i never talk to anyone on this app i just silently read, but ur story is so amazing. a lot of the writing on here is good but i actually wouldn’t believe you if you told me you weren’t a literal author publishing books lol love ur writing so much. and i’m so glad to hear your mom is doing okay :)
omg BABYYYYYY stop u just made my year this is so sweet🥹🥹🥹🥹i promise im not a published author (sadly) but maybe one day!!! im so happy you’ve been enjoying my series it’s truly my pride and joy and it never fails to blow my mind when others also love it like what??? and thank u for ur kind words ab my mama, it means so much to me!!! i LOVE u🫶🫶🫶
summary: Eleanor moves through the world like a shadow searching for light, and Chris burns too brightly, as if trying to outshine a buried grief. When they collide on a night filled with a mutual self-loathing, something quiet but insistent begins to grow between them — a pull that they never dare speak of, yet orbit in harmony nonetheless. Their bond deepens quickly, shaped by vulnerability, near-misses, and the ache of things left unsaid. As their lives pull and blur at the edges, they learn that what they are for one another in the moment may matter more than how it ends.
warnings (throughout the series): smut; angst; addiction; family trauma; depression; heavy drinking; mentions of death; mentions of abuse; 18+
The sun had only begun its slow unravelling of the night when Eleanor stepped out, closing the motel room door with a soft click behind her. The cold air met her bare arms with a blunt, clean bite that might have reminded her she was alive, had she still possessed any faith in her own edges. Her body had been little more than a husk carrying the echo of nerve endings for many long hours; sensation was something half-remembered, like a language she had abandoned.
She leaned her hip against the cheap iron railing, its chipped paint pressing a faint grid into her palm as she braced herself. She slipped the last cigarette from her crumpled pack, the foil rustling like dry leaves. It caught the first blue of dawn, a tiny silver flag waving her surrender.
The lighter’s spark flared too bright in the blue half-dark, and she drew the smoke in slowly — an old, bad ritual that never really soothed her but gave her hands something to do, her mind something to circle while the rest of her splintered apart.
She thought of the night that had folded itself around her — the warm press of Chris’s mouth, the gentle severity with which he had kept her tethered to her own skin. It had not saved her mother, had not changed the fact that her brother looked at her now with a hate that tasted like blood on her tongue. But for that hour — for that warm, impossible hour — she had not been a daughter fleeing ruin, nor a sister plastered in old disappointments. She had only been herself, solid and undeniable, a woman in the arms of a man who knew exactly where her bones ended and began.
She nearly smiled — nearly — at the memory of his care. How absurd, how achingly absurd, that a man like him would touch her so gently in a room that smelled of smoke and stale carpet. That in that graceless bed, she had felt for once not cheap, not spare — but real.
The cherry of the cigarette burned lower, a small orange eye staring back at her as if waiting for an explanation. She gave it none. Instead she tipped her head back, watched the sky shift — deep purples giving away to a thin vein of gold that promised daylight whether she wanted it or not. The world spun on. It always did. Her mother’s voice — that ruinous, slurred, poisonous voice — would never speak again, and yet here was the sun, lifting its stupid, perfect face above the earth like nothing had happened.
A sound behind her — the rustle of a socked foot against concrete. She did not turn at once. But the scrape settled something inside her, reminded her what it meant to exhale in the company of someone who might catch the pieces.
When she did look, he was there. Hair flattened awkwardly on one side, eyes rimmed in pink from sleep he had probably faked just to make her think he was resting. Relief caught on his face like a first swallow of water after a too-long thirst. He looked at her cigarette, then at her hollow expression.
“Hey,” He said, voice thick with morning, “You okay? What are you doing out here?”
She took a drag that filled her lungs to bursting, then let it out in a trembling thread. “I just needed some air.” She said simply. Her voice did not sound like her own.
He nodded — like that was enough, like it was an answer that made sense. He stepped closer, the chill off her skin replaced by the warm bulk of him as he hooked an arm around her shoulders. She sank into it, let herself press her cheek to his chest. She felt him breathe, deep and patient, like he might transfer that steadiness into her blood if he could just hold her tight enough.
They stood like that for a long while. The sunrise crawled higher, painting the cracked parking lot in soft pinks and blues. She wondered at the cruelty of machinery that kept spinning when every cog inside her felt seized up and smoking. She wondered if the sun looked this gentle the day her mother first lifted a bottle to her lips. If it would look the same when they laid her in the ground.
Chris’s hand rubbed a slow, patient circle against her upper arm. When he spoke, his voice was careful, hesitant — trying not to crack the fragile glass of this moment. “Do you feel like going to the hospital now?”
The word made her flinch. It conjured up sterile lights, her mother’s slack face, the stale finality of a body no longer animated by the angry, destructive, complicated spark that had made her mother hers.
Still, she nodded. There were no tears left — only that dry, tender ache at the back of her eyes, the prelude to a sob that never arrived.
“Yeah,” She whispered, “Yeah. Let’s just go.”
He squeezed her once more, then took the dying cigarette from her fingers, crushed it against the metal railing and let it drop to the ground. He kissed her temple, as if to promise her that not everything had to be carried alone. And together they turned back toward the door to collect their minimal belongings, the day stretching out ahead of them — merciless, necessary, and somehow, with him beside her, just survivable enough.
—
She could not have said, later, whether her feet touched the hospital’s tiled floor at all — the automatic doors drew them inside on a sigh of stale heat and antiseptic, the kind that curled at the back of the throat and lingered there like a warning. Overhead, the strip lights buzzed their cold insect hum, indifferent to her ruin. Chris followed just behind her, his presence an orbit, silent but solid, a faint warmth at the edge of her fraying certainty.
At the reception desk, a young woman in scrubs looked up from her computer with an eager, brittle cheer that belonged to a world that did not yet know how to be careful with its gladness. A plastic reindeer headband, garish against the clinical white of her collar, bobbed when she smiled. “Merry Christmas!” She chirped, her voice a cruel echo of the world still turning, still warm, still unbroken somewhere outside these walls.
The words struck Eleanor like a trick candle that would not go out — she felt her ribs squeeze around the memory that yes, it was Christmas. Only yesterday she had held the foolish hope that this year might be clear of sirens, slammed doors, the sweet-sour stink of vodka and orange juice before breakfast. How childishly she had trusted in a day on the calendar to save her.
She steadied her voice with the same careful precision she used to hold her breath underwater as a child. “We…we called last night. About…” Her throat felt scraped raw. “…about a, uh, deceased woman. Theresa Russell.”
Something softened in the woman’s expression — an apology, the sort given by strangers with no real cost. “Of course. Please have a seat — I’ll let the mortuary attendant know you’re here. He will be up shortly.”
The word mortuary sank in her belly like a stone dropped in black water. She managed a polite nod, mumbled thanks that tasted like cardboard, then let Chris steer her to the waiting area’s hard chairs. He sat close, knee brushing hers, his hand folding over her own — his thumb tracing that same mindless pattern into her skin as if trying to carve the shape of his presence into her bones.
They did not speak. There was nothing language could manage here. Somewhere down the hall, someone laughed — a nurse, maybe, or a visitor unaware of the small universe collapsing in Eleanor’s chest. She stared at the floor tiles until they blurred, the pattern repeating like her mother’s voice once had, slurred and slantwise in the dark of too many nights.
The man who came for them — John, he introduced himself with a small bow of his head, as if they were neighbours meeting at a fence — had the soft, practical face of someone accustomed to rooms that demanded both silence and gentle instruction. She studied the fine pleats beside his eyes, the tidy hush of his voice. He did not look at her with pity. For that alone, she might have wept if her tears were not already dried to salt inside her.
There were small details, practical facts, the slow machinery of death laid out in bleak sentences she barely heard. Then John asked if she wished to see her mother. For a moment, something in her — raw, animal — wanted to flee, to run backwards through the white corridors to where the night had been warm and Chris’s arms had hidden her from what could not be undone. But Chris’s hand squeezed hers, warm and unyielding. His eyes told her it was hers to decide. And so she nodded, because there was no other true answer.
The elevator ride was a slow slide downward, the lights flickering dull and yellow as they dropped. With every floor the air grew thinner, colder, pressing the grief up into her throat until she could taste metal behind her teeth.
When the doors opened, she stepped out into a hallway that smelled faintly of bleach and stale air. No windows, no clocks, just the hum of fluorescent tubes and the hush of her own footsteps echoing off the tile. Chris’s shoes made a softer sound than hers — a small comfort that anchored her when she thought she might float up and away entirely.
At the end of the hallway were double doors, heavy and grey. John’s badge beeped against the lock. Eleanor’s pulse was a metronome in her neck as the doors swung open and the cold came for her bones. Inside, the room was clean to the point of cruelty. No clutter, no warmth — just the hollow hush of a place built for things no one wanted to remember. In the centre was a gurney, a white sheet pulled up neat and high. For a childish second, Eleanor wanted to reach for the sheet and tug it high over her own eyes too.
John’s voice was careful, his tone a practiced kindness. He told her — gently — what she already knew. “While we have not conducted an autopsy, we find it probable that she passed from late-stage liver failure.”
The words floated around her like moths, soft and useless. Her mother had been leaving for years. Each bottle emptied a little more of her away until her body simply obeyed the exit she had scripted for herself. Would it have mattered, Eleanor wondered, if she had come sooner? Would any return have undone the end her mother had been building for decades?
John again, too kind, “Would you like to see her?” He asked, his words landing soft as snow on her raw ears.
Eleanor’s lungs stuttered, then remembered to move. She nodded once, the motion stiff and childlike. Chris’s fingers twined tighter with hers. When the sheet folded back, she found herself staring at a stranger and a mother all at once.
Her skin — that once-familiar shade — had turned the sickly hue of old paper, tinged yellow where the sickness had burrowed deepest. Her hair looked thinner, the lines in her face cut deeper than Eleanor remembered from even just a few short months ago. But there was no slur of cruel words on her lips, no glass bottle clutched in her fist — just stillness. Just silence. The peace that had always been withheld in life, delivered at last by death.
She reached out — her fingertips trembling — and brushed her mother’s cheek. It was colder than she had braced for. The chill bit through her fingertips, through her bones, through the last illusions she had been clutching so tightly. Her voice cracked as it slipped free.
“Hi, Mama.” The sound of it made her flinch — the way it filled the sterile room and then died there, unanswered forever.
She stayed like that for a long time. Long enough for her knees to ache and her teeth to chatter. Long enough for every memory — good, bad, worse — to unspool behind her eyes in fractured reels. Chris stayed a presence at her shoulder, his silence more soothing to her than any words, his warmth a single tether to the present.
When she finally spoke again, her voice was as thin as paper. “What…what happens now? Will a funeral director come?”
John hesitated. He shifted his weight, eyes flicking to Chris before landing gently back on her. “Typically, yes…but — I’m sorry, Ms. Russell — another family member advised us that there wouldn’t be a funeral. She’ll be transferred directly to the crematorium.”
His words hit her like a slap. They tasted like fire and blood and fury. “Who told you that?” She asked, though her voice was calm — too calm. The calm of something about to break.
John cleared his throat, looked down at the patient file in his hands. “It was…Reid Russell. He’s listed as next of kin.”
