summary: who really needs a prenup when you're in love?
pairing: ormund hightower x ex-wife!reader
content/warnings: social media au, modern au, incorrect legal jargon written by a person who is not a lawyer
A/N: full disclaimer i found a UK prenup template on google and threw this together with the help of one my very good friends who is currently in law school (and i had to admit that i write ormund hightower fanfic to her...a very humbling experience indeed). so this is to say, we're all going to suspend reality for a bit when we read these documents <3 i sincerely apologize for all the inaccuracies in this lol. and of course for context this is a hard jump forward in time, but please remember the series is nonlinear so all questions you may have about what happened between 2020-21 will be answered!
MASTERLIST
FROM: Ormund Hightower <[email protected]>
TO: Reader Godswood <[email protected]>
DATE: 5 October 2021, 16:43Â
SUBJECT: Prenup Â
My love, Aaron sent the final draft of the agreement so Iâve attached it. Lots of very dull language concerning the company and trusts and usual things that go into this sort of business, but please do go through it properly with the solicitor. Even though none of this will ever be of relevance to us itâs important you know what youâre signing. Please let me know if thereâs anything you have questions about and Aaron can walk you through it. Donât stay up all night reading it, Iâll be back from Tokyo tomorrow morning. Reserve the day for usâŠÂ
I love you very much
xxx
O
Sent from my iPhoneÂ
FROM: Reader Godswood <[email protected]>Â
TO: Ormund Hightower <[email protected]>
DATE: 5 October 2021, 19:12Â
SUBJECT: RE: Prenup Â
Thank you honey I love you! I guess since you went to the trouble of getting me a lawyer I promise I will actually read it properly :) miss you so much and canât wait to see you! And canât believe the wedding is only a few weeks away!!Â
Also on the wedding, the florist has suggested some shades of orange in the arrangements and I thought it would maybe be pretty! Is that okay?
FROM: Ormund Hightower <[email protected]>
TO: Reader Godswood <[email protected]>
DATE: 5 October 2021, 19:23
SUBJECT: RE: Prenup Â
Orange is garishÂ
Sent from my iPhoneÂ
FROM: Reader Godswood <[email protected]>Â
TO: Ormund Hightower <[email protected]>
DATE: 5 October 2021, 19:25
SUBJECT: RE: Prenup Â
Okay! Iâll tell them no. Love you baby Iâll see you soon!!
7 OCTOBER 2021 @ 17:42
TRANSCRIPT OF PHONE CALL CONVERSATION BETWEEN READER GODSWOOD (shown as "R") AND COUNSEL EDGAR BULWER (shown as "E")
[transcript starting 3:07 into phone call]
R: ...and that's so crazy you went to school with Ormund! What a small world. He said you were the best.
E: [laughter] Yes, we were quite the duo at Eton. That's kind of him to still think favorably of me after all the foolery we got up to.
R: I can't imagine Ormund getting up to any trouble.
E: [laughter] You would be surprised. [sound of paper shuffling] Now, let's get to the boring bits, shall we?
R: I guess we have to.
E: So you've had a chance to review the agreement, yes?
R: Well, I've skimmed it...to be honest, a lot of that legal stuff just goes, like, in one ear and out the other. [laughter]
E: That's normal. But you've no questions about it? Anything you'd like me to explain?
R: Um...I guess not? I obviously have never been married before. I talked to my mom and she didn't sign a prenup when she married my dad, which I guess makes sense since they didn't have anything.
E: Yes, well, as I'm sure you can imagine, these type of agreements are quite standard when you're entering a marriage with assets near Lord Hightower's scale.
R: Oh yeah, I can imagine. [laughter]
E: I wanted to talk through a few provisions with you and make sure everything is understood. Let's start with the London property.
R: My apartment?
E: The Maiden Street penthouse, yes.
R: What about it?
E: When did you begin residing there?
R: Um...probably in...November, I think? November 2020. I can't remember the date I moved in.
E: Okay, no worries. You understand what the agreement is saying?
R: Uh, I think so.
E: So you understand that the flat was purchased for your use, but you don't actually own the property?
R: Yeah, he told me that. Something about taxes and rich people stuff, I don't know. [laughter] It's through, like, one of the Hightower company things, right?
E: Yes, exactly.
R: Okay, yeah. Yeah, I understand that.
E: So you're comfortable with that?
R: Well, yeah. I mean, we're going to live at Oldtown once we're married anyways. The apartment is just for when I'm working in London, or he is, or whatever. Ormund said it will always be there for me if I need it. I don't really care whose name is technically on it.
E: Right then, just making sure you understand.
R: I do.
E: Okay, onto the next... [sound of paper shuffling] The children, then. You two plan on having them?
R: If it was up to Ormund, we would have a whole team of them already.
E: [laughter] That sounds like him. So all of that section looks good to you? The schooling, the residence, staying in England, all of those bits?
R: Oh, yep. It all makes sense. Ormund has very strong opinions on how to raise kids. Did you know that every Hightower boy has gone to Eton? Literally since the 1400s?
E: Oh, yes. I'm familiar. So...you agree with the section on children?
R: Sure, I don't see any problems with it.
E: Alright then. What about the financial provisions?
R: What section is that?
E: Uh...section eight.
R: Oh, I see it. [hums] So if I put up with him for five years, I get ÂŁ4 million?
E: [laughter] I suppose you do. Youâre fine with that amount?
R: I am more than fine with it. I grew up sleeping in the same bed as my mom. I think I could manage with ÂŁ4 million.
E: ...okay. And then for the fidelity section, I wanted to--
[sound a man's voice on R line]
R: Sorry, Edgar, give me a second-- [voice becomes muffled, presumably from speaker being covered] Honey, what'd you say? [sound a man's voice on R line] Oh, okay, yeah, I'm almost done. [voice becomes clear again] Sorry about that. Ormund reminded me we've got a dinner reservation in 10, so is it fine if we speed through the rest?
E: Oh, of course. So, the fidelity section. You understand the financial consequence?
R: [laughter] Yeah, I'm not going to cheat on him. And he won't cheat on me. No worries there.
E: [clears throat] Alright then. So...the whole thing is good?
R: Yep!
E: Great. Then you can just sign it and send it back to me.
R: Sure thing. Thanks again!
E: Yes, of course. Remember to call if you have any questions that come up, alright? And please tell Ormund I said hello.
since you said confess: my guy bestfriend and i kissed after being friends for 2 years but i was returning back to dorm after breaking up with my bf(my guy bsf didn't know abt him cuz my bf was my tutor back in high school and he is old --- 29 ) and when i was in the parking lot of the dorm he (my guy bestfriend) saw me and confessed but i was like heavily drunk and crying bs so we kissed. he's been texting me ever since but i can't reply agh i feel like i made huge mistake.
Hey anon, welcome to the confessional !
I wanna start off by saying that even though I donât know much of your past relationship, having a big power imbalance (tutor/student + age gap) puts you in a vulnerable position where most of the times you might feel pressured to do things you donât want to. If he was your high school tutor, you most likely met when you were underage and Iâm so sorry you had to go through that. I hope youâre taking care of yourself!
Now, regarding your best friendâŠ
It is common to act impulsively when youâre drunk. You were also carrying the weight of a breakup you couldnât talk about so donât blame yourself for what happened.
You were dealing with intoxication and emotional stress so that was not the right moment for your bsf to confess (even if he didnât know).
Youâre ignoring him because you feel guilty and anxious. First of all, be honest with yourself. Do you feel like you made a mistake because you do not reciprocate his feelings? Are you scared of losing his friendship? Do you feel like you somehow âcheatedâ because you had just broken up?
Communication is the best way to solve things, but you donât have to tell him about the breakup if you donât feel ready. You can let him know youâre going through something and need some space. Youâre allowed to take your space and time to heal.
And remember, most of the times we regret saying or doing things while dealing with heavy emotions because they influence our way of thinking. So take your time and be honest with yourself, donât let the guilt take over you. When youâre not under the influence of those feelings anymore, you will find clarity.
Sending you lots of love!
(If you ever feel like the situation is getting too overwhelming, do not hesitate to seek professional help! Iâm a psychology student but my analysis and advice does not substitute a professional psychologist.)
reader, who wants to be an actress, was in a relationship with ryland probably while he was getting his PhD or right after that.
reader who is going through a lot while working different jobs and doing auditions and not really taking her career anywhere and thinks ryland has his head in the clouds.
ryland is just probably too busy with his research poor guy.
anyway, miscommunication, angst, angst, angst.
few months/years (?) later reader gets into the industry and meets colt cause heâs a stunt actor.
it was probably shocking to see the exact copy of her ex boyfriend but a completely different person.
even if ryland talked about having a twin (maybe he didnât) reader never really met him.
You meet Ryland Grace in a coffee shop that smells like burnt espresso and old paper, three blocks from the university, and he's hunched over a stack of papers with a highlighter behind his ear like some kind of academic pirate. You're there to run lines for an audition you won't get. He's there because, as you'll learn, he's always there, buried under research he cares about more than he probably should.
You fall for him slow and sure, the way you fall for people who make you feel like the smartest person in the room just for asking good questions. He's brilliant. He's kind. He looks at you like you're a problem he wants to spend the rest of his life solving.
You think that's romantic, at first.
The trouble is Ryland's head lives somewhere else. It lives in labs and grant proposals and the kind of research jargon that makes your eyes glaze over no matter how hard you try to care. You tell him about callbacks and he nods and says that's great, honey in a voice that's already halfway back to whatever he was thinking about before you started talking.
You don't blame him, not really. Not out loud. He's not choosing his work over you on purpose â he's just a man with a mind that runs at a different frequency than the rest of the world, and you knew that when you fell for him.
But knowing it and living it are different animals.
You're waiting tables and doing background work and standing in line for auditions that go nowhere, watching your bank account shrink and your hope go with it, and Ryland is off changing the world one experiment at a time, and there's a version of you that starts to resent the gap between those two lives. You don't say it. You let it curdle instead, quiet and slow, the way resentment does when you're too tired to have the fight properly.
You have your head in the clouds, you tell him once, after he misses your callback because a data run went long. You don't mean it as cruelly as it lands. He looks at you like you've slapped him.
I'm trying to build something that matters, he says.
