Baelor accidentally reads your diary and discovers the vulnerable desires you never dared confess. Instead of judgment, he offers understanding, honesty, and a promise to cherish every hidden part of your heart—and starting it with bending you over his desk.
WARNINGS; explicit sexual content, baelor does indeed bend you over a desk, he is not subtle, possession, rough sex and then gentle sex, minors dni.
NOW EXCUSE ME WHILST I WATCH WALKING WITH DINOSAURS BECAUSE OUR MAN HERE IS THE FUCKING NARRATOR!
The sunlight of King's Landing filtered through the high, arched windows of the Tower of the Hand, casting long, golden rectangles across the polished mahogany of the great desk.
Dust motes danced in the stillness of the solar, swirling around stacks of parchment and heavy leather-bound ledgers. Baelor Targaryen sat in the high-backed chair, his broad shoulders filling the space.
He had spent the morning immersed in reports from the Reach and the Stormlands, his mind a disciplined machine of statecraft and duty.
Beside a stack of tax records lay a small, unassuming book bound in pale blue leather. It was not a ledger, nor was it a history of the Seven Kingdoms.
It was yours.
You had left it behind in your haste to attend the midday meal with the Queen, a lapse in caution that you would soon regret.
Baelor had no intention of invading your privacy. He respected you, loved you with a quiet, steady intensity, and viewed you as the sanctuary of his life. He had reached for a scroll, but his hand brushed the blue leather, and the book fell open.
His eyes scanned a page of looping, elegant script. He intended to close it immediately, to preserve the sanctity of your inner thoughts.
Then, his gaze snagged on a single sentence.
I crave the weight of him, not as a lover who asks permission, but as a master who claims his prize; I want him to bend me over the very desk where he writes his laws and fuck me until my legs fail and I cannot walk.
Baelor froze. The air in the room suddenly felt thick, heavy with a heat that had nothing to do with the afternoon sun. He stared at the words, reading them again, then a third time.
The image flashed through his mind, you, his sweet, soft-spoken wife, the woman who blushed when he kissed her neck in public, pinned against the wood, your breath hitching in a way that wasn't caused by gentleness.
He turned the page and then the next.
The diary was a map of your hidden hunger. You wrote of the way his broad chest made you feel small and fragile, and how that fragility sparked a desperate need to be overpowered.
You wrote of the silence between you in the bedroom, the polite, tender exchanges of pleasure that left you satisfied but longing for something more visceral.
You described the fantasy of his calloused hands gripping your hips, the sound of your own whimpers turning into screams, and the sight of him losing the legendary Targaryen composure to the raw, animal heat of desire.
Baelor felt a slow, pulsing throb begin in his groin. His trousers tightened, the fabric straining against the sudden hardness of his cock. He had always treated you with a reverence that bordered on the sacred.
He feared his own strength, the sheer physicality of his frame, and he had spent their marriage tempering his passion to ensure he never overwhelmed you. He had been the perfect husband; patient, kind, and careful.
He looked at the desk. He looked at the heavy oak surface, the inkwells, the scattered papers. He imagined you there. He imagined the sound of your skin slapping against the wood, the scent of your arousal mixing with the smell of old parchment.
A small, predatory smile touched his lips. He closed the book with a soft thud and set it exactly where he had found it, though he did not move from the chair.
He waited.
The sound of your footsteps echoed in the hallway, light and hurried. The heavy oak door creaked open, and you stepped inside, your silk gown of pale cream shimmering in the light. You stopped short when you saw him, your chest rising and falling in a quick rhythm.
“Baelor,” you breathed, your voice soft. “I realized I left my journal here. I hope you didn't...”
You trailed off, your eyes falling on the blue leather book. Baelor did not speak. He simply watched you, his mismatched eyes dark, the pupils dilated until the blue and brown of his irises was a thin, shimmering ring.
The intensity of his gaze pinned you to the spot. “Did you see it?” you asked, your voice trembling as you took another step into the room, eyes wide and lips parted.
Baelor stood up. He was a towering presence, his silhouette blocking out the sun. He moved toward you, not with his usual measured grace, but with a slow, deliberate prowl. Each step sounded like a heartbeat against the stone floor.
“I saw many things,” Baelor said. His voice had dropped an octave, vibrating with a low, gravelly resonance that sent a shiver racing down your spine. “I saw things my sweet, innocent wife had been hiding from me.”
“I... I didn't mean for you to read that,” you whispered. “It was just... fantasies.”
Baelor stopped inches from you. The heat radiating from his body was an oven, smelling of cedar, expensive ink, and masculine musk.
He reached out, his large hand wrapping around the nape of your neck. His grip wasn't painful, but it was firm, possessive, leaving no room for retreat. He tilted your head back, forcing you to look up into the storm of his expression.
“Fantasies,” he repeated, his thumb brushing over your jawline. “You wrote that you didn't want softness. You wrote that you wanted to be claimed.”
You swallowed hard, your throat dry. “Baelor...”
“Do you still want it?” he asked, his voice a low command. “Do you still want your husband to stop being gentle?”
You couldn't speak, but could only nod, a small, frantic movement. The admission broke the last shred of his restraint.
You backed away, your heels clicking against the floor, until the small of your back hit the edge of the mahogany desk. You gasped, your hands flying up to your chest. The panic in your eyes was there, but beneath it, a spark of electric anticipation ignited.
Baelor's hand shifted from your neck to your waist, his fingers digging into the soft flesh of your hip. With one sudden, powerful motion, he gripped your shoulders, spun you around and shoved you forward.
You let out a sharp cry as your stomach hit the mahogany desk. The impact knocked the air from your lungs, and you found yourself sprawled across the wood, your chest pressed against the cool surface, your hips tilted upward.
The position was vulnerable, exposing and raw.
“Look at the desk,” Baelor commanded, his voice right at your ear. “Look at where you wanted this to happen.”
You looked, your vision blurring as you saw the inkwell wobble from the force of your landing. You felt his body press against your back, a wall of hard muscle and heat.
He didn't kiss you.
He didn't whisper sweet nothings, but instead, he reached down and gripped the hem of your cream silk gown.
The sound of fabric rending filled the room. He didn't slide the dress up; he tore it. The silk groaned and gave way, ripping from the waist down to your thighs.
The cool air of the solar hit your bare skin, making your nipples harden against the desk. You whimpered, a sound of pure, unadulterated want.
“You've been so quiet in our bed,” Baelor murmured, his breath hot against the shell of your ear. “So polite. I wondered why you always seemed to be holding something back.”
He reached around, his hand sliding between your thighs, he did not tease, he did not linger, but without warning, he had pushed aside your smallclothes and shoved two thick fingers deep into your heat, finding you already drenched.
The sound was a wet, visceral squelch that echoed in the quiet room. “You're soaking,” he noted, his voice devoid of its usual softness. “You've been thinking about this while I was reading reports. While I was playing the dutiful prince.”
He withdrew his fingers and you felt the sudden absence like a wound. You arched your back, your hips instinctively seeking him.
“Please,” you gasped. “Baelor, please.”
“Please what?” he asked, his hand moving to grip your hair, pulling your head back so you had to look at him over your shoulder. “Tell me exactly what you want, since you were so brave in your writing.”
“I want you to fuck me,” you sobbed, the shame melting into a fierce, burning desire. “I want you to take me. Hard. Don't be gentle. Please, don't be gentle.”
Baelor let out a low, guttural growl. He reached for his belt, the leather creaking as he unbuckled it with efficient, hurried movements. He shoved his breeches down, and you heard the heavy thud of his cock springing free.
You didn't have to see it to know the size of him; you could feel the heat radiating from the length of him as he pressed it against the crack of your ass.
He was massive, a thick, pulsing vein thrumming against your skin. He didn't use lubrication; he didn't need to. Your own arousal was a slick lubricant, coating your folds. Baelor gripped your hips, his fingers bruising your skin, and aligned the head of his cock with your opening.
He thrust.
The entry was a violent, singular motion. You screamed, a loud, echoing sound that would have shocked anyone outside the door, but in this room, it was the only music that mattered. He buried himself in you in one go, his cock stretching your walls to the absolute limit.
The sensation was overwhelming, a mixture of pressure and piercing pleasure that made your vision go white.
You felt the air being pushed out of your lungs as your chest slammed back down onto the desk. Baelor didn't give you time to adjust. He began to move, his thrusts deep and punishing.
Shlick. Squelch. Slap.
The sounds of their union were loud and vulgar. Each time he drove forward, his balls slapped hard against your perineum, a rhythmic, meaty thud that vibrated through your entire body. The friction was intense, the head of his cock rubbing against your cervix with every deep plunge.
“Is this what you wanted?” Baelor roared, his composure entirely gone. “Is this the weight you craved?”
“Yes!” you shrieked, your fingers clawing at the mahogany, leaving scratches in the expensive wood. “Yes, more! Harder!”
Baelor obliged as he shifted his grip, hooking his arms under your armpits and pulling your upper body slightly off the desk, angling your pelvis to take him even deeper.
The change in angle allowed him to hit a spot deep inside you that made your toes curl and your mind fracture.
The pace accelerated, for he was no longer a prince; he was a predator, a dragon claiming its hoard, his thrusts became frantic, overzealous, the force of his movement caused him to slip out almost entirely, the wet, sucking sound of his cock leaving your body echoing in the room, only for him to slam back in with a force that made the desk slide several inches across the stone floor.
“Gods, you're so tight,” Baelor groaned, his voice a ragged edge. “You're squeezing me... you're trying to drain me dry.”
You couldn't answer as you were lost in a sea of sensation. The feeling of the hard wood beneath you and the hard man behind you created a vice of pleasure. You could feel the sweat dripping from his forehead onto your back, the saltiness of it mixing with the scent of sex.
He began to grind his hips, his pubic bone smashing against your backside with every stroke. The friction on your clitoris, though indirect, was enough to send you spiraling. You felt the tension building in your lower belly, a coil of heat tightening until it was unbearable.
“I'm... I'm going to...” you gasped, your voice breaking.
“Not yet,” Baelor commanded, his voice a low snap. He reached around and gripped your clit between his thumb and forefinger, rubbing it with a brutal, fast intensity.
The combination was too much. Your orgasm hit like a tidal wave, a series of violent spasms that gripped your internals, squeezing his cock in rhythmic waves. You wailed, your body shuddering, your head tossing from side to side as the pleasure ripped through you.
Baelor let out a choked sound, his own climax imminent. He stopped the grinding and went back to the deep, piston-like thrusts, each one more desperate than the last. He was panting, his breath coming in ragged gulps, his muscles corded and straining.
“Fuck, look at what you have done to me, my sweet girl, I intend to fill you to the brim with my seed and take you over and over again," he groaned, the words almost a plea.
With one final, devastating thrust, Baelor buried himself to the hilt. He stiffened, his entire body locking up as he erupted. You felt the hot, thick jets of his seed hitting your cervix, filling you to the brim.
He didn't pull away, he stayed pinned inside you, his chest heaving against your back, his heart drumming a frantic rhythm against your spine.
The silence that followed was heavy, broken only by the sound of their synchronized, labored breathing. The room felt different, the air charged, the sanctity of the solar replaced by something primal and honest.
Slowly, Baelor began to relax. He didn't pull out immediately. He leaned down, pressing a tender, lingering kiss to the nape of your neck, his lips soft and warm. The contrast was jarring, the sudden return of the gentle husband after the storm of the master.
He slid out of you with a wet, lingering pop. You collapsed onto the desk, your limbs feeling like lead, your breath still coming in shallow hitches. You were shaking, a fine tremor running through your muscles.
Baelor stepped back and looked at you. Your dress was ruined, your hair a wild tangle, your skin flushed a deep rose. You looked broken, claimed, and utterly satisfied.
He reached down and picked up the blue leather diary. He didn't hand it back. Instead, he tucked it under his arm. “I think I'll keep this for a while,” Baelor said, his voice returning to its princely calm, though a hint of the gravel remained. “I find I have a sudden interest in your... literary pursuits.”
You rolled onto your side, looking up at him. You felt a strange mixture of vulnerability and empowerment. The secret was out, and instead of judgment, you had found a hunger that matched your own.
“You read the whole thing?” you whispered.
Baelor smiled, a slow, knowing expression. He reached down and offered you his hand, pulling you up from the desk with effortless strength and as you stood, you felt the warmth of his seed leaking from you, a sticky reminder of the last hour.
You tried to take a step toward him, but your knees buckled, your legs truly unable to support your weight.
Baelor caught you, sweeping you into his arms and holding you tight against his chest. He looked down at you, his eyes shimmering with an affection that was now laced with a new, dangerous understanding. “You said you wanted to be unable to walk,” he murmured, kissing your forehead. “I believe I have fulfilled the request.”
You leaned your head against his shoulder, closing your eyes. The Red Keep continued to hum with the business of the crown outside the door, but inside the solar, a new treaty had been signed.
“Will you do it again?” you asked, your voice barely a whisper.
Baelor began to carry you toward the bedroom, his stride confident and strong. “My sweet, innocent wife,” he said, his voice vibrating through your chest. “I intend to spend the rest of our lives exploring every single page of that book.”
As he laid you down on the silk sheets of your bed, the sunlight had shifted, leaving the solar in shadow. But in the bedroom, the fire was just beginning to burn. Baelor stripped away the remains of your gown, his eyes roaming over your body with a possessive hunger that made you ache all over again.
He didn't start with kisses. He started by pinning your wrists above your head with one hand, his weight pressing you into the mattress.
“Now,” he whispered, his lips brushing against yours. “Tell me what else you wrote. Tell me everything you've been craving while I was being a gentleman.”
You opened your mouth to speak, but he silenced you with a kiss, not a gentle one, but a deep, demanding exchange of saliva and heat.
His tongue pushed into your mouth, claiming your space, sucking on your tongue with a hunger that mirrored the act on the desk. You moaned into the kiss, your hips lifting instinctively, searching for the hardness you knew was waiting for you.
He broke the kiss, trailing his lips down to your throat, biting softly at the sensitive skin.
“I want to hear you say it,” he commanded.
“I want... I want you to take me however you want,” you gasped, your voice trembling. “I want to be yours, completely, no more politeness and no more hesitation.”
Baelor paused, his gaze locking onto yours. The love in his eyes was still there, but it was now intertwined with a raw, dominant energy that made you feel like the only woman in the world.
“As you wish,” he said.
He moved down your body, his hands exploring every curve, every fold, with a renewed sense of purpose. He spent a long time with his tongue, tasting you, swirling around your clit until you were sobbing and begging for him to fill the void.
He played you like an instrument, knowing exactly where to press, how to suck, and when to tease and when he finally entered you again, it wasn't with the violence of the desk, but with a slow, agonizing deliberation. He pushed inside inch by inch, watching your face as you stretched to accommodate him. He wanted to see the pleasure, the slight pain, and the utter surrender in your eyes.
The sex in the bed was different, longer, more intimate, but no less intense. He explored every position, bending you, twisting you, making sure you felt every single inch of him.
He was attentive to your needs, but he dictated the pace, the rhythm, and the depth, his cock dragging deliciously through every crevice within the warmth of your cunt. “Fucking take it,” Baelor groaned into your ear, “This is what you wanted, isn't it? I am but a husband fulfilling his sweet wife's desires, so do not fucking hide from me, as you've learnt what I am capable of when you hide from me.”
Your breath hitched, a broken sob of pleasure escaping your lips as Baelor’s words sank in. The threat wrapped in affection was a catalyst, sending a fresh surge of heat flooding your pussy.
You arched your back, pressing your chest hard against the sheets, offering yourself up to him completely. You didn't dare hide; the memory of his previous punishments, the way he broke your resolve until you were begging for mercy, was enough to keep you wide open and trembling.
Baelor didn't give you a moment to recover. He gripped your hips with bruising force, his fingers digging into your skin to anchor you as he shifted his angle.
He withdrew almost entirely, the head of his cock teasing the very entrance of your cunt, before slamming back inside with a wet, heavy thud that knocked the air from your lungs.
“Look at you,” he growled, his voice a low vibration against your skin. “Shaking for me. So desperate to be filled.”
He began to drive into you with a relentless, punishing rhythm. Each thrust was calculated, designed to hit that part of you that made your eyes cross together with brutal precision.
The sound of skin slapping against skin filled the room, a rhythmic percussion to your whimpers. He wasn't just fucking you, he was claiming every inch of your interior, stretching you wide and filling you to the absolute limit.
As he hammered into you, Baelor reached around, his large hand finding your clit and grinding against it with a firm, demanding pressure. The dual stimulation was overwhelming. You felt your walls pulsing, clamping down on his thick shaft in tight, involuntary spasms.
“That's it, squeeze me,” he hissed, his pace accelerating into a frenzied blur of friction and heat. “Take every fucking inch of it. Let me feel how much you need your husband.”
You were spiraling, the tension building in your lower belly until it became an unbearable ache.
You tried to push back against him, seeking more of that crushing depth, but he shifted his weight, pinning you flat and asserting total control over the movement.
He slowed down for a heartbeat, dragging his cock slowly, agonizingly, through the slick walls of your pussy, savoring the way you whimpered in frustration.
Then, he surged forward one last time, burying himself deep enough to touch your cervix. He held himself there, pulsing inside you, as he felt your orgasm shatter through you in violent waves.
“Baelor!” you screamed into the pillow, Baelor let out a guttural roar, his own release hitting him as he pumped load after load of hot cum deep into your womb, filling you to overflowing while he held you pinned, ensuring you felt every drop of his dominance.
Hours later, as the moon rose over the Blackwater Bay and cast a silvery glow over the Red Keep, you lay entwined in his arms. You were exhausted, your body humming with a lingering electricity, your skin smelling of salt and sex.
Baelor held you close, his chin resting on the top of your head. He was quiet, his breathing steady and calm. “Are you alright?” he asked softly.
You shifted, feeling the soreness in your hips and the pleasant ache in your core. You smiled, pressing a kiss to his chest. “I've never been better,” you replied.
He tightened his grip, a small, possessive gesture. “Good,” Baelor whispered. “Because I've been thinking about the chapter where you mentioned the gardens. I think it's time we started a new entry.”
You shivered, not from cold, but from the thrill of knowing that your husband, the perfect prince, had finally discovered the darkness you carried and that he loved it even more than he loved the light.
The Tower of the Hand had always been a place of law and order, but for the first time in its history, it had become a sanctuary for the beautifully undone.
Tags ✶ arranged marriage, enemies to lovers (sort of), wartime angst, mention of b&c, grief/mourning, hurt/comfort, soft smut (barely)
Wordcount ✶ 2,090
Once a lady in service to Queen Aemma, you returned to the capital years later as instructed by Rhaenyra, who needed a trusted ear in the Red Keep. Married to the Hand, what should have shattered your marriage when war broke out, instead brings you closer together.
Otto Hightower Masterlist
The Red Keep was dreary that night, as it had been the previous night, and perhaps each and every one since King Viserys had died. It had become all the more so since the tragedy that had befallen the king and queen, and all present in the castle that night, courtier and servant alike, still carried the weight of that ordeal on their faces.
Everyone walked the halls in near silence, as though more than whispered conversations would upset Helaena’s grief or trigger Aegon’s temper, who had taken to the drink even more than before and raged at every hour of the day and night.
While war was by definition never a peaceful, gentle affair, the sheer horror of what had occurred had changed your perspective rather, and you longed for the days of your youth where the capital was quieter and the future did not seem so grim.
As a cousin to Aemma Arryn, you had come from Vale alongside her to serve as company when she had wed Prince Viserys, and remained at her side when he had ascended the throne. Year after year you had witnessed the births that tore her apart and brought only grief, with only the joyful occasion of Rhaenyra’s birth, until the very end and the birth of her son that took her.
As such, you had always been protective of her only living child, and when Rhaenyra had suggested you return to the capital after a decade at the Eyrie mourning your cousin, you complied. She had been in need of eyes and ears, a supporter who would look out for her best interests.
The one thing you had not expected was to find yourself married, to the Hand no less. However the match was advantageous, and secured your position nearer the king, as you knew affection for a former lady of his first queen would only sustain you for a short time.
Otto Hightower was intelligent, his conversations in private were agreeable, and while you had always suspected he never shared more than he was comfortable with Rhaenyra knowing, trust was built over time.
The Hand’s chambers were cold as you entered that night, and empty. A fire had just been lit, the maid scurrying out of the room as you came in. Picking up a shawl you had left the night before, you wrapped it around your shoulders and sat near the hearth, a soon forgotten book on your lap.
Forlorn thoughts would not leave you, questions and doubts, and you had no outlet for them. While your loyalties had been with Rhaenyra, and only your marriage to the Lord Hand had protected you in the early days of the war, you now doubted where you truly belonged. You had let your discontent and sometimes outrage known in private, but it had grown cold as ash since the death of Jaehaerys, and you could hardly reconcile what you knew of Aemma’s daughter to that horrific act.
“If you have come to argue with me tonight, I would request that you leave,” Otto’s voice came from the doorway, pulling you from your thoughts. Setting the book aside, you rose, a retort on your lips, but it died upon seeing his appearance.
He looked weary, as though he had aged a decade in a matter of hours since you had last seen him. It took you a moment to realize what looked so different about his person. It wasn’t the wrinkles at the corner of his eyes, nor the downward line of his mouth—it was more of an absence than the sudden appearance of something new—at his chest, the Hand insignia was gone.
