Lay your head upon my knee.

call me lady | she/her | mid 20s | fanfic sideblog

[ladyisabelsblade]

⁺‧₊˚⊹🕯 her ladyship's private library 🕯⊹˚₊‧⁺

call me lady! she/her. mid 20s. avid fanfic reader. part-time fanfic writer.

find my recent work in #herladyshipwrites | listen to my crazed rambling in #herladyshipspeaks | learn about my reader character here | check out my Ao3 here

(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.)

↓ masterlist under the cut ↓

adrian chase

⊹ looking out for you | part one

bob reynolds

⊹ bobby | oneshot

header image by alice haun on artstation.

[goat-limbs]

Heartburn | Ch.9.

contents (nsfw): Dunk x fem!Reader, Modern AU friends to lovers rom-com with pregnancy. Fluff, humour, smidge of angst (just lots of feels), pregnant sex, edging, praise kink, voice kink, gentle fem-dom, premature ejaculation, overstimulation, multiple orgasms, smidge of come eating. Song used in this chapter.

<- previous chapter MASTERLIST next chapter -> (19/06)

synopsis: In which they survive the morning after. (Pregnancy status: 16 weeks, II trimester).

word count: 12,8K

a/n: Banner by me, dividers by @strangergraphics, proofread by @hextoken! I have to go to a corporate party today, pray for me.

Sunlight seeps through the curtain slits. Dunk's feeling like he's grown in the night. Broader in the shoulders and softer in the belly, he finds himself swollen and raw elsewhere. There's density to his hips and soreness to the groin that burgeons outward. When he opens his eyes everything's blurry, but by the press on his arm and the smell of biscuits he can tell you're still there and none of the ache is phantom.

He turns his head to the side and down where his bicep has gone half numb under you. “H-hi,” he says.

“Hi yourself,” you say.

He can make out only the blur of your face tipped up at him. The sound of you is morning-rough, gummy at the edges, and his whole body goes at it with something brazenly pleased before his brain gets a vote.

“Um,” you add. “So—”

Dunk palms at you gently because his eyes are useless and he has to solve the room by touch. He is sprawled on his back, you nuzzled to his side, your feet somewhere around his mid-calf and one hand spread small over his ribs. The shirt has ridden up on you in the night. He feels bare thigh against his hip and has to look at the ceiling he cannot see.

“How’re ye feelin’?” he asks.

“Good,” you say. Your fingers twitch. “You?”

“Grand, but,” Duncan says, “blind.”

“Oh, right.” You twist away from him, and he keeps his arm loose enough to let you go. When you come back, he tightens. “Sorry, I took them off you," you say. "Here—”

The glasses get pushed onto his nose and the world snaps itself back together in lines and colours the names of he's no longer certain. “There ye are,” he says.

Seeing you makes him worse. More nervous, because now there are sharp edges. Your mouth looks bitten by sleep, eyes crusted a little from last night’s tears. Your hair has gone all mussed and flattened on one side, and the T-shirt collar hangs too wide on you. His T-shirt. The sight should be ordinary, because shirts are ordinary things, except Dunk has the distinct sense of having been granted back a morning that had been stolen from him once before. The first one. The one where he woke up with a body full of you and no you in the room to prove it.

Now you are here, frowning faintly with worry gathering between your brows, and he feels so lucky it borders on daft.

“You sure you’re good?” he asks.

You nod, then seem to check the answer against yourself. Your hand shifts under the cover, thighs move by a cautious inch, and your face does a small grimace.

Dunk sinks a notch. “Sore?”

“A little.”

He winces. “Ah. Shite. Was I—” Stops, then starts again, worse. “Was I too much?”

Your eyes flick up.

“I mean—” His ears begin to burn. “Too rough. Or too eager. Or—”

“Dunk.”

“—too heavy with my hands. Or just… too much of me.”

You stare at him, then soften in a way that makes him want to hide. “No. You weren’t too rough.”

He studies your face, searching for the lie out of habit. “You’d tell me?”

“Yes.”

“Properly?”

“Yes.” A pause. “I’m sore in a nice way.”

That phrase grabs him low and stays there. His hips seem to hear it first and some lazy pull starts under the ache. He shifts one shoulder against the pillow and hopes the blanket is being merciful. “In a nice way,” Dunk repeats, because he is an idiot.

You look embarrassed now, which helps nobody. “You know what I mean.”

Duncan does. He knows too well. His own body has woken all used and tender, cock sore from work, holding back and coming hard enough that some part of him may still be missing. There is a dragged-open feeling in him, though nothing of his has been entered except by wanting. He understands being glad for the ache. He understands wanting proof that something happened and stayed happened. “Aye,” he says quietly. “I know.”

Silence arrives then, thin and awkward, and lies between you with its eyes open.

“Was I too much?” you ask.

Dunk’s head turns so sharply the pillow drags at his ear. “What?”

“Last night.” You look at his collarbone rather than his face. “I was a bit… I don’t know. Mad.”

He nearly laughs from pure disbelief, except your face is too serious for that. “No.”

“You can say.”

“I am sayin’.” He reaches, then stops before the touch lands at your cheek, as if the rules have changed in the night and nobody has handed him the new sheet. “You were—” His throat tightens around several answers, all of them too large or too plain. Lovely. Wild. Good to me. Mine, some awful part supplies, and he shuts that door hard. “You were grand,” he manages. “More than.”

Your mouth pulls into something small. “Grand.”

“I’m not very articulate in the mornin’.”

You nod thoughtfully. “That explains it.”

A breath of laughter leaves him, and you answer with your own, but the question remains where both of you can see it: What now. It sits on the bed with the clothes on the floor and the cold mugs from last night and the smell of sleep and sex and clementines.

You pull the cover higher over your chest. “We should probably talk.”

“Aye,” Dunk says, though every muscle in him files a complaint.

“Because I don’t want this to get… unclear.”

He gives a small nod. His hand lies open on the mattress beside you. “Right.”

“And I don’t want you thinking you have to.”

That brings his eyes back to yours. “Have to what?”

“This.” You gesture vaguely under the duvet, toward your bodies and the rest of the wreckage. “Me. Us. Whatever this is. Because I’m, you know. Pregnant.”

Duncan takes a second with that. He hears the sense in it, but hates the sound of it. “I don’t feel made to,” he says.

“You did a bit before.”

“With the ring?”

You wince. He hates that too. “Aye,” he says before you can soften it for him. “I know. I made a bollocks of that.”

“I didn’t say—”

“You laughed.”

“Dunk.”

“No, I know why.” He looks down at the blanket. There is a loose thread near his thumb and he worries it instead of your patience. “I think I do, anyway. I was tryin’ to put the house up before we’d even checked if the ground takes a nail.”

You go quiet.

“That sounded better in my head,” he adds.

“No,” you say. “I get it.”

He risks looking at you again. “I want to help. Want to be here. That part’s true.”

“I know.”

“And the other part—” His mouth goes dry. “I liked last night. I want it. I want… you. I’m sayin’ that plain enough, aye?”

Your face changes, then closes slightly, as if plainness has still found a way to hurt. “Aye,” you say. “That’s plain.”

“But I don’t want ye thinkin’ I’m only here for that either.”

“I don’t.”

“And I’d rather it be me than some stranger,” he says, then blushes so hard it nearly makes him dizzy. “Jesus. Sorry. That came out—”

“No.” Your voice has gone quieter. “No, I understand.”

“It’s safer,” he says, grabbing for the practical rope before he drowns in the other thing. “I mean, with the baby and all. If it helps you. If you need it. Or want it. I can—” His face burns worse. “I can be that. For you.”

Your eyes stay on him. “You can be that.”

“If you want.”

"I do," you tell him. “So um… if we’re being practical.” Your jaw works once. “Is kissing allowed?”

Dunk blinks. Looks at your mouth and immediately has no right to answer anything requiring thought. “I’d like it to be.”

“Touching?”

“Aye.” His voice lowers. “If you want me touchin’.”

“I do.”

He swallows.

“What kind?” you ask, then regret shows on you in a hot flash. “Sorry. That sounded like a form.”

“It’s all right.” His hand flexes against the sheet. “The kind where ye tell me if I’ve gone wrong.”

“That’s broad.”

“I’m a broad fella.”

You laugh, and the sound loosens something in him. Then your face shifts again. “Protection?”

“Aye,” he says, too fast. “I was thinkin’—maybe we should. Or could. If ye wanted. For mess.”

Your brows pull in. He sees the mistake arrive before he knows which mistake it is.

“For mess?” you repeat.

“Aye. Just—”

“If you’re planning to keep seeing other people,” you say carefully, already moving yourself away by an inch without seeming to notice, “then yes, obviously. That would be safe. I mean, I’m not saying you can’t. We talked about it, didn’t we? So if you—”

“No.” Dunk nearly sits up. “No, no, that’s not what I meant.” You only gape at him. “Jesus, lass, that’s not what I meant.” His hand reaches this time and lands on your wrist. “I meant the actual mess. Sheets. You. Cleanin’ up after. I thought maybe it’d be easier for you.”

“Oh.”

“I told ye I’m not seein’ anyone.”

“I know.”

“I’m not.”

“Okay.”

“And I don’t want to.”

Your eyes lower to his hand around your wrist. “Okay.”

“Are you?”

“No.” Your answer comes quickly enough to calm some ugly thing in him. Then, quieter: “I’m obviously not seeing anyone either.”

“Good,” he says, then hears himself. “I mean—”

“It is good,” you say.

There is another silence. Different this time. Warmer and more dangerous.

“For what it’s worth,” you add, staring somewhere near his shoulder, “I don’t mind the mess.”

Dunk’s body takes the sentence disgracefully. He feels himself stir under the blanket with enough interest to make his soul sigh and leave him to it. You notice. Of course you notice. Your mouth parts by a fraction.

He shuts his eyes. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

“I’m tryin’ to have a serious conversation.”

“You can be hard during it. Multitasking.”

He laughs, boyish and powerless. You smile properly then, and for one small stretch of morning the thing between you becomes almost simple. Almost.

Because you are still looking at him with that carefulness. Because he is still holding back half the sentence in his mouth. Because both of you are making a shape around the same missing word and pretending the shape itself will do.

“So,” you say. “We keep it… between us?”

“Aye.”

“When I need it.”

“When you want it,” he corrects, then looks startled by his own nerve.

Your face softens. “When I want it,” you say.

“And if you don’t, ye say.”

“Yes.”

“And if I do something wrong—”

“I’ll say.”

“And if I get too—”

“Dunk,” you say, then put your hand on his chest. “You’re allowed to want things too.”

He lies very still under that, because the sentence has teeth. After a moment, he covers your hand with his. “Right,” he says, though it comes out clipped.

You nod, as if that has settled anything. Then you look down at your own body under his shirt, at your knees under the cover, at his hand on yours. “So this is very mature of us.”

“Aye,” he says. “Terribly.”

“Awful.”

“Near bureaucratic.”

It gets you. You press your face into his arm to hide the laugh, and Duncan lets himself turn into it, nose brushing your hair. Biscuits. Sleep. Skin. A trace of him, too, caught in cotton and warmth. His chest goes very full.

“Tea?” he asks after a while, because he has to put the feeling somewhere.

“Tea,” you agree. Then, smaller, before he can move: “And maybe stay here for another minute.”

Dunk closes his eyes. “Aye,” he says. “One minute.”

One minute becomes two, then God knows how many, because Dunk shifts, huffs softly through his nose, and fishes your hand out from under the duvet. He starts cautiously. Thumb over your knuckles. A rub at the side of one nail. The rough pad of his finger traces the crease where yours bends, nervous enough to make the whole thing feel less like idling and more like inquiry. How much of this is he allowed, when it is neither useful nor filthy. How long until one of you names it and ruins the little shelter it has made.

Then he opens his own hand beside yours and rests you against it.

The comparison is so unfair you nearly laugh. Your fingertips only reach the middle knuckles of his, and his palm sits beneath yours with room left over, warm and scored with small lines that look deeper for belonging to someone who does practical things badly and often.

“You’ve such small hands, lass,” he says.

“No I don’t.” Your voice wobbles at the edges, which is horrible of it. “You’ve giant paws.”

He smiles, but only barely, as if too much face might startle the permission away. His thumb slips into the hollow of your palm and tickles there once, then again, slower. You curl a little round it. He watches that happen with a dazed, soft sort of attention that makes you feel discovered in the worst place.

You roll closer. His arm tightens under you, then stills. For a second he goes careful all over. “How d’ye get anything done with such tiny hands, hm?” he murmurs.

Instead of answering, your other hand creeps from under the duvet and lands on his thigh. The muscle under it jumps. “I think you know how much I can get done with such tiny hands,” you say.

Dunk hiccups. Then, to his obvious horror, giggles. He clears his throat so hard it becomes a cough. “You’re a wee menace.”

“Mhm.” You close his hand around yours, then let him have it. “Go make that tea.”

It all works. Sort of. His feet touch the floor, and Duncan realises he's got exactly one T-shirt in here that's currently occupied, and worse, that he's naked and half-hard.

He contemplates options but one where he asks you to hand that shirt over doesn't even make it to the waiting list. He decides that if you could climb into a bath in front of him he can show some courage too.

So. Dunk mans up, or tries to. His feet touch the floor and he pushes himself upright to stand. He keeps his back to you and crosses to where his boxers have been abandoned on the floor. Crouching for them is a mistake in several directions, but he gets them hooked in his fingers, steps in and drags them up minding to sort his dick in there so that it doesn't look like it's screaming I'm needy first thing in the morning.

When he turns back, you have your face aimed very carefully at the window. Your mouth has gone into a put-upon, thoughtful pout, as if the curtains have presented you with some riveting theory. Dunk looks at you for half a second, then smiles. “Aye,” he says. “Very respectful.”

Your eyes flick to him and away again. “I’m looking at the light.”

“Course ye are.”

A grin. “What?”

“Mm.” He pushes the glasses up his nose with one finger, and lets himself enjoy the fact that you have to hide your face under the blanket. “I’ll be right back.”

You only hum to that. Wait for his footsteps to hush once he reaches the kitchen and allow yourself a little squeal into the pillow.

The girlishness he manages to drag out of you by existing near a kettle is ignominious. You are not sure he knows he spent half the night with his face pressed into the bend of your neck, humming and purring sweet little unconscious things like stay and smell nice whenever you shifted too far from the furnace of his chest. Then morning comes and he stands there abashed over a perfectly ordinary tent under the covers, as though your own body would not have betrayed you just as plainly if God had granted women the same crude signage.

All of it lays another brick in the awful construction of Duncan’s sexiness, which is strong and, frankly, a little lethal because he has no earthly notion of it. He is shy until pining gets the better of him. Needy enough that the shyness cannot survive long. Once something is given, he handles it with care. Listens. Anticipates. Looks for the place where your body has begun to ask once your mouth starts failing. It should make him less dangerous, that kindness. Somehow it makes him worse.

When he got up, you had taken to ogling his gorgeous round arse with such immediate appetite you forgot, for half a second, that both of you are here through necessity, accident, and one long chain of poor judgement. The rules are useful. Emotionally fraudulent, maybe, but useful all the same. They let you believe you are protecting the two of you from the version of intimacy that grows thorns later and cuts as resentment. They let you take what mirrors the thing you want while keeping a cloth over the contaminated parts.

Still, Dunk is right. This is better than strangers. If it stays inside this out-of-time pocket pregnancy has made for you, perhaps it is survivable. Perhaps it is even sensible. You remain close. You have somebody to lean on. Dunk misses less, you explain to yourself, staring at the pale scratch of sunlight on the floorboards. The two of you can practise easing into the strange family-shaped arrangement that will be waiting once your body finishes one labour and the rest of your life begins another.

You sit up in the bed and look towards the window. A husk hangs from the sill on a translucent thread, gutted clean by whatever abandoned it. It's split down the back, papery and crumbling, and the thing that has rearranged itself in it has cut its way out and flown off without your eyes on it.

Duncan comes back with two steaming cups and a mean reminder of how broad his chest is. He sits at the foot of the bed and turns the cup in his hand so that you can take it by the ear. "I've put toasts on, too," he says.

You nod with your mouth hidden into the rim. "I'll give you your shirt back in a minute," you say, seeing how he curls into himself. It's a large pity, large enough to rival him, for you'd love to just keep him around like this. "I have uh… spare towels and toothbrushes in the bathroom. If you want to, I mean—"

"I thought," Dunk starts. "It's Saturday. I thought we could still sort out the nursery. If you want."

"Really?" you say. "That'd be great. Yeah, I would love that. The room's ready, we just need to put things in it."

"Grand." His cup finds yours and they clink.

You smile into your tea. Get up. At the wardrobe you open one door and disappear half behind it, bare legs visible below the wood. “We could probably do the same thing at yours,” you say from in there. “Sometime later. When you feel like it. A nursery, I mean, or a corner?”

Dunk nods before he remembers you cannot see him. The thought lands strangely. It reminds him painfully that the arrangement will be divided into two households. That, inevitably, you will come to his flat and set your feet on the floor and, to Duncan, symbolically, it means things getting crossed off. Your voice reaches him. “Dunk?”

He blinks. “A-aye. Yeah. We ought to do that.”

You come out in cotton shorts and a T-shirt still large on you, though much smaller than his, and kneel beside him on the mattress. “Here,” you say, passing him back his one. Then, after a beat, softer: “You can stay over here as much as you want when the baby is born, you know that, right? I just thought it’d be good for you to have things at your place too.”

Dunk takes the shirt from you. “I know,” he says, though his throat has gone a bit narrow with it. He hands you his cup and ducks into the cotton to get sucker-punched by his private version of tangerine dream. The whole thing is warm from you. Smells of sleep and your skin and the sweet rot of whatever lotion has survived the night. It settles over his shoulders as if it has learned him from inside your body and came back altered. He has to sit still for a second with his head only half through the neck-hole, sightless and enormous, before he can finish pulling it down.

When his face reappears, you are looking at him with your mouth tucked in. “What?” he asks.

“Nothing.”

“That’s not a nothin' face.”

“It is.” You reach over and tug the hem straight for him, fingers brushing his stomach through cotton. “You looked very heroic, fighting your own shirt.”

“Mm, a hard battle,” he says, grave as he can manage.

He listens to your laughter with focus meant for the speech of people wiser than him. Finishes his tea and waits for you to finish yours. Then, you show him around the bathroom while Duncan pretends he doesn't know where things are and nods thoughtfully at every stop of the tour. Once it's wrapped, he quells an urge to kiss your forehead and maybe slap your ass lightly. He showers with the soap he's used that one time before, then joins you in the kitchen for breakfast.

First, Dunk snorts at the disparity of plates. Yours holds one sad toast while his overflows with bread, eggs and sausages. When he shots you a questioning look you only shrug and send a don't judge me face in his direction. So Duncan sits. Eats. Tries to not think much about hands that made it for him.

In this mundane moment, Dunk’s memory manages to dim all the girls he has ever smothered into hurting him. Compared to what he feels now, those loves seem skinny. Starved at the ribs. This one is embryonic but ever-growing, blind and hungry and insisting on itself without any shame.

He watches you nibble at the bread’s crust and chase every bite with a sip of tea. One leg perched on the seat of the chair, you do not look at him, only scroll through emails on your phone with your mouth set flatter by the second. He sees how it fleeces the morning bliss off you, bit by bit. Then decides to take the role you keep offering. Someone who has a say in it. Someone who can want things.

“Have ye thought about takin’ leave already?” he asks.

“Hm?” You lift your head. “Oh, yeah, I just…” Your gaze drops back to the phone, then away from it. “I don’t know what I’d be doing with the time, you know?”

Dunk considers that a minute. Wipes his greasy mouth, cringes a little, then rests an arm across the table, ruling halfway through the movement to leave you untouched after all. His fist closes instead.

“We could… I dunno.” He takes a sip of coffee. “We could figure that out. Together, I mean. I’ll have more time soon.”

“Oh?” you say. “Right. School’s ending.”

“Mhm. Few weeks.” Dunk nods. “I’ll still have summer coaching and the activity programme with the kids, but it’s not full-time. We could prepare a bit better. Meet Ray and Red. Maybe you could…”

“What?”

“Come to a game,” he says, quieter. “Meet Egg. If ye want.”

You go still for long enough that Dunk regrets it. Then, you put your phone face down and rest your palm over his fist. It loosens under you. His fingers thread through yours.

“That sounds good,” you tell him. “I probably could use some time off.”

Dunk nods.

You look down at your joined hands, then back at him. “You ready for the nursery?”

Dunk sweeps the room with vacant eyes. “Aye,” he says. “Think so.”

The nursery has been waiting with its door closed. He doesn't know when the painting was done, nor does he ask by whom, because each possible version delivers a small resentment. Had it been you alone, Dunk would scold you for not seeking help. Had it been anyone else, he'd be wounded about not being the first choice. When the door opens, both of you lean on the frame as if bare walls might turn and ask what exactly you think you are doing here. There are boxes stacked by the skirting board, a rolled rug, cot in the exact middle, a changing table flat-packed in a carton with arrows pointing which side is up for some reason. A lamp shaped like a moon. Three soft baskets that smell of new rope and shop dust.

You tell him the changing table should go under the shelf. Dunk measures the wall again though it's been measured twice already, then lifts the table as if it has no weight and puts it exactly where you point. “There?” he asks.

“A little left.”

He shifts it a little left.

“No, your left.”

Dunk's mouth quirks. “That was my left.”

“Your other left, then.”

He gives you a look over his shoulder, wounded by female sense of directions, and you laugh hard enough that he smiles fully. The room eases by one small notch.

After that, the two of you become very serious about things that are very serious only to new parents. Which drawer gets the vests. Whether nappies should live closer to the wipes or closer to the little bin with its impressive system of odour containment. Dunk folds three tiny sleepsuits. You unfold one, refold it worse, and he says nothing, only fixes it when he thinks you are looking elsewhere.

“I saw that,” you say.

“I didn’t do anythin’.”

“You think I can’t fold baby clothes.”

“I think,” Dunk says, eyes on the drawer, “there’s a chance the baby will want its legs in the leg bits.”

You stare at him.

His mouth twitches. “That’s all.”

A muslin hits his head. He catches it without looking, which is so irritatingly impressive you have to turn away and busy yourself with the baskets.

Slowly, the space stops looking like storage and begins to acquire intent. Sheet goes on round the mattress. The little blanket folds over the rail. The lamp finds the corner. Books line up on the low shelf, bright spines and silly animals and one about a tractor Dunk claims is important because children ought to have options. You put the first packet of nappies in place, then stand there with your hand still on it. “Yeah,” you say, to no one.

Dunk looks up from where he is kneeling by a drawer. “What?”

“No, just. Yes. This looks… fine.”

“Aye.” He follows your gaze, then nods too hard. “Yeah. It does. Looks nice.”

There's a hollow, mouth-biting silence after that. Nice is a stupid little word for a room that now contains future. It's too small to express the enormity of the folded clothes that wait for a body neither of you has held yet. Nice is what's said because the real thing is a cutthroat.

Dunk gets up. You both stand in the middle of it with your foreheads set into brave shapes. “This is nice,” you say again, worse this time.

“Aye,” Dunk says. “I like it.”

You glance at him, and his face destroys you. His eyes are red-rimmed behind the lenses, magnified into bareness. Nothing held back on him. Duncan is a pretty crier because nearly none of him frowns. He just sweats tears out of those baby-blues until they adorn his lashes and drop onto cheeks. There's no attempt at hiding, only a fist at the ready to wipe the excess had it blurred his vision.

A complete opposite of you. Mouth slicing itself into a lopsided crescent from the force of trying to keep it inside, then plain ugly sobbing. It erupts from bawling eyes to a painful choke on the back of a mouth. Then snot comes thick and unstoppable, smears the upper lip with salt, and all of you becomes shiny in a way that would cake up any powder.

“Why are you crying?” he asks, voice breaking.

“I’m not crying,” you say, immediately crying. “You’re crying.”

His mouth twitches, then fails. “Am I?”

"Yes, Duncan," you wail. "Visibly."

Duncan steps in as if called by it. The room does a strange thing to a private wound in him. Bursts open the scar tissue that's grown round abandonment. Tends it, cleans it, stitches the evened edges and kisses it better. Small things do that to people. He feels welcome to walk barefoot on the fluffy rug and flick the carousel of geese into a stroll. There's a family for him somewhere in here, and you are a third of it. He doesn't know what kind of wrong has its fingers around your throat, but steps in all the same, because it doesn't really matter.

He gathers you against his chest and the two of you stand there leaking stupidly into each other. “Lass,” he murmurs, palm at the back of your head. “Hey. C’mere.”

“I’m here,” you say into his shirt, which now carries an imprint of your face like it's a fucking Veil of Veronica. “I’m very clearly here.”

“I know.”

“Why’re you crying?” you ask again.

His hand stills, then moves again. "Happy," he lies. “Jus' happy."

You pull back. “Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Lie badly.”

Dunk's face works. For one flicker you think he might tell you something. Something old. Then he only cups your face in both hands and wipes beneath your eyes with his thumbs. His own are worse. Damn tender and unfair in their size. “And you?” he asks. “Why’re you cryin’?”

You try to answer like a normal woman with control over her organs. The effect is half-strangled, half-mangled through teeth and comes out jittery. “I’m—" you hiccup, "scared I… I won’t be… a good mum.”

He stares at you, genuinely baffled. "Sweetheart," he says, as if it's all dead simple. "You'll be an incredible mam."

Laughter comes abrupt and deranged, hitting the surface of his lenses in wet little spots. Duncan says it like the matter has been already inspected and passed. It makes the idea briefly possible. "You don't know that," you tell him.

“I do.”

“You don’t.”

“I do,” he says again, with the same conviction he's used to persuade you municipal swamp is green. He brings your hand to his mouth and kisses your knuckles. Then knuckles of the other one. Then the hollow of it while your fingers brush his nose. Then your wrist, where the pulse knocks and knocks. "I do know."

“Dunk—”

A kiss on the forehead cuts you off. Long and determined. It makes you gasp and you hope that Dunk will read the gasping as one of the necessary phases for calming down. You clutch the shirt on his stomach, then, with no better plan than needing less fabric between you, you push your palms underneath it. Touch the life of his ribs. His muscles jerk.

“I only trust you,” you say, staring at the damp hollow at the base of his throat, “because you’ll be a great dad.”

He does that thing in the face that heralds the slackening of the whole body. Galvanised within himself to push past the layers of fear, Duncan bends and kisses you deep enough to make the both of you stumble. His hands frame your face, then neck, then shoulders, undecided. "Girl, what are you doin'—" he mutters into it. "What're you doin' to me?"

Loving you, you think, unbidden. You mumble a thing that has a shape of his name but doesn't survive the journey from throat to mouth. Set your fingers on his back and try to pull him closer.

He hums and starts walking. Stops kissing, but stays mouth to mouth. His thumbs and forefingers cuff round your elbows, twitching. There are heavy nasal breaths and working throats and between one swallow and the next Duncan stares at you through those damp, heifer-like lashes as if the answer might be printed somewhere on your face.

"Where's this goin'?" he asks.

"To the—" you stammer. "To bed. If you want."

His whole chest sinks on the exhale. "Thank God," puffs out of him.

Then—arms. A strongman’s foreplay begins with Duncan’s palms finding your arse like it’s signposted. He gets you up with a grunt that nurtures relief where effort should be, and your body remembers the route with alarming ease. It's the third time now. Three times out of three, you have failed to get yourself to bed under your own power where Duncan is concerned. The thought brings another one behind it, bad and quick-footed: perhaps this is simply what he does with women. Perhaps all that size has made a habit of carrying girls through doorways and making them feel singular for the length of one corridor.

You shut that down with both legs round his waist and both hands at his neck, because thinking has done very little for you lately besides invent pain. This belongs to me, you tell yourself, with no court of appeal available. The lift, the hands, the breath punched out of him when you settle against his stomach. Him. All of it yours for as long as he keeps walking.

He kisses you through it. The shape of him between your thighs, already interested, makes a hard bid against you. In the bedroom he lowers you to the mattress with care so anxious it turns clumsy at the last inch. Your back bounces, and he follows you down halfway before catching himself on both arms. There, he hovers, huge, open-mouthed, and trembles for it, and you know damn well it is not from the weight on his shoulders because you tremble too while holding nothing.

Your fingers hook in the hem of his shirt and lift. Dunk straightens enough to help you; yields his arms and head so you can drag it off him. On the other side of cotton he's a mess with his glasses endearingly askew. "There," you say, placing a palm on his cheek.

He huffs, embarassed, scrunches his eyes and smiles with a tongue pushed against the backs of his teeth. Then his hands find your shorts. He searches first, gets your nod, and that is all it takes. The waistband drags down your hips by the work of patient fingers, resists where you're sunken into the bed so you lift, and you could swear he breathes out a little yes.

Around nudity, you tense. Duncan sees it. "There," he says and bends to press his mouth to your stomach.

In current circumstances it is such a strange place to be kissed right before sex that you laugh like an idiot, and ugly too—phlegmy and cracked and wet in a way that you're certain is not attractive. But Duncan looks up with his eyes gone red for entirely different reasons than five minutes ago. "You said kissin's alright," he says.

"I did."

“So—” His palm smooths down your thigh to the knee, broad and calloused like low-grain sandpaper. He gets under the joint and makes it bend, lifts until the leg opens from the hip and leaves you spread in a way that has both of you breathing through the nose. Mouth set judiciously where your belly swells from the pubic bone, he mutters, “—I’m kissin’.”

His body starts moving like communicating vessels: one crawling thing follows another. Crawling palm kickstarts lips. “Still kissin’,” Duncan says, and lies, because now he’s licking. He has his tongue set broad across your navel, travelling upwards until it meets the border of your shirt’s hem.

That invites his other hand to lift it. He bunches the cotton above your tits and continues the kissin’ between your breasts. His hips creep up too, first to your mid-thighs, then level with yours, and the weight of him releases some tension from your loins. He’s wide enough to keep you open by his presence alone, so the hand at the hinge of your knee remains soft. Thumb brushing the side of it. Small. Careful. Damning.

Your palm and finds his hair. Fingers apart, you comb through the roots, then become meaner with the pulling once his stubble brushes your nipple. “Dunk,” you say. “Come here.”

He does, badly. Too much of him for grace, he comes there fast and heavy. Hooks your leg around his hip and presses his clothed, warm cock to your cunt. “Shite,” he hisses when you tug the hairs at his nape. He looks at you, and when you think there will be more kissin’, he stays frozen, just gaping.

“Don’t look like that,” you say.

“Like what?”

“Like I’ve done something to you.”

His eyes drop, then lift. “Haven’t ye?”

He seems a bit shocked by his own answer, so to save him from it you reach for his face and pull him down. Allow yourself the wet and neatless pass of tongue through his mouth. Your leg tightens round him because your body is quick to throw invitation now the brain is ridden with persistent fuck it. Fuck me instead.

Duncan’s hand goes down between you and gets stupid with the practicalities. He could have thought this through better. Could have undressed properly, could have come to bed with some sort of sequence in mind, but details of lovemaking keep leaving him the second your mouth opens under his. He only wants to be close. The rest is laces, waistbands, cloth, mortal hindrance. He shoves at his boxers one-handed, gets them low enough to make use of himself, and winces when the cotton scrapes the head of his cock.

Then, skin meets skin and a sigh falls out of him in one long, shattered piece.

He fits his fist round the base to guide himself. Thumb pressed just under the head, he squeezes until the dew pearls out, slick and clear, then drags it through you. Slow first, because he deludes himself that slow might save him. The crown parts the wet seam of you bluntly, slides up, catches over your clit, and comes back down to nudge at the entrance with no entering done. Your whole body gives a small, greedy twitch to that. His does worse.

“Christ,” he says into your mouth.

Again. A little firmer. His cock learns the route by the fractions: clit, slit, soft clutch of the opening, back up through the mess he has made wetter by being in it. He mixes himself with your sweet sap until the slide acquires sound. The tender parts of you speak through glimmer and greed, while his answer is held in the wrist, in the rippling stomach, and the balls drawn tight enough to feel like someone's holding them.

