pope cody falls in love with a girl working at the strip club
warnings: smutty themes but no real smut (pope has thoughts)
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the club is packed. there are so many men packed in tightly, throwing money at the girls on stage. and you're invisible. you're weaving through the crowds, placing drinks down and moving back to the bar.
you love and hate nights like these. nights when the club is so packed you can go unnoticed, but it's so damn busy. your legs are hurting as you move around the club in those massive, sparkly heels you hate. outfit just as revealing as it always is.
no andrew. you miss his intense gaze, following you, keeping you safe. there are so many assholes in this building, grabbing at your skin as you just try to do your job.
for the studio space. this is all for the studio space, you remind yourself.
a breath leaves your lips as you rest by the bar. a breath leaves your lips and you look around the room. the bartender side eyes you as she gets another round of drinks ready.
"you get somewhere to be, honey?" she asks, side eyeing you.
you shake your head. "just someone I wanna see later," you answer and open the cap on the beer. you're thinking about andrew, about how he opened your beer at the beach, cleaned the top and handed it to you.
she nods slowly, but she rolls her eyes. another girl fallen hopelessly in love with a man she thinks is gonna save her. you think he's gonna save you? you think he's gonna get you out of here? the bartender knows she's gonna see you back here again.
you take the beers and head off to the booth in the corner.
would andrew come if you called? you're thinking about him as you run drinks around, waiting for the end of your shift, the end of the night. you've got two jobs once the place closes. clean the trays and sort out money in the front office. you can text andrew in that time, waiting for his response while you do your jobs.
an hour later, the lights come up. the music stops and the girls start gathering up the money on the stage. security starts forward and the stragglers left in the club start heading out.
you begin cleaning trays as girls take their tips to the back. cash tips (yours and the dancers) are shared equally, card payments go towards your paychecks.
you grab your phone over the bar and send andrew a quick text. you haven't been able to see him since that day on the beach, since he walked you home. there had been opportunity to pick up extra shifts and you desperately needed that money.
andrew isn't a big texter, short replies only. but you don't mind that, don't mind building the conversation for him. as long as he's happy with it too, as long as you're not irritating him.
you don't have to wonder if he'll be awake at this hour. he's always awake whenever you message him, replying within minutes at most. always asking you to text him when you make it home safely.
you: wanna come over later?
you go back to cleaning the trays. spraying them with the chemical spray and wiping the spilled beer from them.
your phone buzzes against the counter top.
andrew: why?
andrew: what's up?
it looks, to anybody else, that he's saying no. but this isn't a no from andrew. the what's up was an after thought, like he's panicked about how blunt he's been. like he doesn't want to be blunt with you.
you type out a response. because, really, nothing is up. you just wanna see him. you just want his company while you decompress from a long week. someone to talk to, someone to just be there.
you: just want some company
andrew replies immediately.
andrew: ok. don't walk home, I'll pick you up
you try to get control over the way your heart is beating. but, for the life of you, you can't. you can't keep the smile off your face, either. you get your jobs done, get your tips counted, get changed and head out.
andrew's truck is the only one parked outside of the club. you adjust your bag on your shoulder and cross the road. he winds down his window as you approach. "hey handsome," you say, leaning through the open window, standing on your aching toes to kiss his cheek.
you head around to the passenger side and let yourself in. "thanks for the ride," you say and drop your bag by your feet.
he doesn't drive away until you buckle your seat belt.
his jaw is clenched as he looks at the road. "sorry I haven't been able to see you since our first date," you say, pushing your hair out of your face. you feel sweaty and gross, but you don't have the energy for a shower. "I've pretty much been working and sleeping every day since."
he glances at you and then back at the road. "that's okay," he says and changes gear. "we can call this the second date."
you're smiling and it's blinding, but andrew doesn't want to look away. he forces himself to, to spare both your lives. you reach for his hand on the gear shift and lace your fingers through his.
warm, slightly clammy like he's nervous. but he has no reason to be. you squeeze his hand and he turns down your street, pulling into the little space outside your apartment. he's parked here once before, when collecting the rent checks for smurf.
"c'mon," you say and hop out of his truck. you swing your bag over your shoulder and push the truck door shut.
andrew follows you. he shoves his keys into your pocket and takes your hand when you reach for him. lacing your fingers through his, just like you did in the car. you take him up the metal stairs while fishing your keys from your pocket.
you open the door and let him into your apartment.
it's a room and nothing more. and it's a mess. andrew sucks in a breath as you take it in. "sorry," you say and immediately go to pick things up. "i forgot how bad it was in here."
"it's okay," andrew says. he spies the cat on your sofa, the brown and white fluffy thing that looks like it sheds everywhere.
before you know it, he's beside you. picking up clothes you'd been too tired to toss into the hamper, a box of take out you'd been too tired to throw away yesterday, dishes you haven't yet gotten to.
andrew cleans it all. he pulls on the yellow rubber gloves and gets to washing up your dishes. "i try to keep the place clean," you tell him as you shove your clothes into the overfilled hamper. fuck, there's just not enough space for you to do anything.
"it's okay," andrew says again. "i like cleaning."
a breath leaves your lips as you drop your dirty pyjamas into the hamper. you just need to make sure you wake up in time to go to the laundry room.
you step towards him as andrew puts your dishes on the drying rack. they drip into the little tray and run back into the sink.
you're not sure if he notices you until you're there, wrapping your arms around him and pressing your forehead against his back. he stiffens under your touch, his posture straightening. "thank you," you whisper and hold yourself there for a moment.
and Andrew let's you. he stays still while you've got your arms around him, doesn't move until you do. until you unwrap yourself from around him and turn back towards the sofa.
you clear your clothes horse out of the way and begin unfolding the sofa, a ritual you go through every day. as soon as you move a cushion your cat jumps down. she brushes her body against your legs and heads towards andrew.
you ready the sofa bed, throwing your blanket and cushions back onto it. you place your bear in the middle and turn back to Andrew.
he's still, hands braced against the sink as he looks at your cat. she's watching him, too. tail flicking at this stranger in your home.
"come on," you say and tug on the bottom of his shirt. andrew pulls his gloves from his fingers and follows you away from the kitchenette. he follows you to the sofa bed, watching as you sit down on the edge.
there's something about it, his stomach squirming. fuck, it could be so sexy, if you weren't so damn tired. if this wasn't only your second date. if he wasn't so afraid of blowing it.
there are a million thoughts running through his head. why is your apartment so messy? are you tired? have you eaten enough? why did you call him?
your hands settle on his hips. he's strong, you can feel it beneath your fingers. "I'd like to kiss you again, andrew," you tell him as you look up at him, your voice quiet like you're tired. you are tired, andrew can see it in the way you're looking at him. "would that be okay?"
he nods and you pull him towards you, pulling him onto the sofa bed. he toes off his shoes and follows you to the other end. you push him down against your pillows (uncomfortable, and he can't believe you've been sleeping on them) and lean forward.
you don't kiss his lips right away. his cheeks, his jaw, his nose. everything but his lips. andrew wants to chase you. he wants to follow your lips until they're on his. a noise leaves his throat as you sit back and push your hair over your shoulders, keeping it out of the way.
"do you want me to kiss you, andrew?"
he's desperate as he nods, as he tells you yes. yes, he wants you to kiss him. he needs you to kiss him.
god, things turn so quickly. you throw your leg over his waist and climb onto him. hands on his chest, you look down at him, blinking rapidly through your tiredness. "is this okay?" you ask, fingers fiddling with the buttons of his shirt.
fuck yes. it's more than okay. it should be more than okay. maybe if he was somebody else, maybe if his head wasn't so fucked up, he would pull you down, kiss you first, grip your hips and thrust his clothed, hard cock against you. but he sits, waits for you to move first.
you lean down and press your lips to his. too quick for andrew to kiss back, his hands on your hips. you're not rocking against him, holding yourself still as you lean down to kiss him again.
this time, you give him time to kiss you too. andrew closes his eyes and kisses you back, pushes his lips against your own. he feels your tongue against the seam of his lips and opens wide, letting you explore. your hands roam, too, finding his shoulders, travelling up to try to tangle in his hair. but his prison hair cut is just too short for you to do anything but scratch your nails against his scalp.
there's a quiet chirp as the small creature jumps on the bed. your cat, brown with a white belly, walks towards the pillow. you withdraw from him, press your forehead to his, and glance to the side. "seriously, beans," you say to your cat. "great timing, girl."
beans walks forward as you sit back on his lap. she stares at andrew like she's fascinated. she reaches out and taps his face with her paw. you immediately scoop her into your arms. "sorry about her," you say and put her back on the floor. "where were we?"
"you were kissing me," he answers quickly, drumming his fingers against your hip. it's not impatient, it's desperate.
you go to lean in, but pull back and hold your hand against your mouth as you yawn. "sorry," you say but it comes out all weird as you keep yawning.
but it's okay. andrew sits up and wraps his arms around you. he presses his chin against your chest, just above your tits. "you're tired," he says, your hands finding his cheeks.
you shake your head. "i'm fine," you answer.
he removes you from his lap and lays you down beside him. andrew climbs on top of you, your legs on either side of him. god, it would be so damn easy to lose control, to trust against you while you're both still clothed. you wrap your legs around him and he drops his head to your shoulder.
"you need to sleep," andrew says and you shake your head again. you're gonna tell him that you're fine, but he doesn't believe you.
your nails are raking against his scalp and andrew wants to moan. a low noise from the back of his throat as he presses himself against you. but he holds himself back. he kisses you instead, sweet and slow. you hold himself there for a moment, until andrew pulls back to look at you.
god, you look so tired. you're blinking like it's near impossible to keep your eyes open. "okay," you finally say, but you tighten your legs around him.
andrew drops a fleeting kiss to your lips. he eases your legs from around his middle, ignoring how hard he is as he lays you down. you move away from him, yawning as you move over to your closet (bursting at the seams) and pull open the bottom drawer. "i haven't got anything for you to wear," you tell him as you pull out a set of matching pyjamas. frilly shorts covered in cherries and a matching tank top.
your back still to him, you shrug off your cardigan and pull your top over your head. you pull on your pyjamas, yawning again as you turn back to him.
andrew is still standing there. you tiptoe across the floor, around the pull out bed and towards him. "are you okay sleeping in your underwear?" you whisper like there's someone else in the room to wake up. there isn't, but you're both aware of just how thin the walls are.
"yeah," andrew whispers.
your fingers work at the buttons of his shirt. you push it from his shoulders and let it drop to the floor. you do the same with his black jeans, pushing them down his legs until they hit the floor.
he's hard. god, you can see it through his boxers, just how hard he is. you swallow and look into his hazel eyes. "do you need to take care of that?" you ask him.
andrew looks away from you. but you're stood so damn close, it's hard to look anywhere but you. he wants to apologise, wants to cover himself up and go sleep on the sofa (if you had one that didn't double as your bed).
"hey," you say, reaching up to hold his cheek again. a soft touch he doesn't deserve. "take care of it in the bathroom if you need to," you say and use your other hand to reach for his. "i can come and help, if you want me to."
and he does. fuck, he does want you to help. he wants you to wrap your fingers around his work and work him until he's coming undone. but you're too much of a good thing and he's too afraid of blowing it.
andrew shakes his head. "get into bed," he says and nods at the still bare sofa bed. "i'll be back soon."
as andrew disappears into your tiny bathroom (it's in order, but it has to be), you lay your duvet over the bed. beans jumps back up, joining you as you settle beneath the blankets. immediately, beans climbs onto your lap.
"what do you think?" you ask her, stroking her head. "he's pretty cool, right?" she blinks slowly at you, her only response. "he's gonna start coming over more, i hope, so you gotta be nice."
andrew listens to it all. door slightly open as he splashes cold water on his face. he looks down, looks at the tent in his underwear, where his blood rushed south. all from your touch, your kiss, you on top of him. your legs locked around him, so damn tempting.
but he couldn't. he sits there, on the closed lid of the toilet, and puts his head in his hands. you're too good for him.
by the time he emerges from the bathroom, you're laying back and beans is at the foot of the bed, curled into a ball and snoring.
he hesitates. you're asleep, he thinks. turning away from him, holding the bear against your chest. it's sweet in a way he doesn't want to disturb.
"come join me," you say, voice tired as you pat the bed.
andrew moves around the bed. he stops, lets beans sniff his hand, and continues on. you pull the blanket back, letting andrew climb in beside you.
it's such a weird sensation. andrew slips beneath the blanket beside you and lays flat. stiff beside you, arms at his side.
you put the blanket over his body. taking your bear, you reach over him and place it on the ground in a way that is almost loving.
and then, you're on him. you lay against his chest, throw your leg over his and your hand against his chest. "that's better," you whisper.
you fall asleep after that. andrew lays still, letting you sleep. he breathes in deep and looks around. your apartment. you. everything you have is in this one room. a room he knows smurf is charging you too much for. this is one of her few genuine buildings, not one she runs the family business through.
you deserve so much better than this.
lmao ignore that i was complaining about working 6 days in a row yesterday bc i've voluntarily jumped on day 7
My harsh whisper stopped Carter in his tracks. He looked up from the red wrapping paper, his eyes darting between myself and the bassinet beside our bed. “She’s still asleep.” He argued, seeing Brianna still breathing calmly and steadily in the bassinet she looked still too small to be in, even for seven months.
“Yes..... for now.” I said back. “I told you to go slow so we could be quieter. If your turbo wrapping skills wake up Brianna, or God forbid Meghan, I will never speak to you again.”
Carter rolled his eyes, but I could tell by his steadier movements, he was at least trying to be quieter. Typically, we would not be wrapping Christmas presents this late in the game. Or at least.... I wouldn’t be wrapping presents. But with all of the changes that had been happening lately with both girls and everything going on with me, I left shopping until pretty close to the last minute. Now, Carter and I were sitting in our room in the dark at 3 AM on Christmas Eve because Carter had a night shift today and wouldn’t be back home until Meghan was opening presents from Santa on Christmas morning.
A soft, adorable little cry came from the bassinet, causing us to both freeze again. We held still, waiting to see if it was just a fluke and Brianna would soothe herself and go back to sleep. But we had apparently run out of our luck for tonight and her little cry only got louder. Carefully, I got up from the wrapping paper pile and went over to the bassinet to pick her up. She settled some in my arms, but by the way she moving her head, I knew what she was looking for. I joined Carter back on the ground and pulled my shirt aside, Brianna latching quickly. I leaned my back against the bed and just watched Carter. His eyes flicked up to me again and he let out a soft chuckle.
“What?” I asked, scoffing.
“If someone would have told me ten years ago that I would be spending Christmas Eve morning sneakily wrapping presents with my wife for our four year old and baby, I would have laughed in their face.”
I couldn’t help but chuckle. “You were a different man back then.”
“I sure was.” He paused a moment and looked at me, this time a very content look crossing his face. “I like this version of me better.”
My heart clenched at that. I continued to nurse Brianna as Carter finished up the gifts. Wrapping paper crinkled, tape tore, and Brianna’s soft suckles filled the air. I would wait to do the stockings until I set out the gifts from “Santa” that night, so once Brianna was finished, Carter took her as I cleaned up, changing her diaper and getting her back to sleep in the bassinet. Crawling into bed with him felt so good, especially when I pressed myself close to his chest.
Carter chuckled. “Feeling a little extra cuddly tonight?”
“Yeah.” I paused a moment and nuzzled my head into his chest. “I guess I’m just a little sad.”
“Sad? It’s Christmas Eve.”
“Yeah, but Brianna’s first Christmas. And you have to spend most of it at the hospital.”
Carter sighed and wrapped his arms tighter around me. “I know. But we’ll do some stuff today before I go in. And after this night shift I’ve got the next two days off. The girls will barely miss me. They’ll be asleep most of the time.”
“I think you have too much faith in our children.” I scoffed. Carter chuckled again and nuzzled his cheek into my hair.
“Then we better get ourselves to sleep. Right, Mrs. Claus?”
“I believe we should Mr. Claus.”
Carter and I were able to get maybe two more hours of sleep before Meghan woke up and came running wide awake into our room. Her hair was sticking up in all different directions and the Christmas pajamas I had put her in the night before were wrinkled, both evidence of how rough of a sleeper she was. As I sat up in bed, stretching out my still tired limps, Meghan went straight to the bassinet. She grabbed the top edge and pressed her face against the mesh on the side.
“Morning sissy!” She cheerfully exclaimed. She had started doing this every morning whether she woke up before us or not. It was always a ‘good morning, sissy’, typically followed by a one sided conversation about her dreams last night. Sometimes Brianna would reply with some kind of adorable baby noise and it would make Meghan’s morning. “It’s Christmas Bree!” She exclaimed again, jumping up and down with excitement.
“Christmas Eve, baby girl.” Carter groaned, still lying on his stomach like he was still trying to go back to sleep.
“And Santa is coming!” Meghan added. “Mommy, I need to tell Bree about Santa!”
“I think you told her a lot all about him all this week.” I chuckled, standing and grabbing Brianna from the bassinet so she could join us in bed.
“Santa! Santa! Santa!” Meghan exclaimed. She climbed into the bed with us, bouncing up and down by Carter before hitting his shoulder a few times.
Carter groaned. “It’s too early for all this energy.”
“Daddy wake up!” Meghan hit his shoulder again. I chuckled as I got Brianna adjusted to nurse again. “Daddy!” She yelled and pushed him again. That’s when Carter popped up and pulled her into his arms. Meghan started laughing as Carter tickled her and “attacked” her with kisses. The two of them continued to laugh from the center of the bed, distracting Brianna a little bit as she tried to nurse.
Holidays when you really don’t have any family can be harder some years more than others. Some years you just want to stay home and forget about the day. That's what it felt like for Carter and I a lot before our relationship started. But ever since we had Meghan, Carter tried his best to make sure every holiday was the best one yet. That included starting our own Carter Family traditions.
The morning always started with pancakes. While pancakes in our household were a pretty regular occurrence, there was something a little more special about today. The way Carter would patiently let Meghan “help” him cook. The way he indulged her when she begged for “just a couple more chips, please daddy”, referring to the tiny chocolate morsels he sprinkled into the batter. I just watched from my spot at the dining table, Brianna seated in her high chair as she lightly batted at the lacy fringe on the sleeve of the Christmas outfit Meghan insisted we put her in before we came downstairs. I thought back to what Carter had said just a few hours earlier as we wrapped the gifts now hidden in my closet: if someone had told me years ago this is where I would have ended up, I wouldn’t have believed them. But I was damn happy to have it now.
Finishing up my coffee, I set down the mug just as Meghan came running into the dining room, bored with cooking now that her father had to take over because of the stove. “Mommy, can we watch Muppets? Or the Grinch?”
“Sure sweetie.” I smiled. “We want to make sure Brianna gets introduced to all of the Christmas classics.”
Meghan started jumping up and down. “Yes! Sissy, you’ll love the Muppets!” She exclaimed as she took Brianna’s hand and moved it side to side. “There’s Gonzo and Kermit and Miss Piggy and Fozzie Bear!”
I heard Carter scoff as he shook his head. I looked up as he continued to flip pancakes. “We shouldn’t have sent her to pre-school.” He laughed. “She’s too smart for her own good.”
“You were bound to be outsmarted in your own house at some point. You do live with all girls.” I chuckled and stood, letting Meghan run ahead of me. In the living room, I set Brianna down on the floor and she immediately rolled onto her back. She brought her legs up and began trying to pull her socks off. Meghan was laughing at her and talking to her. I guess when my back was turned as I was setting up the DVD player, she managed to pull one off. Meghan called her a silly girl and put the sock right back on her foot, making my heart melt.
Breakfast was eaten at the coffee table this morning, Brianna even enjoying a couple tiny pieces of a plain, fluffy pancake. We watched the Muppets Christmas Carol, which Meghan was enraptured in. But we only got through about fifteen minutes of the Grinch before both girls fell asleep, contact naps, Meghan on Carter’s chest and Brianna on mine. The funniest part was Carter to fell asleep not long after both girls went down. And honestly, I kind of enjoyed just sitting there, watching them all sleep as the cartoon played in the background.
After nap time, we cleaned up breakfast just in time to make lunch. We mainly just snacked, spending some time lying under the Christmas tree, before deciding to finally all change out of our pajamas. When Brianna went down for her second nap of the day, Meghan, Carter, and I worked on cookies for Santa. It was a new tradition we wanted to start with Meghan now that she could help a little bit better and was actively into all the Santa stuff. Some of my favorite memories with my mom were decorating Christmas cookies together and Carter remembered doing it once with a nanny. It seemed like a fun thing to try. And it was fun, if not very messy too.
“Now Meghan, you be really good for your mom tonight and Santa will make sure to stop here before he goes back to the North Pole.” Carter was knelt by the front door, coat on and bag over his shoulder to head into the hospital.
“But you won’t be here Daddy.” Meghan whined, grabbing the collar of his jacket.
“I know Bug. But hey, I will be back tomorrow morning before you get up to open presents.”
“You promise?” She pouted.
“I promise. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.” Carter brought her in for a big, tight hug, before kissing the top of her head and standing. He walked over to me, Brianna in my arms. “You be good to peanut.” He told Brianna before giving her a kiss too. He stepped forward and whispered in my ear, “Good luck tonight”, before giving one final kiss to my cheek and heading for the door.
“Merry Christmas you guys.”
“Merry Christmas Daddy!”
“Mommy.”
You’d think that I would be used to being suddenly awaken by one of my children by now, but you would be wrong. I couldn’t have been asleep more than thirty minutes if that. After Brianna’s last feed and diaper change, I had snuck my way downstairs and played Santa Claus, making sure the gifts we had wrapped in red paper were positioned just so right underneath the tree, and the stockings were filled. It had made my heart squeeze a little when I went to grab the stocking stuffers out of my closet, and I found my stocking full and lying against the stuff, filled with little things Carter had picked out. Everything had looked perfect downstairs and the Christmas cookies we made earlier had actually been a welcome midnight snack. After checking that both girls were still asleep, I bundled myself up in bed, pulling Carter’s pillow close to my chest so I could have him as I drifted off.
And then I felt the small finger poke my back.
“Mommy.”
“Jesus!” I couldn’t help but exclaim as I sat up in bed. My vision focused and I found Meghan standing by the bed, looking up at me. I rubbed my eyes and turned to the nightstand. 2:05. Well, I guess I’d actually been asleep closer to an hour and a half. I leaned forward and helped Meghan climb into the bed, the two of us lying back down together.
“What’s wrong, sweetie?” I asked groggily, brushing hair from her face. “Did you have a bad dream?”
“I woke up and couldn’t go back to sleep.”
“Why not?”
“I wish Daddy was here.”
I swallowed harshly and pulled her closer to my chest. “I know sweetie. Me too.”
“It’s Christmas and he’s at the stinky hospital.”
Now that made me chuckle. “Yeah sweetie, he is. But I’m here. And so is Bree. Remember your dad said he’d be home to in morning just in time for you to open presents.”
“Can we go see him?”
That made me pause. “What?”
“Daddy shouldn’t be away for Christmas. I want to go to the hospital and see him.” She craned her little neck up to look at me. “Please.”
Every logical part of my brain said no. It was two in the morning. It was freezing outside. Both girls, especially Brianna, didn’t need to be out in this weather. But then another part of me, the part that also missed my husband fiercely, understood what Meghan needed. She had gone through months of her family being apart, and on the day of the year where being together was a given, we weren’t.
I squeezed her tightly and kissed the top of her head. “Sure, baby. We’ll go see your dad.”
Both girls had two, almost three layers on by the time we were all in the car and pulling out of the driveway. They each dozed off in their car seats as the car heater blasted. Meghan had been so excited to go see Carter that she hadn’t even thought to run into the living room. So thankfully, we would still have Santa’s visit to look forward to when we all got home. And I was even more grateful that neither girl got fussy as I pulled them from the car in the parking garage so we could head inside. I saw the vans outside that must be busing the homeless and knew we needed to head in another way if I wanted to avoid the crowds. As soon as the elevator dinged for the ER and the doors opened, of course Meghan had to see something that confused her.
“Is that Santa?!” She asked, pointing to the man stumbling back towards a gurney. I could see the staples shining off his head thanks to the fluorescent lights. I sighed and shook my head.
“Uh, no, sweetheart. That’s not Santa. That’s...... that’s one of his helpers.”
“What are you guys doing here?”
“Auntie Abby!”
Thank God for Abby and her perfect timing. Meghan let go of my hand and ran towards the desk, getting scooped up by the intern as I pushed the stroller over. Brianna was still somehow sleeping soundly inside. Maybe these kids’ sleep really did thrive in the ER. “We came to see Daddy.” Meghan explained as Abby sat her on the counter and she began playing with the woman’s stethoscope.
“You did, huh?” Abby asked, looking at me and raising an eyebrow.
I shrugged. “It’s Christmas. Family is supposed to be together on Christmas.”
“Well, I can’t argue with that.” Abby replied. She took off her stethoscope and put it around Meghan’s neck before returning her to the ground. “Okay, let me see this baby.” She said as she walked around the stroller. I carefully pushed up the visor and I could see Abby physically melt a little bit. “She gets bigger every time I see her. How is she?”
“Doing great.”
“Sissy can roll over.” Meghan added, trying to pull herself up to peer into the stroller too.”
“She can? You must have taught her that, huh?” She turned to me. “She crawling yet?”
“She’s trying to. She can almost stay sat up completely on her own, which is cool. And she likes to push herself up by her arms. She also is very talkative when she’s not passed out.” I chuckled, motioning to how deeply passed out and oblivious Brianna was to where she was right now.
“Dialysis for patient Sanders?” We both looked up at the man standing off to the side with the big machine.
“Do you want me to—”
“No, no. I got. Thank you.” Abby said, stopping the bearded, tired looking man leaning against the desk. She looked down at Meghan before giving her a kiss on the head. “See you in a little bit Meggy. Duty calls.” She gently squeezed my arm before leaving.
“Do you know where Dr. Carter is?” I asked the man. He let out a quick yawn before standing up straight.
“I think he was down in sutures.”
“Thanks. Come on Meghan.” I took my daughter’s hand and started leading her and the stroller down the hall. Sure enough, through the open blinds, I could see my husband in the room. Carter was sitting on a stool and Chuny was standing next to a male patient with some kind of hand injury. As Carter started taping the hand, Chuny looked up and smiled at me. I picked Meghan up, letting her wave at the woman. Chuny waved back before saying something to Carter. He quickly turned his head and Meghan got so excited when she realized it was him.
“Daddy! Daddy!” She exclaimed. Carter quickly said something to Chuny, before standing and joining us in the hall. Meghan practically flung herself at him before the door to the room even closed.
“What are you guys doing here?” He asked, letting out a shocked breath when Meghan wrapped her arms tightly around his neck. “Is everything okay?”
“No Daddy." Meghan said fiercely. "You can’t be alone on Christmas. It’s not fair.”
Carter chuckled and secured his arms around Meghan before looking at me. “She must have been very convincing to get you out of the house so late.”
“I honestly couldn’t argue with her logic.” I reached forward and cupped his cheek with my hand. “We both really missed you.” A sudden squeak caused us both to laugh as we looked down at Brianna. “Sorry baby girl. The three of us missed you.”
Somehow, Meghan overheard Neela and Abby talking about giving out gifts to the homeless kids stuck in the ER, and before I knew it, my little girl was also getting the chance to play Santa in the wee morning hours. And boy, did she take her job seriously. She followed close behind the two of them, handing the gifts to the parents when the child was asleep. In the same spirit, I parked the empty stroller in the lounge and helped Wendell pass out pillows and blankets while Carter sat at the desk, watching over everything as he fed Brianna a bottle and gently cooed at her.
After a very brief moment of playing in the snow that was now falling, our family had ended up bundled together in the lounge. Brianna had woken up and I was currently nursing her again, while Meghan was back to sleeping on Carter’s chest, the bunny she’d brought from home tucked tightly in her arm. Carter gently brushed his fingers through her hair and I watched as he just stared at Meghan in the most content way.
“What’s that look for?” I asked, moving Brianna over to the other side.
“Nothing.” He shrugged. “I just..... I just think we’re raising a pretty damn good kid.” He looked up at Brianna. “Kids.”
I smiled. Meghan had been so excited to help Abby and Neela, even making sure they had ribbons for all the presents so the kids could feel special. “Yeah, I think we are.”
Carter leaned over and I immediately knew what he wanted, our lips meeting. “Thank you for bringing them in tonight. It’s definitely not the Christmas I thought we would have......”
“Yeah, but it makes sense for us.” I finished for him.
He nodded. “Have you thought about when you want to come back to work?” I sighed and laid my head down on his shoulder. It had been just over six months since I’d worked a shift at County. “I mean, you don’t have to come back if you don’t want too. You can stay home with the girls if you want to. I don’t mind.”
“No, I want to come back. I appreciate women who do it, but I couldn’t completely be a stay at home mom.” I paused and ran my thumb over Brianna’s arm as she continued to nurse. “I don’t know if I want Brianna in a daycare right now though. Especially with it being cold and flu season.”
“Of course not.” Carter agreed and kissed the top of Meghan’s head. “But, I mean, we could hire a nanny again. Maybe just part time to help with Brianna. Maybe help get Meghan to school. Hey, I could even see if Corrine wants to come back.”
“She was really good with Meghan. But I thought she retired.”
“People can be tempted with the right situation.” I chuckled again and kissed his shoulder before he kissed the top of my head this time. “Hey Evie.”
pope cody falls in love with a girl working at the strip club
warnings: reader almost gets assaulted (but pope saves her). i think i said in the first part that she's in college, if i did i changed that here.
Prev
the next time he stops in, it's the middle of the week. less girls are up on the stage with less men to throw their money around. the lights are still dim to hide the debauchery and the drinks are still flowing.
but he's not interested in any of that. his wallet is thick with the cash smurf paid him with; he's ready to tip you whatever it'll take to keep your attention on him.
you spot him before he spots you. "andrew!" you call, but he can't hear it over the music. you push yourself away from the bar, moving as quickly as you can over to him.
andrew's face lights up when he spots you. he's got those sweet, crooked teeth on display as he smiles at you, the purple lights moving across his face. "hi," he says and you lean closer to hear him. his hands settle on your waist. "can i get another private dance?"
you pull your sparkling lip between your teeth and look around. "i get off in an hour," you tell him and fix the collar of his shirt. it doesn't need fixing, but you're just looking for an excuse to touch him. "i can get you a beer while you wait."
andrew nods and you lead him to one of the comfier booths in the back. you fetch him a beer from the bar and try to fill the rest of your shift.
and andrew is just watching you. it's intense, but it's not uncomfortable. for the first time since management fired the old security guards and got the new, cheaper ones, you feel safe.
you meet his eye a couple of times, checking him over. he's okay, just sitting with his beer. drinking it slowly to not bother you. you'd get him another in a heartbeat if he asked for it, but he doesn't.
you're taking a round of shots over to a table. some dark liquid that smells like you'll regret it the next morning. "here you go, boys!" you call over the music, so damn sure they can't even hear you as you remove the shots from the tray one by one.
they raise them up, say something you can't hear. you turn to walk away, to collect the next tray of drinks. but a hand wraps you, wrapping around your thighs. "stay, sweetheart," he says, his hand travelling higher.
you're ready to smack him with your tray, frozen in place by fear and the cheers of the other men around the stable. his hand is still moving, still creeping up your leg. beneath the skirt, fingers slipping under the material of your thong.
he doesn't get much further than that. not before his head is slammed against the table. andrew has his hand around the guy's neck, keeping him in place. "touch her like that again and you're dead."
he's deadly quiet, wouldn't have been heard if the music didn't shut off and the lights didn't come up as soon as he slammed that guy down onto the table. security guards (like they give a shit) approach, but you pull andrew off before they can get to him.
hand in his, you dump your tray on an empty table and drag him outside. andrew follows you willingly, his strides long to keep up with the slight jog you manage in your heels. "that was fucking crazy," you say as you drag him into the cool air of the outside world.
it's quieter, waves crashing against the shore and andrew can think. fucking crazy. and all he did was lightly threaten a guy for touching you. if you think that's fucking crazy, you should get out now before he ruins you.