So am I, you say, and neither of you says what you're both thinking â that maybe you're building in different directions, and maybe that's the whole problem.
It ends quietly. No shouting, no big scene, which somehow makes it worse â you'd almost rather it hurt loud than fade like a stain you can't quite scrub out. He says something about needing space to focus. You say something about needing someone who's actually there. You both mean it. You're both right. That's the tragedy of it.
You don't hear about a twin brother until years later, and even then it's only a passing thing â my brother does stunt work, if you can believe it, complete opposite of me â said once, in the early days, back when you still told each other things that didn't matter yet. You forget it almost as soon as he says it. Why would you remember? You never had a reason to.
Three years pass. You get better auditions. You get worse auditions. You get some work, finally â a supporting role in a mid-budget thriller that's actually going to get a real release, the kind of thing you used to lie awake imagining. You're on set, wired on catering-table coffee and nerves, when the stunt coordinator introduces the guy doing your love interest's fall gag.
This is Colt, he says. Colt Grace.
Your stomach drops before your brain catches up.
He turns around and it's Ryland's face â Ryland's exact face, the one you used to trace with your fingertip in the dark, the one you thought you'd memorized down to the last freckle â except it isn't. The eyes are the same shape but they hold themselves differently, cockier, quicker to crinkle at the corners. The mouth curls into something looser, easier, a smile that doesn't need three seconds to arrive the way Ryland's did when he'd surface from whatever equation he was drowning in.
You okay? Colt asks, and even his voice is close enough to gut you and different enough to confuse the wound.
Fine, you say, too fast. You just â you look like someone I used to know.
Yeah, he says, easy, like this happens to him all the time, like he's used to being someone's ghost. I get that a lot. Got a twin. Ry. Smart guy, terrible taste in flannel.
You laugh before you can stop yourself, and it startles you â how easy that was, how it didn't feel like laughing at Ryland so much as laughing with something that used to be him and isn't anymore.
Small world, you manage.
Smaller than you think, he says, and there's a flicker of something in his face â surprise, maybe, or recognition â like your name just landed somewhere it shouldn't have. Like he's doing the math too. Wait. You wouldn't happen to be â
Yeah, you say, before he can finish it. I would happen to be.
You spend the rest of the shoot very carefully not thinking about the way your pulse spikes every time he's on set. You tell yourself it's the shock of it â muscle memory mistaking a face for a feeling, nothing more complicated than that. You tell yourself a lot of things.
Colt doesn't bring Ryland up again, not directly, but you catch him watching you sometimes between takes with an expression you can't quite name â not pity, not curiosity, something more careful than either. Like he already knows the shape of the story and is deciding whether he wants to hear the rest of it.
It's on the last night of the shoot, at the wrap party, when he finally asks.
You're both a little drunk on cheap champagne and the giddy relief of a project finished. He finds you by the food table, looking devastatingly ordinary in a leather jacket that shouldn't work with the string lights behind him and somehow does anyway.
So, he says. You and my brother.
Me and your brother, you agree.
Bad?
Not bad, you say, and mean it, and it surprises you how much you mean it. Just... wrong timing. Wrong frequencies. He was building a life in his head and I was trying to build one in the real world and we never quite figured out how to do both at once.
Colt nods slowly, like he's turning that over, filing it somewhere. Sounds like him, he says. He'd fall in love with a black hole before he noticed the person standing in front of him.
You're not exactly selling your own brother right now.
I love the guy, Colt says, and there's no edge to it, just plain fact. Doesn't mean I don't know him.
You look at him â really look, the way you haven't let yourself all shoot â and it hits you sideways, unwelcome and undeniable: he's not Ryland. He was never going to be Ryland wearing a different job. He's someone else entirely who happens to share a face, and the thing twisting low in your chest right now has nothing to do with nostalgia and everything to do with him, specifically, the real and current him, standing three feet away in string-light glow like he was built out of everything you didn't know you still wanted.
This is insane, you say, mostly to yourself.
What is?
Nothing. You shake your head, take a step back that you immediately regret. I should go. Early call tomorrow. Well â not tomorrow, we wrapped, but â
You're rambling, Colt says, and he's smiling now, the easy one, the one that isn't Ryland's at all.
I'm aware.
Can I get your number? he asks, and it's so simple, so unweighted by anything except itself, that you almost say yes before your brain catches up with the enormity of it â the twin brother, the ex, the whole tangled inheritance of a face you used to love on a man you're only just meeting.
I don't think that's a good idea, you say, and you don't sound convinced, not even to yourself.
Probably not, Colt agrees, unbothered, still smiling. Ask me again in a year.
You don't. Not exactly. But you also don't throw away the napkin he presses into your hand before he goes, his number scrawled under a doodle of a stick figure falling off a building â for stunt-related emergencies only, he's written beneath it, and you laugh, alone, in a parking lot that smells like cut grass and cheap champagne, and you think: oh, no.
You think: this is going to be a whole thing, isn't it.
Years Pass...
He. [ryland] finds out the rest of it in his mother's kitchen, of all places, on a Sunday he almost didn't come home for.
He's been putting off this visit for weeks â grant deadlines, a conference, the usual excuses that are true enough to hide behind â and when he finally pulls into the driveway it's already loud inside, already warm with the smell of his mother's cooking and the sound of the TV his father never turns off even when no one's watching it. He lets himself in through the side door like he has his whole life.
And then he stops in the hallway, keys still in his hand, because you're standing at his mother's stove.
You. In his mother's kitchen. Laughing at something, sleeves pushed up, hip against the counter in a way that says you've stood there before, more than once, easy as anything. And Colt is behind you, close, one hand resting flat against your lower back like it belongs there, like it's never once considered being anywhere else â and Ryland's whole body goes very, very still.
He sees the ring before anyone says a word. Small, simple, catching the kitchen light when you reach for a spice jar. He sees his mother beam at you from the table like you're already hers. He sees his father, laughing at something Colt said, looking at the two of you the exact way he used to look at Ryland and â years ago now, a lifetime ago now â you.
Nobody's told him. That's the part that guts him worst of all. Not you're getting married, not it's serious, not even a warning text. He's found out by walking into a room he thought he knew.
Ry! his mother says, delighted, already halfway out of her chair. *We didn't know you were coming â *
He says something. He doesn't know what. Some version of sorry, wasn't sure I'd make it, some version of a smile that doesn't reach anywhere near his eyes, and he sits down at the table across from the two of you because there's nowhere else to sit, and he watches.
He watches you reach for the salt and Colt hand it to you before you finish asking. He watches you two argue, easy and grinning, about whether the sauce needs more garlic â the kind of stupid domestic argument that isn't really about garlic at all, it's about the shorthand of two people who've made a hundred meals together and will make a hundred more. He watches his father ask Colt about the wedding date and watches you answer instead, already so folded into this family that the question doesn't even need redirecting.
And he can't stop his mind from doing the thing it does, the terrible unstoppable thing, running the numbers on a different equation entirely â the one he never let himself run when it might've still had a solution.
That could be me, something in him says, quiet and vicious. That could've been me.
He pictures it before he can stop himself. You in this kitchen a hundred Sundays deep, a ring on your hand that he'd chosen instead. Evening walks he never took because there was always one more page of data to look at â he sees it now, clear as anything, the two of you circling the block at dusk, his hand finding yours without having to think about it, the kind of habit he never let himself build because he was always somewhere else, some other year, some other problem. He pictures church on Sunday mornings, your shoulder against his in the pew, his mother's hand squeezing his afterward the way she's squeezing yours right now. He pictures family dinners where it's his hand that lands on the small of your back without asking, easy, unthinking, the way Colt's does now, the way his never learned to.
He pictures a version further out still, one he has no right to, one that arrives anyway â a nursery he never built, a name they never picked, small and impossible and gone before it ever had the chance to exist, and it aches in a place he didn't know was still capable of aching.
None of it happened. All of it could have.
He gave it away one lab session at a time, one missed callback, one I'm trying to build something that matters at a time, and he told himself the whole while that the thing he was building would matter more than this â more than a kitchen, more than a ring, more than a hand at the small of someone's back â and maybe it does, in the ledger the universe keeps. He doesn't know anymore. He's not sure the universe's ledger and his own ever agreed on the exchange rate.
Ry? Colt says, and Ryland realizes he's been staring, realizes his face must be doing something because his brother's easy grin has gone careful, watchful, the way it used to when they were kids and Ryland would go quiet in a way that meant something. You good?
Yeah, Ryland says, and it comes out rougher than he means it to. He clears his throat. Tries again. Yeah. Just â long week.
You look at him then, for the first time all evening, really look, and there's something in your face he can't quite read â not pity, he hopes not pity, anything but that â something closer to an old, worn kindness that used to belong entirely to him and now has to be shared, divided, handed out in careful portions to a man who gave up his claim to the whole of it.
It's good to see you, you say, and you mean it, and that's somehow the cruelest part of all â that you can say it and mean it and feel nothing underneath it but plain, uncomplicated warmth, while he sits there with an entire imagined lifetime collapsing quietly behind his ribs.
You too, he manages.
He excuses himself before dessert. Says something about an early flight that isn't entirely a lie. His mother hugs him too long at the door, the way she does when she can tell something's wrong and knows better than to ask. Colt walks him out to the car.
You sure you're good? Colt asks, and for once there's no edge to it, no old competition, just his brother, genuinely asking.
I'm happy for you, Ryland says, and it's true, mostly, the way a lot of things are true and also cost something to say. Both of you.
Colt studies him a long moment, the porch light throwing his face into the same shadows Ryland's seen in mirrors his whole life, and for once neither of them says the thing they're both thinking â that this could have gone so many other ways, that timing is the cruelest kind of physics, that some losses don't announce themselves until years later, in a kitchen, over garlic, with someone else's ring catching the light.
Drive safe, Colt says instead.
Ryland does. He doesn't remember much of the drive. Just the ring, and the hand at your back, and every Sunday he'll never get to have.
Maybe he now has a reason to say yes to the suicide mission.
I've been immersing myself in the Tumblr vibe about Ormund. Obsessively-tender with a scent fetish â my favorites.
Looking at the genres, I want to say: Ormund isn't actually that religious. Hear me out.
