not sure if you were still thinking about it but if you were still thinking about doing OF I would recommend watching Kat Blaque on YT's videos about her experiences doing SW, shes a black trans woman so ofc she has a very unique perspective but I think her insight is good for anyone considering casually or professionally making OF content 🧚♀️
i’m not rlly considering it anymore but i will def check her out!! thank u sm for the rec and the message anon
Summary: You and Arthur find something short of comfort in one another against the desolate backdrop of Annesburg's smog and grime.
Tags: nsfw/18+, sex worker!reader, reader pov, smut, pwp, verbal degradation, sub Arthur, mutual masturbation, Arthur has tuberculosis, dark/bleak themes, cis reader, gendered language
A/N: Dividers are by @/saradika-graphics, and header images are my own. [Ao3 link]
You've never needed a cigarette more in your life.
It's the same complaint as always, just amplified by the unyielding persistence of it—miners who reek of sweat and desolation approaching you with foul breath and even worse manners. Most of them are harmless, and you've learned to avoid the ones who aren't, but every dollar you've earned providing them with the tawdry rush of petty sin has gone straight to paying rent on the small room you share with two other girls. It's barely livable, though only a slight downgrade from the best accommodations in town—one of the pathetic, weather-beaten shacks huddled on the hill with the rest of the poor souls who call Annesburg home.
As you meander down the wooden walkway, past the shuttered saloon and beyond the stacks of crates and pallets shoved against the dingy, stained, once-white stucco of Schultz's guest rooms, you peer up at the sky. It looks like rain. The heavens are as gray as the dreary landscape below, meeting at the horizon and mixing into dismal, unremarkable infinity. When moisture hangs in the atmosphere, it seizes the smoke and smog, until the air is thick with the acrid taste of it. A stew simmering with the worst parts of a cigarette and none of the sweet relief.
The same weary faces pass you on your walk, smeared with grime and empty of joy. You've seen them so many times, they just about fade into the background, dissolving into a pale, lifeless monochrome. It lulls you into a trance until you spot one that's unfamiliar. It belongs to a man who stands alone outside the station. Dressed in all black, he's smoking a cigarette idly, scanning the road before his chin lifts and his eyes settle on the black miasma churned out by the line of chimneys perched at the top of the hill. You've never seen him before, and you've made it your business to be familiar with every man in town. Seeing two opportunities wrapped up in one, you approach him.
He glances your way but doesn't acknowledge you, continuing to smoke and watch the smog choke the sky.
"Can I have a drag?" you ask, nodding to the cigarette.
He looks almost startled to be addressed, but composes himself and arches an eyebrow before he gruffly replies, "No."
You've learned to speak the language of what exists in the empty spaces around words, and as much as it seems like he doesn't want to be bothered, you decide to persist.
"C'mon. Just one, handsome," you purr, taking a closer look at him.
The usual, empty flattery is accurate, for once—he has a strong jaw, just enough scars for character, and dense stubble covering a face that should belong to a gentler man. Instead of the bleary, haunted portals of those who spend their days underground, his aquamarine eyes smolder with the glowing cinders of a life of violence, ruthless and unforgiving. He's lean, but holds himself like a man who used to be much larger, his broad shoulders filling the seams of his raven black overshirt, while the rest of it hangs too loose over his form. The gunbelt wrapped around his narrow hips holds a revolver and a sawed-off shotgun, both well-worn and, evidently, well-used.
"You serious?" He sounds incredulous, but there's an almost imperceptible amusement in the question.
You shrug and offer a wry smile. "Well, I ain't jokin'."
"Christ." With an exasperated sigh, he digs in his pocket for the pack and pulls out a fresh one, handing it to you with a withering and disinterested glare. You take it, feeling like a woman stumbling upon a fresh spring in the desert.
"I didn't need a whole one. Just wanted a drag."
