Wrenched him by the spine, by the stomach, by the wet ruined thing in your hand. His seed kept spilling through wheezes and whines, opaque and lovely, painting you in broken lines while Duncan stared as if witnessing some private miracle he had caused by accident. “What did ye do, oh sweetheart. Oh, look at you.”
His hands came to your breasts. Transfixed, he touched the mess of himself there, thumbs dragging through it first, then whole palms, smearing him over the heavy swell of tits. You released his cock and caught his wrists. Guided him higher, over your collarbones, then your throat, then your face, until his thumbs rested near your mouth. You licked over both. Duncan's throat clicked.
“Did you like it?” you asked, looking up at him with the most innocent doll-like eyes you could manage.
Duncan nodded. Then he smiled, defeated. Then grinned fully, crooked and helpless and bright enough to make your lids wet. “You wicked thing,” he said. “Wee fucking menace, I—yes. Oh, fuck.”
You had never heard him swear so much. Perhaps ever. It made you vain in the warmest possible way. You cupped his face with one hand, thumb slipping a little on the damp of his cheek. “I like when you are like this,” you whispered.
“Fucked stupid?”
“Pleased,” you said. “Because of me.”
His gaze softened all over again, though his breathing stayed wrecked. “Ye like pleasin’ me, lassie?”
You nodded.
“Well,” Duncan said, and turned his face enough to kiss the heel of your palm. “All ye do is please me, sweetheart. Nothin’ else.”
Click. A swipe of hand over your toes. "There ye are," Duncan says, beyond pleased with himself. "Not too shabby, aye?" Then he presents you your own foot as if it has gone through a dazzling makeover.
"It's great," you say, smiling. "Thank you."
"Mm." He kisses your sole once, then lowers it onto his lap. Gives you a glance. "Ye all right, girl?"
"Yes, just, um—" Your hand swipes over your throat. "Just heartburn. It comes and goes."
Duncan grins. "Ye know that means the baby's growin' hair?"
"Shut up," you snort. "We've got the same app and mine said no poppycock like that."
Duncan frowns, though the tips of his ears go incriminatingly warm. “It ain’t poppycock.”
“No?”
“No," he says. "It’s a thing people say.”
“A thing people say.”
“Aye.”
“People also say a lot of stupid things.”
He narrows his eyes at you, still holding your foot. “I’m telling ye, there’s something to it.”
You look at him and realise, with unreasonable fondness, that the -cock part of the poppycock itself has wrong-footed him a little. The great father of your child, undone by folklore and a nursery-level obscenity. It suits him tremendously.
“Well,” you say, settling deeper into the mattress, “with the amount of heartburn I’m getting, he’ll come out with hair to braid.”
Duncan’s face opens in spite of himself. “Maybe he will.”
“He’ll need conditioner by week two.”
“Could have curls.”
“Could have your hair,” you say.
His smile goes quieter. He looks down at the foot in his hand and rubs his thumb under your toes. “Poor wee thing.”
“Excuse me, your hair is beautiful.”
“Aye, and mad.”
“Beautiful and mad.”
“Grand. That’ll do him well in life.”
You laugh, then the heartburn climbs again and turns the laugh into a small, irritated breath. Duncan notices instantly. His thumb stops.
“Ye good?”
“Mm.” You gather yourself with some effort and shift your feet to the floor. “I’ll be right back.”
His hand comes up near your knee, ready without touching. “Do ye need—”
“No, it's okay.” You stand, test your balance, then point down at him. “I’m giving you a five-star review.”
Duncan’s mouth twitches. “For the toes?”
“For the full service.”
He smiles fully and suspects he's looking far too pleased with that. Watches you leave and when he loses sight of your calves in the hallway, Dunk spreads himself on the floor and breathes deeply. His shirt has ridden up a bit and the wood is cool against the strip of skin above his waistband.
Duncan thinks he may have redeemed himself a little. The thought embarrasses him for its size and for how quickly it spreads through him with warmth and hunger for belief. He performs small works, foolish works, maybe, to anyone looking from the outside. To him they feel near holy, and that is part of the trouble. He keeps making altars out of tasks because tasks do not turn round and ask him what he means.