You bite his lower lip because you cannot think of a sentence worth the effort. He groans, and that makes more of him leak into his own hand. It gets spread back through you on the next pass. There is something near argumentative in it, the way he keeps refusing to give you the thing both of you are braced for. Your hips keep lifting to steal it from him. His knuckles brush your pussy lips each time he works himself down. The heel of his palm grazes the damp hair. He shudders as if the contact keeps running up his spine and knocking something loose behind the eyes.

“Duncan,” you breathe.

“Aye,” he says, uselessly. “Aye, I know.”

He does know. Knows, because your fingers seem dead set on claiming some of his hair for themselves with how viscously you tug. There's a flex to your thigh, hips canting restlessly once the tip of his cock presses where it ought to go but slides away. The tenderest parts of the both of you keep quarrelling, negotiating, resolving, while the faces are busy enduring the wait. Duncan watches yours as if watching a match held to paper.

"Come on," you say, looping both arms round his neck. "Dunk, please."

"But, luv—" he strains, resting his forehead to your mouth. But you're so tight, Dunk wants to say. He laughs, and thank God, you read it as I'm on it. While what Duncan means is I'm sorry for this. Sorry for putting you here. Sorry for liking you so much I forgot to pull out. Sorry for every inch of me and the exact opposite too. "Okay," he says. "Okay."

His hips adjust to stop lying about themselves, and he breaches you slowly. You take him in laborious, exerting shards that make his spine empty of sense. Warmth closes around his length stern as a stubborn mouth and his own puffs out air so suddenly his cheeks swell with it.

He's halfway through when you whine from the bottom of your furious body and cant up for more. "Aye," he says. "Aye, I'm here."

Another inch. The grip is so snug and living the whole of his chest becomes devoted to the passage. His brain too, and his hands, and skin that reddens under your touch and Duncan wonders if scalps can bruise from hair being gripped too ardently. He sinks the last of himself, and when his lower belly meet you, Duncan stops breathing. His body arrives late to the place his heart has been making a fool of itself over for weeks. "There," he says. "There ye are."

You relax around the fullness. Yes, this is right. Your eyes scan him, and find that the lens nearest you is fogged at the edge. And suddenly, you want him bearer, just to see him plain. So you reach for the glasses, and ask, "Can I take those off?"

Dunk huffs a breath. The movement shifts him inside you by some wicked measure and both of you pretend to endure it normally.

"I won't see a thing," he says.

"I know." You slide the glasses off and set them somewhere safe by your pillow. Without them, his face changes. Equally handsome, but transmuted into another kind of comeliness. He's less goofy, more exposed. Somehow more mature and vulnerable. His eyes lose their hard outline, start searching badly and wrinkling where he tries to squint. You cup his jaw and bring him down until his ear is at your mouth. "How about you just listen to me?" you whisper.

The twitch inside you is immediate. "Oh?" you say. Duncan only breathes out a fragmented chuckle. You stroke his cheek with your thumb. "You like that?"

His throat works, excruciatingly thorough, to swallow that gulp down. His hips slip again, then stop, as if there is someone outside of him scolding the misbehaving parts. "Girl," he pleads.

"You do." Your mouth brushes the shell of his ear and his whole back sets until some hard-working vertebrae clicks. "That's good to know."

He pulls back enough to sweep your face and finds, possibly, the shape of your smile. His eyes narrow, poor useless things, and he looks set up by the natural order of things. “You’re very pleased with yourself,” he says.

"A bit."

"Aye, well." He swallows again. His voice has gone thick where he's meant for it to be firm. "Mind yourself then."

You bring him back down. Dunk comes willingly, like he always does when something's been asked of him. His mouth opens against your neck as if that's a grounding thing to do, and he thrusts carefully, deep enough to make your leg flex against his side. The pressure against his ribs is warm, the hand at his nape warmer, and the lips next to his ear border torrid.

"You feel so good," you tell him.

He groans, surrendering the baritone to a higher pitch. "Jesus—"

"So good, Dunk."

"Don't say it like that."

"Like what?"

"As if—" He takes another breath and moves through it. Cock drags slow and proper, particular enough for you to feel the whole thick length of him leaving and coming back. "As if you know."

"I do know."

You might not be an expert on how to execute the part after winning men that makes them brave enough to tell you all the things you yearn to hear (I love you, I love you, I love you), but this—this, you know. You know where they are softhearted. You know how to find this part. Despite what your mother said, it is not wicked. It's listening for key words that quieten their voices, and looking where eyes ought to be set. Dunk seems to be good at this too, because he reads the cues with surprising proficiency. Whether by guess or wisdom, it eludes you, but he manages to be there when you need a hug, a good word, a joke, a shoulder, or now, a fuck. What kind of fuck, he understands quickly too. You don’t yet pass judgement on the intention behind it: if he means to stay for long, or if he has simply recognised the means to an end. The version in which this is just the way he has sex, unperformed and therefore wholly aligned with you, doesn’t even make it to your head.

And Dunk is softhearted in many places. He’s unbearably tender when it comes to tending bodies, as if each part of you deserves kindness. It’s only natural to conclude he’d like that back, in one form or another. He reacts to praise as though it puts ground under his feet. Keeps finding ways to be useful, offering himself in small practical pieces, as if saying notice me, notice me, I am here, without understanding at all that it is impossible to not notice him. If someone in his past failed to see the easiness to love him that he comes with, they were either dumb or cruel in the throat. The only thing in him that halts the loving is the fearful nature of frail hearts. You recognise that like you are both made of similar clay, even if you cannot put a finger on the exact place where it hurts. In cases such as Duncan and yourself, bravery arrives in steps. Valour blooms rather than surges, so you give him a small brick for the lifeblood to keep building. Praise him for the way he is. Just this.

"I do know," you tell him. "You're so patient with me. So careful. I like that."

It costs him some. The hand under your knee pulses, fingers pressing, loosening, pressing again. His stomach jumps against yours, fills with a deep breath, then corrects itself to not flatten you.

"See?" you coo. Pour the sweetness straight into his ear canal so the only thing received by cochlea is that he is being good. "I love how heavy you are. How well you fill me. Fuck, Duncan—" He hits you just right, on the right there. You tighten, and keep muttering, "You're so good to me. So fucking good to me, my good boy."

"Ah—f-fuck—" he snaps, shocked and half-pained.

"Duncan."

He makes the mistake of lifting his head when you say his name. Blind as he is, he still finds your mouth. Kisses you hard, then badly, then breaks to inhale. His hair has fallen over his forehead. Without the glasses he looks dismantled in a more private way, as if you have caught him between skins. "Say it again," he mumbles.

You blink. "What?"

His ears turn crimson. He keeps thrusting. Stays deep, because that's when your body keeps rewarding his with blissful little clenches. Discipline fleets him, and Duncan forgets altogether how to keep himself in reins. It feels too good. Brushes the cords too accurately. "What you said," he rasps.

"That you're good to me?"

He shuts his eyes.

Oh. So that is where it lives.

You pull him closer with the heel of your foot and start speaking into his lips. "You're good to me," you say, slower. "You're good at this. Perfect at this. You make me feel—oh—" You have to stop there, because the next stroke takes the end of the sentence and folds it under your tongue.

Dunk hears enough. Perhaps more than enough. His face comes down beside yours and he starts fucking you with his mouth at your cheek, breathing there, taking the praise like punches he intends to keep as bruises.

"You're beautiful," you whisper. "You know that?"

"N-no." He shakes his head.

"Yes." Your fingers push into his hair. "You are. So handsome. You're so pretty like this."

"Girl," he wheezes. "Girl, I can't—"

"You can." You kiss the corner of his mouth. "You can take it."

You break some working piece in him. He gives one fuller push, then another, and a sound, too open, too surprised, leaves him. His whole body locks above you. "Shite, I—" he gasps. "Shite, wait—"

It takes him too early. You afflict him, his ears and nose and neck with those delicate touches that make the roots of Dunk's hair buzz. With your voice, so fucking loving, it makes his brain melt and threaten to leak. It's all too much. He comes, hideous for trying to withhold it, strong for you being the cause of it, and shivers violently through his every giant muscle. His cock kicks deep with each wrung out spill, face drops to your shoulder, then whole of him follows the drowning to fold around you. The noise he makes there is loud enough to shame him later, if you let it.

You do nothing except hold him. For several seconds Duncan doesn't speak. He focuses on breathing instead and maybe not turning to ash under the blaze of shame. Not one, but a title of few-pumps-chump has finally been handed to him with a shitty confetti and a stale flute of cheap champagne. He stays seated inside you and trembling through the last of it. When he tries to lift himself, his arms disagree.

"I'm sorry," he says, hoarse. “I didn’t mean to—” His pelvis shifts by accident and he winces, oversensitive and still hard enough to make the smallest movement count. “Fuck.”

"Dunk." You press your mouth to his temple. Smooth the hair off his forehead. "Don't be. There's nothing to be sorry for, hm?"

"But you didn't—" he huffs, sounding furious with himself and deeply far away.

A smile, or so he thinks. "I'm okay," you say.

"You didn't finish."

"No," you say. His brows knit. It makes him look so abysmally disappointed that for a beat you consider scraping that and lying.

He lies back down, nuzzling his face to your neck. "Then talk to me," he says.

Your stomach does an unbecoming, joyous little flip. "What?"

“Talk to me,” he says again, quieter. His voice has rawed its own edges, embarrassed and determined both. “Please. I can stay. Jus'—tell me things.”

You smirk. “What things?”

Duncan scowls. “Cruel woman.”

Your hand starts playing with his hair again. Scratching at the scalp, pulling gently. “You want me to praise you back into fucking me?”

Dunk’s eyes close. “Aye,” he says. “If you’re offerin’.”

What moves through you borders unkind. You hook both legs along his sides, cross them on his arse and turn your face to his ear. "So listen," you say.

He's so obedient his entire body slackens as if hearing is achieved through epidermis. For a while, he does just that. Listens with his lashes lowered since sight has become a luxury, and useless to him anyway. He's just touch and sound.

"You're so hot like this," you whisper. His fingers twitch on your shoulder. "You are. All fucked out and sorry for yourself." Against your neck his lips move and draw the shape of Christ. You brush the sweaty curl at his temple. "Your cock feels so good inside me," you say, softer, because it's a less generic truth. "See? You came and I'm still full of you."

Dunk makes a sound rid of consonants. His face turns an inch, mouth opening at your throat because it needs to be put somewhere to not grow loud. You feel him pulse once, tired and sore, and then another thing starts under it. A tiny return. Thickening that makes you rethink your approach on I can take you once again.

“I like it,” you tell him. “The mess you make. I like knowing it’s there.”

“Lass—”

“Makes me feel special.”

That one hurts him. Pleases him too, which may be the hurt of it. He gives the smallest aborted press, an insidious tremor of a body that wants to eat more than it can hold, but it drags through you slickly enough that both of you go quiet. He hisses through his teeth. The overburden of senses has him by the nerves. You can feel it as an argument within the muscles. Pleasure with a hot little blade tucked inside it.

You slide your palm down his back. Sweat has pooled at the dip of his spine and over his shoulders. “I like how big you are,” you say. “How you spread me open just by being there.”

Duncan shudders. His cock gives another slow, disbelieving throb.

“Oh,” you coo. “There he is.”

“Mean,” he mutters, but stays exactly where he is with his ear offered. He wants the cruelty by handful. Wants it ladled warm into the hollow places. Wants to be destroyed by kindness because kindness is the thing he has least defence against.

“You like it?” you ask. He nods once. “Can you tell me with words?”

A pause. His throat works against your skin. “A-aye.”

“Good.”

His whole body rises to that, a rough tightening from shoulders to arse. He moves by mistake, a shallow slip in and out, and the noise bursts from him with such pained sweetness your fingers tense in his hair.

“Careful,” you murmur, though care has begun to look like a strange medicine.

There's a laugh, short and bitten. “Tryin’,” Dunk says.

He always does, which might be a thing that turns you more sombre. “I know you are,” you say and get taken off-guard by how lovesick you sound. You plant a kiss at the place behind his ear. “That’s what I like.”

Duncan goes still again. Listening so hard his body seems to have turned all its chambers towards you. “I like your shoulders,” you say, and let your hand prove it. Sweep over one broad slope, then the other. “I like your sweet face. Especially when you’re inside me.” At that, his breath leaves him in pieces.

There is more. There is a daft, impossible amount more. It crowds up on your tongue in unsayable particulars. I like that your front teeth face inward a little and seem slightly too large for the civil architecture of your mouth. I like the freckle on your left cheek. I like that your left eye crinkles more than the right when you laugh. I like your feet. I like the soft of your stomach. I like your voice in the morning and what you feel like in bed beside me. I like. I like, I like, I like—

You spare him and do not spare him at all. “You’re so pretty, Duncan.”

His hips jerk again. There. No use pretending that one missed. Inside his head the answers to each of your praises start piling up. I like your sweet face too. He bites the thought down and tastes your skin instead. I like your shoulders too. I like your hands. I like them in my hair. I like your laugh when it turns to cackle. I like when you cook and get cross at the pan. I like when you go snotty while crying. I like your tits. I like your arse. I like your thighs. I like the weight of you. I like waking up with one of your hairs stuck to my mouth. I—

“F-fuck,” Duncan hisses through an involuntary back-stabbing twitch.

It's slippery. Lovely. He moves through his own spent and feels the sting prickle from the tip of his cock to the base of his spine like thousands of insects' wings fluttering between layers of skin. His mouth goes so wide the jaw clicks, hand finds your hip, grips, releases, then grips again with a gentleness that comes out more desperate than on purpose.

“Too much?” you ask.

He shakes his head. “N-no.”

In a quick assessment Duncan realises he is fully hard again. Worse than before, somehow. His cock feels harder than it has any right to, bigger too for the swell of deliciously tormented tissue. Blood fills him so utterly he gets light-headed with it and has one fleeting, cowardly thought that maybe men go soft after disgracing themselves for a reason and ought to leave their luck alone. Because this feels stolen. Forbidden in how sweetly it spreads through him. He is bathed in himself and your slick, trembling with it, and still some jurisdiction of the hips returns to him. Enough to roll them into you heavily and whisper, "Keep talkin'. Keep talkin' to me, sweetheart. Please."

It arrives so raw you nearly lose your nerve. Nearly. With the shift inside, your body, faithless and bright, remembers what it was promised. "You're doing so well, Duncan. You're so good. Look at me, darling."

He goes where your palm orders his chin and looks vaguely at where your face should be. It's blurry and he's not certain a case would be different if he had his glasses on. "I want ye to feel good, lassie. I want to be good for you. Oh, fuck—"

Your chest tightens like a hand closing round glass. You smooth your thumb under his eye, where he is hot and damp. “You are,” you tell him. "Kiss me."

He lowers his mouth to yours and lets them meet with too much gratitude, open lips driven by poor coordination. The kiss makes him move into a shallow glide. He is filling out properly, impossible and worried inside you, honed through the overbright ache because praise stomps on every other version of comfort and laughs at it.

"There you are," you say. "Oh fuck, there you are. Right there—"

"Yeah?" Dunk says. Starts pulling back farther, enough to make you protest the loss. When he slides in again both of you feel the second life of him. He brushes the rawest depths. The mess you claim to like so much gets pumped back in with a sound so wet and filthy the burn in Duncan's ears begins to feel cold.

"Yes—" you moan. Clench around him as if welcoming the insult. "God, you're so good—"

He whimpers. Quiet and punched out. Buries his face into your shoulder immediately after as if a noise so vulnerable doesn't have the right to exist in his body.

The sound spills across your chest and bleeds into your fingers. “Oh, Dunk.”

“Don’t make a thing of it.”

“I’m making several things of it.”

“Lass.”

“You sound beautiful,” you tell him, with a face so soft it could kill him.

His whole body flinches. “Jesus, woman.”

“You do.” You pull at his hair until his face comes back where you want it. “You sound beautiful when you want me.”

Duncan stares in your general direction, eyes narrowed and wet, lips parted around breaths he has forgotten to ration. Then his hips move again, and again, each stroke careful out of necessity, each one less careful because you keep rewarding him for it.

I like when you want me too, he thinks, frantic with it. I like when you need me. I love—

He squeezes his lids shut. Whole cliff edge waits under one syllable.

You kiss him before he can fall off it and murmur, “Good boy,” against his mouth.

The last of the strategy leaks off with the sweat at Dunk's temple. He thrusts deeper, shakes harder with the cost of it, and your back arches clean off the bed. Pleasure opens low and hot, fed by the weight of him, the broken sounds, the knowledge that you have put your mouth to some hidden hinge in him and made it swing wide.

“Again,” he says, barely there.

You smile against his lips. “My good boy.”

His cock jumps inside you so hard you gasp. He hears that too. Even without sight, he is learning you by damage and reward. He finds the rhythm by your sounds and keeps his face so close your words have nowhere to go except to him.

“Perfect,” you whisper. “I'm so close, Dunk. Keep fucking me like this. God, you're lovely—” A groan, then another careful stroke. Your thumbs brush under his lower lashes in a sweet little I'm here, I'm here with you. It's not really fair to be able to see his face opened so cleanly while he can't see yours, but the partial anonymity pours some courage down your throat. "I don't know who taught you to be ashamed of wanting," you say, "but they were wrong."

Duncan whines out your name. Torn and bruised by his teeth. The sound of it said like that tips you. You cradle his head to your neck and come with your mouth full of his hair. It seizes you crude and complete, legs and arms locking so hard he has nothing left to do but stay buried and take what your body milks out of him. “My good boy,” you whisper through it. “Duncan, my good boy—”

Good boy. Good boy is what Dunk has always wanted to be, and has tried to be, and still nobody has told him so. Good boy said with conviction by both your mouth and body is what lures him into following you into his second orgasm. He comes again, and worse for it. Loud this time, and costly. His whole body fights itself over where to put the force of it, lower stomach clenching, calf near mangled from the effort of keeping his weight off you. His voice breaks somewhere above his own size. “Ah—Christ, girl—ah, fuck—” Then he spends another load inside you, bathing his cock hot, while your cunt keeps pulling at him in ruthless aftershocks as if it has claimed him now and wants payment.

You keep him trapped by every limb you have. Keep him there while he shudders, while his hips give their last helpless stammers into yours, while his breath falls apart against your throat. It feels brutal for how close it is. For how much of yourselves you have both put into the other without saying the sensible things first.

When it passes, Duncan stays braced over you, trembling. His mouth works near your skin. “Y-you—you—” he stammers. “You make such a mess of me.” He blinks, then palms the mattress for his glasses. Finds them and manages to slide them on one-handed, though not entirely well for they sit on his nose crooked. But at least he can see you again. And Jesus fucking Christ—

The love is no longer embryonic. It has managed to gestate into some sort of Leviathan in the span of one fuck. He looks at what he's done to you and cannot believe his eyes. All of you looks warm. Face melted of every wrinkle it could produce, you lay below him blissed and gorgeous and Dunk feels as if he's going to need to step out from his own skin if he doesn't thank you. For this. For listening. For seeing him and guiding him when he's blind.

"God, girl, what was that?" he says. "What've you done to me?"

You regain the ability to frown. Your brows knit, worried, and you perch yourself higher on one elbow. "Are you not well?" you ask, brushing his cheek. "Have I—"

"No." Then, Duncan laughs. Not because he's happy, though he is, and not because anything is being particularly funny. His body chooses laughter for him. He puts his palm to your jaw and touches your lower lip. Presses on it, stretches it, and it's so glossy it slips away. "Yer not real," he says. "Yer an impossible girl."

A smile splits you, weird and uncanny. It lacks the eyes. Confused, you whisper, "Duncan?"

He answers the sound of his name with his mouth. Poorly at first. A little startled, a little overbrave, a kiss dragged from some place in him still smoking. He catches your lower lip, lets it go, comes back for the corner, then the whole of you, and the further he gets from the post-nut clarity, the more careful he becomes. His hand settles at your neck with a tenderness that feels borrowed from later life.

You let him. Let the kiss calm into something with breathing in it. When he pulls back, his forehead stays close to yours. “How d’you know me so well?” he asks, almost accusing.

Your eyes soften. “I could ask you the same,” you say.

If you did, you'd hear that I love ye, and it cannot be right of you. Duncan goes still above you. “Aye,” he says, though it barely counts as speech.

You brush your thumb over the corner of his mouth. “What?”

“I’ve never had it like that in my life,” he says, blushing fiercely. “I don’t know what it means, or if it has to mean anythin’, but I just—shite, I’m sorry, I jus'—”

“Me too,” you say. He blinks. You nod, because he looks like he needs the second strike of it. “Me too. I wasn’t lying about anything.”

“Thank you,” Dunk says. It is the first thing he can find that is small enough to fit his mouth. Then he shifts, and the small thing gets ruined. “Ah—shite.”

He tries to pull out carefully. Careful does not save either of you. The slip of him leaving is uncomfortable and cold. He hisses. You hiss too, then both sounds turn into sheepish laughter. Dunk sits back on his heels with hands hovering over you as if there is still a correct place to put them and he has not found it yet. "S-sorry," he says.

“Stop apologising for having a dick, okay?”

That makes him look at you in scandalised silence, which is worth the ache. He groans, and looks down since your face is a bit too much. His hands find your knees. He closes your legs gently and rocks them once as if settling something very important and badly made.

You sigh, loose and thready, and your whole lower body goes into a tired little tremor.

“There,” he says. His gaze catches lower. Sticks. “Shite,” he says. “I’ve, uh—”

“What?”

Instead of answering, Duncan leans in and, with the same care, straightens your legs leaving them slightly parted. The air finds you. You make a protesting noise, but he is already lowering himself between your thighs, ungainly and tender about it, until his cheek settles in the crook of one leg and one huge hand smooths over your navel.

“Don’t get any ideas,” you warn him. “I’m still very much untouchable.”

“I—I know.” His voice grows rougher, muffled near your skin. “Me too. I jus’—”

He moves his mouth close and kisses you. There. Low, over skin, without asking anything more from your nerves. His cum is seeping out. Your slit is filled white and wet enough that his spent drips lower, down the swell of buttock and onto the sheet. The sight ought to shame him, probably. Instead, it quiets something in his bones and wakes something worse.

“Relax,” he murmurs. “Just a kiss, lass.”

You try, though relaxation has become a complicated act. His breath warms where everything is swollen and used. He only rests his mouth in small presses, nose close enough to take in the scents bleeding over each other. The newness of it makes him oddly proud. Animal-proud. Kind of proud that probably only another beast would understand.

Duncan ought to leave it there. He knows this from the very recent, first-hand education in what happens when a body is pushed past what it can politely take, and he has no wish to be cruel with you. Still, curiosity implores him. He lets his tongue out only a little and touches you near the entrance, where the trickle has thinned enough to seem less like a dare. Just the tip of it. Just once.

The concoction meets him badly alloyed, both of you discoverable in it. He is salt and water, almost insipid were he to perform alone. You are richer. Sharper. Creamy in the way he remembers from the drunken night that got the two of you here, with that same wild edge underneath. Together it is stranger than either of you apart. Overwhelming, but with a door in it.

He licks again. Small and careful. More reverential than useful, though he would sooner bite off his own tongue than call it that. If romance is a place, Duncan thinks, it is here. Then, he stops thinking much at all. Your fingers find his hair after a moment. You comb once through it and leave your hand there, too tired to do anything finer. When your thigh starts twitching from the weight of his head, he lifts it and looks up at you. “Go shower?” he offers, hoarse. “I’ll change the sheets.”

You stare at him, a little stricken, than let him embrace the weirdness with dignity. Nod. His hands are there to help you when you try to rise and get off the bed. He pulls his T-shirt over you, though only the head, forgetting to put arms into their respectable holes.

"The sheets are—" You start pointing and it's only a finger vaguely poking under cotton.

"I know," Dunk says. "Go, go."

While you're gone, he does things automatically and with his head elsewhere. A man who is a friend and a co-parent and a willing, but ultimately rejected fiance, can only extend his stay this long. Even though for a moment Duncan has felt like an actual lover, there is no argument in him that would sound appropriate aloud. He looks at the dirty sheet in his palms and here he can no longer tell which part of the stain belongs to him, and which to you.

He's stood with a pillowcase half-fixed when you return. Sleepy-looking and warm from the shower, you come closer. Help him with one decisive shake and throw the pillow onto the bed. Then, you crane your head up, and tell him, "Stay? If you want."

Duncan sighs. Bends to kiss your forehead, and says, "Aye." You breathe out too, and the air dilutes int something more chewable. "I'll be right back," he says.

It feels natural to the point of danger. Cuddling in the morning, breakfast together. Setting up a room. Having a mild breakdown over it, which reforges itself into emotions too messy to be talked over so they lead to sex instead. The sex is mind-blowing and leaves Duncan both full and hollow. You take shower first, he goes second. He knows where the sheets are and where the towels are. He knows to wipe his feet before stepping onto the tiles, otherwise you huff so loudly he can hear you across the flat. You gave him a toothbrush. His cock feels a bit scraped, balls empty, but both things are pleasant and sit agreeably on the hips. He walks down the corridor to the bedroom and hears the telly muttering. He can tell exactly which episode of Sapphire & Steel is playing, because he's seen it many times. He cannot remember the plot of it properly, but it's the one with people disappearing into the photographs. In the bedroom you've passed out on your side of the bed, curled, with one arm invading beyond the middle, and the other wedged under your chin. He has his side of the bed. He sits, puts your hand on his thigh, watches the episode and remembers one afternoon when he watched it with Rafe. When the show ends, he turns the telly down and lowers himself so his face is level with your belly.

He's nervous. There's a human inside the size of an avocado, and when Duncan thinks of an avocado in his palm it all seems improbable to him. He's got no idea if the baby can hear him, but feels it is seemly to introduce oneself. "Hello in there," he whispers, quiet to not wake you. "I am your da. We'll meet in uh—" He takes out his hand and counts the remaining time. "In five months," Dunk says.

It all feels very silly but very necessary. He pulls air in through his nose and continues, softer, as if low volume is the thing that might make it less strange. “I, uh… I’ve read babies like when ye sing to them. So I’m gonna—jus' quiet. We won’t wake your mam. She’s asleep.”

There is no answer from above. Only your thick breathing and the small shift of your knee. Dunk takes that as permission. He adjusts himself with one arm folded under his head and legs hanging off the mattress from the knees down. His eyes rest on a place where the child is doing its secret dark work. Then, he clears his throat, feels foolish, and starts with a hum so low it near stays in his chest entirely.

"I wish I was on yonder hill," Duncan croons, half-swallowed for shyness. “‘Tis there I’d sit and cry my fill, until every tear would turn a mill.” He shuts his lids. It's not really a lullaby, but it's the first thing that comes to his mind. The old language feels borrowed and worn smooth enough by other mouths for him to express something Dunk doesn't understand yet.

“Is go dté tú, mo mhuirnín slán… Siúil, siúil, siúil a rúin… Siúil go socair agus siúil go ciúin…"

And may you go, my darling safely. Walk, walk, walk on, oh love. Walk steadily and walk softly.

His voice deepens where it warms. It starts coming quieter, and somehow fuller, and your eyes open somewhere inside the dark of sleep. Unmoving. The room has gone that thin afternoon hush where a body can pretend it is still dreaming if it keeps still enough. Dunk does not know you are listening. That makes it worse. Better. One of those.

There's a hand resting near you, shy of touching until he forgets himself and lets two fingers settle on the cotton. The pressure is almost nothing, but you feel it.

“Siúil go doras agus éalaigh liom,” he sings. The line makes a door appear in your head. An escape. Come away with me. Elope with me, without him having to say anything modern enough to frighten either of you.

When he sings that part he misremembers Gaeilge briefly and lets the thing be just sound, for the true matter and its recipient are, for now, only wishful thinking.

The last blessing comes. “Is go dté tú, mo mhuirnín slán.”

You keep your eyes half shut. Watch him through the blur of your lashes.

“I’ll sell my rock, I’ll sell my reel,” he goes on. “I’ll sell my only spinning wheel to buy my love a sword of steel.” His thumb moves against your shirt. You doubt he notices, or that he understands what his own voice is doing. Making vows out of other people’s grief, putting shape round something he has no courage to hold up in daylight yet. Love, maybe, dressed as a folk song so it can walk past both of you unsearched.

Your throat tightens. Stupidly, completely.

“Is go dté tú, mo mhuirnín slán.”

He hums the chorus this time more than sings it. The Irish turns soft in his mouth, almost sleepy.

“Siúil, siúil, siúil a rúin…”

You let your eyes close before he can catch them open. Let him have the kindness of being unseen. Let yourself have the worse kindness of hearing him.

“Siúil go socair agus siúil go ciúin…”

His fingers spread a little wider over your shirt.

“Siúil go doras agus éalaigh liom…”

By the last line, his voice has thinned to nothing much. A murmur. A breath laid carefully where his hand is.

“Is go dté tú, mo mhuirnín slán.”

For a while after, he only hums. Then even that fades. His hand grows heavy on you, and you know he's fallen asleep. You let out the long-trapped gasp, and with it, a tear falls down your cheek.

[renkith]

guy whose kink is making u feel safe. takes pride in it even

[serduncansdelight]

do I even need to elaborate?

[goat-limbs]

Heartburn | Ch.8.

contents (nsfw): Dunk x fem!Reader, Modern AU friends to lovers rom-com with pregnancy. Humour, angst, banter, sexual and romantic tension, mentions of jealousy, horny thoughts, acts of service, pregnant sex (🗣️🗣️🗣️) consisting of: standing sex, cowgirl, coming inside, lots of feels, aftercare.

<- previous chapter MASTERLIST next chapter -> (12/06)

synopsis: Universe smashes them together. (Pregnancy status: 14-16 weeks, start of the II trimester).

word count: 14K 🤭

a/n: Banner by me, dividers by @strangergraphics, proofread by @hextoken!

It has not even occurred to Dunk that he could date. Last time he tried, he came out of it with his heart all mangled and a new distrust of women who said they liked simple men while meaning simple to keep. Even if he were ready now, to start he would have to meet certain conditions. He would have to talk to women in a way that suggested interest. To do that, he would have to possess some interest in the first place.

When he leaves your flat after an incredibly awkward supper tacked onto what Dunk had thought was an amazing day, he realises he has none. None spare, at least. Whatever ration of interest a man gets issued in life has gone your way entirely and left the cupboard bare. He walks home with the taste of tomato sauce and embarrassment still in his mouth, thinking of how well the baby shopping had gone and how normal it had felt to stand beside you in aisles full of cots and bottles and things neither of you knew how to judge yet. Then dinner, the papers, the maths teacher, and you telling him he could ask her out as if offering him a lift to someplace he did not want to go.

For months after that heart-mangling incident, the one that brought him together with Raymun, Dunk thought falling in love again was a risk he could not afford. Given his generous nature and his inability to keep boundaries where there ought to be some, it seemed only sensible. He had been told he was smothering and that his tendency for enmeshment was fearsome, so staying alone with all those feelings appeared to be the right order of things.

Then Raymun fell in love. With his love came you, and Dunk found himself cured of all his previous resolutions. He took to liking you quickly, and to interest quicker still, because you were the prettiest thing he had ever seen and his eyes, unfortunately, worked well enough with glasses on to make that everybody’s problem. After that came wanting, and there he stayed. For two years he wanted with the low-grade stamina of someone persisting in rain because the bus must come sooner or later. Only every time he gathered enough courage to make a fool of himself, some boyfriend of yours arrived first and had to be withstood. One had a car too loud for the size of his personality. One wore scarves indoors. One called you babe in a tone that made Dunk’s fingers tighten round pint glasses. He endured them all with the pained dignity of livestock at market, and when it finally came to him and you, it went so well he ought to have known the God was setting a trap.

Now, week or so later, he sits on the courtyard bench with a chocolate the maths teacher left in his locker in one hand and a card saying thank you. coffee later? in the other, wondering why on earth he would date someone else when you are out there carrying his child.

A few nights before, he asked Raymun what he thought of it, and Raymun, being Raymun, answered by asking three questions back over the rim of his pint. D’you want to? D’you like her? D’you think she likes you? To the first two Duncan said no, to the third one, I dunno.