Inhaling deeply, he pinches his cigarette between thumb and forefinger, pulling it away from his face to regard it thoughtfully.
He pushes the smoke from his mouth after a moment and shakes his head. "You don' wanna share, trust me."
You pull the matches from your dress pocket, lighting the cigarette and taking a long, blissful drag. "Well, thank you all the same. You're quite the gentleman."
He scoffs before chuckling derisively. "You should be careful makin' assumptions 'bout strangers."
"I happen to make my livin' makin' assumptions about strangers." Your flirtation is calculated—an offer, an invitation, but nothing more.
"Then maybe you should find another line of work." Tone turned brutish and biting, his words come with a expression of disgust as he looks you up and down. With one last puff, he blows the mephitic cloud in your direction, flicks the butt into the road and ambles away, heavy steps taking him down the walkway and toward the gunsmith, where he disappears inside.
You laugh to yourself, pulling in another exquisite mouthful of smoke. It burns your tongue and heats your lungs, the subtle act of self-destruction the most control you'd felt all day. If all your experience with the appetites of men are worth a damn, you know it won't be the last time you see him.
It's only a few days before you spot him again, leaning against the outside of the sheriff's office, palm planted on a empty barrel at his side. He's studying a bounty poster, with notes written on the back of it, from what you can see. Noticing your approach, he stuffs it back in his satchel before shaking his head at you with a roll of his eyes.
"You lookin for any company tonight?" You sidle up next to him, letting your weight rest on your shoulder blades as they press against the cracked boards covering the outer wall of the lawmen's office.
He chuckles cruelly, again sizing you you up with a disapproving scowl. "I ain’t the kinda man who has to pay for it."
"'Has to' and 'wants to' are very different things."
He straightens himself as if readying to walk away again, but when he takes his weight off his hand and looks down at it, he curses under his breath.
"Goddammit."
You can't help but laugh. A mistake a local would never make.
"The soot?" you ask. "It on everythin' 'round here. A…natural consequence."
Wiping his hand on his trousers, he raises an eyebrow. "Consequence?"
"This whole town is in a dirty business, mister. Was built around it. I'm sure you seen the signs—it covers the buildings, it hangs in the air. Gets in your skin, your hair." Unconsciously, your hand wanders up to your own tresses, twisting a lock around your finger. You can't remember the last time it felt clean. "Filth can only make more filth. Every person, every place that dirties its hands faces consequences, eventually." You shrug, feeling his cautious scrutiny on you, now. "Ours here is just a little more…obvious than others."
He relaxes slightly and leans back against the building. "You talk a lot like someone I know. Someone who's maybe read one too many books. Among other things."
"I don't know about all that. I just seen too much of human nature." You turn, leaning on your arm as you look straight at him. "Maybe your friend has, too."
A sharp shake of his head follows, eyes falling to his boots as he shifts uneasily. "Didn't say he was my friend."
Normally you wouldn't press your luck, but your curiosity has you looking for something besides enough cash to afford a warm meal. The expression on the stranger's face is inscrutable, but in the shadow of the brim of his hat, you can almost glimpse the squall that you've already sensed rages beneath the steeled exterior.
"Seems like he's rather more than that. Or…used to be."
He pushes off the wall again, twisting to face you with a chilling sting in his eyes. One hand drops to hook a thumb into his gunbelt, and the other arm hangs loose at his side, dangling next to his revolver.
"I really don' know where you get off runnin' your mouth like that," he says in a husky snarl and takes a menacing step forward.
"You're still talkin' to me, ain't you?" you observe with an obvious glance down to his gun.
You're both frozen for a few long moments, his palm clearly itching for the comfort of the revolver. But he just lets it go. Walks away without a word. You watch him closely, studying every deliberate step as he crosses the road and the freight tracks that bisect them. In front of the station, he unhitches a bay-colored mare, steps into her saddle, and spurs them out of town, apparently in pursuit of whatever poor soul had their likeness captured in the poster he so hastily put away.