“The king has dismissed you,” you said with a frown, oddly sad.
Otto sighed but nodded, stepping into the room to pour himself a cup of wine. “He feels I can no longer advise him.”
Your grief took over even though he had requested for a peaceful evening. “Perhaps for good reason. The funeral procession was cruel, and unnecessary,” you accused, shaking your head at the memory of poor Helaena, shaking with grief.
“I shall agree with the former, not the latter,” your husband replied severely, setting the pitcher down and turning to you. “It is right for the people to know, and the realm to see the usurper for what she is.”
Anger rose in you again, despite your better judgement. “She is not. She would not,” you protested, clinging to a weakening hope.
Otto’s face softened at this, and somehow it made him even more tired than he had. “The two rat catchers were clear in their confession,” Otto reminded you, not unkindly. “I am afraid your affection for her late mother blinds you.”
“And your hatred for her husband blinds you,” you replied, but you could see the argument had come to an end.
“We are at a stalemate, then,” Otto said with a sad smile, picking up his cup of wine and walking towards his desk, stopping in front of it abruptly, as he thought he had only now remembered that he no longer had duties to attend to. “And anyway, it matters not now. Aegon has named this imbecile Cole as Hand.”
“Aegon is grieving. He might yet realize his mistake,” you reasoned half-heartedly—you both knew he would not, and it was a frightening prospect to have a man filled with grief on the throne, for enemies and allies alike.
“It is out of my hands now,” he simply replied.
Otto took a careful sip of wine before discarding the cup on the edge of the desk, uncaring that it might spill on his correspondence, and sat in the chair at the foot of the bed. When his eyes rose to yours once more, you were struck with how changed he was.
The line of his shoulders showed the weight of the years and the weight of a fractured realm, of no less than four decades of serving king after king, and the weight of what might have been mistakes or regrets.
He seemed painfully human and frail, in this new light. While you had known when the match had been made that you were not marrying a man, but an office, it somehow only became clearer now that he was stripped of it.
Perhaps tonight was the first time you were truly meeting your husband. “I have watched you rule in the king’s incapacity, and while I have not always agreed with you, I know you have always done what you believed to be right for the realm,” you conceded.
Otto looked at you then, noticing the way your eyes were rimmed with red and how troubled you seemed, under your anger. He felt he had played a hand in it, and this regret came to join a long line of those who kept him awake at night.
“I am aware that in the years we have been married I have made a poor companion,” he admitted, to which you gave him a sad smile. “I often preferred my duty to the crown than my duty to you.”
At that, you shook your head. “You loved the king and I loved his daughter,” you said, sorrow rising in your eyes. “I don’t fault you for serving him just as I have served her.”
Otto sighed, appreciating the position you found yourself in. “Indeed.”
There you were, bound to him by marriage, and bound to Rhaenyra for the love of a woman dead two decades prior. Now both sides had shed blood, each in horrendous ways you could not support.
“Tonight is perhaps the most honest we have ever been with each other,” you said before he could speak again, pulling the shawl from your shoulders and setting it over the back of the chair, as you always did when you were preparing to leave his chambers and return to yours.
“Let us forget about it all, for a few hours at the least,” he suggested, reaching to unlace his boots. “Night is here and the realm will still be at war on the morrow.”
To his utter surprise, you did not take your leave, but instead came to him and knelt, pulling at the leather laces yourself. “Allow me,” you murmured, setting the boots aside once they were pulled off, and reaching for his coat, making him stand.
Piece by piece, you revealed more of the man under the layers. The coat went first, then the belt, closely followed by the heavy doublet where the insignia used to sit. It was the second time in his life where he was being dismissed, and still it carved into his chest all the same.
“Might I say, despite everything, that I am grateful that you are my wife,” he said then, as quiet as a confession.
“You may,” you replied, just as quietly, pressing up on your toes, and he accepted your kiss gladly. It was chaste and fleeting, not nearly enough for him to feel your warmth, but he took it gratefully nonetheless, as the gesture of peace it was.
Then, your hands found the hem of his undershirt and rose it over his abdomen, guiding him to remove it entirely. Otto sighed when you dropped your forehead to rest against his chest for a moment, and the two of you simply breathed together, finding solace in the silence of the room. Words still lingered between you, some cold, some jagged and cutting, but they would be spoken later.
“Come, and let us rest,” he said, walking to the bed and settling against the pillow.
He watched as you pulled the laces of your gown and draped it over the back of the chair, over the shawl that had taken residence in his chambers—in that moment he thought that he would miss the sight of it, the simple presence of this scarf in his rooms when he came in at night, heavy and weary with the burden of the realm.
It was rare that you bared yourself to his gaze fully, and yet on this night you did, setting your cotton shift atop your gown and coming to him without any fabric to hinder his eyes or his touch. Without a word, afraid to startle you into retrieving your shift and hiding yourself from his gaze again, he admired the curves of your body.
Kneeling on the edge of the bed, you allowed him to run his hand up from your knee to your hip with a sense of wonder, the back of knuckles then tracing a line from your navel to the valley between your breasts.
Everything felt different now, somehow, more solemn. Whether it was forgiveness or the calm before the storm, he could not say. The only truth he knew in that moment was the softness of your skin and the quiet whisper of your sigh when you climbed beneath the sheets, settling astride his hips, your cheek against his heart.
“One day mayhaps, we will forgive each other,” you said, barely loud enough for him to hear, the words whispered against his skin.
“There is no need for that,” he replied, his hands cradling your back. In the crook of your most intimate place, you felt him harden, not out of desire, but out of the simple comfort of holding you, and it felt more precious than any moment of passion you had ever shared.
Slowly, with no rush towards any destination, you rocked against him until a gentle wave of heat had taken the both of you, and it made you wonder whether there was a peaceful plain somewhere between love and hatred, and you had reached it—perhaps it was where forgiveness lived.
Otto held you carefully as you ground against him, taking his body into yours with a shift of your hips, his hands wandering across your skin all the while.
He basked in this new state the both of you found yourselves in, husband and wife outside of the constraints of the duties you had both chosen, fully knowing it would not last, and dawn would bring war back to his doorstep.
On the morrow he would leave King’s Landing behind, and the grandson he had spent the better part of twenty years raising in preparation for the crown would be standing without sane counsel. Whether his greatest endeavor would prove to be his greatest failure or not, only time would tell—and mayhaps, in time, you would find it in you to forgive him.
Dividers by @zaldritzosrose. Requested by @ilariyalavorowrites.
Otto Taglist: @thedarkwhisperstome @targaryen-madness @lovexbunny
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Do you think Dex could bend a truly good love interest’s morals?
Dex Finds Himself a “Good Girl”
TW injury, stalking, moral corruption, suggestive/sexual content, harassment by a Task Force agent, murder, she/her pronouns.
WC 1.4K
You swear you’re a good person.
You help at the food bank when you can. You donate to a wildlife charity every month. You always round up for children’s hospitals at the cashier. You carry reusable bags. You move worms and snails off the pavement after rain because it breaks your heart when pedestrians step on them unknowingly. You say “thank you” to bus drivers, and by now they know you by name. You cry at videos of old dogs getting adopted. You once said “sorry sorry sorry” to a spider before trapping it under a glass and putting it outside.
You swear you’re a good person.
That was all you were trying to be when you found a man bleeding out on your rooftop.
He was slumped against the brick, one hand pressed to his side, blood slipping between his fingers. His suit was a dark blue and black, torn open at the ribs. His face was pale, though his eyes were not.
“No hospitals,” he said.
And because you were a good person, you swallowed hard and said, “Okay.”
You knew first aid, you volunteered in enough community centers not to.
“Do you have a name?” you asked.
His teeth chattered a little. “Dex.”
You swear you’re a good person when you let him inside your apartment.
You swear you’re a good person when you clean the blood from his body and nurture him back to health.
You swear you’re a good person when you let him sleep on your couch, even after you realize the suit is familiar.
Even after you realize he’s familiar.
Even after you realise he’s Bullseye. Even if he’s the kind of man good girls are supposed to run from.
But you look at him, Dex sits on your couch under your blanket, bruised and battered, and says, “I’m one of the good guys now” with absolute conviction and a lopsided grin, as if he was imitating you.
You swear you’re a good person when you believe him.
Or maybe you just want to believe him. Maybe you decide wanting to believe in him counts as mercy.
You swear you’re a good person when he’s eventually well enough to leave.
You swear you’re a good person when you spend two weeks pretending you’re glad he’s gone.
In truth, your apartment feels empty. You keep looking at the place where he bled on your tiles longingly.
Then, like a lost cat, he comes back through the window.
His hair was streaked with blood, he has blood on his knuckles. His eyes are tired and fixed on you.
“Task Force is crawling my streets,” he says. “Can I stay here?”
You swear you’re a good person when you say yes.
You swear you’re a good person when he kisses you that night.
It happens in the kitchen, under the flickering yellow light, with rain tapping against the glass.
His mouth hits yours hard. You gasp, and he swallows it. His hand cups the back of your neck, thumb pressing under the soft flesh of your jaw, holding you still while he kisses you deeper. His body pins yours to the counter, and you know you should be scared.
You swear you’re a good person when you kiss him back.
You swear you’re a good person when you pull him closer by his belt loops.
You swear you’re a good person when he tells you he’s been watching you since he left.
He said he was sure you got home safe. He was making sure nobody followed you. He was sure the man from 4B stopped looking at you like a creep. He was sure you were safe, because he was a good man, right?
You should tell him to leave. Instead, you cup his cheeks and press his forehead to yours.
“Don’t lie to me about it again,” you whisper gently, which is not the same thing as telling him to stop.
You know that. Dex knows that, too.
You swear you’re a good person when you basically forgive him for stalking you.
You swear you’re a good person when he starts staying over.
Suddenly, he has a toothbrush next to yours. His shirts end up in your closet.
You swear you’re a good person when his hands go under your shirt, groping and gripping and touching like he can’t believe you’re letting him. He kisses your neck until you’re whining. He bites your shoulder hard enough to make you arch. He grinds against you, still clothed, like he’s trying to crawl out of his own skin and into yours.
“Tell me to stop,” he pants.
You don’t. Instead, you drag him down.
You swear you’re a good person when he fucks you. When he gets you naked with desperate, clumsy hands and pushes your thighs apart like he’s afraid you’ll change your mind if he goes any slower. Your thighs are shaking so hard you have to grab his hair and mewl into his shoulders.
He fucks you deep and messy and stupid, hips pounding into yours, one hand gripping your thigh, the other braced beside your head. The bed hits the wall and nails tear down his scarred back. His mouth drags over your nose, your cheek, your lips, all open-mouthed and frantic.
“You’re mine,” he says, voice wrecked.
You just let out a helpless “hmpph!”
He laughs once against your mouth.
You swear you’re a good person when you let him fuck you silly in your own bed, even though you know what he is.
You swear you’re a good person when Task Force comes knocking three days later, when Dex is out.
The agent at your door is handsome, but not your type.
“Ma’am,” he says. “We’re asking about a Bullseye sighting nearby.”
You blink up at him. “No, sir. I haven’t seen anything.”
You swear you’re a good person when you lie.
He doesn’t leave and steps closer instead, one boot over your threshold.
His gaze drops to your bare legs, and then to the oversized shirt you’re wearing. It was actually Dex’s shirt.
“You live alone?” he asks.
Your stomach turns upside down. “I think you should go.”
He shrugs, “I’m just asking questions.”
His hand catches the door before you can shut it. Then he is inside, too close, fingers brushing your.
You freeze.
He looks at your mouth.
“You sure you don’t know anything?” he murmurs.
You swear you’re a good person when you lie again, this time through gritted teeth. “I said no.”
His hand slides to your waist and you shove him.
He laughs, but he tries to put his hands on you again.
Eventually, you shut the door and get him out.
You wait for Dex.
You swear you’re a good person when you tell him everything, knowing exactly what Dex would do.
“Name,” he says.
You tell him what you saw in the badges.
You swear you’re a good person when you don’t ask where he is going.
You swear you’re a good person when he comes back before dawn dragging the agent by the back of his collar. The man is crying.
His badge is gone, face is bruised, pushed to his knees on your wooden floor.
Dex stands behind him with a gun in his hand.
“Apologise,” Dex says.
The agent sobs through it. He says sorry, says he didn’t mean it. Says he was just messing around.
Dex presses the gun to the side of his head and looks at you. “Can I?”
You swear you’re a good person.
You swear.
You swear.
You swear you think about mercy. You swear you think about laws. You swear you think about the literal human life Dex has put in your hands.
Still, you say, “Yes.”
Dex shoots him in the head. The agent drops, and blood spreads across your wooden floor.
He looks at you as if asking, are you proud of me yet?
You swear you’re a good person when you help him clean up the mess. You swear you’re a good person when you hold the bin bag open. You swear you’re a good person when you help him scrub blood from the floorboards. You swear you’re a good person when you help him bury the body.
What else were you supposed to do? Let him do it alone? After he defended you? After he did what you asked him to do?
You swear you’re a good person when you crawl into bed beside him that night.
You tuck yourself under his chin and whisper, “I love you.”
His arms close around you as he says, “I love you, too.”
You swear you’re still a good person.
Or maybe you’re just in love. Maybe you don’t know the difference anymore.
—
To answer your question anon, yes. If you were so blinded by love, you wouldn’t even notice the goalposts had moved!
again, it truly really matters on how in love you are/you perceive to be, but I’m writing it on the extreme end for the sake of the story!
Hi Sem! Read you were working on some modern AU pieces and thought about something:
You are Baelor's gf and you have seen the announcement for a new horror film at cinemas and you try to convince Baelor to watch it together. He tries to get the idea out of your head because he knows very well that you are quite the scaredy cat, but if there is something that man cannot resist is you pouting, so you end up going together. He was right, though, you are scared shitless and he has to comfort you through the entire duration of the film.
Hope the rest of the week went well for you, sending lots of good energy!
Thank you for the request Dov! I apologise for taking a while to get to this. I hope you enjoy it!
(I wrote it with Professional Boundaries!Baelor and reader in mind, but it can also be read as a standalone ☺️💜)
Professional Boundaries Masterlist ✦ Main Masterlist
Summary: A new horror film, a stubborn decision, and a boyfriend who knows you better than you know yourself.
Word count: 1.1K
Tags: 18+/MINORS DO NOT INTERACT, Modern AU, part of the “Professional Boundaries” world but can be read as a standalone, established relationship, age gap(reader is in her late 20s, or early 30, Baelor in his mid-40s), best friend Lyonel, she/her pronouns, AFAB reader, English is my second language
Please let me know if I’ve missed anything!
Disclaimer: I do not own the characters, setting, or story of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. This work is a fanfiction created for enjoyment and non-commercial purposes only.
If there was anyone to blame, it was Lyonel. He had shown you the trailer in the first place during your usual hangouts. The film featured one of your favourite artists, Tanselle, in what appeared to be a genuinely interesting horror film.
And while you generally did not like horror, you really wanted to see it. But you did not want to do so alone.
You looked over at Baelor, who was sitting next to you. His hand rested warmly on your bare thigh, absent-mindedly tracing small patterns against your skin as he read.
You watched him for a moment, and then another. You would never grow tired of looking at him.
Eventually, you leaned over and pressed a kiss to his jaw before snuggling closer. Without looking up from his book, his arm immediately moved and wrapped around your shoulders, pulling you closer.
You smiled against his cheek, pressing another kiss.
"Do you want to go to the cinema this weekend?"
“Mhm, that would be nice.” He turned a page. “Do you already have one in mind?”
“Maybe…”
The way you said that got his attention. Slowly he lowered his book and looked at you.
“It is called ‘The Manuscript’. It is a horror film.”
Baelor raised a brow. “A horror one?”
"Yes..." You smiled almost sheepishly.
His expression became impossibly patient. “No, love.”
You stared at him.
“What?”
“No.”
“Baelor!” You huffed.
“Lyonel told me before..” He continued calmly. “That you barely slept for three nights after the last one you watched.”
You immediately made a mental note to murder Lyonel.
“This one is different.”
“Is it?”
“Yes!” You sat up straighter. “It is not about a murderous stalker like the last one. This one is about an author who moves into an old coastal house to finish his novel.”
“A promising start.” He said, an undercurrent of amusement in his voice. You chose to ignore it.
“Apparently something in the house keeps rewriting his drafts overnight. And the things that are written start happening to everyone around him!"
Baelor closed his eyes, inhaling deeply.
“It sounds very upsetting.”
“I think it sounds fascinating.” You retorted.
“It sounds like a terrible decision.” He said firmly. “Those kinds of films are not your forte.”
“I can handle this one.”
“I do not think so, my love.”
“Baelor!” You huffed, offended.
“You are wonderfully brave in most situations.”
“Most?” You narrowed your eyes.
“At life, work, presentations." He reached over, tucking a loose strand of hair behind your ear. “This is not one of them.”
You gasped. “I can watch a horror film without being scared.”
“You cannot.”
“I can.”
“You absolutely cannot.”
You stared at him, pursing your lips into a pout.
“Please?”
“No.”
You shifted fully into his lap. His expression immediately became suspicious as you cupped his face, staring into his mismatched eyes you loved so much, still pouting.
“Please.”
A kiss landed on his cheek, then the other. Another one was pressed near the corner of his mouth.
“Please.”
“No, dearest.”
You pressed another kiss, even closer to his mouth.
“Please.”
A long escaped him, as he closed his eyes. You could practically see his resistance crumbling to dust. A long sigh escaped him then, in defeat.
“The things I do for love.”
You let out a laugh before pulling him in and kissing him fully as if to seal your victory.
⚬ ⚬ ○ ⚬ ⚬
The cinema was packed, the opening weekend having attracted every horror enthusiast in King’s Landing. Baelor, ever the gentleman, bought the tickets, the drinks and the overpriced popcorn. All the while looking at you, hoping you might reconsider.
“I will not.” You told him firmly, as you made your way to your seats.
“You should.”
"Seven Hells, Baelor!" You said as you sat down.
"You will be clinging to me within twenty minutes." He pressed a kiss to your temple.
“I will not.”
“You will.” He smiled. “But I will not mind, you know that.”
"You better not." You retorted.
But, he was right. Of course, he was right.
The film did not even reach the first major scare before your hand found his arm.
It was not a conscious choice, it simply happened. The atmosphere was awful, strange noise, then awfully silent.
The atmosphere was unbearable, strange noises, entire scenes spent staring into darkness. Waiting and listening.
“Nothing has happened yet, love.” He murmured gently.
"I know…” You tried to brush it off. “I just wanted to touch you, keep you close."
He hummed softly, accepting that answer immediately.
Twenty minutes later, you grabbed his arm. Thirty minutes later, you were pressed firmly against his side. Every time the music shifted, you tensed. Every time a door creaked open, your stomach dropped. Every time a character investigated a suspicious noise, you buried your face against his shoulder.
Every time someone investigated a suspicious noise instead of leaving immediately like a sensible person, you buried your face against Baelor's shoulder. His thumb rubbed slow circles against your arm soothingly.
“It is not real.” He whispered during one particularly awful scene.
“I know.” You said, but you did not sound convinced.
Then came the jump scare, the type that nearly launched you out of your seat. You grabbed his hand so hard he actually winced.
“Sweetheart, please let go.”
“No, I am not going to.”
“I am beginning to lose circulation.”
You immediately loosened your grip, heat spreading at the back of your neck.
“I am sorry.”
His fingers slipped between yours, slotting comfortably.
“There we are.” He whispered kindly. “Much better.”
By then, Baelor was spending more time watching you than the film.
He felt every reaction before it happened, the way your fingers tightened around his hand and the way you instinctively moved closer.
And every single time, he pulled you closer to him. He pressed a kiss to your hair, murmured reassurances against your temple. He was patient, endlessly patient.
By the time the credits rolled, any dignity you possessed before was gone. You felt emotionally and physically exhausted.
The lights came on, and you sighed heavily.
“You were right.”
“I know.” Baelor smiled kindly, rubbing your shoulder.
“I hated every second of this.”
“I am aware.”
“Why did you let me do this?”
Baelor stood and offered you his hand. You took it immediately.
“Because you wanted to.” He pressed a kiss to your knuckles. “And who am I to stop you?”
“My boyfriend, that’s who.”
His mouth twitched.
“Fair point.”
You narrowed your eyes at him. He looked entirely too pleased with himself. But, he was also holding your hand and still smiling at you in that infuriatingly gentle way that made it almost impossible to stay annoyed.
“If we go home now…” He guided you toward the exit. “Take a long bath and order takeout, would that make you feel better?”
Maybe.
A little.
Actually, quite a lot.
“Yes, please.” You said softly.
He leaned down and kissed your forehead, as his fingers tightened around yours.
“Your wish is my command, my love.”
Because I could not figure out how to properly add and reblog my taglist to a scheduled post, I am skipping it for now. I did not want to risk missing anyone or picking and choosing unfairly. We will be back to the regular taglist once I am back from my holidays!
TW reader (she/her) is batshit insane, knowingly drinking from a spiked drink, mentioned attempted assault (not by Dex), gun threat, kidnapping, violence, blood, murder implied, self-endangerment, obsessive/protective behaviour. (Let me Know if I missed anything)
Dex called you a disaster magnet, which was honestly adorable.
Like, aw. Your boyfriend thought disasters just naturally occurred around you. Your murderous assassin boyfriend thought the universe kept looking at you, his sweet little girlfriend, and going, yes, that one. Let’s put her in Situations.