He knows what he means. That has never been a matter of doubt. Saying it, though, feels adjacent to asking for something, and Duncan hates the prospect of causing discomfort with all his might. I love ye, and then the whole injured beast of him rises behind the sentence with its old begging: keep me, choose me, make me a place and do not change your mind. There is the wound itself, old and blunt, and then the smaller cuts round it made by other hands, by women who had wanted him until he became too much work, by rooms where he learned to stand near the door, by the first proposal with the ring shaking in his pocket and your kind, frightened no laid carefully between you.
Logic has been trying its best with him. Logic points to your drawers with his socks in them. To the toothbrush in the cup. To the way you let him kneel and fuss and get underfoot, the way you reach for him in sleep, the way you say his name when pain or pleasure has taken the manners out of you. Logic tells him naught would go wrong if he said it now, softly, with no bed ruined by grief and no apology chasing after. A different thing in him pulls back until the words go tight in the throat. Some guard at the gate, half-starved and loyal to bad orders.
He thinks of the ring in his flat more often than is sensible. Whether he could go back under some pretence and bring it here. Whether he would have it in him to ask again, properly this time, with fewer wild eyes and less duty making a mess of devotion. Whether you would take him now. Everything seems to be saying yes, but he has been turned down once, and once is plenty for Duncan. Once is enough to put a mark on the place.
Still, he is happy. God help him, he is. He has got himself a lovely girl, sweet and sharp and heavy with his son, and he finds you so sexy sometimes that it makes him daft with gratitude. If you decided to keep him under your slipper, he thinks he would bear it grand. Fetch, carry, kneel, take correction. Yet that is another thing about you. You do not seem to want him flattened. You leave room for the rest of him. His wants, his foolishness, his ugly jumpers, his hunger, the bit of him that chooses the wrong onesie because the pattern made him smile.
He remembers himself smiling terribly upon finding the very shite-coloured one tucked at the bottom of the drawer. Recognised it by the chest alone. You had hidden it away with the good things. Kept it. That should tell him something and it does tell him something.
Duncan covers his eyes with the heel of his hand and breathes again. The floor holds him flat and honest. He thinks that, maybe, he could be braver sometime soon, when a loud clatter from the bathroom makes him near bite his tongue.
He surges up so fast his little toe falls victim to the bedframe. He swears some, shakes his foot in the air and rushes down the corridor with sweat already pearling in the well of his back. The closer he gets to you the better he can hear the sounds and once Duncan is three steps away from the bathroom it is clear that you are crying. He calls out your name.
"What happened?"
The door gets shoved closed when he's about to barge through, and your voice comes pained from the other side. "Please, don't come in!"
Duncan hesitates. He rests both hands on the wood and puts his ear to it. "What's happening?" he asks, softer.
There is no answer. Blood starts pumping loud in his temples. He reaches one palm to the doorknob and stops there. "Lass," he says. "Lass, did ye fall over? Are ye hurt?"
"N-no," you weep, unconvincing. He can hear water running in the sink and your hiccuped breathing.
A barbed swallow forces its way down Dunk's throat. "Is… is there blood?" he asks, eyes squeezing shut. Nothing again. Likely, you didn't hear him, but likely is not doing it for Duncan now. He wraps his fingers tight round the knob and tells you, "Sweetheart, I’m coming in unless ye tell me you’re safe." Whether you're about to tell him or not, he doesn't have time to check, for he cracks the door open with breath held in his lungs.
"Don't look," you say when he steps in, and it works like a spell because his eyes go straight to you.
You are standing with your back to him, a towel held to your chest. In the mirror Duncan sees your face first. Tear-streaked, mouth pulled tight, eyes swollen with the effort of staying quiet. He comes to you because he must. His body has no other instruction. On the way he checks the floor, the sink, the edge of the bath, the hard corners of everything that could have taken a piece of you. There is naught. No blood. No broken glass. No wet print of a fall.
