When their S/O seems weak but is actually pretty strong. || Feat. Sanji, Robin, Usopp, Nami. [Headcanons]
Tags: fluff, mentions of fighting
Wordcount: 2.4k
A/N: this is based off this request!! sorry it took me over a month, but it's here finally. my last headcanons as i decided to not write them anymore (except getting every hc i have so far to 3 parts), so enjoy! love you all! as always, pls like, reblog and comment! divider credits go to @cursed-carmine <33
Sanji had always been a man of extremes, and from the moment you joined the crew, he treated you like a piece of fine porcelain. Because you possessed a gentle disposition, a soft voice, and a look of perpetual kindness, he had mentally categorized you as someone who needed constant shielding. He spent the first few weeks of your acquaintance in a state of high alert, swirling around you with plates of delicate desserts and offering his arm to help you navigate even the slightest dip on the Thousand Sunny's deck. To him, you were a woman of softness in a world full of jagged edges.
He loved the way you looked when you were simply being - the way you smiled at the sunrise or the gentle manner in which you tended to the ship's small plants. He often daydreamed about the ideal way to protect you, imagining himself as your eternal knight, warding off every stray breeze or rude comment with ease. And even though it was a huge bonus, he didn't just love your beauty; he loved the perceived fragility of your spirit, which triggered every protective instinct he possessed.
The shift in his perception, when he finally realized there was more to your personality than just your gentleness, happened during a skirmish on a rocky island where the crew had been separated. Sanji had been fighting off a group of mercenaries, his mind frantically scanning the area for you. When he finally spotted you, you were cornered by three hulking men, each twice your size. Sanji's heart nearly stopped; he yelled your name, launching himself forward with a Diable Jambe to save you from what he assumed would be a brutal assault.
He arrived just in time to see you move, and what he saw… wasn't at all what he expected. With a look of calm, almost apologetic serenity on your face, you delivered a sequence of strikes so fast and so powerful that the air itself seemed to crack. The mercenaries didn't even have time to scream before they were sent flying backward, crashing through stone pillars with the force of a cannonball. Meanwhile, you didn't even look winded; you simply smoothed out your clothes and turned to Sanji with that same gentle smile, asking if he had seen where the others had gone.
Sanji didn't move for a full minute. He stood there, one leg still smoking, his jaw practically touching the dirt. He needed a little to adjust, to come to terms with the fact that the person he had spent weeks trying to shield from a stiff breeze had just demolished a squad of mercenaries without breaking a sweat. Instead of being intimidated, however, Sanji experienced a surge of attraction so violent it nearly knocked him over. The gap between your soft appearance and your devastating strength was, in his eyes, the most erotic thing he had ever witnessed.
After that day, his devotion reached a fever pitch. He didn't stop treating you with tenderness - he still brought you the finest teas and the most delicate cakes like the gentleman he was - but there was a new heat in his gaze. He became obsessed with the contrast. He loved that you could be the softest person in the room and an incredibly powerful person on the battlefield. He started asking you to show him a few moves, though it was mostly an excuse to watch the way your body moved when you exerted yourself.
He found a strange, intoxicating thrill in the way the rest of the world underestimated you. Whenever a new enemy would look at you and sneer, assuming you were the weak link, Sanji would simply lean back, light a cigarette, and wear a smug grin. He would almost feel sorry for the opponent, knowing that within second, the gentle person they were mocking would be the one putting them onto the ground. The knowledge that his beloved was secretly a hidden force of nature became his favorite secret.
Robin
Robin had always been a keen observer of human nature, and she had found you fascinating from the very beginning. While others were drawn to your gentleness as a trait to be protected, Robin saw it as a choice. She noticed the way you carried yourself, the way your eyes remained calm even in the midst of the crew's usual chaos. She suspected there was a depth to you that you didn't openly advertise, and that mystery was what first drew her in.
For a long time, she simply enjoyed the quiet intimacy you shared. You were one of the few people who could sit with her in a comfortable silence while reading side-by-side in the library for hours. She loved the softness of your presence, loved how you acted like a cooling balm to her often turbulent thoughts. She would occasionally reach out and brush a stray hair from your forehead or let her fingers linger on your wrist, treating you with a delicate affection that matched your own demeanor.
She uncovered your secret during a high-stakes infiltration mission. Robin had been utilizing her Devil Fruit to gather intelligence, keeping a watchful eye on you as you moved through the enemy stronghold. When a sudden ambush occurred, a high-ranking officer who was renowned for his brutality and immense physical power lunged at you from the shadows. Robin had already begun to sprout arms to intercept him, her expression one of focused concern as she tried to save you.
Then, you reacted. There was no panic, no scream, and no hesitation. In one fluid motion, you caught the officer's wrist, the sound of the impact echoing through the hallway like a thunderclap. With a calm, almost bored expression, you redirected his momentum and slammed him into the floor with such concentrated force that the tiles shattered in a spiderweb pattern around him. You didn't even use a flashy technique; it was simply raw, overwhelming power, executed with a precision that spoke of years of training.
Robin stopped mid-action, her sprouted arms vanishing as she watched you stand over the unconscious man. You looked back at her, your expression returning to that soft, gentle mask, and asked in your usual melodic voice if she thought your surroundings were otherwise clear. Robin felt a shiver of genuine excitement run down her spine. To her, the revelation wasn't much of a shock, but a confirmation of what she suspected all along. She loved and respected the duality of your nature - the fact that you possessed the power to destroy, yet chose to be gentle.
Following that encounter, Robin's flirting become more clear and pointed. She found herself craving the moments when you would drop the facade, even just a little. She even started initiating more physical contact, not out of a desire to protect you, but out of a deep-seated appreciation for the strength she knew lay beneath your skin.
She loved the way you would handle her with such tenderness, knowing all the while that you could likely level a building if you wished. It created a profound sense of trust and equality between you. Robin didn't want a protector, nor did she want someone she had to shield; she wanted a partner who understood the burden of power. Seeing you navigate the world with such gentleness despite your capacity for violence made her love you with an intensity that was as quiet and deep as the ocean.
Usopp
Usopp's relationship with you was built on a foundation of mutual sweetness. In the early days, he saw you as a kindred spirit - someone who wasn't aggressive, someone who preferred peace over conflict, and someone who looked like they might be just as intimidated by a giant sea king as he was. He took it upon himself to be your guardian, often puffing out his chest and telling you exaggerated stories of his bravery to make you feel safe. He loved that you listened to his lies with genuine interest and a soft, encouraging smile (even if you knew it was all fake).
He spent a great deal of time trying to toughen you up, giving you tips on how to hide behind the biggest rock or how to fake a fainting spell to avoid a fight. He truly believed that you were the most fragile member of the crew, and this belief made him feel useful and courageous. He cherished the way you would thank him for his protection, often patting his hand or giving him a gentle hug that made his heart race with a mixture of affection and pride.
Sadly, the illusion he had been living in shattered during a chaotic battle on a tropical island. Usopp had been pinned down by a barrage of projectiles, shaking in his boots and praying for a miracle. He looked over to see you walking calmly toward the enemy line, your expression as serene as if you were taking a stroll through a garden. He began to scream at the top of his lungs, waving his arms frantically and yelling for you to get back before you got hurt.
He watched in absolute horror - which quickly turned into absolute awe - as you reached the front line. A massive enemy warrior swung a spiked club at you, and instead of dodging, you easily caught the weapon with one hand. The shockwave from the impact blew the grass back in a perfect circle around your feet. With a gentle, almost pitying look in your face, you delivered a single strike to the warrior's chest that sent him soaring backward through three separate palm trees.
Usopp's jaw practically hit the sand. He stopped screaming and simply stared, his eyes bulging. He watched as you systematically dismantled the rest of the enemy squad, moving with a graceful, effortless power that looked more like a dance than a fight. When the battle was over and you walked back to him, still looking like your usual, kind self, Usopp didn't know whether to hug you or run away in terror.
Once the shock wore off, Usopp became your biggest and loudest cheerleader. The fear was replaced by a delirious sort of pride. He began bragging to anyone who would listen - and many who wouldn't - about how his partner was secretly a weapon of mass destruction. He loved the "secret agent" vibe of your relationship; the fact that the world saw a gentle soul while he knew the truth.
His flirting changed with that revelation, too. He would often lean against you, boasting about your strength to intimidate others, though he was still the first one to hide behind you if things got too scary. He loved that he could be his anxious self around you, knowing that you were more than capable of handling any threat. The contrast of your gentle nature and your terrifying power became his favorite thing about you, and he spent every day in a spate of perpetual wonder that someone so strong could be so incredibly kind to him.
Nami
Nami valued two things above all else: money and reliability. When you first joined the crew, she liked you because you were easy to get along with and didn't cause the kind of destructive chaos that Luffy and Zoro did. Your gentle nature was a breath of fresh air; you were the one person who would actually listen to her complaints about the boys without interrupting or making a joke. She saw you as a sweet, calming presence, though she did occasionally worry that you were a bit too soft for the dangers of the Grand Line.
She treated you with a protective, almost sisterly affection at first. She would make sure you were well-fed and that your clothes were in good repair, often guiding you away from the more dangerous parts of their adventure. She liked the way you looked at her with such sincerity and warmth, and she found herself leaning on you for emotional support after a particularly stressful day of navigating through treacherous storms.
The turning point occurred during a clash with a corrupt naval officer who had seized a hoard of treasure Nami had already claimed as hers. Nami was furious, but the officer was a monster of a man, protected by a wall of armored guards. Just as Nami was calculating a way to use her clima-tact to create a distraction, you stepped forward. You didn't look angry; you didn't even look determined. You just looked… gentle. Gentle?!
Nami watched, bewildered, as you walked right up to the armored guards. When the first one tried to push you aside, you didn't move an inch. Instead, you caught his arm and, with a flick of your wrist that looked almost casual, sent him crashing into his comrades like a bowling pin. You then turned to the officer, and with a single, devastating blow to his midsection, you knocked the wind out of him so thoroughly that he collapsed in a heap, his treasure spilling everywhere.
Nami froze, her eyes wide. She looked at the unconscious guards, then back at you, who was now calmly picking up a gold coin and handing it to her with a soft smile. For the first time in a while, Nami was speechless. The realization that you were super powerful - and that you had been letting her protect your this whole time - sent a weird kind of thrill through her. It wasn't just about the strength, but also about how efficient you truly were. You had neutralized the threat with zero wasted movement and zero collateral damage to the treasure.
From that moment on, Nami's perception of you shifted into something much more romantic. She loved the idea of having a partner who looked like a gentle lamb but fought like a lion. It was the ultimate asset. She began to flirt with you in a way that was more playful and possessive, often leaning into your space and reminding you that the strongest woman on the ship belonged to her.
She found a deep sense of security in your presence. The gentleness you showed her was no longer something she felt like she needed to protect, but something she could simply cherish without second thoughts. She loved the way you could go from effortlessly crushing a foe to softly tucking a lock of hair behind her ear in a matter of seconds. To Nami, your strength was the most attractive thing about you because it meant she could finally let her guard down, knowing that as long as you were by her side, she and her berries were completely safe.
hi miss raven, apologues if you've talked about this before but have you seen Mayla Classic's collaboration with Twst?
Yes, I’m aware of the MAYLA x Twst items. The two have had multiple clothing + jewelry collaborations in the past and I’ve commented on all of them as they’ve come out. I cannot link to all of them, but here’s the latest one. You can surely find the rest if you look under my #twst merch tag.
In fact, a lot of those older items (like the earrings, the shoes, etc.) returned recently; they were previously only around for a limited time. They may have been temporarily brought back to promote the latest collab: the vests, blouse, and dormitory skirts. That way, MAYLA can push for people to buy “the entire set”, including the accessories.
A/N: Something a little self indulgent for me because just the thought of wearing one of Ace's forgotten button ups makes me happy sooo, I might make a part two to this if anyone wants~ comments and reblogs and likes are appreciated!
TW: Suggestive, use of babe
Word Count: 2.8k
You’d found one of his shirts by chance, solely because you didn’t think Ace owned a shirt or even knew what one was yet he had a couple. Mainly button ups but that would do. It would do the job of keeping your shoulders from getting burnt which was Marco’s concern and worry for you. Your shoulders had been getting too burnt since you were mainly wearing tank tops and bikini tops (unknowingly driving Ace up the wall but it wasn’t your fault that you were in an area of the New World that was mainly summer islands!) and Marco had told you to start covering your shoulders so they wouldn’t get worse and blister. You’d pouted and had said fine, you were still not thrilled with it because you had been putting sunscreen on but even that hadn’t helped and now Marco was concerned.
You had snatched the yellow shirt and put it on. You glanced down at yourself and nodded your own approval. It was oversized and you liked that it was, it made it much easier to style it the way you wanted to. (and it smelled just a bit like Ace still, smokey, with a hint of the ocean..)
You had styled it accordingly, tying up the ends of the button up and making it a crop top over your bikini top and those high waisted shorts that apparently drove Ace crazy but you didn’t know that. You didn’t think anything of it as you fixed your hair, styling it so it wouldn’t get in your way while on deck and you headed to shore.
Who knew Ace would have the perfect solution?
Definitely not you and definitely not Ace.
The Moby Dick had docked for a couple of days at one of the islands in Whitebeard’s Territory. It was a summer island and the beach was beautiful as was the island market. You and some of the other girls wanted to hit up the market and then do the beach but there was also a festival the next day which meant you'd be buying a new dress.
“Where did you get that shirt?” Laura asked with a tilt of her head and you glanced down at yourself. “I didn’t know you owned one like that.”
“I don’t.” You told her with a bit of a blush. “I went into Ace’s cabin to see if he had anything, apparently he does.”
The girls stared at you, exchanging looks with each other before snickering a bit. “You got that from Ace? I didn’t know Ace had shirts.” Diana snickered as you laughed and shook your head.
“I didn’t know he did either. He told me I could go into his cabin anytime and I took a wild chance.” You shrugged, not seeing anything wrong with it and they didn’t either- other than the fact that you had gone into Ace’s cabin, the man you had quite the thing for, and stolen one of his shirts.
“Hmm. Anyway, why are you wearing a shirt?” Laura raised a brow and you sighed, scowling in the direction of Marco.
“Marco told me that I needed to protect my shoulders from the sun.” You pouted and she snorted.
”He’s not wrong, you’re going to get blisters on your shoulders if you keep it up.”
You rolled your eyes, pouting once more as the girls laughed. “Yeah, yeah, that’s what he said too.” You grumbled as the four of you headed down the gang plank and towards the village, laughing and joking as you were prone to do. It wasn’t often the four of you were able to get together on an island with no work to worry about.
You hadn’t noticed Ace talking with Marco and Thatch and you definitely didn’t notice Ace do a double take at the yellow button up shirt that you had on.
-------------------------------------------------
”Is that…. My shirt?” He asked, staring right at you as you walked past, laughing at something one of the nurses had said.
Marco glanced over and raised a brow. “You own a shirt, yoi?”
“I guess so?” Ace rubbed the back of his neck but his cheeks were flushed a bit seeing you in his shirt.
You.
His crush.
The one he fumbled around?
The girl who managed to fluster him without even trying?
Wearing HIS shirt?
“Ace?” Thatch called to him, amusement clear in his tone as he waved his hand in front of the Second Division Commander’s face. Ace always seemed to forget where he was when you were involved and it was hilarious for everyone but him. “Hello? Earth to Ace.”
Ace blinked, staring at him and swatting at his hand. “Stop it. I’m just shocked I remembered I had shirts.”
He had stopped wearing them when he joined the crew officially and preferred to go shirtless even though he had mainly been shirtless most of the time before but that didn’t matter, what did was how the hell had you gotten ahold of it and why did he like you in it so much?
He flushed again, much to the amusement of his brothers, and his dark brown eyes watched your form as you left.
Those damn shorts too.
Those damn shorts were going to be the death of him along with seeing you in his clothes.
Maybe he should get more shirts solely to give them to you to see you in them…
Woah, let's not go there.
He thought as he tried to think of anything other than the image of you in just his shirt….
“Oi, Ace. You’re on fire.” Thatch snickered while Ace scowled and extinguished the flames but his cheeks were red.
”Shut up, I’m going into town.” He grumbled much to the amusement of Marco and Thatch.
He didn’t mean to but he followed you and some of the girls through the little village market, his eyes keeping track of you and that damn yellow shirt. Where did you even find it? There was no way that it wasn’t his. It had to be his, right? What if it wasn’t his and he was just…
No, it definitely was his.
“Seriously, I still can’t believe Ace owns shirts.” Laura said with a snicker and you laughed.
Gods, your laugh was so pretty and warm like you were. He couldn’t help but smile stupidly. He could listen to your laugh all day and he wanted to but he also liked to be the one who caused it too.
“Me neither, but it got Marco off my back so I can’t really be mad.” You said with a soft laugh, thinking about Ace and his reaction if he knew you had one of his shirts.
Would he care?
Would he like it?
What would he think?
You bit your lip as you kept walking, occasionally stopping at different stalls, buying a couple of items you thought were cute or things you needed before the next island. The crew wouldn’t be here for long but it was still long enough that you got to enjoy some shore leave. Most of the crew would end up at different taverns that night you were sure.
You were unaware of Portgas D. Ace following and keeping an eye on you and your friends just to be sure you were safe but in reality, Ace was trying to figure out the best way to approach you and ask you about the shirt and tell you to keep it. He could do that without making a fool of himself, right?
Right?
Ace looked up when the girls pointed at a store and you waved them to go on, telling them you would catch up to them later as you looked at the handmade jewelry.
There was a bracelet with red beads that had caught your eye and yes, you knew they looked like Ace’s necklace but you couldn’t help yourself. It was cute and you liked him but… would it be too much to get it?
You and Ace were friends, and yes, you had a crush on him, but you didn’t think he felt the same…
"You should get it.”
Your eyes widened when you recognized his voice. He was right behind you, blushing just a bit as he stood there, shirtless, with that damn orange cowboy hat. He looked unfairly good as he smiled shyly at you.
“I mean- if you want to-"
Damn him and being shy and awkward at this moment.
You blushed, smiling just a bit.
“You think so? I do, it’s really pretty.” You looked at the bracelet and then at him. “I thought you were going to stay on the Moby?”
He almost told you that it wasn’t as pretty as you in his shirt but he didn’t. “Ah, well, I was going to but then I remembered I needed to get some things and the second is staying on board tonight.” He told you, which was partially true, he wasn’t going to go out to the tavern with the others but there’d be plenty of drinking aboard the Moby tonight as it was.
You frowned a bit, lips pouting out. “You aren’t coming tonight?”
He shook his head as he watched you pay for the bracelet and declined a bag. You slipped it on and it wasn’t lost on him that it looked like his necklace and the beads around his hat. He may have filed that in the back of his mind for later because he liked it a bit too much. “Nah, are you?”
You had been thinking about it but now that you knew that Ace wasn’t going to go… “No, I think I’ll stay aboard. I could catch up on some reading.” You told him and his eyes brightened and seeing those brown eyes light up was all the confirmation you needed that you'd made the right choice.
“Well… that being said.” His grin was crooked as he stepped closer to you, fingers bravely reaching out to brush the hem of his shirt that you wore, and honestly, Ace didn’t know where he had gotten the courage to do so either. “You plan on wearing this later too?”
You felt your cheeks heat up and smiled up at him, a tiny bit shocked that he did take the step forward. The attraction was there and it had been since the two of you had properly met but you hadn’t expected him to be so brave.
If he was going to flirt like this, then you could too, and maybe you wouldn’t fumble it.
“Maybe…Do you like it?” You asked and he leaned down and tugged on the hem just a bit. It was perfect on you and paired with those damn shorts.
Ace wanted to take both of them off of you.
“I do. But I seem to recall I think this is mine.” He said and you blushed even more, biting your lip. You couldn’t lie to him but with the way his voice dropped and how he was looking at you, you gathered that he didn’t mind one bit.
“I would hope so. I found it in your cabin.” You told him honestly and he laughed huskily.
"Yeah? My cabin?”
“Mhm. Don’t you remember you told me I could have anything of yours?”
"I did, didn't I? You can keep this.” He told you with a lopsided grin. “It looks better on you anyway.”
You felt your heart quicken at that and you couldn’t stop the smile that lit up your face. “I think I will keep it. It’s keeping my shoulders protected.” You told him and he laughed again, fingers hooking in the belt loops of your shorts this time and tugging you closer.
“Good, can't have you getting burnt, can we?” He told you but it was far more intimate and far more dangerous than how Marco had told you. You bit your lip as you looked up at him, hands coming to rest on his chest.
“Mmm. No, I’d rather not get burnt. Not by the sun at least.” You smiled up at him and then took a step back, the dangerous moment breaking as you did so but that still didn’t quell the fire between the two of you.
He raised a brow but couldn’t help but smirk as he watched you take a step back.
”And what would you rather be burned by?” He asked and you laughed, shaking your head.
“That’s something you’ll just have to find out, won’t you?” You giggled before nodding towards the market. “I’m going to shop more, are you coming with me?” You asked and his face lit up as he nodded, mind still racing with the thoughts of you in his shirt and those damn shorts but he couldn’t help himself.
Your smile was worth all of his chaotic thoughts today and the feelings that he could feel growing even more.
“Might as well.” He stretched his arms above his head, causing your eyes to trail that toned chest of his, and you felt your cheeks heat up. You were suddenly very glad that Ace didn’t wear shirts because oh gods, he was far too gorgeous for his own good. "Don’t have to be back on the ship for a few more hours.” He gave you another grin, one that made your heart flutter even more than the closeness from the moment before did.
“Good” You smiled at him before wiggling your brows as you took his arm, looping yours through his. He blushed so prettily too. You couldn’t help but enjoy it. “You can carry my bags then.”
Ace laughed, shaking his head. “Is that why you asked me to come along? For manual labor?” He teased and you nodded, looking up at him with bright eyes and Ace decided then and there as he met your gaze that he would do just about anything you asked when you looked at him like that.
“I’m a lady, Ace. I need a big strong man to carry my bags.” You teased, giggling a bit but you blushed when you felt him flex his bicep underneath your hand.
“Me? Well I can do that.” He smirked just a bit more as the two of you walked through the market. Ace wouldn’t admit it to you but there was something extremely nice about having you on his arm in his shirt and looking at him like he was the only thing that mattered to you.
—------------------------------------
The two of you spent the afternoon, flirting, stealing glances at each other, and enjoying each other’s company. You two always did and it was something that you had come to treasure, spending time with the wildfire of a man that was the Second Division Commander of the Whitebeard Pirates. Of course, your mind kept drifting back to how he had pulled you closer by your belt loops and you wondered if he would do it again later…
Were the two of you flirting? Did he feel the same for you? Was he just flirting?
You bit your lip as you glanced up at him, he was eating meat of some sort that he had found while two of you walked back to the ship. You hadn’t bought a lot but you hadn’t let go of Ace’s arm and Ace hadn’t made any moves to tell you to move it either.
“Ace?” Your voice brought the pirate’s attention back to you, granted it had never really left you but you didn’t know that. He smiled.
“Yeah, babe?” You blushed a bit and smiled up at him.
“About me wearing your shirt later…” Your eyes met his and then they dropped down to his lips. “If I hypothetically did…should it be just your shirt?”
Ace’s footsteps faltered at your words and the tips of his ears turned red as he thought about it. God, you in just his shirt in his cabin?
YOU?
His crush?
The woman he was very much attracted to and very much wanted in every way a man could want a woman?
“I mean… hypothetically, I’d like that, if you’d like that.” He said, rubbing the back of his neck with his free hand, after he had finished his meat. You were honestly surprised that he hadn’t choked on it.
You blushed a bit but you squeezed his bicep and looked up at him with a sly smile. “Well… I think I could hypothetically make that happen… Around midnight?”
Ace almost short circuited but he gathered himself and he smirked just a bit, excitement filling him at the thought of you in his cabin in just his shirt. He was sure this had to be a dream but he’d take it if he was yet he had a feeling that it wasn’t.
I saw your post with the Obey Me demons using reader's lap as a pillow... I'd love to see your take on that concept for some of the SwSh guys 🫣 particularly Piers and Raihan
☽ ◦ ◦ ◦ ✩ ❤ ✩ ◦ ◦ ◦ ☾
✩ Milo would be talking about how you're too good to him as you offer for him to use your lap as a pillow. But you also don't need to tell him twice, he'll be settling there without any further prompting from you. If he's had a busy day he might even accidentally fall asleep without meaning to. He'd be so embarrassed about it too, spluttering out apologies upon waking. It all dies in his throat when you assure him you don't mind and are happy to see him take a break once in a while.
✩ Bonding time for you and Raihan can sometimes be him using your lap as his pillow while he scrolls through his phone and then laughs every ten minutes at something funny that comes up on his feed that he shows you every time it happens. Or sometimes he just lies there and starts telling you about some of the battles that happened today at the gym. Which if he has lost any of them it turns into him ranting about how close he was to winning, just smile and nod, let him get out of his system.
✩ You offer your lap to Piers and he is accepting with little hesitation. You'll just need to accept the fact that he will not be eager to let you move unless you really need to. In fact he won't move unless he needs to, he might have somewhere he needs to be but he's willing to be late if that means he gets five more minutes resting on your thighs. You might even remind he needs to be somewhere and he'll say that he's about to get up. Except he isn't. He isn't making any efforts to move at all.
✩ Leon's eyes would light up at your offer. You wouldn't even get a chance to finish your sentence before he's making himself comfotable in your lap. You might think that he's been waiting for this moment from how he's acting but if he has he's not going to tell. If you were to start playing with his hair or stroking his head he would melt. He also is not moving unless he really has to because he is where he wants to be.
✩ Rose takes you up on the offer the moment it comes out of your mouth. The second his head rest on your thighs, he's thinking to himself how much he needs this. He becomes really open and vulnerable, starts listing off some of the things stressing him out in that moment. He's grateful for you, for your comfort even when he can tell as he starts breaking down the latest statistics and how unsatisfactory they are, you're completely lost.
For the love of GOD more lactation kink twst pleaseeeeee
❝𝐌𝐢𝐥𝐤!! -- 𝐑𝐞𝐦𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐒𝐭𝐮𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐬 𝐄𝐝𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧❞
(Only the NRC students I've missed up to this point, excluding Ortho.)
