series warnings: dark themes surrounding history of domestic violence, dark themes in general, heavy emotions (hope can also be heavy)
.................................
In the wee wee hours your mind gets hazy
Radio relay towers gonna lead me to my baby
The radio's jammed up with talk show stations
It's just talk, talk, talk, talk, 'til you lose your patience
Mister state trooper, please don't stop me
Hey, somebody out there, listen to my last prayer
Hi ho silver-o, deliver me from nowhere
SIR NO YOU ARE NOT YOU ARE A MENACE. SOCIETY IS CRUMBLING BC YOU ARE DISTRACTING THE GIRLIES (gn) GO HOME!!!!!!!! GO FUCKING LAY YOUR OLD ASS DOWN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
the outfit is such an “i’m just a dude” fit like NOOOOOOO YOURE RUINING MY LIFE like isn’t he tired ??????? doesn’t he need rest ?????? the nursing home is calling go away pls PLSSSSSS (his legs are so thick i am sick with lust)
Javier Peña x Latina!sex worker!informant!Reader x Santiago Garcia
Join my general tag list (Comment to join the tag list for this fic)
Triple Frontier Master List
Spotify Playlist
Series Masterlist : Read on AO3
Summary: Javier confronts Santi, but Candy has Santi's back; we get a little insight into Santi's childhood and what makes him this way.
Content and warnings for whole fic, not chapter by chapter unless something is added: Sex work, drug trade, some drug use/pressured used, sex workers and the mistreatment/stigma surrounding them specifically in the 70’s (my blog is sex worker positive) but ima put potential dub con depending how you look at it as a sex worker who works with dangerous men, some action surrounding reader and the guys and the drug trade, SMUT HEAVY, corruption kink (were corrupting santi here, he’s young, 25), no loss of virginity tho, threesomes, some slight m/m smut but that’s not the focus here, but as you know this blog is an lgbt blog so I’m always open to gay shit. Talk of war and some PTSD but I won't be going a whole lot into it.
For the record, this is a fic that takes place in the drug trade and deals with the darker side of humanity, so anything from Narco's and Triple Frontier is liable to be discussed or mentioned here. This is your warning. This is not a dark fic nor is it centered around dark themes like Leather and Lace or Sunshine Starlight Sweetheart Brightside, but they are open to be talked about.
Reader has a nick name: Candy. Not her real name just what she goes by on her profession. Much of the inspo for this and for the title came from the Bruce Springsteen song “Candy’s room” so check it out for the vibes.
Reader speaks Spanish and had hair. I've decided Candy is just latina bc she's a sex worker in Colombia so this is what I'm doing. Reader also has curly hair and dark skin.
ADDITIONAL WARNING!: I'm adding implied covert incest to the warnings. If you don't know what it is, it's NOT the same as physical/sexual, its where the child has a relationship with a parent that is more like spouses than parent/child. I'll leave more to google. In the context of this fic, Santi's mom parentified Santi, made him the "man of the house", treated him like a husband and relied on him to help pay bills.
Thank you as always to my beloved Fen <3 I couldn't do this without your encouragement.
A short 1.8 words
Support writers! Reblog and comment!
**************
“GARCIA!” Javi chased after the young man, running down the stairs. Santi moved fast with his youth, but Javi’s longer legs gained an advantage, skipping stairs and eventually catching Santi and slamming him against the wall.
“I’m sorry!”
“You’re damn right you are! How did you get her number?”
“Your book!”
“You’re going through my shit, Garcia?”
Candy’s voice rang at the top of the stairs, her robe and wild curls flowing as she transcended down the stairs. “Let him go!”
Javi backed up, letting go of Santi’s shirt with a shove. “You stay the hell away from her!” He said to Santiago.
“Excuse me?” Candy stood in front of Santi, crossing her arms over her robe to protect her modesty, for whatever that was worth. “He is my client, and if he wants to see me, he can see me! You don’t own me!”
Jaci sighed, pinching at the bridge of his nose with a huff. “That’s not what I meant. He’s a DEA agent-”
“And you aren’t?”
“He’s not going to be careful! Candy, you sleep with dangerous men, men we are after! If he’s not subtle, you both end up dead!”
“And screaming out his name in my stairwell is being subtle?”
Javi didn’t have a response, chewing on his cheeks and Santi tried to excuse himself. “I’m just, I’m going to go.” But Candy caught his hand.
“Santi, sweetheart, it’s okay, we can go back upstairs. You paid me, sweetie.”
He was still avoidant. “No, it’s okay, I reserved the time, I-I’ll just go… yeah- fuck,” he shook his head and tried to go.
Santi pulled away again, but Candy held on: tight but gentle.
Javi tried to nudge him on. “Go on out of here-”
“I’m sorry-” Santi tried to apologize to the floor when the door opened, and an old woman in a black lace vale shuffled in.
Candy dropped Santi’s hand in favor of wrapping her robe better. “Hola, Señora Perez.”
The old woman eyes Santi and Javi, then looks at Candy. “You alright here, mija?”
With a soft smile, Candy assures her. “Si, Señora, gracias. El,” She nodded to Javi with a glare. “él se va.”
Señora Perez nodded, placing a withered hand on Candy’s shoulder and turning her away from the two boys. “Mija, have I ever told you about my grandson?”
Candy held back a laugh. “No, Señora.”
“He’s a nice young man, a church going boy.” She touched the cross around her neck. “If I may offer some advice, I would suggest you find some different company.” She glanced at Santi and Javi who both avoided her eyes, then back to Candy’s expensive, flowing robe. “And perhaps some more clothes.” Señora Perez patted Candy’s shoulder and moved on towards her door.
Candy muttered “Garcias, Senora” and everyone waited in silence until her apartment door was closed before Candy turned to Santi, as soothing as ever. “Would you like to come back upstairs with me?”
Santi seemed to be considering it when Javier butted in. “Garcia, don’t you fucking-”
“Enough! You are not in charge of him!” Candy shouted before grabbing Javi’s arm and pulling him out the front door and closing it behind her. “What are you doing?” She asked, unsure why Javi was acting this way.
But Javi didn’t know himself. He wasn’t an idiot, he knew she saw other men. Hell, he saw plenty of other women himself. Was it that he saw Candy with another man? Was it that the man was Santi? Or was it what he was claiming, that Santiago couldn’t be careful, that he couldn’t protect her? Yeah that was it. It certainly wasn’t the bubbling jealous at the idea that Santi was fucking her, holding her, that she kissed his plush lips- uh, that he kissed her plush lips. No, Javier Peña was jealous.
Instead of divulging all this, Javi diverted. “What are you doing with him? He’s just a kid.”
She scoffed at him. “He’s 25, plenty old enough.”
“Yeah, old enough to get sex from bars, or a nice girlfriend not-” Javi stopped, but it was too late.
She cocked an eyebrow at him. “A prostitute? You can say it, Javi. I’m aware of my job title.”
“Candy, baby, that’s not what I meant-”
Candy rolled her eyes, her hand reaching for the door. “Call me whenever, Javi, but you leave that boy alone.”
She opened the door and Javi only got a peak at Santi, connecting eyes before the door shut in Javi’s face as he took a step forward.
*
Santi watched as Javi walked towards the door, and when it shut he was certain Javi would open it… but he didn’t, and eventually the sound of descending footsteps signaled he left.
“Santiago? Can I call you that now?” She asked as she approached him carefully, with that soft smile that always put Santi at ease. Santi kept looking at the door. “I knew that was your name, before. Knew you worked for the DEA, didn’t know you were Javi’s partner.”
Finally, Santi turned toward her. “Can we not talk about him?”
“Sure. Would you like to go back upstairs with me?” Candy extended her hand that Santi took. She smiled wider. “Let’s go, handsome.”
As they ascended the stairs, Santi’s nerves were through the roof. He felt guilt, like he’d been caught. Santi never got caught before, because he’s never done anything wrong. The pressure from such a young age to be good, to do right, to be the man of the house… it carried over. Santi got his first job at 8 with a paper route he held for years until he found a less than legal job at 13 in a kitchen. The job had so many health code violations and safety hazards, Santi’s arms and legs were burned and cut with scars he now passed off as from the military. He had wounds from there too, but that was primarily the scar down his neck from the bullet that almost killed him, and a few in the chest that went straight through. Frankie said the 4th bullet you don’t even really notice anymore. Santi’s fourth bullet he didn’t feel because he thought he was dead.
All his life he’d needed to do right. His older sister, she was the problem child, the one causing mami problems… Santi loved her too. Elena had her own troubles, their father leaving severely affected her and she sought out that healing from men way too old for her. By the time she entered college, she was a full blown feminist and was teaching Santi all she knew. For his sister’s part, Elena was insistent that Santi be a good man. He learned a lot of valuable lessons about consent and how to treat a woman, not that he had much opportunity to use it.
Santi had become the man of the house when their dad left, his mother treating him like a husband some days. She called him her esposito; her little husband. She’d stay up late at night with him on the couch talking, talking to him about how his father did her wrong, her troubles at work or church… Sometimes it made him feel special, but often it just made him feel worried. He felt like all the problems were his to fix. Elena got into college on scholarship. She’d been a part of a women’s group and had worked hard to save up… Every dime Santi made in his youth went to his mom, so when it came time for adulthood, he couldn’t afford the luxury of college. Santi enlisted in the army at 17, sending home chunks of his paycheck to his mom until the day she died.
The pressure to be good, to be right, to never mess up even the slightest… it manifested in anxiety that Santiago pushed down and down and down… it was bubbling up right now, gurgling in his stomach and in the bile at his throat.
Mami would not approve. She was violently against Elena’s premarital sex, and had told him he could not be like her. God forbid she knew he was seeing a prostitute. Did she know? Was she watching him? Did she know of all the meet ups they'd had this month? Elena wouldn’t approve either, she thought prostitution was degrading to women and that men that sought out prostitutes were objectifying them… this act with Candy was desecrating the two opinions he valued most.
But he didn’t want to stop.
“Do you want to have sex, or would you rather just talk?”
Santi turned to her, confused at that statement. “I thought… do you…”
Her smile changed from soft and assuring to bright and joyful. “Talk? Yes Santiago I can do more than suck dick.”
Panic swept through him. He didn’t want her to think of him like that. She was special to him. He wasn’t stupid, he knew they weren’t dating, but he didn’t just value her for her body. “No! Oh god no, Candy I don’t think of you like that, fuck- you’re- I”
“Santiago.” She placed her comforting hands on his shoulder, a hunt of worry in her eyes. “It’s okay, sweetheart. I’m just teasing you. Breathe, can you do that for me? In your nose, out your mouth…”
Santi did as she said, and slowly calmed down. “I’m sorry, I just…” When she cocked an eyebrow in concern again, Santi collected his thoughts better. “I enjoy your company. P-physical or not.”
Her reassuring smile was back. “Well I’m glad. I enjoy yours too.”
“You’re just saying that.”
“No I’m not.” She frowned ever-so slightly, but unlike his mother he didn’t automatically feel like the frown was his fault or his problem to fix. “Santiago…” Candy took his hand, leading him to the small loveseat and sitting down. “I have a lot of different kinds of men here. I hope that isn’t shocking to say, but I do.” With a gentle nudge to his shoulder, Santi smiled again. “You’d be surprised how many men just want to talk. It’s a lot of them. Before or after sex, but sometimes that’s all we do. I like talking to them, getting to know them. And Santi?” She kissed his cheek and giggled at the tickle of his mustache. “I like getting to know you.”
So Santi stayed there with Candy curled up and lying against his chest on the love seat, just talking. She calmed him. He liked being with her, just being. He knew it was an act, at least part of it. She was paid to be here… but Santi couldn’t help feeling for her, wanting to be with her… With Candy, Santi felt like he could actually be himself, he could be that version of himself he was with Frankie, Benny, Will, and slowly but surely Javi, even if today set him back. Fuck, what was Javi going to say at work tomorrow? Would he yell at him again, get him fired for soliciting prostitutes or for going through his things, would he request a new partner- Santi’s finger wrapped around one of Candy’s curls, carefully letting the lock slip through his fingers as to not to mess them up… he found himself grounded again. That could wait until tomorrow. Candy mattered now.
*******************
Check out the playlist!!! Lots of fleetwood mac and eagles!
Prescious baby Santi <3
Now tell me...
Who do you want Candy to end up with and why?
Santiago
Javier
Voting ended onOct 30, 2023
please tell me why in the comments and reblogs! I love to here your thoughts on who had better chemistry, who would work better, who needs to work on themselves etc bc they both got their issues, Javi is a sad slut and Santi is a sad baby.
Thank you so so much for reading!!!
And I want to add, to all my readers effect by the war, whether you or your family or friends, I'm praying for your safety. I don't know how much that means to you, but it's what I have <3
This just keeps getting better girl! I personally think Javi is a better match for Candy, just in terms of temperament and experience.. but she can still help baby Santi with his mommy issues and all of that pent up tension. Whatever you end up writing, I bet its gonna be delicious.
Thank you for providing a perfect distraction in these tough days 💔
Series Summary: Maybe reckless hearts come in pairs.
Series Rating: Explicit (18+ only)
Series Content/Warnings: Fluff and Smut, Smoking, PIV Sex, Oral Sex, Hands Doing Hand Things, light use of restraints, cats (in case you have allergies)
Word Count: 7.1K
Author's Note: This is a big one, guys. Buckle up!
Previous Chapter / Series Masterlist
Chapter 4
Not even a mile.
Javi rests his hands on his hips, lungs burning, face tilted toward the dreary November sky. He didn’t even make it a mile.
“Jesus fucking Christ, Peña,” he mutters, the words catching in his throat. He coughs hard, once, twice, and fans the hem of his t-shirt away from his sweaty stomach.
He used to be able to run.
Yeah, he didn’t like it. But he could do it – had to do it – and it was fine. He’d like to blame the years behind a desk, but he knows the years of cigarettes are equally responsible. He walks for a minute, letting his breathing return to almost normal, and then picks up the pace again. He puts his eyes on the horizon and tells himself twenty more minutes.
He can do anything for twenty minutes.
After ten, he can hear his heartbeat in his ears.
After fifteen, a stitch pinches in his side and a fucking piece of gravel works its way into his shoe.
That’s why he doesn’t hear the pickup until it’s close. That’s what he tells himself anyway.
He shifts to the crumbling shoulder of the road, leaving plenty of room for the truck to pass, but it slows down, and he turns his head to see your amused face.
You reach across the roll the passenger window down. “You’re going the wrong way.”
Javi steadies his breath, trying not to sound winded, as he rests his forearms on the edge of the open window. “Wrong way?”
“If you’re trying to get out of Texas. You’re going the wrong way. Border’s –” you point to the right, towards the stands of cottonwoods in the distance that follow the river – “that way.”
“Why would I be trying to get out?” He swipes his palm over his forehead to catch the trickle of sweat creeping toward his eyes.
“Why else would anyone run?” You wrinkle your nose. “For fun? Because you were not making that look fun.”
His laugh is half-cough. “Yeah. It’s not.”
You tilt your head. “Want a ride back? If you’ve had enough for the day?”
He reaches for the door handle. “I’ve had enough.”
You watch him climb in, then execute a swooping middle-of-the-road turn that dips into both ditches, and Javi grips the door handle as the pickup bounces back onto the asphalt.
“You’re fine, grandma.” You flash him a smile as you shift the truck into second, wind from the open windows whipping through the cab.
You ride in silence for a minute or two, and Javi watches you from the corner of his eye. He likes the way your small hand grips the stick shift, the flex of your thigh through your jeans as you press the clutch. There’s a smile playing around the edges of your lips, like you know he’s looking at you – like you’re enjoying it.
“You always pick up hitchhikers?”
You glance at him, your eyes dropping to his lap before looking back to the road. “Only when they’re showing that much leg.”
Javi looks out the window so you don’t see his grin. He’d dug these running shorts out of a box in the closet – they’re from his academy days, so 15 years and almost as many pounds ago – but he knows they still fit well in the right places.
He points up ahead. “Turn there.”
You flick your eyes sideways toward him. “Oh, Javier Peña. I know where you live.”
“That why you were driving down this road?” He drops his voice so it’s barely audible over the crunch of your tires on the gravel drive. “Were you coming to see me?”
You laugh as you bring the truck to a stop in front of the house. “I just thought it was a beautiful Sunday afternoon to go for a drive.”
He lifts a doubtful eyebrow, pointing to the gloomy sky.
“Maybe I like gray days.”
“Yeah. I bet that’s it.” He angles his body towards you. “Want to come in? Pop’s not here.”
“I know. He’s at Mama’s.” You pull the keys from the ignition. “Like every Sunday.”
As the two of you cross the yard to the house, the barn cats appearing from nowhere to weave around Javi’s ankles.
“You have a fan club.” You follow him into the house, and he gently nudges the cats away with his foot so he can close the door.
“Cats like me. Kittens, too.” He smiles as you roll your eyes. “I’m going to take a shower. Be out in a minute.”
---
It was more than a minute. You make circles around the living room – look at the family pictures on the wall, thumb through a farm supply catalog on a side table – before your curiosity carries you down the hallway. You pass the bathroom: the shower is running, and the scent of cedarwood drifts from beneath the closed door. You glance into the room across from it. It looks like an office – there’s a desk, a bookcase, a filing cabinet.
The next room, though – you take a few steps inside.
There is a bed made up with a navy coverlet and two pillows in plaid cases lean against the wooden headboard. The nightstand next to it has a lamp and an alarm clock; an empty water glass is perched precariously on the edge. A low bookcase is against one wall and a small desk sits opposite it. A tall wooden dresser is tucked into the corner next to a closet with a full-length mirror hanging on the door. The closet is half-open, and you look inside – a smell, that Javi scent of tobacco and soap and skin, surrounds you.
You take a step in, sliding your hand over a row of ties on a hanger. You pinch one between your fingers – slate blue with diagonal mustard stripes – and pull it free. You drape it around your neck, fingertips stroking the silky fabric as you leave the closet and walk to the desk. The top of it is mostly empty: there’s a cup with a handful of pencils and pens, an address book next to it, a thin stack of papers.
“Anything interesting?”
You turn to see Javi standing in the doorway, a dark gray towel wrapped around his waist. His chest is bare, still damp, and his wet hair curls along the tops of his ears. You hope your swallow isn’t audible.
“Still looking.” You move to the bed, smoothing wrinkles from the blanket with the palm of your hand.
“Have at it. Remember? Open book.” You hear the sound of bare feet on wood as he walks into the room. “Gonna get some clothes on.”
The swishy thump of the towel hitting the floor freezes you in place, your eyes wide.
“Are you seriously naked right now?”
Hangers clink against one another in the closet, and his voice echoes from the small space. “Turn around and find out.”
You laugh, pulling open the top drawer of the nightstand. “I would, but I have this drawer to look through.”
You push through the contents with one finger, your eyes wide.
“Which drawer?”
“The top one.”
“Don’t open the bottom one.”
“Well, now I want to.” You spin around with a grin. “But let’s talk about these first.”
He’s zipping up his jeans as he turns to face you, and you’re momentarily distracted by the sight of the trail of dark hair disappearing beneath the denim.
“Are these professional –" you hold up a pair of handcuffs, dangling them from your bent finger – “or personal?”
His smile is a little lopsided, a little dangerous. “Is your interest professional or personal?”
“You can’t answer a question with a question.” You play with one of the cuffs, pushing the single strand through the double, listening to the teeth click inside the housing.
He crosses the room towards you and reaches for the other cuff – the two of you now linked by the chain. He looks down at you as his thumb glides over the metal. “You know the first rule of handcuffs?”
You shake your head.
“Make sure you know where the key is.”
He taps the cuff against your wrist, just hard enough to click once.
“Do you?”
“Know where the key is?” He presses a little harder – another click. “I’m sure I could find it.”
“Hmm. Not good enough.” You reach for his other hand, folding his fingers around the cuff you place in his palm. “I should probably head home.”
He shifts his jaw to the side with a slight smile as he reaches past you to drop the cuffs onto the bed – they land with a muted clink – but then he stays like that, his body leaned close into yours. “You sure?”
You place the flat of your hand on the center of his bare chest and give him the slightest nudge. He takes a step back and you smile at him with a lift of your eyebrows as you walk towards the bedroom door.
“I’m sure.”
He follows you down the hall and out onto the front porch. You’re halfway to your pickup when he calls out after you.
“That’s my tie.”
You turn – lift the two ends where they are draped down your chest, slide the tie back and forth slowly against the nape of your neck – and grin as you walk backward to your truck. “I’ll give it back. I just wanna to see how it looks on my floor.”
He smiles, but the hungry glitter in his dark eyes makes your fingers tremble as you open the door.
You slide in. “Bye, Javi.”
He doesn’t speak, doesn’t wave - he just watches you leave. You keep your eyes on him in the rearview mirror until he’s out of sight.
“Shit.” You bounce your hand on the steering wheel as you turn onto the road toward town. “Shit, shit, shit.”
You don’t know what you were planning when you got in your pickup earlier and drove down this particular stretch of road. You thought you’d just glance down that long driveway and see if Javi’s truck was there.
Sunday lunch at your mom’s house with your sisters and their families had stretched into a late afternoon of football and conversation, but, dear God, you’d been so fidgety. Esther and Mama were working on a menu for Thanksgiving – it was in only three weeks, autumn falling away so fast. You couldn’t listen to anymore of the debate over what kind of rolls to make, so you headed to the kitchen.
Maybe a cup of tea would settle you down.
“What’s up with you, Tab?” Ruth followed you from the living room, her sharp eyes having been on you all day.
You pulled a coffee cup from the shelf, keeping your back to her. “I’m fine, Ruth.”
“You’re not fine. You can barely sit still.” She crossed the room, pulled a box of Constant Comment from the cabinet, and dropped a teabag in your waiting mug. “Something wrong? Anything we should know about?”
You met her eyes – they were that classic Ruth mix of suspicion and concern. “Nothing bad, Ruthie. I just feel restless. Maybe I should go for a walk.”
‘Restless’ didn’t even come close to how you were feeling.
It had been two weeks since Javi had been at your apartment, two weeks since that fucking phone call had sent him out the door, the quick thump of his boots on the stairs carrying him away.
You weren’t proud of how much you’d thought about him since then. You’d be grading papers and picturing his dark eyes or washing your hair and thinking about the muscles of his forearms. You would try to fall asleep at night and remember him standing by your bed – right there.
Close enough to touch. The thought sent a stab of desire through your center.
Ruth tilted her head to the side, a smirk on her face. “Ohhh.”
You narrowed your eyes at her. “What?”
“’Restless,’ Tabby?” She wiggled her eyebrows, grinning. “Feeling a little…on edge?”
You rolled your eyes as you poured the hot water into your mug.
“Maybe you should call Ray. See if you can get rid of some of this –” she waved her hand up and down the length of your body, amusement tickling her voice – “pent-up energy.”
You pointedly ignored her as you turned to carry your cup back to the living room.
You’d lasted another 26 minutes.
Long enough to finish the tea. Long enough to listen to Charlie explain most of the plot of Matilda to Chucho, long enough for Ruth’s husband Abe to start snoring in front of the television, long enough for Mama and your sisters to settle on sweet potato rolls.
You stood up and grabbed your keys and said goodbye to everyone, ignoring Ruth’s knowing smile. She wasn’t wrong about how you were feeling, but it definitely wasn’t Ray you wanted.
But now you’d left him – Javier Peña, for fuck’s sake – half-naked and alone.
“Shit.” You want to go back.
You tap the brakes at the next intersection, slow to a roll, start to turn the steering well.
“Goddamnit.” You shake your head – straighten out, accelerate, shift into second. You can’t go back. Because you’re positive that if you go back, whatever happens will be on his terms, and you’re not about to let Javier Peña be in control.
---
Wednesdays must be brown tweed: the skirt is just above your knee, and you’re wearing a turtleneck sweater that clings to your body. Javi doesn’t remember any teachers looking like this when he was in high school.
He knows it’s you. He recognizes your walk now – the length of your stride, the sway of your hips. There’s a bounce to it, a rhythm, like you’re moving to music no one else can hear. He darts his tongue out to brush over his lower lip, thinking about that – about that bounce, that rhythm.
It’s been two and a half weeks since you’d left him standing there watching you go, and he fucking wishes he didn’t know that. He wishes that he hadn’t driven down that back alley you live on looking for your pickup more than once. And he definitely wishes he hadn’t gone into the hardware store last Saturday morning; you hadn’t been there, but he’d spent 25 minutes being quizzed by the old men and walked out with 7,500 feet of baling twine he didn’t need.
He knows he’ll see you tomorrow, but he’d run out of chores to fill the afternoon and couldn’t shake the thought of a quick drive through town.
He’d driven toward the high school and then guessed what the best route would be back to your place. He tries not to think about the shit Murphy would give him for this: all those years spent hunting sicarios around Medellín, and now he’s using those skills to find some woman he can’t stop thinking about.
But it’s worth it – because here you are.
“Fuck me.” His jaw works the gum in his mouth hard.
You’ve stopped, one hand on a brick wall, leaning over to slip your pump off your foot and shake a pebble out. You bend a little more to slide the shoe on and your tweed skirt lifts higher in the back, revealing more of your thighs in their dark tights. The nylon is stretched just enough by your curves that it’s almost translucent – the shine of hinted-at skin beneath sends a pulse of hunger through him.
He eases the truck down the street, keeping one hand on the wheel as he leans over to roll the window down. “Want a lift?”
You stop, turning towards his voice. You bite the edge of your lip as you walk to the window, leaning down to meet his eyes. “I’m already home.”
He glances past you, sees the hardware store just two doors down, and shrugs. “I can give you a ride around back.”
“Sounds like you’re just trying to lure me into this truck.” You grin, opening the door. “But I’d be crazy to turn down a ride from Javier Peña.”
“I’ll remember that.”
It takes barely thirty seconds to get to your tiny alley parking lot.
“The rides aren’t usually that short,” he says as he puts the truck into park.
You laugh, clapping your hands together. “Oh, shit, Javi, that’s funny. I didn’t know you were funny.”
He smiles, fingers tapping against the steering wheel as he tries to figure out how to stretch this moment out.
You reach for the door handle, then turn back suddenly towards him, eyebrows lifted. “Were you looking for me?”
“What?” He shifts the gum to the other side, keeping his face blank.
“Just now. Were you looking for me?”
He considers this for a moment, wonders what answer is the right one. But he’s too old to lie. “Yeah.”
You shift in the seat, tucking one leg behind the other, and your bent knees are angled toward him. “Why?”
“I needed to know –” he reaches across the seat, slides the tip of his finger under the hem of your skirt where it rests on your thighs, pinches the nubby fabric – “what Wednesday’s skirt looks like.”
He watches his fingertips slip along the folded edge, bends his knuckles to graze them against the soft give of your thigh. He hears your breathing change – first, a quick inhale through your parted lips, then something like a sigh that sends blood throbbing into his cock.
“Tweed.” You sound hoarse. “Wednesdays are tweed.”
“Mmm.” He stretches his pointer finger to stroke once along the inside of your thigh, hidden beneath your skirt, then pulls his hand away. “It looks good on you.”
He looks up at you, but your gaze is still fixed on your lap. When you meet his eyes, yours are a little wild – you exhale and a tiny tremble vibrates through you.
“Do you want –” you stop yourself, shaking your head. “Thanks. So, I guess we’ll see each other tomorrow?”
He flits an eyebrow up and you tip your chin down, forehead furrowed. “Thanksgiving? You have to come.”
Javi had planned to – Pops had all but insisted – but he likes knowing you want him there. “I’ll be there.”
You reach for the door handle. “Okay. See you tomorrow.”
Stepping out, you glance back over your shoulder, a sly smile on your face. “Thanks for the ride. I hope the next one is longer.”
With that you slam the door, your fingers wiggling in a wave as you walk away.
---
You’re sliding on your shoes when the phone rings.
“Thank God you’re still home.” Esther sounds frazzled. “We need your chairs.”
“My chairs?”
“Your dining chairs. We’re two short and we’re not using folding chairs on Thanksgiving.” Esther sighs. “We have Chucho and Javier this year and I completely forgot extra chairs. Anyway, Abe is on his way to get them. You can just ride over with him.”
“Okay, Esty. And breathe.” You dramatically inhale and exhale. “This is only the most important family meal of the year.”
She laughs, the tension easing in her voice. “Sure, just that. No big deal. Thanks, Tab. See you soon.”
---
Abe unloads the chairs from the bed of the truck, waving you off your offer to help. “I got ‘em, Tabby. You go on in.”
You carry two tubs of Cool Whip into the kitchen – the contribution you were invited to make this year, a promotion from the ice you’d been assigned in the past – and weave through the complex choreography of your mom and sisters. You slide the containers into the fridge, give your mom a quick kiss, and then slip back out of the room.
The house is packed and warm, the air heavy with sage and cinnamon. Your brothers-in-law and Chucho are lined up in a neat row on the couch, eyes fixed on the football game on television. Esther’s mostly grown kids are entertaining Ruth’s little ones with a very loud game of Go Fish, and hovering over near the dining room doorway is one very uncomfortable looking Javier Peña.
You cross the room to stand by him. “Hi. You look tense.”
His smile is more grimace. “This is a crowd.”
“I know. I should explain birth control to my sisters. I mean, I love these kids, but –” you pull Charlie into a hug as she walks by, kissing her on top of her head as she wiggles – “why did we need so many?”
Charlie pulls free and looks up at you seriously. “Don’t forget my birthday is in two weeks. I like green and horses.”
You widen your eyes at her. “You like green horses? That’s weird, Charlie.”
She laughs and skips away.
You lower your voice to a hushed whisper. “I swear, someone has a birthday every other week. They’re going to bankrupt me.”
He chuckles softly. “That why you stayed away so long?”
