camille

🕰️🫀🦌🐇🍒 21, she/her.

[llillacwine]

Masterlist 🪷🫧

angst, ✬. fluff, ❃. smut, ꨄ︎. smut-adjacent, 𝜗ৎ.

THE PITT

Jack Abbot. ⋆✴︎˚｡⋆

˙⋆✮ standalones:

Coming soon!

Frank Langdon. ⋆✴︎˚｡⋆

˙⋆✮ standalones:

Coming soon!

ANIMAL KINGDOM

Pope Cody. ⋆✴︎˚｡⋆

˙⋆✮ standalones:

But I keep coming back for more. ✬𝜗ৎ (7.8k words)

It’s been a few months since you moved your belongings out of Baz’s house on the seafront—since you and Pope lost custody of Lena, and inadvertently every last scrap of faith you had left in your relationship. Now, Pope makes a butchery of himself every other night in cage-fighting—thinking of you, and his dead brother, and the sweet girl the two of you lost, all because of him.

DCU

Clark Kent. ⋆✴︎˚｡⋆

˙⋆✮ daisy!reader series:

Summary: You and Clark have been best friends since you were kids, in love with each other since your teens. It's just a pity he was too caught up in his self-sacrificing martyr complex to let you do something about it.

Pt. I, I never stopped falling for you ✬❃ꨄ︎ (15k words)

Pt. II, You get lost when you're led by blind faith ✬❃ꨄ︎ (17.1k words)

˙⋆✮ baby daddy!clark series... ✬❃ꨄ︎

I'm having your baby (it's none of your business!) (Incomplete)

Summary: Clark's been a goner for the Daily Planet's political editorialist pretty much ever since the first time you chewed him out with that belligerent, lovely tongue of yours. As fate would have it, after a cliché office Christmas party, you suddenly turn up on his doorstep telling him that you're having a baby. That the baby is his.

˙⋆✮ standalones:

Tears (run down my thighs) ❃𝜗ৎ (5.3k words)

Honestly, you almost wished you had a bit more self-respect—sure, Clark's obviously more attractive than all of the other men you've dated, but a lot of the things that turn you on about him are pretty commonplace. Also, it's early days. You're not even sure if you can call him your 'boyfriend' yet, but still, here you are, imagining jumping his bones all because the poor, charming, achingly handsome guy is assembling the new chair you got from IKEA

Adrian Chase. ⋆✴︎˚｡⋆

˙⋆✮ standalones:

I owe you a black and two kisses. ✬𝜗ৎ❃ (9.3k words)

You can't stomach the way Adrian still looks at you, even after half a year of you ignoring his yearning, babbling texts, even after you pretended, stoic expression and all, that you didn't kiss him that night at Coverdale Ranch. Oh, well. What happens at Harcourt's stays at Harcourt's...right?

[llillacwine]

But I keep coming back for more,

synopsis: It’s been a few months since you moved your belongings out of Baz’s house on the seafront—since you and Pope lost custody of Lena, and inadvertently every last scrap of faith you had left in your relationship. Now, Pope makes a butchery of himself every other night in cage-fighting—thinking of you, and his dead brother, and the sweet girl the two of you lost, all because of him.

word count: 7.8k (unedited, because it's me).

content warnings: angst, mentions of sex/fem!receiving oral, Pope losing Lena, emetophobia (reader gets wasted), self-harm in the form of Pope’s self-punishing and violent behaviour, the unresolved breaking down of a relationship, two people who love each other a lot but can’t make it work, reader is occasionally referred to as "Honey" in place of y/n, Deran is your best friend, Smurf & Baz, strong language, possible excessive use of em dash (AI will have to pry it from my cold, dead hands).

author's note: this is my personal introduction to writing for Shawn Hatosy, hopefully (most likely) the first of many. I’m currently on S4 of ‘Animal Kingdom,’ and unfortunately Andrew ‘Pope’ Cody has charmed me with his sad puppy-dog eyes and self-hatred. I’m hoping to write a depraved, horny, devastating Jack Abbot fic next, because this depressed the shit out of me to write. Hope you enjoy it, nonetheless! If enough of you do, I honestly might make it into a series :)

“You can’t expect me to call my best friend about this, Craig. No, I'm being serious—I ain’t hearing this shit. Don’t you think he’s done enough?”

“I think he’s broken, man. He lost Baz, lost Lena. Now his girl won’t talk to him? No wonder he’s fucking lost it.”

“She’s not his girl,” Deran interjected, seething the “his” through gritted teeth. “Pope made damn sure of that. He did this, Craig. Not her. She fucking tried to make it work—tried to make him better—“

“Then she left!” yelled Craig indignantly, raising his arms and dropping them back down to his sides with an unceremonious slap against the denim of his jeans. “Some good she did him.”

Deran felt a muscle twitch in his jaw. “It ain’t on her to fix him. Not Smurf, not some kid, and definitely not Honey.” He then glanced at the door of the bar, before going to the half-belligerent, half-hurt expression on his big brother’s face. “Just…get out, Craig. I’m not having this conversation again. It’s not on you either. If Pope’s on some suicide mission, that’s on him.”

Defeat crumpled the frustration that was keeping Craig wound-up and tense. It unravelled from his rigid spine first, slumping him forward until his shoulders went with it. He looked deflated and at a loss. Like a dog at Deran’s doorstep, his spoils of the hunt rejected.

“She could at least give him a call, man,” he sighed dolefully, scratching at the tufts on the nape of his neck. “I know he’s not her responsibility or whatever, but they were in love, weren’t they? That’s gotta count for something.”

It counted for everything.

Deran knew that. Knew you. Knew you still had parts of Pope etched into you so deeply that it reached bone. That you most likely would drop whatever you were doing if he were to pick up the phone and tell you about just how bad things had gotten since you and his biggest brother called it quits—since he twisted that knife in you for the last time that you could stomach and sent you packing from Baz’s place.

That’s the kind of woman you were. The kind of soft-hearted, tender person that he probably should’ve severed himself from years ago but Deran was almost as selfish with you as Pope had been. You’d loved Pope like your skin was uncalloused for the sake of his rough fingers to press dents into. Like your blood’s sweet for him to lap at with his doglike, wounded tongue. Like you were made for him.

You’d loved Deran first—not in the same way, not with your mouth breathing pretty things into his like you did with Pope to calm him down. But you were the first person outside of that nightmarish house of horrors and chlorine-burn and swollen bruises that treated him like a kid and not some burly knucklehead like the rest of his brothers. The two of you bonded over a shared love for surfing and Marlboro Golds. Yours was the first shoulder he’d cried onto after he realised that he loved you—God, he loved the bones of you—but there was something missed that he only really felt when he was with Adrian.

You made his childhood bearable. Deran owed you.

He should’ve kept Pope far away from you as soon as he saw those blown pupils of his, that tell-tale sign that his big brother found another thing to obsess over. But by the time he realised that it was more than some depraved fixation he had, you were already in deep right with him. Submerged in it, in fact. In him. Nursing his wounds like it was goddamn second-nature and kissing the cuts on his knuckles like an anchorite. Until Pope’s eyes were all pupil—not a glimpse of hickory or sun-bleached gold to comb out. He was a goner, and so were you, and it was too late for Deran then to save you.

It wasn’t too late now.

So he shook his head at Craig, feeling all kinds of guilty—like a Cain-figure almost, knowing Pope was at home pummelling his fists against a punching bag and yearning for the one thing he couldn’t have. Then he lifted his shoulders, truly sorry for their oldest brother, but thinking only of the salty sea air and the pigtailed girl who first called him friend.

“Sorry, Craig. But I ain’t asking her to do shit for him.”

Pope would never expect it of you anyway.

Deran knew that. Hell, Craig knew that. If Deran's made some angel out of you from the bloodied cloth of his fonder childhood memories, then whatever Pope has done to you in his head could only be described as idolatry.

Ever since he was a kid, he'd had a complicated relationship with religion. But Pope would've lived on his knees at your feet for the rest of your life if you'd only asked. He thinks of you every time he finds himself on them—in the ring, straddling the brawny waist of some bull-headed asshole, beating the shit out of his face until there's only meat left. It's not quite the on-the-knees worship he was used to when he thought of you. Absent of the draping of your legs over his shoulders as he lapped you up like holy water. These pieces of shit never had their hands in his curls the way your pretty fingers did, pulling and tugging, their grunts nowhere near as sweet as your airy sighs of Andrew Andrew Andrew as he calls you honey, 'cause he swears you taste like it.

Fuck, he'd live with his knees permanently bruised. Hiding the grimace whenever they clicked so he could take you apart, again and again, until it's his mouth doing the unravelling and only his mouth that can put you back together.

It's not just the sex he misses, though. Pope's relationship with intimacy was almost as twisted and depraved as the one he had with God.

(You're the cure in both equations—the doe-eyed salvation to the chronic soft dick he suffered with after prison and the tremble he got in his hands when praying).

He misses everything. Coming home from a job to you and Lena cuddled up under a scratchy blanket, Powerpuff Girls still on the television as her head lolled sleepily on your shoulder and your fingers absently carded through her thick curls. Misses the smell of your skin, all sun-soaked and coconut-drenched from the cream he'd lather generously over you just to get a touch. You'd play with his hair most nights. He'd curl up almost embryonic on your lap and murmur nonsense into the flimsiness of your sleep-shorts, playing with a loose thread as you play with his curls. The two of you comforted with the knowledge that, just down the hall, Lena was fast asleep. In the morning, it would be more of this sickly domesticity—sweet Lena wincing at the saccharine orange juice through the spearmint of her toothpaste, giggling as Pope made a similar face after making the same mistake. You'd plate them both fruit and pancakes, kissing Lena's temple, Pope's mouth (you'd join in on the gag, grimacing at the sourness of the OJ), and sit down at the little table to eat with them.

For a brief, anguishing, gorgeous time, Pope had a life. Had a family. Had a little girl who needed him and a good woman that wanted him.

Now, he was back to nothing. Back to Smurf. May was well crawl back into her barren womb to rot there with the rest of her bile and hate. After all, he and Julia were just the sorry afterbirths of all Smurf's worst parts. He should just return to that nasty, darkened matter—be where he belonged.

Since that was biologically impossible, Pope settled for the next best punishment. The house.

He'd made love to you for the first time in this place. Not in this room where he rots now. In his room. In his bed. Arms bracketing your delicate head as you whimpered at the size of him. He'd been shaky and as nervous as a virgin. Damn near blew his load as soon as you hooked your legs around his waist, ankles digging into the dimples at the small of his spine and hands groping at the freckled meat of his shoulders to coax him deeper. To bring him in home to you.

That room's not his anymore. Neither are you, so it felt fitting. It also felt fitting to serve his time in this room—the one Smurf had decorated for Lena. Walls smeared in lilac and other posters for a little girl that was living on a nicer side of town now. Wardrobe still pink with tagged clothes. His limbs ached from being cramped up on the tiny, twin-sized mattress. He deserved it though. Same as how he deserved the contusions on his ribs and the split-lip. The purplish shiner over his left eye is just as needed as the taunting lettering of his niece's name on the untouched wardrobe. All of this—the room, the house, Smurf's meatloaf, his haunted old room down the hall—serves as a reminder to what he's lost. What he let get away.

Pope sat on the edge of the bed. Spine rigid. Palms flat against his thighs. Light imbuing through gauzy curtains. The lavender paint shines like bluebells in springtime.

"Pope."

Smurf. He had his back to her but he could already picture her hip against the doorframe and that viper-like sharpness in her eyes. Like she wants to cut him open and eat him alive.

"You can't sit in here forever, baby..."

Yeah? Fucking watch him.

Pope merely let his chin graze his shoulder in a halfhearted attempt at acknowledging her, and said, "M'fine."

"When you let those people take Lena, I didn't think that meant I wouldn't be seeing your girl around here anymore either?" Prison must've took it out of Smurf, because the faux-concern was just rubbing salt into his many wounds. Or maybe Pope could just see right through her now. "Where is Honey, Andrew? I didn't realise her and Lena were a package deal."

That sucker-punched him. Didn't realise? Lena would've clung to your hip until she went off to college if she could. And you would've let her. Even when her limbs got too gangly and your knees as creaky as his. You loved that kid. And Lena loved you.

She was fawn-eyed and doleful the day they first took her away. You'd cried yourself sick. Pope had to hold back your hair. (He promised he'd get her back. Promised he'd do anything to bring her home. Even said, mouth heavy and wanting against yours—all apologetic and grieving—that he'd give you a baby of your own, too. Give Lena a little sister...In a way, he had. Just not with your eyes).

"Andrew," Smurf said sternly, "I'm talking to you, baby."

Pope sucked in a trembly breath. "She's gone, Smurf. We're done. She left."

There was a beloved beat of silence when she didn't say anything at all. Pope relished in it. Thanked God for it. Thought of you and the comfortable silences you'd give him.

Until, "Because of Lena?"

"Because of me. I ruined it. I lost Lena. I got angry and stupid. So she left," he said scathingly; not angry at you, but needing to spit the words out else he'd lose them in his throat.

"Well, that ain't on you, baby. I don't think it's very fair of her to leave you over something that wasn't in your hands," mused Smurf. "Why don't you ask Deran where she is? I'm sure your brother wouldn't mind—"

"She left me," he interjected, voice cracking down the middle like a wishbone. "She don't want nothing to do with me. I ain't gonna—" Pope wrenched his eyes shut, balling his hands into his fists on his knees and trying to think of your sweet perfume to calm him down. It just made his chest throb. "I don't wanna chase her 'round town, begging her to take me back. She deserves better, same as Lena."

The two of you should be together still, he thought miserably. Maybe not in Baz's—too many ghosts, too much hurt. Pope ruined that place, same as he ruins everything.

But somewhere else where Lena could hear the sea, with not a glimpse of pink. She didn't like pink. But she liked you, and she liked the sea, and the two of you would've been happy together. Orange juice in the mornings and Powerpuff Girls at night. Seashells on Lena's nightstand and her drawings on yours. You'd braid her hair before school; maybe she'd even start to enjoy it with you taking care of her—maybe she'd have friends 'round for sleepovers, and you'd cook for them. Lovely and motherly in a frilly apron. The two of you wouldn't have to wait up for him. You'd have a whole bed to yourself, no tortured man attaching himself to you like a sad appendage, mumbling into the hollow of your neck.

Instead, Lena lived with strangers. Kind enough ones. She had a swing-set. A sister. She couldn't hear the waves from her room anymore, but the beach wasn't too far.

Did she think of you? Did she dream of you, like Pope did?

Did you dream of him?

The tequila left your throat raw and cheeks warm. Salt lingered on your tongue, the acidity of the lime wedge neutralising the burn.

You were in your nicest dress. God knows why, or for whom. You'd told yourself in the mirror that it was for you, but you so detached from your sense of self lately that it felt hollow and wrong to say that. The hem had ridden up to your upper-thigh, exposing the bare lengths of your legs and a tinkering anklet Pope used to kiss when he fucked you in a mating press.

Deran's bar looked almost garish through the lenses of your drunken, droopy eyes. Your chin was lolled in your palm, elbow perched on the sticky bar, about to slip and knock over your empty shot glass.

"If you don't start to look alive real soon, I'm cutting you off," your best friend drawled as he used a dishcloth to dry out a pint glass.

"You wouldn't," you said childishly, challenging him with the sloppy jilt of your chin and a scowl.

Deran arched a single brow at you. "Yeah. Yeah, I would."

"Well, look—" you perked up, folding both arms out in front of you on the bar surface and giving him your most dazzling smile, "I'm alive. And ready for another!"

"Jesus. Look at 'ya, Honey. You're ready for bed, not tequila."

You hiccupped in offence. "Bed? Bed? You promised me a distraction—a night out! You can't—hik!—" you cringed, "can't expect me to just go home and sleep! C'mon, Der, you're meant to be cheering me up not bumming me out."

"He does that, Honey," a sympathetic voice said from behind you, all cocksure but familiar enough to warm your tender, drunk heart.

Delighted, you spun around to smile up at Craig. He towered over you, his hair loose and dishevelled around his rugged face. He grinned crookedly at your dazed, beaming expression and the askew nature of your flimsy dress.

"Hey, Craig," you said sweetly.

"Hey, Honey." He lowered himself into the barstool next to you, still towering, and tauntingly hooked a finger through your fallen strap to slide it back up to your shoulder. He settled it down with a patronising pat before signalling Deran to grab him a beer. "How long you been here, huh? You look wasted."

"Am—hik!—not!" you protested, indignant.

"Yeah," he laughed, "sure." He took the beer from Deran, feeling it sweat into his hand. "Thanks, bro. Put it on my tab, yeah?"

Deran didn't look too pleased to see him. "Your tab."

"Yeah. My tab."

"What are you doing here, Craig?" he sighed.

"I'm here to see my favourite girl, duh," he replied affably, bumping his shoulder with yours. You blushed, a bit girlish in your drunken state. "Where you been, Honey? We don't see you 'round the house no more."

Deran's jaw tightened. "Craig."

"What? I'm only asking," his brother said innocently, blinking back at you and the fresh, forlorn frown that downturned your lips into a shiny pout. "I miss you, s'all. And your bikinis..."

"I just... Andrew and I, we're..." Your brain felt like mush. As liquid and sour as the tequila still burning in your throat. You felt yourself sway a little, slumping into the hard ledge of the bar. "I don't think it's fair of me be there, y'know? Not when he's living there again."

It killed you when Deran told you that Pope had moved back into the family home. You'd thought you'd saved him from all of that. At the very least, if he wanted nothing to do with you anymore, you figured he'd still keep his independence from that place. That woman.

You'd had a home together, the two of you. Lena, three. Well, it was Baz and Cath's place first. You didn't intend on staying forever, just until you found someplace else where Lena could hear the sea. But it had been a home, for all intents and purposes. The place you'd spent the better part of a year with two of your favourite people—eating breakfast, teaching Lena fractions, nursing Pope's wounds (the kind that bled and the kind that only you could reach).

Naively, you'd thought you'd shown him a world that existed without Smurf, violence, and all that generational hurt. But as soon as the two of you called it quits, he went right back to it. To butchering himself for her. To bleeding for her. He probably smells of chlorine again these days. That had faded when he was with you. The artificial tang of the pool had been exchanged for saline and the faint, sweet warmth of sun-cream. That was no doubt gone now. He presumably didn't give a second thought to protecting his skin, nor any other part of himself.

Your beautiful boy, all covered in scars and butterfly-stitches and yellowing bruises.

"Hey," said Deran gently, crouching a little so he was at eye-level with you, "we don't gotta talk about him, Honey. You don't even need to think about him. C'mon, I'll pour you another drink."

And so he did. Then another. And another. Then a mai tai, complete with a gaudy umbrella and a maraschino cherry.

You were sipping it through a red straw, barely keeping upright. The rest of the bar had cleared and you had no idea what time it was. Your dress was even more higher on your thighs now, and you were pretty sure that the wrong turn on the barstool would have you flashing your underwear. Luckily, it was just you, Deran, and Craig—the two of them taking it turns swigging from the bottle of rum that Deran used to make your cocktail.

“—hey,” you blurted, almost sputtering on your drink as you swivelled round to slap a hand down on Craig’s shoulder, “how’s J? I haven’t seen him since, like, well—you know…but how is he? Is he—with Smurf being home—I worry—“

“J’s fine,” Craig swept in, sounding a bit disgruntled. “Kind of thinks he rules the roost now, but whatever.”

You shrugged, indifferent and half-pleased. “He’s a smart kid. I think if you give him the chance—hik!—he could make you legit.”

Craig and Deran exchanged a thoughtful, collusive look over your droopy head until the latter reached over for your tumbler glass and gave the melting ice-cubes a shake.

“Refill?” he mumbled, already going for the bottle of orange curaçao.

You smiled at him blissfully, the muscles in your face stretching out. “Sure.”

So you had another mai tai. Then, a Long Island. You were halfway down it by the time your vision started to go starry and muted-white. Everything went off-kilter. Craig became a burly blur of shoulder-length locks and a concerned frown, then the both of them were ushering you to the bathroom, saying your name and putting brotherly arms around your shoulders. Deran’s hand gathered your hair back but it wasn’t anything like Pops’s, neither was Craig’s as it rubbed halfhearted circles between your shoulders as you hacked up your guts.

Acid, bile, and self-resentment stared back at you, splattered across ceramic along with the remnants of that candied cherry. Soon you were heaving again—half-sobbing into the bowl, mumbling nonsense, mumbling for Pope. It’s like prayers.

“Shit…” cursed Deran, after about your third bout of throwing-up and no sign of reprieve. He kept one hand bunching your hair into a makeshift ponytail as he used the other to miserably rub down his stubbly jawbone. “Fuck it. Craig, call him.”

“Bro, call who? She’s—dude, she’s like, wasted. She’s probably gonna need her stomach pumped or some shit—“

“Pope, man,” Deran snarled through his teeth, smacking Craig on the chest with the backs of his knuckles. “Calling fucking Pope!”

Craig was out of the bathroom like a bullet. Deran, however, stayed with you. He always would. Promised it as kids when the both of you were still missing teeth. He even crouched down next to you, smearing his thumb over your dewy cheekbone to collect a sorrowful tear that had fell from your welling waterline.

It killed his heart to see your bottom lip wobble at the tenderness. How long was it since you last felt a scrap of affection? When you were both young, you’d each yearned for soft touches equally like dogs for a bone. Sniffing around at each other’s frail ankles like hungry sparrow-hawks around carrion.

Deran loved you. Loved the bones of you. He’d said it before and he’ll keep it saying. He needs you like you’re a rib inside of him. An iron lung. To see you like this—all slumped and sad against the graffitied wall of a bathroom stall in his bar; lost eyes, pouty mouth, emptied from the stomach and the heart—he felt sick himself.

You’d saved him all those years ago. Why couldn’t he save you?

“Honey,” he said, trying to be gentle but not knowing how—cursing his mother’s blood, “hey, look at me…” you tried, blinking forlornly through tears and daze. “Shit. M’sorry. I should’ve stopped filling up your glass. Should’ve stuck with my gut.”

“We’re s’posed to be having fun. Was having s’much fun. And then…” you stared, crestfallen, at the evidence of your empty stomach. “Deran, I’m s’sorry. Didn’t—hik!—mean to. Please don’t hate me.”

Deran felt almost as sick as you looked. “I could never hate you. You’re my favourite person.”

After everything, you found it hard to believe that you were anyone’s favourite anything.

Pope was lost to his mother’s clutches again—her nails back in him, right where she’d claimed the pinkish knots for herself decades ago. And Lena was someone else’s daughter now, telling some other patient woman about her nightmares. Even Deran felt distant these days. Face pinched with pity as he looked at you—keeping your glass full and mind fogged so you didn’t spend too much time longing after his brother, nor the ephemeral life you’d had together.

Were you truly so stupid to think that it might last? That Pope was yours, and that the pair of you could raise Lena together?

“Where is she?” a voice viciously banged from outside of the bathroom, muffled and contemptuous and yours.

“Pope, listen, bro—you gotta just—“

“Where is she, Craig?”

You hiccuped again, choking on it and your own air as you stared up at Deran in horror. “Andrew? Did you call…”

“Shit.”

Your best friend straightened up, massaging the throbbing pulse over the bridge of his nose. Your hair fell back down against the nape of your neck, tickling your collarbone. Deran looked distressed and overwhelmed with sudden regret. Had he even meant to ask Craig to call their big brother? What had he been thinking?

“Shit!” Deran yelled then, banging his fist against the steel door of the bathroom stall, making it rattle and you shudder.

All of that was enough to have Pope bursting in.

And you’re there—for the first time in weeks—knelt and weak; wan, hurt, and all apart. You must look wretched. Pope’s eyes go from murderous to aching in moments, and all that tension in him left in a few ragged breaths. He was all yours again. He was all apart, too.

“Honey,” he breathed.

Your lower lip started to waver again. “Andrew.”

“What the hell did you two do?” Pope sneered, glaring furiously at Deran. “You know she’s a lightweight!”

“Hey,” you mumbled disgruntledly, your regurgitated breakfast in your periphery.

“She wanted to drink, Pope. Wanted a distraction. This is on you, not me,” Deran retorted sharply. “I was only trying to clean up the mess that you made.”

“That right? My little brother, cleaning up my mess, huh?” snarled Pope.

Teeth-gnashing and hound-like. All Smurf’s, really. Maybe he wasn’t ever yours.

Then his eyes were on you, and the softness seemed suddenly gone from him—this cold, nearly catatonic, look to them that made you shrink closer towards the dirty wall.

“What're you playin’ at, huh? Sitting here, touching all kinds of germs—throwing up your guts and sitting with these two idiots, letting ‘em get you wasted. This ain’t you,” he ranted, chest heaving. “I know it ain’t, so what the hell?”

“It’s not like I’ve got a kid to come home to,” you shakily manage to spew back, feeling surprisingly defensive considering the state you were in. “Lena’s not exactly waiting for me back at home, is she? I figured I could have a night for myself. Instead of being by myself. Is that—hik!—alright with you, Pope?”

Calling him that was a low-blow, you both knew it. There was an agonised twitch to his left eye that gave his wounded pride away, but you couldn’t find it in yourself to care. He’d wounded you enough, surely his ego could take a blow or two.

Pope just clenched his jaw at you. “Just get up. Look at you. You’re on the floor. Do you know how filthy it is in here? Get up, Honey. I’m taking you home.”

“You’re not taking me anywhere!” you shrilled, doing everything but stomping your foot like a stropping toddler in protest.

“Yeah?”

“M’staying. ‘Feel better now, anyways. Could drink more. ‘Cause Deran cares about me. Deran wants to see me happy. You, however, are just a big, ol’—“

You were halfway home in fifteen minutes.

Buckled into the passenger side of Pope’s truck, temple cool against the condensation of the window. He didn’t like to drive with the radio on so it was just the two of you, the indigo-blue sky, and the occasional bloodbath of a red-light up ahead. You felt like a chastised child. A mutt locked outside the back door to stand out in the rain and think about what it had done—your upset belly akin to muddy paw-prints over cream carpet. You hated yourself.

Apart from the chirping of grasshoppers in rich people’s well-kept lawns and the low rumble of the engine, it was eerily quiet. Pope didn’t even spare you a single glance, hadn’t even looked at you as he got you into the seat and fastened you in, just muttered to himself about how you must be getting all the germs from the bathroom floor into his car.

The silence and the fresh air from the small crack in your window were enough to sober you up a little, so much so that after a few familiar turns and short-cut gullies, you eventually realised where he was taking you.

“No,” you stammered, scrambling to sit upright in the chair and white-knuckling the side of the door. “Pope, I’m not going there. ‘Don’t wanna see her.”

Pope finally glimpsed at you—brief and concerned through the rearview, where a beaded rosary dangled just out of reach.

“I don’t…” he drummed his fingers against his wheel, anxious, “I was gonna take you home, but I don’t…”

He didn’t know where you lived now. Not since you recklessly gave up the lease of your first ever place to move in with him and Lena at Baz’s. There was entire pieces of you that he had no idea about. New furniture and items of clothing—days gone by where he wasn’t there in the evenings to kiss your hairline and ask you what you’d done. He didn’t know about the uneven floorboard in the living room, nor how a few of the shower nozzles sprayed water up the pearlescent tiles in your bathroom. Pope hadn’t seen the new lamp that you’d gotten for your bedroom, because sleeping in the dark felt so much more frightening now without him next to you. He’d probably forgotten the smell of your sheets and shampoo—how it felt to hold you at night.

(He hadn’t. Never would, really).

“Oh,” you said solemnly, realising. “Erm, well. It’s not too far from Deran’s place. ‘Got it on the front. Y’know, in case…”

In case Lena ever came home.