There's a lot of content about religious guilt and shame that he genuinely believes in.
Ormund Hightower is a man who showed his bare winkie and ass to a married lady. Is that how a religious man who truly believes in decency behaves? Never. Any guilt? None.
Ormund believes in Hightower supremacy. Especially over the Targaryens.
Belief in the Seven is probably just one of his tools. Not that it troubles him on any internal level.
Ormund uses it as leverage against Daeron and as a way to alienate him from his lineage - the Targaryens are godless, while you're a good boy, raised in the light of the Seven.
Maybe Ormund did genuinely believe in the Seven at some point, and maybe some of that remains, but his mission to elevate the Hightowers â and himself, of course â is his real, main goal.
Ormund's faith in the Seven, and what it means to him, doesn't come close to comparing with Alicent's.
Perhaps Ormund even sees excessive faith as a weakness, something meant for the led, so they can find comfort in it.
Ormund sees himself as a scholar, an enlightened man and leader who has to make decisions that will impact the success of his grand Ormund-plan.
That's what I think for now. Maybe we'll learn more. But I like the idea that Ormund doesn't actually care that much about religion and uses it for his own purposes.
TL;DR
give me a sinful Ormund whose religious mask is slipping off
I get it anon, Iâve read many many good ones with this trope, the writers are really talented but now it feels like everything is the same with the same plot đ (i keep reading them regardless)
Iâm gonna link a few ones Iâve read that are non targ!reader here!!!
novice!reader by @/lovebugism
handmaiden!reader by @/pearlessance
fake tyrell!reader by @/silv3rswirls
(these are all +18 so MDNI)
and if anyone has more non targ!reader recommendations leave in the comments please!!
Get me a dornish!reader whose lineage ormund really admires, but when he actually marries her he doesnt know what to make of her because (guess what bitch?!) she is unbound, unbent, unbroken! SHE IS INSANE, she'll defy him infront of everyone, she's poisoned him and only when he was on his knees begging for the antidote, she gave it to him, she's held a knife to his throat on multiple ocasions, and he might have creamed his pants once or twice because of it. Whenever he gets his anger issues and starts to destroy everything around him, she'll be like "you think that's what being insane is?" and will proceed to go to a hightower colletion of vases and paintings and will destroy everything and then the next time ormund does it again, her next target is his fragrances/incenses colletion.
She is Daeron's mother and poor is the soul who says she isn't. She's his most fiercy protector. Discussions about his education will draw blood from her and her husband. The first time she found out about Ormund manipulating and threatening Dearon, she grabbed the first knife she saw and went after Ormund. She threw it so hard that got stuck on the wood right by Ormund's head, he got a scar on the ear for that. She just didnt kill him because the guards got to hold her down.
She has stilleto like nails because whenever he wants to bed her, her main intention is to get the sheets painted red with his blood
"Your mother whored herself to a Targaryen. I will not give you to your own brother. I will not allow you to repeat her sins and bring further shame upon the Hightower name.â
By then, he had crossed the solar and taken your chin firmly in his hand, his fingers dimpling the skin of your cheeks. You had begun to cry, though you could not tell whether it was from fear, shame, or the sudden loneliness of knowing you might never truly belong anywhere.
âBut then I could live with Father and Mother,â you whispered, tears slipping down your cheeks. âI could go home.â
Ormund bent until his face was close to yours, his breath hot against your skin. His grip tightened beneath your chin. âThis is your home.â
sent to oldtown as a ward beneath your cousin lord ormund hightower's protection, you learn there are some vows that are easier to preach than to keep.
warnings: 18+ (mdni), eventual smut, canon-typical incest (cousins), sexual humilation, loss of virginity, religious guilt, age gap (~20 years), grooming, dubcon, emotional manipulation, obsession (mutual), stockholm syndrome, power imbalance, canon divergent, no use of y/n
I wanna die, I have a spam acc on X with no followers literally just to post shit and I just found out the account was PUBLIC and the tweet with most views was the one I said nobody could know I would ride jack oconnell as jimmy crystal non stop đđđ I feel so ashamed rn
contents: novice!reader, slow burn, strangers to lovers, mutual pining, angst, hurt/comfort, religious imagery cw for power imbalance, obsessive behavior, gaslighting, spiritual manipulation, barely proofread, smut 18+ (MDNI): ormund has a scent kink, mutual masturbation, m!receiving oral, thigh riding, dubcon due to manipulation (but everyone is kind of a perv here so it balances out), this is a pretty dark fic so please heed the warnings!!!
( NAVIGATION ) | ( MASTERLIST ) | ( AO3 )
Sometimes you think you were unforgivably damned from birth.
You had been born, as far as anyone could tell you, on no particular night in no particular place to no one in particular who cared enough to claim you. You belonged to nothing more than whatever poison youâd inherited flooding your veins, and the years of constant isolation that had drawn an invisible line between you and the rest of the world.
Everywhere you went, you tried to copy what you understood was expected of you, but humanity had never come all that easily to you. You spent most of your life, instead, feeling like a gown turned inside out, with all of your seams and soft parts showing.
First, it had been the other orphan girls you were raised with in childhood, rows and rows of flocking sparrows in matching tatters of grey and navy. Then it was the septry in the Riverlands, where youâd spent the bulk of your teenagehood; and then it was the handful of minor households you served, scattered along the coast from Stormâs End down to Sunspear. After that, it was Septa Enith â who had known you since you were small enough to be lifted onto a washing stool to reach the basin â who sent a raven to the sept keeping you for the season, imploring you to come to Oldtown.Â
âLord Ormund Hightower stands in need of a tutor to assist in his nephewâs instruction,â the letter wrote in the old womanâs perfect script. âIf the Mother grants it and your present duties permit, come to Oldtown with due haste, and the Seven may yet make some purpose of you.â
So you had gone to Oldtown the way you had gone to every foreign town throughout your childhood. A ghost wandering a half-gone graveyard, a stranger let loose in another manâs sanctuary â hoping, always hoping, that someone might finally decide you were something worth keeping.Â
When the city rose finally before you in tiers of sun-bleached stone, with a towering lighthouse crowning its center like a great white candle, you believed that you had only traded one kind of nothing for another â as you had done your whole life.
Septa Enith leads you through the corridors of the tower with her habit whispering faintly behind her. You follow a few paces back with your eyes downcast, dressed in a gown of plain wool that marked your status â lesser, unfinished, a novice still â lacking the septaâs seven-pointed veil you had not yet earned, and allowing your hair to hang loose behind you.
âSepta Enith,â Lord Ormund greets from further inside his office upon her entrance. The room is warm with early-morning light, turning motes of dust aglitter where they drift through the tall stained-glass windows. The air is sweet with the scent of pine logs smoldering low in the hearth, where a young boy lingers â Daeron, you figure, still soft-cheeked with the last days of childhood.
His uncle rises from the great oak desk, full of organized letters and ledgers. Heâs tall, broad-shouldered, and handsome to the point of devastation. He comes around the desk, boots padding softly along the cobblestone.Â
âThis must be the girl you wrote me of.â
You sink into a small, practiced curtsy with your gaze fixed on the cobbles. Septa Enith introduces you like a woman would present her own handiwork â that you were traveled and well-taught; a little green yet, but still diligent and pious beyond most girls your age.
But you were not devout, in truth. Not really. The gods were like your parents in that regard: neither one was coming to look for you now. And in the few times you had sunk low enough to beg the gods for mercy, they only seemed to shove more suffering down your throat to keep you from crying out again. But devotion was never the point â a girl so alone in the world, with no dowry and no kin to speak of, had precious few paths laid before her. The grey wool and the seven-pointed star was, perhaps, the only one that would ever choose you back.
With your eyes still lowered, you see only Lord Ormundâs polished boots enter the narrow scope of your downcast vision.
He lingers before you, close enough for you to catch the scent of him â leather, incense, and musky bathing oils. He waits with a polite grin for you to lift your eyes, and raises his brows to his hairline when you donât.Â
He ducks his head instead, made of short, dark-auburn curls, trying almost playfully to catch your gaze from below â the way a young boy might peer beneath a table to startle someone hiding there. He leans closer then, enough for you to hear the soft pull of breath he draws in through his nose.
You flinch involuntarily at the nearness of his warmth, before willing your body back into its practiced submission once more.
âRosewaterâŠâ Ormund mutters, almost to himself, as if he were solving some sort of riddle. âAnd something else beneath itâ orris root, Iâd wager.âÂ
He straightens then, satisfied with his guess, and waits again for a response from you that never comes.Â
It was always easier to be quiet, you found, after so many years spent in the company of high lords and ladies who cared not if you lived or died. You had learned to stand so still in a room that you all but vanished from it, refusing to give away even the smallest, truest piece of yourself.
Ormundâs grin grows wider at your silence. His deep, melodic voice is coated in amusement as he quips, âSepta Enith hasnât sent me a silent sister, has she? Iâd hate to think my nephewâs new tutor has sworn off speaking entirely."
âNo, my lord,â you answer finally, though the words are swallowed back down again almost as soon as they leave you.
âShe speaks!â Ormund chuckles, the sound ringing through the quiet expanse of his office. âA voice like a mouse, yes, but a voice all the same.â
Still, though, you fail to lift your eyes to meet his own. Youâre grateful when the man doesnât press you any further for it, though you can feel a tension that suggests he wants to â like the glimmering heat off a flame. Thereâs something strangely gentle in his palpable restraint; a simple courtesy that costs him nothing, though he seems to take a private pride in offering it nonetheless.
âYou neednât be frightened,â he tells you, gentler now. âYouâll be treated kindly here. Enith keeps a fair house, as Iâm sure you know, and Daeron is no great trialâ are you, boy?â
He glances over his shoulder towards the hearth, where Daeron stands with his hands folded behind his back and his eyes watching the exchange with an attentive, green-eyed stare â a future knight in the making no doubt.
âNo, uncle," Daeron answers, firm but gentle, and with a deep voice that still fractures slightly with the remnants of boyhood.
Lord Ormund's pink mouth curves into a pleased grin. âWell, what do you think, then? Shall we keep her?"
He poses the question lightly, as if you were a piece of livestock being brought to market. You suppose he means it in jest, or at least, as something far more light-hearted than the words truly sound, but it strikes you deep in the chest anyway.