"i can't believe you saved me like that." you press yourself up against the wall and drag him closer. "that was brave," you say, shoulders shaking as your back hits the cold wall.
once he's as close as you want him, as close as he was in the back room a few weeks ago, you let go of his hand. he lets both settle on your waist, where your skirt ends and the sides of your thong ride up in a place that's purposefully titillating. and it's getting to him in every way.
"i didn't like it when he put his hands on you," he says. he's looking down at you, eyes roaming your body in a way that isn't hungry. like he's checking you over under the yellow lights outside of the club. nothing, not a single bruise. he breathes out, his head against your forehead.
but he lifts it away just as quickly as he put it there. like he wasn't given permission, like he wasn't allowed to touch you in that way.
you do it for him, wrapping your arms around his neck and pulling him against you. forehead against his like you've known him for years, like you've loved him for years. like you haven't just made out for the convenience of it.
you look back towards the door. "i gotta go finish my shift," you whisper. he nods and drops his hands, but you've still got your arms around him. "you're gonna have to wait for me out here, okay?" your fingers push through his hair, as if that'll make him understand. "and then we can go on that date."
date. the word makes him look up. date. he can count on one hand how many of those he's been on. date. you want one with him, the stranger you kissed so his brothers would think he had sex.
date. he wants to say it back, as if to confirm it. but saying it out loud makes it real, makes the possibility of you going inside and never coming back out because he'd been too forward.
but the possibility of you is something too great. so andrew waits. he waits as you finish your shift, waits for you to get changed into something less revealing. jeans, a tank top and your cardigan. simple, hiding what you do in that building. you swing your bag over your shoulder and head out.
and he's still waiting outside. you're smiling so wide as you push open the door and see him standing there. "great," you say and hold out your hand for him. "lets go."
he follows you willingly, slipping his hand into your like its second nature. it shouldn't be. he should be saying away from your touch. the thought alone make him want to withdraw his hand, skin prickling where you touch him.
but he can't. not when you look back with that smile and squeeze his hand.
"where are we going?" he finally asks as you continue to pull him down the street, leading the charge.
you're holding your cardigan closed as you walk. andrew remembers what you said about walking home. he never really forgot, but that small action dragged it to the front of his mind.
"well, I don't think anywhere will be open for us to get a drink, so I grabbed some beers from behind the bar. thought we could sit on the beach."
Andrew's eyebrows raise. maybe you're more like a Cody than he originally thought. "your boss okay with that?" he asks and you shake your head.
"I paid for them."
a reminder that you're too good for him, like cold water being thrown over his body.
you pull him across the path between the houses and the beach. andrew looks to the left for just a second. a small place on the beach front, where he can hear the ocean when he's not sleeping, where the rent isn't controlled by smurf. that's what he's thinking about.
you don't drag him across the sand like andrew expects you to. he follows you over the wall that he thinks is supposed to be some sea defense (it looks shitty, but the buildings are still standing) and watches as you settle on it.
you pull two beers from your bag and hand one over to him. "here," you say, using your now free hand to pat the space beside you.
andrew sits down beside you, all stiff and rigid. posture perfectly straight as he holds his still capped beer. you pass him yours and dig through your bag for something to open it with. "shit," you mutter when you find nothing.
andrew puts his bottle down. "I got it," he says and hops down from the low wall. he puts the top of the bottle against the edge of the wall and hits it. the cap pops off, he wipes it around with his shirt (because hes nothing better to wipe it with) and passes it back to you.
fuck, that was hot. and he does it again to his own. the same ritual, wiping the rim before he sits down beside you. "thanks," you say, holding your bottle out so he can tap the neck of his against yours. "for saving my ass again."
he looks down at his bottle, thinking about that little denim skirt you wear to serve drinks, what's left revealed to him. somehow, he prefers you like this.
the waves are crashing and you're both fixed on the sand. you kick your legs slightly, the back of your trainers hitting the wood. if it wasn't so rhythmic, it would be annoying, it would have him looking at you with a clenched jaw.
you take a sip and put the bottle down beside you, trying to hide the face you pull. it's nasty shit, but it's all you had. "you really came back to see me tonight?" you asked him.
andrew nods, his thumb brushing over the droplet running down the side of his bottle. he glances to the side, at where the bottom of your jeans (already sandy) meet your shoes (pretty but dirty. it makes sense, he thinks, considering you walk home every night).
"i liked the way you kissed me," he says quietly.
you smile and put your lips around the top of your bottle. another sip, another grimace you try to hide. but he sees it, sees the way your eyes squeeze shut like it truly is gross.
a startling example of why you don't belong in his world.
"i'd do it again," you say and stifle a yawn. "if you want me to." you put the bottle down, holding it against your knees. it tips forward slightly and some of the foamy head dribbles out over the top. "not even just to get you away from those guys you were with."
his chin raises. "my brothers," he says.
"yeah?" it's not supposed to sound like a question, but it is. "you guys all look so different."
"different dads," he answers.
you release a whistle. "that's a lot of different dads," you say and lean back, bracing your hand against the wall.
andrew just nods. he's the one that's been there for all of them. all the shitty men smurf brought round when he was just a kid. maybe that's why he is the way he is.
and he's silent. watching the waves before he watches you, takes all of you in. your cardigan, the same one you wore while you pressed kisses to his skin. jeans that match the denim skirt you were inside, a tank top to bring it all together. simple. he likes it.
you're looking at him, too. following his eyes as they travel up to your face. you open your mouth, as if you want to say something else, but you don't.
he breathes in through his nose and looks down at his beer. "why do you do what you do?"
the question doesn't take you by surprise. your place of work, the place where you met, of course he's gonna wonder.
you cleared your throat and put your bottle down. gross, disgusting stuff that you don't want to finish off. "i tried to rent a dance studio," you confess.
because it really is a confession. you haven't told anybody that. not anybody at work, not the few friends you had made outside of work. your parents think you still have the studio, that you're teaching kids to dance during the day and living above it at night.
"you dance?"
again, you understand the surprise. you don't dance at the club, don't twirl around on the poles. you're supposed to be invisible compared to those girls, weaving through the crowds of men.
you nod. "yeah," you say. "i had the space ready, classes scheduled, all my stuff in the apartment above it. and then, the landlord jacked up the rent within a few days of me being there and i lost the place. barely had enough to find somewhere else, got the job at the club because i couldn't find anything else."
a breath leaves your lips and you look up, look at the stars overhead. "i'm saving all my tips," you say. "gonna rent out the studio space and start giving lessons."
it should be unexpected, how sweet it is. but it's you. in the two interactions you've had with him, you've been nothing but sweet. and andrew wants to see it. he wants to see the studio space, he wants to see the lessons. he wants to see you dance, directing a troop of kids lena's age in little tutus. they'll try to do the same as you and they'll almost get it, but you'll have the grace that comes from years of training.
he wants to ask, but he doesn't. not yet, not on this first date. that's what you called it, right? your first date? that's what he wants it to be, that's what it feels like.
but you're not drinking your beer. too busy talking, telling him everything he wants to hear. and andrew just listens. he doesn't have much to say, doesn't want to say anything that might scare you off. so he listens, watches you, occasionally sips his drink.
"c'mon," you say and hop up from the wall. you hold out your hand for him, the other holding the neck of your half full bottle. "you can walk me home."
walk me home. he's so damn curious about your space. did you keep it like him, not a thing out of place? did you have space to dance? he hopes you do. he hopes you have plenty of space to stretch, those pretty, dainty ballet shoes on your feet, the ribbon climbing up your legs. did you have one of those bars to stretch? did you have the full outfit, the leotard and the skirt that would fan around you when you twirled?
you lace your fingers through his like it's the most natural thing in the world. not leading him, this time, but walking beside him, steering him gently. hands swinging between you like an old married couple on a late night stroll.
"would you-" his jaw tightens as if he's doubting himself. "would you teach kids how to dance?"
"that's the dream," you answer.
he clears his throat. "what kinda dance would you teach?"
you glance at him. "you interested, handsome?" you ask, voice entirely teasing. "i was thinking ballet, modern dance, tap dancing to start with. maybe get some employees in the future, get some more classes started up."
immediately, you're wondering why he wants to know. if he has a kid he hasn't gotten to tell you about because you've been too busy talking instead. it would be okay if he did, you think immediately.
he nods. "i got a niece," he says. "i haven't seen her a while, i don't know if she'll want to do dance lessons. but i can ask my brother."
"my first student," you say, unable to hide the giddiness there. "i hope so, anyway."
andrew recognises the buildings you pass. not here, he thinks as you lead him down the alleyway, towards the metal stairs. anywhere but here.
but you take him up the stairs, like you have no idea. and you don't, he realises. you don't know who owns the building you live in, who you're paying the rent to.
"it's not much," you say when you reach the top step. "but it's home."
you fish your keys from your bag, unlock the door, and push it open.
andrew stops in the doorway. you're right, it's not much. it's nothing. its a tiny studio apartment, a sofa with a duvet folded beside it, a rack full of drying clothes, a bare bones kitchenette. it's really nothing. nothing at all.
it's shit. it's worse than shit. he wonders exactly how much rent you're paying smurf.
"you coming in?" you ask, holding the door open.
andrew shakes his head. "no," he says and the smile you'd been wearing since he saved you from that asshole in the club drops from your face. "not this time."
"but next time?" you ask, a little bit of hope returning.
"next time," he replies.
you step forward, hips swaying again. a kiss to his lips, one hand bracing against his firm chest, the other slipping into his pocket to pull out his phone. no passcode. you don't expect anybody gets close enough to dare steal his phone. you kiss him again, put your number into his contact, and slip his phone back into the pocket.
"there," you say and step back. "now you don't have to go to the trouble of coming to the club. i don't think they'd let you in anyway," you confess. "even though what you did was really brave and you're literally my hero now."
brave and hot. andrew doesn't think he's ever been called that before. he wants to kiss you again, but you're inside of the door, ready to shut it and go to bed. "text me, okay?"
"okay," he answers.
you shut the door on him and andrew looks around. it's a bad neighbourhood, one he used to collect rents in for smurf, the few times he did it. you shouldn't be living here. you should have somewhere nice, a big space for you to do whatever you want in.
he heads back to the club, just to get his truck. just to drive his truck and head back to your place. to sit outside, to watch over you. just to keep you safe.
(tagging everybody that commented hehe): @nurse-abbot
The first night home with Brianna didn’t feel real. We were just so excited to finally have her home after so many agonizing months of waiting. We ordered pizza, we watched a movie, and just kept our family in one little bubble all to ourselves. Meghan stayed really close to Brianna all that night, never really taking her hand off of her little sister. I think she couldn’t believe that Brianna was actually here with us rather than away in the NICU where she wasn’t allowed. Like if she let go, she would disappear again. It was honestly one of the best nights as a family we had ever had.
Reality hit rather quickly after that.
When Meghan was a newborn, I used to crave the rare moments when I would get a minute or two of silence to myself. While Meghan wasn’t a super fussy baby, there were still moments, especially after Carter’s attack, that things would just become so overwhelming and overstimulating that I would feel my body physically relax whenever the apartment and then the mansion would go silent. It used to make me feel so extremely guilty that I wanted those moments; that I wanted that quiet. Like I was supposed to be built to handle all of this and make it through, especially given my job.
Now with Brianna, the quiet was the thing that caused me the most stress. During the day, Brianna spent a lot of her time contact napping. She would just lay on my chest most of the time, or Carter’s when he wasn’t on shift. That was easy and reassuring, feeling her soft little breaths against my neck. If she was sleeping on one of us it meant that we could tell that she hadn’t had an apnea spell or forgotten all of the things we worked so hard on to get out of the NICU. Days meant safety and comfort.
Nights were a whole other story. While I was supposed to be getting whatever rest I could before Brianna inevitably woke up to be nursed, I found the mere thought of closing my eyes left me absolutely petrified. There were no monitors here at home, no beeps or pulses filling the air. It was just the calm sounds of Brianna’s tiny breaths and Carter’s snores while I laid wide awake staring at the bassinet.
For all intents and purposes, Brianna was doing well. Some might even say she was thriving despite her very traumatic beginning. But that still didn’t reassure me enough to not lie there staring at her, waiting for something horrible to happen.
I don’t know exactly what the sound was, just that she had made one. I had been in the dozing state that I had been in the last couple of days, so my ears were still attuned to everything. Careful to not wake Carter, I pushed the covers back and reached into the bassinet, scooping Brianna up and bringing her to my chest. I did my normal checks on her, starting first with making sure she was still breathing. It startled her a little bit when I first picked her up, but she quickly settled and went back asleep with her sweet face tucked into my neck. It allowed me to feel her breathe.
Letting out a sigh of relief, I sat back down on the edge of the bed harder than I wanted. I started rubbing small circles on Brianna’s back, rocking her back and forth like I did in the NICU. She’s okay. Everything’s okay. I tried to tell myself. She’s okay now. Brianna is breathing.
“Evie?”
I jumped slightly at the sleepy voice before turning around. Carter slowly sat up in bed, his eyes still partially closed as her tried to wake up. “Sorry.” I whispered, still rubbing Brianna’s back. “I didn’t meant to wake you up.”
“Is Brianna okay?”
“Yeah. Yeah, she’s fine.” I shook my head and turned back towards the bassinet. I nuzzled the top of Brianna’s little head and felt the bed shift behind me.
“Evie..... baby..... what’s wrong?” I felt Carter’s weight completely leave the bed as he walked over beside me.
“Nothing’s wrong.” I shrugged.
Carter sat down beside me and I could just feel him looking at me. Could even see him out of the corner of my eye. However, I still felt myself flinch involuntarily when he reached his hand towards my face. “Evie....” Carter sighed. He slowly tried again, and this time he cupped my cheek with his hand. I didn’t have any choice but to look at him as he stroked my face with his thumb. “Evie.... have you been sleeping?”
“I’m fine.”
“Honey, no you’re not. You-You look exhausted. When was the last time you slept more than a couple minutes?”
“I need to stay alert.”
“You need to sleep.”
“What if something happens?” Even I could hear how sharply my voice cracked. “I-I need to watch her.” My hold got tighter on Brianna. I can’t lose her. Not now. Not after every fucking thing we’ve been through.
“Well..... how about I watch her for a bit. Just so you can get a little sleep.” Carter said carefully. “Would that be okay?”
For a moment, I didn’t really say or do anything, just looked down at Brianna, still so calmly asleep. Then I looked back up at Carter. Maybe..... maybe it would be okay. “Maybe..... just for a little bit.” I finally said.
“No problem sweetie.” He said, smiling at me. He gently reached for Brianna and brought her towards his chest. She grunted and I started to reach back, but Carter shook his head. “It’s alright.” He cooed. “You just got to get comfortable again, don’t you?” He kissed the side of her head and started rubbing circles on her back just like I had. He noticed me watching. “I’ve got this babe. I promise.”
I looked at Brianna’s sweet little face and then back up to Carter’s one more time before finally relenting and crawling back into bed. Pulling the covers up around me, I watched as Carter stood and started pacing around the room with Brianna, a slight bounce to his step to keep her asleep. It was the last image in my head before my brain finally shut off fully for the first time in days.
Evie was exhausted.
Carter felt like the worst husband in the world that night after catching Evie not asleep and holding Bree like the baby would disappear if she didn’t. The rose colored glasses had been lifted from his face and he could actually see what had been going on right in front of him for days, if not weeks. Evie had not been sleeping. She was running their household on fumes and he could tell it was starting to catch up with her. He started noticing more things immediately.
Evie watched Brianna all the time. Not in the way you normally would with your baby. No, to Carter it seemed like Evie was watching her like she was waiting for something bad to happen. She checked her temperature ever few hours. Counted diapers like it was her job. One time, he even caught her holding her hand under Brianna’s nose. And that wasn’t all.
Germs were the bane of Evie’s existence. The enemy. The counters and tables were wiped down twice every time she did it. She wouldn’t let him feed Brianna from a bottle unless she had cleaned it herself. Brianna’s blankets were constantly washed and she didn’t let her put anything in her mouth when they started doing tummy time. That’s when Carter realized why Evie had been so adamant about Meghan not going back to daycare once Brianna was brought home. She already made Meghan wash her hands every time she wanted to play with her sister. Imagine what she would do if Meghan had been coming home from daycare every day. God, he felt so stupid.
He thought it was because of how obsessed Meghan was her new sister. She wanted to help with everything. Absolutely everything. She brought them diapers when the living room caddy ran out. She sang to her and “shared” her toys even when they were the same size as the baby. Carter had thought it had been so cute and the idea of not having her go to daycare seemed like a good one. Meghan could bond with her sister in the way she was supposed to before she headed to pre-school in August. But now he saw the truth: Evie didn’t want Meghan to bring home anything that could harm Brianna’s still developing, still fragile immune system.
Then the bathroom incident happened and Carter knew he had to do something.
It had been a long day at work. An emotional day at work. Carter had brought home take out, pizza, so that he could make things easier for not only himself, but Evie because she had been at home with the girls all day. Dinner had gone well, but when Carter went to give Meghan her bath, Brianna had gotten fussy and ended up cluster feeding for almost two hours. So he did bath and bedtime with Meghan by himself, which he didn’t mind. He’d done it plenty of times before. By the time he made it back upstairs to their room, Carter found Evie absolutely wiped with her shirt and bra completely off and Brianna suckling more for comfort now than nutrition.
“Hey, give her to me. Go take a shower and relax for a second.”
Evie didn’t even say anything, just handed Brianna over and slowly walked into the bathroom, shutting the door behind her slower than molasses. Carter went about getting Brianna back to sleep, rocking her slowly and giving her a pacifier that he wasn’t able to wash. He wouldn’t be telling Evie about that. He changed her diaper, zipped her into one of her sleep sacs, and rocked her until her eyes closed. Out like a light in no time at all. But it was long enough that the moment after Carter stood from placing her in the bassinet, he realized the water had never turned on in the bathroom.
“Evie?” He asked after softly knocking on the bathroom door. “Evie? Baby? Is everything okay?” Still no answer. He checked the knob and thankfully it was still unlocked. Opening the door, his heart broke at the sight in front of him. Evie was sitting on the closed toilet lid, wrapped in a towel, with her hair up in a clip. She was staring at the cabinets under the sink. Staring at nothing.
“Evie?” He said again, gently. She looked up slowly. Disoriented. “You need sleep.”
“I’m fine.” She said for what seemed like the hundredth time that week.
He sighed. “You’re not.”
Evie immediately shook her head. “No, I am. I just...... I just needed a second. I can stay on top of things.” She muttered. “I have to stay on top of things.”
“Evie.”
“If I miss something—”
“You won’t.”
“But what if I do?” Her voice made that same defeated, heart wrenching cracking sound it did that first night he caught her. “What if she stops breathing and I don’t notice? What if Meghan brings something home? What if she gets sick? What if—”
“She’s okay.” Carter tried to stay gentle, calm.
Then Evie laughed. Carter swore he had never heard that sound come out of his wife’s mouth. It was a dreadful little sound. No amusement. Just utter exhaustion and something else he couldn’t quite name. Something from her soul.
“You know how many times we thought that in the NICU?”
Carter didn’t know what to say to that because she was right. How many times had they exhaled only for another complication to happen? Another apnea spell. Another infection scare. Another failed CPAP trial. Another terrifying night.
Evie finally moved again, rubbing both of her hands over her face. “I can’t do it again.” She whispered. And that more than anything hit him hard. Evie hadn’t meant she was tired; that she was overwhelmed. She meant she couldn’t survive losing their daughter.
Carter got to her and crouched down on the ground, taking her hands in his. A few tears slipped down Evie’s cheeks. She still didn’t trust safety. Didn’t trust stability. Didn’t trust that this happy ending would actually stay happy. Carter cupped her cheek with his hand.
“We need help.” He said quietly.
That made her tense. “What?”
“You haven’t slept in weeks.”
“I’m a mom. Moms don’t sleep.”
“No. This is different.”
Her face crumpled again and more tears followed. “I’m scared all the time.” She whispered. “So scared.”
That made the tears finally started to fall down his own cheeks. Because he had been scared to, but just tried not to let it swallow him. He tried to focus on the good things that they were able to now have. Focus on how Brianna was starting to smile. Focus on the fact that she was starting to grow out of the preemie clothes they had gotten in a rush after she was born. The same focus that had made him miss what was happening in front of him to his wife.
Carter kissed the top of her head and then proceeded to help her shower and get ready for bed. When they were back in their bedroom, he tucked her into bed before crawling in behind her. She rested her hand inside of the bassinet, drawing small circles on Brianna’s moving chest. He wrapped his arm around Evie’s waist and pulled her close to him.
He was going to get his wife help. He had to get her help.
Carter made the appointment as soon as the office opened the next morning. Didn’t hesitate like he might have in the past. Just told the receptionist that he and his wife needed to get in as soon as possible and made an appointment for the end of the day. Evie had been in the kitchen as he spoke on the phone, scrubbing bottles and pumping parts while Brianna was asleep in the wrap on her chest. Meghan was coloring at the table, her snack spread out messily beside her. That’s when Carter noticed the way Meghan kept looking at her mother ever couple of strokes from her crayon. Had his four year old noticed something was wrong with her mother before he did?
He was eventually able to tell Evie about the appointment when he caught her changing Brianna’s diaper up in their bedroom. She hadn’t been downstairs much since breakfast. She hadn’t eaten much too, so Carter wanted to make sure she had some lunch and a shower before they headed out. Add one more thing to the list of reasons Carter had been a shitty husband lately: Evie hadn’t been taking care of herself like normal either.
“Hey babe.” He said gently, giving her a soft smile as he walked towards the bed. Brianna was wiggling around on the bed post diaper change, making a little squeaking noise. “Hi princess.” Carter chuckled and sat down beside her on the bed, rubbing her belly. “Do you feel better now?”
“You made an appointment.”
Carter looked up. It wasn’t a question. It was a statement. Evie. was still looking down at Brianna. “I did.” Carter confirmed. “For 3 o’clock. I..... I think we need it.”
Evie nodded slowly. “I need it.”
“Evie.....”
“What about Meghan?”
“We’ve taken her before. They said it was alright.”
“What about Brianna?”
“She can stay with us too. I know she’s been cluster feeding lately and Elaine said she didn’t mind if you had to nurse during the session.”
“What if something happens?”
“Baby, nothing is going to happen.”
“What if—“
“Evie.” Carter sighed, gently taking Evie’s hand and squeezing it. “Baby, you can’t keep living like this.”
“I’m taking care of our daughters.”
“I know.”
“I’m keeping them safe.”
“I know.”
“Then why do you keep acting like I’m doing something wrong?” Her voice cracked and the tears began to pool in her eyes. Carter shook his head and wrapped his arms around her, pulling her close.
“Oh Evie. You’re not doing anything wrong. Not at all. But...... but Evie...... I can tell you’re drowning. You’re my wife. You didn’t let me drown when I was not okay, and I’m not about to let you.” Evie grabbed onto Carter this time and held him tightly, her tears soaking his shirt. Carter could feel her shoulders were forced to relax simply due to the sheer exhaustion of letting everything out. “I know you’re scared. Scared to leave the house. Scared of something happening to her. But I really think we should go talk to someone. To Elaine.” He paused a second and stroked her hair. “Is that okay?”
It took a moment, but eventually, Evie did nod her head weakly against his shoulder. But when Carter looked down, her fingers were clutched tightly onto Brianna’s sleeper. Like if she loosened her grip for even a second, someone might try to take her away again.
The car ride to Elaine’s office was quiet. Not with tension, but fragility. The whole afternoon had felt fragile. It had taken some convincing, but before they left, Evie had attempted a very short nap and had taken a hot shower. It made her look better then she probably felt. Carter had let her handle getting Brianna ready, letting her count and recount items in the diaper bag, while he got Meghan together. Now his wife sat in the passenger seat, gripping the diaper bag and trying to discreetly look in the rearview mirror to check on Brianna in the back seat.
Carter noticed every single time.
“You okay?” He asked when they stopped at a red light. Evie nodded far too quickly for his liking. Carter sighed and nodded his head to, but still reached for her hand and tried to give it a reassuring squeeze. By the time they pulled up to the brick office building where Elaine’s office was housed, he could feel Evie’s hand had a slight tremor, which honestly was justified. This was the first time Evie had been out of the house since Brianna had come home from the NICU. This was a big step for her, and he was just proud she had made it this far.
Instead of bringing the stroller or even the car seat inside, Evie wore Brianna in the wrap on her chest. Just a little more reassurance that the baby was close and was okay. Thankfully the office waiting area was calm and empty when they arrived. Soft instrumental music and the easy lighting gave the room the cozy feel they were so incredibly used to by now. Carter could tell Evie had relaxed some when they entered the familiar space, but it still wasn’t completely to his liking.
He watched as Evie’s eyes still tracked everything. The receptionist at her desk. The sound of footsteps walking down the hall. Meghan fiddling with her coloring book, impatient to work on her picture. The tiny breaths coming from Brianna. Every noise seemed to set her on edge more than the last. Especially when the door to the office opened and Elaine appeared in the doorway with a smile.
“Well, there’s my favorite family.” Elaine said, walking up to the group as they stood from the couch.
“Hi Miss Elaine.” Meghan waved, picking up her things.
“Hi sweetheart.” Then her gaze moved to Brianna, still wrapped against Evie’s chest.
This was the first time she’d seen the baby outside of stories and pictures. “Oh.” Elaine breathed softly. “She’s beautiful.”
“Thank you.” Evie said, bouncing Brianna slightly. It was nice to hear someone say that after everything they’d gone through.
Elaine nodded and then looked at the whole family. “Why don’t you all come in and we can get started?”
Carter nodded, helped Meghan gather her things, and finally put a hand on the small of Evie’s back. The office looked just the same: same couch, same couple of chairs, same sweet smell. Carter set Meghan up at the table with her coloring book and stuffed bear before joining Evie on the couch. He looked over at Brianna and smiled when he saw she was still completely content in her wrap. It all felt familiar and safe. Once again, he saw Evie’s shoulders lower just a little more. They both knew this place. Elaine sat in her chair across from them, and for a moment, nobody spoke until she smiled at the two.
“So, you finally got to bring Brianna home. How has that been?”
The silence that followed answered before either of them did. Elaine waited patiently, her eyes slowly looking between Carter and Evie, before the man let out a shaky, hesitant sigh. “It started really good.”
Evie let out a shaky laugh, her voice cracking. “That sounds awful.”
“No.” Elaine gently argued. “It sounds honest.”
Evie looked down at Brianna and started rubbing small circles on her back, before taking a deep breath. It was now or never. If she couldn’t be honest here, where else could she be? “Once she got home, I thought everything would feel better.”
“And does it?” Elaine asked carefully.
Evie opened her mouth and then immediately closed it again. The shame immediately washed over her. “No.” She whispered. “I’m happy she’s home.” She added quickly. “God, I’m so happy. But I…” Her breathing wavered. “I can’t stop waiting for something bad to happen. I watch her breathe constantly.” She finally admitted out loud. “I barely sleep. Every sound she makes wakes me up. If she sleeps too long, I panic.”
“She’s checking her breathing all night.” Carter gently added, but Evie still looked down, almost like she was a child that had been caught doing something wrong. And Elaine noticed right away.
“Evie.” she said softly. “How often do you think about Brianna dying?” The question was blunt. Clinical. Gentle, but direct. Evie’s resolve still immediately crumpled and tears started falling down her cheeks.
“All the time.”
Elaine nodded slowly. “Thank you for saying that out loud.”
“I know it sounds insane.”
“No, it sounds like trauma.” That made Evie looked up. “You spent almost three months being taught that your baby could crash at any moment. That something could go wrong and she could be gone in an instant. Your nervous system adapted to that reality. It learned that hypervigilance kept her safe. And now, your body doesn’t know how to stop.”
“I’m tired.” Evie continued to sob. “I’m so tired.” Carter immediately wrapped an arm around her shoulders.
“Is that what feels hardest right now?”
“Yes.”
“She’s terrified to.” Carter added, remembering that first night he saw after she woke up and though something was wrong.
“When I sleep, I can’t watch her.”
“Evie, how long has it been since you’ve had uninterrupted sleep?”
Evie blinked, trying so hard to remember. “I…I don’t know.” And that answer alone said everything.
“Evie, surviving a NICU stay doesn’t just affect the baby.” Elaine started. “Parents can absolutely experience post-traumatic stress afterward. Especially mothers after traumatic births.” Elaine paused, thinking for a moment. “Evie..... can I ask you some more direct questions?” She nodded. “This isn’t me trying to label you or judge you. I just want to understand what’s happening for you.”
“Okay.” Evie replied, adjusting the wrap around Brianna.
“How often would you say you feel relaxed?”
“I don’t know. Maybe… maybe a little when she’s awake.”
“So then, how are you taking care of yourself throughout the day when she is or isn’t awake?”
“She isn’t.” Carter said quickly.
“I am.” Evie replied, looking defensive.
“Evie.”
“I shower.”
“How often are you eating full meals?” Elaine asked.
“Uh, typically at least dinner. I try and snack throughout the day. Drink water to keep my supply up.”
“And you said you don’t typically sleep when Brianna sleeps?”
“No.”
“Have you wanted to see friends? Family?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“I don’t…” She struggled to explain it. “I don’t want people touching her. Or holding her. Or bringing germs around her. And honestly….” Her voice got quieter. “I don’t really want to talk to anyone. When Carter said we were coming today, I was really apprehensive. I-I just feel safer inside.”
“Safe from what?”
And there it was again. That impossible question. Because logically, Evie knew how irrational some of this sounded. But emotionally...... emotionally it all felt very real. “I don’t know.” She admitted finally. She shrugged. “Everything.”
Elaine nodded and Carter’s grip on Evie’s hand tightened. “Evie, I want to explain something to you.” She paused. “You obviously know about postpartum depression, correct?” Evie nodded tiredly. “Well sometimes, PPD doesn’t always look like sadness. Sometimes postpartum depression presents more as anxiety. Hypervigilance. Obsessive thinking. Withdrawal. Sleep disturbance. Emotional numbness. Brain fog.” She paused a moment to give the two parents a chance to start to digest her words. “Sometimes, when someone spends months in survival mode, symptoms don’t fully emerge until the crisis is over. Delayed postpartum depression and postpartum anxiety can happen after NICU stays. Especially traumatic ones.”