Pope swallowed threadily, ligaments going taut in his thick, freckled neck. He looked so much broader now, you were slowly realising the more brave you got to look sideways to him. Even more filled out than before, with a half-healed welt over his eye and the scarred flesh of a scabbed over cut on the opposing cheekbone. He’d shucked on a jacket before being called over to play white-knight, and his shoulders and biceps pressed against the dark denim in a way that made you even dizzier.

God, you loved him. You missed him. You wanted him back: Lena too. There was even a spare bedroom in this place you’d gotten. The rent was obscene and your landlord useless, but it was some kept-dream for you. That wraparound porch and the spare room. The entire place smelt of the sea and lavender incense.

Pope would be happy there, you think morosely. You kept the place clean. He’d take over that if he was to move in—would do it religiously. And you’d cook, because Pope’s definition of a healthy meal was a slab of barely-cooked meat and raw asparagus. You’d serve him hearty dinners and bloat him up with it (and love). Sure, you loved how muscular he looked now, but you’d be lying if you said that you weren’t fond of a bit of pudge on him. The cutthroat look he had now was just further proof of Smurf’s talons in him. In some depraved way, you wanted to fatten him just the slightest bit—make him homely, make him comfortable: make him yours.

You gave the directions to where you were living now. He followed them diligently and without a word, exhibiting every last nervous tick you’d ever seen him do, from the drumming of his fingertips to the incessant twitch in his jaw.

He pulled into the communal driveway at the back of the row of houses that yours was on, right between your neighbour’s obnoxious minivan and a Wildcat Ultra Minarelli. He knocked off his headlights and left the both of you bathed in shadows. It was suffocating.

Why was he even here? Why did Deran tell Craig to call him? Why did he pick up? The questions swarmed around your mind like small, primal animals.

Chest tightening, you turned to him, feeling infinitely pathetic and two-inches tall. “Thanks for the lift, I—.”

“I’m not letting you walk in by yourself,” he quickly interrupted you, looking rather insulted that you’d even assume he would. “You were stumbling like a baby deer outside Deran’s bar.”

Insulted, you felt your eyebrows pinch inwards and your mouth open to retort. Pope didn't give you the chance. Scoffing to himself, he popped open the driver's side door and left the car. Feeling quite petulant, you slumped down in your chair and crossly folded your arms over your chest as you glared after the vague outline of him walking around the front of the car to your side.

The air hit you unforgivingly, shivering and scowling at Pope for the offence of exposing you to it. He just gave you this droll, half-apologetic look before extending out his arm. You took it, ignoring the yearning for more of him, to touch skin instead of denim—telling yourself that this wasn't intimate nor domestic, this was Pope being Pope. His brothers called him, and he heeded it. Doglike.

He cared about you still, you knew that—you weren't so butt-hurt to deny that Pope had a beautiful capacity for love, even if it was strange and mangled, and not at all like how you felt it. But he couldn't just switch it off any more than you could. Craig no doubt told him that you were a drunken mess, that you could barely stand and were hurling into a dingy toilet surrounded by coke debris and a used condom. There wasn't a possible scenario where Pope wouldn't show up for you. You supposed this was what hurt the most. The lingering concern, the persisting love, the way his touch still rendered you.

"C'mom," he mumbled, almost to himself, as his hand ghosted along the bare length of your arm and into the dip at the small of your spine, coaxing you out of his truck, "I've got you."

You don't, though, you thought viciously as he lead you over the pebbles to the scrap of a front-garden you had. You don't have me at all.

He walked you up the two small steps onto the wraparound decking, stubbornly ignoring the porch-swing that was swaying softly in the sea breeze. His hands left you then. Suddenly, you were stood in a freezing tundra rather than your doorstep. It made you feel lonelier.

You went for your bag that was already slipping down your shoulder, looking for your keys. Rummaging through a sample perfume bottle, lip glosses, loose sticks of bubblegum, you just kept retrieving random items without even hearing the dainty jangle of your keys. The fading warmth of the booze already had you on edge, but the panic of not being able to find them was making your fingers shake and breaths come out in panicked bursts of air that Pope didn't take long to catch onto.

"Here," he said gravelly, taking the handbag from you and carding through all of your things to quickly take out your house-keys. He didn't gloat. He wouldn't. Not with you. He just gave you this brief, sheepish smile that looked more like a wince and put them into your hands, before returning to staring at his shoes.

"Thanks," you breathed, and moved to unlock your door.

The lungs of your house inhale strangely upon welcoming Pope into them. He followed you slowly inside, half-predator, half-prey; quite unassuming considering his stature. He still had that swagger about him that was never cocky, yet still annoyingly attractive. A heavy, uneven gait. You felt it behind you as you moved deeper into the small entry hallway, flicking on a light-switch and bringing life back into this bizarre night.

He kicked off his shoes without second thought, toeing them off, one-by-one, because that was Pope. He didn't want to trek any outside dirt into this sacred place of yours. Didn't want to ruin it any more than he inevitably would by just being here.

In your living room, as the two of you pass through it like ghosts to seemingly get to your kitchen, he smelt lavender and saw the crochet blanket draped over the back of the sofa that used to be Lena's favourite. It was all so dizzyingly nostalgic. As were the books stacked up in rogue piles by the French-doors leading out to the back porch, and the waxen candles on the coffee table, the cardigan slung over the arm of a thrifted rocking-chair, and a kitsch dreamcatcher looped through your curtain-pole.

Your kitchen wasn't any easier to stomach. So uniquely you, quaint too. Your favourite mug was left on the countertop with a terracotta coffee-ring just underneath it, dried tacky to the cheap wood. There was even a photo-frame on the windowsill just above the sink—it didn't hold a glossy photograph, rather a slightly crinkled drawing of a family of three. It didn't take much for Pope to recognise Lena's crayons. To recognise his unruly curls and your doe-eyes, the sweet girl in-between you.

"D'you want anything?" you asked him, already on your tiptoes trying to reach a glass from a slender cabinet.

Pope blinked, having almost forgotten why he was here.

"I'll get that. You—" he cleared his throat, looking at your still dilated pupils and the fallen straps of your little dress, "go and change, brush your teeth. I'll get you some water. Tylenol, too."

"Oh, you don't..." Then, he levelled you with this look that said, yes, I do have do this, and you went quiet again.

Acquiesced, as you usually do for those puppy-dog, hickory eyes of his, and ducked out of the room to freshen yourself up.

Your absence from the room didn't make it any less suffocating, Pope realised rather quickly. It wasn't just you that did this time, he was coming around to seeing, it was everything that came with you—that fierce love you had for Lena, the earthy, sweet smell of you, and how you hadn't changed one bit.

He poured you a glass of water and found your medicine cabinet with ease, popping two Tylenol out of a sleeve that was almost gone—wondering, unhappily, how many of these you've had to take recently under similar circumstances. He stayed at your kitchen island, thumb working over a chip in the oak surface, staring at the settled water in the glass and the twin pills next to it. Just down the hall, he could hear faucet being turned off in the bathroom, followed shortly by the rustle of fabric and some endearing, disgruntled sounds as you fought with the zipper of your dress. He'd considered going in there to help you, but decided against it—Pope couldn't see you like that; all that soft skin and the dewy, vulnerable look in your eye as he helped you out of the satiny slip. Leaving you in whatever panties you'd put on, because he knew for a fact that you hadn't worn a bra with that dress.

Thankfully, he hadn't needed to, because you came padding out of the bedroom not long after, approaching him and the kitchen as if he were a frightened, bathing animal in the woods. Your hair collected back by a claw-clip, most of your legs bare save for the tops of your thighs that were covered by a plaid pair of boy-shorts and the fraying hem of an oversized tee.

You looked painfully pretty. Eyes soft and still a bit unfocused, with smudges of glitter lingering even after you tried to smear it all off with a cotton-pad and some micellar water. You were wringing your hands together when you walked up beside him, reaching nervously for the tall glass of water and the first of the painkillers.

"Thanks, Pope," you said shyly.

"Andrew," he managed to choke out as you swallowed the first pill, staring at him thoughtfully over the rim. "You call me Andrew. 'Always have."

You settled the glass down carefully. "I didn't think I could anymore. 'Didn't think it was my place."

"S'always your place. I'm—"

Pope cut himself short before he could upset either of you any more. But the stricken look on his face as he dragged his eyes to look out to the sea through your window was enough to suggest that enough damage was done—if the matching hurt in your chest wasn't already.

I'm your place.

You took the moment to just look at him. He really was gorgeous. You'd nearly forgotten how many kisses long his throat was. Would he let you remind yourself? The neckline of the navy tee under his jacket was low enough to expose the strong sinews in his neck: sun-drenched, freckled, and untouched by your mouth for far too long.

"I'm sorry that Craig called you," you mumbled, resting the small of your back into the kitchen island. The two of you were side-by-side now, both looking out at to your little cut of the seaside—where Lena should be in the sunny afternoons, building sandcastles and collecting seashells. "Hell," you scoffed next, "I'm sorry I got this drunk at all. I just—it's been, well. I think you know."

Pope nodded shallowly. "I know."

Gutted, you gnawed down on your bottom lip and looked at him again. It was like you just couldn't help yourself. This time, he actually looked back. Chin tilting down to you, giving you all of his attention. Your knees felt weak.

"I miss her," you told him earnestly.

"Me too. I know. I know. I couldn't—" he looked physically pained as he shook his head, fists balling at his sides. "Smurf was saying all this shit about keeping her close. Saying she'll let us see her. Talking 'bout moving you in with me. I didn't want you there, Honey. Not Lena, not you. Not there. I knew Lena would be happier with that family than in that house. I kept thinking about," Pope choked, "about Julia—"

"Andrew," you interjected, moving in front of him now. He shook his head desperately, pushing himself against the island and away from you, murmuring prayers of please and your name. You listened, surrendering your palms to him, but still went on, "I get it. Lena deserves better than that place—than Smurf. But so do you. What I don't get is why you had to go back there? Why you left? I could've helped get Lena back. It's not always Smurf who has to fix things. I could've—we could've done something. Us. We were doing it together, weren't we? We were happy. Was it..." you wet your lips, apprehensive, "were you happy, too?"

"So happy. It was..."

Pope looked so distraught, hands tucked behind his back, shoulders trembling. He didn't have words for it. You'd give him a home and a family. Softened out the harsh edges of all the ugliness around him. Made Lena feel safe and happy, listened to.

“I lost her. For the both of us. You loved her too, and… They took her, because I wasn’t safe. Because I’m fucked up.” He tucked his wobbling bottom lip between his crooked teeth, a whimper lodging itself violently in his throat. “I couldn’t even—I couldn’t—“

“Andrew. Andrew, hey, hey,” you spoke as gently as you could, angling your head down to try and meet his torn-up gaze. “Can I touch you? Is it okay if I—“

“Please,” he wept, keeping his hands behind his back but baring himself to you. “Please, please, please.”

And you’re on him. Because he was begging so sweetly, because he looked so broken, because you loved him. You love him. You cradled one, steady palm to the nape of his neck, tucking his head into the crook of your own, and smoothed the other between his crumpled shoulders. He shook against you, crying like it hurt. His hands didn’t move. You wondered if he was making the inside of his palms bleed. You never wanted him to bleed again. Thought about tearing the limbs off whatever brutes had been beating him to a pulp in that ring as you ghosted your lips over his sweat-slick throat.

“It’s okay. It’s okay. I don’t blame you,” you promised him. “I understand why you did it. She looked happy, yeah? She has a sister. Swings. You wanted her to be happy.”

“You—you…” He couldn’t get his words out, they were ravaging their way from him as if they were being yanked by brutal force from his sternum, “you made her happy, too,” he sobbed.

You squeezed your eyes shut and pressed your nails bluntly into the denim of his jacket. “I just want her to be happy. And you, Andrew. You’re not happy right now.”

“Not happy unless m’with you.”

“I’m the same,” you admitted shamefully, eyes still closed. He was yet to return the embrace, but you didn’t begrudge him for it. “I think about you all the time. ‘S why I got drunk tonight. I didn’t wanna think about how lonely I am without you two.”

That made Pope sob harder. “I ruined it. I ruined everything. M’sorry, sweetheart. I’m so fucking sorry. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

He kept saying it. Until his lungs started to rasp, his throat was raw, and he finally moved his arms around your waist, dragging you into his body. You held him impossibly tighter and Pope squeezed at the flesh of you. You wanted to climb into his ribs and stay there. He longed to have you in his blood.

“M’sorry,” he slurred shakily for the last, gut-wrenching time, sounding so exhausted.

His mouth brushed your jawbone, warm breath and devotion.

“I forgive you, Andrew.” You stroked your fingers through his curls. “We’ll figure it out. You and me, yeah?”

He didn’t repeat the words back to you. Couldn’t. It made you deflate a little, only now realising what this was. Knowing he wouldn’t wake up in your bed come the morning. Tomorrow, he’ll be back in that haunted house of his—he’ll be Smurf’s again. This ironic taunt of a home will be empty again and you’ll be alone. The spare bedroom will never know Lena’s laughter, the left half of your wardrobe won’t ever house his clothes, and you’ll make too much breakfast again. The dull throb of your hangover will feel like a punishment that you deserve for mourning this relationship that will never work out. Inevitably, this will all have been for nothing.

Pope was probably never even yours to begin with.

But neither of you wanted to confront that right now. Not with the moon and the sea behind you, and that empty child’s bedroom down the hall. This was the first time in weeks you’d been in each other’s arms, why destroy that with reality?

“You made me so happy,” he sniffled again, rueful and apologising in his own way. Thanking you, too.

You merely hummed, scratching your nails against his scalp now. “Yeah?”

“The happiest I've ever been.”

But that was all over now. That dream of yours—that the three of you could be a family—it was fallible and gone.

The sound of the waves lapping against the shore would never sound the same again.

[wesandresons]

SHAWN HATOSY as JACK ABBOT THE PITT 2.07 “1:00 PM”

[mcybank]

Tender — Jack Abbot

pairing — jack abbot x college!reader

summary — the worst-cared-for girl in the county keeps washing up in jack’s er, and he can’t help but start paying attention.

warnings — 19.2k. large age gap (jack’s fifty/reader’s in twenties), doctor/patient dynamic initially, power imbalance (attending/nursing student, age, life experience), yearning!jack, protective!jack, jealous!jack, and literally every single word in the book, mutual pining, slow burn, he falls first, hurt/comfort, reader shows signs of adhd but it isn’t explicit, alcohol use (recurrent drunkenness, mention of alcohol poisoning, ER, and repeated intoxication played somewhat lightly), loneliness/self isolation, low self-worth, it’s very difficult for her to accept care, lack of family support/implied estrangement, financial stress and overworking, she’s also spending an unrealistic amt of time hanging out in the ed but it’s fanfic so it’s ok, jokes about financial stress, injuries (sprains, split lip, bruising, gravel burns), medical setting, blood, referenced patient death (patient dies, off-page, Jack grieves), making out/heavy kissing, suggestiveeee content (thumb-in-mouth beat, grinding) but nothing explicit. 

notes — oops sorry this fic is so so self-indulgent 🫶 i literally loved writing them tho i was thinking about them for days on end. tried to take a swing at this based on this idea i had + thank you @ker0senebunny for inspriring the shoe scene!!!! inspired by this post + my er visits where i was literally the worst patient ever

Friday and Saturday after midnight, the board filled up with the same predictable words; alcohol poisonings, bar-fight lacerations, the kids who’d taken things they couldn’t name and showed up convinced they were dying when they were mostly just twenty and having a large thought. Jack triaged it on autopilot, and he’d stopped finding any of it interesting somewhere around year seven. 

Sure, sometimes there were some cases that got a mild laugh out of him or turned his head. There was a kid who’d superglued his halloween mask on his own face for a dare. The guy who’d lost a bet and swallowed something he wouldn’t name in front of his mother, who was present and furious. The occasional genuinely strange thing the human body did that still, after all these years, made Jack think huh, that’s interesting, the small grim curiosity that was about the only part of the job the years hadn’t fully sanded down. He kept those and told them to new nurses over shitty coffee at four a.m. because he supposed that was a better story than what he could say about the Middle East. 

The first time you came in, he’d handed you over to Shen. You were a sprained wrist and a BAC that explained the wrist, sixteen other things were louder, and Shen was free then. 

He’d clocked you for half a second on his way to a GI bleed in bay nine: girl on the gurney, one heel too high on, and one somewhere in the greater metropolitan area, some little pink lace-trimmed thing sliding off one shoulder, telling Shen with enormous seriousness that she was so sorry, she didn’t usually do this, she’d had a singular margarita. Only.

Singular. He’d categorized it under the thousand other single margaritas he’d sworn to in this department and forgotten you before he’d reached the bleed. 

The second time, he didn’t take you either, but he noticed the wrist. 

Same wrist. Different night — a Saturday, three weeks in, the sort of shift where the waiting room sounded like a kennel — and he caught it sideways while he reviewed another chart. It was the same left wrist, taped this time, the nails on that one hand done in some soft pinky color gone chipped at the tips as though the week itself outlasted the manicure, somebody walking you through the discharge paperwork you clearly were ignoring. Something thought for him instead of him thinking much for it, some pattern-recognition thing buried under twenty-some years of reading bodies fast, the same instinct that made him glance twice at something almost normal. A wrist that kept coming back, he supposed. A thread snagging on a nail, there and gone. 

The third time, it was Shen, breezing past the station with his Dunkin, saying over his shoulder, “Frequent flyer’s back.” 

He shrugged, not yet placing that you were the frequent flyer, and went to bed four.

And that — somewhere between the third time and a number he stopped keeping an honest count of — was where it stopped being a chart and became some sort of thing. A bit, he’d say. The nights the bars let out and the board lit up, he’d find himself reading the incoming names a half-second longer than triage required, and feeling something wrong in his chest when yours wasn’t in them. 

Pittsburgh was notoriously interesting, Jack learned through you, in that it apparently contained an infinite supply of ways a girl could get herself in trouble. He was convinced he could’ve drawn a map of the city by your injuries. There was the ankle, of course, a recurring grievance, always the shoes, never your fault. There was one time you’d burned your hand on a curling iron getting ready tipsy and come in more upset about the makeup you’d had to redo (because of crying it off) than the blister. The night you’d gone over in a parking lot because you refused to look at the ground while walking — looking at the ground, while drunk, you informed him, was how you trip — and the time you sliced your finger open trying to shotgun a White Claw with a key because someone had bet you couldn’t. You were really proud of the last one, you’d won the bet. 

You were never the same disaster twice, he had to give you that. A little too keen on busting yourself up here and there, sure, but at least it was the wrist once, then a knee that met a curb, then a memorable evening involving a fence you’d been certain you could clear. You came in apologizing — always apologizing, to him, to the nurses, once, memorably, to the wall — and you came in sweet, which was the part that got under him, because drunk people in this ER were a lot of things and sweet was rarely one of them. 

“Mmm,” you hummed the fourth or fifth time, the second your eyes found him through the gap in the curtain, going boneless with relief like Jack was the cavalry and not the man who was meant to flash light into your eyes for thirty seconds. “The pretty one.” 

Jack let out a huff. “Thanks, doll.” 

“Doll,” you repeated, the word going gummy in your mouth. “He calls me doll.”

“Eyes open. Follow the light.” 

“You call everyone that, Dr. Abbot?” you said, his name coming out in a cluster like you were losing thread of it, the Abbot dissolving into something closer to a hum. 

“Sure do,” he lied. “Track the light.”

You looked at his mouth, then his hands, then back up, a slow uncoordinated sweep because your eyes had stopped reporting to anything in particular, much less what they had to. Pupils blown wide and lazy. He thumbed your eyelid up a fraction to get the light where he needed it; your lashes were clumped and starry with whatever mascara had survived the night. 

He held the penlight steady and waited you out. He had nowhere to be. That was the thing about the dead hours after bars closed; the bleed had been signed up to the floor, the chest pain turned out to be a panic attack and a large energy drink, and there was just you, and the saline ticking into your arm one slow drop at a time. 

“What’d you get up to tonight?” he murmured, thumb finding the pulse at your wrist, counting without meaning to.

“S’fast ‘cause you’re here,” you said, sounding very pleased with yourself.

“Sure it is. Where’d you hurt yourself tonight?”

“... stairs,” you said after a moment, like your brain had to run a few laps to get to the word. 

“Oh, yeah?” He hummed. You lifted your free hand a little off the mattress, lost track of it, and dropped it back down. “How many?” 

“Mm. Four?” You squinted at the ceiling. “Maybe three. I dunno. Not the Great Wall or somethin’. Promise.” 

“I believe you.” He nodded, then turned your forearm to the light, finding the scrape you’d come in with. It was gravel-burn, raw, the heel of your hand and a stripe up your wrist. Nothing that needed more than cleaning. You watched him do it with your head tipped against the pillow, gone quiet so the talking had run out for a second, which never lasted.

“Should I get a better first aid kit?” you asked, then clenched your jaw for a second like you felt something was wrong with it. “S’I don’t have to bother you all the time?” 

“Might be a good idea to invest,” he said. He pulled the swab through the gravel-burn slowly, and you hissed and tried to pull back the hand on reflex. “Easy.” He kept it, his grip light yet unmoving around your fingers. “Almost done. Don’t fight me.”

You hummed, like you wanted a different answer.

Jack wet his lips, shaking his head slightly. He worked the grit out of the scrape, a fleck of it catching raw skin, and he tilted your arm to the light, getting it on the second pass, and wiped it on the gauze. Your hands twitched in his, and he pressed your fingers flat to the mattress with his thumb, and they stayed.

“You’d have to do it yourself, though,” he said. “Bathroom sink at three in the morning with one hand.” He reached for fresh gauze. “You’d make a mess of it.”

You frowned at the ceiling, nodding. “Sounds a little bad.”

“It’s a lot bad.” He laid the gauze over the scrape, thumbed the tape down at the edge of your wrist slowly, smoothing it flat where it wanted to lift. His knuckle dragged once over the thin skin there, and he felt your pulse jump under it. “You’d scar, probably.” His thumb passed the chipped polish, the chunky gold ring you’d kept on, even for this. “You’ve got nice hands. Shame to wreck ‘em over the sink.”

It took you a second. “You think so?”

“Don’t wreck ‘em.” 

“You like when I come in,” you said, delighted. 

“What I’d like,” he said, flat, lifting his eyes to yours, “is you off the stairs and down to the one drink.” His thumb settled over the back of your hand again. “But if you’re set on flinging yourself down, then you come here. Deal?”

Your fingers had curled around two of his somewhere in there loosely, without you noticing. He felt them settle, and he held very still so as to not spook you. He chose to not acknowledge it or look at it.

“Deal,” you mumbled, somewhere far off, probably forgetting the front half of the terms. 

He let it go at that, taping down the last edge and turning over your wrist once more to be sure of it. Then he set your hand back on the mattress, yours still loosely hooked through his, going nowhere.

“Anyone out there to get you home?” he asked. 

“Dunno.” Your nose scrunched. “Was gonna Uber.”

He sighed through his nose. “Where’s that girl — the one you came in with last time? Why don’t you call her?” 

“That’s annoying, Dr. Abbot,” you said, almost in a whine. 

“Yeah?” He kept looking at the wall behind you. “What’s annoying about a ride home?” 

“Calling people. Making it a thing.” Your free hand flopped vaguely. “Then they gotta come get you, and they’re all — have to be nice about it, but you can tell.” Your nose scrunched. “It’s a whole production.”

He pressed his thumb flat back over your hand where your fingers were still caught in his. 

“Oh? Nothing annoying about it, sweetheart. You call, she comes. Simple as that.” He turned to face you. “But if you insist on it, I’m not signing you off until you’re good enough to go home alone. So you call your girl, or you sit right here and keep my department company till you’ve cleared enough that I’ll sign off on it.” 

Your eyes narrowed as you looked at him as though he’d spoken a different language. “Second one?”

“Obviously you pick that one,” he said. 

He pulled the stool over and sat. For a few minutes, he had nowhere to be, and now, apparently, neither did you.

It wasn’t that you simply didn’t let people help you, either. Jack had never seen anyone so committed to being simply fine. Jack had met the stoic kind before; construction guys who walked in with rebar through a forearm acting like it was a small inconvenience; old ladies who’d been having a heart attack since last Tuesday and didn’t want to be a bother. But Jack had always believed those people to be suppressing, and you were just convinced, somewhere down in the foundation, that needing anything was an imposition. 

That was also why the shoes confused him so much. 

“This is the same damn ankle,” Jack said, turning your foot in his hands, watching the swelling outside of it. 

“You don’t have to remind me. Most men buy me a drink before they get this familiar with my ankles,” you said, then groaned as you looked at his eyes going over the swelling. 

“No drink.” He pressed along the bone. “Not my fault you keep handing your ankle to me.” 

You tipped your head back against the pillow, groaning again. “Dr. Abbot, they look so bad. I feel like I’m pregnant.” 

“I can do a quick blood draw and we can rule it out.” His palm flattened on the mattress beside your feet, leaning over to meet your eyes again. “But I think it’s those heels of yours, doll.” 

Your eyes snapped to him. “Don’t be a dick, Dr. Abbot.”

He tilted his head, then pointed at the laminated paper stuck to the wall. “Aggressive behavior of any kind toward healthcare workers is a felony.” 

“Then arrest me, doctor. I’ll die on this hill — and they’re not heels.” Your lips pursed, and the corner of your mouth kicked up. “Cuffs may be a little forward for a date, but I won’t stop you.” 

“Aren’t you just so sweet,” he muttered. “What are they, then?”

“Bottega Lido Mules.”

The words meant absolutely nothing to him — could’ve been a pasta dish, a town in Italy, a wine — but they clearly did to you, so he remembered them. 

“That’s nice, doll. They’ll be the reason I see you again.” 

“Maybe, ‘cause I’ll never stop wearing them.” 

You said the words your whole face, hands coming off the mattress to make the point with a drunk theatrical conviction as you argued something that genuinely mattered to you. Jack thought, not for the first time since he’d met you, that you’d have been magnetic stone-sober at a dinner party, the kind of girl that made a table lean in. It was just that he only ever got the 3am version.

At least you had a hill you’d die on and didn’t apologize for, Jack supposed. 

“You married, Doctor?” you asked as he started icing your ankle. 

“No,” he said, holding your eyes for a second. “Why — you got a boyfriend I should know about, then?” 

He almost wished you did have one. He wished that there were somebody whose name you’d have said just now who’d be in the waiting room with his jaw tight because you’d gone and hurt yourself again. Somebody who’d take care of the ankle when you walked out of here in crutches, who took the keys when you had too many. He wished there was a person in the world whose job you were. 

And you weren’t his first patient who he’d understood to not have someone taking care of them. He knew that if he carried them all, he’d drown inside a month if he tried to be the person nobody else had been. He’d never once had it turn into a wish, standing here with an ice pack in his hand going slack in his hand because he was too busy resenting someone who didn’t exist for not being in the waiting room. 

He wondered when down the line you’d stopped letting the people in your life around you be the ones you could call, became a girl who said sorry for bleeding and had nobody, nobody, and looked at him like he was the warmest place she’d been in all week.

You laughed. “If I had a boyfriend, would I be laying it on so thick?” 

He let out a breath through his nose, despite himself. “Stop wearing the heels, doll. Not nice to not have a foot.”

The next time you came in, it was a Thursday. With some pileup of bad luck, you came in somewhere past one with a split lip and a story about a dance floor he only half got the shape of. Jack hadn’t even been assigned to you yet, he’d just seen your name on the board, and reassigned himself quietly enough that dared anyone on shift to comment. Nobody did. 

“Lip’s not bad,” he said, tilting your chin up under the light, thumb at your jaw. The split was already going fat and shining at the center of your lower lip, and he found his eyes stayed on your mouth a second past the part that was his job, on the soft unhurt swell of it under the hurt. He moved his thumb. “Doesn’t need anything. You bit it when you fell down. That’s all.”