âIf it please you, uncle,â Daeron responds politely.Â
Lord Ormund turns back to you then, still sporting the same polite grin. His brows bounce with amusement as his pale gaze sweeps your form in a slow, daunting pass.
âThen yesâŠâ he hums to himself. âI think we shallâŠâ
Your days, for the first time since childhood, take a shape that feels almost permanent.Â
You rise each morning before the sun, kneel through your morning prayers alongside Enith and the other septas in the hush of the sept, break your fast on stale bread and watered wine, and then report to the small, sunlit chambers where Daeron takes his studies. Septa Enith watches every day from her chair by the window, tending to her needlework while you lead the young princeâs lessons, and correcting you only rarely.
Daeron, as you had come to find after weeks within the Hightower keep, was a perfect pupil. He was quick, attentive, and always very sweet. He minds his histories well and his prayers even better, and only rarely drifts his attention out the window toward the training yards where the squires train with blunt swords. But you had been a child once, too, even though it felt a very long time ago now â and you deign to crack his knuckles with the pointer stick the way your teachers had once done to you.
âWeâll start easy,â you say from across the low table, where a scattering of parchment lay between you. âThe Hightowers of Oldtown."
ââAn old, just, and true line,'" Daeron recites the text easily, with his eyes fixed out the window and his finger drumming with a boyish distraction. ââKeeper of the light, guardian of the Citadel and the Faith.' Words: We Light the Way."
âGood,â you hum. âThe Tyrells of Highgarden?â
âWords: Growing Strong. Their sigil is a⊠a golden rose on a green field. They hold Highgarden by right of the Gardener kingsâ though they were stewards once, not lords."
âThe Lannisters of Casterly Rock?"
âWords: A Lannister always pays his debtsââ
âA common phrase, yes, but not their true words,â you correct gently, lips pursed to keep from smiling. âTry again.â
âWordsâŠâ he trails off, wrinkling his freckled nose in thought. âHear Me Roar. Their sigil is a golden lion on crimson. They say they're the richest house in the Seven Kingdoms, though Septa Enith says rich men are always saying that about themselvesââ
âThat was not meant for you to repeat, boy,â the older woman scolds without looking up from her stitching. Daeron ducks his head with a grin pursed to the side of his mouth, and you allow yourself the smile youâd been holding back all lesson.
A steward arrives in that moment, rapping twice along the door frame to announce his presence. âBegging pardon, Septa,â he says with a polite bow of his head, just before his eyes find you. âLord Ormund has requested your presence in his office.â
âOhââ Your eyes widen as you glance back at Daeron, then to the half-done lesson laid out before you, and then to the lanky man across the room. âIâ Weâre still at our studies, ser. Might I come after weâveââ
âGirl,â Enith snaps, her voice cutting through the room like a whip. All eyes turn to her in an instant. Her wise, watery gaze hardens at you. âLord Ormund does not wait on the patience of novices. You will go to him now, and you will be grateful he thought to send for you at all."
Heat crawls up your neck from the high collar of your woolen dress. You swallow through the distant shame of being scolded before your own pupil, as if you were a child of Daeronâs own age, and rise with a murmured apology to no one in particular. You follow a few paces behind the steward with your eyes fixed on the floor.Â
Ormundâs office, you find, is washed in beams of silver-gold from the morning light spilling through the high windows. He stands within the rays with his strong hands clasped loosely behind his back as he gazes out over the tower's long descent to the river below.Â
The sound of the door clicking shut behind you draws his attention. He turns his head, and the light catches in his sheared curls, turning them a richer shade of auburn.Â
âThere you are,â he greets with a kind smile, motioning to his desk in the center of the room with a broad hand. âCome in. Sit, if you like.â
You do not move from your place. You remain just inside the door, with your head bowed and your hands folded obediently in front of you, the way you had been taught. You say nothing in response until he asks.
âHow does my nephewâs lessons fare?â
âWell, my lord.â Your voice comes out smaller than you mean it to, trembling at the edge of each syllable despite your attempts to steady it. âHeâs very smart. Heâs very clever, too, as Iâm sure you alreadyââ
âCome closer, wonât you?â he interjects suddenly, though not unkindly. âI can hardly hear a word from you all the way over there.â
Your slippers pad along the cobbles as you near him with small, hesitant steps, and with your breath caught somewhere in your throat. You stop an arm's length from him before the great stained-glass windows â Ormund closes what little distance remains himself, smothering you in his warmth and the incense clinging to the silver pomander hanging at his sword belt.
His wide hands lift to rest along the outsides of your elbows without warning. Youâre perhaps more startled by the gentleness of his touch rather than the touch itself â you can feel the warmth radiating from his palms even through the thick sleeves of your dress. He dips his head the same way he had the first time he met you, trying once more to catch your downturned gaze.
âYou neednât be frightened of me,â Ormund tells you softly, though it did very little to loosen the perpetual knot in your chest.
âI am not, my lord,â you tell him, half-strangled, and wonder distantly if a lie is still a sin if itâs meant to spare someone else the trouble of you.
Ormund says nothing for a long moment. When you dare to lift your eyes, you find that heâs already leaning in â the way he had that very first day. Your pulse falters a beat when you hear him draw a slow breath beside your temple. You go very still, like a trapped animal going quiet in the hope of being spared.
âLavender,â he muses to himself. âAnd⊠beeswax.â
He straightens once more, pleased with himself, and smiles down at you again.Â
âThe motherhouse must be running thin, if you've had to make do with the castle's plain milling,â he quips with an attentiveness that feels borderline intrusive. âIâll have something better sent along to you at once.â
You say nothing. There is nothing to say to that, you think â nothing that wouldnât feel like spurring on his kindness, which has started to feel like comes with a debt you didnât agree to owe.
âWell,â he says in response to your silence, dropping his hands to his sides. The warmth in his strong face returns again, with the negligible tenderness of a lord dismissing one of his middling servants. âI wonât keep you from your duties any longer. Go on back to my nephewâ I imagine Enith's grown fond of her needlework again, now that she's free to listen to you instead.â
You drop into your usual curtsy with aâyes, my lord,â murmured beneath your breath. You rise again and turn to go, but Ormund catches you before you can.Â
He ducks down and presses his mouth to yours in a parting kiss that a great lord might bestow on any woman of his household. His lips are soft and light against your own, but lingering nonetheless â long enough that the peck turns from well-mannered to borderline indecent.
You go rigid at the shock of it, too stunned to do anything more than stand there with your hands clenched into fists at your sides until he pulls away from you again.
âMay the Seven be with you, sister,â Ormund says with a kind, untroubled grin, as if nothing strange had passed between you at all.
âAnd with you, my lord,â you manage through the invisible hand still wrapped around your throat.Â
It takes the length of the corridor outside for you to remember how to breathe again. You feel the ghost of his mouth on yours for hours after heâs let you go.
Something about Ormund sticks in you like a splinter under the skin. The thought of him grows on you like ivy on cobblestone â quiet and quick and everywhere. It was his unwavering tenderness, you think, or maybe the way his eyes always seemed to linger on you a beat longer than courtesy required, which left something raw and unfamiliar in its wake. Like what little you remember of love in your girlhood, a childhood infatuation that was usually very fickle but always very intense.
It was this same constant turning-over of him in your head that made it so easy to suspect him when your slips began to disappear.
It was a small thing at first â a sliver torn from the edge of your thin linen, leaving the hem pulled and frayed. A rat, you assumed, gnawing for fabric for its nest; or a splintered edge, maybe, from where your trunk had snagged it. And when a second strip vanished, this time cut clean from the chest, you believed it had been a rat then, too.
But then an entire slip had disappeared outright, gone from the wicker basket of unwashed linen, and no amount of searching your small chamber seemed to turn it up.
Septa Enith called you mad when you told her of your suspicions, but you knew what kind of man Lord Ormund was.Â
You had felt his breath along your temple, heard him murmur rosewater and lavender and beeswax against your skin with the quiet reverence typically reserved for prayer. And, thus, the thought crept into your skull unbidden, shaped like that same warm breath along your skull. Try as you might to laugh it off as foolishness â the overactive fancy of a girl raised with gossiping novices, forever seeing shadows where none existed â the thought did not leave you. And after a time, you understood it would not leave you until you knew if it was true.
And so you lie.
You tell Septa Enith that you were feeling poorly and asked if she could take Daeronâs lessons herself that day. You bore her subsequent scolding with your eyes down and your hands folded â that you ought to have more of a backbone than to let a little queasiness keep you from your duties; that a septa's calling was not so easily set aside as that. You had already memorized the prayers of contrition you would say for it later, kneeling before the Mother to confess the small sin honestly.
But for now, you spend the rest of the morning in your chambers â sitting first upon your bed and then, when that grew tiresome, at the writing desk by the window. You watch the morning light drift across the ancient floorboards and feel more and more foolish by the minute. By midday youâve nearly convinced yourself that youâve wasted a perfectly good lie on nothing, and that the missing slips had simply been misplaced; that Lord Ormund had far better things to occupy his time than a novice septa's undergarments.
Then you heard his voice in the corridor, exchanging some brief word with a passing servant outside â âSee that the eastern rooms are aired before the Citadel men arrive,â he says.
It would have meant nothing to you at all if it hadnât been drawing nearer to your bedchambers. Your heart lurches wildly in your chest as you scramble from the desk and into the small adjoining bathing room â easing the door shut until only a hairâs-breadth crack remains. You press yourself against it, scarcely daring to breathe.
A knock comes at your door a moment later. Itâs soft and courteous, two sharp raps against the wood, as if to make certain that no one at all was behind it. The heavy door creaks open without invitation. You hear the scuff of boots against the floor and the click of the door easing shut, just before Ormund comes into view.
Through the crack in the door, you watch the man move slowly through the narrow confines of your quarters. The late morning light catches the auburn flecks in his curls as he passes the window by your writing desk. He lingers there for a long moment, studying the things scattered across its surface as if he were already well acquainted with them.Â
He lifts the smooth river stone youâd kept since childhood, somehow already knowing where to find it, and runs his thumb mindlessly over the smooth edge. As he does so, he dips his head to skim through the parchment scattered there â clumsy sketches, scant prayers, and miscellaneous writings of dried ink.