And to be fair, from the outside, the evidence was damning.
You had been roofied, you’d had a gun pointed to your head, and you had been kidnapped at least twice.
At a certain point, any normal boyfriend would start asking questions. Any normal boyfriend would be like, “Hey, babe, why do you keep ending up in extremely specific danger scenarios that allow me to arrive at the perfect moment and feel morally useful?”
But Dex was not a normal boyfriend. Which meant he looked at the absolute pile of red flags that was your personal safety record and went, my girl :( she is so unlucky :( I must protect her forever :(
And you were like, yes, correct, no further questions.
Because the thing was, you knew that Dex loved saving you.
He would never admit it like that. Obviously. If you said, “Hey, do you enjoy when I get almost murdered because it gives you a chance to feel like a good person?” he would probably start chewing through drywall and die of asbestos poisoning before saying yes.
And of course he didn’t enjoy seeing you in danger. Dex would tear the city apart brick by brick if it meant keeping you safe. Dex even treated a paper cut on your finger like it was a personal failure to protect you. Dex once nearly lost his mind because you burned your tongue on soup.
But after he saved you? Oh, that man was glowing.
He was happy, but not happy in a normal way. He wasn’t exactly smiling and fist-bumping himself because he did a good deed. Dex wasn’t emotionally stable enough for such a mild reaction
He would look destroyed, doing that heart-eyes thing he did. He got to be the man who came for you. He got to be the man who carried you home. He got to be the man who tucked you into bed and cuddled beside you until sunrise, checking your breathing like your lungs expanding were his responsibility.
So yeah. Dex’s enrichment activity was rescuing his girlfriend. And you, being a generous partner, provided enrichment frequently.
The roofie incident was probably your worst offence.
Not morally. Morally, there were a lot of contenders. But logistically, that one was insane even for you.
Dex had told you not to go to that bar alone.
Which, obviously, meant you went to that bar alone.
You wore something cute but not too cute. Something damsel-in-distress-coded. Something that said, oh no, I’m lost and pretty and perhaps too trusting for this cruel world.
Meanwhile your internal monologue was just: okay, where are the worst men in this room?
You found one in thirteen seconds. You sat next to him and he bought you a drink.
You knew he spiked the drink even before the glass even touched your hand. You saw the stupid man put a tablet in and the drink slightly changed colours. Amateur.
Still, you drank it enough to make it convincing.
You didn’t drink the whole thing, obviously. You were insane, not auditioning for a true crime podcast episode.
Eventually the drug kicked in enough that the lights blurred, and your body got warm and floaty. When he put his hand on your back and murmured, “Come on, sweetheart, let’s get you some air,” you could wobble like a tragic Victorian widow and let him guide you outside.
Dex found you in the alley.
One second the man’s hand was on your arm, trying to reach under your skirt, the next it was not, and there was the noise of a sack of meat being introduced to brick with enthusiasm.
Then Dex was in front of you, hands on your face, eyes wild.
“Baby. Hey. Look at me. Did you drink anything he gave you?”
You blinked up at him innocently. “I don’t know.”
It was a fucking lie.
Dex believed you immediately. His face just… fell.
“Oh, sweetheart,” he cooed.
Sweetheart.
You almost laughed. You did not, because again, craft, and you gotta commit to the bit, you know?
Then you apparently passed out, which was not ideal, but when you woke up you were in Dex’s lap on the couch with three blankets over you.
So honestly, it was a net positive.
He had blood on his jaw. His knuckles were wrapped. His eyes were red like he had been awake for hours, so you could assume the guy was dead and he got rid of the body. The second you stirred, he looked down at you like you were a miracle.
“There you are,” he whispered.
Fuck. You loved him so much.
“Dex?”
His whole body dropped with relief. “Yeah. I’m here. I’ve got you.”
See, this was the problem.
How were you supposed to stop when he said things like that?
The gun incident was worse because you were fully conscious that time, trying to piss off dudes with guns.
Which, in your defense, Dex had been sad lately. This would give him something to smile about.
So when some guy with a not-so-concealed-carry gun outside a corner store called you something gross, you smiled.
You turned around and said, “Is that supposed to scare me?”
After a bit more back-and-forth argument, his hand went under his jacket.
And then, very suddenly, there was a gun pressed to your head.
Oops.
Still, the man did not even get to finish his threat.
A knife lodged itself to his wrist, the gun dropped, and Dex sank another knife to his neck.
Then Dex was on you.
“Are you insane?” he snapped, hands grabbing your face, your shoulders, looking you over like he couldn’t decide whether to kiss you or bubble-wrap you.
“What’s wrong with you?” he demanded.
You blinked up at him. “He was rude.”
Dex’s eye twitched a little. Then, he pulled you into his chest and held you so tight you could barely breathe.
“My stupid girl,” he muttered into your hair, shaking. “My stupid, stupid girl.”
There he is!!! Cuddly, wrecked, I-almost-lost-you Dex.
You tucked your face into his shirt and smiled.
Worth it.
Then there were the kidnappings.
The first kidnapping was very cinematic. You were in a van, cuffed in zip ties. Because you told Task force agents you knew where Bullseye was and then proceeded to start ragebaiting them.
It was so clichè.
The agent kept saying things like, “You’re leverage.”
You know better. You were bait.
Dex caught up before they even got out of the block. You heard the crash first, then shouting, then the van doors being sliced open like Dex was a horror movie monster specifically for guys who underestimated you.
Afterward, he cut the ties off your wrists with such care you nearly felt guilty.
“You’re okay,” he kept saying. “You’re okay. I’ve got you.”
You leaned into his chest and sniffled a little.
The second kidnapping was when he started keeping supplies in the car. A little my-girlfriend-is-in-trouble supply.
The box consisted of: Water, your favourite pack of sweets, blanket, hoodies, specific scissors for zip ties, and a first aid kit.
You opened the trunk of the car and saw them arranged neatly and genuinely had to stare for a second because that was the most romantic thing anyone had ever done.
He made you a kidnapping kit.
You, his disaster magnet. His girlfriend who kept getting abducted because apparently New York had a quota and you were employee of the month.
Dex caught you looking and said, almost shy, “I can get you a spare change of clothes, too.”
You wanted to bite him. You wanted to marry him. You wanted to get kidnapped again immediately just to honour his preparation.
And Dex never suspected.
He never once looked at you and thought, hey, maybe my girlfriend has weaponised her own helplessness because she likes seeing me feel redeemable.
No, he just kissed your forehead, pulled you closer, and whispered, “You have to be more careful.”
And you, professional liar, would nod solemnly. “I know.”
“You can’t trust everyone.”
“I know.”
“You can’t keep ending up in places like that.”
“I know.”
In reality, you knew the opposite. You knew exactly which places to end up in.
Because honestly, Dex needed this.
Dex needed someone to save. Dex needed to feel good about himself.
And you needed Dex to be happy; that was your higher purpose.
Was it healthy?
No.
Was it romantic?
A little.
Was it good for Dex?
…probably not?
But did he look adorable afterward, curled around you in bed, nose pressed into your hair, whispering, “I’ll always find you,” like he had just earned another little gold star on his soul?
Yes.
So really, who was the villain here?
Not you. For all you were concerned, you were just a girl providing enrichment for her boyfriend
A girl who had been roofied, picked a fight with a man with a gun, gotten kidnapped twice, and still had Dex looking at her like, my poor baby, the world keeps happening to you.
So tomorrow, you were probably going to take a shortcut through the dodgiest alley in New York. For the sake of love, obviously.
This is a snippet from my Mafia!Baelor × Jazz Singer!Reader fic that I wrote while I was away. I keep editing and rewriting it for the 101st time that I don’t feel like writing it anymore 😭 It’s gotten to like 10k words now.
Hello! Love point of no return, the smut is so hot - I’d love to see a more dom Ryland, maybe with a hyper fixation for rope play / shibari…
Friction
Ryland Grace/Reader | Explicit, MDNI | ~15.5k words
Tags: rope bondage, shibari, soft dom ryland grace, established relationship, pre-canon, dirty talk, praise kink, light choking, subspace, aftercare, multiple orgasms, he has done his research, the library book has been on his nightstand for three weeks
The book has been on his nightstand for three weeks. The rope has been in his sock drawer for four days. Ryland Grace is the world's worst secret-keeper. Tonight, you decide to do something about it.
[ cross posted on Ao3 ] [ fic masterlist here ]
The book has been on his nightstand for three weeks.
You know this because you've been counting. Not in a weird way. In a casual, ambient, oh-look-it's-still-there kind of way that has, admittedly, started to feel slightly less casual every time you've walked past it. The book is called The Complete Guide to Western Rope Bondage. The cover is matte black with a single silver illustration of a knot on the front, the kind of design that thinks it's being subtle and is, in fact, screaming.
He has not mentioned it.
He has, at various points, casually rearranged the things around it. Moved his glasses on top of it once, like a hat. Stacked a half-drunk mug of tea next to it. Last Tuesday he balanced his phone on it while charging, which you suspect was an attempt at camouflage and which only drew your eye directly to it, because nobody balances a phone on a book unless they are pretending the book is not there.
You have said nothing. You have been, frankly, delighted.
Because alongside the book there has been: a browser tab he forgot to close, open to what appeared to be a forum thread titled "single column tie for beginners, advice?". A second library book, returned before you could clock the title, which he insisted was "just a thing for school" with the bright innocent expression of a man who has never in his life convincingly lied. A small coil of soft white cotton rope that appeared in the bottom of his sock drawer four days ago, which he relocated to the bedside drawer two days ago, and which he has since checked on, you are fairly certain, three separate times.
Ryland Grace is the world's worst secret-keeper. It is one of your favourite things about him.
It is also why, tonight, when he comes into the bedroom in his pyjama pants and a faded t-shirt that says I HAVE A CHEMISTRY JOKE BUT I'M AFRAID IT WON'T GET A REACTION, and finds you sitting cross-legged on the bed with the book open in your lap, his face does something extraordinary.
It is a face that goes through approximately six expressions in two seconds. You catalogue them, because you love him, and because they are very funny.
One: recognition.
Two: alarm.
Three: a brief, valiant attempt at innocence.
Four: the dawning realisation that innocence is not on the table.
Five: a flicker of something else. Something warmer, and lower, and considerably more interesting.
Six: the smile. The crooked one. The one he does when he's been caught and has decided, with admirable speed, to enjoy it.
"Ah," he says.
You turn a page. You do not look up.
"So."
You turn another page.
"So you've," he says, and stops. Starts again. "So that's. That's a book."
"Mm."
"That you have. Found."
"Mm."
"In our bedroom."
"On your nightstand," you correct, helpfully, still not looking up. "For three weeks."
There is a pause. You can feel him calculating. You can practically hear it. He's running through, you suspect, several increasingly creative explanations and discarding each one on the basis that you are smarter than he is currently capable of being.
"Okay," he says. "Okay. Right. So."
You finally look up.
He is standing at the foot of the bed with his hands shoved into his pyjama pockets, his hair doing the thing it does at night where it sticks up at the back, his glasses pushed up onto his head and clearly forgotten about. He looks, for a man who has just been busted, remarkably pleased. Slightly flushed. Mouth twitching at one corner like he's trying not to laugh and only partly succeeding.
"How long," you say, "were you planning to wait."
"To," he says.
"To say something."
"Oh." He considers this with the seriousness of a man being asked a question on the SATs. "Honestly? I had not landed on a timeline."
"Three weeks, Ryland."
"Three weeks is a timeline. It's a slow one. I had not ruled it out."
You close the book. You set it on top of the duvet. You raise both eyebrows.
He exhales, scrubs a hand over his face, and laughs, soft and a little helpless. "Okay. Okay, yeah. Fair. I have been. I will admit. I have been, uh. Sitting on this."
"Among other things."
"Among," he agrees, "other things."
"Were you," you say, "going to mention the rope, too. Or was that going to live in the sock drawer indefinitely."
His mouth opens. Closes. Opens again. "You found the—"
"It was in the socks, sweetheart."
"It was under the socks."
"Ryland."
"Look," he says, holding up both hands now, the picture of a man trying to defuse a situation he has, in fact, set up entirely himself. "I want to be clear that there is a reason for the order of operations here. There's a methodology. I had a plan."
"You had a plan."
"I had a plan."
"That involved hiding rope in your sock drawer."
"That involved," he says, "doing the reading first. And then ideally not springing anything on you. And then, you know. Talking. About it. Like adults."
"And how was the talking going."
"The talking," he says, "was scheduled for some unspecified future date when I had finished assembling the relevant. The relevant. Look. There are things you should know before you say yes or no to a thing. There are things I should know before I ask. I was being thorough."
"You were stalling."
"I was being thorough and also stalling. These are not mutually exclusive."
You bite the inside of your cheek to keep from grinning. He sees you do it, because of course he does, and his whole face goes soft around the edges. He climbs onto the bed, finally, and sits down at the other end of it, facing you. He pulls his glasses down off his head, looks at them like he's surprised to find them, and sets them on the nightstand on top of the book, which is now, of the two of you, the third most embarrassed object in the room.
"Okay," he says. "Okay. Hi. Let's. Let's do this properly."
"By all means."
He takes a breath. He looks at his hands for a second, and then he looks back up at you, and his eyes are doing the thing they do when he's about to be serious about something, which is to say they are very steady and a little bit bright.
"So I've been," he says, "reading about something. Which you have now correctly identified. And I have been reading about it for. A while. Actually a longer while than three weeks, if I am being honest, the book is just the most recent of several books, which I am bringing up now because I am committed to full disclosure."
"Several books."
"There is a stack at school. In my desk drawer. Under some lesson plans." He winces. "Don't ask which lesson plans. The answer will distress you."
You make a small involuntary noise.
"Right. Anyway. The point is that I have been. Thinking about this. For some time. And the thinking has gotten, increasingly, less abstract. And at some point in the last, I want to say, month, it stopped being a thing I was curious about in theory and started being a thing I was, very, specifically. Curious about. With you."
He pauses. He's watching your face.
You keep it still. You do not, you are quite proud, give him anything.
"And I want to say a couple of things up front," he says, "before I get any further into this, because I think it matters. The first thing is that I am not. Bringing this up because I think anything is, you know, missing, or wrong, or. None of that. We are good. We are extremely good. This is not a, a fixing thing. This is a, a, an additive thing. A bonus content thing. A director's cut."
"Ryland."
"Sorry. Yes. The second thing is that I have done a truly embarrassing amount of research. Like. Genuinely embarrassing. I could give a seminar. I have, at this point, opinions about cotton versus jute that I will spare you unless you are interested, in which case I have a lot to say. But the relevant takeaway is that I know what I'm talking about. I would not be bringing this up if I didn't. I would not put you anywhere I had not, mentally, been already and figured out the load-bearing parts of."
Something low in your stomach tightens.
"The third thing," he says, and he's still watching you, still very steady, "is that I have been thinking, very specifically, about. About what I'd want to do. If we did this. And I want to tell you. I want to lay it out. So you know what you're saying yes or no to, if you say either."
"Okay," you say. Your voice is, you notice, a little quieter than it was a minute ago.
"Okay," he says back. He shifts on the bed. He doesn't come any closer. He's giving you space, which you only notice because of how deliberate it is. "So. Here's. Here's what I've been thinking about."
He takes a breath.
"I've been thinking," he says, "about doing this slowly. Like, much slower than you would think. Because the thing about rope, the thing that is genuinely the cool thing about rope, is that the point of it isn't the. Isn't the end state. The point of it is the time it takes to get there. The whole experience is the wrapping. The being-held. The not being able to go anywhere because you don't need to go anywhere, because I've got you. That's the thing. That's what it's for."
He's looking at you and he's talking with his hands a little, the way he does when he's enthusiastic about something, but his voice has gone quieter to match yours, and the effect is that he sounds less like he's explaining and more like he's confessing.
Your mouth is dry. You did not notice it going dry.
"I've been thinking," he says, "about starting with your wrists. Just your wrists. Because I want to see how you do with that first before I do anything else. Single column tie, behind your back, soft cotton, the kind that won't leave marks unless I want it to. I've been thinking about how that's going to feel for you. How your shoulders are going to sit. How you'll have to lean forward a little, because you won't be able to balance the way you usually do, and I'll have to put a hand on you to keep you steady. Right here." He touches the centre of his own sternum, lightly.
The image arrives in your body before it arrives in your head. His hand. Flat against you. Holding you up because you can't hold yourself. You feel the heat of it climb up the back of your neck. Your stomach does something low and stupid and slow.
"And I've been thinking about how that's going to feel for me," he says. "Having you like that."
You cannot look directly at him. You cannot look away from him. Your eyes have settled, traitorously, on his mouth, which is a problem because his mouth is what is making the sound, and the sound is the issue. His voice has dropped half a register without him seeming to notice and you have, you are realising now, stopped listening to the words a sentence ago. The words are arriving on a small delay, like a translation. The sound is going somewhere else. Somewhere lower. The sound is doing the work the words are only describing.
"I've been thinking," he says, lower still, "about taking my time once you're tied. Not doing anything for a while. Just looking at you. Because I am, you should know, extremely planning to look at you. For a while. And I've been thinking about what you're going to do, while I'm doing that, because you are very bad at being looked at without doing something about it, sweetheart, you cannot help yourself, you will start to fidget, and you will not be able to, because I will have made sure of that."
Your thighs press together before you decide to do it. The duvet shifts under your hand. You think, with great and useless clarity: he is not even touching me.
You try to say his name.
What comes out is closer to a breath than a word. A small soft thing. Not language. You feel it leave you and you cannot take it back and there is a heartbeat of silence after it in which you realise, with a fresh wave of heat up your throat, that he heard it.
His eyes change.
"Yeah," he says, quietly. Like he's answering you. Like that sound was a complete sentence and he heard it and he is, very mildly, taking note. "Yeah. That. That's what I've been thinking about."
He doesn't come any closer. He doesn't have to. You feel the inch of space between you on the bed like it has acquired weight. Your pulse is in your throat. Your pulse is in less defensible places. He is sitting cross-legged in his pyjama pants and a t-shirt about chemistry and he has not raised a hand and you can feel exactly where he has decided his hand is going to go first, on your sternum, holding you up, and you cannot, you find, breathe quite normally.
"I've been thinking," he says, and his voice has dropped again, and you feel it in the small of your back, "about what I'd want once you've stopped being able to fidget. About putting my mouth on you. Slowly. Working out what makes you make noise and what makes you make better noise, because there's a difference, and I have, frankly, been collecting data on this for some time, and I have hypotheses I have not been able to test under controlled conditions."
The laugh that wants to come out of you does not come out. It catches somewhere in your chest and turns into something else on the way up. You exhale through your nose. Your hand has, you discover, closed in the duvet without your permission, and you cannot make it let go.
"I've been thinking," he says, ignoring you, or possibly answering you, or possibly both, "about not letting you come for a while. Because you are extremely in charge most of the time, like I said, and a lot of being in charge is about deciding when things happen. And I want to. I want to take that. For a little bit. I want to decide. I want to make you ask. And then I want to make you ask again. And then I want to see what you sound like when I finally say yes."
You make a sound. You do not know what kind of sound. It is small and involuntary and absolutely not your fault.
He notices. Of course he notices. The corner of his mouth lifts. Just slightly. Just enough that you know he heard it and filed it and is, somewhere behind his eyes, pleased.
"I've been thinking," he says, softer now, almost gentle, "about every single one of these things, in detail, for weeks. I've thought about them sitting at my desk during fifth-period prep. I've thought about them in the shower. I've thought about them lying right here next to you while you were asleep, which I am telling you because I said I would be honest. There is not a part of this I have not turned over and looked at."
He stops.
Not for breath this time. For effect. You feel the shift the second it happens, in the way the silence between you changes texture, in the way his shoulders settle, in the small specific stillness that comes over him when he is, you know from a hundred other contexts, about to land something.
He looks at you. Properly. He takes his time about it. His eyes move over your face, your throat, your hand still closed in the duvet, the way your chest is moving, the way you are not, currently, meeting his eyes. He looks at all of it. He looks at all of it the way he looks at a problem he has already solved and is now simply confirming the solution to.
The half-smile is gone. Or it has changed. Something has settled into the corner of his mouth that was not there a minute ago, something quieter and more certain, and you understand, with a small bright drop somewhere behind your sternum, that he has known for some time that you were going to say yes. That he has been watching you arrive at it. That the gentleness of the speech was, in part, a courtesy, and the courtesy is now, very deliberately, being set aside.
"And the only thing," he says, and his voice is low and easy and entirely unhurried, "the only thing in the entire world that has been stopping me from doing any of it."
He pauses. He holds your eyes. He lets you feel it.
"Is that you haven't asked me to yet."
The room is very quiet.
You can hear, distantly, a car going past on the street. You can hear the soft hum of the fridge from down the hall. You can hear your own pulse, which is doing something embarrassing.
He's just sitting there. He's not pushing. He's not even moving. He's put the entire situation on the bed between you, neatly assembled, and stepped back from it with both hands visible. The ball, as the saying goes, is in your court. He is wearing a t-shirt about chemistry.
You look at him. You look at the book on the nightstand. You look back at him.
"You did do a lot of reading," you say.
He grins. Wide and stupid and relieved.
"I really did," he says.