He bands one arm round your shoulders from behind and draws you back into him. His mouth lowers to the side of your head. “Are ye hurt?” he asks. “What happened, lassie? Talk to me.”
You only weep harder. His gaze drops. The towel is pressed to your breasts, clutched there in a fist gone pale round the knuckles. A different fear enters him, smaller and stranger.
“Is something wrong here?” he asks, touching the back of your hand.
Your eyes shut. After a few seconds, you lower the towel. There are two damp stains on the front of your shirt.
The relief unspools through Duncan so fast he nearly goes weak with it. He has to breathe out through his nose and make sure no laugh comes with it, because the laugh would only be terror leaving him in the wrong shape.
“Lassie,” he says. “Oh, sweetheart. My sweet girl, that’s normal.” He turns you in his arms despite the small sound of protest you make, and gathers you close. “It’s normal. C’mere.”
“It’ll get on your shirt,” you say, brokenly.
“I want ye on my shirt,” Duncan murmurs. “C’mere.”
That does it, or at least enough of it. Your body comes into him slowly, stiff first, then less so, and he feels the warm damp bloom through cotton where your breasts press to his chest. His hand cups the back of your head. The other stays wide across your shoulders. He knows this is normal. Knows it within one blink, the way he knows the whole of the app now. Third trimester and another function arriving early, another piece of yourself declaring new management without asking permission. No wonder it has frightened you. No wonder it has made you cry.
Duncan ponders if there is a way to say I love you that can neither spook you nor tear open the guarded thing in himself. Some new road to the same place, through a quieter gate. His mouth finds your ear. “Will ye let me take care of you?”
Your hands close into fists in the back of his shirt.
He shifts a little and you hiss through your teeth. Duncan stills. Smooths his palm down your hair until you lift your face to him. He can't really bear the sight of your welling eyes, but he keeps himself upright in the important places.
“Are ye tender?” he asks.
You nod.
“I’ll be very gentle.”
“It’s just that—” you hiccup. “It’s just another thing and I—”
“I know,” he says. “I know. Yer so strong, my sweetheart. Nothing bad’s happenin’.”
Your back gives by one notch under his hand.
“Let’s clean ye up, hm? Come, wee thing.”
He takes your hands and brings you to the sink. Pulls the stool out from under it, then gets a clean washcloth from the cupboard. He washes his hands properly, hot water and soap to the wrists, drying them on a towel he knows is clean because he folded it there himself that morning. Then he wets the cloth and wrings it out until it is soft and warm in his palm.
You watch him with a look that makes him feel twelve feet tall and useless. He is nervous too, in several directions. Smaller humans have depended on him plainly enough. Children with scraped knees. Egg with his clenched jaw and silences. This is different. You are grown, clever, and proud, and he has big hands made rough by work. He feels in his element and terrified of failing you in the same breath.
He sits on the stool. It is low enough to make foolish angles of him, knees high and spread, elbows awkward, yet even there your chest is near level with his face. He looks up at you first.
“Tell me if anything hurts, aye?”
You nod again.
With careful fingers, he rolls your shirt higher. Underneath, your breasts sit heavy and glossed around the nipples, the skin damp where milk has gathered and strayed. Duncan keeps his face steady. Something low in him, older than thought, purrs out a wicked good at the sight of you like this: mother of his child, body working early, needing him enough to help. He lifts his eyes back to yours.
“Still all right?”
“Yes.”
He brings the cloth to the underside of one breast and only presses it where a drop has wandered down. Waits. You breathe out. Another nod.
So he continues. Small touches. Cloth held, lifted, folded to a clean corner, held again. He does not rub unless he has to. Uses his free hand to support the weight of you from below, fingers spread wide. His glasses steam over a little. When he moves higher, the cloth brushes the nipple and you flinch hard.
Duncan stops immediately. “Hurts?”
“Shit,” you whisper. “Yeah, it actually hurts.”
“All right.” He lowers the cloth. “Do ye want to ring the doctor?”
You shake your head.
“Are ye sure?”
“It’s just sore. I looked it up. It can be sore.”
He studies your face, then the skin, then your face again. “No fever? No bad pain inside?”
