his biceps are almost as big as his goddamn neck, his thighs are like tree trunks, his chest is broad like his shoulders, the muscles that plane his back something you love to run your fingers over and watch twitch when he's overstimulated or when he's trying to relax under your watchful eye after a hectic shift
his freckles add to the playground his body becomes the moment he's home and safe from the outside world, the wrinkles around his mouth and eyes, above his brow on his forehead that lend to the fact that he makes so many expressions and feels so openly sometimes for someone who's been through so much
his fingers tangle in yours when you hold hands, out and about or simply sharing space on the couch. out on the back patio he's curated just for you once he found out how much you like to spend time outside. watching the movement of his arms as he put together a simple sun shade with a few posts and a swatch of thick canvas proven and reviewed to have uv protection woven into it had been the highlight of a hectic week
and then he'd gone above and beyond to hang up new plant and beautiful patterned shawls all around the space to make it the comfiest and coziest second living room for you basically. a new couch and lounge table were the second things you watched him expertly put together. his thick fingers twisting screws and bolts into place in order to get them secured properly with the tools had you standing there like a moth entranced by a porch light
his fingers are tangled in yours now as you sit atop his lap, his cock buried deep as the back of your thighs rest atop his, 'easy, baby, take a breath for me, you're taking me so well'
and of course he's thick here too, stretching you in the best way, in the way that only he can. he knows it too, knows how to provide- how to communicate- how to be the perfect partner for you and you love him, god do you love him. you wiggle your hips now, pulling a whining sound from him through a punched out breath, you lean into him and kiss him full on the lips, hands cradling his face as you do so. he looks up at you with those gleaming hazel eyes, bright with pleasure and your heart melts just as your stomach flips and your core tightens. he groans this time, brow furrowing as his hands tighten on your waist
'c'mon, move for me, please, baby'
and who are you to deny the man who does so much for you?
a bit different of a request buuuuuuut do you have any ideas for other shawn character magazine mockups teehee? like sammy, charlie, or pope (dunno what magazines theyd be in but i trust your creative juices)
did someone ask for more magazine mockups? @in-ky did! everyone say thank you to them! (and i threw in stan for good measure - we all know he became an early 2000s heartthrob)
once again NO AI WAS USED IN MAKING THESE! just canva and a dream :)
I know that this might be a given, but if I EVER find out someone is commenting links of my fanfics—ESPECIALLY THE SMUT ONES—under any of Shawn's accounts or any other actor in general's account (ie tiktok, instagram, twitter), I will be deleting and shutting down everything, and you all will never hear from me ever again.
coming from a fandom where an author is currently getting death threats because fans thought it'd be a good idea to comment smut fics of a person with his coworker under his tiktoks and also bringing it up in a large YouTube fandom where the YouTuber tweeted about it, this is insensitive and insane.
don't even get me started how mad I get when celebrities (noah wyle I'm looking at you) bring up fan fiction into professional spaces. not even 6 years ago, fan fiction was such a taboo subject, but then covid happened and we all forgot how to act. like what happened to fandom etiquette????
KEEP THE FICS INSIDE THE FIC SPACES PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF EVERYTHING THAT IS HOLY!!!!!!
Andrew Pope Cody’s favorite position is cowgirl. He loves watching your pretty face scrunch up in pleasure as you move on his cock. He watches your tits bounce from beneath you, his mouth hanging open as he nods subconsciously. His big heavy calloused hands resting on your hips, fingers digging into your skin.
Sammy Bryant’s favorite position is missionary. He can’t stop leaning down and kissing your soft lips through shared moans. He loves pushing down on your lower tummy as he plows into you, feeling himself deep in your guts. He’ll throw your legs over his shoulders to get a deeper angle on the nights he feels like being rough, plowing into you so hard you can feel the little pudge above his cock pushing against your clit.
Jack Abbot’s favorite position is doggy style. He rests his leg on a fluffy pillow, the other bent at the knee hanging off the bed a little. He loves the way you arch your back when he softly runs his palm over it, pushing down lightly at your shoulder blades. His hands grabbing at your hips, pulling you back onto him. Throaty grunts coming from his lips, little “fuuck yeah, you like that?” Coming from his plushy lips, he’s biting his bottom lip, skin slapping skin as he pounds into you from behind.
Titus Danforth’s favorite position is also cowgirl, but you on his lap. He fucking loves when he’s sitting up against the headboard and you’re on his lap, riding his cock. Your arms wrapped around his neck, nodding and moaning, moving your hips. His big hands running up and down your back, pulling your bare chest into his and it’s all sweaty and messy and perfect. He buries his face into your neck, sniffing it deeply and biting at it, smiling.
jack consistently gets cuteness aggression around you.
you have no idea how often he has to stop himself from rounding the nurses annex and squishing your cheeks together with one big, calloused hand. just squeezing the puffy flesh like his own little stress ball and whispering “you’re so… fuckin’ cute” before dropping his hand and going back to work.
you have no idea that jack pulls you to stand in between his legs at the bar, your back to his chest, in an act of completely innocent adoration. on the bar stool, his knees frame your hips and his one hand drags across the skin tenderly. the other arm wraps around your clavicle, leaning you further back to him. he doesn’t give a shit what robby thinks, he’s passed that point 1 beer ago. so when he drags your earlobe into his mouth, suckling and smiling into your neck when you squeal and giggle and flinch, he can’t help himself when he questions. “so pretty, who’re you this pretty for, huh?”
and friend… you have no idea, the strength jack has to possess when you furrow your eyebrows at one of his commands and tilt your head like a little puppy.
it was a normal shift at ptmc, what jack would always describe as “your usual mix of blood and tissue and coding.” not necessarily a bad shift, in fact quite tame! which is why it’s so confusing that jack is leading you to the bedroom with a slight, sudden push to your back so you stand in the middle of the room. your scrubs still smell like the soft vanilla of your detergent, despite the grime layered on from a 12 hour shift.
jack approaches, his gait swaying as his hands clasp behind his back. he needs to bring back his military training just so he doesn’t completely sink his teeth into you within seconds of getting you alone. facing you, jack tilts his chin up, looking down his nose because he knows it riles you up. “take your panties off.”
a bambi blink, a tilt in your head & a swallow before you lean down. jack watches your every move as you slide your scrubs down, and peel of your panties before handing them to him. fuck.
you think his aggressive cuddles were bad then? how do you explain the deep nose breaths he now takes before speaking? your panties, pastel pink with a little white heart in the center, a lacy little bow around it, has jack’s eyes rolling back.
he isn’t even shameless when he brings them to his nose, a deep inhale as the lace drags against his cheek. it builds in him so quickly his hands shake, “been wanting to get my hands on you alll day. lay down, lemme see those eyes.”
and you have no, fucking idea, how much the love and affection in your eyes drives him insane. god forbid you yawn and apologize mid thrust, his hand might be permanently etched into your throat as he kisses at your face. he can’t help himself, moving to bite at your neck, “my baby, i love you so much.”
gator with a baby daughter (I'm thinking about toddler-age-- still kind of babbling incoherently instead of talking) and his and her favorite thing EVER is when he just picks her up and throws her around.
roughness comes naturally to him. it always has. but it's different in the way he holds her-- scoops her up from behind and fits her onto his shoulders, snags her by the back of the shirt just before she runs into something, reaches over a hand that spans her entire torso to halt a random fall without moving from his place on the sofa.
it's intrinsic. it's just like him to act quickly, almost without thinking, to hold and protect. and he finds gradually that she likes when he tosses her around, manhandles her, lifts her up so high she can touch the ceiling with her grubby hands. he just grabs her, wherever she is or whatever she's doing, and she never minds so long as she can grip onto his hair or his forearm or the buckles on his work vest.
sometimes, following the sound of squealing and giggles, you find them both in the living room, your daughter's face torn in joy while gator pulls her down from where he's thrown her over his shoulder and hangs her upside down, his hands firm around her middle. he's grinning ear to ear at her, and she's laughing just as hard, even as you scold him and tell him to be careful and put her down.
he just turns that grin on you, protesting, "what? look, she likes it. no, it's fine. I've got her. oh, just relax, mama."
and you grumble something about how he's gonna kill you one day.
I think this specific kind of wrestling actually feels like a form of self-control to gator. in his head, the trust his daughter has in him is priceless. she's utterly, completely sure he won't hurt her, and by that metric, he's certain of it, too. this is the roughest he'll ever be with her; this is the final line in the sand of the violence he's been pushed toward for his entire life without ever feeling a real desire to engage in it.
this is the imaginary test he didn't realize he was taking; this is where he discovers the final, pivotal difference between roy and real fatherhood-- between roy and himself. it's by her judgement that he finally realizes how strong a grip he has on himself and on his learned behaviors.
his baby trusts him not to hurt her, and so he never will. it's as simple and groundbreaking as that.
andrew cody who sneaks into the bathroom after staying over at your place to brush his teeth with his finger as usual and spots an unfamiliar green toothbrush in the little cup where your purple toothbrush has always sat. his throat immediately gets tight. he didn’t realize you were seeing other people. he certainly isn’t. and in a moment of hurt more than anger he grabs the green toothbrush and walks back out to your bedroom.
“what is this?” andrew says, holding up the toothbrush, as you rub your eyes and roll towards him with a groan.
“mm… good morning,” you hum, trying to wake up, “toothbrush,”
“whose toothbrush?” he says, sitting on the edge of the bed next to you, trying not to sound desperate.
“yours,” you say, voice still scratchy with sleep.
“this isn’t mine,” andrew says.
“well, i guess technically not yet, yeah,” you sigh, sitting up and shifting closer to him, placing a soft kiss on his cheek, “you gotta use it first,”
andrew just sort of stares blankly at you and you finally wake up enough to catch on to what’s happening in that head of his.
“i got it for you,” you say, threading your fingers through his curls which have fluffed up with sleep, “for when you stay here,”
“you got this for me?” andrew blinks at you.
“well, i know it’s not the most romantic gift,” you smile, placing a kiss on his shoulder, exposed by his muscle tee, “but i thought it might be nice,” you mumble against his skin.
andrew drops the toothbrush on the bed next to him and takes your face in his hands, kissing you sweetly. you giggle against his lips, pulling yourself closer to him.
“thank you,” he says your name tenderly, forehead resting against yours.
“you’re so sweet,” you say, placing another quick kiss on his lips, “it’s just a toothbrush,”
“no- it’s-” andrew sighs trying to collect his thoughts, “it’s just nice that you thought of me,”
“well, i think about you a lot,” you smile.
“yeah?” he says, a blush spreading across his cheeks.
“mhm,” you nod before leaning forward, peppering kisses to his neck softly, “i like you,” you murmur between kisses.
andrew sighs, his eyes fluttering closed, god he likes you so much. in a little burst he grabs you by your hips, lifting you around his waist as you grab the back of his neck with a giggle. he stands, swiping his toothbrush from the bed, carrying you to the bathroom.
“andrew,” you squeal, “what are you doing!”
“i gotta try out my new toothbrush,” he says, placing you gently on the counter next to the sink. he stands between you legs as the two of you brush your teeth, giggling and exchanging minty kisses. you both rinse, smiling almost shyly at one another before he passes you a little hand towel to wipe your mouth with.
“so…?” you say, resting your hands on the edge of the counter, leaning towards him, “i’d like the review for your new toothbrush,”
andrew just smiles at you, pushing further between your legs, resting his hands on your waist. he places a soft kiss on your lips, your mouths moving together slowly. he pulls you closer with a sharp tug, slipping his tongue past your lips, the sharp sweetness of peppermint dancing in your mouths.
Sammy Bryant who loves when you ride him, but only if he gets to hold you. He wants to have his arms wrapped around you while you bounce in his lap, keeping you pressed so close you can hardly pull off an inch before you push your hips back down. He's kissing your neck and collarbone, occasionally pulling you into long, hot kisses.
When you feel like punishing him (or just like to see him whine), you'll push his chest down and make him lay back. He'll look up at you in betrayal, pouting as his arms immediately come up to reach for you.
"Baby..." he says, sounding honestly hurt but is quickly distracted by you straddling his lap. Begrudgingly, he lets you mount him and his hands rest sadly on your hips.
The whole time you're riding him, his whimpering and whining. "Wanna kiss..." "touch me, baby, c'mon." But its no use, you won't give in. When he gets closer, he really ramps it up, desperate to be held by you.
When you finally open your arms to him he shoots up, crushing you in his embrace as he pistons his hips up into you, chasing his release. He's practically drooling on you, covering your neck in kisses. "Thank you, thank you... l-love you..."
from what we've seen in the show, you can't convince me that jack doesn't live for a good gossip session. and he's so messy with it too. like he does not care who's around, whether they're the victim or just an innocent bystander, he's talking about the latest gossip with you.
you were sitting at your desk, typing up one of your charts, when jack comes rolling in on a chair beside you. "did you hear about the latest girl of robby's?" he asks you, not even bothering to whisper. that catches your attention almost immediately. far more interesting than the information on screen in front of you.
"no, who?"
"do you remember shannon? she's one of the on call psychiatrists here." you nod. "well, apparently, she and robby hooked up last night and he left in the middle of the night. didn't even bother to leave a note. just up and left."
"how do you know all this?"
"because he's my best friend, sweetheart," he says it in that 'duh' like tone. "he told it to me himself. oh and the tension between them when they ran into each other earlier? it was uncomfortable as hell. you should've been there."
you snort, looking back at your charts. "god, i wish. no offense to your best friend, jack, but he's got a terrible track record with women. and she's so nice too! i can't believe he would ever do that to her."
"trust me, i've tried telling him that. but he just won't listen. no matter how many times-" jack's voice gets cut off with a sharp clear of someone's throat. it's almost comical the way you both simultaneously turn around, only to come face to face with gloria.
"are you two working or gossiping?" she asks with a stern look, crossing her arms.
nothing but a squeak comes out of you. jack might be an attending, meaning he's practically invincible to gloria and her punishment. but you were just starting your residency here at ptmc. she could easily write you off and send you away. but the man comes to your rescue without a second thought.
"don't get mad at her, gloria. she was working and i interrupted her. that's on me," jack says smoothly, shooting her his charming smile. it works well enough for her, since she accepts his answer with a soft hum before walking away.
"we'll finish our discussion later, sweetheart," he whispers to you, shooting you a wink.
flash forward a couple months to a year, and you're both dating. over time you had learned that jack was partially deaf due to his time in the army, so he occasionally relied on sign language to communicate. which he obviously taught you. your movements were a little more rusty and slow compared to his, but he was patient whenever you tried to talk to him using your hands. having this silent way of talking made it so much easier to gossip when at work. because now you didn't have to worry about others hearing you.
ellis and shen stand by the charge nurse's station, watching as you two talk by signing accordingly. "are they gossping in... sign language?" shen asks, taking a sip from his seemingly never empty dunkin cup.
"yeah, abbot started teaching it to her shortly after she got here," ellis answers.
"he never taught us sign language after we started working here."
"true, but we didn't start dating or move in with him either."
shen shrugs, taking another sip. "that's fair."
a loud laugh escapes you at something that jack signs, to which a huff of laughter comes from him in return. there's a small smile of admiration on his face, as well.
"i'm kinda jealous," shen speaks up after seeing that display.
"...yeah, me too. maybe she'll teach us so we can all gossip together."
synopsis you and Robby had been going casual for a while now, but when Jack comes into the picture and wants your attention Robby has to share, but with how much the two of them talk about each other while with you, you suspect they might be more than happy with the situation... (7.3K words)
warnings smut MDNI. Three ways kinda. fingering, breast play, handjobs, making out, p in v sex, pussy eating, getting frisky at work, three way kissing? langauage, age gap but no specified
author note consider this my sorry for no part two to golden girl.... there probably won't be a part two to this though either....
the pitt masterlist! other rabbot x reader work!
You had never known two men to be as competitive as Jack and Robby.
Two men who admitted to themselves they were both good doctors- great even, though they had different styles. They could look past each other's ways of doing things in order to support each other. One could lead with authority and drive, the other moving round his leadership with kind steps and guidance.
Except when it came to you.
When it was you, they were two teenage boys on the pitch trying to impress a field of girls.
When Jack had asked you for drinks you'd been overjoyed that your lingering glances and petty touches had been enough to convey your interest. However, you then had to explain yours and Robby's arrangement.
You'd been fucking quietly (as in on the down low, nothing about the way you fucked was quiet) and needed to make sure Jack was okay knowing that wouldn't be stopping just because he was taking you on one date. As much as you'd been looking at Jack, hoping for his attention, you couldn't stop the attraction you had to Robby. It had come first, afterall.
You'd said as much to Robby with his cock deep inside of you. Your hands on his shoulders as you bounced, the plap plap plap of skin bouncing off his bedroom walls. “Jack- Jack asked me for drinks,” you gasped.
Robby's skin glowed in sweat. His hands dug into your hips, helping you move up and down at a brutal pace. “My Jack?”
Something about the way he insisted Jack was his had you moaning out, your walls tightening around him.
“Fuck, don't do that,” Robby grunted, head thrown back on his headboard with a whack.
“Your-your Jack. Yes!” Your hands reached back to his thighs, fingernails digging into his skin.
It thrust your chest in Robby's face and he didn't miss a beat to trail his tongue messily across your chest, tasting your sweat and groping at your breast to take your nipple and swirl his tongue around the bud. He moaned around it, sucking like a baby and sending stimulation through your body.
“Fuck-fuck, Robby,” you moaned, dragging your core over him in delicious circles.
He hummed and watched you with encouraging nods. He pulled away from your breast and took your neck, bringing you in to him sharply. He nodded along with the movements of your body. “Come on my cock, scream my name, then we can talk about your date with Jack.”
Come on his cock you did, body shaking, mouth hung open soundlessly as Robby held you close into his chest and rutted up into you till he finished, painting your walls and biting down on your shoulder.
Moments later you were tucked into his side, Robby twirling bits of your hair with his head rested against yours.
“So Jack, huh?” he'd asked. “You want to go.” He wasn't looking at you but at the empty space at the bottom of his bed. There was a chest at the bottom with the essentials for such activities: towels, wipes, condoms, lube, maybe even some toys you'd slipped in as a joke all well within reach for him.
“Yeah I do,” you said. “We're only casual right, I'm within my rights to see who I want, aren't I?”
It was all teasing. You knew Robby didn't really want to share you but couldn't commit either so until then you'd be exercising your freedom.
Till he broke, because you knew he would.
That's how you ended up at a bar with Jack, crowded together in a small booth in the corner just days later. A few empty glasses sat around you, as well as an empty basket of chicken wings you'd shared earlier in the night.
Jack's arm was thrown around the booth, finger so close to touching, thigh almost pressed to yours but he kept just beyond touch. Either out of respect for yours and Robby's arrangement, or to drive you crazy.
“How long's this thing with you and Robby been going on?” he asked.