You take a breath. Your hands are not steady. You don't try to make them steady. You reach behind you, slowly, and you pull your hair off the back of your neck, and you hold it there for a second, and his face does something you will think about later, in detail, with great satisfaction.
"Okay," you say.
He goes very still.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
"Yeah to. To which part."
"To all of it, Ryland."
His exhale is audible.
"Okay," he says. His voice has gone rough at the edges. "Okay. Right. Yeah. Okay. Give me. Give me one second."
He gets up. He goes to the dresser. He opens the drawer. He turns around with the coil of rope in his hands, and he is, you notice, very slightly pink in the face, and his hands, you notice, are not steady either.
"Hi," he says.
"Hi."
"I love you a lot."
"I love you too."
"I am going to take my time," he says. "Just so you know."
"I gathered."
He climbs back onto the bed.
He sets the rope down beside him on the duvet, neatly coiled, and you look at it and then you look at him and you watch, fascinated, as a small flicker of something passes across his face. Not nervousness exactly. Not anymore. Something more like the feeling of standing at the edge of a thing you have planned in detail and are about to step into for the first time. He looks at the rope. He looks at his own hands. He breathes out, once, quietly, and the flicker resolves.
"Okay," he says, mostly to himself.
He looks back up at you, and his eyes are warm, and the half-smile is back, and the something-else underneath it is back too, and you understand that whatever momentary uncertainty just moved through him has been catalogued, accepted, and set aside.
"Come here," he says.
It is not a question. It is not unkind. It is the voice of a man who has thought about this exact moment for weeks and has decided, on the available evidence, that this is how it begins. You go to him. Of course you go to him. Your knees move you across the duvet without consulting you and you arrive in front of him, on your knees, close enough that you can feel the warmth coming off his chest through the thin cotton of his t-shirt.
He looks at you for a long second.
"Hi," he says, softer.
"Hi."
"You're okay."
"I'm okay."
"You'll tell me if you stop being okay."
"I'll tell you."
"Good," he says, and the word goes through you in a way that is genuinely unreasonable given that he has not, technically, started anything. He sees it. The corner of his mouth moves. He files it. You feel filed.
He reaches up, slowly, and he brushes your hair back from your shoulder with the side of his thumb. His knuckles graze the skin at the side of your neck and you do not, you are very proud, make a sound. Then his hand settles, flat, at the centre of your sternum, exactly where he said it would. He does not push. He just rests his palm there for a second, as if checking the calibration of a piece of equipment he has been describing to you in theory and is now meeting in practice.
"Okay," he says, quieter. "Okay. Yeah. There you are."
He moves his hand. Down. Slow. He hooks his fingers in the hem of your shirt and lifts, and you lift your arms because you have apparently agreed to be useful, and the shirt comes off over your head and is, with great care, folded once and set on the nightstand on top of the book. You almost laugh. He almost laughs. Neither of you does.
He looks at you.
It is, in fairness to him, exactly what he said he was going to do. He looks at you for what feels like a very long time. His eyes move, slowly, over your collarbones, your shoulders, the line of your throat, the slight rise and fall of your chest, the place where his hand rested a second ago and where you can still feel the heat of it like an imprint. He does not say anything. He does not need to. The looking is doing something to you that words have already done once tonight and are apparently going to keep doing in different forms.
You want to cross your arms. You don't. You hold very still and let him have it, and the holding-still is, you realise, a thing you are choosing, and the choosing is its own kind of giving.
"Beautiful," he says, eventually. Just that. Quietly. Not a comment. An exhale.
His hand comes back. Settles between your shoulder blades. Light pressure. "Off the bed for me, sweetheart. Just for a second."
You slide off the edge of the bed and stand on the floor. He stays where he is, kneeling at the edge of the mattress, which puts him almost exactly at your eye level, and his hands settle on your hips. His thumbs hook in the waistband of your pyjama bottoms. He slides them down, slowly, all the way down, steadying you with a hand on your hip while you step out of them, one foot then the other. He folds them. He sets them on top of the shirt. The little stack on the nightstand is becoming, in its quiet way, completely unhinged.
He looks at you from where he's kneeling on the bed.
You have, you realise, never been looked at quite like this before. Not by him. Not by anyone. He is looking at you the way he looks at something he has earned the right to look at, the way he looks at a thing he has been thinking about so long that meeting it in person is a small and serious event. His eyes are bright. His hand is still on your hip and his thumb is moving in a small absent circle on the curve of bone there, like he doesn't know he's doing it.
"Okay," he says, and his voice is rough at the edges again, "okay, you have to. You have to give me a second here, because I'm going to. I'm going to lose the plot if I don't. Come back up here. Knees. Yeah. Like that."
You climb back onto the bed and kneel facing away from him, your back to his chest, your hands loose in your lap. The mattress shifts behind you as he settles in closer, close enough that you can feel the soft cotton of his t-shirt against your shoulder blades, close enough that you can feel him breathe. His hands rest, briefly, on your upper arms. A grounding touch. A here-we-go touch.
"Hands behind your back for me," he says, near your ear.
You bring them back. Your wrists cross, automatically, neatly, the way they would in handcuffs, and you hear him make a small soft noise behind you that you are going to think about later, in considerable detail.
"Look at you," he says, quietly. "You've thought about this too."
You cannot answer. Heat moves up the back of your neck where he can see it. He sees it. He does not comment. He is, you understand, busy.
The rope comes off the coil with a soft dry sound. You feel the weight of the bight as he doubles it. You feel him measure the length against your forearms, once, then a second time. He is, even now, checking his work.
"Okay," he says, and his voice has gone different. Not the bedroom voice. Not the speech voice. Something narrower and more focused, the voice of a man with his hands inside the actual problem. "The thing about a single column tie is that the whole trick is friction and load distribution. You want the wraps doing the work, not the knot. The knot is just where you stop the wraps. So I'm going to wrap you a couple of times here. Soft. Snug, not tight. Tell me how it feels."
The rope settles around your wrists. Cool at first, then warming fast against your skin. He wraps once. Twice. A third time. He is so careful. He is so unhurried. You can feel the small precise tension as he pulls each wrap into place, and you can feel his knuckles brush your skin, deliberate, attentive, not incidental.
"How's that," he says. "Talk to me."
"It's. Good."
"Good how."
"Snug. Not. Not tight."
"Can you move your fingers."
You move your fingers.
"Good," he says, soft and pleased, and you feel the word in three different parts of your body. "Good. Okay. Now I'm going to take the working end through. Here's where the friction does its job, see. This part. The wraps grip themselves. So even when I tie it off here, the tightness doesn't change. You're not getting tighter. You're getting secured. There's a difference."
You did not know there was a difference. You did not know you wanted to know there was a difference. You know now.
You feel him pull the working end through. You feel the small definitive cinch as the friction takes. You feel him tie something off behind your wrists with a soft brisk efficiency that you are not surprised to learn he possesses, given that this is a man who has, by his own admission, given a seminar's worth of thought to this exact event.
His hands rest on your forearms when he is done. He sits back, just slightly. He does not let go.
"Test it for me," he says, quietly. "Pull. Gently. Just see what it does."
You pull. Gently. The wraps hold. There is no give. There is no tightening either, exactly as he said. You are simply, definitively, held. Your shoulders adjust, exactly as he said. You lean forward, a little, because you cannot balance the way you usually do, exactly as he said.
His hand arrives at the centre of your sternum from behind, palm flat, steadying you. Exactly as he said.
"There you go," he murmurs, right at your ear. "There. I've got you. I told you."
You make a sound. Small. Involuntary. Absolutely not your fault.
He files it. You feel him file it.
"Okay," he says, soft. "Okay, sweetheart. Now I get to look at you for a while."
He works the knot at your wrists once, gently, testing it himself. He runs the back of his fingers up the inside of one of your forearms, slow, checking the line of the rope where it meets your skin. Then he sits back. The warmth of his chest leaves your back and you feel the absence of it in a way that is, honestly, a little embarrassing.
"Don't go anywhere," he says, softly, like there is any version of this where you could.
He moves. The mattress shifts. He comes around the side of the bed and settles in front of you, cross-legged, knees almost touching yours, and now you can see his face again for the first time since the tying started. His hair is sticking up at one side from where his hand kept going to it during the speech. His t-shirt about chemistry has, somehow, become a thing you cannot stop noticing. His eyes are bright and very level.
"Hi," he says.
"Hi."
"How are we doing."
You try to assemble an answer. Your assembled answer is: "Good."
He smiles, slow. "Yeah?"
"Yeah."
"Okay. Talk to me if that changes."
He picks up the rest of the rope. There is more of it than you realised. He had not just brought one short length out of the drawer. He had brought enough. You watch him uncoil it across his lap, sorting it into a length he likes, and you understand, with a small clean drop somewhere behind your ribs, that he had a plan for tonight that did not stop at your wrists. That when he said the only thing he had meant the plural. That the chest harness, when it arrives, has been pre-measured.
He looks up and catches you looking at the rope.
"Mm," he says, soft. "Yeah. I'm not. I'm not done with you yet, sweetheart."
You make a small noise that you absolutely did not authorise.
"Okay," he says, in the narrowed-focused voice from before, the one that arrives when his hands are about to start working. "So this part. This part is what most people picture when they picture this kind of thing. The chest harness. I'm going to build a frame around your ribs. Above and below. It's structural. The whole job of it is to give the rest of the system something to anchor to, so when I do the next bit, it has something to hang off of. Okay?"
"Okay."
"I'm going to need to be in your space a little for this. I'm going to be close. Tell me if that's too much."
It is, you suspect, going to be too much in a number of ways that he has not specified. You nod.
He brings the bight of the rope up. He folds it once. He measures it, briefly, against the width of your ribcage with a small workmanlike motion, and you watch him do it and you have the distinct and unhelpful thought that you have never wanted him to take his shirt off more in your life than you do at this exact moment, while he is fully clothed and you are not, and you understand with absolute clarity that this asymmetry is deliberate, and that he knows it, and that the knowing is part of the point.
"Lift your chin a little for me."
You lift your chin.
He passes the rope behind your back, under your arms, and brings it around in front of you. The first wrap settles high across your chest, just under your collarbones. He pulls it through with one hand and catches it with the other behind you, and you feel his knuckles brush the side of your ribcage as he passes the working end. Once. Light. Deliberate. He does not acknowledge it. Neither do you.
"This wrap," he says, conversational, like he is teaching the most ordinary class of his life, "is the upper band. It sits here. It's not load-bearing in the way most people think, it's actually mostly for shape, and for. For where I want your shoulders to be sitting. Which is exactly where they are right now. Good."
The second wrap comes around. Lower. Underneath. Just below your breasts, snug against the curve of your ribs. He pulls it through and threads it back, and as he does his fingers pass, briefly, along the side of your breast. Not lingering. Not avoiding. Just passing, with the kind of casual intimacy of a man who has decided that you are now within the territory his hands are allowed to cross while working.
You exhale through your nose. He does not look up.
"This one," he says, "is doing more of the actual work. You can feel the difference, right. This one's snug. The wraps above and below are going to share the load."
"Mm-hm." You cannot, you find, make a longer sound than that.
He passes the rope behind you again. The cinch goes in at your side, against the inside of your upper arm, and you feel the small bright tightening as he pulls the two bands toward each other and ties them off there. His fingers work at the knot. The backs of his knuckles rest against your ribs while he ties. He is so close. He smells like the soap you both use and something underneath that is just him, and the t-shirt about chemistry is brushing the back of your hand where it is bound at the small of your back, and you do not think you have moved at all for several minutes, possibly longer, possibly years.
"Other side now," he murmurs.
He moves around you to do the matching cinch on your other side. His hand travels across the front of you to get there, the back of his fingers tracing, slowly and apparently incidentally, across the upper band as he goes. The contact is, for half a second, deliberately and unmistakably across the curve of your breast.
You make a sound.
He does not stop. He does not even look up. He just finishes the pass and threads the rope through and starts the second cinch, and his face has done nothing, but his ears, you can see, are very slightly pink.
He files it. You file the filing.
He ties off the second cinch. He runs his fingertips along the lower band, checking the tension. He nods, once, to himself. Then he reaches behind you and brings the working end up to your wrist tie, and you feel him thread the rope through the cinch at the back, and you understand, with a slow rolling realisation that goes through your whole body, what he is doing.
He is connecting them.
Your hands, at the small of your back, are about to become part of the harness. The rope at your wrists is being tied into the rope at your ribs. You are not just being bound. You are being integrated.
He ties the final knot. He tests it. He runs his hand, flat, down the line of your spine from the back of your neck all the way down to where his knot sits at the base of your shoulder blades, and the gesture is so casually proprietary that you make another sound, smaller this time, almost inaudible.
He comes back around to the front. He sits, again, cross-legged, knees almost touching yours.
He looks at you.
The looking is, somehow, worse than before. You are now framed. You can see, peripherally, the soft white lines of cotton crossing your chest above and below. You can feel the rope holding you upright in a way your own muscles are not, currently, contributing to. You can feel your hands at the small of your back, secured to your own ribcage. You cannot, you discover, slump. You cannot hunch. The harness holds you in a posture that is, by accident or design, the exact posture of being presented.
And he is looking at you like the looking has been the entire point of the last twenty minutes.
"Beautiful," he says, quietly, the second time tonight. He uses the word like he's learning how to. Like he is, perhaps, going to use it again.
"Ryland."
"Mm."
You don't have a next sentence. You just wanted to say his name. You wanted to hear yourself say it and you wanted him to hear you say it and you wanted, you realise, for it to come out small and a little wrecked, which it has.
He breathes out. He shifts forward. He brings one hand up, slowly, and rests it flat against the upper band where it crosses just under your collarbones, his palm warm through the rope and against your skin. His thumb moves, once, in a slow arc across the cotton.
"You feel okay."
"Yeah."
"Tell me if anything goes numb. Hands especially. Promise me."
"I promise."
"Good."
The word, again. You feel it land in three different places.
He leans in, slowly, and presses his mouth, briefly, to the centre of your forehead. Then to the bridge of your nose. Then, for a long warm second, to your mouth. He does not push it. He does not deepen it. He just kisses you, soft and slow and entirely on his own time, while you sit bound in front of him and cannot, with your hands, do a single thing about it. When he pulls back, his thumb is still moving on your collarbone, and his eyes have gone very dark.
"Okay," he says, soft. "Okay, sweetheart. We're not done yet."
He sits back. He surveys his work for a long second, head tilted slightly, the way he does when he is looking at a thing he has built and is mentally checking it for load-bearing accuracy. His eyes go from the upper band, to the lower, to the cinch at one side, to the cinch at the other, to the line of rope disappearing behind your shoulders. He nods, once, small.
"Okay," he says, mostly to himself. "Okay. Last bit."
He picks up the remaining length. There is, you note, still a surprising amount of rope left. You had assumed, somewhere in the back of your head, that he was almost done. You were, you are learning, wrong about this. You are wrong about a lot of things tonight. This is, apparently, going to be a recurring theme.
"This part," he says, his voice quieter now, no longer in teaching mode, more like he is talking to himself while he works and has decided to let you listen, "is going to come down from the front of the harness. Here." He touches, lightly, the centre of the lower band, where it sits in the soft valley just under your breasts. "Down. Across your hips. Around the back. Up to the cinch points on the sides. So it's all. It's all going to connect. Everything is going to be part of everything else."
You exhale, slowly. You feel him track the breath.
"And then I'm going to do something around your thighs," he says, "but not. Not so much that you can't move them. I just want. I want the line of it. I want to see it on you. I want you to feel it there."
He stops. He looks up at you. The corner of his mouth lifts, slightly, with the small specific wickedness it has acquired over the last hour.
"You know where I want you to feel it," he says.
You make a sound. You do not have a word for the sound. It is not a sound you have made before and you are not, currently, in a state to interrogate when it might have entered your repertoire.
"Yeah," he says, soft. "Yeah. I thought so."
He brings the working end down from where it sat at the centre of the lower band. He pulls the length through his hand once, smoothing it, and then he leans in, close, and his face is at your collarbone as he reaches around behind you to feed the rope through the cinch at your shoulder blades. His cheek brushes the curve of your throat as he does. You feel the soft scratch of stubble. You feel his breath on your skin and you feel your own pulse jump visibly there, and he must see it because he makes a small soft pleased sound that goes through you like a struck note.
He doesn't pull back right away. He stays close for a second, his face at your neck, working the rope by feel behind you. Then his mouth, briefly, lights on the place where your shoulder meets your throat. Not a kiss. A pressing. A confirmation. You hear yourself say something that is not a word.
"Mm-hm," he murmurs, against your skin. "I know. I know, sweetheart. I'm taking my time. I told you."
He pulls back. He keeps working.
The rope comes down the front of you, from the lower band, slow. He guides it past your stomach. Past your navel. His knuckles trail the path the rope is taking, light and deliberate, as if showing the rope where to go and showing you where it is going at the same time. By the time the working end reaches the top of your hip he has, technically, done nothing untoward, and you are, in practice, almost incapable of holding still.
He passes the rope around your hip and behind you. He brings it back through. Your hips, he is now, very methodically, framing. A wrap above. A wrap below. He pulls them snug against the curve of you and you feel them settle, low, lower than the harness, in a place that is, anatomically and otherwise, beginning to be a problem.
"Okay," he says, his voice gone soft and very low. "Okay. Let me. Let me just."
He shifts. He leans in. His forearm rests, briefly, against the inside of your thigh, light, just for balance, as he reaches to thread the rope behind you. The contact is, you tell yourself, incidental. The contact is, the more honest part of you knows, not incidental at all. You make a small involuntary noise.
He pretends he has not heard it. He is busy.
He brings the rope around to your other hip. He ties off a small efficient connection at your side, where the hip wraps meet the cinch from the harness above. Now the harness and the hip rope are one system. The wrist tie behind you is part of that system. You are, increasingly, one entire piece. You are no longer a body with rope on it. You are, you are realising with a slow heat that is climbing in places it has no business climbing this far in advance, a body that is part of the rope.
He sits back. He looks at his work again. He nods.
"One more thing," he says. "Bear with me."
He takes the remaining length and brings it down past the hip wrap on one side. He guides it across the top of your thigh, just below where the hip rope sits, low across the front of your upper leg. He passes it around the back of your thigh, brings it back, and ties it off into the hip rope so it forms a soft loop. Then he does the same on the other side. Two loops, one around each thigh, low and snug, attached up to the hip wrap. They do not restrict your legs. They simply sit there.
They sit, specifically, exactly where the line of his attention has been pointing for the last twenty minutes.
You can feel them. You can feel the line of the rope across the front of each thigh. You can feel where each loop disappears around the back. You can feel, with a clarity that is genuinely unfair, the open inch of space between them.
He runs a fingertip, once, along the front of the rope where it crosses your right thigh. Slow. From the outside in. Following the line of it. His fingertip travels along the rope until it reaches the inner edge of the loop and then, for one half-second, it does not stop. His knuckle brushes, briefly and with absolute deliberation, across the place his speech had promised and his hands had been deferring.
You jerk.
You cannot help it. Your hips move and your breath leaves you in a sound that is half gasp and half something else, and the harness holds you upright when you would otherwise have folded forward, and he watches it happen with his hand still resting, lightly, on your thigh.
"Mm," he says, soft. "Yeah."
He removes his hand. Just like that. He sits back on his heels and looks at you, and his face has done the thing it does when he has confirmed a hypothesis, the small bright contained pleasure of a man whose data has come in exactly as predicted.
"Okay," he says. "Yeah. Yeah, we're. We're good. We're past good. Sweetheart, look at you."
You cannot look at yourself. You can, however, look at him, and what you see in his face is the same look from before the speech ended, the look of a man who has been planning a thing in detail and is now, with great satisfaction, watching the thing arrive. Except now there is something further in it. Something almost reverent. Something that has, you understand, been waiting for this exact configuration of you to exist.
He reaches up. He cups the side of your face. His thumb traces, slowly, along your cheekbone. You lean into his palm without deciding to.
"You okay."
"Yes."
"Tell me how you are."
"I'm. Ryland."
"I know. Use your words for me, sweetheart, just a couple."
"I'm. I can't. I want."
"I know."
"Please."
The word leaves you before you decide to release it. It is the first time tonight you have asked him for anything in plain language and the sound of it in your own voice is a thing you are going to think about, later, with great and burning specificity.
His eyes close. Just for a second. Like the word has gone through him too.
When he opens them, they are very dark. The half-smile is gone. The settled certainty is fully in his face now, the look he had right before the closer of his speech, and his thumb is still moving on your cheekbone, and his voice when he speaks is so quiet you almost feel it more than hear it.
"Yeah," he says. "Yeah, okay. Lie back for me."
You lie back.
It is not, mechanically, easy. Your arms are behind you, tied to the harness, and you cannot use them for balance. You start to tip and he catches you, one hand at the back of your neck and the other flat against the harness at your sternum, and he lowers you down slowly onto your back across the duvet. He is so careful. Your shoulders settle. He adjusts your hips so your weight is not on your wrists, and the small specific competence of it, the way he handles you like you are precious cargo he has personally packaged, does something to you that you do not have language for.
He looks down at you for a long second.
The angle is, you understand, different now. He is up on his knees beside you, fully clothed, and you are laid out on the duvet in nothing but rope. The asymmetry from earlier has acquired a final form. He is looking down at you the way he looks at a problem he has solved and built and is now, with great satisfaction, going to test.