“But-But I love her.” Evie stuttered, her anxiety building. Like she needed to defend herself.
Elaine’s face softened and she tried to give Evie a reassuring smile. “Oh, I know you do.”
“I don’t resent her.” Evie continued shakily, her eyes filling with tears again. “I don’t want to hurt her. I just…” She looked panicked suddenly. “I need her to be okay.”
“And your brain has decided the only way to guarantee that is to never fully relax.”
Elaine’s voice remained calm.
“It feels like if I stop paying attention for even one second…” Her voice cracked. “Something terrible will happen.”
“That’s anxiety and that’s exhaustion.” Elaine continued gently. “The withdrawal, the inability to rest, forgetting to care for yourself, difficulty concentrating...… those can absolutely overlap with postpartum depression.”
Evie looked stunned. Relieved even. Someone had finally translated what was happening inside her head into words she could understand. “They always told us that postpartum depression meant...… that you didn’t love your baby.”
Elaine immediately shook her head. “No. That’s only one possible presentation. But many mothers with postpartum mood disorders love their babies deeply. In fact, sometimes the fear of losing the baby becomes all-consuming.” Carter exhaled shakily beside her and that made Elaine turn toward him. “How are you doing in all of this?”
Carter blinked rapidly, not expecting to be asked anything. He was mainly here for moral support. “I’m worried about her.”
“What worries you most?”
“She disappears.” He admitted quietly.
“What do you mean by that?” Elaine asked.
“She’s physically there. Taking care of the girls. Feeding Brianna. Talking to Meghan. But mentally…..” He swallowed. “It feels like she’s still stuck in the NICU sometimes.”
“That’s also very common after medical trauma.”
“Mommy doesn’t smile as much.”
The room went still at the little voice that just pierced through the tension. Meghan hadn’t even looked up from her coloring as she said it. Like she’d just been listening the whole time, waiting for her moment to add to the conversation like she was a little adult. And it pierced straight into Evie’s heart.
“Oh sweetheart…” The tears started falling harder. Carter held her a little closer, knowing the fact that their four year old had keyed in on everything made her feel even worse. Evie quickly wiped her eyes, trying to calm down. “I don’t want my girls to remember me like this.”
“You won’t stay like this forever.” Elaine said calmly. “But you do need support. Real support. Rest. Continued therapy. And I would highly recommend evaluation for postpartum anxiety and depression through your PCP or your OB.” Evie nodded slowly. Still overwhelmed, but listening. “And most importantly, you need to give yourself some grace. The last year of your life has been so hard physically, emotionally, and mentally. It won’t fix itself overnight, but we will work to try and make you feel better again.”
By the time they left Elaine’s office, both Evie and Carter were emotionally wrung out. Meghan had fallen asleep on top of her coloring book, while Brianna continued to sleep tucked against Evie’s chest, completely unaware that her parents’ world had just shifted again. But for the first time in weeks, there was at least a direction they could go in. A name for what was happening.
So they decided to start simple. They made a schedule, one that specifically allowed Evie to sleep. Not “close your eyes while listening for breathing” sleep. Just true, real, deep sleep. Every night Carter didn’t have a night shift, he took over nighttime feedings, putting an air mattress in the nursery so Evie wouldn’t be disturbed. Because of that, Evie would pump more during the day so that she could at least get four or five hours of sleep in one uninterrupted stretch.
At first she hated it. Absolutely hated it. The first night, Carter had to physically push her from the nursery up to their bedroom. But it had worked. He had gone to check on her at one point and found her completely out, cuddling with Carter’s pillow and one of Brianna’s blankets. A couple of nights he even found Meghan in bed with Evie, her little face into Evie’s chest as they held each other tightly. Those nights were the ones she seemed to sleep the most.
Carter also made planned moments where Evie could practice some self-care. He made sure Meghan didn’t follow when she went to take a shower. He made sure to rub her back or feet when she seemed tense. He encouraged her to sit outside for a few minutes a day, enjoy the sun and the fresh air. Haleh started dropping off dinners twice a week “just because” along with her favorite desserts.
But then came the next really hard step.
To help with the still lingering anxiety with going out in public, they decided to meet with Dr. Coburn after they went to Brianna’s first pediatrician appointment out of the NICU. It actually felt kind of poetic. Mother and daughter both needing follow-up care after surviving something enormous. And of course, the morning started chaotically. Brianna wanted to cluster feed. Meghan couldn’t find her shoes. Evie changed outfits twice because nothing fit her body the same way anymore. And Carter hovered so obviously that even Meghan noticed.
“Daddy.” She whispered, gesturing for Carter to bend down beside her.
“Yes Bug.”
“You’re doing your worried face.”
Carter furrowed his brows. “I don’t have a worried face.”
“You do.”
“I do not.”
“Yes you do.” Evie jumped in, actually giving him a slight smile.
While there was definitely anxiety and worry going into this appointment, especially because they were coming back to County for the first time, Evie at least felt more informed and ready then when they had taken Meghan for her first appointment. They brought a small baby robe for Brianna so she wouldn’t be cold, but still free to be examined. Evie fed her again and they changed her diaper so she would stay comfortable. And despite everything, the appointment went really well.
Brianna weighed just over eight pounds now. Still tiny for nearly three months old, but growing beautifully for being so premature. The pediatrician listened carefully to her lungs, checked her oxygen saturation, examined her muscle tone, and smiled warmly, saying ,“She looks wonderful”, and causing Evie to tear up in relief. The doctor explained she would probably continue to stay on the smaller side for a while, but developmentally she was doing better then expected. Told them to keep doing what they were doing.
After Brianna’s appointment, they took the elevator up one floor to go see Coburn. The shift in Evie was immediate, going back to the tension she had somewhat lost at the pediatrician. “You okay?” Carter asked quietly as they walked towards the exam room.
Evie nodded automatically. But then she paused and actually shook her head. “I don’t want to do this.”
Carter reached over immediately, taking her hand. “I know.”
“I feel crazy.”
“You aren’t crazy. You’re asking for help.”
Carter held Brianna as Evie sat on the exam table. Meghan was down in the ER, excited to be following around Nana Haleh and Auntie Chuny until her parents were done. Pratt may have even shown her a couple things that most four year olds would be repulsed by. When the door finally opened, Dr. Coburn walked in, giving a small smile like normal. She checked over Evie’s vitals and then checked to see how her c-section scar was healing. And when she was done, she leaned against the counter and put her hands in her lab coat pockets.
“Well, physically you’re healing very well.” She paused a moment. “Dr. Duncan called me and we talked about some of the symptoms you’ve been experiencing. I’m glad you decided to come in. What you’re experiencing is not uncommon after a traumatic birth and prolonged NICU stay.”
“I don’t feel sad all the time.” Evie finally spoke. “I just feel…... scared. Constantly.”
“Postpartum depression and postpartum anxiety overlap a lot.”
The appointment ended up lasting longer than Evie thought it would. They went through all of Evie’s symptoms again. Talked about if she had ever thought about hurting herself or Brianna. Evie answered faster then she had in therapy, finding it easier since it wasn’t the first time admitting it out loud. Dr. Coburn agreed with the diagnosis Elaine had made of delayed PPD and they began discussing treatment. Therapy would continue at least once a week. She encouraged them to continue with the self-care routine they had begun. And then they talked about medication. That part scared Evie most.
“I don’t want to feel numb.”
“That’s not the goal. We want you to feel like yourself again. I am recommending a very low-dose SSRI. Something that is going to be compatible with breastfeeding. We’ll monitor how that affects you. I think at least something right now would be beneficial.” Coburn saw the look of fear in Evie’s face. “But you also don’t have to decide today.” She added gently. “Both of you are healthcare professionals. I know you can make an informed decision for yourself.”
That made the tension in Evie’s body release in a way that even she noticed. Someone outside of their family believed she was competent; trusted her judgement. Especially her judgement as a nurse. She hadn’t felt like that since before Brianna is born. And it was one of the first times Evie actually felt good.
Slowly but surely, as Evie started sleeping more and taking her meds and continuing therapy, she let other people back into their home and their lives.
Susan became the fellow mom to go to. Despite Evie having four more years of experience as a mother, Susan became one of her go to’s for every possible questions about Brianna’s health and well-being. They talked about feeding schedules and late night diaper changes. They talked about sore chests and mom guilt. Susan gave Evie a chance to talk about the woos of being a mother without judgement or shame.
Abby was the exact opposite. She was Evie’s chance to talk about something other than her kids. Abby kept Evie up to date on all of the latest County’s gossip, because old nurse habits die hard. New interns were discussed in detail, as well as things like Morris’ latest fumble and the person currently annoying Pratt the most. Apparently, there was also a new med student that seemed to have a crush on Abby, which Evie took particular interest in. And from the look on Abby’s face, Evie could tell that the feelings might have been mutual.
Other people like Luka, Sam, Haleh, Chuny, all rotated through the Carter house at some point over the next couple of months. For some it was the first time they had met Brianna, let alone held her. That part took a minute for Evie to feel comfortable with, especially since most of them were health care workers and exposed to many things. But slowly, she was able to let go just a bit and let more people start to help. These people loved her daughter, loved her children. And she didn’t want to deny them the chance to do just that.
But even with Evie doing so much better than she had been, Carter was still cautious. He was very careful about his attending schedule. At first, he tried doing chunks of shifts, multiple days in a row followed by a couple days off. But when Evie told him she preferred having him around more consistently, he tried his best to get one day on and then one day off whenever he could. A small part of him also started to miss his time in Africa. While he definitely didn’t want to expose his family to some of the more dangerous parts of his time there, he couldn’t help but wonder if doing field work or a different kind of medicine might give him more time with his wife and children.
The decision to put Meghan in pre-school a little early hadn’t been taken lightly. At first, even suggesting preschool felt almost cruel to Evie. After finally getting both girls home and under one roof again, the idea of willingly sending Meghan somewhere every day tugged at every guilty part of her heart. She was terrified that Meghan would feel unwanted if she was sent away during the day; that she would realize Brianna was getting to stay home with mommy and be upset or start to become jealous.
But the more they talked about it in therapy and with each other late at night, the more they realized this wasn’t about getting Meghan out of the way. It was the opposite. Meghan needed something that belonged just to her again. For months her entire little world had revolved around hospitals and whispered conversations and adults saying things like “Be careful around the baby” and “Mommy’s tired today.” She had been extraordinarily good through all of it. Too good, honestly.
Four-year-old’s were not supposed to understand this much. And it seemed like every time Carter or Evie looked at Meghan lately, they realized she had quietly started making herself smaller in the house. Less demanding. Less loud. Less needy. Less like their sweet, rambunctious little girl. As if she understood everyone was already carrying too much. That realization alone broke Evie’s heart. Her kid was supposed to be a kid.
So they found a preschool program nearby that started a few weeks earlier than the public school year. Small classes. Warm teachers. Long enough for Meghan to settle in, make friends, paint pictures, sing songs, and build off of the things they had already started teaching her at home. A place where she could be inquisitive and playful and happy. Long enough for Evie to maybe breathe a little during the day, take care of Brianna without worrying that she wasn’t giving Meghan enough attention. Maybe clean the house or sit and relax when she finally put Brianna in the bassinet that she started to trust more and more.
The night before Meghan’s first day, Carter found Evie sitting on the floor in the living room, surrounded by tiny clothes and other small piles of laundry. She was holding the glittery purple backpack Meghan had insisted she needed, something brand new for her first day. It had looked so massive on her when she first put it on in the store. Evie stared at it with watery eyes.
“I don’t understand how she’s old enough for this.” Evie said, sensing Carter and feeling his gaze.
Carter smiled softly and moved to the sofa, sitting behind her and putting his hands on her shoulder. “She’s been old enough for this for a while.”
“I know.” She sighed. “She’s just…” Her voice cracked unexpectedly. “She used to fit on my chest.”
Carter nodded and kissed the top of her head, nuzzling her. “It’s Brianna’s turn to do that now.” That made Evie look over at the bassinet across the room where Brianna slept swaddled tightly, still impossibly tiny even after weeks at home.
“I know.” She paused and Carter thought she wiped a tear from her face. “I’m watching both my babies grow at the same time.
The next morning, Meghan woke up before everyone else, full of excitement. When she finally burst into her mom and dad’s bedroom, she was already dressed, even in her shoes. Meghan climbed into her parent’s bed and loudly announced, “I’m ready for school!”
That immediately woke Brianna.
“I’m sorry sissy.” Meghan said sheepishly, as Carter grabbed Brianna from the bassinet and handed her to Evie. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“It’s okay Bug.” Carter cooed, sitting down on the bed next to her as Evie positioned Brianna to nurse. “Bree knows you’re excited for school today. She’s excited for you too.”
When they all eventually made their way downstairs, Carter took over breakfast and lunch packing while Evie started on Meghan’s hair. The four going on fourteen year old had been very specific with what hair style she wanted for her first day of school: two braids tied back with different colored rubber bands. The first time Evie did it, Meghan didn’t like how it turned out, thought it wasn’t even. So she asked her mom to do it again. Not in a mean, bratty way, but just a determined way. Most days Evie would tell her it was fine and move on. Today, however, she knew her daughter wanted to make a good first impression. So Evie happily redid the style, making sure to be extra careful to be neat and precise the second time around. She almost sobbed when Meghan hugged her tightly around the neck after seeing the second set of braids.
Eventually, they all somehow ended up out the door and arrived at the school not long after. Carter helped Meghan put on her purple backpack once she was out of the car and she ran up to Evie with the accessory bouncing against the backs of her knees as she came over. She grabbed her mom’s hand and held it as they walked into the school, Evie letting Carter carry the car seat inside. This moment was about Meghan, and by God, Evie was going to give all the attention to her oldest. No matter what her hurting brain told her to check on.
The preschool itself was cheerful and bright. Finger paintings taped to walls, tiny cubbies, everything drenched in the smell of crayons, disinfectant, and graham crackers. The sound of children grew louder and louder the deeper the tiny family walked into the building. And Meghan Carter looked absolutely thrilled by it all. She was buzzing with excitement and started pulling Evie forward to try and hurry her mother towards her classroom. They had only visited the place once a week ago and Meghan already knew where to go.
“Hi.... Meghan Carter, right?” Ms. Saunders, Meghan’s new teacher, said cheerfully as they walked into the classroom.
“That’s me!” Meghan exclaimed, jumping up and down.
“Looks like someone is excited to start school today.” Her teacher chuckled and crossed her arms.
“Oh yeah.” Carter scoffed. “Very excited.”
“Well we are very excited to have you.”
Ms. Saunders walked Evie and Carter through everything one more time, made sure they had everything for Meghan, what it was expected she’d do in a day, where she would go in the school for various things, etc. The whole time Meghan kept her hand in Evie’s, but she could tell her oldest wanted to go and join everyone else in what they were doing. And by the time the adults were finished talking and Ms. Saunders graciously took a couple picture of the family, Meghan was ready.
“Bye Mommy! Bye Daddy!”
“That eager to get rid of us?” Carter chuckled, kneeling down to give her a hug goodbye.
“It’s school.” Meghan explained seriously. “I have to be by myself.” But then she looked at her mother, and her expression actually softened. “You okay, Mommy?”
That nearly shattered Evie into a million pieces. Evie crouched carefully and kissed Meghan’s forehead. “I’m okay, baby.”
“You’re crying.”
“I know.”
“Why?”
Because you were just born. Because I missed months of your life while sitting beside an incubator. Because you got so much older while I was trying to survive. Because I love you so much it hurts. All of those thoughts ran fast through Evie’s head. And instead, Evie smiled shakily and brushed a piece of hair behind Meghan’s ear. “Because I’m proud of you.”
Evie hugged Meghan so tightly before letting the four year old say goodbye to her sister, who was thankfully still sleeping in her car seat. And then Meghan walked over to the cubbies, put her backpack away and just joined the group of kids as if she had been there the whole time. So small. So brave. Carter immediately stepped behind Evie, using one hand to grab the car seat and then wrapping the other around Evie’s waist.
“She’s okay.” He murmured softly as he started to guide his wife out of the classroom.
“I know.”
“She’s going to love it.”
“I know.”
And Meghan really did love school. Not just loved it, but thrived in it. Every day she came home and told Carter and I about what she did that day. She would talk about different words she learned, what she had for lunch, and even sang Brianna all the different learning songs they were doing. Her favorites were the days of the week and the alphabet. She was always bringing home finished worksheets and coloring pictures, and folders with notes of good behavior and how well she was adjusting.
At home, I felt like I was actually starting to relax a little more. With all my attention on Brianna, I started to fully see that she was indeed thriving and doing well. And in turn, I began to trust myself more and more as therapy continued and the medication I decided to try took effect. I actually started doing other things while Brianna napped instead of just sitting right beside the bassinet and watching her.
Now, I didn’t just jump right into leaving her alone. Absolutely not. I would have combusted. But would I clean up the toys in the sunroom while she laid in the bassinet a few feet away? Yes. Did I start to leave her in the dining room while I prepped dinner? Occasionally. But it did still seem like things were getting a little bit better, a little less hopeless. My brain was starting to calm down in a way that I realized it hadn’t done since I got pregnant with Brianna. It was a true relief.
When Halloween came around, Meghan wanted to do matching costumes and I was so glad I was actually up for it. She had recently become obsessed with Peter Pan in her journey through the Disney canon and was dead set on that being what we dressed as. I was all for it, especially when she wanted Carter to be Captain Hook. The sight of my husband in a long curly wig made me belly laugh for the first time in a really long time. It was even better when Meghan insisted that she be Peter Pan so that Brianna could be Tinker Bell.
We did the best we could with the costumes while still making sure both girls were bundled up against the weather. Haleh was gracious enough to come over to take pictures, and she had a field day with Carter’s costume. She promised to tell me the reaction of everyone in the ER when she passed around a copy of the pictures in the coming days. We even ended up taking Brianna to just a couple houses so Meghan would be happy that she was included before I brought her home and got hot chocolate ready for when they returned.
Everything had been a learning curve for the past several months, and thankfully Carter was there with me every step. He never missed a therapy session, went with me to my follow ups with Coburn, and worked to be home as much as he could, not only for the girls, but for me. I would never be able to express how appreciative of him I was. But the one thing we hadn’t done really and truly since before Brianna was born, was go on a proper date. The kind of date where you dress up and go somewhere and just spend hours together without a toddler pulling on your leg for attention or a baby needing to be nursed. And a part of me really wanted to try and give Carter a night where we could attempt to be just us. No matter how nervous I was.
First, I started putting my plan to action by forcing myself to leave the house without Brianna. Haleh and Chuny had been trying for weeks to get me to do it and I thought my brain was finally in a good enough head space to attempt it, so I gave it a shot. I cried the moment I sat in my car alone from the first time in months. I almost didn’t pull out of the driveway. I could just go back inside, pick my baby up, cuddle her, and never leave again. But that wasn’t a part of the plan. So I took a deep breath, prayed really hard that the meds would help me get through it, and went to go get coffee. The coffee turned into a quick grocery store trip for a couple essentials, and I was back in an hour. I don’t think I had ever been so anxious but proud of myself in my life.
Next, after a few more outings on my own, I started trying to find a day where both Haleh and Carter were off or at least only had a half shift. Honestly, that seemed like it was proving to be the hardest part of the whole ordeal. Seemingly every time Haleh told me it would line up, Carter had to switch with another attending because of one reason or another. It happened three times and it was making me feel like the universe didn’t want us to go out at all. But thank God for Haleh. Finally, she just told Susan that if she changed Carter’s schedule one more time, she’d stage a nurse mutiny. We found a date very quickly after that.
The morning of our date, I used Brianna’s first nap to shower and shave. There wasn’t really any chance of anything happening tonight; the SSRI’s were still decreasing my libido, which kind of sucked. But if I was going to be putting forth my best effort mentally, I would put in the effort physically as well. The next wake window was spent with Brianna doing tummy time, a few minutes in her swing, and helping mommy pick out a dress. I think Brianna really liked that part of the day. She started to get really vocal about things, especially her disappointment in me when I tried to go for a shirt and pants instead of a dress.
Meghan helped me finalize the outfit after I picked her up from school, accessories and all. She was really excited to see me all dressed up again and even got me to dance around with her while I was getting ready. Haleh got to the house around 4:30 and immediately took over watching the girls so I could finish up which I greatly appreciated. I just wasn’t prepared for my husband to get home sooner than I expected him to.
“Hey babe. What’s Haleh doing here?” I heard his voice calling out as I just finished up my lipstick. I hurriedly checked myself over, walking into the bedroom just as he walked in. The surprised look on his face made me chuckle a little. He looked like the sweet, golden retriever boy he was when I first met him. “Wow.”
“Hi.” I replied, nervously playing with the side of my dress.
“Hi there.” He practically purred. Carter walked forward and wrapped his arms around my waist. “This is a nice surprise. What’s going on Evie?”
I paused, swallowing and then taking a deep breath. “What do you think about going to dinner with me tonight? Just the two of us.”
His eyebrows raised a little. “Really?” I nodded. “W-What’s the occasion?”
“I mean, you could say either of our birthdays.” I shrugged. “Kind of forgot to celebrate them with everything going on.” I paused, putting my hands on his chest. “But do we really need an excuse to go out just the two of us?”
Carter looked down at me and I watched him study my face for a moment. I could see the gears turning in his head, and honestly, I didn’t blame him. But eventually he did smile at me and kissed the top of my head. “Okay. I’ll go get dressed and be ready in ten minutes.”
“Sounds perfect.”
True to his word, Carter was ready and downstairs before I could even sit down with Brianna. We said our goodbyes, and Carter held my hand tightly as we walked to the car, trying to reassure me that everything was going to be okay. We were right on time for our reservation, so thankfully we were seated right away. The beginning of the date was good, choosing drinks and talking through food selections before we decided to get a couple of things to try and share together. Once the waiter was gone with our choices, Carter grabbed my hand and started rubbing my palm and fingers with his thumb.
“So how was your day?”
“Uh, it was good. I went through my closet a little bit, which was nice.”
“Oh a bet Brianna was very entertained by that.”
“Oh yeah, she got a great view from her mat on the floor. Tummy time was very entertaining today.” I paused a second and looked down at our hands, my brain running a little bit more then normal. “John..... could we maybe try....... not to talk about the girls.” I asked, squeezing his hand. “My brain could really use the distraction to I don’t get up right now and rush home.”
Carter nodded, squeezing my hand. “Of course. Well, we could talk about how amazing you look in that dress. How about that?” He smirked and I rolled my eyes. “Fine, okay. What do you want to talk about?”
“How about work? I’ve.... missed County. I guess, for lack of a better term. How-How’s everybody? How are the new interns?”
“The interns? Okay, I guess. Definitely different.”
“Different how?” I chuckled, rubbing my thumb against his knuckle.
“They just..... don’t have the same people skills, I guess you could say. Sure they know all the medical stuff, which is obviously important. But sometimes they seem like a bunch of robots just trying to get from one patient to the next. Pratt’s even doing it.”
“Even Abby?”
“Every once in a while. I’m more worried about Abby not practicing to her full potential. She’s great, but she forgets that sometimes. Let’s some of the other interns, namely Ray, walk all over her.”
“She’ll get it. I know she will. How’s Luka?”
Carter chuckled, taking my hand and kissing it. “Luka’s Luka. He and Sam seem to be doing okay though. They all moved in together.”
“Really? I didn’t know they were that serious. A part of me kept thinking even after everything that happened in Africa, he’d get up one day and go back.”
“Me too. It’s nice to have him around. Especially because Susan is being so weird.”
“Not liking her as chief?”
Carter shrugged. “Look.... she’s.... she’s great. She’s doing the job. It’s just weird taking orders from Susan.”
“Why? Because she’s a woman?” I raised a brow.
“Of course not.” Carter scoffed. “Because she’s Susan. I’ve known her since I was a med student. I honestly even had a little crush on her back in the day. She just feels more like a colleague then my boss. With Weaver, she was always that position. The leader. I don’t know, with Susan, it’s just different.” He shrugged. “Hey, guess what?”
I chuckled. “What?”
“We just had a conversation and never even mentioned either of our children.”
That time I let out a full out laugh. “We did didn’t way.”
“Yeah..... you did.” I looked at Carter a lot closer than I had been and felt a shiver go up my spine.
God, I loved the way this man looked at me. Even when I was fighting for my life, trying to stay in the moment with him and not think about my two kids, especially my baby at home, he still looked at me like I hung the moon. He jumped at the chance to have dinner with me even after what I assumed with a tough day at work. He held my hand and stayed in the moment. I felt tears start to pool in my eyes and watched his face morph with concern.
“Hey. Hey. What’s wrong?” He asked, looking like he was about to jump out of his chair over to me.
I cleared my throat and let go of his hand to wipe my eyes. “No, I’m okay. I promise. They’re..... they’re actually happy tears.”
“Yeah?”
I nodded. “I just really love you. Like probably an absurd amount.”
Carter chuckled. “Oh yeah? Well, I love you too. An extremely absurd amount.” He leaned over the table and I met him halfway in a kiss. “And I’m never gonna stop loving you either. No matter what.”
A few weeks later, I brought Brianna inside of the ER for the first time to see everyone. I hadn’t told Carter I was going to do it ahead of time, and when he walked up to the desk, I saw the moment his heart fell out of his butt. Even when I told him I came just because I wanted to, he still watched closely. That was until he got his hands on Brianna and started showing her around like he did to Meghan. That’s when he finally started to relax, in his element, showing off his daughter.
And watching Brianna finally get to be around some of the closest people in our lives, for the first time, my brain had finally gone quiet.
Hey guys..... well I'm back. 😅 Hope you guys like this and it was worth the wait.
Also, Happy Birthday Mr. Wyle. The Carter family is definitely celebrating Dr. Carter along with you. 🥳
in which jack abbot accidentally fucks huckleberry's twin sister
smut, age gap (reader is mid 20's - jack is late 40's plus), slight daddy kink (though daddy is never used) lets assume she's on birth control, jack has a dominant personality, protective jack, lowkey protective brother-in-law robby
hucklebaby masterlist
"good to have you home, kid."
you weren't expecting either of them to be home when you used your brother's key to let yourself into the house he shared with his husband to be. it's the day, he and robby (you've taken to calling him that and he doesn't entirely know how he feels).
you're paused in the hallway, eyes wide like a deer caught in headlights. not in your own clothes, robby can tell that much. you've got a shopping bag hanging from your forearm, probably full of your clothes, he guesses.
he just sips his coffee as he stares at you. "yeah," you say, standing straighter and pulling your shirt further down like you've forgotten you're wearing shorts. jack's shorts. "yeah, i..."
but you're searching for the words, floundering. and robby just smiles into his coffee. he finishes the mug and nods his head towards the kitchen. "come on," he says and begins walking. "I'll make you breakfast."
breakfast with robby. michael robinavitch. mike, you've heard dennis call him once or twice before. there's something about it that's making you nervous, that's making you feel like you did back when your daddy would catch you sneaking out when you were a teenager.
a disapproving father, ready to give his daughter a lecture. you swallow thickly and follow after him.
"thought you'd be at work," you say honestly as you slip into the seat. at the kitchen table
standing at the stove, robby shakes his head. "dennis is, but i'm not."
you nod and straighten out the place mat in front of you. "even attendings get a day off," you mutter and he nods. you look at him, brows furrowed as you think. "when does jack get a night off?"
and robby pauses. egg ready to crack against the side of the pan but he's still. he turns to you, looking every bit the disappointed father. you get it, you get why your brother is so attracted to this man that is so much older than the both of you. this man that looks like he could rock your world and give you a lecture all at once.
and it's almost like jack, just different. he'll rock your world, but he won't give you a lecture. he'll take care of you instead.
your tastes differ, but not by much.
"that's what i wanted to talk to you about," he says and finally cracks the egg. it hits the hot pan with a sizzle.
he doesn't turn to you, doesn't look you in he eye and tell you what he wants to tell you. maybe that was the point of the breakfast, to distract himself from having to look at you when he says what he needs to say. you wouldn't call him a coward, not for the work he does every day, but you wish he'd just look at you and say it.
"you can just come out with it," you tell him, picking at the skin around your nails. your nails themselves were now perfect, painted carefully while jack was on his night shift. "whatever you want to say, just say it."
and, honestly, it takes robby by surprise. you don't hold back, don't pull any punches. there's a reason jack likes you.
"okay," he says and turns the stove off. he walks around the breakfast bar and and pulls out a seat at the table. he sits opposite you and clasps his hands together like this is some kind of work meeting. how many residents have seen him like this, all serious and such?
"you and doctor abbot," he begins and you roll your eyes.
"jack," you answer.
robby gives you a look. because you're being ridiculous and, by the way you've fixed him with a smirk, you know it. "you and jack," he continues and you nod, satisfied with the change. "do you know what you're doing there?"
he sees the change in you, the way you fold your arms over your chest and fix him with a glare that is downright nasty. "do you know what you're doing with my brother?" you spit, venom in your voice.
robby shakes his head. "i'm going to marry your brother," he says. you roll your eyes and robby releases a breath. the petulant child being scolded by the parent. and he's not that much older than your - than whatever jack is.
"your brother and I have been together for a while now," he says, ignoring whatever shitty response you're waiting to let loose. "we're marrying each other because we feel ready for it. but what you've got going on with jack is-"
"Is what?" you're like a poked bear, standing up, ready to swipe your claws across his chest.
robby sucks in another breath and runs his hand over his face. "he's not seen anybody seriously since his wife died." he says it slowly, like you need some time to think.
just like he thought you would, you sit back. "is he seeing me seriously?" you ask, your voice finally small. and robby regrets it instantly. "or, what is this? should i just pack up and go back to nebraska and forget all about this?"
you're back to picking at your nails. "I didn't mean it like that," robby says and shakes his head. "i've not seen jack like this in a long time," he continues, playing with the ring on his finger, the one he'd one day soon exchange for a wedding ring.
you're looking up at him with wet lashes. and, fuck, robby feels horrible. "is that a good thing or a bad thing?" you ask, putting your nail between your teeth. not to bite down and rip off, but just to chew on the perfect paintwork.
robby reaches across the table and pulls your hand away from your mouth. he sees it then and only then, but probably because you didn't let him see it before. you're scared, terrified of whatever this is you've got with jack. you blink you watery lashes and the tears fall. "I don't know if i'm making a mistake here, robby. i mean, what if this isn't forever? what if i leave home, move out here and it isn't forever?"
you wipe away the tears but you don't sit there and sob. robby stands and walks around the table. he drags the chair on the end behind him and sits next to you, his hand on your back. "it might not be forever," he says honestly. more tears, but you're still not sobbing. "and, if you think it's gonna be forever and it doesn't end up being forever, you've always got a room here?"
your hand wipes at your nose as you sniffle. "thanks," you say and wipe under your eyes. "you'd let me stay even though jack's your friend?" you ask him.
robby lets out a gentle laugh and nods. "you're family, kid," he says and stands. "i'm gonna make you something to eat and then you can disappear upstairs." he puts the chair back at the end of the table, steps around the breakfast nook and returns to the stove.