“Few months. We both needed a release with no strings attached kind of thing and it just happened that way.” You weren't ashamed of it. Not embarrassed that you'd given in to Robby the way you'd always wanted to. You didn't care that he was your boss or older than you by some decades. If stuff like that bothered you, you wouldn't have been sitting in the bar with Jack.
“You ever thought of asking me?” he asked with a smirk.
“If you were there that day, I just might have.”
It wasn't like you could ever ignore how attractive Jack was. Just as you couldn't ignore how attractive Robby was.
“And if I wanted to take you on more dates,” said Jack. “How would that work with you and Robby?”
You took your time in running your fingers over the rim of your glass.
The fact of the matter was you thought it wouldn't get better than Robby. Same hours and the same needs bled into sex that had your body shivering and never left you without pleasure. You liked it. You hadn't thought about changing it. You didn't know if you could find as deep a knowing as you had with Robby.
“I-I don't know,” you said, frowning to yourself at your own admission.
“Hey-hey,” said Jack, hand brushing back your hair and cradling your cheek. “I'm not asking you and Robby to stop.” Jack shuffled closer, finally touching you. “I'm just asking if you had room for one more.”
That's how you ended up in the back of Jack's truck pulled around to the dark corners of the bar, sprawled naked along the backs of his seat, legs spread and his mouth hot and heavy on you.
He'd got an orgasm from you pressed up against the wall, fingers curling and circling in the ways you liked like he'd been studying for this.
“Yeah... yeah...” Jack talked down to your pussy, your arousal coating his lips and almost dripping down before he dove back in, fingers spreading you wide and tongue slotting in.
“Jack! It's-it's too much!” you cried, desperate to close your thighs but his hands darted out and kept one high up on the back seats and the other limp on the floor. “Jack!”
His tongue fucked into you. “Just come. Come for me baby and I promise I'll stop, I promise-”
Condensation rolled down the windows of his truck, your body moving against the seats as you withered in pleasure. You had come on his tongue, not that it stopped Jack as he promised it would.
You had to explain to Robby the next time you saw him why there were bruises he definitely didn't leave at your thighs and why the pussy he'd memorised the taste of had something different to it.
That's how the challenge started.
Your time was split three ways: Work, Robby and Jack. Downtime was spent in Robby's apartment or Jack's place. You had a perfectly divided sets of your favourite clothes in each wardrobe, had given enough hints for each of them to get in your favourite snacks and a toothbrush in each bathroom.
You had, you would say, perfectly trained them.
They knew it. They knew they'd somehow become your toys. They knew if you weren't with one of them you'd be with the other and they used your body like a telegram to read each others messages, but as far as you knew they'd never brought it up with each other in person.
“What are you doing tonight?” asked Robby, hovering next to you, looking down at the tablet in hand.
Around the two of you the Pitt carried on moving. The doctors and nurses conversed and walked, the patients complained and crashed and nobody looked twice at the boss talking to a resident. If they'd looked too close they might have realised how often the two of you did speak in work.
You stood, staring at the board, trying to find a blank spot to slide into. “Uh, dinner with Jack.”
From the corners of your eyes you spotted Robby shifting his weight, head lowering as he huffs.
“Dinner with Jack, second time this week, huh,” he said. “Wonder how this place can manage without him.”
A smirk graced your lips as you turned to consider him.
“Someone feeling neglected?”
“Noooo,” he said, dragging it out and finding something on the tablet cover that was much more important than staring at you. He quipped his head to the side. “Just... you and Jack been going on dinners a lot, this week.”
“Our second one?”
“I could take you for dinner too.”
“But you never do.”
“Do you want me to?” he tried to sound casual but his brows rose at once.
You shrugged. “Ask me.”
“Got to book in time to see you now?” Robby asked. His head bent lower to your ear until you could smell the mint on his lips and feel the heat of his breath ghost the shell of your ear. He blew on it lightly, knowing how it sent shivers down your spine and made your body curl closer into his. “I was here first.”
You tried to hold back a smirk as you stepped back, turning to him. “Is someone jealous?” you teased.
Robby pulled his lips into a frown and shook his head, but he couldn't meet your eyes.
Casual was what Robby wanted, what he thrived on and the only thing he thought he was consistent at. So consistent it was his only relationship. Really, he had no right to be jealous and yet you saw the way his eyes narrowed when patients flirted with you. You knew he felt it when he fucked you hard after doctors on higher floors came down and stared too long at the way you leant over a computer. Casual was what Robby was good at, so he'd never admit he was getting it wrong.
“I'm a single girl,” you reminded him.
“That you are,” he trailed every word longer than it needed to be, saying it as if he didn't quite believe himself.
“And I'm allowed to have dinner with whoever I want?”
“It's not about the dinner,” he said, eyes following a nurse that walked a little too close to the two of you. “It's the fact that I want you in my bed tonight and you tell me you have plans.”
“If you wanted me in your bed more you could just make me your girlfriend?” you said, biting down on your lip to stop your smile.
You watched a glimmer of panic flash in front of his face before it gave way to relief. He knew you weren't really asking because casual worked for you too. Not having to remember dates, or buy anniversary presents or text constantly. It was what you needed. And yet, you loved to tease him with the G and B words.
“I don't have to. You'll come around,” Robby shrugged. “You always do. Tell Jack I said hi.” He walked past you then, hands grazing your elbows as he shuffled by like there wasn't plenty of space.
The small touches he teased you with through out the day was never enough to sustain you. That's why he did it: to keep you coming back for more.
Your dinner with Jack ended how it did almost every night, you in his lap in his apartment, lips moulding against yours, hands running up your back.
Jack always took it slow like the pleasure of you was something to savour, like he didn't believe he'd ever get the chance again. But it had been three months of going back and forth between the two, three months of your body bathed in their kisses and walking around with your head in the clouds.
As much as you loved being with Robby, Jack was new and you were still learning.
“Grinding down on my lap?” he teased slightly breathless, pulling back enough to speak.
You hadn't even realised you were until you felt your panties dampening, till you felt the tension in your hips and the smirk on his lips.
Jack seethed in a breath and went back into you, hand catching the back of your head to draw you in as he encouraged your movements. “Does Robby not satisfy you?”
You smiled against his lips, nipping. “You boys,” you muttered, shuffling closer into his hardening cock, hidden behind his jeans. “Really want to out-do one another, huh?”
“Just want to make sure you're not wasting your time,” he said. Jack pecked your lips over and over again as his hands found the buttons to your jeans, deftly popping them. “With either of us.”
“Let me be the judge of that.”
It didn't take long for Jack's fingers to wriggle themselves into your jeans, running lines against your clothed pussy that cried for him. He loved to watch how you moved against his smallest of touches, how you reacted slowly, needy.
“Jack,” you gasped, tilting your head back as his thumb pushed down on your clit, circling slowly. “Robby-Robby says hi.”
Jack hummed. “Does he?” his middle finger slid past the elastic of your panties, finding a home in the warmth of your walls. “He can come say it to me, no good using our girl for messages.”
His lips kissed sweetly at your temple, his endearing move that would catch you off guard in the dirtiest of moments. When he was coaching orgasms out of you through curling fingers or driving into you with your cock, his lips would find your forehead and stay there, mumbling encouragements and compliments that had your body grow fuzzy in a different way.
It was the same way Robby pulled you into his side, fingers twirling around your hair or knuckles grazing your forearms.
They had ways of surprising you, still.
“I got you something,” said Jack, pulling back to get a look at you.
“Oh?”
Jack nodded and tilted his head to nudge against your hose like some horse begging for attention before he withdrew his finger from you. He patted your thighs and you climbed off, falling back into his sofa and letting the cushions swallow you.
You watched as he put his finger in his mouth, licking off the taste of you as if it was a taste of his favourite dish.
Your eyes trailed down his body as he disappeared. The swing of his hips, the pull of his pants over his crotch and the veins that pulled in his arms that had you drooling.
When Jack returned there was a small box in hand and he settled down next to you, throwing an arm around the back of the sofa and offering you the box.
“What is it?” you asked without taking the box. The instinct to sit on your hands to not reach out was a hard one to fight against.
You didn't do gifts, at least not with Robby. His gifts came in litters of kisses and drawn out pleasure throughout long nights. The only present he'd ever got you was a set of lingerie that had only ended up in strips and tears of fabric sprawled along his bedroom floor.
Jack shrugged. “A puppy. You want him to suffocate?” he teased.
With a roll of your eyes you pulled the lid open as Jack tugged your legs into his lap, running his hands up and down.
A thin chain lay on a small velvet, black cushion, a delicate J hanging on the end.
You could feel Jack's eyes on you, watching and waiting for a creation. You were scared to reach out and touch it. Terrified that you'd reach out and the lid would snap shut, that the chain would strangle you. It was as if you'd never been given a gift so beautiful. You hadn't. “Jack, I... I don't know what to say.”
Was it too much? If you and Jack were as casual as you and Robby how could you wear his initial on a necklace?
But you didn't want it to disappear.
You thought about the J hanging over your heart, the chain dangling when you slowly sank onto Jack's cock. You imagined Robby finding it, the way his fingers would push down on the letter till J was etched in there. Or when you rode him, lingering over him to watch his pleasure, would he take the metal letter into his mouth and keep it warm?
“I think you should say-” said Jack, taking up the chain and slowly moving, resting it around your neck. “I love it.”
You moved your hair aside, allowing him to clasp it and relishing in the cooling metal against the flush of your skin. “I do. I love it.”
Jack kissed over the clasp against your skin. “Yeah?”
When your head turned his lips were there, waiting and kissed yours sweetly, hand crawling up to your neck to lay you flat against him. He tested the taste of you with his tongue. His hand ran down your front, pulling at your shirt and exposing the skin only just healing from your last night with him.
“This way,” he said, lips moving against yours with enough time to find words. “When you're with Robby, I'm there too.”
Robby caught sight of the necklace a week later.
“Hey,” he said, eyeing Samira who stood over your shoulder. “Can I borrow you? Ten minutes? Fifteen, tops?”
Sometimes with how well you and Robby played co-workers you couldn’t tell the difference between needing to see a patient and him needing you.
“Course.” Your chair scraped back as you bid a see you later to Mohan and followed after Robby.
He was making a hard line through the department, wearing out his trainers as he didn’t once look back to see if you were hot on his heels. You were.
“Everything okay?”
He led you out the doors and past the stairwell where the on call room was tucked in a corner. It was a room you’d grown familiar with. You knew the desk was rickety and wasn’t best for the kind of activities you and Robby got up to in the room. You knew it was best to cushion the headboard with a cushion, not because there were neighbours to worry about, but to stop anyone else passing by from hearing the thud.
Robby pressed his key into the door and held it open for you, checking the coast was clear before nudging you in and slamming it closed behind the two of you.
His hands were on you, fisting your scrub top, lips claiming yours like he wanted to share his very breath with you.
In spite of the patient you had waiting on discharge, the chairs that you never seemed to quite catch up on and the monitors still ringing in your mind, you held onto Robby with just as much fever. Your hands gripped his shoulders, finding his scruffy hair and pushed your tongue against his.
“You know better than to tease me at work,” he said.
You bit down on his bottom lip, tugging it out.
Robby guided you back to the bed with steady hands on your hips. “Or at least I thought you did.”
When the back of your knees met the bed frame you fell back, dragging Robby with you.
“I have no idea what you're talking about,” you mumbled, hands winding under his top, scraping at the roundness of his belly and feeling the bristle of his hairs.
He hummed, pressing his weight into you. “No?”
“Nuh-uh,” you said.
Robby pulled back enough for you to catch the darkness in his eyes, your slightly tinted lip balm smudging his lips. “I thought you were clever, huh?”
Teasing. You'd only been leaning over charting, maybe jutting out your hips a little more. Maybe grazing against Robby more than you needed to.
There was little time to reply before Robby was licking into your lips again, groaning at the taste and the push of himself into you. He opened your mouth and sort your tongue, hands pushing and pulling up your scrub top until skin gave way to skin and he could feel the plains of you, the warmth you were giving off. He tugged and moved at the skin and pulled off your scrub top.
You knew how it would go. In ten minutes Robby would work you up, have you teetering on the edge of insanity and want then send you back out to the ward. He'd demand you to double up on patients and get them all discharged before you left. He'd get you begging by the end of the night.
Your scrub top was thrown to the corner and Robby's hands grabbed your breasts, groping and moving, licking over what spilled from your bra and nipping.
Your legs wrapped around his waist, tugging him in closer-
Then- he grew cold and still, his lips moving away from his chest.
“Huh? Robby, what?” You shook yourself out of your haze and looked at him.
“What's this?” his voice was low in his throat as he pulled back.
There was cooling metal rested on your chest. Your spine tingled as a finger traced the letter there.
Robby was staring down at the necklace with a frown, eyebrows pinched together and mouth twisting.
You'd imagined Robby finding out about the chain a dozen times, but you didn't expect the look of hurt or anger there. “It's nothing. It's just- Jack, a gift.”
“Gift?” he questioned.
You nodded and gulped, suddenly worried. What if Robby said he couldn't do it anymore? He couldn't share you? Would he insist upon you ending it with Jack to have you all to himself, or would he ditch you and leave you to Jack's capable hands.
The both of you shuffled. Robby swung his legs over the bed, running a hand through his hair as he hunched over and you sat up.
“It's nothing, just a gift, I promise, Robby. I promise,” you said, holding onto his shoulders and pressing a kiss into his shoulder.
Robby stared down at his hands. “It's pretty,” he grumbled.
“You're prettier,” you said, resting your chin on his shoulder.
Robby turned and pulled a face at you.
You smiled and kissed his shoulder again. “Don't think anything of it.”
He inhaled, body moving against yours as he did. “Hard not to. His fucking letter of his name is sitting in between my favourite place.” His eyes flickered down to where your chest was lying in temptation.
You stilled as his hand darted out, picking up the J and fiddling with it.
There was an odd look to him. There was a clench in his jaw and you could feel his body tense but that familiar darkness was still in his eyes. He still licked his lips like he wanted to take a bite from every bit of your flesh and he wasn't letting go of the initial at your chest.
You'd seen the ways your boys acted. When you mentioned the dinner with Jack and watched Robby try to act like he didn't care. When Jack stripped you bare and eyed the bites Robby had left the nights before. Jack would give time to making those marks worse, deeper in colour and mixing Robby's dried spit with his own. How even with his cock deep inside of you Robby would go the lengths of asking for excruciating details on your dates with Jack.
“Well, I have a theory,” you said, swinging yourself into his lap. His hands fell upon you, working like velcro. “You quite like it, the challenge.”
His brows rose, hands casting up and down you. “Challenge?”
“You and Jack. Sharing me.” To test the waters, you rolled your hips against him and felt his cock answer. “The back and worth. Wanting to do better than the other.”
“Don't I?” he asked, kissing over the chain between your shoulder and neck. He picked it up between his teeth and dropped it back down.
“You both have your talents,” you whispered, tilting your neck back and grinding down on him.
“Yeah?”
“Your favourite things... your favourite parts...”
“Parts?” Robby's eyes were wide and pleasing, looking up to you.
You nodded and closed your eyes, chasing the feeling of him. “Jack... he likes to be down there more,” you said with a particular roll down on your hips. “You like to be up here.” You brought your hands up and squeezed at your breasts to bring them together.
Robby's eyes practically bulge out his head and he latches himself between them, groaning into your skin like this was the only rest bite he craved. The only place he needed to be.
“Jack's staking his claim,” you moaned. “Making sure... you see him.”
His tongue left a trail of his saliva over your chest. “Then I guess I better stake mine.”
Three days later, Robby's head was between your thighs, nudging his tongue in deep, rubbing his nose into your wetness.
You were calling his name, moaning his name when a new smaller cold chain wrapped around your ankle. You pushed yourself up on your elbows, looking through the haze of pleasure to see a band around your ankle, a delicate R hanging there.
Robby's eyes flicked up to you, smirking and your arousal wetting his lips.
“An anklet, huh?”
“You started it,” said Robby. “A necklace?”
Jack shrugged. “It was something nice.”
“It was a dig.”
Jack shook his head innocently. “No.”
The two of them were leant casually over the counter, stealing a few minutes of relative peace before Robby had to lead him room to room and tell him who was going home and who was not. Who had good chances of living a normal life and those that did not.
Their idea of peace was staring at you from across the floor, where you lingered with Dana. You were talking, just talking with the occasional smile but it was enough for the two of them.
They kept their conversations timid regarding you. They could say everything they needed to say by leaving little bits of each other on your skin.
It seemed the new gifts suddenly sprang on you was encouragement enough.
“So what do we do about it?” asked Jack.
Robby was reluctant to tear is gaze away from you as he slowly dragged his gaze to check on Jack. “On what?”
Jack nodded toward you. “We gonna do this forever?”
“Seems to be working,” said Robby.
“Forever?”
Robby nerves grew on him. He turned his body to Jack, considering him as he considered you. “Has she... said something?” Robby knew he wasn't what made boyfriends or husbands, but were you not happy with what you had?
“No,” said Jack, moving to look down at his hands. “We just gonna keep sharing her? I don't like the idea that I'm stealing your guys time from you.”
“We make it work,” said Robby.
The both of them returned to observing you.
“I like her,” said Jack.
Robby agreed. “Yeah. More than me?”
Jack's eyes ran up and down from you. “Only time will tell.”
“If you're worried about her time we can work something out,” said Robby.
He had the feeling you'd like something like that too. Your time together exhausted him in the best way possible before work so he wasn't sure how you managed splitting your time between him, Jack and work and supposedly getting some rest all between it.
“Work something out?” asked Jack, frowning at the words. It seemed the both of them were stubborn about you. “What? Like a schedule?”
Robby's head fell side to side. “Something like that.”
It took two more weeks of shared dates and beds before you, Robby and Jack could finally be in the same room that wasn't the hospital.
You'd noticed the two of them were talking about each other more. It wasn't unusual for one to bring up the other with arms firm around you, lips etched to your neck.
“Has Jack found that little spot that gets you whining yet?” Robby would ask, sucking on said mark with thick fingers curling into you.
Jack had but you didn't need to answer that for him to know.
“Mmh, mmh, I love this pussy,” Jack said one night when he'd already spent fifteen minutes in lucking and sucking up your pussy. “Can fucking taste Robby in here.”
It was becoming apparent to you, even if it wasn't them, that they really, really liked seeing each other in you. Liked kissing over the same marks and tracing the same path.
Robby had invited you over under the pretence of just casual drinks. You'd said you had plans with Jack (his nights off getting increasingly more likely) and saw the tick in Robby's jaw that you had plans again. Plans that meant his time with you was limited to what he could steal in the staff lounge and on-call room.
Which was why Robby had invited you and Jack around to his. For drinks. Casual.
It didn't stay casual for long.