“No.”
“No… red patch?”
You glance down with a miserable little sniff. “Dunk.”
“I have to ask.”
“I know you do," you say. "No red patch.”
“All right,” he says, though the worry stays working in his jaw. “All right. We’ll go slower.”
His hand starts shaking a little in the wrist. He could find something softer or pack you into the tub again and then wrap you in a blanket and tell you it is no matter if you leak through it. Yet something tells him the misery of it does not lie in the leaking itself but in your body giving up its woman post while the mother post takes over.
He drops the cloth in the sink and hangs his head low for a second. There is shame, loud and striking and bitter as a bitten tablet, in the part of him that has noticed the shine on you and answered it. You are crying and sore, frightened too, by a thing your body has done, and still some ancient, pre-verbal creature in him has lifted its head. Something older than sex, maybe. Or older than any sex he has known what to do with. His tongue gets all confused by aching to go places that are not for him. Want shapes in him from lacking this kind of warmth, and from the tug at the sight of you standing there with milk on your skin, carrying his son and needing him to be good enough with his hands, good enough with his mouth, good enough in any way a man can be useful.
He wipes his palms on his thighs, then reaches for your hips.
“Come here a bit,” he says. You look at him with wet eyes. “Only closer," Duncan says. "That’s all.”
You let him draw you in between his knees. Your belly gets there first, high and full. Duncan lays one hand on the side of it since that place is known and safe, and there everyone understands what his tenderness means. Aodhán shifts under his palm, faintly, or perhaps Duncan only hopes he does.
Then his gaze moves higher. To your tits spilling heavy over the bump, with their nipples damp and sore and their skin slick in small tracks where the milk has gone. It strikes him near like a bite in the neck, reverential and sharp like canines both, and it makes him want to bow his head again simply to pay respects to the body he's been adoring more and more with passing months. At this point he's the one needing, though the need does not feel wicked when it reaches you. It feels like a thing looking for the correct work. Give it a task and it may yet become mercy.
You make a small sound, and his eyes snap back to yours. “Sorry,” he says. “I’m here. I’m with ye.”
Your fingers twitch at your sides. Duncan brings his hand slowly up from your belly to your ribs, then stops below the curve of one breast. He does not touch the tender part yet. Only waits there, palm open, asking the skin before he asks you. “Will ye let me try something?”
Your mouth tightens. “What?”
“The towel hurts,” he says. His voice comes out rougher than he means it to. He clears it badly. “Mouth might be softer.”
To that, there's a stare. A tremor sprints his back and has nowhere decent to go. He keeps his face lifted, keeps his hands still. Lets you see the whole awful truth of him as far as he can bear: frightened, aroused, careful, wanting to make this easier for you and wanting you both.
“If ye don’t like it, I stop,” he says. “If it hurts, I stop. If ye say my name wrong, I stop. All right?”
Your throat works. Duncan’s thumb moves once over your rib, barely there. “Do ye trust me?”
"I do," you breathe. "I do, just—"
"C'mere then," Duncan says. "C'mere, sweetheart."
He pulls you down to sit sideways on his thigh. You come slowly, wrap one of your arms round his neck and balance the other on his knee. Duncan grunts under your weight, because it feels grand already to have your arse spilled over his leg and your side pressed to his chest. He's ashamed, a little, of the hard-on he's got going on in his shorts, and knows damn well you can feel him twitching. "I'm sorry," he rasps. "I'm sorry, lassie, I promise ye this ain't nothin' wicked, I jus'—"
"I know, sweetheart," you tell him. Coo it into his temple, and Duncan cringes at the fact that within one minute the roles get reversed and it's him getting comforted away from thinking he's a deviant.
"It's jus'—" He swallows. Runs a finger on your sternum. "There ain't nothin' this body can do that will make me want ye less, ye understand me?" Then, his palm lies flat over your heart. "Here's what I—what I care about. Do ye know what I'm sayin'?"
Your hand wraps in the roots of his hair. "I do," you whisper, and rest your cheek on his forehead. "I do."