“S’throbbing, Doctor,” you mumbled, the word coming around muffled around the split. 

“It’ll throb. You’ve got a swollen lip.” He let go of your jaw and reached for the penlight. “Eyes on me.” 

“I was so cute before this,” you said through a groan. 

The huff that came out of him was almost a laugh, dragged out against his own will, and he shared a fleeting look with Bennet — a fairly new nurse — who had tilted his head briefly and was too afraid to meet your eyes.

“Alright. Still the prettiest girl I’ve treated tonight,” Jack said when your brows had furrowed together.

“You treat other girls?” 

“It’s a hospital,” he said. “Few hundred a week.”

Your face looked wounded. “Few hundred.”

He leaned in slightly, faking a whisper. “You’re my top three.”

You were further gone than usual tonight. He’d noticed it the second he came around the curtain, the way your head was having a hard time holding itself up, the loose unmoored swim of your eyes that took longer than it should to find his finger. A piece of hair had come loose and stuck to the gloss at the corner of your mouth and you hadn’t the coordination to deal with it, and he had the unprofessional impulse to, and didn’t. 

Bennet kept working the blood pressure cuff up your arm, half an eye on you, half on his own work. 

“Track the light,” Jack murmured. “Slowly.”

“Too bright.”

“Tough.” The corner of his mouth moved up slightly. “You can bat your lashes at me when we’re done. Right now, I need ‘em open.” 

You batted them anyway, slowly and theatrically, just to be a problem about it. They were long, and the theater of it was so ridiculous, and Jack had to bite down the inside of his cheek to keep his face flat to wait you out, until you gave up and tracked the finger. Your pupils were reactive, equal, and lagging half-a-beat behind. He clicked the light off. 

“Too bright,” you said again. 

“It’s off,” he drawled, chuckling. 

Bennett thread a line into the back of your free hand, and you watched him sink it with a drowsy focus. 

“Why’s it go in the back of the hand?” you mumbled. “More nerves there. Hurts more. Why not the — inside. By the elbow.” You tilted your head slightly to let your eyes wander to the crook of your arm. “Bigger vein. The antec—antecubital,” you said carefully, sounding out each syllable, afraid of messing it up. You wet your lips and turned to face him, then Bennet. “Why’s nobody use the good one?” 

Jack pursed his lips and looked at you for a moment. 

“Saves the good one,” he said, catching up, eyes going back to your chart. “AC vein blows easily when somebody’s moving around, and you —” He tipped his head at you, raising a brow, the squirming drunk of you. “ — Are gonna move around. Back of the hand’ll hold. I’d rather you be sore than re-stuck twice ‘cause you couldn’t sit pretty for thirty seconds.” He paused as he saw your eyes glaze over. He sighed. “Ask me how I know that about you.” 

You’d gone busy, lips moving slightly like you were repeating it back to yourself so it’d stick, and Jack felt something in his chest shift a degree as he watched you do it. 

He sighed, dragging a palm over the lower half of his face. “Where’d you learn that, then?” 

“School,” you said to the ceiling, a small hint of pride taking over your voice. “M’gonna become a nurse. Gonna be good at it.”

Bennet snorted, finishing the tape. “Gonna be patching up drunk girls just like you then, huh,” he said. “Full circle.”

Jack watched the pride go out of your face slowly, like a house losing its power. Your chin dropped and your eyes slid from Bennet to the curtain as your hand fisted in your lap. 

“Yeah,” you said, almost curiously. “Guess so.” 

Jack’s jaw clenched involuntarily. It wasn’t the guy’s fault, not really. It was a nothing joke, the sort the whole department tossed off a hundred times a shift, the gallows shorthand that kept you sane at two in the morning. Jack had made worse about patients who’d never know, about drunks who wouldn’t remember, about exactly this, exactly girls like you. He’d just never had one of them go quiet before, watched the bright thing fold itself up and get tucked away. 

“Bennet, you done?” 

“Yeah, line’s good — ”

“Then go take vitals on six. I’ve got her.”

Bennet went, and it was just the two of you again. 

Jack pulled the stool over with his foot and sat — lower than he had to, level with you, taking himself out of the column of people standing over you tonight and telling you what you were — and waited until your eyes came up off the curtain and found him.

“There she is,” he said when your eyes found him. He turned your taped hand over under the light like there was still something to do with it. There wasn’t, he just wanted his hands on something of yours while he undid what the room had done. “Look at me. Nothing good on the curtain.” 

“How’s school treating you then, doll?” he asked, aiming for offhand and not steering you off whatever Bennet had knocked loose.

“Hard,” you said, but a small smile had crawled up your lips. “But I like it.” Your shoulders came up loosely.

“Yeah?” He kept his thumb moving over the back of your hand slowly, like he could press the bright thing back up to the surface where it belonged. “I think you’ll be good at it.” 

It was such a strange feeling, Jack distantly noticed, to feel this utter conviction. He was rarely sure of anything good anymore. Sure of plenty else; sure within ten seconds of a bad rhythm which way the night was going to break, sure of which of the kids wheeled in at 2 am he’d see again and which he wouldn’t, a grim accumulated certainty that had nothing in it he’d ever wanted to be right about.

The job had made him an expert on the downslope of things. He could read the exact moment a body wanted to quit better than he could read most of what people said to his face. And here you were, and he was so sure of the other direction, and he felt the same weight of it behind his sternum, except it had swung and pointed at something good for once. You were going to be excellent at this. 

It bothered him a little, how much he wanted to be there to see it, whoever you were going to be once you stopped washing up on his floor on the worst nights of your week. He’d known you, what, a handful of shifts as a frequent flyer, a bit, a name his eyes unconsciously caught on. He had no business feeling certain of anything about you, and he was, and he’d let himself feel it. 

Your eyes found him properly again. “Liar.”

He huffed out a short laugh. “Tell you what. You finish that program, you get through all that mess where they try to drown you.” His thumb smoothed over the tape. “Then you come find me here and we’ll see if we can get you here with me on nights. Clearly you’re at your finest then.” 

It was maybe something silly to say, and Gloria may have his head for it. He had no actual standing to say anything like it, even though you’d never remember it. He knew better; hope was a controlled substance in his field and he was stingy with it on purpose, because he’d seen the withdrawal.

But God, he’d love to see the part of you he could only catch glimpses of through the wreck like a light under the door. He’d love to be the one who taught you which arrogance to keep and which to let the job take away. He’d love, plainly and without anywhere to put it, to watch you become who you’d just told him you were going to be. 

It was a lot of loving for a girl who’d been in his department and wouldn’t recall his face or a word of this by tomorrow morning. He was getting sentimental, or old, or both; the years stacked up behind his eyes until he started mistaking everything for a second chance at something. 

Your lips moved. “So I can patch girls up like myself?” 

“Nah.” He kept looking at your hand. “You can patch up old bastards like me, too.” Then, he pointed his index finger of his free hand at you, mock-stern. “Gotta make sure you’re not at point three BAC, though. Will have to do that work to get you working with me.”

“Mm.” Your eyes flickered up to the ceiling, weighing it with the enormous gravity of the very drunk as though he’d posed a very real proposition to you. “Okay. For you, I’d stop.”

“For me?” he repeated, mostly to buy himself a second.

“Mm-hm.” You turned your face to him and said it with such ease, no glance away to leave yourself an exit. “You’re worth not drinkin’ over.”

Your words went in clean, the way the best and worst things do, under the ribs where he kept nothing armored because nobody ever aimed there. Jack felt the back of his neck go warm and was abruptly, intensely grateful for the light that wouldn’t display it. 

Jack huffed, having to look away at the floor then. “That’s the nicest thing anyone’s said to me all year, and you’re not gonna remember it. Hell of a thing.” 

When he made himself look back up, you’d tipped your face into the pillow, watching him from the side with your eyes gone soft and heavy, the smile arriving unguarded across your mouth. The split tugged one corner of it, that small wince folded right into the sweetness, and you seemed to not feel it. 

He had the sudden, idiotic wish to have met you on a night you’d remember. To have perhaps caught you when you fell at the bar, to have been the stranger whose arm happened to be there, not the doctor it eventually routed you to. Perhaps he could’ve been a man in your night instead of a stop in it.

He shook his head. “You’re trouble, you know that, right? Saying all these nice things. What’s a man supposed to do with that?” 

He’d have liked to have been remembered, was the bottom of it. By you specifically. He’d spent decades being the man people were grateful to and glad to forget.

“What’s your name, Doctor Abbot?” you asked, drowsy.

He looked down at his badge, then back up at you. “Take a wild guess?” Then, he added, “You never looked at my badge?” 

“Sorry. Didn’t read.” 

“Don’t apologize to me. It’s Jack.”

Jack was doing his usual rounds this Friday, on a rush from a chest pain in two that turned out to be a panic attack and a kid in five who’d put a kitchen knife through the meat of his own palm trying to halve a frozen bagel when Ellis caught him by the elbow at the board.

“Heads up, Abbot,” she said, grinning. She nodded toward triage, toward the doors. “Bed three. Your, uh—” The grin tipped over, delighted with itself. “Girlfriend’s got a boyfriend.” 

It was a running thing now. Somewhere around the fourth or fifth time you’d washed up on his shift the staff had started on it — your frequent flyer, your stray, your girl’s back — and Jack had stopped bothering to deny it because that’d only feed it, and he’d learned not denying it had a way of starving the joke faster. 

He looked, and was immediately able to notice what you weren’t doing more than what you were; you weren’t grinning at the ceiling, weren’t doing that boneless sweet-relief thing. You were sitting up too straight on the bed, hands folded in your lap, and there was a guy fitted to the chair beside you with one arm slung along the back of yours and a hand resting on your knee like he’d put it there to mark the spot. He was saying something low to the side of your face, and you were nodding at it, and not looking at anybody.

Jack felt a muscle tick in his jaw, immediately not feeling anything nice about the situation. “I got it — you mind taking six for me? I’ll come in a couple minutes.” 

By the time he’d made it to you, he’d settled his face into something unbothered. You could read it, he’d realized at some point during your frequent visits, and that only meant he had to be on his better behavior around you. 

“Evening.” He pulled the curtain half-round behind him, glanced at the chart clipped to the foot of the bed, then at you. “What’d we do tonight?”

“She caught an elbow,” the guy answered. “Some asshole on the dance floor. It’s nothing — she’s fine. She’s just a lightweight, aren’t you — ” A little squeeze on your knee. “ — didn’t even really need to come in, but y’know. Better safe.” 

You weren’t a lightweight, he immediately wanted to correct. He’d seen you put away enough over the months to know your tolerance better than this guy apparently did; he knew the difference between the nights you were genuinely wrecked and the nights you came in clearer than you let on, and looking at you, tonight, you weren’t anywhere near the state implied. 

“You,” he said, tipping his chin in your direction. “Not him. Where’d it get you?” 

You lifted your hand up from your lap and touched your cheekbone, movement slow, and Jack stepped in and tipped your head up toward the light with two fingers under your chin, thumb resting just shy of the scrape. The skin had gone dark along the bone, tender, an elbow’s worth of it. Nothing that needed more than an ice and a night, but you were still holding still under his hand and not meeting his eyes, and that he didn’t like at all. 

“It’s okay,” you said. “Really. S’not even — ”

“Let me be the judge of that, sweetheart. Gettin’ paid for this.” His eyes flicked down to yours and caught, holding it there a second with a small question in the rise of a brow, before he went back to the bone, thumb tracing the edge of the bruise so light you barely felt it. A small frown pulled at the corners of his mouth at the sight. “Follow my finger. Eyes only.” 

You followed, pupils fine and equal. No concussion in it. 

“She’s fine, I told you,” the guy said from the chair, a little laugh under it like he was inviting Jack in on something. “Hardly. She bounces back.”

Jack clicked the penlight off and turned to the side. “Gonna need the room.”

“I’ll stay.” The hand went back to your knee. “I’m all good here.”

“Can’t clear a head strike with people in the room. You get it.” Jack tilted his head to the side, raising a shoulder. “Liability. Coffee machine’s down the hall. Give me two minutes with my patient.”

The easy smile on the guy’s lips went thin around the edges, looking for a thing to push against and not finding it. He stood up slow, making a show of it, squeezing your knee and letting you know he’ll be back in a minute, babe, a hand trailing your shoulder on the way past, all of it aimed less at you and more at Jack holding the curtain. Jack pressed his lips in a thin line as he met the guy’s eyes. 

The second the curtain closed behind him, a breath left you, tiny and involuntary, and your shoulders came down in the empty room. 

“Sorry, Dr. Abbot,” you murmured. “I keep being a mess at this place.” You took in a short, almost shaky breath. “Sorry.” 

“None of that,” he almost grumbled, penning your chart. “Your folks down here, sweetheart?” 

“No,” you said to your lap, picking the edge of the blanket. “Back home. A few states over.” You let out a laugh. “Just me out here. S’nice.” 

Jack forced a small smile, having to look at the ceiling while you looked down at your lap, shaking his head, more of an action for himself than for you. He pulled the stool over with his foot and sat, getting level with you. 

“What’s goin’ on with you, huh?” he asked quietly, making sure there was nothing sharp in his tone at all. “Honest. I like seeing you but not like this bruised up with a guy who talks for you.” His thumb found your wrist. “So talk to me. What’s going on?” 

“He’s fine,” you said. “Just likes being around.”

Jack tilted his head, dipping his head to meet your eyes that were still facing down. “Not the important part of the question, and you know it.” 

You sighed. “Sorry, Jack.”

“Quit it. The only thing I want from you tonight is some honesty, alright?” 

A corner of your lip kicked up, even though the dimness in your eyes held. “Your eyes look really pretty tonight.” 

“Heard that one before,” he drawled. “Had ‘em fifty years. Try a new one.” 

“Your neck’s going red,” you mumbled, fingers reaching up to press flat to the warm of his skin, right there below the jaw, like you just had to feel whether it was true.

Jack stilled. Your fingers were cold on his neck. He distantly registered his pulse was probably going under your fingertips, and you’d feel it if you held there a second longer. And then you caught yourself, hand snapping back to the blanket.

“Sorry. Sorry — I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t have done that — ” you said, the words coming out in a taut string. 

“Easy,” he said, voice coming out rough. He swallowed. “Got me all flustered and now you’re gettin’ all shy?” 

You huffed a small laugh, your hand still fisted in the blanket where you’d snatched it back. “I’m not allowed to do that. I don’t think.” 

“Had no idea you knew how to behave,” he leaned a little back from the stool, crossing his arms. “Should I be worried about that guy out there?”

“Jealous, Doctor?” 

He rolled his eyes slightly, not responding. 

You sighed when you realized he wasn’t taking the bait. “He’s fine. He just likes being around.” 

He stood off the stool and reached for the discharge clipboard at the foot of the bed.

“Whatcha doing there?”

“My job.” He clicked the pen. “Clearing you. You’ve got no concussion. You’re not dying tonight.” He scrawled on the paper. “And I’m writing you a script for the bruise and a code for an Uber — ”

“No, no,” you said immediately. “Please don’t do that.” 

He raised his hand with the pen, palm open. “You never let me Uber you back when you’re alone. At least have this.” Your face scrunched up, and he could practically feel the guilt building in you. “Don’t need to use it now. Or ever. You can keep it for whenever.” He set the slip on your lap before you could push it back at him, the matter completely closed on his end. “Goes in your phone case. You can forget it exists until you need it.”

“You can’t keep handing me stuff — ”

“Department’s got a whole stack. You’re not special.” He capped the pen, though the corner of his mouth made it slightly visible that his words were false. “Don’t flatter yourself, doll.”

You looked down at the slip, your thumb worrying the edges of it. “I don’t like taking things.” 

“I noticed. A few hundred times now.” He tucked the pen back in his scrub pocket, and his voice came down a notch. “If it really makes you feel so bad, though, then maybe we can start taking care of ourselves so you don’t have to keep ending up here?”

Jack was in the middle of hand-off, Robby doing his thing before Robby left and did whatever the hell he did. They were at the board, Robby running down the floor. It was six-fifteen in the ugly hour, the in-between where the day shift was dragging itself toward the door and the night hadn’t started biting yet, the light through the ambulance doors gone gold and slanted and almost decent for once.

And then the doors slid, and you came through them. Jack’s attention peeled to you the second your shape entered the room, except this was wrong, he distantly registered. It was daylight and six in the evening and you were on your own two feet, upright and, assumedly, sober and walking in through the front like a person as opposed to a patient. You were wearing a jacket that swallowed you, and he assumed underneath it was shorts of some sort. He could see a stripe of navy cotton peeking from under the collar of your jacket as you adjusted a tote bag on your shoulder. 

You looked, frankly, like a completely different species from the one he scraped off bed four on weekends. The jacket was too big — his first thought was that it was a man’s, and his second thought, which he didn’t care for, was about whose — sleeves shoved up to your forearms, a stripe of soft navy cotton on the collar, and below it bare legs and shorts and sneakers that had likely never seen the inside of a club. Your hair was up and a little damp at the temple and your face was scrubbed clean.

You looked like somebody’s whole good day, he thought. You looked around around the waiting room with slightly widened eyes, a lost expression coating your features like you’d built up a lot of nerve to walk in here and had no idea what to do with it. 

“ — and the tox screen is still pending, so don’t let them,” Robby was saying. 

“Mhm,” Jack said, attention already halved. 

And Bennet, breezing past the triage desk with cheerful obliviousness, caught your figure and said, out loud, “Don’t tell me you’ve started day drinking. It’s barely past six, you gotta pace yourself — ” He let out a small laugh at his own joke, and kept walking, and didn’t see the way it landed. 

Your body stiffened, and you looked like a deer in headlights. Your mouth opened, some sort of flustered apology forming, he was sure. 

Jack let out a short groan, shaking his head. He set the tablet on the counter, already moving to cross the floor toward you. “Finish the hand-off with Shen. I gotta go deal with something.” 

Robby said something at his back — deal with what? — but Jack was already gone, crossing the floor slowly but somehow still eating the distance fast, and he watched you spot him coming and watched the relief crash over your face. Except you were sober now, in the daylight, and your whole face was going soft and grateful and just slightly wrecked at the sight of him.

He stopped a couple feet short of you, closer than a doctor, further than he stood to you at night. He wasn’t sure what to do with his hands — there was no chart to hold (he should’ve brought the tablet) or wrist to take or a penlight to shine — so he clasped them behind his back, and tilted his head to get a better look at you. 

“Hi,” you breathed.

“Hey,” he said, eyes doing a quick once-over to make sure you really didn’t have any new injuries.

You shifted the tote under his gaze and clutched whatever was in the bag a little tighter.

“Jack —” you started, stopped, like the name had come out wrong. “ — Dr. Abbot.” You winced, pinching your eyes shut for a second. “Jack?” you tried to say again, smaller, your eyes flicking up to check his face to check if you’d overstepped. “Sorry, I don’t know which — ”

“Jack’s great.” His mouth tugged up, despite himself. “You’ve called me a lot worse. Jack’s a step-up.” 

You let out a startled little laugh, your mouth coming over your mouth like you could catch it, as your body eased a degree. 

“I’m sorry — I don’t — God, this is so embarrassing. I’m sorry.” 

“You know how many times you’ve apologized to me? Quit it.” He rubbed a finger over his lips. “What’s got you here today, then?”

“Um, I came to see you.” He raised a brow, and you let out a short breath, then continued, “I might not remember a lot of it, but I remember you took really good care of me. And my friends who came in with me sometimes said you took really good care of me.” The words came out softer now, flowing, more earnest. “Even though I was a mess. Especially when. So I just wanted to —” You shrugged, smiling slightly. “ — come say thanks.”

Jack felt the complete warmth of you land somewhere he kept no armor. “It’s the job,” he said quickly, before he could stop himself. “You didn’t have to come down here for that. That’s — it’s what we do. Anybody on shift would’ve done the same.” 

Your expression faltered for a moment, and your eyes dropped to the tote at your side as your shoulders came in. You shook your head, a small motion, then smiled again. 

“Right. No — yeah, of course.” You chuckled. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to make it a — I know it’s your job.” You shifted the bag, then shifted your weight from one foot to another. “Still, though. You did, so I wanted to.” 

Jack already wanted to take his words back, but he couldn’t, so he just shook his head. “Hey, you’re my problem, though. So thank you. For the thanks. We’re even.” 

Your shoulders eased and you nodded. “Well, I also have something for you.” You hauled a container out of your tote and held it out to him with both hands before you could chicken out. “It definitely doesn’t make up for all of the times you helped me.” You looked down at the container. “And I don’t know if you’re lactose intolerant, or have a peanut allergy or anything. I’m sorry if you do — I can — ”

“I’ve got a cast-iron everything. The cookies won’t kill me.” When you pushed the container further to him, he took it off your hands, eyes quickly scanning the round chocolate chip cookies, forcing a smile down. He swallowed whatever had lodged in his throat. 

“These are homemade?” He weighed the container in both hands, absurdly. You nodded. He swallowed whatever on earth had lodged in his throat at that.“Didn’t have to do all that for me.” 

“I wanted to,” you said quickly. “I wasn’t sure how the food here is, so thought it might be a nice change.” 

“Worse than you’re imagining,” he said, then tipped his head to the side as the memory crawled into his brain, uncalled for. “You’ve actually thrown a sandwich across the room.” 

Your palm came up to your mouth, and you let out a muffled, “I’m so sorry.” 

Jack snorted, shaking his head. Then, after a moment, he cleared his throat before it could get away from him. He looked back toward the board, then at you, knowing time was slipping and he’d have to go back to work and you’d have to go somewhere else, most likely. 

“You got finals or anything coming up soon?” he asked. 

Your lips curved down, and you nodded. “Yeah, in a couple weeks.” 

“Am I gonna be seeing you getting wheeled in wasted?” 

“I want to say no,” you said, smiling a little crooked. “I’m working on it. But I’ve said that before and ended up here. So.” You shrugged, lips jutting out like you were also unimpressed with yourself. “Ask me again in a couple weeks, I guess. I’d like it if you didn’t, though.” 

“Then quit doing the hard nights alone,” he said, leaning in just slightly. “You keep yourself off the stairs, and you can come bother us instead here with a textbook.” He raised a brow as he held your eyes. “We’ve got a family room that’s almost always empty at night.” 

“I couldn’t — ”

“Won’t be a bother. Trust me. You’d be silly not to use people’s help when they’ve clawed through the same exams to get the badge. You get stuck, somebody’ll know it cold.” He shrugged. “Half of ‘em are bored out of their minds some nights. You’d be doing us a favor.” 

You let out a breath, brows pinching together. “That’s — yeah.” You let out a short laugh, looking away for a second. “I’d like that. A lot. Thank you, really. As long as you don’t mind.”

“This is a teaching hospital, doll. I don’t mind, so long as you don’t mind the company. Might be nice for me, too.”

You smiled and for a moment, neither of you moved to end it. Then you shifted the tote back up your shoulder, and Jack felt the pull to keep you here one more second before he could stop himself. 

“Go home,” he said gruffly. “And I’ll be looking for you. So actually turn up, don’t make me look for nothing.” 

The whole sun of you came up at that, stunned, like you hadn’t expected to be looked for by anyone. Jack felt the ground go quietly out from under him, the vertigo of having reached for a person’s happiness on purpose and connected, of being, for once, the cause of a face doing that. He’d gotten so used to delivering news that took the light out that he’d forgotten it ran the other way, too.

“I’ll turn up. I promise.” 

He nodded, clearing his throat and turning for the board, bidding you a throaty goodbye. 

“She’s the girl that everyone on night talks about?” Robby asked immediately, falling into step beside him. 

Jack looked at him sideways, shaking his head. “You got something to say, too?”

“No,” Robby said, rubbing his palm at his chin like he was holding something in. “You like her or something?”

Jack halted for a second, pointing his index at Robby as he lowered his chin. “You shut up. She’s gonna be a nurse.” 

“Oh, yeah,” Robby laughed. “Looks like she’s gonna be your nurse, old man. You’ll need it soon enough.”

Thank god you did turn up. Jack had the sense that maybe he’d scared you off altogether by his offer, and the line he’d toed had two very alternate spectrums: you’d find a new hospital altogether to go to in the metropolitan area after your falls or poisonings, or you’d be here a lot more often, which he still wasn’t sure would’ve been often enough. 

The first time you came in, it was well past midnight and Jack had unfortunately not been able to catch you off the bat because he was in an emergency surgery. He’d walked out of it with his blood-stained surgical gown still on to be met with the sight of you by the nurse’s station, writing something down on the back of a discharge form for Lena, with another Tupperware laying on the table. He made the guess that you’d brought the whole floor something and were three minutes from having Lena eating out of your hand. 

You’d found a corner of his department and made yourself a small soft home in it inside of ten minutes, and you were leaning in, and Jack stood there for a moment with the bad night still ringing in his ears and felt something unclench in his chest by a fraction.

“ — no, but you gotta,” you were saying to Lena in earnest as Jack approached closer. “If you put the brown sugar in while the butter’s still hot, it’s just — it’s a different cookie.”

“You taking the recipe, Lena?” Jack asked then, fully submerging into the knot you’d made with his charge nurse. 

You turned to face him, a smile forming on your lips almost immediately, and then your eyes dropped over him, to the gown, the rust-brown stain dried dark across the front of it, the set of his shoulders. 

“I am,” Lena replied. “Gonna make these for the kids.” She punctuated her sentence by holding up one of the cookies. 

“Gonna make some for us, too, then?” Jack asked, raising a brow, and settled his elbows over the table. He turned his neck to face you properly, putting on his best smile.

Lena laughed shortly. “I don’t like you enough.” She pushed off the counter with some forms in hand. “Her, maybe. You can have whatever she leaves behind.” She shot you a look that was almost warm before she went and disappeared down the hall. 

“Could be you someday,” Jack said, tilting his head in the direction of Lena’s chair. 

You shook your head, then pushed the container in his hands. “I’ve got to graduate first. And pass pharm, which is currently — ” You patted your tote bag, textbooks heavy. “ — trying to kill me.”

Jack nodded toward the family room, placing the container on the table for a second beside him. “C’mon, then, doll. Let’s see what the pharm’s doing to you.”

“You don’t have to — ” Your eyes flicked down the gown again. “You just came out of surgery. You don’t have to help me study.”

“Actin’ like I’m the one who got the surgery,” Jack muttered, chuckling slightly. He was already peeling off the gown one-handed, balling it up to toss. He started walking, and you followed behind him. “C’mon. It’s pretty empty right now.” 

It’d been pleasant that night and the few after to have five to ten minute increments of sitting with you helping you study in between doing his actual job. He’d duck in between things — a lull after discharge, the dread stretch while he waited for a CT scan, the ten minutes a trauma took to roll in once the call came — and you’d be there in the family room with your stack of cards on the couch. He’d drop on the chair across you or the couch beside you and pick up wherever you’d left off like he hadn’t left at all. Then his pager would buzz and he’d be gone, and you’d still be there an hour later when he came back, and he’d sit back down, and both of you’d pretend this was a completely normal way to study.

It’d annoyed him the first night how badly the flashcards were failing you; he’d seen you stare at the words and your eyes would glaze and slide right off it like they were greased. You’d memorized or retained nothing. And then he’d said, half to himself, a story for the why to click, and he’d watched it lock in you. 

So he’d stopped quizzing you primarily off the cards and started telling you stories instead and you’d talk it back to him, reasoning out loud, getting there in the saying of it the way you never got there on the page. 

The nights stacked up. The first week, you’d sat at a table across from him. By the second, you’d migrated to the chair beside him. Your coffee, the one by the far end of the table, was right by his elbow. Lena started leaving a second cup at the station when she saw you come in, his and yours, and never commented.