“Exactly. It was purely for my budget.” You slant your eyes sideways. Javi’s wearing a blue plaid shirt, dark jeans, and a brown leather belt with simple oval belt buckle. The buckle has a design circling the edge, but you’d have to get closer to identify it – the thought of that, your face right there, sends a shiver through you.
“You look nice.” You inhale the spicy bite of his aftershave and the clean smell of soap, a combination that makes you want to press your face into the open collar of his shirt. “Smell good, too.”
He shifts a little, his body opening towards you.
“Thank you. You look pretty. But that’s –” he lets his eyes move over the dress you’re wearing – “not Thursday’s skirt.”
You smooth your hand over the wine-colored crushed velvet – the dress is short, with a loose flouncy skirt and an empire waist, and it’s one of exactly two dresses you own. Esther had reminded you twice last night to “dress up” for Thanksgiving, but she didn’t know you’d already hung this dress on your bathroom door while thinking about Javi.
“I’m not at work.” You shrug, lifting the hem of your skirt and letting it drop.
“It’s too short.” He tilts his head to look at your legs.
You frown, eyes narrowed. “No, it’s not.”
He drags his gaze up your body, a playful glimmer in his dark eyes. “I meant for work. It’s too short for work. You wear that around boys, they won’t be able to think straight.”
You arch one eyebrow. “Just boys?”
The heavy-lidded look he gives you sends heat over your skin. “I’ve seen legs before, Kitten.”
“Wow.” You sigh dramatically. “And to think I wore this for you.”
His expression changes: surprise, pleasure, something sharp and greedy. He starts to speak, but Esther’s voice interrupts.
“Dinner’s ready!”
You obediently turn to follow the crowd into the dining room, leaving Javi to watch you go.
---
There is a medley of snores coming from the couch, and even from inside the house, you can hear the ruckus of the hide-and-seek your nieces and nephews are playing in the darkened yard. Javi is furiously chewing his gum while hunched in an armchair across the living room and you can tell he has maybe fifteen minutes before he cracks.
“Mmmmm.” Your yawn is dramatic, arms stretching out in front of you, and you pretend to shake off sleepiness. “I am exhausted. Mama, this was wonderful, but I think I’d better go home before I fall asleep right here.”
“Let me wrap you up some leftovers.” Your mother starts to rise, but you shake your head.
“Don’t worry about that.” You stand up, and cross to kiss her on the top of the head. “I’ll just come over tomorrow and let you feed me again.”
She laughs and pats your hip. “That’s better anyway. You can help put up the Christmas tree and we’ll hem your bridesmaid’s dress.”
Ruth points her open book toward her husband who is slumped on one end of the couch. “Tab, just kick him. He can drive you home.”
“Oh, he can sleep. Javi’s going to drive me.”
Javi had been watching you closely and at your words, he springs up out of the chair. “Yeah, I’ll take her.”
Ruth scoots her glasses down her nose, her eyes flitting back and forth between the two of you. “Well, okay then.”
Javi says his thank-you to your mother, bids goodbye to a barely awake Chucho, and the two of you are out the door in ninety seconds; you can practically see the relief pouring off him. You wave to the kids in the backyard, promising them you’ll see them tomorrow, and climb into the truck. Javi closes the door and gets in, the interior light going dark when he starts the engine.
“So. I’m taking you home?”
“No, Javier Peña.” You shake your head, a smile lifting the corners of your lips. “You’re not taking me home.”
---
The headlights of the truck illuminate the rough trunks of the cottonwoods; past them, you can just make out the sparkle of moonlight on slow-moving water. Javi clicks the headlights off, and the night feels quieter in the darkness. Javi hadn’t asked any questions after your words; he’d just driven out of town and made a few turns until you reached this dirt road that ended at the river.
“I’ve gotta ask. How many women have you brought here, Javi?” Your voice sounds loud to your ears in the small space of the truck cab.
He looks across the seat at you, his palms sliding down the steering wheel to rest on his thighs. “None.”
“None?” You lift your eyebrows.
“No women.” He shrugs. “Lotta girls.”
You laugh, the nervous energy in your body releasing. “I hope that wasn’t recently.”
He shakes his head, eyes fixed straight ahead.
You glance down at the bench seat that stretches between the two of you. It’s empty, and it would be easy to slide across until you’re inches apart.
So you do.
You slide across, turn your body into his, ease one hand onto his chest. You slip it up, up, up, until it’s resting on his jaw, and you tilt his face down to yours.
And then you kiss him.
His lips are softer, softer than you expected, and you edge your tongue against them, feeling light-headed as he opens his mouth for you. You tease the pouty cleft in his bottom lip, sliding the tip of your tongue against it until his hand curves around the nape of neck and his tongue finds yours with a grunt. His other hand lands at your knee, pushing your skirt up to squeeze the flesh of your bare thigh.
You pull away, savoring how he chases your mouth with his, and you sweep the pad of your thumb over the plump of his lips when he tries to kiss you again.
“You gonna tease me, Kitten?” His roughened fingertips stroke against the nape of your neck, before sliding up to tangle in your hair, tipping your head back. His mouth finds your throat and his words are muffled by your skin, drowned out by your moan. “Then I’ll just kiss you here.”
His mustache is prickly, and chilled goosebumps shiver over your skin. When you feel his tongue drag a line back to the edge of your jaw, you flatten your hands on his cheeks and pull his mouth back to yours.
You settle your teeth into the curve of his lip, nip softly, and when he groans, you do it again. His hand on your thigh grips you hard and he tries to tug your leg across his lap, but the steering wheel blocks him.
“Goddamnit. This fucking thing.” He pulls his mouth from yours, brow furrowed in frustration. “Need more room. Move over.”
You scoot away and he moves with you, his hand curling around the back of your thigh and guiding your leg across his lap. You’re not straddling him – your hip is still on the seat – but the shift lets him get his arm around you, pulling you hard into his body.
“Better.” His mouth is back on yours, tongue pushing between your teeth, and you flick open the top few buttons of his shirt to slide your hand onto his warm chest. You break the kiss, bringing your face to his throat; you need to breathe the clean, musky scent of his skin. Even in the dim moonlight, you can find the freckles there and you map them – first with your fingertip, then with the tip of your tongue. He is salty and warm – you want to taste all of him.
His hand has moved higher on your thigh, your dress pushed to your hip, and he glides his hand up to caress your ass through the lace of your panties. “You wore this dress for me, Kitten. Did you wear these for me, too?”
Your lips are pressed against the throb of his pulse when you answer. “Depends. Do you like them?”
You feel the rumble of his groan against your mouth as he unceremoniously flips up your skirt to your waist, exposing all of your ass to his gaze. One finger traces the edge of your panties, then slips just beneath to stroke your skin. “I like them.”
“Then yes.”
“Fuck.” His word is a pained exhale as you cup your hand against the front of his jeans. He’s hard, straining against the zipper, and you feel slick and sticky and hot as he pushes himself into your hand.
You take a breath, pull your hand away. “Javi. When’s the last time you got tested?”
He squints and you can see him thinking, and you shake your head. “Oh, no. That took way too long.”
“I’m just trying –” he closes his eyes, brows knitted together – “to be sure. It was…”
You straddle his lap, shins pressing into the leather of the seat on either side of his thighs, and place your hands on his jaw, kissing the corner of his mouth. “Get tested.”
“Mmm.” His hands slip under your dress, grab thick handfuls of your ass, and he drags your center over the bulge in his jeans. “You sure?”
You rock against him and watch his eyes flutter closed. “I’m sure. You’re cute, Javi, but you’re not get-gonorrhea cute.”
“Jesus Christ.” He opens his eyes to frown at you. “When was your last test?”
“I can give you the exact date if you’d like,” you say. “And I haven’t been with anyone since.”
“That so?” His mouth finds your throat, the edges of his teeth sharp against you. “What about Ray?”
You flatten your hands on his chest and push away from him, narrowing your eyes. “You think I fuck Ray?”
He reaches for your hands and turns them over, then kisses the fragile inner skin of each wrist in turn. “I think Ray would fuck you.”
You grin and roll your hips over the hard press of his cock. “Of course he would. But I don’t want to fuck Ray.”
You bring your teeth to his ear – a hard bite into the soft lobe. “I want to fuck you, Javier Peña. Just take care of that first.”
He grunts, sliding his hand into the space between your bodies to cup your pussy with his wide palm. He presses the heel of his hand firmly against you, slow circles that drag your slick panties against your clit. “I don’t have to fuck you to make you come, Kitten.”
A gasp first – when his fingers slide between your folds, the thin barrier of lace feeling like nothing between you. Next a whimper – when he pulls his hand away, his dark eyes amused as his tongue sweeps over his bottom lip.
He pinches a fold of lace between his fingers and gives it a gentle tug. “Take these off.”
You slide off his lap and kick your shoes into the floorboard, then lift your hips off the seat to push the panties down your legs and drop them next to you. He watches you, patting his thigh when you’re done, and you straddle him again, slanting your mouth to his. He kisses you hard, all teeth and tongue, and then pulls away.
“Let me see.” He nods towards your dress, and you bunch the skirt into one fist, gathering it to your waist. You feel exposed – swollen, wet, spread wide over his lap – but his hard exhale makes you ache.
“Pretty.” You watch him slide two fingers against you. He glides them over your clit, teases your entrance, smiles when you buck into his hand. “You’re fucking soaked. You must need this.”
You narrow your eyes, reaching to squeeze him through his jeans, and he can’t contain his groan. “You must need this, too.”
Fuck – he feels big. You are unbuckling his belt before you can stop yourself, unbuttoning his jeans, pushing the zipper down. He’s not wearing underwear – you’re surprised – but you’re glad of it when he fills your hand, thick and hard and hot. You scoot back on his thighs so you can see him, see your hand stroking up and down the ridged, rigid length. You swipe your thumb over the head to catch the pearly drops of precum there then lift your hand to your mouth to lick them away with the tip of your tongue.
“Jesus fucking Christ.” His eyes are heavy-lidded and dark as he watches you.
“You taste good, Javi.” You lick your fingers, drip spit into your palm and then bring your hand back to his cock, wrapping a wet fist around him. He lets you work him for a minute or two, his palms flattened high on your thighs, fingers digging in.
“Fuck. Enough.” His voice is harsh as he grasps your wrist and pulls your hand away. “You first.”
One hand curves around to grip your ass and he yanks you forward on his lap, his other hand sliding between your legs. The cold metal of his belt buckle is caught between his thigh and yours and it’s digging in, but it’s forgotten when he shoves two fingers deep into you and sinks his teeth into your neck as your head drops back with a moan.
The base of his palm presses firmly into your clit and you rock into his hand as he fucks you with his fingers. You push your hands into his hair – it’s a little shaggy, curling over the tops of his ears – and you twist it to pull his lips to yours. The air is thick with your ragged pants into his mouth and the slick squelch of his fingers sliding into you again and again.
You hear your voice, breathless and whimpering. “Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck.”
He knows what he’s doing.
Right to the edge – your pussy tightening around his fingers, your face buried in his hair, eyes squeezed shut. But then he stops. He pulls his fingers from you – now only gentle, teasing strokes slipping light through your folds, barely-there circles tracing your clit.
You grunt, bite the shell curve of his ear. “Don’t play.”
“You made me wait a long time to get you like this, Kitten.” His teeth nibble the edge of your jaw, one hand moving over your breast, fingers rolling your hard nipple through your dress. “You can wait a little longer.”
He does it again and again – brings you so close, thighs trembling and heart pounding – and then backs off.
Again and again, until you are almost falling apart.
“Please, Javi.” You’re whining – you can hear it – but you don’t care. “Please.”
His eyes are black in the darkness, the muscles in his jaw tensed, and you can see he’s almost as far gone as you are. “This time, Kitten. You can come this time.”
You lean back to watch him slide his fingers into you again; your palms are on his knees behind you, his own thighs spread wide to hold you open for him. It takes so little this time – your body is wound tight and waiting.
You rock your hips into his hand as his thumb works circles fast against your clit, and you’re suddenly there, clenching so hard around his fingers it almost hurts, light exploding behind your eyes. You feel like you’re both falling and flying, tethered to the earth only by his husky murmurs. “That’s it, baby, that’s it.”
He eases you down, his touch growing softer, until you are still in his lap.
“Holy fucking shit, Javier Peña.” You’re breathless, practically laughing, and you let your body fall into his. “You almost killed me.”
He chuckles, but you hear the tight edge in it and can feel the hard length of his cock pressed between your bodies.
You lean back to make space to reach for him. The head of his cock is dark red and weeping, the length of him almost throbbing in your hand, and when you give him a squeeze, he hisses out a breath.
“Your turn now.” You slip the fingers of your other hand between your thighs, gather the slippery slick there, and spread it over him. His eyes glitter as he watches you and when you begin to move your hand over him, his body jerks towards you.
“Not gonna take long, Kitten.” He grits out the words, his eyes flicking fast between your small hand gripping his cock and your pussy still spread open across his thighs. “Shit.”
One of his hands is tangled in the fabric of your dress, the other flexes against your hip. There is a sheen of sweat glistening on his chest and his forehead, and the tip of his tongue is caught between his teeth – his face slack, his brow furrowed.
He grunts, hips lifting off the seat to fuck your fist; you know he’s achingly close.
“Fuck. Goddamnit.” His words are low and pained as he grabs your panties from the seat, and he covers the head of his cock just as come spills thick and hot over your hand. “Fuck. Fuck.”
His eyes close and his head thuds against the back window, chest gently rising and falling with his ragged breaths.
He’s almost motionless – the stillest you’ve ever seen him.
“Goddamn.” He slides his hand around your hip to give your ass a squeeze. “I promise I usually last longer than that.”
You let go of his cock with a soft laugh, wiping your hand clean with your ruined panties. “You’ll just have to prove it sometime.”
“Fucking bet I will.” He lets out a long exhale, then pulls you to him, nuzzling the sharp curve of his nose softly against your cheek before kissing the corner of your mouth.
You rise up on his lap, and he stops you as you start to climb off him.
“Shit.” He glides his hand up your inner thigh, his touch soft as velvet now. “Look.”
Pressed into the inside of your thigh is the image of his belt buckle: a simple oval with a braided rope edge. He traces the shape, dips his finger into the gentle indentation.
“That better go away,” you tease as he rubs his thumb over and over against it, his brows drawn tight together.
“I fucking hope it doesn’t.” He gives your thigh a final squeeze, helps you slide off to sit on the seat beside him. “Looks good there.”
You laugh, flouncing your dress down over your legs. You lift your soaked panties with the tip of your pointer finger and frown. “I can’t put these back on.”
Javi chuckles as he zips his jeans and buckles his belt. “Sorry about that.”
“Don’t be. I didn’t have a plan.” You shrug, dropping the panties onto the floor. “It could have been much worse.”
He reaches across the seat to slip his hand up your thigh beneath your dress, fingers teasing the bent crease of your bare hip. “I like the dress better like this anyway.”
“Well, as long as you’re happy, Javier Peña.” You smile – relaxed and satisfied. “Now you can take me home.”
---
He insists on walking you up the creaking staircase, but he mutters complaints the whole time. “Not even a fucking light back here. Thing’s a piece of shit. Goddamned death trap.”
Once you reach the door, you lift one finger to his lips. “Shush. I know. You hate these stairs.”
He shakes his head. “Not safe.”
“It’s fine. Just don’t move suddenly.” You grin with a lift of your eyebrows, and he frowns. “Oh, Javi. You’re too serious. Now give me a kiss and go home.”
He doesn’t need a second invitation. He pushes your back into the door, dipping his head to capture your mouth and one hand snakes behind you to slide beneath your dress and squeeze a handful of your bare ass. “Sure I shouldn’t come in?”
“I’m sure.” You push two hands into his chest and he steps back with a crooked smile.
His fingers catch the hem of your dress, lifting it halfway up your thighs. “Show me.”
You turn your knee out, revealing the soft landscape of your inner thigh and he exhales hard. The whole drive to your apartment, he’d kept reaching across the seat to slide his fingertips to that spot. The impression of his buckle is almost gone now, just a faint hint on your skin, but he still traces it with a satisfied sigh.
“I’m gonna be thinking about it the whole fucking way home.”
“Well, enjoy that.” You lean forward to kiss his cheek. “Thanks for the ride.”
He doesn’t turn to go down the stairs – just folds his arms across his chest and waits.
“What?” You narrow your eyes at him.
He tilts his chin down, frowning. “You think I’m going to leave you standing on these fucking stairs in the dark in a goddamned alley? Go in and lock the door. Then I’ll go.”
You raise your hand in a mock salute, then turn to unlock your door and step inside. “Yes, sir. ‘Night, Javier Peña.”
“’Night, Kitten.”
You close the door, turning the lock. At the audible clunk, you hear him start to move. His boots on the stairs are a percussive thump that grows distant, and you lean against the door, hands clasped over your mouth to contain your smile.
You don’t know when you’ll see him again, but whenever it is?
Taking a break from Thanksgiving thots to ask how you envision OTTR Leto meeting reader?? I haven’t given it much thought before this moment and now I’m desperate to hear your thoughts on the beginning of their relationship
I think about this one all the time.
You met Leto in Venice. Ocean Front Walk Venice, CA.
It gets hot in the Valley.
So hot that when you’re getting off your shift one blazing afternoon in downtown Los Angeles, the prospect of sitting in dead stop traffic on the 60 to Jurupa Valley, in your busted Honda Civic, only to go home to a stifling house with no AC…. Is anything but appealing.
So you do something unexpected. You are going to cool down, and you’re going to treat yourself while you do it. You’re going to pretend your life is ab-fab (absolutely fabulous) if only for one evening.
You take off from the parking lot of your job and instead of heading east, you go west. You stop at Neiman Marcus and you buy a dress. One that is too expensive to actually keep. So you wear it out and tuck the tags with every intention to return the next day. The dress looks amazing tho, it’ll be a shame to say farewell. It’s a classy little black cocktail thing that goes well with your plain black work shoes.
You get a little touch-up at the makeup counter to refresh your lipstick and spray on some Diptyque, and you head back to your car. You google, “open houses ocean view near me” and you take off to the coast.
You park your car a few blocks away from the listing. If the agent sees that heap, they probably won’t let you step inside. I mean this house is listed for nearly 15 million dollars. You shouldn’t even be walking down this block. You feel almost guilty for parking anywhere near this neighborhood.
There’s about 5 or six other people in the house looking around. The agent smiles at you and hands you a brochure when you enter. A glossy embossed thing listing the amenities as well as her contact information. You feel a little overdressed. The men are in tommy Bahama shirts and the women are in Lulu Lemon leggings.
You get a glass of free champagne and you help yourself to the charcuterie tray, looking around the house with appraising eyes, trying to nod your head at the bannisters and balconies like “hmm yes, maybe this will do.” Truthfully the house is beyond gorgeous. It’s ocean adjacent and has it’s own deck, pool, hot tub rooftop lounge, bedroom balcony… the kitchen is a thing of ART. The whole open concept and glass everything makes you feel so utterly out of place.
But its not like buying it was ever in the cards or the intention. the AC works, that’s all you care about, and you step outside the living room patio balcony, the ocean breeze hits your face in the most cooling fantastic sort of way. You audibly sigh and close your eyes breathing in the air. A voice from behind you startles you.
“Refreshing, isn’t it?” You nearly drop your glass, surprised by the man’s proximity.
God. He is handsome. Slick backed hair, mirrored aviators, a thousand watt smile, movie star jaw, and a dark navy suit cut, sewn, and ironed by Giorgio Armani himself. He looks like a magazine advert for Ray Bans. Now this, this is the type of man who buys a 15 million dollar home. Not you. The way he’s smiling at you now seems like… like joke or something. Like he’s laughing at you. He can smell the Honda Civic on you, can clock your shoes as Margiela knock-offs… heat creeps up your face despite the cooling breeze.
You look down at the floor and smile politely. “Excuse me” you mutter and go inside to investigate another part of the house.
You run into him again in the closet. Literally, you bump into him in the grand walk in. He’s probably going to need a closet this big for his collection of fine Italian sartorials. “Sorry” you mumble, ducking out. God he smells good.
You head back down to the kitchen to grab more cheese and crackers. Another bonus of open house crashing along with the free AC and free sparkling wine. Free food.
You’re midway through shoving another Brie covered cracker into your mouth when you see him again, in the kitchen, examining something attached to the marble countertop. His glasses are hanging from the center of his undone silk shirt. Those eyes.
You cover your cracker-full mouth and gulp. He’s so fucking cute furrowing his brow at the contraption and he spins the lever of it with one hand and smiles. He looks up at you.
“Pasta maker.” He points to it before shoving his hand back in his pocket. “You ever use one like this? It’s old school.”
You shake your head, still swallowing cracker.
“Wonder if it comes with the house…” He muses, looking up at the recessed lighting. He points up. “They all come with this now, you notice that?”
You shake your head again.
He tsks and continues, “Can’t stand it. I like something softer, y’know. These are harsh. You get up at 3 in the morning to get a glass of water and you want to kill yourself.”
You shrug and take a sip of sparkling wine. You wish you could talk to him but you can’t. You can feel yourself on the verge of saying something fucking stupid and it’s best to just not speak at all. So you look up at the recessed lighting with a curious face, trying to see the harshness, as he put it.
“Something hanging, like right over here,” he indicates over the island. “Something with yellow light. Soft, capiche?”
You smile at the word. It makes you more comfortable for some reason. “What? Like the Tiffany lampshades in the pool hall?” You offer with a smile.
He grins the most dazzling smile at you, stepping a foot closer and nodding. “Not exactly what I had in mind, but keep talking.”
“I was thinking more Venini myself.” You offer, taking another sip. He nods at you with appreciation.
“Tasteful. And soft. I’m listening.”
Your cheeks hurt from smiling at this point and you take a few steps to the living room gesturing near the sofa.
“An Arco floor lamp in the corner right here.” You submit to him, looking back over your shoulder with a wink. He chuckles.
“Took the words right out of my mouth.”
“And for the foyer,” you stride over to the front entrance, “A Sputnik. Right in the middle.”
“Gold or silver?” He asks.
“Bronze of course.” You reply with an affected air.
“How silly of me, dear.” He puts his hand over his heart.
The real estate agent makes a remark on what a gorgeous couple you are and how you just “fit the house”.
You start to protest but the man puts his arm around your shoulders and thanks the agent saying, “whatever baby wants, baby gets.” Winking at the woman and KISSING the side of your head. Which makes your face turn hot instantly.
He is… good at playing along, isn’t he. Well isn’t that what you were doing already? cosplaying as someone who could afford the house, and now you’re cosplaying a couple with this man whom you don’t even know the name of? Jesus—Just go with it, you suppose. Enjoy the pretending before you have to go back to the heat of Jurupa Valley…
“Now what about the dining room?” He asks into your ear in a deep voice, arm still over your shoulder.
“Hmmm,” You’re slowly running out of lamp styles, but you can’t let on. “How do you feel about Venetian glass, darling?”
“Inspired. Really,” he squints his eyes at the recessed lighting over the dining table. “We are in Venice after all.” He laughs with a toothy smile. “You have fine taste…” he leads.
You give him your name. He repeats it before telling you his. “Leto”
“I should have known you would have fine taste by the dress you’re wearing.” He compliments, picking up a glass of sparkling wine on the marble counter and gesturing your dress up and down.
“Thank you.” You blush. It’s not even yours. It’s on loan. You’re returning it tomorrow and you feel like a fraud.
Leto bites his bottom lip in contemplation then takes a step towards you, his hand making its way towards the nape of your neck with stern concentration on his lips. Oh fuck he’s about to kiss you. You make the split second decision to let him, closing your eyes gently, puckering your lips, holding your breath, and leaning in slightly.
But he doesn’t kiss you. You feel the slide of glossy paper down the back of your neck and the settling of it under your dress. He was tucking in the price tag of the dress for you. Jesus fucking Christ. You step back, embarrassed. He pats your arm. You cover your your brow, feeling your face get hot once again. So much for searching for that cool breeze by the coast!
Leto chuckles pleasantly. “Hey, hey, don’t be embarrassed. Happens to the best of us.”
God he’s probably giving you the benefit of the doubt. Probably thinks you just have so many new designer dresses that you innocently forgot to take the tag off… but if he had, would he have tucked it back in like he did? Or would he have just plucked it off?
“You like the house?” He asks, still jovial like the most embarrassing thing in the world didn’t just happen to you 5 seconds ago.
“It’s amazing. Perfect, really. The location, the style. It’s a dream. I have always wanted to live in Venice… the energy here is unbelievable.” You look around at the pristine grandiosity. The sun is close to setting now over the ocean and you sigh wistfully at the stunning view. “Whoever gets it is a lucky duck, I’ll tell you that.” You say, cheersing the sun itself before knocking back a sip of wine.
Leto watches you watch the lapping waves. “Let me buy it for you?”
You nearly choke on your drink. “Leto?! The house??”
Leto nearly doubles over in laughter, holding up his hand in apology, “No. No. I’m sorry, I— I meant the dress.”
Your face goes hot again. He knows! He knows you’re planning on returning it. Shit, he probably saw you pull up in your Civic!
“Please let me buy it for you. It suits you perfectly and it’d be a shame for anyone else to own it.” His eyes are so soft and kind and pretty and you almost want to cry.
“I… I can’t let you do that. It’s already on my card. I promise I won’t return it though, after that compliment, how could I?”
Leto nods. “At least let me take you out to dinner? Give you an excuse to show it off?”
Your heart nearly sinks. He’s probably the type to insist on picking you up. And he’s going to, what? Drive to the IE to do that?
“I live kind of far away…” you trail off, cringing slightly.
“I can send a car for you.”
“Leto, No, I—“
“Do you live father than a car ride? I can send a plane for you if you’d prefer?”
You laugh, but the returning stare isn’t a joking one. He’s fucking serious.
“I promise I won’t try anything funny. I just… want to pick your brain for more design ideas.” He grins and scratches the back of his neck, “It doesn’t have to be a date. Could be a business dinner? You would be my consultant…”
“Oh really? Consultant?” You cringe.
“Or it can be a date. A proper one. The best meal of your life. The Barber of Seville at the LA Operahouse, dancing, desert, a starlit walk on the beach outside my brand new house.” He grins. God what a fantastic smile.
“Sound like a 5 hour date.” You assess.
“What? You want longer? Because I will have a hot tub by the time this date rolls around and that can add up to 2 hours.”
“Two hours? Ambitious.”
“Agreed. But if done properly…” he winks and hands you a business card with his number on it. “Just think about it. I’ll be around.” He takes a deep breath, surveying the house and you, “I could stay and play house with you all day but I have a sudden urge to get ahold of my broker.” He takes your hand and kisses it.
“Nice meeting you Leto… Atreides.” You read off of his card.
“The pleasure was mine, gorgeous.”
Once he leaves, you have to go out to the balcony again for a breath of fresh air.
Join my general tag list (Comment to join the tag list for this fic)
Triple Frontier Master List
Spotify Playlist
Series Masterlist : Read on AO3
Summary: Part of If You Wanna Be Wild, Santi is sick and Javi comes over to take care of him, both realizing something is brewing.
Warnings and content: PTSD (flashbacks), internalized homophobia but like. Its mild. Flashbacks to that one scene in Glee with Blaine and Tina and the vapo rub lololol
A/N: I know it's been a min since the last chapter and I promise it's coming but I thought I'd giving a lil bonus chapter. Takes place before chapter 3.
A/N 2: for those who aren’t boomers like me, MASH is a show from the 70’s about med soldiers in Korea. It was a comedy but also dealt with super heavy themes and makes me cry
1.8 words
******************
When Javier Peña waltzed into work at 8:23 AM, he was surprised to find Garcia was not at his desk. Santiago was always on time, and usually early, often staying late to make sure his paperwork was just right. Javi had once returned after realizing he forgot his wallet before the weekend only to drag Santi out of the DEA’s office practically pouting at nearly midnight.
So needless to say, Santiago being gone on a Monday morning was certainly enough to make Javier concerned enough to walk back up to the secretary. Maybe he had finally gone out and enjoyed his life a little on the weekend. The kid needed it, he needed to let off some steam, and a guy that looks like him certainly wouldn’t have any trouble finding a nice girl. Well. Javi hoped she was nice. Santiago would get eaten alive.
“Hola Colleen, ¿Has visto Garcia?” He asked, leaning over her desk.
She did not look up at him. “There’s at least 6 Garcia’s in this building.”
Javi cocked his head to the side. “Which Garcia do you think I’m talking about?” A rhetorical question. “He’s late.”
“What’s it to you? You're late every day, your little lap dog probably got stuck rescuing a kitten from a tree or something.”
He would waste time on something like that.
“Colleen”
She rolled her eyes. “He called in sick, Javi, now mind your business.”
“Sick?” How did he possibly get sick, the kid had the best immune system he knew. Didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, ate all his veggie’s off his plate like his mommy was still watching. “How sick.”
“I didn’t press for details. He never uses sick days so if he wants to play hooky for once it’s none of my business.”
“Thank you Colleen.” Javi smacked the desk, not hard at all. “This was very helpful.”
Javi waited until noon to call.
“Hola?”
“Garcia, where the hell are you?” He didn’t want to make it seem like he’d been asking about him, after all.
“Oh, hey Javi.” He sounded awful. “Lo siento, I thought they would have told you I was out sick.”
“Well, no one tells me shit around here, you know that.”
“Except for prostitutes.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, I’m going on break, want me to swing by and get you anything? Some food, medicine, blankies.”
“Oh, actually, there’s some paper work in my top drawer-”
“I’m not bringing you work, Pope! Jesus, were you the kid who had friends bring him his homework when he was home sick from school?”
Santiago coughed and his poor throat sounded so horse. “Well, if I had friends and if I took days off, I suppose I would’ve.”
