✧˚₊‧ down bad! peter parker who fucks like he’s mindless !
it’s not like he’s touch starved for any sort of real connection; everyone who he loves doesn’t know who he is, he doesn’t have anyone to go home to besides that red and blue stupid spider-man suit that mocks him from the hanger. he watches the news as people cheer for him but no one wants him.
truly wants him. peter parker, not spider-man.
peter parker is a man who is starved of touch. he can live with no connection— it was just him and his aunt for many years… but the feeling of another person’s hands on him that wasn’t some goon in manhattan trying to put him to early retirement… it was foreign to him.
it’s been four years since mj, and he hasn’t felt anything on his body… except now, his breaking point.
youre not quite sure how you ended up in his vicinity anyway, but you did. you were simply in professor banners class when he came running in at the last minute, completely sloppy looking and out of his mind to talk to the professor. you stayed back to watch him ramble to him, seeing how disgruntled he looked, the bruises on his jaw and his forearm peaking out under the empire state hoodie.
when he left, you left, and you asked for his number.
that’s how you ended up here; in his messy bed, his cock thrusting in and out of you like a piston. he’s rough with his thrusts but gentle with his hands, like his fingers are trying to mark every single inch of your body, his lips haven’t left your neck since he’s thrusted.
“o-oh god baby.” he whispers, voice cracking under the pressure of your pussy clenching down on him. your nails rake down his biceps,
you moan around him, listening to his chorus of whimpers and pleads as the wet sound of his cock forcing its way into your puffy folds fills his mundane apartment bedroom. “f-fuck peter! keep going! oh fuck!”
the apartment walls in this place may not be the thickest, but peter’s cock is, so you don’t care that your moans could probably be heard from top floor to basement.
he moans when your fingers create more markings into his body, his senses going haywire with each stroke of his dick. “feels good baby? pussy needing me s’so much, don’t you?” he whispers, sucking on his right thumb before bringing it down to your clit, rubbing tight circles on it. “never letting you go, swear to god, fucking christ…”
each one of his thrusts picks up with the speed and velocity only a man like peter parker could display. you couldn't describe it but you felt so full but so good at the time time. your eyes rolled back as he kisses your cheek, feeling his balls slap against your clit.
he kept thrusting like he had something to lose; his hands touched you like he was trying to keep a reminder to himself what a female body felt like, what another human's body felt like under his own callous palms.
he's never felt like this in four years, and now, he's a selfish man and who could blame him?
peter was a man suffering in silence, currently thrusting into you like he was personally trying to break your cervix— and you didn't mind it, feeling like heaven itself as his forearms cage your head, kissing your face even as the tears flow from overstimulation, his mouth catching each one.
he brings you closer and closer, groaning deep into your ear as you tighten around him. the bed was louder than you at some points but you didn't even try to be quiet.
if anyone truly knew what peter parker was suffering with for four years... they'd understand why he fucks like this. why he fucks like it's his last day on earth. why his cock ruins you like it's never done before... and you didn't quite understand the full extent of it...
you just understood peter parker making you cum, and feeling ropes of his hot and heavy cum filling your pussy.
and in the same night? he tucks you in and sneaks out the fire escape, because peter parker only gets temporary joy when the city needs spiderman all the time.
click here for main masterlist! 𝄃𝄃𝄂𝄂𝄀𝄁𝄃
AUTHOR'S NOTE: god, brand new day is gonna eat so hard. ive never written for peter, but he was so fucking fine in that trailer, so why not write for him. sadie, tom, and zendaya in the same movie + promotion is gonna be so funnnnn, I can’t fucking wait. I do not care; i will somehow get a sadie hot ones episode as well as a sadie vs tom hot ones episode because I said so.
thank you for all the support in every way possible! all support is very much appreciated! all content created on this blog is mine, do not copy or sent it through ai!
he doesn't know you. yet. he just knows that you're new to the gym, based on the fact he's never seen you around. simon would've remembered a girl in tight biker shorts and skimpy sports bras, taut workout jackets, and the occasional oversized hoodie. adorned with a cute matching water bottle to whatever you wore that day and headphones.
he's never seen someone so polished for...the gym. a place meant for getting dirty and sweaty after a good workout, but he doesn't mind. not at all.
especially when you're doing leg and glute day. bending over for stretches, squatting with a full rack of weight—or whatever your body can carry. the grimace on your features with a heavy hip thrust. it rushes all his blood down south.
it's barely been a week since you'd joined this gym, and he's already enthralled—and a downright dog.
but he wasn't used to talking—just staring someone down until they noticed, which he did a lot. when he approached you, he didn't know what to say, and you felt the looming presence over your shoulder. well, there he was, staring you down.
lifting off your headphones, you spared him a sweet look, "you need something?" he just pointed to the machine you were using. "oh! i'm almost done, you—"
he threw you a thumbs up and turned away as quickly as possible, leaving you dumbfounded. instead of continuing the exercise he interrupted to approach you, he sat back on the machine and watched you finish your set. adjusting his heavy erection that wasn't hidden by his gym shorts. you felt his eyes but didn't dare look his way.
just as you finished and were about to clean off the seat, he appeared at your side and stopped you. simon was filthy, seeing the sweat marks left on the seat made his cock throb. "'s fine." he grunted, sitting his heavy body right down. your perfume still lingered when he did.
it wasn't even part of his strict workout routine. he was working legs that day, you were doing arms. he didn't care.
numerous other times stuck out. moments you caught him turning his head over his shoulder to stare at your ass when he walked by, picking machines right behind where you squatted, hijacking your machines after a heavy workout, or picking a treadmill right beside yours when all the others were empty.
until he finally worked up the courage to ask to spot you. he knew you didn't need it, but god, it was the only way to get close to you, to touch you.
he was surprised you even agreed, but you saw what he did. perving on you any time you went to the gym at the same time—which was often because he learned your gym schedule.
he was helped you squat, hands unnecessarily on your hips, chest way too close to your back. every so often, a certain squat slotted his hard cock against your ass, and he didn't hide the grunt. adjusted himself shamelessly while he did so.
it's not like you reprimanded him, but you also didn't feed into it—though, by default, not saying no to him was a greenlight in his eyes.
just ignore the way his breathing picks up and a choked groan escapes him. he definitely didn't just finish in his shorts.
And you really thought Simon would be a little mean during sex. He had to be a sadist after everything he’s been through.
So, when he’s between your parted thighs, you’re shocked when he speaks to you so softly. Quietly begging in your ear, cock pressed to the hilt, for you to be good for him.
And everytime you let out a whine, fingers tightening at his shoulders because he’s massive and you feel like you’re splitting in two with every thrust; he shushes you. ‘You can take it. Yes—yes you can.’
And when you clench tighter around him because the cadence of his voice licks warmth in your core, he smiles. ‘There you go, baby. Just like that.’
So we’ve seen König being a loser but what I was just thinking about loser!reader and maybe Price or Simon (or both) playing into it?
cw: the men being lowkey mocking/condescending, weird relationship with both of them, I guess emotional manipulation is mixed in, semi praise kink but not in a sexual way, implied smut at the end
-
Your overachieving was getting to be a problem. You’d run out of ammo way too fast due to you taking down every enemy before anyone else got the chance, you’d do an extra lap or rep during training just to show that you could do it. And it got to the point where you ended up getting sick from the stress and over exertion but you forced yourself through it so you wouldn’t miss anything and so that your precious Lieutenant might finally notice.
But the thing is, he was well aware of what you were doing. Everyone was. The way you’d look his way after everything you did to see if he was paying attention. Sometimes he would be but he was so hard to rest with the mask, it was impossible to tell whether or not he approved. The whole team tried to tell you to rest but you were so stubborn, shaking your head and insisting you were fine as if your hands weren’t clammy and your face wasn’t flushed.
You tried so many times to get his approval, asking if he had any advice or just anything to say and all Simon did was grunt out a rough dismissal. Of course it stung a little but it just gave you more motivation to push harder. Because all you wanted was approval. But you never got it.
“I just don’t know what I’m doing wrong.” You were kneeling between Price’s legs with your head in his lap, sniffling as you let everything out to him. “I try and I do more than anyone else but he just won’t say anything.”
“I know. Bummer, innit?” Price runs his hand over your hair to smooth it out, looking down at you like something to be pitied. “You just want him to tell ya that you’re doin good?”
“Yeah.” You nod, pouting as you meet his eyes. One of your hands comes up to his knee and you just tap it lightly and mess with a thread on his pants. “You think I’m good, cap?”
He nods and his hand traces along your jaw slowly before going back up to your hair. “Sure, kid.” You whine quietly and lean into his touch, like a dog that’d been left alone all day.
“You mean that?”
“Sure do. C’mere.” Price gets you off the ground and sits you in his lap. He moves some loose strands from your face and brings you closer before peppering kisses on your lips. “Ya don’t think the lieutenant likes ya, hm?”
“No, sir.” You mumble and shake your head. “I’m not sure what to do.”
“Well let’s call him in, get to talkin.”
Price calls for Simon to come to his quarters and he walks in not even five minutes later to you still on the man’s lap. Your cheeks are a bit wet from the few tears that fell and you look at him like you’d been scolded.
“Y’been cryin’.” He points out as he sits in the chair across from you two and crosses his arms. “Again? Really?”
Price clicks his tongue, shooting Simon a glare. “Be nice, now. Girl’s worried ya don’t like her much.”
“S’that right?”
You nod and wipe your face off. “Yeah. I try to get your attention and I just wanna know if I’m doing a good job but you won’t say anything.” You sniffle and start crying again, leaning into Price and letting him pull you into his chest.
“See? You’re torturin her, give her a compliment.”
Simon just scoffs and watches as you cry softly into Price’s neck. He shakes his head and sighs before getting up and walking over and pulling you off Price’s lap. You look up at him still crying and let him wipe the new tear from your face.
“Fuckin hell, y’so emotional. Cryin over some approval, what a dummy.”
“No, nuh uh I’m not a dummy,” you protest and grab at his chest. “Come on LT, you see how hard I work. I do all the heavy lifting on missions, you don’t have to fire a single shot. The captain thinks I’m good.”
He hums quietly and glances over at Price before looking back down at you. He doesn’t say anything for a second, letting you suffer for a few more seconds. “I think y’alright.”
Your eyes light up and you smile a little when he says it. Finally. “Just alright, though? Why?”
“Y’could do more.” He begins and lifts his mask enough to be able to kiss you. “Help me around base, do shit f’me. Get my tea.”
“Mhm?” You kiss him back while your arms come around his neck. He nods and keeps mumbling, listing off a whole bunch of tasks for you to do on top of what you were already working at.
“Good kisser, though.” He breaks away and you keep kissing along his neck. “Y’get some of this, Price?”
“Course I did. Always do.” He nods, shifting in his seat a little as he watches you two. “Make it up to her, Riley. Get her to cry for a new reason a while.”
just thinking about how Simon would act after an intruder incident.. this is very rushed sowwy
You were still shaken up. Very much so. In fact, you were so shaken up that you couldn’t speak for a week afterwards out of fear. His birdie was horrified.
Simon felt horrible. It had nothing to do with you, but everything to do with him. He could hear the distant echo of his father yelling about what a man’s honour was. What kind of man was he if he couldn’t keep his family safe? He felt nothing short of an embarrassment to you.
Riley seemed to notice the dark cloud over the house as well. The big German Shepherd curling up around the both of you whenever possible, sleeping at the foot of the bed inside of the big dog bed, being less jumpy.
Simon took the rest of the week off. Tending to your injuries, rubbing your back when you got scared, coddling you as much as you needed. Simply didn’t let you out of his sight. The only time he left you alone was to buy new cameras for the house.
“I thought we already had those?..” you muttered while on the couch, petting Riley. “We need more, luv. The other ones are old. Need to keep a better eye on you. Watch your show, yeah?”
He even bought an entire monitor for his office, solely for the purpose of being able to stream the camera feed 24/7. Even Johnny thought he was overreacting
“Dinnae wanna pry, LT, but don’t you think the lass can protect herself?” the Scotsman commented. “You are pryin’. Don’t worry about what I’m doin’.”
The first time he asked you out, he was a nervous, melting wreck. His friends, watching from a distances, guffawed at the sight of the huge man hunched over to match your height a bit better.
When you started dating, trying to hold your hand was a whole tactical operation for him. He’d had a thirty-step strategy, and you smashed it in one second when you slipped your fingers between his. Simon instantly squeezed your hand to get more of your warmth.
Your first kiss, just outside the destination for your second date, excited him a bit too much. He stammered and folded all over himself trying to hide why he couldn’t go outside for a few minutes. When you figured it out, you turned your head with a smile to preserve his frayed dignity.
He came much too quick for the first few times you had sex. It took you edging and training him to extend his stamina. But how could he control himself when he had such a lovely woman wrapped around him? To be fair, he was a trooper; and he’d go several rounds to satisfy you even if it made him cry and whimper so prettily in overstimulation.
He’d turn red every time he asked you for affection. If you complimented him, he’d almost hide his face. You figured it out and initiated even harder. For one thing, you knew he’d have a hard time asking for love himself… and it was fun to fluster him. Oh my god!— don’t even get started on the day you took control. He almost busted the instant you pushed him against a wall and caged him between your arms, one hand pinning his huge ones to the wall. When you both went out, it was you talking for him sometimes because he just couldn’t find the words.
Even after you dated and were long married, Simon crushed on you— and he crushed hard!! He’d stare like a blissful fool at the littlest things you did. He could listen to you for hours. For him, the honeymoon period never ended. He never stopped aweing at the fact that he’d ended up with someone as wonderful as you.
Oh, and he still sometimes needed a few minutes to calm down after you kissed him ;)
Imagine Simon coming home from a mission into his supposedly empty appartment and finding his stuff different from when he left.
He grabs the gun from the back of his pants and walks further into zhe appartment. He checks every room till only his bedroom is left.
Simon opens the door slowly getting hit with a sweet scent of roses.
His eyes scan the room till they land on the delicate form of a Person sleeping on his bed.
Slowly does Simon walk through the small space to stand next to the bed and the person.
The gun touches the persons head and they immediatly wake up.
"You´ve go' five seconds before i shoo' you. Wha' are you doing here?"
Reader looks at the big broody man like a deer in headlights.
"I-- Who-- I--" Reader studders and looks shortly around the dark room.
"Wha´ are you Doing in my apartment?" his voice doesn´t sound as rough as it did before but the gun is still against Readers head.
"I´m sorry" tears are running down readers face while they try to keep it together so Simon wouldn´t hurt them.
Simon asseses the Situation again.
There was a small, dirty backpackon the floor next to the bed. Reader is wearing a Gray tanktop with spots of dirt and... no pants.
His eyes snap back to readers face when he notices the panties they are wearing.
"You homeless?" Simon nods to the backpack on the floor.
Reader looks at Simon with Big wet eyes and then they nod. "Yeah"
Simon puts the gun down onto the nightstand after resecouring it. Reader jumps from the movement and looks at the man.
“Okay what are ye doing here?” Simon asks taking a step to the bed.
Reader explains that they lived in the alleyway behind the apartment complex so they noticed that Simon left and didn’t come back so they broke into his apartment taking the fire escape.
Something in Simon softens after they talked about their earlier living situation.
“You can stay” with that Simon turns around and leaves the room after he took the gun with him.
Thinking about Simon trying Tinder for the first time but it’s not what he expected. He signed up without telling anyone because if he had uttered a word about it, you already know Johnny or Kyle is going to snoop through his phone to look at his profile.
But Simon being Simon, he doesn’t know how to present himself in a good light. His photos were bad; he took two selfies as he created his profile and they were not good to say the least. One was a mirror photo of him holding his tiny phone with both of his hands as he stoically stared into the mirror. The other was just a selfie of him except it wasn’t angled high or even remotely attractive. It was angled down as if he was taking some sort of quick snap.
The only thing saving his profile was a photo of Riley wearing a vest and goggles.
His bio was the worst of them all.
“I like working out. I have a busy job.”
That was it.
No personality, no indication that he wanted more than just a quickie.
Simon wasn’t expecting much out of the app and he was right because the next day, he opened up the app to find no matches.
Got the man thinking that he really was ugly.
It ruined his self esteem a little if he said so himself. Simon didn’t care about what other people thought but gosh, not even one person wanted to match with him?
…. And then he learned that he also had to swipe to get matches.
So on Simon’s off day, he practically spent half of the day swiping through people. He was picky, believe it or not.
Boring bio? Bye.
Too much filters or AI? Bye.
Too corny? Bye.
Clearly only looking for a one night stand? Bye.
Kind of hypocritical considering his profile looks like he only spent five minutes creating (which he did).
Just when Simon was about to give up on his love life for good, the last profile he stopped on was yours. Simple, nice photos, interesting bio and funny prompts. He hesitated— not because he wanted to skip, but in fear of rejection. Because if he swiped right and there was no “it’s a match!”, he’d probably wonder if he’ll ever find the love of his life.
His thumb hovered over the middle of his phone before he pressed down and swiped right.
It’s a match!
His phone lit up with the two profiles and underneath was his chance to send a message first.
Fuck. He didn’t know what to say. Should he try to be funny? Or start it off with a simple hey?
Simon began typing, deleting, typing and deleting the same message for the next two minutes before finally settling with a: “Hi. How are y”
He typed too fast that he didn’t even finish his sentence before he pressed sent.
dad’s best friend!Simon who’s got you crying in his arms over your most recent breakup, rubbing your back, and murmuring in your ear how he can make it all better.