Something inside her went bright and red-hot — anger and grief twisted so tightly she could barely breathe around it. Reid. Her baby brother who had become a ghost in his own skin — who had left their mother to die alone and then decided she did not even deserve to be mourned.
She turned back to the gurney, to her mother’s hollowed face. Leaned down and pressed her lips to her temple — cold and waxy, but still hers, always hers. “I’m sorry,” She whispered, though she was not sure for what — for leaving, for staying away, for never being enough to save her from herself.
When she pulled back, her eyes found John’s, telling him she was finished here. He nodded, gentle as a pastor closing a coffin. He pulled the sheet back over her mother’s face. The finality of it made her knees buckle, but Chris was there — his arm around her shoulders, his body a fortress against the shivering inside her skin.
She thanked John — the words small and cracked but sincere — and let him guide them back up the hallway, up the elevator that hummed and moaned as it carried them back to the living.
The cold met them as they stepped out, slicing at the thin, raw skin beneath her eyes. A sun too bright for mourning had climbed while they had been below ground — higher now, glaring down with the indifferent clarity of a clean hospital corridor, a polished floor, a form signed and filed away. It made her eyes water, though she tried to blame only the wind. The air was sharp enough to make her lungs burn as she drew in, as if she had to re-teach her ribs the rhythm of living breath after all of that grave-like quiet.
The parking lot was only half-awake — here and there a car window scabbed in frost, windshields iced in fragile lacework that someone, somewhere, would scrape clean while thinking only of work, or errands, or Christmas dinner waiting at home. She let her eyes drift over it — the small banality of an ordinary morning, cruel and necessary all at once. In her chest, the ache bloomed wide and formless, filling the hollow spaces that words had abandoned.
In the car, the seat beneath her was cold enough that her bones felt it through her coat. Her hands shook so badly she almost dropped her phone as she fumbled for it. Chris said nothing — just watched her, his eyes carrying her grief like it belonged to him too, like he would bear it gladly if only it meant she did not have to.
She dialled Reid’s number with numb fingers, the cold screen of her phone slick against her skin. Each ring felt like a dare she hoped he would accept — that he would lift the receiver and give her this one violence, this single permission to hurt him the way she had been hurt. But it rang and rang — once, twice, three times — until his voicemail picked up, a recording of his voice that felt like a slap: breezy, thoughtless, like the child he used to be. She did not wait for the beep. She was already pouring herself out into the static hum, her voice raw and too loud in the car.
“No funeral?” She almost laughed — the sound broke on the way out, twisting into something hoarse and ugly, “How could you? How could you just— you just left her at the hospital, Reid! She needed better than you, better than—” Her voice broke, a ragged sob she fought down as her throat closed around it, “You chose to stay with her. You chose to be responsible for her. But really you just needed her to be your excuse forever—” She could feel the rage splintering into something softer beneath it — a begging that threatened to slip through her teeth if she did not kill it now.
Her mouth trembled around the last words, voice pitched low and trembling. “You should be ashamed of the person you’ve become. I hope that haunts you. I really hope it does.”
She hung up before she could say I love you — before she could say I hate you. She hung up before she could forgive him, or damn him properly. The silence that followed was cavernous.
Her shoulders hitched once — a sharp tremor that escaped before she could choke it back. Then Chris’s hand was there — gentle in her hair, fingertips brushing through the strands at her temple like he was searching for the fever he knew he could not cure. He tucked her hair behind her ear, palm warm and so alive against her cheek.
“I’m so sorry, El.” The words were soft, but they gutted her more than any scream could have. She nodded — a brittle, helpless motion — though nothing in her throat would rise to meet him. She was emptied out, hollow as the room where her mother lay under a thin sheet, a life packed away in silence.
He leaned into her, his forehead tipping against hers, his breath warm when he brushed his lips to her temple — a small benediction for all the years she had spent never feeling worth a gentle touch. But that was not enough. The ache inside her chest demanded more than comfort. It wanted proof that she was still flesh, not just grief personified.
She caught his face between her palms — cold fingers pressed into the familiar angle of his jaw, anchoring herself to something living, something real — and tugged his mouth down to hers. The kiss was not soft at first. It was desperate — an exhale of fury and shame and the terrible relief of being known. Her breath shuddered against his lips, the salt of old tears, the stale ghost of her last cigarette clinging there.
But Chris slowed her down. Kissed her back like she was not broken glass but something holy he was desperate not to crack. His lips moved carefully, patiently. He let her pour every ragged edge into his mouth, let her mouth mesh with his, let her breath catch in a sob that trembled between their tongues. He tasted of warmth, of promise — of the smallest mercy that she would not carry all of these complex emotions alone.
When she finally pulled back — her nose brushing his, eyes shut against the ruin the sun still insisted on revealing — his hands cupped her face as though in prayer. He kissed the corner of her mouth once, then again, like he could stitch her wounds closed, one soft kiss at a time.
His forehead pressed to hers now, his voice low enough that the frigid air around them could not steal it. “Where do you want to go?” He asked it like he was asking for permission to carry her anywhere she needed.
She opened her eyes — lashes damp, vision blurry with the leftover glaze of everything she could not yet bury. She looked past him at the windshield — frost patterns spiderwebbed like veins across the glass, the sky beyond it cruelly blue. She swallowed once, her breath catching in the hollow place behind her ribs. And then, as if confessing something secret and ordinary all at once, she shaped the only word that felt true.
a/n: hi my loves i am back from the dead. my mom has been doing a lot better over the last couple of days (thank you to everyone who has reached out about her, i appreciate the kindness more than i could ever say) and i have started to be able to feel like myself again. i am so sorry it's taken me so long to update the series but this chapter in particular had a lot of themes in it that made me lowkey freak out a bit each time i attempted to edit it. BUT here she is hot off the press for u all, i love each and every one of u so much and thank u again for being so patient. MUAH <333
hi babies i’m sorry i’ve been so mia on here. a little while ago my mom fell and got a pretty major brain injury which has been as nerve racking as you’d expect. i’ve been super preoccupied taking care of her and monitoring her but she seems to be on the road to recovery so i feel like i can actually finally breathe. i’ve been trying to write whenever i’ve had a free minute and will hopefully be back to posting very very soon. i love and miss u all and appreciate those who have checked in on me, if u could be patient for just a tiny bit longer ill have a new ftb chapter for u all super soon!!! <333
summary: Eleanor moves through the world like a shadow searching for light, and Chris burns too brightly, as if trying to outshine a buried grief. When they collide on a night filled with a mutual self-loathing, something quiet but insistent begins to grow between them — a pull that they never dare speak of, yet orbit in harmony nonetheless. Their bond deepens quickly, shaped by vulnerability, near-misses, and the ache of things left unsaid. As their lives pull and blur at the edges, they learn that what they are for one another in the moment may matter more than how it ends.
warnings (throughout the series): smut; angst; addiction; family trauma; depression; heavy drinking; mentions of death; mentions of abuse; 18+
It was nearly midnight when Chris pulled the car away from what passed for Eleanor’s childhood home — though even in his mind, the word home felt like an insult, a word misapplied to walls that had never deserved it. Beside him, she was a shadow of herself. No fight left in her posture, no sharp wit in her eyes, no warmth in the hand that trembled uselessly in her lap.
He drove as if the road were made of thin glass and the world might splinter beneath them if he was not careful enough. Each pothole was a threat, each streetlight a cold witness to the helpless rage pressing at his throat. Rage at Reid — that wasted sneer and rancid grin. Rage at that suffocating house that had never protected her, only hollowed her out one quiet, miserable year at a time.
Mostly, though, the rage was drowned out by the helplessness. Watching silent tears trace clean lines down her cheeks felt like bleeding from the inside out. He wanted to pull over, hold her face in his hands and promise to fix every piece of her that had been broken by the people who were supposed to love her. But he did not know how. He knew that some wounds were too old to remember their first cut, too deep to be touched by clumsy comforts.
So instead he did the only thing left within his reach. He found her somewhere to rest. He pulled into a cracked parking lot outside a squat little motel — neon sign half burned out, VACANCY buzzing like a ghost’s whisper. It reminded him of every roadside stop in a movie about running away — the kind of place people checked into when they could not bear to go home.
He left her in the car — just for a moment — the engine still running warm around her. He booked the room in low murmurs with a bored woman behind bulletproof glass. When he came back out, her eyes were distant, reflecting nothing but the dull streetlights overhead.
“Come on,” He murmured, voice barely above the hush of the wind. He opened her door, offered her his hand. She took it — fingers cold, so light in his palm they hardly seemed to belong to her at all.
The climbed the metal stairs together. The door creaked open to a room just big enough for a bed and a nightstand. Mismatched floral curtains, a single lamp switched on and casting yellow onto cheap wallpaper. It was nothing — but it was enough. Enough to offer her the opportunity to rest.
She did not say a word. Just crossed to the bed like a sleepwalker and let herself fall, flat on her back, arms flung out as if she might anchor herself to the stained ceiling tiles. She did not close her eyes — only stared upwards, her breath so shallow he thought once or twice that she had forgotten how. Chris stood in the doorway for a heartbeat longer, every muscle locked in useless sympathy.
Then he crossed the room. Sat down carefully on the edge of the mattress, close enough to feel the chill radiating off her skin. He reached for her hand — limp, useless where it lay against her stomach — and wrapped his own around it.
“I’m so sorry,” He whispered. Three words that felt pitifully small against the enormity of her loss. Sorry for her mother, for Reid, for the poison in her brother’s voice, for every night she must have spent in that house with fear curdled in her stomach. Sorry, too, that he had been so far from enough — that he could only bear witness and not rescue.
Still, something in her cracked at that — just a hairline fracture at first. He saw it in the way her throat bobbed around a swallowed sob, the way her eyes flooded without blinking. The first tear hit the side of her cheek, then another, then a whole river she could not dam up even if she tried. Small, choked gasps pushed through her teeth — sharp enough to make his own eyes sting.
He lay down beside her then, pulled her into the curve of him, felt the sharp jut of her shoulder blade press into his ribs. She folded against him without resistance — like she might crawl inside him if only she could. He pressed his mouth to the cold crown of her hair, breathed her in, his hands moving over her ribs, her hip, as if mapping out all the places that still needed guarding.
“You know that none of what he said was true,” He murmured, voice cracking every other word, “As horrible as it is, El, she made the choice to drink. It’s not your fault, and it never was.”
But her pain was too big for his hands. It spilled through his fingers no matter how tight he held on. He stroked the hair back from her damp cheek and thought of how unfair it was, how impossibly cruel, that love alone could not lift her out of that house for good.
Then — through her small tremors, the tears that slipped from her almost modestly, as if ashamed to be seen — he felt her shift. Her fingers, so recently limp and cold, moved with a fragile, searching purpose. They drifted down the trembling line of her belly, brushed the metal button at her waistband. He heard the tiny snap of it, the gentle rustle of the zipper giving away — that hush, sharp and final as ice splitting underfoot. He froze, breath caught in his throat.
“Eleanor…” He started, but her name tasted different now — soft as a sigh, too fragile for the shape of his mouth. But she only tilted her chin, eyes bright and wet, and met him with a stare that pinned him to the trembling edge of something he was too afraid to name.