“Oh, come on,” said Jack taking a swig of his beer, all sweaty from how he'd held it most of the night. “If both of us approached you at a bar, who you picking?”
“I'm not answering that,” you laughed.
You were sandwiched between the two of them on Robby's sofa, curled up between the meat of their thighs that were spread to touch you. Around the back of the sofa, Robby rested his arm while Jack watched you with his head rested on his arm propped on the back of the sofa.
“What? You have to,” said Robby.
“No, I don't,” you said again with a laugh, taking a sip of beer.
“We're big guys, we can handle it,” said Jack with a shrug of indifference.
You doubted they could, whoever you picked. The other would take you to bed and fuck you into the mattress and lick their name against your spine.
Robby's finger prodded into your shoulder for an answer.
“Okay,” you said. You leant forward and ditched your can on the coffee table before settling back with their bodies closer to you. “How does it work?”
“How does what work?” asked Robby, very intrigued by the prospect of who you'd go for.
You rolled your eyes and flattened your feet on the floor. “Dress it up for me. What's the bar like? Who am I with? What are the two of you doing?”
Robby made some sort of pfft sound and laid back.
Jack rubbed a finger over the bottom of his lip and dedicated time to think about it. “The bars dark, low, that kind of thing you'd find downtown,” he recited like he'd thought about this a hundred times. His hand comes to your knee, circling it till you jerked at the tickle. “You'd come with a bunch of your girlfriends and Robby and I-”
“- at the bar,” interjected Robby. His eyes drifted from Jack to you. “We met for a couple drinks, tired from work.”
“Oh, this is very realistic,” you smirked.
Robby gave his own back. “And then you walk in. Little dress, like that black thing you wear sometimes.”
“Practically begging to be noticed,” said Jack. “How could we not? Two old men, down on their luck and a pretty, young thing like you walks in.”
The tingle down your body ran deeper, fuzzier than ever with Jack's hand on you and Robby's eyes lingering. Their breaths and heat co-existing drove you slowly mad.
“Then you start throwing down favours? Is that it?” you asked quietly.
“Rest of the night carries on a bit,” said Robby, drawing your attention to him. He shifts his head side to side as if weighing up the different ways this hypothetical night could go. “Jack and I are having drinks, keeping an eye on you all night.”
“Some of your friends decide to call it early but you want to keep having fun,” said Jack, his hand travelling further up your leg. “Wild girl.”
You had no time to retort before Robby was reaching for you, talking again.
“Jack and I had been waiting for you all night, watching, thinking about buying you drinks every time you got out your card out.” His voice was low, body leaning into you.
“I approach you at the bar, some cheesy line I know you'd secretly like-” added Jack.
“You come sit with us,” said Robby, “Stuck between the two of us just like you are now.”
Robby's breath fanned your pulse thumping in your neck and Jack's hand travelled to the height of your thigh, rubbing his hand up and down. You could imagine it. The bar with the lights down low, catching the eye of the two men who leaned in to talk to each other. Maybe Robby would spot you first as he was saying something to Jack and un-able to take his eyes from you Jack would just have to take a look also.
From there you'd dance with your friends, swing out your hips more than needed, brush back your hair with every sway. You'd check they were watching, enamoured by you every once and in a while and of course they were. How could they not?
“I'm sitting with you now?” you ask, voice breathless as you struggled with knowing who to look at.
Jack's head nodded as his hand came up, popping the button of your jeans. You didn't rise to meet him, nor did you try and stop him.
Neither did Robby.
“Just like now. A good girl, sat between two men who are just slowly, slowly trying to get a taste.” Robby's voice dropped lower and lower, head ducking until he brushed hair from your neck and pressed light kisses along there.
You could feel your own chest heaving, see the the quick moves of it under your hooded gaze.
Jack's hand had slid down your pants and was making a slow observation of your clothed pussy, wet like he'd never known it to be.
You leant your head back for Robby as another warmth spread along the other side of your neck. “Do I let them?” you asked. “Get a taste?”
“Oh yeah,” said Jack, on the account of Robby finding a home in your neck and kissing and licking over his favourite spot. The spot that had your panties growing wetter. “Yeah you let them try, you're so sweet like that.” He pressed a kiss onto your clothed shoulder.
“Whose do we go back to?” you asked, your hands coming up to cradle each of their heads.
“Mine.”
Both of their voices were muffled from lips pressed to different parts of you, but both were just as possessive.
Your fingers curled delightfully around the backs of their heads.
The two of them retreated, looking to each other.
“No cat fights now, boys.”
You leant into Jack first just to grate against Robby's nerves. You pressed your lips into his, holding his face to yours as your lips parted his and you swallowed the sound of surprise he gave you. He groaned and moaned into your lips as he fingers prodded at the gate to heaven under your panties. You were sure he was making more of a noise and more of a show of it because Robby was at your other side.
You didn't know if you'd expected Robby to groan and complain about the show the two of you were putting on. Whether or not he'd get up from his sofa and demand you both leave, ending what you'd been teetering on for months.
Instead, you felt him remain steady and close behind you, his eyes burning into your skull.
You pulled back from Jack slowly, the wet smack of lips leaving the room.
Robby eagerly took you in his arms when you leant back into him.
He sighed at the taste of your lips but as soon as your mouth opened up he moaned at the taste of you mixed with Jack, some forbidden fruit he'd taken the first bite of and become addicted to.
“Oh my god,” Jack groaned from behind you, finally slipping two fingers past your panties and into you folds.
You gasped against Robby's mouth, teeth clashing with his. He held your neck, holding you in to draw out the kiss as his tongue flicked against yours.
You felt Robby's arm stretch out and you expect the feel of his warm embrace, of his hands cupping your chest or pulling back your hair. Instead, he moved past you and wrapped his fingers around Jack's wrist, urging him to move his fingers inside of you in a steady pace.
“Oh-” you moaned, back arching up into Robby was he dropped his head to your neck.
“You're squeezin' me like that, honey,” Jack mumbled against your ear. “Feel like you're already gonna come, huh?”
Robby made a noise into your neck. “We got her excited.”
With your eyes closed in bliss and focusing on not rocking into Jack's hand you blindly reached out. A hand gripped onto Jack's thigh that tensed under your claws digging in and the other to Robby's cock that strained against his jeans.
“Please,” you said, breathless.
Any other time maybe Robby would have put up a fight, make you work for just a glimpse of himself but he smiled and clicked his tongue before he shifted in his seat and started to pop the buttons slowly.
Jack bit down on his lip, his finger working you open and curling but eyes on where Robby's hands fumbled for the belt. “Yeah, that's what you wanted? Wanted Robby's cock?”
“Yes,” you said with a lick of your lips.
Jack brought out his fingers and spread you arousal all around you before circling that small bundle of nerves.
Your head was thrown back, stretching out the skin of your neck. “J-Jack!”
His teeth scraped your neck.
“Gonna come already?” asked Robby, amused at the state of you. He'd never had a front row seat to the effect Jack had on you and by what you'd felt through his boxers and jeans, he was enjoying it.
You shut him up when you bypassed his layers of clothing and wrapped your hand around his cock.
Robby seethed and laid back as you reached around for him, taking what arousal was leaking for the head and dragging it down him.
“You're so good at that, aren't you, baby?” asked Jack as set a steady rhythm upon you. “So good.”
“Jack,” you panted. “Please, I wanna- I wanna-”
He nodded against you.
“You wanna come?” asked Robby from behind you, a hand running up and down your back. “So soon?”
“Let her finish,” said Jack pulling back and staring at you. He worked his fingers over your clit faster, dipping into your heat to drag up your want and repeat it until you were starting to tremble. “Not her fault she's excited by the both of us against her.”
Robby grumbled but couldn't find the words to say much else as your thumb swept the tip of him repeatedly.
“J-Jack!” you came onto his hand with a breath of a moan, your hand squeezing Robby.
“Fuck!” he groaned as he watched you come down from your high.
Jack sent a smirk over your shoulder. “What? Gonna come so soon?” he teased, licking a finger into his mouth and cleaning you from himself.
You caught your breath, slowly taking away your hand from Robby's cock and sitting up straighter. Your heart hammers, your ears were left ringing like you'd just gone through something life changing. You think you had.
Both of the men at your sides shuffled to sit up on either side of you.
“What's up?” asked Jack. “No regrets?”
You looked between the two of them and shook your head.
Before you knew it Robby took to one side of your neck, Jack the other. You were left sitting there as they held you up for them to do their diligent work.
Your eyes closed as you focused on the rub of Robby's beard as he sucked a deep mark onto you. On the other side Jack's slight stubble grazed as he scraped his teeth against different spots of you, unable to settle.
Their hands were hot as Robby's ran over the length of your back, coming around to squeeze at your breasts and earn noises of relief as reward while Jack focused on pulling down your jeans, on pulling open your thighs, desperate to be slotted in between them.
You guided Robby up by his chin, kissing him with a heavy tongue and eager lips writing everything you wanted him to do to you. His cock was still out, protruding and begging for attention with every messy swipe of your lips.
Jack was still on you, making a work at your neck.
You pulled away from Robby, his eyes still almost black from need when you moved to Jack, to kiss him and give him a taste of Robby.
You didn't know if it was just the adrenaline of the two of them kissing you, working you open and apart but you swear you'd never felt the two of them kiss you like they did then. With the other watching, with the other just within reach and with their lips still on the soft skin of yours.
You kept like that for a while, in between them, kissing each one moment, the other breathing hard on you. At some point Jack had gotten his own hardening cock out, rubbing it up and down leisurely as if you had all night to enjoy everything.
Delicately, you dragged your nails down their necks, cupping their chins and kept them steady and like putty in your hands.
Enamoured and under you spell neither realised when there wasn't just one tongue but another. When your smooth skin gave way to stubble neither blinked and when the hands became gruff and coarse, they relished in it.
All until you could guide Robby and Jack's mouths in together, settling back on the sofa like you were about to watch your favourite show.
You watched as Jack's grey and Robby's brown brows furrowed in as they focused in on the new taste, the rougher lips and hotter tongue. Their hands were searching these new bodies with grips and grasps.
Their cocks bobbed with their movements and you watched, mouth salivating.
Noises you'd never heard them make before left them but you weren't even jealous. You were wet and trying to remember what they looked like caving into each other to keep in the back of your mind for months to come.
Only when their faces were reddening and you feared they might fait from suffocation and you'd have to call PTMC and explain why their cocks were out, you clapped your hands once.
Their eyes opened, mouths still against each other as they caught their breaths before looking to you slowly, eyes hazy and faces red, lips swollen.
“Well, this has been fun,” you said, patting their thighs and wedging yourself out from between them. “But I should call it, work tomorrow, early night and all.”
The two were frozen, dumb-founded like teen boys realising they might like their guy friend a little too much.
You were already at the door, throwing your hair over your shoulder and showing the beautiful litters of marks they'd left on you. “See you in work!”
You left gratified. You'd got to come by Jack's hands once and had watched them make out. And even though you were accustom to a drawn out night of pleasure, you were more than set up for the rest of the night with the image of the two of them safely stored away.
taglist (if you want to be added or took off just say the word!):
i was thinking y/n drops the kids at her parents so she and robby can have the house to themselves, but mila starts fussing about a toy she left behind so her mom/dad drives back to grab it, kids still in the car, and walks right in on them. bonus if her mom isn’t even surprised, just gives them the slow knowing look like she’s been waiting for this.
no pressure at all but i think it could be so good haha
Thank you for the request!!! It was very fun to figure out and write. Also, thank you for your patience!!
Format is awful!! Sorry for that, I’m still out. i’ll fix it when I get home :)
700 words
warnings: smuttish?
“They’re at movie night,” you murmured against Robby’s lips, your fingers tangled in the lapel of his jacket. “We have a good three hours before they come back.”
Robby walked you backward into the house, one of his hands already banded firmly around your waist as he closed the door behind him with a soft click.
“Want a glass of wine?” you asked, a sly smile pulling at the corner of your mouth.
He pulled you flush against him, his gaze dropping to your lips before locking back onto your eyes. “I don’t want you to have a glass of wine,” he teased, his voice dropping an octave.
You pouted, leaning back just enough to narrow your eyes at him. “Why?”
“Because you bite me too much when you drink wine.” He kissed you, slow and deliberate.
Your teeth caught his lower lip, tugging at it deliberately before you let him go with a soft pop. “You’re just too biteable.”
A low, vibrating chuckle rumbled through his chest. “I am other things, too.”
You grinned, rising up on your toes to kiss him again as he backed you through the hallway until the back of your knees hit the cushions of the couch. He followed you down, and with a swift, eager shift of weight, you pushed him back against the pillows and straddled his hips.
The lazy kiss dissolved instantly into a heated, breathless make-out as hands found their targets—his fingers gripping your waist, yours tangling in the hair at the nape of his neck. Your core ached for him, hyper-aware of the hard press of him beneath his jeans.
When your hips instinctively shifted and bucked against him, a sharp grunt tore from his throat, his fingers tightening so hard against your flesh you knew it would leave bruises.
With a low groan, Robby maneuvered you beneath him in one fluid, seamless shift, your knees settling on either side of his hips as his hands pushed up beneath your blouse, his lips abandoning your mouth to begin a hot, worshipful pilgrimage down your neck.
Everything narrowed down to him: his weight heavy and grounding against you, his tongue tracing your flushed skin, his hands teasing the sensitive slope beneath your bra, his hips moving with a slow, agonizing care against yours.
Your phone lay discarded somewhere in the house—or so you believed, completely forgotten given the absolute derailment of your rational thought. Consequently, you missed the buzzing of the first call. And the second. You definitely missed the discreet chime of the home security alarm notification. Hell, you didn't even hear the front door open.
Your eyes snapped open only when Robby’s warmth suddenly vanished from you.
Standing right there in the middle of the living room was your mother, grinning from ear to ear.
“Mom,” you breathed, scrambling upright, frantically tugging your blouse down into place and shoving a dazed, half-erect Robby off of you. “What are you—what happened?”
“I could ask you the same thing,” she murmured, her arms crossed over her chest, utterly unbothered. “I thought you had a conference tonight?”
Your eyes rolled up toward the ceiling. “Mom,” you warned, your face burning hot enough to fry an egg.
“Ma’am,” Robby was already trying to stand, smoothing his shirt down with crimson cheeks, but your mother stopped him with a casual tap of her hand against his shoulder.
“Don’t make this any more awkward, Michael.”
He swallowed hard, pressing his lips into a tight, miserable line.
Without missing a beat, she stepped past the living room and headed straight for the stairs.
You stared at Robby, your eyes wide as saucers, your skin practically radiating heat.
“What the heck?” he whisper-yelled.
“I don't know,” you hissed back in the exact same frantic pitch.
A moment later, your mother returned to the living room holding Mila’s battered, one-eared moose plushie. She gave it a cheerful little wiggle. “She forgot this,” she explained brightly. “Imagine her panic when your father agreed to let her come back for it.”
“Ahh,” you muttered. It was literally the only syllable left functioning in your brain.
“Well, I wouldn’t want to interpose on your… activities. Excuse me.” She beamed, entirely too amused. You groaned, hiding your face in your hands.
“Don’t tell the kids.” You asked. More plea than order.
“You think they don’t know?” Your mother asked, hand already on the handle of the door. “We all know, honey.”
“Goodbye, ma’am. Nice to see you,” Robby chimed in desperately, looking like he wanted the hardwood floor to swallow him whole.
She offered him a surprisingly fond smile before strolling toward the front door. “Goodnight, kids. Good for you, though.”
Summary: It wasn't often that Titus found himself denied what he wanted. In his years of breathing gilded air and walking on floors polished by others, he had learned that with a simple snap of his fingers, he could get what he desired. Desire had always been a currency he never truly lacked—he wanted, and therefore he had.
Then you came along. The one thing in the room that he couldn't purchase, beguile or command into his hands. The future bride of Alex Le Domas.
Tags: 18+, violence, death, smut, titus is possessive and obsessive, reader doesn't mind it, slightest hint of cheating, dark romance
Word count: 4.4k
A/N: i hope you enjoy! i had so much fun writing this!! as always, feedback is highly appreciated <33
Ready or Not | Masterlist
Main | Masterlist
It wasn't often that Titus found himself denied what he wanted. In his years of breathing gilded air and walking on floors polished by others, he had learned that with a simple snap of his fingers, he could get what he desired.
Well, if it was allowed by his father. His voice still echoes in Titus' mind even while he's bed-bound—sharp and dismissive, always reminding him that power wasn’t something he could be trusted to wield unsupervised. As if he were still that impulsive boy who broke a man’s nose at thirteen.
And Ursula isn't that much different. She speaks to him like she's in control of him, like she knows better. Like, he isn't the one the world should really fear.
But desire had always been a currency he never truly lacked—he wanted, and therefore he had.
Then you came along. The one thing in the room that he couldn't purchase, beguile or command into his hands.
The future bride of Alex Le Domas. A man Titus found so offensively weak that it bordered on the comical. Alex, who, with his mild smiles and soft shoulders, lacked the hunger that was necessary in their world.
How could someone like that deserve to touch something as incandescent as you?
If Titus had his way, you'd be the future Mrs. Danforth instead. Draped in his family's jewels, bearing his crest, and standing at his side. He'd only known you for a day, but the few glimpses he'd seen had told him enough.
You were smart. Cunning. Knew how to soften your words, shift your posture, and smile at the right times. But if you were with him, that wouldn't be necessary.
Because you'd be with the most powerful man. No need to sweet-talk others; they'd sweet-talk you.
If you had been promised to any other man, if Alex hadn't been part of one of the elite families, Titus would have stolen you without a moment's hesitation. But fate had arranged for Alex to meet you first.
And bound by ancient rules, Titus had to yield for the first time.
So now, he stands in the corner of the lavish but garishly decorated ballroom, pretending he's bored while actually keeping an eye on you. He watches how you shimmer beneath the chandeliers, your dress catching the light with every spin and laugh—how every elegant tilt of your head bares your delicate neck.
He imagines what it feels like to clasp his hands around it. How your eyes would widen in fear, but also delight. How'd he show you what true pleasure is, how it's intertwined with ferocity—something he doubts soft Alex can manage.
His fingers tighten around the glass until the stem whines in protest, watching as you lean on Alex's arm like you have no idea how unworthy he is of the privilege. Then Alex's hand dips low—too low—across the small of your back, skimming just above your ass. Titus' breath hitches, rage flaring white-hot behind his ribs.
"Stop staring," Ursula hisses sharply into his ear, shoving his shoulder. He has to clench his fists to stop the instinct to slam her to the floor. She always uses that tone with him, that clipped, scolding cadence that makes something old and bitter claw at the back of his throat. As if she were the elder sibling and not his twin. As if he were a child who needed correction.
She continues, none the wiser, "You look like you want to kill him."