Won’t you let him make it all better, sweetheart?
You don’t entirely know what he means, but this is your third break up this year and you’re starting to think something’s wrong with you because all your friends have more success in their dating life’s. You trust Simon, he’d never do anything to hurt you after all. You’re just so tired, eyes puffy from crying so much and you do just want to feel better again, so you nod, whispering a quiet plea.
You didn’t expect to be laid out across your bed with his fingers in your panties soon after, covering your face, and squeezing your thighs shut when he starts to slide them off your hips. And he just cooes how he knows you so well, that you don’t have to be embarrassed with him.
Won’t you let him see your pretty pussy, baby? He just wants you to feel good.
《 A/N: sooooo... i may or may not have been unhealthily obsessed with AKOTSK lately (i'm writing for dunk & lyonel if you'd like to stalk me on one of my side blogs). but in light of this being heavy on my mind & HOtD premiering this sunday... have some knight!könig ('; and to everyone to replied on my last post, come get y'all juice 𖹭 》
── ⋆⋅𖤓⋅⋆ ──
• knight!könig who was orphaned as a young boy, losing his father to the battlefield and his mother to the sheer heartbreak of it. he spent most of his younger years offering his services to many lords and households throughout the kingdom in return for shelter, food, and coin.
• knight!könig who, with luck, managed to pick up swordsmanship along the way from a man who'd seen his potential. his combined skills of sword fighting and close-hand combat made him a formidable opponent during his years growing older.
• knight!könig who's skill doesn't escape the eyes and ears of the king - your father, and he's plucked from his many nights spent wandering between inns and namesakes to serve under your household as a chamber knight - specifically to look after you.
• knight!könig who, in the years of serving under your father and keeping a watchful eye on you, has grown to know you more than you know yourself. he homes in on your mannerisms - from the minute changes in your facial expressions to the slight twitch of your fingers when you're upset. he's memorized your routines second best to his own, and could follow you through them blindfolded if you asked him to.
•knight!könig who begins to struggle to keep you at arms length, falling victim to your relentless teasing and flirting. his jaw clenches beneath his helm when you feign innocence - staring up at him with wide doe eyes, and he thanks the gods above for the hardened steel of his armor that covers his twitching cock.
• knight!könig who is really quite strict with you regardless of the way you leave him aching and hard (unbeknownst to you), never letting you leave his sight and scolding you when he finds you doing something you know you shouldn't be. it leaves him confused when your cheeks flush at the stern tone of his voice, but he brushes it off as your embarrassment of being caught red-handed.
• knight!könig who gets sent away sometimes, tending to matters known only between the king and his counsel. he's gone for days on end - sometimes even weeks, leaving you under someone else's temporary care, and it makes his skin crawl. you're his responsibility, his priority, his. He can't help it when he wakes in the middle of the night after finally being allowed some sleep, cock pulsing and breeches stained with cum and the phantom touch of you. the dream is fleeting and he groans, pathetic and smitten.
• knight!könig who comes back, exhausted and adorned in the dented and cracked steel of his armor. he's unscathed save for a few bruises and a scratch here and there, but he doesn't escape your ebbing concern and prodding fingers. he won't admit it - feigning annoyance at your incessant poking at his wellbeing, but he's secretly enjoying every second of it.
• knight!könig who continues to grow impatient with you as time goes on, yet seemingly remains undeterred by your endless attempts to get a reaction out of him. he tries his hardest to ignore the innocent lilt to your voice as he stands guard at near the doorway of your quarters. 'can you help me braid my hair? my arms are tired', 'ser könig, could you help me with this dress? the lace is stuck', or 'could you stay with me for the night? i heard noises and i can't seem to fall sleep'. he sees through your antics, of course, because if not to fulfill those requests, why else would you have ladies in waiting?
• knight!könig who tries so hard to shield the ugly, brutal side of himself from your eyes. his luck falls short eventually when he hears your suprised cry from where he's taking watch in the hallway. he wastes no time - the heavy weight of the door flying open where you'd left it ajar. one of your own servants, it turns out, is kneeling above where you lay disheveled and panicked upon your bed. könig sees the knife upon your throat, the small beads of blood from where the blade had knicked your soft skin, and your frantic hands as you try to push your assailant back - and those few seconds are all it takes before he's on you.
• knight!könig who does his best to keep you focused on him and not the bloodied, tangled mess of a body that's crumpled on the floor behind him from his own blind rage. the entire castle is awake at this point, guards and chambermaids rushing about, the booming sound of your father's voice from down the hall as he demands to know what's going on. but still, könig keeps your eyes on him as you beging to settle from your panic.
• knight!könig who understands that sleep will not find you easily this night by the way your hands grab at him for reassurance and your pulse jumps in your throat. he hauls you off after exchanging words with your father, promising it's to keep you safe; but it's mostly for his own peace of mind that you stay right where he can keep his eyes on you.
• knight!könig who begins to come to terms with the chokehold you have on him, the skin prickling possessiveness and sense of protection he has over you oozing out of him in waves. it's so cloying that he could choke on it, but he decides to burn it down to a low simmer once he has you safe in his own quarters, tucked beneath the blankets of his featherbed as he continues to keep watch over you. he doesnt sleep a wink, but it's a sacrifice he's willing to make time and time again if it means you're safe where he can see you.
Thinking about being stuck between Dadbf Simon and John during a movie. It’s very comfy being squished between the two.
cw: 18+ mdni, fauxcest, smut.
Simon playing with your pussy under the blanket, pads of his fingers keep flicking and rolling your misused clit over and over. You’re pressed up against John, his beefy hairy arm inbetween your tits as you hold onto his arm, bottom lip trembling as if he’d help you in this predicament you’re in. But he only takes a swing of his beer, “Play with your Dad alright, gotta be quiet, ‘M watchin the movie.”
You only let out a little whimper, the dialogue of the movie in your ear, along with your messy heat squelching everytime Simon slots a finger in your cunt so casually. His brown eyes flicker from you to the movie, scar on his face twitching with the growing smirk, your hips grinding into Simons hand that’s running through your glossy folds. Simons sucks his finger clean, dipping it back in your pretty hole with another digit, ragged voice hushed in your ear “You’d be bloody terrible at the theater swee’art, so fuckin loud.”
John is considerate though, very considerate! Giving you long, sloppy kisses that help you reach your climax easily after god knows how long of being edged during commercial break. Sucking your tongue as you claw down his arm, cumming again on Simons hand. You only fumble forward trying to keep yourself still, your face in John’s lap, face to face with the chubbing hard on in his jeans.
His pushes your curls back, rubbing your nape, “Give your Daddy a treat f’ interupptin my movie, yeah honey?”
And your face is all messy and fucked by the end of the movie, choking and on your full lips. Your own cum staining the couch John will clean up. Simon will coo, patting his knee for you to slide over because, ‘’S long past yer bed time swee’art.’
The brute of a man will smear John cum across your lips before slipping it into your mouth to suck on, sliding his wet fat cock into your snug cunt inch by inch, that Prince Albert piercing just right against your soaking walls. Simon will slow fuck up into you, one rough hand gripping your waist and holding you against his chest while grinding you down on his length, your choking uo sleepy moans, incoherent mumbles as Simon croons, “Gonna cum ‘nd then sleep baby, ‘s alright, Dad’s got you.”
John will zip himself up, kiss the top of your head, running fingers through Simons hair on the way to get you some new pajamas.
Simons aiming to make a mess of you tonight.
a/n: they’re running my mind rn. Like woah I actually do have plot for them. My fault y’all.
Every part of König gives you more reason to love him, and more cause to lust after him.
König's hands, calloused and worn, but not as rough as they might look. He tries to remember to use a hand salve—from the little tin that you gifted him—while he's on assignment, but he can never figure out the proper amount to use. When he's home, he comes to you, holding the small metal container in his hand: "bitte, mein liebe, you are much better at the lotion than I am." König's hands in yours, big and warm and soothed by the salve—not lotion, you remind him to no avail. König's hands, scarred and veiny, but so gentle despite his size. König's hands in your hair while you snuggle up next to him, pulled into his lap so that he can run his fingers over your scalp while your eyes flutter shut.
König's hands exploring every inch of your skin. König's hands running up your sides while he's buried to the hilt inside you, gripping your waist to keep you from squirming, but it's just so good, you can't help it. König's hands holding the nape of your neck so that you can’t look away from him while he pounds into your soaked cunt relentlessly. König's hands around your face, palm pressed delicately against your chin while you suckle eagerly on his thick fingers.
König's arms, muscular and bruised from being thrown against doors so often. He doesn't complain about the bruising; never seems to care about the pulsing ache that occurs when he accidentally presses against one when opening a door with his shoulder. But you coo over him regardless, and kiss the purple blotches as if your love alone might help them heal. König's arms that wrap around your waist with ease, allowing him to press himself close to you while you do even the most menial task, because he doesn't care that you need to finish dinner, he wants to hold you now, Schatz.
König's arms holding his large frame above you while he presses kisses to your neck and chest, teasing you before he gives into what you both want. König's arms caging you in on the mattress while he groans in your ear, sinking into you with a whimper. König's arms, the muscles in his forearms strained from this position but it's exactly the kind of workout he wants. König's arms that are just so perfectly situated on either side of you, you just can't help but reach up and wrap your fingers around them. And they're too big for you to get a real grip on but, god, isn’t that the point?
König's stomach and chest, softer around the edges when he's on leave. König's chest, the perfect pillow for you when you join him in bed, face buried against him and the coarse, dark hair that tickles your cheek when you nuzzle him, fingers trailing innocently down his happy trail just to appreciate the sensation. König's stomach, muscles tightening just a bit beneath your hands as you explore the warm skin of his tummy. He never understands your affection for his bulkier appearance; doesn’t get why you find something as simple as his attempts to gain muscle mass so appealing. But, then, he doesn't complain when you kiss him from collar to navel so delicately.
König’s chest heaving while you press wet kisses to it, sitting up on your knees in front of him. The muscles in his stomach pull taut while you fuck the head of his cock with your fist, no urgency to your movements. You will kill me, Schatz, he whines when your free hand splays over his stomach, your mouth finding his nipple and offering teasing kitten licks. König’s stomach, covered in his spend when he finally lets go for you, giving you another excuse to worship his body by licking him clean.
Warnings: 18+. Unprotected p-in-v. Disgustingly loving sex (sorry). Soft dom!Simon Talks You Through It™️ Creampie. Brief mention of Reader’s insecurities w sex
Note: I’m on Instagram now (kinda), come say hi :-)
Word count: 2.1k
It wasn’t like you hadn’t tried before.
You’d had your fair share of lovers and experienced more than a good deal of fun. With everyone in the past, climax came the same way, every single time: clitoral stimulation, and clitoral stimulation alone.
By this point in your life, you suspected your g-spot was probably just a figment of your imagination, no more real than Atlantis, Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy.
That was, until, you met your boyfriend, Simon.
And things had only been official for a week.
You and him had fooled around a handful of times—made love, as he called it, and kissed and cuddled and occasionally dry-humped until the two of you were both panting, groaning messes—but all of this was new. Simon was still learning you, as you were him.
He finished between your tits. You came on his tongue. He fingered you to the point of tears, and you learned how to touch his sac just right to get him to blow his load in seconds. On this night in particular, you were fucking missionary, and holding hands while you did.
Lovesick puppies, Price would say. Neither one of you seemed able to unglue your lips or unlace your fingers or keep your hips from colliding again and again and again in frantic search of the other’s furthest depths. You were perfectly wrapped up, with no desire to move
Except, you needed to reach down between your bodies to actually get off. That was a minor detail.
You didn’t think the man above you would mind if you moved your touch from his, but then that grip tightened the second you tried pulling away.
“Keep it there, lovie. Like holding you like this,” he said.
You enjoyed it, too. It was intimate, and sweet, and with your hands pinned on either side of you, locked securely in his, you felt safe. You just couldn’t finish.
“But I…I need to come,” you whispered against him. You rolled your hips and felt his cock twitch inside you.
Simon grunted, then swallowed. Nodded slowly.
“Yeah. I’ll get you there. Feel this?”
He slid deeper for emphasis.
You didn’t.
You rarely did, or at least not in the way you figured you were supposed to get when something pressed there.
“I think…sort of, yeah,” you hedged your answer.
Don’t bruise his ego, don’t hurt his feelings.
This is all on me, Si, I promise it’s not you.
Cutting in over your thoughts, Simon moved swiftly. Took your hips in his big, strong hands, lifted up, and plunged his cock to the hilt. The girth of him was enough to knock the air out of your lungs, and you felt your walls stretch, sting, and weep sweet liquid warmth around that intrusion. You moaned.
“Better?” The man’s question was simple.
Before you could answer it, he was sliding a pillow underneath your backside. Sawing his long, thick, leaking cock in and out of you, he reached a new spot.
You made a face, feeling good from that but…strange.
Simon snatched your hands up again and planted them beside your head on the mattress. He thrusted steadily. He peppered kisses all over your face and your neck while the bed frame squeaked in time, and you had to dig your heels into his ass to ground yourself.
“Talk to me, baby. Can’t make it better if you don’t.”
“I—I know, I just can’t—”
At the same time, Simon tilted your hips slightly once more, and the tip of his cock kissed something soft and wet and dizzyingly pleasurable inside your body. A loud, embarrassing cry slipped out between your lips.
You wanted to clap a hand over your mouth, hating the way you’d just sounded, but your fingers were stuck to his. Simon grinned down at you, toothy and approving.
“Can’t do what, now, darlin’?”
The warm, bulbous head of his cock had found its mark, and he just kept prodding that spot, like it entertained him to do it. The fingers laced between your own constricted their grip even more, and Simon leaned down to kiss you while his cock carved a mind-numbing path. In between kisses, he praised you.
“That’s my girl. She’s likin’ it now, isn’t she?”
“Feel good when my cock hits that spot?”
“Your pussy’s fuckin’ soakin’ me, baby.”
But still, somehow, it just wasn’t quite enough.
Maybe you’d never found that place after all.
This was where most men gave up—after a few good minutes of fucking when their balls had gotten to be as swollen as stones and their bodies were aching for release, more often than not, they’d go off chasing their own high. That was when you usually started rubbing your clit, or waited for your partner to finish so they could get you off with their tongue or something.
You hated to feel like a burden, and you really despised the thought of being the reason your sweet Simon couldn’t get to orgasm. So you squirmed again.
Straining to reach down, to try and touch yourself, you whimpered, “Si, please, it just—it takes me too long—”
“Good thing we’ve got all night,” Simon replied bluntly.
Then, once again, he twisted your bodies like you were as soft and malleable as putty in his hands, and this time, he hitched one of your legs around his hip, high.
With one slow-rolling thrust and an audibly squelching sound, Simon’s cock stretched your hole to maximum capacity, and then a little more. Your juices leaked down his shaft, aiding the slide, and he stabbed in a few shallow strokes. Probing. Testing the waters, as if he were trying to find something hidden inside you.
You sucked in a breath. Simon’s gaze slid to yours.
“Let’s find that precious spot, lovie. Easy, now.”
Gently coaxing your body open, he drove a slow, measured pace. He split your cunt like it was the easiest thing in the world, delving within your wet, velvety heat to tease every contour and crevice of your pussy. His tip leaked precome. His balls glistened in your arousal and landed with the gentlest plap, plap, plaps while he explored your insides with his member.
It really was as simple as that, nothing more and nothing less than poking around. Having patience.
“S-Si,” you stammered, nose wrinkling slightly.
“What’s’at, baby? Got something to tell me?”
Like a teacher, almost, he pressed for more.
Like his cock was showing you something new about your body but he needed your help to tell him just how and where to find it, Simon took care to be kind. He smoothed a hand over the crown of your head and then cradled the back of it, one massive set of fingers splayed out against your skull and engulfing it wholly.
He still held onto your other hand tight.
Your cunt pulsed. Ached. Fluttered around him.
Stuffed to the brim, you had only to feel, and murmur:
“Higher.”
“Higher?”
“Um, to the…to the left.”
Simon tilted his hips left.
Yes.
That was just it. So close.
Almost…
Or, maybe…
“Maybe it just…isn’t there,” you huffed out, deflating. “Know you’re trying so hard, baby, but I think I can’t—”
Then Simon hit the same spot as before, only higher.
Just like you’d told him: to the left, and then…
“Oh, fuck,” you cursed. “Oh, fuckfuckfuck.”
The grin above you stretched even wider.
“There, lovie?” Simon goaded you on.
“Right there.” You nodded furiously.
A wave of pleasure swept through your limbs, from your core down to the soles of your feet. Your toes curled, and you squeaked, feeling Simon’s cock graze that soft, spongy, sensitive place—except he’d pushed in deeper. The sensation made your eyes roll back.
“Little dove doesn’t mind my pokin’ after all, huh?” Simon’s words were a tease, but you heard a strain in them, too. The second you were caught in the throes of real pleasure, your cunt must’ve clamped like a vice.
“Keep…keep pokin’, Si,” you choked out. “I like it.”
Your lover kept at it—poking from the inside.
The routine almost felt like losing your virginity all over again, together. Simon cradled your head, told you how good you were doing, how sweet you were for him, and you whimpered under his hold. Squirmed and clung to him for dear life, then kissed him feverishly.
Simon’s mouth was hard and hungry, his thrusts deep. His cock throbbed within the wet, clenching confines of your pussy, and he seemed to be going wild at the feeling. With the idea that he was driving you wild, too.
You realized as much when he whispered it to you.