It's been one of the worst weeks you've had. Between the wage strike and the mayhem that followed Leviticus Cornwall's murder, everyone has been shut up inside, afraid to step into the echoes of a crossfire that took so many lives. You haven't had a customer in two days, the miners all home with their wives and the lawmen still occupied with cleaning up the mess from the shootout.
You don't have the luxury of that choice. Not working means not eating, but unsuccessfully pacing the empty walkway, trawling for even a single lonely man grows tiresome, so you wander behind the boarded-up saloon to sit next to the water.
Legs dangling over the mud, you consider the splintered wagon wheels, broken crates, and smashed barrels lodged in the muck below your feet. A visitor would think it debris from the violence that erupted from this very location barely seven days prior. But you know better. You know that the river's edge has always collected the detritus carelessly cast out by Jameson Mining and Coal Company. Even literal trash cannot escape this place.
Evening is closing in, and the river is host to the narrow, gliding canoes of fishermen slicing over the surface as well larger ships chugging determinedly through the muddy depths, their origins and destinations likely beyond your imagination. The water laps at the bank, the familiar iridescent sheen floating on the surface, and it'd almost be beautiful if it didn't carry the pungent stench of fuel.
You hear boots behind you—first, hollow steps over wooden boards, then a grinding crunch through the gravel surrounding the railroad tracks. Shortly after they reach the dock, a hand extends down to offer you a cigarette. Taking it, you crane your neck to see who you already knew was there. You each strike a single match, the warm glow of the lonely flames illuminating your faces in time, and you smoke together in silence.
After a few minutes, you decide to share a thought that had been with you for days. "I seen your picture on them posters, Arthur."
"That a threat?" His question is untroubled, almost playful. It takes a bold man indeed to show his face in a town he's wanted dead or alive and somehow find humor in the circumstance.
"I wouldn’t still be standin' if I was in the habit of threatenin' customers."
He breathes out sharply, but you can hear the smile in his voice as he says, "Oh, you think I’m your customer now?"
"What else would you be? My tobacco benefactor?" Gesturing theatrically with your half-spent cigarette, you look up again to catch his eye.
"Big word for a woman like you," he jabs, meeting your gaze but briefly.
As he goes to take another drag, he's hit with a rattling, hacking cough. It shakes his whole chest as he gasps, nearly doubling over while he tries to pull air back into his lungs. When the fit has finally passed, he spits on the ground, the saliva that makes impact with the dock mixed with just as much blood.
You let the moment settle while he collects himself, knowing the last thing he wants is for you to acknowledge the obvious. Working in a mining town, you're used to the sound of lungs coated in death.
"A 'woman like me.' As if a man like you is in a position to judge." The decision to poke at another tangled nest would be foolish in a different situation, but you know, by now, why he's found you on the dock.
"What kinda man am I then?" Voice still raspy from the violence of the cough, he lets his head fall lazily to side, a cool curiosity painted on his face. It's like his daring you to say it.
"A killer, for one. If them posters are tellin' the truth."
"And what if they are?"
You almost snort. "Then it seems you got bigger problems than worryin' about whether or not you’re my customer."
Silence seats itself between you again. The distant foghorn of a boat—some steam ship traveling the waterway to ferry the goods of industry, no doubt—startles the birds in the trees across the river. Driven from their perches, they take off in frantic flight, floating silhouettes black and crisp against the purple sky. You both watch them fly off, tracking their graceful, arcing escape until they disappear downriver to find a safer roost.
"I got a room, next to the gunsmith." With two quick puffs on a cigarette shortly devoured by the burning glow at its tip, Arthur shifts his weight to the opposite leg. "Come after dark."
You turn to look behind you, eyes on the fiery clouds hanging low above the western horizon. "That'll be soon."
"I know." He flicks the glowing butt into the water. "I ain't got time enough to wait longer n'that."