𝐒𝐮𝐢𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐬: Trey Clover ⭒ Cater Diamond ⭒ Deuce Spade ⭒ Jack Howl ⭒ Jade Leech ⭒ Floyd Leech ⭒ Jamil Viper ⭒ Rook Hunt ⭒ Lilia Vanrouge ⭒ Sebek Zigvolt
𝐖𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬: Mostly gn!Reader, adult content, lactation (Trey, Jack, Lilia), established relationships, service dom (Trey, Jamil, Sebek), porno mentions (Cater), Mommy kink (Deuce), Tweels are a couple of ignorant dumbasses, teasing (Cater, Rook, Lilia), begging (Deuce), dom!Reader (Rook), not proofread because I need to pump these suckers out, and more.
These boys aren't labeled as Yandere in this series, so I'll be keeping it within their normal personalities for all to enjoy.
⋆ ｡ ⋰ ˚ ⋆☁︎︎‧₊˚✩ ⋰ ⊹ ⠀.⠀
He hadn't meant for this to be so perverted, really. It had started, in his mind, as his poor baby momma needing help. You'd just put the baby down for a nap, and he'd been busy making another batch of friskets when you came into the kitchen, crying because you were lactating while the baby was asleep.
"I swear I just fed him!" He'd heard you whimper, and immediately had pulled from his work to wipe his hands and come to your aid. "Shh, you're alright, you're alright."
Always the gentle giant, he'd been careful to lift you onto the counter, the same way he used to when you were horny teenagers in the kitchen. "Don't cry, it's nothing bad." His voice was soft as he cradled your head to his shoulder. His thick fingers would trace your skull, gentle as they found their path to your breast.
Kneading it gently like the dough of a loaf, he'd crack a small smile at the way a little came out and made your shirt just a little wetter. "How about I drink it?" He'd murmured, still smirking, still kneading gently, still the same horndog he always hid under his sweetness. He promised to make it better, and to his credit; he did. He was happily suckling on every drop he could squeeze out, savoring the rather sweet taste your milk had. He loved it, every second of it.
He'd watched one porno where the guy sucked a tit and immediately wanted to try it on you. He figured it would be like giving you another hicky, but gentler and with less teeth. And let me tell ya, the moment he was on, he didn't want to leave. He'd found a way to make you whine and arch your back into him, and every little gasp had him eagerly grinding down on your poor thigh. Seeing a specific little gasp and the tossing of your head to the side, Cater could only giggle and tease you more than he already was.
"You sound like you're getting close. D'you like it that much? Huh, pretty baby?" He spoke as if his hand wasn't currently rubbing slow circles on your aching center. If not for the fact that he was adorable this way, below your shoulder, suckling and grinding, you might've kicked him off by now.
"Baby?" You called back, an indignant laugh following it. "You're the one trying to nurse."
"And? You're still my baby."
"Mommy, please, I swear I deserve it. 'M good, aren't I? Didn't I do everything you asked?" Deuce felt as pathetic as he knew he sounded, but he couldn't bring himself to care. Your hand wrapped around his twitching dick, your other hand cradling the back of his head, tangled in the navy locks while he looked at you with teary little eyes. His mouth hung open, dry and feeling useless from a lack of being able to kiss you.
His pointless begging only seemed to serve a point to you babying him. He cries when he doesn't get to have you the way he wants, he whines when he can't mark you with his teeth, and he squirms whenever you make him take charge. "Please, Mommy, please, 'm good, 'm good. Lemme kiss you, please, I need t'... need t'kiss you."
But he wasn't getting the kisses he wanted. When you brough him, face to chest, skin to skin, and told him to nurse like the baby he is, he seemed to finally get that this was how he should put his mouth to use. He's hesitant at first, like his first kisses of the day. He's slow, gentle, but when you coo praises in his ear, he'd melting right into it. Anything for you, as long as you're happy. And he'd be a liar to say he didn't sob against your teat the moment you finally let him cum.
Jack had barely managed to contain himself when you first offered him to drink from you. He didn't understand, but if the pups weren't getting all of it anyway, then why would he waste something? Especially since it was so good for them. Surely it'd be good for him!
Within the hour, Jack found himself taking every last drop like water after a forty-day hike in the desert. You tasted sweet, and he loves sweet things. "Tastes as good as you." He'd murmur, eyes half-lidded and ears pressed flat while he tried to be gentle on your sore body. He felt bad enough that his babies were the ones nipping you during feedings, he really didn't need to accidentally piss you off by getting too excited.
When you eventually run dry, his appetite isn't satisfied. He liked it. He liked it far too much. "Can I have more? No, no, not now. When you have more, obviously."
Jade hadn't originally thought about mammalian milk beyond its intended purpose. Not until he heard something about it being good for the skin. Of course, that hadn't been what piqued his interest. It was Floyd directly asking you during a cuddle session how it tasted.
"How should I know? I haven't had any since I was a baby."
Your answer had been reasonable enough. But now you had Jade curious. One after the other, they were prying you for answers to questions about human milk, what it was made of, babies, anything. But with all the answers came the lanky arms of Floyd around your waist as he'd tugged you onto his lap. "Why don't we make a baby ourselves? It'd need milk because Shimpy's a human, right?" The prospect amused Jade, who was already joining his eager twin brother to undress you.
You had been such a pretty fool when you offered to help him manage his stress. And after thoroughly devouring you repeatedly, you couldn't imagine how he was calling this a management of his stress. It felt more like you were being managed. "Milly," You'd call, your hand in his ebony locks to tug him back from your thighs. "Is this really enough? It feels like I'm not helping you."
"You're helping."
His response was soft, but short enough to tell you that, no, you weren't. He was still pent up. "Milly." Your whine had his ears perk up this time, and those sharp eyes would go soft when you pulled him to your chest. Being the man he was, Jamil protested your attempts to distract him. "I already said you were helping."
"But it doesn't feel like it. You're treating this like we're adults." Something in your tone must've gotten to him, because he'd let out his usual sigh of defeat before sitting back on his heels. "Then what do you suggest we do? Stop?"
No! Anything but stopping! When your arms wrap tight around his neck, Jamil found himself grunting in dismay for the moment before once more finding himself on your chest. "Oh, I see." Slow. His voice was slow. His voice was a whisper.
Drawing out his tongue, Jamil let his saliva pool down over your nipple before taking it in his mouth for the first time. He was careful of his teeth, but your squeal was enough to tell him he was going the right direction. As if he was seeking your pretty sounds, he'd mock the action again and again, until eventually he was mindlessly suckling. It was oddly soothing, not unlike a child sucking their thumb. He'd make note of that for next time.
Rook is a goddamned pervert and we all know it. So when you found out he'd never sucked a booba™ before, you, the amazing lover he'd managed to bag, immediately sought to fix that.
He'd made a show of enjoying how you dragged him to his room, and just as much excitement went through him when he figured out what this was. "Oh mon, for me?" You being on his lap was one thing, but for you to strip without letting him help? That was another. Now, his gloved hands slid along your hips while his head rested on your shoulder.
He was quite enjoying the sight of you exposed, so much so that he brought his right hand up just enough to lightly flick the pebbled nub you'd offered. He didn't mind your forwardness, he never would, but this was unusual, even for you.
"Then who am I to deny such a generous offer?"
Lips, teeth, tongue, all clumsy from inexperience, but all which quickly learned. He can tie a knot in a cherry stem with his tongue; did you really think it would be hard for him to figure this out? Suffice to say, you'd be here for a while, under praise and under tongue.
In all his years.
He'd never thought to consider his mouth on the pebbled nubs of your nipples. It had always been his hands, his fingers. Never his mouth. So, when watching your firstborn suckle for the first time, the thought finally crossed his mind that he could do that too.
He didn't immediately act on the whim, but when the idea had festered for a few months, he wasn't as patient as he thought he'd be.
Lilia had been marking your pretty neck and thighs, humming some tune to calm your frayed nerves when he made his move. With you lying in bed already, that meant all he had to do was crawl up to you and beg with the crimson cat eyes of his. He'd be gentle, he promised. Had your husband ever broken a promise?
The answer was now yes.
He didn't realize how easily you'd start lactating under his usual touch on your breast, and your milk was simply divine to him. The taste, the smell, everything about the fact that it came from you, had him greedily feeding on what was meant for your infant child. But then again, he'd live. You'd make more by the time he actually needed his next feeding. Lilia, however, couldn't be sure when he'd get the next chance.
"Do you enjoy this?" From one side to the other, lapping up the mess he'd made from squeezing your tit just to nurse on it the same way he had the first, he was watching you pant and squirm like the pathetic thing he knew you could be. "Don't worry, I'll make sure this becomes a habit."
Sebek could hardly believe you. How could you want him to do something so perverse? Had you no shame? Honestly, what would he do if you weren't smart enough to only run your mouth with him.
It had taken a lot of convincing to get him to try it, and though he didn't like it at first, he warmed up to it when he saw how much you liked it, he began to see the appeal. You felt good there, which made you tighten up a little, which felt good when he was inside you.
Having the math click was one thing, having the math work, that was a whole other side to heaven. He'd learned how to tug with his teeth, how to lather it with his tongue, and the way you squealed when he dragged you only his lap so he could handle you better. And best yet, he was shutting up. Minus the growling, obviously.
Now you need only imagine how long it'd take to convince him to drink the milk that comes with it one day.
꒰ ᶻ Z Z. SYNOPSIS occasionally, your dear boyfriend goes through a rut. . and suddenly, you are the only cure for his pain! /ᐠ˵- ⩊ -˵マ
꒰ ᶻ Z Z. GENRE smut, porn with little plot
꒰ ᶻ Z Z. INCLUDES Jack Howl, Ruggie Bucchi, Leona Kingscholar
꒰ ᶻ Z Z. WARNING fem!reader | explicit content | no guaranteed spoilers of main/side quests | established relationship | possible grammar errors | not proof read | aged up characters | ruts/heats | implied overstim | breeding | piv | wolf-like genitals | lion-like genitals | oral (fem rec) | knotting (jack) | pet names | author note at end <3 | Octavinelle ver
ׅ꒰JACK HOWL ୭ ˚
Wolves goes through ruts during warmer months, such as March and February
Wolves are very possessive of their mates and Jack is no exception, instincts wins against him
At first, it was unnoticeable. . that subtle heat in his lower stomach, getting warmer and warmer with every passing second. It’s like Jack’s senses were heightened further; the scent of you, the touch of you, the sight of you has become dangerously intoxicating. Watching you closely with sharp eyes, he’s practically salivating. . but not from hunger, well . . perhaps a different type of hunger.
It’s already early spring, Jack’s heat tends to regularly appear during spring or summer. Ooh. . so that’s what why that
noticeable ache in his abdomen and the desire for you wholly has begun to appear. He’s going through his rut.
“Nngh. .” Jack huffs out through ragged breaths and breathless groans, the firm grip on your hips tightens ever so slightly when you squirm.
God. . how long has it been since Jack pounced on you— keeping you stuck in the mating press before manhandling you onto your knees and hands. You are moaning weakly into the sheets, the only thing keeping you from collapsing onto the bedsheets below was your dear boyfriend’s grip on your waist. . keeping you propped up for him to pound his cum into your velvety walls. With a whiney voice, you loudly moan out his name— sobbing when he presses you against the sheets, leaving to nibble at your already marked up neck.
With each push of his hips, thick cock plunging deep into your raw pussy, his thick cum pours from your sensitive cunt. . staining the mess fabric below. Desperately, Jack slowly drags his tongue against the skin of your neck. . groaning in delight at the taste of you against his tongue, sweet and inviting.
“Haah—! . . ohgodd, J- jack!” You gulp out, eyes rolling back with a deep and rough thrust into your gooey walls.
Your walls quiver and spasm around Jack’s length tightly, you are soo close to cumming for the nth time— overstimulation starts to bite at your flesh. You tremble violently, squealing in ecstasy as your sopping cunt squeezes around his length, squirting onto the messy sheets. Fat tears roll down your cheek from your intense orgasm, whimpering softly when Jack kisses at your shoulder— the sweetness completely contradicts those rough and mean thrust he gives.
“Mmhp. . fu- fuck, soo warm” he grumbles against your marked skin, heavy balls slapping at your puffy clit.
“Y- you feel —nngh. . wonderful, sevens—“ Jack grits out through clenched teeth, hesitating leaning in to bite at your shoulder— eventually giving into his instincts to mark you further.
You let out a loud yelp of his name, eyes rolling back so far when Jack’s knot swells up against your glistening folds. It presses harder and harder against your cunt until it slips inside with an obscure and loudly wet squealchh.
“Haah—! J- jack!” You sob out, a new batch of tears pouring from your glossy eyes.
He lets out a soft, shaky sigh of pleasure when his knot slips into your warmth— eliciting a loud squeal of a mixture of pleasure and pain from you. Jack slowly kisses at laps at each mark on your neck and shoulder, any spot he could reach is met with delicate affection. He moves you to rest against the bedsheets, cuddling you while his knot is still plugged into your pussy— the chances of you taking his seed increases.
Once Jack’s rut is finally over, he’ll make sure to give you the best aftercare. . but for now, he’ll hold you close to his warm body.
ׅ꒰RUGGIE BUCCHI ୭ ˚
Unlike wolves, hyenas lack a specific date for ruts, rather, the female hyenas ovulate throughout the whole year
Naturally, male hyenas rely on their mate to initiate sex, due to being more submissive than their counterpart
Ruggie could easily smell it on you; that hint of spice, sour, and sweetness scent that lingers on your body. . it’s enticing. You must be ovulating, it’s the only explanation for you being so bothered and desperate at the same time. Beastmen have a better sense of smell. . they can smell certain fumes better than a regular person, for example, he knows exactly when you fingered yourself.
That tasty sweet smell on your skin is slightly subtle but still bold enough, you must have done it early ago. Ooh, Ruggie is truly desperate for a taste of you. . but his biology clearly states that the male must wait for the female to initiate sex, unless they’d like to be bitten.
“Oooh. . fuck-! Ru- ruggie” you gasp out loudly, body trembling when he wraps his lips around your clit, sucking tightly.
Ruggie has his hands sprawled on the inside of your plush thighs—keeping you pried apart, giving him enough time to drag his tongue through your slick folds. He’s completely drunk off the taste of your arousal, mindlessly moaning into your cunt and lapping at your pussy. . tongue smearing through your fat folds, parting them apart with each lick.
“Mmhp. .” Ruggie whimpers into your cunt, sighing when you drag your fingers through his hair, ears flattening against his hair.
He is a wet mess, chin and mouth soaked and glistening from your sticky juices, lips swollen from how long been buried agaisnt your sopping pussy. Ruggie is shameless, lips sucking loudly onto your engorged clit— even moaning and whimpering when he suckles onto your clit, causing the perfect amount of vibrations to course through your body, ripping out another orgasm from your exhausted body.
“H- haaah. . can’t ta- take it anymore. .!” You drool out, throwing your head back when he plunges his tongue into your quivering hole.
Your velvety walls flutter around his tongue, gasping when he stretches your walls out by fixing his tongue into you. Your body is throbbing soo much from the pleasure, it aches in the best possible way. Your legs struggle to stay open and you don’t have to worry about it, Ruggie is easily keeping you wiiide open like you’re paying him for it.
Again, you drag your nails against his scalp, tugging on his scalp tenderly, bucking your hips. An intense shiver courses through your spine when Ruggie flattens his tongue at your spasming hole, dragging the wet muscle all the way to your buzzing bud.
“Nngh—! Mmhp, baby. .” You mewl out, hips shakily trembling, lightly squirming from the pleasure.
Ruggie’s grip on your thigh tightened, silently asking if you can stay still while he feats on what you give him.
“Mmhp. . n- noo. .” He murmurs against your sticky pussy, a thin string of arousal connected between his lips and your cunt.
“D-don’t squirm from me. . need more of youu” Ruggie finishes, dipping his tongue back into your hole. . nose pressing against your clit.
Your jaw drops, eyes roll back, your grip tightens on his hair. You let out a breathless moan of his name, gushing around his tongue, feeding his hungry mouth for the nth time of tonight. And Ruggie is there to catch every drop, loudly dragging his lips through your pussy folds.
“Nngh. . n- no more. . please” you pant on, pushing at his forehead.
“N- noo. . prefect, pl- please. .” He protested, resting his cheek against your thigh, pouting at you.
“Just one more. .” Ruggie says, grinning mischievously when you nod your head.
You know it wouldn’t be just one more, but how could you ever think of denying Ruggie when he gives you those eyes? Sure, you’ll be jelly-boned once he’s done it’s you. . but that’s a later concern!
ׅ꒰LEONA KINGSCHOLAR ୭ ˚
Similar to hyenas, male lions don’t actually have a specific season in which a rut can appear, in reality, lions can mate throughout the whole year but a rut can be triggered by the female’s heat
Lions are quite territorial of their mate, sometimes becoming rougher with the intent of leaving their mark. . awfully similar to Leona
The second you stepped into Savanclaw, Leona almost immediately woke up from his little nap— keen scents picking up at the distant and subtle yet sweet scent of you. He is patiently awaiting your arrival in his room while pretending to be asleep. . although the wild flicks of his tail give away his facade— in reality, he’s eagerly waiting for his dear prey to finally barge into his room. And when you do. . that spicy, musky, intense, sweet smell of you, practically radiating off your skin, invades his senses. . oooh, you’ve got him hooked just by your scent.
“Haaah. . nngh! C- can’t take it anymoree!” You squeal out loudly into the sweat-soaked pillow, voice muffled by the soft fabric, fat tears rolling down the curve of your cheek.
You are drooling and gasping into the sheets, mindlessly gasping out your boyfriend’s name. Your body and skin tingles, a mixture of sensitivity and overstimulation. . it aches in one of the best ways possible. Leona had already reduced you into a whimpering and whining mess; thick fingers plunging deep into your quivering hole, massaging against your velvety walls as his rough tongue drags along the swollen length of your clit. . the perfect amount of pressure to have you bucking needily.
With each mean thrust of his thick, barbed cock back into your raw, leaking, puffy cunt has a copious amount of cum pouring from your stretched hole, staining the mattress beneath your slick body further. His tongue drags roughly against the warm, marked skin of your neck, canines finding their spot on your flesh— there’s bite marks all along your neck, some on your chest, some on your thighs, there’s even some bruises indented onto your hip and thighs. It’s clear to every student, beastmen and human, that you are only Leona’s mate.
“Leonaa! L- Leona. .” You mewl out loudly, back arching further into the bed. . swollen nipples grinding against the fabric— you squirm lightly from the onslaught of pleasure.
“C’mon, herbivore. . say my name” Leona grunts out between groans of pleasure, hips snapping into yours.
“Fu- fuck. . Leona!” You sob out, whining when his grip on your hips tightens where you squirm away from his touch.
“Again” he groans out between ragged breaths, teeth finding your neck once again, leaving his mark.
His tail curls around your thighs lightly as Leona nuzzles deeper into your neck, suckling lewdly at your skin. Your eyes roll back, an intense tremble courses through your body as you gush around his barbed cock for the nth time.
“Mmhp—! F- fuck! Ngh, Leona!” You wail out loudly, walls swallowing and squeezing tightly around his length.
He groans out your name into the sweaty skin, hips firmly flushed against your body— cock bobbing and twitching painfully, buried to the hilt of your pussy. Thick ropes of cum shoots into your white covered walls, causing globs of cum to seep around his thick base.
“Haah. . n- noo more. .” You say in a breathless and rough voice, gasping when he snaps his hips back into yours.
“C’mon, herbivore. . s- surely you’re not exhausted just from this” Leona says in that prideful and arrogant tone, you can practically imagine that smirk on his face.
However, you are wayy too fucked out to give a snarky comment back— simply melting into the sheets as his skin slaps against yours with a wet plap.
ׅ‧˚꒰♡ ୭ ˚. ᵎᵎ All work belongs to only me, @/yuuna-iridescent-scales!! Translating, plagiarism, copying, posting on another website, claiming as your work will not be tolerated, instant block ᶻ Z Z
ׅᛝ AUTHOR NOTE ! ׁ ׅ ᶻ Wooow. . my first smut fic on this blogദ്ദി/ᐠ｡‸｡ᐟ\ originally, I was going to add the octotrio in this post but decided I would make a separate post(ᵕ—ᴗ—). I actually wasn’t expecting 300+ people to enjoy my first fic(..◜ᴗ◝..). I’m totally not exploding rn.. one of my fav twst writes followed me back omlomloml
Anywhores, I’m soo frustrated, pls just give me an ace or deuce card wtff. .
Idia swears he got isekai’d into a hentai game, like somehow In the very limited amount of times he even went outside, he managed got hit by truck kun and died before getting reincarnated, because he has to be in some sort of other worldly heaven. There’s just no way a super hot girl like you would genuinely pick him in a campus full of god tier guys like Vil or Malleus. Why pick an introvert like him? If this was a dream hed gladly stay asleep for the rest of his life. His ridiculously hot girlfriend was an absolute gooner. And he was a very, very weak willed man.
After much (and he means very much) in depth conversation about your interests kinks, he learned that almost nothing was off the table. Whether you wanted to watch hentai and masturbate together, edge him until he cried, overstimulate him until he was shooting blanks, or dry hump him while watching anime, he was one sigh away before he gave in.
But by far the most favorite of your kinks was the free use one. The thought of being able to take you whenever and wherever and you do the same to him. The way you’d crawl under his desk while he grinded weeklies had him go afk. Suddenly not caring about whatever rpg open world he was playing when he felt you tug his pants and your wet tongue on his cock. He gripped the edge of his expensive gamer chair as you deep throated him. His UR+ card, his diamond, his ungodly pull of a girlfriend was sucking the soul out of him. He didn’t dare pull you back or disturb your rhythm, letting you hollow your cheeks and swirl your tongue the way he liked. His stomach caving in as he came with a whine. The ends of his Hair tinged red as you swallowed his thick cum. What really killed him was the way you simply wiped your mouth before going back to whatever you were up to before and acted like nothing had happened.
That night he cuddled up with you in bed as you pushed your plush ass into him. You knew exactly what you were doing and what you wanted, but even he can be a tease. He didn’t give in until you were begging and whining for him to fuck you. To which he proceeded to only fucked your thighs (as revenge and because they’re really soft). Eventually you both fell asleep, tired from a relentless day of fucking like animals. He should have honestly known though, there is no peaceful sleep around you.
His heavy eyes opening many hours later with a raspy groan as he felt a signature warmth. His eyes blurred and it took him a while to fully process the scene in front of him. You, ontop of him, riding him to oblivion as your tits bounced wildly. The bed creaked softly and each of your moans went straight to his cock. Your tight vice of a pussy milking him for all his worth. His hands struggling to find grasp before landing on your waist to ground himself.
The surprise of his presence only made you squeeze down on him. Slowing your hips as you spoke to him softly, words slurring and partially broken “O-oh Idia, you’re awake!? I’m sorry, I just couldn’t help myself…” He could honestly cum just from the sound of your voice, but he’s already been there, done that. He thrusts up back into you with a renewed vigor, groaning as he reaches for your soft tits to squeeze at them. “G’nna cum” he grunts before you rock into him. And even though he cums first and the overstimulation has his mind numb and fingers twitching, he wouldn’t give this up for even rare first edition premo merch. Letting you use him like a glorified dildo as you cum tightly around him. Somehow making him cum even more after he thought he was emptied.
Yes he’s completely sure now, this is his infinite tsukoyomi and he’d like to stay here forever.
Description: You’re spider-man’s closest thing to a friend since the world forgot his name. Helping him with gadgets, cleaning his wounds…all without him ever taking the mask off. His true identity has always been a barrier between you two, but what happens when he gets hit with the pollen, and not only him, but the creature lurking inside him fixates on the only person he gets to call home?
Tags/warnings: sex pollen smut, fem!reader, porn with plot, whiny desperate peter >>>, dry humping, piv, riding, oral fem!rec, fingering, dark!peter taking over for a bit, orgasm denial, prone bone, so much yearning, mask stays on…or does it?
Note: You have no idea how giddy it makes me to write him again. He had NO business looking that good in the movie so I had to get this out of my system. Enjoy 🤍
Masterlist
You've seen spiderman hurt many times. When you signed the lease of the first apartment you could afford as a recent graduate, you never thought that would become your new normal.
The first time it happened was completely accidental. He’d arrived at the building in the middle of the night, bruised, bleeding and too disoriented to realize that the window he’d come through was not his.
That night, the noise of a heavy body collapsing onto the floor woke you up. For one terrifying moment, you believed someone had broken into your apartment, only to switch on the lamp and find the city’s superhero groaning and pressing his hands to his side. His suit was torn there, and blood soaked through the ruined fabric onto your rug.
He barely lifted his head when he heard you gasp, the lens of his mask focusing on your figure standing there with wide eyes, wearing only an oversized shirt.
“Wrong window,” he choked, then tried to hold himself up but immediately collapsed again. “Dammit,” he cursed, waiting for you to freak out any second now.
You could have, but instead you rushed to him and knelt beside him.
“Oh my god, are you okay?” Your hands hovered helplessly over his body, trying to see how bad the damage was in the dark. “You need a hospital–”
“No!” He snapped, trying to turn away but failing miserably. “I’ll be fine, I heal quickly.”
“You still need to stop the bleeding,” you countered, folding your knees under your body so you could rest on your calves. “Listen, I can help you. I took some medical courses last year and I have a kit somewhere.”
You looked at him with pleading eyes. He’d saved the city so many times, the fucking world, it was the least you could do to give something back.
He considered his options for a second, and to be honest he didn’t have many. His body was betraying him, and he couldn’t even get up to fix it himself like usual.
The blood loss made him nod, and you wasted no time in getting up and finding said kit. The blood loss also made him drift in and out of consciousness as you tended to the wounds on his ribs as much as you could.
It did not make him less cautious of you though. When you noticed the rip on his mask over a nasty gash on his neck and reached for it, his hand closed around your wrist and even half conscious, his grip was strong.
“Please,” he whispered. Pleaded. “Keep it on.”
The fear in his voice made you promise you would. Even if you couldn’t get to that gash properly. Even when he fell asleep on your floor and didn’t wake up for six whole hours.
The next morning, he opened his eyes and found you sitting on your bed, still staring at him.
His hands patted his chest, and confirmed his arachnid powers had done its job and healed him mostly. But most importantly, his mask was still in place. With no warning from E.V of it being removed. He learned that you’d spent the night making sure he was still breathing without seeing his face.