“Could lose my bloody mind when you’re like this—” Another sharp, labored breath. Another shudder passing through his body when your insides squeezed. “—so why didn’t you talk? Ask for what you needed?”
Your voice was small. “Didn’t wanna be a bother.”
Your eyes were locked with Simon’s, and in his irises, you caught a shade of concern. It flared, hot as anything, then mixed with disbelief. Disappointment.
“Don’t be angry, Si, I—” you started, hurried.
“‘M’not.” Simon blinked. But he gritted his teeth, and he withdrew his cock until the head was bumping and teasing between your folds, then he shook his head. “It’s those fuckin’ pricks who should be sorry, yeah?”
The ones that you’d been with before.
You wanted to protest, insist that you were at least partly to blame, but you never got the opportunity.
Simon was back inside you in a blink.
Hitting that same spot again, and again, and again.
He grinned, the tic of a muscle in his jaw telling you that he was less amused this time around, but proud.
Vindicated.
“Well. It’s not like they’re ever gettin’ a chance in between these pretty legs again, are they, lovie?”
You nodded in agreement.
You smiled back at him, only to have that gentle curve falter a little when you felt Simon’s thrusts accelerate.
“Only thing that’s gonna touch this spot other’n my cock is my seed, splatterin’ all over your walls, right?”
When he gave a playful nip to your lower lip and squeezed your hand tighter, you knew that he meant it. The man had plunged so deep inside you that his pubic bone was now grinding against your skin, and the rest of him was buried. His balls, all full and warm and heavy with his release, rested firmly in your cleft.
And the steady, measured strokes of his cock landed with near-surgical precision on the G-spot you’d convinced yourself up until tonight didn’t exist.
Simon beamed. You were overcome with ecstasy.
“This it, lovie? This spot right ‘ere?” he cooed.
His cock bobbed against that gummy and indescribably dizzying place, causing your last moan to morph into something more akin to a shriek.
You nodded your head: “Y-Yes. Yes.”
“Feel good when I hit it?”
“Fucking perfect, Si.”
You sighed when the man bottomed out for what felt like the millionth time, and the pleasure never waned. He felt just as good now as he did when he first got in.
“Yeah? Gonna come on my cock then, pretty girl?”
“Yeah. I’m— I’m so close.”
“Go on then, love.”
And, shortly, you did.
Maybe three, four, five more stabs of his cock to your most precious, intimate place and you were unraveling beneath him, stars bursting in your line of vision. It seemed dramatic to say, but that was really what it came to—your mouth hanging open, eyes wide, gaze peering into Simon’s while he fucked you through the most intense orgasm of your life. You clung to him, and your walls spasmed again and again and again, milking the man’s release in the next few seconds. Simon shuddered and grit his teeth as he unloaded a thick, gooey load inside, dousing that spongy, body-numbing spot and then some. The two of you moaned in unison.
Your body was boneless, your head a hazy mess.
It took several seconds for your conscious mind to come back online fully, and when it did, Simon was leaning in again and planting kisses along your face.
“That’s my girl,” he murmured, breath fanning hot across your skin. “My perfect girl. You did so good.”
You smiled and caught his mouth for a proper kiss.
“Thank you,” you murmured against him.
Then Simon squeezed your hand—the one he’d been holding this entire time. He lifted it gently, like he was afraid too rough of a movement might split you in two.
He turned your wrist and kissed the back of your hand, eyes locked on yours and expression soft while he did.
SIMON "GHOST" RILEY // fantasy au, king!simon, queen!reader, f!reader, pregnant!reader, mention of simon being bigger than reader, mention of body insecurities, gossips, mean language from the court ladies (booo), fluff, simon being supportive and a sucker for his wife
[could be read as a continuation of this]
You woke up when the sun had already risen. When the rays of it from the lake below was reflected from the panoramic windows of the royal chambers and made you wince, blinding you in an instant. The maids have already come inside and helped you out of bed.
"Good morning, Your Majesty."
"Good morning, Ala."
The dress, light for such a hot summer, slipped easily over your fresh nightgown, and the thin ribbons were tied firmly, but not too tightly.
You stopped wearing corsets the day you found out you were pregnant. Simon threatened to throw them all out when you wanted to wear that thing again to the next ball, which infuriated him. He never liked to see the marks a corset left on your skin.
Of course, you were beautiful in all of the dresses from your collection. The one he saw you in for the first time, when you dropped your glove on the stone floor of the throne room, and you both reached out to pick it up. Or the one you wore to your wedding, which accentuated your hair and eyes, and Simon couldn't turn his gaze away when you walked towards him through the large doorway, passing the guests. And even the one you chose for walks in the garden, which were the only physical activity you could do while you were in the last months of your pregnancy.
But something deep and hot rouse through Simon's body whenever he saw the marks those torture devices left on your skin. When he was undressing you at evening after the long day spend at court and observing new recruits from the royal guards, he was eager to see your smooth, warm skin under his palms. But not the deep marks from strings and hard coverage of the corset.
You never minded not wearing them ever since. You could hardly imagine the babe inside you growing comfortably if you continued squeezing yourself in ones.
Once the dress was in place, you hair brushed and made in a semi-loose style, you looked out again, this time to the training field where Simon usual trained in the morning with some of the guards or even Johnny, the head of the guard.
"The King is at the council, Your Majesty. Do you wish for me to tell him to join you for your breakfast?"
"No." You shook your head.
Simon had some things to do. And so did you. Feeding your babe some tea and sweet berry pie would be the first on your list for today.
***
"What a thing she has become now! So..."
"Enormous."
"She must be carring a lamb in there, no doubt about that."
"I had a stray cat my maid adopted in her shabby rooms. The belly of that creature was so huge, and she had sex kittens! The queen must be carring a litter."
Those were the voices you heard on your way to the dining room. Their laughter getting seemingly louder as you passed, your dress flowing behind you, as you put your palms on your belly.
The babe in you was big, that was not to be denied. You started needing help getting up from the bed when you were at your sixth month, and it was always Simon or Ala near you to help. The physician confirmed that the babe had been growing strong and that it is simply expected for a future heir to be big, as The King was big himself.
Simon was a pillar of a man. Big statue, towering over almost every guard and nobleman in the castle. The broad shoulders seemed to be even wider with the cape he wore and even when he put on his armor. The pace with which he walked had you rushing after him in the first weeks of him officially courting you.
The babe will be just like his father, big and strong.
But is was the ladies in waiting's next words that made you stop, just reaching the dining room where the cooks had already prepared the food for you.
"Look at her waddling. Even Lord Edwins The Fat walks with more grace."
"I would not be shocked if The King took a mistress. What pleasure can be found then The Queen looks like... this?"
Ala stilled beside you, noticing how you stopped walking.
Fat. Waddling. Mistress.
All the words hit you like a freezing wind in harsh regions of the kingdom that you once toured on. The words that never crossed your mind once before. But... were they wrong? With the way you struggled to get up from the bed, could not see your legs while standing, and how hard it was to find a comfortable sleeping position, you never thought that it could be...
"I am not hungry."
"You Majesty?"
"I will be in my chambers."
Ala watched, perplexed, as you turned around and walked back through the hall. And hearing the two ladies giggling nearby, she could have guessed what caused your appetite to evaporate.
***
"My love."
He had found you in your chambers, sitting on the stoned windowsill and looking onto your belly, covered by the fabric of the dress. When you raised your eyes at him, the mere glint that hinted your eyes had wattered made him rush to your side, immediately getting on his knees, despite the office cape and all the attire he was wearing to the council.
"My love." Simon repeated, catching your face in his one palm, and gently stroking you cheek, wet with the tears.
They made you cry.
Those ladies, barely the age of permission to attend social gatherings, had run their dirty mouths and made you cry with those ridiculous, insulting, ungrateful words. They had the audacity to even plant such a thoughts into their spoiled heads, and had been churlish enough to speak the filth in your presence.
Simom fought hard to cover the anger he felt when Ala told him what had happened. He tried not to show the fury that was dancing in his brown eyes, but you knew better.
You always somehow knew him better.
"What did you do?.." You asked meekly, sniffling.
They made them repeat it. Every single word, every single thought. He made their fathers stand on their knees when he brought more people who spread the same rumors through the castle. And he made each and every one of them send off, permanently restricted from ever visiting the court again.
"They will never bother you again." He said, stating the obvious truth, the result that was accomplished.
Simon kissed your forehead, then your lips, and pressed your faces together, your noses touching.
"No one will ever think or say something like that ever again, my love."
It was a promise. One of many he made to you, and one of many he will hold.
Because he was ready to do everything for you. For the woman who felt for his utter lack of experience when it came to courting. For the woman who had to stand on her tiptoes to reach his lips on your first kiss. For the woman who was carrying a new life inside her body, doing what could be only described as a wonder.
Simon placed the other palm on your belly, feeling the instant kick that touched his skin. The smile touched his lips.
"Now, you also should not bother you mother."
"He must be restless." You grinned slightly.
"Or she is hungry." He said, moving his head away and looking into your eyes.
You looked down, understanding that he knew you, indeed, had not had any food yet.
Simon did not care for a single moment whether the babe you were carrying was a boy or a girl. He experienced too much of a lack of attention from his parents in his childhood to think that the child you will bring into this world could be something other than loved. Wanted. Cherished.
"You are the only woman I have my eyes on." He said, growing your attention. "The only woman I will ever have my eyes on. And now that you are growing our babe? You are a perfection."
That made your breath hitch.
Simon was never one for the grand speeches. His actions always spoke louder than his words, whether it came to political decisions or family matters. He always shown that you were loved. By catching your eyes during a busy ball. By tracing the lines on your spine in the mornings when you were just beginning to wake up. By having the pink roses that you liked so much while visiting the Eastern Province planted in the royal garden.
He loved you. And with every babe you will give him, he will make sure you know how much.
20K words, Simon’s hair has grown out, reader wears glasses, Simon doesn’t know how to dance, smut, the fluffiest fluff, angst, size kink, Simon is huge, pee mentioned, Simon is filthy but we all knew that. Tell me if I missed any tags.
He was four years old when he stole your crayons.
Not all of them. Just the good ones. The red one. The yellow one. The bright, sunflower-gold one that you'd been saving to colour the sun in the corner of your drawing, the way all four-year-olds drew the sun — a circle in the corner, rays shooting out like a child's idea of joy.
You looked at him across the low art table in that bright little preschool room that smelled of poster paint and digestive biscuits.
He was stocky even then.
Chubby-cheeked and heavy-set. A thick, sturdy little boy who sat with his legs wide and his fat fists curled around your crayons like he'd earned them.
He wasn't even looking at you.
He was colouring something — a car, maybe, or a blob that might have been a dog — and the yellow crayon moved in big, purposeful strokes across his paper.
You did not cry.
You considered it.
Then you leaned across the table and took them back.
He looked up.
Brown eyes. Even at four, they were startling — dark and serious and far too watchful for a boy his age.
He stared at you.
You stared back.
Then he slid the gold crayon back across the table to you, said nothing, and went back to his drawing.
His name was Simon.
You would not learn that until the register was called the following morning. But you remembered his eyes before you remembered his name.
— ✦ —
He broke your glasses in Year Two.
Not on purpose — or so you believed, for most of your life, until you were old enough to accept that
Simon Riley did very few things without purpose.
He knocked into you in the corridor outside the dining hall, your plastic NHS frames hitting the linoleum floor, one arm snapping clean off at the hinge.
You stood there, the world going soft and blurry at the edges the way it always did without them, and you felt the particular, humiliating sting of being unable to see properly — the vulnerability of it, the indignity.
Simon picked up the frames. Looked at them. Looked at you.
He didn't say sorry straight away. He examined the break with the seriousness of a boy who was already, at seven, very careful about what he said and when he said it. Then, "I'll carry your bag till they're fixed."
"You broke my glasses," you told him like he didn’t know.
"I know." He nodded.
"That's not the same as fixing them."
"No," he agreed. "But it's what I've got."
He carried your bag for three days. And when your mum brought the repaired frames in on the fourth morning, he handed the bag back without ceremony, turned, and went to join his mates by the football cage. No further apology. No acknowledgement that anything had occurred between you at all.
That afternoon, you kicked over his sandcastle in the playground.
He watched you do it. Didn't say a word.
You felt better.
And somehow, after that, you were friends.
— ✦ —
He couldn't read very well. You figured this out in Year Three, during the round-robin reading in class — when the teacher went along the rows and each child read a sentence aloud.
You noticed the way Simon's jaw set and his hands went flat on the desk the closer it got to his turn. The way his eyes moved across the page, laboured and slow, tracking words like they were things to be wrestled rather than known.
He got through his sentence. Barely. His face was blank when he sat back, the particular blankness he'd already learned to wear — that carefully constructed nothing that meant everything was fine when everything was not fine at all.
You didn't say anything about it. Not then. You were eight years old, not stupid.
What you did was start reading with him at break time. You presented it as something you needed — you told him you were practising for a reading competition and needed an audience.
Simon was not fooled. He was never fooled, not really.
But he sat down with you on the bench by the library door and listened while you read, and then slowly, carefully, you handed the book to him and asked what he thought happened next, and he had to read ahead to find out.
It took most of the school year. But by the summer he was reading chapter books. He never thanked you. He did start saving you a seat on the library bench every break time, and that was the same thing.
— ✦ —
He played football and rugby.
You read on the grass bank above the field.
It became a kind of institution — the ritual of your shared proximity without shared activity. Simon on the pitch, broad and determined and already bigger than the other boys by Year Five, already moving with that particular physicality that seemed less like playing and more like declaration.
And you on the bank above, your book open, your reading glasses (a better pair now, tortoiseshell) perched on your nose, half-reading and half watching without ever quite admitting to the watching.
He always knew you were there. He didn't do anything about it. But sometimes, when he scored, he'd look up at the bank first before he looked anywhere else.
You told yourself you were only there because the grass was nice and the light was good.
You were not a good liar, even then.
— ✦ —
The boy's name was Daniel Holt and he pushed you over in the playground in Year Five because you'd refused to give him the answers to the maths homework.
You'd said no three times and the third time he pushed you and you went down hard on your palms and your knees, the concrete was unforgiving.
You were crying before you'd fully registered what had happened. Not dramatically — small, shocked, indignant tears, the kind that arrive before the pain does.
Simon was there before a teacher was. You didn't even see where he came from. One moment the playground was its ordinary mid-morning noise, and the next Daniel Holt had a split lip and Simon Riley was standing over him with blood on his knuckles and a look on his face that was completely, utterly calm.
The calm was the frightening part. Even at ten.
He got three days at home for it. He spent the first afternoon sitting on your front step, eating crisps, because he knew you'd be furious with him and wanted to face it head-on.
You were furious. You told him he was an idiot. He told you Daniel Holt had it coming. You told him violence wasn't the answer. He told you Daniel Holt wasn't going to touch you again.
He was right. Daniel Holt never came near you again.
You didn't thank him either. You went inside and made him a sandwich, and that was the same thing.
— ✦ —
Secondary school arrived like a change in weather — everything slightly larger, slightly louder, the corridors longer and noisier, the stakes somehow higher and more ambiguous all at once. You arrived with a bag so heavy your shoulder ached within the first hour: your textbooks, yes, but also the extracurricular books you carried everywhere, the extra notepad you used for non-school thoughts, the six different highlighters you colour-coded by subject.
Simon took the bag from you on the third day without asking.
"I can carry it," you told him.
"I know," he said.
He slung it over his shoulder like it weighed nothing, which for him it probably didn't. He'd grown over the summer — not just taller, though he was that, but broader, thicker through the shoulders in a way that made him look like a man playing a boy, trying the shape of it on. He wore it well, even at eleven. He wore everything like he'd already decided what he was and was simply waiting for the world to catch up.
He carried your bag when it was heavy, and it was frequently heavy. He did it without comment and without making you feel small for needing it. That was the thing about Simon — he never made you feel small. He made other people feel small, sometimes, when they deserved it. But not you. Never you.
— ✦ —
The bruises were never from rugby.
You knew by the second year of secondary.
You were not naive — you had read enough, observed enough, understood enough about the world to recognise the shape of what was happening in Simon Riley's house even though he never said a word about it.
The bruises were in the wrong places for rugby. They appeared in the wrong season. They were around his ribs and his arms and once, memorably, along his jaw, and he came to school the Monday after the jaw bruise with that face — that blank, carefully constructed nothing face — and you sat next to him at lunch and said nothing at all.
You said nothing because there was nothing you could do. You were twelve. You were a girl with a book bag and highlighter pens and absolutely no power over the man who was hurting your best friend, and knowing that — the impotence of it, the helpless, hollow ache of caring about someone you could not protect — was the first truly adult pain you ever felt.
What you could do was this: you could make sure he had somewhere to go.
Your mother, who was perceptive in the quiet way that some mothers are, never asked questions when Simon turned up at the back door on a Sunday evening or a Wednesday after school.
She just set another plate.
Your house became a refuge without anyone naming it as such. Simon did his homework at your kitchen table, ate your mother's cooking, watched telly with your family, and slept on your sofa sometimes when the option was presented naturally enough that it didn't feel like charity.
— ✦ —
You got your period for the first time on a Tuesday in November, in Year Nine. In the school toilets, third period, when you were thirteen years old and the day had been entirely ordinary right up until it wasn't.
The particular cocktail of shock and pain and embarrassment and the specific existential bewilderment of being a person whose body was doing something enormous without prior adequate notice left you sitting on the closed toilet lid crying in a way you hadn't cried in years.