You’d stopped apologizing for taking up his time somewhere in there. He noticed when you’d started saving him the worst looking cookie on purpose because he’d once told you he liked the ugly ones. He’d noticed when you learned the rhythm of his pages; you’d go quiet and just hand him the next card when his eyes drifted to the board through the window of the door, would have it ready when he came back, like you’d kept his place for him while he was off keeping someone alive. 

He noticed that he more than looked forward to it. Somewhere in the dead middle of a bad shift, his feet would take him toward the family room before his brain could catch up on the why of it all. An empty table on a night you didn’t come in sat wrong with him, a tiny disappointment he didn’t have anything in him to figure out why.

Sometimes, like now, you’d get distracted. Jack had learned. He’d walked into the family room to see you and Ellis folded into opposite ends of the couch, the flashcards abandoned in a fanned mess on the cushion between you, both of you mid-argument and enjoying yourselves too much.

“Poaching my study hall, Ellis?” he said, finally moving in. 

Ellis pointed one stern finger in your direction as she pulled herself off the couch. “Do the crossword, not the sudoku.” 

“She’s gonna make you a worse student,” Jack said to Ellis’s back.

“She’s making me a worse doctor,” Ellis said cheerfully, already at the door. “I’ve been here twenty minutes. I have patients.” She turned to you one final time. “Crossword. You’ll thank me later.” 

She gave Jack a knowing look on her way out, one he didn’t want to read too much into, and she was gone, the door swinging shut behind her in one slow plunge. 

You watched the door settle, and the entire wattage of your attention turned to him. He hadn’t gotten used to that, and he didn’t think he ever would. “Looks like I’ll never be a nurse.” 

“Don’t say things like that.” He came around and lowered himself onto the couch beside you. “What’re you stuck on? Hit me.”

Your palm met his upper arm, a small smack. 

He narrowed his eyes at you. “Hit me all you want. You’re not getting out of this.” 

“But Jaaaack,” you drawled, tipping your head back on the couch. “Not here to study today.”

His eyes flickered over to your form briefly as he gathered the cards and squared them. “Oh, no? What’re you here for then?”

“Dunno.” You pulled your knees up to the couch. “Didn’t wanna be at mine. And work was a lot and boring.” You turned to face him then, a small smile growing on your lips. “Thought I’d bother yours instead.” 

He set the squared deck on his knee. “Lucky me.”

He’d caught it, though, how you’d folded the sad thing in the middle of the sentence where it’d draw the least attention and moved on before it could sit. He let it move on, but he kept it. The image of you on a Tuesday, work behind you, and the choice you’d made was to drive to a hospital rather than go home to your own quiet. He was getting a picture of what that quiet looked like and learned that he didn’t like it very much.

“Work was boring, huh,” he said, though he couldn’t imagine what a fun day looked like as a waitress. “You working more?”

“Mm. Saturday girl quit, so now I’m on Saturdays, too.” You picked at your sock. “S’okay. Tips are good. I learned that old guys tip better when you call them ‘sir.’” 

He huffed. “Do they?”

“Huge. It’s a cheat code.” You tilted your head at him, smiling shyly. “You’d tip well, I think. You’d overcompensate.” 

“I’m not gonna sit here and get profiled by you in the only few minutes where I can catch my breath.” He held the card up, front to himself. “And I tip twenty-five percent like every functioning adult, thank you.”

You groaned. “Where can I get tipped more than that?” 

“You don’t want me to answer that.”

“I do. I do. I’m a broke student. Point me to the money — where should I apply?” You shifted on the couch, fully facing him now, the cards apparently abandoned for the moment. “C’mon. You’ve lived a hundred years. You’ve gotta know where I can make some quick cash.” 

“You’re sweet to me, doll,” he muttered, rolling his eyes. He set the cards down and looked at you, genuinely considering it now. He tried to ignore the fact that you likely had money troubles and tried to think about how he could actually help. “Define quick.” 

“Like — by next Thursday.” 

“Legally?”

“No.” 

“Legally, you can sell plasma. Twice a week, they pay you, you sit there with a juice box.” 

Your nose scrunched. “I don’t love needles in me sober.”

“You’re gonna be a nurse.”

“In other people. That’s totally different.” You waved it off. “Next. What else?”

“Sleep studies pay you to sleep. Egg donation pays a whole lot but it’s a whole process, not a Thursday deal.” He was ticking them off on his fingers, now fully committed. “Medical research’ll pay you to test things. Phase-one trials. You take an experimental drug and they watch you for side effects.”

“That’s the one.” You sat up. “How much?”

“No,” he said immediately, shaking his head. “Absolutely not. I bring you in here to keep you from blacking out. I’m not gonna have you volunteering to get poisoned for a quick four hundred bucks.” He pointed at you. “Maybe start laying on the ‘sir’ a little too thick from now on.” 

“Sir.” You tested on him directly, dropping your voice, leaning in an inch, lashes going slow. “Could you help me out, sir? Tips have been so slow, sir.” 

He turned his face away from you, now making himself look out the window. “I’m not entertaining this.” 

“Oh, but sir.” You’d fully abandoned the cards now, scooting closer, a hand under your chin, the picture of innocence. “I’m just a girl. A poor, hardworking girl trying to be a nurse. Don’t you want to help me out, sir?”

“I am trying.” He pulled up the flashcards. “If it’ll help, I’ll bring my SWAT buddies into your place and they can run up a tab.” He waved a card in front of your face, trying to get your attention back to it. “You do this, I’ll have eight cops eating mozzarella sticks in your section by Friday, overtipping ‘cause I saved their lives. Won’t even have to call ‘em sir.” 

“Right. No, that’s — ” You let out a little laugh too quickly, eyes widening at his words, and you took the card out of his hand mostly to have something to do with yours. “You don’t have to do that. Obviously. I was kidding — ” You batted the whole thing away with a shake of your head. “God. No. I’m okay, I promise. I was kidding.”

“I’m half-kidding,” he said, raising a brow. “I do know those guys. It’s no skin off me. But it’s okay.” 

He let the offer sit like that, and he saw you pinch your eyes shut. He watched the whole thing happen on your face, the small involuntary recoil you always had when anyone offered you real kindness. You were bad at it. For a girl who lied so charmingly about how much she drank and how her night went, you had absolutely no poker face for being cared about. You had not the first idea how to hide it.

He found it unbearably endearing.

You opened your eyes and looked a little caught, a little sheepish as your thumb worried the corner of the card.

“You’re a strange girl,” he mumbled, fond, before he could stop it. “You know that?”

“Shit — Jack,” you said through a small laugh, shaking your head. “I don’t — I’m — ” You pressed your lips together and your shoulders came up almost to your ears in a stiff shrug. “Is there anything I can do for you? I can’t just accept — all your help.” 

He snorted. “What help? I give you a study room and review flash cards.”

“Let me do something. I’m a good cleaner — ”

His head went back slightly, shaking his head. “You’re really not.”

“Okay,” you continued, rallying. “A dog? Guys like you always have dogs they don’t walk ‘cause of their hours. I can walk dogs.” 

“No dog.” He raised his hand when he saw your mouth move again, stopping you. “You pay me back by passing your boards. You can pay me back plenty if you end up working here, doing good at the job.”

You went quiet for a second. “That’s just me doing my own thing. That’s not real.”

“That’s real to me.” He shrugged, like he hadn’t just made your whole future the price of his kindness. “I get a good nurse out of it someday.” He pulled himself off the couch. “And now I gotta go. Floor’s not gonna run itself.”

“Boo,” you said, pulling the entire deck on your lap now. “You’re the worst study partner. You leave constantly.”

Tonight, Jack had come into the family room after leaving you for a longer stretch of time than usual — a multi-vehicle situation that had eaten two hours and most of his patience — and found the studying had long since lost.

You’d migrated to the couch at some point. The textbook was open face-down on the cushion beside you like a small tented roof, your flashcards fanned across the middle seat, and you were folded in the corner with your knees pulled up and cheek mashed into the worn armrest, fighting your eyes and losing completely. You’d dimmed the overhead lights, lighting the lamp in the corner, the one nobody used, throwing everything low and gold.

He paused in the doorway. “You awake?” 

“Mhm. Need a cat nap, though,” you murmured.

Jack snorted, shutting the door behind him as he walked closer to you. “How far’d you get?”

“Far enough.” Then, you added, “Cat nap.”

“Sayin’ it like I’m gonna not let you have one.” 

Your eye cracked open a sliver, tracked him, then fell shut again. “Feel like you’re gonna make me do more cards.”

He toed the leg of the coffee table aside, reached down, and started clearing your mess off the cushions. He lifted the textbook and shut it around the receipt you’d jammed as a bookmark; gathered the flashcards and squared them in his palm; capped the highlighter and pocketed it. You watched the cleanup through one half-open eye, not lifting a single finger, your cheek staying flat to the armrest. 

“There. No more cards. You’re done for tonight, doll.” 

“Hooray,” you mumbled. 

He nudged your socked foot where it had crept up across the cushion. “C’mon. Budge up a second. Don’t want you wrecking your neck sleeping like that.”

You made a small sound of protest but you went, peeling your cheek off the armrest with reluctance. There was a crease pressed into your skin where the fabric seam had been and your hair was flat on one side and mushed on the other. You blinked up at him, swaying where you sat, eyes glassy and unfocused in the gold lamplight.

He sank into the space he’d cleared, the cushion dipping, tipping the two of you a fraction into each other. That was all the invitation your body apparently needed, because you folded into him without a beat of thought — too tired to second-guess it, he supposed — your temple finding the warm of his shoulder, your whole side melting against his. You drew your knees up and tucked them against his thigh. Your hand came to rest on his chest, palm flat, fingers spreading once before they went still. You exhaled after a moment, long and slowly, and burrowed your nose into his neck. 

Jack stilled. 

“Ten minutes,” you murmured, the words barely coming out as words.

He took his arm off the back of the couch and settled it around your back, broad hand spanning between your shoulder blades and drawing you that last fraction deeper into him. You went boneless with it, a small contended hum slipping out of you. 

Because he couldn’t help himself, he tipped his head down a fraction to say into your hair, “Been doin’ really well, y’know that, sweetheart?” 

You hummed, the sound of it vibrating against his throat, your fingers curling the faintest bit in his scrubs. “Thanks, Jack.”

“Gonna be a good nurse,” he murmured, thumb moving once along your shoulder. 

“Gonna work with you,” you mumbled, three-quarters gone. “You said.”

“Mhm.”

“Holdin’ you to it.” 

“Yeah, I know you are.” The corner of his mouth flicked up where you couldn’t see it. “Go to sleep. You can hold me to it in ten minutes.” 

When you didn’t answer for a second, Jack realized you were already gone. You were warm and trusting at his side, your hand slack over his heart, your breath sinking deep and even into his neck. 

Jack let his head tip back against the couch, pinching his eyes shut at the feeling of you, at the feeling you caused. His hand spread slowly across your back, feeling the breath go through you — the proof of you — and he let his thumb find the curve of your shoulder and rest there, keeping his eyes shut. He sat with the enormous fact of you, the girl he’d not seen anyone circle back for, gone soft and so pliant in his arms like she’d always belonged there, and he stopped pretending he wasn’t already lost. 

The ten minutes came and went. He let them. He’d have given you the whole night, the whole shift, the whole of whatever this was turning into. There wasn’t one place on the earth worth standing up for, and he’d known it for weeks, and only now, with your breath slow against his throat, did he let himself sit all the way inside of the knowing.

Jack came out of the OR and signed — albeit distantly, mind running a meter a minute about nothing good — what needed signing and said the things he was meant to, feeling the familiar piece of his own damn soul rotting away in the place those things went to rot. He knew the spot by now. It’d been decades of depositing them into the same place, and the place didn’t fill, exactly, but it never emptied, either. It just sat there, getting heavier, like things usually do when you keep adding to it and never take anything out.

This one would sit a while. Jack had started to sense it around the first year in this job; the ones that stayed had a weight, and you knew on the table whether you were getting one of those or whether it’d wash off by morning. This one wouldn’t.

He stripped his gloves, and somebody said something he answered without hearing, and then his feet simply walked past the board, carrying him down the hall toward the one door on the whole floor that wouldn’t have somebody else’s catastrophe behind it. 

His hand was flat on the door. He was still wearing the gown, and he looked down and registered it too late. He should’ve changed it, left the thing in the dirty bin with the rest of what the shift had taken, the way he always did before he came to you, kept the two halves of the floor separate on purpose. 

He opened the door. You were on the couch, one leg tucked under you and the other foot on the floor and a half-empty cup of coffee on the table going cold. You’d been doing something on your phone, or nothing, when the door opened, and you looked up with the easy expectant expression on your face you always had before it dropped. He watched it melt.

“Hey,” you said, making your voice soft.

“Hey.” His voice came out rough, and he almost winced as he heard it himself. 

You set your phone face-down on the cushion and unfolded yourself from the couch and stood, crossing the room to close the gap between you. You stopped in front of him and looked up, your brow doing a small worried thing, and he let himself be looked at.

“Sit down,” you said. “You look like you’re gonna fall through the floor.”

He distantly registered you walking him to the chair — your hand finding his forearm, a light touch — and he let you. He folded into the chair like the strings of his own body had been cut, his elbows finding his knees and head dropping.

He heard you move, small domestic sounds of you filling a cup, the tap somewhere down the hall turning on then shutting off. Then your socks were back in his eyeline, toes pointed to him.

“Here.” You crouched, came into his lowered field of vision, and pressed a cup into his hands — water, cold — and folded his fingers around it when they were slow to close. “Drink it all.”

He drank because that was the path of least resistance. The water caught something he hadn’t registered was bone-dry. You took the empty cup out of his hands when he was done, setting it on the table behind you, and then he felt your hands find his shoulders.

He flinched just slightly, the smallest involuntary thing, for nobody touched him like that. Nobody put their hands on him that weren’t shaking one of his or needing something from him. You settled your thumbs into the iron base of his neck and pressed slowly, working the knots the night, the days, the weeks, and probably the year had wound there.

Your thumbs were unsure of themselves — you weren’t good at it, you weren’t trying to be, you were simply trying — and that was somehow worse because it got further to him than skill would have; there was the unpracticed earnestness to it, like you’d simply decided his shoulders had been holding too much and you wanted to put your hands there to take some of it down. 

He felt his head drop lower, coming forward on its own, the tension bleeding out of his neck by degrees under your hands. Your thumbs found a place at the top of his spine that had been clenched so long that it had stopped registering as pain, and you pressed there, and a fraction let go. He felt his shoulders drop the inch they’d been holding up all night, and an uneven breath went out of him.

You kept your hands moving, your thumbs working the meat of his shoulders through the cotton, occasionally finding a knot and leaning your weight into it until it gave. 

His head tipped a little forward after a stretch of time — chasing, or simply falling — and it found the soft of your stomach. His forehead rested against the front of you, where you stood close in the gap between his knees. He hadn’t intended for it, or maybe he had, somewhere under where the intention happened, his body had chosen to stop holding its own weight and give it to the nearest thing that felt like it’d take it. His eyes were already shut, and he stayed there, hands coming up on their own to rest at the sides of your waist. His fingers anchored into the fabric of your shirt.

“Shitty job sometimes,” he mumbled after a moment.

“Yeah,” you said softly above him. “I bet it is.” 

Your fingers had found his hair, threading through the curls. Then, you added quietly, “But you’re really good at it.” 

His fingers tightened a fraction at the fabric on your waist as he let out a short huff. 

“Didn’t help him,” he said finally, the words coming out muffled behind his own mouth. “Whatever I’m good at didn’t help him.” 

“Maybe not.” Your fingers scraped carefully at his scalp. “I think you were the best shot he had.”

He breathed you in, choosing to let the words rest in his skull for a while instead of fighting them. 

“I’m — ” He heard you take in a breath and felt it go through your whole body. “I’m really grateful I met you, Jack.”

For some reason, he waited for you to take it back. There was a primally fast thing in him that told him that you’d take the words back, and he’d have understood.

“You don’t have to say anything,” you added. “I just wanted you to know. While you’re here being all — ” Your thumb moved at the back of his neck, tender and so gentle. “ — Figured it was a decent time to tell you I’m glad you exist.” 

He took in a shaky breath against you, fingers tightening again. 

“Thank you, sweet girl,” he said, and it sounded like it’d been punched out of him. “Likewise. More than you know,” he finished, his arms wrapping around the rest of your waist now, pulling you in like he could just fold himself smaller if he held hard enough.

Your fingers kept moving slowly in his hair, your other hand coming around the back of his head to hold him there. He couldn’t think of the last time he’d let anybody do this; as far as he could remember, he’d decided in some wordless permanent way that he’d carry his own weight from then on, that it was cheaper, that needing somebody was a bill that came due eventually and he’d rather not run the tab. 

“You should sit,” he said after god knows how long without letting go. “Selfish, keepin’ you standing here.”

“It’s okay.”

He hummed, thumb moving once at your waist. “Two more minutes then.”

“Whatever you need, Jack,” you said, voice quiet. “I’m not going.”

Jack’s phone lit up on the arm of the couch at 10:52, face-down, buzzing itself a quarter-inch off the leather before he caught it. 

He’d been working his way, with grim completionist patience, through an iceberg video you’d sent him three days ago with the message ‘THIS rabbit hole i need you to fall down.’ You’d followed it up by telling him, ‘do Not skip tiers!!’ He hadn’t skipped tiers. He was, in fact, ninety minutes deep and only about two-thirds down the pyramid, somewhere in the tier where a young man with a serious voice was explaining internet folklore he couldn’t believe was real. 

He was fairly sure it’d been invented by some teenager, but Jack only shrugged, distantly wondering why on earth anyone would spend the labor — the diagrams, alone — hoaxing a thing this elaborate for an audience of complete strangers. He also wondered why on earth you were so interested in this. As quickly as the thought arrived, he realized that he was working down the iceberg himself.

Working down a thing you’d handed him felt adjacent to sitting next to you, and his apartment had become the sort of quiet that made adjacent worth ninety minutes of contemporary folklore. He’d sooner have chewed glass than admitted it out loud.

It was a good apartment and an unwitnessed one. He’d realized somewhere in the past year it was untouched by any hand but his. Every object was exactly where he’d last set it down, for there was no second person to nudge the remote three inches or leave a hair tie on the counter or ask why there was a mug in the sink and no bowl. His leg was off for the night, propped against the arm of the couch, the whole standing weight from his night shift to SWAT calls finally set down somewhere it was allowed to stay.

So, the phone going off, went off loud in the silence that had become almost-permanent. Your name lit across the screen, and the picture with it (one you’d set yourself, commandeering his phone to do it). It was already strange that it was a call. You never called; you texted in floods, six messages deep before he’d gotten to the first, but the ringing meant the thing had gotten past the point where typing it out would hold. 

He looked at your laughing face buzzing on his phone for a second too long, the cold little instinct, and thumbed it green.

“Hey,” he said. “You know it’s almost eleven on my night-off. This better be good.”

You stayed silent for a second, and he could hear your breath and the hollow of a call connected in a car, the cooling engine’s tick and automotive acoustics. 

“Hey,” you said finally, and Jack felt it wrongly. The back half of the word had gone soft and unsteady at the end.

Jack was already sitting up. “Hey, yourself,” he said. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing.” He heard you swallow quickly. “Sorry. God, this is so dumb. You — were you asleep?” 

“I was almost through with your iceberg, if you want the truth.” 

You made a sound that tried to be a laugh but didn’t clear the runway, breaking apart halfway. “You watched it?”

“Almost.” His fingers were drumming against his prosthetic leaning by the couch now. “Are you out?”

“I’m —” You paused, then hummed like you were debating. “I’m kind of near your place, actually?” Your voice rose toward the end, like you were embarrassed or questioning it all yourself. “I know. It’s creepy. But I think I need to — talk to you.” 

“Yeah?” He tried to keep his voice light, though he could already feel something in his body start racing, panicking. “You break something?”

“No. No. Promise. It’s nothing like that.”

For some reason, that put a deeper hook in him. If it wasn’t a wrist, an ankle, or your body doing something it shouldn’t, then it was the other kind, and he had no idea how to hold something like that. He wasn’t sure what he could do with a sprain he couldn’t ice.

“Okay — ”

“Wait,” you interrupted, voice pitching higher, and he could see you were psyching yourself out. “I could just say it now, honestly. It’d probably be easier over the phone.”

Jack’s eyes widened a fraction at that. His stomach suddenly felt cold. 

“No,” he said, voice rougher than he’d intended. “I won’t make it hard. Whatever you want to say, I promise. Just — not like this, okay? Come here.” 

He listened to you breathe as you weighed it and knew, with bone-deep certainty, that he wouldn’t like what you were going to say. “Okay,” you breathed. “I’ll be there in fifteen.” 

Jack opened the door after the first knock, unembarrassed of waiting. You’d come as you were, a coat thrown open over sleep clothes, good wool hanging loose over a thin cami with lace at the collar and soft shorts and bare legs down to the sneakers you hadn’t laced properly. The second fact that registered to Jack was that you’d been crying; there was a soft ruin around your eyes, the mascara long gone, wiped with a sleeve somewhere back in the evening. Your hair was up and losing, a claw clip hanging looser than he believed it was meant to.

“Hi,” you said, eyes raising to meet his. “Thanks for letting me come by.”

Jack felt his shoulders rise to his ears just slightly at the formality. He felt like a bucket of ice had been dropped upon him because somewhere in the past few weeks, you’d stopped apologizing to him as much, which had felt like a small victory he never told you he was counting. And here it was again, your stiff little courtesy, the door swung back shut on a thing that had been open. Jack didn’t like it. He didn’t like it at all. 

“You don’t thank me for coming by,” he said gruffly, opening the door wider.

You came in, but only just. Before he could steer you to the warmth of his apartment, you were already reaching into the bag on your shoulder — hands shaking, he realized, with a fine tremor — and pulling out a folded piece of paper, creased hard down the middle and then again like you’d tried to bundle it up into a fist.

He unfolded it and smoothed out the edges, eyes looking for yours briefly, but you’d already looked away. Your bottom lip was between your teeth and you were looking at the ground. He forced himself to look down.

It was your pharmacology exam. Your cramped looping handwriting scattered the margins, a star drawn to one question because you starred everything. There was red pen all down the side and a number circled on the top. The number, Jack saw immediately, was not catastrophic, not a failure even. It was a low pass, the sort of grade that would’ve stung for Jack in his school days and evaporated by the next exam. He’d expected worse from the way you’d been shaking holding it. 

He looked back at you, confused more than anything. “Congratulations, you passed.” 

Your jaw tightened, and he could see your eyes go bright and wounded. “It’s a seventy-one.”

“That’s a pass.”

“Barely. Barely.” You took the paper out of his hands, folding it away like you couldn’t stand looking at it anymore. “And you helped me with this so much and I still couldn’t. I’m so tired of — ” You stopped, looking up at the ceiling as you pressed your lips flat. “It’s not about the test.”

“Okay.” He leaned back against the counter, giving you the whole floor of the room. “Talk, then.” 

You looked at him, and he watched you gather it all up, deciding, as it settled into your face, your mouth, whatever you’d come here to say.

“I don’t wanna waste your time anymore,” you said, tugging your bottom lip between your teeth as your eyes landed on the wall behind him. “I can’t — it’s not fair.” 

Jack felt the whole floor shift under him and felt his brows go up an inch as he tried to keep his face seem collected. 

“You’re you,” you continued. “You’ve got a whole life, a hard one, and I’ve been just — dumping mine on you. Making you sit there and hold my hand through studying and I’m — ” You shook your head, face going grim as you said the words. “It’s not fair to you. You’ve been carrying me for so long, and it’s not fair. None of this is yours to carry. I’m not yours to carry.” 

His nose scrunched just slightly, something like burning blooming at the center of his face. Something in his chest had cracked along the seam he had no idea was there, because he’d never had to look at it once straight on. It was easy to carry your own weight when there was no one asking to take some. It was easy to call solitude a principle when nobody had ever made the alternative real. And you had. You’d made it real for months, and here you were proposing — no, telling — to take it back, to hand him his loneliness again because of some measurement of fairness. 

The horror of how much Jack didn’t want it — how badly, how completely he didn’t want to go back to how it was before you — was the first honest look he’d taken at himself in longer than he could stand to count. 

“That so?” was all he could say, voice roughening as his brows narrowed at you. 

“Yes.” You mistook the roughness for agreement, or maybe you just needed to do so, because you kept going. “You don’t have to help me. The only thing I can think is you’re — you are a good person and I was there. And you help people, it’s what you do.” Your hand waved in the general direction of him as your voice cracked. “So help someone who’d actually make it worth it. Who won’t barely pass and keep getting too drunk and — ” You laughed slightly, and it was all wet and terrible, the sound. “I’m a bad use of you. You’re this — you are so much, Jack, and I’m a bad place to put it. So put it somewhere better.” 

Jack had to force a swallow when you ended your words with a sharp intake of breath, the pool behind your eyes slipping free slowly down your cheeks. You’d run out of anything that’d make you wipe it away now, and that undid him worse than the crying itself, that you were standing there and letting it fall, done hiding, wrung all the way out. 

“I’m sorry — ” he started.

“It’s okay,” you said immediately, shaking your head.

“For making you think that’s what it was,” he said, lowering his voice. “That’s on me, that you talked yourself into thinking this has been some sort of charity.” He cocked his head to the side then, wishing you’d look up at him. “But you’re gonna quit shaking your head for one minute, and hear the rest, ‘cause you got it wrong. All of it, backwards and upside down.”

He came off the counter and closed the space himself, until you had to lift your chin to keep his eyes. 

“I’m not a man who spends his nights on a stray out of the goodness of his heart. Ask anyone I work with what I’m like. I don’t have that lying around spare.” His jaw tightened. “So take the halo off. That’s not what this was.”

“Then why — ”

“You,” he said plainly, for he learned it cost him nothing to do so, and a lot if he didn’t. “I wouldn’t do this for just anyone. There’s nowhere else I want to put it.”

He watched everything in your face tighten at his words, the disbelief and reflex to argue all curdling underneath. 

“If you don’t want this.” Me. Me, he wanted to say. “Say it. I’ll leave you alone. You don’t owe me anything.”

“That’s not — ”

“But don’t act like it’s some favor for me.” He was closer now than he’d been. “Don’t tell me you’re leaving for my sake. That’s a lie.”

“It’s not — ”

“It’s a lie,” he said, voice going flat and so final, as he slowly nodded his head. He looked at you a second, lips coming between his teeth, then looked away as he felt something physical seize over his entire body.

Jack himself had to process the words as he said them, because he was only just realizing how much truth they held.

“You make it good.”

He forced himself to look back at you, and you had tilted your head now to look up at him, caught and still as stone, the arguing gone completely off your face now and replaced with something more frightened.

“Don’t — ” One of Jack’s shoulders came up in a half-hearted shrug. “You’re the one part of my day that doesn’t take anything out of me. Just — get that straight, sweetheart.” 

You were just looking up at him with your whole face undone, the tears gone still on it, as though his words had knocked your own clean out of you.

“I don’t know what to do with that,” you said quietly. “People don’t — that’s not a thing that happens to me, Jack. Being — ” Your sentence broke apart and your hand had come up and fisted loosely in front of his shirt without either of you deciding it should, holding on, holding him there. “I don’t know what to do with it.”

“Nothing.” His hand came up slowly and covered yours where it fisted in his shirt, holding it flat there against his chest. “It’s just true.”

You made a small, pained sound and dropped your forehead against his sternum, right where his hand held yours, and he felt the whole strung-tight weight of you gave at once and settled into him. He felt you breathe against his shirt at the same time he felt his own pulse going too fast on your knuckles; he wasn’t bothered enough to try and slow it, because there was no point now. You’d already found out. 