You knock on the door as quietly as you dare. Schultz doesn't like you and the other girls doing business in his establishment. It's part of a uneasy truce with the gentle, peculiar German, an exchange for a discount on baths, when you can afford it.
The sound of Arthur’s boots cross the small room before it swings open. His hat is off, and he's removed the vest that you've always seen over his coal-black overshirt. Without a word, he steps back to allow you inside. You've been in the room before—despite the gunsmith's protests—but never when its looked so tidy. Anything he'd brought with him is evidently packed away in the trunk next to the bed, with the exception of his gunbelt and his black gambler's hat, which you noticed hanging over the coat rack by the threshold.
At the soft click of the door latching, you turn to face him. He's studying you, eyes dragging over your form, from fingertip to collarbone, across your breasts and falling to your waist. They travel down the skirt of your worn dress, which is as covered in soot and grime as everything else in Annesburg. But that doesn't seem to register to him, the look on his face without judgment or disgust, just curiosity. Like he's allowing himself a good look for the first time.
"You ain’t afraid of me."
"No," you reply. "And I'm surprised you'd ask. Knowin' when to be afraid is what keeps a person alive 'round here."
Bottom lip stretched to the side in something short of a smile, he shakes his head. "I weren't askin'."
With a step back, he nods at you, and you know what it means. Slowly, you start to take off your dress.
Your fingers have slid the scuffed and blemished buttons through their frayed hollows hundreds of times, but under the intense scrutiny of his profound gaze, they falter, struggling with every other one. Eventually, you manage them all, letting your dress slide off your shoulders and fall in a tattered pile around your feet. The corset is next, the hooks and studs cooperating somewhat better, and once you're free of its restrictive embrace, you untie your drawers. They slide down you legs without resistance.
The cotton chemise, threadbare and stained, clings to your naked form underneath. Before you can remove it, Arthur reaches out, his fingers hovering, slowly tracing the air around around the outline of your breast. He lets his hand float down to the hem of the garment. Worn fabric gathered between thumb and fingers, he rubs it with a startling tenderness before releasing it from his grasp. Hastily, you pull it over head, eager to move past the disquieting moment.
A cautious step closes the distance between you, your hands seeking the buttons of his overshirt. Only one is loosed under your touch before his hands close around yours, strong and warm and rough. It's not to hold them, but to take their place, and he quickly unfastens the rest.
Once his shirt is shrugged off his shoulders, your breath catches, as if you're beholding something meant to be kept from sight. It's the body wrought by a hard life, littered with scars, muscle clinging to the ribs just visible beneath.
You press your palm to his chest, his skin clammy and pale behind the dusting of tawny hair that covers it. The sheen of sweat on his sternum matches that on his brow, and just as he shivers beneath the careful path your fingers take down his stomach, he wraps a large hand around each of your arms, gently pushing you away.
"You shouldn't-" he starts, but just breathes out heavily. "I don' want you to…" Gesturing to his chest and allowing you to fill in the rest, he trails off and nods to the bed.
You lay down, as bidden, propped against the brass headboard while he takes a seat in a small wooden chair opposite you. Spreading your knees wide, you let his eyes wander you while he slowly unbuttons his trousers.
"Tell me what I am," he demands, palming himself roughly through the thick fabric of his pants.
Tethered to his gaze, your eyes flit to his erection, then back to his face. "Hard as a rock for one…"
"No." Through the haze of his arousal, you see something else in the sapphire orbs fixed on your body in repose. Not an urgency, but a submission. "What I really am."
You understand what he wants. You'd felt ready to give it to him all along, but you hesitate. A strange desire for comfort knots your stomach. Not just for yourself, but for him. But you sense he's not paying you for comfort. Not directly.
"You're a wanted man," you offer, with a calculated detachment. "Who doesn't seem to care enough for his life to mind that he's already got a noose halfway around his neck."