Ormund touches nothing else. He only looks, cataloging the smallest parts of your life with his eyes alone.
He sets the small stone down with a quiet thud and crosses to the hamper of unwashed linens tucked beside your washstand. He peers inside and, without hesitation, plucks one of your slips from the pile.
Your heart goes still but very loud all at once as you watch the man bring the linen up to his nose to inhale the scent of you upon it â of rosewater, soap, and faintly of sweat. His strong chest rises beneath his emerald doublet as he takes a slow breath in. His eyes fall shut on the long, lingering exhales that follow.Â
You see only the profile of his broad form from where you stand. He goes quiet and still thereafter with something that seems almst peaceful.
When his hand moves into his trousers, with the linen slip still caught in his fist, you do not move from the doorway. You stand frozen in disbelief while his hand disappears in his pants, while the rest of your slip hangs lazily at his thigh. You scarcely breathe â because your heart has moved so far up into your throat that you cannot, maybe; or because you long to hear the manâs grumbled groan as he works himself hard with his fist.
His adamâs apple bobs in his throat when he tips his head back. His moan comes from the very back of his throat, sounding like distant thunder as it rolls across the quiet room. The pleasured sound feels like a hand between your thighs, where a strange throbbing has started to settle â an ache that longs to be smoothed out.
âYesâŠâ Ormund groans to himself through a jaw clenched tight.Â
And, as if spurred on by his own words, you feel your hand reaching down to lift your skirts â and to shove your fingers where the dull pulsing has settled.Â
Your pointer and forefinger slot wet between the velvety folds of your cunt. You pierce yourself with them slowly, the way it had been down to you by a young knight somewhere between The Twins and Riverrun in your girlhood.Â
You remember the way he attempted to pleasure you with his fingers, dragging them in and out and in and out of you. And even though you failed to orgasm then the way the knight said you ought to have, you fight now to chase that pleasure warming in the very pit of your stomach now.
You brace yourself against the doorframe with your free hand and watch the man stroke himself with a lidded gaze â with the same violating scrutiny he always seems to watch you with.Â
Youâre no different than he is, a cynical voice screams in the very back of your head. The two of you are made out of the same kind of sin. But even still, you find yourself hunting the feeling simmering in your stomach; a knot pulled tight and threatening to snap.
Ormund tenses in place, bracing himself with a strong hand along your bedframe as his towering body quakes with the tremors of his orgasm. His knuckles go white around the ancient wood, gripping there hard enough to splinter it.Â
His moan sounds like thunder in his chest â âFuckâŠâ he grumbles lowly. âFuck, yesâŠâÂ
He reaches his pinnacle before you do, and when the aftershocks have subsided and his limbs have stopped shaking, Ormund pulls your dress from his trousers. Something sticky darkens the pale fabric where his fist had held it. You catch only a sliver of the stain before he tosses it back into the basket of unwashed linens.
Your heart slams against your ribcage; hard enough that you worry he might hear it through the door as he slips back out of your bedchambers, just as quietly as he had come in.
You remain in the crack of your own bathing room door long after the sound of his footsteps has faded down the corridor.Â
You wonder how many times Ormund has let himself into your chambers while you attended your lessons and prayers each day. You wonder how many times heâs pleasured himself using your garments as a rag, and how many of those garments you must have washed without noticing his pleasure stained upon it.Â
You wonder, even more so, if you should feel more violated by the thought than you do â if it would be such a sin to take pleasure in the thought of being so carnally desired.
You drag your fingers, finally, from the depths of your pulsing confines. The pads of them have started to prune with the slick gathered upon them, shiny with honey and slightly stringy when you separate your middle and pointer finger from one another.
What are these hands supposed to do now? the voice berates you still, while your loins tingle with a lingering pleasure. Because they are certainly far too stained now to pray.
You need a mother to comfort you; a father to shield you; someone older and wiser to cry to, because the skies are empty and no god has answered you yet.Â
Your attempts to tell Septa Enith what youâd seen had failed you entirely. You had gone to her that afternoon, before the courage could leave you, and found her in the small garden off the sept where she typically took her afternoon needlework. You told her what you had witnessed (and nothing of what your own fingers had done to yourself while you witnessed it).Â
Her needle stilled mid-stitch. For a moment, you thought she might believe you, as her wrinkled face twisted in shock at your confession. But when she finally spoke, her voice came flat with something closer to anger than alarm.
âSo you lied to me this morning?â she asked after several moments of daunting silence.
âYes. I did,â you answered honestly from where you knelt beside her chair, with your hands clasped in your lap like a penitent child. âAnd I do mean to repent for it, Septa, for however long you think fit. But I saw him. With my own eyes, in my own chambers. I saw him take myââ
âOh, enough of that,â she grunted, as if she were dismissing a child mid-fancy. Her face screwed with annoyance as she berated you. âI have known you since you were a girl of seven years. Sniveling and friendless and full of stories that were never true; stories you told yourself to escape the real truth of things. I remember it. The other septas remember it besides.âÂ
You cowered at her words. Her mouth thinned into a tight seam; her watery blue eyes hardened in a way that you had not seen since your earliest, clumsiest days under her instruction â when you were still learning which lies got a girl a slap and which got her days of confinement.
âAnd now you would have me believe that Lord Ormund â a kind man who has shown you nothing but courtesy since the day you set foot in this tower â has been sneaking into your chamber to steal your smallclothes and use them to⊠pleasure himself like a lovesick stableboy?"
âI saw it," you repeated, voice cracking with a desperation to be believed. You blinked away the haze of tears burning at your waterline as you begged her. âSepta, pleaseâ"
âEnough,â she shoved your pleading hand away and stood, smoothing out her skirts with hands that were not quite steady. âIâll not hear any more of it. You'll do your penance tonight as you've promised, and you'll pray besides for honesty â and for gratitude, perhaps, that a house such as this took in a girl with no name and no prospects and gave her some purpose at all.â
You stayed where you knelt as the woman moved towards the tower, heavy with the sinking feeling that she was moving to Lord Ormundâs solar to carry your confession to him herself.Â
âIâd have thought you'd grown past your stories by now,â she scolded without looking back at you.
The summons, which you knew was inevitable, doesnât come until the sun has dipped low over the horizon â turning the cloudless sky into a mixture of deep orange and dark lavender. A steward knocks at your door and does not meet your eyes when he tells you that Lord Ormund awaits your presence in the castle sept. You had lain through the afternoon anticipating exactly this, but your stomach still flips in spite.
The sept is empty and quiet with the remnants of evening prayer. The air is stale and thick with the scent of burning incense and glowing candles. What little light remains falls through the stained glass in slanted beams of color across the ancient wood â deep red where it touches the Warriorâs carved shield, soft green pooling at the Motherâs feet, and jewel-blue catching the folds of the Fatherâs robes where he stands in eternal judgment above the altar.Â
You find Lord Ormund standing near the front with his back to you, and with a leather-bound copy of the Seven-Pointed Star in his hands. His voice is low and even as it carries through the empty nave, reading aloud to no one at all: ââŠAnd the Crone raised her lantern, saying: truth is the light by which the righteous find their road, while falsehood is a mist that leads only to darkness.âÂ
He speaks the words as if he knew precisely when you would arrive, and had arranged the moment accordingly to catch you in some sort of trap.
Ormund does not look up when your slippers pad along the narrow aisle. He lets you linger there instead, like a stupid lamb walking itself to the slaughter. The silence grows too suffocating to bear. You feel the weight of the sept pressing down on either side of you â old wood and candle-smoke and the watchful, carved eyes of seven gods who had never once troubled themselves to answer your prayers.
âSepta Enith came to speak with me this afternoon,â Ormund says in lieu of a greeting when he turns finally to face you. His smile is thin-lipped and gentle, if not a little disarming. âShe tells me youâve become⊠distressed.â
It takes you a long moment to find the courage to speak. The words well up into your throat like bile but refuse to come out, lingering bitterly on your tongue instead. The candles crackle in the silence you leave behind.
âIâ I only told her the truth, my lord,â you tell him. And though your voice does not waver, your folded hands start to tremble despite your effort to keep them still.
âThe truthâŠâ he echoes, as if he were tasting the word on his tongue for the first time. He saunters down the steps of the altar with the leather-bound book tucked beneath his strong arm. âYou believe, truly, that I entered a noviceâs chambers without invitation? That I used her garments for something so sinful? That Iâve been⊠stealing pieces of her garments for my own keeping?âÂ
A laugh leaves him then, warm with amusement.
âSurely, you do not think so little of me as that.âÂ
âI only know what I saw,â you answer and hold his gaze until it feels like a little rebellion. Itâs the first time youâve ever offered him your eye contact so freely, to be sure, and it feels like it costs you something to do it.
âWould you swear it?â Ormund asks, approaching you like a hunter would a prey animal caught in a snare. The candlelight catches in the strong curve of his jaw and the blue of his eyes, carving him out of flickering gold and shadow. âYou would swear it before the Father himself. Invoke His judgment upon your soul, should you speak false."
Your mouth opens and closes like a fish out of water until you find the breath to answer. âI⊠I would never lie before the Seven, my lord.â
âNo,â the man hums with a shake of his head, studying you still from a few paces off. Something in his chiseled features turns gentle, or seemed to besides. âI do not believe you would.â
You think the words are meant to comfort you.Â
They do not.
âBut I do believe something else," Ormund continues without his gaze straying from yours. âI believe loneliness makes strange companions of the mind. Wouldnât you agree?â
You stiffen from where you stand before him, bracing yourself for his following words, which you know are bound to find you like a rod to the thigh.
âYou grew up without mother or father. Without kin of any kind, as Iâm told,â Ormund rambles with all the tenderness of a man delivering some sad, gentle truth. âA child left alone in such a place learns to invent reasons for the things she cannot understand, does she not? It is not a fault in her, to be sure. It is only what loneliness does to a mind left too long to its own devices."
âI am not a child,â you try to argue, though the words come out more strangled than you intend.
âNo,â Ormund grins, devilish enough to squint the edges of his eyes. âBut perhaps some distant part of her lingers in you yet."