He doesn't bother responding, but Ursula doesn't really care, already murmuring something about a governor that he doesn't listen to. He despises this part of his life: the diplomacy, the handshakes, the pretence that anyone else in the room matters. Being forced to feign ignorance of his true power, how he could dismantle every man present if he chose to.
He lifts his glass and drains it in one controlled motion. Ignoring Ursula's incredulous scoff, he makes his way to the hallway, slipping into an empty room before stepping out onto a balcony. He inhales the still-warm air of the night deeply.
Fuck Alex Le Domas. Fuck Ursula. Fuck his father.
And even if he is tempted, he isn't foolish enough to tell fate the same.
Minutes later, the door to the balcony creaks open behind him, and he slips into the corner, hiding in the shadows. He doesn't move, doesn't breathe; his instincts take over.
It's you, he realises. Alone. You wander over to the railing, fingertips grazing the stone leisurely before you lean your forearms against it. He sees your shoulders rise as you draw in a slow breath, head tilted back to the sky.
He can't help himself. "Beautiful night," he remarks.
You don't startle, turning your head towards him like you'd known he was there already. "It is," you reply, a smile gracing your lips. "It's just a shame the stars can't really be seen here."
“You prefer the countryside?” he asks, stepping forward. The Danforth manor resides in the countryside. And if that isn't to your liking, he owns several other places and has the means to buy more.
"Sometimes," you shrug lightly, turning and leaning your back against the stone to face him completely. "I like the quiet." Your gaze drifts over him, and he feels himself straightening, liking how you pause at the broadness of his shoulders and the way his arms fill out his jacket. How your eyes linger at his mouth longer than is appropriate. You continue once you reach his eyes again, "The ability to do whatever you want without anyone hearing."
He hears the implication for what it is. He feels his mouth curling, a predatory grin slowly creeping over his face as he imagines you unleashed on his territory, him pursuing you through the wilderness, tearing your dress to shreds, biting into your thighs, claiming you as his own.
"So, tell me," you ask, "why are you out here alone? A man like you doesn’t hide in the shadows unless he’s avoiding someone… or watching someone."
So you had noticed him earlier, drawn to his presence as much as he was to yours, following him out instead of staying with your fiancée.
His smirk deepens. “Something like that,” he says, dodging the question. He steps out from the shadows and leans against the railing beside you. "You're getting married next week. Excited?"
You deflate, not visibly, but he still senses the way your shoulders seem to lower. He’s not even sure you realise it. "Yes," you breathe, managing a polite smile. "Will you be there?"
"No." He had planned to, but now that he's seen you, there's no way he could watch you walk down the aisle, signing yourself away to someone who isn't him.
"Oh." Your disappointment is almost tangible, a slight furrow appearing between your brows as you turn your attention back to the view. “Well… do you have any advice for me?”
Are you aware of what you're stepping into? What a life with a Le Domas truly means?
"Marriages in our world are rarely straightforward," he says, observing you closely.
"Meaning?"
You don’t understand. Titus feels his anger rising again at Alex's carelessness.
It isn't his place to tell, can't as per the rules—only your fiancée is able to—but he can warn you.
"Meaning…" He lets his gaze drift over your face, down to your mouth. "Old families have... old customs."
"What kind of customs?" you ask softly.
His eyes lock back onto yours. "The kind," he says, "that test whether a new bride truly belongs."
Your soft lips part, drawing his attention to them again. He leans in, moving purely on instinct, and you move forward to meet him, but the sound of footsteps interrupts you.
"A house always has its secrets," he hurries to add, retreating into the shadows just as the door swings open.
"Baby, are you out here?" Alex calls out.
Your furrowed brow smooths out quickly as you turn toward the door with a bright smile. “Yeah, I’m here. Just feeling a bit hot.”
Alex smiles in relief, his arm wrapping around your waist as he presses a kiss to your cheek. He'd aimed for your mouth, but you'd turned before he could. Titus feels a sick satisfaction watching it.
"I want to introduce you to—" Alex's voice grows muffled as he steps inside again, pulling you by the hand. You follow him, but your gaze flickers to the darkness where Titus stands.
Titus feels the burn of it in his chest and wonders whether cursing fate would really be that imprudent.
The following week, Titus enquires the help of his staff secretly, looking for any loophole that would allow him to take you from Alex, but none exists. He has to sit back and watch as his woman gets claimed by another, unable to do anything about it.
With access (hacked, of course) to the Le Domas' security cameras, he sits at the Danforth residence watching as you gather around the table after the wedding, ready for the game to begin.
You look stunning in your wedding dress, the white satin cascading down your body softly. You'd look even better in black, but that's neither here nor there. He's furious that Alex gets the pleasure of helping you out of it later, and it had only added to his bitterness that he could tell even from the flimsy cameras that the fabric was cheaper than you deserved to wear.
And then the one thing that mustn't happen does—you pull the hide and seek card.
He watches as the faces of your new family drop, how Alex's eyes squeeze shut in horror, and how you smile incredulously and giggle at their reactions. Still unaware of what it means.
He smashes a glass against the wall. Then a vase.
Dread, as he realises it is later, fills his stomach as he watches you hide poorly, lucky that the maid was killed just before she discovered you. He expects you to hyperventilate, to reveal your position and watch you get captured when the rest of the family enters the room—but you don't. You cover your mouth, stay silent, tears pouring down your face as they clean the room. The tears stop after a moment, and then your face hardens.
He watches with knitted brows as you move from behind the bed to the walls, patting them down, and then he realises you'd remembered his words.
Had realised what he'd meant—that the house has hidden walls. Pride blooms in his chest.
You don't get to find it, though, before you're attacked. Over the course of the night, he watches you get beaten up, shot and nearly die in a car crash. He has to clench his fists, nails biting down into his palms, to keep his anger and the never felt before worry at bay.
But he also sees you fight with all you've got; throw punches, land kicks, and even shoot to kill with absolutely no hesitation. You stab your husband before he gets to stab you.
And come dawn, it is you who wins—a woman carved from the same iron and shadow as him.
Titus has never felt prouder or more relieved in his life. He watches you, covered in blood splatter, wedding dress torn, and feels himself harden in his pants.
He thought he'd seen you at your best, thought you couldn't get more beautiful, but this was like a vision straight out of a dream. He palms himself, groaning loudly as you grin. Pleasure shooting up his spine as you laugh victoriously.
But as fast as the heat had ignited inside him, as fast it was put out. Because your winning doesn't ensure your survival—it triggers a new game.
A game where he has to hunt you. A game where he has to kill you if he wants to remain the most powerful.
"Fuck," he mutters, squeezing his eyes shut. Fate once again seems to taunt him.
From the moment you woke, tied and gagged, you'd realised that you hadn't survived like you thought—you'd just been thrust into another game.
A game where it had all been for nought, that you'd killed your in-laws and your husband, if he even deserves that title, if you didn't survive. Stumbling through the Danforth residence, barely escaping being shot, you're cursing Alex Le Domas for not preparing you for this. For not telling you what might happen. For marrying you when he knew this might be the outcome.
You're covered in blood once again, the metallic taste coating your tongue. The offer from that lady swims around your head—how you could survive the night if you just married her son.
You should have accepted it. It wasn’t even the thought of selling your soul that stopped you—it was who you’d be marrying.
Because the thought that had flashed in your mind when she explained hadn't been of survival, it had been of Titus. How you wanted it to be him and not her son.
Because he was the only one who had warned you. A man who had no stake in your survival, who still had taken the time to warn you as best as he could. And even in the dungeon, before he'd placed the syringe in your neck, his eyes had glimmered with regret. His promise to be one to get you sounded less like a threat and more like a farewell.
There was also the fact that you were inexplicably drawn to him. Had been ever since he'd stepped foot in your radius. And he had been by you as well. You'd felt his stare throughout that day, your skin prickling with heat whenever he was near.
Your thighs had been sticky with want, shame coiling deep in your stomach, but attraction didn’t care about morality—only heat, instinct, and the way his eyes devoured you. You were about to be married, and another man was the one on your mind.
But seeing as Alex turned out to be a bitch, you don't feel particularly conflicted about it anymore.
And so instead of accepting her offer, you'd driven her sword—with her still holding it—into another's throat, dooming them both. Then you fled, racing toward the woods.
An arm shoots out, colliding firmly with your stomach. You hit the ground hard and scramble back, but no follow-up blow comes.
With unsteady legs, you stand and turn to face your attacker. Titus.
"Hi," he breathes, pickaxe glinting in his arms. He's alone this time. "I told Ursula to wait in the house. That I would steer you back there."
You're not even close to the house, and he doesn't seem like he's going to make good on his promise.
"You've been quite resilient," he says, a hint of pride in his voice. "The Xings were getting on my nerves, so thank you for taking care of them."
"Oh... uh, you're welcome," you murmur, watching him carefully. He doesn't make a move to come closer.
"I'm sorry I have to do this," he rasps. "If only Alex hadn’t seen you first, I could have—" He shakes his head. "Never mind. I’ll remember your death with fondness.” A strange sincerity shimmers in his eyes. With one fast step, he brings his arms up, swinging the pickaxe down, aiming for a quick and painless death.
You manage to scramble backwards, fast enough that it only catches the fabric of your dress. It's slammed into the tree behind you, trapping you against it.
He pulls at it, but it's stuck. With a frustrated groan, he leaves it, crowding you into the tree. "I guess I'll have to do it the old-fashioned way."
His hands are on your neck before you can object. Your hands fly up to grip his forearms, nails clawing into his skin. Your gaze is forced up, watching as the stars glimmer distantly above you. If you are going to die, then at least that isn't the worst last sight.
"Wait—" you protest, barely able to get any sound out, but his grip loosens slightly. "Marry me," you wheeze.
Titus frowns. "What?"
You gesture at his hands, gasping for breath. He loosens them but doesn't release you. "Marry me," you repeat. "That woman told me it was a loophole. That if I marry someone from one of the families, then I don't have to die, and they get the ring." You huff harshly, "You get the ring."
He searches your face for dishonesty but doesn't find any. A strange feeling of hope blooms in his chest, but he isn't the foolish man that his sister believes him to be. He calls the Lawyer to check, and only then does he release you. And being the traditional man that he is, he drops down to one knee before you—something he would never do for anyone else. "Will you marry me?"
You don't hesitate. "Yes." You're grinning at him, aware that you should be afraid, but the adrenaline rushing through your blood doesn't solidify as that—it turns into relief instead.
Titus wastes no time, pinning you against the tree and smashing his lips against yours. It's a fight he wins easily, your mouth parting when his tongue pushes forward. It's all teeth and spit, nothing romantic or soft about it. He grabs your leg, lifting it around his waist, pushing his hips into you. You moan so sweetly against his lips, an even more breathy sound leaving you when he pulls at your hair.
"If we didn't have to marry before dawn, then I would take you right here," he groans into your ear. "But I want to take my time with you," he promises.
He then drops to his knees again.
"Titus?"
He doesn't bother answering, lifting your dress and ripping your panties off in one swift move. Your leg lifts easily, perched over his shoulder, even if you're confused. Another question gets broken off into a moan as his tongue swipes through your wetness.
"Fuck," he mutters, before diving back in. You're even sweeter, even wetter than he'd imagined. Your thighs quiver, hands finding his hair for stability, and it doesn't take long for him to make you tremble. You moan loudly—his name leaving your mouth as you come. It's the most dulcet sound he's ever heard. He bites your thigh hard as a reward.
"To be continued," he promises, as he rises again. As Titus pulls you with him—to marry him—he can't help but grin. Every bloody step and every murderous fight that brought you here—it hadn’t been luck—it was fate leading you to him.
It's the second time in two days that you're wearing a wedding dress, though, this time it's black and significantly more expensive. You’ve washed away the blood, though your thighs still feel sticky, and the bite mark on your skin throbs faintly, a lingering reminder of your soon-to-be husband.
You should feel scared—at least sad that this is what it's come to—but something inside you has changed in the last twenty-four hours. The frightening part isn’t the violence you’ve endured or inflicted; it’s how natural it now seems.
You can't find it in yourself to feel bad. Not when you'd only really accepted Alex's proposal because you thought you would never find better.
But now you have. Titus is different—he doesn’t hide what he is. He doesn’t mask his hunger, his intentions, or his brutality. There is honesty in that—a brutal kind of purity you’d never found in Alex’s soft lies.
"You look beautiful," Ursula says as she steps into the room. She looks small and fragile, a far cry from the woman who had chased you most of the night, intent on killing you. You stiffen before she even opens her mouth—your body recognising her as a predator even if she’s playing harmless now.
She takes a seat next to you. "I'm so happy you survived, even if you don't believe me," she says. She glances over her shoulder, smiling nervously. Her voice quiets, "Titus can't be trusted to wield the power himself. He's—well, you've seen him. He's a psychopath." She takes your hands in hers. "But together, we can control him. Make sure he doesn't ruin the world."
"You want me to control him?"
Hearing the edge in your voice, she hurries to add, "Not control him, per se. Guide him. Make sure things don’t spiral out of control."
You take your hands back. Her touch feels wrong—like a spider weaving a web she believes you're too stupid to see. Turning to the mirror, you pretend to fix your hair as you consider your response.
There's a flicker of movement in the corner of the mirror—broad shoulders and dark eyes watching from the doorway. You don’t react. You don’t warn her.
"I know you didn't want to marry him," she continues, oblivious, "We could be great together."
"You and I?" you murmur, eyes flicking to the reflection of Titus for the briefest moment.
Ursula doesn’t notice the glance. Titus does.
"Yes—" she begins.
"I knew you wanted the power for yourself," Titus interrupts, revealing himself with a sardonic smile.
Ursula's eyes widen in horror as she stands to face him. "Titus..." She lifts her hands, trying to placate him. "That isn't what I meant."
"Isn't it?" He stares at her, hazel eyes darkening with rage. "You're trying to corrupt my bride, turn her against me, so you could have all the power." He doesn't waste time arguing it further, grabbing Ursula. She doesn't have any time to react before his arm folds around her neck, cutting off the oxygen. She tries to protest feebly, but he doesn’t loosen his grip like he did for you.
He mutters lowly into her ear, "There are no rules against killing family members."
His grip tightens, but his eyes are on you—studying your reaction, ensuring you’re watching.
You don't shy away. You maintain his gaze. And when he breaks her neck, you don't flinch.
You simply watch as the life drains from her face with an unsettling calm. It feels as if this world has stripped away the last traces of who you used to be, leaving behind someone only Titus could understand.
You return your focus to the mirror, turning your back on him without fear.
"I’ll see you soon, soon-to-be Mrs. Danforth," Titus murmurs, catching your gaze in the mirror once more before leaving his sister’s broken body on the floor.
Power thrums through your chest as you stand in front of Titus and the council. There's a smile on your face, visible even through the veil, when you see how Titus stares at you. He looks at you like you're the most beautiful woman he's ever seen—hunger evident in his gaze.
He looks incredible in his black suit. Powerful. Commanding.
Yet, beneath his confident exterior, you sense a flicker of doubt, a moment where he wonders if you’re here out of necessity. Despite the blood oath you'd just signed.
But as he unveils you, stepping forward to kiss you, you meet him first. And then he knows for certain that you're not.
You're here of your free will. You're here because you are his.
The following moment, when he's awarded the High Seat, when the council kneels at your feet, and the sacrifice commences, only makes the feeling intensify.
And with the council's steps echoing down the hallway, you're finally left alone.
"Mrs. Danforth," Titus murmurs reverently as he turns to you. "My wife," he almost growls. He draws you against the stone lectern, your back meeting its edge. His grip on your hip is firm, and you can feel the bruise beginning to form beneath his touch. “Mine,” he hisses into your ear, his teeth grazing the soft skin.
"My husband," you murmur back.
He wastes no more time on words, as if he's already waited a lifetime to have you, his lips crashing onto yours with an intensity that takes your breath away. The adrenaline pumping through his blood equals yours as he flings your dress up.
He groans in approval when he sees you're bare underneath. "Such a good girl," he murmurs as his fingers swipe through your wetness. You moan, pressing yourself closer to him. The words send heat spiralling down your spine. Without warning, he plunges two fingers inside, the stretch burning deliciously.
You bite on his lip harsh enough to draw blood, something he only groans at. Your hands fumble at his pants, unable to open them as he curls his fingers inside you, and he chuckles lowly.
"Desperate, are we?" he taunts, but still helps you. He enters you with a groan, burying himself to the hilt in one swift move. "Say my name," he demands, biting down on your shoulder.
"Titus," you breathe.
"Louder," he commands, snapping harder into you. Your screams echo off the stone walls, his name falling off your lips like prayers.
His grip tightens on your waist, teeth grazing your collarbone. "Good girl," he hisses. "You belong to me. You're my wife."
You moan his name again, nails clawing at the fabric of his jacket.
"Yeah? Does that feel good?" he says. "Better than Alex ever was, right? You’ve never felt a man like this before.” Every thrust is measured, his gaze locked on yours, claiming your reactions as his. When you gasp, bite, or whimper, his lips curl into a satisfied grin.
“Never,” you gasp, arching into him.
"Yeah? Your husband fuck you better than that wimp did?"
You moan in response.
He pulls your hair. "Answer me."
"Yes," you cry out. "You fuck me better than he ever did."
"That's right," his thumb swipes at your clit, sending you over the edge. He follows, pumping his cum deep into you.
You were his wife. Not Alex's. He doesn't even consider him to have been your husband—not when Titus was the one who got to have you forever.
Not when Titus was the one you would bear heirs for.
He stills after a moment, his forehead leaning on yours. He should know better than to doubt fate. It had never failed him; it had simply bided its time. Now everyone saw him for who he truly is—the most powerful man in the world, his fingers bearing both the High Seat ring and a wedding ring.
No one would be able to stop him with you by his side—he'd kill them before they even had a chance to try.
THERE'S NOTHIN' MORE WE COULD GET OUT OF HERE, BABY DRIVE ✮⋆˙
a doctor walks into a strip club not expecting to find his most timid patient
MASTERLIST | RULES | INBOX
PAIRING michael robinavitch x stripper!reader
WARNINGS 18+ MDNI fem!reader, shy!reader (on occasion), strip-club setting, private/lap dance, er!barbie mention if u squint, depression themes, burnout, reader wears skirts, partial nudity, social anxiety, sexual shame and insecurity, fear of emotional intimacy, i make robby wear his glasses all da time… sue me, doctor/patient meet cute, minor head injury, needles/sutures, objectification and male-gaze framing, jack is a lil sleazy in this for narrative purposes, reader calls robby michael!, sex-worker/client power dynamics, references to marital infidelity (not between mcs), alcohol and smoking, clothed grinding, authority/instruction kink, praise kink, lots of pet names, light condescension/dumbification, dom!robby, hair pulling, clothed clitoral stimulation, fingering, multiple orgasms / overstimulation, age gap, car sex, oral sex (f receiving), non-graphic mention of maternal suicide
WC 14k
Today has been a shit day to be Michael Robinavitch.