When she turned, her jeans slid from her hips with an almost shy defiance. The sound of the fabric sighing to her ankles made his skin prickle — the shape of her thighs, the gentle swell of her hips, her underwear thin as dusk light. She faced him fully then, her mouth parted, her breath quick as if she had been running through a dream.
She found the line of his jaw with her lips — a fleeting warmth over stubble that rasped like pen on paper, writing some confession only they would ever read. He closed his eyes. He could feel the dampness of her tears, the shape of her breath breaking against his skin.
“El,” He tried again, but the word was helpless. And his hands, traitorous and true, found the warm slope of her back, dipped lower, traced the curve of her ass like he would die if he did not touch her now.
“Chris,” Her whisper was a wound. A trembling, desperate wound breathed straight into his pulse. She climbed into his lap, knees bracketing his hips, the sudden heat of her pressed close enough under her thin underwear that he thought for a moment his heart might stop — because what was left to do but give her everything?
She rocked once — just once, a testing question that knocked the breath out of him. Then, without breaking his gaze, she lifted her sweater with a small, almost clumsy tug, and the lamplight scattered over her shoulders, her ribcage, the subtle, perfect lift of her breasts as they rose with her shallow breath. Her hair fell forward in tangled spindles, catching the light in such a way that made her look, for a heartbeat, holy. Her chin quivered, but her eyes did not waver.
“I need you to make me feel real again, Chris, please.”
The plea cracked something inside of him — some brittle shell he had built around the truth of how much he wanted her, always, forever. His hands — broad, clumsy with need — found the backs of her thighs, traced upward with a reverence that bordered on grief. He pressed his forehead to hers, breathing her in, tasting the salt of her sorrow.
“Okay,” He breathed — soft, sure, an agreement that felt more like a vow. “Okay, El. I will.” And when he kissed her, it was not hunger first but shelter — the soft press of his mouth on hers, sealing something in, or perhaps sealing something out.
“Lie down.”
She eased off his lap with the slow grace of someone moving through water. The mattress caught her, held her, and he rose over her — braced on an elbow, his eyes tracing every plane of her face as if he were memorizing a map that might be gone by dawn. He could feel her heartbeat through every inch of her skin — that tender warmth he had wanted for so long it almost made him ache with grief that it was happening like this.
But here she was. Here he was. And in this moment. This moment. This was the moment he had simultaneously desired and feared since the day he had met her. Desired because she was all he had ever wanted; feared for that very same reason.
He felt the tremor in his chest when she tugged at the hem of his shirt — thin fingers slipping under the fabric, brushing his skin like a question. He let her lift it over his head, arms trembling in her soft grip. The material fell away — discarded at the edge of the bed, another piece of him offered up to her mercy. Her sad eyes were wet with tears, but beneath the grief something flickered — a desperate need to drown for just a while.
She reached up. Her fingers combed through his hair — rough at first, then softer, gentler, as if she were grounding herself in the shape of his skull, the scratch of his stubble against her skin. When she tugged him closer, their foreheads bumped, breath tangling in the thin space between them, and he let out a sound that might have been her name or a plea or just the raw truth of how badly he wanted to disappear into her and never find his way out again.
Her mouth found his again — a hesitant hunger, her breath caught in his throat as if she could climb inside him and stay there, safe from the world. He groaned into her lips — a sound that felt torn from someplace deep, a confession given shape. She caught his lower lip between her teeth and tugged, drawing a shudder from the very base of his spine. And in an instant he understood that since the day he met her, it was this cruelty, this grace, that he craved.
He let his greedy hands wander across every inch of skin she offered him: the fragile bridge of her collarbones, the soft plane of her stomach that quivered under his fingertips, the tender underside of her breasts that fit so perfectly into his palms he wondered if God himself had sculpted them just for this. Every heartbeat beneath his touch felt like an answer to a prayer he had not known how to speak until now.
She undid his pants carefully, letting them fall to his knees before freeing his strained length from his boxers. The cool air bit at his skin but it was her hands — so small, so sure — that turned the ice into fire. Her delicate sobs and whispered needs, her trembling limbs and tear-stained cheeks, her hands wrapping slowly around his aching shaft — they all turned him into her slave.
He felt her pull him under and let her. The weight of her need pressed into his chest, heavy enough to bruise. He leaned into her touch, forehead pressed to hers, his hips stuttering forward as though his body had long ago decided it belonged to her. As her thumb dragged circles around his tip — so warm, so alive in her palm — he swallowed down his all-consuming desire: a desire so present, so destructive, so constant that he was sure that the moment he sunk inside of her — joined their bodies as one at last — it may never again go unacknowledged.
He pulled back, looked down at her. His mind had turned to mush from the crushing reality of her open before him in this way, but his deprived body took the lead. He slid down her frame, pressing his open mouth to the warm swell of her belly, the dip of her hip, until the edge of her underwear met his tongue. He peeled the lace down her thighs — his breath tangled in the hush of fabric, in the slip of skin beneath his lips — before planting a gentle kiss along the crest of her heat.
The smell of her arousal hit him like something holy and ruinous all at once, and like a starved man he buried himself within her folds — groaning as her honey-sweet juices coated his flickering tongue. He traced every inch of her — slow, unhurried laps of his tongue — in an attempt to memorize every note. Her hips trembled under his hands, her soft cries echoed off the peeling wallpaper as her fingers weaved through his hair as though she could fuse him to her.
And right then he hoped — with the fervour of a man on the edge of belief — that she could. That he might be permitted to remain there, lips fixed to the tender, swollen centre of her, not as a trespasser but as something more enduring. As if this — the quite shake of her thighs bracketing him, the breathless invocation of his name curling from her tongue — might be a place, a geography unto itself, in which he could dwell indefinitely. Where time softened and stilled, where nothing else was required of him but this sacred attention.
He wished to live inside that heat. The pulsing rhythm of her pleasure, the taste of her like some rare and elemental thing. He wanted to lose himself, to disappear into her completely, to be swallowed by the salt and sweetness and tremor of her, until there was no longer any separation between his need and her receiving. If this were all there was — if the rest of life could fall away, and only this remain — he would not mourn the loss. Here, where his mouth could speak the language of devotion more fluently than words, where the air smelled only of her, where the only truth was the wet litany of her moans. Here was all that he needed.
When alas she pulled him up to meet her mouth, her kiss was wet with fire. He prayed to God that it would leave a burn — something to remind him, years from now, that they were once here. A road map back to this single hour where the world fell away and all that existed was the rush of her sighs and the slip of their bodies. She hooked her leg around his hip, drew him closer until there was no air left between them, until the shape of her was the shape of his entire world.
Her hand found his length once more, guiding its swollen tip to where she was warmest, neediest. And as he slid into her for the very first time, eyes lowered to his famished length disappearing slowly between her slippery folds that enveloped him exquisitely, he realized for the first time that sex did not constitute filth — no, the sight before him was not dirty by any means; it was not degrading or shameful or violent. It was poetry.
He pulled out halfway, feeling her completely as he did. And when his hips met hers again — slow, inevitable — he caught her gasp with his mouth, swallowing it like a vow. Each thrust was careful, like the world might shatter if he pushed too deep, too fast — but the hunger beneath it was a creature with teeth, coiling low in his belly, begging him to claim her fully at last. He almost laughed at the cruel miracle of it: that grief could live here too, pressed tight against the deepest pleasure, the most necessary relief, he had ever known.
Her sad eyes grew heavy in pleasure, lashes fluttering as her mouth fell open around a sigh that felt like a benediction. He could not pull his gaze away from her — her beautiful features contorting into the most transparent display of trust he had ever been witness to. His length swelled inside of her spongey walls from the sight before him — overwhelmed by the desire to keep her in this state forever.
Slow and deep, the friction pulled a moan from his chest, something low and raw that made the mattress shake below them. Her hips rose to meet each gentle thrust like a tide hungry for the moon — and he knew that he would drown here, gladly, if he could.
She gasped his name, breathless and pleading — something low and ruinous in her voice when she begged him for more, for anything, for everything. It made his stomach tighten, made his own mouth form a groan. And then, softly, as though testing the waters, she whispered: “C-choke me, please.”
At her desperate plea, her breathless request, fear grabbed at him from the image of his own hand forcibly wrapping around her throat — suppressing her breathing, the very thing necessary for her existence, and in turn, his existence. How could he cause her to struggle so terribly? But even more, how could he ever deny her a thing?
So with a delicate kiss along her jaw, he wrapped one large hand around her beautiful neck; only just barely squeezing the sides. Her eyes fluttered closed, and a solitary tear slid free — a bead of salt that seemed to catch every sorrow she had buried for years. He leaned down and kissed the tear away, stealing her pain however he could.
“Oh Eleanor,” He breathed, his voice breaking around the shape of her name, his heart swelling and shattering into a million pieces at once. Her swollen lips trembled — a fragile thing — and he pulled them into his own, swallowing her hurt as it slipped from her in short, breathless gasps.
He rocked into her slowly, reverently — each movement a prayer, each stuttering thrust a promise that she was not alone in this world. She clung to him like an anchor in a storm, and he let himself drown gladly — lost in her warmth, her sweetness, her soft cries that stitched him back together even as they undid him.
He felt her legs wind tighter around his hips, ankles locked at the small of his back as if she could mould him to herself forever. And maybe she could — maybe this was how time bent: the quiet knock of her heels against his ribs, the slip of her breath into his mouth, the soft, shivering chant of his name echoing between the cracked walls of this borrowed room. He would not object.
She asked for more, and he gave it. Each time he drove deeper into her, he felt something else inside him loosen — some old, fearful knot he had kept wound tight for years. She was undoing him cell by cell, turning all the dark corners of him inside out and bathing them in light. As she whispered his name in a final, breathless voice like a secret prayer, he wondered if it was possible to die from how good it felt to be needed this completely.
And when she shuddered beneath him, her nails sinking into his back, breath hiccuping through a half-choked moan, he kissed her cheek, her temple, her open mouth, frantic for every drop of her he could taste. He wished he could sink into her veins, exist in every beat of her heart, be so deep inside of her that no part of her would ever be left alone again.
He let go too — buried deep, heart breaking, made whole. In that ruinous moment, there was no past, no grief, no broken childhoods — only this: her body pulsing around him, his soul laid bare for her to keep. And when their gasping breaths settled, when her lashes lifted to meet his eyes again — he knew this was love in its purest, fiercest form. A love that could ruin them both, if they were lucky enough to let it.
The room had fallen into that soft, echoing hush that only comes when two people have spent themselves utterly — when there is nothing left for the stale air to cradle but the slow breathing that stitches their bodies back together, breath by quiet breath. Chris pulled out of her slowly, rolling onto his side, an arm slipping around Eleanor’s waist like an instinct remembered before thought. He pressed his palm to the slight rise and fall of her ribs, tracing the shape of her breath as though it might yield up every secret she kept shuttered behind her eyes.
His mind refused stillness. It circled and circled — around the tender ache in his lower back, the faint rawness where her nails had marked him, the warm damp between them where what they had done still lingered. He could not quite hold it in his head: the thing he had both run from and ran toward in equal measure for so long — undone at last, as gently as it could have been, and yet fierce enough to alter him down to the salt in his blood.