"There you are," he says, softly. "There you are."
He puts a hand, flat, low on your stomach. Just resting it. The weight of it goes through you. His thumb moves, once, along the line of the lower hip rope where it crosses your skin.
"You feel okay."
"Yes."
"Shoulders okay."
"Yes."
"Hands."
You move your fingers.
"Good." The word again. You feel it land. "Sweetheart, look at you. Look at you. I'm just. I'm going to look at you for a second. Is that okay."
"Yes."
He does.
You have, possibly, never been looked at so completely in your life. His eyes go everywhere. The rope across your chest. Your throat. The slight shine of sweat at your collarbones. The line of the hip rope. The loops at your thighs. The space between them. His attention is the most physical thing currently happening to you and he is not touching you at all. His hand is still resting, light, low on your stomach, and his thumb has gone still, and he is just looking.
You move, involuntarily, a fraction. Your hips shift. The rope at your hips moves with you. You see his eyes drop to track it.
"Mm," he says. Soft.
He shifts. He moves down the bed. He settles between your legs, on his stomach, propped on his forearms, and the new angle puts his face level with the lower hip rope, and you realise, with a slow heat that climbs the inside of your thighs, that he is now exactly where he has been describing being for the better part of an hour.
He rests his cheek, briefly, against the inside of your thigh, just above the rope loop. He turns his face slightly. He presses his mouth to the soft skin there, slow, a real kiss, and you feel his lips part and the warm flat press of his tongue and you make a sound that you do not authorise and cannot retract.
"Hi," he murmurs, against your skin.
"Hi."
"How long have you been like this for me."
You cannot answer. You do not know. Time has, you suspect, broken slightly.
"Long enough," he answers himself, soft. "Yeah. I know. I've been watching."
He kisses, slowly, across the inside of your thigh. He kisses the soft hollow just above the rope loop. He kisses the place where the loop meets the inner skin of your leg. He kisses, with great deliberation, around where you need him, in a small unhurried arc that maps the outer perimeter of his actual destination. He is taking inventory. He is, you understand with a kind of distant despair, still doing reconnaissance.
"Ryland."
"Mm."
"Please."
"I love it when you say that," he says, conversational, his mouth still moving slowly across the inside of your thigh. "I love it. I've thought about it. It is, in fact, one of the things I have been thinking about. I want you to know that."
"Ryland."
He laughs, quietly, against your skin. The vibration of it goes through you in a way that makes your hips jerk forward without your permission.
"Okay," he says, softer. "Okay, sweetheart. Okay."
And then his mouth is on you.
He licks you, one long slow stroke straight up the centre of you, and the sound that comes out of you is high and broken and entirely new. He makes a low pleased sound back, into you, into the wet heat between your thighs, like he has been waiting to hear that exact noise and is filing it for later. His hands settle on your hips, but only briefly. They move down. He hooks a finger under the rope loop at each thigh and pulls, gently, opening you wider for him, and the rope obliges with a soft creak and you make a sound you do not authorise.
"There," he murmurs. "Better."
The hip rope is, you note distantly, holding you in place where his hands no longer need to. You understand now why he built the system the way he did. The rope is helping him. The rope is part of him. The rope is, you understand with a small distant heat, currently doing more to you than his mouth, because his mouth has not started in earnest yet and the rope is already holding you open for him.
He licks you again, slower, savouring it. Then again, the flat broad press of his tongue dragging all the way up and ending in a slow tight circle around your clit, and your hips try to lift. The rope at your hips creaks, holds. You do not move. Your breath leaves you in a single shaky exhale.
"Fuck," you hear yourself say.
He laughs against you, a small warm vibration that makes you make a noise you do not authorise.
"Mm-hm," he murmurs, his lips brushing your clit as he speaks. "Yeah. I know."
He takes his time.
He takes, in fact, all the time he said he was going to. He licks slow flat strokes up the length of you. He works his tongue into you, briefly, pushing in, fucking you with it in slow shallow strokes that make you say his name on a broken vowel. Your breathing has, you realise, picked up. You hear yourself, distantly, the small fast hitches of it. He hears it too. He hums into you in response.
Then back up. He sucks your clit into his mouth, the small bright pull of it, and you make a noise you have never made before in your life. He hums around it. He releases. He licks you again, slower. He is calibrating. He is, you understand with a kind of distant wonder, running the experiment he said he would run. He is mapping you. He is checking what makes you make noise and what makes you make better noise, and he is, on the available evidence so far, learning very fast.
He sucks your clit again, harder this time. Your back arches against the duvet and the harness holds you and you cannot, with your hands, do a single thing. Your breath comes faster.
"There," he murmurs, briefly lifting his mouth, his chin already wet, his voice gone low and rough, "there it is. There. Look at you. You are soaking, sweetheart. You are absolutely fucking dripping for me. I can taste how long you've been like this."
"Ryland."
"I know. I know. I've got you."
He releases the thigh loops. He brings one hand up. He hooks his fingers, instead, into the front of the hip rope where it crosses low across your stomach, and he uses it. He uses it as a handle. He pulls, lightly, lifting your hips up off the duvet by the rope itself, tilting you into his mouth, and the angle changes and the sensation changes and your breath leaves you in a ragged shocked sound that is barely a word.
"Yeah," he says, soft, into you. "Yeah. Just like that. Stay there for me."
He holds you there, suspended by the hip rope against the strength of his arm, and he goes back down on you with the new angle, and the new angle is, you understand within about three seconds, devastating. He sucks your clit and works it with the flat of his tongue at the same time and your hips cannot move because he is holding them in place with the rope itself, the rope he built specifically so it could be used this way, and you are, increasingly, breathing in fast shallow hitches that you cannot regulate.
You try to look down at him.
He must feel your head lift, because he glances up, and the second your eyes meet his you make a noise like you have been struck. His mouth is on you. His eyes are on yours. His hand is wrapped in the hip rope, holding you up to his mouth. The lower half of his face is wet. His chin is wet. He looks like a man who has been doing exactly what he is doing for as long as he has been doing it and is, with great satisfaction, not about to stop. The combination of his mouth on your clit and his eyes on your face and his hand fisted in the rope and the loops at your thighs and the fact that you cannot, with your hands, do anything but lie there and let him eat you, is too much. You make another sound. Your breath catches. Your head starts to go back.
"Uh-uh," he says, briefly pulling off. His mouth is wet. His voice is wrecked. "No, sweetheart, look at me. Eyes on me. I want you to see this. I want you to see what you look like with my mouth on you like this. I have been thinking about your face right now for six weeks. You are not going to deprive me of it."
You make a noise that is not, technically, a word. Your breath is coming faster.
"Yeah," he says, soft and low. "Yeah. That's what I thought."
You open your eyes. You lift your head, again, with great effort.
He waits until you are looking at him. Until you have, deliberately, met his gaze. He holds your eyes for one long deliberate second.
Then his mouth returns.
And he does not look away.
He sucks your clit and works it slow with his tongue and his eyes stay locked on yours, and it is, you understand in some far back unreachable part of your brain, the most him thing he has ever done. He is going to make you watch. He is going to make you see him doing this. He wants the data on what your face does. He wants to record it. He wants, the speech had said, to see what you sound like when he finally says yes, and apparently finally says yes is happening now, and the saying-yes is being delivered with his mouth and his eyes both, and you cannot, you find, look away from him.
The pressure builds. He sucks at your clit in tight focused steady pulls that have absolutely abandoned any pretense of teaching mode. He is no longer figuring you out. He has figured you out. He is now, deliberately, doing the thing he has figured out, with the focused unhurried efficiency of a man who has the right equation and is solving for the variable.
Your breathing is ragged now. Open-mouthed. You can hear yourself.
He slides his free hand up off the rope, briefly. He brings two fingers to your mouth. You suck them in without being asked, because it is the only thing you have left that you can do with your body, and his eyes go black when you do.
He pulls them out, wet. He brings them down. He pushes them, slow, into you, and you feel them slide in easily, you are so wet they slide in like nothing, and he makes a low broken sound when they do.
"Christ, sweetheart," he says, his voice cracked. Christ. You are. You are absolutely. Yeah. Okay. Okay, you can take more than that. Look at you. You can take more."
He pulls his fingers out, briefly, and adds a third. He pushes them all back in, slow, slow, and the stretch of it makes your back arch against the rope and the sound that leaves you is high and broken and your breath stops, briefly, before it starts up again faster, much faster, the small fast pulls of it audible in the quiet room.
"There," he says, soft and wrecked. "There. Yeah. Look at you taking that for me. Look at you."
He curls his fingers inside you. He finds the spot he is, evidently, looking for, the spot you had not known you had labelled in his head for him, and his fingertips drag against it with the stretch of all three of them filling you and you make a sound that is, frankly, humiliating. Then his mouth is back on your clit, sucking steadily, while his three fingers work you from the inside, curling in time with the pulls of his mouth.
You are gone.
Your breathing is, you realise dimly, no longer regulating itself at all. It is coming in fast desperate hitches. You can hear it. He can hear it. The room is full of the sound of your breath and the small wet sounds of his mouth on you and his fingers in you, and the hip rope creaking faintly each time his arm flexes against it, and your own voice making noises you do not recognise.
"That's it," he says, briefly lifting his mouth, his fingers still moving inside you, "that's it. There you are. I've got you."
"Ryland please."
His mouth returns to you, briefly, a slow press, before he lifts again. His eyes lock on yours, low and rough. "Come on, sweetheart. Come on my mouth. Come on my fingers. Look at me and do it. Yes. Yes. Now."
And then, with absolutely no warning, his mouth closes around your clit and you feel the soft careful precise scrape of his teeth.
It is so light. It is so deliberate. It is, you understand in the same second it is happening, something he has been saving, something he has been timing, something he has known he was going to do exactly when he did it. His teeth, his tongue, his three fingers buried inside you, his eyes on you, the rope holding you in place, the rope at your hips holding you up to his mouth, and your breath stops happening and your chest cannot move against the harness and the sensation goes bright in a way you have never felt before, and then it goes through you, and you come.
You come with his teeth grazing your clit and his three fingers buried inside you and your eyes on his and your hands tied to your own ribs and his hand fisted in the rope at your hips and the rope holding you in the exact posture of being given, and the sound you make is loud and high and absolutely beyond your control. You come around his fingers in tight clenching pulses, the stretch of them making it sharper, brighter, more, and you feel him groan into you when you do, the sound vibrating against you and dragging the orgasm out longer. He works you through it with his mouth and his fingers and his steady dark eyes on your face. He does not stop. He does not slow. He keeps you there, in it, riding the bright sharp peak of it for longer than you knew was possible, his fingers still curling against that spot inside you, his mouth still working your clit in steady pulls. Your breath comes back in great shocked gasps. He works you through every one of them.
When you start to come down he eases off, gentling, slow soft passes of his tongue, his fingers stilling inside you, the pressure backing off in careful stages. His hand uncurls from the rope at your hips and he lowers you, slowly, back down to the duvet.
You are not.
You are not entirely here.
The duvet is soft under you. That is a fact you have access to. The ceiling above you is white. That is another fact. Your eyes are open. You think they are open. The light is doing a thing where it has gone soft at the edges, gone blurred, gone honeyed. You can feel the rope. You can feel the rope as the most present thing in the room, the rope across your chest, the rope at your hips, the rope at your wrists holding your hands to your own ribs, and the rope is the thing keeping you in your body when the rest of you has gone somewhere else.
You hear him say your name. From far away. Soft.
You think you make a sound back. You are not sure.
His cheek is on your hip. You can feel his breath, warm, against your skin. He is breathing. You are breathing. The breathing is the same thing, somehow. The breathing is one breathing.
He shifts. The mattress shifts. He moves up the bed, slowly, and you feel him settle alongside you, his body warm against your side, his hand sliding flat across your stomach above the hip rope, his face close to yours. He kisses your temple. Soft. He kisses the corner of your mouth. He kisses the bridge of your nose.
He is saying things. The things he is saying are warm and quiet and at first you cannot quite assemble them into language, you can only assemble them into the texture of language, the low gentle particular shape of his voice when it is close to your ear and speaking only to you.
The texture, eventually, becomes words.
"There you are," he is saying, soft. "There you are, sweetheart. Hi. Hi. I've got you. I'm right here. I've got you. You did so well. You did so well for me. Look at you. Stay with me a little bit. Yeah. Yeah, just like that. Breathe."
You breathe. The breathing is, you discover, something you have to be reminded about. You breathe in. The air goes deeper than you expect. He breathes with you. His hand on your stomach rises and falls with the rope.
"Good girl."
The words land somewhere quiet. They do not hit. They settle. You feel them in the same place you feel the rope.
He kisses your temple again. He stays there. His mouth is warm. His hand on your stomach is warm. The warmth is, you discover, holding you together in a way that is, currently, necessary.
You do not know how long you are there. Time has, you suspect, broken slightly. You have been told this happens. You did not know it would feel like this. It feels like floating in warm water with the lights off. It feels like the rope and his voice and his hand and nothing else.
You become aware, slowly, that you are coming back. The ceiling is whiter. The light is sharper at the edges. You can feel the duvet under you in detail again, the small weave of it, the slight cool of where your shoulder has not been pressing it. The room reassembles. He is still here. Of course he is still here. He has been here the whole time.
You turn your head, slowly, and look at him.
He is right there. His face is close to yours on the pillow. His eyes are warm and very steady and watching you with the focused careful attention of a man who has been waiting and is not going to rush. He smiles, small, when you meet his eyes.
"Hi," he says, very softly.
"Hi."
"There you are."
"Mm."
"How are you doing, sweetheart. Talk to me. Just a little."
"I'm." You try to find the word. "I'm. Good."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
"Can you tell me where you are."
You consider this. "Bed."
He laughs, very quietly. The laugh moves through his chest and into your side where you are pressed against him. "Yeah. Bed. Good. Excellent."
"With you."
"With me. That's the one."
His thumb moves on your stomach, slow, against the rope. He is, you notice, checking. He is running through a list. He has, you suspect, been running through a list the entire time you were away. His eyes go to your hands, briefly, to the angle of your shoulders, to the rope at your hips, to your face. He brings his hand up. He touches your cheek. He brushes your hair back.
"Anything hurt."
"No."
"Hands okay."
You move your fingers. "Yes."
"Shoulders."
"Yes."
"Tell me if anything changes."
"I will."
"Good." He kisses your forehead. He stays there. His mouth is warm against your skin. "Good, sweetheart. You did so well. I am. I am genuinely struggling, here, to convey to you how well you just did."
You make a small pleased sound. It is the first proper sound you have made since you came back, and it surprises you a little to hear it.
He smiles against your forehead. You feel the smile.
He pulls back, slightly. He looks at you again. His eyes are still very dark, you notice, underneath the softness. The softness is real. The dark is also real. He has been holding both, in parallel, the entire time.
"Stay with me a little longer," he says. "Yeah?"
"Yeah."
"Tell me your name."
"What?"
"Tell me your name, sweetheart. Just say it for me."
You say your name.
He grins. Slow.
"There you are," he says. "Yeah. Okay. Now we can keep going."
He kisses you. Properly. The first proper kiss since the harness, his mouth warm against yours, the taste of you still on his tongue, and you make a sound into it that is, you realise distantly, the sound of you fully arriving back in your body.
He pulls back.
"Because," he says, soft, his forehead against yours, "I am, sweetheart, in fact, not done with you."
He kisses you again. Slower. Properly. You can feel him taking inventory through the kiss, the way his mouth moves against yours, the soft thoroughness of it. His hand has moved up off your stomach. It rests, warm, against the side of your throat, his thumb at the line of your jaw, holding your face exactly where he wants it.
When he pulls back, his eyes are dark again. Fully. The softness has not left, but the dark is rising back through it.
"I need you to sit up for me," he says, soft. "Yeah? Slowly. I'll help."
He shifts. He sits up alongside you, swings his legs around, and slides one arm under your shoulders. He brings you up with him, slowly, taking the weight of your upper body for you, because your hands are still tied behind your back and you cannot push yourself up. He is so careful. He brings you up to sitting and steadies you there, one hand flat at the centre of the harness, the other at your lower back. He lets you find your balance.
"There," he says, soft. "Good."
You sit, looking at him. Your knees are tucked under you. The hip rope creaks softly as you settle. He is sitting in front of you, fully clothed, hair worse than ever, the lower half of his face still faintly damp, and he is looking at you with the same focused careful attention he tied every knot with.
He smiles. Small. Crooked.
"Stay right there for me," he says.
He gets off the bed.
It is the first time he has moved away from you in a long time, and you feel the absence of him like a small cool draft against your skin. You watch him. He stands at the foot of the bed and pulls his t-shirt off over his head in one motion, the chemistry pun balling up in his fist and getting tossed, without ceremony, in the direction of the laundry basket. He misses. He does not appear to care. His hands go to the waistband of his pyjama pants and he pushes them down and steps out of them, and then he is standing at the foot of the bed in nothing at all, and you have, you realise, not exhaled.
You look at him.
You look at him properly, for the first time tonight, and the looking is sudden and total and unbalancing. He is flushed across the chest. His hair is a complete disaster. He is hard, obviously, achingly, the visible evidence of how long he has been holding himself in check while doing everything he has done to you for the last hour. His hands at his sides are not quite steady.
He sees you looking. The corner of his mouth lifts.
"Hi," he says, softly.
"Hi."
"Yeah," he says. "I know. I've been. It's been a long evening."
You make a small wrecked sound that is half laugh and half something else. He grins, briefly. He climbs back onto the bed.
"Okay," he says. "Okay, sweetheart. Last bit. Come here."
He gets you up onto your knees. He turns you, gently, by the harness, so that your back is to him and you are kneeling facing the foot of the bed. He shifts you, slowly, until you are kneeling at the very edge of the mattress, your knees just at the line where the bed ends and the floor begins. The hip rope creaks. He is using it, again, to position you, the rope doing the work of placing your body exactly where he wants it.
He gets off the bed.
He stands behind you, on the floor. The height of the mattress puts you, kneeling, at exactly the right level. You understand, with a small bright drop, that this is what he was building toward when he chose where to put you. The geometry has been planned. Of course it has.
His hands settle on your hips. Warm. Skin to skin now, for the first time in over an hour, and the difference is immediate. You make a sound. He makes a small low sound back, like the contact has hit him too.
"Okay," he says, soft, at your ear. "Okay. I'm right here. You with me."
"Yes."
"Tell me your name again."
You say your name.
"Good." His mouth presses to the back of your shoulder, soft. "Good, sweetheart. Stay with me."
His hands move. One stays on your hip. The other slides up your back, slowly, finds the rope at your shoulder blades where the wrist tie connects to the harness, and his fingers wrap around it. He has, again, a handle. He has, again, the system he built doing exactly what he built it to do.
He pulls, gently. The rope pulls your shoulders back, the harness pulling with them, and your spine arches and your chest goes forward and the hip rope tilts you, slightly, the angle of your body adjusting under his hand without you having to do anything. You are being posed. You are being put into the position he wants and the rope is doing it for him.
You exhale, shakily. Your breath has, you realise, picked up again.
"There," he murmurs. "Yeah. Like that. Look at you."
You feel him, then. The warm press of him against you, at the very entrance of you, slick from your own wetness and from the residue of his mouth and his fingers from before. He does not push in. He just holds there, the pressure of him against you, and you make a sound that is desperate and unauthorised and entirely his fault.
"I know," he says. "I know. I'm taking my time."
"Ryland."
"Mm-hm."
He pushes in. Slow. So slow. He sinks into you in one long unhurried stroke, his hand still wrapped in the rope at your shoulders, his other hand fisted in the hip rope, using both to hold you exactly where he wants you, and the stretch of him after the three fingers is, somehow, still a stretch, and the slow inevitable slide of him into you makes you make a noise that is almost a sob.
He bottoms out. He stays there. He breathes.
"Christ," he says, his voice cracked. "Oh, sweetheart. Oh, fuck. You feel—"
He cannot finish the sentence. You understand. You are not capable of finishing sentences either. He is in you. He has been talking about being in you for an hour and he is now, finally, in you. The fact of him is the only fact in the room.
He moves. Slowly at first. Long deep unhurried strokes, his hand in the rope at your shoulders pulling you back onto him in time with the push of his hips, the rope doing the work of moving you because your hands cannot. The harness creaks. The hip rope creaks. You can feel the rope at every wrap on your body, holding you in the shape he chose, while he uses you in the exact way he described he was going to.
"There you are," he murmurs, his mouth at your shoulder. "There. Yeah. Just like that. Just like that."
He picks up the pace. Not by much. Just enough that the strokes become harder, more deliberate, the slap of skin audible in the quiet room. Your breath is, you realise distantly, picking up again, fast hitches that match the rhythm of him. You feel it starting to build again. You did not know it could build again so soon. You did not, in fact, know anything about your own body that you are currently learning.
He feels it before you can tell him.
"Wait," he says, soft, almost surprised. His hand on the rope at your shoulders flexes. "Wait. Sweetheart. Are you. Are you already."
You make a noise that is, you suspect, an answer.
He laughs, low and incredulous, the sound vibrating against your back. "Already. Okay. Okay, that's. That's fast. That is genuinely. Okay."
He presses his forehead to the back of your shoulder for a second, as if collecting himself. His hand on the hip rope tightens. When he speaks again his voice is rougher, lower, the half-smile audible in it.