That had been one year ago.
After thanking you profoundly for helping him, he’d repaired your window, apologized several times, and disappeared into the apartment next door. He then considered moving into another building, but the thought was brushed away very quickly when he remembered the balance in his bank account.
So he acted more careful instead. For a while, he only turned back home when your curtains were already closed, or he only left the apartment when you had already left for your job (because yes, he absolutely researched the hell out of you after that night.)
Then he moved to the attic of the building. Bigger space, no neighbors, no risks. No you. Or at least he thought.
Because some nights…some delirious nights he still found your window a few stories down, and the accidental visits became less accidental. When he was too badly injured to care for himself, he came to you, even after you confessed your degree had nothing to do with medicine.
When he noticed you understood about his equipment malfunctioning, he’d bring it for you to inspect. When he became too reckless with himself you talked his ear off about how being difficult to kill did not make him immortal.
Somewhere along the way, you became spiderman’s friend.
Spiderman was safer. With you, spiderman was the only part of him he could let you see. Because that was the thing, you only knew the masked superhero.
He’d spent so much time blocking away his identity, making peace with the fact that there was no longer anyone in the world who would call him Peter and know exactly who that person was. That name only belonged to the people that once knew him, and no longer existed, so he never gave it to you.
Never showed you more than a sliver of skin when his mask rode up or glimpses of his abdomen when you tended to his wounds. He always kept that barrier and you respected it, even on those nights he was too weak to stop you. Even if sometimes not knowing the color of his eyes kept you up at night.
A promise was a promise.
Maybe that’s why he kept coming. Why he trusted you with a certainty he couldn’t understand. Why he eventually showed you his new living quarters in the attic and let you spend time with him. Why half a year ago, he added another chair next to his desk so you could work together, or help him when he was out patrolling and needed an extra set of eyes.
“I’m officially the girl in the chair, spidey,” you joked that time as you sat next to him, spinning around in your chair.
He’d gone quiet immediately, his body tensing up enough to make you frown, but then managed a small smile and said you were. You pretended you didn’t notice him being too quiet as he worked on his inhibitor after that.
He was wearing a hoodie, sweatpants and the mask. Always the mask that didn’t quite let you see through him. After a moment of quiet, you rolled your chair closer to his and nudged his arm playfully.
“You know I can’t keep calling you spidey forever, right?”
He snapped out of his trance, and the chuckle that came from under the fabric was unmistakable.
“Why not?” He nudged your arm back, but still focused on the device he was hunched over. “I like spidey.”
You put your elbow on the desk, resting your cheek on your hand so you could lean a little closer.
“I like it too, but it feels ridiculous after having my hands all over your body almost every night.”
The moment the words left your lips, you realized how bad that sounded. He straightened up, turning toward you.
“Wow.” Even if you couldn’t see the smile on his face, the lenses of his mask were quite expressive sometimes. He was amused.
“That came out very wrong,” you said immediately, before he bursted into laughter. He had been laughing more since you entered his life. “You know what I meant,” you whined, laughing too with heat flooding your cheeks.
“I think I know,” he chuckled, making you roll your eyes.
“I’m being serious though,” you added, a little more quietly. “You don’t have to say your real name. Just give me something.”
“Mmm…” he acted like has considering it, going back to tinkering with the piece of metal between his fingers, but then his eyes drifted to the flowers he’d bought that morning, and the name came out of his lips before he could think twice about it. “You can call me Maynard.”
“Maynard?” You repeated, suppressing a chuckle. “You don’t sound like a Maynard. That’s like an 80 year old man’s name.”
“That’s all I can give you,” he shrugged playfully.
You had a feeling it went deeper than that, but you’d also learned not to push it with him.
“Alright. Maynard,” you nodded, “but don’t expect me to use that name unless you’re dying. Guess I’ll stick to spidey for now,” you chuckled, going back to your own work as he hummed in agreement.
The conversation ended there. With him trying not to think about your hands all over his body in…different conditions.
Peter didn’t know exactly when his gratitude became longing. He could not identify the moment the friendship, the closeness, or just your smile, shifted into something he craved everyday.
Despite the mask and the fake name, he knew that after years of being no one to everyone, he had become someone to you. And you had become everything to him. Even if it was behind walls he’d built, you were the person who knew him better than anyone alive.
Which is why, the night he lost control of himself after an unknown dust was thrown at him in a fight, he chose not to crash land into your room.
Peter hit the floor of the dark attic with a loud thud, as his senses went overboard. His suit was sticking to his body uncomfortably due to the sweat coating his feverish skin. The fabric was intact, with no visible wounds in his body, just that burning sensation of something running through his veins.
And that dark part of him he’d managed to lock down with the inhibitor, trying to claw its way out.
“What the…what the fuck is going on,” he cursed, clutching his heaving chest as he panted against the worn wood floors. “I can’t–I can’t breathe…”
The computer’s monotone voice broke through the silence.
“You have arrived injured. I’m letting her know–”
“NO!” He cut the AI off, “EV, don’t tell her–”
“Message already sent.”
He glanced up at the digital clock on his desk. 2:18 am.
He groaned, grabbing his head when a wave of migraine hit him. He knew what came after that. The black eyes. The desire to break. To take. But this time something felt different. It was like a pull, looking for something or someone…for…for you?
Oh fuck.
You were going to come in and you were going to see him like this. No, no–
“Spidey?” You asked from behind the door, knocking exactly twice before opening it anyways.
The air changed the exact moment you walked in, and that something inside him shifted too. It became aware that the only thing it craved to survive was in the room now.
He needed to get to you. He needed to pin you down and–
“Don’t!” He managed to scream, holding his hand up weakly when you scrambled toward him.
You stopped right in your tracks, eyes wide and running all over him, searching for torn fabric, blood, or anything that would explain why he looked like every breath was painful.
“What happened?” You frowned, when you couldn’t find any source. “Did you get hurt?”
You instinctively stepped forward, but he waved his hand in front of him again.
“Stop, stop, stop,” he said quickly, “don’t come any closer.”
The harshness in his voice caught you off guard, but what sealed the deal was him dragging himself further away from you. It was barely more than a clumsy, desperate crawl, but he managed to put a decent distance between you before collapsing against the side of his thrifted couch.
He avoided looking at you. The oversized shirt covering your body, the comfy shorts you were probably wearing, the way your hair looked messy from rolling out of bed as soon as you got EV’s warning even if you had work the next morning.
You stayed right where you were, watching him. His suit had always fit him like it was painted on his skin, but every pant made his chest rise and fall beneath the fabric so violently that you wouldn’t be surprised if it ripped at the seams.
This reminded you too much of the changes that happened in him months ago.
It started with a sharpened temper, then the heightened sensitivity to everything, the black covering his eyes, and moments during patrol when his reactions became simply frightening for someone who had as much strength as he did. But you were supposed to have stopped it.
“Is it the inhibitor?” You asked, crossing your arms over your chest, “is it failing?”
“I–I don’t know…I was hit with some dust out there,” he breathed. “I think it’s tampering with it…my head is killing me. Everything is too much.”
You nodded, turning toward the workstation.
“I will check the programming. Just hold on.” Not your best attempt at reassuring him, but he groaned in acknowledgment.
“EV?”
The computer woke when you touched the keyboard, illuminating the dark attic in a wash of blue light.
“Online.”
“Please run a diagnostic on the inhibitor and any possible interference.”
“Beginning diagnostic.”
You waited impatiently for the results, tapping your fingers on the desk while you watched him from the corner of your eye.
Over there, he…he was doing his best trying to breathe.
This obviously wasn't his first time having sensory overload. When the animal tried to take over the human part of him, everything in the city became impossible to escape. Not a single movement, or sound, or simple existence within miles was unnoticed by him.
But this time? The rest of the city had disappeared. There were no sirens in the distance, or voices coming through the walls, or every heartbeat in the building pounding in his head.
There was only you.
Your rapid heartbeat echoing inside him. He felt every tap of your fingers against the wood, every slight catch in your breathing each time he made another involuntary and pathetic sound from his spot on the floor.
Your scent…God, your scent filled the entire apartment.
The scent he found himself coming back to so often that it scared him. He didn’t want the attachment. The possibility of having someone again only to risk losing them again.
That same scent was making every muscle in his body react in a way he didn’t understand. It made him, and the other him, wanna do things to you he had only dreamed of in his wildest fantasies. Things he wasn’t proud of, things he wouldn’t dare to say out loud, even if he looked at you through the lenses of his mask and you couldn’t see the black in his eyes.
He pressed the back of his head against the couch harshly.
This was wrong. So wrong.
His senses were supposed to consume everything when the change came. Instead, they had fixed themselves entirely on you.
He could feel the heat of your body from across the room as though you were still in front of him. Could remember with sickening detail how soft your hands looked when they reached for him. Could almost feel the burn of the touch that had never landed because he stopped you.
What if he’d let you? What if he’d felt the way your hands ran all over his body? What if you’d moved them lower, and lower, as your mouth–
“Diagnostic complete.”
Your heads snapped toward the screen.
“There’s no external damage affecting the integrity of the device. I detected a foreign biotoxin in the bloodstream that may be bypassing the inhibitor, activating the suppressed arachnid hormones.”
“What biotoxin?” You frowned.
“Unknown. No matches found in available databases.”
Great. He thought. He had no time to take a bath with Yelena Belova to find out what the stupid dust was.
The screen changed, displaying a model of his nervous system. There were yellow bright lines pulsing quickly, running all the way from the base of his brain down the length of his spine. Something unknown was moving through his blood, altering the part of him he had spent months forcing into submission.
He sucked in a breath as he watched you read the screen. Your eyes were focused, and a bead of sweat made its way down the side of your forehead.
He suddenly felt the need to lick it off.
Wanted to run his tongue from the base of your neck to the back of your ear. Wanted to fist your hair and make your heart beat out of your chest from how good he knew he could make you feel–
“The effects remain within his enhanced tolerance. However, prolonged exposure to certain hormones can cause extreme distress without relief.”
“What hormones?” Your voice, worried and unknowing of his thoughts only made him feel guiltier.
It took him a second to realize what you asked, but EV threw him under the bus before he could say anything.
“There’s a significant rise in reproductive hormones. The unknown toxin is inducing a strong mating response in him.”
Mating response. He stopped breathing.
Your eyes slowly moved from the monitor to him, and he saw the moment your attention dropped lower to the tent of his pants.
That suit concealed nothing on a good day. On one like this? Fuck. Fuck. Fuck–
He shifted almost immediately, but the movement only worsened the pressure, pulling a helpless groan from his throat that made your pulse jump. You looked away at once, turning back to the computer.
“Is there a way we can…umm…stop it?” You asked hesitantly.
“The subject is experiencing severe sexual arousal with a fixation on a nearby individual,” she explained, because fuck him if he wasn’t the unluckiest individual on earth. “Acting upon it can be a positive option to relieve sexual tension.”
He wished the floor would open beneath him, swallow him, and never ever EVER spit him back out again.
Your pulse was absolutely hammering after that. He caught the sudden change in your scent. There was a sharp spark of surprise, nervousness, and something else beneath it that his altered senses fed on immediately.
You kept your eyes fixed on the monitor, although the data had stopped meaning anything the moment you heard fixation on a nearby individual.
“Is that what you really feel?” You asked softly after a moment.
His head fell forward, catching it between his gloved hands. He didn’t know how to answer without making everything worse.
Although, after what EV said, could it really be worse?
“…Yes.” The word came out rougher than he expected. Yet still not enough for what was happening inside him. “It’s like…I can only feel you. All of you.”
Heat rose to your face once again.
“What does that mean?”
Don’t say anything, don’t–
“I can smell you.” Great start, idiot. He cleared his dry throat before continuing. “I can smell your shampoo…the lotion you use…the ink on your hands from your favorite pen.”
He chose not to mention he could also smell the adrenaline on you. The heat gathering slowly beneath your skin.
Your eyes dropped to your hands, and under the dim light of the computer, you caught the ink stains in them from your journaling session before bed.
“I can hear your heartbeat changing every time I speak,” he added. Okay, that one slipped out.
You swallowed. And god, he felt that in his own throat.
The suit was suffocating him at this point. He wanted to rip it off as much as he wanted to rip off the fabric covering the goosebumps on your skin.
“Is it only because I’m nearby?” You asked, gathering the courage to turn your chair to him.
White lenses met you across the room. He dragged in another shaky breath of oxygen made of you as he thought about his next words. He could’ve lied. He should’ve lied. But instead, chemically overwhelmed and stripped of every defense he possessed, he gave you the truth.
“No.”
His voice was firmer this time. No hesitation in it despite the thousand red alarms pounding in his head telling him to shut up.
“It picked you–no, I picked you for a reason,” he added. “And it’s not just me. The other…the other me wants you too.”
His voice went lower on the last part, that told you how much it cost him to admit that.
The silence following his confession was heavy. For a moment he wished he could read your mind. For all he could feel of you, your thoughts were unreachable.
His own mind was a mess. The impulses didn’t feel like thoughts anymore, just his body feeding him instructions.
Get up. Cross the room. Touch her. Breathe her in.
His palms shook with the urge to close around you. His teeth ached with the need to graze your skin. His eyes burned with the desire to see beyond fabric.
Every part of him seemed convinced that the small distance between you was a mistake he needed to correct. That he needed to breathe you in until his lungs burned. Drag his mouth along the inside of your wrist and taste the pulse there.
He hated it.
He hated that something inside him could look at the person he cared for the most and reduce her to an answer for his pain.
“EV, how long is this state going to last?” He asked the computer, followed by a weak cough as he clutched his side.
“Your enhanced physiology is struggling to break down the toxin’s structure. I estimate a time between ten to twelve hours before it’s metabolized. However, neurological collapse is expected before that timeframe.”
“What?” You looked at him. “There’s no way we’re letting that happen. Maybe I can–”
“Don’t even start,” he cut you off, shaking his head profusely.
“So what? I’m supposed to sit here betting on whether your body collapses on hour three or hour six?”
“I’ll just pass out, big deal. I’m not putting you in danger because of this. I can handle it.”
“You’re barely handling it now. There’s no danger in trying–”
“You don’t understand what’s happening inside me right now,” he argued, raising his voice. “This other thing, the one the inhibitor controls it’s…awake. That part of me doesn’t think like I do. It doesn’t care if you're scared, or hurting–”
“You wouldn’t hurt me–”
“You don’t know that!” He snapped, his fist struck the floor next to him, hard enough to make the worn wood crack beneath his knuckles.
The sudden noise made you flinch. He smelled the flash of fear moving through your body for only a second.
One second enough.
“Fuck–that is what I mean,” he cursed, covering his lenses with his hands. “I don’t…I don’t know if I’d be gentle. I can’t risk this, I can't…shit, I can’t risk you.”
The words, said with so much pain, and honesty, seemed to settle somewhere deep in your chest.
“Okay,” you nodded, settling deeper in your chair. “But I’m not leaving you like this. I can’t risk you either.”
He shuddered a painful exhale. His head dropped to the couch again, shutting his eyes in preparation of what the next hours of torture would be.
Except…he didn’t even last ten minutes.
The suit was killing him, so he decided he’d be better without it. He reached desperately behind his back, clumsily undoing the zippers that tied the suit together.
He could feel your wide eyes on him as he tugged the fabric off his shoulders, peeling it off his sweaty arms. He groaned when he lifted his hips and the suit grazed his swollen crotch. In a matter of seconds that felt like eternity he managed to break free from the spandex, and threw it away somewhere in the room. He’d undressed down to his dark boxers, mask still in place, revealing the marble sculpture of his body.
You let out a shaky breath from your spot, eyes raking over a body you’d only seen partially. He was covered in wounds most of the time, but this time, he only had faint bruises from the night before decorating his chiseled abs.
His tight muscles flexed with every rise of his chest, his bulge straining harder the more you devoured him, pressing against his pants, making him curse quietly.
You noticed, and returned your eyes to the screen to track his vitals.
He felt grateful that you’d given him that grace, but just you being in that room made it very hard for him to think of anything other than your existence.
Too hard.
Before he knew his hand drifted down the growing ache in his crotch, trying to feel some relief, but every rub he made over the fabric of his boxers sent a jolt of pain through his body instead of pleasure.
It only made it worse when he realized you were tense at the desk, trying very hard to keep your focus on the screen and not on the whines he was letting out.
“…I’m sorry,” he apologized instantly, breathlessly, moving his hand away. “I didn’t–”
“Don’t apologize,” you shook your head quickly, eyes still on the screen. “You…you can do whatever you need.”
He didn’t say anything, just whined in pain again, so you took it as a chance to say it before you regretted it.
“But my offer still stands, spidey.”
What a polite way of saying ‘I’d let you fuck me into next week so you can control your horny arachnid hormones, spidey.’
Fucking hell.
“I’m okay I just–God I didn’t–I didn’t think it would feel this way…” He laughed humorlessly, staring at the ceiling. “But I–I got this. Yes.”
You kept quiet, hearing him mumble to himself about a hundred times about how he had this.
“I’m okay…I’m good…it’s fine…”
He wasn’t.
“Fuck I don’t…I’m going to die…”
For God’s sake.
“I think I can help.”
By the time he registered the words and looked back at you, you had already moved from your chair and shortened the distance between you, kneeling in front of him.
His senses went from one thousand to one million. He forced his hands behind his back, trying to keep the animal from grabbing you and getting it over with.
“What–what are you doing?” He stammered nervously, the lenses of his mask going wide.
“Maynard,” you said quietly, ignoring the way his body tensed up at that name. “Would it make you feel better if I put my hand here?”
You placed your hand right in the center of his chest, and your cold palm met his overheated skin. He gasped, feeling every individual fingerprint on his skin. He wanted them marked on him. Tattooed.
His back arched from the couch, with a strangled gasp breaking from beneath the mask. The relief hit him all at once, through a simple contact that felt like salvation.
Your hand steadied him for only a glorious second, but now that you had touched him, his body knew precisely what it had been denied.
It wanted more.
His own hand closed around yours so suddenly that you almost pulled back, but he loosened his grip the instant he realized how tightly he was holding you.
“Sorry–”
“Don’t apologize.” You pressed harder.
He was burning.
The heat beneath your palm scared you, but what scared you more was the violent pounding of his heart beating against your hand so so quickly.
“Better?” You asked quietly, trying not to bite your bottom lip at the image of him crumbling under your palm.
“So fucking better,” he said breathlessly, pressing your hand tighter against his chest. “I…dammit–”
“Breathe,” you reminded.
His head fell back against the couch. Chest rising up and down, up and down, up and down.
Just take her, man, she’s right there–
Your free hand accidentally brushed his neck, right where the border of the mask started, snapping him right back. He grabbed your hand, not harshly, but firm enough to make your breath hitch.
“Please.” Was all he said.
Leave it on.
It brought you back to that first night he’d crashed into your life.
“I wasn’t planning on removing it,” you whispered, leaning closer. “You can keep it on. But let me help you…I really want to.”
See? She wants it. She needs it so bad.
He hated that the other guy was right. He knew you meant what you said because he could smell the proof pooling between your thighs.
Fuck it.
In a sudden movement he reached for your waist, dragging you forward so you were straddling his lap. The bulge you landed on made you gasp, hands instinctively grabbing onto his sweaty biceps for balance when he let out a broken groan that vibrated against your core.
His hand cupped your jaw, bringing it closer to his face, and your dilated pupils reflected on the white of his lenses.
“I can feel that you want this,” he mumbled, tilting his head to the side. “Please, say it again…”
You shifted your hips, barely, so minimal yet he felt it travel through his whole body. He hissed, tightening the grip on your jaw.
“I want this,” you repeated firmly, moving your head closer to his ear. “You can take whatever you need…”
You moved your hips again, more deliberate this time, pulling a broken whine from him. The toxin made every contact feel like electricity racing down his spine, straight to the heavy, aching weight of his cock under you.
“Yes…yeah just like that…” he panted. “Just let me…”
His hands landed on your waist, moving you back and forth at a quicker pace over his bulge. You gasped at the friction, fingers digging into his shoulders, while he let out a collection of muffled words you could barely understand.
“...M–more…” he whined, throwing his head back against the couch. “I can’t–I need…”
“What do you need? More what?”
“More contact.”
His hands left your waist to grab the hem of your shirt.
“Can I?” He whispered.
You nodded eagerly, gasping when his hands shifted to the collar of your shirt instead, ripping it off your body with a sharp pull.
“Oh fuck,” he cursed when he realized there was nothing under that shirt, and saw your nipples hardening instantly under the cold air.
He resisted the urge to bite them through the mask.
His hands, however, wasted no time to cup your breasts with a broken whine. His thumbs played with your nipples, tugging at them as hard as he could allow himself to without hurting you.
“Fuck you’re perfect…you’re so perfect…” he whispered, more to himself than you, pulling some soft whimpers out of you when he tugged a little harder. His hands drifted to your lower half, to the hem of the last piece keeping your body from his greedy eyes. “These too,” he said, “please, can I? I want to feel you.”
“Yes,” you nodded, already out of air.
You didn’t even know why you tried to get off his lap to take the shorts off properly, when he just did the same as the shirt: ripped it in half where it rested on your hips, yanked it off from your body and threw the ruined pieces far away.
You weren’t wearing anything underneath.
“I can smell you. God, I can smell you. You’re so–oh God…”
Now he could feel your wetness drenching his boxers, dripping onto the fabric. He could almost taste it in his mouth. He wanted nothing more than to drown in it for hours.
“Can–can I–?”
You didn’t even let him finish, you grabbed his hand and placed it right between your legs.
Water. He found water in the middle of the dessert.
His hand moved carefully through your wet folds once, twice, delighting in your warmth, the way you felt, the way you let out the prettiest sound he had ever heard in his miserable life.
“Fuck…” you cursed softly, moving your hips eagerly when he kept stroking slow. Too slow. “Touch me, please.”
He obliged, fingers finding your clit in movements that had you gripping his shoulders tighter, eyes fluttering shut so beautifully he had to bite his lip to not let out a pathetic sound.
“Been wanting this,” he mumbled. “Longer than today. Longer than tonight.”
His finger slid inside of you, making you moan when he curled it just right.
“There were…there were nights I thought about you riding my hand,” he kept going, voice cracking as he added a second finger, stretching you more. “I’ve wanted you for so long–not just because of this shit in my blood. Because it’s you.”
Every word made you clench around his fingers. Every admission pulled another shaky moan out of your throat. You were a mess already, breathless, hips rolling down to meet the thrust of his fingers.
“Oh my God–don’t stop, please don’t stop–”
“Not stopping, baby.”
He kept working you open, the white lenses of the mask never leaving your face. His free hand slid up your chest, settling between your breasts.
“I’m–I’m close,” you managed. “I’m so close–”
“Come on…you’re perfect. You’re so fucking perfect like this.”
The heel of his palm lifted to press against your clit. You were right there, right on the edge, about to come on his hand and drip down his boxers–
“Please,” he begged, unable to keep it in. “Let me fuck you after this…please. I need to be inside you. I’ve needed it for so long–just let me, after you come, please, please–”
The plea undid you.
You came with a broken cry, stopping your movements as your walls pulsed around him. The sound you made against his shoulder nearly finished him right there.
It took you a second to just breathe again, your chest synching up with his in the search of oxygen. He kept rocking his hand slowly, not just to work you through the aftershocks, but because the friction of your pussy in his hand brought the tiniest relief to him.
You just stayed there as the last soft waves rolled through you.
Once you were able to see clearly again, you let out a breathless chuckle and straightened back up.
He needed you. He needed you so badly you really thought he was going to die if you didn’t help him.
You placed one hand on his chest as the other reached under you, slipping inside the fabric of his boxers without breaking eye contact.
The second your bare fingers brushed him, his hips jerked hard under you.
“You said please,” you whispered breathlessly.
You wrapped your fingers around him and pulled him free.
His cock sprang out, heavy and flushed between your bodies, so thick and hard and painful. The head was red and shiny, with precum dripping down the vein that ran along his length. The tip brushed the skin of your stomach, leaving a warm, wet patch that made the hair on your arms go up. He could smell the small flicker of intimidation sparking inside you, but the want that followed was stronger.
You stroked him a few times, slowly just as he’d touched you at first.
“Oh my God, your hand–your hand–”
Another thick bead of precum welled up and spilled over your fingers. Whether it was the toxin or just his enhanced physiology, he was dripping for you.
Flustered wasn’t enough of a word when you had his leaking cock in your hand.
His hands slid down to your hips, gripping tighter, guiding you up as if he was about to lift you then pulling you back down immediately.
Fuck her. Fuck her right now.
“Please, I need–I need to feel you…” he cried out. “Let me…let me…”
You nodded just as desperately, lifting yourself up as he helped, steadying you with shaking hands until the thick head of his cock nudged against your entrance. You both exhaled hard at the same time when you started to sink down, taking him inch by inch.
He was big. Almost too much. The burn of it made your breath hitch, but the way he cursed under his breath multiple times, completely at your mercy, made you keep going until he was buried balls deep.
You sat there for a moment, breathing heavily, and so full of him.
When the initial sting faded away, you started moving. He let you set the pace as you adjusted, holding back his need of thrusting up. His fingers dug on your skin, not lifting just holding you, but the more that you moved, the more that control started to waver.
He could feel it coming. The change.
You kept moaning, bouncing on top of him, completely unaware of his self restraint crumbling away.
His grip slowly tightened when his eyes began turning completely black under his mask. That careful, pathetic boy who’d been begging disappeared beneath something more…primal.
Fuck. Whatever had been holding him back finally snapped.
The next thing he knew, his hands slid under your thighs with sudden strength. He lifted you up in one motion until only the thick head of him remained inside you, held you there for a second as the last part of him tried to remember how to be gentle–then snapped his hips up hard.
That first thrust pulled a sharp moan out of you, but there was no chance to adjust this time. He set a relentless pace almost immediately, using pure strength to bounce you on his cock while he drove up to meet every drop of your body, buried so deep it stole your breath every time he bottomed out.
“Oh my–May…Maynard–” the name you barely used on him slipped out in the middle of the frenzy, but his hand reached behind your head to pull your hair back slightly as he kept thrusting up.
“Don’t call me that,” he snapped, his voice so different from just minutes earlier. “It’s Peter. Call me Peter when I’m inside you.”