Raymun shrugged, offensively simple about it. “Then don’t do it.”

That might have settled the matter if the two of them had not, ten minutes later, gone from one woman to the other as if comparing sacred field notes. Raymun had Rowan’s whole little catalogue ready: how she slept now with one hand under her cheek and the other under her belly though there was barely anything to hold; how she had become adorable over food in a way that made him half mad; how she had discovered the phrase you make it best and used it to turn Raymun into a full-time kitchen servant without ever lifting her voice.

Dunk listened, smiled where he should, laughed where the story asked for it, and felt a small dull sadness open in him at every detail he could not match. He knows your appointments, your nausea, what tea you tolerate, what colour baby clothes you consider criminal. He knows the shape of your feet in black tights and the sound of your voice when illness drags gravel through it. But there are whole ordinary hours of you he has no access to. How you sleep when nobody sees. What you eat at midnight. Whether you talk to the baby yet, or think that daft, or do it only inside your head. Raymun has a life growing round Rowan, messy and domestic and full of crumbs. Dunk has updates, errands, and a longing he keeps trying to dress as good behaviour. Things improve minutely when he's useful, so that is what he focuses on.

“Are you saving that chocolate for later, or can I have it?”

Dunk looks up. Egg stands in front of him with his bag hanging off one shoulder, eyes already fixed on the bar in Dunk’s hand.

“What?”

“The chocolate,” Egg says. “If you’re not eating it.”

“Why? D’you want it?”

Egg’s face opens into a grin so quick and shameless Dunk has to snort. “Well, if it’s upsetting you.”

“Cheeky little—” Dunk mutters, but gives it over anyway.

Egg takes it, drops onto the bench beside him with all the entitlement of a landlord, and starts working at the wrapper. For a moment there is only the crisp little noise of foil and paper. Then he says, with his mouth already full, “So. Are you engaged yet?”

Dunk shuts his eyes. “Jesus Christ.”

“That means no?”

“That means mind your own business.”

Egg chews, unbothered. “You were the one asking me.”

“I did not ask you any such thing.”

“You did. You asked if she ought to be your wife.”

“I asked a general question.”

Egg gives him a flat look.

Dunk huffs and leans back against the bench. “No. We’re not engaged.” Then, too quickly, he adds, “I didn’t ask.”

Egg studies him.

Dunk frowns. “What?”

“You’re lying.”

“I am not.”

“You are.” Egg’s eyes narrow. His bald head tilts a little, and Dunk gets the dreadful sense of a crystal ball being consulted at close range. “Oh,” Egg says. Blinks once, solemn with discovery. “She said no.”

For one full second Dunk thinks he has never been so humiliated in his life, and that includes falling face-first into a mud pit during a staff sports day while children chanted his name like Romans at an execution.

Then Egg adds, “Well, no wonder if you’re flirting with Miss Darry.”

Dunk turns his head very slowly. “I’m doin’ what?”

“Flirting,” Egg says, with a tired patience more fitting for a teacher than a pupil. “With Miss Darry.”

“I am not flirtin’ with Miss Darry.”

“She gave you chocolate.”

“That’s not flirtin’.”

“And a card.”

“That’s gratitude.”

“And she smiles at you with all her teeth.”

Dunk looks down at the card again, then away, as if the thing may sprout more accusations if watched too closely. “She asked me for coffee because I helped mark first-class maths.”

Egg bites off another square of chocolate. “Adults are so bad at knowing when things are happening to them.”

“Listen here, you wee menace—”

“And if you’re having a baby with one lady, you shouldn’t be collecting chocolates from another.”

“I didn’t collect it. It was in my locker.”

“Worse then. She has access.”

Dunk gives him a look. Egg only chews, pleased with himself for about three seconds before his face goes thoughtful again. “Are you going to ask her again?”

Dunk sighs and rubs both hands over his eyes under the glasses. “I don’t know, Egg. Should I, if she said no once? I don’t think so.”

Egg thinks on that. Then his gaze slides past Dunk’s shoulder, towards the black limo nosing up by the school gate. He stuffs the chocolate into his bag with sudden efficiency. “Well,” he says, hopping down from the bench, “you’ve the ring already. You could try asking Miss Darry.”

Dunk grabs him before he can bolt. Egg yelps and laughs as Dunk tucks him under one arm like he weighs no more than a sack of potatoes.

“You little horror,” Dunk says, carrying him across the yard while Egg wriggles without any true commitment to escape. “I ought to leave you in lost property.”

“You can’t. I’m claimed.”

“Aye, unfortunately.”

By the time they reach the car, Egg is still laughing, flushed in the face and indignant in the pleased way children get when an adult has agreed to be ridiculous for them. Dunk opens the back door with his free hand and the laugh goes out of him cleanly.

Maekar Targaryen sits in the back seat, straight-spined in a dark suit, looking at Dunk as if he has been summoned for assessment and found damp. Egg goes quiet too.

He stands there with the boy still half-pinned under his arm. Then he sets him down a little too carefully. Egg smooths his jumper with injured dignity and climbs in.

“Has my boy been misbehaving?” Maekar asks.

Dunk clears his throat. “N-no. No, sir. Jus’—just tomfoolery, is all. Like kids do.”

Maekar’s eyes move from Dunk to Egg, then back again. He gives one small nod, the kind that seems to dismiss and approve in the same motion. “Good day to you, sir,” he says.

“Good day,” Dunk says, and closes the door.

The limo pulls away a moment later, black and polished and awful against the ordinary schoolyard. Dunk watches it go. In the back window Egg lifts a hand without turning round. And Duncan could swear, right before the glass takes Maekar’s face beyond seeing, that the man is smiling.

It brightens him some. Enough that he texts Miss Darry, tells her he’s too busy, and thanks her for the chocolate. Enough that measuring the spare room at your place today, putting everything into the respectable little corner he has arranged with you, feels a fraction lighter.

When he gets there he knocks twice, then a third time, and as he is about to get sweaty all over from the sort of thoughts that bloom out of inertia, he hears your tired voice on the other side of the wood.

“Yes, I’m coming, for fuck’s sake.”

The door opens to reveal you beyond cross, but the minute you see him your face does something utterly strange. It falls back into what Duncan presumes it was before: your mouth frowns with such compulsion the chin dimples under it, your eyes remoisturise, and he knows to add the prefix simply from the already wet redness of them which makes you look like you are battling conjunctivitis.

He steps into the skin of a watchful caretaker as if coming home. “Hey,” he says, reaching for your shoulders. “What’s happenin’, hm?”

“I—” You make that breathless little catch people make when they have been crying for hours. One hand goes to your forehead. “Fuck,” you whine. “It’s today. I’m so sorry. I completely forgot.” Each word comes out damper than the one before, until forgot hitches on the last syllable and a new tear beads on your lashes.

“Oh, sweetheart,” Dunk sighs.

You are always smaller than him, but today exceptionally. He notices the hunch in your neck and the slant of your knees, and is revolted by both because he knows the stance of defeat from muscle memory. He walks you backwards into your own hallway, kicks the door shut behind him, and gathers you in.

“Lassie, c’mon—” he mutters, setting a palm over the back of your head. It is large enough to shield near all of it.

Then you are crying fully. Mumbling I’m sorry and hiccuping into his shirt, clutching at his waist so hard your fingers bite through the cotton. You wipe your face into him, and Dunk aches clean through with it. He rubs your back, rocks you a little, shushes you under his breath, and prays you cannot hear how fast his heart is beating.

When you calm some, he takes your face in both hands and wipes the streaks from under your eyes with his thumbs. “What happened, girl?”

You stare at him. “N-nothing.”

Dunk huffs through a smile.

Your face crumples again, less dramatically this time, more from the nuisance of being known than from fresh misery. “I just… feel like shit,” you say. “Work’s been awful, I’m tired, my back aches, I hate that pregnancy pillow, I don’t want to eat anything I’ve got at home, my hair is greasy, and—”

You stop, swallowing hard.

“And?” he prompts, gentle.

“And I really want to have a bath,” you say, with the malady of a person confessing fraud, “but I’m afraid I won’t be able to get out of it.”

Dunk looks at you for a second. Your eyes are swollen. Your mouth is all dragged down. There is a crease from the pillow still printed faintly on one cheek, and your hair has been tied up and let down and tied again until it has given up all loyalty to shape. “Right,” he says.

You sniff. “Right?”

“Aye.” His thumbs smooth the tear tracks once more, then he lets his hands drop to your shoulders. “We can sort that,” he says. “Why didn’t ye tell me?”

“What,” you croak, “that I’m disgusting?”

“That ye needed help.”

You stare at him, stumped. His eyes are large behind the lenses, soft and kind and warm despite the blue of them, like cold winter light over the ocean. Because you being useful all the time makes everything worse, you think. “I dunno,” you tell him.

Dunk receives that with the grave patience he has for children coming down from a crying fit. “What’s first,” he asks, “food or bath?”

“Bath,” you say, then hesitate. Your eyes move over his face, suddenly unsure. “Would you?”

“Mhm. Course.”

“Won’t that be weird?”

Dunk’s mouth tugs at one corner. “No.” You give him a look. “I’ve seen ye before,” he adds.

“You were drunk.”

“I can get drunk if ye want.”

A laugh, finally. Still damp-faced and wrecked enough for it to catch in the throat. “Sod off.”

“There she is,” Dunk says. “Go change. I’ll run it.”

In the bathroom he has a mild moment of panic. Then, because he is a practical man when panic gives him something to do, he pours far too much of something foamy under the running tap. The bath clouds over quickly. Good. Grand. A civilised barrier between his eyes and certain death. He keeps the water only a few degrees above lukewarm because the app said so, and stands there with one hand under the stream knowing he is going to get clouted for it. He finds he does not mind much.

You step into the bathroom with every nerve in your body alarmed. There is nothing normal about a friend giving you a bath. There is especially nothing normal about this friend. You're being silly, you could just take a shower. When your back gives one dull throb the thought of getting even one ounce of comfort becomes stronger than reason or the entire history of social boundaries. At this point you might agree if Lyonel were the one proposing it, though you’d have to drown yourself after.

Dunk is knelt behind the back of the bath, one sleeve pushed up, arm wet with water and foam. He lifts his head when you come in. His face is already pink, but his voice stays even. “C’mon,” he says. “I won’t look.”

He spreads one arm out for you. It drips on the tile. You come closer, then stop when it comes to taking the robe off. Dunk shuts his eyes with theatrical force.

You huff. “Oh, fuck that. I’d rather have you looking than me breaking my neck over this.”

The robe loosens and peels. Slides down your back. Dunk keeps his lids low, but begrudgingly, he sees.

First your shoulders, tense and rolled a little towards your chest, with the muscle there pulled like a bowstring. Then your back, with a warm bare line carrying the day in every tight place. Lower, where the spine gives way to the small inward dip above your hips, and those two hollows there nearly finish him for reasons he has no language for and too much body for.

He almost manages to skip to your legs and feet. That would have been sensible despite likely to help very little. Yet, his eyes land on your arse and stay there for one harrowing second.

Familiar. Longed-for. Still heavy in his hands if he lets memory have any say in it. He remembers the spill of it into his fingers, the same backs of thighs bracketing his shoulders and the redolence of their apex, kindly facing his nose. The blush deepens on him brutally, laying siege on his neck, face, and, by the feeling of it, scalp too. He thanks the God for not making him bald, and begins to sweat.

What is worse, the angle makes you look unpregnant enough for Dunk to momentarily misplace a reason behind this circumstance. His mind supplies a string of cause and effect: if there are hands, they ought to be held; if there are thighs, they ought to be squeezed; dimples of Venus revered, neck's nape licked, spine unkinked, skin rubbed and felt, buttocks bitten or kissed or outright eaten because they seem delicious to him. Once he gets, barely, past the first involuntary wave of primal depravity, he thinks he might be able to endure it (also barely).

You turn, and he catches enough of the front for the whole experience to morph into lethal. A glimpse of a side-boob, heavy and round, is gorgeous enough for Dunk's heart to recall all the emotions shadowing tenderfoot boy-virgins. Upon leaning, the breasts pour over your ribs and he becomes highly conscious of the reasons for their swelling. His gaze drops to stomach, still mostly yours, still quiet to the eye, but not silent.

He's never put much thought into whether pregnant women are sexy or not, so to see your body and undergo the all-systems seizure is a surprise to him. It seems as if his cock is connected to the heart, that is connected to the head, that is connected to all his limbs that currently tingle. The cock, the heart, and the head agree on one matter: that he's never seen a thing more beautiful in his life and the thought that he's the one who did this to you fills him with smugness and sickening joy.

The belly disappears behind your thigh as you put one foot into the bath, and Duncan comes back to himself enough to lift both arms, hovering, ready in case you need them.

“This is tepid,” you scoff, balancing on his forearm.

Dunk squeezes his eyes shut. “It’s warm,” he says thickly, and knows when you are sat only by the sound of it. Once the water sloshes he deems everything safe enough to see again and cracks his lids open. Kneels behind you, and with some regret, notices that the only visible things now are your head, shoulders and knees.

You lean back and rest your neck on the edge of the bathtub, next to his palm. “Are you temperature-blind too?”

It’s sweet enough that he smiles. Small and murmured so softly he knows, despite complaining, that the service is working. “Ye gonna be mean to me, lass?” he asks.

A pause. “No,” you say. “Sorry.”

His hand slides to your shoulder. Swipes the hair off it. “Besides,” Duncan says, “it’s safer for the baby. The a—”

“The app said so, is it?”

“Point taken.” He blushes fiercer for it. Lets his fingers idle on the apple of the joint, then slip beneath the sheet of water. “I know ladies like to scald themselves in showers and whatnot, but it can’t be this bad, hm?”

“It’s not,” you say.

The dance is very gentle. Dunk hasn’t planned this far, so he doesn’t know how much he’s allowed or what he’s expected to do. One large worry is you saying thank you, I got this, and making him wait outside. One ardent wish is to wash your hair. He lingers on the precipice, stirring the water next to your arm, hoping his hand will decide for him once the opportunity arises.

You seem to not mind. Only ask him, “And how do you suddenly know what ladies like to do in the showers and whatnot?”

“Well believe it or not," Dunk says, "I’ve met some ladies in my life before you.”

You hum at that, then turn your head a little against the rim. “Speaking of,” you start. “How’s your maths lady?”

Dunk frowns. His hand stills. “She’s not my maths lady.”

Another beat. Then: “You know what I mean.”

He thinks about saying that he has no interest in your stupid idea of him dating, and less interest still in hearing you encourage it from the wrong side of a tub while he is trying very hard to keep himself decent. The whole thought comes up too blunt and hot for speech, so he only huffs and draws his hand from the water. “She’s still a colleague,” he says.

Internally, you go: thank fuck. Thank fuck, because despite the whole thing being engineered by your fear-ridden brain, you still wanted to win this one, and you have. For the most part, at least, because Dunk is not dating the maths teacher. Lovely. A smaller part of it belongs to your body’s new flavour of cruelty, which has led you to some humiliating places.

Hinge is not a pond where pregnant women can swim safely. Your logical mind has told you so, basic human hubris has told you so, and Rowan has told you so, then proceeded to help you construct an alluring profile anyway. If anything has announced your transition from the first to the second trimester, it is the mild hots unravelling into full-blown randiness. It has left you leering perversely at anything that has fallen victim to Lyonel’s oral fixation, rolling your hips against the moon-shaped pillow you always secretly imagine to be Duncan, and cannibalising your own lips at any of his texts that could qualify as mildly romantic. Big part of the shame is that even a simple how you? has been filed under that category as of late.

An even bigger part of the shame is the maths teacher. The unexplainable jealousy of her, and the last two weeks spent wondering less how you are going to survive it if it happens than how to prevent it. Showing up at school under petty pretext, wearing one of the belly-revealing tops did not happen only because the summer is technically still spring, and a fool’s one.

Enough became enough when your hand joined the rutting hips and the mouth left agape against plush like you were a teenage girl practising kissing on a mirror. You tried to be normal and available and modern. The app gave you freaks, cowards, lactation enthusiasts, and one man who opened with respectfully, how pregnant? The thought of each sickened you before it excited anything, while thoughts of Dunk remained persistently intrusive. Yes, of that one night, but more, too. Of his hands on you. On your feet, on your belly. Of the way his head dips so his lips can reach your shoulder every time he hugs you. Of the way he blushes at wrong moments and never backtracks from a promised thing. Of his back bared from bowing over the crib. Of his smile. His freckles. His hair in tufts, his slim nails, his shoes being enormous next to yours in the hallway, and the way he says lass like you are someone special to him.

You slide down until your head dunks under the water, just enough to wet your hair. The bath muffles the room for one blessed second, then you come back up blinking and wiping droplets from your eyes with the heel of your hand. When you reach for the shampoo, it’s not there.

The next thing you hear is a wet cough of liquid being squeezed from the bottle. “Is it all right if I do it for ye?” Dunk asks.

You try very hard not to sound giddy. “You want to wash my hair?”

“Well,” he says, practical as a hammer. “You want your hair clean, don’t ye?”

“Y-yeah.” You sit up a little, drawing your knees in until you can fold around yourself. “Sure. If you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind, girl.” Then, Dunk lathers the shampoo between his palms and slides his fingers into your hair.

The sound you make is small. Small, but it lands in him so badly. Breathy and sweet and gone before you can catch it back. Your head eases into his hands with the whole damp weight of it, and Duncan loves it so immediately he has to look down at your crown to gather himself. Your hair clings to his fingers, slick and heavy with water, softer once the shampoo works through. It parts for him in darkening ropes. Catches between his knuckles. Holds the heat of your skin.

With strands drawn out of the way he can see the knobs of your spine and the line of bathwater teasing the tits that are flattened against your thighs. Technically, he sees nothing. Unfortunately, his imagination works like a warehouse with every shelf badly labelled and all the doors left open.

So he keeps to the work. Slow, circular movements. Fingers at your temples, careful over the sore-feeling places. Behind your ears. Back to the crown. Then, at the nape of your neck, he grows bolder. His whole palm frames it and squeezes. Not hard, only enough to feel the tension ease and give the muscle somewhere to go.

You gasp. “Oh, yes—”

Duncan smiles like an idiot. “Good?”

“Yeah. Yeah, um—” You swallow, throat clicking softly. “Sorry. Sorry for the state of me.”

“Stop that.” His hands still for a second. “There’s nothin’ wrong with your state. It’s blessed, so it is, and I don’t want to hear any more snarks about it.”

Under the correction you go quiet. Worse, you obey it. Your shoulders sink, first from exhaustion and then from something more treacherous, until your body begins accepting the hands on it as if without them it gets wounded with deficiency. The touch works down past the scalp and takes liberties elsewhere: slackens your jaw, unhooks something under the breastbone, sends a warm pulse through your hips that has no regard for context. The last person who touched you with this sort of care was also Duncan, but then it came with drink, darkness, and several hours missing from the timeline. This is worse for being clear. You know where his fingers are. You know where yours are gripping your own knees. You know the water has gone nearly still around you and your body, faithless little beast, is starting to hope he never stops.

When you’re about to lose it and start begging him, touch me, touch me, keep touching me, he stops. “Pass me the shower head, will ye?” Dunk says.

You do, blindly, while scowling at the very bottom of your soul and mourning your losses. He starts the water, tests it against his wrist first, then shields your forehead with his cupped palm and begins rinsing. Warmth floods you. Warmer than the bath, finally, as if the man has discovered mercy after all.

You tip your head back, throat bared long and vulnerable, and it does something murderous to Duncan’s blood pressure.

He takes the gift of your closed eyes to gape. At your teeth showing between parted lips, at your lashes clumping darker with damp, at the small working of your neck when you swallow. He keeps the water from your face with the seriousness of a surgical task, which means he simply has to keep touching you. His palm smooths over your temple, cheek, the slick line of hair. Then, he guides the spray lower and rinses the last of the soap from your back. Sadly, the moment when your hair gets clean arrives.

Dunk turns the shower head off. “There,” he says, voice only a little ruined. “Now for the dreaded part, hm?”

“Yeah,” you say, then swallow. “Just—please don’t laugh.”

Duncan, offended by the very thought, says, “I won’t.” He stands, and because he is occasionally capable of saintliness when directly supervised, fixes his eyes with great discipline on the far wall, the towel rail, the corner of the ceiling, anywhere that is neither tit nor arse. Then his palms slide under your armpits. “Up,” he says.

You make one small noise of protest, but he lifts, and your body goes with him as if someone has pulled a string through the top of you. For one second you are dangling more than rising, knees straightening, feet finding the bath’s floor, water sliding off you in streams. The minute you’re upright your arms cross over yourself, even though your back is to him.

You hear fabric shift. Then the bathrobe lands over your shoulders, heavy and soft, and Dunk’s hands come next, drawing it round you without fuss. A towel follows, catching the wet ends of your hair before they can drip down your spine. He pats rather than rubs, which should be funny and somehow only makes your throat feel narrow.

“Here ye are,” he says. “All in one piece.”

You clutch the robe closed at your chest. “Thank you. Maybe just help me get out?”

He nods. “Course.”

You are prepared for an arm. A forearm, specifically. Something to balance on while you step over the high side of the tub with as much grace as a pregnant woman can manage. Dunk, however, has other ideas.

He comes round to the side, bends, and starts gathering you up. You jerk a little in surprise. “What're you doing?”

He pauses, genuinely baffled, one arm already behind your back and the other slipping under your knees. “Helping?”

“Duncan.”

“C’mon,” he says. “Don’t be a wuss now.”

You put up a final symbolic fight in the form of a suffering look, and Dunk only waits it out.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” you mutter, and let him have you.

He lifts before your body has fully agreed to be lifted. Arms go from hovering to holding, and then the bathroom drops by a few inches. Your stomach dips with it. Your hands fly to his shoulders and clutch there, and you wish for him to read it as some small fear because it's a closer neighbour to dignity than the truth.

He has the weight of you settle against him with such immediate rightness that Dunk has to set his jaw against it. The way he perceives it, you weigh almost nothing and also the entire room, which is troublesome and confusing both. It is simple enough for muscle, so Dunk could carry you to the end of the street and back without thinking much of the effort. Complicated when it gains density. There is your forehead right next to his chin and he tries to be mindful of not scratching it. Where your hair presses his chest the cotton soaks, warms, and darkens. Water slides down your calf, gathers at the heel, and drops onto the floorboards with hollow taps. He walks carefully, as if the flat has become uneven on purpose.

Once he gets to the bedroom, he asks, “Where am I puttin’ ye?”

You turn your face into his shoulder. “The floor is fine.”

So he lowers you as if the floor is miles away until you come back to standing. You look up. He looks down.

The room goes oddly close around the two of you. Your hair drips because he hasn't done a very good job drying it. One cold bead runs from the end of it and lands on the back of his hand. Dunk watches it break there.

“Right,” he says, though nothing has been made right by saying it.

You still have both hands on his shoulders. Your fingers have gone slack, but persist. “Right,” you echo, softer.

He could step back. There is space behind him. There is a whole bed to put between you, a whole hallway to traverse and make you a cup of tea, a whole street to walk to his own place, whole country to run and a whole world to travel, and none of those would make Dunk feel any better.

“D’you need anything else?” he asks. Your eyes flick over his face, and for one mad second he thinks you might say yes.

 Yes.

Robbed of touch, you want it back. His fingers in your hair again, nails on scalp, chest to your side, no, to your chest, and sliding and heavy on you until breathing is something you get to indulge in only if you do your maths correctly and gulp once the weight eases. Touch me, hold me, crush me, anything-me, so you don't have to spend another night on a half-arsed tryst with a pillow masquerading as him.

“Hold me,” you say, because the little in- dividing sanity from its opposite has begun to look less like a prefix and more like a plank over a ravine. You could've just said no. It has two letters as well, which should make it sturdier. But the numbers let the no acquire certain overfamiliarity with the in- which would send you back under the covers to scrape his smell from the bathrobe with your teeth and pretend his mouth is at your neck instead of back at his own flat. Anything braver than hold would kick the plank clean out from under you and make the word into a whole insanity with no seam left to hide in. So you choose the hyphen. The smallest scrap. A thing with enough necessity in it to be genuine and enough restraint in it to still let you lie about what you mean.

Dunk is there before you finish thinking. Arms, whole miles of them, come round you, wrap you, then keep wrapping as if the first pass failed to convince him you are caught. It is less a hug than a gathering. He takes you in by increments and still seems to think there is more of you to collect. His body bows around the shape yours takes until his face finds the junction of your shoulder and neck. The bridge of his glasses nudges you there, cold for a second. His mouth stays open against the robe, breath soaking through.

You have to rise onto your toes from the force of it. Your heels lift. Your whole weight goes strange and borrowed, balanced between his arms and the floor, and because he is Duncan he notices and shifts one foot forward so you can lean properly. His hand spreads between your shoulder blades, then drags down your back through the bathrobe. “Ye feel good,” Dunk mutters into you. He keeps rubbing. Finds your spine and makes it look innocent, and the fact of it having to be made to look so speaks for itself. "Smell nice," he says, breathier.

“Dunk,” you say.

He answers with a sound from the chest. A hum, an almost-purr, thickened by the place his face is pressed. “Mm.”

Then he starts rocking you. Barely. Back and forth in a motion so small it could pass for soothing if your body had less imagination. His hand keeps working at you through cotton. Shoulder to waist, waist to shoulder. Makes your toes curl against the floorboards.

Insanity acquires new shape. It becomes an empty bed and sheets cold on one side and morning that holds only one person. It is having a man who knocked you up kept at an arm's length while his nose is wedged into your neck. And maybe loneliness has you both by throats, but for a second you let yourself believe he might want it too and rule that it would be saner to just… ask him.

“Would you—fuck,” you stammer. “Would you consider, uh—” Dunk moves then. Lifts his head off you and looks, making the whole art of producing speech this much harder. Under the scrutiny you manage only: “Can you stay?”

He frowns, puzzled. "Aye, course. Of course I can."

"No. I mean—" You shake your head. "Can you stay with me. Can you—oh God." Your forehead knocks his chest.

Duncan stills, then says, "Girl." He frowns some more and studies the parting of your hair. "Girl, what d’ye need?" he asks. "What d'ye need, just tell me."

"I need—I need—" you start, but fail there. Wonder if there are some other ways of speaking that Dunk would understand, because it turns out asking outright gains so much ridicule on its way out it withdraws itself from the options. Your hand finds his wrist. You put it on your hip first, which is cowardice. Swallow, and proceed: lower, until your arse fills his palm.

He goes rigid. Lets himself be put in place and nothing more. When you look up his eyes are locked somewhere between you. There's an attempt at a kiss; a poor one. You're out of toes to tip onto and out of mouth to purse so it lands off, on his jaw, and becomes something far sweeter and purer than you've had in mind.

"Ah," he says. Gives himself a moment to kickstart the grey matter of his brain and recognize the bit between the cause and effect. It's still very much improbable, but Dunk risks it. "Yer saying—" he whispers. "Ye—you want me?"

A small nod.

“Now?" he asks. His thumb wedges under your chin. "As in: right now? Ye want to—w-with m-me?”

“Yeah?” You cringe. He's stunned for way too long for this to go smoothly. “Shit, I’m sorry—”

“No,” Dunk says. He finds the side of your neck. “No, no, no, don’t be. Don’t be, please—” A gulp. “I w-would. I—yes—I—yes. God, aye, I want to.” Teeth worry his lower lip. “But uh—is it… safe?”

“Yes,” you laugh, for lack of better reactions. “Yes it is, I checked.” With that Dunk's face muddles back into bewilderment he hides very poorly. The hand on your arse tenses. “What?” you mouth.

“Ye checked?” he asks, pouting. “Why did ye check?”

A cold little fright nips through you. “Cause I’m—” you stammer, then let it out in one breath. “God. Going a bit mad here and I considered checking out Hinge but Rowan said I’d attract only creeps right about now so I read a little before I did anything.”

Duncan blinks. Behind the lenses, his lashes move in two enormous dark fans. “H-hinge? You considered Hinge?”

“Y-yes?" you say. He keeps staring. "Duncan, what is it?”

“I—nothing. I mean—nothing.” His eyes drop and grip loosens. The crossness arrives in him by parts, which is how you know it for real: first the stilling of his mouth, then the colour high on his ears, then a hard gulp moving his throat. You have seen him awkward, embarrassed, worried, wounded. This is rarer, and heavier for being held down. “I jus'—”

He sees it with ugly clarity: men with stupid names and blank faces sending you their little texts, all vapid smiles and dead-eyed compliments, asking questions they have no right to ask. Worse, he sees hands attached to them. Mouths. Their shrivelled, hopeful pricks trying to talk their way near the place some ancient, thick part of him has already marked in chalk and blood as his. It horrifies him, the thought itself and how quickly it stands up in him, ready to bite.

“Why do you look unbelievably cross about it, then?” You put your hands on his chest and beneath them his heart is racketing like a drum. It is scary to see him angry. It reminds you how much force lives in him unspent, how much of him is usually lowered on purpose. “Look, I know it’s your baby," you say carefully. "I wouldn't do anything to harm it, alright? I’m just… weird." A sigh. "I fucking hate it here sometimes.”

“W-where?” Dunk asks, hoping you don’t mean his arms.

“In this… body,” you say and Duncan almost blurts out Why? Why, I love this body. I dream of it and think about it often. I want this body to myself.

“It’s strange, and a bit gross, and I sweat a lot and if I’m not sleepy I’m just horny all the time, and I—” you hiccup. “God, I’m sorry, this must be so weird to you. I’m so sorry, please forget I said anything?”

“No,” Dunk says. “No, don’t do that. Don’t do that, I want to—” He catches you back from where you have gone loose in his hold. “I said I’d help you with anything. And I would like that.” He brings his face closer and sets his fingers to your temple. Either the pulse is in you or in him, or both of you have become terrible at keeping quiet under the skin. “What I don’t like is that you considered Hinge before coming to me. And that you say bad things about yourself,” Dunk whispers.

He thinks of courage, then. How it keeps changing shape. He has permission and still there are things lodged in him he cannot ask without sounding small. Do you want me or just anyone? Am I easier than Hinge, or harder, and you are making the effort anyway? Do you remember anything? You come tighter around him, cinching his waist. Your mouths touch and Dunk closes his eyes.

“I like this body,” he says.

His hand slides from your temple to your neck and lower, cautious until cautiousness begins to pain him. He slips his fingers between your skin and the robe near the collar. The other hand finds the knot at your belt and waits. He waits for anything. A twitch, a flinch, a word, some sign that he has gone too far and should be put down for it.

You nod. So Dunk pulls. The belt gives, and the robe loosens round you.

“It’s… hot,” he says, simpleton that he is.

The trouble is, this body has always been hot to him. He has never known how to give it a clean name. Pretty is too innocent for the places his thoughts go after the first look at you. Maddening comes nearer. Now, with you changing in front of him and the change tied back to his own curse of being a man words fail even worse. His hand sneaks beneath the fabric and finds your belly. The backs of his knuckles graze the skin there.

“It’s making a baby for us—” he says, sombre-eyed. “Yer bloody pretty, lass,” Duncan says, because despite wanting to tell you hot, sexy, toothsome, edible, challenging, ripe, built for my grip, spreadable, kissable, gorgeous, dangerous, disastrous, full, an answer to why lads lose their hands and heads, he knows damn well girls always like to be called pretty.

It works wonders. You let him wedge his hands deeper until the collar of the robe slips wide, falls off both shoulders, and by the time it lands round your feet Duncan is so hard he learns a new truth about trousers. None of them are made for him—old jeans, good jeans, jeans chosen by Raymun—all of them turn traitor under enough pressure. He grips your arms without thinking, partly for himself, partly to stop the quick frightened movement you make to cover yourself.

"Dunk—" you whine.

The unfairness of it is clear. "Aye," he says, gone strange. "Aye, sorry. Hold on."

He grabs his T-shirt by the neck and drags it over his head as boys do, glasses nearly going with it. Once his chest is bare your eyes go over him in famished little sweep and Dunk has to lick his own mouth for bracing against it. His hand goes to his belt. What should be simple, since he's undone belts for the larger part of his life without audience, becomes difficult because of the audience precisely. His thumbs are slipping, he's muttering shite twice, and finally gets it open with a jerk too harsh for the poor leather. He shoves everything down so jeans, pants and shame, the whole construction of it, go to mid-thigh before he remembers his feet and has to kick one foot free, then the other, in a small hopping mess that ought to be funny. He cannot spare enough brain to check.