“Jesus, Garcia.”
“I’m JOKING! But yeah it was my sister. Mamí would have my head if I fell behind.”
That kid was never going to be free of his mother. “Other than work, do you need anything?”
“No, I’m alright, thank you.”
“Alright, I’ll see you tomorrow? 8 O’clock?”
“I’ll see you when you walk in at 8:45”
“Shut the hell up.”
*
Javi was getting ready to leave work when he thought he might call Santi again to see if he needed anything on his way home. They didn’t live far, after all.
He called once, but the boy didn’t answer. He called again, no answer. When there wasn’t an answer a third time, Javier got concerned; he must be too sick to answer. Only stopping briefly at a corner store for some medicine, Javi rushed over to Santiago’s, banging on the door. “Garcia? Garcia!”
After a few minutes, Santi stumbled to open the door, looking groggy and messy and so unlike the boy he knew. Santiago shaved every morning, came to work crisp and put together. Right now, in a rumpled t shirt and shorts and a face that looked like he hadn’t shaved since Friday morning, Santi looked like an adorable disaster.
“What happened? Are you okay?” He asked, worry in his eyes.
What a guy. “Am I okay? Garcia I called you three times and you didn’t answer, you look like hell.”
“Oh.” Able to relax a bit, Santi’s shoulders slumped and he rubbed his eye as he coughed and looked at the bad in Javi’s hand. “What’s that?”
Javi glanced at the bag before returning his gaze back to the sick man. “I brought you some medicine. Thought you might need something.”
The smile Santi gave him made his heart leap. “Javi, I appreciate you worrying.”
“I wasn’t-”
“But I’ve had three of my tia’s stop by and baby me already.”
“Oh-”
Santi saw Javi’s slightly dejected look, and it made his heart swell just a bit to see that yeah, Javi was an asshole, but he was his asshole and Javi cared about him. Javi wanted to take care of him. “You know how to make soup?”
“I can try.”
“Good, because I’m starving.” Opening the door to let him in, Santi went back to his couch to watch M.A.S.H.
Javi set to work. “Jesus, Garcia, M.A.S.H? Didn’t you get enough of war?”
“They can’t show anything on TV worse than what I’ve actually seen.” He mumbled, cuddling up in a blanket again.
Javier often forgot that Santiago had a whole life before him, a whole life of seeing things Javi couldn’t protect him from. Occasionally, Santi would mention his friends from the Army, his special ops team he was a part of, but not much, and especially nothing with what happened or why he left. There was his best friend who was a pilot and a pair of brothers. The older brother had been honorably discharged recently with “post-vietnam syndrome” although they hadn’t really spent that much time in Vietnam, comparatively. Vietnam was just the thing that got people talking, finally. This only came up in concern for the young brother who without an older brother’s guidance was hard to reel in.
By the time the soup was done, Santi seemed asleep so Javi walked over to the couch quietly only to find Santi was awake, watching M.A.S.H with tears in his eyes. Javi looked to the TV and although he couldn’t pinpoint what was going on, the scene was somber. “Garcia?” He didn’t answer him. “Garcia, hey, Santi-” Javi touched his shoulder causing Santi to gasp out of his trance.
“Will?!” Santi jumped up, eyes wide with panic and hand going for his hip only to find no gun. No holder. No uniform…
“Hey, amigo, relaje, relaje… It’s okay.” He held up his hands to try and placate him. “It’s just me, you're safe, I’m not going to hurt you, Santi.”
When Santi realized it had happened again he quickly averted his eyes, subconsciously shifting away from his friend. “Fuck, sorry, I was… dreaming.”
Javi knew he wasn’t dreaming. He had been awake, clearly, but Javi didn’t question him. “Dreaming about how you got that scar on your neck?”
He knew him a little too well. That’s why Santi called out for Will, the voice he had heard before slipping into unconsciousness. Santi felt like he had been going crazy. It wasn’t as bad as it had been for Will; Santi could handle gunshots and cross fire and action. He could handle it well, he knew he was capable. It was other things, however, things like dead bodies or funerals that sent him into a haze. One funeral he went to when he looked in the casket he saw himself. He never told anyone and never went again. When he went to mass he prayed he would never have to go Frankie, Will, Benny, or Elena’s. He prayed he’d go first.
“No.” He took a few bites of soup, complimenting it.
Javi just nodded. “Alright.” Turning the TV to the Mary Tyler Moore show, Javi tried to change the subject to distract Santi. “Always thought she was hot.”
“Me too. Had a crush on her when she was on the Dick Van Dyke show.”
Javi chuckled. “Of course you did. Here.” He went and got the cough syrup and put it on a spoon. “Here.”
Like a child, Santi whined. “Asqueroso”
“Shut the hell up, I’m not Mary Poppins and I’m not giving you sugar to wash it down.”
“Fiiiiine.” Santi lifted is head enough that Javi could guid the spoon between his plush and waiting lips, eyes dropping in exhaustion and face flush with fever in a way that made Santi just look… fucked out.
No, fuck, shit, he’s not suppossed to be thinking those things about his partner, or men in general. Not that Javi had a problem with it, but he wasn’t gay. It was just his mind wandering, that’s all.
“Javi?” Santi mumbled half asleep.
“Hm?”
“There’s some vicks vapor rub on the counter, can you grab it for me?”
“Yeah, no problem.” When Javi returned with the rub, Santi was out cold. “Garcia?” He felt his forehead, he was burning up. Poor kid was probably exhausted. Sighing, he opened the vapor rub. With care and precision, Javi rubbed a bit on his neck and a little on his chest, only dipping slightly under the collar so as to not put his hand anywhere untoward. It wasn’t sexual, Santi just needed help. Digging through his medicine cabinet, Javi also found some peppermint and lavender oils and remembered what his own mother used to do when he was sick. A tiny bit of lavender under the nose and some peppermint on Santi’s temples, Javi hopped at the very least he could have a good sleep.
He deserved it, honestly. The young man worked hard, he cared about what he did and the people of Colombia. He was smart, capable, and kind, traits that Javi remembered liking so much in Steve. He was easy to like.
Settling into a chair nearby with some soup, Javier decided to stay for a little bit just in case Santi needed something or in case he got worse.
When Santi woke up a few hours later it had already gotten dark out and he had intended on moving to his bed. When he began to sit up, however, Santi saw Javier asleep on the chair. He must have stayed to keep an eye on him. Santi’s heart was full, overcome with emotion and affection for his partner in ways he can’t remember feeling since… well shit, Santi can’t remember feeling like this. He had friends he loved dearly, he loved his sister and his mother and all his extended family… but this felt… different. He couldn’t put his finger on it.
Standing up, Santi quietly used the bathroom and got another blanket from his room. Before laying down again, Santiago carefully laid the blanket over Javier, tucking him in.
“Buenas noches, amigo. Y gracias."
************
Hope this was enough to tide y'all over!
I was writing the vapo rub scene and it was gonna be a lil more intimate but then I got trauma flashbacks to Glee and ina singing and... I said hmmmmmmmm nope lol
Summary: after a series of failures to find a dominant, your long time best friend Marc offers to give topping you a shot.
About this: Marc Spector/f!reader, mentions of kink, dominance and submission, kneeling, orgasm control
Immersivity: reader is a non-physically described cisgender woman. She works with animals and spends months out of the year in a place where it is cold—but this is the extent of her description. If there are other details which need mentioned because they hinder your immersive experience, please feel free to point them out.
*
“Give up. Give In. in the end It would be better to surrender before you begin. be lost. Be lost—And then you will not care if you are ever found.”—Victoria Schwab
*
Marc sends the message one night after the two of you have hung up from a lengthy venting session about your latest dating failures. A simple, without context:
You could do better
I know, you type back, squinting at the screen of your phone in the darkness. Outside, the wind howls—another snowstorm which you hope will either amount to nothing or be bad enough that you won’t have to traverse the icy roads to work in the morning. You roll onto your side, adjusting the pillow beneath you. You’re covered nose to toes beneath the coverlet and still shivering, but Marc always has a way of making you feel warm. That’s why I told that guy off, isn’t it? I know I can do better.
You watch as he types, no hesitation:
You could do me
*
In the morning, you text him with one hand, spooning Cheerios into your mouth with the other.
What, are you offering? There. You’re giving him an out. His message had confused you, left you spending half the night awake wondering about its context. You could do me. You could do me. You could do me? However he had meant it, you knew you had to offer him an easy way out. A fire escape. Maybe one of those seats on the plane that are right by the emergency exits. There’s a parachute beneath your seat, Marc, you think to yourself, drinking the remnants of milk from your bowl. Take it.
Yes. Give me a chance to help you feel better
Your face flushes. God, how embarrassing is it that Marc knows how bad you need fucked? Not just that—Marc knows how bad you need submitted. That was the caveat of having him as a best friend: he was more likely to listen than to speak, and as such, you told him everything. All your struggles with the kink scene up here in your little frozen section of the States. All the things every guy before him had done wrong…
You aren’t into that stuff, you text back.
And at the end of your work day, toes frozen in your boots, cheeks dry and chapped from the wind, you finally pull out your phone to see his response:
Says who?
*
I’m at a disadvantage here, you type to him while cooking dinner. The tiny kitchen of the sublet you rent during the winter months smells of pesto. You’re just glad it’s warm, wiggling your bare toes by the heat of the stove. You know all my kinks, I don’t know yours.
Marc sends a voice chat. It’s just over a minute long. Your heart is in your throat while your finger hovers over the play button. God, what the fuck could he be saying? Is he listing them all out for you, in alphabetical order or something? It will be the first time you’ve heard his voice since his text (“You could do me”, the phrase haunted your dreams now).
Pressing the button, you quickly hold the phone up to your ear. There’s no one else in the sublet with you, but you still imagine that his words will be scandalous enough to curl the nails in the floorboards.
There is rustling—Marc’s voice in the background, bright and laughing and calling out to someone, and then obviously speaking lowly into the phone to you: “You know what my kink is? Three years ago when I tried to take you hiking on that backpacking-for-beginners trail and got us lost, you remember? We spent half the fucking day—literally six hours or something—finding our way out, and after we did, I felt so bad I took you out to dinner. We didn’t even go home first, we were so hungry. We went to that fancy Italian place in town, both of us smelling like sweat and covered in dirt and at least ten pounds lighter from all the energy we burned out there in the woods, and when the waiter finally set that plate of food in front of you, you took a bite and you made this sound, this sound like you’d been dying of thirst but now you were lapping water right out of God’s palm. It was pleasure, and, and relief all in one—hearing you make that noise, and getting you to make it over and over again? That’s my kink. Do with that what you will.”
The voice message ends.
You drop your pesto spoon in the pot of boiling noodles.
*
You call him that night. You have to.
You and Marc have been friends for years, meeting in your early days of adulthood. It had been a fast friendship, both of you complimenting each other well. Marc was so easy to love, it had only made sense that you’d fallen in love with him. He was handsome and gentle and sometimes scathing and often hilarious. The only thing standing between him and a long term relationship was what Marc considered his ‘baggage’: the terrible abuse he had suffered as a boy, and the ramifications of it which he was still actively working to overcome after all these years. Marc didn’t think himself fit for marriage or even long-term dating. It was a shame for all the single women out there.
A blessing for you, though.
“Is this weird?” you ask as soon as he picks up the phone. “I don’t want things to be weird, Marc.”
“You spent half your day FaceTiming a horse,” says Marc dryly. “I don’t think your life can get any weirder.”
It was true—you had had to walk out to the barn three separate times today through the sleet to let an owner FaceTime with her horse who was sick and under your care. It had felt a little strange, being the third wheel in that conversation, but you understood her anxiety.
“I just—Marc, I don’t want to lose you. As a friend.”
You hear the phone shift as he shuffles it from one ear to another. He says: “The only way you could lose me would be if you told me to get lost. So can we figure this out?”
“Are you even attracted to me?” Maybe it’s desperate, but you’ve asked it. Marc has always taken efforts to compliment your appearance (resulting in heart palpitations all afternoon for yourself), but he’s never explicitly said that he finds you attractive.
On the other end, Marc lets out a breath which sounds a little like a laugh. Or a sigh? “Yes. Are you attracted to me?”
Marc clearly has never looked in a mirror as long as he has been alive. Tan skin that turns golden in the right lighting, dark curls that you wouldn’t mind trying to manage with your fingers, brown eyes that hint at the color of whiskey, a jaw to die for…
You clear your throat. “I mean—sure.”
“Sure.” You can hear his smile on the other end. It makes you want to die, just a little.
“Kind of.”
“Understandable.”
“You’re passable.”
“I’ll take it.”
*
One time, he texts while you brush your teeth. And if I’m no good at it, you can keep going to all those kink clubs up in the arctic circle
And if you are good at it? you wonder, because Marc has never been bad at anything in his life. Because ever since he suggested it, it’s all you’ve been able to think about, the feelings that you’ve had for Marc surging forward from the dusty shelf in the back of your brain where you had stored them all these years. Marc could just give you a look and you’re pretty sure it would melt you. There’s no way he’s going to be bad at topping you.
Then I’ll take care of you
Yes. Yes, melting already. You spit in the sink and rinse.
*
“Tell me again how it went with this last guy,” Marc says during your next phonecall. The two of you call each other every other night religiously when you are away (“up in the arctic circle” as he would say) for the coldest three months of the year. His voice is warm and low, quiet.
Even though you have already told him once, it is different now, isn’t it? The thought of relaying again everything that happened makes your face heat, makes you tug the blankets over your head until it is dark all around you.
“Do I have to?” you wonder.
“Do I have to make you?” he wonders back, voice lowering a fraction.
Your heart stutters. Your breaths begin to come at a faster rate.
“No,” you say, breathy and obviously on the verge of being devastated. “I’ll tell—we met on fetlife. He seemed nice and his picture was cute. Our interests lined up, so we met up at one of the clubs in town, but even though our interests had matched up on paper, we weren’t, like, meshing in real life.
“Like—,” you have to pause to clear your throat, voice dropping down low enough to almost be considered a whisper. God, you couldn’t believe you were telling Marc this again. “He…he called me a slut. I had marked that I wasn’t into degradation like that, but I think he thought it was an exception.”
“Why did he think that?” Marc asks. You’ve heard it said before that a lawyer never asks a witness a question that they don’t already know the answer to. In this moment, it seems like Marc is the same way.
“Because he called me his slut,” you admit. “He thought that would like, negate…I don’t know.”
“Are you?” Marc asks. “A slut, I mean.”
It rolls off your tongue before you can stop it: “Not his.”
There comes a breathy little exhale from Marc’s end of the line. It couldn’t be you—not when you’re holding your breath, eyes wide at your own audacity, at the mere suggestion that you would be okay being Marc’s slut, but not this stranger’s. Marc’s voice rasps from the other end: “I know, honey. I know.
“Tell me what happened next.”
*
I’ve been thinking, you text the next morning (which is true, there is a single moment spent outside of work that you aren’t spent thinking about this). Maybe this is where I’m going wrong with every guy, but—maybe we should practice. On the phone, you know?
Over text? he asks.
Sure, you say, aiming for nonchalant.
I want to hear your voice, he texts, effectively ruining any hope you had for nonchalance. It’s the last thing you want though. You’re terrified that hearing Marc’s voice croon such dangerous, sinful things to you will destroy you. You will be irrevocably changed. There will be the Before Marc times and the After Marc times.
Compromise? Start like this, and if we’re clicking, then we can do it over call.
It, he teases. Can you say it? Can you tell me what you want?
Jesus, Marc. You know what I want.
Use your words.
You whine, an honest-to-God audible whine beneath your blankets. He’s already slipping into the role so well. Or is he? Is he truly made to be dominant, some prodigious Dom, or are you simply made to melt at everything he does? But it also brings to light the question: what do you want?
Can I think about it?
Always, he says.
*
It takes time for you to gather your thoughts. Everything to think about the fact that this is Marc you’re talking about, your brain gets fuzzy and you lose your words. Finally, you devote yourself to writing it out longhand and thinking in general terms. What would you have wanted from Mr. My-Slut if he had asked you the same question?
When you’re finished, you text it to him before you can second guess yourself.
I want to feel owned. I want to feel small but safe. I want to feel consumed, like nothing else matters but you and what you do to me and what I do for you. I want my head to feel empty of anything that isn’t good for me or doesn’t feel good.
You bury your face in your pillow, but aren’t even there long enough to suffocate before your phone buzzes with a reply.
I can do that.
*
For a while, you don’t text Marc. You even miss one of your ritualistic calls. The thought of speaking to him when he knows what you want from a Dom is too much. Before, it had been easy to brush off your kinks to him. So much about wanting to be submitted had become akin to pop culture. Yeah, I want someone to tie me up and spank me and call me a slut, tee-hee!
It had always gone so much deeper for you, and for so many others, you could imagine. You were a hard worker even as a child. You became someone that people could rely on—and too often, they did. It only made sense that you would crave a way to be useful to someone, crave a way to shut your mind off. Crave a way to feel loved.
You throw yourself into your work, marking off days on a calendar. The first day of March, you will drive south back to the city. Back to Marc. Your contract here will be up, until next winter. God, you can’t wait to see him again. He always meets you outside the door to your building, chewing gum and pacing, like he’s nervous. Though only God knows what he would have to be nervous about.
Marc doesn’t text or call you either. He must have picked up on the vibes. Instead, he gives you space.
The next time you are due for your nightly vent sessions, Marc calls you. If you are worried you’ll get a talking to (or at least questions: why you hadn’t called, whether or not you were mad at him or other absurdities), you don’t get one. You slip back into the warm easiness that is your friendship, swapping stories about your days, talking about current events. Sometimes you don’t say anything, just sit in silence knowing the other person is there or listen to the quiet sounds of the other doing some mundane task: folding laundry, pouring a glass of water.
You exchange your customary ‘Love you’s at the end of the call, but the words reverberate in your throat. You love him. You really do.
*
Okay, show me what you got.
?
Come on, you know what I mean. I’m ready. Let me have it.
Oh is that how this goes?
You blink at the question. …yeah?
I don’t think so, he texts. You know how to ask for something you want.
Your heart leaps to your throat. Thumbs shaking a little, you ask: How’s that?
You say please.
You take a deep, soothing breath. Please?
That’s the word, yeah. Then he sends the thumb’s up emoji—monster.
Marc, I’m ready. Can we try, please? Your nerves are shot, stomach in your throat as you wait for a response. As soon as you see him start typing, you lose your nerve and turn off your phone screen. It’s like a horror movie. You can’t watch. When he finally sends a response and you open it, your mouth drops.
You can do better than that, can’t you? And a moment later: Beg me.
Fuck you, you text, laughing brightly at his audacity.
Not with that attitude, he types. I only fuck good girls.
“Jesus, Marc,” you mutter to yourself, breaths coming fast and short. How can he just say stuff like that? Single sentences that are hotter than any of the dirty talk men have given you during sex over the years. For a while, you are torn on what to answer. You want to quip, to say something bratty and whitty that will make him give one of his quiet exhales of laughter, the kind you are so familiar with hearing from the other end of your sofa while you both scroll through your phones. But, deep down—
What if I’m not a good girl? Maybe he’ll consider it just mindless sexy talk. Yeah, I’m not a good girl, I’m a bad girl. Maybe you’ve even said something like this before to one of those other guys. You can almost hear in some generic male voice the response: yeah, you’re such a bad girl.
Which is why Marc’s answer is so striking: She’s in there. Do I need to help you?
You have no idea what it could mean, but your fingers answer without any hesitation: Yes please
And your phone rings.
You answer it. Holding the phone to your ear, you become aware of how you are holding your breath, not letting a single word or sound pass through your lips.
On the other end, you can hear Marc’s steady, soft breathing.
“You there, baby?”
You hum in affirmation, but it comes out as a choked whine that makes your face turn hot.
“You’re going to have to use your words,” he warns. “But I’ll help you. Alright? The only thing I need you to do is this: if I say something that isn’t true, don’t say it. Otherwise, just repeat after me. Can you do that?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Good girl,” he says, voice dipping into a silky, pleased octave from his side of the phone. Your thighs clench together. Holy fuck. He’s going to destroy you. “Here we go: Marc Spector.”
“Marc Spector,” you sigh shakily. Easy enough.
“I trust you.”
“I trust you.”
“I trust you so-o much.”
You snort. “I trust you so-o-o much.”
“That I trust you to know what I need.” Mouth dry, you repeat the words. He adds: “And I trust you to be able to give it to me.”
“Marc,” you whisper, though you don’t know why.
“I love the way you sound when you say my name,” Marc admits to you. “Especially when you sound half-wrecked, and I’m five hundred miles away, not even able to touch you. But I need you to be a good girl and follow my directions. Repeat after me, or say nothing. Can you do that? Say, Yes.”
“Yes.”
“Good girl,” he says again. “I don’t know how anyone could mistake you for anything else. Now keep repeating, okay?: I trust you to be able to give me what I need.”
“I trust you to be able to give me what I need,” you repeat. As you say it, the words strike you in the chest. They’re true. You really do. All the people in the world, and maybe you love Marc more than any of them. And he is the sort of man who keeps his word—always.
“And I want it.”
“I want it,” you breathe.
“Real bad, Marc.”
“Really bad, Marc.”
“Are you in bed?”
“Are you in—wait—“ Marc laughs. “Yes? I’m—“
“I want you to get out of bed and get on your knees,” he says—just casually. Oh, lovely evening, now get down on your knees for me. Like being on your knees for Marc wasn’t on your mind constantly these days.
Without higher thought, you throw the blanket off, the cold air chilling your body. Sitting up, you let your legs dangle off the edge of the bed, holding the phone to your ear with your shoulder. Your socked-toes skim the floor.
“What’s it matter if I go down there?” you whisper. “I’m in a different state. It’s not as if you can see me.”
“It matters to me,” he says. “If it’s too cold, put down a blanket. I don’t want you to hurt yourself. Go on.”
You don’t bother with the blanket, appreciating the chilly floors against your bare knees and shins. You sit on your heels, thighs squeezed tightly together.
“What if I just lie?” you wonder. “Say I did it, but I’m still under the covers.”
“You wouldn’t do that. Are you down there?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Fuck. ‘What does it matter’, as if I need to see you. Like I can’t picture you clear as day in my head. Like it doesn’t mean more to me to know you’re on your knees a hundred-hundred miles away, just because I told you to.” Marc sounds strangely wrecked, and the knowledge that this menial action really has affected him so deeply has your shoulders going lax, bowing over to rest the top half of your frame against the soft mattress. Your cunt aches.
“Marc,” you whine.
“Yes?”
“Please,” you groan, turning to muffle your face into the mattress. Your further words are just inarticulate mumbles. He laughs, soft and warm.
“Spread your knees apart,” he says. “Far apart, as wide as you can.”
It is the last thing you want to do, but you do it. The brief sparks of pleasure that lit you up every time you clenched your thighs together are gone now, the cool air brushing against your heated sex through your underwear. It only emphasizes how much you ache, how little you’ve been satisfying yourself lately because every time your hand dips between your legs, Marc comes to mind, and you’re too flustered to give in and rub one out thinking of him. But oh god, that’s going to change. You can tell.
“Are you wet right now?” he wonders lowly.
You make a sound that is the vaguest affirmation you can give.
He exhales, the sound shaky through the speaker. “You’re so fucking good. I don’t know how you could ever think otherwise. Absolutely perfect. That’s how I know you’re going to be good and follow this next rule of mine.”
“Wha’s that?” you slur, head fuzzy where it rests against your sheets.
“You can touch yourself as often as you like,” he says, making your face burn hot again. “Use those toys I know you have—but absolutely no one else. Not in person, not over the phone. If we do this, you rely on me and I do the same for you. Deal?”
“Deal,” you sigh, relieved that his condition goes both ways. You aren’t necessarily strict on monogamy, but you are strict on devotion. The last thing you could ever do would be to go behind your partner’s back—and it’s something that could be liable to shatter your heart if it happened to you.
“Glad we’re on the same page,” he says. “But this next part is just as important okay, so make sure you’re listening, yeah?”
“I’m listenin’.”
“If you want to cum, you get permission from me, first.”
Oh my god I didnt want this to end. Read all 3 chapters in a binge. Cannot wait to read more. This is so wonderfully written and so sooooo goddamn hot.
“Would you pretend?” he asks against your mouth, both your lips swollen from the heated kisses you’ve been sharing. The back of Jake’s car is downright luxurious, plenty of room for someone to kneel, seats soft and clean and wide enough for a body to lay on. Most nights when he wants to go cruising, the two of you end up like this in a parking garage or on a back road.
“Pretend what?” you ask, brain moving slow, like it has been dipped in molasses.
“Pretend it’s your first time,” he says. The two of you had been swapping stories about how you lost your virginities—it had made Jake delightfully jealous, you had thought, his hands tightening on the wheel when you discussed the naive, shy way you had touched another man. But then he had pulled off the nearest exit and driven you here to a secluded spot where the pavement had turned to gravel. “Pretend you’re a virgin. Would you?”
“You’d like that?” you wonder, a little baffled. But before he can answer, you slip into the role. You let your eyes soften, a hint of anxiety in them. Your voice quivers a little, fingers playing with the loops of his belt as you say: “I thought most guys didn’t like inexperienced girls.”
Jake groans. He fucking moans at the way your voice shakes, the way your hands flutter away from where you truly want to touch him, the way you look up through your lashes at him, like there’s a need inside you that you don’t understand but desperately need him to quash. He leans down and mouths at your neck softly. “Most guys don’t. But something about it makes me crazy.”
“You’d be my first?” you ask him, breathless with hope. “You’d be okay with that? Being the first inside me?”
His hips jerk against yours, cock brushing your pussy through your denim and his own slacks. “Yes, fuck, yes!”
“But…but Jake—your cock feels so big—what if it doesn’t fit?” you ask.
“Sweet little pussies like yours will stretch, baby,” he says, hips beginning a slow series of grinding thrusts against you. You try to meet him clumsily, even though you know him and his body so well, even though the rhythm you both have established is so solid that it’s hard not to be in sync with him. “You were made to take a cock like mine.”
God help you, because you feel your own blood rising at this little charade. Something about how aroused Jake is arouses you to a degree you hadn’t expected. Your legs shake around him.
“Jake, fuck, it feels good,” you whine, tilting your hips to welcome his own more easily. “Is it going to feel like this when you—when you put it inside me?”
“Better,” he groans. “So, so much better.”
“Feels like, like it does when I touch myself at night,” you gasp, letting your mouth quirk into a grin that borders on evil where he cannot see. “Feels like I’m gonna cum, Jake.”
Jake’s the one who cums, body stiffening, sucking in a breath through his teeth as his cock twitches in his pants. You loop your legs around his waist, helping him to thrust more firmly against you, groaning softly and tangling your fingers in his curls to scratch at his scalp with your blunt nails.
“Fuck,” he gasps, shaking. “I’m sorry.”
“Which of us was the virgin that time?” you tease.
He rolls you both onto your sides and swats your ass.
Summary: You and Santiago can be very distracting when Frankie is on a call.
Rating: Explicit
Pairing: Frankie x female reader (you) x Santiago
Word Count: 3,800
30 Pieces of Home Masterlist | Homecoming Universe | Astroboot’s Masterlist | Thirstworldproblemss' masterlist
"Don't answer," Santiago tells him with a gruff tone, with his lips muffled against the soft skin on your neck.
The ring tone is blaring in Frankie's pocket.
Frankie's mother has the worst timing.
She has an uncanny ability to call whenever he is at work, or in the garage tinkering on his latest project, or otherwise occupied and cannot come to the phone.
"Just let it go to voice mail," you add, and Frankie knows he should. He does. But he can't help the way cold sweat breaks out across his spine. Fingers itching against the sofa cushions as he's already reaching for his pocket.
Because the thing with his mom calling is that inevitably whatever he was doing has to be put on hold. If there is one thing that Frankie has learnt from an early age is that Beatriz Renata Morales cannot stand for is to be ignored. Not by anybody and certainly not by her one and only son.
The consequences of doing so are never pleasant.
Seventeen year old Frankie once came home from the cinema after having turned his phone off during the movie to a police car standing outside their curb, and his mother crying by the front door explaining to the police that her son was missing and most likely already dead. Then he had to spend a weekend comforting her and apologizing.
It's why, even though Frankie was sitting on the sofa, with you straddling his lap. Even though Santiago was sat right next to him, without an inch of space between Frankie's back and Santiago's chest, when he hears the customised ringtone he has for his mom, the one that he's been conditioned to never ignore.
Frankie answers his phone.
"Hola mama"
He ignores the protesting whines from you and the chorus of "seriously Fish?" from Santiago,
And as the voice of his mom comes through the speaker, against every nerve in his body and his achingly hard cock screaming at him to hang up, Frankie doesn't. Instead Frankie, sets you down on the seat cushions besides him as he gets up from the sofa, and walks away to the other end of the room.
"Francisco why do you sound out of breath."
Shit.
"Uhm... I-uh I went for a run. I just-- yeah I just got back."
"A run? At this time of the night? It's past nine. It's dark outside. You live in Florida, it's not a safe state. Do you not watch the news?"
Frankie resists the urge to roll his eyes. Nevermind that he's a trained Delta Soldier. Nevermind that the three of you live in the middle of nowhere, with the next house being miles away and at least 10 minutes by car. Nevermind all of that because talking back to his mom is out of the question. If his mom decided tomorrow that she believed the earth was flat, then world had better adapt and get flat, because she won't be convinced by facts and reason.
But he doesn't bother to stop his mom and instead decides to wait until she's tired out of lecturing him and moves on to gossiping about his distance cousins and how scandalous it is that Sabrina, his second cousin removed is dating a man half her age.