He didn’t even give you time to process, still lifting and dropping you onto his cock at the exact hard rhythm he wanted. The only one that satisfied the need inside of him. Your hands instinctively reached for the edge of the arm of the couch he was leaning against, fingers digging into the worn fabric as he hit that spot inside you over and over again.
“Of fuck…Peter–fuck…yes…”
“That’s better,” he approved. “I was right, you’re so so perfect…taking every inch like you need it as bad as I do…”
A desperate sound slipped out of you at the praise, he could feel your walls clenching tight around him as your body went for that second orgasm, your eyes were fluttering shut, almost there–
“Nuh–uh,” he denied immediately, stopping mid thrust, holding you pressed against him as you gasped, surprised and confused.
“What–what happened? I was about to–”
“I want you to hold it for me. I know you can.”
That twisted part of him enjoyed the slow realization on your face.
Even if you couldn’t see his eyes, you knew the same spiderman he’d been without the inhibitor, was the one with your body at his mercy now.
Good.
He stayed buried to the hilt for a moment, breathing hard behind the mask. When your breathing finally slowed down and accepted that the high never came, he stood up. Still inside you, he walked you to the bed in the corner of the room.
His bed.
He pulled out with a wet sound that made both of you groan, then laid you down roughly near the edge of the mattress. He kneeled down, strong hands hooking behind your knees and dragging your legs over his shoulders, folding you open for him completely.
“Look at the ceiling,” he ordered. “Don’t look at me.”
You obeyed, staring up at the wood beams high above you while he tugged the bottom of the mask just high enough to free his mouth.
Peter leaned down and pressed a few soft kisses to your swollen folds. He wasn’t necessarily eating you out, just giving a few loud smooches that felt good enough to make you grip the sheets.
“M’sorry, you were so perfect there…” he mumbled condescendingly against your most sensitive spots. “But I need you to hold on a little longer. Can you do that for me, sweetheart?”
You nodded, eyes still fixed on the ceiling. Maybe too eager. Maybe too pathetic. Just like he’d been. Had he pumped that toxin into you?
Either way, you didn’t care. You’d be lying if you said you didn’t like this version of him.
He laughed right over your clit when you moaned loudly, after he moved his tongue in a slow, torturous swipe over it.
“Was back there too much?” He cooed. “Maybe I just need to stretch you more...”
Two fingers slid inside you, so easily, but the sudden stretch still dragged a whine out of your throat. He curled them immediately, finding the spot that made your hips jerk.
“Peter…”
“Huh?” He acted coy, pumping his fingers with a rhythm that kept you right on the edge without letting you tip over. He added a third finger, making your back arch from the mattress. “Keep holding it in.”
Every shake of your body fed the stupid toxin inside him. Having you like this…really trying to keep your body from coming apart because he said so.
God. He was never going back.
“You just took my cock. I think you can take three fingers with no problem.”
He kept the same relentless pace, chuckling when your body started twitching again.
“Shhh, you’re perfect, absolutely perfect…”
“Peter…” you called out again, hand dropping the sheet to find his shoulder instead. “I need…need…”
“Need what?”
“Need you inside me…please I won’t–I won’t hold for much longer just–fuck me.”
He stopped altogether, a smirk you couldn’t see stretching the corner of his mouth. He pulled his fingers out with a wet pop, licking them clean before tugging his mask back in place and standing up.
“Yeah?”
Your legs dangled off the edge of the bed for a moment before his hands gripped your hips and turned you over. He moved you higher up the bed, grabbing one of the pillows, and shoving it under your hips, tilting your lower body up for him.
He then climbed onto the bed behind you and knelt between your spread thighs, the mattress dipping under his weight as one hand stroked down the length of your spine.
But something made him stop.
“This fucking mask–” he cursed under his breath. “It’s suffocating me.”
The sweat on his forehead had pooled under the mask, making it so sticky over his eyebrows that it was affecting the lenses he was trying to see you through.
“I need you to be a good girl for me,” he added breathlessly, yet still commanding enough. “Keep your head on the mattress. Ass up. Don’t turn around.”
You nodded. Too eagerly again. Couldn’t care any less again.
He didn’t think twice, just yanked the mask off and tossed it aside. It landed near you, making you bury half your face on the sheets as if staring at the mask alone would be disobeying his commands.
The sound he made when the cool air hit his face was pure relief. He swiped the sweat off with his forearm, finally seeing you clearly. Face down. Eyes squeezed shut. Already clutching the sheets.
“You look so pretty like this,” he mumbled. “All spread out for me…waiting.”
“Peter…” you whined, lifting your ass slightly from the pillow.
“I know, I know. You’re okay.” He couldn’t keep the smirk away when he added, “you said please.”
He reached between you, guiding the thick head of his cock between your thighs until it nudged against your entrance. You were still soft and ready and perfect.
Peter pushed in slowly, letting you feel every inch as he sank deep and deep and deeper.
He braced one hand beside your head and kept the other on your hip, pushing you into the mattress as his thighs hit the back of yours. Slap. Slap. Slap. The position left almost no space between your bodies, with Peter pressing his chest against your back.
“Fuck…you feel so good like this…so pretty taking me.”
He kept going, making the mattress creak and the base of the bed hit the brick wall repeatedly. Your desperate moans ran through his body like electricity, making something inside him crack open again.
What? What is–
The moment his rhythm stuttered, he shook his head, trying to clear it. Beads of sweat flew from his hair to your back.
“God–you…you’re making me–” The roughness of his thrusts slowed down immediately, inhaling a sharp intake of air as he felt the change again. “I can’t, I can’t…”
He lifted his gaze to the window behind the bed and noticed his eyes had turned back to its original color.
“Oh my god,” he gasped, stopping altogether. He straightened up, still kneeling and inside you, but panicking. “I’m…I’m so sorry. I don’t know what happened I–“
“Peter!” You cut him off, pushing yourself back, closer to him, without turning around. “Shut up and fuck me.”
The order left your mouth breathless, pushing back against him even more to make the point clear. His hands twitched when they gripped your hips again.
“Okay, okay…” he panted, groaning when you dropped back on the bed and his cock almost left the warmth of your pussy. “I’m sorry–if I was too rough, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to…”
He picked up the pace again, but the words tumbling out of him now were pure pleading Peter again.
“Don’t turn around–don’t turn around–fuck, fuck…” slap, slap, slap. “You can come now. Please. Please, I want to feel it–you’d come apart so pretty on me, I know you would…pleasepleaseplease–”
His final permission and the desperate way he said it made you crash harder than the first time, crying out into the mattress. The second he felt you coming around him, he knew he couldn’t last much longer either.
“Can I–inside…please, can I??…let me fill you up–”
“Yes–inside, Peter, do it inside me…”
He buried himself to the hilt with a strained groan and finally came. The orgasm tearing out of him was harder and longer than anything he’d ever felt, holding you there, filling you up.
You gasped against the sheets, breathless, as the waves of cum seemed to go on forever, flooding you with warm and thick ropes in every spurt as he emptied himself inside you.
“Thank you…thank you…” His forehead dropped between your shoulder blades, sending broken gasps against your skin as he kept coming. “You are so perfect–fuck…so perfect…thank you…”
The pollen wrung him dry until he could barely breathe, and even then he kept rolling his hips weakly, chasing the last of it while he slowly softened inside you.
When it finally eased, the pain, the need, the hunger…he pulled out slowly with a whine, and half collapsed over you. His arms held most of his weight as he planked above you, but you could feel every ridge of his muscles brushing your sweaty skin.
Peter’s eyes fluttered shut, feeling exhausted and aching in the best way, almost lulled by the sounds of your agitated breaths.
You both felt the warm trail of liquid leaking out between your bodies and neither of you moved or said anything for a while. He could’ve stayed like that forever, really. With your naked body under him, no masks, no barriers, just your swollen pussy leaking out his seed–
“Successful ejaculation brought down the arachnid hormone levels immediately. Inhibitor working within regular parameters now. Congratulations, Peter.”
EV’s monotone voice cut through the silence.
It took two seconds of shock before you both broke into breathless laughter. His teeth grazed your back as your bodies vibrated in sync from the amusement and overall flustering after everything that happened.
“Thank you, EV,” Peter muttered.
“You’re welcome. I gathered data and the released semen volume exceeds standard parameters by two hundred and twenty six percent due to the high hormonal concentration. Hydration, clean up and rest are advised.”
“For fucks sake…” Peter cursed under his breath.
“Oh god…” you mumbled against the sheets.
That was your call back to reality.
Peter felt you move under him, reaching blindly to the side until your hand found the mask. You lifted it over your shoulder, offering it to him without looking.
“I don’t want to,” he said, too quickly, then cleared his throat. “I…I don’t want to put it back on.”
“Then I’ll close my eyes,” you offered instead.
“No–I mean…you don’t have to. I don’t want to wear it around you anymore. Not after…all of this,” he admitted sheepishly.
“But you told me to not turn around,” you reminded him, dropping the mask on the mattress again. “And that was you, not the darker you.”
He chuckled, nodding even if you couldn’t see him yet.
“Yeah, because if I saw your face while I was balls deep inside you I would’ve busted before you came.”
There it was. He said it. No turning back now.
At least it got a chuckle from you too.
“Listen I…I meant everything I said. Everything. The wanting, the nights I thought about you,” he confessed. “I don’t want you to feel like I just used you when…when there was always a reason why I needed you like oxygen tonight.”
Your breath hitched, and his hand found your waist, pulling you closer to him, and when you didn’t push away…he exhaled in relief behind you.
“So maybe…you can turn around now. If–if you want to. Know the real me.”
“I would really like that,” you whispered without hesitation.
You tried lifting yourself up to turn around, but he did most of the job, moving away the pillow he had placed under you and helping you roll onto your back. You closed your eyes, at least until you were facing him completely, and took a deep breath. Holding onto his biceps for moral support, you finally opened them again.
Seeing his face for the first time felt so intimate, even after everything you just did.
There he was. The same guy who just fucked you into next week, looking more shy and boyish than you could’ve ever imagined.
Brown eyes. Dark, curly hair sticking to his forehead. A nervous smile tugging at the corner of his gorgeous mouth.
So young. So earnest. So yours.
Not spidey anymore. Just Peter.
Your Peter.
Thank you so much for reading 🤍 I used to write Peter so much back in the day (shoutout to my starktonyx era) and I’ve missed him dearly.
PAIRING: Sanji/Female Reader. CONTENTS: Graphics Depictions of Violence, Canon-Typical Violence, Jealousy, Self-Esteem Issues, Self-Worth Issues, Misunderstandings, Light Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Kidnapping, Love Confessions. WORDCOUNT: 6.6k
Summary:
Your heart growing fonder for Sanji was unexpected in the grand scheme of things. You knew his attention wasn’t singularly focused on you; he was that way with every woman, particularly Nami.
It was a different kind of tenderness he held for her, and as much as you loved her, you couldn't help an ugly feeling creeping up inside you.
Notes:
I wanted this fic to be about insecurities, the reader and Nami's friendship, and obviously, misunderstandings when it comes to Sanji.
It's been a while since I wrote a fic with no suggestiveness? no implied sexual content? who even am i? This fic was planned for this tho, and i'm not soooo sure it came out that great but I'm glad i could let some stuff out! I hope you guys enjoy it!
If you have a few bucks to spare, consider buying me a kofi!
Your heart growing fonder for Sanji was unexpected in the grand scheme of things; you had never liked a man like him before. Someone so attentive towards you, never letting you go a minute without offering his service, whether that was a meal or a beverage or almost anything. You could ask him to jump into the ocean and get a pearl from the bottom of it and he would most likely do it without a single complaint. However, you would never ask anything of him; he was free to do as he pleased, and you loved to see the things that he could come up with to show his admiration for anyone.
You knew well that was a mask on his part, you could see through the cracks and what it could mean for him to be so loud about his adoration and his acts of service. And you wanted to know more about him, if he would let you.
You knew his attention wasn’t singularly focused on you; he was that way with every woman, particularly Robin and Nami.
Nami.
It wasn’t like you didn’t know about Sanji’s affection for her, it had been obvious since the moment you joined the crew. It was in the way he looked at her, looked after her, in his praises spilling so naturally from his lips whenever she was around. It was a different kind of tenderness he held for her, and as much as you loved her, you couldn't help an ugly feeling creeping up inside you.
It was unbearable sometimes, especially when you were sharing time with her, gossiping about whatever had caught your attention one day, lounging on the deck of the Thousand Sunny, when Sanji would show up like he usually did, offering treats for you.
“Ladies, a drink especially made for you, so the hot weather doesn’t affect you!” Sanji announced with a grand gesture, showing you the glasses on a plate.
You smiled, content that he had been considerate without you even asking, and took the drink in your hand. You thanked him just as Nami showed him a smile, almost simultaneously, and you witnessed his eyes turning into hearts in a beat.
You couldn’t blame him at all. You also had eyes, you saw what a gorgeous woman Nami was, her every move was gracious, and she was smart and feisty. Nonetheless, you couldn’t help your feelings, and it annoyed you every time you were near them.
“Nami, dearest, would you like dessert?”
“Nami, your kindness knows no boundaries!”
“Nami, if there’s anything you need, you only need to call for me!”
You wondered if her name would ever wear out with how much he called for her.
At some point, you had decided to distance yourself from them whenever you notice it was going to be intense (it wasn’t on Nami’s part, Sanji was in for the theatrics and the only one to blame for being loud about his attraction).
You adored the Strawhats, incredibly so, but until your feelings passed, until you felt safe again, you decided it’d be for the best to step away when you knew it’d be too much.
“Are you okay, my love?”
You eyed Sanji carefully from your seat at the bar. The drink in your hand was only half full, as you had started to drink probably 10 minutes before he walked in. The expression on his face showed his concern, and you knew you must have made some kind of grimace. Or maybe he could see right through you, who knows.
“I’m okay.” You replied, flatly.
“Are you sure? You disappeared just to be here on your own.” He still offered you a small smile, like he was trying to appease you. It made you ache. “Do you want some company? I could prepare some drinks for you, anything you want-”
“I just need some time alone.” You interrupted him. You didn’t mean for your tone to be cold, but it wasn’t the first drink you had, and it wasn’t the right emotions you were feeling.
Sanji didn’t look hurt, but he did look even more worried than before.
“I’m sorry, I just…” You started, sighing loudly before forcing a smile. “I’m fine, I just want to be by myself right now, Sanji. Thank you.”
“Of course. I’ll prepare a meal for you whenever you’re ready to go upstairs.”
He showed you his usually charming grin, and it made you melt inside.
It didn’t melt the jealousy brewing in your stomach, and it made you all the more angry with yourself. It wasn’t the first time Sanji had checked on you whenever you retracted, and you appreciated intensively; but it wasn’t what you needed considering you were the problem.
You had condemned your feelings before they could even be put into words out loud. You had neither told Sanji how you felt, or Nami that it was bothering you how close he was to her. Not that she had anything to do with it, but as your friend, you figured you should tell her everything that was currently bothering you. You were just putting it off, afraid to seem like an insane woman.
After a couple of drinks that made you a little dizzy, Sanji was waiting for you at the galley with cream filled pastries, ones you had mentioned some time ago that you loved. You were thankful you weren’t drunk enough to cry.
*
It had all happened so fast that you didn’t even know how it happened when you opened your eyes.
You were laying on a cold hard floor, in a room that was entirely foreign. While your eyes adjusted to your surroundings and the lack of light, a very familiar voice called your name.
“Are you okay?” Nami whispered nearby.
You blinked repeatedly, until you could notice her silhouette not far away.
“Where are we?” You countered.
The immediate thing you felt was nausea. When you tried to move your arms, handcuffs were tying you to what you assumed was a post. You promptly understood the position you were in.
“Another pirates’ ship, they took us when they tried to invade the Sunny. Are you okay?” She repeated, concern obvious in her tone.
“I’m chained with Seastone handcuffs…” You replied meekly, groaning when you tried to sit up.
You heard her suspire desperately.
“I’m trying to undo my chains, but it might take some time.” Nami reassured you.
The more you blinked, the more you could figure out where she was and what she was doing, especially because there was a little light coming from a porthole nearby, enough to let you see that she didn’t seem injured, but she was similarly chained to a post, maybe six feet away.
“They’ll come for us, don’t worry.” She said, without a single drop of trepidation in her voice.
“Yeah.” You smiled weakly, dizzy once you sat up, immediately resting your head against the post.
There was no doubt in your mind that they would come for you.
But it would be nice if you could get the goddamn cuffs off you.
It made sense that they had bound you like this, not only putting handcuffs on you but also making sure that you could only move so much by chaining you to the post by your hands and feet. Your Devil Fruit powers allowed you to destroy almost anything you could touch, transmitting your energy to any surface, enough to drill a hole through a wall or destroy an entire ship if you desire. There were some disadvantages with it, but none of it mattered if you couldn’t use them anyway.
You stared at Nami’s figure as she tried to pick at the lock restricting her legs. The longer you stared, the better your eyesight adjusted, and you noticed how focused she was, tongue peeking out like it usually did when she had her full attention on something. You hated to think, in moments like those, that you understood why Sanji would fall for her, why anyone would fall for her.
This wasn’t a difficult task for someone like Nami, she was called the “Cat Burglar” for a reason, and you knew that sooner or later she would break free from her restraints. And soon enough, she did.
“Ha!” She exclaimed, hands free as she stretched her wrists.
It took her only a minute to free herself from the chains of her feet, and she was kneeling beside you in the blink of an eye, undoing your own restraints.
“Nami.” You called for her, and when she only replied with a hum, not looking at you, you repeated her name. “Nami, listen to me, you have to leave.”
“What?” She did look at you then, deep frown on her face, that much you could make out in the darkened room. “I’m not leaving you here.”
“Yes, you have to. You cannot undo these cuffs.” You reasoned, knowing fully well that the chains were no issue for her, but the cuffs could only be opened with the key, or be destroyed with how hard the material was. “You would have to carry me!”
“Then I’ll carry you.” She replied like it was no big deal.
“You’ll get us both killed. They are after our bounties for sure, they won’t hesitate to kill us!” You insisted, though she didn’t even acknowledge your words. “You have to leave, you can come back with the others!”
“I’m not leaving you!”
“Nami, fo fuck’s sake, just go!”
“I said no!” She raised her voice enough that you worried someone outside the room might hear. “There’s no way I’m leaving you here, are you crazy?”
You huffed, exasperated. You were stubborn, but she was as thick as you were. Then again, in a situation like this, you would do the same thing, and it would never cross your mind to leave her alone in a ship full of stinky pirates.
“Fine, but if you’re not gonna go, don’t waste time like this.”
“I’ll undo the chains at least.”
“Try to look around, maybe you can check what the situation in this ship is, and where Luffy and the guys are.
“You’re too bossy.” Nami quipped, and you noticed her smile in the shadows, which made you smile in return.
“Look who’s talking.”
You both chuckled, surprisingly lighthearted considering the situations you were in. You knew her enough to know that she was considering your last idea, it might even have crossed her mind before you even said it.
“I’ll be back in no time.” She declared, standing at full height once your chains were undone. “Sit tight and don’t do anything stupid.”
“I’m not Luffy!” You arched your eyebrow at her joke, but she only laughed in response before sneakily walking out through the door.
You sighed, leaning against the post. You trusted Nami that she would keep herself safe, and maybe even encounter the rest of the crew.
You briefly recalled how you got there; a blunt hit to the head before you could even think about using any kind of defense. It had been a sneaky raid on the Sunny, or at least those were the small fragments you got in your mind. You only had a brief glimpse of what happened; if you got yourself out of the cuff, maybe you’d have a clearer mind.
That strike would explain the nausea and the blood you felt trickling down your neck, though the cuffs were doing their work in making you dizzy.
It had only been a few minutes before the door bursted open, and anxiety made your hair stand on end when you saw a big man in the doorway.
You could only see so much in the dark, with the light from outside the room creating a darkened figure in front of you, but you could tell he was pissed off when his deep voice echoed through the room.
“Where is your friend?”
“Fuck off.”
Before you could even register what happened, you fell backwards against the wooden floor after being hit in the side of the head. Blood splurted from your mouth, making you cough. You couldn’t really see, vision blurry as your brain readjusted to what was happening, but you still tried to defend yourself with what little strength you had, putting your hands up and attempting to hit whoever was in front of you.
You only got a mocking laughter in return.
“You’re so pathetic without your silly powers, aren’t you?” He taunted you, grabbing your wrists by the cuffs.
“And you’re not even a man without that bat.” You responded, eyeing the weapon he had hit you with, currently stained with your blood.
His fist making contact with your cheek right after made you even dizzier, your mouth filling with your own blood, and you panicked when you felt like passing out.
“Your bounties are the same even if you’re dead, you know that, right?”
“Our friends are coming for us…” You managed to say, voice slurry as you tasted your blood in your tongue.
“And we are counting on that.”
He laughed again, and you heard it so distant despite him being right on top of you.
You groaned, in and out of it as he tied you back up to the post, not nearly tight enough as it was before. You weren’t a risk in your state.
There was no doubt in your mind that anyone in the crew was going to burst through that door at any minute, but you weren’t sure if you’d be awake to see it. And with the amount of blood you felt oozing down the side of your face and onto the floor, you started to doubt you’d even see Nami again.
But you had at least been wrong in that assumption when the door opened and she was there, being held with her hand behind her back by the same man that got you in your current state.
“What did you do to her?!” Nami exclaimed, struggling to get free but to no avail.
“Nothing she didn’t deserve.”
Nami argued with the man as if none of your lives were at risk, and you admired her for it, even if you couldn’t really hear most of it. You lacked the strength to do it yourself in that moment, otherwise you’d be kicking and screaming just like her.
She was tied to the post in no time, double the amount of locks on her this time, before the door closed a minute later, leaving the two of you alone.
“What happened?!” Nami asked, worry seeping through her voice. “I told you not to do anything stupid!”
“I guess I’ve been hanging out with Luffy for too long…”
“Well, don’t worry, I managed to use their snail phone! And I did a little something fun too that will help us!”
You turned your head to look at her when you recognized her playful tone, but you realized your injury must have looked a lot worse than you thought when her expression showed only concern.
“What did you do?”
“You’ll see.” She offered a small smile and a wink. “Are you alright?”
“I’m fine.”
“Don’t fall asleep, you know head injuries make you tired but keep talking to me.”
“Should I tell some jokes?” You quipped with a lopsided smile. You grimaced afterward when your lip stung; it probably split when you got punched in the face.
“If you want.” Nami chuckled, fumbling with the chains, though she could barely move her hands. “I haven’t actually talked to you in a while, or that’s what it feels like.”
You remained silent, looking at the ceiling.
“You haven’t been hanging out with us as much, which is weird ‘cause we are always together.” Nami went on with a lighthearted tone, but you could feel her hesitation. “Is everything okay? You know, besides the fact that you’re bleeding right now.”
“I just felt like having a little me time.” You huffed out a laugh before replying.
“Why?”
Maybe if you hadn’t been friends, if you hadn’t shared so much in all the time you’ve been crewmates, she wouldn’t press so hard. But you knew her well enough, she wasn’t going to let it go. You ponder on what to say for a moment, the injury in your head making it difficult to actually think for longer than that, before speaking.
“I like Sanji.”
“I’m shocked.” Nami teased you with a chuckle. “Me and Robin already know.”
“I figured.” You replied with a smile.
“You’re not that obvious, but we noticed. I don’t think the guys know, you’d have to hit them in the face with it for them to figure it out.”
“Maybe not even then.”
“So what, you are just avoiding us because of him?” Nami paused and her expression changed into a frown. “Did he do something?”
“No, that’s not it.”
“Then what?”
With a sigh, you gather the courage to admit to something you didn’t really want to, especially not in front of Nami, to Nami, who was not only Sanji’s object of affection, but rightfully so, because she truly was beautiful, smart and kind. While it’d be unfair to compare yourself to her, you couldn’t help it; no matter how many amiable qualities you might have, pertinent for a pirate in Luffy’s crew, you feared it wouldn’t be enough.
“I’m jealous.” You confessed like it was air, so low she might not be able to hear you. But she did.
“Jealous? Of who?”
“Of you.”
“Me?” Nami was offended, brows furrowed so deep it almost made you laugh. “What do I have to do with this?”
“Sanji likes you.” She opened her mouth to respond, but you didn’t give her the chance to, not wanting to hear what her reasoning would be when she denied it. “He’s always fluttering around you, attending to your every need, and I can’t blame him because I can see what he sees in you. You’re perfect and…”
‘And I’m not’ was what you wanted to say, but you stopped yourself. Confessions and self-pity were two different things.
“And I’m not mad at you, I don’t blame you either. You’re my friend and I adore you so much, and I hate that I feel this way, but I can’t help it… Especially when he says your name all the time…” You sighed, unable to go on, afraid you might have ruined your friendship with Nami with the amount of vulnerable information you just shared.
She sighed as well, louder and much more exasperated than you expected.
“Man, you and Sanji are both really thick.”
“What do you mean?” You asked with a frown.
“He’s crazy about you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about Sanji, who worries nonstop about you, especially since you started being distant with us. And I’m talking about times when you mention to him in passing that you like a certain pastry or sweet stuff, and then we have it for dessert for a week. Or when he thinks he’s being sneaky and gives you a little more extra food than he gives me or Robin. Or when he looks at you when you’re fighting someone and kicking their ass and he’s trying to keep a massive nosebleed at bay.”
You looked at Nami like she was crazy, a look that she mirrored, obviously in disbelief of your own ignorance.
“Right now is clearly not a good example of that ‘ass-kicking', but I know he’s swimming faster than the Sunny can go to get here, and he’s not doing it specifically for me.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. He’s literally always at your beck and call.”
“Yeah, probably because I’m cute, but he’d be at your beck and call if you wanted to, you just don’t take the opportunity. And he’d probably trip over to get it done in no time, too.”
“He makes desserts for you too!”
“He does when I ask him to, but he makes a bunch of it when you mention your favorites. And you don’t even have to ask.”
You teared your eyes away from her to look at the ceiling again. If what Nami said was true, you never even registered those little details in Sanji’s behaviour towards you. Nami’s wit was one of the sharpest in the crew, so you knew she wasn’t just making stuff up to make you feel better.
That was the thing about liking someone like Sanji, whose affection scattered effortlessly in every direction, like the wind; how could you even tell when he was treating you differently than anyone else?