It is as close as he can make himself standing next to a verbal proclamation. The sweet thing of it is that it serves you both. You've already relaxed another notch. What Duncan wants to say, desperately, is that he recognises the fear in you and you should fear not. He knows what comes after, he knows you're working your arse off to save your womb from suffering the consequences of his oversized genes, and he wants to tell you it does not matter in the slightest. He's got a cock big enough and a heart hungry for you enough to love you through all the shapes and stages you will fit yourself into. Himself, Duncan returns to something that was never present in his life, but ought to be. His body receives it as memory, though his life has given him none.
He wedges his hand under your breast and cups it whole. Handles its ballast, then brings his mouth, gossamer-light, to where your skin stretches from collarbone and swells into a curve. His tongue comes out above the nipple first. One slow swipe through the shine gathered there. The taste is faint and warm, sweeter than he expects, with something soft and bodily under it, almost creamy yet too slight to call rich. It finds him as a shock of recognition without recollection. Duncan stops with his mouth still close, breath passing over the wet place he has made, though all he wants is to fill himself and take more, and more, and more.
“How’s that?” he asks.
Your hand tightens in his hair. You shift on his thigh, and his palm settles along the inner side of the leg nearest him, holding you steady.
“Good,” you say. “Doesn’t hurt.”
“That’s grand,” he murmurs.
Then, he returns to it with his mouth opened wider. Drags his tongue over the gloss, flat and careful, gathering what needs gathering. His eyes close. The nipple is tender and warm against him, softened by the wet, so welcoming that some brutish part of him wants to press his whole face into your tits and stay there until breath becomes somebody else’s concern. The memory of your flinch keeps him measured.
He hums against you. Does not notice his hands growing firmer until one has filled itself with your arse and the other is gripping high on your thigh. His mouth becomes less tentative too. Tongue circling, lips closing softly round the nipple, drawing just enough to make more of that thin sweetness come out for him. Soon he is making out with your breast in earnest, wet and hungry, while the first little sounds begin leaving you above him.
"Dunk—" you breathe. "Oh, fuck—"
At that, he releases you, and noses upward, over the warm rise of your chest, along the hinge of your jaw, until he finds you. He kisses you once. The taste on his tongue passes back into you and it excites him horrendously that there is a way to give you back a piece of yourself like that.
“Are ye good, my girl?” he murmurs.
You nod and catch him again, softer this time. “I am. Thank you,” you whisper.
His brows pull sharply. It slices him like praise would, seizes low in his stomach and draws the muscles there into a hard cramp. His cock twitches against your hip.
“Christ, lassie.” He presses his forehead to yours. “Yer gorgeous. Ye know that? I always want ye. Every bit.” The fingers high on your thigh flex. He feels the heat held between your legs and keeps himself where he is, though the hand wants to travel. “Can I touch ye?” he asks. "Do ye trust me still?”
He is sure he has leaked through the cotton by now. The wet has cooled against him, then warmed again, and he cannot decide whether he hopes you have noticed.
You swallow. Your face passes beside his, lips grazing his cheek on their way to his ear. Duncan goes rigid beneath you. “Touch me then,” you whisper. “And put your mouth back on me.”
It’s a fragile thing he’s handling, he knows this much. Duncan has never thought himself an adept lover, though by now he likes to believe he is somewhat versed in the language your body speaks to him. It has told him plenty about how you like him sometimes pliable and sometimes bolder. He tries to merge the two, because having your tits this close and served to him like the finest meal makes being in charge out of the question. Still, he knows when you need guiding. Knows encouragement works on you much the same way it works on him, reaching places touch alone cannot quite get to.
By some earnestness in him that has survived every reason to lose it, Duncan believes you whenever you tell him things that would sound unthinkable from any other tongue. That he is pretty. That he is good. That he does things well and pleases you. The words barge into him whole, free of malice, and he keeps them with a devotion near embarrassing. So he gives them back now, hoping the exchange stays even. Hoping you believe him too when he tells you how gorgeous you are, how badly he wants you, how every change in your body only gives him something new to learn and adore. God help him, he means it. He knows how to hold you when shame makes you stiff, how to wait until you soften, where to touch when soreness has made the usual routes impossible. Knows how to please you because you have taught him, and because every lesson has ended with pleasure answering in his own body too.