“Very grateful for you,” he murmured, his other hand pulled up to rest over the back of your skull. “Told you so earlier. Meant it more than you let yourself hear.”

You huffed against his shirt — half a sob, half a laugh, maybe the ruined cousin of both — and he felt it go through the cotton and land warm against his skin, felt your fingers uncurl a fraction from the fist they’d made then re-fist, like even now some part of you was checking he was still there to hold onto. 

Jack held still for it, same as you had in the family room for him. He was good at holding still, it was half the job, but this was a different kind — he supposed — where there was a plain animal willingness to be a wall for as long as you needed one and not move a muscle that might spook you out of it. 

He rested his chin at the top of your head, murmuring, “I don’t have to tutor you anymore, if that’ll help.” He swallowed, closing his eyes as he breathed in your faint perfume. “We can scrap the whole thing, if that’s what’s making you feel so bad.”

You stilled for a second, then made a small sound against him. 

Despite himself, despite it all, he let out a short chuckle. “S’okay. I’m the reason you got a seventy-one. You’re allowed to switch.” 

“You’re the reason it’s a seventy-one and not a thirty,” you said, and it came out muffled and immediate. You almost sounded cross, like you didn’t want the slander against him to stand even now.

After a moment against him, you added, “I don’t want to be just someone you help, I think. I don’t want to be somebody — I guess — that you’re just good to.”

When Jack hummed, you continued, “I don’t know what I wanna be instead. Just — a friend — or, I don’t know. Something that goes both ways.”

Jack’s chest swelled at the words. He felt that he’d have been anything you asked of him, simply because it had just become how it was. It was almost outrageous how, if you’d asked, he’d have handed it over, the whole rest of it, whatever you wanted the name to be, whatever box you needed him in.

A man his age was supposed to be past this. He was supposed to have calcified somewhere in the second decade of the job into something that didn’t reorganize himself around what someone he’d known properly only for the better part of the year had asked him.

“Consider it done,” he murmured, letting the word settle. Friend.

You breathed against him, and Jack felt himself want to remain exactly here and knew that he shouldn’t. He knew that the kind thing now was to give you somewhere to put your face that wasn’t his chest, some ordinary ground for you to set your feet back down on. 

“C’mon.” He got a hand on your shoulder and eased you off him gently, a slow, slow reclaiming of the eight inches of air between your body and his. He dipped his head to catch your eyes, which were pink-rimmed and swollen and doing their utter best to avoid his now that the worst was out of you. “Do you want me to order food?”

Your neck rolled back slightly as you met his eyes, caught slightly off-guard at the shift of tone. You blinked. “That was a lot, and now you’re asking about food?”

“It was a lot,” he agreed. He reached up and thumbed a smudge of leftover mascara from under your eye briskly, and you let him. “And now it’s done. So, food, and we can watch the stupid video you sent me before you head home.”

It had been six days since you showed up at his apartment, and Jack had embarrassingly counted every single one of them. You’d left his apartment somewhere past two with your eyes finally dry and a paper bag of his leftover Thai you’d protested and taken anyway, and he’d walked you down to your car and stood in the lot like some idiot in a movie until your taillights turned off his street, and then he’d gone back up to a quiet that felt, for the first time in years, like something had been in it.

Since then it had gone like it always had and nothing like it; you still turned up with flashcards and left a graveyard of half-drunk coffees on every surface. But he’d noticed how you started letting him sit closer now, let a compliment land without flinching off, and once, mid-story, had reached over and fixed his scrub top where it had folded under, casual as breathing. 

Friend was the word you’d settled on. Jack was thinking about that when Shen dropped into step beside Jack with a cup of fresh Dunkin sweating in his hand. 

“You know it’s not standard to let your girlfriend occupy the family room for three hours of your shift, right?” 

“She’s not my girlfriend,” Jack immediately clarified. It seemed more important to do now than it was earlier, when people only knew you when you came in as an emergency. Still, it felt wrong, like a key going in the wrong hole. “And you got a problem with it?” 

Shen lifted the coffee in surrender, unbothered. “You know we’ve grown to her. She and I do the Wordle every midnight.” Then, he spread one hand. “Administratively, she’s not staff. She’s not a patient. She’s not family of a patient. Which leaves the category I’d have to call —” He tilted his head, faux thoughtfulness. “ — Abbot’s girlfriend, and I don’t think that’s in the handbook.” 

“Try again,” Jack drawled, thumbing a form he wasn’t reading that didn’t need to be read. “She’s a nursing student getting hours of free tutoring off a board-certified attending. Put that in the handbook. Teaching hospital. I’m teaching.”

Shen shook his head, letting out a small laugh. “Alright. Alright. She’s not your girlfriend. Mind if I ask her out, then?” 

Jack snorted. “If you could only be so lucky.” 

“Clearly she has a type for attendings,” he pressed, grinning. “Or is it just the ones with gray hair?”

Jack looked at him sideways. “This is getting a bit weird, even for you.” 

“I’m happy for you, man. Even if you’re gonna make us all watch you not do anything about it for the next six months.”

“Mind your own damn business.”

“Sure,” he turned, lifting a hand over his shoulder as he went. “Close the blinds anyway. There’s a window on that door. Everyone can see her making you dumb.” 

Jack looked down the hall and set the form down before going there to close the blinds — telling himself it was for the window, for Shen’s real talk — and knowing, somewhere under that, that he was really just going to you. 

He could see you through the window in the door before he reached it, which was, he supposed, exactly Shen’s point. You had a textbook open in your lap and you were chewing the end of your highlighter, brow pulled in, mouthing something to yourself, working a card over your head. You’d pulled the sleeves of one of his old sweatshirts down to your hands, the one you’d swiped from his locker two weeks ago and never given back and that he’d never once asked for, because he’d found he didn’t want it back, found he liked seeing it swallow you.

You gave him a smile when he walked in. He reached up and tipped the blinds shut on the window with two fingers, the floor outside tipping away. 

“Why’d you close them?” you asked, slightly bored.

“Apparently the whole department’s been getting a show.”

You furrowed your brows then. “A show of what? Me failing?”

“Somethin’ like that.” He let it go at that, coming around and lowering himself onto the couch beside you, the cushion dipping and tipping you toward him a degree, what it always did that neither of you ever corrected. “How’s it going? Honest.”

“Honestly?” You blew out a breath, closing the highlighter. “I’d kill for a drink.”

“Oh?” Jack settled back against the couch, his arm coming up along the top of it behind you. “Telling that to the one man who’s seen what you look like at the bottom of the bottle.”

“Jaaaack,” you said, almost in a whine. “Let’s go to a bar.”

He snorted, dragging a hand down his face. “Now I’m wondering what’s pushing you toward the edge.”

He picked the flashcard you had set on the textbook, the one you’d been studying. He read the front of it without much intention — your handwriting was cramped and looping, a star drawn next to it — and turned over and checked the back. He did the same thing he always did, the story, the image; he’d done it a hundred times by now. He could do it half-asleep, and most nights he half was. 

You thought about it for a second, your bottom lip tugged between your teeth, then walked yourself to the answer. 

“Mhm. See. Good,” he murmured. He flipped the card to the back to check you, and you’d had it. Of course you’d had it, you’d had more of this than you ever gave yourself credit for. “Tell you what. Get the next three right, and I’ll get us a drink once your exams are done.” 

Your brows narrowed. “Bribe?”

“It’s an incentive.” He held up the next card, eyes on you. “Don’t think. Just answer me.” 

You did. One, then the next, then the one after. You were quicker now that there was something on the end of it, your lip caught between your teeth as you walked yourself there each time. He noticed you worked when there was something to earn. After all three, he hummed. “See. Good girl, there you go.” 

He felt you go still beside him, and his eyes flickered up to you to see your eyes dropping to your textbook. He stayed silent a second, eyes raking over you, your thumb running the worn edge of a card back and forth. 

Jack knew better than to point out how you being flustered was almost silly when he’d said the same words many times while taping you up or shining a penlight in your eyes. He let his arm stay where it was along the couch, hand not quite touching your shoulder, and watched the side of your face.

“You wanna do some more?” he said finally, voice coming out rougher. “Or are we done for the night?”

You held up a finger, as if telling him to wait.

“Okay, then,” he mumbled, leaning back further against the couch. “Take your time.”

After a second, he turned to say something dry to break the silence. You’d turned your head, too, and were closer than he initially realized, your eyes coming up off the card and finding his, near enough that whatever he had bubbling in his throat died there immediately. 

Jack hummed involuntarily. You closed the sound by pressing your mouth to his, the feeling of the plushness so very featherlight, there and barely there, the softest press. 

He went still as stone, every system in him locking at once. His hand was still along the back of the couch and his mouth hadn’t answered yours, not because he didn’t want to — God, he did — but because the entirety of him had gone still with the disbelief of it, with the you, here, choosing this — him — and the half-second of nothing stretched into a second, too damn long. 

He’d seized on you, the fact you’d nearly walked, had stood in his kitchen finding the kindest way to disappear, and here you were, closing the last of the distance yourself.

You pulled back like you’d touched a stove, a gasp leaving your mouth, replacing where his own had been. 

“Oh god.” Your hand flew up to your mouth, your eyes going wide before pinching shut completely. “I’m sorry — I’m so sorry, Jack. I read that so, so wrong. You’ve been so nice and I — fuck, I’m sorry.”

Jack made a pained sound that was lost somewhere in your ramble, at the sight of you snatching it back. Nothing had gone wrong. Jack knew you’d read nothing wrong, and that the only thing that had happened was that he’d been too slow, too stunned, too thirty-years-rusty to catch what had been handed to him in good reflex.

His hand came off the back of the couch and he caught your jaw, thumb on your chin as he pushed slightly against your skin. He was distantly aware that he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so afraid about leaning in to kiss a woman, and went in to try and give you back the second he lost, mouth finding yours the exact way every bone in his body knew he should’ve the first time. 

You made a startled sound against him before the entirety of you melted. His mouth worked against yours, thoroughly, making sure not to fumble it twice. His thumb stayed on your chin, tilting your face the half-degree he wanted it, and when your lips parted on half a breath, his entire upper body leaned in to follow it, deepening it. 

It was you who moved first. Of course, it was you, always you. You followed it, the kiss pulling you up and forward, your knee coming over his thigh, and then you were settling over him. Jack let out the throatiest of a chuckle, still intent on keeping your mouth, as your hands slid from the front of his scrubs to his jaw. 

Jack’s hands caught yours on instinct — one at your waist, one at your hip — steadying you down to him, your hips still slightly in the air like you weren’t sure you could close the last of the distance, your weight held in the suspended air in the ache of almost, thighs braced on either side of his. 

Jack pulled back just enough to look at you, letting his head fall back against the back of the couch, dragging his eyes up the length of you poised over him. He blew out a short breath, the corners of his lips kicking up as his palm glided up and down on the side of your waist, catching onto your tank top on accident to show a sliver of skin at your lip — warm, soft, the band of your shorts sitting low — and he watched his own hand do it before he dragged his eyes back to your face.

“Nothing halfway with you, huh?” he said, the words practically coming out from his chest. His thumb rested against that bared sliver of you. “Climbing me at my work.”

You lowered your head, and your nose grazed against his. “You started it.”

“I did?”

“You closed the blinds.”

He let out a surprised laugh. “I can promise you I didn’t expect this when I did that.” 

Your lips ghosted over his for a second, and his chest swelled at the sight of you trying to tamp down the sweetest smile. “Problem?” 

“No.” The words came out immediately, because apparently somewhere in him, there was still something insatiable and teenage that had lurched up at the sight of you. “No. No problem.”

His hand spread flat and warm against the small of your back, fingers slipping under the hem of the top to your warm skin there, and he drew you down, finally, that last suspended inch collapsing as he settled your weight flush over him. 

He had to pinch his eyes shut a second, then open them again to take in the whole sight of you. His hand came up to your jaw. The light caught the loose hair at your temple, the bare line of your shoulder where the strap had slipped. Your mouth was full and flushed from his, parted slightly, your breath coming. The skin under his hand at your back was hot to the touch, and he spread his fingers wider against it just to feel more of it. 

You were trying not to smile. Your lip caught between your teeth, the corners pulling anyway. 

His finger perched against your jaw moved to your lips, dragging slowly across the lower one, parting it under the pad of his thumb. He watched it give, your breath warm against his skin. 

Your eyes flicked up to his as your lip closed around the first knuckle, your tongue hesitantly pressing flat against the pad, the wet heat of it catching him so completely off guard that the air went out of him in a rough exhale. His other hand fisted at the small of your back, turning over to gather the hem of your tank in his grip. 

“Oh.” His eyes had dropped to your mouth and fixed there, his jaw slack as his head cocked to the side. “Pretty.” 

His gaze was locked on the sight of his thumb disappearing past your lips, no hesitation in it, that same no-halfway boldness turned filthy and sweet all at once. The tired man in him went down all at once. 

His thumb dragged free, catching on your bottom lip and tugging it down before it slipped loose. His chest heaved harder now under the warm weight of you. 

“Where’d that come from?” he muttered gruffly, almost to himself, thumb pressing the slick of your own lip back against you. His palm moved to cradle your face, tapping your cheek softly once. “Can’t be doing things like that here, doll. I’m on call.” 

“Then don’t make it so easy.” Your lips brushed his thumb, then you moved down to press your mouth to the line of his jaw, the stubble catching your lips, then lower to the warm of his throat.

“You callin’ me easy?” he said through a chuckle, letting his head tip back. You scraped your teeth over the cord of his neck and felt the whole of him go tight underneath you, his fingers flexing hard into the bare skin of your back. 

“Alright.” His voice had dropped to stone. “You’ve had your fun.. No more of that,” he said, though made no move to stop you.

You peppered a line of pecks down his throat down to where his collar had started, your lips dragging over the jut of his collarbone through the thin cotton. He swallowed. One of your hands slid up to the back of your neck, fingers pushing into the soft gray at his nape, scratching light, and the other flattened over his chest, over the steady-then-not rhythm, fisting slow in the fabric just to feel him breathe wrong because of you.

You sat back an inch to look at him. His head was still tipped back against the couch, his throat bared where you’d left it momentarily pink and glossy, his eyes half-lidded. His hands had gone heavy and possessive at your hips, giving up pretending he wanted them anywhere else, you anywhere else.

You dragged your thumb over his bottom lip, watched it give, the same way he did to you. 

“Can I ask you something?” you asked, quietly, your hips settling more firmly into his lap. 

“Mm.” His hands spread wide, settling you down harder against him. “My social security number is — ”

You laughed. 

“Two-two-six — ”

“Jack — ” You swatted at his chest, the seriousness dissolving into something giddier. “I’m being serious. Stop.” 

“Okay, okay.” The corners of his mouth lifted up, and his hands squeezed slightly at your hips. He pulled his head up off the couch to meet your eyes properly. “Shoot. Doubt I could stop you.” 

“Are you seeing anyone?”

He let the question sit, humming. His thumbs moved idly at your hips, head tilting against the couch like the question required any real thought. “There’s a few women,” he said, lowering his voice as he looked at you, like he was letting you in on a secret. “There’s a nice lady who brings me fruit baskets.”

Your hand, on the flat of his chest, slid up slow to his throat and he kept talking like he didn’t notice.

“ — there’s this nurse on days who keeps leaving me her number at the station — ”

You leaned in and closed your teeth slightly on his earlobe. He let out a short laugh, one that was dragged out of him, his head tipped to give more of it to you without permission. 

“Alright. Okay,” he said as your nose dragged the line of his jaw. “Stop doin’ that. I don’t wanna explain teeth marks to the whole floor.” 

Your hips set firmer into his lap. “Jack,” you warned. “I can’t do this if you’re seeing fifty other women.” 

He sobered a degree, his thumb going still at your waist, his eyes coming up to actually hold yours. The joke drained out of his face as he realised the edge of seriousness you tried to tamp down, and he momentarily short-circuited at how it was even possible for you to wonder. 

“Hey.” His hand came up off your hip, pushed the hair back from your face and stayed there, cradling. “Until five minutes ago, there were zero women. Forget fifty.” 

Your only response to that was a smile and your cheek leaning further against his palm. He let his thumb move once across his cheekbone, watching the way your cheek turned into his hand. Your eyes drifted half-shut. There was a speck of dried highlighter ink on the side of your finger where it curled against his throat. The strap of your top had slid off your shoulder again; he looked at all of you and stopped bothering to pretend, even to himself, that he was looking at anything other than the only thing in the room he wanted.

“What about you? You seein’ anyone?” His thumb stayed where it was, but his voice had gone quieter. “‘Cause I’ve seen people bring you in. And I never liked one of ‘em.”

You huffed a small laugh, your nose grazing his. “Jealous, Doctor?” 

“Yeah.” He watched the laugh stall on your face at how easy he gave it up. “If there is, he should be worried. I’d like to take you on a nice date to change that.” 

“Ohhhh,” you drawled through a laugh. “There’s no one, but I won’t say no to the date.”

“Then you’ve got yourself one, doll.” He kissed you on it — short, sure, his hand still cradling your face — sealing the thing as the corner of his mouth caught yours before he pulled back. He let his forehead rest against yours for a second and breathed you in. 

Then, with a short groan, he tipped his head back off of yours. 

“I gotta get back out there.” His thumb was still moving at your jaw, clearly working against the very thing he was saying. “My work ethic’s going wrong and my residents might actually report me.” 

Then, his hands found your waist and he lifted you off, setting you off his lap and onto the cushion beside him where the entire thing had started. You landed with a small affronted sound, your hand fisting in his collar a beat longer before he had to let it go. 

You flopped back into the cushion where he’d deposited you, one hand pressed flat to your chest, the picture of wounded. “I guess it’s true what they say about old men. They use you. Wham, bam, thank you ma’am.” 

He stood up and scrubbed his palm down his face like he could wipe the last ten minutes off it before he had to walk out and be a doctor again. He could still feel the heat sitting at the back of his neck and even though he’d tried to scrub your gloss off, he was sure there was a remnant somewhere the worst possible person would notice. 

“Yup, got exactly what I wanted. Thank you, ma’am.” His hand came down to rest at the top of your head and gave it a slow, condescending pat, ruffling the wreck of your hair worse than it already was. “I’m a terrible man. You’re welcome to stay here while I go be one somewhere else.” 

He made himself step back and snagged his pen off the table, the badge, the small armor of the job clipping back into place piece-by-piece. The whole time his eyes kept catching on you, sprawled and rumpled where he’d set you down, looking up at him like the night had gone exactly where it was supposed to. He’d seen this room a thousand nights. He’d never once not wanted to leave it. 

“Mm. Gotta go home. S’almost three,” you mumbled. “And you get off at seven.” 

“I do.”

“So.” You pushed yourself off the cushion, slow, gathering your hair back off your face and pushing up your strap, putting yourself back together piece by piece the same way he was, the night closing in on both ends. “I’ll go and let you be a doctor. You’ve been very neglectful.” 

“Don’t I know it,” he muttered. He watched you reach for your textbook, your highlighter, the flashcards, and sweep it all back into your bag, feeling the small stupid pull of not wanting the room to empty out. 

He stepped in before you finished, catching your jaw, tilting your face up to kiss you once more. You went still under it, the bag forgotten halfway zipped, your hand coming up to rest light on his chest. He pulled back an inch to look at you.

“Text me when you get home,” he said, thumb dragging along your jaw. 

You chuckled, brows pulling in. “It’s a ten minute drive.”

“Text me. Humor an old man, since I’m so terrible to you already.”

[llillacwine]

sorry all not an announcement re: IHYB (though I am very close to finishing the next chapter, I promise!!!).

rather, if I was to hypothetically write for Jack Abbot…would y’all hypothetically read it…?

[langdonfranks]

I'm doing the work. I've been sober 186 days. I'm going to meetings. I'm taking the drug tests.

PATRICK BALL as DR. FRANK LANGDON The Pitt, 2.14 "9:00 P.M."

[winterstellars]

summer is a room (i) | professor!baelor targaryen x reader

ೃ⁀➷ this is part four of the professor baelor universe. find the masterlist here.

Content Notes: History professor Baelor, graduate student reader, Modern AU (modernized Westeros, not characters in modern real world), professor/student relationship so therefore inherent power imbalance, age gap (reader is in her 20s), explicit sexual content, PiV sex, choking, brief drug use, angst, reader POV, no Y/N.

Word Count: 10k

Author Notes: This is one half of reader & Baelor's summer between her 2nd and 3rd (final!) years of grad school. My semester's finishing up so hopefully the wait for part 5 won't be as long. Thanks for bearing with me, I love chatting with y'all and I hope I've cooked up something tasty with this massive chapter <3

do not copy or reproduce any of my work! do not feed my work to generative ai!

Read it on AO3 here if that's what you prefer :)

Summer is a room of unopened windows. Open me of this oppression. This deviant solstice in which I watch you from across the garden. It’s enough, isn’t it? I can live off of this. —Lisa Marie Basile, “saint of fixation”

It’s a win-win arrangement. He gets housesitting services: someone to bring in his mail, water his plants, keep the kitchen from accumulating dust while he spends the summer with his family in the Stormlands. You get a place to stay in the gap before your new lease starts, a full house where the sink actually functions and you’re not awoken at two in the morning by the refrigerator making a startling new noise. There’s the massive bed all to yourself, too. The fancy coffee machine. The little fenced-in garden where you can fall asleep to the sound of his neighbor playing the saxophone in the early evening hours. You’re the one who’s benefitting, mainly.

Don’t hurry back, you’d joked when he handed over his spare key. The kiss he’d given you before he loaded his suitcase into his car and driven off into the humid morning still haunts your lips. No promises, sweet girl, he said.

You love his townhouse, you always have. You love the softness of his kitchen. You love the morning light that douses the living room and the evening light that turns the bedroom burnt orange. You love picking a book off of his well-stocked shelves and spending the whole weekend lingering in its pages. You’ve never, not once in your life, lived in a place so stable and comfortable and indulgent. Playing homeowner while you cook breakfast in nothing but your underwear and one of his shirts has to be some sort of fantasy.

But summer, that lazy beast that settles its hot chest against every crevice of King’s Landing, is long. Painfully so. Three weeks into his absence, you’re ready to eat your words. You’d give anything for him to hurry back to you.

The hours go slow while you babysit the library circulation desk. It’s a decent gig. You can at least play with the beginnings of essays and poems while you sit there. Mostly, though, you stare into midair and wonder about Baelor. About Summerhall, the family estate that he talks about as if it’s a magical realm. You picture him in those white linen shirts you’d seen him packing. In your imagination, he’s some sort of prince in his gorgeous palace, standing on a balcony while the wind makes a crown out of his gray-streaked curls.

“Tell me about the library. Did anyone check out anything interesting today?” He asks when he calls to check in. You’re lucky he can’t see you rolling your eyes.

“It was fine. I spent three hours looking for a law textbook that someone had put in the engineering section, that was fun.” You sigh and sip at the cocktail you’d made yourself with his nice whiskey. “I want to hear about you.”

“What about me?” He chuckles, always sounding a little surprised that you’re as interested in the mundanities of his day as he is in yours.

“I don’t know. Did you win at polo or shooting or whatever it is you rich people do?” It’s only half of a joke. You think he has mentioned shooting with his brother at some point.

“You’ll be disappointed.” There’s a shuffling noise in the background; you imagine him laying back on silken sheets beneath a canopied bed. “I spent most of today in the study.”

Of course. All the luxury in the world and he’s probably hunched over some absurdly expensive antique desk, scribbling away at peer reviews until his eyes water. His attachment to his work is fascinating. Devastating, too. You’d seen the leather satchel he packed, stuffed fuller than his suitcase had been. Papers packed tight. All begging for attention. Sometimes you wonder what he thinks will happen if he puts it down. It’s not the worst addiction he could have, but it’s an addiction nonetheless.

“You should be having fun,” you chide him, sounding more like a mother than a… well, whatever you are to him. A something-more-than-casual-hookup, something-less-than-girlfriend, it seems. You try not to let the ambiguity eat at you, but gods, it’s got sharp teeth.

“I could say the same for you.” Well, he’s got you there. “You have the money I left you.”

“That’s for emergencies.” You scoff. You’d taken one look at the envelope he’d left on the kitchen table and had felt dizzy. Whatever he thinks the going rate is for housesitting, he must’ve multiplied it by five.

“That’s for you, sweet girl.” The lowness in his voice, amplified by the rasp of the phone, makes your thighs clench. “Use it. You deserve it.”

“Fine.” As if it’s some horrible task, spending his money on fun. And yet you’re certain that you’ll feel guilty about it. Money might be a toy in his family. For you, it’s a tension headache.

The clock’s pushing one in the morning and you’ve moved from the kitchen to the living room to the bedroom by the time you hear him make his time to go sigh. “I ought to go to bed. You’ll tell me if you need anything? You can text me anytime, you know that.”

“I know.” You have your phone perched on his pillow. Eyes closed, sheets cocooned around you, you can almost pretend that he’s right there.

“Good night, sweet girl.”

“Good night,” you murmur, and then, “I miss you.”

“I know.”

There’s a part of you that’s made bolder by the fact that he’s not really there. It scratches at the inside of your ribcage and makes you want to say things that you shouldn’t say. With your head tucked into the blankets that are steeped in his scent, your I miss yous sound more and more like I love yous every time he calls. You could almost let your guard down. You could almost let yourself say what you really mean.

But then your eyes are opening to emptiness and the blue light of the phone, and his metallic voice saying just before he hangs up: “I miss you, too.”

Summer is doing something strange to you.

It’s not the heat. Well, it’s not just the heat, because you’re no exception to its heavy, vicious presence. The aircon tries its best, but when the sun reaches its apex and the streets radiate so hot you can taste the asphalt in the air, no one can escape it. You’re pouring sweat the whole walk home from campus. The second you step into the townhouse, your drenched clothes get stripped off and kicked into a sad little pile while you stand in front of the open fridge in your underwear and chug water like your life depends on it.

But then there are the dreams. Hazy, fractured, they stick to the inside of your skull like bits of wet confetti. You’ve started scratching lists into your journal first thing in the morning. An attempt to remember, to find meaning in the recurring symbols. Feathers, ink stains, someone’s hands all bloodied-up. Each night feels like a trip to some mysterious place that leaves you bone-weary and befuddled when you wake.

And amidst it all: Baelor. The lack of him winds itself into a needy cord around your neck. Strangles you while you retreat into your own mind during the long hours at the circulation desk. You’re more lust-struck than you’ve ever been in your life. Hands constantly scrambling to sate the need, each time you come around your own fingers you’re only deepening the void in your gut.

The evenings that Baelor doesn’t call spread like jam, thick and viscous. You languish in the muggy air, half-asleep, feeling an emotion you can’t put a name to. On the horizon: clouds looming heavy over Blackwater Bay. There’s a thunderstorm building, threatening to break.

You’re in the middle of a dream where your teeth are falling out when your phone rattles you awake. A groggy Hello? while your tongue prods the corners of your mouth, making sure that everything’s where it ought to be. The sheets have embedded little wrinkles onto your arms and cheeks. A sheen of sweat swaddles you while you peel yourself upright. There’s air humming through the vents and the overhead fan is doing its best, but you can tell the aircon is straining to keep up.

“Did I wake you, love?”

“No,” you mutter, blinking the sleep out of your eyes, “no, sorry, I’m awake.”

A little chuckle on the other end, probably him hearing right through your lie. “You work too much, you need your rest. I can call back—”

“No, please?” You can’t hide how needy you are. “Tell me about your day?”

You put him on speaker while you stumble downstairs, pouring yourself the tallest, iciest glass of water possible. He clearly didn’t take your commandment to have fun very seriously. Peer reviewing articles, editing syllabi for the fall term, helping his brother with business… his day sounds about as tedious as yours. You hmm and uh huh? while he talks, investigating the thermostat (which claims it’s about ten degrees cooler than it actually feels).