It’d be so much easier to think about everything and anything if you weren’t having a massive bleeding at that moment. You feared you might start to feel cold any second, and the urge of passing out would be too strong (though it was getting hot in the room, for some reason).
“Everything you just said about me.” Nami spoke after a bit of silence, and you eyed her, anxiety bubbling inside your chest. “I’ll take it as a compliment. I know I’m cute and all, but I’m not competing with my friend.”
“I’m sorry, Nami.” You whispered when relief washed over you, making you feel slightly embarrassed over your outburst. “I’m not-”
“Don’t worry. I mean it.” She offered you a genuine smile, one that showed all the affection she had for you. “It surprises me to see you like this, but I want you to know that you’re perfect, too.”
“Thank you.” You mirrored her expression, wishing you were strong enough to reach for her and hold her hand.
“And if Sanji makes you feel less than perfect, you can kick his ass. And I’ll join you.”
You managed to laugh weakly only to cough up blood afterwards. Nami called your name and you heard her, but as if she was coming from the other side of the room. You were starting to feel drowsy, cursing under your breath, angry at yourself for having this conversation under these circumstances and for allowing all of this to happen. It was a common occurrence with the life you had to be kidnapped, but it was rare that you felt so out of it, so depending on your crewmates that it made you feel weak and helpless.
Why was it getting so hot in there?
The harsh noise of the door breaking open startled you, bringing you back from your mind to the situation at hand as you saw the man who had inflicted those injuries on you fly across the room and land beside you with harsh thud.
He was bloodied himself, and almost completely pathetic when he looked at Sanji, who was standing in the doorway, responsible for kicking him through the door.
The small amount of blood you had left in your body was already boiling with ire, giving you a small amount of strength but enough to make you wrap your arms around the bastard’s neck, using the chains tying the cuffs together to choke him. Adrenaline coursed through you, enough to tighten your hold on him, and to deafen whatever noise and ruckus that was happening around you.
Until you felt Sanji’s hands on yours, and his voice so close it created goosebumps on your skin.
“Sweetheart, let go.” He said into your ear, almost like a whisper, as his touch, so delicate, tried to pry your hands open. “It’s me, darling. You have to let go.”
You only did so after a moment, releasing a loud, trembling sigh, when you realized that Sanji was actually touching you and embracing you safely.
He held you in his arms, fumbling with the key he most likely took from the poor bastard before he kicked his ass, and freeing you from the cuffs quickly.
When you didn’t regain your usual energy, Sanji panicked, eyes wide open, his one visible brow furrowed upward in deep concern. You briefly wondered how bad you looked for him to make an expression like that, though the amount of blood on your face must have made any injury you had looked infinitely worse.
He swiftly scooped you in his arms, one hand grasping your legs and the other on your back, tightly holding onto you as he made his way out. You didn’t have the strength in you to hold your head up high, leaning against his shoulder instead, feeling so warm in his hold you could fall asleep.
“Nami, Nami-” You weakly called for her, voice slurry as you tried to look around the room. “Where’s Nami?”
“I’m here, I’m okay!” She replied, somewhere behind Sanji.
“She’s half dead and she still tried to choke me!” You heard the man’s voice yelling, desperately, like he was trying to look for an explanation of what happened. A strangled whimper followed immediately.
“Shut up, she should’ve killed you.” Zoro’s voice was unmistakable to your ears, and you huffed, amused by his words.
Once outside on the deck, you came to the realization of what Nami had done when she slipped out the room earlier.
“You-You set the ship on fire?” You asked her, in disbelief.
“No!” She yelled, exasperated. “I only set a tiny part of it on fire! I didn’t think the idiots on this ship would let it get this bad!”
You huffed out a small laugh, closing your eyes as you sank your face into Sanji’s chest. He had held you like this on other occasions when you needed saving, but you’ve never felt like you could doze off so easily before. You heard him call out your name repeatedly, and it took a lot of willpower on your part to respond.
“You gotta stay with me! We’re getting you to Chopper in a heartbeat!” Sanji pleaded, squeezing you in his hold.
“I’m dizzy…” You could only muster.
His voice was still talking to you, desperately, but you had stopped registering actual words before you lost consciousness.
*
It took a lot of effort to simply open your eyes, vision blurry for a moment as you blinked away the tiredness of your eyes. There was a dull ache in your head, and you slowly moved your hand to check your own forehead. Only then you noticed that someone was holding it tightly.
“She’s awake!” Chopper exclaimed right beside you, and you felt his hoof touch your forehead.
“Darling, are you okay?” Sanji’s face came into view, and your heart softened when you realized it was him holding your hand. “Do you remember what happened?”
“Who are you?” The look in Sanji’s face made you feel immediately guilty, and you managed to smile, a sign that you were only kidding. “Where am I? What year is it?”
He let out a long, loud sigh as he sank his face into the bed, pressing his forehead to the back of your hand.
Chopper didn’t look amused, and you knew he was on the verge of scolding you but held back.
“Very funny. Are you in pain? Nauseous?”
“I’m tired. And there’s like a pressure in my head, but not too bad…”
“You should stay in bed for a couple of days.” When you groaned, Chopper chastised you as he checked the bandages on your head. “We have to make sure this won’t worsen! Bed rest, lots of water, and you’ll be good to go if there are no other symptoms! So no strenuous activities for now!”
“Fine, you don’t have to boss me around…” You replied, smiling when he beamed at you. “Thank you, Chopper, you’re so sweet.”
“You know I don’t like compliments!” Chopper said, with a smile and blush on his cheeks as he stepped out of the room. “Don’t move! I’ll change your bandages soon!”
You giggled, turning your eyes at Sanji, who was looking at you intensely.
“I’m okay, Sanji.” You reassured him, purposely saying his name as softly as you could.
“That wasn’t funny.” He berated you half-heartedly, a small smile tugging at his lips.
You moved your other hand to check on your head, most of it covered in bandages, before sliding it down your face. The cut in your split lip sting, and you felt multiple cuts on the side of your face, a big one that had been stitched on your cheekbone. You probably had a nasty bruise, feeling how sore the skin was there.
Embarrassed to be looking so weak in front of Sanji, you turned your head to the side, groaning slightly when you pressed your cheek into the pillow.
“Are you alright? Are you hurting anywhere?” He asked, running one hand over the side of your face, so delicate it felt like the brush of a feather. He ran his fingers through your hair when you didn’t reply, gently patting your head. “I’ll call Chopper again-”
“I’m okay, I mean it.” You turned to him, disregarding your shame, tightly holding onto his hand. The hand that had never let go of yours.
You sat up as Sanji helped you, arranging the pillow on the headboard.
“Could I-” Before you could even finish the question, he was already pouring water in a glass from a tray by the bedside table, handing it to you gently. “Thank you.”
You felt some tension in the air, but you were aware that it was only from your part. Your memory was fragmentary, with some puzzle pieces missing, but you remembered the conversation you had with Nami when you were both abducted. It turned out that saying things out loud gave your feelings a certain kind of materiality that you didn’t know how to handle.
“How long was I out?” You asked him, as Sanji watched you carefully.
“Almost a day.”
You grimaced. No wonder he seemed more concerned than usual.
“How’s Nami?”
“She’s fine, she only has a bruise on her side. She was here to check on you a minute ago, Robin is helping her take a bath now.” When you arched your eyebrow, he explained further. “The bruise doesn’t let her move her arm around much.”
“I should have been more careful…” You said without much thought.
“Darling, you were hit in the head. There wasn’t much you could have done.” Sanji chastised you sternly this time. You sensed that he wanted to say more, but he didn’t.
You studied his expression; he had dark circles under his one visible eye, his hair was tousled. He definitely seemed tired, and you came to the conclusion that he had spent all the time you were unconscious holding your hand. He was gazing at you softly, like he usually did. The words Nami said to you rang in your mind; that he liked you, more than you could tell.
Attempting to distract yourself, you slowly drank from the glass, hissing when your swollen lip touched the rim.
“Does it hurt?” He asked with a frown. His hand tried to reach for you but it stopped midway.
“It stings. Does it look too bad?”
“You had never looked more beautiful.”
You huffed out a small laugh, looking away.
“Don’t pull that on me.”
"I mean it.” Sanji reached for your hand this time, holding it gently as he ran his thumb through your knuckles. It flustered you, but you didn’t pull away. “Doesn’t mean I don’t wanna go back to that ship and kill the man who put you in this state.”
“Thank you for saving me.”
“There’s nothing to thank me for. I didn’t get there in time.”
“What are you talking about?” You asked, bemused, as you set the glass on the bedside table. “If you hadn’t gotten there when you did, I might have bled out, or died from the fire.”
“If I had gotten there earlier, you wouldn’t even be in this bed.” You pursed your lips when you realized how upset he was, the hand that was holding yours trembling. “And… I saw when they took you and Nami away, and I also didn’t get there in time…”
“Enough, Sanji. It was my fault that I wasn’t alert when it happened.”
“I-”
“Thank you for saving me.” You repeated, firmly this time, squeezing his hand.
“I’ll always save you.”
With tenderness you had never seen before, Sanji placed a kiss to the back of your hand. You couldn’t hide the gasp that escaped you, and blood rushed to your face so fast you felt dizzy again.
“I know that you don’t… want me that way-” Sanji started, nervously looking down.
“What?”
“That’s why you’ve been avoiding me, right?” His eyes went to you again, trepidation obvious in his expression. “I wasn’t trying to make you uncomfortable, if my feelings felt like a burden for you. But I still wanted to take care of you, make you feel like nothing has really changed-”
“Wait. Is that what it seemed like? That I was avoiding you?” When he nodded, you stared back at him in incredulity. Without thinking, you asked: “What about Nami?”
“What about Nami?” He mirrored your expression.
“You…” You felt embarrassed to even bring her up, but he was staring at you with such focus, like he really wanted to understand everything you were saying, that you couldn’t even think about hiding anything. “You’re always all over her, and doing everything she asks…”
“I can’t say no to a beautiful lady.” Sanji anxiously ran one hand down his pants (probably looking for his pack of smokes, though he didn’t even attempt to grab them), eyes darting elsewhere for a brief second before coming back to you. “And Nami is Nami. But I’m always looking at you, looking for you. I like… tending to your needs, catering to your whims.”
The weight of Sanji’s words were hitting you like a thunderbolt, and you couldn’t help your dumbfounded expression as he went on.
“But you rarely ask me anything, and since you’ve been a little more reserved, I figured it would be better to let you be, to not overwhelm you…”
Maybe Nami was right. You were both really thick.
“You thought I had feelings for Nami?” Sanji asked carefully.
“Yeah…”
“I love women.” He admitted promptly, making you chuckle. As if you had no idea.
“I know.”
“I can admire their beauty, and I will always let them know that they deserve the world. But what I feel for you, my love…” Sanji brought your hand to his lips again, pressing a small kiss before continuing. “You’re always on my mind. All this time you kept your distance, when I noticed you didn’t want to be around me… Giving you space, holding back my tongue from calling you “my dear”, “my sweet”, “my angel”, all of it killed me because I was dying to tell you how special you were. None of this can compare to whatever sentiment I might have for any other woman.”
You had to avert your eyes from his so as to let his words sink in. Sanji was saying he was attracted to you, that you had been wrong all this time, and for all the insecurity you still had in your heart, somehow you believed everything he said. You had never seen him more vulnerable, sitting by your side and holding your hand; he wasn’t sacrificing his life but you still knew it took a lot for him to materialize his feelings into words.
“I know I flirt a lot, with any woman I see, and-”
“And you’re a perv.” You added, teasingly.
“That too.” He added without an ounce of shame. “It might be difficult for you to believe me, but I hope you find it in your heart to never doubt any of my feelings…”
“Sanji,” You held his gaze this time, feeling your cheeks burning but with enough confidence to ask: “You have feelings for me?”
With a sigh that implied the heavy weight that he was getting off his shoulder, he replied with confidence:
“Yeah. Yes. Desperately so. I can’t even contain them.”
“I like you. A lot.” Sanji’s face lit up like you’ve never seen before, making you smile. “I wasn’t avoiding you, I just. I couldn’t stand seeing you fawn over someone else, especially Nami. She’s gorgeous, and-”
“She is. It doesn’t mean that you aren’t.” He interrupted you, caressing your hand while he reached for your face with the other, carefully stroking your cheek with his thumb. “I was captivated by you the moment I first saw you, and not only did your beauty blinded me, but your kindness, your passion and sense of humor made it so easy for me to fall for you. I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to convince you of all that. If you let me.”
Sanji was overdramatic, you knew that. But in the intimate space that was currently the sick bay, you couldn’t help but believe everything he had just said. Leaning into his touch, nuzzling the palm of his hand, you smiled softly.
“Okay.”
“Okay?” Sanji beamed, inclining closer.
“Okay.” You repeated, feeling the warmth of his skin the closer he got.
The smell of smoke and spices invaded your senses as his lips ghosted over yours for a second, as if giving you the opportunity to pull away. When you didn’t, Sanji kissed you, gently yet passionately, pressing his lips to yours with an intensity that made you gasp.
A hiss did escape your lips when he pressed closer, and he pulled back.
“Damn, sorry!” He cautiously ran his thumb over your bottom lip. “Did I hurt you?”
“It’s just a little tender.” You flinched a little; he wasn’t using any pressure but the cut hurt more than you expected. “You’ll have to give me another kiss when I’m better.”
“Oh, darling, I’ll give you as many as you want!”
You pecked his lips promptly, quick and soft, and to your amusement, Sanji looked like he was about to have a heart attack, cheeks flushed and small hearts forming in his pupils. So much for someone who just confessed his feelings in such a sentimental way.
“And you know what?” You smile playfully, determined to tease him when he gave you a quizzical look. “I also love women, as much as you do. So if your eyes ever wander to someone else, mine will too.”
For a moment, you couldn’t tell if Sanji was still alive.
Until his nose started bleeding.
You chortled, totally pleased with his reaction as he desperately tried to wipe away the blood.
“You’re a mischievous lady.”
“But you like my sense of humor, right?”
“Yo-You were joking?!”
“Was I?”
You grinned cheekily as a response, and Sanji could only groan in response.
“Don’t do that to me again, please, my love.” Sanji begged, holding tightly onto your hand. “That joke you made when you woke up… I wouldn’t know what to do…”
“Sorry.” You pet his head, running your fingers through his hair. He looked like he could melt underneath your touch. “I couldn’t let the opportunity to mess with you slip.”
Your breath hitched when his lips trailed up your wrist and forearm, tenderly whispering your name against your skin. You weren’t sure if your teasing could compare to what he was doing to you.
When the door opened, you were startled, and seeing the knowing smile on Nami’s face as she stood next to Chopper made your cheeks burn with embarrassment. Sanji simply looked mildly annoyed to be interrupted when Chopper yelled.
Leon, Raihan and Guzma with an S/O from Unova? It's just....Unova is one of the best regions :))
Gen 5 is my fav so I can relate to loving Unova !
Leon will know quickly you’re not from around here given your lack of an accent lmao. So one of his first questions to you is “where are you from” but he thinks it’s neat you’re from there! He’s never been there himself and has always wondered what it’s like, and how beautiful castelia city must be. He’d be shocked to find it’s not as great as the telly makes it seem.
Raihan will also ask where you’re from the day he meets you, you get asked that question more than enough whenever you meet new people in galar anyways. He admits, he doesn’t know much about the place other than an amazing opportunity to get a hydreigon or even a haxorus <3 he would love to visit for these reasons alone.
Guzma can tell you’re not from around alola off the bat. People in alola are too damn calm and relaxed with their toxic positivity, either you had a fucked up childhood like him or you’re not around here. He would ask you of course and come to find that your aggressive nature is because you’re from unova! Or to be specific, castelia city. So you’re a city bitch? Makes a lot more sense now.
20K words, Simon’s hair has grown out, reader wears glasses, Simon doesn’t know how to dance, smut, the fluffiest fluff, angst, size kink, Simon is huge, pee mentioned, Simon is filthy but we all knew that. Tell me if I missed any tags.
He was four years old when he stole your crayons.
Not all of them. Just the good ones. The red one. The yellow one. The bright, sunflower-gold one that you'd been saving to colour the sun in the corner of your drawing, the way all four-year-olds drew the sun — a circle in the corner, rays shooting out like a child's idea of joy.
You looked at him across the low art table in that bright little preschool room that smelled of poster paint and digestive biscuits.
He was stocky even then.
Chubby-cheeked and heavy-set. A thick, sturdy little boy who sat with his legs wide and his fat fists curled around your crayons like he'd earned them.
He wasn't even looking at you.
He was colouring something — a car, maybe, or a blob that might have been a dog — and the yellow crayon moved in big, purposeful strokes across his paper.
You did not cry.
You considered it.
Then you leaned across the table and took them back.
He looked up.
Brown eyes. Even at four, they were startling — dark and serious and far too watchful for a boy his age.
He stared at you.
You stared back.
Then he slid the gold crayon back across the table to you, said nothing, and went back to his drawing.
His name was Simon.
You would not learn that until the register was called the following morning. But you remembered his eyes before you remembered his name.
— ✦ —
He broke your glasses in Year Two.
Not on purpose — or so you believed, for most of your life, until you were old enough to accept that
Simon Riley did very few things without purpose.
He knocked into you in the corridor outside the dining hall, your plastic NHS frames hitting the linoleum floor, one arm snapping clean off at the hinge.
You stood there, the world going soft and blurry at the edges the way it always did without them, and you felt the particular, humiliating sting of being unable to see properly — the vulnerability of it, the indignity.
Simon picked up the frames. Looked at them. Looked at you.
He didn't say sorry straight away. He examined the break with the seriousness of a boy who was already, at seven, very careful about what he said and when he said it. Then, "I'll carry your bag till they're fixed."
"You broke my glasses," you told him like he didn’t know.
"I know." He nodded.
"That's not the same as fixing them."
"No," he agreed. "But it's what I've got."
He carried your bag for three days. And when your mum brought the repaired frames in on the fourth morning, he handed the bag back without ceremony, turned, and went to join his mates by the football cage. No further apology. No acknowledgement that anything had occurred between you at all.
That afternoon, you kicked over his sandcastle in the playground.
He watched you do it. Didn't say a word.
You felt better.
And somehow, after that, you were friends.
— ✦ —
He couldn't read very well. You figured this out in Year Three, during the round-robin reading in class — when the teacher went along the rows and each child read a sentence aloud.
You noticed the way Simon's jaw set and his hands went flat on the desk the closer it got to his turn. The way his eyes moved across the page, laboured and slow, tracking words like they were things to be wrestled rather than known.
He got through his sentence. Barely. His face was blank when he sat back, the particular blankness he'd already learned to wear — that carefully constructed nothing that meant everything was fine when everything was not fine at all.
You didn't say anything about it. Not then. You were eight years old, not stupid.
What you did was start reading with him at break time. You presented it as something you needed — you told him you were practising for a reading competition and needed an audience.
Simon was not fooled. He was never fooled, not really.
But he sat down with you on the bench by the library door and listened while you read, and then slowly, carefully, you handed the book to him and asked what he thought happened next, and he had to read ahead to find out.
It took most of the school year. But by the summer he was reading chapter books. He never thanked you. He did start saving you a seat on the library bench every break time, and that was the same thing.
— ✦ —
He played football and rugby.
You read on the grass bank above the field.
It became a kind of institution — the ritual of your shared proximity without shared activity. Simon on the pitch, broad and determined and already bigger than the other boys by Year Five, already moving with that particular physicality that seemed less like playing and more like declaration.
And you on the bank above, your book open, your reading glasses (a better pair now, tortoiseshell) perched on your nose, half-reading and half watching without ever quite admitting to the watching.
He always knew you were there. He didn't do anything about it. But sometimes, when he scored, he'd look up at the bank first before he looked anywhere else.
You told yourself you were only there because the grass was nice and the light was good.
You were not a good liar, even then.
— ✦ —
The boy's name was Daniel Holt and he pushed you over in the playground in Year Five because you'd refused to give him the answers to the maths homework.
You'd said no three times and the third time he pushed you and you went down hard on your palms and your knees, the concrete was unforgiving.
You were crying before you'd fully registered what had happened. Not dramatically — small, shocked, indignant tears, the kind that arrive before the pain does.
Simon was there before a teacher was. You didn't even see where he came from. One moment the playground was its ordinary mid-morning noise, and the next Daniel Holt had a split lip and Simon Riley was standing over him with blood on his knuckles and a look on his face that was completely, utterly calm.
The calm was the frightening part. Even at ten.
He got three days at home for it. He spent the first afternoon sitting on your front step, eating crisps, because he knew you'd be furious with him and wanted to face it head-on.
You were furious. You told him he was an idiot. He told you Daniel Holt had it coming. You told him violence wasn't the answer. He told you Daniel Holt wasn't going to touch you again.
He was right. Daniel Holt never came near you again.
You didn't thank him either. You went inside and made him a sandwich, and that was the same thing.
— ✦ —
Secondary school arrived like a change in weather — everything slightly larger, slightly louder, the corridors longer and noisier, the stakes somehow higher and more ambiguous all at once. You arrived with a bag so heavy your shoulder ached within the first hour: your textbooks, yes, but also the extracurricular books you carried everywhere, the extra notepad you used for non-school thoughts, the six different highlighters you colour-coded by subject.
Simon took the bag from you on the third day without asking.
"I can carry it," you told him.
"I know," he said.
He slung it over his shoulder like it weighed nothing, which for him it probably didn't. He'd grown over the summer — not just taller, though he was that, but broader, thicker through the shoulders in a way that made him look like a man playing a boy, trying the shape of it on. He wore it well, even at eleven. He wore everything like he'd already decided what he was and was simply waiting for the world to catch up.
He carried your bag when it was heavy, and it was frequently heavy. He did it without comment and without making you feel small for needing it. That was the thing about Simon — he never made you feel small. He made other people feel small, sometimes, when they deserved it. But not you. Never you.
— ✦ —
The bruises were never from rugby.
You knew by the second year of secondary.
You were not naive — you had read enough, observed enough, understood enough about the world to recognise the shape of what was happening in Simon Riley's house even though he never said a word about it.
The bruises were in the wrong places for rugby. They appeared in the wrong season. They were around his ribs and his arms and once, memorably, along his jaw, and he came to school the Monday after the jaw bruise with that face — that blank, carefully constructed nothing face — and you sat next to him at lunch and said nothing at all.
You said nothing because there was nothing you could do. You were twelve. You were a girl with a book bag and highlighter pens and absolutely no power over the man who was hurting your best friend, and knowing that — the impotence of it, the helpless, hollow ache of caring about someone you could not protect — was the first truly adult pain you ever felt.
What you could do was this: you could make sure he had somewhere to go.
Your mother, who was perceptive in the quiet way that some mothers are, never asked questions when Simon turned up at the back door on a Sunday evening or a Wednesday after school.
She just set another plate.
Your house became a refuge without anyone naming it as such. Simon did his homework at your kitchen table, ate your mother's cooking, watched telly with your family, and slept on your sofa sometimes when the option was presented naturally enough that it didn't feel like charity.
— ✦ —
You got your period for the first time on a Tuesday in November, in Year Nine. In the school toilets, third period, when you were thirteen years old and the day had been entirely ordinary right up until it wasn't.
The particular cocktail of shock and pain and embarrassment and the specific existential bewilderment of being a person whose body was doing something enormous without prior adequate notice left you sitting on the closed toilet lid crying in a way you hadn't cried in years.
You got out your Nokia. That familiar brick of a phone, the keypad worn smooth at the number five. You typed Simon's number and pressed call before you'd properly decided to.
He picked up on the second ring. "Yeah."
"Simon." Your voice came out wrong. Too thin.
A beat. When he spoke again his voice had changed — quieter, more careful. "Where are you?"
"Girls' toilets. Near the science block."
"Right," he said. "Stay there."
He appeared outside the girls' toilets seven minutes later — you could hear him through the door, his voice low and flat, telling a Year Eight girl to go use the other ones — and then he was there, right there on the other side of the door, talking to you through it in that steady, even way he had when he wanted to be calm on your behalf.
"You're alright," he said. “Do you need me to go to the office?"
"No," you managed. "I need — I don't know what I need."
"I'll get you something from the vending machine," he said, that Manchester accent of his low and unhurried. "And I'll text your mum."
When you came out of the toilets twenty minutes later, looking wrung-out and clutching what the school nurse had provided, Simon was leaning against the wall. He looked at you for a moment — took you in, the way he always did, that comprehensive, assessing look — and then he stepped forward and kissed your cheek. Quick. Certain. His mouth warm and deliberate against your cheekbone.
"You're alright," he said again. He said it like a fact. Like he was making it true by saying it.
You cried a bit more, for different reasons, and he pretended not to notice.
— ✦ —
He was captain of the rugby team by Year Ten. It suited him — the leadership, the sense of purpose, the structure of it.
You went to his matches sometimes, wrapped in a scarf on the touchline, and watched him move across the pitch with that same quality you'd noticed on the primary school field: less like playing, more like declaration.
He was ferocious and focused and occasionally frightening, and the other boys deferred to him not just because he was bigger than them but because he had the kind of authority that doesn't need to be announced.
Afterwards he'd find you on the touchline, still carrying that quality — coiled, alert — and it would take him a few minutes to come back to himself. To come back to you.
"Good game," you'd say.
"Yeah," he'd say.
And then slowly, the set of his shoulders would ease, and he'd become Simon again. Your Simon. The one who stole your crayons and carried your bag and ate your mother's shepherd's pie like it was sacred.
— ✦ —
He could make you laugh. This was not a small thing.
Simon Riley was not, by general consensus, a funny person. He was serious and quiet and his face in repose looked like a man carrying a private weather system. But he had a dry, deadpan wit that he deployed rarely and precisely, and it landed, every time, like a key in a lock made specifically for it.
He knew how to make you laugh because he'd spent years learning you. The specific frequency of your humour. The things that made you dissolve into giggles rather than just smile. He deployed his wit with the same precision he deployed everything else, and the result was that when Simon Riley made you laugh — really laugh, the helpless, breathless kind — it felt like being given something he didn't give to anyone else.
Which, you would eventually understand, was accurate.
— ✦ —
His name was Ryan Marsh and he was your first kiss, in the park on a Friday evening in Year Ten, and it was fine. It was nice, even. Ryan was sweet and nervous and smelled of his older brother's aftershave and the kiss lasted approximately forty seconds.
Ryan Marsh had a broken nose the following Monday.