"robby?" you call as he flips the egg. he hums, turning his body only slightly towards you. "you'll be a good dad," you tell him.
there's nobody that can steal the smile from his face after that.
***
the text message sits on your phone, ready to be sent. but you don't press send, leave it there, waiting.
a younger man would call you needy. a man sure about you would soothe your worries. but you're not sure where you stand with jack, whether this message will send him running for the hills.
it would just be awkward after that, at the wedding, pretending you weren't so briefly in love with him at one point that you were willing to leave your life in nebraska behind to be with him.
you: are we something serious?
no, no, no. it's all wrong. you backspace it and retype it, something less desperate and needy.
you: just wondering what we are :)
you: it's fine if we're nothing
you: just wondering
there. perfect. it's too late anyway, you've already sent them. you've already sent them and now jack is gonna think you're needy and now he's not gonna reply to you and now you're never gonna see him again except for awkward interactions where him working with your brother and his future husband forces you to interact.
you throw your phone to the end of your bed and scream into the pillow.
and then there's every other possibility. that he'll think you don't want something serious with him. that you're sending that message because you want to pull back and you want him to pull back, too.
you scramble for the phone. maybe you can just delete the messages and he never has to see them and you can go back to normal.
your fingers fly over the number the number pad and you unlock your phone. you're frantic, trying to get to your messages.
read
fuck! you throw you phone back to the other end of the bed. read but not replied to. you scream into the pillow again.
from the end of the bed, your phone vibrates. you stare at it, terrified. this is it. this is the i don't think we should see each other again call. this is the it's been fun, but i need someone older call.
you hold the pillow against your chest and watch it. his picture fills your phone screen, his 'readers' on his face as he squints at the camera like he can't really see. the thought of not seeing that anymore breaks your heart, snaps it in two and leaves you bleeding on the floor.
your phone rings until it can ring no more. the screen goes black, jack's face disappearing from view. you cry, full sobs that you held back earlier. tears rolling down your cheeks, makeup a mess.
your phone lights up again. a quick ping!, a text message coming through. you double tap the screen until you can see it in full.
jack: pick up the phone
jack: sweetheart
jack: i'm being serious
you wipe your nose on the pillow and unlock your phone. you're already on his contact, already reading his messages. you press the call button by his contact picture, put it on speaker and wait.
jack picks up almost instantly. and for an instant, you say nothing. just the sounds of your sniffling. "sweetheart," he says and you sob.
such a lovely nickname for something so fleeting.
"hi," you manage. it's wet and gross and you know he can tell you've been crying.
"what's going on, sweet girl?" jack asks immediately. you almost crumble. "what were those texts about?"
you wipe away your tees and draw in a shaking breath. you can do this. you can do this. "just thinking," you answer, breath shaking and lip wobbling. a nothing answer and you know it.
"you don't want to be something serious?" he asks.
and you're crying all over again. not because of his question, but the thought of not being something serious might tear you apart. tear you apart and then you'll have to go to PTMC and have to see him all over again when he comes in for his night shift.
"talk to me, sweetheart. i can't fix it unless you talk to me."
the phone rests on the pillow in your lap. you pick it up, as if that'll somehow make you feel better. it doesn't. "do you want to be something serious?" you're not sure if he can ever understand you with how unsure you sound.
he pauses. fuck, this is exactly what you're afraid of, exactly why you didn't want to ask him.
"is that what this is about, sweetheart? you were literally riding me this morning."
a fact, but it doesn't answer your question. "jack," you push.
"this is something serious," he answers, his voice sure. you're entirely jealous of the feeling. "sweetheart, this has always been something serious. we don't have to keep it serious, if you don't want to-"
"no!" you say quickly, your heart beating so damn fast.
another pause. another reason for you to cry. "that's it," he says in that low voice that sends a thrill down your spine. "good girl. you gonna be okay while i drive over?"
there's a small part of you that hates yourself for crying some more. but he's so fucking good. he's so good and he wants something serious with you. of course you're gonna start sobbing.
"but robby's here," you manange, your cheeks entirely damp.
"breathe for me, sweetheart. i'll be there soon."
"but robby," you say again.
"don't worry about it, okay? i'll be there soon."
"okay," you answer. no goodbyes, not yet. you don't think you can emotionally handle that.
jack hangs up and you jump from the bed. leaving your phone discarded. you grab your makeup wipes from the dresser and clean up your face. no makeup, no more tears. you free your hair from the tie and head downstairs.
robby sits on the sofa, another cup of coffee. you wonder just how many he consumes in a day, how many cups he needs to get through the day shift. of course that translates to home; he'd probably crash without it.
his head turns slightly as you walk into the room. you feel like a child asking for parent's permission to have a friend over. "robby," you call, your hand on the door frame.
he hums and turns his head fully, looking at you over the back of the sofa. you don't want to shrink, you want to talk to him adult to adult. but this entire thing has left you fragile and needing comfort. comfort that was on his way (you should have told him to grab snacks).
"jack's coming over," you tell him. robby's eyebrows go up. "i asked him something stupid and got a little upset so he's on his way." you tighten your grip on the door frame. "is that okay?"
robby laughs. just a small laugh, not one that has his full body shaking. "yeah, that's fine," he says.
you release a breath and look around, look at what he's watching on the tv. something mindless, something you're sure you've turned off when you've gotten the remote away from your brother before. you step around the sofa and sink into the armchair, joining him.
you sit there in silence, no need for any words. every few moments, you glance at the window, hope to see his car pulling up. it's a good few minutes, minutes full of doubt (minutes where you're hoping he's read your mind and is stopping for snacks).
but the more you think about it, the more it makes sense. he was in bed, without his leg. he had to get up, get dressed, put his leg on and get in the car. you relax into the armchair, waiting for him. you'll wait as patiently as you have to.
his car pulls up. you're out of the armchair before he's parked, running towards the front door. you yank it open and run out before you can stop yourself, before you can pull your shoes on and collect yourself.
jack climbs out of his car. you're running, calling his name. he turns, pushes the door shut just in time to catch you in his arms. "fuck, sweet girl," he whispers as you wrap your arms around him, standing on your tiptoes.
you just kiss him. arms around his neck, you press your lips to his. slowly, gently, the sweetest kiss the two of you have ever shared, you think. "jack," you say, your lips still against his. you don't want to pull away, not while he's here in your arms. "we're something serious," you whisper.
he nods, pressing his forehead against you're own. "we're something serious," he repeats, solidifying it for you. you're serious with doctor jack abbot. . you're something serious with doctor jack abbot.
he pulls away slightly, takes you in. "you're not wearing shoes," he says and you hum, kissing him again.
"i really wanted to see you," you answer.
his laugh is so damn loving. this is a man that loves you, even if you haven't said it to each other yet. and you know he loves you because you're something serious. "come on," he says and taps your ass. "jump."
you do, wrapping your legs around him. part of you wants to moan, to make some disgusting comment. right here? up against the car, doctor abbot? but you bite your lip and let him carry you away. "this might be really awkward," you tell him as he carries you towards robby and your brother's house. "robby's taking this whole big brother-in-law thing very seriously."
jack hums, but he's still smiling as he carries you. "should have thought about that before you came running outside with no shoes on," he says. you kiss him again. and again.
he carries you into the house, nudging the door shut with his hip. "can i put you down yet?" he asks, every couple of words muffled as you keep kissing him.
"no," you say without much thought.
jack puts you down anyway. "c'mon," he says, spinning you around. "let me go say hello to robby."
you let him go. reluctantly, keeping your hand in his. jack leads you into the sitting room. he stands behind the sofa, looking down at his friend. his close friend, though you wouldn't be able to tell from the way jack is looking at him.
"robby," he says, squeezing your hand.
robby turns his head, looks at his friend. "abbot," he says, but there's no venom in his voice, no venom in either of their voices.
jack walks towards the armchair. for a moment, you think he's gonna sit down and pull you into his lap. but he doesn't. "why don't you go and make us some coffees, sweetheart," he says and taps your ass, sending you on your way.
you turn to robby. "you want another?" you offer and he nods. you turn your attention to jack. "are you having a coffee or do you wanna nap after this?" you ask, hyper aware that you've potentially pulled him out of sleep.
jack kisses your hair. "yeah, sweetheart," he says and lets go of your hand. "i'll take a coffee."
you get the message, loud and clear. give me a minute while i talk to robby. you take robby's empty mug from him and disappear into the kitchen.
jack sinks into the armchair. "my girl sent me some weird texts today," he begins, rolling his trouser leg up to take off his prosthetic. "you know anything about that?"
robby glances towards the kitchen. "we had a little talk, brother. that was all."
jack furrows his brows. "she was crying, robby. you made my girl cry."
a breath leaves robby's lips and he leads forward, resting his elbows on his knees. "i was making sure you're good enough for her," robby confesses. "she's family now, jack. gotta make sure you're treating her right."
jack lets himself smile. you've got people looking out for you, people you can run to when he's not there. "this is something real, robby," he says. "i'm gonna treat her right."
robby settles deeper into the sofa. "you better, brother," he says and tips his head back against the sofa cushion.
you come into the room then, managing to hold three cups in two hands. holding the handles, keeping the mugs together. jack takes two of them from you and you pass the last one to robby.
"thank you, sweetheart," jack says as you walk back over to him. you take your too sweet coffee from his hand and sit on the arm of the sofa. not quite on his lap, but close enough that jack can wrap his arm around you.
"were you two being nice?" you ask them and sip your drink.
they look at each other. "we're always nice," jack answers and robby nods in agreement. "told robby how serious i am about you."
your cheeks are hot as you turn to him. "because we're something serious," you say and jack squeezes your hip.
you're something serious with jack abbot. you're something serious with jack abbot! you sit there happy with your future brother in law, your boyfriend (boyfriend!), waiting for your brother to come home.
this is happiness.
this looks like the end but it isn't! i have so much more planned for hucklebaby and her man
in which jack abbot accidentally fucks huckleberry's twin sister
smut, age gap (reader is mid 20's - jack is late 40's plus), slight daddy kink (though daddy is never used) lets assume she's on birth control, jack has a dominant personality, dick sucking, cum swallowing, exploration of daddy kink
synopsis: The team helps Adrian, Chris, and Ads prepare for the upcoming mission, and you and Adrian have an important conversation about what will happen when he gets back.
tags/warnings: 18+ MDNI, omegaverse dynamics, alpha!Adrian, omega!reader, fluff, talk about heats/ruts/marking, SMUT (piv sex, reader is on birth control), Adrian is clingy and sappy
word count: 6.7k
notes: Thank you as always to @embeanwrites and @snowyathena for the beta read!! Lmao remember when part 7 was going to be the last part???? and now I've got it planned out to part 10 at LEAST??? why do I do this to myself
Masterlist | part one | part two | part three | part four | part five | part six | part seven
As the team prepares to send Chris, Adrian, and Ads off for their week-long mission, everyone is on edge. Even Adrian, who is notoriously bad at picking up on other people’s feelings, can see it plain as day. They haven’t had a mission this personal in a long time. Maybe ever.
Fleury and Bordeaux have been on the phone all afternoon, booking motels and rental cars, sparing no expense. Adrian and Judomaster pack up all the weapons, ammo, and other supplies they might need out in the field. It’s been a while since the field kits have been restocked.
Emilia and Chris hole up the conference room so she can debrief him in-depth on each of the targets they’re trying to track down right now. Economos tries to help, but he can barely bring himself to even say the names of his prior colleagues, falling back on his typical coping strategy of avoidance. If he doesn’t talk about it, doesn’t process it, then it can’t hurt him. He sticks his head in his laptop screen and does what he needs to do, and that’s that.
Adrian and Ads should probably be in there with them, but they’re busy doing their own preparations. They want to get moving as soon as possible, before the lead goes cold, so they’re rushing to pack their bags and Chris’s. Chris will pass on the information while they travel.
When they’re finished, they start bringing everything to the van, which Chris and Emilia have started prepping. It would be faster if they could fly, but with all the fucking weapons they have to take, they would never make it through any kind of security clearance.
Three duffle bags are Adrian’s. One for clothes and toiletries. Two for his weapons and the Vigilante suit. He’s lugging them outside when he catches a glimpse of something that stops him in his tracks.
Chris and Harcourt, standing at the back of the van taking a rare, soft moment to themselves, Chris pressing a soft kiss to his mate’s lips. It’s fucking weird, is the first thing he thinks, watching them be all lovey and gross. He kinda understands how everyone else might feel when he’s being soft with you.
But then Adrian remembers that the bonded pair in front of him, his pack Alphas, are about to be separated for a week, and he feels a pang in his chest, because he understands in a way that he never has before. If they feel for each other even a fraction of what Adrian feels for you—
Adrian swallows roughly and turns away, giving them privacy. Suddenly, all he wants, more than anything, is you.
He’s been apart from you before, but not like this. Not since the day you first kissed him. In the last seven weeks, he’s seen you every day. Spent every possible waking hour at your side.
The idea of leaving you behind, even for just seven days, is eating him up inside.
After a quick pit stop at your desk for your picnic blanket, he finds you in the infirmary with Adebayo, where you’d been packing medical kits for them. When he walks in, you’re doing a refresh of some important first-aid practices.
Ads doesn’t need it. But you do. You can’t go with Adrian, but you can do this. Make sure the med kits are fully stocked, make sure the supplies aren’t expired, make sure Ads remembers how to set a broken bone.
“One last thing—dislocations,” you’re saying, as he pushes open the door. “Both Adrian and Chris have dislocated their shoulders more than once, which means it’s even more likely for them to accidentally do it again, and neither of them are exactly careful about it—”
Adrian winces. That’s true, he has to admit. He’s come crawling back to you with his arm dangling loose more than once, and every time, you look at him with this exasperated frown before correcting the problem with your gentle hands. He knows how to fix it himself, and so does Chris, but it hurts a hell of a lot less when you do it.
“They know what they’re doing for the most part, but if they need help, you want to hold the arm here, and brace them like this—have another person help you, if you can—oh, and don’t forget to—”
Ads is half listening to you, half watching you with concerned eyes, because you’re rambling almost as much as he does, which can’t be a good sign. You’re normally more put together than this, giving clear, concise instructions, but today, it’s like you can’t get the words out fast enough, and everything is coming out in a jumbled, frazzled order.
It’s strange, seeing you like this. He wonders why you’re so stressed. Yes, your relationship with him has changed, now, but—you know him. You know he’s capable. This level of worry is something else entirely.
“I think she’s got it, babe,” Adrian interrupts, with a gentle hand on your back, and you look up at him, your brow furrowed with concentration and worry.
“I know she does,” you say. You look at Ads. “I know you do. I just—”
“It’s okay, girl,” Ads says, her voice soft. “I get it. I’ll take care of him for you. I promise.”
Your lower lip wobbles, just a bit, and you throw your arms around her. “Thank you.”
She squeezes you tight, and exchanges a confused look with Adrian, who keeps a steady hand on your shoulder. He waits for the tension to drain from your body, the way it always does when he touches you, but it never does.
“Come on,” he says softly. “Let’s take a break, baby.”
Adrian leads you out to the courtyard, to the spot beneath the tree. He has started thinking of it as your spot, a shared little bubble away from the chaos of the rest of the office. When he plops down onto the blanket, he yanks you down with him, into his lap, wrapping his arms around you and pulling you into him. You yelp as you topple on top of him.
“You didn’t even try to fight me,” he scolds playfully.
You roll your eyes. “I didn’t realize I had to be on guard around you. Next time you try to sweep me off my feet I’ll punch you in the face. I’ll ask Emilia to work on that with me in our next session.”
“The training with her is going good?” he checks. “You’re not hurting anymore?” Adrian’s hand brushes beneath your shirt, over the scarred skin of your healed-over bullet wounds. “I don’t want you to push too hard—I mean, obviously I want you to be able to protect yourself—”
“Emilia wouldn’t have let me even start if she didn’t think I was ready,” you remind him.
“I know. You’re super badass and capable, and also really cool and I love you,” Adrian says, and when you finally smile, he kisses it right off your face.
“You guys are so gross.”
Chris’s voice rings across the courtyard, and your lips break apart. Adrian glares at his best friend, and your bright laughter echoes in the air.
“Shut up, Chris,” Adebayo scolds in the distance. “Let them live!”
After work, you head home for the night with Adrian. You’re still buzzing with some kind of nervous energy, though it’s not as bad as it was earlier. Having something to do seems to be helping, so he steps back and just lets you take control. There’s also a tiny, selfish part of him that just wants to make sure that you touch everything that goes in his suitcase, so that everything he wears during the week that he’s gone will smell like you.
You haven’t stayed the night. It’s a bridge that both of you have been weirdly afraid to cross. You’ve done all kinds of other couple-y things. You went on cute dates to the zoo and the aquarium, you played video games, you had movie nights. You did all the same things you used to do when you were just friends, but now there’s—more. Now Adrian gets to hold you, to kiss you, to tell you the things he was never allowed to say before. But never pushes any further than that, because he’s afraid, not of you, but of himself.
After the heated moment you’d shared in the Checkmate office, Adrian had pulled back significantly. It’s hard to control himself around you. He just wants you, so fucking much, all the time, and—you’d agreed to take things slow, so that’s what he’s been trying to do. Because every time he kisses you, or sucks a dark bruise into the skin of your neck, he has to desperately resist what his body tells him it needs. To make that mark permanent. To knot you, to claim you, to make you his, forever. He doesn’t want to push you into something you don’t want, something you’re not ready for.
It’s one thing to cuddle with you for a few hours on the couch. Even in bed, above the covers. It’s another to lie there with you for an entire night. But as the evening grows later, and you’re still there, at the safe house with him, he smiles. Because it doesn’t look like you’re going anywhere tonight. He doesn’t want you to go anywhere tonight.
If he’s going to be gone for an entire week, he wants as much time with you now as he can get. And he thinks that you do, too. That it might help with…whatever the hell is going on inside your brain right now.
As you zip up the suitcase on top of the bed, he comes to stand behind you, wrapping his arms around your waist, and kisses the underside of your jaw.
“Will you stay?” he asks, his voice low. “Just to sleep?”
“I was planning on it,” you say, and he smiles, rubbing his cheek against yours like a cat. You giggle, and he feels a little relieved, that you’re at least calm enough, happy enough, to still laugh like that. “That tickles. You need to shave again.”
“Ugh. Don’t wanna,” he whines, just to hear the sound again, and his heart lifts when he gets what he wants—he hears the light sound of your laugh, feels the rumble of it against his chest.
Adrian doesn’t mind shaving anymore, really. He’s used to it, now. But now, when he complains, you always offer to do it for him, and he has an excuse to stare at you for ten minutes uninterrupted.
“I’ll do it,” you say softly, and he grins, having gotten exactly what he wanted. “Just let me get changed, okay?”
Five minutes later, he swallows roughly when he sees you sitting on the bathroom counter in nothing but a short pair of sleep shorts and one of his shirts. He tries desperately to shove down his immediate arousal, even though he knows you can smell it, just like he can smell yours.
As you work in silence, sharp razorblade scraping across his cheeks, Adrian can still see the tension in the way you’re holding yourself. You’re worried. When you take a moment to rinse off the blade, he speaks.
“I’m gonna be okay, Omega,” he whispers, hands coming to grasp your hips. His thumbs rub soothing circles into your bare skin, where your shirt, his shirt, rides up.
“I know you’re going to be okay,” you say, talking while you work, finishing up the lower part of his neck. “I’m sorry if I’m being a lot. That’s not…that’s not what I’m thinking about right now.”
You finish what you’re doing and bring the damp washcloth to his face to clean him off. Once he’s clean, he grabs your wrist, turning his head to the side just slightly and pressing a kiss to the bracelet he’d made for you out of the scraps of his old Vigilante suit. You smile softly at him.
“What’s going on?” he asks softly, because you’re being quiet. Too quiet. You bite your lip and hesitate, and he hates it. “You can tell me, baby. You can tell me anything. You know that. I’m sorry we argued earlier, I don’t want you to think that I think you’re incapable or anything less than fucking badass, because you are badass, and great at your job, and I love you—”
“That’s not it,” you laugh. “But thank you. You are also a badass, baby.”
“What is it, then?”
“The week you get back,” you say carefully, “I’m due for my heat.”
You’re trying hard to be casual about it, but—it’s anything but. You’re terribly nervous, because you know that Adrian is going to be too.
Adrian stares at you, mouth agape. You look at him pointedly.
“Oh,” he says, swallowing nervously, a little dumbstruck. “Oh.”
Everything that’s been happening with you today suddenly makes a whole lot more sense. The way you’ve been jumpy and anxious. It’s not just you being worried about Adrian going on a mission. It’s you, on the verge of preheat, if you aren’t in preheat already, being worried about your Alpha.
“So,” you say, clearing your throat. “Will you…help me through it?”
“Of course I will,” he says in a rush, his arms wrapping around you. “If that’s what you want. I just—I don’t want you to feel obligated or forced, just because we’ve been, you know, kissing and other stuff and—if you would feel more comfortable using…toys, I mean, just—I know we’ve talked about this already, that we want each other like this, and that you’re mine and I’m yours, but I want to make sure this isn’t just, like, hormones, you know—”
You cut him off with a kiss, and he melts into it instantly.
“I always want you,” you say softly. “The hormones just make it—more.”
“Oh,” he says dumbly, trying to ignore the arousal stirring deep in his gut just at your admission.
“And if you want,” you say nervously, tugging at the material of his shirt, “Since—like you just said. That you’re mine, and I’m yours. I was thinking. That I want you to mark me, Alpha.”
“I want that,” Adrian says hoarsely. He remembers kneeling in front of you, his face buried in your core, remembers just how strong the urge was to mark you, to make you his. He wanted it so bad, in that moment. He’s wanted it every day since. “I’ve never wanted anything more. But I want—I want you to mark me too. I want us to do it together. So—can we wait? Until my next rut? If your heat is in two weeks—then by the time you’re due for your next one, we should be—”
“All synced up,” you finish with a smile. “Yeah. Yeah, we can wait.”
“Should I even be going on this mission?” he checks worriedly. “If your heat comes early—”
“If my heat comes early, I will deal for a couple days until you get back.”
“No,” Adrian says firmly. He remembers how he felt during his rut, hot and writhing and miserable and alone. You will never feel like he did during that week of agony, not on his watch. “If your heat comes early, you will call me, and I will come home early and take care of you. Promise me.”
“Adrian—”
“Promise me,” he repeats, heart pounding. He holds your gaze.
“I promise,” you say. Your voice is soft. “I will call you.”
“I’m gonna call you every fucking day anyway,” Adrian says, smiling. “So much that you’re gonna be fucking sick of me.”
“I’d never get sick of you. Now, Chris, on the other hand—”
“Hey!”
“I’m just telling it like it is, baby.”
Adrian laughs as you hop off the counter and drag him toward the bedroom. “You’re supposed to be on my side!”
“I am on your side! I don’t get sick of you. I want you around all the time. Always.”
You prove your point by flopping onto the bed and dragging him on top of you. He lands carefully, bracing his arms on either side of you so he doesn’t crush you with his weight.
“I think even you would get sick of me eventually,” Adrian says. He presses a quick, teasing kiss to your lips before going to shut off the lights. You worm your way beneath the covers, holding them up for him to slide in with you when he’s finished.
“You’re wrong,” you say, more of a whisper now that it’s dark in the room. Adrian pulls the blankets tighter over you both and lies down facing you, eyes wide open in the dark, waiting for them to adjust so he can see you a little more clearly. When they do, you’re smiling at him. “You know, I’ve been thinking.”
“Stop thinking,” Adrian advises. “And just let me enjoy my first night sleeping next to you.”
“Well, if you would let me finish!” you laugh. “It’s been long enough. We should—” You cut yourself off, hesitating.
“We should what?” Adrian asks.
“I’m just thinking,” you say. “That it would be easier, if you came home, and you knew…where you were going home to.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, if you want, while you’re gone,” you say, “I could take all your stuff that’s here in the safe house, and move it into my apartment. This was always supposed to be a temporary arrangement.”
Adrian’s heart hammers in his throat. “Really?”
“Really. And then when you come home, you can spend every night sleeping next to me.”
He imagines it. Coming home. Knowing that home means you. Means a place that you both share, where every blanket and pillow and coffee cup is touched with a hint of your scent and his. A place where he gets to go to sleep beside you every night and wake up beside you every morning for the rest of his life.
“Yes,” Adrian says, nodding furiously, smiling like an idiot. “Yes, let’s—let’s do that. Please.”
He kisses you, again, and smiles into it, thinking about how he’ll get to do this all the time.
He just needs to get through this fucking mission, and he gets to come home. To you.
It’s happening again.
Adrian is too far away, this time. He watches the red soaking through your uniform, your knees hitting the ground. He smells your scent in the air, tinged with the metallic hint of blood. Your eyes meet his across the field, terrified and pained.
He’s living his worst nightmare all over again, and he can’t stop it.
He’s screaming, and running, and he tumbles to the ground beside you, he yanks off his mask. You’re going to be okay, you have to be okay. You will be. He knows you will be.
He’s had this dream, he’s relived the memory a dozen times since the day it happened, but this time, when he turns you over, when he touches your face—it’s cold. His own pulse hammers in his neck as he feels for yours. He can’t find it.
“No, no, no,” he says, heart rising into his throat. “What—no, what’s happening please wake up oh god no—”
Adrian bolts awake, breathing like he’s just run a marathon, and it takes him a moment to come back to himself, to realize where he is.
In bed. With you. With you, alive, tucked against him, safe. He can see you breathing, the rise and fall of your chest. He can feel your warmth.
It’s not enough. He reaches out with one trembling hand to touch your neck, careful not to wake you. Only when he presses against your neck and feels your pulse, thrumming strong and steady beneath his fingertips, does all the air rush out of his lungs in a relieved whoosh.
“Holy fuck,” he whispers, and he feels a tear stream down his cheek. He doesn’t even bother wiping it away, just closes his eyes and lets himself slump down against the pillows, trying to calm his own racing heart.
“Adrian?” you mumble, and his eyes fly open again to see your hand fumbling for him in the dark. He instantly feels both terrible for waking you and immensely grateful to hear your voice.
“It’s okay, baby. Go back to sleep,” he says, his voice hoarse, a little frustrated, even. He catches your wandering hand before it can settle against his chest, where you’ll be able to feel how hard his heart is pounding in the aftermath of a nightmare. He doesn’t want you to worry.
It’s the first night he’s sleeping with you in his arms. It should be peaceful. It’s everything he’s wanted for months. Instead, here he is, staring at you through the dark like you’re going to disappear any moment, haunted by the memory of you soaked in your own blood.
Your eyes blink open sleepily, and you watch him silently for a moment, weighing whether to do what he says and just go back to sleep, or argue with him. He stares back at you.
You don’t argue. You don’t say a word. But you don’t go back to sleep either. You sit up, shift yourself over, and hug him, feeling his arms wrap around you in return, squeezing tight to hide the way he’s shaking.
“You’re okay,” you say quietly. “It was just a dream. You’re okay.”
“Not me,” Adrian says thickly. “You. It was—it was the day you got shot, baby, all over again. I couldn’t do anything—I saw you hit the ground and there was so much blood and I couldn’t—I’m sorry, I’m so sorry—”
“Stop that,” you shush him. After a quiet moment, you ask, “Do you dream about that day a lot?”
Adrian doesn’t answer. You sit up a little, prop yourself up on his chest, and brush sweaty curls off his forehead.
“Okay,” you say. “We don’t have to talk about it now.” You start to roll off of him, and he clings to you in a panic.
“No—stay—”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
You roll onto your back, guiding Adrian to curl around you, pulling his head down to rest on your chest.
“Go back to sleep, baby,” you say, running your fingers through his hair, and he wraps his arms around you like a teddy bear.
He tells himself he will, after you fall back asleep. Once he feels your breathing even out. But he stays awake the rest of the night, anxious, just listening to the steady thump of your heart echoing against his ear.
Adrian had promised you yesterday that he would back off after this mission. Get this protective anxiety out of his system. As he sits there, in the dark, he thinks that maybe that promise won’t be so easy for him to keep.
Adrian wakes up the next morning with you still draped over him, a comforting, calming weight. He’d drifted off eventually, into a half-sleep, and now he blinks awake, the world a little blurry without his glasses as he looks down at you, using his chest as a pillow, hugging him like a stuffed animal. He’s warm and soft and comfortable and he does not want to get out of bed and face the world.
He glances at the clock on the nightstand. 6 a.m. His chest tightens.
He leaves in six hours.
When he looks back down at you, you’re looking right at him, and he forces a smile, pulling you up to his mouth for a messy morning kiss.
“Your hair is a fucking disaster,” you observe, amused, lifting a hand up to tug at the little curly tufts that are sticking up every which way. “I didn’t realize you had such bad bed head.”
“I regret to inform you, there are a lot of things about me that are a fucking disaster,” Adrian jokes, hands landing on your waist, thumbs rubbing gentle circles. “You did, unfortunately, sign up for this shit.”
“Well, how about you go shower and fix that while I make some breakfast?” you suggest.
Adrian’s grip tightens on your waist. He doesn’t want that.
The idea of spending even twenty minutes apart from you today, when the clock is winding down, when he is going to have to leave for a week, makes him feel anxiously possessive in a way that he hasn’t felt since—since he watched you walk away from him, that night at Chris’s trailer after the other Alpha ordered you to go home, when he was deep in his rut, when he needed you and couldn’t have you. It’s an irrational kind of panic, but he feels right now like if he lets you go, he’ll never see you again.
He can’t explain all that to you without sounding insane. Like some possessive, overbearing asshole. So he just clears his throat, and forces a smile, and says, “Come with me?”
You undress together, leaving your clothes on the edge of the bed, and you follow him into the bathroom wordlessly.
In the shower, he determinedly ignores the fact that this is the first time he’s seen you naked as you stand together beneath the stream of warm water, his arms wrapped around you from behind. He recalls the days you spent wrapped around him the same way while he worked on the Vigilante suit, the little kisses you would pepper on his neck, and he does the same now. You tilt your head for him, to give him better access, and he inhales deeply, hugging you tighter.
“Are you okay, baby?” you ask softly. “Still thinking about that nightmare?”
“No,” he says, shaking his head. “Just. Gonna miss you.”
“I’m gonna miss you too. You’re lucky, you have a big fancy mission to distract you. I’ll stay as busy as I can with work, but I’ll probably have to take things a little easier this week, once I’m in preheat.”
“You’re absolutely sure that it’s okay for me to go?” he checks, even though he’s already asked you a dozen times. He doesn’t feel good about leaving you so close to your heat. “I can ask Judomaster to go instead—”
That he’s even offering tells you how anxious he is. Adrian loves going on missions, and he loves going on missions with Chris, and he complains for days when Judomaster gets to work with his best friend instead of him.
“I know myself. I know my body,” you tell him. “If I felt like I needed you to stay, I promise you, I would tell you. You’re only gonna be gone for a week. I’m not due for ten days.”
It still seems like cutting things too close for comfort, in Adrian’s eyes.
“I just don’t want you to suffer,” he says, quiet and concerned. When you turn around to meet his gaze, you know he’s thinking about his own rut. The sweaty, sleepless nights, the cramps, the agony.