In his trying to match you for nudity so the embarrassment settles in its good bones, Dunk fucks himself over. He's got no idea if he's doing it for you the same way you're doing it for him, but such is a disadvantage of being a man whose dick tells on him: plainness. It would show plain how much he wants you even without it, if only by the heaving of his chest and redness on him. Even without a raging hard-on, which tries to stand proudly but is unable for the weight of it, Duncan's sure you'd recognise the want on him. He can only hope the little kicks of muscle and dew coming from the tip count as honesty rather than greed.

"I'm trying—" he says, quiet, then reaches for you again. "I'm trying to make it even."

Your memory gets jogged instantly, and you seethe at your mind for banking such sight somewhere distant. The pieces you have of him from before arrive anew, with merits of sobriety, of your bedroom's lighting, of him being nervous as sin, somehow managing to make it look as if you are the one doing him a kindness. In the blink between standing freely and being gathered, you catch the hollows under his arms when his biceps flex, the quiver of them kept in their cage of skin, the billow of his stomach with each hard breath and the way his cock gives a small answering throb below it. His body keeps contradicting itself, undecided between muscle and softness, all of it forced into one large being. His knees point a little outward, hips cut into chewable dips, thighs are broad and furred with something too fine for the rest of him. Almost tender-looking, which is mean considering the size of them.

And God above—above. Iliac furrows bracketing his lower belly, lethal enough, sunk deep enough to make him so irrefutably man you gain understanding of why anyone ever got vulgar about those gutters and called them sex lines.

They invite it. They invite thighs to bracket them, tongues to lick down them, mouths to kiss them, fingers to fit inside the grooves, faces to rest there, arses to press back against them until his balls are flattened to buttocks. Before the gathering ends, one demented conclusion gets its claws in you: Duncan is so solid he would remain rideable under any amount of you. He'd last you until the end of this, and then some.

You go where his arms take you. Up, higher, and higher, for in this over-fervour neither of you seems interested in the limit to climbing another person. His neck gets yoked by your grip, hands find your ass, and he uses the pardon lifting grants him to clutch it until the flesh goes hard. Karma for this indulgence is instant: the weep from between your legs drags his cock, makes him groan loud and torn, and since there’s no pity in your face he knows disguising it as effort has failed.

Locked in this full-body shackle, Duncan feels sexy. Holding a woman he’s put a baby into while remaining helpless makes him feel accomplished. You’re carriable, though to say light is to rob you of the resplendent human burden he believes himself created to keep. Belly still small enough to not get crushed, you cling to him, and every press of you on his torso makes Duncan beg the powers that be to not render him a one-pump chump.

“I don’t think we’re ever even,” you say. You seem to trust his muscles despite their tremble, for one of your hands comes to caress his face. He brings himself closer to it.

His beautiful face, lips of which he bites constantly, nose of which rubs next to yours, eyes of which drill into you with their perfect hopeful blue, and you're certain it eludes Duncan what you mean, and instills some idea about you being clever.

None of you are. We're never even because you're behind with your wanting, both of you think at each other violently.

"Aye," he says. Reckons you're telling him he's the fool here, and agrees. "I've got ye though," Duncan says, voice a little ruined because he very much does not got himself. He seeks your mouth anyway. "Can I kiss ye?"

Show, don't tell, your lips go. They flatten to his first. Wet, firm, already enough to make some working part of Duncan’s brain step off the ledge. Then you open and hum into him, and he goes near stupid with it. His breathing turns loud through his nose. The hands under your ass squeeze, then knead, because that is the only remedy for the overwhelming urge to grab your face and take more of your mouth than he’s been given.

Thankfully, you grant it. Deepen the kiss yourself, wedge your tongue inside and bring one hand to his throat to hold him there. The squeeze is light, but brands him anyway. His head swells with all the yearning things, all the I want you, yes, you are wanted like this, yes, your body is safe with me, yes, I can hold it, yes, kiss me, kiss me, kiss me, because he loves it when you kiss him. He loves your hands on him. God, Dunk is so fucked already that his mouth breaks from yours only enough to say, “I meant it.”

You just hum back, busy licking at his teeth.

“I do like this body,” he says. “Wasn’t sayin’ it to keep ye sweet. I like it fierce.” Then, he starts rocking you against him. Small at first, and less so when your grip tightens round his neck. His hands spread you, part you at the cheeks until his fingers brush the slick edges of your pussy. You keep kissing him. Keep taking his mouth as if the hand between your thighs is only another thing you have decided to allow.

You’re wet. He goes so mad with it his grip adjusts. The head of his cock finds the slick and slips through it, messy and blunt and enough to make him drag his mouth open under yours. “I want to fuck ye so badly,” he says, leaving himself there for you to take what you need from him. “Want you to fuck me back, girl,” Duncan says, and in the same second, he breaches.

You take. Seize and clench and grab so hard your jaw sets itself, and from the back of your throat crawls a dry click that bounces off Duncan’s uneven enamel. Then “F-fuck,” comes out of you and disintegrates into a grunt once more of him gets inside you. It’s rupturous, rapturous, poetic and honest. Fucking great, is what it is, to have your whining and moping and complaining answered with the ardent keenness of a man who acts like he owes you his life for keeping a baby you want anyway. A private crumb of you finds it in itself to admit that you want it because it’s his.

"You're so—" you say, mouth dry. "Strong."

He smiles, so sweetly. Like you've done him some kindness. You could say pretty. Handsome, lovely, good, but the way he holds you brings strong to your mind first.

"Ye good then?" he asks, grinning. Sinking. There's more of him, and more, and you keep waiting for your buttocks to meet his hips but the meeting is getting postponed by endless inches.

"Yeah," you tell him.

Good is a mild descriptor. The spread burns deliciously. Melts into a deep ache with warmth at its rim your body recognises as something it's owed, and by rights. Feet cold from the strain of thighs cinching his waist, you get struck by the contrast of temperatures. His hips, hot to the bone, twitch once, as if begging for more sense than he has given them, and you encourage that craving with a brush of thumb on his throat. "Keep going," you say. "Just… don't drop me."

Never. He'd rather take a cramp to the calf, a bowie to the ribs, a bat to the kneecap, a deconstruction to the troth, a nail to the head and hail to the thief than rid himself of the holy parsimony raging in his muscles from not driving into you outright. He gets you on the whole of himself slowly, gently, and once he's all safe and sound within your splendid womb, Duncan whispers, "I'd never."

In his head lives a fantasy that converts him from being a last resort into a yearner who's finally wanted after weeks of expressing bravery through adept courtship. He's taken you to a date during which you've let him get the chair for you and call the waiter. Then your hand has brushed his on the menu and the foolhardy Duncan has closed his palm around your fingers, and you let him do that too. You've smiled at him with lips smeared glossy, set his arm round your shoulders on the way home and climbed onto your toes so he could kiss you.

He's kissed you plenty. You've been teasing, flirting and taunting him beyond what's legal. The pinnacle of it happens in your bedroom where, with its lights dimmed, Duncan acquires a skill to his fingers, otherwise absent. He undoes the button of your trousers, wedges flat palms under the fabric and slides all your layers down by the power of thumbs cleverly hooked over the waistbands. Comes back up, groping your thighs and arse, and finds the clasp of your bra that's for once his ally. His hands don't shake. The lace peels off your tits. There are dents in the skin where it has held you against gravity and he learns that when breasts become honest about their weight and lower onto ribcage is one of his favourite sights.

He lifts you to show you how strong he is, how reliable. To see if you'd let him, too. You wrap yourself around him, cinch his belly and neck with your limbs. With his cock exposed to elements he keeps kissing you and rocking you against his hips until the first contact is made. The tip parts your lips and you gasp. Nerve endings hone themselves to receive pleasure only. He quells the resistance, burrows himself fully, and his brain loses capacity of telling fantasy from reality. He's stuck in the former, where he is confident and worthy.

You moan, full-mouthed. Duncan smiles, and coos, "Biiiig stretch." Then, he realises he has said it out loud, and the whole brave idiot in his head drops dead.

"I—" he stammers. Doesn't get to finish because there's a small snort against his lips, then laughter, and your whole irriguous insides start quaking with it, making him clench his jaw. "Luv," he grits, squeezing your arse.

"Since when are you so smug?" you ask. Kiss him for it like he's done something right. "I like it," you tell him. "C'mon Dunk. I can take it."

You like it on him too much. The borrowed shape of nerve and whole posture stolen from a man with better practice sits on Duncan as if it has been waiting for him to grow into it. It straightens something in him and squares him. Gives his mouth a sharper line and makes his arms look less accidental, less apologetic, more like boons he has finally decided to use.

For you. On you. Because you asked.

That thought bubbles foul and honeyed in your head. Your need, somehow, has overthrown his usual inadequacy. It has dragged him upright by the scruff and put him where you have privately wanted him for longer than is reasonable to admit: proud, useful, pleased with himself for pleasing you. A small, dangerous idea puts down a root somewhere tender. That maybe, if the whole thing had not come at you backwards and sideways, you might have made each other better on purpose.

You jerk on him with your hips, impatient and clumsy. Duncan huffs a laugh against your mouth, startled into himself again. “Aye,” he says, abashed. “Aye, I’ve got ye.”

Then, he moves. The first lift makes your thighs seize round him. The first descent makes the breath go blunt in your chest. He does it slowly because he is trying to be good, and because you are wrapped round him in a way that leaves no margin for errors. Hands under your buttocks with fingers sunk deep and heels of them taking the weight where your body spills. He works you on him with the plain problem-solving force of moving something heavy and dear and alive, and every inch down feels discovered twice: once by the body and once by the greedy mind that knows whose body this is.

A body that gets filled. Emptied. Filled again.

His cock muscles in with its girth so ample you can tell which veins of him pulse hardest. It leaves you hollow for a beat, then comes back so surely your belly coils, coaxing tight wheezes of air out of you. Each time he lowers you, your clit slaps against the hair below his navel. The scratch blooms as little bright injury you start anticipating. You know the rhythm by the third time. By the fourth, your hips are trying to meet it and the whole diaphragm of pelvis flexes to keep him. By the fifth, your nails have found his neck.

It is complicated only if you let thought get involved. You are held up by his strength, dependent on it, opened and moved because he can do that to you and because you told him to. Your feet cannot find purchase, your balance belongs to him, and still the power of it sits in your own throat. You could stop him with a word. You could break him with praise. You could make him harder by saying his name the right way, and there is an equality in it you've never managed to find by standing level with anyone. A strange fairness made out of mismatched sizes and opposite hungers.

On another level it is dead simple. Duncan is strong enough to lift you and kind enough to listen. You are wet enough to take him and mean enough, now, to enjoy what it does to his face.

Your hand tightens enough for your thumb to press the bob of his throat when the pleasure finds its proper shape. Between your legs first, then higher, into your chest, under the tongue, behind the eyes. “There,” you tell him. “Right there. Oh, fuck, Duncan—”

His whole expression changes, but he keeps it at there. Holds the found angle with severe compliance, lifting and lowering you through the same strip of bliss until the repetition makes you go doll-like. Fucked so well you’re certain your face drains of every hint that intelligence lives anywhere within it, so you hide it in his. You press your nose into his cheek so hard you can feel the solid outline of his teeth through skin. His glasses prod your forehead. Both mouths just hang open since kissing has become too skilled an activity for either of you. Instead, you breathe loud, ugly breaths into him, like you’re the one doing the lifting.

Duncan watches you from too close. His eyes go blurry behind the lenses. “Good?” he mumbles, raspy.

Silly man, you think. Yes, good, yes, keep going, yes, until rather than speaking your body just shows him how good. Your calves lock themselves at the small of his back so fiercely he has nowhere to go but deeper. The first cramp takes you there, then the next, each one making your cunt grip him in greedy shocks until your breath turns useless against his face.

It is liquid succour poured over bone and bruise, if the bruise were months of being devastatingly unfucked while Duncan keeps being his best self in your orbit. In the tightness your body shapes you can feel him throbbing, worse and better for being held there. His arms close round your waist and keep you, while the orgasm spends its havoc through you. Eyes roll back in your skull. Your head fills with cotton, warm and sodden, and the room dims as if set a few feet underwater. In it, you register him moving.

Duncan’s thighs are on fire. He has no idea how he hasn’t spilled yet (given that he's just witnessed your eyes doing the thing, and at last in the right context), and he worries briefly that something in him has gone broken. He takes three stumbling steps backwards until his calves strike the edge of the bed. So he sits. You quiver on him, and he stays there stunned, holding you through the last of it. When it’s over he falls onto his back with you clutched to his chest, still hard inside you.

For a moment he thinks perhaps that was it. That the body can be fooled by mercy if the wanting is severe enough. Everything in him has pulled tight, gone blind, endured the full sweet punishment of you coming around him, and surely after such a thing a man ought to be empty and softened. Released from service. None of that, though. His occupation is to lie there with his cock still buried and aching, too hard for comfort, lit by some phantom ending that never arrived. When you shift on him the smallest amount, the sting runs from root to tip, raw in its brightness, making his stomach ripple.

“It’s good,” you tell him, voice loose. “God, you’re good.”

Dunk shuts his eyes.

There is praise, and then there is whatever that does to him. It gets deep into bloodstream and starts moving in his veins. Then you start moving too, and Duncan knows for sure he has not come yet.

You push off his chest. Bestraddled, he watches the ascent diligently: your tits hang heavier when you’re bowed and settle once your back straightens. There, they shift slightly outward. The weight of them travels until skin draws fine and taut from sternum to collarbone. The upper slopes lift with your breath, but the undersides lower and stay there. Flesh touches flesh with a softness so plain and human Duncan’s mouth fills with spit.

His hand goes because it must. It reaches and fits under one breast with the strange exactness of a thing made to house him without asking. He wedges the span from thumb to forefinger into the crease. Your tit settles over his knuckles, warm and fuller than memory, and beneath the heel of his palm your heart beats hard enough to rival his.

Light catches you so that he can tell the change. His fingers find your stomach with their backs, just grazing, and the skin there is soft in a way that puts daft images in his head, small impossible creatures made of satin and warm milk and whatever else men with sex-drunk brains invent when faced with a woman.

Then, his whole hand covers your belly, and that is much worse. Worse in the sense of too much lack landing in his grip. He spans an area so vast all sensible parts of his mind get blown out. Under that touch, your hips roll. Duncan sucks in a stinging breath, then grits, "What're ye doing, girl?"

You cover his palm with yours, and bring the other back to his throat. Curled fingers, clever fingers, hold him where pulse does its best to tightrope between excitement and peril. Then, you clench, slow and mean enough for his heart to stop completely for one whole second. “Making you come,” you say, though for Duncan it's more like making you die. “I want to see your face when you do and remember it this time.”

He chokes a little, tries to cover it with a groan and it all comes out mixed and mangled into some shape of your name Dunk's never said out loud. His hips rise because he becomes an overeager boy who loses the battle to greed. "Christ, f-fu—" he says, then bends his knees under you to help you solve a problem that is his cock begging for friction. It gives you something better to use, and God help him, you use it. Rock down, grind forward, take the part of him he has been trying so hard to keep courteous and turn it into a tool for his wreckage.

The deconstruction of Duncan begins at the points of him that carry profound sense for the predicament he's in: the head of his cock, raging with heat; the ridge under it, rubbed raw with your slick; the tight forlorn pull in his balls every time your hips drag back and make his body expect relief, then deny it with a new descent. Duncan crumbles by fractions. First a sound, then a twitch. Then the last of his good posture. His hands fumble, find your waist, lose it, and finally pull.

You fall forward over him and catch yourself with one palm beside his head, saving his throat from the full weight of you, though the loss grieves him instantly. He would have taken it, happily, dumbly, with his windpipe dented and gratitude leaking out his ears. Instead he grips your arse and the broad of your hips where God, in a rare moment of sense, has granted you handles Duncan can delude himself into thinking are there for his enjoyment.

“What do you need?” you ask, breathy and gorgeous above him, cheeks shining, forehead damp, mouth all used-looking from him and still asking.

Dunk looks up at you and has to search himself for speech. Most of him is gone already. What remains has no pride worth naming. “Use me,” he murmurs, and pours all the devotion he has for you into the miserable little shape of it. His fingers dig in. “Use me, girl.” Under your sharpening eyes, he grasps at the fortitude built badly enough it cannot hold one form for long, and adds, smaller, "And kiss me."

You blink. Lower yourself and take his upper lip between yours, suck it softly, then give him a sweet, taunting nibble that has his hips punching up. The flesh pulls, stretches, slips free redder, and you smile against it in a way that makes him want to confess to crimes he has not yet committed.

Your arms wind round his neck. It opens him up under you, throat bared, and you go there with filthy acumen. Lick a long wet path over the pulse and tendon, up where his skin goes tender under the jaw, then to the shell of his ear. Your breath arrives first. Hot, broken, full of effort. “Talk to me,” you whisper. “Tell me how you feel.”

For an answer, Dunk moans. He means to do better, he does. But you are panting now, rutting down on him fast enough that the bedframe remembers the both of you, fingers threaded in his hair, hips working him with that half-desperate rhythm he ought to be ashamed of loving. Your cunt keeps taking him and taking him, and there is no clean thought left in him. Only this. Only breath.

When you lift your head, something in his face changes. "Dunk?" He only blinks too many times. “Do you want to stop?” you ask.

His head shakes. “N-no,” he says, near bitten. Swallows, tries again, hand sliding to your thigh to keep you from reading him wrong. “No, lass. Just—slow. I wanna—” His eyes squeeze shut with some useless heat behind them before he finds something at least adjacent to what should be said. “I wanna feel ye proper," he murmurs. "You’re… you’re so kind on me.”

It quakes you some. He's trying to prolong it, the sweetheart, you think. So your body quiets for him first, then alters. You exchange the speed for depth and give him fat, thorough rolls. Let the planes of his hips take the whole weight of your arse, just as you've wanted. His balls flatten under your buttocks on every downstroke, cock throbs madly in your womb.

“Oh—” he breathes, and sounds scattered enough to make your stomach tighten. “Oh, that’s—aye. Aye, there. Fuck, right here. Like that.”

You bend close and kiss him again, softer, with the same hunger spread over it like a tearing sheet. He kisses back badly. Too open, too wet, too much air-gulping getting in the way. When you sweep his face, Duncan’s lids are glistening, lashes clumped in little dark points behind the crooked glasses, so undone he looks like a weeping saint with a bad eye.

His stomach swells into yours with fast, shallow gasps. One palm leaves your hip and comes to the back of your neck. He holds you there, foreheads touching, mouth close enough that every word is partly yours before it is finished.

“Feels—” He stops, teeth flashing over his lip. “God, ye feel amazin’. So warm. So—ah—so good round me. I can feel ye everywhere. In my back. In my bloody teeth," he says, then catches your cheeks dimpling. "Don’t laugh.”

You do laugh, very softly, and kiss the corner of his mouth for it.

Dunk groans. “Cruel woman.” His hand tightens on your nape, thumb rubbing without rhythm. “No, no, keep—please, keep doin’ that. You’re gonna have me. You’re—ah, Christ—you’re pullin’ it out of me.”

You slow further, vicious with pity, and he near sobs.

“That’s it,” you whisper. “Let me see.”

His eyes open to yours. Blue, glassy, embarrassed beyond measure and unable to hide any of it. He tries to speak again, because you asked him to, because he would try to move a mountain if you took his face in your hands and said please, for me?

“I’m close,” he says. Then shakes his head, helpless with the size of the understatement. “No, I’m—luv, I’m right there. Don’t stop. Don’t—” His mouth opens under yours, breath breaking up. “Please. Please, I’m gonna c-come.”

Heat spreads like conflagration through Duncan’s bones, and all of his muscles go ablaze with it too. He feels the rupture of the tightening coil and breaks into an out-of-tune chant of yes, yes, yes, while you milk him and let his hips stammer.

It starts low, in the drag of his balls drawing up so hard it borders pain, then strikes the root of his cock with a shock that makes his whole frame buck under you. “Ah—fuck, fuck, lass—” he chokes, then loses even that much sense when the first spill leaves him.

His hands clamp down on you. There's no pulling anymore, only holding on while his body empties itself in heavy, helpless pulses. Each one makes him flinch. Each one makes his cock throb so hard inside you he can feel it answer against the grip of your cunt, the seed pushed out and held there, nowhere to go, nowhere he wants it to go. His hips keep trying, little rhythmless, aborted jerks, and he finds only a crude animal wish to stay buried until the last of him is wrung out.

“Good girl,” he hears himself say, or thinks he does. Dug out and cracked, roughening on the way from between his ribs. “Oh, God—my best girl. Take it. Please, take it. I’m—ah—I’m sorry, I—”

He has no idea what he is apologising for. For coming. For wanting. His eyes squeeze shut, then open again because you asked to see him and some part of him remembers even while the rest of him is being dismantled.

The next pulse makes his chest cave around a breath that sounds ugly and comes with its edges wet. He comes again, or keeps coming, he cannot tell. The pleasure has stopped behaving like pleasure and started acting like something with teeth, something that bites deep enough to find the softest parts of him and shake them.

His soul goes with it. That is the stupidest possible way to understand it, and still the only one Duncan has. It leaves him in shudders, in spend, in the long broken noise he makes when you stay there and take all of him without flinching. For one blown-out second he feels loved so plainly his eyes sting, and he cannot tell whether the tears threatening him are from release or from mourning the fleeting fallacy of his malleable boy-heart.

You see it. The exact place where his strength gives up its post. His face goes open underneath you. The blush is everywhere now, ears to throat to the broad rise of his chest. His glasses sit crooked with their lenses misted, and behind them his eyes shine stunned. His mouth, the beautiful foolish thing, keeps parting as if speech might come back if he only makes room for it, but all that gets out is breath and your name in pieces.

Last time you missed this. Or lost it to drink, to darkness, to the mind’s rotten habit of keeping the wrong souvenirs. Stupid, you think, with an ache so sudden it has no time to dress itself up. Stupid, stupid girl. Because Duncan in rapture is worth remembering with pious accuracy. The cut of his jaw slackened by pleasure. The hard male brutality of his size made defenceless by what your body has done to him. The little crease between his brows. The way his face looks too large for innocence and somehow full of it anyway.

And God, the way he comes. Thick, hot throbs, intimate enough to make you tighten again in little aftershocks. His cock kicks and spends, kicks and spends, with deep-gathering warmth that spreads in a slow, private heaviness. You hold still over him and let it happen. Let him put himself there, in you, with the same earnest violence he brings to everything he cannot say properly.

Dunk makes another sound when he feels you clench. Almost a whimper, though he would hate the word if he had enough brain left to object. His hand slides from your neck to the back of your head, looking for a place to rest. His fingers tangle clumsily in your damp hair.

“Lass,” he says, wrecked. Then softer, because the fierce part of it has passed away and left him with only the unbearably tender aftermath. “Jesus. Lass.”

"Duncan," you say, framing his cheeks. They are warm. "Sweetheart, you alright?" You brush the locks darkened with sweat off his forehead and feel a staggering urge to cradle him.

Duncan's very much not alright. He's shattered into a million pieces, but there is a sober part of him that knows he shouldn't cling. He should tell you, or better yet, carry you to the bathroom and let you tend to your business there, because the app said so. "A-aye," he breathes. "You ought to—" A thick swallow. "I'll help you to the—"

“No,” you say. “Stay a moment. C’mere. Sweet boy, come here, let me hold you.”

“But—”

“Nothing will happen if we stay here for two minutes. I’ll go, just—”

You settle over him, careful where the small swell of your stomach rests against his. Duncan lets you because resistance, in that moment, would require bones in places where he has none. He's not crying, maybe, or not enough to call it that, but his eyes look sore. You swipe beneath one with your thumb. Then the other. He looks away.

“Oh, don’t,” you murmur.

His jaw shifts under your palm. The shame of being scrutinised after the body has made a holy spectacle of itself is sitting plain on him, right there in the colour blotching his neck. You coax his face back anyway, gentle under the chin, and make him meet you. “Thank you,” you say.

Duncan blinks. “For what?”

“For that.” Your thumb makes a small pass over his cheek. “For listening.”

He cannot answer. Something in him tries and only finds the raw place where all the words have been burned out. You spare him the effort by lowering your face to his. Cheek to cheek first, then brow against temple, your mouth near enough his ear that your breathing goes into him. Slow. Deep. A little unsteady. He feels the ribs move around it. It wakes him up some.

His hand remembers it's alive and slides down your back. Over the borrowed heat of skin, down the knobs and shallow dips he now knows in one kind of dark and one kind of light. “You feelin’ better?” he asks.

You nod. Then make a small pleased sound, too close to a purr for Duncan’s remaining sanity. “Mm. Much.” His palm stops low and stays there. “Can you stay tonight?” you ask.

How about forever, Duncan thinks, with such dreadful ease his heart will need some proper scolding later. Aye, forever, if you asked it plain and did not laugh after. What he says is, “Aye.”

“Okay.”

Then you lift yourself off him with a small groan, and Duncan begins to loose you. The loss is horrible in its own right. His cock slips free, tired and overused and sad about leaving you, and he feels what follows: too much of himself spilling warm across his lower belly, dragging over skin and hair. He blushes so hard it ought to count as a second fever. He lies there softening, wet and creamed over, betrayed by what has been done and how much of it there is.

You look down only a second before your eyes flick back to his face. Duncan opens his mouth. “Don’t,” you say, faintly amused and too kind about it. “Don’t even start.”

You climb off the bed on unsteady legs. He means to sit up. Means to help. Means to stop lying there like an offering left out by mistake. But then you bend, gather his T-shirt from the floor and pull it over your head, and Duncan dulls.

It drops over you wrong and right. Too broad in the shoulders, too long on the thigh, collar slipping enough to show one side of your neck. His shirt. On you. With your hair messy and your legs bare and his come still leaking between them, no doubt, though he does not let his eyes go there because he has suffered enough for one evening and also possibly has not.

You disappear toward the bathroom. He remains in post-little-death rigor mortis with one hand frozen over his stomach because he has no idea whether touching anything makes the situation better or worse. The ceiling receives the full force of his stare.

When you come back you have a towel, wet wipes, and a glass of water. You kneel beside him, and the mattress wobbles under the new weight. Duncan grunts.

“Hey,” you say. “It’s all right.”

“It’s—” He swallows. “I can do that.”

“You gave me a whole bath. Least I can do.”

“That’s different.”

“How?”

He has no answer that doesn’t sound foolish, filthy, or too soft in the middle. You open the packet and pull out a wipe. The first touch is cold below his navel and makes his stomach suck itself in.

“Sorry,” you murmur.

“S’all right.”

You wipe his lower belly first. Your other hand steadies him at the hip, thumb resting in the hollow there as if it has any business knowing him. Duncan watches your face because watching your hand will kill him.

Then your fingers close round his cock to move him aside, and his breathing goes funny.

You pause. “All right?”

“A-aye,” he says.

You give him a look, then continue. Lift him with a care so simple it becomes unbearable, wipe along the softened length, the tender head, and the mess gathered at the base. His cock gives one poor twitch in your hand, more memory than ambition, and Duncan shuts his eyes because surely God has limits and he has found them.

“Dunk,” you say.

“I’m not doin’ anythin’.”

“No, I can see that.”

Your hand moves lower. Wipes his balls. Clinical, it should be clinical. It has the shape of nursing and the heat of being claimed in a way he has no defence against. He lies there, fists balled by his sides, while you clean him up as if his body is allowed to be inconvenient in your presence. As if the mess of him deserves tending.

“What’re ye doing?” he asks, helplessly.

You glance up. “Cleaning you.”

“Aye, I know that.”

“Then why ask?”

Because I don’t know what to do with being looked after, he thinks. Because if you keep touching me after, I’ll begin thinking after belongs to me too.

He says nothing. You spare him again.

Once the wipes are set aside, you pat him dry with the towel. Softer than necessary. He feels the careful press along his belly, the inside of one thigh, the last damp place near his groin. Then you toss the towel away, pass him the glass of water, and wait until he drinks.

“Yer so bossy,” he mutters into the rim.

“Correct.”

That gets a small laugh out of him, almost soundless. He drinks, hands the glass back, and you put it on the floor before lying down beside him. “Hi,” you say.

Dunk turns his head on the pillow. “Hi.”

Your mouth twitches. You look exhausted now that the urgency has left you. Washed-out and pleased and sick still, all mixed together unfairly. The T-shirt has rucked up at your hip. He fixes his eyes on your face.

“I can see you thinking,” you say.

“Aye,” Dunk says. “I’m thinkin’.”

He is thinking so much it has become a crowd. Whether this changes things. Whether you wanted him or only relief with a familiar face. Whether he is allowed to be happy. Whether you will regret it by morning. Whether he should apologise for some part of it and which part first. Whether asking to kiss your stomach now would ruin his life quicker than staying quiet. Whether you know his shirt on you has done damage no compensation can mend.

Before any of it reaches his tongue, you shuffle closer and nuzzle into him. Your nose presses under his jaw. One arm comes over his chest. “We can talk in the morning, hm?”

Duncan looks at the ceiling again. Breathes in. Breathes out. Lets his hand come up and settle over your back, where it has apparently always wanted to live.

“Aye,” he says. “Morning.”

[goat-limbs]

Heartburn | Ch.7.

contents (sfw): Dunk x fem!Reader, Modern AU friends to lovers rom-com with pregnancy. Humour, angst, sexual and romantic tension, horny thoughts, fluff, jealousy.

<- previous chapter MASTERLIST next chapter -> (05/06)

synopsis: The very awkward morning after accidental sleep over. They try to be normal, but get jealous instead. (Pregnancy status: 10-13 weeks, end of the I trimester).

word count: 9K

a/n: Banner by me, dividers by @strangergraphics, proofread by @hextoken! This is probably the last sfw chapter :v

It's incredibly hot. For one confused second you think the fever has climbed into the mattress and swallowed you. Your clothes stick unpleasantly along the back, one sleeve is twisted under your arm, and throat is dry enough to make swallowing feel like work. When you try to roll you can't quite manage it, because something broad and warm is lying across the middle of you.

One slow blink. Then another, and everything starts coming more shaped in the dull blue wash of the mute telly. People on the screen are moving their mouths as if language has been taken from them for the night and they've been left to mime some tiny domestic catastrophe in a room made of aquarium light.

Third blink, and your eyes drop to where you're being stranded to find Duncan's palm on your stomach. He's asleep beside you, though beside is rather generous.

He's arranged like someone has tried to fold a ladder and given up half way. Half on the mattress, half off it, head near the middle of the bed, one leg bunched under him and the other hanging from the knee down. His glasses sit crooked on his face, skewed and pressing a dent into the bridge of his nose. He's on his belly, cheek smashed into the sheet, mouth slack with sleep, and one huge hand is spread over you with such absurd possession that your first emotion about it is peace, which is aggravating.

He's asleep. He's got no idea what he is doing. Makes the tenderness feel illegitimate to enjoy.

In your lack of enjoyment, you stare, despite there being no sensible reason for it. He looks ridiculous. Too large for the bed, too young round the mouth, all poor limbs at weird angles. A lock of hair has dried wrong over his forehead. The glasses make him look like a child who fell asleep mid-homework and lost the fight to drooling onto the page.

On the top of his left cheek there is a darker speckle. You must've seen it before, surely, but something makes it stand out to you only now. A tiny brown mark set there as if someone placed it with a pin. In the dim, with his face turned loose and harmless, it becomes unbearable. Too specific, intimate and private. A place that ought to be kissed or brushed with a thumb. A detail you have no business wanting to touch.

Your hand lifts very slowly, then stops before your fingers reach him. His shifts. Duncan makes a sound low in his chest, and mutters something into the sheet. You catch no words at first, only the rough shape of them. Then, clearer, sleep-thick and almost cross: “Don' go.”