Simon maintained, with total conviction, that Ryan had walked into a door. Ryan, to his credit, corroborated this story completely.
You did not push the matter, partly because you had no concrete evidence and partly because some part of you — the part that read on the grass bank and watched the pitch and noticed when Simon looked up at the bank before he looked anywhere else — felt something that was not entirely uncomplicated about it.
You and Ryan Marsh did not have a second kiss. You told yourself it was because the chemistry hadn't been right.
You were getting a bit better at lying to yourself, by fourteen. But only a bit.
— ✦ —
GCSEs arrived the way all important things arrived — with more weight than you'd expected and less warning than you'd have liked.
Year Ten and Eleven were the years you restructured Simon's entire approach to studying, methodically and patiently, the same way you'd helped him learn to read, finding the approach that worked for how his mind moved.
Simon was not unintelligent.
He was, in fact, formidably sharp in ways that didn't translate easily to an exam paper: quick to read people, quick to understand systems, possessed of a spatial and strategic intelligence that you recognised and admired even as you taught him how to write it down in ways that the mark scheme would accept.
He sat with you at your kitchen table night after night — your mother quietly replenishing the tea,— and you explained things in the language that made sense to his brain rather than the language of the textbook.
He sat with you at lunch during school hours and glared at anyone who called you a nerd. The glaring was extremely effective. Simon Riley's face, by fifteen, was a significant deterrent.
His GCSE results, when they arrived, were good. Better than anyone who knew his circumstances might have expected from a boy who'd had so much working against him.
He rang you on the house phone when he opened the results envelope. He didn't say much. His voice, when he spoke, was different — something in it unguarded, the Manchester in it softer somehow, without the armour it usually carried.
"Couldn't have done it without you," he said.
"You did it," you told him firmly. "I just held the torch."
"Still needed the torch."
You smiled so hard your face ached. "Go celebrate, Simon."
"Yeah," he said. And then, quieter, "Thanks, sunshine."
— ✦ —
He was an apprentice at the butcher's on Renshaw Street after school — learning the trade with the same focused, physical competence he brought to everything else, solid and unhurried, his big hands learning new kinds of precision. You had a job at the bookshop two streets over.
On his lunch breaks you would walk over with a sandwich and a packet of crisps, and you'd sit on the low wall around the side of the shop while he ate and you talked about nothing in particular and everything in general.
He had sawdust on his boots and you'd have ink on your fingers from pricing stickers, and you'd sit in the thin afternoon light talking about books and people and where things might go from here, and it was the most ordinary, irreplaceable thing in the world.
You didn't know, then, that you were storing it up. You didn't know you were in the middle of something finite.
You were seventeen and you thought you had time.
— ✦ —
It was the eleventh of September, 2001.
You were at work when it happened — the bookshop had a small television in the back room, and you watched the footage with your hand pressed over your mouth and the world rearranging itself into a new shape around you.
Simon came to you that evening. He didn't knock — he had a spare key, had done for years — and you heard him come in and go into the kitchen and fill the kettle, the sound of him so familiar and domestic and real that something in your chest loosened a fraction.
He brought you tea. He sat on the sofa beside you and you watched the news together in silence, and at some point your head found his shoulder without either of you deciding it had.
"I'm going to join up," he said. Not asking. Telling.
You lifted your head from his shoulder. Frowned at him. "Join up what?"
"The military."
The word landed in the room and stayed there. You looked at his face — that flat, certain expression he wore when he'd already decided something — and you felt the ground shift slightly under you.
"Simon. You're seventeen."
"You can join at sixteen with parental consent," he said. Straightforward, as though he'd already looked into it. Which of course he had. "Seventeen without."
"That's—" You stopped. Started again. "You've thought about this before today."
"Yeah."
Of course he had. You could see it now, the shape of it — this was not a reaction to the footage on the television, not a hot, impulsive thing. This was something Simon had been building toward without telling you. The structure of it. The purpose. The particular kind of belonging that came from being part of something larger than yourself. You'd always known he'd go toward something like this. You'd just hoped, without ever quite admitting to the hoping, that it might be further away.
"You're not going to try to talk me out of it." Not a question.
"Would it work?"
He held your gaze. "No."
"Then no," you said. Your voice was very steady. You were proud of it. "I'm not."
He was quiet for a long moment. The television continued its awful repetition. Then his arm came around your shoulders, heavy and warm, and he pulled you in closer against his side.
You stayed like that until the tea went cold.
— ✦ —
The train station was grey and noisy with other leavings, other arrivals, other people in the middle of things.
Simon stood in front of you on the platform with his kit bag and his big, careful hands and the face he'd spent seventeen years learning to keep blank, and it occurred to you, not for the first time and not for the last, that you loved him.
That you had loved him in different quantities and different registers for most of your life. That you did not know how to say it and were not sure it would do either of you any good if you did.
So you didn't say it.
You went up on your toes and you hugged him — truly hugged him, arms around his neck, your face pressed against his jaw — and he held you back with both arms, the kit bag dropping to the platform, and he was so solid and warm and real that you memorised it.
"Don't be an idiot," you told him, muffled.
He made a sound that was almost a laugh. Almost. "Best I can do is try." The Manchester in his voice, low and warm and his.
"Simon."
"I know," he said quietly, against your temple. "I know, sunshine."
You stepped back. You held it together. He picked up his bag and he walked toward the platform and at the door of the train he turned, and looked at you standing there with your glasses and your coat and your hands pressed together in front of you, and for a second you saw something in his face that wasn't blank at all.
Then he was gone.
You cried on the way home. Proper, ugly crying, in the front seat of your mother's car, while she drove and said nothing and passed you a tissue.
You cried because you thought you might never see him again. Because the world had cracked open on a Tuesday in September and people were going toward the fracture and Simon Riley was one of them.
You cried because you never told him.
— ✦ —
He sent a birthday card every year.
They arrived with no return address and postmarks from places you'd never heard of, and sometimes they were late and sometimes they were so early you suspected he'd sent them weeks in advance in case he couldn't later.
They were always plain — Simon Riley was not a man who browsed the sentimental section — white or cream envelopes, the kind of card that was almost generic, and inside: his handwriting, which had improved vastly from the boy who'd struggled across the page in Year Three, and always the same thing. Your name at the top. Happy Birthday, sunshine. And then: S.
Just S.
Like he was still close enough that you'd know exactly who that meant. Like the initial was sufficient.
It was.
You sent his birthday gifts to a P.O. box he'd given you, wrapped carefully, the tag always: From your best friend. You didn't know if he received them all. You sent them anyway. It felt important to keep sending them — to maintain the thread, even when you couldn't see both ends of it.
— ✦ —
Thirty-four years old now.
You have no husband. You had come close, once — a man named Patrick who had been perfectly acceptable in every measurable way and who had wanted to marry you and had probably deserved someone who could give him more of herself than you could manage.
You had not been fair to Patrick. You knew that. You had been in love with someone else for most of your adult life, and even with the someone else absent and silent and possibly dead, there wasn't room for anyone else.
You have no children, though you wanted them. The timeline on that was becoming its own quiet ache, the kind you didn't prod too often.
You have a job that pays the bills and not much else — admin in an office building that smells of carpet cleaner and recycled air, the kind of work that requires enough of your brain to stop it from wandering but not enough to satisfy it.
You have an apartment that is functional and yours and that you have tried to make cozy, with books on every surface and plants that are mostly surviving and a kitchen you actually cook in.
It is not the house. It is not the house you told Simon about when you were sixteen and lying in his back garden on a summer evening, staring up at the sky.
No birthday card for five years now.
Five years of the particular, specific silence that was different from all the silences before, because the silences before had been interrupted. Annually, reliably, he had broken them.
Five years of nothing had the texture of conclusion. Of a chapter closing. And you had reached the point — slowly, painfully, with the kind of acceptance that doesn't feel like acceptance but feels like exhaustion — where you were fairly certain Simon Riley was dead.
Your heart ached for your best friend in the low, constant way of grief that has become so familiar it's almost structural.
You carried it the way you carried other things, quietly, with your spine straight.
Which is why you are sitting across from a man named — it didn't matter, it really didn't matter what his name was — on what your colleague Debbie had described as 'a perfectly nice date with a perfectly nice man' and trying to remember what it felt like to be interested in your own life.
The man sitting across from you was the complete opposite of Simon Riley.
He was trim and well-dressed and had the kind of face that was handsome in a way that required no effort to appreciate and inspired no particular feeling from you.
He had been talking for, by your reckoning, forty-seven minutes. In that time he had covered: his career (impressive, in his telling), his car (expensive, in his telling), his last holiday (exotic, in his telling), and his general philosophy on modern dating (nuanced, in his telling).
He had not asked about your job. He had not asked about your books or the one peeking out of your handbag; the one he'd glanced at and not commented on. He had not asked if your pasta was nice, which it was, actually, genuinely nice, and you'd have told him so if he'd asked. He had not asked you almost anything, come to think of it.
Simon Riley, who spoke perhaps a tenth as many words as this man, had always asked.
Simon Riley had always wanted to know. Not because it was polite. Because he actually, genuinely, in the particular way of people who care about very few things very deeply — wanted to know.
You excused yourself to use the bathroom and stood at the sink running cold water over your wrists and looking at your own reflection, and you thought: this is fine.
This is a perfectly nice evening with a perfectly nice man. This is what moving forward looks like. This is what being a person in the world, a person with a life and a future and reasonable expectations of company, looks like.
You dried your hands. You went back to the table. He had ordered himself another drink without asking if you wanted anything.
You finished your pasta and smiled at appropriate intervals and thought about Simon Riley and felt, as you so often felt, quietly furious at him for being gone.
— ✦ —
The birthday card arrived on a Thursday morning.
You almost missed it entirely — it was tucked between a pizza delivery leaflet and something from your energy supplier, the cream envelope almost camouflaged by the mundane. You shuffled through the post on autopilot and then stopped.
Your name, in handwriting you would have recognised anywhere, would have recognised in your sleep, had recognised in your bones for thirty years.
You sat down on the bottom stair. Your legs suddenly uneasy.
Your hands were not steady.
The envelope opened. The card was white. Plain. Almost generic.
Inside:
Happy Birthday, sunshine.
I'm sorry it's been so long.
I'll explain everything.
Come, if you want to.
If you can stand the sight of me.
Below that, an address. Three towns over. A postcode you didn't recognise.
And then, at the bottom, the way it had always been at the bottom: S.
You sat on the bottom stair for a very long time.
Then you got up, went to your room, and started thinking about what to wear.
— ✦ —
You plucked up the nerve to go on a Saturday.
The drive took forty minutes and you spent most of it trying to manage yourself — talking yourself through reasonable expectations (he is alive, that is enough, start there), warning yourself against things you could not control (the five years, the silence, the way your hands were doing that unsteady thing again), cataloguing everything practical (the address, the map).
The street was quiet. Semi-rural, the kind of neighbourhood that sits between things — between town and country, between the ordinary and the aspirational. The houses were spread out, set back from the road, each with its own front garden and its own character.
You parked. You looked at the address. You looked up.
And you stopped breathing.
It was a beautiful house.
Large, substantial and solid, the kind of house that had been built to last. White painted render, clean and bright in the afternoon light. A white picket fence surrounding the front garden, which was full of flowers. Roses climbing the gatepost. Lavender edging the path. Foxgloves and dahlias and great loose clusters of something purple you couldn't name from here. The kind of garden that had been planted with intention, tended with care, left to be a little wild in the best way.
A porch. And a porch swing, painted white, with a yellow cushion on it.
And flying from the corner of the roof, bright against the blue afternoon sky: the Union flag.
You sat very still in the driver's seat.
You were sixteen years old. It was a summer evening and you were lying in Simon's back garden on an old sleeping bag, looking up at the sky. He was beside you in the way he was always beside you — solid, quiet, taking up exactly the right amount of space. You'd been talking about the future the way teenagers do, in great floating hypotheticals that feel more like weather than plans.
"What kind of house?" he'd asked. He asked follow-up questions always, quietly, wanting the specifics. It was one of the things about him you loved.
And you'd described it. A big house, not ostentatious but real — space for books and for people and for a garden that did what it wanted within reason. A white fence, because you'd always liked them. A porch with somewhere to sit. A flag, because you were — despite everything — proud of where you were from.
Simon had been quiet for a long moment.
"Okay," he'd said. Just: okay.
You had thought he was humouring you.
You had not thought — you had not let yourself think — what it might mean, that he was going to do anything about it.
You got out of the car. Your legs were not entirely reliable. You held the gate and walked up the path — lavender brushing your hand where it grew close, the scent of it too perfect, almost staged — and you stopped at the foot of the porch steps.
The door opened.
He had to duck.
That was the first thing you noticed. The physical fact of him, the sheer size of him, his shoulders nearly touching the doorframe on both sides simultaneously, the automatic dip of his head as he stepped through onto the porch.
He straightened.
The afternoon light landed on him and you had to spend a moment recalibrating, because the last time you'd seen Simon Riley he had been seventeen years old with sawdust on his boots and a train ticket in his hand, and this man —
This man.
The white button-down shirt was simple, the sleeves rolled to the elbow, and from his left wrist to well past the roll of the sleeve his forearm was dark with ink — a sleeve of tattoos, intricate and considered. A whole geography of imagery that you couldn't read from here but would, you thought, take time to learn.
His right wrist carried a watch. His black slacks were fitted close enough that you could see the muscle of his thighs pulling the fabric with every shift of his weight, and his shoes — loafers, black with gold buckles, completely unexpected and somehow exactly right — were precise.
His hair. A dark sandy blonde, longer than military specification presumably allowed and slicked back from his face, which meant you could see all of it, his whole face; the angles that had sharpened from boy to man, the jaw, the set of his brow, and those eyes. Those brown eyes that had been watching you since you were four years old and had never, not once, looked at you with anything less than complete attention.
He was raking those eyes over you now. Slowly. With the same quality he'd always had — that comprehensive, unhurried assessment that somehow never felt like being measured — and his hands were in his pockets and he was standing there like that, on the porch he'd built or bought or arranged specifically around a description you'd given him at sixteen.
He looked like something out of a magazine and like Simon all at once.
You were going to murder him.
"Hi, sunshine."
His voice. Lower than you remembered, rougher, carrying all the years he'd lived since you last heard it. That Manchester accent — still there, unmistakably, that warm northern flatness underneath everything, the vowels shaped by a city, by a street, by a particular kind of upbringing that no amount of training had entirely smoothed out.
That nickname, in that voice, in that low, deliberate way he'd always said it: like you were his.
Like it was a prayer.
You opened your mouth. And you closed it. And you looked at him — this enormous, tattooed, stupidly handsome man who had stood on your mother's doorstep at twelve years old with bruises he didn't mention, who had kissed your cheek at thirteen and broken Ryan Marsh's nose at fourteen and waved goodbye from a train platform at seventeen and then sent you birthday cards from the edges of the world for a decade and then stopped for five years —
"Five years," you said. Your voice was very quiet.
Something moved in his face.
"I-,"
"I thought you were dead." You snapped cutting him off.
"I figured you would’ve."
"Simon."
"I know, sunshine." He said it the same way he'd always said things he couldn't argue with — not deflecting, not dismissing, just absorbing. The Manchester vowels in his voice like a hand on your shoulder. "I'll explain everything. I promise. All of it. Whatever you want to know."
You looked at him.
He looked at you.
The afternoon settled around the house, around the garden that was your garden in your own sixteen-year-old description, around the flag and the porch swing and the lavender and all of it, and the distance between you on the path and him on the porch steps was perhaps four feet and thirty years and five years of silence and a whole life of choosing not to say the one true thing.
"You built me the house?" you asked, whispering it. Like you were afraid to say it.
He was quiet for a moment. Then, "Bought it. Had the garden done the way you said."
"Simon." Your heart ached.
"You said lavender at the edges," he said. His voice was completely level. "You said a porch with somewhere to sit. You said you wanted to see the flag from the garden."
You pressed your hand to your mouth.
The rage was still there — it was not going anywhere quickly. The five years of it, the grief of it — but underneath it, something else. Something that had been there since you were four years old at a preschool art table, larger and quieter and more permanent than anything else you'd ever felt.
"You were sixteen," he said. As though this explained it. "You told me what you wanted. I just..." He stopped. Started again. "I wanted to be enough first. I wanted to have what you needed."
There was a long silence. A bee moved through the lavender. Somewhere a few streets away, a lawnmower hummed.
"Come inside," Simon said. "I'll make you tea. And I'll tell you everything."
You looked at him on the porch of the house he'd built you from a word, and you thought: you absolute idiot. You wonderful, impossible, infuriating man. You thought I'd stopped. You thought thirty years of this was something you could be enough for eventually, like it was a bar to clear, like there was a version of you I was waiting on instead of just —
Instead of just you. Always just you.
The lavender brushed your hand again. You walked up the steps and he looked down at you with those brown eyes that had never once left you.
"Hi, Simon," you said.
Something happened in his face. Something opened.
"Hi, sunshine," he said, his hand coming to the small of your back to guide you inside.
He made the tea.
You stood in the kitchen of a house that smelled of fresh paint and cedar and something faintly floral from the garden drifting through the open window over the sink, and you watched Simon Riley move around it like he'd always lived here — filling the kettle, finding the mugs without opening the wrong cupboard, knowing where the teabags were — and you thought: how long. How long has he been here, in this house he bought for you, learning where everything lives, waiting.
You sat at the kitchen table. It was a good table, heavy oak, the kind built to last and you ran your thumb along the grain of it and tried to arrange your feelings into some kind of order and failed.
Simon set the mug in front of you. Milk in last, the way you'd always taken it, which he knew because he'd made you approximately four thousand cups of tea over the course of your lives. He sat down across from you, his own mug between his big hands, and looked at you.
You looked back.
The kitchen light was warm and it caught the angles of his face. The jaw, the brow, the slight crook in his nose that was new, or newer, the result of something you didn't know about and weren't sure you wanted to.
He was watching you with that particular quality of attention he'd always had. Complete. Patient. Like you were the only thing in the room worth looking at.
"You're not wearing your glasses," he said.
You blinked. Of all the things. "No."
"Contacts?"
"For about ten years now, yes."
He was quiet for a moment, studying your face with that same unhurried attention, "I missed them."
"You missed my glasses?" You say with the deadpan tone you'd perfected over the years.
"Tortoiseshell ones," he said. "Used to push them up your nose when you were concentrating." He took a gulp of his tea, Adam's apple bobbing when he swallowed.
You stared at him. Eighteen years. Eighteen years of distance and war and God knows what else, and he missed your glasses. "Simon."
"Just saying."
"You are unbelievable." You scoff.
"The contacts suit you," he said, and the corner of his mouth moved — barely, almost nothing, but you'd spent your whole life reading that face and you caught it. "Everything suits you. But I liked the glasses."
"Stop it." You snap.
"Stop what?"
"Whatever that is," you said, and you pointed at his face, at the not-there-almost-smile, at the quality of his voice when he said everything suits you, at all of it. "You don't get to do that. You've been — Simon, you've been gone. You've been gone for eighteen years and for five of them, I thought you were dead." Your voice stayed steady, which surprised you. You'd expected it to crack on that. "So you don't get to walk out onto your porch looking like — like that — and tell me you missed my glasses and flirt at me like no time has passed."
He listened without interrupting. He always had — it was one of the things about him, the way he gave you the whole space of what you were saying before he entered it.
"You're right," he nodded.
"I know I'm right." Your spine straightened.
"I owe you an explanation."
"You owe me considerably more than that, Simon Riley, but yes. An explanation would be a start."
He wrapped both hands around his mug again and looked at you across the table and there was something in his face that was not the blank-nothing face, was not the armour he'd worn since he was twelve years old but something that was quieter and more exposed and a great deal more frightening because of it.
"Not here," he said.
You frowned. "What?"
"I don't want to do it like this. Sat in a kitchen." He glanced around the room briefly, as though orienting himself. "Come to dinner with me tomorrow night."
"What I—"
"The Grill on Merton Street."
You went very still.
The Grill on Merton Street. You hadn't been in years — not since you'd moved away from the area, not since things had shifted and the rituals of your old life had quietly been replaced by other things.
But you knew it. You knew every table in it. The way the light came through the front windows on a Sunday, the smell of it — roasted meat and old wood and the particular warmth of a place that had been feeding families for decades.
Your mother had loved it. Your father used to order the same thing every time and be pleased about it every time, and you and Simon had sat across from each other in the corner booth with the sticky laminated menus and kicked each other under the table and laughed.
"That's still open?" you managed.
"Had a look earlier this week," he said. "Still there. New owners but the same building. Same corner booth."
You looked at him. He looked at you. Outside, through the open window, a late bird was making itself known in the lavender.
"Fine," you said. "Dinner. Tomorrow. And you're going to tell me everything." you struck at him with a serious face.
"Everything," he agreed.
"I mean it, Simon. All of it."
"I know you do."
You drank your tea. It was exactly right. The temperature, the strength, the milk ratio and you hated him a little bit for that. For the fact that he still knew, that across seventeen years and God knows how many miles he still knew exactly how you took your tea, and he'd made it correctly on the first attempt without asking, and you were absolutely not going to cry about that.
You were not.
— ✦ —
You dressed carefully.
Not because you were trying to impress him.
You told yourself this firmly, standing in front of your wardrobe in the room you'd taken in the local B&B — you'd booked a night, not knowing how long this might take, not knowing what state you'd be in for the drive home afterwards — and you told yourself that you were simply dressing appropriately for a dinner at a decent restaurant.
That was all.
That was the entirety of it.
The dress was deep green. Fitted through the waist, falling to just below the knee, with a neckline that was elegant rather than dramatic.
You'd bought it for a work event two years ago and it had lived in your wardrobe since, waiting for an occasion that felt worth it. You put your hair up — not elaborately, just neatly, the kind of arrangement that looked effortless and had taken twenty minutes — and you wore the small gold earrings that had been your grandmother's. Low heels. The good handbag. A slick of red on your mouth that you almost wiped off twice before deciding to leave it.
You were not trying to impress him.
You were absolutely trying to impress him.
He was waiting outside The Grill when your taxi pulled up, standing on the pavement with his hands in his pockets. The air around him relaxed and easy. An anchored stillness, like a man who'd learned to wait and had made peace with it. He has the same dark slacks as yesterday, same loafers with the gold buckles, but the shirt tonight was black.
A deep, clean black that made his shoulders look approximately the width of a doorway, which was in fact an accurate assessment — and he'd left the top button undone. His hair was the same: pushed back, dark sandy blonde curling at the nape of his neck and catching the amber of the streetlights.
He saw you get out of the taxi.
He went very still. Completely, suddenly, entirely present in a way that landed on you like a hand against your sternum. Under your heartbeat.
You crossed the pavement toward him and his eyes moved over you — slowly, comprehensively, that same rake of attention he'd given you yesterday on the porch steps, only this time there was nothing restrained about what it did to your pulse.
He eyed you the same way he used to look at the extra cuts of slow roasted beef your mother added to his plate every time he joined you for a Sunday roast after church.
"Hi," you said.
"Hi, sunshine." His voice was low. The rough Manchester sending tingles down your spine.
He opened the door for you.
The Grill smelled exactly the same.
Roasted meat and warmed bread and old wood and something faintly of candle wax. It hit you the moment you stepped through the door and you had to stand still for just a second, just one second, to absorb the weight of it.
Your father's coat on the hook by the door. Your mother's reading glasses going into her bag as the menus arrived. Simon across from you, fourteen and fifteen and sixteen, his big hands wrapped around a Coke glass, his eyes on you under that careful brow.
The layout had shifted slightly — new owners, as Simon had said — but the bones of it were the same. The dark wood panelling. The low warm lighting. The tables set with proper linen and actual candles in glass holders. And in the back left corner was the booth.
Simon's hand was at the small of your back as the host led you through. A light touch, barely there, the kind of thing that could be merely courteous and was absolutely not merely courteous.
You said nothing about it.
You were almost at the booth when a voice said, "Well. I don't believe it."
You turned.
Margaret and Gerald Howarth.
Margaret had been your mother's friend since before you were born — a small, bright-eyed woman who had somehow barely aged in two decades. Her silver hair cut the same way it had always been, her husband a large, genial man beside her with a napkin already tucked into his collar. They'd been eating here since before you were born too, you suspected. Some people were simply woven into the furniture of a place.
"Margaret," you said, and you felt a genuine, warm rush of it. Of being seen by someone who had known you as a child, who had watched you grow up, who carried that particular knowledge of you that only people of a certain generation can hold. She was already rising halfway from her seat, her hand extended, and you took it and she covered it with her other one, the way she always had.
"We heard you were back in the area," she said — which was interesting, since you'd only arrived yesterday, but news apparently still moved at its old speed around here. Her bright eyes moved to Simon, and something in them softened with recognition and surprise in equal measure. "And Simon Riley. My goodness."
"Mrs Howarth." Simon's voice was respectful, quieter than usual, and you noticed — because you noticed everything about him — that he straightened fractionally. Not stiffly. Just the particular adjustment of a man in the presence of someone he'd known when he was young and unguarded.
"Look at the size of you," Gerald said, not unkindly, staring up at Simon with the frank appreciation of one large man for another. "What are they feeding you?"
"Gerald," Margaret scolded mildly.
"It's a compliment." He shrugged.
Simon almost smiled. "Good to see you, Mr Howarth."
Margaret was looking between the two of you with the expression of a woman who had been quietly observing people her entire life and drawing accurate conclusions from very little evidence. "Are you together?" she asked, with the particular directness that came with age and with having known you since you were in a pushchair.
"We're having dinner," you said carefully.
Margaret's expression said, quite clearly, that she had heard this and had also heard everything it was not saying. "Well," she said, patting your hand once more before releasing it, "it's lovely to see you both. You always did belong together, the pair of you. I said that to your mother once, do you know. I said those two—"
"It was lovely seeing you, Margaret," you said, with great warmth and only mild desperation.
She laughed, a bright, pleased sound and settled back into her seat.
As you turned to follow the host the rest of the way to the booth, you were almost certain you heard Gerald say, to his wife, "told you" in a tone of quiet marital satisfaction.
Simon was very carefully not reacting to any of this. You were very carefully not looking at him.
You saw two others you knew before you reached the booth.
Kim Ashworth, who had been in your form in Year Ten and who looked essentially the same as she had in school except that she had a baby on her hip and a husband trailing behind her with a changing bag.