And now here she was, soft and open beside him, eyes fluttering beneath wet lashes, her hair sticking in damp strands to her temples. He worried for her — in that deep, all-consuming way that made his chest feel tight enough to split. He worried about the part of her that had come undone for him so sweetly while another part of her was still splintering under grief she had not yet figured out how to manage.
Yet even through the worry, he was filled with something bright and molten — an amazement so pure it almost embarrassed him. He had always thought sex was just that — friction and heat, a moment’s distraction. But this? This had unmade him in ways he did not know he had wanted to be undone. It gutted him and filled him all at once. He thought of all the nights he had turned away from her mouth, from her unspoken invitations, convinced he would ruin something delicate and unspoken. And now it was ruined, or remade — he could not tell which, but the tremor in him told him it must be both.
He bent his head, nose brushing the dark crown of her hair. He pressed his mouth to her temple where her pulse fluttered on beneath cool skin. Each tear she gave up now, he caught with his lips like small prayers he did not know how to finish. He did not dare say a word yet — the hush was too fine, like white sand. He only listened to her breathing, the shallow catch of it, the way her belly quivered beneath his palm.
When her voice came — so small it almost vanished into the stale hush of the room — it startled him like a bird loosened from a hedge.
“Thank you.”
He shifted back just enough to see her face. Eyes wet and searching, grateful for the moment of reprise. He kissed her then, not with hunger but with recognition, pressing the shape of his mouth to hers like a seal.
“You don’t have to thank me, El,” He murmured when they parted, “Never for that.”
He asked if she was okay — though he knew the answer already. She nodded, and he felt her lie slip between his ribs like a splinter. It was not the sex, he knew. But all the jagged grief that had come before it, all of the agony in her life that had come to a head all at once, and all the ruin waiting when the warmth of them faded.
So he slipped out from under the covers, tugged her gently with him — his hand wrapped soft around hers like he feared she might dissolve if he let go. He led her to the small bathroom, the light overhead buzzing to life and flickering against the cracked mirror. He turned the taps and waited until the pipes gave up warmth — steam blooming softly against the glass, making a small, private world of fog and hush. She let him wrap his arms around her again, let her kiss her collarbone.
When the tub filled, he guided her in first. She sank into the water with a shuddering sigh, her shoulders dropping by inches, eyelids fluttering closed at the first touch of heat. He stepped in behind her, lowering himself until her spine met his chest, her damp hair spreading dark across his collarbone. He looped his arms around her middle as if he could keep her stitched together with the simple fact of his warmth.
He felt her breathing settle, if only by fractions. Her head tipped back against his shoulder, the pulse in her throat flickering like a fragile light. She was unspeakably beautiful like this — soft and hollowed out, yet somehow stronger for the raw seam still open in her chest. For a long while, neither spoke. He traced lazy circles over her skin beneath the water, listening to the hush of it lapping at porcelain, to the slow drip of a tap that would never quite seal.
Then, in a voice that was more fractured exhale than sound, she broke the hush. “I didn’t ask where she was.”
He dropped his gaze back to her profile, to the way her brow pinched, her mouth turned down like a child’s — the guilt lay over her beauty like ash. He lifted a wet hand, cupped her cheek, stroked the bone with his thumb.
“Is there a hospital in town?” He asked, voice soft but firm enough that she would know he would not let her carry that guilt alone.
She swallowed, her throat bobbing against his forearm. A tiny nod. A sniffle. He pressed his lips to the crown of her head. “I’ll call them tonight, okay? And we’ll go first thing in the morning, if you want to.”
Her breath shuddered out — the smallest piece of relief breaking through the storm. “Thank you,” She whispered again, her voice cracking on the shape of it.
He shifted his hold so his mouth found her ear, his chest pressing her closer as if he could fuse them together entirely. “I love you,” He spoke like an earnest promise — so raw, so plain it almost startled him. Words that were not new but felt born anew by everything they had shared tonight.
Her body trembled in his arms. A choked sob, a hitch of air, and then she turned her head just enough that he could see her eyes — wide, red, yet bright enough to remind him that there was a road out of all this grief, and it led through her.
“I love you,” She told him back — voice breaking but sure, the truth of it spilling warmer than the water around them.
And he held her there, in the steam and the silence and the small, fragile certainty that whatever monsters waited outside this cracked door, he would stand against them, if only to keep her warm enough to sleep through the night.
a/n: i have not put this much thought into smut (is this even considered smut at this point?) EVER in my life!!! the main reason ive been missing for over a week was because although this chapter has technically been finished for like a month now i have obsessively gone over it at least a dozen times bc i feel like i can never do these two justice. im still not 100% happy with it but can no longer handle torturing myself (or u guys) so it's getting posted. i love u all so so much forever and always <333
summary: Eleanor moves through the world like a shadow searching for light, and Chris burns too brightly, as if trying to outshine a buried grief. When they collide on a night filled with a mutual self-loathing, something quiet but insistent begins to grow between them — a pull that they never dare speak of, yet orbit in harmony nonetheless. Their bond deepens quickly, shaped by vulnerability, near-misses, and the ache of things left unsaid. As their lives pull and blur at the edges, they learn that what they are for one another in the moment may matter more than how it ends.
warnings (throughout the series): smut; angst; addiction; family trauma; depression; heavy drinking; mentions of death; mentions of abuse; 18+
They had finished getting ready in a hush so charged it was hardly silence at all — a silence alive, waiting to be broken by one careless word, a laugh in the throat, a stray touch of knuckles against skin. He could feel it hovering between them like static as they moved about the bedroom, sharing the mirror, the dresser, the soft territory of the bed where he fell apart. Every time he caught her eyes in the mirror, that sly curve at the corner of her mouth, he felt his own throat dry up. And so he had made himself turn away — the fragile heroism of restraint, pulling him out the door before they finished what they had already begun.
Now they were at his aunt’s house with its old, holiday hush — pine, gravy, the dense bloom of family voices layered one over the other until they blurred into a kind of nostalgic hum. He sat beside her at the long table polished by decades of elbows and laughter. Earlier, in the car, she had been all nervous motion. Her knee bouncing, her fingers fussing with the worn hem of her sleeve until he had simply taken her hand, pressing his thumb over her pulse as though he could quiet it with his touch alone.
But here, inside, she had managed to slip into it. To let the edges of her worry soften against the warmth of the house. He had watched her lean into introductions, the tentative, slightly clumsy reach for a title when he said this is Eleanor — no neat label to hold her place at his side. She had smiled through it. And she was smiling now, her ankle looped around his under the table, a secret braid of warmth and claim that he felt more acutely than the dull drone of his uncle explaining to him the best way to salt a driveway.
He watched her more than he listened. The way her mouth parted around her laughter as she spoke to his cousin, her lashes lifting and falling like a pair of gorgeous butterflies. He felt her foot tighten around his ankle whenever the conversation made her shy, the small squeeze like a tether pulling him back when his mind began its drift.
It was the soft shiver of her phone on the tabletop that reminded him of the world beyond the one in her eyes. It lit up her face for a second — stark glow caught on the arch of her cheekbone — and he tilted it towards her with the gentlest nudge. “Your brother,” He murmured, the word a shard of unwelcome reality between them.
She flicked her eyes down — Reid, in stark, bland letters, heavy as a reproach. Her mouth folded around a sigh, and her thumb hovered for the barest second before dismissing him with a flick that looked practiced. “Probably squeezing in a last-minute guilt trip about me not coming home,” She said under her breath, too soft for the rest of the table to hear. She set the phone back down like it was a bug she had trapped under glass, but he did not miss the way her foot tensed against his. Did not miss the fine muscle along her jaw quiver before she found her smile again — easy, bright, stitched back together for the benefit of cousins and aunts and uncles who did not know what it cost her.
She turned back to his cousin, picking up the thread of their conversation like nothing had happened. He watched her. Watched the shine in her eyes that she was trying to keep steady, the small nods to hide her distraction, the bright hum of her voice. But the phone lit up again. And then again, the small hum shivering the cutlery at her place.
The third time, she faltered mid-sentence, cheeks flushing with an apology catching at her lips before she could swallow it back. She touched his shoulder as she rose, her palm light and fleeting. “Excuse me— I’m so sorry, I just— I’ll be right back.”
He tried not to watch her leave, but he did. Her hand pressed on her stomach like she was trying to hold herself in place, feet whisper-quiet on the old hardwood as she slipped out of the dining room and disappeared into the hall.
He sat back in his chair, the warmth of dinner gone now with her absence, replaced by the dull scratch of his fork pushing through the last bits of glazed carrots and cold turkey. Conversation rose and fell around him — laughter, cutlery clinking, Marylou’s soft voice drifting over the table like steam — but it all felt far away. Muffled, like his head was underwater.
His mind, instead, was elsewhere — behind a closed door in his mother’s house, steam ghosting off his shoulders, her breath at his neck as he came undone under his own hand with her name brimming at the back of his teeth, her hand on his bare chest like she owned it. Maybe later. Two words, so small, so careless on her tongue but lethal in his core.
He dug the dull edge of his fork into the stubborn shred of meat, turning it over like it would reveal something. He knew this fear well — the cold knot of it at the base of his spine, the voice in his head that always made him pull back at the last second. Not because he did not want her — god, he wanted her more than anything — but because there was something about Eleanor that made his hands feel unclean, clumsy. He had ruined things before. He had touched things that did not belong to him — women who turned into regrets, apologies, half-told stories that lingered in the small hours when he could not sleep.
But her — Eleanor — he could not bear the thought of seeing regret in her eyes the morning after. Could not bear to give her another wound to carry.
And yet tonight, that old caution felt thin. Like cellophane stretched over a flame. It was inevitable, he felt. And maybe this was what it meant to want something so purely it undid all your careful self-protection. The tension in his spine told him so. The memory of her moans, heard weeks ago yet still so loud in his mind, the soft brush of her shoulder against his ribs — it would not let him breathe without wanting more. It was almost absurd — to sit here, among glazed carrots and light conversation, his entire chest thudding with the certainty that he would want her again the moment they were alone.
He half-heard Nick crack a joke, his cousin reply, the clink of glasses. He lifted his eyes and found Marylou’s across the plates and candles — the tilt of her head soft with a question she did not speak aloud. He just smiled faintly, pushing another forkful of food he did not taste into his mouth.
But the truth pressed at his ribs, hot and insistent. All he could think was later. The word felt like a promise, a threat, a prayer lodged in his stomach. How close her body had been to his as he fell apart. The raw way she had looked at him, like she wanted to be touched, devoured, kept.
When his phone vibrated against his thigh, it startled him so completely he almost let out a sound — some half-formed yelp buried in his throat. He fumbled for it beneath the table, the rattle of cutlery and voices around him suddenly too sharp, too bright. The glow of the screen cut across his vision.
El: come to the bathroom.
For a breath, shamefully, the first spark in his chest was that same hot current that had been needling at him for hours. This is it, he thought, a pulse of heat rolling low in his gut, this is later. Now. His ears rang with it — a sick, sweet adrenaline that made him stand so abruptly his chair scraped the floor, drawing a glance from Matt across the table. Chris muttered something shapeless about the bathroom, barely hearing himself over the loud pulse in his throat.