“Dunk,” you whisper. You lie there with the telly painting him blue and white by turns, feeling your body misread the whole scene with dumb eagerness. It takes the weight of his palm and calls it safety. Takes the crooked glasses and cheek mole and long leg hanging off your bed and begins building a future out of rubbish materials. "Dunk," you say again.

He doesn't wake, only frowns a little, as if disturbed by some dream too small to matter. His fingers flex once, then settle again.

You should move him. His neck will be ruined in the morning. He should go home, or at least get properly under the covers, or do anything that does not involve sleeping half-collapsed. Instead, you turn your face into the pillow and shut your eyes. For one minute, you tell yourself.

One minute of letting it be exactly what it looks like. One minute of his breath scraping softly, of your heart making an idiot of itself in the dark. You fall asleep before the minute is done.

Dunk is carrying a chair. A plain kitchen chair, too small for him, one leg shorter than the others. He carries it through a long corridor full of doors. Behind every door he can hear cutlery clinking, voices low until they boom with laugher, someone saying pass the salt. He knows, with a terrible conviction, that he is supposed to bring the chair somewhere, but nobody told him which room. Every time he opens a door, people inside go quiet, eye the chair first, then him, and fall so silent their mild embarrassment is palpable. He thinks he's arrived too early, or perhaps too late, or with the wrong object altogether.

He clutches the thing in his palm and keeps trying rooms. In some, there is already a chair, but child-sized. In others, there is no space at the table unless someone else gives it up. In one, he sees a woman's hand on the back of an empty seat that could be meant for him, or someone else, but he is too afraid to ask. He cannot see her face.

The chair begins changing weight. Sometimes light enough to carry under one arm. Sometimes so heavy he has to drag it behind himself. At one point he sets it down in the corridor and sits on the floor beside it because he is tired. The place keeps lengthening. The noises of dinner being had behind closed doors get louder and go on without him.

Finally, he finds a room with no table. Only a coat hanging on the back of a door and a small lamp left on. The chair fits there, perfectly. He puts it down and realises the short leg has stopped wobbling. Instead of comfort that the arrangement should bring, it fills him with panic. Simply because it fits. Because someone may come and tell him to leave it there. Worse, someone may come and tell him to stay.

He wakes with a shallow breath, his neck wrung in an odd direction, shoulder dead from the joint down, and his mouth tasting like old tea and a shoe-sole. His body informs him, in detail, that he has been sleeping like an eejit.

For a few seconds he cannot place where he is, nor can he move. The room is dim with a silent AM rerun of Great British Bake Off being ridiculous in the background. Dunk blinks at it, baffled, then looks beside him and goes so still the ache in his spine sharpens to a bright point.

His hand is on you, near clutching your shirt, claiming the rights his waking self would never dare claim. Underneath it your belly rises and falls softly, conducting business in secret. You are asleep on your back, face turned towards him. Fever has left you damp around the hairline. Your mouth is open enough to roughen your breathing. One of your hands is curled near your chin like a child's, and the sight of it makes something in Dunk's chest step forward before his brain can call it back.

He feels the end of the dream leaving him. The waking mind accepts this arrangement with a gratitude of an animal allowed indoors. In a rebuttal to hopeless wandering his subconscious has found a place in the dark that makes sense. There's tenderness in it married with anguish, because the loverboy instinct tells him to rub that hand on you. Wake you with a kiss to the warm temple, and a bunch of husband-like questions. He even starts, a little. His thumb moves in a tiny twitch, when Duncan realises your body is there only by interference and he's a big useless bastard caught within it, taking comfort off a sleeping woman because she failed to shove him away.

Horror arrives late but enthusiastic. He lifts the palm by degrees, as if removing a trap. It peels from the warmth of your clothes and hovers in the air. You make a small sound, and Dunk freezes again. Waits. Counts two of your breaths, then three. When your eyes, thank God, remain closed, he begins the delicate works of extracting the rest of himself from the bed.

Doesn't go too great. He's too much man for stealth at best of times, and these are far from best. His dangling leg has gone numb below the knee, and glasses have been bent against his face with one arm of them getting hooked in the bedding. His hip complains when he tries to move it. Somewhere in the chest cavity his heart is making an attempt at escape. “Shite,” he mouths to nobody.

He gets one foot to the floor, then the other. There is a quiet crack of his back that sounds, to him, like gunfire. You stir, making Dunk stand up too fast and nearly black himself out.

"Mm?" you murmur into the pillow.

"Jus' me," he says, which is possible the least useful thing ever said by a human man. He clears his throat because his voice is coming out rough for some reason. "Didn't mean to wake ye."

A long breath. "Time?" you ask with your eyes closed.

He has no idea. "Early," Dunk says. His phone is in his pocket and when he reaches for it he finds that it shares space with the thing he's managed to forget about stealing from your bathroom. He rubs the lace between his fingers once, then decides to not risk it. "Jus'—early. Go back asleep."

You shift under the blanket. "You sleep 'ere?"

The question is reasonable, which doesn't necessarily mean he has any reasonable answer for it. He can feel every bad one lining up in him, each one worse than the last. Aye, beside you, with my hand on your stomach like someone in a painting about fathers. Aye, after committing an offence in your bathroom. Aye, and if you asked me to do it again I’d probably lie down so fast I’d injure myself.

"Err—passed out," he says instead, because a lie about sleeping on a couch, which would be tremendously better than this, arrives a beat too late in his brain. "On the edge there, like an idiot."

Your mouth moves faintly against the pillow. "Mm."

"I'll make coffee," Dunk says. Leaving the room suddenly seems essential to the survival of everyone involved. "Tea for you. If your throat's still at ye."

You make another sound, already sinking back under. He takes it as permission since he needs it to be one, then turns and leaves before some hidden part of himself decides to confess to anything.

In the kitchen, he builds a case for himself. You'd said he could touch. Had taken his hand and set it there before. You were asleep. He had fallen asleep. People did worse things in the world than sleep beside someone they were having a child with, Dunk tells himself. The case is weak but technically alive, given that Dunk's brain has kindly omitted the infamous bathroom wank.

He puts water on, finds coffee, tea. Opens the wrong cupboard twice, because his mind is circling elsewhere. Soon enough the kettle starts to tremble. Dunk presses the heel of his hand onto one eye beneath the glasses and holds it there until colours bloom behind the lid. He needs to go to work later. Teach children how to throw beanbags without turning it into war. Speak to Egg, maybe. Pretend to be someone who knows what they're doing.

His hand slides to the pocket in another mindless tic. The moment his fingers meet the fabric, Dunk's mind manages to revamp booty into keepsake. The theft is now a romantic expression of unspent yearning that he forbids from tipping into concupiscence. He's a boy in it, and you're a girl in it, and in a better world with more storge poured into the cracks he'd write you a poem or a song. Instead, he remains wanting at a permitted distance, keeping useful and himself light enough to not force the frail scaffolding of things to groan under his weight. Desire, if it must exist, can be made considerate by service. So the underwear stays where it is, if only to feed the part of him that is starving decorously at the edge of the table.

He pours the tea and brews the coffee too strong. Prepares a toast he almost burns if it weren't for you appearing in the doorway. Your hair is flattened on one side and there's a blanked dragged over your shoulders. It makes you look annoyed about having a body at all.

“Up, are ye? How’re ye feeling?” he asks.

“A bit better. Less like I’ve been dug up.” Your hand comes up to wipe a glisten from under the nose. “Don’t you have work?” you ask.

He shrugs. “Second period.”

You glance at the clock on the oven. “You’re going to be late if you keep making toast at me.”

“I’m not making toast at ye," Dunk huffs.

“You are. Aggressively.”

He looks down at the plate, then back at you. Frowns a little. “Do you want it or no?”

You take the toast. “Obviously.”

That eases him somewhere he does not care to examine. He watches you nibble at the corner like someone who've hoped to be hungry and found it not being the case, and the want to stay rises in him so plainly it feels boorish. He could ring the school. Say he is sick. Say there is an emergency. But there are children waiting for him, and Egg, and a life he has been living since before your body started carrying a person partly made of him.

“I’ll go in a minute,” he says. “You’ve paracetamol there. Doctor said plenty of fluids. And rest.”

You give him a look over the plate. “Did the doctor say that, or did the app?”

Warmth crawls over his cheeks. “Both.”

A smile. “God help me.”

His shoulders loosen. “Aye, he is trying,” Dunk says.

You laugh weakly and Dunk takes it as leniency, which is dangerous, because he is exactly the sort of man to become worse under leniency. He tidies what there is to tidy since leaving without doing something feels wrong. You watch him from the counter, eyes heavy. When he finally has no excuse left, he picks up his keys.

“Text me if you get worse,” he says.

You wave a hand at him. “I’ll be fine.”

“Text me if you get worse,” he repeats, softer.

A beat. Your face yields the way children's faces yield when they realise there is no convincing him they are tall enough to reach the upper shelf themselves. “Okay,” you say.

He nods. Stands there a moment too long. Then, he makes himself go before a deranged impulse to kiss you goodbye, loving husband-style, takes root.

The kitchen keeps letting him leave after the door shuts. Like on a photograph taken with long exposure, he exists in versions separated by fragments of seconds. Dunk with keys in hand, Dunk in the threshold, Dunk with his shoulder narrowing through the gap, then already outside. Each one lags and seems to leave you time to say something before the next takes him further away. Then, the latch settles, the last of him goes with it, and you are alone with the toast.

Your head feels full of warm wool. Fever does strange things to proportion: makes an overcooked breakfast swell into domestic delusion, a repeated instruction into devotion, a man leaving for work into some small marital abandonment. You bite the burnt edge because he made it, and while scraping charcoal from your tongue you find yourself genuinely, offensively puzzled that the father of your child has left without kissing you goodbye.

By evening, after sleep and water and the fever coming down enough to gift scale back to things, you manage to demote the morning to a failure mode of a sick mind.

The next week and a half breaks itself into pieces. You work. You rest. You promise Dunk you will take it easy and then answer his texts three hours late from Lyonel's office. Every day you keep meaning to find a date for shopping and fail. First because Lyonel needs copy by yesterday. Then because Rowan wants to compare maternity bras and cries in the changing room because one of them makes her feel like an auntie at a funeral. Then because you sleep fourteen hours and wake with a headache from having done so.

He texts without complaint. Practical things, like Did ye eat? Doctor said to ring if fever comes back. Or: Apricot this week. Which seems a bit large to me but there ye are.

It gets stranger, sometimes. A picture of three children from his school standing proudly beside a mud structure that he explains was meant to be a castle and became a bunker. A blurry photo of Egg’s shaved head with the caption: He says it’s aerodynamic. A message late one evening that only says sleep well, lass, and somehow irritates you so much you stare at it for ten minutes before writing back you too, Dunk.

The nausea starts to loosen its grip by degrees, though it remains spiteful about smells. Coffee becomes possible again from across the room, never near your face. Lyonel’s cologne stays an act of workplace violence. Your own shampoo turns traitor for two mornings, then returns to the side of good. Hunger comes back in blunt, unseemly strikes. One afternoon you eat three slices of toast standing up and then feel so moved by cheese you have to sit down.

Your body keeps making announcements before you can bear to acknowledge why. Your breasts are heavier. Your waistbands leave deeper marks. The lower part of your stomach, easy enough to ignore until now, begins to hold itself differently by evening. In the morning you can still argue with it. By night, bloated and tired and mean with the day, you stand in between the hallway mirrors and turn sideways.

Nothing, you think. Then: something. Then, angrily: shut up.

You lift your shirt anyway. One gives you a version. The warped one offers another, stranger and more definite. Between them you stand multiplied, a line of women all pretending they have not noticed the same small change.

It is hardly visible. May be digestion, may be posture, may be the enormous lunch you ate because a person inside you has lately learnt to ask for food with a fist. Still, your hand goes there in a brief press below the navel while you try your best to avoid the poster-ready, motherly hold. Your fingers instead point down and have to curve sooner than memory thinks they should, because the lower belly no longer gives in quite the same way. There is enough of it now to change the route of your hand. Ordinary soft and crease have begun to pull smooth over the low swell of uterus, stretching the skin a little where it used to kink and fold when you bent. Not much. Just enough for the understanding to carve an informative path, leading from palm to brain.

You finally text Dunk on a Tuesday. Friday? Baby shopping if you’re still game.

His reply comes so fast you picture him holding the phone already. Aye! Course. Then, after a minute: Want me to drive?

You look at the message and tell yourself the warmth in your chest is the usual heartburn. Yes please, you write. If you don't mind.

Course I don't. Another bubble appears: I'll pick you up.

It is both plain and warm enough for you to have to fight yourself over not trying to stretch the conversation further. You smile at it so hard Lyonel's brows crawl underneath the curls on his forehead, then a stupid grin joins them.

On Friday afternoon you change many times. First, you discard the jeans that defy you after two buttons. It makes you wonder whether an already rising necessity to hold clothes in place with a hairband means you've foredoomed your future and the size of Dunk's baby will eventually cause your spine to fold. Sweatpants are an option for a second before you tell yourself to not give up just yet. By the end your bed is covered in garments that no longer fit for various reasons. You stand there in your bra, overheated from the work, and choose a dress because it drops from the shoulders and makes no firm claim on the waist. It solves nothing and simply declines to put a line through the part of you that keeps shifting.

Duncan is waiting by the car, one hand on the roof, looking too large and too earnest for the neighbourhood. Glasses on. Hair still damp from a shower. Jacket open over a plain shirt. He turns when the door shuts behind you.

He looks pleased to see you. Then his eyes drop, and he starts looking worse. Barely a moment, but you see the exact instant he notices the altered line of you beneath the fabric. His face goes open in a way that would be comic if it didn't land straight in the softest, most breakable place you have. His mouth parts. Hand tightens on the roof of the car. You could swear his eyes glisten, a little.

“Dunk,” you warn.

He glances back up. The red has started in his cheeks and gone all the way to his ears, and worse, he tries to shrink from it, shoulders coming in, chin dropping, as if he has been caught looking at something prohibited. You dislike it immediately. He should not have to fold himself smaller over this. So you come the rest of the way and put your arms around him.

Duncan takes the hug a second late, then carefully, like the rules of it might change while he has you. When you press in, you feel the heavy drag of his breath through his chest. It catches you in a stupid spot. Low, first, then warmly, even lower. You have missed him, you realise, with vexation that does nothing to make it less true. When you part, you stay close. Take his hand from where it has gone useless by his side and put it on your stomach.

“It’s mostly bloat,” you tell him.

But Duncan is too far gone. He has an urge to kiss you slow and grateful for it, then a thought about it not being any kind of reward for you stops him. And plenty others. “Aye,” he says, far too gently. “Maybe.”

You roll your eyes because there is nothing else to do with the pressure in your throat. He survives it, since there is a whole afternoon with you still ahead of him, and in the state he is in you will surely roll those pretty things more than once.

He smiles and opens the passenger door for you. “C'mon, then. Let’s go buy things in colours you approve of.”

The car smells of his shower gel and the paper bag of school things he has shoved into the back. You find a crumpled worksheet by your foot, half a dinosaur coloured in with what appears to be sincere violence, and decide against asking. Dunk waits until you have the belt on before he pulls away, then starts driving so slow you have a fleeting thought you'd get there on foot sooner, even pregnant.

For three streets the drive is silent. He checks the mirrors. Changes gear. Does the responsible adult act so completely you start to suspect him of enjoying it.

Then he asks, “That green, is it?”

You look down. Then back at him. "Is what green?"

"The dress."

A blink. You look down again, fully baffled. "Dunk," you say, carefully. “It’s… blue?”

He keeps his eyes on the road. The corner of his mouth goes first, dipping like it has been tugged down by a hook. Then the rest of his face starts failing around it, first around the eyes, where the folds deepen behind his glasses in a way that makes looking at him suddenly feel unwise.

The seat takes more of your weight while a smile works under your nose. “You’re fucking with me.”

“No,” he says.

“You are.”

“I only asked.” He gives one small shrug, then an innocent look so badly timed and so sweet that something in you nearly melts. Before it can, his eyes go back to the road. “Can’t blame a man for askin’.”

“You know it's fucking blue!” Both fists thump against your thighs. "No one's that colourblind!"

Dunk loses it then. A snort gets out of him first, delighted and helpless, and the hand he brings to his mouth comes too late to save anybody. His shoulders jump once. It is such a young sound from such a large man that you have to look out the window for a second to get away from it.

“Nice,” you say. “Making fun of a pregnant woman. Very brave.”

“Ah, hush, wee thing,” he says, still smiling. “You’ll have enough fun out of me at the shop.”

“Will I?”

“Aye. Put me near colours and small clothes and I’m finished.”

His ears are still faintly red from before, but now he looks pleased with himself in a way that makes irritation difficult to keep. “Good,” you say. “I hope they have sixteen shades of cream.”

Dunk makes a wounded sound. “Cruel woman.”

“You started it.”

“I asked if your blue dress was green.”

“And lived,” you mutter, fond. “Count your blessings.”

At the shop there is way too much light and a wall of things you have no right needing this early. Bottles with complicated teats, nappies in blunt white bricks, tiny socks clipped together at the cuffs for feet that are still only theoretical. At the entrance, prams stand in a row with their hoods up and straps lying open, upholstered vacancy with price tags.

Dunk goes straight for a trolley. A large one, naturally. The kind people use when they have produced twins or lost control at a Tesco.

“We don’t need a big one,” you tell him.

He looks down into it, then back at the aisles. Dunk knows this. Logic may insist there will be other shops, other Fridays, other chances to do this properly, but logic has never done much for him when something depends on doing well on the first try. “Might.”

“For what?”

A shrug. “Things.”

You look at the empty trolley, then at where he's looking. “Hard to argue with things.”

He accepts the leave and starts pushing beside you. The trolley objects to him almost immediately. One wheel has a limp, and every few steps it makes a slow, determined pull towards the shelves. Dunk keeps bringing it back with both hands and an amount of care no empty trolley deserves, matching your pace.

For the first ten minutes you are principled. You look at muslins and say they can wait. You touch a pack of newborn vests with animals stitched over the heart and put them back because wanting them this much feels premature. Then, there's a small hat with soft ears you stare at long enough for the hat to grow ugly in front of your eyes, and return it to the shelf with your jaw set.

Dunk picks up a packet of plain white sleepsuits and reads the back carefully. “Those have the fold-over hands,” he says.

You pause. “The what?”

He turns the packet round and points with one large finger. “For scratches. Says here. And Raymun said they can get at their faces with the nails.”

A swallow. “Raymun said.”

“Aye. And some books.”

A woman beside you reaches for cotton pads with the serene expression of someone eavesdropping for sport.

“You’ve been reading about scratch mitts?”

“About babies,” Dunk says, faintly injured. “The mitts were included.”

That is how the first thing goes in the trolley. Fold-over sleepsuits, white, with a little yellow sun stitched near the collar. Then muslins, because babies leak from more places than seems fair. Then a pack of tiny socks, because their size makes something in you go foolish and sore. Dunk puts in a cellular blanket after explaining, with more authority than you are ready for, that the holes are the point.

A small guilt opens under the fondness. He knows about blanket holes while you have done no reading worth mentioning. The first trimester has flung itself past in work, nausea, sleep, and a loneliness you keep stepping over because there are emails to send and copy to fix and a body to haul through the day. The rest of your attention has gone to trying to throttle the lingering horniness by looking at the calendar with your due date on it, as if staring might make the months move faster out of embarrassment.

“You’re unsettlingly prepared,” you say.

“'m not,” he says.

You lean against the shelf and look down at your feet. “You know about blanket holes.”

He looks pleased in a manner he tries to make practical by checking the price. “I know one thing about blanket holes.”

“That’s one more thing than I knew,” you say, and it comes out sad enough that Dunk stops looking at the tag.

He doesn’t know the right words. What he wants to tell you is too large and would come out wrong anyway. That you are doing enough by standing there. By letting him put a blanket with holes into the trolley. By keeping his baby and letting him near enough to have a family around the edges of it. Instead, he comes a little closer and brings the blanket to your cheek. “This one’s soft.”

Your eyes close. A smile finds its way through. “It’s beige.”

“Is it?” he murmurs. “Thought it was red.”

“Dunk.”

It comes out half-whined, laughter pulled unwillingly through the sad place, and relief goes through him so cleanly he nearly grins. He keeps it small.

“How about you put in anything you like,” he says, “and I’ll tell ye what it’s for if I know.”

After that it becomes easier to let wanting have a shape. A changing mat with pears on it goes in because you keep touching the corner and then pretending you haven’t. A packet of bibs follows, then a thermometer, then a soft hooded towel with little ears sewn into the corner. Dunk lifts it, runs his thumb over the edge, and looks at you as if asking whether towels can matter. All he sees is that you love it, so he puts it in.

The bath support takes longer. It is pale and rubbery and shaped in a way neither of you can make sense of until you read the picture on the box. Dunk looks from the baby in the illustration to the object in his hand, then down at your stomach. The movement is so careful your cheeks start feeling warm.

“For washing them?” he asks.

“For keeping them from sliding, I think.”

“Aye,” he says quietly, and adds it to the trolley as if it has become necessary now that he understands it.

He finds nail scissors next. Tiny ones with rounded ends. The hinge makes a useless little click when he tests it, and he almost drops the whole thing for the size of his fingers. His brows draw together. “They’re awful small.”

“So will the hands be.”

He thinks about this. Hands smaller than his thumb, fingers with nails already growing, a whole person arriving with edges that might hurt themselves. He puts the scissors in without another word.

By the end of the second aisle the large trolley has become reasonable. It holds cotton, towelling, small devices, pale things, soft things, proof that wanting can be sorted by category and carried on wheels. You walk beside it feeling a little less foolish each time something else goes in.

Near the clothes, you find two rompers in the same unfortunate family of colours shops invent to distress men. One is pale sage. The other is grey, which feels like cheating even to you. You hold them up against each other.

“Right,” you say. “Test.”

Dunk stops pushing. The trolley wheel makes one last crooked attempt at freedom and knocks his shoe. “Ah, here.”

“No fear. Just tell me what colours these are.”

He looks at the rompers. Then at you. Adjusts his glasses. Then back at the rompers with a focused dread, like he's been asked to defuse something in public. “That one’s grey,” he says.

You cock your head to the side. “Which one?”

His hand hovers, then retreats. “The left.”

“My left or your left?”

He catches his lower lip between his teeth, fighting a smile so broad it puts a dimple in his cheek. “See, that’s dirty work.”

Through the heat fighting its way up your body, you tell him, “Answer the question.”

He squints. Actually squints. A flush begins blooming on his neck with great sincerity. “The one with the buttons.”

“They both have buttons.”

Dunk makes a pained little sound and opens his hands at the rompers, genuinely wronged. “Why would they do that?”

You grin fully. “Because they hate you.”

He breathes out through his nose and takes a step back, stretching the rompers farther from his face, trying for solemn resourcefulness to outdistance his own eyes. “That one is green.”

You look at the romper in your right hand. “This one?”

“Aye.”

“It’s grey.”

His eyes close briefly. “Then the other one’s green.”

“The other one is also sort of grey.”

“That’s cheating, that is.”

A snort gets out of you. The sound of it softens him visibly, though he tries to hide it by taking one romper from you and studying the label. “Sage,” he reads, offended. “Sage is a herb.”

“It is also a colour.”

“It should pick a trade.”

“Do you want the herb-coloured one?”

He looks between them again, then gives up with an honesty you find more damaging than success. “I like the one ye smiled at.”

There is very little to do with that, so you put both in the trolley and move on.

Then, an aisle you find to be a promised land once your eyes rest on the pregnancy pillows arranged in a soft heap. Great curled things, moons and commas and pale sleeping beasts. You press a hand into one and your whole body produces a quiet report in favour. Your hips, back, stomach, and some miserable hinge inside the pelvis all vote yes before you have opened your mouth. “God,” you say. “I need this.”

“Put it in,” Dunk says immediately.

“It’s enormous.”

“So is the trolley.”

You shake your head. “You were waiting to be proved right.”

His lips press together. “A bit.”

You lift a crescent-moon one. It is heavier than expected and shaped to humiliate. Dunk takes it before the second struggle can begin, fitting it into the trolley. It clearly makes you happy but, privately, he hates the pillow with unreasonable bitterness. He feels replaced by stuffed cotton before he has ever been given the job. It is a wicked thought that arrives fully formed anyway: you would not need that great curled bastard if he were allowed to lie where he fit best. The notion burns him so badly he nearly steers into a stack of baby baths.

“You alright?” you ask.

“Aye,” he says. “Wheel’s gone funny.”

“The wheel has been funny since we came in.”

“Aye. Getting worse.”

“Mm.”

The cots are at the back, in a quieter section of the shop with softer light and shelves arranged as if noise would be wrong here. The air smells of new wood and packaging. Little beds stand made up with tiny mattresses and fitted sheets, each one offering a shape to a future that still refuses to hold one for long.

Dunk slows before you do.

There are white ones, natural wood ones, one painted a soft green he wisely does not comment on. Some have drawers underneath. Some turn into toddler beds, according to the cards clipped to the rails. Mobiles hang above them in felt clouds and bees and moons, waiting for somebody sentimental enough to set them moving.

Dunk is that somebody. He reaches up and flicks one with the back of his knuckle. Three small geese begin a lazy circle over an empty mattress.

You watch him watching it. His face has gone quiet in a new way. Earlier he had been pleased, embarrassed, bullied by colours, proud over his research. Now something has pulled him inward. He walks between the cots with the trolley forgotten behind him, barely touching but looking at everything. At one cot, he crouches. His elbows fold over the rail and he peers down into it as if something might already be there if he looks gently enough.

The size of him beside it makes them look like they are meant for dolls, not children. His knees are too high, shoulders too broad, hands folded together like they are too clumsy to be trusted here. Still, the picture settles somewhere tender and inconvenient. This man, bent over a small empty bed, trying to imagine the weight of a person who has so far existed mostly as symptoms, measurements, fruit comparisons, and trouble.

In Dunk’s mind, small beds have chipped rails. Metal corners. Blankets that belong to many children before they belong to more children. He remembers rows of them more than he remembers a single one that was his. Some were too short before he had the language to complain. Some had screws that worked loose. One mattress dipped so badly in the middle that every baby placed there seemed to be sliding towards the same tired hollow. He has no clean memory of being put down in a cot chosen for him before he arrived. He cannot say whether there was one big enough by the time he needed it. There were beds. There were places to sleep. That is a thinner thing.

This one could be picked. Paid for and built before the child came. Waiting with its screws tightened by his hand, its mattress level, and sheet clean.

Your palm appears on his shoulder. “Do you want to buy one today?” you ask.

Dunk looks up. His glasses have slipped a little. “Is it not too early?”

“We’re three months in,” you say. “So technically it isn’t.”

He takes that in like you have granted legal permission for a feeling. His hand stays on the rail. “Could I buy it?” he asks.

“The cot?”

“Aye.” His thumb moves along the wood, then stops, because even touching it too much embarrasses him. “Any one you like. I’d like to buy it. And build it, if that’s alright.”

For a second you have no answer. He looks too ardent asking. Too exposed in the shop light, crouched there amongst rabbits and laminated warnings about safe sleep. The request has come out of him plain, but whatever sits underneath it is large enough to make speech seem like the wrong tool. “Yeah,” you say, softer than intended. “Sure.”

His eyes stay on your face.

“You can pick,” you add. “They’re all pretty to me.”

Dunk looks back into the cot. The geese above the next one have slowed almost to stillness. He nods once, serious as anything, and wraps his fingers round the ribs of the rail. They barely fit there. "D'you like geese?" he asks.

"I love geese," you tell him.

So it's the one with geese. He pays for it separately, then packs everything into the car with the pregnancy pillow wedged behind your seat so poorly it keeps nosing the side of your head all the way home.

Back at your place, Dunk gives you the lightest bags with such poor subtlety that you almost object, then don't. He takes the rest himself, most of it coming in bags that cut into his fingers. When you unlock the door, he is pink in the face and pretending this has cost him no effort at all.

The cot pieces spread across your floor in pale wooden lengths. Screws go into a little bowl. Instructions flatten under Dunk’s palm. He takes his glasses off once to wipe them, puts them back on, and lowers himself to the carpet. You leave him to it and go to the kitchen to make supper out of what can be warmed, cut, or forgiven.

Both things take a long time—supper because a great part of the ingredients makes you feel nauseous upon being cut open, the crib because it is, after all, a rather small object in Duncan's hands. He lays its organs out grouped by the order of assembling, swears a little at the bits and bobs and makes it sound charming enough to worsen the nausea.

You manage pasta, a pan of jarred sauce, and a salad so basic it almost resents being called one. The cucumber is fine until the knife opens it and releases that wet green smell directly into the back of your throat. Onion is impossible. Tomatoes look slimy inside. You stand there breathing shallowly through your mouth, stirring with one hand, watching Dunk through the counter gap while he hunches over the cot and tries to make two pale pieces agree with each other.

It provides you with some inward facing bother, having him there on your floor building furniture for your child. Your body floods itself with hormones and your brain, given one inch of fabricated domestic bliss, takes the whole mile at a run. Him shirtless over the same pieces, sweat caught down his back. Those stupid glasses fogging for reasons caused by different kind of effort. His hands made rougher by wood and screws, touching you after. His face close to yours and his breath smelling of the exact day he has had, and you being able to tell because one can about a person who is theirs.

The pan spits. You look back too late and catch the heel of your palm close enough to heat that pain flashes up before the burn can settle. “Shite,” you hiss, yanking your hand back.

Dunk looks over immediately. “Alright?”

“Fine,” you say. “Just… stupid.”

He keeps looking for another second, then a screw betrays him by rolling under the cot frame. He crouches to retrieve it, one palm braced on the floor, and his shirt rides up at the back.

A narrow strip of lumbar area shows above his jeans. The spine dips cleanly in the middle, framed by the strong cut of obliques at either side, the whole place looking made for hands in a way that feels medically unjust. For holding. For squeezing until your fingers leave shape behind. Suddenly you think of tongues on skin, nails dragging red, his body, specifically, bowing forward under pressure. Your neck feels hot.

The tap goes on. Both hands go under the cold water, including the one that has no reason to be there. You press wet fingers to your throat after, then lean over the counter between the kitchen and the living room, letting the edge hold some of your weight while you try to make your voice even. “How’s it going?”

“Near done,” he says, and steps back with the screwdriver still in his hand.

There is a cot. Around it, the floor is all torn cardboard, folded instructions, plastic sleeves, and one runaway screw. But in the middle of your living room there is a baby bed now, pale and square, looking absurdly small with Duncan standing beside it. He gives one rail a testing nudge.

“Just needs the mattress in,” he says. “Then that’s it, I think.”

To make a point, he reaches up and flicks the mobile. The geese begin their slow circle over the empty space.

You swallow. Smile. “It’s lovely,” you tell him. “You hungry?”

“Aye,” he says, immediate. “Always.” Then his face does a delicate guilty rearrangement. “I’ve a bit for work to do, if I’m stayin’ a while. After I eat. If that’s alright.”

You shrug first, because doing anything else would reveal too much, and pass him a plate. The two of you end up on the couch with the food balanced where it can be balanced. Dunk eats fast, then catches himself and tries to eat slower, which only makes the whole performance worse. He hums through the first few bites. Terribly. Full-throated enough that you nearly ask whether the pasta has inspired him spiritually.

Instead, your body chooses to focus on something more harrowing. He likes it. He likes the food you made in a kitchen with your wet fingerprints still on the counter. This should be ordinary. It lands somewhere below ordinary and starts making trouble.

You get through half your plate before the smell and the day and the stupid little geese overpower you. “Do you want the rest?” you ask, offering it over.

Dunk looks at the plate with plain interest, then at you with stronger principles. “You might want it later.”

“I won’t.”

“You might.”

“Dunk.”

“I’m not scrounging off a pregnant lady, lassie.”

For a second, there is only your stare on him and his enormous moral firmness over three forkfuls of pasta. Then you sigh, defeated, and set the plate back in your lap.

It is fucking weird. So domestic it becomes weird. The ability to sort him properly slips when he is on your couch like that, in your flat like that, eating like that. Part of you cannot understand why the natural progression is running late, one where after supper he is under you, naked and bitten in places not-so-private, so others can see he's spoken for. The cold thought you have been harbouring all this time makes its attempt and struggles to squeeze through.