“It’s not so bad. Remember, baby, you just had your first rut,” you say. “They should get easier, now. I won’t be in as much pain as you were.”
“No,” he says firmly. “Because I’m going to be there, to help you.”
“I also have a decade and a half of experience under my belt,” you point out. “I know what works for me. How to cope with it. Four times a year, like clockwork.” You smile wryly. “Except that one time you threw me off schedule.”
“You’ve been with other Alphas before,” Adrian says. He says it like a question, but it isn’t, not really. He knows you have.
“You really want to talk about that right now?” you ask with a raised eyebrow.
“No,” Adrian grumbles as he turns off the shower, both of you clean and refreshed for the morning.
“There haven’t been that many, anyway,” you say, wrapping yourself in a towel and then brushing a hand through his wet hair. He hums at your gentle touch. “It’s hard to know that they won’t…take advantage. It was only ever people I trusted. And only when it was a particularly bad cycle.”
“Take advantage?”
“Mark me,” you explain. “When I didn’t want them to.”
Unexpected, possessive anger surges in Adrian’s chest when he remembers that there are shitty Alphas in the world who won’t take no for an answer. He looks at your neck and imagines seeing the shiny, silvery mark of someone else’s bite marring the smooth skin, and he growls.
“That’s so fucked up,” he says, his voice low and fierce. “That anyone would—you’re mine—”
“And you’re mine,” you say simply. “And soon, everyone—even strangers on the street—will know that.” Adrian shivers when you lean forward and press a gentle kiss to the skin at the juncture of his neck, right where you’ll sink your teeth in when the time is right.
He mirrors you, rubbing his cheek against yours, mingling his scent with yours on your skin. It’s wishful thinking that it will linger for the whole ten days that he’s gone. But he can mark his territory for now, he thinks, as he kisses your neck, sucking a bruise into the skin there. It’s not a bite mark, but it’s something. Something that will linger for a few days, at least. You laugh.
“You are ridiculous,” you say, and he smiles.
“Can’t let you forget about me while I’m gone,” he tries to tease, but it comes out smaller than usual.
“I could never,” you whisper. If you said it any louder, your voice would wobble.
The air in the bathroom is thick with steam from the hot water of the shower. But it’s thick with the scent of arousal, too.
“I want you,” you say, stepping forward, trailing your palms up Adrian’s bare, damp chest.
“You know I want you,” Adrian says nervously, reaching up to hold your hands there, firm, against his pecs. He watches a drop of water drip down from your hair, trailing down between your breasts, disappearing beneath the towel wrapped around your body. “I want you so much. I always want you.”
“I want you now,” you say.
“Are you sure?” Adrian can feel his heart pounding against his chest. With your hand sitting there, right above it, you can probably feel it too.
“I’m sure.”
Thank god, he thinks, as he guides your wrists up and around his neck and stoops low to pick you up. He carries you like you’re something special, breakable, precious. Every step is careful with you cradled in his arms. When he sets you down on the mattress, and you let the towel fall away, he can forget, for a minute, about everything else, because all that matters is this moment with you.
He kisses you, and he’s just too goddamn happy to be anything but sloppy and enthusiastic. You giggle as his kisses trail to your cheeks, your forehead, your chin, and it makes him feel even lighter, the way you laugh.
“Are you sure?” you check, and Adrian looks at you with bewilderment.
“You’re kidding, right?”
“I just know you’ve never—now that you’re an Alpha. It can be a lot. We can wait, if you want.”
“I’m done waiting,” he says, firm and determined. “I’ve been waiting for years.”
He starts kissing your face again, down your neck, until his tongue is circling one nipple, and you groan. But just as his hand drifts down toward your core, trailing over the soft skin of your belly, he has a fleeting thought and pauses.
“Wait—um,” he says awkwardly. “I don’t have, like. Condoms? And I know we have not talked at all about—pups. But I’m assuming that even if—even if we did. Now is not a good time—”
You giggle. “You really didn’t pay attention to Alpha sex ed in school, did you?”
Adrian flushes a little. “No.”
“Even if you did have condoms,” you explain carefully, “they would probably break. From your knot.”
“Oh,” Adrian says, growing even redder. “So—what—Omegas are like, really fertile, aren’t you? What do we—”
“I’m on birth control. I’ve got an implant.” You bite your lip. “And you’re right. We haven’t talked about it. But if you wanted—one day. We could.”
You’re the one lying beneath him, but somehow, he feels like he’s the more vulnerable one right now. His heart feels like it’s beating outside his chest, and your words make him feel like you’ve reached out and touched it, setting him alight like a live wire.
“You would want that?” he asks hoarsely. “With me?”
“I want everything with you,” you say, eyes shining. “Alpha.”
Adrian surges forward and captures your lips with his, his broad frame pushing you down deeper into the mattress, and you gasp into a groan when his hips come flush with yours and you can feel the evidence of his desire pressing heavy on your thigh. Your legs fall open to welcome him closer, and you reach low, taking his cock in your hand.
His eyes flutter shut and his head falls forward to your chest, your other hand coming up to run through his hair and hold him in place as he goes back to pressing mindless kisses to the sensitive bare skin of your breasts. You stroke him, squeezing gently, and he thinks, suddenly, back to his rut. When he was thrusting against a pillow, or into his own hand, imagining, wishing it was you instead.
He doesn’t have to imagine anymore. Now the real thing is right here in front of him and he’s so swept up in you he’s not sure he’ll ever come back.
Your touch is soft and sleepy and warm, and it’s almost enough to make him forget everything else for a while—how much he needs you, how long he’s waited for this moment, how much he’ll miss you while he’s gone. He’ll think about this every day, your warm hand wrapped around his cock, pumping, lips brushing against his ear as you whisper praises.
When Adrian touches you, you’re already slick and eager, ready for him, but he pushes two testing fingers through your folds anyway, dipping inside you where you’re wet and warm, listening to the gasps of pleasure you make. That alone is almost enough to make him cum.
“Just—” you gasp. “Fuck, Adrian. Skip the fucking foreplay. I’ve been waiting for this for weeks.”
“I don’t want to hurt you—”
“You’re not going to hurt me,” you insist, hitching your legs around his waist, letting his cock drag through your wetness, whimpering when the head bumps at your clit. “Please, Alpha—”
“Fuck,” Adrian says, because he can’t stand to hear you beg like that. He could never say no to you. He caves instantly, notching himself at your entrance and pushing in, trying to keep his breathing steady as he’s swallowed by your warmth.
You hiss out a breath at the stretch of him, spreading your legs wider. A pleased hum reverberates through your chest when he gives a testing, shallow thrust, and it hits you in all the right places.
“So good, baby,” you whisper. “You make me feel so good.”
Even as you say it, you’re touching him in return in ways that he’s only ever dreamed about before, your nails digging into his shoulders, heels pushing into his back, pulling him in closer, deeper. He wants more. He wants you to touch him everywhere, to leave traces of yourself on every single part of his body. Until you’re a permanent part of him, until he’s a permanent part of you, until leaving you behind for a mission doesn’t feel like leaving himself behind.
Adrian’s mouth trails over you in return—your neck, your chest, your arms, your face. He wants to leave his scent behind. He wants you to smell like him even when he’s not around this week. He wants any Alpha that sees you on the street to know that you’re taken, to know that you’re his.
It’s that thought that spurs his movement, quick, deep thrusts that makes you whine. You shift your hips to meet his, and then there’s nothing but the sound of skin on skin, of heavy mingled breaths, as Adrian ruts into you.
As your head falls back, his eyes latch on to your neck, and he feels it. The way his teeth are itching to bite into the juncture of your neck. He wants it so bad, his instinct is telling him to just do it, but—now is not the time. He grits his teeth, looks away, down at his own arm, which he’s using to prop himself up over you as he plunges into you, feeling the knot growing at the base of his cock.
“Oh,” you gasp, as you feel it too, starting to catch at your entrance as he moves. “Want—want your knot, please, fuck, want it so bad, Adrian, fuck.”
“Whatever you want,” he chokes, watching you take him with fascination. “All of me, you have—all of me.”
A moment later, he feels you flutter around him, and your mouth falls open, drawing his eyes again to your neck, where he can see the furiously beating pulse. The urge to mark you roars inside him.
He thinks for a split second about biting into the skin of his own hand instead, just to satisfy the urge, until his eyes fall on the crumpled ball of your underwear lying on the bed next to him.
He shoves it in his mouth with a growl and bites down on the fabric as his knot finally catches. It’s nothing like biting down into your skin, but the taste of you still coats his tongue, and it sends him over the edge himself as he comes with a muffled groan.
For a moment afterward, you’re both quiet. He lets more of his weight rest on top of you, lets himself hold you tight. He closes his eyes and tries to commit the feeling to memory. He wants this to be the thing that lasts, the thing he dreams about while he’s gone. Not the nightmares of your cold body, drenched in blood. But the good dreams, holding you like this, alive and happy and so in love he can’t take it.
“You okay, baby?” you ask him after a minute. He feels your lips on his cheek, and he smiles around your underwear. You furrow your brow as you reach up and pluck them out of his mouth.
“Why are you eating my underwear, you fucking weirdo?”
“Because I really wanted to bite you,” Adrian says. “And this was a good alternative.”
“I wouldn’t have minded if you did,” you whisper, fishing the fabric in your hand.
He grins and kisses you as he steals them back out of your hand. “I’m keeping them.”
“Wha–why—”
“Because they smell like you and they taste like you—”
“That is so fucking weird. If I wasn’t in love with you that would be so creepy.”
“But you are in love with me,” he says smugly. “And I don’t care if it’s creepy. I’m keeping them.”
“If you take my panties on this mission and Chris sees them, I will kill you. No matter how in love with you I am.”
Adrian sobers a bit at the reminder that he’s leaving. He glances at the clock on the nightstand.
“You’ll call me?” he asks. You don’t even get annoyed with him, even though he’s asked the question half a dozen times in the last two days.
“Every day.”
“And if your heat comes early—”
“I’ll call you,” you say softly. You frown, brushing his hair out of his face with both hands, trailing your palms down the front of his chest, letting yourself touch him because you know you’ll be starved of it for a while after this. “I’m going to be okay, Adrian. You are the one going out to do dangerous shit.”
“I do dangerous shit all the time,” Adrian says lightly. “I’m pretty good at it.”
“I know you are.”
“A week is a long time,” he whispers, like if he says it too loud, it will grow even longer.
“We have survived worse things than a week apart,” you say. “But no matter how long you’re gone, you’re stuck with me. I’m not letting you go that easy.”
“Literally,” Adrian jokes, shifting his hips, almost laughing at the way you move helplessly with him, knotted together.
synopsis: Vigilante finally gets back out on the streets, and Adrian is mission-ready. You are, too - but he has trouble coming to terms with the idea of you being in danger again.
tags/warnings: 18+ MDNI, omegaverse dynamics, alpha!Adrian, omega!reader, angst, overprotective!Adrian, Chris and Adrian bonding
word count: 5k
notes: Thank you as always to @embeanwrites and @snowyathena for the beta read!! <3 I have been sick the last week so I haven't been on tumblr much, but I am still writing when I get the chance. So glad you all are enjoying reading this as much as I am enjoying writing it, and I so appreciate your patience as you wait for updates each week!
Masterlist | part one | part two | part three | part four | part five | part six
For the first four weeks back at work, all Adrian does is work on the suit. It’s a labor of love, it is, but fuck, he’s itching to get back out in the field and fucking kill somebody already. He’s been on edge since he beat his brother’s ass a month and a half ago, like a stretched rubber band that hasn’t been allowed to snap.
It doesn’t help that he’s also fucking horny every time he looks at the work table and remembers you spread out on the table for him. He’d thought things might get easier, after a few weeks, once the rush of hormones from his first rut truly settled, once he got used to being in your proximity all the time. He was so wrong.
He just—wants you. Always. He feels like a fucking teenager, constantly readjusting himself in his pants, pulling you into the closet to shove his tongue into your mouth on the days when he just can’t help himself. He’s still getting used to it. The fact that he can let himself lean into your touch, tug you closer, take your affection instead of just waiting for you to give it. But over the weeks, he gets better at recognizing what he needs when he needs it, and he starts initiating contact, too, whether it's a simple squeeze of the hand, or a long, tight hug, or a messy, needy kiss.
In his defense, you’re just as bad. He catches you sometimes, pressing your thighs together, your pupils dark as you watch him work. When he rubs at his neck, aching from bending over his sewing machine, you replace his hand with your own, like you can’t resist the excuse to touch him. He tries to keep working. He does. But then his hands start to shake, and he’s stabbed himself with his needles too many fucking times, and he’s fucking horny again, goddamnit.
More than anything, though, he just wants the Vigilante suit to be ready.
“You don’t have to wear the suit to go out in the field,” Fleury points out when Adrian is complaining one day in the break room, trying to rub a knot out of his neck.
Adrian just looks at him, horrified, like he’s said something blasphemous.
“What? Only you, Smith, and Jagger wear ridiculous outfits.”
“You’re just fucking jealous because I look cool as fuck while I’m killing people,” Adrian states.
The only thing that makes the long hours in the workshop bearable is your presence. Sure, you can be a sexy distraction, but—you’re also a comfort. Sometimes you help him, sewing on pieces and pockets, polishing up the brand-new armor pads, chatting with him about nonsense or suggesting improvements, like adjusted holster placements so he can hold more throwing knives, since he’s always chucking them into bad guys’ necks but never bothering to collect them afterward, or a better spot to store replacement ammunition so it’s more easily accessible when he runs out of bullets.
Other times, you just sit in the room and work on your own projects on your laptop, in quiet, companionable silence. He peeks at your screen one day while you’re in the bathroom, and it looks like you’re designing a custom women’s utility belt for Bordeaux. For someone who’s primarily a medic, you sure do wear a lot of hats around the Checkmate office.
Either way, you help him focus, keep him calm. When he starts to get frustrated, by a snapped sewing needle or a stubborn piece of armor, all you have to do is put your hand on top of his, or say his name. His fists will clench until your fingers lace through his, and your other hand will come to cup his cheek, rubbing the tension out of his jaw where he’s been grinding his teeth. He’ll turn his head just slightly, to press his lips against your wrist, against the bracelet he’d made for you out of the scraps of his old suit. Then you kiss him for real, and he forgets about everything else for a brief moment, because there’s just you, and the way he wants you, the way he loves you.
You’re there with him when he finally finishes, at the end of the work day, watching over his shoulder as he does one last wipe-down of the brand-new chest plate. He feels you leaning on him, your chin resting on his shoulder, your arms wrapping around his waist from behind. Then he sets down the rag and the polish with a sense of finality.
“Well?” you say after a minute. He realizes he’s just staring at the suit, smiling like an idiot, because—it’s finally done. He feels the excitement creeping in. “Are you gonna put it on?”
He turns his head and smiles at you, wide and bright. “Yeah. Yeah, I am.”
He immediately starts stripping down, pulling his polo shirt over his head, leaving him in just a white undershirt. You bite your lip, and he blushes when he catches the way you’re staring at his biceps. He flushes, cheeks turning a pretty pink color, and he flexes the muscle. Just a little. He can’t help himself.
You go a little shy yourself and look away while he takes off the rest of his clothes and starts stepping into the suit. Once he’s shuffled most of the way into the suit, you glance back with a tiny smile, watching him reach around his back for the zipper.
“Let me,” you say softly, and he turns his back to you so you can zip him up. You step up onto your tiptoes and press a kiss to the back of his neck. “Does it feel good?”
“Yeah,” he says quietly. “It does. Does it look good? With all the adjustments?”
You speak soft and low, right in his ear. “You look so fucking hot, babe.”
Adrian’s cheeks go from a pleasant, pretty pink to a hot red, but he’s still all smiley and excited as he watches you reach for the Vigilante mask on the work table.
“Bend down,” you tell him, intending to pull it over his face for him, but he stops you with two hands on your wrists.
“Wait a minute,” he says, because he wants to fucking kiss you, and he won’t be able to do that with the mask in the way. His lips meet yours in a long, firm kiss—one that says thank you for helping me, and I love you. Then he pulls back, and says, “Okay. Now you can put the mask on.”
You laugh, and pull the fabric down. It covers his face, it washes his world in the color red, and he shivers. He fucking missed this so much. He feels like himself again, completely, for the first time since he changed. He breathes in, and—
He laughs, delighted. God, he can’t remember the last time he felt this happy, because it fucking smells like both of you on the inside, your scent and his mingled together. Because you’ve been here, helping him work on this new suit every day.
“What’s so fucking funny?” Chris says, cracking open the door and poking his head in the room. “You guys are so fucking loud, you better not be fucking in here—” He cuts off when he sees Adrian in the suit. “Oh, shit! Are you done?”
“We’re done!” Adrian says.
Chris smiles. “In the mood for a patrol?”
“Don’t even fucking—you know I am I have been in the mood for a patrol for like three weeks—”
“Go,” you laugh, watching Adrian literally bounce on the balls of his feet. Chris laughs too. “Get out there. Take out some bad guys.”
You help Adrian arm himself while Chris puts his costume on, joining him in the weapons room and holding out guns and knives and ammo, watching him pack them away in all his pockets and holsters, completely giddy.
Before he goes, Adrian yanks off his mask one last time, pulling you into his chest until you’re pressed against the firm pads of his armor and kissing you thoroughly.
“I love you,” he murmurs against your lips, heart swelling, because he’s so fucking grateful that he gets to say that now.
“I love you, too,” you say. “Go, have fun. Be careful. I’ll be waiting.”
“First patrol back,” Chris says as they hop in the Sebring, which has been less of a Vigilante-mobile and more of a regular car these last few weeks. Adrian is thrilled to put it back to work. “Where are we heading?”
Adrian has been turning it over in his head for weeks. The first thing he wants to do when he gets back out on the streets. He could take it easy. Start small. It’s been a while, after all. It would probably be smart to just do a regular patrol of some dark alleys downtown, crack down on some drug deals or graffiti artists. Just break the suit in, get that first kill, see some drug dealer’s blood spatter across his visor.
But he said something to you a few weeks ago, planted a seed in his own head, and he keeps circling back to the idea. He looks over at Chris.
“Gut frequents that bar down on Porter Avenue,” Adrian says casually.
He’d asked Economos to look into his brother’s routine a few weeks back, and John had been all too willing once he’d heard the details of what the other Alpha had said and done to you. He just wordlessly handed Adrian a file the next day.
Chris pauses. “You want to go after your brother,” he states. Adrian nods. “Vig…”
Adrian’s voice hardens at the hesitation in Chris’s voice. “He assaulted her.”
“I was there,” Chris says. “I know exactly what happened, I saw it.”
“You want me to just let him get away with it? All that shit he’s said and done? To me? To her?”
“I killed my brother,” Chris says, and Adrian falls silent. “I know the circumstances were different. I loved Keith. He was good to me in a way that Gut never was to you. But I am telling you from experience that when you kill your family, you will carry that shit with you forever.”
“Gut is a shitty person, though. Not like your brother.”
“He is,” Chris agrees. “Gut used to bait you when we were kids just to prove that he had the upper hand. He doesn’t have the upper hand anymore. You are stronger than he is, and you are a better person, if you just let it go, man. He is a sad, pathetic Alpha who will probably die alone. While you have a new family that cares about you, and an Omega who loves you.”
“Isn’t it my job?” Adrian asks. “To do everything I can to keep her safe?”
“It is,” Chris says. “But don’t waste your time on the petty shit. You kicked Gut’s ass the other day. Let that be enough. These assholes who used to work at ARGUS—you should be directing that energy, that anger, toward them. They are a direct threat to her and the rest of the people we care about. We keep our family safe by looking at the big picture.”
Chris is looking at him more seriously than he ever has before, which gives Adrian pause. It’s strange. Their friendship is typically one where they fuck around and do stupid shit and have a good time, but over the last few weeks, Adrian has gotten to see a different side of him. Chris has been strangely more vulnerable with him now that he is also an Alpha. Our family, he said. Not Gut and his mom, but his pack.
“I wish I had a better brother,” Adrian says softly.
“You’ve got me,” Chris says.
Adrian feels, suddenly, like he might cry, and he tries really hard not to, because he does not want to ruin the cool bro moment that he is having with his bff right now. He just swallows, clears his throat, and says, “Cool, thanks man.”
“No problem, bro,” Chris says, his voice suspiciously tight. Adrian thinks he hears a sniffle.
“Should we go?”
“Yeah. Yeah, let’s go. Down by the docks, maybe? There’s always some shady shit going on down there.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
Getting back out on the streets as Vigilante doesn’t go quite as Adrian expected. He assumes he’ll fall right back into it, this persona he’s put on for so long, but something feels different. At first, he thinks it’s just the new suit.
It’s not that, though, he realizes after his first few patrols. It’s that people are more inclined to just…do what he says, now. They’re answering his questions without argument when he and Peacemaker are wandering the streets downtown, tracking down some gang or arms dealer. When he corners a piece of shit criminal at the end of an alley, they’re shaking in their boots like they never have before. It’s subtle. But he notices.
Adrian feels like he’s radiating some new superpower, and he tries not to let it go to his head, but god, it’s fucking satisfying.
But the most satisfying part of his patrols, strangely, is no longer the punishing criminals or the killing people. Obviously, those are still important and fun. He believes in justice, it’s important to him. But it’s always been hard, difficult work. Stressful, a lot of the time. He loves the adrenaline high of a fight, but sometimes the crash afterward is bad.
Dealing with that alone has always been hard. He remembers the early days, getting back to his mom’s house in the early hours of the morning, stumbling down the basement stairs. Sometimes not even making it that far—just sleeping off stab wounds in the back seat of his car, because he wouldn’t be able to walk. Adrian has been so accustomed to doing everything himself. Doing everything alone. Winding down in solemn silence.
But that night, when he gets back to the office, you’re there waiting for him with a cold bottle of water and a sweet smile, and all of the darkness of the night instantly melts away. You treat his wounds with your soft, gentle hands—nothing more than bruises, but you fuss over him anyway. You help him wipe down his weapons and clean off his new suit, cataloging rips and repairs that will need to be done the next day.
“Thank you,” he murmurs, not wanting to break the comfortable silence between you. He goes to tug you in for a kiss, but you wrinkle your nose and bat him away playfully.
“Go take a shower,” you say. “You’re all gross.”
Adrian grins and does as you ask, and when he comes back, squeaky clean, there’s food and water waiting for him. He marvels at the sight of you munching on a slice of pizza, just waiting to take care of him, in a way that no one has ever taken care of him before.
“I’m clean,” he says, leaning over you in your office chair. “Can I have a kiss now?”
“Hmm,” you consider, tipping up your head for him. “I suppose that’s acceptable.”
Adrian presses a kiss to your lips, smiling the whole time.
“How was it?” you ask. “First patrol back.”
“It was good,” Adrian says. “I wanted—” He debates whether to tell you about his conversation with Chris. “I wanted to fuck with my brother tonight.”
You pause and stare at him silently for a moment. It’s not a judgemental stare. It’s just an observant one. You’re eyeing him carefully, considering what to say next.
“Did you?” you ask eventually.
“No,” he says. “Chris said that I shouldn’t. That I should be the bigger person.” His brow furrows when he sees you biting your lip and wincing. “What is it? Do you think I should kill him? Me and Chris had a sick bonding moment about everything but ultimately if you want me to kill Gut, I absolutely will, baby, just say the word—”
“I know you wanted to…take care of Gut for me,” you interrupt. “But I kinda got my own revenge?”
“You—what?”
“I went to John the other day, just to see if he could find any dirt on him—”
“I also went to John,” Adrian says. “He didn’t tell me!”
“I asked him not to,” you say. “Just—listen. Your brother went for some medical tests recently.”
“Medical tests?” Adrian asks. “What kind of—”
“An STD screening,” you smirk. “His results were fine. But I had John falsify the documents. So he and the rest of the world thinks he’s got an STD now, and now even the few Omegas he might have been able to sweet talk into bed will not want to have sex with him anymore if they’re being responsible about their sexual health.”
Adrian’s eyes go wide, and the smile that crosses his face is maniacal. “This. This is why I’m in love with you.”
Your loud, sharp laughter is cut off by the press of his lips against yours.
Once Adrian has taken two weeks to settle back into the rhythm of regular patrols, Chris and Emilia brief him on what the rest of the team has been working on while he’s been holed up in his workspace building the new suit. And the team has been busy.
Including you, apparently. Adrian learns that the majority of the hours you spent away from him while he was in his workshop, Emilia has been doing physical training with you. You’re not in quite as bad shape as she was after the incident at Coverdale Ranch, but she still has some pointers for you as you get fully back on your feet. You’re determined to never be caught off guard and hurt like that again, and it shows—you haven’t missed a session, and you’re putting extra effort in to hand-to-hand combat training that you’ve never cared for much before.
While Fleury and Judomaster field and handle incoming job and mission requests, everyone else focuses their energy on tracking down the “motherfuckers who fucked us over,” as Emilia scathingly puts it whenever it comes up in conversation. She’s irritable as ever as she stomps around the office giving orders. She’s quick to call them out by name, bitter and angry in a way that Adrian has never seen her before, which is really saying something. It’s the worst thing a person can do, in her eyes, he realizes. To fight at someone’s side for so long and then turn around and treat them like an enemy.
“Conference room in five!” Harcourt demands, her voice ringing loudly across the office.
While Adrian, in theory, doesn’t have any problems taking orders from the others, he’s still learning to bite his tongue, because his knee-jerk biological reaction now is to growl and tell her to fuck off. Adrian takes a deep breath, ignoring the grating irritation. You notice, sitting at your desk next to his, and silently reach out a hand under the table for him to squeeze. He takes it gratefully and doesn’t let go.
It’s taken a lot of self-control to keep himself from snapping—it’s like he can feel the tension of the entire pack ramped up to a whole new level now. Emilia isn’t the only one who’s stressed. He can smell everyone’s distress on the bad days. But having you there makes it easier to tune it all out.
Around the conference table a few minutes later, everyone sits silent and tense as they wait for Emilia to speak up.
“Bordeaux and I have been strategically reaching out to old contacts,” she says, with no preamble. “Only contacts we are absolutely certain we can trust. And we don’t have a ton of information, but we’ve got enough to start taking action. I don’t want us to be sitting ducks anymore. We are going on the offense, and we are taking these people down.”
“It’s time for field work,” Bordeaux summarizes.
Adrian’s heart rises into his throat, just a little, and he glances over at you. You’re looking at Bordeaux, focused and determined, but when you feel his gaze on your face, your eyes flick over to meet his. He sees the flash of concern in your features. You can sense his panic, feel the way his grip tightens on your hand under the table. You want to ask him what’s wrong, but now, in front of everyone, is not the time for a conversation. You just brush your thumb over the back of his hand, soothing, and he sucks in a deep, shaky breath.
Adrian’s not worried about going on a mission. He can take care of himself. He can. And he’s glad it’s time for more field work. It means they’re getting closer to apprehending the people responsible for hurting you. For nearly killing you.
But field work means—it means putting everyone at risk again. It means putting you at risk again. And all he can think about is your blood on his hands, and the fear that he felt, and the thought of losing you now, now that he knows what it’s like to have you like this—it would fucking kill him.
“Some of us will stay behind in the office and keep working on this like we have. Research, putting out feelers into the community, talking to other black-ops agents. But there’s only so much we can do from inside the office. We’re sending people out. Peacemaker, Vigilante—” She tosses them files. “You’re heading out of state for the week to follow our strongest lead. The rest of us will keep working from the office, to hopefully generate more leads and support you remotely. You’re leaving around noon, tomorrow.”
Adrian exhales a sharp, relieved breath. He is going on a mission. You are staying here, safe.
“I should be going with them,” you say, and Adrian’s fear comes roaring back in an instant, because of course you’re fighting this. He shouldn’t have expected any less. “Neither of them have any medical training. I am fully healed from the last incident. Adrian might have a healing factor, but Chris doesn’t, and if anything goes wrong—”
“That’s true,” John says. “But I need you here. You’ve been a great help with research. Maybe Adebayo can go. She’s got some field medic training.”
You frown, but can’t argue too much with his logic.
When Adrian looks at you, he can see it on your face. How much you want to come with him.
And you can see it on his face. How much he doesn’t want you to come. How much he desperately wants you to stay here, safe, at home. The thought eats him alive with guilt even as he thinks it.
He’s supposed to be on your side, he knows that. He’s supposed to speak up right now, say something in your defense, like he always did before, when he was a Beta. He’s supposed to support you, he promised himself he wouldn’t be an overbearing Alpha asshole, and here he is, thinking overbearing Alpha asshole thoughts like stay and protect and mine.
You pull your hand out of his, tucking it into your lap, like you can read his mind, and you know how much he doesn’t deserve to hold it right now.
But you also know you’ll be more help to the team if you stay back, keep working with John and like you have. You can do field work, but it’s not where your strengths lie. Adebayo is an acceptable second option. So you swallow it down.
“Okay,” you say, short and quiet.
The rest of the meeting unfolds in a blur of mission goals and details, and Adrian focuses as much as he can, but he spends half the time looking at you, distracted, because you seem distant and out of it, worrying your lip and looking toward the door like you want to bolt.
The tension is killing him. He’s sitting less than a foot away from you and it feels like a mile. He wants to hold your hand again, but he’s afraid to reach for it, because if you ignore him, if you push him away, it would devastate him.
As soon as Bordeaux calls it a wrap, you’re out the door, and he’s hot on your heels, following you outside to the courtyard beneath the tree, where just a month and a half ago, he laid on a picnic blanket beside you and admitted that he’s been in love with you for years.
Now, he watches you pace back and forth, clearly anxious and irritable, and he has no idea what to say to make it better.
“Baby—” he starts, and you immediately cut him off.
“I don’t like this,” you say. “I want to go with you.”
“I know you do.”
“So why—”
“It’s a small-scale mission. We are gathering information. Nothing dangerous. It’s not like the entire pack is going. You’ll be more help to everyone here, like Economos said. Chris and I can handle it.”
“I know you can handle it,” you say, but you still sound upset. “You are good at your job, and more than capable.” Adrian’s chest starts to puff out with some weird kind of pride at the compliment, despite the frustration lacing your tone, but it quickly deflates as you continue ranting at him. “I also know that you are constantly pulling needlessly dangerous stunts and getting yourself shot, and I know that other people have field medic training, but I am an actual medic, and it’s my job to take care of this pack, to take care of you, and I can’t do that if we’re going to revert back to where we were six months ago when no one ever wanted me to leave the office, Adrian.”
“That’s not what this is,” Adrian insists.
“Are you sure?” you demand, looking him directly in the eye.
“I’m sure,” he says. It’s perhaps the least convincing lie he has ever told, and he immediately feels hot and nauseous with guilt.
“Wanna try that again?” you ask, crossing your arms. “Because I’m pretty sure you just lied to my fucking face, Adrian, and I did not like it.”
“I’m trying,” he says helplessly. “I promise you, I’m trying, and I can’t—can you please—let me do this mission. My first real one back. If you’re there, I’ll spend the entire time distracted, more worried about keeping you safe than about getting anything done. So let me get back on my feet. And then we can talk about this again later?”