The hallway seemed narrower than before, the hush of the house closing around him. Someone’s child laughed in the next room — that thin, careless joy only children carry, echoing off the walls. He found the bathroom door shut tight. He paused, forced himself to exhale the heat curling at the back of his throat. His knuckles tapped against the wood — gentle, careful.
“It’s me.”
The door opened. And in the next breath all the heat — all that foolish, desperate anticipation — died in him like a snuffed match.
Eleanor’s eyes were raw. Red. Brimming. Tears clung to her lashes like tiny stars and her lips were pressed together so tightly it looked like they might split. There was no mischief here — no secret thrill, no desperate lust. Only grief. Only shock. Something sharp enough to steal the air out of his chest.
He stepped in, pulled the door shut behind him with a gentle click that sounded, in that hush, like a gavel. He reached for her face at once — cold skin, damp with tears. “Hey — hey, hey, what’s wrong?” He hated his voice for how large it felt, how clumsy. She only shook her head like she wanted to throw the thought off of her, like the words were lodged too deep to dig out.
“Eleanor, please,” He whispered, his thumbs smoothing tears into her skin as though he could press them back into her, keep her whole. He felt the fragile bones of her jaw beneath his hands, the fine tremor that passed through her throat when she swallowed. His stomach turned with every second she did not speak.
When her lips parted, her voice came out in pieces — rough-edged, too old for her soft mouth. “She’s gone.”
It landed inside him with all the slow, crushing weight of something he did not yet understand. He blinked at her, searching her eyes for more, but she only stood there, breathing as though each breath cost her something she no longer wished to pay. He whispered, as if saying it aloud might dislodge it, undo it. “Who’s gone? El— who?”
He saw it then — the flinch of her mouth, the small drag of her lip between her teeth, the flicker of something ancient in her gaze. When it came out, it was so quiet it might have been mistaken for a soft breeze.
“My mom.” The words so slight they nearly dissolved on her tongue, “She died.”
He felt the floor tilt. The air in his lungs stuttered and gave out. He looked at her and saw the grief, the old fear she had always kept hidden beneath that sharp wit and soft voice. The terrible relief of an ending she had dreaded and needed in equal measure.
“Oh, El…” He breathed. His forehead pressed to hers. His hands tightened against her jaw, wishing he could hold her together by force alone. In that tiny bathroom, his own heartbeat roared in his ears. He could think of nothing to say — no words to fix what could never be fixed. So he just held her. Let her press her silent tears to his throat. Let his own breath catch and break on the top of her hair.
“I need to go to Vermont,” She croaked, voice thick with grief and dread. He nodded softly, “We’ll go. We’ll go right now.”
And when he spoke again, it was no grand promise, only the simplest truth he could muster in a world that had just changed shape forever. His lips found the damp crown of her hair, the salt of her grief warm against his mouth. “I’m here, okay. I’ve got you.”
And he did. Even if he had no map for this sorrow — he would hold her steady, ruin himself if he must, if it meant she would not shatter alone.
—
They left the warmth of Christmas behind without so much as a word of explanation to the cousins or the aunts or the blinking lights that lined the front porch. Chris had just leaned in close to Marylou, voice low and urgent, and his mother’s soft hand had come to rest on Eleanor’s shoulder, a fleeting pressure that felt like both an apology and a blessing.
Then they were gone — boots crunching over the frostbitten driveway, headlights sweeping across the packed snow, the car doors shutting with that particular finality that made her stomach turn. She sat with her hands folded tight in her lap as they pulled away from the warmth of the porch light — the only witness to their retreat.
Three hours of road unspooled under them like a single black thread. She watched the world slip by in half-formed scenes — gas stations, winter-bare trees, the occasional lone farmhouse blinking against the dark. She said almost nothing; neither did he. His hand rested over hers on the console — large, steady, the warmth of it a quiet declaration that no matter how far they drove, she was not alone.
She thought, distantly, that if she could have asked for anything just then, it would have been to stay in this car forever. To exist only in this humming nowhere, the low sweep of headlights ahead — just circling around her past, never having to step back into it.
But the road did what roads do. It led them home.
Chris turned onto the cracked street she had walked so many times as a girl — a neighbourhood that always seemed to smell of stale rain and rotting leaves. The same sagging roofs, the same broken chain link fences. The houses looked embarrassed in the half-light, as if they might collapse if one looked at them too directly.
She lifted a hand that did not feel like hers, pointed at the end of the cul-de-sac. “There,” She said. Her voice sounded distant to her own ears. “That one.”
The house sat like a black hole — dark windows, the porch light long ago blown out, weeds clawing up through the snow and cracked concrete as if to prove that nothing here was ever truly dormant, only waiting. The mailbox gaped open, stuffed with envelopes that would likely never be opened.
When Chris killed the engine, silence rushed in. She stared through the windshield at the house like it might swallow her back in. His hand found hers again — warm, big, thumb brushing over her knuckles. She could feel how cold her own skin was by comparison. She did not look at him. If she did, she knew she would shatter.
“Ready?” He asked, voice careful.
She lied with a tiny nod.
The path to the door was the same — loose cinder blocks, half-buried in frost, that rocked under their steps. She pressed her fingertips to the door — the same chipped paint she remembered scratching with her nails when she was too small to know the word for fear. It gave under her hand. Of course it did. It had never been very good at keeping anything out.
Inside, the smell rose to meet her — sour, stale, the sick-sweet tang of cheap liquor and something rotten. The air was heavy with it, years of living ground into the carpet, pressed into the yellowed walls. She flicked the light switch by muscle memory. The single bulb overhead sputtered to life, its cold glow spilling across the peeling linoleum, the sagging couch she had sat on through a thousand nights of shouting, and another thousand nights of silence.
Reid was there. Slumped across the cushions like he had grown roots in the stained fabric. Beer cans balanced on the armrest, another half dozen crushed beneath his bare feet.
Her heart dropped right through her ribs when he stirred. His eyes blinked open, bleary and red, his skin pallid in the flickering light. For a moment — no more than the beat of her heart — she saw him as he once was: a boy pressed under blankets beside her when their mother’s voice thundered and turned the sky to shrapnel. But then he shifted, his face splitting open around a grin that made her stomach flinch.
“All it takes for your prissy ass to come home is for her to fuckin’ croak, huh?” The words fell from him slurred, cheap coins tossed at her feet.
She let them hit and stepped further into the room, felt the carpet give under her boots like wet moss. She sank into the old armchair, its cushion sighing under her weight. Chris hovered beside her — a quiet sentinel, the threat of him humming under the pale light.
Reid’s eyes found Chris, slid over him like grease on glass. “And you brought your boy of the week,” He sneered, letting out a dry, rasping laugh before he closed his eyes again like they were too heavy to hold open.
She ignored it. She had to. “What happened, Reid?” Her voice was so soft it felt foreign — she hated how it sounded so careful, so childlike.
His eyes stayed shut, and his lips barely moved as he spoke. “She must’ve been sick. I mean, her eyes turned yellow a few weeks back. Would hardly get off the couch. Then she just fell right there in the kitchen today. Never got up.”
The words settled on her skin like frost. She felt them melt, then freeze again somewhere deeper. Her breath caught in her teeth. “Why didn’t you take her to a doctor?”
His eyes snapped open then. Wild. Not just beer — there was something stronger in his system. Something sharp and jittery showing itself behind his pupils.
“How the fuck you figure you got any right to ask me that?” He shoved himself upright, almost tripping the pile of cans below him. “Where the fuck were you, huh? Off in California, acting like you’re too good for this place — too busy sucking cock to visit your mom.”
Each word found its mark, striking like a thrown bottle. Chris shifted beside her, but she put a hand on his leg without thinking. Reid lurched closer, stumbling over the stained carpet, eyes locked on hers like he wanted to crawl into her skull and tear the memory of him out.
“Selfish whore,” He spat. “Never came home. Never called. She drank herself blind waitin’ for you to come home, Ellie.”
The nickname scraped against her bones. She swallowed around the taste of salt and rust in her throat. Her eyes drifted over his face — the sunken cheeks, the tremor in his jaw. His own eyes were wild, too bright, pupils sharp pinpricks. My brother, she thought, my baby brother — as if repeating it might conjure back the child she had once cradled when he needed his mother.
“What did you take?” She whispered, voice splintering on the last word as a fat tear slipped down her cheek.
He laughed — sharp, broken. His grin split his face, wolfish, hungry for her pain. “She died hating you for leaving. You hear that? Hating you. Now get the fuck out.”
The words dug. They dug down through the numbness, through the layers she had built so carefully, so deliberately. Chris’s arm swept in front of her now, a barrier. He growled at Reid, partially stepping in front of her. “Back up,” He said, his voice low enough to crack the stale air, “Don’t talk to her like that.”
Reid squared his shoulders, ugly grin gone, eyes bulging. “Who the fuck are you? You don’t tell me shit, you hear me? You don’t come into my fuckin’ house and tell me shit—”
It would end in fists. She saw it play out like a ghost — Chris’s jaw locked, Reid’s fists swinging wild, blood and bruises and more ugly words to keep her up at night. She could not bear it. Not today.
She forced herself upright, legs like wet paper. She pressed her palm flat to Chris’s chest, felt the iron tension there, the storm brewing in his bones.
“Chris,” She whispered, eyes pleading, “Let’s go.”
He pulled his eyes to her — really looked at her — and whatever he saw there broke him out of it. His shoulders dropped just enough. His hand caught hers, tight, warm, anchoring her back to something solid.
They turned. Reid’s voice followed them down the hallway, spitting venom: “Yeah, run back to your fancy life, you cunt. Don’t come back. Don’t you ever fucking come back.”
She knew she would not. She stepped through the door, felt the cold bite into her bones, the old house shrinking behind her. Chris’s hand in hers — solid, warm, trembling only where his thumb traced her wrist — was the only thing that told her she had not left herself behind in that ruined room.
Above them, the dark sky held its silence. The street lamps hummed. And snow began to fall on that small house like a mercy it would never deserve.
a/n: let it be known that i am absolutely terrified for ur reactions to this chapter!!!!! pls don't hate me too much bc i love u all to the moon and back <333
summary: Eleanor moves through the world like a shadow searching for light, and Chris burns too brightly, as if trying to outshine a buried grief. When they collide on a night filled with a mutual self-loathing, something quiet but insistent begins to grow between them — a pull that they never dare speak of, yet orbit in harmony nonetheless. Their bond deepens quickly, shaped by vulnerability, near-misses, and the ache of things left unsaid. As their lives pull and blur at the edges, they learn that what they are for one another in the moment may matter more than how it ends.
warnings (throughout the series): smut; angst; addiction; family trauma; depression; heavy drinking; mentions of death; mentions of abuse; 18+
It was Christmas Eve, and the house seemed, somehow, to have grown larger overnight — swollen gently with warmth and sound. There was the hush and clash of pans, the faint, crackling loop of Marylou’s holiday playlist leaking from the old speaker on its corner shelf. And underneath it all, the smell — evergreen and cinnamon and the deeper, forgiving warmth of something roasting low in the oven — so familiar that for a fleeting moment, Chris felt as though he had stepped back into one of his own boyhood memories, wrapped in paper and lit with colourful lights.