And yes, Robby understands — hard not to, with the department he runs thrumming behind him like a hive full of grief — that he is hardly the sorriest soul within earshot. Blood hits the floor. Heartbeats quit. Lives learn, fast and loud, that the Almighty can be blunt as a brick to the face.
In this place, Robby has witnessed enough human catastrophe to know that his own shit day should rank somewhere below minor inconvenience.
Knowing it, unfortunately, doesn’t ease the drag.
Because there’s this fucking tiredness that lives in him now by strata, each year pressed flat beneath the next, until whatever came before has been fossilized beyond recognition.
He remembers only fragments of that earlier man, someone who laughed without effort, someone who did not hear his name and immediately feel another small portion of himself being requisitioned.
They ask, and he gives. They ask again, and he gives again. That is the work. That is who he is. The two have grown around each other so completely that separating them would require cutting into bone.
But usually, the work of the emergency department can still pull him above the fatigue. Adrenaline is useful that way.
Today has offered no such mercy.
Hence, shit.
Just a steady procession of petty failures. Interruptions. Demands. Death by thumbtacks. Laughable, except there is barely enough of him left to puncture.
At six, a pipe bursts over radiology and turns half the department into a damp, swearing migraine, ceiling tiles sagging with dirty water while everyone responsible for maintaining the building becomes mysteriously unreachable.
At seven, a confused patient pulls the fire alarm because nobody will let him smoke beside the oxygen tanks which, if nothing else, demonstrates a level of commitment to a terrible idea that Robby almost respects.
Almost.
At eight, he discovers that the overnight attending (cough, Jack, cough) has left him a waiting room packed to capacity, two unsigned charts, and one impressively hostile email from the hospital’s administrative assistant whose pink signature and tiny heart-shaped bullet points do nothing to soften the phrase “ongoing efficiency deficits.”
And by ten, his coffee has been knocked out of his hand, his lunch has been stolen from the refrigerator, and Whitaker has called out sick.
That leaves Robby down a physician and picking up whatever cases he can cram into the narrow spaces between one thing and the next.
Curtain Seven holds an uncomplicated eyebrow lac.
Practically a gift. A tiny, finite problem for a man whose entire life currently feels composed of open tabs and unfinished sentences.
Five minutes to assess, ten to irrigate and close, two more to recite the standard warnings about dizziness, vomiting, confusion, unequal pupils, and the many creative ways a minor head injury can become his problem again by midnight.
In and out. Straightforward. Painless, at least for him.
Then back to the several other problems already elbowing for space inside his overtaxed brain.
But the moment Robby pulls back the curtain, straightforward goes comprehensively to hell.
Medically speaking, it is exactly as the chart advertised. A small cut above your eyebrow. Manageable. Routine. Boring, even.
You are none of those things.
You sit perched on the edge of the gurney as though you have been placed there for safekeeping and warned not to touch anything. Spine stick-straight, hands gathered neatly in your lap.
Your cardigan is a soft color he doesn’t have a name for, but he thinks it’s pretty, buttoned almost primly to your collarbones, tiny pearl buttons marching down the front.
Your skirt spills modestly over your crossed knees, sheer tights covering the rest of your legs, and a pair of neat ballet flats dangle just above the floor.
One toe traces a nervous little semicircle through the air before you catch yourself and hold still.
At the sound of the curtain, you turn, and your eyes find him immediately, enormous and worried and so wholly fastened to his face that doe-eyed no longer feels like a figurative term.
Robby nearly takes a step back.
He has not eaten. That must explain the dizziness.
He clears his throat and looks down at the chart, seeking temporary asylum among the intake notes. His eyes catch on your name. Pretty name. Naturally. Pretty woman, pretty name, the universe apparently committed to the theme.
He says it aloud and glances up to confirm the pronunciation. You nod quickly, almost eagerly.
“I’m Dr. Robinavitch,” he tells you, then relents before you can attempt the full four syllables. “Dr. Robby, if you like.”
That earns him another look — good grief.
It’s a look that should be reserved for lifeboats at three a.m., that trembling instant when you realize the sea might still let you live. You shouldn’t waste that on a man built mostly of leaks and patch jobs.
“Hi, Dr. Robinavitch,” you say softly. “It’s lovely to meet you — well, I suppose it isn’t, really. Lovely, I mean. I’d rather not be in the emergency room.” Your mouth sours at your own words. “Sorry, that was rude. I don’t mean I’d rather not meet you. Just not like this. With this —” A limp hand flutters at your face. “— whole facial fiasco.”
It’s strangely funny, hearing his full name from your mouth. Most people seize the abbreviation when offered. But you cradle Robinavitch like fine china, intent on returning it intact.
“Right. That,” he says, taking a few measured steps closer. “Can you walk me through what happened?”
Robby can practically see the debate flicker across your features. Truth in one corner, lie in the other, both taping up their knuckles. The lie comes out swinging first, something vague and graceful rising in your eyes, but your conscience cheap-shots it before the bell.
“I, um, ran into a door.”
“And how did that happen?”
He has the answer assembled before you can give it to him, because there are only so many roads that lead a grown woman directly into a stationary object.
Too much wine, perhaps. A phone held three inches from your nose. Some spectacularly avoidable mishap born from distraction, intoxication, or the particularly lethal combination of both. People do not generally collide with doors while demonstrating excellent judgment.
You duck your head, and your thumb drifts to one of the pearl buttons on your cardigan, nudging it back and forth in its buttonhole, rubbing over the thread until the tidy cross-stitch has gone soft and fuzzy at the edges.
Not a new habit, Robby thinks. The button has been loved nearly to death.
“Do I have to tell you the exact details?” you ask, already shrinking from the question. “Because I would really prefer not to.”
That does not help your case. Something irresponsible, then.
“I would prefer it if you did,” he prods. “I need to know if anything threw off your balance before impact. Vertigo, alcohol, low blood sugar, a sudden loss of consciousness. Anything like that.”
He keeps the rest to himself, the way his own interest is tunneling deeper, a quiet animal gnawing through wood to find the soft center.
“No, um, nothing like that,” you insist. “I was reading while I walked and I just… didn’t look up soon enough.”
Robby blinks. “You were reading.”
It’s not a question, really, only a small correction entered into the file he had already begun assembling in his head.
So he was wrong.
Entirely, which perhaps he should’ve anticipated. He was just trying not to judge a book by its cover. But your cover is proving remarkably faithful to the contents.
Without meaning to, Robby begins sketching the rest of you around it. You work somewhere quiet, he decides. A library, maybe, or some obscure university office tucked behind a corridor nobody visits without an appointment, surrounded by tidy shelves and coworkers who instinctively soften their voices around you.
You pack your lunch the night before in a regiment of matching containers. Drink tea, not coffee, probably something floral and faintly medicinal. Buy pens only after testing how smoothly they move across paper. Say sorry when other people bump into you.
Probably apologized to the door afterward, too.
A laugh falls out of him before he can decide whether it’s appropriate, soft at first, then edged with genuine amusement. “Must’ve been a hell of a book.”
“You know, I don’t think doctors are supposed to derive entertainment from their patients’ poor spatial awareness,” you mutter, lashes lowering the instant the words escape, as if the joke were a spark you need to smother before anyone sees the smoke.
A small, stubborn curve clings to the edge of his mouth as he cants his head in concession. “Fair point. You’re right, and I apologize.”
The words are properly contrite. The twinkle in his eyes says he’s enjoying every second anyway.
Then he moves closer, and the witty spark in your eyes gutters out on cue. He catches the exact sputter of your breath — one skipped beat, a sharp sip of air — as he settles between your knees and towers over where you sit, broad shoulders eclipsing your view of anything but him.
“Let’s take a look,” he murmurs.
As soon as his thumb brushes the corner of the bandage, you begin talking.
“It probably looks worse than it is. I mean, I haven’t actually looked, because I thought that might make me feel faint, which is ridiculous because I’m not squeamish, usually, except with my own blood, apparently, and I did clean it, I promise, I just wasn’t sure if hydrogen peroxide was still considered good or if everyone decided it was bad while I wasn’t paying attention —”
“Hydrogen peroxide is still considered good,” he cuts in, trying to drape calm over your runaway syntax.
Robby eases the tape away slowly, one inch at a time.
The wound beneath is nothing: a shallow scrape, the faintest puff of swelling. Still, annoyance sparks anyway, a quick, irrational flare. Ridiculous. A red skid mark above your eye — insignificant, yes, but on that face it feels like graffiti on marble.
The reaction inside him is almost comically paternal, a stern memo from some inner guardian demanding the universe exercise better stewardship over its delicate masterpieces.
Robby cradles your cheek with latex-clad fingertips, pressing gently around the scrape to check for deeper swelling. You flinch, shoulders stiffening, mouth pursing around a startled hiss.
“Tender there?” Robby asks, the lines of his eyes tightening with concern.
Your lip disappears beneath your teeth, eyes darting up through thick lashes. “A little. Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize.” His thumb drifts along the unbruised ridge of your cheekbone, touch light as breath.
Honestly, with the number of apologies flying between you, he ought to be wearing a mason jar on a string around his neck — your coins on one side, his on the other, rattling like wind chimes every time either of you says the word.
“I just don’t want to make your job harder by… y’know being uncooperative.”
He stifles another laugh.
The idea is so backwards it’s almost endearing.
Patients usually fight him like toddlers at bath time. If you were any more compliant, you’d offer to suture yourself up while reciting after-care instructions.
“You’re a dream compared to the gentleman who tried to bite me for even suggesting stitches.”
Also, a dream in other respects, but he’ll keep that to himself.
“Stitches?” you echo, pupils flaring wide as if you’ve spotted the needle already.
Robby raises both gloved hands in the universal easy there gesture. “Yes, stitches. Two, maybe three. We’ll numb the area, you won’t feel a thing. Promise.”
Your gaze flicks from his gloves to his face, searching for any hairline crack in the reassurance he’s offered.
Robby feels suddenly exposed, half-convinced you’re also reading the shallow crow’s-feet and the faint gray at his temples, those watermarks that say used but serviceable even on his best days.
However, whatever you see must satisfy you; the tension in your jaw eases, and you exhale through your nose, giving him a small, firm nod.
“M’kay. Should be fine,” you murmur, offering a tentative half-smile that wobbles at the edges.
“Will be,” he corrects, voice dipping to the same rhythm as the cotton pad he draws along the cut. Outward strokes, clearing dried blood.
The antiseptic smell billows up, but it falters against the subtler warmth of you. Clean skin, faint lavender shampoo, sun-warmed wool, the sweet trace of whatever lip balm you worried away earlier.
He sets the cotton aside, swaps it for the syringe of lidocaine, and pitches his voice to the same hush one might use coaxing a skittish foal.
“Tiny pinch coming — deep breath with me.”
You obey promptly. The needle slips under the skin. He feels the faint give, watches your lashes flutter but not fall.
“Good,” he praises. “Halfway done with the worst part.”
While the numbing spreads, he cups your jaw with his free hand, thumb tracing an idle circle well clear of the scrape. He doesn’t know why he does it. Can’t stop either. An anchoring touch, perhaps. Nothing more.
Your pulse beats quick beneath the glove, bird-wing frantic, yet you keep still, eyes trained on his like you’ve decided they’re the safest coordinates in the room.
Thread, needle, forceps. He moves through the motions with ritual care, narrating each step.
“Little poke,” he says as the curved needle dips. “Pulling through, just a tug.”
You tense, then relax when the promised pain never arrives. He snips the tail, smooths a fresh swab over the line of the suture, and starts the next pass. Two stitches.
Then, for safety, a third, fine as spider silk, barely visible against your skin.
“All right, last one. Another deep breath.”
Your inhale is shaky but obedient. He mirrors it, slow and exaggerated, so you can match pace. In those three shared seconds the world shrinks to the hush of fabric, the faint click of instruments, the muted roar of blood in his ears.
The final knot seats neatly. He studies the trio, a tiny constellation guarding the fragile universe of your eye, and feels a swell of pride, as though he’s fitted diamonds into marble rather than nylon into flesh. A dab of antibiotic, a butterfly dressing laid with careful hands.
“Gorgeous work,” he jokes, meaning the repair but, embarrassingly, meaning you as well. “You’ll hardly know it’s there in a week.”
Your shoulders sag in a relief so tangible he could cup it in his palms. He steps back only after giving your cheek one last feather-light pat.
“Bravest patient of the night,” he declares, peeling off his gloves with a snap and dropping them into the bin.
A slow exhale pours out of you, followed by a smile so earnest it could power streetlamps.
“I barely felt a thing,” you say, eyes tracking him as though he’s some rare object and you’re afraid to blink it away. “Thank you, Dr. Robinavitch.”
“You did great.” He feels the need to add that one. He’s not sure why. Surely not because you instantly perk up at the praise. “Don’t get it wet tonight. And, um, starting tomorrow, cleanse only daily with diluted baby shampoo, blot dry, tiny dab of ointment. This will all be in the instructions you’ll be given. These stitches come out in about six days. Any signs of streaking redness, increasing tenderness, yellow drainage, or sudden headache, you come back in. Deal?”
“Deal,” you say, quick nods punctuating every syllable.
He reaches for the handle, then pauses. “Oh, and the book stays closed anytime your feet are moving, yeah?”
You clutch the strap of your bag and give him a tiny, chastened nod. “Right. Yes. Books and walking are officially divorced.”
Robby hasn't been able to stop thinking about you.
He isn’t entirely sure why, and in the interest of preserving what remains of his peace, he has elected not to investigate. Ignorance is bliss, after all, and bliss is already more than a man with his age, schedule, and accumulated wreckage ought to expect.
Romance is not something he can sustain. He has made peace with that, mostly. Fleeting companionship is different.
A drink, a laugh, the uncomplicated relief of a warm body beside his for seven weeks or so. He is good at beginnings. Endings even more so, particularly when he can arrange them before a woman begins leaving things in his bathroom or asks him to describe the future as though he has ever possessed one.
Love and similar things demand room he does not have. Time he cannot promise. Parts of himself he suspects have already been spent elsewhere.
And you seem like you deserve more than a man who’s only confident in the temporary.
Which is all theoretical anyway. Seventeen minutes is not enough time to determine whether a woman is interested in you. You gave him no indication you wanted him. And he has no intention of making a fool of himself by looking for one retroactively.
More importantly, life is not generally so obliging as to place the same stranger in his path twice.
It has been four days already, and his memory has begun eroding in all the wrong places.
You are still there, technically, but less in full and more in fragments. Your face keeps blurring at the margins no matter how often he finds himself, coincidentally, trying to call it back.
He remembers your nails. Neat, he thinks. Maybe rounded. Something careful about them, as though you spent time making sure even your hands caused no offense. The cardigan was pale, soft enough that he remembers wanting to touch the sleeve, although now it is cream, now pink, now some color he suspects you never wore at all.
Your mouth resists him most.
Presented as a still, it flat-lines. He only revives it by remembering kinesiology rather than anatomy, the subtle concavity when you spoke, and then, abruptly, the entire feature reanimates, pulsing with life he can’t keep.
The thought of you persists, even here, in a room thick with stale cigar smoke that rasps over his tongue like powdered charcoal.
Robby presses his thumb into the bridge of his nose until color sparks behind his eyelids. Creams and pinks.
He refocuses on Jack, who has sprawled comfortably into a low leather chair. A cigar glows between his fingers, the ember brightening each time he makes a point to Mateo and Parker, orange-red, then dull, then orange-red again.
How he allowed himself to be dragged here, of all places, remains unclear. Jack’s talent for weaponized rationality probably played a role.
It began innocently — one drink, Robby, come on — then snowballed into you’ve been a hermit for half a year, and ended with Jack beside Robby’s car holding his keys hostage until he agreed to accompany them.
At no point had anyone mentioned that the “quiet place Mateo knows” employed women in six-inch heels. And by the time he clocked the neon, tacky signage, the silhouette of a woman wrapped around a pole, he was already wedged in the back seat between Parker and a cooler.
Jack catches him staring and lifts his brows. “Try to look less like you’re waiting for the health department to arrive.”
Robby exhales through his nose. “Give me two more whiffs of this carpet and I’m calling them myself.”
“You’ve been here twelve minutes, pal.” Jack taps ash neatly into the tray beside him. “Loosen up. Have a drink. Let a pretty woman remind you that the human body occasionally does things other than crash and burn.”
“I’m well acquainted with its full range of functions, thanks,” Robby says, finally lifting the glass he’s ignored all night. The ice has surrendered to a sad film of water, flavor leached out before he even tasted it.
Parker tears her attention from the stage, lashes still raining glitter, and pins him with a look that borders on pity. “With all due respect, Robby, I think you may have forgotten a few of the more recreational applications.”
Robby tracks the path her eyes abandoned, just in time to glimpse a quicksilver blur twining up the pole before the lights swallow it whole.
He hasn’t forgotten. He has simply not mistaken remembering them for needing them, or so he has been telling himself since his last fling ended four weeks ago. There was sex, plenty of it, an indisputably recreational application that, for forty-five minutes at a time, returned his body to something other than a piece of shiftwork machinery.
Then it was over, the loan period expired, and the instrument went back on the surgical tray.
Jack salutes Parker with his glass in agreement.
Robby swings his gaze between them, unimpressed. “I’m old enough to remember when that kind of commentary would’ve at least been whispered behind my back.”
“Night crew’s a different animal, man. After midnight, we’re all equals.” Mateo lifts one shoulder, entirely unrepentant.
Robby snorts. “No, we aren’t.”
“And that attitude right there —” Mateo lifts a finger and aims it straight at him “— is exactly why Jack dragged your ass out tonight.”
Robby inhales to fire back, but the song ends on a hard cut, swallowing his comeback in a wave of cheers. Silver lights bleed instantly into velvet red, and an anticipatory murmur travels across the room with remarkable speed. Glasses thunk onto tables. Spines straighten as though tugged by the same invisible string.
A man near the front actually elbows his friend into silence, eyes fixed on the curtain.
A familiar woman steps out.
Or, more accurately, Robby’s eyes insist she is familiar, and his mind arrives several seconds later, scrambling for an explanation.
Robby has seen that happen often enough. A limb arranged at an angle the body was never designed to hold. Blood arcing with such absurd force it looks less like injury than special effects. The first look rejects it. The second begins the unpleasant work of believing.
He trusts the second look because panic is an unreliable witness, because fatigue smears what’s real, because a person under strain will borrow a stranger’s face and fasten it onto any recognizable outline if recognition feels safer than confusion.
So that is what this must be. A trick of light. A bad angle. His weary mind reaching backwards four days and dressing an unfamiliar woman in the remnants of you.