"Okay," he says. "Okay, fine. Fine. Yes. Yeah. We can do that. We can absolutely do that."
Then his hand in the rope at your shoulders releases.
You feel the absence of it for one half-second, and then his hand is sliding, slowly, up the line of your spine. Up the back of your neck. Around to the front. His palm settles, warm and certain, across the front of your throat.
He does not press. He does not squeeze. He just rests it there, his fingers light at the side of your neck, his thumb at the line of your jaw, the heel of his hand at the soft hollow at the base of your throat. His hand is, you realise with a small bright drop, exactly where his hand has been heading all night. The sternum. The collarbones. The side of your throat after the harness. The kiss. He has been circling this. He has been getting closer to it for an hour. And now he is here, his hand at your throat, the warm certain weight of him there, holding you in place not with pressure but with the simple fact of his hand on you.
You make a sound. It is small and wrecked and you do not have a word for it.
"Yeah," he says, soft at your ear, his voice gone low and dark. "Yeah. I've been thinking about this too."
His thumb moves, once, along the line of your jaw. He tilts your head back, slowly, until it rests against his shoulder, until your throat is exposed in his hand, until you are arched against him with the rope holding you up and his hand holding you back and his body pushing into you from behind. Your breath comes in slow shaky pulls. He can feel each one. His hand at your throat feels every single one of them.
"Breathe for me," he murmurs.
You breathe.
"Good." The word lands directly into the skin of your throat under his palm. "Good, sweetheart."
He starts moving again. Slow at first. Deep. The rope at your hips is the only thing positioning you now because his other hand has stayed there. The shoulder rope hangs loose. His hand at your throat is what is holding your upper body in place. The rope built the cage. His hand is the final lock.
You feel yourself, distantly, going somewhere again. The light at the edges. The slowness. The hand at your throat is keeping you here, keeping you in your body, the simple anchoring fact of it.
"Stay with me," he says, quiet. "Yeah? Stay right here. I want you here for this."
"Yes."
"Good girl."
The words go through you and you make a sound and his hand feels the sound move up your throat and you feel him smile against the back of your shoulder.
He picks up the pace properly now. The strokes get harder. Deeper. The slap of his hips against you is loud in the quiet room. His hand at your throat does not move. It just stays, the warm certain weight of it, the thumb at your jaw keeping your head tilted back against his shoulder, the heel of his hand at the base of your throat, and you can feel your own pulse against his palm and you understand that he can feel it too.
His other hand slips off the hip rope.
It slides down your front. Down across your stomach. Under the hip rope, between your legs, and his fingers find your clit with the precision of a man who has been there recently and knows the way. The moment his fingertips press there you make a noise that is, frankly, indecent.
"There," he says. "Yeah. Right there. I've got you. Come on."
He works your clit in tight focused circles in time with the strokes of his hips and the hand at your throat holds you exactly where he wants you, and you can feel him deep, the angle of him hitting the same spot his fingers had found before, and the combination is, you understand within about ten seconds, going to undo you completely.
"Look at you," he says, his voice gone rough. "Look at you taking that. Sweetheart. Sweetheart, you are. Fuck. I'm not going to last. I'm not. Come on, come for me, I want to feel it, come on."
You come.
You come a second time, harder, sharper, your whole body going tight inside the rope, and his hand at your throat feels every pulse of it move through you, and you feel the harness hold you in the exact shape he set you in, and you feel him groan against your shoulder, deep and broken, and his hand at your throat tightens just slightly, just enough that you feel it, just enough that it makes the orgasm go bright and sharp at the edges, and his hips stutter and he buries himself in you and comes with a sound that is, you note distantly through the haze of your own pleasure, the most undone you have ever heard him.
He holds himself in you. He breathes. His hand at your throat softens, just slightly, the thumb stroking along your jaw. His mouth presses, open and wet, to the place where your shoulder meets your throat.
The aftershocks start, small and bright, before he has even finished. Your body keeps clenching around him in soft involuntary waves and each one makes him groan against your skin and you cannot stop them, you are not in charge of stopping them, you are not in charge of anything anymore. Another wave. Another. Smaller. He is still in you. He is softening, slowly. He is breathing against your shoulder.
"Oh," he says, very softly. "Oh, sweetheart. Oh, look at you. You're still going. You're still. Yeah."
His hand at your throat strokes your jaw. His other hand is still between your legs. He has not moved it. His fingers are still there, light, resting against your clit, and as you ride the small waves through your body he starts to move them again. Slow. Light. Almost nothing. Just enough.
"You can give me one more," he murmurs. "Can't you. Just a small one. You're so close already. Look at you."
"I can't."
"You can."
"Ryland."
"Sweetheart. Yes you can. Just one more. Just for me. I want to feel one more move through you while I'm still in you. Yeah? Come on."
His fingers work, so light, the lightest possible pressure, slow circles that match the small involuntary clenches still moving through you. He is softening inside you and you can feel it, the slow change of him, and somehow this is doing it too, the awareness that he is going soft in you and is still, with the last functional half of his attention, working you toward one more.
"Come on, sweetheart," he murmurs. "Right here. Right here with me. One more."
You feel it gather, small and bright and so close to the surface that it barely has to climb to get there.
"There," he says. "There. Yeah. Let me have it. One more for me."
You come again.
It is so small. It is so bright. It moves through you in a soft slow wave that makes you shudder against him from your shoulders down through where he is still inside you, and his hand at your throat feels it move up through you and his other hand feels it move through your clit and he makes a low broken sound at the back of your shoulder, his whole body tightening around you in response.
"Yes," he breathes. "Yes, sweetheart. Yeah. There. There. Good."
The wave subsides. His fingers slow. They still, eventually, against you, but he does not move them away. His hand at your throat stays where it is, warm, steady, the thumb stroking your jaw. He is still, just, in you. He stays.
"Oh," he says, very softly, against your shoulder. "Oh, sweetheart. Sweetheart. Look at you."
He holds you, like that, against his chest, his hand at your throat and his hand between your legs and the rope holding you in the exact shape he set you in, for a long time. You do not know how long. Time has, again, gone strange around the edges. You can feel your own pulse in his palm. You can feel his pulse in his chest behind you.
Eventually, slowly, he eases his hand from your throat. He brings it up. He brushes the hair back from the side of your face, tender, slow. He kisses the line of your jaw where his thumb has just been.
"You with me."
"Yes."
"Yeah?"
"Yes, Ryland."
"Good." A kiss to your temple. Soft. "Good. Okay. Okay, sweetheart, let me. Let me get us sorted."
He eases out of you, slow, careful, both of you making a small involuntary sound at the loss. His hand stays warm and flat against your stomach as he does. He kisses the back of your shoulder, once, soft.
"Stay right there for me. Just a minute."
He moves. The mattress dips and rises as he gets off the bed. You hear him in the en suite, briefly, the soft sounds of water and a cloth. He comes back. He kneels behind you on the bed again and you feel the warm gentle press of a damp cloth between your legs, careful, thorough, and then a soft dry one after it. He cleans you up the way he ties knots, which is to say with the focused unhurried attentiveness of a man for whom the doing is the whole point.
"Okay," he murmurs. "Okay. Let's get you out of this."
He gets you turned around, slowly, by the harness, until you are facing him again, kneeling in the centre of the bed. He sits cross-legged in front of you. His knees touch yours. His hands settle on your forearms behind your back, checking the wrist tie, and his eyes do the small bright inventory thing again, looking you over from collarbones to thighs.
"How are we doing," he says, soft.
"Good."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
"Anything hurt."
"No."
"Anything numb. Hands. Tell me."
You move your fingers. "No."
"Good." He smiles. Small. Crooked. "Okay. Sweetheart. We are going to do this in reverse. Yeah? Same as we did it. Just. The other way. Slowly. Tell me if anything feels weird coming off."
"Okay."
He reaches behind you. His fingers find the knot at your wrists first, because that was the last thing he tied to the harness, the connection point that made the whole system one piece. He works it loose. He pulls the rope back through the harness cinch. He frees the wrist tie from the rest, and now the rope at your wrists is its own length again, separate.
But he does not untie your wrists yet.
"In a minute," he says, when you make a small questioning sound. "I want to do these in order. Trust me."
He moves on. He works on the hip rope and thigh loops first. His hands are deft and patient. He unties the thigh loop on one side, slow, slides the rope free, then the other. He lays the lengths across the duvet next to him as they come off. Then he works the hip wraps. He unwraps them, slowly, his knuckles brushing your skin as the rope comes away from you. Each wrap that comes off, he traces the line of where it was with the backs of his fingers, slow, deliberate. There is a faint indent in your skin where the rope was. He runs his thumb along it. He does not say anything. He just looks at where his rope was.
He kisses, once, the soft place at your hip where the lower wrap had been sitting.
"There," he murmurs. "Yeah."
He moves up. The chest harness comes off in stages. The cinch on one side first. The cinch on the other. Then the lower band, slow, unwrapping from your ribs. He pulls the rope through and lays it aside. You feel the cool of the room replace where the rope was. You feel his fingers trace the line of the indent again, light, careful, the way he traced the hip mark.
"Look at that," he says, soft. "Look at where I had you."
He kisses the line. Once, twice, following the soft red mark just below your breasts where the lower band had sat snug. His mouth is warm. Your breath, against your will, hitches.
He smiles against your skin. He kisses the place once more. Then he moves up. The upper band comes off the same way, unwrapped slowly, set aside. He traces the line just under your collarbones. He kisses there too, slow, almost reverent.
"Hi," he says, quietly, into your collarbone.
"Hi."
"Almost done."
He sits back, just slightly. He brings you forward, gently, until your forehead rests against his. He reaches behind you. He finds the knot at your wrists, the last one, the first one he tied tonight. He works it loose.
The rope comes away from your wrists.
Your hands fall, slowly, free for the first time in what feels like hours, and they do not seem to know what to do with themselves. He catches them in his. He brings them both around to the front. He looks at your wrists. They are faintly pink where the rope was. The lines of the wraps are visible, soft, not raised, just the soft impression of where you were held.
He brings one wrist to his mouth.
He kisses the inside of it. Slow. He kisses the soft place where the rope had sat. He does the same with the other wrist. He rubs his thumbs, slowly, into the small muscles of your hands, the way he would knead a cramp out, working the blood back through them.
"How are these," he says.
"Fine."
"Tell me if they tingle."
"They don't."
"Good."
He keeps holding your hands. He looks at you over them. His eyes are warm. The focused careful attention is back to its normal household configuration. He looks like himself. He looks, you note, extremely like himself, like a man who has been Ryland Grace this entire time and is now just letting it all show.
"Okay," he says. "Come here."
He pulls you down with him. He lies back against the pillows and brings you with him, settling you against his chest, your cheek on his shoulder, your hand resting flat over his heart. He pulls the duvet up over both of you. He folds you in. He rests his chin against the top of your head.
You can feel his heart under your palm. It is, you notice, still going faster than it should be.
"Hi," he says, softly.
"Hi."
You stay there for a while. His hand moves, slowly, up and down your back. His breathing slows. Yours slows. The room is very quiet. You can hear, distantly, a car going past on the street. You can hear the soft hum of the fridge from down the hall. The same small sounds the room made an hour ago when he was telling you what he wanted to do.
He has, you note, done all of it.
You make a small sound against his shoulder that is almost a laugh.
"What," he says. His voice is sleepy now. Warm.
"You did do a lot of reading."
He laughs. The laugh moves through his chest, into your cheek where it is resting against him, into your hand where it is over his heart. He laughs for a long time, soft and slow and helpless.
"I really did," he says, finally.
"Was it. Was it worth it."
"Sweetheart."
"Mm."
"I am going to be processing tonight for, in fact, the rest of my life."
You smile against his shoulder. He kisses the top of your head.
You lie there. He is warm. The rope is in soft pale coils on the duvet near his feet, neat where he laid them as he took each one off you. You can see them, peripherally, the white of the cotton against the dark of the cover. They look, you think, more innocent than they have any right to. They look like rope. They look like the kind of thing he would, with great quiet certainty, put back in the bedside drawer in the morning.
You think about the book on the nightstand. You think about the browser tab. You think about the small coil that appeared in the sock drawer four days ago and the way he checked on it three separate times before he was ready.
"Ryland."
"Mm."
"Are there more books at school."
He goes very still. You feel him try, for a second, to assess whether this is a trap.
"Yes," he says, carefully.
"Bring them home."
He laughs again. Helpless. He pulls you closer. He kisses the top of your head.
"Yeah, sweetheart," he says, soft and warm and slightly wrecked. "Yeah. Okay. I can do that."
You close your eyes.
You think, with the last small functional half of your brain before sleep takes you, that you are going to have to renew the library book one more time. Just to be safe. Just in case.
benjamin poindexter absolutely fumbles his way through your relationship. it's not remotely funny—he's messed up and-slash-or embarrassed himself so many times he isn't actually sure how he's ended up here. here, as in with your wedding clothes on the floor, with the ring on your left hand cool against his bare chest, with your leg slung over his.
a few days after you speak for the first time, you're chatting offhandedly with him outside your workplace, waiting for a cab (he would've offered to drive you, but he doesn't get off just yet) when you mention a skirt you like wearing—he says it's a nice colour, and you're confused. he's never seen you wearing it. this part's unrehearsed; he blurts out something about seeing you in passing, but you're sure you would've remembered seeing your charmingly weird, nervous wreck of a coworker walk past you in the hallway. whatever, he's too cute to worry about it too much.
on your first date, the waiter asks him what he wants before he asks you, and he says, "whatever she'll be having."
"what if you don't like it?" you ask, and he says, carelessly, that seafood is just fine.
and how does he know that?
not again—you're too nice, too distracting. making him forget all the things he's practised saying in the mirror, until he's a blushing mess, barely getting his words out. but you believe him when he says he saw what you'd been reading last, because he is a sniper after all. it's kind of in his job description to see just about everything. it is true, kind of, but just not in the way you'd think.
he's breathing easier when he says he won't do it again.
on your fourth date, you know something's definitely wrong. he's just so familiar, too familiar with your space; it makes your stomach curl nauseatingly. but you say nothing. how can you, when he's so sweet to you? and when he asks you if you want to make things official, stumbling over his words and blushing such a pretty pink, you almost forget what you'd been thinking.
but you know it now.
your new boyfriend has been stalking you.
it's hard for you to wrap your head around that, especially when it just seems so unlike him! he's nice, if a little off-putting, but he doesn't seem the type to do this. and why?
sure, he's a bit clingy, a little possessive, tends to be very jealous every now and then—but stalking is a bit excessive, no? how does an obsession with details translate into an obsession with you?
yet you do nothing to stop him, just yet.
you're walking home after a night out with your girls, and maybe he thinks you're not sober, or maybe he's just tired of hiding this side of him. but you swear you hear his footsteps sometimes through the light drizzle, catch a glimpse of blonde in a fogged-up reflection, see a much larger shadow just behind yours.
eventually, at the risk of appearing more than a little insane, you slow down and speak to no one in particular. "i know you're there, dex."
it doesn't take much coaxing for him to step out of the shadows, face clouded by guilt—no, regret at being caught. and then there's guilt when he sees your face, how upset you are. not because he's been stalking you for god knows how long.
"i—" he begins, but you cut him off. "there's nothing to say, dex, how could you?"
"i'm sorry," he mutters, even though he's not.
"no you're not," you say, and he stays very, very quiet.
"i'm going home. don't follow me."
his hands clench and unclench uselessly at his sides. "i just wanted to make sure you're safe."
"i work for the goddamn fbi," you snap, whipping around on your heel to face him again. "just like you. so i don't need a fucking creep following me around, okay? i never want to see you again."
your words do more damage to him than any hit ever could have, and he blinks and swallows and looks away like he might actually cry. your definitely-not-small, fbi special agent boyfriend—well, ex now—is almost in tears just because you said a few mean words to him, and ones he deserved, too.
but he listens, and you're home alone, and you know he's not watching you, and you kind of miss him.
and then the texts start coming in.
dex <3: let me know that you're home safe.
dex <3: are you okay?
dex: <3 please respond
dex <3 i know i fucked up but please just let me know you're okay
you ignore the texts and get ready for bed, and when you pick your phone up again to set an alarm, the latest notification says,
dex <3: i'm outside your door
naturally, this is when you reply. verbally.
"fuck off, dex!" you yell, fully aware that your neighbours will probably hate you for it, and also that dex will hear you over the rain.
dex <3: please open it
dex <3: i know i've been bad and i've upset you but i need you
dex <3: baby please i love you i'm sorry i'll be so good
it's raining harder now, and you finally cave. breaking up with him is one thing, but you still don't want him to get pneumonia. even now.
dex looks pathetic. that's the first word you can think of as he stands there, drenched. he's holding flowers that look more dead than alive in one hand, phone in the other. he looks up at you nervously like a scruffy little cat, afraid of what it might see in your gaze. his eyes are red-rimmed, knuckles all bloodied up. he's an absolute mess, and then a tiny part of you actually starts to believe that this had been for your own good.
something tugs at your heart. "oh, dex," you murmur, and impulsively pull him into your arms, to hell with the rain. you are mad at him, but apparently you love him more than you could ever hate him.
his knees positively give out when he stumbles into your house, body pressed against yours like he's trying to crawl into it, fit himself right behind your ribs. he's so much larger than you, but you still end up on the floor, as he sniffles and sobs and apologises into your chest. you kick the door closed and he looks up then; "it's not locked—"
you run your hand through his hair and watch his eyes lose focus for a second before you're gently urging him away from it. "it's okay, i'll do it in a second," you assure him. "and if anything happens, i have you to protect me, right?"
not something you particularly agree with; you can protect yourself too. but from the looks of it, dex really needs this right now—he blinks away tears to look at you. "yeah," he says hoarsely. "you do."
your thumbs swipe across his cheekbones, wiping at the moisture there before you kiss him, salt and rainwater, and he sighs into it, content.
maybe it's a little nice to know someone's ready to jump in and save the day if you're in danger. he's not always around because he has a lot more work than you, but it becomes a bit of a routine. doing your thing, seeing texts pop up every now and then—don't go into that store, something's off, you almost stepped into traffic, be careful, i like your sweater, i love you.
then he embarrasses himself when he decides to propose to you, three years later. even though that includes colluding with your friends who he's not very fond of, but everyone who knows you knows you have an extremely particular vision of what things should be like if you ever do get proposed to.
except when he's down on his knees and looking up at you, he forgets everything he's supposed to say, holding the little velvet box in very shaky hands. you wait. the cameras are rolling. finally, he's stammering out "will you—"
you nod and you're crying and you say yes and get down on his level to wrap your arms around him. the stupid speech he'd practised is still tucked in his back pocket, forgotten when you kiss him. he doesn't cry then, but later, at home, you suddenly see the corners of his lips curve down as he begins to sniffle.
"oh, baby, what's wrong?" you ask, threading your fingers together. your engagement ring presses into his skin, and then he actually starts crying, even as he tells you he's fine.
you choose to have a small courthouse wedding, nothing fancy. it's what works out the best, anyway, what with the nature of your jobs and all. materially, he messes up half his vows, stumbles over the other half, and finishes it with a mortified blush and "i'm sorry, i love you."
clearly it does something for you, though, as you all but rip his clothes off the moment you get home.
1.5k words i am so sorry for the inactivity but uhh unfortunately i accidentally ended up getting a life ie. hanging out with friends instead of dexmaxxing i know i'm such a fake girlfriend i'm sorry dex did i get his energy right
have a quick drabble of dry humping with ryland bc I can't get it out of my head
------------
A movie plays softly in the background, cookies cooling on the stove and a board game laid out on the coffee table. But none of those things are important as you grind down on Ryland, his hands helping guide your hips against his clothed length. You hadn’t meant to end up like this, the two of you hung out all the time and it never ended with you writhing on his lap, fingers brushing through his hair and petting his cheeks.
You claim his tongue with yours, moaning into the kiss when he shifts just right beneath you, his sweats thin enough for you to feel all of him. He breathes your name, biting back a cry as you circle your hips and throw your head back, his face leaning in to bite at your breast over your shirt.
You weren’t even sure how you ended up here, one second you were fighting over the points of the game and the next his tongue was down your throat, hands pulling you into his lap with a growl. You think maybe you said something that pissed him off, maybe this was a punishment for hurting his feelings. But then again, maybe he’d been flirting all evening and you were feeding into it a little too much. Who could say?
Either way, you were panting into his mouth and grinding against him, swallowing down his whines and whimpers when you move just right. “This okay?” You whisper on his lips, laughing when he pulls back with an incredulous look on his face. “Please don’t stop,” he all but cries, “god, please don’t stop.”
A smirk tugs at your lips, your hand closing around the strands of hair on the back of his head and pulling, tilting him so you can kiss him as thoroughly as you want. He melts into you, moaning at the scratch against his scalp.
You can feel how wet you are, feel how your panties stick to your core with each pass over him. You know you’re leaving a stain on his pants but the thought only spurs you on. You have a feeling he won’t mind, anyway.
Finally, his hands slide from your hips to your ass, gripping tightly and giving him purchase to push up against you. “Oh - ooh, fuck,” he whispers, “you’re gonna make me cum like a fucking teenager.”
You grin, “that’s the plan, Ry.” And he whines into the air, hips jerking and hands squeezing tight. “It’s okay,” you nip at his jaw, “want you to come.”