“Yer maddening gorgeous, my girl,” he slurs, coming back down to your chest. His breath rasps over the damp skin. He's licked most of the milk off and taken it and eaten it, and now the fervid part of him needs to know whether you are milking for him elsewhere too. His hand moves higher and presses flat between your legs, over the gusset of knickers. Warm. Damp. He loves it terribly, that answering thirst gathering under his palm while his lips close round your nipple again.
“I’ve put a baby in ye,” he mutters against where you're tender. “I’ll take care of ye through it and after.” His fingers drag the material aside. The first touch of your pussy makes his jaw lock. “If ye let me, I’ll put another in ye,” he says, half-mad with it. “I won’t go anywhere, sweetheart. Where the fuck would I go?”
Your hips buck into his hand. The fingers in his hair tighten, release, then close again while your breath breaks over the crown of his head. “Dunk, fuck—please—”
He rushes naught. This time he means to make the whole of it yours, and if he comes in his pants like an idiot, he will survive the indignity. His forefinger traces the shape of your cunt first, follows the swollen seam through its slickness, learning what he already knows and finding it changed by whatever he's managed to make of this moment.
He's humming with how good it feels to have his mouth full though an urge to bite down on something pulls his spine tight. Put his teeth into the sweetness of you and hold. He knows better. His tongue comes out instead, flat and broad, and drags from your nipple over the slope of your breast, up the centre of your chest, along your throat. At the side of your neck the restraint wears itself out and Duncan bites.
You moan again, and your groin presses harder into his hand. Fuck yes, he thinks. "Take me," Duncan says and feeds you his finger down to the second knuckle. Your cunt takes it with a greedy clutch. Duncan feels each small yielding round the joint where the swollen tissue drags close around him. It reaches straight into his gut, that feeling. He curls his hand and watches your face alter.
“There ye are,” he breathes.
Your eyes close. “More.”
“Aye?”
“Aye, more, Dunk.”
He brings the second finger alongside the first and enters you patiently. The stretch pulls a broken noise from your throat. Duncan stills inside you, fingers buried deep enough to feel the pulse working there unsteadily.
“Tell me," he says.
“It’s good.” Your grip twists in his hair. “Keep going.”
He listens. Crooks both fingers toward the front of you and draws them back through the wet grasp of your body, learning the pressure from every change in your breath. Question and answer, conducted under the skin. When he finds the place that makes your knees soften, he returns to it, presses with the pads and holds until your hips begin seeking him like you've forgotten the predicament entirely.
“Like that?” he asks.
“Yes. There.”
“Here?”
“Duncan.”
The sound of his name harms him further. His head moves along your chest, kissing wherever he can reach. Soon, your tits are all glossy again, and Duncan realises he's drooling. There's something in milk-heavy breasts that turns him depraved, and it's him who needs to nurse his sore, blunt tongue on you. You're both wounded, but he's the one needing this to breathe. In this symbiosis, you let go too, and become warmer in his hands and heavier across his thigh. Trust has weight, apparently. It spills over his leg and puts its arms round his neck.
He adds the smallest turn of his wrist. Your cunt closes hard enough to make the bones in his hand feel caught. “Christ,” he mutters. “Ye feel—”
Speech fails him again. Soft would be a lie. Tight says too little. Hot belongs to kettles and sun. This is a living hold, drawing at him with a strength hidden inside yielding flesh.
His hips begin their own labour against the side of your thigh. The wet front of his shorts rubs there in short, helpless twitches. He barely registers starting. His body has never shown much obedience around you unless you give it a direct order, and now you give him naught except his name in scraps.
“Dunk—ah—Dunk.”
“Aye. I’m here.”
He works his fingers deeper when your pelvis tips. Slower when your mouth tightens. Firmer when you pull him closer. Every small easing he draws from you returns through his own nerves sharpened, almost painful. Service has always been the safest shape of his hunger: carry this, fix that, hold still. Let him put his hands where the hurt lives and he will tear himself open gladly over being allowed.