Your hands clench into fists. Your dull nails bite crescent shapes into the delicate skin of your palms. âI saw youââ
âYou've always had a fondness for stories, havenât you?â he interjects, almost fondly so. âSepta Enith told me as much herselfâ said that you used to⊠frighten all the other girls with tales of dragons in the rafters, of shadows that moved on their own in the dark.â
âI was a child thenââ
âShe said you often mistook the wind for voices; and shapes in dark corners for things with faces,â Ormund continues with a grin, tilting his head until the candlelight pools in the hollows of his eyes. âSo tell me, sister, and weigh it honestly, as the Seven would have you weigh it⊠What is more likelyâ that a lord of this tower crept into a servant's chamber to steal her smallclothes like a common thief? Or that a girl who has spent her whole life inventing stories has done so once more?"
His words close around your throat like a pair of cold hands. You search desperately for a response but find nothing immediately waiting. Your voice has sealed itself shut around whatever truth you might have offered him, choking instead on the smothering weight of his.
Ormund steps closer and holds the Seven-Pointed Star out between you. His voice comes out sterner this time as he commands, âRead. Iâve already marked the page for you.â
âMy lordâ"
âRead."
Your hands tremble when they reach for the book he motions towards you. You find the leather still warm from his palms and impossibly heavy between your fingers as they fumble for the scarlet ribbon tucked inside. The thin pages turn heavily, until the inked words swim finally before you, blurred at the edges with time and something hot building behind your eyes.
âAloud,â Ormund presses at your silence.
Your voice is scarcely more than breath when it finally comes to you.
âFalse witness is⊠is a wound upon the soul. For the tongue that fashions lies⊠distances itself from the light of the Fatherâ and the Mother turns Her face from deceit until repentance is soughtâŠâ you swallow hard through a tight throat, fighting the tremor in your voice. You press on before you lose the nerve, and pretend not to notice the weight of Ormundâs stare fixed upon you.
âLet he who bears false tales examine his own heart before⊠before casting stones upon another. For the Crone's wisdom teaches that the eye deceived isâ is no less guilty than the tongue that speaks the falsehood aloudââ You cut yourself off with a shake of your head, a stubborn refusal at Ormundâs plain attempt at manipulation. âI cannot.â
âYou can,â the man nods, warm and almost encouraging. âContinue.â
Your voice cracks in two, but you obey regardless â because some well-worn part of you never learned how to do otherwise.
 ââŠAnd let the penitent seek not to defend his pride, but to humble himself before the Seven. For truth asks no champion, and innocence need fear no judgment,â you continue, voice thick and wet with unshed tears, breath hitching occasionally in your throat. âBow thy head before the⊠the Father, confess thy trespass before the Mother⊠and the Smith shall make wholeâ that which falsehood hath broken. So shall mercy be grantedâ unto the contrite, but the stubborn shall⊠shall dwell in the Stranger's shadow⊠until the last of their daysââ
By the time you reach the passage's end, your vision has dissolved entirely into tears. They burn hot and humiliating down your cheeks and chin until one strikes the page before you could catch it. It blooms dark against the old vellum. You scrub at it with your sleeve, as though you might undo the stain before it set.
âIâIâm sorry," you stammer â to the book, maybe, or to Ormund, or to the Seven watching from their carved and unmoving faces.Â
The man says nothing for a long while. When he finally speaks again, the sternness has slipped entirely from his voice â replaced by something that sounds, almost, like kindness.
âYouâve carried a great deal on your own, havenât you?â Ormund wonders suddenly aloud. You peer up at him with your eyes still glittering like stained glass. His hardened face has softened slightly, because of the tears clouding your vision maybe, or perhaps due to a newfound warmth. âYou've spent your whole life learning to survive on what you need. But tell me, my girlâ What do you want?"
You donât realize until then that no one has ever asked you that before â not once, in all your years of learning to be small, useful, and no trouble to anyone who might otherwise have turned you out into the cold. The question moves through you like a key turning finally into an old lock thatâs long rusted shut.
âIâŠâ you try hard to speak, but your breath catches somewhere in your throat before you can. âI don't know, I⊠Iâve neverâŠâ
You trail off, shaking your head. Ormund ducks down to catch your gaze when it falls away once more.
âTell me,â he presses gently, brows softly furrowed. âSpeak true.â
âIâve⊠Iâve never belonged anywhere, my lord,â you confess for the first time aloud. âI don't remember my mother's face. Nor my father's. No oneâs ever⊠ever chosen me before. The only reason the sept took me in was because there was nowhere else for me to go, I⊠I think thatâ Iâve always been in⊠in someone's way. I don'tâ I donât even know what Iâm supposed to want.âÂ
A laugh sputters from your mouth, all watery and ashamed. You trail off again, so quietly you can barely hear your own voice over the pounding of your heart.Â
Your face screws into a pained sort of look as you admit to him, âI think⊠I think I only want someone toâ to tell me what to want, what to do.â
The candles gutter along the altar, though no draft has moved through the sept. Your words cling so ardently to the incense-thick air between you that you wish so desperately that you could reach out and put them back in your mouth again â suddenly terrified that youâve given away far too much of yourself.
Ormund steps forward, close enough to smother you with the warmth radiating from his towering form. He plucks the leather-bound scripture from your trembling hands, closes it with a resounding thud in one broad fist, and tosses it blindly to a pew just beside him without once looking away from you. The book hits the wood like a door slamming shut. Your shoulders jerk as the sound echoes through the quiet sept.
You try to will your hands to stop shaking at your sides as you peer at the man from beneath lashes clumped wet with tears. He spends a long moment staring down the bridge of his nose at you, chest rising and falling with even breaths beneath the clasps of his doublet.
When he speaks again, his words come out low and steady from his mouth â far gentler and far more certain than any god has ever been to you before.
âKneel,â he commands plainly, needing no further adornment to carry the weight of the word.
You stand frozen before him for several long moments thereafter.Â
The last color pooling from the stained glass thins now as the sun sinks somewhere beyond the windows â crimson bleeding to rust, green fading to a negligible yellow, blue fading to the color of an old bruise. Above the altar, the Seven look down upon you with nothing but judgment. They offer you no counsel, no rescue, no sign that they had ever been listening to all your years of prayer.
Then, with your cheeks still wet with thick streaks of tears, you clasp your hands tightly together and lower yourself to your knees. They meet the cold wood with a quiet thud, and the chill of it climbs up through your skirts.Â
Your lowered gaze lifts slowly to the man towering above you. You find no comfort waiting in his strong features. There is nothing behind his light eyes except the flickering candlelight and the same coldness as the Father looking down from his stone alcove â as if Ormund, too, felt owed something you had not yet given.
âThere can be no absolution without obedienceâŠâ he says without taking his eyes off yours, even as his hands reach for the buckle of his sword belt.Â
The gold clinks faintly together; the leather hisses faintly when itâs pulled through. At first you think he means to spank you with it â bend you over his knee, lift up your skirts, and whip you bruised. Your stomach twists with excitement at the thought.Â
A mixture of dread and self-deprecation consumes you a moment later, when he tosses the scabbard aside and reaches for the tie in his trousers instead.
ââŠShow me the second,â Ormund continues, this time with his fist hidden in his pants, massaging himself there the same way he had in your chambers. âAnd perhaps Iâll be gracious enough to give you the first.â
Your mouth waters like a starving hound when he frees his cock from the confines of his slacks, tucking the hem beneath his balls. Itâs heavy and half-hard in his fist â a shade paler than the rest of his skin, and glowing a faint pink color at the tip. This one is far bigger, far prettier than the cocks youâd seen throughout your teenagehood â when high lords and lanky knights would pull it out for you, âcâmon, just kiss it,â theyâd beg, right before berating you when your face screwed in disgust instead.
All that repulsion seems to leave you now. Your mouth parts without further command from him, as if an unconscious part of you had longed to wrap your lips around his cock and taste the glittering spend heâd buried into your slip that morning. Your tongue darts out in a soft kitten lick to collect the pearls drooling from the tip, more salty than sweet.
âAll of it now. CâmonâŠâ you hear the man coo above you, like a parent urging their child to finish their supper.Â
You abide him willingly and take the rest of his cock into your mouth. Your eyes squeeze shut as your hands ball the fabric of your dress into fists, fighting back the gag that rises in your throat as you force yourself to take the entire length of him â if only to prove to yourself that you could, that you would lay the whole of your obedience at his feet for the smallest word of praise from his lips.
Ormundâs head tips back. A mixture of a laugh and a moan rumbles in his throat when the tip of your nose buries in the coarse thatch of brunette hair above his cock, smelling of sour sweat and musky bathing oils. Tears prick at the backs of your eyes like burning embers. His wide hand splays along the crown of your skull, more gentle than forceful, and it feels like an act of clemency.
âThe gods werenât enough for you, were they?â Ormund says, a lazy grin audible in his voice, as his thumb smooths over your hair. âNo, you needed someone real to teach you, didnât you? Someone real to belong toâŠâ
His words make you nauseous.Â
You feel the urge to puke, but stronger still is the urge to make him feel good. You want to please him and murder him â you want to be obedient to him alone; you want to make him smile; you want to make him proud; you want him to forgive you and hate you and desire you all at once. You want to kiss him all over, and then beat him for making you so unholy, and then kiss him so more, and then let the hounds consume his sin to the bone.
You let him cum in your mouth instead.
âTake it all. There you goâŠâ he praises in murmured slurs, keeping you pressed against him while he tenses above you. You nearly gag when the first drop of his spend stains your tongue, heavy and slightly bitter. âTake it all, and Iâll make you holy again,â Ormund babbles, almost to himself, as he shivers against you. âI promise⊠I promiseâŠâÂ
He pulls you off him with his fingers twisted tight in your hair, though not quite hard enough to hurt. He stares down at you with lust still swimming in his glassy blue eyes, and you wonder what you must look like from his perspective â on your knees, swollen-mouthed, heavy-eyed, wearing a mixture of cum and saliva down to your chin. The statue of the Father looms just behind him. You pretend not to notice.
âOpen your mouth,â Ormund commands before you can swallow.Â
You do as youâre told, careful not to let the pearl-colored spend drip off of your tongue when you show it to him. Ormundâs chest heaves at the sight, as if it had snatched the breath from his lungs entirely. And then, before you can blink, he kneels before you â holding you by the chin with the hand not knotted in your hair, and kissing you hard enough to swallow you whole.