Funny, though. He sounds lighter. You’d go so far as to say excited, though nothing he reports seems particularly exciting.

“Can’t believe you,” you tease when he’s finished. “You know you’re allowed to take a break? No one’s going to kill you for it.”

“Work comes before play, you know that.”

“I’m not talking about play. I mean an actual break. Do nothing for a day, I dare you. Go stare at the clouds.” You’ve never seen him truly idle in all the time you’ve known him. Always fretting over a task, no matter how small: making tea, reorganizing a stack of papers, taking a call from one of his sons or brothers. The notion of him sitting somewhere, hands empty, eyes unfocused, is as strange and unsettling as your tooth dream.

“What about you, sweet girl?” He asks, oh-so-conveniently changing the focus back to you. “Did you use the money I left you?”

“Mhm.” You cast a sideways look at the untouched envelope on the kitchen table while you formulate some sort of story. “Um, I got my nails done.”

“Good girl. That wasn’t so hard, was it?” 

“Stop that.” It’s sinful, how cocky he sounds, praising you for spending his money. “D’you want me to bankrupt you or something?”

“You’d have to try awfully hard to do that, love,” he says. You can hear the smirk in his voice. Fucking rich boy. No matter how well he hides it, he’ll always be part of a class so far above you that he might as well live among the clouds. You, with your student loans quietly gaining interest and the odd collection of part-time jobs you’ve been working since you were fourteen… you’re solidly in the dirt of the world.

“You’d better start working on an airtight prenup, then.”

Fuck. Stupid joke. Your smile fades into thin air, skin prickling as if the room’s suddenly gone cold. You should know better than to use marriage as a punchline. It’s one of those lines you leave uncrossed with him, even if it hovers between the both of you like a loaded gun. Of course you’d be reckless enough to pull the trigger at some point.

“About that,” he says, in a tone that you can’t read over the phone. Heart pulsing out of control, your mouth goes dry and your brain comes up with a hundred possibilities for what he’s about to say next, each one more disastrous than the last. 

“Uh huh?”

“I told my boys that I’m seeing someone,” he says.

“Oh.” 

Genuinely dumbstruck, a long moment goes by before your brain fully processes what he’s said.

“Um, did you tell them that… like, how we met, or—”

“I said we met on campus. I think it’s best to leave it at that.” There’s a rumble of an inhale or an exhale. “But I told them that you’re a writer. That you work at the library. They’d like to meet you.”

“I’d love that,” you say so quickly, giddy with nerves, “I’d love to meet them, honestly. Anytime. If that’s alright with you.”

“I’ll figure out a time. Thank you, sweet girl.”

You’re not sure what to say. You’re not sure what to do with your hands. You’re standing in the middle of his kitchen, still bleary from your evening nap, feeling like a bomb just went off. Seismic tremors ripple through your bones. The sun glints off of your phone screen and casts a shiny, trembling reflection onto the wall.

The lie by omission doesn’t even bother you. You’d gladly play along with whatever story he wants to tell so he doesn’t have to admit that you were his student. You’re real. Not some nameless secret. Something more means that you’re someone who gets to meet his sons. His brothers someday, maybe. You’re someone who can fit into his life. Someone who might end up in one of those picture frames over the mantle someday. 

It’s all you wanted, really. A dream come suddenly, shockingly true.

There’s some sort of muffled conversation on the other end of the call. “I’m sorry, sweet girl. More business. I’ll call you tomorrow?”

“Yeah, yeah, of course.” You stutter through the big, stupid grin on your face. “Talk to you then.”

“Good. Good night, love.”

“Good night.” You say, and then: “I love you.”

There’s the briefest silence.

Your breath hitches in your throat.

And then the call ends.

Fuck.

You’ve said it before, haven’t you? Surely you’ve let it slip by now. Gods, you’ve probably thought it a thousand times. While you’re falling asleep next to him. While he’s inside you. While he’s making you tea and hmm-ing while he reads your writing. He’s called you “love,” but that’s different. You’d use that with children, with shy undergrads who are nice to you in the library, with a seagull, for fuck’s sake. But as you stand there in the stark stillness of the kitchen, wracking your brain, you come up blank.

Maybe he hadn’t heard you? You try to replay the conversation in your memory. How long had that pause been, between you blurting out I love you and him hanging up? It feels like a whole handful of seconds had gone by, but maybe you’re remembering it wrong. Maybe he’d hung up in the middle of you saying it. There was someone in the background, maybe he was distracted by them. Maybe you broke up a little.

Or maybe he heard you loud and fucking clear. And didn’t say it back.

“Fuck.” You hiss. “Fuck, fuck, fuck. Fuck!”

Your phone clatters to the floor. Typical you. Shattering all the happiness you’d worked so hard to build. Fucking idiot, you curse yourself, whole body slipping into panic. Hands shaking while you fetch your phone off the hardwood, you’re trying to avoid going into full cardiac arrest when you look down and see that it’s pulled up your emergency contact screen. 

Fucking hells. If this doesn’t constitute an emergency, you’re not sure what does.

It takes all of two rings for that familiar accent to greet you, bright and buoyant as ever. “Hey! I was just thinkin’ of you, isn’t that funny?”

“Dunk,” you warble, “I fucked up.”

“Winger!”

The pub’s packed tight. Saturday night, and there’s a football game on. King’s Landing Dragons versus Winterfell Direwolves. You bump your way past a stag party hogging the bar. The group of guys bang their fists and chant while the groom-to-be chugs his beer. The first daters, the uni friends, the girl groups mingling with the guy groups, all the usual suspects are there. 

“Oi, Winger!”

You follow the sound to the corner, because even in the middle of all the chaos, you’ve at least got the certainty that Winger means you. And sure enough, you find him there: Duncan, tall and solid as ever, wrapping you in the sturdiest hug you’ve ever felt as soon as you lay eyes on him.

“You grew!” You giggle while you’re smushed against his chest. Your go-to line for as long as you can remember. Maybe he has grown, you wonder when he finally sets you down. He looks different. Good. He’s grown his hair out, shoulder-length and shiny as fresh copper even in the low lights. But those blue eyes, that scrappy old flannel with the hole in the cuff… he’s the same Duncan who you met when you were eight, that lost puppy of a boy who latched onto you as much as you did him.

“Nah, only sideways,” he grins, patting his gut (where you’re absolutely certain there’s nothing but abs). “Hey, you alright?”

He probably knows the answer is no. You look as tired as you feel. You’d been on the phone with him until the small hours of the morning, ranting and crying and pouring yourself shot after shot of Baelor’s top-shelf whiskey. Even now, the smell of alcohol in the air makes your stomach turn. The fact that you’ve wrestled yourself out of bed and taken the ferry all the way to Dragonstone is a fucking miracle.

“I’m fine.” You shrug, which means not at all. 

“It’s fine if you’re not, y’know.” Mercifully, though, he changes the subject before all the weariness and heartache can claw its way to the surface again. “Hey, come meet my friends.”

He introduces you to Raymun—Fossoway, as in Fossoway Cider? you ask, and he just nods his mop of dark curls and blushes—and Raymun’s fiancée Rowan. Duncan fetches you a club soda while you get the full story about the whirlwind romance, the engagement, the wedding plans. They’re a funny couple. Finishing each other’s stories. Her correcting the details about how exactly he’d proposed. Him babbling about how he’d chosen the ring. You get a full slideshow of picture after picture of their baby, too: Rosie, three months old, apparently being fawned over by Rowan’s girlfriends for the evening.

“She’s Daddy’s girl through and through,” Rowan sighs, and Raymun just beams with pride.

“Aye, but she’s got her Mum’s good looks.” There’s a cheeky little look between them. Like they’re sharing a joke you’re not in on.

It’s sweet, though. How comfortable they are with each other. How they ebb and flow, how they tease and flirt. You’d be more charmed by it if you weren’t struck by the crushing question of whether you and Baelor could ever have it so easy.

Maybe you could’ve, if you hadn’t gone and royally fucked it up.

“So Duncan says you’re a writer?”

“Yeah,” you cringe internally, always so graceless making small talk about yourself. “Um, I’m in grad school at KLU. It’ll be my last year this fall.”

“Ugh.” Raymun catches himself. “Sorry. Nothing to do with you, I promise.”

“He’s got a thing about King’s Landing,” Rowan adds for him. “Hates the fancy folks. The Velaryons, the Celtigars, all them.”

“It’s the Targaryens mostly, but I—”

“Oi!” She elbows him in the ribs. “She’s fucking dating one of them, idiot. Remember what Duncan said? Have some class.”

“Oh! Right, sorry. No, I didn’t mean… it’s nothing personal, just, like, the principle,” Raymun scrambles sheepishly. You’re sure, from the looks on their faces, that you’ve gone a bit stiff. Residual pride puffs up your chest, even if today you’d gladly rant about the “fancy folks” and how much they tend to set your nerves aflame.

“That’s alright.” You manage a lopsided smile. “I get it. They’re not for everyone.”

Duncan, always your savior, swoops back in with another round of drinks. “Hey, pool table’s open. You want to play?”

“No mate, I’m shit,” Raymun insists, but he looks all too happy to be strong-armed into a game.

“You boys do that.” Rowan nudges you. “Fancy some air?”

Outside, you can hear the cheers and groans as the football game enters the second half. Rowan takes a hit of her cherry-flavored vape while the pair of you lean against the brick exterior and bask in the lukewarm breeze. Across the street, a pack of drunk uni boys whistles at the pair of you. Fuck off! you both yell back at the same time.

“Gods, sorry,” you wince. Rowan gives you a quizzical look, cocking a perfectly-plucked eyebrow.

“Sorry for what? They were talking to you.”

“What?”

Judging from the way she gives an incredulous little chuckle, you must look properly astounded. “Yeah, babe. I’m not their type now, am I?”

“Are you serious?”

You wonder if there’s something wrong with your eyes. She’s gorgeous. If someone told an artist to draw a beautiful woman, they’d draw her. Even under the dull streetlights, her curls are a bright, soft crown. Perfectly messy, perfectly twirled into an effortless bun that you could never, ever hope to achieve. The v-neck of her emerald green top frames her tits just right. Her jeans might as well be custom fit from the way they hug her ass. She’s a goddess, a vision, the kind of woman who you feel a little embarrassed standing next to, and you’re just… well. You’re you.

“You should be everyone’s type,” you offer, directing your gaze back to the concrete before you seem as perverted as those boys across the street.

“Aw, thanks,” she grins. “Sorry about Raymun, by the way. He’s from the Reach, you know how they get all territorial.”

“It’s fine. Really. He seems lovely.”

“Yeah, he’s a nice one.” You can feel her eyes on you, parsing you apart. “How’s yours?”

“Mine?” 

Gods, it feels strange to talk about Baelor like this: so casual, so open. Like your relationship is as typical as anyone else’s. You’ve spent a year having heart palpitations about the notion of anyone at the university finding out about the two of you, and now you’re calling him mine on the sidewalk for any of the tipsy passersby to hear.

“He’s good,” you reply after chewing on the inside of your cheek for a minute. “He’s away for the summer, actually. Visiting family and all that.”

“That’s too bad.” She offers you a sympathetic hit of her vape. “Nothing like reunion sex though, yeah? They’re fun when they’re all pent up.”

Coughing up a cherry-flavored cloud, laughter bubbles from deep down in your chest. It’s a strange sound. Something you haven’t heard in what feels like ages. Light as a baby bird, making your whole body sparkle with a nicotine-laced effervescence. Maybe this was what you’ve needed all along as the antidote to your hollowness: summer air, girlish giggling, conspiratorial smiles shared with a potential partner in crime.

And maybe it’s that lack of pretense, that clever warmth that Rowan has, that makes you blurt out: “I told him I loved him last night.”

“Oh?”

“He didn’t say it back.” You’re wincing at yourself, but the floodgates are open and the rant tumbles out all at once. “I mean, it was right before I hung up, so maybe he didn’t hear me? But I think he probably did. And just before that, he said he told his sons about me and that they wanted to meet me, so I thought… I dunno, it just slipped out, but I thought it made sense, you know?”

“Maybe you just shocked him,” she reasons. “It’s one thing to think it, it’s another to hear it, yeah?”

Well. It all sounds so simple when she puts it like that.

You gnaw on your lip for a long minute. “What should I do?”

“If I were you? Nothing. You’ve said your bit, it’s his turn to say his.” Rowan tilts her head. “Aw, hey. Does he make you sad like this all the time?”

“No!” You’re quick to protest. “No, he’s perfect. I really do love him. It’s just… it’s hard sometimes.”

“Yeah, well. That’s just how it is, ain’t it?”

A car rumbles by, boosted bass making the ground quiver beneath you. Craning your neck to look past the old rooftops, past the glow of King’s Landing shining from across the bay, you stare into the night sky and just breathe. Messy you. Foolish, fucked-up, poetic you, always entangling yourself in complications because it’s more comfortable for you that way. You’ve been drifting in the atmosphere of your confusion. Untethered. And beside you, Rowan tucks her vape back in her pocket, a friendship one hour old and already pulling you back down to the ground.

“Hey, c’mon. Enough of that.” She gives you a playful nudge in the ribs. “Raymun really is shit at pool. Want to do a round of boys versus girls? You look like you could use a win.”

Breathy laughter drifting off on the wind, you rally your energy and find it shockingly renewed. “I could.”

Neither of you are a particularly skilled shot. But true to her word (and Raymun’s own), he really is utter shit. Drunken blush every time the cue strikes a ball at an awkward spot, he endures Rowan’s teasing all while staring at her with the widest, most starstruck eyes you’ve ever seen on a man. Team rivalry gets forgotten somewhere in the banter. You all lose track of the score and whose turn it is. They’re magnetized to each other’s sides, lips on necks and hands on hips, a sort of public foreplay that would make your stomach turn if it were anyone else. You’ll give them a pass. They’re too cute to hate.

“Hey, there she is!” Duncan claps as you sink the four ball, even though he’d spent ten minutes helping you set up the shot. His palm’s sweaty when he high-fives you. Big, toothy grin on his face. In the din of pop music from thirty years ago and angry football fans howling at the TV, you wrap your arms around his tree trunk frame and close your eyes. So solid, so constant. Your Dunk.

“Thanks for this,” you murmur into his shirt. “I missed you.”

He nests an innocent kiss onto the top of your head. “Missed you more, Winger.”

It’s two in the morning by the time you finally rattle the key into the lock of Baelor’s townhouse. Drunk on nothing but happiness. Humming some synth pop song the pub had on repeat. You’ve got girls’ night plans with Rowan in the works. A promise to Duncan to come to a match for the boys’ rugby team he’s started coaching. Every little nook of your heart feels so full. You pull out your phone and find two missed calls and two unread texts.

Please let me know when you get this. I just want to know that you’re safe.

You tap out a reply and then toss your phone somewhere into the sea of bedsheets while you head for the shower.

i’m fine!

For once, maybe you mean it.

It’s not easy to do nothing. But you do it. Or, at least, you skirt as close to “nothing” as you can. A week later, phone on speaker propped against the mirror, makeup scattered across the vanity like a glittery bomb’s gone off, you don’t bring up that rogue “I love you”. You tell him about your plans for the night: mini-golf with Duncan, Rowan, and Raymun. You assure him that yes, you’ll pay for it with the money he left. You listen to his updates: his older son off to Tyrosh for an internship, his younger son invited on a beach holiday with school friends, his brother called into the city on business, all convenient excuses for him to shut himself in the library of his summer mansion and work until his eyes water. You let the conversation simmer in mundanity, pretending like nothing’s changed, like there’s not a needy creature pecking at your ribs from the inside, begging him to say it back.

“It’s good that you’re spending time with your friends,” he says. “I’m happy for you.”

There’s something taut about his voice. It makes your stomach flutter with nervousness. Are you? you’d push if you were bolder. I’m happy for you. I’m proud of you. I miss you. All these things he says, as if he’s steering toward a confession and slamming on the brakes at the last second. You bite your tongue while you swipe on another layer of your already-melting mascara. Silence has become your new accomplice. It stretches and stretches until it snaps.

“I should go.”

“Alright.” Disappointment dulls the excitement. “The aircon’s broken, by the way.”

“I’ll have it looked at.”

“Okay.” You wait for him to say something else, but he doesn’t. “Good night.”

There’s another pause. Breath held tight, you stare at the screen and wait. 45:05, the call time says. It ticks up and up. 45:06, 07, 08. You could say it again. Make sure he hears it. Double down, put all your cards on the table and dare him to make a move.

No. You’re doing nothing, you remind yourself. So you don’t.

“Good night, sweet—” is all you hear before you hang up.

There’s a man in the living room.

Still half-asleep, mouth dry, the margarita you’d split with Rowan last night making your stomach unsteady, you feel like you’ve stumbled into a bizarre little dream. Your detective instincts are slow to kick in. There’s no sign of a forced entry. He’s not shoving Baelor’s antique clock and silver candlesticks into a bag. If he’s a robber, he’s a fucking terrible one.

The stranger prods at the thermostat. Sleeves of his nicely-pressed white shirt rolled up, you have to stare for a moment at the sheer size of his forearms. Faint sweat stains make the contours of his biceps visible through the fabric. The aircon? you wonder, although he’s absurdly well-dressed. Maybe that’s just the kind of world that Baelor lives in, though. Even the electricians are clad in expensive watches and designer shoes.

“Hello?” You try your voice, finding it roughened by a morning rasp.

He turns, fixes you with a furrowed-brow look, eyes giving you a thorough once-over. A few strands of crisply-coiffed white hair cling to his forehead. He seems vaguely familiar, yet you can’t begin to think of who he reminds you of. You’re suddenly all too aware of the fact that you’re wearing nothing but a scrappy pair of panties and a three-sizes-too-big King’s Landing Dragons tee you’d dug out of Baelor’s closet.

“Ah,” he says. “The lady of the house.”

“Um…” your brain buffers. “Sorry, I wasn’t expecting anyone this soon.”

“Clearly.”

That wakes you up. Fancy electrician with an asshole scowl and the snark to match. Subtly trying to smooth your shirt further down your thighs, you consider whether it’s best to scramble back upstairs and leave him to his work or continue your strange journey to the kitchen for the cup of coffee that’s singing your name.

“Can I get you something to drink?” You offer, stomach growling, coffee winning out. “Tea or coffee?”

“Whiskey on the rocks,” he says, and your nervous laugh dies in your throat as you realize he’s not joking. “What, is the ice maker broken too?”

He digs into his back pocket as he swaggers through to the kitchen. You follow like a wide-eyed lost dog, stuttering faint protest when he pulls out a pack of cigarettes and nestles one between his lips. Massive hands pluck a matchbook from Baelor’s collection on the kitchen table—silver, emblazoned with a hotel logo—and strike a flame while you stand dumbfounded in the doorway.

“Seven hells,” the stranger grunts, flipping through the cabinets, “where does my fucking brother keep his glasses?”

Oh.

It all comes together. The white hair, the looming frame, the annoyance oozing from every pore. A recurring figure in half of the photographs in the house. The man you know Baelor’s talking about each time he says my brother with a sigh, half-frustration and half-fondness. Maekar.

“Other side of the sink.”

Ah, he huffs, fetching himself a glass. You let him pillage the liquor cabinet while you brew a pot of coffee. There’s no way you’re about to have this interaction without any caffeine in your body.

“Baelor didn’t say you were coming.” You try to sound nonchalant while the machine burbles and drips. Maekar makes himself completely at home at the kitchen table with his glass of whiskey in one hand and cigarette in the other. 

“Used to be that I could drop in anytime I liked.” He drains half the shot in one sip. “But that was before you.”

Tucked against the corner cabinets, the air in the room feels impossibly humid and dense. It’s hard to read the expression playing out behind his well-groomed white beard. Accusation? Amusement? You feel like you’re going through the motions of your morning under a magnifying glass, cold eyes drilling into your every move. You know he’s judging your choice of attire. He’s probably judging which mug you choose from the cabinet: a hand-painted one that reminds you of the teacups Baelor had broken months ago. The almond milk you’re pouring into your coffee. The way you refuse to dirty a spoon just to properly mix the milk in, opting instead to just sip the too-bitter coffee while the white clouds settle to the bottom.

The more you stand there amidst the silence and the stares, the more you start to feel a sense of pride prickling at your chest. The townhouse has, for better or for worse, become the place you think of when you think about home. Your milk in the fridge. Your books strewn across the couch. Your hair getting caught in the drain of the tub. Maybe you won’t call him out on what this seems like to you—a nosy little brother taking advantage of a convenient opportunity to snoop—but you won’t shy away, either.

You clatter your mug onto the table, taking a seat and pointing at his nearly-empty pack of menthols. “D’you mind?”

“I won’t tell if you don’t,” he shrugs, sliding it across the table. You’re not a very well-practiced smoker, only ever indulging to look cool in front of handsome boys or to round out a night of drinks. Luck is on your side, though. You strike a match and take a drag without coughing.

“So was there a reason for you dropping in when you know your brother’s not here?” You dare to ask, meeting his steely gaze.

“Maybe I missed having a decent glass of whiskey.”

“Uh huh.” Doubtful, you tilt your head. “Like you can’t afford good whiskey?”

“I can afford it just fine,” he grumbles, “I gave this to him for his nameday. My fucking mistake, though. The distillery’s out of business now. Should’ve kept it for myself.”

Somehow, you doubt that. There’s a tenderness in the way he holds the bottle. A little smirk ghosts across his face. He seems like the kind of man who will whine and complain about wasting expensive liquor on his brother when really, deep down, he’s all chuffed with himself and his gift-giving abilities.

“Anyways. I thought I might do some investigating while I’m in the city,” he continues, blowing smoke sideways. “I’ve got this mystery, see.”

“Oh? What’s that?”

“My brother.”

Can’t help with that one, you want to tell him. You’re still working at unraveling that particular mystery yourself.

Worry outweighs any clever remarks, though. “Is he alright?”

“He ought to be. It’s King’s Landing that usually makes him such a miserable old bastard, not Summerhall.” He quips. “Suppose that’s your doing, too.”

“You think he’s miserable?” Tired, you’d understand. Flustered, maybe, especially if he had heard your confession. But miserable… that makes you chew the inside of your cheek while your cigarette smoulders between your fingers. As much as you’re happy keeping Baelor at arm’s length while you wait for him to make a move, any move, you hate thinking of him wallowing his summer away.

“I think he’ll work himself to death if he gets the chance. And we don’t want that,” he raises an eyebrow, “do we?”

There’s a little guilt trip woven into that question. A hidden implication: that he’s only working as much as he is to distract himself from missing you. You’ve tried, you want to protest. It’s all you’ve been doing since he left. Gods, it’s a fucking bit between you two now. You’ve held up your end of the bargain, filling your evenings with Duncan and Rowan and Raymun instead of rotting away in the achingly empty bed.

Maybe you could’ve tried harder, though. Made less of a joke of it. Pushed him to put down the papers and the emails. Guilt twists your stomach in knots. Here you are, all proud of yourself for having a life beyond him, all while he’s shutting himself in a dark, lonely library like it’s a form of penance.

“Got any plans next week?”

“Hm? No.” Jarred back to reality, you rush to take one last drag of your cigarette before it burns out. Coffee washes the taste out of your mouth. Bitter replacing bitter. You can’t say that you have anything worth mentioning planned for the upcoming Midsummer holiday. With the University closed for the week, you were probably going to get drunk with Duncan and watch an obscene amount of reality TV.

“Come to Summerhall, then.” Maekar’s glass clinks as he sets it down, empty, the imprint of his lips fading on the rim. “At least the aircon functions there.”

“You’re sure that’d be alright?” You can’t deny the way you light up at the offer. Your mind conjures up images of rolling green hills, elaborate mansion halls cool and crisp even during the peak heat of the day, Baelor’s weight next to you as you fall asleep. It’s a tempting portrait.

“It’s my house, if I say it’s alright then it’s alright.” He coughs, forehead reddening. You watch him contemplating another glass of whiskey, ultimately deciding against it and pouring himself the dredges of the coffee you’d made.

“And I won’t be a bother? To your family?”

“Won’t be many of us this year.” No milk for him, but you could’ve guessed that. “His boys won’t be there, if that’s what you’re wondering. Me and him. My four youngest. Everyone else’s made a run for it.”

It’s exactly what you’d been wondering. Odd how those blue eyes seem to drill straight into your brain. You wish there were a book you could consult here. Is it alright to meet your maybe-boyfriend’s nieces and nephews before his sons? Is it acceptable to show up to his family’s summer mansion to stage a work-life balance intervention? When in this situation do you demand to know whether he loves you back?

“If you think he’ll be fine with it, then alright.”

“Good.” The way he says it makes you think that you didn’t really have much of a choice in the matter. “You do own trousers, I hope.”

“No, I walk around Uni like this,” you deadpan, fighting sarcasm with sarcasm. Under different circumstances, you’d worry about making a good impression. Defer to shyness. The way this morning is going, though, you’ll be lucky if he gets a lukewarm impression from you.

Maekar just scoffs. “Careful, girl.”

Room heady with smoke and coffee, you breathe deep and wonder what you’re getting yourself into. There’s a thick, threatening undercurrent in the air. Tense as a warm front before it snaps. Nothing about it feels careful.

It’s raining when Baelor picks you up from the train station in Ashford. He lets you tuck yourself into your arms, lets you linger there in the parking lot, lets the steady drizzle dampen his hair while he holds you. I missed you so much, you murmur into his shirt, relishing in the way he kisses you. So what if there’s only two other cars around? It’s delightfully public, deliciously normal.

“I missed you, lovely girl,” he says, his wide hands wiping rain off of your forehead. Even with dark circles framing his eyes, he looks at you with a kind of gossamer-soft glow that makes your heart ache from sweetness.

Once you’re settled in the passenger seat, he drapes a hand over the steering wheel while the other perches possessively on your thigh. “I’m sorry my brother maneuvered you into coming here. He shouldn’t have intruded like that.”

“I don’t mind. I didn’t really need much maneuvering.” You trace the tendons of his fingers while he drives. Ink stains decorate the outside of his pinky. His wedding ring occupies its spot on his ring finger. You try not to think about that. You try not to think about whether its constant presence might have anything to do with the fact that he hadn’t said I love you back, either. Keep yourself the fuck together, you’d chanted over and over in your head on the train. You repeat it now, to the rhythm of the windshield wipers as the rain comes down. Keep. Yourself. The fuck. Together.

Somewhere in the repetition and the downpour, you drift off. It’s only when you feel the car jolt from asphalt to gravel that you wake. Sun peeks through still-bulging clouds, making the whole world glisten. Everything you see is impossibly green. Impossibly lush. The trees that line the road are likely older than Westeros itself, aching under the weight of their own gnarled limbs. 

There’s a gate looming ahead, dragon motifs woven into the metalwork. Your one semester of Valyrian in undergrad doesn’t do you much good, but you try nonetheless to read what’s spelled out at the peak.

“Pez… perz…”

“Perzys ānogār,” he finishes for you, perfect rs rolling off of his tongue. “Fire and blood.”

You’d scoff at that, joke about how dramatic his family is, how he ought to get that tattooed, but then you see it. Summerhall. Framed by the rolling hills of the Stormlands, it’s a sliver of sun pulled from the sky. Afternoon light refracts off of the windows. Looming like a golden palace amidst all the greenery, you’re blinded by the finery, by the arches, by the sprawling, manicured grounds that seem like they’ve been ripped from the pages of a child’s storybook. It is a palace. A princess might as well be trapped in one of the tall towers that stands at each corner of the mansion. For all you know, there’s a dragon lurking somewhere nearby.

Baelor pulls up to the courtyard, where a man in a crisp suit is opening your door before you can process what’s happening. “Welcome, miss.”