You got out your Nokia. That familiar brick of a phone, the keypad worn smooth at the number five. You typed Simon's number and pressed call before you'd properly decided to.
He picked up on the second ring. "Yeah."
"Simon." Your voice came out wrong. Too thin.
A beat. When he spoke again his voice had changed — quieter, more careful. "Where are you?"
"Girls' toilets. Near the science block."
"Right," he said. "Stay there."
He appeared outside the girls' toilets seven minutes later — you could hear him through the door, his voice low and flat, telling a Year Eight girl to go use the other ones — and then he was there, right there on the other side of the door, talking to you through it in that steady, even way he had when he wanted to be calm on your behalf.
"You're alright," he said. “Do you need me to go to the office?"
"No," you managed. "I need — I don't know what I need."
"I'll get you something from the vending machine," he said, that Manchester accent of his low and unhurried. "And I'll text your mum."
When you came out of the toilets twenty minutes later, looking wrung-out and clutching what the school nurse had provided, Simon was leaning against the wall. He looked at you for a moment — took you in, the way he always did, that comprehensive, assessing look — and then he stepped forward and kissed your cheek. Quick. Certain. His mouth warm and deliberate against your cheekbone.
"You're alright," he said again. He said it like a fact. Like he was making it true by saying it.
You cried a bit more, for different reasons, and he pretended not to notice.
— ✦ —
He was captain of the rugby team by Year Ten. It suited him — the leadership, the sense of purpose, the structure of it.
You went to his matches sometimes, wrapped in a scarf on the touchline, and watched him move across the pitch with that same quality you'd noticed on the primary school field: less like playing, more like declaration.
He was ferocious and focused and occasionally frightening, and the other boys deferred to him not just because he was bigger than them but because he had the kind of authority that doesn't need to be announced.
Afterwards he'd find you on the touchline, still carrying that quality — coiled, alert — and it would take him a few minutes to come back to himself. To come back to you.
"Good game," you'd say.
"Yeah," he'd say.
And then slowly, the set of his shoulders would ease, and he'd become Simon again. Your Simon. The one who stole your crayons and carried your bag and ate your mother's shepherd's pie like it was sacred.
— ✦ —
He could make you laugh. This was not a small thing.
Simon Riley was not, by general consensus, a funny person. He was serious and quiet and his face in repose looked like a man carrying a private weather system. But he had a dry, deadpan wit that he deployed rarely and precisely, and it landed, every time, like a key in a lock made specifically for it.
He knew how to make you laugh because he'd spent years learning you. The specific frequency of your humour. The things that made you dissolve into giggles rather than just smile. He deployed his wit with the same precision he deployed everything else, and the result was that when Simon Riley made you laugh — really laugh, the helpless, breathless kind — it felt like being given something he didn't give to anyone else.
Which, you would eventually understand, was accurate.
— ✦ —
His name was Ryan Marsh and he was your first kiss, in the park on a Friday evening in Year Ten, and it was fine. It was nice, even. Ryan was sweet and nervous and smelled of his older brother's aftershave and the kiss lasted approximately forty seconds.
Ryan Marsh had a broken nose the following Monday.
Simon maintained, with total conviction, that Ryan had walked into a door. Ryan, to his credit, corroborated this story completely.
You did not push the matter, partly because you had no concrete evidence and partly because some part of you — the part that read on the grass bank and watched the pitch and noticed when Simon looked up at the bank before he looked anywhere else — felt something that was not entirely uncomplicated about it.
You and Ryan Marsh did not have a second kiss. You told yourself it was because the chemistry hadn't been right.
You were getting a bit better at lying to yourself, by fourteen. But only a bit.
— ✦ —
GCSEs arrived the way all important things arrived — with more weight than you'd expected and less warning than you'd have liked.
Year Ten and Eleven were the years you restructured Simon's entire approach to studying, methodically and patiently, the same way you'd helped him learn to read, finding the approach that worked for how his mind moved.
Simon was not unintelligent.
He was, in fact, formidably sharp in ways that didn't translate easily to an exam paper: quick to read people, quick to understand systems, possessed of a spatial and strategic intelligence that you recognised and admired even as you taught him how to write it down in ways that the mark scheme would accept.
He sat with you at your kitchen table night after night — your mother quietly replenishing the tea,— and you explained things in the language that made sense to his brain rather than the language of the textbook.
He sat with you at lunch during school hours and glared at anyone who called you a nerd. The glaring was extremely effective. Simon Riley's face, by fifteen, was a significant deterrent.
His GCSE results, when they arrived, were good. Better than anyone who knew his circumstances might have expected from a boy who'd had so much working against him.
He rang you on the house phone when he opened the results envelope. He didn't say much. His voice, when he spoke, was different — something in it unguarded, the Manchester in it softer somehow, without the armour it usually carried.
"Couldn't have done it without you," he said.
"You did it," you told him firmly. "I just held the torch."
"Still needed the torch."
You smiled so hard your face ached. "Go celebrate, Simon."
"Yeah," he said. And then, quieter, "Thanks, sunshine."
— ✦ —
He was an apprentice at the butcher's on Renshaw Street after school — learning the trade with the same focused, physical competence he brought to everything else, solid and unhurried, his big hands learning new kinds of precision. You had a job at the bookshop two streets over.
On his lunch breaks you would walk over with a sandwich and a packet of crisps, and you'd sit on the low wall around the side of the shop while he ate and you talked about nothing in particular and everything in general.
He had sawdust on his boots and you'd have ink on your fingers from pricing stickers, and you'd sit in the thin afternoon light talking about books and people and where things might go from here, and it was the most ordinary, irreplaceable thing in the world.
You didn't know, then, that you were storing it up. You didn't know you were in the middle of something finite.
You were seventeen and you thought you had time.
— ✦ —
It was the eleventh of September, 2001.
You were at work when it happened — the bookshop had a small television in the back room, and you watched the footage with your hand pressed over your mouth and the world rearranging itself into a new shape around you.
Simon came to you that evening. He didn't knock — he had a spare key, had done for years — and you heard him come in and go into the kitchen and fill the kettle, the sound of him so familiar and domestic and real that something in your chest loosened a fraction.
He brought you tea. He sat on the sofa beside you and you watched the news together in silence, and at some point your head found his shoulder without either of you deciding it had.
"I'm going to join up," he said. Not asking. Telling.
You lifted your head from his shoulder. Frowned at him. "Join up what?"
"The military."
The word landed in the room and stayed there. You looked at his face — that flat, certain expression he wore when he'd already decided something — and you felt the ground shift slightly under you.
"Simon. You're seventeen."
"You can join at sixteen with parental consent," he said. Straightforward, as though he'd already looked into it. Which of course he had. "Seventeen without."
"That's—" You stopped. Started again. "You've thought about this before today."
"Yeah."
Of course he had. You could see it now, the shape of it — this was not a reaction to the footage on the television, not a hot, impulsive thing. This was something Simon had been building toward without telling you. The structure of it. The purpose. The particular kind of belonging that came from being part of something larger than yourself. You'd always known he'd go toward something like this. You'd just hoped, without ever quite admitting to the hoping, that it might be further away.
"You're not going to try to talk me out of it." Not a question.
"Would it work?"
He held your gaze. "No."
"Then no," you said. Your voice was very steady. You were proud of it. "I'm not."
He was quiet for a long moment. The television continued its awful repetition. Then his arm came around your shoulders, heavy and warm, and he pulled you in closer against his side.
You stayed like that until the tea went cold.
— ✦ —
The train station was grey and noisy with other leavings, other arrivals, other people in the middle of things.
Simon stood in front of you on the platform with his kit bag and his big, careful hands and the face he'd spent seventeen years learning to keep blank, and it occurred to you, not for the first time and not for the last, that you loved him.
That you had loved him in different quantities and different registers for most of your life. That you did not know how to say it and were not sure it would do either of you any good if you did.
So you didn't say it.
You went up on your toes and you hugged him — truly hugged him, arms around his neck, your face pressed against his jaw — and he held you back with both arms, the kit bag dropping to the platform, and he was so solid and warm and real that you memorised it.
"Don't be an idiot," you told him, muffled.
He made a sound that was almost a laugh. Almost. "Best I can do is try." The Manchester in his voice, low and warm and his.
"Simon."
"I know," he said quietly, against your temple. "I know, sunshine."
You stepped back. You held it together. He picked up his bag and he walked toward the platform and at the door of the train he turned, and looked at you standing there with your glasses and your coat and your hands pressed together in front of you, and for a second you saw something in his face that wasn't blank at all.
Then he was gone.
You cried on the way home. Proper, ugly crying, in the front seat of your mother's car, while she drove and said nothing and passed you a tissue.
You cried because you thought you might never see him again. Because the world had cracked open on a Tuesday in September and people were going toward the fracture and Simon Riley was one of them.
You cried because you never told him.
— ✦ —
He sent a birthday card every year.
They arrived with no return address and postmarks from places you'd never heard of, and sometimes they were late and sometimes they were so early you suspected he'd sent them weeks in advance in case he couldn't later.
They were always plain — Simon Riley was not a man who browsed the sentimental section — white or cream envelopes, the kind of card that was almost generic, and inside: his handwriting, which had improved vastly from the boy who'd struggled across the page in Year Three, and always the same thing. Your name at the top. Happy Birthday, sunshine. And then: S.
Just S.
Like he was still close enough that you'd know exactly who that meant. Like the initial was sufficient.
It was.
You sent his birthday gifts to a P.O. box he'd given you, wrapped carefully, the tag always: From your best friend. You didn't know if he received them all. You sent them anyway. It felt important to keep sending them — to maintain the thread, even when you couldn't see both ends of it.
— ✦ —
Thirty-four years old now.
You have no husband. You had come close, once — a man named Patrick who had been perfectly acceptable in every measurable way and who had wanted to marry you and had probably deserved someone who could give him more of herself than you could manage.
You had not been fair to Patrick. You knew that. You had been in love with someone else for most of your adult life, and even with the someone else absent and silent and possibly dead, there wasn't room for anyone else.
You have no children, though you wanted them. The timeline on that was becoming its own quiet ache, the kind you didn't prod too often.
You have a job that pays the bills and not much else — admin in an office building that smells of carpet cleaner and recycled air, the kind of work that requires enough of your brain to stop it from wandering but not enough to satisfy it.
You have an apartment that is functional and yours and that you have tried to make cozy, with books on every surface and plants that are mostly surviving and a kitchen you actually cook in.
It is not the house. It is not the house you told Simon about when you were sixteen and lying in his back garden on a summer evening, staring up at the sky.
No birthday card for five years now.
Five years of the particular, specific silence that was different from all the silences before, because the silences before had been interrupted. Annually, reliably, he had broken them.
Five years of nothing had the texture of conclusion. Of a chapter closing. And you had reached the point — slowly, painfully, with the kind of acceptance that doesn't feel like acceptance but feels like exhaustion — where you were fairly certain Simon Riley was dead.
Your heart ached for your best friend in the low, constant way of grief that has become so familiar it's almost structural.
You carried it the way you carried other things, quietly, with your spine straight.
Which is why you are sitting across from a man named — it didn't matter, it really didn't matter what his name was — on what your colleague Debbie had described as 'a perfectly nice date with a perfectly nice man' and trying to remember what it felt like to be interested in your own life.
The man sitting across from you was the complete opposite of Simon Riley.
He was trim and well-dressed and had the kind of face that was handsome in a way that required no effort to appreciate and inspired no particular feeling from you.
He had been talking for, by your reckoning, forty-seven minutes. In that time he had covered: his career (impressive, in his telling), his car (expensive, in his telling), his last holiday (exotic, in his telling), and his general philosophy on modern dating (nuanced, in his telling).
He had not asked about your job. He had not asked about your books or the one peeking out of your handbag; the one he'd glanced at and not commented on. He had not asked if your pasta was nice, which it was, actually, genuinely nice, and you'd have told him so if he'd asked. He had not asked you almost anything, come to think of it.
Simon Riley, who spoke perhaps a tenth as many words as this man, had always asked.
Simon Riley had always wanted to know. Not because it was polite. Because he actually, genuinely, in the particular way of people who care about very few things very deeply — wanted to know.
You excused yourself to use the bathroom and stood at the sink running cold water over your wrists and looking at your own reflection, and you thought: this is fine.
This is a perfectly nice evening with a perfectly nice man. This is what moving forward looks like. This is what being a person in the world, a person with a life and a future and reasonable expectations of company, looks like.
You dried your hands. You went back to the table. He had ordered himself another drink without asking if you wanted anything.
You finished your pasta and smiled at appropriate intervals and thought about Simon Riley and felt, as you so often felt, quietly furious at him for being gone.
— ✦ —
The birthday card arrived on a Thursday morning.
You almost missed it entirely — it was tucked between a pizza delivery leaflet and something from your energy supplier, the cream envelope almost camouflaged by the mundane. You shuffled through the post on autopilot and then stopped.
Your name, in handwriting you would have recognised anywhere, would have recognised in your sleep, had recognised in your bones for thirty years.
You sat down on the bottom stair. Your legs suddenly uneasy.
Your hands were not steady.
The envelope opened. The card was white. Plain. Almost generic.
Inside:
Happy Birthday, sunshine.
I'm sorry it's been so long.
I'll explain everything.
Come, if you want to.
If you can stand the sight of me.
Below that, an address. Three towns over. A postcode you didn't recognise.
And then, at the bottom, the way it had always been at the bottom: S.
You sat on the bottom stair for a very long time.
Then you got up, went to your room, and started thinking about what to wear.
— ✦ —
You plucked up the nerve to go on a Saturday.
The drive took forty minutes and you spent most of it trying to manage yourself — talking yourself through reasonable expectations (he is alive, that is enough, start there), warning yourself against things you could not control (the five years, the silence, the way your hands were doing that unsteady thing again), cataloguing everything practical (the address, the map).
The street was quiet. Semi-rural, the kind of neighbourhood that sits between things — between town and country, between the ordinary and the aspirational. The houses were spread out, set back from the road, each with its own front garden and its own character.
You parked. You looked at the address. You looked up.
And you stopped breathing.
It was a beautiful house.
Large, substantial and solid, the kind of house that had been built to last. White painted render, clean and bright in the afternoon light. A white picket fence surrounding the front garden, which was full of flowers. Roses climbing the gatepost. Lavender edging the path. Foxgloves and dahlias and great loose clusters of something purple you couldn't name from here. The kind of garden that had been planted with intention, tended with care, left to be a little wild in the best way.
A porch. And a porch swing, painted white, with a yellow cushion on it.
And flying from the corner of the roof, bright against the blue afternoon sky: the Union flag.
You sat very still in the driver's seat.
You were sixteen years old. It was a summer evening and you were lying in Simon's back garden on an old sleeping bag, looking up at the sky. He was beside you in the way he was always beside you — solid, quiet, taking up exactly the right amount of space. You'd been talking about the future the way teenagers do, in great floating hypotheticals that feel more like weather than plans.
"What kind of house?" he'd asked. He asked follow-up questions always, quietly, wanting the specifics. It was one of the things about him you loved.
And you'd described it. A big house, not ostentatious but real — space for books and for people and for a garden that did what it wanted within reason. A white fence, because you'd always liked them. A porch with somewhere to sit. A flag, because you were — despite everything — proud of where you were from.
Simon had been quiet for a long moment.
"Okay," he'd said. Just: okay.
You had thought he was humouring you.
You had not thought — you had not let yourself think — what it might mean, that he was going to do anything about it.
You got out of the car. Your legs were not entirely reliable. You held the gate and walked up the path — lavender brushing your hand where it grew close, the scent of it too perfect, almost staged — and you stopped at the foot of the porch steps.
The door opened.
He had to duck.
That was the first thing you noticed. The physical fact of him, the sheer size of him, his shoulders nearly touching the doorframe on both sides simultaneously, the automatic dip of his head as he stepped through onto the porch.
He straightened.
The afternoon light landed on him and you had to spend a moment recalibrating, because the last time you'd seen Simon Riley he had been seventeen years old with sawdust on his boots and a train ticket in his hand, and this man —
This man.
The white button-down shirt was simple, the sleeves rolled to the elbow, and from his left wrist to well past the roll of the sleeve his forearm was dark with ink — a sleeve of tattoos, intricate and considered. A whole geography of imagery that you couldn't read from here but would, you thought, take time to learn.
His right wrist carried a watch. His black slacks were fitted close enough that you could see the muscle of his thighs pulling the fabric with every shift of his weight, and his shoes — loafers, black with gold buckles, completely unexpected and somehow exactly right — were precise.
His hair. A dark sandy blonde, longer than military specification presumably allowed and slicked back from his face, which meant you could see all of it, his whole face; the angles that had sharpened from boy to man, the jaw, the set of his brow, and those eyes. Those brown eyes that had been watching you since you were four years old and had never, not once, looked at you with anything less than complete attention.
He was raking those eyes over you now. Slowly. With the same quality he'd always had — that comprehensive, unhurried assessment that somehow never felt like being measured — and his hands were in his pockets and he was standing there like that, on the porch he'd built or bought or arranged specifically around a description you'd given him at sixteen.
He looked like something out of a magazine and like Simon all at once.
You were going to murder him.
"Hi, sunshine."
His voice. Lower than you remembered, rougher, carrying all the years he'd lived since you last heard it. That Manchester accent — still there, unmistakably, that warm northern flatness underneath everything, the vowels shaped by a city, by a street, by a particular kind of upbringing that no amount of training had entirely smoothed out.