He had only just abandoned the mess upstairs: a sprawl of butchered wrapping paper, spent tape rolls, the unlovely evidence of his last-minute wrapping spread across his old bedroom floor. He padded down the stairs in his socks, listening to the stair treads sigh under his weight.
The kitchen doorway gave him a frame through which to stand and watch — and what he saw nearly tugged laughter from his throat before he could swallow it back. There was Eleanor: sleeves rucked to her elbows, fingers clenched white around a metal masher she wielded like an improvised weapon against a bowl of mashed potatoes that clearly refused to yield. There was a particular set to her shoulders — that telltale tilt of chin, as if defiance alone might persuade the lumps to dissolve. But her eyes betrayed her — wide, flicking to Marylou for reassurance, then darting down to the bowl again, like a student before an exam.
He let himself lean there a moment, shoulder to the frame, content to let the warmth seep into him — not just the heat from the oven, but the subtler warmth she seemed to carry with her, even in her struggle. That small furrow of concentration between her brows deepened when she caught him watching her.
Her eyes narrowed, bright and wary, “Can I help you?” She asked, trying — failing — to sound annoyed.
He only smiled — that ridiculous half-smile that made him feel fifteen again, stupid and wanting — and pushed himself off the frame, crossing to the fridge in two soft strides. He took out the milk, nudged her gently with his hip until she shifted, grudgingly. She squared her shoulders at him like a dare. He matched her look with a grin pinched just shy of smug as he uncapped the milk and poured a small, precise spill into her battered bowl.
“Relax, Gordon Ramsay,” He teased under his breath, “You’re beating them into cement.”
She made a dismissive sound deep in her throat, folding her arms in a protective knot over her chest, “I had it under control,” She said, but her eyes gave her away: the small flicker of relief that passed across them before she could wrestle it back into indignation.
He took the masher from her gently — her knuckles brushing his in that simple, domestic collision that might as well have been a flare in his veins — and worked the lumps away with practiced flicks of his wrist. He felt the steadiness of it, the small pleasure of the simple, physical task. And he felt, too, the steadiness of her gaze hovering near his shoulder, that reluctant gratitude she could never hide for long.
Behind them, Marylou turned from the oven — hands braced around the bulk of the glazed ham she lifted out with a faint, theatrical grunt. Steam billowed up, fragrant with honey and cloves, wrapping the kitchen in something mouth-watering. She set the roasting pan down with care, the metal clanging lightly against the countertop.
“Alright you two,” She said, peering at them over the steam rising from the ham, “That’s enough kitchen heroics for now — you’d better both start getting ready. We’re leaving for my sister’s in an hour.”
Eleanor’s shoulders dipped, the faint tilt of defeat softened by a smile that ghosted the corner of her mouth. She tilted the bowl slightly toward Marylou as if to present evidence of her failed conquest. “They’re not quite…” She trailed off, helpless, a single word dropping away like a stone into water.
Marylou laughed — that warm, unbothered sound that made the kitchen feel like home. She placed a steady hand on Eleanor’s shoulder, giving it a gentle squeeze. “Honey, I’ve been making these for twenty years. Go get pretty, I’ll finish.”
Reluctantly, Eleanor let her arms fall, the bowl fully surrendered at last. She turned to Chris, her cheeks flushed pink from warmth, from embarrassment, from something quieter neither of them would name out loud. He raised his brows, the barest arch of triumph. Told you so. She narrowed her eyes, lifted her hand, and pushed at his chest — though the shove was so light he barely rocked back, only caught her hand with his own for a heartbeat before letting it slip free.
“Come on, chef,” He said, voice soft with mischief, and swept his arm toward the hall in an exaggerated gesture that might have made her laugh if she had not been trying so hard not to.
She sighed dramatically, but he caught the ghost of a smile tugging at her lips as they walked side by side out of the warm kitchen, leaving behind the drifting music and Marylou humming to herself as she took over the potatoes.
Back in his bedroom now, he stood half-turned toward the wardrobe, one hand braced on the door as he dug blindly for a clean towel. Behind him, Eleanor hovered by her half-unzipped suitcase on the edge of his bed — the bag spilling its soft cargo of clothes and half-folded shirts onto the worn comforter she had already mussed.
“Do you think I need to, like…” She trailed off, holding up a knit black dress and then glancing back at a pair of jeans. “I don’t know — is this a dress situation? Or can I just wear…this?”
He turned fully, the towel now hanging forgotten over his shoulder. For a moment, he only looked at her — the faint furrow of doubt between her brows, that small crease that told him she still did not quite believe she belonged, though no one but him would ever see it. There was that quiet need in her to do it right, to slip seamlessly into his people, his world. He found something at once protective and foolishly fond uncurl in his chest.
“You could show up in a trash bag,” He said softly, letting the words bloom with warmth rather than tease, “No one would bat an eye. Casual’s fine.”
She studied him through narrowed eyes, as if weighing whether to trust him. For a heartbeat, he half-expected her to press the point, to lift the dress again. But then she let it drop, the soft fabric folding over the bag’s edge. Her shoulders loosened, the small knot of worry untied with a breath. Okay,” She murmured, half to herself, “Casual it is.”
He turned back to shut the closet door, raking a hand through his hair and feeling the way the strands clung to slight static of the dry winter air. Already he could feel the itch of the day clinging to his skin — the swirl of wrapping paper dust, the sticky warmth of the oven heat, the faint ghost of pine needles.
“Cool — I’m gonna grab a quick shower and then—” He turned mid-sentence, ready to head for the bathroom door — and then stopped cold.
She was undressing already — so utterly unguarded about it that it struck him harder than he could have prepared for. Her fingers slipped under the waistband of her pyjama bottoms, nudging the fabric over her hips with an easy grace that belied the quiet havoc it wreaked on him. Her tank top already lay discarded behind her, a careless, intimate heap on his bedspread. His eyes betrayed him — skimming the small, pale hollow at the base of her spine, the clean dip of her waist, the subtle pink of one nipple made sharp by the December chill. She stood half-turned, oblivious, the side of her bare breast catching the flat winter light.
For an absurd moment, he felt rooted there — the towel slipping lower on his shoulder, his mouth gone dry, his pulse blooming loud in his ears. He tried to gather himself, to press the air back into his lungs as if it might steady the bright ache coiling low in his gut.
“—and then I’ll, uh…” His voice snagged in his throat, catching on the edge of want, “I’ll be quick.”
“Okay,” She said easily, like she was not naked in front of him. Like she was just telling him the weather, voice unbothered.
He forced his feet to carry him away — each step a clumsy betrayal of the raw, bright ache unfurling in his stomach. His stride was stiff and mechanical, as if every inch of him was not now humming with the thought of her skin, her laugh echoing through his skull like a dare. He shut the bathroom door with more force than he meant to, the latch clicking into the hush like a closing confession. He braced both palms on the sink’s cold porcelain, bent his head, trying to summon a thought that was not her.
Get it together.
He turned on the shower, steam rising immediately to cloud the mirror. The hiss of the water was too loud in the tiny bathroom, or maybe it was just his pulse drowning everything else out. He stripped quickly with a roughness that made him feel boyish and foolish at once, and stepped in beneath the spray. It struck the back of his neck, warm and relentless, needling into the knot of heat coiled at his spine.
The ache low in his gut pulsed sharp and needy, and still, she would not leave him. She was there behind his eyelids: the pale small of her back, the line of her hip shifting as she stepped out of her clothes, the imagined weight of her hair swinging loose across her shoulder.
His hand found himself without thought — the same old ritual made more vivid, more shameful by the nearness of her figure on the other side of the wall. His thumb traced the ache he already knew too well, coaxed the thoughts of her out of himself with each deliberate stroke.
It was embarrassing how fast his depraved mind went there — how easily he conjured up the exact cadence of her voice, the way her pyjamas clung to her hips before she had shimmied out of them. He imagined turning back around, crossing the hall to her. Her startled laugh dissolving into moans, her fingers slipping under the waistband of his pants instead of her own.
He worked himself faster now, spine trembling with a need so fierce he could barely handle it. His breath caught on every exhale as the steam curled around him, trapping his moans in his throat before they had the chance to push past his teeth. He looked down at his cock, violently swollen and embellished with pulsing veins, and imagined it was her hand wrapped around him; the soft scrape of her nails at his hip. He could almost feel her mouth at his ear, that shy little smile turning into something dangerous. His jaw tightened, eyes fluttering shut as his hips jerked into his fist. It was obscene, how fast he found himself there — on that precipice where want blurred into something helpless.
The washroom door swung open with a sudden, unmistakable creak.
“Yo—” The word cracked out of him, harsh and unfinished, half a second from coming undone. His free hand braced hard on the tile, willing himself still.
“Sorry, just need to brush my teeth,” Her voice — so casual, so close — cut straight through him like a live wire. The sudden knowledge that she was right there, separated only by the thin, wet curtain, was nearly more than he could stand. He forced his fist away from himself like it had burned him, the water beating down harder as if to punish the flush still staining his skin. He busied his hands instead in soap, scrubbing too roughly, like he could rinse the ache from his bones.
He could hear her — the soft click of the toothbrush against porcelain, the gurgle of the tap. He willed his mind somewhere clean, somewhere that did not echo with the thought of turning around, of pulling the curtain back and showing her just what she was doing to him, of imagining her reaction if he asked her to step in—
Don’t. He bit the inside of his cheek, forced the thought away. He scrubbed soap over his chest, rough, urgent, like he might strip the red-hot need from his skin altogether. And when he turned off the tap, his voice sounded too rough, too raw. “Hand me my towel?”
A second later, her hand appeared at the edge of the curtain — small, delicate, the exact picture of his fantasy just moments before. He grabbed the towel with fingers that nearly shook, wrapped it low around his hips, praying she would not glance too closely at the state he was still in.
When he stepped out, the room felt smaller for her nearness. She was bent over the sink, rinsing her mouth. The line of her back, the low hug of her jeans, the unthinking curve of her hip — he wanted to memorize it, press it into some hidden place inside himself where it could ache freely. He watched the small foam of toothpaste at the corner of her lip, wanted — absurdly — to touch it, to kiss it clean.
“You look pretty,” He choked out — but it came out too honest, too raw, stripped of the casual tone he was going for.
She lifted her head, eyes meeting his in the mirror — wide, warm, crinkled at the edges with that smile that made him feel like she had just put him back together. “Thanks,” She said, gentle, as if she did not know what she had done. She wiped the corner of her lip with the back of her hand, the gesture so guileless it nearly broke him.
He lingered a breath too long in the doorway, the towel clutched like a final defence. And then, before the sight of her could undo him again — the way her lips had turned bright pink and swollen from brushing, the way her sweater slipped down her shoulder — he forced himself back into the hall, pulse still loud enough to drown the world outside this house. He needed to get dressed. Needed to remember how to breathe. And most of all — he needed, somehow, to quiet the want that would not stop humming through every last bone in his body.
But the moment he dropped the towel from his waist was the same moment the bedroom door clicked open, and every fragile piece of composure he had built in that short breath of solitude shattered at once. His little pep talk, his attempt at convincing himself to act normal, to pull it together, all of it blew apart the second Eleanor stepped back in.