He frees himself, already thick and flushed with want, and teases the head of his cock with a patient palm before wrapping his broad fist around it. Slow, languid strokes pull a clear bead out of the tip, which he smooths back over the shaft. You can almost feel the glistening velvet of his skin in your own palm as you watch, captive to the pleasure he found in your words. With each careful pump, a throbbing ache blooms between your legs, begging for attention.
"Slow down, cowboy," you breathlessly command. "Let me catch up."
Arthur does as he's told, releasing his grip on his length. Calloused fingers lazily tease the base of it while his eyes drop to your center.
The first tingling kiss of stimulation is enough to liberate a soft moan. It escapes your throat as you delicately caress your swollen folds. Your other hand closes around your breast, and your thumb teases a nipple while you spread yourself wider. In another bed, for another man, it would be all the invitation needed, but Arthur just watches, gaze alternating between your face, your breast, and your cunt. The friction he aches for is plain to see, and his chest heaves with the strain of the control you're forcing him to maintain.
As you part your lips, darkened by the blood pumping through them, you feel how wet you've already become. If your drawers were still on, they'd be soaked through, dripping with a kind of desire unfamiliar and unwelcome in your usual transactions.
Spreading them further, you let your fingers become glazed in the consequence of your own wanting—the foreign desperation to be touched, rather than the resignation to it.
"You're a murderer," you whimper out, and his hand closes back around his cock.
Skin pulled and stretched over the swollen head, it weeps hungrily and slathers his palm, easing the steady motion of his strokes. Diving back for more of your slick, your finger slips inside you, and you suck a sharp breath through your teeth.
A clipped groan erupts from his chest as he watches you. "Go on."
"Heartless." The word is barely audible as it tumbles from your lips, your fingers finding your pearl, swollen and begging for soft pressure and purchase. "Killin' other men just 'cause they're on the wrong side of your gun."
Fervor replaces his steadiness, the rhythm of his arm faltering with a wave of pleasure that pulls his brows together and flexes the muscles in his taut stomach.
"Not so fast…" Your warning is playful, gentle, as you ease into your own trembling desire.
Again, he obeys. He watches your careful, practiced movements, slowing his rhythm, a moan grinding in his throat, catching against the cough that follows it. The recovery is quick this time, his breath back to the steady, shallow respiration of lust with just a few more strokes.
Circling your clit, your hips lift involuntarily, as if meeting the touch of someone else.
And, despite yourself, its his touch you imagine.
You allow yourself to close your eyes for a moment, lost to a different reality behind the blissful curtain of your eyelids. Instead of your own caress, it's his mouth lapping at you, his tongue swift and firm against the jewel nestled between your legs. Rather than your other hand, which slides down your stomach to meet the demands of your vision, it's his thick finger that curls inside you. The determined rumble you imagine from his throat is swallowed by your throbbing flesh, his breath hot, moist, and needy against your slit.
"Jesus christ…" His muttering curse, dense with both desire and frustration, pulls you back to the room, eyes snapping open to find him motionless except for the insistent twitching of his cock, gripped loosely in his fist. "Don' leave me behind, now."
You pull your finger out of your wet warmth, moving your hand to grip your thigh while the other still plays with your clit.
"A fuckin' thief," you hiss out. "Takin' what you haven't earned. What you don't deserve."
Free hand closed tightly over his knee—like the lonely, clutching grasp you each maintain on your own flesh could be exchanged for the other's touch—he starts again. Long quick strokes from base to tip, he's pumping furiously now, growing as close as you are. A cool heat drips down your legs and spreads to the soles of your feet.
"And I know why you keep comin' back here."
"Why," he growls, the single syllable packed with layers of the self-loathing you'd seen in him from that first day.
"Because you know you're a lost cause, just like the rest of us."
His face twists with pleasure, his pupils blown and eyes glassy while his hand moves faster still.
"Not until I'm done…" you whine, your voice constricted by the unbearable ache of the climax about to find you.