That nickname, in that voice, in that low, deliberate way he'd always said it: like you were his.
Like it was a prayer.
You opened your mouth. And you closed it. And you looked at him — this enormous, tattooed, stupidly handsome man who had stood on your mother's doorstep at twelve years old with bruises he didn't mention, who had kissed your cheek at thirteen and broken Ryan Marsh's nose at fourteen and waved goodbye from a train platform at seventeen and then sent you birthday cards from the edges of the world for a decade and then stopped for five years —
"Five years," you said. Your voice was very quiet.
Something moved in his face.
"I-,"
"I thought you were dead." You snapped cutting him off.
"I figured you would’ve."
"Simon."
"I know, sunshine." He said it the same way he'd always said things he couldn't argue with — not deflecting, not dismissing, just absorbing. The Manchester vowels in his voice like a hand on your shoulder. "I'll explain everything. I promise. All of it. Whatever you want to know."
You looked at him.
He looked at you.
The afternoon settled around the house, around the garden that was your garden in your own sixteen-year-old description, around the flag and the porch swing and the lavender and all of it, and the distance between you on the path and him on the porch steps was perhaps four feet and thirty years and five years of silence and a whole life of choosing not to say the one true thing.
"You built me the house?" you asked, whispering it. Like you were afraid to say it.
He was quiet for a moment. Then, "Bought it. Had the garden done the way you said."
"Simon." Your heart ached.
"You said lavender at the edges," he said. His voice was completely level. "You said a porch with somewhere to sit. You said you wanted to see the flag from the garden."
You pressed your hand to your mouth.
The rage was still there — it was not going anywhere quickly. The five years of it, the grief of it — but underneath it, something else. Something that had been there since you were four years old at a preschool art table, larger and quieter and more permanent than anything else you'd ever felt.
"You were sixteen," he said. As though this explained it. "You told me what you wanted. I just..." He stopped. Started again. "I wanted to be enough first. I wanted to have what you needed."
There was a long silence. A bee moved through the lavender. Somewhere a few streets away, a lawnmower hummed.
"Come inside," Simon said. "I'll make you tea. And I'll tell you everything."
You looked at him on the porch of the house he'd built you from a word, and you thought: you absolute idiot. You wonderful, impossible, infuriating man. You thought I'd stopped. You thought thirty years of this was something you could be enough for eventually, like it was a bar to clear, like there was a version of you I was waiting on instead of just —
Instead of just you. Always just you.
The lavender brushed your hand again. You walked up the steps and he looked down at you with those brown eyes that had never once left you.
"Hi, Simon," you said.
Something happened in his face. Something opened.
"Hi, sunshine," he said, his hand coming to the small of your back to guide you inside.
He made the tea.
You stood in the kitchen of a house that smelled of fresh paint and cedar and something faintly floral from the garden drifting through the open window over the sink, and you watched Simon Riley move around it like he'd always lived here — filling the kettle, finding the mugs without opening the wrong cupboard, knowing where the teabags were — and you thought: how long. How long has he been here, in this house he bought for you, learning where everything lives, waiting.
You sat at the kitchen table. It was a good table, heavy oak, the kind built to last and you ran your thumb along the grain of it and tried to arrange your feelings into some kind of order and failed.
Simon set the mug in front of you. Milk in last, the way you'd always taken it, which he knew because he'd made you approximately four thousand cups of tea over the course of your lives. He sat down across from you, his own mug between his big hands, and looked at you.
You looked back.
The kitchen light was warm and it caught the angles of his face. The jaw, the brow, the slight crook in his nose that was new, or newer, the result of something you didn't know about and weren't sure you wanted to.
He was watching you with that particular quality of attention he'd always had. Complete. Patient. Like you were the only thing in the room worth looking at.
"You're not wearing your glasses," he said.
You blinked. Of all the things. "No."
"Contacts?"
"For about ten years now, yes."
He was quiet for a moment, studying your face with that same unhurried attention, "I missed them."
"You missed my glasses?" You say with the deadpan tone you'd perfected over the years.
"Tortoiseshell ones," he said. "Used to push them up your nose when you were concentrating." He took a gulp of his tea, Adam's apple bobbing when he swallowed.
You stared at him. Eighteen years. Eighteen years of distance and war and God knows what else, and he missed your glasses. "Simon."
"Just saying."
"You are unbelievable." You scoff.
"The contacts suit you," he said, and the corner of his mouth moved — barely, almost nothing, but you'd spent your whole life reading that face and you caught it. "Everything suits you. But I liked the glasses."
"Stop it." You snap.
"Stop what?"
"Whatever that is," you said, and you pointed at his face, at the not-there-almost-smile, at the quality of his voice when he said everything suits you, at all of it. "You don't get to do that. You've been — Simon, you've been gone. You've been gone for eighteen years and for five of them, I thought you were dead." Your voice stayed steady, which surprised you. You'd expected it to crack on that. "So you don't get to walk out onto your porch looking like — like that — and tell me you missed my glasses and flirt at me like no time has passed."
He listened without interrupting. He always had — it was one of the things about him, the way he gave you the whole space of what you were saying before he entered it.
"You're right," he nodded.
"I know I'm right." Your spine straightened.
"I owe you an explanation."
"You owe me considerably more than that, Simon Riley, but yes. An explanation would be a start."
He wrapped both hands around his mug again and looked at you across the table and there was something in his face that was not the blank-nothing face, was not the armour he'd worn since he was twelve years old but something that was quieter and more exposed and a great deal more frightening because of it.
"Not here," he said.
You frowned. "What?"
"I don't want to do it like this. Sat in a kitchen." He glanced around the room briefly, as though orienting himself. "Come to dinner with me tomorrow night."
"What I—"
"The Grill on Merton Street."
You went very still.
The Grill on Merton Street. You hadn't been in years — not since you'd moved away from the area, not since things had shifted and the rituals of your old life had quietly been replaced by other things.
But you knew it. You knew every table in it. The way the light came through the front windows on a Sunday, the smell of it — roasted meat and old wood and the particular warmth of a place that had been feeding families for decades.
Your mother had loved it. Your father used to order the same thing every time and be pleased about it every time, and you and Simon had sat across from each other in the corner booth with the sticky laminated menus and kicked each other under the table and laughed.
"That's still open?" you managed.
"Had a look earlier this week," he said. "Still there. New owners but the same building. Same corner booth."
You looked at him. He looked at you. Outside, through the open window, a late bird was making itself known in the lavender.
"Fine," you said. "Dinner. Tomorrow. And you're going to tell me everything." you struck at him with a serious face.
"Everything," he agreed.
"I mean it, Simon. All of it."
"I know you do."
You drank your tea. It was exactly right. The temperature, the strength, the milk ratio and you hated him a little bit for that. For the fact that he still knew, that across seventeen years and God knows how many miles he still knew exactly how you took your tea, and he'd made it correctly on the first attempt without asking, and you were absolutely not going to cry about that.
You were not.
— ✦ —
You dressed carefully.
Not because you were trying to impress him.
You told yourself this firmly, standing in front of your wardrobe in the room you'd taken in the local B&B — you'd booked a night, not knowing how long this might take, not knowing what state you'd be in for the drive home afterwards — and you told yourself that you were simply dressing appropriately for a dinner at a decent restaurant.
That was all.
That was the entirety of it.
The dress was deep green. Fitted through the waist, falling to just below the knee, with a neckline that was elegant rather than dramatic.
You'd bought it for a work event two years ago and it had lived in your wardrobe since, waiting for an occasion that felt worth it. You put your hair up — not elaborately, just neatly, the kind of arrangement that looked effortless and had taken twenty minutes — and you wore the small gold earrings that had been your grandmother's. Low heels. The good handbag. A slick of red on your mouth that you almost wiped off twice before deciding to leave it.
You were not trying to impress him.
You were absolutely trying to impress him.
He was waiting outside The Grill when your taxi pulled up, standing on the pavement with his hands in his pockets. The air around him relaxed and easy. An anchored stillness, like a man who'd learned to wait and had made peace with it. He has the same dark slacks as yesterday, same loafers with the gold buckles, but the shirt tonight was black.
A deep, clean black that made his shoulders look approximately the width of a doorway, which was in fact an accurate assessment — and he'd left the top button undone. His hair was the same: pushed back, dark sandy blonde curling at the nape of his neck and catching the amber of the streetlights.
He saw you get out of the taxi.
He went very still. Completely, suddenly, entirely present in a way that landed on you like a hand against your sternum. Under your heartbeat.
You crossed the pavement toward him and his eyes moved over you — slowly, comprehensively, that same rake of attention he'd given you yesterday on the porch steps, only this time there was nothing restrained about what it did to your pulse.
He eyed you the same way he used to look at the extra cuts of slow roasted beef your mother added to his plate every time he joined you for a Sunday roast after church.
"Hi," you said.
"Hi, sunshine." His voice was low. The rough Manchester sending tingles down your spine.
He opened the door for you.
The Grill smelled exactly the same.
Roasted meat and warmed bread and old wood and something faintly of candle wax. It hit you the moment you stepped through the door and you had to stand still for just a second, just one second, to absorb the weight of it.
Your father's coat on the hook by the door. Your mother's reading glasses going into her bag as the menus arrived. Simon across from you, fourteen and fifteen and sixteen, his big hands wrapped around a Coke glass, his eyes on you under that careful brow.
The layout had shifted slightly — new owners, as Simon had said — but the bones of it were the same. The dark wood panelling. The low warm lighting. The tables set with proper linen and actual candles in glass holders. And in the back left corner was the booth.
Simon's hand was at the small of your back as the host led you through. A light touch, barely there, the kind of thing that could be merely courteous and was absolutely not merely courteous.
You said nothing about it.
You were almost at the booth when a voice said, "Well. I don't believe it."
You turned.
Margaret and Gerald Howarth.
Margaret had been your mother's friend since before you were born — a small, bright-eyed woman who had somehow barely aged in two decades. Her silver hair cut the same way it had always been, her husband a large, genial man beside her with a napkin already tucked into his collar. They'd been eating here since before you were born too, you suspected. Some people were simply woven into the furniture of a place.
"Margaret," you said, and you felt a genuine, warm rush of it. Of being seen by someone who had known you as a child, who had watched you grow up, who carried that particular knowledge of you that only people of a certain generation can hold. She was already rising halfway from her seat, her hand extended, and you took it and she covered it with her other one, the way she always had.
"We heard you were back in the area," she said — which was interesting, since you'd only arrived yesterday, but news apparently still moved at its old speed around here. Her bright eyes moved to Simon, and something in them softened with recognition and surprise in equal measure. "And Simon Riley. My goodness."
"Mrs Howarth." Simon's voice was respectful, quieter than usual, and you noticed — because you noticed everything about him — that he straightened fractionally. Not stiffly. Just the particular adjustment of a man in the presence of someone he'd known when he was young and unguarded.
"Look at the size of you," Gerald said, not unkindly, staring up at Simon with the frank appreciation of one large man for another. "What are they feeding you?"
"Gerald," Margaret scolded mildly.
"It's a compliment." He shrugged.
Simon almost smiled. "Good to see you, Mr Howarth."
Margaret was looking between the two of you with the expression of a woman who had been quietly observing people her entire life and drawing accurate conclusions from very little evidence. "Are you together?" she asked, with the particular directness that came with age and with having known you since you were in a pushchair.
"We're having dinner," you said carefully.
Margaret's expression said, quite clearly, that she had heard this and had also heard everything it was not saying. "Well," she said, patting your hand once more before releasing it, "it's lovely to see you both. You always did belong together, the pair of you. I said that to your mother once, do you know. I said those two—"
"It was lovely seeing you, Margaret," you said, with great warmth and only mild desperation.
She laughed, a bright, pleased sound and settled back into her seat.
As you turned to follow the host the rest of the way to the booth, you were almost certain you heard Gerald say, to his wife, "told you" in a tone of quiet marital satisfaction.
Simon was very carefully not reacting to any of this. You were very carefully not looking at him.
You saw two others you knew before you reached the booth.
Kim Ashworth, who had been in your form in Year Ten and who looked essentially the same as she had in school except that she had a baby on her hip and a husband trailing behind her with a changing bag.
She stopped mid-step when she saw you, did a small, delighted double take, said oh my God twice, and then looked at Simon in a way that was extremely uncomplicated in its appreciation before remembering the husband with the changing bag. There were promises exchanged to catch up properly, phone numbers that would probably not be used, genuine warmth on both sides.
And then at the bar, perched on a stool with a whisky, Dave Pearce — who had played alongside Simon on the secondary school rugby team and who greeted him with the particular vocabulary of men who knew each other at fifteen and have not changed as much as they think.
There was a brief, loud exchange that involved at least one shoulder-clap that could have knocked a smaller man sideways, and then Dave shook your hand too and told Simon he was punching. Which Simon received without expression and you tried your hardest not to laugh, biting your lip.
Finally the corner booth. You slid in. Simon folded himself into the seat across from you, the table scaled to ordinary human beings and therefore slightly absurd against the size of him, his knees bracketing it, his shoulders blocking the view of the room behind him entirely.
The menus came.
They were not laminated anymore — proper printed card, changed seasonally, the kind that meant the new owners had ambitions. But the roast was still on. The proper Sunday roast, the one your father used to order when you could afford to.
"Same corner," Simon said quietly.
"Same corner," you agreed.
He was looking at you across the table the way he used to look at you across this table, except that now his face was older and larger and had been to places that had clearly asked things of it. The look was different in its texture. Deeper, maybe. Older in the same way he was older. Like it had more weight behind it from all the years of being carried.
"You said everything," you reminded him. "All of it."
"I know."
"So." You gestured for him to start.
He set his menu down. Looked at you. And then he started talking.
He told it the way he told everything — without embellishment, without drama, in the flat, precise language of a man who had learned to communicate facts and trusted the facts to carry the weight without decoration.
He'd gone in at seventeen and he'd been good at it. Not surprising. He was built for the structure of it, for the clarity of having a purpose and a unit and a chain of things that made sense.
He'd moved up fast — faster than he let on in the cards he'd sent you, which had been careful, he explained, deliberately careful, because the more you knew the more you might worry. Which, you pointed out, had not been his decision to make. He didn't argue with that.
Task Force 141 came later. Years later, after deployments that he summarised in a sentence each and you understood enough from his face to know that each sentence was doing the work of much longer things.
He was a lieutenant now. He said it the way he said most things about himself, flatly, without vanity, presented as information. He had certain freedoms now that he hadn't had before, certain ability to make choices about where he went and when and what he did with the things the years had given him.
You both ordered your food.
"And the five years?" you asked, sipping your cocktail the waitress had brought over.
He was quiet for a moment, he stared at his San Miguel pint, the condensation sliding down the glass. Your food had arrived at some point during the waiting, while Simon collected his thoughts.
He picked up his fork and then set it down again.
"There was a man," Simon said.
Something about the way he said it made you put your fork down too.
"He ran drugs. Major operation, international — I won't go into all of it." He said this without flinching, looking at you steadily, not softening it. You'd always appreciated that about him — the way he treated your intelligence as a given. "After I escaped him, he decided to make it personal. He went after the people I—" He stopped. Chose the word carefully. "The people I was connected to."
The candle in the glass holder between you threw warm, unsteady light across his face.
"He killed them," Simon said. "My brother. Tommy's family." A pause that cost him something; you could see it cost him. "My Mother."
The restaurant continued around you — the murmur of other tables, the clink of cutlery, someone laughing softly near the bar — and you sat very still.
"Oh Simon," you whispered, you could feel the way your face formed the sympathy.
"I'm alright." He said it the way he'd always said it, the Manchester flat and absolute. The way that meant; don't make it bigger than I can hold right now. You knew that voice. You honoured it.
"He knew about you," Simon said and you froze. "That was the other thing. He'd done his research." His jaw shifted slightly. "As long as he was alive, you weren't safe. If I'd contacted you, properly contacted you, kept the thread going the way I wanted to, it would have given him a cleaner line. A more reliable way to reach me."
You understood the logic of it. You understood it clearly and immediately in the part of your brain that processed information. The other part — the part that had sat on the bottom stair with a birthday card after five years of silence, the part that had thought past tense — that part was going to take considerably longer.
"So you cut me off," you said. Not as an accusation. As a fact, laid down. You were starting to understand the shape of it.
"To keep you safe. Yes."
"Without telling me why." You sighed but you knew you were being unreasonable, but you hoped he would let you for a little longer.
"If I'd told you why, you'd have known there was a threat. And you'd have—" He stopped. The corner of his mouth moved, something that was not quite a smile and not quite not one. "You'd have done something about it. Gone looking. Made noise."
"I would not have—" You stopped, because you would have. You absolutely would have. You'd spent thirty years being completely unable to sit on the sidelines where Simon Riley was concerned, and the knowledge that someone was threatening him would have made you entirely unreasonable. "That's—" you huffed.
"Yeah," he said.
"You could have found a way—"
"There wasn't one. Not one that was safe." His voice was very level. "I went through every option, love. I promise you. Every one."
The word arrived quietly, without ceremony.
Love.
He'd never called you that — not in thirty years, not in all the time and all the familiarity of what you were to each other. He said it the way he said everything that mattered: without preamble, without dressing it up, laid down like the fact it was.
"And now?" you asked. Your voice was quite steady. Steadier than you felt.
"He's dead." No elaboration. None needed. The flat Manchester vowels carrying the weight of it cleanly, without mess. "And you're safe. And I—" He looked at you across the table, across the candle and the white linen. "I bought the house," he said. "I've spent a while making it what it is. Making if perfect. I saved up for years. The 141 pays well when you get to a certain level and I wasn't spending it on anything else."