She was there — halfway through the doorway, one hand braced on the frame, as though even she could not decide whether to cross the line into this quiet shock. For the briefest second they regarded one another — or rather, she regarded him, helplessly at first, her eyes caught like a moth in the bright, appalling flame of what she was not meant to see. Her eyes fluttered down to him — all of him — standing at brazen, undeniable attention, the flush rising from his length to the startled cage of his ribs. He felt it like a brand, the raw pulse of being witnessed.
“Oops!” She breathed, but the expression was nothing more than air, paper thin. Then her hands flew up to cover her eyes as if she were hiding behind her fingers at a horror film. She turned then, shoulders twisting first, hair swinging like a dark curtain too late to hide behind. The heat rose in him — neck, chest, jaw — a flush of shame made sharper by the fact that his body refused to wilt, refused to be modest when modesty might have saved him.
“Shit, sorry,” The apology snagged in his teeth, useless against the fact that one part of him refused all apologies, still stiff, pulsing, giving him away more honestly than his words ever could. He lunged for the towel, fingers fumbling at its rough edge — a gesture so absurdly belated that he might have laughed if his throat were not so tight.
She was the one who laughed — a fragile sound, high and light, but threaded through with something that trembled in the space between them. “I’m the one who’s sorry,” She said into her palms, voice muffled, her shoulders drawn up towards her ears as though she could fold herself small enough to disappear. But then — because the world is cruel in its details — she confronted it head on in a way that turned his bones liquid: “Are you just gonna…leave that?”
The ache between his hips twitched at her phrasing — the blunt innocence of it made obscene by the fact that there was nothing innocent there. His chest rose too sharply; he dragged a hand down his jaw, rasping over stubble still damp from the shower. He tried for levity but heard the hoarse edge of hunger in his own voice. “I— shit, Eleanor— I was trying to take care of it in the shower when you—” He broke off on a laugh that cracked too easily into something closer to a groan.
Behind her hands, she let out a shaky, almost guilty giggle. “Oh god. I’m so sorry.”
He shrugged, helpless, voice raw. “It’s okay.” He dropped the useless towel in his hands to slip on a pair of boxers, though the tight cotton only boxed him in, pressed the ache inward until it pulsed sharper. She did not turn back around. He could feel her thinking, every second stretching out tight and hot between them. Her shoulders rose, fell. Then her voice — softer, lower, carrying something dangerous — drifted back to him: “I can leave the room if you want.”
His breath snagged, his vision pulsed white at the edges. His fingers dug into the wall for balance. He opened his mouth, tried to shape the words he ought to speak — the polite deflection, the casual reassurance — but they would not form. He was buzzing all over, his chest tight as if he had swallowed the air whole.
And then her voice again — that same tone, thick with an edge that went straight to his spine, “Or I can stay right here.”
The sentence dropped like a lit match, and the room seemed to shrink to the stretch of hardwood between them. For half a second, he just studied her — the shape of her back, the curve of her neck above her sweater’s loose collar — so unbearably close and yet turned away, waiting for him to decide if the line would hold or snap, as if the decision might break her as much as him.
Then his body gave him the answer. He stepped towards his bed slowly — one, two strides that felt like surrender. He pushed his waistband down again, no ceremony now, letting himself free with a groan that seemed to scrape his throat raw. The shame had sharpened into something else entirely — need stripped of its polite disguise. He sat down on the edge of the bed, chest rising and falling, hand wrapping around himself once again like it was not even his choice anymore — just instinct, need, a plea given shape by his hand.
The first stroke pulled his eyes shut, a shudder rolling through his ribs, a sound deep in his chest that startled him by its rawness. And his fist moved, slow and punishing, every nerve alive and raw in that environment. The room was so quiet that the soft rhythm of his hand might have been the only proof that time still moved. He tried to keep the motion steady, not for himself but for her — for the knowledge that she was there, just beyond the fragile shield of her turned back, listening, imagining.
Even in his pleasure, he recognized how out of control he was, how powerless he was to her. His mind played out every close call between them — the intimate phone call at Thanksgiving, the way she looked on her knees in front of him, the taste of her lips just one day ago — and the images forced a groan from his lips like gravel, low and dark.
“Come here,” He whispered, the words scraped bare of any pretext.
She turned, slowly, like she was stepping into warm water, eyes wide, mouth parted with a soft, incredulous breath that made him grip himself harder. She came to him without a word, one measured step at a time. At his knees she paused, looked at him, and the corner of her lip lifted — like they now shared a secret too sharp to say aloud. When she lowered herself beside him, the bed dipped beneath her weight — and with it his composure dipped, too.
He tried to keep his hand steady, slow — he wanted her to see, to feel the way her nearness changed the very texture of his skin. Her eyes dropped to his fist, to the flushed length now slick with pre-cum, and then lifted to meet his, like a dark mirror that reflected back every pulse of heat in his belly. He felt dizzy, every muscle tight as wire.
When she leaned in, her breath caught in his hairline, warm and humid. The first touch of her mouth at his neck was so soft he nearly flinched — the drag of her lips, the small scrape of teeth, a half-bite that pulled a sound from him low and wounded. His cock twitched in his own hand, chasing the pulse she had lit beneath his skin.
“Does it feel good?” She murmured, so close to his ear that her words felt like they entered him rather than merely brushed the surface.
He answered with a choked groan, hips twitching up, his fist slick and relentless now. He could barely breathe, could barely form a single thought. He tipped back, one elbow braced on the mattress, the ceiling above him a blank he could fill only with her shape. She followed, her leg crossing over his thigh, pressing her warmth against him as though she meant to tether him to the bed, to herself.
Her mouth was back at his neck, teeth worrying the tender skin, breath broken against his pulse. He wanted to say her name — and maybe he did, half-formed on his tongue as she mouthed his jaw, his pulse, the damp hollow beneath his ear. The heat in him tightened, coiled until it was a single fragile strand that might snap if she so much as breathed too close.
And when it broke, it broke all at once — a rough, ragged sound tearing out of him, his hand jerking as he spilled over his stomach, shivering from ribs to knees, undone in a way that felt like a slaughter. He felt the mattress tremble beneath him, the air sharp in his lungs as though he had just surfaced from water.
She stayed right there — soft and still beside him — until his heartbeat eased out of its frantic climb. He felt her hand on his chest, brushing it gently. She kissed the corner of his jaw once more, delicately, like they were true lovers in another life where none of this was new or unspoken. When he could finally see straight again, he turned to her, face flushed and half- ashamed at how simply she had undone him without a touch.
She was grinning — that sly little smile that told him she was filing every detail away to replay it later. “Better?” She asked, voice bright, teasing like none of it had just left him undone. He huffed a laugh, nodded, still breathless. “Yeah. Better.”
She slipped off the bed then with a fluid grace, ducked to grab the discarded towel from the floor and handed it to him, like it was no big deal that she had just watched him stroke himself to the picture of her. Then she padded to the mirror, rummaging for her mascara with all the nonchalance in the world.
Chris wiped himself clean, pulled his boxers back on, his eyes locked on her reflection. He studied her shoulders, her mouth, her eyes that flicked to his every so often, like she knew exactly what she had done to him — what can of worms had just been cracked open between them.
“You okay?” He asked, voice softer now, wary.
Her gaze met his in the glass — that same spark glinting there, wicked and bright. “I’m great,” She replied simply, smile curling at the corners like a secret she was keeping just for him.
He tilted his head, a crooked grin tugging at his lips. “Are you— do you need to—”
She didn’t even flinch, just kept swiping mascara on with that look that warned him that he was playing with fire. “Well, we’re running late for dinner,” She reminded him, sing-song soft, voice thicker now, like there was so much more she was holding back.
Chris watched the tension in her shoulders, the subtle flush of her throat — the promise coiled there like a hidden flame. He opened his mouth to press her, to ensure she was fine, but she beat him to it, flicking her eyes back to his in the mirror, voice low and dangerous:
Not to be so weird but how did you do the ai picture with Chris?
hi omg not weird at all! i uploaded a picture of chris and a picture of who i imagine to be eleanor and use this prompt:
create an image that looks like a selfie taken with an iphone with them and a 2 year old brown hair female toddler. there should be no clear subject or specific composition just a casual, unintentional snapshot. the image should be slightly blurred from motion and lit evenly by streetlights. the aspect ratio should be 9:16. it must not look AI-generated, but rather like it was taken by a real person. it should be blurry, as if it was taken by chance while they were having fun, make sure they look very familiar
summary: Eleanor moves through the world like a shadow searching for light, and Chris burns too brightly, as if trying to outshine a buried grief. When they collide on a night filled with a mutual self-loathing, something quiet but insistent begins to grow between them — a pull that they never dare speak of, yet orbit in harmony nonetheless. Their bond deepens quickly, shaped by vulnerability, near-misses, and the ache of things left unsaid. As their lives pull and blur at the edges, they learn that what they are for one another in the moment may matter more than how it ends.
warnings (throughout the series): smut; angst; addiction; family trauma; depression; heavy drinking; mentions of death; mentions of abuse; 18+
Chris stayed by the door for a beat, his hand on the knob as though the thought of escape might still rescue him from the necessity of this conversation. He looked smaller for it — shoulders bent inwards, eyes darting anywhere but her, his mouth working open and shut in the way of someone who might speak if only the words would assemble themselves in a neater order. She watched the faint tremor in his jaw, the way he dragged a hand over his face like he could scrub the entire moment away if he just tried hard enough.
It became clear after what felt like hours of silence that he could not speak first, so she did. She pressed her back against his dresser, arms folded so tight across her chest that her fingers dug little crescents into her sweater sleeves. Trying to sound lighter than she felt, she forced out, “I didn’t think you’d ever really been in a relationship before.” The words hovered between them, childish and small.
His eyes finally lifted to meet hers and they looked heavy with exhaustion. “I was,” He said, softly, “Just once. But I was still a kid.”
She almost wished he had lied. Somehow, the truth — that years had passed and this woman still pulled something raw out of him — landed in her gut like a stone. She shifted her weight from foot to foot, mouth parting with no words willing to leave.
But the question found its way anyway, a shape drawn up from the place in her that needed to know, “Will you…will you tell me what happened?”
He flinched like she had pressed a bruise. But he did not turn away — only pushed himself off the door at last, pacing a slow half-circle before surrendering to the edge of his bed like he could not trust his legs to hold him. He rubbed his palms on his jeans, exhaled hard through his nose. When he spoke, his voice sounded far away, like he was telling her someone else’s story.
“She was my best friend. We met when we were kids — same neighbourhood, same bus stop. We were always around each other. But it wasn’t really like that until senior year.”
A quiet, mirthless laugh pressed at the corner of his mouth, eyes flicking to her and then away. “I asked her to be my girlfriend in the dumbest way possible. It was a joke. Or it started that way. I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing.”
She stayed silent, letting him have the space to dig it up, piece by piece.
“We were stupid for each other that year. Always together every single day. And then…after prom night, I don’t know. She got distant. Busy with college stuff, she said. I bought it.”