From the corner of his eye, Frankie spots Santiago casually slotting in behind you on the sofa. At the movement, Frankie can already feel the nervous tic in his jaw as the small muscle there jumps.
Technically, Santiago hasn't even done anything yet. Has barely even touched you, his hand settled on the side of your hip. But it's the way that Frankie knows Santiago has never been the biggest fan of his mom, not since their early military days for... well... for a lot of reasons that Frankie prefers not to think about.
And it's in the way he's looking at Frankie over your shoulder, dark honed eyes holding the contact and not letting up even for a second that Frankie can just tell that the man is about to start some shit.
Frankie shoots him a flat, discouraging look, a preemptive warning. Not that any of Frankie's warnings has ever stopped Santiago before. And he sure as shit ain't stopping him now.
The man will never pass up a chance to start shit. And that goes double for when Frankie's mom is involved. Can't resist to show his discontent with her in every conceivable way that is in his arsenal.
In front of him, Santiago's hand slides from its resting position from your hip to your waist, eyes still watching him. Then he's making his way over your stomach to snake under your shirt until he's resting it snug against the underside of your breast. The whole goddamn time, the bastard is staring Frankie down, daring him to do something about it when Santiago knows damn well he can't right now.
The only thing Frankie can do is narrow his eyes further, shaking his head in a silent but sharp signal that 'Now is not the fucking time!'
But of course, the pendejo just smirks right back, lifting his chin until his lips are resting next to your ear. "You gonna let me entertain you while our husband is busy, carino?"
The words are just loud enough for Frankie to hear and it sends a shock of heat down his spine. The obnoxious, cocky expression tells Frankie that the man raised his voice just loud enough for that to have been intentional. But just because Frankie knows what Santiago is up to, doesn't mean that it stops his cock from hardening against his jeans all the same.
"Santiago..." you begin, sounding reluctant.
Thank fuck, one of you at least some sense.
Your eyes meet Frankie's from across the room holding the contact. "Nothing too loud, okay?" you say.
And with that, Frankie's last hope of any semblance of peace of mind falls flat, even as his stupid, over-eager cock continues to rise.
He always do forget that Santiago isn't the only one who has a vendetta against his mom. You've never been a fan either.
Santiago's touching you in earnest now, and you're letting him. His wayward hand fully cupping your breast, and Frankie can see your nipple perk up though the fabric under the touch of those clever fingers.
Fuck.
Frankie is so damn screwed.
"Of course, carino. I'll be quiet as a mouse." Santiago stage-whispers in your ear, as though his hands aren't rucking up your sensible work blouse to expose your bra, nipples straining against the thin fabric as his talented fingers continue to toy with them.
You hum, a soft, breathy little sound, and Frankie stands no chance at that, cock twitching against the restrictive denim of his jeans. And it's made even worse when he hears Santiago tut-tutting you.
"Quiet, sweetheart. We don't want to distract Frank while he's on the phone now do we?"
Frankie grits his teeth, and shoots Santiago the bird. But the infuriating man is completely undeterred, just huffs out a quiet laugh. His other hand slides between your legs, pressing down, as best as he can with the restriction of your sensible work skirt.
You make another little breathy hum. It drowns out the voice still droning on in his ear and every other noise until all Frankie can hear is you. Until Frankie feels like his skin is on fire.
His cock aches, and he has to reach down to adjust himself, trying to ease some of the pressure from his previously well fitting jeans. He does his best to be surreptitious, but there's no escaping your notice with two sets of eyes trained on him.
"Problem, Frank?" Santiago asks with the casual tone as if nothing is wrong. As though he was not the cause of every damn problem Frankie is having at this exact moment.
And there's nothing Frankie can do about it at the moment. Because his fucking mother is on the other end of the phone with him, and this is the most inappropriate thing that Santiago has ever put him through (and that's not a short list of things to begin wtih). There's nothing to do except shoot Santiago his middle finger again, with feeling this time, and stew in his frustration and arousal.
The voice in his ear rises in pitch, and then there's a pause.
Shit!
His mom asked him a question, but he has no idea what the fuck it was. Frankie shuts his eyes to block out the distracting sight in front of him, and wracks his brain, but he can't pull up any of what's been said. The best he can do is responds with a non-committal grunt. He holds his breath hoping it'll pass as an answer to whatever his mom wanted to hear.
"I knew you'd agree Francisco."
It seems to do the trick. The non stop stream of chatter picking back up again,
and Frankie breathes out a sigh of relief.
It’s echoed by a louder, breathier sigh, and Frankie’s eyes pop open despite himself, taking in the debauched site in front of him.
Your skirt is bunched up around your waist, Santiago’s hand tucked into the front of your panties, and Frankie can see the movement of his hand though the thin material. Your head is tilted back, breath coming out in soft pants as Santiago works you over with his fingers.
Santiago is still staring back at Frankie. But the defiance that was there moments ago has melted away. Those pitched obsidian eyes have gone heavy-lidded, gaze heated under tightly-knitted browns, with a look that Frankie knows all too well.
Your left hand disappears behind you, tucked between your back and Santiago's chest and obscured as his view may be, Frankie doesn't need to be able to see it to know exactly what you are doing to the man. Not with the say Santiago's frame flexes ever so slightly as he rocks his hips upwards.
You are giving as good as you've got.
Santiago licks his own lips, eyes fluttering as he bites down on the lush bottom lip, a half-hearted effort to stifle a groan.
Then his lips part again, the bottom one slick and shiny and blooming a darker pink from the press of his teeth.
“Fuck, cariño.” Santiago’s voice is low and hoarse in a way that goes directly to Frankie’s already aching cock. “You’re playing with fire there.”
"No, I'm not," comes your teasing, breathless reply, "I'm playing with your cock."
Frankie's cock jolts at the perfectly over-enunciated word, like it knows you're talking about it. His hand flies down to press against it without conscious thought, and now he's the one who has to bite down on a groan.
"Don't you like it when I play with your cock, Santiago?" you ask. You might be talking to Santiago, but you're staring directly into Frankie's eyes, wearing that gorgeous, naughty smile.
It's a miracle Frankie doesn't come on the spot.
Santiago doesn't seem to be faring much better than Frankie is. The man's hips hitching forward into your grip, the line between his brows digging deeper until he wears an almost-pained grimace.
Frankie watches Santiago gather himself in a visible act of willpower, face smoothing out as he puts on that familiar cocky grin.
"Oh, I do, sweetheart. Let me show you how much."
With that, Santiago locks you against him, chin hooked over your shoulder, one arm around your ribs, and the other hand diving deeper. Frankie may not be able to see exactly what's happening in your underwear, but he can see it on your face when Santiago presses his clever fingers inside you. Can tell he must have gone in with more than one. That he must be curling them exactly the way you like against that one perfect spot but the way your eyes practically roll back in your head.
You mouth falls open on a silent moan, your free hand coming up to clutch at the arm Santiago has wrapped around your middle, fingernails digging into his skin, but Santiago doesn't stop.
Frankie can see the motion of his arm as the man drives his fingers in and out of you. Not slow and deliberate, the way Frankie expects of him, but fast and almost harsh. Jolting into you, each push inside driving staccato little gasps and grunts and squeaks from you. You always poke fun at yourself for those noises afterwards, claiming you sound ridiculous, but Frankie think's they're fucking perfect. It's the sexiest damn thing in the world when you're so lost in pleasure that you lose control of the sounds you're making.
But you haven't quite lost control yet. You're still keeping the volume down, but fuck, Frankie feels like he's about to. He's rocking his hips up into his own hand in time with Santiago's movements. Can't make himself stop, even when it drives a muffled grunt from his own throat.
There's a pause in the voice on the other end of the phone, then, "Frankie? Are you alright?"
Shit.
He'd forgotten he was even on the phone. Has no idea what his mom has been rambling about all this time.
"Yeah, uh.." He coughs, trying to clear his throat though his voice still comes out too deep, "Something's come up. I've got to go, mom. I'll call you later."
He slams the end call button before she can say anything else, knowing he'll pay for it later, but right now he doesn't care if she spends an hour lecturing him on how rude it was. He has something else he needs to do.
Santiago's eyes widen as Frankie stands abruptly. He unfastens his belt, and unzips his jeans as he advances on the two of you. You remain seemingly unaware, too lost in pleasure to notice his approach, but Santiago does.
"Good of you to finally join us, Frank," Santiago says, raising his chin challengingly, clearly unrepentant. That's okay though.
He will be.
He spares Santiago a single quelling look, staring down at him until that stupid cocky expression falters. His throat bobs as he swallows with, and Frankie can't help the satified smirk that grows on his face before turning his attention to you instead.
You're looking up at him with glazed eyes, slightly out of it but you still have a welcoming smile there for him, arms already lifting to wrap around his shoulders.
"C'mere, baby," Frankie murmurs as he grabs hold of you. "Let me finish what Santiago started."
He doesn't bother with any sort of prep, Santiago's taken care of that, just pulls his dick out of his underwear with one hand and Santiago's fingers out of you with the other. Then he bends his knees, hooks your underwear to the side, and pushes inside.
You're hot and wet and tight around him, clutching his shoulder and moaning against his throat as you take him oh-so-perfectly, the way you always do.
Frankie can't help the groan that forces its way out of his chest as your body flutters and squeezes around him.
An echoing groan sounds from behind you, and Frankie looks up to find Santiago, eyes dark and dazed staring back at him. The man looks stunned. Chest heaving, mouth and pants both hanging open.
Clearly your clever fingers had been busy as well.
The bulge of Santiago's hard cock is protruding obscenely from his open fly. He's still wearing his boxers, but the material is dark, nearly saturated with precome in a wide sticky spot and clinging wetly to the contours underneath, leaving almost nothing to the imagination.
Fuck he loves how worked up Santiago gets when you touch him. The man himself, so clearly completely gone for you, but never quite willing to admit it.
Santiago makes an abortive moment towards his dick, then stops, throat working as his hand hovers there in midair, and Frankie grins.
"That's okay, Santiago. You can jerk your cock if you need to. Isn't that right, baby?" he asks you, as if it's your permission Santi needs to touch himself. He's forcing his voice to level despite the way you're still shuddering in his arms, that perfect pussy still squeezing him just right, "It's okay if Santiago jerks off, isn't it?"
You nod, forehead sliding against his jaw with the movement, and he breathes in the smell of your shampoo as he watches Santiago.
The man's hands inch closer and closer to the twitching mess of his sticky, covered cock, but still hover indecisively like he doesn't trust that it's not a trap.
Smart man.
Frankie pulls back, tired of waiting, and grins against your temple as you clutch at his shoulders again.
"I got you, baby. I'm not going anywhere," Frankie croons to you, as he presses back inside as slowly as he can manage, his eyes never leaving Santiago's, "I'm just gonna fuck you right here, nice and slow, while Santiago watches. Gonna show him how you come so pretty on my cock. How many times you think you can come for me this time?"
You don't answer him with words. Just a deep moan that has his chest fill with pride.
"What do you think Santiago? How many times should we make our beautiful wife come?"
Frankie has a front row seat to see the way Santiago's eyes widen, pupils blowing out so far they look nearly black.
"Five," he says. "Don't stop until she's at least come five times."
Frankie has to laugh at that. Greedy brat.
"You hear that baby? five times," Frankie murmurs into your ear, and you whimper breathlessly back at him.
Besides him, Santiago moves in a rush, grabbing at his crotch, curses under his breath when his fingers fumbling over each other as he struggles to free himself from the clinging wet fabric. He finally manages it, and his cock emerges, looking almost painfully hard, the head dark red and shiny, before it immediately disappears into his fist.
Santiago's eyes slam shut with that first stroke, and he groans, the sound loud and rough, like it was torn from his very soul, the damn drama queen.
That doesn't stop you from reacting, that pretty little pussy of yours clenching down around him, making him groan too, and you clench again, tempting him to fuck you hard and fast until you come around him, that perfect way that you do.
And he will. You will... just not yet.
Frankie keeps his strokes slow and measured despite the temptation, teasing you both, even as you squirm and moan and squeeze him tight.
Santiago shows no such restraint. His hips are pistoning up into his fist, driving his cock through the circle of his hand fast and rough, the loud wet slap-slap-slap of it clearly audible.
"Fuck, Frank. Move it on along. Make her– ngh– Make her come already," he jeers, obviously meaning to sound cocky, but failing miserably. The words come out breathless, interrupted by gasps and grunts he can't seem to contain.
The asshole never did have any patience.
"Oh, I'm gonna," Frankie tell him, tells you both as he slides one hand down to put pressure on your clit, right where you need it, as he continues to fuck up into you with at the same slow pace. He grits his teeth in a strained smile as you immediately squeal and flutter around him. "Gonna make you come so hard for me baby."
And he is going to. He can tell it's coming, can feel it in the way you tighten up around him. Another minute or two, and you're gonna come so pretty on his cock. And Santiago doesn't look to be far behind you, ass bouncing as he jerks his cock with sloppy-fast strokes.
"But Santiago better not."
"Wha-? I– What the fuck, Frank?" The worlds stumble, barely coherent off Santiago's tongue, and Frankie...
Frankie... is not a good man.
A good man would not take so much pleasure from watching the way Santiago gapes up at him in confusion, clearly at a loss. A good man wouldn't enjoy watching the man fumble for understanding. He should not get off on watching Santiago fumble, clever fingers going clumsy, strokes slowing to a stop, even as hips continue to stutter into his fist like he can't control himself. The shiny of his cock emerging and disappearing and re-emerging slowly, almost as slowly as Frankie is still fucking in and out of you.
"That's right, Santiago," Frankie tells him, appreciating the way Santiago's cock jerks in his grip at the sound of Frankie's voice, precome leaking out to dribble down over his already slick knuckles. "You're going to go just as slow as I am."
"The fuck I am–" Santiago begins, but Frankie just keeps talking right over the top of him.
"You're going to go just as slow as I am," Frankie grits out, somehow managing to hold onto the commanding tone despite the way you're panting and moaning so sweetly against his neck, hips rocking in time with his own, "And you're not going to come. Not until Boa's come five times. Not if you want a chance to fuck her next. Do you understand me, Santiago?"
"I– Fuck, Frank. I–," Santiago stutters, but Frankie's out of time, he can feel it in the way you're tightening up around him, in the way he's having to hold up more and more of your weight as your knees start to go out from under you.
"I said, Do you understand me, Garcia," Frankie barks out, and Santiago's whole body jolts, curling forward, his hand jerking to the base of his cock and squeezing so hard it must be painful.
Frankie has half a second to worry he just tipped him over the edge early, but then Santiago's straightening up, eyes wide and empty.
"Yes, sir."
And just in time, because you suddenly stiffen in his arms, breath leaving you on a keening wail as you make good on his promise, and come hard on his cock.
Fuck, you feel so good, clenching and fluttering around him, and Frankie has to grit his teeth until his jaw aches, struggling to keep his composure, to keep fucking you through it, to make it as good for you as he can, without following you over the edge.
He manages it, but just barely, his vision starting to grey out slightly at the edges by the time you finally relax, sagging against him. He cradles you in his arms, holding you against himself as you come down, stealing a much-needed moment to just breathe and let his own tension ratchet down a notch.
He hears Santiago's voice, strained and near despairing from besides him, "One."
I don’t have a tag list. 😅Please follow astroboot-writes and turn on notifications for writing updates! 🥰
Dedications: This is all Thirstworldproblemss beautiful sexy horn brainchild. She wrote it for me in our DMs when I was having a particularly rough week to cheer me up and I love her endlessly for this one.
Rating: Explicit - 18+ Only. Minors interacting with this work will be blocked.
Notes: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I’ve never written Marc before, so here we go.
Not beta-read.
Warnings: Cursing, mentions of canon-typical violence, explicit sexual content—vaginal sex, unsafe sex, masturbation, public sex, rough sex
Summary: The first time you and Marc catch one another in a tight spot, you both make it out by the skin of your teeth. You’re both wounded; you’re both riled up as all hell.
The first time you fuck Marc, he’s up and out of the bed before you’ve even come down from your high.
Javier Peña x Latina!sex worker!informant!Reader x Santiago Garcia
Join my general tag list (Comment to join the tag list for this fic)
Triple Frontier Master List
Spotify Playlist
Series Masterlist : Read on AO3
Summary: Javier goes to see Candy to 'get information', runs into the last person he was expecting.
Content and warnings for whole fic, not chapter by chapter unless something is added: Sex work, drug trade, some drug use/pressured used, sex workers and the mistreatment/stigma surrounding them specifically in the 70’s (my blog is sex worker positive) but ima put potential dub con depending how you look at it as a sex worker who works with dangerous men, some action surrounding reader and the guys and the drug trade, SMUT HEAVY, corruption kink (were corrupting santi here, he’s young, 25), no loss of virginity tho, threesomes, some slight m/m smut but that’s not the focus here, but as you know this blog is an lgbt blog so I’m always open to gay shit. Talk of war and some PTSD but I won't be going a whole lot into it.
Additional warnings: References to BDSM and rough sex thats consensual, but consenual under the blanket of prostitution so much that I think I'll put it as dub con due to lack on comfort and ability to say no. None it is shown but the aftermath is, and Javi provides aftercare although he was not a participant. Smut today! The usual smut warnings I'm not gonna detail everything lol it's nothing crazy like my usual lol, there's lots of oral, piv sex, teasing, begging. B
For the record, this is a fic that takes place in the drug trade and deals with the darker side of humanity, so anything from Narco's and Triple Frontier is liable to be discussed or mentioned here. This is your warning. This is not a dark fic nor is it centered around dark themes like Leather and Lace or Sunshine Starlight Sweetheart Brightside, but they are open to be talked about.
Reader has a nick name: Candy. Not her real name just what she goes by on her profession. Much of the inspo for this and for the title came from the Bruce Springsteen song “Candy’s room” so check it out for the vibes.
Reader speaks Spanish and had hair. I've decided Candy is just latina coded bc she's a sex worker in colombia so this is what I'm doing.
4.3 words, a good chunk of which was written by my beloved Fen. I've been rather burnt out of smut lately, and I wanted this to be good to establish Candy and Javier's connection and chemistry so my dear @my-secret-shame-but-fanfiction wrote ALL THE SMUT FOR ME. They write wonderful fanfiction so pleeaasseeee check out their work!!
Support writers! Reblog and comment!
*****************
“And just what do you want to know this time, Peña?” You say, leaned up against the wall under a poster of Farrah Faucet.
Javier stepped up to you, broad frame and tall figure encasing you up against the wall of your apartment. He was anything but intimidating, and he wasn’t trying to be; Javier Peña was a good man, even if he didn’t think he was. You couldn’t help but care for him, blurring the lines of what a hooker and a John’s relationship should be, but you couldn’t help it, and Javi knew. Javi was protective of the women he sleeps with, and you were no exception. In addition to getting you out of legal trouble a few times, he had helped you when you had issues with creepy, dangerous men and had even helped a friend or two.
He was someone you trusted and someone whose time you looked forward to; someone who made you cum, multiple times and hard. But it was more than that. Javier was gentle with you, fucking you hard but never leaving a mark and if he thought you were tired or in pain from previous activities, he’d allow you to take care of him in other ways, even down to a hand job. He loved connection, but he loved your comfort more.
Once, after a grueling bondage session with impact play from another client, you had been left worn, bruised, and in pain when Javi called you for a late night fuck. Sure. You could squeeze him in although you had been looking forward to giving yourself aftercare since clients didn’t pay for that side of things.
Javi had come over in his usual charm, making out on the couch and grinding against you as per usual, touching you sensually to warm you up, but when he slid off your skirt and tried to touch you only to find you dry he stopped. “What’s wrong?”
You had tried to insist nothing was wrong, tried to promise it was fine; you had lube for a reason. When he lifted up your skirt and saw the bruises forming on your skin, he went into a rage.
“WHO THE HELL DID THIS?”
Eventually, you are able to calm him down and start to explain the concept of BDSM to him and he tells you that no one should be leaving marks like that. He gestures to the bruises and the welts
“He pays for it and I let him, Javi. You don’t have to be a hero to something I consent to.”
He begins to settle, tracing the bruises that showed despite your tan skin and the dim lighting. Yeah, okay, maybe they were kinda bad. He’d gotten carried away with the belt, but you had said he could use a belt. Technically, you could tell him to stop, or to go less hard… but this world didn’t look kindly on whores who had rules.
“Where all did he hurt you?” Checking your exposed skin over but not undressing you anymore, Javier’s lips were pursed into a hard line and his eyebrows drawn together in focus. It was mainly just your ass that had taken the beating. Javi carried you to your bed, gently laying you down on your stomach and asked if you had any aloe vera. When you said no, he ran down to the bodega down the street. Javier took care of you that night, providing the after care you hadn’t gotten and held you close the remainder of the time he had asked for. That morning despite not giving sex and thus not expecting payment, you found the money he had promised on your kitchen counter.
“Can’t I just take time out of my day to visit my favorite girl?” He asked, leaning over you with his forearm pressed against the wall above you.
You scoff playfully. “You tell that to all your girls?”
Javi’s lip quirks up, eye squinting in a small smile that crinkled at the corners, showing the early signs of age on his handsome face. Pushing 40 looked nice on him. “I do, but you’re the only one I mean it with.” He solidified his tease with a wink.
“Really?” You raise your own eyebrow in turn. “This has nothing to do with Lorea?”
At that, Javi pushes himself off the wall with a laugh, a genuine and hearty laugh that you love to see. “You’re a quick one, arentcha, Candy?” He crosses his arms, hip popped and takes in your whole body. He wasn’t just here for information on Lorea, after all. He’s never just here for information.
“Gotta keep an ear to the ground, never know when it’ll come in handy, like-” You gently shove him with one hand. “Getting me that visa.”
His playful manner faded but his face remained soft. “If it were up to me, I would.”
You knew that, of course. There really was no reason for the DEA to give you a vida; you’d been helpful, but nothing groundbreaking and there was no reason to believe your life was at risk so you were stuck. There were some days, however, that you dreamed… dreamed of moving to America… maybe with Javi… but those were just daydreams to get you through.
“I know, baby. Now, enough talking” Javi opened his mouth to protest, but you pressed a finger up against those lips. “We can go over what I know and what I can find out while you give me that after-sex massage.” You hook your finger on his collar and start pulling him towards the bedroom.
“Oh, I see” He teases before grabbing your wrist, yanking it and twirling you towards him in order to wrap you up in his arms. “You think you’re in charge, all of a sudden?”
You smile sweetly at him, purposefully batting your eyelashes. There’s a familiar edge to his tone that you recognise immediately. One that just activates every bratty bone in your body.
“When am I not in charge, Javi?” You purr.
He stares at you for a second, his muscles tense as he holds you, that split second of quiet before all hell breaks loose.
And then he pounces.
With a snarl his lips meet yours, all tongue and teeth as his right hand snakes up to grab your jaw and tilt your head up to meet him. The pressure is firm, controlling, but careful. Safe.
He swallows down your chuckle and pushes you back against the wall firmly, moving his left arm to cradle your head from any real force. His facial hair scratches at your skin as he trails sloppy kisses and light bites over your cheek, down to your neck where he’s light enough not to leave a bruise but hard enough to leave you wanting.
You wrap your arms around his shoulders, tugging at his shirt as he slides his hand to your shorts and pops the top button.
His fingers are warm against your skin and he wastes little time, barely undoing the zip, before he’s pushing his hand under the waistband.
Javi groans, the sound low and deep in his chest as he realises you’re not wearing any underwear. He slips his forefinger over your clit, circling it lightly. His mouth hovers near yours, sharing your air, his hot breath against your cheek as he watches your face.
The second you bite your lip, trying to muffle that first little whine of pleasure, he sinks two fingers into your heat and presses his thumb against your bundle of nerves.
It’s a little awkward at this angle with the tight denim of your shorts still on your hips. He can’t quite sink as deep as you’d like, as you need. But you know he’s doing this on purpose. Working you up without giving you true relief. Wanting to make you beg.
You squirm against him, trying to wriggle and get the angle just right.
“What’s wrong, mi amor?” He whispers teasingly. “Something wrong?”
“Javi…” Your voice comes out in a whine and he chuckles.
“Can’t the princesa ask for what she wants?” He lightly scraps the edge of his short nail against your clit, dragging downwards before falling back into the previous rubbing rhythm.
You bite back a moan, screwing up your eyes as he presses lightly at that perfect spot inside before quickly moving his fingers away. “Please.”
“Please what?”
You glare at him.
“Please what?” He strokes against you again and you gasp, your words falling out in a jumble.
“Please sir.” You spit, shooting him a dark look that you know he’ll love.
He chuckles, pressing the heavy bulge in his jeans against your thigh. “Oh, someone’s in a bratty mood today, aren’t they?” He kisses your mouth, not giving you a chance to retort back. And nips at your bottom lip as you slide your hands into his hair.
He circles your clit faster, grinding against your leg as you scrape your nails across his scalp. “Fuck,” he breaks the kiss and presses his forehead against yours. His eyes screw shut as he drags his thick cock against your skin. How the jean’s button hasn’t pinged open from the strain of the size of him, you’ll never know. The burn of the denim against your thigh is oddly pleasant, the shallow thrust of his hips just punctuating the slick glide of his fingers in and out of you.
The air catches in your throat as you try to hold in your moan and Javi’s eyes snap open. The look he gives you is dark and hungry.
He tuts. “Oh, no, we can’t have that, can we?” He hooks his left thumb through a belt loop and tugs your shorts down over your ass before letting them drop the rest of the way to the floor.
Now, without the material’s restriction, he sinks his fingers deeper into you. Curling them perfectly against your walls, your slick coating his skin. Liquid pleasure flows along your nerves and steals your breath.
You grab hold of Javi’s shoulders, your fingernails digging in as your back arches. “Ah- oh god!”
He shakes his head, a condescending frown on his face. “Shouldn’t take the Lord’s name in vain. I thought you were a good little Catholic?”
“Javi, please-”
“Not good enough.” He grows in your ear before suddenly pulling his fingers out of you and dropping to his knees.
You gasp, but don’t have longer than a second to lament the loss before his mouth is on you. He sucks your clit into his mouth, pinching the bud lightly between his teeth as he flicks over it with his tongue. At the same time he grabs a hold of your thighs, spreading you wide and hooking your right leg over his shoulder.
He groans deeply, savoring your taste as he sinks his fingers back into your aching folds.
You moan loudly, grabbing onto Javi’s hair for support as he fucks you with his fingers and tongue, pushing up and against you so hard that you have to balance on the tip of your left toes and trust in his strong arms to support you.
The words that fall from your lips are boarding on incoherent, whimpered out sounds of ‘more’ and ‘please’ that barely sting together. Javi knew your body far too well by now and used every single trick he had in fucking you dumb as quickly as he could.
You fight your body’s urge to clamp your legs around his face, even though his forearm pressed firmly against your thigh would stop you from getting too far anyway.
Your orgasm builds dizzyingly fast, just scratching on the edge of your mind. Your hips buck against his mouth wildly, no longer under your own control and instead just following Javi’s tantalizing rhythm.
“Javi, fuck-” This is what you love about having sex with Javi; it felt normal, it was fun, it was good, and you gt paid for it. Win/win.
He growls low in his throat approvingly as you tug on his hair, trying to warn him of how close you are. He thrusts his fingers deeper, pushes his face against you completely as if he had no need for oxygen as he grinds against you.
Heat sparks up from your core and you come against him with a sharp cry, tears in your eyes from the force of it. The ecstasy overwhelms you, so sharp it is almost painful as he pulls your orgasm out from your soaking folds, demanding your pleasure.
He only moves his mouth away from you and stills his hand when he feels you slump a little against him, your limbs turning boneless.
You breathe heavily, almost light headed as you come back to yourself.
When you look down, you see Javi looking up at you with a shit eating grin that makes you want to slap him playfully.
“I think that was the fastest one yet, hermosa?”
You scowl at him, but can’t keep the smile from your lips. “Maybe.” You say finally.
Javi chuckles, pressing kisses to your thigh and slowly pulls his fingers out of you with a wet drawn out pop.
“Hmm, look at what a mess you made?” He raises his eyebrow teasingly as he holds up his fingers for you to see. Your creamy slick covers his fingers, catching the light as he moves his hand before he licks them clean. Purposefully making a show of it.
He waits until you begin to speak before he swipes his tongue through your folds.
“Javi,” you begin to chastise.
“Just cleaning up your mess.” He mutters, dipping his tongue back inside. He hums approvingly, dragging his tongue along your slit and swirling around your clit before diving back in.
“Javi-”
“Didn’t realize how messy you are.” He moans against your core. “Gonna take longer than I thought it would.”
You whine as he curls his tongue inside, pressing against your clit with the bridge of his nose. That familiar heat begins to build between your legs. You worry your lip between your teeth, letting the sensation tighten in your belly until it becomes too much.
You tug on his hair, pulling him away from you. The bottom half of his face shining.
“Tesoro, ” you breath, “if you don’t fuck me now, I’m gonna-”
“Oh, you’re gonna what?” He raises his eyebrows at you.
You pause, then pout. “Cry.”
He chuckles and sighs, getting up. “You sure have me bent around your little finger, bebita.”
“What?” You blink at him in mock surprise, “I don’t know what you mean, you’re the one incharge here.”
“Sure.” He murmurs, lightly taking hold of your chin again to kiss you deeply. He intentionally wipes some of your wetness from his cheek onto yours as he moves back, a cheeky smirk on his face.
You tut, but he quickly kisses you again, wrapping his arms around you and pulling off your top and bra, quickly followed by his own clothes.
His cock is burning and hard as he rubs it firmly against your skin, only breaking contact to grab hold of your ass and lift you up. He presses you against the wall and raises your legs to his hips, which you quickly wrap around him with a yelp and a giggle into his neck.
“Gonna fuck me against the wall, sir?”