His eyes shut tight, his head falling back and hips thrusting harshly. A broken whimper comes from deep in his chest, his legs shaking under you until he tenses. You keep moving, realizing just how close you are, and topple over the edge of your own orgasm. It catches you by surprise, your hands pulling his face into your chest again just for something to do while you writhe through it.
When you open your eyes again, he’s looking up at you with shining eyes, his mouth open just a little, like he can’t believe you’re real. You bite your lip and kiss him, sinking down to just rest in his lap. “You’re good at that,” he grins at you, hand coming up to swipe hair out of your face. You laugh, laying your head on his shoulder. “Thanks, nerd.” His laugh shakes your body, but he doesn’t move you, just relaxes against the couch and shuts his eyes.
dex wakes up to feel you up in the middle of the night.
ᯓ tags │ very suggestive, sleepy horny dex
the room was quiet, moonlight slipping through the blinds and painting soft stripes across your sleeping face. dex had been watching you for nearly an hour - curled up in his hoodie on your bed, one arm tucked under his head like a pillow.
he didn’t move. didn’t blink too much. just stared at the way your eyelashes fluttered with dreams, how your lips parted slightly when you breathed out that little sigh every few seconds.
his fingers twitched like he wanted to reach out and brush a strand of hair from your forehead, but he didn’t dare. scared you’d wake up. scared the moment would break.
he memorized everything - the curve of your cheek, the way your nose scrunched just slightly. a quiet warmth bloomed in his chest. the fact that you trusted him enough to sleep right beside him while he stayed awake watching over you like some guard dog.
the moment your breathing changed, shifting from deep sleep to soft wakefulness, dex held his breath. he hadn’t meant to disturb you, but instinct had taken over: one arm slowly curling around your waist, gently pulling you back into him.
his chest pressed lightly against your back as he spooned you from behind, careful not to squeeze too tight. the warmth between you two was immediate and his heartbeat thudded in his ears.
“is everything okay?” your voice came out drowsy and sweet. he felt something melt inside him.
"yeah," he murmured, low and tender, different from his usual voice. "everything's okay."
unexpectedly, dex pressed a soft kiss to the side of your neck, just below your ear. his lips were warm and gentle as they trailed down along your skin, feather-light at first like testing waters but quickly growing bolder when you didn’t pull away or protest.
one hand slid slowly up under the hoodie you were wearing, fingertips grazing bare skin with careful strokes. his touch was curious but worshipful as if every inch of you was something sacred worth memorizing by heart.
his fingers traced the curve of your shoulder, then down your arm, mapping every dip and softness like he was committing it to memory. when his hand reached yours - he laced your fingers together gently.
then he shifted closer. with slow, deliberate movements, like you were something fragile and precious, dex turned slightly and pressed himself fully against you from behind. chest flush to back now, one leg hooking lightly over yours under the blankets.
he kissed a new spot on your neck, a little lower this time and exhaled softly there before leaving another kiss right after. each touch was tender but growing needier by the second. the space between you vanished completely as he pulled you even tighter into him.
his breathing deepened as his warm hand moved upward. fingertips brushed over your collarbone first, then hesitated for just a heartbeat near your chest.
every movement was careful, reverent even as if he were touching something infinitely valuable. his palm flattened gently against you through the thin fabric of the hoodie, applying soft pressure like a question rather than an assumption.
then he kissed you again and at the same time let his thumb trace slow circles right over where his heart was racing against yours.
"dex..."
his fingers slipped fully under the hoodie now, warm fingers meeting your body as his hand glided upward, past your stomach, over your ribs. the fabric bunched slightly around his wrist as he moved.
palm open and tender again, dex let his hand rest gently over you, skin to skin, and a shiver ran through him. you were soft and plush under his touch.
he didn’t grab or squeeze; instead he cupped slowly, the curve fitting perfectly in the shape of his large palm and began moving with delicate pressure: thumb brushing lightly across sensitive skin while kissing down from your neck toward that spot where shoulder meets collarbone.
his touch turned firmer. dex began gently squeezing your breasts through his careful palm movements: soft presses at first, then rhythmic little kneading motions like he was trying to memorize the feel of you.
each squeeze sent warmth radiating between you both - his heartbeat thudding faster against your back - and his kisses grew hungrier down your neck and shoulder.
he wasn’t being greedy or pushy; every action was still loving in its own way. tender even as it became more intimate. but there was need there too - an ache building quietly inside him that made his breath come out warmer, heavier with each exhale against your skin.
his hands moved with more familiarity now, no longer hesitant, but still worshipful in their touch. dex cupped each breast fully this time, thumbs circling slowly before focusing on your nipples, rubbing small circles at first, testing your sensitivity.
seconds after, his fingers pinched lightly, but enough to tease; rolling softly between thumb and forefinger while his other hand kept massaging the opposite side.
you could feel the firm press against your backside as dex held you close. he was completely hard now, a thick ridge straining through his sweatpants where his hips naturally curled into yours.
he didn’t try to hide it or pull away; there was no shame in him. the tension in his body had shifted: every breath came deeper, slower with restraint - but obvious arousal hummed beneath the surface. when you subtly shifted adjusting without meaning to, it sent a jolt straight through him. dex bit down softly on your shoulder before kissing over the spot apologetically.
"mm… I’m sleepy," you mumbled, voice thick with drowsiness, your body going heavier against the pillows as exhaustion tugged you back toward dreams.
a soft whine almost escaped him at your words. he hesitated for only a second before pressing closer again, his arms tightening around your waist and then slowly, carefully began to grind his hips back once against yours.
just a little roll of his pelvis through the fabric; testing if maybe you’d wake up enough to respond. one hand still lazily kneaded your breast while he kissed along your jawline: slow pecks followed by open-mouthed ones that were more breath than lips.
you turned around fully this time, twisting in his arms with a suddenness that surprised even him and your mouth crashed into dex’s.
your lips parted wide, desperate and open-mouthed, kissing him like you’d been wanting this all night without realizing it. tongues met clumsily at first, warm and eager but quickly found rhythm: sliding together in messy, hungry exploration.
dex gasped softly against your kiss; caught off guard by the intensity of it but he didn’t pull away as both hands immediately flew to cup your face. his thumbs stroked along your cheeks while his lips moved frantically over yours: kissing back just as desperately.
the kiss deepened, messy and breathless. your lips clung to his like you couldn’t get close enough; teeth accidentally brushing in the heat of it before tongues tangled again.
dex made a low sound in his throat as he kissed you back harder. one hand stayed cradling your face while the other slipped down to grip your shoulder, then slide around to press firmly against the small of your back.
he pulled you flush against him as much as possible, the space between gone now and tilted his head just slightly so your mouths could align perfectly.
his breathing came fast and shallow through flared nostrils; every exhale warm on damp skin when you briefly broke apart for air.
"dex, we should sleep, have to get up early tomorrow"
he stilled instantly, lips parting from yours, breath catching in his chest. for a second, he just stared at you: eyes wide and slightly dazed, lips swollen from kissing.
his body screamed no, every nerve still buzzing with warmth and want but the logical part of him knew you were right. still, it took everything in him to nod slowly instead of arguing or begging for five more minutes.
"yeah," he whispered hoarsely, voice thick with restraint and maybe disappointment too but not frustration toward you. he tucked your head back against his shoulder and adjusted the blanket over the both of you.
the room settled into quiet again. just the soft hum of the AC and moonlight painting stripes across the bed. dex shifted carefully, curling around you like a human shield. one arm stayed wrapped firmly around your waist while his other hand rested near your face, fingertips lightly brushing your hair every now and then.
dex pressed one last kiss at your temple. the rhythm of your breathing synced first, slow, even inhales and exhales that deepened as sleep pulled you under. he felt the exact moment your body went fully relaxed against him.
his own eyelids grew heavy soon after. the adrenaline from kissing had faded, replaced by a soft drowsiness that spread through his limbs. he nuzzled unconsciously into the crown of your head and his arm tightened around you just once before falling asleep beside you.
› summary: in an effort to get over the end of a long term relationship, you go home with a handsome stranger from the club. unbeknownst to you, he also happens to be your new coworker.
› summary: in an effort to get over the end of a long term relationship, you go home with a handsome stranger. unbeknownst to you, he also happens to be your new coworker.
› tags/warnings: explicit mentions of smut (minors DNI!), language, alcohol use, reader is an english teacher, not beta read, reader has female anatomy, no use of y/n, strong language, hookups, reader used ryland as a rebound, reader was in a bad relationship before ryland, this would be right after he's kicked from academia, lots of exposition in this one sorry y'all
› wc: 4.5k
ᯓ★
The first thing you're aware of when you wake up is the headache.
It sits right behind your eyes, a dull pang that seems to heighten with every passing second. For several long, deep breaths, you keep them closed. It's easier this way, you think, as you're unwilling to confront anything more complicated than the dry scrape of your tongue at the roof of your mouth and the pleasant soreness in your legs. There's a faint, mechanical whir of an air conditioning unit nearby that's fighting a losing battle against the late August heat, the sounds of San Francisco coming to life outside of what must be an open window.
This is why you don't normally drink.
In your early twenties, you'd thought yourself impervious to hangovers. This was disproved shortly after your twenty-third birthday. The morning after a particularly vicious night out had been spent puking your guts up while Hallie stood behind you, pulling your hair away from your face and cooing comforting words that irritated you more than anything else.
Fuck.
Hallie. And Reagan.
You open your eyes. The room around you is both unfamiliar and startlingly intimate.
The ceiling above you is painted a nondescript white, fan rattling with every few turns. A thin blade of sunlight spills through the gap between a pair of cheap blue curtains, spreading over the rumpled sheets near your waist. There's a dresser against the opposite wall, its surface covered in trinkets, a half-empty glass of water, and a collection of books stacked horizontally. A framed print from a movie you've never seen before hangs above it.
You stare up at the ceiling for a few moments longer, trying to recollect the events from last night, but your mind is painfully blurry.
There are fragments. Lights flashing across a crowded dance floor. Reagan pressing a drink into your hand and insisting that you let loose. The sticky hardwood beneath your heels. A brunette sliding her hand down a man's arm with a grin before disappearing into the crowd. Blond hair. A crooked smile. Your own voice asking, with a confidence you certainly do not possess while sober, Tough crowd?
The mattress shifts beside you, and your whole body tenses. You wince. Slowly, carefully, you turn your head.
The man from the club is asleep on his stomach beside you, his face turned towards the window. He has one arm tucked beneath his pillow, the other sprawled out, close enough that the backs of his fingers almost brush against the bare skin of your hip. His hair is rumpled from sleep, the strands near his temple lit gold by the sun. His glasses are discarded on his nightstand, next to a few Advil laid out.
You don't remember his name.
You're not sure if this is your error or his, though. Did he ever give you his name? Had you given him yours? You can't recall.
What you do remember is giggling breathlessly into his mouth when he kissed you in the backseat of the rideshare, and laughing loudly when he dropped his keys outside the building. Heat licks up your neck, embarrassment and exhilaration replacing your stomach with butterflies.
What have you gotten yourself into? It was so irresponsible of you, going home with a stranger. What if he had kidnapped you? Or murdered you? This is exactly the kind of thing that ends with girls your age on the news.
You close your eyes again. Okay. Panicking is not helping. You're alive, you're well, not missing any vital organs or anything—at least, that you know of.
You inhale deeply. This is not a catastrophe. You are an adult (pushing thirty, to put it bluntly). A single adult, as Hallie had repeatedly emphasized on your way to the club. You're allowed to go home with an attractive stranger. You're allowed to do whatever you please, even if Anthony would have hated it.
Thinking of Anthony is the least helpful thing you can do right now, so you decide to finally get up. You peel the comforter off your body, unsurprised to find yourself naked. You'd be a little disappointed if the night had ended on the more PG-13 side of things, all things considered.
Your clothes are scattered across the room. You sit up, cringing at the wave of nausea that threatens to have you kneeled over a toilet for the next twenty minutes. Your headache blooms with fresh enthusiasm, throbbing slightly.
Your denim miniskirt and panties are discarded on your side of the bed. Slowly, you swing your legs over, wiggling back into your bottoms. You locate your black halter top on the other side of the room. You're thankful you had forgone a bra last night, as it's one less article of clothing you need to worry about. You tiptoe with such care that it's almost comical. The last thing you want is to wake this guy up and endure an embarrassing exchange that you'd really rather avoid.
A floorboard creaks under your foot, and the man behind you sighs and shifts in his sleep. You freeze, glancing over your shoulder at him. He makes a low, unintelligible sound, his hand moving across the mattress as if searching for something. As if searching for you, you realize with a sinking feeling. You don't dare exhale until his own breathing settles into an even rhythm again.
Then you tug your top on.
You find your purse on the floor by the door with a quiet sigh of relief. Your phone is inside, with less than ten percent battery left. The screen lights up when you pull it out. You have nine missed texts and three missed calls. You open the groupchat first.
Reg: Pls tell me ur alive
Halls: Tbh I wouldn't mind getting murdered by that guy
Reg: Not helping
Halls: Ur no fun
Reg: I rlly don't want to have to file a missing persons report
Halls: I think you need a break from true crime
Reg: It's called TRUE crime for a reason!!
Reg: How bad would her luck be if her first rebound after literal Satan is a psychopath murderer
Halls: Have you ever tried a more positive outlook on life
You can't help the silly grin that tugs on your mouth.
You: Alive and well
Typing bubbles pop up nearly as soon as you send your text confirming your continued existence.
Halls: Hooray!
Reg: Back at your place yet?
You: No. About to leave now
Reg: Good luck. Can I come over
You: Sure meet u there
Halls: No fair! I have work >:(
You lock the screen before Hallie can continue complaining, shoving your phone back in your purse and slinging it over your shoulder.
The bathroom is visible through the open bedroom door, directly across the narrow hallway. You slip inside, easing the door shut behind you. It's… cleaner than you'd expect from a single guy around your age.
You barely recognize yourself in the mirror. Your mascara is smudged, a few dark tear tracks running down your cheeks. Mortification coils in your gut. Had you cried in front of your hookup about Anthony? You wouldn't put it past yourself. The breakup is still fresh, tender and raw in all the wrong places.
Your lipstick has faded almost entirely, though it lingers around the edges of your mouth. Your hair is a tangled mess, and there's a darkening mark on your collarbone that has you shivering in the warm bathroom. You think of his mouth on yours, on your neck, your ear, trailing down in spite of the pathetic whimpers leaving your mouth.
"For fuck's sake," you mutter to yourself.
Cold water helps. You splash your face twice, scrubbing with your hands in hopes of getting rid of the evidence. You try to smooth your hair down, though it still looks a little rough, and try not to look around too much. As badly as your nosy self wants to snoop, peeking around feels too invasive.
When you're finished cleaning up, you spare one final glance into the bedroom. The man is dead to the world, but it does little to assuage your unease.
God, you feel guilty. What kind of asshole leaves without saying anything? You, you guess. But disappearing without a word sends the same message as explaining face-to-face that it was a one-time sort of thing, doesn't it? You can only assume so. This is your first one night stand. At least this way, you're saving both of you the time and awkward conversation.
It wasn't meant to be the beginning of anything. That had been the point. You had gone to the club because Hallie and Reagan insisted that getting over Anthony required you to remember that other men existed, that other men would be interested in you. You had spoken to the blond stranger because he was cute and because he had looked amused at your terrible opening line and because, for once, you had wanted to do something for yourself without first imagining Anthony's reaction.
And you did it. You proved whatever it was you needed to prove.
There's no reason to complicate the matter now.
That's the mantra you repeat to yourself as you skulk through the apartment, finding your heels by the front door and slipping into them. You escape into the hallway and close the door quietly after you.
His apartment is only on the second floor, thank God, and before you know it you're on the street in yesterday's clothes, squinting up at the morning sun. You're dismayed to realize he only lives a few blocks away from you, but at least it makes your walk all the easier.
Reagan is waiting for you outside your apartment door. She's leaning against the wall, scrolling through her phone and smacking her gum. She looks great, you realize a little petulantly. Her nearly white-blonde hair falls over her shoulder in a loose braid, makeup done and a cute pair of jeans and a tank top thrown on. You must look like you've been hit by a car in comparison.
"Hey," you sigh as you approach her, shouldering your purse as it starts slipping down your arm.
"Hey," she greets coolly in return. She gives you an appraising look before adding, "You look awful."
"Thanks," you grumble. You jam your key into the lock with a little more force than strictly necessary.
Reagan follows you inside, shucking her boots off carelessly. "So, tell me about last night."
You shrug, setting your purse on the kitchen counter. It feels so good to be back home after the morning you had, surrounded by your plants and books and fuzzy rugs. You decide you're never going to try the one night stand thing again. Too much work.
"It was good," you say, heading towards your bedroom. Reagan tails you wordlessly. "I think."
"You think?" she asks. She sits on your bed, leaning back on her hands.
"Well, I don't know." You dig around in your wardrobe for a pair of sweatpants and a nice, big t-shirt. "I don't remember a lot of it."
"I always forget you have a shit tolerance."
"Yeah, laugh it up. At least it's cheaper for me to get fucked up."
She waves a hand. "But black out? I mean, yeesh."
"I remember the important parts." You roll your eyes and step into the bathroom connected to your room. You throw a towel over the shower rack, setting your clothes by the sink, and turn the dial. You undress quickly, eager to get under the hot water, and slip into the shower.
"Did you at least get his number?" Reagan's voice is closer now. You peer around the shower curtains to confirm that she is now in your bathroom, trying to pop a pimple near her hairline in your mirror.
"No."
"What?" Reagan turns away from the mirror so quickly you hear her socks squeak against the tile. "Did you leave him yours?"
You duck your head beneath the spray, combing your fingers through your hair. The water is almost painfully hot, but it feels amazing on your tense muscles. "No."
She whistles. "So you really went for the whole hookup routine."
"I guess," you say, starting to wash your hair. "Isn't leaving in the morning the whole point?"
"Depends. Was the sex good?"
You squeeze your eyes shut. The easy answer is yes, the sex was good, and you don't think you've ever come that hard or that many times in your life. A tingle in your stomach reminds you of his fingers; a thumb swiping over your overly sensitive nipples; his middle and ring fingers fucking into you mercilessly as he pet your hair and pressed open-mouthed kisses to your skin; his big hands wrapped around your wrists while his cock brushed your cervix with every drunk, sloppy thrust.
The more difficult answer for you to swallow was that it hadn't just been good. To say it was good felt like a disservice to yourself. It was the best sex you'd ever had in your life.
You had slept with Anthony countless times. Of course you did. You'd gotten together your senior year of college, dated him for nearly three years, and you aren't a prude. Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course. At the time it had felt only natural to fall into bed with him. In the beginning it was passionate, maybe fueled by that infamous honeymoon phase, and towards the end…
You never hated it. Sometimes it had been nice, when he had kissed your neck in a way that made you inhale sharply, or ran his hand along your waist with a tenderness that made your heart swell.
But there had always been a set distance between your body and your mind. A sense that you were observing yourself, taking notes on your own performance. Were you moving enough? Making the right sounds? Taking too long? Not long enough? Was your face doing something weird?
Anthony never complained, but he hadn't needed to. He had a very particular way of sighing when you wanted something, a way of treating any attempt of explaining how you'd liked to be pleased: like it was a chore, a complicated set of instructions for a piece of furniture he didn't want all the much anyway. He would try, sometimes, but with a reluctant concentration that made you wish you'd kept your mouth shut.
Eventually you started doing exactly that. It was easier to let him finish and call it good; easier to smile when he asked if enjoyed yourself; eventually you began to assume that's what sex was when the novelty wore off.
Sex became something mildly pleasant that you did for the closeness of it, or because it had been a while, or because the person beside you reached for you in bed and saying no required more energy than saying yes.
Last night hadn't felt that way in the slightest.
The stranger you left the club with had paid attention to you with an intensity that was almost embarrassing. He watched and listened for your reactions to his touch, his mouth, and adjusted accordingly—as though every hitch of your breath and involuntary roll of your hips was something worth noticing for its own sake. He had asked you what you wanted, and listened.
At some point, you stopped worrying about what you looked like. That miserable, exhausting awareness of yourself had slipped away, and you were able to be present. Entirely.
Reagan picks up on your silence and treats it like an answer. "It was, wasn't it?"
"It was… fine," you say.
"You are such a bad liar," she snorts. "It's actually a little insulting."
"I didn't know." Your voice comes quieter now.
"Know what?"
You swallow. "That it could be like that."
There's a brief silence, and you worry for a moment that you've really overdone it, the whole pathetic ex-girlfriend thing, but then Reagan sighs. The sound is full of such fierce irritation that you can't help but smile.
"I hated Anthony."
"You say that about every guy Hallie and I talk about," you say, unable to hide your amusement.
"I mean it, too."
"Besides, he wasn't that bad. He just—"
You cut yourself short. You shouldn't be excusing him or his behavior. You know this. Reagan's told you so many times that you're sure she's sick of it, and for once you finally understand.
There was constantly something about you that Anthony felt needed correcting. Your skirt was a little short. Your friends are immature. Your apartment is too cluttered. You laugh too loud when you drink. You expect too much. You make things difficult.
"I don't know," you finish lamely.
Reagan doesn't answer immediately. When she responds, her voice is gentler.
"I'm sorry," she says. "I was on your ass a lot about breaking up with him, and I'm glad you did, but I know it's been hard."