"For years," you repeated, feeling a shiver rack up your spine and your toes go numb.
"Since I was about twenty." He said this without apparent embarrassment, as though it were the most natural thing in the world to spend fifteen years saving money to buy a woman a house from a description she'd given you at sixteen years old. "Took a while to find the right one that wasn’t too far from your parents. The lavender took three growing seasons to look like it did when you pulled up."
Three growing seasons.
He had planted the lavender three years ago. He had stood in a garden three towns from where you lived and planted lavender along a path because a sixteen-year-old girl had mentioned it lying on her back in his garden thirty years ago, and he had tended it for three years, and he had waited.
"Simon Riley," you said.
"It's got room for your books Sunshine, built the shelves myself." His lips quirked up at the corners at your flabbergasted expression.
"You are the most—" You stopped. Started again. "Do you have any idea what the past five years have felt like? Do you have any idea what I—" Your voice did the thing you'd been preventing it from doing, cracked at the edge of the sentence like a plate under too much weight. You stopped. Pressed your lips together. "I grieved you. I sat in my flat and I genuinely, actually grieved you and decided you were dead. I had — Simon, I had a plan for getting through it. I was managing it."
"I know."
"Don't say I know." you snapped sounding more like a bratty child than angry.
"I'm sorry." And this was different. This was not the automatic I know, the absorbing of your anger. This was something he said the way he said very few things — carefully, with full weight behind it. His eyes on yours across the table. "I'm sorry for the five years. I'm sorry I couldn't find another way. I'm sorry you were on your own with it." A pause. "I'm sorry it took me this long to have something worth coming back with."
"The house is not—" You stopped. "You didn't need to buy me a house, Simon. I didn't need—"
"I needed to," he said. Simply. "I needed to know I was coming back with something real. Something that wasn't just me turning up with nothing after all that time, asking you to — to accept—" He moved his hand across the table, and his fingers stopped just short of yours. Not touching. Close. "Asking you to take me as I was. I needed it to be enough. I needed there to be something I could give you that was—"
"Simon." Your voice was very quiet.
"I know it's not—"
"Simon." You turned your hand over on the table. Just that. The small, deliberate movement of turning your palm up.
He looked at it. Then he looked at you. Then, slowly, he put his hand in yours — his enormous, careful, tattooed hand. Not quite the one that had carried your bag through every corridor of secondary school and pulled you up off the pavement after Daniel Holt and held you on the platform at the train station, but this one now and his fingers closed around yours and he held on.
"I only ever wanted you," you said softly.
"Sunshine-"
"You were always worth it," you cut him off. And then, because it was time — because it had been time for approximately thirty years and you were done waiting for the right moment when the right moment had repeatedly failed to arrive — "You were always enough. You were always the thing I was — Simon, you have always been the only one I wanted. Exactly as you are."
He was very still.
"I didn't tell you on the platform," you said. "I should have. I've thought about it every day since."
"So have I," he said.
The candle between you flickered in some movement of air from the kitchen, and in the warm unsteady light his face was open in a way you had waited thirty years to see. His hand was warm and sure around yours, and from the other side of the restaurant you were almost certain you heard Margaret Howarth say something to Gerald in a satisfied undertone.
"You planted the lavender," you grinned.
"Three years ago." He finally smiles back at you, it was crooked and uneven and you loved it.
"You are," you said carefully, "the most ridiculous man I have ever known." You shook your head still grinning.
"Missed you too, sunshine," he smirked.
Dinner ended the way the best dinners end — not with a definitive conclusion but with a gradual, reluctant unwinding, the kind where both people keep finding one more thing to say, one more thread to pull, because the alternative is standing up and the evening becoming past tense.
You ordered dessert.
Neither of you particularly wanted it but you both ordered it, and you both knew why, and neither of you said so. The chocolate brownie was very good. Simon ate his methodically, the way he ate everything, and at one point looked up and caught you watching him and said nothing.
The candle between you had burned down to a stub by the time the bill came.
He paid. You protested on principle. He gave you a look that had not changed at all since he was fourteen years old — flat, certain, faintly amused — and handed the card to the waiter without further discussion.
"That's not—" you started.
"Next time," he said.
Next time. You let it sit there between you, warm and presumptuous and everything you wanted.
Outside, the evening had cooled.
The last of the summer still holding in the air, the kind of September evening that felt like a concession, like the year wasn't ready to be done.
The street was quiet for a Saturday, just a few couples moving between the restaurants and a group of lads outside the pub further down having a smoke. The amber of the streetlights made everything look like something worth remembering.
Simon stood beside you on the pavement, close enough that his arm brushed yours when he turned to look down the street, and you were very aware of the warmth of him and the black shirt and the lavender you couldn't smell from here but could somehow still feel in your hands.
"Walk with me a bit," he said. Not a question, not quite. He'd always done that — phrased invitations as though the outcome were already agreed, as though he simply assumed you'd say yes because you almost always did.
"Alright."
He fell into step beside you, and for a little while you just walked — past the wine bar with its fairy lights, past the old library that had become a gin distillery at some point in the last decade, past the post office that had been there since before either of you were born. You talked about small things. Easy things. The kind of conversation that runs alongside the real one underneath.
Then he stopped.
You stopped too.
Simon looked down at you. His hands were in his pockets. That brown gaze of his moved over your face in the way it had been moving over your face all evening — like he was cataloguing it, like he was making up for lost time in the looking.
"Dance with me," he said.
You blinked. "What?"
He tilted his head, "Come dancing with me."
You stared at him.
Simon Riley, who had sat against the wall at every school disco you'd ever attended, arms folded, watching everyone else with the expression of a man conducting a private risk assessment.
Simon Riley, who you had never, in thirty years of knowing him, seen voluntarily approach a dance floor.
"You don't dance," you said.
"No," he agreed. "But you do."
The simplicity of it landed somewhere very central.
You do.
As though that were reason enough. As though your enjoyment of a thing were sufficient justification for him to walk into it without hesitation.
Which, you supposed, when it came to Simon, it always had been.
"Alright," you said, for the second time in ten minutes.
His hand found the small of your back again, that same light, deliberate touch from inside the restaurant and he guided you down the street.
Simon said you weren't far, when you heard it.
The particular sound of a Domino's box. The slight crinkle of a carrier bag. And then your mother's voice, carrying across the quiet street in the way it always had — warm and clear and entirely without volume control.
"Oh honey! We thought - oh!"
"Oh fuck," you cursed.
You said it very quietly. Not quietly enough. Simon chuckled under his breath.
Your parents were coming along the pavement from the direction of the only car park around here — your father in his weekend coat, your mother in the blue one she'd had for fifteen years. A Domino's pizza box balanced in her arms and a carrier bag hanging from your father's hand.
Movie night. Of course. They still did it every other Saturday, had done since you were small, and of course they would do it tonight of all the Saturday nights in the entire calendar.
Your mother's face when she saw you was pure, unguarded delight — the face she always made when she encountered you unexpectedly, as though each time were still a pleasant surprise. Then her gaze moved, naturally and automatically, to the man standing beside you with his hand at the small of your back.
The delight didn't disappear. It did something more complicated.
"Oh honey," she said again, but differently this time. Softer. Her voice going somewhere else entirely. "Simon?"
The Domino's box dipped. Your father caught it with the reflexes of a man who had been catching things your mother nearly dropped for forty years.
Simon had gone still beside you. Not that controlled, present stillness he had, the one that wasn't tension but something adjacent to it. He was looking at your mother with an expression you couldn't fully read from the side, but you could see the line of his jaw, and it was careful.
"Mrs—" he started.
"Don't you Mrs me," your mother said. Her voice was not angry. That was the thing — you'd prepared yourself, in the split second between seeing them and now, for anger, or for the brisk, self-protective coolness she used sometimes when she'd been frightened. But it wasn't that. It was something that had tears in it, which was considerably worse to witness.
She handed the pizza box to your father without looking at him — he took it with the silent competence of long practice — and she crossed the pavement in four short steps and she put her arms around Simon Riley.
He was so much larger than her. He had always been larger than her, even at fifteen when he'd eaten her shepherd's pie at the kitchen table and been careful to seem like it was casual and not like he was starving. Even when she gave him seconds and he looked like he would beg for thirds.
But now it was almost absurd, the smallness of her against the width of him, and he stood there for just a fraction of a second — that fraction where you could see him recalibrating, receiving something he hadn't prepared for — and then his arms came around her and he held on.
Your mother was crying. Small, quiet sounds, the kind she made when she was trying not to. Her face was pressed against his chest and her hands gripped the back of his black shirt and she said, muffled and with great feeling, "You absolute boy."
Simon said nothing. His eyes, over the top of your mother's head, found yours.
You had to look away. The street was very interesting. The lamppost in particular.
You bit into your lip.
Your father appeared at your shoulder.
He was a quiet man, always had been. The kind of steady, observant presence that took things in without making a production of the taking in. He stood beside you with the pizza box over one arm and the carrier bag in the other hand and watched his wife hold the boy who had eaten at their table for a decade, and he said, very quietly, to you,
"Well. He's not dead then."
"No Dad," you managed. "He's not dead."
"Good," your father said.
As though this settled it. As though the entirety of the past five years of your grief and his, because he had grieved Simon too in his quiet way, in the way of a man who doesn't say things aloud but feels them thoroughly. He looked at Simon over the top of your mother's head and gave him a single, deliberate nod. The kind that meant; we'll talk. The kind that meant; I have things to say to you. The kind that also, underneath both of those, meant; I'm so glad son.
Simon received the nod with equal gravity, which was exactly right.
Your mother finally pulled back. She held Simon by the arms — or tried to, her hands not quite making it around the circumference of them — and looked up at him with red eyes and the particular expression of a woman who has a great deal to say and is choosing, for now, not to say most of it.
"You'll come for dinner," she said. Not a question. The same tone she'd used on him at fifteen and apparently intended to continue using indefinitely. "Sunday. Proper dinner. Not a restaurant. Mine."
"Yes," Simon said. Immediately. Without hesitation.
"Good." She released his arms and reached up and patted his cheek once, firmly, the way you might with someone who had done something frustrating and beloved in equal measure.
Then she turned to you, and her expression did something complicated and warm and knowing, and she didn't say any of the things she was clearly thinking, which you appreciated deeply.
What she said instead was: "Don't stay out too late. You're thirty-five, not seventeen."
"Mum." You scolded.
"I'm just saying." She shrugged.
"We're going dancing," you told her, with the energy of someone redirecting a conversation through sheer momentum.
Your mother looked at Simon. Simon looked at your mother. Something passed between them that was private and thirty years old and not yours to have.
"Of course you are," she said.
Your father passed the Domino's box back to your mother, and said, "Right then. We'll leave you to it." He looked at Simon one more time. "Sunday," he confirmed.
"Sunday," Simon said.
Your parents moved off down the pavement.
Your mother looked back once — just once — and her face when she did was the face you'd seen her wear at your primary school nativity and at your GCSE results and on the morning you'd gone to university; the particular face of a woman watching her child be happy and feeling the full, complicated, loving weight of it.
Then she turned back to your father and said something you couldn't hear, and his hand found her shoulder as they walked, and they rounded the corner and were gone.
You stood on the pavement in the September evening and breathed.
Beside you, Simon was also very carefully just standing there.
"She cried on me," he said, after a moment.
"Yes."
"Didn't expect that."
You turned to look at him. He was looking at the corner your parents had turned, and his face had the quality it sometimes had when something had reached him — not visibly, not dramatically, just in that particular stillness that meant something had got through.
"She cried about you," you told him. "When you stopped writing. Three years ago — there were several times, actually, but three years ago was the worst. She held me in her kitchen and we both—" You stopped. Managed the next part carefully. "She loves you too, Simon. She always did. You were at our table every other night for years."
He was quiet for a moment. Something moved in his jaw. "I know," he said. And this time the I know was different from all the other times he'd said it tonight — heavier, and private.
"You agreed to Sunday dinner," you giggled.
"Of course I agreed to Sunday dinner," he said knowing full well he would have been stupid not to and gotten an earful from your mother.
Simon offered you his hand.
Not at the small of your back this time. His hand, palm up, in the space between you. Old-fashioned and deliberate.
You put yours in it.
"Come on then," he said. "Let's go dancing."
There was, as it turned out, only one place to go dancing in this town on a Saturday night if you meant actual dancing — the kind with a proper floor and music with a real structure to it.
It was not a club.
It was not a bar with a cleared space near the speaker.
It was the old church hall on Callow Street, which had been hosting the Saturday Evening Social Dance since before either of you were born, and which Simon seemed to know about with the specificity of a man who had done his research.
"A dance hall," you said, standing outside it. Through the tall, thin windows the warm light was visible, and the sound — strings, a proper band, something with a waltz rhythm that made the windows hum faintly. "You're taking me to a dance hall."
"Only place with a floor."
"Simon, this is a — there will be pensioners in there." you said quietly.
"There'll be a dance floor," he looked down at you. "And you said yes." he shrugged but looked smug.
He pushed the door open and held it, and because you had in fact said yes, and because the music through the door sounded genuinely lovely, and because you were still holding his hand from the pavement, you went in.
The church hall smelled of floor polish and tea. Fairy lights were strung along the rafters — someone's addition, not the original fixtures, and they made the whole space amber and soft.
Round tables lined the edges, most of them occupied by couples in their sixties and seventies and eighties, a few younger faces dotted among them, everyone dressed with the particular care of people who still believed an evening out was worth dressing for.
On the small stage at the far end, a four-piece band was working through something in three-four time with the ease of musicians who had played together for years.
And at the edge of the floor, clipboard in hand, wearing the same expression of organised authority she'd worn every PE lesson for fifteen years was Mrs Valerie Croft.
She was smaller than you remembered. Or perhaps you were simply larger.
She'd retired at some point — the hair was fully silver now rather than streaked — but the posture was identical: spine straight, chin up, the bearing of a woman who had spent decades telling teenagers to stand properly and had eventually simply become the embodiment of the instruction.
She looked up from her clipboard as you approached and her eyes moved from you to Simon, and to her credit, she didn't miss a step.
"Well," she tilted her chin up to meet his eyes, "Riley."
"Miss," Simon said. Which was technically incorrect given that she had a ring on her finger and had for as long as you'd known her, but you suspected it was because he'd called her Miss in secondary school the way you had. "Mrs Croft. Sorry. We were passing and— " He paused, which was unlike him. "Is there any chance we could crash it?"
Mrs Croft looked at him. She looked at you. She looked at your joined hands with the expression of a woman who had supervised enough teenagers to recognise a development when she saw one.
"Can you behave yourselves?" she asked.
"Yes," you said nodding.
Simon said nothing.
Mrs Croft made a sound that was not quite a laugh but was adjacent to one. "Floor's open," she said. "Don't knock anyone over." And she turned back to her clipboard.
The first dance was not elegant.
Simon was, as he had always been and had openly admitted, not a dancer.
He was a man built for other kinds of movement — purposeful, directed, the kind that had somewhere to go. Dancing required a different relationship with your body, a willingness to be present in it without agenda, and that was not naturally his.
But he was trying. And Simon Riley trying at something he wasn't good at with complete, unhesitating commitment was one of your favourite things in the world.
He held you correctly — one hand at your waist, the other holding yours at the right height — because he had clearly looked this up at some point, which you were choosing not to think about too hard. His footwork was careful. Deliberate. Slightly behind the beat in the way of someone counting silently.
"You're counting," you told him trying your hardest not to laugh.
"Shut up."
"Simon, I can see your lips moving." you snorted.
"I said shut up."
You were laughing now. Properly, helplessly, the kind that came up from somewhere real — and he looked down at you with that face, that flat, long-suffering, completely fond face, and something in his eyes that was warm in a way that had nothing to do with patience and everything to do with the fact that your laugh had always been, apparently, one of his favourite sounds.
"You're doing fine," you told him, once you'd recovered.
"I'm doing terribly," he answered. "Keep going."
By the second dance, he was better.
By the third, he had found something. Some adjustment in the way he held you, the way his hand settled more fully at your waist, drawing you closer so the movement between you became less about individual steps and more about one shared thing. He was a quick study. He always had been, once he'd decided something was worth doing.
You became aware, gradually, of the room watching.
Not intrusively. Not all at once. But in the soft, peripheral way of a room full of people who have been in love for decades and recognise the particular weather of it when it walks through the door.
An older couple near the stage — she in pale blue, he in a suit that had been good once and was still cared for — had stopped talking to watch you.
A woman at one of the corner tables had her chin in her hand.
Mrs Croft, by the door, was very deliberately looking at her clipboard and failing to look only at her clipboard.
You didn't mind. You were too busy watching Simon watch you.
The band changed tempo at half past nine.
The waltz gave way to something with a different shape entirely — something that moved from the hips rather than the feet, a rhythm that was slower in its pulse and considerably less innocent in its intention.
A rumba.
You looked up at Simon.
He looked down at you.
"I don't know this one," he said.
"I'll show you." you breathed.
You took his hand and placed it lower at your waist, right above the curve of your ass. Deliberately watching his face when you did it, watching the shift in his expression, the way something in his eyes went very still and very focused. "Hip to hip," you told him. "Slower than you think. Let the music pull you."
He followed your lead with an attention that was frankly overwhelming in its completeness.
Simon Riley giving you his full, undivided, physical focus was not a small thing. He was so large and so present and he moved with you rather than against you, adjusting with every shift of your weight, and somewhere in the second minute of the song the counting stopped and something else replaced it.