“Mmm hmm.”
You grin. “Can’t wait the ten seconds it will take to get to the bed?”
He shakes his head. “Nope. Plus I want Farrah to see.” He nods to the Farrah Faucet poster above you.
You snort and shake your head at him. “You’re such a goof.”
He kisses your cheek, rubbing firm circles into your thighs with his fingers as he holds you up. He slowly rubs the head of his cock against you, rocking his hips to make swallow circles.
“You fucking love it.” He mutters against your lips as he thrusts into you.
You moan as he fills you, the stretch of him igniting your deep burn of arousal into a full on blaze.
“That’s it, that’s better isn’t it? Better for you to be full of my cock, sweet thing.” He mutters as he sheethes himself fully inside, the head of him rubbing perfectly deep.
You barely manage a nod before he starts moving, fucking you hard against the wall. His hand once again around the back of your head to stop it from smacking against the plaster.
You hang on for dear life, your fingernails digging into his skin unintentionally as he hits that sweet spot again and again and again, knowing he would take care of you, relentless in his pursuit of your pleasure.
You kiss him hard between your moans and gasp for breath, biting sharply at his bottom lip and whining when he nips you back.
He shifts his weight slightly, pushing forward with his left leg and your back arches as he presses deeper, your legs shaking. The sound of skin slapping against skin echoes around your apartment. Javi mutters in half broken sentences under his breath, jumbles of words that would probably still be incoherent if you weren’t distracted by the way rams into you. How he hits every sweet soft so perfectly.
Pleasure builds in your stomach, your toes curl as he keeps up his relentless pace. Not giving you a moment of reprieve as your hurtle towards your second orgasm.
You squeeze his biceps, trying to stave off your pleasure for a moment longer, but it’s seemingly impossible with the way he moves in you.
“Gonna make me cum, baby.” You whine in his ear and Javi’s thrusts stutter for the smallest moment, a quiet groan escaping his lips before he recovers himself and focuses all his energy on stuffing himself into you at the exact same pace.
“That’s it baby,” he grunts, sweat beading on his brow, “squeeze my cock, cum for me-oh shit!”
You cum hard against him, gasping as your walls clamp down around his thick length and digging your nails into his skin. For a second it’s like you're floating.
He thrusts twice more before he buries himself to the hilt and cums deep, pressing his face into your neck and he groans and shakes with the force of it.
You hold him for a second as he breathes hard, still pinning you to the wall. Once he regained his own composer, Javi took note of your shaking legs and knew as soon as his body weight was taken off you, you were going to sink to the floor. Always a caretaker, Javi gripped your thighs and hoisted you up; instinctively your legs wrapped around him as he carried you to your bed.
“Rub my back?”
“Happily.”
Moments like this seemed so domestic with him, seemed like you were just a normal couple spending a sweaty summer day in bed. Never mind the fact he had 10 minutes before he needed to get the hell out of here before your next client showed up, lest they ran the risk of running into each other. Always a little awkward, and you always tried to schedule a little time in between clients to prevent such meetings. Nothing but class in Candy’s room.
*
“What do you wanna know about Gabriel?” Candy asks him, the sun from her open window illuminating golden off the skin of her back. She lazily smoked a cigarette that Javi gave her; it was practically an agreed upon part of payment at this point.
“Do we really have to just jump into it? Feels so transactional.”
She laughed at that. “Well it is a transaction, Peña. I’m not just calling you up on a random Tuesday to talk drug lords.”
“Yeah, okay. What do you know? Apparently enough if you’re on a first name basis.”
She shrugged. “That’s pretty standard. I’m not going to call him Señor Lorea while he’s balls d-”
“I get the picture.”
Candy gave him some information that was useful to start with; where he socializes with other deals and producers (and hookers), how many children he has, and where they go to school (after making him promise the children wouldn’t be involved), and a few other details. Candy said she could find out more with some time, but Javi had to work to get her out of Colombia.
“C’mon, you gotta get going before my next client.”
Javier groaned loudly, not wanting to move away from her. “I’ll pay for any time he’s paying for.”
“That’s not how it works, I can’t just call him up and cancel, this isn’t a dinner date.”
“You’re telling me you don’t have his number?” Javi teased, trailing his finger down her spin, noting the way it was more visible than the last time he noticed. He wondered if she was eating okay, or if this was a by-produce of coke parties.
“Most clients want to stay anonymous, they don’t want me calling them in the middle of the day to play boyfriend-girlfriend.”
Javi gently flicked her shoulder, making her giggle. “It’s for your safety, Candy”
“Oh yeah, I won’t know how to get a hold of you otherwise, I can’t just walk into the DEA office, heaven forbid.”
“Well, you could-”
“Can’t let the whole office know you solicit hookers.”
“I think that ship sailed.”
“Your sweet little catholic boy of a partner would have a heart attack.”
Javi chuckled at that. For his own privacy and everyone’s safety, Javi never told Candy the names of his partners; except for Steve, but Steve had met her several times. He did, however, give them all nick names if they stayed around long enough, and Santi’s was obvious. “Pope turns into a blushing virgin every time we have to go to a- a, uuhhhhh” He hesitated on what to call it without offending Candy.
“A whore house?”
“You said it, not me”
Candy turned over and smiled, shoving at him. “Go, I gotta wipe your cum out of me. This boy is a bit of a blushing virgin himself so I gotta be thorough.”
With an over dramatic groan, Javi rolled over and put out his cigarette and took Candy’s to put it out for her. Still, he stuck around as she went to the bathroom to clean up. He lit up a fresh one as he took a look around the apartment. It was clean, dressed up in an effort to hide how cheap the place actually was; posters covering cracks from age and holes made by angry clients, a carpet covering the scratches from when one shoved her into her side table, curtains perpetually covering a side window to hide the bullet hole and duct tape from when a John’s wife caught them. He wanted better for her, he did. He wanted better for all the women he was involved with, for his community, that’s why he did what he did. But Candy was special. He’d been trying to get her a visa for years, but she hadn’t given anything big enough and her life hadn’t been put in danger on behalf of the government for her to be granted one.
Least he could do was fix her window next time. Let a little sun in.
He looked over the posters. “You got an Aubrey Hephburn poster yet?”
“No, surprisingly.”
“Good, I got you one I saw at a store. Didn’t wanna bring it in case you had one already.”
Candy poked her head out of the bathroom, watching Javi pull on his socks and shoes as he sat on the bed, jeans still unbuttoned. “Javi! You didn’t!”
“I did, hermosa, I’ll bring it next time.”
Grinning, she turned back to fix up her hair in the mirror. “You’re the best, I’m going to give you the best blowjob of your life. Can you hand me some lingerie, baby?”
“Making me pick out what you’re wearing for your next boyfriend, awfully messy.” He teased, but found a red and black bra and panty set.
She dressed as Javier finished smoking his second cigarette.
“Alright! Out!” Candy walked out of the bathroom in a silky, fluffy robe. Javier couldn’t help but smirk at the juxtaposition between how she looked for this new man and him. For him, Candy was perfectly happy to be dressed down with him comfortable, herself. She didn’t have to dress up for him.
As she ushered him out the door, Candy planted a kiss on his cheek before opening it, only to find Santiago on the other side of the door, leaned up against the wall.
Santiago, however, was staring wide-eyed at Javier with a strike of fear in him.
“Garcia, what the hell are you doing here?” Javi couldn’t help the jealousy that crept up in him, instinctively trying to wrap an arm around her that Candy shrugged off. What was he doing with her? He needed to be careful, a DEA agent in bed with a prostitute that was frequented by powerful and dangerous men, he was setting her up for harm. Santiago couldn’t protect her like him.
“I… I was going to wait until it-it’s time… I didn’t want… to be… rudeImsorryIllgo” Santi averted his eyes and headed back towards the stairs. He stopped only long enough to stuff his hand into his pocket, pulling out the money he was going to pay her and sitting it on a wide guard rail before descending down the several flights of stairs.
Candy turned to Javi. “What the hell was that?”
Grabbing the money and placing it in Candy’s hands. “My partner.” Javi quickly ran down the stairs, following after the flustered kid. “GARCIA!”
*****************************
CATS OUT OF THE BAAAAGGGGGG
Poor little flustered santi ;-; I love him.
And my precious, protective baby boy.
Also, THERES A PLAYLIST NOW! Please comment songs you think fic the vibe. 70's music but 80's and 60's is okay too, even outside of those decades as long as they fit the vibe or the content (I.e. I have some Lana Del Rey because I think it sounds right, or I have sugar sugar by the archies bc the line "you are my candy girl" etc.)
Gonna take a moment to plus my latest series on my dark blog, Blessed be the Fruit, a Handmaid's Tale AU with Joel (and some Tommy) it is a dark fic so dub con due to the nature of the AU, but not the gaphic horrors of TWW.
Again, thank you thank you thank you for my beleoved Fen for writing the smut!
The men you keep bringing home are no good for you. It's up to your landlord Joel to protect you from heartbreak.
my masterlist!
pairing: joel miller x f!reader
rating: 18+ (mdni)
tags and warnings: AU - no outbreak/modern day, obsessive!joel, dark!joel, but also soft!joel, landlord!joel, violence, death, murder, stalking, jealousy, truly creepy behaviour, unprotected sex (lead by example; just not mine), creampie, dubious consent, reader’s serious lack of self-preservation, sexual tension, abuse of power, spanking, spitting, squirting, praise kink, degradation kink, joel is a munch, somnophilia, possessive behaviour, dirty talk, a smidgen of gaslighting, the general filth you should expect from me by now, a spoonful of genuine intimate connection™️, implied age gap, submissive reader, dominant joel, daddy kink, knives, mild torture, light anal play, voyeurism, unreliable narration, inappropriate use of a necklace, panty sniffing, ambiguous(?) ending
word count: ~ 15.8k (uh, oops!)
read on ao3!
hello, all! this fic has been tossing and turning inside the proverbial sheets of my head for a while now. when i tell you it's darker than anything i've written, i mean it, so please, please mind the tags. this story does not depict a healthy relationship; joel is a total creep and both he and reader are heavily delusional. with that said, please enjoy this (super long) one-shot!! xoxo
PREFACE
Stars, hide your fires;
Let not light see my black and deep desires.
— Macbeth, I.IV
~
THE TENANT
You're beginning to think it’s a built-in bad luck charm. A microchip implanted in your skin or a flaw you have yet to pick out. Every single one of your prospective boyfriends has disappeared off the face of the Earth since you moved into town.
It isn't you. It's not. There is nothing wrong with you. It isn't your fault that either they decide after one date that you aren't worth seeing again, or they stand you up before the date can even begin. Your profile pictures are decent. You followed the rules meticulously: a shot of your face, a group picture to show you have friends, a selfie, a candid. You've examined them time and time again for flaws and find none that a man would care about. You're pretty. Sexy. Confident. They're just intimidated. Fuck, you're turning into your mother.
And yet—
Since moving into this apartment—this beautiful, once-in-a-lifetime deal of an apartment—your luck with dating has abruptly ended.
It's a lovely building. A stout brownstone with wrought-iron stairs and an old, but functional, elevator, it's traditional and charming. Perfect for a single woman.
Six months. This is your first second date in six months. David is just fine. He's handsome in a frat-initiate kind of way, with a nice smile and a good sense of dress. He doesn't ask many questions about you, and he's a little pretentious about films you don't give a shit about, but he likes you. You didn't have a horrible time on the first date: he wasn't afraid to spend his money on you at the nice restaurant. And he has a car.
Raised as an optimist, you learned to see the good parts of a situation. David can work out.
On the way out of the elevator, you spot your landlord Joel speaking to the concierge. You instinctively smooth down your hair and wave at him as you walk by, shrugging your purse onto your shoulder. “Hi, Joel. Hi, Sam.”
Sam the concierge waves back, but Joel puts his back to the conversation and gives you his full attention, bracing his hands on the edge of the desk. Your heart leaps and your head goes fuzzy with nerves. You barely manage to force a giddy giggle back down your throat. Relief coats your bones when Sam excuses himself to take a call.
Joel Miller’s an older guy, his tousled dark hair threaded with silver on his head and in his beard. One look at him and a person could know that he works with his hands for a living; he’s broad-shouldered, strong, with big arms and a capable air about him. He’s proven his mettle a hundred times over already with the miniscule repairs he’s made to the building. He turned it into a good place to live; he even trims the hedges outside and polishes the doorknobs when they get rusty.
He’s wearing a green T-shirt today, which is another member of the typical summertime circulation of blue and grey T-shirts, and a pair of jeans. “Evening,” he says, his rich brown eyes sparkling. Sometimes, you can see him smile when his mouth isn’t showing it. It’s charming. Enthralling. “How’s that new lock workin’ out for you?”
You grin. He remembered. Joel installed a new deadbolt on your door last week, since the chain on the last one broke. “It’s perfect,” you tell him. “Are you in a chocolate or lemon mood this time?”
His gaze flickers down your body, taking in your yellow dress, before meeting yours again. “Lemon,” he says.
You bite the inside of your cheek. Talking to a handsome man feels like tossing your heart in the air and trying to juggle. Flirting with a handsome man is like toeing a tightrope between two mountains and forcing yourself not to look down. Your stomach swoops with the path of his eyes over your body, and you cannot convince yourself that you imagined it. “Lemon squares it is. Thank you again, Joel.”
“Just my job to keep my tenants safe,” he says, lifting one shoulder in a shrug. You can see a pair of keys in his pocket along with his cell phone. The mere sight of his belt makes your cheeks hot. Why are you looking at his belt? You’re going on a date with another man, for God’s sake. Relax.
“Helps when I like my tenants so much,” adds Joel, and you forget why you were scolding yourself in the first place.
“Yeah?” You tilt your head to the side. “Maybe you should be baking for them, instead.”
Joel steps away from the desk, working his jaw as he seems to fight down a smile. “It’s for the best this way, believe me. Can’t cook for shit.”
“Big, strong man like you can’t work a stove?” you tease. Don’t look down.
“I only fix ‘em.” There’s a crooked smile on his face now, and your heart beats your ribs to shrapnel. “You look real nice. Goin’ somewhere?”
That simple validation calms your nerves more effectively than a half-hour of repeating affirmations into the mirror before leaving your apartment. You give the skirt of your sundress a little swish. “A date, actually,” you say, feeling sheepish. Your landlord certainly doesn’t need to hear about your track record as of late. “He’s taking me to Sunfest, in the park.”
A minute twitch of his brow is the only reaction he gives to the news. “That so?” he says. “Lucky man.”
“More like lucky me,” you say with a small laugh, tucking your hair behind your ear. Stop talking, you plead to yourself. Too much information. Shut up, kindly excuse yourself, and leave.
Joel shakes his head, and now is the first time you notice that his eyes haven’t once left you. It warms your body. “He’s the lucky one. Trust me.”
“Okay. I concede.” You chew on your lip for a moment and, sure enough, his gaze hones in on your mouth. The air in the lobby crackles white-hot. You clear your throat, turning your head to find David’s car parked on the street outside. “I should go. But I promise I’ll get started on those lemon squares soon.”
It’s a possibility that you only imagine Joel’s eyes flitting from the car outside back to you when you turn your head back to face him. “Do me a favour?” he says, a scrape to his deep drawl.
“Anything, Joel.”
A muscle in his jaw ticks. “Be safe,” he says. “You have my number if anything goes wrong.”
You give him a grateful smile. “I’ll be safe, Joel. And if I’m not, you’re the first person I’ll call.”
“Good. That’s…” He trails off, still watching you, his eyes trained in their path across your face. “You’re good. Smart, beautiful, good. You deserve to have somethin’ real.”
The simple, small praises melt your bone marrow and recast it in the shape of him. The old chandelier hanging from the ceiling casts him in a soft light, stark against the hard muscles and profound depths in his eyes. He's breathtaking. You've always known it, but…
He sees something in you, too.
David honks his horn and makes you jump out of your stupor. You walk backwards out of the lobby just to keep looking at Joel for as long as you can. “For the record,” you say, “you’re a good man, Joel.”
“Don’t be so sure, honey,” he replies, his tone playful.
You laugh, hurrying out to David’s car as the door closes behind you.
“This place is beautiful,” you said to Sam, the concierge working the front desk of your prospective apartment. The appropriate paperwork was in your arms, your eyes scanning every inch of the old building. Of all the places you'd seen in and around the neighbourhood, this was the most promising. You hoped to get a glimpse at a unit before you signed, though. Assuming the landlord even wanted you to live here.
Sam smiled at you. “Lots of people just see the cracks.”
“There's so much character,” you replied, admiring the crystal chandelier. The walls were a calming, aged white, the floors genuine hardwood. The lobby was decorated with plush chairs upholstered with burnt orange fabric, the corners filled with real potted plants.
The door opened behind you, and you turned to see a handsome stranger, dressed in a pair of dirty jeans and mud-caked shirt, wiping his forehead with his forearm. Behind you, Sam said, “This is Joel Miller. The landlord.”
“Oh!” You were flustered, floundering to stretch out your hand to shake as you introduced yourself. “I’m sorry to catch you at a bad time. This building is gorgeous. You've done a great job with it, Mr. Miller.”
The landlord did not once look at Sam, his eyes fixed solely on you as he wiped a hand on the cloth slung over his shoulder and shook your hand. His hand engulfed yours, warm and rough. The touch jolted you like an electric shock. Your hands must have been clammy and shaking with nerves, but the contact steeled you.
The intensity of his gaze, however, made you shift on your feet. He didn't waver, didn't stray, like a man set on a mission. Nothing about him was shy. He drank in the sight of you, indulging without shame, his eyes travelling to the next destination once they'd had their fill. It made you feel stripped to the bone.
“It's nice to meet you,” he said. “Sorry for the dirt. Just finished weeding.”
You shook your head in dismissal. “You really take care of this place.”
“It's good work,” he said plainly. “Serves me well. I like gettin’ my hands dirty, fixin’ things.”
“Where were you when my sink broke every week at my old place?”
“Fixing the sinks in this one.”
You laughed. “Well, for what it's worth, the outside is beautiful, too. Not a weed in sight.”
“Pleased to hear it,” said Joel, his dark eyes glittering under the chandelier.
“You're from Texas!” you said suddenly. Oh, God, kill me now. I sound like a stalker.
But Joel smiled, a raspy laugh leaving his mouth. You wondered if he laughed often. He looked like a serious man. “You familiar?”
“I was born there,” you supplied. “Left when I was young, but my dad lived there all his life.”
“Lookin’ good on you already,” he said. “It’ll be nice havin’ another one of us around.”
“Does that mean you're considering me?” you couldn't help but ask. Fuck, you wanted this apartment.
“I've already considered,” said Joel, his eyes sweeping your body. “You're the only applicant.”
Your hands were trembling and your heart thrummed with excitement. “Oh, God, thank you!” you gasped. “Joel, thank you.”
You could swear his chest swelled a bit at your graciousness. “I can show you the unit, if you’d like. It needs some TLC, but I’m happy to help with the process as best I can. Unless you have someone to…”
You realised what he was hinting at and shook your head. “Oh, no, it’s just me. I’d love to take a look.”
You noted the slight drop of his shoulders and followed him into the elevator. A part of you was surprised to see there was no gate that closed you in; they were plain, somewhat modern elevator doors. “Fixed it last month,” Joel said, looking sideways at you. “Just in time, apparently.”
You grinned at him, bouncing on the balls of your feet. “Nice to see there's no creepy operator in here.”
“Just me.” He punched the button for the third floor and rode with you to the top.
This was the start of your new life.
You shut the passenger’s side door and situate yourself inside David’s Lincoln. He’s dressed in a pair of black shorts and a clean Henley. “Hey, beautiful,” he says, leaning in to kiss you across the console.
You hum, smiling against his mouth. “You clean up nice, too.”
He places a hand on your thigh and pulls away from the curb. He's a touchy person, which is perfectly fine considering how long your latest dry spell has lasted, but at least he isn't inching his way up your dress to cop a feel while he drives.
The festival is bustling with people, tented stands, and the smell of fried dough and beer. It’s almost dinnertime, and your stomach growls. When was the last time you ate? You spent hours agonising over what to wear until you were sweating and had to shower all over again. You wish you’d snuck an apple into your purse.
David pulls you into him as you both walk through the winding paths between vendors. “It’s a beautiful night,” you say breezily.
David squeezes your waist. “Mmm. You’re beautiful.”
A bit too corny for your taste, but you let it slide. “Don't tell me you're allergic to powdered sugar, because I’ve been eyeing the elephant ears.”
“God, if I eat that shit, I think it’ll set me back a month at the gym,” he laughs. “Let’s get one for you, though.”
Great. Now you're the expensive date who eats while her date watches her stuff her mouth with an elephant ear. “Uh. Maybe later.”
You stop at a jewellery vendor and spend a good while eyeing up a beautiful gold necklace and the heart-shaped pendant dangling from it. David doesn’t notice your staring and breezes by with your hand firmly in his. “Let's check out the grand stand. My buddy’s band is playing before the fireworks display.”
“Sure,” you say, turning your head to watch the necklace disappear slowly from view.
The gigantic domed stage houses a group of musicians currently tuning up their instruments. David sidles right up to the front and releases your hand to execute an elaborate handshake with his friend, who’s fine-tuning his bass.
“Hey, man,” greets the bass player. “Good to see you. Who’s this?”
You open your mouth to introduce yourself, stretching your hand out, but David says, “My date for tonight. Baby, this is Ray, of Uncontrolled Bleeding fame.”
The bass player shakes your hand politely. “Very nice to meet you.”
Because it doesn’t seem to matter much to David, you decide it’s worth the time to tell Ray your name. “It’s nice to meet you, Ray. I’m excited to hear you play.”
Not that you've ever heard of a band called Uncontrolled Bleeding. Still, Ray seems nice enough, and you're on a date. You should give them a chance.
David squeezes your waist and kisses you lightly on the temple. “You mind if I go backstage for a bit to say hi to the other guys? Won’t be long.”
What?
“Oh!” you manage to eke out over the great swooping nosedive your heart has just performed. He’s here to see his friends. He’s not on a date. “Of course. Take your time. I’ll just… walk around.”
David departs with Ray for a personal backstage tour while you bite down on your tongue and turn back in the direction of the main strip. A few vendors catch your attention, and you take your time because God knows David is taking his. A little bit of you revels in your own petty victory when, a half-hour later, Uncontrolled Bleeding begins to blare their metallic, screaming anthems across the park and you haven’t returned to the grand stand.
You find your way back to the jewellery vendor to ponder over your favourite necklace some more, but your night gets worse when you find that it’s disappeared from the headless display mannequin. You solemnly slide your wallet back into your bag and pause when you hear your phone ringing.
“Hello?”
“Where are you?” It’s David’s voice, presumably, though it’s so loud on the other end of the line that you can barely make out his words. “I can’t… where… left?”
You plug one ear and look vaguely in the direction of the grand stand across the park. “I can’t hear you very well, David.”
“… afterparty… downtown… going… Uber home?”
You press your lips together and look down at the ground: at your pretty sandals, your new dress. Your entirely wasted potential on a guy who wanted you to find your own way home. “Yeah, David,” you say tightly. You don’t particularly care if he can hear you. “You have fun with your friends.”
“Can’t hear… talk later… okay?”
You hang up and wander back toward the vendor selling elephant ears.
~
“Miller.”
“Hi, Joel.”
“Honey, it’s loud. Can barely hear you. Are you safe?”
“I’m safe, Joel, I promise. It’s just—Uncontrolled Bleeding.”
“What?”
“No, I mean, the band. They’re really loud. I hate to ask, and I know it’s late, but—”
“What do you need?”
“I, uh… I need a ride home. I can’t get a cab, and all the Ubers around are taken, and the busses are rerouted all the way—”
“I’m comin’ to get you. You just wait for me at the entrance, okay, baby girl?”
“Thank you, Joel.”
“You know I said you could call me for anything. I meant it.”
“Okay. I’ll see you soon.”
“I’ll see you soon.”
“Oh! Wait—”
“What? What is it?”
“Do you want an elephant ear?”
~
Joel is white-knuckling the steering wheel when he arrives to pick you up. Despite the congestion around the festival grounds and the fact that your apartment is at least fifteen minutes away, Joel makes it to you in a mere five.
“Did you blow every red light to get here, Mr. Miller?” you ask with a playful smile as you secure your seatbelt and settle on the truck bench.
“I was in the area,” he says with a crooked smile, looking your way. “May have pushed forty a couple times, though.”
You sheepishly extend a cardboard takeout box filled with fried, powdered dough. “Will you take this as my sincere thanks, or will you expect a separate batch of lemon squares?”
Joel answers by dipping his head and taking a bite of the flattened, doughy bread. You watch every minute movement, his strong jaw working as he chews, indulging you even though he’s already done far too much to get you out of this rut. He doesn’t once break eye contact while he eats; you begin to chew subconsciously on your bottom lip.
“Ain’t bad,” he declares at last, and your shoulders deflate with a kind of relief, “but if you let me take you for some real dinner, I’ll forget about that extra batch.”
You tentatively reach for his mouth and swipe some powdered sugar from his moustache with the pad of your thumb. You feel his eyes scanning your face all the while. “Look at me, the lucky girl,” you say softly. “One date goes wrong, and there’s a strong, handsome man waiting to take me on another.”
From the very first day, Joel Miller has always taken his time when it comes to looking at you. It’s a penetrative stare that makes your skin heat up from the tips of your ears down to your chest. His eyes are so dark, pools of warm melted sugar, and you feel yourself leaning, trancelike, slow, into that cavernous gaze. Your body is not your own. It seeks the subtle warmth, the familiar scent—sawdust, coffee beans, rich, dark cologne—and the violent torrent of sensation that erupts from the contact point when he cups your cheek in one hand.
You’re in the throes of attention, warm as a candle weeping fat waxen tears.
“Told you before,” says Joel, his thumb sweeping fondly across your chin, “you deserve somethin’ real.”
“Yeah,” you sigh happily, feeling all-too complacent under the touch of his rough palm, “maybe I do.”
Behind you, a car honks its horn, and Joel curses, pulling away from the curb. He takes you to Turner’s, a bar by campus that would be crawling with students if it weren’t for the festival. Joel comes around to the passenger’s door and opens it for you, helping you hop out with your hand enclosed in his. His palm is a steady weight on your back as you both walk inside the dim, stuffy bar.
The back is bustling with activity—drunk folks playing pool or watching the Huskies’ football game or splitting their attention between both—but the bar itself has enough spaces open to fit the two of you. Here, the light is burnt orange, and it makes the strands of grey in his hair shimmer gold. His eyes observe his surroundings with a military precision before they flit back to you, magnetic.
“Shame to waste this dress on that asshole,” says Joel, sweeping his gaze down, back up, barely perceptible. “You’re too goddamn pretty for any of ‘em.”
You’re deliciously abuzz with the incisive way he compliments you. It feels like being punctured down to your very soul; you will never forget the shape of the stain his words leave. “Do you spy on all my dates, Joel?”
He smirks. “Don’t need to spy on ‘em, baby. They’re a bunch of obnoxious kids.”
You huff, resting your cheek against your palm. “I just don’t get it. I thought David was just fine. Then, he takes me on a date just to abandon me for his friends and tell me to find my own way home.”
Joel shakes his head, scoffing as he runs his fingers through his beard. He does that when he’s frustrated sometimes, and you wonder if his hair is soft or coarse. “Piece of shit doesn't know how good he got it.”
“You must know something I don’t,” you say mirthlessly, watching the bartender approach from the other end of the long honey-oak block. “I haven't been able to get a second date since I moved in.”
Joel is silent, eyes still firmly fixed to you, until the bartender arrives, a charming middle-aged woman with a particular Texan twang you could recognise from a mile away. “What’ll it be, Joel?” she asks, giving him a sweet dimpled smile. “Hi, honey. This old man botherin’ you?”
“Only in a nice way,” you reply, squeezing his shoulder.
Joel hides his grin with a swipe of his fingers over his bottom lip. “Coffee for me, Rina. Drivin’ home.”
Rina’s eyes slide to you, and you ask for the same. You don't want to drink alone. She reappears moments later with two small, chipped mugs of dark roast in her hands. Setting them in front of you, she takes your food orders: a BLT for Joel and a veggie burger for yourself. It’s almost ten o’clock now, too late to eat, but your eyes droop sleepily and your stomach growls for a taste of real food. The powdered dough, shockingly, did not suffice.
“You ever miss Texas?” Joel asks once you're halfway into your respective meals. You notice that he only digs into his sandwich when you aren't eating, and abstains briefly to watch while you take your bites. It's an exchange of energy, a steady vigil by your side, the hypnotic pull of his warm body. You cannot scoot any closer to him, but your leg brushes his where you rest your foot on his barstool.
“I wish I remembered more of it,” you tell him. “I grew up a big city girl. Even lost my accent a year into being away. My dad would tease me about it all the time. Said I’d been gentrified.” You fondly shake your head. “Miss him like hell.”
“I can still hear it sometimes,” says Joel, tilting his head to the side, “when you get all passionate about somethin’. Like the time I installed your deadbolt and you tried to explain away your Backstreet Boys CD.”
You put your head in your hands. “Oh, God. I thought you'd forgotten.”
“Nuh-uh, baby, you ain't easy to forget. And I like when you get excited. You get this look in your eye.”
“Yeah?” You slide your foot up his ankle and bring the leg of his jeans with it. Up, down, you keep going, letting the relative darkness embolden you, his sweet little pet names and his silent adequacy enabling what is most definitely inappropriate behaviour. “Tell me about this look, Joel.”
He rests his elbow up on the bar and squares his broad shoulders to you. They eclipse all the other patrons behind him. “You've got pretty eyes,” he tells you. “First thing I noticed when I met you all those months ago. Saw how they lit up when you smiled. Heard your happiness when you told me about Texas. It was nice to be the reason you smiled, ‘n’ I just wanted to make it happen again. I couldn't say no to you. Don't know how any man ever could.”