“You like this,” you breathe near his ear.
Duncan’s fingers falter once. “Aye.”
“Taking care of me.”
His forehead presses to your shoulder. “It does terrible things to me.”
Your moan breaks loose when he rubs that place again. “You’re good at it too.”
“Lassie—”
The word comes out with enough force to embarrass him, though embarrassment has little country left in him now. His cock strains and leaks against your skin through cotton. Everything in him has been given employment.
A fool arrives at the holy well by taking the wrong road. Mud on his boots. Hands too large for the cup. Thirst making a spectacle of him. That is Duncan here. You open because he asks, tell him where, give him the weight of your want without making him earn it through suffering first. He receives the gift with the bewilderment of someone who has spent his life expecting every good thing to be withdrawn upon closer inspection.
His thumb finds your clit. He touches lightly, watches your whole belly tighten, then circles with growing certainty when your nails graze his scalp.
“Oh, yes,” you whisper.
“Aye?”
“Yes. Just—keep—”
“Aye, I’ve got ye.”
He says it into the side of your neck and believes it for the length of the sentence. Your body begins to lose its separate pieces under him. Thigh, belly, breast, throat: all drawn into the one effort, all sending the same message. Duncan follows the signs faithfully. He knows when your hips need holding and when they need freedom. Knows the sound that means softer, the one that means deeper, the sudden silence that means he has found something worth staying with.
Your hand pulls his face up. He comes willingly, lips parted, breath spoiled.
“Kiss me,” you say.
He near breaks his neck for it. You take his lower lip between yours, and the intimacy of it cuts stranger and deeper than the sex. Your tongue touches his. Your cunt tightens. Duncan groans straight into you.
“There,” you whisper against him. “My good boy.”
His stomach caves. His fingers drive upward, wanting more of whatever this is, and your cry catches between your teeth and his.
“Say it again,” he begs.
You look at him through wet, heavy eyes. “Good boy.”
Duncan near comes in his shorts. Mind supplies him with unbidden images. Him, returning home to you, no matter where you've both made it. Late at night with everything quiet and you all warm for him and your tits full of milk so he can put his mouth to them and get his chin all white and sweet from you. His cheek pillowed against you and hands damp with what he squeezes out of you. And there, him making love to you, kissing your soft post-labour belly, kissing between your legs, kissing your neck, your temple, your mouth until it's plump. Telling you he loves you without fear, and calling you his wife with pride in his chest.
“Girl,” he whines. Turns his hand inward with two fingers crooked inside you and making a slow wheel there while his thumb keeps circling. You draw yourself tight round his knuckles then hold, and Duncan feels every change as if your body is closing its fist round him. He keeps the pressure steady, wrist working in patient little turns, eyes fixed on your face through his smeared glasses. Your breathing begins to break. “C’mon, sweetheart,” he rasps. “Let me feel ye. I'm, ah—"
There's a quiver in your thighs. First some small, treacherous shivers against his hips, then hard enough that Duncan has to brace you firmer. Your cunt begins to pulse, drawing him deeper while the rest of you arches away from it. He works through the first break until your head falls back and the sound in your throat loses all shape.
The hand holding his knee leaves it and comes down between his legs. It closes over the unbearable bulge there. Your mouth finds his ear. “Good boy,” you gasp, still coming. “Fuck, my good boy—oh, Dunk—”
So, in the end, Duncan does come in his shorts. Bursts into your fingers with his tongue plastered to your breast and palm fisting your buttock. It's unpretty and loud with whimpers he's trying to muffle against you. He feels his balls emptying and sees the confirmation of it blooming wet and glossy under cotton.
"Shite," he gasps. "Sweetheart, I—" A swallow. "I didn't mean to. Oh, I didn't mean to, I—"
"I know," you say. Breathe heavily. Your head lolls on his and your body sags until you're cradled between his spread thighs. "I meant to, though."
"I made a bigger mess of you." A beat.