But the second look is the same as the first.
The woman remains you. A vision rendered in arterial red, lace curling over your body in ornate filigree, satin bands drawing the eye down the sleek length of your legs to crimson stilettos that land against the stage with sharp, ceremonial clicks.
Light pools in the soft hollow of your waist, slides over the swell of your hips, catches on the bounce of cleavage held in scalloped cups.
He could still call it resemblance, perhaps, if not for the small interruption above your eyebrow. The cut. The one he irrigated, aligned, closed. His handiwork sits there like a signature on a painting, ruining every alternative.
A bolt of percussion fires through his veins. One huge, discordant thud that reverberates all the way up into his skull.
“Jesus,” Parker whistles, lounging into her elbows. “Alright, I see why she’s got regulars.”
Robby does too, though agreement seems a flimsy response to what’s happening.
You’re… wrong word, wrong word, wrong word.
Pretty is flowers in glass jars and daylight and picnic tables. Sexy is no better, insufficient and boyish, a word that is used in locker rooms and bad dating apps.
What you are now is something closer to magnetic, maybe.
You draw the room toward you molecule by molecule, the way the moon hauls entire oceans across the earth without asking permission. Even Robby, professional skeptic, finds his spine tilting, happy to pretend the leash isn’t there while secretly begging you not to drop it.
A flush climbs his neck, prickling beneath the starched edge of his shirt, so he sneaks a finger inside for air.
Jack notices, turning just enough to smirk around the rim of his glass as if to say told you so. But he doesn’t know the real reason Robby feels suddenly suffocated.
Robby shrugs deeper into the leather, posture telegraphing cool indifference like a man impervious to heat.
He isn’t. And he’s even less impervious to the whiplash of matching this siren to the shy patient who sat in his ER.
The woman in the ER had nearly apologized herself into a corner over the possibility that saying hello wrong might make her rude. This woman keeps a hundred people waiting on one slow turn of her hip and does not apologize to any of them. Four days ago, you could barely hold his gaze without softening it with a timid smile. Now you meet the eyes of strangers one by one, choosing them, releasing them, granting each man the brief narcotic thrill of being singled out before moving on fast enough that none of them can confuse attention with ownership.
It should feel like performance. A costume, a trick of lighting, confidence painted on as carefully as whatever dark color shines across your mouth. Except nothing about it reads false.
You are not pretending to command the room any more than you had been pretending to be nervous with him. Both things are true, somehow, two states held inside the same body without either invalidating the other.
Schrödinger’s woman, collapsing into whatever form the environment demands.
The possibility unnerves him more than a lie would: that he never really sees all of anyone, that patients arrive in pieces and leave with the rest of themselves still undisclosed. That the same could be said for him.
At work he’s precision incarnate, voice pitched to steady the hands of interns and family members alike. Off the clock, the same voice can’t convince him to answer texts or fold laundry that’s been clean for a week. He’s the doctor who tells grieving spouses to hydrate, then forgets to eat until his vision tunnels. Two truths, both real, both incomplete.
On the next pass your eyes collide with his, momentum juddering so fiercely the rest of you almost follows.
Almost.
You decant the shock into a languid pause while your hand trails over the valley of your waist. The crowd drinks it in as pure seduction, none the wiser. Robby is. He witnesses the recognition bloom hard behind your pupils before you bury it. For a second he was seeing Curtain-Seven-You blinking up through the polish, startled to discover her doctor reclined with a sweating glass and a stare he can’t pretend away.
One blink later the mask reseats itself. The woman he sutured melts back beneath the gloss-hard shell of the woman steering the room by its collective bloodstream.
You prowl towards the pole.
The knot of men ringing the stage is already rowdy, but your proximity behaves like accelerant. One slaps the rail, another looses a lewd invitation, all of them bending forward to peak at the whisper-thin scrap stretched over your ass.
Robby’s molars meet with a crack at the wet, barking laughter of appreciation that follows.
You appear unbothered, palm sliding up chrome, spine unwinding as you lift onto the lethal points of your heels, a slow ascension that leaves the pack panting.
You draw one leg behind you and tip forward, lace disappearing between parted thighs as you roll downward.
His hand lifts to his mouth, knuckles pressing against his teeth, and then he bites down because Christ, because fucking hell, because apparently the human body still does plenty other than crash and burn.
His, for one, springs to attention violent enough that he has to shift in his chair and pass the movement off as a casual adjustment, pretending the sudden pressure behind his zipper is nothing more than a quest for better lumbar support.
Rising inch by inch, you draw yourself back up.
A gentle press of your wrist sets you spinning once unhurried around the pole. Your gaze rides the rotation, finding one patron, then another, gifting each a fraction of electric eye contact that has wallets loosening like reflex.
When the orbit swings you toward Robby, you turn your chin a breath away, letting your hair curtain the sight of him, withholding the current he suddenly realizes he wants more than air.
“Well?” Jack suddenly murmurs, nudging him with the side of his arm. “She doing anything for you?”
“She appears to be doing something for everyone,” Robby replies, dryly, lifting his glass as though the room’s collective reaction has nothing whatsoever to do with his own.
“Maybe you should find out what she does one-on-one,” Jack says mildly, like he’s suggesting another round. “Private dances are a thing here, I’m told.”
“I think I’ve seen enough,” Robby replies, aiming for bored and landing somewhere closer to strained.
He has not seen enough, not even enough to satisfy the first sharp edge of curiosity. A dozen questions are now cracked open where one used to be. Enough is nowhere in sight.
You never look at him again.
The song winds down. The room stands for you. Applause swells while you gather the scattered bills with calm hands, then slip behind the curtain without so much as a backward glance.
Good, Robby tells himself. Better this way.
The lie rides home with him in the passenger seat.
The first vintage car Robby bought had already been abandoned once. He found it beneath a collapsing canvas cover behind a house outside Pittsburgh, all four tires sunk into the earth.
He traced the rain-carved rivulets of rust down its fenders as the homeowner, beer resting on a potbelly, bragged about a future overhaul spoken in the casual, uninterested tone of a man who’d rather let weather finish the job.
Robby bought it before he had anywhere sensible to keep it. And for two long years Robby spent his evenings and weekends nursing seized pistons free, lathing corrosion off gears, feeding the straight-six new gaskets and hope until it almost sounded like itself again.
He called it a hobby, later upgraded the label to cheaper than therapy, but never once spoke the truest thing — that some stubborn, eight-year-old corner of his heart was trying to prove that abandoned didn’t automatically make a thing unworthy of rescue.
“Hi, Dr. Robinavitch.”
Robby straightens, throat clearing more than once. “Hi. It’s… nice to seeing you again.”
A poor choice of words.
He knows it from the way the sentence seems to remain in the room after he has finished speaking.
Nice to seeing you again here, he means. In the emergency department, fully clothed in a yellow sundress, purse clasped between polite hands. Not nice seeing you again since the strip club, where he’d gone home afterward and wrapped his fist around his cock like some middle-aged sleazeball with no better use for his imagination.
Surely you will assume he means the emergency room. Any reasonable person would.
“Um, I followed all your instructions. For the aftercare, I mean.” Your hand rises halfway toward your eyebrow before seeming to think better of it. “It looks all right, doesn’t it?”
The upward tilt at the end gives you away. Robby recognizes the bid for praise, though he is less prepared for how instinctively he wants to satisfy it.
It is profoundly disorienting to see you like this, returned to his most timed, sweet patient.
“It looks great,” he promises, lips tipping into a smile he can’t stop. “Seems you did everything right.”
Relief melts your shoulders, an overlarge reaction to a modest bit of validation. Robby feels an equally outsized glow at having caused it.
Drawn in, he shortens the distance between you, leaning over the gurney to parse the neat ladder of scabbed flesh.
“Any redness, swelling — any drainage? Fever? Swelling?”
“No.”
“Kept it dry?”
“Mostly.”
“Mostly?”
You blink up at him. “I showered.”
“Everyone showers,” he points out.
The answer comes out drier than intended, though not unkindly. You seem to consider this, lips parting and then closing again, as though reviewing the entire history of human bathing for a more defensible response.
Robby waits and dislikes how charming he finds the hesitation.
“Right, well, yes,” you concede at last, cheeks warming. “But some people are better at keeping their faces out of the water than others.”
He nearly lets the grin escape. “And which category would you place yourself in?”
Then he makes the mistake of letting the sentence form an image. Water coursing over cheekbones, pooling in clavicles, dress adhering to the soft body beneath.
He does not need to imagine much. His memory has become inconveniently exact where your body is concerned.
The swell of your breasts, full and heavy. He has seen the smooth plane of your stomach, the dip at your navel, the round flare of your hips, the way that scrap of satin vanished between the fat curve of your ass when you bent over and held the room there with you.
The sundress feels suddenly fraudulent, a modest little curtain drawn over a body his mind has no trouble stripping bare.
“Uh… the less-graceful division.” A nervous little smile flickers and dies.
“Well, fortunately, shower water isn’t acid,” he teases, sliding a latexed thumb beneath the healing seam. “Once the wound has had a day or two to seal, brief contact is generally harmless. Prolonged soaking, scrubbing, contaminated water — those would concern me. Your inability to lean backward does not.”
There is really no reason for him to be here today. The department is fully staffed, plenty of nurses, plenty of docs. Suture-snipping is a five-minute chore, and anyone with gloves and passable vision could handle it.
Langdon even volunteered — “I’ll take the stitch removal” — surely looking for something easy to do in between back to back GSWs. But Robby’s eyes caught your name on the board, and before the words could stop themselves, he’d stepped in.
“I’ve got it.”
He didn’t think it was rude. More curt, maybe. Decisive. Perhaps carrying the implication that Langdon should fuck off and find a different patient. He recovered by invoking continuity of care. He knows how the wound looked initially. He can assess healing against the baseline.
All true points.
And plus, Robby likes to finish what he starts. That’s what he told himself about the car, too, during that second frost-bitten winter, when the engine still wouldn’t turn over and more pragmatic voices egged him toward the scrapyard.
It justifies the way he looks at you now. He intends to finish with you as well. Finish what, though? A repair? A detour? He can’t name it yet, only feels the torque of wanting to see the job through.
“Does removing them hurt?”
“Not usually.” Robby adjusts the goose-neck lamp above you. “There’s some pulling. Maybe a sting if the skin has started growing around one of the knots. Compared to the laceration itself and the anesthetic injections, this should be the easy part.”
You nod and brace yourself, chin tipped up, lips pressed into a thin determined line. Your fingers close around the edges of your handbag, knuckles tightening. Robby is not sure why you haven’t set it aside. Perhaps you expect to flee halfway through.
Robby angles the forceps and offers a calm, “Try not to tense.”
A terrible instruction, really. You go rigid beneath his hand.
He places one gloved hand along your temple, thumb resting just above your cheekbone, and brings the scissors to the first knot.
The surgical scissors dip, catch, snap. He eases the filament clear.
Your nose wrinkles.
“You okay?”
“Yeah. Just… felt weird.”
“That’s the official technical term.” He huffs a laugh, swiping a finger at the injury. “Look at that — one down, two to go.”
He snips the second knot, giving his hands more concentration that the task requires. You study a blank patch of wall beyond his shoulder. Robby trains his eyes on the shears, the tray, anywhere but the soft sweep of your lashes.
Each time your lines of sight drift close, you both twitch a millimeter off course. An awkward pas de deux so perfectly in sync it reeks of rehearsal.
“So, um.” You exhale like you’re stepping off a ledge. “Is the plan to keep acting like you didn’t see me?”
For a breath the tiny blades hover, silver comma in the sentence. Robby’s hand moves again before the moment can form into trouble.
“I assumed that was what you preferred.”
Snip. The last blue thread lifts away. Robby drops it into the tray and peels his gloves.
“Well — yes. Usually,” you admit, eyes tracing anything but his. “It’s just awkward now, and I’m sure it’s awkward for you, too, and I feel like I put you in a strange position by being here.”
Robby inspects the thin pink line left behind, then cleans away the faint crusting with a square of saline-dampened gauze.
The edges have knitted neatly enough that he decides against Steri-Strips, though he smooths a small bandage over it for protection anyway.
“You came here for medical care,” he says, pressing the adhesive down with his thumb. “You didn’t put me in any position. You had stitches that needed removed, and I’m a doctor.”
“I know, but you didn’t know what I did before, and then you saw me doing it, and now you have to do this while we both pretend you haven’t seen significantly more of me than is appropriate. That feels like a strange position.”
He stares at you.
“To be fair, I’m the one who came into your, um, place of work and saw you like that. You didn’t bring any of it in here.” He gives a stiff chuckle, then rushes, “Not that I make a habit of visiting those kinds of places.”
You face falls, though only by degrees, nothing he could accuse himself of causing if he wanted the escape, only a tiny collapse around the eyes before they drop to your lap.
Shit.
“Right,” you murmur. “I understand.”
He does not think you do. You understand what his tongue accidentally suggested: that he considers himself separate from men who go to strip clubs and, by extension, considers you separate from women deserving uncomplicated respect.
“I only mean it wasn’t planned,” he corrects quickly. “On my part. Not that there’s anything wrong with where you work.”
You push yourself off the gurney too quickly, knees nearly catching its metal frame.
“You don’t have to explain, Dr. Robinavitch.” The title returns with enough formality to put several safe feet between you. “Really. I understand.” You smooth the skirt of your dress, though there is nothing wrong with it, eyes darting toward the curtain. “I should go, anyway. I have another appointment.” A pause. “Am I all right to leave?”
A firm no hovers on his tongue.
He could claim the adhesive hasn’t fully bonded, that follow-up education on UVA vs UVB protection is suddenly urgent. Hell, he could ask about nausea, tinnitus, sleep patterns — whatever buys an additional thirty seconds so he can reel his arrogance back in rather than watching you walk away with it.
“Yes, you can go.” Robby steps back, creating a polite corridor of air even while every muscle in him strains to close it again. “The wound is closed. No signs of infection.”
You nod, murmur another thank-you, and leave with the brisk determination of someone escaping a small fire.
He tosses the gloves, scans the room to be sure nothing’s missing, and steps into the hall.
By Friday, you have almost convinced yourself that Dr. Robinavitch’s opinion does not matter.
Because it doesn’t, really. Why would it? You don’t know the man. You don’t even know his first name. You only know how he looks in navy scrubs and how he looks in a dark green hoodie with the sleeves shoved to his forearms and you know how he blinks behind askew glasses when the universe throws a curveball.
None of that grants him jurisdiction over your self-worth, you remind yourself — for the sixth, seventh, eighth time in the last hours (which is absolutely a rational number of times for something that totally, unequivocally does not bother you)
You have no idea what his favorite color is, what he does on his days off, whether he reads before bed or falls asleep with the television on, whether he has friends who tease him or children who call him when they need something fixed. He could be boring. He could be unbearable.
He is functionally a stranger, and the opinions of strangers should pass over you without leaving a mark.
Except there had been a moment during that first visit when he had not felt like a stranger at all.
Some tiny aperture had opened in your mind, no more substantial than a daydream caught between blinks, and through it had been an entire future built from nothing. He would maybe ask for your number. You'd manage polite astonishment, of course, pretending the last ten minutes hadn't been an obsessive loop of ask me, ask me, ask me.
Then coffee. Maybe dinner. Conversation that would wander past the pleasantries and into the real questions. Everything happening in the normal order, the one other people seemed to enter without needing a script.
A man likes a woman. He asks her out. She says yes.
There would be no transaction or discussion of time or disclaimers about boundaries or fees. Just interest migrating, cell by cell, toward intimacy.
That little fantasy had been naive. Nothing in your life had ever been handed over with both palms open. You had fought for every apartment, every paid bill, every small square of stability you could defend as yours, and even stripping had begun less like a choice than as the only unlocked door in a hallway full of deadbolts.
It was never meant to be forever.
Forever had looked a little quieter when you pictured it, something involving the degree you had worked for, maybe kitten heel shoes that wouldn't destroy your arches, perhaps a desk with a small green plant you would remember to water because in this imagined life you were also the kind of woman who remembered such things.
Instead, your diploma yellowed discreetly on the wall while your student loans siphoned off money earned in rhinestones and six-inch heels, the sort of circular joke capitalism might have written after three drinks: you had gone into debt to become qualified for work that could not support you, then used supposedly disreputable work to pay for the qualification.
But the work does keep you housed.
It keeps the electricity on and the refrigerator stocked and (miracle of miracles) lets the rent clear without taking the rest of your life with it. As survival strategies go, it beats overdraft fees and lukewarm Ramen by a mile.
And plus, you are good at it.
A song lasts three minutes, sometimes four, and for that small illuminated span your life became beautifully finite.
Eight counts, a mark beneath your stilettos, the angle of your chin timed to the bass. Nothing accidental, nothing capable of catching you unprepared. Under the lights you swell to mystic size, pure glitter and gravity, and the house confuses being watched with being known.
You give them a body, a smile, the suggestion of closeness. Not one thing more.
“Someone’s askin’ for you.” Candy — six feet of sunset-red hair, glitter-lidded eyes, and a cigarette behind her ear — materializes at your elbow.
She worries a cocktail straw between teeth painted Revlon Fire & Ice, shifts weight onto one stiletto and fixes you with a look.
Candy had been at the club long enough to remember three owners, two renovations, and at least a dozen girls who had arrived with stage names chosen in the parking lot and disappeared before anyone learned their real ones.
She was not material, she would have corrected anyone who suggested it, largely because she considered children loud and motherhood an elaborate pyramid scheme.
Still, she had taken one look at you on your first night and decided you were hers to keep alive. Somebody had to.
You glance toward the hallway. “Who?”
“Didn’t ask. Tall. Glasses, maybe.” She stabs her straw toward the lobby, cherry lipstick parting in a half-smirk. “Or not. Lighting’s shit out there.”
“Well, that narrows it down,” you say with a laugh, tightening the cap on your mascara.
Through the mirror Candy tips her chin, curls spilling forward like spent matchsticks. “Trust me, honey, you won’t miss him. Sticks out like a sore thumb in there. Real stuck-up face. Could be handsome under all the disapproval.”
“Reassuring,” you murmur, sliding the tube into your makeup bag. “All right. I’ll go talk to him.”
You step away from the mirror’s glare, padding down the corridor that smells of hairspray and stale Mojitos.
Being requested has long since stopped surprising you.
The frequency still does, perhaps, because it happens more to you than to most the girls and you cannot quite identify the mechanism, what small thing you do that makes men single you out from an entire room of beautiful women.
You suspect it might be the distance, the impression that some essential part of you remains elsewhere. Men enjoy a locked door when they believe money might furnish the key.
So a summons from the floor means little, a private-room request, which you're sure is to follow, even less.
The steeper the fee, the holier they feel. And your fees are steep.