“I know that you feel like you have to protect me,” you say. “I know that you have always felt that way, even before you were my Alpha, Adrian. But I need you to remember that this is a two way street. Yes, I am yours, and it is your job to protect me. But you are mine and it’s my job to take care of you.”
Something stirs within him, hearing you lay claim to him like that. You are mine.
“I know I am. I am so grateful that I am,” he chokes out. “I never, ever want you to doubt that.”
“I think sometimes you need the reminder, Adrian. I think—you have been so wrapped up in all of this, in yourself, in your new responsibility as an Alpha, that you have not thought about the fact that my life has also changed. You have never been an Alpha before, but I have also never had an Alpha before! I am not blaming you, baby. I love you, and I know how hard this adjustment has been for you. But it has not been easy for me either.”
“I’m sorry,” Adrian says, distressed. “I just want to be a good Alpha.”
“Stop worrying about being a good Alpha,” you say quietly. “And start just…being my Alpha. Please.” You’re quiet for a moment. “If you need me to stay behind this one time, while you get back into the swing of mission work, I will let it go. But I cannot and will not do that forever. I need you to let me take care of you, too. We compromise. Do you hear me?”
“I hear you,” he says, nodding hastily. “I hear you, baby. I hear you, and I love you. I love you so much. I promise I do. The fact that I even get to—to say that to you, now, when I never could before—I feel so fucking happy. I have never been happier than I am with you. So whatever you need. I can’t promise not to be protective over you. Because you’re special and you’re mine and I love you. But I can promise to try.”
He approaches you slowly, his arms out, and lets you make the choice to step into his embrace, dropping your face into his neck. Holding you there, against him, his racing heart starts to settle, and with every inhale, he feels you sink deeper into his chest, the fight draining out of you.
You don’t hate him, he thinks, his eyes closing with relief. You just worry about him, the same way he worries about you.
“And I swear to god, Adrian, if you get fucking shot—”
“I am not going to get shot,” Adrian says. “And even if I did—”
“Don’t!”
“Even if I did, you know as well as I do that I can go to sleep and wake up in the morning and be perfectly fine.”
“Just promise me you’ll be careful.” He feels your lips moving against his skin, and your arms tighten around him wordlessly.
“I promise.”
“Thank you.”
“You are the best thing that ever happened to me,” he whispers, pressing a kiss to your hair.
❀⋆.ೃ࿔*Chapter 6: The friend I'm dreaming of is far away (but I'm here)❀⋆.ೃ࿔* Sugar Daddy!Michael Robinavitch x Reader
w.c: 3.4k+
summary: Boundaries are blurred and lines are crossed when you and Robby momentarily forget about the transactional arrangement you share with him as your sugar daddy.
f.c: idiots in love (they sicken me with their affection for one another), brief mention of possible animal cruelty but nothing graphic
masterlist ❀⋆.ೃ࿔* chapter 5 (previous)
"I'm really sorry."
"It's fine, Michael."
"It's not. You don't deserve this."
"Honestly, it's not a big deal."
"This isn't how tonight was supposed to go," Robby sighs, pinching the corners of his eyes with his pointer and thumb. "I've had this reservation since Christmas."
"Aw, Mike! Now I'm starting to feel bad, too. It's not your fault though, 'kay? Work ran late. It happens."
"Multi-car pile up," he mentions again for about the third time tonight, face fallen in guilt. "It was all hands on deck. 'S not like I would've left even if I could've, though. Jack even showed up early—" he pauses and clears his throat. "…Whole thing was just a fucking mess, I guess is what I'm trying to say."
"You help people," you murmur on the other side of the call. "It's what you do. I could never be mad at you for that."
Robby's quiet, so you clear your throat. "Um, I know a place we can go eat, but you have to promise you won't like, ever end up hating me or something and make me stop talking to you, 'cause then you'll still know about it and it's really important to me."
"Why would I ever hate you?" The question, to him, is rather obvious to voice. He couldn't really imagine a single reason as to why he'd ever come to dislike you, much less hate you.
For some strange reason, Robby thinks there must be a small smile on your face when you bashfully murmur, "That's not the point, Mike. You have to promise, okay?"
"Okay," he murmurs back. "I won't ever hate you."
He can hear a sigh of relief on the other side of the call. "Thank you."
You've just finished locking up the nail studio when Robby pulls up in his car. You'd mentioned this morning you didn't have any booked appointments, but when he'd taken the time just before the pile-up victims arrived to the ER to let you know his shift would be extended until further notice, you assured him you would also be busy with a regular.
She'd called you in a panic because she'd broken one of her nails at work and had a pretty solid suspicion that her boyfriend was going to propose later this evening for Valentine's Day.
Ever the hopeless romantic and a loyal nail tech, you'd gone down to the studio to open it for her, still dressed in the outfit for your own outing with Robby. She'd asked if you also had plans, and you shyly admitted that you were going out to dinner. Cindy had squealed when you mentioned Altius, gushing about how delicious the food was, and her boyfriend had actually asked her out in that restaurant when they were starting to date. You didn't have the heart to tell her the plans had been sidetracked and you actually didn't know how you were going to spend the night.
You told yourself that you hadn't called it a date out of fear of jinxing the night, but it was more out of the uncertainty of knowing exactly what to call this.
You…did want to call it a date. And wouldn't it be nice? Having your first date with Robby be on Valentine's Day?
But would Robby be bothered if you did?
The past few weeks have been confusing, to say the least. But maybe it's just you being way in over your head from your lack of dating experience. Granted, you weren't even dating Robby, so that only brought more bewilderment on the matter.
Still, the question lingered. Along with another one:
Is this what it's supposed to feel like in an arrangement like yours?
"Hi," you say, getting on your tip toes to kiss his bearded cheek. "You look handsome."
"Yeah?" he says, letting out a breath with his small grin.
"Mhm," you smile. "You clean up nice."
He's wearing a gray button up, though he'd opted out of tucking it into his charcoal gray Carhartt pants. Robby could escape exposing his softer, rounded stomach at work, where he wore the more figure flattering color: black.
But tonight? Yeah, harder chance.
"You do, too," he says. Robby's cheeks are tinged red when he looks you over, and you're nearly breathless when you see his crow's feet crinkle along with his eyes when he smiles. "You look beautiful."
The plaid navy and baby pink mini dress you're wearing is partially concealed by the black peacoat somewhat buttoned, stopping just above your cleavage. An outfit born from two hours of pulling clothes from your closet and discarding them with a huff when they didn't meet your standards.
"I asked Cindy if this was too much, but she said it was perfect for the occasion," you say, looking away shyly. "I hope she was right."
"Cindy?"
"My client. She's sweet. I really do hope she gets proposed to."
"No better day than the day of love, right?" Robby chuckles.
You sigh dreamily. "Yeah." You notice he's holding something on one hand. "What's that?"
He holds it out to you, revealing a vibrant bouquet of baby pink and rich purple, looking sheepish when you gasp softly. "I, uh—flowers. For you. I had no idea there's more than one type of orchid until i Googled them at work a few days ago. The florist said winter's their blooming season."
You'd mentioned orchids once.
It was the night you first met Robby, back in Alla Famiglia. While getting to know each other in conversation, you'd shared details about yourselves. Basic things, really.
His favorite movie? Dead Poet's Society. Yours? Pride and Prejudice.
Yes, the 2005 version.
Music? AC/DC and U2 for him, Daughter and Candy Claws for you.
Robby had chuckled and shrugged when you asked about his favorite flower, saying he'd never really given it much thought. In turn, you spent about five whole minutes gushing about how gorgeous you thought orchids were before bashfully apologizing and continuing to ask about him.
You hold the bouquet close to your chest, delicately tracing the petals of each flower. The ones you can see, anyway. There's so many bursting out of the pretty paper and crinkled cellophane that it's a wonder they fit at all with the ribbon tying them together. Your eyes are soft when you look up at him and quietly say, "You remembered my favorite flower?"
It makes something tug at his heart.
For all your gentle nature and soft teasing the two of you like bantering back and forth with, what's in front of him is undeniable. The vulnerability in your voice and the shyness written across your face. It's something so delicate that he's wary of even talking in fear of somehow ruining. But he gives it a shot anyway.
"Of course I did," he murmurs. "Do you like them?"
"I love them," you whisper, holding the flowers higher to hide the giddy smile tugging at your lips. "I've never gotten flowers without having to ask for them."
"You won't have to with me," he assures. "You deserve your flowers, angel."
Though you tell Robby he can park outside your apartment complex, the two of you end up walking down three blocks from it. You've got an arm wrapped around his bicep, and he can feel your heat even through his jacket. He's glad you can't see his face, because he's pretty fucking sure he's grinning like an idiot while you chirp about how your day went and rattling off details about the types orchids there are.
Apparently, he'd bought laelias and vandas.
You keep thanking him for them, and Robby finds that the best way to quell your gushing gratitude is to kiss your temple, which makes you look down at the icy sidewalk where your hand is warming the stems of the flowers, and, after a gentle quietness, resume talking, though much softer.
"It's right there." You point at a lightly crowded area, just across the street of a bodega.
There's a food truck parked and set up, steam rising from its roof. Its window is opened, and there's a man nearly hanging off the edge of it to jot down orders and shout them over his shoulder to the cooks inside. Robby has to put on his glasses to read the sign, but he looks it over and realizes what it is.
"A taco truck?" You nod contently.
"I've only tried it twice, but it's amazing," you say. "And," you add a little smugly, "they're from the San Diego-TJ border area, so they're authentic."
You can take the girl out of California, but you can't take the California out of the girl.
"Cuánto quiere pagar la niña hermosa?"
You and Robby are still browsing the truck's menu when the cashier speaks. Your eyes flit up towards him and your cheeks warm, and you let out a small, tinkling laugh that draws Robby's gaze towards you, letting his eyes flick between you and the cashier.
"What'd he say?"
"He's asking how much I want to pay," you murmur. Robby gets the gist that's not all the man said, and an itch of irritation makes his brow twitch when he sees the man's dazed, goofy grin.
Mostly because it looks terribly similar to the one he had on his own face the entire walk here.
That's the reason why he doesn't hesitate to place his card on the metal of the truck's register, the black Amex nearly glowing in the bright lighting. "You won't have to do that," he says, grin growing when you beam and lean to lay your head on his shoulder. "I'll pay for it."
It's an amazing dinner. Though Robby didn't doubt the culinary skills of the chefs at Altius, there was just something different about street food. Especially with you for company. The meal is amazing, and he tells you so, pretending to roll his eyes and poke fun at you when you gloat and say you have, for once, put him onto something new.
It's a good night, with the heat from the kitchen along with the food keeping the two of you warm while you sit at a table with white plastic chairs, laughing and enjoying yourselves. So Robby's unsure as to why he disrupts it to talk about what's gone unsaid.
"Hey, about the other night," Robby blurts. "I wanted to say—"
"We don't have to talk about it if you don't want to," you interrupt, smiling gently.
Everything about you is gentle. It's probably why he hasn't called this whole arrangement off, he thinks.
You're good for him. He tries to be good to you in return.
"No, guess not," he murmurs, wiping his mouth with a napkin. "But you didn't deserve that. Jack was out of line for everything he said." You shrug, but you look away, faintly embarrassed that Robby probably knew what happened had upset you and that's why he was bringing it up.
"He was worried about you. I get it." Your lips twitch into a smile and you tilt your head, narrowing your eyes briefly. "That Lolita comment, though—"
Despite himself, a huff akin to a laugh escapes Robby's mouth. "Yeah that was—that was fucked. Sorry again. He can be an asshole when he wants to. Might've gotten it from m—"
"Todo bien? You guys enjoying the food?"
The conversation ends when a man, whom introduced himself as Daniel, the owner of the establishment and the main cook, starts to make friendly chat with the two of you.
"Are we celebrating an anniversary tonight? First, third, tenth?" He looks at Robby before turning to squint at you. "Maybe not the last one."
"It's actually our first date," Robby tells the man. "She's been singing high praises about this place, figured it'd be perfect for a romantic night."
You almost don't hear Daniel's response in favor of getting lost in Robby's words.
First date.
You'd been so busy fretting about whether or not you should call tonight a first date that you didn't consider what it would mean if he called it as such.
Daniel asks if you're locals, and Robby says he's not originally, but he's been working in the city for twenty-ish years. You tell him you've only just moved from California to Pittsburgh about a year ago. He keeps the chatter going until he leaves you to enjoy the rest of the meal.
There's a glimmer in your eyes when Robby turns to look at you, and he squirms, chuckling nervously.
"What?"
"You—" you bite your lip in an attempt to control your grin. "You said it's our first date. I didn't know we were, y'know. On a date."
"I mean, I think we—ahem—lightly touched on monogamy when we first created the document," Robby says, shrugging in his lame attempt of staying nonchalant. "I haven't gotten the chance to ask you, though—"
"I haven't been on dates with anyone else!" you rush to say. "With everything that's going on all the time, I'd hardly have time to. Omigod, not that I would if I could—!"
Robby laughs.
"I haven't either," he says. "Had time, I mean. But I wouldn't, even if I could, too. So, uh, 'm glad we're on the same page for that."
You smile and place your hand on top of his. "Yeah, me too."
The two of you look over to the truck when the radio's volume is raised and Vincente Fernandez's Hermoso Cariño can be heard playing loud and clear. Daniel winks over at the two of you. Your face feels like it's on fire, and though Robby's face is flushed, he's chuckling.
Yeah, it's a good night.
It starts pouring freezing rain halfway through the walk home, and the two of you laugh as you run through the streets, Robby's jacket held above your head. It's only when you glide on your boots through the icy sidewalk and squeal loudly that you stop, clinging to a lamppost.
The two of you pant and laugh, kneeling over to catch your breath before looking up at each other, both your faces cold and beaming. The stare feels almost electrifying, almost like something will happen with it, but then Robby is looking away and clearing his throat, grinning bashfully.
You grant him the small mercy of letting him walk you only up to the start of the staircase inside of your apartment building. He makes a mental note to ask you for your landlord's phone number next time he comes over.
"Thank you for tonight," you say softly, wringing your hands together while he shoves his into the pockets of his jacket. It was soaked with water, but he found that he didn't mind all that much with the knowledge that you were going to head home completely dry. "I had a nice time."
"Don't mention it," he says. "Thank you for letting me take you out on a date. Even if I, ah, forgot to mention that's what it was."
You giggle, bringing your fingers to your lips. "It's fine, Mike."
"So, I guess I'll, uh, talk to you—"
"Are you going to kiss me?"
What?
"I just—" you squirm nervously. "I don't know what this is. And I know we're friends, but tonight was different, right? Or, or maybe it wasn't, because we have an arrangement, and I just messed things up—!" Your words are muffled by Robby's lips pressing against yours.
He hums against them when you moan softly, melting under his touch. You return the kiss once you catch up to what's happening, eyes closed and trying to remain upright on your suddenly weak legs. Robby keeps a hand on your back, the other cupping your cheek. Pressed between your bodies is the bouquet of orchids.
The two of you pull away when you run out of air, resting your foreheads against each other. Robby is panting quietly while you let out soft breaths, trying to rewire his brain into coming up with something to say.
It turns out he doesn't need to, because the moment's interrupted by someone clearing their throat loudly. You look over to see your next door neighbor, an elderly man, looking down at both of you from the stairs with an unimpressed look on his face. You sheepishly part so he can walk past, mumbling something about lack of shame nowadays.
"I'll call you when I get home?" Robby murmurs huskily. Unable to trust yourself with words, you hum and nod quickly. Eye contact feels impossible now. He smiles and presses one last kiss on your cheek before letting you go.
"Goodnight!" you squeak over your shoulder, hurrying up the stairs and disappearing from his sight.
Yeah, Robby thinks, still staring at the empty staircase in a daze and smiling stupidly, definitely a good night.
Almost like you never left to begin with, though, you're back with Robby in record time.
He'd barely just arrived to his apartment, grinning to himself and whistling some radio song while throwing his keys into a bowl by the door when he heard it. Coming from the cracked window overlooking the alley just outside the fire escape stairs were the faint yowls of a cat. He'd been worried he'd end up back at work as a patient with the way the metal railings were coated in ice from the rain, but that worry was overwhelmed by his concern for a stray cat that could possibly be stranded or hurt.
It'd been hard finding it through the light rainfall still going on and his glasses being smudged, but Robby ended up back in his living room with a drenched cat. Though calling the fur-naked thing hiding underneath his couch a cat was a stretch.
Still, while he attempted to coax the poor thing out, he dialed your phone number.
"Omigod!" you squealed through the call's static. "Turn on FaceTime!"
"Uh, and how do I do that?"
"Mike!" you whined. "Now's not the time for you to be old! I wanna see the kitty!"
Robby fumbled with his phone for a few seconds while grumbling before the screen split into two camera boxes, where you awe'd at the sight of the cat's peeking eyes from the slit under the furniture.
You said goodbye so you could hang up the call, though not before blowing about a dozen kisses to the camera directed at the drenched cat.
Robby pretended those were for him.
He left the apartment unlocked so you could come in without knocking. He hears the door shut and the sound of your boots walking about.
"Oh, she's precious," you coo, rushing over to kneel by his couch, where the black cat laid underneath a heap of his clothes. "Hi, baby! Oh, you're so beautiful. Yes, you are!"
"I thought she was one of those bald cats at first, but she's got random spots of fur on her body," Robby calls over, turning off the stove and walking over to you. "Think somebody shaved her fur off and left her out on the street."
"People can be cruel," you murmur, gently scratching the feline's chin. "What are you gonna do?"
"I don't know," Robby muses. "Call a shelter, maybe—"
"Oh!" you startle him, laughing softly while you lift the swaddled cat to cradle it in his jacket. "You know what this is?"
"What?"
"A fulfilled fortune!"
"A what?"
"Remember?" you prod. "When we opened our fortune cookies on New Year's?"
An alien of some sort will be appearing to you shortly
"Oh, Christ," Robby scoffs, but he's grinning too, then chuckling. "That is not what this is, sweetheart."
"It so is!" you huff. "She was meant for you. The universe sent her to you!"
Just like it brought me you, angel?
"Okay, yeah," he says, dramatizing his skepticism for the sole purpose of catching the pout on your lips. " 'M gonna bring a towel."
He leaves you to get it, but pauses just at the end of the hall to hear you talk.
"Hi, baby," he hears you croon to the cat. "You are so beautiful. Mhm. You are. So you know what 'm gonna call you? Supernova." You let out a small laugh that makes Robby's heart stutter. "Or maybe just Nova. It's a pretty name, right? Think we can convince Mikey to keep you, Nova?"
"Hey," Robby murmurs when he walks back in, handing you the hot towel. "Fresh out the towel warmer."
"Oh my gosh, you have a towel warmer?" you squeal. "Okay, yeah, I'm staying here forever."
Yes. Please, stay here and never leave, he thinks.
The two of you don't talk about the kiss.
But even though you don't, you both know something's changed. Whatever was written on the contract is being forgotten in favor of allowing each other to grow closer than either could have anticipated.
The worst part about it is that Robby finds that he doesn't mind.
a/n: getting sad that im almost done with this fic, the new masterlist is already in the drafts:((( but this means the series is open for blurbs/requests, etc.!!
and i was literally going to make jack and reader interact again but with the series ending soon I wanted to cram in another chapter of these two being idiots in love🙂↔️angst is still happening but don't beat me up pls smut is also approaching😭
Unavoidable - Dr. Brendon “The Shark” Park x Reader
Chapter Five: Safe
Series Summary: The moment you meet Dr. Brendon Park, your entire world changes. He's your mate. The person you're destined to be with. But, god, does he have to be such an asshole all the time? Really, does he?
Chapter Summary: An emergency code in the hospital finally pushes you and Brendon into each other's arms for good.
Tags/Notes: omegaverse, alpha!park, omega!reader, fated mates, heat/rut, kinda hurt/comfort, panic, possessive/protective park, brendon threatens robby bc....im me
Content: umm so a "code silver" is a feral alpha on the loose in the hospital, so i guess there's a level of implied threat? it's just kinda high tension/panic
A/N: i like stealing ideas from myself bc i have good ideas!! anyway just wanted to get this out since i have to focus on mrs. danforth for the next 48 hours. expect happy slutty emotional mating fest sometime in the next week!!
Word Count: 2.1k
You know you’re going to be pushing it the moment you start getting ready for the day. You feel a little warm but not quite feverish, a little aroused but not quite dripping with it, a little emotional but not quite overwhelmed. But it’s just one shift; you’ve made it through a day feeling like this before without issue. You load up with a scent-suppressing lotion for the sake of your coworkers, take a deep breath, and resolve to make it work for a few more hours before you can super casually find a way to ask Brendon to spend your heat with you even though you just had your first kiss two days ago.
You even go the extra mile and ask Robby to put you on lighter duty and stick you with omega patients if possible to keep yourself and everyone else calm. It’s a thankfully easy day in the ED where you get to text Brendon and hang around with your friends pretty regularly in between sutures and meds and intubations. Your heat’s definitely threatening, but it’s under control with regular breaks, a steady water schedule, and plenty of support from the rest of the staff when you need help.
And then things get derailed.
You’re in the middle of tapping away at Frankie’s chart after his latest rehab appointment when a robotic voice crackles through all the hospital’s speakers.
“This is a Code Silver. All omegas report to their nearest shelter. If you cannot access a shelter, press the silver button on any patient remote for additional security instructions. Repeat: This is a Code Silver. All omegas report to their nearest shelter. If you cannot…”
Panic bubbles up in your throat as your instincts flare, all senses fading out so that you can focus on getting to safety during your heat. Code Silver. Feral alpha on the loose in the hospital. Usually they’re in the ED after being picked up for an assault or reckless accident.
You can’t remember where the nearest shelter is up here; you’re not on the ED floor and you’ve never thought to check up here. From behind the glass wall, you see nurses and doctors milling around, none of them alarmed the way you are as they head to the pockets of the hospital designed to protect them.
Inside of you, everything is burning. Your stomach tightens up and your hands start to sweat. The lights are too bright. The sounds are too loud. You catch yourself whimpering under your breath as your feet start to feel like hundred pound weights holding you to the floor.
You have to get out of here. There could be danger anywhere. You have to move. But the idea of the omega shelter is terrifying to you right now. Too many smells, too many bodies.
So you just give in to your instincts and run.
Brendon hears the code in the middle of surgery. Forty-five minutes deep in an ACL reconstruction, his mind goes blank. His ears start ringing and, for the first time in his career, the surgical field in front of him is complete gibberish. Usually he can read the bones and tendons much more easily than any text. They make sense to him when nothing and nobody else does.
But, right now, all he can see on a loop over and over is your distress.
He knows you’re going into heat and a major stress is the last thing you need. He knows you’re sensitive and sweet and in the exact right headspace to be scared.
And you’re alone.
Wherever you are in the hospital, no matter how many people may be around or what you were doing when the code was called, you don’t have your mate there. For an omega in heat, away from their nest with nothing else for comfort, there’s nothing more frightening.
After a few deep breaths to try to stop himself from losing it, Brendon withdraws from his position and quietly orders, “Garcia, I need you to take over for me.”
“What? Why? We’re right in the middle of-”
He barks, “Take over. Now.”
With Brendon giving her no choice as he withdraws the arthroscope and sets his tools aside, Garcia shifts over and starts mentally going over the steps she needs to take. She rapidly gets herself up to speed and demands, “What the fuck is going on, Park?”
“I have to find her,” he rumbles back, already pushing out of the suite. “Atterman’s on call if you need more support.”
Garcia understands right away. She shakes her head and sighs to the rest of the team, “Remind me of this moment if I ever think about bonding with an omega at the hospital.”
The nearest nurse laughs and then it’s back to business.
Brendon rips off his surgical gown and cap, tosses out all his PPE, and sprints away from the surgical wing at a full clip. He shoves into the nearest stairwell – the elevators stop functioning during most of the emergency codes – and launches down them until he’s at the bottom floor. The ED is going on business as usual, its few omega doctors safely in their nearby shelter while Robby and Abbot lead the charge in keeping the machine running smoothly without them. It’s chaotic to say the least, but Park still catches the lightest trace of your scent among all the others. It doesn’t go toward the Pitt’s shelter or any of the exits. You’re not here.
Brendon practically barrels into Robby, catching him off-guard. As Robby stumbles back when Park’s hand goes into his chest, Brendon pushes, “Robinavitch. Where is she?”
Robby can smell the rut bleeding off Park’s skin. He can see it in Park’s overly dilated eyes, the sweat on his brow, the way his breaths are more like pants. It puts him on edge immediately. With a gentle voice, he tries, “Park, you’re supposed to stay in your department during-”
“Don’t. Don’t start with me right now.” His voice is pure danger. It’s a match hovering above gasoline. Lethal. “Where’s my fucking omega?”
“I think your rut’s breaking through, Shark,” Robby says with a heavy, serious tone. A warning. Alpha to alpha. “You need to go home or at least get back to your office before-”
“No,” Park growls back. A real growl, not the kind you hear in any old alpha argument. It makes Robby’s scent go sour as he shrinks beneath Park’s presence. Everyone within ten feet notices and shivers from the intensity. Park’s fingers bruise into Robby’s shoulder as he insists, “I need to know where she is. Right now. Or I’m going to put your head through the desk and ask the next dumbass doctor I see instead.”
Robby’s frozen in submission and can’t do anything but rush out the truth, “She was supposed to be with a patient up in physio a half hour ago. The- the teen whose leg you worked on together. She probably went into their shelter, but I don’t know for sure. Start there.”
Park lets go of Robby with a push and turns around. He burns through to the nearest stairwell, leaping upward three steps at a time. Right now, if that feral alpha came across him, Park would rip him limb from limb with his bare hands if it meant getting one single step closer to you.
At the physical therapy department, on the same floor as ortho, Park shuts his eyes and breathes deeply to try to catch your scent. The alphas and betas work quietly, on edge as they wait for either the all-clear or a follow-up code that they have to shelter in place, too. But Park just pushes past all of them, his eyes half-lidded as he chases down the faintest trace of you, getting stronger with his every step. There’s a pool of you by the orthopedic surgery rehab suite, tracking back and forth, mixed up with lots of others. Your appointment with the kid and his family. He passes by the suite, toward the omega shelter, and immediately loses your scent. With his brows furrowed, Park backtracks a few paces to the next-closest intersection of halls. He tracks your scent toward the wing of offices, where it gets stronger and stronger. His pace picks up when he realizes where you’ve gone, heart pounding against his ribcage.
Brendon pushes his office door open, following his nose, and finds the blinds in his glass office drawn, something he rarely does, with all the lights off. Frustration rises in his gut when he can’t see you right away, relaxing on the couch opposite his desk or something. But your smell is so vibrant and it definitely dead-ends here. So he locks the door behind himself and tentatively asks into the quiet, “Are you alright?”
Your tiny voice slides out from behind his desk. He can hear you shivering and it makes him snarl at the idea that anything has hurt you or frightened you. “Is it safe now, Bren?”
“They haven’t called the code yet, but the lock on my door is as good as the shelters,” he tells you quietly, carefully crossing his office toward your voice. He flicks on the dim lamp on the bookshelf behind his desk and finds you when the light fills the room’s corners. You’re curled up around yourself beneath his desk, your whole body shaking slightly. Low and protective, he asks, “What are you doing in here? You should’ve gone to the shelter, baby.”
Your eyes are so wide and frightened he can hardly bear to look at you without surging forward to hold you. But he doesn’t want to move too fast. Scaring you even further right now would be a fate worse than death for him. After a second, you squeak out, “I- I saw all the security guards drawing their weapons and everyone rushing around and I just- I got scared. I didn’t want to be trapped in there with everyone.”
He nods slowly. Really slowly. Like the gears that control the motion need grease. “You were scared. So you came to my office.”
You nod gently, too. Tentatively. Your tongue is heavy and your brain is moving so slowly, but his presence is a guiding star. His scent is finally helping your heart rate slow down. With chattering teeth, you whimper, “Smells safe here.”
He drops down onto the floor to get a better look at you and sees that you’ve wrapped yourself in his hoodie, which had been hanging on the wall, wearing it backwards with the hood high up on your neck, the perfect spot for burying your nose. You’ve also dragged the throw pillows from the couch under his desk and rummaged around for his spare scrubs and the clothes in his gym bag.
You’re nesting.
This isn’t just an omega being freaked out by a Code Silver. He’s seen that before. You’re definitely in heat early, triggered by the stress. It’s radiating off of you in waves. And now you’re seeking out the comfort of your mate to calm your fear because it’s ten times as visceral as it would be at any other time in your cycle. This is pure instinct.
Something deep inside of Park stirs as he looks at you. Puzzle pieces snapping into place. His voice is softer than you’ve ever heard it as he presents his hands. “Can I help you come out, angel? I promise I’ll keep you safe.”
After a minute of studying him for any signs of deception, you gingerly crawl out from under the desk, but you don’t stand up. Instead, you fold into his arms. He cradles the back of your head and shifts you fully into his lap. While he breathes deeply, encouraging you to match his slower pace, you press your nose to his neck, softly whimpering and shaking against his chest.
He kisses your temple and soothes into your skin, “You don’t have to be scared anymore. You’re safe with me. Nothing will ever hurt you while I’m here, pup.”
Pleasure shivers up your spine when he calls you that. You’re lost in a sea of his scent and his strength. You barely even hear it when the code is called off, buried inside of Brendon’s safety. You don’t even realize how your fingers are gripping into him hard enough to bruise. He doesn’t care. All he cares about is protecting you. He wants to envelope you in his arms so tightly that you can live there forever, never having to touch the cruel earth that could dirty your feet.
After a minute of quiet, Brendon murmurs, “I’m gonna get you home and take care of you now, angel. Don’t worry about a thing.”
With your fists clutching his scrubs and your tears staining them dark, you nod and manage to whisper, “Alpha.”
In lieu of my ko-fi, please consider donating to my mother's long-term dementia care fund.
synopsis: As you and Adrian return to work and settle into a new routine, he marvels at the ways your relationship has changed. The pack makes a plan to start hunting down the people who got you hurt in the first place.
tags/warnings: 18+ MDNI, omegaverse dynamics, alpha!Adrian, omega!reader, fluff, smut!! (fingering + oral - f receiving, adrian cums in his pants, as is my agenda)
word count: 5.7k
notes: Thank you as always to @embeanwrites and @snowyathena for the beta read! Also - I am SO close to finishing up the Vegas wedding bonus episode of i don't want to miss you like this. Whenever it's done I might skip an update of this series to post that instead!!
Masterlist | part one | part two | part three | part four | part five
After the traumatic circumstances of Adrian’s presentation, his lengthy rut, and the tense encounter with Gut, Emilia and Chris had advised you two to just…take a couple days. Spend time together. Wind down from the stress of it all.
So that’s exactly what you do.
You determinedly get Adrian settled into the safe house. All of the things he picked up from his mom’s have been carried inside and unpacked, as are the things that Chris dropped off from the trailer—all of Adrian’s new clothes, the care package you’d sent him while he was in rut. Then you order Adrian to drive over to your apartment, too, to pick up a few things.
He tries to step inside, but the second he crosses the threshold, it’s just—too fucking much. God, it smells so much like you, it’s overwhelming, like his senses have been dialed up to eleven. You see him start to panic a bit, and tell him softly to wait in the hall. So he sits on the floor outside your door, listens to you bustle around inside, and wonders what the hell you’re doing.