The revelation stuns you in your seat. His expression telegraphs little save for his attentiveness, his posture locked parallel with yours, singularly focused on the way you react to him.
You try for a joke. “And I was the only applicant.”
It crumbles, sand in your mouth. Something has shifted. Joel isn't the type to shy away from a conversation, but his gaze hasn't once shifted from your face. It feels like flames licking your cheeks, the heat of that look pushing in on both sides, inescapable. You find that you enjoy the way his attention makes you preen; you want him to look at you.
He thinks you have pretty eyes.
“You know that ain't the reason why,” he says, whisper-quiet and gruff amid the vague chatter in the bar.
“Why, Joel?” you ask, spine straightening, teeth sinking into your bottom lip. As you suspected, his eyes flick down your face, lashes obscuring the precise shade of his irises.
His Adam’s apple dips. “‘Cause I like you,” he says, the feeling of it like the slide of suede down your spine, “and I wanna keep you safe.”
You shrug slightly, giving him a smile. “I feel pretty safe.”
Joel’s hand drops to the bar top and his fingertips brush yours. The touch jolts your sleepy mind awake. “You're too good for every single one of those assholes you bring around. You know that, right?”
“I’m beginning to understand.”
“You deserve someone who's gonna be good to you. Give you all the attention you need. Make you… happy.”
You swallow thickly, the candle flame pressing in, sucking the oxygen from your lungs. “Thank you, Joel.”
His fingers begin to creep up every ridge of your knuckles, slowly turning over your palm so it faces the ceiling. The rough pad of his thumb traces the long lifeline inside.
“Repeat it.”
His eyes lift to yours, and for a moment, there’s something in them that ignites an instinct inside you to flee. There's danger in those eyes: the careful, measured restraint of a man who knows more anger than he lets show. A flicker, brief but incandescent, passes through your head, an electrical current.
He’s the reason you never had a second date.
It disappears the instant it comes, the Paterian glimpse of an idea in its entirety fleeing for the horizon, and the instinct recedes in favour of the warm, melting sensation his fingers disseminate through your bones.
“I deserve someone who will be good to me,” you repeat, like a mantra. “I deserve someone who’s going to make me happy, and keep me safe.”
“That's right,” says Joel, brushing his thumb along the veins in your wrist. You feel the shiver, but you're locked to him, your eyes unable to take in any information apart from the way he feels, looks, smells. “You're a good girl, baby.”
Your lashes flutter and a sweeping rush of pressure descends on your core at the way those words sound on his tongue. You picture him directing you to your knees and calling you a good girl while you take his big cock between your lips, imagine the way he would hiss through his teeth, good fuckin’ girl, that’s it, baby girl, while he fucks you from behind, merciless. Hands and tongues and limbs would mould into one another, amalgamate, becoming indistinguishable.
He would be good to you. You know it. He’s always been good to you.
“Joel?”
“Hmm.” Fingers still make idle patterns on your forearm.
“I think you should take a look at my sink when you get a chance. It might be broken.”
No amount of coy suggestion could make him ignorant to your desire for closeness. You can feel your body screaming for it, grasping at him with buffed claws. Joel smirks, looking down at your foot making a path up and down his ankle.
“I’ll take a look tomorrow.”
~
It’s two o’clock in the morning when a shuffling outside your bedroom door guides you out of a decent sleep. In total silence, the most minute noises can be deafening. But it sounds, to your sleep-addled brain, like the hasty retreat of footsteps.
You blink awake, shifting onto your other side to peer above the darkness of your doorway. Through the bleary haze in your eyes, you notice a tiny red light in the upper corner of the room.
You squint, rubbing your eyes furiously to pry them open wide, but your vision is the static grain of an old television, and your eyes refuse to adjust. Instead, you grumble, pulling your comforter over your head, and go back to sleep.
You’ll tell Joel tomorrow.
THE LANDLORD
He cannot wait until the morning.
The nighttime, he discovered long ago, is a friend. It’s the gentle descent of darkness, the horizontal fall of the golden-hour sunlight scanning the entirety of the apartment before it at last succumbs to silent, tar-black night. Occasionally, a car will pass below, or the honk of a horn will tear jaggedly through the quiet, but most times, Joel can sink comfortably into the dark and assume his post.
Six months ago, he showed some restraint.
Of course, the connection was instantaneous—the pretty girl standing in his foyer with a radiant smile on her face, drinking in the chipped paint and ancient railings and furniture imprinted with years of use, arrested all movement of his heart. You wore a white dress and a pair of strappy sandals, not suited whatsoever for walking the city but perfectly tailored to make an impression. You arrived punctually, all smiles and handshakes and Southern politeness despite your insistence that you'd left it all behind. You shone. And when Joel slid his rough, work-worn hand into yours, dipping his gaze to watch the way he dwarfed your fingers, he felt a tremor roll gently from your body to his, thunder over a mountain. He wanted to chase the next lightning strike.
It began leisurely, like a hobby, something he could go to when life got a little much. He watched you come home, examining the way your shoulders rounded slightly when you were upset and the way you wiggled your fingers in a wave to those passing by when you were happy. He watched, typically from the garden out front, as you pranced about your balcony on cool mornings to the electronic croonings of Britney Spears, curled up in a chair with a blanket over your legs and a coffee mug warming your hands, or watered your thriving plants from where they hung in the direct morning sunlight. Your day-to-day became his day-to-day.
And then, he was doing more than merely watching. He was following.
Your favourite coffee place by the apartment building, just a block away. He lingered far behind that first morning, his fingers twitching in your direction before the rest of his body steered him. The neighbourhood wasn't so great back then, prone to muggings and the like. He wanted to keep you safe. That was all.
You ordered something cold, too sweet for his tastes, and sat for a while as you worked. The barista spent the rest of your time there eyeing you up whenever he could. Joel scoffed. He wouldn't know what the fuck to do with you. Just a goddamn kid.
He followed you to work and back, on those rare days he wasn't occupied maintaining the grounds. You sat in a corner cubicle with a decent amount of sunlight and typed away on your laptop all day. Joel monitored the company’s publications just so he could have a glimpse of the way you wrote; he wasn't interested in makeup, but he bought a subscription to Viva because he wanted to trace his fingers over your name in those small italic letters. MANAGING EDITOR.
Your writing is clean, efficient, and smooth. It reads like velvet. He keeps a pile of magazines and newsletters tucked in the back of his bookshelf. For the August edition, they printed your interview with a local prizewinning novelist; you beamed in the picture, photographed in your favourite coffee shop, so happy and so generous, sharing your talent with others.
He was so fucking proud.
Five months ago, he watched you bring a date home for the first time.
It blindsided him. He could not prepare, plan, or sabotage. He could not do a thing as you guided the man—a fucking kid with a too-big ego, grinning smugly for his imminent conquest—inside the elevator. Joel could only watch helplessly, wiping his brow from his precarious place on the ladder, as you walked past him with no more than a soft, sweet smile. He never forgot the painful imprint of that smile on his eyelids. It still burns his eyes late at night, when he stays awake inside his office, monitoring his dual screens. He will pinch the bridge of his nose and close his eyes just to replay the memory of that look.
The kid left the next morning, before you woke. He never contacted you again. You trudged into the lobby that day, a weariness in your eyes that did not match the vibrant colour of your dress. You spoke idly to another woman in the elevator about your broken thermostat, hugging yourself to keep warm.
It was working perfectly a few hours later, and there was a bouquet of roses waiting for you at the concierge’s desk. Fiddling with the red ribbon, tears welling in your eyes, you asked who the admirer was. Sam shrugged his shoulders, but when you turned to look out the front windows, you saw Joel tending to the red roses in the garden bed.
It earned him the first taste of your baking. Biting into one of those moist, warm brownies felt like melting a little piece of you down and moulding it into the shape of his mouth. It felt like taking a piece of the girl he’d coveted for weeks and rolling it over his tongue, keeping it. Swallowing it down. There it rested inside his stomach until the next time he did you right.
He wanted to tell you no. To insist that he would do anything to make you feel good even if you wanted nothing to do with him. To make it clear that he did everything for you, not for some feeble professional relationship between a landlord and his tenant. He breathed you. He needed you.
So, four months ago, he began to watch you through the cameras.
They’re small, discreet, tucked into holes in the wall that have been spackled over, repainted, re-sanded. He ran the wiring while you were at work, listening to your CDs on loop to get a better sense of the earworms you hummed on your way out the door every morning. One in the living room, one by the entrance, and one in the bedroom.
He could keep you safe this way. This way, he would know if those men you brought you home were treating you right—fucking you like you deserved.
You were so goddamn pretty when you came. For months Joel had sat in his office, slicked-up cock in his hand, jerking himself hard and fast to the pictures of you in Viva. For months he’d spilled over his fingers, on his belly, on the glossy pages of the magazines. The heady, cloying scent of his own sweat and cum stuck to his nostrils. It wasn’t enough. He could imagine wrenching open your tight little pussy all he wanted—the slow, heavy drag of his cock between your hot, wet walls and the sweet noises he’d steal from your tongue—but it wasn’t the satisfaction he needed.
Joel needed you. Your body, your smile, your voice. He needed to wrap you tight around every vein, a tourniquet, squeezing until all feeling was lost.
You would be his, in time. He just needed to make it so.
The first time he watched you pleasure yourself, rain pattered gently against the window panes and thunder echoed in the distance. A couple grids had already lost power, and Joel had a backup generator if the apartment was next, but you did not seem to mind one bit that the storm drew closer. You clicked off the television, retired to the confines of your bed and its soft white linens, and slipped your hand beneath your flimsy shorts. Joel sat upright, his back creaking in protest, his knuckles white around the edge of his desk as he watched, unblinking, the way your fingers gently circled your clit.
He didn't touch his cock once that night, no matter how deeply his own need tugged at him. He couldn't look away from the camera feed for fear that he may miss the moment you reached your orgasm.
When it arrived, it was delicious to watch. Your back arched, your lips parted, and your eyes fluttered shut, fingers rapidly rubbing your slick pussy as you seized under your own ministrations and slowly settled, melting into the mattress. He needed to see more. He needed to be there.
You were a chiaroscuro of savoury, sultry magnetism and the ichor of the morning sunlight. You were kind and thoughtful. You were gentle, patient, attentive. You were one hell of a baker. You were so fucking sexy it made his tongue prickle with the prospective taste, the anticipation of touching your soft skin engulfing any sense. Reason had no place in Joel Miller’s mind when it came to the sweet girl upstairs.
Three months ago, you had recovered from the evident betrayal inherent in expecting more from your date than a one-night stand. The next man was older, a partner at a law firm, and took you to dinner at a nice restaurant. He asked questions about you and reciprocated your enthusiasm for good cuisine. He was kind and treated you well. But an incendiary rage ignited in Joel at the sight of the bastard’s hand on your lower back. Another man was touching you. Another man was getting close to you, making you smile, whispering in your ear. Another man was attempting to claim what was rightfully his.
Joel followed your date home that night instead. He lived in a high-rise downtown, the sort of building that had a doorman and a valet.
Joel followed him down to the underground lot with a lead pipe in hand.
“‘scuse me.”
He shut his car door and turned around, giving Joel a polite smile. “What can I do for you?”
A calculated sheepish scratch on the back of his head. “Just… ah, shit, I don’t mean to bother, but my engine isn't turnin' over and my phone died. Mind if I used yours?”
He patted his pockets for his cell and gave it enthusiastically. Joel did not take the phone. He used the proximity to pull the man close and bring the pipe down across his head.
Blood bloomed, pretty and potent and rich as the roses he planted for you. The body made little noise, the skull shattered upon impact, the legs crumpling. It could never have been much of a man, going down so fucking quick. Should've put up a fight.
The man must not have liked you very much to let himself die. Joel, whose eyelids were tattooed with your radiant smile, would have crawled his way back out of a certain grave. Joel loved you. You belonged to him. This was a necessary consequence.
The pipe was dented by the time he was finished. Joel sank to his knees once the body fell, bringing it down again and again, the meticulous arc of the rusted metal uniquely stirring. It felt so fucking good, battering the skull to pieces, blood and brain and bone fragments accumulating on the ground and the pipe and his face. It felt good knowing he had kept another man from betraying you, hurting you, fucking you only to leave in a blur. He was being altruistic. He was becoming a good man for you.
Joel, kneeling in the pool of warm blood until his jeans were soaked crimson, rubbed his hand down his face and smeared the blood across it. Chest heaving, he let the grin stretch his face.
He had found his calling.
Two months ago, he slipped inside your apartment while you were asleep.
You had a rough day. Your boss insisted the company could not afford to give you a raise despite skyrocketing share prices and all the fucking work you’d done for them. The rain started just before you left the building, holding back tears, and a car splashed icy, muddy water on you during your walk home. Salt in the wound. You were sniffling as you let yourself into the apartment, your hands trembling with the effort of shouldering your bag and your misery. Joel approached you from behind and lifted the bag onto his shoulder.
“Hi, Joel.” Sad and soft and still so polite despite it all.
“Hey.” He opened every door for you on the way to the elevator and rode it up with you for good measure. “Wanna talk about it?”
You just shook your head and sidled up next to him, your cheek resting on his shoulder. He held his breath, overcome with the sensation that if he moved an inch, the spell would break, and the comfort you sought from him would slip between your fingers. Your arm brushed his, your dewy lashes fluttering as you finally let yourself relax. Joel inhaled, and the scent of you cleaved him down the middle: rain and perfume.
“Would you give me a raise?”
He looked down at you and smiled. “For a batch of those cupcakes, I’d give you whatever you like.”
It was a half-truth. He’d give you whatever you wanted, cupcakes or no. The sound of your laughter dripped into his bloodstream, saline. It cleansed him of the wrongs he'd committed. He was doing what needed to be done. The world had to realise it turned for you, and then all would be right.
Hours later, when the sun finally dipped below the horizon, shrouded by distant skyscrapers, he sneaked his way inside. His master key made easy work of the lock, but he had to pull the chain lock off with a pair of pliers because his hands could not reach between the gap. He made clinical work of it and stepped inside.
There was a chair in the corner of your bedroom for days you felt like reading by the window. Joel lowered himself into it and began his vigil.
It was a science to study the way you slept. He began to learn the patterns of your breathing, the minute movements of your limbs and how they translated to the moods of your dreaming. The amount of times you turned around, groaned, or hummed correlated directly to the sort of day you'd had. He began to map your tells in his head, drawing them out, formulating blueprints of the simple things that made you.
To Joel, it was like connecting a red string between thumb tacks, like pouring the varnish over a finished painting, sealing a promise, closing an envelope. He enjoyed the satisfactory slotting of each puzzle piece into place, creating your image, finally knowing you.
By then, he’d caught the virus. He’d let himself get close, and now he was infected with it—that insatiable need to be near, to watch, to admire from mere feet away.
He continued to acquaint himself over the weeks with your sleeping self to supplement the time he could not spend with you while you were awake. On more than one occasion, he got careless, letting himself succumb to sleep in that corner chair, joining you in the dream world. In those dreams, you were wrapped up in his body, warm and soft and tight, and he was taking. He was behind you, on top of you, beneath you, forcing you to look in the mirror as he spread you open on his cock and wrapped his fingers around your throat. In those dreams, your eyes rolled back and your lips moulded to the shape of Joel, yes, oh my God, and he'd whisper back to you—my sweet girl, my good fuckin’ girl, all mine.
And you were. You were his.
Tonight, he followed you to the festival.
He watched you make a beeline for the necklace you wanted only to pout when you saw it had disappeared. He watched your face fall as David’s rejection sank bone-deep. He reeled in his own gnawing rage, pushing deep down that urge to storm right in and rip out the asshole’s throat with his goddamn teeth, and waited until you called him.
He knew you would. You trusted him. You needed him. You needed a strong, capable man to take care of you the way you deserved. So he waited inside his truck by the phone, happy to at last hear your sweet voice on the other end of the line.
Thank you, Joel.
He tucked those words under his ribs, letting them flower and spread. Those words gave him purpose, made him buzz with erratic energy, validated all his actions. He was doing everything right.
Your dress was so fucking pretty. Jesus, he wanted to slip his hands under the hem, finger the waistband of those pink panties he knew you were wearing, and bunch the fabric up around your hips as he stuffed you full of his dick. Fuck, he would fill you up with his cum and tuck your panties back over your abused pussy, keeping all of him safe inside. You’d be so happy. You’d get drunk off his cock, begging for it, crying for it. He’d give you everything.
You do feel safe with him. You said it yourself.
Now, leaning against the doorway in your bedroom, Joel turns the heart-shaped pendant over and over in his palm, rubbing his thumb over the smooth gold surface. It’s cool and quaint and will kiss your skin beautifully. But he needs to wait for the right time. He needs to make sure you’re ready.
The sense memory of your fingers on his skin, gracious and gentle, the way you always are, is pushing at the edges of his control.
There's no one like you. He’s never been more certain of anything.
You're so goddamn sweet in those tiny silk pyjamas, your body curled up on the bed and your leg slung over a large pillow. You may feel cold and lonely at night, but that's only for now. He won't let you feel alone much longer; his body calls to you, singing your name. He has only so much restraint, and he's been waiting for six months.
Your lips are slightly parted, your face smooth and serene under the spell of sleep. You're the reason he fixes what's broken. The world needs to be better for you. It needs to be safe and bright and perfect.
He planted tulips today. You’ll appreciate them, he thinks. He wants you to wake up to vibrant colours every morning and go to sleep knowing that he thinks about you.
You shift slightly in your sleep, a soft moan leaving your mouth as you hug the pillow closer. Joel straightens in the doorway, wondering if your mind can sense him nearby. He doesn't know what he would do with himself if you were dreaming about him. His eyes move from your pretty face down your chest, barely concealed by the tiny top you're wearing, to find the apex of your thighs, temptingly spread on the mattress.
He won't. He can't. You’ll never trust him if he loses himself to desire. Joel grits his teeth, his cock achingly hard in his jeans, and unbuckles his belt as silently as he can. He pulls out his dick and squeezes himself at the base, staving off what he knows will be a too-fast orgasm. You move again, your body stretching out on the bed. Joel spits into his palm and begins to stroke his cock.
He can see a sliver of your waist where your shirt rides up, half of your ass where your leg is slung over the pillow, and your tits smushed together just over the hem of that scrap of a top. You're all of his fucking fantasies rolled into one. Joel breathes hard through his nostrils, his fist tight around the tip of his cock.
He wants to shuck down those little shorts and put his face in your pretty pussy. He wants to grab your hips and guide his cock inside you. He wants to slide into your addictive cunt until you forget your name. Until you forget every name but his. Your soul will be stained with him. His has never forgotten your shape.
God, your tight pussy would feel so fucking good around his cock. He jerks himself roughly, bracing his hand against the doorframe when a little whimper leaves your mouth. Fuck, he mouths, gritting his teeth so hard that his jaw begins to ache. He fucks his own fist, sloppy and unrefined, eyes fixed to your waiting pussy between creamy-soft thighs. His cock dwarfs your slit, eager to spread you open—he’ll fix so nicely once he gets you ready.
Joel feels his stomach tighten, his balls pulling up, his jaw taut as he brings himself to a high over your body the way he has so many times. He switches so he can jerk off into the hand around which his gift to you is coiled, spilling his cum all over his fingers and the necklace as he bites into the heel of his palm. His spine decompresses and his cock slowly softens in his hand, the tension briefly relieved. His fist gradually loosens around the cum-slick necklace; the heart has imprinted its shape into his palm.
You stir, turning over in your bed, and Joel hastily departs, tucking his cock back into his jeans. He has enjoyed this brief interlude, but he has work to do.
Besides, he’ll see you in a few hours. He knows damn well the sink works just fine, but he’ll take any excuse to see you again. And it seems you’ll do the same.
~
Joel keeps him in a spare apartment in the building, one whose walls have been padded for soundproofing.
Joel’s sleeves are rolled to his elbows and he's occupying the chair across from David, who's taking his sweet fuckin’ time waking up. Joel’s been pacing for a half-hour, rubbing his fingers over his bottom lip, contemplative, but the bastard won't move.
So Joel takes a seat, grabs a fistful of the kid’s hair, and yanks it forcefully so he’s staring him right in the face.
One eye is already blackened—Joel got a little carried away. The sedative worked perfectly, but David has a punchable face. It took all he had not to keep going.
“Mornin’, sunshine,” says Joel as the kid slowly blinks awake, bleary and unfocused. “Eyes on me, now. Don't want you slippin’ away again.”
David only stares for a moment, gears grinding gently to life in his brain Once that animal instinct kicks in, the kid starts writhing against his restraints, bucking hard in Joel’s unrelenting grip. It's useless, of course. He’s tied by the wrists and ankles. Helpless.
Good.
“What—why the fuck… let me fucking go, man, please,” groans the kid.
“You made a mistake, David,” says Joel. “Think I’m gonna forget about that?”
David whimpers, flexing his hands subconsciously as pain undoubtedly prickles his scalp. Joel hasn't let go of his hair. “Please just let me go, man. I swear I didn't do anything. If you want money, I’ve got money.”
Joel smirks, a scoff slipping out. This is rich. The delectable flame licks up his throat again, indistinguishable from the pleasure of a good meal, a good fuck. It's craving. It’s darkness. He sinks deeper.
“You think it's manly to leave your date for your friends and leave her to find a way home herself? You think it's funny to treat her like a little toy and then leave her when you're done?” Joel sneers. “You didn't even call her back, David.”
He whines out another please, his ankles ineffectually kicking out. “I don't know what the fuck you're talking about. Just let me go. Fuck, it hurts.”
“You don't know,” says Joel, repeating it, slow and savoury, rolling it around in his mouth. “You wanna know the most insulting part, David? You don't even care. You made her upset, and you didn't get on your goddamn knees to beg her forgiveness. You didn't do everything in your fuckin’ power to get her back.” Joel brings the knife from his pocket and idly pushes the tip into David’s cheek. “You think she ain't worth that, David? Tell me the truth, now.”
David shrieks, hysterical, the terror and pain so fucking delicious that Joel gulps it down and yet still wants.
“Are you fucking kidding me? No bitch is fucking worth it. She was cute, but that's it, I swear. I didn't know she had a boyfriend. I wouldn't have—”
The knife digs, gouges, splitting skin and prodding muscle. Joel can feel the edge of the blade slot between the kid’s teeth. He howls, screaming for help to nobody that can help, not quite gone enough yet to realise his utter hopelessness. Joel will have to rectify that.
“Oh, I ain't her boyfriend yet,” Joel says calmly. “But I am hers, way she's mine. And you hurt what's mine. I can’t forget that.”
The knife retreats to admire its handiwork. The cheek is split, the edges jagged, spitting blood. The kid’s tears slip down his face and dip into the wound, salty enough to hurt. He screams and he cries and it’s beginning to get on Joel’s nerves.
“Please stop,” he cries, watching his assailant rear back and grip the knife tight, like an ice pick. “Please… fuck, please—!”
He’s getting real sick of that word. Please. A mere please can’t excuse the look he put on your face last night. A please will not absolve him of the cardinal sin.
No one—no one—makes you frown.
Joel sinks the knife into David’s knee, using both hands to drive it to the hilt. The kid’s face is ashen, white and grey as clouds rolling in, and his frail screams begin to peter out; he’s losing consciousness. Joel won’t have that—not until he’s finished.
“Stop whinin’, David. A real man falls in front of his woman and makes things right. A real man fixes what's broken. And a real man”—he twists the knife, gorging, glutting on the feeling of making amends on your behalf—“does everything in his power to show her he loves her.”
“Please…” The final, feeble attempt of a doomed man to return from the cliff’s edge.
Joel stands, adjusting his grip on the kid’s hair, and brings his knife just beneath his chin. When he drives it upward, he can see the shimmer of the blade through David’s slack, open mouth.
“I told you to stop whinin’.”
~
He’s in your bedroom again.
He felt the need calling to him, vibrating with a particular intensity he could not ignore. He rarely comes to see you twice in one night, but now that he's here, he knows it was the only way to settle his nerves.
You're asleep, lips parted against your pillow and a piece of hair fluttering in front of your face with every exhale. Joel approaches your bedside and tucks it safely behind your ear. You don't wake, but you hum sleepily, hugging your pillow closer. Joel smiles, satisfaction sinking deep and assured into his core. He's done right by you. You’ll go happily to him. Moth to a gemlike flame.
He wanders around the edge of the bed, gaze lazily indulging in your body as he goes. His cock twitches again with a need he cannot yet meet, the desire to move your panties aside and fill you with him. He does not. He kneels at your bedside, closest to where your legs have scissored apart beneath your sheets. The temptingly sweet call of that warm place between your thighs has Joel shifting your comforter aside and ghosting his fingers across the soft skin of your calf.
Your breathing deepens slightly, like you're sucking in a long mouthful of air, and then you settle. It's the only indication you give that you can feel his presence. And then it’s gone, and he’s hooking his fingers in the waistband of your pretty panties and bestowing upon himself what he's only seen through screens for months.
You're spread open and glistening, an indication of some preceding dream or fantasy playing out in that keen, busy mind. Your body is wholly pliant, so soft and glowing in the faint silvery light streaming in from the window, and it would be so easy to—
No. He will not taste you. If he does, he won’t stop. You need to trust him. There is blood on his hands that hasn’t yet washed clean, and he will not imprint those rust-red fingerprints on your body. You’re his world—what kind of man willingly imparts such pain onto a world he loves?
Some infinitesimal fractal lodged in Joel’s head obliged him to return to you tonight, to cleanse himself of the events that transpired under the illicit cover of night. The very sight of you reminds him what he’s doing this for. He crushes his nose into the wet spot that darkens your panties and inhales deeply, acquiring some sense of what you will taste like. The smell makes his head go fuzzy, intoxicated, tang and sweetness and impending gratification. In your sleep, you sigh, melting against the mattress.
Joel brings your panties back up over your pussy and thinks, Tomorrow.
THE TENANT
You're miserable when Joel knocks on your door the next day.
“He hasn't called me,” you tell him, letting yourself stew, sulking from the feeling of yet another man deciding you weren’t worth a follow-up phone call. “Am I repulsive? Am I a total freak? Is it something in my perfume?”
Joel looks down at you, lips parted as if on the precipice of a response, sweeping his gaze up and down your body. You’re wearing a simple sweater and skirt, but fuck, he can make you feel naked. His gaze penetrates deeper than flesh. It’s only then you realise he’s holding coffee.
Two cups of coffee.
“Oh, Joel,” you sigh, licking your bottom lip. “How did you know?”
“Lucky guess,” he says with a crooked smile, his voice a bit raspy, as if caught off-guard. He hands you your favourite drink—caramel macchiato, double espresso—from your favourite place down the block, and you could kiss him with how good it feels to hold the cool, condensation-slick cup in your hands. Your entire body deflates with the first sip.
“You’re my hero,” you tell him. “I mean it.”
Joel shakes his head fondly. “You got a funny sense of heroics.”
“They taste exactly like this,” you say playfully, tracing the rim of the plastic cup. “Thank you, Joel.”
He swipes his thumb across your chin. “It’s only coffee, baby.”
Since last night, something is inexplicably different. A new, once-forbidden boundary has been crossed. It may be technically inappropriate for your landlord to bring you coffee, touch you so intimately, call you baby. But it makes you feel like warm melting honey, and who is to say a feeling like that is wrong?
He’s wearing a blue T-shirt today. His hair is tousled like he slept on it, and your fingers tingle with the anticipatory sensation of how it would feel to take fistfuls of his locks in your hands. He’s stunning. And you catch yourself staring too late, tearing your gaze away the way one retracts their hand after burning it on the stovetop. Your heart skittering, you direct Joel to the sink and plan some excuse in your head for why it has miraculously fixed itself overnight.
But he doesn’t even spare a glance toward any of your appliances. He’s only looking at you.
“I got somethin’ else,” he says, almost shy, reaching into his pocket for a tiny box.
He grimaces when your eyes, wide and obviously panicked, meet his. “Jesus, I didn’t really think about how this looks. I’m not… proposin’, I swear.”
You both release a nervous laugh, but you cannot deny that your nerves are still fluttering at the sight of that simple suede box in his big hands.
He opens the lid and you gasp. It’s your necklace—the very same heart-shaped pendant you had been eyeing up at the festival. It’s shiny and polished and precisely, undeniably, the same one. “Oh my God,” you whisper, gently sliding your finger over the cool golden pendant. “It’s beautiful. Joel, how did you…”
“Turn around,” he says softly, the gentle direction guiding you better than any hand could. You obey, and Joel steps forward until his hard chest is flush to your back. He’s warm and sure and smells so good—cologne and coffee and mint and something potent, like iron—and all your questions fizzle to sparks in the air. You can no longer grasp for them. You reach out and you only find him.
His touch is careful. The heart-shaped pendant settles against your breastbone and shimmers in the afternoon light. Your chest briefly shimmers with the thought that you were made to wear this necklace. His large, rough hands ghost across the back of your neck as he secures the clasp, and you shiver. A single knuckle trails slowly down your spine, bumping every vertebrae on the way.
“It ain't your perfume.” His deep, grumbling voice is equivalent to the scratch of his beard against your temple as his jaw moves with each word. “And you're nothin’ close to repulsive. Look in that mirror and tell me what you see.”
There is a mirror, a full-length one by the entrance to your apartment, and it's surreal to watch your own body turn to face it, to watch yourself defer entirely to the man behind you. It feels nice to just let him steer you every which way.
“I see you,” you tell him, your hand lifting to the pendant on your throat. “And this.”
Joel clicks his tongue, his nose sliding up your temple. “What else do you see?”