He is doing it for the baby. He is here for that.

Before you can say anything a normal human might, Dunk leans over the side of the couch for the paper bag and pulls out a clipped stack of worksheets. “Mind if I do this?”

“What is it?”

“Maths assignments.” He shrugs. “From first class,” he adds, as if that explains anything.

You frown at the pages. “Why is a P.E. teacher checking maths assignments?”

“I, uh—maths teacher’s sick. She asked me,” Dunk says. You keep staring at him as if he has just claimed a secondary profession in dentistry, so he smiles and adds, “I’m not that thick, luv. I can manage some first-grader mathematics.”

“Oh… y-yeah, I know.” You shake it off, or try to.

Your brain swells unpleasantly in the quiet that follows. You may not have the best nose for men; that has been proven in several educational instalments. Most of them turned out to be relationship dilettantes with nice-smelling smoke screens. Once the fog came down, you were either dumped or forced to do the dumping for the sake of your sanity. This tactic, though, you know. Damsel in distress. Works exceptionally well on men like Duncan. A nasty little element of your upbringing crawls out then: your mother’s voice, sweet and sour, telling you to always assume the worst of women when precious male specimens are near.

Instead of throttling it, you blurt, “Is she pretty?”

Dunk sucks in some air. “W-what?” You stare at him. He looks genuinely thrown, which somehow makes it worse. “I—I dunno,” he says, blinking. “I guess so? I don’t know, she’s just… a teacher. My colleague.”

Troubleshooting, now. Now, your heart screams. You could say sorry and blame it on being partially brain-dead from nausea. You could apologise and take the hot little shame that comes with blurting something ugly out of nowhere. It is only that the thought of someone else batting her lashes at him does no favours to your stomach or anywhere lower.

You wonder if uterine envy could be a thing, then make yourself worse by staring at the mark on his cheek. It rises when he squints at you. Others must notice it too. Others must notice him, period, because how could they not? They must gape, ogle, crane their necks, lay their palms on his forearm, giggle and lick their lips, willing his eyes to settle there. You wonder if Dunk looks at other women’s lips. If he blushes around them. If he goes warm and clumsy and pleased because someone with normal hormones and a flat stomach asked him for help with sums.

It makes you sick clean through, and before you turn green enough even he would be able to name the colour, you say, “You should ask her out.” Hate yourself in the same instant.

Something in you, meaner and more managerial than the rest, decides to treat the wound as excavation. Dig yourself out by handfuls. If the crush cannot be starved, maybe it can be given walls. Maybe this is simply better. His kindness has become too hard to stand near without misreading it, and every new interval between you feels less like space and more like a test you keep failing in private. If Duncan had someone else in his life, there would be a line thick enough for even your stupid heart to see. A woman from work. A nice one. One who asks him for help with maths and gets his baffled smile over worksheets and no complicated biology grafted to it.

It tastes vile. Hurts so cleanly you almost respect it. Still, you push through, because the alternative is sitting here pregnant and jealous over a woman whose face you have never seen.

Dunk stares at you as if the sentence has reached him in another language. The worksheet in his hand bends slightly under his thumb.

“I mean it,” you say, though your mouth has gone dry. “You don’t owe me celibacy, Dunk.”

His head pulls back a fraction. “I never said I did.”

“No, I know. I’m saying you don’t. We’re still human, aren’t we? We shouldn’t put our lives on a hook because something unplanned happened.”

He says nothing.

You hate this. Hate yourself for sounding sane. “And I’ve been thinking about it too, so maybe it’s a good moment to talk about it.”

That lands. Colour rushes up him so fast it could be fever. Neck first, then ears, then the blunt handsome planes of his face. His fingers crumple the edge of the paper.

“You’ve been—” He stops. Starts again, rougher. “H-how d’you even imagine it?”

You blink, genuinely thrown. “What do you mean?”

Dunk panics, a little. First, because he wants no maths teacher. He has no vacancy anywhere for a maths teacher, pretty or otherwise, no matter how kindly she asks him to take home sums. Secondly, because the thought of anyone coming near you, especially now, makes all the hairs on his body lift in a way he doesn’t like. His chest gets hot. His stomach makes a brave attempt at returning pasta to sender. Some filthy old part of his brain stands up with a club and says: who, exactly, in their right mind, would come close to a woman carrying his child?

The thought arrives first. Primitive, ugly in the teeth. His before he can make it decent. Then air gets in. He drags enough of it through his nose for the mind to take over from the animal. Reluctantly, miserably, he can see the reason in what you are saying. You owe each other honesty and the baby care and some version of friendship that can survive the strain. You do not owe each other the shape of a marriage neither of you agreed to. He counts his blessings, sourly, that the matter has come up now and not seven weeks earlier, when he would have had no claim to even the raw little fury currently making a fool of him.

He looks down at the worksheet. The child has written seven plus five equals eleven. Dunk feels an unreasonable sympathy for the error. “I mean,” he says slowly, “I don’t know how I’d imagine it. That’s what I’m askin’.”

And there it is: the feeling that you have stepped wrong. Put your foot through some tender, rotten board in the floor and now the whole room has heard the crack. You sit up a little, though your body protests it, and gather a blanket around your middle as if that might put things back where they were.

“I haven’t planned anything,” you say quickly. “I only mean… naturally. If it happens. I’ve less chance than you now, obviously, but if something—or someone—happens to be interesting, I’m saying you can.” Your mouth has started running and there is no catching it by the coat. “I’m just saying you can date. That I wouldn’t mind," you lie through your fucking teeth.

Dunk only looks at the papers in his lap. If you stop talking now you are going to cry, and crying over this would make it true in some way you cannot afford.

“I don’t know,” you say, worse now, softer. “I suppose I’m saying you can if you want to. Not that you need my permission, Christ, that’s not what I mean. Just in case you were wondering. Unless you weren’t, then just—ugh.” You press the heel of your hand briefly to one eye. “Forget I said anything. I’m sorry, I’m just—”

“I get it, lass,” he says. Quiet.

You lower your hand.

He smiles at you, and it is so sad your whole jaw goes tight enough to click. “It’s fine,” he says. “I will… keep you posted.”

There is a little hum in your ears. You make yourself smile back. Wide. Awful. Pulled so hard it feels as if someone has hooked thumbs into the corners of your mouth and stretched.

“Yeah,” you say. “Me too. All right. Great. That’s all I’m saying.”

Dunk nods. Looks back at the worksheet. Picks up his pen again.

The telly murmurs low. His pen scratches red ink over paper, and the relief of both of you having behaved so reasonably is horrendous.

[goat-limbs]

Heartburn | Ch.6.

contents (nsfw): Dunk x fem!Reader, Modern AU friends to lovers rom-com with pregnancy. Humour, angst, misunderstandings, Reader is having a hard time, Rowan is a good friend, lots of yearning, underwear theft, scent kink, masturbation.

<- previous chapter MASTERLIST next chapter -> (29/05)

synopsis: Aftermath of the failed proposal with life kicking Reader's ass a bit. Thankfully she has Dunk to help her, but who will help Dunk? (We are something like 8-10 weeks in with the pregnancy).

word count: 9,7K

a/n: Banner by me, dividers by @strangergraphics, proofread by @hextoken! Happy birthday to the Birthday Anon, I hope you like panty sniffing done by sad boys :3

In Duncan’s mouth Will you marry me? is actually Should we marry? said with the conviction of someone asking directions. And that, perhaps, is what does it in the end.

Because you have felt everything these last two weeks with such abhorrent intensity already. Tired enough to resent objects. Always hungry and then disgusted mid-way through the meal. Sick in sly little turns that don’t reach vomiting and therefore cannot even be dramatised properly. Your tits ache. Your stomach goes queer at smells that used to be your own kitchen. On top of all that, you have heard the heartbeat for the first time and nearly climbed into Duncan’s ribs from the force of it, and then scowled a little for how naturally it came.

He took you home. He sat on your floor and worked your feet in those big careful palms until your bones melted. Neither of you said a thing about it, because a gesture like that only stays innocent in the hands of very unawkward people, and you are not those people.

When he draws an actual ring, and one that looks insultingly as though he has thought of you in the choosing of it, you feel too much to sort cleanly.

The thing itself is dear. You would wear it. You might have loved being given such a thing under a different sky. But the frame round it spoils the first astonishment. It comes to you freighted with duty, with fright, with his giant impossible goodness, and you hate yourself for the sharp bright flicker in you that wanted, for one deranged second, to say yes simply because he looked so earnest asking.

You cannot tell him any of that in the moment. If you open your mouth you may cry, or accept, or ask something humiliating like whether he means now or only because of the baby. Some mean little girlish organ inside you had wanted to be chosen and now cannot tell whether this counts—it must be what all this searching has been about. Your body, traitor that it is, chooses for you.

It sends the whole knot of feeling out the wrong door. A laugh comes on you so hard it near doubles you. By the time you clap a hand over your mouth it is too late; another peal gets out, then another, and your eyes are stinging with water. And it doesn’t just come because the whole thing is ridiculous, though God, from one angle it is. You are laughing because it is unbearable and because if you do not laugh you may do something much worse, like take the ring and break your own heart with it.

He sits there on his heels and stares at you like he’s ashamed of existing, so you troubleshoot instead of being honest with anyone in the room. Wipe those tears and ask him if he’s lost his mind. Not because you think so, just to check if the child is going to have two lunatic parents or just one.

You’ve a hunch neither of you is fully sincere or fully at your wits, because how can one be when things are happening this fast and with no pause in sight. He asks if you’re angry, and you tell him no despite being, a little. It is an odd thing to be proposed to and feel as if what’s being offered is the mind’s emergency measure rather than the heart’s own movement; comfort a person produces because they cannot reach the wound itself and so place something useful nearby and hope it helps. Maybe not angry exactly, then, but faintly soured by it. Your mother would laugh herself sick at the whole arrangement, so both the proposal and the baby go straight into the enormous drawer of things you will never tell her.

You answer a half-measure with one of your own and tell him the ring is pretty. Then, because cruelty is sometimes only honesty in shoes, you add that he ought to keep it for an actual wife. At that Duncan looks so gravely stricken you almost take it back, but then you put it on the day being too full of feeling for either of you to know what to do with it, never mind all of it together.

When you linger on the fact that you’ve just been proposed to by a man you know hardly anything about and who knows hardly anything about you beyond what friends of friends know about each other, he says possibly the first true and sensible thing all evening. He asks if you can hang out. And for a great many reasons you are glad. 

It is a good idea not to live estranged. It will be good for the baby, when it finally arrives, to find parents who know something of each other beyond preferred lager and whose turn it is to get the next round. And despite part of you shrinking from the performance of it and all the little consequences that follow—shop girls smiling at the poor doomed pair, strangers deciding what you are to each other, the whole world eager to drape a shape over you before you have made one yourselves—some tiny romantic crumb in you howls at it all the same.

Because there is devotion in Duncan. It lives in his eyes and hands and shoulders, in the slight lop of his mouth when he looks at you now. Even if it is only for the baby, you decide you can live inside it for a while. Better, perhaps, to rent a shabby house than remain homeless.

Silence, for a while. He sits next to you, making the sofa dip so your hips slant with it. The box turns in his fingers. Finally he snaps it shut and pockets the ring. He sighs from somewhere low in himself, tips his head back and says, “I should probably go. Will ye be all right?”

“Mm,” you say. “It’s like living in a perpetual hangover. I’ll be fine.”

He nods to that, then gathers himself off the couch and points vaguely at the door as if he has to persuade himself towards it. There is absolutely no reason for him to stay. You are fully capable of boiling your own kettle and feeling odd in your own flat. He gets as far as the door before you stop him. “Hey, Dunk—”

His head lifts. “Aye?”

“How did you know about pregnancy weeks?”

“Oh.” He shifts a little. “I told—” He swallows, suddenly looking as if this may have been a tactical error. “I told Raymun. Hope that’s all right?”

“I told Rowan,” you say. “I guess we’re even. So?”

That brightens him a little. “Raymun showed me an app.” He is already pulling his phone out. “Look.”

You drift closer while he opens it. He shows you a pastel little diagram with the baby floating in a black oval like a bean in space. “Sweet pea now,” he says, with such fondness it nearly short-circuits you. His thumb taps ahead. “And that’s next week. Then that one.”

You look at the screen, then at him while he doesn’t notice. He is completely engrossed. He starts telling you what vitamins the app says you should take and what it recommends for nausea, and by then you have to snort.

“Okay,” you say. “I’ve seen enough. You can go now.”

He sinks a little at that. “D’ye mind it?”

“No.” You shake your head. “It just feels strange that you’ve been out there with Raymun nailing logistics while I’ve been talking to Rowan about everything except the logistics and trying to figure out how to sell Lyonel’s booze. Not exactly pregnant behaviour.”

Dunk goes solemn with that, the way he does when he thinks he has been handed a job. “I can do the logistics,” he says. “If ye want.”

You stare at him for a beat. It does offer to take something off your back. Then, just as quickly, the other side of it rises: handing him the weight of it all, letting him get practical and useful and necessary, and knowing the arrangement has an end point. Something in that feels wrong. Unfair to him. Unhealthy for you.

So you smile, a bit tight. “I’ll get the app too.”

He studies your face as if checking whether that is a real answer. “Right.”

“But I don’t mind that you’re interested,” you add. “It’s nice.”

That softens him. He nods, pockets the phone, hesitates a moment, then bends and kisses your forehead. “Sleep well, lass.”

You close the door behind him and groan into the empty flat at the whole ridicule of it. At the proposal. At the app. At the forehead kiss. At the fact that you are now painfully aware of how tender he was with your feet, and wonder why in God’s name your brain insists on filing that under some deranged version of an erotic encounter.

With the next appointment scheduled for two weeks from now, you half-ass the promise of hanging out by merely keeping Dunk in the loop. It is mostly texts and short calls. Between work and Rowan, who has fully surrendered to the role of pregnant wife-to-be, it is all you can manage.

You meet her twice for breakfast, partly to compare symptoms and partly for girl talk, though those two things keep bleeding into each other. Pregnancy, you learn, comes in all flavours and tempers, because Rowan is your mirrored opposite in nearly everything. She is fidgeting, restless, forever adjusting in her chair, forever talking, forever midway through choosing flowers or dresses or napkins or whatever fresh circle of hell weddings contain. She has colour in her cheeks and too much life in her limbs. You, meanwhile, are so tired you could put your head down in the jam and sleep there.

“I’m serious,” you tell her over tea and toast on the day of the second appointment. “It’s like my body has decided this body no longer matters. We are now focusing on making a new body, so all my energy goes into this.”

Rowan laughs so hard she nearly snorts tea. “I did read that, actually,” she says. “That it can hit you like that. Rotten luck that it picked you, though.” 

“Cheers,” you mumble through the sore in your throat from all the other things you don’t talk about.

“How are you even managing work?”

You sigh and drag your fork through egg you no longer want. “Well. I suppose Lyonel thinks I’m burning out, because I fell asleep on my hand the other day and he actually looked concerned about something for the first time in his life.”

Rowan blinks. “Hang on—you didn’t tell him?” 

Your face wrinkles. “That I’m pregnant and will most likely go on maternity leave in a few months and suffer the consequences of it? Not yet.”

She gives you a fond, patronising look over the rim of her cup. “You do know you’ll have to stop work at some point, right?”

“Part of me knows it, yes. For now I can’t. And you should be glad, because your future wife status depends on it.”

Rowan scoffs. “One of these days Lyonel’s cologne is going to make you puke on his expensive shoes and he’ll send you away before you get any say in it.” 

You grimace. “Duncan says it passes. That the first few weeks are hard and then it gets a little better.”

She goes still and just blinks at you. “I’m glad you have another pregnant hen to seek advice from.” 

“Fuck off,” you mutter. “He’s just… engaged.” As soon as it leaves your mouth you can hear the irony of it. “As in dedicated,” you correct, a beat too late.

“What was that?”

“Nothing.”

“No, no.” Rowan points at you with a bit of sausage. “That there. What was that?”

You go quiet, shoulders tightening, and pray uselessly into your tea, god no, god no, god no.

She sees it land. Her eyes narrow. “Did Duncan—?”

Playing dumb proves to come with more effort than grace. Still, you try: “Did Duncan what?”

“What did he do?”

There’s no way of saying it without getting berated, so you mutter it into your tea first and have to say it again. “He proposed.”

Rowan freezes, then grabs both your hands off the table and turns them over, inspecting them as if evidence may yet materialise there. “I see no ring here, though,” she says, a little panicked.

“Well,” you say, pulling a face, “I said no.”

That gets you a full scowl. “Why the fuck would you say no? I thought you liked him.” Under her nose, she adds, “You liked him enough to fuck him.”

You scoff and yank one hand back. “I don’t fucking know him. He’s just been… there for two years, and I know nothing beyond what team he cheers for and that he’s friends with Raymun because they met down the fucking pub. That’s it, Rowan.”

Her face softens then, annoyance giving way to something careful. “Hun. I know it’s backwards. I know it’s not ideal. But have you thought this through? Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. He’s a good lad, and he likes you, and—”

“I cannot think of a worse thing than baby-trapping a guy who’ll look back and resent me years on,” you cut in. “Call me a thick-o, but I don’t want to be proposed to because I got accidentally knocked up. I know it’s noble. I know it.” You stare down at your plate. “It’s just… not what I want. Ugh, it’s insane, right?”

Rowan goes solemn at that. For a second she looks as though she is about to tell you she knows a thousand worse fates than this, and you are sure she does. Then, she reins herself in. “It’s not insane,” she says. “And I get it. I’m proud of you, actually.”

You look up.

She shrugs, picking at the handle of her cup. “You’re right. We don’t have to do a thing just because there’s a path worn into the ground for it. It’s only—” Her mouth goes a bit crooked. “I’ve spent half my life being dead set against this sort of carry-on, and now that I’ve gone and done the properly transgressive thing of following the path, it feels disgustingly right. So I forget, sometimes, that not everyone’s built like me.”

“Thanks,” you say, and mean it. Inside, of course, the truth is more embarrassing. You do want it. You just want it with a hundred conditions attached, a whole chain of stupid ‘buts’ clamped round the ankle of it.

Rowan lets the silence sit only a moment before she tilts her head. “Are you all right otherwise? Apart from the obvious.”

You cringe and cover half your face, as if anyone in the café might read your mouth. Then you lean in and whisper, “I’m… weirdly horny.”

She gapes at you. “Don’t piss me off.”

“What?”

“Well, that, for one, I envy.” She sits back with a huff. “I’ve been feeling all sorts of gross about it, and whenever Raymun gets ideas I swat his poor arse off.”

You shrug, self-conscious enough to stare into your tea. “We should maybe swap then.”

“Well, have you thought about Duncan?” Rowan asks. “You’ve already done it once, so—”

“Christ, Rowan.” You drop your hand and stare at her. “How do you imagine this going? Hey, I won’t marry you, but we can fuck, how about that?”

A grin twitches at her mouth. “I can’t imagine him saying no, to be honest.”

“That is not the point.”

“No, but it matters.” She points her fork at you. “You already know you don’t hate sleeping with him. He very clearly didn’t hate sleeping with you. The pair of you have been carrying on like two Victorian widows over one drunken shag, and meanwhile here you are whispering across your breakfast that you’re horny.”

You groan and rub at your forehead. “You make everything sound revolting.”

“I make everything sound exactly as it is.” Rowan chews, swallows, then says, “You don’t have to make it tragic just because it’s awkward.”

“It would be tragic,” you mutter. “He proposed. I said no. That tends to put a dampener on things.”

“Did you say no because you don’t want him?”

You go quiet.

Rowan arches her brows. “Well?”

“No,” you admit. “I said no because I don’t want that version of it.”

“There you are, then.”

“There I am nowhere,” you snap, feeling warm in the neck. “What am I meant to do? Ring him up and ask if he fancies helping me through some sort of hormonal collapse?”

She snorts. “Put like that, maybe not.”

You give her a flat look.

Rowan softens again. “I’m only saying he’s not some random man off the street. And you’re already tied to each other now, whether you marry or not. It’s not wicked to want a bit of comfort from the father of your child.”

You stare at the dregs in your cup. “You say that as if it’s sensible.”

“I say that as if you’re both making this harder than it has to be.”

There is enough truth in that to irritate you properly. You sigh, push your plate away, and mutter, “Maybe I should just reinstall Hinge.”

Rowan laughs from the throat. “Aye, brilliant plan. All the amazing options that start knockin’ once you announce you’re pregnant. Lovely, hope you like oddballs.”

You sigh.

“Wait till you start lactating,” she adds. “That’s when the real ones come out.”

“Oh, shut up,” you groan.

She is still laughing when you glance at your phone and swear. “Bollocks. I’ve got to go back.”

You shove your chair back, gather your bag in a hurry, nearly knock your spoon onto the floor, fix it, then make for the door before doubling back because leaving Rowan with only a wave feels wrong somehow. She is still sat there, one hand over the almost non-existent curve of her stomach in that absent new way of hers, when you bend and wrap your arms round her.

“Thank you for being pregnant at the same time,” you murmur into her hair. “I think I’d go mad without you.”

Rowan squeezes you hard round the ribs. “You’re still mad,” she says, getting a laugh out of you. She tips her head back to catch your eyes. “Go on, then. Before Lyonel sends a search party.”

You kiss her temple. “Love you.”

“Yeah, yeah. Off you fuck.”

You leave smiling, then rush the whole way back to work with your bag slipping off your shoulder and your stomach sloshing tea in protest.

At the office it feels as if Lyonel has taken a bath in musk while you were gone. He gives you a long look the minute you step in, eyes skimming you head to toe with all the tact God forgot to put in him.

“You look a bit sickly,” he says. “Maybe I shouldn’t let you out for lunches.”

You show him your tongue for lack of a better response and drop into the chair opposite his desk.

He only grins and shuffles the mock-ups closer. The cider campaign has spread across the whole surface in glossy disorder: bottle shots, orchard photos, two possible taglines circled in red, one moodboard full of damp gold light and apples split open with their insides showing. Lyonel taps one of the layouts with a ringed finger.

“This one looks like we’re selling grief,” he says. “Which, granted, we often are, but I’d prefer it if the customer only realised that after the second bottle.”

You snort and pull the page nearer. He is happy enough after ten minutes of rearranging copy, swapping a photograph, and vetoing one slogan with the explanation that it sounds ‘like a priest trying to flirt.’ By the time you get him to approve a version, you are almost enjoying yourself.

Then he reaches for the vape. Your tongue clicks against your palate.. He pauses with it halfway to his mouth and looks at you over the top of it. “What?”

“Could you maybe… not smoke that inside?”

His brows lift. “Smoke?”

“You know what I mean.”

He studies you another second, then sets it down. “Touchy.”

“And just reminding you,” you mutter, looking back to your notes, “I need to leave earlier today.”

That earns you another look, sharper this time. Suspicious, interested and irritatingly awake. “Doctor’s visit again?”

You do not look up. “Yeah.”

“Should I be concerned about you?”

“No,” you say. “Why?”

“Well.” He leans back in his chair a little. “You are either being diagnosed with cancer or pregnant, and both options are terrifying.”

Your head comes up so fast your neck nearly cramps. You say nothing. Only stare.

Lyonel’s mouth shifts. Absurdly, horrifyingly knowing. “You think I’m entirely self-absorbed,” he says. “Fair enough. But I do see things.” His voice drops a little. “Are you all right? Honestly.”

You blink at him. “Lyonel.”

“Am I right, then?” He reaches over and lays his hand over yours where it rests on the notes. The gesture is so uncharacteristically gentle it alarms you more than the question. “Am I such a terrible boss,” he asks, “that you’re keeping important things from me?”

You swallow. “These are private things, though.”

“Well, we’re friends too, I’d hope.”

You hesitate, then say, small, “Option B.”

Lyonel goes still. For one second his face is unreadable. He turns it over in his head, all of it, faster than should be possible. Then, his grin breaks wide and sharp.

“Is it with the giant?” he asks. “You are going to have a terrible time pushing that out of you.”

You choke so hard your eyes water. Between denial and laughter, what comes out is, “How the fuck did you know that?”

“Please.” He flicks his fingers. “Let’s say I could smell how wet between the legs he was for you.”

“You are disgusting.”

“And yet correct.”

“I’m reporting you to HR.”

“We have no HR.”

“To the unions, then.”

Lyonel laughs outright at that, all pleased with himself. “Go on. Tell them your decadent employer guessed you got knocked up.”

You cover your face with one hand. “I hate you.”

“No, you don’t.” He tilts his head. “So. Duncan.”

You groan.

“The teacher. The very large one. Earnest eyes. Built like a provincial war memorial.”

“Oh my God.”

“He does have the look of a man who’d apologise to furniture after walking into it.”

“He is a nice person,” you defend, not knowing exactly why.

Lyonel catches that and his grin turns sly. “Ah. There she is.”

You glare at him. “Don’t.”

“Have you told him?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“And nothing. He knows.”

“Stunning. Riveting. You ought to write fiction.”

You drag in a breath through your nose and let it out slowly. “He’s been decent.”

Lyonel’s face softens by a hair. “That matters.”

You nod.

He toys with the vape without lifting it. “So tell me. Is this good news or bad news?”

You look down at the papers, then at his hand still near yours, then away. “It’s just news,” you say. After a beat, quieter: “And I’m keeping it, so I guess we can tip that toward good.”

Lyonel laces his fingers together and exhales through his nose. “Can’t believe you’ve made me an uncle. I think I’m too young for that.” His hand reaches for the vape again by instinct. You give him a look. “Right,” he says, abandoning it. “Sorry.”

That surprises you almost as much as the earlier concern did.

He folds his arms over his chest and watches you for a moment. “If you need anything, you come to me.”

You huff a laugh, slightly phlegmy. “I’ll remember that when it’s time to change a nappy.”

“I don’t think the daddy would like me doing that, pet.”

Briefly and with some fatigue, you think about correcting both the pet and the easy assumption that there is now some shared domestic future between you and Duncan that other people can see from the roadside. In the end you only say, dryly, “I suppose not.”

He lets you off the hook, at least for now. The work gets finished early as promised, and by the end of it you feel—and likely look—wrung out enough for Lyonel to mutter only, “Good luck,” on your way out, then give you a smile you decide is almost disturbingly sincere.

It is early enough still for the sun to play hide and seek between the clouds. Every time it slips out it goes suddenly warm; every time it vanishes it turns bitch-cold again. You cannot tell whether spring is truly this changeable or if your body has simply gone mad. Your back feels damp under your clothes, in turns hot and clammy, and you hurry to the clinic while trying very hard not to examine the faint butterfly feeling in your stomach at the thought of seeing Duncan.

He is already there when you arrive, and for one idiotic second all you can do is look at him. He is in full P.E. teacher attire: shorts meant to hit a normal man at the knee and which on him land somewhere between above-knee and mid-thigh, a big sweatshirt with some washed-out print across the front, and, as usual, a piece of vision aid that should by all laws of God and man do nothing for you and somehow does. He turns when he spots you and his whole face alters around it.

“Hey,” he says at once. “You all right?”

“Why does everyone keep asking me that?” you mutter.

His mouth twitches. “Well. You look a bit…”

“A bit what?”

He eyes you with care. “Tired.”

You give him a look. “I fucking am. I’m making a child while working and remaining part of society.”

He chuckles, low and warm. You stop then, look him over once more, and narrow your eyes. “Why do you look like you’ve run from school?”

“I did run from school.”

You bark a laugh, and the day improves by a small but measurable margin.

The doctor is the same as last time, only mildly less tense, as if you have all now agreed this is really happening and may as well proceed like adults. He asks a lot of questions, looks through your results, and does another scan. The heart is still there. Still beating far too fast for something the size of a whatever-it-is-now to be allowed such force. This time Duncan is less struck dumb by it. He puts an arm round your shoulders and keeps his mouth pressed to your temple through half of it, like this is normal friends behaviour. You let him.

“Nine, maybe ten weeks,” the doctor says after a while.

Duncan, without missing a beat, goes, “That’s a kumquat, I think.”

You turn your head just enough to stare at him. “A what?”

“A kumquat. Or near enough.”

The doctor laughs. “Your—” he pauses, obviously thinking better of whatever word he was about to use, “—the father has been doing his reading.”

“Clearly,” you mutter.

The doctor talks you through what to expect over the next weeks, confirms the nausea is normal, then stops and looks at you more closely. “Have you a cold?” he asks.

“What?”

“You look a little feverish.”

“Great,” you say. “Another thing to add to all the other things.”

He takes your temperature, peers at your throat, asks a few more questions, then rules that yes, on top of being pregnant, you are also simply ill. You lie there thinking that if the female body is such a miracle of design then the designer ought to be taken out and shot.

You get slightly berated for trying to carry on as normal. Duncan gets visibly worried beside you, which is more annoying than it should be because it lands warm all the same. The doctor prints another picture. This one Duncan takes before you even fully register it exists.

“You can keep that one,” you tell him as you sit up properly again. “We’ll swap. One for one.”

He looks at the printout like it might dissolve from sheer luck. “Aye?”

“Aye.”

That seems to please him so much he goes quiet.

By the end of it all the doctor is writing things down, updating dates, reminding you to rest, and then, with the authority of a man who has decided enough is enough, tells Duncan to take you home. You lift your head. “She’s in the room still.”

The doctor only waves a hand as if this changes nothing.

Duncan nods. “Aye. I’ll take ye. Came by car.”

You turn to him. “Why are you by car?”

“I’ve shopping in the car,” he says.

That is so obviously not the whole truth that you narrow your eyes at him, but he only holds the scan picture carefully by one corner and avoids looking guilty by sheer force of size.

He manages to get you into the car without much trouble, stops by the pharmacy to get paracetamol because by now he knows it is the only relief pregnant women are allowed, and ignores all your whines and huffs about how you are going to be fine and he should not fuss. And it is not that Duncan is cross with you. It is only that, in the two weeks between the last appointment and this one, you have managed to see him exactly zero times, push Raymun’s cider business so far ahead it is nearly on the shelves, and get yourself ill enough that Dunk knew something was up the minute he laid eyes on you.

His own two weeks have not exactly been light either. Half of them he’s spent wondering how much of his presence would count as help and from what point on it would just become foisting himself on you because he likes the idea of being near. The other half has gone on Raymun, who is near frantic over Rowan not wanting much done to her except the rubbing of her back and the fetching of impossible things, and on Egg who says things in that level little voice of his that sit in Dunk’s head for hours after. That Daeron fell asleep in a chair with a cigarette still going. That Aerion told him if he is so clever he can start paying rent, then emptied Egg’s schoolbag out on the floor to see whether there was anything worth selling. That Aemon stopped calling. That their father is due back and everyone in the house is acting like weather before a storm. Egg says all of it with a shrug that is far too old on him, as if he is only reporting on the state of the bins. Duncan keeps having to stand there and answer like a teacher and not like a man who wants, quite badly, to go round and start dragging grown males out by the hair.

So Dunk has been carrying that as well, turning it over with no good answer to show for it. Because if he pushes too hard, Egg will only shut up and look at him with that old little-man face of his. And if he lets it lie, he feels like a coward. It leaves him in a state he knows well by now: worried in three directions, sleeping badly, and making plans for other people because it is easier than admitting he cannot sort the ones already in his hands. 

By the time he pulls up outside your place, he has worked himself into a quiet state about it. As pure rage is alien to him, it lingers in the area of a thick, stubborn worry that sits in his throat and will not shift. He goes round to the back, reaches into the boot, and gathers the bags before following you to the door so naturally it is clear he has decided this part without consulting you. 

You glance back over your shoulder while digging for your keys. “I take it you’re coming inside?”

“Aye,” he says. “And you’re going to bed.”

You frown at him. “It’s four in the afternoon.”

“Which gives you plenty of time to rest.”

Your shoulders go stiff. You fold your arms across yourself. “Do not order me around.”

“I’m askin’ nicely,” Dunk says. Then he adds, “But you know damn well I could pick you up and put you there myself.”

That stalls you for a second. Just enough of one that he almost smiles. Then you unlock the door and let the both of you in.