“Will you have her bags taken to my room, please, Yorkel?” Baelor hands him the keys while you find your footing.

“Right away, sir.”

“Thanks,” you manage to say, jaw still slack as you stare at the exterior. 

A firm hand finds its spot on the small of your back. “Shall we, sweet girl?”

If you were starstruck by the outside, the inside is enough to blind you. Double staircases and a massive chandelier greet you in the entryway. North wing to the right, Baelor explains. Dining room, library, lounge, drawing room, sitting room (you don’t fully understand what the difference between the last three is). South wing to the left, mostly bedrooms. He guides you up the stairs, where a massive portrait hangs front and center: a man in a suit with a dragon brooch on the lapel, his hand on the shoulder of a seated woman in a rust-orange Dornish-style gown. You’ve seen iterations of their faces in Baelor’s living room and in the Sunspear villa. Daeron and Myriah. Young and regal. Like a king and a queen.

“Are these all your family?” You ask, gesturing towards the corridor walls that are bedecked in old, gilded frames. Distracted, you nearly run into a maid carrying a silver tray before Baelor manages to steer you out of the way.

“My apologies, miss,” she says, calm and classy, carrying on with her work before you can insist that you’re the one who ought to be sorry, not her. You feel like you should be apologizing for just stepping on the pristine floors and breathing the cool, lilac-scented air. All the faces in all the portraits leer at you. Intruder, they accuse silently.

“I’ll give you the full tour tomorrow,” he promises. “You’ll want to rest before dinner.”

He guides you down the halls, past the ghostly gaze of dead family members. Our room, he says at last, opening a door while you bite back a grin. The room in question is probably the size of your entire previous flat. Massive curtains have been draped back, allowing sunlight to filter through the bay windows and splash the sage green walls. Through a doorway in the corner, you can see a claw foot tub. There’s a four-poster bed, a crystal light fixture sparkling from the ceiling, a rug that probably costs more than the average house.

“You live here?” Is all you can bring yourself to say. There’s more you want to ask. You’re dying to unravel the stories behind the portraits, eager to peer around all the corners and wander through all the grand rooms. It’s a strange, surreal, sparkling world you’ve wandered into.

“Only during the summer,” he says, “and as long as my brother tolerates me.”

Right. As if that makes it humbler, somehow.

“I’ll be in the library. Dinner is at eight.” 

Pressing a kiss to your forehead, he lingers for a moment, as if he’s about to say something else. You meet his blue-brown gaze, breath frozen. But then he’s gone, leaving you to the intricate stillness, to the room that feels like a gaping mouth trying to swallow you whole.

You try to rest. Mostly, you flit in and out of consciousness. Fever dream snippets cascade every time your eyes close. You wander the halls in your dreams and wake, wondering how you’ve gotten yourself back to bed. You think you hear footsteps outside the room. Sometimes heavy, sometimes a faint pitter-patter. But when you stumble to the door and poke your head out, there’s never anything there.

Keep yourself the fuck together. Cool water and a quick rinse in the tub help. Not enough, though. Your head is still swimming as you touch up your makeup and tug on a slightly-wrinkled sundress.

It’s only a little frightening that you’d woken up to find your belongings all neatly unpacked, toiletries organized on the vanity and clothes hung up in the dresser next to Baelor’s. You don’t recall any of the staff coming in while you’d been in bed. Maybe they’re quiet, good at fluttering around unseen. Maybe the house is actually haunted.

Right down the hallway. Left to get to the entryway. After that, you’re less sure of where you’re going. You end up in the lounge (or is it the sitting room?), then the drawing room (or is it the lounge?), then a room that must be the library.

There’s a blur of white in your peripheral vision. You whip around, finding a little girl peeking at you from behind an armchair. Her pink dress is all aflutter, white hair coming loose from her barrettes. The two of you stare at each other for a moment. Ghost? You wonder.

“Hello.”

“Hi,” she says, and then scurries away before either of you can say anything else.

You try to follow, if only on the off chance that the dining room is her destination, but she’s long gone by the time you make it into the hallway again.

“Lost?”

“Fucking hells.” How is it that the most menacing man you’ve ever met can sneak up on you like a cat? “Yes, actually.”

Maekar snorts. “Are you certain you weren’t just spying?”

“That depends. Have you got something worth spying on? Secret dungeon, maybe?”

He gives you a long look from head to toe, probably trying to decide whether inviting you here was a mistake or not. You do your best not to shrink from it. He’s an animal of a man, quiet in the way he observes you but not less threatening for it. The kind of creature you might’ve been afraid of when you were little. He’s more afraid of you than you are of him, a grown-up might’ve said, even if you wouldn’t have believed it.

There’s a softness there too, though. Minuscule, buried in the lines around his eyes. It’s enough for you to see past the gruff facade. Enough to know that, just like his brother, he’s human.

“Come on, then,” he says at last. “Can’t have you wandering off.”

Of all the rooms in the mansion, the dining room might be the fanciest yet. It looks more suited to a banquet than a casual family dinner. Candlelight casts shadows over the vaulted ceilings. Maekar takes the seat at the head of the table, where a gigantic portrait of Aegon Targaryen hovers on the wall behind him. You’re fairly certain you’ve seen that portrait in history textbooks. Odd, how you’ve found yourself tangled up with a family whose fingerprints are all over the course of Westeros’s history. 

Baelor pulls out a seat for you, ever the gentleman. While the staff pours water and wine, four pairs of eyes stare at you from across the table. Two boys, two girls. The smallest: the same girl you’d encountered in the library. She’s giving you a sly grin, which you flash right back at her. 

“Aemon, Daella, Aegon, Rhae.” Maekar goes down the line one by one before he offers them your name.

“You’re Uncle Baelor’s girlfriend?” Daella seems incredulous. Twelve years old, if you’re remembering correctly, and probably the mirror image of her mother. Next to her, Aemon goes beet red and stares down at his napkin.

You shrug. “I’d say it’s more like he’s my boyfriend.”

Maekar snorts. For half a second, there’s an exchange of looks between him and Baelor, a language you could never hope to understand. Anxiety flares inside you—you’ve never called him a boyfriend before, especially not in front of other people—but he doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t correct you. Just squeezes your hand under the table, warm and strong.

In between bites of Northern-style roast chicken, you answer the barrage of questions from Maekar’s children. What do you do? What do you write? Are you famous? Have you ever read The Tales of Florian and Jonquil? What did you think of it?

“Well, what did you think of it?” You reverse the question at Aegon, who perks up immediately.

“I liked the dragon fighting part! The rest of it was a bit boring.”

“Finish chewing before you speak, boy,” Maekar chides, though there’s no malice in it. Just a tired, fatherly frustration. Sorry, Aegon mutters with a mouth full of green beans.

You’re keenly aware of Baelor’s eyes on you during your dinnertime deposition. And though he steps into the conversation from time to time—Not tonight, sweetheart, he asserts gently when Rhae demands you meet her beloved pony Morning—he lets you handle their inquiries by yourself. It’s impossible to shake the sense that you’re being tested. And even if you manage to play along, even if you earn a giggle or two, your heart’s beating faster than it did in any exam you ever took in school.

After the chocolate mousse (which ends up smudged on Rhae’s nose somehow), the staff clear the table like clockwork while Aegon and Rhae whine about being sent to bed. It’s Aemon who corrals them. He lets Rhae clamber onto his back, gives a dutiful good night, Dad, to Maekar, offers you a shy smile. It was nice meeting you.

Daella lingers, sly as a fox. “Can I stay up—”

“One hour,” Maekar grunts, “and don’t let me hear that TV.”

“Thank you!” And even though he puts on a firm face, there’s nothing but fondness there when she pecks his cheek before running off to join her siblings.

It’s strange, really. You feel like you’re in the dark of the cinema. That soft sternness, that familiarity, it’s utterly foreign to you. Fatherhood might as well be a fantasy film. Blinking away your wistful stare, you turn and meet Baelor’s gentle gaze. Opening you, reading you. His hand returns to your thigh, a comforting weight, a silent I know. You latch onto his fingers with your own. It’s been too long since you had the anchor of his body latching you into reality. How fiercely you’d missed him. There’s a needy tension in your hands. Don’t let me go, it says. 

Maekar lets out a long groan as he stands, rubbing his bearded chin. “Drinks and billiards?”

“Not tonight, I think,” Baelor says without breaking eye contact, the tiniest sparkle of suggestion surfacing. “Long day.”

“Yeah,” you lie. “Exhausted.”

You’re barely inside the threshold of the room when Baelor’s mouth is on yours. Lips on lips, teeth crashing against tongue, you stumble backwards while he swallows the laughter right out of your throat. This is what you were truly starved of. The heat of his body, the possessive clutch, the way he touches you like he could break you, like he’s just barely holding himself back.

“Perfect girl,” he rumbles in between hungry kisses, “beautiful girl, do you know how good you are?”

“No—” You gasp, shivering as he makes quick work of your dress. Your mind’s a summer storm, processing touch rather than words. His hands leave you bare in the moonlight before you even fully realize what he’d said.

“No?” He has to guide your hands to his shirt, your trembling fingers fumbling over the buttons. “Do you need me to show you?”

“Please.” 

Together, you undress him. He lets his linen shirt fall to the floor while you trace the contours of his chest. You savor the salt-and-pepper scrape of the hair that blooms over his pectorals, interrupted by those two jagged silver scars, thinning and trailing down, down, down, to where it frames his hardening cock. All the muscles in his hips and thighs roll like marble, chiseled and smooth. Your eyes drink in the veins that run down the length of his cock, the moisture that gathers at the tip, the way it pulses to full erection under his white-knuckled fist. He’s a vision. A statue of a god you want to pray to.

He presses you toward the bed, and you let your legs part as your back hits the velvet comforter. The room of your body is a place you’ll always let him in. Baelor hovers over you, wolflike and wanton, eyes fixed on your exposed cunt. 

Beautiful, he repeats, a little whisper. Heart hammering against your ribs, your breath comes in shy stutters as he traces the glistening folds. His fingers prod and caress every little nook. There’s no demand in his touch. Just quiet exploration. As if the warm, wet flesh of you is some precious thing.

“Look here.” He notches the tip of his cock at your weeping entrance, waits until your eyes fixate on the joining of your bodies. “I want you to watch.”

“Oh, fuck,” you gasp, burning at the sight, watching him split you open with a slick, sinful sound, “oh, fuck—”

A wide hand claps over your mouth right before your voice elevates to a shout. Shh, shh, shh, he hisses, halfway buried inside you. Addled by lust, you forget you’re not in the safety of his house where you can cry and moan as loud as you like. You’re like a pair of teenagers. Horny as beasts, biting back the obscene sounds that bubble up. He keeps you muzzled like that for a long, painful moment, until the vibrations in your vocal cords die down.

Fuck. Oxygen deprivation sends an electric shock straight to your clit. Slowly, trembling, you wrap your fingers around his wrist. He lets you slide his hand down, over your chin, until it’s perching around your throat. The tendons in his jaw tighten once he realizes what you want.

“I can take it,” you rasp, “I want it.”

“Gods, you’re…” he’s muttering, “fuck, sweet girl, I can’t—”

“I want it.” You whine, squeezing his wrist insistently. “Hard. Please.”

“Fucking hells.” Composure entirely lost, he tightens his grip and presses his cock fully inside you all in the span of a single second.

There’s no pause. No chance to adjust to the stretch or the squeeze. He fucks you fast and fierce, setting a brutal pace that sparks your entire body alight. The slap, slap, slap of skin echoes off the walls, dulled by the blood pounding in your ears. Either he doesn’t know his own strength or he’s being rougher than he’s ever been. You don’t care. You cant your hips up to meet each thrust, mouth agape, gasping for air while he ruts into you.

“There… there you are, sweet thing, good girl,” he praises you, though there’s a sharp edge to his voice, one last vestige of restraint. Tension builds and builds low in your stomach. Your mind is screaming even if you can’t use your voice. I love you, you tell him with your body, with the drag of your tongue over his, with the scrape of your nails down his back, with each needy clench of your cunt.

You get ridiculously, indecently wet before you come. You can feel it staining his pelvis, ruining the sheets. The sound fills your foggy head: a sickening, gorgeous song. Oh my gods, you’re mouthing, jaw dropping open, all the tension coiling tighter and tighter. 

Baelor kisses the corner of your mouth, your cheek, your brow. “I—fuck, I feel it. There it is. Let it happen.”

And how can you deny him? How can you not fall to pieces as he keeps his persistent, ruthless rhythm, fucking you just the way you like, keeping you powerless and pinned beneath him? His cock and the way it fills and bruises your pussy is only half of what sets off your orgasm. It’s the look in his eyes. The possessiveness in his palms. You’re his, every particle of you.

Scream cut off by his pressure, you writhe and sob while you come, feeling the wave of it all the way down to your toes. His beard tickles your chin while he mutters filth and sweetness. He brings you through it, only increasing his pace when you’re soaked and slack beneath him.

With your head lulling back on the bed, you’re faintly aware of the light from the hall slipping through the gaps in the doorframe. The door itself is just barely ajar. You can’t tell if it’s just the blurriness of your vision, but you think there’s a shadow there. Tall, broad, faint. You blink. Tears invade your eyes. Maybe there ought to be panic rising inside you, but all you can process is how badly you need Baelor to come.

“Come inside me?” You whisper, raking your hands through his hair. It’s a cheap trick at this point, a surefire way to get him to finish. But you want it as much as you’re sure he does. Weeks apart mean you don’t want to waste his come on your belly or in your mouth. You want it deep. Careless. Spilling out of you like a secret.

“You shouldn’t—” he chokes out a strained laugh, “shouldn’t let me keep… doing that… gods…”

You just smile, all weak and watery. “I’d let you do anything to me.”

And then Baelor’s grip is going iron-strong as he comes, staining your vision with black spots. A ragged, animalistic sound bursts from his chest. Thick, hot warmth floods your core. Gods, it feels good to be claimed like this. To be so full of him.

When your eyes refocus, the doorway’s empty. Maybe it was a trick of the light. A figment of your fucked-out imagination. A voyeuristic ghost. Whatever it was, it’s lost to the darkness, to the song of your breath and Baelor’s mingling together against the din of crickets stridulating outside. A night breeze picks up against the windowpanes. In the distance, thunder begins to roll.

[japril]

Patrick Ball as Frank Langdon The Pitt. S02E15 9:00 P.M.

[kayascodelorio]

[ohmovie]

Come out, come out, little knight, it's time you faced the dragon.

AERION "Brightflame" TARGARYEN A KNIGHT OF THE SEVEN KINGDOMS│Season 1, 2026 –

[gameofthronesdaily]

Harry Collett (Behind the Scenes) HOUSE OF THE DRAGON — 2.01 'A Son for a Son'

[llillacwine]

ohhh baelor targaryen modern au fic (to hop on the trend). son's best friend vibes; valarr brings his studious, witty, pretty friend to the family's holiday estate at summerhall for the holidays after their uni term is over. and maybe baelor could keep his own wits and composure about him if the attraction stopped simply at the little sundresses she likes to swan about in, or if it was merely just those small skirts she insists upon wearing for the family dinners grandpa daeron insists they all gather for. but it's worse than that. she matches him intellectually. she's quick, well-read. when he can't sleep in the dead of night - because when can he - and he finds himself in summerhall's library, callused fingers tracing the aged spines of first edition books, she's already there, curled up on a wingback armchair in a satin sleep dress, reading something from the conquest or other histories. she needles him. likes to tease him. knows she's riling him up and knows that it's wrong - that valarr is her best friend, that she loves him, that he trusted her enough to bring her into the fold of his messy family and didn't even flinch, so at least she should have the decency to not flirt with his widowed old man that keeps looking at her sun-warmed legs or how the sea-water's making the ends of her hair curl after a swim...but really, she can't help it. and neither can baelor..........

[llillacwine]

hiii i’m back!! so sorry for my absence - i will reply to all the lovely asks in due time. i am hoping to update IHYB very soon - uni & work both have me so swamped.

i’m also thinking of writing for steve harrington, because like the rest of the world, im head over heels for joe keery. so feel free to send him some requests as i work on the next chapter of IHYB ;)))

[llillacwine]

you’re literally the best writer for Clark Kent on tumblr and I have read most of them, I think. You just get the character and it draws me in. It always seems strange when people write him and say things he would NEVER say. Would love if you did a story from his POV. Having said that, you have fed us and owe nothing. I’ll revisit your stories as long as they’re published.

hiiii oh thank u so much, that's so kind!! <3

I received so many lovely requests and I've definitely got a few ideas - and will certainly try a bit of character study into clark's pov !! idk if u guys are sick of yearning clark angst (from IYHB) butttt it's my new fix. like I need that. need him.

thank u so much again <333

[crucifem]

"Stop writing only smut! write fluff and angst!"

Are you? Guys okay? Writing is subjective to who wants to write it. There is no place where you should shame someone for just being more interested in the sexual aspect of writing. If you're so concerned about lack of other genres WRITE THEM YOURSELF.

Telling people to stop writing what they enjoy is the most obnoxious thing you could do in the writing community. Genuinely. God forbid someone just wants to post their favorite little fantasy with their favorite character. You guys act like we're killing people by not constantly writing more fluff or angst over smut.

I'm SO tired of seeing people complain left and right because they don't like smut.

Another thing—You guys ask for fluff and angst and then it gets NO traction, absolute dirt interactions from those who are supposedly "tired of only smut."

So no! Actually, i will continue to write what i want and anyone else who write smut doesn't deserve to feel any type of pressure or guilt because people don't know how to scroll away from media they dont like.

[llillacwine]

hiiii feel free to send in any clark requests (fluff/angst/smut i don't mind, but i do have a preference for angst) whilst i'm working on the next chapter of IHYB hehe <3

[llillacwine]

I find myself running home to your sweet nothings.

Chapter VI. series masterlist.

synopsis: Clark's confronted, and haunted, by his mounting guilt over not revealing to you the Superman of it all. He suffers through your complaints of morning sickness, sleepless nights, sore boobs, and everything else he considers a symptom of his alien-blood with hunger-pangs of guilt and shame. Though, he continued to bury all of that regrettably as your heart softened against your resolve, slowly letting him in. In his head, he now had everything to lose if he told you the truth; not just you, but the future the two of you might have together, with this baby, with each other. He couldn't butcher that and throw it all to the wind. Not with all these pretty smiles you'd felt generous enough to grant him recently, or with how more open you are now to affection, to soft touches, and softer words. Clark loves you. And you both love this baby. Since when did a bit of secret-keeping hurt anyone?

word count: 7.2k

content warnings: angst, Clark experiences a lot of self-doubt and internalised insecurities here, pregnancy, sexual tension, the secret-keeping continues..., insane amounts of yearning and slow-burn (Clark's giving Jeff Buckley a run for his money, but let's be real, so is reader), Star Wars references galore.

track vi: Sweet Nothings by Taylor Swift.

Springtime swept over Metropolis; warm and blue, the return of the early morning sun, birdsong, and the sticky, earthly leaves of cherry blossoms. The season for new life—spring lambs, fresh rosemary, opening the kitchen window just a crack to let in sweet aromas and sunlight and fresh, sprightly air. It felt only right that you started showing in March; your baby (according to Rina’s fruit-allocated measurements at every midwife appointment) was approximately the size of a small melon. With the tenderness of springtime came, for you at least, a heightened sense of the world—everything sharper; new odours of ozone and asphalt (the occasional, worrying tang of smoke and sickening metal clinging to Clark’s clothes), more vibrant colours in the blooming trees, and even the softness of air.

It was starting to scare the heck out of Clark.

From all of his avid research, he could tell this wasn’t an ordinary pregnancy. Sure, he already had his superstitions because of his own abnormal biology, but with your morning sickness following you into the second trimester (“Ah, yes, hyperemesis gravidarum is what we call it…” Rina diagnosed, frowning solemnly as she jotted down every last gory detail you recounted of upset stomachs and rejected meals), it was determined rather plainly for him. Clark walked around with shame clotting his skin. Every time you complained about a migraine pulsing against your skull or some other uncomfortable symptom, he felt guilt twine around his guts like barbed wire. 

It only got worse. When Rina first mentioned that you might even suffer from preeclampsia as the pregnancy progressed—a fancy term for high blood pressure, Clark soon found out—he considered telling you about the Kryptonian of it all then and there. Surely, this all had to be the fault of his bloodline? It was a grotesquely terrifying thought, that all this nausea, discomfort, and complications were caused by him, but it was a thought that haunted him through every check-up or bad morning of yours. He felt like this monstrous, deceitful thing for continuing to keep it from you—Superman, his inhuman DNA: the truth. Though, somehow more harrowing than his guilt, was Clark’s fear.

What would you say…what would you do…if you found out who he was? What he was? The implications of it all were too macabre for him to even think about. The baby, your baby—his—would be the first of its kind. Half-human, half-Kryptonian. He was possibly putting your body through all sorts of dangers—the kind that he wasn’t even sure that it could withstand, biologically. You’d surely hate him forever, if you were to ever find out. A marrow-deep, visceral fear that you’d take the baby away—take yourself away—ran through him like a tangled, jagged ribbon.

“...I don’t understand why you just didn’t tell her when she first told you that she thought she was pregnant,” wisecracked Kara, after Clark finished surmising all of these worries to her.

In retrospect, going to his aloof cousin about this was probably not the best idea. But, she was on Earth for the weekend—something, evasively, about Krypto missing him (but Clark did wonder if these were Kara’s sentiments, instead)—and there wasn’t really a better person left alive who could understand what he was feeling. Even so, understanding didn’t directly translate to excusing, and it was this that Clark should’ve known better about. Especially with Kara still recovering from a month-long bender on Daxam (a red-sun planet), all swollen, bloodshot eyes and a still slight slur to her tongue.

Clark, who was sat almost childlike in a cross-legged position on his apartment floor, Krypton lapping rough-tongued at his knuckles, blinked his eyes indignantly at her. “Because, Kara…” 

He faltered. Because, what? Because Clark Kent didn’t particularly think that far ahead. Not with the girl of his dreams sat all pretty on his bathroom counter, legs draped around his waist, with this doe-eyes of anxieties lit up sweetly by the New Year’s eve firework displays. The last thing on his mind that night was telling her about his true-identity, especially after she’d bruised his heart so easily three weeks before—he didn't dare imagine the agonies she could inflict upon him if she knew the whole truth. 

“Because,” he breathed again, shaky and anguished—uttering words he hadn’t even fully accepted in his mind, “she looked at me that night like I was human. Like I was the same as her—afraid, confused…And I didn’t want that to stop.”

Kara’s drollness softened at that, the bite in her slackening like a dog scorned. She was sprawled out on his couch, nursing her hangover with a bag of frozen peas he wrapped up in a tea-towel for her, massaging it against her temple until now. Suddenly solemn, she sat up, stared at him, and let her bottom lip jut sullenly as her big-little cousin scratched absently behind Krypto’s fuzzy ear as if he needed something living to remind him that he was, too.

“Clark,” she said slowly, “you’re more human than any of them. You know that, right?” 

He didn’t like that. He appreciated it, but it felt wrong and ugly for him to accept that he was anything less than some freakish mutt. Clark’s eyes—unburdened by his deceptive glasses this evening—drifted to the glowing windows of surrounding apartments and offices. People were setting tables for dinner, music was spilling through ajar windows, and lives were unmarred by the fear that the woman they loved, the woman carrying their baby, was in pain because of them.

“Do you know what I envy most about them?” Kara, again; her voice carrying a kind of astuteness that had been absent from her for years now, with all her partying and endless chasing of ghosts. “They get to be fragile. They get to love—even when it hurts them, and it doesn’t scare them so badly that they never try it again. They’ve got this privilege of hurt that we don’t have because we heal so quickly. In that regard,” she continued sensibly, taking a swig of the orange juice he’d poured for her, “it pays to be flesh, not steel.”

“Red sun makes you wise,” Clark mused, heavy-hearted.

She shrugged, feigning nonchalance. “Maybe it’s being an aunt.” 

“I keep hearing her heartbeat,” he rushed out, eyes wet. The words tumbled out of him, “The baby’s too. When I’m above the city—fighting, trying to defend it, keep them safe. Sometimes when I’m trying to sleep. I’m supposed to protect them, but what if I’m the reason she’s so ill? What if my blood is hurting her?” 

Kara looked distraught. “Kal—“

“I need to say this. I have to,” he spat out, ravaged and poisonous, like his words were just as insidious as all the vile thoughts and nightmarish dreams that had been plaguing him—syllables like peach-pits that needed prying out before the cyanide started to taste too much like Kypronite and wormed out all the rot in him. “What if this kills her? What if I lose them both? This has never happened before—no human has ever had a half-Kryptonian baby. How am I supposed to sit with her, eat dinner at her table, hold her hair back when she’s sick…knowing what’s happening to her, that it’s because of me?”

Even now, he heard the two of you; tucked under a dense blanket of car-horns, drunken laughter, and the steady thundering of the underground subway. Existing as two, twin-beats, fluttering within your ribs, exacting a bullying knife against his own.

Clark buried the heels of his palms into his eyes. “Every time she breathes too fast, I blame myself. Every time she complains about backache, or feels nauseous, or says she’s dizzy—I, gosh, Kara, I feel like it’s me doing it to her.” 

A forlorn sigh and a bit of rustling later, Kara knelt in front of him, nuzzling at Krypto’s scruff and reaching for Clark’s shoulder with her other hand.

“You already love this baby more than anything. And her,” stated Kara. 

(Clark hadn’t explicitly told his cousin that he loved you, but he supposed it was obvious. You don’t belong to him but Clark certainly belongs to you. The burden of Atlas had rested squarely on his shoulders ever since he realised what he could do for Earth…still, he felt like an outsider to it all. Belonging reached him on your couch, months ago—your mouth pressing pretty and lying kisses into his, hot and heavy. 

He loved you then, he loved you before, he loved you now). 

“...that’s not a crime, Clark. You’re allowed to love them. You’re allowed to have a family of your own. Rao knows you and me never had one in blood.”

They both knew that family went beyond their shared bloodline. With Clark’s parents back in Smallville, he found acceptance and a love enough to make him feel wanted. Still, he understood what Kara meant. A haunting fear had always been there for them both—well, for Clark at least—that a family would be out of the question for him. Being a father. 

He always measured himself against what he could do for the world rather than what it could for him. The ouroboros price to pay for being steel—he had to be worthy of Earth. It gave him a home after his history was obliterated, light years away. How could he ever repay that kind of debt? 

So, no. Clark didn’t think a family of his own was ever preordained. He’d think of it, guiltily, in the later years of his boyhood—seventeen, packing up his bedroom for college, thinking about returning to this place with the girl he loved. Ill-gotten dreams of a child knee-deep in the overgrown grass of the farm, feeding corn to the roosters, a tiny hand wrapped entirely around one of Clark’s fingers. He kept those hopes a secret like homesickness until the moment that test turned positive and you looked at him as if this was something he might be worthy of experiencing alongside you. Ever since, they’ve spilled out through all his cracks like springtime sun.

“That love shouldn’t mean hurt,” Kara exacted, a sucker-punch. “And you shouldn’t hate yourself for any of this. I mean,” she blinked at him, dry and derisive, “you definitely should’ve put on a condom before sleeping with the girl you’ve liked for years—”

“Kara!” he gasped, affronted.

She smirked, rolling from her haunches to a cross-legged position, mirroring him. “Am I wrong? Like, seriously, don’t they teach sex-ed in Smallville, or are you all too clutching-at-pearls for that?” 

“You’re impossible,” Clark muttered miserably. “And to think I thought you were maturing…”

“Hey, I use protection,” she retorted.

Ruddy-cheeked, he stood up quickly. “That’s enough of that, I think.”

“Did Ma Kent never teach itsy Clark about the birds and the bees—”

“Kara!”