He drew you closer. His hand at your hip pulled you in until there was no space left between you, until you could feel the warmth of him through the green of your dress and you were very aware of every point of contact, of the music and of the room full of people who had gone very quiet.
Then he turned you.
It was not technically correct. It was not what the dance required. But he turned you in a single, smooth movement that his body had decided on and yours simply followed, because that was what it did with him.
And then he dipped you.
The room tilted. His arm was across your back, solid and immovable, and you were suspended in the amber light with the music around you and your hand at his shoulder.
He lowered you — slowly, with complete control, no hesitation in the hold and then his face was close, very close, and his nose grazed the line of your throat making your breath hitch.
A slow, deliberate graze. The warmth of his breath against your pulse point. You felt it in places that had nothing to do with dancing, between your legs throbbing.
His hand — the one at your hip — slid down, just slightly, just enough, finding the outside of your thigh where the fabric of your dress lay, and he hooked your leg, slowly, around his hip. His fingers at the back of your thigh. Holding you there. His nose still at your throat.
The music resolved. Somewhere behind you, someone started clapping.
He brought you upright. Smoothly, slowly, until you were standing again and his hand was still at the back of your thigh. Your leg still around his hip and your faces were very close. Your heart was conducting itself in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with exertion.
You were panting. Slightly. Just slightly.
He was not panting. He was looking down at you with the almost-smile, the one that had always been rarer than gold and twice as valuable — and his eyes were warm and very dark and entirely, completely satisfied with themselves.
"You looked that up as well," you managed.
"No," he said.
"Simon—"
"That one," he said, "I just wanted to do."
From the table by the stage, the woman in pale blue was applauding with great enthusiasm. Her husband had two fingers in his mouth and was whistling.
Mrs Croft had given up entirely on the clipboard.
The taxi back was not a long ride.
It felt longer than it was, and shorter than you wanted.
You sat beside him in the back seat with his thigh against yours and the city moving past the windows and neither of you speaking. The silence had a texture to it that was thick and warm and anticipatory in a way that made the air feel heavy in your lungs.
His hand was on your knee. Just resting there, heavy and warm, the way he did everything — with complete, unapologetic certainty.
You did not move it.
The house appeared at the end of the lane with its white fence and its dark windows and the lavender silver in the moonlight.
You were out of the taxi before it had fully stopped and you were aware how eager this appeared and you didn't care.
Simon paid the driver and caught up with you in three strides because his legs were considerably longer than yours and always had been.
He got to the door first. Key in hand.
The door opened.
And you did not wait for him to step through it.
You took him by the front of his shirt, that black shirt, warm from his body, the fabric bunching in your fists and you lips were suddenly on his.
You walked him backwards through the doorway and you felt the moment his back met the wall just inside and you were already kissing him before he'd fully registered the sequence of events.
Your mouth on his. Your hands in the front of his shirt. Thirty years of it finding its way out all at once, without ceremony, without preamble, without any of the careful management you had been applying to yourself since you were four years old at a preschool art table.
He kissed you back.
He kissed you back the way he did everything — thoroughly, completely, with his full attention and no apparent interest in doing anything else ever again.
His hands came to your face, big and careful, tilting your jaw, and for a moment you were simply inside the realness of him and the warmth of him and the fact that he was here and alive and kissing you in the hallway of the house he'd bought for you.
He pulled back.
"Easy, sunshine," he said against your lips. Low. A little breathless, which you would be privately triumphant about later. The corner of his mouth pulled up in that crooked smile.
You became aware, in the slightly dazed way of someone returning from somewhere, that your hands were still in his shirt and his hands were still on your face and you were standing approximately two inches apart in his hallway.
You also became aware, in the refocusing of your vision, of his mouth.
Of the scar on his upper lip.
You didn't know how you hadn't noticed it before — through dinner, through the dancing, through all of it.
Perhaps you had simply not been this close before. Or perhaps you had been looking at so many things that you hadn't been looking at everything.
It was small, a thin pale line bisecting the left side of his upper lip, old enough to have faded to silver, the kind of scar that had been there for years and had been lived with so thoroughly that the face had absorbed it.
You lifted your thumb and touched it, gently. "How'd you get this?"
He went very still, alert and present and reading you.
You kissed it. Softly. Just that.
Something moved in his throat.
His hands shifted from your face to your waist, warm and settled, and he began to move you gently — backwards, one steady step at a time — turning you both away from the wall and deeper into the hallway. His foot found the door behind him and pushed it closed with a quiet, final click.
"If I tell you about that one," he said, his voice low and even above your head as he guided you past the entrance and toward the stairs, "I'll have to tell you about the rest."
He looked down at you as he said it, that look, the one that said you were the most interesting thing he had ever encountered. The one that made you feel simultaneously seen and slightly undone — and his expression had in it something that was fond and amused and entirely, devastatingly warm.
You kicked your heels off at the bottom of the stairs. They went somewhere behind you. You didn't look.
Your bag went next, dropped against the banister.
"The rest?" you repeated. Your voice came out slightly smaller than you intended. Your eyes, entirely without your permission, moved down the front of him — the black shirt, the breadth of his shoulders, his torso, his thick thighs, all of him — and back up again. Slowly.
He watched you do it. He said nothing.
You swallowed. "Tell me then."
His hand at your waist steered you up the first step, and then the second, and the stairs curved slightly toward the landing above, and at the top of the stairs he pushed open the door to a bedroom.
The room was large and furnished.
A bed, properly large, the kind that accommodated a man his size without complaint. Low lamps on either side casting the same amber warmth as the hall below. Dark wood floors, a window looking out toward the garden, the curtain shifting slightly in a crack of night air.
He kissed you, just inside the door you kissed him back and his hands were at your hips.
Then he pulled back with a groan. Both of you breathing slightly harder than was strictly accounted for by climbing one flight of stairs.
"I want to, sunshine," he said. His voice was very low. Restrained. His hands still on your body, holding you there, his thumbs moving in a small slow motion against the fabric of your dress that was doing nothing to help you think clearly. "I do. But I need to hear it from you first. Your permission. Clear words. I don't want to misunderstand you."
You opened your mouth.
And then your eyes moved, over his shoulder, to the dresser.
A skull mask looked back at you.
You closed your mouth. You looked at it. The mask, white and stark and precise but somehow both alien and completely, recognisably his. The balaclava beside it, folded neatly. And tactical gloves — enormous, black, reinforced, approximately the size of your head.
"That yours?" you asked.
Simon turned his head, following your gaze. He looked at the dresser, then back at you. "Yeah."
"What is it?"
"What I wear on missions."
"Oh," you said.
And then your brain did something entirely beyond your authority. It constructed, with great speed and considerable detail, an image: Simon, broad and enormous, in black tactical gear. Gloved hands. That mask. Hovering over you.
You swallowed.
The image did not leave. It simply settled in, warm and vivid and decidedly unhelpful.
"Sunshine."
His hand came to your face — his big, warm, ungloved hand, his actual hand, the one you knew — his thumb sweeping gently under your eye, bringing you back into the room and the amber lamplight and the present moment.
"Hmm?" you managed meeting his gaze.
His eyes moved over your face with the same comprehensive attention he always gave you.
"Your permission, love," he said. Quiet. Certain.
"Oh." You blinked. "Yes. Yes, you have it. Always."
The almost-smile. "Not for everything I want to do to you." His thumb was still moving, very gently, under your eye. "I'll ask. Multiple times."
You stared at him. "Multiple—"
"Times," he confirmed. His voice was entirely level. His eyes were not.
You pushed his shoulder and your cheeks burned.
He caught your hand as you pushed it and laughed, a low, real, full sound, the kind that you had spent most of your life engineering because it was so rare and so completely, unreasonably good.
You laughed too, properly, the helpless kind, and his forehead came down to rest against yours and you were both laughing in the amber light of his bedroom with the skull mask on the dresser and the lavender outside the window and thirty years behind you and everything in front.
The laughing settled.
Not all at once — it unwound gradually, the way laughter does when it's the real kind, leaving something warm and loose in its place.
His forehead was still against yours. His hands had moved from your face to your waist, both of them now, holding you the way he'd held you on the dance floor — with that complete, unhurried certainty, like you were something he'd been waiting to hold properly for a very long time and intended to do it right.
The amber light of the lamps lay across everything. Through the gap in the curtain, you could see the edge of the garden — the pale shapes of flowers, the dark of the lawn.
"Tell me about the rest," you said quietly.
He pulled back just enough to look at you. "The scars?"
"You said if you told me about the one on your lip you'd have to tell me about the rest." You reached up and touched the scar again — that thin, silver line — with the pad of your thumb. "So tell me about the rest."
He looked at you for a long moment. Then he reached up and began, without ceremony, to unbutton his shirt.
You were very still.
He did it the way he did everything — without drama, without performance, button by button from the collar down, and when he shrugged it from his shoulders and set it aside you understood, in a way you hadn't before, what eighteen years of that life had written on him.
He was enormous.
You'd known that in the abstract — had known it from the doorframe and the dance floor and the way rooms seemed to reorganise themselves around him — but this was different.
This was the specific, undeniable reality of his shoulders, the breadth of his chest, the muscle of his arms that carried the tattoo sleeve on the left, the ink wrapping from wrist to shoulder in dark, intricate patterns that in this light you still couldn't fully read but wanted to.
And the scars.
There were more than you'd expected.
Each one a different shape and age and story, written into the topography of him in pale and silver lines. A long one along his left ribs. Something older, fainter, across the top of his right shoulder. A circular scar below his collarbone on the left side that your medical knowledge was sufficient to identify and that made your chest constrict briefly and completely before you put that particular knowledge away for now.
He was watching your face as you looked. Careful. Giving you the time of it.
You stepped forward. You placed your hand flat against his sternum — his heart under your palm, steady and real — and you felt him exhale.
"The lip," you said.
"Kandahar. 2004. Caught the stock of a rifle." He said it the same way he'd told you everything tonight — flat, factual, trusting the fact to carry the weight. "Bit through my lip. Wasn't pretty for a while."
You moved your hand from his sternum to his ribs. Found the long scar there, traced it gently with your fingertips.
"That one."
"Knife. 2009. I moved the wrong way and the other man moved the right way." The shadow of something in his face that was not quite humour and not quite not. "Lesson learned."
Your hand moved to his shoulder. The older, fainter scar.
"Before the military," he said, before you asked. His voice changed, just fractionally. Flatter. Doing more work to stay level. "Not a mission."
You understood. You didn't ask further. You pressed your lips to it instead — gently, just that, your mouth against the old pale mark — and you felt the breath go out of him in a way that was different from all the others. Slower. Deeper.
"Sunshine," he said. Very quietly.
"The one below your collarbone," you said.
A pause. "That one's not a story for tonight."
You tilted your head back to look up at him. "Is it a story for eventually?"
His eyes on yours. Something in them that was considering, assessing, "Yeah," he said. "Eventually."
"Alright," you said. You meant it. You had waited thirty years; you could wait for the story of one scar.
His hand moved to your face. That same gesture from the hallway — his thumb at your cheek, slow and deliberate and he tilted your chin up and kissed you. Not urgently this time. Slowly. Deeply.
His hands found the zip at the side of your dress — careful, unhurried — and he looked at you, a clear question in it, and you nodded, and his hands were very steady and very gentle. Your dress went the way of your heels and your bag, somewhere behind you, unmissed.
He looked at you the way he had looked at you on the porch yesterday, and outside The Grill tonight, and across the restaurant table, and on the dance floor — with that complete, comprehensive attention.
Only now there was nothing restrained about what was in it. It was simply there, open and certain, and it was thirty years of something finally being allowed to be exactly what it was.
"Hi," you said. Which was absurd. Which made him laugh again, low and real.
"Hi, sunshine," he said. His hands at your waist. His forehead dropping to yours.
“Si I need to-“ you breathed in deep, “I um,” he pulled his head away from yours, looking into your eyes with those brilliant brown ones of his.
“What is it Sunshine?” He asked, his finger under your chin tilting your head up.
“I’m, I’ve never-“ you sigh, “I’ve told you so many things, I can’t believe I can’t even say this to you.”
“Do we need to slow down?” He asked, his voice softening.
“No. It’s not that. I mean I’m not a virgin if that’s what you’re thinking I just, no guy has ever-“ you sigh again, your eyes dropping from his.
Simon is quiet. He waits, the way he always waits — giving you the whole space of it, not rushing you toward the end of the sentence.
“Made it good,” you finally say, to his chest. “For me. It’s always just, fine. Maybe sometimes I get close but then it’s over. Not that there’s been loads of guys, maybe three.”
A beat.
You make yourself look up at him.
Something changes in his face.
You see the flare of it.
Anger.
Not toward you — you feel that immediately, the anger isn't at you, it moves through him and settles somewhere else entirely. His jaw shifts. His eyes, for just a moment, go somewhere dark and quiet.
"Every one of them," he says. Low. More to himself than to you.
"Simon—"
"Had you," he says. "And didn't—" He stops. The jaw again. His eyes squeeze shut. "Didn't pay attention."
"It's not—"
"It is." His eyes open. He looks at you, his hands moving to your hips, both of them, settling there with a weight that feels like anchoring, like he needs the contact as much as you do. The darkness has settled now, controlled, underneath everything else.
"And I wasn't here." Something moves through his expression — not guilt exactly, but something adjacent to it, something private and old. "Should've been your first, sunshine. Should've been there to—"
He stops himself. His forehead drops to yours.
"I've waited years for this," he says quietly. "I'm not rushing it. And I'm going to pay attention."
“Pay attention?” You ask breathless.
“To every sigh,” he kissed your cheek, “whimper and moan.” His lips moved down to your jaw. “To the way your hips move, the way your back arches, the way you’ll writhe under me, how I’ve imaged it every time I’ve gotten off for the last two decades.” He whispered the last bit into your ear, teeth tugging on your earlobe.
You gasp, “Simon.” Your cheeks burn.
“Oh don’t tell me you never thought about it.” He grins pulling back to look down at you.
You look at the floor sheepishly cause of course you have. Of course you’ve cum the hardest you ever have in your life only when thinking about Simon fucking you.
"Oh you have." He smirked titling his head.
“Shut up.” You push his shoulder and he laughs.
His hands leave your hips and then you're moving, his arms around you, and the edge of the bed meets the back of your knees.
Then his massive paws are in your hair and his lips are on your neck as your back meets the sheets. His weight heavy and solid on you. You could tell he was holding himself up so he didn’t squish you.
He leaned back on his heels, kneeling between your legs. You sighed in satisfaction when his fingers ran over your bare skin. His blunt nails scratching softly where your pelvic bone sits.
"So beautiful Sunshine," He grabs your hips and squeezes, "Fill my hands with you finally." Simon groans. A noise you've been picturing in your head. This and everything else that happens this evening, you truly believe, will be one of those times when reality is better than anything you have imagined.
Simon's brown eyes have always been intense, but right now the way he's looking down at you it's like he is someone else entirely. His eyes almost black with how much they have darkened.
"Simon." You tangle your fingers with his.
"Can I?" He asks. His hand, the one not in yours, trailing down your thigh and stopping on your mound. You clench around nothing when he pushes down, just a little bit of pressure that you feel in your clit and makes your hips buck.
You don't miss the way his lips do the almost smile thing. You nod furiously but he shakes his head.
"Need your words love." He raises a brow.
"Yes, yes Simon touch me." You breathe out, your chest feeling tight when he nods, moving his hand down to cup your cunt over your underwear.
And maybe its because you haven't had sex in three years, maybe its because you are touch starved or maybe its simply because its Simon, but your back arches and your moan is down right pornographic with a simple touch over your underwear.
"So responsive." He mumbles, his thumb rubbing circles over your clit through the fabric. "Get your tits out for me Sunshine, wanna see em." he grunts feeling your underwear getting wet.
Shakily you reach behind your back and unclip your bra. "Been thinking about them for years. What they look like, how they'll bounce when I fuck you." He groans as you pull the straps down your arms and fling the bra on the floor.
His eyes are on your chest, he doesn't blink. Then as if his system has rebooted, he blows air out of his cheeks and whistles low. "Fuck lovie, so pretty. You're a dream." Simon leans forward and wraps his lips around your breast, his tongue swirling around the nipple as his thumb continues circling your clit.
You moan, fingers tugging at his hair.
He comes off your breast with a pop making you whine and push at his shoulder. He grins pressing his thumb firmer against you, while sliding his other hand over your leg, index finger tracing over the small scar on you leg from when you fell off your bike after Simon broke your training wheels.
There was something comforting about this. Simon wasn't someone you had to explain yourself to, he already knew every version of you, he was simply adding this one to his list. This version, open and honest and begging the man you'd known for thirty years to make you cum on his fingers.
This didn't feel like a hook up, not like other guys have, but it felt like two people who have been each other's home for years and they're finally admitting it.
"Kiss me Simon." You're not even sure if what you said made sense with how much you were panting. But he leaned down to graze his lips along yours. Teasing and soft, despite the fast past he'd started to set with his thumb.
"Stop teasing." You huffed.
"Its my favourite pastime." He grinned hooking his fingers in your underwear, pulling them down and moving with them to settle between your legs.
You gasp, when his tongue slides from your asshole to your clit. "Simon!" His dark eyes are locked on yours as he swirls the tip of his his tongue around your entrance. Your toes curl, your head falling back onto the soft bed sheets.