She stopped mid-step when she saw you, did a small, delighted double take, said oh my God twice, and then looked at Simon in a way that was extremely uncomplicated in its appreciation before remembering the husband with the changing bag. There were promises exchanged to catch up properly, phone numbers that would probably not be used, genuine warmth on both sides.
And then at the bar, perched on a stool with a whisky, Dave Pearce — who had played alongside Simon on the secondary school rugby team and who greeted him with the particular vocabulary of men who knew each other at fifteen and have not changed as much as they think.
There was a brief, loud exchange that involved at least one shoulder-clap that could have knocked a smaller man sideways, and then Dave shook your hand too and told Simon he was punching. Which Simon received without expression and you tried your hardest not to laugh, biting your lip.
Finally the corner booth. You slid in. Simon folded himself into the seat across from you, the table scaled to ordinary human beings and therefore slightly absurd against the size of him, his knees bracketing it, his shoulders blocking the view of the room behind him entirely.
The menus came.
They were not laminated anymore — proper printed card, changed seasonally, the kind that meant the new owners had ambitions. But the roast was still on. The proper Sunday roast, the one your father used to order when you could afford to.
"Same corner," Simon said quietly.
"Same corner," you agreed.
He was looking at you across the table the way he used to look at you across this table, except that now his face was older and larger and had been to places that had clearly asked things of it. The look was different in its texture. Deeper, maybe. Older in the same way he was older. Like it had more weight behind it from all the years of being carried.
"You said everything," you reminded him. "All of it."
"I know."
"So." You gestured for him to start.
He set his menu down. Looked at you. And then he started talking.
He told it the way he told everything — without embellishment, without drama, in the flat, precise language of a man who had learned to communicate facts and trusted the facts to carry the weight without decoration.
He'd gone in at seventeen and he'd been good at it. Not surprising. He was built for the structure of it, for the clarity of having a purpose and a unit and a chain of things that made sense.
He'd moved up fast — faster than he let on in the cards he'd sent you, which had been careful, he explained, deliberately careful, because the more you knew the more you might worry. Which, you pointed out, had not been his decision to make. He didn't argue with that.
Task Force 141 came later. Years later, after deployments that he summarised in a sentence each and you understood enough from his face to know that each sentence was doing the work of much longer things.
He was a lieutenant now. He said it the way he said most things about himself, flatly, without vanity, presented as information. He had certain freedoms now that he hadn't had before, certain ability to make choices about where he went and when and what he did with the things the years had given him.
You both ordered your food.
"And the five years?" you asked, sipping your cocktail the waitress had brought over.
He was quiet for a moment, he stared at his San Miguel pint, the condensation sliding down the glass. Your food had arrived at some point during the waiting, while Simon collected his thoughts.
He picked up his fork and then set it down again.
"There was a man," Simon said.
Something about the way he said it made you put your fork down too.
"He ran drugs. Major operation, international — I won't go into all of it." He said this without flinching, looking at you steadily, not softening it. You'd always appreciated that about him — the way he treated your intelligence as a given. "After I escaped him, he decided to make it personal. He went after the people I—" He stopped. Chose the word carefully. "The people I was connected to."
The candle in the glass holder between you threw warm, unsteady light across his face.
"He killed them," Simon said. "My brother. Tommy's family." A pause that cost him something; you could see it cost him. "My Mother."
The restaurant continued around you — the murmur of other tables, the clink of cutlery, someone laughing softly near the bar — and you sat very still.
"Oh Simon," you whispered, you could feel the way your face formed the sympathy.
"I'm alright." He said it the way he'd always said it, the Manchester flat and absolute. The way that meant; don't make it bigger than I can hold right now. You knew that voice. You honoured it.
"He knew about you," Simon said and you froze. "That was the other thing. He'd done his research." His jaw shifted slightly. "As long as he was alive, you weren't safe. If I'd contacted you, properly contacted you, kept the thread going the way I wanted to, it would have given him a cleaner line. A more reliable way to reach me."
You understood the logic of it. You understood it clearly and immediately in the part of your brain that processed information. The other part — the part that had sat on the bottom stair with a birthday card after five years of silence, the part that had thought past tense — that part was going to take considerably longer.
"So you cut me off," you said. Not as an accusation. As a fact, laid down. You were starting to understand the shape of it.
"To keep you safe. Yes."
"Without telling me why." You sighed but you knew you were being unreasonable, but you hoped he would let you for a little longer.
"If I'd told you why, you'd have known there was a threat. And you'd have—" He stopped. The corner of his mouth moved, something that was not quite a smile and not quite not one. "You'd have done something about it. Gone looking. Made noise."
"I would not have—" You stopped, because you would have. You absolutely would have. You'd spent thirty years being completely unable to sit on the sidelines where Simon Riley was concerned, and the knowledge that someone was threatening him would have made you entirely unreasonable. "That's—" you huffed.
"Yeah," he said.
"You could have found a way—"
"There wasn't one. Not one that was safe." His voice was very level. "I went through every option, love. I promise you. Every one."
The word arrived quietly, without ceremony.
Love.
He'd never called you that — not in thirty years, not in all the time and all the familiarity of what you were to each other. He said it the way he said everything that mattered: without preamble, without dressing it up, laid down like the fact it was.
"And now?" you asked. Your voice was quite steady. Steadier than you felt.
"He's dead." No elaboration. None needed. The flat Manchester vowels carrying the weight of it cleanly, without mess. "And you're safe. And I—" He looked at you across the table, across the candle and the white linen. "I bought the house," he said. "I've spent a while making it what it is. Making if perfect. I saved up for years. The 141 pays well when you get to a certain level and I wasn't spending it on anything else."
"For years," you repeated, feeling a shiver rack up your spine and your toes go numb.
"Since I was about twenty." He said this without apparent embarrassment, as though it were the most natural thing in the world to spend fifteen years saving money to buy a woman a house from a description she'd given you at sixteen years old. "Took a while to find the right one that wasn’t too far from your parents. The lavender took three growing seasons to look like it did when you pulled up."
Three growing seasons.
He had planted the lavender three years ago. He had stood in a garden three towns from where you lived and planted lavender along a path because a sixteen-year-old girl had mentioned it lying on her back in his garden thirty years ago, and he had tended it for three years, and he had waited.
"Simon Riley," you said.
"It's got room for your books Sunshine, built the shelves myself." His lips quirked up at the corners at your flabbergasted expression.
"You are the most—" You stopped. Started again. "Do you have any idea what the past five years have felt like? Do you have any idea what I—" Your voice did the thing you'd been preventing it from doing, cracked at the edge of the sentence like a plate under too much weight. You stopped. Pressed your lips together. "I grieved you. I sat in my flat and I genuinely, actually grieved you and decided you were dead. I had — Simon, I had a plan for getting through it. I was managing it."
"I know."
"Don't say I know." you snapped sounding more like a bratty child than angry.
"I'm sorry." And this was different. This was not the automatic I know, the absorbing of your anger. This was something he said the way he said very few things — carefully, with full weight behind it. His eyes on yours across the table. "I'm sorry for the five years. I'm sorry I couldn't find another way. I'm sorry you were on your own with it." A pause. "I'm sorry it took me this long to have something worth coming back with."
"The house is not—" You stopped. "You didn't need to buy me a house, Simon. I didn't need—"
"I needed to," he said. Simply. "I needed to know I was coming back with something real. Something that wasn't just me turning up with nothing after all that time, asking you to — to accept—" He moved his hand across the table, and his fingers stopped just short of yours. Not touching. Close. "Asking you to take me as I was. I needed it to be enough. I needed there to be something I could give you that was—"
"Simon." Your voice was very quiet.
"I know it's not—"
"Simon." You turned your hand over on the table. Just that. The small, deliberate movement of turning your palm up.
He looked at it. Then he looked at you. Then, slowly, he put his hand in yours — his enormous, careful, tattooed hand. Not quite the one that had carried your bag through every corridor of secondary school and pulled you up off the pavement after Daniel Holt and held you on the platform at the train station, but this one now and his fingers closed around yours and he held on.
"I only ever wanted you," you said softly.
"Sunshine-"
"You were always worth it," you cut him off. And then, because it was time — because it had been time for approximately thirty years and you were done waiting for the right moment when the right moment had repeatedly failed to arrive — "You were always enough. You were always the thing I was — Simon, you have always been the only one I wanted. Exactly as you are."
He was very still.
"I didn't tell you on the platform," you said. "I should have. I've thought about it every day since."
"So have I," he said.
The candle between you flickered in some movement of air from the kitchen, and in the warm unsteady light his face was open in a way you had waited thirty years to see. His hand was warm and sure around yours, and from the other side of the restaurant you were almost certain you heard Margaret Howarth say something to Gerald in a satisfied undertone.
"You planted the lavender," you grinned.
"Three years ago." He finally smiles back at you, it was crooked and uneven and you loved it.
"You are," you said carefully, "the most ridiculous man I have ever known." You shook your head still grinning.
"Missed you too, sunshine," he smirked.
Dinner ended the way the best dinners end — not with a definitive conclusion but with a gradual, reluctant unwinding, the kind where both people keep finding one more thing to say, one more thread to pull, because the alternative is standing up and the evening becoming past tense.
You ordered dessert.
Neither of you particularly wanted it but you both ordered it, and you both knew why, and neither of you said so. The chocolate brownie was very good. Simon ate his methodically, the way he ate everything, and at one point looked up and caught you watching him and said nothing.
The candle between you had burned down to a stub by the time the bill came.
He paid. You protested on principle. He gave you a look that had not changed at all since he was fourteen years old — flat, certain, faintly amused — and handed the card to the waiter without further discussion.
"That's not—" you started.
"Next time," he said.
Next time. You let it sit there between you, warm and presumptuous and everything you wanted.
Outside, the evening had cooled.
The last of the summer still holding in the air, the kind of September evening that felt like a concession, like the year wasn't ready to be done.
The street was quiet for a Saturday, just a few couples moving between the restaurants and a group of lads outside the pub further down having a smoke. The amber of the streetlights made everything look like something worth remembering.
Simon stood beside you on the pavement, close enough that his arm brushed yours when he turned to look down the street, and you were very aware of the warmth of him and the black shirt and the lavender you couldn't smell from here but could somehow still feel in your hands.
"Walk with me a bit," he said. Not a question, not quite. He'd always done that — phrased invitations as though the outcome were already agreed, as though he simply assumed you'd say yes because you almost always did.
"Alright."
He fell into step beside you, and for a little while you just walked — past the wine bar with its fairy lights, past the old library that had become a gin distillery at some point in the last decade, past the post office that had been there since before either of you were born. You talked about small things. Easy things. The kind of conversation that runs alongside the real one underneath.
Then he stopped.
You stopped too.
Simon looked down at you. His hands were in his pockets. That brown gaze of his moved over your face in the way it had been moving over your face all evening — like he was cataloguing it, like he was making up for lost time in the looking.
"Dance with me," he said.
You blinked. "What?"
He tilted his head, "Come dancing with me."
You stared at him.
Simon Riley, who had sat against the wall at every school disco you'd ever attended, arms folded, watching everyone else with the expression of a man conducting a private risk assessment.
Simon Riley, who you had never, in thirty years of knowing him, seen voluntarily approach a dance floor.
"You don't dance," you said.
"No," he agreed. "But you do."
The simplicity of it landed somewhere very central.
You do.
As though that were reason enough. As though your enjoyment of a thing were sufficient justification for him to walk into it without hesitation.
Which, you supposed, when it came to Simon, it always had been.
"Alright," you said, for the second time in ten minutes.
His hand found the small of your back again, that same light, deliberate touch from inside the restaurant and he guided you down the street.
Simon said you weren't far, when you heard it.
The particular sound of a Domino's box. The slight crinkle of a carrier bag. And then your mother's voice, carrying across the quiet street in the way it always had — warm and clear and entirely without volume control.
"Oh honey! We thought - oh!"
"Oh fuck," you cursed.
You said it very quietly. Not quietly enough. Simon chuckled under his breath.
Your parents were coming along the pavement from the direction of the only car park around here — your father in his weekend coat, your mother in the blue one she'd had for fifteen years. A Domino's pizza box balanced in her arms and a carrier bag hanging from your father's hand.
Movie night. Of course. They still did it every other Saturday, had done since you were small, and of course they would do it tonight of all the Saturday nights in the entire calendar.
Your mother's face when she saw you was pure, unguarded delight — the face she always made when she encountered you unexpectedly, as though each time were still a pleasant surprise. Then her gaze moved, naturally and automatically, to the man standing beside you with his hand at the small of your back.
The delight didn't disappear. It did something more complicated.
"Oh honey," she said again, but differently this time. Softer. Her voice going somewhere else entirely. "Simon?"
The Domino's box dipped. Your father caught it with the reflexes of a man who had been catching things your mother nearly dropped for forty years.
Simon had gone still beside you. Not that controlled, present stillness he had, the one that wasn't tension but something adjacent to it. He was looking at your mother with an expression you couldn't fully read from the side, but you could see the line of his jaw, and it was careful.
"Mrs—" he started.
"Don't you Mrs me," your mother said. Her voice was not angry. That was the thing — you'd prepared yourself, in the split second between seeing them and now, for anger, or for the brisk, self-protective coolness she used sometimes when she'd been frightened. But it wasn't that. It was something that had tears in it, which was considerably worse to witness.
She handed the pizza box to your father without looking at him — he took it with the silent competence of long practice — and she crossed the pavement in four short steps and she put her arms around Simon Riley.
He was so much larger than her. He had always been larger than her, even at fifteen when he'd eaten her shepherd's pie at the kitchen table and been careful to seem like it was casual and not like he was starving. Even when she gave him seconds and he looked like he would beg for thirds.
But now it was almost absurd, the smallness of her against the width of him, and he stood there for just a fraction of a second — that fraction where you could see him recalibrating, receiving something he hadn't prepared for — and then his arms came around her and he held on.
Your mother was crying. Small, quiet sounds, the kind she made when she was trying not to. Her face was pressed against his chest and her hands gripped the back of his black shirt and she said, muffled and with great feeling, "You absolute boy."
Simon said nothing. His eyes, over the top of your mother's head, found yours.
You had to look away. The street was very interesting. The lamppost in particular.
You bit into your lip.
Your father appeared at your shoulder.
He was a quiet man, always had been. The kind of steady, observant presence that took things in without making a production of the taking in. He stood beside you with the pizza box over one arm and the carrier bag in the other hand and watched his wife hold the boy who had eaten at their table for a decade, and he said, very quietly, to you,
"Well. He's not dead then."
"No Dad," you managed. "He's not dead."
"Good," your father said.
As though this settled it. As though the entirety of the past five years of your grief and his, because he had grieved Simon too in his quiet way, in the way of a man who doesn't say things aloud but feels them thoroughly. He looked at Simon over the top of your mother's head and gave him a single, deliberate nod. The kind that meant; we'll talk. The kind that meant; I have things to say to you. The kind that also, underneath both of those, meant; I'm so glad son.
Simon received the nod with equal gravity, which was exactly right.
Your mother finally pulled back. She held Simon by the arms — or tried to, her hands not quite making it around the circumference of them — and looked up at him with red eyes and the particular expression of a woman who has a great deal to say and is choosing, for now, not to say most of it.
"You'll come for dinner," she said. Not a question. The same tone she'd used on him at fifteen and apparently intended to continue using indefinitely. "Sunday. Proper dinner. Not a restaurant. Mine."
"Yes," Simon said. Immediately. Without hesitation.
"Good." She released his arms and reached up and patted his cheek once, firmly, the way you might with someone who had done something frustrating and beloved in equal measure.
Then she turned to you, and her expression did something complicated and warm and knowing, and she didn't say any of the things she was clearly thinking, which you appreciated deeply.
What she said instead was: "Don't stay out too late. You're thirty-five, not seventeen."
"Mum." You scolded.
"I'm just saying." She shrugged.
"We're going dancing," you told her, with the energy of someone redirecting a conversation through sheer momentum.
Your mother looked at Simon. Simon looked at your mother. Something passed between them that was private and thirty years old and not yours to have.
"Of course you are," she said.
Your father passed the Domino's box back to your mother, and said, "Right then. We'll leave you to it." He looked at Simon one more time. "Sunday," he confirmed.
"Sunday," Simon said.
Your parents moved off down the pavement.
Your mother looked back once — just once — and her face when she did was the face you'd seen her wear at your primary school nativity and at your GCSE results and on the morning you'd gone to university; the particular face of a woman watching her child be happy and feeling the full, complicated, loving weight of it.
Then she turned back to your father and said something you couldn't hear, and his hand found her shoulder as they walked, and they rounded the corner and were gone.
You stood on the pavement in the September evening and breathed.
Beside you, Simon was also very carefully just standing there.
"She cried on me," he said, after a moment.
"Yes."
"Didn't expect that."
You turned to look at him. He was looking at the corner your parents had turned, and his face had the quality it sometimes had when something had reached him — not visibly, not dramatically, just in that particular stillness that meant something had got through.
"She cried about you," you told him. "When you stopped writing. Three years ago — there were several times, actually, but three years ago was the worst. She held me in her kitchen and we both—" You stopped. Managed the next part carefully. "She loves you too, Simon. She always did. You were at our table every other night for years."
He was quiet for a moment. Something moved in his jaw. "I know," he said. And this time the I know was different from all the other times he'd said it tonight — heavier, and private.
"You agreed to Sunday dinner," you giggled.
"Of course I agreed to Sunday dinner," he said knowing full well he would have been stupid not to and gotten an earful from your mother.
Simon offered you his hand.
Not at the small of your back this time. His hand, palm up, in the space between you. Old-fashioned and deliberate.
You put yours in it.
"Come on then," he said. "Let's go dancing."
There was, as it turned out, only one place to go dancing in this town on a Saturday night if you meant actual dancing — the kind with a proper floor and music with a real structure to it.
It was not a club.
It was not a bar with a cleared space near the speaker.
It was the old church hall on Callow Street, which had been hosting the Saturday Evening Social Dance since before either of you were born, and which Simon seemed to know about with the specificity of a man who had done his research.
"A dance hall," you said, standing outside it. Through the tall, thin windows the warm light was visible, and the sound — strings, a proper band, something with a waltz rhythm that made the windows hum faintly. "You're taking me to a dance hall."
"Only place with a floor."
"Simon, this is a — there will be pensioners in there." you said quietly.
"There'll be a dance floor," he looked down at you. "And you said yes." he shrugged but looked smug.
He pushed the door open and held it, and because you had in fact said yes, and because the music through the door sounded genuinely lovely, and because you were still holding his hand from the pavement, you went in.
The church hall smelled of floor polish and tea. Fairy lights were strung along the rafters — someone's addition, not the original fixtures, and they made the whole space amber and soft.
Round tables lined the edges, most of them occupied by couples in their sixties and seventies and eighties, a few younger faces dotted among them, everyone dressed with the particular care of people who still believed an evening out was worth dressing for.
On the small stage at the far end, a four-piece band was working through something in three-four time with the ease of musicians who had played together for years.
And at the edge of the floor, clipboard in hand, wearing the same expression of organised authority she'd worn every PE lesson for fifteen years was Mrs Valerie Croft.
She was smaller than you remembered. Or perhaps you were simply larger.
She'd retired at some point — the hair was fully silver now rather than streaked — but the posture was identical: spine straight, chin up, the bearing of a woman who had spent decades telling teenagers to stand properly and had eventually simply become the embodiment of the instruction.
She looked up from her clipboard as you approached and her eyes moved from you to Simon, and to her credit, she didn't miss a step.
"Well," she tilted her chin up to meet his eyes, "Riley."
"Miss," Simon said. Which was technically incorrect given that she had a ring on her finger and had for as long as you'd known her, but you suspected it was because he'd called her Miss in secondary school the way you had. "Mrs Croft. Sorry. We were passing and— " He paused, which was unlike him. "Is there any chance we could crash it?"
Mrs Croft looked at him. She looked at you. She looked at your joined hands with the expression of a woman who had supervised enough teenagers to recognise a development when she saw one.
"Can you behave yourselves?" she asked.
"Yes," you said nodding.
Simon said nothing.
Mrs Croft made a sound that was not quite a laugh but was adjacent to one. "Floor's open," she said. "Don't knock anyone over." And she turned back to her clipboard.
The first dance was not elegant.
Simon was, as he had always been and had openly admitted, not a dancer.
He was a man built for other kinds of movement — purposeful, directed, the kind that had somewhere to go. Dancing required a different relationship with your body, a willingness to be present in it without agenda, and that was not naturally his.
But he was trying. And Simon Riley trying at something he wasn't good at with complete, unhesitating commitment was one of your favourite things in the world.
He held you correctly — one hand at your waist, the other holding yours at the right height — because he had clearly looked this up at some point, which you were choosing not to think about too hard. His footwork was careful. Deliberate. Slightly behind the beat in the way of someone counting silently.
"You're counting," you told him trying your hardest not to laugh.
"Shut up."
"Simon, I can see your lips moving." you snorted.
"I said shut up."
You were laughing now. Properly, helplessly, the kind that came up from somewhere real — and he looked down at you with that face, that flat, long-suffering, completely fond face, and something in his eyes that was warm in a way that had nothing to do with patience and everything to do with the fact that your laugh had always been, apparently, one of his favourite sounds.
"You're doing fine," you told him, once you'd recovered.
"I'm doing terribly," he answered. "Keep going."
By the second dance, he was better.
By the third, he had found something. Some adjustment in the way he held you, the way his hand settled more fully at your waist, drawing you closer so the movement between you became less about individual steps and more about one shared thing. He was a quick study. He always had been, once he'd decided something was worth doing.
You became aware, gradually, of the room watching.
Not intrusively. Not all at once. But in the soft, peripheral way of a room full of people who have been in love for decades and recognise the particular weather of it when it walks through the door.
An older couple near the stage — she in pale blue, he in a suit that had been good once and was still cared for — had stopped talking to watch you.
A woman at one of the corner tables had her chin in her hand.
Mrs Croft, by the door, was very deliberately looking at her clipboard and failing to look only at her clipboard.
You didn't mind. You were too busy watching Simon watch you.
The band changed tempo at half past nine.
The waltz gave way to something with a different shape entirely — something that moved from the hips rather than the feet, a rhythm that was slower in its pulse and considerably less innocent in its intention.
A rumba.
You looked up at Simon.
He looked down at you.
"I don't know this one," he said.
"I'll show you." you breathed.
You took his hand and placed it lower at your waist, right above the curve of your ass. Deliberately watching his face when you did it, watching the shift in his expression, the way something in his eyes went very still and very focused. "Hip to hip," you told him. "Slower than you think. Let the music pull you."
He followed your lead with an attention that was frankly overwhelming in its completeness.
Simon Riley giving you his full, undivided, physical focus was not a small thing. He was so large and so present and he moved with you rather than against you, adjusting with every shift of your weight, and somewhere in the second minute of the song the counting stopped and something else replaced it.
He drew you closer. His hand at your hip pulled you in until there was no space left between you, until you could feel the warmth of him through the green of your dress and you were very aware of every point of contact, of the music and of the room full of people who had gone very quiet.
Then he turned you.
It was not technically correct. It was not what the dance required. But he turned you in a single, smooth movement that his body had decided on and yours simply followed, because that was what it did with him.
And then he dipped you.
The room tilted. His arm was across your back, solid and immovable, and you were suspended in the amber light with the music around you and your hand at his shoulder.
He lowered you — slowly, with complete control, no hesitation in the hold and then his face was close, very close, and his nose grazed the line of your throat making your breath hitch.
A slow, deliberate graze. The warmth of his breath against your pulse point. You felt it in places that had nothing to do with dancing, between your legs throbbing.
His hand — the one at your hip — slid down, just slightly, just enough, finding the outside of your thigh where the fabric of your dress lay, and he hooked your leg, slowly, around his hip. His fingers at the back of your thigh. Holding you there. His nose still at your throat.
The music resolved. Somewhere behind you, someone started clapping.
He brought you upright. Smoothly, slowly, until you were standing again and his hand was still at the back of your thigh. Your leg still around his hip and your faces were very close. Your heart was conducting itself in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with exertion.
You were panting. Slightly. Just slightly.
He was not panting. He was looking down at you with the almost-smile, the one that had always been rarer than gold and twice as valuable — and his eyes were warm and very dark and entirely, completely satisfied with themselves.
"You looked that up as well," you managed.
"No," he said.
"Simon—"
"That one," he said, "I just wanted to do."
From the table by the stage, the woman in pale blue was applauding with great enthusiasm. Her husband had two fingers in his mouth and was whistling.
Mrs Croft had given up entirely on the clipboard.
The taxi back was not a long ride.
It felt longer than it was, and shorter than you wanted.
You sat beside him in the back seat with his thigh against yours and the city moving past the windows and neither of you speaking. The silence had a texture to it that was thick and warm and anticipatory in a way that made the air feel heavy in your lungs.
His hand was on your knee. Just resting there, heavy and warm, the way he did everything — with complete, unapologetic certainty.
You did not move it.
The house appeared at the end of the lane with its white fence and its dark windows and the lavender silver in the moonlight.
You were out of the taxi before it had fully stopped and you were aware how eager this appeared and you didn't care.
Simon paid the driver and caught up with you in three strides because his legs were considerably longer than yours and always had been.
He got to the door first. Key in hand.
The door opened.
And you did not wait for him to step through it.
You took him by the front of his shirt, that black shirt, warm from his body, the fabric bunching in your fists and you lips were suddenly on his.
You walked him backwards through the doorway and you felt the moment his back met the wall just inside and you were already kissing him before he'd fully registered the sequence of events.
Your mouth on his. Your hands in the front of his shirt. Thirty years of it finding its way out all at once, without ceremony, without preamble, without any of the careful management you had been applying to yourself since you were four years old at a preschool art table.
He kissed you back.
He kissed you back the way he did everything — thoroughly, completely, with his full attention and no apparent interest in doing anything else ever again.
His hands came to your face, big and careful, tilting your jaw, and for a moment you were simply inside the realness of him and the warmth of him and the fact that he was here and alive and kissing you in the hallway of the house he'd bought for you.
He pulled back.
"Easy, sunshine," he said against your lips. Low. A little breathless, which you would be privately triumphant about later. The corner of his mouth pulled up in that crooked smile.