You watch your lashes flutter, your head listing slightly to the side. “I see myself.”
“Hmm.” It’s a sound of approval, his palm now sliding around your waist and his arm banding across your body. He presses his hand to your hip bone and pulls you back against him. “Such a beautiful girl in that mirror. Ain't that right?”
“Joel, I…” You can feel his swelling erection prodding your ass and your head feels hazy with a heady, lustful desire you can no longer ignore or dismiss. “I don't think we should be…”
“No?” His mouth curves against your temple and you shiver at the coarse scratch of his moustache on your skin. It feels deliberate, premeditated. “I won’t tell a soul,” he murmurs, his thumb stroking your hip right where the hem of your sweater begins to inch upward. You can see a strip of your own bare stomach in the mirror. He’s making your eyes droop, your lashes flutter, your body light up from one nerve ending to the next, a closed circuit.
Oh, God. His touch is measured, gentle yet barely restrained. It is dipping a finger into the water just as it nears its boiling point. Months of staring and dreaming and retreating to your bed to touch yourself to thoughts of someone you cannot touch have led you here: his necklace, his gift to you, sitting prettily on your throat, his capable hands moulding you slowly to the shape of him. He’s touching you.
“You like me?” His voice rubs hard on your ears, sanding you down, smoothing the rough edges. He lets you linger on the precipice, a firm grip on your hand, letting you make the choice: to let go, or to reel yourself in.
“I like you,” you whisper, snapping the tether and plummeting to the warm, wet earth below.
You watch Joel’s eyes close in the mirror, something like a prayer falling from his lips. It does not take the shape of words—it is gruff and yet soft, hardly loud enough to discern over the ringing in your ears—but it’s so reverent that you can picture yourself falling to your knees at the sound of it.
His hand skims up your waist until he finds your throat, gently pinching your jaw so he can direct the turn of your head. You go easily, tilting your gaze back to rest your temple on his shoulder, as his other hand slides up from your hip to your ribs, grazing the underside of your breast. “You like me enough to touch you like this?”
You gasp, finding an anchor in the deep brown—nearly black, now—of his eyes. They’re warm but they’re dangerous; once you look, the cage door slides shut, and you’re trapped.
This must be one of your many dreams.
“Yes, Joel.”
“Mmm.” He smirks, teasing his tongue across his plush bottom lip. You watch the movement and feel yourself tightening, want want want a chorus in your ears. “You wanna kiss me, baby girl?”
Silently, you nod, your fingers gently sliding through his silky locks while your other hand seeks the strong balancing force of his shoulder. His smile sobers to a deep, stunning severity, and you cannot think to let it frighten you when you’re already slanting your mouth over his.
It starts slowly. His mouth is soft, his hands deftly returning the fervour with which you hold him, cupping the back of your neck with his other hand warming your ribs. A small gasp escapes you, and a rumble of satisfaction passes from his chest through yours, and it flips an ineffable switch inside him.
Joel turns you in his arms, his chest pressed to yours, his hand shooting out to brace against the wall as he walks you back toward it. Sufficiently cornered, you let your body melt into him, his palm now warming your lower back, his tongue feverishly seeking the seam of your lips. You let him pry you open, tasting the coffee and mint on his breath and inhaling the rich scent of him, sticking it with greedy hands to the walls of your brain. You’ll never tire of him, of this.
He kisses you like a glutton seeking more fulfilment, like an aesthete seeking that exhilarating, fleeting moment in time, desperate and unwavering and famished. Tongues slide together, hands grope and wander, fabrics shift. You can feel your sweater lifting at the same time your fingers finally find the hem of his T-shirt, but he beats you to the chase. You’re dizzy by the time he breaks away to remove your shirt, but you dutifully lift your arms to help him.
You seek his mouth again to resume the kiss, but Joel is decidedly feeling pious. He kisses his way down your throat, the necklace dangling from it, your sternum, your belly, sinking to his knees as he goes along. His hands are firm on your hips, squeezing, keeping you in place, while his mouth draws a map of you, eliciting the honeyed sensation of warm water dripping down your body.
“Oh, God,” you whisper, your head knocking back against the wall. It's so much. You've never been the object of attention quite like this, the marble statue at which the devout kneel, obsessive in their worship. You've never had a man fall to his knees to put his mouth all over you.
Has he wanted you as long as you’ve pined for him?
Joel grunts, his lips dragging open-mouthed kisses from one hip to another, his fingers hooking in the waistband of your skirt and yanking it down. You yelp, grasping his shoulders.
Joel only growls into your skin, his hands dropping to your ass and kneading you while he continues down past your hips. “So fuckin’ beautiful,” he grumbles. “So goddamn pretty. Don’t know how I waited this fuckin’ long. Jesus, baby girl, you're perfect. Goddamn perfect.”
His ramblings are poison. Every word infects, squeezing out your healthy cells, replacing them with the delicious scrape of fire against the ceiling of a room. The scratch of his beard. The sweet nurturing sound of his voice. The cared-for sensation of being kissed and touched and spoken to like you're someone worth a second date. Like you're worth the price of all the world and a couple stars, too.
And so the words slip out, shy and whisper-quiet and your cheeks burning hot enough to blister.
“Please, Daddy…”
Joel’s hands tighten on your body, a fractional movement that kicks up the frantic beating of your heart. He tilts his head back to gaze up into your eyes and you feel more naked with that single stare than ever before.
“That what you need, sweet thing?” he says, pressing his lips to your inner thigh. “You need Daddy to make you feel good?”
“Mhm,” you whine, the pitch of your voice pathetic and needy. You watch him crush his nose into your inner thigh, nipping at your sensitive flesh, and his name leaves your mouth in a sob.
“‘m gonna need words,” he commands, biting you again in reproach. “Talk to me, baby girl. Tell me what you want.”
“I want you to make me come,” you plead, grasping his soft greying hair in your fingers. “Please.”
“You gonna call me what you wanna call me?” he prompts, smacking your thigh. “C’mon, baby, lemme hear it.”
“Daddy!” you cry out, your hand tightening in his locks. “Fuck, Daddy, please make me come.”
Joel growls, bringing your soaked panties down your legs. Your knees nearly knock together, but he’s shouldering his way between them, bringing one up onto his wide shoulder. You're spread open like this, bared plainly for your landlord to feast upon at his will. The sight of his lips parted, waiting and ready to take your pussy into his mouth, has you trembling.
He gives a slow, experimental lick, sliding the flat of his tongue through your wet slit. You shudder, your head lolling against the wall. One teasing drag of his tongue and you’re butter, humming and whimpering for more, Daddy, please as he takes his fucking time tasting what you have to offer.
“Goddamn sweet,” he grumbles, his blunt nails digging crescent moons into the flesh of your ass, pulling your body flush to him. “Waited so fuckin’ long for this.” You watch the fire ignite from red- to blue-hot in Joel’s eyes, his gaze shuttering as he loses himself, devoted entirely to the process of unravelling you.
The next time he dips his tongue between your folds, he does it deliberately, calculated, as if he has already memorised your shape and now seeks to pry you open. He parts your lips to make way for his mouth, hot and soft against your clit. Softly, you cry out, watching as he presses a featherlight kiss to your pearl. You try to grind against his face, needing more, but a resounding slap to your ass stops you dead.
“No takin’ what I don’t give,” he says. “You understand me?”
You pout, but you nod your head anyway.
He decides it isn’t good enough and abruptly takes your clit between his teeth in a scolding bite.
“Repeat. It.”
“I’ll only take what you give,” you tell him. “I’ll be good.”
Apparently satisfied, he hums, diving back in and finally—finally—sucks on your needy clit. “Oh!” He’s eager, sure, but he’s practised. He’s meticulous in the way he applies pressure to your clit, lapping at you greedily and pulling back to draw your pleasure into measured tidal waves. You crest only to recede from shore, and then his lips suction to you again, his hand snaking around to your front and pressing down on your lower belly.
“Fuck!” you squeak, your stomach tightening as the dizzying pleasure overcomes you. “Joel, I’m gonna—!”
The orgasm pulls you under, drowning you with a forceful hand, your lungs sucking in mouthfuls of air. You seize, your heel digging into Joel’s muscled back, your fingers fisting his hair, your cunt clenching desperately around nothing, begging to be filled. Joel keeps his mouth on you all the while, licking you through your high, and you think it’s a benevolent act until your orgasm gently fades and he continues to make out with your pussy as if it never happened.
“Ah! Joel, please—” It’s so much. Too much; your pussy contracts relentlessly at the endless attention from his tongue, happily licking your clit and relishing the faint throbbing underneath it. It’s like he’s starved. His eyes are closed, his beard glistening with your wetness, his fingers dimpling your flesh as he pulls you right along to another high.
Two thick fingers gather up the juices you’ve leaked onto your thighs and push them back into your hole, insistent in their desire to enter. You gasp, your heart in your fucking throat: “That’s only two?”
He chuckles, but the vibration only makes you jump, letting his fingers sink inside your cunt to the knuckle. “Oh, fuck, fuck, Daddy, that feels so good, please make me come again, I need it, please—!”
Joel groans into your pussy, curling his fingers toward him so they press against a spongy spot inside you that sends your head spinning, your mind folding in on itself. All you know is the next orgasm, the best way to get him to give it to you, the fastest way to reach that indelible place once more, just once more—
Joel’s hand applies more pressure to your belly, and you scream, clawing desperately at his shoulder as you give yourself over to something much, much stronger than an orgasm. It’s foreign, the creeping sensation of an invader taking up residence in your body. You cannot see, cannot hear. It assumes control, tearing a cry from your mouth and locking all your limbs tight and splashing your wetness all over Joel’s chin, beard, shirt.
You think he only stops because you begin to list; he catches you around the hips and presses a soft kiss to your used little clit. “Mmmmm,” is vaguely how you manage to thank him, your eyes peeling slowly open.
“I know, baby girl,” he says, stroking your hip bone with his thumb. He litters kisses all over your thighs, coaxing you through the minute twitching of your muscles as they relax. “You did so good for me, pretty girl. So fuckin’ beautiful. My sweet girl.”
You shiver in his grasp, watching as he makes his way back up your body. He swipes his forearm across his wet beard and you moan a little at the sight. “Nobody’s ever…”
Joel crowds you, his hand cupping the back of your neck so he can guide your gaze up to him. “That's what you don't understand, sweetheart,” he says. “You can try to find another man to make you happy, but he won't be me. I’m the only one who’s gonna treat you right.”
“Joel…” Sense begins to push at the edges of your brain, but you only slump further into his touch, letting him secure your hair behind your ear. “This isn't right,” you whisper. “I pay you every month to live here. People will know. People will talk about me.”
“People have suffered worse for a hell of a lot less.”
You have no time to decode his words because he grabs your hand and presses your palm over his chest. Beneath the shirt and the warm, tanned skin, you feel a strong, rapid heartbeat, hammering away at his ribs. He maintains eye contact, the gaze incisive, peering right into the cluster of wiring inside your head that calls his name. “You feel my heart and you tell me this ain't real. You think this ain't love? You think it's obsession? Infatuation? Think I can’t see you lookin’ at me the way you do?”
His words pin you to the ground. They’re possessive, covetous—jealous. He wants you, and he knows you want him. All these months, he’s wanted you the way you’ve craved him; all the comforts and the roses and the baked goods in lieu of payment for substantial repair jobs; the times he’s let slide some late payments because I know it’s tough sometimes, the inexplicable kindnesses in your everyday.
Joel Miller dedicated himself to you the second you arrived to see the prospective apartment.
“You’re mine,” he says, his thumb stroking your jaw. “And I wanna hear you say it.”
People will call you a whore. They’ll think you’re pimping yourself out for cheaper rent. They’ll send you filthy looks. But the man in front of you makes you feel wanted. Desired. You’re better than all the dates that failed. You’re better than a shitty boss who won’t give you the raise you deserve. Joel is good to you. He’s always been.
“I’m yours, Joel Miller,” you say, resting your forehead against his. “Now please take me to bed.”
He grins, taking your hand and leading you to your bedroom. You get grabby straight away, fingering the hem of his shirt with a pleading look in your eye. You can still see the evidence of your orgasm staining the collar. “You can take it off, baby,” he says with that cocky smile, letting you lift the shirt over his head. In the sunlight, the grey in his hair shimmers, and his chest is bared to you. You lick your lips, placing your hands on his broad shoulders just to feel the way your palms contour to his dips and curves.
You lean in and put your lips to his neck, tracing the shape of him down to the hollow of his throat, He tastes faintly of fresh air and sweat, and he smells like you. Your hands admire the warmth and strength underneath them, his body so tangible when only yesterday it was a distant dream. He lets you indulge, though his hands flex at his sides, and your fingers fumble with his belt buckle.
“Help,” you mumble against his chest, bumping your nose into him. Joel chuckles, relieving you of your burden and shucking off his belt. It clinks along the floor somewhere nearby, and you can unbutton his jeans to bring them down, freeing his hard, throbbing cock.
Your mouth waters at the sight. He’s thick and slightly curved, the tip leaking precum onto his belly, his balls heavy with the need to come. During those long nights after long days of work, you would imagine, for hours on end, what lingered just below his belt; the little trail of hair leading down his soft belly to your destination; the way his wide shoulders would bracket your body, shelter you from all the tough shit you could possibly suffer. You would picture all the ways you could thank him. You bite your bottom lip and ready yourself to sink to your knees, but Joel is having none of it. He attacks your mouth, kissing you deeply, his hands sliding up your back as if he's trying to count every vertebrae. He doesn't relent even when your knees hit the edge of the bed and you collapse backward onto the mattress. He only crawls over you and pins you beneath his hard body.
“So pretty like this,” he says, lowering his head and nudging your chin upward with his nose to give himself better access to your throat. He sucks and nips at you all the way down, pausing at your heaving breasts. His fingers gently toy with one stiff nipple while his mouth occupies itself with the other, teasing it with his tongue and his teeth. You moan softly, content to watch him explore your body, squeezing your tits before he migrates downward.
“Daddy,” you whisper, stroking his hair away from his face, your head falling back onto the pillows as his fingers part your folds once more. “Fuck, please, touch me. I need you inside me.”
Joel settles in between your open legs and takes his cock in his hand. You mewl for him, determined in the face of his big cock to fit it nicely inside you. “Mmm, you ready for me, baby girl? You need Daddy to fill you up, use you like a pretty little toy?”
You’re nodding frantically, the words igniting you. “Please take me.”
Joel slaps the head of his cock against your clit, once, twice, watching your thighs twitch. Spreading the slick wetness from your pussy onto the tip, he finally guides himself to your hole and notches just inside.
“Jesus,” he utters. “Jesus, you're a fuckin’ dream.”
“It’s real,” you pant, “I’m real.”
He begins to disappear inside you, wrenching you open, your poor pussy disused from going so long without decent sex. You feel the pinching pain give way to a delicious pressure in your core as he eases into you, taking it slow despite his taut jaw, his gritted teeth. Your cunt forms a tight seal around his length, your arousal lubricating his entry, and you feel lightheaded. He’s so fucking big—and he’s still going.
“Oh, my… Joel—”
“I know, baby.” He brings his thumb to your clit and helps you relax with every circular swipe. “I know what y’like.”
You keen up against him, your thighs squeezing his hips. He's only halfway inside you and it feels like being filled up to your throat, choking on the air you breathe. Your head falls back, your hands flying up to your tits and squeezing.
“Daddy…”
One of Joel’s hands overlaps yours where it grasps your breast. “That’s my girl. You can take me. Always knew you could.” Still, he's panting with the exertion of holding back.
“You thought about me?” you say coyly, trying to pull him deeper inside you. He obliges, if only because you're being so petulant, and his hips finally knock into yours. You release a bone-deep sigh of relief.
“All I do”—his hips thrust shallowly, baring his teeth as he paws at your thighs—“is think about you.”
You cry out at the angle, the depth he reaches, how thick and heavy he sits inside you. Your pussy sucks him in, begging for more, and Joel obliges by hooking his hand in the back of your knee and pushing your thigh toward your chest.
Your vision whites, a ragged cry leaving your mouth. “Oh, fuck! Yes, yes, yes, that feels so good—”
“‘s right, baby girl. I’m the only one’s gonna fuck you this good,” Joel grits out, dragging his thick cock along your walls, spreading you open, forcing himself to fit. The head of his cock kisses your cervix with every thrust, measured in their intensity, just enough to drive you up the goddamn wall but never enough to sting. “I’m the only one you want.”
Your mouth is open and his pounding urges a steady rush of ah, ah, ahs up your throat. Joel leans over you and tilts your head back with a hand in your hair to slant his mouth over yours. He lets you pour your cries into his mouth and he swallows them down, fucking you so hard that your hips begin to ache.
He smatters your jaw with sloppy kisses. You lift your hand to his face and trace the patches in his beard, your brows drawn together in your perpetual haze.
“I dreamed about you,” you whisper, taking his earlobe between your teeth to make him growl against your skin. “Touched myself thinking about you.”
“I know,” he says, his hips grinding hard against yours, rubbing up against your used clit. He answers your gasp by nibbling your throat, and you keep him fixed to you with your hand at the back of his neck. His soft hair is matted with sweat and you want to bury yourself here, etch the shape of him into your stone. He's strong, capable, so present in this moment that your heart begins to throb to the beat of his.
Joel surges upward and takes you with him, forcing you to sit on his lap. At this angle, his cock reaches deeper, somehow, your mouth falling open and your forehead dropping to his shoulder. His palm is a soothing presence on your sweaty back as he tells you things that make you flush from your chest to your ears.
“Thought about takin’ you on the goddamn bar last night,” he grunts, guiding your ass in a rolling rhythm along his lap, his cock gliding slowly along your walls. You moan, your thighs shaking around his hips. “Thought about spreadin’ you over my desk and fuckin’ you dumb with my cock.”
You sob into the crook of his neck, grinding down on his cock, the pressure of his navel against your clit sparking hot in your lower belly. “What else?” you ask, nipping at the strong muscle where his shoulder meets his neck. Your tits are pressed up against his chest, his warmth engulfing you, your body slowly lowering over him as he guides you the way he likes.
His palm coasts down your spine until he finds your puckered asshole. His name is jagged and rubbed raw on your tongue.
“Shhh, baby girl.” The pad of his finger teases your hole with just enough pressure to ooze electric ecstasy down your spine. “Feels good, doesn't it?”
Fuck, his voice is so gentle, so knowing. You curl your fingers in his hair, your nose tickled by the locks that curl over his ears.
“Mmmhmm,” you mewl, lifting your hips as best you can despite the growing aches, telegraphing your desire to be touched by him—played with.
“Thaaat’s it,” he coos, his nose nudging your cheek as he turns his head. His finger continues to prod your asshole while his hips buck up into you. “Openin’ up for me like a good girl. You’d let me take you wherever I want, hmm? Whenever I want?”
“Yes, Daddy, yes,” you moan, your mouth perpetually open against the skin of his neck. You can’t think. You can't breathe. You can only drink down mouthfuls of him and let your body succumb to the delicious weight of his cock inside you. “Yes, I’ll be your little slut. I’ll be whatever you want. You make me feel so good.”
He seems pleased with your babbling, grinning into your cheek as he keeps you spread wide and pounds up into you. His finger continues to tease your tight hole until he feels your body contract around him and apparently decides that he isn't quite through with you.
“Turn around. Hands and knees.”
Who are you to refuse?
You lament the brief loss of his cock as you shift into your knees, resting your forearms on the bed and teasing him with a wiggle of your ass. Joel hums appreciatively, sidling up behind you and grinding his hard cock between your asscheeks. You jolt forward, but he catches you around the waist and warms his palm at your ribs.
Something warm and wet lands in a glob on your asshole, and you realise he fucking spit on you. Your head spins, dizzied by your own arousal, and soon, the warm, wet head of his cock slips back inside your hole, and you relish the refuge of being taken by him all over again.
“You wanna know what else?” He begins to fuck you hard and fast and almost angry in its intensity. His thrusts knock against your ribcage and rattle the bars, your heart floundering for a way back to the surface. “I thought about knockin’ on your door every goddamn day and putting my dick in this pretty fuckin’ pussy. Thought about your tight fuckin’ body every single time I saw you walk by and a long time after. I thought about the noises you'd make and Jesus, I was right. So goddamn sweet.”
You’re drooling onto the pillow, your eyes rolling back in your head, your fingers uselessly clasping handfuls of your white sheets. Joel is an animal, mounting you from behind and taking you hard, deep, the slick squelching noises of your coupling so crude and indecent that they burn through your ears like a lit fuse. It's wrong. You never should have kissed him. But wrong shouldn't feel like this.
Wrong shouldn’t taste like mint and coffee, shouldn't smell like roses and sawdust. Wrong shouldn’t feel like his cock sitting snug inside your pussy, some obscene jigsaw, seeping saplike pleasure down your spine.
This must be right.
His hands are rapacious, one wrapping around your hair and the other guiding the bend of your back, arching you perfectly to fit him while he takes you the way he likes. “Such a tease in those pretty dresses. Such a prim and proper girl ‘til she gets the right dick. You’ll get on your knees for this dick, baby girl, won't you? You’ll beg for it like a goddamn whore.”
“I will!” you moan, your cheek pressed into the mattress. The force of his thrusts have you travelling up the bed in minuscule movements, his thighs slapping hard against yours. “Fuck, I will, Daddy! Please, Daddy, I wanna make you feel good, I’ll do anything.”
“You're doin’ such a good job already, sweet thing,” he says, using his leverage on your hair and your waist to yank you upright, his chest pressed to your back, your ass now firmly sat in his lap. You moan long and low at the new angle, your back arching and your toes curling.
Joel groans against your jaw, his mouth travelling along the line of it in sloppy kisses that indicate he's about as close as you are. “Yeah, baby. Fuckin’ drunk on my cock. Fucked you good and dumb, hmm? Fucked you so good you can't even think.”
You can only manage a low whine, the sound of it a fleeting puff of air from your lips, the oxygen in your lungs depleting and replaced with the smell of him. You try to bounce on his dick—you really do try—but you cannot remember how to work the muscles in your thighs. You cannot remember what you had for breakfast nor the colour of the skirt you wore today. You can only vaguely understand the shape of the man behind you, the name that belongs to him, the way you curve and fit into him. You’re falling, the technicolour world outside your window fading to the sound of soft, beating wings—that may be your heart, fluttering in your ears—as you seize, yielding to the pleasure.
You will not recall the sounds you make when you come, grasping blindly at his thighs to keep yourself from falling over, your ears ringing. You feel his moustache scratching your jaw and his cock working you through your high, slowing his thrusts to help you land softly on solid ground. You may cry out his name, and you may call him something else entirely. But it's vibrant. It's radiant as the sunlight now dipping behind the distant buildings. It tastes just as sweet as the golden hour.
Joel does not stop fucking you when your body goes limp in his arms. No, he resumes his brutal pace, using you like a fucking toy to get himself off. You happily take it, your head lolling back against his shoulder and your eyes drooping.
“Nnh, fuck… I’m gonna… Jesus—oh, fuck—”
His hips press flush to your ass and he nuzzles his face into your throat, depositing kisses and love bites all over your skin as he pumps shallowly into you, his hot cum filling you up and leaking generously around the seal of your cunt. You gasp, your fingers threading through his already-tousled hair, keeping him glued to you as he flexes against your body and comes hard enough to double himself over.
He collapses on top of you, forcing you to bend at the hip, little puffs of air escaping his mouth and seeping into you. You whine, your sore hips battered and bruised, your pussy deliciously abused as you pulse continuously around his dick. “Joel, please…”
He comes slowly back into his body, his lips trailing down your spine as he lifts himself upright. “Shit. ‘m sorry, baby girl. You feel okay?”
You hum happily, letting yourself pant into the mattress. “Feels so good.”
Joel pulls out, savouring the tight drag of his cock out of your pussy, hissing through his teeth and watching his thick cum dribble slowly out of your hole. “Such a fuckin’ pretty sight. My sweet girl, all used up.”
You drop your face into your forearm and giggle. Joel smooths his hand over your lower back. “What's so funny?”
“Just…” You sound a bit hysterical as you continue to laugh. “I’m going to be late on rent this month. I put a down payment on a car.”
Joel lowers himself next to you and gently pulls you into him, his moustache tickling your cheek. “Planning on gettin’ the hell outta dodge?” he says playfully, nipping your earlobe.
Your eyes droop and you sink into him. “Think I’ll stay here for a while.”
“I know you will, baby,” he murmurs.
“Joel?”
“Hmm.”
“Thank you for the necklace.”
~
It’s night when you next wake, and Joel is next to you.
For someone so stern and strong, he looks utterly serene in his sleep. His lips are slightly parted, half his face pressed into the pillow, his hair curling around his ears and his arm lazily draped over you. You gently sweep a lock of hair away from his face.
Through the dark, the red light beams, and the arm around your waist tugs you closer.
Black and yellowed bruises scattered across his ribcage. Angry pink abrasions on his knuckles or jaw, the dark reddish brown of old blood crusting around deeper gashes.
They never bothered him too much. The suit takes care of it in the blink of an eye when he needs it to. Well before Steven wakes up so that Marc can make sure that his other half will always stay none the wiser of what their body is put through on a daily basis.
Marc is usually the one responsible for most of the marks and bruises. But Steven, with his clumsiness, isn't altogether blameless.
There are nights when Marc will wake up with a sore arm from a box of souvenir junk that's fallen onto Steven during inventory time. Sometimes, Steven in his half-conscious stupor will bump into a particularly hard corner of the shelves leaving Marc with a purple blotch on his hip or shoulder. It happens often enough that when Marc wakes up fronting and find his body marred with big ugly bruises, he doesn't react with even an ounce of surprise.
After all, pain and bruises are routine for him. It's what Marc has known for as long as he can remember. But Marc can't say he's used to this.
He's standing in front of the small mirror of the bathroom. His eyes lingers over the maroon-red mark that's discoloring the junction of his neck, right above his clavicle. It's the length of three fingers. It's bright, splotchy and glaring.
It's so unexpected it takes Marc several long seconds before he registers it for what it is.
Not a mosquito bite, it's too large for that. Not a bruise caused from a punch.
A hickey.
A grumble simmers in the back of his throat. Marc has a pretty good idea how the body ended up with a hickey.
Steven was going to take you out on a date last night. Some restaurant you’d been wanting to try “for ages.”
You'd looked so excited when you'd told him about it over breakfast that morning. Eyes bright, smiling cheek to cheek that made his chest squeeze tight within, as you had devoured the pancakes he'd made for you.
Marc stares back at his reflection in the mirror. At the big showy red blotch on his skin. If Marc leaves it as it is, it's sure to spread even wider until it turns purplish and blue and covers half of his throat.
Shit, you really went to town on his— on Steven's neck.
The two of you must have had fun.
His fingers trail the outline of the discoloration of his skin. The skin is bruised and a little tender, but it doesn’t hurt. Not in the way he's used to.
This isn’t the lingering pain from the impact of blunt knuckles or the sharp throbbing of broken ribs. This is different.
This bruise was made, not with a fist or a weapon, but with care. Made with your soft lips dragging across his neck. Your exploring fingers digging into his hair as your teeth scrape down his jaw and down his --
Fuck. What is he doing?
He glares accusingly at himself in the mirror.
What the hell was that?
Marc doesn't do this.
He doesn't let himself think about what it's like when you and Steven are together.
That's the rule he set for himself early on when you entered Steven's life: Marc is going to stay out of your way.
Leave you and Steven to live a normal and happy life without his interference... Except he fucked up.
Marc feels like a goddamned Disney villain most times. It's bad enough that Marc steals away hours—sometimes days—from Steven's quiet London life without the man knowing.
Somehow, and Marc isn't entirely sure how he's managed to land the three of you in this position, but not only do you know about Marc now. Marc's also cornered you into the impossible situation that you have to keep his existence secret from Steven.
Leading to the present status quo. One where Marc eats away at the poor man's life like a bottom-feeding parasite. Stealing time from Steven, on mornings that you wake in their bed. Hours that Marc could and should be ceding back to Steven. Instead, Marc finds himself lingering more and more often. Standing in the kitchen, cleaning up waiting for you to wake.
In the beginning he told himself that it was to keep an eye on you. After all, he can't have you wandering around in apartment flat and uncover something that is not meant for your eyes. But he'd be lying to himself if he said that was still the case. Because Marc trusts you after all.
No, he knows why he does this. Why he stays in the mornings, sat across you from the table, watching you eat with warmth fizzing pleasantly in his veins. He knows even if he'd never dare to put words to what it is.
He wants to take.
A heavy, sick feeling spreads in his stomach—his old familiar friends, shame and guilt—because Marc has already taken enough.
He doesn’t get to take this too. Doesn't get to think about what it's like when you and Steven are together.
That time belongs to Steven. You belong to Steven.
Marc is just an interloper.
His eyes pull back up from the floor of the bathroom and he catches himself frowning in the mirror.
He hasn’t moved his hand. His fingertips linger, thumb dragging over the pulse of his throat before pressing down on the bruise, hard. Digging in until he can feel the ache of it. Until the mark stings like it would have when it was freshly made by you.
A sharp thrill sparks down his spine, and warmth streaks across his lower stomach. Marc ignores it. Ignores the heavy ache that pools in his groin. It’s fine. As long as he ignores it, doesn't take things further, then he can let himself have… this. The fading echo of the love you have for Steven.
Marc leaves the hickey.
He wears his civilian clothes when he goes out at night on Khonshu’s business so the suit won’t heal it. Tries to avoid getting hurt so he won’t leave any other bruises for Steven to find. It feels strange. It's been a long time since Marc approached a fight with anything like caution.
Over the course of the next week, he wakes up each night to see that the hickey has bloomed. Marc maps its journey as it spreads from the small spot on his throat up the length of it until it almost reaches his jaw. Then it begins to fade.