His shoulders lifted in a helpless shrug that made him look devastatingly young. “One day I thought I’d surprise her at home. I got her flowers like an idiot. Knocked, nobody answered, door was open, so I went up to her room. And…she was in bed with another guy from our school.”
His words slipped into the quiet of the room like a chill under the doorframe. Eleanor’s lungs felt tight, her throat dry. She did not dare interrupt him — did not know what she would even say if she did.
“She tried to spin it — said it didn’t mean anything, she didn’t want to hurt me. But it was bullshit and I couldn’t even look at her. We broke up, obviously, but I was so fucking stupid I kept—” His voice caught, jaw working to keep the shame contained, “I kept hooking up with her anyway. Right up until we moved to LA. It was like I couldn’t stop.”
He fell silent then. Staring at the floor like it might give him an answer he had not found yet. She wanted to speak — to say something — but her mind was just static. So she crossed the room and sat beside him on the bed. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders, pressed her cheek to his hair.
“That’s horrible,” She whispered, “I’m so sorry, Chris,” And she meant it. But he felt stiff in her arms — almost a resistance of her empathy. Her chest squeezed around it.
After a breath that tasted sharp, she asked the question she was not sure she wanted the answer to. “What did she want…today?”
He sat up just enough to scrub his palms against his thighs again, a futile comfort. “She said she wanted to apologize. Said she regrets it every day. So we just talked for a bit. She wanted to know how I’ve been, what it’s like living in LA. If I’m…seeing anybody.”
The last bit landed in Eleanor’s ears like the crack of thin ice. She swallowed it down, forced herself to nod, to keep her voice level. “And? Did you…catch up?”
He huffed out something that could have been a laugh, bitter around the edges. “Yeah, pretty much. That’s all it was.”
She studied him — the tired line of his mouth, the way he could not quite look at her. Her chest felt hollow. Carefully, she slid her hand to his knee. “Are you gonna see her again?”
There — the flicker in his eyes, the ghost of something that frightened her more than any spoken confession. But after a beat, he shook his head.
She hesitated, but then carefully asked, “Are you okay with that?”
He breathed out, shoulders dropping, “Yeah,” He said, quiet but firm, “She fucked me up for good. So yeah, I’m okay with that.”
She watched his eyes, looking for a crack in the surface. She let her fingers trace an idle path along the denim at his knee, wanted to ask Are you sure? Are you really okay with that? But she did not, for she was terrified of what he could say.
Instead, it was he who moved this time, reaching for her — arms winding around her waist. He lowered them both back, slow as sleep overtaking a restless child, until she lay beside him, her shoulder a pillow for his temple. He buried his face into the curve of her neck and just breathed, warm and heavy against her skin. The relief that flooded her was so sharp it made her eyes sting.
“So,” He murmured against her collarbone, voice muffled by her sweater, “What did you think of my dad?”
She blinked. The question jarred her for a second — a sudden left turn down a barely softer road. She took her time answering, letting her fingertips trace the length of his forearm, goosebumps rising in her wake. “Honestly? I think…with everything considered, he seems like he could be a really great guy.”
Chris’s exhale tickled her skin. He hummed, the sound low and somewhere between agreement and doubt. “Yeah. I hope so. I think.”
He sounded so young, so tired. She tilted her head, pressing her lips to the crown of his hair. “Well, I don’t think you need to figure that out right now.”
His arm tightened around her waist in silent gratitude. His breathing evened out, warm and steady against her throat. She felt him drifting — or maybe it was her drifting — but for the first time that day, the storm inside her went quiet.
“Pretty sure we have a tree to decorate downstairs,” She murmured, voice slurred by the force of sleep she was half-tempted to let win. Beneath her ribs, she felt his chest stir — a rumble of protest that vibrated up through her shoulder and into the delicate hush of the room. He made a low sound, half a groan, reluctant, already resigned. When she tipped her head back to find his eyes, they were nothing but narrow slits, glassy with fatigue and the soft helplessness of someone she would do anything for.
He lingered a breath longer — a man at the edge of surrender — then released a slow, theatrical sigh and pressed the heel of his palm across his eyes. “Alright,” He mumbled, his voice creased with mock suffering, “Let’s speed run this.”
She laughed under her breath as he unfolded himself from the warmth of the bed, his arms stretching high above his head until his back cracked in quiet protest. He muttered something that sounded suspiciously like “I hate Christmas”. Then he reached down for her wrist, his fingers warm and familiar as they tugged her upright and into motion.
The soundtrack of Home Alone 2 floated through the house before they even made it down the stairs. In the living room, they found Marylou perched on the couch, her smile a bright, unguarded thing that settled Eleanor at once. Matt and Nick sprawled across opposite ends like kids who had been made to behave, flanking their mother.
Marylou looked over at them with a brightness that still caught Eleanor off guard. “Perfect timing, you two,” She called, the warmth in her voice wrapping around Eleanor like a blanket, “Hot chocolate’s about ready. And this tree isn’t going to decorate itself!”
Eleanor stilled for a second at the foot of the stairs. The lights were now neatly tied up along side the tree, and beside them, boxes overflowed with tinsel, tangled garlands, ornaments of every possible shape and colour. It looked so normal. So simple yet festive. Something she might have seen in a Christmas movie years ago but never dared to imagine she would ever have.
Her heart squeezed hard in her chest, but she forced herself to step forward, smile in place. She felt Chris’s hand brush the small of her back as he guided her into the living room.
When Marylou returned from the kitchen, she was balancing a big tray of mugs, steam curling in delicate ribbons into the air. Eleanor’s fingers closed around the warm ceramic when it was offered, and the scent of chocolate and marshmallows filled her nose in a way that made her eyes sting for reasons she could not name.
“Alright kids,” Marylou said, clapping once with playful authority, “Let’s make this tree look like it belongs in this house, huh?”
It began with the lights — Nick and Matt circled the tree, muttering accusations about dark spots and crooked loops. Chris drifted between them like an unwilling mediator, shoulders brushing branches, his shoulder edged with mild exasperation. Eleanor sat on the couch and watched them, giggling behind her mug.
When it was time for the boxes to be cracked open, Eleanor knelt at the base of the tree, careful fingers plucking out old glass ornaments and painted wooden figures. Each one felt like a small secret — a look into their life-long traditions.
Chris leaned over her shoulder, handing her hooks, his breath warm against her temple every so often. She took her time with each piece, finding the perfect branch for it, pausing to admire faded paint strokes, chipped glitter. As if the tree might remember her tenderness in the days to come.
And then she found three small masterpieces, yellowing with age and cracked at the corners: macaroni noodles glued into wonky stars, dabbed with glitter and crooked felt letters — Nick, Matt, Chris. She held them up silently, her lip caught between her teeth as her eyes flicked to Chris.
He squinted at them, then rolled his eyes and laughed softly. “Oh God. Not those.”
She pushed out her bottom lip dramatically, still holding the little ornaments like they were holy relics. “They’re adorable,” She teased, “Don’t pretend you’re not proud of your artistry.”
He nudged her shoulder playfully with his, “Put ‘em in the back.”
She ignored him, and with exaggerated care, she found three spots front and centre, side by side. As she pressed each one onto a sturdy branch, she pictured three small boys sitting at the dining room table, glue and noodles scattered everywhere, tongues poking from the corners of their mouths in concentration. A warmth spread through her chest at the thought.
When the boxes were empty, the tree looked like it had swallowed Christmas whole — loud, mismatched, bursting with stories. Eleanor sat back on her heels, beaming at the mess of twinkles and memories. Marylou declared it perfect — her voice ringing over the bickering hush of her sons — and then she called for pictures. A chorus of groans rose from the boys in unison.
“Oh come on,” Eleanor chided, pushing herself up and hip-checking Chris lightly as she passed, “Be nice to your mom. It’s cute.”
Chris grumbled something under his breath, but obediently fell into line beside his brothers. They stood stiff and awkward in front of the tree, Matt holding up the middle finger, Nick elbowing him, Chris half-hiding his grin. Eleanor laughed behind Marylou as she snapped the photo.
Then Marylou turned, her eyes twinkling and insistent. “Eleanor, honey. Get in there.”
She froze, her mouth fell open. “Oh— I…that’s okay—”
“Go on.” Marylou waved her toward the tree like she had been part of this family for decades, “Scoot.”
She swallowed the startled lump in her throat and moved, slipping in between Nick and Chris. Nick threw an arm around her shoulders with theatrical affection, squeezing just enough to make her squeal. Chris hooked an arm low around her waist, fingers brushing her hip through her sweater. The warmth of it — the ease of it — made her smile so wide her cheeks hurt.
Marylou counted down, snapped the picture, then another — a moment caught, a brief lie that maybe this was all so easy. When they finally broke apart, everyone collapsed onto the couch, warm mugs reclaimed, soft laughter trailing off as they all refocused on the movie playing on the TV.
For a while, it was just the movie and the sound of the tree’s lights humming faintly in the corner. Then Marylou’s voice drifted over from her end of the couch, mild but sharp as a pin. “Chris, honey — you didn’t answer me earlier. Where were you today?”
Eleanor felt the shift the moment the question left Marylou’s lips. Chris stiffened at her side, hand tensing under the blanket they shared. Eleanor’s own muscles tightened at the reminder. He cleared his throat. “I…ran into, uh— Sofia.”
Silence. Thick, choking silence. Eleanor did not dare look away from the TV, but she felt Marylou’s stare like heat on the side of her face. When Marylou finally spoke, her voice was even, but the weight behind it pressed on Eleanor’s ribs.
“I see.”
Eleanor snuck a glance. Marylou’s mouth was a careful line, her eyes flicking once to Eleanor and then back to her son. There was so much unsaid there that it made her stomach knot. Matt’s voice cut through the hush, dry, the only mercy in it the way it forced the moment to move, “How’d that go?”
Chris shifted beside her. “It was fine,” He said shortly, brushing it off like dust on his shoulder. Nick’s silence was louder than any word. He did not bother hiding the tight curl of his lip. But that was that. The movie played on. The lights on the tree continued to twinkle as if they did not care what ancient ghosts had found their way into the house today.
Beneath the blanket, Eleanor felt Chris’s hand drift to her thigh, fingertips hooking under the edge of her jeans, toying gently with the hem like he was trying to ground himself. Without thinking, she found his hand with hers and squeezed, once, firm and sure.
He turned to look at her, gratitude and a tinge of guilt flickering behind his eyes. She offered him a small smile, and his own mouth tugged upward, crooked and sleepy. Outside the window, snow drifted down in slow spirals, dusting the world quiet. Inside, the tree glowed like a promise: imperfect and alive and full of memory. She leaned her head on Chris’s shoulder, pushed down the sliver of darkness of the day and instead focused on all of the warmth.
Omgg hiii I remember when I first started tumblr i remember one of the first fan fics I read and it was something about reader and the triplets were making brownies or smth and Matt and Nick left to get the ingredients and reader and Chris hooked up so there was a pt 2 where Matt and reader hooked up and I remember something like Matt saying “ I don’t like to share “ or something like that😭😭
I love ur stories smmm but I was wondering (you dont have to ) if u can tag me on that story or reblog it IIFF you can ❤️
omg i definitely remember reading this a long time ago! it's not mine and sadly i don't remember who wrote it :( sorry diva
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