His tongue swipes against yours to collect his own cum and sighs hard through his nose at the taste of it, a mixture of himself and you. You can taste the ale on his lips and the lemon dessert from his dinner right before he pulls away from you; still close enough to run the tip of his broad nose over the bridge of your nose.
âHave you ever done that before?â he whispers, breath fanning warm against your mouth. You shake your head against him, too breathless for words. âGoodâŠâ he hums, then wonders aloud with all the sheepishness of a young boy. âHas anyone ever made you cum before?âÂ
âTheyâve tried,â you confess.
A smile curls slowly on his lips at that, pleased by your answer.
Ormund drops his hand from your chin to your dress skirts. His palm is warm and calloused as it creeps up the hem. You hold your breath in anticipation, waiting to feel his fingers slip into your cunt the way yours had done when you watched him pleasure himself. They slip around your thigh instead, digging into the skin hard enough to leave bruises when he drags you suddenly into his lap.
You brace yourself on his broad shoulders at the sudden shift in position, reminding yourself to breathe when the newfound proximity forces him to lift his chin to look at you properly. He keeps one hand on the back of your head and his other on the swell of your ass. His whisper fans across your jaw as he says, âIf absolution is what you want⊠Then claim it.âÂ
Before proper reasoning can take over, you grind your hips up and down his strong thigh, chasing the same pleasure youâd been so close to giving yourself earlier that day.Â
With your dress skirts now pushed up to your hips, your cunt is able to press fully to his trousers â the delicate skin parts along the fabric with every pass, exposing your sensitive clit to the merciless rhythm. You can already feel the wet spot youâre leaving on him there.
Your broken whine of pleasure and embarrassment echoes throughout the empty sept.
Ormund grins wider at the pathetic sound. âItâs okay, my girl⊠Take it⊠You can do itâŠâ he praises lowly, helping you rock your hips up and down his thigh with his free hand. âThere is no sin here that I cannot pardon for you. Leave your guilt to me and let go. Thatâs it⊠Let it go.â
Your hips lose their rhythm, hopelessly chasing the warmth swelling in the pit of your stomach â a rope pulled tight and fraying, bound to snap at any moment.Â
âYouâre so needy for it now, arenât you? After you couldnât pleasure yourself with your fingers earlier? Hm?â he whispers in your ear, then smiles wider when you falter. âNo, donât stop now. Keep going. There you go.
You bury your face in his shoulder and twist your trembling hands in his shirt, choking on the pleasured moans welling in your throat. You feel dizzy and half-disgusted with yourself, as your heart hammers harder with every word from his mouth.
âYou thought I didnât notice, did you?â Ormund hums with an audible grin. âI could hear you whimpering behind the door⊠You liked watching me using your dress to make me cum, didnât you? âŠHm?â
You nod wordlessly into his neck, and feel the rumble of his laughter there as he chuckles to himself.Â
âI knew you would⊠I knew the kind of girl you were when you stepped into my officeâ the kind who mistook her loneliness for devotionâŠâ he mumbles against you, helping your hips move up and down his thighs when your own rhythm falters. âThe kind who prayed for guidance and got only silence in return⊠Well, the gods mightâve abandoned you, my girlâ but I will not.â
You peer at the altar ahead with teary eyes, where all the eyes of the Seven look down upon you as you unravel in your sin. You cum with a fragile whimper in your throat a second later, trembling in Ormundâs lap and holding onto him like a raft while your sensitive cunt drools on his thigh.
âYesâŠâ the man praises in your ear, smoothing his nose across your temple just before he presses his mouth to the burning skin there. âThere it is⊠Give me all of it, my girl. I can take it...âÂ
Ormund continues his sweet murmurings until the aftershocks have passed â until youâve gone lax on top of him, with your body heaving enough to melt against his. You want to be soldered to him, just like this, with his cheek against your cheek and his hands in your hair and your cunt to his thigh. Perhaps this was your purpose, you think to yourself, as the last of your pleasure drips onto his thigh. Perhaps the gods sent you here to find religion in the crooks of his body, and Ormund in the crooks of yours.
âAm I forgiven now?â you ask in a small, teary voice. Though whether the question is meant for the gods staring down at you from their alcoves, blurred now by the unshed tears clouding your vision, or for the man holding you through every wave of pleasure and guilt â you cannot say.
âYes,â Ormund answers instantly, soft mouth brushing the shell of your ear as he smooths your hair from your temple. He feels your body slacken with a breath of relief against him, as if some unbearable weight has finally been lifted from your shoulders. âYou will always be forgiven, my girl⊠So long as you remember that you must kneel to me to ask for it.â
You close your eyes at that, distantly ashamed of the relief blooming in your chest, unable now to tell where the comfort ended and the feeling of captivity began.
hotd bringing me back to my asoiaf obsession, I need someone to write ormund hightower x targ!reader who is basically a female version of daemon (maybe his daughter) but 10x more careless and impulsive so she basically shows up at tumbleton banging at his door with a sword and a whole lot of attitude
part two point five of how do you like your eggs in the morning? | part one | part two | ao3
Summary: An invitation. A garden. A dozen things he could have done differently.
Tags: childhood friends to lovers, pining, fingering, f!reader, flashbacks, angst
A/N: 18+ only! this is part 2.5 of a 3 part series. happy ending guaranteed, but you'll have to wait for part 3. content warnings for mentions of terminal illness and infidelity.
The letter arrives like flowers through frost: cardstock, robin's egg blue, poking out from the mailbox amidst a bouquet of medical bills and junk. Nobody has been to the house in several days. Colt is reluctantly on location, breaking his back rehearsing a car roll. Ryland reckons he is just as sore from sleeping in a hospital chair for a week straight.
Three names, on an attached slip, to RSVP. His name is last: his mom's, then Colt's, then his. He hadn't expected an invite. If he thinks about it long enough, he can still feel your hand against his cheek. He'd earned that. He hasn't earned this. But most likely isn't a matter of earned; you had to invite his mom, and you had to invite Colt, which means you had to invite him.
He recognizes the curve of your Ys, the loop you took on sometime around the sixth grade. His name, in your hand. He brushes a thumb across the ink.
He has a suit.
He has a ticket to New York, for an academic conference he anticipates being disinvited from any day now.
He shouldn't go. To be respectful of you. To stay home with his mom. To spare himself.
He shouldn't go.
-
He skips the ceremony, abandoning any fantasy of speak now or forever hold your peace, and walks straight into the reception.
It's a beautiful venue. No real surprise thereâyou've always had good taste in everything but men. And lord knows you've been to more than your fair share of weddings over the years. Everywhere he looks are little familiar details (lavender centerpieces, white roses, candles on the wall), like you used all of your mom's receptions to curate exactly what you might want for yourself one day.
He's timed his entrance carefully. Late. The first dance, the garter, the toasts are all finished; the dance floor has attracted a healthy crowd; caterers buzz around the half-empty tables, clearing away glasses, swapping out dinner plates for cake. The room is a sea of people he doesn't know, friends of yours from law school and from work and from your new life. Presumably your mother and Josh are around here somewhere.
And there, across the room. Surrounded by bridesmaids. Hair pinned up. Empty seat to your left.
You.
Your dress is white, of course, white and satin and thin-strapped, and he watches one of those straps slip precipitously close to the edge of your shoulder as you laugh at something a bridesmaid said, and watches the delicate motion of your throat as you sip champagne, and watches the drag of your thumb across your lower lip as you check that your lipstick is intact, and then you look up and he's in front of you and you are here.
"Hey," he says.
You don't quite gape, but you get close. "You," you say, standing. "Hi."
"Hi."
"Hi. I wasn't." You shake your head as you come around the table. "You RSVP'd no."
"Did I?"
"I'm very familiar with the guest list, at this point. The only one who said yes wasâ"
"Colt, yeah. I'm Colt tonight."
"Right." You stop in front of him, and thenâclasp your hands together. Like you were about to hug him, but thought better of it. "Well. Thanks for coming."
Before you can sit back down, he rushes to say, "Can we talk?"
You arch a brow, glancing back at the table. Your bridesmaids are all distracted. Talking amongst themselves. He can't really make out their individual faces. He thinks he recognizes one girl from high school, from your grade, Cathy or Kristen or something. "Uh oh."
"No, it's nothing bad. I'm just, I'm flying back tomorrow." He shrugs. "Thought it could be nice to catch up."
"Depends. Are you going to make me cry this time?" You wind an arm through his elbow, which he didn't know he had extended, and he realizes with a bone-deep relief that this is you saying yes.
"I'll try my best not to."
"You'd better," you say. He lets you lead. He's a little fuzzy on where the exits are. "I spent, like, two hours getting my makeup done. But sure. I could use the fresh air."
In the entryway, you pull your arm from his, getting ahead of him by a few steps. There is a moment where you are shadowed by the light from inside, a dark golden glow cast over your dress. Salt in the air. Waves onto sand.
He blinks, and it's gone.
The exit opens up to a garden, empty of people, filled to bursting with white roses. It must be somewhere around midnight, but the night above looks later, somehow, the hazy purple-grey of a two a.m. sky.
"So, is actual Colt okay," you say, breaking the silence, "orâŠ"
"Away on set."
"That's going well, then. The whole Hollywood thing."
"Yeah. He's, he's really doing it. He sends his best." He adjusts his glasses. "Mom, too, they bothâthey both send their best."
"She'sâ"
"She's been better. But she's in good spirits, all things considered. Chemo's going well. Another month until they can check if it worked. Again. And then if it works they're going to. There's this surgery. Anyway. She still has that quilt, um, the one you and your mom, from last timeâ"
You nod. "Yeah, I'm glad she. Not glad that she has another use for it, but, glad she has it." He feels his hand on your arm. He looks down at it. Your right hand; no ring. "It's good she has you, too."
"Yeah." He chuckles, low. Bitter. His glasses slide down his nose. "That's the one upside to a forced sabbatical. Plenty of free time."
Your hand pulls away. "I saw. UNESCO." If you still keep up with him, his work, that would mean you maybe went into medical malpractice law after allâbut he doesn't knowâand before he can ask, you continue, "So you'reâ"
"Still on staff, officially. By the time I get home, probably not."