On the fourth day the stark red has grown subdued. By the fifth, the blotches on his skin are well on their way to healing. And on the sixth...
On the sixth day, Marc finds a second mark right below the fading one at the base of his neck and long red streaks marking scratches on his shoulder.
New marks keep appearing with each week. Small finger-nail shaped crescent moons on his shoulder blades. The indent of teeth on his clavicle. More hickeys, the small and gentle bruises scattered across the body like a treasure hunt for Marc to find.
He's not sure how he feels about that. Except that there's a strange and unsettling flutter deep in the pit of his stomach everytime he catches sight of one of them in the mirror.
Shit. He's probably not supposed to feel anything about them at all. After all, they shouldn't affect him one way or the other at all. None of them actually hurt.
Judging from the frequency they're appearing, Steven obviously likes them. What’s Marc gonna do about it? Sit you down over the breakfast table, as he ladles up pancakes on your plate and casually drops that he keeps finding marks you've left on Steven? That it makes him feel... (funny? strange? good?) some way about it?
No, this is fine.
There's nothing to be done with the strange situation the three of you find yourselves in. All Marc can do is catalog each and every one of them. Each and every bruise and scrape and bite you leave on Steven, pressing harsh fingers over them until the blunt ache sets in so that Marc can feel them too.
Nothing is wrong. It's fine.
As long as he doesn't think of anything more, doesn't let his mind wander, then Marc isn't crossing a line. After all, there's nothing else he can do about the situation.
The only thing he can do is to keep his silent inspection of each hickey and scratch left on the body. He tells himself it's because he has to know what's going on with the body. To make sure it’s in good enough condition for Khonshu’s missions. That’s all it is. It has nothing to do with the fact that it's a tiny window into the part of Steven's life with you that Marc won't let himself intrude or eavesdrop on.
He almost believes it.
And if there’s a bittersweet feeling that weighs heavy in his stomach, it doesn’t matter. He can ignore it. Marc is no stranger to wanting things he can't have, things he doesn't deserve.
It's fine.
Everything is fine.
And it would have kept on being fine if it weren’t for the fucking lipstick.
The first time it happens, Marc wakes up alone in the apartment slumped over a chair, a book in his lap. Steven must've fallen asleep while reading. Nothing unusual there.
Marc doesn't even notice anything’s wrong until he steps into the bathroom and catches sight of his reflection in the mirror.
Smears of glossy scarlet stand out glaringly against his skin. It's on his face, his mouth and neck, bright red like a traffic light, warning Marc to stop.
Against his better judgment, Marc doesn't heed the warning.
His hand comes up to trace a pristine, perfectly-defined lip print on his cheekbone, trying not to let himself imagine what caused it. He pushes the invading image of your smile and the sweet curve of your lips down into the depths of his mind where he can't reach.
This is different from the hickeys and scrapes. Completely superficial. There is no underlying injury for him to punish himself with, but he catalogs the marks anyway.
The one on his neck is less pristine, smeared at the edges. His fingers drag over the skin in the same place your lips would have.
There's a bright-red smear at the corner of his mouth.
Marc stares at that one for a long time, breath coming in faster and heavier as his fingers hover, not quite touching.
He doesn't dare touch it because he knows what sort of contact made those marks. Can almost feel the weight of your arms wrapped around his neck, the slight sting of your fingers twined into his hair. The bridge of your nose alongside his as your plush lips press to his in a desperate, devouring kiss.
Shit. Shit!
His heart thrashes hard and fast with the fluttering panic of a trapped hummingbird inside his chest. Stepping backwards, a rush of blood floods his body and he feels lightheaded with the pace of it.
He can't look at it. Has to turn sharply away. Grabs a washcloth and the soap and scrubs until his skin feels raw. He doesn't let himself look again until the marks are gone because it feels like crossing a line. One he wasn’t—isn’t—going to let himself cross.
"It's my four month anniversary with Steven," you tell Marc as you reach for the toasted bagel with cream cheese in front of him.
Marc slides the plate back out of your reach and begins to layer smoked salmon on top.
"Where are you two going?"
"Steven booked Gloria. It's the cute Italian place with all the flowery corner booths and pretty porcelain dishes, remember?"
He nods as though he has any idea which restaurant you’re talking about. He doesn’t. Marc doesn’t spy on Steven’s dates with you.
"Their truffle pizza is delish, and for dessert they have this heavenly lemon meringue pie which is—and I am not exaggerating in the slightest—eight inches tall.”
"Sounds nice," he says, adding the finishing touches to your bagel. He barely has time to place the last caper before you swipe the plate from his hands and take a large bite out of it.
You moan your approval, then chew and swallow, smiling at him as you lick your fingers clean, and Marc doesn’t let himself think about anything at all.
"We'll go there sometime," you say, and it makes Marc stop in his tracks. "We can share it together."
He doesn't say that there’s no way in hell. Doesn't tell you that he doesn’t get to be together with you outside of the bubble that is these stolen mornings here in Steven's apartment. Doesn’t try to explain why somehow that would be crossing the last tenuous line he's set for himself.
Instead he turns around, stowing the cream cheese back in the fridge and steadfastly ignoring the insistent itch under the collar of his shirt. Your latest mark is there, simmering with heat where the shape of your lips are still branded onto his skin.
"Sounds nice," he says again.
Marc doesn't peek on your date with Steven.
It's not easy to stay away. His consciousness keeps floating to the surface, an involuntary reaction to Steven's feverish excitement that buoys Marc closer to awareness. Trapped in the dark purgatory where he’s peripherally aware of the palm of their hands going clammy with sweat and the whole of their body flashing hot and cold. He has to constantly swim down into the nothingness to avoid being inadvertently pushed to the front.
But Marc holds steady, even when he can feel their heart pounding away in their chest like Steven is running a goddamn marathon. He's determined to let you and Steven keep your private time private. The two of you don’t need him hanging around peeping like some perverted fly on the wall.
But…
It's a special kind of hell when Steven gets this excited.
It takes everything Marc has in him to fight the instinct to step in and take over, but he manages it somehow, holding on by his metaphorical fingernail until Steven finally succumbs to an exhausted sleep.
As the first dim light of the morning sun slinks through the windows, Marc wakes to find himself in bed, tangled up in twisted sheets.
His thighs ache, his back is stiff and it takes him several moments to orientate himself. Sandy-eyed and more exhausted than he should be, he peels back the bedding, to reveal…
Red.
His bare chest and stomach are smeared in bright crimson red.
Blood.
He's covered in it.
Adrenaline cracks through him, bright and sickening, and Marc jolts upright.
Oh fuck, what has he done now?
No. He forces himself to regulate his breathing, air hissing between his teeth as his chest heaves. It couldn't have been him.
The last thing he can remember is ceding the body to Steven, and then the fight to keep his consciousness submerged. Steven wouldn’t have done this either, which means– Shit! Shit!!
It's everywhere.
Splotches parade across his torso, bright and glossy and so very red. Really red, almost… too red. He tips his chin down to get a closer look, and…
There's a perfectly defined shape of a set of lips on his left pec.
Marc stares at it, then raises a trembling hand to press two fingers over the ruby red lip-print and sags with relief.
Not blood. It's fucking lipstick.
Your lipstick.
His face prickles with heat, his fingers trembling against the skin of his chest.
There's another, less well defined print next to it, and he traces that one as well, and then the red ring smeared around his nipple. He follows the trail of color down his chest and abdomen. It's fucking everywhere. Way more lipstick than could possibly come from a single application.
Marc can picture it. Fuck, he is picturing it, as clear as day. Your bright eyes gazing up at him through lush lashes as you kiss your way down his– down Steven's heaving chest, pausing your assault every now and then to reapply your lip color. The tip of the waxy red stick smoothing over your plush lips, leaving the shiny red color behind. The way you would purse your mouth before leaning back down to stamp another mark upon his skin.
Marc's fingertips brush over another red smear low on his belly. One that’s just barely visible before it disappears under the edge of the sheet.
There’s static in his head, so loud that it drowns out everything else. He can barely hear his own thoughts so it’s easy to ignore the little voice in his head screaming that this is a bad idea and push the sheets aside to follow the red streak down the crease of his thigh.
Tired muscles jump under the brush of his fingers, skin prickling, and he's suddenly, uncomfortably aware that he's hard. Achingly so, his dick throbbing just inches from where he's touching the trail of lipstick on his skin.
The soft cotton of the sheets drags against his overly-sensitive skin as he shoves it the rest of it off, and–
Fuck.
He stops, every muscle in him tensing up because the red smears and kiss marks don't end with the one on his hip. Of course they fucking don't. They continue down the sparse trail of hair leading to his groin where there's a perfect bright red ring circling his aching dick, right below the leaking head.
There’s several rings, the red streaked and smeared up and down the length of him. Oh fuck.
His dick pulses, jerking against his stomach, and a drop of precome wells from the tip. He watches as it rolls slowly across the flat plane of the head which is graced with a single, only-slightly smeared kiss mark.
Marc feels that mark as if it were branded onto him.
He takes himself in hand without thought, thumb slicking though the slippery fluid, smearing it across the impression of your lips. His whole body jerking as he grinds his thumb into that red spot, pressing as though he could somehow imprint your touch into his skin—into the very fabric of his torn and fucked up soul.
He gets lost in the feeling, pleasure just short of pain that has him shuddering and shaking under his own touch. Lets go only long enough to lock his fingers over the circle of scarlet right under the head of his dick. Then it’s on to the other ones, covering each of the marks in turn, squeezing and sliding between them, rubbing the seemingly endless stream of precome he’s oozing over his cock. The lipstick spreads, smearing further until it’s staining his hand as well. The skin of his palm and the length of his dick both streaked with that bright alarming red.
Everything aches. It's overwhelming. Sharp pleasure pushes along every nerve, filling up every empty crevice in his hollow chest until there’s no room left for anything else, and he doesn't know if it's from the touch of his own hand or the knowledge that these marks are from you (from your soft, plush mouth wrapped around his dick) or both.
Marc doesn't do this.
He doesn’t do slow. Or soft. Doesn't let himself indulge in this kind of languid, drawn-out touches.
Sure, he jerks off. When the need arises, he takes care of it. He handles his hard-on the same way he deals with the other tasks involved in the upkeep of their body—with little patience and just enough effort to get it over and done with as efficiently as possible.
More often than not, it's him in the shower, fisting his cock with quick, perfunctory motions as he stares at the wall and tries not to think of anything at all (something that's been harder than usual these past few months). It's something he does as a matter of routine. Just one more item on his hygiene checklist: wash hair, jerk off, wash body, dry off, brush teeth.
This is.... not that.
If he stopped long enough to acknowledge what it is he's doing. To put words to what this is, he's not sure he can think of anything but "fucked up". Fucked up and entirely alien and new to him. Slick and soft and slow. The drag of his fingers over the stained, sensitive flesh of his straining, aching dick almost sensual, and it drives a low, guttural gasp from his lips.
The sound is met by a sleepy sigh from behind him, and Marc freezes.
Fuck.
He doesn’t dare turn his head to confirm what he already knows. That you must have spent the night with Steven, and you’re still lying there in his bed now.
And Marc is sitting less than an arm's length away from your sleeping body, smearing your lipstick up and down the length of his leaking, jerking cock.
And you're about half a second from waking up and catching him red handed and realizing just how fucking disgusting he is.
Terror spears through him as images of what happens next flash behind his eyes.
The shock on your face. Your redredred lips parted in surprise and disbelief. How disbelief would shade into horrified disgust when you see the proof of just how fucked up he is; the way he's made himself sick with yearning over you. Over something that's not his—could never be his because you're a thousand times too good for him.
Marc wants nothing more than to curl up into himself and disappear forever, but he forces himself up and out of bed. Keeping his back towards you, he retreats toward the bathroom as quickly and quietly as he can manage. He doesn't dare turn around.
If your eyes are on him…
If it's already too late…
He doesn't want to know.
That resolve lasts until he's reached the questionable safety of the bathroom. He can't help but sneak one a last look over his shoulder at you as he slides the door closed.
Your eyes are closed. Thank fuck. The knot of fear in his chest loosens slightly at the sight of you sleeping peacefully, unaware of his disturbing behavior.
But– Oh fuck, your lips.
The delicate contours of your plush mouth are smeared and stained with the same color that's streaked across his body, a fucking beacon in stoplight red.
His skin, every square inch that's tinted with the evidence of your touch, starts to burn, and Marc burns with it.
He doesn’t remember shutting the door. Doesn’t remember turning to press his back to the wall. Marc comes back to awareness staring down at one of his hands where it’s wrapped around his aching, leaking, red-smeared dick. The other hand is pressed against the lip print on his chest, fingernails digging in. A bright spark of pain courses through him, and he pushes harder, clawing at the stained flesh as though, if he just presses hard enough, he can peel back the layers of himself to reveal the memory of what it felt like to have your lips against his skin.
Marc is excruciatingly aware that he is fucking things up. Has fucked them all to hell and back already.
The line he told himself he would never cross is somewhere miles behind him along with his self control and any shred of decency. This is wrong. He should not be doing this. Has no fucking business with his hand anywhere near his dick when his mind is full of you.
The knowledge of how fucked up all of this is, makes him slow his strokes. Guilt and shame weigh him down, as heavy as Khonshu’s armor, flooding his body almost as thoroughly as pleasure.
But he still can’t make himself stop.
The floodgates are open. Marc can’t stop rubbing his dick any more than he can stop seeing you, eyes wide and knowing; your ruby red lips pressed to his, sliding over his stomach, wrapped around his cock.
His chest heaves, breath stuttering painfully in his lungs. His fingers tighten around his cock, and the pleasure that sears through his veins is blinding. It’s consuming, all-encompassing, burning through every reservation and shred of morality until it robs him of the ability to tell right from wrong.
Everything is a haze. There are no thoughts left in his head. Nothing left except you.
All he can think of is the look of pure delight on your face after you take your first bite of the breakfasts he makes for you. The way he'll sometimes catch you gazing at his back when he's standing by the stove and you think he can’t see. The forty-five minutes each morning that you're his alone.
Warmth seeps through his chest and takes root beneath his ribs, a counterpoint to the almost painful heat rippling in his gut. It climbs his spine and spreads outward along his limbs until all of him, from his stomach to the tip of his head, is filled with the sensation. It feels good. In a way that Marc can't ever remember having felt.
There's a strange sound pushing against his throat, and if Marc wasn't so far gone, he'd register it as sounding dangerously close to a whimper.
His eyes flutter open, (and fuck he can't remember when he even closed them) to find himself staring up at a stranger in the mirror. He doesn't recognize this man. The messy black hair that falls over his brow doesn't belong to him. Nor do the swollen lips, parted slightly as if their owner is about to plead for something. Dark eyes have gone glassy and wet, with an unfamiliar drunken glaze.
He doesn't know this man, but it’s not him.
Can’t be him.
Or maybe it is.
Need, ugly and grasping, is written across his face. He can feel it dripping out of him, can see the full extent of his depravity, staring back at him. He looks desperate, nearly unhinged.
Out of control.
All the things he doesn’t get to be, because he’ll just fuck things up.
But that doesn’t stop the jagged heat blossoming in his stomach. It starts from the tip of his toes, wrapping his limb with aching bliss until his knees go weak and he's nearly doubling over unable to hold his own weight.
His hips cant up to meet each stroke of his hand. Chasing after the pleasure eagerly, even as the residual shame clings to every inch of him.
He presses his eyes shut again so he doesn't have to look at himself in the eye as the looming promise of his orgasm rises higher.
He regrets it immediately.
In the dark, without the distraction of his reflection to look at, there's nothing to stop his mind from filling the blank space with you.
Your gaze from across the room.
Your touch when the back of your hand accidentally brushes against his when you help him with the dishes.
Your voice...
“Together,” you'd told him yesterday. You'd go tho the restaurant together. As if you two were a couple.
The breath catches in his lungs, searing pleasure streaking along his limbs, achingly sweet and…
Wrong.
This is so fucking wrong.
Wrong of him to think of you here with him. Wrong to imagine the warmth of your body pressed against his, your smaller hand wrapped around him in place of his own. Wrong to wonder how soft your lips would be, trailing down the length of his neck, teeth sinking into his neck to leave another fresh mark, one meant only for him.
The feeling is too large, too overwhelming. It's fucking unbearable. Pleasure doubling and redoubling to fill every inch of flesh, every cell, until his body feels alien to him.
It rips through him, chaotic and endless. A cacophony of static, chaotic and endless, fills his head as his climax explodes through him. Pulse after agonizingly blissful pulse rips through him, and he spills himself across the white porcelain of the sink.
It goes on and on and on until he's empty and wrung out.
Until the only thing left in is the harsh noise of his uneven breathing wheezing out of his chest and the acidic guilt and shame that are lodged in his throat like bile that he can't spit out.
The strength has been zapped out of his limbs. His knees are weak, threatening to give way, and his hands shoot out, gripping the sides of the cold and dirty sink as he slumps forward, barely holding himself upright. His forehead is pressed against the cool glass of the mirror, but refuses to look at his reflection.
It's there all the same. The incriminating flush of his skin nearly as red as the marks from your lipstick. The evidence of your lips pressed to his skin with intent, with care, with… love.
But not for Marc.
It’s never going to be for Marc.
He closes his eyes again and lets the world fade away.
Dedications:
To my favorite clown @thirstworldproblemss who had her mastery hands all over this and wrote majority of this pieces (all the best parts of it).
Also dedicated to @guruan who is currently in tumblr jail and if tumblr could let her out that would be great!!! I need my beautiful MK boys in art form and Leslie's presence in my life on tumblr.
Follow me on astroboots-writes and turn on notifications to be notified when I post something new!
Where’s My Goddamn Money? [Marc Spector x Fem!Vampire!Reader]
Word Count: 2.5k
Warnings: Blood drinking, lack of consent, groping, nudity, suggestive language. Minors DO NOT INTERACT
Summary: Marc Spector wants his wallet back.
A/N: I wrote this fic a long time ago, but removed it in a fit of angst shortly after posting. I’ve been thinking about Ula recently because of spooky season and wanted to share her with y’all. I hope you love her as much as I do!
“I know you’re here Dracula, you big fucking nerd. Where’s my Goddamn money?!”
Hurried steps and the swish of a crescent-shaped cape accompany the echoing voice of Marc Spector as he descends the slate steps of your abandoned-chapel-turned-temporary-home. Seems ironic to live in the belly of a place so full of crosses, but it reassuringly houses a small family catacomb, and it just might be the last place anyone would think to look for a vampire… unless they knew who they were looking for. And would you look at that, Spector figured it out.
“Took you long enough, Spector.” You sip your wine, curled up on the velvet divan, the ceiling drips steadily above you, and you couldn’t look more like a fucking vampire if you tried. You look like a boudoir photoshoot they’d sell at an alternative gift shop, and if you were able to appear in photographs, you’d consider posing in a calendar for real. Eternal life has it’s disadvantages certainly, but it is easy on the eyes.
“Where’s my fucking money, Ula? I know it was you.”
He stalks closer to you now with a slow intensity. It’s funny; for how rushed he seemed to be making his way down the steps, he appears to have lost some of his impatience upon reaching his destination. The sight of you totally naked in the candlelight on the blood red velvet fainting couch has the desired stunning effect on poor Marc Spector. His steps grow slower, edging closer to you, but scanning his surroundings now with creeping mistrust. Smart boy.
You pick at a button on the sofa and purse your lips. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Marc.” You smile wickedly at him, taking another sip from your glass.
Marc’s mask dissolves and he flips back his hood to reveal an unamused angular face, inky curls hanging handsomely over his brow. What a tasty looking treat. And so thoughtful. To bring himself all this way.
“My fucking wallet, Ula. Black. Leather. Full of cash. Ring any bells?”
You put an affronted hand on your bare chest, making sure to caress a nipple with your ring finger while you give him a cartoonishly innocent doe-eyed look “Why, whatever could you mean, mister Spector? Are you accusing me of being a thief?”
“You this lonely, huh? You have to take things of mine to lure me down here. You’re obviously not expecting… company.” He shakes his head and gestures to your curled nude form.
“I’m deeply offended, Marc. I assure you, I did not take your wallet.” You set the wine glass down on the lacquered table, next to the flickering candelabra. “Tell you what” You stalk toward him, very slowly as not to frighten him, “You can even search me if it’ll make you feel better.”
Marc gulps and takes one step backwards for every advancing footfall you trod across the damp stone floor. His back eventually reaches a column and he pauses wide eyed allowing you to slowly and carefully close the distance between your bodies.
You thought an avatar might be a little harder to hypnotize, but he was no more of a challenge than any other man. His eyes are effortlessly tractioned by your own and his jaw loosens in wonder as you step between his legs.
He puts up no fight when you grab his hands and place them on your waist. Oh darkness, his hands are warm, warm and sweet like his candied brown eyes. And fuck, the way his panicked heartbeat vibrates through his hot fingers and into the flesh of your ass? The radiance is akin to the memory of sunlight… you can smell he sun on his golden warm skin. Everything in you screams with a bat-shriek to bite into him now, to suck the sweet life out of his sun-kissed neck, with its thick ropes of tense muscle, fatigued from carrying that pretty head around.
He won’t fight now, not while you’re looking at him like this, but you can’t hold his gaze forever… or perhaps you could. You’d wager your hypnotic gaze could theoretically keep him here for as long as his biology could remain stasis without rest and water— but there’s no chance your patience and lust could wait that long. Not while the throbbing vein in his neck, so thick, so appetizing, is inches from your face. You’ve improved upon your restraint in the last few hundred years, but it’s yet to be perfected. And why wait? You don’t want the stupid bird to come looking for him, do you?
Your eyes are heavy on his own when you purr, “search me, Spector.” He nods like a zombie and his hands are rough on your body, zeroing in on the fleshiest part of you— your bare ass, he squeezes and pulls your cheeks apart and his lip curls like a dog when he growls softly. Whether the vocalizations are a demonstration of pleasure or defiance, you don’t care.
“Ooohh,” Your eyes tighten in mirth and you nearly lose the gaze before you widen them again.
“Good boy, Spector.”
You bite your lip, letting your pearly fangs hook on your bottom lip. He’s delightfully obedient to the gaze. You let your long nails scrape along his scalp, scratching him affectionately before you take a handful of his unruly curls in your grasp.
“Such a good boy that I’m going to let you in on a little secret, okay?”
Marc gives no indication that he understood and he continues to stare dumbly into your eyes and pinch and squeeze the softness of your backside in his warm, wide palms.
You huff impatiently and use the reign of his thick strands to nod his head in agreement for him. You smile with satisfaction. “I did take your fucking wallet, Marc.”
Again, no reaction from him, thoroughly caught in the haze and muck of your sticky spell.
“I took it to lure your cute little butt down here so we could have some fun.”
Still silence, hardly a trace of recognition on his dazed face.
You trace a long fingernail down the side of his cheek, poking up the corner of his mouth into a half-smirk. “Gods, I love a man who knows when to shut the fuck up.” You laugh, scraping your nails gently down his neck and down his suit, to the crescent emblemed breast plate. You nearly, very nearly, break the gaze to look at the plate while you tease your fingertips across it. But your gaze is steady.
“But that’s not the secret, Spector. You knew I took it. The secret is this, and I’ll drain you if you ever tell anyone, but the secret—” You pitch your voice down to a breathy whisper, “You know how mortals have to invite a vampire into their home before we are allowed to enter?”
No response, no matter.
“Well, the opposite holds true for mortals entering a vampire home.”
Again, not a flicker of recognition from him, his thumbs are rubbing needy circles at your backside and the closer you step into him, the more pronounced you can feel the pulsing heat between his legs. Fuck, maybe you should drink from him there. It’s been a long time since you feasted on a femoral artery of a man.
“You see, Spector, once you enter a vampire’s lair, you can’t leave without express verbal permission.” You lick your fangs to punctuate your point. “Like a mouse in a glue trap, I could keep you here as long as it pleases me,” you laugh.
You think you see a subtle widening of his eyes, but it could have been a trick of the candle light.
“Oh don’t be scared, Marc. I’m not going to kill you. Not even going to change you. Just going to take a few good mouthfuls of you, and then I’ll let you go.” Your mouth waters at the visual you’ve painted for yourself. Mouthfuls of his thick pulsing blood, straight from the femoral artery. Christ, you need to feed.
“Does that sound good to you, Marc?” His nostrils flare a bit and you grin. “Oh look at you, baby. You’re excited, I can tell.” You place your palm at the inside of his knee and drag it up, up, up, till it’s resting over the booming ventricle at the center of his thick, warm body, it’s playing a quickening beat and you can feel your fangs grow at the temptation of it.
“Eyes on me, baby.” It’s harder to talk the more your throat fills with the analgesic fluid and your fangs thicken and extend. Your tongue gets hard to control in your attempt to swallow the flood of venom that pools in your mouth. You drop to your knees, never breaking eye contact while you kiss his inner thigh. Your lips are right above the searing pulse point he smells like heaven itself. You rip off his stupid loincloth with impatience. Nuzzling your face into his thighs as best you can while still holding his eyes with your own.
Your bare knees sting slightly on the cold wet floor, You grip onto his thighs, nails biting into the grey linen wrapped coverings while you affectionately nip at his clothed inner leg, never breaking the gaze. In your mad craving, you hardly register as a string of venom drips to the floor from your mouth in a debauched display. You admit you can’t remember the last time you went on your knees like this for a warm suck, but Spector looks delicious from this angle, leant back against the cold stone column, legs obediently spread for you. His hands, unable now to “search” and grope you, are balled into fists at his sides.
Your fangs are at full extension and they grow itchy and painful, if you had any patience left you’d have asked Marc to vanish this part of his suit, but he’s likely capable of fuck-all since the gaze kicked in, so you sink your teeth right through the gauze of his leg coverings, hitting that sweet throbbing vein that’s been calling out to you, begging for relief, begging you to slow its rapid pace down.
Your eyes close in relief and ecstasy, and it’s no matter that they do, the damage is done. You don’t have to hold the gaze any longer, your prey is paralyzed. Though, you think briefly you might enjoy it more if he were able to struggle, to vainly wriggle his thick thighs against your predatory hold. He would be so much fun to play with! To wrestle him down, to fight for your meal— for each suck to drag him further and further away from his own strength… but mortals are so fragile, if it weren’t for the gaze, many would perish from a heart attack before you could get to the meal. Only the most unrefined of your kind ever resort to such discourteous practices when feeding.
He tastes so thick and sweet, and so very very warm, much warmer than a neck bite. The heat of his thighs on either side of your head adds to the burning delicacy, the muscles are more tender down here as well… as much as you had fantasized about the ropey texture of his neck under your lips, this holds its own delights. Sure, you can’t taste the sun, salt, and stubble of his neck— but the flesh down here is soft like butter-seared fois gras. Blood syrupy and warm like hot mead. You don’t want to drink too much, but you don’t want to drink too little either. It’s unlikely Marc Spector will be fooled twice and pay you another visit, so you must savor and make this last as long his blood will hold.
When his heartbeat eventually slows to a resting rate, you make an irate little sound against his blood soaked thigh and force your teeth to pull back into your mouth. Fuck, its so painful to do when your lust isn’t slaked, much easier to just drain him… but a promise is a promise.
You nip your finger and squeeze a few drops of your own blood till it pearls on your skin and you swipe the healing blood onto his puncture wounds, effectively sealing him up. It does nothing for the staining though, and the dark red continent is prominent against the light grey of his suit. You wipe your mouth with the back of your hand and smile, rising up to your feet. You step in between his legs and snake your arms around his trim waist, planting a bloody kiss on his dazed mouth. He kisses you back faintly, like one might groggily mouth a kiss in their sleep.
“Mmmm, darling, you tasted even better than I dreamed you would.” You wipe of the stain of blood you transferred to his lips with your thumb and you pout at him.
“Baby is tired, isn’t he?”
Marc blinks slowly at you in response, eyes rolling back in delirium, and he heavily collapses into your embrace. Luckily your senses are heightened from having just fed, so you’re able to support his weight with ease and bring him to rest on the divan. You prop him up comfortably. Poor baby is helplessly unconscious… Perhaps you took a tad too much from him? You climb on top of him, still naked, and straddle his limp form to press your ear to his chest.
Still beating. Strong enough.
You sigh with relief. If he was dying you’d have to change him and then you’d have that fucking bird on your ass for turning his avatar. Nearly 600 years old and you still can’t control your lust to a conscionable level. Just imagine, Spector as a vampire! You laugh at the idea and slap his sleeping chest as if he were the one who came up with the thought. “Ha!” He would make a miserable vampire, he’d never have fun with it. No imagination. He’d be the type to be wracked with guilt at every kill. Sad silly boy. A regular Louie du Pointe du Lac, feeding on cats in shame and writing disconsolate letters to no one with his own blood tears. What a mess he would be!
You prop yourself up in a cobra pose on him, forearms and elbows on his breastplate, laying on him fully, the tops of your feet pointed atop his shins. You shake your head at his handsome face and smooth the curls from his brow. For the first time in a long time you have a whim to sleep for a moment… but you can’t, you haven’t slept in nearly 600 years, so you prop your chin on your fist and stare at the pretty avatar while he sleeps, drinking in his slumber with your eyes, savoring the slow rise and fall of his chest.
You reach under the decorative pillow and pull out a black leather wallet. You grin as you tuck it safely in his belt and you kiss his warm cheek before whispering in his ear, “I grant you permission to leave when you wake, Marc Spector.” You rest your head in the crook of his neck, lips teasing his weak pulse point. You sigh when you close your eyes and pretend that you can dream.
tangentwithtanner
romaincrisis
janainaart
gummygunk
turnnoffyourmind
stormborns
blakekathryn