You have learned the taxonomy by now: the overexcited ones who can barely sit still, the grabby ones who pretend they misunderstood, the married ones who turn their rings inward, the unmarried ones who act as though that makes them virtuous.
Odds are Tall-Maybe-Glasses will slot into one category or another. They always do.
What you find is not remotely what you expect.
Even under the club’s shit lighting you recognize him instantly, despite the bodies cutting between you, despite every reasonable part of your brain insisting there must be hundreds of men in Pittsburgh with broad shoulders and glasses, hundreds who own dark green long sleeve shirts and jeans, hundreds capable of sitting stiffly around a drink they must regret ordering.
But only one of them blinks at disaster the way he does.
Only one is Dr. Robinavitch, and he is already looking directly at you.
You consider turning around and pretending Candy found the wrong girl. Too late. You feel her surfacing already, that other side he seems uniquely equipped to excavate. The fumbling girl who never knows where to put her hands and whom you have worked very hard to keep out of this room.
By the time you reach him, whatever elegant greeting your usual persona here might have offered has abandoned you completely.
“Dr. Robinavitch,” you say, stopping before him with your arms held awkwardly at your sides. “What are you doing here?”
“You can call me Michael,” he says, holding your gaze. It looks like he almost regrets saying that, but he continues on. “We’re not at the hospital.”
It is a nice name. Simple, strong, well-suited to him. It belongs in kitchens lit gold before sunrise, in slow Sundays and coffee cooling on the counter, in a voice calling up the stairs that breakfast is ready. It belongs to people who know him well enough to shorten it when they are teasing and draw out every syllable when they are cross.
“Michael, then,” you say, testing the shape of it while pretending it does not make him seem suddenly, inconveniently more human, then repeat, “What are you doing here?”
Michael lifts the glass to his lips, the ice chiming. “Having a drink.”
“Thought you didn’t frequent places like this.”
It’s cheap. Petty, even. You know it the second you say it, but that sentence has been bruising beneath your skin all week, tender every time you press at it.
Michael looks down into his drink. “I deserved that.”
Your posture slips by a degree, less certain of itself.
“I wasn’t trying to make you feel bad,” you say automatically, then wince because that is plainly untrue. “Well, I was. A little.” Your finger finds the edge of the bar, worrying at it. “But only because you made me feel bad first, which is childish, I know, and not that it even matters because you don’t owe me anything, I just…” Stop. Breathe. Locate the point. You make yourself meet his eyes again. “Could you answer the original question honestly, please? Because the drinks here are terrible.”
You have never been particularly good at cruelty, not sustained cruelty, anyway.
When you were eight, you once cried harder than your cousin after shoving him off a swing because he had called you stupid, then spent the rest of the afternoon bringing him popsicles and checking his scraped knee as though guilt itself might cauterize the wound.
Even now, one flicker of remorse in someone's face and your anger begins eating its own tail.
“I wanted to see you. To apologize.” His mouth pulls taut, irritation aimed inward. “I didn’t know where else to find you.”
“Oh.” A rogue strand of hair is tucked away, buying you a second to breathe. “Well, that’s… nice. Unnecessary, but nice.” You give him a shrug. “It’s okay. I know you didn’t mean it the way it sounded. I’m just a little sensitive sometimes, apparently.”
“No. You’re not too sensitive. I was insensitive.” He pauses, as though deciding whether to risk the rest. “And I’d like the chance to —”
A hand lands lightly at your elbow.
“There you are.” A voice interrupts. “You free for a private?”
The club rushes back in all at once. Damp skin. Sugared alcohol. A bartender shouting over the room as ice spills hard into a metal sink.
You turn and find one of your regulars smiling down at you. Married category. Grabby-hands category. Frequent overlap.
He is broad through the middle, expensive watch flashing at his wrist, his face polished into the benign affability of someone who says my wife doesn’t understand me like he has personally discovered marital dissatisfaction.
Once, after three bourbons, he had shown you a photograph of said wife and two daughters without the faintest sense of irony. Beautiful family. Matching white shirts on a beach somewhere, everyone squinting happily into the sun.
Then he had tucked the phone away and laid both hands on your thighs despite having been told twice not to.
You had removed them one finger at a time.
He had called you feisty.
Those are the moments that blur the professional laminate of the job, makes you wonder whether a woman who participates in other people's dishonesty are still allowed to want honest things for herself.
Your mouth opens, closes. “I — uh.” The word sticks, unfinished promise in Michael’s gaze tugs at you, but the house cut doesn’t wait. A practiced smile slips into place. “Absolutely. Room three’s free. Go grab a seat, I’ll be right behind you.”
Before the man can move, Michael’s voice cuts in.
“I’ll take that room instead — at double your usual rate.”
You lashes jump. “Sorry, what?”
“I need a private moment with you,” he clarifies. “Whatever it costs, I’ll double it and add another hundred.”
The regular bristles, shoulders squaring. “Pal, you can’t just buy my slot.”
“That’s exactly what I’m offering.” Michael swings his gaze to you. “Triple.”
You start to shake your head. “Micheal, that’s not procedure. I have to —”
“Take care of customers, I know. So let me be the customer.” He trails off on customer, like he's only now realizing that buying your time might require more than throwing numbers into the air.
“Rich boys and their wallets.” The man scoffs, the sound thick with bottom-shelf whiskey and wounded vanity.
But he does unclamp his fingers from your forearm, wiping the phantom scorch across faded denim as if your skin left a welt.
The grumble from Mr. Grabby fades behind you, leaving you alone with Michael again.
Michael and that unreadable face, solemn eyes and a tightly ironed flat mouth, giving away nothing. Refusing to hint at what he expects to happen when you breathe in a smaller room together.
You sift his features one last time, hoping for a spark, for motive, or leak of feeling, but the shelves are bare tonight, so you assemble a customer-service smile, flash the bouncer your wristband, and angle your chin toward the corridor.
“Um — this way, please.”
He ducks in behind you, almost too big for the narrow hall, one shoulder skims peeling latex paint, the other nearly takes out a exit-sign wire. His fists stay buried in his pockets.
Neon leaks through the frosted door ahead, flooding everything in pink-blue prisms. When you step inside and catch your reflection in the mirror, you look like a broken candy heart flashing on and off in a vending-machine light show.
“Clock starts when the door shuts,” you say, palming the latch.
“Then shut it.”
Baritone honey pours over you and a tide of goosebumps rise in its wake. You're grateful for the anonymity the lighting provides, hiding the way your mouth parts like you've never heard a command before.
Snick.
The door seals and silence rushes in, puffing outward until it fills every corner of the room.
He lowers himself into the narrow armchair, long legs arranged with care, spine straight, hands folded together over his lap. No ring on his left. Still no ring, because yes, you checked again, and yes, you had checked the first time you met him too. You tell yourself it's not a weird thing to notice. People notice hands.
“Okay, there’s a couple rules before we start.” Your voice nearly snags as you move in front of him, every shift of your sequined costume scattering red flecks over his face. “First, no touching unless I initiate. If I do, you let me lead.” You lift another finger. “Second, stay seated unless I tell you to move. And third… anything said or done here disappears when the timer goes off.”
He nods.
Normally, this part requires almost no thought. Muscle memory takes over and your mind slips away into its little palace of useless thoughts. What you will eat after work. Whether Candy ever returned your lip liner. How many payments are left on your student loans.
You think about anything but the man in the chair.
But tonight, when you tap the music to life, the little door in your head refuses to open. It remains here, aware of him, aware of yourself through his gaze, awareness folding over awareness until the whole thing feels less like performance than standing between two mirrors and watching the image multiply.
Still, your body knows where to go.
You skim two fingers along the wall, static skittering beneath their pads, and then you turn.
Your left knee softens, weight melting into the floor through the arch of your foot as your shoulders roll into the first down beat. Three slow steps carry you neatly between his knees.
One hand plants on the chair-back above his head, the other glides down your own thigh, tracing its curve until only a sliver of air remains between your skin and his, rule one perserved by the narrowest margin.
Michael’s shoulders iron themselves to the seatback, eyes flicking up to yours, down, immediately back up, panicked by the prospect of settling anywhere too long. His thumbs sneak under the armrests, improvised restraints for hands that clearly no longer trust themselves.
You let one painted nail trace the shallow notch of his collar and feel the shiver it pulls it loose.
Then you turn again, hips sweeping slowly over his lips before planting your hands on his knees and folding forward until his exhale punches hot against the back of your thighs.
“Listen —” He stalls, throat clicking around the word like it’s too wide to pass, “I never meant to belittle you. Before. In the ER.”
A soft, warning little “mm-mm” escapes your lips as you lift one hand before he can continue, pivoting back toward him as you sink into the space between his parted knees, palms gliding slowly up the hard planes of his thighs.
“You're wasting very expensive minutes, Dr. Robinavitch.”
“Michael,” he corrects automatically, then drags in a breath. “But you need to know...” He blows the sentence out through flared nostrils, gathers the rest like loose change and dumps it at your feet. “I never thought less of you. If anything” — he swallows, pride shrinking a size — “I’m far too invested in what you think of me. So I’d really prefer it if I didn’t leave here with you convinced I’m some condescending asshole.”
Your fingers tighten just enough to gather a pinch of his trousers. “Why?”
His brows crash together. “Why what?”
“Why are you so invested in what I think of you?” The words tumble out softer than you intend, but there’s no stuffing them back inside now.
“I don’t know,” he admits. “I just… do.”
You answer by rising onto your toes, sliding forward until your knees plant on either side of his thighs and gravity pulls you down, snug, perfectly aligned. You can feel how hard he’s trying not to rock up into you; the tension turning his thighs into steel beneath your calves.
You cup the back of the chair with one hand, the other drifting to the nape of his neck, fingertips teasing the short hair there while your hips settle, testing his restraint like a match teasing gasoline.
“Did you really come here just to apologize?”
“Yes.” It lands flat and Michael's gaze flinches sideways. You can practically hear the second half of that lie thrashing in his throat, begging for a more believable host.
“I don’t know that I believe you.” Your hips tip forward in a languid circle, coaxing a muted groan that reveals far more than his answer did.
His mouth parts around the sound and an impulse sparks — close the distance, lean in and test whether his kisses are as buttoned-up as every other part of him. But kissing would not be part of the dance. A kiss would be yours, not the performer's, and you've already bared more of yourself with him than intended.
“Do you think I have ulterior motives?” His eyes flick down to your lips then snap back up as though caught.
Your nails trace the neat seam of his shirt, an excuse to keep touching him while you marshal courage. “I think a man who shells out triple the rate has some motive. Whether that's ulterior or not is still up in the air.”
One corner of his mouth tugs upward, a brittle almost-smile. “Touché.”
A sharp beep-beep-beep interrupts the charge in your chest.
“Time.”
You don't move right away, hands now resting on the broad shelf of his shoulders as if checking for something you forgot. A heartbeat passes before you ease back, letting air slip in.
“If that’s… all you needed, apology accepted. Promise.” Your voice skips like a stone. “I’ll just— grab the door.”
Before you can slide from his lap, his hands move to your waist.
The touch is tentative for all of half a second, waiting, perhaps, for you to remind him of rule one.
When you don’t, his hands forming a firmer pressure into your sides. “That’s not all I needed.”
Heat sparks under his thumbs, soldering whatever resolve you had to stand up.
“What does that mean?”
“It means —” A muscle jumps in his cheek. “I did come here to apologize. I just didn’t anticipate wanting... considerably more than your forgiveness.”
Your inhale stalls mid-rib. “Such as?”
“First,” he murmurs, leaning in until his breath ribbons across your mouth. His lips graze, barely, a static spark you could almost pretend you imagined. “I want to kiss you. Will you let me do that?”
Your body tilts toward him on instinct, gravity picking sides, but you slam the brakes a centimeter from his mouth.
Heat still flares across your cheeks as you remind both of you, “I don’t kiss customers.”
His hands ease from your waist. “Okay.”
“That’s it?” you blurt, half-expecting the bargaining to start.
He blinks, brow pleating. “Did you expect a fight?”
He almost looks hurt by the idea.
But that's almost exactly what you were primed for. Just like that the negotiation table collapses, all your rehearsed rebuttals clattering to the floor while he simply pockets his desire and honors the line. No counteroffer, no charm as defense, nothing.
He’s the first customer who’s ever heard no and decided the period at the end was permanent, and the respect tastes oddly like defeat.
“You could ask me again when I’m not working.”
“Could I?”
Your pulse jumps at the invitation you just opened and you curse your mouth for racing ahead of your fear, yet the idea of him wanting you outside this neon fishbowl sends a ridiculous bloom of warmth through your body.
“If you still want to,” you say, pretending cool confidence while your mind is screeching please say yes, please say yes.
“I will.”
“You can’t know that.”
“No,” he concedes. “So tell me when you’re not working and give me the opportunity to find out.”
“And if you change your mind?”
“I won’t,” he says, voice trimmed of hesitation. His stare pins you in place. “But if it makes you feel better, I’ll wait until then to say I told you so.”
Three Thursdays later, Michael Robinavitch still hasn't cashed in his told-you-so, even though he earned the right to say it several times over (turns out he's far too charitable for that), but you've learned two things about him all the same.
The first is that his kisses are anything but buttoned-up.
You learned this after your first date, which began at a little restaurant with linen napkins and candles guttering inside cloudy glass jars and ended with the servers stacking chairs around you.
Michael asked you questions with the same concentration he gave everything else, chin tipped into one hand, eyes fixed on your face as though every silly tangent might eventually prove significant.
And there were tangents.
The glow-in-the-dark stars you stuck to your childhood ceiling in accurate constellations, the library card you considered your first real possession, the disastrous apartment with the radiator that screamed at three every morning and a kitchen drawer that came completely free of the cabinet if you pulled too hard.
In return, he told you about the cat who bullied him awake before sunrise, the grandmother who still called to ensure he was eating properly, the years he’d spent letting work devour every other part of his life.
By dessert, he was no longer merely the doctor from the ER or the man who had paid you to dance for him.
He was Michael. You were you.
Somewhere between stealing bites of his chocolate cake and defending tiramisu as a perfectly respectable morning food, the invisible Plexiglas box marked Stranger slid right off its hinges and vanished.
And then after he drove you home, he stood outside your apartment door, beneath the jaundiced porch light and asked, “Will you let me kiss you now?”
A gentleman right until you said yes.
Then both hands framed your face, broad palms swallowing your cheeks, and his mouth came down with startling hunger.
Michael did not kiss so much as take possession of every breath you tried to draw, lips parting yours, tongue sweeping in with an appetite that turned your knees watery and your fingers useless.
The take-home box slipped from your hand and landed upside down between your shoes.
Neither of you noticed.
The second thing you learn is that the restored car taking up half his garage is less an object than a private history he has kept alive by hand.
He has loved it patiently, replaced what failed without resenting the failure, returned to it year after year with a consistency few people have managed to draw from him — or so you've been told, courtesy of Candy, who knows a girl whose brother is dating someone with a cousin who works in the same hospital.
You try not to think about that part too much. About the consistency. About how few people have managed to keep him, or be kept by him, and what that might eventually mean for you.
Because for all the ordinary sweetness of this undefined thing, dinners and garage tours and his hand finding the small of your back without thinking, there is still a clock somewhere.
The car proves Michael is good at returning to the things he choose. You have no proof you are one of them.
So you enjoy each moment as it comes and refuse to count how many might be left, which is another way of admitting you already believe they are finite.
For now, though, there is this one: Michael bent beneath the raised hood of said car, bare forearms streaked with grease.
His glasses keep slipping down the bridge of his nose while he works, and every few minutes he nudges them back into place with the cleanest part of his wrist, unaware that this only leaves another dark smudge near his temple.
“This is still the original carburetor,” Michael explains, tapping some hidden component with the wrench. “I rebuilt it twice before I got the idle where I wanted it. Replacing it would’ve been easier, but then you lose part of what makes the car —”
“Mm-hm.”
“— worth preserving.”
“Absolutely.”
Your gaze crawls from knuckle to wrist to the ropey lines of his arms, lingering on a bead of sweat the slips toward the cuff he he's shoved past his elbow. Above that: a slash of collarbone and the thin vee of skin beneath his open button.
He eases to his full height, one hand braced against the frame. “What am I pointing at?”
The question yanks your attention toward the car so quickly your neck nearly protests.
“The… engine?”
Michael’s brow arches. Wrong answer, apparently. You follow the line of the wrench and find not one tidy solution but a chaotic constellation of bolts and hoses, none generous enough to wear a nametag.
“That specific part of the engine,” you amend.
“Technically correct.”
Heat rushes into your cheeks. “It’s just — there are so many pieces.”
“There are.”
“And you were talking very quickly.”
His mouth twitches, but he mercifully turns back beneath the hood. “I’ll slow down.”
“To be fair, I learn better by doing,” you tell him, nudging a stray nut with the toe of your sandal. “Maybe you should let me drive it.”
His head emerges from the engine bay again, eyeing from your painted toes up to your face. “You know how to drive a manual?”
“I know how to drive in the broad, point-A-to-point-B sense,” you offer.
“That was not my question.”
“You could teach me.”
His gaze maps your face, skepticism eroding under a tide of fond exasperation. “You’d have to do listen very carefully and do exactly what I tell you.”
An unexpected knot draws your stomach in on itself.
“I could do that.”
He lets the silence stretch, eyes fixed to yours, until the faintest sliver of a grin breaks through.
“We’ll see.”
Twenty minutes later, you confirm, beyond reasonable doubt, that you cannot operate a stick shift.
The poor car bucked, stalled, lurched forward with all the dignity of a go-cart missing one wheel, and by the time you finally limped back into the driveway, Michael looked as though the lesson has carved twenty years off his remaining lifespan.
“It really wasn’t that bad.”
His hip now rests against the fender, knuckles drumming against it. A few new worry lines have set up camp across his forehead and you're fairly certain each of them bears your initials.
“You’re a terrible liar, you know.” You reach up, smoothing a grease-free patch on his sleeve. “But thank you for trying.”
“I said it wasn't that bad. I didn't say the car enjoyed itself.” His gaze drops to your hand on his sleeve, a slow warmth softening the lines fatigue carved earlier. “You listened. Mostly. We can work with mostly.”
You smooth the same spot on his sleeve again, mostly to keep touching him. “Would you call me a promising student?”
“Promising implies measurable improvement,” he says. Only when your mouth falls open in offense does his expression finally give with a crooked little smile. “You're very promising. In more ways than one.”
You drop your head, squinting at a phantom smear on the glossy hood because looking at him feels reckless.
“I — um — thank you.” The smile you manage is small, shaky, painfully earnest, before retreating to the safety of your shoes. It takes a full second for your tongue to unstick. “Guess I'll try to keep the... improvement curve steep.”
He reaches over, thumb hooking a wild curl and tucking it back, then lingers, knuckles grazing the angle beneath your jaw.