You're not sure what to say to that. It has been hard, to be honest, but also freeing. Reagan has never kept a guy around for longer than three months (by her own choice, she claims men get boring and pushy after that), much less three years. How could she understand what it's like to lose such a big part of your life?
You shut the water off.
Reagan gives you some privacy to dry off and change. You pad back into your living room to find her sprawled on the couch, texting, You sit beside her with a sigh, and she shoves her feet into your lap.
"I think," she declares, "that you're due some good karma from the universe."
"Yeah?" you say absentmindedly, grabbing the remote from your coffee table and flicking through streaming services. "Does the universe have Venmo?"
"Har har." She pokes you with her foot and you smack her shin lightly. "I'm serious. You're in for something good. Restorative. Something a little slutty, but in a healing way. You might even see your mystery man again."
A knot tightens in your throat. He only lives a few blocks south. It's a possibility, as much as you wish it wasn't. "I don't think that's how karma works."
"Maybe not," Reagan says, reaching forward to snatch the remote from you. "But wouldn't it be funny if it did?"
ᯓ★
The following Monday sees you in a rush. You're late to your staff meeting, again. This is thrice now, in the last month, but you can't help it.
Or, to rephrase, you absolutely can help it, you just hate staff meetings so much that dragging your feet in protest feels mandatory.
By the time you reach Grover Cleveland Middle School, you are sweating through the back of your blouse. Your phone and coffee balance precariously in one hand while you shoulder your tote bag and shove your way through the main entrance's heavy doors with the other.
The front office smells the exact same as it always does in the summer: floor wax, printer toner, coffee, and the faint tang of hand sanitizer. You inhale deeply, cherishing it one last time before it gets tainted with middle school body odor.
"Morning!" Mrs. Moreno chirps from behind the front desk.
"Morning," you grimace, glancing up to offer a tight smile. Someone has taped a cheerful paper banner above the mailboxes that reads WELCOME BACK, GCMS STAFF! in bubble letters. It's eight in the morning and you'd be damned if you said you don't want a drink right now. Such is the life of educators.
"You're just in time. Library."
"Thanks," you say, already moving.
The library doors are propped open when you arrive. Inside, the rest of the staff have already gathered around the long study tables, clustered loosely by departments, though a few stragglers sit in different groups. History near the windows. Math and science at the back. Electives closer to the computers. You take your place with the rest of the language arts department, along the sides across from physical education.
You slip into the empty seat at the end of the table beside Marisol Chen, who teaches sixth-grade ELA and, much to your envy, appears far more composed than your flushed face and heavy breathing.
She turns, glancing at you over the rim of her glasses. "Rough start?"
"Something like that," you huff.
You're relieved to find that you didn't miss anything. At the front of the room, Principal Alvarez stands beneath a blank projector screen, messing around with something on his phone. A few murmured conversations float around the room, coworkers catching up after the summer with polite small talk and meaningless questions. The assistant principal crouches near the laptop cart, sorting through the tangle of cords.
The week before school starts always feels like being slowly lowered into a pot of boiling water while someone self-important on the board describes it as professional development. You've only been teaching for four years, and when you were fresh out of college and starting at Grover Cleveland, you were so overwhelmed you had seriously weighed the options of gritting your teeth and dealing with it, or running away.
It's times like this you wish you had chosen the latter.
There are rosters to review, bulletin boards to finish, classroom expectations to go over, and at least one required meeting in which Alvarez goes over the year's vision, goals, updated policies, and that sort of bullshit. You're starting to suspect he's more in love with the sound of his own voice than anything else.
The projector finally flickers to life. A blue slide appears on the screen, titled Building Forward Together. Beside you, Marisol inhales deeply through her nose.
You nudge her and whisper, "Be strong."
"I'm trying."
Alvarez claps his hands once, looking supremely pleased with himself. "All right, everyone. Thank you for your patience. I know you're all eager to get back into your classrooms, so we'll try to move efficiently this morning."
You snort into your coffee, and Marisol rolls her eyes. You open your planner to a blank page and write Staff Meeting at the top, but you know before the meeting is over you'll end up with a whole page of doodles, little flowers and swirls.
"Before we get into our goals and some new updates," Alvarez says, "I want to start by welcoming a few new faces to our family."
Family. Ugh, you hate when people use that word. Nonetheless, you find yourself dragging your gaze up curiously. You know there's been a few new hires this year, one of which will be taking up residence in 214, the classroom right across the hall from yours. You hate to admit it, but you're excited. Your current "family," as Alvarez likes to put it, is a little lacking.
You clap politely for new office secretary and the paraeducator joining the seventh grade team, your eyes sweeping over the crowd in an effort to catch any unfamiliar faces that might be your incoming neighbor.
Alvarez checks the paper in his hand. "And finally, we are very excited to welcome the newest member in our science department, Ryland Grace. Ryland, if you could stand up, please?"
You—and nearly the whole language arts department—crane your neck to catch a glimpse of the man that stands from somewhere in the middle of the rest of the science teachers. No wonder you hadn't seen him earlier, tucked away like that.
He's tall, broad-shouldered, and Christ, he's handsome, but—
Oh, my fucking God.
You clap a hand over your mouth, turning your head away so fast that your neck pops, but it's too late. He saw you, you know it. His embarrassed smile had faltered, his eyebrows had shot up into his hairline. He fucking saw you, and recognized you as fast as you recognized him. How could you not? You were in his bed, only two days prior.
"What is wrong with you?" Marisol mutters at your desperate attempt to hide in the shoulder of her blazer. "He's not that ugly."
"Later," you choke out. You risk a glance back at the man from the club—at Ryland fucking Grace, your coworker that you slept with—and a small whimper escapes you when you see him looking back.
For a moment, you nearly convince yourself that you're imagining it. You were so drunk on Friday night, maybe he just looks really similar. But you know that's not the truth.
His blond hair is tamed, neater than it had been against his pillow. He wears a pale blue button-down tucked into dark slacks, the sleeves rolled to his forearms to combat against the heat. And those glasses—those stupid glasses. They'd gotten all fogged up from kissing, and you had plucked them from his face, admiring the way his pretty eyes went a little fuzzy, glazed over with need.
You think you might be sick.
He sits down, disappearing again behind your other coworkers, but you can feel the heat of his gaze pinning you down.
Or maybe you're imagining it.
Maybe, if there is any mercy left in the universe, Ryland Grace has already decided to be mature and professional about this; maybe he's looking at Alvarez now, taking careful notes on the district’s new instructional priorities; maybe he is not thinking about you at all; maybe, if you're lucky, he has forgotten the exact sound you made when he kissed down the side of your throat.
You press your pen so hard against your planner that the tip punches through the paper.
Marisol leans closer. "You're making me nervous."
"I'm fine."
She makes an amused sound. "You look like you need medical attention."
Your face feels too hot, your stomach twisting and rolling in nauseating circles. There's a nonzero chance that you actually do need medical attention, but you swallow it down with some coffee. "I said I'm fine."
At the front of the library, Alvarez clears his throat. “All right, now that introductions are out of the way, I want to shift our focus to this year’s building goals.”
A slide appears behind him.
BELONGING. CONSISTENCY. GROWTH.
Fine. Wonderful. All excellent concepts. You would love to belong somewhere other than this room. You would love some consistency in the form of never again seeing a man you slept with at work. You would love to grow into a new person immediately, preferably one with amnesia.
But alas.
You stare at the presentation slide while Alvarez continues speaking, his voice smoothing into the same distant, administrative hum as the air conditioner overhead. Around you, your coworkers nod along like normal people, people who have not recently discovered that karma has a staff ID and teaches eighth grade science across the hall.
Across the hall. You sink in your seat, wishing the floor would open up under you and swallow you whole.
You'll see him during passing periods, and at the copier. You'll see him during fire drills, staff lunches, parent nights, professional development days, and every other mandatory ritual this place invents to remind you that escape is an illusion.
Hell, apparently, is room 214 at Grover Cleveland Middle School.
Who would've thought?
ᯓ★
› A/N: hi hi! baby's first tumblr post omg. sorry for any inaccuracies as i'm not a teacher :( i'll make a masterlist for the series once i have some more parts out but enjoy this for now!! and if there's any tags or warnings or anything i'm missing pls let me know
so when he weasles his way into your life, enough to meet you he practically studies your hands because he would rather die then be made uncomfortable by you of all people.
he knows eventually you'll let him in and surely that'll mean more time together and maybe holding your hand or even a kiss if he's lucky. but for now he'll stick to getting coffee and complaining about work. all while his eyes are stuck on your hands, watching the way you trace your knuckles while you talk, imagining what it would feel like if it was his skin. he watched how you tap at the table before you stand and how often you moisturise your hands, even what soap you use.
late at night he revises what he learnt from the day with you and he'll 'practice', stroking his cock at the pace he thought you would use, squeezing just enough, getting used to it in his own way. his eyes are closed tight remembering how you tapped his shoulder, or passed him his drink. those quick fleeting touches and brushes of skin, he knows you so well, he knows how gentle you'd be.
when he gets closer he starts thinking of your lips, how they stretch when you smile and how they pressed against your cup as you took a sip of your hot drink, how they puckered while you blew out gently to cool it down— fuck that last one got him every time.
he would cum thinking about it, hot white spurts shooting out across his stomach in thick ribbons while he squeezed his cock harder. dex would drain his balls not wanting to waste a drop to a thought that wasn't about you. he'd moan loudly, your name obviously, arching slightly while his cock twitched and fell limp against his thigh.
and of course dex is already groping for his phone thinking to the next time you'd be free that he would coincidentally be aswell— another coffee maybe or something a little more date like.
SUMMARY: the only thing worse than falling for your best friend's dad was realizing he might actually feel the same way
modern!BFF's dad!Baelor Targaryen x f!reader // modern!BFF's dad!Maekar Targaryen x f!reader
look at your dad (such a dork) ♥︎/♦︎
an almost date with dada? ♥︎/♦︎
best friend's dad syndrome ♦︎♦︎
would you hate me if i sexted your dad? ♦︎♦︎
↪︎prompts from the grateful list
bathtub sex (Maekar) ♦︎♦︎
romantic evening (Baelor) ♥︎
spanking (Maekar) ♦︎♦︎
office sex (Baelor) ♦︎♦︎
calming the other's anger with sex (Baelor) ♦︎♦︎
calming the other's anger with sex (Maekar) ♦︎♦︎
webcam sex (Baelor) ♦︎♦︎
flirting (Maekar) ♥︎
break up/make up sex (Baelor) ♦︎♦︎
daddy kink (Baelor) ♦︎♦︎
i need to see dex's reaction to leo throwing a tantrum 😭 how will he handle it? does leo even throw tantrums? or is he always just the sweetest boy ever?
Dex Deals With His Son’s Tantrums
TW: crying child, food if you squint. Mostly fluff, really! You and Dex have a son called Leo, Husband! Dex x Wife! Reader (lmk if you I missed anything)
WC 1.9k
Could be read as a one-shot, but you can read more stories in this universe here!
Leo is sweet, yes. Leo is gentle. Leo says please and thank you and kisses Dex on the cheek before bed. Leo waves at bugs instead of stepping on them. Leo once cried because a cartoon cloud looked lonely.
But Leo is also four, which means sometimes he becomes unreasonable and throws tantrums.
And Dex, unfortunately, has no natural defense against that.
This particular disaster starts because Leo wants to wear his dinosaur hoodie.
Not the blue jumper. Not the red jumper. Not the expensive tactical-adjacent little jacket Dex bought him because it looked “practical.” The dinosaur hoodie. The green one with the little felt spikes down the back and one sleeve that has a jam stain that never fully came out.
The dinosaur hoodie is in the washing machine.
Leo takes this news horribly.
“No,” he says.
You are packing his lunchbox at the counter, already hearing the tremble in his voice. Dex doesn’t. Dex hears an unreasonable no about a piece of clothing and assumes this is a negotiation.
“It’s dirty,” Dex says.
Leo’s lower lip wobbles.
Dex, a man who can read a twitch in someone’s trigger finger from across a room, doesn’t read the wobble.
“You can wear the blue one.”
Leo stares at him.
Dex stares back.
Leo inhales.
Dex’s eyes flick very slightly to you, because even he feels it now. Some primitive fatherly instinct tells him a storm is brewing, but it doesn’t tell him what to do with the storm. His face stays blank and unreadable to anyone but you.
To you, his face was saying:
What is happening.
Why did his face do that.
Help me, sweetheart.
Then Leo bursts into tears.
And it’s not a small little cry either. It’s a full, body-folding sob, like Dex has outlawed joy. Leo drops to the kitchen floor in his socks and dinosaur pyjama bottoms, folds himself over his knees, and cry-screams into his hands.
Dex does nothing.
He stands there holding the blue jumper, flat-faced, watching his son cry on the tiles like he has discovered a new method of emotional warfare.
This is a man who can walk into a room and know exactly who is lying, who is afraid, who will fold first. He understands how to push and push and push until his enemy cracks. There are parts of Dex that are cold in a way you don’t romanticise. He can be cruel. He can be detached. He looks at people outside of this household and sees only problems or targets.
But Leo is none of those things.
Leo is on the kitchen floor crying because his hoodie is still wet.
And Dex has no idea what the rules are.
His eyes go to you again.
What is my son doing.
Do I stop him.
Do I pick him up.
Is he hurt.
Did I hurt him.
Tell me what to do.
You press your lips together so you don’t smile too much. “He’s upset.”
Dex looks down at Leo, then back at you. That much, his face says, is very obvious.
Leo cries harder, his tiny shoulders shaking.
Dex lowers himself onto the floor across from him.
And he just… sits there stiffly in his black shirt and dark trousers, knees bent, forearms resting on them, holding the rejected blue jumper. And then he waits.
That is what Dex does when he doesn’t know what else to do. He watches. He lets the thing happen until it reveals a pattern. With anyone else, this process is frightening. With Leo, it’s just a father sitting on a kitchen floor, baffled and loyal, waiting for his son to finish being upset.
Leo peeks through his fingers.
Dex says nothing.
Leo wails again, louder, apparently offended by the silence.
Dex’s eyes snap to you.
Wrong. Silence was wrong.
You take pity on him. “You can talk to him.”
Dex turns back to Leo like he’s approaching a bomb that has feelings.
“Leo.”
“No!”
Dex stops and looks at you.
He said no. Do I continue.
You nod.
Dex looks faintly annoyed that parenting requires this much improvisation.
“You can be upset,” he says, clearly repeating something he has heard you say before. It comes out a little flat, but it’s sincere. He’s done this enough times for it to be in his natural vocabulary now, though it was never this bad. “That’s okay.”
Leo sobs, “I want my dinosaur.”
“I know.”
“I need it.”
Dex blinks.
This is where his brain buffers. Need is a serious word to him. Need means food, shelter, safety. Need is what you are to him. Need doesn’t, in Dex’s private dictionary, usually mean a damp green hoodie with felt spikes.
But Leo says it like it is true, so Dex accepts it.
“Okay,” he says.
You can see him adjusting his entire worldview in real time. Leo needs the dinosaur hoodie. The dinosaur hoodie is wet. The washing machine is the enemy. Dex’s hand twitches once, like some insane part of him is genuinely considering opening the washer mid-cycle and presenting Leo with a dripping hoodie as tribute.
“Dex,” you warn softly.
He does not look at you. “What?”
“Don’t take it out.”
“…I wasn’t.” He says, because he just now realises how domestically catastrophic that would be.
Leo hiccups miserably. “Daddy can get it?”
Dex closes his eyes for half a second.
You almost laugh, because he wants to say yes so badly. He wants to be the kind of father who can retrieve the beloved need of his child from the belly of the machine and make the crying stop. He wants to fix this. He wants to be good enough for his son.
But he can’t.
Or rather, he shouldn’t.
So he sits there and does nothing.
It might be one of the hardest things you have ever watched him do.
“No,” Dex says quietly.
Leo cries again.
Dex looks wounded.
You set the lunchbox aside and come sit beside him. Your knee presses against his thigh, and tension leaves him immediately, like your touch gives him a script. You lean close and murmur, “He’s tired. He wanted control. The hoodie feels safe. He’s not being bad.”
Dex’s eyes stay on Leo.
“He’s just little,” you add.
Little.
That word makes sense to him.
Leo is little. The world is big. The washing machine took his dinosaur. His father offered him the wrong replacement and expected that to be enough. Dex, who has never known how to be normal about possession or comfort or anything he loves, understands that Leo’s grief isn’t only about fabric.
It is about wanting the thing that makes you feel safe and being told you can’t have it.
Dex knows what that feels like. He’s spent enough years away from you to understand.
His voice changes when he speaks again. It’s… softer.
“I didn’t know it felt important,” he says.
Leo sniffles behind his hands. Dex glances at you, checking.
You nod.
He continues, awkwardly brave. “I thought you just wanted it.”
Leo looks up at him, blotchy and wet-eyed. “I do want it.”
“I know,” Dex says. “But I know now that it feels bigger than that.”
Leo rubs his nose with his sleeve.
Dex sees the mess he made on his clothes. His eye twitches with the force of not correcting it.
He’s little. He’s allowed to be messy because I love this little man.
Leo whispers, “I’m a dinosaur.”
Dex looks at you.
Oh.
Dex realised that Leo’s not throwing a tantrum because he wants to be difficult. Leo had a whole world in his head where today he was going to be a dinosaur, and Dex accidentally told him no.
Dex swallows.
“You’re still a dinosaur,” he says.
Leo’s mouth trembles. “No spikes.”
Dex looks at the blue jumper in his hands. Tragically spikeless.
You can practically see the violence of his concentration. He is building and discarding solutions at frightening speed. Buy another dinosaur hoodie. Buy ten. Have one in every colour. Learn sewing. Never wash the hoodie again. All of these thoughts pass behind his blank face.
Then Dex does something that surprises even you.
He sets the blue jumper aside, lifts one hand, and curls his fingers stiffly beside his own head like claws.
Last night, Leo was doing the same thing, claiming to be a T-Rex. He’s imitating his son.
Leo pauses.
Dex looks very uncomfortable.
You stare at him.
Dex, sociopathic assassin Dex, sadist-to-everyone-but-his-family Dex, is sitting on the kitchen floor making a dinosaur claw.
His expression remains completely flat and makes it ten times funnier.
Leo sniffles. “What- d-daddy doing?”
Dex’s eyes flick to you.
Is this helping.
You are biting the inside of your cheek so hard it hurts.
“Daddy’s being a dinosaur, sweetie,” you say.
Leo wipes his cheek. “Daddy’s not a dinosaur.”
“No,” Dex says solemnly. “I’m not.” Then, after a pause, he adds, “But you can teach me how to be.”
Translation: show me how to be a proper dinosaur, so you can prove to yourself that you don’t need the hoodie to be one.
Leo stares, and the crying stops in uneven little hiccups.
Dex lifts his other hand, both of them now held like claws. It is maybe the cutest thing you have ever seen.
Leo crawls forward a little. “Your claws are wrong.”
Dex nods immediately. “Show me.”
Leo gets onto his knees, face still wet, and adjusts Dex’s fingers like a tiny palaeontologist. Dex lets him.Leo bends his fingers into a better shape, tells him dinosaurs don’t sit like that, tells him he has to make his arms smaller because “T-rex arms little, Daddy.”
Dex obeys, because Dex has no natural instinct except to follow the orders of his four-year-old son because Leo has stopped crying and Dex would probably crawl through glass to keep it that way.
You lean back against the cabinet, smiling like an idiot.
“There,” Leo says, satisfied.
Dex sits with his arms tucked ridiculously close to his chest.
“Better?”
Leo nods. He isn’t as upset now, because he knows he doesn’t need them to be a dinosaur now. But he still wants them. “But still want spikes.”
Dex sighs “I know.”
Leo leans into his lap. This time, Dex doesn’t need to be told what to do. He has done it enough times that it’s second nature to him.
Dex hugs him, one arm around Leo’s back, then the other, protective by nature even when comfort doesn’t come naturally. Leo melts into him.
Dex looks down like he is the only living thing in the world he has never wanted to dissect or control. Leo makes him participate. Leo makes him stay human. Leo cries on the floor over a hoodie, and Dex, who can be monstrous to everyone else, sits there and learns how to be understanding because his son needs him to.
After a while, Leo mumbles, “Daddy?”
“Yeah?”
“When it’s dry, I wear it?”
Dex nods.
“And you be dinosaur too?”
Dex’s eyes close.
“Yes,” he eventually says, because a man with no mercy for most of the world apparently had no spine whatsoever when it came to his family. “Of course.”
Leo smiles and tucks his face under Dex’s chin.
The tantrum is over as suddenly as it arrived.
You reach over and smooth your hand through Dex’s hair. “You did good.”
Dex’s brows furrow. “I did nothing.”
Nothing but copy his toddler, really.
You smile. “Exactly.”
He looks down at Leo, who’s now calm.
Dex considers that for a long time.
With anyone else, doing nothing is a tactic. It’s a way to wait someone out until they break.
With Leo, sometimes doing nothing is love.
Because he’s little. He doesn’t need fixing or forcing. Doing nothing means sitting on the kitchen floor with his ridiculous T. rex arms and waiting for the storm to pass.
(An adult-size dinosaur hoodie arrives on your door the next day, because if Dex is gonna be a dinosaur, he’s gonna do it right.)
—
Note: Ya’ll I’m addicted to writing this miniseries. I love it. I am never gonna stop. 😭🫠
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