He waits as patiently as he can, which isn’t very patiently at all. Every minute he spends without you in his sight, he gets even more antsy, even though he can hear you through the wall, your footsteps on the floorboards, the way you absentmindedly hum to yourself. Right when the anxiety starts to eat him alive, when he’s about to call your name, you finally step outside, carrying a hefty bag, and he’s on his feet in an instant, his arms wrapping around you.
“You’re okay,” you say worriedly. “I’m okay. We’re okay.”
“I know,” he says. “My brain knows that. I don’t know why my body doesn’t.”
“I’m gonna make it better,” you say. “Come on.”
Back at the safe house, Adrian watches you go into caretaking mode in a way he’s never seen. The place is a completely blank slate, for the most part. Pretty nice, not stressful, at least, not in his eyes. He’s confused, at first, at the way you’re being so particular about every little detail of the place—the way the curtains are hanging, the way the blankets are folded on the couch—and then he realizes, with a bit of awe, that you’re nesting. You’re making the place into a little nest, for him. And he feels like the luckiest person on the planet.
You fuss over the bedroom the most, remaking the bed with sheets you took from your own apartment, topping it off with the pillow and the teal teddy bear you’d sent him in the care package that now shares both of your scents.
“Lay down,” you tell him, and Adrian follows the order obediently, kicking off his shoes and curling up in the middle of the pile of blankets and pillows you’ve made for him. You smile. “Comfy?”
He reaches out for your hand and yanks you on top of him, grinning as you squeal with surprise. He takes one of the blankets and covers the both of you, pulling you as close to him as he can, closing his eyes.
“It’s perfect,” he says. And he means it. He feels your lips press against his forehead, and his hand cups the back of your head, holding you there, right where he wants you.
You spend two days like that, curled up together, sleeping, talking, exchanging soft kisses, and slowly but surely, every bit of stress drains from Adrian’s body, like it was never even there to begin with. On the second day, you suggest going out, but he’s not ready to share this, to share you, with the rest of the world yet. So you stay in, you watch movies, just cuddle, until your scents are so mingled that he doesn’t know where his ends and yours begins.
It’s the most peaceful two days he’s ever experienced in his life.
They go by far too quickly.
Tuesday evening, after dinner, Adrian changes into a new pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt, even though he really doesn’t want to. The clothes he had been wearing were just starting to smell like you. But he smiles to himself when he realizes it’s just an excuse to make you stay an extra hour snuggled up with him on the couch before you head home to sleep in your own bed.
It’s like a knife to the heart, watching you walk away from him every night, closing the door behind him and turning to face the empty safe house. He drags himself right into the bedroom, crawls into the nest you made for him, and stays there until you come back the next morning. But it’s what you both agreed on. He doesn’t want to rush things.
Now, when he comes out of the bedroom, he smiles when he sees you sprawled out on the couch, wrapping up a conversation with someone on the phone.
“Okay, I’ll talk to him and let him know,” you’re saying. Adrian plops down on the couch next to you and pulls you into his lap as you hang up. You giggle as you toss the phone aside.
“Who was that?” he mumbles into the skin of your neck, inhaling deeply. Your hands scratch through his hair, and he makes a pleased rumble at the back of his throat.
“It was Em.” Your gentle scratching pauses, fingers knotting in his curls and tugging gently, pulling Adrian back until he’s looking up into your eyes. He frowns when he sees the worried furrow in your brow. “She wants us back in the office tomorrow. If you feel like you’re up for it.”
Adrian tilts his head as he considers. “You’re coming back too, right?”
“Why would I not?”
His fingers brush carefully over your shirt, hovering over the injury on your shoulder. “Are you hurting, still?”
You smile softly. “I’m not fully healed, but I can certainly go back to the office. Just no field work until I’m back to one hundred percent.”
“Then I want to go back to work,” Adrian says quietly. “I want to…feel normal again.”
“I hate to break it to you, Ade, but you have never been normal.” He smiles, and you cup his cheeks in your hands. Your thumbs brush over his jaw, and you smile, too.
“You’re all fuzzy,” you observe.
Adrian sighs. “Fucking hell. I just shaved, literally yesterday morning. I hate this. I keep nicking myself, I’m so shit at it because I’ve never really had to do it before.”
“Let me,” you say.
“Really?”
“Come on.” You get to your feet and hold your hand out. When Adrian takes it, you tug him to the bathroom.
Five minutes later, he’s got you sitting on the edge of the sink with a razor in your hands, and he’s standing in front of you with his face covered in shaving cream. When you get close to his face, he gets all giggly, and you scold him.
“Stop that. I’m not gonna be able to do this properly if your face is all scrunched up—”
“I can’t help it, you just make me smile, baby. I feel ridiculous.”
You start with his jaw, and he tries not to shiver at the gentle scrape of the blade against his skin. It’s more intimate than he thought it would be. He should have known, really. When he thinks about it, he wouldn’t let just anyone near his neck with something sharp. It’s a weird kind of trust exercise. And you’re touch is so soft, and you’re so close to him, and your head is tilted just the right way that he’s getting a direct whiff of your scent with every inhale—
His smile falters. He closes his eyes. Do not get an erection right now.
“You good?” you ask, raising an eyebrow, and he swallows.
“Mmhm,” he says unconvincingly. “You’re just very pretty and you smell very nice and you’re all up in my personal space right now. Please ignore me.”
You smile and continue working, tackling his upper lip. He starts to smile again.
“Stop it.”
“It tickles!”
“Since when are you ticklish?”
“Since always! It is my biggest weakness. Do not tell my enemies, please, they would laugh me right off the streets.”
“You talk too much.”
“You say this like you didn’t know that already.”
You sigh and grip his jaw with your hand so you can finish off the last few swipes of his cheeks. Then you chuck a damp washcloth at his face. Adrian laughs as he wipes himself off, then presents his clean face to you for inspection.
“All ready for your first day back,” you say proudly, admiring your handiwork. You press a kiss to both cheeks. Then he tugs you in for a real one, and he’s smiling again.
“Thank you,” he says.
On Wednesday morning, Adrian is still incredibly nervous. He picks you up from your apartment so he doesn’t have to walk into work alone, but the impending anxiety is still eating at him as he walks through the door that morning, clutching your hand in his like a lifeline. He’s expecting a terrible weirdness, a strange adjustment period for the entire pack, because there’s suddenly a third Alpha thrown into the mix. His mind tells him that everyone will see him differently, treat him differently. He doesn’t want that.
Despite his worst fears, his coworkers prove within the hour that they literally could not give less of a fuck that Adrian is an Alpha now.
“I’ll still beat your ass,” Judomaster says, munching on some Cheetos.
“It’s fucking nine in the morning. Why are you eating Cheetos?” Adrian asks, disgusted. “Also, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I am several inches taller and more muscular now, so it’s very possible, that in fact, I would beat your ass—”
“Okay, bitch, let’s go to the training room—”
“That’s okay,” Adrian says hastily. “I don’t want to, um, hurt your feelings, you know, or hurt you. Who knows, maybe I’d squash you like a bug with all my new big muscles, you’re so tiny—”
“Shut the fuck up, Adrian,” Bordeaux says, and Adrian shuts the fuck up.
“Damn, she told your ass,” Fleury observes.
Adrian frowns and spins to look at you in his rolling chair. You laugh at the what the fuck look on his face.
“It’s just like you wanted, baby,” you say, giggling. “Everything’s exactly the same.”
The slight sting of his hurt pride softens quickly as he smiles softly at you, grabbing your hand and yanking you into his lap. You laugh when his chair goes spinning in circles.
“Except now I get to have you,” he says, nosing at your neck.
“Keep it in your fucking pants, Adrian,” Emilia calls from across the office. “Do not make me hire an HR department.”
“Let them have a moment,” Ads says, watching you two fondly. “They’re cute.”
“They’re sickening,” John says. “I’m going to puke up my breakfast.”
“Fucking gross, dude,” Chris says.
“I’m gross? They’re about to make out in the middle of the office—”
Adrian is, in fact, two seconds away from kissing the sense out of you, but you stand up, out of his lap, and he whines at the loss. “Nooo, come back.”
“Sorry, Adrian, you don’t have time to make out with your Omega right now,” Bordeaux says. “Debrief in the conference room in ten minutes.”
“Ten minutes is plenty of time,” Adrian says with a cheeky grin.
Adrian does not, in fact, get to make out with you for ten minutes. Instead, he frowns when Emilia calls your name across the room and you step out of his reach.
“Where are you going with Harcourt?” he pouts.
“Em’s going to take my stitches out,” you tell him. “I’ll meet you in the conference room, okay?”
Adrian’s frown deepens, a tiny dent appearing between his eyebrows as they draw together with worry. “Can I come with you?”
“If you really want to,” you say. “It’s no big deal.”
“It is a big deal,” Adrian says. “You are a big deal. The biggest deal, to me. You’re healing from a life-threatening wound, and it’s my job to take care of you. I should be there. Fuck the meeting, they can fucking wait—”
“Okay,” you interrupt, your voice soft. Maybe it will be good for him, you think, to see that you’re healing well. You’ve told him every day that you’re feeling better, and you are literally a medical professional, but hearing it from Emilia might actually drive the point home and make him stop worrying so much.
He follows you like a puppy into the infirmary, where Emilia is waiting. You hop up onto the metal examination table and strip your shirt off. His eyes immediately latch on to the three wounds scattered over your front, and he swallows, his throat tight, as he remembers what it felt like, out in the field, feeling your blood soak through his gloves as he tried to stop the bleeding.
You don’t actually need the comfort when Emilia takes out the surgical scissors, but you reach out for his hand anyway, because you think he needs it.
“These two are healing really well. Better than I expected,” Emilia says as she pulls the suture thread out of the wounds in your side, near your ribs. Better than she expected, Adrian thinks. That’s good. That’s really good. But then she presses around the skin at your shoulder and frowns a bit. “This one’s looking a little inflamed, though.”
“Why?” Adrian says worriedly. “Is it infected?”
“I’ll take some antibiotics this week, just in case,” you say. “And I’ll take it easy for an extra week. No heavy lifting.”
“I will do all the lifting,” Adrian says firmly, and you laugh, but he’s frowning. “I’m serious. Don’t even pick up a fucking pencil—”
“But you can still take the stitches out,” you tell Emilia, interrupting Adrian’s dramatics. “If we leave them any longer, the skin will heal over them.”
Emilia nods, and follows your direction, then sanitizes each area carefully. Adrian watches every movement like a hawk, squeezing your hand tightly, reminding himself that this is good. That the stitches are coming out, not going in, which means that you’re healing.
“All set,” Emilia says after a minute, reaching into the cabinet for the meds you’ll need and passing them to you. As you move to hop off the table, Adrian stops you.
“Let me,” he says, and you let him fuss over you, picking you up by the waist and gently setting you down before you can move. Then he carefully pulls your shirt back over your head, smoothing the fabric down your sides.
“Thank you,” you murmur quietly.
Emilia watches the exchange with a private smile.
In the conference room a few minutes later, Adrian smiles to himself. You’ve always sat next to him at meetings, even before all this, and now, after years and years of wishing he could, he gets to hold your hand beneath the table.
He looks over at you, his eyes flicking over your body, like he can see your injuries through your clothes. He knows you’re okay. That you’re going to be okay, at least. He just saw it for himself. But the glaring reminder of how close he’d been to losing you has shaken him a little bit. He tugs your chair a little closer to his until your warm thigh is pressed up against his.
“Alright,” says Adebayo at the head of the room, drawing his attention out of his spiraling thoughts. “Here’s the deal.” Everyone turns to look at her.
“We’ve been trying to figure out what went wrong the other week,” Bordeaux says.
Adrian’s jaw clenches, and his grip on your hand tightens. He didn’t realize that this meeting was going to be about that day. His heart pounds a little harder.
“Obviously, we got ambushed,” Adebayo says. “So John and I have been trying to find the weak link. Where the line of communication went wrong.”
“I wanted to give our informant the benefit of the doubt. He was a former ARGUS agent, he left after all the Lex Luthor bullshit, just like the rest of us did,” John says, pulling up the man’s profile on the screen. Adrian’s eyes flick over the information quickly. “But it looks like he just left one bad organization for another. He lied to us.”
“It’s him?” Adrian says, his face going dark instantly. He commits the face to memory, files the name away. Leon Sullivan. “It’s his fault?”
“Checkmate is not the only business that sprung up in the aftermath of the ARGUS mass exodus,” Fleury notes. “Bordeaux and I have been talking to other ex-ARGUS employees. A lot of them have moved to independent contractor work, and they see us as direct competition.”
“Since we are pooling our talents and resources, we are more skilled and capable,” Bordeaux says. “We’re, quote, ‘stealing’ their business, in their eyes. And we believe that this man, and a group of other mercenaries, saw this as an opportunity to feed us bad information and take out our most important players.”
“This was targeted?” Emilia says, her voice tinged with shock. “Who—?”
John hesitates before he lists off some names, and Emilia’s face darkens with every one. “In addition to Leon—Nate, Hilary, Selena, Lydia, Dev—”
“You’re fucking kidding,” she says. “Lydia and Dev? Those motherfuckers—”
“These people were trying, on purpose, to kill us?” Chris clarifies, equally as shocked. “Ex-ARGUS agents? Who left because they agreed, like you did, that Lex Luthor was too corrupt?”
“But they’re not too corrupt to send their own fellow soldiers to their deaths,” Emilia spits. “Fucking unbelievable.”
“Not fellow soldiers anymore,” Judomaster points out, not unkindly.
“It’s just business, to them,” you say thoughtfully. “I wonder—”
“It’s not just business,” Adrian says tightly, clutching your hand in a death grip, his face flushing hot. “You—you almost died because of what they did. I’ll fucking kill them all, I swear to god I will—” He inhales sharply, a pain in his chest as he relives the memory, holding you in his arms, drenched in your own blood, unconscious—
You shush him quietly. “I’m okay, baby,” you remind him, pressing a calming kiss to his jaw. He takes in a shaky breath and focuses on it, the soft point of contact where your lips meet his skin, and remembers that not twenty minutes ago, he was in the infirmary with you and Emilia, talking about how well you’ve been healing.
“Leave some of those bitches for the rest of us,” Judomaster cuts him off. “She might be your mate, but she’s our friend, too.”
“They put the entire pack in danger with this shit. We track them down, we take them out. I’m not taking any risks,” Chris says firmly.
“I agree,” Ads says. “We need to treat this like an active threat. Emilia, John, Fleury, Rip, Bordeaux—you all used to work at ARGUS. Leverage those connections, carefully, to see how many people we’re really dealing with here. Only talk to people you are one hundred percent certain you can trust. Chris and I will focus on this Leon guy who we know fucked us over, try to track him down. He’s disappeared, as far as we can tell. But he’s out there somewhere.”
“I can help,” you say. “John’s been showing me how to do some more intense computer shit, if you’ve got names, or phone numbers—”
“What about me?” Adrian says. “I want—I need—” He cuts himself off, shaking with barely-restrained fury.
He needs to fucking kill somebody. Preferably the one whose fault it is that you’re hurt.
“You’ve had a rough week and a half,” Emilia says. “Focus on getting readjusted for now. Rebuild the Vigilante suit. The materials came in yesterday. We’ll keep you updated, and as soon as we’re ready to kill, I promise you Adrian, you will be the first to know.”
Maintaining the suit already took hours of work every week. Completely rebuilding it from scratch is another project entirely.
It takes much longer than he would like it to. He spends the first two days alone making himself a new workbench, repurposing an old storage closet, moving in all his tools from his Vigilante lair. Then it’ll be hours spent bending over his sewing machine with a concentrated furrow to his brow and pieces of thread dangling between his lips.
Adrian hates to admit it, but Emilia was right. Rebuilding the suit is a good way for him to get back into the swing of things. He settles into his new routine pretty quickly, even given all the recent changes to his life, from his literal body to his new living arrangements.
He doesn’t let up with his training. He’s back in the weapons room with a gun in hand not fifteen minutes after that first meeting, imagining that the dummy targets have the face of Leon Sullivan. He thinks about going to print out a picture and tacking it on, but that might be a bit much. Still, every day, he’s practicing—guns and knives and throwing stars. When it’s time, he’ll be ready.
But things are still difficult some days. It’s not an adjustment that happens perfectly overnight. Having something to focus on, a project that’s his and his alone, helps him. Rebuilding the suit gives him an excuse to hide away when everything starts to feel like too much.
As much as he’s reluctant to admit it, he experiences things a little differently now. Every sense is more intense—chattering from his coworkers that he used to be able to tune out, like the overlapping scents of everyone in the pack, the bright fluorescent lights, even the sounds of the gunshots echoing off the walls in the weapons room—everything in the open-concept office always bugged him a little, and now it’s turned up to a thousand. It’s a lot to adjust to all at once. So having this quiet, lamp-lit, more private workspace really helps.
You help, too, as much as you can, putting personal touches on the space like photos and knick-knacks, until it’s like a functional little nest for him to work in. When you notice him starting to lose it a little, overwhelmed by one thing or another, sometimes you just have to remove him from the situation, take him outside for some fresh air, and sit under the tree with him and let him hold you until your scent can calm him down.
Once the space is finally set up, it’s time to start working. Adrian has been putting it off for days, because he knows it will break his heart a bit when he takes the seam ripper to the old Vigilante suit.
Logically, he knows, it’s just a pile of fabric and armor. But he feels weirdly sentimental about it. He made his first ever kill wearing this suit. He spent hours inside of it, blowing shit up in the woods with Peacemaker. There are dents and scratches and scorch marks all over this thing, and every time he looks at them, he remembers.
He was wearing it when he met you for the first time, when he stumbled into the Henenlotter video headquarters after the Goff mansion fiasco.
“Motherfucker cut half my pinky toe off. It’s the most important toe there is—”
Everyone else had waved him off, in the van, rolled their eyes, but you indulged his whining and immediately reached for your med kit.
“Let me take a look at that for you, huh?” you’d said, and you’d cleaned him up with your gentle hands, and he’d admired you, this strange Omega who was somehow both badass enough to work black ops but softhearted enough to care about him when no one else ever had.
You stand beside him, now, and see him hesitate, the tool in one hand and one limb of the suit in the other, and you put a hand on his shoulder.
“You okay?” you ask softly. He bites his lip and nods, eyes still a bit unfocused, far away.
“Yeah. Just…remembering.”
You hum. “The memories are in your head, and your heart,” you remind him. “Not in the fabric.”
“Obviously. Fabric is not sentient babe, it cannot have memories. Though it would be so cool if I could build a mini army of stuffed animals or something, like little sidekicks! But also, the thought of a bunch of stuffed animals walking around the office after dark with access to guns and no supervision is chilling as fuck, so maybe not—”
That afternoon, you stay with him in his tiny storage-closet workshop and help him break down the suit. He salvages as many bits and pieces as he can—he’ll be able to save and sew in the same pockets, the same holsters for his favorite weapons. His utility belt still fits around his waist. His visor can be popped out of the old mask and molded into the new one—thank god. He did not want to have to bribe the optometrist again.
At the end of the day, you gather up the last of the old material into a pile and start to box it up.
“We can save the rest,” you say. “For small emergency repairs.” Adrian nods and starts to reach for the box.
“Let me fucking carry it,” you say. “I am not made of glass. It doesn’t even weigh that much.”
Your sharp tone gives him pause, and your words remind him of something, echo exactly the words he has heard himself say to Chris and Emilia dozens of times in your defense. You aren’t made of glass, and you know your own limits. And Adrian is not going to be an overbearing Alpha who takes away every scrap of your independence. He steps back, even though his instinct tells him to fight you on it.
“Okay,” he says, and he watches you carry it away to the storage room with gritted teeth.
While you’re gone, Adrian distracts himself by doing something else for you. He takes a few final scraps of the old suit—strong, thin strips of kevlar—weaves them together. He’s still braiding when you return, the door clicking shut behind you, and your brow furrows.
“What are you doing?”
“I haven’t gotten you a courting gift,” he says, and you giggle.
“God, what is this, the eighteenth century?” you laugh. Adrian looks at you, a little lovesick, and you soften. “You don’t have to get me anything, Adrian. All I want is you.”
“Humor me,” he says. When he reaches out for your hand, you give it to him without question, and when he wraps the fabric around your wrist, he looks at you, seeking permission. “Can I?”
You just nod, and smile, and he ties it in a tight knot, then pulls your wrist up to his mouth to press a kiss to your pulse point.
“Now it’s official, Omega,” he says quietly, and you feel your face flush with heat. It’s the first time he’s used the title like that. Like a special, precious word that means—everything. Not what you are to the world, but who you are to him.
“Thank you for the gift,” you whisper, swallowing past the sudden lump of emotion in your throat. “Alpha.”
Adrian feels, in that moment, like his heart might explode, and before he can stop himself, he’s kissing you, one arm sweeping everything off his work table while the other sweeps you up and places you on top of it. His lips move against yours with fervor, hands trailing over your cheeks, your neck, your arms, your waist. His large palms land on your thighs, spreading your legs, encouraging you to wrap around him.
He breaks away from your lips for air, to give himself a moment to breathe, to calm down, but—when he inhales, he gets a direct whiff of your arousal, the wetness pooling between your thighs, and he groans.
“Oh, fuck,” he says. “Fuck, baby, you smell so fucking good, I can’t—”
“Please, Adrian,” you say, your hips shifting as you try to press your thighs together, seeking out any friction you can. Now that you feel like you’re allowed to use it, the word is on the tip of your tongue, and it tumbles out. “Alpha—”
That possessive feeling, growing ever-familiar, roars up in his chest. He wants to touch you everywhere all at once, to drop to his knees and worship you, to cry at your feet, because he just feels so fucking much. He kisses you again, sloppier this time, and you kiss him back, matching his urgency, like you want to climb inside him just as much as he wants to climb inside you.
Adrian relishes in the high-pitched whimper you make when he presses his thumb against your center through your clothes.
“Let me taste you,” he says, kissing his way down your neck, leaving a wet trail behind. He wants to taste you so bad he’s salivating. “Fuck, please, let me—I’ll make you feel so good, I promise I will—”
“Yes,” you say, nodding frantically, already kicking your shoes off. “God, please, yes, I need you so fucking bad.”
You guide his hands to the button of your jeans, and he’s flicking it open in an instant. In one jerky movement, with more enthusiasm than finesse, he tugs your jeans and your underwear down your legs.
Then he’s dropping to his knees, parting you with his fingers, and lapping up the slick that drips out of you with a long, deep lick of his tongue.
Adrian groans at the taste of you, warm and sweet and perfect, and when he breathes in the scent of your arousal directly from the source, a rush of heat bolts down his own spine, his cock twitching uncomfortably in his pants. He palms at himself for just a moment as he licks at you, tongue delving inside, working sloppy and eager, but then he immediately reaches back up, because he’s finally got you where he wants you after years of dreaming it, and he’d rather be touching you.
He can’t fucking get enough. He’s wanted this, wanted you, for so long.
You tremble, the hum of Adrian’s groan vibrating through you, and he reaches for one of your shaking hands and brings it to his hair. He stops licking at you for only as long as it takes him to say, “Hold me where you want me, baby.”
You pause at first, and he’s nervous for a second. Maybe you’re used to more dominant Alphas. Maybe you want him to push you back onto the table, to boss you around, to take more control. He’s never been like that—
But then your fingers tighten in his hair, and you smile at him, and all the worry washes away. Because you don’t want another Alpha, he knows that. You want him.
You fall back onto your elbows with a surprised noise and a thump, and Adrian uses the new position as an opportunity for leverage, wrapping his arms around your thighs and tugging you closer, burying his face further between your thighs. Your hand fists in his curls, bringing him up just a bit higher, until his lips latch onto your clit. Then a finger slips inside you, and you gasp out a sound you didn’t mean to make.
“F-fuck, god—”
“Is that good?” he asks, mouth pulling away from you, but another finger working its way inside, stretching you open, exploring, curling. Seeking out the spot that will make you gasp, that will make you make that noise again, make you pull his hair in that way that makes warmth pool in his belly.
Adrian nips at your inner thigh, and the feeling of your skin between his teeth overwhelms him for a moment, some base instinct urging him to get to his feet, to sink his teeth into your neck instead, to mark you, claim you, make you his forever. His cock is leaking now as he thinks about it, a steady stream of precum, because he wants you so fucking desperately, and you’re right here, splayed out on the table in front of him. It scares him, a little, how much he wants you, how strong the urge is, how primal. He pushes the thought away. Not here, not now.
But this isn’t about him. This is about you. This is about his Omega, finally his, finally this.
He twists his fingers, reaches deeper, and finds it, your back arching off the table.
“More,” you say breathlessly. “More, please, faster—”
He gives you exactly what you want, watching your face with awe, thrusting into you with his hand, and his thumb starts rubbing fast, tight circles on your clit. You clutch the edge of the table with one hand, the other still grasping tight to his curls, your muscles trembling with unreleased tension, so fucking close. Your hips rock forward to meet his every movement.
You’re so wet the sound is obscene. It makes Adrian’s cheeks flush hot. He caused that reaction in you. He is making you feel like this.
He is your Alpha.
“Come on, Omega,” he says, shifting to his feet, kissing his way up your body with his mouth while his hand continues to work you up. The air is thick with the scent of your arousal and his, and he leans forward over you for a messy kiss, begging against your lips. “Come for me, please, want to feel it, want to smell like you all day, for the rest of my life—”
His own hips are moving, now, seeking friction against your soft thighs even through his jeans, and when he feels you fluttering around his fingers, a gush of slick coating his hand, he comes too, right in his pants, like a fucking teenager, a burst of hot pleasure washing over him like he’s never felt before, because all of his senses have been cranked up a thousand times just for being with you.
He can’t even bring himself to be embarrassed about it. He just looks down at you, at your blissed out expression, and smiles, his eyes bright. When he goes to kiss your cheek, you turn your head for a real kiss, cupping his face in your hands and laughing, and he feels like the happiest, luckiest person on the planet.
Unavoidable - Dr. Brendon “The Shark” Park x Reader
Chapter Four: Gonna Make Our Own Lightning
Series Summary: The moment you meet Dr. Brendon Park, your entire world changes. He's your mate. The person you're destined to be with. But, god, does he have to be such an asshole all the time? Really, does he?
Chapter Summary: How Brendon Park realizes you're his with a first kiss that triggers his rut.
A/N: just a wittle more fluff before we properly get down to business next chapter uwu
Word Count: 2.6k
If you asked Brendon Park when he realized the two of you were mates, it would be tonight.
It’s been a long fucking day at the hospital. Wall-to-wall traumas for both of you, keeping you annoyingly apart when all Brendon wants is to get called in for a consult so he can steal you away for a few minutes. Park’s leaving later than usual, late enough that the summer sun is already setting, and usually he’d just peel out of the parking lot and speed home, but today he slows down for one reason and one reason alone: He sees you standing underneath the bus stop shelter at the end of the hospital’s street, making conversation with one of the ED nurses.
Absolutely not.
The luxe black car – a convertible, definitely classic, with a super long back and a shape that makes you think of Grease or James Bond – stops right in front of you. One of the tinted windows rolls down slowly and Brendon’s eyes rake over you with surprise. He asks bluntly, worry and frustration mixed up, “Why are you taking the bus?”
Still taking in the insane car he’s driving, you tell him, “My car wouldn’t start this morning.”
He leans over and pushes the passenger side door open. “Get in.”
“You don’t have to-”
“C’mon, let’s skip that part,” he insists. “You know you wanna ride in the fancy car anyway. In.”
With a sneaking smile, you hop down from the curb and tell him your address as you set your backpack on the floor first. Sliding onto the rich red tufted leather interior, you gawk, “This thing’s a fucking boat, Bren.”
“1960 Lincoln Continental. Last cool car ever made in America,” he explains seriously. You can tell he’s one of those guys who would call a car his baby. Once the door’s closed behind you, Brendon takes a deep breath and wrinkles up his nose. As he pulls into traffic, sliding one hand behind you on the seat without actually touching you, he mutters, “You smell like Abbot.”
“Really?” You try to sniff yourself, but all you’re getting is oceans and oceans of Brendon. You’d been expecting his scent to get stronger alongside yours, but it’s even more consuming than you’d figured it would be. “We had a long meeting together right at the end of the day.”
Gruffly – more like pouty – he sighs and admits, “I don’t like it.”
You take in his possessive little frown and giggle, “Jealous much?”
“Yes.” He clenches his jaw and tries not to sound too growly about it even though he’s currently fantasizing about shoving his second-favorite ED doctor Jack Abbot’s skull through a wall just for unintentionally leaving some of his scent on your precious body. “Jealous. Much.”
In response, you scooch closer on the bench seat and nuzzle in under his arm, reaching up on your right side and tugging his hand down so it’s on your shoulder, his fingers draping down over the top of your chest. He rumbles involuntarily while you cozy up, one of your palms floating down to rest on his thigh. You haven’t heard him do that before and it makes you a little dizzy. Basking in the fullness of his cinnamon and nutmeg radiance, you give his muscular thigh a squeeze that may be slightly selfish and check, “Does that help?”
Grinning wide and stupid, he pulls you closer to his chest so he can happily suffocate in your smell and teases, “You putting the moves on me, cherry?”
You nod firmly. “Yes, yes I am. Is that alright with you?”
“I think I can let it slide this time.”
“Okay, good, because I’m very comfy here. Can I put on some music?”
“Whatever you want,” he says immediately. “Tape collection’s in the glovebox.”
You scoff. “Tapes?”
He rolls his eyes. “Yeah, sweetheart, tapes. The whole car’s authentic to its era.”
“Wow, you are such a loser,” you tease as you lean forward and pop open the storage, taking out his book of cassettes. Your nose wrinkles adorably as you observe, “This is all rock and metal crap. Is that all you usually listen to?”
“Does that surprise you?”
“I guess not, but I still hate it.”
“My apologies, princess.” Even if he’s making fun of you, the way he says it definitely stirs something around in your fluttery stomach. “I’ve got some more classic stuff toward the back.”
You flip through until you find a tolerable album and then take it out of its case. “The Feel of Neil Diamond. Finally something decent.” You push it into the tape deck, the vintage buttons providing a nice satisfying click. “This is the one with ‘Cherry, Cherry,’ right? My friends would sing that at me all the time in med school.” Then you give him a mischievous glance and ask, “Can we put the top down? The weather’s nice.”
He chuckles and nods, flipping the switch so that the convertible retracts and folds back. “Whatever you want, sweetheart.”
“That’s what I like to hear,” you giggle as you scrub through the tape until you hear those punchy guitar strums that start up “Cherry, Cherry.” The light and vibrant beat fills the car and spills onto the street and you squeal in a way that makes Brendon’s heart dance. He drums his thumb against the wheel while warmth fills him up. You sit up straighter and swing your shoulders back and forth, lifting your hands all the way up to clap along with the record. The breeze threads through your fingers and you throw your head back to smile with the sunset. Your voice parts your lips almost without you noticing.