You became aware, in the slightly dazed way of someone returning from somewhere, that your hands were still in his shirt and his hands were still on your face and you were standing approximately two inches apart in his hallway.
You also became aware, in the refocusing of your vision, of his mouth.
Of the scar on his upper lip.
You didn't know how you hadn't noticed it before — through dinner, through the dancing, through all of it.
Perhaps you had simply not been this close before. Or perhaps you had been looking at so many things that you hadn't been looking at everything.
It was small, a thin pale line bisecting the left side of his upper lip, old enough to have faded to silver, the kind of scar that had been there for years and had been lived with so thoroughly that the face had absorbed it.
You lifted your thumb and touched it, gently. "How'd you get this?"
He went very still, alert and present and reading you.
You kissed it. Softly. Just that.
Something moved in his throat.
His hands shifted from your face to your waist, warm and settled, and he began to move you gently — backwards, one steady step at a time — turning you both away from the wall and deeper into the hallway. His foot found the door behind him and pushed it closed with a quiet, final click.
"If I tell you about that one," he said, his voice low and even above your head as he guided you past the entrance and toward the stairs, "I'll have to tell you about the rest."
He looked down at you as he said it, that look, the one that said you were the most interesting thing he had ever encountered. The one that made you feel simultaneously seen and slightly undone — and his expression had in it something that was fond and amused and entirely, devastatingly warm.
You kicked your heels off at the bottom of the stairs. They went somewhere behind you. You didn't look.
Your bag went next, dropped against the banister.
"The rest?" you repeated. Your voice came out slightly smaller than you intended. Your eyes, entirely without your permission, moved down the front of him — the black shirt, the breadth of his shoulders, his torso, his thick thighs, all of him — and back up again. Slowly.
He watched you do it. He said nothing.
You swallowed. "Tell me then."
His hand at your waist steered you up the first step, and then the second, and the stairs curved slightly toward the landing above, and at the top of the stairs he pushed open the door to a bedroom.
The room was large and furnished.
A bed, properly large, the kind that accommodated a man his size without complaint. Low lamps on either side casting the same amber warmth as the hall below. Dark wood floors, a window looking out toward the garden, the curtain shifting slightly in a crack of night air.
He kissed you, just inside the door you kissed him back and his hands were at your hips.
Then he pulled back with a groan. Both of you breathing slightly harder than was strictly accounted for by climbing one flight of stairs.
"I want to, sunshine," he said. His voice was very low. Restrained. His hands still on your body, holding you there, his thumbs moving in a small slow motion against the fabric of your dress that was doing nothing to help you think clearly. "I do. But I need to hear it from you first. Your permission. Clear words. I don't want to misunderstand you."
You opened your mouth.
And then your eyes moved, over his shoulder, to the dresser.
A skull mask looked back at you.
You closed your mouth. You looked at it. The mask, white and stark and precise but somehow both alien and completely, recognisably his. The balaclava beside it, folded neatly. And tactical gloves — enormous, black, reinforced, approximately the size of your head.
"That yours?" you asked.
Simon turned his head, following your gaze. He looked at the dresser, then back at you. "Yeah."
"What is it?"
"What I wear on missions."
"Oh," you said.
And then your brain did something entirely beyond your authority. It constructed, with great speed and considerable detail, an image: Simon, broad and enormous, in black tactical gear. Gloved hands. That mask. Hovering over you.
You swallowed.
The image did not leave. It simply settled in, warm and vivid and decidedly unhelpful.
"Sunshine."
His hand came to your face — his big, warm, ungloved hand, his actual hand, the one you knew — his thumb sweeping gently under your eye, bringing you back into the room and the amber lamplight and the present moment.
"Hmm?" you managed meeting his gaze.
His eyes moved over your face with the same comprehensive attention he always gave you.
"Your permission, love," he said. Quiet. Certain.
"Oh." You blinked. "Yes. Yes, you have it. Always."
The almost-smile. "Not for everything I want to do to you." His thumb was still moving, very gently, under your eye. "I'll ask. Multiple times."
You stared at him. "Multiple—"
"Times," he confirmed. His voice was entirely level. His eyes were not.
You pushed his shoulder and your cheeks burned.
He caught your hand as you pushed it and laughed, a low, real, full sound, the kind that you had spent most of your life engineering because it was so rare and so completely, unreasonably good.
You laughed too, properly, the helpless kind, and his forehead came down to rest against yours and you were both laughing in the amber light of his bedroom with the skull mask on the dresser and the lavender outside the window and thirty years behind you and everything in front.
The laughing settled.
Not all at once — it unwound gradually, the way laughter does when it's the real kind, leaving something warm and loose in its place.
His forehead was still against yours. His hands had moved from your face to your waist, both of them now, holding you the way he'd held you on the dance floor — with that complete, unhurried certainty, like you were something he'd been waiting to hold properly for a very long time and intended to do it right.
The amber light of the lamps lay across everything. Through the gap in the curtain, you could see the edge of the garden — the pale shapes of flowers, the dark of the lawn.
"Tell me about the rest," you said quietly.
He pulled back just enough to look at you. "The scars?"
"You said if you told me about the one on your lip you'd have to tell me about the rest." You reached up and touched the scar again — that thin, silver line — with the pad of your thumb. "So tell me about the rest."
He looked at you for a long moment. Then he reached up and began, without ceremony, to unbutton his shirt.
You were very still.
He did it the way he did everything — without drama, without performance, button by button from the collar down, and when he shrugged it from his shoulders and set it aside you understood, in a way you hadn't before, what eighteen years of that life had written on him.
He was enormous.
You'd known that in the abstract — had known it from the doorframe and the dance floor and the way rooms seemed to reorganise themselves around him — but this was different.
This was the specific, undeniable reality of his shoulders, the breadth of his chest, the muscle of his arms that carried the tattoo sleeve on the left, the ink wrapping from wrist to shoulder in dark, intricate patterns that in this light you still couldn't fully read but wanted to.
And the scars.
There were more than you'd expected.
Each one a different shape and age and story, written into the topography of him in pale and silver lines. A long one along his left ribs. Something older, fainter, across the top of his right shoulder. A circular scar below his collarbone on the left side that your medical knowledge was sufficient to identify and that made your chest constrict briefly and completely before you put that particular knowledge away for now.
He was watching your face as you looked. Careful. Giving you the time of it.
You stepped forward. You placed your hand flat against his sternum — his heart under your palm, steady and real — and you felt him exhale.
"The lip," you said.
"Kandahar. 2004. Caught the stock of a rifle." He said it the same way he'd told you everything tonight — flat, factual, trusting the fact to carry the weight. "Bit through my lip. Wasn't pretty for a while."
You moved your hand from his sternum to his ribs. Found the long scar there, traced it gently with your fingertips.
"That one."
"Knife. 2009. I moved the wrong way and the other man moved the right way." The shadow of something in his face that was not quite humour and not quite not. "Lesson learned."
Your hand moved to his shoulder. The older, fainter scar.
"Before the military," he said, before you asked. His voice changed, just fractionally. Flatter. Doing more work to stay level. "Not a mission."
You understood. You didn't ask further. You pressed your lips to it instead — gently, just that, your mouth against the old pale mark — and you felt the breath go out of him in a way that was different from all the others. Slower. Deeper.
"Sunshine," he said. Very quietly.
"The one below your collarbone," you said.
A pause. "That one's not a story for tonight."
You tilted your head back to look up at him. "Is it a story for eventually?"
His eyes on yours. Something in them that was considering, assessing, "Yeah," he said. "Eventually."
"Alright," you said. You meant it. You had waited thirty years; you could wait for the story of one scar.
His hand moved to your face. That same gesture from the hallway — his thumb at your cheek, slow and deliberate and he tilted your chin up and kissed you. Not urgently this time. Slowly. Deeply.
His hands found the zip at the side of your dress — careful, unhurried — and he looked at you, a clear question in it, and you nodded, and his hands were very steady and very gentle. Your dress went the way of your heels and your bag, somewhere behind you, unmissed.
He looked at you the way he had looked at you on the porch yesterday, and outside The Grill tonight, and across the restaurant table, and on the dance floor — with that complete, comprehensive attention.
Only now there was nothing restrained about what was in it. It was simply there, open and certain, and it was thirty years of something finally being allowed to be exactly what it was.
"Hi," you said. Which was absurd. Which made him laugh again, low and real.
"Hi, sunshine," he said. His hands at your waist. His forehead dropping to yours.
“Si I need to-“ you breathed in deep, “I um,” he pulled his head away from yours, looking into your eyes with those brilliant brown ones of his.
“What is it Sunshine?” He asked, his finger under your chin tilting your head up.
“I’m, I’ve never-“ you sigh, “I’ve told you so many things, I can’t believe I can’t even say this to you.”
“Do we need to slow down?” He asked, his voice softening.
“No. It’s not that. I mean I’m not a virgin if that’s what you’re thinking I just, no guy has ever-“ you sigh again, your eyes dropping from his.
Simon is quiet. He waits, the way he always waits — giving you the whole space of it, not rushing you toward the end of the sentence.
“Made it good,” you finally say, to his chest. “For me. It’s always just, fine. Maybe sometimes I get close but then it’s over. Not that there’s been loads of guys, maybe three.”
A beat.
You make yourself look up at him.
Something changes in his face.
You see the flare of it.
Anger.
Not toward you — you feel that immediately, the anger isn't at you, it moves through him and settles somewhere else entirely. His jaw shifts. His eyes, for just a moment, go somewhere dark and quiet.
"Every one of them," he says. Low. More to himself than to you.
"Simon—"
"Had you," he says. "And didn't—" He stops. The jaw again. His eyes squeeze shut. "Didn't pay attention."
"It's not—"
"It is." His eyes open. He looks at you, his hands moving to your hips, both of them, settling there with a weight that feels like anchoring, like he needs the contact as much as you do. The darkness has settled now, controlled, underneath everything else.
"And I wasn't here." Something moves through his expression — not guilt exactly, but something adjacent to it, something private and old. "Should've been your first, sunshine. Should've been there to—"
He stops himself. His forehead drops to yours.
"I've waited years for this," he says quietly. "I'm not rushing it. And I'm going to pay attention."
“Pay attention?” You ask breathless.
“To every sigh,” he kissed your cheek, “whimper and moan.” His lips moved down to your jaw. “To the way your hips move, the way your back arches, the way you’ll writhe under me, how I’ve imaged it every time I’ve gotten off for the last two decades.” He whispered the last bit into your ear, teeth tugging on your earlobe.
You gasp, “Simon.” Your cheeks burn.
“Oh don’t tell me you never thought about it.” He grins pulling back to look down at you.
You look at the floor sheepishly cause of course you have. Of course you’ve cum the hardest you ever have in your life only when thinking about Simon fucking you.
"Oh you have." He smirked titling his head.
“Shut up.” You push his shoulder and he laughs.
His hands leave your hips and then you're moving, his arms around you, and the edge of the bed meets the back of your knees.
Then his massive paws are in your hair and his lips are on your neck as your back meets the sheets. His weight heavy and solid on you. You could tell he was holding himself up so he didn’t squish you.
He leaned back on his heels, kneeling between your legs. You sighed in satisfaction when his fingers ran over your bare skin. His blunt nails scratching softly where your pelvic bone sits.
"So beautiful Sunshine," He grabs your hips and squeezes, "Fill my hands with you finally." Simon groans. A noise you've been picturing in your head. This and everything else that happens this evening, you truly believe, will be one of those times when reality is better than anything you have imagined.
Simon's brown eyes have always been intense, but right now the way he's looking down at you it's like he is someone else entirely. His eyes almost black with how much they have darkened.
"Simon." You tangle your fingers with his.
"Can I?" He asks. His hand, the one not in yours, trailing down your thigh and stopping on your mound. You clench around nothing when he pushes down, just a little bit of pressure that you feel in your clit and makes your hips buck.
You don't miss the way his lips do the almost smile thing. You nod furiously but he shakes his head.
"Need your words love." He raises a brow.
"Yes, yes Simon touch me." You breathe out, your chest feeling tight when he nods, moving his hand down to cup your cunt over your underwear.
And maybe its because you haven't had sex in three years, maybe its because you are touch starved or maybe its simply because its Simon, but your back arches and your moan is down right pornographic with a simple touch over your underwear.
"So responsive." He mumbles, his thumb rubbing circles over your clit through the fabric. "Get your tits out for me Sunshine, wanna see em." he grunts feeling your underwear getting wet.
Shakily you reach behind your back and unclip your bra. "Been thinking about them for years. What they look like, how they'll bounce when I fuck you." He groans as you pull the straps down your arms and fling the bra on the floor.
His eyes are on your chest, he doesn't blink. Then as if his system has rebooted, he blows air out of his cheeks and whistles low. "Fuck lovie, so pretty. You're a dream." Simon leans forward and wraps his lips around your breast, his tongue swirling around the nipple as his thumb continues circling your clit.
You moan, fingers tugging at his hair.
He comes off your breast with a pop making you whine and push at his shoulder. He grins pressing his thumb firmer against you, while sliding his other hand over your leg, index finger tracing over the small scar on you leg from when you fell off your bike after Simon broke your training wheels.
There was something comforting about this. Simon wasn't someone you had to explain yourself to, he already knew every version of you, he was simply adding this one to his list. This version, open and honest and begging the man you'd known for thirty years to make you cum on his fingers.
This didn't feel like a hook up, not like other guys have, but it felt like two people who have been each other's home for years and they're finally admitting it.
"Kiss me Simon." You're not even sure if what you said made sense with how much you were panting. But he leaned down to graze his lips along yours. Teasing and soft, despite the fast past he'd started to set with his thumb.
"Stop teasing." You huffed.
"Its my favourite pastime." He grinned hooking his fingers in your underwear, pulling them down and moving with them to settle between your legs.
You gasp, when his tongue slides from your asshole to your clit. "Simon!" His dark eyes are locked on yours as he swirls the tip of his his tongue around your entrance. Your toes curl, your head falling back onto the soft bed sheets.
A few occasions, you could count on one hand, had a guy you were with eaten you out and it was good but fuck, it didn't feel like this.
You felt like you were burning all over with each swipe of his tongue, each dip inside your entrance, each pattern he begins to circle over your clit.
He was learning you.
Simon groans against you, his breath hot, it made you dizzy. You feel everything, its too much to quick and your hips start to buck against his mouth.
Simon clearly had no intention of slowing down or stopping as he slides his arms around your thighs and splays his hands over the tops of them locking you in place.
It feels like fire, like molten lava pooling low in your abdomen the harder his tongue presses against you.
You don’t even recognise the sounds coming out of you, it’s as if every movement pulls a new one from you.
His thumb replaces his tongue and he rubs the bump in small circles until you can barely breathe. “Sound so pretty,” he murmurs just as your back arches and you moan loudly into the night air.
He is still speaking but you can’t hear anything he is saying, it’s all blurring together the way your vision is blurring. His thumb slides from your clit down until it’s pushing its way inside you. Your hips jerk away but his other hand is quick to hold you in place.
“No running.” Simon growls.
You cry out when his tongue comes back to torture you, lapping at you like he’s never had a drink and you're fresh water. Soon enough the rhythm he’s built has your hips rolling forward seeking more of whatever he has to give you.
Your hand reaches for his arm and squeezes hard the exact moment your vision turns white and your body shakes, dissolving into pleasure. It's like lightning pulsing through you. He works your through your orgasm, wringing every last wave of pleasure from you before he moves to your lips, kissing you.
“Did so good Sunshine. I’ve got you.” His arms wrap around you, your nipples grazing against the hair on his chest, that alone has you whimpering.
"Need more, want you inside me Simon. Please." You look into his eyes, your shyness gone with your orgasm.
"Okay Sunshine." Simon chuckles, the sound vibrating against you.
He pulls back and gets off the bed before he starts to unbuckle his belt. He pushes his black slacks down along with his underwear, his large, and he was so fucking big, cock already hard.
"Always wondered what you'd be like in bed," He tilts his head with a smirk, "If you'd like being in control. Or if you'd prefer me to lead," He knelt on the bed again, and oh my god Simon Riley, your best friend of thirty years and the love of your life was crawling up the bed towards you until his cock was flush with your entrance. "If you'd be needy and beg. Or if you'd bark orders at me." He slapped the head of his cock against your clit. "If you'd be loud or quiet."
"If you'd let me do whatever I wanted to you," his head titled back, eyes shut, "Fuck Sunshine, the things I've imagined doing to you," He looks down at you with the most intense gaze, pining you there on the bed, "Would you let me lovie? Do whatever I want to you?" He asks, pearly whites peaking out to sink into his bottom lip.
"Like what?" Your breath is so unsteady, so hitched and uneven you feel your cheeks heat even more than they have done at his words.
He grins, "Like what?" He chuckles pushing the head of his cock against your entrance, not in, but resting against it, "Wanna fuck you so hard you can't walk. Make love to you slow and so deep you'll feel me everywhere. Bend you over every surface in this house and make you cry on my cock-"
"Simon!" You gasp.
"Can I Sunshine?" He groans pushing in a little more and your eyes sting with tears at the stretch.
"Yes! Please yes!" He pushes in slowly. One of his hands coming next to you on the bed and the other gripping your hip. He keeps sliding in further, so slowly until its sheathed inside you.
Simon does not move. You can see the restraint within the way his teeth are gritted, his brows furrowed, sweat forming on his forehead.
“Fuck you feel amazing wrapped around me, so tight.” He groans.
You don’t have any words and even if you did, you doubt you would be able to say them. You have never felt so…full. So filled to the brim and unable to get a reprieve from it.
“M’gonna move, gotta move Sunshine,” Simon growls and the fullness disappears for a second before he’s pushing himself back in.
“Fuck you feel so good Si.” You shudder and stars appear in your vision when he moves forward and takes your legs with him folding you in half.
Simon Riley has you in fucking mating press and didn't even break the slow rhythm he's building. He continues this push and pull movement until it begins to flow, each movement begins where the other ends. The pattern making you sob, “Don’t stop!”
You can't function and its only now that you understand the phrase 'being fucked dumb', rocking your hips, trying desperately to keep up with each thrust, back arched so beautifully.
Simon lets his hand slip and curve around your jaw without thinking about it, "Taking me so well Sunshine." The feral look in his eyes sends a shiver up your spine.
"Too big." You sobbed, your hands grabbing at his large biceps as he thrusts harder. He could feel every ridge and curve of your sopping cunt.
"You can take it." He encouraged you, biting at your neck leaving marks in his wake and looking so damn happy whilst doing it.
You continued to moan and whimper, tears of pleasure falling down your face while Simon's huge body hovered over you. Protecting you from the outside world, in here, it was just you and him.
"Si..oh!" you cried out feeling him hit that rough spot inside your weeping, swollen cunt.
"There it is." He didn't mean to grin like a obsessed man in such an intimate moment but he couldn't help himself. He never can with you. Each thrust hits the one place no man ever seems to be able to find but Simon seemingly found with ease. A spot that makes a tightening begin like a coil, being wound with every drive of his hips.
Your sinful noises morph into higher pitched breathy little screams.
"I know lovie, I know." He cooed, holding you closer. His sweat glazed skin meeting yours as his large veiny hand slips under your head, his other arm curling around your waist.
You move your hips and he groans vulgar into the air, his hand gripping your hair and pulling your head back, a little to the side before he attacks your neck all messy. Smearing his lips across your throat, you don’t even recognise the sound that leaves your mouth.
He pulls away, his dark eyes flit to your squelching pussy, the noise attracting his attention pupils dilating, honing in on the way your cunt sucks his cock back in. He couldn’t pull away even if he wanted to and fuck he doesn’t, he wants nothing more than to stay in your pretty pussy forever.
“Simonfuckyespleaserighttheredontstop!” All the words and moans blend together until your mumbling nonsense trying your hardest to keep conscious, it’s difficult with the way he’s fucking into you so deliciously it’s making you delirious in the best way.
His big body towering over yours, big hands gripping you almost bruisingly. His thick muscular hairy thighs press against your skin compellingly, the sight before you, it's irresistible. All you have to do is look down to see his massive cock sliding in and out of you, a ring of white collecting at the base.
It's too much seeing him like this, feeling the sweet pleasure burn through you and yet Simon moves one of his hands off your head and presses a thumb to your swollen, aching clit.
You're done for.
You sob, so fucking loud you swear everyone in the world can hear it, hot tears flow down your cheeks staining them.
"That's it." The words wash over you with your orgasm, it swirls around you, clings to you, and pushes you down down down the rabbit hole of pleasure. Oversensitivity sets in making you whine at his touch, but you can't stop yourself from wanting more.
Your hips buck into his touch eliciting a dirty chuckle from him.
As Simon picks up his thrusts, he comes to the conclusion that he loves you like this, wants to see it everyday. You're so drunk, so delirious and he loves it. Loves the far away look in your eyes right before they roll back into your skull.
He shoves his face into your neck groaning, "Gonna cum Sunshine, need to. Where?" his thrusts pick up again, as if that were even possible.
"Cum inside me Simon, fill me up." You cry out.
Simon must have been right there as he cums the second you finish your sentence. Hot thick robes of cum pushing deep inside you. He rubs your clit faster and another smaller orgasm zips through you leaving you whimpering.
He stays in you, holding you until he goes soft. He moves your legs so they don't cramp. "Did so well for me Sunshine. I love you so much." He looks into your eyes as more tears spill down your cheeks.
"I love you Simon." you bring your fingers into his hair, pulling him closer to kiss you. The contrast between the way he just destroyed your guts and is now kissing you so softly, is astounding.
He is careful when he picks you up and walks into the ensuite bathroom to the right, flicking the light on and placing you on the toilet. "Gotta pee sunshine, don't want you getting you a uti." He says and you're so tired you don't even have the energy to be embarrassed.
Your eyes as still closed as you pee. Your hand moves to find the toilet paper but a warm flannel is being pressed against you, Simon's other hand on your knee to keep them open. You whine and push his hand away, "Simon that's icky." You frown at him opening your eyes to see him looking at you with a frown of his own.
"Nothing about you is icky Sunshine. I'm clearing up my mess, now move your hand." You do as told and it occurs to you, through your tired haze, while Simon gently wipes you clean that he must be used to clearing up mess with the job he does.
"All done. Want a shower or straight to sleep?" He asks.
"Sleep." You yawn making him smile at you.
He carries you back to the bed, lifting the duvet and settling you both underneath it.
The particular quality of afterwards settles in the room.
The warmth of it, the specific silence, the way the world outside the window continues to exist and you become aware of it again in layers. The sound of the garden. The distant sound of a car somewhere. The sound of him breathing.
You were lying with your head on his chest. His arm around you, heavy and warm. His heartbeat under your ear, steady and unhurried, the same heart that had been beating beside you in one form or another for thirty years.
His hand moved. Slowly, idly, up and down your back.
You watched the lamplight glow on the beside table. You thought about the lavender. You thought about the train station in 2001, and the birthday cards, and the bottom stair with the cream envelope, and Margaret Howarth saying you always did belong together with the satisfied certainty of someone who had known it before either of you did.
"Simon," you said.
"Yeah."
"You planted lavender for three years."
"You mentioned that already."
"I'm still processing it."
A low sound in his chest that was the rumble of a laugh contained. "Take your time Sunshine."
You propped yourself up and looked at him. His face in the lamplight — older, marked, those brown eyes that had been watching you since you were four years old, now watching you from a pillow in the house he'd bought you.
His expression was open in the way it had been open on the porch and at the restaurant table and in the dance hall, the way it had been open perhaps three times in thirty years before tonight and was now, apparently, simply his face when he looked at you.
You loved him so much.
You had loved him in different quantities and different registers for most of your life and now you loved him in this one too, this new one, and it was the same love and completely different and you thought you would be discovering its dimensions for a considerable amount of time.
"You should have told me," you said. "Years ago. Before the train."
"Yeah," he said. No argument.
"I would have said it back then too."
Something moved in his face. "I know," he said. And then, quieter, "I wasn't ready then. Wasn't enough yet."
"Simon—"
"I know what you're going to say."
"You were always—"
"I know," he said. "I believe you. Now." His hand came up to your face, tucking a strand of hair back, his thumb at your cheekbone. "Took me a while to get there. But I'm here."
"You're here," you agreed smiling.
"And you're here." his hand tangled itself in your hair.
"I'm here." you giggled.
He looked at you for a long moment. Then, "Stay with me."
Not a question, not quite — more like a hope said aloud. The rarest thing from him. He had carried so much silently for so long, and this one small thing cost him something, and you could see it, and you loved him for it.
"It's my house," you said cheeky and bright.
He blinked. Then that laugh again — the real one, the rare one — and your heart did what it always did when you earned it, that particular, irreplaceable lurch.
"Yeah Sunshine," he said. "It is."
You lay back down against his chest. His arm came around you. His heartbeat under your ear.
Outside, the lavender moved. The Union flag was still on the roof. The porch swing sat in the dark with its yellow cushion, waiting for morning.
"Sunshine," he said. Into your hair.
"Hmm."
"I love you."
You pressed your lips to his chest, above his heart.
"I love you too," you said. "I've loved you since you were that chubby four-year-old who stole my crayons."
A long pause.
"Chubby," he repeated.
"Stocky," you amended, grinning into his chest. "You were very stocky."
"I was four."
"You were a very solid four year old."
His arm tightened around you — not painfully, just firmly, the way of a man making a point through the medium of holding — and you laughed again, helplessly, into the warmth of him.
He made that sound, that low rumbling laugh that lived in his chest, and the lamp burned warm and low and outside the lavender moved in the dark.
Simon Riley.
Who stole your crayons at four and broke your glasses at seven and learned to read because of you and carried your bag through every corridor of secondary school and punched a boy for pushing you over and kissed your cheek in a toilet corridor and sat beside you through every lunch and glared at anyone who called you a nerd and came round to your kitchen table for years and went to war at seventeen and sent you cards from the edges of the world and planted lavender for three years and bought you the house you described at sixteen and came home.
In which Human-Grim has to take care of our NRC-Boys-As-Animals, and has a time of it.
This was a lot of fun to do, a lot of the characters already had animal motifs, others where very hard to come up with an animal equivalent. Still not particularly happy with some of my choices, but c’est la vie. Also been a hot minute since I've spent this long on a drawing. Twisted Wonderland has me in an absolute vice grip, consumes most of my waking thoughts, clears my skin, waters my crops ... I'm tired and starting to not make sense. I shall end my inane ramblings here.