"You never were afraid of pissing people off."
"Guess I should have been."
"Mm. You'll figure it out."
"Yeah. Maybe. I could use some advice."
"Really? From the child bride?" There's no bitterness in your voice, just a smile. Light. Teasing. The way it used to be.
"You seem to have it all figured out," he says with a shrug. "The job. The ring. Life."
You laugh. "Nobody has it all figured out. There could always be somethingâŠ" The smile fades, not into a frown. Something in between.
"Better?"
You don't look at him. He watches as you play with your ring. "Different."
He stops walking. You make it a few steps ahead of him. "Are you happy?"
"I should get back," you say. You lean up to kiss him on the cheek, once, quick. "It was good to see you, Colt."
You walk away. Two steps. Ten steps.
"Wait," he says.
You turn.
"I never actually got to see the ring. The new one."
You narrow your eyes at him. "Not much to see." But you do walk back, heels clicking, hand outstretched. "They all look the same, more or less."
He takes your hand, and looks at it.
You're right. It's nothing out of the ordinary. The simple band. The diamond above. But your hand is warm in his. Your wrist is soft where he brushes his thumb across it, your pulse delicate beneath his fingers, and, on a whim, he steps in, and tugs you closer, and brings his other hand around your waist.
Your eyes are wide as you look up at him. He swears he feels your pulse pick up, feather-light. "What are you doing?"
He takes a step back. You follow. Then to the side, then back, vaguely in rhythm with the distant sounds of music from inside, and the ocean in his ears.
"Feels like I owe you at least one dance in your life that I don't completely fuck up by the end. Think of it as a wedding gift."
Your smile is small, but warm. Relaxed. "So I shouldn't be expecting anything off the registry, then."
"I don't know. Anything on there in the soon-to-be-fired adjunct's salary range?"
You scrunch up your nose, like you're genuinely thinking about it; the corner of your mouth lets him know you're not. "Luggage tags?"
He laughs. "Okay. Luggage tags." He dips you. He feels, through the hand on your back, the way your breath catches. "I'll see what I can do."
He brings you up from the dip slow, close. He lets his eyes linger. Your mouth is an inch away from his, less, even, and he watches your lips part and then feels as you press them to his, and
-
No. You wouldn't do that.
-
He brings you up from the dip slow, close, and it's nothing, nothing at all, to lean in and kiss you.
He presses his hand into your back, and cradles your face with the other. He walks you backwards until you are pressed against a wall, and moves his mouth over yours, deep and unhurried, like he can kiss away your husband. Like he can erase the reception, and the altar, and everything that came before.
You seem surprised at first, suspended for a moment, only a moment, before you thaw to his touch. Your hands rise to his chest; his face; they wind up around his neck, your head tipping back against the brick behind you. You open your mouth first. When he mirrors the movement, when his tongue finds to yours, you make a sound, into his mouth. A soft one. A small one.
He pulls you closer.
Your hands are in his hair. He can feel the heat of your body through your dress, the whole length of it, and the dress goes down to your ankles but that doesn't stop him from reaching down, reaching under, those expensive shoes of yours giving you enough height that he is able to run a hand up between your knees and your thighs and. And.
"Fuck." He breaks away to say it. You're wet already, enough that it's soaked through your underwear, which is so delicate to the touch it might as well not be there at all. White lace, he assumes. He wants to pull it off you with his teeth. "Is this for him or for me?"
Instead of answering, you close the distance, letting him taste the champagne on your tongue again.
He thinks about that, that non-answer, thinks about it over and over as he pulls your underwear to the side and presses his fingers into you, or
-
"Is this for him or for me?"
Instead of answering, you lean inâbut he pulls back, keeping the distance between his lips and yours. "Come on," he says, his voice low. "Use your words."
"I." He pulls those stupid lacy panties to the side, teasing his fingers at your entrance, and you make the softest sound, less whimper than sob. "Please don't make me answer that."
And then you kiss him, and he's so stunned he lets you, or
-
"For him or for me?"
You lean in, he pulls backâbut not so far. Not even enough to see you, really, just far away enough that he can talk without you swallowing the sound.
"Please," he says, letting his forehead rest against yours. "Please just say it."
You hesitate, or
-
"Please," he says, "I know I don't deserve it, butâI need to hear it. Even if it's not true. Please."
You press back. He lets himself meet your gaze. There is a light shimmer across your eyelids, or else nothing at all; your lipstick is a mess, or perfectly intact; your eyes are a little glossy. A little red.
"You," you finally say. "You. Always you."
He kisses you again at the same time he slides a finger into you, so that he can taste the gasp you let out. You are hot around him, hot and soft and wet, and he drags his thumb up, looking for your clit, and he knows he's found it because he can feel the exact moment you start to have trouble kissing him back.
"You're so beautiful," he says, and he feels the way you throb around him at the words.
"Rylandâ"
"You are," he says, and you just said his name with his fingers inside you and he is going to be cool about it, he is not going to get distracted, he is going to be so focused and so normal. "You are, you always are, I should have told youâI've thought about this for so longâ"
He gets his other hand up to your torso, letting one strap slip off your shoulder so that he can cup your chest, dragging a thumb over a nipple and smiling against your mouth when you arch into the touch.
"Me too," you say. The words slip out of you, ragged, like they're something you weren't expecting, or weren't supposed to say aloud. You're clinging to his shoulders, nails digging into his back as your fingers twitch, as you try to keep upright, try to keep from falling apartâbut he can feel the way your breath catches. He can feel the flutter of your walls around him, and he knows, he knows he can get you there, knows moments before it happens that he is going to make you fall apart here, now, against a garden wall, thirty feet away from your own wedding reception.
He breaks away to kiss up your neck, below your ear. "Come on," he says, and the sound you make is so devastating that he has no choice but to return his mouth to yours. "Come for me. Come for me, pleaseâit's you, it's you, too, it's always been youâ"
He wants to watch your face, but you kiss him desperately, one hand pulling him closer by the hair like you're trying to muffle yourself, and so he settles for the feel of you, your mouth and your moans and the way they vibrate through you both as you finish around his fingers.
He keeps kissing you through the whole thing.
Softer, when the aftershocks begin. Gentle against your lips; then, when the hand on the back of his head loosens, he moves to your cheek, your eyelids, your temple. Your forehead.
When he pulls his fingers out of you, you let out one last soundâmore sigh than anything else. Leg returning to the ground. He narrowly resists the urge to take his own fingers, the fingers still wet with you, into his mouth. Instead, with his other hand, he helps fix your strap, and takes a step back to look at you as you lean against the wall.
You press a thumb beneath each eye, wiping gently. "You promised you wouldn't ruin my makeup."
"I said I wouldn't make you cry," he says. You reward him with a laugh that is tiny and gorgeous and a knife to his heart. "Come back with me."
You pause. "What?"
"Don't go back in there. I have a hotel room, Colt's hotel room. We canâ"
"No." You step away from him. "I can't. This was." Your hands run over your dress, trying to smooth new wrinkles out of the fabric. "Shit. We shouldn't have. I shouldn't have. I just stood up in front of everyone and saidâI promisedâ"
"Seems like an empty fucking promise, at this point."
"It's not. It's not." You shake your head frantically. "This was just a mistake. I'm married."
"Sure." He feels like he's about to throw up. "You've got husband number one under your belt. Family tradition, right?"
You go still. Your eyes flick up to meet his, and he feels it in his throat. "Glad to see you haven't changed," you say. Then it's back to businessâtucking up a strand of hair, checking your lipstick, not even looking at him as you walk away.
He watches you go, or
-
"Come back with me," he says. "I'm sure there are tickets left, on the same flight. Or we can wait for the next one. Come home."
"This is home, for me." There's a tiny divot between your brows, the one you always get when you are confused, or irritated, or infuriated, and it's there now and he wants to press his lips to it but you are out of reach. "My whole life is here. My apartment, my friends, my marriage."
"What about me? I'm here. I'm here now."
"Yeah." You press two careful hands to your face. There are tears there. He wants to wipe them away, but when he steps forward, you counter with a step back. "I think I was a little better off when you weren't."
You turn, or
-
"Come back with me. Or, or, or I can miss my flight. I can stay."
"I'm married. I have a husband."
"He doesn't have to know. We don't have to tell anyone, we can. Just tonight, orâ"
You shake your head, or
-
"Come back with me. Please." You are starting to blur before him, and he doesn't know if it's tears or memory or three years of distance, and he does not care. "Everything is a mess. All of it. I have no idea what I'm doing. Most days I don'tâI can'tâI don't know anything, but I know that I have been in love with you for ten years, and you have to. You have to at least let me tell you that. You have to know."
You are farther away than before. You are very still.
"You haven't been in love with me for ten years," you say quietly. "You haven't even seen me sinceâ" Your face is calm. The dampness on your cheeks, the red-rimmed eyes, all gone. "You don't know me anymore."
"I do know you." He steps forward. It doesn't bring him any closer. "I do."
"No, Ryland." The kindness in your voice is the cruelest thing he's ever heard. "You don't."
"No?"
"No."
-
No.
-
It's no use.
He doesn't know how long he's been sitting here, looking at the blue envelope. The yellow dress. The loop-tailed y.
It doesn't matter. None of it matters. His career is over and his mother is dying and all he can do is sit here, in an empty house, staring and staring and staring, and no matter how many times he runs the simulation, adjusts the variables, charts and recharts the data, the verdict is the same: there is no sensible world in which you would choose him over a man who was smart enough to kiss you and brave enough to be honest about the reason why.
He looks at the photo again.
You look happy.
He marks three Not Attendings, putting the card aside to bring to the hospital. The registry site remains open on his laptop. He'll pick something off of it, labeled with his mom's name. His mom's, and Colt's. The best thing he can do for you, he understands now, is leave you alone.
-
Months later, in a classroom, scrolling over a break, he sees a post from your brother. A photo album. Green centerpieces on the tables; sunflowers; your hair hanging loose and your smile radiant as your new husband dips you.
Your reception dress was short, not floor-length. Fringed, not satin.
He adds it to the list of things he was wrong about, and goes back to work.
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