Inside, he sets the bags down by the kitchen counter. You turn on him with your arms still folded, but there is less heat in it now. “Are you angry with me?”

“No.” He shakes his head. “But I don’t like bein’ away for two weeks and findin’ you like this.”

Your face does something small and crumpled. Your eyes begin their glimmer, and panic goes through him so quick it near makes him breathless. “Ah, shite—no, lass, I didn’t mean—” He comes to you, hands half-lifted. “Sorry. Sorry. Don’t do that.”

You huff a weak laugh that sounds one bad inch from tears. “I’m not doing anything.”

“Aye, well. Stop it anyway.”

Another little breath goes out of you. You rub under one eye and lean your shoulder briefly against the wall. “It’s fine,” you murmur. “Maybe I really am tired.”

Dunk softens straight through. “What d’you need?”

You think on it, then sigh. “I guess bed isn’t the worst idea.”

“There we are. D’you want to eat something first?”

“No,” you say, with the grim conviction of the truly afflicted. “Everything’s disgusting.” A beat. “You could make me tea, though. And for yourself. If you want to stay a bit.”

He nods. “Aye.”

You point vaguely down the hall. “I’ll see you in the bedroom, then.” Then you stop. Turn back, and squint at the bags by the counter. “Dunk?”

“Mm?”

“What’s in those?”

He goes sheepish, and because there is so much of him, it shows everywhere. “Bought some food I read’s good for you,” he says. “And tea. And some…” He glances at the bags. “Baby things. Since you were busy.”

You stare at him. Actually choke a bit on the start of a reply. “That’s… uh—”

His stomach drops. “Too much?”

“No, no.” You shake your head fast. “I just—never mind. What did you get?”

It steadies him some. He crouches by the bags and starts pulling things out with dour practicality. Crackers. Ginger tea. Clementines. Yoghurts with that miserable healthy look food for pregnant women always seems to have. Then the baby things. A packet of little socks. A soft blanket. Three tiny vests. And, with all the certainty of a man unveiling a sound decision, a few bits of clothing in what is, to him, plainly green. 

“It’s because we don’t know what it’s goin’ to be yet,” he explains. “Neutral, see. And I like green.”

You take the little romper from his hand and just stare at it. Your face pulls tight in a way he recognises on the spot. He is about to be roasted. Oddly, he finds he does not mind that at all. In fact he waits for it with a kind of interest.

Instead, you look up and say, “Can I see your glasses for a second?”

Dunk frowns. “Why?”

“Just gimme them.”

He bends down enough for you to pluck them off his face. The room blurs. You put them on and mutter, “Jesus.”

Then, you hold up the romper with theatrical concentration and inspect it. Dunk has to lean back and squint uselessly to see anything at all. You look strange in his glasses. Endearing too, though he wishes very much he could see you properly. The frames are too broad for you and the lenses blow your eyes up enormous. Worse still, you are wearing something of his, however briefly, and that does something ill-advised to the inside of him.

You smack your lips. Sigh. “Nope. It’s not the glasses. Still poo-coloured.”

Dunk blinks at the blur of you. “What?”

“This is not green, you goof. This is shite-coloured.” You hold the thing up between two fingers. “Who makes baby clothes in this shade? Duncan—are you colourblind?”

“It is green.”

“It is absolutely not green.”

“It is.”

You grin so wide he can hear it in your voice. Then you laugh, loud and helpless, and because of course he does, he starts laughing too, though he still feels entirely right. “It’s green,” he insists.

“It’s baby diarrhoea.”

“That’s still under the umbrella of green.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Give us those back,” he says, reaching for you at last because this has gone on long enough.

You dodge half a step, still laughing. “Clearly they don’t help you at all—”

But he gets an arm round your middle anyway and pulls you in. Just enough. Enough that your laugh shortens against him. Enough that his face lands close to yours, too close for his peace and too blurred for his comfort. He can barely make out the shape of you now. Only the warmth of your body, your breath, and the faint line of your mouth.

Then, your hand comes up and settles on the back of his neck. “I love your enthusiasm,” you say, softer now. “But can we go shopping together? I promise I’ll make the time.”

Dunk closes his eyes at that. Just for a second. Lets the touch be there and himself experience the warmth seeping from your skin to his throat. His thumbs move once over your waist as if they have thoughts of their own.

“Mm,” he says after swallowing. “Can I get my glasses back now? I’ll snap my neck without them.”

You huff a laugh and slide them back onto his nose. He feels the familiar weight settle. When he opens his eyes again you are still there. Close enough to punch his nose with the smell of butter and clementine zest.

“Will you be good and go to bed now,” he asks, “or do I’ve to make you?”

You step out of the embrace, roll your fucking eyes, and at this point Dunk hates the way Pavlovian responses work in his own body. Then, you turn, march off toward the bedroom, and despite Duncan knowing this whole evening is going to be quite literally hard for him, the pinch he’s been carrying at the back of his neck loosens one notch.

So he makes the tea. Thinks a great many things about how to survive this without making a complete idiot of himself, and then remembers this is what he wanted. He steps through your flat with the odd sense that your corridor accommodates him better than his own, then finds the bedroom door wide open, the telly on so low it is nearly only light. And you—on your back in bed, over the duvet, lousily half-covered by a throw and still in your clothes, with one shoe on as if you lost the will halfway through the job.

He sets the mugs down on the bedside table and stands there looking at you for a second longer than is useful. Your hair is all over the place. One arm’s flung out. You look less like a person who has gone to bed than one who has been dropped there by invisible force.

Dunk crouches and reaches for the shoe. Your foot twitches in his hand. You stir, make a small sound, and he says, low so as not to startle you, “Look at ye. Didn’t want to go to bed and now you’re near droolin’ into the pillow, hm?”

Your eyes stay shut. “I don’t drool,” you mutter.

The words come out rough with rasp. You hear it too. Your eyes blink open a slit. “Oh my God,” you croak. “Maybe I am sick.”

It is another misfortune to Duncan. He keeps his face straight with effort, thumb still hooked at your heel while his brain trips over the sound of you all husky and wrecked with sleep. “Aye,” he says, a bit too quickly. Then, gentler: “Think maybe ye are, lass.” He gets the shoe off and sets it aside. Sits on the edge of the bed. “D’you want to change?”

You give a tiny, miserable shake of the head. “No. Please don’t make me move.”

A smile pulls at him. “What if I move ye?”

You make a thin, put-upon noise, but let him shift you all the same. Duncan slips an arm behind your back and another under your knees and lifts just enough to get you where you ought to be, then works the blanket and covers around you properly. You are warm through your clothes. Too warm. By the time he has you tucked in, the tea is set by your bed and you are sunk deeper into the pillow with the loose, dazed look of someone whose body has decided the argument is over.

“You’re a saint,” you tell him.

God save him. He wishes he were. Instead he sits there hearing your voice make that shape for him and wonders what other praise would sound like in it. What it would sound like if he had earned it with his fingers. Or his mouth. What it would sound like repeated around a yes because you could not do much else. He sits there wishing for his body to seize all blood circulation, or better yet, for a fucking aneurysm—anything to stop the attention gathering between his hips. 

A swallow he manages to force through comes out loud. He tucks the blanket once more near your shoulder though it needs no tucking. “You gonna sleep?” he asks. “Mind if I take a shower?”

You blink up at him. “Course not.” Your voice catches again and comes out worse. “You don’t even have to stay if you don’t want.”

Dunk clears his throat. “I want to.” You look at him a second, tired enough not to make much of it. He adds, because he has to add something, “Just—been at school all day. Clinic after. Feel a bit grubby, is all.”

“Mm,” you rasp, already halfway gone again. “Help yourself.”

He nods though you have shut your eyes by then. Stands. Looks at you once, then makes himself turn for the bathroom before he does something catastrophically foolish, like climb in beside you just to see if you would let him.

When he closes the door it dawns on him that he’s somehow found his way to the promised land. In this bathroom lives the answer to why on earth would a human girl smell like the inside of a biscuit packet and Duncan’s gonna find it as if his life depends on it. 

So he starts with whatever bottles and jars are lined along the sink and stacked on the shelf. Uncorks the perfume and wedges his nose into the caps because spraying them outright would be difficult to explain to someone who’s got a newly acquired hound dog sense of smell. One of the creams carries a faint scent of biscuit, another of clementine peel and one of the flacons has something soft in it that must live somewhere at the base of your throat and wrists. Bits of you are in all of it, but none of them are exactly right. That makes Dunk think you are the secret ingredient to all of this and do something the products cannot manage on their own.

Resigned, he puts everything back where he found it. Then, he bends to one of the lower cabinets for a clean towel and gets confronted with your laundry basket. He gasps softly.

Some wicked ounce of boyhood, still alive in him despite the years and the schooljob and his giant responsible body, lifts its head and tells him to have no respect for himself. It makes him double-check if he’s closed the door properly. What happens next he will later attempt to class as an accident of momentum and circumstance and weak moral judgement. In one unconscious fit of getting afflicted with dick-for-brains and heart-for-dick, he sends his rational mind on mandatory leave from decision-making and lets himself be tempted by the crumpled knot of lace at the top of the heap. Watches his own hand reach for it like he’s watching someone commit a crime from three feet away, and presses it to his face.

His mouth hangs open. The minute he’s muzzled, all the blood in him remembers. His body gets thrown straight back to that moment when he had his nose buried in it and your pussy was underneath the cloth, and he was drunk and you were too, and there was a heft of your ass between his fingers and your thighs on his shoulders.

He finds it there. Gone darker, closer, headier, with tang at the edges. Slightly overripe, like fruit tipped past perfect and threatening to spoil if nobody is bold enough to get at it in time. It is a note more maddening than what you carry at the throat and Dunk wonders if there is more to a scent than creams and oils and perfume and sweat. He wonders if it’s something truer than heat at the loins and if it’s possible that you’ve made yourself into a complex thing he may spend his life trying to disassemble and inevitably, fail.

Events fold down on him. One second he’s back to the first night so completely he fears the hard-on rising in his pants has all to do with the memory of fucking you. Then, his chest suffers a full-on assault of the smaller things: your hand squeezing his at the clinic, the same hand at his neck, you laughing, you crying, you in his glasses, your forehead glowing with the mild fever and your feet going soft under his fingers and your voice gravelled in a throat that’s sore and from there his name is being croaked out so intimately his body gives a small helpless hitch.

“Christ,” Dunk whispers. He blinks and finds himself breathing you in like a sinner with his cheek nearly brushing the cabinet door and his palm deep beneath the waistband, fingers wrapped round his balls like he’s trying to make the boner go back where it came from. “Fuck—”

Some bastard reasoning in him is winning the argument. The point, supposedly, is to get his body out of the way so he can go back into your room and be decent amongst all the little things you do that are slowly becoming insufferable.

At some point all the merged parts of him begin to work against him and feed him conjured images. When he moves his hand to the base of his cock, in his dick-for-brains it is your hand. He slides the fist down to the tip and near hears you saying you’re doing so well. Humming. Cooing at him in that hoarse voice. Speaking his name, his full name, saying Duncan, calling him yours, giving him a place to belong to, telling him he’ll be a great father and all of that straight to his ear, so close your mouth brushes his earlobe.

He’s got no idea why any of that would happen, because Dunk has never thought of himself as neither heartthrob nor cuntthrob. He’s simply a throb for girls with nice necks and tits that go heavy when the bra falls off and hips that spill over surfaces they are pressed to, and when he thinks of all of this he’s becoming wetter and wetter between the legs. So wet that the shameful act of jerking off with a mouth full of your underwear acquires a sound, and he gags himself tighter.

The effect is him becoming quieter and even more turned on, because between his mouth and palm your knickers warm from his breath and strengthen their hold on his sinuses. Make his toes curl in his socks. He goes faster and faster, and prays for you to let him, at least once, to make love to you again, for you to plow your nails through the meat of muscle on his back when he’s eating you out, to let him wipe under your eyes with his thumbs and play with your hair and grant him the image of your cum face, and then Dunk is fully gone.

He gives in to what his body has wanted all along and what his brain has never let him entertain cleanly. The made-up you at his ear gets bolder, filthier, meaner in all the sweetest ways. He hears you tell him put a baby in me and it is so hot to him his wish for an aneurysm near materialises, only in his cock.

“Jesus—” he chokes into the lace.

He fumbles himself out of his shorts, hissing when the rough fabric catches on the tender head, then sprawls over the cold porcelain of your sink like he’s trying to survive a wound. One hand works him in short frantic strokes while his mouth keeps filling with your knickers and your scent and all the stupid rotten things he has made of both.

Your name spills out first. Then lass. Then please, said to nobody who is there to hear it. Then, Duncan loses the last of whatever little dignity had kept him upright through this. He mutters to you in scraps. Please. Let me. Ah, Christ. Good girl. Little torn-off bits of talk, pathetic enough to shame him if shame were not already queueing up outside the door.

He comes with his face turned into his own forearm, teeth sunk hard into it to stop the cry. The force of it goes through him so sharp his knees near give and he has to catch himself on the sink. For one blind second he can hear nothing but blood and breath and the wet drag of his own hand finishing the job while his cock pulses itself empty under his fist.

When he can see again, the first thing he does is look at your knickers. They are damp with his spit. He stares at them in full mute horror, then jerks his eyes round the room in a panic to check whether he has sprayed anything impossible to clean. Sink, mirror, tiles, floor. He finds spots and deals with them in a rush, yanking toilet roll loose with one hand while the other still shakes with the last of it. Shame keeps punching him like a heavy boulder.

He starts the shower, strips, and thinks only that at least his dick is down now. Under the water he just stands and lets it run hotter than is sensible, hoping the last of the tension will leave him and go down the drain. He uses only the plain bar soap to clean himself because reaching for any of your fancy bottles would be begging to get trapped in here for another round of disgrace if any one of them smells even faintly of you.

When he steps out, he sees the knickers where he left them. That is when he permits himself one more second of possession. He palms them, pushes them deep into his pocket, and spends the whole walk from the bathroom to your bedroom convincing himself he did not do it.

There, he finds you asleep. One arm under the pillow, mouth parted, the blanket kicked low again since your body has elected fever on top of everything else. Dunk smiles to himself. Goes to the free side of the bed and sits, careful not to jostle you. Then, because his own back is one long complaint from the day, he stretches both arms over his head and lets out a slow breath through his nose.

From behind him comes a hoarse little hum. “Biiiiig stretch.”

He chuckles, caught, and turns to look at you. Your eyes are open only a slit. Glassy. Cheeks and forehead shining. But your face has gone calm in sleep, none of the strain from earlier left in it.

“You all right?” he asks.

“Mm,” you say. “You?”

That throws him for half a beat. “Aye. Why wouldn’t I be?”

You blink slowly. “You’ve been brooding since the doctor’s.”

He stares at you in silence, surprised enough that he forgets to hide it.

“I’ve eyes,” you mutter.

Dunk huffs once through his nose. “Do ye.”

“Mm.” You shift a little deeper into the pillow. “You wanna talk about it?”

For one dangerous second he thinks of all the things he could say that have you in the middle of them. The biggest of them is there like a bad tooth: that all of this has him half split open with gratitude and dread, and that a fair bit of the dread comes from the fact that he has never had a family without the word broken nailed to it.

He could tell you that. He could tell you he does not know how to speak of being left without making it sound like a plea for pity, and that the thought of pity from you makes his skin crawl even though it would be yours. He could tell you the whole thing feels so enormous to him because nobody has ever stayed by right, only by accident or habit, and now there is a child in the middle of the future asking to be counted before it has even got limbs to speak of. All of that crowds up and stops at the back of his teeth. Then his mind swerves, thankfully, into ground more fit for human use. “There’s this…” He scrubs a hand over his mouth. “This kid in my school.” 

You nod a little to show you’re listening.

“He’s a good lad,” Dunk says. “Bright. Bit odd, but in the right ways. Small fella. Carries himself like he’s forty.” He glances at you and finds your eyes on him despite how tired you look. “Home’s not… simple for him.”

He picks at a loose thread on the blanket. “He says things. About his brothers. His house. Just drops them in like nothin’. One of them smashed up his schoolbag. One of them shaved his head drunk and nicked him. Their da’s due back and the whole place sounds fit to burst when he talks of it.” He pauses. “But he says it all like he’s listing what’s in the fridge. Then looks at me as if I’m meant to know what to do with it.”

Your hand moves under the blanket and finds his where it rests on the bedspread. He goes quiet.

Then: “I don’t—” Dunk says after a moment. “Know what to do, I mean. Not really. If I push, he shuts up. If I don’t, I feel like I’m lettin’ him down. And he’s only a child.”

You rub his knuckles once with your thumb. “He talks to you,” you say.

“Aye.”

“That’s not nothing.”

He glances down at your hand on his. Small against big. His fingers still a bit rough from gym equipment and steering wheel and all the other ordinary uses of them. “I know,” he says. “Still doesn’t tell me what I’m meant to do.”

“No.” Your voice catches and roughens worse. You clear it with a tiny wince. “Sorry, no, that’s not useful.” You shift a little under the covers. “Can you ask him? Not what happened, I mean—whether he wants you to do anything. Whether he wants you to step in at all.” You pause. “And if you can’t ask him, maybe you measure it by feel? There’s probably a moment where it stops being his business to manage and becomes too much for a kid. Do you feel like it’s there yet?”

A laugh almost gets out of him at that, though not from mockery. More from the shock of finding something solid in what he had thought would be only kindness. “Christ,” he says softly. “Maybe.”

“I know absolutely fuck-all about children,” you add, and his mouth does twitch now. “But I know a bit about people trying to act as if things don’t hurt when they do.”

Dunk turns his head. You are half gone with tiredness, eyes barely open, throat a gravel, and still there is that effort in you, the reaching. More than just to soothe him. To actually think it through on his behalf.

“And maybe talk to the father, if he’s not the source of the problem,” you murmur. “Or someone else in the house. But ask the boy first if you can. Let him have that much.” You blink slow, fight your way back up for one more second. “I don’t know if any of that’s useful.”

He sits with it. “It is,” he says. “Thank you. That does help.”

You nod a little into the pillow. “Dunk, you can tell me things. We’re stuck together, and I keep whining to you about every little thing that happens to me. I don’t want it to be one-sided. Wouldn’t be right.” For a second after that you drift, and he thinks you are gone. Then: “Hm, what’s his name?”

“Aegon.”

One eye opens a bit more. “That’s awful.”

Dunk laughs properly, quiet enough not to shake the bed. “Aye.”

“Poor child.”

“He likes Egg better.”

“I like Egg better too.”

You shut your eyes again. Your hand stays where it is on his for another few breaths before going loose with sleep. Dunk lets it lie there till the weight of it changes. Only then does he ease his own hand free and sit beside you in the low hum of the telly, listening to you breathe and feeling, for the first time that day, a little less trapped inside his own head. He doesn’t even know when it happens so that his body folds on the mattress and cheek touches the pillow.

[goat-limbs]

Heartburn | Ch.5.

contents (sfw): Dunk x fem!Reader, Modern AU friends to lovers rom-com with pregnancy. Smidge of angst, humour, banter, Raymun being a good friend, Egg cameo, lots of feels and yearning, one 🤏 foot massage :3

*Mo chailín daor -> My dear girl.

<- previous chapter MASTERLIST next chapter -> (22/05)

synopsis: Aftermath of the telling, Dunk's reaction to it and their first doctor's visit! From this point forward I will be marking how pregnant Reader is so this time we are 7 weeks in :)

word count: 8K

a/n: Banner by me, dividers by @strangergraphics, proofread by @hextoken! I promise this will make sense. And just a reminder, taglist is ofc open.

Four hours is a long time when your own mind has turned mutinous. In that span you change it three times. First you think you will tell him and get it over with before fear can grow roots. Then you decide you absolutely will not, because there is no reason to drag him into a thing you have not even managed to hold properly in your own two hands yet. Then you circle back again, because this is not a leaky tap or some other private disaster to be handled with paper towels and a grim face. By the end of it you have drafted six versions of nevermind and deleted all six, because none of them land. They all sound like lies written by a woman already half inside a larger one.

On Rowan’s advice you buy two more tests from different brands, as if science might be bullied into contradiction by variety. (It is not.) Both come up positive. Each time the waiting strips you raw, and each time you realise with a small shock that you are hoping for the same answer. Tea appears in your hands by the mugful. You drink so much of it that the taste goes flat. You call the clinic and make an appointment in a voice that sounds, to your own ear, entirely like somebody else’s.

Half an hour before he is due, you stand in the hallway between the two mirrors and practise expressions. Smiles, mostly. Calm ones. Reassuring ones. Ones that might survive a first glance. There is nowhere else to hang the mirrors, so one faces the other and sends your reflection running off in crooked ranks behind you. One gives you the plain lie. The other, older and faintly warped, gives it back with a twist: the smile goes distorted at the edges and even though there is nothing human-looking about it, this reflection feels more accurate than the first one. Your mother got rid of nearly every mirror in the house when you were a girl, so you keep these two out of something that feels, on bad days, a little like spite.

By the time he knocks, you are still caught between, watching an infinite number of your own hands rise and fall a fraction too late in that dim iridescent tunnel. Once the door opens, your nerves are humming so hard you barely register that he is nervous too. What you notice is the dampness at his temples, the way he has clearly come on foot through weather that cannot decide what season it belongs to, and his eyes—enormous behind the lenses, fixed on you with such helpless attention that avoiding them is impossible.

In the kitchen he looks like he’s bracing for catastrophe and trying to be decent about it. When his mind starts lurching toward the most embarrassing possibilities, something in you gives up on finesse and reaches for blunt force instead.

The word pregnant leaves your mouth, and Dunk’s face goes blank.

It empties, as if every expression has left. You tell him you think you would like to keep it, and still he gives you nothing. He stands there petrified while your own pulse goes at you like a fist on a locked door while something monstrous is chasing the fist’s owner. You are squeezing your cup so hard a cramp catches in the little muscle of your palm and makes your smallest finger twitch. The pain finally forces sound back into you.

“Dunk?” you say, because the silence has turned mean. “Are you with me?”

That brings him back. A visible moment of him stepping behind his own eyes again. He looks at you and then something softens so completely it startles you. He takes the cup from your hands, puts it aside, and then he is all shoulders and arms and chest, gathering you in with such force and certainty that your own body gives up and makes more tears. He smells of damp air and anxious sweat and the cold he has carried in from outside. Some bit of weather still clings to him. He keeps thanking you, and it takes you a second to understand why.

He is happy.

It goes through you strangely and ungently. He says he is happy and hugs you tighter, and your eyes sting all over again because of course this is how he would do it, with gratitude so plain it makes your ribs feel poky. You could say I’m glad it’s with you. The truth stands there ready enough. Yet what comes out is softer and more defended, something about there being worse fates than this. He does not seem to mind. Or perhaps he minds and forgives it instantly. When he says you will make it work, he says it with such simple conviction that your brain, treacherous thing, takes him for safety and holds onto him.

“So, um—” you begin after a while, your mouth half lost against his sweatshirt. “Do you want to talk stuff?”

“Mm, stuff?” Dunk hums above you. “As in: rules?”

You shrug as best you can inside his arms. “Yeah. Like… do you want to come to appointments and all that.”

He draws back a little. “Course I do. When’s the first one, then?”

“In two weeks,” you say. “A proper check.”

“I’ll come,” he says with negative amounts of hesitation. Below zero. It should maybe worry you, how quickly he slots himself into the sentence. Instead it eases something jagged.

He studies your face a moment longer. “You scared?”

You let out a breath. “Shitless. My mam was… difficult.” The word seems thin and insufficient. Dunk takes it as if it weighed much more.

“But you’re a great woman,” he says, and the seriousness does a great many things to your stomach. “And I’m not too bad with kids. Ah, worst case, we raise a criminal.” 

A laugh does get out then, surprised and wet. “You’re so silly.”

He smiles in the smallest way, as if he is pleased to have earned it and trying not to crowd the moment by showing too many teeth.

You talk a little longer after that, though nothing in it feels as large as what has already happened. Bits and pieces. Practical things. He asks whether you have eaten. You lie and say enough. He does not call you on it, but his face says he knows better. The room slowly returns to itself around you and all of it looks absurdly normal.

When he finally gets up to leave, he does it with the air of a man pulling his own hands off something he does not want to let go of yet. There is no argument in him about going, only reluctance. All his heartstrings look yanked tight under the skin. He passes the mirrored gate and you watch endless versions of him stepping through, each one smaller and less true to the original. At the door he stands still a moment, looks like he’s about to say something, then his fingers drift to your face where strands of hair have caught in your brows and between eyelashes. He touches your forehead and swipes them to the side. You feel the tiny drag as he frees them, a ticklish sting across your eyelid, delicate enough to make your eyes threaten water for reasons that have nothing to do with pain. Then, he smooths the rest behind your ear and says, quiet and certain, “We’ll be all right.”

You smile at him. His hand ends up at your neck. It’s warm and a little damp. The urge to kiss you arrives whole. The same bad, blinding urge he had that first night at the pub quiz, when wanting had first stopped feeling abstract and started feeling like a thing with weight and momentum. It comes to him now with a sentiment that it would fix something, ease something, set the whole world a little straighter.

He stops himself before the thought can get any further than that. “Sleep well, lass,” he says. Only lets his thumb brush once beneath your ear, and after that makes himself go.

Dunk does some walking before he realises he’s headed not home at all. He’s torn between running while screaming and going somewhere to get blind drunk. The news sits in him, so huge, his chest feels swollen with it. Before he chooses either option, phone materialises in his hand and he’s texting Raymun: you up? Need to ask ye somethin.

He gets back fast. Aye. Usual place in 10?

Dunk is already turning before he finishes reading. Halfway down the next street he sees Raymun coming from the other end, coat half-buttoned, hair in the state of someone who’s been stuck on the couch doom-scrolling. For one mad second Dunk nearly shouts it across the pavement, but stops himself out of worry for his kneecaps.

“Oi!” Raymun calls. “I’ve only got an hour or so. Rowan’s asleep, but if she wakes and I’m not there she’ll be raging.”

Dunk hugs him. “Aye, won’t take ye long,” he says. They head for the door and Dunk asks, “She up your arse this much?”

“Nah, she’s just scared a bit,” Raymun says. They go to the bar and order. Once they have the pints, Raymun carries on, abashed in a small happy way. He scratches the back of his neck. “I am too, honestly. Scared, I mean. Everythin’s goin’ well, but why would I have everythin’ goin’ well for once, I dunno.”

Dunk nods thoughtfully. He’s scared too, but for many more reasons than Raymun. “And Lyonel?”

“He’s a bastard, but a good one.” Raymun lights up a little and laughs. “Came to see the orchard. Met my grandfather. Got so drunk he nearly had to crawl out. Apparently they love each other now.”

Dunk laughs at that and drinks his beer. Raymun looks at him and frowns. “Dunk,” he says. “I love seein’ ye, mate, y’know I do.” He sets a palm on Dunk’s shoulder. “But did ye make me risk me life to ask about Rowan and the cider business?”

“Aye, no, I didn’t,” Dunk says. He says your name first, just to have it hanging there in case he decides to coward out and tell Raymun only half of the truth. But Raymun looks at him with such friendly, tolerant eyes it all spills out of him. Dunk takes a big breath and looks somewhere past Raymun’s head, to a vintage poster saying Guinness is a whole meal. “After that night at the Storm,” he starts, “we slept together. Spoke of it little after. She gave me a free pass.”

Raymun’s face shifts the more he hears. “Free pass?” he asks, trying hard to balance eagerness with outrage. Dunk nods. Raymun lowers his voice a bit. “So nothin’ came of it?”

“Ah, somethin’ came of it,” Dunk says. He winces, then makes himself look at Raymun. “She’s pregnant now. Just told me.”

For a moment Dunk hears how it sounds once it’s said to somebody else. Deranged. Frightening. Faintly impossible. More than any of that, right. Once he says it, it belongs in the world and fits there, and despite all the crooked bits of it, Dunk likes the sounding of it.

Raymun’s face lags. He is clearly searching for something to say, but his mouth cannot seem to keep pace with the options. What he lands on is, “So that’s why Rowan was so strange when she came back.” He looks at Dunk long and hopeful. “Are you—?”

“Happy?” Dunk says, and makes him suffer a second longer by taking another sip of his beer. “Aye, mate. Nearly cried right there.”

“And you guys—?”

“No, just—” Dunk shakes his head. “We keep it where it is. Just parenting together.”

Raymun frowns. “Duncan.”

“What?”

“You absolute gobshite.” Dunk cuts him a look over the rim of his pint. Raymun leans closer, drops his voice. “You ought to tell her.” He makes a helpless sort of face, pleading and disbelieving all at once.

“There’s naught to tell, Ray,” Dunk says. “We slept together, she remembers nearly none of it. She asked could we still be friends. I ought to keep that more than anythin’ else.” He can see exactly how little Raymun approves of this. There’s a pause, and Dunk sighs, sinking a little on the stool. “But I’ve just told her we’re gonna be all right, and then it hit me I know piss-all about children that aren’t grown enough to get in a mud fight at lunch.”

Raymun barks a laugh. “Well I don’t know much about that either.”

“How far in is Rowan, then?”

“Ten weeks? Eleven?” he says. “Somethin’ like that.”

Dunk leans in as if they are discussing something unthinkable rather than pregnant women. “Well,” he says, “what’s she like?”

“Oh, fussy.” Raymun huffs, all fond. “Mean to me one minute, then she wants her neck rubbed. Sweet enough in the evenings, cranky in the mornings. Eats a lot, but I think it’s more because she reckons she ought to than because she actually wants to. The kid’s a Brussels sprout, but her back aches sometimes like it’s an elephant.”

“Brussels sprout?” Dunk mutters.

“Aye, look—” Raymun whips out his phone and opens an app all done in pink and peach colours. “I’ve got it all here. Gonna be a plum soon.”

Dunk stares at the screen with the grave attention he usually gives lesson plans and suspicious rashes on children. “That’s a stupid system.”

Raymun snorts. “Why?”

“Because plums vary, don’t they? Brussels sprouts too. One sprout’s small, another’s near a tennis ball if you’ve bought badly.”

Raymun laughs into his pint. “Aye, all right, fair point.”

“And why food at all?” Dunk asks. “Why’s it not somethin’ useful?”

“Because women would kill whoever made the app if it said your baby is now the size of loose change,” Raymun says. “How far in is she?”

Dunk frowns. “Three weeks?”

Raymun blinks at him. “Three weeks since what?”

“Since it happened.”

“That ain’t how it works.”

Dunk looks genuinely affronted. “How else would it work?”

“It counts from the last period.”

Dunk stares. “That’s stupid too.”

“Aye, maybe, but that’s what they do. So if it was three weeks ago…” Raymun squints at the screen, thumb moving. “She’s what, four? Five weeks, maybe.”

“How d’you know that?”

“The doctor told us,” Raymun says. “And I read.”

Dunk gives him a look over the rim of his glass. “You?”

“Fuck off,” Raymun says mildly. “Here. Four weeks.” He turns the screen. “See? Poppy seed. Rice grain. One o’ them.”

Dunk peers at it, then lifts his hand and tries to pinch the air at the size of it. His fingers wobble before they even get close enough. “That can’t be right.”

“It is right.”

“That’s not even a size. That’s debris.”

Raymun laughs so loudly the barman glances over. Dunk keeps staring at the app as if the grain might enlarge under pressure. A whole child. At present, apparently, smaller than a thing stuck to the side of a pot.

“What d’you do,” he asks after a moment, “when a woman’s fussy?”

Raymun rocks his pint a bit. “Hit and miss.”

“That helpful, is it?”

“I’m serious. You’ve got to offer options. Tea. Toast. A lie-down. A walk. Neck rub. Blanket. Open a window. Close a window. Then she picks one and tells you the other six were stupid.”

Dunk absorbs this with a solemn nod. “Right.”

“And sometimes,” Raymun adds, “she’ll say nothin’s wrong, and somethin’s clearly wrong, and you’ve just got to stand there and keep bein’ useful till she decides what it is herself.”

“Sounds grim.”

“It’s grand,” Raymun says at once. “Just grim sometimes.”