“You don't have to prove anything to me,” he murmurs, coaxing your gaze upward with the barest pressure. “You’re allowed to be learning. I happen to like teaching you.”
Up close, you notice the daylight trapped in his irises. Minute gold dust swirling through dark syrup, copper shavings glinting every time he blinks. The color is so glossy, so mirror-deep, you catch your own startled face rippling back at you.
“Even if I put your beloved car through the garage wall?”
Michael leans closer, his hand sliding from beneath your chin to rest lightly at the side of your neck. “If you put my car through the wall, I’ll be very upset.”
You swallow, and the motion bumps against the pad of his thumb; he follows the leap of your pulse like he’s tracking wildlife.
“You wouldn’t forgive me?” you tease, letting the words skim the edge of a pout. “I’d hate to disappoint you.”
“I'd forgive you,” he murmurs, mouth tipping farther into a smile. “But you'd have to prove you learned your lesson.”
You narrow your eyes at him, though the smile tugging at your mouth ruins the effect. “That’s interesting. I distinctly remember you saying I didn’t have to prove anything to you.”
“You don’t have to prove anything right now,” he corrects, leaning close enough that his breath warms your mouth. “But after putting my car through a wall? I’d keep you up all night making sure the lesson stuck.”
Excitement unwinds through you, fed by every almost Michael has left smoldering between you. His hand beneath your skirt but never under your panties. Your bra loosened beneath his fingers, only for him to kiss the exposed slope of your shoulder and fasten it again before leaving.
The night you climbed into his lap and ground against him until both of you were breathing like you had run somewhere, only for Michael to murmur that you should slow down while his own hips revealed his truth once, rutting beneath yours.
You have been circling this for weeks, close enough to feel the warmth of it without ever stepping fully inside. Now the circle seems to have opened.
You glance at him from beneath half-mast lashes. “All night?”
“Would that be so terrible?” he asks quietly. “Spending the night showing me you can follow directions?”
You nuzzle lightly against his palm.
“I can follow directions,” you say at once, the words nearly tripping over each other in their hurry to reach him.
“Let's see it.” His thumb traces your lower lip. “Turn around, press your palms to the hood, and wait there until I join you.”
A thrill fizzes through your limbs as you turn. Each step towards the hood feels electric. You place your palms flat against the glossy surface, worrying the inside of your cheek, adjusting yourself by small, nervous degrees until you think you resemble what he asked for.
Boots scuff behind you.
Michael's palm settles at your lower back while the toe of his shoe nudges one ankle, widening your stance by inches.
His hand slides to the nape of your neck and presses until your breasts mold to the hood and your breath fogs the paint.
“Good,” he murmurs near your ear. “Stay just like that.”
He fits his palms atop your smaller ones, trapping them to the metal, the heat of his skin bleeding straight through.
His legs slot behind yours, hips pressing in until the hard length of him is an unmissable line against your ass.
You're keenly aware of how little space he's left you — and how much you like it.
One hand releases yours, patience pooling in every inch of its downward glide down your waist. The soft hiss of fabric follows until his fingertips catch the skimpy hem of the skirt you wore on purpose, pinching it like he's checking its integrity.
Lately you've treated riskier hemlines as negotiating tools. Flash a little more leg, tip the scale from almost to yes. From the way his grip tightens, the strategy seems to be paying handsome dividends.
“Tell me if this is too fast,” he says, but the desperation lacing the words makes it very clear he hopes the answer is no.
“It's not.” You arch the smallest amount into his hand, offering proof that you have no desire to slow him.
“Let me hear it — tell me I can finally do everything I’ve wanted since you looked up at me in that prim little blouse with those pretty doe eyes.”
“Whatever you want, Michael,” you manage, voice catching on a soft gasp. “I’m yours — just tell me how to please you.”
A dark chuckle rumbles out of him.
“You have no idea how much you’re pleasing me.” His lips skim the fine hairs at your nape. “So relax and let me take care of you, honey. That’s all I want.”
His free hand skims under your skirt, knuckles dragging upward until he finds the thin cotton he intends to ruin.
He cups you through the barrier, pressure light, exploratory.
“All this for me, baby?” There's genuine surprise hidden beneath a teasing tone, fingers prodding at the damp material, zeroing in until they find your clit.
You brace on the slick metal, nails scraping for purchase that isn't there as a sharp breath escapes you.
You grind back into his hand and he rewards you by gathering a fistful of your hair, guiding your head back so you're forced to listen.
“I asked you a question,” he rasps, fingers still stroking where you need them. “Answer me, honey — who’s all this for?”
“You,” you gasp, pushing harder into his touch.
“Thought so.”
His fingers keep circling, not faster or harder, refusing the impatient escalation every man before him seemed to mistake for skill. There had only been two, technically three if you counter the college boyfriend whose idea of foreplay lasted approximately the length of a commercial break, but enough to teach you that pleasure usually required instruction, negotiation, the subtle repositioning of a wrist followed by exaggerated encouragement so nobody's ego bruised.
Michael needs none of it.
He reads the staccato hitch in your breath like sheet music, easing pressure when your thighs tense, adding the tiniest grind of his palm each time your exhale fractures.
“Can you come like this, baby? Just from having your clit rubbed?” His fingers press a fraction more firmly, listening when your breath splinters. “Is this how you touch yourself at home?”
Your thighs tense around his hand, not from the pressure this time but from the sudden, ridiculous urge to hide. He has you bent over his car with your skirt around your hips, yet apparently being asked about your masturbation habits is where modesty finally draws the line.
“Yes,” you mumble, cheek burning against the paint.
“Nothing to be shy about.” His lips brush the back of your shoulder, almost sweet enough to distract from his hand. “Perfectly normal. Besides, I’m very interested in learning exactly how you make yourself come.”
“Usually I — I have to concentrate harder than this.”
Usually there is work required. A whole tedious committee meeting between brain and body, several false starts, the refusal to think about laundry or tomorrow or whether you locked the door.
With Michael's hands on you and his weight suffocating against your back, the entire process collapses into something almost simple. It feels good, then better, then suddenly far too good, the pressure rising so quickly you cannot locate the moment it became inevitable.
“Yeah?” he murmurs against your ear, the smile audible in his voice. “Poor thing. All that cleverness, and a few touches have you going empty on me.”
Whatever remained of your mind gutters out. Pleasure crowds every available space, swelling in your organs, beneath your stomach, down the backs of your shaking thighs.
“S’too good,” you breathe, barely forming the consonants. “Michael, I can’t… ’m gonna come.”
Your voice sounds distant even to you, drowned beneath the blood rushing in your ears.
“Already?” Michael murmurs, pleased surprise warming the word. “Didn’t stand a chance, did you?” His palm presses more firmly against you. “Go ahead. Show me how pretty you are when you come.”
Your climax detonates like a string of firecrackers, first a bright spark at the center of you, then rapid-fire pops that ricochet up your spine and down your thighs.
Your vision goes pointillist, tiny pinpricks of white dancing at the edge of sight, while your hips jerk once, twice, a third time under his palm. Every new burst feels sharper than the last, until the sparks fade to a soft glow that leaves you boneless against the hood.
With careful hands, Michael tucks your hair away, mouth brushing the place where neck becomes shoulder. Then he urges your chin toward him, and captures your lips in a slow kiss you answer weakly, all pliant mouth and lingering shivers.
The kiss keeps your soft and unsuspecting while his fingers hook beneath the edge of your panties and draws them aside.
Cool air reaches you for half a second before the pad of his finger finds your bare clit, slick and swollen from the orgasm he has barely finished coaxing out of you.
You jerk instantly, a startled cry catching between your joined mouths as your knees threaten to fold. His free arm bands around your waist, hauling you tighter against his chest when you squirm at the overstimulation.
“I know, honey. I know it’s sensitive,” Michael murmurs, tightening his arm when another helpless squirm runs through you. “You can come for me again, can’t you, sweetheart? Hmm?”
“You’ll help me?” you ask, voice small and fractured, as though he is not already doing exactly that.
“Course I will.” His fingers dip through your folds. “Gonna do all the work. You just be my pretty girl, yeah?”
He gathers the wetness there, coating one finger before easing it into you. Your walls flutter around the intrusion. Michael pauses at the first tense pull of your body, lips brushing your shoulder while he waits for you to soften around him, then advances another careful inch.
He crooks the finger slightly as he begins to work it in and out, testing the angle until your knees weaken and a garbled moan tumbles from your mouth.
You try his name once and lose it halfway through.
After a minute, Michael stills with his finger buried deep.
“Think you can take one more?”
You manage something between a nod and a whimper. Apparently it is answer enough. A second finger joins the first, spreading you slowly while his arm tightens around your waist to hold you steady through the stretch.
“That’s it,” he praises, easing in until both knuckles press flush. “Good girl. Open up for me.”
“More,” you plead, words pouring out without supervision. “I can take more than your fingers. I want you, Michael, please.”
“Not bent over my car.” He pumps both fingers into you slowly, as though proving denial does not mean deprivation. “When I finally fuck you, I intend to take my time. Properly.”
“Please,” you babble, clenching desperately around him. “I’ll be good. I’ll do whatever you tell me.”
A rough sound leaves him. His fingers plunge into you harder, once, twice, forcing your mouth open around a broken moan.
“You think I don’t want to?” he rasps. “I’m trying to do this right. So don’t tempt me into giving you less than I intend to.”
You try to tell him you do not want less, that having him here would feel like everything, but his fingers drive back inside before you can shape the sentence.
They curl, withdraw, return harder, each stroke pulling pleasure tighter beneath your stomach until your hips begin meeting his hand of their own accord.
The argument dissolves somewhere between one breath and the next. You still want him, God, you want him enough to feel hollow without him, but the approaching orgasm seizes control of every available muscle and leaves your tongue useful only for begging him not to stop.
“There you go — knew you’d listen.” His voice is a rough purr against your ear. “You’re close, aren’t you? Give it to me, baby, right on my hand.”
You obey.
And this time it isn't an explosion, but a long, rolling pull that drags pleasure through every muscle. And gone before you can process the full weight of it, leaving your lungs empty and your legs shaking so hard his arm has to catch all of you.
He keeps you upright while he withdraws, then spins you gently to face him. A quick kiss lands on your forehead before he parts his lips and sucks the taste of you from his knuckles.
The sound he makes is all satisfaction. “Sweetest thing I’ve had in this garage.”
Your cheeks burn, words tangling on your tongue. Michael must sense it, moving to smooth your skirt as one plam stays at your lower back.
“Easy, honey,” he murmurs, thumb brushing your cheek. “How’re you feeling?”
“Good,” you breathe, then reconsider because the word is painfully inadequate. “Better than good. I just can’t really think yet.” You press your burning face into his chest, hiding there with a small, mortified laugh. “Don’t make me talk until my brain comes back.”
“That could take a while,” he says, laughter rumbling beneath your cheek. Before you can protest, his arms tighten around you. “Lucky for you, I’ve cleared my evening.”
Seven weeks is usually when Robby begins looking for an exit.
It isn't a conscious thing. He does not circle the date on a calendar or wake on the forty-ninth morning possessed by some biological imperative to sabotage his own happiness.
It happens by accumulation. Small expectations begin collecting around his ankles, almost weightless individually, until he notices he is standing in something deep enough to drown in.
And Robby — who has spent most of his adult life being needed by more people than he can satisfy — feels the familiar urge to escape before he disappoints one more.
Seven weeks just happens to be enough. Enough to enjoy a woman. Enough to leave before enjoyment turns into dependence, or dependence turns into something he cannot provide without cutting into himself for spare parts.
Tonight, however, Robby is parked behind the club at nearly six in the morning, waiting for you in the restored car while dawn begins thinning the darkness around him.
His phone sits facedown on the passenger seat, though he does not need to look at it to remember what is waiting inside: dinner reservations for next Friday, a reminder to teach you how to change a tire the week after that.
Plans stacked neatly beyond the seven-week mark, each one entered by his own hand, each one quietly assuming there will still be a you and him when the date arrives.
If he has anything to do with it, there will be.
The contradiction does not escape him. It has, in fact, been sitting in the passenger seat all night.
The engine idles beneath his hands, every vibration familiar.
He has already checked the clock four times, although your shift ended seven minutes ago and he knows closing rarely means leaving. There are tips to count, makeup to remove, men to steer toward the exit after alcohol has convinced them money can interrupt the rotation of the Earth.
The metal door finally swings open and you emerge in pieces he once would have considered incompatible.
Above the collarbone you are still dusk-lit velvet with eyes rimmed noir, lashes casting soft shadows against your cheeks, a comet's tail of glitter charting the dip of your throat. But flats have replaced your heels, a swollen paperback bulges from your tote, and the cardigan you've buttoned askew is pale pink.
Mystery solved.
You spot the car and stop so abruptly the red-haired woman behind you mutters a curse, forced to sidestep you.
Through the windshield Robby watches your mouth shape a tiny, startled no, as if the word could turn the headlights off by itself.
By the time he climbs out, you are approaching with the wary steps of someone encountering an unattended explosive.
“You brought that here?” you ask, eyeing the vehicle.
Robby glances back at it, though he hardly needs to.
It's got new imperfections now. The little hooks your nails carved into the paint the first night in his garage, when he had you trembling against the hood. The smudged scrape across the rear panel from the night he fucked you over it. The faint scratches along the passenger side, left by your shoes while he knelt on the concrete and ate you out until your thighs shook around his ears.
None of it is damage he has been able to treat as damage.
When he waxed the car last Sunday, he polished around the marks from your nails with ridiculous care, preserving them as neatly as initials cut into wet cement.
“I said I'd pick you up,” he says, lifting one shoulder.
“But in this car?”
You look past him again at it, visibly appalled on his behalf. You know how he feels about the car, which means you also know downtown is a minefield of shopping carts, careless doors, drunk pedestrians, and parallel parkers who believe bumpers are instructional.
You know that he loves the car. He's told you so, himself.
He might love you more.
Unfortunately, that sentence is considerably harder to say than it is to diagnose, so he'll keep it tucked away for a little while longer.
Instead he fishes the keys from his pocket and holds them toward you.
Your eyes fall to them, then rise slowly to his face. “What are those for?”
“The car.”
“I know what keys do, Michael.”
He is still not entirely used to that.
Michael.
Nearly everyone has called him Robby for so long that his first name feels less like an identity than a fact printed on hospital credentials. He had not used it socially since around the time his mother took her own life, a softer version of him then sealed somewhere on the wrong side of that loss.
Robby is what remained. Robby became a doctor, became useful, became someone too busy tending other people’s emergencies to examine his own.
But that night offered Michael to you anyway.
Now he likes hearing it in your voice, likes the strange sensation of watching you resurrect a name without resurrecting the grief attached to it.
“Good. We’re already ahead of where we were with the carburetor.”
Your eyes narrow, but your hand remains firmly at your side, apparently unwilling to implicate itself in whatever terrible idea he has conceived.
Robby reaches for it anyway, turns your palm upward, and deposits the keys there before you can refuse them on principle.
“You need practice,” he explains.
Your fingers curl around the metal with great reluctance. “Do you not remember what happened last time?”
“I remember there wasn’t enough road,” he replies. “And now there’s more road.”
You look past him toward the empty street, then back again. “You keep saying things you think are reassuring, and they are not.”
It makes him smile, though he conceals most of it while opening the driver’s door for you.
You settle behind the wheel and begin arranging everything with a process he thinks might be better suited to launching an aircraft. Seat forward. Mirror down. Mirror up again. Hair tucked behind one ear, then untucked when you decide the ponytail is pulling too tightly. Your bag lands between you, paperback still protruding from the top as though prepared to flee independently if the lesson turns ugly.
Robby waits through the entire ceremony, then calmly reminds you where the clutch is after you press the brake instead.
Your first attempt kills the engine anyway.
“Vehicular manslaughter,” you whisper.
He can feel the laugh pressing against the back of his teeth, but keeps his voice level. “Start it again.”
The second attempt gets you three feet. The third carries you out of the parking space and onto the service road, the engine smoothing beneath your hands. Your shoulders slowly descend from around your ears, one hand loosening its death grip on the wheel.
Robby has always been better at beginnings and endings. For once, he does not think about either.
“Where am I going?” you ask.
Robby looks toward the empty road ahead. “Doesn’t matter. Just drive.”
So you do.
MARIA NOTE fourteen thousand words. FOURTEEN. all because i thought it would be hot for robby to unexpectedly see shy reader’s tits at a strip club. hubris is real and she has punished me severely. unfortunately, i regret nothing. thank you for reading this absolute beast <3
YOU CAN FIND MY MICHAEL ROBINAVITCH MASTERLIST HERE ⭑.ᐟ
─ ⊹ ⊱ ꕤ｡˚⋆ you’re notoriously sensitive . . . but robby doesn’t mind 𐔌՞. .՞𐦯⋆. ❤︎︎ ︎
𝐋𝐘𝐍𝐍𝐈𝐄’𝐒 𝐂𝐎𝐅𝐅𝐄𝐄 𝐒𝐇𝐎𝐏 ⛾ ⟡ ݁₊ .
“Baby, baby. You have to stop crying, honey. You’re breaking my heart,” Robby coos with a gentle palm on your cheek as you heave another sob. He’d been trying to talk you down for hours to no avail, but a bad day at work meant you’d left teetering the line between fine and not — right now, you were the epitome of the latter.
“I know, I’m sorry, Mikey,” you sniffle with tears free falling. You nuzzle into the gentleness of his palm, but feel guilty for accepting his touch. He shouldn’t have to play shrink because of your oversensitivity.
Robby thinks that sentiment is nonsense. He can see it on your face without you having to vocalize it. He tilts his head and kisses your tears away for the umpteenth time. His other hand rubs circles into your back where he’s had you cradled since this all started. “Why’re you sorry, baby?”
“Because I — I’m so anxious all the time. All I do is cry and cry and take everything personally and you don’t deserve to deal with it.”
“Deserve it?” Robby scoffs. “I don’t deserve you, baby — I earned you. And with that, I earned everything you come with, the good parts and bad. I signed on for this, honey. And I’m not going anywhere,” he says. “Got it?”
The declaration only makes you cry harder. His tone of voice and its genuineness. Like he means it. Like you’re a prize and not a punishment, and that he isn’t eternally damned because he chose a girl with a soft heart. It’s touching, overly so, and it only has you sobbing harder.
But Robby’s prepared for that. He pulls you closer on instinct, lets you cry into the crook of his neck, and rubs your back in soothing motions. “Mhm,” you mumble simply in turn. It’s all you can manage without choking up further.
Robby doesn't mind that either. “There’s my girl. S’all I want, okay? You never burden me, ever. Never will. That’s a promise,” Robby says, brushing away the tear-stricken hairs that litter your cheeks and forehead. “Enough tears, honey. That’s it, just let me hold you” ♡
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