"You made me feel better," you say. "Does that count for something?"
"Aye, it counts for everythin'," he says. Then, he laughs. "Fucking Christ, I'm like a virgin every time with ye, ain't I?"
A deep sigh comes from you. "A virgin would run from me." You cup his chin and tilt it to look him in the eye. "You're just… yourself."
Duncan feels terribly perceived, though out of the two, it is you who is more exposed and damper. You look at him as if he's good enough the way he is, even if it means sometimes a man grown, and sometimes a green boy who finishes into a P.E. teacher's attire.
"I—" he stammers. Swallows. Traces a thumb over your neck. "Can I—can I sort ye out? Properly."
"Does it involve licking?"
"Wicked girl." He blushes furiously. "If ye want."
You smile at him with all of your teeth.
So he sorts you out, and himself in the process. Steps with you into the shower. He lets you lean your back to his chest, near sag against him, while his hands wander. He cleans. He licks too. Once, he bites the ball of your shoulder and you give him a little uh in response. After, he pats you dry, gently, and leaves you for a moment, wrapped in the towels and sat on the edge of the tub, while he walks through the flat, naked, to get clean clothes. Since now he's in charge and has a say in it, he brings you his T-shirt. A bra that feels softest in his palm and some nursing pads as well. You let him dress you and it feels as intimate as touching you intimately does. Everything is private. Everything is his. Everything is privilege.
In the bedroom he steps in behind you and fits himself along your back. His hands travel down your sides, spread beneath the belly, low, then meet there, palm over palm, taking its weight. “Tell me if—” he starts, and lifts.
You groan. Your knees slack and your head drops back onto his chest. “Oh God. How did you know?”
“Saw it online,” Duncan says into your neck, bashful about the usefulness of his own hands. “A midwife showed it. Said it can take some pressure off.”
“Christ, can you stay like that till I deliver?”
“Ye know I can,” he mutters.
He holds you there, your son raised a merciful inch away from the bones he has been bearing down upon, and begins to rock. A small movement from foot to foot, broad body taking yours with it. You give yourself over until your spine has hardly any employment left. His chin settles near your shoulder. First comes a hum, low enough that you feel it through his chest before you properly hear it. It's plainly Too-Ra Loo-Ra Loo-Ra.
Duncan sings quietly, rough in places, carrying you from side to side. By the second verse your eyes have closed. He sings the third anyway and keeps you lifted until sleep has made you heavy against him.
thinking about adrian getting a raging hard on when he gets to see the fruits of his teaching, when you finally, properly and quickly assemble and disassemble a gun in front of him and he just stares at you with gleaming eyes, red cheeks and mouth slack, looking like you've just gotten on your knees and asked him to suck him off, only in his brain this is actually a million times hotter
adrian gulps back a broken whimper when you ask "how was that?" with a nervous bite at your lip
he doesn't immediately act upon his new blatant need to get off because he wants to watch you do it so many more times in a row, he wants you to get so good at it that you rival his own speed and agility
he just shrugs it off like he's unimpressed because he knows it will only make you eager to prove yourself to him
adrian quirks his mouth in challenge and says "yeah, it was okay. i'm pretty sure you can do it faster though"
writing is so funny because i could write nonstop for 9hrs and then hit a block where im like "how do i transition between this moment and the next?" and then i just dont touch it for 6 months
Serious advice tho if this happens, it's likely because you already wrote past the end of the scene and wandered too far from the more logical transition point, and you should go back to the last time the writing felt "unforced" and cut everything after.
You can also just skip the transition. Really good writing can span years in a single sentence, like you can just authoritatively state fact and your reader will go with it.
......suddenly struck by the idea for a piece of worldbuilding of "fae don't like iron bc it is the most stable element*"
*as in elements higher you can extract energy via fission and lower you can extract energy via fusion but iron itself there is no excess binding energy to extract at all
“Never Forget” until the new target is those that they disagree with.
Edit: please watch this video essay by Jacob Geller. It speaks on really important points as to how “bad art” is a weapon of fascism and how it reflects the Degenerate Art Exhibition(s)