When he hears you sing along, unabashed and unashamed, for Brendon, it may as well be the first time hearing after a lifetime living in silence. He’s leaving Plato’s cave, striving toward your sunlight, to experience the fullness of breathtaking beauty and truth for the first time. This is the most at ease you’ve ever been with him. You stop smelling as tart and sharp as you do at work. It’s sweeter. So much sweeter. The pastel spring blossoms alongside the juicy summer fruit. Brendon takes a deep breath of the breeze carrying your full scent and it coats his entire consciousness.
You look over at him and smile.
And he knows.
It’s you, isn’t it?
His pupils dilate. Heat blooms in his cheek, his chest, his stomach, his everywhere. Yes, everywhere. The world reorients and he knows something for certain for the first time in his life: You are his mate. Fated. Something rare and special and sacred.
You’re his.
You always have been.
As the song fades out, Brendon stops the car next to the curb in front of your building. Then, before even turning the engine off, before thinking or letting you think, before he can dare to so much as breathe the moment away, he kisses you. It’s so urgent, so needy, that it steals your breath and pushes you halfway back against the seat. You squeak out a surprised sound. When he goes to pull back, scared he’s misread everything, you shake your head and whine and yank his lips back to yours, both your hands on the sides of his face.
Not caring in the slightest that there are people walking by and you’re in a convertible with the top down, you push Brendon back against the bench seat and crawl into his lap. His hands snap to your waist, thumbs rough on your hips, and you grind down on him without even thinking about it. Your body begs against his. You play with his thick hair and press your chest to his as he rolls his tongue over yours. He catches your lower lip between his teeth. He growls under his breath as you whimper into his mouth.
When he finally manages to pull away from you, knowing that he’s not going to push further than this right now when he can’t have all of you, Brendon’s breaths are hard and fast and shallow. He presses his forehead to yours and takes what feels like hours to steady himself. Then he kisses you again. Soft this time. He murmurs in disbelief, “Jesus fucking Christ.”
A wave of perfect rom-com giddiness washes through you alongside slick that’s invading Brendon’s nose, concrete proof that you really, really fucking want him. You bury your face in his shoulder, too giggle to look at him, and ask, “Do I still smell like Dr. Abbot?”
“No,” he laughs, running his hands up and down your sides. “You’re perfect.”
“Maybe you just like how Dr. Abbot smells now.”
He nips a kiss onto the side of your head and replies, “I don’t think that’s it, sweetheart.”
You lean back and look at him mock-seriously, pushing a finger into the center of his chest. “You just like when I smell like you instead of anyone else.”
Brendon presses his nose to your scent gland, making the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end as a shiver zaps up your spine. When he breathes in, it’s an intoxicating mix of you both. He has to admit that you wearing him like cologne turns him on like nothing he’s ever experienced. So he places a careful kiss on the sensitive skin that makes you sigh dreamily, imagining how good it’ll be when it’s his teeth instead, and agrees, “I do. I really do.”
you: HE KISSED ME
you: HE RESCUED ME FROM THE BUS STOP IN HIS SEXY CONVERTIBLE AND THEN HE KISSED ME
trin: RED ALERT
trin: WEE WOO WEE WOO
trin: GUYS ITS ALL HAPPENING
denny: was it good???
trin: yeah i want the dirty details
yoyo: how hot from 1-10
you: 10 but im not screwing around giving it that
you: like it was some john hughes nora ephron level making out
you: i need to throw out these panties lowkey
trin: donate them to me im lonely
yoyo: PERVERT
denny: PERVERT
you: PERVERT
trin: :(((
trin: soooo y’all are gonna fuck nasty soon?
you: jfc we better im so horny im gonna die
yoyo: you should tell him that
trin: i know it was rejected last time but send a slick pic maybe???
trin: maybe???
you: trinity santos shut the fuck up challenge level impossible
denny: idk im kinda on her side here
you: MY SWEET OMEGA PRINCE NO
denny: im just thinking he might send a dick pic back!!
you: god am i the only one who wants to keep romance alive in this world
yoyo: yes
trin: yes
denny: i just think if he’s your mate then maybe it would be nice to know what you’re getting into
you: im gonna know in, like, four days anyway!!
trin: CAN I GET A YEEHAW IN CHAT
you: …
you: yeehaw
you: (im really happy)
trin: YEEEEAAAHHH!!
Park wakes up on edge, his arm instinctively reaching to the other side of the bed for a mate who isn’t next to him. It’s still nighttime dark; he has surgery at 6:30. You won’t even be awake for another two hours. After last night, the lack of you – an abyss of his need – has him growling under his breath the entire time he gets ready for work. He’s annoyed with every tiny thing: He hates the way his spoon feels in his mouth during breakfast, he’s pissed at himself for not packing his bag correctly the night before, he nearly tears his scrubs to shreds when one pant leg gets caught on his foot.
At least his car is still thick with the smell of you from last night. That soothes him more than he cares to admit, especially when that same Neil Diamond tape starts automatically. But by the time he’s scrubbed in, he’s annoyed again, snapping at residents and furrowing his brow. Park the Shark at his worst.
The weirdest part? Everyone smells fucking terrible. Especially the omegas. His favorite surgical nurse whose presence usually pulls him back from irritation during procedures because she smells like a damn Parisian bakery? Vile. Like bread gone moldy and overly saccharine like straight molasses coating his throat. He’d think he was getting sick or something if it weren’t for the fact that all the betadine and latex gloves smell the same.
The first nice smell all day comes when he heads down to the ED for a consult. Yours, of course. But it’s faint, just a slight undertone. You aren’t here right now. Already groaning as he snaps on his gloves, he joins Robby, Santos, and Whitaker next to a gnarly busted elbow joint. Because it’s them, he doesn’t greet anyone, just asks bluntly, “Where’s cherry?”
By the patient’s head, Santos cuts him an amused sideways glance as Robby answers, “She scrubbed in with Garcia for an appy about an hour ago. Probably wrapping up by now.”
He grunts in response, obviously displeased by the answer. Turning his attention to the severed elbow on the table, he asks, “What’ve we got?”
Robby and Santos lead him through the case over the next few minutes. Whitaker shrinks into the corner, but Park doesn’t notice, laser-focused on his work as always. He’s already charting out the surgical plan in his mind, mostly ignoring his coworkers because they don’t really know what they’re talking about anyway.
It’s only when he’s about to leave and Robby stops him that Park realizes what’s going on. Robby puts his hand on Brendon’s chest and lowers his voice. His tone is knowing and sympathetic, but he still has to say it. “You should head home, Dr. Park. I’ll page Torres for this.”
“What are you talking-”
“Look at Whitaker,” Robby murmurs. Park’s dark eyes flick over to Dennis, who’s in the corner with glassy eyes and pink cheeks. He’s clearly trying to focus on whatever Santos is talking about, but there’s a soft wobble to his lip and a flightiness in his eyes. Robby swallows hard and tells him seriously, “You stink, brother. If it’s affecting my doctors, you can’t be down here. Get to a pharmacy and schedule your leave.”
Park rolls his shoulders and nods. He has a hard time believing that one kiss from the right omega has hurtled him into the beginning of his rut, but it’s undeniable now. His heart rate is high and his brain is on alert and his stomach is growling for my carbs. God, he hates when Garcia’s right.
Brendon takes out his phone, shoots off an email to Torres and the other ortho surgeons, and mutters, “Thanks, man.”
“No problem. We gotta look out for each other.”
you: i missed you today :(( thought you’d come down for this super sexy femur break i had to call ortho for
brendon 🦈: Sorry, sweetheart. Robinavitch kicked me out of the ED during my first consult.
you: ooooh what did you do naughty boy?
brendon 🦈: Rut started for real. It was affecting omegas. Had to leave early.
you: oh
you: already?
brendon 🦈: What do you mean?
you: nothing. i guess you did smell pretty yummy yesterday
brendon 🦈: Yeah?
you: mhmm
you: are you gonna be able to work tomorrow before the weekend starts?
brendon 🦈: Yeah. Just picked up a rut delay pack at the pharmacy to buy myself a day or two. Scheduled my leave starting Monday.
you: me too
brendon 🦈: You too?
you: yeah
you: me too
You’re going to be in the next few days. The knowledge weighs heavily on Brendon’s mind, flooding around him like a pornographic haze tailored specifically to the part of his brain that the pill pack hasn’t yet started suppressing. Brendon’s whole body twitches with the desire to hop in his car and storm to your apartment and screw your brains out. Because he can’t have you, he wraps his hand around his cock and fucks his fist to sleep.
In lieu of my ko-fi, please consider donating to my mother's long-term dementia care fund.
Unavoidable - Dr. Brendon “The Shark” Park x Reader
Chapter One: Mulled Wine
Series Summary: The moment you meet Dr. Brendon Park, your entire world changes. He's your mate. The person you're destined to be with. But, god, does he have to be such an asshole all the time? Really, does he?
Chapter Summary: You've known that harsh, frustrating Dr. Park is your fated mate for months, a fact you've been able to keep to yourself thanks to your suppressants. Then he shows you a rare moment of human kindness. And catches your scent. And things feel very, very different.
Tags/Notes: omegaverse, alpha!park, omega!reader, fated mates, kind of enemies to lovers, trinity santos is a meddler, everyone is confused about their feelings
Content: canon-typical medical content, park is an ass (not to reader)
A/N: thank you to do the anon who dropped several fated mates asks when i requested park omegaverse ideas! ill be taking a variety of your thoughts for this series so thank you very much. oops writing another series when i have ten unfinished ones ahaha!!! nothing's real
Word Count: 4.4k
Six months ago, your world stopped in the middle of the Pitt during a random Tuesday shift.
You’d joined the ED only a few weeks prior, a transfer from the VA after Jack Abbot, who’d been your patient, recommended you join him at his hospital. He said it was not only a better environment for omegas but that you’d have more opportunities to find your niche during your residency. You wanted to find a surgical fellowship after your residency, and putting in hours in an emergency department would let you log some OR time if you played your cards right.
That day, you'd helped triage the worst broken femur you’d ever seen from an insane football injury and paged for an ortho consult. Dr. Brendon Park came downstairs within minutes; his sub-specialty in sports injuries had him as the first line of defense.
When he pushed through the door, a thick cloud of clove and amber filled your nostrils.
Your pupils dilated. Heat bloomed in your cheeks, your chest, your stomach, your everywhere. Yes, everywhere. The world reoriented and you knew something for certain for the first time in your life: Brendon Park is your mate. Fated. Something rare and special and sacred, even among medical professionals who write it off as a medical phenomenon.
This was supposed to be the most important moment of your entire life. A moment that makes an omega’s knees weak and their world restart for the better. The two of you were supposed to leave the room enamored with each other, ready to explore the possibilities of your life together.
There were two problems with this new reality of yours.
You had been on scent blockers for nearly a decade, which made you unrecognizable to him, and,
Dr. Brendon Park is a big, huge, massive, planetary fucking asshole
“He’s the most stereotypical alpha I’ve ever had the displeasure of encountering. Always peacocking around scenting all over everybody and grinding to be ‘The Top-Rated Orthopedic Surgeon on the East Coast Three Years Running,’” Trinity sneers, doing a decent impression of him as she walks out of yet another awful consult with Park the Shark, snapping off her gloves and punting them in the trash. “You know I had a dream about clocking him in the jaw the other night after we had to work on that hand amputation together?”
Next to you, Whitaker says, sounding almost wistful, “You should try it for all of us omegas who can’t stand him. At least it would give us some entertainment.”
You nod along as you peck away at your chart. It’s a major point of frustration for you; Park is so annoying you want to swat him like a fly, but something in your biology stops you from bad-mouthing him when you can still smell him lingering in the ED. You hate the fact that you get tongue-tied whenever he comes up, the thought of his autumnal scent like a warm, addictive blanket around your shoulders.
Trinity leans over the desk and waves her hand in your face. “Earth to cherry,” she teases, using the nickname based on your scent the way affectionate alphas do to their omega friends, “I’m being mean about Park; don’t you want to pile on while I’m still pissed?”
“Um, not today,” you try weakly, catching Park’s bulky frame talking with Robby in the corner of your eye. “I need to, ah, to get to-” Thankfully, an ambulance rolls into the bay before you have to come up with some lame excuse to duck out of the conversation and away from Park’s smell. You nod toward it and say, “That’s my ride. See you later, guys.”
As you jog over to the EMTs as they unload a crying, embarrassed, upset teenage boy, Park watches you carefully, his subconscious making sure you get to your destination safely. He’s always liked you more than the other ED residents who always find some way to piss him off. The only doctor he fully respects down in this hellhole is Abbot and Abbot chose you personally, which automatically gave you some cred in Park’s mind, but it’s more than that. It’s something in the way you speak, maybe, or how you hold yourself around patients. He can’t quite place his thumb on it, but you’re just better than the rest of your class.
After an hour of waiting on imaging and taking a thorough history for the teenage athlete with his shattered knee, you reluctantly page for an orthopedic surgery consult – and brace yourself when it’s Park who returns it right away. You half-jokingly warn the family, “The surgeon who’s coming down gets called Shark by everyone in the emergency department, but don’t let his whole thing scare you. He’s one of the best sports medicine surgeons on the eastern seaboard; you’ll be in great hands.”
Your patient’s mom smiles and gives your forearm a gentle touch. “Thank you, doctor. I’m glad to hear that.”
As usual, Park walks into the room already talking. “Saw you bringing in a kid from an ambulance earlier; what have we got going on here?”
“This is Franklin Murray, but he goes by Frankie.” You give the kid a warm, affirming smile as he stares nervously at the hulking doctor who’s just come in, his alpha scent stinking up the room and making all of you feel small, even Garcia as she stands in the corner. “Fifteen, male, no secondary sex yet. He came to the ED today via ambulance with both parents showing a traumatic fracture to the patella with ACL and meniscus involvement due to an accident at a track meet. After thorough evaluation, I’m guessing the next course of-”
“You’re guessing?” Park grunts as he tugs on his gloves and starts to roughly maneuver the poor kid’s swollen knee around. Through Frankie’s winces and yelps, Park chastises you, “I don’t like the sound of that. Try again.”
You bite your tongue and grimace. “The likely course of treatment would be either open reduction and internal fixation or arthroscopic repair of the tendons with stabilization of the kneecap, but I’m not the orthopedic surgeon here, thus the consult.”
“Good work on these fixes,” he murmurs, almost under his breath, like he doesn't want to give you any praise. But it makes your traitorous heart flutter anyway. Park shakes his head out and snatches the X-Ray machine over, flipping through the scans with that familiar intensity on his face. You can always imagine, far too clearly for your ongoing sanity, what it would feel like to be on the receiving end of a look like that while he drills into you, reckless and sweating, giving you exactly what you need. It’s exhausting. While you swallow hard and avert your eyes, Park gives Frankie a stern expression and informs him, “Kid, you’re not gonna be running on this leg anymore. Time to buckle down on your school work to diversify your options.”
Your mouth falls open as Mrs. Murray chokes out, “Are you serious? You really believe it’s that catastrophic of an injury?”
Arms crossed over your chest, you glare daggers at Park and say to the room before he can, “Actually, Dr. Park is the one who’s guessing now. He can assess the severity of the injury and perform the right surgery to repair it, but he definitely can’t see into the future when it comes to healing, rehabilitation, and physical therapy.”
Park gives you a flat not-smile and tells Mrs. Murray, “Twelve years in orthopedics with a specialization in sports injuries; I know what a long-term disability looks like when I see it.” While you debate how unprofessional it would be to jump on his back and bang some sense into his thick skull with your fists, he glances at Garcia and says, “Get him prepped. I’ll have my team prepare Surgery Three. Come find me when we’re ready to scrub.”
Garcia nods. “Of course, Dr. Park.”
As Park leaves the room without another word, you turn to Frankie and his parents, all of whom now have tears in their eyes because of that stupid-ass alpha, and tell them, “Look, Frankie, you’re not gonna run for the rest of this season, but that definitely doesn’t mean you’ll never run again. Stay positive and focus on following your post-op instructions to a tee, okay? I’ve seen athletes come back from much worse than this and there are actually a lot of studies that show a positive outlook can improve outcomes during recovery, so keep your chin up. For me. Promise?”
Frankie gives you a weak smile, sniffles, and nods.
“Okay, good. I’ll be the first one to check on you after your surgery. I’ll introduce you to our awesome rehab team – they’re so amazing, I promise – and we’ll get you on the right schedule to get you back on track – and on the track. Good?”
Mrs. Murray pulls you into a hug. The gentleness of getting a hug from another omega always makes you feel light and soft. The feeling only doubles when she pulls away and says, “You’ve been so great during all of this, thank you.”
“That means the world to me.” You assure one more time, “We’re all going to make sure he gets the best care possible. You and your husband can wait here at the hospital in one of our family lounges or you can ask reception to give you a call when he’s coming out of anesthesia. Either way, I’ll see you later this evening.”
Then you give all of them another professional smile, walk confidently and slowly out of the room – and then absolutely book it toward the elevator when you spot Park about to successfully escape back upstairs.
“Hey, mister, you stop right there!” You snatch Park by the arm (using your rage to ignore the part of your brain that notices how large and firm his bicep is) and try to drag him away from the elevator toward the nearest corner where you can have him partially alone. After letting you struggle to move his massive form for a second or two, he goes along with you. He doesn’t speak, just gives you one of those ‘get on with it’ looks of his. You furrow your brows, set your jaw cruelly, and shove your finger hard into his broad chest. “You absolutely cannot talk to patients like that. You crushed his dreams without even caring and that’s not acceptable. He’s just a kid!”
“He’s fifteen,” Park scoffs back. “It’s time for him to start learning the ropes of the real world.” Then he laughs, sounding a bit condescending for your taste, and puts his big hand on your shoulder, “And that’s doctor mister, pup.”
The word makes you do a double take. Calling another adult that is so overtly intimate – almost familial – that it has absolutely no place at work. If someone overheard it, they’d assume you were married. Or they’d report him. And, honestly, it’s a spear straight through your resolve to resist him.
A tiny whimper escapes your lips without your permission and you have to pinch your thighs together to attempt to convince yourself not to get all slick when you don’t have a panty liner on. With your eyes shamefully averted, tears stinging them and face burning hot because you’re so embarrassed you whisper, “You can’t call me that when you’re not- when we’re not-”
“I’m sorry,” he replies, earnest, urgent. Regret floods his body; he knows exactly what kind of effect sudden intimacy like that could have on an omega. He cups your cheek, forcing you to look up, but he’s sure to drop his hand away as soon as he has your eyes. You can still feel the strength of his smooth skin on yours when it’s gone and you miss it immediately. You’ve never noticed how pretty his blue eyes are when they’re focused solely on you. “I- I honestly don’t know why I said that. I’ve never called someone – anyone, not even girlfriends – that before.” He tilts his head to the side and searches your face like there’s a mirror in your eyes and maybe he can understand himself by looking into them. After a minute of tense silence, he mutters, “I know I’m…me. I know how people talk about me and they’re not wrong. But I’m not a sexist. I’m not someone who ever questions omegas being doctors or treats them any different than the idiot alphas I work with and- Sorry. Genuinely sorry. I really don’t know what came over me.”
Suddenly unable to stop himself, he takes your hand in his, squeezing it gently, almost like a stress ball, and goes on quickly, like the words are just tumbling out of him, “You’re an incredibly competent doctor and I appreciate that you don’t just fold to me the way a lot of people do. It makes me a better physician when you challenge me. I know I could, ah, work on my bedside manner. If it matters to you, I’ll go back to Frankie and his parents and apologize before his surgery, alright? You’re right; he’s- he’s just a kid. Hasn’t even presented yet. He doesn’t need me talking to him like that when he’s already scared shitless. You’re a kind doctor and a good hire and you shouldn’t ever doubt yourself.” With his voice now shaking slightly – that’s new to him, very new – Park finishes, “I hope you can forgive me. For- for saying that just now and for being a dick. I promise I’ll be better for you.”
For you.
It slips out.
He doesn’t know why.
But he doesn’t apologize for that one.
You study him for another moment, smelling the subtle change to his scent. It’s lighter and sweeter now, more like warm cinnamon instead of harsh clove, and you’re officially a little drunk on it when it’s served up with a side of him actually showing you some vulnerability and care. Without overthinking it, you throw your arms around the back of his neck and murmur, “I forgive you. Thank you for saying all that. It matters, I promise.”
For one split second, he can write it off as normal omega sweetness, the same way he does when his nurses hug him after a successful procedure. He knows how to respond to those hugs. Hands briefly on the upper back, posture tall but open, a professional compliment exchanged. But then his nose makes brief, soft contact with the scent gland on your neck.
There’s only so much scent blockers can do.
They can’t stop someone from smelling your pheromones directly above your skin, especially at the strongest gland on your body. Crisp green apple and nectarine and cherry, the exact sorts of fruits that marry well with cinnamon and cloves. The two of you are a mulled wine slowly simmering over a fire, the rich steam filling a small space with its intoxicating aroma.
Brendon’s cells rearrange. His heartbeat speeds up and his veins are suddenly full of something sweet and syrupy. His eyes flutter shut and he softly noses your neck, the tiny gesture completely instinctual, a quiet, barely-audible moan coming from somewhere deep inside of him. Somewhere completely foreign. He pulls in a deep breath and lets you coat his throat and lungs. When you feel the bridge of his nose touch your jaw, you gasp softly.
Brendon’s right hand slides down your spine slowly, resting at the small of your back, pulling you close against him with a campfire rumble in his chest. His other hand goes to the back of your head, protective, intense, and you twine your fingers in the soft hair at the base of his neck, loose and slightly curled after a day of surgeries. Your nails scratch his scalp softly, right at the edge of his scruff, and he shivers. You roll onto your tiptoes and bare your neck more, thoughtless, pressing your chest to his and falling into the dream of having a mate who adores you completely. Who holds you like this. You sink into the intimacy of the moment and he does, too, both of your bodies molding to the other.
Time ticks by in slow motion. Neither of you have any clue how long the embrace lasts, but you’re pretty sure you could stay safe and cocooned inside of it forever. This is what everyone’s talking about; it has to be.
Then Garcia clears her throat behind Brendon and quietly says, “Um, Dr. Park? Sorry to, ah, interrupt, but I finished with Frankie’s prep; it’s time to take him in for the surgery.”
Brendon pulls away as quickly as possible, eyes blown wide and dark. Pure shock rolling over him in waves. It takes herculean force to stop looking at you. At his mate. He tightens his jaw. Rolls his shoulders. “I’ll, ah, I’ll see you around.” He has to swallow hard and breathe slowly, focusing on Garcia’s and Santos’ nearby scents, to get his cock to soften. Before turning around, he murmurs seriously to you, “Thank you for your understanding. Sorry again.”
You whisper breathlessly, “It’s okay.”
Brendon gives you one more curious, scrutinizing look – Did you feel what he just felt? Does his scent make you go wild like that? Does this mean something? – before turning around and heading with Garcia toward the surgical wing.
Materializing behind you after following Garcia around like a stray, Trinity balks, “What in the holy hell shit fuck was that?”
“I, ah, I- He- He apologized to me. For being mean to my patient,” you rush out to try to explain the truly bizarre scene she’d walked in on. Oh, fuck, your panties are ruined. Your head is pounding and blood whooshes loud and fast in your ears. Blinking fast as your pupils adjust to the lights after being so wide, you awkwardly stammer out, “Um, I have to tell you something, Trin, because if I don’t talk about it with someone I think I’m going to die.”
Back at Santos’ and Whitaker’s shared apartment that evening, Dennis’ jaw has gone slack as he leans forward over his Chinese food and clarifies, “Park the goddamn Shark is your fated mate? How did you- When did you-”
“The first time I met him,” you admit sheepishly as you push your food around your plate. “I could tell right away. Clearly he doesn’t use any suppressants or blockers; it’s completely and totally overwhelming. The first few months, I could hardly think around him until I got used to it.”
Trinity’s eyebrows go up. “Overwhelming? Park? I barely know what he smells like.”
“Yeah, because you’re an alpha.” Whitaker rolls his eyes and then gives you a sympathetic half-smile. “Park does smell really strong. I mean, not as strong as Robby, but-”
It’s your turn to question, “Robby? I can barely smell him at all. What is it…menthol?”
“Peppermint,” Dennis sighs wistfully. “And a little bit of this kind of cold smell I can’t place. Like that Dentyne ice gum with the crystals in it.”
Trinity hangs her head and groans, “I need more non-omega friends; this is brutal.”
Whitaker shushes her and asks you, “How have you been doing it all this time? I just have a crush on Robby and working with him every day makes me want to vomit.”
“It helped a lot that he was always a dick to me,” you reply with a heavy sigh. “Now that he’s all ‘I promise I’ll be better for you’ I just- I’m fucked.”
Dennis whispers like he’s watching a rom-com, “He said that?”
“Yeah, he did.” You flop back on the couch, your appetite dying. Then you throw your arm over your forehead and groan, “And my breakthrough heat is scheduled for next month, of course, because I have the worst luck in the world.”
Whitaker stares at you like you’re absolutely bonkers. “Why haven’t you switched to the implant for your suppressants? The technology’s been available for years now. I haven’t had a heat since before med school.”
“I had one for a year, but the side effects were too strong for me. I guess that makes sense. My secondary hormone levels have always been through the roof. Hard to suppress.”
“You should have a blood panel done,” Trinity adds, “the hormones behind the whole ‘fated mates’ legend can cause-”
“Trinity, please. I’m also a doctor. I know.”
She raises her hands up in defeat. “Well, are you at least certain that you have enough time off planned for when you take the placebo pills? I know I helped you out on your breakthrough heat last year, but now I have-”
Whitaker leaps off the couch. “What?!”
Trinity yanks him back onto the cushion. “It’s not a big deal, huckleberry, that’s something friends do if they need to. Don’t be such a prude.” Then, exasperated, she returns her attention to you. “Like I was saying, it’s gonna be way worse now that you know your mate’s just out and about in the hospital. Now that you know what he smells like. You have to tell him.”
“No. Not an option. I can’t do that.”
“Why not? It’s not like you can avoid it forever.” When you frown, she narrows her eyes at you and gestures like ‘duh,’ “Y’know, it’s fate.”
“I’ve been doing a great job avoiding it until today! And you said yourself that’s a myth! We absolutely can avoid…what do they call it now to make it sound all serious?”
“Endocrine-Mediated Pairing Response,” Dennis says with dramatic, sarcastic air quotes. “Like it’s some disease and not a normal part of evolution.”
“I mean,” Trinity treads carefully, “it is kind of a disease, if you think about it.” She looks to you for confirmation, offering, “Like, something’s happening to you that you can’t control, and it’s because of your hormones, and you don’t want it to be happening. We treat endocrine disorders, right? How is EMPR any different?”
A bit tentatively, you reply, “Who said I don’t want it?”
“You, just now.” Trinity shrugs and says, “You said you don’t want Brendon. So wouldn’t you rather be – sorry for phrasing it like this, but I’m sure you get what I mean – a normal omega? Den can just go around having crushes and once him and an alpha click, they get to choose who to mate with. Isn’t that how it should be? Your body’s doing something to get in the way.”
“Well, yeah, I guess if you say it like that, but-” You gesture around dramatically, trying to make sense of your own thoughts while your friends look on in pity. It doesn’t even make sense to you, not really, which is part of the problem. You’re doctors; you want to be able to sort everything into neat boxes, but there are always exceptions. Some of those exceptions are diseases, some of them are normal variations, some of them are advantages. They all just are and it’s up to your field to decide which category they fit into. So you tell them the truth: “Look, when I hugged him today after he showed me a different side of him, that’s- It was- Jesus, honestly, it’s the best I’ve felt in my entire life. Seriously. I felt so safe and so comfortable and, yeah, okay, so turned on. But it definitely didn’t feel like something was wrong and that’s definitely not a feeling I’d medicate away. I've never felt anything like it.”
She pushes, “Even if that feeling is entirely dependent on proximity to Park the Shark?”
After a minute of quiet, tears sting at your eyes. You’ve never felt so confused. You whimper out, “I don’t know. I really don’t know.”
“Oh, cherry.” Trinity scooches closer and wraps her arms around you. She lets her scent flare in an attempt to comfort you, but all it does is make you long for the way it felt when Brendon’s scent finally fell into place with yours. Still, you nestle into the nook of her neck and try to breathe deeply and let your nervous system calm down. “We can figure this out. The three of us – well, us two, at least – are plenty capable of dealing with something as simple as hormones, right? We’ve got, like, two decades of medical training between us -- and Garcia, too, who I’m sure would help out if I asked.”
You pull back and swat tears off your cheek. You feel pathetic and silly and sad all at once. “Help with what?”
Trinity takes out her phone, already scheming. “When’s your heat, sweetheart?”
Still sniffling while Dennis tries to follow what the hell is happening, you take out your phone and open the tracking app. “I start my month of placebo pills tomorrow, so just about four weeks.”
With a tight nod, she says, “That means Shark’s gonna start smelling you like crazy this week while the suppressants leave your system.”
“Fuck, I hadn’t even thought of that,” you groan, pacing around the apartment and debating the merits of hiding under a rock for the next six weeks. “I’ve never had to do this with my mate just walking around all the time. The rest of you stupid alphas won’t even pick it up until the last week before my heat starts. I’m supposed to be-”
“Okay, time to end the spiral,” Whitaker interrupts, standing up and steadying you with hands on your shoulders. “Trinity’s right. We’ll figure this out.”
“I texted Garcia and she’s down,” Trinity replies, trying to sound encouraging. “For the next couple weeks, we run recon on Park. There’s no way he’s ‘the Shark’ 24/7, right? He’s gotta be some semblance of normal underneath all that. We’ll get enough details for you to decide if you can, y’know, invite him to, ah, to do your whole heat thing with you this time or if you need more time to, ah, to trust him with your- with your precious-”
Finally, that makes you laugh. “Are you blushing?”
Definitely turning red, she practically shrieks, “It’s weird to think about!”
You howl, “We’ve literally had sex before.”
“That doesn’t count; we were both-”
“Doesn’t count?” Trying desperately hard to keep a straight face through the laughter, you tell her with a pout, “You’re hurting my feelings here, rosemary.”
“I’m just saying; this is Park we’re talking about. Picturing him all knotted up in your sweet little nest is like-” She shakes her head like the concept is truly revolting. “Not trying to yuck your yum, but…yuck.” Then she forces a smile and adds, “But, hey, if it doesn’t work out, well, you always have dildos.”
A little softer now, you sigh, “Dildos don’t make me feel like he does.”
“Maybe if we added a good vibrator too it could get you there?”
Before We Knew Better | Andrew 'Pope' Cody Masterlist
Rating: 18+ MDNI
Summary: When Andrew ‘Pope’ Cody was taken into care Smurf pulled some strings and got him put in a place close to Oceanside. That place was with you and your parents. Something Smurf would later regret when she realised that the bond you and Andrew forged in the month he was there was never going away. The years went by and the older boy became your best friend. Your protector. Your person. Fast forward and when Andrew gets out of prison he finds out Smurf’s hatred for you has gone to a whole other level.
Pairing: Andrew ‘Pope’ Cody x reader
Overall Warnings: Smut, violence, overprotective Pope, sub!Pope if you squint, angry pope, piv sex, oral sex, established relationship.