Dunk drinks. Thinks. Looks again at the little grain on the screen.

Raymun lets him sit with it for a minute, then says, “You’re really not gonna pursue this, then?”

Dunk’s mouth shifts. “Pursue what?”

“The girl.”

Dunk rubs at the label on his bottle. “Ray, look at it from where I’m stood. I’ve got more than I thought I would already.”

Raymun goes still at that.

Dunk shrugs, uncomfortable under his own honesty now it is out. “She’s keepin’ it. She wants me there. I’m there. That’s—” He stops, because even saying it plain makes something hot move up in his gut. “That’s grand enough to knock me sideways. I’m not gonna start askin’ for more and ruin the lot.”

Raymun looks at him for a long moment with something that understands too well. “Aye,” he says in the end. “I get you.”

Dunk huffs once, humourless. “Do ye?”

“I do, actually.” Raymun tips his glass against the bar top. “But still. You’ve a bad habit of folding yourself up to fit whatever room you’re in.”

Dunk glances at him.

Raymun does not push further. He just nudges the phone back between them and says, lighter now, “Anyway. Your one’s currently a grain of rice, give or take. So maybe start there and work your way up.”

Dunk looks at the tiny white shape on the screen again and feels, all at once, terrified and absurdly proud. “A grain of rice,” he repeats.

“Aye.”

He nods to himself. “Right.” Then, after a beat: “I’ll need that app.”

So Raymun helps Dunk install the app. He recommends Dunk books to read and websites to check out. Apparently there is an Instagram profile run by a dad for other dads and Raymun makes Dunk follow that account. They sit until Raymun gets a text from Rowan that consists of five question marks and that’s a sign enough that Raymun has pushed his luck tonight. They hug tight goodbye, and Raymun gives Dunk one solemn look, and says, “Mate. I didn’t say congratulations. So—congratulations. Yer gonna be a dad, ain’t that somethin’?”

“Aye, that’s somethin’,” Dunk says. He clasps Raymun’s shoulders once more and then they go their designated directions, Raymun much faster than Dunk. At home, Duncan falls asleep lulled by lager and a strange certainty that all will be well and tells himself that for now things are solid, because grains of rice are at least roughly all the same size.

He eases into the rest of the week slowly. Texts you sometimes to test the waters, and you always reply, even if only to tell him work is hectic. Once, he goes as far as to send you a goodnight message, and to that you send back sleep well, old man, which makes him slightly warm in the ears.

With less than a week before the first appointment, he gets a bit antsy. Checks the app often as if the babe’s not gonna transform from a grain of rice to a sweet pea unless he monitors it. Egg finds him, curious as ever, sat on the courtyard bench with a nose wedged into his phone and as kids do, just plops beside him and looks over his shoulder.

“What’s that?” Egg asks, peering at the screen.

“Nothin’ that concerns you,” Dunk says, angling the phone away. “Don’t you have class?”

“I’ve a free period.” Egg tips his head. “Don’t you?”

Dunk only sighs at that, which is answer enough. Then he notices the plaster on the side of Egg’s head. Small thing, flesh-coloured, just above the ear. “What happened there?”

Egg reaches up and touches it as if he had forgotten. “Daerion was drunk shaving my head and got me a little.”

Dunk goes very still. “He what?”

Egg glances at him. “A little,” he repeats. “It’s fine.”

Dunk looks at the bandage a second longer than he ought to. “You all right?”

“Yes. All men cut themselves shaving at least once,” Egg says with maddening calm. “And I’d still sooner have him do it than anyone else. Aerion would take off more than a slice.”

Dunk’s hand curls into a fist on his knee. He makes himself loosen it. “If you want to talk more about it,” he says carefully, “or want me to do anythin’, I would.”

Egg shakes his head at once. “No.” Just that. No.

Then, his eyes drop to the phone again. He squints at the pastel nonsense on the screen, the little fruit icon, the week count. When he speaks next it is with grave interest. “So you’re going to have a baby?”

Dunk lets out a slow breath. “Jesus.”

“With whom?”

“What business is it of yours?”

“None,” Egg says. “But it’s happy news, no?”

Dunk cannot help the way his mouth shifts at that. “Aye. It is.”

Egg absorbs this. “I didn’t know you had a wife.”

“I don’t have a wife.”

Egg turns his whole face up to him. “Then who are you having a baby with?”

“A girl,” Dunk says, already annoyed with himself. “A woman, I mean.”

“Well why isn’t she your wife, then?”

There is a pause in which Dunk comes up with three possible answers and believes none of them. “Because things are…” He trails off. “They’re as they are.”

Egg watches him with open disbelief.

Dunk rubs a hand down his jaw. “What?”

“Well.” Egg shrugs, but only with one shoulder, a gesture he has plainly stolen from some older brother. “Is she going to be your wife, then?”

Dunk hangs there for a moment. Then, against all dignity, he hears himself ask, “Should she be?”

Egg’s brows pull together. “Are you asking a seven-year-old that?”

Dunk snorts despite himself.

“Are you even an adult?” Egg goes on.

“Mind your business,” Dunk tells him. “And don’t test me.”

“I’m not testing you,” Egg says, affronted. “I just think if a woman is making a baby for you, you ought to make her a wife. That’s what my father says.”

It lands quite hard, despite Dunk not wanting to admit it. He looks back at the phone, at the sweet pea where the grain of rice had been two days ago, then at the yard in front of them where a football lies abandoned in a patch of weak sun. “You really think so?” he asks.

Egg nods at once. “Yes.”

Dunk studies him. “And what would you know about it?”

Egg sits up a bit straighter. “Plenty.”

“You’re seven.”

“And you’re ancient,” Egg says. “That doesn’t seem to be helpin’.”

Dunk laughs under his breath and shakes his head.

Egg, encouraged, presses on. “Besides, you strike me as husband material.”

Dunk turns and stares at him. “How d’you know phrases like that?”

Egg gives him a look that is nearly pity. “I’ve told you already. Girls like me.”

“Oh, have you.”

“Yes. One of them said it.”

Dunk huffs. “One of the girls in your class called you husband material.”

“Not in my class.” Egg looks faintly smug now. “An older girl.”

“Jesus wept.”

“She said I was serious and had nice eyelashes.”

At that Dunk gives up and laughs outright. Egg allows him a second of it before returning, with brutal efficiency, to the matter at hand. “So,” he says. “Are you going to marry her?”

Dunk looks down at the app again, though he is no longer reading a word on it. The question is much too large for a child to have asked. Too simple too. “I don’t know,” he says.

Egg accepts this more easily than any grown person would. “Well. You should figure it out before somebody else does.”

Dunk blinks. “What’s that mean?”

Egg shrugs. “Women hate waiting.”

Then the bell goes sharp through the yard. Egg hops down from the bench.

“You’re late,” Dunk says.

“I know.” Egg starts off, then glances back. “Congratulations, anyway.”

Dunk is still sitting there like he has been hit lightly over the head. “Aye,” he says after him. “Thanks.”

Egg nods once and heads inside. Dunk stays on the bench a minute longer. Husband material, says the seven-year-old oracle with the cut by his ear and a father rich enough to make rules for schools. Dunk rubs at his mouth, thinking of you and your frightened face in the kitchen and your voice saying I think I’d like to keep it.

By lunch he has not stopped thinking of it. By the end of the day the thought has rooted. By evening it has become a plan stupid enough to feel, in certain lights, almost noble. The next day he guts his savings account a little and goes to buy a ring, hoping one of the clerks will have hands like yours so he can judge the size properly, all while telling himself he probably will not do it anyway.

The woman who comes to help him has hands near enough in size to serve, though Dunk rules them inferior for reasons he cannot explain without sounding unwell. The fingers are the right sort and the knuckles show a little, same as yours, but yours are prettier. He spends one full stupid second wondering whether prominent joints are a thing men are meant to find attractive, then gives it up. He likes them. That is enough. There is no committee to answer to.

He picks something modest, but good. Gold band, blue stone. Not too grand, and not mean either, just a ring a woman could wear every day without fearing it. When the clerk tells him it is a lovely choice because it matches his eyes, he nearly puts it back from sheer discomfort. Then, because the whole exercise has already cost him his dignity, he asks if she would mind trying it on so he can see the size on an actual hand. She giggles at that and goes pink all over in a way that confuses him until it is too late and she says, “She’s one lucky lady.”

Dunk chokes on his own breath a little. Lucky does not strike him as the word for any of this, though he considers himself to be.

For the days after, he keeps the box on his bedside table like a thing under observation. As if its mere presence might declare itself either a brilliant idea or proof of damage to the head. It says nothing, of course. It only sits there, square and shut, while he glances at it every morning and every night and feels his pulse do odd things.

On the day of the appointment he wakes sweaty, nervous and giddy all over. Before he can think better of it, he sends you a gif of a wriggling cat.

You text back: I know. Glad one of us is excited, I’m NAUSEOUS and I have to go and do bloodwork in half an hour.

Dunk smiles at the screen and writes: If you puke you get a free pass on it.

You react with a laughing face, then send the clinic pin and the hour, neither of which he needs because he has both memorised already.

What feels odd to him, and then odder the longer he sits with it, is not seeing you for two weeks. A few messages, a few careful little exchanges, and that is all. He knows Rowan and Raymun are by now attached at the hip. He knows every arrangement is different and that this one is barely an arrangement yet. Still, some part of him resents missing the small things. He does not even know what small things there are to miss. Only that there must be some, and that they are happening without him.

At the clinic’s main hall he spots you before you spot him, though that might only be because he has been scanning every face that comes through the glass like a dog waiting at a gate. You walk in with your coat unbuttoned, bag slipping off one shoulder, tiredness written plain across you. Frazzled too, a little. Hair not entirely obeying. Mouth set as if the day has been giving you tasks since dawn. Lovely all the same, so much so it makes something in him go weak and witless.

You are halfway through saying hi when he decides to just hug you. A small sound leaves you when he tightens, and Dunk jerks back half an inch. “Shite. Sorry,” he says, sheepish. “Too tight?”

You swat him once in the chest, light. “If I puke, it’s on you now.”

That gets a grin out of him. “Fair enough.”

You are smiling too, faintly, and there is enough of the old ease in it to settle him some. Only some.

Inside, the waiting room smells the way fluorescent lights look. You sit shoulder to shoulder in plastic chairs with a poster about folic acid looking down at you from the wall. Dunk keeps his knees wide because otherwise there is nowhere for them to go. You keep fiddling with the strap of your bag. When the nurse calls your name, your hand finds his before either of you says anything about it. Your grip stays, and tightens once they get you both into the office.

The doctor is kind in the brisk, practised way of a man who has seen every human feeling come through his room and does not make a spectacle of any of them. He asks a run of questions, checks your details, glances over the bloodwork from earlier, and then starts building the shape of it all aloud. Last period. Cycle. Symptoms. Nausea. Tiredness. Any bleeding. Any pain.

You answer well enough at first. Then he says, “So that would put you at around seven weeks,” and your whole face turns to him.

“Seven?” you ask. “How is it seven? We—” You stop only long enough to look annoyed at having to say it in front of a stranger. “We conceived about five weeks ago.”

Dunk, still holding your hand, says, “It doesn’t count from that.”

Your head turns to him so fast he nearly feels the movement in his own neck. “How do you know that?”

The doctor laughs under his breath, a touch sardonic. “He’s right. We date it from the first day of your last menstrual period, not from the day you had sex.”

You stare between them as if there is nothing worse in this world than being mansplained pregnancy.

Then the doctor says something about your husband being well informed, and both of you answer at the same time.

“He’s not my husband.”

“I’m not a husband.”

The doctor looks up over the file. There is half a smile at one corner of his mouth. “Okay,” he says, drawing the word out only a bit, and leaves it there.

He explains the next part carefully. At this stage, he says, there may be cardiac activity visible, but he cannot promise it. Sometimes it is there. Sometimes it is simply too early, even when dates look good on paper. Either way, there would need to be another scan later to confirm development properly. He says parents often like to look if there is a chance. He says it gently, as if offering rather than insisting.

You nod. Dunk nods too, though his throat has gone tight again.

The doctor gives you time to get settled. There is a screen pulled, instructions spoken in the same calm voice, a sheet draped over your lower half. It feels intimate in the clinical sense, the way hospitals are intimate: by necessity, routine, and asking a body to become information. When you are ready, Dunk is brought back near your shoulder, where he can see your face and the monitor and not much else. He is grateful for that. It keeps his attention where it ought to be.

The colour has drained from your face a little, so he takes your hand again.

The room goes quieter than it needs to for a moment while the doctor works. There is the soft scrape of equipment, a few words of warning from him before anything uncomfortable, your small breath through the nose. Dunk looks at your face, then at the ceiling, then at the monitor because he does not know where else to put the force of his attention.

At first the screen means nothing to either of you. Grey and black shapes. Grainy weather. The doctor angles things, measures, adjusts. Then, he points.

“There,” he says.

You squint. “Where?”

He shows you. A small dark sac. A tinier thing within it. Not a baby in any storybook sense yet. More the idea of one. A start. A shape. Dunk leans in without meaning to with your fingers gone hard around his.

The doctor measures quietly, clicks a few things, studies the image. Then he stills. “And yes,” he says, softer. “There’s cardiac activity.”

For one beat neither of you reacts, perhaps because the sentence is too technical to mean what it means. Then, he turns on the sound.

It’s fast. Thin and rapid and busy. More like a trapped flutter than anything grand. Still it fills the room and packs your ears with it. Dunk feels your hand convulse in his.

Something passes over your face that he doesn’t have vocabulary for because there are too many pieces in it. Fear, wonder, bewilderment, some old grief maybe, something opening and other things closing. His own chest seems to go hollow and full at the same time. That frantic little sound keeps going, absurdly quick, belonging to nothing he can see with ordinary sense, and yet there it is. A baby. A grain of rice with a heart already hard at work.

“Mo chailín daor,” Duncan mutters, absolutely stunned.

When he glances at you, your eyes are wet.

When you look at him, his are worse.

The doctor, wise enough not to crowd the moment, talks you through the practical bits while you both struggle to rejoin the earth. Measurements look appropriate, he says. Dates are rough but seven weeks is reasonable. Bloods are fine from what he can see so far. He tells you what to watch for, what matters, what does not, when to come back. He prints a picture that barely resembles anything and hands it over with absolute seriousness.

Dunk looks at the printout, then at you, then back at the picture. “That’s—” he starts, and fails.

You laugh once through your nose, shaky as all hell. “Yeah.”

You leave quietly. Remain quiet throughout the waiting room walk, as if you were both shown the truth about the universe and it turned out to be Lovecraftian. Only when you reach the corridor does Dunk finally manage, low and thick with it, “That were fast.”

You make a helpless little face at him, still clutching the printout. “Christ, I near shat myself.”

Dunk blinks. “Thank Christ for that near because on that you wouldn’t get a free pass.”

You break so suddenly into laughter that for a second Dunk only stands there, startled and relieved by it. Then the sound tips strange. Too sharp and wet. Your face folds as quick as paper in water and before he can make sense of it you are crying outright.

He panics a little. His hands come up uselessly, hovering. “Ah, shite—lass—”

You spare him the choice by stepping straight into him. The impact is soft but wholehearted. Your face goes into his chest, and a second later his jumper is taking the brunt of it. Dunk folds his arms round you. He has seen this kind of overwhelm a hundred times on children—how a thing grows too large inside them and has to come out the eyes or the nose or the whole body. So he does not ask what is wrong, only steadies you and says, quiet as he can, “You’re bate, aren’t ye? Want me to take ye home?”

You nod against him and make a miserable little sound. “Yes.”

So he does.

In the cab you sit in the back with your head on his shoulder and the printout held between you. Neither of you says much; you just look at it. Then at each other’s hands around it. Then at it again. Dunk likes the silence of it. It feels full rather than empty.

At your building he gets out with you by instinct and only then realises he should likely have booked the taxi with a stop for him after. But at the door you turn, wrung out and tired and all softened by the crying, and ask, “Do you want tea?”

He nods. Follows.

The minute you get inside it is as if the last of your strength runs out through the soles of your feet. You make it to the couch, then drop there in your coat and shoes and everything, one arm flung over yourself, the other still holding the printout. “I’m sorry,” you mutter without moving. “I know it’s rude but you have to make the tea.”

Dunk laughs under his breath. “Aye, grand.”

He puts the kettle on, finds mugs by guesswork and memory, and when he comes back you are sprawled across the couch exactly as he left you, still staring at the picture, one hand now over your belly.

Dunk passes you a cup, then sits on the floor by where your feet are on the sofa. “How does it feel?”

“Strange,” you say. “Like—nothing’s happening yet and you can’t tell. But it feels different. It’s hard to work with this in my head.”

“D’you need to keep working?” Dunk asks.

“Aye, I’d rather, for a while longer. Lyonel is a complete cunt sometimes though, and he keeps smoking that fucking candy vape of his and it’s foul.” You take a sip and grimace faintly. “Everything in that office smells of melted sweets and cologne. I swear to God if I’m sick on one of his mood boards I’ll call it performance art.”

That makes Dunk laugh, but the laugh fades quick because his eyes have drifted to your belly again, and you catch him at it. “You can touch it if you want.”

He looks up. You set your tea aside, reach for his hand, and place it low on your stomach. There is something in the gesture that snags briefly in your head, some half-memory of him there before, as if his touch is known to that part of you already. “Here,” you say, blinking through it.

Dunk goes thoughtful and very gentle. His hand barely weighs anything there at first. Only when you press it in a little more does he let it settle proper. There is no chance of feeling anything from the baby yet. Still the whole thing seems suddenly enormous to him.

“How big’s it going to get?” he asks through a thick swallow.

“Like—” You lift your free hand and sketch the shape in the air over yourself, the round of some future you. “This big? Maybe bigger, given it’s you.” A beat passes. Then you say, “I like how you didn’t question the parenthood issue at all.”

Dunk frowns. “Why would I?”

“I don’t know. Any other man I know would.”

“Well, did ye sleep with anyone else?”

“No, you prick,” you scoff.

He grins at that. “And are ye still happy-adjacent?”

“Yeah.” You nod, small with it. “Closer and closer to just happy.”

He sets his tea on the floor and turns a little more toward you. His hand stays where it is. Only his thumb moves, once, absently. “I didn’t know ye wanted a baby.”

“I didn’t,” you say. “It just… happened.” Another beat. Then, under your breath: “I didn’t know we’d been that reckless.”

An ugly thought passes through Dunk so fast he hates himself for it even as it comes. “Did ye think about—?”

“For about ten seconds,” you admit. “Then I thought about keeping it and that won.”

“Would ye tell me then?”

“No,” you say.

Dunk thinks on that and cannot sort his feelings cleanly enough to name them. “Why not?” he asks.

You weigh the answer before you give it. “It would hurt you,” you tell him. His face does absolutely nothing with that, which is frightening enough for you to shift. Trying to catch his eyes, you say, “Hey, Dunk.” Your chin wrinkles a little with it. “You cross with me for that?”

“No, no.” He forces himself to keep looking at you. “Just… odd, thinkin’ all this might’ve passed me by.”

“Well, it didn’t.”

He smiles then, faint. Breathes out through his nose. “You’re sure I’m the father, right?”

“Oh, sod off.” You roll your eyes and this time Dunk has to look away for plain reasons of being a man with functioning blood.

He settles his head against the couch near your calves and asks, “Anythin’ else botherin’ ye, lass?”

You think on it for a moment. “My feet ache. That’s it. End of complaints.”

He hears you loud and clear. Turns some more until he is sat cross-legged on the floor opposite you and reaches for your foot, and you are so stunned by the smallness of the gesture that you do not even protest. He plucks a shoe off you and side-eyes it briefly, sees it is a bit mangled, and remembers it is him who had mangled it in his fist. Underneath there is pantyhose, black and sheer, and your toes in it look slightly drained of colour and squished by the flat’s tip.

He takes your heel into the hollow of one hand, and the other he wraps round those poor toes and presses them towards the dorsum as the joints go naturally. They creak and pop and all of that makes you hiss and try to steal the foot away from him, but Duncan holds your ankle and mutters, “Sorry. Sorry, lass, I’ll be more careful.”

To prove it he stretches his fingers higher, towards your shin, wedges them under the trouser leg and squeezes a little. The muscle under gives. Your foot grows heavier in his grip and he gets back to work.

This time slower. Thumb pressed into the ball of your foot through the nylon first, then the arch, then the tender seam where the heel meets the rest of you. He is sage about it, and patient. He uses both hands as if this is some practical thing deserving his whole attention, and maybe to him it is. Your breathing starts changing before either of you remarks on it. Little sounds leave you, barely even sighs at first. Just the body giving up its complaints one by one.

Dunk keeps his head bent. Watches what his hands are doing. Feels the fine drag of the tights under his thumbs and the shape of your foot inside them and the warmth building where he holds you. It should be ordinary enough. A foot is only a foot. Except yours is not. Yours has an ankle made for his fingers to near meet round it, and an arch that jumps sometimes under his palm, and toes painted in some colour he cannot name in this light. He is trying very hard to be decent about all this and feels, with increasing inconvenience, that decency and his body are once again after wanting different things.

He kneads the sole more firmly and your head tips back against the couch. Eyes shut. Mouth goes soft. You have simply stopped guarding yourself and left him alone with the effect he is having, which is very dangerous to Dunk’s head.

He thinks of what Egg told him and what Raymun told him and cannot say whether either of them are right about anything, but the ring box in his pocket keeps prodding his hip through the fabric and he is painfully aware of having bought it. He’s so aware of it he could scream.

The more he touches you the more he wants to. Your calf. The back of your knee. Both your legs over his shoulders. That is the plain truth of it in a moment that ought to be tender only and Duncan wonders if he could keep it this way if, by some odd twist of fate, he’d get lucky.

When he deems the first foot done, he sets it back on the couch and takes the other one up. Does the same job there, a little quicker only because his nerves start misbehaving. By the time he is finished you are near dozing, and with that his chance seems to be slipping too. So he shuffles across the floor, closer to your face, reaches for his pocket and, very softly, says your name.

“Mm?” you stir. Your eyes creak open.

He fumbles, swallows, runs a hand through his hair. Then finally opens his fist in front of you and says, “I thought maybe—for this, I mean. Should we marry? I bought ye a ring. To do it proper.”

You go so perfectly still save for your eyes, which widen and shrink and then widen again. Your chest expands around a breath and Dunk thinks his shirt has gotten soaked clean through under the jumper from how nerve-racking this is. When the moment stretches he contemplates if he has offended you with such a piss-poor proposal and realises he could have done it more proper and he would have liked to do it more proper.

Instead of saying yes or no, your cheeks swell and the skin pulls tight over your temples as you try and try but nothing comes of it, and then you blow air through your pursed mouth, clearly aiming at not laughing and failing spectacularly. You choke a little. Giggle and then cackle and then wheeze with a hand over your eyes. Finally, you sit up and set your hands on his shoulders.

“Dunk,” you say, still breathy. “Have you lost your mind?”

Not yet, but he might. Of all the things Duncan could say like no, or why, or maybe? or don’t you like the ring?—what comes out is, “Are ye cross with me now?” because that is the part that matters most.

Your face softens at once and you shake your head. “No,” you say. “Not cross. Just… baffled. We don’t have to do this, you know. It’s not fucking regency era.”

“Aye,” Dunk says, because he supposes it isn’t. He mutters an apology, lets out a sigh heavy enough to bend him with it, then scrambles up off the floor and sits beside you on the couch. You take the ring from his hand and trade him the scan picture for it, turning the little thing between your fingers while he holds his breath, just a bit.

“It’s very pretty,” you say at last. “You should keep it for someone you actually want to marry, you know?”

But I want to marry you, Dunk thinks, with the plain helpless certainty of a child thinking a thing. Or maybe wants is too quick a word for something that has come over him this hard and sudden. He does not know. In that moment it feels true enough to hurt. Maybe he is too done in by the day, and by the last two weeks, and by everything everyone has told him—from a seven-year-old to a thirty-something man. He wonders whether men ever wise up at all, or only get stupider with age.

“Aye,” he says. Then he goes quiet a moment. Then: “D’ye think we could meet more often, though? For appointments and—I dunno.”

You nod and put the ring back into his hand, and he bloody does not want it back.

“We can hang out,” you tell him, nodding. “Go baby shopping together, and stuff. Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Dunk says, forcing a smile into place. “That’d be grand.”

[goat-limbs]

Heartburn | Masterlist

contents: Dunk x fem!Reader, Modern AU rom-com. Features Raymun, Rowan, Lyonel, Egg and very background Targaryens. Semi-reversed medium-burn (lmao, go figure). Friends to friends-with-benefits to lovers with a secret third thing. Which brings me to the biggest nsfw warning of this fic: unplanned pregnancy. It doesn't happen until Ch.3., but I know some people (including me, ironically) don't like reading about pregnancy, so you have been warned. If that's the case you can safely read up to chapter two and then call it a day. Dunk has my uterus confused, ok.

Besides that: mutual pinning, awkward crushes, they are in their 30s, it's set in Ireland (I know -.-) but most of nationalities are not defined, miscommunication but not in a way that will make you hate the characters, actually lots of humour, fluff, smidge of angst, attempt at magical realism. So far nsfw warnings include: drunk unprotected sex, pregnant sex. Tags will be updated for each chapter.

disclaimer: I've never been pregnant, but I hope my extensive research will prove sufficient. If you 🫵 have been and ever notice something wildly incorrect, please let me know! If you haven't noticed anything incorrect yet, but still would like to share your experience, also let me know! If you want. I'd love that.

synopsis: For two years, you and Duncan orbit each other inside the same circle of friends, each mistaking the other’s awkwardness for disinterest. Then, one reckless night changes the terms entirely. A story about bad timing, good longing, and leaving the hardest thing until last.

a/n: Hi *waves awkwardly*. Yeah so... this happened. Nobody look at me. I have no idea how many chapters this is going to have, but I'm planning weekly updates on Fridays. I promise to tag up to the wazoo. Anyway, banner as usual by me, and dividers by @strangergraphics. This fic is being proofread by @hextoken!

chapters:

chapter one: (sfw) In which they all get very drunk.

chapter two: (nsfw) In which they make the baby :')

chapter three: (sfw) In which she realises they made a baby.

chapter four: (sfw) In which she tells Duncan.

chapter five: (15/05)

The rest TBA.

[2soulscollide]

WEBSITES FOR WRITERS {masterpost}

E.A. Deverell - FREE worksheets (characters, world building, narrator, etc.) and paid courses;

Hiveword - Helps to research any topic to write about (has other resources, too);

BetaBooks - Share your draft with your beta reader (can be more than one), and see where they stopped reading, their comments, etc.;

Charlotte Dillon - Research links;

Writing realistic injuries - The title is pretty self-explanatory: while writing about an injury, take a look at this useful website;

One Stop for Writers - You guys... this website has literally everything we need: a) Description thesaurus collection, b) Character builder, c) Story maps, d) Scene maps & timelines, e) World building surveys, f) Worksheets, f) Tutorials, and much more! Although it has a paid plan ($90/year | $50/6 months | $9/month), you can still get a 2-week FREE trial;

One Stop for Writers Roadmap - It has many tips for you, divided into three different topics: a) How to plan a story, b) How to write a story, c) How to revise a story. The best thing about this? It's FREE!

Story Structure Database - The Story Structure Database is an archive of books and movies, recording all their major plot points;

National Centre for Writing - FREE worksheets and writing courses. Has also paid courses;

Penguin Random House - Has some writing contests and great opportunities;

Crime Reads - Get inspired before writing a crime scene;

The Creative Academy for Writers - "Writers helping writers along every step of the path to publication." It's FREE and has ZOOM writing rooms;

Reedsy - "A trusted place to learn how to successfully publish your book" It has many tips, and tools (generators), contests, prompts lists, etc. FREE;

QueryTracker - Find agents for your books (personally, I've never used this before, but I thought I should feature it here);

Pacemaker - Track your goals (example: Write 50K words - then, everytime you write, you track the number of the words, and it will make a graphic for you with your progress). It's FREE but has a paid plan;

Save the Cat! - The blog of the most known storytelling method. You can find posts, sheets, a software (student discount - 70%), and other things;

I hope this is helpful for you!

(Also, check my gumroad store if you want to!)

[kakashi-h-sakura-h]

Cool!

[autistichalsin]

Periodic rent-lowering-gunshots:

Fiction is not reality.

You can enjoy things in fiction that would be awful in the real world. Like playing a murderhobo in a game! In the real world, being or supporting a murderer-thief would be pretty damn awful, while in the game it's just good fun. Same with anything else you choose to do with the pixels on the screen, like kinks that don't affect anyone real, so they're okay in fiction, but would be pretty damn bad in real life.

No one else is responsible for your online experience. They are required not to harass you, but they are not and never will be obligated to not post about ships, kinks, or tropes you dislike just to avoid you seeing them. It's up to you to blacklist words or phrases, block tags, or even block users as needed to avoid seeing content that upsets you.

No one can force you to read anything against your consent. Any content you don't like seeing can be instantly avoided by closing out of the offending post/fic.

You are not owed an online experience free of discomfort.

Nothing that happens in your imagination can ever make you a bad person. Words you write or read about fictional characters will never make you a bad person.

The claim that media consumption influences real-life behavior is intellectually dishonest and serves only to excuse the behavior of real offenders.

Fiction is a safe way to explore horrifying or confusing concepts. Therapists agree that fiction, even (or especially) about taboo topics is a good coping mechanism, especially, but not exclusively, for trauma survivors. Fiction is to adults what play therapy is to children. This doesn't stop being true if the work in question is of a sexual nature.

Sex isn't an inherently worse or better motivation than anything else. A work written to create feelings of arousal isn't dirty, shameful, or in any way less pure than works written to entertain, provoke moral questions, or for other reasons. And worth noting is that multiple purposes can exist in the same story, especially fanfiction.

You aren't entitled to an explanation for why someone reads, writes, or otherwise enjoys certain works, kinks, tropes, ships, etc.

[damienhaaas]

FAMOUS AUTHORS

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HISTORY AND CULTURE

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ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT

Books-On-Line: This large collection includes movie scripts, newer works, cookbooks and more.

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MISC

Banned Books: Here you can follow links of banned books to their full text online.

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A Celebration of Women Writers: The University of Pennsylvania’s page for women writers includes Newbery winners.

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Prize-winning books online: Use this directory to connect to full-text copies of Newbery winners, Nobel Prize winners and Pulitzer winners.

[science-junkie]

… and here is a gift for all of us.

[goddess47]

So I can find this again! Great list!

[clairificusrex]

Don’t lose this post

[sapphling]

ahaha brooooo you have to check out how soft the skin on my inner thigh is this shit is crazy. no like just put your palm there and gentle caress with your thumb lmao it's like nuts you've gotta check this shit out. please.

[melodicwriter]

[helsex]

Guy who is touch starved but emotionally repressed goading you into punching him for completely normal reasons

[mearchy]

my favorite genre of fictional character is like "i am terrifying to almost everyone, i'm very good at killing, i can endure anything, i've become exceptionally good at playing into my reputation, and if you try to give me positive social interaction i will react with confusion and cower in a corner like an abused animal. and i may try to shoot you. but there is also a chance i may imprint on you like a feral dog receiving its first loving touch! good luck."

[kcrabb88]

I feel like we really lost something when we started looking at writing as a reader-centric product meant to appeal to the desires of a specific audience rather than a writer-centric approach of someone writes whatever particular thing particular compels them/whatever weird thing the demons in their head want to talk about, and people out there who are also compelled, and/or relate, find that writing. A lot of discussions of writing really center around what readers want rather than a writer's exploration. Sometimes as a reader I don't know what I want. I click on a fic or pick up a book I'm not sure about but that looks interesting, and I love it. Reading what I expect to get is it's own joy, but we always need to expand our horizons and not get mad at creators for not always writing what we want/expect.

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

the existence of dark and taboo fanfiction literally cannot hurt you. it can only upset you if you don’t like it but for some reason choose to seek it out, ignore the warnings the author gives, then deliberately read it on your own free will. you choose to seek it out then read it just to make yourself upset. sounds like a you problem to me