࿐ྂ

The following weekend, Clark—in all his self-punishment and quiet compensations for your quiet agonies—decided that the perfect bit of reprieve he could offer you after another harrowing week at the Planet was a Star Wars marathon. He swore, truly, this had no selfish intentions whatsoever. The sole Ikea sofa in his apartment was swathed in blankets, pillows cushioning the uncomfortable back, and the faint, buttery smell of microwaved popcorn wafted from his kitchenette to the living room. Sunlight spilled through the floor-to-ceiling windows, and made you look unfairly ethereal from your spot on the couch, a band tee stretching over the gentle curve of your belly. 

You were reclined enough that your socked feet were kicked up on his coffee table, one leg folded over the other, knees tucked sensibly under a blanket that smelt like pine and Clark’s laundry detergent, with Clark perched a bit too antsy for your liking next to you. There was an episode of How I Met Your Mother where Ted Mosby roped his umpteenth girlfriend into watching the Trilogy with him, as if to gauge whether or not she was worthy of his-pseudo romantic dream of a botched take on The Graduate (translation: worthy of marrying him). You kind of felt like that right now.

The two of you were halfway through Empire Strikes Back, and you were starting to think Clark could narrate the entirety of these films if he really wanted to. You were at the sequences of Yoda’s tutelage of Luke Skywalker on Dagobah—this swampy, murky quagmire where sagacious Jedis could apparently go to escape the evil Imperial Empire (or whatever…)—and, through your periphery, you could see Clark’s mouth faintly moving around Yoda’s words…‘Do or do not, there is no try.’ It was almost endearing. 

“I don’t want to burst your bubble or anything,” you said, feigning airy nonchalance when Clark’s head snapped to you, startled, “but this one’s full of plot-holes, Clark.”

He blinked at you, pausing the film rather impertinently. “What? No, it’s not.”

“Erm. Yes, it is,” you argued. “Like, the weird blue ectoplasm ghost of Obi-Wan—”

“They’re Force ghosts,” he corrected astutely.

“Right.” You nodded solemnly. “Obi-Wan’s Force ghost,” you said insolently (Clark let out a little self-satisfied scoff), “told Luke to go to Yoda, and called him the Jedi who instructed me. But in the prequels last week, Qui-Gon Jinn was Obi-Wan’s master when he was a padawan? And didn’t Yoda only teach younglings before they were given a master to ‘instruct’ them?”

“Well.” Clark faltered, looking taken aback and almost insulted that you were even questioning it. “Well, that’s—I mean, that’s all technicalities. Right? Like, even if Qui-Gon was Obi-Wan’s primary master, Yoda still would’ve instructed him at some point. Like, when he was at the Jedi Temple—”

“But, then, Yoda’s not the ‘Jedi who instructed him,’ is he? He’s just…some Jedi that instructed him. Isn’t that unfair to Qui-Gon?” you said, admittedly enjoying riling him up a tad too much.

Clark, on the other hand, looked absolutely baffled and distraught that you were saying any of this to him at all. He flailed with the remote for a moment, staring between it, the paused television, and you, like he couldn’t quite decide what he was most upset with here.

“You’re—that’s…” He miserably raked his fingers through his curls, as if he was experiencing some personal kind of grief. “Hah, well!” Clark exclaimed then, victorious. “What if, after Qui-Gon died, and Obi-Wan was forced to take on Anakin as his padawan, Obi-Wan might’ve had to take on further training to assume the status of Jedi Master, as he was still only a Jedi Knight?”

A smirk twitching at your lips, you raised your hands drolly in surrender. “Hey, I don’t know. I didn’t write the films.”

“But, you just—” Clark squinted at you indignantly. “You’re messing with me.”

“I think it’s chronic,” you sighed. “Maybe it’s a second trimester thing? I just have to make you miserable…”

“Oh, ha, ha. You’re hilarious.” 

“Mhm. Let’s add it to the long list of traits the baby hopefully gets from me,” you taunted, tracing two fingers in a walking-like motion along the length of his arm, until you finally reached his underjaw and gave it a flick, punctuating the teasing motion with a, “my sense of humour.”

“You’ll pay for this,” Clark swore, but the fond lilt in his voice betrayed him. 

You leaned back, lolling your head against the pillow he’d nestled between you and the wall and smiling at him lopsidedly. “Oh? And what is it you’re going to do to me?” 

A pretty, pinkish colour flooded to his cheeks and the shells of his ears, a small cough rasping awkwardly against his throat. Confidence seeped back into him slowly, his knee brushing yours as he bravely let his hand linger just over your thigh—the softness of a crochet blanket keeping his skin from yours.

“Well…” Clark said hoarsely, trying to play off his nerves cavalierly, “I could use my Jedi mind-tricks to train our baby in the ways of the Force. Make them my padawan.” 

“Oh, really? That’s your huge plan—prenatal Force training?” you mocked. “Are you gonna whisk our child away to some marshy planet and whisper cryptic shit in their ear, like Yoda? Do or do not, small foetus, there is no try—”

“Don’t mock Yoda, all right? He’s a legend,” he chuckled heartily, brushing his fingertips just above your knee, almost feather-light. 

“I’m so sure,” you drawled. “A two-foot swamp gremlin with a speech impediment.” 

Clark guffawed incredulously. “He’s nine-hundred-years-old!” 

“Mm, looks it.”

“You’re mean,” murmured Clark with an expression smeared in mock-woundedness and affection, his thumb smoothing over your thigh through the woollen blanket.

“And you’re so easy to wind up,” you retaliated.

“I’m starting to think that’s the only reason you keep me around,” he mused.

“Probably,” you said similarly, feigning thoughtfulness. “That, and your super nice apartment. And maybe the biceps. Maybe.”

Clark’s scoffed exaggeratedly. “Wow, she compliments.”

“Don’t get used to it,” you remarked wryly. 

His touch stilled. His thumb was no longer absently moving against the blanket over you. Rather, his hand just hovered—warm and present, in the kind of manner that felt sacred and precious. You glanced between the spectacular blue of his eyes, swarmed and ravaged by the dilating of his pupils, and that offending hand—a network of aquamarine veins pressed steadily against sun-warmed skin, strong and big. It would be a lie if you said that you hadn’t imagined these very hands holding your child. They’d dwarf your baby—tiny and delicate; the closest thing to perfection either of you would ever get—but you didn’t think for a second they’d ever cause any harm. Clark wouldn’t even injure a fluttery, black-fly on a windowsill. 

“You know, one day you’re going to regret being so mean to me—”

You stiffened, a soft, butterflying of motions fluttering in your belly.

“Shut up, Clark.” 

“Sorry?” He blinked at you, genuinely surprised.

“Just—shut up.” You both went quiet, your palm flattening nervously against your abdomen as you tried to will your heart to stop thundering so violently in your ribs—it might’ve just been indigestion, or the usual palpitations you get whenever Clark spoke to you in that smooth voice of his. Though, in the ensuing silence—him watching you attentively with a half-furrowed brow and an uncertain grin, like he wasn’t sure if this was part of the bit—you felt it more surely this time.

The baby was moving. A tiny push, the heel of a foot maybe, or some other small limb protruding beneath your skin. Delicate, but definitely making themselves known.

“Oh my god,” you muttered, a fragile tremble to your voice as you pressed your other hand to your belly as well.

This seemed to startle Clark, who twisted himself at the hips and reached for your shoulder as his other fingers stayed splayed over your thigh. “Are you all right? What’s happening? Are you—”

“I felt it.” 

Panic oozed into amazed wonder. “You…felt—?” 

 “Quick!” you exclaimed, excitement shrieking your voice the slightest bit as you snatched his wrist and yanked his hand up to your stomach. Your fingers intertwined with his, you returned your touch to the soft swell of your baby—and there it was again, another faint, fluttering shift. 

For a moment, Clark’s mind was elsewhere—back in his apartment maybe, emptying his most visceral fears to Kara as the world churned around them in all sorts of violent and belligerent colours. He thought about the warmth of the cotton against your body, the soft-stretch of your shirt, how pretty you looked in your joy at finally feeling the baby—and it’s you, you, you until…He felt it for himself. Not quite a kick, as they say; more so a wriggling nudge. 

“Did you feel it?” you asked breathily, whispering to him. 

Tenderness overwhelmed him. Reverence and disbelief. Utter, soul-crushing love.

“Yeah. Yeah, I felt it, sweetheart.” Clark’s voice fractured along with the rest of him as his thumb swept searchingly over the spot where the movement had been. It settled, but it was burned into his memory. He saw the sonogram, memorised the tiny length of their limbs, and he could hear the heartbeat from twenty-blocks away—but this felt earned, and intimate, and yours. The both of you. 

You let out a sweet laugh—maybe the sweetest you’d ever granted him; too happy, perhaps, in this perfect moment to be guarded—and squeezed affectionately at his hand. “It feels so weird. It’s like…I don’t know, like a goldfish.” 

“A goldfish,” sputtered Clark, looking up at you as if you were the most sacred thing in the world. 

“Our goldfish,” you said dryly.

That earned an approving hum from him, but no other droll words followed. Apparently, this wasn’t the moment for wit. Clark swept all of that aside in honour of one final sweeping of his thumb against your skin—having tentatively tucked up the hem of your tee just enough to feel it (warm, traced with growing stretch-marks, wonderfully you). 

The rest of his fingers flexed anxiously against the fabric of your shirt when there wasn’t another fluttery motion, a slackening of disappointment on his expression. It made your heart ache. Even worse, the impercetible—though noticeable, if at least only to you—welling of tears in his pretty eyes.

“Hey, what’s this for?” you murmured, the agony in your chest unfamiliar and knife-like as he shakily tucked his wobbly bottom-lip between his teeth. “I’m sure they’re just resting. That was the most they’ve ever moved, like, ever, so—”

“That’s not it. Gosh, I’m sorry. I’m a mess—” Clark went to take his hand away from you, another cycle of his self-punishment, but you beat him to it—keeping your fingers delicately around his wrist, making sure he didn’t withdraw his touch. Instead, you reached up with your free hand, sweetly brushing the wetness from his cheek before he could taste salt. (You didn’t know that the only thing lingering on his tongue now was guilt and the worst of love. It killed him). 

“Don’t apologise,” you said, almost indignantly in your concern. “This is a big thing.”

He laughed, a half-weep. “The biggest,” he agreed earnestly.

“It’s a lot,” you offered, smoothing your touch from his dewy cheekbone to his hair, raking your fingers through the unruly curls at his temple.

“It’s everything.”

“The Force is strong with them, I think,” you mused, hoping something lighthearted might soften his heart against whatever had scared it. 

Another chuckle, more forlorn this time, but he still stared at you so adoringly that it didn’t matter. “Seriously?”

“Oh, yeah. I mean, I’m thinking Yoda, if they’re a boy—”

“Enough,” he said, laughing at you. In a moment of sunlit weakness—your beautiful disposition, and own golden smile—Clark let his head rest on your shoulder. “I think this is brilliant, what you’re doing…”

“Pregnancy?” You brushed it off almost modestly, still running your fingers through his curls. “Women have been doing it for centuries, Clark.”

That delivered a regretful pang to Clark’s already knotted stomach. In his shame, he tucked his head further into the crook of your neck, relishing in the prettiness of your laughter as his hair tickled the column of your throat, but resenting himself for how unworthy he was of it. Of you. 

It was a trope he always hated in literature; the monster (an inhuman, carnal thing; too strong for its own self to control, too consumed by an unbridled yearning to belong) who loved the girl. It pervaded through all sorts of media, in pretty disguises and torrid retellings. The sentiment always lingered, though. And Clark felt it most deeply, now—some modern Prometheus, though more alien than lab-rat. Laying at your feet this most immense and tragic love—a terrifyingly unfamiliar thing that might be ruining your life, and yet here you were, brushing it all aside self-effacingly as if any of this were normal. As if Clark were normal. 

And yet…Clark didn’t move. He kept himself nestled against the warmth of your shoulder, listening to your pulse—feeling it—and to the quickening of the baby. He tried to assimilate to this warmth of humanness and feeling, to an unfamiliar rhythm of kindness and affection as you continued to play with his hair. Ephemerally, the weight of his fears (the Atlas-burden of the world) and the enormity of his devotion didn’t crush his weak spine—they simply existed; breathing a terrible life out of rotten lungs into his body of steel. He felt utterly useless and cruel, in a way only a human could be, and completely undone all of it.

࿐ྂ

“...So, I was thinking either…” Clark stood at your refrigerator, taller than it, one hand holding the door ajar and the other braced on the top of it as he peered inside at your lacklustre shelves, “...chicken and artichoke orzo…a spinach frittata…tofu noodles…or, salmon and—” 

“Clark,” you interjected, perched atop of the countertop where he left you and a bit exasperated, “you know I love your cooking.”

He blanched, straightening up and taking his head out of the fridge. “Uh, oh. That’s not reassuring.”

“No, really! I do!” you said, maybe a tad too emphatically because of the half-wince, half-smirk he slanted you as he sensibly shut the fridge and strolled back over. You tried not to let your breath hitch and betray you as Clark’s hands came to rest on the granite, either side of your hips, but obviously it did and you quickly recovered by blurting, “I’m just sick of vegetables. Like, pregnancy’s supposed to be a time for cravings—gorging myself because my clothes are already starting to not fit anyways, you know? Just one night, I want a burger, and fries, and pizza—” 

“Burger and pizza?” laughed Clark, teasing.

You squinted at him witheringly. “And wings.”

“Wings.”

“A fat bucket of ‘em.”

“And ice-cream, too, I’m guessing?” Clark snickered.

“Oh, my,” you feigned a dreamy swoon, slapping one hand down onto his broad, strong chest, “he does get me!”

Clark rolled his eyes at you. Then, he did a few other things with his eyes—the same thing his gaze had been doing since that morning when you showed up at the Daily Planet in this skirt of yours; slim-fitting, a straight, narrow cut, knee-length. It was new, so it didn’t sit too snug around your growing bump, but it did hug the rest of your curves in a way that Clark had blatantly been struggling with ever since you swanned over to his desk smelling like tonka bean and neroli. Maybe you chose the skirt knowing what it would do to him…and maybe you purposely didn’t shimmy it down your thighs when it hiked up after he helped you up onto the island. And what? 

So, yeah. His gaze was lingering, long, intent, shameless, and yet you didn’t feel a pinch of discomfort. It made you feel like sunlight. Glasses slipping down the sweat-slicked slope of his nose, he traced the subtle changes in your body—the softening of your curves, the swell of your belly, the slight flare of your hips, and your thighs…They met the hem of your twill skirt in a way that made the fabric cling. Your blouse was this diaphonous, chiffon-ish material, an ivory colour, draped elegantly over your shoulders but tighter at your chest. The fabric must’ve been sheer in the tangerine-sunset, teasing through the kitchen window above your sink, because Clark’s gaze seemed tormented between there and your thighs—as if he wasn’t quite sure where to look. Either way, you relished in it, leaning back against the cabinet behind you, self-satisfied by the soft, honeyed halo of dying sunlight that made his curls even lovelier than usual. 

(You knew that this would make the blouse strain even more against the jutting of your collarbones—that the lace of your bra would be visible through the chiffon. You also knew that it would wound Clark even further). 

Which, of course, it did. Enough to make his hands move fervently from the countertop to your thighs, where they pawed at your flesh like a man starved of touch. 

“Right,” he rasped, head sinking between his shoulders, “so—burgers, pizza, ice-cream—”

“Fries. Don’t forget fries,” you supplied, cheesing.

Clark’s eyes swept back to yours, pupils blown and heady. “Fries...” 

“You’re so good to me,” you drawled, not feigning a swoon this time, but a flirty, sultry voice as your finger traced the length of his sternum through the starch of his dress-shirt. 

“I’m starting to hate you,” Clark muttered to your lap, staring miserably at it, and, by proxy, his hands. 

You blinked innocently, tilting your head to the side all forlorn and mock-hurt. “That’s not very nice.”

“Okay!” he said bracingly, taking a large, fluid step backwards, almost hitting his tailbone against your farmhouse table. Trying to gather his wits, he snatched his blazer from off the back of the nearest chair, throwing it into the crook of his elbow, and sent you a fleeting look. “Right. I’ll bite, and go fetch your grease.” 

“So judgy,” you giggled, slipping down from the counter and traipsing after him through your living room and to the corridor, where he started to frantically pull on his loafers. Sighing lachrymosely, you swayed yourself against the doorway, touching your belly with a sentimental smile. “We’ll miss you!” 

He narrowed his eyes on you. “You’re evil.” 

“I’m pregnant.” 

“Potato, po-tah-to.”

“Yeah, yeah. Go and buy me my pizza, before I hit you,” you seethed, stalking back to your living room to put something on the television.

“We still need to watch Return of the Jedi!” Clark hollered as he unlocked your front door.

“We’ll see about that!” you called back.

You heard a peal of hearty, fond laughter before the gentle closing of the door. The apartment felt so lonely without him, the faint hum of the now-neglected refrigerator and the ticking of your grandfather clock as your only company. Sighing more earnestly now, a genuine ache pervading your hollow chest, you sank into the sofa, hand drifting against your belly. The baby was moving around a lot more lately, a familiar constant that you were falling in love with. Outside, dusk was settling over the city like a purplish bruise, and you could imagine Clark just emerging out of your apartment building, bracing the springtime breeze of nightfall as he hastened out to satiate your ridiculous, greasy cravings. 

An unfathomable, senseless pull trickled through your ribs. It was a vile sensation, serpent-like in the way it coiled around each bone—in its treacherousness. You felt so much for him, it was obscene. The lines were so blurred now, and so out of reach—you were so used to the guaranteed tangibility of being hurt, but now you could barely graze it with your claw-like fingernails. Even they felt blunt now; absent of their jaggedness, of desperation. Sure, you wanted to latch something into the softness of Clark Kent’s flesh so he had your mark on him, so he couldn’t slip away from you—but you’d rather your teeth than your nails, and that meant something altogether too frightening for you to swallow. Hunger, desire; your body craved so many things lately that even that felt hazy. 

Eventually, you found some nonsense documentary to busy your addled mind with as you waited for him to return to you. It felt like you were barely halfway through when you heard the click of the lock again and rusty screech of hinges, and Clark was sweeping back into your apartment, breathing life back into its lungs—into you. He smelt like the city itself; petroleum, car-exhaust, asphalt warmed from rain, and a ghost of springtime wind. But beneath all that, as he came breezing into your living room, all windswept and handsome with his dishevelled curls and arms full of food, it was just Clark; your Clark—the crisp linen of his shirt, his cedar cologne, and the faint trace of otherworldly ozone that you could never really place, but he was too consuming to ever think about it for long. Like now, knelt on your Afghan carpet, balancing two paper-bags in one strong arm (the bottoms of them both already darkened by grease) and a large pizza-box in the other. 

“You were gone for, like…” You sat up blearily, absentmindedly pausing your shitty documentary as you glanced at the grandfather clock, “not even twenty minutes, I swear.”

Clark grimaced through a sheepish grin, lifting his shoulders in a deferential shrug. “Got lucky, I guess. Short queues.”

“Uh-huh.” You stared at him conspicuously, barely registering him handing you a carton of salty fries. “At dinner-rush…in Metropolis…?” 

“Maybe they knew I had a hangry pregnant woman waiting for me.” He manoeuvred around the coffee table, where he had just splayed out your feast like some hedonistic, postmodern Last Supper, and disarmed with a boyishly charming grin as he flopped into the spot next to you on the couch. “Or maybe…the Force was with me.” 

You giggled, feeling miserably coquettish in your shrillness. “You’re an idiot.”

His tie brushed your knee as he leaned forward to fetch himself a slice of pizza—topped deliciously, of course, with all of your favourites. It would be a lie if you said that you didn’t stare at the flexing muscles in his forearms after he nonchalantly rolled the sleeves of his shirt up to his elbows. Mouth watering—and not from the indulgent banquet of deep-fried bullshit in front of you—you tried to focus on other things. Like, your fries…the paused documentary glaring at you from the television screen…anything. 

(Still, against your best efforts, hunger continued to growl in your stomach, and Clark continued to be devastatingly gorgeous. Even as he took a ravenous bite from a cheeseburger, a smearing of sauce spilling to the corner of his mouth. You’d never wished to be a slab of meat or a crisp layer of romaine-lettuce more). 

“Golly,” praised Clark, staring hungrily at his burger, “you were right, honey. This was the right call.” As if some starved, primal creature, he took another gluttonous bite. And something about it…fuck, you felt carnal. What was wrong with you? 

Barely managing to raise a fry halfway to your mouth, you watched as his jaw worked, clenching your thighs together at the faint groan of approval from deep in his throat, and the unexplainable intimacy of the sauce still glistening at the corner of his moving mouth. You wanted to die.

“This is—wow. Is this the best burger you’ve ever had or what?” When his question wasn’t met with a reply, Clark glanced at you, brows pinched together, “Sweetheart? I said—”

“Haven’t tried the burger yet,” you said, too-fast and too-sharp. He blinked at you, gulping rather animatedly. He looked so ridiculously good for a guy with burger-sauce moustaching his lip…but, maybe it was the endearing innocence in his eyes. You needed to regain your composure. “And I might not get a chance, if you end up scoffing them both down.”

He feigned an insulted gasp. “I’d never!”

“Really? I was about to get up and leave the two of you alone. You know, let you make love to her in peace,” you mocked.

“It’s not a her,” mumbled Clark defensively, taking a shy, and far smaller, bite this time, munching on it like a scolded puppy.

“Sorry. Him.” You chewed belligerently on a fry. “I don’t discriminate, Clark. You can make love to whoever you want to.”

“We both know full well that—” And that was all he said. That was all he had to say, because you knew—you both knew—what he meant. 

(‘...That the only person I want to do that with, is you...’)

At the very least, the hunger in you was in Clark, too. You felt like you might dissolve into this grotesque puddle of greed and lust and—you wouldn’t say it. You won’t.

“Right,” Clark said, startled by his own slip-up. He snatched the remote, scrolling through the apps on your television. “Return of the Jedi,” he asserted, a little breathlessly, “and I won’t hear any objections.”

“I’m not happy about it,” you mumbled, lying.

He glimpsed at you, his grin weak but real, and swore, “You’ll thank me later.”

Admittedly, you loved the film. (It might just’ve been Clark, but that was trickier to stomach than accepting that you might actually enjoy Star Wars). Even so, a day of typing up the latest editorial on a congressman’s embezzling of campaign funds and the baby wriggling all worm-like in your womb had drained you more than you’d thought. Between the easy rhythm of your laughter intermingling with his and Clark’s running commentary on his favourite scenes—which felt like every other one—you felt yourself slip away into some rosy haze. The last of the fries wilted in their cartons and two slices of pizza remained. Clark seemed to relax into himself, into you, as more of the movie went on; he’d even untangled his tie somewhere after the battle of Naboo, draping it carelessly on the velvet arm of your sofa. It was maybe this sickening domesticity of having him here, so comfortable and belonging to the warmth of your home, that made you easy enough to slip into the heady molasses of a half-sleep daydream. 

Luke Skywalker was staring out at twin suns, hope and ache on a bleeding skyline of tangerine gold, when you felt your eyelids finally begin to flutter. Clark felt it before he saw it—the subtle swaying of your weight into his, your breath imperceptibly slowing into something sleep-soft, and the sweetest of sighs pillowing from your lips as you surrendered to the lull of it. He glanced down and swore he almost unravelled.

Your cheek was smushed adorably against his shoulder, one arm slung protectively around the swell of the baby, and the other pressed between both of your bodies. You looked heart-warmingly peaceful, in a way that he couldn’t possibly ruin by waking you up. The ugliness in the world (and his mind) haemorrhaged into a slow-bleed of tenderness as Clark fought the urge to brush his mouth against your temple—or any trace of warm skin he could find, really. He wasn’t picky. Not with you.

He swallowed thickly, trying so hard not to jostle you too much as he reached his other arm out—not the one uncomfortably wedged against you; no, that would disturb you too much. He smoothed his thumb over your cheekbone, then your brow. Skin, and you, and love; it all ached.

“Hey,” Clark whispered, the crushing weight of devotion contusing him like infallible wounds, “you’re missing the end.” 

A displeased, though pretty, sound tumbled from your pouted mouth, and you nuzzled closer to him in protest.

“Aw jeez,” he murmured fondly, in a unique sort of agony, “that’s what I thought.” 

Another form of punishment—though an incredibly selfish one; sadomasochistic in nature, for how much he enjoyed it—Clark tucked the arm between you behind your back instead and slid the other under the bare crook of your knees. You barely even stirred, only sighed that same grouchy, wonderful noise, muffled this time against the starch of his shirt as he cradled you to him. He could’ve cried when he caught a lethal whiff of your shampoo, letting it ooze cruelly through his lungs as he carried you—the featherlight mass of everything that mattered—through the narrow corridor to your bedroom.

Gosh, he hated himself…he really did, sometimes. Like now. Your knuckles tenderly grazed his underjaw as he settled your limp body on your mattress, and he tried to ignore the agonies of his doubts as you curled embryonically in on yourself, on the bump. He wondered, painfully, if the baby was in the same position right now. 

You were still in your work clothes—in that gosh-darn skirt and blouse. You’d have his neck for it in the morning, reprimanding him scathingly for letting you crease the materials. But, who was he to wake you up? Clark knew how hard a good sleep was for you to come by lately. He wouldn’t butcher that by unnecessarily waking you up to tell you to change—and he definitely wasn’t about to do it himself. 

Rather, he knelt again (he’d live his life on his knees at your feet, if you’d only ask). This time, at your bedside—guilt-ridden and wounded with it. Measuredly, Clark stared at your pretty, slumbering face, made you sure that you were definitely out, and warily removed his glasses, slipping them into the back-pocket of his slacks. He wanted to see you—like, really see you. 

You felt like home. 

The tremor of your eyelids against some serene dream made his heart throb. He hoped it was about him, selfishly. Greed becomes him, lately. He’d like to blame you for satiating the hollowness in him for affection—for how naturally you gave it to him, now—but he couldn’t blame you for anything. Not a single thing.

Clark’s fingers trembled like the naked sprigs of a ripe tree in wintertime when they found your bump through the chiffon of your blouse. It felt like a smattering of bubbles, the sudsy kind from when you’re elbow-deep in dishes—only, more miraculous that. Precious. “Hi, lovie. Have you been kinder to her today, like I asked?” 

A stubborn flutter against his palm. Their mother’s child, for sure.

“I thought so,” he chuckled weakly. He glanced at your face again—obliviously unaware, perfectly asleep. Clark Kent’s arms had held up collapsing bridges and fracturing skyscrapers—nothing quite measured up to this. “You know, you’ve lucked out, kid. She’s going to love you so much…n’ be the best mom around…you’ll be so happy. I know it.” He almost sobbed when he added, “I just wish I could tell her that. I wish I could tell her a lot of things, heh…” 

He hated that this moment was besmirched with his own guilt and secrets. It made him feel loathsome and rotten.

Teary-eyed, he smeared his dewy nose against the inside of his wrist. “Sorry. Your old man’s a bit of a wreck, lately. I’ll try and fix that before you get here, lovie. I need to be strong for you…” he feebly got to his feet, blinking at you, “and your mom.” 

The heaviness in his heart excruciating, Clark tucked your comforter over the curled length of you, up your shoulders and under your chin, where your hands bunched at it unconsciously. The soft parting of your mouth around the whisper of something dreamlike and not for his ears made the world spin.

“Beautiful girl,” he breathed, knuckles delicately moving over your squished cheek. “Goodnight, sweetheart.”

And then, Atlas himself, Clark Kent left. Engulfed by the lonely silence of a deafening world that he could carry on his shoulders, but all he clung to was the lull of two heartbeats—too much of a frightened animal to reach for the one thing that might offer him peace.