A few occasions, you could count on one hand, had a guy you were with eaten you out and it was good but fuck, it didn't feel like this.
You felt like you were burning all over with each swipe of his tongue, each dip inside your entrance, each pattern he begins to circle over your clit.
He was learning you.
Simon groans against you, his breath hot, it made you dizzy. You feel everything, its too much to quick and your hips start to buck against his mouth.
Simon clearly had no intention of slowing down or stopping as he slides his arms around your thighs and splays his hands over the tops of them locking you in place.
It feels like fire, like molten lava pooling low in your abdomen the harder his tongue presses against you.
You don’t even recognise the sounds coming out of you, it’s as if every movement pulls a new one from you.
His thumb replaces his tongue and he rubs the bump in small circles until you can barely breathe. “Sound so pretty,” he murmurs just as your back arches and you moan loudly into the night air.
He is still speaking but you can’t hear anything he is saying, it’s all blurring together the way your vision is blurring. His thumb slides from your clit down until it’s pushing its way inside you. Your hips jerk away but his other hand is quick to hold you in place.
“No running.” Simon growls.
You cry out when his tongue comes back to torture you, lapping at you like he’s never had a drink and you're fresh water. Soon enough the rhythm he’s built has your hips rolling forward seeking more of whatever he has to give you.
Your hand reaches for his arm and squeezes hard the exact moment your vision turns white and your body shakes, dissolving into pleasure. It's like lightning pulsing through you. He works your through your orgasm, wringing every last wave of pleasure from you before he moves to your lips, kissing you.
“Did so good Sunshine. I’ve got you.” His arms wrap around you, your nipples grazing against the hair on his chest, that alone has you whimpering.
"Need more, want you inside me Simon. Please." You look into his eyes, your shyness gone with your orgasm.
"Okay Sunshine." Simon chuckles, the sound vibrating against you.
He pulls back and gets off the bed before he starts to unbuckle his belt. He pushes his black slacks down along with his underwear, his large, and he was so fucking big, cock already hard.
"Always wondered what you'd be like in bed," He tilts his head with a smirk, "If you'd like being in control. Or if you'd prefer me to lead," He knelt on the bed again, and oh my god Simon Riley, your best friend of thirty years and the love of your life was crawling up the bed towards you until his cock was flush with your entrance. "If you'd be needy and beg. Or if you'd bark orders at me." He slapped the head of his cock against your clit. "If you'd be loud or quiet."
"If you'd let me do whatever I wanted to you," his head titled back, eyes shut, "Fuck Sunshine, the things I've imagined doing to you," He looks down at you with the most intense gaze, pining you there on the bed, "Would you let me lovie? Do whatever I want to you?" He asks, pearly whites peaking out to sink into his bottom lip.
"Like what?" Your breath is so unsteady, so hitched and uneven you feel your cheeks heat even more than they have done at his words.
He grins, "Like what?" He chuckles pushing the head of his cock against your entrance, not in, but resting against it, "Wanna fuck you so hard you can't walk. Make love to you slow and so deep you'll feel me everywhere. Bend you over every surface in this house and make you cry on my cock-"
"Simon!" You gasp.
"Can I Sunshine?" He groans pushing in a little more and your eyes sting with tears at the stretch.
"Yes! Please yes!" He pushes in slowly. One of his hands coming next to you on the bed and the other gripping your hip. He keeps sliding in further, so slowly until its sheathed inside you.
Simon does not move. You can see the restraint within the way his teeth are gritted, his brows furrowed, sweat forming on his forehead.
“Fuck you feel amazing wrapped around me, so tight.” He groans.
You don’t have any words and even if you did, you doubt you would be able to say them. You have never felt so…full. So filled to the brim and unable to get a reprieve from it.
“M’gonna move, gotta move Sunshine,” Simon growls and the fullness disappears for a second before he’s pushing himself back in.
“Fuck you feel so good Si.” You shudder and stars appear in your vision when he moves forward and takes your legs with him folding you in half.
Simon Riley has you in fucking mating press and didn't even break the slow rhythm he's building. He continues this push and pull movement until it begins to flow, each movement begins where the other ends. The pattern making you sob, “Don’t stop!”
You can't function and its only now that you understand the phrase 'being fucked dumb', rocking your hips, trying desperately to keep up with each thrust, back arched so beautifully.
Simon lets his hand slip and curve around your jaw without thinking about it, "Taking me so well Sunshine." The feral look in his eyes sends a shiver up your spine.
"Too big." You sobbed, your hands grabbing at his large biceps as he thrusts harder. He could feel every ridge and curve of your sopping cunt.
"You can take it." He encouraged you, biting at your neck leaving marks in his wake and looking so damn happy whilst doing it.
You continued to moan and whimper, tears of pleasure falling down your face while Simon's huge body hovered over you. Protecting you from the outside world, in here, it was just you and him.
"Si..oh!" you cried out feeling him hit that rough spot inside your weeping, swollen cunt.
"There it is." He didn't mean to grin like a obsessed man in such an intimate moment but he couldn't help himself. He never can with you. Each thrust hits the one place no man ever seems to be able to find but Simon seemingly found with ease. A spot that makes a tightening begin like a coil, being wound with every drive of his hips.
Your sinful noises morph into higher pitched breathy little screams.
"I know lovie, I know." He cooed, holding you closer. His sweat glazed skin meeting yours as his large veiny hand slips under your head, his other arm curling around your waist.
You move your hips and he groans vulgar into the air, his hand gripping your hair and pulling your head back, a little to the side before he attacks your neck all messy. Smearing his lips across your throat, you don’t even recognise the sound that leaves your mouth.
He pulls away, his dark eyes flit to your squelching pussy, the noise attracting his attention pupils dilating, honing in on the way your cunt sucks his cock back in. He couldn’t pull away even if he wanted to and fuck he doesn’t, he wants nothing more than to stay in your pretty pussy forever.
“Simonfuckyespleaserighttheredontstop!” All the words and moans blend together until your mumbling nonsense trying your hardest to keep conscious, it’s difficult with the way he’s fucking into you so deliciously it’s making you delirious in the best way.
His big body towering over yours, big hands gripping you almost bruisingly. His thick muscular hairy thighs press against your skin compellingly, the sight before you, it's irresistible. All you have to do is look down to see his massive cock sliding in and out of you, a ring of white collecting at the base.
It's too much seeing him like this, feeling the sweet pleasure burn through you and yet Simon moves one of his hands off your head and presses a thumb to your swollen, aching clit.
You're done for.
You sob, so fucking loud you swear everyone in the world can hear it, hot tears flow down your cheeks staining them.
"That's it." The words wash over you with your orgasm, it swirls around you, clings to you, and pushes you down down down the rabbit hole of pleasure. Oversensitivity sets in making you whine at his touch, but you can't stop yourself from wanting more.
Your hips buck into his touch eliciting a dirty chuckle from him.
As Simon picks up his thrusts, he comes to the conclusion that he loves you like this, wants to see it everyday. You're so drunk, so delirious and he loves it. Loves the far away look in your eyes right before they roll back into your skull.
He shoves his face into your neck groaning, "Gonna cum Sunshine, need to. Where?" his thrusts pick up again, as if that were even possible.
"Cum inside me Simon, fill me up." You cry out.
Simon must have been right there as he cums the second you finish your sentence. Hot thick robes of cum pushing deep inside you. He rubs your clit faster and another smaller orgasm zips through you leaving you whimpering.
He stays in you, holding you until he goes soft. He moves your legs so they don't cramp. "Did so well for me Sunshine. I love you so much." He looks into your eyes as more tears spill down your cheeks.
"I love you Simon." you bring your fingers into his hair, pulling him closer to kiss you. The contrast between the way he just destroyed your guts and is now kissing you so softly, is astounding.
He is careful when he picks you up and walks into the ensuite bathroom to the right, flicking the light on and placing you on the toilet. "Gotta pee sunshine, don't want you getting you a uti." He says and you're so tired you don't even have the energy to be embarrassed.
Your eyes as still closed as you pee. Your hand moves to find the toilet paper but a warm flannel is being pressed against you, Simon's other hand on your knee to keep them open. You whine and push his hand away, "Simon that's icky." You frown at him opening your eyes to see him looking at you with a frown of his own.
"Nothing about you is icky Sunshine. I'm clearing up my mess, now move your hand." You do as told and it occurs to you, through your tired haze, while Simon gently wipes you clean that he must be used to clearing up mess with the job he does.
"All done. Want a shower or straight to sleep?" He asks.
"Sleep." You yawn making him smile at you.
He carries you back to the bed, lifting the duvet and settling you both underneath it.
The particular quality of afterwards settles in the room.
The warmth of it, the specific silence, the way the world outside the window continues to exist and you become aware of it again in layers. The sound of the garden. The distant sound of a car somewhere. The sound of him breathing.
You were lying with your head on his chest. His arm around you, heavy and warm. His heartbeat under your ear, steady and unhurried, the same heart that had been beating beside you in one form or another for thirty years.
His hand moved. Slowly, idly, up and down your back.
You watched the lamplight glow on the beside table. You thought about the lavender. You thought about the train station in 2001, and the birthday cards, and the bottom stair with the cream envelope, and Margaret Howarth saying you always did belong together with the satisfied certainty of someone who had known it before either of you did.
"Simon," you said.
"Yeah."
"You planted lavender for three years."
"You mentioned that already."
"I'm still processing it."
A low sound in his chest that was the rumble of a laugh contained. "Take your time Sunshine."
You propped yourself up and looked at him. His face in the lamplight — older, marked, those brown eyes that had been watching you since you were four years old, now watching you from a pillow in the house he'd bought you.
His expression was open in the way it had been open on the porch and at the restaurant table and in the dance hall, the way it had been open perhaps three times in thirty years before tonight and was now, apparently, simply his face when he looked at you.
You loved him so much.
You had loved him in different quantities and different registers for most of your life and now you loved him in this one too, this new one, and it was the same love and completely different and you thought you would be discovering its dimensions for a considerable amount of time.
"You should have told me," you said. "Years ago. Before the train."
"Yeah," he said. No argument.
"I would have said it back then too."
Something moved in his face. "I know," he said. And then, quieter, "I wasn't ready then. Wasn't enough yet."
"Simon—"
"I know what you're going to say."
"You were always—"
"I know," he said. "I believe you. Now." His hand came up to your face, tucking a strand of hair back, his thumb at your cheekbone. "Took me a while to get there. But I'm here."
"You're here," you agreed smiling.
"And you're here." his hand tangled itself in your hair.
"I'm here." you giggled.
He looked at you for a long moment. Then, "Stay with me."
Not a question, not quite — more like a hope said aloud. The rarest thing from him. He had carried so much silently for so long, and this one small thing cost him something, and you could see it, and you loved him for it.
"It's my house," you said cheeky and bright.
He blinked. Then that laugh again — the real one, the rare one — and your heart did what it always did when you earned it, that particular, irreplaceable lurch.
"Yeah Sunshine," he said. "It is."
You lay back down against his chest. His arm came around you. His heartbeat under your ear.
Outside, the lavender moved. The Union flag was still on the roof. The porch swing sat in the dark with its yellow cushion, waiting for morning.
"Sunshine," he said. Into your hair.
"Hmm."
"I love you."
You pressed your lips to his chest, above his heart.
"I love you too," you said. "I've loved you since you were that chubby four-year-old who stole my crayons."
A long pause.
"Chubby," he repeated.
"Stocky," you amended, grinning into his chest. "You were very stocky."
"I was four."
"You were a very solid four year old."
His arm tightened around you — not painfully, just firmly, the way of a man making a point through the medium of holding — and you laughed again, helplessly, into the warmth of him.
He made that sound, that low rumbling laugh that lived in his chest, and the lamp burned warm and low and outside the lavender moved in the dark.
Simon Riley.
Who stole your crayons at four and broke your glasses at seven and learned to read because of you and carried your bag through every corridor of secondary school and punched a boy for pushing you over and kissed your cheek in a toilet corridor and sat beside you through every lunch and glared at anyone who called you a nerd and came round to your kitchen table for years and went to war at seventeen and sent you cards from the edges of the world and planted lavender for three years and bought you the house you described at sixteen and came home.
𝜗ৎ Simon won't admit it but he's an exhibitionist freak
cw. mature content
Simon doesn't necessarily care where he fucks you, he's quite lenient with it actually. like the time he had you took you across his captain's desk while everyone else was in the dinning hall. You just wanted to deliver your husband the lunch you had freshly prepared, all of his favourites, at his base yet the bastard couldn't help but feel like a horny teenager, pulling you in the first room he saw, that just so happened to be his captain's office.
Just seeing you in that pretty sundress had his dick hardening under his slacks, he just couldn't resist his pretty dovie and he couldn't care less about where he's pinning you. His gloved hand hurriedly pulling up his balaclava as he pressed his mouth to yours, his lips rough and chapped due to the lack of moisture on them. Simon's mouth moved hungrily against yours, his thick tongue pushing into your mouth as his hands already groped your ass.
He picked you up with his hands firmly under your ass while your arms wrapped tightly around his neck, you bit his lower lip, letting out a soft giggle as you licked his lips to moisturize them, "Your lips are so dry." "'cause I haven' kissed ya enough, c'mere lovie" he mumbled before chasing the feel of your lips as he puts you down on the cap's desk.
Simon immediately spread your legs before he pressed his hips right against your clothed cunt, his bulge prominent in his pants as he grinded without a care that he was practically humping his wife in his captain's office while people were present. His large hand cover the span of your waist as he pushed his thick tongue through your parted lips, "fuck luv, ya look bloody gorgeous!" He murmured before swallowing your tongue whole as he ate your mouth desperately.
The balaclava sat uncomfortably tight on his broken nose but he didn't mind, getting lost in the way your mouth felt against his. His large hand hurriedly pushed up the hem of your dress, bunching it at your waist as he dipped his hand underneath the tiny fabric you called underwear. The thrill of simon touching you in such a public place had your pussy gushing and soaking the lacy pair, a dark spot spreading as simon's eyes dipped and the side of his mouth turned into a cunning smirk, "look at ya, fuckin' soaked through the pair. Does this excite ya tha' much, huh?"
The way he condescendingly spoke had your thighs pushing together with his hand, "shut up, you're the one who's acting like a horny teen–!" Your words get abruptly cut as simon glides his thick fingers, the middle and ring, through your dewy folds, stuffing them right into your pussy as you gasped. "F-fuck!" He smirked and without another thought he started to thrust his hand as humanely as it could go, the hand on your thighs travelled up and pulled your hips free of those panties, throwing them somewhere across the room.
Your mouth lets out a shriek at the sudden explosion of pleasure spreading through your cunt up to your stomach, you bit your lip, slapping a hand over your mouth as you let out a muffled scream, your eyes sharply stared at the locked door, just outside of it, soldiers walked cluelessly at the forbidden act happening behind the door. Simon's smirk just widened as his pace didn't waver despite your attempt to close your legs, his free hand gripping your thigh wide open as he fingered you, "Keep 'em open doll." The tips of his nails scratched and poked at the sweet spot inside of your gooey, clammy walls made your eyes roll back in your head.
You felt the coil in your stomach tighten as you bit your lip tightly, trying to not let any lewd sounds out in your husband's captain's office, your other hand gripped onto his shoulder, digging into the skin through the tshirt as your cunt clenched around his fingers, "There ya go luvie, cum on ma fingers." His fingers moved faster than ever as your toes curled in your shoes, your head thrown back as you came with a cry, "Simon!"
You panted, gripping onto his shoulder while the other hand gripped the edge of the table as your pussy pulsed like a heartbeat, suddenly feeling empty as he removed his fingers. And without wasting another second, simon worked open his belt, his thick cock slapping his thigh because of how heavy it was even when hard. His tip was flushed red and already leaking precum as he gripped his base and slammed it deep in your cunt making you let out a shriek!
He let out a hiss at the tight warmth of your cunt, slapping a hand over your mouth, "Bloody hell baby, don' be so loud, can't have anybody knowing I'm fuckin' ya." Tears swelled in your eyes as he rammed his hips into your cushy cunt, your arousal leaked down your cunt to your table and down your ass. You tried, really did, biting your lip to quiet down your cunt along with his hand covering your mouth but you had just came, your body still thrumming from the pleasure as he fucked you hard.
Simon let out a short laugh, watching as you struggled to keep quiet, your thighs trying to close as you shook your head desperately, "Shh shh hun, ya can take it. Be good f'me." He grunted, slamming his hips into your cunt. You could feel every throbbing vein and every thick ridge of his cock shaping your walls, all due to the overstimulation and thrill. Simon's hand sneaked down and coaxed your swollen clit out of it's hood, letting out a smirk as you immediately clenched impossibly tight around him.
With his ministrations on your poor clit and your poor swollen pussy, it wasn't long when you reached your peak only this time it was something more as you squirted all over him, "There ya go doll, there ya go!" He let out a amused laugh, not stopping as you sprayed all over his stomach and jeans, dripping down to the table and floor as he chased his own orgasm before cumming deep in you, "Good girl baby."
It was late in the evening when Price finally entered his office, too busy in the meeting with laswell when he stopped at the door. He took one look around the office, it looked like how he had left it but he could feel something in the air, something sweet when his eyes spotted the pink lacy pair of spoilt panties neatly kept on the middle of his very sticky desk with a note "Apologies for using your office sir." He immediately recognised simon's neat yet gruff handwriting, crumbling the note as his calloused fingers brushed on the still wet spot on the panties—his L.T's wife. John smirked, rubbing the fabric, "Dirty Bastard."
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