Releasing your leg, you dive back into yourself, two fingers filling your aching void while other hand pushes you closer to the threshold. Again, you lose yourself to another place, an impossible vision of the same encounter in a different version of your life. His life. He's above you, vital and strong, and you're clean of the ash and soot that for so long you've worn as a second skin. Rolling his hips, he drives his thick heat into you again and again, resting his forehead against yours—the touch more intimate than even if your lips were pressed together. You feel him twitch and throb within your tight walls, as you both reach for the rapture on the other side.
"Arthur, I…!" The world bleeds white and your thoughts splinter, shattering through the fantasy that had you calling out his name. Shockwaves of ecstasy tense and shake your body, and through the gasps that attempt to refill your lungs with the air just knocked out of them, you open your eyes.
It was like he was waiting for you see him, witness him, and he cums just as you lock eyes again. Face contorted by the ripples of pleasures, a long shuddering moan falls from his mouth and he spills over his hand, the ribbons of seed slowing as he carries himself through it.
For a moment, as the static fills both your heads, you can almost see a reflection of your fantasy in his weary eyes, as if he was really there with you, after all—bodies moving together and his face hovering above yours with an expression free of pain and preoccupation. As desperate for an escape as you were.
That mirror is brief and ephemeral, not shattered so much as carried away by the quiet tension settling over the room. Arthur breaks away from your gaze, wiping his hand and then his softening length on a handkerchief he'd left on the ground next to him. Reclining again in the chair, he lets his head fall back, heels of his palms pressed to his eye sockets. You don't understand at first, but then you hear the quiet rasp of his lungs.
He's trying to catch his breath.
Of all the things you've witnessed, this is the one that makes you look away. Makes you offer the meager kindness of a moment of privacy. You pull your hands from between your legs, wiping then on the stained bedclothes beneath you.
You sit up on the bed and swing your legs over the side, preparing to dress quickly and leave him to his evening. But he stands up before you, pulling his shirt back on and buttoning it while he walks over to the trunk.
"You can have the room for the night if you want it," he says, without looking your way. "It's paid for." As he gathers his belongings, it becomes obvious he never intended to stay another night in Annesburg.
It's unclear whether he sees your sheepish nod of acknowledgement, but you know he's not a man who wants to be thanked. You watch him finish dressing, his charcoal-colored vest finding it's way back over his shoulders and his gunbelt slung back over his hips before he pulls on a dark, wool coat. A wad of bills is dropped on the dresser, marginally more than your usual rate. You're not ungrateful. The night in a real bed alone is more than you could've expected.
He pauses at the door, with his hand resting heavily on the knob. His hat still hanging on the coat rack, you take the hesitation as an offering. The space to say one last thing.
"I hope you find some kind of peace."
His back, a once-mighty mountain eroded to rocky spines, fills the doorframe, and you hear him swallow and exhale slowly—a wheezing breath from lungs covered in something worse than soot. He lifts his hat from the rack and pulls it down low over his eyes.
"It’s too late for that, darlin’."
And, as you watch the door close behind him and hear the haunting finality of the latch striking its plate, you know that he's right.
twin u and me both. i’m constantly thinking abt the way her legs look in her expensive heels and the way her chest looks in her tops when she doesn’t wear a bra 😵💫
charlotte😭😭😭 i love that woman sm shes so cute but lowkey just as freaky as samantha😛😛 my type
and the bodyyyy the body on her oh my goddd. every time she wears those short dresses n little belt and you can see the outline of her hips and her ass while she’s walking i get a little fuckin crazy. like what’re you doing w all that baby, cmere. i love that she sticks to what she’s comfortable with in the bedroom, and how she takes over situations she’s in to control everything and run the show. charlotte w me around youd never have to do anal or go down on me i don’t care just let me fuck you exactly how you like it. who cares what i want, what do you want. run my life
